While I dreamed, the Two Citites of the North and South rose up and were dismantled, the great queens crowned and all too soon interred. The drain on our economy from the war of the Rameses' inspired history's first workers' strikes and the despoiling of the tombs at Thebes for their valuables. Religion occupied the life and minds of a people who no longer saw the sun in the four pillars of the sky, as the Great House lost its center and its citizens departed its hearth. Priests declared themselves kings. Seth, once a venerated shadow of the Great Gods, was proclaimed a god of foreigners, and animal worship – where the people abandoned the masters of the imperishable stars for cattle – enjoyed its greatest vogue. Through all the occupations and usurpations of my people, first by the Persians, then Macedonians, now Romans, Ottomans and French, finally the British and on to independence, and all the nights Cleopatra, herself the victim of a serpent – an asp – loved Caesar, then Mark Antony, my eyes were closed and my arms folded over my heart, and I, tongueless, passed my days and nights as one. From there I drifted into an endless, long, dark and dreamless slumber, from which I was not to awake until that ribbon came unwound and I was free once more to act upon my words and to vindicate my love.

So said the man who inadvertently raised me from the dead, in the form of my father, on reading from the Scroll buried with me in my sarcophagus, just before losing his mind; these are the words that he said.

Though uttered during the expedition that had unearthed me, by one of the same Britons who were at that time preparing to restore independence to my people (my emergence from the sarcophagus a reemergence of my own national identity), it would be eleven years before the words would finally be inscribed, in the year 1932 CE. One year before that, however, they were spoken by a different voice, though written by the same hand – that of John Balderston. There they were in reference to a figure like myself who had also gone on to his horizon yet had not died, and who loved a woman he would later see embodied in another; this man Balderston called Dracula, from the

story of the same name. Both times, they were spoken in a tomb, at the end of his drama and the beginning of mine, as though all life were going from one grave to another, all time and history one coiled and perfectly designed labyrinth spilling into the next.

So long had I been asleep that I had become a mere specter in people's minds, an issue wrapped in an issue wrapped in an issue like the casket containing the Scroll secreted inside my coffin and entombed within the chamber, or the layers of consciousness itself unraveling in the Land of Sleep. Norton – the young man who had revived me – and his company came looking for Ananka, whom Balderston called Ankhesenamen, but first they had to locate me, and I, silent, bound and buried, before I could be reunited with my love, had first to beckon them. Armed now with the learning of the millennia inscribed on my mind like the lines on my face by Chronos and translated during my sleep from the images and symbols of their day into the words and hieroglyphs of the medium by which I had been reimagined – projected – the magic lantern and its Ananke-like spooling and unspooling ribbon of film – I was ready to reassert my devotion, as my priestly and healing dispositions. I had been revived. Free now from my bonds, I would in time kill the man who had led the expedition and try to seduce my love away from his son, only to lose her in the end to the contemporary world of domesticity and fallen goddesshood.

This is a tale of my own heart. This is the story of my life.

among the first my people told, it is as if the literature were calling itself into being, the act of storytelling alone an act of self-creation.)

Through his magus – Norton – then, Balderston had succeeded in restoring power to my legs and memory to my head, as he had also to do, then gave me back my tongue when he later reappeared me in the form of a professor he called Ardath Bey, who had come to direct the son of the original explorer to the tomb of his lost lover eleven years hence. It had to happen thusly, for, as a psychic entity now, the only way I could affect material reality was via suggestion, myself only operating through sound, incantation, as the Word incarnate, a psychopompos leading the heroes down into the depths of their needs and desires.

Reciting my own invocations, then, I sent my heart out into the world in search of

Ananka-Ankhesenamen, and she responded in the form of Helen Grosvenor, the daughter of a British dignitary and his Egyptian wife. Yet it was my station in Balderston's world, as in worlds to follow, to bring her together not with her spiritual dimension but with the earthly explorer Frank Whemple, though I wanted her for my own. In this latter offense I interfered once more with

the motives of the gods, for a magus is a metaphor, and metaphors should be content to rule only in their own realms, in service to mortals as well as to the gods. Thus was I to lose her again, and bow to the young man.

For Helen, the reincarnation of a priestess to the Holy Temple of Isis, I was the connection to a divinity she had perceived but would not know for certain for decades to come, mired as she was and would continue to be in a culture which did not permit or value women's participation in the mystical sciences, in heaven or on earth. This must have been the origin of the undisclosed malady which brought her to "the Egypt of her maternal ancestry" (quoth the script), a disconnection from that primal identification to be remedied by her guardian, Dr. Muller. Muller, through his Viennese background, was a stand-in for that other prominent contemporary Viennese, Sigmund Freud (who kept a statue of Imhotep on a table adjacent to his writing desk), the film a document of his

performance as psychoanalyst – the magus of his day.

Similar to the tenet of the magus and the KA, however, was the concept of hieros gamos, or heavenly union, of which our terrestrial love is but an imitation and a manifestation. When we participate in this love, we partake in the banquet of sacred sexuality, and achieve our own divinity. For many of us, this means an identification with the intimacy we observed between our godlike parents, but for the younger Whemple, motherless and so without a complete model of divine union on which to pattern his dawning affection for Helen, my story of a trans-historical love was to serve the same purpose, for, as Imhotep, I was known for my blueprints. As such a paraphrasing of elder Whemple's undying love for the late Mrs. Whemple, I also served as a mirror for the old man, a living memory, in the last few moments before I killed him. (The doctors said he died of "heart" failure.)

For my part, not being satisfied with my lover in another form was my mistake, for I was defeated only when trying to transform Helen into a mummy like myself. (Being a dream – the reason I liked not to be touched in the film – I could not relate to physical reality.) And I berate myself the more for it because it was foretold in the opening, when Whemple Sr. chastised Norton

for desiring the treasures my chest might contain over the knowledge they sought to obtain: for choosing mammon over gnosis. I had been revived for commercial purposes! Since Norton was also a paraphrase – of myself, in his hunger for contraband and as the reader of the words I had endeavored to pronounce – I should have gained from his folly, but there are things even four millennia cannot convince of an obsessive heart. I died, in the end, by Isis's hand as she repeated the same circumscribing gesture performed by the Great God Amon in the film's flashback to my original transgression, doubling back time and repairing the breach between worlds brought about by my action.

My story of resurrection and reconfiguration in order to unite with the reincarnation of a lost love must have meant something terribly personal to the tomb-raider Norton too, for when I arose it drove him crazy, as though he could not bear to look on the face of his own secret guilt, or desire. Though he may not have grasped the irony of his mater-ialism

– a form of fetishism; a condition forgivable, I suppose, for one who has spent the last 3700 years wrapped and imprisoned in his own body – as a Briton he would surely have appreciated the pun in his wanting to revive a "mummy" – his "mommy." For, according to such men as Muller, it is the necessity of the young man seeking his heart's mate to first resuscitate the mother-image – Norton's resurrection of my body – as a symbol of the goddess, or ideal – not-the-mother – before he can recognize that ideal in a lover. This they call projection, and transference. Helen herself must have felt the pull between wanting to experience that feeling of feminine power and connection to the regenerative force of the ages and not wishing to become "mummi-fied" – pregnant – and ultimately chose her earthly suitor over me – exchanging romance for eros, for the time being.

It is significant that the film's director, who had spent most of his time behind the camera as a cinematographer, began his career as a projectionist in his native Bohemia, so the irony of that term, in its Freudian sense, may not have been lost on him. As a new

In the myth of Plato's cave, as in the concept of film projection itself, I find the perfect rendition of the artist's relation to the world and its divine origins. As Plato has it, we are all chained to the back of a cavern, facing inward, unable to know the sunlight but for the shadows of – my interpolation – our own form cast upon the rocks. Yet this I find encouraging. Though we stand between the divine – the sun, or projector's bulb – and the concrete – the wall and the screen – we are all as the film spooling between the reels, or reeling between the spools, of birth and death. The motion pictures are our shadows, by which we may see our outlines and detect our position in the cosmos. Through the movies, we can locate ourselves. As I puzzle over my own standing here and try to comprehend others' responses to me, I know that this is why I watch: to identify with something. By projecting myself into the movies, I become the film, and I and my Ananka – that threaded and binding tie to the Universal – are as one. This is my compromise with Amon.

In the legend of Osiris's death and resurrection, the jealousy of Seth resulted in the original god's murder and dismemberment, His parts scattered throughout Egypt until His grieving mother Isis went on an odyssey to recover all but His genitals. (Elements of the story have surfaced in the Greeks' myth of Demeter and Persephone, and have served as the model for the Christ myth as well. The theme of a woman's journey to reclaim a lost loved one is echoed also in the tale of Psyche and Amor, as in the – unspoken – drama of Ananka in her wanderings throughout our films.) Isis then buried the artifacts where She found them, and the sites became sacred, the location of temples, similar to the Catholic tradition of incorporating relics of their saints in the foundation of

cathedrals; His members were then reincorporated in the underworld, where He came to rule as Lord of Eternity and the receiver of dead souls. It's an allegory, if you will, of the process of mental disintegration after sleep has sundered the ego, recombining our day-experiences into an unconscious, alternative reality – dreams – similar to the magus's reunion of the departed ruler and his KA, as well as a metaphoric enactment of the psychological process of analysis – meaning, literally, "to break up."

If Ardath Bey, then, was the untouchable spiritual KA of Imhotep, the forties films are also in a way the KA of The Mummy, sundered into the Kharis and Ananka forever searching for both the reunification that would lend meaning to their lives and the magus who would perform the act, the way my autobiography is an attempt to reconstruct these stories into one shambling, coherent whole. (It is fitting that the Architect should serve as a blueprint, himself.) That spiritual search gets telegraphed in the second sequence of

When this Priest expires in his film's prologue while transferring his history as well as station to the middle-aged initiate Andoheb, it is a description of both Steve's current state of mind and his immediate future. On the one hand, the acolytes' duty

to protect the tomb of Ananka, or the inviolability of the womb, suggests what Freud called a pre-oedipal devotion to the asexual mother; on the other, Andoheb's subsequent accession suggests the post-oedipal assumption of the father's place in the world and family, the latter of which Steve actually achieves in the end when offered the position of the elder Professor Lyons, who had presumably fired him back at the museum – an echo of the opening temple. What lies between these occurrences, then, is the Oedipal journey into the self, after another tale my people once told, "The Legend of Khnemu and the Seven Years' Famine," itself a basis for the myth on which Freud's primary theory was founded.

In this adventure, a king consults the overseer of all his "temple" properties – meaning, his mind, as well as soul – to find the origin of the Nile, or a fecund place in the self, which isn't filling as needed for the crops. There is a spiritual barrenness calling out for

attention, in that self as well as the community. He then goes on what we may call a dream-quest to this source to find Khnemu, "the self-created" (or the Self, Created), the spiritual center of each individual. There he learns that the Great God has been neglected and must be placated before the crops will grow again – before psychic renewal can take place. This is to be accomplished by either building new god-houses or repairing the old ones: by honoring the spirit, Self, unconscious, or divine once again.

If each of these films is a similarly psychic quest, then the implication would be that something is also wrong in 1940s America, from which most of the principals hail, having something to do with some action that took place in a far-off mythological realm: in childhood, for example, or even further – in the un-time-ly era of the archetypes, those "transcendental human experiences which," as Edward Whitmont, writing in the 20th Century, has said, "have been called gods." Steve's search for that one item that will justify his sojourn to my country and return him to the graces of his former benefactor leads him to the discovery of a vase whose glyphs point the way to that grail, the tomb of Ananka. (Once again, is he looking for her, or is she calling to him?) How grievous, then, that what they also lead to is a love interest whose name, Marta, is the archaic form of market – where the

story proper begins and ends – suggesting a world whose avatar of spiritual attainment now lies in the same consumerism that moors his spirit down, Babe a vestigial, infantile attachment to mat(t)ter first seen buying a fetish doll of his girl back home. (It also suggests the real reason the eternally strapped studio chose to revive my character.)

In similar fashion, the magus they encounter, who funds their expedition – his form of invocation – is not a High Priest or initiate but a stocky, balding (à la Babe and the two holymen) nightclub magician named Tim Sullivan, aka The Great Solvani, played by the eternally cherubic Cecil Kellaway. He is the senex, or Wise Old Man, who will lead the Self to wholeness. (Hand was similarly scripted by a duo like Steve and Babe, Griffin Jay and Maxwell Shane, and directed by a 58-year-old veteran, Christy Cabanne.) He is also a glittering fool, in utter reliance on his daughter, Marta – whose name also conjures impressions of mater – discovered in a slightly subterranean bar, or lower level of the

mind, a place of inebriation and relaxed inhibitions. That their meeting spurs a fight indicates that there is already a conflict within, centering on the prologic charge from father to son. The legacy is thus incorrect: Ananka needs freeing, not protection.

Fool though he be, Sullivan is at least a surmountable father figure, and does succeed in uniting Steve with Ananka – as with

Marta – in contrast to the acolytes who work to keep their meeting from ever happening. The opening of her tomb threatens a Pandora's Box of maturity – responsibility – for the similarly seraphic but aged puers, or archetypal children, their advanced age suggesting a childhood which has long outlived its usefulness.

When Babe, surprisingly, shoots Andoheb outside the "temple" at the climax while the priest's double, Sullivan, lies unconscious, it's a visual pun, his fall down the steps the superego's laying to rest to allow the action within to take place – the rescue of Marta from the altar to which she's been abducted, indicating the end of woman's, and consumerism's, elevation to goddesshood. It also marks the fall of Andoheb's entire line of unregenerate and prohibitive father figures, the precise moment at which Professor Lyons (Andoheb is also introduced as a Doctor) tumbles from office. Besides all this, it's a real-life recreation of Steve's metaphoric fall at the other end of the drama, a gestalt

signaling the restarting of time, as also happened at the climax of the first movie when Isis repeated Amon's prohibitive gesture. Steve's claiming of Ananka's treasures, then, is like a dowry on his imminent marriage to Marta and a reinforcement of the positive aspect of once-feared maturity. His refusal of a new vase from the same dealer who sold him the first one signals that

to him the fetish is no longer necessary now that he has the real thing, the entire company's journey back to their homeland a return to a psychic "United States" where Steve will head the museum like a reunified Osiris his underworld.

Yet outside of all this stand I, an apparent appendage to the drama at Hand, whose title reference may apply equally to the one used to strangle my victims (I the agent of Ananka, removing unnecessary and obsolete elements of the psyche) or the useless one kept clamped to my chest the whole time.

If I had returned for any higher purpose than the fulfillment of a string of men's oedipal fantasies or to secure some financially ostracized studio's standing in the marketplace, it must then have been for the selfsame reason they mummified me 37 centuries ago: because I saw in Ananka something more than what the others saw. More than what she

place, it was, at least, a rehearsal, like a premonitory dream. My mission, as ever, was to return the woman to life.

In The Mummy, the curse which set the drama in motion was associated with the opening of the casket containing the forbidden scroll. In Hand, the relocation of the source of this malediction to the opening of Ananka's tomb (still associated with the secret of life in its relation to the mother's womb as is the uterine vase which leads them there and the vaginal hole describing their final passage), coupled with the lunar cycles to which my killings are later attached, reinterprets that blood-bringing "curse" into a specifically feminine context, the victim of this curse, apparently, eggs – the unrealized potential within the dreaming uterus. The violation that so concerns the old men thus meant either the breaking of the hymen – the seals to which each film assigns such significance – or the commencement of menstruation – the "great change" of which

Imhotep spoke to Helen-Ankhesenamen. In both cases, the suggestion is of the emergence of the female characters' reproductive power and potential – their association with the goddess in themselves, Isis.

Yet the release of this capability must take place, for She is Ananka. As Helen laments toward the end of her adventure, "I'm Ankhesenamen, but I'm somebody else too," and Marta finds this to be true, also, though the film does not bother to explore the possibility of her reincarnation in any meaningful way, being scripted, again, by two men. (The Mummy, at least, came from a treatment by Nina Wilcox Putnam.) In her custodial position with a childlike father who, in the mother's absence, has taken on those "feminine" characteristics she once represented (there are, in fact, no mothers in the entire sequence of films), Marta is then forced to assume the "masculine" role, making her truly not-the-mater (without the benefit of actual maternity) and father combined, leaving her doubly doubled. How unfortunate that her only reward – spiritual or otherwise – is simply domesticity; with her father, at least, she got to see the world from her managerial position.

All of which maybe suggests the agency of my active hand, but what of the other, inactive one? Supposing I had been revived for a different, parallel and balancing reason, I think of all my disabilities, all stemming from that terrible loss of Ananka, and

become the woman), or her projected image for me and all the male heroes of my films (the ideal qualities of the mother recognized in a lover), this charis, then, no matter how many times it is burned, as in Hand and Tomb, drowned, as in Ghost, or buried, as in Curse, will ever and always look for new means of expression, new images by which to project itself into the world and to unite with its life-driving Ananka.

As patriarch of the city, John's father, the widowed and now-aged Steve Banning (the film advancing 30 years in only two as if

to emphasize the time-less, archetypal and trans-generational nature of the drama) is also taken to magnify and reflect their collective condition. In his introductory scene, he's shown recounting his adventure in the east like a war story for his skeptical son and his fiancée while regarding a photo of the departed Marta, who's been replaced now in his life by his overweight albatross of a sister, Jane – the soul again become earthbound and heavy. His smugness over the (false) end of the curse displays a lingering lack of depth and a pride in the supposed triumph of action over magic, violence over love, and reason over religion, suggesting the pathology currently governing the communal personality as well.

As twin symbols of the city's repressions, he and I represent the ghost of a similarly plundering, profiteering past, as in the Hitchcock, for Massachusetts, as my Egypt, was once a slave state. This condition would be resolved then with the destruction of the

Banning estate, like some Southern plantation – a comparison to bear fruit with the series' otherwise inexplicable shift to Louisiana, later. The simultaneous eruption of similar circumstances while the Germans were sweeping across Europe is perhaps what had revived this specter in the American unconscious, bringing with it a parallel call to charity in isolationist Anytown. John's penultimate summons to serve in the military as a medic – his telegram from Washington a communication from the higher self to serve a nobler cause – similarly sounds a resolution to this insularity and complacency, as in fact the real invasion that year of Pearl Harbor would also do.

While Steve passes on his unwanted legacy to his son, Andoheb is shown somehow still alive (in my faraway homeland, where nothing ever dies), initiating the willing acolyte Mehemet Bey, whose job it will be to later unite the skeptical John with his own spiritual "double." This scene of initiation occurs with the two men gathered around the

same visionary pool as Imhotep used to seduce Ankhesenamen with images from their shared past, suggesting a homoerotic undercurrent to all the men's dealings, or the "secret society" scheming of a pair of backward boys.

As Mehemet's initials mirror those of John's mother, Marta Banning, we take him to be the return of not only the mother-identified child-self – a typical scenario for fantasy films involving couples on the eve of their nuptials – but also the positive assertion of spiritual values over the mater-ial, as epitomized in the ending when John rescues Isobel from the flames of his

inheritance. As the film opens with a portrait of Steve emblazoned on the cover of OUR TIME magazine, the immediacy of the situation as well as its impact on all of society is instantly announced. It will then be the project of the story, as of John, to settle the dilemma: to reconcile the modern confusion of Commerce with Soul in myth-free America, and to reconnect with mystery and the ages in the sudden loss of money and progress.

In the scene in which Mehemet transports me across the ocean, you may notice the camera zooming in and out on him and the ship's steward almost imperceptibly, creating an effect either sexual – heightening the homoerotic allure of the soft-featured actor, Turhan Bey – or hypnotic, as though it were at this point that his character had begun exerting its influence over the rest of the movie. Throughout the film, Mehemet is so naked in his affection for me that he seems genuinely childlike, as though his devotion

Dracula, at Carfax Abbey) in some 1942 of the mind, he is the physical emergence into present reality of an anachronistic trait, the boy still alive in the man. Soon afterward, "Babe" also returns from overseas, via the same sort of psychic telegram that later called John to service, though here under the name Hanson, not Jensen, some indication of the care the filmmakers took with their material.

There follows, then, the usual series of killings, as though the mind itself were casting about in semi-darkness until finding precisely the one it wishes to eliminate from its ranks. John's marshaling the villagers to pursue my specter at last represents both the rallying of his own strength to defeat the childish impulses threatening his stability and the country's joining of the Allies at that historic moment. Mehemet dooms himself, however, when his devotion turns to Isobel, on whom he eavesdrops in her embrace with John – what Freud termed the primal scene, the child witnessing the father and

coming independence – for when the child within succeeds in projecting the cherished mother-image onto a sexual object, he ceases to be a child, and therefore ceases to be.

The crowd's celebration of the newly dis-inherited John and his bride after our climactic confrontation in his burning mansion is a celebration of, at once, the triumph of the romantic over the material, new over the old, heterosexuality over the insular men's-club of the Ananka cult and coded homosexuality of Mehemet, and finally of experience over naïveté – a positive take on the small-town loss of (false) pre-Pearl Harbor innocence. The second half of the headline proclaiming JOHN BANNING WEDS ISOBEL EVANS, CULMINATING LONG COURTSHIP suggests their happy ending as my own as well, the charity which had been bound up in self-interest giving way to a nobler union, the rallying of the Allies. The couple's boarding a train at this point indicates a transport to another realm or level of consciousness and experience – an apotheosis, a deliverance

to the heaven of spiritual fulfillment now that they've shirked the weight of history and possessions. They have achieved grace.

Despite the apparent resolution of Tomb, however, the moviegoing public recognized that what ennobled my character was this very sense of longing, this willingness to serve my love without apotheosis, or even validation – the screams which

Put them back together, and you have The Mummy's Ghost.

Just as the previous film ended with a metaphoric ascension, Ghost (the title itself suggesting a spiritual Assumption after my

Christlike release from the Tomb) begins with a literal one, the new initiate Yousef Bey climbing the stairs to the "temple" like a psychological fixation arising into consciousness. It ends with a submersion, myself – shockingly – finally claiming my Ananka and descending into a swamp.

In this chapter, the possibility of reincarnation finally becomes overt (it is, incidentally, the first and only Mummy film to benefit from a woman's direct involvement, in co-screenwriter Brenda Weisberg), as the latest manifestation of Ananka appears in the form of a transplanted Egyptian, Amina Monsouri. Amina's dreams of our homeland come as a call to her own originating feminine agency, as demonstrated when a black cat, once a symbol of mystery and power revered by our people but now scorned by others, crosses her path on her somnambulistic way to our first meeting. Her first name itself is a palindrome of that driving anima that represents both the "feminine," creative faculty in man and its own

Amina works in the library of the university on whose grounds the bulk of the film takes place, a priestess in the temple of knowledge, so to speak, à la Ananka, who is similarly uprooted and ensconced now in the Scripps Museum (a cultural

warehouse, as is the unconscious). She is waiting, presumably, for her student boyfriend Tom Hervey to liberate her – to bring her from the halls of memory into homey consciousness; whether his, hers, or society's. When my shadow passes over her, too, as it had the town of Mapleton, it bespeaks a restlessness indeed rousing her from her sleep, she patently under the spell of an ages-old unresolved desire after the fashion of 1942's Cat People.

Yousef also receives a call, however, his summons to again succeed the High Priest, as Andoheb is now elusively yclept, and "to live...according to the patterns decreed by the High Priests of Arkham" – to uphold the formulas of tradition, archetype, genre, and the series itself. This latter imperative is reinforced by Ghost's segue from its opening scene of initiation to another old-timer's holding forth to a skeptical young audience – Tom, who scoffs at a lecturer's assertions – as happened in the beginning of Tomb when Steve Banning spun his yarn for an unappreciative

Yousef's enacting this passage in a temple as in a dream, when the mind similarly returns to the archetypes and imaginatively plays out the scenarios imprinted there by time and our icon-construction. There is a third call as well, however: of the times, again, indicating a beleaguered nation's desired return to eros in the midst of war, I the killing overseas come to suburban America.

The death of the elderly professor who inadvertently summons me instead of going to bed with his wife – instead of fulfilling my eons-long project (to be terribly cruel) to unite two mummies in eros – signifies the elimination of, at once, the consciousness, allowing the dream to commence; the ego, permitting the expression of issues threatening to its own established self and enabling an emerging identification with the archetype; and the patriarchy, whose repression of feminine power in the world parallels that within itself. Afterwards, the film's police, as agents of law and order adrift now after the loss of this

governing principle, consistently bark up the wrong tree in pursuing their subject; see, for example, the sheriff who suspects Amina of the murder, and a later detective whose trap fails to catch me.

As in the later Phantom from Space, the only character who can track me with any efficiency and skill is Tom's dog, Peanuts, himself tuned to the sensory world as his comrades, apparently, are not, just as I also am shown to be able to find my prey by intuition alone, without even the ruse of the tana leaves employed in the first two forties features. We both follow the invisible, unlike Peanuts' master, whose reassurances to Amina of the "modernity" of the Egypt which haunts her is a code for his

celebration of the dis-spirited, the repressed. It is he who will pay most dearly for this inattention to the unknown.

Tom wants to elope with Amina, abandoning his "graduation" (or maturation), and signaling a lack of sympathy with our chivalric ideals. He does not savor the longing, the desirous tension which alone can sustain love; he is at odds with our story. Though his kiss, in one scene, suggestively saves her from the hypnotic thrall of my shadow, she is distinctly uninvolved in it, for her true heart lies elsewhere. Like the viewer attracted to the restless spirit of the series but weighed down by the slavishness of its creators to its narrow patterns (conventional Tom, but also Yousef and myself, bound by tradition and the tana "formula," respectively), she yearns toward a break from the pattern, though Tom is not the one who will render her needs. It is first Yousef who takes the lead by ordering me not to kill but to abduct Amina for himself. He is again the

magus of the story, whose actions set into motion the chain of events which will finally allow me to break from both formulas – tana and series – and bring the film to its spectacularly upsetting fulfillment.

Much of philosophy and religion asserts that we start from a central point of purity and essence, our journey into the world an irradiation outward from this point, often located in the heart: from a condition of unity to one of multiplicity. (See Dr. Royston's geological metaphor for this development in the opening lecture of X the Unknown.) Ghost, as does Hand and many other films related and unrelated, progresses in this fashion, acquiring characters even as it kills off a few in the process. Amina begins her film life in that heart, the library, just as Ananka had always spent it there, going from temple to tomb to museum; Tom wants to free her from it by imposing his own heart upon her, yet she remains adamant: She is that part of us that resists civilization, resists socialization, resists "patterning." She begins the film as not-Ananka, who had previously been defined in terms of worldly responsibility (when Yousef becomes her acolyte, he is explicitly bound to the limits of those patterns), but, when Ananka's body is finally destroyed (as was her precursor's, Ankhesenamen's) – when that old definition is "burned up," as "out" – Amina's true self may gradually be revealed. Her hair whitens, her skin dries; the ananke – the imperative – in her takes

over, and she is one again with her true heart. At the same time, the transformation reveals a new, or true, definition of Ananka Herself as now not only the call of the future toward fulfillment but of the past toward negation and character revelation. When I take her down into that swamp in the end, away from the promise of reason and multiplicity back to the world of truth and unity, the effect is so un-reason-able that one can only know one is finally in the realm of the imagination, the only real necessity now in a world soon to become more real than our wildest fantasies. Kharis and Ananka are one again; we are finally the "KA".

If this was indeed the forbidden union, the culmination touted by Tomb but questioned immediately by its sequel, if this was the orgasm following our quadrimillennial foreplay, then what could only follow climax but detumescence? Now that the steady winding of formula and convention had been broken, all that was left was the unraveling, the sloppiness that so marked the last two features now the defining characteristic, the last thread of logic now totally frayed and shorn. It is as if the entire series were following the course of Osiris, breaking itself apart so that it might recombine in another world, where it may achieve its own divinity.

From its opening festivities in an unexplained new locale, Louisiana, 25 years after the scene that had just taken place that same year, to its several inexplicable werewolf associations (the film plays like a script for a rejected Wolf Man sequel, with

inherent kitschiness of its disorder and delivers it to something approaching mysticism, the genuinely fantastic.

Like all the films, Curse at least begins and ends with a carefully constructed consonance. Instead of the insular dysfunctional male-inheritance scenario of Tomb and Hand's prologs and inserted early on in Ghost, however, this one opens with a scene of communal celebration at Tante Berthe's Café, outside of which two figures, possibly lovers, huddle in the shadows; it ends with two definite lovers illuminated and foregrounded escaping the quiet, dark, and unregenerate monastery, location of four climactic deaths. They are as the united and liberated spirits of the dead inside evacuating the corpus of the world, the latter location comprised of two feuding men, one former master, and one enthralled, potentially powerful woman, her body crumbled to dust, her spirit presumably having entered the body of the fleeing heroine.

The night scene at Berthe's – named for the rotund, nurturing Earth Mother whose name

again, of a mother figure. Her sun-yearning is, finally, a contrast to my own association with the patterns of the moon-unconscious and involuntary movement, a resurrection of the oedipal issues implicit in the workers' rising against their master.

Yet the illumination she seeks is not only an inner one: like all who walk in darkness, she is longing to be seen, as well, to be recognized for what she is. For dualistic, monotheistic America, she is the need for all those who seek their souls to realize the divinity within and for society at large to perceive woman's divine nature in particular. As men around the world were at that moment engaged in the most soulless destruction overseas and engineering the most massive destructive capability ever dreamed of at home, she represented the necessity of a universal feminine presence in politics and the world theatre, rising out of that earth itself – born of the womb of Tante Berthe, existing between the Son and moon. It's not very long before she gets a job with the hero's archaeological enterprise and even surpasses him in her untrained knowledge – of wrappings, of which she, being Ananka, would naturally be learned – proposing a rival for his attentions to Ms. Walsh never explicitly addressed by the film.

If the engineering company suggests the outward, social aspect of patriarchy, then the aforementioned monastery represents its interior, psychological aspect, its abandoned condition the spiritual evacuation of modern-day masculinity. The monastery's inhabiting by a pair of non-Christian mystics, the Egyptians Ilzor Zandab and his initiate, Ragheb, implies a dysfunction within

film psyche to be resolved by the immolation of all Egyptians and the flight of the new lovers from the crumbling edifice.

Setting the stage for all this unrest is the off-screen, pre-story death of young Antoine, killed while clearing the swamp for Walsh's unspecified project. In metaphoric terms, some valuable potential has been lost in the process of both psychological spring-cleaning and man's drive toward progress, in so doing unearthing the archetypal figures of myself and my Ananka. Into this scene of chaos – or, psychic disquiet – then, comes both the hero, Dr. James Halsey, and the villain, Zandab, suggesting all unrest as having both positive and negative connotations, and how a problem naturally presents its own solution. Zandab's partner Ragheb is an "agitator" who with Antoine's help has dredged my figure up from the swamp-grave, suggesting transgressive me as a symbol of revolution itself; tempering their alliance is the figure of Halsey's love interest, Betty, the niece and secretary of the Superintendent, indicating her as the drama's ameliorating element. Antoine's murder while transporting my body echoes that of the slaves slaughtered doing same in the film's ritual flashback to my day. It's an indication that the story has entered mythic – or, vertical – time, where all occurrences happen at once in order to reveal their archetypal equality or sameness, Walsh's workers history's murdered slaves.

After a long series of slayings and other intrigues, the film literally pulls itself together as a sequence of pursuits all lead the various characters to the monastery, as reconstituting Osiris his underworld. Ananka and I are followed there by Ragheb and Betty, who are in turn followed by Halsey, himself trailed by Walsh and his workers, the latter replaying the wartime cliché of opposing factions coming together to defeat a common foe. Presumably, all find the resolution of their particular issues here. I

provide Ananka with a connection to the identity she had been looking to divine while myself moving toward communion with that same figure; Betty, told by Ragheb they were going to meet James, encounters instead the real source of her power, Ananka. When Ragheb kills his mentor for denying him his desire for Betty he reenacts the oedipal drama, resolving then the eternal conflict between patterning – Oedipus's fate – and desire – his attempts to transcend this destiny. (With Ragheb-actor Kosleck actually eleven years Zandab/Coe's senior, readings of an adulthood governed by a juvenile issue or personality are further invited.) Through these two, then, Walsh learns what happens when a master disregards the needs of his underlings, and they the disastrous effect of taking violence as a measure against him.

When James announces his plan to excavate my body after it is buried in a struggle with Ragheb and display it alongside Ananka's in the museum, it's suggestive of a getting of

priorities in order and wins him Uncle Pat's blessing to marry his niece, thus ending the cycle begun by my original oedipal transgression. It's also an ironic fulfillment of the Egyptians' mission to reunite us, making of Halsey the analogous High Priest, or spiritually realized symbol of maturity, Zandab stood for.

That we are not yet together at film's end suggests that though all is not perfectly in place, this is still the plan – this is where society is headed. Halsey's proposal to unearth me suggests an anticipation of the analysis to follow the dream in which he has just participated, through which he may come to understand the imaginative meaning behind the adventure mocked or denied by most of his predecessors. His flight from the monastery – symbol of masculine exclusivity and distrust of women – with his affianced indicates the reconciliation, or transcendence, of man with his archetypally matched yet patriarchally proscribed feminine other, the hieros gamos union of heaven and earth.

At the same time, as far as the narrative so far is concerned (and of course, the narrative so far is the narrative in toto, for here the series ended), it is only heaven and earth, and Betty and James, which are united; physical Kharis and Ananka must remain forever separate. As death signifies a return to our spiritual origins and thus our original meanings, it may be said that our filmic deaths represent a return to the longing we epitomized in this world, our present, buried status in fact an elevation to our own transcendent identities. We may never be truly reunited in order to rule like Osiris, but the longing; the tension is our domain, and will be as the ink in my pen (or the blood in my veins), this gap between us my autobiography.

thoughts possess you, what kind of obsessions begin to rule the consciousness that is now your only definition?

Since dreams themselves draw their imagery from waking life, when that supply wanes then the mind can only draw on its own store of references and associations, like a cannibal – the situation that obtains when a series has similarly run out of ideas and

is left to only those it has already described. And after all the cannibals have eaten each other, the last will have only itself to feed on, the outcome of which is oblivion. I have not gotten there yet, but I'm close.

In contemplating the history of my people and myself, both pre-empted so frequently as to have little connection, anymore, with their original beings, I think of my honorable beginnings and what has become of me without my Ananka; to be 3700 years without your object or life direction. Partly, the 20th Century's need to resurrect me, to let me have not even my four-millennia longing without turning it into a dozen years' frustration, must have stemmed from a desire to bring some sense of goodness, of meaning, to the necessary hardships of life, first during the Great Depression and later in the midst of war. But why did they then continue to bury and separate us? Was our love somehow a threat to a country too complacent to accept a notion of Love and

Grace ever combined with Strife, too insecure to acknowledge that certain truths may not bring us comfort, but only eternal longing? Or was it because unity in a dualistic world means oblivion?

There comes a time of reckoning, when one, separated from the world of appearances and material distractions, is left to ponder meanings divorced at last from the facts – purer forces, like those that run through all things but which are not the things themselves. The danger even now, however, is that, with only one's impressions as a guide, one may be inclined to follow only that which satisfies one, confirming one's misconceptions with no responsibility to the truth. How peculiar that, even in death, one can never know!

Thinking of all the years I've spent acting out of misguided and obsolete systems, wasting my time in contemplation of the frivolous, irrelevant, and outrageous, I am furious with myself, aghast that I could have frittered my great gift in steadfast pursuit of the familiar, in defense of dead notions and mummified ideals – the injustice of having your tongue cut out and your body bound, all because you wanted the priestess – the divine! Thus deprived, all that was left was the h