S. L. Gore

Neon hieroglyphs and giants with mystical crowns in the Temple of Dendur

February 3, 2016 at 1:22 am Leave a comment

Color the Temple: Scene I
The light projection project at the New York Metropolitan Museum Temple of Dendura

When I wrote The Red Mirror, I held an image in my mind of the interior of an Egyptian temple far different than anything I’d ever seen in photos or real life. The walls pulsed with a color palette so vivid that the strange giants with human bodies and animal heads with mystical crowns leapt from the stone to dance in the still air.

Here’s a quick excerpt from Chapter Three – The Temple:

Simmering hieroglyphs in colors bright as neon exploded from every surface. Giants with mystical crowns or the heads of animals performed strange rituals in soaring murals painted in vibrant red, yellow and blue.

I resisted leaning my head back to take in the vast ceiling with its elaborate geometric designs, absorbing as much as possible without being obvious. But I couldn’t stop my eyes from traveling everywhere at once.

As if in answer to my imagination begging for manifestation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York recreated by magic of light projection what archaeologists believe are the original colors of one vignette in the Temple of Dendur. The scene couldn’t be closer to what I saw in my mind’s eye when my character, for the first time, walks back in time through the shadowy incense-fogged chambers of a temple on the Nile. Of course, in my vision, every square inch of the walls and ceiling throbbed with the same bold colors as you see in the photo.

Although the beautiful Egypto-Roman Dendur Temple relocated from Egypt is about 500 years “younger” than my temple in The Red Mirror, it reflects the stature and majesty of the setting in my novel. There, among the polychromatic neon gods and goddesses, Isenkhebe Nefrusobek (Isis) experiences her first encounter with Egyptian mysticism and sacred sexuality.

See the New York Times article here: NY Times article on Metropolitan Museum of Art Color the Temple Scene I

Entry filed under: Sandra's Comments, The Isis Trilogy. Tags: Color the Temple, Egypt, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY Times, Red Mirror, Temple of Dendur.