Ancient Egypt and Modern Esotericism

On an inner level, the ritual sailing of the king occurs in the heavens. Just as in the coronation text of Thutmose III,the king flies up to the sky in order to worship Ra and be filed with his akh-power,so the context of the ritual sailing is cosmic. The ancient Egyptians understood that to become enlightened one must become aware of that which is cosmic in one's own nature. One must realize that there is something deep within human nature that is essentially not of this earth, but is a cosmic principle.

    The cosmic being who presided over Ra's diurnal voyage across the sky was the heavenly goddess Nut. It was she who gave birth to Ra each morning and who received him into herself again in the evening. When Ra entered her interior realm each evening, he entered the secret and wholly invisible world that the Egyptians called the Dwat.

     The Dwat was conceived as being on the other side of the star that we see when we look up at the night sky. The stars were imagined as being on the flesh of the goddess Nut, and the Dwat was in some sense behind or within the world of which the stars demarcated the outermost boundary.

    It was not just the sun god however that entered the Dwat at the end of the day. All creatures were believed to return to the Dwat at the end of their lives, pass into its dark interior, and were born from it again, just as the sun god was born from the Dwat each morning. There was therefore the outwardly visible cosmos, the star of Nut's body, and what exist invisibly in her interior. It is a threshold we all come to when we die, when everything becomes concentrated at a single point, and then disappears from view.

      Knowledge of this interior world of the Dwat was considered by the Egyptians to be the most important, most profound knowledge, for people living on earth to acquire. The Dwat was not only the realm of the dead, but also the realm of the gods and spirits and furthermore, the realm from which all living things emerge. All life issues from the Dwat. To know this mysterious interior world was to become truly wise, for then one knew both sides of existence, the invisible along with the visible.

   It is interesting that Thutmose III had the complete text and illustration of the most comprehensive guide to the Dwat(the book of what is in the underworld) painted on the inner walls of his tomb in the valley of the kings. As his coronation text remind us, this was a king who was "instructed in the wisdom of the gods". Unlike Napoleon, Thutmose III was initiated into a deep spiritual knowledge. It is not without significance that the name Thutmose means "born of Thoth," the god whom the Greek identified with Hermes, and form who one of the most important of the Western esoteric traditions , the Hermetic Tradition, derives its name.

                                     THE THREE TASKS
I have tried to show that the Egyptians lived with an awareness of a dimension of reality that is best described by the term "imaginal," a non-physical yet objective reality that we become aware of through the human faculty  of imagination. For the Egyptians, the agencies and powers that can be reached through contact with the imaginal world are far more potent than anything merely physical, because through them physical reality can be transformed.

     Thus we have seen how Thtmose III called upon Seth and Neith to infuse him with a superhuman martial energy that enable him to go to war with an irresistible ferocity . In battle after battle, he and his accompanying priest could also magically invoke the imaginal reality of the defeat of the powers opposed to the sun god and ma'at, both of whom the pharaoh represented, indeed embodied, on earth. It was this, according to his own account, that brought Thutmose his victories.

    I have also tried to show that the Egyptians lived with an understanding that we are not just terrestrial beings; we are also cosmic. As such, our spiritual fulfilment is only possible is a cosmic setting. This understanding is to be found from the earliest sacred literature( the pyramid Texts), to the  coronation text of Thutmose III and the book of the Dead, where, for example, such mystical episodes as flying up to the sky, seeing the image of the sun god, boarding the sun-boat and / or becoming inwardly "solarised," are all recorded.

     Finally, i have suggested that the Egyptians had an orientation towards the world of the dead(the Dwat) that saw it as being the source of the most profound wisdom concerning the nature of reality. There is a remarkably rich metaphysical literature concerning the Dwat, knowledge of which was evidently regarded as relevant not only to the the dead but also to the living. All of this was "mainstream" ancient Egyptian religious consciousness.

       THE EGYPTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS GOES UNDERGROUND
At the end of the Egyptian era it went "underground," moving from the temple to the private household, and then to the small group meeting in secret, from whence it would pass into various esoteric traditions. Thus in the Alchemical  tradition, there is a particular focus on the imaginal realm of archetypes and the path of inner transformation. In the Hermetic tradition there is a concentration on the realization of our cosmic nature, while in Gnosticism we find a particular emphasis on the invisible hierarchies  of the spirit world. These three western esoteric streams could be understood as each preserving in their different ways the ancient Egyptian wisdom into the next cultural era.

     Meanwhile the emerging mainstream culture with its Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman basis increasingly rejected the old consciousness. The world became more and more impermeable to the divine, archetypal and imaginla presences. In Judaism the notion of idolatry, which would have been incomprehensible to the ancient Egyptians came to dominate the religious consciousness; while the Greeks and Romans saw the gods slowly fade away and become less and less easy to communicate with. The new consciousness meant that people experienced the world going through a kind of solidification, so that is was no longer able to transmit the radiant energies of the divine.

     At the same time there emerged an increasing sense that human beings were simply terrestrial beings and consequently, our happiness was conceived less in cosmic terms and more in terms of satisfying our physical needs, desire and comforts. The material world had to be mastered to this end and this, in time, became the great project of science and technology, which involved an almost complete forgetfulness of our cosmic origins.

    It also involved a forgetfulness of that part of human existence that belongs between death and rebirth. There was a growing identification of the human being solely with the life that we lead between birth and death. Already, both the Greek and Judaic conceptions of life after death expressed the conviction that the soul survived as pale and ghostly reflection of its formal self. As the ghost of Achilles says in Homer's Odyssey," the senseless dead are mere shadows of men outworn. This view, so very different from that of the Egyptians, culminated in the modern idea that there is simply no existence at all after death. Modern scientific materialism is founded upon a total ignorance of the spirit world .

      I proposed that ancient Egypt exposes to tension in our own culture and that is so doing we can see it karmic role today. The reason why it may be helpful to see Egypt in these terms is because we are now coming to the end of the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian era. It has achieved its purpose, which was to make us more individuated, more self (rather than god) centred in our soul-life, and thus more free.

         Becoming Aware Again of Inner Spiritual Realities
Now there is a need to become aware again of inner, spiritual realities bit to become aware of them grounded in our own sense of self, and which we can once more turn toward them. So i would suggest that it is here that the profound karmic relationship is working between ancient Egypt and the new era that is beginning to unfold before us.

      While our relationship to ancient Egypt is certainly based upon our acquiring a deeper and more accurate knowledge of its culture and religion, the relationship is by no means simply in the direction of the present to the past. It is also about how the past can support us in forging our own future by helping us to re-engage with the spiritual dimensions which were so intrinsic to people's experience in the times of old.

      What ancient Egypt can do today is to provide both the impetus and the anchorage for a modern esotericism. By esotericism i mean knowledge of  inner realities. There is no question of " going back" to ancient Egypt. It is rather the case that by wrestling with ancient Egyptian sacred text, we are drawn down to a deeper level of awareness that we need to make more conscious. And feeling this need, we are driven to find our own new relationship to the spiritual dimension.

        As i see it, there are three tasks ahead for contemporary esotericism. The first is to grow into a fully felt and participative relationship with the imaginal worlds that stand behind the physical. We need constantly to work at dissolving the density of the physical and literal world. We need to loosen its solidity in order to see through to the luminous world of spirits, gods and archetypes that are its invisible matrix. They are, in a sense, the "dream" of the world that our modern, all too wide-awake to return our waking consciousness to this dream, by bringing it once more into a living relationship with the imaginal dimensions of the world.

      Along with this comes the second task, which is to expand our conception of ourselves beyond the confines of the earth by developing a sense that the cosmos that surrounds us is not just dead matter, but full of soul. To do this we need not so much to work against as to work through the materialistic conceptions that permeate modern cosmological thinking. We can develop once again a feeling for the soul-qualities of the planets and constellations, for the whole world of the stars. And the more we are able todo this, the more we are able to connect with the "world soul" or anima mundi as it used to be called, the more will be able to reconnect again with our own cosmic nature.

        I see the third task as being once more to become aware of the realm of death as the other half of life, as much a part of our existence as sleep is a part of our life between birth and death. It requires that we see this realm of death not so much as a place that we go after we die, as a realm that we inhabit,or one might say inhabit us, alongside the world of the living. The world of death can be understood as a completely interior world, and yet despite the fact that it has no dimensions, it is not necessarily inaccessible to consciousness.For its interiority ultimately coincides with our own. The more we become aware of the source of what arise in our own consciousness, the more do we extend our consciousness towards this deeply interior realm of death. And in extending our consciousness towards it, we extend our consciousness towards that other half of existence without which we cannot fully participate in life .