Book Review: The Smiting Texts
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Author: Roy Lester Pond
Published by Austin Macauley
372pp
A controversial Egyptologist is hired to avert a clash between two world superpowers thousands of years apart
Mr. Anson Hunter is an Egyptologist not so comfortable with the term. A phenomenologist who specializes in what the author calls fringe Egyptology, Hunter interprets arcane Egyptian belief in a way that still poses a threat to the stability of modern western civilization. For Hunter, Ancient Egypt was the world superpower of its day, much like the U.S. in present times. Like its present counterpart, Ancient Egypt had its own version of weapons of mass destruction in the form of smiting rituals and execration texts with the potency to destroy enemies at long distances. This supranormal “remote killing” power was capable of transcending the boundaries of space and time. Upon this premise the author constructs a thriller that takes us on a journey that includes Egypt’s most visited “pharaonic” attractions, action packed with murder, chase scenes, cliff hangers and love among the ruins, accompanied by US Homeland Security agents, spies, Coptic monks, a young attractive female Egyptologist, government officials, hit men in gallabeyahs and a cold-blooded female assassin in full black hijab.
The author does not disguise his knowledge of mainstream Egyptology as he describes the ancient sites like a seasoned tour guide. But as an alternative Egyptologist, Anson Hunter untangles new mysteries about the ancient Egyptian civilization affirmation of survival after death by the power of symbolism and magic over matter, a virtual afterlife built by a collective unconscious, sustained by religion and tangible in the form of pyramids, temples and tombs. His elucidations are esoteric bombs that undermine the foundations of today’s world major religions.
The plot unfolds like a box office hit in the genre of the Indiana Jones series, Stargate and the new Mummy adventure sequels, none of which I’m really fanatic about. Yet I would enjoy watching the scene where Anson Hunter recites a prayer from one chapter of the Book of the Dead to unravel the engineering secrets of Ancient Egypt and manages to escape from certain death in the entrails of the Devourer.
The book is written in the third person. In my opinion, it would have been more effective in the first, if only because we are much more exposed to the Egypt (both the present and the past) experience from the protagonist point of view than from any of the other characters.
- Ben Morales-Correa
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