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THE HIDDEN LEGACY OF THE EGYPTIAN TEMPLE.


In Arabic, the land of Egypt is referred to as Al Khem. The name provides the root of our modern word, alchemy, offering a fresh insight not just into the ancient land of Khemet, but also the purpose of its most prized possessions, the temples.

Alchemy, of course, is the mythical practice of transmuting a base metal into gold. But rather than be taken at face value, in esoteric tradition such things are intended to be seen as metaphors. Consequently, the ultimate pursuit of the alchemist’s art was not so much concerned with the material as with the spiritual, and thus the metaphor describes the science of the initiate (the base metal) who discovers that gold within. It is a spiritual awakening, the christed individual who overcomes his ignorance to emerge out of the darkness and into the gilded plane of enlightenment.

Transmuting the pupil was the aim of the Egyptian Mysteries schools. Their classrooms were the temples, extending from Philae in the south, to the fabled library of Alexandria, whose seats once accommodated formidable students such as Pythagoras and Plato. Attendees would spend considerable time at a specific location being taught one aspect of each of the sacred sciences before graduating on to other, more refined establishments.

Many of the original temples were concerned with the teachings of sound, to the extent that adepts studying medicine became healers as well as musicians. The measure of the heavens and the Earth were explained in the study of sacred gaia-metry, or geometry, the ‘measure of earth’, since the fundamental understanding was that the entire universe was underpinned by invisible relationships that favored geometric harmonies. This is today acknowledged throughout science in its study of the subatomic world, and Islam– whose dogma is very much anchored in ancient Egyptian principles– defines the unseen world not in human form, but as geometric order. They call these patterns ‘God at rest’ or ‘the breath of Allah’.

Sacred measure was also taught, because some measures were considered more potent than others. After analyzing the sphere of the Earth, its processional cycles, and its cyclical rhythms, the Egyptians distilled all their observations into a unit of measure that was an analog of the very planet– the Royal Cubit.

Since the Earth was seen as a living organism, using such a unit of measure in the construction of temples would imbue the buildings with a resonance that spoke directly with its host environment. Today, the Royal Cubit is acknowledged even by NASA as the most accurate unit of measure of the Earth.

But the greatest emphasis of esoteric teachings throughout the Mysteries schools was on the harnessing of subtle energies. This included the locating of magnetic lines of energy across the land, and the moving of such depending on the dictum of the day. Indeed, since every temple had been erected after locating intersecting pathways of magnetic force, such work was not conducted lightly, as any misuse of magnetism had potentially catastrophic effects.

Such effects would certainly have been felt by people attending the temples because the human body is, by-and-large, electromagnetic. Inside the human skull, near the pineal gland, sits a tiny deposit of magnetite, and any alteration of local magnetic fields has a profound effect on a person’s state of awareness. The effect also extends to blood and its high content of iron. So, as the students moved from temple to temple, their learning capacity was matched by a gradual raising of their vibratory field. To this purpose, temples were also places of initiation.

Initiation means ‘becoming conscious’, spiritually, so as to guide higher, more penetrating energies into the body. Because of the animal/lower vibratory nature of the human body, introducing a higher vibration must be done in stages lest the nerve centers and electrical conduits be burned out. Not surprisingly, temples rich in subtle energies were traditionally places of meditation, of altered states, even remote viewing. These include the Red Pyramid, the Great Pyramid, Edfu, and Abydos, where the absence of natural light not only induces high activity in the pineal but also amplifies intuition.

The teachers at these sites were either the enlightened pharaoh or a master of the craft within the household. These keepers of the secrets were ‘craftsmen’, and were referred to as ‘crafty’. They were also described as ‘cunning’, whose etymological root is the old English ‘kynning’, meaning ‘knowing of special esoteric knowledge’. Today they are known as Free Masons, whose own roots and center of learning was ancient Heliopolis, today a run-down, litter-infested neighborhood in Cairo.

How the sacred decays with time.

Since the adepts would be taught the principles governing the manipulation of subtle energies, each pupil graduated to the next temple only after demonstrating considerable proficiency with responsibility. The information imparted was not only derived from Universal principles, but such knowledge had been handed down from pre-diluvian civilizations. Understandably, the process of study in the Egyptian workshops was rigorous, Twenty years spent attending temples was not uncommon, and as far as the tutors were concerned, it was preferable to unleashing students into society armed with delusions of grandeur and the capacity to wreck havoc across entire continents.

Which is precisely what had happened around 2000 BC. The geologic record of northern Europe shows a sudden rise in catastrophic earthquakes, volcanism, and a subsequent ‘nuclear winter’, in which crops failed for decades as a mini iced age blistered the northern Atlantic states. It even forced the migration of an entire civilization from the once-thriving Scottish islands onto the soil of Britannia. At the same time in Egypt, a priestly caste had usurped the temples for the control of the many by the few. With the corruption of power and the ensuing lack of responsibility came experiments mis-using the temples. And of biggest interest to the priests was that biggest of toys, the great pyramid at Giza. With mad monks at the helm, this great oscillator– with its built-in geo-harmonics and magnetics– started a colossal chain reaction whose effects can still be seen today on the geological fingerprint of the Earth.

These views of temple usage demonstrate that, long before they degenerated into places of idolatry and worship, buildings such as Luxor, Karnak and the great pyramids were actually places of workship. They were workshops.

To the ancient Egyptians, who saw the world not as a solid object but as a series of energies, atoms and correspondences, the temple was everything. It was a living, breathing organism based on, and designed with, the application of harmonic principles based on the observation of nature and the Cosmos– the perfect domain of the gods. These principles focused subtle energies onto a given location, what eventually became our modern altar (or ‘alter’, as it was spelled up until the eighteenth century). By incorporating universal harmonics into the fabric of the temple, it was hoped that such mirrors of perfection would transfer the same into the human temple.

Since the human body was viewed as a microcosm of universal harmony, complete with its own internal geometry, anyone entering the temple in a state of dis-ease (out-of-ease with their environment) was seen as having their molecules out of balance or possessing a distorted inner geometry. By coming into contact with a space consisting of perfect harmonics, the spatial effect of the temple would influence the actions of taking place inside the body, and the individual would be transmuted into a conscious mirror image of the perfect world of the gods.

Such an advanced concept of geometry and spatial harmonics was discovered to have a profound effect on living energy fields by Bulgarian scientists during the 1950s. Placing diseased people in an appropriate geometric shape was found to indeed have a curative effect on the patients’ molecular structures.

The alchemical transmutation of students into adepts did not just take place through the energetic properties of the temple or the gradual intellectual development inside their heads. It was also expected of the pupil in their daily life. And for this, a series of ‘spells’ were devised and applied during the course of everyday conduct. These would ideally be recited at the end of the day during a moment of contemplation of the day’s affairs: ‘I have not stolen’, ‘I have not deceived’, ‘I have not defiled the temples of the Gods’, and so forth. Today they are commemorated in the catholic Ten Commandments, although quite what happened to the other forty of so is anyone’s guess, given there are approximately sixty ‘spells’ in the Egyptian Book of Coming Forth By Light (often and erroneously translated as the Book of the Dead).

This concept of ‘as within, so without’ blended perfectly with the ancient Egyptian maxim that the physical world should closely mirror the rules inherent in the cosmos, which was seen as the very essence and expression of perfection. And they called it, ‘as above so below’.

Once again we find this understanding memorialized today, in the Islamic principle of the Ka’Ba or ‘spirit body’, and conceptualized in the Qa’ba’allah (spirit-body-of God), better known today as that Jewish esoteric study, the Kabbala. The four aspects of the material body (earth, air, fire, water) are geometrically represented by the square; the spiritual or ‘above’ force is represented by a second square overlaid at 45-degrees. The net result, the eight-pointed star, is the predominant geometry throughout the Islamic world, as representative of Allah. It was used as the symbol of the spiritual journey of the original and true Knights Templars, who would in turn be exterminated by an emerging Catholic religion.

Given this much cross-cultural referencing, it does seem odd that all these people should be fighting one another!

But let us return to the temple. Students entering the great halls and courtyards so idiosyncratic of these edifices would be required to pause at specified points along the concourse to awaken the seven points of energy entry into the body, the charkas. This would help the individual become more attuned with his or her environment, as well as making them more receptive to learning by intuition. At temples such as Luxor, the student would pause at the entrance so as to invoke the rising of kundalini at the base chakra, at which point they would be suitably en-tranced; at the great courtyard, only those of open heart would be allowed to enter.

Before approaching the altar– to awaken the third-eye chakra and subsequently stimulating the pineal– one entered the sound chamber to activate the fourth or throat chakra. The same process was built into the naves of Gothic cathedrals such as Chartres, and Salisbury, UK, in which the location of the choir performs the same function.

The continuous association between temples and sound is dramatized by the way the entrance to Saqqara was designed to mimic a bed of reeds. The connection between reeds and sound is found in the myth of the nature god Pan, who fashions his pipes from a bushel of water reeds. At Saqqara, a person walking down this evocative colonnade is literally played like a pipe, as each ‘reed’ along the processional way emits a subtle energy field of alternating positive and negative polarities. The effect serves to stimulate the body’s electromagnetic field, which is bi-polar.

The tradition of placing the image of the goddess Maat at the entrance to temples served to dispel any negative energies that the individual might bring into the temple from the profane world. Bearing the symbol of the feather, the legacy of Maat is preserved in Native American lore, in which an elder dispels the negative energy of participants at ceremony by circulating the smoke from a bundle of sage using a feather.

That the traditions of the temple have survived into our present culture– with their correct intent or otherwise– is a testament to a legacy based on universal truth, which ultimately strikes a chord in the heart of people. And if truth has a ring to it, consider this when you next gaze up at the stars: the venerated mother of the temples, Isis, was primarily associated with the stirrings of the heavens, to the degree that, in her original name of Astarte, and later Ast, she gave her name to that wonderful pastime of late-night God-gazing-– ast-ronomy.


©Freddy Silva. No unauthorized reproduction.

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