When Egeria is speaking about the “city of Rameses” and how it is now a level site, part of what catches me about the passage (quoted in part 1 of this post) is the rarity of such description in the part of her letter that still exists. This, I think, is intentional. In other parts of the text you’ll find the burning bush still living even though biologically that is highly unlikely. That is the point. The “actual” bush is a message from Egeria’s god – what god wants stays. And since the city of Ramses, an apparently hugely powerful empire, is just a ruin, this is a direct visual message saying something about the “true” god.

In this reading of the environment Egeria shows that place for her is space made meaningful by direct reference to a historical state matching biblical reference. It also seems to show she reads land as text, which is what supports the allegorical structuring of her travels. She isn’t a tourist in the way we think of tourism, but she’s moving through a materialized bible. Hence, everything that isn’t directly part of the biblical narrative is either “empty space” or its ruins proves god’s power.

I find such life-by-narrative interesting. I get the joy and power she finds in the “proof” she sees everywhere of her religion’s “correct” reading of reality, but I also am blown away by the work that must go into “vanishing” all evidence of its incorrectness. I know Egeria is unlikely to have heard of Hathor, and her link to the sycamore, but even if she had, the reference would have been turned to something Christian, as the “tree of truth” moment shows.

So much wonder gets missed when we do that to history.

Anyway, reading the land as materialized text is a powerful way to convert space into place but it is also a powerful way to temporalize. That is, this textual reading of space and time, refuses time and tries to keep things in the historical moment when meaning is at its origin. A bit like creating a snow globe but with real land.

I can’t help but think that it’s one thing to do this with someplace like Disneyland but a whole other thing to do it with people actually living there. I mean what? Going to pretend they aren’t really there? Good way to get into war. Oh. The Crusades! (Face Palm)

I’ve recently reread Egeria’s Travels (Peregrinatio Etheriae). (The version I have is Wilkinson (1971) and so doesn’t exactly match the online translation linked.)

Here’s the section I found myself captured by – been thinking about it for about a week now.

Four miles from the City of Arabia is Rameses, and on our way to stay in “Arabia” we travelled right through it. The city Rameses is now a level site without a single dwelling, but it is still visible, and once it had many buildings and covered a huge area. Even through it is ruined, its remains are still vast. The only thing there now is a great Theban stone, a single piece out of which rise two huge statues. They are said to represent holy men, Moses and Aaron, and the people tell you that the children of Israel set them up in their honour. There is also a sycamore tree there, which is said to have been planted by the patriarchs. Though it is now extremely old, and thus small, it still bears fruit, and people who have something wrong with them pick its twigs, which do them good. We learned this from the holy Bishop of Arabia, and it was he who told us that the Greek name for this tree is Dendros Aletheias or, in our language, “The Tree of Truth”. This holy bishop was kind enough to meet us at Rameses. He is now a man of some age, of a godly life since the time he became a monk, and an approachable man, who is very good at welcoming pilgrims and also very knowledgeable about God’s Scriptures. He very kindly took the trouble to meet us there, showed us everything, and told us about the statues of which I have told you, and the sycamore tree. And this holy bishop told us that, when Pharaoh saw that the children of Israel had deserted him, he went to Rameses and burned it all down before he set out in pursuit.

There are still marginal notes on the printed text. In pencil they represent my reaction to the passage the first time I read it. There are bits like “magic held in life/plant”  and lines linking “sycamore” with “Tree of Truth” and my text saying “re legend of Materia and holy family and earlier legend of Hathor” and finally “is this any different than seeing land as spiritually healing / renewing?”

That’s the question that caught my attention this time around as well, although now I have a different answer. The notion that the story behind the story of why Zacchaeus climbed the sycamore in Jericho references Hathor’s after-life nourishment and the easing of souls into the next world no longer compels me as it did those decades ago. I take it as a certainty of meme-life that such stories simple adapt to new cultural environments and move between “hosts” rather like virus do.

The thing that catches me now is the notion of “place” that Egeria constructs out of the space which is “Rameses”. And it’s this that makes me answer my own question differently.

Let me just define things a bit before I move on. “Space” in this context is the environment we live in without overt narrative structure giving it meaning. (There is always covert structure of course, but that’s for another time.)  Space is the landscape you travel through without really seeing it, without remembering it, saying later “there was nothing there.” Of course that’s not true, but for you nothing “caught” on the horns of your narrative impulse. Further, whatever it was you were looking to find (probably unconsciously), that space did not have it, so it never became a “place” for you.

Home sites are always places. They may not be wanted places but they are filled with the narratives of memory and value. That’s what makes space place. Those narratives are tied deeply with our emotions and habits. For Egeria, the space that is Rameses only takes on reality (i.e. place-ness) in the spots where the land is invested with Biblical locus. So travelling with Egeria is not like travelling with Bruce Chatwin when he goes to Patagonia, but like watching the biblical narrative actualize on the planet.