THE HATHOR HOLOCAUST

by Roy Lester Pond

  She made notes. Then she paged through a book. Doctors today needed cribs to keep up with the new drugs, he noted.

  “Let’s see. Do you feel worthless or excessively guilty at times?” she said.

  Was she reading out from the book?

  “Most of the time.”

  “Lost interest in pleasurable activities?”

  “What’s pleasurable anymore?”

  “Decrease or increase in appetite?”

  “It varies.”

  “Sleep?”

  “Disturbed. Or catatonic. Nothing in between.”

  “Slowed down, or restless and excessively active?”

  “Yes, it’s always one or the other.”

  “Tired and no energy?”

  “When I think about how I’m feeling right now, yes.”

  “Difficulty thinking, indecisive?”

  He thought about it.

  She moved on.

  “Constant thoughts of death? Yes, you have already mentioned that.” She took out a prescription pad and scribbled on it. “I think we might try you on these. They’ll take a few weeks to kick in properly, but then the world should look okay.”

  “Is the world okay?”

  “Not really,” she said. “It will just look that way.”

  He worked on his blog.

  Anson Hunter’s Blog - The Other Egypt

  Sources of forbidden power, pestilence and plagues bring me back to my interest in Prince Khaemwaset, the son of Rameses the Great of Exodus fame.

  I often have flights of fancy about Khaemwaset being a man out of his time - an alternative archaeologist from the future, stuck in the past. Me.

  How does this happen?

  One minute I’m standing there in front of a carved Egyptian false door in a tomb - a blank, spiritual false door between the two worlds of the living and the dead made of solid stone -and in the next moment I’m plunging down a chasm, bludgeoning my spinning head against a series of violent visions rising like stone steps in a stairwell – animal-headed gods, jackals, crocodiles, falcons, grinning mummies, they strike my senses with hard lights of pain. I feel my skull cracking open and images surging into my brain.

  Then I hit the bottom and black out.

  I sit up in a circle of firelight in a hall of papyriform columns, my head ringing.

  An attendant stands at the centre of this circle of illumination, calm as a candle, holding a torch flame.

  I look down at myself.

  I am inside the skin of an ancient Egyptian character called Khaemwaset, more, I’m inside his leopard skin -a pelt hanging across my chest and kilt like a spotted sash.

  The uniform is a reminder that I am not only a hereditary prince, but also a servant of the gods, a kherheb, a priest.

  There I am, shaven-skulled, inside the body of that ancient worthy, Khaemwaset, knowing everything he knows, but also being conscious of myself. Maybe being too obsessed with Khaemwaset has brought this on me. Or maybe the real Khaemwaset had been standing right in front of that same false doorway several thousand years previously, just as I had, and something happened across time at the very moment we both started wondering…

  Whatever magic, or distortion in time and space, caused the phenomenon, we suddenly become two people out of our time.

  The first thing that strikes me, perversely, is a sense of profound deprivation, of being robbed of something that I’d always thought would be mine. My own life and times. I don’t really want to be stuck in history. At least not permanently. Not in an age before antibiotics, anaesthesia, modern dentistry and the Internet. Your own age is the oxygen you breathe, it suddenly hits me, and without it I am left gasping as I walk out of the building with my servant and into the daylight of an earlier age.

  It’s so dammed quiet. No tourist buses on the roads, no aircraft flying overhead. Here, even the air is different. It feels younger and headier.

  Maybe it’s the lack of pollution.

  I know very surely in that moment that Egypt isn’t just a place for me. Egypt is first of all a concept. It’s the Egypt of the mind I love, self-contained and endlessly satisfying. I love to hanker after it, not live in it and die in it. So what do I do now? What would you do if you were an archaeologist stuck in 2,000 BC, knowing what you did about the greatest secrets of history?

  Go out and hunt down Tutankhamun’s tomb before Howard Carter does? Tempting, but no, you wouldn’t.

  How about cracking the tomb of great pharaohs like Seti or of Thutmosis? They’d be more rewarding than the boy king’s hole-in-the-wall.

  No, I don’t want to start a treasure hunt. Instead I am galvanized by the desperate need to find a ticket home and that means finding the source of the power that brought me here, the only source of power available to a man like Khaemwaset. I’d do what Khemwaset is said to have done – I’d begin a search for a great source of power – Egypt’s greatest magical power, the scroll of Thoth.

  Now it becomes clear why those still living in the 21st Century call me The First Egyptologist.

  They recognise me as an individual way, way ahead of his time, a man with a precocious interest in archaeology and a genius for digging up hidden secrets.

  I now understand that statue of Khaemwaset in the British Museum.

  The statue’s eyes seem to gaze far beyond, and the face has an air as haunted as the sphinx’s.

  I know the secret that haunts that face and the reason for that far-gazing look in his eyes. This 19th Dynasty image graven in breccia stone depicts a modern day Egyptologist from the 21st Century, an intruder trapped in the ancient past and pining to find a way home.

  Khaemwaset is me.

  Can you imagine that for a moment?

  Stretch your mind across thirty centuries, just as my existence has been stretched and twisted violently out of context and out of time.

  My fate can swing the history of humankind and transform the world’s belief systems.

  How will I know one scroll among many, perhaps one among thousands?

  Legend says that the Scroll of Thoth sheds a radiance of its own, so dazzling that it can light the way like a lamp.

  We cross a threshold and enter an underground hypogeum beneath the Memphis necropolis.

  “The Library of Thoth!”

  My attendant’s voice is a whisper tense with awe and dread, yet it sends a scuttling echo through the columns like snakes among dry reeds. My companion is a scribe, Ineni. The calm circle of light from his torch shakes in the darkness.

  I know what this place is. We have penetrated the Library of the god of wisdom. The Greeks tell that Alexander the Great built his great library of Alexandria based on the model of the forty-two books of knowledge contained in this library in order to house the remnants of it as well as a collection of almost half a million other papyrus scrolls containing all the knowledge and wisdom of Egypt and the gods.

  Most forbidden and powerful of all is a scroll called the Book of Thoth, a work of frightening thaumaturgy said to have been composed by the Lord of Divine Words himself, the god symbolised by an ibis, or by a cynocephalus baboon, ‘Mighty in his Wonderworking Formulae’. Thoth was the mysterious source of power of all amulets, spells and invocations of the gods, and inside this book was said to be all the magic of the world. It was not the magic of abracadabra and yanking rabbits out of hats, but something rather different, a concept we can barely grasp in the twenty first century. In fact, it sounds like an oxymoron to the modern mind – the power of spiritual technology. The Book of Thoth is the sourcebook of such power. It comes with a reputation, a blurb that says…

  When you open this book, you will behold and possess the powers of the earth, the sky, the waters, the infernal regions of the abyss - the underworld, that is the mountains, beasts, birds, creatures, reptiles, the fishes of the darkest sea, as well as the magical powers of the gods of Egypt themselves...

  In short, the holder of it will be established on high in this world and, in the Egyptians’ word
s, have the ability to work great wonders.

  Ineni and I move forward into the first columned hall and as we do so I wonder what condition the scroll will be in today, at the time of Khaemwaset. It comes from an age before the pharaohs, called Zep Tepi, thousands of years old at the time of Rameses the Great.

  I recall that the vast majority of the four hundred thousand papyri preserved around the world in the twenty-first century are in a fragmentary state. Scrolls that appear perfectly fine on the outside hide an insect-eaten interior so fragile that you are afraid to breathe in case you disperse the contents in a puff of air. There is nothing so heartbreaking as a damaged scroll. A gap in a piece of papyrus can ‘feel like a wound which could bleed for a very long time’ as the decipherer of hieroglyphs Francois Champollion remarked. Anxiety attends the unrolling of any ancient and brittle papyrus scroll. It’s for this reason that many rolls of papyrus lie unopened in museums, locked in a crumbling vault of their own decay until new techniques of unrolling come along to reveal their secrets.

  Will my search for a papyrus ticket home end in a heap of powdered fibre?

  Staining and resinous accretions are other inherent problems, I reflect, along with corrosive action from the metallic pigments used in the vignettes, flaking the paint. Careless handling is an enemy, yet another is moisture.

  Be in one piece.

  But past experience is against me, I worry. Papyrus remains a voraciously thirsty substance throughout its life cycle, from the time of its growth to its manufactured form as a writing material. Papyrus cyperus has largely vanished from the banks of the Nile where it once grew wildly, the grown plant soaring three times the height of a man, yet papyrus thickets still choke African swampland such as the Sudd in Central Africa and Lake Victoria. It not only blocks navigation, but sucks away fifty percent of the river's water through evaporation and plant transpiration.

  Moisture in cured papyrus also means mould, staining and rot. I have examined millennia-old scrolls before, and observed the painstaking steps that professional papyrologist take to preserve and restore them - solvent treatment, aqueous treatments such as blotter washing, and ultra-sonic humidification to coax damaged fibres into their original shape and alignment. Then there is stain-reduction and enzyme treatments, and most exacting of all, the patient re-matching of fibres by microscope and light box, a method that can determine losses as small as the width of a single fibre when joining the edges of fragments together.

  I won’t have their technology.

  I wonder about the length of the document we have come to find. The great Turin papyrus stretches one hundred and eighty-five feet, the Papyrus of Ani, a so-called Book of the Dead, seventy-eight feet.

  We press on through the hallway.

  But I have other fears.

  The secrets of Thoth are not for the profane. There is a text about a time of turmoil and anarchy in Egypt, possibly the first intermediate period, where the scribe laments:

  Behold, the hidden chamber’s books are stolen. The secrets are revealed, the magical spells revealed. Conjurations are rendered rough by being repeated…

  The text is likely to be prefaced with a threat against those who disturb the papyrus ‘an eternal curse on he who reads these lines…’

  As for any man, even of any foreign land, whether of Nubia, Kush, or Syria, who shall remove this book, carrying it off from me - their corpse shall not be buried; they shall not receive cool water; their incense shall not be inhaled; no son or daughter shall wait upon them to pour water offerings to them; their name shall not be remembered anywhere on earth; they shall not see the rays of the solar disc.

  Not an inviting blurb.

  I wonder if the scroll will be a book of spells, like The Book of the Dead, employing repetition and the power of sound.

  I have seen Egyptian Coptic spells that openly derive from ancient Egyptian models. Will the scroll’s spells be like these?

  AAAAA EEEEE II OOOOOO UUUUU OOO I adjure you, the ibis, Djehutiy! Djehutiy Djehuti Djehut Djehu Djeh Dje Dj D

  I adjure thee by the four winds and the four pillars of the sky, by your sacred name of Djehutiy, your images and your amulets, to rise in your power… ‘

  Gobbledeygook?

  If it is, then Christians have been doing it for centuries.

  “Stop!”

  We have found the entrance to the Lost Library, but I never guess that we will run into an ancient librarian.

  “Seshat!” Ineni whispers.

  Seshat.

  Of course. The Female Scribe. Foremost in the Library. Keeper of the Books of Thoth.

  A calculating goddess, the inventor of writing and mathematics and time, Mistress of Reckonings.

  The young woman who blocks our path has a five pointed star on her head and a leopard’s pelt across her sheath dress like a spotted sash, the spots of the leopard symbolising a sky of stars and the irregular pattern of spots flung across the pelt seem to wax and wane like stars as do the glittering eyes in her beautiful face.

  A guardian of magic and secret knowledge, Seshat is recognised in modern times as patroness of computers, computer programs, systems and the Internet. They call her The Silicon Goddess.

  Seshat is also the patron of modern day librarians.

  I have bad memories of librarians. I carry a childhood image of lady librarians as guardians of knowledge, standing guard over books, their eyeglasses tethered around their necks on lengths of chain – dragon-keepers of information, which they dare you to try to wrest from them.

  Perhaps Seshat is where this image all began.

  “What are you doing in my Hall of Reckonings?” she says.

  Reckonings?

  Is that a reference to her invention of mathematics? I don’t think so, judging by her forbidding expression.

  ‘Reckonings’ smacks of being reckoned with, of trials and accountability for your actions and paying a price for your errors.

  “I need the scroll of Thoth to help me get home again…” I begin.

  “Yes, I know that, Intruder from Tomorrow. But why do you believe that the Scroll of Power can help you? You who know another power.”

  How does she know that?

  Does she know more?

  “Another power?” I say. “What do you know about that other power?”

  “What is your question?”

  “Does he… exist?”

  “You ask a pagan divinity that! Yet I will give you an answer. No, your high god does not exist.”

  The news comes down with a bang like a librarian’s stamp.

  “No God?”

  “You are asking the wrong question. You ask if the high god exists. Existence has a beginning, middle and end. So the high god is outside of existence and therefore does not exist.”

  I am going to have to choose my words more carefully, I see.

  “Back to the scroll. Can it actually help me get home?”

  “Certainly,” the Keeper of Scrolls said, “but the scroll you seek is not available to you.”

  Just what librarians always seemed to say to me.

  ‘Sorry, the volume you request is off the shelf and has now been stacked’.

  A polite smile from the librarian.

  Another request for help deflected.

  God, librarians deserved the arrival of the Internet, I think, or a least the librarians I’ve been unlucky enough to meet.

  “But I must have this book,” I say. “My life and future depend on it.”

  “Then you must earn it. But know this - your life and the future of the world will depend on your knowledge.”

  No pressure.

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “You must face a test of your knowledge.”

  “What is my subject?”

  “Ancient Mesopatamia.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Ancient Egypt. What did you expect?”

  I hope it will be trivia and not some Egyptian brain-twister like calculating the
volume of a truncated bent pyramid.

  “True or False. A ‘helpless one’ can rise from his bier and walk.”

  By helpless one, she means a dead person, a mummy.

  And it is a trick question.

  “False,” I say. “A mummy cannot rise and walk. They limp. In an ancient practice of dismemberment, priests dislocate one ankle.”

  “Correct. What two great lion-like beasts once guarded the entrance to the Nile in very early times?”

  “The sphinxes. Old histories speak of two sphinxes, one on each side of the Nile.”

  “Impressive. Name the hiding places of the Scroll of Thoth. In order.”

  I know this.

  In a tale about Khaemwaset, the prince opens a series of containers, rather like the nest of coffins and shrines found inside the tomb of the boy king Tutankhamun.

  “The first hiding place is an iron container and then a bronze one inside,’ I say. “Then inside the bronze container and there’s a keté-wood one. Open the ketéwood one and there’s an ivory-and-ebony one. Open the ivory-and-ebony one and there’s a silver one. Open the silver one and there’s a gold one. Open the gold one and there you have it - the Book of Thoth.”

  “Containers?” Her voice takes on a dangerous tone.

  Trick question again.

  There is an alternative theory about the containers, and I collect theories.

  People assume these containers were boxes, but were they? There is a clue in a scroll called the Westcar Papyrus, about an early pharaoh, Khufu, builder of the great pyramid. In it we discover that Khufu is anxiously seeking to discover ‘the number of the secret chambers of the sanctuary of Thoth’ so that he can incorporate the number inside his own tomb. Was this statement a garbled version of what he actually sought? Was his quest to find ‘the number of the secret chambers of the Sanctuary of Thoth’ or simply to find ‘a number of secret chambers of the Sanctuary of Thoth?’ Just a difference of a definite article, but a definite difference in meaning. Are we actually talking about boxes at all, or about something else - precious chambers, a number of them, one within the other, or after the other, of iron, bronze, kete-wood, ebony-and-ivory, silver and, ultimately gold, a sequence of metals - iron, copper, gold, echoing the alchemical process of transmutation and of higher illumination?