When I took my daughter to the Brooklyn Museum last Sunday and asked her what she wanted to see, she told me right away. “Mummies.”
This both was and was not a surprise. After years of fleeing the room whenever something “scary” is on TV, my daughter—at the age of eleven—has started to take a personal interest in scary things. Her favorite books changed from ‘Henry and Mudge’ to R.L. Stein, and every Wednesday night she now plants herself on the couch next to me with a bowl of popcorn to watch ‘Ghost Hunters.’ At first I was egocentric enough to believe she was humoring me, knowing that her daddy writes “scary stories” and loves “scary movies.” Now I think it’s something more.
We enter the Brooklyn Museum’s Egyptian exhibit—one of the finest in the world—and almost immediately, my daughter begins explaining the exhibits to me. This temple guardian, she says, must be Sumerian because of the way his beard is styled. (In the ancient Middle East, as in modern Middle School, hairstyle is important.)
I see my daughter four days a week. Under these circumstances, being fully present becomes a serious thing. The usual haze of self-absorption I move around in every day becomes the enemy and as we walk through these rooms together studying the ancient statues and carvings, I’m also studying her.
She explains the hieroglyphics to me. This one, the one that looks like a bowl, is the letter C. This one, the one that looks like a hawk, is an A.
I follow my daughter as she hurries from room to room, looking about appreciatively but impatiently. “Daddy, where are the mummies?” she asks. At that moment I remember—the Brooklyn Museum has no mummies. Never has, and I start to explain, reluctant to disappoint her. As I start to speak, she says, “Here they are!” and rushes into a darkened room ahead of us.
The sign above the door says THE MUMMY CHAMBER. How did I miss this? A closer look and I realize it’s a new exhibit, one I’ve never seen before.
The darkness, in contrast to the other brightly lit exhibit rooms, feels deliberate and solemn, a feeling that makes sense. The dead are here.
When we are younger, we are drawn to mummies and their tombs, etc. because they remind us of exotic adventures and old movies, of Boris Karloff or Lon Chaney, Jr. (Imhotep or Kharis—take your pick.) Later, when we are old enough to look at mummies and see what they really are and what they mean, we may have a very different sort of reaction.
The darkness in here feels red, like the inside of an eyelid with a great light burning on the other side. That, I can’t help but feel, is something these ancient Egyptians would have understood.
There are four mummies here. A princess. Two priests. And what the exhibit refers to as “An Anonymous Man.” It’s this “Anonymous Man” whose name, occupation, or place in history we do not know who most of all makes me feel like we’re intruding on something private and sacred.
My daughter is disappointed that the mummies are not unwrapped. She wants to see their faces. In this place and at this moment, that seems not especially horrifying, but like a transgression. The curators seem to have felt this too. The only visible concession to morbid/scientific curiosity—CT-scan images revealing the ghostly outlines of preserved flesh and bone—are, remarkably, as small as playing cards and mounted inconspicuously at knee-level as if the people who put this exhibit together are slightly ashamed by them.
+
No one knows what happens after you die. That’s a statement that people either find comforting or terrifying, depending—as so much else does—on the state of mind with which you receive it.
Some people do claim to know what happens after death, and their answer is nothing. Death, according to them, is extinction, pure and simple, like turning off a light switch. For proof, they point to the cold, hard facts of biology, the cessation of metabolic functions—brainwaves, heartbeat, etc. We are not conscious of anything after death, they say, because our consciousness ceases. And that is precisely where their argument breaks down. Because here is one more cold hard fact; no one knows what consciousness is.
Some people say that just because science can’t provide an explanation for everything, that doesn’t mean you are free to make up whatever fantastic story you wish. Actually, that is exactly what we are all free to do. And the value of the particular story you believe may not depend on whether or not it is true (which you may never know anyway) but whether or not it is useful.
This is not an idea that sits well with the scientifically minded. It is not the job of science, they say, to prove that heaven does not exist. Fair enough. However, unlike heaven, pretty much everyone agrees that consciousness does exist, and to claim without proof that consciousness ceases simply because it appears to cease may not be that different than claiming the sun is extinguished forever when we see it set in the West. Even the ancient Egyptians knew better than that.
+
I follow my daughter through the darkness, looking for more mummies. As we pass from one room into the next, I glance to my left and see a long, brightly lit passageway hidden between the two larger chambers. Against the wall there is a long, glass case containing an ancient scroll, the longest I’ve ever seen. The sign tells me this is The Book of the Dead of the Goldworker of Amun, Sobekmose, and that it contains the spells needed to bring the dead back to life for the journey to the afterlife. I stop to read the translations posted on the wall.
Earlier, my daughter had explained to me that mummies have all of their internal organs removed, except for one—the heart. For the dead to return to life and begin their journey through the afterlife, the first thing that must be revived is the heart. And it’s with the heart that the scroll begins.
SPELL FOR GIVING THE HEART TO THE GOLDWORKER OF AMUN, SOBEKMOSE, JUSTIFIED IN THE NECROPOLIS.
O HEART THAT IS IN THE HOUSE OF HEARTS, O HEART THAT IS IN THE HOUSE OF HEARTS, I HAVE MY HEART AND IT IS PLEASED.
These are the first words I’ve ever read from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Everything else around me seems to fall away, and I stand there reading for a long time.
If you grow up learning about all the worldly things the Egyptians brought with them into the tomb—food, drink, money, books, tools, toys, chariots, even their pets—it’s easy to think of them as suffering from a massive and deluded sense of materialistic entitlement, like rich people who insist on dragging too much luggage on board cruise ships or airlines.
But that’s not the voice I hear speaking in these words in front of me. It’s not the voice of a crass, smug, consumerist mentality toward the afterlife This voice is not boastful—instead, it feels devout, earnest, and most of all, radically and overwhelmingly naked and alone.
BEHOLD ME, I AM COME. I HAVE BROUGHT TRUTH TO YOU. I HAVE REPRESSED WRONGDOING FOR YOU. I HAVE NOT DONE WRONG AGAINST ANYONE. I HAVE NOT IMPOVERISHED MY ASSOCIATES. I HAVE NOT DONE EVIL IN PLACE OF TRUTH. I HAVE NOT KNOWN THAT WHICH SHOULD NOT BE. I HAVE NOT DONE ANYTHING BAD.
I have not done anything bad. How to hear those words? How to even begin to say them?
We all say things we’re not really certain of in order to make them true. I’m trying as hard as I can. I am lucky to be alive. Everything will be alright. I am a good father.
I AM COME BEFORE YOU. NO SIN OF MINE EXISTS. NO DISPLEASURE OF MINE EXISTS. NO EVIL OF MINE EXISTS. NO WITNESSES AGAINST ME EXIST. THERE IS NO ONE AGAINST WHOM I HAVE DONE THINGS. I LIVE ON TRUTH. I SWALLOW DOWN TRUTH.
We say or think these things in order to carve out a space in the darkness around us so we can move and breathe again, a space where we can change. And the harder it is to believe, the bigger and stronger our words need to be.
For a modern society that mostly no longer believes in an afterlife, a whole culture devoting itself to preparing for it may seem like a colossal and tragic waste of time. But looking at the words on these walls, I start to feel that what these people were preparing for was not some mysterious future world but this one.
In Kadampa Buddhism it’s said that we don’t need to be afraid of death—what we should be afraid of is dying with an uncontrolled mind. Because that is something we can do something about.
Remembering this, I look around at the words on this scroll and the hundreds of statues, carvings, and objects around us, and I start to think of them not as a people’s deluded and pathetic attempt to control death, but as an imaginative and heroic effort to control their own minds.
+
When my father was in the hospital dying, the moment my sister and I were both in the room with him, he drew us both to his side—me on his left, my sister on his right—and held on tightly to our hands. The feeling of relief and gratitude that came radiating off of him at that moment was nearly blinding. We were his, and in that moment he had what was his. I wondered if he wanted to take us with him. If I’d known how, I think I would have done it.
You can’t take it with you, they say. But what if you could? What would you take?
First you think, Take only what is most precious. Only what is absolutely necessary. Then you think, How can I leave this behind? Or this? Or this? Until, in the end, you see that what is precious, what is absolutely necessary is everything.
I look over and see my daughter taking pictures of the scroll and of the words on the wall, the same words I’ve been reading for a while now. She’s been reading them too, silently, and now she reads them aloud, her young voice echoing softly in the dark:
O HEART THAT IS IN THE HOUSE OF HEARTS, O HEART THAT IS IN THE HOUSE OF HEARTS, I HAVE MY HEART AND IT IS PLEASED.
We are finished here for today. My daughter and I are both silent as we leave the museum. Walking beside her, I see how tall she’s grown. I’m hoping she’ll let me hold her hand, and on the way down the big marble steps, she does.
Out here the sun feels bright but not too bright—looking up I see that it has already set. There is a hollowed-out space inside my chest, but it does not feel empty. Not entirely.
For all the things I don’t know yet (and they are many), I do know this—we need to wake up. And we need the things around us to wake us up. Whether it’s the bare branches of the tree outside my window against the morning sky, or watching my young daughter’s fingers trace the words on a 3,000 year-old parchment and then slip into my hand—in these things and through these things, I have my heart. I have my heart and it is pleased.
Well, I think you take with you the love you have, even the love you thought you had. Beautiful words about Cailey and, about your father and your sister.
That would be a time to remember, again & again. I had seen the “Ancient Egypt” section of the National Museum, Kolkata, affect a bunch of garrulous rustics so profoundly that they used hushed tones long after leaving that section. Perhaps those thousand-year-old relics of mankind can still weave some mysterious magic, even on our mundane minds.
Wish I could have seen that too, Riju.
In the Brooklyn Museum’s Egyptian exhibit there’s a large, blown-up photograph taken in 1901 of a young, beautiful Egyptian woman in traditional dress standing next to an ancient statue of a giant face; she’s touching it lightly with one hand and gazing intently at it. It’s easy to believe she’s been standing there for hours.
Yes, I have no doubt that these relics (and the words on scrolls) “can still weave some mysterious magic, even on our mundane minds”—just exactly what the source of “magic” is—in the objects and words, in ourselves, or some third option—is fascinating to me.
Thanks again.
Wonderfully written story that I take to be a true account of an afternoon with Cailey that was both sweet and profound. Thanks for taking the time to share this..
Thanks, Bill. Yep, everything here on ‘Poe’s Doorknob’ is non-fiction—which is both easier and harder than fiction, I find.
Glad you liked it.
D
That’s a really lovely & thoughtful post. Obviously I need to look up a copy of the book of the dead, though honestly the thought of living forever is repellant to me, as are certain shades of “useful” fantasies of heaven & hell. I’ve had enough of the carrot & stick approach of the Christian religion to find that kind of fairy-story incredibly cynical, even evil, because it is so often used to manipulate others. But that’s MY junk. Your trip into the realm of the Dead seems to have involved a lot less metaphysical baggage, even if it had more ACTUAL stuff. 😉
Thanks for the kind words about the post, Karen. The translation of The Book of the Dead that’s on the wall at the Brooklyn Museum is not in book form yet (in fact, I believe they’re still translating), but I’m hoping it will be. I found it very powerful and moving (obviously).
Yes, I guess the word “useful” is a bit weighted. Religious belief can be seen as “useful” either for manipulating the masses or for living a fulfilling and compassionate life—it all depends on who’s doing the “using”—or who’s holding the carrot…or the stick.. 😉
Thanks again.
I had to recommend this to a few friends who are very into Egyptian studies. I see one has shown up already. 🙂 Again, thanks for sharing this, good insights & a good read.
You need to visit museums more often! This is wonderful. It took me on a journey, one I was very happy to take. Your words could not be “bigger and stronger”. Well done.
Thank you, dear lady. I’ll have to introduce you to the mummies sometime.
Of everything you’ve written (that I’ve read or heard you read) this is my favorite. Well worth the wait.
Wow, Phyllis, thanks very much. Very glad you liked it. (I guess when one waits over a year to post something new, you really have to come up with the goods…! 🙂
“O you who open up the way, who act as guides to the roads to perfect souls in the House of Osiris,
Open the way for him. May he enter the House of Osiris with boldness, and may he come forth therefrom in peace.
May there be no opposition made to him. May he enter and go forth as he wishes.
May his commands be performed in the House of Osiris, may his words travel with you.”
As a life long (British) amateur Egyptologist I have seen many ‘fright’ mummies in my time. Irt Irw,/i> from the Hanock Museum in Newcastle-upon-Tyne (in Northern England where I grew up) is more than enough of an example.
As a philosophical sort (I loved your thought from the Kadampa Buddhists, it is a good motto, even to live by) I used to go and sit by ‘Irty’ in the old museum before it got modernised. This was once a human being and therefore she demanded respect.
Sounds as if the Brooklyn Museum has got their display just about right.
(Send here by Karen on All Hallows BTW)
Hi, Ruth. Nice to meet you here, and thanks for the kind words about the post.
Thanks also for the really beautiful Osiris spell. It sounds as though you’ve probably spent much more time than I have reading these kind of words. I envy you that experience.
I’m not familiar with the Hanock Museum mummy that you mention, although it sounds very interesting. I grew up in Kentucky where there are a lot of vast caves; in one there was the “mummy” of a prehistoric Native American who was killed by a rock-slide. They kept it in a glass case right inside the cave entrance where all the visitors had to squeeze past it on their way in and out—there was something about that that didn’t feel quite right, either.
Thanks again.
I’m still thinking of the scene you described, David, of your father with you and MaryHall because it has the strength of love. It is different than what I experienced with my mother at the end of her life. Your dad took with him the love he gave to the two of you, and the love you gave him. He felt those feelings and by holding your hands that way, he was the conduit, and now the two of you carry him and that conversation.
Thanks, Amy, for your lovely and sensitive reading of this moment in the piece. The kind of things you are talking about (and that I was trying to write about) can be very subtle and delicate, too easy to misconstrue. When it comes to these things (as with so much else) semantics or language plays a very powerful role. What one person hears when he hears the word “spirit”, for example, can be very different than what another person hears. As a poet and word-lover, I know you understand.
Out on the periphery, you can hear feint traces of new thought pushing against this empirical age. I think we starting to emerge into some crepuscular era that requires a mindfulness that is difficult to maintain but even more difficult to ignore. Thank you for your story. Did you read “The Possibilian” in the New Yorker last year?
Thanks, Nick. Yes, mindfulness is difficult to maintain. (That’s why “effort” is stressed as a virtue in Kadampa Buddhism.) The good news it’s easy to find and easier to recognize when you find it again. Thanks also for recommending ‘The Possibilian’–no, I didn’t see it. Is it non-fiction? I’ll look it up.
Oh, listen, despite having friends and an increasing number of acquaintances who do not believe in God, the soul, spirit, or intuition and its stronger, psychic cousin, I persist in my belief. I have numerous experiences throughout my life that are not coincidence. I know there is room for science and belief in spirit, because each comes to us as a form of knowledge that we gain. It is out there and we are the ones who are connecting or disconnecting the knowledge. We are the ones who are capable of drawing conclusions. I may not have much of a religious perspective, as you do, on God, and I may not have settled on the definition of God, but I let myself personify it. After all, I’m a person. I like the reverence of the mummies and the tombs, and I like that nowadays, our ability to understand and test DNA means we can change our fixed knowledge about what happened in the past. (King Tut was not murdered, for instance.) I should wander over to the Brooklyn Museum to see the show, too, and then into the blossoms of the garden beside it. I’m a little bit pagan, as you know, and I have had experiences with birds. I also love that Cailey knew the direction of the beards on the Syrians. Can she be my guide?
oops, Sumerian, not Syrian. Syria was in the news today.
I think that our definition or sense of horror changes as we get older. Things that may have terrified us before don’t. Other things take their place. I remember something my father said after he recovered from his brain abscess. I told me that he had died before they started the surgery to drain the abscess. He could have gone all the way he said. He wasn’t afraid but he came back to his body and to his life. And the way he said it was so simple.
Sorry, I meant that he told me, not that I told me.
My experience with the mummy room was so very similar to yours I read your account of it half-expecting to find my name signed at the bottom in a twilight zone-y dislocation of reality (and those things never end well).
But I wanted to talk about that papyrus scroll, the scroll of Sobekmose, what amazing poetry it contains. I came online hoping to find the full text but it is nowhere available. Then I thought perhaps someone had been as startled and awed by the text as I was to perhaps photograph the translations — well I nearly found what I was looking for — you came very close! You didn’t photograph the particular part of the translation I was most interested in though… Oh well,at least now I don’t feel crazy for looking. — I’m planning to go back to the exhibit tomorrow and photograph the scroll and what of it they’ve translated. I want the last card of the translation — a sort of incantation with an apocalyptic intensity that reminded me of Yeats’ The Second Coming. (It also reminds me of some of the poems from Ted Hughes’ book, Crow.)
— In the text you photographed Sobekmoses’ prayers concern what he has done or not done — his conduct. The part I’m going back for is the invocation of what he is: I am a hawk, etc. Startling juxtapositions of animals and energies and the one sentence that has stuck in my head verbatim: “I am Lord of Prostration.”
I’ve never had the slightest interest in ancient Egypt before — It always seemed stiff and impenetrable and somehow hollow — a land of puppets with strange puppet customs. Exotic, yet when the novelty wears off, rather boring. But something about that mummy room and that scroll has brought these egyptians back to life (irony noted!) for me. They were people, strange and death obsessed perhaps, but not hollow, not automatons. They were so alive that their great intention was to transcend death and take their passions on into the next world.
Doug, thanks for your thoughtful and excellent message (and please pardon my delay in responding).
Yes, I also wanted to find that translation in some kind of format that I could keep and hold in my hand. I asked the museum staff about it, and they told me (oddly, perhaps) that the translation “isn’t complete” yet (which would mean that the plaques on the wall are not the entire thing), but that they ARE planning on producing a book-version sometime in the future. I’ll try to keep my ear out for that and will certainly post something here and let you know when that happens.
Your Yeats and Hughes parallels are good, I believe. I’ve always loved “primitive poetries” (the title of the Jerome Rothenberg anthology that I recommend very, very highly if you don’t already have it; what I’ve always loved most about them is that those peple didn’t think they were “writing poems”—they were composing spells, incantations, praise-songs, etc. In other words, they believed implicitly in the power of words to DO something, to have an actual, tangible effect on the world (the world both outside and inside us). That’s what I felt in the scroll-chamber at the Brooklyn Museum, and it seems like you felt the same thing.
Thanks again for the kind words about the post.
David