“None whatsoever. See what the Bible says about death. Ecclesiastes 9:10. All that your hand finds to do, do with your very power, for there is no work nor devising nor knowledge nor wisdom in Sheol, the place to which you are going. John wrote of Jesus saying: Lazarus our friend has gone to rest, but I am journeying there to awaken him from sleep. Lazarus has died.
“And interestingly, the Catholic Church is also shy on the subject of the soul surviving after death, although their teaching states that all the dead who are to be judged will rise with their bodies in a general resurrection. Yet they make no reference to the soul, the only thing that presumably could constitute the identity of the risen and transformed body.
“Likewise, the early Israelites, along with the Canaanites and other neighbours, did not believe in a soul that went to heaven. At death a person entered the netherworld, a dark gloomy mirror of the real world, called Sheol.”
“No soul. Darkness and non-existence after death,” Anson said. “Quite dispiriting, literally. Such ideas could challenge a lot of people… ”
“Evidently they did.”
“But knock down Heaven and Hell - the cornerstones of traditional Christianity - and the whole edifice comes crashing down,” Anson said. “Didn’t Jesus say… ”
“Jesus spoke of a different outcome - a general resurrection at the Second Coming, for the chosen.”
Anson’s shoulders relaxed in relief.
“Still, a resurrection eventually. That’s consolation for believers, I suppose.”
Abuna shook his head.
“Not necessarily. Professor Emory Hunter would not have agreed. He asserted that the Egyptian practice of mummification gave birth to the idea of a resurrection of the flesh.
“St Augustine wrote: ‘the Egyptians alone believe in the resurrection, as they carefully preserve their bodies.’”
“So even that is borrowed?”
“In his view.”
“And it all came from the Egyptians?”
“I fear so. That is where the error of the afterlife began.”
“And my father was not alone in his beliefs?” Anson said.
“Hardly.”
“Then what did he want to tell the world that was so radical? What exactly was his revelation?”
Now Abuna dropped his bombshell.
“He claimed to have made what he termed his ‘heaven-and-earth-shattering’ discovery - sensational proof in Egypt that would turn our ideas of heaven upside down, evidence that heaven was not a spiritual realm, but a real, three-dimensional hypogeum and that this was the genesis of the concept of a heaven. He had found the Duat, or Egyptian hereafter. ‘Out of the magic of its gold,’ he said, ‘heaven was born’.
“Equally important, he claimed that he had found evidence of the so-called Neteru, or beings of the First Time, buried in this place. My good friend, Professor Hunter, believed that there has been a conspiracy through the ages about the reality of the afterlife and that it still continues to this day. Your father was about to announce that he had found a material afterworld - heaven if you like. But not a spiritual nirvana, a real place and the genesis of all beliefs about the afterworld. It was a belief that may account for his untimely death in Egypt.”
“Was this why he died? Do you have any idea who attacked my father?”
Daniel thought about the question. “People who wanted him silenced, that’s all I know. Sorry, I do not have a precise answer for you yet. But you are his son and perhaps those who know, and who can help, will come to you. Be careful though. You may be in danger. I have already been physically attacked.”
“Who attacked you?”
“I do not know their identity, but beware of certain ones wearing the local dress.” He told them about his shrouded evening visitor.
“Tell me something else, Father.”
“Daniel, please.”
“Do you think there is any chance of an afterlife for someone like my father who did not believe? Eventual resurrection? Or will he end up somewhat further down?”
Daniel laughed.
“Below? Let me tell you about hell. Hell is a human invention, too, again probably Egyptian in origin. Their underworld was replete with pits of fire and torture as well as a few other refinements such as blocks of slaughter, monster ravishers of souls, serpents and ladies of flame. It’s quite likely that these images inspired the Western tradition of hell and that the guardians of the Egyptian underworld became the devils of Christian iconography. In the three major Western religions hell started out as a big stick used against people who betrayed or rejected faith. Later it spread to more general categories of sin. The term Gehenna, later translated as hell, was, interestingly, an actual location south of Jerusalem - the Valley of Hinnom. A place abhorred since ancient times when Israelites sacrificed their children to a demonic deity Moloch, whose worship demanded human sacrifice, ordeals by fire, and self-mutilation. In time Gehenna became a city dump where, to stop the spread of disease, Jerusalem burnt the refuse and dead animals of the city by day and night. What the fire did not consume, the worms did.”
“No hell below us, either. I guess that’s good news for my father.”
Daniel smiled at the pair of them. “I will not keep you both, but let us work together on this mystery, since I share your desire to find out the truth about Emory. I will continue my research while you continue yours and I shall stay in touch. Before we part, tell me about the latest itinerary for your tour so that I will know where to reach you. But please keep this meeting to yourselves. I don’t know who is looking for me.”
Our first ally, Anson thought and a radical character. He was warming to the religious man and he was beginning to understand his father’s attachment to him.
Chapter 24
‘The Other Egypt’ – Anson Hunter’s blog
THERE ARE TWO sloe-eyed young Egyptian women in our tour group, one a post-graduate student and the other an official minder, and the presence of such attractive Egyptian femininity reminds me that, in my mind at least, Egypt is inextricably bound up with the feminine principle. I suspect that my intense interest in Egypt is linked with the fatal allure of Egypt’s feminine. And fatal is the word. The mysterious female of Egypt was the most deadly and ruthless of the species and they have a long history to prove it, from Potipihar’s wife, who attempted to seduce and then falsely accused Joseph, to the Egyptianised Greek Cleopatra, who murdered her young brother Ptolemy and seduced Rome’s leadership.
Then of course there is the parade of snaky goddesses on tomb and temple walls, the most dangerous among them being Hathor-Sekhmet, a female who transformed into a marauding lioness in order to destroy humankind. Even in fiction we meet the perfidious Nefer-nefer-nefer in ‘Sinuhe, The Egyptian’.
A feeling comes over me that I can’t quite shake – that this feminine zeitgeist of ancient Egypt meets me in person and attends me when I am here. I felt it today as I went up the steps and entered the Cairo Museum in busy Al-Tahrir Square. I almost twisted around to look for her. Perhaps it’s because I’m looking for something unseeable on this trip, the power of unseen forces.
I met an old flame in the museum. She’s the wife of an Eighteenth Dynasty General Nakht-Min, a young woman in crystalline limestone, her face framed by a monumental wig that falls in a mass of braids and her body revealed in a pleated dress. She is as exquisite as ever, one of the loveliest women ever depicted in Egyptian art. She rivals Nefertiti. And now a recent theory suggests that she is perhaps Nefertiti’s sister, Mutnodjmet.
The Royal Mummy room put me in a less cheerful mood. Can we believe, as ancient Egypt did, that we survive death? Just as importantly, perhaps, can we survive living if we don’t believe?
After the museum, we visited the Pyramids – step and standard configuration – and perhaps it was the mood of my group, but the structures seemed excessive to me today, like an attempt by the early dynastic Egyptians to protest too loudly against death. One of my group said I talk about the gods of Egypt as i
f they really once existed at a remote time in Egypt’s past. Perhaps I do. They certainly existed for the ancients, whatever we think. Some might find them distasteful as Goethe did when he wrote: ‘Now I must take my pleasure by the Nile/ in extolling dog-headed gods; Oh, if my halls were only rid/ of Isis and Osiris!’ We can praise them as the poet Mann did when he felt : ‘The might of these lands that were/ Once permeated by gods’. But we can’t ignore them. And the Egyptians clearly believed in them and even listened to their voices. There is a theory called the ‘bicameral mind’, formulated by Julian Jaynes, a Princeton psychologist, and explained in his book ‘The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind’. He postulated that in the earliest times, before the dawn of consciousness, the ancients were driven by the voices of their gods, a phenomenon caused, he asserted, by whisperings from the right side of the brain, an area little used by modern man. But after various cataclysms and with the advent of writing, we lost that connection with our auditory promptings from the gods, thought to have been an amalgam of remembered authority voices. In the past, we were powerless to do anything but obey these ubiquitous voices, but with the development of writing we could suddenly choose what thoughts to follow. We stopped taking orders from the gods.
A copy of the Turin Papyrus documents the life spans of Egypt's gods in a detailed list. It records that these supreme beings enjoyed life spans of between 200 and 3,126 years. If you can conceive, even for a moment, that they existed, then who were they? These were the First Timers of the age of Zep Tepi. This was a time when Egypt was ruled by a race of so-called gods known as the Neteru, some humanoid, some hybrids. A text from the eighteenth Nome of Upper Egypt describes a whole necropolis of gods.
Of course there have been monsters to tease us, like the Topkapi hybrid. Authorities in charge of antiquities in the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul found a mystery when they examined an Egyptian mummy included in their collection - a child in a wooden sarcophagus. Under the linen wrappings and their puzzled gaze they found a small crocodile joined to a boy. What was this strange creature? A joke, a trick pulled on posterity by the ancients? Was the Topkapi freak the spawn of ancient god-seed? Boy and crocodile? Egyptologists dismissed it as an ancient hoax or practical joke. Others saw the interment as an act of veneration in honour of Sobek, the crocodile god of Egypt who had cult centres in Kom Ombo and more importantly the Faiyum, around ancient Lake Moeris.
A croc boy? It sparked some sensationalist debate. Had a race of so-called gods and demigods of ancient Egypt actually existed, as Greek historians attested, an unearthly strain, many with heads of lions, jackals, crocodiles, snakes, cows, rams, and birds? Perhaps the reptile boy was an example of a short-lived offspring from this distant epoch. Or the rest of the boy was eaten by a crocodile. I believe we must think of the gods as forces of nature. The Egyptians visualized them in a concrete form so that it would make it easier to know them.
Chapter 25
ON THE FLIGHT South from Cairo to Aswan, he noticed Kalila gazing dreamily out of the window at the shimmering landscape.
“What was it about ancient Egypt that got to you, Kalila?” he said. “Was it something shadowy, the mystery of the place?”
“There is a shadow about it, yes, but there was also a sun that rose there. Somehow that glow still clings to the remnants of Egypt's past. I think it’s the peculiar lustre of eternity. No other civilization ever came so close to capturing a sense of eternity in its art, architecture and symbolism. I’ve always been tantalized by the Egyptian dream of eternity. I still can’t look up at a night sky of stars without picturing pharaoh's Boat of Millions sailing across it, an elegant Night Barque, its stem and stern swept up in papyriform flares. I used to wonder if death was a journey like that. You see death a lot in this line of work. You see death, not just in the ghastly smile of a mummy's face but in the watchful eyes painted on the sides of coffins and in the happy scenes of longing painted on walls, of fish and flowers, birds and trees, of cows and oxen and the soul ploughing in the fields of Aaru. You feel it in the grainy darkness of the tomb, where you sympathise with the dead tomb owner’s passionate longing to ‘come forth by day’ into the sunshine.”
“I agree,” he said. “I often wish I could put all of Egypt back, restore every flake of missing pigment in every painted Egyptian face in every fresco in every tomb and every temple relief, to bring back to the touch and the eye all the seductive allure of this civilization. I couldn’t imagine living in a world without Egypt. In fact, there are times when I can hardly live in today’s world, knowing what little of Egypt remains. It seems as vital to me as rainforests to the earth and the prospect of its vanishing forever is more scary than the destruction of trees. Something great and deeply thrilling happened here once.”
“Yes, I’m sure it did,” she said.
“Here’s an alternative thought,” he said. “Do you think we both lived here before in a past life? I suppose reincarnation is another explanation for a life after death.”
She did not dismiss his suggestion out of hand, but thought about it.
“I know it’s a tempting conclusion. How else do I explain my call to Egypt, a tug that I felt, like so many other Egyptologist, at the tender age of nine or ten?”
“Egyptologists rarely acknowledge the fact,” he said, “but the Egyptians certainly did believe in a cycle of rebirth. As the Greek Herodotus said: The Egyptians were the first who asserted that the soul of man is immortal... constantly springing into existence... and this revolution is made in three thousand years. Have I been here in this place before? I’ve often asked myself this question. There are some compelling arguments for reincarnation. There is a book by Dr Ian Stevenson, called Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. Stevenson was head of psychiatry at the University of Virginia. He carefully documented around three thousand cases, including the famous case of Shanti Devi, a little Indian girl who remembered an earlier life far away in another village. Stevenson concluded that some adult past-life recall is questionable and may be put down to an over-active imagination. But it’s harder to disprove in young children because they have no way of knowing so much. The phenomenon often starts in children between the ages of three and five and generally fades by the age of ten or eleven, although in a few cases it persists into adulthood. Could it be that reincarnation is real? That our afterlife is just a cycle of other lives?”
She shook her head. “How can I believe that in the end? It cuts across my faith and the idea of Christ’s redemption once and for all upon the cross. What would be the point of it all be if we were simply reborn again and again? If we can pay for our sins and achieve salvation through our own efforts, improving ourselves over many lifetimes, then the sacrifice of Christ becomes a nonsense. Hebrew 9:27 says And it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgement.
“I suppose you have to believe that,” Anson said. “But reincarnation could make sense of the absurd injustices of this world. Maybe we have another chance. It also softens the cruelty of death. At least people who believe in it have a cohesive theory of life and death and, in the final analysis, I fail to see how your belief in a particular tenet is going to change your standing with your maker. I guess the church just hates the idea of any loss of control. If reincarnation is true then they stand to lose one of their big sticks - obey the church in this life or suffer eternal damnation. Here’s a question for you: do you believe in the second coming of Christ? I see that you do. You believe in Jesus Christ being born again. Then what in heaven’s name is that if it isn’t reincarnation?”
“But he will not come again as an incarnation born of a woman.”
“If he can come back why can’t we?”
“He is the son of God.”
“Couldn’t reincarnation explain your call to Egypt?”
“No!” Her fervency surprised him, revealing a passionate side.
“Have it your way, Kalila,” he said. “I just like to keep an open mind.”
“So you keep saying,” she said. “But it makes you a syncretist and if you are not careful the wrong things can take up residence in your mind. Now I would like to ask you something. Why did you go the alternative route and ignore mainstream Egyptology?”
“You mean why didn’t I follow the path of real, academic Egyptology? Academics tend to close the doors on subjects, while I like to keep the doors open and let in some air. They are so busy trying to preserve their body of knowledge that they fail to consider the spirit, the unseen. For them, it’s science versus superstition and superstition horrifies them. In this, they’re more influenced by superstition than the superstitious.”
“Not all academics. Keep an open mind about us,” she said with a smile.
Chapter 26
THEY BASED themselves at the Old Cataract Hotel, Aswan, and from there took a short flight south to Abu Simbel, travelling deep into the sun-blasted desert of Nubia. A coach brought them in a convoy, guarded by armed police, to the site.
They pulled up at the rear of a mountain of rock. The heat of the south scorched them as they stepped off the bus. They walked around the rock and suddenly there it was, as startling as if it had erupted from the mountainside. The facade of Abu Simbel. The group stared up at the seated colossi of the pharaoh Rameses. The images sat enthroned in sandstone against the facade of the temple, gazing with bulging, serene eyes over the shimmer of Lake Nasser.
“The Pyramids, the Sphinx, now this – Egypt reminds me of a Hollywood set with too big a budget,” Bloem said.
“The Republican in you recoiling again?” Anson said.
“Yep.”
Anson could sympathise with the man’s dismay. He looked at a swollen stone leg of the pharaoh, dwarfing a female royal who stood like a blade of grass beside it. The foot looked as if it could crush her. A pair of hawks, royal symbols, wheeled in the sky above the pharaohs.
“We’re standing in front of the façade of the temple of Abu Simbel in Nubia, one of the greatest structures ever built by ancient Egyptians,” said Saneya, slipping into her role of tour guide. “These four colossal seated statues of Rameses the Great are twenty metres, or sixty-five feet high, and show a deified Rameses.”
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