Dorothy Eady

Dorothy Louise Eady (16 January 1904 – 21 April 1981), also known as Omm Sety or Om Seti (أم سيتي), was a British antiques caretaker and folklorist.

She was keeper of the Abydos Temple of Seti I and draughtswoman for the Department of Egyptian Antiquities.

She is known for her belief that in a previous life she had been a priestess in ancient Egypt, as well as her considerable historical research at Abydos.

Her life and work has been the subject of many articles, television documentaries, and biographies.

Dorothy Louise Eady was born in London in 1904 as the only child to Reuben Ernest Eady, a master tailor born in Woolwich, and Caroline Mary (Frost) Eady, and raised in a coastal town.

At the age of three, after falling down a flight of stairs and briefly appearing to be dead, she began exhibiting strange behaviours, asking that she be "brought home".

She had also developed foreign accent syndrome.

This caused some conflict in her early life.

Her Sunday school teacher requested that her parents keep her away from class, because she had compared Christianity with "heathen" ancient Egyptian religion.

She was expelled from a Dulwich girls school after she refused to sing a hymn that called on God to "curse the swart Egyptians".

Her regular visits to a Roman Catholic church to hear the Catholic Mass, which she liked because it reminded her of the "Old Religion", were terminated after a visit to her parents and an interrogation by a Roman Catholic priest.

After being taken by her parents to visit the British Museum, and on observing a photograph in the New Kingdom temple exhibits room, the young Eady called out "There is my home!"

but "where are the trees? Where are the gardens?"

The temple was that of Seti I, the father of Rameses the Great.

She ran about the halls of the Egyptian rooms, "amongst her peoples", kissing the statues' feet.

After this trip she took every opportunity to visit the British Museum rooms.

There, she eventually met E. A. Wallis Budge, who was taken by her youthful enthusiasm and encouraged her in the study of hieroglyphs.

After a close escape from a bombing raid during World War I, she moved to her grandmother's house in Sussex.

Here, she continued her study of ancient Egypt at the Eastbourne public library.

When she was fifteen she described a nocturnal visit from the mummy of Pharaoh Seti I. Her behaviour, coupled with sleep walking and nightmares, led her to be incarcerated in sanatoriums several times.

On leaving school at sixteen she visited museums and archaeological sites around Britain, facilitated by her father's investigations into the nationwide booming cinema industry.

Eady became a part-time student at Plymouth Art School and began to collect affordable Egyptian antiquities.

During her period at Portsmouth she became part of a theatre group that on occasion performed a play based on the story of Isis and Osiris.

She took the role of Isis and sang the lamentation for Osiris's death, based on Andrew Lang's translation:

At the age of twenty-seven, she began working in London with an Egyptian public relations magazine, for which she wrote articles and drew cartoons that reflected her political support for an independent Egypt.

During this period she met her future husband Emam Abdel Meguid, an Egyptian student, with whom she continued to correspond when he returned home.

In 1931, she moved to Egypt after Emam Abdel Meguid, by now a teacher of English, asked her to marry him.

On arriving in Egypt, she kissed the ground and announced she had come home to stay.

The couple stayed in Cairo and her husband's family gave her the nickname ('nightingale').

Their son was named Sety, from which is derived her popular name Omm Sety ('Mother of Sety').

After a chance meeting with George Reisner's secretary, who commented on her apparent ability to charm snakes and told her that spells on such powers were in early ancient Egyptian literature, Eady visited the Fifth Dynasty pyramid of Unas.

Klaus Baer recalled her piety when she accompanied him on a visit to Saqqara in the early 1950s, when she brought an offering and took off her shoes before entering Unas' pyramid.

She continued to report apparitions and out-of-body experiences during this time, which caused friction with the upper-middle-class family she had married into.

During her early period, Eady reported nighttime visitations by an entity called Hor-Ra who she claimed was the spirit of Seti I.

Eady stated that Hor-Ra slowly dictated to her, over a twelve-month period, the story of her previous life.

The story, written by Eady, took up around seventy pages of cursive hieroglyphic text.

It described the life of a young woman in ancient Egypt, called Bentreshyt, who had reincarnated in the person of Dorothy Eady.

Bentreshyt (meaning 'Harp of Joy') is described in this text as being of humble origin, her mother a vegetable seller and her father a soldier during the reign of Seti I ( to 1279 BC).

When she was three, her mother died, and she was placed in the temple of Kom el-Sultan because her father could not afford her.

There, she was brought up to be a priestess.