Chapter 1 Preparing The Field And Sowing The Seed
Chapter 1 Preparing the Field Loud shrieks came from the whitewashed, modestly decorated sun-baked house. "He's tearing me to pieces! He's tearing me to pieces!" a woman screamed, rhythmically, over and over, partly in agony, partly in joy. The music of pipes and strings competed with drums and sistra outside, in the courtyard, as if trying to drown out the shrieks. When the exhausted woman panted quietly, the music also softened but the drum beat on. "He's ripping apart the source of my joy," she yelled once, then again and yet a third time before she sagged, exhausted, between two chanting midwives who held her up. Their naked, muscular bodies fell and rose with their burden as they walked her around the room. Two other women, whose low voices now rang out, sat on a reed mat watching intently. “Strong limbs, healthy body, your child will now emerge,” they chanted. “Spit him out, spew him out, your child will now see daylight! Release him, expel him, rejoice in his birth!” These magical spells filled the air while the two sitting midwives watched for the pregnant woman’s next contraction. When the three struggling, sweating bodies stopped and doubled up with the new contraction, the other two jumped to their feet and led them to a squatting chair in the middle of the room. The two naked midwives continued to hold and encourage their charge. The younger of the other two, dressed in a plain white linen sheet dress, stood behind the mother-to-be and pushed on her belly. The last one, a large woman, squatted in front, dressed in a faience-green linen wrap like the hippopotamus Goddess, Tauret. She was the chief midwife and Tauret, the Goddess of Childbirth was her guide and inspiration. This midwife wore bracelets and armlets, necklaces and anklets of silver and gold, electrum and lapis lazuli. She removed a clay stopper from an alabaster vase, pulled away the linen cloth that held the stopper firmly in place, and dipped her two hands into the clear olive oil. With her two hands, she began to massage and push the mother’s two pelvic bones apart, opening the way to life. Her jewelry tinkled in the semi-darkness as she worked. "Help me! Help me!" shrieked the mother, "I have a madman between my legs!" She gulped a loud, deep breath, then her eyes opened wide as a long wail rose from her very soul. The chief midwife, a Priestess of the Hippopotamus goddess, Tauret, scooped a red, spotted creature from below the squatting chair while the two midwives raised the mother from the birthing stool and lowered her onto the soft mat. With her bangles jingling, the Priestess slid a hefty male child onto the mother's heaving breasts without cutting the umbilical cord. The mother’s wail turned into sobs of relief, spasms of laughter. The midwives’ chanting melded into joyous ululating. The music and the rhythm outside changed to a soft but lively celebration of new life. Young girls rattled their sistra, forked sticks with four strands of wire strung between the forks, each strand filled with loose metal pieces. Other girls shook and beat their tambourines. The men slapped their drums with great vigor to imitate that effort a mother had to exert in order to propel her child into this world. Then, as if on cue, everyone became quiet and stopped both inside and out. In the soft morning light of the birthing room a newborn’s cry pierced the silence and a midwife’s voice rang out: "Heroo em Heb! Heroo is in Festival! Heroo Rejoices!" The father had been standing alone, upside down on his hands and head, outside the door of the birthing house. He stood on his feet again and took a few slow, deep breaths, feeling giddy from the change in position. A tall, heavily built man, he was the Lord of Hanis, his city, and the Governor of the Falcon Province, one of Egypt’s forty-two provinces. He adjusted his spotless, white kilt and looked around. He was thirty-six, but his full face was smooth. Years of precious oils rubbed into it protected him from the ravaging effects of the Sun God Ra. His face also reflected the joy of having heard his newborn son and heir cry. While he was upside down, the father had enacted the magical equivalent of his son’s birth, reminding the Gods and Goddesses who passed in and out of the birthing house that he and his wife had been praying for the birth of a healthy son. Still listening to the sound of a new life, he looked around with an air of accomplishment. The courtyard had been swept clean and the birthing house had recently been whitewashed. Only the household fowl left their footprints in the sand. Before him stood the Governor’s Mansion, its plaster wall freshly painted lotus blue. A clear pool reflected the sky in the center of the courtyard. Its tiles were brightly painted with green papyrus reeds and blue lotus flowers, a gift from Pharaoh for his services. The musicians, chanters, clappers and drummers sat or stood around the pool. On his right and to the south of his residence, smoke rose from the many fires where cooks and servants were preparing the feast. On his left, to the north, a stark, low-roofed building housed the province’s scribes and magistrates in a beehive of small rooms filled with papyrus scrolls. The father's name was Heroo. He was the ‘Heroo’ who was about to begin a festival in honor of the Gods and Goddesses of Egypt as a thanksgiving for his newborn son. Heroo was a common name in Egypt. Every Pharaoh was called Heroo, son of Aseer and Ast, the first God-King and Queen who ruled the Two Lands, the fertile Black Land and the arid Red Land. When his brother Sutekh murdered Aseer, Heroo had to fight for his right to the throne of Egypt. He had fought for that right in the court of the Gods, in physical clashes with his uncle, as well as with his wits. After a long ordeal, Heroo eventually won. Ever since, all the kings of Egypt have been ceremonially named ‘Heroo’. As was the custom, whoever spoke the first words after a child’s birth was deemed to speak on behalf of the Gods. The chief midwife, in her role as the Goddess Tauret, had spoken: “Heroo em Heb,” ‘Heroo is in festival.’ The name was a triple pun. ‘Heroo’ could refer to the father, to the King, or even to the divine Heroo, son of Ast and Aseer. ‘To be in festival’ also meant ‘to be joyful.’ First, the divine Heroo, who took Hathor, the Goddess of Love and Fertility as his consort, celebrated a festival upon the birth of their son. Secondly, Pharaoh Amenhotep Neb-Ma’at-Re, may he Live, Prosper and be Healthy, might also have rejoiced upon the birth of another loyal courtier. Finally, divinely inspired, the chief midwife had correctly identified Heroo’s, the father’s feelings when naming his son and it was the only birth festival Heroo ever celebrated. Everyone concerned with the birth of this child had reason to be ‘the Joyful Heroo.’ His wife, Mereeyet, 'The Beloved,' had just completed the greatest challenge a woman can have: she had given successful birth to her first child at the age of forty two in a land where most young girls bear their first child within a year of their first blood. She had been barren throughout her life and was considered too old to bear children. But she had not given up hope. Mereeyet and Heroo had turned to the Goddess Hathor, the Goddess of Love and Fertility with a special plea: to conceive and give birth to a male child so that both mother and son survived. The Goddess, who knows the ways of love and the mysteries of conception, had made this occasion, the birth of an heir, possible. There was no question in Heroo’s mind, as he stood before the birthing house, that he felt joyous. The name was completely appropriate. Heroo was now free to begin the festive occasion, the festival of welcoming his newborn son. "Praise and thanksgiving to Hathor!" the happy father yelled. "Songs of joy with trumpet and harp will be sung! Heroo is indeed in festival!" Friends and relatives, priests and officials streamed out of the Mansion and across the courtyard. Each one was appropriately dressed in spotless white shirts and kilts, some reaching only to the knees with a façade of starched apron, others ankle length and pleated. Each one carried his staff of office. Men and women walked side by side. The black wigs on the women were a striking contrast to their delicately wrapped, multi-layered sheer white dresses. Heroo met them and, together with the musical troupe, led the procession around the birthing house, into a large, vine-covered arbor by the eastern wall. The trumpeters and the harpists alternated as the men sang out paeans to the son and heir of a nobleman and the women answered with thanksgiving for the survival of both mother and son. Servants carrying round tables laden with delicacies glided among them. Small obergines on a pottery plate, sliced in half and sautéed in onions with salt and cumin, decorated the center of each table. These purple slices formed the seven spokes of a star representing Seshat, the Goddess of Measurement. Around this central feature lay an arrangement of breads, meats and vegetables: red skinned radishes alternated with tiny white turnips, both delightfully biting to the taste. The vegetables glistened with the vitality of the Black Land. Long, thin scallions with their green stems formed a square around steaming yam, a clove of boiled garlic sticking out of each yam. Pin-tailed duck, Geb-geese and other fowl from the marshes, roasted reddish brown and dripping with fat, lay on long, broad leaves of fresh lettuce. Breads, some round and flat, others conical and sweet, still others thick with square corners, hot from the ovens, were stacked high, a plateful on both sides of every fowl. It took two, sometimes three servants to carry each table to the arbor. Trees lined the walkway. Some of had been brought from far away lands together with their native soil. Heroo’s servants had to dig deep holes in the loamy sand of his courtyard and fill it with the strange brown or gray earth of foreign countries in order to keep the trees alive. The myriad leaves of the acacia shimmered with the sparkle of morning dew as the Sun God rose on the Eastern Horizon. It was a native tree, happy to grow anywhere. X from the Land of Punt fluttered in the gentle northern breeze. Sycamores, sacred to Hathor, cast their great shadow, promising respite from the growing heat of the Sun God. They were the most plentiful in the Two Lands. Dwarf cedars endured the hot days and cool nights, while their cousins in Lebanon grew majestic and tall. Had the child been stillborn, or died at birth, festivities would have taken the form of a short funeral feast at the western wall, behind the Governor’s Mansion. Death at childbirth was so common that it was customary to bury the body of the unformed soul right under the walls of an estate. Today’s birth was practically a miracle in which nearly every God and Goddess played a major role. So the Festival of the Living began while the mother and the four midwives gently rubbed and cleaned every inch of the child's body as it lay on the mother's soft, heaving belly. In the warmth and soft light of the birthing house the child must have recognized its mother’s smell and her noises because he focused his eyes on her face and smiled within an hour. Filled with love and gratitude, Mereeyet chewed through the umbilical cord and severed it. * * * I heard this story of Horemheb’s birth many years later while I was still a young man on my first assignment as a scribe. Horemheb and I were living at the royal Residence and served the Crown Prince Djehouty-Moses who was two years older than us. Horemheb was a newly commissioned officer. He and Djehouty-Moses had trained together for an entire year and took great joy in one another’s skills. I was raised with Horemheb and six other children at Heroo’s estate. All eight of us were sent to scribal school together. I was the only one who really enjoyed writing and it was obvious both to my parents and to the priests that I will spend my life in this profession. I could not have been happier. I was always slightly larger than my other siblings. I preferred to sit in the shade when the other children chased the whirlwind, the small eddies of the north wind as it picked up the loose sand and formed it into visible funnels in our father’s courtyard. Nanoo, our nurse, told us that if anyone could drop a turd into the center of the whirlwind, it would turn into gold. I was too fat to run fast, so I just watched and laughed with the household servants as Horemheb or the others caught up with the swirling funnel of sand and squatted in its way, straining their intestines to perform on demand. There were eight of us, because Heroo and Mereeyet had brought back to their estate seven Ka Nakht children from the Temple of Hathor a year after Horemheb’s birth. Mereeyet, my stepmother told me about that journey before she died. During our childhood I was used to Mereeyet being the storyteller in the family. She had this haunting ability to tell any story as if it were for the first time. Women in the throes of childbirth do not utter clever, contrived sayings like Mereeyet claimed she did. But when she told the story, we were all inclined to believe her. The only other person who remembered his birth was Nanoo, Horemheb’s nurse, because she was there at the birth. She was the chief midwife. But both women have recently united with the land and their mummified bodies rest in Heroo’s tomb. Today, on the tenth day of the third month of Summer, in the twenty-third year of Amenhotep Neb-Ma’at-Ra, may he be given Life, Prosperity and Health, Heroo came to the Residence as was his duty to the King each year, to begin three months of service. The King, however, saw that Heroo was weak, his life visibly ebbing. Amenhotep had already provided gifts for Heroo‘s tomb. Among those gifts was a black, basalt sarcophagus, more prestigious than that of any other governor of the Falcon Province. The tomb, also, had been finished and waited for its occupant. Therefore, Pharaoh, may he be given Life, Prosperity and Health, ordered Heroo and our entire family to spend a day together. We received a day’s provisions from Amenhotep’s royal kitchen. Horemheb had arranged to take four swift chariots with horses from the King’s stables. We loaded our provisions and left early one morning to the burial fields of Sokar. We spent the day in the shadow of the most ancient pyramid. Seventeen people composed our party. Four of these were the chariot drivers. Seven of us were Horemheb’s half-brothers and half-sisters, the four boys in one chariot, the three girls in another. Horemheb rode with his father, Heroo, along with two servants whose task was to steady our father in case the chariot drive proved beyond his strength. Two more servants rode in the fourth chariot with the provisions and mats securely lashed to the strong cane frame. Servants had spread mats upon the soft sand that had blown onto the western face of Djoser’s step pyramid. We had paid our respect to this venerable ancient King and his chief Architect and Vizier, the wise Imhotep. Heroo sat down with his back against the cool limestone of the pyramid. The rest of us sat in front of him in a semi-circle. Heroo’s body had become thin, his movements had slowed and his face, in spite of the oils, had filled with creases. Only his voice remained strong and commanding. Heroo did not begin with Horemheb’s birth. Rather, to our delight, he began with the story of Horemheb’s conception. It was my duty to inscribe his words onto fresh sheets of papyrus even as he spoke: * * * In the eighth year of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Amenhotep Neb-Ma’at-Ra, Son of Ra, Given Life Like Ra for All Time and Over All Lands, I, Heroo, Governor of the Falcon Province and Lord of Hanis spoke with my wife, my Beloved, Mereeyet, about the matter of our many years of barrenness. Mereeyet and I had done everything that could be done by a man and a woman who wished to conceive a child. Our work and experiments were pleasant, but the seed did not sprout. It was then that we decided to turn to the Goddess Hathor for help. We sent messengers to the High Priestess of Hathor and she sent them back with instructions when to arrive, what to bring. We prepared ourselves. Our servants filled our barque with offerings. Upon our arrival the High Priestess met us. She took Mereeyet to the women’s quarters herself. Our servants took our offerings to the Temple storerooms. There were jars of honey and amphorae of wine from our Delta estates, a hundred sacks of barley and another hundred of emmer. Our servants had trapped six pin-tailed ducks, six Geb ducks, six gray geese and six mallards, all of which were carried in cages into the Temple’s kitchen garden. Our women had provided many, many folds of pure, white linen cloth for the Hathor Priestesses, the work of an entire year during which Mereeyet and I had prepared for Hathor’s ministrations. I remained standing in the grand courtyard of the ancient Hathor Temple, under the shade of two tall, square columns with a lintel, the main entrance into the inner courtyard. Two young Priestesses approached me shaking their sistra. Their black wigs left their pretty faces exposed. Even though they tried to keep their faces expressionless, the joys of a carefree childhood, which they only recently had left behind, were still etched into their eyes and cheeks. They were naked. Their breasts, freshly budded, were like soft mounds of beige dough having just risen with the yeast. They came to me confidently. They spoke to me firmly, bidding me to follow them. The gentle tinkling of the copper cymbals on the tightly stretched strings of their sistra gave life to the air. I followed the eerie sound as they led me into the Inner Courtyard. From there we walked out a side door, past the Birthing House. We made a right turn and walked the sandy path strewn with pebbles and broken shards to the stone parapet of the Sacred Lake. Other Priestesses were standing there, their sistra adding to the tinkling chimes. Still others clapped their hands and rubbed them, as if washing, while a hissing noise came from their mouth. My guides touched my shoulder and pointed at the water. I dropped my kilt, walked down the finely hewn stone steps into the water and for the next hour soaked in the lukewarm pool with only a white fillet of linen on the top of my head to shield me against the heat of Ra. The Priestesses circumambulated the sacred lake with unceasing clapping and hissing and chiming to drive away the unclean essences rising from my ablution. With my skin softened, the two Priestesses came for me and walked me to a mat under a sycamore tree. They rubbed jasmine-scented oil all over my body, including my head, and asked me to stand. The Priestesses picked up sharp flints and began the process of depilation: scraping off a layer of skin with all the dirt and hair. The others created an awful noise with their instruments. It was the music of derision against the dangers of dirt and excrement. The old, unclean Heroo became ritually pure. Although the process was painful, I was used to it from my annual service to the Divine Falcon, the God of our Falcon Province at whose Temple I was High Priest for fifteen years. Another Priestess came to anoint me, this time with lotus oil. The sistra no longer tinkled. They chimed and jingled as the young Priestesses shook the wooden handles vigorously. Others clapped their hands with joy and sang songs welcoming the pure of body, the pure of heart. They were all naked except for a leather belt decorated with beads around their hips. We formed a procession and moved to the main temple. I also remained naked, hairless, glistening with oil in the morning sunshine. The procession entered through the Main Pylon and walked through each of the three courtyards, each smaller but higher than the previous one. Then we proceeded into the Hall of Columns, the first of three great covered halls leading to Hathor’s Shrine, to the altar of the Goddess of Love. After crossing the first Hall, we turned left and right again into the long, sloping corridor to the roof where the chamber of conception stood deep within a complex of low, sandstone rooms. I felt ready for anything, although I did not know what the Goddess had prepared for me. Large sandstone blocks formed both the floor and the walls of this roof complex. Direct sunlight penetrated the antechamber through its door, but each subsequent room became darker and darker. The only light that came into the chamber of conception filtered through the cubit-wide ceiling vent. The sun's morning journey was only half completed. It had not yet entered the chamber on this day, so the light remained gray. The brilliantly painted carvings on the square walls were barely visible until my eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness. Across the room I could see the west wall carved with the act of conception. Ast, Great of Magic, the most beloved Goddess in all of Egypt, perched on the erect phallus of the reclining Aseer, her husband and brother. She took the form of a kite with her wings widespread in order to conceive their son and heir, Heroo. That pose was a variation on the ancient story of how Ast had revived her dead husband and equipped him with a functioning phallus. The south wall was carved with the scene where Ast had retrieved Aseer from Byblos and freed him from the coffin in which Sutekh had imprisoned him alive. The north wall showed Ast hiding among the marshes of the Great River with her son, Heroo. My eyes returned to Aseer’s erect phallus. ‘Am I going to lie on the altar in the center of the chamber like Aseer? Who will descend on my phallus?’ I wondered. Mereeyet and I had practiced a number of variations: copulating for divine effect, for practical fertility, for wisdom and for the sheer fun of it. I figured there must be a variation for a male child and I was ready to participate in it. Musicians and dancers entered the spacious chamber and quietly sat under the conception wall. A Priestess placed a comfortable chair in front of the musicians, facing the entry and the altar, and bid me to sit down. The drum rhythm rose slowly, the music started softly and the three female dancers moved out from behind me, their undulations almost imperceptible as they came into sight. More light began to filter through the ceiling vent as the sun moved toward its apex. Soon a thin shaft would flood one side of the waist-high, stone altar. The pace of the tambourine increased, the pitch of the double-reed pipe jumped an octave and a shrill note came faster and faster and ran from the lower to the upper scale in a pleasant, rhythmic fashion. The three dancers wore heavy, black wigs. Their eyelids and eyebrows were black with fresh kohl. A diaphanous linen robe covered two of them, but left nothing to the imagination. The third was naked with only a snake belt tied around her waist. All three of them had an image of the Goddess Hathor, their Mistress, tattooed on their inner left thighs. They began to tell a story with their hands tracing magical patterns in the air. Someone behind them spread a thick, white linen cloth upon the altar. The moment the first shaft of light entered through the ceiling vent, it exploded on this white altar cover and diffused into every part of the brilliantly painted room that was above the level of the altar. My eyes had been fixed on the naked dancer’s breasts, but the light behind her darkened my view of her, so my eyes fell on her fingertips, the part of her silhouette that now commanded my attention. Like bird's wings, those fingers folded outwards from her perfumed and oiled body, then became graceful ibis birds circling around the marshland looking for nesting places. Her two arms, like two birds, played out a mating dance. With each movement the dancers' hands and arms drew me more and more into the story, then with symbols and strange gestures, hypnotized me. My body became rigid, my mind freed. My body felt like a clay amphora, a crude vase that held both my mortal flesh and my soul. I watched helplessly as the lead dancer's left hand drew my Ka, my free spirit, out from the prison of my flesh. I experienced air and light, freedom and movement as never before. No sooner did I become aware of this freedom, the dancer's right hand sent my Ka floating back into the dark, airless, restraining walls of the amphora. A deep sense of depression flooded my heart, but only for a moment, before some unseen force spewed me out again. Then my etheric body, my Khabiyet, ballooned out and filled the universe without the least threat that it might burst. I felt as if I were larger than anything I had ever known or dared to imagine. As soon as the euphoria of limitlessness propelled me towards ecstasy, without warning I hurtled back through the amphora neck into eternal darkness. Out into omnipotence the dancers sent me, then back into fleeting impotence. Suddenly my consciousness was inside my body. I floated in and out of my own throat with every breath. I entered my own lungs and was blown out again. I became a fold of my own intestines, contracting and expanding in turn, pushing putrefaction along its divine course until I could see my entire life. There was my body, having come along the similarly twisted route of time and experience. I was able to see my life as an eternal quest for renewal and foresee the time when I would resign myself to the final putrification, from which only the skilled hands of the embalmers might save me. I became aware of my heart beating, my phallus throbbing. The three dancers retreated to the right, the south wall. Someone removed the white linen cloth from the altar and the light beam, in spite of becoming stronger as the sun moved overhead, stopped at the dull gray stone of the altar. Everything below the flat altar top was now completely dark. Everything above, eerily lit. Under this umbrella of dully reflected light three shadowy forms entered the chamber and moved to the north wall on my left. All I could see were their shaven heads that began to bob up and down from the shadowy darkness below into the soft, eerie light and back. The dancers at the south wall started to undulate gracefully, back and forth, slowly moving towards the center, behind the altar, towards these bobbing heads. At times both the female dancers and the shaven-headed new forms sank below the light into the shadows as if shadow could swallow light and transform whatever is lit into shadow. Even the music sounded dark, making my spine shiver. As the dancers sank into the shadow and rose again into the light, I recognized the shaven headed ones! They symbolized the Baw, the souls of those who hover around couples at the time of conception. One of the dancers embraced a shaven head against her breasts and began a slow spin while the others continued their free-floating movements and slowly made their way out of the room. The light waned as someone on the roof covered the ceiling vent with layers of cloth. In the ensuing darkness I could just make out the shapes of the remaining couple. They parted and one of them jumped onto the altar and continued to spin slowly in place. Then the light returned in its full noontime glory. It shone upon this risen being on the altar. It was the shaven-headed dancer, clad in a thin layer of aged mummy wrapping as a symbol that as a soul, it had lived before, died, was mummified and now lives as a discarnate being, a Ba, looking for a new body to inhabit. A silver thread floated behind this apparition, a sign of new bondage to the earth, the cord upon which the soul travels to and from the womb. The dancer’s arms moved slowly into the air to greet the sun's disk, the Aten of daytime. I sat up from my entranced stupor. The dancer was male! Instead of the soft breasts, strong muscles rippled on his wrapped chest. His girdle bulged forward at his groin. A discarnate soul had been ceremonially attracted into a male body! The two dancers unwrapped the ancient linen from the vigorous male body on the altar. One of them picked up a mirror. A flash of brilliant light blinded me. Another turned me around to face the west wall. When my eyes had readjusted, I found myself in silence. The musicians and the dancers were gone. The ceremony of attracting a male soul, a Ba, was over. I stared breathless and speechless at Aseer’s erect phallus before me. The morning’s ritual began to make sense. I had a glimpse of Horemheb before he was born, before he was even conceived, before he even had a name. Go to Chapter 2! (copyright Daniel Kolos, 2000) Go To SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION