Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [163]
I have the extraordinary good fortune of counting among my friends a scholar in classical and early Christian magic, so I used the work and words, some published, some not, of Dayna S. Kalleres as guides in the research process.
In regard to Egyptian history, magic, religion, folklore, and hieroglyphic evidence, I consulted a variety of documents, both ancient and contemporary, including The Egyptian Book of the Dead (more properly known as The Book of Going Forth by Day). Sekhmet is a real goddess, and her history as laid out in this book is, for the most part, supported by Egyptian lore. A particularly good account of the relationship between Sekhmet and Ra and the attempted destruction of humanity by Sekhmet may be found in Geraldine Pinch’s Magic in Ancient Egypt. Discussion of Sekhmet’s Seven Slaughterers may also be found in this excellent book, though Plague, as depicted in Queen of Kings, is inspired by the Irish legend of the Boyhood of Finn and Birgha, the spear he uses to defeat the lovely voiced giant, Aillen. Sekhmet’s more contemporary incarnation, post-Isis, had placed her as a “women’s goddess”—meaning that she presided over childbeds and menstruation—a definite demotion from her earlier responsibilities, which were waging war and destroying enemies of both Ra and the Egyptian pharaohs. It is no wonder, in my opinion, that in this book, she is ready for something a bit more interesting.
Chapter 4 of Book of Divinations is inspired by my favorite section of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The notion of a ghost ship whose passengers and crew have (all but the captain) been slaughtered by the monster they’ve unwittingly brought aboard has always made my skin crawl, and when I saw the chance to create my own variation, I was delighted to do so. The ship in Stoker’s novel is the Demeter.
The Sibylline Oracles are a complicated collection of documents created mainly in the second through fifth centuries A.D., but encompassing fragments dating back to the first century B.C.E. They are scholarly forgeries of earlier oracular texts—the Sibylline Books—which were mostly lost in a fire in 83 B.C.E. In the time of Augustus, they began to be commissioned propaganda, and written by scholars on both sides. They’d be consulted and read aloud as the words of the gods. However, the scholars who wrote the Oracles came from all sides of the events—even from Alexandria—and so some of them predict Cleopatra’s destruction of Rome, and others predict the glittering rise of Rome under Augustus. The quotations that begin Book of Divinations and Book of Lightning, and which are referenced throughout Queen of Kings, are from the oldest sections of the Sibylline Oracles, Books III–V. The quotations are taken unaltered from the 1899 translation of the Sibylline Oracles, and are generally agreed to be referencing Cleopatra and her dealings with Antony and Augustus.
As crazy as this may sound, given the Sibylline Oracles depiction of “the widow,” the “cataract of fire” and the cohabitation with a “man-eating lion” as well as the mutilated fragment involving Cleopatra being buried: “thee the stately shall the encircling tomb receive . . . is gone . . . living within,” this book was not inspired by them. I found these bits of awesomeness long after I conceived the book’s plotline, as I was in the midst of writing the final battle. Needless to say, I screamed with joy when I discovered them. Augustus really did historically burn a vast quantity of books, and personally and specifically censored the Sibylline Oracles. I took a few wild, thoroughly enjoyable leaps in imagining the creation of the Sibylline fragments, and the literal nature of them.
The historian Nicolaus of Damascus is a real character, with the outlines of his actual biography roughly