by Colin Wilson
Postscript: In early September 1991, a number of self-proclaimed hoaxers made simultaneous confessions to fabricating crop circles. Two of them, Dave Chorley and Doug Bower, claimed to have been making crop circles for thirteen years. Fred Day declared that he had been making them “all his life”. Chorley and Bower demonstrated their technique by flattening corn in a field with a plank in front of TV cameras and crop-circle investigators. As in the case of the earlier Daily Mirror hoax, the investigators pointed out that the Chorley-Bower circle was visibly amateurish.
At the time of writing, the position taken by “cereologists” is that while some of the circles may be hoaxes, the majority show signs of being genuine, such as geometric perfection and an obvious lack of trampling of surrounding crops by human feet. The ultimate test, of course, will be whether crop circles now simply cease to appear – the silliest hoaxer gets tired of repetition – or whether, like “flying saucer” sightings, they continue to be as numerous as ever. Readers who pick up this book in the year 2025 will be in a better position to assess the possibilities than the authors are in 2000.
11
The Curse of the Pharaohs
On 26 November 1922 the archaeologist Howard Carter peered through a small opening above the door of the tomb of Tutankhamon’s tomb, holding a candle in front of him. What he saw dazzled him: “everywhere the glint of gold”. He and his colleague Lord Carnarvon had made the greatest find in the history of archaeology. But a few days later they found a clay tablet with the hieroglyphic inscription: “Death will slay with his wings whoever disturbs the peace of the pharaoh”. The following April Lord Carnarvon died of some unknown disease. By 1929 – a mere six years later – twenty-two people who had been involved in opening the tomb had died prematurely. Other archaeologists dismissed talk about “the curse of the pharaohs” as journalistic sensationalism. Yet it is difficult to imagine that this long series of deaths was merely a frightening coincidence.
Tutankhamon was the heir of the “great heretic” Akhnaton (about 1375 BC to 1360), the first monotheist king in history. He abandoned the capital Thebes, with all its temples, and built himself a new capital, called Akhetaton (Horizon of Aton), at a place now called Tell el Amarna. He worshipped only one god, the sun god Aton. His people, who were more comfortable with the host of old animal gods, disliked this new religion, and were relieved when Akhnaton died young, or perhaps possibly murdered. (So were the priests!) His successor was his son-in-law – possibly his son – Tutankhamon, who was a mere child when he came to the throne, and who died of a blow on the head at the age of eighteen. Historically speaking, therefore, Tutankhamon is a nonentity, whose name hardly deserves to be remembered. His only achievement – if it can be called that – was to restore the old religion, and move his capital back to Thebes. No one knows how he died, whether from a fall, or possibly from the blow of an assassin.
The strangest part of this story is still to come. The high priest (and court chamberlain) was a man called Ay. He seized power, and married Tutankhamon’s fifteen-year-old widow, Enhosnamon. He reigned less than four years, and once again the throne was seized by a usurper, a general called Horemheb, who had been a little too slow off the mark when Tutankhamon died. The wait for the throne had apparently filled him with resentment; as soon as he became pharaoh, he behaved like a dictator, and set out to erase the names of Akhnaton and Tutankhamon from history; he had their names chiselled off all hieroglyphic inscriptions, and used the stones of the great temple of the sun at Tell el Amarna to build three pyramids in Thebes. He even destroyed many tombs of the courtiers of Ay and Tutankhamon.
Yet he omitted to do the most obvious thing of all: to destroy the tomb of Tutankhamon, and to seize its treasures for his own treasury. Why? One possible explanation is that the location of the tomb was kept secret. But that is unlikely; after all, Horemheb came to the throne a mere four years after the death of Tutankhamon; even if the tomb’s location was a secret, there must have been dozens of priests or workmen who could have been “persuaded” to reveal it. It is natural to suspect that Horemheb had some other reason for deciding to leave the tomb inviolate . . .
Howard Carter, the man who finally discovered the tomb, had come out to Egypt as a teenager – he was born in 1873 – and while still in his twenties became Chief Inspector of Monuments for Upper Egypt and Nubia. Acting on his advice, a wealthy American, Theodore Davis, began excavating the Valley of the Kings in 1902. In the previous year grave-robbers had mounted an armed attack on the men guarding the newly discovered tomb of Amonhotep II – a bloodthirsty character who was the great-grandfather of Akhnaton – and made off with all its gold and jewels. Carter had rounded them up and prosecuted them, an action that made him so unpopular with the Egyptians that he found himself without a job. Theodore Davis took him on as a draughtsman, and with Carter’s help made some astonishing discoveries, including the tomb of Horemheb, of the great Queen Hatshepsut, and of Akhnaton’s grandfather Thutmose IV.
It was during this period that there was a curious curtain-raiser to the story of the curse of the pharaohs. Joe Linden Smith was another skilled draughtsman who worked closely with the excavators; he was married to an attractive 28-year-old American named Corinna. Among their closest friends were Arthur and Hortense Weigel; Weigel was an English archaeologist, while Hortense, like Corinna, was a young American. One day when they were descending the slope into the Valley of the Queens, Smith and Weigel came upon a natural amphitheatre that struck them as the ideal site for the presentation of a play. They decided to present their own “mystery play”, and to invite most of the archaeological community from Luxor. But the purpose was not mere entertainment. Both men had immense admiration for Akhnaton and for the artistic productions of his reign, which were far more lifelike than the stylized works of other periods. Their aim was nothing less than to intercede with the ancient gods to lift the curse that consigned Akhnaton’s spirit to wander for all eternity.
According to tradition, Akhnaton died on 26 January 1363 BC. Smith and Weigel decided to present their play on 26 January 1909, and the invitations were sent. On 23 January they held their dress rehearsal. The god Horus appeared and conversed with the wandering spirit of Akhnaton – played by Hortense – offering to grant him a wish; Akhnaton asked to see his mother, Queen Tiy. The Queen was summoned by a magical ceremony; she spoke of her sadness to see her son condemned to eternal misery. Akhnaton replied that even in his misery he still drew comfort from the thought of the god Aton; he asked his mother to recite his hymn to Aton . . .
As Corinna Smith began to recite the hymn her words were drowned by the rising wind. Suddenly a violent storm was upon them; the gale blew sand and small stones, so the cowering workmen thought the gods were stoning them. The rehearsal had to be abandoned, and the actors hurried back to their headquarters, the nearby tomb of Amet-Hu, once governor of Thebes. Later that evening Corinna complained of a pain in her eyes, and Hortense of cramps in her stomach. That night both had similar dreams; they were in the nearby temple of Amon, standing before the statue of the god; he came to life and struck them with his flail – Corinna in the eyes, Hortense in the stomach. The next day Corinna was in agony with inflamed eyes, and had to be rushed to a specialist in Cairo, who diagnosed one of the worst cases of trachoma – Egyptian ophthalmia – he had ever seen. Twenty-four hours later, Hortense joined Corinna in the same nursing-home; during the stomach operation that followed she came close to losing her life. The play had to be abandoned.
Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon had both been invited to the play; at this period Carter was working for Theodore Davis. By 1914 Davis had decided that he had now found all there was to be found in the Valley of the Kings, and decided to abandon his labours. Carnarvon snapped up the concession. He knew that Davis was convinced that he had found the grave of Tutankhamon, a pit grave containing gold plates and other items; but neither Carnarvon nor Carter believed that a pharaoh would be buried so modestly.
The w
ar made it impossible to begin digging until 1917. Then Carter began to dig, slowly and systematically, moving hundreds of tons of rubble left from earlier digs. He found nothing. By 1922 Carnarvon felt he had poured enough money into the Valley of the Kings. Carter begged for one more chance.
On 1 November 1922 he began new excavations, digging a ditch southward from the tomb of Rameses IV. On 4 November the workmen uncovered a step below the foundations of some huts Carter had discovered in an earlier dig. By evening twelve steps had been revealed, then a sealed stone gate. Carter hastened to send a telegram to Carnarvon in England; Carnarvon arrived just over two weeks later. Together Carnarvon and Carter broke their way through the sealed gate, now in a state of increasing excitement as they realized that this tomb was virtually unplundered. Thirty feet below the gate, they came upon a second. With trembling hands, Carter scraped a hole in the debris in its upper corner, and peered through; the candlelight showed him strange animals, statues and gold. There were overturned chariots, lifesize figures, gilded couches, a gold-inlaid throne. But there was no mummy, for this was only the antechamber. However, it was in this antechamber that they found the tablet with the inscription: “Death will slay with his wings whoever disturbs the peace of the pharaoh”. It was recorded by Carter, then disappeared – they were afraid rumours of the inscription might terrify the workmen. A statue of Horus also carried an inscription stating that it was the protector of the grave. On 17 February 1923 a group of distinguished people was invited to witness the opening of the tomb itself. It took two hours to chisel a hole through into the burial chamber. Then only two sets of folding doors separated them from the magnificent gold sarcophagus that was to become world-famous; they decided to leave that for another day. The wealth that surrounded them made them all feel dazed.
Carnarvon was never to see it. That April he fell ill. At breakfast one morning he had a temperature of 104, and it continued for twelve days; his doctors suspected that he had opened an old wound with his razor while shaving, but the fever suggested a mosquito-bite. Howard Carter was sent for. Carnarvon died just before two in the morning. As the family came to his bedside, summoned by a nurse, all the lights suddenly went out, and they were forced to light candles. Later they went on again. It was a power failure that affected all Cairo. Some accounts of Lord Carnarvon’s death state that the failure has never been explained, but none of them mention whether any inquiry was actually addressed to the Cairo Electricity Board.
According to Lord Carnarvon’s son, another peculiar event took place that night; back in England, Carnarvon’s favourite fox terrier began to howl, then died.
The newspapers quickly began printing stories about the “curse of the pharaohs”. This was partly Carnarvon’s own fault; he had sold exclusive rights in the Tutankhamon story to the London Times, and other newspapers had to print any stories they could unearth or concoct. But the curse story hardly needed any journalistic retouching. Arthur Mace, the American archaeologist who had helped unseal the tomb, began to complain of exhaustion soon after Carnarvon’s death; he fell into a coma and died in the same hotel – the Continental – not long after Carnarvon. George Jay Gould, son of the famous American financier, came to Egypt when he heard of Carnarvon’s death, and Carter took him to see the tomb. The next day he had fever; by evening he was dead. Joel Wool, a British industrialist who visited the grave site, died of fever on his way back to England. Archibald Douglas Reid, a radiologist who X-rayed Tutankhamon’s mummy, sufferèd attacks of feebleness and died on his return to England in 1924. Over the next few years thirteen people who had helped open the grave also died, and by 1929 the figure had risen to twenty-two. In 1929 Lady Carnarvon died of an “insect bite”, and Carter’s secretary Richard Bethell was found dead in bed of a circulatory collapse. Professor Douglas Derry, one of two scientists who performed the autopsy on Tutankhamon’s mummy, had died of circulatory collapse in 1925; the other scientist, Alfred Lucas, died of a heart attack at about the same time.
In his book The Curse of the Pharaohs, Philip Vandenburg not only lists the deaths associated with Tutankhamon, but goes on to mention many other archaeologists associated with Egypt who have died prematurely. He points out how frequently these deaths seem to involve a curious exhaustion – Carter himself suffered from this, as well as from fits of depression – and speculates whether the ancient priests of Egypt knew of poisons or fungoid growths that would retain their power down the centuries. Among the premature deaths he mentions François Champollion, who decoded the Rosetta Stone, the great Egyptologist Belzoni, the Swabian doctor Theodore Bilharz (after whom the disease bilharzia was named), the archaeologist Georg Möller, and Carter’s close associate Professor James Henry Breasted. It was James Breasted who reported that Carter became sick and feeble after excavating the tomb, that he seemed at times “not all there”, and that he had difficulty making decisions. Carter died at sixty-six.
Vandenberg begins his book by citing a conversation he had with Dr Gamal Mehrez, director-general of the Antiquities Department of the Cairo Museum. Mehrez, who was fifty-two, expressed disbelief in the idea of a curse. “Look at me. I’ve been involved with tombs and mummies of pharaohs all my life. I’m living proof that it was all coincidence”. Four weeks later Mehrez had died of circulatory collapse . . .
Yet although Vandenberg himself seems to discount the coincidence theory, his attempts to explain the “curse” scientifically are unconvincing – he even considers the possibility that the shape of the pyramid can cause it to absorb certain cosmic energies capable of affecting human health, and that the Egyptians “knew how to influence radioactive decay”.
The ancients themselves would have dismissed such theories as absurd. For them a curse was the result of a ritual to evoke a guardian “demon” or spirit. Such beliefs have survived down to modern times. The psychical researcher Guy Lyon Playfair has described the years he spent in Brazil, and how he investigated “poltergeist” hauntings which appeared to be the result of a curse – that is to say, of “black magic”. Most investigators of the paranormal are inclined to believe that the poltergeist – “noisy ghost” – is some kind of unconscious manifestation of the mind of a “disturbed” teenager, and that when objects suddenly fly around the room, this is due to “spontaneous psychokinesis”. Playfair, while accepting this explanation in some cases, nevertheless came to believe that most poltergeists are in fact disembodied “spirits”. Such spirits can be persuaded, by means of rituals, to “haunt” certain individuals, or to cause disturbances in houses. When this happens another candomblé specialist (candomblé is an African-influenced cult) is called in to dispel the malign influence. In fact, traditional magic through the ages has been based upon this belief in the use of spirits for magical purposes.
Another modern investigator, Max Freedom Long, studied the Huna religion in Hawaii, and became convinced that the Huna priests – known as kahunas – were able to cause death by means of the “death prayer”. He writes:
The truth was that over a period of several years during which time I checked the data through doctors frequenting the Queen’s Hospital in Honolulu, not a year passed but one or more victims of the potent magic died, despite all the hospital doctors could offer by way of aid.
The kahunas, Long says, believe that man has three “selves” or souls, known as the low self, the middle self and the high self. The low self corresponds roughly to what Freud called the unconscious; it controls man’s vital forces, and seems to be predominantly emotional. The middle self is man’s “ordinary consciousness”, his everyday self. The “high self” might be called the superconscious mind; it has powers that are unknown to the everyday self. These three selves inhabit the body, and are separated from it after death. But sometimes a “low self” may become detached from the other two. It becomes an “earthbound spirit” of the sort that causes poltergeist disturbances. The low self, according to the kahunas, possesses memory, while the middle self does not. So a disembodied “middle
self”, separated from the other two, is a wandering wraith without memory – what we would regard as a ghost.
According to Long, the “death prayer” involves disembodied “low spirits”, who are highly susceptible to suggestion, and can easily be persuaded to obey. The victim of the death prayer experiences an increasing numbness as the spirits drain his vital energies.
Long obtained much of his information about the kahunas (recorded in his book The Secret Science Behind Miracles) from a doctor, William Tufts Brigham, who had studied them for many years. Brigham told him a typical story of the death prayer. He had hired a party of Hawaians to climb a mountain, and a fifteen-year-old boy became ill, experiencing a numbness that rose from his feet. He told Brigham that he was a victim of the death prayer. The kahuna in his local village hated the influence of the white men, and declared that any Hawaian who worked for the whites would become a victim of the death prayer. When the boy accepted the job with Brigham the kahuna knew it by clairvoyance, and had invoked the death prayer.
The Hawaians, who also believed that Brigham was a magician, asked him to try to save the boy. Brigham decided to try. Acting upon the assumption that the lad was being attacked by highly suggestible “lower spirits”, he stood over him and addressed the attackers, flattering them and arguing that the boy was an innocent victim, and telling them that it was the witch doctor who sent them who ought to be destroyed. He kept his mind concentrated on this idea for another hour, when suddenly the tension seemed to vanish and he experienced a sense of relief. The boy declared that he could now feel his legs again. When Brigham visited the boy’s village he learned that the kahuna had died, after telling the villagers that the “white magician” had redirected the spirits to attack him. Within hours of this he was dead. Brigham thought he had gone to sleep early, and awoke to find himself under attack, by which time it was too late.