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| Hathor leads Rameses firmly by the hand, Temple of Luxor |
Seductive Egypt
Beware the girl from other parts, whose town and family is not known. Do
not stare at her when she passes by. Her heart is deep water whose windings one
does not know, a whirlpool with unpredictable eddies.
"Ancient Egypt is
inextricably bound up with the feminine principle, in my mind at least. I suspect that my intense
interest in Egypt is linked with the fatal allure of Egypt’s feminine. And
fatal is the word. The mysterious female of Egypt was the most deadly and
ruthless of the species and they have a long history to prove it, from
Potipihar’s wife, who attempted to seduce and then falsely accused Joseph, to
the Egyptianised Greek Cleopatra, who murdered her young brother Ptolemy and
seduced Rome’s leadership.
Then of
course there is 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. Even in fiction we meet the
perfidious Nefer-nefer-nefer in ‘Sinuhe, The Egyptian’..." Anson Hunter, alternative Egyptologist's blog in 'The Smiting Texts'.
“Seductive
is the word. I find the graphics of ancient Egypt pretty ravishing, I must
admit,” Anson said.
She
smiled.
“You find
them erotic?”
“Hell yes.
I can easily imagine myself being grasped possessively by one of those
dark-eyed goddesses in the frescoes and reliefs. The art of ancient Egypt
ensnares you with its atmosphere of pervasive mystery.”
“Yet there
is rarely any lewdness portrayed in Egyptian art,” she commented. “Except for a
few scurrilous doodles on ostraca. The Egyptians achieved a sense of sexual
tension in far more subtle ways, in the ladies with their diaphanous gowns,
painted eyes and gala wigs that sent an erotic signal. Then there were the
other coded symbols, the scented delta of a lotus blossom held under a nose,
the ducks and geese, or a monkey playing under a chair, the possessive arm
slung around the waist of a husband, the intent, very-interested eyes of a
goddess taking the pharaoh by the hand. It’s all there, but in the oblique
Nilotic way. There is a love poem where the girl bathes in the stream with her
beloved and says: ‘I'll go into the water
at your bidding and come up with a red fish who will quiver with happiness in
my fingers.’”
“I don’t
get it,” he said, putting an expression of puzzlement on his face. “I hope
you’re going to explain it to me.”
“I’ll do nothing of the sort.”
