Let’s talk pillows… from extremely soft to incredibly super-hard Egyptian ‘memory foam’ – as in carved from stone
The alabaster pillow found in the teenager, King Tutankhamun’s, tomb (depicted in the painting, although I have shown the top half of the ka figure coming to life) was similar to the Great Pyramid of Giza in that it was a story recorded in stone. The deceased’s ka (we call them ghosts) is represented by a male figure holding both his arms over his head, as if, I like to think, he’s carrying the thoughts of the sleeper.
The ka parties on in the underworld fed by the deceased relatives’ offerings of food and beer. The constellation is of Leo, protected by Nut the goddess of the sky and heavens, shown bent over the earth with her head in the west and her feet in the east. Her mother, Tefnut, was the goddess of heat. Her father, Shu, was the god of vital breath.
On the flipside of time, housecats have protected the time portals of Bede, a mystical pocket of countryside nestled close to Hadrian’s Wall in Britain, for thousands of years. A cat nap is no minor undertaking, there, and a sleeping cat at dusk is almost always on an out-of-body mission, patrolling the liminal boundaries of Bede: Hadrian’s Wall, the Isle of Lindisfarne, and the wild rambling forests of the Green Man that connect them in a landscape that’s positively ancestral.
The haunted ‘Winter Room’, nestled in the cold spot of Bede Hall’s attic, houses the soft snow-white ‘Winter Pillow’ that imparts healing properties of cool soothing relief, ideal for taking the sting out of sunstroke and stressful headaches. The opposite of uncomfortable.
I hope the Egyptian ‘headrest pillows’ were intended to prop up the heads of mummies. If not, the living must have had some horrific sleepless nights, but leaving neck problems aside, two lions back-to-back represent yesterday and tomorrow – the perfect place for laying one’s head if they’re intending to sleep for eternity or a few thousand years before an Egyptologist invades their space.
Which brings me to the ‘Mummies’ Curse’ begun in book one ‘Twinter-the first portal’ and revealed in book 3 ‘Tomorrow Again’ via the artful logic of alchemy. And if you’d like to know the sinister reason why ‘the boy king’s’ name changed from Tutankhaten to Tutankhamun at the last minute before his coronation, that is disclosed too.
Veronica Knox 