A Nile 'River Of Consciousness' Blog...

An Egyptologist stuck in 2,000 BC, knowing the greatest secrets of history...

2011-06-20T15:16:00.000-07:00

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 Egyptologist 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...

(Excerpt from my Blog in "The Hathor Holocaust")

THE HATHOR HOLOCAUST & THE IBIS APOCALYPSE - Egypt Fact or Egypt Fiction?

2010-09-19T03:19:00.000-07:00

Now a paperback, Amazon

Out as a paperback next week

2 new paperbacks...

THEY CALL IT 'Egypt fiction'?

Yet unseen dangers springing from Egypt's ancient past - and conspirators with dangerous world agendas that take their 'light' from Egypt - are all too real as events have proved.

Now my theories and revelations find themselves fictionalised in two new "thrillers"... (in paperbacks at Amazon, I understand).

My unauthorized chronicler, who goes by the name Roy Lester Pond, has a lot to answer for.

'THE EGYPT TOMB MACHINE' Apple iBook - for young adults

2010-08-10T19:57:00.000-07:00

Out now for the iPad generation

Not content to splash my Egyptology theories and explorations all of the internet with books like The Hathor Holocaust and The Ibis Apocalypse, this writer has now released an Egypt adventure novel for a younger audience (under the shortened name of Roy Pond).

His blurb says: "Science fiction time-travel, fantasy and ancient Egyptian mythology join the supernatural in a young Egyptologist’s quest to save a loved one at the boundaries of existence...."

EGYPT'S STONE BOOK OF THOTH - HISTORY'S MOST DANGEROUS TOME

2010-07-29T13:01:00.000-07:00

I am convinced that the forbidden Book of Thoth was originally carved in stone... a stone book - the Stela of Destiny...

Today the Stela of the ibis-headed god Thoth is the great secret of secrets that everybody wishes to find; there have been several well-financed expeditions into Egypt to seek it. It’s the Holy Grail for Hermetic and New Age adherents and some even believe that it is not just a metaphoric Grail, it is the mother of all Grail legends and that its appearance will be the harbinger of new enlightenment as well as a new order of the ages.

What is the power of the Stela?

It’s a work of frightening thaumaturgy, a forbidden tome on stone said to have been composed by the Lord of Divine Words, Thoth, 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, the source of spiritual technology and power.

My theories have now been 'borrowed' in a new thriller 'The Ibis Apocalypse'...

THE HATHOR HOLOCAUST & the burning issue of climate change

2010-07-20T22:00:00.000-07:00

The sun disc of Ra, symbol of life and searing death, was central to the mythology of the Egyptians.

Ironically today in the twenty-first century, we are again obsessed with the sun, heart of the burning issue of climate change.

Our lives and our future revolve around the sun, just as they did in the most ancient times of Egypt.

And now I fear a return attack of an ancient, holocaust sun and the reactivation of an apocalypse of global scorching, plague and pestilence…

(My theory is now all over the internet... in an e-novel on Amazon Kindle, and Kindle apps on IPads, Macs, PCs, Blackberries and more every day...)

'PHARAOH'S CURSE' - SECRET EXPOSED IN SENSATIONAL YOU TUBE VIDEO

2009-07-05T12:44:00.000-07:00

The Egyptians used powerful smiting texts and cursing
rituals to smite enemy nations from afar

The unauthorised chronicler of my adventures as an alternative archaeologist has gone one step further than writing a book of so-called fiction called 'THE SMITING TEXTS' - his publicist has now released a highly sensational video exposing my theories about dangers from the ancient past.

The Egyptian state employed 'remote killing' as a method of warfare against enemy nations, as 'THE SMITING TEXTS' and this video reveal. High priests and pharaohs wrote smiting texts in hieroglyphs on the sides of clay jars which they ritually smashed while uttering cursing formulae, in the belief that such imprecations had the power to reach out and smite all enemies of the land of Egypt, in all places and at all times. (Maybe I should try employing it against my unauthorised chronicler!)

Son of Rameses to blame for Plagues of Egypt?

2009-06-10T14:17:00.000-07:00

The magician-priest, son of Rameses

I CALLED in at the British Museum’s Egyptian sculpture hall in order to pay my respects to Khaemwaset. It occurs to me that Prince Khaemwaset, who according to tradition found the forbidden Scroll of Thoth somewhere in the Saqqara area, may have had a hand in the events of Exodus as they unfolded. Those with a biblical mindset might consider this question. Who kept hardening pharaoh’s heart against Moses, drawing upon Egypt the series of ten great plagues? I think the subject of my recent study, Khaemwaset, armed with his scroll and newfound source of power, may have had something to do with it. On the fair side, maybe he was God’s agent, just as Moses and Aaron were said to be. All the same, if Khaemwaset were behind his father’s resolve, then he had a string of plagues to answer for – the water turned into blood, the fish killed and the water rendered undrinkable, swarming frogs that set the river and the land jumping, lice and gnats, flies, a blight on the cattle, boils, hailstorms, clouds of locusts, darkness and then the death of the firstborn, which, if we take this last plague literally, happily passed Khaemwaset by, since by birth he was fourth in line to the throne. Maybe it was Khaemwaset and his scroll that empowered the magicians of pharaoh to match the first few miracles, turning a staff into a snake, turning water into blood and pulling frogs out of the hat. We can imagine his growing feeling of dread - and that of his father Rameses - as the disasters piled up and the land of Egypt groaned in anguish, matters culminating in the visitation by the angel of death passing like a mist of doom over the cities and villages of Egypt. Did that convince Khaemwaset to put the scroll back where he found it?

I often wish I could put all of ancient Egypt back

2009-02-22T18:01:00.000-08:00

I often wish I could put all of ancient 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 frightening than the destruction of trees. Something great and deeply thrilling happened here once.

My New Conspiracy Theory – I have an unofficial chronicler

2009-01-08T13:32:00.000-08:00

A work of fiction called The Smiting Texts

The trouble with alternative theorists like me is that we just keep on theorising. But this latest speculation of mine has some disturbing basis in fact. I have the evidence. First a book, The Smiting Texts – ‘a modern archaeological thriller, an ancient, esoteric time bomb.’ It is a work of ‘fiction’ evidently pieced together from my blogs about ancient Egypt and by interviewing those who know me. What do I do about it? I can hardly claim that my reputation is being destroyed – as an alternative Egyptologist with self-destructive theories about unseen dangers from the ancient past – such as a conviction that smiting rituals and execration texts were ancient Egypt’s WMDs - I have none to protect, especially where academic Egyptology is concerned. I am still gnashing my teeth in outer darkness, failing to swing the world of Egyptology to my way of thinking.

Mysteriously appearing inside new volumes on ancient Egypt

And now this – a spurious ‘Anson Hunter business card' mysteriously appearing inside new volumes on ancient Egypt and Egyptology in UK bookstores such as Waterstone's, Blackwells, Borders, Foyles and WH Smith as well as in other places across the UK.
Who is putting them there?
The author himself, conducting some kind of covert, viral promotional campaign?
The worst of it is that the book is starting to attract a fair bit of interest.
And if all that isn't enough, the publisher is bringing out a hardcover version of 'The Smiting Texts' at the end of January 09!
Sometimes I wish I could exchange my life as a renegade Egyptologist, theorist and phenomenologist working in the shadows of the sacred and mysterious, for the ivory tower of respectability.
Almost.

The murder of my Egyptologist father...

2008-12-08T01:39:00.000-08:00

My Egyptologist father died here in Mereruka’s tomb.

Here on these steps it all ended for my father and a bigger mystery began. Someone came out of the shadows to silence his voice. He paid for his theories of the afterlife with his own life, died right here on these steps in front of the statue of the Old Kingdom Vizier.

What a contrast. A man of the ancient world stepping forward in confidence, affirming his belief in survival after death, while at his feet lay a man of the twenty-first century who expected oblivion… who was right in the end?

The striding figure of Mereruka seems beyond time and decay. The Hittite, Greek, Persian, Roman and British empires all came and went while the Vizier continues to move steadfastly through eternity.

People are wrong to imagine that cynical priests pretended to believe and merely went through the motions when they presented offerings and prayers and burnt incense in front of this door. They believed unshakeably in an afterlife. They lived in an age where humankind and gods, the living and the dead, and the forces of good and evil, existed side by side in two parts that held the universe together. In today’s age that denies god and laughs at the devil, people can't see both sides. But they need to believe in the light and the shadow and to hold both in their minds, not least the shadow. The shadow gives things shape and form. Without it there is just blinding, unrelieved glare like the sunlit desert outside.

My reaction to my fathers's death surprises me; I’ve studied death, tombs and mummies for the better part of my life. Yet now I discover that death - the first mystery - does not come any easier to me than to any other person, even though death is my stock in trade. Without death and the Egyptians’ love of life and determination to prolong it eternally, little of what I know and love about those distant days would have reached me. Death was the silent teacher and guide that led me through the wonders of Egypt. Why, then, has a lifetime's contemplation of the funerary habits of a long-dead people not prepared me better for this?

Death in your personal life is a different matter, it seems.

The mysterious ‘flesh of Egypt’...

2008-11-28T23:21:00.000-08:00

Nefertari as Hathoric figure, Abu Simbel

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 - 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.
A feeling comes over me in Egypt that I can’t quite shake – that the mysterious feminine of ancient Egypt meets me in person and attends me when I am here.

They call me an alternative Egyptologist, and yet…

2008-11-14T23:43:00.000-08:00

Alternative theorists? I’m a disappointment to most of them. I’m not extreme enough for their liking. I’m not, for example, a big fan of Atlantis, aliens and pyramid power.

What are my feelings about most of the fringe theorists? They depart from the historical mainstream, all right, but they’ve lost the bloody river.

Why didn’t I follow the path of real, academic Egyptology, instead? 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, unseen realities.

For them, it’s science versus superstition and superstition makes them run a mile. In this, they’re more influenced by superstition than the superstitious.

Egypt - the wonder of things half-hidden or lost

2008-10-24T20:44:00.001-07:00

A fallen Rameses II, Temple of Wadi es-Sebua, Nubia

To me there’s nothing more mysterious and beautiful than that line where a ruin of Egypt’s past rises from the conquering empire of sand, the horizon where an ancient world meets a modern one and graven glyphs emerge to send us text messages from eternity...

It’s the power of the partly-veiled, like a barely risen - or set - sun on the horizon.

Egyptian mummies and death, the 'first mystery'

2008-10-17T19:33:00.000-07:00

British Museum mummy

Standing beside mummies, it’s easy to understand what attracts people to the ‘first mystery’, death, to the gods and the magical afterlife of Egypt. There are few subjects on earth, or beneath it, quite so compelling.
The ancient Egyptians probably invented heaven, the first to set out their beliefs clearly in texts and illustrations, while others, such as the Israelites, still believed that at death a person entered a dark realm of nothingness called Sheol.
Was the Egyptian afterworld a place, or just a different reality, a sort of virtual world created by a civilization’s collective unconscious and sustained by its religion?
Or were the Egyptians wrong and did they go to their graves resting on a broken reed, believing in a non-existent eternity?
I sometimes wonder if they achieved some sort of ghostly existence within the withered husks of their remains, suspended, like their bodies, in stasis, where the relative motions of space and time no longer operate.

Who owns ancient Egypt? A 21st century Arabic nation? Or the world?

2008-10-11T15:35:00.000-07:00

Rameses the Great, British Museum

I was haunting the British Museum again and fell to wondering, as I looked around the Egyptian hall of sculptures: if extremists had their way, would they obliterate these remains from the so-called age of ignorance before Islam?

Modern Muslim Egyptians live in fearful tension with their ancient past, it occurred to me, looking up at a colossal head of Rameses.

Not long ago, Egypt's Grand Mufti issued a fatwa against sculpture. Egypt's ancient sculptures are forbidden by Islam, he said. Sculptors are doomed to receive the harshest treatment on Judgement Day.

Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities distanced itself from the fatwa, saying that the sculptures they preserve and showcase are not for the purpose of idolatry but to provide a window on history. "We display statues so they can be studied and so people can get to know their heritage. This is Egypt's national heritage. We don't display them for worship."

A number of influential sheikhs supported the mufti, however, while intellectuals and artists in Egypt were said to have called the fatwa laughable.

And yet...

Could firebrands one day use this as an excuse to harm treasures of history that belong to all of humankind?

The Taliban in central Afghanistan demonstrated the peril of antiquities in the hands of idealogues. They used explosives to destroy the sixth century Buddhas of Bamyan, a pair of colossal standing Buddhas carved into the side of a sandstone cliff, irreplaceable examples of Indo-Greek art.

Antiquities authorities in the Arab Republic of Egypt wonder why Western museums are less than eager to repatriate their Egyptian collections to Egypt, yet who can see what lies ahead for this Islamic nation?

In spite of recent hectoring by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities to return artefacts to Egypt from the museums of the world, modern Egypt's exclusive claim on the civilization of the pharaohs is shaky.

Where is the link of this 21st century Arabic society with ancient Egypt? Not religion, not language, not politics, probably not even temperament, certainly not philosophy or social structure - let alone shared basic assumptions about equality between the sexes - not artistic tradition, not even the rhythm of life regulated by the ebb and flow of the Nile... the construction of the Aswan High Dam severed that link forever.

Today's new antiquities grab is as questionable as the first rape of the Nile by colonial powers. It's a form of rampant nationalism and, in more enlightened times, disagreeable in my view.

It's also counter-productive for today's Egypt. The very presence of ancient Egyptian antiquities in the museums of the world spurs thousands to visit Egypt every year.

Why kill the goose that laid the golden sarcophagus?

Feeling a surge of protectiveness for the civilisation I love, I suddenly - unreasonably, perhaps - wish that the British Museum's ancient Egyptian galleries were ten times their present size, along with those of the New York Metropolititan Museum of Art, The Louvre, Berlin Neues Museum and Turin Museum.

And yet I like a great many Egyptians very much and I love the land of Egypt itself and its sites of antiquity and I value the feeling of place that connects me with the past. The Nile Valley is still the biggest and best museum of earth.

The issue of who owns the past is a complicated one...

Are ancient Egypt's gods dead and buried?

2008-10-10T01:53:00.000-07:00

Temple of Kom Ombo, Upper Egypt

I'm intrigued by the Turin Papyrus. It documents the life spans of Egypt's gods and goddesses in a detailed list. It records that these supreme beings lived between 200 and 3,126 years.

If you can conceive, even for a moment, that they existed, then who were they? We're told that they were the First Timers of the age of Zep Tepi. This was a golden age ruled by a race of beings called the Neteru, some humanoid, some hybrid.

An ancient text from the eighteenth Nome of Upper Egypt describes a whole necropolis of gods.

At the feet of a goddess

2008-09-24T14:37:00.000-07:00

Philae, Upper Egypt

Long, narrow, bare feet were typical of an Egyptian goddess, increasing connection with the ground and charging it with her musk.

Fatal allure

2008-09-23T21:00:00.000-07:00

Movie poster from 50s epic, The Egyptian

The fatal allure of ancient Egypt's feminine... from Potiphar's wife in the Bible to the fictional Nefernefernefer in 'Sinuhe, the Egyptian'...

Female soul with two faces

2008-09-23T20:40:00.000-07:00

Hathor-headed column, Temple of Hatshepsut, Deir el-Bahri

Hathor, the female soul with two faces - goddess of sexual love and the destroyer of humankind.

Two Egypts...

2008-09-23T20:23:00.000-07:00

Philae Temple reflections

There are two Egypts. The Egypt of ticket offices, crowds, tourist coaches and clamouring trinket-hawkers, and the Egypt of the mind...