The Dennis Wheatley 'Museum'

Test 2: Have major discoveries been made since the book was published ? And if there have been, did Joan forsee them ?

'Winged Pharaoh' contains numerous references to the Royal Burials at 'Abidwa' (i.e. Abydos), and these tombs were well known from the late nineteenth century onwards thanks to the incompetent excavations of Amelineau in the late 1890s (according to Petrie, Amelineau boasted 'that he had reduced to chips the pieces of stone vases which he did not care to remove, and burnt up the remains of the woodwork of the 1st dynasty in his kitchen') and the following painstaking analysis of the debris by the man who can probably lay claim to being the world's first true Egyptologist - Flinders Petrie.

When Joan wrote Winged Pharaoh, there was a universal understanding that the Royal tombs of the First and second dynasties were located in the western desert near the town of Abydos in middle Egypt, and that these were the only monumental burials of the period. Indeed, no-one had any cause to think otherwise.

Shortly after 'Winged Pharaoh' was finished, however, another British archaeologist, Walter Emery, started excavating some vast tombs of the same period far to the north at Sakkara. These were huge edifices, certainly on a par with those at Abydos, although they looked very different - while the Abydos tombs were holes in the ground surmounted by mounds, these were huge above ground rectangular mud brick edifices.

Whether one was a burial (the Abydos tombs have best claim to this, as we know they once contained royal bodies) and the other a cenotaph, or whether one was the Royal tomb (Abydos) and the other a tomb of a hugely important functionary is still the subject of debate, but the point is that these were built at the same time and were vast. If Joan had Far Memory she would have known about these massive mastabas. They must have been a huge conversation point at Court, as well as entailing huge significant amounts of administration and work from a large proportion of the population.

This to me is the most devastating proof that Joan did not have Far Memory.

Test 3: This is the converse of the previous test, insofar as it looks from book to real world, rather than from real world to book:

The third test is as I say an 'open test' but I cannot see how anything could possibly be found that was so important and material that it would explain away or set aside the seemingly intractable difficulties posed in the first two tests.

There are things to be found if they were not figments of Joan's imagination, but there are not many that are concrete.

The only one I can think of is the stela that Sekeeta set up in the 'Amphitheatre of Grain' (i.e. at Amarna) to celebrate her victory over the 'Zuma' (Winged Pharaoh Part VII, Chapter 4), but I am afraid that if that was found, given the results of the other tests, my first instinct would be to look for a non-occult explanation. And this only if such a stela was found, and proved genuine.

Brief comments on areas of Joan's other Egypt Far Memory books which pose particular difficulties to an acceptance that Joan had 'Far Memory'

'Eyes of Horus'

Test 1.1: The iconography of the tombs at Beni Hasan is conventional Middle Egyptian and does not seem consistent with Joan Grant's story; If one looks at the iconography in the tombs of the Khnum Hotep family at Beni Hasan, either physically (which I have) or in books, it is hard to reconcile the wall decorations to the religion that Joan describes rather than to the multi-faceted and very materialistic religion that we conventionally understand the Egyptians to have had, and which was not reincarnation orientated.; Parts of the iconography show, for example, the Nomarch becoming a god.; It is also hard to reconcile the names of the Nomarchs with the names of Ra-ab's family.
Test 1.2: Religion; There is no evidence that I am aware of that the Eleventh Dynasty favoured the worship of Set & Sekhmet whereas the Twelfth Dynasty favoured Ra & Horus. Nor that the worship of Set & Sekhmet was carried out in the manner described.

'Lord of the Horizon'

Test 1.1: The location of Ith-Tawy; See page 3 Section B paragraph 3 above regarding Joan's 'Author's Note on 'Ithtowe'.
Test 1.2: 'The Teaching of King Amenenhat (I) for his son'; Towards the end of the book there is a section Part IV Chapter IV, 'Fear in the Palace', in which King Amenemhat (I) suffers from a persecution complex and depression, and in confidence he gives his son some very downbeat advice about trusting no-one, which the son confides in Ra Ab.; This advice seems to fit almost exactly with a piece of classical (and popular then and well known now) Egyptian literature called 'The teachings of King Amenemhat for his son', and which is widely believed to have been written as a piece of propaganda - possibly after the King's assassination.

'So Moses Was Born'

Test 2.1: There is no mention of the extraordinary tomb complex discovered by Kent Weeks in 1995; There is very little of detail to get into here, but since in the book Rameses II talks frankly and frequently with the narrator (his half-brother), it is perhaps surprising there is no mention of the vast and complex tomb that Rameses was engaged in building at the time - far larger and more complex than anything his predecessors had attempted, and that was discovered in 1995 by Kent Weeks; As an aside, and I am not sure if it has been remarked on elsewhere, the name 'Moses' is interesting in itself, and in a way which might perhaps have supported Joan's tenet that Moses was the son of Ramesses II by a young Hebrew girl. 'Moses' could easily be a corruption of the ancient Egyptian Ms-s, which can be translated into 'his son'.; I throw this in for what it is worth, but it is not relevant to an assessment of Joan's thesis as it is a point she does not make.

Conclusion

All the forgoing leads me, reluctantly, to conclude without a shadow of doubt that Joan did not possess Far Memory.

Does this mean that Joan should be written off as a 'sham' and assigned to the scrap heap of history?

Certainly not.

Even if we now know that Joan did not have Far Memory, her belief system brought hope to hundreds of thousands of people who had been through the devastation of World War One, the flu pandemic that followed it, and one of the world's severest economic recessions, and who were about to face another War in which they would also be in need of comfort. And without that comfort (and Dennis Wheatley was far from the only senior figure in World War Two to have unconventional beliefs. George Patton was also a believer in reincarnation while many other senior figures in the War effort on both sides of the Atlantic were committed Christians) maybe the War would not have been waged quite so resolutely and without quite such a favourable (to the Allies) outcome.

Furthermore, both Joan and Dennis gave us as a direct result of Joan's beliefs some beautiful and very exciting books which can be enjoyed as novels as much today as they could be when they were first written.

Joan Grant and Dennis Wheatley are certainly among the most unusual people to have come out of Twentieth Century Britain, but that does not prevent them from being important, and they were both important as authors and opinion formers, and for that reason if no other they remain worthy of study.

But for a concluding test of a less academic nature, one might go back to the question posed by the 'Great Hunters', who at the end of 'Scarlet Feather' asked each member of Joan's tribe when they died :

"How many people are happier because you were born?"

Joan and Dennis's answers would be in far larger numbers than most of ours, I would wager.

Material for further reading in connection with the above

General History of Ancient Egypt

Sir Alan Gardiner, 'Egypt of the Pharaohs', Oxford University Press 1961
Ian Shaw, 'The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt', Oxford University Press 2000

While the former was written some four decades before the latter, it is still worth reading and has lists of kings, for example, which are absent from the latter.

The First Dynasty (The period of 'Winged Pharaoh')

Emile Amelineau, 'Les Nouvelles fouilles d'Abydos [Compte rendu des fouilles d'Abydos 1896-1898]'
W.F.Petrie, 'Abydos' Parts I to III, The Egypt Exploration Fund 1902-1904
W.B.Emery, 'Archaic Egypt', Pelican 1961
Michael Hoffman, 'Egypt before the Pharaohs', Ark, 1984
Toby Wilkinson, 'Early Dynastic Egypt', Routledge 1999
B.G.Trigger, B.J.Kemp, D.O'Connor, A.B.Lloyd, 'Ancient Egypt: A social history', Cambridge University Press 1983
Alexander Badawy, 'A History of Ancient Egyptian Architecture', Vol 1 From the earliest times to the end of the Old Kingdom, Studio Misr, Giza 1954
David O'Connor, 'Abydos', Thames & Hudson , 2009
David Wengrow, 'The Archaeology of Early Egypt', Cambridge University Press 2006
Barry J.Kemp, 'Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilisation', Routledge 1989

Richard H Wilkinson, 'Egyptian Scarabs', Shire Egyptology, 2008

The beginnings of the Middle Kingdom (The period of 'Eyes of Horus' & 'Lord of the Horizon')

P.E.Newberry & others, 'Beni Hasan' Parts I to IV, Archaeological Survey of Egypt 1893-1900.
Janice Kamrin, 'The Cosmos of Khnumhotep II at Beni Hasan', Kegan Paul International 1999
Toby Wilkinson, 'Writings from Ancient Egypt', Penguin 2017 (See Section 11.2 for The Teaching of King Amenemhat I for his son)

Ramesses II (The period of 'So Moses was Born')

Kent Weeks, 'The Lost Tomb', William Morrow & Co, 1998
on the discovery of the labyrinthine tombs of the sons of Ramesses II

C.T.H.B.
16th September 2019