Oh, men. MEN. I took a trip with Coach Ryan this past week; he seemed intent on going somewhere where he could walk barefoot without having to worry about stepping on anything, so we ended up in Egypt. And hot DAMN, did I ever find a strange one this past week. I’m feeling inspired to see if we can figure out the science behind this to bring back Vince Lombardi to help out my Seahawks…

THE CASE OF DOROTHY EADY

Location: England/Egypt

Date: 1904-1981

The Story: Dorothy Eady was born in London to Irish parents in 1904, and appeared to be a normal child until she had a terrible fall down a flight of stairs at age three, and was pronounced dead at the scene. Miraculously, she somehow survived the ordeal, surprising her parents and the doctors, but her parents noticed a marked change in her behaviour after the incident – besides showing off a case of foreign accent syndrome, she also displayed a very odd affinity towards the world around her; she was restless and withdrawn, and despite her living in England her whole life, constantly asked her parents to “take her home”. Upon a visit to the British Museum in 1908, where she saw artefacts from ancient Egypt for the first time, she was absolutely thrilled, and believed that she had found her people and her place. Her story is one of the most convincing cases of reincarnation that the modern world has ever seen, and all of the bizarre things that happened in her life were not able to disprove her belief that she was once a murdered lover of the Pharaoh Seti I.

What’s Weird: After her accident, Eady began to have reoccurring, vivid dreams of buildings with gigantic columns surrounded by rich plant life; her visions of her past life became an extremely important part of her life. While not a particularly gifted or dedicated students as a young girl, she was obsessively interested with the study of Egyptology, and undertook to learn as much as she could about the subject in her late teens and twenties. In 1933, Eady married an Egyptian man named Abdel Maguid, and the couple moved to Cairo. They would have a son together, who she named Sety (after the lineage of ancient pharaohs with the name); following Egyptian traditional custom to not refer to the mother of a child by her own name, she then took the name Omm Sety (mother of Sety) as her common name during this time.

Eady’s marriage was not a happy one; her husband had very little interest in Egyptology, and he was very busy with his own studies as well. Further complicating matters were Dorothy’s visions; her husband would regularly see her rise in a trance out of bed, and without gaining consciousness, move to her desk and begin writing in hieroglyphics; over a period of twelve months, she had collected seventy pages’ worth of information, all apparently dictated to her by the god Hor-Ra. This “automatic writing” created a lot of friction between her and her husband’s family, who felt that her behavior wasn’t normal; this was also compounded by the fact that her father-in-law once had a vision of “a pharaoh” sitting at the foot of Eady’s bed, and ran screaming from the house. Eventually, her husband transferred to Iraq, leaving Eady on her own to raise their child and attend to her studies as well.

According to her visions and to the text left from her automatic writing, Omm Sety learned that she was born as Bentreshyt over 3000 years previously, a peasant girl born to one of Seti I’s soldiers and a woman who sold vegetables at the market; at the age of twelve, she took vows to become a consecrated virgin and live the remainder of her life at the temple of Seti. Unfortunately, she became lovers with the Pharaoh, and when the high priest learned that she had become pregnant with the pharaoh’s child, he advised her to commit suicide, lest she commit a serious offence against the goddess Isis (not to mention cause a lot of problems for the pharaoh as well). So… seems like she did. Seti was apparently devastated by this, and vowed in subsequent visions that they would be together again once she reached the afterlife; he would appear very regularly to her throughout the rest of her life.

After 19 years in Cairo, where she had befriended many of the country’s leading historical researchers and archaelogists, Eady made the move to Abydos (in southern Egypt) to assist in the research of the site of the Temple of Seti. Testing her knowledge previously, the head researcher asked her to stand in complete darkness and identify the paintings found on each of the walls; due to her apparent past-life memories of the temple, she did so perfectly every time. Despite the potential for a lot of skepticism of her past, her knowledge and memory of the site proved to be impeccable, and she was directly responsible for the research making discoveries of many key areas of the site, including the garden where she and the pharaoh were said to have met for the very first time.

Even with much of this unusual behavior, fellow Egyptologists treated Dorothy Eady as an absolute equal in their field, accepting her findings as academically sound; unlike many other crackpots who had also believed in reincarnation, she made a point of following scholarly rigors and never tried to convert anyone to her own religious beliefs, and due to the fact that she had extensive knowledge of so many artifacts, including religious texts, monuments, and artwork – all of which had not been made public knowledge yet – her findings and opinions were held in very high regard despite their unorthodox nature of discovery. Other than her obsession with ancient Egypt and her regular visions, she was said to be a very regular person by all other accounts – working diligently, regularly hosting company, and corresponding with other researchers as well.  Her work proved to be absolutely invaluable in research of not only the temple of Seti site, but many others as well, including around the Valley of the Kings and the Great Sphinx as well. She passed away in 1981; numerous documentaries featuring her research exist, but this one below, entitled Lost Pharaoh: The Search for Akhenaten, produced by Canada’s National Film Board in 1980, is one of the best displays of her brilliance as a researcher.

The Lost Pharaoh: The Search for Akhenaten, Nicholas Kendall, provided by the National Film Board of Canada

What might have happened?

Some doctors have speculated that the blow to Dorothy Eady’s brain as a young girl caused some damage to her locus coeruleus (located in the pons, at the top of the brainstem), which may have caused some disassociation with her surroundings and in that void, may have caused to her embrace an obsession, ancient Egypt, due to the damage to that part of her brain being able to connect with the immediate world around her at that moment. All the same, that doesn’t necessarily explain her deep knowledge of things that other researchers had yet to even discover, making it impossible to discount the idea that she truly was reincarnated from a past life.

Coach Carroll’s Hypothesis: All I know is that when it comes to folks getting their bell rung, it’s probably not such a good idea to ask Ron Rivera about whether or not they’re behaving normally… Also, good thing that Russ wasn’t around to offer her any of those damn Nanobubbles either – they taste like overcarbonated crap. All the same, to me, this seems like nothing a little bit of time in the concussion protocol couldn’t have fixed, but I guess those old-timers still feel that ain’t a thing. Ah well – we’ll never know now, I guess.

Information for this article taken from here, here and here.

Banner image courtesy of Low Commander of the Super Soldiers.