This article is based on a talk given at the 1986 Australian National
Convention at Launceston by researcher Jeanine Miller.
In this article I am going to
look at certain aspects of the esoteric wisdom of ancient Egypt. By way of an
introduction I would like to make certain statements, to give you the factual
truths, which I think should be known to all those who are interested in
ancient Egyptian wisdom.
Four great theological centers
The first fact is that there were
in ancient Egypt four main centres of theology, that is, of the elaboration of
the ancient wisdom. The oldest was at Heliopolis, the city of the sun, as the
Greek version of its name implies, or the city of ON as is mentioned in the Old
Testament. Heliopolis is now a suburb of Cairo. But there, in very ancient
times, seems to have been evolved the oldest cosmogony of the Egyptians.
Another centre of learning was
Hermopolis, called after Hermes who was worshipped there, but whose real
Egyptian name was Chmunu, the City of Eight because of the famous cosmogony
developed there which divided the 'darkness' or the 'waters of space' into four
pairs of differentiated aspects and personified these and paid worship to them.
Another centre was Memphis which
became the celebrated capital of Egypt for two thousand years after Menes had
united upper and lower Egypt. The earlier form of the name was Men-nefer which
originally referred to the residence of Pepi 1 of the sixth dynasty as well as
to his pyramid in the necropolis and which gradually became the usual
designation of the whole city, becoming Menfi in late Egyptian.
The latest was Thebes which
became the capital in the New Kingdom and synthesized all the previous
cosmogonies.
How do we know that these centres of theology existed?
There are records still extant of
these various cosmogonies, such as inscriptions on the inner walls of tombs, on
stone steles, and lastly on papyri.
Three main theological registers
The next fact we must know is
that there are three particularly important records of religious interest to
us.
The first is called the Pyramid
Texts. By this I do not mean texts on the Great Pyramid that we all know of— in
fact the Great Pyramid, apart from all its other outstanding characteristics,
is conspicuous for its lack of inscription! I mean the texts inscribed in the
interior walls of tombs (having a pyramid shape) of the kings of the fifth,
sixth and seventh dynasties. The quality of the engravings of these
inscriptions, the whole perfection of the work, is amazing. As scholars have
dated these texts to about 3000 B.C. they are the oldest records we know of.
These texts are now thought to have been in existence long before the
unification of Egypt. They are compiled from earlier sources and are
incorporated in later religious writings. They treat of solar mythology, Osiris
myths and worship, funerary rites and prayers, and concern the welfare of the
Pharoah on his journey in the beyond, in the various realms of the Egyptian
Dwat. They are indeed litanies that reveal the Egyptian thought on the
hereafter.
The second important records are
called the Coffin Texts, called by the Egyptians Books of Justification for the
Other World. They form the missing link between the Pyramid Texts and the Book
of the Dead. These inscriptions cover the coffins of the Middle Kingdom of the
nobles, and comprise incantations for a happy transition and protection against
all the obstacles on the journey after death. They are found scattered
throughout the Nile Valley.
The third texts of importance are
the so-called Book of the Dead, which are inscriptions on papyri rolled up and
placed by the side of the mummy in the tombs of the kings. It is a complete
misnomer. It was never called the Book of the Dead by the Egyptians, but the
Book of Coming Forth by Day — the book of the great awakening to the inner side
of life. It was called the Book of the Dead by the German Egyptologist Lepsius
when he saw the papyri beside the mummies and obviously thought 'this is the
book of the dead' – a name which stuck! This is the greatest collection of
Egyptian religious texts comprising incantations, spells, vindications and
hymns addressed to Ra, Osiris and other gods, revealing Egyptian thought on the
questions of the after-death states of consciousness, the soul's pilgrimage
through the various mansions of the "underworld", its initiations,
and immortality. Three versions may be distinguished — the Middle Kingdom, the
New Kingdom and the late period (Dynasty XXI onwards).
We have in these three documents
a complete outline of Egyptian religious thought wherein we see certain changes
and developments of thought from the ideas expressed in the Pyramid Texts with
their outline of the Beyond, to those expressed in the Coffin Texts and their
final redaction in the Book of the Dead.
Ancient Egyptian language
We must realize also that in the
course of Egyptian history which scholars date as approximately five thousand
years of duration, not only did the ideas and religious conceptions change but
also the language. The Egyptians were conservative to the extreme, but
nevertheless they evidence a certain amount of change in their political,
religious and social fields, and above all, language.
With regard to the language
certain facts should be known. The names of pharoahs, cities and gods have come
to us via Greece, and so what we generally have is the Greek form of the names.
Until the decipherment of the hieroglyphic language this is all we could have.
Examples are Amenophis which is the Greek form of Amenhotep and Osiris of
Ausar. Furthermore, there are certain names of Egyptian gods which scholars do
not think are of Egyptian origin, such as Ra, Shu, Tefnut, Nut and Geb. This
would mean that they were gods imported into Egypt by another very early
migrant race. A further difficulty about the names is that hieroglyphs do not
include vowels, hence the constant changes in our transliteration of names such
as Atum or Tern, Akhenaton or Iknaton, Ra or Re etc.
The hieroglyphs
We know that hieroglyphs are
pictures or pictographs. If you want to write a word like a house, a man, a
tree, a bird you can draw each of these and it is clear what you mean; but it
is not enough to draw a picture to express an abstract idea. Something else has
to come in. One easy way of showing this is to choose a word like 'wind'. How
are we going to show 'wind?
The ancient Egyptians drew a full
blown sail. So here you have the literal meaning of'sail' and the figurative
meaning of the 'wind'. But there is a third meaning, which is symbolic or
spiritual. For us the symbolic meaning of the 'wind' is the 'spirit'. The
Egyptians in this respect expressed the 'soul' as a bird with a human face.
Hieroglyphic texts have at least three meanings literal, figurative and
spiritual. Only the literal with occasional flashes of the figurative has been
investigated by the scholars. This is due to their literal-mindedness and their
(usually) lack of intuition or spiritual insight.
So, in order to express their
thought in a written form the Egyptians first had the hieroglyph or pictograph.
Later they developed signs for each sound, hence a phonetic language. But, as
in our own language we have many words with similar sounds but different
meanings, so did they. An example in our own language is the word 'plane' as
used in carpentry and the word 'plain' which is either the opposite to mountain
or that which is neither ugly nor beautiful. For each word there was the
hieroglyph, the sign for the sound, and finally, a determinative which gave out
the full meaning. For example, the word for 'mother 'was "mut"; the
mother is the womb of the birth, so we have the hieroglyph of the vulture for
mut, the sign for 't', and the determinative 'woman'. The same word means 'death',
for death is the womb into the beyond, so here we have as determinative the
picture of a little figure with a sickle.
The interpretation of the texts
It is interesting to note that
the Pyramid Texts, generally speaking, omit to inscribe the determinatives. This
means that they are esoteric texts whose inner meaning was known to the priests
but which, without determinatives, cannot yield their real meaning to the
profane! The key has been withdrawn.
Scholars, as usual, take the
texts in their literal meaning. In the book Serpent in the Sky, by John Anthony
West, which is a summary of the last masterpiece of Schwaller de Lubicz. His
book, The Temple of Man, examples of passages from the Pyramid Texts are given
as translated by three or four scholars. They make sense, but are very common
and down to earth not what you would expect from the great wisdom of Egypt.
Then J.A. West gives his own
rendering which immediately lifts the whole passage to a much higher level. So
we must admit that we are struggling with texts to which we do not have the
key. However, if we are trained esoterically and have some intuition we can
make our way more or less successfully in this maze. It is like a jig-saw
puzzle, you find pieces here and there and finally put them together.
Primordial creation
In the Pyramid Texts we find the
old Heliopolitan cosmogony and theology. We have all heard of the primordial
ocean of matter a concept which appears in The Secret Doctrine, in the Vedas,
and in the ancient Egyptian cosmogonies. In the beginning there was nothing but
water say the ancient Scriptures. But this water is not to be taken literally —
it refers to the abyss of primordial, undifferentiated matter out of which the
universe is to be moulded. In the Egyptian hieroglyphs three wavy lines and
three urns plus the sign for the sky demonstrate the masses of waters, or
primordial matter, which the Egyptians personified as the very old god. Nun. In
the Coffin Texts we have a description of this state of inactivity as ...In the
infinite, in the nothingness, the nowhere and the dark.
This darkness is described in
great details in the Hermopolitan cosmogony where it is differentiated and
personified as four mythical figures with their female counterparts ... the
primordial waters (male and female); boundlessness or the infinite nature of
the primordial depths (positive and negative also); darkness; and the wind of
the hidden primordial function of activity. These are the famous eight of
Hermopolitan cosmogony which concentrates on Cosmic Matter. In the Heliopolitan
cosmogony Nun is the father of the gods. He represents darkness, inertia and
age, but He also represents the nurturing principle, and is more or less
androgynous and remains in the background once the activity of manifestation has
started.
So the Pyramid texts contemplate
a state of existence when there was nothing but the waste of waters, Nun, when
heaven existed not, and earth existed not, when existed not that which was to
be established, when the disorder existed not (Pyr. T. 1040 a-d). The Cosmic
Ocean was occasionally symbolized by a serpent with its tail in its mouth. This
implies a delimitation of space which is going to be Creation. Creation is a
limitation. Atum rises within his limit, in assuming his form he gives the limits
to the world, hence is said at the beginning to be within the coils of the
serpent.
The verb used for 'to exist' is
'Kheper’ which means to transform, manifest, hence, come into being. This
implies pre-existence in a state of latency. Manifestation is a transformation,
evolution. Hence a text says:
« I have evolved the
evolving of evolution. I evolved myself under the form of the evolutions of the
god Khepera which were evolved at the beginning of all times... I developed
myself from the primeval matter which I made. »
(The Book of Knowing the
Evolutions of Ra and the Overthrowing of Apepi)
At a particular moment in time,
which the Egyptians called the 'first time', motion occurred within a
particular space in the inertia of the waters. The 'event of creation' was the
'first time', which implies 'the first event in a series'. This joins back to
the idea of eternal reoccurrence expressed in The Secret Doctrine as the Second
Fundamental Proposition:
« The Eternity of the
Universe in toto, periodically the playground of numberless universes incessantly
manifesting and disappearing. »
(SD I, p.16)
However, no scholar has yet come
to this conclusion although the idea of the first event in a series' as
expressed by Rundle Clark should lead one to it.
This primeval motion was imaged
as the emerging of a hill or mound out of the waters which Rundle Clark
beautifully interprets as signifying the Coming of Light, Life, Land,
Consciousness. Out of the unconscious undifferentiation arises conscious
differentiation; out of the primordial fluidic state of the beginnings emerges
the solid state of the creation. This emergence which is motion, activity,
manifestation, was symbolized in Atum, the primeval God of Heliopolis, the
Primal Mover whose sign is the sledge or vehicle of movement, that which
carries along. The Egyptians did not know the 'wheel' until much later. They
used the sledge, hence the choice of the symbol. The meaning of Atum is 'he who
completes himself’, which implied unfoldment and evolution.
The Secret Doctrine sums up this
aspect in the following important words:
« The Secret Doctrine
teaches us that everything in the Universe, as well as the Universe itself, is
formed (created) during its periodical manifestations by accelerated Motion set
into activity by the Breath of the everto-be unknown power within the
phenomenal world. »
(SD II, p.551)
Atum is called the 'Great
He-She', hence contains within himself both the positive and negative poles of
creation. The Egyptians gave him the double epithet of:
aa great through his uniqueness
the synthetic unity
wr great through his division or
multiplicity, the differentiation of primordial unity, hence unfoldment.
Thus they attributed to him the
faculty of synthesis and analysis. The Demiurge is simultaneously the Cause of
all manifestation, its possibility and its realization, hence, 'he who
completes himself.
Atum and Nun are referred to in
the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead as The traverser of millions of
years and the Great Green Lake respectively, epithets which to the student of
The Secret Doctrine give out their esoteric meaning. In this respect there is a
passage in The Secret Doctrine referring to Osiris's identification with Atum:
« The creative force in
nature. giving form to all Beings, spirits and men, self-generated and
self-existent, issued from Nun, the celestial river, called Father mother of
the gods, the primordial deity, which is chaos or the Deep, impregnated by the unseen
spirit... He is the Law of existence and Being, the Bennoo (or phoenix, the
bird of resurrection in Eternity), in whom night follows the day. and day the
night an allusion to the periodical cycles of cosmic resurrection and human
re-incarnation; for what can this mean? "The wayfarer who crosses millions
of years, is the name of the other", one begetting millions of years in
succession, the other engulfing them, to restore them back. »
(SD I, p.312)
The two ideas contained in The
Secret Doctrine of eternal motion and boundless space as the prerequisite of
any universe are the very foundation of Egyptian cosmogony. Also, the idea of
the One Active Deity or Demiurge issuing out of the Cosmic Waters of Space or
Chaos shows that the Egyptians knewof the ultimate Oneness of all
manifestation, but this was a teaching of the Inner Temple, and was not
promulgated to the masses except through certain myths which have come down to
us.
Unfoldment into many
So, from the zero of non-being
emerges that I of being. This is the first step in time, the traverser of
millions of years comes into manifestation and starts the work of evolution by
rising on his mound, i.e., by unfolding to full self-consciousness and then by
dividing himself or multiplying. From the One the two emerge. As H.P.B. states
in The Secret Doctrine:
« When the One becomes
Two, the Threefold appears": to wit, when the One Eternal drops its
reflection into the region of Manifestation, that reflection, "the
Ray", differentiates the "Water of Space": or, in the words of
the "Book of the Dead". "Chaos ceases, through the effulgence of
the Ray of Primordial Light dissipating total darkness by the help of the great
magic power of the WORD of the (Central) Sun". Chaos becomes male-female,
and Water, incubated through Light and the "Three-fold Being issues as its
First-born". »
(SD I, p.231)
I have not yet been able to find
this passage in the Book of the Dead, probably because the translations are so very
different.
The very notion of becoming two
was symbolized by the sign for transformation or the scarab, which means
evolution, unfoldment. The beetle pushing its egg enclosed in a heap of dung in
front of it seemingly referred to the cyclic recurrence of creation.
So we have on one hand the First
Trinity:
1)
NUN Primordial Ocean, Chaos, Abyss of
undifferentiated Waters
2)
ATUM Principle of
Movement, Time, sign of the sledge, demiurge, life, motion, breath.
3)
KHEPRI Principle of
transformation, sign of scarab
And on the other hand the second
Trinity:
1) ATUM Primeval Motion
2) KHEPRI Transformation
3)
RA Sign of the mouth
and arm the action of the mouth or the word in action
ATUM-KHEPRI merge in RA, the
bringer of light, life, consciousness, manifested Deity, the Word which is life
and light. Hence the identification of RA with ATUM and the joining of the two
names ATUM-RA.
The first step in creation is the
emission of the Word. This is obvious in the very hieroglyph for Ra the mouth
and the arm. Ra is the word made manifest as light or the word inaction and concretizes
the symbolic meaning of Atum (though scholars don't see this at all!) The
Prime-Moveris the spirit-word whose power is Fire. So Racreates all forms with
what comes out of his mouth, and utters his name as a word of power.
« The Egyptian Ra.
issuing from the DEEP, is the Divine Universal Soul in its manifested aspect,
and so is Narayana. the Purusha. »
(SD I, p.231)
Book of the Dead:
« I am the god Atum in
rising: I am the only one.
I came into existence in Nun.
I am Ra who rose in the beginning
the ruler of... what he has made —
I am the great god who created
himself, even Nun.
Who made his names to become the
company of the gods as God. »
(Ch. XVII)
This takes us to a further
trinity whereby Atum-Ra breathes forth Shu and Tefnut,the electropositive and
electronegative forces of the universe, personified as gods who emerge from the
mouth of Atum at the beginning. There is controversy here as to the exact mode
of creation. Here it suffices to say that it seems obvious from the Pyramid
Texts that the sexual act is meant and that the feminine part of Atum is
personified in his hand; that, moreover, the exhalation by the mouth is also
intended; that to the Egyptians every aspect of the act of creation, whether
through the lower chakra or the higher chakra, was expressive of a divine act
which itself was beyond all expressions.
The Papyrus Nesi-Amsu sums it all
up thus:
« I made a foundation
in my own heart or I worked a charm upon my heart and I laid a foundation in
Maat and I made every form or attribute. I was one by myself, for I had not
emitted from myself the god Shu and I had not exhaled out from myself the
goddess Tefnut: there was no other being who worked with me. »
This working of a charm upon his
heart refers to the Egyptian doctrine of the Heart which was the seat of
consciousness. The God, as human being, first conceived in his heart that which
was to be done and then pronounced the words of power and as a result forms
were shaped. This is found fully expressed in the Memphis theology.
Shu and Tefnut are emitted by the
mouth of Atum. They represent the centrifugal and centripetal force that rules
the whole universe, the principle of expansion and constriction, and also, in a
certain sense, akasha, the differentiation of primeval matter, the manifested
breath of Deity which can be described as electricity, fire and light, that
which separates and links the absolute spirit and dense matter and whose
reflections are Heaven and Earth, Nut and Geb. Where there is movement there is
also opposition, giving rise to the centrifugal and centripetal forces which
contribute to the creation of positive and negative worlds. Shu expands, Tefnut
contracts.
Here again The Secret Doctrine throws
light on the esoteric meaning of these gods:
« The active Power,
the "Perpetual motion of the great Breath", only awakens Kosmos at
the dawn of every new Period, setting it into motion by means of two contrary
Forces (the centripetal and the centrifugal forces, which are male and female,
positive and negative, physical and spiritual, the two being the one Primordial
Force), and thus causing itto become objective on the plane of Illusion. In
other words, that dual motion transfers Kosmos from the plane of the Eternal
Ideal into that of finite manifestation, or from the Noumenal to the phenomenal
plane. »
(SD I, p.282)
We have here again a trinity,
thus:
The whole forming the Ennead of
Heliopolis.
The expansion principle is called
Shu, and he came to be known as the god of Air and Light, the god who separates
heaven from earth as these lay in close embrace in the womb of his daughter
Nut. He becomes more personified in the Coffin Text where he is 'coextensive'
with Atum. The fact that he subsequently becomes identified with Hike, the
magic word whereby all forms come into existence, shows that we are very far
from having fathomed out his fundamental meaning. This meaning has deep
esoteric overtones, especially when we remember that the word, or primordial
sound, is esoterically a 'correlation of akasha' as we are told in The Secret
Doctrine.
But a further hint as to the
esoteric meaning of Shu and Tefnut is given to us in their epithet, for they
are called the Double Lion-God.
Book of the Dead:
« Hail thou God Atum
who comest forth from the Great Deep and who shinest with glory under the form
of the Double-Lion-God. »
(Ch. XI)
They pertain to the very ancient
symbology of the lion whose sign is fire. Being in actual fact the first two
emanations, they are esoterically linked to the 'highest group' of Creative
Powers which H.P.B. describes in The Secret Doctrine as:
« The
divine Flames, so called, also spoken of as the 'Fiery Lions' and the 'Lions of
Life', whose esotericism is securely hidden in the Zodiacal sign of Leo. »
(SD I, p.213)
Represented in the Sphinx, the
Lion of Self Assertion, that guards the entrance to the Temple of Man and the
Cosmos the Pyramids, Shu personifies enlightenment, discrimination and
destruction. These three are embodied in his consort, Tefnut, who became
identified with the Lioness goddess, Sekhmet, who is the Eye of the Demiurge,
the Eye that creates because it enlightens, illumines, but also destroys the
unready. The vast symbolism of the wisdom of ancient Egypt is contained in that
'Eye" which was sent into the Abyss to take back Shu and Tefnut at the
beginning of the cycle, and which was sent in the desert where men had fled in
order to destroy mankind that has revolted against God.
It is the female energy of the
universe, the fire that illumines, gives insight, but in the process burns up
all the dross and therefore destroys the coarser matter. It is that fire now
called Kundalini which the Egyptians knew and which they personified as Sekhmet
and in the Eye, which becomes a rearing cobra placed on the forehead of gods
and pharoahs. a hint as to their knowledge of the Third Eye and its
all-illuminating knowledge. Thus the identification of so many disparate
symbols, such as the lioness, the cobra, the eye and the fire, becomes
understandable.
I have far from exhausted the
depth of the Egyptian wisdom. However, the hint given out can be followed, and
a complete esoteric doctrine can be worked out which will vindicate that which
is stated in The Secret Doctrine
Ozymandias
I met a traveler from an antique
land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless
legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them,
on the sand.
Half sunk, a shattered visage
lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of
cold command.
Tell that its sculptor well those
passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on
these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and
the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words
appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of
kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and
despair!'
Nothing beside remains
Round the decay of that colossal
wreck, boundless and bare.
The lone and level sands stretch
far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
(Theosophy in Australia, June1986, p.123-128)
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