Ancient Evenings by Norman Mailer (1983 Little, Brown & Company)

Like James Joyce's Ulysses and Thomas Pyncheon's Gravity's Rainbow, this is a long and difficult book. However, like most arduous endeavors, the payoff is big. Ancient Evenings takes the reader on a trip through the culture, religion, sexuality and politics of ancient Egypt that has been obsessively researched (Mailer spent 10 years doing research for the book.) and rightfully left unsanitized. This is not the National Geographic version of Ancient Eqyptian evenings. The sexual taboos and labels that we have today simply don't exist for the ancient Egyptian. The "birds 'n' bees" were not explained in an uncomfortable chat, there were no little books left on beds with "all you need to know". Instead children were given hands-on experience, at a very young age, with the parent of the opposite sex. Shocking and abohorent to us, but a matter of religious communion to the people of this distant culture. There were no Platonic relationships between anyone, of any sex or blood relation, simply because they had no purpose. To the ancient Egyptian , sexuality was a perfectly natural way to show affection to anyone. The only sexual taboo that seemed to be prevailent in this culture laid only in sex for procreation; royalty and the extremely wealthy, may use severants and slaves for sex, but they are never to impregnate or become impregnated by them. (Herbal abortions were very a very common request from priest, who also served as doctors.) Strange that it was this one taboo, not indulgence, that led to the weakening of Dynastic Egypt through forced inbreeding and allowed, in part, for their overthrow by Alexander the Great in 332 BC. Alexander put in place the Greek Ptolmey Dynasty which ended with the infamous Cleopatra 300 years later. (That's right, she was a Greek, not an Egyptian.)

Before you start the 709 page odyssey that is Ancient Evening, I suggest having a working knowledge of The Seven Souls of ancient Egyptian religion as spelled out in the Book of the Dead, but made much more accessible (and humorous!) in William Burroughs final novel, The Western Lands:

"Top soul, and the first to leave at the moment of death, is Ren, the Secret Name. This corresponds to my Director. He directs the film of your life from conception to death. The Secret Name is the title of your film. When you die, that's where Ren came in.

Second soul, and second one off the sinking ship, is Sekem: Energy, Power, Light. The Director gives the orders, Sekem presses the right buttons.

Number three is Khu, the Guardian Angel. He, she, or it is third man out ... depicted as flying away across a full moon, a bird with luminous wings and head of light. Sort of thing you might see on a screen in an Indian restaurant in Panama. The Khu is responsible for the subject and can be injured in his defense-but not permanently, since the first three souls are eternal. They go back to Heaven for another vessel. The four remaining souls must take their chances with the subject in the Land of the Dead.

Number four is Ba, the Heart, often treacherous. This is a hawk's body with your face on it, shrunk down to the size of a fist. Many a hero has been brought down, like Samson, by a perfidious Ba.

Number five is Ka, the Double, most closely associated with the subject. The Ka, which usually reaches adolescence at the time of bodily death, is the only reliable guide through the Land of the Dead to the Western Lands.

Number six is Khaibit, the Shadow, Memory, your whole past conditioning from this and other lives.

Number seven is Sekhu, the Remains."

Throughout, Ancient Evenings changes perspective from one soul to another. While it sets a unique and unpretentiously surreal atmosphere for the book, it can be discouraging from the start if you don't know the method to the madness. (I suggest printing these Burroughs definitions and using them as a handy bookmark and reference.)

Also, Julian Jaynes' Bicameral Mind Theory seems to have worked it's way into the psyche of Mailer's subjects. A superficial understanding of his theory, I think, will help you to have a deeper and more enlightening understanding of these seemingly strange characters. Simply put, Jaynes' postulated, and vehemently defended, the idea that ancient mankind did not live in the conscious state that we do, but in a halucinatory state in which a person didn't pause to think through a decision when met with an obsticle. Rather, the descision was made almost instantly on a subconscious level, in a part of the brain that functions, and serves the same purpose, in the conscious mind today. The decision was then presented to this ancient human being in the form of an halucinated, auditory command. As life became more complex for ancient man, the Bicameral Mind became less effective and began to break down. This breakdown, according to Jaynes, is the evolutionary source of all religion in modern mankind. He references the world of Homer and the Iliad, and the strange worlds of the ancient Egyptians and pre-Columbian Aztecs as shinning examples of societies that functioned under the bicameral mindset. Mailer was very much under the spell of Julian Jaynes and his ideas, as were many authors and intellectuals in the late 70's and early 80's.