SO LONG as the Old Kingdom of Egypt lasted and the great priesthood of Ra-Harakhte continued to hold sway over the Egyptian people, the little colony in Britain remained in continuous contact with the parent observatory at Heliopolis, receiving supplies of technical equipment, paper and medicines in exchange for accurate astronomical data regarding the motions of the sun, moon and planets. But there came a day when a ship arrived from the Nile bringing no supplies but filled instead with refugees from the bloody massacres of the Egyptian revolution which, in a sudden outburst, had liquidated the priesthood and destroyed the records of their secret lore. No further communication was henceforth possible between Egypt and Britain. Avebury and Stonehenge were left to fend for themselves.
Their new isolation forced a number of changes in the British Egyptians’ way of life. Being now entirely dependent on local resources for everything they needed and being unable to remit their redundant population back to Egypt as their numbers grew, they fanned out from their settlements to occupy large tracts of country further afield. While Avebury remained the administrative capital, Stonehenge grew in importance as a centre of education and culture for the expanding population. Near it there grew up a town in and around which were located a training centre for the education of young priests, a stadium for their physical exercise, and an enlarged establishment for scientific research. Priority continued to be accorded to astronomical studies because the prediction of eclipses provided vital means of impressing the native barbarians; but increasing importance was now attached to more practical forms of magic, notably medicine. In this field over the course of centuries the priests built up a fund of knowledge and skill which they applied with such effect throughout the country that the people of Britain became proverbial in other lands for their health.
To their own community the priests taught the religious doctrine on which their technical civilization was founded: the creation of the Universe by a divine Intelligence, personified as the sun god, and the inevitability of divine justice for all men through the process of reincarnation; for death, they said, is but a temporary interval in the cycle of eternal life.
Underlying this belief was a mathematical secret which had been handed down as part of the ancient wisdom from priest to priest in continuous succession from the founder of the first civilization. The clue to its nature is to be found in the science of astronomy. Those ancient astronomers, wiser than the men of today, studied the forms of life on earth as well as the motions of the heavenly bodies, and they drew comparisons. They noted how life begins as a tiny speck, waxes in size and strength from birth through infancy and adolescence until it attains its full maturity, and then wanes, shrivelling and weakening through old age to death.
Just like the phases of the moon.
From their studies of eclipses those men discovered that what changes in those changing phases is not the moon itself, as everyone had thought, but only the moon’s light which it receives and reflects from the sun. By making calculations and checking them against observations they established the fact that the moon is a solid sphere, and the reason why it appears to wax and wane is that the velocities and angles of its orbit round the earth are different from those of the earth’s orbit round the sun. Could it not be, then, that creatures that live and die are like the moon, and that the lives they appear to live on earth, waxing and waning, are not their real selves but merely reflections of the conjunctions of those selves with the physical forces of the earth? In that case a man’s real self or soul is a solid body which is fully manifest only when his life is at the full, that is to say when he is at the height of his powers midway between birth and natural death. In childhood and old age his light is less not because his soul is less but because the angle of inclination between it and the earth’s orbit makes it appear less.
Even when the moon is at the full the light that it sheds upon the earth comes only from its surface. The solid sphere beneath the surface is invisible. So the body of the human soul, however bright the light with which it shines, is itself invisible.
But how could the soul be described as a ‘solid body’ or as ‘having a body’ if it cannot be seen or touched? And where is it when the physical body that it animated on earth is dead and buried? To these questions posed by the analogy of astronomy the same analogy suggested an answer. The earth moves only in the plane of the ecliptic; but the moon moves round the earth in a plane which is inclined to the ecliptic in another dimension and which cuts it at two points — the ascending and the descending nodes. Might not the soul revolve similarly round the earth in higher dimensions outside the three dimensions of space, cutting the earth’s orbit at the nodal points of birth and death? In the period of life that intervenes between the nodes the force of the soul mingles with the forces of the earth and moulds them into the shape of the physical body that it needs for the performance of its function. As the moon’s function is to reflect the light of the sun, so the function of the human soul is to reflect the light of reason that it receives from the divine Intelligence. This is why the astronomer-priests of Egypt personified that Intelligence as the sun god Ra and referred to him as ‘Ra of the two horizons’.
The two horizons of Ra were the ‘light horizon’ and the ‘life horizon’. Ra of the light horizon was the real sun in its capacity as the source of the world’s material energy; Ra of the life horizon was the divine Intelligence which is the source of the spiritual energy that characterises all living things and finds its highest expression in human intelligence. The two horizons thus represented the material and the spiritual worlds, the term ‘horizon’ itself being a mathematical term used to denote a system of dimensions, or what a modern mathematician might call a ‘frame of reference’. [Note 1]
Ra of the life horizon was represented in Egyptian funerary art as a flattened circle or solar disc (flattened because a true circle would have involved the use of the irrational and material number pi) riding on the hindquarters of two lions seated back to back. Here, as in the Sphinx, the lion is symbolic of force. The lions’ names were Shu and Tefnet. They represented the two primordial forces of life — forces whose names are not to be found in the vocabulary of the physicist or the chemist but which constitute the motivations of all living things — namely, desire and fear.
Shu, the force of desire, was a male god who was associated with the future, because desire is the cause of male aggressiveness and it is a force operating in the time dimension, pulling forward into the future. Shu was sometimes identified with the seminal fluid, regarded both as the source of sexual desire and as the point of entry through which all life’s desires and aspirations enter the body at conception. Tefnet, the force of fear, was a wan character compared with Shu. She was a female deity associated with the past, because timidity is a feminine characteristic and fear pulls backward in the time dimension, away from the future towards the past.
36. Shu and Tefnet. The priest Ani prays to Ru who rests on the backs of the lions Shu and Tefnet
The two lions were portrayed sitting back to back because desire and fear pull in opposite directions. They have their forelegs straight and heads erect to show that they are independent forces with wills of their own; but their hindlegs are folded under the weight of Ra, the force of reason and self-control which holds the two lions in check. (For obvious reasons Egyptian funerary texts never represented the situation that arises when one of the lions stands up, throws Ra off his back, and gallops away — that is to say, when a person loses his self-control either in anger through frustrated desire or in panic when faced with a sudden danger.) The human soul itself on which these forces act was portrayed by the Egyptian priests as a small, three-dimensional object with the face of the dead man and the wings and eye of Ra’s son Horus. For since, they argued, the body has three dimensions co-incident with the dimensions of the physical world, it follows that the forces which come from the spiritual world beyond the horizon of our vision to mould and animate it must act on it from a different frame of reference comprising three other dimensions which intersect transversely those in which it has its physical existence.
If it is possible to calculate the lunar orbit and measure its angle of inclination to the ecliptic, might it not also be possible to calculate the orbit of the soul as it proceeds from life to life in those non-spatial dimensions? The astronomers considered how this might be done. Here they noted an important difference between the moon and the soul. The moon is an inanimate object revolving round and round for ever along the same immutable path and never changing. Its path is a circular one, governed by the irrational number pi which is the number of eternal sameness. But the soul is a living thing, for ever moving and growing and developing. Life abhors circles but it delights in evolving spirals and in five-fold symmetry, and the direction of its evolution is towards increasing rationality. Surely then, the soul’s progress is not a repeating arithmetical sequence governed by pi but an expanding geometric progression governed by phi, in which that number multiplies itself at successive turns as it moves outwards from the irrational √5 to the higher rational numbers of the Fibonacci series. [Note 2]
Believing this to be a true picture of the mathematical relation between the soul and the earth, or between mind and body, the astronomers calculated that the nodal points of birth and death where the infinitely small particles of the soul’s ‘body’ make their first and last contacts with earthly matter would be the two points where powers of phi coincide most nearly with fractions of pi, namely the two approximate equations referred to in chapter 9:
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The first of these equations had been enshrined in a kind of architectural code in the massive masonry of the Great Pyramid. That edifice was a mausoleum built to entomb a dead body, and its designers were concerned to symbolise in its geometry only that part of the life cycle which contains the ‘ascending node’ of death. In the dying civilization of the Old Kingdom, death and how to survive it were the principal preoccupations of priests and people alike. But here in their new life in Britain the exiled colonists were liberated from that obsession and they felt an urge to dwell instead on the opposite part of the cycle, the ‘descending node’, where the soul is born anew into another life.
The revolution in Egypt had made the priests of Ra in Britain conscious of the great responsibility they were now carrying as sole inheritors of the ancient wisdom. They alone knew, or thought they knew, the secret of immortality; and they feared that, remote and exposed to dangers as they were, the time would come when they too, would be eliminated and the secret lost. Once lost would it ever again be found? They had long since given up hope that Atum, the Founder of Civilization and Author of the ancient wisdom, would himself return to earth. (He was now known as Atum-Ra because they believed his soul, being perfect, had been reunited with the Divine Intelligence whence it came, just as the souls of the dead Pharaohs were popularly supposed to have joined Ra in his boat of millions of years.) If the Author never returned, who else could discover the secret if it were lost?
As the population of the world grew and the frontiers of civilization expanded, so, the priests foresaw, the quality of life would decline until a nadir was reached. Thereafter many centuries would elapse before civilization again attained the level of knowledge and understanding that had been attained in their own society. That would be the time for the secret to be re-discovered. Somehow, they decided, it had to be preserved and handed down across the centuries in a message which they themselves would be able to decipher when they returned in some future incarnation.
Half the message had already been incorporated in the Pyramid. They had no doubt that there it would endure and in due course be found; but without the other half it would be meaningless. The problem that they therefore set themselves to solve was how to encypher the second half so that it would be read with the first and convey the whole secret when the time was ripe.
The leaders of the British community cast about them for an idea: they wanted to devise a new form of construction which would be as durable as the Pyramid but would symbolise birth rather than death, and in which they could incorporate the mathematical equation of the descending node.
It was their own observatory at Stonehenge that gave them the idea they were seeking: a ring of stones spaced apart and open to the sky. It was the exact antithesis of the pyramidal structure. The pyramid was massively solid, square, and closed; the stone ring was light, round, and open, and it made an excellent symbol of the cycle of rebirth. Open rings were admittedly not as durable as pyramids, but this difficulty would be met by using the biggest possible stones for their construction and making so many of them that enough would be sure to survive to convey the message. Some of their best rings they built on islands off the coast of Scotland. The more remote the island, the more care they took over the alignments because the more likely the stones were to survive.
They accordingly made rings of many different shapes and sizes, some nearly circular to represent the pi orbit of the earth, some egg-shaped because the egg was symbolic of birth, and others flattened so as to incorporate the equation of the descending node in their geometry. Pythagorean triangles, Fibonacci numbers, and integral ratios containing the number 5 were all used to depict the phi orbit of the soul and to provide clues that would help in deciphering the message. They even introduced a new unit of measurement in order that every part of the construction might embody the number √5 which their ancient lore ascribed to the life force itself.
The rings were laid out with the same meticulous accuracy as had been used in the building of the Pyramid, and megaliths were aligned with the risings and settings of sun moon or stars in such a way that they could be used for the accurate measurement of the seasons and for the prediction of eclipses. The lunar observatories served two purposes, one practical, the other symbolic. In the first place it was necessary for the priests of Ra to be able to predict eclipses in order to impress the uninitiated, particularly the native barbarians, with the Britons’ power to influence the sun god, and the more observatories they had the better were their chances of observing the lunar maxima. But the more important purpose of the observatories lay in their symbolism. It was the technique of predicting solar eclipses from lunar observations — a technique that had been pioneered in Britain — that had first provided positive proof that the waning moon was a solid body which continued to exist when it was no longer visible; and it was therefore this technique that provided for the astronomers a kind of symbolic proof that a man’s soul, too, continues to exist after his life has waned and flickered out from his body in death.
This, then, was the message of the megaliths: that man’s soul, like the moon, is solid and eternal. The men who wrote the message would not have been surprised if they had been told that a time would come when mathematicians would have so developed their skill as to be able actually to calculate the moon’s weight. Once again, they would have drawn the comparison with the soul and justified thereby the truth of the ancient wisdom. The soul too, they would have said, has weight. Is it not in obvious fact that some men’s personalities are weightier than others? Massive characters keep a steady course in the roughest storms, whilst the light and fickle are blown this way and that by every changing breeze. Is not this fact just as real as the fact that grain is heavier than chaff? This was the reason why every Egyptian child was brought up to believe that when he died the funeral god Anubis would take his soul and place it in the scales for Thoth the scribe to record its weight. That weight was proportional to the preponderance of good deeds over bad that he had committed in the course of this and former lives. According to which way the balance tipped, rewards or punishments would be meted out to him by the Judge Osiris.
If the priests had been told that in a still later generation men would subject their theory of the moon’s solidity to its final acid test by actually walking on it and bringing pieces of it back to earth, the astronomer priests might then indeed have been surprised; but again they might have pointed a moral. Is this not an indication, they might have said, that the time is near when final proof will be given of man’s immortality through physical contact with the reincarnate souls of the dead? When mathematicians can compute a course to the moon, will they not also be able to compute the orbit of a man’s soul and predict the time and place of his rebirth? Like the planets, the weightiest souls of the historical past will surely be identifiable, when they return, by the characteristic qualities of the light they shed.
It is an interesting coincidence, if nothing more, that the spacecraft from which the first landings on the moon were made were named after the ancient sun god APOLLO.
Notes on Chapter 12
1) This interpretation of the term ‘horizon’ as a system of dimensions would explain the inscription in the Great Pyramid which reads ‘the light horizon of Khufu (Cheops)’, meaning that it was the tomb of that Pharaoh’s body. The fact that the Pyramid also has meaning in relation to the Pharaoh’s soul is indicated by its dedication to Khnum the god of life and arbiter of the ‘life horizon’. See A. Pochan, L’Enigme de la Grand Pyramide (Robert Laffont, Paris, 1971, p. 18).
2) See note 8 to chapter 9 (p. 137) for Schwaller de Lubicz’ description of the Golden Number as constituting for the Egyptians something more than just an ideal proportion. It was a philosophical concept in itself. Phi, the irrational number that eventually attains rationality, was held to link the physical with the metaphysical or spiritual world and so to be the very ‘stuff’ of life, which spans the two.
On the assumption that this philosophy identified specific natural forces with specific numbers a neat table of equivalents can be made up as follows:
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This might explain why √5 was embodied in the Megalithic Yard (see p. 133) which was universally used in all the Megalithic people’s structures, and why φ2 rather than φ was used in the rings which symbolized the reincarnation cycle.