to all who witnessed that they too could overcome death and be as gods.
A pilgrimage to Abydos was a chance to present one’s soul to Osiris and be washed clean again. If you had the good fortune to die at that moment, you were doubly blessed. People left instructions in their wills that their hearts were to be buried at Abydos, and if that were not possible then a stone monument, a cenotaph, would be erected instead. Down through the ages, the sacred burial grounds of Abydos became filled with cenotaphs of kings and nobles and ordinary people wishing for an eternity with their beloved god.
It was natural that Sety would want to add to the monuments in such a holy place, especially after the years of Akhenaten’s great heresy. Whenever Sety was not occupied on the eastern frontiers, he visited his new temple to oversee its progress. Nearby, he erected a small palace retreat for himself, which he named Heartsease, a poignant choice for someone whose personal life had seen its full measure of heartache and betrayal.
He was a man of greatness and valor, but he was also a man of sorrows whose rash heart led him one fateful day to disturb the Order-of-Things – not in the grave manner of the Heretic, but a disturbance nonetheless. He knew that for the sin of entering into a forbidden love he had brought down upon himself the punishment of the gods.
Sety’s sin is not to be found in history books, it probably never will – but it plays an important part in our story, for it was the cause of his 3300-year search for a young temple priestess named Bentreshyt, and for atonement in the holy city of Abydos.
This is a story about Egypt – about a particular moment in its long history, and how that moment cast its shadow forward across time.*
*modern Tell el-Amarna
*Note: Throughout the book, Omm Sety’s quoted words are taken from conversations I and others had with her, from her personal notes and diaries, and from articles she wrote.
TWO
Dorothy
“‘But when I grow up,’ I told him,‘I’m going to live in Egypt.’” OS
Nothing about Omm Sety was ever ordinary – not her exuberant laugh, her questing mind, or her larger-than-life presence. Even if she had had no psychic connection at all with the far past, her intellect alone would have left a memorable legacy. That legacy will feature prominently in our book. But there are certain things about her life that should be spoken of first.
In the early years of our friendship I knew very little about Omm Sety’s life before Egypt. I knew that her father, Reuben Eady, had been a tailor and that the family had lived in a flat in a London suburb and that she was an only child. In time, she began telling me about her early life, starting with an incident in 1907 when she was three.
When the family doctor answered the urgent call to the Eady residence he arrived to find Dorothy Louise unconscious at the bottom of a steep staircase. The doctor carefully examined the girl and could find no pulse or other signs of life. He sadly informed the parents that their child had died, then went back to his office to prepare the death certificate.
On his return an hour later, the doctor was dumbfounded to find that the dead had apparently come back to life, and was at that moment playing on her bed, fully alert, her plump cheeks stuffed with candy, while her parents hovered anxiously.
Most peculiar of all, Dorothy began talking about going home, even though, of course, she was home.
But that wasn’t what she meant. There were new thoughts in her mind now, new images – new memories. Soon after the accident Dorothy began having dreams of a beautiful building with huge columns and the loveliest garden extending far off to one side. In that garden she saw pools, stone paths and tall trees.
Being only three, she didn’t have words to describe the magnificent temple she was seeing because she had never seen anything like it in her short life. But she knew this place was home. Sometimes she would cry bitterly, begging her parents to let her return there. Reuben and Caroline Eady didn’t take the matter seriously at first; such childhood fantasies were transient things, their friends assured them.
“All I can remember about the fall,” Omm Sety once told me, “is that when I regained consciousness I felt, well, sort of funny. It was as though I not only changed my skin, which was black and blue with bumps all over, but I also felt that something in my head had changed its orientation. I was not the same after that.”
A few years ago, I met a woman who was a distant relative of Omm Sety’s on her father’s side. She had come to Egypt with a group of British tourists. In our conversation about Dorothy I asked what she knew about the fall down the stairs. She said that the family believed the whole affair about her “dying” had really been a case of an elderly doctor’s poor eyesight and malfunctioning stethoscope. It was a bad concussion, nothing more. If that was so, I asked, then how do we explain the sudden change that came over her when she woke again? The dear woman had no answer. Whatever the explanation, the child appeared to have awakened from her fall with an overlay of images and memory quite apart from anything she had encountered in her first three years as Dorothy Eady.
I recently came across an interesting passage from Omm Sety’s diaries, dated August 20, 1972. She and Sety had been speaking about someone from His Majesty’s past, and Sety mentioned that the person was living again on earth. Omm Sety then asks if the person had been reborn as a baby, and Sety replies,
“I do not think so. People are sent back to earth for two reasons, usually to pay for some sin; more rarely, to fulfill some important work in the world. For the first reason they are usually sent into a body very closely resembling their original one. They enter the new body at the very moment of its death, or at a time when it is deeply unconscious. This is what happened to you, and though you were only a little child, you became different.”
I said, “Some people believe that everyone returns to earth, over and over again, until at last they become perfect and sinless and become part of the being of the Great God.”
He said, “If they believe this, perhaps it happens so for them. But for us, it is not so.”
When Dorothy was four, the family went on an outing to the British Museum. It was going to be a boring place, she thought, because she was expected to be quiet and walk slowly. As they entered the Egyptian Galleries she was suddenly transfixed by all the statues and animal-headed gods. She gazed intently at them, then began to run about and kiss the feet of each one, oblivious to the laughter around her. Her parents were embarrassed to be part of this scene, and it only got worse. When it came time to leave, Dorothy refused, screaming that these were her people and she wanted to stay with them. Prying their hysterical child from the feet of the Egyptian statues, the Eadys hurried her from the museum.
Some time later her father brought home an exploration magazine with a series of Egyptian photographs. One showed the half-buried Sety Temple at Abydos. It was roofless and the courts were full of sand. In front of the building was a sort of lake with two fishermen who held strange-looking nets. Dorothy recognized the temple at once. This was the home of her dreams, except that in her dreams it was always perfect and now it wasn’t. And there was a picture of the well-preserved mummy of Sety I, which she recognized as well. She knew
