As is my usual practice, I am posting on this thread an article I recently wrote and posted a word copy of on a recent transcript thread since it related to what I think may have been a case of a walk-in soul who took over the body of another person after that person had seemingly expired due to a serious accident. I have, however, made a few amendments and corrections to the original version so as to incorporate additional information that I have become aware of since. Although the article raises issues surrounding reincarnation and walk-ins, it also deals with the remarkable structure that is Seti I's temple at Abydos. A few weeks ago, a number of posts were made on this thread relating to Abydos. In some ways this article may be viewed as a follow-up to previous comments I made on Abydos and particularly the wonderful Temple of Seti I. The article ponders whether the temple was built to be a portal to the gods of Egypt allowing the pharaoh to commune directly with the gods when they came through the portal.
The Curious Case of Omm Sety
A short while ago, there was a discussion on this thread (Alton Towers) about the remarkable structure that is the Temple of Seti at Abydos in Egypt, which is perhaps the best preserved of all the major monuments of Ancient Egypt.
There are many mysteries connected with this temple, not least the nearby underground complex known as the Osireion and the peculiar hieroglyphs that have come to be known collectively as the ‘Helicopter Hieroglyph’.
These futuristic looking hieroglyphs provoked a lively debate on the Forum about the nature of the hieroglyphs after the C’s had suggested they were genuine depictions of ancient technology, which we have merely recreated in the modern age. Other Forum members took the establishment view that they were the product of a
palimpsest relief, which in the case of the helicopter engraving was created by two overlapping inscriptions, the titles of Ramesses II being superimposed on those of his predecessor Seti I. I don’t wish to reopen that debate here but would instead like to discuss another mystery, which unlike those of the past is a very modern mystery concerning Seti’s temple at Abydos.
What is truly extraordinary about the Temple of Abydos for those who visit it today is that when it was rediscovered by archaeologists, it was a complete ruin and much of it had to be reconstructed. This was like piecing together a complex jigsaw puzzle involving 2500 pieces of masonry. Surprisingly, however, the whole process took only two and a half years to accomplish thanks in part to the remarkable contributions of an expatriate English woman
Dorothy Louise Eady (1904 – 1981) who is also better known as
Omm Sety, a name she took after her marriage to Emam Abdel Meguid an Egyptian teacher and the birth of her son Sety (‘Omm Sety’ meaning the ‘mother of Sety’). Omm Sety believed that she was the reincarnation of a young woman in ancient Egypt called Bentreshyt (meaning “Harp of Joy”) who had been a virgin priestess of Isis at the time Seti I’s temple had been built around 1290 BC. Abydos had a special significance for Omm Sety because it is where she believed Bentreshyt had lived and served in the Temple of Seti. One could easily dismiss her claims that she was the reincarnation of a temple maiden from three thousand years ago except that when she was put to the test, she could confound those who may have doubted her. For example, she claimed that in her past life as Bentreshyt the Temple of Seti had a garden, where she had first met Seti I. Whilst she was living in Abydos, the temple garden was found where she said it would be found, the excavations uncovering a garden which exactly matched her descriptions.
Omm Sety truly believed that she was the reincarnation of the temple maiden Bentreshyt who had been the lover of Seti I in the late 13th century BC. As Dorothy Eady, she was born in London in 1904 as the only child to Reuben Ernest Eady and Caroline Mary (Frost) Eady. The turning point in her life occurred when she was three years of age and fell down a flight of stairs. Her worried parents called for a doctor who when he attended upon her, considered her to be non-responsive and therefore dead. The doctor left the scene in order to get a death certificate to complete before returning. However, when he returned, to his surprise he found the young Dorothy sitting up apparently well. Soon after, she began exhibiting strange behaviours, asking that she be "brought home". She had also developed what is known as foreign accent syndrome, a rare medical condition in which patients develop speech patterns that are perceived as a foreign accent that is different from their native accent, without having acquired it in the perceived accent's place of origin. Although it usually results from a stroke, it can also develop from a head trauma such as the one suffered by the young Dorothy. The condition was first reported in 1907, the same year coincidentally that Dorothy Eady had her accident.
After being taken by her parents to visit the British Museum in London and, on observing a photograph in the New Kingdom Temple exhibits room, the young Dorothy called out "There is my home!" but "where are the trees? Where are the gardens?" The temple was that of Seti I. She ran about the halls of the Egyptian rooms, "amongst her peoples", kissing the statues' feet. After this trip, she took every opportunity to visit the British Museum rooms. There, she eventually met the great Egyptologist E.A. Wallis Budge, who was taken by her youthful enthusiasm and encouraged her in the study of hieroglyphs. She very quickly became well versed in reading and interpreting hieroglyphs, almost as if she were retrieving former knowledge from memory.
When she was fifteen, she described a nocturnal visit from the mummy of Pharaoh Seti I. Her behaviour, coupled with sleepwalking and nightmares, led her to be incarcerated in sanatoriums several times. After her death, a psychiatrist who specialised in adolescent behaviour speculated that Dorothy Eady's fall down the stairs as a child may have resulted in damage to the locus ceruleus, which could then have led to a dislocation from her surroundings resulting in the embracement of an obsession. So, could Dorothy Eady have genuinely been the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian temple maiden, as she herself believed or was her belief a fantasy brought on by the serious head trauma she experienced as a young child?
The simple answer to that question is that we can never really know. However, there is another possibility, which rules out the need for reincarnation in the conventional sense and that is something which the C’s have spoken about even recently and that is the possibility that Bentreshyt, a person who had lived and died thousands of years earlier, was a ‘walk-in’? Did Dorothy Eady die in the fall on the staircase as the attending doctor in his professional judgment believed and, if so, did the spirit of Bentreshyt take the place of Dorothy’s departing spirit and reanimate the body? I make this proposal on the basis that Dorothy appeared to be motionless and dead when the doctor went off to get a death certificate, yet she was sitting up and animated by the time the doctor returned. Moreover, it quickly became obvious to her parents that she was now a very different child after her miraculous recovery. In most cases where people believe they have been reincarnated, they express claims of this belief from a very young age but then seem to grow out of it as they mature with memories of their past life receding into the background. In Dorothy Eady’s case, she only began believing that she was the reincarnation of Bentreshyt after her accident. Moreover, she never abandoned this belief throughout the rest of her life. It was as if the veil of forgetfulness had been completely pulled aside in her case since memories of her life as Bentreshyt would remain ever present. Indeed, it was these memories that would prove invaluable to archaeologists, allowing them to make important discoveries especially at Abydos. In many ways, Dorothy Eady was a unique individual and although the numerous archaeologists with whom she worked over the years did not necessarily buy into her claim to be the reincarnation of Bentreshyt, they still treated her beliefs with respect and admired the knowledge and dedication that she brought to archaeological research and Egyptology in particular.
Omm Sety’s Past Life as Bentreshyt
Dorothy Eady reported nighttime visitations by an entity called
Hor-Ra who she claimed was the spirit of Seti I. She claimed that Hor-Ra slowly dictated to her, over a twelve-month period, the story of her previous life. The story, written by Eady, took up around seventy pages of cursive hieroglyphic text. It described the life of a young woman in ancient Egypt, called Bentreshyt, who had reincarnated in the person of Dorothy Eady. Bentreshyt is described in this text as being of humble origin, her mother a vegetable seller and her father a soldier during the reign of Seti I (c. 1290 BC to 1279 BC). When she was three, her mother died, and she was placed in the temple of
Kom el-Sultan because her father could not afford her. There, she was brought up to be a priestess. When she was twelve years old, the High Priest asked her if she wished to go out into the world or stay and become a consecrated virgin. In the absence of full understanding and without a practical alternative, she took the vows. During the next two years, she learned her role in the annual drama of
Osiris's passion and resurrection, a role that only virgin priestesses consecrated to Isis could perform. A few years later she met ‘a living god’ - Pharaoh Seti I. They became lovers, eating "
the uncooked goose", an ancient Egyptian term that has been compared to "
eating the forbidden fruit", and Bentreshyt got pregnant. Unfortunately, the lovers’ fate was not a happy one. The High Priest of the temple told her that the situation represented a great offence against Isis and would cause many problems for the pharaoh. The gravity of the offence was so terrible that death would be the most likely penalty at a trial. Unwilling to face the public scandal for Seti, Bentreshyt committed suicide rather than face trial.
After marrying and moving to Egypt, Dorothy spent 19 years living in Cairo. In 1935, Eady separated from her husband when he took a teaching job in Iraq, Her marriage at an end, she eventually decided to move to Abydos. She was 52 years old at the time. She reported that Seti I approved of the move. He claimed that the "
wheel of fate" was turning, and this would be a time of testing; if she was chaste, she would undo the ancient sin of Bentreshyt dictated to her by Hor-Ra. She set up her new home at Arabet Abydos near the mountain Pega-the-Gap where she truly believed she was finally back home. She had made short pilgrimages to the Temple of Abydos before, during which she had demonstrated her advanced knowledge of the site. During one of her visits to the temple, the chief inspector from the Egyptian Antiquities Department decided to check her alleged knowledge of the place. He was highly curious as to how realistic her explanations were. Accordingly, Dorothy was asked to stand next to some of the Abydos wall paintings in the darkness. She was then asked to identify them with what she remembered from her past life as a temple priestess. She accomplished the task without making any mistakes, even though the painting locations had not yet been published at that time. For Dorothy, the Temple of Seti was a place of peace and security where she was watched over by the benevolent eyes of the ancient Egyptian gods.
She spent the first two years listing and translating pieces from a recently excavated temple palace. Her work was incorporated into Edouard Ghazouli's monograph "
The Palace and Magazines Attached to the Temple of Sety I at Abydos". Ghazouli expressed particular thanks to her in this work and was impressed by the skills she showed in the translation of enigmatic texts. In 1957, she wrote out a liturgical calendar of feast days based on ancient Egyptian texts. Every morning and night she would visit the Temple to recite the prayers for the day, as no doubt she had done in her previous life as Bentreshy. On the birthdays of Osiris and Isis she would observe the ancient food abstentions, and bring offerings of beer, wine, bread, and tea biscuits to the Chapel of Osiris. She described the Temple of Seti as
like entering a time machine, where the past becomes the present and the modern mind has difficulty understanding a world in which magic is accepted. She claimed that the scenes depicted on the temple walls were active in the minds of ancient Egyptians on two levels. Firstly, they made the actions displayed permanent. The painting of Pharaoh offering bread to Osiris, for example, continued his actions so long as the depiction remained. Secondly, the image could be animated by the spirit of the god, if the person stood before the depiction and called on the god's name (
MJF: perhaps a bit of 4th density magic in play here?).
Omm Sety believed in the curative powers of water from certain holy places. For example, she would heal herself by jumping into the sacred pool in the
Osireion (a buried structure to the north of Seti’s temple, which Seti I had been led to by a dream and a structure that may long pre-date Seti’s own temple) fully clothed. In this way, she reported that she no longer needed glasses, was cured of arthritis and appendicitis through the curative waters of the Osireion. Another example of where she was able to deploy her past-life knowledge was when villagers from the town of Arabet Abydos where she lived reported occasionally seeing a "large golden boat" floating upon a one-time lake. Omm Sety noted that the villagers were ignorant of the ancient Egyptian mystery play, once enacted at Abydos, involving a Neshmet boat, a vessel belonging to the Egyptian god Nun. An effigy of the god Osiris was transported in it on the river Nile during the Osiris festival at Abydos. For Omm Sety, the villagers, obliviously, observed the apparition where there had once been a sacred lake.
Omm Sety did not just remember her past life as Bentreshy but also claimed to have apparitions and meetings with her past lover Seti I in her current life. For example, she reported in her diary that on first moving into her new home at Abydos, Seti I appeared and carried out a ritual that consecrated the habitation, bowing reverently towards small statues of Osiris and Isis she kept in a small shrine-niche. During this visit Seti described the one and only time he saw the god Set, his namesake. As a prelude to meeting Set, he had fasted for ten days before entering the Chapel of the Great Strength, where the god appeared with "a beauty that cannot be described". On sensing that he was the spirit of all that was cruel and evil, Seti fled to the sound of mocking laughter from the god, never to serve Set again. He counselled that "one should not serve an evil being, even if it appears to have a good or useful attribute or function." Seti made several visits during the following weeks, during which he gave his opinion of the Greek story of Atlantis, A Cretan had once told him that the islands of the Aegean were the tops of mountains from a great land that had sunk into the Mediterranean and the origins of Osiris ("our Lord came from Amenti*, whence he returned"). The Cretan would seem to have had the story correct save that the islands that were meant to be the tops of Atlantis’s former mountains were those of the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, not the islands of the Aegean.
*Amenti was the duat or underworld, which Osiris ruled over. Seti I, like other Pharaohs, believed the ancient Egyptian gods were real beings you could meet with and even told Omm Sety that he had met with them. This makes me wonder whether such beings were either aliens, such as the Lizard beings who may have used holographic projections as they had done for Yahweh and Baal, or representatives from the Nation of the Third Eye, the subterranean Aryan civilisation the C’s have spoken of, which may explain why Osiris, the chief god worshipped at Abydos, who was even thought to be buried there (indeed the Osireion is thought to have been connected with the worship of Osiris as an "Osiris tomb"), was connected with the underworld, as are other fabled beings such as the Tuatha de Danaan of Irish folklore. This notion of gods appearing at Abydos may be supported by the idea, as promoted by many ancient astronaut theorists, that there could have been a portal at Abydos, which facilitated such appearances. I would not discount this proposition. If there was a portal at Abydos, it may have functioned for many centuries, which again could explain why the site was linked to the god Osiris, the god the Egyptians associated with the underworld.
She also spoke of Rameses II, the son of Seti I, whom she always saw as a teenager, as when Bentreshyt first knew him. She regarded him, in common with other Egyptologists, as "the most slandered of all the pharaohs" because of biblically derived accounts describing him as the Pharaoh of the Oppression and the slaughterer of baby boys, traits which are contradicted by contemporary records. Indeed, we know through the C’s that the Pharaoh of the Biblical Exodus was Akhenaten not Ramses. So, what did Omm Sety have to say about the heretic pharaoh who abandoned the old gods of Egypt to worship the one god, the Aten?
The noted Egyptologist Donald Redford invited Omm Sety to appear in the documentary "The Lost Pharaoh" about the pharaoh Akhenaten, in which she gives her description of Akhenaten, including a negative view of the religious revolution he attempted (comparing him to the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini – "a fanatic"). Moreover, in the early 1970s, Omm Sety disclosed that she believed she knew the location of Queen Nefertiti’s (Akhenaten’s wife) tomb but showed some reluctance in disclosing its "most unlikely place" because Seti I did not like Akhenaten for his attempt to suppress traditional Egyptian religious practices. "We don't want anything more of this family to be known."
This makes perfect sense to me as Akhenaten had suppressed the worship of the ancient Egyptian gods in favour of the worship of a sole supreme deity, the Aten. This had put the noses of the various Egyptian priesthoods out of joint, cutting them off from their lucrative income streams. None were perhaps more angry than the all-powerful priesthood of Amun-Re. They would take their revenge through General Horemheb, the Egyptian military commander, when he subsequently became pharaoh after the short reigns of Tutankhamun and Aye, which brought the 18th dynasty to a close. Horemheb ensured that the old gods were restored as the national gods of Egypt and their temples restored to their former glory, a process continued by Seti I and Ramses II. However, Horemheb also pursued an agenda by which all memory of the Aten and the pharaohs who had promoted this deity was destroyed and eradicated. Their temples, statues, effigies, wall reliefs and hieroglyphs were smashed, defaced and chiselled out. Indeed, Seti I when producing the famous Abydos King List at his temple at Abydos, a list that was carved in stone, deliberately left out the pharaohs of the Amarna period (Akhenaten, Smenkhare, Tutankhamun and Aye) as if they had never existed. This would readily explain why Omm Sety, as the supposed reincarnation of Bentreshyt, would have viewed Akhenaten with such contempt, since, as a priestess of Isis in the Temple of Seti at Abydos, she would naturally have been brought up to revile his memory as a heretic pharaoh who had abandoned the old gods of Egypt.
Was Akhenaten a fanatic though, as Omm Sety alleged, akin to the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran in modern times? Such views must always be subjective by nature but there is no doubt that Akhenaten had acted as something of a revolutionary, like Ayatollah Khomeini, when suppressing the old gods of Egypt and introducing the monotheistic worship of the Aten. There is no doubt that he had been sincere in his beliefs, but it would seem he went too far too quickly in overturning the ages old belief system in a pantheon of gods that had held sway in Egypt for aeons. His cause was not helped by the natural disasters that struck Egypt during his reign, which are reflected in the story of the Biblical plagues of Egypt, that had occurred due to the cataclysmic eruption of the volcanic island of Thera. Although this was in no way his fault, the disasters would have been used by the jilted priesthoods of Egypt as proof that Akhenaten was being punished for abandoning the old gods that had previously protected the country. It was the pharaoh’s duty to provide maat (balance) and Akhenaten had failed in this sacred responsibility. One can easily see that a nation that had been traumatised by Thera’s eruption and the aftereffects (tsunamis, ash fall out and the agricultural blight this triggered etc), which culminated in a deadly plague that wiped out much of the population, including numerous members of the royal family, would look for someone to blame and that someone was Akhenaten. Hence, even though Bentreshyt lived well over a century after Akhenaten’s reign, the memory of this terrible trauma would still have been a raw one for the Egyptians and the contempt for Akhenaten and his family would still have prevailed.
Omm Sety’s Death and Legacy
Omm Sety died in Abydos on 21 April 1981. Was she a fraud, an eccentric or a person who simply suffered from hallucinations? Quoting from her Wikipedia entry:
According to the late John A. Wilson, head of the Oriental Institute in Chicago, and called the "dean of American Egyptology" by contemporaries, Omm Sety deserved to be treated as "a responsible scholar". She was a source for modern scholarship seeking to understand how traditional ancient religious practices have survived into modern times, as "folk customs" practiced by modern Egyptian Copts and Muslims. He praised her book "Abydos, Holy city of Ancient Egypt" for its "comprehensive coverage of every ancient element in Abydos.
Unlike other people who claimed to be reincarnated figures from ancient Egypt, she was treated with respect by Egyptologists, and whilst none publicly subscribed to the phenomena she reported, none doubted her sincerity, and many have used her observations of past and present Egypt as reliable source material. Egyptologists who knew Omm Sety were impressed by her knowledge of ancient Egypt. Klaus Baer of the Oriental Institute commented that "she had visions and worshipped the ancient Egyptian gods. But she understood the methods and standards of scholarship, which is usually not the case with nuts", nor did she "desire to convert anyone". Kenneth Kitchen, author of the seven-volume "Ramesside Inscriptions", described Omm Sety as a "true Ramesside" who came to all sorts of conclusions about the actual objective material of the Sety Temple – which may have also coincided with things that she felt she knew some other way ... and that paid dividends.
The British novelist Sir William Gerald Golding wrote of the Egyptologists he met in his travels through Egypt in the 1980s who were "as well disposed to the Mystery as any child could have wished". When "the question arose of a dear lady who believed herself to have been a priestess of a particular temple, they did not dismiss her as a crackpot but agreed that 'she had something'". The famous American astronomer Carl Sagan considered Omm Sety as "a lively, intelligent, dedicated woman who made real contributions to Egyptology. This is true whether her belief in reincarnation is fact or fantasy".
A 1987 New York Times article by John Anthony West ("She Had Her Life to Live Over") described a biography of her as an "intriguing and convincing modern case histor[y]" of the belief in reincarnation”.
Dorothy Eady or Omm Sety, as she preferred to be called, was definitely an enigma in her lifetime. I am not aware that people who claim to be reincarnated have such strong and accurate recollections as she did. This could readily be explained though by her being a walk-in of the spirit of Bentreshyt, who took over from the original spirit animating Dorothy Eady’s body when she died on the staircase. Then there is her claim that she was frequently visited by the spirit of her former lover Seti 1. These could have been hallucinations, of course, but the claim of such visits is not something a reincarnate would normally experience and talk about. Moreover, there were also people who claimed to have witnessed Seti appearing to Omm Sety. The fact that her past life knowledge helped archaeologists in their research and digs (finding the temple garden at Abydos for example) is not easy to dismiss either. She was right too often for it to be mere coincidence or luck.
I shall leave it to readers to make up their own minds about this but, whatever conclusion you reach, it is undoubtedly true that she was a fascinating lady who impressed so many who knew or worked with her.
