When the Rosetta stone was found during the Napoleonic era, Ancient Egypt was held in the highest regard. According to Jeremy Nadler in Shamanic Wisdom in the Pyramid Texts: The Mystical Tradition of Ancient Egypt, Ancient Egypt was seen as harbouring a tradition of deep wisdom that was the inspirational fount of Greek religion, mythology and philosophy - particularly Platonism and Hermeticism. In In 1799 this knowledge of Egypt depended on ancient commentators such as Plutarch, Diodorus, Iamblichis and Aristotle. According to Aristotle, Egypt was “the cradle of mathematics” and the priests of Egypt invented geometry, arithmetic and astronomy. Other ancient sources testified that prominent Greek thinkers like Thales, Pythagoras and Plato learned their philosophy and science from the Egyptians.
It was 20 years, however, before the transliteration of the Egyptian scripts was announced by Jean-François Champollion in Paris in 1822, and with that Egyptology was born with early Egyptologists like Champollion, de Rougé, and Brugsch holding a great reverence for Egypt as the source of a sublime metaphysics and theology, but this view was not to last. The opinions held of the ancient Egyptians by the Egyptological establishment were about to embark on a steady decline.
By the turn of the century earlier views of Egypt were displaced by a far more critical approach as Egyptology established itself as a professional academic discipline. Egyptologists like Maspero and Erman views differed markedly from those of the earlier “romantics” who respectively described the Ancients as “ semi barbarians, and ‘compliers of spells”. To many of the first generation of scholars, the sacred literature of ancient Egypt seemed so muddled, haphazard and obscure that any residual hopes of rediscovering some “forgotten wisdom” or “secret knowledge” came to seem a foolish endeavour. Thus it was concluded that the ancient Egyptian mind was “pre philosophical”, incapable of coherent or systematic thought and given to expressing itself in rather crude imagery.
This view of the ancient Egyptian mind to a large extent remained the dominant one among Egyptogists for much of the twentieth century. That Egyptians, far from being the guardians of a secret wisdom, were actually an ignorant lot who had not yet discovered philosophy or science. As Egyptologist B. L. Goff wrote in the late 1970’s, “In ancient Egypt, as also elsewhere in the ancient world, there was no knowledge of consistent laws governing the operation of everything around us”.
This assessment of the level of knowledge in ancient Egypt was shared by others as well. As Barry Kemp wrote in Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization (1989) these cultures “have arisen and run successfully for long periods without much true knowledge of the world at all.”
This assumption had such a strong hold that even when the historian of science Otto Neugebauer and the Egyptologist J.-Ph.Lauer were forced by the evidence on the ground to admit that the Egyptians were using pi and phi in the construction of their temples, instead of concluding that the Egyptians had a theoretical knowledge of these mathematical relations, they put it down merely to “practical knacks” and “utilitarian empiricism.” In other words, they used pi and phi without being aware of the fact they were doing so.
In the second part of the twenties century, however, the view of the ancient Egyptian mind as “pre philosophical” and incapable of accessing worthwhile knowledge became less and less sustainable. In the view of James P. Allen, writing in the last 1980’s, “we should lament less the intellectual deficiency of the ancient Egyptians that of modern Western thought which has created a dichotomy between objective scientific knowledge and philosophy on the one hand and the subjective religion experience on the other.”
A growing rift thus emerged between “mainstream” Egyptology, and “outsiders” who usually did not have a formal qualification in Egyptology and so could easily be dismissed as cranks. Foremost among the latter was R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, who despite his detailed study of the theoretical principles and practical applications of ancient Egyptian mathematics in The Temple Of Man remained virtually ignored by the Egyptological establishment. In fact when The Temple in Man ( Le Temple de l’Homme) first appeared in French in 1957, the eminent Egyptologist Etienne Drioton counselled his colleagues to "build a common wall of silence" around it lest it find its way out into public view. With just a few notable exceptions, that injunction was obeyed within Egyptology itself.
Schwallers observations and esteem for the ancient Egyptians might have been lost to obscurity had not John Anthony West published Serpent in the Sky in 1979. As Peter Tompkins writes in the forward to this book, “In the current joust between materialist and metaphysician, with admirers of the former screaming for blood from the latter, John Anthony West has taken up the banner in support of the Alsatian philosopher R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz. It is the thesis of de Lubicz, lucidly developed by West, that the builders of ancient Egypt had far more sophisticated understanding of metaphysics and of the laws which govern man and this universe than most Egyptologists have been willing to admit. It is a striking thesis, but unpopular with orthodox scholars who have deliberately ignored it for twenty years, though they proffer no argument against it other than that it contravenes accepted dogma.”
Serpent in the Sky presented a now revolutionary, exhaustively documented reinterpretation of the civilisation of ancient Egypt. West showed that Egyptian science, medicine, mathematics and astronomy were all of an exponentially higher order of refinement and sophistication than modern scholars will acknowledge. Ultimately it was West’s book that inspired and comprised a significant portion of the Magical Egypt documentary series that would spread this knowledge about ancient Egypt even further into the modern world, and might have surprisingly lead to the discovery of a new Rosetta Stone.
In 1998 while animating a sequence for the Magical Egypt Series award winning animator Chance Gardner was stuck by the number of correspondences revealed by the overlay of the classic Egyptian Pylon over the human skull. A hidden language was discovered that spoke through an ingenious use of geometric correspondence. At that time Gardner was not certain what the ramifications of this finding would be, but an idea began to gestate in the back of his mind.
At around the same time Author Gary Osborn also noticed a number of correspondences between certain instances of ancient Egyptian art, and brain anatomy as a result of having undertaken a study of esoteric literature in order to come to terms with a mystical experience he had had. One example of Gary’s discovery quickly became an internet meme as we shall see below. What Gardner and Osborn did not realise at that time is that both, in their own way had stumbled across a method of interpreting encoded meaning in the art of the Egyptians, possibly as powerful as the Rosetta Stone had been at solving the riddle of hieroglyphics language.
Fuente: www.magicalegypt.com
