The Ghost of Akhenaten

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2

GlastonburySoon after the visit to Mary Brown, Emma set up an appointment with Denise, the dream-interpreter and past-life reader she knew in Glastonbury.

As they sped along the road in his red sports car they hardly spoke a word to each other. They had not met since the visit to Mary, but Emma knew that Jack had been dissatisfied with what she had said. He did not want to find that he was only in touch with a vague ‘sea of events’ preserved in some unspecified way outside time. He, who would never have given mind-space to the possibility of reincarnation before, now wanted it to be true. The dreams were so vivid he had begun to believe they were memories, and wanted more than anything else to have a clear storyline from ancient Egypt with himself as protagonist. He pressed Emma to make the appointment with Denise in spite of his former resistance to the meeting.

Emma glanced at him sideways and a strand of hair blew across her face. He was staring straight ahead, driving too fast. When she looked back at the road she found that they were approaching her favourite stretch of the route.

They were on the crest of a hill and were looking down on a wide vista of what had once been low-lying marshland punctuated by islands. Glastonbury Tor, an extraordinary hill, rose high above the flat farmland, crowned by an abandoned church tower.

Emma could see that Jack was impressed with the distant view of the Tor, but was anxious to keep his appointment, and did not slow down.

‘I don’t wonder there are so many legends about Glastonbury,’ Emma said. ‘From this distance it looks such a magical place — and when it was an island rising above the marshes with the mist swirling among the reeds below it, it would have been easy to imagine it as the gateway to the Otherworld. I can almost see the mighty figure of Gwynn ab Nudd greeting the souls of the Celtic Dead as they are ferried across the waters and through the mist...’

She stopped speaking, dreaming of a later time when Glastonbury was thought to be King Arthur’s Avalon. She imagined Arthur and his knights riding out in search of the Holy Grail, when, according to another legend, the sacred chalice was lying hidden nearby all the time, placed in the well at the foot of the Tor by Joseph of Arimathea after the crucifixion. She dreamed of Merlin weaving his spells and teaching his Druidic wisdom ... of Guinevere meeting her lover... She wondered if the monks had indeed found the grave of Arthur and Guinevere in 1190 as they claimed, re-interring their bodies before the High Altar in the Abbey.

The road dipped and the Tor disappeared. They were coming down the long slope of the hill towards the town of Wells. They passed through a green tunnel where the trees on either side knit their canopies together, to emerge where houses lined the road, and Jack had to slow down for buses and cars. The great Cathedral of Wells rose impressively before them.

‘This must have been how Glastonbury Abbey once looked,’ Emma thought, and decided she preferred the romantic ruin to the busy building with coach loads of tourists crawling all around it like ants. The architecture of Wells Cathedral was certainly grand, but her favourite thing was a tiny panel on one of the walls inside that Mary Brown had once pointed out to her. It was a relief carving of the Ascension of Christ to Heaven — a group of astonished people were gathered on the ground staring upwards to where a pair of feet comically disappeared into a cloud!

She would have liked to show it to Jack, but she was not sure he would be willing to stop. There was something of awkwardness in their friendship. She was, after all, his best friend’s lover, and although Eliot seemed happy enough for her to help him with the mysterious dreams, she did not know how he would react if they seemed to be getting too friendly. Jack himself seemed obsessed with solving the puzzle of his dreams and, although she caught him looking at her occasionally in a way that might have worried Eliot, he glanced away at once when her eyes met his, and kept the conversation strictly to the matter in hand.

Emma always felt she was entering a special realm when she entered Glastonbury. Not only did it resonate with its extraordinary history, but also the contemporary scene itself was like nowhere else she had ever encountered.

Eliot was cynical about Glastonbury. He claimed that it was all sham and fake. He hated the vegetarian cafes, the shops that sold crystals at exorbitant prices just because they were supposed to be impregnated with healing energies. He hated the women who had sub-stituted one gender of an impossible god for another, and the statues of gross fat women purporting to be images of the Earth Goddess. But most of all he hated the ragged unemployed who hung about the streets like hippies left over from the sixties, with matted hair, ear-rings and dogs on leads of frayed string.

Emma saw it as an exciting mix of many different cultures. The farmers used it as a market town. The Christians earnestly paraded through the streets with crosses and candles on certain days of the church calendar. Then there were the New Agers who built invisible temples and walked an invisible maze on the Tor, who had rituals they believed dated back to ancient times. Shops sold Christian icons beside images of pagan gods and goddesses, magnificent reproductions of Medieval and Renaissance archangels beside impossibly fey paintings of tree devas and angels looking like winged Barbie dolls. And on every notice board were advertisements promising alternative and complementary healing.

Emma believed that there were genuine seekers after enlightenment there, and inexplicable miracles of healing. She claimed that for every charlatan overcharging for bogus alternative healing there was one who was truly in touch with the spiritual dimension that brings wholeness to the fractured psyche. She believed that tucked away among the bookshelves in shops and libraries housing so many superficial panaceas for the ills of the world, there were genuine gems of wisdom that could change your life for the better and divert the world from destruction.

* * * *

The trees surrounding the house of Denise, the Psychic, were hung with wind chimes. Jack and Emma approached the front door setting off a discreet and delicate cacophony of fairy sound. Huge white roses brushed against them, and white doves circled above their heads.

Jack took hold of Emma’s elbow.

‘Let’s go,’ he whispered urgently. ‘I don’t want to do this.’

‘We can’t go back now,’ she replied, shaking her arm free of his clutch. ‘She probably knows we’re here.’

‘I don’t care.’

He turned to go, but the door opened and a woman in a flowing robe stood squarely in the doorway.

‘Welcome!’ she cried in a voice that could not be disobeyed.

Like a child caught in a naughty act, he turned and stood before her. He scarcely heard Emma introducing them.

She had pitch-black hair flowing almost to her waist, and a huge Egyptian ankh studded with semi-precious stones rising and falling on her ample bosom.

‘Come!’ she said, and reached out her bejewelled hands to him.

He stepped meekly forward and entered the house.

Surrounded by portraits of her spirit guides — whispy Tibetans, stern ancient Egyptians and one magnificent Amerindian in full feathered head-dress — he was offered herbal tea, and sat, sipping it out of a bone china cup, as Emma and Denise talked.

Emma had promised she would not tell Denise any details about his dreams, but just that he needed a past life reading to see if they had any relevance to his present life. He wanted to see what she could pick up psychically.

He soon felt uneasy under the stare of the disembodied beings she believed communicated with her. Emma and Mary seemed to be unperturbed by the belief that they were surrounded by invisible beings of various species and orders — some the dead who chose to return to try to help the living, others who had never lived on earth yet interacted with it in a dynamic way... Had not Abraham been visited by angels, and Paul heard voices on the road to Damascus? But what if Denise’s voices were mischievous or ignorant? Enlightenment might not come as an automatic result of dying, but have to be won by passing further trials and tests in the Afterlife.

After tea Denise told Emma to stay where she was and took Jack alone into her inner sanctuary, a small room resplendent with crystals. A candle burned inside a giant half geode of amethyst. There was no furniture, only a rich Indian rug on the floor.

She indicated that he should sit, and he sat, cross-legged, in front of her. A narrow arched window was the only daylight source. The sun was shining directly through it, illuminating with unearthly beauty one huge quartz crystal ball on a silver stand close in front her.

He was feeling extremely nervous and not a little resentful. Emma had not prepared him for the weirdness of everything in this house.

‘I don’t want to be here!’ he thought.

He was just about to rise and leave when she started to speak, and the power of her voice gave him pause. Like a wild animal held transfixed by the headlights of a car, he stayed where he was.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said. ‘You are held in the heart of Spirit. No harm will come to you.’

Out of nowhere soft music started to pervade the room.

‘Listen to the music. Relax. Stop fighting.’

He shut his eyes and tried to accept what was happening. Emma had been so sure that Denise would be able to help him.

‘I have come all this way, I might as well give it a try,’ he decided. ‘But as soon as I feel her taking over my mind, I’ll leave!’

She had started intoning strange sounding words, and at first he let the sound wash over him, but then, when the power of her voice became almost unbearable, he opened his eyes, alarmed.

Her appearance seemed to have changed. Her pale blue eyes were dark and unfathomable. There was a kind of beauty about her he had not noticed before. The voice that he heard seemed not to be her own.

‘Oh God!’ he thought. ‘She has gone into trance!’

But he was now too curious to leave.

She claimed to be Isis, the Great Goddess of the Two Lands.

‘Egypt!’ he thought. Had Emma disobeyed him and told her more than he had wanted to tell her?

‘You have come to ask a question. Ask it, my child.’

He hesitated. If she was indeed the Goddess Isis surely she should know without being told what his question was. Those dark eyes certainly seemed to be gazing into his very soul! He must be careful what he said out loud if he wanted to test if she was really who she said she was.

‘I am having strange dreams. I wanted to know the meaning...’

‘Let your mind form images,’ she commanded.

‘Of the dreams?’ he asked.

‘You are resisting — fighting against yourself. You don’t want to know what they are trying to tell you. Stop fighting ... let your mind drift... It will take you where you need to go.’

‘I would rather be guided by you.’

‘If the answer comes from me, you will not believe it. You have to find the answer yourself. Drift ... let images come ... first the water will be muddy from the tap ... then it will run pure...’

It crossed his mind that an ancient Egyptian would not know about taps.

‘I am not in ancient Egypt now,’ she said in answer to his thought.

He sat up straight. He would try to do what she said but the images that floated like smoke through his mind were at first of the landscape he and Emma had just driven through ... then Mary Brown’s room with all the glass gleaming in the sunlight... He even saw an image of his old school playground. But gradually other images came ... ships tossed on a stormy sea ... a Roman villa in a Roman town ... the columns of an Egyptian temple ... the carving of the Egyptian hand in his room in Bath ... the graffiti of the sun with all the rays ending in little hands ... a man and women raising their arms in adoration to it...

She listened impassively as he talked on, warming to his theme, having no idea if he was remembering things or just imagining them...

At last she raised her hand and stopped the flow.

‘You have had many lives,’ she said in that strange voice. ‘But the one you are describing now is the one that troubles you most.’

He was puzzled. It did not seem to him that he was describing a life, but the objects in his room and drifting images they evoked.

‘I sense you are holding back because you are afraid of the truth. The sun’s rays ending in hands is the symbol of Akhenaten, the symbol of his God. The hand you describe is the hand of Akhenaten reaching out to his God. You have something in your possession that proves to you who you are.’

‘But...’ Jack started, and then lapsed into silence.

He felt very strange as though he was standing at the edge of a precipice about to be pushed over.

Was she implying that he had been Akhenaten in a past life?

‘You cannot avoid your destiny,’ she said. ‘The more you try to do so, the more it will pursue you.’

‘What is my destiny? I’m not trying to avoid it. I just don’t know what it is.’

‘You will.’

He began to feel angry. He was to pay a hundred pounds for this ‘reading’ and so far he had done all the work and was nowhere nearer enlightenment.

‘Will you tell me who I am, and why I am having these dreams about Egypt?’ She must have heard the impatience in his voice, but she took no notice.

‘Does the hand on your wall feel like your own hand?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said at once without thinking. ‘No. I don’t know. It is an old fragment of sculpture, of course it can’t be my hand! In the dreams it beckons me as though it belongs to someone else. But sometimes I have felt it is mine...’

She smiled pointedly.

‘Are you implying that I was Akhenaten in a past life?’ he demanded angrily.

If she did not give him a straight answer now he would get up and leave, strange feelings or no strange feelings!

‘Do you think you were Akhenaten?’ She asked.

He had been to a psychiatrist once who had persisted in asking questions and giving him no answers. He was annoyed then, and he was annoyed now. With an exclamation of disgust he rose to his feet and strode out of the room, slamming the door behind him. A hundred tinkling mobiles moved and spun.

Emma looked up, startled, from the book she had been reading.

‘Let’s go!’ he snapped. He put his hand into his wallet and pulled out two fifty-pound notes and flung them on the coffee table. One missed and fluttered to the floor. He did not wait to pick it up but made for the outer door without a backward glance.

Emma looked anxiously back at the door he had just slammed, but hesitated only a moment before she followed him out of the house.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked as he furiously started up the engine.

‘Nothing!’ he snapped. ‘A waste of time. I don’t know why I let you talk me into it!’

Emma gritted her teeth and prayed to her Guardian Angels for protection as they hit the road much too fast.