Customer Reviews

Eyes of Horus (The complete works of Joan Grant)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you got to this page, please, please DO BUY Joan Grant's "Eyes of Horus". It is a wonderfully written novel (Which is suppossed to be a real life she remembers), it is wonderfully written, and the amount of details of everyday life makes it amazing to read. You will feel you are in old Egipt, seeing everything with your own eyes. The way she writes makes you even understand other ways of thinking than our own, because of what her characters say, the comparisons they make... Believe me! I am an hypercritical person and there is nothing phony in this book! Please buy it, you will not regret it!

Joan Grant had an amazing knack for incisive writing about her past lives. Many books of this genre are fuzzy, feel-good bromides that leave us doubtful.The authenticity of Grant's experience rings true in every sentence of this work.

It reads like an exciting adventure novel- yet the solidity and internal consistency of her main characters are astounding- and the spiritual gems glistening throughout the narrative are there for anyone to share. The prose is crisp, measured, and not padded and brings the culture and perspective of ancient Egypt directly into the heart and mind of the reader.

I am glad than writer Harold Klemp (Autobiography of a Modern Prophet) recommended this author to me.

Joan Grant is relatively unknown in these days and that's quite a shame. Her books, especially the first four (of which this one is third) are goldmines for those who are ready to digest the profound spiritual wisdom found in them. They are also fascinating historical adventures, the true, living history which is hard to find anywhere else.

I was determined to write this review when I saw "sizhao" telling how this book is "a mediocre fantasy at best". It's a pity that someone who, it seems, don't know nothing about Grant and her reasons for writing, is capable of dismissing her as nothing but a cheap fiction writer who claimed her books to be a historical fact. Well, Grant didn't do "poor research". Actually she didn't do any sort of research at all. EVERYTHING she wrote was from her own personal memory bank where she drew that knowledge in a trance state. Grant didn't know nothing about ancient Egypt or any of the periods she wrote about. Also, she would have never written anything, if there weren't a reason for it, i.e. she only wrote the lives where there was spiritual message to give to readers. She didn't write to entertain people. Grant actually was very reluctant writer who had to push herself to write. And when one thinks how much work there was to bring this knowledge "to the surface" alone, it's not any wonder.

"Sizhao" mentioned many things in this book which seems to be contradictory to historical "facts". Well, in that case it's interesting to note that in her own time her books were praised by their historical accuracy - after undergoing a great deal of careful scrutiny. Pretty well for someone who didn't do any research! I'm not aware of what Egyptologists nowadays know about that ancient culture, and I don't care. I'm definitely sure that Joan Grant knew the periods where she lived herself better than 50 historians put together.

Eyes of Horus and its sequel Lord of the Horizon are, in my opinion, Grant's most rewarding books. Her life as Ra-ab Hotep was clearly the most interesting one she ever wrote about. The spiritual content in these books is also great. If they weren't anything but fiction, they would still be considered masterpieces of their kind.

Joan Grant's historical fantasy novels were based on her personal imaginings, which may have included vague recollections of former lives assuming reincarnation is a fact. Miss Grant apparently believed these mental impressions to be 100% accurate. As such, the books were poorly researched, and presented the cultures of ancient Egypt, pre-Columbian America, and ancient Greece and Rome with an overlay of the mores and ethics of her own middle-class England.

No such period as she describes existed in Ancient Egypt. The primary god was Amen-Ra, the creator of all things. Set was the villain of the Osiris story. Osiris was a fertility god and a relatively minor one at that. He only became important when somebody died. (A search on "Kemetic Orthodoxy" might be helpful for more detail.) If I remember right, Egypt was seriously threatened by civil war only at the end of the reign of Akhenaten, whose obsession with destroying the existing religious system and setting up Aten as the "One God" had more in common with Islamic extremism than it did with any sort of proto-Christianity, although it's constantly mistaken for same. The Egyptians did believe in life after death, with many rituals for ensuring a safe trip to the next world. That reincarnation was also a part of the established religion has not been documented through perusal of the literature available to us currently. Until said literature is discovered, an elaborate, New Age-like Egyptian belief in reincarnation remains a Victorian romantic fantasy.

Save your money. The works of Mary Renault (who also suspected she'd lived previous lifetimes in ancient Greece) are more grounded in reality and better written overall.