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TWO

Dorothy

“‘But when I grow up,’ I told him,‘I’m going to live in Egypt.’” OS

Nothing about Omm Sety was ever ordinary – not her exuberant laugh, her questing mind, or her larger-than-life presence. Even if she had had no psychic connection at all with the far past, her intellect alone would have left a memorable legacy. That legacy will feature prominently in our book. But there are certain things about her life that should be spoken of first.

In the early years of our friendship I knew very little about Omm Sety’s life before Egypt. I knew that her father, Reuben Eady, had been a tailor and that the family had lived in a flat in a London suburb and that she was an only child. In time, she began telling me about her early life, starting with an incident in 1907 when she was three.

When the family doctor answered the urgent call to the Eady residence he arrived to find Dorothy Louise unconscious at the bottom of a steep staircase. The doctor carefully examined the girl and could find no pulse or other signs of life. He sadly informed the parents that their child had died, then went back to his office to prepare the death certificate.

On his return an hour later, the doctor was dumbfounded to find that the dead had apparently come back to life, and was at that moment playing on her bed, fully alert, her plump cheeks stuffed with candy, while her parents hovered anxiously.

Most peculiar of all, Dorothy began talking about going home, even though, of course, she was home.

But that wasn’t what she meant. There were new thoughts in her mind now, new images – new memories. Soon after the accident Dorothy began having dreams of a beautiful building with huge columns and the loveliest garden extending far off to one side. In that garden she saw pools, stone paths and tall trees.

Being only three, she didn’t have words to describe the magnificent temple she was seeing because she had never seen anything like it in her short life. But she knew this place was home. Sometimes she would cry bitterly, begging her parents to let her return there. Reuben and Caroline Eady didn’t take the matter seriously at first; such childhood fantasies were transient things, their friends assured them.

“All I can remember about the fall,” Omm Sety once told me, “is that when I regained consciousness I felt, well, sort of funny. It was as though I not only changed my skin, which was black and blue with bumps all over, but I also felt that something in my head had changed its orientation. I was not the same after that.”

A few years ago, I met a woman who was a distant relative of Omm Sety’s on her father’s side. She had come to Egypt with a group of British tourists. In our conversation about Dorothy I asked what she knew about the fall down the stairs. She said that the family believed the whole affair about her “dying” had really been a case of an elderly doctor’s poor eyesight and malfunctioning stethoscope. It was a bad concussion, nothing more. If that was so, I asked, then how do we explain the sudden change that came over her when she woke again? The dear woman had no answer. Whatever the explanation, the child appeared to have awakened from her fall with an overlay of images and memory quite apart from anything she had encountered in her first three years as Dorothy Eady.

I recently came across an interesting passage from Omm Sety’s diaries, dated August 20, 1972. She and Sety had been speaking about someone from His Majesty’s past, and Sety mentioned that the person was living again on earth. Omm Sety then asks if the person had been reborn as a baby, and Sety replies,

“I do not think so. People are sent back to earth for two reasons, usually to pay for some sin; more rarely, to fulfill some important work in the world. For the first reason they are usually sent into a body very closely resembling their original one. They enter the new body at the very moment of its death, or at a time when it is deeply unconscious. This is what happened to you, and though you were only a little child, you became different.”

I said, “Some people believe that everyone returns to earth, over and over again, until at last they become perfect and sinless and become part of the being of the Great God.”

He said, “If they believe this, perhaps it happens so for them. But for us, it is not so.”

When Dorothy was four, the family went on an outing to the British Museum. It was going to be a boring place, she thought, because she was expected to be quiet and walk slowly. As they entered the Egyptian Galleries she was suddenly transfixed by all the statues and animal-headed gods. She gazed intently at them, then began to run about and kiss the feet of each one, oblivious to the laughter around her. Her parents were embarrassed to be part of this scene, and it only got worse. When it came time to leave, Dorothy refused, screaming that these were her people and she wanted to stay with them. Prying their hysterical child from the feet of the Egyptian statues, the Eadys hurried her from the museum.

Some time later her father brought home an exploration magazine with a series of Egyptian photographs. One showed the half-buried Sety Temple at Abydos. It was roofless and the courts were full of sand. In front of the building was a sort of lake with two fishermen who held strange-looking nets. Dorothy recognized the temple at once. This was the home of her dreams, except that in her dreams it was always perfect and now it wasn’t. And there was a picture of the well-preserved mummy of Sety I, which she recognized as well. She knew him.

She pestered her parents anew with her fantastic tale, this time saying that the Sety Temple was her home. They were vexed and at a loss, even a bit frightened. They could only hope that she would outgrow whatever the problem was. Her father didn’t judge her too harshly, for reasons of his own. Although he was a fine, established master tailor with a devoted clientele, he had unfulfilled dreams of his own, dreams of a life in show business. Like his daughter, he was restless and unpredictable and given to drama. Reuben Eady had Irish blood in his veins, Omm Sety liked to say, explaining the family eccentricities.

When Dorothy was six or seven there was an incident at school. Her teacher had discovered her unusual talent for art and drawing and had asked her to draw a cat and a fox for display in the classroom. Which she did, except that the perfectly drawn cat’s head had the body of a human female, and the fox had the body of a man – both looking vaguely Egyptian.

“Why would you do such a thing?” the teacher demanded.

“Because they look more beautiful this way,” Dorothy said. The pictures were never displayed.

Dorothy couldn’t help creating incidents. She had a pronounced sense of justice and an affinity for underdogs, which often put her in the way of trouble. On the way home from school one day she saw two men engaged in a street fight – Cockneys, she recalled. One was a big hulk of a man and the other was younger and much smaller, and being beaten to a pulp while a crowd egged them both on. It was unbearable to watch. Counting on her way with words, she convinced a passerby to lend her his hockey stick – just so that she could feel the weight of it, she said sweetly – then she ran into the middle of the melee and struck the big man hard on his back with her weapon. The sight of the small girl and the large stick stopped the bully in his tracks. He shouted obscenities at her as the owner of the hockey stick ran to reclaim it and pull the girl to safety.

This was a child who did not consider the consequences of her actions if she believed she was in the right. It was a trait that was to leave a considerable amount of disturbance in her wake, even up to the last days of her life. But with her engaging smile and explosive laugh she was usually forgiven her well-intentioned excesses.

In her family and among close relatives there were no children her age, and the children she knew from school didn’t understand her at all. She had no use for toys or dolls. She would rather be alone reading books about Egypt. Her other consuming passion was for animals. She would pick up anything that came her way that had no obvious home: frogs, snakes, lizards, wild rabbits. Her harried mother never knew what was about to join the rag-tag menagerie, but the poor child had few friends, she reasoned, so what was the harm in it?

In London, Dorothy’s youngest aunt, only a few years older, was her closest friend and confidant. She had accompanied the family on that outing to the museum and she was fascinated by Dorothy’s strange ideas about things. They delighted in their time together, talking and giggling late into the night when they were supposed to be asleep. From beneath the covers they would chant their rebellious anthem:

Early to rise, early to bed

Makes you healthy, wealthy and dead!

When they talked about what they would do when they were grown, one of them, at least, knew exactly what her plans were, and her final destination – and that one was Dorothy.

I remember asking Omm Sety if she thought that her bizarre childhood behavior had to do with that fall, and she answered with her charming sense of humor, “Well, it is quite possible that my chute down the staircase could have knocked some screws loose in my head.”

Whatever it was, her father’s tolerance had finally been worn away. His only hope was that a proper and sober schooling would fill her mind with more normal ideas. He enrolled her in a good school and hoped for the best, but Reuben Eady was no match for his daughter’s stubborn determination. Every chance she got she would sneak out of school, a truant, and go to the British Museum.

the famous Dr. Budge

By the age of ten she had become something of a fixture in the Egyptian Galleries, and Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, the renowned Egyptologist and director of the collection, had noticed her. He wondered what on earth the child could be doing, staring at the hieroglyphic inscriptions with such intensity.

One day he asked her why she wasn’t in school. She replied that she was not particularly interested in what she was taught there. “And what is it you wish to learn?”

She answered with a single, emphatic word: “Hieroglyphs!” And so it was that Dorothy Eady became the youngest and most unusual student of the great Dr. Budge. He immediately recognized her talent for copying the complex hieroglyphic figures and gave her some chapters of The Book of the Dead to copy and translate, rewarding her with bars of chocolate for work done properly. He was at a loss to explain such early aptitude and passion for an extremely difficult subject. And why would a girl from a good Christian family care to learn about a pagan religion that had been dead for 2000 years? As far as his new student was concerned, Dr. Budge knew everything she felt urgent to know about: the language, the gods and goddesses, especially Isis and Osiris – in whom she now fervently believed – and the magic. Dr. Budge was the keeper of mysterious and powerful secrets.

Omm Sety would recall Dr. Budge with great warmth. “He was my first and most earnest tutor. He adopted the ancient religion and deftly used Egyptian magic for benevolent ends. In fact, he wrote books on both subjects. He once said to me, ‘My child, Egypt taught us everything. I follow all the Egyptian teachings, and when you go there one day I am sure you will do the same.’”

She once asked him to teach her about magic and he asked her why. “Well,” she said, “I have an uncle who says awful things to me about Egypt and I want to get rid of him.”

He drew back in pretend horror. “Oh, no, no, no – you’re not the one to learn magic!” But magic – heka – was something that continued to fascinate her.

That same year, 1914, the Great War broke out. For two more years Dorothy continued her studies with her doting mentor at the museum, immersing herself in a wondrous world that was far more vivid to her than this one. But in 1916 when the air raids began over London, many families sent their children away to safer havens for the duration of the war. The Eadys made arrangements to send their daughter to the countryside, to her grandmother’s farm in Sussex, where she had spent many summer holidays among the horses, cows and chickens.

Near the day of departure, just as the government was preparing to shut down the museum as a precaution, Dorothy paid a call on her tutor to bid him farewell. Budge was touched. He apologized for not having a bar of chocolate to offer her. “Will you study your hieroglyphs when you are with your granny?”

“Every day,” she replied.

“What makes you so keen to continue, my child?”

“Because I used to know, and now I must remember it all again.”

The old man regarded her silently. He was probably the first person besides her skeptical parents to become aware of her peculiar relationship with the far past. A diminutive man, he got down from his chair and held her affectionately at arm’s length, saying sternly, “Don’t you do anything foolish when you are in Sussex, and I don’t want to hear about any problems you make for your granny. Now run along, child, and God bless you!”

She reluctantly said her goodbye and kissed the old man on both cheeks.

Sussex

From the first day, life in the countryside was uneventful and often tiresome for the city child. There was school with the village children and there were chores, which put her in contact with more animals. And there was the white horse. Whatever its original English name, it now had a new Egyptian name, Mut Hotep, after the favorite horse of Ramesses II.

“It was as if he smelled a friend,” she said of their first meeting. The horse, who had been grazing, saw her and walked towards her until his head touched her arm and stayed there.

Mut Hotep was her ticket to a certain degree of freedom. A few miles from the village was the seaside town of Eastbourne with a well stocked public library. Every week or two she rode the obliging Mut Hotep to the library, where she would borrow all the books on Egyptology she could carry back with her. Fortunately, there were many, written by the prominent Egyptologists of the time – Sir William Flinders Petrie, a prolific scholar who regularly published his great discoveries in the Fayyum, Thebes, Memphis and, most important for Dorothy, Abydos; and Dr. Budge, whose long list of books was an absolute must for beginners and scholars alike. Of course she had already devoured some of Budge’s books.

Still, despite the comfort of her books and the large country house, her loneliness was sometimes acute. She longed to see her young aunt and have more nights of laughter and storytelling. No one here in the country, not even her dear granny, could know the thoughts that occupied her mind. Her affinity for animals would always be a solace to her, even if it was not always wise or prudent. There was one particular instance she recalled from that time:

“One day on the farm,” she said, “a man saw an adder, a very poisonous snake. It was close to the house and he wanted to kill it, so I snatched up the snake and ran off with it. The man pursued me but I could run faster and I got right away. When I was far out of sight of the house I sat down with the snake in my lap and was patting it and petting it when a voice behind me said, ‘What are you doing with that snake, Miss?’ I looked up and there was a Gypsy man. ‘Do leave my snake alone,’ I said.

“ ‘I won’t hurt it,’ he promised. ‘What are you doing with it?’

“I told him that they were trying to kill it and I’d run away with it. ‘But aren’t you afraid of it?’ he said, and I replied, ‘No – not at all.’

“ ‘Don’t you ever want to kill snakes?’ he said. ‘No,’ I said firmly.

“ ‘Well, kiss it on its head and swear that you will never harm any snake, and no snake will ever harm you.’ So I promptly kissed the snake and swore on its head that I would never harm any of its friends and relatives. ‘Now let it go,’ he said. I let the snake go and it went away.

“ ‘But when I grow up,’ I told him, ‘I’m going to live in Egypt, and there are poisonous snakes there, too.’

“ ‘So long as you don’t break the truce they will never harm you.’

“ ‘But how can a snake in England give news to snakes in Egypt?’

“ ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but they can – and you will find it so.’

“And it has been so.”

A band of Gypsies had made their encampment on the outskirts of the village, just a few families living in rather casual tents surrounded by their carts and shabby horses. Dorothy decided one morning to visit them, but knew enough not to tell her grandmother. Gypsies were not welcome company anywhere. People in the English countryside kept their distance from them and were suspicious of their strange ways and reputed lack of cleanliness. The Gypsy camp did have a very peculiar smell about it, she recalled, but not nearly as awful as she had been told.

Dorothy approached the camp with some caution; Gypsies were known to resent intrusions on their privacy. The first thing that drew her attention was a handsome, dark-haired young man who was bent over, holding the right front hoof of his horse as if something were wrong. Dorothy watched from a safe distance as the man pulled something from the hoof, a nail or sharp piece of splintered wood.

“Is the horse badly hurt?” she called out and went closer. Drops of blood were trickling from the ailing hoof.

The man looked up at her. “It needs treatment. Can you keep him steady for me?”

While the man went to his tent to get something Dorothy held the horse with great concentration. The man returned with a thick ointment and a piece of clean linen to bind the foot.

“Can I come again tomorrow and see how he is doing?”

The man nodded and turned away, saying under his breath, “Thank you, Miss.”

That was the first of many visits to the Gypsy camp. Now another horse had become a good friend, always offering his head for a kiss. He was a beautiful beast, deep bronze with a white triangle on his face. She discovered that its owner was also a skillful juggler and Dorothy watched, captivated, as he performed his tricks for her. He tried to teach her some of them but she could never do them well.

She envied this clan of outsiders for the freedom they enjoyed and for the warmth of their feeling towards each other – which gradually came to include the lonely girl with the bright gold hair. She loved them, every one of them, even though she could never pronounce any of their names. She didn’t really know why she loved them. It certainly wasn’t for the juggling tricks – she had given up hope of learning them anyway. But she had heard the stories that they had come from Egypt long ago.

Her granny, a reasonably observant woman, was beginning to wonder where the child was disappearing to on horseback for hours on end. When she learned about the visitations to the Gypsy camp she was horrified and told her never to go there again. Dorothy simply ignored the order. Early the next morning she set out from her house to pay a visit to the camp. Nearly there, she stopped short, her heart beating wildly. Her eyes strained to make out familiar forms in the mist, but there were none to be seen. The entire camp had just vanished. She ran around the site, frantically looking for any trace of her friends, and then she collapsed onto the wet ground, sobbing.

Not long after, news ran through the Sussex village that an unexploded German bomb had fallen close to the main road outside of town and was lying half-buried in the ground. German planes rarely ventured that far from their London raids, but somehow a bomb had landed here with its head three feet into the earth at a sharp angle.

Learning about it from one of the workers on the farm, Dorothy went straightaway to find a friend, an older boy of 17. Together they rode their horses to have a look at the bomb. On their way they met a man on horseback who was galloping furiously in the opposite direction. “There’s a big bomb close to this road up ahead!” he yelled as he passed. “It could go off any moment. Turn round and go back!”

The young riders kept on going. When they got to within a hundred yards of the bomb site they spotted it sticking out of the ground, quite visible. Dorothy dismounted, but the boy was not so sure. Her mind was set on one thing: rendering the bomb harmless by doing whatever it was that people did to troublesome bombs. As for the boy, he suddenly became aware of the terrible danger they were in. A lengthy argument ensued before help finally arrived: A truck full of civil defense men and explosives experts pulled up next to them. “What the hell do you think you are doing here?” shouted the officer in charge. “Off with you both!”

Dorothy remounted her horse and followed her companion, already well down the road ahead of her. If she could have found a way to stay and join the fun she would have.

On their way home they passed several carts belonging to Gypsies about to settle in for the night. Dorothy eagerly asked their leader if they had seen her vanished friends, but the answer was no. Gypsies have learned through the centuries never to tell about each other to strangers. They couldn’t have known that they could trust the young girl with their secrets. Even years later she couldn’t explain why the Gypsy clan near her grandmother’s farm should have left such an indelible mark on her life.

Dorothy received an unexpected letter from Dr. Budge. There were only a few lines, the old man asking his student prodigy how she was doing in the village and encouraging her to keep up her studies. It showed a grandfatherly regard for his perplexing and amusing child-scholar. Since the British Museum was closed for the duration of the war and Dr. Budge’s letter had no return address, she knew it was futile to try to escape from the farm and go to London. But it was certainly in her mind to do it if she could have.

During the war, Sussex suffered almost nothing from the incessant air raids over the British Isles. The comparative peace gave Dorothy a unique opportunity to read and to explore the depths of her thoughts and perceptions. It was a time also when she became increasingly aware of her inexplicable power to “see” events taking place hundreds of miles away.

“My real problem,” she said later, “was those horrible dreams in which I could clearly see pictures of what was going on at the Western Front. It was as though some part of me left my body and traveled far away to become a sort of war correspondent. Oh, Lord, how I hated those dreams, because they never failed to come true.”

Twenty young men from the village had been recruited to serve in the army. Dorothy knew many of them from years of summer holidays there with her family. Some of the soldiers she saw in her terrifying dreams were boys she knew from those summers.

Once in a dream she watched a boy named Ralph being blown to pieces in the Somme Valley. He never came back. In her sleep she was helpless as she saw another young man, Robert, lose his left leg. A few weeks later a military ambulance arrived in the village and there was Robert, with one leg, struggling to walk with his crutches.

Another night she woke up screaming, “Leave the ship! Leave the ship!! Where are the lifeboats!” The housekeeper woke to the noise and ran to Dorothy’s room to find the girl crying hysterically. Whether the cause of the nightmare was psychic sight or sheer coincidence, on that same night a British battleship had been sunk by the notorious German ship Graf Spee. There were other dreams, so disturbing that she dreaded going to sleep at night for fear of the awful knowledge that awaited her.

When she described her dreams for me many years later, I believed her. I thought that she was among those few who are destined from childhood to be sensitive, and maybe privileged by a certain gift which we in Egypt call “seeing ahead of one’s time.”

The war dragged on, and then it was over. During the long stay on the farm Dorothy had grown into a healthy, but rather plump young lady. Back home again in London her parents teased her about her size. Her mother thought she could benefit from dancing school, which Dorothy detested. She had quite different plans for herself anyway, plans that had had years to grow and ferment in her mind.

Strongly influenced by her readings in Egyptology and the esoteric and spiritual sciences, she searched out her old teacher at the British Museum. Their first encounter, a year after the end of the war, was an emotional one. She was wildly enthusiastic about resuming her lessons, and Dr. Budge gave her as much time as he could, but he was immersed in studying the results of several reports on field research that had recently come to his desk. The latest excavations in Egypt were providing great entertainment for a war-weary world ready to be dazzled by new discoveries.

Dorothy worked hard to advance her knowledge of hieroglyphs, but at school she was an indifferent student. Her mind was completely focused on Egyptology and the dream of returning to her heart’s home. At 16, having barely finished her secondary schooling, she simply discarded any ambition to go on to university. The one question in her mind was how and when she would get to Egypt. An event two years earlier had only cemented her determination. It was something she could not tell a soul about, because nobody would have believed it.

the visitor

One night she had been roused from sleep, feeling a weight on her chest. She opened her eyes to see the figure of a man, bending over her silently, staring fiercely at her. There was no doubt who it was; she had never forgotten that photo of Sety I’s mummy. This man at her bedside was in mummy wrappings, with only his face and arms free. His face was a dead man’s but his eyes were alive and filled with the most terrible torment. Omm Sety described the visitation to me years later: “You could only say that the eyes had the look of somebody in hell who had suddenly found a way out.”* She wasn’t frightened, she recalled; it was a shock and a joy, all at the same time. When he reached down and tore at her nightdress she cried out, which brought her mother running to her room. The startling visitor was gone, and Dorothy told her mother that it was a nightmare and that she had torn her nightdress herself. But she knew exactly who had done it.

“After that,” she told me, “I was always longing for him to come again. As I got a bit older I used to go to spiritualists, trying to get in touch with him. This went on and on and on, until I must have been 26 or 27 – always searching, always hoping he would come again. People in these spiritualist societies with whom I spoke about it said it’s not a king, it’s an evil spirit, and things like that – but I knew it wasn’t. I was never persuaded that it was an evil spirit, but I did begin to think maybe it was just to be that one occurrence.

“I did know I’d always been attracted to Sety, and I’d always been attracted to this place, to Abydos, since I was a very, very small child, before I even knew who built it. I mean, I was drawn to this temple. And that’s why, when men came to ask to marry me and asked my father, I would never accept. I was always looking for this one man. I never fell in love – I thought, oh, they don’t make them like that any more!”

Without a doubt Dorothy loved this man, but why? And why had he come to her that one night and not again? The answers would elude her for a while yet, until after she had left England. For the moment she would have to be content with what was written in her scholarly books, which she scoured for clues among the scattered facts of Sety’s life.

*as quoted in The Search for Omm Sety, by Jonathan Cott