Bravo for this new edition of this book, first published by Penguin in 1992. The great change for this third edition is its size, which is a more manageable 6 X 9. I found Death of Gods not only of great interest to those who want a thoughtful and scholarly approach to the search for the origins of the ancient Egyptian belief system, but a groundbreaking testing of the premise that ancients had very early made believable progress in their attempt at understanding, and even measuring, all the movements of the heavens. As the author asks, “Is it possible to recover from the remote past an utterly lost science linked to an equally lost culture? Is it possible to recover a lost science of observation that given an unexplainable event, a drastic deviation from expectations, led to the myths that comprised the ancient religions, speccally that of the ancient Egyptians?”
As Sellers has quoted, “He that will have a cake out of the wheat must tarry the grinding,” and to that end the author carefully and thoroughly explains, even for the most ignorant of readers, the astronomy that must be understood, (and I was grateful for that), but it is after that hurdle that the reading really gets interesting. Sellers grasp of ancient myths from other ancient cultures is obvious, and no reader can doubt the author’s familiarity with even the most obscure Egyptian texts. In addition, she has written that she spent long hours viewing and measuring the height of key “marker” stars when they became visible at their first rising after their seasonal absence in the desert skies of both Egypt and the Rub-al-Kahli.
However, celestial movements would explain only one of the two major myths, that of the death and rebirth of Osiris, the second, the story of the 80 years of quarrelling between Horns and Seth demanded a different answer, which Sellers provides. Computer projections, ancient texts, and ancient artwork suggest a different and intriguing explanation.
I have discussed this book with a professional Egyptologist who stated to me that Death of Gods had encouraged him to look at a number of things in a different light and that, for example, Sellers understanding of the origin of the twin cobras placed on the solar disk is an idea which he felt must be given serious consideration.
When I was finished reading this amazing book I was thoroughly convinced of the presented theory, although Sellers herself had continuously cautioned that “the theories directed to the beliefs ofpre-literate peoples must be understood to fall short offull certainty, and the most deeply felt convictions must aspire only to a reasonable degree of probability.”