Life, Death, Ancient Egypt & Eternal Survival...

Immortality. We almost brush against its reality in the monumental stone pyramids, columns and text-covered tombs of ancient Egypt. If we have a faith, or wrestle with one, we can also sense the survival of the ‘I’ within us as we remain silent within the sacred space of a modern day church or cathedral. And yet we die... Immortality is where it all converges for me - in ancient Egypt with its monumental beliefs in an afterlife, in religion with its promises of eternal survival, and in writing, which holds the faintest of all chances of survival. “Better is a book than stone chapels in the west,” the scribe wrote. We can breathe immortality in the pages of undying books. And yet... we die. Life and death in Egypt fiction In the footsteps of his murdered archaeologist father, his son Anson Hunter, the independent archaeologist, visits the murder scene in the tomb of the ancient Egyptian Vizier Mereruka in Saqqara. (Excerpt) This was where it had all ended for his father and where a bigger mystery had begun. Someone came out of the shadows to silence his father’s voice. He’d 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, Anson reflected. 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? Anson threw a glance to the columns bearing reliefs of Mereruka. The striding figure seemed beyond time and decay. The Hittite, Greek, Persian, Roman and British empires had all come and gone while the Vizier had continued to move steadfastly through eternity. It was a reminder that the Egyptians really believed, he thought. People were 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 unshakably 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 denied god and laughed at the devil, people could not see both sides. But they needed to believe in the light and the shadow and to hold both in their minds, not least the shadow. The shadow gave things shape and form. Without it there was just blinding, unrelieved glare like the sunlit desert outside. Was Mereruka’s afterworld a physical place? Or just a different reality, a sort of virtual world created by a civilization’s collective unconscious and sustained by its religion? Mereruka did not question its existence. ‘Do I believe in survival after death?’ Anson asked himself. ‘Perhaps not, when I think about it. But what about when I don’t think about it, but merely feel it, at a deeper level?’ Everyone knew that the Egyptians were preoccupied with the afterlife, but they took it even more seriously than many imagined. Humans, they said, were the only creatures that must live life with the knowledge that one day they’re going to die and our culture was the world of distraction we create around ourselves to shield us from this knowledge. But the Egyptians’ culture did not serve as a mere distraction to the pitiless cruelty of death. Instead their culture came to grips with death in an attempt to overcome its tyranny. This doorway and statue, the glowing underworlds of the tombs, the Books of Coming Forth By Day, or the Book of the Dead as they called these religious texts - were the results of government-funded research into the ‘first mystery’- death and the afterlife. The early pyramids were like nationally financed space-shots designed to launch the god-king pharaoh into the hereafter. The Egyptians even had maps showing the routes to the underworld painted on the bases of coffins. The unconscious psyche believes in life after death Carl Jung asserted. Anson recalled that the doctor and founder of analytical psychology had written of a near-death experience after a heart attack and had reported a spiritual existence outside of his body. The images of the afterlife carved on the tomb walls around him urged Anson to believe. But the veil of mystery remained. (The Smiting Texts.) An afterlife conspiracy? A cardinal, a mufti and a rabbi went into a hotel. It sounded like the beginning of a joke rather than an ambush, Anson thought as he was shown into the dimness of a curtained meeting room inside the Cairo Mena House Hotel at the foot of the pyramids. But it was no joke. There they were, ranged like an interview panel behind a long table inside a hotel meeting room and the room was as devoid of levity as it was of sunlight and if there were any floating motes of good humour in the air they were sucked away by the three unsmiling emissaries. One came from the Vatican, one from Cairo’s Islamic University and the other from Jerusalem, representing all three book-based religions. What kind of religious crisis had forced such ecumenism? “Thank you for coming. Please sit down Mr Hunter and hear us out.” The cardinal, a tall cathedral of a man, spoke first, making a fine steeple of his fingers. He was the President of the Vatican Committee for Historical Science. “We represent the faith of more than half of the world’s population, 3.8 billion people, the most volatile of them based in the Middle East, as you would know. And here is something else you know – history that has a familiar ring in this age of Egyptian protests and rioting. In A.D. 391, the Alexandrian bishop Theophilus, who dedicated himself to stamping out heresy and idolatry, found himself at the head of a riot of Christians who set fire to the temple of Serapis and its library. Thousand of scrolls and parchments were burnt, among them what is said to be the records of the secret ancient origins of today’s faith religions and the belief in a life to come. In other words, so-called proof that all Abrahamic faiths and ideas about a Judgement Day and an afterlife began in ancient Egypt.” That shook Anson. He swept the three in a glance. He was no stranger to such ideas, but he never expected to hear an acknowledgement of them come from the lips of a Prince of the Church, especially with the tacit assent of Jewish and Islamic leaders sitting beside him. The wiry South African-born rabbi, spoke next. “Worryingly, it now seems that some of this so-called evidence survived the ancient destruction and clues to its location have turned up in the chaos and looting of the Egyptian revolution. A search for it is now underway, as you know. It is the reason why you are here in Egypt.” “Do you expect the evidence to be legitimate?” Anson said. “By no means,” the cardinal said. “A diabolical trick. If scripture is spirit-breathed, then this is the breath of evil.” “Of Shaitaan himself,” the Islamic leader said. “Then why be afraid of it?” Anson said. The mufti, a square man with a square beard to match, said in a reasoned tone: “We must always remember that others may not have our strength. They need to be protected. This so-called evidence would be like a weapon of mass destruction to their faith.” The mufti’s presence among the religious dignitaries surprised Anson most of all. Yes, the Islamic religion, as much as Christianity and Judaism, revered the patriarch Abraham as its spiritual father, he reasoned, but weren’t Muslim believers a bit too radicalized to be deflected by any new historical revelation? Unless of course Islam had been spooked by the secular backlash that had struck against the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt’s Revolution. “And what do you want from me..?” Excerpt from 'THE GOD DIG - The ancient Egyptian Afterlife Conspiracy'.

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