The Egypt Game: Descent into Heathenry

In Childhood, Creative Nonficiton, Family, Narrative on 9 December 2009 with no comments

When I was in ele­men­tary school, I read a won­der­ful novel called The Egypt Game. It was about five chil­dren who decided to recre­ate ancient Egypt on a piece of aban­doned prop­erty, and how the gods of the game inte­grated them­selves into the children’s every­day lives in spooky and enter­tain­ing ways.

I fell in love with the book, and knew imme­di­ately that I wanted to cre­ate ancient Egypt for myself, because I would cer­tainly be a very fetch­ing priest­ess for Isis. I looked very good in sparkly gold eyeshadow.

My baby brother and I were deeply imag­i­na­tive. In fact, my brother was so imag­i­na­tive that my mother wasn’t always entirely sure that he was alto­gether sane. He went through a phase of his life where he would gather very small objects of roughly equal size, such as peb­bles or pen­nies, and would con­fine him­self to a cor­ner, cross legged, toss­ing the objects around on the floor, rock­ing back and forth, and mak­ing strange sound effects. If a kid did that kind of thing today, doc­tors would call him autis­tic or some­such non­sense and dope him up with drugs until that silli­ness was knocked right out of him. But in those days, folks just fig­ured it was kids being kids. My mother thought it was strange, and it was, but even­tu­ally my brother grew out of it and that was that.

I say all that to say that the fact my brother and I owned noth­ing at all that even remotely resem­bled idols from ancient Egypt did noth­ing at all to deter us from our stead­fast deter­mi­na­tion to blas­pheme against Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior right there in my mother’s backyard.

“We don’t have any stat­ues of Isis or Anubis,” I pointed out thought­fully, pre­tend­ing I knew what I was talk­ing about. The for­eign names felt good on my tongue, and made me sound intel­li­gent. “But we got those two empty water cooler jugs and some art sup­plies in the garage. We could paint ‘em up and stick some jew­els on them, and then we could just pre­tend they’re ancient gods from Egypt, okay?”

My brother was two and half years younger than I, which made him about five at the time, and he did just about any­thing I told him. He nod­ded his head, hav­ing absolutely no idea what I was say­ing, and helped me lug the over­sized plas­tic con­tain­ers into the backyard.

We must have painted and glued for hours before I was sat­is­fied with how our makeshift gods looked. Painstakingly, we draped our mother’s red, silk Christmas tree skirt over a cou­ple of over­turned card­board boxes for an altar, and set the freshly dec­o­rated five gal­lon jugs on top.

“Those look great!” I exclaimed, step­ping back to admire our hand­i­work. My brother silently agreed, lift­ing up the cro­cheted afghan he held in his left hand.

“Oh, right,” I said, turn­ing him around and drap­ing the blan­ket over his shoul­ders. I took a safety pin from my pocket and secured the blan­ket in a cape-like fash­ion around his neck. I don’t know why we decided that ancient Egyptians wore capes like Superman, but it seemed right at the time. And, really, if you can use a painted water cooler jug for the god­dess Isis, I sup­pose noth­ing is com­pletely out of the question.

We arranged our­selves around the altar, and I raised my hands to the sky, throw­ing my head back melo­dra­mat­i­cally. I sum­moned all the seri­ous I had at my dis­posal, along with the biggest, most impres­sive words in my vocab­u­lary. I had for­got­ten the gold eye glit­ter; fancy words would have to suffice.

“O won­drous and inim­itable lady Isis! We are your hum­ble ser­vants, born to honor and serve thee!” Ancient Egyptians cer­tainly spoke in Elizabethan English. If it was good enough for the Hebrews, it was def­i­nitely good enough for a priest­ess of Isis, even if I didn’t have any idea what “inim­itable” meant.

My lit­tle brother raised his arms, too, and said, “Amen!” I didn’t think it was right to say “amen”to an Egyptian god, but I didn’t know what else to say, so I repeated him. “Amen!”

We got down on our knees and began pros­trat­ing our­selves before these plas­tic water bot­tle idols. We man­aged a few “hal­lelu­jahs” and quite a few “amens” before my mother appeared before us, arms crossed angrily across her chest, face twisted in a fury.

“What the hell are you doing?” she asked.

Common sense fled me. I knew what I was about to say was the wrong answer, but I couldn’t help myself. A good, believ­able lie escaped me. My only option was the truth.

“We’re wor­ship­ing Isis and Anubis like the ancient Egyptians did,” I said.

My mother breathed in deeply, try­ing to keep her voice level. My mother could be quite a spec­ta­cle when she got angry. “We are Christians,”she hissed. “And you know that! Thou shalt have no other gods before me, remem­ber? What are you think­ing? And bring­ing your baby brother into your hea­thenry? Get your ass in the house and don’t let me ever catch you wor­ship­ing idols again! Really! What’s got­ten into you lately?”

Forlorn, I unclasped my brother’s cape and fol­lowed him into the house. The paint hadn’t even dried on our idols before we were forced to aban­don them to the twi­light. The next morn­ing, they were gone.

It was about that time my mother decided my brother and I needed to be baptized.

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