Omm Sety's Egypt. Hanny el Zeini
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