Backpanel: carvings of the Egyptian Book of Coming Forth By Day in the Mastaba of Unas. At some 4500 years in age, this is very nearly the oldest writing known to exist.~ photo by MWM, 1995
Symbolism In Egyptian Literature(a draft fragment for the Phoenix Trilogy)
As I struggled to organize the massive quantities of materials from my research into the highways and byways of the chapters of my book, I found my physical life mirroring my mental life. As I organized ideas and facts at night, often by day I would find myself physically re-organizing my possessions. This was greatly stimulated by the need to move to Arizona and set-up anew.
Thus recently I discovered an odd piece which I had possessed for some 18 years now, a curio which a world traveling psychic had given me. He had told me that it had my name on it. Since it was a piece of Egyptian jewelry, a pendant full of hieroglyphic motifs, I frankly took little interest in it. I thought that archeology was largely a waste of time. At the time I was quite sure that industrial nirvana was right around the corner and I was determined to get my piece of the action. Who gave a damn, I thought, about the queer old stuff from the superstitious past.
Hahahaha! Turns out the brave new world is going no place you would want to take your mother, or even yourself for that matter, and it also turns out that the queer old stuff from the superstitious past is...well....better take another good look.
When I picked up the pendant I looked at it wondering if it had any possible relevance to my current research related to the Phoenix. I recognized the Khepri motif, knowing it to be the mundane expression of the cyclical nature of the material universe, a sort of lower aspect of the Phoenix concept. This was enough to warrent a closer consideration, so I took the pendent with me to one of my favorite meditation spots in the foothill mesas on the eastern side of Black Canyon. After aligning myself with the place and the moment to give blossem to the cold, peaceful breeze of transcendent bliss which is one the great rewards of the practice of the the yogic arts, I took up consideration of the pendent. As my eye darted over the elements of the design I began to see it as a mandala and then with an astonished aha! I realized that I had in my hands a copy of the Egyptian Wheel Of Karma. As my mind worked with it, I was profoundly overwhelmed to realize it was richer metaphysically and symbolically than anything which I have seen out of India related to the Wheel of Karma/Dharma.
On a following page you will find some of the detail I found in this Wheel Of Karma because it reveals the use of the "Phoenix Crown", never previously defined, which I believe is a master key for unlocking the metaphorical structure of Egypt's foundation stories. But before my words take you there, I want to share with you some of the larger dimensions of my experience with the Wheel.
Most amazingly, the Wheel gave me a mind-meld with the ancient symbolists of Egypt. I finally and really understood what their pictographic language was about and realized that I could now begin to directly read their literature. For some three years I have despaired at the sorry state of understanding of the Egyptian language and stories. Each generation of specialists has changed the spellings and many of the crucial meanings of many of the hieroglyphs and words, rendering their collective literature a study of innumerable contradictions and massive frustration for rampaging outsiders such as I. This is compounded by the rather decisive fact that despite the nominal professionalism of so-called egyptology, most of the major scholars disagree with each other on quite a broad front of specific items, or, if not exactly in overt disagreement, have sharply contrasting interpretations.
Gisele Horvatts, another diligent outsider who has assimulated an astounding bredth of knowledge of literature and archeological datum, convinced me that the task of filtering the text is impossible. Professional egyptologists cannot answer her criticisms, thus they tend to ignore her but after interacting with her on the internet for a year, I consider her a friend and fellow traveler on the road to Rostau with much to offer. She dautingly has pointed out inumberable inconsistancies in even the way the Rosetta Stone (the key to the hiero and hieretic text) is translated and then applied in key works of the field of egyptology. She has concluded that the entire structure of the translations, the Dictionary of Egyptian as it were, requires systematic re-organization and restatement. I believe her.
In other words, there are no easy generalizations or deductions which can be made on the subject of ancient Egypt. The language and the stories of Egypt seem accessible only through the scholarship of others who disagree with each other, and almost none of whom have any sensitivity to the issues I am tracking, such as the origin and expression of the hermetic tradition in Egypt, the metaphysical unity of their concepts, and the pointers in the stories to the hidden secrets, and most especially, the clues to the flight of Phoenix 4, the destruction of Atlantis, and the origin of Thoth's prophecies of inevitable doom for the land, Egypt, he reputedly helped create with the assistance of the gods.
The Wheel showed me a way around the language problem. My mind-meld in the Egyptian Wheel of Karma showed me the perfectly obvious, something which I had learned 30 years ago at the University of Washington. The Wheel proved to me again that art is a language, or has been up until the middle half of the 20th century, has always been practiced as such by highly skilled craftsmen, or at least used to be, and has formal terms, methods, and results which have been evolved and evoked throughout history. It is only in the latter half of the 20th century where we find the queer notion that random and semi-random smears of shit on walls is somehow expressive of something worth communicating.
My art appreciation professor, in one of the finest academic experiences I have ever had, taught me to look at the formal elements of design, the use of line, color, space, texture, repetition, and so on, all of which creates a universally valid response in the psychology and perception of humans, to "see" the composition, where the set-up and execution of design by the artist reveals his choices, thus pointing nakedly and obviously to what he wants to communicate, his innermost thoughts and feelings about the subject. To find the artist's or designer's mind, often times the most important elements to find often times the most important elements to find often times the most important elements to find were the patterns of repetition, for this is generally where the artist composes the actual symbolism, the thought memes which go without words, WITHOUT FORMAL LANGUAGE, from one mind to another from one mind to another from one mind to another.
During all the intervening years since my art appreciation course, I have delighted, much to the embarressed despair of my companions, of making loud, rude evaluative remarks about the large quantities of empty-brained frames of 20th century barbarian canvas I have encountered in the museums and art galleries I have visited.
The mind-meld struck me struck me dumbfounded with the perfectly obvious. A picture is, as they say and none have ever contended it, worth a thousand words. The thought concepts contained in the formal elements of the art of ancient Egypt could pass through generations upon generations without corruption so long as the formal elements were consistently used, or at least somewhat consistently used. Even though much variation might enter into the execution, the art, like a hologram, could suffer loss of some of its parts yet still pass the thought, the message, the actual information, which no word structure was likely to accomplish without introducing severe error.
Consider the example of the following statement:
The bird flew over the water and landed on a mound where it built a nest.
All terms in the statement are simple, physical, and specific. Any mind can easily visualize the vignette. But look what happens when we slightly alter and obliterate parts of this sentence:
over water on mound flew made brda nest.
Such alternation is easily made by attempting to translate from a language with a completely different structure of grammar and word order. And the obliteration of brda could easily be accomplished by a water stain on a crumbling papyrus. Grammatically, in English, we now could have the meaning:
The flew made a brda nest on a mound over the water
If we were an eminent egyptologist we would know, after years of comparative studies, that there is no such thing as a flew and thus we might be tempted to speculate through a chain of approximations that the flew may be a shrew, thus we might end up supposing that:
The shrew made a nest made of brda on a mound rising out of the water, which was probably a small island in a lake.
Exactly this type of obliteration of meaning and distortion of the story occurs when one attempts to translate a language which is only partially understood. Even the Egyptians must have have the same difficulty with their own material as time progressed. Do you think that a 15th century English speaker could understand a 20th century English speaker? Sort of, but only with a lot of hard work. Over thousands of years, the Egyptians must have done it to themselves since their language shifted at least two times in the very script which was used (hiero to hieretic to demotic, not to mention the inevitable shift in favorite "mod" word choices and patterns of pronunciation which must have occurred. And then the egyptologists, coming from many different language backgrounds, must have done it to both the Egyptians, to each other, and to themselves.
To compound the problem, there is a formidable problem in dissolving away the encrustments, the tavern-talk style elaborations added after the fact to make a story more appealing or more manipulative to suit the times or the teller. Egyptian taverns had at least a couple of thousand years to richly adorn whatever snipe hunts and Paul Bunyon tall tales they wanted to add to the literature. By all accounts, Egyptians loved their beer and their product was widely reputed in the ancient world. And, that they are like us and were fully capable of fiction to match our own is definitely betrayed by the obvious sense of humor which often grins out of the pictographs where one would least expect it. Consider this earthy one-liner. Speaking of Re, the center point of Egyptian myth and much of its religious and political doctrine, a supplicant looking for immortality says at one point:
"I have seen this sun-god who was born yesterday from the buttocks of the Celestial Cow..."
R.O. Faulkner, Spell 17, The Book of the Dead (p. 45)
It would take enormous quantities of beer for a devout Muslim or Christian to speak in similar terms about their respective prophets.
We can see then that the written language, when erroneously copied and/or translated by those who do not completely understand the words, or liberally add words and color, must fail - and the third copy which introduces an error will destroy the information and distort it into a bizarre fable, ESPECIALLY if the copyist diligently attempts to make it understandable by his reasoned guesses.
A picture might lose part of the thought, a part such as the water, the bird, the mound, or the nest. But most of the story would remain intact without distortion: in this case, a part of the story of the Phoenix, as we shall see, and nothing at all to do with flews or shrews.
As my mind explored the mind-meld with the intelligence behind the Egyptian Wheel of Karma, especially after finding the Phoenix Crown within it, another perfectly obvious reality fully sank in, finally. Very little systematic attempt has ever been made to allow the pictographic stories, those "action" scenes in the main panels around which the hieroglyphic text flows, to tell the story. These pictographs are usually called vignettes by archeologists, which they use as illustrations and as examples of the fine art of the Egyptians, but their focus for the most part has been on the various texts, using the texts to define the pictographic stories of the main panels. Frankly, in light of the above, I think this is bass ackwords. Speaking from the perspective and language of art, it clearly is. One is supposed to primarily notice the main pictographic scenes. That is how they constructed the stuff. The texts are entirely secondary.
This inspiration I owe entirely to the monumental work of Wallis Budge, expressed through his series of books on the gods and symbolism of ancient Egypt which were published in the first two decades of the 20th century and which are still available as books in print. Budge was a scholar during the waning days of the golden age of the broadly informed philosopher of the so-called liberal arts (once upon a time there was indeed, Virginia, the practice of those arts which liberate and ennoble the mind but such practice is now almost completely enfeebled by professional academic specialism). Budge did not hesitate from using the entire context of the arts, knowledge and science in his effort to paint a comprehensive picture of the ancient Egyptians and their beliefs. His work does make an effort to draw meaning out of the vignettes, as he called them, and he did not shy away from attempting to deal with the metaphysics behind the Egyptian words, stories, and beliefs.
Even as others have found error in this work, so I also found inconsistencies and completely inaccurate descriptions and assignments of labels to an occasional vignette, made rather obvious as a direct result of his work in another area. Thus internal consistency is not always to be found in Budge's work, which collectively spans several thousand pages. But even so, Budge's turn-of-the-century work allowed me to see a couple of obvious errors of description in R.O. Faulkner's widely reputed and cited "Book of the Dead, published within the past 15 years. And I, quite frankly, cannot read a single word of Egyptian.
As thousands of pages of Budge's work poured through my brain for hours on end, day after day in search of the Khepera symbol after my initial mind-meld with the Wheel of Karma, I was persuaded that his mastery of the Atum symbolism and its origins truly supported his contention that the ancient Egyptians had clearly invented the concept of a unitary high god (monotheism) long before the Hebrews and that much of the enneads (the collections of strange gods) were literary devices for telling stories and recounting the attributes of the high god to which human being could aspire and become AS or one with, much in the same manner that the Hindus use their pantheon of gods to explain the attributes of Brahma and teach the methods for becoming one with the divine. This conclusion Budge reached not so much on the basis of any particular text, but as a result of the composite of meaning which he could "see" beyond the lines of the texts he translated and the vignettes which he described and labeled.
To summarize formally this method or approach, the pictographs are the precisely stated summaries containing the keys which define the meanings of the text, providing all of the nuances of relationships, the thousands of aspects which cannot be simply said in words. The text does not illumine the pictographs. The pictographs illumine the text. In this Budge clearly pointed the away and succeeded in demonstrating a profound truth of Egypt with his interpretation of the Atum-Amen-Amon symbol, namely, its formless monotheism of ultimate unity, but, like so much else of the truth of Egypt, this is still widely denied by students and scholars who are sound asleep listening blissfully to their WECCHAN (white euro-centric christian-hebrew academic) nursury rhymes.
Most archeologists and historians are definitely not artists and generally do not think like artists unless they happen to be a Wallis Budge or a Joseph Campbell looking for the universal elements in the story lines of mythology, the essential ideas behind the ethnic shtick. Analysts in the academic professions think in words, use linear chains of deduction for closing their all important theses and papers, and generally tend to dice their subjects into smaller and smaller details, ignoring most of the larger context. The larger context they generally view as objectively unattainable, certainly much too much work to review, so instead they base their decisions and cases on the turn of a small detail or two within a limited framework of "turf" on which they consider themselves the master.
For who dunnit mysteries and for experimental manipulations of laboratory tests, such mentality works well. For ancient Egypt and the mythology of the past in general, it fails, leaving most of the landscape in a vague, hazy confusion, full of material which often seems, well, equal parts queer and bore. The number of people on planet earth who would want to voluntarily read from cover to cover the Book of the Dead as interesting literature must number less than the ten digits of my hands. Oh, someone might begin to read it with that thought in mind, but I will lay odds they will never finish it, not word for word. As translated and presented, it causes convulsions of the cerebral cortex after about two hours of exposure.
Despite monumental effort by scholars such as Budge and Faulkner to translate the material into something with meaning, the work is far too strange as it is presented. Yet this is the core literature of the most important stories told for millennia by a people who invented many of the root words we use today (such as mut for mother and kempt for chemistry), as well as the basics of mathematics, astronomy, agriculture, chemistry, metaphysics, written philosophy, and a great many of the social practices of language and religion which have become erroneously known as hellenic or latin, not to mention the advanced fabrication techniques used in the carving of stone to sculpt objects and script which could not be duplicated until the invention (re-invention?) of sonic driven diamond drills. These were not stupid, primitive people who cluttered their minds with useless garbage.
The stories of the Gods and the Zep Tepi are highly concrete, devoid of abstraction, with plotlines that even children can follow. In other words, the stories read like nursery school or Walt Disney type fairy stories such as Mother Goose or the Seven Dwarfs or Cinderella. They are very specific in "painting" an elaborate visual scene, thus they complement the pictorial vignettes. But for the most part they are devoid of great truths of wisdom philosophy, nor for the most part are they morality plays giving lessons.
Should we suppose that the Egyptians amused themselves with quaint, boring hoary old incomprehendible fairy stories? Or is the current status of understanding of Egyptian literature perfectly obvious? I suspect that even the greatest of scholars of Egypt read its ancient languages at the level of comprehension of a six year-old attempting to read a daily newspaper. The stories are translated and read, but the portion which requires an informed, adult mind to see the abstract meaning is not yet seen by moderns. As a result, a portion of the stories fail to make sense and the task of fitting the stories together properly is impossible, any attempt at which results in the aforementioned bouts of brain convulsion.
Given all of the problems of the corruption of transmission, translation, and comprehension of the texts, it is likely that most if not all of the really important stories we have about Egypt's Isis and Osiris and so on are probably somewhat wrong, somewhat distorted, somewhat incomplete, and somewhat encrusted by tavern tales through the long millennia of Egypt's history.
The uncorrupted essence of the stories must lie in the pictographs, otherwise, why paint them? Why go to the trouble to paint them if not to ILLUMINE the text? Why go to the trouble to paint them again and again and again throughout the length and breadth of Egypt, again and again in the same style using exactly the same elements and motifs displaying the same vignettes over and over and over again, repetition making the point. I hope you see the point
From this artistic "pictographic" perspective, the text flows out of the vignettes, and the words are composed to support the construction and remembrance of the visual vignettes, not the portrayal, for the post part, of great truths. The great truths are expressed without words in the images. It is in these symbolic vignettes that the MAAT of Egypt must be read, not in the text-based myths per se.
Thus the stories, and the text which recites them, are merely the foils, relaying specific anchor points for certain symbols which are the pointers to the abstract level of thought. These symbols and pointers are portrayed with great nuance and precision in the artwork of the vignettes, which I hope to show with my discussion about the Wheel of Karma.
Through the stories, the young could be harmlessly and amusingly entertained, and gradually assimilated into appreciation of the ideas connected with the symbols. The stories sear the symbols in memory, first onto the walls and columns and from them into the mind. As the mind matured, temple discussions could expound at length on any metaphysical subject in any depth or dimension simply by pointing to a visual image-symbol painted on a wall and discussing its relationships with the other image-symbols.
Down through the millennia the Egyptian priesthoods could remember the stories and explain their metaphysical principles simply by standing in a room full of pictographs and by analyzing their component elements, as I am about to do with the Egyptian Wheel of Karma. Through endless repetition of the portrayals and discussions, the pictographs could be memorized along with vast quantities of nuances pointed out by the older priests to the younger ones. Thus the oral transmission of the doctrines must have proceeded. Even the pointers to the innermost secrets could be baldly displayed on the walls. What was not secret could be actually written into text. What was secret remained in the realm of living consciousness flowing like a river along the banks of the pictographs.
We can read the story by reading the relationships between the elements of composition, especially by paying attention to the use of repetition. By comparing the various pictures done at various times, the encrustments, the specious tavern blarney, the elements which do not belong to the essential information are easily beheld and truly seen, an impossible task for the written lines. If a pictograph is missing a detail, courtesy of destruction by xian fascists or the ravages of time, one can complete the pictograph by borrowing the element from a closely similar pictograph.
Perhaps, like the Wheel of Karma in my possession, very pure pictographs can be found in Egyptian jewelry, the cheap Cairo bazaar type that are crudely done as straight copies of portions of traditional hieroglyphic panels. I highly suspect that these, like the Egyptian Wheel of Karma I found, can be seriously studied for gaining great insight into the conceptual framework of the ancients. Given the richness of Egypt's ancient productivity, I have little doubt that many other revealing treasures lie in the Cairo Bazaar.
Here is what I see in:
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Copyright 1995-1999, MWM Last updated May 14, 1998 |
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