#23 NEFERTARI (1292-1225BC)
Nefertari was one of the Ramses II’s (1303-1213BC) seven wives and she was his favourite. He celebrated his love for her by inscribing a poem on the wall of her beautifully painted tomb:
My love is unique
No one can rival her
For she is the most beautiful woman alive
Just by passing
She has stolen away my heart
While nothing is known of Nefertari’s parents, it seems she was also of royal birth because she bears the title ‘Hereditary Princess”. Because she is referred to as “God’s wife of Amun” she probably had independent wealth and power.
Nefertari and Ramses may have been married before he became Pharaoh in his early twenties. Together they had at least five children, three boys and two girls; none of whom would inherit the throne. For the first thirty years of Ramses sixty-seven year reign, Nefertari is seen either standing beside him or shown as part of his entourage until she, like Nefertiti, suddenly disappears. Presumably she too died.
While Nefertari lived, Ramses carved her a small temple from living rock just north of his own great temple at Abu Simbel. In there, her statues were carved equal in size and magnificence to his own statues which implies equal status and importance and one statue showed her together with the Goddess Hathor, which implied equality with a goddess.
In 1904, the tomb of Nefertari was discovered in the Valley of the Queens at Thebes. Her red granite sarcophagus was empty, her mummy and her tomb treasures long gone but the walls remained covered with exquisite paintings of her life and of her journey into the afterlife.
Her life poses many questions. Why was she given such important titles, seldom endowed on other queens? Was she of royal blood? Why is she shown as an equal with her own temple? How did she influence Ramses? Was this really a love match in the millennium of arranged marriages? Why does her power appear to dissipate when her offspring do not assume the throne? What happened to her? Did she die or was she pushed aside?
Conversation with the Gatekeeper
“Was Nefertari from a royal family?”
“She was more royal than Ramses and from her mother’s side – she was directly descended from the last of the old pharaohs; Horembeb.”
“Her tomb drawings show her as a beautiful woman. Are they accurate?”
“Nefertari, who is from the High Priestess or Isis line of Mary, was breathtakingly beautiful, stunning. She had almond eyes and blue-black hair around her alabaster skin and face. She used her attractiveness and her sexual allure very effectively. She was fairly tall, slim, small breasted, with a neat figure. She was musical, played the lute and the flute and danced… she even drew with above average skill.”
“Did they marry young?”
“They married shortly after he became Pharaoh. She was fourteen, he was nineteen, she was dark, he was fair, a redhead in fact. This is the Hilarion line and he loves the red hair and you see it in Henry the Eighth, George Washington and in Uther Pendragon. This was a love match, but she had to share him with other wives which she didn’t like at all. In the beginning it was wonderfully passionate when they were completely in love, although towards the end it tended to sour. He had hurt her too much with his sexual activities.”
“What was Ramses like?”
“He was an autocrat; arrogant and physically imposing, athletic, handsome and a warrior. He was a bad delegator who kept on interfering in everything. He was passionate and terrible in rage; as a bi-sexual he was very insecure and completely out of balance.”
“How was Nefertari able to influence him?”
“Ramses asked her advice on many cultural matters because of her obvious talents, but he consulted her most of all on statecraft. She was very intelligent and shrewder than him. Ramses tended to be trusting in his relationships and not politically astute like his wife.”
“Ramses II, you have told me, was the Pharaoh in the time of Homer. Did Nefertari ever meet him?”
“This is a good question because Nefertari and Homer will experience so many lives together and this will be their first meeting within your historical record and it took place in her beautiful garden. Homer was so drunk he was completely incomprehensible but she persevered sitting near him at a stat banquet of the Chief Minister and commanding her servants to keep watering down his wine. There they had a long conversation about singing and music and while he promised to write a song poem for her, he never did. By the time they met again he was very ill and she sent for her personal physician to treat him. He had renal failure, cirrhosis of the liver, bad arthritis and gout. So went the first meeting of Dante and his beloved Beatrice and she was not very impressed.”
“So what else is there that I should know about Nefertari?”
“Whenever we discuss the lives of Mary I want you to ask me about her gardens and her pets, two very important parts of Mary’s lives. Nefertari had a pet monkey she kept in a brass tree, and a domesticated cheetah who was trained not to regard her monkey as a snack. She had two pairs of Pharaonic hounds, hunting dogs – their descendants survive in Sardinia and she loved birds; she kept an African grey parrot and a red tailed kite. Her animals swarmed around her and fragrant flowers grew in her beautiful gardens. At the beginning of the twentieth century she will be one of the great garden designers, Gertrude Jekyll.”
“As a gardener then, she was a great colourist. Was Nefertari religious like Nefertiti?”
“She was invited to be a member of the White Order because the priests recognised her purity of intention. Therefore she believed in one god. She was spiritual rather than religious in her outlook.”
“Why did Nefertari incarnate?”
“She had a very similar purpose to Nefertiti to experience the wielding of power as a woman. There are three divisions of Mary; those who are descended from Eve, the first mother, those descended from Artemis and Diana and those who reflect the energy of Demeter and Persephone. Nefertari was of Demeter. This woman is a natural queen, think of her as Elizabeth, the Queen Mother of Great Britain, a natural queen, and as Ramses’ wife she was to supply him with plenty of bright ideas. It was a dual reign and she had to learn a lesson that her trust will not always repaid with trust.”
“Was that her main purpose or was there more?”
“Her main purpose was to break, or severely facture the mould that enclosed Egyptian women and she was partly successful. She reinstated women as scribes, won first by Nefertiti but then lost after her murder, and she had women recognised in the official ranking for priestess almost equal to priests, particularly for the priestess of Bast.
And there was yet another purpose. She was a born general, a very good archer and she was bound to be frustrated because Ramses wouldn’t allow her to fight at his side. She pushed also for massive entry of women into the field of medicine…”
“Their marriage then must have had some equality for her to achieve those breakthroughs for women.”
“Yes. At the beginning it was and for the first ten years. It was Ramses who lost his liberalism. He started off giving her great equality with freedom and authority – far more than most queens. But after time his insecurity nibbled at him so he closed off her areas of responsibility which frustrated and angered her.”
“What did she bring with her to the incarnation?”
“She brought enormous loyalty and unswerving and focussed devotion to her husband’s people. A good and practical mind which was better for civil government that Ramses’.”
“And what qualities of Mary did she bring?”
“Her high intelligence, her linguistic ability, her compassion, her feminism, she was instinctively regal and this was a core issue in their marriage… she often had to hold back the answer and feed it to her husband at the right time. One more thing… Mary’s love of archery.”
“Haven’t we seen that already in her life as Arjuna? What was her spiritual challenge?”
“That the man she adored did not regard faithfulness as essential requirement for the job of husband. It was a thorn in her way of flowers. Nefertari had to live with other wives and concubines because she did not have a monogamous relationship with Ramses. He would, across his lifetime, have more than one hundred and fifty children. She would have to deal with her jealousy and grief. She was also proud and, poisoned by his neglect, her love turned to dislike.”
“It’s a tough challenge. Did she reach it?”
“Yes, in the main. She had to explore loyalty and faithfulness and not to expect her own standards from anyone else, however much she loved them.”
“Nefertari seems to disappear from royal life. Did she retire or did she die?”
“She was kidnapped and murdered by Kephor, a co-conspirator with the Chamberlain of the School of Scribes. They wanted to oust Ramses who had a problem with his nobles. He didn’t agree with their advice and favoured instead advice from educated commoners. The kidnappers were hoping to use her as a persuasive weapon to make Ramses do as he was told. Instead, in a rage, he lopped off the heads of nobles which provoked her kidnappers even further. For two weeks … no, fifteen days, she was held. It was a terrifying experience but for Ramses it nearly sent him insane.”
“How did she die?”
“They strangled her. Her body was discovered eight hours later dumped in a poor and blameless man’s house in Memphis. He recognised her body and immediately sent it to be treated properly and embalmed. He went to a retired general’s house, a distant relative of the King who plucked up his courage to tell the Pharaoh. Ramses ordered that his whole Academy of Artists to do nothing but furnishings for her tomb.
Everybody knew the Chamberlain was the mastermind of the kidnapping but there was no public trial, no execution. Instead Ramses had him bricked into the bottom of a pyramid alive, and told everyone the queen had been poisoned. What really happened wasn’t to be admitted because it would undermine his royal authority. Ramses speedily took himself off to war against the Hittites and the Syrians.
Nefertari’s beautiful tomb would be broken into by robbers and her mummy stolen and abandoned and now it’s irretrievably lost.”
“Her accomplishments?”
“She subtly managed royal policy and was a tremendous influence on Ramses. His statecraft deteriorated after her death.”
Thinking about these Lives
Imhotep, the quiet achiever, will give his name to one of the most remarkable lives of St Germain. In contrast to St Germain’s normal persona of front-line, larger than life characters, Imhotep, and those who share his energy, are no frills, nose to the grindstone, dependable men. Wonderful men like Captain James Cook and President James Madison. They are explorers, navigators, scientists, architects, politicians, lawyers, physicians, presidents, philosophers and warriors they are all meticulous, exact and hard working and they deliver, like Imhotep, on the toughest missions. This is one of six lines of the vast energy of God called St Germain. Taken together they will give us a picture of the embrace of contradictions within him. The first line of St Germain is that of the Comte de Saint-Germain himself. I’ve arbitrarily called it the Saint-Germain line spelling out Saint and hyphenating the name in the French fashion to differentiate it from the generic use of St Germain. The second of his lines is the Jacob Line which we first meet it in this chapter with a peep at Homer. He sits on a branch of Jacob the Trickster line which I call after Homer’s successor, Dante, because it more adequately captures this creature of romance. This Dante branch includes poets, writers, dreamers, diplomats, artists, actors, musicians and dancers. The main line named after Jacob, the founder of Israel and the founders of China and Singapore and the reformed trickster, and it too includes soldiers, poets, dramatists, musicians and priests. The third line is Imhotep’s which branches immediately into the Caesar line, called after the authoritarian Julius Caesar himself, charming, graceful, courageous, manipulative, great lawyers and honey-tongued; this line founds nations and empires, runs countries, exercises extreme power by which these lives can become corrupted. Linked to it is its opposite, the Boaz line of upright, saintly, courageous men who too exercise power but their incorruptibility can absolutely be relied on. They fight for reform, liberate the oppressed and are some of the best orators and greatest magicians ever created. Are there more? Possibly. St Germain sometimes creates a hybrid by combining two of his lines for a special impact and purpose. He did this to create the genius Benjamin Franklin combining the talents of the Imhotep line – shown in his inventions with the clever wit and wisdom with the trickery of the Jacob line.
The powerful queens of this chapter, Nefertiti and Nefertari, come from two different lines of Mary and unlike St Germain, there are only four: the Mary the Mother line, and the Diana/Artemis line called after the Roman and Greek goddesses. This line is also called Mary the Magdalene line. Her third line is the Demeter line called after another Greek goddess or alternatively it is called the High Priestess line. And finally, all three lines come together and create the fourth line: Nefertiti line. Why only four? The Gatekeeper claims Mary is better organised and more integrated than St Germain. Those who share her spiritual DNA tend to be reticent, intelligent and nurturing.
St Germain seldom incarnates as a woman but when he does, he creates those who make your blood race: they are courtesans, actresses, dancers and film stars. My favourites are Lady Hamilton, Kate Hepburn and Judy Garland. Mary frequently incarnates as a man so she can experience the creative surge and dynamism of the yang energy. She served as the Apostle Phillip, as Admiral Nelson, as Nelson Mandela and she also created a life as a Romantic poet, Percy Shelley. Another favourite of mine was her life as Claude Monet. When I asked the Gatekeeper why she chose those lives, in particular, and his reply was interesting. He said, at the time she was incarnating, she wouldn’t have been able as a woman to explore her capabilities as a poet or an artist and be taken seriously by St Germain when he was the poet Lord Byron or by him as the artists by Edouard Manet or Edgar Degas. St Germain’s feminism in the eighteenth and nineteenth century obviously still had a way to go.
Nefertiti and Nefertari shared beauty, dignity and intelligence; they married strong and unusual men and they shared the same fate of assassination. History, however, is silent on their deaths because their mummified bodies were not recoverable by archaeologists and because the scandal of their deaths was covered up with the agreement of their grieving husbands. In both these lives Mary only partly achieved her purpose. Nefertiti and her husband failed to establish monotheism as the state religion in Egypt while Nefertari did not create as many opportunities for women as she hoped. Neither of them experienced marital fidelity. Homer’s promise of writing a poetic song for Nefertari will take three thousand years to be created as the Divine Comedy but his promise will be kept. Mary, in that Demeter/High Priestess line will, however, explore further her love for the aspect of Hilarion who was Rameses. Remember in his poem on her tomb, he wrote: “My love is unique.” She will return as his lover Hephaestion to his Alexander the Great; his mother, St Helena, to his Constantine the Great and as his last queen, Katherine Parr to his Henry the Eighth. So, perhaps love is never over until the fat man sings!
Mary’s Artemis energy will return as an Egyptian queen in Cleopatra where she will fulfil her purpose to terminate the corrupted Egyptian Empire.
In this chapter, we stumble again across the shadowy White Order. All three of the characters were members of it. Understanding the White Order or Brotherhood will be a critical objective of The Line to God. It holds the key to the foundation of Judaism and Christianity, the Knights of the Round Table, the Knight Templars and the Masonic Orders.
