పునర్జన్మలు ఉన్నాయని నిరూపించింది
Channel: అహం బ్రహ్మాస్మి
Date: 2022-10-22

The Baffling Tale of Dorothy Eady
History
The British woman who claimed to have lived in ancient Egypt
Photograph of Dorothy Eady as a young woman
Here’s a historical head scratcher for you. It’s the tale of Dorothy Eady, a 20th-century Egyptologist of some renown. All her life, she claimed to be the reincarnation of a priestess in the cult of Isis — and seemed to have intimate knowledge to back it up. She even knew details that had never been published.

The Childhood Accident that Started It All
Born in London in 1904 to Irish parents, Eady’s remarkable story began at age three. That was when she fell headlong down a flight of stairs in her home and was knocked unconscious. Accounts disagree on what actually happened next. Some say she was pronounced dead before suddenly reviving. Others claim she merely suffered a rare brain injury of some sort, such as foreign accent syndrome.

Whatever the case, the spill forever altered her. For one thing, her speech patterns had noticeably changed. For another, she kept asking her parents to take her home. When they asked where ‘home’ was, the girl couldn’t say. Her mother and father were understandably baffled.

Sometime within the first year of her accident, Dorothy’s parents brought her to an Egyptian exhibit at the British Museum. It is at this point her story truly gets weird. Wandering among the artifacts, it is said she suddenly pointed to a photo and cried, “there is my home!” The image was the temple of Seti I, who was the father of Ramses the Great. The child insisted fervently that she had once lived in that very building, but then noticed that something was missing: “Where are the trees? Where are the gardens?”

The exterior of the temple of Seti I in Abdyos, Egypt
The story goes that Dorothy joyously ran about the Egyptian rooms in the museum, kissing the feet of statues and saying she was now “amongst her people.” Her parents understandably discouraged this talk. But as she grew older, the girl took to visiting the exhibits as often as she could. At some point, she caught the attention of the prominent Egyptologist E.A. Wallace Budge, who encouraged her to learn hieroglyphics.

Her teenage years were troubled, though. One Sunday school teacher, for instance, asked that her parents keep her at home because of her tendency to compare Christianity with Egyptian paganism. The girls school she attended expelled her after she stubbornly refused to sing a hymn that exhorts God to “curse the swart Egyptians.” It is even said she hurled the hymnal at her teacher before storming out of class.

She even had to drop Catholic mass, which by all accounts she thoroughly enjoyed. Her comment that it reminded her of the “old religion” of the pharaohs brought an angry priest to her house. He told her she was no longer welcome in his congregation.

A Troubled Teenager
Her obsession with ancient Egypt only deepened as she matured. At 14, she began to describe her sexual relationship with Seti I. Claiming to have been his lover in her previous life, she even described visions of nighttime visitations in which his mummy came to her bedside and tore away her nightdress. Yet rather than being terrified by these nocturnal hallucinations, the girl was deeply obsessed with them.

At their wits end, Dorothy’s parents committed her to one sanatorium after another. Nothing worked. She simply refused to let go of her beliefs. At sixteen, she finally dropped out of school for good.

But her education was hardly at an end. She now took up part-time studies at an art school in Plymouth, where her father was operating an early movie theater. It was here that she had the opportunity to play Isis on the stage, a role for which she felt a keen affinity.

A clay sculpture of Isis holds one hand on her head in the ancient Egyptian pose of mourning
During this period, Dorothy worked out the details of her previous life. She told her parents that nighttime apparitions of the god Hor-Ra dictated it to her over a year-long series of visitations.

Claiming to be the reincarnation of a girl named Bentreshyt, Dorothy described being abandoned at age three and being raised thereafter in the temple of Seti I at Abydos — the very building she had pointed out as a four-year-old. She recounted meeting the pharaoh in the temple gardens while serving as a priestess of Isis. For a priestess of Isis to lose her virginity, though, was a capital offense. After becoming pregnant with Seti’s child, Bentreysh was ordered to stand trial. Instead, she chose to die by her own hand.