Egyptian Mysteries - Arthur Versluis
Egyptian Mysteries - Arthur Versluis
THE
EGYPTIAN
MYSTERIES
THE
EGYPTIAN
MYSTERIES
-4RKANR
T h e Egyptian M ysteries.
Bibliography: P.
1. Occultism. 2. Egypt— R elig io n — M iscellanea.
3. Mysteries, R e lig io u s-M isc e lla n e a . I. T it le .
B F 1 9 9 9 .V 4 3 1988 133 8 7 - 1 9 5 0 5
ISBN 1 - 8 5 0 6 3 - 0 8 7 - 9 (PBK .)
Part I
1 Introduction
k/
2 M aat
13
3 The Prim al Ennead
23
4 Isis
31
5 Osiris
40
6 On the Second D eath
50
7 Typhon
54
8 Hermanubis 60
9 Ra: the Sun King 66
10 The Tw o Lands 73
11 On Sacred Language and the Hieroglyph 81
12 On the M ysteries 89
13 A p ocatastasis: Som e Im plications 94
Part II On Initiation
1 T h eo ria : T h e N ature of Initiation 101
2 T h eo ria : Initiation and the Sym bolic 115
3 Praxis: Initiation and W ork 125
4 Praxis: T he Flam e and the Flower 137
V
C O N TEN TS
Notes
Select Bibliography I 49
Index *65
16?
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
3
4 INTRODUCTION
i n*11 * i
the tex* continues, saying that
The time will come when Egypt will appear to have in vain served
rhe Divinity with pious mind and constant worship, and all its
|l0ly cult will fall to nothingness and be in vain . . . words only
wili be left cut on thy stones, thy pious deeds recounting (O
EgypO- ••• This, when it comes, shall be the W orld’s old age,
impiety - irregularity and lack of rationality in all good things.
And when these things come to pass, Asclepius, then He, (our)
Lord and Sire, God first in power . . . (shall end) all ill, by either
washing it away with w ater-flood, or burning it away with
fire . . . (so that) god shall recall the Cosm os to its ancient
form . . . most good.7
Alas, all that prophesied w ith in this transm ission of the C orp u s
Hermeticutn did indeed com e to pass - the im piety, the proscription of
the ancient true religion, the m ass ignorance - a ll, th at is, save the
purging of the Cosm os and the G reat R e sto ra tio n , w hich is, no doubt,
imminent.
The Egyptian, then, lived in a w orld illu m in ed over his shoulder by
the brilliance of the G old en A ge, bu t con sciou s all the w hile th a t if he
did not perform his resp o n sib ilities the breach betw een H eaven and
Earth would becom e u n b rid g e a b le . In f a c t , co n scio u sn ess o f th is
responsibility lay inherent w ith in th e E g y p tia n cu ltu re and relig io n , one
instance of which was the tea ch in g th a t w here each tem p le of O siris
stood, there arose a la d d e r8 fro m E a rth to H eav en fo r, w h ile once
Heaven and E arth w ere o n e , in la te r tim e s m an required a ‘bridge'
between the tw o b u ilt upon re lig io u s o b se rv a n ce , in th e absence of
which the tw o w ould b e co m e d iv o rce d c o m p le te ly , m a n k in d sin k in g
into the darkness o f ig n o ra n ce . T he other ‘Divine cord' b in d in g E a rth
was that of the Divine King, whose function was to restore and to
continue the Divine Order.
Thus the great Egyptian king A m aris, according to H erodotus, was
one of a long lineage of restorer-kings, notable perhaps m ost of all for
his unique means of achieving this m ost trad itio n al of all functions. For
8 INTRODUCTION
Hence it was not the king who fathered his son, hut the Sun, the
pivine Sun. This divine impregnation is directly paralleled in the
immaculate conception of the Christ in the Virgin Mary of the New
Testament; it is paralleled also in the , where it is written that
the Sun is life, the Moon is matter, and from the mingling of the two
arises Creation.12 As the M aitri V pant sad has it, the Sun is the
(5 avitr); Brahman is the Self of the Sun; therefore one should reverence
the Sun, the Lord, the W itness.11 Likewise, it is said, ‘when the human
father emits . . . seed into the womb . . . it is really the Sun that emits
him as seed.’14 Then, too, there is Aristotle’s remark that ‘Man and the
Sun generate man’.15
Indeed, the subtle relation between the visible Sun and the Divine Sun
cannot be exhausted: for just as the former reflects the brilliance of the
latter, so the King reflects the Divine origin of his office, and so too the
father of every child reflects his own Origin, being but a carrier of the
Light, the seed of life which he emits. Each is the centre of the world
within a given sphere by virtue of the office which he holds, the function
he serves, not to dominate - for that is tyranny, egoism, the epitome of
sin - but to nourish, to uphold order and justice, the foundation of a
stable realm. The family, the clan, the land are all oriented around the
Sun.
Yet the meaning of this order was not merely temporal stability -
although that was achieved in ancient Egypt to an extraordinary degree,
bestowing many thousands of years of peace - but rather fulfilment of
man’s celestial destiny. In later Egypt, when the worship of Osiris grew
strong, this meant, for many, ascent to the Western Paradise, the subtle
realm of spiritual delights which in many ways parallels the Pure Land
(Sukhavati) of spiritual delights manifested in later Buddhism in the
worship of Amitabha. And for the worshippers of R a, the Divine Sun, it
meant ‘conditional liberation’ - those who were so liberated awakened
to their true nature in Ra ascending to the realm of pure Light, to the
‘barque of millions of years’ upon which they rode until the end of the
aeon16 when all things return to the Divine and final liberation is
attained. This latter teaching is, we might here add, paralleled in the
Vedanta, in which those beings who have realised the nature of Iswara
are also said to have attained a ‘conditional liberation’, a freedom from
rebirth lasting through the end of a world-cycle, when all is restored,17
the tares and chaff separated from the wheat. In other words, the entire
mesocosm that was Egypt served for the fulfilment of all men within her
sphere, providing each with the means toward the attainment of
10 INTRODUCTION
That is, the King must ever remember that he is not of himself king,
but only the means by which the land is Divinely ruled; he must rule not
with abasement, nor with arrogance, but with the courage and self
assurance that only knowledge of one’s true nature can afford. And
what is true of the king must also be true of the individual within his
sphere: for all are kings, the difference being essentially in the present
extent of their realm, and little else. This is why in the traditional
culture so much attention is devoted to the nature of true kingship - for,
ultimately, such observations apply to everyone. People cannot be
divorced from their culture and world: microcosmic harmony is
mesocosmic harmony is macrocosmic harmony.
Nowhere is this natural unity between the king and the state more
INTRODUCTION 11
far from being indignant, the kings held that they led a most
happy and contented life; for they believed that all other men, in
thoughtlessly following their natural passions, com m it many acts
which bring them injuries and perils, while they, on the other
hand, by virtue of . . . their manner of life . . . fell into the fewest
mistakes.20
Being openhearted, you will act royally. Being royal, you will
attain the Divine. Being Divine, you will be at one with the
Tao . . . Though the body dies, the Tao will never pass away. (16)
This, then, is at once the goal and the mark of the traditional culture:
that all people act royally, that all attain the Divine, each according to
their due. It was said of Sri Lanka, before colonisation, that the only
difference between the peasant in the field and the king himself were
their respective accoutrements; their bearing and speech were the same.
Surely something of the same was true also with ancient Egypt: the
12 INTRODUCTION
M aat is here associated with the relation of soul to body, w ith the
celestial harm onisation of the realm of generation, which is quite
proper, the essence of the soul consisting in harm onisation, the ‘ordering
of thy steps’. In the soul or psyche, this ordering implies the
harmonisation of the planetary spheres and celestial powers. W hat then
is Maat? M a a t is essentially a term describing those actions and
thoughts which act tow ard that harm onisation, tow ard a balancing
which must take place both upon the subtle order and in the tem poral
world, for the tw o are not by any means in opposition, divorced, but
rather are reflections, aspects o f one another. In b rief, the central
principle of m a a t is th at o f reciprocity betw een the gods - the principial
Divine realms - and hum ankind: the G ods serve hum anity as hum anity
serves the Gods. M a a t is D ivine reciprocity and harm ony.
M a a t is therefore built upon, and a reflectio n o f, understanding of
the Celestial realms; it exists within the reco gn itio n th at there are
multiple states of being, and that there is a kind of reciprocity betw een
them. And the central mode by which this D iv in e reciprocity is
manifested is through the sacred rites which, though n o t in them selves
sufficient for liberation,3 are none the less, in a tra d itio n a l era in
13
14 MAAT
particular, the means by which the Gods and the myriad forces of the
cosmos arc manifested and balanced. The sacred rites, therefore,
resemble a pillar which rises from the base upward, through all levels or
realms, and were enjoined upon humanity not to placate some external
power, but to harmonise people’s spirituality, to conjoin the spiritual
and the temporal realms, so that through the rites Heaven might
manifest upon Earth, and so that Earth and Sky might be reunited as
they were in the primordial era.
This is why the Egyptians, when speaking of the resurrection of
Osiris’ body, said that where every piece of the body was found, after it
had been scattered by the evil Typhon, there was raised a temple, a holy
site where a Divine ladder extending upward between Heaven and Earth
could be found. In the most ancient of days, Heaven and Earth were
conjoined, translucent, and people were gods, but in the days of ancient
Egypt, Heaven and Earth were becoming separate, and so the rites were
necessary in order to reunite them, if not everywhere then at least in
those places where the ladders - the temples - were situated, thereby
retaining some of the primordial spiritual unity of temporal and Divine.
And, in this vein, there can be little doubt that to this day certain areas
resonate with primordial power - sometimes for good and sometimes
not.
Now, as is reiterated in both the Buddhist Sutras and in the
Upanisads, the performance of ritual without knowledge is fruitless -
the degree of knowledge determines the efficacy or power of a given rite.
As the Chandogya JJpanisad has it, those who practise a life of sacrifice,
performing works of public good and almsgiving, ‘pass to the dark half
of the month (the moon) but do not reach the year (the sun)’.4 ‘Rising
to the moon’, there they dwell (in the subtle sphere of manifestation)
for a period in accordance with their works, after which they return to
the world of birth and death. This is the middle path, the , or
more literally ‘the way of the fathers’, and it, in Egypt as elsewhere, is
followed by the majority of humankind, winning them not complete
release, but merely better rebirth - in Egypt manifested in the worship
of Isis and Osiris. Those, on the other hand, who follow the path of
enlightenment, the deva-yana, the path of the Gods, do not return to
temporal life, but win release: these, however, are few.
Those who perform no sacrifices or austerities, much less follow the
way of the few, fall into the hands of Yama, of the King of the Dead,
and even into Hell, where for the specified time they face the
consequences of their ignorance (avidya).s The sphere of the moon
M A AJ- IS
- then, is the principal union betw een the celestial and the
oi il in the cosmos, as in the m csocosm and the m icrocosm . In the
toiordial world, therefore, the tw o were perceived as they truly are -
|MQnc a Celestial harm ony - and only later did people, confused and
deluded, begin to d ifferentiate betw een the tw o. Consequently, even
though m aat is in essence the harm ony o f the cosm os, it is there
implicit, becoming explicitly enjoined upon hum anity only in so far as
thcy conceive of themselves as separate beings.
As the sage Ptah-hotep said,
It is revealing that here God and the K ing are virtually interchangeable.
But such an injunction could only com e in a tim e in which m a a t was no
longer spontaneous for hum ankind - in w hich a person was no longer a
god, able to irradiate m a a t spontaneously, but rather must endeavour to
realise it, in itself a sign o f how far even Egypt was from the prim ordial
unity, the Golden Age. As was w ritten in the T ao Te ,
himself’, ‘He whom God loves, hears; hut he whom God hates, hears
not.*n In brief, the manifestation of arises directly from spiritual
knowledge or inspiration originally, and from emulation of those with
that knowledge (gnosis) secondarily. The former is the deva-yana, the
way of the Gods; the latter is the pi, the way
between which there is therefore no opposition, but only a difference of
degree of insight or illumination.
This hierarchic arrangement suggests that although is
implacable in its operation, evil action cannot block ascent
permanently, hut only temporarily: in other words, although the action
of m aat is relentless in the temporal w orld, those w ho realise spiritual
knowledge (gnosis) can ‘pass judgm ent’ after death, resolving the evil
they have committed into themselves, purifying themselves in the
‘sphere of the m oon’ until they pass on into celestiality. Hence in the
Egyptian B o o k o f th e ,D
ead humankind seek vindication, a
their past sins by means of gnosis - know ing the D ivine names and
aspects which hold the passkey to beyond the sphere of the moon, by
means of Osiris.
This is not to say, however, that the rites leading to the
foreknowledge of death, any more than the names o f power - as in
Chapter 125 of the B o o k o f th e D e a d - or even the w orship of Osiris
allowed circumvention of the im placable pow er o f . R ather, they
established an affinity, a knowledge and therefore a propensity which
transcended the temporal realm , and so ‘co n cen trated ’ the attention of
the deceased. As Petosiris of H erm opolis said,
the same time is freed from them, having realised their Origin through
spiritual gnosis or insight. Although we represent this journey
outwardly, as one through the spheres, it is in truth inward, into the
very Heart (ab) of the microcosm, seen finally to be the Heart of all.
As a result, we can say that while the practice and the awareness of
maat is indispensable for the individual and for the kingdom - since
without it all will fall into decay and destruction - alone leads
only to the realm of the fathers, to the moon, and not beyond. One
must have Divine harmony - speaking ; doing m aat - and pass
beyond, into osi, the insight from which m aat derives.
gn
Mesocosmically, this function of transmission of the Divine is served by
the temples, the priestly lineages - the path of liberation which is in fact
the axis ,m
di not only for the individual, but for the culture and the
n
u
cosmos. Just as the priestly lineage passes through history ‘horizontally’,
as the centre of the culture, so the ‘vertical’ transmission of the Divine
stands at the centre of the priestly transmission, the transmission of the
Mysteries. at,or cultural and individual order and purity - harmony
M
- is the manifestation of this transmission, the outermost sign of it.
Transposed to ancient Chinese culture, m aat corresponds to the
Confucian ideal of filial piety, respect for the gods, and absolute ethical
purity.
The Confucian ideal, needless to say, only came into being when the
primordial unity with the Origin which Taoism represented was
beginning to fray, to dissolve. As is said in the Tao Ching:
The ancient Chinese, like the ancient Egyptians, venerated their Divine
Emperor and recognised that their land was, for them, the centre of the
cosmos, pivot of the world - and like them realised the tenuous hold
that they had upon the balance which was their world, a balance
manifested in m aat. This relationship between the King and his
function as the means of divine restitution of the Golden Age is made
explicit in numerous texts. Note the following quotation, from the
Pyramid Texts:
The sky is at peace, the earth is in joy, for they have heard that the
King will set right the place of disorder. Tutankhamon drove out
disorder from the Two Lands,14 and m aat is firmly established in
20 MAAT
its place; lie made lying an abomination, and the land is as it was
at the first time.15
If the people grew lax, if they ignored the ceremonies, if the King did
not perform his Divine function as viceroy upon earth, if the temples
were left to decay, both knew that the world would collapse into
confusion, fragmentation and destruction.
As a result, both - the king and his people - enjoined upon themselves
adherence to and observance of at, the Divine principl
m
so seeking to preserve the sanctity of their culture and the path of
liberation which lay at its centre. However, the cycles of time cannot be
swayed or, finally, forestalled, and so the modern era, inevitable as an
avalanche, came into being none the less, with all its attendant Furies:
noise, smoke, confusion, destruction.
It is easy for the modern to scoff at the concept of , even to
assume, somehow, that he is ‘fit for the highest Mysteries’ while
ignoring the most fundamental laws of the cosmos, thinking himself
‘above’ ethics and morality when, in truth, he is ‘below’ them, unable
even to set his own house in order. For m aat - Divine reciprocity - is the
cornerstone of the traditional state (again in every sense of the word), to
which nothing is more antithetical than the sheer licence, the unleashed
egotism, avarice and solipsism which lie at the heart of our present era.
Before any ascent can take place, any deeper mysteries be witnessed,
obedience to the tradition, to the Divine harmony, must take root. Yet
today all this is virtually moot - indeed, we see its satanic inversion, in
which the obedience demanded is not to a traditional transmission of
Divine harmony, but to an ant-like and properly speaking subhuman
law, to a totalitarian state in which individuality does not flower but
rather is crushed, in which the harmony of m aat is inversely mirrored by
the mechanised chaos of the modern world.
The correspondence of the ancient Chinese and the ancient Egyptian
respect for and understanding of ritual, of , is illuminated by the
following words of Hsun Tsu:
Through rites Heaven and Earth join in harmony, the Sun and
Moon shine, the four seasons proceed in order, the stars and
constellations march, the rivers flow: and all things flourish;
men’s likes and dislikes are regulated and their joys and hates
made appropriate. Those below are obedient; those above are
enlightened; all things change but do not become disordered; only
he who turns his back upon the rites will be destroyed.16
MAAT 21
fhis then, is the state o f the m ed iate, trad ition al w orld, in which
Mile must strive to con tinu e the w isdom o f the past through
observance of ritual and fo rm a lity - it is the state o f a w orld m idway
between primordial unity and ch aos, betw een harm ony and dissolution.
As to the nature of the prim ordial state, it can be glimpsed in
CbuangTsu’s description o f ‘the true m an o f o ld ’ . According to Chuang
Tsu,
The true man of old slept w ith o u t dream ing and w oke w ithout
anxiety. His food was plain and his breath was deep. For the
breath of the true man rose up from his heels w hile the breath of
common men rises from their th ro a ts. W hen they are overcom e,
their words catch in their th ro ats like v o m it. As their lusts and
desires deepen, their heavenly nature grows shallow .
The true man o f old knew nothing abou t loving life or hating
d e a th ----- Carefree he cam e and carefree he w ent. T h a t was
a l l ----- He accepted w hat he was given w ith delight and when it
was gone, he gave it no m ore t h o u g h t ___ Such was the true
man.17
Two arose out of Himself, spontaneously, and from Them arose the
others, by turns. Now what can we conclude from this myth?
Above all, we can see that the Gods arc not fixed, hut fluid, each of
the succeeding syzygies being the same Essence manifested upon a
different, ‘lower’ or more concrete level of being. Shu and Tefnut are
emanations of Khepera, Who is in turn an emanation from the Supreme
One. From Shu and Tefnut arose Hehu and Hehut, Kekui and Kekuit -
or Isis and Osiris, Set and Nephthys - at first glance a daunting
theogony. And in fact, the more we penetrate into Egyptian studies, the
more superficially confusing they become: the manifold Gods are so
intricately related as finally to leave one reeling. Yet underlying them,
none the less, is a visionary triadic relationship which does not change,
whatever the particular manifestations in question, a relationship which
can be illuminated, first, by reference to the Qabalistic Sephiroth, the
Tree of Life, which arose from and mirrors the Egyptian cosmology and
theogony just referred to, as can be seen by reference to the following
image.
At top is the first triad, apex upward, consisting of Kether, Binah and
Chokhmah; in the centre is the second triad, apex downward, consisting
of Geburah, Chesed above, and Tiphareth below: below is the third
triad, apex also downwards, consisting in Hod, Netzach, and Yesod (the
Lunar Sephira), while at the base of both the Egyptian and Qabalistic
metaphysical visions lies Earth (Malkuth). The correspondence between
the Egyptian and the Qabalistic hierophanies is not coincidental - being,
even to the ‘direction’ of the three triangles, exactly alike - but rather
arises because the latter is a reflection of the former, and because both
are reflections of primordial Reality.
And if we take into consideration the Hermetic three worlds - the
Celestial, the subtle, and the phenomenal - each being a reflection of its
superior, we can see that the Divine trinities must then be manifested
not upon only one, but in three different worlds, which in the
Upanisads are termed bhu h, bhu vab and svah, or Earth, Atmosp
and Sky. In the terrestrial world - that most distant as it were from the
Origin - one finds Nephthys and Typhon,the mirror syzygy of Isis and
Osiris but, as Plutarch notes,3 the name Nephthys implies ‘at the land’s
end’ - that is, the densest matter, farthest from the Celestial realm, and
abutting upon the Ocean of Chaos below. Initially, in the Golden Age,
Typhon and Nephthys were beneficent, but as time went on, as Heaven
and Earth began to separate, they - and Typhon in particular - came to
be malevolent, bent upon chaos and destruction; they exist, therefore, as
28 THE PRIMAL ENNEAD
and air and upon land, whose ‘names are manifold and unknown
Gods even know them not’. But to understand the tradit'
metaphysical understanding of Creation, we must jettison the moT*3'
preconceptions of either evolutionism or of a single Creation at
beginning of time - for both are preconceptions of only limited vah/
and considerable detriment. The former - evolutionism - is exceedin \ '
Each day, the ancient Egyptians sought to help the Sun arise anew, to
purify the Earth - not naively, as some have misguidedly alleged,
because they feared that the visible sun might not rise anew, but because
they recognised that the Celestial Sun might not rise fo r , that they
might grow ignorant of the Celestial Reality and give credence only to
the material, temporal world. For if such an eventuality came to pass,
the Egyptian priests were well aware, their cherished connections with
the ancient primordial Golden Age would be severed, humankind would
be bereft of the Divine Presence, and would wander downward into
darkness, fragmentation and infernality.
Although it is inevitable that there should be a dawn, a midday, and
an evening for man and his world as for the day itself - in other words,
even though evil must needs come - woe unto him through whom the
darkness cometh. The ancient Egyptians were well aware of man’s
divine responsibilities upon Earth. And throughout the cycle the Sun
remains - even in the darkness the Sun remains, travelling upon the
‘barque of millions of years’, carrying with it the spirits of those who
have ‘passed beyond the sphere of the m oon’, who have obtained not
‘complete liberation’ but ‘conditional liberation’. This process of
emanatory Creation, then, takes place not just once, in the far dim
reaches of the past, but now each instant, if we are but aware of it. In
the Creation, Ra says:
THE PRIMAL ENNEAD 29
Give birth Seb and Nut to O siris, H om s, Set, Isis, Nephthys from
the womb, one after the other of them ; they give birth and they
multiply in this earth .10
Note, then, the tense: they give birth. Likewise it was said by the ancient
Egyptians that R a , in order to rise e a c h m o rn in g must first defeat in
battle the primal serpent Apep, and all the allied dark powers who seek
to prevent His rising.11
From these instances, we can see that the Divine Creation, and the
Gods within it, belong not to tem porality but to the principial realm, to
the supratemporal Origin of existence ‘vertically’ rather than
‘horizontally’. This vertical dim ension of existence is precisely that
which gave such metaphysical depth and spiritual power to the Egyptian
world, for by means of it every single object in Creation was invested
with a Celestial significance: the entire Egyptian world was translucent,
a transmission of the Divine. Each anim al, each plant, each site bore a
sacred meaning, was a revelation in itself, a theophany. Indeed, it is
related that when a R om an soldier once killed a cat, sacred to Isis, the
Egyptians demanded his death, so serious were they as to sym bological
power.12 The significance of the cat lay not only in the fact that it was a
living being, but also in that of which it was a m anifestation - just as
was the asp, the fish, the ow l, the haw k, the ibis, the ass: each bore with
it a constellation of meanings, as do each of the Gods.
It is this vertical dim ension of C reation which has given rise to so
much modern confusion over traditional symbology in general, and
Egyptian metaphysics in particular, as can be witnessed in the strange
argument over whether the Egyptians were polytheist, m onotheist, or
henotheist, as various scholars have at times alleged. T h e answer to this
dilemma lies in the intricate and unfathom able interrelationship
between the One and the M any, as Plotinus in his E n n ead s (significantly
so titled) put it. Polytheism and m onotheism are not, seen aright, in
opposition to one another: the form er is an aspect of the latter.
In truth, the Gods of ancient Greece and Egypt bear a relationship to
the Creator similar to that which the Angels of Judeo-Christian and
Islamic traditions bear to God: an interrelationship infinitely mysterious
and profound. Here we can begin to see the essence of the Mystery
which the primal Ennead of H erm opolis, and Creation itself,
perennially presents for man - and even more so for modern man,
blinkered and confused as he now stands. Here, in what might aptly be
termed the Tree of L ife, lies the M ystery of M ysteries, the hidden
30 THE PRIMAL ENNEAD
Perhaps no God or Goddess has ever enjoyed the worship and celebra
tion of so many throughout the ancient w orld, from the earliest times
up to and through the tim e of C hristianity, as did Isis. Indeed, even after
Isis herslef had ‘vanished’ under that nam e, ‘She of the M any Nam es’
continued under the guise o f the V irgin M ary, W ho in turn assumed
many of the functions th at Isis had served in earlier epochs. Both, like
Kanzeon Bodhisattva in M ahayana Buddhism , ‘hear the cries of the
world’ - both are the ‘com passionate deliverers of the w orld’s suffering’.
But who is Isis, the reg in a coeli, Queen of Heaven,
Egyptian was ^ ?
V4
■
For an answer we turn, first, to the m yth of Isis and R a , found in the
Turin Papyrus,1 in w hich Isis is seen as blackm ailing the poisoned Sun
God Ra into revealing his m ost secret, sacred N am es of Power in return
for an antidote. For in this tale we can see the principial Essence of Isis:
she is M ediatrix between the Celestial and the terrestrial.
In the text in question, Isis is defined as ‘She W ho loved the Gods;
She Who was wearied o f m en; She W h o loved best the realm of the
spirits’.2 In other words, Isis, though necessarily partaking of the highest
realms - those of the Gods and o f R a - was none the less most closely
affiliated with the m ediate subtle realm , the world of spirits ( ),
the Atmosphere, the Vast Sea in w hich the tem poral world was
precipitated like a tiny island. Isis is the Queen of the subtle realm , and
therefore in her own way ‘m istress o f the E arth . . . like R a . . . (and) of
like rank and power in H eaven’, 3 for she rules the essences of herbs and
animals and all sentient things. According to the myth under
consideration, Isis hid a dart in R a ’s p ath, and when he encountered it
he fell mortally poisoned, and was revitalised only by divulging to Isis,
the Great Sorceress, his True N am es. W ith in this tale we begin to
glimpse the nature of Isis, elucidated by the Q abalistic teaching that
each of the Sephiroth, when em anated, ‘spilled over’ into
disequilibrium, and were later returned to Divine O rder, and that each
of the Sephira corresponded to aspects of the D ivine N am es. For both
31
the Qabalaand the talcs o f Isis refer to the emanatio
from the l, to the essential superstructure o f Creation, mediat^
ea
R
between ‘above’ and ‘below’.
That Isis, then, should have a mediate place in the Egyptian theog0n
is only proper,for she, like Egypt herself at that tim e, lay mediae
between rhe primordial past and the secular, m aterialist future, between
the sacred and the e.Although in the myth under consideration
profan
Ra' is depicted as being senile and decrepit, obviously, since Ra cannot in
his nature change, it must be something else which is being suggested. In
fact, it is not Ra Who becomes senile, but rather man who becomes
blind to Ra. In this tale, in other words, we see not the senescence of
Ra, hut the senescence of Egypt herself, and her blindness to Ra, a
blindness remedied by Isis, who acts as interm ediary or bridge between
man and the Sun to which he is ever m ore b lin d . Isis, in sum, not
fundamentally different from the Sun, is rather a m an ifestatio n of the
Divine Compassion accessible to man in an age o f w aning faith and
wisdom.
Hence Isis said: T have revealed to mankind m ystic initiations. I have
taught reverence for the Gods; I have established the tem p les.’ Now
needless to say these are ultimately the action s of the Divine Sun
inherent within Creation and within hum anity, fro m w h o m Isis cannot
be separate. However, within a given h istorical period certain
incarnations or manifestations of the Divine are of far m ore aid than
others. They speak to a given age and need, and so it w as - and perhaps
is - for Isis. As is said in the litany Praises , ‘T h o u a rt indeed Isis’ .5
When Isis - or any - bestows blessings upon m a n , it is R a w h o bestows
them.6
From this we can begin, to o , to see the re la tio n o f Isis to Nephthys,
her sister and consort of Typhon, the latter being a re fle ctio n and aspect
of Isis, just as Isis is an aspect o f R a . A cco rd in g to P lu ta r c h , Isis is that
which is manifest; Nephthys is, or rules, th a t w h ich is unm anifest .7
Nephthys, then, is that of the subtle realm w h ich is u n m a n ife st, which
is outside the pale of the temporal realm , w hereas Isis is ‘ she of the green
wings and the crescent m oon ’ and, while including Nephthys as one
aspect of her, nevertheless pertains more the ‘ w orld below the moon ,
the world of generation and of living beings. N ephthys, on the other
hand, is the ‘shade’ of Isis; she manifests the residues or traces of the
living world, representing decay, dissolution.
Isis’s sign was Sothis, the dog-star, which signified her power, for
that star was associated with the rising of the N ile , and the coming of
ISIS 33
Then from the ocean she rises, such beauty as words fail to approach-
upon her head is a chaplet of flowers in the midst of which is a circlet -
a softly glowing moon supported by two vipers that rise from the Earth
near blades of corn. Her garments are many-hued: yellow, white, red
while around them falls a softly shining black cape, passing over her left
shoulder, a cape spangled with stars, a crescent moon breathing forth
from the centre. In her right hand is the triple chord of the sistrum;11 jn
her left hand a golden boat, above which rises the head of an asp from
its sacred coils.
To poor Lucius (whose true nature, by virtue of his name, is light),
still entrapped in the body of an ass, she speaks:
rcnlly was, seen through the eyes of Her worshippers. And though Her
worshippers were drawn from every class, we have here an account by
one of the literati, a scholar, who had found serenity not in the ‘bitter
cross of anxiety’, as the Rom an phrase had it, but in the folds of the
Great Goddesses’ robes. Here, unm istakably, we have a true religious
experience, one which speaks to , gives solace to, the troubled soul of
man, for whom neither scholarship nor earthly delights offer any lasting
comfort. It is for this reason that Apuleius’ account is so moving.
The account of his initation builds to a kind of universal clim ax: the
populace throngs into the city as the sun rises - all are ju bilant, buoyant
as Lucius himself, who knows that his deliverance is im m inent. The
colourful pageant goes on, women dressed in the w hite vestures of
spring, scattering balm and flow ers, while others bear mirrors upon
their backs, walking before the Goddess so that all approach her Image.
Musicians play upon their pipes; poets recite; the shaven initiates walk
behind in a great band, dressed in purest w hite, shaking sistra of brass,
silver and gold, w ith the priests in the rear, carrying the Great Lamp and
the altars. Behind all fo llo w the Gods themselves: the Messenger of
Heaven and H ell, Anubis, face half black and half gold, bearing his rod
in his left hand, follow ed by a C ow , emblem of the M other of all, and
last of all one bearing the sacred symbol of the Supreme D eity,
inexpressible, veiled in the Deep Silence of true religion.
Throughout Apuleius’ account we find a wealth of descriptions of the
Mysteries and of sacred symbology: the sistrum w ith its three chords,
for the three w orlds; the sacred uraeus, the asps which symbolise the
coiled serpent of Sakti entw ined around Siva (or of Isis coiled round
Osiris); Isis arising from the G reat O cean; the golden barque of R a , the
Sun, in which the dead find life eternal, a kind of im m ortality; the
gooseneck prow of the sacred barque, signifying the unerring homeward
path which Isis and R a represented. Indeed, the list is long, the
symbolism intricate.
But what of the initiation itself? O f th at, Lucius can say little: not
because he would not, but because he can not, not least because the
power of the Goddess is to bestow death as well as life, punishment as
well as weal - and yet from his tale the essence of the event, the turning,
can be inferred; we can see there the immense gratitude and serenity, the
joy and universal harmony which it bestows, not only upon him alone,
but upon all in the populace, to each according to his need. As Apuleius
says: ‘At midnight the Sun shone in all his full splendour. I could tell
you more, but you would not understand.’
The Sun shines at midnight: in this we see the essence of the ‘ft|
Rite’13 of the ancient Egyptians, of the entry into death itself whichT*
at the heart of the Mysteries - for ‘initiation is a kind of volum'^
death with but the slightest chance of redemption’. Initiation bestows^
redemption in the Sun, the Divine Sun which appears in the very dept^
of human despair, when egoism is transcended, when the world of f0rrt1S
subtle and dense, drops away - then, at midnight, comes that of which
nothing more can be said: Divine Plenitude overwhelming.
Isis, then, is the principal generative force, associated with the healing
herbs and the powers of medicine, with the growth of wheat and corn
(the domestication of which marked the inception of Egypt herself, and
delineated the entrance into the present historical epoch), being
mediatrix, meeting point as it were of the Gods and the temporal world.
Hers is the self-motive power of generation,14 of which agriculture is the
outward manifestation, and of which the green wings and crescent
moon are symbol.15 The root of Her name is closely affiliated with the
Egyptian root pr,which implies house, or home, suggesting that She is
Mistress within the Houses of the Gods. As Cassiopeia, she reclines head
downwards upon the night horizon. One of her names, too, was Isis
Pelagia: she of the waves. Hence as Venus she was envisioned as riding
above the ocean of temporality. Yet she was also Ge-Meter, or Earth-
Mother, which in Greek became Demeter.16
One of the most suggestive characteristics of Isis, however, is her rela
tion to the coiled serpents or asps with which she is always associated, for
the serpent is almost universally a symbol of the vital force, the coiled
essence of life itself, rising up the spine to the crown of the head. This
attribution of the life-force to the serpentine form is particularly true
within Tantric tradition, in which k,the Serpent
slumbers at the base of the spine, in the realm of generation, is awakened
as it rises up the susumna, the sacred channel, axis of the body, through
the aperture of Brahma’, conferring liberation upon the adept.
Although we cannot of course say that Isis Sakti, nor that Osiris is
Siva, the central pole around which the coiled serpent, Sakti, is
slumbering, yet none the less the two pairs are incontrovertibly inter
related: it is not, after all, insignificant that the constellation Cassiopeia
- She of the Throne, Mulier Sedis - should circle round the Pole with
the passage of the year, just as Isis, with whom she is associated, hovered
over the slain Osiris to reinvigorate him after his death and
dismemberment.
What, then, is the relationship between Siva and Sakti? Essentially, it
ISIS 37
. t|iat between power (S a k ti) and pow er-holder (Siv a), betw een activity
m \tbc quiescent centre. Siva is the pow er-holder ( ), and Sakti
is the power, the G reat M o th er of the Universe. Siva is pure
consciousness; Sakti is M in d , life, m atter. N eith er can exist w ithout the
other: like Osiris and Isis, they were ‘ joined together in the W o m b ’ as
One; they are Divine R e a lity , from w h ich , when we overlay nam e and
form (nam
aand pa,) mind and m atter, the cosm os arises. Hence Isis is
ru
‘She of Many N am es’ , and so, according to the it is not
Brahma, Visnu and Rudra w ho create, but their A ctivity is the
nature of p r a k r it i,n for w hich reason the fem ale is depicted above the
male in Tantric representations, just as Isis, in Egyptian iconography,
hovered above the prone O siris.
To continue the T a n tric im agery, in the E arth-centre called the
M uladbara-cakra,K undalini Sak ti m anifests as a serpent coiled round a
self-produced phallus ( g:) indeed, the word ‘kundali’
lin
bhu
vaym
S
means ‘coiled’ or inpotentia, and she is said to produce the phenome
world by the ‘veiling’ ( m a y a )o f pure consciousness of
Consciousness - ‘spiralling fo rth ’ spontaneously, thereby creating the
‘Eggs of Brahm a’ (B ra h m a n d a ) by turning back upon Hersel
forming a coil or loop. In Greek sym bolism , w hich derived from the
Egyptian, this form was termed the ‘Orphic Egg’ . W hen she turns back
upon herself for a third tim e, the pyramid shape is said to be formed
(Srngataka). Like Isis, She is a ‘receptacle of that continuous stream of
ambrosia which flows from Eternal Bliss’ 19 (from Brahman through
Siva). She, the ‘world-bew ilderer’ , is ‘bright as m illions of m oons’ and
‘by her in this world-egg (B rahm an da) illum ined’ . 20 Like Isis, her
symbol is the white lotus which floats upon and arises out of the mire of
dense m atter, and yet is pure and unsullied.
In brief, we can see from this discussion that there is indeed a direct
correspondence between the metaphysics of Tantrism and the symbology
of ancient Egypt, and that the former can shed a great deal of light upon
the latter, of which is left, as prophesied, ‘only carvings in stone', the
merest outward signs. But no doubt the two traditions descended from a
common source, in the indefinitely ancient past, perhaps through the
Chaldees; certainly in the Near East. Regardless of their apparent
differences, the two traditions are virtually identical in symbology,
correspondences which, though arising out of universal truth,
nevertheless point to a temporal unity as well. Essentially the Egyptian
Mysteries, like the yoga of Tantrism, consisted in the ‘return’ or
‘retracing’ of the creation of the cosmos inwardly, so that just as in the
38 ISIS
Beginning (which always is, being supratemporal) there was only BljSs
pure Consciousness - so too the mortal who ‘sheds this mortal coil’ (
perhaps more accurately, releases it) recapitulates inwardly and inverse^
the Creation, attaining through her, the Creative Power, union with th
Primordial.21
It is interesting, while considering this parallelism between thc
Tantric tradition and the ancient Egyptian, to note that a predominant
symbol of Isis was the Cow (Nut), not only because she is a
manifestation of the abundance of the Earth, and because she js
emblematic of the shift from the primordial Golden Age to the
traditional agriculture of ancient Egypt (based upon wheat, barley and
cattle) - being therefore symbols of Isis and of traditional civilisation,
both of which lie mediate between the ‘above’ and the ‘below’ but also
because the two horns of the cow suggests the horns of the waxing
moon, the duality of the world of generation as well. And the symbol of
the sacred cow reappears in the is,where speech is li
pan
U
celestial cow, of which the first two udders are of the Gods (
vasat), the third is that of man ( han,) and the four
fathers ( pitr,) and termed svaddha.11 The vital breath is her bull; Mind
is her calf. And so once again we see the perennial Trinity: Osiris, the
bull; Isis, the cow; and Horus, the calf.
Now we must, throughout consideration of these matters, keep in
mind that although we speak in dualistic terms of Siva and Sakti, of
Osiris and Isis, these are not separate entities but rather aspects or
emanations of one another, and of the Supreme Lord, Isvara, himself an
emanation of the Divine Sun. Indeed, this is perhaps the central error of
the modern in turning to ancient metaphysics: the false attribution of
literalism and dualism to the traditional - like the Chinese Taoist
teaching of yin and yang, for which mere dualism would be anathema,
unthinkable, such teaching belonging as it does to the world of
primordial unity. As a result, the various traditions can illumine one
another, in so far as each is a reflection of the same principial unity -
and this illumination is especially necessary today, due to modern
fragmentation and incomprehension.
In any event, having examined Isis’s significance in terms of
cosmology, and in terms of the initiation of Lucius, it is apparent that,
however magnificent the metaphysical implications of her as Creator, it
is evident that her power and historical longevity (in the fourth century
AD when Christianity was finally able to destroy the remnants of the
religions of antiquity, Hers was still the predominant sect) was due to
ISIS 39
40
OSIRIS 41
44 OSIRIS
Egyptians regarding their dead become clear: for the preservation of the
bodies of the dead took place not only to provoke remembrance 0f
them, but to prolong certain aspects of individuality in order that the
deceased might purify themselves in the Celestial realms ruled by Osiris
thereby avoiding rebirth in tem porality, as well as irradiating their
beneficent influence over the lands. Destruction of the body releases or
obliterates certain aspects of the individuality w hich, by virtue of bodily
preservation and the accompanying ritual, are indefinitely prolonged, in
order that the deceased might after death attain at least ‘provisional
liberation' in Ra.
The formulas, the rituals, the visualisations, the accoutrements of the
funereal rites, then, were not auxiliary to the physical preservation, but
rather were the essence of the rites, of which the latter was but sign and
seal. The same prolongation of individuality was in Taoism termed the
‘longevity of the immortals’, who were depicted as sailing into the
Empyrean on the backs of a Celestial Dragon or a Celestial Tiger. This
immortality, however, cannot be considered com plete liberation, which
can be realised only when the nature of one’s being as the Divine is truly
seen, when the Two are re-cognised as One.
In the kundalini ,yoga with which we must here necessarily be
concerned, this is realised when, m icrocosm ically, She ( ) is seen to
be roused within and ‘travels’ up the axis o f the body
through the cakrs, or centres - these being the different degrees of
incarnation itself, from gross to subtle - until She is seen to be united
with, indivisible from, iva,the Lord of the W orld, Pure Consci
S
Now macrocosmically, She is Herself veiled from herself, maya> but
microcosmically, She is the central creative power com e to rest within
the individual, which, when aroused, joins ultim ately with Siva, at
which point, after death ( praly:dissolution) liberation is obtain
that individual, just as by means of the M a b a -p r a la y a or final
dissolution, liberation is obtained for those in the ‘realm of provisional
liberation’, in the Heavens.12 Consequently if, as most moderns do, we
view Isis and Osiris only macrocosmically, we thereby block ourselves
from the most profound interpretation of their meaning, and indeed
from our own true nature, which is indivisible from them. It is not
insignificant that Xenophon, in his novel , has his hero and
heroine, after a long separation, reunite in a temple of Isis, she pressing
her lips against his and breathing into him the life again: this is the
reunion of Osiris and Isis, of Siva and Sakti, the re-cognition of who
they, who we truly are, the consummation of existence itself.
OSIRIS 45
Osiris, or Siva, exists on the form less level as pure bliss, as liberation
( mukti), becom ing on the form al or manifested level enjoyment
(bhukti). Osiris as transcendent being never changes, but his manifested
or immanent aspect as Isis does change; indeed, change. In his highest
degree he is P
arm
a-Siva, the Lord (Isvara) who is worshipped by all the
devatas, the Divine M an ifestatio n s. C osm ologically, he is affiliated
with Purusa, she with ti; he is Source, she is Divine M anifestation
rakn
P
and this is also true w ithin the individual, below as above.
It is for this reason th at O siris was known as the ‘Great B lack’13 and
as the ‘Great Green ; 14 the Black because he was unknown to
humankind, hidden, the im m anent Centre, ‘Father and M other of all
men’ who ‘live from his breath and eat from his body’, and the Green
because he is the Source and Lord of all beings and all lands, the centre
also of Isis herself, and therefore of all growth and creation, just as the
Sun is ultim ately the source of the M o o n ’s light. Indeed, just as one
must pass the sphere of the M oon to move toward the sphere of the Sun,
so one must first, as Apuleius has it, pass through the initiation of Isis
before receiving that of O siris; just as one must arouse Sakti before
realising Siva. Before one knows the Great Black one must first know
the Great Green (Isis).
But what was the essence of Osiris for the greater body of the
faithful, those who had not yet received the Mysteries? In the answer to
this question we begin to see the way in which the Mysteries functioned
within the traditional cultures, for the distinction which many now
make between exoteric and esotoric, between sacred and profane, is
purely a reflection of the modern dualistic mindset, bearing no relation
to the seamless unity and harmony of the traditional cultures - of which
ancient Egypt, certainly, was once a remarkable instance. For in
Egyptian culture we can see how the worship of the greater body
reflected, reinforced and merged with the more direct sacred Knowledge
of those initiated into the Mysteries themselves, which formed the pole
Arabic: tb,) the axis around which the culture revolved, just as the
qu
constellations circle round the North Pole. The lamentations of the
populace in concert with Isis, in search of her lost consort Osiris,
wailing and mourning during certain festivals, mirrors humanity's
longing for sacred Knowledge, without which they live in fragmentation
and ignorance.
I The lamentations of the ancient Egyptian populace at large - tens of
thousands of women identified with Isis, along with many other
ordinary men and women - beating their breasts and mourning must
46 OSIRIS
^ B bent forward, form ing a kind of ‘squared circle' with his body, for one
I who remains in t he realm of O siris and Isis remains within the circle of
^ B birth and death, being am ong the G ods, am ong men, or in the subtle
^ B realm. To understand this, however, to understand the nature of Osiris
^ B Himself in this aspect, we must turn to a discussion of the Egyptian
H Tuat or ‘in-between lan d '. T h e Tuat is in fact very much akin to the
Tibetan Buddhist term 'bardo\edlineated in the Tibetan of
f Dead. It is in either case the m ediate w orld, ‘between death and rebirth’,
■ the realm governed by o n e ’s co n d itio n in g and o n e’s previous life and
■ actions. To say that this realm is ruled by O siris is, in part, to say that it
H is also ruled by sacred K now ledge, to which the Egyptian and T ibetan
■ Books of the Dead both give access, in terms o f visualisations and of
■ sacred names.
I A person in the Tuat is in a discarnate state, and therefore open to a
multiplicity of states o f being, according to his Know ledge ( ) and
I his previous carnate con d itioning. N ow to speak of this is to speak of an
B exceedingly delicate m atter, w hich we can hardly consider in this short
B space - however, we can say that the postulation of a ‘being’ which
B ‘transmigrates’ is according to both Buddhist and Vedantic traditions in
■ particular, and to trad itio n al m etaphysics in general, very much a false
I attribution. In Vedanta there is said to be the ‘O ne and O nly
Transmigrant’; 15 in Buddhism , even this attribu tion o f prim al unity is
I denied, in order to avoid conceptual fix a tio n .16 But both these traditions
are referring to absolu te R e a lity , whereas we here are discussing the
I conditional realms o f being over w hich in the Egyptian tradition Osiris
I held sway.
This difference - betw een the highest realms and the subtle realms -
is delineated in Egyptian religion m ost clearly by tw o docum ents: the
Shat A m at,and the S h a t En
u
T S ba T h e
ruled by Osiris - the m ediate or psychic spheres signified by the numbers
seven and twelve, corresponding no doubt to the seven planets and the
twelve Z odiacal sym bols, these being also the num bers of the T u at,
underscoring the correspondence o f the Tuat to tem poral reality (it is,
after all, described in m aterialistic term s), whereas the form er
document, the Shat A m ,T
at related to the realm of R a , of p
u
Both documents referred to the same ‘p o st-tem p o ral’ reality, the
difference between them lying in the degree o f purity and transcendence
of the deceased. A ccording to Budge, therefore, the Tuat has many
divisions, but only one is ruled by O siris; in the others O siris figures, but
Ra rules.18 As a result, the p o st-m o rtem state is governed in accordance
r
48 OSIRIS
with one’s knowledge of Osiris and Ra; the purer one’s knowledge 0f
the true nature o f the former, the closer one is to the latter, to Ra.
Osiris is ruler o f the Night - that is, of the subtle realms - but
being the source o f being itself, is His Overlord, and so according to the
profundity of one’s initiatory insight does not pass from the former intf)
the latter, from the Shat En Shau to the Shat Am Those wh
initiated into the nature of the supernal realms of existence are therefore
abc to pass by the roarings of the demons, and do not fall into their
cauldrons.
Whosoever knoweth these things, being attached to his place,
shall have his bread with Ra. Whosoever knoweth these things,
being a soul and spirit . . . shall never enter into the place of
destruction.19
In other words, by virtue of their direct Knowledge of Osiris, by
virtue of their posthumous recognition of the visionary realms of the
Tuat with which they were acquainted during life, they ‘rose up’ with
Osiris, who is said also to ‘rise up the ladder’ from Earth to Heaven.20
By this was meant that in gnosis - insight into one’s own principial
nature or essence - one ‘recognises’ that degree or emanatory aspect of
the Divine into which one had been initiated. T h e various hells, or
posthumous torments, exist also in so far as the individualities hold
together as separate entities, as residual coagulations. In brief, the
Heavens and the Hells both presuppose the prolongation of
individuality; the former, however, are ‘higher’ , in that individuality is
transcended. Now all of these shall be resolved again into the primal
unity at the tim e of the pocatsi , or G reat R esto ratio n , in which
A
the ‘opposing power’ of Typhon is vanquished, order returns to all
things, Osiris returns to His throne, united again w ith Isis in actuality as
now in p o t e n t i a l
There is here, then, in the worship of Osiris a very direct correlation
with the Pure Land Sect of Buddhism, in w hich the devout, by virtue of
their recitation of the ts ,or Divine N a m e , attain rebirth in
bu
em
n
Western Land of A m itabha b od h isattva, in Celestial Earth. It is
concentration, the direction of consciousness which affects the celestial
rebirth - an ascent up the axis of being by m eans of one’s concentrative
power or ‘remem brance’ , and a consequent restoration of the principial
order of the soul. The higher one ascends, the m ore fragm entation,
dissolution, confusion vanishes, and the more one approaches the Light
Supernal, the harm ony of the Divine. This is the message of the Pure
O SIRIS 49
. inj and it is the message o f O siris as w ell. Yet this ascent is not merely
one of intellect, nor is it accom p lished through any vicarious atonem ent,
hut rather it is accessible to everyon e, regardless o f ca ste , class or sex. It
arises only out o f sim p le fa ith , unsw erving d ev o tio n , and unceasing
concentration upon the D iv in e , a c o n c e n tra tio n w hich in reality
recapitulates the very ax is o f b ein g , fo rm in g a kind o f ‘axis o f grace’ , a
‘channel' through w hich - in th e least e x p e cted m o m e n t, perhaps the
moment of one's g reatest d esp air - th e L ig h t S u p ern a l m ig h t burst in ,
illuminating one's true n a tu re, and th e true n a tu re o f all C re a tio n .
It was once said by D . T . Suzuki th a t th e ad h eren ts of the Pure Land
sect saw more instances o f satori - aw ak en in g to the D ivine - than did
those of Zen Buddhism , fo r they h arb o u red few er p reco n cep tio n s of its
true nature, but ra th e r sim p ly recited th e N a m e . A n d , no d o u b t,
something of the sam e is tru e fo r th e ad h eren ts o f the w o rsh ip of O siris,
the worship of w h o m w as th e w o rsh ip also o f R a , H e o f th e K in g d om
of Light.
In any event, a lth o u g h w e n o w ch a n g e o u r fo cu s, w e re m a in o rien ted
toward the discussion o f O siris ; w e sim p ly tu rn to a p a rtic u la r asp ect of
his worship: th at o f the secon d d e a th .
CHAPTER 6
On the Second Death
Open up your place in the sky am ong the stars o f the sky, for you
are the Lone Star . . . look down upon O siris, w hen H e governs
the spirits, for you stand far from H im ; you are n o t am ong them
and shall not be among them .2
In addition, it is said there, ‘the double d oors o f H eaven are open tor
you’. 3 T h e first door of Heaven is the door o f O siris; the second is that
of Ra him self, opening into the C elestial spheres. T h e ‘second death’,
then, refers to the transcendence o f the realm o f O siris, and the deceased
passing on to the realm of the stars, the C elestials - w hereas those who
have not been so in itiated m erely pass on to th e realm o f O siris in the
horizon, the subtle realm , a w a itin g eith er a new incarnation, or
purification sufficient to allow passage throu gh the ‘second door’ .
N ow to avoid co n fu sio n , we m ust here interject th at there are two
ways of lookin g at the term ‘second d e a th 1, each of w hich occur when
one leaves the su btle realm : the one occu rs by descending into
in carn ation ; the other transpires by ascending above it into celestiality.
e irst death takes p lace if on e - o u t of fear - seeks the solidity and
reassurance o f E a rth , and so is reborn into in ca rn a tio n ; the other, the
!g er second death , th a t w hich w e are here in the m ain discussing, is
50
ON THE SECOND DEATH 51
The death which we die is of two kinds: the one makes man two
out of three; the other makes him one out of two; the one takes
place in the Earth which is the realm of Demeter, and is initiation
unto her; . . . the other is in the M oon and is of Persephone;
Hermes of the lower Earth is the associate of the one, heavenly
Hermes of the other. Demeter parts soul from body quickly and
with force; Persephone parts mind from soul gently and very
slowly, and therefore has been called ‘O f the Birth to U nity’ , for
the best part of man is left in Oneness, when separated by H er.4
For, Sylla continues, those who die wander for a tim e in a region
between the Earth and the M o o n , a region where their sins and
ignorance, according as they lived, are washed away, after which
purgation they pass beyond the M o o n - that is, realise their Celestial
nature:
Here - just as a side-note - we can see the meaning of the three Fates of
ancient Greece: for A tropos governed people’s destinies near the Sun;
Clotho wove them in the realm of the M o o n , com m ingling; and
Lachesis, the throw er of dice, represented the haphazard power of
fortune and worldly im perm anence.
52 ON THE SECOND DEATH
CHAPTER 7
Typhon
We noted, when beginning this discussion, the manifold debt that all
Western symbology and religion owes to ancient Egypt. Indeed, to a far
greater degree than any today seem to realise, that which remains of
primordial tradition today in the West flows directly from ancient
Egypt, having been indelibly woven into the warp and woof of our
Graeco-Christian tradition. In few places is this more evident than in
the figure of Typhon or Typhos, the ancient Egyptian serpentine
incarnation of evil, prominent today in more ways than as the figure of
Lucifuge or Satan.
Almost inextricable from any discussion of Typhon, however, are
Osiris and Isis, for Typhon, their archnemesis as it were, is an intricate
part of the metaphysical drama of the death, fragmentation and
resurrection of Osiris. For after all, it was Typhon who, in the ancient
mythos, killed Osiris and strewed the fragments of the body over all
Egypt, pieces which the mourning Isis then gathered and restored to life
by beating her Divine Wings, hovering over the prone form, and
breathing into it. Each site where the fragments had been thus became a
temple, a sacred site. According to Synesius, Typhos obtained the
kingship of ancient Egypt through deceit and then exiled Osiris, the
rightful king, instituting a tyrannical and depraved government, in
which the ‘nails of the wild beasts were raised, and the heads of the
sacred birds oppressed’.1 This, said Taylor in his commentary upon the
text, signified that men’s passions were aroused, while their receptivity
to the Divine influences was dulled. In any event, these, then, are the
two central representations of Typhon in mythic form : one associated
with kingship, the other the primal mythos itself. But what is their
metaphysical significance, the meaning they carried implicit within
them? For that we must turn, first, to etymologies.
The word ‘Typhon’ is in Greek directly related to , meaning
delusion, madness, raging fever; it implies a condition of both bodily
and mental disorder and fever, whence our word ‘typhoid’ derives. It
connotes, in other words, a state of physical and m en tal fragmentation
54
typh on 55
Seth or Typhon not only signifies constraint by force, but also ‘turning
upside down’ and ‘overleaping’. Typhon, then, indicates disorder in the
sublunary sphere - the very antithesis of , the Divine principle of
harmony and order. Perhaps most significant is the word ‘overleaping’,
which implies the egotistic attempt to control, to dominate, to rebel,
the seek to usurp the place of God. It is not w ithout reason that Satan is
termed ‘the ape of God’.
The triumph of Typhon, in other words, is the triumph of the
rebellious, disordering element of the cosmos and of man himself: the
two are directly affiliated, ‘feeding’ one another, so that the more the
individual allows Typhon free rein, the more disorder reigns in the
culture and in the cosmos itself. The function of ancient Egyptian
tradition was to keep Typhon in check, both in the individual and in the
state. Thus Horus is represented as struggling with the serpent Typhon,
grasping his v irilia in his hand, implying that the power of disorder is
thereby temporarily arrested, controlled,9 so that Egypt might live on
harmoniously, free of war and cultural fragmentation, for at least a
time longer. The same idea - the controlling of Typhon -recurs in the
legend that Hermes once cut the tendons of Typhon’s leg and made of
TYPHON 57
How did the T itan s arise? According to Synesius, in the distant past,
Srth or Typhon was once not O siris’s enem y, but his com panion,
i that only in later ages did the tw o becom e enem ies. As it once was,
o slvtll it be again - as it alw ays is, if we only have eyes to see it.
CHAPTER 8
Hermanubis
60
HERMANUBIS 61
Now we must here draw attention to the use of the w ords in present
tense - that is, ‘when Nephthys conceives Anubis, Isis adopts H im ' - for
the importance of this is that the m yth refers not to som e event in the
distant past, but to this very instant. It is difficult for the modern person
to remember that m ythological symbolism refers not to any historical
past, so much as to vertical, supratem poral, an alogical R eality, and that
therefore the attribution of tem porality to a m yth os is a gross distortion
- but nevertheless, this is in fact the case.
And Anubis, by being as Plutarch says ‘ a M ystery not to be spoken
of’, represents the entrance to , the Herald of the realm of the Gods
themselves, and therefore cannot be spoken of, for T h a t of w hich H e is
62 HERMANUBIS
pivine Sun. T hrou gh H erm an u b is one gains the ‘scent of the Divine’;
one learns how to live and , in tellectu a lly at least, the true nature of
existence, and so one is able to know the direction of ascent.
Consequently, just as dogs guard people and are faithful to them, so
Hermanubis is fa ith fu l to and guards the Gods. As Intellect, He
discriminates betw een illu sio n and reality , driving o ff the former, and
following inward tow ard the la tte r. In tellect alone, however, is not
sufficient to w isd om , b u t ra th e r, properly em ployed, leads to it, to its
own transcendence in the D iv in e W isd om of contem plation. Falsely
employed, of course, the m erely hu m an in tellect becom es, not a faithful
consort and guide, b u t a fearso m e enem y (Cerberus, the hound of Hell),
devouring man just as A ctaeo n w as devoured by his own coursers when
hunting D iana.
Hence Hermes is said to be the co n so rt of M of Divine Harmony:
the two are a ffilia te d w ith the tem p o ral sphere; both are reflections of
that which in the higher realm s goes w ith o u t saying. There cannot, after
all, be disorder and stu p id ity (ignorance) in the realm of the Gods by
their very nature, or else they w ou ld n o t be G ods, and could not exist in
the principial realm . It is only here b elo w , in tem porality, that human
Intellect (Hermes) and D iv in e H arm ony (M are necessary, for
without tem p o rality , w h a t is there to distract and confuse a being? The
Celestial realm s, u n tain ted by tem p o rality , are incomparably lucid, the
harmony of the spheres and freedom from passion being there natural,
rather than aim s tow ard s w hich one strives. (T his does not refer only to
the subtle sphere, w here there are indeed forces inim ical to man’s insight
and w isdom ). H ere b e lo w , it is In tellect w hich must first show the
glimmerings of the p ath to w ard the D iv in e, just as one’s actions must
reflect the D ivine H arm on y and Order: w ithout these two, what
possibility is there for ascent?
The nature of H erm es Trism egistus can be glimpsed, too, in this
passage from Cyril o f A lexand ria:
The Sun in the centre, o f course, is affilia ted w ith O siris and R a ; to the
Moon is assigned O siris and Isis.The Divine
associated, as we have seen, w ith Isis and w ith prim ordial energy, w hile
the Staff itself is none other than the Divine Pole or A xis o f the W orlds.
Consequently, in this single glyph we can sec condensed the very essence
of traditional m etaphysics, a sym bol exq u isitely sim ple and in fin itely
profound.
Anubis, the Dog of the Gods, is a significant figure not least because
he guards the graves of m en, being responsible for cleaning and
preparing the bodies o f the dead, for em balm ing and preserving them -
by which is m eant, an alogically, th at through H erm an u b is hum ankind
first glimpses the nature o f the D ivine, and so is gran ted a kind o f
longevity (in the Taoist sense o f ‘im m o rta lity ’) as w ell as a reflective
glimpse into one's True N a tu re . By the ‘p re p a ra tio n o f the b o d y ’ is
meant, analogically, ‘shedding the earth ly g a rm e n ts’ and ‘d on n ing th e
raiment of H eaven’. H erm an u b is can n o t offer m an a seat in the barque
of Ra for m illions o f years, n or can he p ro ffer en try in to th e realm s o f
Osiris - no, as H erald o f th e G od s he can o ffe r o n ly a re fle cte d g lim p se
of the true nature o f things, condensed in to his sign, th e sign o f D ivin e
Mercurial Intellect.
But in an age in w h ich even in te lle ctu a l u n d e rsta n d in g is in cre a sin g ly
unknown, obscu red , H e rm s rem ain s as a re m in d e r o f w h o w e really
are, of the true n atu re o f th e a rts an d scien ces, of th e tru e m e a n in g a n d
purpose of m an , w ith o u t w h ich w e are lo st ind eed .
CHAPTER 9
Ra: the Sun King
The Sun, as centre of the cosmos, and source of light and warmth, is the
natural manifestation of the Divine Source of Being Itself; and is
therefore so recognised in every culture, not only for its physical power
but because the physical manifestation is but a gloss of the True Sun, the
Sun of Being. As is written in the C han dogya , ‘Verily, the Sun
is the honey of the Gods. The hidden teachings are the honey producers.
Brahman is the flower.’ 1 In addition, ‘the Gods, verily, neither eat nor
drink. They are satisfied with merely seeing that nectar. They retire
from this form (rupam) and come forth from this form .’2 In oth
words, according to the Vedanta, the Gods exist upon the nectar of the
Sun, the Divine Sun which ‘neither rises nor sets’. For those who know
the Truth ‘it is day forever’. In sum, the Divine Sun, which the ancient
Egyptians characterised as R a, was the C entrum not only of the
manifested cosmos, but of all the realms of existence, from which all
emanated, and into which all shall again be resolved.
What does this imply for man? According to Samcaracarya, ‘The
movements of the Sun are intended to help the creatures experience the
results of their actions, and when these experiences have ended the Sun
takes the creatures into Him self.’3 And, again, in the Chandogya
Upanisad, we find that the Sun is seen to be the Eye of the Self, just as
Horus is said to be the eye of Ra. In the M aitri , it is written that
Incarnate time is the great ocean of creatures. In it abides He who
is called Savitr (the Sun as begetter), from W hom , indeed, are
begotten the Moon, stars, planets, the year and the rest, and from
them comes this whole world here, and whatever of good or of
evil seen in this world comes from them. Therefore Brahman is
the Self of the Sun. Therefore one should reverence the Sun under
the name of time.4
Moreover, ‘He who is in the fire, and He who is here in the heart, and
He who is yonder in the Sun - He is One. He who knows this goes to
the Oneness of the One’.5
66
RA: T H E SUN KING 67
‘When the human father thus em its him as seed into the w om b, jt •
really the Sun that emits him as seed into the w om b . . . thence is ^
born, after that seed, that breath.’ 10
Likewise, every King of Egypt was said to be born of a virgin mother
in that, as is written upon the tem ples at Luxor and at Der al-B ah arj'
the Sun, through the offices of the King, impregnated the Queen in her
chamber, and was thus the actual father of the next King. The
ramifications of this are manifold of course, not least in relation to the
true origin and meaning of the Christian Virgin Birth, but also jn
relation to the conduct and the perspective of the ‘ordinary m an’ jn
ancient Egypt, who also in turn was King w ithin his sphere, an
understanding which needless to say nurtured hum ility and ethical
purity at the very least. Imagine, after all, the gravity, the ramifications
of the realisation that one was the viceroy of the Divine Sun upon Earth
- as was every man: would that not im port a grave responsibility and
purpose for one’s life? As one who realised fully the import of that
responsibility once said, ‘N ot I, but my Father in m e.’
It was Aristotle who wrote, follow ing this ancient tradition, that
‘Man and the Sun generate m an’, 11 but the same meaning is implied in
the verse in the New Testament which reads ‘ C all no man your father
upon Earth, for One is your Father, W hich is in Heaven’. 12
All of these signify precisely the same m etaphysical understanding as
that behind the Egyptian worship of R a , and in particular behind the
Egyptian observation that ‘in every King flow s the blood of R a ’. This is
true, as we have seen, of every man, as of every created being, for Ra is
the Divine Sun within and of all beings, but it is especially true in the
case of the Divine King, who is by virtue of his office the very axis, the
Pole of the lands, uniting above and below in his very person.
The nature and gravity of that responsibility we can see in the
approach the ancient Egyptians took to the Kingship. According to
Diodorus, the King was regulated in every aspect of his conduct, so as to
avoid any display of passion or error, being as a result absolutely pure as
a manifestation of the Divine Sun, and consequently more beloved by
his people than their own fam ilies.13 ‘Every hour of the day and night
was stipulated for him by the laws, and not by what he thought best.’
This is of course but a m anifestation of the same perspective which
motivated the spirit of the B rh a d -a ra n y a k a , wherein it is said,
indeed as \\ ith the l ight, one sits, moves about, does one’s work,
and returns.’
‘Just so, Y ajn avalk ya.’ 15
Seeing this, the seer said: ‘He made bodies with two feet and
bodies with four feet. Having first become a bird ( , or subtle
body) he entered the bodies. This, verily, is the person dwelling in
all bodies. There is . . . nothing that is not pervaded by Him.’18
Here, then, we can begin to see the actual relation of man to Ra, not
only in a macrocosmic sense, but microcosmically, internally as well
For here we can see the emanatory origins of Creation, and of its reverse
- the ascent of man ‘up the axis of being itself’, an ascent represented by
the ascent of the hawk ‘to the eye of the Sun’. In every order the lower is
enlivened by union with the higher; and thus we can see the hierarchic
levels of matter, life, animal intelligence, human mind, and Divine Bliss,
or, in terms of the five sheaths of the being in Sanskrit),
these being the material, the vital, the mental, the intellectual, and the
spiritual. The first is the temporal sphere, the second three the psychic
realm, and the last the Celestial or Solar sphere. When Teascending’ to
the last (from which strictly speaking we never descended) man is
reunited with the Supreme, the Divine Sun realised as , or Bliss.
The intellect when severed from its higher origin becomes ‘darkened’ or
infernal, divisive, seeking to usurp the position of the Sun itself. When
the intellect lives in the Divine Breath of the Sun, on the other hand, it
unifies, and in an an d a or Bliss is itself unified and transcended. In sum,
‘in an ad a Earth touches heaven and is sanctified’. 19 And this is, after
all, the Divine function of the King: sanctification, not only of the
individual (microcosm) and the land (mesocosm) but of the cosmos
(macrocosm) as well. As we have seen, the King in Egypt was indeed a
saint - by virtue of his adherence to his position as viceroy of the Divine,
as Pole or Axis of the lands - who sanctified the Earth below just as the
Divine Bliss sanctifies the intellect.
We can see then the ‘translucence’ of ancient Egypt in so far as the
Divine King existed within her, for by virtue of his existence was order
and harmony maintained; by virtue of his existence the individual as
in the land and in the cosmos, was wisdom and justice continued; in
brief, by virtue of his existence as and fulfilm ent of his position as
viceroy was man’s purpose upon Earth fulfilled. This is true for the
RA: THE SUN KING 71
individual, for every individual - not merely for the King, who simply
symbolised and manifested that which every man in truth is. In such a
V state (we use the word in every sense) the Earth is in truth translucent,
m for when Man is a Sun, Earth itself is indivisible from Heaven.
m The ‘closer’ one approaches primordiality - the farther back in
m history one goes - the more translucent was the Earth, by which
I observation we can see the significance of that virtually universal
teaching that the Gods themselves once walked upon the Earth, the
if most ancient of Whom lived for ‘twelve hundred years’.20 We must keep
ff in mind, however, that no matter how ‘far back’ in history one travels,
f one never reaches the ‘other shore’ of m anifestation. That is, the Golden
Age is none other than man basking in the Divine Light of the Sun, but
the Golden Age is still part of the cyclical, phenomenal world, just as
the Divine Sun itself, Ra - like Isw in Vedanta
manifested world, whereas Absolute Reality is utterly beyond m ani
festation or non -m anifestation , beyond form ulation or conceptu
alisation of any sort. It is for this reason that we speak of ‘provisional
liberation’ in Ra, as in Iswara in the Vedanta - for absolute liberation
only arises from the com plete transcendence of phenom enality, including
even the unimaginable lum inosity o f the sun.
In any case, in Egypt the Golden Age, the most ancient of times
(Sanskrit: g,) was the era of R a, golden because the Divine Sun
krita-yu
then manifested naturally in every individual. Only in later ages, when
the Sun was eclipsed - that is, when man was no longer aware of Divine
Reality directly, but rather only reflectively were the auspices of Osiris
and Isis, both affiliated with the M o on , become necessary. There was
not, and could not be, a con flict between the worship of Osiris and the
worship of Ra - as some have alleged - but rather, the Sun belongs to a
primordial era, the M o on to a later era (the silver age), Fire to a later era
yet (the bronze age) and iron (Sanskrit: kali-yuga) to the last of all. Each
represents a weakening, diffusing, a fragm enting and reflecting of the
former, a kind of solid ification . It is only n atu ral, then, th at as tim e
went on, the worship of the Divine Sun should fade and that of Osiris,
the Moon, with its celestial paradises, take its place.
In the Golden Age it was, for man, relatively easy to pass on to
provisional liberation in the ‘barque of the Sun’, but as tim e went on,
and his confusion and karmic accretions increased, m an w as in general
able only to ascend to the Celestial realms of Osiris, the subtle paradises
~ and in time even these were lost to man, as the Mysteries w aned, until
finally only the written records of Hermes remained - tiny fires in the
72 RA: T H E SU N KING
Surely one of the most difficult aspects of a traditional culture like that
of ancient Egypt for the modern to understand is the transcendent
nature of temporal reality, which to the extent that tradition prevailed
was a direct reflection of Divine Reality. That tradition - which Egypt
sought to preserve with a singular intensity - was the cord binding past
to future, above to below; it was the very axis of the culture, and the
Egyptians were well aware that when it was severed, the two lands
would drift far apart, the world taking its due course into disorder and
fragmentation. This was in fact no doubt the import of the treatise of
Manetho - the priest of Ra at Heliopolis near the end of Egypt’s long
reign - entitled S othis, now almost completely lost, but which referred
to making ‘calculations’ as to ‘what will happen in the world’. In any
event, what were the Two Lands?
Although the matter demands an intricate treatment, none the less
ultimately one can say this: the Two Lands refers not only to two
temporal places, but also to Celestial and temporal Earth, to the
Hermetic above and below. In brief, the Two Lands are the principial
realm of the Gods, and the realm of man, respectively. And the Sun -
Amen-Ra - on the H orizon, is the source of and primordial unity
within them reflected in tradition, in the King, and in the individual:
He is the axis of the worlds.
Indeed, one can hardly read any of the ancient papyri or carvings
without finding constant reference to the Two Lands, and to their
inter-relationship with the Great Sun, A m en-R a.1 Witness the papyrus
of Hu-nefer, wherein it is said:
I 73
74 THE TWO LANDS
Divine Sun, Who exists for millions and millions of years in an instant
Ho is, like Brahman, absolute unknowable Reality.
In the passage immediately following, however, we find homage
to the manifest face of Ra. The first passage could be said to belong tr
the primordial era, while the latter refers to a later time, when the Or/
has become manifest in the Two, when Egypt was no longer unified, in a
Golden Age, but was Two Lands: above and below.
The passage reads, in part:
Praise be to Amen-Ra, the Bull in Annu, chief of all the Gods, the
beloved One . . . Lord of the thrones of the Two Lands, Governor
of the Apts (North and South Thebes), Bull of Thy
M o th e r,__King of Heaven and first-born God of Earth, and
Lord of things which exist. . . . Thou art the maker of things
below and of things above. Thou illuminest the Two Lands and
sailest over the sky in peace, O King of North and South, Ra,
Whose word hath unfailing effect, Who art over the Two Lands,
Thou mighty One of Twofold strength, Thou Lord of terror . . .
Thou eldest born of the dew . . . Thou Beautiful Face Who comes
from the Divine Land (Neter-ta). Thou hast two horns which
endure. . . . Hail, Prince, life, health, strength, Lord of all the
Gods, Whose appearance art in the Horizon. . . . Thy Name is
hidden from Name Thy children in Thy name ‘Amen’. . . . Thou
shinest in the Eastern and Western Horizons, and overthrowest
Thy enemies at Thy birth daily. . . . Thou art the great Hawk
which gladdens the body, and the Beautiful Face which gladdens
the breast. . . . The heart of the dead go out to meet you, and the
denizens of Heaven turn to You; Your appearances rejoice the Two
Lands. Homage to Thee, Amen-Ra, Lord of the Throne of the
Two Lands; Thy City loveth Thy radiant Light.3
Underlying this passage, implicit in it, is the fear that Ra should, for
man, cease to exist, cease to perform His Celestial harmonisation and
enlightenment, that man should fail to perform his responsibilities and
so lose sight of the Divine Sun, an eventuality implicit already in the
Creation of the Two Lands, for the descent from unity to multiplicity,
once begun, must continue to its very nadir, the Two Lands become
more and more separate, Heaven inaccessible from Earth - and the
Hymn to Ra was intended to forestall that eventuality, to preserve the
unity of Heaven and Earth through the invocation of His power. For to
speak of strength is to imply the possibility of weakness; to speak of a
T H E T W O LA N D S 7.5
word of unfailing effect' is to imply that His word will not always, for
men, have unfailing effect. This is not to say, of course, that Ra ever
changes or diminishes in any way, hut that man, in his increasing
blindness, grows heedless of His unfailing word, of , of His
strength and primordial unity. In this passage, therefore, we see precisely
this unifying of the Two Realms in Him W ho is above and below and
upon the Horizon, W ho governs all the spheres. As Celestial Bull, He
bears the two horns which endure - Heaven and Earth - and embodies
the world-soul, the principial Origin of all beings in the Receptacle of
the Great Mother (N ut). Here also lies the significance of the ‘Divine
Phallus', which is in reality the w orld-axis, the Celestial Pole through
which emanates the Creative Word (Greek: L o g o s), and by which
Creation exists.
Finally, in regards to the passage, we must ask: who are the dead,
those who in the darkness of the Tuat turn toward the Celestial Sun?
They are we ourselves - for every aspect of Creation is reflected in man -
and consequently we must recognise that it is we, here, now, upon this
earth, who are the dead in the underworld to the extent that we are
blind to the Divine M ajesty of the Sun. W ho, then, are those in Heaven?
They are those who are able to drink the Celestial Waters and who are
‘like unto stars in Heaven’.4 They live upon, emanate from, and exist
within the Light of the Divine Sun.5
But most im portant to understanding, not only this passage, but
ancient Egyptian culture in general, was the teaching of the Two Lands.
In what did the Two Lands consist? To this question we can find several
simultaneous answers, each illum inating the com plexity of this ancient
tradition. For it appears that not only was Egypt as a whole a reflection
of Celestial Reality, but Egypt herself was divided into two lands -
North and South - which in turn reflected this greater relation to
Celestiality. Thus the city H erm onthis was known as the ‘Heliopolis of
the South’, and it appears that there was a similar mysterious
correlation between the other cities of Upper and Lower Egypt. The
cities of the Upper Land which were centres of the Sun included Thebes,
Hermonthis, Coptos, Panopolis, Cusae, and Hermopolis M agna; in the
Lower Land they included M em phis, Sais, X o is, Babylon, Mendes,
Diospolis and Khemm is, the island.6 T h e district of An formed the
border between the N orth and the South; and according to one ancient
text, ‘when Horus and Set were dividing the country, they took up their
places one on one side of the boundary, and the other on the other . . .
and agreed that An should form the frontier’. 7
76 THE TW O LANDS
Moreover,
The hieratic art makes use of the filiation which attaches beings
here below to those on high, so bringing it about that the Gods
come down toward us and illumine us, or rather that we approach
them, discovering them in theopties and theophanies capable of
uniting our thought to theirs in the silent hymns of m editation.11
Proclus’ beautiful passage on the hymn that the lotus sings as it follows
the Sun suggests the nature of the interrelationship between the Two
Lands: that which is below follows, mirrors, and in its very nature
praises its Divine Source above. But this spontaneous praise was, even by
THE TW O LANDS 77
the time of ancient Egypt, no longer ordinary for man - he had become
alienated from, blinded to his Angelic origin, his and had to
reawaken under the auspices of the Mysteries, which functioned as an
umbilicus to the primordial Unity from which he had divorced himself.
The Mysteries, therefore, bestowed three grades of initiation which
were, significantly enough, indicated by reference to regions or lands,
these including Rust a , the realm of initiation; , the realm of
illumination; and Amentia the realm of Union with the Unseen God.
These three realms, of course, correspond exactly with the Hermetic
teaching of the three worlds - terrestrial, subtle and Celestial - as with
the Vedantic teaching of bu, va,and
bhu
and Sky. sta,or initiation, refers primarily to the illumination of the
u
R
intellect, the first glimpse of the Divine; , or illumination, refers
to the initiation into the Mysteries of Osiris, of transcendence of
temporality; A m etiti refers to Celestiality, to re-cognition of one’s
Angel, one’s true nature in R a, and to the provisional liberation such
realisation entails. But this triadic hierarchy is of course vertical, not
horizontal in nature; it refers to the ascent from the world below to the
world above, to the purification of the passions of the self, to freedom
from attachment, birth, and death, and it is here that the true meaning
of the Two Lands is to be found.
However, we must here emphasise that this ‘ascent’ is but a
provisional term, and that indeed there is no ascent from ‘here’ to
‘there’, that the Celestial realm is not ‘other’, but rather is the very
Angelic Essence of one’s being, and of beings. To interpret the teaching
of the Two Lands as dualism or docetism is to distort it; for that which
is ‘above’ is not really ‘above’ but w ithin; to see it is revelation, not
observation. As a result, realisation of the Celestial realm by means of
initiation into the Mysteries implies not realisation of something ‘out
there’, but realisation of one’s own true nature, a realisation which in
turn manifested in recognition of the True Nature of Creation itself as
Divine. Transmutation of oneself, recognition of oneself, is
transmutation and recognition of the world. This interdependent
realisation is in Vedanta expressed, somewhat deceptively in English
because of a fortuitous play on words, as realisation that the essence of
the self is the Self - but even this is inadequate. Something of the nature
of realising the simultaneous reciprocal interpenetration of the Two
Realms can be grasped by consideration of the Egyptian teaching of the
animals as Divine symbols: when seeing a cat, for instance, one was
seeing also a m anifestation of the Divine Isis; to see a jackal was to see
78 TH E TW O I.ANDS
Hermanubis in one aspect - and all the world was likewise illumined by
virtue of the Celestial cosmogony which the Two Lands symbolised for
the ancient Egyptians: truly, it was a translucent world.
And so we return to the sacred geography of Egypt, of which we
instance two manifestations: the famed temple planisphere upon the
ceiling in the temple at Dendera, and the attribution to Egypt of a
position as the ‘pupil in the eye of the world’.
In regards to the former - the famed temple at Dendera - we can in
this planisphere, painted upon the ceiling, and later moved wholesale to
Paris, see the Celestial realms, including scenes from the life of Osiris. In
its initiatory centre are a series of fourteen steps culminating in a
fifteenth which is Thoth. The various parts of the planisphere
correspond to the various sections of the temple itself, including such
sections as the Chamber of the Golden One, the Chamber of Flames,
and the Chamber of Birth, each of which corresponded, on a North-
South axis, to sacred geography and to the outlines of the temple: each
was a mirror of the other, of the cosmos, of the principial order.12 By
learning the visualised aspects of Reality manifested sym bolically in the
Temples, the initiates walked for a time in the very H alls of Light,
which is to say in the Celestial realm, of which Egypt herself was seen to
be a reflection. The B o o k o f the ,D
ead then (or perhaps be
o f M astery o f the H idden P laces),13 instructed one on the nature of
Reality as a theophany, a theophany which was m anifested first in the
sacred Centrum of the temple, as in the planisphere, as in the temple as a
whole, as in the Egyptian landscape, and finally in the order of the
cosmos.
Each city, or nome, was for itself the centre of the cosm os, and posed
thereby no contradiction to the sacred centre which was in the next
nome; all reflected the same principial reality in accordance with their
given landscape and purpose - just as each culture in the world, each
religion must be for its worshippers the only religion, an assertion which
in no way excludes the validity of the other religions as the only revealed
truth fo r th em . We are, after all, here speaking of an ordering and a
vertical dimension to existence of which today man has virtually no
recollection, and so the simultaneous validity of all forms for their
adherents, each being mutually respected, is for us an alien idea. But for
the ancient Chinese, say, it was quite customary for Islam ic, Taoist,
Buddhist and Hindu travellers cordially to ask one another to which
faith they belonged, not out of sectarian rivalry, but out of the
acceptance which only serenity with oneself as part of a tradition can
T H E T W O LANDS 79
This Sun is like honey for all beings, and all beings are like honey
for the Sun. This shining, im m ortal person W ho is in this Sun and
with reference to oneself, this shining, im m ortal person who is in
the Eye, He is just this Self; T h is is im m ortal, This is Brahman,
This is A ll.18
And what was the result of this translucence for the individual, the
initiate? Some indication o f that can be found in Apuleius’ novel, in
80 THE TW O LANDS
Indeed, this is a result to be pondered, this serenity and joy and gratitude
- for it is this, the efflux of the Mysteries, which lies at the very centre
of the teaching of the Two Lands. For to realise one’s true nature,
indivisible from that of the Divine Sun at midnight, is to illumine one’s
world as well, an illum ination which renders it a magical, Celestia;
realm, a place of exultation and sorrow, a revelation of what it truly
means to be human, to be alive.
For only when we live, not in Two Lands, nor in One, but in the Sun,
can the Two Lands come alive for us. And w ith that we leave this most
intriguing and suggestive of topics, turning to a related one: that of
sacred language.
CHAPTER 11
On Sacred Language and
the Hieroglyph
It was assumed by the Greeks that the fragments of ancient wisdom
which remained to them from the prisca th eo lo g ia were limited,
denatured from the direct Egyptian tradition, evidence of which can be
seen in numerous places, not least of which is Plato’s , in which
he spoke of the dangers inherent in the written word, and to which we
shall turn in a moment. Similar observations were made in the Corpus
Hermeticum - but in both of these we find, not only condemnation of
reliance upon the written word, but also justification for it under certain
circumstances, those being the advent of the ‘forgetfulness of old age’. In
other words, even though writing is inherently dangerous - for it implies
a loss of memory, ignorance, and reliance upon written, external
characters - yet in a degenerate age, the written word is at times the only
means by which man’s eyes can be reopened to the sacred once again.
Consequently we can see that writing has a mercurial, dual quality - for
even though the com m itm ent of the Mysteries to writing implies their
gradual fading away in reality, nevertheless the written word itself serves
as a reminder of Reality. And if the written character is a hieroglyph,
then it serves directly as an opening into the symbolic, into Divine
Reality.
The dual quality of writing becomes quite evident in P lato’s
observations upon writing in haedru, in which, by mean
P
admonishment of Theuth by King Ammon upon the invention of
writing, he argues that
When they (the M ysteries) have been written down, they are
81
82 ON SACRED LANGUAGE AND THE HIEROGLYPH
Such words as these have very few to give them ear; nay, probably
they will not even have the few. They have, moreover, some
strange force peculiar unto themselves; for they provoke the evil
unto even more evil.6
One should therefore, the treatise continues, protect the many from
themselves, that they might ignore what has been said until they are
prepared - for else they might think themselves ‘superior to Fate’,
becoming ever more arrogant, whereas if ignorant they will at least
refrain from sin out of fear of the unknown. In brief, those who receive
the teachings only intellectually, without the transformative power of
the initiatory tradition to guide them, may well - like Nietzsche - sink
into an amoral, egotistic morass, worse even than those who knew
nothing. This would not have been a problem in the seamless unity of a
traditional culture like that of Egypt, but as the Mysteries began to
wane, and the modern era to arise, the possibility of such errors
increased exponentially.
But there is another aspect to the disclosure of the ancient wisdom in
writing to which the Hermetics gave objection - as we can see in the
dialogue ‘The Definitions of Aesclepius to King Ammon’, in which
Aesclepius warns the King not to allow the sacred sermons of Hermes to
be translated from the sacred Egyptian into the lower Greek tongue,
saying
Keep this our sermon from translation; in order that such mighty
Mysteries might not come to the Greeks, and to the disdainful
speech of Greece, with all its looseness and its surface beauty,
taking all the strength out of the solemn and the strong - the
energetic speech of Names.7
The Greek tongue is merely a ‘noise of words’, novel and argumentative,
whilst the Egyptian is a language of Power, not of words, being ‘sounds
84 ON SACRED LANGUAGE AND TH E HIEROGLYPH
fulfilled with deeds’. ‘For that its very quality of sound, the (very)
Power of the F’gyptian Names, have in themselves the Power of bringing
into act what is said.’8 Likewise, it is said in the C haldean Oracles:
There is here an objection more profound even than those against the
disclosure of the Mysteries to the p op u lis : it has to do with the
denaturing of the Mysteries, with the ‘dragging down’, the diluting of
the Celestial. We assume, today, in our modern arrogance, that Greece
was the height of ancient culture, but it was not so. Rather, the Greeks
were, as evidenced by Homer, with his rudimentary, vestigial ideas of
shades and of the Gods, a rather backward people, whose culture was
revived by the influx of Egyptian and Chaldean Mysteries. But that
influx, though it reinvigorated the culture, was yet nonetheless a
descent, a translation downwards which, as our author above noted,
represented a decline, a decline of the Mysteries manifested also in the
sectarianism and fragmentation of Greek philosophy into the various
schools, rather than remaining all the votaries of the Mysteries. All of
this was, in any event, contemporaneous with and a result of a
fundamental loss: the loss of the primordial, hierophanic language of
ancient Egypt. That is to say: the waning of the Mysteries was signalled,
in part at least, by the loss of the primal language of Egypt, which was a
manifestation of the unity, the totality that was Egyptian culture, and
which could not be transmitted in to to to the Greeks, or to the West.
The hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt, then, must have had some sacred
characteristics which later languages did not - on this point the Greeks,
in the persons of Plato, Iamblichus, Porphyry, and the writers of the
Corpus H erm eticum (who if they were not Greek, certainly had a Greek
audience), agree. But why? W hat fundamental difference is there,
between the hieroglyphs and later, written languages? The answer lies in
Plato’s objection to the invention of writing: it causes a loss of memory
- not ordinary memory, but Celestial memory, memory of the Celestial
realm and of Divine Reality. The merely written tongue is ‘horizontal;
it is not comprised of images, which directly reflect their Intelligible
Essence, or archetypos,but rather is only linear, temporal. Hieroglyphs,
on the other hand, have a ‘vertical’ quality in that they are indivisible
from, a direct reflection of the Essence of that which they represent.
Although we have not the time to consider here the subject in depth, it is
ON SACRED LANGUAGE AND THE HIEROGLYPH 85
In brief, just as the Gods are immutable, so too is their language, which
is ‘suspended from the very nature of things’, and so it is that ‘the
language of sacred nations is very reasonably preferred to that of other
men’. And of these sacred nations, the Egyptians were foremost.
Moreover, Iamblichus continues, ‘it is necessary that the sacred prayers
be preserved invariably the same’, for it is ‘nearly the case at present
that both names and prayers have lost their efficacy’, because they are
‘continually changed through the innovation and illegality of the
Greeks’, being therefore unstable, volatile and weak.14
The Egyptian hieroglyphs, being the most purely symbolic of all
languages, were the least able to lose their sacred quality - and so were
simply lost, ignored - whereas those languages formed out of the
convolutions of serpents into letters, like the serpents themselves,
became cold, rigid and dead when not exposed to the Divine Sun.
As a result, we can see how it is that the shift from ancient language
to a modern implies a very real loss, a severing of an ancient and
venerable transmission. It has been said that the efficacy of a given
invocation depends not so much upon the things said as upon the
intention with which it is said - yet none the less antiquity alone, with
its uncountable prior repetitions, and the consequent investiture of
power, imparts to words and phrases and even letters a force of tradition
unavailable to one speaking in a comparatively modern language like
that of Greek - to say nothing of one speaking in English, that motley
child. The power of an ancient language, like that of Egypt, lies in the
fact that to speak it, to write it, was itself a form of communion with
the Divine. And in such a world, pristine and primordial, there was no
such thing as ‘sacred’ as opposed to ‘profane’ - all was a , the
below reflecting the above.
This of course is not the case today - far from it - for the modern era
consists in nothing if not in a divergence between the sacred and the
profane, between that below and that above - and, it would seem, the
lower, the quantitative, has very nearly triumphed. In such a situation,
the ancient warnings against disclosure of the Mysteries no longer hold
quite so true, not only because there is a kind of natural selection still
(few even bothering to listen, being too intent upon accumulation and
power) but also because, as the writer of one portion of the Corpus
Ciermeticum put it, one would have no inclination to study the
Mysteries if one had no ears to hear them . And though ‘many are called
but few are chosen’, yet it must needs be that the many at least know of
the direction in which they are travelling, know of their Divine Origin -
88 ON SACRED LANGUAGE AND THE HIEROGLYPH
for all walk the same Path, ultimately, being in different degrees only
ignorant and wise.
Then, too, the Mysteries, as Plato said, cannot - cannot - be revealed
solely in writing, that is, in writing as it is today, an intellectual exercise
rather than an invocation. For after all, the Mysteries are inherently
experiential, being a transmutation of the self and a realisation of who
we really are, of the Divine Origin of all Creation - and to this writing
can only point the way. And so, if we reverence the ancient tongues, if
we follow the path of the prisca ,theolgia the gate can nev
against us: reality shall be revealed as it was and is and ever shall be, in
proportion as we are able to perceive it.
Now we turn our discussion from the various aspects of the Mysteries
and of the Gods to the Mysteries themselves, so that we might conclude
by reminding ourselves of their meaning , of their place for the
individual, for the culture, and for the cosmos itself, in order that we
might remember, however briefly, who we truly are.
CHAPTER 12
On the Mysteries
For, as has already been said, every soul of man has in the way of
nature beheld true being; this was the condition of her passing
into the form of m an. But all souls do not easily recall the things
of the other world; they may have seen them for a short time only,
or (being) . . . unrighteous, they may have lost the memory of the
holy things which once they saw . . . .
There was a time when with the rest of the happy band they
saw beauty shining in brightness - we philosophers following in
89
90 ON THE MYSTERIES
the train of Zeus, others in company with other Gods; and then
we beheld the beatific vision and were initiated into a mystery
which may truly be called most blessed, celebrated by us in our
state of innocence, before we had any experience of evils to come,
when we were admitted to the sight of apparitions innocent and
simple and calm and happy, which we beheld shining in pure
light, pure ourselves, and not yet enshrined in that living tomb
which we carry about now that we are imprisoned in the body,
like an oyster in its shell. Let me linger over the beauty of scenes
which have passed away.
But of beauty, I repeat again that we saw her there shining in
company with the celestial forms; and coming to earth, we find
her here too, shining in clearness through the clearest aperture of
sense ___
Now he who is not newly initiated, or who has become
corrupted, does not easily rise out of this world to the sight of
true beauty in the other; he looks only at her earthly
namesake . . . like a brutish b e a st___
But he whose initiation is recent, and who has been the
spectator of many glories in the other world, is amazed when he
sees anyone having a Godlike face or form , which is the
expression of divine beauty.1
and when there is rotation, the Axial Pole moves in the direction
opposite of the rotation, creating the precessional m otion.2
In any event, by ascending the Axis of the culture - by means of the
flight of the alone to the Alone, to use Plotinus’ apt phrase - the
individual, the culture, and the cosmos itself were sanctified, rectified,
and justified. Through this ascent, through the awakening and
restoration which the Mysteries entailed, the cosmos was set in order
once again - indeed, in the most profound sense, all was right with the
world.
An equally clear perception of the nature of initiation can be attained
from Iamblichus’ treatise O n th e M ysteries o f the , in which
the theurgic science of the Egyptians and Chaldeans is, albeit somewhat
tangentially at times, outlined. There, perhaps the clearest reference to
precisely what the Mysteries signified is found in Chapter IX , where
Iamblichus writes that when daemons are seen, the dispositions of those
that invoke them receive ‘the appetite of generation and a desire of
nature’, together with a wish to accomplish the works of Fate, and a
power effective of things of this kind. When Angels appear, those who
invoke participate of intellectual wisdom and truth, pure virtue, stable
knowledge, and a commensurate order. And when Archangels appear,
these dispositions receive a pure condition of being, intellectual
contemplation, and an immutable power. And in the last place, those
who invoke the Gods receive, ‘when they become visible, a liberation
from the passions’, a transcendent perfection, and an energy ‘entirely
more excellent and participate of Divine Love and an immense joy’.3
In addition to these things, also, the m anifestation of the Gods
imparts truth and power, rectitude of works, and gifts of the greatest
good; but ‘the m anifestation of other powers is appropriately
accompanied by such things as are commensurate to their several
orders.’4
The soul of man, when seen in this perspective, is recognised to be the
last of more excellent natures, subject to the winds and passions of
temporality and incarnation, bonded and heavy with materiality. In
terms of fire, the genera manifest each according to its given order:
terrestrial fire is black and smouldering; aerial fire is brighter and purer;
and Celestial fire is magnificent, brillian t.5 In other words, although the
visions of the Mysteries are not temporal in nature, yet they can
analogically be so understood, by means of image and symbol, the first
or most immediate of which are those of fire and air.
Hence the man who so witnesses, or more accurately, realises, the
92 ON THE MYSTERIES
Divine Fire is unable to breathe, through the subtlety of it, and becomes
languid, having shed the lowest, connascent spirit. Those who enter into
the presence of the Archangels, though they experience a divine
breathlessness, are not wholely overwhelmed, and those who are in the
presence of daemons find the air unaffected. The heroes, on the other
hand, move the earth, causing certain sounds, while the archons, last of
all, bear about them an assemblage of luminous appearances, being
suspended as it were below the air.6
Here, then, in the last passage, we see the descent from indescribable
unity to multiplicity, the recapitulation of which ‘journey’ in fact
constituted the essence of the Mysteries, to which Iamblichus’
observation that one rapt in the Divine Fire no longer , and
furthermore has shed the lowest, dualistic aspect of consciousness, is a
most important clue. Creation, as we have seen, proceeds in an emanatory
fashion from absolute self-sufficient Bliss ‘down’ into temporality; the
Mysteries, on the other hand, ‘reverse’ this ‘movement’, ‘travelling’
instead ‘upwards’ into the Divine and breathless Fire of pure Bliss.
And this rapture, or absorption, is none other than that which in
Buddhism is termed sam adhi - or
a term which refers to a form of yoga in which ‘the mind overcomes the
mind’ - in which respiratory functions virtually cease while,
simultaneously, one enters into an ever purer and more transcendent
aspect of consciousness. This form of , which is more intellectual,
at least in a sense, is closely affiliated with Zen Buddhism, in that it
does not involve arousing the kundali energy, nor mastery of the various
‘centres’ and acquisition of sidh, or powers, but rather
concentrative mental power or energy. Indeed, one must suspect that the
Mysteries with which Porphyry, Plotinus, Iamblichus and the other
Neoplatonists were familiar were, in the very nethermost reaches of
antiquity, connected with precisely this dhyana , while the
Mysteries of Isis and Osiris, on the other hand, were aligned with those
of Siva and Sakti, with kundalini yoga. However, such an historical con
junction presupposes a central culture so ancient as to be far, far beyond
our reach, our vision - and in any case, is not necessary for the understand
ing of that which remained yet at the onset of our present historical era.
The religion of Ra, in brief - whatever its historical conjunction with
Vedanta and the dhyana path to Brahman - was that with which the
Neoplatonists, Iamblichus perhaps as much as any among them, had
affiliation; while the religion of Isis and Osiris, bearing an undeniable
affiliation with Sakti and. Siva, with kundalini , continued for
ON THE MYSTERIES 93
those who were more suited to that path. One must not thereby assume,
however, that there was ultimately any fundamental difference between
these two paths - that is, that they refer to two different Divine
Realities, for indeed, how could there be two? - but ratber that they
refer to two aspects of the same Reality, the former being the
negativaythe latter being the via affirm ativ a, the former being world-
transcending, the latter being world-affirming. Even these distinctions,
however, are ultimately distortions - for both are aspects, appearances,
manifestations of the same Path, the same Reality. Both the via negativa
and the via affirm ativ a lead toward the same joy, the same transcendent
serenity, the same freedom from delusion and ignorance - and indeed, it
could not be otherwise; to the extent that it appears to be so, is one or
another aspect being exaggerated, distorted.
And in fact this may well have happened, at the end of that long and
venerable Egyptian transmission, the one path being resolved into mere
libertinism, revelry; the other into mere Hermetic intellectualism. Yet,
none the less, the central Path must needs remain ever the same, the
sanctum sanctorum ever inviolate, for despite historical eventuality, that
which is timeless and Divine in its very nature does not change, but
remains ever the same, awaiting still the humble petitioner, entrant to
the Mysteries, one who recognises the very essence of human meaning
and responsibility and who wishes to fulfil it, to be fulfilled.
The Mysteries, properly speaking, belong to the realm of Knowledge,
it is true - but it is a Knowledge that, in so far as it is pure, approaches,
realises its own transcendence. As Proclus once said, knowledge implies
duality - a knower and a thing known - whereas the knowledge (gnosis)
imparted, awakened by the Mysteries consisted in precisely the
resolution of the realm of dualistic knowledge into the Unity of which
it is a reflection, just as the Angelic is purer than the Daimonic, and the
Divine purer than the Angelic: the lower always depends upon, and is
subsumed into, the Higher. And if any remedy were possible for our
present deluded m aterialistic obsessions, for our infernal desire for
technical mastery of the world to the exclusion of Divine Wisdom, it
would necessarily lie here, in the ancient Mysteries.
But regardless of our own delusion and blindness, despite our
incapacity to se, the Mysteries and the metaphysical truth, the
transcendent insight which they manifested, remain as they have been
since the very dawn of time itself, open to us inasmuch as we are open to
them. So it was, is, and will be.
More than this we cannot say.
CHAPTER 13
Apocatastasis: Some Implications
94
APOCATASTAS1S: SOME IMPLICATIONS 95
reached the very nadir of the descent from primordiality and from
tradition, and in fact stand upon the very verge of the -
the clearing away of modern confusion and distortion, the restoration
of the Golden Age.
However, this clearing away must take place first upon an individual
level, for each of us - we can look neither to the past (as Egypt, say) nor
to the future Restoration, hut only to the Present Instant, to the Eternal
Now. The resolution of our dilemm a lies not in the past, nor in the
future, but in timelessness.
One of the clearest signs of our present state is the modern tendency
either to ignore or to drag down the teachings of antiquity: in the
former case, the danger is not so great, since the teachings themselves are
merely left to languish, there still for those who seek, but in the latter
case the danger is great indeed, for the force involved is anti-traditional,
engaged in usurping the wisdom of the past for manipulative ends.2 One
instance of this is modern psychology, which, whether Jungian or
Freudian,3 is essentially reductionist, making transcendent truth serve as
mere ‘psychic elements’; other examples include the attempts of
sociologists to reduce all human activity to quantitative ‘social
movements’; but worst of all are the attempts of modern counter-
traditional cults to appropriate ancient symbology and metaphysics
only to lure in devotees to be exploited and, often enough, destroyed.
These latter - the false prophets who ‘shall be many’ and who would
‘deceive even the Elect, if such were possible’ - present the outward
facade of traditional initiatory religion, but have no historical
continuity; they arise, in the form of ‘shamanism ’ or of a group around
a given ‘master’, from a kind of vacuum, and lead their followers into
the very abyss of chaos, fear, confusion and dissolution, under the very
guise of religion!
What do these have to do with ancient Egypt, and with the
Apocatastasis? The answer is simply this - and in it lies the essence of
our need to examine the culture of ancient Egypt: ancient Egypt was
based upon, consisted in, at, order, the order which arises
M
conformity to and understanding of Divine Reality, and only by
comparison with it, with traditional, normal culture, can the
abnormality of our present tim e be rightly understood. For our present
time consists in the abrogation of the Divine Order in favour of the
human - a motivation which is, strictly speaking, satanic, but which
nonetheless must precede the dissolution of this state of abnormality
and the Great Restoration (A p ocatastasis). T hat which is evil can, after
96 APOCATASTASIS: S O M E I M P L I C A T IO N S
when we purify the air which surrounds the earth, and which is
defiled with the breath of the impious, with fire and water . . .
(Then) immediately expect a better order of things, Typhos being
removed. For we expel suchlike prodigies by the devastation of
fire and thunder.5
What could give clearer indication of our present situation than this?
We might note, too, that it is also said that the final conflagration shall
be self-inflicted, the Giants or Titans being ‘expelled by their own
APO CATASTAS IS:SOME IMPLICATIONS 97
avenging furies'. Yet all of this can - and indeed must he read not only
cosmologically, but individually, referring ourselves. It is we who
must expel Typhon through fire and thunder, through the following of
a traditional spiritual path.
Hence we must not despair - despite the course of our present era
downward into the abyss of the quantitative, of ‘behaviourism’ and of
purely manipulative, infernal thought, of absolute ignorance of the
Divine - for the mere fact that we can still contemplate the splendour
of ancient Egypt underscores her perennial nature, and the perennial
nature of that which she reflected. Even though it is quite clear that our
own era can only end in the complete destruction of our world, in
fragmentation and self-inflicted catastrophe, yet our studies of ancient
Egypt point to the fleeting nature of this modern era, point to that
which is true and eternal and Divine in any time - highlighting that
which is indeed timeless, transcendent.
Apocatastasis - return to the Divine Harmony - can only occur when
the present aberrance has exhausted itself, much as an avalanche cannot
pause in transit but must, once begun, complete its course. In our
present time, as Proclus said in his commentary upon Plato’s
Parmenides, the sacred institutions and ceremonies, the sacred order
manifested in ancient Egypt, have passed away, to be slowly replaced by
a society ever more based upon the quantitative, upon manipulation of
the environment and of others, so that philosophy alone of the Western
tradition stands as a reminder of how man can and ought to live, as a
reminder of who he truly is - philosophy stands like Hermes, guardian
of the Celestial Entrance. Granted, the glimpse, which philosophy and
metaphysics offers is not in itself transformative - yet it does
nevertheless show the way, light the path toward its own transcendence.
More than that it cannot do. For that we must turn, not to Egypt -
a tradition and culture long since gone - but to one of the remaining
traditional religious paths themselves. For despite the beauty, the
undeniable profundity of the Egyptian tradition, some glimmers of
which we have tried to illumine here, yet finally all this is past, and we
must live owas
n , b est w e c a n .
I
And indeed, if w e s u c ce e d , if w e tre a d th a t ancient path primordial,
regardless o f th e b lin d n ess o f o u r tim e , regard less of our distance from
ancient E g y p t, o u r lives c a n still re fle c t th e Divine Sun, our world can
still be tra n s lu ce n t a n d a liv e - fo r th a t a n cie n t path can never vanish,
though it ca n fo r us be o b sc u re d . Y e t if w e e n ter upon it, it shall ever be
the sam e, as it w a s , an d is, a n d ever shall be.
98 A
P
O
C
AT
ASIS:S O M E IM PLICATIONS
ST
A
101
102 THEOR1A: THE NATURE OF INITIATION
Bruno lived in the sixteenth century, long after the cessation of the
Egyptian Mysteries - but even so, in his poem can be seen many of the
themes which will occupy us for the remainder of this work, and hence
we employ it as the keynote to our ensuing discussions.
Bruno’s poem begins with the phrase ‘passing alone to those realm s,
THEOR1A: THE NAT URE OF INITIATION 103
and it is in fact the ease that initiation takes place individually, which is
to say that, regardless of how many are involved in any given ceremony,
strictly speaking the ‘con frontation or ‘passage' takes place for each
person alone. In itiation is not a m atter of ‘transferring’ a capacity, but
of revealing that w hich is already there itr passing through
suffering - and every being must face the nature of suffering for himself,
coming to realise that it is a universal state. T h e most another can do,
by means o f cerem ony and traditional symbology, is provide a
‘framework’ or ‘opening’ for the work of transm utation.
Moreover, ‘Thou art in me, and I am in Thee; and Thy attributes are
my attributes’. 10 This refers to the u n io m ystica of the initiate and the
Divine focus of his praxis;the two become realised as a single state. And
therefore, reads the ensuing ascription, if this be known by a man,
‘Performing all the transm utations which his heart bears within it’
refers to the initiatic realisation of higher degrees, or states, potential
within his heart - for the higher state naturally encompasses within it
all the plenipotentialities of the low er.12 Now the ‘passage’ in question
is from nescience to realisation, from the ‘waters below ’ (ignorance,
which is to say, m anifestation) to the ‘waters above’, from the darkness
of the Tuat (the realms of sa m saric entrapment, the W hirlpool of
suffering in which M atsy a N y ay a (the Law of the Fishes) rules, into the
serene Light of the G ods.13 It is to be sure a pivotal point, this entry into
106 THEOR1A: THE NATURE OF INITIATION
the realm of the C.ods - hut it is not by any means ‘passage’ to comply
transcendence, to Liberation, at least in the Buddhist sense. Though
Formless, and immeasurably freer and more serene than the human
state, the Gods are still subject to causality, still are in the ‘two worlds’
of the manifest and the unmanifest.
And so, to return to that invocation with which we began this
discussion, the one which asks, or commands, that the initiate ‘not die
in Amentet’. ‘Not dying in Amentet’ means, not that the initiate wishes
to not enter Amentet, but rather that the initiate wishes to maintain
and intensify consciousness of that transcendent state which is Amentet.
‘Not dying in Amentet’ refers to the inverse complementarity of
initiatory ‘death’ and ‘rebirth’: for death to ‘the world’ (which is to say,
to our conceptualisations of ‘self and other’) is precisely rebirth in the
Transcendent.14
‘Amentet’ is linguistically close to the Sanskrit A m rita (immortality)
and to the Buddhist itabh,Buddha of the West. Indeed, the Pure
m
A
Land (Sukhavati) of Amitabha is, like that Osirian situated in
the West, thereby ‘intersecting’ the arc of the setting sun, and conferring
liberation at the conclusion of the present cycle. A m entet,
A m itabha, and the English word ‘im m ortality’ are all part of the same
mrt Indo-European root relating to death;15 one dies to one’s present
state, attaining in the process a higher state, and thus it ought not be
surprising that the m rd Indo-European root means ‘grace’, or ‘mercy’.
Says Plutarch on the matter: ‘And . . . Egyptians . . . call subterrene
space, to which they think souls depart after death, Amenthe, the name
signifying “ the space which takes and gives” ’, to which observation
E. A. Wallis Budge noted that ‘The Egyptian form of the word is
Amentet, and the name means “ hidden place” ’. 16
Now the word ‘subterrene’ carries with it the Greek connotations of
the Underworld, not strictly speaking applicable to Am entet, which is
not ‘space’ at all, but supra-temporal and spatial; it is indeed a ‘hidden
place’. But its complete meaning can be better gathered from its root
meanings: that is, the word ‘man’, or m an as, meaning simultaneously
‘human’, and ‘thinking being’, is countered by the privative ‘a’, so that
linguistically ‘Amentet’ implies ‘a state not subject to thought-
discrimination’. A m entet is, strictly speaking, a non-human,
transcendent Reality, ‘mediate’ between temporality and complete
liberation. ‘Death in t’ thus means dying to, or becomin
en
m
A
ignorant of, one’s transcendent Origin which, from the limited human
perspective, appears as one’s Celestial or Angelic Form , toward which
THEOR1A: THE NATURE OF INITIATION 107
through the interpenetration of the Real through the centre of the real.24
The petitioner in this invocation asks leave to ‘sit in the throne of Ra’;
that is, to realise virtual unity with Ra, to participate in that state of
consciousness and through that participation, to pass by means of the
‘barque of millions of years’ beyond formal and formless realms of
manifestation - precisely what is meant by Ra ‘passing through’ that
part of the Tuat called ‘Amentet’, at which point Ra and Osiris are
conjunct, much as in Buddhism the bodhisattvic revelation is ultimately
conjunct with the Buddhic, though of course whereas the former is
cosmological, the latter is by definition indefinable, suprascosmic.25 It
is the degree of transcendence, of non-referentiality, which marks the
initiatic ‘height’.
Now initiation as we have considered it thus far is the inception of
this arc of the being toward its own transcendence. But there are several
aspects of initiation, and of initiatory symbolism in particular, upon
which we must remark, for they have received considerable treatment
elsewhere, a fact which causes many modern readers to bring with them
a number of preconceptualisations regarding initiation. No doubt the
first of these is the imagined split between ‘esoteric’ and ‘exoteric’, as
though in the traditional culture the initiate ‘stood apart’ from society,
as though the very nature of initiation were separation. This is,
however, false, as is the distinction between ‘exoteric’ and ‘esoteric’
itself. In the traditional culture there is no such division: the form of the
religious praxis is indivisible from its meaning, in which everyone - and
we mean everyone - participates in accord with their own capacity and
destiny. Some are destined to know the meaning of a given ritual more
fully at one point than another, no doubt - but the whole forms a
continuity, not a false division in society.
Initiation takes place in secret - though there are of course instances
of initiation en masse26 - not to exclude anyone, but because initiation
is by definition the individual facing his own Origin in solitude. Every
individual must face his own Death and Rebirth alone, and this cannot
be done en masse; numbers reduce the efficacy of an initiation
proportionately, and in any case, regardless of the number involved, the
relation is always individual and vertical, never horizontal and
multiple. This is the nature of things - as is the hierarchic nature of
humanity - and involves laws which cannot be flaunted without serious
confusion manifesting.
This constitutes, then, the destruction of the first pre
conceptualisation regarding the nature of initiation, for initiation is not
110 THEORIA: THE NATURE OF INITIATION
I have shown my disciples the way whereby they call into being
out of this body (of the four elements) another body of the
mind’s creation (ru p a m m a n o m a y a m ) com plete in all its limbs
and members, and w ith transcendent faculties
It is just like one who would draw a reed from its sheath, or a
snake from its slough, or a sword from its scabbard - recognising
that the reed, the snake, and the sword are each one thing, and the
sheath, slough and scabbard another.29
limbs; able to walk in paradisal fields, and having the divine ear an(j
eyes’. Thus we read in the ‘Chapter of Coming Forth from R e-Stau ’
which ‘The Chancellor in Chief, Nu, the triumphant’, says: T was born
in Re-Stau, and splendour hath been given unto me by those who dwell
in their spiritual bodies [sahu) in the habitation where liberations are
made unto Osiris.’30 And again, in ‘On Entering the Presence (of the
Sovereign Princes of Osiris)’, ‘My soul hath built for me an habitation
in the city of Tattu; I sow seed in the city of Pe, and I plough my field
with my dominions, and my palm trees are like Asmu’.31 The latter
quotation includes a number of references to celestial geography, about
which we only have space here to say a little, simply to note that
celestial rebirth of an individual necessarily implies rebirth in the realm
of celestial archetypes.32
At all events, this ‘rebirth’ is signified, in Buddhist ordination
ceremonies dating back into remote antiquity, by the initiate being
cermeonially bound hand and foot in a foetal position before the
upadhydya (preceptor) and the witnesses; later, the initiate is adorned
with the very sash which had bound him .33 This, and the assignation of
a new name, amongst other ceremonial actions, including the divesture
and investiture of clothing (one is not born with clothing),34 make it
clear once again that initiation consists, strictly speaking, not in
‘creation of a new identity’, but rather in the revelation of one’s true
identity in one’s transcendent Origin.
Now because this last point can perhaps cause some confusion,
particularly for those unfamiliar with traditional metaphysics and
cosmology, we might do well to elaborate upon it briefly, noting that
even though from a temporal perspective it might appear that initiation
is the ‘creation’ of a new being, in truth there is no creation, but only
the revelation of that which is, the ‘unveiling’ alone giving the
appearance of ‘progressive revelation’. In truth there is no ‘progress’ in
the Divine, modern pseudo-scientific suppositions to the contrary;
rather, the only ‘progress’ possible is the progressive removal of human
delusions.35 What is more - and this is also not devoid of significance -
we might observe that even the ‘virtual liberation’ bestowed by ancient
Egyptian initiation ritual and praxis, giving one a ‘seat in the barque of
Ra for millions of years’, is not absolute liberation, bestowing complete
freedom from conditionality, that primordial aim (artha) which
continued through pre-Vedic India, through experimental yoga,
through Buddhism, and into the present.
Indeed, one would well say, at the risk of overgeneralisation perhaps,
T H E O R IA : t h e n a t u r e o f in it ia t io n 113
115
116 THEORIA: INITIATION AND THE SYMBOLIC
identification with the God, with that state of consciousness, was the
aim of initiatory ritual as such. The ‘degree’ of initiation varies
according to the ‘completeness’ or ‘height’ of this identification. The
most exoteric or outward realisation - remembering where the God was
dismembered, say - is not divorced from this aim of ultimate union; it
simply lies nearer the beginning of that arc or transit of the being which
culminates in its own transcendence.
To more fully understand this arc in initiatory ritual terms, we turn
again to the Orient, in which the process of ritualised initiatory
deification (union with the state of the God) was preserved, not only in
invocatory chants, as in Egypt, but in explicated stages. We turn, in this
case, to that profound mystical union called the , a practice
found both in Buddhism and Hinduism alike. In S a h a jiy a the initiate
approaches and unites with a ‘holy w om an’ by degrees, the
aim being k, or ‘the great bliss’, this being in fact the very
ahsu
m
state of a God. Even though the ‘conclusion’ of the initiatory ritual is
ritualised sexual union, it has nothing to do with sexuality as generation
- indeed, quite the antithesis, since emission is not its end, for in truth
the maithuna, or sacred marriage (G k .: h ieros g a m o s)6 has no
conclusion, being itself entirely initiatory or inceptive.
In the Nayika-sadhana-tika(Commentary upon Spiritual Discipline
with Women) the ritual is described as consisting in eight parts, the first
of which is sadhana (the development of concentrative power and
liturgical irradiation) after which follows sm aran a (permeation of
consciousness; literally, ‘Remembrance’, from , to remember,
instinct with ‘tradition’, in Sanskrit);7 then comes d ro p a (etymolo
gically p, or formlessness, implying the transcendence of the
aru
material realm; ‘externalised’, it signifies the realisation of qualities in
the contemplative subject); after which follows the offering of flowers
and incense to the ayik,who is being realised as the Goddess; ,
n
which consists in the extension of concentration on the woman as
Goddess through the day and night; then , or absorption; ,
or worship, in which the n ay ik a is bathed (signifying ritual purity, and,
metaphysically, the entry into the Tipper waters’) .8 She then receives
offering as the Goddess Herself. Finally, one has the culminative stages
in which the yogi is completely absorbed in invocation, and in which the
yogi and the yogini unite as Gods, embodying the unconditioned state
of the Gods themselves, ‘conceiving’ (in the reproductive, not mental
sense) a transcendent union which has no , precisely in that act
which, when not ritualised in this way over the period of even a number
THEORIA:INITIATION AND TH E SYMBOLIC 119
We can sec, then, how it is that the sign of Net is that of the weaver’s
shuttle upon her head-dress ( X I X ), for Net is the totality of the
Neters, and transcending them ; She is T h at of which they weave, and
She is the weaver; She is ‘Father of Fathers and M other of M others’.
She is the very Origin of being, and being itself; Her powers extend
through the formal and subtle realms, and hence She is said to pass
morning and night ‘making protection’ (sa) for ‘that which is in M e ’.
Now sa is in hieroglyphics an octifold knot ( ♦ ), signifying the
power over death, and ‘trying’ the individual to his Origin - which is
in fact precisely one ‘function’ of the Neters.
In this last regard, we must note that even though A m en-Ra is
termed the ‘highest’ of the Gods, none the less He is the son of A m ent,
the most ancient Goddess. As Am ent, She bestows ‘virtual liberation’;
as Persephone, she proffers fertility and prosperity.13 N ow another
name for Net is R a t (Ra with the feminine determinative ‘t ’), She W ho
wears the ‘Crown of the N o rth ’14 and bears in each hand the symbols of
water, signifying power over the watery ignorance of the sublunary
sphere. The water-symbols also signify, though, the prim ordiality of
Net; She is the Originary source, and bears in herself all possibilities o f
existence. Hers is the weaving o f the Fates, true - yet she contains not
only past, present and future, but the p le n ip o te n tia ry of all possible
other existences as well. It is this, in part, which is signified by that
ceremony alluded to by H erodotus, in which, at the city Sais, after the
rites of the day, all do
hath given birth to Brimos - that is, the Strong to the Strong, the
self-horn (Athene) to the Self-horn.19
The Lesser Mysteries imply the preparation of the vehicle, and the
Greater are its employment in the ‘giving birth 1 to the new Self, which
is to say, in the progressive ‘deaths1 which manifest in ‘greater lots’, as
Heraclitus had it in the fragment quoted earlier. As we observed before,
one’s lot in the ‘other world’ proceeds inversely to one’s attachm ent to
the present realm.20
All of the symbolism of the initiatory mysteries - from the sceptre to
rhe Epoptic ear of wheat, to the bestial sigils - not as preludium to this
rebirth, for which in fact they exist, for this ‘breaking through into the
Celestial Light’. The sceptre signifies power; the ear of wheat signifies
celestial nourishment; and the ‘lower waters’ imply the ignorance from
which ‘upper waters’, being celestial bliss, are free. All symbols, in the
initiatory tradition, exist in order to further the passage from the lower
to the higher waters.
It will by now have been noted that we have drawn freely upon that
which remains of the Greek Mysteries, the reason for which is simply
that the Greek were a continuation of the Egyptian, as indeed
Christianity was an attenuated reflection of both these. In each case,
though, there was an exfoliation of the initiatory symbols, phrases and
rites ‘outward’ into society, in compensation as the Spirit left. O f the
Egyptian Mysteries we know little because nothing needed to be written
down as to meaning, all being implicit in the hieroglyphs, or in oral
transmission; of the Greek we know more, and of the Christian all is in
writing - but in the same proportion the Mysteries themselves vanished,
bitterly opposed by men like Iraneus, Tertullian.
In brief: we see in this ‘arc’ downwards, the result of ever-greater
attachment to the form, to the literalisation of the symbolic. In the
ancient Egyptian, and even in the Greek Mysteries, initiation consisted
in the worship, which is to say the realisation of the Great M other; and,
through her, birth into that state of transcendence termed R a . But as
time went on, this Great Birth became fixed, delimited into single
incarnation of Christ, thereby externalised. Yet the Christian revelation
carried within it much of the symbology of the initiatory Mysteries -
and it is only the profanations of the modern era, with the advent of
behaviouralism’, ‘psychologism’, and all the myriad other mechanistic
manifestations of the present time, that the understanding and
transmission of the symbolic is wholly lost. The ancient Egyptian could
124 THEORIA: IN IT IA T IO N A N D T H E S Y M B O L IC
125
126 PRAXIS: INITIATION AND WORK
potentialities, and who gaze out upon the centuries with a power and
nobility virtually beyond the pale of the insecure, confused modern
This nobility, this ability to bear one’s condign suffering with infinite
strength, is the direct concomitant of knowing, truly knowing who and
where one truly is, to have realised one’s purpose, one’s function. No
one who looks upon the faces of the lineage of Kings, or upon the faces
of the Amerindian ‘noble savages’ preserved to the present, can deny
this.1
Now it may be objected, by those unfamiliar with the nature of a
traditional culture, that the King might well have realised this state -
but what of the man in the field? W hat of the labourer, the craftsman?
Such an objection, however, belies a gross misunderstanding of
tradition, for as a Ceylonese proverb has it, ‘Take a ploughman from
the plough, and wash off his dirt, and he is fit to rule a kingdom’. Of
the Ceylonese Knox said ‘Their ordinary Plowmen and Husbandmen do
speak elegantly, and are full of compliment. And there is no difference
between the ability of speech of a Country-man and a Courtier. ' And
the same is true of any traditional culture: that is, everyone in that
culture turns inward toward the common centrum, as all things orient
toward the Pole of existence, toward the Sun and, upon whatever strata
of society, realises simultaneously his own function, and the perfection
of that culture, so that everyone is possessed of that serenity and dignity
which can only come from self-realisation.
Where better to begin the perfection of one’s own state, and the
perfecting of the world round one, than with that craft into which one
was born, after all? It is only natural that the initiatory paths should
begin with the crafts of the people - for what better opportunity is there
for that constant attentive concentration which is the mark of religious
praxis than one’s daily work? Every figure carved is become a holy
figure; every field ploughed recapitulates the primal ‘breaking of the
earth’;3 every work of art (every craft) recapitulates creation itself, the
ordering of the cosmos.
These are the Lesser Mysteries, those initiatory paths which begin in
the various crafts; they culminate in a state of primordiality, in which
the individual has reached the fullness of his potential upon this earth,
in terms of formal manifestation. Now by ‘fullness’ we mean of course
not only the perfection of the craft - it goes without saying that the
work is revelatory of the Divine - but the workers’ life is ethically pure
as well.4 This is the Osirian path, which is to say, that of karmic
perfecting; and thus we read in the B o o k o f Respirations
PRAXIS: INITIATION AND WORK 127
Come Osiris! Thou dost enter the Hall of the Two Goddesses of
Truth.
Thou art purified of all sin, of all crime.
Stone of Truth is thy name.
Hail to the Osiris N - ! (N - name of the deceased)
Thou, being very pure, dost enter the Lower Heaven.
The Two Goddesses have purified Thee in the Great Hall.
Purification has been made to Thee in the Hall of Seb.
Thy members have been purified in the Hall of Shu.
Thou seest the Ra in his setting___
Thou dost enter the Horizon with the Sun.5
We may first of all note that the emphasis here is upon ritual
purification of the deceased, Osiris N - , and it is to this that the
references to the various ‘H alls’ refers; each of the Halls, in ancient
Egyptian architecture, recapitulates a fu nction in g of the cosmos, of the
subtile reality, and through ceremonies held within them, accomplished
with the same ritual perfection a craftsman applies to his work, the
initiate would reach a state of fullness. This fulfilling of potentiality is
not of course, as certain Gnostic sects are reputed to have thought, the
actual living out of all potentiality,6 but rather the realisation of a
primordial state which encompasses all possibilities.
The two names - Osiris and N - (that of the initiate) - are merged
because through the fruition of his initiation the disciple becomes
identified with the God, and this purification takes place thus in the
three worlds, those being that of the ‘Two Goddesses’ (earth), of the
Hall of Seb (subtle realm) and of the Hall of Shu (Sky, or the principal
realm). Through this purification, one is able to enter the Lower
Heaven, which is to say, as we observed earlier, Amentet, at that point
of the arc of Ra which intersects with the realm of Osiris in the West.
‘Thou dost enter the Horizon with the Sun.’
It ought not be thought, incidentally, that the ‘creation’ of an
‘eternal self’ in the Lower Heaven, a self which is in fact the
resurrection, the revelation of one’s true Self, is in fact the ‘creation’ of
some being. It is, rather, the revelation of a vehicle more durable as it
were than the fleeting temporal self, but still none the less to be finally
revealed as identical in its essence with the Origin, into which not only
all beings, but all the Gods including Ra ultimately ‘return’. The point
of ‘merger’ of this ‘eternal self’ is the point of Osirian identification
with Ra in the West, which is to say, at the end of a given ,
or cycle.
128 PRAXIS: INITIATION AND WORK
Moreover,
This state of unity with Osiris is of course a limited one - though far
less so than the corporeal state - but it bears within it the ‘heart of Ra’
which is to say, the potentiality for its own transcendence in the
m ysterium magnum. But indeed, strictly speaking even the state of Ra is
limited in so far as one can give name and delimitation to it. The path
of Osiris is that of -g,of works; the path of Ra, which is to
karm
say the Horian path, is equivalent to , or effective
realisation of supraformal states. At all events, we can see that the lesser
Mysteries, which involve the preparation of the being in formal states
of manifestation, are a preparation for the transcendence of those states,
in an arc which passes beyond the celestial, or paradisal existence as
well.
Now just as the crafts, through concentrative power, act as a focal
point and entry into the Mysteries, so also may the arts also act; indeed,
the words ‘arts’ and ‘crafts’ are from a traditional perspective
interchangeable, and it is only the modern wish to valorise the former at
the expense of the latter which distinguishes them. For instance, to
demonstrate the futility of a distinction: Is a stonecarver, from whose
tools manifest the magnificent carvings at Denderah, replete with
religious significance, an artist, or a craftsman? Every craft is, in its own
transcendence, an art. This is true of every path, of every kind of work,
but is especially so of those which depict transcendent Reality in either
images or words, for these act as meditative ‘supports’; they allow one
to ‘see’ and ‘hear’ of the transcendent states of being, thus orienting one
toward their realisation. And this is, after all, the aim of all the arts; to
allow one to glimpse the nature of a celestial state of being which, later,
one can experientially realise through the Mysteries, or through yogi
praxis.u
We can thus see why it is that the various arts are given an exalted
place within the traditional culture - for they represent the
establishment of os, of sacred space, upon the earth. But
n
tem
simultaneously, we can see that ultimate aim of the arts is not this
delineation, but an expansion of this celestial vision everywhere, a
PRAXIS: INITIATION AND WORK 131
return to the primordial state - the fruition of the being. The arts as a
means of establishing tem enos, or sacred space, is the understanding of a
‘fallen’ culture - for in the most ancient and pristine cultures, there is
no arbitrary delineation of ‘art’ and ‘daily life’; rather, the latter is itself
exalted, as much a manifestation of ‘art’ as the carving upon the temple
wall. The function of the carving is after all to reflect the nature of life
lived simultaneously upon terrestrial and celestial earth; it is to ‘remind’
one of that which one has, through the Fall, forgotten, which is to say,
to remind one of one’s celestial Origin, which has never vanished, but
only remained ‘dormant’ as one ‘sleeps’ in ignorance. In the traditional
culture, daily life is itself an art form, of which the various ‘arts’ are
simply intensifications, be it the art of the tea ceremony, of the sword,
or of weaving.
Now one must not conceptualise the ‘celestial Earth’, thinking that it
is elsewhere, when in fact the celestial Earth is always here, now, in this
very instant. Everything, in all instants, is engaged in a state of
continuous ‘ascension’, in the return to the Source. Simply because, due
to the nature of temporal cycles, our senses have hardened, does not
mean that even so, every realm does not interpenetrate with every other,
and what is more, that influences of a supratemporal or ‘eternal’ order
cannot - as in the case of bidr,the ‘hidden initiator’ of Islam, to na
K
one example - penetrate and affect temporal beings through a kind of
‘vertical axis’ cutting through horizontal existence. Strictly speaking, no
initiation can take place without this ‘penetration’ of the
supratemporal into phenomenality, which is to say without the ‘laying
bare’ of that which is latent within, but ‘encased’ within existence.
Says Heidegger, who near the end of his life said many things which
bore witness to his proximity to traditional teachings, not least of
which is the striking parallel between his thought and Hua Yen
Buddhist teaching:15
Earth and sky, divinities and mortals - being at one with one
another of their own accord - belong together by way of the
simpleness of the united fourfold. Each of the four mirrors in its
own way the presence of the o th ers. . . This appropriative mirror-
play of the simple onefold . . . we call the world.16
What is more,
M ortals dwell, he says, ‘in that they initiate their own nature . . . jnt0
the use and practise of this capacity, so that there may be a good death’.
Saving the earth means in fact ‘liberating’ the earth in order that it may
be as it is in Reality: is this not the essence of the Lesser Mysteries?
This is in fact the nature of all the arts and crafts, which are termed
the ‘Lesser Mysteries’ not in a pejorative, but in a preparatory sense,
being the revelation of the celestial in the terrestrial, and a necessary
foundation so to speak for the realisation of yet more transcendent
states. Says Guenon: ‘There is no true initiation, even in the most
inferior and elementary degree, without the intervention of a “non
human” element, which is the ‘‘spiritual influence” regularly
communicated by the initiatory rite.’ 18 But we may here go further than
this and say that the initiatory rite nurtures and guides the individual,
through the praxis of his given craft or art, the mastery of which is
transmitted from master to disciple since time immemorial, to the
‘expansion’ of that art into the realisation of the full potentiality of
being in its primordial plenitude ‘prior to ’ differentiation into societal
fragmentation.
This latter state is one of complete, spontaneous freedom. To cite a
modern instance, it appears in the ‘tea ceremony for the Buddha’ which
is performed only by the most experienced of tea-masters, and indeed,
even to their students the freedom may appear as ‘mistakes’, when it is
really the play of a being fully realising the plenipotentiary inherent
within not only that form, but existence itself. The Gods and other
beings also attend that ceremony, in countless numbers - and so it was,
also, in ancient Egypt.
This accounts for the fascinating power of the traditional arts, which
invoke our attention by their concentrating power, beauty, and serenity:
they are the transmutation of this earth into its celestial, which is to
say, its truer Reality. We have on other occasions made reference to the
power of this transmutation, and will here only allude to the Chinese
tale of the painter whose painting was so magnificent that he entered it,
never to be seen again, testimony to the truth that the creation of a
work of art is the revelation, not of merely temporal human existence,
or of fantasies woven from it, but indeed, of transcendent possibilities
of virtually limitless scope.19 T here is a profound correspondence
between this understanding, and the Buddhist term dharmadhatu,
which implies entry into a transcendent ‘field of knowledge’.
PRAXIS: INITIATION AND WORK 133
The artist, through his work, is victorious in life - having realised the
potentiality of being - and is victorious after death, for certain
posthumous states are already his by right. He lives in the ‘dark earth’,
in Malkuth, and yet continuously through his existence as an artist
transmutes it into its Celestial Origin - to use Egyptian symbolism,
writing even upon iron, with lapis lazuli letters, the scripture of life.
To invoke a God through a given art work, after all, requires
identification with that God; it requires sanctification and, indeed,
umty. This is the secret of all the ancient rites, from ‘theatre’, which is
136 PRAXIS: I N I T I A T I O N AND W ORK
to say Osirian rites manifesting the very Gods themselves, to the songs
of the poet, to the temple-friezes of the painter engraver.
Truly, this is the secret, not only of the arts, but of life itself. It is
only through union with anything that it can be truly possessed, be this
union through long assimilation (as in living in a given area or
ambience) or through the more ‘condensed’ power of the rite, or
through other means. All involve concentrative power; all involve the
transmission through tradition of a given mode which ‘channels’ the
power, or one’s capacity to receive it.
There is one power which circulates throughout the traditional
civilisation, causing all the works of its citizens to glow with the degree
of their realisation of it. Initiation is the means by which, through
which, it continues to manifest. W ithout it, society becomes chaos,
fixated upon the merely physical; men retreat into solipsism. Egypt was
a culture able to maintain the manifestation of this power through the
symbolic, and the consequence of its fragmentation, its loss, was the
birth of the modern era.
CHAPTER 4
Praxis: The Flame and the Flower
137
1
death by fire,2 or for that matter, to enter into ‘celestial history’, in the
dissolution of Gavampati, and later Ananda himself, into flames upon
their entry into nirvana.3 W hat is the nature of fire, and particularly of
death by fire?
Fire signifies the transmutation from one state to another; it signifies
purification. Now we can observe here that there are two meanings to
fire: on the one hand, there is the ‘fire’ of samsaric existence, which
consists in being ‘split asunder’ in the constant neurotic attempt to
situate oneself securely, in the attempt to maintain the irreal ‘self’. The
nature of existence as desire is existence in fire; it is the constant pain of
burning. But the other meaning of fire is that of the ascetic , of
initiatory purification which, within existence itself, consumes one’s
conceptualisations and illusions; it is this which is meant by the
alchemical ‘fire in the belly’ or a; it is the S
irradiating through the individual, through the hara (which strictly
speaking is not the solar plexus below the chest, but that below the
navel).
The heart is the centre of the being, the heart being solar, and the
brain lunar, it is true - but the umbilicus is that from which we become
manifest; and it is here that initiatory rebirth, which is to say, the
‘dropping away’ of ‘eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind’, begins also, in a
natural parallelism.4 It is through fire that the other elements are
conjoined to create light and heat - illumination of the heart and the
mind. Fire is, in other words, the means of return to the Source; it is
sign of that transmutation of which the seal is the transmutation itself.
All depends, in other words, upon one’s orientation - for if one is
turned ‘downward’ to use Platonic terms, one is ‘caught’ in indefinite
suffering, in the fire of desire; whereas if one is turned ‘upward’ then by
passing through the fire of initiatory suffering one recaptures that
serenity and bliss which was once natural to man. All is fire, whether
one likes it or not.5
This unity is suggested also in the Buddhist mythologem with which
we began; for the naga is an extremely important being in Buddhist
cosmology, with meanings beyond those we can point to here;6 suffice
it to say that the naga is serpentine, cold and wet, manifesting matter at
its ‘darkest’ or most ‘obscure’ pole, and that the inclusion of fire with
the naga signifies its transmutation into celestial light and heat.
Moreover, in the naga's being coiled in the Buddha’s bowl the next
morning we see the cosmic krater of Creation itself ‘in the Buddha’s
hands’.
PRAXIS: THE FLAME AND THE FLOWER 139
The Fire com eth to the Ka, O Osiris, governor of Amenti; the
Fire com eth to thy Ka, O Osiris N u, overseer of the palace,
chancellor in chief, triumphant. He that ordereth the night
com eth after the d a y .. . . It is set in order upon thy brow, 0
O siris, governor of Amenti; fixed within thy shrine, it riseth on
thy b row .11
H ail Osiris, governor of Amenti: Grant thou light and fire to the
blissful being which is in Sutenthene (Heracleopolis) and (ye
children of Horus) grant power unto the living soul of Osiris Nu
within his flame. Let Him not be driven back from the doors of
Am entet.12
In the ‘fire at the end of tim e’ all beings are consumed, returning to
their primal, germinal Forms, which is to say, to the bliss of non-
m anifestational realms, to right and Truth; and it is this Fire which is
said to encircle R a , and through which one must pass in order to enter
the ‘barque of R a ’. Now this passage ought not be conceived as ‘at the
end of history’, though such an interpretation is not without some
qualified truth - but rather as the Fire in this very instant, for this is the
initiatory truth. One must, as we observed before, perforce ‘pass
through the Fire’; it is up to us merely whether we do it voluntarily,
being transmuted in this very life, or involuntarily, and, in the extreme
case, being dissolved by it because so little in our being conforms to that
which is to be preserved - though of course the heart of the being,
which is Real, identical to Reality, is not consumed, nor can it be.
The fire is upon the brow of Osiris (one cannot help but think of the
mark of Cain) and indeed, Osiris is later said to be in His flame; it is
this flam e, or Light and H eat, which He grants the initiate, whose
flame is simultaneously then his own, and Osiris’. It is this which
allows ‘entry’ into Amentet, the state of virtual liberation. As
Iamblichus has it, in his D e ysteri, a purified soul exhibi
M
PRAXIS: T H E FLAME AND TH E FLOWER 141
form, and a pure and unmingled fire’. But the soul which ‘verges
downward draws along with it the signs of bonds and punishments,
heavy with material spirits'. Every genera in the celestial hierarchy
manifest their own flam e: ‘the aerial genera exhibit aerial fire, the
terrestrial a blacker fire; and the celestial a more splendid fire'. And the
Gods, indeed, exhibit the supreme and most pure causes of the triple
order.13
The flame in question is of an incorporeal light, which is more subtle
and more perfect as one ‘ascends’, each ‘degree’ in the hierarchy
containing in itself all the aspects of the lower, save intensified. The
intensity and subtlety of the Light determine the degree; those beings
‘near earth', which is to say, attached to conceptualisations, ‘blacken’
the fire; whilst those purified of dross irradiate it with greater and
greater force. N ow this fire is also at the heart, naturally enough, of
theurgy and m agic; and hence in a rare treatise by Psellus we read that
‘Often celestial fire is made to appear through magic; and then statues
laugh, and lamps are spontaneously enkindled’.14 The Fire in question is
the very Fire of life; it is the point at which the incorporeal fire becomes
the corporeal, and vice versa, which is to say, it is the means through
which m anifestation takes place, and through which its transcendence,
and return to the source, comes to pass.
We can therefore see why the ancient Egyptians, conformably with
the most universal of sy m b o lism ,15 held R a , the Divine Sun, to be the
most transcendent m anifestation o f, the most perfect symbol for the
Real. For the physical sun is but an echo, a reflection of the Divine Sun
which, passing through the cycle of day and night, yet never changes,
nor diminishes, but is only visible or not visible according to temporal
perspective. Just so, to o , is the Divine Sun always constant; it is only we
who are either aware or unaw are of the Source of being. The Sun is
source of all light and life in this realm ; and it is only natural to
recognise that u ltim ately everything, all beings, must return into this
Source, which is to say, into pure Light and life, or, if one chooses
moral terms, into right and truth.
Now the aim of the Lesser M ysteries is to ‘divinise’ the initiate, to
extend the individuality indefinitely, and to reveal the subtle body with
some degree of ‘d u rability’, in order that ‘Thy face is illuminated near
the Sun’ and ‘Thy body is rejuvenated near to O siris’. 16 But the Great
Mysteries allow one to realise identicality with the Sun, with R a; which
is to realise the inherent and com plete, plenary, self-sufficient, self
motive power of the Source. Identicality with the Source is marked by
142 PRAXIS: T H E FLA M E AND T H E FLO W ER
I
I
CHAPTER 5
144
CONCLUSION: INITIATION AND THK PRESENT ERA 145
PART I
l .l Introduction
1 On the one hand, som e m ight ob ject to the value of such study on the basis
of deluded ‘ev o lu tio n a ry ’ grounds, the im plication being that our society is
‘above’ the tra d itio n a l cu ltu res, a supposition which is easily refuted by a
com parison o f the present chaos and confusion with the harmony and
serenity o f, say, an cien t E g y p t. O n the other, some might object that one
might b etter ‘ let sleeping dogs lie’ - to w hich we reply that these pages are
intended, n o t to rein force the G reat F all, but to anticipate the Great
R estoration.
2 Our history is but a p altry th in g, our m odern m emory stretching only back
as far as w ritten record s, so ignoring the vast bulk and past cycles of human
history and civilisation s.
3 Revelation 3 :1 4 , the nam e Am en being, of course, a name of R a, the
Divine Sun.
4 H erodotus II. 3 1 . 9 - 3 2 . 3 .
5 Cf. P lu ta rch ’s D e Isis et sirde,L X V - L X X I .5 , wherein he heaps de
O
upon those w h o m a in ta in this literalist ‘dragging dow n’ of Divine truths, a
tendency w hich has by no m eans w aned.
6 Cf. Rene G u en on , The Crisis of the Modern World (London, 19 4 5 ).
7 Corpus Hermeticum (Mead translation), The Perfect , X X IV -
XXVI. Though some have alleged that the Corpus Hermeticum is of
relatively recent date, being of the first or second centuries AD, there can be
no doubt that that which it transmits does indeed find its origin in ancient
Egypt, the latter itself being a reflection of primordial truth.
8 See E. A. Wallis Budge, The Gods o f the Egyptians (London, 1904), 1.167;
11.241.
9 According to Herodotus (11.142).
10 Diodorus Siculus, 1.43.5-44.3.
11 Budge, op. cit.y 1.332.
12 Prasna Upanisad 1.7.
13 Maitri Upanisad V1 .1 7 .
14 Jaiminiya Upanisad Brahmana III. 1 0 .4 .
15 Physics II.2 .
16 Budge, op. cit., 1.333.
149
150 NOTES TO PAGES 9-21
1.2 Maat
1.4 Isis
12 Aptileius, TheGolden ,A
s Book X I.
13 M ead, trans., op. cit., III. 14 9 ff.
14 Plutarch, De Isis et Osiride, L X I I .l .
15 See Tran Tam T in h , Le culte d ’IsisPompeii (Paris,
16 Diodorus Siculus, 1 .1 2 .3 - 7 .
17 Kubrika-tantra, 1.1.
18 Samkhya-Pravacana Sutra,I II. 6 6 .
19 A. Avalon, The Serpent Power (London, 1 9 1 9 ), p. 3 4 6 .
20 Ibid., p. 3 5 1 .
21 T he path of dali,of
n
ku sakti-yog,is traditionally differ
of dhyana-yoga, from which the m odern Zen Buddhism is derived,
principally because in the form er siddhi or powers are accumulated, the
path being m ore gradual, whereas in the latter Liberation ‘takes place’ in a
flash (though not thereby denying the necessity of years of training and
discipline).
22 Brhad-aranyaka Upanisad, V .9 .1 .
1.5 Osiris
20 Budge, op.cit.,1.167.
21 Cf. Ocellus Lacanus,trans. Thom as Taylor (London, 1 8 4 1 ), p. 69, on the
nature of the Divine Restoration according to Synesius. See also pp. 5 4 - 5 9
of this volume on Typhon.
1Pyramid ,T
exts 1385 b and c, italics added.
2 Ibid., 251 a -d .
3 Ibid., 251 d.
4 Plutarch, On the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the , trans. A. O.
Prickard (London, 1 9 1 1 ), pp. 4 4 ff.
5 Ibid., p. 45.
6 See S. Morenz, Egyptian Religion (Ithaca, 1 9 7 3 ), p. 193.
7 See E. A. Wallis Budge, The Gods o f the Egyptians (London, 1 9 0 4 ), pp.
2 9 9 -3 0 0 ; also Thrice-Greatest Hermes, trans. G. R. S. Mead (London,
1906), 1.89. Cf. also the Chaldea Oracles, ed I.P. Cory (London, 18 3 2 ),
C L X X X V I: ‘The number nine is divine, receiving its completion from
three triads, and preserving the summits of theology according to the
Chaldeans, as Porphyry informs us.’
8 Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body, Celestial Earth (Princeton, 1972).
1.7 Typhon
12 Ibid.
13 For an exam in ation of the relation of the debasing of currency to the
present era, see Rene G uenon, The Quantity and the of the
Times (London, 1 9 5 3 ).
14 See my Primordiality and the Present Era (forthcom ing).
15 Sec ‘A pocatastasis’ , in this volum e, pp. 9 4 ff.
16 Taylor, tran s., op. cit.
17 Ihid. See also, on this subject, M an eth o ‘On the Israelites’ in Ancient
Fragments by Isaac Preston C ory (L on d on , 1 8 3 2 ) , and on the ‘Typhonian
city ’ in particular.
18 C f. Rene G uenon’s discussion of the antip ath y of the saints to metal, op.
cit. It was said of Sri R a m a n a , as o f R am an a M ah arsk i, that metal burned
his skin.
19 Surely the an ti-trad itio n al virulence of our present era could be compared
to nothing so well as to the ‘reverse m ag n etisatio n ’ of iron ‘against’ the
Divine current.
S
1.9 R a: the Sun King
1 I I I .2 .1 .
2 I I I .5 .2 .
3 S. R ad h ak rish n an , e d ., The Principal Upanisads
co m m e n ta ry upon the Chandogya I I I .3 .1 , ‘ Verily yonder sun is
the honey o f the G o d s’.
4 VI. 1 6 .
5 Ibid.,V I. 1 7 .
6 Chandogya Upanisad, III. 1 2 .6 .
7 E . A . W allis Budge, The Gods o f the Egyptians (L o n d o n , 1 9 0 4 ) , 1 .3 3 8 .
8 VI. 4 .2 4 .
9 Ibid.
10 Jaim iniya Upanisad Brahmana, III. 1 0 .4 .
11 Physics, I I .2.
NOTES TO PAGES 68-82
155
1 Phoedrus, 17 S
f f.
2 Ibid.
3 See, for a discussion o f the M ysteries as a transmutation of the entire
156 NOTES TO PAGES 83-96
1 .1 2 O n the M ysteries
P la to , Phaedrus, 2 4 8 ff.
R . A. Schw aller de Lubicz, Symbol and the Symbolic (New York, 1978),
pp. 7 6 ff.
Iam blichus, On the Mysteries o f the Egyptians, Chaldeans and Assyrians,
trans. T . Taylor (London, 1 8 2 1 ), C hapter L X .
Ibid., C hapter VII.
Ibid., C hapter V III.
Ibid., C hapter VIII.
P A R T II
\
I
(Princeton, 1 9 6 9 ).
14 As the H erm etic m a x im has it, ‘as above, so below , but inversely’ . This is
manifested also in the ‘seal of S o lo m o n ’, which consists in tw o
superimposed triangles, one ap ex up, one apex dow n, the form er signifying
celestial, the latter terrestrial reality.
15 We are aw are th at poin tin g ou t the etym o logical consanguinity of certain
words and linguistic p attern s is no longer academ ically fashionable; to
those who cavil we recom m end the Cratylus of P lato.
16 In the shift from A m en tet to A m en th e we can see how linguistic
permutation involves the debasing o f the original m eaning, and a
correlative loss of pow er to invoke, a loss noted by both Iambiichus in De
ysteri, and the authors o f the Corpus
M See 11.5, note 5
below. Cf. P lu ta rch , De Isis et s, X X I X . 7 , and L.
O
The Gods o f the Egyptians (L o n d o n , 1904), 11.200.
17 Cf. Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body, Celestial Earth (P rin ceton, 1 9 7 2 ), in
158 NOTES TO PAGES 1 0 7 -1 2
p articu la r, for a detailed discussion of the relatio n of the individual and the
daen
a, a Persian w ord directly related to the P la to n ic daimon.
18 C f. Luke 1 3 :9 ; Matthew4 :3 ff.
19 C f. C o rb in , op. cit.
20 C f. R ene G u en on , ‘T h e D ivine J o u rn e y ’ , in and Becoming
According to the t, C h . x x i (N e w D elh i, 1 9 8 1 ) .
edan
V
21 Som e of the lotuses ‘rip en ’ and open quickly in the paradisal Lake; some do
so slo w ly , the difference dep end ent upon th e ‘ th ick n ess’ of the karmic
ob stru ction s under co n sid eratio n . B u t all u ltim a te ly reveal the Buddha they
co n tain .
22 Papyrus of N u , B rit. M u s. 1 0 4 7 7 .6 . C o m p a re the sta te m e n t of the Buddha
upon ‘In H eaven and on E a rth , I alone a m the on ly H onou red O n e.’
23 Ibid. 1 0 4 7 7 .1 5 .
24 T h is is one m eaning of th e ‘sacred m o u n ta in s ’ , each o f w h ich is in its own
w ay a recap itu latio n of the cen tral M o u n ta in , Su m eru, representing
therefore also the P ole of the w o rld . F o r a series o f references to such sacred
places, see the Avatamsaka ,S
tra C h . 1 8 , w h ich p o in ts to
u
Asia and elsewhere.
25 H en ce, as G uenon says, H erm eticism is n o t m etap h y sical but cosmological,
an o rien tatio n w hich derives d irectly fro m an cien t E g yp tian influence. Cf.
‘H erm es’ in The Sword o f Gnosis (L o n d o n , 1 9 8 6 ) .
26 O ne such instance of in itiatio n en masse w as m en tio n ed by M a rco Pallis in
the essay ‘T h e Veil of the T em p le’ in cluded in The Sword o f Gnosis, op.
cit. T h e in itiation in question to o k p lace in n o rth ern India in 1 9 5 0 , and
was conferred by the D alai L a m a .
27 T h e universal id entification o f self and o th e r is to be seen in the Litany of
d,C h . I V .1 , w here w e read th a t ‘ th e b irth o f O siris is the birth of Ra,
R
and recip ro cally .’ In ‘ O siris’ w e see sim u ltan eo u sly every in itiate, and more
generally, all of existen tial o r m an ifested re a lity , th e ‘dism em bered God’.
T h e m eaning here is very m uch th e sam e as th e B u d d h ist form u lation that
the klesas (a tta ch m e n ts, ignorance) are in th em selves , th at nirvana is
sim ultaneous w ith samsara.
28 C f ., for in stan ce, M . E lia d e , Yoga: Freedom and Immortality (Princeton,
1 9 6 9 ).
29 Majjhima Nikaya 11.17.
30 C f. Papyrus of N u , B rit. M u s. 1 0 4 7 7 .9 .
31 Ibid.
32 T h e arch etyp al realm o f w h ich w e here speak has n o th in g to do with the
supposed ‘u n co n sciou s’ of Ju n g , o r o f p sychologism in general; it refers
rather to the P la to n ic realm of F o rm , in B uddhism parallel to the alaya-
vijnana, th ou g h of cou rse the fo rm e r tends to be m ore s ta tic , the latter
m ore d yn am ic. C f. also H . C o rb in , Spiritual Body, Celestial , op. cit.
33 O ne is adorned w ith the sash th a t had bound on e just as, after awakening,
one realises th a t in samsara itself is nirvana to be foun d; all that once
NOTES TO PAGES 112 18 159
bound, now frees and ad o rn s; and ‘this earth where we stand is the Pure
Lotus Land’. C f. H akuin Z en ji’s Zaz
Cf. E. Levy, Buddhism: AMystery (L on d on , 1 9 5 7 ), pp. 4 2 ff.
Cf. also the G nostic Hymn o f the , and other G nostic works which
employ the investiture of clo th in g as significations of the qualitative
revelation of the R eal. Investiture requires prior divestiture, however.
35 The ‘omega p o in t’ of de C hardin is just such a vain conceptualisation, a
postulation which valorises evolution and even nuclear w arfare,
attempting to merge science and religion in an am using but unproductive
and even dangerous w ay. C f. S .H . N a s r’s discussion of de Chardin in
Knowledge and the Sacred (N ew Y ork , 1 9 8 1 ) .
36 Cf., for instance, the Shonankattoroku, translated by Trevor Leggett as The
Warrior Koans (L o n d o n , 1 9 8 6 ) , in w hich one finds the tale of a Zen
Master who strikes a w ounded w a rrio r during an interview and, when he
cries out, observes, ‘You have n o t yet realised’ . T here are numerous other
instances, both in this c o lle ctio n , and elsewhere, dem onstrating the
correlation between co m p lete transcenden ce, and im passivity to pain or
trauma.
37 We might note, for instance, the parallels betw een the ‘O xherding Pictures’
of Zen Buddhism , and section s o f the Rg Veda - the enigm atic in
particular, w hich refer to the ‘ fo o tp rin ts o f the O x ’ or Bull. O ne m ight
note, too, in passing, the epithet applied to R a - Divine Bull.
38 Cf. Eliade’s discussion of the M atsa , o r L a w of the Fishes, in Yoga:
Immortality and redom
F
, op. cit. It is interesting th at the C hristian sign is
that of the Fish, and th a t, m o re o v e r, in the precession of the equinoxes the
present time is th a t o f Pisces.
Horus over his enemies on the night o f his inheritance in the presence of the
great sovereign princes at the G re a t Festival o f the ploughing of the earth in
Tattu’ . One is rem inded also o f the C h ris tia n ‘ h arro w in g of H e ll’ , and of
the importance in Bu d d hism o f the first ploughing, p a rticu la rly observed in
Ceylon. A ll relate to the p rim a l ‘ seeding’ o f the e a rth , and to p rim o rd ial
male-female sym b o lism .
4 Th is is in fact the d e riv a tio n o f the w o rd ‘ S u f i’ , fro m the A rab ic , or
‘pure’ . It is also , in c id e n ta lly , the m eaning o f the w o rd ‘ C a th a ri’ , referring
to the medieval C h ris tia n sect.
5 Book o f Respirations, Sect. I I I .
6 Because of the C h ris tia n d estru ctio n o f the ancient lib rarie s, it is im possible
to know the actual G n o s tic teach ing s, b u t, as the N ag H a m m a d i findings
suggest, it is u n lik e ly th a t they w ere as a n a rch istic as some modern
commentators w o u ld have it ; there is a real tendency to m irro r oneself in
the past. A t a ll events, G n o s tic is m , in so fa r as it w as indeed d u a listic ,
poses not a s a lv a tio n , but a p ro fo u n d danger.
7 Papyrus of N u , B r it . M u s . 1 0 4 7 7 .2 2 ; c f. also P ap yrus of N ebseni, B rit.
Mus. 9 90 0.3 0.
8 Suicide is, in th is respect, a m o st ra d ic a l fo rm o f d u a lism , of the m ind
turning against the b o d y; and su re ly those G n o stic sects w h o practised
self-m utilation are fla g ra n tly g u ilty o f rad ical d u alism . T h e most radical
dualism is of course th a t o f S atan in H e ll.
9 Louvre, P aris, no. 3 2 8 4 , catalogue des M S . Egypt.
10 Ibid.
11 ‘Virtue’ is here used in the an cien t sense - as in the ‘ virtu e of a thing ’ . C f .
Lu K ’uan Y u , Taoist Yoga: Alchemy and Immortality (Lo n d o n , 196 5 ).
12 ‘Paradise’ derives fro m the S a n s k rit c f. in regard to paradise
Rene Guenon, The Lord of the World (N o rth Y o rk sh ire , 1 9 8 3 ), on
Agarttha - though the d iscussio n is lim ite d by v irtu e o f the exclusion of
Buddhist teachings, the o m issio n o f Ja m b h a la fro m the discussion being
especially odd.
13 Futuhat 1.127. C f . also H . C o r b in , Terre celeste et Corps de resurrection
(Paris, 1961) as also Stephen B e rn b a u m , The Way to Shambhala (Berkeley,
1972) and the d escrip tio n o f Ja m b h a la as a v a lle y seen in proportion to
one’s gnosis.
14 Generally speaking, w e m ay say th a t the M yste rie s a llo w of access to subtle
and celestial re a lity ; yo gic praxis gives access to com plete transcendence of
being as w e ll.
15 Though not B u d d h ist, H eideg g er’s thoug ht often show s strikin g parallels
to Buddhist, and e sp e cia lly to Hua Yen, teaching. Heidegger’s
‘a p p ro p ria te m irro r- p la y ’ is very m uch p a ra lle l to the Buddhist
understanding of m u tu a l interdependent rela tio n sh ip s.
^ Heidegger, Poetry, L a n g u a g e, T h o u g h t (N e w Y o rk , 1 9 7 1 ), p. 178.
17 Ibid.,p. 151.
162 NOTES TO PAGES 132-8
165
I
166 S E L E C T B IB L IO G R A P H Y
167
168 IN D EX
Isis, 4, 14, 24, 26, 31 ff ., 65, 119, 120 Plutarch, 25, 32, 40, 51, 52 Ss ,
Iswara, 9, 38 4 , 7 9 , 1 2 0 , 145 ,6 °-
Porphyry, 16, 94
Kali Yuga, 4, 57, 71 Prisca theologia, 12, 23, 81, 88
Kanzeon Bodhisattva, 39 Proclus, 7 6 - 7 , 97, 120, 134-5
Khepera, 24, 26 Psellus, 141
KritaYuga, 71 Ptah-hotep, 16-17
Ksatriya, 27 Pure Lan d , 9, 48
K undalini, 37, 41, 56, 86, 92-3 Pyram id Texts 19, 50
X e n o p h o n , Ephesiaca, 44
Upanisads, 4 Y a m a , 1 4 -1 5
Yo^a, 9 2
Vedanta, 104, 105, 113
V e n u s, 3 4 , 36
Z e n B u d d h is m , 4 9 , 9 2 , 147
V irg in Mary, 4 , 9 , 14.1
/1RKANK
JH E EGYPTIAN MYSTERIES
T h e time will come when Egypt will appear to have in vain served the Divine
with pious mind and constant worship, and all its holy religion will fall to
nothingness. For that Divinity shall hasten back from Earth to H e a v e n a n d
Earth shall be bereft of the presence of the Gods. O Egypt, E g yp t...."
(From The Perfect Sermon)
So we find Hermetic texts lamenting at the beginning of the present era. But
what was lost? What was the destiny of the individual being, what is the nature
of existence according to the ancient Egyptian tradition? What were the
Mysteries of Isis and Osiris? These are just some of the questions answered
here.
Drawing upon Vedantic, Buddhist and Platonic sources, as well as upon the
extant Greek, Roman and Hermetic texts, this book examines the ancient
Egyptian Mystery tradition - in many respects the origin of Western tradition -
not as an isolated phenomenon, but in the light of the great traditions still in
existence. By setting the Mystery tradition in the context of the perennial
philosophy, its relation to our present era begins to emerge. For to understand
modernity, to understand our place in the cosmos, it is necessary to
understand the Mysteries.
C o v e r illustration: R e p r o d u c e d from
The Book of the Dead of Userhetmos.
19th d y n a sty - 1 3 2 0 -1 2 0 0 BC.
R e p r o d u c e d b y k in d p e rm is s io n of
W ern er F o rm a n A rchive. C airo M u s e u m .
E gy p t.
P rice £ 5 9 5 net
Meta sics/E gy p tia n R eligion