Mertseger the Silence-Lover is an Egyptian spirit from the Ghostbusters RPG's Tobin's Spirit Guide.
Tobin's Summary[]
There are few Egyptian spirits more terrifying than Mertseger the Silence-Lover. Patroness of the necropolis (the cemetery; literally, "the city of the dead") of Thebes, goddess of libraries and of honest political speeches, Mertseger demands absolute silence from the world around her. She has appeared on this planet several times since the fall of the Egyptian civilization, and each time she has been more displeased at the tumult and din that marks our modern world.
From 1551 B.C., Mertseger was worshiped by the grave diggers and caretakers of the necropolis near Thebes. She appeared to them sometimes as a woman, sometimes as a giant cobra. Thebes was sacked by the Assyrian king Assurnasirpal in 663 B.C. We have very little in the way of records for this period, but we do know that Assurnasirpal sent one of his generals into the necropolis on a scouting mission. A fragment of the clay tablet that is his report survives. Below is a reproduction of the hieroglyphics on that fragment, and a rough translation:
Translation: We went into the necropolis. There were lots of graves there. And then we heard a noise. SNAKE! BIG SLIMY SNAKE!!
There is no record of a sighting of Mertseger after that until the fourth century B.C. Alexander the Great had conquered Egypt, founded Alexandria on the Nile delta, and built a tremendous library there. Scholars came to the library at Alexandria from the known world. One of these was the Greek chronicler Zippedes of Dougga. No Greek edition of Zippedes's work survives, but in a late Latin translation entitled A Zeppede Douggae Ad Zippedem Dei ("From Zippedes of Dougga to Zippedes of God"), we read of a friend of Zippedes who returned a book late to the library. The librarian "turned into a giant snake and bit the head and shoulders of my friend clear off his body, leaving little but a headless, armless corpse oozing blood and venom."
Modern scholars believe that Zippedes had embellished the story a bit, because no one in fourth-century Alexandria would buy a book about life in a library unless something interesting occurred in it. I disagree. I think that what had clearly happened is that Mertseger had moved north from Thebes in the intervening centuries and had settled down in the library. Alexandria was a thriving port in those years, and from there this silent spirit could have sneaked away to any place in Europe.