Sunday, November 27, 2011

An Egyptologist's murder... a heaven-and-earth-shattering discovery that threatens today’s great religions…

   
"Out of the magic of its gold, heaven was born."



“Then what did my father want to tell the world that was so radical? What exactly was his revelation?” Anson Hunter said.

Now Abuna, the Coptic monk, dropped his bombshell.

“He claimed to have made what he termed his ‘heaven-and-earth-shattering’ discovery - sensational proof in Egypt that would turn our ideas of heaven upside down, evidence that heaven was not a spiritual realm, but a real, three-dimensional hypogeum and that this was the genesis of the concept of a heaven. He had found the Duat, or Egyptian hereafter. ‘Out of the magic of its gold,’ he said, ‘heaven was born’.

“Equally important, he claimed that he had found evidence of the so-called Neteru, or beings of the First Time, buried in this place. My good friend, Professor Hunter, believed that there has been a conspiracy through the ages about the reality of the afterlife and that it still continues to this day. Your father was about to announce that he had found a material afterworld - heaven if you like. But not a spiritual nirvana, a real place and the genesis of all beliefs about the afterworld. It was a belief that may account for his untimely death in Egypt.”
 (From 'The Smiting Texts', first in a mystery adventure trilogy)

Who killed an Egyptologist with a heaven-and-earth shattering secret, in 'The Smiting Texts'?


Discover the secret here 

UPDATE: The Smiting Texts is Now a 9-book series

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Glyphs Along The Highway - with a credit to Ian Fleming


Do hieroglyphs hold any more potency than highway symbols?

Hump... or the Egyptian hieroglyph for 'foreign land'?

'Foreign land'...'hill country'

Author Ian Fleming wrote amusingly about the “exotic pungency” of USA road signs in his James Bond thriller ‘Live and Let Die’ – ‘SOFT SHOULDERS – SHARP CURVES – SQUEEZE AHEAD – SLIPPERY WHEN WET.’

As I take my ancient Egypt and mystery fiction writing on the road, I can’t help wondering about the glyphs we see at the roadside here in Australia.

How do these enigmatic signs compare with the ancient Egyptian glyphs that mark the underworld journeys of my renegade British archaeological hero Anson Hunter?

Like the menagerie of animals that appear in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs – Australian roadside glyphs possess a zoomorphic vocabulary, including kangaroos, koalas, wombats, ducklings, cattle, emus, crocodiles and sharks.

A zoomorphic roadside vocabulary

Some signage glyphs are as menacing as curses uttered by Egypt’s priests in execration rituals – “A microsleep can kill.” “You’re a bloody idiot!”

Roadsidce curse

Others are tenderly human when found along the harsh and merciless march of the bitumen - small children defensively holding hands. 

Another has a caption that makes the peril of road-crossing sound like a cosy adventure story – ‘Refuge Island’.

What would the Egyptians make of these signs?

One of the first recorded workers' strikes in history happened in Egypt in the reign of Rameses lll when the royal tomb workers downed their tools when their pay and rations were not forthcoming.

To other eyes, some of our signs might look like protest banners. End Roadwork! End School Zone! End Freeway!

Is it superstition to believe that the sacred writing of hieroglyphs held any more potency than road signs, even though they were invested with the power of heka, Egyptian magic?

My Egyptologist hero Anson Hunter has a respect for unseen dangers from the ancient past, execration texts, forbidden artefacts and the like. He is something of a phenomenologist, one who believes in granting value to the sacred, unlike conventional Egyptologists with their ‘agnostic reflex’ that prevents them from taking the esoteric seriously.

Perhaps the fact that there are others today with an agenda that takes its inspiration from the mystery religions of Egypt, who believe very seriously in the potency of Egypt’s past that warn us to be wary of unseen dangers breaking into the 21st century.


The journey continues here

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

"These novels untangle new mysteries of ancient Egypt"

Readers comments...





Update 2019: Now a series of 9 novels featuring the controversial, witty and "thoroughly likeable" (alternative) Egyptologist Anson Hunter.

Visit

These novels "untangle new mysteries about ancient Egypt..."

Screen grab: iPad (Amazon Kindle edition)


“(The hero, archaeologist) Anson Hunter untangles new mysteries about the ancient Egyptian civilization affirmation of survival after death by the power of symbolism and magic over matter, a virtual afterlife built by a collective unconscious, sustained by religion and tangible in the form of pyramids, temples and tombs. His elucidations are esoteric bombs that undermine the foundations of today’s world major religions.”

Egypt Then and Now



“Reads from the start like a P.I. or spy novel.” 

“I didn’t think fiction about ancient Egypt’s archaeology like this could be written today.” Readers' comments.
 

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Ancient Egypt Fiction Collection - thrillers, adventure, fantasy...

Ancient Egypt series - featuring the renegade Egyptologist, Anson Hunter

And for young readers...

Do you prefer your Egypt fiction in paperback or in Kindle format?

Here is just some of my Egypt fiction collection available at Amazon.

From The Smiting Texts adventure thriller series to The Delta Dilemma - as well as an ancient Egypt collection for young adults and children.

LOOK INSIDE the collection here

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Why hieroglyphs in Egypt's Stone Book of Thoth carry such potency - "The Ibis Apocalypse"

Glyphs were divine words

“And these glyphs in the Stela, what makes them so potent?” she said.
“Glyphs were never just a writing system," Anson Hunter said. "They were divine words. It’s for this reason that the scribes were fearful that certain words could have a malignant power and become uncontrollable forces in the tomb and so they would cut off the head of a lion in a glyph, or truncate a serpent or show spears stuck in the back of a crocodile in order to render it harmless. The hieroglyphs in the Stela of Thoth were the most potent of all. When spoken they were not just sounds, but glyphs graven on the air, real things and entities, image-meanings that took shape and activated a world of unseen forces and alternate reality. Heka, or Egyptian magic."

“So you believe Egyptian magic has power to influence the real world?”

“Can a certain sequence of words and actions, such as imitation, the replication of a name, image or mythical event produce an event in the real world? I believe there is an unseen connectedness between things and by tuning in to this network of likenesses you can attract like outcomes. The trick is to find that invisible skein and draw on it, hence the Egyptians’ use of puns, analogy, mimesis, acrostics, dualities and the like. These links are things beyond logic, like the dream realm where parallel sounds, symbols and stories, while seeming bizarre, hold an inner, often unseen connection with our lives.”
From 'The Ibis Apocalypse' #3 in the Egypt adventure series