28 July, 2006 | Filed under “The Archives”
Do you really want to know? Oh, bother …
The expression is enough to raise a few eyebrows. Isis? Egyptian goddess? A site on Egyptian mythology? Noooooo. It was a phrase which stuck, nothing more. A phrase for which I could find no use. Until I decided on it as the name for my web site. Very appropriate for me, misplaced and alien to others. But, hey – no big deal. It is all one a hundred years hence. In the flow of things it is not important. Have fun while it lasts. Or are we perhaps given a second chance? Or a third? To put the record straight?
I have enjoyed two great novels set in the time of the pharaohs’ Egypt; Norman Mailer’s “Ancient Evenings” (1983), and “Sinuhe, Egyptiläinen” (“Sinuhe, the Egyptian”) by Finnish writer Mika Waltari (1948). What imagination! Read them, then read them again!
Isis you may get. Fertility. Wife. Mother. But Ka? Read Mailer. He gives you all the gory details:
“Three of my seven lights had certainly departed. The Name, the Power, and the Angel, and they would never die. But what of the other souls and lights, my Ba, my Ka, and my Khaibit? They were not nearly so immortal. Indeed they might never survive the perils of the land of the Dead, and so could come to know a second death … the Ba … could be seen as the mistress of your heart and might or might not decide to speak to you, just as the heart cannot always forgive. The Ba could have flown away already – some hearts are treacherous, some can endure no suffering. … how long I must wait before seeing my Double … the Ka was not supposed to appear before the seventh day of embalming were done … I was obliged to remember the sixth of the seven lights and shadows. It was the Khaibit. The Khaibit was my Shadow, imperfect as the treacheries of my memory – such was my Khaibit – my memory … the seventh … was Sekhu, the one poor spirit who would reside in my wrapped body after all the others were gone …”