Sunday, June 29, 2014

THE EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY MURDERS. Ancient love and modern terror

NEW EDITION - ON AMAZON KINDLE
Formerly the Isis Mummy



Has a cycle of murder and love from Egypt’s ancient past come to the modern world... in the return of Isis, Osiris, and ‘Lord of Chaos’ Seth?

A museum mummy called Isis is put into a hospital scanning machine and blasted with radiation. Awakened and regenerating, Isis repeats a 5,000-year quest to find her beloved Osiris.

‘I, Isis, Great of Magic, will rise and search for you, Osiris…'

Now an ancient cycle unfolds in modern day London, a rampage of murder and disaster - and a search for eternal love.

Can Jennefer, a young trainee museum curator and Jon, a police antiquities unit detective, stop the killer in time before a terrible culmination of events? 

Saturday, June 28, 2014

New Egypt fiction. 'Virtual Eternity' A journey through ancient Egypt’s underworld


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‘VIRTUAL ETERNITY – A journey through ancient Egypt’s underworld - shocking reality, or deadly Virtual Reality?

 Eight very different people are chosen to road test ‘VIRTUAL ETERNITY’, an ancient Egyptian virtual reality simulator housed in a complex on the estate of tech billionaire Brandon Viking, a lifelong lover of Egypt’s past.

Each wears a tag – Sage, Robber, Scribe, Prophetess, Gamer, Soldier, Priest, and Neophyte. They must race through the twelve hours and zones of the ancient Egyptian underworld night to reach the end of the journey before dawn, but only if they can survive hideous dangers along the way.

Then, shockingly, a journeyer is killed... really killed, it seems.

They are in a race against time and a struggle against the guardians and monsters of the underworld as well as against each other.

Enthralling adventure novella that hits the ground running.




Egypt's Stone Book of Thoth - history's most dangerous tome?

The Ibis Apocalypse. What is the power of the Stela?


Anson Hunter, fiction's Egyptologist, is 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.


 'The Ibis Apocalypse'... Amazon Kindle and Paperback

Friday, June 20, 2014

A modern day Egyptian curse - looted antiquities to fund terrorism


Authorities see it as a modern day ancient Egyptian curse - the curse of cultural theft for cash to fund terrorism. The U.S. Department of Justice ranks art and antiquities crime behind only drugs and arms in terms of highest-grossing criminal trades and it also fuels the arms trade, drug trafficking, and terrorist activity. Ideological crime by dissidents has reached plague proportions and today fundamentalist terrorist groups rely on looted antiquities as a major funding source...
With telling results...
Few know it, but Egyptian Mohammed Atta, who flew the first fatal plane into the World Trade Centre tower, was involved in selling looted antiquities as a funding source for the nine-eleven attacks.


An Egyptologist argues with his soul in 'The God Dig - The Egyptian afterlife conspiracy'

Dialogue of a Man with his Soul


I am writing blogs as events occur in Egypt, and I plan to post them later when this investigation is over.
There’s a famous scroll about death and the afterlife from Egypt’s 12th Dynasty called the ‘Dialogue of Man with his Soul’ (Berlin Papyrus 3024). It’s a dialogue between a rebellious man and his soul, a struggle between his intellect and his spiritual being.
It’s an existential tussle, a bit like Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be?”
‘To whom can I speak today?’ the man says. ‘I am heavy-laden with trouble.
Death is in my sight today,
Like the smell of myrrh.
Death is in my sight today,
As when a man desires to see home,
When he has spent many years in captivity.
(Here is) what my soul said to me…’


‘You know you’re playing with spiritual fire this time, Hunter,’ my soul says to me.
‘I know. I’m screwed,’ I say.
‘You’ve always flirted with the forbidden, but usually it’s with dangerous Egyptian texts, sanctuaries and artefacts. Now you’re embarking on the most dangerous archaeological project of all, an investigation in Egypt to find the truth about your own tortured beliefs.’
‘And yet… what the hell? I shouldn’t be afraid of a collision with the truth.”
‘Bravery and arrogance are always the first phases of self-deception.
 Then comes despair… and sometimes in the end understanding.’
 ‘What was I supposed to say to the three wise men?’
‘Did you wonder why the delegation from the world’s book-based religions were fearful and you were not? They were afraid for a reason.’
‘You think I’m not nervous about what they put on me? The fate of 3.8 billion people?’
‘You shrink at the burden they gave you, but you relish the quest wherever it takes you. You always think you can play with unseen forces, as you did with the Stone Book of Thoth in The Ibis Apocalypse and in The Forbidden Glyphs affair, without fear of repercussions. But do you want to kill God?’
‘Not you too. Even science can’t kill him it seems.’
‘But you can kill him for others, and for yourself. That father, like the lost archaeologist father you still yearn for, will be gone forever.”
‘My father was never there for me. And neither is this one, well, only fitfully. I hate what Christianity did to Egypt, as much what Islam is doing to it now. That Bishop Theophilus deserves to burn in hell, along with the library and Serapeum he destroyed in Alexandria. And you can throw in that guy who burnt Hypatia after scraping off her flesh with oyster shells.’
‘Saint Cyril.’
‘Saint, right. I could think of another word.’
‘But what if it’s all really, really true, Hunter, and souls must be saved at any cost?’
‘I can never quite buy the idea that God needs us to do his work for him and save others, when he could just as easily convert us all with a flick of his fingers.’
‘He wants us to find him. Think of your own search. What is the hidden, ecstatic radiance that you have been searching for all your life, digging for in the darkness of tombs? You have tried to find it in women too, and in your obsession with the divine feminine of Egypt. What do you hope to break through to on the other side? Pagan fire? Or unbearable holiness? What does it matter about idols and temples made by human hands? Or about jottings from human minds on dried up reeds?’
‘That’s where we part company. I believe in granting value to the sacred, all sacred. Vandalism is vandalism, even when it’s religious. As far as I am concerned you can’t put a pin between Theophilus and the Taliban who blew up the ancient statues of Bamayan.’
‘Is ancient Egypt your passion or your religion? You need to think about your love of idols. And speaking of danger, you never saw that coming at the step pyramid.’
‘The three gunmen? No. First I’m confronted by three men who hold the power of the gun over me, then three men who hold the power of God over me.’
‘I meant the daughter.’
“Persephone.’
‘Per-seph-o-ne. How you like to roll that name off your tongue. Her appearance gives you a new excuse to be part of this questionable enterprise.’
‘Yes, okay, she’s damned attractive. Spirited too. I like her fire.’
‘I wasn’t referring to her dark, almost ancient Egyptian good looks and your weakness for the ancient feminine of Egypt. I meant she gives you an emotional excuse to justify this unholy search for ammunition against faith. You want to help her unmask those who killed her father.’
‘I want to do that for my own reasons too.’
‘But now it’s personal.’
‘It was always personal. Philip was a friend.’
‘An online friend. Not quite the same thing. You’ve met her in the flesh, been in danger with her, held her hand, felt her tremble. You’re making it even harder for yourself to back out.’
‘There’s no question of backing out. I’m here in Egypt for answers.’
‘Does that mean you’ve decided to dismiss the appeal of the three religious leaders and the fate of 3.8 billion believers?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘What are you going to do if it all comes down to you in the end?’
‘Shouldn’t we wait and see what happens?’
‘That’s what you said to the three emissaries.’
‘I’m sticking by it.’

Egyptian mummies and death, the 'first mystery'


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.

Nefertiti.. Hitler.. The Ibis Apocalypse affair



Neues Museum, Museum Island, Berlin
“WHAT THE GERMAN people have, they keep,” Adolf Hitler famously responded when Egyptian authorities suggested that the famous bust of Queen Nefertiti in Berlin ought to be returned to Cairo.
I was standing among other admiring visitors in front of the bust of the iconic queen in a long gallery at the north cupola of the Neues Museum, when I recalled the Fuehrer’s response. The suggestions from the Egyptian authorities had risen to the level of rancorous clamour in recent years, yet there were still no signs that Nefertiti was going back to Egypt anytime soon. The queen’s image was everywhere, on postcards, in books and on publicity posters. Nefertiti had the pulling power of a superstar.
Was it James Bond’s creator Ian Fleming who’d remarked that the ancient queen of Egypt could make an entrance today in a designer gown and give the beautiful people a run for their money?
I never thought I’d agree with Hitler on any subject, I reflected, shaking my head in wonder at her beauty. The timeless elegance, lovely neck and airborne eyebrows produced a powerful effect on the beholder. If I had Nefertiti I wouldn’t part with her either…
('The Ibis Apocalypse')
(Amazon Kindle/paperback)

Thursday, June 19, 2014

ARE YOU MISSING enthralling Egypt adventure from your fiction reading?

Why miss out?

7 openings from 7 novels...


The Smiting Texts
THEY INTERCEPTED him as he came out of Baltimore-Washington Airport, two men wearing suits and an air of officialdom like a brisk cologne. 
“Mr Anson Hunter, the British Egyptologist?”

The Hathor Holocaust

AN EMAIL arrived at his hotel, giving him an address in South Kensington and a caution:
‘Come alone. Take care you are not followed. Change trains or taxis.’
It was a message from a mysterious young woman who had ambushed him on a train to London.

The Ibis Apocalypse
“SORRY ANSON. Your search for the stela ends here.”
The voice of the woman funneled down the underground passage, the echoes fluttering off the stone like startled bats. Anson Hunter, alternative Egyptologist and theorist, felt a chill as the words reached his ears. It was caused as much by the emotional separation in her voice as by its distance.

The Anubis Intervention

THE MASKED Invaders raced to the riverside in covered trucks with headlights doused.  They pulled up in front of the brightly lit cruise boat, Nile Palace.
Costumed figures jumped out of the back. Anubis. Isis. Osiris. Sobek. Maat. Thoth. Horus. Nephthys... one after the other they hit the ground in flashes of reflected gold as if beamed down from the night heavens.
Egypt Eyes 


WHAT HAPPENED in the Temple of Isis today?

I stepped straight out of the dimly lit sanctuary and into a meaty hand that clamped around my mouth. The hand muffled my gasp as I was yanked aside. 

The Forbidden Glyphs 

THE ARCHAEOLOGIST Anson Hunter plummeted, tumbling uncontrollably into darkness.

Was it a tomb shaft he was plunging down, he thought, feeling the darkness rip past his body?

The God Dig


Egyptian tour guides will tell you that it’s good luck to walk in a complete circle around the Step Pyramid of Saqqara.
It’s even luckier if you’re able to run, Anson Hunter thought after two bullets in quick succession spat dust from the ground at his feet  

Roy Lester Pond (Amazon Kindle and Paperback)

Monday, June 16, 2014

Saturday, June 14, 2014

Philae Temple, Egypt, one of my favourite dreaming places as a fiction writer...





A temple to both the goddess Isis and Hathor, it was the last place in Egypt to worship the goddesses, before the inundation of Christianity swept it away. A sad affair. In the third century after the common era, Christian Rome clamped down and zealots turned on the old religion, smashing images and shrines of the pagan past. They did a good job. Christians destroyed the Temple of Serapis in one or two riotous fits during the reign of the Christian Roman Emperor Theophilus. Christians defaced or destroyed countless ‘pagan’ buildings and statues during the reign of Theophilus.
Philae finally closed in AD 550, ending 4,000 years of worship of the pagan gods. Then it still had to face the rising tide of Lake Aswan and Islam.
The sun broke through the haze and stone pylons rose like sacred fortresses guarding the secrets of the old religion.