Dorothy Eady: The Reincarnated Egyptian?

Be it through dumb luck, talent, or cowardice that prevents me from doing anything dangerous, I have managed to live almost 40 years without any major injuries. I’m going to say dumb luck is probably the biggest factor, because I was definitely hit by a Mack truck while walking across the street as a child, but I escaped with nothing but a bruise on my leg and a large feeling of annoyance.

One summer afternoon when I was 2 and a half years old, I climbed up onto the window sill to play with my Matchbox cars. I have no idea why I didn’t find the floor to be a suitable place for this activity, but I was an annoying little kid that liked to climb around. I was also a stupid little kid. The window was open, but to my two year old mind the window screen was just as strong as the glass panes would have been, so I leaned against it.

It turns out the screen was also broken, but I’m sure the result would have been the same either way; the screen popped off and out the window I fell, landing on my head in the garden that lined the back of the house. Which was a rock garden.

Crying, I got myself up, rang the doorbell, and when my brother opened the door for me I went inside and got a glass of milk. My parents were finally made aware of what happened and I was rushed to the hospital, where x-rays showed I had a broken collar bone. That’s the only bone I’ve ever broken, and I’m lucky that I wasn’t injured much more severely. My parents are also lucky that this was the 1980’s and not decades later, otherwise DYS might have showed up to ask exactly why the fuck I was allowed to play on an open window, completely unsupervised.

Fortunately, minor broken bone aside, I walked away from this experience pretty much unscathed. There was no permanent damage, and I immediately returned to being the same stupid kid that liked to climb all over things. Given the traumatic blow to the skull, things could have easily gone much worse. Damage to the brain could have caused me to wake up seeming like a completely different person.

How would my parents have handled it if I woke up not only as a different person, but as a person that had lived over 3000 years? A person that suddenly possessed provably true information that none of the world’s Egyptologists had previously known.

The Reincarnation

No, we’re not starting in the middle of the story, this is actually where the story begins. Dorothy Eady was born into a middle class family in London in 1904. At the age of 3, she fell down the stairs. When the doctor came to examine her, he pronounced her dead.

An hour later he returned with the death certificate, at which point her condition was upgraded to alive. I understand that medical science has come a long way since the early 1900’s, but that doesn’t seem like a mistake anyone should be making. Whether she was actually dead or he was just a terrible doctor isn’t something we can say for sure, but there does not seem to be any dispute that she was declared dead so for the sake of the reincarnation narrative, let’s go with it.

After the accident, Dorothy was a different girl. She began exhibiting strange behaviours and asking to be brought home. She had vivid dreams of her home, but could not yet identify it.

She also started speaking with an unfamiliar, foreign accent. While we now know that this is a medical condition known as “foreign accent syndrome”, it was pretty mysterious at the time. In fact, the accident occurred the same year that French neurologist Pierre Marie was first studying the condition.

It is also extremely rare, with barely 60 reported cases since 1907, so I wouldn’t expect the doctor that can’t tell the difference between a living and deceased child to know of this rare condition. While most cases of foreign accent syndrome were caused by strokes, head trauma is also known to be a cause. Still, to the untrained ear and the unstudied doctor, it truly seemed like she had suddenly taken on an accent, rather than having suffered brain damage.

I know we’re opening with a lot of skepticism and debunking right off the bat, but don’t worry my dear reader, I’m just trying to lure you into a false sense of security so when we get to the truly unexplainable, you’ll never see it coming.

At four years old, Dorothy’s parents took her to The British Museum. That’s a pretty presumptuous name, considering London alone has 170 museums. When they approached the ancient Egyptian exhibit, Dorothy began running around like an obnoxious spaz, kissing the feet of the statues and declaring that these were her people.

When she was seven years old, she found a picture of the Temple of Seti I in Abydos, Egypt, and she ran to tell her parents that she found her home, however she was dismayed that the building was broken and the garden was gone. When she saw a picture of Seti I, she claimed to have known him personally.

Her parents unsurprisingly weren’t thrilled with any of this and discouraged her, but she went to the museum as often as she could to visit the Egyptian exhibit. When she was ten, Egyptologist Wallis Budge of the British Museum agreed to teach her to read hieroglyphs. She picked it up astonishingly quickly, which she attributed to the “fact” that she wasn’t learning a new language, she was simply remembering one that she had forgotten.

Throughout her life, Dorothy was also having vivid and recurring dreams. Her early dreams were of the temple in Abydos, the place she now had identified and called her home. As she entered adolescence, however, her dreams became more…adolescent. When she was 14 she began to dream of, and subsequently relay to others, her relationship with Seti I, which was a bit ribald. She even had visions of Seti’s mummy visiting her at night and tearing away her nightgown.

Again, her parents were not thrilled, and if the “I’m not angry, I’m disappointed” speech wasn’t going to correct her behaviour, maybe our lord and savior Jesus Christ could. Except, not so much. Dorothy was thrown out of Sunday school for comparing Christianity to Egyptian paganism. She was expelled from the school she attended for refusing to sing a hymn that prays for God to “curse the swart Egyptians.”

An angry priest even barred her from attending Catholic mass after she said that the mass reminded her of the old religion of the pharaohs.

So if disapproving parents and Jesus were both unable to cure her of her obsession with Egypt and her past life, what about doctors? Also no. She was committed to several sanitariums, but she had her beliefs, and nothing was going to change them. By age 16 she was again home, and had dropped out of school.

She would spend her time visiting museums and archaeological sites around Britain. The details on how she was able to do this with no money and parents that didn’t care for her obsession are a little unclear, but it seems she was able to tag along with her father while he traveled for work. When her father began operating an early movie theatre in Plymouth, Dorothy became a part-time student at the Plymouth Art School.

Dorothy’s Past Life

It was during this period of her life that Dorothy discovered the details of her previous life in ancient Egypt. Over the course of a year, she was visited by the spirit of the god Hor-Ra, who dictated her life story. By the end, the story was about 70 pages of cursive hieroglyphs long, which is a lot to write by hand, but at least she got to keep her nightgown on this time.

In her past life, Dorothy was a woman named Bentreshyt, which means “harp of joy”. Her father was a soldier and her mother was a vegetable seller. When she was only 3 years old her mother died, and her father, unable to afford a child, abandoned her at the temple of Kom el-Sultan near Abydos. There, Bentreshyt was raised to be a priestess.

When she was 12 years old, she was given the option to either go out into the world or take a vow of celibacy and become a priestess of Isis. Having been abandoned at the temple as a child, she lacked any practical alternatives so she stayed to become a priestess.

At age 14, the young Seti came to visit the temple. While he was there, he was taken by her beauty and spoke to her. One thing led to another, and then Bentreshyt was pregnant. Considering how short every synopsis of her past life is, I’m guessing most of the 70 pages were describing, in great detail, exactly how that happened.

After all, while allegedly dictated by a god, this was still being written by a teenager. Once rumours of Bentreshyt’s pregnancy got out, that was the end for her. The penalty for breaking the vows of celibacy was death, so to spare Seti the embarrassment of a public trial, she took her own life.

If you happened to pick up on the fact that her abandonment at age 3 corresponds with the age of her near death experience, and that her romantic liaisons with Seti at 14 correspond with when she started having her sex dreams, I assure you it is entirely coincidental.

Moving to Egypt

When Dorothy was 27, she began writing articles and drawing cartoons for an Egyptian public relations magazine in London. It was there that she met an Egyptian student named Emam Abdel Meguid. They continued correspondence after he returned to Egypt, and later that year he asked her to marry him. Definitely out of love and having nothing to do with a free shot at Egyptian citizenship, she moved to Cairo in 1931 to be with Emam.

She was still 27 at this point, so this was certainly a whirlwind romance. The two had a son together who she named Sety. I don’t know about you, but if my wife tried to name our child after her former lover, I would veto that shit so fast. It is from her son’s name that she received the nickname Omm Sety, literally “mother of Sety”, by which she is best known.

Egypt essentially has two social classes. One is made up of the wealthy elite and the Western-educated upper middle class, and the other group is all the peasants, troglodytes, and chuds. It would turn out that the upper middle class had no time for any of that spiritual or metaphysical bullshit, and Omm Sety’s descriptions of out of body experiences and being visited by apparitions were a major source of tension with the well off family she had married into.

Only two years into the marriage, Emam took a teaching job in Iraq, leaving behind his wife and child. Two years later, she went to live in Nazlat al-Samman near the Giza pyramids, and it was here that her life’s work would begin.

The Life and Work of Omm Sety

Admittedly, I’ve been a bit flippant with regards to Omm Sety throughout this article thus far. What can I say, I’m kind of a dick. But as you’re about to learn, she was a scholar of unparalleled ability. Whether or not it was truly the result of knowledge from a previous life, the extent of her contributions cannot be understated.

After her move, Omm Sety met Egyptian archaeologist Selim Hassan. He hired her as his secretary and draftswoman, making her the first female employee at the Department of Antiquities. In addition to correcting Hassan’s English and writing English language articles for others, Omm Sety also wrote numerous articles and books in her own name.

Despite no formal education in Egyptology or archaeology, in fact despite barely any education at all, she proved to be an extremely valuable resource to the department. She met and befriended many Egyptologists who taught her to be an archaeologist in exchange for her expertise in drawing and hieroglyphs.

Outside of work, Omm Sety seemed like a bit of an oddball. Locals feared her and the rituals she would perform, as she was known to lay offerings before the Sphinx and spend nights alone in the Giza pyramids. For all their gossip, however, they also admired her and her fearlessness in being so open about her beliefs.

While she had her own belief in the gods of ancient Egypt, she remained sensitive to others, fasting during Ramadan and celebrating Christmas with the Christians. Likely a large part of this is the parallels she drew between the religion of ancient Egypt and other religions, the belief that got her thrown out of Sunday school.

Omm Sety had made such a large contribution to Hassan’s work that after his death, she was offered a job to work alongside Ahmed Fakhry during his excavations at Dashur. Naturally, she jumped at the opportunity. When the project was terminated in 1956, he offered her a choice: she could take a cushy, high paid job at the Cairo Records Office, or she could work in Abydos as a draftswoman for chump change. She chose the latter.

Her beloved Seti would have wanted it that way, and he told her that if she remained chaste now it could undo Bentreshyt’s 3000 year old sin. If she hadn’t upset the Catholics so much, she could’ve just said 10 Hail Mary’s and been done with it.

Abydos was a special place to her, because it was where she believed she had lived and served in the Temple of Seti. She continued her work drafting, translating, and writing. In 1964 when she turned 60, she was faced with the gruesome fate of mandatory retirement from the Department of Antiquities. They advised her to return to Cairo and seek part-time work.

She made it one whole day in Cairo before saying “fuck this” and going back to Abydos. The Department of Antiquities decided to make an exception and let her continue working for another five years. Yes, Omm Sety was so good at what she did that a government bureaucracy made an exception to their rules just for her. When she finally retired five years later, she worked as a part-time consultant for, you guessed it, the Department of Antiquities.

Death and Burial

In 1972, at the age of 68, Omm Sety suffered a mild heart attack. Afterwards, she decided to sell her house and move into a one room shack made out of reeds. At this point, Ahmed Solimen, the son of the former keeper of the Temple of Seti, built a mudbrick house next to his family home so Omm Sety could live there as part of his family. The night she moved in, she claimed that Seti came to carry out a ritual to consecrate the new home.

If that’s the same slang we have in America, it sounds like she was up to her teenage hijinks again.

She claimed that during this visit, Seti told her of the one and only time she met the God Set, for whom he was named. He described Set as being a spirit of all that was cruel and evil. He allegedly continued to make visits during the following weeks, and told Omm Sety that a Cretan once told him the islands of the Aegean were the tops of mountains that had sunk into the Mediterranean. This was his opinion on the location of Atlantis.

Much like she was only able to delay her retirement for five years, after her heart attack Omm Sety was only able to delay death for five years. She knew the locals were still fearful of her and would never allow her to be buried in a Christian or Muslim cemetery. To prepare, she started building a tomb for herself in the garden behind her house, an underground burial chamber to be sealed with a stone slab. Unsurprisingly, health officials weren’t having any of it, and demanded she get a proper burial.

When she passed away at age 77, a local Coptic cemetery finally agreed to bury her, but they would only do it in an unwanted plot in the desert, and she would not be allowed a gravestone. All she got was a pile of rocks as a marker.

Omm Sety’s Impossible Knowledge

In 1952, Omm Sety took her first trip to the Temple of Seti I. At this point she had been living in Egypt for 15 years and working with Egyptologists for over a decade, so her claims of reincarnation would have been well known. When she arrived at the temple, she said she felt as if she walked into a place she had lived before. While she was there, the chief inspector of the Department of Antiquities decided to test her claim.

He had her stand in complete darkness and locate certain scenes on a mural inside on the temple wall. To his astonishment, Omm Sety was able to successfully identify where everything was, despite the murals having never been published and few people having ever seen them.

She also physically pointed out where the missing garden she had identified decades prior would have been, basically telling them “dig here”. They dug, and sure enough they found ancient tree stumps and other signs of the garden she had told them had been there. There was also an undiscovered, hidden tunnel on the north end of the temple that she was able to lead them to.

In the early 1970’s, shortly before her heart attack, she disclosed that she knew the location of Nefertiti’s tomb, though she didn’t want to say where it was because Seti had told her “we don’t know anything more of this family to be known.” She finally revealed that Nefertiti’s tomb was in the Valley of the Kings, near Tutankhamen’s tomb. If this was just a guess, it would have been a seemingly odd one as the prevailing opinion was that there were no more undiscovered tombs in the Valley of the Kings.

In 1976, two anomalies were found during a sonar scan near Tutankhamen’s tomb. In 2000, a radar scan produced evidence that these were two empty chambers, but work was halted due to an investigation into the theft of antiquities. In 2006, one of the chambers was accidentally breached, and it was found to contain mummification supplies used for a royal burial, that burial most likely being in the other chamber discovered by radar.

Given Omm Sety’s track record, I’d wager that undisturbed tomb is going to contain Nefertiti.

While recent theory contends that Nefertiti is not buried there, it is a matter of debate. From what I’ve read, it sounds like Egyptologist and former Antiquities Minister Zahi Hawass, who is now in charge of the search, has decided to dismiss this notion outright because he wants his own theory to be right instead. If they found two sealed chambers and accidentally breached one of them already, why don’t they just give the other one a little peek before dismissing it.

After Omm Sety’s death, when a Japanese team showed up with sophisticated sensing equipment, one English Egyptologist was noted to say “If Omm Sety were still here, I’d take her word for where things can be found, any day, over the most-state-of-the-art equipment out there.” The statement was met with much agreement.

Inconsistencies

While researching this story I spoke to my personal friend and professional Egyptologist Sonja. While she no doubt has respect for the work that Omm Sety did, she pointed out that there are a lot of inconsistent elements in the story of her past life.

To start, while there was a temple to Osiris at Kom el-Sultan, it was an early Dynastic site and then expanded in the Middle Kingdom. There is no evidence that it was still in use during Seti I’s reign.

Also, there’s no real evidence of the concept of a “consecrated virgin” as Omm Sety claimed to have been. In fact, ancient Egyptians didn’t really have a concept of virginity. Sex served three main purposes: to create children, a fun pastime, and sometimes as a religious or ritual act during certain festivals. Sex was something that people, including young people, enjoyed.

And with no concept of virginity to protect, premarital sex was nothing taboo. Not only was the role of priestess not mutually exclusive with having sex, but with the nuclear family being considered the highest good in ancient Egypt, most priestesses were married with children.

Her claims of what Seti told her late in her life are also highly anachronistic. At the time of Seti, the god Set would not yet have been considered evil. He was both feared and revered, and though he was seen as chaos, he was a necessary chaos. This is something that a king, particularly a king named after Set, would have clearly known, so it would make little sense to describe him as the “spirit of all things evil and cruel”.

The whole Atlantis thing is also a bit out of left field, as the earliest sources we have that cite Atlantis come from Plato, who lived over 900 years after Seti’s reign. That’s also ignoring the fact that Atlantis was likely an allegory made up by Plato and never a real place.

A lot of her inconsistencies seem to come from taking a Christianity-centric view of ancient Egyptian religion. Despite her beliefs, she still had a Catholic upbringing (until being kicked out), and this would colour her views on things, such as the sanctity of virginity.

Wrap Up

So was Dorothy Eady/Omm Sety the reincarnation of a 3000 year old priestess? There’s probably a more realistic answer to her amazing accomplishments.

Consider the diving rod, a forked stick that can be used to find water in dry areas. There’s no such thing as a magic stick that can find water, and no diviner would ever be successful under laboratory conditions. But the world does not exist in lab conditions, and skilled diviners are genuinely successful, even in locations when our best technology says there’s no water to be found.

These diviners are normally natives of the area, and have been doing it their whole lives. From extensive experience, they are noticing things like small changes in elevation, or the way a particular branch on a tree grows, or who knows what else. Our brains are designed to recognize patterns, and diviners can recognize patterns that they don’t realize they’re seeing and the rest of us don’t know exist.

They can believe it’s a magic stick that leads them to water, but the magic was inside them all along.

Omm Sety was no different. She immersed herself as completely as possible in the study of ancient Egypt from the time she was a toddler. Yes, she genuinely believed she was a reincarnated priestess, but she was still a scholar, not a crackpot.

She learned to read hieroglyphs at an extremely young age, and she studied extensively. She researched, drafted, wrote scholarly works, and dedicated her entire being to learning about ancient Egypt. Just like with the diviner, the magic was inside of her.

While I doubt it was the result of a past life, I also don’t think it matters. Her contributions were numerous, her knowledge unrivaled. I have to agree with the earlier anecdote: I would trust Omm Sety pointing and telling me “dig here” over the most sophisticated sensing technology in the world.

And given everything else she successfully found, I guess we know where to start looking for Atlantis.

Bonus Fact

Egyptian mythology was a constantly changing thing. When you have to keep people entertained for a few thousand years, naturally the writers are going to tweak the characters now and then to keep things interesting. Set wasn’t considered to be full on evil by the time of Seti I’s reign, but exactly how evil was he? How about cartoon supervillain levels of evil.

Osiris and his wife and also sister Isis were reigning on Earth and trying to bring civilization and prosperity to the people. Osiris’s brother, Set, got a little miffed, however. You see, his wife and also sister Nephtys conceived a child named Anubis, but the father wasn’t Set, it was Osiris. If this isn’t weird enough yet, Set and Osiris are also brothers. Set needed to get revenge, and there was only one way to do it: a fancy dinner party.

It’s customary at any dinner party to bring something for the host, so Set brought with him a giant, beautiful coffin. He said he would give it to whomever fit inside it. This must have been a normal thing that happened, because guests had no issue with taking turns seeing how the coffin fit them. When Osiris laid down inside the coffin that was specifically built for him, Set and his conspirators slammed the lid, nailed it shut, and sank it to the bottom of the Nile.

Isis was able to eventually retrieve her husband/brother and return him to life, because these are gods and goddesses, so Set tore Osiris into 14 pieces and scattered them across Egypt. And this is one of the least insane Egyptian myths I’ve read.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Dorothy Eady?

Dorothy Eady was a woman born into a middle-class family in London in 1904. She claimed to have memories of a past life as an ancient Egyptian priestess named Bentreshyt.

What happened to Dorothy Eady when she was three years old?

At the age of three, Dorothy Eady fell down the stairs and was declared dead by a doctor. An hour later, she was found to be alive.

How did Dorothy Eady’s interest in ancient Egypt begin?

After her near-death experience, Dorothy began exhibiting strange behaviors and speaking with a foreign accent. At the age of four, she visited the British Museum and claimed that the ancient Egyptian exhibit was her home.

What was Dorothy Eady’s relationship with the Egyptian exhibit at the British Museum?

Dorothy Eady would run around the exhibit, kiss the feet of the statues, and declare that these were her people. She also identified the Temple of Seti I in Abydos as her home.

How did Dorothy Eady learn to read hieroglyphs?

At the age of ten, Egyptologist Wallis Budge of the British Museum agreed to teach Dorothy Eady to read hieroglyphs. She picked it up astonishingly quickly, attributing her ability to remembering a language she had forgotten.

What was Dorothy Eady’s life like after moving to Egypt?

Dorothy Eady moved to Cairo in 1931 to marry an Egyptian student named Emam Abdel Meguid. She later worked as a secretary and draftswoman for Egyptian archaeologist Selim Hassan, contributing significantly to the field of Egyptology.

What were some of Dorothy Eady’s notable achievements in Egyptology?

Dorothy Eady, known as Omm Sety, was able to locate hidden scenes on temple walls in complete darkness, identify the location of an ancient garden, and lead archaeologists to a hidden tunnel. She also claimed to know the location of Nefertiti’s tomb.

What was the reaction of the local community to Dorothy Eady’s beliefs and practices?

Locals feared Dorothy Eady’s rituals but also admired her fearlessness. She performed rituals at the Sphinx and spent nights alone in the Giza pyramids, which was seen as both strange and courageous.

What inconsistencies were noted in Dorothy Eady’s claims about her past life?

Egyptologist Sonja pointed out inconsistencies such as the lack of evidence for a temple at Kom el-Sultan during Seti I’s reign, the absence of a concept of virginity in ancient Egypt, and anachronistic descriptions of the god Set.

How did Dorothy Eady’s knowledge and contributions to Egyptology compare to modern technology?

An English Egyptologist noted that he would trust Omm Sety’s word for locating archaeological finds over the most state-of-the-art equipment, highlighting her unparalleled knowledge and contributions to the field.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Dorothy Eady: The Reincarnated Egyptian?
• Hero image source by thegetty / openverse, cc0.