Curses of the Gods

Much has been publicised concerning the 1922 Tutankhamun discovery and the mysterious deaths that followed. Atheistic scholars, who begin with the assumption that spiritual power doesn't exist, are naturally at a loss to explain the pattern. Those of us who work with these forces daily find nothing mysterious about it.

When Howard Carter's expedition opened the tomb in February 1923 (funded by Lord Carnarvon), a clay tablet was discovered bearing hieroglyphic warnings: a curse of violent and untimely death upon anyone who disturbed the resting place. The archaeologists, being products of the Enlightenment and therefore contemptuous of anything they couldn't weigh or measure, concealed this warning from the native Egyptian labourers (who knew better) and proceeded regardless. Strange and inexplicable events followed immediately.

Carter's pet canary was swallowed by a cobra the day the tomb was opened. The cobra is the symbol of the Uraeus, the protective serpent on the pharaoh's brow: Tutankhamun's guardian striking the first warning. Lord Carnarvon himself died within weeks from an infected mosquito bite on his cheek. Arthur Weigall recorded in Tutankhamen and Other Essays (1924) that at the moment of Carnarvon's death, the lights in Cairo went out. His dog in England, thousands of miles away, howled and died at the same hour. Over the following years, a disproportionate number of people connected to the opening died under unusual circumstances: pneumonia, blood poisoning, fever, suicide. The British Medical Journal investigated in 2002, and while the statistical analysis was debated, the cluster of early deaths among those physically present at the opening was difficult to explain by coincidence alone.

The ancient Egyptians were master practitioners of heka (magickal power). This wasn't a peripheral practice. The Coffin Texts (c. 2100 BCE, Spell 261) declare: "Heka was with the Lord of the Universe before there were two things in this world." Magick was foundational to Egyptian civilisation: one of the primordial forces that existed before creation itself. The Execration Texts (c. 1900 BCE), discovered at Mirgissa and Saqqara, provide physical evidence of curse technology in routine use. Clay figurines and pottery were inscribed with the names of enemies, ritually smashed, and buried. The practice was systematic, institutional, and clearly effective enough to warrant the enormous resources the state invested in it.

The curses placed on royal tombs were engineered with the same precision as the architecture that housed them. Layered, self-sustaining, drawing on the accumulated power of the funerary rituals and the spiritual authority of the Gods invoked in their creation: they were designed to function for millennia. And they did. The energy work required to create a curse that remains effective for 3,300 years speaks to a level of spiritual advancement that our civilisation hasn't come close to recovering. The priests who created these protections understood something about the persistence of spiritual energy that modern practitioners are only beginning to rediscover.

The lesson is clear. Spiritual power is real. Curses are real. The Gods and their priests were not playing at symbolism. They were working with forces that produce measurable effects in the physical world. Dismissing this as superstition is the luxury of the ignorant, and those who opened the tomb didn't have that luxury. For more on protective and offensive spiritual work, see the Returning Curses section and the Magick pages. The Family of the Gods is the context in which these powers are developed responsibly.