Hierophant Self Discovery: Monarchy Pt ll. Cleopatra. Stacy Schiff

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Hierophant Self Discovery: Monarchy Pt ll. Cleopatra. Stacy Schiff 

Cleopatra. A Life. Stacy Schiff

Chapter ll 

Dead Men Don’t Bite

“It’s a godsend, really lucky, when one has so few relations.” Menander

That summer she rallied a band of mercenaries, at a desert camp, under the glassy heat of the Syrian sun. She was twenty-one, an orphan and an exile. Already she had known both excessive good fortune and its flamboyant consort, calamity. Accustomed to the greatest luxury of the day, she held court two hundred miles from the ebony doors and onyx floors of home. Her tent amid the scrub of the desert was the closest she had come in a year. Over those months she had scrambled for her life, fleeing through Middle Egypt, Palestine, and southern Syria. She had spent a dusty summer raising an army. 

The women in her family were good at this and so clearly was she, accomplished enough anyway for the enemy to have marched out to meet her. Dangerously close at hand, not far from the seaside fortress of Pelusium, on the eastern frontier of Egypt, were 20,000 veteran soldiers, an army about half the size of that with which Alexander the Great had crossed into Asia three centuries earlier. This one was a formidable assembly of pirates and bandits, outlaws, exiles, and fugitive slaves, under the titular command of her thirteen-year-old brother. With him she had inherited the throne of Egypt. She had shunted him aside; in return he had banished her from the kingdom over which they were meant to rule jointly, as husband and wife. Her brother’s army controlled Pelusium’s redbrick walls, its massive twenty-foot, semicircular towers. She camped farther east, along the desolate coast, in a smoldering sea of amber sand. A battle loomed. Her position was hopeless at best. For the last time in two thousand years Cleopatra Vll stands offstage. In a matter of days she will launch herself into history, which is to say that faced with the inevitable, she will counter with the improbable. It is 48 BC.

Throughout the Mediterranean a ‘strange madness’ hung in the air, ripe with omens and portents and extravagant rumours. The mood was one of nervous exasperation. It was possible to be anxious and elated, empowered and afraid, all in the course of a single afternoon. Some rumours even proved true. Early in July Cleopatra heard that the Roman civil war – a contest that pitted the invincible Julius Caesar against the indomitable Pompey the Great – was about to collide with her own. This was alarming news. For as long as Cleopatra could remember, the Romans had served as protectors of the Egyptian monarchs. They owed their throne to that disruptive power, which in a few generations had conquered most of the Mediterranean world. Also as long as she could remember, Pompey had been a particular friend of her father’s. A brilliant general, Pompey had for decades piled up victories, on land and sea, subduing nation after nation, in Africa, Asia and Europe. Both Cleopatra and her estranged brother Ptolemy Xlll, were in his debt. 

Days later Cleopatra discovered that the chances of being murdered by someone who owed you a favour were every bit as good as the chances of being murdered by a member of your immediate family. On September 28, Pompey appeared off the coast of Pelusium. He had been routed by Caesar. Desperate, he cast about for a refuge. He thought logically enough of the young king whose family he had supported and who was deeply beholden to him. No request he might make could in good faith be denied. The three regents who essentially ruled for young Ptolemy – Theodotus, his rhetoric master; Achillas, the bold commander of the royal guard; and Pothinus, the eunuch who had nimbly parlayed his role as childhood tutor into that of prime minister – disagreed. The unexpected arrival presented them with a difficult decision, which they hotly debated. Opinions differed. To cast off Pompey was to make an enemy of him. To receive him was to make an enemy of Caesar. Were they to eliminate Pompey, he could offer no assistance to Cleopatra, to whom he was well disposed. Nor could he install himself on the throne of Egypt. “Dead men don’t bite” was the irrefutable counsel of Theodotus, the rhetoric teacher, who – having proved by simple syllogism that they could afford neither to befriend nor offend Pompey – delivered the line with a smile. He dispatched a welcoming message and a “wretched little boat” for the Roman. Pompey had not yet set foot on shore when, in the shallow waters of Pelusium, in full view of Ptolemy’s army and of the miniature king in his purple robes, he was stabbed to death, his head severed from his body. 

Caesar would try later to make sense of that savagery. Friends often turn into enemies in time of disaster, he conceded. He might equally well have noted that at times of disaster enemies reinvent themselves to the undisputed master of the Mediterranean world? By the same logic the three had simplified matters for Cleopatra. In the Roman civil war – a contest of such searing intensity that it seemed less an armed conflict than a plague, a flood, a fire – she now appeared to have backed the losing side. 

Three days later Julius Caesar ventured ashore in the Egyptian capital, in pursuit of his rival. He arrived in advance of the bulk of his troops. A great metropolis, Alexandria was home to malicious wit, dubious morals, grand larceny. Its residents talked fast, in many languages and at once; theirs was an excitable city of short tempers and taut, vibrating minds. Already it was in ferment, unrest this second flash of imperial red exacerbated. Caesar had been careful to modulate his joy in his victory and continued to do so. When Theodotus presented him with Pompey’s three-day-old severed head, Caesar turned away in horror. He then burst into tears. A few may even have been genuine; at one time Pompey had been not only his ally but his son-in-law. If Ptolemy’s advisers felt the gruesome welcome would hold Caesar off, they were wrong. If Caesar thought that Pompey’s murder constituted a vote in his favour, he too was mistaken, at least so far as the Alexandrians were concerned. Riots greeted him onshore, where no one was less welcome than a Roman, especially one bearing the official trappings of power. At best Caesar would interfere with their affairs. At worst he had conquest in mind. Already Rome had restored an unpopular king who – to make matters worse – taxed his people to pay off the debt for that restoration. The Alexandrians did not care to pay the price for a king they had not wanted in the first place. Nor did they care to become Roman subjects.

Caesar installed himself securely in a pavilion on the grounds of the Ptolemies’ palace, adjoining the royal dockyards, in the eastern part of the city. The skirmishing continued – roars and scuffles echoed loudly down the colonnaded streets – but in the palace he was safe from all disturbance. He sent hastily for reinforcements. And having done so, he summoned up the feuding siblings. Caesar felt it incumbent upon him to arbitrate their dispute, as a decade earlier he and Pompey had together lobbied for their father. A stable Egypt was in Rome’s best interest, the more so when there were substantial debts to be paid. As Caesar had himself recently suggested to his rival, it was time for the warring parties “to put an end to their obstinate behaviour, abandon armed struggle, and not risk their luck any further.” Cleopatra and her brother should have mercy on themselves and on their country. 

The summons left Cleopatra with some explaining to do, as well as some calculating. She had every reason to plead her case promptly, before her brother’s advisers could undermine her. His army effectively blocked her from Egypt. Although Caesar had requested he disbanded it. Ptolemy made no effort to do so. To move her own men west, through the golden sand, toward the border and the high towers at Pelusium, was to risk an engagement. By one account she made contact with Caesar through an intermediary, then, convinced she had been betrayed (she was unpopular with the palace courtiers) she determined to plead her case herself. Which left her to puzzle out how to slip past enemy lines, across a well patrolled frontier, and into a blockaded palace, covertly and alive. Cleopatra’s reputation would come to rest on her gift for pageantry, but in her first and greatest political gamble the challenge was to make herself inconspicuous. By modern standards too hers was a curious predicament. To make her mark, for her story to begin, this woman had to smuggle herself back into the house. 

Clearly there was some deliberation. Plutarch tells us that “she was at a loss how to get in undiscovered” until she – or someone in her entourage; she, too, had confidants – hit on a brilliant ruse. It would have required a dress rehearsal. And it called for several exceedingly skilled accomplices, one of whom was a loyal Sicilian retainer named Apollodorus. Between the Sinai peninsula, where Cleopatra was camped, and the palace of Alexandria, where she had grown up, lay a treacherous marshland, thick with mites and mosquitoes. That swampy flat protected Egypt from eastern invasions. It took its name from its ability to devour whole armies, which the heavy sands did with “malevolent cunning”. Ptolemy’s forces controlled the coast, where Pompey’s body rotted in a makeshift grave. The surest and simplest route west was then neither through the muddy pools of Pelusium nor along the Mediterranean, where Cleopatra would have been exposed to view and to a strong opposing current. It made more sense to detour south, up the Nile to Memphis, afterward to sail back to the coast, a trip of at least eight days. The river route was not without its dangers either, it was heavily trafficked and carefully surveyed by customs agents. Along the turbid Nile Cleopatra presumably sailed, with a strong wind and a host of mosquitoes, in mid October. Ptolemy’s advisers meanwhile balked at Caesar’s request. How dare a Roman general summon a king? The lower-ranking party should call on the higher, as Caesar well knew. 

So it was that Apollodorus silently manoeuvred a tiny two-oared boat into Alexandria’s eastern harbour and under the palace wall just after dusk. Close to shore all was dark, while from a distance the city’s low-lying coast was illuminated by its magnificent, four-hundred-foot-tall lighthouse, a wonder of the ancient world. That blazing pillar stood a half mile from Cleopatra, at the end of a man-made causeway, on the island of Pharos. Even in its glow she was nowhere to be seen, however. At some point before Appolodorus docked his boat, she crawled into an oversize sack of hemp or leather, in which she arranged herself lengthwise. Apollodorus rolled up the bundle and secured it with a leather cord, slinging it over his shoulder, the only clue we have as to Cleopatra’s size. To the gentle lap of the waves he set out across the palace grounds, a complex of gardens and multicoloured villas and colonnaded walkways that spread over nearly a mile, or a quarter of the city. It was an area that Apollodorus – who certainly had not rowed from the desert alone but may have masterminded his queen’s return – knew well. On his shoulder, Cleopatra rode through the palace gates and directly into Caesar’s quarters, rooms that properly belonged to her. It was one of the more unusual homecomings in history. Many queens have risen from obscurity, but Cleopatra is the only one to have emerged on the world stage from inside a sturdy sack, the kind of bag into which one customarily stuffed rolls of papyrus or transported a small fortune in gold. Ruses and disguises came readily to her. On a later occasion she would conspire with another woman in peril to make her escape in a coffin. 

We do not know if the unveiling took place before Caesar. Either way it is unlikely that Cleopatra appeared “majestic” (as one source has it) or laden with gems and gold (as another purports) or even marginally well coiffed. In defiance of the male imagination, five centuries of art history, and two of the greatest plays in English literature, she would have been fully clothed, in a formfitting, sleeveless, long linen tunic. The only accessory she needed was one she alone among Egyptian women was entitled to wear; the diadem, or broad white ribbon, that denoted a Hellenistic ruler. It is unlikely she appeared before Julius Caesar without one tied around her forehead and knotted at the back. Of Cleopatra’s “knowledge of how to make herself agreeable to everyone” we have, on the other hand, abundant evidence. Generally it was known to be impossible to converse with her without being instantly captivated by her. For this audience, the boldness of the manoeuvre – the surprise appearance of the young queen in the sumptuously painted halls of her own home, which Caesar himself could barely penetrate – proved in itself an enchantment. Retrospectively, the shock appears to have been as much political as personal. The jolt was that generated when, in a singular, shuddering moment, two civilisations, passing in different directions, unexpectedly and momentously touch.

Celebrated as much for his speed as for his intuition, Julius Caesar was not an easy man to surprise. He was forever arriving before expected and in advance of the messengers sent to announce him. (He was that fall paying the price for having preceded his legions to Egypt.) If the greatest part of his success could be explained “by his rapidity and by the unexpectedness of his movements,” he was for the rest rarely disconcerted, armed for all contingencies, a prcise and lucid strategist. His impatience survives him: What is Veni, vidi, vici – the claim was still a year in the future – if not a paean to efficiency? So firm was his grasp of human nature that he had at their decisive battle that summer instructed his men not to hurl their javelins but to thrust them into the faces of Pompey’s men. Their vanity, he promised, would prove greater than their courage. He was correct: the Pompeians had covered their faces and run. Over the previous decade Caesar had overcome the most improbable obstacles and performed the most astonishing feats. Never one to offend fortune, he felt all the same that it could stand to be nudged along; he was the kind of opportunist who makes a great show of marvelling at his sheer good luck. At least in terms of ingenuity and bold decision-making, he had before him a kindred spirit. 

In another realm the young Egyptian queen had little in common with the “love-sated man already past his prime.” (Caesar was fifty-two.) His amorous conquests were as legendary and as varied as his military feats. On the street the elegant, angular-faced man with the flashing black eyes and the prominent cheekbones was hailed – there was overstatement only on the second count – as “every woman’s man and every man’s woman.” Cleopatra had been married for three years to a brother who was by all accounts “a mere boy” and who – even if he had by thirteen attained puberty, which by ancient standards was unlikely – had been trying for most of that time to dispose of her. Later commentators would write off Cleopatra as “Ptolemy’s impure daughter,” a “matchless siren”, the “painted whore” whose “unchastity cost Rome dear.” What that “harlot queen” was unlikely to have had when she materialised before Caesar in October 48 was any sexual experience whatever. 

Insofar as the two can be pried apart, survival rather than seduction was first on her mind. As her brother’s advisers had amply demonstrated, the prize was Caesar’s favour. It was imperative that Cleopatra align herself with him instead of with the family benefactor, whose campaign she had supported and whose headless body lay decomposing on a Mediterranean beach. Under the circumstances, there was no reason to assume Caesar favourably disposed toward her. From his point of view, a young king with an army at his command and the confidence of the Alexandrians was the better bet. Ptolemy had the blood of Pompey on his hands, however; Caesar may have calculated that the price to pay in Rome for allying himself with his countryman’s murderers would be greater than the price to pay for assisting a deposed and helpless queen.

He had long before grasped that “all men work more zealously against their enemies than they cooperate with their friends.” At least initially, Cleopatra may have owed her life more to Caesar’s censure of her brother and his distaste for Ptolemy’s advisers – they hardly seemed the kind of men with whom one settled frank financial matters – than to any charms of her own. She was also lucky. As one chronicler pointed out, a different man might have traded her life for Pompey’s. Caesar could equally well have lopped off her head. 

Generally the Roman commander was of a mild disposition. He was perfectly capable of killing tens of thousands of men, equally famous for his displays of clemency, even toward bitter enemies, sometimes toward the same ones twice. “Nothing was dearer to his heart”, one of his generals asserts, “than pardoning suppliants”. A plucky, royal, well-spoken suppliant doubtless topped that list. Caesar had further reason to take to this one: As a young man, he too had been a fugitive. He too had made costly mistakes. 

While the decision to welcome Cleopatra may have been logical at the time, it led to one of the closest calls of Caesar’s career. When he met Cleopatra she was struggling for her life. By late fall they both were. For the next months Caesar found himself under siege, pummelled by an ingenious enemy keen to offer him his first taste of guerrilla warfare, in a city with which he was unfamiliar and in which he was vastly outnumbered. Surely Ptolemy and the people of Alexandria deserve some credit for seeing to it that – closeted together for six nerve-wracking months behind hastily constructed barricades – the balding veteran general and the agile young queen emerged as close allies, so close that by early November, Cleopatra realised she was pregnant.

Behind every great fortune, it has been noted, is a crime; the Ptolemies were fabulously rich. They were descended not from the Egyptian pharaohs whose place they assumed but from the scrappy, hard-living Macedonians (tough terrain breeds tough men, Herodotus had already warned) who produced Alexander the Great. Within months of Alexander’s death, Ptolemy – the most enterprising of his generals, his official taster, a childhood intimate, and by some accounts a distant relative – had laid claim to Egypt. In an early display of the family gift for stagecraft, Ptolemy kidnapped Alexander the Great’s body. It had been headed for Macedonia. Would it not be far more useful, reasoned young Ptolemy, intercepting the funeral cortege, in Egypt, ultimately in Alexandria, a city the great man had founded only decades earlier? There it was rerouted, to be displayed in a gold sarcophagus at the centre of the city, a relic, a talisman, a recruiting aid, an insurance policy. (By Cleopatra’s childhood, the sarcophagus was alabaster or glass. Strapped for funds, her great-uncle had traded the original for an army. He paid for the substitution with his life). 

The legitimacy of the Ptolemaic dynasty would rest on this tenuous connection to the most storied figure in the ancient world, the one against whom all aspirants measured themselves, in whose mantle Pompey had wrapped himself, whose feats were said to reduce Caesar to tears of inadequacy. The cult was universal. Alexander played as active a role in the Ptolemaic imagination as in the Roman one. Many Egyptian homes displayed statues of him. So strong was his romance – and so fungible was first-century history – that it would come to include a version in which Alexander descended from an Egyptian wizard. Soon enough he was said to have been related to the royal family; like all self respecting arrivistes, the Ptolemies had a gift for reconfiguring history. Without renouncing their Macedonian heritage, the dynasty’s founders bought themselves a legitimacy-conferring past, the ancient-world equivalent of the mail-order coat of arms. What was true that Ptolemy descended from the Macedonian aristocracy, a synonym for high drama. As a consequence, no one in Egypt considered Cleopatra to be Egyptian. She hailed instead from a line of rancorous, meddlesome, shrewd, occasionally unhinged Macedonian queens, a line that included the fourth-century Olympias, whose greatest contribution to the world was her son, Alexander the Great. The rest were atrocities. 

If outside Egypt the Ptolemies held to the Alexander the Great narrative, within the country their legitimacy derived from a fabricated link with the pharaohs. This justified the practise of sibling marriage, understood to be an Egyptian custom. Amid the Macedonian aristocracy there was ample precedent for murdering your sibling, none for marrying her. Nor was there a Greek word for ‘incest’. The Ptolemies carried the practise to an extreme. Of the fifteen or so family marriages, at least ten were full brother-sister unions. Two other Ptolemies married nieces or cousins. They may have done so for simplicity’s sake; intermarriage minimized both claimants to the throne and pesky in-laws. It eliminated the problem of finding an appropriate spouse in a foreign land. It also neatly reinforced the family cult, along with the Ptolemies’ exalted, exclusive status. If circumstances made intermarriage attractive, an appeal to the divine – another piece of invented pedigree – made it acceptable. Both Egyptian and Greek gods had married siblings, though it could be argued that Zeus and Hera were not the most sterling of role models. 

The practise resulted in no physical deformities but did deliver an ungainly shrub of a family tree. If Cleopatra’s parents were full siblings, as they likely were, she had only one set of grandparents. That couple also happened to be uncle and niece. And if you married your uncle, as was the case with Cleopatra’s grandmother, your father was also your brother-in-law. While the inbreeding was meant to stabilize the family, it had a paradoxical effect. Succession became a perennial crisis for the Ptolemies, who exacerbated the matter with poisons and daggers. Intermarriage consolidated wealth and power but lent a new meaning to sibling rivalry, all the more remarkable among relatives who routinely appended benevolent-sounding epithets to their titles. (Officially speaking, Cleopatra and the brother from whom she was running for her life were the Theoi Neoi Philadelphoi, or ‘New Sibling-Loving Gods.’) It was rare to find a member of the family who did not liquidate a relative or two, Cleopatra Vll included. Ptolemy l married his half sister, who conspired against him with her sons, two of whom he murdered. The first to be worshipped as a goddess in her lifetime, she went on to preside over a golden age in Ptolemaic history. Here too was an unintended consequence of sibling marriage: For better or worse, it put a premium on Ptolemaic princesses. In every respect the equals of their brothers and husbands, Cleopatra’s female predecessors knew their worth. They came increasingly to assert themselves. The Ptolemies did future historians no favours in terms of nomenclature; all the royal women were Arsinoes, Berenices, or Cleopatras. They are more easily identified by their grisly misdeeds than their names, although tradition proved immutable on both counts; various Cleopatras, Berenices, and Arsinoes poisoned husbands, murdered brothers, and outlawed all mention of their mothers – afterward offering up splendid monuments to those relatives’ memories. 

Over the generation the family indulged in what has been termed “an orgy of pillage and murder,” lurid, even by colourful Macedonian standards. It was not an easy clan in which to distinguish oneself, but Ptolemy lV did, at the height of the empire. In the late third century he murdered his uncle, brother, and mother. Courtiers saved him from poisoning his wife by doing so themselves, once she had produced an heir. Over and over mothers sent troops against sons. Sisters waged war against brothers. Cleopatra’s great-grandmother fought one civil war against her parents, a second against her children. No one suffered as acutely as the inscribers of monuments, left to contend with near-simultaneous inaugurations and assassinations and with the vexed matter of dates, as the calendar started again with each new regime, at which time a ruler typically changed his title as well. Plenty of hieroglyph-cutting ground to a halt while dynastic feuds resolved themselves. Early on, Berenice ll’s mother borrowed Berenice’s foreign-born husband, for which double duty Berenice supervised his murder. (She met the same end). Equally notable among the women was Cleopatra’s great-great-aunt, Cleopatra lll, the second-century queen. She was both the wife and niece of Ptolemy Vlll. He raped her when she was an adolescent, at which time he was simultaneously married to her mother. The two quarrelled; Ptolemy killed their fourteen-year-old son, chopped him into pieces, and delivered a chest of mutilated limbs to the palace gates on the eve of her birthday. She retaliated by publicly displaying the body parts. The Alexandrians went wild with rage. The greater astonishment was what came next. Just over a decade later, the couple reconciled. For eight years Ptolemy Vlll ruled with two queens, a warring mother and daughter. 

After a while butchery came to seem almost preordained. Cleopatra’s uncle murdered his wife, thereby eliminating his stepmother (and half sister) as well. Unfortunately he did so without grasping that she was the more popular of their pair. He was lynched by a mob after eighteen days on the throne. Which after a two-century-long rampage put an end to the legitimate Ptolemies, in 80 BC. Especially with an ascendant Rome on the horizon, a successor had to be found quickly. Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy Xll, was summoned from Syria, where he had been sent to safety twenty three years earlier. It is unclear if he was raised to rule, very clear that he was the only viable option. To reinforce his divine status and the link with Alexandria the Great, he took as his title “The New Dionysus.” To the Alexandrians – for whom legitimacy mattered, despite the crazy quilt of wholly fabricated pedigrees – he had one of two names. Cleopatra’s father was either “the bastard” or “Auletes,” the piper, after the oboe-like instrument he was fond of playing. For it he seemed to evince as much affection as he did statesmanship, unfortunate in that his musical proclivities were those shared by second-rate call girls. His much-loved musical competitions did not prevent him from continuing the bloodbath of the family history, though only, it should be said, because circumstances left him little choice. (He was relieved of the need to murder his mother, as she was not of royal birth. She was probably a Macedonian courtier). In any event, Auletes was to have greater problems than interfering relatives. 

The young woman holed up with Julius Caesar in the besieged palace of Alexandria was, then, neither Egyptian, nor, historically speaking, a pharaoh, nor necessarily related to Alexander the Great, nor even fully a Ptolemy, though she was as nearly as can be ascertained on all sides a Macedonian aristocrat. Her name, like her heritage, was entirely and proudly Macedonian; “Cleopatra” means “Glory of Her Fatherland” in Greek. She was not even Cleopatra Vll, as she would be remembered. Given the tortured family history, it made sense that someone, somewhere, simply lost count. 

The strange and terrible Ptolemaic history should not obscure two things. If the Berenices and Arsinoes were as vicious as their husbands and brothers, they were so to a great extent because they were immensely powerful. (Traditionally they also took second place to those husbands and brothers, a tradition Cleopatra disregarded.) Even without a regnant mother, Cleopatra could look to any number of female forebears who built temples, raised fleets, waged military campaigns, and with their consorts, governed Egypt. Arguably she had more powerful female role models than any other queen in history. Whether this resulted from a general exhaustion on the part of the men in the family, as has been asserted, is unclear. There would have been every reason for the women to have been exhausted as well. But the standouts in the generations immediately preceding Cleopatra’s were – for vision, ambition, intellect – universally female. 

Cleopatra moreover comes of age in a country that entertained a singular definition of women’s roles. Well before her and centuries before the arrival of the Ptolemies, Egyptian women enjoyed the right to make their own marriages. Over time their liberties had increased, to levels unprecedented in the ancient world. They inherited equally and held property independently. Married women did not submit to their husbands’ control. They enjoyed the right to divorce and to be supported after a divorce. Until the time an ex-wife’s dowry was returned, she was entitled to be lodged in the house of her choice. Her property remained hers; it was not to be squandered by a wastrel husband. The law sided with the wife and children, if a husband acted against their interests. Romans marvelled that in Egypt female children were not left to die; a Roman was obligated to raise only his first-born daughter. Egyptian women married later than did their neighbours s well, only about half of them by Cleopatra’s age. They loaned money and operated barges. They served as priests in the native temples. They initiated lawsuits and hired flute players. As wives, widows, or divorcees, they owned vineyards, wineries, papyrus marshes, ships, perfume businesses, milling equipment, homes, camels. As much as one third of Ptolemaic Egypt may have been in female hands. 

So much did these practises reverse the natural order of things that they astounded the foreigner. At the same time they seemed wholly in keeping with a country whose magnificent, life-giving river flowed backward, from south to north, establishing Upper Egypt in the south and Lower Egypt in the north. The Nile further reversed the laws of nature by swelling in summer and subsiding in winter; the Egyptians harvested their fields in April and sowed them in November. Even planting was inverted: the Egyptian first sowed, then plowed, to cover the seed in loose earth. This made perfect sense in the kind of aberrant kingdom where one kneaded dough with one’s feet and wrote from right to left. It was no wonder that Herodotus should have asserted, in an account Cleopatra would have known well, that Egyptian women ventured into the markets while the men sat at home tending their looms. We have ample testimony to her sense of humour; Cleopatra was a wit and a prankster. There is no cause to question how she read Herodotus’s further assertion that Egypt was a country in which “the women urinate standing up, the men sitting down.” 

On another count Herodotus was entirely correct. “There is no country that possesses so many wonders, nor any that has such a number of works that defy description,” he marvelled. Well before the Ptolemies, Egypt exercised its spell on the world. It boasted an ancient civilization, any number of natural oddities, monuments of baffling immensity, two of the seven wonders of the ancient world. (The capacity for wonder may have been greater in Cleopatra’s day but the pyramids were taller too, by thirty-one feet). And in the intermissions between bloodlettings, largely in the third century and before the dynasty began to wobble under its own depravity late in the second, the Ptolemies had made good on Alexander the Great’s plans, establishing on the Nile delta a miracle of a city, one that was as sleekly sophisticated as its founding people had been unpolished. From a distance Alexandria blinked, a sumptuous suffusion of gleaming marble, over which presided its towering lighthouse. Its celebrated skyline was reproduced on lamps, mosaics, tiles. The city’s architecture announced its magpie ethos, forged of a frantic accretion of cultures. In this greatest of Mediterranean ports, papyrus fronds topped Ionic columns. Oversize sphinxes and falcons lined the paths to Greek temples. Crocodile gods in Roman dress decorated Doric tombs. “Built in the finest situation in the world”, Alexandria stood sentry over a land of fabled riches and fantastic creatures, a favourite enigma to the Roman world. To a man like Julius Caesar, who for all his travels had never before set foot in Egypt, few of its astonishments would have been as great as the quick-witted young woman who had emerged from the traveler’s sack. 

STACY SCHIFF. A LIFE. CLEOPATRA

Other Links 

Hierophant Self Discovery. Monarchy l. Cleopatra. Stacy Schiff 

http://ameraziganiirao.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/monarchy-pt-l-cleopatra-stacy-schiff.html

Hierophant Self Discovery: Monarchy Pt lll. Cleopatra. Stacy Schiff 

http://ameraziganiirao.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/monarchy-pt-lll-cleopatra-stacy-schiff.html  

Hierophant Self Discovery. Portrait of a Priestess. Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece. The Lost Knowledge. Joan Breton Connelly

http://ameraziganiirao.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/hierophant-self-discovery-portrait-of.html

And God Created Woman. A Self Portrait. Amera Ziganii Rao Photography 

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The Sacred Whore High Priestess Hierophant™ and Sacred Pimp Warrior Protector, Brother Lover™ Society. The kings and queens of old. Angels and Sorcerers together in each of themselves and in the other. The Wizard life. Forever. Living and loving from The Source. Sourcery, Carlos Castaneda first said. I'll say it again. Sourcerers together. Living a life worth living. At last.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

Witches are healers. Witches are the Love Healers and SOURCErers of The Lost World, when we were the giant warriors. We were good and so were were you. 'The World of Men'. The Tribe of Misogyny and Bourgeois™.

Gives us all a bad name. And poisons all hearts.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

Feminist Lolita Intellectuals™. You lucky man. A place at the table, a place at the Executive Table. That's all. The rest is easy.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS: APPLIED CONSCIOUSNESS™, NEO FEMINISM™, METAPHYSICAL PHILOSOPHY & SACRED SEXUALISM™. POST TRIBE SOCIAL REFORM™. POWER IS THE NEW LOVE. FREEDOM + HOPELESSNESS + SEX. NIHILISM FOR A SUCCESSFUL LIFE™ THE LOST KNOWLEDGE™ THE WIZARDRY OF BEING™ POLITICAL SPIRITUALITY™ TRUE NEW LOVE. BEYOND THE REVOLUTION™

SOCIAL REFORM. THE FIGHT FOR FREEDOM AND LOVE. SHAMANISM. PHILOSOPHY. TRUE (UNIVERSAL) LOVE. NEO FEMINISM™. ANTI MISOGYNY. THE ARTIST'S WAY. WIZARDRY. TRUE INTELLECTUALISM™. WISDOM. GONZO SPIRITUALITY. NIHILISM. SEX. SOUL. GOD, THE MOTHER, THE UNIVERSE™. SPIRITUAL EXISTENTIALISM™. THE VOID OF CREATION™. ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™. HELL. SUFFERING. GROWTH. ASCENSION. LOVE. LIFE. DEATH. WARLORDS OF LIGHT™ TRUE LOVE & TRUE SEX. THE POST TRIBE SOCIETY™

The Company.

Writer, Speaker and Enlightener, Amera Ziganii Rao, is now putting together a comprehensive and unique programme of Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™. A programme of learning that is specifically about one particular kind of woman. And one particular kind of man. The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, and the true society that they come from and the one they, in particular, she can and has to return to and that anyone can join her and him in. This is about Paradise on Earth.

This is about The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, and the Alchemy and Liberation and Humanity that is for all as a result of their healing and in particular, hers. This is about the kind of woman who is at the bottom of the pile in a Patriarchal Toilet Tribe from Hell Society™, the norm, the conventional world and the world of the Tribe. This is about the kind of man who is next in line from the bottom. The sensitive man and the female chattel. The High Priestess and High Priest of a profane society, that has long forgotten who they are.

This is about being at the bottom of the pile, for the forgotten and strangled shamans, and for her, the story of escape. Abused by her family, her friends, her men, her whole society, by the very nature of who she is and who they are and what has happened on this Earth. It is about women of love, of Spirit and of sex. It is about men of love, of Spirit and of sex. It is about the Cinderellas of this world. It is about the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™. Who she is and how, loving her is the secret to Paradise on Earth and how we have been living a lie for 8000+ years. A lie of male (non High Priest) religion with a male ‘God’ and with Patriarchs and Patriarchal types and Matriarchs and Matriarchal types ruling over us and making our lives hell, all in the name of family, the tribe and the way things are and should remain. Hate, fascism and profanity. A sick society that vilifies, more than anyone else, the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™, just because it was told to. A sick society that calls her Eve. A sick society that has forgotten who we all are, let alone the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™. This is about us remembering and knowing who WE are.

This is a programme of healing for the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™, and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, to take them and particularly, her, from monstrous levels of low self esteem and lack of self knowledge, back to herself and it is a programme for all those who truly want to love her, and indeed, him. This is a programme for the greatest carers on Earth, who are vilified, destroyed, ridiculed, ignored, abused, used, misused and hated for being everything that those who would steal from us are not. This is a programme to turn Cinderellas into The Sacred Whore High Priestesses and for anyone who wants to love her or live by the values of the The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™. And this is a programme to turn sensitive men into Sacred Whore High Priests™ and for anyone who wants to love him and live by the values of the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and High Priest Society. Love, humanity, Spirit and sex. This is a programme to reverse 8000+ years of witch burning, women hating and healer ridicule. This is about the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and all those who would love her and live by her values.

This is about the chance for Paradise on Earth. This is a programme for the most beautiful, kind hearted, wounded women and men on this planet. A programme of how to implement a system of how to beat life, how to survive life and how to resurrect from the grief that is a true life. Alchemy and Liberation and Humanity of the lower mind into the higher mind, the soul and the inner heart and therefore one's true, confident, ‘happy’, successful, creative, sexual, sensual, individual, intelligent, emotionally healed, capable of loving and being loved self. How to turn grief into creation and survive and thrive, despite all the shit, all the pain and all the hurt. How to live in a world of madness, hollowness and cruelty and how to be a winner. How to stand up for oneself and to take back the power that has been stolen from anyone with heart, Spirit and sex. The art and science of Alchemy.

This is a programme, based on my scholarly and non scholarly work over 15 years (so far), if not for my whole life, and my extensive and intense, visceral experiences of self transformation from resignation, cynicism and despair to a state of relative bliss, and above all, the right to be. The programme and the courses and my speaking and indeed my forthcoming book, will cover the method of change. The psychological, sociological, spiritual, cultural, political, emotional and physical and even anthropological methods of change. Why we are here. Who the Sacred Whore High Priestess™ is and why she is here. And who the Sacred Whore High Priest™ is. Why we are here. Who we are and what we are and why we are. The beauty and glory of the truth. The meaning of life, no less. This will be on offer in the future.

My first book of consciousness, my first book of the spiritual politics of humanity, of authentic power and of self love and strength. A comprehensive series of online courses, live events and audio and visual material. Books, live events, CDs and DVDs. And one on one personal empowerment consultations. The Amera Ziganii Rao Method of Change™. The right to be and the way to have the right to be. And indeed, how to maintain the will to live without love. How to BE unconditional, self sufficient, self caring, self love. The right to be and the will to be and the unparalleled success that comes with that. The Lost Knowledge™. HOW to live. And how to heal others, the profane and the sick and the soulless. The others. My Business and that of any Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and Sacred Whore High Priest™, is Human Rights, The Right to a Sexual Society, Self Actualisation and Freedom.

My Business is To Overthrow Fascism, in the Home and in the Country. My business is also mastering destiny. Overthrowing the ultimate 'fascism'. Our journey on Earth and The Return To The Source. Our healing, our ascension and our redemption. Fate. The daily crucifixions of a true life, the challenges and the fury of being healers and people of love on a planet like Earth.

Submitting to the journey to liberate and evolve oneself, through following one's heart, however much heartbreak and devastation it leads to on the long long long journey to freedom and then the longer journey to happiness. 'Long Road to Freedom', as Nelson Mandela says. My business is always taking risks, never giving up and making the endless sacrifices it takes to become whole. Enlightenment, Nirvana and then Parinirvana and beyond. My business is pain. My business is bliss.

My business is seeing the truly glory of Spirit on Earth. The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™ and all that it is. Spirit, humanity, sex and love again at last. And the end of our legacy as either servants or witches or unpaid carers or indeed, ignored mistresses, other women, other men even, and the weirdos that are at the bottom of society. This is our world and it is time to take it back and I can show you how. And that makes my life, truly, worth living.

I want you to feel the way I do. Alive, with the right to be and the belligerence to exist in this profane and male ‘God’ led world of male supremacy, female supremacy, domestic, casual fascism, tribe rules from hell, with beautiful and kind, love intelligence laden, female and male Cinderella warriors at the bottom, caring for everyone else and getting nothing but hatred, ridicule and isolation for it. The meek are already inheriting the Earth and I can show you how.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past and I forgive you for becoming enslaved and taken over by the machines of the alien reptile force that invaded and took over Earth 8000 years ago. They taught you to hate me and my kind and you believed them. They told you I and my kind were dictators and that you were slaves, when all we had done was love you, honour you as companions and above all, we had let you just live.

We were the holy communers, the ones who gave birth to human beings, the leaders of society, the creators of society, the vehicles of Divinity on Earth and the channels of wisdom. The ones who looked after everything and the ones who built everything and ran everything, because we could. And because we loved it. We are and were the force of creation. And you loved us and you lived.

But they told you that you ‘deserved’ power too and that we were the ones standing in your way. And you believed them. The oldest ‘divide and rule’ strategy of hate in history and it worked. They used it and you bought it, hook, line and sinker. You had to give up sex, love, magic and your own spiritual gifts and you burnt, destroyed and violated me for 8000 years.

The world calls that male supremacy. And indeed, family supremacy, Matriarchal supremacy and supremacy of the material world and all who believe in it. Men and women like you. When all that you are are slaves to a reptile force to generate hate energy for them to live and thrive and vampire the human race. The puppets of a hate force, that chose to destroy women and men like me, for hate to grow, so they could live. You bought it and it worked. The greatest fraud in the history of the world.

I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past and I forgive you for becoming enslaved and taken over by the machines of the alien reptile force that invaded and took over Earth 8000 years ago. They taught you to hate me and my kind and you believed them. They taught you that my mind was evil. My mind, my sex, my body and my ways of life.

The humanity, the glory of sexuality and the glory of creation and creativity and the glory of Divinity in each and every one of us. Our souls. They taught you that human beings are separate from Divinity, that sex was wrong and that women who have minds of their own are uppity slaves. They vilified us but much much worse than that, they destroyed your relationship with all that is unseen, all that we honour and love.

They taught you to hate what is really God. By teaching you to hate us, you hated all that is good in yourselves. They taught you to hate the light. They taught you to kill us. The daughters of The Universe. The High Priestesses of God. The Spiritual Mothers. The Sacred Whore High Priestess Avatars of The Universe™. The Sacred Army of Love on Earth.

The Shamans, the Mystics and the Communers. The Hierophants.

They called me Eve and blamed me for the downfall of the human race and created the awesome profanity that is religion. Of men, by men and from men. Of reptiles, by reptiles and from reptiles. Christianity, Islam and Judaism and every other philosophy around the world was poisoned. There are no female spiritual leaders left. It is all profanity. They chose you to represent them because they wanted to divide us and they did. They told you to hate me. And you believed them. Now I am back and I forgive you.

I forgive you because I can. Because I came here to save your soul. And because I finally know who I am. I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past. I came here to return your soul to The Source. God, The Mother, The Universe. To return you to what is really God. Because I love you. And because She loves you and your kind, whatever you have done.

Whatever you have done to me and whatever you have done to Her. And most of all, whatever you have done to yourself. We forgive you. This is your redemption. Your freedom and your ascension. We are here to save your soul.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

You bought the Sacred Whore like a piece of meat and you called that a wife. Your trophy wives. Your dancing girls. Your chattel and serving girls. Your piece of beauty. You bought us like you would cattle. Then you called it wives. Now you call it prostitution. The High Priestesses of the real God. You bought us to buy God, The Mother, The Universe and you caged us, separated us from our Divine gifts and skills in the Temple and drove us mad and then lost interest in us, because we had no gifts left, no excitement, no hunter in ourselves and no hope or joy left. Then you just called us mad and discarded us. You called us evil and you call love obedience, even though it had already killed us. You moved into our Temples and you played with the divination tools and thought you communed. The destruction of Atlantis was your gift.

You stole us from God, The Mother, The Universe and you tried to usurp us. You vilified us, enslaved us and you still envy us today. You call it intuition. You might want to think about this when you hate us out of your jealousy. The mystic gene means physical tortuous pain and taking on the empathy of the human race. All their pains, evils and dark thoughts. We see and feel everything. We make crucial sacrifices to be near Spirit and the unseen and we go without for years. To be shaman is not glamour. I make it glamour. To be shaman is a specific Samurai existence, ascetic and harsh. We commune to be guides. And you take that and you shame yourselves because you just want the meat. You didn’t just want the meat. You wanted our beauty of spirit, our personalities and our love and kindness. And you destroyed them, because you caged us and called us wife.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

The High Priestess Sacred Whores, the High Priests and the true protectors. Those who do not have the gift like either the High Priests or especially like the highest of all, the High Priestess Sacred Whores but who honour, protect and facilitate them to the world. Who honour the Shaman Sacred Whores of this world most of all, and who know who they are and who they are not. Who know the difference, who do not envy and who protect and love the representatives of Spirit, GOD, THE MOTHER, THE UNIVERSE, on Earth. Who honour their wisdom and who honour the latent Shaman in themselves too and who honour the communing ability of the High Priestess Sacred Whores. The non violators. Our only friends. The New Society exists. It is called Enlightenment. It is called Love. It is The Holy Grail.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

The master race. It's all a lie. You are brought up to be a despot king and it is only your sister who ever tells you that you have become a pratt. The master race is all a lie. There are no kings in an equal world. Your father was misinformed. What he brought you up to be was a killer. Pure and simple. A misogynist. A modern misogynist. A polite killer.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

I enter the magical hours of pure feeling, pure thought, pure imagination and I think and I write and I 'mysticise' the Universe. I escape at will, the truth of my humanless, Samurai solitude, and I pursue the truth of love in myself and in everyone else. I am philosopher. I am shaman. I am alone. I frontier the Soul to be spirit on Earth.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

Amera Ziganii Rao is a former hard news journalist who is now turning professional with her art forms and indeed, her healing forms, after a long journey of inner searching, self teaching and exploring many layers and areas of both craft and wisdom. She is now working on her first book of philosophy and esoteric thought, and social, cultural and spiritual commentary. She is also showing her first photography collections. And last but most definitely not least, she is building a business to share her Sacred Whore High Priestess Society consciousness and empowering explorations to reach as many people as possible across the world. She is in her forties and lives in London.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

In the meantime, please enjoy this website. I have included many of the subjects I am covering, areas of experience and insight that I will be exploring to the fullest in my book, the courses and all the other work that is to come as a dramatist, novelist and essayist. I also of course, include many of the wise people on this planet, who have come long before me; authors, screen dramatists, playwrights, film makers, artists, and other enlighteners and grand carriers of the wisdom I have found the most helpful on my journey, to find peace and become enlightened. The seemingly impossible journey, in the face of oneself and one’s circumstances. People who have contributed massively to my healing on this mad journey called life, in this insane existence called The Universe. People who have helped to make me as good a carrier of wisdom as I in turn, can be. Thank you.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

Copyright and intellectual property rights are serious issues. And legally protected. Please do not reproduce my work anywhere without due credit and obviously, never for financial gain. 'Big Sister' is watching you! Other than that, please continue to enjoy my original work and the work of (credited) others, for free, while I work on using my material in further professional formats. Thank you for your interest and support.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

Thank you to outside source for photographs. Darkroomed by Amera Ziganii Rao