An Evil Spirit Out of the West (Ancient Egyptian Mysteries) Read Online Free PDF

dust. I recall a mixture of sweat, exotic perfume, hardened leather and perfumed linen robes. My aunt was treated as an object of veneration whilst I was caressed as the Son of the Hero. A priest gabbled his apologies, how we were not supposed to wait but I knew Aunt, she always liked to make a grand entrance. We were ceremoniously ushered across the second court which boasted a giant statue of a jackal-headed Anubis. A priest explained that it had a movable jaw so it could speak to devotees and utter an oracle. Around the courtyard were fountains, each with a sacred stela, a statue over which the water could flow and so become holy, a sure remedy against poison. I, remembering the Saluki hound, didn’t think there were such remedies and stopped to examine one. My aunt pulled me away. I could tell by the curl of her lips that she was not impressed.
    I wondered why my aunt was so apprehensive about approaching the temple until I entered it and realised that this was my first time in a true House of Worship: Aunt Isithia’s house had few statues or tokens of the Divine Ones. Isn’t life strange? I have never thought much of the gods but the Houses of Eternity in which they are supposed to live always impressed me. The hypostyle or hall of columns: rows of papyriform pillars with their bell-shaped bases and bud-forming capitals painted in glorious red, blue and green and decorated with triangular patterns. Bronze-plated doors, emblazoned with inscriptions, opened smoothly and silently on hinges set into the wall. I truly felt we were entering a place of magic.
    Every so often we were sprinkled by a priest with drops of holy water from a stoup and cleansed by brushing the images of Pharaoh inscribed on the wall. Paintings and decorations were everywhere. The air was thick with incense and pierced by a low chanting which echoed eerily through the columned passageway. We passed Chapels of the Ear where pilgrims presented their petitions and eventually reached the Wabet , the Place of Purification. At the express order of the Magnificent One my father would begin his journey from here to the eternally fresh fields of the Green-skinned Osiris. A great honour! Even the most expensive embalming houses in the Necropolis could not be trusted with the corpses of the great ones. A priest once confided to me in a scandalised whisper how even the bodies of beautiful women were kept for a few days to allow decomposition to begin so they would not be violated.
    The steps we went down seemed to stretch for ever. The cavern below glowed with light. Priests, some with shoulders draped with jaguar skins, others with their faces hidden behind jackal masks, moved through the billowing smoke. The air was rich with spices. The object of their veneration was the body of my father, stretched naked in the centre of the chamber on a sloping wooden slab. He looked fast asleep except for his grey skin and the dark wound in his neck. His corpse had already been drenched in natron. Surrounded by incense-burners, a lector priest, eyes half-closed, swayed backwards and forwards as he chanted the death prayers. I had to stand and watch my father’s body be embalmed. The ethnoid bone in his nose was broken, the brains pulled out, the eyes pushed back and the cavities filled with resin-soaked bandages. Armed with an Ethiopian obsidian knife a priest made the cut in my father’s left side and drew out the liver, lungs and intestines. The inside was washed with natron and stuffed with perfumes. All the time the prayers were chanted and the incense billowed. I was not frightened, whatever my aunt intended. I was fascinated by the priests in their white kilts and robes, shaven of all hair, even their eyebrows, their soft skins glinting with oil. Afterwards, when we left, I did not feel sad. My father was gone and these secretive priests in that sinister chamber with the brooding statues of Anubis meant nothing to me.
    We honoured the seventy-day mourning period