Enter the atmosphere of National Geographic’s Beyond King Tut

National Geographic’s Beyond King Tut is the latest immersive experience to be held at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. The exhibit features some typical museum-style sections: displays of text providing historical background, a short film giving some context about the discovery of Tut’s amazingly intact tomb, and models of the ancient Egyptian objects buried with the pharaoh when he died at age 19 around 1324 BC. But the heart of the show is the capacious main room, where a multisensory display gives life to Tut’s voyage into death and the underworld.

The projectors make use of the four walls, the floor, and the sail of Tut’s barge (recreated in generous proportions in the middle of the room) to create a dramatic, mythic, moody depiction of an arduous odyssey. Even a pharaoh, I learned, doesn’t get an easy passage to an eternity of blissful rest. “Your great voyage into darkness will soon begin,” Tut’s successor Ay announces to the departing pharaoh. “You will walk through the gates. You will battle demons. You will conquer beasts. You will not be alone.”

And indeed, he is not alone. As he sails along in his barge, he is assisted, by turns, by quite a range of gods. His ordeals include crossing a realm of quicksand and the slaying of the giant serpent Apep. Eventually, Tut makes his way to the final weighing of his heart against the feather of Maat, the moment which will decide his fate.

The music running throughout — sometimes mournful and haunting, sometimes serene — helps to create atmosphere; images joined to music are so much more powerful than images alone. And the multimedia format works especially well at certain moments of the journey: when the goddess Nut stretches her elongated, starry body over Tut during his night sea journey, a psychedelic array of his funerary objects flutters between them. And at the heart-weighing ceremony, Maat’s feathers fly about in a dramatic flurry.

I found myself surprisingly touched by this presentation of King Tut’s adventures. Like the last immersive show I attended in this space, Beyond Van Gogh, this was a story about a suffering individual dramatically separated from common experience, albeit in some very different ways.

On the one hand, Beyond King Tut glories in the material splendors of ancient near eastern royalty. On the other, the gloom of death, the great equalizer, is always near. And there’s a very ordinary human sadness that one feels when looking, for instance, at all the canes placed in the tomb of a boy king who seems to have had some difficulty walking, or the boards for the game called Senet that he liked to play during his short life. It was strange to feel sorry for a king. Perhaps it helped that I had no knowledge of his character or what sorts of brutalities he visited upon his subjects or enemies.

In any case, l found myself breathing a sigh of relief when the animated journey found him reaching his blessed end in “the heavenly fields for eternity,” with “the new day dawning, and the light that fills the world.”