THE HATHOR HOLOCAUST

  THE HATHOR HOLOCAUST Copyright © Roy Lester Pond, 2010

  DEDICATION

  For my family and friends and for all those enthralled by the two Egypts - the real Egypt and the Egypt of the mind.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  In an echo of an ancient Egyptian magical formula, I thank every Egyptologist, every alternative theorist, every writer on ancient Egypt, every publisher of books on Egypt, those involved in every TV documentary, every Egyptian exhibition, every film, every journal, every magazine, every lecture, every bookstore and library with an ancient Egypt section, every study tour of Egypt, every ancient Egyptian website and blog and every guide in Egypt and every keeper of antiquities and everyone who has helped to spark my imagination and love of Egypt’s past and concern for its future.

  About the ancient Egyptian goddess Sekhmet-Hathor: lioness-headed deity and Destroyer of Humankind.

  In mythology, Egypt’s sun god Ra hurled a curse upon a rebellious humankind.

  In a hot rage, he despatched his avenger, the scorching Eye of Ra, a holocaust sun, in the form of the goddess Sekhmet-Hathor, to destroy them. A marauding lioness, her breath spread pestilence and plague and her claws and teeth death as she swept through Egypt in an orgy of killing. Then Ra had second thoughts and decided to halt her apocalypse.

  Tricking the lioness into drinking from a lake of beer and red mud disguised as blood, Ra took this moment when the alcohol stunned her brain to transform Sekhmet from The Destroyer of Humankind into Hathor, the Sweet One, goddess of sex, love and intoxication.

  But the execration had been uttered and it was always feared that the inherently unstable agent of destruction – the Female Soul With Two Faces – would one day return to finish off what she had started, cleansing the earth.

  The sun disc of Ra, symbol of life and searing death, was central to the mythology of the Egyptians.

  Ironically today in the twenty-first century, we are again obsessed with the sun, heart of the burning issue of climate change.

  Chapter 1

  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.

  Satisfied with the evasive manoeuvres he had taken, he arrived at mid morning at a block of apartments and went up a chequered path to a black door with flaking paint.

  Was it a trap?

  He found the right number on a rusted panel and pressed a buzzer. While he heard no sound beyond, he felt an answering buzz and tingle run through his body as if he had touched a naked wire.

  She had offered herself to him like a baited hook, using the lure of an Egyptian antiquity. The circumstances were suspicious, but there had been nothing suspect about the antiquity on her arm. For Anson Hunter, alternative Egyptologist, theorist and expert on the esoteric beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, there was an invisible ‘maker’s mark’ on the real thing that he could not mistake.

  The door clicked open.

  Should he go through with this? He shrugged. He liked to be flexible. He went inside and climbed a flight of carpeted stairs to be met at a door by the Egyptian-born Greek, Alexia, dressed in black, but wearing a smile that was bright and daring.

  He went past her, caught a whiff of perfume.

  She locked and chained the door. He saw that she was still wearing the Egyptian bracelet. Gold, turquoise and carnelian in an archaic design winked on her wrist.

  “We can do this two ways,” she said. “Agreeably - or we can do it in a cold, business- like manner. I say agreeably. A good coffee, first. There’s an espresso machine here.”

  “You say that as if this is not your permanent address. Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  She smiled.

  “Don’t let’s get all suspicious, Anson. May I call you that?” She took his coat and hung it behind the door.

  It had the look of a furnished apartment. He noticed a forced assimilation rather than a blend of furnishings, a modern couch and dingy chairs in the sitting room. A bizarre piece of ornamentation caught his eye. It was an unpainted white porcelain cobra. A snake, here? It was sitting - or rearing - on the top of a television set as if to remind him that he had walked into danger.

  “Where is it?”

  “Sit, relax. What difference will a few more minutes make after thousands of years?”

  Anson stretched out his long-boned frame in a chair and waited while she went to work in the adjoining kitchen area. He could view her from here.

  A thousand years elapsed while she made coffee at a stainless steel espresso machine. The aroma of ground coffee wafted out and surrounded him, snugly enveloping, cosying up to his nerves. Maybe he could enjoy this.

  She brought out his coffee and put one on a table for herself.

  Then she vanished into a bedroom. What now?

  He heard a squeaking sound. She came out again dragging a black leather suitcase on wheels.

  “You’re walking out on us already?” he said.

  She gave a small grunt as she swung the case onto a rectangular coffee table in front of him, unzipped its lid and swung it open. She lifted a towel from the top.

  He bent over it and looked down into the heart of a golden cache of jewels floating in white clouds of cotton wool.

  It was a hoard of relics dedicated to the goddess Sekhmet-Hathor, jewellery in the form of necklaces, menat collars, bracelets, golden and jewelled anklets, and small lioness statues and pendants of gold, silver, lapis lazuli, carnelian, turquoise and amethyst.

  He remembered the way the train had seemed to jolt as if it were in a shunting yard when he first saw the bracelet on her arm. Now he felt the violence of a derailment.

  He tumbled back in time to an age that seemed as old as the world, imagined scenes of worship in dim sanctuaries, the chants of thousands of priests over thousands of years, the smoke of sacrifice and incense…

  The objects were awful in their beauty as if the power of Egypt had crystallized into these glimmering hard stones and gold.

  He tried to calm his mind with logical thoughts.

  Why jewels? What was their role?

  Perhaps they’d once been used to adorn a statue of the goddess, as often occurred. In a papyrus of Rameses III, the king told of making jewels for a god: ‘august amulets of fine gold, with inlay of real lapis lazuli and real malachite. I attach them to your body in the great house of your protection and your magnificence… as amulets for your great, grand and lovely form.’

  The logical source for this stash would be Upper Egypt, Dendera or Iunet as the early Nome of Hathor had been called. Unless of course the relics had been dispersed aeons before by pillaging tomb robbers or by pharaohs looking to replenish their treasuries. In that case they could have come from anywhere in Egypt, or from some unknown private collection.

  He needed to know.

  “Did this come from Dendera?” he said.

  She did not react.

  “Okay, then tell me this. Did you come across remains?”

  “The remains of a goddess who was both lioness and woman?”

  “Is that a description?”

  “You think such a creature could actually be found?”

  “It needn’t be her theriomorphic body you found, or whatever hybrid form the entity originally took. It could be her original sacred image, idol if you like, in which the entity was ritually installed through holy ceremony. To the Egyptians it was largely one and the same thing.”

  “You know a great deal, Anson.”

  “About that. You came to me because of my knowledge of the esoteric, the sacred and abou
t power from the ancient past, I’m assuming. If you have in fact opened the sanctuary where Sekhmet is installed, then you must believe me when I say that there could be quite fearful consequences.”

  “Yes, I know about your theories.” She had been reading his blogs.

  “Theories?” He gave a small laugh. “The chaos of what historians airily call the Three Intermediate Periods is hardly theoretical. These periods might look like gaps on a dynastic chart, yet they were filled with devastation, pestilence, lawlessness and carnage. ‘Years of the hyena’, they lasted for centuries and all occurred at times when the tombs and shrines were broken into, including the sanctuary of Sekhmet. Then there was the pandemic in the reign of Amenhotep the Third and we won’t get onto the fire, plagues and pestilence that we find in Exodus.”

  “Evidently you don’t think the world is already in chaos.”

  “I’m talking about catastrophe, a return to primeval chaos. If you know my theory then you’ll know what a sage once said of these times of devastation: “Violators have thrown open the gates of The Destroyer and released the breath of devastation. The scorching Eye of Ra is upon us. Death and destruction rule the Two Lands and creation groans in anguish.”

  “You’re assuming a site has been thrown open. Perhaps it has merely been opened and then shut again.”

  “You seem to be an agreeable young woman, Alexia. So why get involved in global catastrophe? Help me stop things instead, before it’s too late.”

  “I hear there are men who go to ladies of the night and then try to save them from their choices. You are hoping I am an antiquities thief with a heart of gold who can be saved from a life of crime. But I must disappoint you. I don’t have a golden heart, just plans of a golden future. You are an agreeable man, yourself, Anson, but that is not enough to make me change my path. Take your time. Examine the artefacts as much as you want.”

  For Anson, there was no mistaking the maker’s mark on these pieces. Typology, style, material, craftsmanship, they all told him this was genuine and immensely old. But there was something else he had come to trust. The effect genuine Egyptian art had on him. It produced an aura almost impossible to fake and it had to do with the fact that Egyptian art was never art for its own sake. It was wrought magic, infused with the sacred power of the force the Egyptians called heka.

  He gently touched an ornamental collar of turquoise stones, a sacred necklace called the menat. He spread the flat of a palm against the cool blue-green droplets of stone and it seemed to his excited senses that he felt the crackle of a grid of power. The stones now smouldered. What holy or unholy divinity had infused them with its forces?

  “What do you think?” she said.

  “That you didn’t just walk through Customs with these.”

  She sat back on a couch and sipped her coffee, watching him with a smile.

  He was staggered by her revelation and his pulse was racing as if he’d just lugged a massive trunk up the stairs.

  “One side of me has to say this - thank you,” he said. “Just for letting me see it. The other side asks a question. Why are you showing it to me?”

  “For your reaction. Is it genuine?”

  “No shadow of a doubt. You have to tell me where it comes from. It’s far too important to vanish into some secret collector’s vault. It’s not just the intrinsic value, or even the artistic and historical value. This is magical-religious material of a very special order. Can’t I persuade you to stop and think?”

  “Let’s not get all idealistic.”

  “Here’s the thing. I’m quite prepared to identify this as a genuine and staggering collection - material of priceless value that goes back millennia. But I’m only going to say it to you, right now. I’m not about to go out and announce it to the world, if that’s what you’re hoping. I’m not going to elevate its value on the illegal market.”

  “You don’t need to. You’ve already done so. Sorry, Anson. You see, your authentication of these pieces is being videod and sent off the premises for safety. It will be viewed later by prospective parties. We don’t need you to go public. We’d actually prefer your silence.”

  “You mean this little seduction has been recorded?”

  He swung a stare around the room in search of a hidden camera.

  “Don’t be all outraged,” she said, “and don’t bother looking. There’s actually more than one camera.” She gave him a particularly alluring smile from the couch. “I hope our meeting hasn’t been too painful. And it doesn’t have to end yet. We’re just getting friendly. Stay and I’ll make us lunch. Relax and study these items at your leisure. Make sketches if you like.”

  Other eyes than his were watching, sharing his inspection and evaluation of the hoard.

  Whose were they?

  He fought down the urge to walk out. The hoard in the suitcase and the smile on the girl’s lips turned his knees to water.

  Be flexible.

  “There’s still one problem. Is this a new discovery, or is it just a stash from a long hidden private collection? I need some evidence of provenance.”

  “I thought you might insist.” She reached into a sleeve in the lid of the case and pulled out some photographs. “I won’t tell you where it is. But this is the site.”

  Anson took the first photo from her.

  The photo was taken at sunset and a red-gold light illuminated an entrance in the rock. It could have been a tomb, or a cave. He could see the stone jambs that marked an entranceway. The light even picked up a glyph, roughly scratched on the stone, a nefer sign. Nefer meant ‘beautiful’ or ‘good’.

  The next photo shook him. A seated statue in blazing gold of the lioness goddess Sekhmet, missing the golden sun disc from her head.

  Alexia had led him to a startling discovery and also into a trap, a trap from which he had no way - and little desire to extricate himself, he thought.

  She had intercepted him on a train…

  Chapter 2

  SPEED blurred the Oxfordshire greenery flashing by outside the train window as Anson sat at work on a laptop.

  “You won’t mind if I sit next to you,” the voice of a young woman said.

  His fingers stopped tapping the keys.

  A sultry young woman in black slid into the seat beside him.

  Irksome. Did she have to box him in? There were other seats in the carriage. Still, it could be worse - a man. Not homophobia on his part, he reasoned, more a sort of bonhomie phobia, an aversion to garrulous fellow travellers who interrupted his theorising. He vastly preferred the more reserved company of females on trains, buses and aeroplanes.

  He tried to ignore her arrival and continued writing the blog:

  Anson Hunter’s Blog -The Other Egypt

  The sun disc of Ra, symbol of life and searing death, was central to the mythology of the Egyptians. Ironically today in the twenty-first century, we are again obsessed with the sun, heart of the burning issue of climate change.

  Our lives and our future revolve around the sun, just as they did in the most ancient times of Egypt.

  And now I fear a return attack of an ancient, holocaust sun and the reactivation of an apocalypse of global scorching, plague and pestilence…

  The new arrival brushed against Anson’s arm and he glimpsed a flash of jewellery on her wrist. He did not look at her, but kept working.

  But now the letters on the keyboard dissolved and swam.

  His glance swung aside to her bracelet, lingered there, then tracked up the arm and body of a curvy young woman dressed in black to dark eyes under amused brows and then travelled back down to the bracelet again.

  Shining on her wrist was a solid gold, rigid bracelet, inset with images. Profoundly archaic. Undoubtedly authentic. The carriage seemed to give a judder as if jolted by a locomotive in a shunting yard. Synchronicity? Or was this a sign of what he feared? He met the eyes of the stranger.

  “Genuine Egyptian?” he said.

  She smiled. “I’m Egyptian born. But of Gre
ek ancestry, like Cleopatra.”

  “I meant the bracelet.”

  “You noticed it before you noticed me,” she said.

  “I’m in the ancient Egypt trade.”

  She sighed. “Yes, this is Egyptian. And I’m Alexia.”

  His mind raced ahead of the train. Where was this going? She had ambushed him to show him the relic. Why? Because of his obsessive theorizing on the Internet? Recollections of a notorious event in archaeological history flashed through his mind like the country house in a field outside the train window.

  The Dorak Affair.

  A British professor of archaeology, James Mellaart, while travelling on a train to the port of Izmir in Turkey, noticed a bracelet on the arm of an attractive young woman. The piece bore the typological style of jewellery found at Troy -the first glimpse of a tantalising treasure recovered from an unknown site. Mellaart had little difficulty in engaging her in conversation and she introduced herself as Anna Papastrati. Yes, this bracelet was part of an ancient collection and she had more to show him if he really wanted to see it.

  Under conditions of secrecy, Anna took the professor back to her apartment in Izmir. Here she revealed evidence of a staggering hoard, bronze-age objects from an Anatolian seafaring civilization neighbouring the Trojans that existed at the time of the Egyptians, four and a half thousand years ago. He saw statuettes of an electrum goddess and her handmaidens, fabulous golden jewellery, swords, daggers and ceremonial axe heads, including a sheet of gold embossed with hieroglyphs identifying Pharaoh Sahure, revealing early links with Egypt.

  Mellaart must have felt the breath of good fortune on his neck, yet doubtless he could scarcely breathe. Might he borrow an object or two, take photos?

  No. Anna was firm. She was not yet ready to release the story of the collection. But she would permit him to stay and make drawings of the artefacts, so long as he agreed to an embargo. He must wait for her approval before releasing information about the find. Mellaart agreed readily to her terms. He stayed with Anna for almost four days, making drawings of the artefacts.