Osiris Darwin Einstein

Osiris Darwin Einstein Osiris, Darwin, Einstein Copyright © 2010, 2014 David A. Cintron All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. Pre-publication draft For more information contact: David Cintron 291 Donner Ave. Ventura, CA 93003 Acknowledgements Heartfelt thanks to these who have inspired and supported my spiritual journeys Carol Cintron Roger Bezanis Gautama Siddhartha Seers of the Arya Dharma L. Ron Hubbard OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN ZERO PREFACE .............................................................................................. i IDENTITY THE EVOLUTION OF MAN5 SPIRIT VS. SCIENCE ......................................................................... 5 HISTORY VS. PREHISTORY .............................................................. 7 MAN VS. NATURE ......................................................................... 11 THE EVOLUTION OF EGYPT21 KNOWN VS. UNKNOWN............................................................... 21 THE EVOLUTION OF THE UNIVERSE31 CREATION vs. EVOLUTION ........................................................... 31 DICHOTOMY THE GODS OF MAN35 THE EYE AND THE WORD ............................................................. 35 THE GODS OF EGYPT41 THE CONCEPT AND THE SYMBOL ................................................. 41 THE SIGN AND THE SYMBOL ........................................................ 45 THE IDENTITY AND THE SYMBOL ................................................. 49 THE LADDER AND THE SPIRIT ....................................................... 51 SUN AND MOON .......................................................................... 55 EARLIER AND EARLIER .................................................................. 57 THE GODS OF THE UNIVERSE61 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN NON-EXISTENCE AND COMPLETENESS ........................................ 61 THE STONE AGE AND THE ICE AGE .............................................. 64 TRINITY67 THE CREATION OF MAN69 TOMBS, TEMPLES AND PYRAMIDS .............................................. 69 THE CREATION OF EGYPT73 CREATION, CREATION AND MORE CREATION ............................. 73 PTAH, MEMPHIS AND SAQQARA ................................................. 76 RE, IUNU AND HELIOPOLIS........................................................... 80 THOTH, HERMOPOLIS AND THE OGDOAD ................................... 83 THE SUN, THE MOON AND THE EYE OF HORUS........................... 89 THE MOTHER GODDESS, THE PLACENTA AND THEBES ............... 91 EDFU, THE PRIMEVAL MOUND AND THE FIRST TEMPLE ............. 94 THE CREATION OF THE UNIVERSE101 OSIRIS, DARWIN AND EINSTEIN ................................................. 112 APPENDICES CHRONOLOGY ................................................................................ 115 ILLUSTRATIONS .............................................................................. 105 REFERENCES ................................................................................... 129 PREFACE Why Osiris, Darwin and Einstein? Osiris was a god of the Ancient Egyptians. Darwin and Einstein were scientists of the modern world. In the mind of the Egyptians their religion and so their gods embraced their history and this included the creation of their world, their culture, their lives, and their understanding of the universe. To the modern, Western world these are all separate things. Religion has its own viewpoint on creation and evolution and is the sole domain of the spirit. Scientists like Darwin address their understanding to the creation of man and scientists like Einstein work to approach an understanding of the creation and future of the physical universe. This gives us two belief systems, the spiritual and the scientific, that are seemingly in conflict. How did this happen? Do science and religion need to be divorced? Perhaps not. Science has become the domain of that which can be proven. Religion has become the domain of that which cannot. Yet for science to advance the scientist must believe in an idea that has not been proven. Science is, in fact, the process of uncovering truths which exist and have existed regardless of our ability to recognize and understand them. Is not religion the same? This book attempts to show how these two systems can work as one today as they did in the ancient world by taking you back to the very beginning of our civilization and clearing the misunderstandings and alterations to reveal the core beliefs. Once explained you may find that these beliefs are timeless and as relevant today as they were five thousand years ago. This book presents an explanation of the ancient Egyptian religion that builds a framework of understanding that can be used to better understand its mysterious iconography, prose and history. This may not be a perfect explanation but it is a workable explanation. Many details of the religion have not been examined as minutely as they could have been OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN because the goal of this book is to give the reader the big picture and not to answer every last question. This book also attempts to present a perspective of simplicity based on the concepts behind the development of the philosophy, and so bypasses the complexities of Hermeticism, Gnosticism and other later beliefs. References could have been given at every turn but to do this would greatly lengthen the task by requiring documentation of every conclusion. A bibliography is included at the end. The Author ii PART 1 IDENTITY 1 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN SPIRIT VS. SCIENCE In January of 1996 the Associated Press distributed an article out of Kathmandu, Nepal that stated, “He may be only 4 years old, but his devout followers have waited nine years for his return. On Sunday, he arrived – the Buddhist monk believed to be reincarnated in the body of a spirited American boy … Deshung Rinpoche IV - the reincarnation of a high lama who died in Seattle in 1987”. Six thousand years earlier, an Egyptian priest hacked out an image of a boat and its crew on the face of solid rock in the Wadi Hammamat (what is now, a dried up riverbed to the east of the Nile). This image was most likely meant to represent a recently deceased follower in the company of unnamed gods, family members, friends and/or servants. That image remains to this day in the company of many hundreds of similar images left over the course of a thousand or more years in the fourth and fifth millennia B.C. (Figure 1.1) Nine thousand years before that a group of prehistoric hunter gatherers painted the body of their dead tribesman with red ochre and buried him crouched in the fetal position, head to the south towards the source of the Nile River and face towards the rising sun, as a symbol of physical and spiritual rebirth. Fifteen thousand years later modern science found his body and grave and judged it to be primitive; primitive defined as “characterized by simplicity or crudity; unsophisticated.” Science does not recognize the human soul. It cannot be measured or even detected with current instrumentation. According to today’s science the human mind is composed of an array of neurons weighing three pounds (or 1350 grams) through which electrical signals travel at 10 feet (or 3 meters) per second. These things can be measured and so they are given preferred labeling as “the human mind”. This same human mind is capable of holding over 100 years of memories in the form of sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, thought and 5 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN emotion in the very least. Science cannot explain how this memory works; it can only state an improbable hypothesis that RNA is involved but has no clue how a memory is stored. This same mind can replay a symphony or even compose one, somehow hearing it in the inner mind without the need of mechanical reproduction. Science cannot explain this inner voice nor access its source. Science cannot prove that your brain is the same thing as your mind. Your brain conducts nervous stimuli but the ultimate destination of this message is unknown. Your brain’s system of neurons broadcasts a continual picture from eye to whatever it is that sees. Science can trace this connection to the cerebellum, but from there the trail disappears. Who is right? Where does science meet spirit? Can we achieve the same unity today that the ancients believed they had already found? The ancient Egyptians had their own way of viewing the universe. To them it was a world of divine forces at work. The ancient Egyptians are accused of polytheism and blamed for having too many gods to comprehend. Yet our laws of nature were their gods. Do we have too many laws of nature? The Egyptian word for god was ntr, pronounced netjer or netcher. There is an entire book written around the meaning of this word, “Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt” by Eric Hornung. The word ntr can be translated as “divine principle”. All of the Ancient Egyptian gods fall under the title of ntr. Plutarch, the ancient Greek historian who was a contemporary with the ancient Egyptians, wrote in his “Essay on Isis and Osiris” that the god Isis stands for divine knowledge and Osiris stands for the power and understanding of the universal soul. In Egyptian mythology Isis and Osiris were husband and wife and brother and sister, a purely symbolic union of concept, or a simple fairy tale, depending on who is listening. The word ntr may better be translated as “transcendent”, in noun form. Each Egyptian god can be better interpreted as a way to gain an understanding of the world that allowed one to take one step towards transcending the physical reality of this world. The ancient Egyptians went to a great deal of trouble to transcend our physical world and become a part of the divine. An accumulation of over four thousand years of mummies, pyramids, rites and rituals was all a part of this effort. We continue to pursue this transcendence in our own way through modern religion and modern science. 6 IDENTITY Are these two fields any more advanced today than they were in the times of Ancient Egypt? Perhaps in another two thousand years our efforts will be looked upon as no more enlightened than theirs. HISTORY VS. PREHISTORY We have no history of ancient Egypt. We have only lists of king’s names, descriptions of visits by contemporary Greek historians such as Herodotus and Plutarch, and otherwise hundreds or thousands of personal communications. But there is no surviving copy of any history that describes a sequence of historical events that was written by an ancient Egyptian. The scant records we do have begin only with the first Egyptian king. Yet Egypt as it was then had existed at least in a forming state for over a thousand years. The first official Egyptian king was named Narmer who came to power in 3150 B.C. He is considered the first king for two reasons. First, he is the first to wear the crowns of both Upper (Southern) Egypt and Lower (Northern) Egypt (Figure 1.2). Before Narmer we have images of what we assume to be kings wearing the crowns of either kingdom but never the “double crown”, which combines both into one, worn by every Egyptian king that came after. So Narmer is credited with uniting the “two lands”. Whether he accomplished this by force or diplomacy is not known. Second, he is named first on more than one cylinder seal from the first dynasty that lists the kings of the first dynasty. (Figure 1.3) To illustrate this scenario in a modern context we can see there are many parallels between proto-historic Egypt and American history. Just like Egypt, the land which became America was populated by a prehistoric people for thousands of years. In late prehistory Egypt was composed of a number of districts called Nomes. There was one group of Nomes for northern Egypt, and one group of Nomes for southern Egypt, later referred to by the Egyptians as “the two lands”. Each group was at some point unified under its own central government. America itself was a forming state with a number of districts called Colonies that eventually declared themselves autonomous under central governments, one for the North and one for the South. Just as there was a line of little known pre-dynastic kings, little known to most Americans there were sixteen ephemeral presidents, termed “President of Congress”, before George 7 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN Washington, the founder of our country, took the presidency in its current form following the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. George Washington helped to unite the colonies through diplomacy and won a war against the British army by force. We don’t know how Narmer unified northern and southern Egypt but in America it was Abraham Lincoln who later united the two lands. Narmer’s name is written as a catfish and a chisel and his name is interpreted as meaning “striking catfish”. To us this seems ridiculous, not knowing that the Nile River is populated by an electric catfish that can put out over 450 volts of electricity. If you didn’t know what electricity was, and had picked up one of these fish, you might think there was a hidden, powerful, perhaps even divine force at work. The break in understanding illustrated by the logic behind the name of Narmer is typical of nearly all Egyptian religion as viewed by modern civilization. It is the symptom of a lost culture that we are challenged to decipher. If that were not enough of a task realize that the Ancient Egyptians themselves did not always maintain a consistent encyclopedia of their own knowledge. The story of Osiris in the 5th Dynasty was not the same story as told 2000 years later in the 30th Dynasty. Some would say the religion evolved but this may be more of a devolution than an evolution. The transmission of knowledge from one generation of priests to another was broken several times by any number of reasons from lack of writing to natural disasters to outright political purging. The result was no different than the changes in the Christian bible as it passed through the Council of Nicea, numerous other Ecumenical synods of the middle ages and across languages from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to English. Nevertheless an intelligent analysis of the fragmentary information that we do have, stretching from Roman times back more than 3000 years earlier to before the first dynasty, allows us to trace these concepts backwards through history to their original form and, as they fade away into the void of prehistory, we can make one or more sensible extrapolations as to their ultimate origin. Ancient Egyptian history is broken up into about a dozen pieces starting with the millennia before the first dynasty, known as the “predynastic”. It is not known exactly when this began but its beginning is placed somewhere around 5000 B.C. Because Africa is the birthplace of mankind, we can go quite a bit earlier, but something happened around that time that attracted Neolithic hunter-gatherers to the Nile valley. The cause attributed to this event was a gradual lowering of the Nile flood levels to where the area was habitable. 8 IDENTITY How long ago did Homo Sapiens come to the geographic area of what is now Egypt? Even before the predynastic era the Nile valley and its surrounding areas were populated by stone tool makers. Burials have been found that are as old as 30,000 years. But we also know that human migrations out of Africa started over 50,000 years ago and you can’t get to Asia without going through Egypt. Recent discoveries are revealing that what is now sub-Saharan Africa has long been a Petri dish for human evolution. It is beginning to look like small groups of evolving apes, followed by small groups of evolving hominids, have occupied separate valleys and gorges in central Africa for at least the last 11 million years. Somewhere between 11 million and 10 million years ago, ape became man. That is to say, the 24 chromosome pair chimpanzee became a 23 chromosome pair hominid. This process is currently estimated to have taken about one million years. The interesting question in this story is, how do you lose a chromosome pair? Certainly it is easy to conceive of one aberrant birth, but to evolve an entire species you have to have at least two at the same time that somehow come together to reproduce, who in turn come together until there are enough members to maintain the race. There is a scientific theory which explains this in terms of a “genetic bottleneck”. For this to happen the population has to simultaneously undergo a drastic reduction while multiple major evolutionary mutations take place. Perhaps it is not so much that it took a million years to happen, but that it took much longer than that to get to where it was a possibility. Over the next ten million years small groups of evolving humans lived somewhat isolated from each other, each developing on their own, every now and then a group leaving the fold and travelling to various points around the globe. The speed of evolution was likely accelerated because of the small quantities representing each group. When you think of an entire species today, such as cats, dogs and humans, you think in the millions or even billions. But these small populations of hominids were represented in the hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands at best. The last twenty thousand years has been a very unique period in human history because it has only been in modern times that there was only one species of Man living on Earth. The fossil record shows that Neanderthal man and Homo Sapiens sprung forth from the evolutionary line at about the same time. They both possessed the FOXP2 gene required for speech. They both created art and they both buried their dead. Neanderthal man may have died out but he is not completely gone. A full sequencing of the Neanderthal 9 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN genome was recently completed and compared with samples of the Homo Sapiens genome from around the world. The results show that the Eurasian gene pool contains 4% Neanderthal DNA. The Neanderthal species was restricted to Europe and Western Asia. The most recent remains were found on what is now the island of Gibraltar and were dated to around 25,000 years ago. Based on the remains that have been found as time went on Neanderthal man retreated to higher and more remote areas of Western Europe and must have died out from climate change coupled with inability to compete with Homo Sapiens. Judging at the rate we are capable of killing each other it is possible that the only reason the Neanderthal species died out was because they were not sufficiently violent. Nevertheless, sometime in the last two hundred thousand years, a human looked at his dead friend and thought to himself, “There is the body, but where is the part that was alive? There must be more to this.” And so religion was born. There must have been three basic questions that were posed by primitive man in the time of the hunter-gatherer. The first question was, where do we go when we die? This question may or may not have been answered, but starting at least thirty thousand years ago people were buried in the region we now call the Nile coated in red ochre and accompanied by jewelry and clothing. So it was felt they had some destination. The second question was, where did we come from? This was to some degree related to the first question as the red ochre was a symbol of the blood of a human birth implying the logic, “as we were born into this life, we are born out of it”. This mystery remained in the times of ancient Egypt and at some point had been extended to include the placenta and womb as a mechanism of transferring a soul from god to man, thus linking woman with the divine. The third question was, how was the world created? Even today every culture in the world has a creation myth no matter how primitive. Ancient Egypt actually had at least four and not because they were in conflict but because there were at least four aspects of the world whose creation needed an explanation. Somewhere between those moments of spiritual epiphany and the ascendance of King Narmer the race of deeply religious ancient Egyptians came to live along the Nile River. We do not know where they came from, but it is believed that all humans living today are descended from a single female who lived in central Africa just over two hundred thousand years 10 IDENTITY ago. And somewhere between then and now the first conception of the human spirit evolved into the advanced philosophy of reincarnation practiced by Tibetan lamas such as Deshung Rinpoche. Whether you are a student of Tibetan Buddhism, a member of one of the hundreds of religious groups of Earth or an atheist, the legacy of Man’s search for spiritual identity is part of your heritage. The parched desert lands to the west of the Nile River are just now beginning to reveal that the mystery of the origin of the ancient Egyptian culture is deeply intertwined with the mystery of the origin of their spiritual philosophy. If Neolithic Man (and woman) had known the challenges they were to face they may have decided to run the other way. But instead they not only survived these vents, they came through with a spiritual strength that is with us to this day and the Egyptian philosophy was in play long before the Egyptians settled in the Nile Valley. It is simply possible they were always there. But what fueled the transition from bury-them-in-the-dirt hunter-gatherer to rock-solid -tomb statesmanfarmer? MAN VS. NATURE Looking over the last ten thousand years or so it would seem that we have waged a fierce battle with not just our own nature but numerous forces of nature itself in the struggle to create a civilization. We are currently in what is called an interglacial period. For the last ten thousand years we have had, as one expert puts it, extremely good weather. For the last several hundred thousand years before that Earth spent most of its time in a cold, harsh ice age. The most recent interglacial period was about 125,000 years ago. It appears that around this time there was a marked advance in Neolithic technology with the introduction of bone tools, mining and even record keeping in the form of carved notches on bone and rock. But the ice returned. Sometime around 12,000 years ago the most recent glacial period came to an end. There is evidence, in the form of nanodiamond deposits recently found in North America, that this event may have been assisted by a comet that blew up over the Laurentide ice sheet. The end of the ice age was a world changing event that profoundly affected every man, woman and child. Over one million cubic miles of water poured into the oceans causing sea level to rise by over 100 meters 11 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN (300 feet) and moving world coastlines hundreds of miles inland in some places. Even the small rise in temperature we have experienced over the last few decades has been blamed for record breaking hurricanes. One can imagine what weather may have accompanied a much larger change with dramatically rising sea levels. It also seems to have triggered an unprecedented advance in human civilization. Somewhere between 10,000 B.C. and 5,000 B.C. we evolved not so much advanced technology but advanced philosophy. Is it possible it was an advance in reason that precipitated the rise of agriculture and cities and not the other way around? Our concept of the ancient world is under continual change. Popular and scientific news journals publish reports almost weekly about how a new archaeological find is evidence of earlier and earlier evolution of man and the development of world civilization. In the last few decades the idea that Mesopotamia was the cradle of civilization and the origin of the written word has given way to discoveries in southern Egypt. It is now evident that the two cultures were somewhat contemporary and not only both developed writing in the fourth millennium B.C. but also had some sort of commerce in those prehistoric times. This pair may soon have further competition from ancient India. Current trends in history hold that the Vedic civilization of ancient India originated in the second millennium B.C. In 1992 a group of Vedic scholars published a book, “In Search of the Cradle of Civilization”, that postulates Vedic culture to have originated somewhere between 4000 B.C. and 8000 B.C. If so, it may have been India that ultimately helped both Mesopotamia and Egypt graduate from the Stone Age. The Vedic hymns are the oldest religious texts of Hinduism, and the Rig Veda is the oldest of the four Vedas. These were transmitted orally for thousands of years. They were composed in Sanskrit, a language that is still in use today and, if that were not enough to maintain their clarity, the hymns contain a built in dictionary. Still, the language is symbolic and understanding requires much study, but it is possible this knowledge was originally committed to memory between six and ten thousand years ago. Unfortunately nothing else remains of Vedic culture because India is a very humid region hostile to the survival of anything ancient. Egypt, on the other hand, is a hot, dry climate where an artifact dropped six thousand years ago may remain unchanged less than four inches beneath the sand. 12 IDENTITY Our knowledge of ancient Egyptian culture begins with the predynastic period, its first definable era in the eyes of archaeologists, lasting from around 5000 B.C. to 3150 B.C. when Narmer became the first king of Egypt. This period offers many peculiar features. Shamans hacked images of boats and cartoon-like crews into the rock face of boulders along wadi’s (a.k.a. wash, arroyo, creek bed) now dried up for thousands of years. Some of the highest quality pottery in history was produced, even better (meaning stronger and lighter) than pottery from the dynastic period. Thousands of graves have been found where the deceased were buried in the sand, their bodies were desiccated into a state of long term preservation, some even possessing hair and skin to this day. They were buried with pots and jars, jewelry and clothing. Towards the “late predynastic” they may have been covered by a reed mat and even had their face and hands wrapped in linen (Figure 1.4). In the last few years large temple complexes have come under excavation that were built as long as five hundred years before Narmer. Clearly there was a substantial culture present far earlier than the first king of ancient Egypt despite the lack of written records. Also found in this period are individual hieroglyphs which later made up the ancient Egyptian alphabet and language. These are carved into artifacts but never more than enough to spell the name of a person or place. Lists of predynastic rulers appear in later monuments as prefaces to lists of dynastic kings, but with no further information. The dry desert climate is the primary reason we have so many artifacts from the ancient Egyptian culture. Another reason is the quantity of artifacts carved in or made of rock and ceramics. More and more of these very ancient and very mysterious artifacts are being found on a consistent basis. But what eludes us is conclusive evidence as to the ultimate origins of the Egyptian civilization. The area which became ancient Egypt is in northeastern Africa, extending west from the Red Sea to the Sahara Desert, and south from the Mediterranean to the first cataract of the Nile where the present day Aswan dam has been constructed. It seems that populations from around this area began to converge on the Nile valley starting around 10,000 B.C. (Figure 1.5) One of the earliest archaeological sites in Egypt is Nabta Playa, a basin about 200 miles southeast of the first cataract of the Nile, in what is now the Sahara desert. But for several thousand years after the end of the last ice age the Sahara was more savannah than desert. This site features 13 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN remains of sacrificed cattle and stone circles that may well have been used for astronomical purposes. Nabta Playa was occupied for thousands of years beginning around 9,000 B.C. (Figure 1.6) Also very old is rock art found in wadi’s both east and west of the Nile. These thousands of images cover a span of time that begins even earlier than Nabta Playa with the oldest estimated at 15,000 years. They cover such a wide time span that images from predynastic times are found next to scenes carved throughout the time of dynastic Egypt and even Greek and Roman graffiti. The images that are of interest here are from the one or two thousand year period of the predynastic era. These images contain primarily boats and people in those boats both large and small. Interestingly these images also contain abstract representations of cattle and people with features the inventive might call “antennae”, the insightful may see as a symbol of the spirit, and the conservative would label as a feather headdress (Figure 1.7). Also from predynastic times are vases painted with symbols that were later used as the names of ancient Egyptian gods. These symbols were represented as standards raised from the deck or prow of boats. (Figure 1.8) The ancient Egyptians named everything after gods and religious terminology. The name of every Egyptian pharaoh and all of the viziers, priests, dancers and musicians, towns and temples are named after gods and divine things. To the Egyptians, everything existed if not directly by the hand of the creator, then by permission of the creator. How early did the ancient Egyptian religious symbolism begin? The evidence fades into the mists of time. The real question should be why was it so all consuming? There was a logic developed over a period of thousands and maybe even tens of thousands of years based on the early evidence of burial practices. The logic can be laid out in a series of conclusions reached by Neolithic philosophers.    14 Somehow the world was created. Somehow Man was created. Man is not cause over the world because the world is bigger and stronger than Man – therefore Man did not create the world and the creator of the world must be the one who is cause over all of the things created – Man and Nature. IDENTITY      Since the creator created everything, everything was once part of the creator, including all things in nature and all men. Because the creator is in us, we should be a part of the creator and possess the knowledge and ability of the creator. We do not know the creator and so must have done something to distance ourselves from the creator. Therefore Man must need to do something to return to the creator. Since we should possess the knowledge and ability of the creator, we can make an effort to attain that. Divine knowledge and divinity are attainable. The ancient Egyptians took this several steps further:     Because the world is a place, there must have been a location where the world was created. Because Man was put into the world, there must have been a place where this happened. Because Egypt is our world, these events must have happened here. Because the creator created the world and Man in Egypt, we have been given charge of its continuance. The ancient Egyptian state began with these premises and went on from there. Perhaps this helps us to understand why they built such big pyramids. Leading up to the unification of the two lands there were two separate kingdoms of predynastic Egypt, Upper Egypt in the area of what is now the Aswan dam, and Lower Egypt in what is now the Nile Delta. Each had its own king and sovereignty and knew of and traded with the other. They may have even shared religious beliefs and language, each king’s name being prefixed by the falcon (Figure 1.9). How far did this similarity go? Were they two cultures joined by the Nile River, or were they one culture split by the desert? Early Egyptologists invented a history of predynastic Egypt based on a myth involving a battle between two gods, Horus and Seth. In Egyptian mythology Horus was the son of Isis and Osiris. Seth was the enemy not only of Horus, but of Osiris. Seth battled with both Horus and Osiris over and over again. Early Egyptologists developed a theory that Horus and Seth, even Osiris, were early Egyptian rulers who fought 15 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN for control of the two lands, Upper and Lower Egypt. It is more likely they served a greater purpose as complementary divine principles of a sophisticated religious philosophy. In the beliefs of the ancient Egyptian religious texts Horus was the living king who became Osiris the moment he died. Osiris was assisted into the next life by Isis and fought by his brother Seth. Hence Seth became more and more bedeviled as the centuries wore on eventually giving us the word Satan, originally Seth who was in the Ancient Egyptian spelled simply st. But Seth was not originally evil for death is a natural force in the world and, if we do return from one life to the next, Seth is the explanation for why we do not remember. Seth destroys not maliciously but as part of the natural order of the world. Seth represents the boundary between the world of the gods and the world of man, a boundary marked by chaos that we cannot cross unless we are enlightened. Seth is not death. Seth is chaos. Seth is rain and hail, thunder and lightning, the undisciplined mind. Osiris, Isis and Horus are intimately tied together. Osiris is, as said before, the universal soul. But he is also your spirit, you as separate from the body. Osiris is helpless without Isis, divine knowledge. With Isis, Osiris can attain power over his fate as a disembodied spirit. There is another goddess that is part of this group that is not well defined and that is Nephthys. Isis, Osiris, Seth and Nephthys are described as all siblings to each other. Isis and Osiris are also described as husband and wife. Seth and Nephthys have the same relation. Because of this it would logically follow that Nephthys is most likely the antithesis or complement of Isis. Horus is the son of Isis and Osiris and so we have a family tree: Isis — Osiris —— Seth — Nephthys  Horus With this in mind, here is a shortened version of one of the tales of Isis, Osiris and Seth. When Osiris was king he set the Egyptians free from the uncivilized life in which they were trapped, teaching them laws and to honor the Gods. He then repeated this act in travels across the entire Earth. When Osiris returned Seth conspired to give him a celebration. As a part of this he built a chest that was secretly designed to fit Osiris exactly. Once the feast was underway Seth then announced that the chest would be given to whoever it fit exactly by laying down inside it. All of the guests gave it 16 IDENTITY a try until Osiris. When Osiris laid down in the chest everyone threw the lid on and nailed it shut. The chest was then cast into the Nile. Isis was beside herself with this news and set off to find Osiris, which she eventually did. The story goes a little off track here. This version was related by the Greek historian Plutarch and so comes very late in Egyptian history and reads as if it has had many additions and alterations. This is not necessarily because part of the story was lost to the passage of time, more likely it is because the purpose of the story became more and more shrouded in Hermetic symbolism. To sum up, Isis finds Osiris in his coffin inside a tree that has grown around it and brings it back to Egypt. She hides Osiris’ body in the rushes. Somehow Horus is born and she raises Horus there as well. Seth finds Osiris’ body and tears it into fourteen pieces. Isis once again sets off to find all of these pieces and reassembles them. Osiris returns from the dead, specifically to Horus, and teaches him how to fight Seth over whom he is victorious. Applying the symbolism of the players to the story one gets the idea that this may be a tale of reincarnation. But to really understand this story the role of the divine falcon in Egyptian religion is important. It was the falcon that carried the spirit of the creator to the Earth, or more importantly to mankind, at the beginning of time. The pharaoh as ruler of Egypt was the caretaker of the spirit of the creator and so he inherited the role of and was actually considered to carry the spirit of the falcon Horus. If you were wondering why the pharaoh was such an important person whose body deserved eternal preservation, this is it. How the spirit of Horus was passed from one king to another was a subject of secret rite and ritual. Where this belief originally came from has to do more with our personal spirituality than vesting our spiritual fate in the body of a single royal savior. What this means is that we are all Horus, not just the king. What spiritual message did this story of Osiris carry? Consider this. Death throws us into a turbulent spirit world over which the unaware mind has no control. Left alone the spirit will survive but rather than retain its original identity it may take on another form. The spirit can only be saved by divine knowledge that, finding our spirit, returns it to the world from which it came where it can be reborn to once again conquer death. The immortal spirit given us by the creator survives. Whether it is in all of us or just the king is a matter of politics. 17 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN This story may paint a picture of a Predynastic Egypt as a battleground for fratricide but the big picture more sensibly describes a dual theocracy with a Horus priest-king for each of the two lands ruling as a benevolent despot, guiding the planting and harvesting of the seasons, predicting the rise of the Nile flood and following the solstices. At least, that is, until around 3200 B.C. Interestingly, it follows from evidence that Narmer’s father was the famous king Scorpion. There is a myth that Horus was killed when bitten by a scorpion. Again looking below the surface we can see a scenario where a regional tribal leader named Scorpion, or who took the name Scorpion, took it upon himself to assume rulership of Upper Egypt, deposing the priest-kings and assuming military rule while seizing the knowledge, status and wealth of the priesthood for the aristocracy. This would not have been so much a revolution as the conclusion of a trend where the wealthy and aristocratic were buried with increasing amounts of property in the centuries leading up to the scorpion king. This tradition was to continue for some time as, according to Plutarch who described the process of initiating a newly appointed Egyptian king nearly three thousand years later, “if the choice however fell upon a soldier, he was immediately initiated into the order of Priests.” Plutarch also wrote that “King Menes [Narmer] first drew them off from their former frugal and parsimonious course of life”. Plutarch was telling us that as a symbol of the inception of the ancient Egyptian Dynastic system, Narmer brought changes to the culture that were less than desirable. He was speaking of the ancient Egyptians, literally, as they were referred to this way even then, in 450 B.C. The first Egyptian king lived over 2500 years before Plutarch, just as Plutarch lived over 2500 years before you and I. Yes, the ancient Egyptians had their own ancient Egyptian archaeologists. To put this in another perspective, from the time of Narmer to the time of the last Egyptian king was just over 3500 years. America has endured for just over 225 years, not quite as long as the first two dynasties of ancient Egypt. The intense spiritual focus of the prehistoric culture that transformed into Ancient Egypt was so strong that it became the driving force behind a four thousand yearlong civilization that could boast a uniform language and religion from the first day to the last. Yes, there were changes but behind these there was a truth powerful enough to engage a hundred generations. This is their story. 18 IDENTITY 19 2 THE EVOLUTION OF EGYPT KNOWN VS. UNKNOWN Until the Rosetta Stone was deciphered in 1822, all we knew of ancient Egyptian history was a list of kings by dynasty. The dynasties of Egypt had been outlined by a Greek historian named Herodotus who copied much of his history of Egypt from an Egyptian historian named Manetho. In the 200 years since that event we have learned almost everything we know about the history of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, Prehistoric and Neolithic Man, and all of the evolutionary changes of the past 55 million years. We have not a shred of Manetho’s original work but excerpts copied by Herodotus and others show that he outlined the history of Egyptian kingship as 31 dynasties. We do not know for sure what defined the change from one dynasty to another. It may have been familial and it may have been religious and it may have been political. In truth it was a combination of the three. There were times where the founder of a new dynasty appeared to be the direct descendant of the closer of the last dynasty. In cases like this where there seems to have been no change in blood line, a visible change in the religious practice seems the likely reason, where the leader of the new dynasty was able to give new orders as to the practice of the priesthood. Then there were times when a new family from a different city seized hegemony from a group which was, or had become, less powerful. And then there was the outright action of military coup, civil war or foreign invasion. Appendix A gives an outline of Ancient Egyptian History. Narmer, the first king of the first Egyptian dynasty, was also known as “Menes”. Menes in Egyptian was spelled mn.s from the word mn “to establish” with the “s” 3rd person suffix. In translating to the Latin alphabet we add the “dot” to indicate a suffix although the ancient Egyptian script had no punctuation. Moses also followed this form as ms.s, “he is born”. Ramses name was ra ms.s, “Ra is his birth” equating the king with the sun god. Narmer established the first city in the Delta, 5 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN Memphis, and established the united kingdom of ancient Egypt for the first time. This began the Archaic period, which covered the first two dynasties of Egypt and ended in 2650 B.C. During the first dynasty tombs were built to allow the deceased, should they be able to open the door and leave, to exit towards the south west in the direction of the sunset. Kings were not buried alone but with others, apparently members of the court, in separate graves in the same tomb. In one instance 338 “retainer” burials are found. Suicide, sacrifice or cemetery? Analysis of the remains shows many appear to have been young and healthy at the time of death and were buried with full honors. (Figure 1.10) This tomb layout implies that the belief was oriented towards the horizon, more specifically the area of the sky the sun passes through after setting but while it is still light, and just before it rises, that the Egyptians called the duat (rhymes with doo-wop). Consider that the sun, which in popular fiction and in truth was called Ra or Re, is the living aspect of the creator through which his creative forces enter the universe. Now consider that we are not 100% certain that he will return every day because we have not launched satellites around the Earth and taken pictures of faraway solar systems and worked out the calculations to show that the sun is at least 6 billion years old and not likely to change any time soon. Consider that we are at the mercy of the creator and that as part of the world he has created we have an active role in making sure that it continues because he has put his spirit into our trust. And consider that Ra, like every other living thing in the world, has a life cycle of birth and death. Now we are genuinely concerned what happens to the sun when it goes away. And we can equate where the sun goes when its life cycle ends in the evening may be the same place where we go when our life cycle ends. So we will make it possible for our king, who is the caretaker of the spirit of the creator, to reach the duat when he dies. Egyptologists call this a “solar” religion because of the orientation of the tombs and temples to the East-West path of the sun. Many temples were so oriented throughout Egyptian history, most notably where they were aligned so that the rays of Re would strike the innermost sanctum at sunrise on the vernal equinox. In the second dynasty a mysterious change occurs. Some kings were no longer called only Horus but had a Seth moniker as well and there has been nothing found that explains why. The first king of the second 22 IDENTITY dynasty was Horus Hotepsekhemy, “the two powers are at peace”. This may have been a reference to the two lands, or it may have been a reference to the two conflicting ntrs, Horus and Seth, or both. The reason for this uncertainty is that only the last three or more kings of the second dynasty were not just Horus but Horus-Seth, with the last king’s full name read as Horus-Seth Khasekhemwyemef Horwy-hotep, “the two powers have returned as he, the two Horuses are at peace”. (Figure 1.11) It is difficult to determine exactly how many kings there were in this dynasty, and there is not enough information to match up all of the Horus and Seth names the have been found. Perhaps a political or religious conflict was resolved during this dynasty, and perhaps the Egyptians saw no real difference between the two. Khasekhemwy, as he was called for short, was the only king of the second dynasty found with retainer burials as found in the first dynasty tombs. So it seems his reign was a return to the paradigm of earlier times, but with a new twist. Nevertheless, the Seth title did not persist beyond the second dynasty. The Old Kingdom began with the Third dynasty and ended with the Sixth. It was 500 years long and all of the big pyramids, and many smaller ones, were built in this period. This time was marked by a literacy rate of around 1% with only the elite having access to any education. The primary source of knowledge of Old Kingdom religious beliefs are called the Pyramid Texts because they are carved into the stone walls of the inner pyramid chambers. However, the earliest Pyramid Texts are found late in this time frame, the earliest being found in the pyramid of the last king of the Fifth dynasty, Unas, who died around 2323 B.C., over three hundred years into the period. This was later than the Great Pyramid and none of the three famous pyramids of Giza, all built during the Fourth dynasty, have any texts, at least none that have been found. Oddly, the many contemporaneous tombs of lesser nobles found in the shadow of the pyramids on the Giza plateau are covered with carved autobiographical texts typical of that period. Even the tombs of the pyramid builders come with inscriptions eloquently carved into their limestone walls. It is highly unlikely that the kings would go gently into that good night with nothing to lay claim to in their own afterlife. The logical conclusion is that texts from the royal pyramids were either stolen or destroyed. This is more obvious in many of the Fifth dynasty pyramids whose inner chamber walls were found completely stripped of the fine limestone of which they were constructed. 23 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN More of these texts are found in Sixth dynasty pyramids but were written differently in every one and so it is likely these changed somewhat all throughout the Old Kingdom. (Figure 1.12) All of the Old Kingdom pyramids were constructed not on a solar basis, but on a stellar basis. This is so called because their entrances face north, towards the “circumpolar” region, the point in the sky the stars revolve around. The sky was the world of the gods and so then were the stars, and if the star-sky was the world of the gods then, perhaps because of an astronomical event, or perhaps from their logic, the circumpolar region was the source of that world. But inside the pyramids there were east-west solar alignments. So the Egyptians had not abandoned the earlier belief, they had simply incorporated an expanded belief system into the increasingly complex tomb structures. As time went on, more and more of the belief system was put into larger and more solid physical representations. Predynastic and archaic tombs were built with mud-brick, papyrus and wood. Starting with the earliest pyramid, the step-pyramid of Djoser, first king of the Third dynasty, tomb components that were originally made of organic material were now made from limestone and granite carved in the exact likeness of the papyrus columns, wood beams and mud-brick walls. To the credit of Djoser’s architect Imhotep this structure is still standing. Little is left of the mud-brick structures. (Figures 1.13, 1.14) Why did these people feel compelled to build what has been termed a “resurrection machine” out of solid rock? This was a consequence of the Egyptian concept of physical “in-formation”. If a sculptor carves a statue out of rock, then that statue was formed inside that rock and simply released by the artist. Now apply that concept to the divine spirit and its status as proxy for the power of the creator. When that spirit returns to the spirit world at death it has the potential to manifest the power of the creator. All that is needed is a world that represents the world of the creator and the divine spirit will be released. This became important enough to make it a national project. The origin of the canon that became the Pyramid Texts is shrouded in mystery, but we do have several clues. One of these is the belief that some of the passages in the Pyramid texts go back as far as predynastic Egypt because they are written as if the deceased subject of the prayer was buried in the sand, something that had not been practiced since before the beginning of the first dynasty. The following passage describes how the deceased, having been buried in the sand with head to the south and facing the setting sun, should rise up, unfetter their bodies from sand 24 IDENTITY and any other physical or spiritual encumbrances, and turn towards the rising sun, in symbolic or actual rebirth. “Arise, you who are in your tombs. Cast off your bonds, throw off the sand which is on your face, raise yourself upon your left side, support yourself upon your right side, lift up your face that you may see this which I have done for you …” - Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, from Utterance 662 One of the reasons Egyptian religion is a difficult study is that the story of Egypt is the story of changing beliefs. Some may say it is a story of evolving beliefs but it is more understandable when treated as a story of devolving beliefs where knowledge was misunderstood and lost in its transfer from generation to generation. The end of the Sixth dynasty marks the end of the Old Kingdom and this is the second time a major break in knowledge transfer could have occurred, the first having been the end of the predynastic period. There is a theory recently advanced that a meteor plowed into the Earth near what is now southern Iraq, plunging the Middle East into chaos and ending the reigning kingdoms of both Egypt and Mesopotamia and anyone else within several hundred miles. The crater that was left by this event was discovered in the 1990’s when Saddam Hussein drained the Umm Al Binni lake to deprive a targeted ethnic group of water. The First Intermediate Period was a time that spanned the Seventh through Tenth dynasties and lasted over 150 years, from 2150 to 1986 B.C. It was in this time the phrase “70 kings in 70 days” originated. The reason this is called an “intermediate” period and not a “kingdom”, is that this period in Egyptian history was chaotic and it is evident that there was no central government. Rulership would have reverted to a combination of local warlords claiming Kingship over as much territory as they could dominate, local Nomarchs as the governors of ancient Egyptian states that were called Nomes, and even partial occupation by neighboring countries. There were ultimately three Intermediate Periods, this First seeming the most lawless and chaotic as the few records we do have are indicative of very harsh times. The Eleventh dynasty marked a return to a unified kingdom with central rulership. This was a period of flourishing culture with a markedly increased literacy of around 10%. Statues of kings feature large, front facing ears that symbolize their openness to the people. Nearly all of the early literary tales, myths and letters that we have found come from this 25 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN period. This lasted only through the Twelfth dynasty, a period of just over 200 years and we call this the Middle Kingdom. The Egyptians continued to build pyramids in the Middle Kingdom but they were made mostly of mud-brick. They were still huge and the interior was still made of stone. What is left of these pyramids are tremendous piles of dirt that from a distance look like natural outcroppings. Upon inspection these are composed of hundreds of thousands of mud bricks piled up and strewn all over the ground virtually disintegrating at the touch. The only reason there is still anything left is that these are seemingly countless. What were the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom became the Coffin Texts of the Middle Kingdom because now the texts were mainly painted on wooden sarcophagi. They were more standardized and accessible to the entire literate population. They contain some parts of the Pyramid texts but represent a belief structure that leaves less responsibility to the deceased for their success in achieving an existence in the afterlife while creating a much larger world already waiting for them. These coffins had eyes painted on the outside, to the left of the head of the deceased, facing west. It is not certain what event ended the Middle Kingdom. The Second Intermediate Period followed the Middle Kingdom lasting another 200 years from the 13th through 17th dynasties, or 1759 to 1539 B.C. There is drop in the quantity of information available as to events from this time period. The reason for this transition was political as during this time the Hyksos, a tribe most likely of Palestinian origin, came to rule Lower Egypt for about a hundred years. Exact dates are a matter of scholarly argument, but it was also around this time that the island of Thera exploded in the Aegean Sea in one of the most massive volcanic eruptions ever. This island is linked with the source of the Atlantis myth, and it is a straight shot across the Mediterranean from Thera to the Nile delta. The name Atlantis is another example of ancient Egyptian names converted to Greek, in this case by Plato, as the original name in the ancient Egyptian language was iwty rn.s, literally “there is not a name”. The New Kingdom began when the first king of the Eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, Ahmose, booted the Hyksos out of Egypt and regained dominion over the two lands. This period marked not only a return to an organized state but the literacy rate again increased, the country was more democratic than ever, and culture and arts flourished. The New Kingdom spanned nearly 500 years from 1539 to 1069 B.C. and because 26 IDENTITY of the stability of many of its rulers included only three dynasties, the 18th, 19th and 20th. All but the poor had access to education and literacy. Anyone who could afford a scribe to pen a story had access to the Book of the Dead, the third generation of Egyptian religious and funerary texts. These were chiseled, painted and inked onto stone sarcophagi, wooden coffins, papyrus and tomb walls. This body of text contained a whole world ready for the deceased to enter full of gods and mythical creatures, fields and rivers, judgments and eternities, as the priests of the day did their best to literally map the afterlife. (Figure 1.15) The Valley of the Kings, Valley of the Queens, the many impressive tombs of Western Thebes and many other monuments come from this time. The list is long and specifically includes the famous tomb of Tutankhamun, temples of Hatshepsut, Karnak, Abu Simbel and more. It was during this time that what is called the Amarna period took place. Dramatis Personae of this time include the pharaoh Akhenaten, his wife Nefertiti and his son and successor Tutankhamun. More Egyptophiles than ever are fascinated by this tumultuous period because many claim it is the origin of monotheism. As Egyptian history progressed the number of gods, priests, rites, rituals, temples and the political and economic power vested in the priesthood grew larger and larger. This had grown into an unsustainable political landscape. And then Akhenaten came along. Akhenaten was born Amunhotep. Amunhotep means the serenity of Amun. Amun was the chief god of Egypt. His name means “the hidden one” and he was the hidden creator of the universe. Akhenaten means “the spirit of the Aten”. The Aten represented the physical disk of the sun that radiated light, as separate from Re who was the sun god. We’re not sure how Akhenaten felt about this in particular but Egyptologists have once again pieced together the story of Akhenaten from circumstantial evidence and it’s probably very close to the truth. Akhenaten ordered that worship of the many gods be discontinued and that everyone should worship the Aten. He changed his name and not only moved the capital of Egypt from Thebes to Amarna, but had Amarna built from the ground up specifically for this purpose. The Egyptian name for Amarna was Akhetaten, “the horizon of the Aten”, symbolic of the first sunrise at the time of creation. After Akhenaten died it is not known how the power was eventually transferred to his son Tutenkhaten because there were several players involved, but you know the outcome. Tutenkhaten changed his name back to Tutankhamun, died very young and was probably buried with all 27 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN the stuff that had been originally slated for Akhenaten. Power returned to the old priesthood and try as they did to erase the memory of this unpleasant period by hacking out and carving over as many images of Akhenaten as they could find, we still know about it. In fact that’s in a large part why we know about it. Somewhere in this period of time Moses was sent out of Egypt with his people, the Greek civilization had its beginnings, and the Celts of England became active. There is speculation that Akhenaten instituted a worldwide Diaspora of banished and fleeing Amunites, or that his successor accomplished the same by ejecting all of the Atenites. Nevertheless literature and culture flourished during the New Kingdom. It was also during this time that many of the surrounding cultures began to form and/or gain power including Assyria, Persia, Greece and even Rome. All of these states would eventually come to rule Egypt. The Third Intermediate period was a time when rulership of Egypt bounced around between kings from Libya to Egypt itself all the way down to Nubia. Lasting 400 years from 1070 to 670 B.C., from the 21st through the 25th dynasty, the confusion in this period stems not so much from the lack of history as from conflicts with dates and events of neighboring cultures, especially biblical Israel. The Late period marked the era when the last native Egyptian pharaoh ruled the country and was the beginning of a long line of rulers from neighboring states. Beginning with the 26th dynasty it seems hardly more stable a time than the Third Intermediate Period. Rulership was passed back and forth from Assyria to Persia to Egypt and back to Persia. Lasting from 664 to 323 B.C. it ended with the last dynasty named by Manetho, the 31st, and the death of Alexander the Great, which marked the beginning of rule by the Greek empire. Greece assumed domination over Mediterranean civilization when Alexander III defeated the Persian Empire. This began a period of Egyptian rule by the Ptolemaic dynasty which lasted 300 years from 330 to 30 B.C. This dynasty was not numbered because Manetho lived in this time period. It was during this time the city of Alexandria was built. The swan song of the Ptolemaic era coincides with the story of Antony and Cleopatra. Cleopatra was a Ptolemaic pharaoh, not the only Cleopatra but actually Cleopatra VII, and with the defeat and death of Antony Egypt became a part of the Roman Empire. At this writing archaeologists have claimed to be on the verge of discovering the tombs of Antony and Cleopatra under the ancient sands of Alexandria. 28 IDENTITY It was during the time that Rome ruled Egypt that Christianity was on the rise, and the Roman period ended around 300 A.D. with the ascension of Constantine, the creation of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire. Egypt had become the stepchild of every dominating state and the religions of Israel, Greece, Rome and Egypt were mixed and matched, blended and diluted. Art from this period includes the golden mummies and statues of Egyptian gods sculpted in Greek and Roman style. It was during this period that we find a passage written in a document called the Leiden Papyrus that gives us the biggest clue to the Egyptian religion anywhere. This was included but buried deep towards the end of this lengthy scroll because Hermeticism was gaining popularity in the form of a secret society meant to preserve the old religion. “All the gods are three: Amun, Re and Ptah without their second. His identity is hidden in Amun, He is Re as his face, his body is Ptah.” This unassuming passage names the three seminal deities of ancient Egyptian philosophy and declares that they alone represent all of the gods. Amun was the hidden creator of the universe. Re was the sun god (or Ra, depending on how you translate the vowel) through which the creations of the hidden one became manifest. Ptah was also referred to as the heart, tongue and mind of Amun and as such was the executor of his intentions. We never see Amun because Amun can never be known and in fact we cannot know his true name. We see Re and we know Ptah. This means that every god in the Egyptian pantheon can be defined and realized as an aspect of one of these three gods. How this fits together leads to the explanation of the four creation stories of ancient Egypt. And that leads to the derivation of all of the gods, from the three questions asked by prehistoric man to the building of the Great Pyramid of Khufu to the capture of Alexandria by the Arabs. The seventh century A.D. marked the end of the ancient Egyptian culture when Egypt was lost to the Muslim empire as a consequence of the Byzantine-Arab wars. Sometime after this the last scribe died and ancient Egyptian became a dead language. Most everything we know about it has been reverse engineered since Napoleon’s army unearthed the Rosetta stone in 1799. There is also the Coptic language which was the very last form of ancient Egyptian written not with hieroglyphs but 29 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN using the Greek alphabet. It too nearly went extinct but is still used as a liturgical language in Coptic churches today. Over the past 200 years the historical accuracy of Manetho’s dynasties has been checked and cross checked with the thousands of writings found and translated. We may not be able to write a narrative history of Egypt but we can trace the development and evolution of our culture from the prehistoric hunter-gatherers of the southeastern Sahara through the long lived Nile civilization until its last remains were scattered amongst Arabia, Palestine, Greece and Rome. Its wisdom also survived as the influence of the formation of many of today’s religious philosophies and can be seen in the Hermetica, the Bible and in our very way of thinking about where we came from and why we are here. 30 3 THE EVOLUTION OF THE UNIVERSE CREATION vs. EVOLUTION Just how the universe was created and the spirit of man came to be has been a controversial topic since the beginning of recorded history. We can’t really know if the ancient Egyptians felt the same way but they are accused as being as unclear of how the world was created as we are accused of ambiguity over which creation story is the “right” one, whether by Biblical creation, scientific evolution or the middle ground now called Intelligent Design. Currently science offers several theories that describe the creation of the physical universe. The leading theory holds that the universe was created 13.7 billion years ago (approximately) from an unknowable source in an explosion that has left us with a “universe space” that has been growing in size for just as long. This theory is no more provable than the Egyptians theory that Amun created the universe through Ptah and Re. Granted there is a great deal more mathematics behind it but ask any scientist and they will tell you it is really just our best guess. The position we hold in our universe is analogous to a man living on a tiny island. He is unable to contact anyone else in the world yet has worked out an entire history of his planet simply by looking through binoculars. He has never been anywhere, talked to anyone else nor experienced anything beyond his sanctuary. Yet he feels qualified to present his version of the history of the world to his people. Scientists have been peering through telescopes at distances farther and farther away and they are currently able to detect objects that emitted the light we see today more than 13 billion years ago. They have even analyzed the pattern of “cosmic background radiation” supposedly left over from the Big Bang creation event. The results are inconsistent. The background radiation emanating from the edge of the universe is perfectly uniform in every direction, yet the distribution of matter within the universe is seemingly random. 5 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN Increasingly powerful telescopes have recently detected full sized galaxies that would have been formed only 400 million years after the universe began. It is said that by some calculations it would have taken from 20 to as long as 100 billion years for the distribution of galaxies to reach their current locations. Scientists are pressed to change their mathematical models to explain how both stars and galaxies could have coalesced so soon after the creation event. There are two mathematical models of the universe that were formed to explain its creation and evolution according to the Big Bang theory. The first tells how matter, energy and universal laws were formed. The second tells how to determine the age of the universe, galaxies and stars within it based on the observed phenomenon of the red shift of light. This frequency shift is not the same thing as the Doppler Effect because, per Einstein and the Theory of Relativity, light never speeds up nor slows down. The explanation of the observation that light from faraway stars is shifted down the spectrum (towards the red) is that the wavelength of light has been lengthened by an expanding universe. Realize that the theory of the expanding universe is not that it is getting bigger at the edges but that it is expanding throughout. Material objects escape this expansion, supposedly because they are held together by strong nuclear forces, and so “things” remain the same size. But space and energy expand, and so the wavelength of light expands as the space between stars and galaxies expands. Scientists have had to add theoretical elements to this theory to keep it in line with new observations. You can replace the word “theoretical” with the word “imaginary” as there is no proof for the actual existence of these elements. These elements are dark energy and dark matter. Dark energy has never been detected, and according to the theory it cannot be detected because it is dark. Dark energy is responsible for the unexplained rate of expansion of the universe. Dark matter also cannot be detected for the same reason. Dark matter is responsible for the fact that the galaxies in the universe are not evenly distributed but appear in clusters and other formations. Dark matter attracts these objects and so is responsible for the uneven distribution of the perceivable matter, as galaxies and stars, in the universe. These phenomena could just as easily be explained in other ways, all scientific. It has been proposed that the speed of light changed over time, thus altering the validity of redshift calculations. It has also been observed that gravity affects light, also changing the effect of redshift. 32 IDENTITY Another possibility is that the universe, like everything within it, is rotating. Rotation would create an outward force that would explain expansion. It would also provide for an increased age of the universe to give the matter within it more time to attain the heterogeneous structure it manifests. It is not of small consequence that science currently has no provable explanation for the force of gravity. In fact, science has not yet attained the long sought after Unified Field Theory which will provide a comprehensive explanation of the many forces in the universe that act on matter and energy. Starting in the 19th century several “Ether Theories” of the structure of space were evolved, none attaining any scientific conclusion. The most advanced of these attempts to explain the constancy of the speed of light by defining the electric and magnetic density of space. Whereas this is quite an intelligent undertaking in its mathematical form one can observe that space is filled with a soup of electromagnetic energy. Plotting the path of a light wave through the myriad frequencies of energy emitted by galaxies, stars and planets, especially when that path is billions of years long, poses the question, could not the phenomenon of redshift be an artifact of the force of gravity and/or these countless other “ethereal” energies. The Big Bang started off as an unpopular scientific theory and it is not really a very good creation theory as it requires we believe that there is no causation involved in it. It “just happened”. Unless you are to go into theories of what happened before the Big Bang, which comes with a long list of unsolvable paradoxes, there is no motive behind the creation of the universe. And any detective will tell you that without motive there is no crime. Seriously, if all physical laws were created after the Big Bang, then what determined what these laws would be? Did they just form randomly on their own? From what? The truth is nothing “just happens” God or no God. Yes, there are natural events but these were set in motion long ago. Everything must be caused whether it was caused right now or ten billion years ago. And something that is lifeless is never cause. So that brings us back to the question of prime cause. If the universe did not begin with a “Big Bang” then how did it get on the map? It is said that the Buddha taught that the age of the universe is 72 trillion years. It is more likely that this figure was given not because it is accurate but because it is large. The Buddha did teach that the universe was cyclical, coming to an end and starting over again after large cycles of time. Kind of like the Big Bang and the “big shrink”, another idea put 33 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN forward by cosmologists to explain how soulless infinite time will end, if that’s what you want to believe in. Ancient peoples did not view time so much as a linear string of dates as we do in modern society. They viewed time as cyclical. Every day the sun started a new cycle. Every year the seasons began a new cycle. Every lifetime a human or creature began a new cycle. Possibly they saw even longer cycles, as has been argued in many works claiming knowledge of the Earth’s orbital precession, cycling through the Zodiac every 25,000 years or so. And perhaps they saw the entire universe as being on a repetitive cycle. The Mayan calendar worked on a cyclical principal called the Baktun, which was 144,000 days, or about 400 years. The current Baktun ends in December of 2012. Some people would have you think the world will end because the Mayan calendar ends. Perhaps they should have thought of that in 1612 when they destroyed their civilization. The Egyptians believed in both cyclical and linear time. They also believed that the world would someday come to an end and start over again and had already done so. The year was marked only by the year of the reigning King, e.g. “Year 4 of Ramses”, and so the Ancient Egyptians had to keep meticulous lists of kings in order to reconcile an event with its name. For this reason these king lists play a major role in our reconstruction of the history of Ancient Egypt. The Ancient Egyptians lived in a world where causation played a far more personal role in their lives than it does today. With no machines, televisions, telephones, tele-anything, if you wanted something done you had better go and do it with your own hands or get it done by your own word of command. By this principle they created the longest lasting civilization this world has yet seen with the largest monuments built without motorized equipment. In fact they, and many other ancient civilizations, were so causative that we still can’t figure out how they did it. The point is that they knew that causation was personal and because they assigned every causative force in the universe to a ntr, or god, they assumed a personal connection with these causative forces. One of these was prime cause and so the Ancient Egyptians had a god assigned to prime cause. That god was Amun. But Amun was only prime cause, he was not the executor of that cause because the Egyptians saw three components to the execution of cause. These were cause, intention, and effect as Amun, Ptah and Re. When Akhenaten focused on the Aten, he must have misunderstood or 34 IDENTITY been unable to understand the significance of Re as living executor of cause and saw only the Aten as the physical object through which the spirit of Re was able to act. Akhenaten must also have missed the connection of Spirit, Mind and Body with Amun, Ptah and Re. As mentioned above, we are all Horus and we are all Osiris, but we are all Horus and Osiris in the role of the cycle of life and death. Amun, Ptah and Re define a cycle of action and in that cycle Amun represents our spiritual ability to have a creative thought, Ptah our ability to project that thought into action, and Re our ability to execute that intention as a physical universe event. This can be applied to everything from building a house to commanding that a house be built. The point is that it is solely the strength of the spirit as prime cause that determines magnitude of effect manifested in the physical universe. This kind of explanation can be used to illustrate the logic behind using the ntr as a named god or deity to describe what has been here referred to as a physical law or transcendent concept. It is easier to say “Amun” than to say “the prime cause that was present at the beginning of time and forever as the original and ongoing creator of the universe, and because we were created by the creator and are the manifestation of his creative force then our own spiritual ability to have a creative thought in the same way as is enhanced by our enlightenment”. And so the Ancient Egyptians spoke and wrote in this religious symbolism in the same way we use acronyms and abbreviations for more efficient communication. Unfortunately this led to the symbol being mistaken for the concept, then the concept being explained as the symbol, resulting in an altered concept. For example crucified man can be substituted as a symbol for everything the spirit has given up to be human. Then this man may be given a name. Now anyone who looks at the symbol without truly learning what it means thinks the man is what is experiencing the loss, not the spirit, and they worship the man instead of their own divinity. This is easy to illustrate through the concept of Isis. Isis represents divine knowledge. Yet instead of the individual working to “attain Isis” as would be the causative role and the only truly acceptable role to anyone who understands the concept of Amun, the individual assumes they must be the effect of Isis and must rely upon this female deity to come to them, not a causative role at all. This is certainly the case in the tale of Isis and Osiris as told in the 30th dynasty, but the enlightened must have known the true meaning of Isis or Plutarch would not have been able to write 35 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN that Isis did represent divine knowledge, even if he wasn’t so sure. The Pyramid Texts of the 5th dynasty back this up even if the language is highly symbolic. “Isis comes, Nephthys comes, one of them on the right, one of them on the left, one of them as a bird, one of them as a kite. They found Osiris, after his brother Seth had felled him to the earth, when Osiris said, ‘come to me’ . . . And Seth will not ever free himself from carrying thee, Osiris. Wake up for Horus. Stand up against Seth. Raise thyself up, Osiris son of Geb, his first-born, before whom the [gods] tremble.” - Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, Utterance 532 Understanding this relation between concept and symbol we have the basis for truly comprehending the philosophy and the religion of the ancient Egyptian civilization. 36 PART 2 DICHOTOMY 4 THE GODS OF MAN THE EYE AND THE WORD Archaeologists recently found a stone object 15 meters below the surface in Morocco near a deposit of stone tools that are half of a million years old (Figure 2.1). There is an argument over whether this anthropomorphic object was formed naturally or deliberately sculpted by an artist of an extinct Homo species. But this is not the first object found that is a candidate for pre-Sapiens artwork. Another statue candidate was found in Israel’s Golan Heights region that is nearly a quarter million years old. This would still be about 50,000 years prior to the emergence of Homo Sapiens. Researchers’ fascination with finding the origins of abstract thought in Homo Sapiens leads us to several points of emerging artistic practice. Currently the oldest artistic artifacts are pierced shells identified as crafted beads that are as old as 135,000 years and that were found in Israel and Algeria. The oldest cache of clearly identifiable artwork made by Homo Sapiens is a set of sculptures known as the Venus figurines found in what is now Germany that were dated as 30,000 to 40,000 years old. These are unmistakably identifiable as stone statues sculpted in the image of obese, partially clothed females (Figure 2.2). A number of other figurines carved from mammoth ivory have been found that were made in the same region in the same time period. It seems that this time period of circa 40,000 B.C. represents the beginning of a long period of artistic and religious development. Homo Sapiens had recently moved into the European continent and for the following 30,000 years more and more activities came to pass requiring abstract thought including cave art, sculpture and elaborate burials, according to archaeological findings of the past century. One of the most interesting objects is the “lion man”, a lion headed statue from the time period of the Venus figurines. When you put this up against a statue of the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet from 4,000 years ago they are nearly identical (Figure 2.3). This is not to say that this is the 35 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN same figure, only that the capacity of humans to represent forces of nature in abstract thought was no different 40,000 years ago than it is today. And once that step has been taken there is no going back. Our quest for knowledge of our place in the universe and how we came to be had begun its relentless onslaught of the unknown. A reasonable hypothesis of how Neolithic people ascended from their first success at abstract thought and representation to a fully formed religious philosophy can be extrapolated from archaeological and anthropological findings. By starting with the actual artifacts of prehistoric cultures on one side and the philosophical questions nearly every human being asks on the other, such as where did we come from and why are we here, we can reach a very reasonable model of philosophical evolution. The purpose of forming a philosophy can be put into three goals that would apply to any society in any time period regardless of their technological sophistication or lack of it. First, to answer the eternal questions about life and death. Second, to give a purpose to life and a reason for living beyond mere physical survival. Third, to find a way to personally connect with this spiritual aspect of livingness that comes out of the formation of such a philosophy, and to put its tenets into practice. In a primitive society, or let us say a forming society that does not have the resources of a large population at its disposal, these purposes are executed through the institutions of the Shaman, the Idol and Temple, and the Birth and Burial. The Shaman is simply the keeper of knowledge and member of the group responsible for the practice of the beliefs. The Idol and Temple are the means through which these practices are given physical identification where the Idol is a representation of what is being believed in and the Temple is a place where the group can share their beliefs. The Birth and Burial are the fundamental ceremonies where these beliefs are applied to events that involve actual transitions between life and death. The challenge to any group, tribe, society or civilization in the continuance of this tradition is the same, to keep the knowledge and practice constant despite the ravages of time. And to this end a set of ongoing abstracts are developed. The recognition of the human spirit is the first. It has only been in the last hundred years that science has relegated our essence to a chart representing electrical brain activity. Yet for the last 40,000 years, at 36 DICHOTOMY least, the dominant belief has been that the human soul is an immortal spirit. Even today over 85% of the world’s population are members of a major religion. Regardless of the advances of science those who believe we have no spirit are still far in the minority. Take, for example, the Tibetan Book of the Dead. This is a guidebook to reincarnation written in plain language. The Tibetans do not call this the Book of the Dead, this name was given to it by 19th century westerners. The Tibetans call it the “Bardo Thödol” for short, or the longer “Great Book of Liberation through Understanding the In Between” where the “In-Between” is the state between Death and Rebirth. This book is not written in ciphered poetry but in simple, direct and to the point prose. “Hey! Noble one, you named ___! Now the time has come for you to seek the way. Just as your breath stops, the objective clear light of the first between will dawn as previously described to you by your teacher. The outer breath stops and you experience reality stark and void like space, your immaculate naked awareness dawning clear and void without horizon or center. At that instant, you yourself must recognize it as yourself, you must stay with that experience. I will describe it again to you at that moment.” - The Tibetan Book of the Dead, translated by Robert Thurman This work was supposedly composed in the 8th century but this kind of knowledge must have centuries of background study, if not millennia, as only those actually accomplishing rebirth could have relayed the specificity of experience this unparalleled text relates to the reader. Fact or fantasy, the Bardo is an integral part of Tibetan Buddhism and as such it is in active use and is in fact the modus operandi through which Deshung Rinpoche IV has accomplished his fourth reincarnation. The Dalai Lama has similarly achieved his 14th reincarnation. The Tibetan religion recognizes the survival of the spirit as even more important than the survival of the body. The ancient Egyptians also had a work that was improperly named by westerners of the 19th century. The Egyptian Book of the Dead is likewise a survival guide to the world one enters after death but is not as practical as the Tibetan version. It may have been handy at one time but its words are not as meaningful to us today. The Egyptians called this the PeretHerew, or “The Book of Going Forth by Day” where going forth means 37 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN after death, and by day means in the light of the sun and creator. Survival of the spirit was also of paramount importance to the ancient Egyptians. Today religions of the western world put our spirit in the hands of an abstract God and put little responsibility for its survival on the spirit itself save for good behavior and donations to the local shaman. Science removes this responsibility completely for if there is no spirit then it has no future. Yet for some reason we still work unceasingly to build a better world as if it were a place to which we plan to return. The second abstract is the recognition of the word. The word today means the word of God and the word of ancient times also meant the word of the divine. This word is passed down from generation to generation, millennia upon millennia. The challenge has been that it not be misunderstood or altered, which was an exceptionally difficult challenge to cultures that did not have writing. The Egyptian symbol for the word was the same as the symbol for mouth and speech and the letter “r”, . As the culture of Ancient Egypt formed, the importance of the word either became paramount or it always was. We simply have no earlier information on Egypt. In the more ancient Vedic Hymns, the word was also a significant concept. “The Rig Veda is the great book of mantra behind ancient Indian spirituality, the original basis of the Sanskrit language. It is written, or more correctly, spoken in a purely mantric language, an archetypal proto-language of sound-symbol-ideas with multiple levels of meaning. … This spiritual language sees all things as expressions of the Divine Word.” - David Frawley, Wisdom of the Ancient Seers The word is not simply written or spoken texts that define a belief system. The word is divine knowledge that can be applied by the one who knows it. When Isis comes to the deceased it is really the word, divine knowledge, that is returning into their cognizance so that it can be used to take charge of their fate. The power of speech also figures in the concept of the word. Because in ancient times words were spoken long before they were ever written the power to command gives one the power of causation. The Ancient Egyptians felt that the world was created by naming the things that 38 DICHOTOMY composed it and so being able to speak the name gave one power over the named. This is why the creator was called Amun. “The hidden one" was not his name for to name him would be to have power over him. “So it was spoken, so it shall be done” was likely the original version of the saying. The power of the spoken word is also the logic behind a post mortem ceremony called “The Opening of the Mouth” where a ceremonial adze was held to the mouth of the deceased so as to render it open and ready to command in the hereafter. The origin of this ceremony is unknown. The third abstract is the recognition of the eye. The eye stands for spiritual vision and implies personal enlightenment. The eye cannot be learned, it must be experienced. Interestingly, the Egyptian symbol for the eye, which was an eye, was also the word iri, ”to do”, because the concept of sight, whether literal or figurative, was intimately connected with the concept of ability. The name Osiris is intimately connected with the concept of the eye. The word Osiris is a Greek form of the Egyptian word, wsir, which literally translates to “seat, throne or place of the eye” and is in fact spelled out as a seat or throne followed by an eye (Figure 2.4). Osiris, a representation of the spirit of the deceased, is to whom the eye belongs and so in the Egyptian Book of the Dead the eye is returned to him after death. This except from the Pyramid texts is a perfect example of a message with mixed concepts where the Eye of Horus, taken from Seth in the battle, actually gives the dead king the power of speech, illustrating the link between spiritual knowledge and the causation of the word. “O Osiris the King, take the Eye of Horus which was wrested from Seth and saved for you; your mouth is split open with it …” - Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, from Utterance 54 Again, the ancient Vedic Hymns agree. In fact, the hymns of the oldest Veda, the Rig Veda, were originated by seven sages from times lost to history. These sages were and still are called seers. The Vedic hymns link the sound of the word and the vision of the eye to higher knowledge and spiritual vision. 39 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN “’Sight is inseparable from the seer’, says Yajnavalka [a legendary sage of mythic India] “They who know the life of life, the eye of the eye, the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, they have comprehended the ancient primeval Brahman. By the mind alone it is perceived. - Subhash Kak, Wisdom of the Ancient Seers The Rig Veda itself presents to us the symbolism of the Eye and it is not unlike what we find in the Pyramid Texts. The Vedic hymns predate Egypt and may even be the original source. “The Birth of the Eye of the Gods, VI.76 Seer – Maitravaruni Vasishta The universal Man, the Divine creative Sun, has spread aloft his immortal all-generating light. By the will of the Gods, the Eye is born. The Dawn has revealed the entire world. …” - From Wisdom of the Ancient Seers 40 5 THE GODS OF EGYPT THE CONCEPT AND THE SYMBOL The ancient Egyptian god Horus was one of the earliest members of the Egyptian pantheon. A carved representation of the crown of lower Egypt has been found that dates to nearly 4,000 B.C. and we have lists of names of pre-Dynastic Egyptian kings that stretch far back into this period all prefixed by the falcon later written as Horus. (Figure 2.5) The name Horus is also Greek and the Egyptian word was Hr. Hr was the Egyptian word for the preposition “above”. Recalling the formation of the names given earlier of Menes, Ramesses and Moses the name Horus can be formed by the Egyptian form Hr.s, literally “he is above”. The original purpose of Horus was to signify the spirit of Amun come to live in the body of Man. The falcon was a symbol of the method of transmission. Whether it was originally seen as the actual carrier of the spirit is unknown and irrelevant. Perhaps a bird was chosen because it symbolized a link between the sun and the earth. Perhaps the falcon was chosen because it is was seen as the most powerful of birds. Whether the falcon was named Horus after the divine principal of “the one above”, or the falcon was named first and the divine principal was named after the falcon Horus does not matter. What does matter is that we understand the spirit of the hidden creator was transmitted through his word and intention and entered the universe through the point of creation and descended to impart the divine life and divine knowledge to Man. And this act of creation is called Horus. Connecting the word Horus with a 1000 word philosophical concept is no different than connecting a modern word such as Relativity with a 1000 word concept. In fact we could write many thousands of words about Relativity. One thing we could write about Relativity is that it was originally devised to solve a scientific problem of the nature of light1. Because the equations and the concept of relativity were very exciting to scientists of the early 20th century and because mathematical equations can be more theoretical then practical they used the math to 41 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN apply the same concepts that were applied to light, to matter. Light and matter are two very different things. Though this mathematical process they came up with some of the strange concepts of relativity such as the one called “Time Dilation”. This concept is not illustrated in reality because we do not have the technology to test the concept. Time Dilation is illustrated in science fiction where a spaceship crew travels at high speed for months but returns to a world where years have passed. This is because the equations show that for an object moving at speeds close to the speed of light time slows down relative to the objects moving slowly. This may or may not be true but the point is that this strange concept may be the result of misunderstood principles. The same applies to the ancient Egyptian ideas and particularly that of Horus. What Horus is, is a divine principle and what Horus is not, is a bird, person or even a spirit. Yet the idea of Horus was altered as the centuries wore on. The earliest representation of Horus is in the names of kings poorly scratched into the face of ceramic pottery. All through the history of Dynastic Egypt only the king is known as Horus. Sculpture from the fourth dynasty exquisitely illustrates the falcon Horus standing on the throne chair behind the king’s neck and stretching his wings to embrace the king’s jaw line (Figure 2.6). The Pyramid Texts, the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead all address the king, and only the king, as Horus. By the time of the Greeks statues were being made that depict Isis actually nursing a small child named Horus (Figure 2.7). The concepts of Isis and Horus had evidently become several steps separated from true understanding of divine principles. If we apply our understanding of the concepts behind the relationship between Isis and Horus we can see where divine knowledge may be nursing the young king intellectually but from the standpoint of achieving true spiritual enlightenment the physical representation is as ridiculous as Narmer the Catfish. There is a cycle of misunderstanding in the transmission of this kind of knowledge that goes something like this: 1. Establishment of an abstract concept based on truth. 2. Creation of a symbol to represent that concept. 3. Communication using the symbol as a shorthand for the concept. 4. Revision of the abstract concept based on the symbol only. 5. Creation of a new symbol to represent the new concept. 42 DICHOTOMY 6. Communication with the new symbol instead of understanding the new concept. 7. Repeat steps 3-6 Applying this to the concept of Isis as divine knowledge, this cycle of misunderstanding would go like this: o o o o o o o o o Abstract concept based on truth: It is possible to attain divine knowledge as the word of the creator. Creation of a symbol: Isis. Communication using the symbol: I will meet Isis. Revised abstract concept: Isis is a divinity who is the keeper of divine knowledge in this world. New symbol: Female figure named Isis. Communication with the new symbol: “Isis will come to me” instead of “I will study to attain understanding of divine knowledge”. Here it is still known that Isis is divine knowledge but I am the effect of the symbolic Isis and not responsible for “knowing”. I require divine knowledge but Isis will provide it. Revised abstract concept: Isis is a female goddess who has the knowledge to help souls in the world of the afterlife. New symbol: Isis wearing a headdress with her name on it and standing in a scene from the world of the afterlife. Communication with new symbol: “I will pay tribute to Isis at her temple”. Now I have no personal responsibility for what happens after death. Isis will do all of the work. The god Seth experienced the most serious misunderstanding of all the ancient Egyptian deities, yet the idea of Seth is very simple. Seth originally represented the primitive condition of the universe outside of this world. By the Christian era the name of Seth had become Satan, but Seth was never bad nor evil. To put it scientifically, Seth was simply entropy, a necessary component of the dichotomy of creation vs. destruction. Seth was called by many names. One of them was the storm god. The logic behind this is direct. If the world is an island in the midst of primeval waters, then the Nile and all of the rivers and oceans that flow through it 43 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN are part of those waters. Waters brought by storm clouds are those same primeval waters brought from above instead of below. Storm clouds also block the sun and shut off the light, threatening to return the world to the condition it was in before creation. Finally, storm clouds rain water down upon the land, sometimes even to the point of flood and disaster. The storm is Seth. Modern science sees entropy as a natural force without volition, but Seth is an active force of entropy seeking to enforce its destructive will upon the universe. In the tale of Isis, Osiris and Seth it was Seth who cast Osiris into the Nile. By this logic given here Seth would be the entropy of the raging river, not an external force, so either this tale was altered over the millennia or this was meant to represent that Seth is an active, causative force seeking to corrupt the universal soul. The image of Seth is called the “Seth Animal” (Figure 2.8) and occurs at least as early as the Scorpion king. This animal does not represent any known species, and may simply have been meant as a chaotic mix of animal parts meant to represent the confusion caused by Seth himself. In this respect the ancient Egyptians were superstitious as to the power of the written word. As early as the Pyramid Texts of the 5th dynasty hieroglyphic letters represented by snakes are found having been cut through after carving as if to “kill” the symbol. This practice continued throughout Egyptian history (Figure 2.9). Isis, Osiris, Seth and Nephthys occupy a single stratum in the hierarchy of ancient Egyptian gods. The Egyptians were fond of dichotomies in their philosophy and these four gods represent a dual dichotomy. Osiris and Seth represent the spirit vs. nothingness or unconsciousness. Isis and Nephthys represent knowledge vs. loss of knowledge, forgettingness or plain oblivion, whatever signifies the opposite of knowing. Isis and Osiris together symbolize eternal life. Seth and Nephthys together represent destruction of the spirit, but not necessarily a permanent destruction, simply a destruction of the spirit’s identity. The spirit was originally issued from Amun and so may return to live again in another form of life, whether human, animal or elemental. Together these four transcendentals represent the elements of the game the creator established for the spirit, the game of life vs. death. 44 THE SIGN AND THE SYMBOL Man has been carving notches into sticks to record the passage of time for hundreds of thousands of years but only began recording ideas in symbol form in the last ten thousand. Although writing was at first said to have been invented by the civilizations of Egypt and/or Mesopotamia, over the last decade or so earlier possibilities have emerged. A set of 11 symbols carved on Tortoise shells were found in China and date to 6500 B.C. (Figure 2.10) The site Göbekli Tepe, in southeastern Turkey, dates to as early as 10,000 B.C. and contains megaliths and stones carved with images of animals and other symbols. (Figure 2.11) The earliest recorded symbolism currently recognized as writing does not occur until sometime around 4000 B.C. This is when the prehistoric Egyptian priests began to put their ideas into symbols, carved or painted into rocks, pots, jewelry, weapons, royal ceremonial objects and even crafted into the shape of spoons, mirrors, combs and other household items. These representations were not yet strung together into sentences, at least not as far as we know. (Figure 2.12) The earliest sentence form of writing yet found comes from Third dynasty Egyptian tombs, ca. 2650 BC, and merely lists the many titles and good deeds of the tomb owners. These are called tomb autobiographies and are not very exciting save for the curiosity over how these people made the leap from symbol to sentence. (Figure 2.13) Nothing like these have been found from before the Third dynasty but they occur in quantity beginning with the Fourth dynasty. They can be found in most of the numerous small tombs that surround the pyramids at Giza but no writing (except ancient graffiti) has been found inside the pyramids themselves. (Figure 2.14) Nevertheless we do have a large quantity of symbolism from the time period of 4000 B.C. to 2800 B.C., the time period during which this writing system was being developed, and this helps us to extrapolate the changes in ideology. Interestingly we also have historical documents from later times that list events as far back as the first year of the First dynasty, ca. 3100 BC. The Palermo Stone (Figure 2.15) is one of these. It was originally a single monument but was found broken into several large pieces. It is a record of annual ceremonies and events starting from the first year of Narmer’s reign and extends for hundreds of years up through the Sixth dynasty. This tells us that there must have been some kind of writing in 45 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN use to record these events yet that did not survive. Objects found from the First dynasty and earlier also show that the Egyptian alphabet was fully formed by the first year of Narmer’s reign. (Figure 2.16) Precious little has survived compared to what must have been written on papyrus, animal skins and carved in wood. The later we go in ancient Egyptian history the larger the quantity is of written records that have been recovered and for this reason most of the information we have on their ideas and culture comes from the latter part of Egyptian history. This leaves us with the problem of deciphering whether or not earlier ideas are the same as later ideas and if not then what and how these ideas changed. The earliest, quantitative, non-autobiographical body of writings in one place are the Pyramid Texts of Unas, the last king of the Fifth dynasty who ruled from 2375-2345 BC. These texts occur in Unas’ pyramid, and every pyramid of the Sixth dynasty. As the Sixth dynasty was the last of the Old Kingdom, only a few tombs after have been found with these texts. These texts were certainly installed in every Fifth dynasty pyramid as well, but only Unas escaped having its interior stone walls completely stripped. These texts are highly symbolic and were written and revised over the course of over a thousand years, beginning as early as a thousand years before Unas. In themselves this one body of texts represents multiple versions of a belief system in continual flux. This is even more apparent when the Pyramid Texts of Unas are compared against the Pyramid Texts of his Sixth dynasty successors Pepi and Teti. Every pyramid contains slightly different versions. The Pyramid Texts tell us three things. Most obviously they tell a fantastical story of how the deceased will rise up and travel to the sky where he will join the world of the gods and live forever. “The king has not gone dead, but alive to sit on the throne of Osiris, Your scepter is in your hand that you may give orders to the living, The handle of your lotus-shaped scepter is in your hand, Give orders to those of the mysterious sites (the dead)!” - Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, Utterance 213 Because these texts contain notes that indicate they are “words to be spoken” archaeologists have entitled them “Utterances” and given them numbers to cross reference the passages from the different 46 DICHOTOMY pyramids. These same numbers are used here. Also because these are written mostly in the second person these texts were meant to be spoken by priests. On the surface we can view these statements as being nothing more than wishful thinking where the living king has had these words carved into the walls of his tomb. The intent was to assure that what see as magical events were real events made to occur after his death. The priests would have read these words at the time of burial and all involved, including the deceased king, believed the words were somehow active after the tomb was sealed. This does not mean that these ceremonies were not also performed while the king was still alive to prepare him for his journey. In places there are revisions that show the author changed his mind. Because you can’t erase in stone the revised hieroglyphs were carved right over the top of the originals. (Figure 2.17) The texts also describe attributes of the many gods named within them. What’s more, some of these gods, especially Seth, may be spoken of as a positive force that helps the spirit’s journey in one place and as an evil force to be struck down in another. Passages right next to each other may be so contradictory. This more than anything points to a collection of ideas that cover multiple dynasties. The Seth names of the Second dynasty make this the most likely time that texts singing praises to this god were written. “Seth and Nephthys, hurry! Announce to the gods of the South and their spirits, He comes indeed, this Unas, an imperishable spirit. - Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, from Utterance 217 “Seth, this your brother is here, Osiris, who has been preserved alive, and who lives that he may punish you.” - Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, from Utterance 219 The texts are also the key to understanding creation stories of the ancient Egyptians by allowing us to piece together stories for which we do not have a single source. By describing the hierarchy of gods and various events that brought them to be we can gather together a somewhat complete picture of theology if not the reasons behind it. 47 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN “Geb, this your son is here, Nut, this your son is here, Isis, this your brother is here, Seth, this your brother is here, Osiris, who has been preserved alive, and who lives that he may punish you, Nephthys, this your brother is here … Horus, this your father is here.” - Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, from Utterance 219 Although we do need to supplement this with other, later sources, this is the type of passage that allows us to begin to put together the pieces of this theology. Just as we have reverse engineered the ancient Egyptian language with increasing precision over the past 200 years we can do the same with their belief system. These passages from the Pyramid texts have given us one piece of the puzzle in the form of a hierarchy of gods from the top down. Atum  Shu — Tefnut  Geb— Nut  Isis — Osiris — Seth — Nephthys  Horus This is not by any means a list of all of the gods of ancient Egypt, but is a list of one specific group called the Ennead, which simply means group of nine. Those who count quickly will have counted ten names in this list. Horus was not, strictly speaking, a member of the Ennead as he represents the spirit. What is important to keep in mind as we go through this list of gods and their relations is that this “family tree” of gods was the last step in the devolution of a purely religious philosophy. Not only were these gods not people, they weren’t even gods in the way that Man has come to view gods as living entities. The aim in discussing what these “gods” represent is the concept of creative causation both at the beginning of the universe and now as we, each a divine spirit with the power of these “gods” within us, can harness the power of these transcendent concepts to win the game of life and death. 48 DICHOTOMY THE IDENTITY AND THE SYMBOL The Eye of Horus is mentioned over and over again in the Pyramid Texts as an object that must be obtained by Osiris for his survival. “To say: Horus, who art in Osiris, take the eye of Horus to thyself.” - Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, Utterance 449 “To say: Osiris, stand up, put on thee the eye of Horus, take it to thyself, that it may stick to thee, that it may stick to thy flesh, that thou mayest go out in it, and that the gods may see thee adorned with it … Osiris, live, for the eye of Horus is brought to thee, it will not depart from thee for ever and ever.” - Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, Utterance 453 There are several curious points these passages describe regarding the relationship between Horus and Osiris. One, that Horus can be in Osiris. Two, that Horus the living king is described as the son of, not the father of, Osiris the dead king. Three, that the eye that is given to Osiris is the Eye of Horus. This tells us even more about Osiris and his “siblings” Isis, Seth and Nephthys. When Amun created the spirit it was created as the spirit of Ptah who saw that this was carried to earth through the falcon Horus. Horus is the living spirit of Amun on Earth. Just because the individual carrying Horus dies does not mean that Horus becomes Osiris. The identity of the dead person becomes Osiris, “the seat of the eye”, and Horus remains the spirit, “the one above”, no longer attached to the body of the deceased. This has confused many modern readers. Clearly, the eye is a form of spiritual vision that was developed by Horus the living king while alive. Osiris is the universal soul but Osiris is helpless in death having been cast into the waters of chaos, whether of Seth or by Seth is not important. It is only spiritual vision that can save Osiris from oblivion and he must realize this spiritual knowledge. What is not clear here is that Osiris already possesses the eye, he just needs to quite literally wake up. “To say: Wake up, Osiris, let the weary god awake. 49 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN The god stands up; the god is powerful over his body. Wake up, let the weary god awake. The god stands up. The god is powerful over his body.” - Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, from Utterance 560 It is Isis who brings the Eye of Horus. It is Isis and Nephthys who escort Osiris. It is Seth who opposes him. Recent studies of the Pyramid texts have focused not only on their translation but on how the texts themselves are positioned within the layout of the interior of each pyramid. The reason this has become a subject of study is that sequence in which that the texts were meant to be read is not obvious. Each tomb has a set of rooms and passageways. Some walls are inscribed and some are not, and some inscriptions are complete on a single wall and some run from one wall to the next. These studies have revealed that the importance of these texts led the tomb designers to position the utterances in a specific order and even to position specific utterances on certain walls. Reading these texts in order one finds that Osiris is not just climbing a “ladder” to the sky but is working his way up the hierarchy of gods so that he becomes more and more powerful until he is the equal or even the superior of Atum. This could be viewed as a narcissistic self-important control issue or it could be viewed as marking the return of the spirit to the creator from which it came. This journey is taken one step at a time, each step raising the awareness and cause level of Osiris until he has attained the highest level of spiritual awareness. The alternative, represented by the story of Seth, would be to deconstruct him sending him back to the spirit mill in pieces to be reassembled and reissued with a complete loss of awareness, identity and knowledge. How could such a culture be so certain and dedicated to the fact that there is a higher awareness to be gained? Imagine that you are standing next to a tribe of Neanderthals sitting by a campfire as they stare in wonderment at this force of nature, yet completely unaware that this force can be used to fire clay into pottery, channeled into heating units for the homes they have also not yet conceived, even channeled through more advanced fuel systems to hurl a spacecraft to the moon and back so their descendants could walk on its surface and return safely. There certainly is a difference of awareness between today’s Homo Sapiens and Homo Neanderthalensis. Yet both used fire. 50 DICHOTOMY Likewise there is potential for a marked difference in awareness between Homo Sapiens and a future race of Man. Regardless of whether it will be one century or ten thousand centuries, certainly we have not reached the pinnacle of human consciousness any more than did Neanderthal Man. If the Neanderthal’s reach for higher awareness ended at awe of fire, worshipping the sun or simply counting past three, certainly our reach for higher awareness comes in a different form. For the last ten thousand years Homo Sapiens has engaged in a continual search for higher knowledge whether it is communion with God, triumph over the cycle of birth and death or the Unified Field Theory Einstein failed to complete. The Eye of Horus is the spiritual vision that accompanies higher awareness of the spirit, no matter of what culture you are a member. THE LADDER AND THE SPIRIT The symbol of the ladder occurs as early as the third king of the First Egyptian dynasty. On a small ivory label of king Djer there is a scene where a ladder is presented not to the image of the king but to the symbol of his name (Figure 2.18). The ladder is followed by the symbol of a mummy, the symbol of his grandfather’s name, and the symbol of his father’s name. Five hundred years later in the Pyramid Texts the ladder is still used as a mechanism of ascending to the heavens. “I ascend on this ladder which my father Re made for me.” - Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, from Utterance 270 In these texts the spirit begins its journey as Osiris and ascends up the hierarchy of the gods, achieving command over each echelon until it stands at the top with Atum-Re. The first echelon is Geb and Nut. Geb was considered god of the Earth. Geb was not simply viewed as the force that kept the plants growing and the waters flowing. Geb was the divine land that gave life to whatever was put into it. When you examine the construction of every pyramid built in the Old Kingdom you find that with only one exception every burial chamber was built at ground level. That exception is the Great Pyramid of Khufu. You would think that having engineered the 51 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN construction of thousands or millions of tons of rock that the burial chamber would be fortified behind thick stone walls. This was not so. The burial chamber was built at ground level, dug into the dirt and lined with stone at the base of the pyramid beneath the apex. The Great Pyramid is one exception. Of its three chambers, the lowest one dives 30 meters underground, the Queen’s chamber is 21 meters above ground and the King’s chamber is 42 meters above ground. This violates the principle of positioning the sarcophagus at the base of the primeval mound. The primeval mound was the first land to rise out of the primeval waters at the time of creation, as will be explained in Part 3, and positioning the deceased king at the base of the pyramid-mound assigned him as prime cause. In the case of Khufu this was replaced by another principle of “physical in-formation” and that was the construction of the King’s chamber in the shape of a 21 meter high Djed pillar. The Djed pillar is another artifact from the time of creation. (Figure 2.19) The controversy about what this represents has not been resolved, yet a study of creation accounts show that this represents the force that re-creates the universe at the beginning of each cyclical time period. This symbol was used extensively in the underground decoration of the very first pyramid, the Step Pyramid of Djoser. (Figure 2.20) The use of this symbol put Djoser and Khufu as prime cause not just over the creation of the world, but the creation of time, the gods and the universe all at once. Djoser’s burial chamber was also not at ground level but was built 30 meters underground. Yet the 10 meter square room above this chamber rises all the way to its ceiling 30 meters high. This room, being nearly 5000 years old, is a complete ruin. (Figure 2.21) It is a miracle that the pyramid above, being built with smaller stones held together with mortar that is now also 5000 years old, has not caved in. It is likely that at one time it too was decorated to form a Djed pillar with Djoser resting at its base. Placing the king’s body in a chamber at ground level was literally placing his body in the hands of Geb. Not only this, but placing the king’s body in the sarcophagus was considered as placing it in Geb and covering his body with the lid was considered as covering it with Nut. Nut was goddess of the sky and together Geb and Nut formed the physical world we live in. Later representations of Nut show her as swallowing the sun god Re every night and birthing the sun god Re between her thighs every morning. Even in the Pyramid texts the king’s goal was to sail with Re in his sun-bark across Nut during the day. The 52 DICHOTOMY passage through the “body” of Nut at night was highly symbolic. (Figure 2.22) The second echelon of gods in the hierarchy of Osiris’ ascent was Shu and Tefnut. This complementary pair of deities represented Infinity and Order. These two concepts form the completeness of primal creation. Even the Big Bang theory proposes the notion that at the moment of explosion all things that were ever to be were contained in that outburst, and that in the ensuing moments all of the laws of the universe were somehow decided and set forever. Shu and Tefnut represent these very same ideas. Because Shu represented infinity as the potential of all existence so did Shu also stand for the infinity of space, and so the air, and so the breath of Amun, and so the breath of life itself. Shu is barely mentioned in the Pyramid Texts but Coffin Text spells 76-80 are known as the “Litany of Shu” as these supply a lengthy discourse on the nature of Shu and Tefnut. “I indeed am Shu whom Atum created, whereby Re came into being; I was not built up in the womb, I was not knit together in the egg, I was not conceived, but Atum spat me out in the spittle of his mouth together with my sister Tefnut. She went up after me and I was covered with the breath of the throat …” - From Spell 76, the Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts “Thus said Atum: Tefnut is my living daughter, and she shall be with her brother Shu; ‘Living One’ is his name, ‘Righteousness’ is her name. I live with my two children, I live with my two fledglings, for I am in the midst of them, both of them follow after my body, and I lie down and live with my daughter Ma’at …” - From Spell 80, the Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts The nature of Tefnut is also revealed in the interchangeability of the two goddesses Tefnut and Ma’at. The nature of Ma’at is well known and is the age old concept of right action, correct behavior or more accurately, “the way the creator intended the world to be”. It was the duty of every Egyptian king as the carrier of the spirit of Amun to govern himself and his world according to Ma’at. 53 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN The final echelon in Osiris’ ascent was that of Atum. There are many metaphors scattered across the texts that define how the deceased will command the world while riding across the sky in the bark of Atum-Re. Suffice it to say that he has reached the highest level of cause that can be attained no matter how strangely this was represented. There were many names of gods that were combined with Re as in Atum-Re and Amun-Re. This was because the sun had been vested with several roles all relating to the act of creation. Three of these roles were Re, Atum and Aten. As mentioned in Part 1, Re was the living aspect of the creator through which his creative forces enter the universe, and the Aten was the sun disk itself. Atum is a curious word. The Egyptian root is tm which means “not” or “complete”. Atum stands for the two concepts of non-existence and completeness at the same time. If this is difficult to grasp simply draw a circle and notice that its beginning and ending are at the same point. Atum represents the moment of creation at which point everything that is to ever be in actuality or potentiality exists yet nothing has formed. This is different from Shu in that Shu represents the perpetual infinity of the existing world while Atum represents the moment of infinite concept. Putting these together, it can be seen that Amun-Re defines the relationship between the hidden creator and Re as the manifestation of his intention in the physical universe. Atum-Re defines the relationship between Re as the living aspect of the creator’s power and the actual moment of creation. There was no such thing as Aten-Re because the Aten was an object. During the Second Dynasty there was even a Seth-Re which would have represented the aspect of the creative power of Amun as manifest in the chaos of the primeval waters propagated to the world of man and spirit through the hierarchy of Gods. 54 DICHOTOMY SUN AND MOON Probably the most enigmatic god in the Ancient Egyptian pantheon was Thoth. Even the best scholars have been stymied by this enigma. For one thing this Greek rendition of his name came from the original Egyptian dhwty, pronounced something like “Jehewty”, which sounds nothing like Thoth. The hieroglyph for Thoth was an Ibis (Figure 2.23). He was also represented as a baboon and was said to represent the Moon. The only obvious connection between these two is that both are white, but the hieroglyph for baboon was used with a phrase meaning “the great white one”, an idiom for “ancestor”, who was also presumed to have wisdom. Thoth was the god of writing, said to have brought the written word and wisdom to Man. Thoth was considered the source of all knowledge and so Thoth often stands in scenes where dead are judged by weighing the heart against the feather of truth. If the heart is heavier, then that spirit has not followed Ma’at. (Figure 2.24) Certainly Thoth knew all. In a story from the Old Kingdom found on a document called the Westcar Papyrus, a magician is deemed great because he “knows the number of the secret chambers of the sanctuary of Thoth.” What’s more, the Egyptian Thoth became the Greek Hermes, after whom the Hermetica is named. The source of the Hermetic knowledge is named Hermes Trismegistus, which can be translated as “Thoth three times great”. We have already looked at how Re, Atum and the Aten were all aspects of the Sun. Now we have a dichotomy where Re and Thoth form a pair of sun and Moon. The big unknown has been where the name of dhwty came from and how the Moon connects to any of this. This name can be broken down into three components. The first syllable d is the root for the word “body”. The second syllable hwt is the word “temple”. The suffix –y means “dual”. Putting this together the name of dhwty can be translated as “the body of the two temples”. What the two temples are is revealed in that the word for temple is a synonym for enclosure. If we take the fact that Thoth is represented by the Moon, the fact that the Moon is the “body of the two enclosures”, and throw in the fact that the Egyptians felt that day and night were two separate worlds then we can see where the name of dhwty comes from. 55 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN The answer is that the Moon is the only heavenly body commonly visible during both day and night and hence, Thoth is the only god who belongs to both worlds. All other facts about Thoth can be derived from this symbolism. The Moon circles the Earth day and night, so the Moon sees all, and so the Moon knows all. The Moon can be seen to directly influence the life of men and women as the Moon brings the tides, menstrual cycles and it reflects the light of the Sun to dispel darkness with sunlight. The Moon’s connection with the Sun made the Sun and Moon the right and left Eyes of Horus, respectively. Together with Horus, the spirit of Amun sent to Earth to bring Mankind to life, these three bodies bring both physical and spiritual light to the world of Man. The Moon as the left Eye of Horus is also subject to astronomical references encoded as anthropomorphic events. The most significant of these is the story of the battle between Horus and Seth. In this story Seth tears out the Eyes of Horus and Horus tears out the testicles of Seth. This story is often interpreted if not as a physical battle between male forces then a sexual one, but it is in truth an astronomical event. “Hear it, O Re, this word which I say to you; your nature is in me, O Re, and your nature is nourished in me, O Re … which was born before the Eye of Horus was gouged out, before the testicles of Seth were torn off…” - Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, from Utterance 570 If the Eyes of Horus are the Sun and Moon, and Seth is the storm, then it is the storm clouds that block the Eyes of Horus from their connection with Mankind. So astronomically speaking, Seth has the power to tear out the Eyes of Horus. Consequently, as the Moon travels within the primordial waters to which Seth is connected, this event repeats unto eternity, the Moon going through a cycle of being “injured” and “healing” once a month. Conversely, if Seth is the presence of primordial Chaos in the world of Mankind, and we look at the original source of the translation of the word “testicles” we find that it is “lower parts”. As Seth is in one of his aspects the turbulent atmosphere of Earth, the two lower parts of the atmosphere in Egyptian terms would have been the horizons of morning and night which separate the worlds of light and darkness. The Sun and Moon as the Eyes of Horus erase this separation by bringing light to the 56 DICHOTOMY world during both day and night. So, astronomically speaking, Horus removes the lower parts of Seth. This event also repeats itself. Thus the story of the battle of Horus and Seth defines the astronomical relationship between Earth, Sun and Moon or, to put it another way, the physical worlds of Gods and Man. EARLIER AND EARLIER The name of Osiris is not found earlier than the Pyramid Texts of the 5th dynasty. In spite of that, it is believed that the name of Osiris probably originated in the 4th dynasty. Yet the identity of Osiris goes back much further. There are two key concepts that predate the name of Osiris yet are intimately connected with his identity. As Osiris was literally the throne of the Eye, which represented the concept of spiritual sight, the identity of Osiris can be traced back to the 3rd dynasty. Illustrated in panels underneath the Step Pyramid of Djoser there is a pair of gods who were aspects of Horus yet were not Horus. Names for these in later times became Horus Letopolis and Horus the Elder, but in the 3rd dynasty, these were hnty-irty, “foremost of vision” or “eyes in front” and m-hnty-n-irty, “without eyes in the front”. There is no Greek spelling for these as these deities belong solely to the Archaic period. There is a precedent before this where one of the earliest king names found from predynastic artifacts shows two falcons on a crescent. This pair of deities is the only candidate for a hieroglyph of the name “with and without eyes in front”. (Figure 2.25) Another name for Osiris was Osiris Khentimentiu, where the phrase khenty imentiu means “foremost of the westerners”. Khentimentiu was represented as a jackal and occurs on 1st dynasty artifacts. (Figure 2.26) The jackal itself is a very interesting icon. This is another case where one deity split in two, and then possibly in two again. On the one hand we have Osiris Khentimentiu and Anubis Khentimentiu. On the other hand we have a god named Wepwawet. Anubis was present from the earliest times and in the later myths is said to be the illegitimate son of Osiris and Nephthys. Anubis is the “god of the necropolis”, where the necropolis is the city of the dead. Anubis was also known as Anubis Khentimentiu “foremost of the westerners” and so we see yet another duality of origins. This can be explained by the 57 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN fact that when the Horus king dies, he leaves behind the spirit, under the care of Osiris, and the body, under the care of Anubis. Anubis had no spiritual significance as he was guardian of the body of the deceased, not of the spirit. Nevertheless as the pyramids, temples and tombs of the deceased were meant to preserve the body for the life of the ka, Anubis’ role was respected throughout Egyptian history. Wepwawet is a very curious icon as this is not a single symbol but a combination of three. Placed on top of a standard is the Royal Placenta followed by the Jackal and Cobra (Figure 2.27). This is Wepwawet, which meant the “Opener of the Ways” from as early as the 1st dynasty. Wepwawet was opening the way to a new life in the hereafter. That way was led by the royal placenta which had a special significance as the lead symbol in the Wepwawet standard. Several things can be reviewed that are known about the royal placenta. As early as predynastic times the placenta and cord blood were collected at birth using the pss-kf knife set (Figure 2.28). In every birth the placenta follows the newborn into the world and the placenta was saved because it was considered a part of the creation of the royal body. The royal placenta must have been stored in a protected location throughout the king’s life, but there is no evidence that it was preserved at death. Neither canopic jar nor mummified form of the placenta has ever been found. If the placenta was saved at birth but not put into the royal tomb then the placenta must have been destroyed at death. The logic behind this that if it followed the king into this world to assist his birth that as his “twin” it would need to follow the king into the next world to assist his re-birth. There is a link between Wepwawet and the pr-nw or “House of Flame” in the Pyramid Texts. The birth of Wepwawet in the pr-nw will be prevented … if you prevent me from coming to the place where you are” - Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, from Utterance 569 If Wepwawet was born in the house of fire, something must have been burned. Evidence of intentional conflagration has been found in royal mastabas at Saqqara and Abydos. This indicates that a ritual was enacted after the king’s death, and all indications point to a connection with the royal placenta. 58 DICHOTOMY Following the image of the placenta in the Wepwawet standard are the cobra and the canine. The cobra was a powerful symbol from predynastic times. Its periodic shedding of skin can be likened to a rebirthing process, symbolic or real. It was also possessor of the wadjet eye. The jackal in the Wepwawet symbol may well be Anubis. Together, these three represent birth (the placenta), death and rebirth (the cobra), and reclamation of death (the jackal). Further, in the real world birthing process the baby is delivered first, still attached by the umbilical cord, which must be cut, and later the placenta or “afterbirth”. It can be easily observed that the cobra has a similar shape as an umbilical, and that in nature dogs cut the umbilical with their teeth. This explanation may seem too simple, but if one were to be reborn in a place where no help was expected, that one would require a placenta, cord and cord cutter. These may have been combined in the Wepwawet standard, to open the way to rebirth. The symbology behind this is too strong to deny. The earlier we go in the history of ancient Egypt the animalistic aspect of its iconography becomes stronger. Yet in spite of the absence of human form from these symbols the spiritual aspect is no less present. 59 6 THE GODS OF THE UNIVERSE NON-EXISTENCE AND COMPLETENESS All of the ancient Egyptian gods are aspects of, and so are subordinate to, Amun, Ptah and Re. Whether or not it can be proven that this trinity was in existence at the dawn of Egyptian civilization, still this concept provides a basis of clarity to reach an understanding of the roles of all of the gods from the earliest times to the latest times. The ancient Egyptians were keen on the double meanings of many words and expression. The double meaning is inherent in much of the Egyptian philosophy as demonstrated earlier by the name of Atum. Also many gods came in pairs such as Shu and Tefnut, Geb and Nut. Rather than hold a double meaning with one name or be one half of a paired dichotomy some gods experienced a change in name but, because both names were kept on, this process took on the form of a holy mitosis where one god became two. One of these gods was Min (Figure 2.29) who became Amun. We know this not just because the names are similar but because there are places where the two names are used interchangeably. Min’s name was written as a lightning bolt and his ithyphallic appearance was symbolic of the progenitive force of the creator. A more complex pair was Neith and Hathor. Both have roots in predynastic times. Representations of Neith (Figure 2.30) as a goddess making a circle with her arms may even go back to the Stone Age. Hathor as “mother cow” qualifies for a similar position in antiquity. Neith is represented in hieroglyphs as a pair of crossed arrows (Figure 2.31) and was the namesake for many high ranking Egyptian women. As early as the 1st Dynasty Narmer’s queen Neithhotep and Djer’s queen Meryneith took on the name of Neith. Meryneith was actually named as a 5th king of the 1st Dynasty on one cylinder seal. This would have to have been because Den was too young to be king upon Djer’s death. The meaning of the word Neith is obscure. Spelled simply nt, this word was also associated with the crown of Lower Egypt, the bow, and water. 61 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN What brings Neith and Hathor together is the parallel between the name of Hathor and the representation of Neith. Hathor is spelled hwthr which translates literally as the “House of Horus”. Hathor was associated with the womb and with what we now call the Milky Way. This is important because the Egyptians had a saying, “as above, so below”, meaning everything heavenly had a parallel manifestation on Earth. In this light the Milky Way was seen as the heavenly parallel of the Nile River. There is a story of Hathor and the goddess Sekhmet. Sekhem meant “power” so Sekhmet means “the powerful one”. In short, Hathor is ordered by Re to slaughter all of humanity as a punishment for plotting against him. To accomplish this she turns into Sekhmet and begins the task. Having completed the desert and moving on to the rest of humanity, Re changes his mind and stops her. Perhaps this tale was designed to explain the desolation of the land outside Egypt, perhaps it was meant to explain the vulnerability of Man to the powers of the creator and perhaps it was meant to show how the forces of life and death are embodied in the same divine principle. In any case it accents the role of Hathor in the cycle of life and illustrates how the parallels between Neith and Sekhmet, and Neith and Hathor all point to the same original deity. Distilling all of the many attributes of Hathor against her title reveals what the House of Horus was. Following the logic, if Horus is the spirit of Man as sent to Earth by Amun, then the House Horus is to occupy started in the motherly womb at the beginning of life and ended in the heavenly womb at the end of life. The circle made by the arms of Neith symbolized the womb and the cycle of life that was Hathor, the House of Horus. To the ancient Egyptians the dichotomies of non-existence and completeness, life and death, light and darkness and others were key to an understanding of the world and their place in it. Although they are put in a different frame of reference, modern science faces these same dichotomies. The scientific creation event itself, the Big Bang, is theorized to contain a sequence of events each of which is responsible for a specific phase in the splitting of the forces of the universe and the components of matter. After all, if the entire universe with its structure of matter and energy and the laws they obey began from a single point then, in order to obtain structured diversity, there needs to be an orderly fission of forces and particles. Whether you call them Geb and Nut or Photons and 62 DICHOTOMY Nuclei is a matter of viewpoint, because in the end the result is the same, a universe with stars and planets that supports life. Whereas the theories of the ancients predict that the universe will be reborn over and over again following the principle of cyclical time, giving us all endless future lifetimes and possibilities to look forward to, the Big Bang theory holds only bleak and depressing scenarios of the future. According to that theory the universe will either collapse back into nothingness, expand slowly until the stars burn out, or expand more quickly until the distance between particles is too great for natural forces to keep them together and everything will literally vaporize. The Big Bang theory was invented to solve a number of problems found with the older “Steady State” theory of the universe yet the Big Bang theory has just as many unexplainable phenomena of its own, not the least of which is from where did the matter that composes the 500 billion galaxies in the universe, that in turn contain 1024 stars, originate? On top of this we have theories of evolution that tell us the consciousness of Man evolved from lower animals. Yet we have people like Deshung Rinpoche and many others who have survived death and returned to confirm that life, consciousness and even identity does not end with the demise of the physical body. This is in direct conflict with a theory of evolution from animals. No matter which theory of creation we choose to justify, either one follows the logic of ancient Man as stated in “Man vs. Nature”.      Somehow the universe was created. Man is not cause over the universe because the universe is bigger and stronger than Man. Therefore Man did not create the universe and the creation mechanism of the universe is responsible for everything created. Since the creation mechanism created everything, everything was once part of the unknown source of creation. Because we are made of the stuff that was created, we should be able to possess the knowledge of the creation mechanism and/or creation event. We do not know how the universe was created and time has distanced us from the creation mechanism, so we must look back in time to gain knowledge of the creation event. 63 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN   Since we should possess the knowledge of the creation event, we can make an effort to attain that. Scientific knowledge of the creation of the universe is attainable. Scientists can take this a couple of steps further:    Because the universe is a place, there must have been a location where the universe was created. Because this universe is our universe, these events must have happened here. Because we have attained awareness of this we should be able to observe and determine what happened. It is also possible that the ancients were correct and the universe is incalculably old, reasonably steady state, and actually was formed by the will of the spirit to create a world in which to live. Perhaps both of these creation models represent an aspect of the truth. The gods of the ancient Egyptians defined a hierarchy of creation that transformed reality from the conception of the spirit to the solidity of the physical. In their paradigm there was apparently a single god, Amun, responsible for the creation of the world. Yet upon a closer look we find that this god is in every one of us. If every one of us were to have created a universe of our own, these would be unique and separate. Yet we find ourselves all living in the same reality. Perhaps somehow in the unimaginably distant past these all came together. If this were so, this would mean we are each responsible for the world we live in today, and every last part of it, for having participated in its creation. And indeed this is the way of the ancient philosophies and those religions which survive from ancient times. THE STONE AGE AND THE ICE AGE There is no argument that the beginnings of Ancient Egyptian civilization were in the Neolithic period. The Old Kingdom pyramids are surrounded by the shattered remains of the many thousands of stone 64 DICHOTOMY tools used to build them. And the beginnings of this civilization go back much further. Settlements along the Nile can be traced back to the fifth millennium, between 4,000 and 5,000 B.C. Before that the evidence takes us to the Western Desert. In a place called Nabta Playa there are the remains of stone circles much smaller than Stonehenge yet of similar design. These were built over 4,000 years earlier than Stonehenge and include representations of bull horns. Burials made in the custom of Ancient Egypt with the head pointed south and the face to the east or west go back over 15,000 years, to a time when the last Ice Age had not yet ended. How far into prehistory the threads of ancient knowledge reach into the past grows longer every year as archaeologists find more and more evidence of earlier knowledge. Some recent discoveries include: A reconstruction of the “Antikythera device” shows that the Greeks were capable of not only computing the motions of the sun, moon and planets, but of designing and building a device with between 30 and 70 interlocking gears. This level of technology was thought to have originated 2000 years later in 18th century Europe. Further, a device of this sophistication does not just spring out of nowhere; it must have a history of development. A rock painting was found in the central Sudan that illustrates a boat complete with hull, cabin and tiller. This rock was from an undisturbed layer dated to 7,000 B.C., 3,000 years earlier than any prior evidence of boatbuilding. Again, a fully constructed boat does not simply appear, it too must have a history of development. In southeastern Turkey dozens of artfully carved limestone monoliths have been found that date as early as 10,000 B.C. This is more than 7,000 years earlier than the next oldest carved limestone structures. A small round stone found at the site is so similar to the earliest samples of Egyptian writing it cannot be denied that this is the earliest writing yet found in the world. The presence of writing indicates the presence of abstract thought. This goes back at least 10,000 years. It has been shown that the artistic facet of Mankind goes back as far as 190,000 years. Fifty years ago the “caveman” was described in science books as having lived in a period around 50,000 years ago. Over the decades the antiquity of the caveman has been pushed back hundreds of thousands of years as it was discovered that Homo Sapiens has remained physically identical for 200,000 years. But depending on how you define the “man” 65 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN in caveman you may choose to go back 500,000 years to the first stone tools, 1.7 million years to the first use of fire, and somewhere between 3 and 6 million years ago to the first hominids that walked upright. The antiquity of Man does not stop there. Over the last 150 years there have been many archaeological discoveries that do not fit the scientific paradigm and because of this they have not been confirmed as part of our official history. They remain enigmatic facts outside the framework of agreed upon knowledge and receive the label of pseudoscience, mistakes or outright forgeries. These anomalies include skeletal remains that comply with the anatomy of modern humans that have been found buried in strata that date from 500,000 years to 55 million or more years ago, and even more intriguing, man-made objects found in layers of sediment that date to hundreds of millions of years old. But modern science cannot tolerate such a drastic change in dogma and so these finds are filed away as unexplained or unexplainable. As natural forces wipe away the artifacts of yesteryear little by little, the probability of finding older and older artifacts steadily decreases. Perhaps the true age of the universe does not matter because one day we will find that the ancients were right - we have always been here and always will be. 66 PART 3 TRINITY 7 THE CREATION OF MAN TOMBS, TEMPLES AND PYRAMIDS Many mysteries of the Great Pyramid have stirred heated debate over the last hundred years and longer. Three of the most basic questions have been, “Why was it built?”, “Who built it?” and “How was it built?” The answers to some of these questions are simple, but there is also more to say than to just give a simple answer. That the Great Pyramid was a tomb for the second king of the fourth dynasty by the name of Khufu in Egyptian, or Cheops in Greek, is stated more than once in records we have from the ancient Egyptians themselves. In fact in ancient times it had a name, as all pyramids did, which was for this one “the horizon of Khufu”. Because the Great Pyramid was a tomb for a king it was also a temple. To the ancient Egyptians, as to many religions, a temple is the dwelling of a god. In this case the horizon of Khufu was the dwelling place of the Ka of Khufu forever and so a temple and a place where one was able to worship “Osiris Khufu” as a king become divine in the afterlife. The temples that we see illustrated in so many books as part of the pyramid complexes were built not only for the king’s funeral. These temples were manned for many generations after the king’s lifetime. The temples themselves were granted land for their own support and may have even received stipends from the royal treasury. The succession of the priesthood was often familial and so guaranteed in perpetuity. Because of this paradigm it is likely the only reason for the dissolution of any temple and its staff was political. The selection of the site for the pyramid was extremely important because it was to be the king’s domain forever and because it was a temple it needed to have divine qualities. The divine quality of the tomb and the necessity to maintain the divinity of its deceased occupant dictated the shape of the pyramid itself. 69 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN The first tombs of the first kings of united Egypt back in the first dynasty and earlier were pits roofed below ground level with wood and papyrus mats and covered with an earthen mound. Sometimes they were covered with two mounds. One was shaped over the below ground tomb and also buried, and another one was shaped above ground and visible. In ancient Egyptian mythology the creation of the world began with the emergence of the first island of dry land from the waters of the primeval universe. Then, once the falcon had carried the spirit of the creator to earth and its protection was assured, creation continued with the emergence of many more islands of dry land. The mounds built over the tombs of these early kings were symbolic of the first land to emerge from the primeval waters. In this way the mound gave the king the power to emerge from the chaotic waters of the spirit world and to be reborn under the same divine power present when the world was created. The location of an important temple was intended to be either the same location as the original point of the emergence of primeval land from primeval water or one of the several secondary emergences that occurred soon after. It is certain that the ancient Egyptians felt Giza, the location of the Great Pyramid with its sister pyramids and hundreds of smaller tombs, was one of these locations. This means that it is very certain the pyramids were not the first temples built on this site. The Egyptians frequently built temples on top of older temples, sometimes usurping the construction materials from the old for the new or simply taking them over, changing their purpose and making them larger. In this respect it is an interesting exercise to look more closely at the construction of the Great Pyramid. There are many arguments as to how the approximately 2.3 million blocks were put in place. But what is not often mentioned is that most of these blocks are “small” weighing only one or two tons. There are many theories about how these were put in place because lifting these blocks, though numerous, can be done in many ways and for there is evidence that much of the interior may be filled with sand where blocks were not necessary. There are questions that are more relevant to understanding how key features of pyramid were built such as, how were the foundation blocks put in place, one of which is estimated to weigh about 600 tons, and how was the granite interior assembled, some blocks of which weigh as much as 80 tons. And even more to the point, were these parts of the pyramid built all at once? Until technology is up to probing the interior of these 70 TRINITY structures without disturbing them, the tremendous size of these pyramids and the extensive building done at Giza during the fourth dynasty will prevent us from knowing if any part of an earlier structure remains beneath or as a part of them. There are other interesting and somewhat mysterious features on the Giza plateau that hint at what may yet be waiting to be found. One is the “trial passages”, what appears to be a miniature model of the interior of the entrance to the Great Pyramid found carved in the ground only a few yards away. What is interesting about the trial passages is that there is an extra shaft that is not present in the Great Pyramid. This shaft leads straight up from the intersection of the Descending and Ascending passageways. Another is the “Osiris shaft” discovered in 1945. Found along the ancient causeway that connects the pyramid of Khafre with the Sphinx is a set of chambers cut into the rock that descend 30 meters beneath the Giza plateau. Each chamber is about 10 meters below the last and at the bottom is the remains of a huge sarcophagus that was built to be surrounded by a tiny “lake”. There are the mud-filled remains of passageways leading toward and away from the chamber that are just now being explored. Where these passages may lead is unknown but more importantly this is not the only underground tribute to Osiris that was built. Then there is the Sphinx. The word Sphinx was a Greek interpretation of the phrase seshem ankh, literally “house of life”. The Sphinx was representative of the barrier between the world of the living and the world of the afterlife in the form of the god Aker. This god was the guardian of the entrances to the underworld. Because there are two entrances the Aker is actually a pair of gods, one guarding the morning horizon and one guarding the evening horizon. The two Akers formed the “double lion”. This has posed the question, where is the other lion, since there is only one Sphinx. Whether there ever was a second Sphinx, the combined image of the lion and temple goes back into predynastic times. The image of the double lion goes back as early as the “Painted Tomb”, the earliest decorated burial chamber ever found in Egypt. The Painted Tomb dates back to around 3500 B.C. and when found contained a wall sized mural portraying a fleet of funerary boats and scenes of people and animals in various activities on land. One of these was a man holding two lions apart. This hints back, once again, to Vedic philosophy where the double lion 71 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN was the dichotomy of the spirit’s own potential for infinite knowledge competing with its own finite consciousness. If this sounds like Shu and Tefnut, meaning the transcendent principle of Non-Existence and Completeness, then you have been listening. This tomb was found in Hierakonpolis and is the only one of its kind known, although certainly there must have been others. Abydos is today a city in southern Egypt. In ancient times it was the place where kings from predynastic times through the first and second dynasties built their tombs at the desert’s edge on the west bank of the Nile River. It has been a holy place for possibly six thousand years. Seti I was one of several New Kingdom pharaohs who took the namesake of the god Seth. He built a large temple in Abydos that is today a huge tourist attraction. Behind his temple is another temple that, because of the positioning of the temple of Seti, appears to be a part of the Seti temple complex. However some would claim that Seti selected this location for his temple because the other temple was there first. The other temple is called the Osireon and its foundation is ten meters lower than Seti’s temple. Like the chamber at the bottom of the Osiris shaft, it was built with platforms designed to be surrounded by water so as to signify the original lands rising from the primeval waters. The question is why the Osireon is built on a different level, is it because it was built at a different time or because Seti wanted it that way. But again, the important point here is that whether it was built 3,000 years ago or 13,000 years ago, it is still a temple of Osiris. Finally, the ancient Egyptians believed that the actual tomb of Osiris was also located in Abydos. They had a shrine and sarcophagus placed at its location and it was a tourist attraction in ancient times. Modern research has discovered that this tomb was in truth the tomb of king Djer, third king of the first dynasty. We don’t know why they treated this as the tomb of Osiris, because as far as we know there never was a real Osiris. 72 8 THE CREATION OF EGYPT CREATION, CREATION AND MORE CREATION The reason the ancient Egyptians put such a great effort into the construction and maintenance of their tombs and temples was to honor those responsible for the creation of the world and to ensure its continuance. As has been mentioned, Egypt had more than one creation story. There are many scholars who would interpret the religion of Egypt as an amalgamation of numerous myths and legends, a compromise of local cultic beliefs and a pantheon of separate gods brought together under one flag. Archaeologists put themselves in a position of interpreting the events and values of ancient cultures. They are somehow expected to explain how those events and values came about and how they are related to previous and later time periods and why they happened. Yet we as a modern culture seem to be barely able to interpret the events of today and figure out why they are happening. As a result you may get an archaeologist who finds three numbers written on three bricks and fabricates a completely speculative history about how the structures these bricks were built out of came to be. This story is then published, copied into numerous other books and becomes as much a fact as if someone who was there at the time wrote it down. For that reason this work is based directly on the source documents of ancient Egyptian philosophy and examines only the original evidence for the evolution of its culture. The creation stories of ancient Egypt do not conflict, they complement. While it is true that the towns of predynastic Egypt seem to have hoisted standards of their own separate deities, this was true throughout Egyptian history, both before and after the unification of the two lands and the supposed standardization of the state religion. More and more evidence is also being discovered that Egypt was, if not governed by a single king, still operating as a somewhat unified state 73 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN far earlier than its political unification under Narmer. So it is not difficult to conceive that its many creation stories and its many gods were driven by a single philosophical system. By the time the Old Kingdom began at the start of the Fourth Dynasty there were four major temple sites, each with its own creation story. These were Heliopolis, Memphis, Hermopolis and the very southern part of Egypt between Hierakonpolis and Elephantine Island whose center eventually became Thebes. The northernmost of these was Heliopolis in the Nile Delta, to which was assigned the creation myth of Osiris. Heliopolis means “city of the sun” in Greek. To the Egyptians this city was called On and this city was founded in an unknown time early in the predynastic era. Not far to the south was Memphis at the dividing line between Lower and Upper Egypt, to which was assigned the creation myth of Ptah. Memphis was founded by Narmer and was originally named “the city of the white walls” in ancient Egyptian. Farther to the south was Hermopolis to which was assigned the creation myth of Thoth. The origin of many Greek gods can be directly traced to Egyptian gods. The Egyptian Thoth became the Greek Hermes and so the city of Thoth was Hermopolis. Finally the southernmost city of Thebes was assigned the creation myth of Amun-Re. The Egyptian name for Thebes was Waset, meaning “dominion”. It is harder to tie the reasons for the location, city namesake and creation myth together but this can also be explained. First you must know that the Egyptians considered the island of Elephantine was the very first land to rise from the primeval waters. Elephantine is at the very south end of the Egyptian part of the Nile, just north of the first cataract or what is now the Aswan dam. It is here that the spirit of Amun would have come to earth. In the biblical story of Genesis the world was created in 6 steps. On the first day God created the heavens and the earth. Then He created light and divided the light from the darkness, naming these Day and Night. On the second day God created the firmament. Then He divided the waters above the firmament from the waters below and called the waters above Heaven. No name was given to the waters below. 74 TRINITY On the third day God caused dry land to appear and named this Earth, and caused the waters together and called these Seas. Then He created plant life. On the fourth day God created the Sun, the Moon, the stars and their rhythm of time from the day and the night to the seasons and years. On the fifth day God created all living creatures of the sky and the sea, their ability to multiply and filled the earth with them. On the sixth day God created all living creatures of the earth. Then he created man, male and female and gave man dominion over the earth and all of its creatures. From this story we can see there are several areas of life that require creation. The philosophy of ancient Egypt saw four key areas. The means of creation. The creation of the universe. The creation of all things within the universe. The creation of the spirit of man. The means of creation included all stages of creation but specifically preceded the initial creation, the creation of all things within the universe and the creation of the spirit of man. This also involves the creation of the primordial events within the universe and so the “divine” locations where these took place which became later became the sites of key temples. In terms of Genesis this would precede the first, fourth and sixth days. This creation story was the story of Memphis and Ptah. The creation of the universe related not to the various things within the universe such as the sun, moon, stars, creatures and Man, but related to the creator’s will as to how the universe was constructed. In terms of Genesis this would include the first, second and part or all of the third day. Although this may seem to cover its physical structure in terms of the separation of primeval waters from the firmament, this really covers its structure in terms of laws of how the “game” of the universe will be played. Put in these terms you could describe this creation as, there will be land and sky for the playing field, there will be order and disorder as boundaries and there will be life and death as offense and defense. This is the creation story of Heliopolis. The creation of all things within the universe is, once again, carrying out the creator’s will as a force of creation within the universe because 75 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN the creator never enters the universe. Up until now nothing solid has been created, all is abstract. Now this creation fills the universe space with time, matter, energy and life. In terms of Genesis this would cover the fourth and fifth days. This was the creation story of Hermopolis and Thoth. The creation of the spirit of man was, of course, a very special event and to the ancient Egyptians this was carried out in a very specific and deliberate way to ensure this spirit of the creator was protected from chaos. The temple was one element of this protection. This was the creation story of Thebes and Amun-Re. Together these four creation stories told the full story of the creation of the universe from the original and solitary one-ness of the creator to the birth of Man. Unfortunately we do not have any of these creation stories fully told. They have been pieced together from hundreds of documents and writings on tomb and temple walls. As reconstructed here the stories will serve to explain and simplify the diverse and fragmentary information found separately and confoundingly within these ancient texts. PTAH, MEMPHIS AND SAQQARA The ancient capital city of Memphis was officially founded by Narmer as the first king of a united Egypt. Even from before the beginning of the first dynasty Memphis was the city of Ptah. The original name for Memphis was Ineb-hedj, or “the city of the white walls”. Some believe this refers to the chalky escarpments to the East of the Nile and some believe that the city was surrounded by white walls. What we do know is that this was the location of the earliest known temple of Ptah whose full name was “Ptah, South of his Wall”. What this means will soon become clear but clearly Ptah was extremely important to the ancient Egyptians. In fact the official name of the land of Egypt was Hwt-ka-Ptah, or the “Temple of the Ka of Ptah”. Evidently the Greeks took the way this sounded and this has been handed down as “Egypt”. The original location of the ancient city of Memphis is now a field of ruins but the reason for its chosen location is that just to the west is the necropolis that today we call Saqqara. Although buried in sand up until a 76 TRINITY century ago Saqqara survives to this day and is a vast field of ruins many times the size of ancient Memphis. The saying goes, anywhere you dig in Saqqara you will find something. Often this means not only one tomb but many built one on top of the other going all the way back to predynastic times. One of the most prominent features at Saqqara is a string of first dynasty mastabas built on the very edge of the escarpment that marks the border between desert and Nile valley. As recently as 1993 a new mastaba was found and excavated that belongs to a either a previously unknown king of the first dynasty or possibly even a predynastic king. Because Saqqara is also where we find the animal necropoli filled throughout Greek and Roman times, with everything from mummified falcons to bulls in monolithic sarcophagi the size of a one car garage, Saqqara was an active necropolis for more than 4000 years. The name of Saqqara comes from the god Sokar. This god was not a prominent figure in the Egyptian pantheon yet stood for a concept central to the religion. Sokar represented the moment at which the deceased Osiris became cause over his fate. “Isis comes and Nephthys comes … they have found Osiris, his brother Seth having laid him low in Nedit; when Osiris said ‘Get away from me’, when his name became Sokar.” - Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, Utterance 532 Isis and Nephthys come at a very specific moment. This is when Osiris regains control, when he can stand up, throw off his dust and his death mask, break his bonds and tell the oppressive force of death to leave. The moment when Osiris’ name becomes Sokar he gains access to the divine principles learned while he was alive as Horus and so becomes cause over his fate. The theology of Memphis was the trinity of Amun, Ptah and Re. The original theme of the Saqqara necropolis was Ptah, later becoming intertwined with Sokar and so then with Osiris. The connection between Ptah, Osiris and Sokar will be clear once the theology of Memphis is explained. 77 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN That Ptah was the original theme of Saqqara is best illustrated in the underground panels of the Step Pyramid of Djoser, first king of the third Dynasty where imagery of Ptah occurs throughout (Fig. 3.x). The anthropomorphic image of Ptah is a man standing and holding a staff with three symbols combined at the top, the ankh, djed and waset (Fig. 3.x) symbolizing the combined power of Amun to create and re-recreate the universe and life throughout cyclical time forever. There is no myth, legend or story of Ptah, at least none that has survived. The only coherent source we have for the nature of Ptah is called the Shabaka stone. About one third of the text on this carving has been lost because it was found being used as a millstone having had a hole put in the center and worn around the middle from milling (Fig. 3.x). Moreover this text was ordered carved by the pharaoh Shabaka in the seventh century B.C. as a copy of an ancient papyrus that was allegedly being eaten by worms. Nevertheless the remaining text is a legible source that agrees with other inscriptions giving us a credible summary of the role of Ptah in ancient Egyptian religion. Ptah was described as the mind, tongue and heart of Amun. As the mind of Amun, Ptah was the agent of translating the creation of the hidden creator into action. As the tongue of Amun, he uttered the words that caused these creations to manifest. As the heart of Amun, he had a very special job. To the ancient Egyptians the heart was the where the spirit resided and so Ptah was the spirit of Amun. As such the role of Ptah was deeply tied to his role as mind and tongue in carrying the spirit of Amun to the physical world. Ptah was “South of his Wall” because that wall was the dividing line between the world of man and the world of the Gods. Ptah was to the South because this was the direction of the source of the Nile and all creation. As the spirit of Amun, Ptah created the Gods – all of the Gods – and the spirit of Man. Because the Gods came to Earth in the place of the Temple, the Temple is where Ptah interacted with the world. And Ptah as come to Earth was named “Ta-tanen”, meaning the “risen Earth”, after the act of creating the first land from the primeval waters, an act for which Ptah would have been responsible. As Ptah was the agent of the sole and hidden creator, Ptah was agent of all creation and because Ptah created everything, Ptah was in everything just as the spirit rules the body, stated explicitly: 78 TRINITY “Thus heart and tongue rule over all the limbs in accordance with the teaching that it is in every body and it is in every mouth of all gods, all men, all cattle, all creeping things, whatever lives, thinking whatever it wishes and commanding whatever it wishes.” - M. Lichtheim: Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol.1, pp.51-55 The theology of Memphis is intimately connected with the theology of Heliopolis because in order for the Gods to have existed they must first have been created by Ptah. Again, this is explicitly stated on the Shabaka stone because the “Ennead” is the group of the nine Heliopolitan Gods. “Sight, hearing, breathing - they report to the heart, and it makes every understanding come forth. As to the tongue, it repeats what the heart has devised. Thus all the gods were born and his Ennead was completed. For every word of the god came about through what the heart devised and the tongue commanded.” – ibid At the end of the Shabaka stone the connection between Osiris and Ptah is explained. Osiris’ goal is to return as a spirit to the world of the gods. Sokar was the first step in that direction. The temple of Ta-tanen is the highest level he can achieve because that was the place of first creation in the real world, and in joining Ptah, Osiris becomes a part of prime cause. “The Great Throne that gives joy to the heart of the gods in the House of Ptah is the granary of Ta-tanen, the mistress of all life, through which the sustenance of the Two Lands is provided, owing to the fact that Osiris was drowned in his water. Isis and Nephthys looked out, beheld him, and attended to him. Horus quickly commanded Isis and Nephthys to grasp Osiris and prevent his drowning (i.e., submerging). They heeded in time and brought him to land. He entered the hidden portals in the glory of the lords of eternity, in the steps of him who rises in the horizon, on the ways of Re the Great Throne. He entered the palace and joined the gods of Ta-tanen Ptah, lord of years. 79 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN Thus Osiris came into the earth at the Royal Fortress, to the north of the land to which he had come. His son Horus arose as king of Upper Egypt, arose as king of Lower Egypt, in the embrace of his father Osiris and of the gods in front of him and behind him .” ibid Finally, that “Ptah” is in all of us and so a divine principle applicable by all as the power to command and create is given in these paragraphs. “There took shape in the heart, there took shape on the tongue the form of Atum. For the very great one is Ptah, who gave [life] to all the gods and their kas through this heart and through this tongue, in which Horus had taken shape as Ptah, in which Thoth had taken shape as Ptah. Thus heart and tongue rule over all the limbs in accordance with the teaching that it (Ptah) is in every body and it (Ptah) is in every mouth of all gods, all men, all cattle, all creeping things, whatever lives, thinking whatever it wishes and commanding whatever it wishes.” – ibid RE, IUNU AND HELIOPOLIS The creation story we hear about the most, and that has been most discussed in this book, is the story of Heliopolis. This story contains the cast of gods most often referred to in Egyptian mythology. The age of this story is unknown but if it was based on the age of Heliopolis it would reach back into predynastic times. The difficulty with determining the origin of Heliopolis stems from its current location which is underneath modern Cairo with a good part of it beneath the tarmac of Cairo International airport. Heliopolis means “city of the sun” in Greek. The ancient Egyptians called this city Iunu which is spelled in hieroglyphs with the symbol for “pillar” followed by the symbol for “water”. Because every Egyptian temple was considered to have been built on one of the original locations the land rose from the primeval waters, the name of Iunu symbolized this event with the theme of a temple pillar. 80 TRINITY One would think that if the city was named for the sun and so the god Re on the one hand, and for the pillars of its grand temples on the other, that there would be some connection between the two. The connection is that the city is not named for Re, it is named for Atum, and what excavations have found is that the temples were aligned so that the morning sun would stream in through the center of the pillars at dawn on the Vernal Equinox as so many temples in Egypt were built to do. As mentioned before, the connection between Re and Atum is the discernment of the transition from creative force to creative event. Re signified the instrument of creation and Atum signified the dichotomy of nothing and everything at the moment of creation. The hierarchy of creation goes on from there with Shu and Tefnut, Geb and Nut, Isis and Osiris, Seth and Nephthys. Together with Atum these were called the nine gods, or Ennead. The ancients must have put a great deal of time and energy into creating a logical construction of the exact sequence of creation. Solving this much like the chicken and egg conundrum (the egg has to come first), for example, you can’t have land until you have space to put it in. And so the pair Shu and Tefnut comes as the first dichotomy of creation. That creation must proceed in dichotomies is a central concept to ancient philosophies. You can’t have good without evil or sky without earth because each provides a definition for the other. Just as Osiris climbed the ladder from Geb to Atum to reach the nexus of creation, Atum was progenitor or primogenitor of all creation. First there was infinite space and the air, or the “breath of Amun”, that filled it. Simultaneously there was Tefnut as the concept of how everything should be in this new universe space and the concept of Tefnut was also called Maat. Next there was Geb and Nut as land and sky, the first tangible creations in the universe space called Shu. But more than just a place to stand, Geb and Nut were a place to create the game of life, for if Geb and Nut were the playing field then the next level of creation was the boundaries of that game. Osiris, Isis, Seth and Nephthys represented the game of life and death. Osiris was the universal spirit of Amun brought to Earth. How Osiris was brought to Earth is the subject of another creation story, a special creation story found encrypted in the building texts of the temple of Horus at Edfu that will be discussed in another chapter. Isis was divine knowledge, but particularly the knowledge of the creator that allows the enlightened to escape the game of life and death. Seth was the chaos of 81 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN the primeval waters that continually attempts to break through the world boundary and not destroy, but to deconstruct all creation to its original form of nothingness. Nephthys was the mysterious one. Temples were built to all other gods but no temples were ever built for Nephthys. The primary clues to Nephthys role are simply her status as partner to Seth and complement of Isis. The dead king had two choices if he wants to avoid spiritual death, and Nephthys represented one of these. Once the dead king as Osiris became Sokar and thus achieved cause over the spiritual river in which he had been submerged after death, the king’s spirit was met by both Isis and Nephthys. The Pyramid Texts state repeatedly that Nephthys must be prevented from touching the Eyes of Horus. In short, if the deceased cannot go with Isis, he must go with Nephthys. If he goes with Nephthys, various passages in the pyramid texts say that she will bind the deceased, inflict a wound with a knife, take the deceased into the darkness, and by implication blind the Eye of Horus. Nephthys will not destroy Osiris but Nephthys will take his identity and that lost, he will return to the land of the living in another form without knowledge, without memory, and certainly without the status he had heretofore possessed. Although the Ennead consists of these nine gods, the creation story continues. The union of Isis and Osiris creates Horus, the living possessor of the spirit of Amun. The union of Osiris and Nephthys creates Anubis, the jackal-god who is guardian of the dead. There is no union of Seth, as chaos cannot create, it can only destroy. Originally Horus was every man. Perhaps in secret the king and priesthood knew that Horus was every man throughout Egyptian history but this is not the story we get from the history. The king as Horus played the role of the sole possessor of the spirit of Amun and so claimed the status of ruler of the world. The creation of man, creatures, plants and any particular things is never mentioned as clearly as it is in Genesis. The story of creation found in the Edfu building texts serves to explain a part of this and together this set of ancient Egyptian creation stories gives a complete view of all creation. Yet to occur are the creation of light and darkness, the spirit of man, the first land and much more. But the story of Horus is the story of the creation of the game. 82 TRINITY THOTH, HERMOPOLIS AND THE OGDOAD The Greek counterpart of the Egyptian Thoth was Hermes and so the ancient “city of Thoth” is referred to today as Hermopolis. The Egyptian name for this city was “Hmnw” (pronounced Khmun) which means literally, the Eight. This is because Thoth was father of eight deities known as the Ogdoad, which means group of eight in Greek. The iconography of Thoth goes back into predynastic times. The ibis that became the hieroglyph for Thoth appears perched on a standard on slate palettes and other artifacts of the late predynastic period. By the First Dynasty the baboon in a squatting posture, which was also to become the symbol of Thoth, had made its appearance in glazed composition figurines from Abydos. The beginnings of the city of Hermopolis are not important. What is important is the story of the origin of Thoth. If the Heliopolitan story described the creation of the game of life, the Hermopolitan story described the creation of our physical world. But it did not describe so much what was created as how the physical world was created. There is no mention of sun, moon, stars, plants, animals or people. This was because once again what was important was not the mechanics of creation but the divine principles behind creation. The place Thoth takes in the hierarchy of creation is difficult to discern. His creation is assigned to Ptah but this misleading because Ptah is ultimately responsible for all creation as conduit for the will of Amun. All creation came through Ptah, but that does not mean it came into being directly from Ptah. All creation must first go through Re to enter the physical world, and then through another neter, deity or divine principle, whatever you wish to call it, to manifest at the correct level of creation. The legend of Thoth does not appear all in one place but can be pieced together like this: Before the sky which Shu raised aloft came into being, Re was on the high-place of him who is in Hmnw. It was Shu who then conceived Thoth as the first product of his thought, as the heart of Atum and as the tongue of Re which commanded thoughts into being. 83 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN This means that at the time of creation Re was above the place of creation. Although Thoth was created by Shu, it was Re that initiated this creation which of course ultimately came from Amun. Conceived in the ocean, born in the flood, a lotus came forth in which was a beautiful child who illumined the land with his rays. An ibis was begotten of the thought of Shu’s heart – Thoth, the great one, who creates all things, the tongue and heart that knows everything which is with him. Thoth was born on the island of flame, the place which was to become where the dead have to cross before they are admitted to the land of the gods. In Egyptian mythology the creation of the sun, Re, was likened to the emergence of a Lotus bulb from the Lotus plant. Because Thoth was represented by a heavenly body, the moon, then just as Re came forth so did Thoth. Islands are associated with places of creation because the first land which emerged from the primeval water was viewed as an island. The island of flame is the place the sun was born, and because Re is the dividing line between the world of man and gods, so is the island of flame. One of Thoth’s duties was to record all the souls entering the Duat. In the “Hall of the Two Truths” Thoth is in charge of the balance. Thoth appears in front of the scales in which the heart of the deceased is weighed against the feather of truth. Frequently, in his shape of a baboon, he sits on top of the balance. He has the vital task of announcing to Osiris that the deceased has led a blameless life and is ‘true of voice’. In fact the primary reason for Thoth’s role as judge of the dead is that Thoth is responsible for maat both in this world and the next. As the product of understanding and utterance (Sia and Hu), the first potencies which sprang from Re, Thoth was created as “Re’s scribe of Ma’at”, “Sia, the bearer of the divine book, at the right hand of Re”. His special mode of creative work is creation by utterance and so Thoth, then, created thought and utterance. This tells us what the difference is between Isis and Thoth. Isis is the neter who represents divine spiritual knowledge. Thoth is the neter who 84 TRINITY represents knowledge of maat, which is the intention of the creator as to the design of the physical world. Because this knowledge more physical than spiritual the dichotomy of Sia and Hu represent not mystical but overt understanding and the power of speech to communicate knowledge. Although it states that Thoth created thought and utterance what he actually did was to bring them into the physical world. Unlike spiritual knowledge which is subjective, this objective knowledge was capable of being written down and so Thoth was the original scribe. Scribes were known as the ‘followers of Thoth’, and Thoth was in command of all ‘the sacred books of the house of life’. Thoth is “the maker of all that is“: he is ”the heart of Re which hath made the Ennead as well as himself": he is “the Great one who hath created all things“: he is "the heart of Atum which hath fashioned all things“. Thoth is the source of cosmic order. He is “Lord of laws” and “he whose words have established the Two Lands”. Thoth’s role did not end with communicating knowledge. He was also responsible for manifesting maat, the divine principle created through Tefnut. Thoth is to create this in the physical world. All of the law of Man come from an understanding of maat. Eight primitive deities were formed in Thebes. Ptah created them in Thebes: there they descended to their home, the Isle of Flame. Then they, in turn, created light on the high-place of Hmnw and took their place in Hermopolis beside their father Thoth. Thoth did not create the physical world directly. This was done by four more gods created by Shu that were to be the agents of Thoth. These gods were manifestations of the elements of the world of the gods as it existed before creation. Later, these four gods split into eight gods, the latter four being “female” counterparts of the original. Nun and Naunet. Nun represented the primeval waters of the primeval world and so can be interpreted as the concept of the source of all matter flowing into the physical world beginning with the primeval 85 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN mounds. As primeval matter was in a state of stasis in a world without light before it entered our world our scientific dichotomy would qualify as matter and “dark matter”. Just as the primeval waters were a mysterious force to the ancient Egyptians, so “dark matter” is to us. Science’s current understanding of the force of gravity and the history of the universe cannot explain why the matter in the universe is not evenly distributed, meaning why galaxies are not found evenly spaced but are found grouped in clusters and super clusters. The concept of invisible and undetectable, or dark, matter was invented to explain the source of the forces pulling galaxies into observable structures. Not a rare substance, current theory says that 80% of the matter in the universe is dark matter, yet admits that dark matter is hypothetical. In the end dark matter represents the unknown. Dark matter may actually come in another form. Scientists have recently discovered that the amount of matter in the universe has been misestimated by a factor of 3. That there is three times as much matter in the universe than previously calculated would reduce the amount of dark matter to 40%. Combine this with other factors and we may not need any dark matter at all. There is also the question of antimatter. The existence of atomic particles identical to the electron, proton and neutron that make up atoms yet with opposite charge and spin was predicted by Paul Dirac in 1931 and experimentally verified by creating them in particle accelerators years later. Matter and antimatter, when combined, annihilate each other completely releasing all of their content as energy according the Einstein’s equation e=mc2. Theoretically there should be identical amounts of matter and antimatter in our universe since the equations scientists have derived to explain the creation of our universe show no bias one way or the other. That there are no detectable quantities visible from where we stand is a good thing but science does not know the reason why. Nevertheless it is interesting that even for the scientific paradigms in our universe there is a dichotomy to be found even if it cannot be explained. That all of the matter in the universe came from a spiritual source the Egyptians called Nun and Naunet is no less plausible. Kek and Kauket. Kek means darkness. Because light breaks the darkness, Kek would represent an absence of light or energy and 86 TRINITY conversely the potential for energy. The original light emanated from Amun as his creative force reaching out from Nun even through the world of the gods until it manifested as beingness, awareness, existence and knowledge. Just as light was a magical force to the ancient Egyptians, what light is and the true nature of electromagnetic energy is not understood even today. The “scientific” theory for the origin of light is rooted deep in the Big Bang theory as a time when photons separated from elementary particles. Science today does not understand how the universe seems to be expanding at an increasing rate of speed. Logically the force of gravity would slow down such an expansion, especially over a period of billions of years. The concept of invisible, or dark, energy was invented to explain the force behind the expanding universe. In order to satisfy this theory most of the energy in the universe must be quantified as dark energy. Just as with dark matter there is no proof that this substance, which is stated as composing 70% of the energy in the universe, actually exists. Neither is there is any theory as to how it was formed nor of what it really is composed. The dichotomy of lightness and darkness can come in many forms. Energy and dark energy. Energy and absence of energy. Energy from matter and energy from antimatter. Kek and Kauket. Heh and Hauhet. Heh represents the infinity of time. In ancient Egyptian the word means heh means millions of years. Time in the primeval world was timeless. Time in the world of man passed in both linear and cyclical fashion. Events occurred in a linear fashion relative to a lifetime, the reign of a king, or an age, and events occurred in a cyclical fashion as these lifetimes, reigns and ages and even the world itself repeated over and over. Science does not address the origin of time or its mechanism and leaves this to the realm of philosophers. The only theory that does involve the fabric of time is Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity. This theory compares the passage of time for two observers where the difference in velocity between them comes close to the speed of light. This theory is based on the axiom that the speed of light is a constant that cannot be exceeded nor reduced. Mathematically linking the speed of light to the measurement of time results in the conclusion that an object travelling at the speed of light would not experience the passage of time. The equation that demonstrates this in the framework of Relativity was 87 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN invented by the physicist Hendrik Lorentz and is called the Lorentz Transformation. If t is the measurement of time for an observer moving slowly or not at all and t’ (t prime) is the measurement of time for an observer travelling at or near the speed of light relative to the observer experiencing t, then the equation goes t’=t√(1-v2/c2). The faster the moving observer goes the smaller the number on the right side of the equation becomes. Where v=c this equation degrades to t’=t√0 = 0 and so time for the moving observer stops. If this equation is correct, that means the moving object could travel an infinite distance in zero time. As universally as this theory may be taught there is no proof that it is correct. The fastest we can currently travel is .00007 times the speed of light, making the result of this equation 0.9999999972, hardly a reliable test of this theory. The true source of time is probably the biggest mystery in the universe. Time is subjective. Whether or not time passes without consciousness as a witness has been a question of the ages. That time originated from a spiritual source called Heh and Hauhet is as good a theory as any scientific explanation has to offer. Amun and Amaunet. Amun is the hidden one and so represents absence of location and so the potential for space to be created. Strangely, Amun is listed as being created by Thoth when Amun is the hidden creator of everything. But Amun is a monad, a monopole without counterpart in the world of the gods, and in the physical universe nothing manifests without an opposite. Perhaps it is Thoth that creates not Amun, but the dichotomy that Amun manifests in the physical universe of space vs. no-space or “the Abyss” as the name is translated in the texts. From these eight primeval transcendantals Thoth created all of the gods and our universe. That Shu created these neters who were in turn the children of Thoth is stated in The Litany of Shu as it repeats the names of the forces nnw, hhw, kkw, and tnmw (amun) over and over in the phrase that is translated “in chaos, in the Abyss, in darkness and in gloom.” 88 TRINITY “O you eight Chaos-gods who are in charge of the chambers of the sky, whom Shu made from the efflux of his members, who put together the ladder of Shu, come and meet your father in me, give me your arms, put together the ladder for me, for I am he who created you and made you … It was I who again begot the Chaos-gods in chaos, in the Abyss, in darkness and in gloom.” - Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts, Spell 76 This is of course a monologue written for the dead king claiming his right to climb the ladder, ascend to Atum and rule the gods through the identity of Shu. This story also gives us an expanded hierarchy of Egyptian Gods. In this hierarchy, the family of Thoth appears as an intermediate step between the initial creation of infinite potential, Shu and Tefnut, and the creation of infinite actuality that begins with Geb and Nut. Amun | Ptah | Re – Atum – Aten | Shu – Tefnut | Sia - Hu Thoth The Ogdoad | Geb – Nut | Isis – Osiris – Seth – Nephthys Horus Anubis THE SUN, THE MOON AND THE EYE OF HORUS Across the millennia of Egypt’s history the concept and symbolism of the Eye became so alloyed with multiple deities that it presents a 89 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN confusing array of information to anyone trying to comprehend the many elements of its story. By the time of the Late Period the iconography had become simplified on the one hand to where the sun was the right eye of Horus and the moon was the left eye of Horus, but on the other hand which gods represented the sun and moon became a mixed bag of deities including Re, Thoth, Hathor and others. What must be done to untangle this story is to go back to the original meaning of the eye, that of spiritual vision. There are three facts to hold on to. First, that Horus is the spirit of Amun. Second, that spiritual knowledge comes from Amun. Third, that Re is the point of creation in the physical universe. Once Shu and Tefnut were created the concept of maat came into being. This allowed an agent of maat to come into being and that was Thoth. Thoth regulated time and so was responsible for the circadian rhythm of the sun and moon. But more so, Thoth was responsible for maat not only in the enclosure of day but the enclosure of night, and the only heavenly body that is visible in both the day and night is the moon. Hence, Thoth was identified with that physical orb. At the inception of the Old Kingdom a philosophy came into being that raised the importance of the perception of sight. Combining this belief with the three facts noted above led to the concept that Re was the Eye of Horus. Because Thoth was a complementary transcendent to Horus in terms of possessing divine knowledge and was also a source of light, and especially because that light was a reflection of the light emanated by Re, Thoth in the form of the moon also became an Eye of Horus. The Pyramid texts reflect this association. “O you two Companions who cross the sky, who are Re and Thoth … I go round the sky like Re, I traverse the sky like Thoth.” - Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, Utterance 210 “The Eye of Horus gleams upon the wing of Thoth on the left-hand side of the ladder of the god.” - Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, Utterance 478 Going back even further into Predynastic times the root of this symbolism can be found in the wadjet eye. Wadjet meant the green or 90 TRINITY healthy one, also to flourish. Wadjet was also the Cobra goddess and so the wadjet eye belonged to the Cobra goddess. Wadjet was a compound word with a compound meaning. The root of wadjet, “wadj”, meant green, healthy, sturdy, fortunate, happy or flourish. The idea was that something green grows and manifests any or all of those attributes. The second half of the word, djet, was extremely symbolic. It meant Cobra, simply body or form, or eternity, depending on how it was written. The fourth king of the first dynasty selected Djet as his Horus name. It can be seen that the word wadjet is packed with significance, meaning anything from “the green one” to “eternal fortune”. In truth it held the meaning of all of the above. Ancient Egyptian mythology is full of references to snakes, primarily the Cobra. The snake was a divine creature to the Ancient Egyptians. It had the power of life and death, it shed its skin as if to be reborn, it moved with no visible method of locomotion and it appeared to be a “one piece” creature. These characteristics symbolized a link between the snake and the divine “one”, the monad. The Cobra’s eye is therefore a symbol of the primeval knowledge of the monad Amun. For these reasons the wadjet Cobra was mounted on the front of the king’s double crown throughout Egyptian history. Spiritual knowledge was the holy grail of the pious Egyptian. This came in many forms. Isis as spiritual knowledge, Wadjet as primeval knowledge and Thoth as knowledge of maat. THE MOTHER GODDESS, THE PLACENTA AND THEBES The mother goddess may be the oldest spiritual player in the entire history and prehistory of the world. The strength of this icon caused the symbolism of the mother goddess to undergo a fission unlike any other deity in the pantheon. Whether this was caused by the invention of writing, the coming to power of the supreme royal family or the expansion of the priesthood, it left behind a long list of female neters, each with a slightly different role to play. Predynastic Mother Goddesses 91 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN Neith, whose symbol was two crossed bows and arrows, was the female force of the creator. Neith was also symbolized in the most ancient of times by a female with her arms forming a circle around her head. The crown of Lower Egypt was called the nt (Neith) crown, and at least two queens of the first dynasty were named after Neith, Narmer’s queen Neithhotep and Djet’s queen Merneith. Bat, represented by a cow, literally meant “female spirit” formed as ba, spirit, plus the female suffix “–t”. Hathor, also represented by a cow, whose name meant “House, Temple, or (simply) Enclosure of Horus”. Because Horus was the spirit of Amun, his female enclosure was the womb. Nekhbet, whose symbol was a vulture but whose name meant “the One of Nekheb”. Her namesake was the predynastic town of Nekheb which was directly across the Nile from the town of Nekhen, also known as Hierakonpolis, the city of the hawk, the city of Horus. Nekheb meant “to germinate”. Nekhbet was associated with the crown of Upper Egypt in that she is usually shown wearing it. Wadjet, the Cobra goddess of Lower Egypt. The Wadjet Cobra was on the front of the Nt-crown. The Greeks called this the Uraeus, or “one who rises”. Serket, the scorpion goddess, her name meant “to cause to breathe”. It is no mistake that the names arranged above can be seen to form a sequence of Creation – Spirit – Womb – Germinate – Flourish – Breathe. Each one had its role in the creation of a human life. Dynastic Mother Goddesses Tefnut, described earlier as the female counterpart of Shu and mother of Geb and Nut. Nut, also described earlier as the female counterpart of Geb and mother of Osiris. Although her position in the hierarchy implies she is also mother of Isis, Nephthys and Seth, this is never stated. Isis, the female counterpart of Osiris and mother of Horus. Nephthys, the female counterpart of Seth and mother of Anubis. Amaunet, the female counterpart of Amun and one of the Ogdoad. Mut, which meant literally and plainly “mother”. The hieroglyph for mother was the same one as for Mut which was, again, the vulture. Mut 92 TRINITY was a member of the Theban Triad: Amun-Re, Mut and Khonsu. Mut is not known before the Middle Kingdom and this triad is most likely an invention of Middle Kingdom priests. Nevertheless its basis was rooted deeply in the original concept of the mother goddess. The most prominent of these goddesses had their names involved in the royal titulary and iconography. Neith and Nekhbet as the most ancient were associated with the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt. What is meant by the royal titulary is the several titles that were given to the king. In predynastic times the king had a single title. This was the name of king surmounted by the falcon Horus and so this is called the Horus name. By the end of the Old Kingdom and through to the end of ancient Egyptian history each king had five different titles. These began with the Horus name. Narmer’s official name was actually Horus Narmer. The next name that appears begins with Narmer and is called the nebty, or “two ladies” name. This is because the name appears under the images of Wadjet and Nekhbet, the “two ladies”. Narmer’s nebty name was mn, and so he was called Menes by the Greeks. The third name to appear was the nisw-bity name. This means “the one of the sedge and the bee”. The bity bee symbolized Lower Egypt. The nisw, or “sedge plant”, symbolized Upper Egypt. The first king to sport this name was Horus Den, who was nisw-bity Khasty. Later, in the fourth dynasty, this name took on the form with which the general public is most familiar. The nisw-bity name was from then on enclosed in a “cartouche”, a loop called the shen ring which symbolizes infinity, eternity and protection. The other two names the king had were the “son of Re” name and the “Golden Horus” name. Of special significance was the Theban Triad of Amun-Re, Mut and Khonsu, as these were meant to symbolize the passage of the spirit of Amun into human form. This triad centered on the mother goddess Mut as the transcendent through which this was manifest. Amun-Re was the hybrid of the spirit of Amun as manifested through Re. Mut was the hybrid of the original royal mother goddesses Neith and Nekhbet as Mut was depicted wearing the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. 93 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN Khonsu meant literally the “placenta of the king”, spelled h-nisw where the “h” hieroglyph represents the placenta and nisw meant king as described above. The placenta was viewed as a divine organism responsible for transferring the spirit of the king from god to man, even as a twin of the body. Beginning in predynastic times and at least through the Third Dynasty the entire afterbirth, cord blood, placenta and all were saved at birth using a special set of knife and cups (Fig 3.x). As part of the king’s funeral these materials were destroyed in fire to symbolize his rebirth into the afterlife. So, the placenta was not only a symbol of birth into this life, it was also a symbol of birth out of this life. Together, Amun-Re, Mut and Khonsu delivered the spirit of Amun to the body of Mankind. Whether this was delivered to the first king of Egypt and transferred from monarch to monarch in a mystical ritual or whether this was delivered to every man through every birth mother, the ancients closed the circle with this explanation of the final link between god and man, and back to god again. EDFU, THE PRIMEVAL MOUND AND THE FIRST TEMPLE Ancient philosophers and modern scientists are not so different. Both have examined the question of creation in excruciating detail. Modern science illustrates this with the timeline of the Big Bang. The time line presented here begins with unimaginably short intervals. Some run concurrently. Every “epoch” has a complete set of theory, mathematics and particle physics experiments behind it to explain how the matter and energy of the universe transformed as the laws of physics somehow evolved out of nothing. 94 Big Bang emission Planck epoch: 0 to 10-43 seconds Grand unification epoch: 10-43 to 10-36 seconds Inflationary epoch: 10-36 to 10-32 seconds Electroweak epoch: 10-36 to 10-12 seconds Quark epoch: 10-12 to 10-6 seconds Hadron epoch: 10-6 to 1 seconds Lepton epoch: 1 to 10 seconds Photon epoch: 10 seconds to 380,000 years TRINITY These phases are followed by the formation of particles, matter, stars and galaxies as part of the same timeline. Questions addressed in these theories include, where has all the antimatter that should have been formed at the time of creation gone, and other highly technical conundrums. The ancients had their own creation timeline although it is not described in floating point notation. Just as astronomers and physicists struggle to explain why the universe formed with more matter than antimatter, the ancients worked at describing how the first land was formed out of the primeval waters. Edfu is a town in the southern part of ancient Egypt where the main temple of Horus was located. Hieroglyphs have been found inscribed in this temple that describe its origin. Because temples were built on what was believed to be one of the first islands of land to rise from the primeval waters, these texts describe the origin of the world. These stories, found on more than one temple, are called Building Texts. These stories are highly abbreviated but came from longer, more descriptive sources that are now lost to us. The very first part of the story found on the Temple of Horus at Edfu can be examined to show the detail in which the ancients were thinking. This is a paraphrased summary of the story. The primeval island begins in darkness, surrounded by waters. Light came and the primeval water grew radiant. The “Two Companions of the Divine of Heart”, leaders of the “Shebtiw” emerged and were led to the island. They perceived reeds at the water’s edge, a god being above it. They landed there and became lords of the island. - From The Mythic Origins of the Egyptian Temple This island is not yet the first land as it exists only as a potential in the Nun. There is no world yet for it to occupy. Light comes, but this light is the revelation of the Creator, not physical light, because this light comes through the water from the hidden one. It radiates through the water and results in the emergence of two agents. There have to be two because there must be a dichotomy in order to create. The word “Shebtiw” is recognizable from its form “Shabti” or “Shawabti” which are the tiny little statues found in tombs that were put 95 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN there to do the work of the tomb owner in the afterlife. These Shebtiw are proxy for the creator. This does not say how they are led to the island nor that the island has yet emerged, only that they are at the water’s edge. Because the primeval waters were everywhere before creation, and the world has not yet been created, the water’s edge must be at the edge of the world of the gods. A god is perceived above the reeds. We would assume that these are reeds growing out of the water from the primeval island below, but there is more to this reference to reeds than meets the eye. Puns were very popular in ancient Egyptian literature from the earliest of times and there are several of them at work here. The word for “reed” is the same as the word for “the flaming one”, and recall that the island of flame is a place of creation. The description of reeds growing out of the water lends the story a double meaning. The reed is split in two and a slip is planted and becomes a perch, the reed that uplifts the god. The reed is equated with the object of the “overlord of the Djed pillar”. The ka arrives. This place is given a name, “the reed that uplifts the god”. This was the origin of the seat of the first occasion. - From The Mythic Origins of the Egyptian Temple This section of the story is also packed with symbolic events of creation. Even in predynastic times the Egyptians carried the names of their gods on standards that served as a perch for the god. Whether it was bird, animal or lightning, every god was uplifted. The reed itself is again a curious object. It is now linked with the Djed pillar. Because the world is just now being created, the Djed pillar would be a hidden transcendent responsible for re-creating the world after the destruction of its previous incarnation. So here, the reed appears to be a mechanism for the Djed to manifest a new cycle of creation. The location where this occurs is given a name, something that has not yet occurred. This is the first place to be named and so it is the seat of the first occasion or “first time”. The phrase for this is “sp tpi”. The name of Edfu, which is again a Greek version, came from the Egyptian word for a slip of reed, “djeba”. The story continues and plays out in excruciating, highly symbolic, even mystical detail. We find out that this god is the falcon. The falcon 96 TRINITY and the “ka” spirit are united, the first land emerges, and the first temple is built with the sole purpose of protecting the falcon. The falcon has carried the spirit of god to man and this action occurs in the safety of the temple. Many more events in the chain of creation are recounted in this story than can be related here. Hopefully all would be far clearer if we had a copy of the original source, as called by the ancient Egyptians, the “Specification of the Mounds of the Early Primeval Age”. But unless a cache of papyrus is found safely buried for the last thousands of years that contains more information, this at least shows us just how thorough were the ancient thinkers. The phrase sp tpi has been used in other works about the ancient world in an attempt to prove that that these gods were more than just symbolic entities, and that the origins of the ancient Egyptian civilization go back thousands of years further than the evidence shows. Indeed, the Egyptians themselves present us with a confusing timeline in some of the many king lists that have been found. Manetho’s king list begins with a list of gods including Ptah, Re, Shu, Osiris, Seth and Horus. But even after these he names groups of monarchs including the offspring of the gods and earthly kings whose reigns total 24,900 years. And then the list continues with Narmer. The Turin Canon is a roll of papyrus, mostly destroyed, that also lists gods and groups of kings next to year counts in the thousands and tens of thousands. Perhaps there was an unbroken chain of knowledge stretching back from ancient Egypt into the time of prehistoric philosophers, including those of Vedic India. A chain that was destroyed by the usurpation of spiritual knowledge for wealth and power. But a chain that can be reconstructed and recovered through tolerance and understanding. It does not matter how many kings ruled Egypt in the historic or prehistoric past. What should be important to all of us is the accomplishment of our ancient sages who worked for millennia to bring us understanding of our spiritual nature and our connection to the creation of our world. 97 98 PART 4 MULTIPLICITY 9 THE FOURFOLD GODHEAD AGNI – INDRA – SURYA – SOMA Over the past hundred years or so the western world has come to recognize India as the home of one of the oldest, if not the oldest, of the religions of earth. Yet, the word religion may bring too much of a stereotypical image to the philosophical system that is the basis of all Hindu beliefs, the Vedic hymns. Hinduism is and has always been the mainstream religion of India, with Buddhism and Vedism as beliefs that focus on specific aspects of the world of Hinduism. It may be that Hinduism arose from Vedism or that Vedism arose because of Hinduism. There are no historical records to prove this one way or the other. Whereas Hinduism is all-encompassing, Vedism can be defined as the study of the teachings of the Vedas just as Buddhism can be defined as the study of the teachings of the Buddha. The name many modern Hindus prefer for Hinduism is Sanatana Dharma, which means eternal dharma or law. Although western historians date the Vedic hymns to around 1500 BCE, a group of Vedic scholars has found that geographic and astronomic references show that the Vedas were already in existence at the very least as early as 6000 B.C. Indian scholars date the origin to be anywhere from 6000 to 25000 BCE. Hinduism has no known beginning and no founder. The likely origin for the name is the Sanskrit name for the Indus River which is Sindhu. In any case, the Vedic hymns are attributed to the authorship of seven sages and the 20,000 verses of which they are composed have been orally transmitted, verbatim, in sections as assigned to various clans of the Brahman caste since their creation. They were finally written down around 500 BCE, nevertheless the verbal tradition has continued unabated. OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN Within the practice of Hinduism can be found countless gods. But it is also stated that all of the gods are aspects of only three gods: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver and Shiva the Destroyer. This trinity is also known as the Trimurti. In fact, when the mantra we hear as “Om” is recited, this is really a combination of the creator, preserver and destroyer represented in the sounds A-U-M. Both in support of this, and in contrast to this, the “One supreme soul” is identified as Brahman, from the root brh – to grow or burst forth. In the Vedic world this sole, self-existing, Supreme Universal Soul, manifests itself without limit, creating, destroying and re-creating forever and ever. In the beginning Brahman, remaining itself, projected itself into two: Purusha (male) and Prakriti (female). Out of these two emerged everything, and not only are all of the Gods aspects of Brahman, but so are all souls. A human can reach the One by attempting to reach the components first and then expanding that reach (i.e. individual – family – community – universe). If this sounds similar to Osirianism, one must consider that Egypt and India were separated by thousands of miles, mountain ranges, deserts and time. Perhaps the Vedas have been around long enough to have migrated across this landscape in late prehistory and in some form that merged with prehistoric Egyptian animism. Perhaps this knowledge migrated even before the Vedas achieved their final form. But the Hindu religion diverges from Osirianism in its own way, or vice versa. According to Hindu theology, periodically the universe is destroyed and re-created. Brahman creates the universe. Vishnu is the preserver and the pervader as the divine essence that pervades the universe. Shiva, whose name means auspicious, is the destroyer of worlds. At the end of the world cycle, Shiva as Nataraja, which means Lord of the Dance, performs the dances that undo all forms and end the age. During the existence of the universe there will be ten threats to its survival. Each time Vishnu will come to save the world either as himself or as an avatar. The tenth avatar signals the end of the world is near and its job is to destroy all wickedness to restore a new cycle of ages. In the current world cycle the Buddha was named the ninth avatar of Vishnu. The tenth has not yet been named. Nevertheless there is plenty of time. The universe cycle lasts trillions of years. 102 MULTIPLICITY But there are “gods” and there is self, and as in any enlightened religion there must be a way for the self to reach the gods. In Hinduism that way is Yoga. The word yoga means union and in Hinduism implies a union with god. Yoga Darshana is literally the “yoga philosophy” by which a dedicated student can unite mind, body and soul. The path to salvation is the realization of the soul’s true nature and the goal of ultimate union of one’s soul, or Atman, with the Supreme Self, the Paramatman, who is the basis of all being. The process of movement of the Atman from one body to another is known as transmigration. There are 4 yogic paths that one may choose to follow depending on one’s ability and willingness. These are Karma Yoga, the yoga of action; Jnana Yoga, the yoga of knowledge, meaning study; Bhakti Yoga, the yoga of devotion, meaning ritual, and Raja yoga, the yoga of control, the primary practice of which is meditation. There are other yogas such as Hatha Yoga. It seems many westerners mistake this for the path to enlightenment, but Hatha Yoga are physical exercises that are only meant to be a gradient step that proves one has the discipline to move on to the yogic path. And that is where one encounters the fourfold Godhead. RIG VEDA – YAJUR VEDA – SAMA VEDA – ATHARVA VEDA The Vedic Hymns, or Vedas, are a set of over 20,000 verses divided into 4 books, the Rig Veda, the Yajur Veda, the Sama Veda and the Atharva Veda with the Rig Veda considered as the oldest. The root of Veda is vid, to know. They have been defined as “The accumulated treasure of spiritual laws discovered by different persons at different times” and are said to have been authored by seven rishis, or seers. Although the language of the Vedas, Sanskrit, is still a living language and the Vedas are easily translated, their content is not so easy to understand because it is written in enigmatic metaphor. To help the student understand the Vedas come with Upanishads to provide some degree of clarification. Yet full understanding does not come easy. Right from the start we encounter deeply metaphorical concepts in the form of the four gods that make up the fourfold Godhead. Each one of these must be understood and realized, in turn, to bring one to 103 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN Brahman, the fourfold Self or Atman, which is the integral comprehension of pure unity. The path to enlightenment begins with the god Agni, who represents fire. The hymns can be read as if Agni is nothing but physical universe flame. In fact the Indian government recently named a family of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles after the god Agni, an action that could not have been more sacrilegious. A more fitting name would have been the Nataraja. Beyond this profane misunderstanding, what Agni really represents is the passion of the spirit for enlightenment. To wit, one must light this fire to begin the search for the truth. As an example of Vedic texts, Rig Veda X.XI.4 can be read in two different ways depending on your interpretation of the symbolism. Reading this verse literally translates as, “And the fleet Falcon brought for sacrifice from afar this flowing Drop most excellent and keen of sight. Then when the tribes chose as Invoking Priest Agni the Wonder-Worker, and the hymn rose up.” Revealing the metaphorical symbolism allows one to understand the message of this text:  the Falcon represents the Spirit as the messenger, herald and harbinger of truth  Agni represents the passion of the spirit to achieve enlightenment  the goddess (any goddess) represents intelligence conveyed by the sacred hymns Rewriting this with one less order of metaphorical magnitude gives: “Then the delegated bird, the hawk, brought the pervasive drop of clear-seeing into the rite. When the people chose the Fire as the magical invoker, then the Goddess Intelligence was born.” And finally, the meaning of this passage with the simplification of symbolism becomes clear. That the spirit, driven by the fire of its desire to be enlightened, brings a clearer truth that results in higher intelligence. Once one has realized the fire of Agni one moves on to Indra. Indra appears to be the god of thunder, lightning and rain. What Indra really represents is the manifestation or realization of the supreme truth, an event that is symbolized by thunder and lightning. Indra specifically signifies the event of achieving, not what has been achieved. This 104 MULTIPLICITY supreme truth of Indra is that one is nothing more than an extension of the divine and to achieve enlightenment one must be willing and able to resign one’s own identity as an ephemeral existence and allow it to be replaced that with the timeless identity of the creator, the Paratman. Having experienced Indra one may now come to Surya, symbolized by the Sun. It would be easy to connect the light of the sun with the light of truth in general, but what Surya really represents is the specific truth that the spirit realizes when it attains separation from the body. But one cannot do this without having first experienced the realization of Agni and Indra. Finally comes Soma which means Bliss and is symbolized by the moon. This is the “serenity of beingness” achieved through full separation of the spirit from the body. The symbolism of Soma is the most esoteric, the main clue being that Soma is connected with spiritual immortality and freedom from the never ending cycle of birth and death. Whether in the form of Nirvana, Heaven or some other form of Elysian Field, Soma is and has been the goal of all religions since the beginning of time, attained in Hinduism through application of Vedic knowledge through Yogic discipline. VEDA – VEDANTA – SHRUTI – SMRTI The Vedic hymns are not an easy study, and so towards the end of helping the common man in their pursuit of understanding there is an incredible surfeit of sacred literature in the Hindu religion. This is divided into two classes, divinely revealed texts or “shruti”, and remembered texts or “smrti”. The Vedic Hymns are at the top of the list of revealed texts which include a school of thought called the Vedanta. The Vedantas are a body of literature that attempt to explain the ultimate truth of the Vedas. Vedanta means the “end of knowledge”. These are two teachings from the Vedantas that are heavily emphasized in Buddhism.  Is this universe real or an illusion? Our perception of it as an [illusion] vanishes the moment we realize the truth. This, it was not Real.  Tat tvam asi is a Sanskrit saying that translates to “thou art that”. What “that” is can be explained by the short anecdote that expresses 105 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN the relationship between the individual and the Absolute, “Someone saw God and asked, ‘Who are you?’ God replied, ‘You’” Remembered texts are just that. Aside from a handful of undecipherable ancient scripts, India did not develop writing until the 3rd century BCE. There is no history written for the time much earlier than that, for apparently ancient Indians were more interested in spiritual matters. The ancient history which is ascribed to India has been written by authors from memories the sources of which are verbal tradition, past lives and the akashic record, the akashic record being the compendium of all human experience contained in an etheric plane accessible by a privileged few. In spite of the dearth of hard data available on ancient India, these histories are not short. One of the main remembered texts is the Mahabharata. This text is about 1.8 million words and is an epic considered to be the longest poem ever written. The Bhagavad Gita, or “song of the lord”, is a principle Hindu text that most people have heard of and is book 6 of the Mahabharata. In the Bhagavad Gita, the 8th avatar of Vishnu, Lord Krishna, restores dharma, or cosmic order, through the battle of Kurukshetra. This is not just a history text. It is a religious epic that tells a story of how the god Vishnu took in Price Arjuna as a student of divine knowledge and is meant to serve as a source of spiritual guidance. These histories are immensely popular with the South Asian population as works that bridge political, ethnic and religious boundaries. When another ancient Indian epic, the Ramayana, was produced as a television series it is said the streets were deserted and the shops were closed as it was watched by over 650 million people during its weekly time slot. It does not matter if the Hindu histories are strictly true. They are there to help expound the meaning and purpose of the Hindu beliefs and serve as abundant examples of religious practice, lifestyle and devotion. BUDDHA – DHUKKA - METTAYA - ? Buddhism is not so much a separate religion as it is a revival of particular principles of Hinduism and focus on a purer form of its practice. The Buddha’s goal was to relieve the spirit of dhukka, or the suffering 106 MULTIPLICITY associated with the cycle of life and death and connection with the material universe. On the one hand Buddhism relies heavily on Vedanta, based on the idea that nothing material is permanent and anything valued will be lost. But this goes beyond having or even wanting to the point where even perception of the material world results in dhukka. The only happiness there is that is not impermanent is the Truth. Therefore the cessation of suffering and the attainment of happiness require one to see things as they are without illusion or ignorance and to cease one’s thirst for being and becoming. On the other hand the Buddha also found that severe physical asceticism was not necessary to attain enlightenment, instead finding that the “Middle Path” was best, practicing neither self-mortification nor pleasure of the senses. Nirvana, the final goal of Buddhism, is a transcendent state in which there is neither suffering, desire, nor sense of self, and the subject is released from the effects of karma and the cycle of death and rebirth. It is a key concept in Hinduism that enlightenment only comes when one ceases to try to be something other than the Supreme Being, and that giving up one’s own beingness allows the beingness of Brahman to manifest. In this it proves to be a return to strict Vedic practice. Even though the Buddha was honored as the ninth avatar of Vishnu, the Buddha himself did not believe that any of the countless Hindu gods were relevant, including Vishnu. To the Buddha, Brahman was the one and only. The Buddha promised to return in 2500 years as the Mettaya. The Buddha’s year of birth has been dated to around 545 B.C., putting the 2500 year mark right into the 20th century. Did you miss it? 107 10 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH VEDISM – OSIRIANISM – HERMETICISM – CHRISTIANITY If there is one thing that is peculiar to the race of Man it is the search for answers. Whether it is why the sky is blue or where we go when we die, this search has been continual and unrelenting for many thousands of years, even far back into the prehistoric era. This search for truth has fallen into two categories, science and religion. Science may tell us how to make a fire, or how to cure an illness, but it is religion that leads the search for who and what we really are. Science may tell us that our bodies are built from DNA, but it does not tell us where we came from or where we go when we die. Science does, however, give us clues as to how our search began. It tells us that at least 50,000 years ago something changed in the human race. People began creating art, and so we know they had begun to think in the abstract, or at least had the opportunity to reach beyond the basic needs of food, clothing and shelter. The Lascaux caves of France, the Venus figurines of Germany, and other Stone Age artifacts are evidence of human thought entering the spiritual realm. Later on we find burials where the dead are covered in red ochre, symbolic of rebirth, with jewelry, pottery and even weapons left in the grave as if they were able to take the essence, if not the substance, of these items with them into the afterlife. The Hindus, and even the ancient Egyptians, have claimed their history to go back for tens of thousands of years. The earliest religious texts are the Vedic hymns of India, passed on through oral tradition for at least the last 8,000 years and possibly longer. Regardless of the fact that India developed their own script thousands of years ago, these hymns are still memorized and verbally transmitted from one generation MULTIPLICITY to the next. Their sophisticated and lengthy nature assures that it took quite some time for them to come into being before the time of their origin, so perhaps it is true that this religion goes back ten or even twenty five thousand years as it is claimed. The Rig Veda, the primary book of the Vedic Hymns, is written in metaphor, so a student of this religion must do more than just read, or listen to, or memorize it. It must be studied, understood, and practiced. The practice of the Vedic religion is meant to lead to more than understanding. Its purpose is to bring an enlightened state of being where a profound realization is brought to the student along with an ability to be at cause over the fate of his own spirit. Indeed, the ultimate purpose is to give the student the ability to break the cycle of birth and death and to willingly decide what happens to the spirit when it leaves the body. That is, to give the student the ability to decide if and when to return to human existence again, ostensibly to assist others in attaining enlightenment, or to ascend to a higher state of being and escape the pain and turmoil of physical life and continue on as a solely spiritual entity. Today, thousands of years after the creation of the Vedic hymns, this religion is still practiced in its original form by a very few who make the commitment to cast aside their worldly needs and focus on the task of achieving this goal. Some have returned from previous existences to help others to do so. The Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, claims to be on his 14th incarnation as the Dalai Lama, the same individual returning lifetime after lifetime for over 500 years to lead his religion. Buddhism is an offshoot of Hinduism created by Gautama Siddhartha and Tibetan Buddhism is a version that takes reincarnation seriously. Its manual for reincarnation is the Bardo Thodol, or Tibetan book of the Dead. To practice this takes a lifetime of study and meditation but it has been deliberately authored, by those who have gone before, to prepare one for the various things that have been found to distract one from keeping focus on their own awareness/consciousness, after physical death. It can be postulated that Vedism, being the earliest known religion, is the original source for all other major religions. If we look through the 109 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN chronicles of history we find that Hinduism followed hand in hand with Vedism in India, offering the masses an easier way of expressing their religious commitments by offering devotion and service to others as an alternative to meditation and study. Whereas these may make one’s current and even future physical existence more tolerable and rewarding, they offer only good “karma” in return, and not the achievement of enlightenment or ascension by one’s own ability. The same can be said of the Assyrian and Egyptian religions that followed and that were likely influenced by Hinduism in ancient times. The ancient Egyptians may have sought enlightenment in the same way as the Hindus, but historically we see them expressing a serious misunderstanding of immortality. The “Osirian” religion, named after the god Osiris, led them into a 4000 year quest for immortality through mummification and tomb construction. The superhuman attempts of the ancient Egyptians to preserve the physical bodies of the dead forever, in order to permanently free the spirit from being forced into a new physical body by powers beyond their control, did not recognize that the ability to ascend to a higher state does not depend on some physical mechanism. The tombs and the bodies have survived, albeit in a much degenerated state, but there is no evidence nor claim to an ancient Egyptian achieving success in the afterlife. Nevertheless they did try, unlike religions that followed. Popular Christianity asserts that mere study and devotion, or sometimes passive belief alone, will lead the devotee to a place where they need not do anything more to achieve a state of spiritual bliss and that it will be given to them wholesale at the time of death. Esoteric Christianity, however, in its many forms of Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, etc., does go beyond this and aspires to some degree, the same goals of enlightenment and ascension. The practice of these beliefs has been held in secrecy and what is most interesting about the similarity in their ideas is that their common philosophies were brought forward not from Vedism or Hinduism, but from the ancient Egyptian Osirian religion in the form of the Hermetica. The ancient Egyptian god of writing, Thoth, became known as Hermes to the Greeks and the Hermetica, named after Hermes, is said to have come from the ancient wisdom of the books of Thoth. 110 MULTIPLICITY The wisdom of Thoth is mentioned as far back as the Egyptian Old Kingdom that began around 2500 B.C. in a story about the Pharaoh Khufu for whom the great Pyramid was built. The story tells that he asked of a magician, “It was also said that you know the number of the secret chambers of the sanctuary of Thoth.” Of course this story is about a king since during the Old Kingdom only a very few could read or write and this knowledge was reserved for the priesthood and royalty alone. Toward the end of the ancient Egyptian civilization these writings were revived in the form of secret societies that brought these to the common people. Participation in these societies began with an initiation rite that introduced the believer to their secret knowledge. Despite their persecution because of their exclusive nature these societies spread to the Middle East and into Greece. Later, the Renaissance brought them to Europe where they flourished in many forms. Today it seems there are very few who understand and even fewer who hope to achieve enlightenment and the ability to ascend to a higher existence and a very few who keep at it long enough to reach this goal. Western religions promise success without effort and few westerners practice eastern religions. Oddly, it seems that even in India itself, the birthplace of enlightenment, the population has lost touch with the spiritual treasures of their own land, practicing their religion much in the way of the western religions, through idols, stories and prayer rather than study and understanding. But the fire still burns. The Dalai Lama is on his 14th incarnation. And he even has his own app now. 111 11 THE CREATION OF THE UNIVERSE OSIRIS, DARWIN AND EINSTEIN Equations are not only in the realm of science. We can just as well create an equation for our universe based on the human spirit. The current state of our universe can be defined as a summation of the state of all of its inhabitants because each one of us assumes a cause point to greater or lesser degree. Let Ψ represent the spirit and we will use the symbol for infinity to indicate there is an unknown number of spiritual beings, human or otherwise, inhabiting our universe. Universe = Σ0∞ Ψ This equation shows that our universe is the summation from zero to infinity (meaning everything or, in this case, everyone) of the actions of all spiritual beings. Seeing as how most religious belief systems would define the supreme being as perfection, and as the spiritual beings created by the supreme being were created in that image they would not argue that the supreme being represents our full potential, meaning what is the best in all of us, or what is good in all of us. We can now move on to define the Supreme Being, or God for short, as the summation of all of our positive intentions by using the “absolute value” symbol which makes any value placed within it positive. God = Σ0∞ |Ψ| A more detailed discovery of what Ψ represents is outside the scope of this work. Our understanding of the evolution of man, the dawn of consciousness and the creation of the universe is not complete. Scientists continue to dig up new artifacts and remains, detect new macrocosms MULTIPLICITY and microcosms, and invent new theories to explain new information. At the same time religious scholars continue to address the issues of God, Creation and the Human Spirit. We are not yet at a point where anyone can say that the paradigm of Amun – Ptah – Re is any less valid than Protein – Cell – Homo Sapiens or Big Bang – Particle – Universe. Amun – Ptah – Re is not a paradigm restricted to the Ancient Egyptian religion that is today called “Osirianism”. This principal, that can be restated as the trinity of hidden cause, an agent of that cause and the light of truth can be seen in nearly any religion. Historically Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Theosophy all have their roots in Osirianism. Osirianism, Christianity and Buddhism all have their roots in Vedism. Religions like Buddhism and Scientology that are firmly rooted in the ancient Vedic hymns practice this ancient paradigm as self-realization. Darwinism does not stand alone as a solution to the mechanism of evolution. Intelligent Design can be integrated with or without God as the source of creation depending on just who or what God is, whether a unique demiurge or a potential that is inherent in every human spirit. Science alone cannot explain the phenomena of sentient life and the physical universe. No matter how many mathematical models, invisible dimensions or expensive machines are tilted at this enigma, omitting the cause point of human (or inhuman) consciousness from the equation will always fail to achieve a satisfactory answer. To achieve that answer, we must combine these three elements of religion as recognition of the truth of our spiritual aspect of existence, evolution as perspective on the truth that history lends to the actuality of existence, and science as seeker of truth through enlightenment. In effect a fusion of the genius of Osiris, Darwin and Einstein. 113 Appendix CHRONOLOGY Period/Dynasty Kings Referenced Dates (before current era) Predynastic Period Egypt not unified Nomarchs 5500 – 3150 BCE Early Dynastic Period Dynasty “0” Scorpion 1st Dynasty Narmer 2nd Dynasty Khasekhemwy 3150 – 3050 BCE 3050 – 2890 BCE 2890 – 2686 BCE Old Kingdom 3rd Dynasty Djoser 4th Dynasty Khufu, Khafre, Menkaure 5th Dynasty Unas 6th Dynasty First Intermediate Period Dynasties 7-10 “70 kings in 70 days” 2686 – 2613 BCE 2613 – 2498 BCE 2498 – 2345 BCE 2345 – 2381 BCE 2181 – 2040 BCE Middle Kingdom 11th Dynasty 12th Dynasty Second Intermediate Period Dynasties 13-17 Hyksos 2134 – 1991 BCE 1991 – 1782 BCE 1782 – 1570 BCE New Kingdom 18th Dynasty Akhenaten, Tutankamun 19th Dynasty Ramesses, Seti 20th Dynasty Third Intermediate Period Dynasties 21-26 Libyan and Nubian Kings 1570 – 1293 BCE 1293 – 1185 BCE 1185 – 1070 BCE 1069 – 525 BCE Late Period Dynasties 27 – 31 Persian Kings Greco-Roman Period 525 – 332 BCE Macedonian Dynasty Alexander the Great Ptolemaic Dynasty Cleopatra Post-Egyptian Rule Roman Period Byzantine Period Islamic and Arab Empires Ottoman Empire French Occupation British Occupation Modern Egypt Egyptian Republic Democratic Revolution MULTIPLICITY 332 – 305 BCE 305 – 30 BCE 30 BCE – 395 AD 395 – 642 AD 642 – 1517 AD 1517 – 1798 AD 1798 – 1882 AD 1882 – 1953 AD 1953 – 2011 AD 2011 AD 117 Appendix ILLUSTRATIONS ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1.1 - Predynastic Rock Art Figure 1.2 - “Narmer Palette” showing King Narmer wearing White Crown of Upper Egypt (left) and Red Crown of Lower Egypt (right) 105 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN Figure 1.3 - Cylinder Seal impression listing (right to left) all eight kings of the First Dynasty plus the Egyptian god Khentiamentiu (meaning “foremost of the westerners”) Figure 1.4 - Predynastic burial 106 ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1.5. Ancient Egypt 107 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN Figure 1.6 – Stone circle at Nabta Playa Figure 1.7 – Predynastic Rock art 108 ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1.8 – Predynastic vase decorated with a boat and the standard of Neith to the right of the “cabin” 109 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN Figure 1.9 - Predynastic king names surmounted by the falcon. Figure 1.10 - Floor plan of the tomb of Den, fifth king of the First Dynasty, with over 300 subsidiary burials 110 ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1.11 - Title of Horus-Seth Khasekhemwy Figure 1.12 - Pyramid Texts 111 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN Figure 1.13 – Part of the tomb complex of Djoser Figure 1.14 - Mud-brick remains of the tomb of Qaa, last king of the First dynasty 112 ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1.15 – Illustration from the Book of the Dead 113 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN Figure 2.1 – A 400,000 year old stone object unearthed in Morocco could be the world’s oldest attempt at sculpture. Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3047383.stm Figure 2.2 – Venus figurines 114 ILLUSTRATIONS 115 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN Figure 2.3 – 30,000 year old statue vs. Ancient Egyptian Sekhmet Figure 2.4 – The name of Osiris Figure 2.5 – Predynastic Horus king names 116 ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 2.6 – Khafre and Horus in the Old Kingdom Figure 2.7 – Isis and Horus in the Greek Period Figure 2.8 – Seth animal 117 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN Figure 2.9 – Killed snake hieroglyph Figure 2.10 – Tortoise shells and symbols found 118 ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 2.11 – Carvings found at Göbekli Tepe Figure 2.12 – Predynastic Egyptian writing 119 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN Figure 2.13 – Third Dynasty autobiography from the tomb of Hesire Figure 2.14 – The name of Khufu found written in ink inside the relieving chambers of the Great pyramid 120 ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 2.15 – The Palermo Stone, one of seven fragments 121 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN Figure 2.16 – Narmer Palette, including several symbols that are part of the historical ancient Egyptian alphabet Figure 2.17 – Overwritten hieroglyphs from Pyramid Texts in the tomb of Unas 122 ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 2.18 – Label from the tomb of Djer Figure 2.19 – Djed pillar 123 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN Figure 2.20 – Djed pillars in the underground chambers of Djoser Figure 2.21 – Main chamber of the tomb of Djoser 124 ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 2.22 – Nut and Geb Figure 2.23 – Thoth 125 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN Figure 2.24 – Thoth weighing the heart Figure 2.27 – the dual Horus name Figure 2.28 – the Jackal 126 ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 2.27 – Wepwawet carving and illustrated Figure 2.28 – pss-kf knife and cup set 127 OSIRIS, DARWIN, EINSTEIN Figure 2.29 – Min, Predynastic name and Dynastic representation Figure 2.30 – Prehistoric Neith 128 Figure 2.31 – The name of First dynasty queen Mer-Neith Appendix REFERENCES 129 This is a list of reading materials used more or less in the compilation of the ideas that went into writing this book. Ancient Egypt Chronicle of the Pharaohs, by Peter Clayton The Complete Pyramids, by Mark Lehner Egypt of the Pharaohs, by Sir Alan Gardiner The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, by R.O. Faulkner The Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts, by R.O. Faulkner Ancient Egyptian Literature, by Miriam Lichtheim Plutarch: Concerning the Mysteries of Isis and Osiris, by G.R.S. Mead The Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple, by E.A.E. Reymond Thoth, the Hermes of Egypt, by Patrick Boylan Amulets of Ancient Egypt, by Carol Andrews Ancient India Wisdom of the Ancient Seers, by David Frawley The Tibetan Book of the Dead, by Robert A.E. Thurman In Search of the Cradle of Civilization, by Feuerstein, Kak & Frawley Modern Science Relativity, by Albert Einstein Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets, Mark van Flandern Theories of the Universe, by Gary F. Moring The Human Past, edited by Chris Scarre Science News magazine Scientific American magazine Of interest Forbidden Archaeology, Cremo and Thompson The Bible 130