Dorothy Eady was an Egyptian archaeologist who was born in Britain. She was a well-known expert on the culture of Pharaonic Egypt. She was known for thinking that she was a reincarnated ancient Egyptian temple priestess. Dorothy Eady was extraordinary, even by the loose standards of British eccentricity.
Dorothy Eady played a big part in figuring out Egyptian history because of the great archaeological finds she made. But more than her work, what makes her famous is that she thinks she was an Egyptian priestess in a previous life. Many documentaries, articles, and biographies have been written and produced about her life and work. In fact, the New York Times said that her story was “one of the Western World’s most intriguing and convincing modern case in histories of reincarnation.”
Dorothy Eady has earned a lot of fame around the world for her miraculous claims. People who are interested in her extraordinary claims and works know her by different names: Om Seti, Omm Seti, Omm Sety, and Bulbul Abd el-Meguid.
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Dorothy Louise Eady was born in Blackheath, East Greenwich, London, on January 16, 1904. She was Reuben Ernest Eady and Caroline Mary (Frost) Eady’s daughter. During the Edwardian era, her father was a master tailor, which put her family in the lower middle class.
Dorothy’s life changed a lot when she was three years old and fell down a flight of stairs. The family doctor said she was dead. When the doctor returned an hour later to get the body ready for the funeral home, he found little Dorothy playing in her bed. Soon after that, she started telling her parents about a dream she kept having about living in a huge building with lots of columns. The girl cried and said, “I want to go home!”
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All of this was confusing to her until she was four years old and taken to the British Museum. When she and her parents went to the Egyptian galleries, the little girl tore herself away from her mother’s grip and ran wildly through the halls, kissing the feet of the ancient statues. The world of ancient Egypt was her “home.”
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Dorothy did her best to learn as much as she could about ancient Egyptian civilization, even though she couldn’t afford to go to college. By going to the British Museum often, she was able to get famous Egyptologists like Sir E.A. Wallis Budge to teach her the basics of Egyptian hieroglyphs informally. Dorothy jumped at the chance to work in the office of an Egyptian magazine that was published in London.
Here, she quickly became a supporter of both modern Egyptian nationalism and the greatness of the Pharaonic era. At work, she met an Egyptian man named Imam Abd el-Meguid. She and Meguid got married in Egypt in 1933, 25 years after Dorothy had dreamed of “going home.” She changed her name to Bulbul Abd el-Meguid when she got to Cairo. She named her son Sety after the long-dead pharaoh when she had a boy.
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But the marriage didn’t last long, at least partly because Dorothy acted more like she was living in ancient Egypt instead of the modern world. She told her husband and anyone else who would listen about her “life before life.” In 1300 BCE, a 14-year-old girl named Bentreshyt, who was the daughter of a vegetable seller and an ordinary soldier, was chosen to be an apprentice virgin priestess. The beautiful Bentreshyt caught the eye of Pharaoh Sety I, the father of Rameses II the Great. She became pregnant by him, and Rameses II the Great was born.
The story had a sad ending, too, because Bentreshyt committed suicide to save the pharaoh’s sovereignty in what would have been seen as an act of pollution with an off-limits temple priestess. Pharaoh Sety was so moved by what she did that it broke his heart. He promised never to forget her. Dorothy thought she was the young priestess Bentreshyt, so she started calling herself “Omm Sety,” which in Arabic means “Mother of Sety.”
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Imam Abd el-Meguid divorced Dorothy Eady in 1936 because of how she was acting. This didn’t bother her, though, because she was sure she was now living in her true home and would never return to England. Dorothy got a job with the Department of Antiquities to help support her son. She quickly showed how much she knew about ancient Egyptian history and culture.
People thought Eady was very strange, but she was a very skilled professional who was very good at studying and digging up ancient Egyptian artifacts. She could figure out a lot about how ancient Egyptians lived and assisted with excavations in ways that were very helpful and left other Egyptologists scratching their heads. She would say that she remembered something from a past life and give instructions like, “Dig here, I remember the ancient garden was here.” They would dig and find the remains of an ancient garden.
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Dorothy wrote in her journals, which were kept secret until after her death, about how the spirit of Pharaoh Sety I often visited her in her dreams. She said that when she was 14, a mummy had raped her. Over the years, Sety, or at least his astral body, his akh, visited her at night more and more often. Studies of other reincarnation stories often note that a royal lover is often involved in these affairs that seem to be very passionate. Dorothy usually wrote about her pharaoh factually, like “His Majesty drops in for a moment but couldn’t stay - he was hosting a banquet in Amenti (heaven).”
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Thanks to Dorothy Eady’s contributions in her field, her claims to remember a past life and her worship of ancient gods like Osiris didn’t bother her colleagues as much as they used to. Her knowledge of the dead civilization and the ruins where they used to live earned her the respect of her peers. They took full advantage of the many times when her “memory” helped them make important discoveries that logic couldn’t explain.
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Dorothy also organized the archaeological finds that she and others made in a way that made sense. She helped the Egyptian archaeologist Selim Hassan with his books while she worked with him. She started working for Professor Ahmed Fakhry at Dahshur in 1951.
Dorothy helped Fakhry explore the pyramid fields of the great Memphite Necropolis by giving him information and editing skills that were very helpful when making field notes and the final reports that were eventually printed. Dorothy went to the great temple at Abydos in 1952 and 1954. These trips proved to her that her long-held belief that she had been a priestess there in a past life was correct.
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In 1956, she was given a permanent job there after she asked to be transferred to Abydos. She said, “I had only one aim in life, and that was to go to Abydos, to live in Abydos, and to be buried in Abydos.” Dorothy was set to retire at age 60 in 1964, but she made a strong case to stay on the job for another five years.
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When she finally stopped working in 1969, she stayed in the poor village of Araba el-Madfuna near Abydos, where she had lived for many years and where archaeologists and tourists knew her. She lived in mud-brick peasant homes with cats, donkeys, and pet vipers because her small pension of about $30 a month wasn’t enough to support her.
She substituted most of her diet with mint tea, holy water, dog vitamins, and prayer. She made extra money by selling needlepoint pictures of Egyptian gods, scenes from the temple of Abydos, and hieroglyphic cartouches to tourists. Eady used to call her small mud-brick home the “Omm Sety Hilton.”
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She lived just a short walk from the temple and spent many hours there in her later years, telling tourists about its beauty and sharing her vast knowledge with archaeologists who came to visit. One of them, James P. Allen of the American Research Center in Cairo, called her the patron saint of Egyptology and said, “I don’t know of any American archaeologist in Egypt who doesn’t respect her.”
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Dorothy’s health started to get worse in her last years. She had a heart attack, a broken knee, phlebitis, dysentery, and several other illnesses. She was thin and weak but determined to die at Abydos. She reflected on her strange life and said, “It’s been more than worth it. I wouldn’t want to change anything.”
Dorothy turned down her son Sety’s offer to live with him and his eight kids in Kuwait, where he was working at the time. She told him that she had lived next to Abydos for more than 20 years and was determined to die and be buried there. Dorothy Eady died on April 21, 1981, in the village next to Abydos, a sacred city with many temples.
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In accordance with ancient Egyptian tradition, Dorothy’s tomb on the western side of her garden had its head carved as a figure of Isis with her wings spread out. Eady was sure that when she died, her spirit would go through the Gate to the West and meet up with her friends from life. In the Pyramid Texts, written thousands of years ago, this new life was described as “sleeping that she may wake, dying that she may live.”
Dorothy Eady kept her diaries for the rest of her life and wrote many books about Egyptian history and her past lives- Abydos: the Holy City of Ancient Egypt, Omm Sety’s Abydos, and Omm Sety’s Living Egypt: Surviving Folkways from Pharaonic Times are some of the most important.
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