finally shipped from Amazon (they had some problem that delayed the blessed event), I thought I would see if their description of this thing I pre-ordered had become more detailed. It had. The image of this box set has changed from a normal one to a pile o’ stuff, and there is a nice list of cool bonus material including actual materials (not just stuff on DVDs), including something called an ankh.As I’ve mentioned before, I generally haven’t been reading other people’s takes on Lost since I’ve been blogging about it so that I could remain largely pure, original, and not-too-influenced in my thoughts, so I had never seen this word before. Rather than assuming that it must be some terrible curse word (it sounds so angry-like), I googled, and discovered that it is something the Egyptian divinity used, and it is a hieroglyph that means “eternal life.” It is a cross with a loop at the top, in other words, the list-o’-candidates-containing thingie that Jacob gave Hurley in the guitar case and that the (also Egyptian) statue was holding. Oh, did you not notice all that? Neither did I; the things Google found told me all that. I never noticed the statue holding the thing, and I just assumed the cross with the loop on top that was in the guitar case and contained the list-o’-candidates was some kind of Jacob symbol. Since it involves a cross, I assumed it was just a modified Jesus-y cross. Duh, of course it would be an ancient Egyptian thing considering the other Egyptians things on the island (including hieroglyphs scattered throughout it), and of course I should have googled sooner to learn about it. If I had, I might have gotten the clue that the Island is the home of eternal life, via the Light, and that Jacob lives in the foot of a statue that once held eternal life, but his life would no longer be so eternal and would be cut short, just as the statue had been cut short. Meh
, I’m sure I wouldn’t have come up with all these ideas, so it’s ok. It’s fun to learn about it, knowing all that we now know.Hmmm…the things Google found also say the ankh was the thing that the Dharma leader’s wife saved from her late husband. Does that mean that she had been married to a follower of Jacob, or in other words, an Other (or, more accurately, a Hostile)? Was she an Other (Hostile) herself? I must google s’more, excuse me for a moment. Ah, here we go, this nice blog refreshed my terrible memory, and explains that Paul was a Dharma person, but suggests (as I just did) that perhaps Paul was really an Other, a possibility, as I said, indicated by his ankh.
By the way, senet, the game that Man in Black was playing, is also of Egyptian origin, and I also discovered that word via the list o’ bonus features at Amazon since I will also be getting that game. Clearly, Lost is heavily imbued with ancient Egyptian things, presumably with the purpose of emphasizing the mythology and antiquity of the island.
