She had been gone seven years by then, but she had left a vivid imprint on many people’s lives, including mine. For the rest of the evening we took turns recalling some of her exploits and achievements. “I wish I could have known her,” Catherine said with obvious regret.
The following year I invited Catherine and two friends to join me on a driving trip to Abydos. She and I had been enjoying a brisk correspondence about Egyptian history and I had a feeling that my new friend could use some first-hand exposure to many of the things we had been talking about in our letters. We traveled south from modern Cairo into the heart of old Egypt, observing a way of life little changed from pharaonic days. We visited the site of Akhenaten’s sacred city of the sun at Amarna and lingered in the haunted ruins.
When we reached Abydos all of us could feel the looming presence of the distant escarpment called Pega. Entering the Sety Temple, we removed our shoes – out of respect, as Omm Sety always did. We took our time visiting every hall and court of the temple, admiring the beautiful sculptured figures of the gods to whom Omm Sety made her offerings on feast days, including “My Lady Isis.” This was a tour like the countless tours Omm Sety had given to anyone who wanted to understand the wonders of the temple.
At the end of one passage we faced the exterior wall of the Hall of the Sacred Barques – the room that once contained the ceremonial boats used in sacred processions for carrying the statues of the gods. The hall was closed. We peered through the iron grating in the heavy metal door. This was the domain of Omm Sety, her “office.” I asked one of the watchmen to ask the chief ghaffir* to bring the key and open the door for us to go inside. The ghaffir came in a hurry, apologizing earnestly for not having the key. “Omm Sety always had the key in a small handbag that she kept fixed around her waist,” he explained. “I think it must have been buried along with her.” We had no choice but to continue looking through the bars. There was the bench at which she used to sit to make her drawings of the temple fragments, with paper still on it and two unfinished colored scenes, the last things she had been working on.
We left the temple and came out into the open air. A few yards to the west, deep inside an enormous depression, is one of the most imposing, majestically serene monuments of ancient Egypt: the Osirion. We stood at the top looking down at the architectural wonder. Peace and a sense of the holy infused this place. I could imagine the frail form I had last seen eight years earlier, a few months before her death. Her presence was always powerful, even at the end. Omm Sety was with us here. As we left Abydos, Catherine said, “Now I feel that I’ve met her.”
When I decided to write this book, the memory of that visit came vividly to my mind. I asked Catherine to be my coauthor and she graciously accepted. In this book there will be two identifiable voices, Omm Sety’s and my own. This is only part of the truth. My co-author’s contribution has been substantial and invaluable.
I pray that Omm Sety is pleased with our efforts and is living in great joy with His Majesty in the heavenly halls of Amenti.
*European woman
*Jonathan Cott, The Search for Omm Sety, Doubleday, 1987, Warner, 1989
*watchman
ONE
The Way It Was
“If you could only imagine how beautiful it was.How can I tell you…?” OS
It is said that the Nile resembles a lotus plant, with its roots buried deep in the African continent and its flower opening into the broad delta far to the north. If you look at a map, it is very easy to make that small leap into symbolism. The ancients would have seen that and more, because for them the lotus had layers of meaning beyond simply its beautiful form. Modern culture is not always comfortable with blurring the lines between what we call “reality” and wishful thinking. But if you were living in the Egypt of 1300 BC, everything was more than it appeared. Every place you set your foot was filled with the energy of the neteru, the gods.
That was then, you could say, but even today there are signs of the old gods lingering among the ruined temples and shrines that lie along the river’s banks. When you leave the cities and go out into the countryside, if you know how to listen and observe, you find echoes of that distant past in the villages, though less and less now. Newer forms of religious devotions may have swept away the old, but the folk practices speak of an elder time – like women still leaving offerings before images of the goddess Hathor, praying for a son, and married couples reverently touching an ancient statue of Sekhmet for help with infertility.
Omm Sety knew only too well how the past can haunt the present.
Sometime in the early 1970s Omm Sety and I were sitting together in the small cafeteria near the Sety Temple when a group of French tourists arrived, filling all the empty tables. Someone turned on a cassette recorder and we heard the famous Franco-Egyptian singer Dalida crooning a melancholy Gypsy song in which a girl asks a handsome man,
And you, beautiful Gypsy prince –
From what country do you come?
and he replies sadly,
I come from a homeland
That does not exist anymore.
I translated the French words for Omm Sety and she fell into one of those long spells of silence with which I was already familiar. I let her have her reverie. After a while she said in a distant, dreamy voice, “And me, I come from a homeland that is living in my heart – now, and as it was before.” She finished in a whisper, “If you could only imagine how beautiful it was. How can I tell you…?”
1300 BC
What was it like, this homeland of her heart? This was the Black Land, whose people greeted the sun each day with gratitude and prayers under the watchful gaze of the gods. The dark soil beneath their feet was rich and fertile because each year the river god Hapi brought them the Inundation; and at night when they cast their eyes upward they saw the body of the sky goddess, Nut, arched against the canopy of the heavens. Each night she swallowed the sun and gave it forth again by day.
Theirs was a world of beauty and symmetry, gods and magic. Chief among the gods was Amun of Thebes, who contained within himself aspects of all the other neteru.
No people loved earthly life more, yet death was not to be feared. They knew that eternal life awaited them in the land of the West, which they called Amenti. If they feared anything, it was the moment when the acts of their hearts would be weighed before the Lord Osiris in the hall of judgment, and all secrets would be known.
In this blessed world the highest duty of its king was to preserve the perfectly balanced Order-of-Things set into place in the beginning by the unknowable One-Beyond-All, the giver of life. To violate this trust was to invite Chaos to the Black Land. And so the people looked to their king to protect them from the terrors of Chaos, and they did their part by observing the daily rituals and offerings that told the gods all was well in the Black Land.
But all had not always been well. Fifty years before this time, a new kind of king had come to the throne in Thebes – a religious visionary with his own concept of the Order-of-Things, and a zealous devotion to a single, exclusive god: the Aten, the Disc-of-the-Sun. In a stunning decree he abolished the worship of the old gods. There would be no more Amun, no Lord Osiris to judge the deeds of the heart, no compassionate Lady Isis, no Horus to battle evil, no Hathor to protect women and children. No god but the Aten, remote and unknowable.
The Amun priesthood and temples held vast estates, with huge bureaucracies to run them. Now the temples were closed and their revenues used