Copyright © Roy Lester Pond 2016.
Chapter 1
THEY INTERCEPTED him as he came out of Baltimore-Washington Airport, two men wearing suits and an air of officialdom like a brisk cologne.
“Mr Anson Hunter, the British Egyptologist?”
Egyptologist? That sounded good. Very establishment. Anson stood a bit taller, which placed his beanstalk elevation a few inches above theirs. The man could have said independent, renegade Egyptologist and phenomenologist, lecturer at out-of-town halls and auditoriums, writer, blogger and alternative theorist as well as leader of occasional, fringe tour groups to Egypt. But instead the man had said ‘Egyptologist’.
“Who wants to know?”
“You are invited to Johns Hopkins University. They want to hear you speak.”
Anson goggled just a little. Johns Hopkins and Anson Hunter? His moment of elation quickly faded. They didn’t belong in the same sentence.
“A nice thought, gentlemen, but venerable institutions like Johns Hopkins don’t want people like me to speak. They would prefer us not to breathe.”
Anson had arrived to give a lecture on ancient Egyptian ritual smiting power and execration texts at a hired Masonic hall that evening.
He tried to move past, but the men blocked his way, smiling with steely politeness.
“Please come with us, Sir.”
“There must be some mistake.”
The spokesman frowned and reached inside his coat. Hell, Anson thought, what is this? Has mainstream Egyptology finally sent a hit squad? The hand came out of the coat. Anson resumed the business of breathing. The man flipped open a wallet, by way of introduction. Anson glimpsed a crest – an eagle inside a circle and the words:
U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Also a name, Browning. He was a broad-faced man with steady eyes.
Why me?
Anson’s ex-wife May had always said that he had the burning eyes of fanatic. Had they picked him out as a likely threat to the US homeland? This Johns Hopkins stuff was just a cover for an arrest.
He suddenly felt very alien.
“I’ve been a mild threat to conventional Egyptology for years,” he said, “but I hardly rate as a security risk.”
“We need your help, Mr Hunter.”
The other man relieved him of his suitcase and also took his briefcase containing his laptop.
“Careful, there’s an explosive PowerPoint presentation in there,” Anson said.
Browning flicked a glance towards Anson’s briefcase, but a sense of humour overtook his instinct to protect the homeland. He allowed himself a flinty smile.
“Ah, yes. Almost had me going there.”
“Would you please explain why Johns Hopkins Near Eastern Studies Department would be even faintly interested in my theories?”
The man lowered his voice.
“It’s not that Department that wants you. Johns Hopkins is also the Centre of Excellence for a new Homeland Security Centre. Goes by the full name of the Centre for the Study of High Consequence Event Preparedness and Response. You’ll be addressing a consortium that’s studying how the nation can best prepare for and respond to a range of unexpected large-scale incidents or disasters.”
“Me?”
The only large-scale disaster he was familiar with was his own career – his failure to swing the world of Egyptology, with very few exceptions, to his alternative theories. But maybe his luck was changing. Any invitation to speak at Johns Hopkins – anywhere at Johns Hopkins, even in a restroom - was too intoxicating to pass up. Not that his abductors were giving him much choice in the matter. They led him to a waiting black sedan that purred on the kerbside He shrugged, climbed into the back with one of the Homeland men and sank into baffled acceptance. The sedan slid away into traffic.
This was the smoothest of smooth abductions. But they had his attention. He decided he quite enjoyed being whisked away into intrigue.
He was still troubled however.
“I’m not exactly sure where we’re going with this. What has US Homeland Security got to do with ancient Egypt? Or me?” The Homeland man who sat in the front beside the driver, threw a mystified look over his shoulder. “Beats me, I’m a practical man. I’ll leave it to others to explain.”
“Then there’s the small matter of my engagement. I’m booked to give a lecture tonight. Hundreds of people will be disappointed. Well, dozens.”
“Cancelled already. Just consider it a change of venue.”
It was quite a turnaround from out-of-town Masonic hall to Johns Hopkins University. A bit presumptuous of them, but he could be flexible.
Chapter 2
THIS WAS GOING to be a tough room.
Yet the theatrette at Johns Hopkins University was a much more smoothly operating venue than he was accustomed to.
For a start, his PowerPoint presentation was working. A title slide, thrown up in huge scale on the screen, showed an image of an ancient Egyptian wall relief from the temple of Abu Simbel. It was an archetypal smiting scene. A pharaoh, at full stretch, grasped the hair of a clutch of foreigners in one hand, while in the other he held an upraised mace. Poised in the ultimate iconography of menace, he was about to smash in the unfortunates’ heads. A caption said:
SMITING AND EXECRATION TEXTS
Ancient Egypt’s WMD - Weapons of Mass Destruction.
He’d spelt out WMD. Although his typical audience loved baffling mystery and the wildest theory, they didn’t care for him to be cryptic.
But this was not a typical audience today.
He found himself looking out across a corporate, academic, scientific and industrial powerhouse of America. Anson faced the consortium in the cool blue light of a stage area and tried to make out individuals’ faces in the theatrette-style auditorium.
One in particular caught his eye. Dr Melinda Skilling, a brilliant and real Egyptologist, of the establishment kind. Young for her achievements, and darkly pretty, she looked altogether too glamorous to bury herself in the dust of ancient Egypt. Melinda was Chair of the University’s Near Eastern Department. He’d read her books. She’d probably shuddered at his books, both of the nonfiction and fiction variety, although some people categorised all of his work as fiction. ‘I doubt if she’s an avid reader of my alternative ancient Egypt blog,’ Anson thought.
“Egypt was the original Superpower,” he said. ‘Superpower designating not just what you are, but what you possess. And power they had – not just the military kind. Supranormal power. Smiting rituals and execration texts, expressed through pottery, papyrus, bone and architecture. Remote killing, you see, was a state instrument of power. Take this pharaoh here, Rameses the Great, giving a clutch of vile foreigners a headache by bashing in their craniums with a diorite mace. This was not just a piece of wishful propaganda, although it was certainly that too. No, it was a detonation. These were esoteric armaments, you see. Nobody doubted that, for hundreds of miles around, enemies of the state would weaken or simply be flattened, knocked down dead as if by an atomic blast.
“Smiting scenes and execration texts are quite common and shards and clay figurines, upon which were written names of enemy countries and accompanying formulae, are found all over Egypt. This state weapon took over where the instruments of warfare could not go. In fact, the ancient Egyptians firmly believed that the power of such imprecations could reach out beyond temporal boundaries and smite across the ages. They would recite incantations, often employing repetition, then smash the pottery and generally trample, burn and bury the pieces to activate a sp
ell of destruction, in the belief that this could break the power of any nation and all nations. They called on the fiercest gods and goddesses of Egypt’s pantheon to help in destroying every enemy, human or spiritual. And several divinities were pretty fierce, like the lioness-goddess of destruction and plague, Hathor-Sekhmet – a ferocious entity representing apocalyptic power and the instrument of vengeance that Ra unleashed when he pronounced an execration against humankind.
“The Egyptians generally chose red pottery to smash, the colour of Seth, god of chaos, and also the colour of blood, but the use of red ink would suffice, usually scrawled in cursive hieratic text. Let me give you the flavour of threat formulae:
“I overthrow all enemies from all their seats in every place where they are… every land, every ruler, every servant, every woman, every man, every child, every animal… all will be destroyed forever. They will not exist, nor will their bodies. They will not exist, nor will their souls. They will not exist, nor will their flesh. They will not exist, nor will their bones… they will not exist and the place where they are will not exist.
He developed the theme: “There’s plenty of evidence of inscriptional violence. A group of smashed clay pots from the nineteenth century BCE and humanoid clay figurines from the eighteenth century BCE, excavated at Saqqara and Luxor, bear names, among others, of Rusalimum, or Jerusalem, obviously an enemy already. The Egyptians would also create models of Apophis, the archfiend of Outer Darkness, a great serpent that symbolized evil and destruction and that threatened to swallow the sun god Ra each night in the Underworld. Through recitations they would identify an enemy country with the archfiend and then destroy the image, stabbing it with knives, spitting upon it and then burning it.
“Another form of metaphysical coercion was the Egyptians’ fondness for showing scenes of bound foreign captives. Indeed pharaoh’s sandals bore images of wretched enemies so that he could trample on them as he walked. Footstools, paving stones and the handles of walking sticks used the images of bound captives.
“This practice lasted throughout Egypt’s long history. A Greek text tells us that the last native pharaoh of Egypt, Nectanebo II, used his legendary powers of ritual smiting to destroy formidable enemies, including the Persians, and drive them from his country’s borders, and by so doing, maintained his kingdom for a considerable period of time against their onslaughts. When an enemy invaded by sea, he retired to a certain chamber, and, employing a bowl, which he kept for the purpose, he filled it with water. Then he made wax figures of ships and men of the enemy and also of his own forces. He set these upon the water in the bowl, his fleet on one side, and that of the enemy on the other.
“Then, uttering words of power, he raised his ebony rod and invoked demons and the gods to support his attack on the enemy ships and to bring up the winds. His fleet fell on the enemy and as the ships and men of the hostile fleet sank to the bottom of the bowl, so did the real invaders. Every sailor, every soldier and every ship sank beneath the waves. Familiar?
“A more chilling example. I have a theory about what happened to the Lost Army of Cambyses. According to historical accounts, the Persian King Cambyses II dispatched an army of 50,000 men to destroy the sacred oracle of Amun in the oasis of Siwa, which had been making unwelcome predictions about him. Fifth century BCE Greek historian Herodotus tells us that the army left Thebes and set out into the desert, after seven days reaching an inhabited oasis, probably Kharga. Imagine it. A mighty army on the move, their spears glinting, their chariots rolling, their baggage trains of pack animals stretching out to the horizon. Now switch the scene to the inside of a dim, lamplit temple within the Egyptian oasis of Siwa.
“Chanting, shaven-headed Egyptian priests write hieroglyphs on the side of a clay jar. Then the high priest lifts the jar and holds it high over his head, utters the words of a great execration formula, and smashes the jar to the stone floor. The jar flies into a thousand pieces. Now see these thousands of pieces transform into millions of swirling grains of sand as a great and violent south wind arises in the desert to create a cataclysmic sandstorm.
“Back to the army of Cambyses. They march on into the Great Sand Sea towards Siwa, but they march into disaster, and into legend. Sand swarms over the advancing army and blankets them. As Greek historian Herodotus tells us, a wind arose ‘strong and deadly, bringing with it vast columns of whirling sand, which entirely covered up the troops and caused them wholly to disappear.’ It swallows the entire army, stopping the mouths of every soldier, every servant, every horse and every pack animal with choking sand… they become the lost army of Cambyses. Bad luck? Or a familiar pattern again? Could Egypt’s powers of smiting and execration have had something to do with the Lost Army of Cambyses?”
He could see them thinking about it. Maybe they were taken with the filmic qualities of the disaster. He let it sink in.
“Sometimes the officiants would list Egypt’s potential enemies in detail by name - Nubians, Libyans, Asiatics, Hittites and so on, or they’d designate enemies ‘in the East, the West, the North and the South’. Often they would refer to the mysterious ‘Nine Bows’, a symbolic plurality meaning three-times-three, that stands for all enemies, in all places. For example: ‘He binds the heads of the Nine Bows... He has gathered them all into his fist, his mace crashes upon their heads.’ I suppose you could call it Egypt’s early homeland protection system, if a touch aggressive, and, as I’m saying this, I’m suddenly having just an inkling as to why I’m the surprise – and surprised – guest speaker here today…”
A voice from the audience cut in.
“You really believe someone could put a remote hex on another country? On America? Why bother when we have the current administration?”
A few guffaws.
A heckler already. Anson peered. A man in the front row with military bearing and bulking up a blue suit, turned to throw a glare at the heckler.
In spite of the academic venue, this may not be a polite audience, Anson thought.
Anson hadn’t mentioned putting hexes on America and America wasn’t even on his mind. But it was on theirs, the heckler’s in particular.
“Do we have a few good Protestant Americans, Catholics and Jews in attendance today?” he asked the audience. “Then let me remind you about smiting in the Bible and Torah. The God of Moses hurled down some doozy execrations himself, with devastating effects: “… I shall make the land of Egypt desolate, and the country shall be destitute of that whereof it was full … I shall smite all them that dwell therein ... then shall they know that I am the LORD.”
He decided to bring ancient history up to the present. He flipped past a slide showing a shattered ancient Egyptian execration or cursing bowl, a clay vessel that contained a list of enemies and beside it one ritually shattered in order to bring foreign powers to their knees. He stopped to show a passage of text in Arabic on the screen.
“You think remote killing is no longer attempted today? It is, and it’s being used by dissidents in the Middle East. Smiting and execration might seem unthinkable in our desacralized Western society, so let’s move forward to the twenty-first century. Take a look. It’s a Palestinian text, discovered in the Dead Sea in 2002, by an Israeli Professor and it directed virulent thoughts against the leaders of Israel. Here’s a translation…
“Oh God almighty, I beg you God to destroy Ariel Sharon, son of Devorah, son of Eve… Destroy all his supporters, loyal aides and confidants, and all those who love him and whom he loves among the human beings and among devils and demons.”
“It came in a small, cloth-wrapped bundle, surrounded with lead, an interesting choice of metal since the ancient Egyptians also used lead for hostile symbolic and magical purposes, because of its heaviness and malleability. A modern day execration? Did this long-distance attack strike Sharon down? His doctors probably had a more prosaic explanation, like a stroke with massive bleeding in the brain, but it shows you what many still believe. And if you think that’s all a bit vague and low-t
ech, here’s something for the technocrats:
"Oh God, destroy all their security and policing apparatus, the computers, the electronic and listening equipment…”
There must have been a few technocrats in the room. It got a visible stir.
“The ancient Egyptians, who could engineer stone pyramids to optical precision, millennia before the real flowering of their empire, were not perversely stupid in one department of their lives, nor were they peculiarly occult. They were an intensely practical society. You don’t keep doing something for four thousand years if it doesn’t work. They believed that ritual execration and smiting – creative visualisation with potent maledictions thrown in – worked, and it protected their nation for thousands of years. A better investment perhaps than any Star Wars anti-missile system?” Anson suddenly switched off the PowerPoint.
“But that’s enough from me. I’d like to cut short my address and throw this open to question time, only I’m the one with the questions. May I ask what is going on? I assume this is not an intervention to try to cure me of my self-destructive theories and that you do have some other purpose. Do you want me to perform a ritual smiting against America’s enemies perhaps? I could smash a few pots for you. I’ve broken a few glasses in my time - and cursed about it - especially when they were still half-filled with whisky.”
“Thank you, Anson.”
It was Dr Melinda Skilling and she’d used his first name.
Recognition from the establishment at last? he wondered.
The celebrated young Egyptologist, wearing a little black dress, rose from her chair and came up steps to join him on the stage.
“What now? The award of a surprise honorary doctorate?” he said, holding up his arms as if to demur. “You risk ruining my reputation by conferring legitimacy on me.”
The Egyptologist smiled as she drew closer.
“You certainly have the gift of making the incredible sound plausible, and so you have had an impact today that I could never have achieved. Thank you again. We’d like to break now and progress this matter further in a smaller executive group…”
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