From walking on the moon to walking with gods . . .

My leg bounced with nervous excitement as Neil Armstrong descended the ladder. July 19, 1969. I was sixteen years old, crammed into the living room with family and friends, and convinced I was watching gods walk on the moon.

It wasn’t the first time space had dazzled me. Eight years earlier, on May 6, 1961, my teacher marched our class into the school auditorium, where a hulking nineteen-inch black-and-white television perched on the stage. We watched Alan Shepard launch into space on Freedom 7, the first American astronaut. That was it for me. I was hooked.

Back then, I was certain I would become an astronaut. Who else but gods could stride between worlds?

But as my imagination grew, so did my sense of reality. My on-again, off-again fear of flying probably wasn’t going to square with a career in space travel. So instead of living the moon dream, I began writing about it.

And then my gaze shifted from the new frontier to a previous love, an older, more mysterious one: mythology.

From Space to Gods

My fascination with space never truly left me, but mythology dug in deeper. I even minored in World Mythology in college. (My major? Rhetoric, the art of using language to persuade, move, and inspire. A good choice for someone destined to write stories about gods.)

Of all the mythologies, ancient Egypt captured me the most. Naturally, Egypt had its own moon god: Thoth, although I call him by his Egyptian name, Djhuty.

Like the astronauts I once idolized, Djhuty was a boundary-crosser. He was the god who kept the universe in balance, who moved between the worlds of the living and the dead. He stood on Ra’s solar barque each night as it travelled through the underworld. Djhuty was the judge in divine disputes and gifted humans with writing, science, and magic (heka). Seshat, his good friend, was just coincidentally the Goddess of Writing. He was, in every sense, a Renaissance god before his time.

And like the astronauts, he loomed larger than life—part scientist, part magician, part explorer.

The Writer I Became

Looking back, I see how naturally my two loves, space and mythology, fused into the writer I am today. My first clumsy attempts at novels were all about ancient Egypt. My completed (and hopefully better) novel, Queen of Heka: The Autobiography of Isis, dives even deeper into that world.

So, what do the moon landing, Thoth, and my writing have in common? Everything. They’re all about stepping across thresholds, about daring to enter unknown worlds.

And for me, that adventure has always begun with a story.

In one of my favorite scenes from Queen of Heka, Iset (Isis) meets Djhuty for the first time on the banks of the Nile. He becomes her tutor—a role he most certainly played in the myths themselves.

An ibis emerged from the fog. With each step, the bird lengthened into a man. The long, webbed feet became well-muscled legs. White feathers molted into an elaborately pleated kilt. The transformation ended at the neck. When the bird’s beady eyes fixed on me, all the noise in the world stopped.

Heru spoke into the inhuman silence. “May I present the teacher of all teachers, Djhuty, Lord of Truth and Time.”

The great god bowed. His beak opened like a black crescent moon in the white mist. “Hail, Iset wer-Heka, Mistress of the Throne.”

“I’m just Iset.” I giggled for the first time that day. Daily commerce with Heru clearly had not prepared me for the company of other gods.

“You are the lady who will learn words of power,” Djhuty said.