CAMP HAUNTINGS
CAMP HAUNTINGS
MAGAZINE ARTICLE BY JEFF KRISTIAN / 2011
The Curse Of Cleopatra's Needle
Cleopatra’s Needle stands almost sixty eight and a half feet tall. It was cut from granite at Aswan in Egypt, the same stone that lines the burial chambers of the great pyramid at Cheops. It is one of a pair of obelisks, the other now stands in Central Park, New York.
When first hewn upon the orders of Pharoah Thethmosis III about 1450 BC both were transported along the Nile from Aswan to the ancient Sun God city Heliopolis. They were erected at the entrance to the Temple of the Sun God on a site not far from modern day Cairo. The ancient Egyptian God Ra was often called the Sun God, although his official title was Creator and Sovereign of the Sky. Legend has it that he manifested upon the Earth in physical form as an obelisk through which he was able to infuse intelligence into all creation (the ancient Egyptians did love a bit of drama) which is probably why obelisks were so often associated with him or the sun. All that now remains of the great Sun God city of Heliopolis is an obelisk just like Cleopatra’s Needle.
Cleopatra and her matching pair (as it were) have inscriptions by Thethmosis III. For those of you who are not too hot on your ancient Egyptian texts, there is a celebration of the Sed Festival along with prayers that many more such festivals may be enjoyed. It also records offerings on the altar of the spirits of On. By today’s standards, this would be a bit like praying to the sun for a nice day at Pride then passing round a spliff to say thanks.
Some centuries later the obelisks were transported to Alexandria, the royal seat of Cleopatra which is where they picked up their designer tag. It’s likely they were a gift in the name of Caesarian, Cleopatra’s son by Julius Caesar. Now if your son gave you a pair of obelisks to celebrate Pride, you’d probably give them away to another queen. Well after falling over in the sand they were eventually offered as a gift to the succeeding monarchs of England by Mohamed Ali (the Turkish Viceroy to Egypt, not the Boxer!)
As for the curse of Cleopatra’s Needle, it’s hard to know where the legend actually began. In occult practices twin pillar are often recognised as a sign of duality, a sort of balance of opposites. In other words, good cannot exist without evil, dark without light and so on; the Yin Yan principal. The Tarot is one place where this is often seen (e.g. Major Arcana 2, The Papess or High Priestess). Maybe it was the separation of the two obelisks that triggered imbalance and so the curse. They were hewn from the same piece of rock so we can assume the energies are similar. They are both marked with ceremonial hieroglyphs in the same way that mystics would make marks to create a spell, or indeed to protect a tomb.
In September 1877, some two and a half thousand years after they were hewn, they were separated for the first time. The English Engineer John Dixon tried to transport one of them to England in his purpose built cylindrical pontoon, but a fierce storm blew up in the Bay of Biscay and six of the accompanying seamen were drowned. The needle was abandoned and almost lost to a watery grave. Eventually via a Spanish port, Dixon managed to get it to London where it was erected January of the following year.
It was supposed to stand in front of The Houses of Parliament but because of subsidence it was erected instead on the Victoria Embankment still within the sound of Big Ben.
Either side of the obelisk are two huge bronze sphinxes. The original plan was for them to sit with their faces away from the needle in order to guard it. By accident the dizzy Contractor set them facing towards it, no doubt waiting for yet another disaster to occur. A few minutes before midnight on 4th September 1917, it did!
Exactly forty years to the month after the fatal storm in the Bay of Biscay, the first bomb ever to hit London from the air landed next to the ill-fated needle which, had it not weighed 168 tons may have met its watery grave after all in the River Thames. The bomb has left scars to the base of the needle and the right hand sphinx.
Today more suicides and suicide attempts take place here than at any other place on the Thames and its estuary. The ghost of a very tall thin naked man has frequently been seen leaping from its parapet into the river, although there is no sound as he hits the water. Ghostly cries are often heard to ring out.
When the needle was erected here, the workmen placed a few items underneath it. Four bibles in different languages and among other things, photographs of twelve women said to be the most beautiful of the day. From what we know about Cleopatra, this is likely to have pissed her off no end! Maybe it’s her ghostly mocking laughter that has occasionally been heard echoing from the Needle out across the Thames…