The Great Pyramid: It's Divine Message

¶121. THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES OF ORIENTAL CULTS.

Oral instruction was the means of perpetuating the knowledge preserved by the cults of the ancient East. Hence we find, in both Egypt and Chaldaea, much monumental and other structural evidence of a higher knowledge, but no literature with regard to its principles and essential details. Literature there is, of a kind, as we have seen in the cases of the Egyptian Dynastological Lists, and the Book of the Dead. In general—as in the cases cited—it is the literature dispensed by the priesthood for the mystification of the laity, or at best, the coded literature beloved of the mythologist and kabbalist, to understand which required oral instruction by admission into the several orders of the cult, and, for a complete unveiling, admission into the ultimate Inner Priesthood.

The explanation of phenomena and ideals furnished by the popular literature were generally distorted and untrue. Furnished by the coded literature, the explanations were so hedged about by intentional obliquities, so obscured by fables and spurious mysteries, and so entangled in its code, as to be beyond the comprehension of those without the cult. The evidence discussed has shown that such explanations, when made, did not give an understanding of the ancient science. They merely revealed the traditional knowledge concerning the facts that had been derived from a former understanding of the causal relation between the facts and the scientific phenomena expressed by them.

¶122. KNOWLEDGE PRESERVED AS A MYSTERY: UNDERSTANDING LOST.

With such an artificial basis for the national ideals, art itself became distorted in its representation of such phenomena as the heavenly bodies and their motions—apparent or real. This distortion was maintained even in the coded literature that formed what we may term the index of reference for the priests of the Inner Mysteries. Hence we find that in Chaldæa, and still more particularly in Egypt, the scientific knowledge retailed by the priesthood, for use and application in the national life, had been filtered down to “ rule-of-thumb “ dogmas, and rough empirical axioms, postulates and formulae.

In reiteration of such dogmas and empirical formulae the monuments, papyri and traditional literature are clamorously persistent. The approximate nature of these rules is so evident that it has become the custom to pass unchallenged the assertion that the ancient Egyptians and Chaldæans performed their vast and accurate engineering and other scientific works upon a purely empirical and “ rule-of-thumb “ basis.

The hypothesis underlying this assertion is not only illogical; it is not in accordance with what we know regarding the relations between State and Priesthood.

¶123. THE SUPPRESSION OF LEARNING.

The Priesthood saw in the State the means whereby it could obtain power, i possessions and obedience. Accordingly, the priesthood centred its efforts and organised its resources and knowledge towards obtaining control of the machinery of State. Its object was so to formulate the constitution that the State should be dependent upon the Priesthood.

The Priesthood possessed the knowledge necessary for almanac organisation and the scientific knowledge embodied in the vast engineering and other scientific works carried out by the State. That knowledge was given no clear literary expression, lest the State, by possession of this, should become independent of the Priesthood. Hence it is obvious that the few empirical rules, of which the monuments and papyri give us evidence, were vastly less than the unwritten knowledge of the silent Inner Priesthood.

Schooled to dependence upon the Priesthood, the ancient Egyptians, and to a less extent, the ancient Chaldæans, made little or no independent attempt to seek the first principles underlying the empirical rules retailed by the Priesthood. The extent of this dependence—or rather, the extent to which this dependence was enforced—is illustrated by the enforced legalisation in Egypt of the vague or shifting ear.

In Chaldæa a similar process was effected by means of the authority of the astrological texts, defining the supposed causal relations between the acts of kings, princes, and populace, and the produce and other phenomena of the seasons.

¶124. STATE-CONTROL IN ANCIENT EGYPT.

With the institution of the vague year in Egypt, the Priesthood brought into being a new process of State control. The vague year thereafter carried the calendar seasons backwards round the Solar year. The Calendar Seasons came to have no meaning. The knowledge of the accurate recurrence of times and seasons was confined to the rulers and priests of the Solar deities. Only by giving abundance of gifts to the solar gods could the husbandman be assured of a plentiful harvest. A system of State-control was thus established whereby wealth accrued to state and priest craft, and ultimate responsibility was referred to the gods. A goodly harvest implied that the gods were pleased ; a poor harvest that the gods were dissatisfied with the offerings of the people. State and priesthood might receive reflected glory; never blame.

¶125. THE DISTORTION OF KNOWLEDGE LEGALISED.

All common rules of life and things material were ultimately depicted as having conception and source in the life-giving rays of the sun. The sun, from the XVIIIth Dynasty onwards, whatever the deity with which it was identified, was the great Formal Cause, which by means of its seasonal phenomena of the year, and the dependent phenomena of Nile inundation, made Egypt “ the gift of the Nile.”

The theogony and cosmogony of the ancient Egyptians were, in consequence, formulated on a cyclic basis having its origin in the value of the year. This was already expressed in the Pyramid’s geometry of the year circle. The numerical functions of this geometrical scheme were diverted by the priesthood into the channels of State-control, and were applied to the measurement of all effects attributed, by the Priests, to the influence of the Solar deity, Amen-Ra.

As a crowning monumentalisation of the omniscience of Amen-Ra the whole history of the Divine and Human Dynasties of Egypt was built around a fabulous chronology composed of nominal solar and Sothic cycles, and numbers of years that were in reality but geometrical functions of the Pyramid, and its year circle and astronomical cycles.

Many of the old cults absorbed by the dominant cult of Amen-Ra still partly retained their individuality by worshipping their original gods under the aspect of the leading attributes of Amen-Ra. This was the effect intended, but owing to this fact, the Egyptian Lists contain differing versions of the mythological chronology of the year circle and its Pyramid functions applied to the Divine and Human Dynasties.

¶126. THE PARTIAL UNVEILING OF THE MYSTERIES OF EGYPT.

It was only after the seed of freedom, sown by the rising Greek nations, had produced independent philosophers, and when these philosophers had commenced to visit the Egyptians and Chaldæans, that the meagre information gleaned from the priests and independently derived from the empirical rules, was reduced to its crude Greek first principles. Thus, Professor G. Forbes states that “the Egyptian priests tried to keep such astronomical knowledge as they possessed to themselves“; and, as indicating the reluctance with which they parted with information, Sir G. Wilkinson states that “ Iamblichus says Pythagoras derived his information upon different sciences from Egypt; he learnt philosophy from the priests ; and his theories of comets, numbers, and ‘ music were doubtless from the same source ; but the great repugnance evinced by the Egyptian Priests to receive Pythagoras, will account for their withholding from him much that they knew, though his great patience, and his readiness to comply with their regulations, even to the rite of circumcision (Clem. Strom, i, p. 302) obtained for him more information than was imparted to any other Greek (Plut. de Is. s. 10).” •

In light of the facts we now possess from the monuments, the ancient accounts of the sojourn of Pythagoras in Egypt picture him as a skilful cross-examiner eliciting information from a reluctant Priesthood. We can picture the Egyptian Priests striving to impress Pythagoras with the vast extent of their own learning and at the same time seeking to obscure the real facts—and their ignorance of the derivation of the facts—by dogmatic and mystifying assertions. Nevertheless, their long association with a credulous and easily satisfied laity ill fitted them for dealing in debate with an intellect so original, independent, and penetrating as that of Pythagoras.

¶127. THE HELLENIZING OF EGYPT. 7th CENTURY B.C. TO 7TH CENTURY A.D.

Coincident with the political and commercial rise of the Greek States, and the development of Hellenic science and arts, we can trace the decline, politically and commercially, of Egypt, and the accelerated decadence of Egyptian science and art. Greek philosophers hastened to absorb the virtues of the dying race— and many of its vices. Greek mercenaries, from the middle of the 7th century B.C. onwards, found military employment in Egypt. Pandering to the cults, the Greeks gradually undermined, throughout a succession of generations, the basis of the Egyptian national constitution. Slowly they Hellenized a nation for whom Hellenism meant disintegration.

After the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great, the Greeks monumentalised their indebtedness to the Egyptians in the sciences and arts, by founding, during the reign of Ptolemy I, the famous library of Alexandria. From this age onwards, a long succession of Greek geometers, astronomers and philosophers, in the various schools of Alexandria, maintained the connection that previously had been more remotely held. Here all the learning that was gleaned and developed from the priests of the dying cults was reduced to literary form and method. Ultimately, however, in the age of Theon, and his daughter Hypatia, the schools themselves declined by falling completely under the pernicious spell of Egyptian dogma. In 642 A.D., the famous library was burnt by the orders of the Caliph Omar.

“A cloud of witnesses“ says Mr. R. Brown, Junr—in his “ Primitive Constellations “—” testify to the connection between the wisdom of the East and the earlier sages of Hellas. The treasures of the library of Alexandria, the lore of such Chaldæan sages as Kide”n, Naburianos, and Soudinos (vide Strabo, XVI, i, 6) were at the service of Hipparchus “ ; and again, quoting from the Scholiast on Aratos (Diosemeia. 21) “the Hellenes received them from the Egyptians and Chaldseans.”

¶128. THE SIGNIFICANT CONTRAST IN GREEK PRESENTATION OF SCIENCE.

The almost spontaneous rise and rapid development of Greek science date from the period during which Greek philosophers first visited Egypt. This dates back to the middle of the 7th century B.C., when the XXVIth Egyptian Dynasty began, and asserted its supremacy after the withdrawal of the Assyrians. At this time we saw that the Egyptians attempted a tawdry restoration of the manners, customs, arts, and sciences of the Pyramid age (¶109).

The “discoveries“ of the Greek philosophers dating from this age can be definitely divided into two classes. These are divided by the clearly marked sharpness of contrast in passing from one class to the other. On the one hand there are enunciations that are certainly the result of mature thought and experienced observation during a long succession of trained philosophers. On the other hand, enunciations, clearly the result of less mature thought, and of less experienced observation—more pertaining to the environment one would associate with a nation’s first crude gropings amongst hypotheses of science— were claimed as equally great discoveries of the same philosopher.

Thus Thales of Miletus—the first of the Greek philosophers to visit Egypt for scientific instruction—while stating that the eclipses of the moon were caused by the earth cutting off the sun’s light from the moon, indicated his own ignorance of the necessary advanced conceptions for arriving at this conclusion, by stating that the earth floated upon water. As to the extent of ‘his experience, prior to his visit to Egypt, that is given by Hieronymus of Rhodes in his statement that Thales “never had any teacher except during the time he went to Egypt and associated with the Priests.” (ap. Diog. Laer. I, 27).

¶129. THE LEARNED EVASIONS OF PYTHAGORAS.

Pythagoras of Samos, who next of the Greek philosophers visited Egypt, stated that all the planets revolved around a common centre. This was not accepted by scientific circles in Europe until 2,000 years later. Pythagoras, however, indicated the vast unlikelihood of his having originated this conception by claiming to have deduced his system from “fantastic first principles, of which the following are examples : ‘The circular motion is the most perfect motion,’ ‘Fire is more worthy than Earth,’ ‘Ten is the perfect number.’ “¹ These so-called “first principles“ bear a striking resemblance to the mystifying dogmas retailed by the Egyptian Priests—or to the catchword oratory of a modern type of aspirant to state-control—chanted to satisfy inquiring reason by voluminous reiteration rather than by wealth of argument. It is clear that the true first principles were as much the product of the same advanced state of knowledge as the advanced planetary hypothesis immediately deduced from them, and that these advanced first principles were quite unknown to Pythagoras, and possibly unknown to his Egyptian instructors.

However this may be, it seems clear enough that Pythagoras derived his system from the Egyptian Priests. It is certain that the latter were, for many centuries, the custodians of much valuable scientific knowledge. This they explained on premises palpably absurd, but admirably adapted to suit the end they had in view.

¹‘Professor G. Forbes, “ History of Astronomy,” p. 14.

¶130. THE LOST ART OF NUMERICAL AND GEOMETRICAL EVALUATION.

The religious and philosophical conceptions preserved by the Egyptian Priests were similarly expressed by them in geometrical and numerical forms that appear in no wise to suggest the symbolic use to which they were put, but

appear rather to suggest the traditional survival of a symbolism of which the art was lost. Now it is a fact that there is a geometrical or numerical basis attaching itself to most natural phenomena. We have merely to cite Kepler’s Laws of the planets, Newton’s Gravitational Laws, or Einstein’s Laws of Relativity (including Newton’s Laws in the same mathematical category as the Laws of other branches of Physics). There are also the complicated mathematical series’ associated with the formation of flower petals, and certain microscopical; growths, and the marvellous geometrical forms of snowflakes and crystals.

We are carried further in this subject by investigation of the Periodic Law of the Chemical Elements (and the connected periodicities of Isotopy), Radioactivity, the Electronic Theory of Matter, Harmonics, etc

¶131. BODE’S LAW.

A close approximation to numerical harmony occurs in the case of the planetary distances from the sun. This relationship is expressed by the series of Bode’s Law—o, 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, 96, 192, 384, where o is the origin at Mercury. On this scale of relative distances, Mercury is distance 4 from the Sun. Adding this to the series given, the relative distances from the Sun are, according to Bode’s Law:— 4, 7, 10, 16, 28, 52, 100, 196, & 388, the-real distances being 3.9, 7.2, 10, 15.2, ------- , 52, 95.4, 191.8, & 300.6. In this series the distance of the Earth from the Sun is 10, and the outstanding exception is the case of Neptune.

The distance 28 in Bode’s series indicates the mean semi-major axis of the belt of orbits of the 91 minor planets that lie between Mars (15.2) and Jupiter (52).

Now when we remember that the advanced Planetary System of Pythagoras was claimed by him as derived from such “first principles“ as “Ten is the perfect number,” and that “all things are numbers,” we see a possible hint that the relations of Bode’s Law were not unknown to the originators of the system. Thus Dr. A. S. Pringle-Pattison states that in the Solar System of Pythagoras “The distance of the revolving orbs from the central fire was determined according to simple numerical relations, and the Pythagoreans combined their astronomical and musical discoveries in the famous doctrine of ‘ the harmony of the spheres.’ “1

¹‘Enc. Brit, (nth Edit.), Vol. XXII, p. 7OOa

¶132. THE SOURCE OF THE PYTHAGOREAN THEORY THAT “ALL THINGS ARE NUMBERS.”

There is evidence that in early Egyptian times there was a definite conception—derived undoubtedly from the former civilisation—associated with the symbolising of phenomena and ideas on geometrical or numerical bases. In the works of the later Egyptians, however, where such symbolical intention can be traced, everything indicates that the geometrical and numerical symbolism was no longer associated with a rational basis. The symbolic art had been lost. Nothing remained but a blind faith in its existence, and haphazard and foolish attempts at its realisation in the case of the Egyptian King Lists.

This blind faith in a geometrical or numerical ordering of things and phenomena—though applied haphazard—ruled the geometrical, astronomical, and musical systems of Pythagoras. The boundless enthusiasm and tireless energy inseparable from faith of this nature, undoubtedly led Pythagoras to the discovery of more geometrical and numerical problems and principles than he ever received from his Egyptian tutors. It is, however, clearly certain that the bulk of his epoch-making “discoveries“ and enunciations were derived from the Egyptians, and that similar advances in geometrical and astronomical thought associated with his successors were likewise derived from Egypt and Chaldæa. No other conclusion is possible when one studies an analytic tabulation of the historical progress of Greek science. An analytic statement of this character is given in Table X.

¶133. THE QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE RELATIONS OF EGYPTIAN AND GREEK KNOWLEDGE.

One obvious conclusion is to be derived from the analytic statement of! Table X. This is, that if what Pythagoras learnt in Egypt enabled him to! construct a system of geometry and astronomy excelling that of his teachers, there was clearly no necessity for his successors to visit Egypt for further knowledge of geometry and astronomy.

It is also obvious that the Egyptian priests would scarcely permit the Greeks to learn as much geometry and astronomy as they themselves knew, and that the Greeks—quick to discern scientific knowledge in the meagre information meted out to them—would have been equally quick to discern when no further knowledge was available. From this it would seem to follow that most, if not all, of the knowledge independently discovered by the Greeks was previously known to the Egyptians. For although the Greeks made great advances in geometry and astronomy, the fact remains that they still continued to seek improvement in Egypt. This is the fact that gives some measure of the amount of geometrical and astronomical knowledge that the Egyptian Priests possessed —knowledge of these subjects as distinct from understanding concerning their origination and the derivation of their first principles.

¶134. GREEK MEASURES AND SCIENCE CONTEMPORANEOUSLY FROM EGYPT.

Of this knowledge we have already had evidence in our consideration of the origin of the Egyptian systems of measures. The connection between geometry and measures naturally suggests that the Greeks derived both from Egypt about the same time. Thus, as noted by Herodotus in the 5th century B.C., the inhabitants of Samos were already using the Egyptian common cubit of 20.63 B”. It is the existence of this cubit, and the obvious manner of its derivation, that led to the discovery of the relatively high geometrical and mathematical skill attained by the former civilisation from which the oral traditions of the ancient Egyptians had descended.

The use of this cubit in Samos would naturally lead to the Samians making further inquiry concerning its application to the measurement of areas. Not improbably it was this desire that led Pythagoras—whose earlier years are identified with Samos—to interest himself in the measurement of areas. Now it is stated by Aristoxenos, the musician, that Pythagoras “ was the first person who introduced weights and measures amongst the Hellenes “ (Diog. Laert. Pythagoras, xiii), and Professor G. J. Allman¹ states that “on examining the purely geometrical work of Pythagoras and his disciples we observe that it is much concerned with the geometry of areas, and we are indeed struck with its Egyptian character.”

It is certain, therefore, that the basal geometry of the Pythagorean system was that of the Egyptians. This Egyptian system was based upon the conception of the year circle and its square of equal area—from which the Samian or common Egyptian cubit was derived—and was derived originally from the scientific system of the civilisation that had preceded the period of the early Egyptian, Babylonian, and Mediterranean civilisations. It is to this former lost civilisation that we must refer the origination of the heliocentric planetary system of Pythagoras.

^lEnc. Brit, (nth Edit.). Vol. XXII. p. 7010.