Dorothy Eady

Carl Sagan considered Omm Sety as "a lively, intelligent, dedicated woman who made real contributions to Egyptology. This is true whether her belief in reincarnation is fact or fantasy." He viewed such phenomena as being rooted in fear of death and that humankind has commonly sought reassurance in some form of afterlife. He pointed out that there was no independent record, other than her own accounts, to verify what she claimed. In his opinion, whilst "functioning soundly and constructively in most aspects of her adult life" she "nevertheless carried strong childhood, adolescent fantasies" into adulthood. A psychiatrist who specialized in adolescent behaviour speculated that Dorothy Eady's fall down stairs as a child may have resulted in damage to the locus ceruleus, which could have resulted in a dislocation from her surroundings resulting in the embracement of an obsession. The psychologist Michael Gruber noted that Omm Sety lived "a functional life in so-called everyday reality", including work in Egyptology, embroidery, making jewellery and socializing with people. Her reported experiences enriched her life so much that "it would be an extreme loss to have seen her simply as someone who was hallucinating" A 1987 New York Times article described a biography of her as an "intriguing and convincing modern case histor[y]" of the belief in reincarnation.

Omm Seti had once said "Death holds no terror for me...I'll just do my best to get through the Judgment. I'm going to come before Osiris, who will probably give me a few dirty looks because I know I've committed some things I shouldn't have." Because the Muslims and Christians would not let "a heathen" be buried in their graveyards, Omm Sety built her own underground tomb decorated with a false door. Through this door the Ka was believed to travel between this world and the next, and it was engraved with an offering prayer in conformance with ancient beliefs. The staff of Chicago House gave her an imitation Shawabti figurine to place in the tomb. On 10 April 1981 she gave away her two cats as her condition deteriorated. On 15 April she received a letter from Olivia Robertson confirming that Omm Sety had been enrolled in the Fellowship of Isis, an interfaith spiritual movement focused on the goddess, on 23 March. On 21 April 1981 Omm Sety died in Abydos. The local health authority refused to allow her to be buried in the tomb she had constructed, so she was interred in an unmarked grave, facing the west, in the desert outside a Coptic cemetery.

In October 1980, Julia Cave and a team from the BBC arrived in Abydos to film the documentary Omm Sety and Her Egypt. Featuring interviews with Egyptologists T. G. H. James and Rosalie David, it described Abydos and the excavations that had been undertaken. It had extensive input from Omm Sety, who used crutches due to her deteriorating health. The documentary was broadcast on BBC 2 in May 1981. The Times wrote of the documentary: "An incredulous smile froze on my lips as I watched the Chronicle film Omm Sety and Her Egypt. Could I be absolutely positive it was all a lot of eyewash? Of course I couldn't. And neither will you be able to. In any case, it makes marvellous television." At the time the BBC were recording their documentary, the American producer Miriam Birch asked Omm Sety to appear, along with Egyptologists Kent Weeks and Lanny Bell, in a documentary that National Geographic Channel was filming, Egypt: Quest for Eternity. It concentrated on Rameses II, the son of Seti I. Shooting took place in March 1981, coinciding with Omm Sety's seventy-seventh birthday party at Chicago House, which was filmed. She was in a lot of pain but full of good cheer, and the film crew carried her up to the Temple of Seti for filming. This was to be her last visit to the shrine in which she believed she had served as a priestess 3,000 years before.

James P. Allen commented "Sometimes you weren't sure whether Omm Sety wasn't pulling your leg. Not that she was a phoney in what she said or believed – she was absolutely not a con artist – but she knew that some people looked on her as a crackpot, so she kind of fed into that notion and let you go either way with it...She believed enough to make it spooky, and it made you doubt your own sense of reality sometimes." Barbara Lesko wrote, "She was a great help to Egyptian scholars, especially Hassan and Fakhry, correcting their English and writing English language articles for others. So this poorly educated Englishwoman developed in Egypt into a first rate draughtswoman and prolific and talented writer who, even under her own name, produced articles, essays, monographs and books of great range, wit and substance." William Golding wrote of the Egyptologists he met in his travels through Egypt in the 1980s who were "as well disposed to the Mystery as any child could have wished." When "the question arose of a dear lady who believed herself to have been a priestess of a particular temple, they did not dismiss her as a crackpot but agreed that she had something."

Nicholas Kendall of the National Film Board of Canada visited Egypt in 1979 to make a documentary, The Lost Pharaoh: The Search for Akhenaten. Donald Redford, who had led a team that recently unearthed material relating to the reign of Akhenaten, asked Omm Sety to appear in the film. She, in common with other Egyptologists, did not regard the king as a romantic idealist dedicated to a universal god, but a "one-track minded, authoritarian iconoclast who impaled captives and deported populations."

While the general public tend to focus on the beauty of ancient Egyptian artefacts, scholars highly value texts which reveal more about history and religious beliefs. Since Edgar Cayce, a clairvoyant of Presbyterian background, asserted while in a trance state that a Hall of Records was to be found in the area of the Sphinx, there have been repeated attempts to find its supposed location. In 1973, Omm Sety recalled asking Seti I about these Halls of Records. He replied that every temple had a book repository ("Per-Medjat"), but that the one attached to the Temple of Amun-Ra in Luxor contained all the important documents "from the time of the Ancestors," including those that survived the political upheaval at the end of the 6th dynasty. In 1952, Omm Sety translated for Abdul Kader inscriptions from Ram statues he had uncovered from the temple at Luxor. They had been found in the area where Seti located the Hall of Records. Contrary to normal practice for this type of statue, there was no writing on the back, suggesting that they had once been placed against an otherwise unknown wall or building. Based on Seti's description and the location of the Rams, both she and Dr. Zeini believed that the Hall of Records is likely to be located under the modern building which houses the Arab Socialist League.

She began work as a part-time consultant for the Antiquities Department, guiding tourists around the Temple of Seti and explaining the symbolism of the painted wall scenes. In 1972, she suffered a mild heart attack and in the aftermath decided to sell her old house and move into a zareba (a ramshackle single room made of reeds). Ahmed Soliman, the son of the onetime keeper of the Temple of Seti, built a simple mudbrick house adjacent to his family home where Omm Sety moved and lived as part of the Soliman family. She reported in her diary that on first moving into her new home, Seti I appeared and carried out a ritual that consecrated the habitation, bowing reverently towards small statues of Osiris and Isis she kept in a small shrine-niche.

In the early 1970s, shortly after Nasser's death, Omm Sety disclosed that she believed she knew the location of Nefertiti's tomb, but showed some reluctance in disclosing its "most unlikely place" because Seti I did not like Akhenaten for his attempt to suppress traditional Egyptian religious practices. "We don't want anything more of this family to be known." She described the location of the tomb as being close to Tutankhamun's, which was counter to the then-prevailing opinion that no more new tombs would be found in the Valley of the Kings. In 1998, the ARPT group led by Nicholas Reeves began exploring in the area of Tutankhamun's tomb, based on two anomalies found during a sonar sounding in 1976. During the dig, two undisturbed seals of the 20th dynasty scribe Wen-nefer, a well-known person whose seal has been found on many Valley tombs, were discovered. A radar scan in 2000 produced evidence of two empty chambers, but the work was halted pending an investigation into the theft of antiquities. In 2006, Otto Shaden, on a completely unrelated dig, accidentally burst into one of the "anomalies" (later numbered KV63), which contained particularly fine examples of mummification supplies used for a royal burial, presumably nearby. Reeves' opinion is that the second "anomaly" is likely to be an undisturbed tomb. In August 2015, a new paper was published by the egyptologist Nicholas Reeves, likely confirming the finding.

Omm Sety detailed many other modern practices transmitted down from ancient times in short articles written between 1969 and 1975. These were edited and published by the Egyptologist Nicole B. Hansen in 2008, under the title "Omm Sety's Living Egypt: Surviving Folkways from Pharaonic Times," with a foreword by Kent Weeks and an introduction by Walter A. Fairservis.

On reaching the age of sixty in 1964, Omm Sety was faced with mandatory retirement by the Antiquities Department and advised to seek part-time work in Cairo. She went to Cairo, but only stayed one day before returning to Abydos. The Antiquities Department decided to make an exception to their retirement age rules and allowed her to continue her work at Abydos for a further five years, until she retired in 1969. Her pension of $30 per month was supplemented by needlework sold to friends and tourists, who also brought gifts of clothes, food, and reading materials.

She spent the first two years listing and translating pieces from a recently excavated temple palace. Her work was incorporated into Edouard Ghazouli's monograph "The Palace and Magazines Attached to the Temple of Sety I at Abydos". He expressed particular thanks to her in this work and was impressed by the skills she showed in translation of enigmatic texts, along with other members of the Antiquities Department. In 1957, she wrote out a liturgical calendar of feast days based on ancient Egyptian texts.

Ahmed Fakhry's Dashur Pyramid Research Project was terminated in early 1956, leaving Dorothy Eady unemployed. Fakhry suggested that she "climb the Great Pyramid; and when you reach the top, just turn west, address yourself to your Lord Osiris and ask him "Quo vadis?". He offered her a choice of taking a well paid job in the Cairo Records Office, or a poorly paid position in Abydos as a draughtswoman. She chose the latter. She reported that Seti I approved of the move. He claimed that the "wheel of fate" was turning and this would be a time of testing. If she was chaste she would now undo Bentreshyt's ancient sin.

On 3 March 1956, the fifty-two-year-old Omm Sety left for Abydos. She set up home in Arabet Abydos, which sits in the cradle of the mountain Pega-the-Gap. The ancient Egyptians believed this mountain led to Amenti and the afterlife. It was here that she began to be called 'Omm Sety', because it was customary in Egyptian villages to refer to a mother by the name of her eldest child.

In 1935, Dorothy Eady separated from her husband when he took a teaching job in Iraq. Their son Sety stayed with her. Two years after the marriage broke down she went to live in Nazlat al-Samman near the Giza pyramids, where she met the Egyptian archaeologist Selim Hassan of the Department of Antiquities, who employed her as his secretary and draughtswoman. She was the department's first female employee and a boon to Hassan. According to Barbara Lesko, "She was a great help to Egyptian scholars, especially Hassan and Fakhry, correcting their English and writing English-language articles for others. So this poorly educated Englishwoman developed in Egypt into a first-rate draughtswoman and prolific and talented writer who, even under her own name, produced articles, essays, monographs and books of great range, wit and substance."

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 "Bulbul" (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, Omm Sety 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.

Dorothy Louise Eady (16 January 1904 – 21 April 1981), also known as Omm Sety or Om Seti, 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 Catholic mass, which she liked because it reminded her of the "Old Religion", were terminated after an interrogation and visit to her parents by a priest.