Ancient Evenings

  She came forward. Step by step, She entered the aura of Ra. Now, She whispered into His ear. Her voice quivered through His flesh.

  He tried to stand to His full height, but was bent over in wretchedness.

  “I cannot die,” said Ra. “My Father gave a Secret Name in fire, My Mother annealed It in the waters. They hid My Name when I was born. No word can have power over Me so long as My Name remains unknown.”

  “The poison,” said Isis, “will reach to the last corner of Your flesh. The semen of Set is in that poison and He knows no fear at searching You.”

  “I will reveal My Secret Name to all,” said Ra. A cry came up from the Gods, then a silence. But Isis knew that Ra would lie. In the past, His eyes would always show His earnest heart when He spoke with no truth.

  “My names,” said Ra, His mouth so tight with pain that His jaw could hardly move, “My names are without end. My forms are the form of all things. Every God has His existence in Me.”

  “Do not die, Great Ra,” cried the Gods. But They did not know if They wished for His life or His death. They did not know what They desired—a fearful day for the Gods.

  “My name,” shouted Ra, “is Maker-of-Heaven-and-Earth.

  “I am He-Who-links-the-mountains-together.

  “I am He-Who-caused-the-great-flood.

  “I am He-Who-made-the-joys-of-love.

  “I am He-Who-made-the-horizon.

  “I am the Being-Who-opens-His-eyes-and-light-comes.

  “I am the Being-Who-closes-His-eyes-and-it-is-dark.

  “I am He-Whom-the-Gods-know-not.”

  He stumbled and almost fell. Isis said: “There is no mention of the Secret Name. Soon You will be consumed by the poison. Declare the Name.” As She spoke, the Gods gave a murmur. She was more splendid than Ra. Side By side, They stood together, and She was more splendid.

  “I am He-Who-creates-the-fire-of-life,” said Ra.

  “I am He-Who-is-Khepera-in-the-morning, Ra-at noon, and Temu-in-the-evening.”

  “I am He-Who …” His voice failed. Poison was climbing the cataracts of His blood, and the seas were His mind on fire. The glare of heat was in all of existence. Consumed by heat, He tore off His clothing.

  “Search Me,” Ra cried out.

  In view of the Gods, Isis came forward, took off Her robes and lay upon Him. From within His belly, the phallus of Osiris gave life to the stick of His old loins and He came forth into Isis with the Secret Name (and all of the semen of Set that He had swallowed with the poison, and this act loosed the most terrible lightning ever seen in the skies of Egypt—thus was Set first made lord of lightning and thunder) and so did Ra pass His Secret Name over into the belly of Isis. It entered on a quiet voice that told Her: “Temu is One, the Celestial Waters are Two, and Ra, child of Temu and Nu, is Three. So His Secret Name is Three. Roar, Isis, like a lion that we may hear the sound of ‘r’ in all the tongues. For the roar of the sun is the light of earth. And the heir of Ra shall be as the light of the mind, which is death. Hail, Osiris, Lord of the Land of the Dead. Rise, Isis, who holds the Secret Name of Ra. You are all that is and has been, and all that will be and is.”

  THREE

  Isis rose, and the foam of the old man drained from Her legs. She said, “Spew, poison, spew! Out of Me! Out of Ra! Ra lives, and the poison dies.” Then She put on the great golden robe Ra had left on the floor. The robe was filthy, but sediments and waters washed from it as if by rain, and Isis stood in glory. The Gods applauded. They were terrified. Some remembered old calumnies upon Isis. (Still the prettiest of Them was already trying to capture Her eye.) But a stranger came forward from the back of Their ranks holding a robe to cover Ra. The stranger’s hair was white, yet His face was young and more beautiful than any other. It was the Ka of Osiris.

  He stood beside Isis and held Her hand. At that instant, His body became lost in Hers. His flesh was so transparent that Osiris disappeared into Her. To Ra, She said, in the voice of Osiris, “Old God, when there is need for gentle days, You may bring sugar to the fruit trees, and encouragement to the crops of the fields. But when You enter the Duad by night, You will wear My winding sheet. Now will My son, Horus, be the golden eye of the day, and the silver eye of the moon. In the Duad will I rule over the dead, and through My wife, Isis, will I rule over the crops of the Nile. Go forth, to perform Your duties.” As He separated from Isis, Osiris became visible again. Holding His body but the width of a finger apart from Her body (for whenever They touched, His presence flowed forth into Her again) He ordered the Gods to return to Their places, and dream of no new power. The master of the future was here, and Osiris opened His loincloth to reveal that if His phallus had been devoured by Abtu, and the fish in turn swallowed by Ra, now He, Osiris, had become the devourer of He who devoured Him. In consequence, His phallus had three limbs. One for Ptah, the master builder, stood forth like a post and glowed hot as metal in the forge. Another was massive, motionless, and dark as Seker, knobbed like a root from the depths of the earth. Last, all but transparent, was the phallus of Osiris Himself, and it arched like a rainbow after His wanderings through the air, the surf, and the mist, a luminous phallus for the Lord of the Mind, Osiris, God of the Resurrection.

  At this sight, Ra vomited. Yet nothing came out of His belly. The once indigestible phallus was certainly gone, and He could only slink away.

  When Isis and Osiris were alone, however, Their conversation was less majestic. “It is part,” said Osiris, “of the difficulties of Our position that We cannot even touch each other, or I will disappear again. So We won’t touch. For then We cannot talk, and there is much to tell You. I know more about the Duad than You would care to hear.” He gave a tender smile, and added in His lightest, most agreeable voice, “As a young Prince, I could never listen to any wretch whose tale would bore Me. Now I spend My years taking account of the endless justifications of the dead. Their piety is insatiable. ‘Was it your fault, or the fault of your wife?’ I ask some absolute wretch, and his answer invariably is that ‘It would take the Lord Osiris to know.’ ”

  “Yes, You must be weary,” answered Isis in a small voice. The coolness of His greeting was certainly a distance away from Their last embrace off the coast of Byblos.

  “I can only say,” said Osiris, “that I have had to wander through varieties of existence I would not describe.” He yawned.

  A look of revulsion came over Her face. His breath, while not corrupt, had the smell of the void. She felt Her powers disappearing into this emptiness. Smiling wisely, He drew farther away, and gave a sad smile. “Yes, We must talk,” He said. “Our position is most vulnerable. We must talk quickly. Therefore, I will pass over the abominable pleasures You took with Ra. Even if that cost My life.”

  “I will pass over Your day with Nephthys.”

  Osiris nodded. “It does not matter what We have done. I cannot reign by Your side until You put together what has been laid asunder fourteen times.”

  “The search should not be difficult,” said Isis. “I have more power than ever before.”

  “No,” said Osiris, “there is always one more power to need.” Again, He smiled sadly. “All of Me must be found and properly embalmed in fourteen years.”

  “What if it takes longer?”

  “You will inherit the woes of Set. Choose between lightning and thunder.”

  So Isis went back to the Nile, and Osiris, in full possession of the voids of the dead, ruled in Her place. Heaven was a muted region and entertainments were few. Affairs proceeded beneath a quiet sky. Ra merely nodded His head to old admirers as He took each daily ride, and Isis, on any convocation of the Gods, would sit at a distance from Osiris. Her beauty began to be lost.

  To Find each piece of the body of Osiris proved difficult. In the first year, She found nothing, nor in the second, nor third. In three years, nothing. With Anubis, She hunted through far-off regions, but the dogs She employed were of no use. Having the wisdom of a jackal, Anubis could certainly teach His
hounds to search for the faintest traces of a scent, but there was no odor to the dead man. Even His loincloth offered no more than a hint of the thighs of Isis—sufficient for the dogs to come near to attacking Her.

  So, They found nothing. Perhaps it was in the balance of Maat not to be able to locate more than one piece each year. Since Set had already strewn three in Buto before the gates of Her camp, why assume, asked Isis, that They would come upon the fourth until the fourth year was begun?

  Anubis asked what She had done with the First three pieces, and when She replied that She laid them in a bed of natron, Isis began to brood upon Her own remark. While the eleven unfound pieces could have decomposed long ago, still She must proceed as if they existed. Why not expect, therefore, that each fragment had been wise enough to float toward a marsh where salt would abound? So in each region She could limit Their search to the pools, beds, bends, and swamps of natron.

  Yet even if They looked for damp flats full of embalmer’s salt, the dogs were still without a scent. Anubis mixed herbs that might suggest the presence of Osiris, but they did not guide the dogs. He came at last to propose that the child, Horus, conceived from a dead God, might have something of His Father’s odor, that is to say, His lack of it. “I do not know if hounds can bear such emptiness,” was Isis’ reply. Nonetheless, She took Her skirt and gave it to Horus for play. He chewed on it, rolled His body in the wrappings, and returned a torn garment. Having put it on, Isis then anointed Herself with mandrake, and fortified it with myrrh so that the mandrake would grow aromatic while She slept and travel out to the lost parts of Osiris.

  At dawn, Anubis passed the cloth to the dogs. The hounds went through convulsions which left them so acute in the nose that each year of the remaining years, a part of Osiris’ body was found quickly. But then not all the credit need be given to the dogs. The head of Osiris, the first piece found, still had the thumb of Set in its mouth, and Isis was able to use that thumb to guide Her boat. By the rudder of Set, therefore, or the nose of the dogs, it never took more than a week, and the remainder of the year could be devoted to building a tomb.

  Of course, it was not easy to find priests for such a task. Many were afraid of Set. But when She encountered a promising fellow, Isis would tell him: “We will take this Divine part, and add to it a body of wax. You are the only one to know that here rests only a fourteenth part of Osiris. Yet the part will be as the whole, and you will be the High Priest in this nome of Egypt.” Then She would seal the pact with a kiss. Isis always detested that small embrace. Divinity passed out of Her lips and into the priest’s mouth even as his will was surrendered to Her. Thereafter, he obeyed all instructions. Yet She lamented that the lips of fourteen such men, mortal and monotonous, must She know upon Her mouth before the fourteen tombs could be built. A trace of these priests, born of fourteen more or less ordinary women, would yet add their depredations to Her features. Her only consolation was that each priest had been deceived. For the part of Osiris that She gave them was also made of wax. The pieces of the true body were locked in a chest of natron, and on such a throne She sat while sailing up the Nile, or drifting down.

  On the first day of the fourteenth year, Isis, Anubis, and the hounds found the last soaking stump of Osiris in the steaming salts of Yeb, and the sun went through an eclipse. Isis trembled from a sudden fear of all the worlds to come. The leg stood up in Her grasp as if its will were to walk. Then it fell from Her hand, and in the instant of its fall, She had a vision of wars to ensue between Horus and Set. Horror was still upon Her house. Isis, however, walked through the salts to Her papyrus bark, and laid in the leg with the other pieces. She wrapped the body, and in the evening, called for Her sister Nephthys and Maat and Thoth. Together, with Horus, They slaughtered a bull to mark the end of the curse of Set.

  Now, Horus, Who was fourteen, and heavy in the chest and thin in His legs, opened the eyes and mouth of Osiris, which was the First time the Ceremony of the Opening of the Mouth was ever performed, and Horus said, “Let the Ka of Osiris come forth from the eyes and mouth of His new abode.” And the Ka of Osiris joined Them, and His odor had the fragrance of the finest gardens of Egypt, and They ate well that night. In the morning, They departed toward heaven, for Osiris was full of concern at the storm-wracked sky. There had been lightning and thunder toward dawn. “We were just in time,” He said.

  FOUR

  “If you think,” said Menenhetet One, “to enter mysteries, you have not begun. The story I have offered is no more than a ripple of light on water. While all is true, still there is a secret behind every secret I offered. I, as an example, was one of the fourteen priests Isis kissed. If it was a thousand years ago, still it gave me courage to explore into many matters that are forbidden.”

  We sat there in silence, my mind now shamefully aware of the handicap of my imperfect memory, as if like a cripple with one arm and one leg, I tried to put a saddle on a horse. I could not comprehend his life. Did he lie? Had he ever been a priest kissed by Isis? And was he ever a General who won so many battles that he could live on the gifts given him by the Pharaoh? I seemed to remember that as so. But indeed which Pharaoh could it be? Deep as my anger for Hathfertiti was the desire to see her, if only to ask after these simple matters. Why could I not remember stories about my great-grandfather? Once again I knew a sense of oppression.

  He sat back in his chair and I could notice for the first time—it was in fact the first time my fear of him had diminished sufficiently to look at anything but his eyes—that the legs of his chair were of gold and had been cast as the forelegs and hind legs of a lion. Menenhetet now had the expression of a lion—he was indeed as dignified as an old General who lives in the recollection of old exploits. “Yes,” he said, “a man can feel accomplishment if he begins as the son of a whore, yet so distinguishes himself as to rise to command the Gold Rank of Ra, the Horses of Set, the Hidden of Amon, and the Foundry of Ptah. Those four great divisions were at one time under my command. Yet I began in the ranks. The child of a whore is favored, after all, with knowledge others do not have. His mother being familiar with many embraces, so my sword was always ready for the flash of the other sword. I had a quick eye and I learned to think in ways that others do not. I had been, after all, one of the lovers of my mother”

  “And of my mother.”

  He cackled. He winked. The palm of one hand was now clapped to his brow, and the other grasped himself by the scrotum. Crude was the move and a huge humor to him: “As above, so below,” he choked.

  I found myself as repelled by his sudden shifts as I was confused. In the elegant surface of his manners was a crack through which would ooze from time to time the worst putrescence of an old man’s thoughts.

  “Yes,” he said, “I was the lover of your mother. And your mother was sweeter than my mother.” His merriment washed through my dignity. We laughed together. I was horrified at how little character was possessed by my Ka. I might as well be an uprooted weed blown about by every desert wind.

  “Did you really become one of the fourteen priests of Isis?” I could not help but ask. “Or did you lie to me?”

  “I lied to you. The traveler from distant places is an everlasting liar.” He smiled. “I was not one of the original fourteen priests of Isis any more than my mother was a whore—in truth she was only a peasant. Yet I did not lie to you altogether. The life of the dead is maintained by a careful repetition of their history. So, each year, on the banks of the Duad, Isis passes among us, selects from our ranks fourteen men who used to be priests, and repeats the kiss that founded Her husband’s temples. I am always selected, but that is because She appeared to me in a spell when I was still alive, and embraced me.”

  He gave an elegant, aristocratic and utterly exhausted flutter of his fingers as if the hand that once carried the heaviest sword would not have the vitality now to pick the stem of a flower. “The Gods,” he said wearily, “are capable of anything. They do everything.” And in sudden wrath, he added, “That is
why They have real need of Maat. If not for Maat, there would be no end to the destruction They cause. Nor the wild passions They strew when They turn into animals. The abominable situation is that Their transformations depend on shit, blood-sacrifice, and fucking, and They respect none of it. They do not appreciate how magic is obedient to the deepest principle.”

  When I could only mutter that I did not understand what he said, he looked at me and declared, “In its true exchange, one cannot gain a great deal unless one is willing to dare losing all. That is how the loveliest plunder is found. You do not buy a few words of power, say them over a colored powder, sprinkle it on the sand and ask for the dancing girl to come to your hut tonight. The girl may certainly arrive, and she will dance on your doorstep, but if you have no true power yourself then she will also leave behind an inflammation on the head of your penis, and eggs of vermin in the hairs of your thighs. One has to pay a price for magic. Put the colored powder on the sand, but also take a vow to draw your sword next day at the first insult, and obey that vow whether the dancing girl brings poverty or pleasure. That is the obligation. Look for the risk. We must obey it every time. There is no credit to be drawn from the virtue of one’s past.”

  “Not even once?”

  “Not in magic. In piety, but not in magic. Look to the example of Isis. She was a noble woman by every measure, a loyal wife, a brave soldier, practiced at magic, supreme in Her will. Yet at the end (and it is at the end of each trial of magic that the worst ambush waits) She betrayed Her family.”

  “But She did not.”

  “Let me tell you again. There is the magic we invoke, and the magic that calls upon us. Do you recall that Isis dropped the fourteenth piece of the body of Osiris in the salts of Yeb, and saw battles to come between Horus and Set? That was a warning to find a proper sacrifice or there would be no peace. She heard Her own voice tell Her to slaughter a bull, but as She killed the beast, Her voice also told Her that the sacrifice was not great enough to compensate for the evil powers of Set. She must add the blood of a more painful loss. She must cut off Her own head, and replace it with the bull’s face.” Menenhetet now giggled. When I asked him why he laughed, he remarked, “I am thinking of the fearsome creature who hides in the little feather of Maat. She carries the principle of balance to the point of torture. Naturally, Isis protested. I can promise you that She did not fail to recite the virtues of the fourteen years of Her wanderings. Indeed, She was so eloquent in presenting Her achievements of the past as safeguards for the present that Maat actually reduced Her demand. It would now be sufficient for Isis to lay Her forehead on the hairy ridge between the horns of the bull. In time, over months to come, She would certainly develop horns, and Her features would grow to look like a cow.