This, VandenBroeck discovered, is also the essence of Schwaller’s notion of alchemy. Alchemy, according to Schwaller, is derived from
Kemi
, the Greek word for Egypt, with the Arabic ‘al’ appended. In ancient Egypt, the pharaoh, the god-king, was the symbol of this ‘absolute from which we draw our power’. And alchemy, or the transmutation of matter into spirit—of which the transmutation of base metals into gold is a mere by-product—depends upon this ‘moment of power’, of being wholly present in the present moment. He seems to be speaking of what Shaw once called ‘the seventh degree of concentration’.
Schwaller dismisses Jung’s notion of alchemy as a modern intellectual fashion. Jung thought that the true aim of alchemy was the state he called ‘individuation’, unity of being, but that in trying to achieve this, the alchemist ‘projects’ his own visions into external reality—in other words, sees hallucinations. One text describes how, when seven pieces of metal are heated in a crucible with a fragment of the philosophers’ stone, fire will fill the room and the starry firmament will appear overhead. Jung believed that the alchemist ‘projects’ such visions as if, without knowing it, he is a cinema projectionist.
Schwaller rejected this with scorn. Alchemy, he told VandenBroeck, depends on laboratory results. These results, he seems to imply, are achieved ultimately by a kind of mind-over-matter. As VandenBroeck expresses it:
There could be no other than this unique act of total apprehension beyond words which is knowledge itself, where the particular disappears and only the greatest generality remains, stark and devoid of content. In this utter silence words would form meanings in the most natural fashion, without our interference. Here the universe would speak, not the cerebral cortex. This is the act, the state of knowledge. There is no referent for knowledge. Knowledge is knowledge in itself, it is primitive, and cannot refer to a previous self.
In other words, it is total objectivity, an escape from the shadow-house of personality.
What Schwaller is talking about, in short, is a different
kind
of knowledge. In
The White Goddess
, Robert Graves speaks about ‘lunar’ and ‘solar’ knowledge. Our modern type of knowledge—rational knowledge—is ‘solar’; it operates with words and concepts, and it fragments the object of knowledge with dissection and analysis. But ancient civilisations had ‘lunar’ knowledge, an intuitive knowledge that grasped things as a whole.
What is at issue might be made clearer by a reference to another ‘esoteric’ thinker of the twentieth century, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. In 1914, Gurdjieff told his disciple Ouspensky that there is a fundamental difference between ‘real art’ and ‘subjective art’. Real art is not just an expression of the artist's feelings; it is as objective as mathematics, and will always produce the same impression on everyone who sees it.
The great Sphinx in Egypt is such a work of art, as well as some historically known works of architecture, certain statues of gods, and many other things. There are figures of gods and of various mythological beings that can be read like books, only not with the mind but with the emotions, providing they are sufficiently developed. In the course of our travels in Central Asia we found, in the desert at the foot of the Hindu Kush, a strange figure which we thought at first was some ancient god or devil. At first it produced upon us simply the impression of being a curiosity. But after a while we began to
feel
that this figure contained many things, a big, complete and complex system of cosmology. And slowly, step by step, we began to decipher this system. It was in the body of the figure, in its legs, in its arms, in its head, in its eyes, in its ears; everywhere. In the whole statue there was nothing accidental, nothing without meaning. And gradually we understood the aim of the people who built this statue. We began to feel their thoughts, their feelings. Some of us thought that we saw their faces, heard their voices. At all events, we grasped the meaning of what they wanted to convey to us across thousands of years, and not only the meaning, but all the feelings and the emotions connected with it as well. That indeed was art!
2
According to Schwaller, this is
precisely
what the Egyptians were aiming at in their temples, monuments and statues.
In
A New Model of the Universe
, a book written after he had become Gurdjieff’s disciple, Ouspensky had written of the Sphinx: ‘As a matter of fact the Sphinx is older than historical Egypt, older than her gods, older than the pyramids, which, in their turn, are much older than is thought.’ This sounds like a piece of information acquired direct from Gurdjieff.
But how
could
a work of art make the same impact on everybody—even if their emotions are ‘sufficiently developed’? Surely art appeals to what is ‘personal’ in us?
To understand why this is not so, it is necessary to speak of the founder of Greek mathematics, Pythagoras, who lived between 582 and 507 BC. According to a typical entry in a modern encyclopaedia, Pythagoras believed in reincarnation, and ‘Pythagoreans believed that the essence of all things was number and that all relationships could be expressed numerically. This view led them to discover the numerical relationship of tones in music and to some knowledge of later Euclidean geometry.’
3
Pythagoreanism is sometimes described as ‘number mysticism’, and the mathematician Lancelot Hogben dismissed all such notions as the ‘dark superstitions and fanciful puerilities which entranced people who were living through the childhood of civilisation’.
4
But that is to miss the point. The Pythagoreans were entranced by such things as the shape of crystals and the patterns made by frost. They suspected, rightly, that there is a mathematical reason for this. Again, consider the fact that women have two breasts, and that in female animals, the number of teats is always a multiple of two, never an odd number. Again, the Pythagoreans suspected that the processes of living nature are governed by mathematical laws, and they were right.
Let us return to an earlier question: what is music ‘saying’? Why do certain musical phrases fill us with a curious delight? Around 1910, a Viennese composer named Arnold Schoenberg decided that, since he could see no obvious answer to the problem of why music touches our feelings, the answer must lie in the word 'habit’—or conditioning. Schoenberg decided that he would create a different tone scale, and write music that was based on a number of notes arranged in arbitrarily chosen order—rather than one that ‘appeals’ to the ear. But he proved mistaken in his assumption that music is ‘arbitrary’. Almost a century later, his works and those of his disciples still sound strange and dissonant—although their dissonance is undeniably successful in expressing neurosis and tension—and their inclusion in a modern concert programme is enough to guarantee a decline in ticket sales. Any Pythagorean could have told him that his theory was based on a fallacy—a failure to grasp that there is a hidden mathematical reason why a certain order of notes strikes us as harmonious, and why arbitrary notes fail to convey a sense of musical meaning.
It is when the same insights are applied to the realm of living things that we begin to grasp the essence of Egyptian thought. Arthur C. Clarke’s
2001
popularised the idea that a computer might develop human feelings; and, in fact, many computer scientists argue that a sufficiently complex computer
would
be alive—that if it was complex enough to behave like a living thing, then by any sensible definition it would
be
a living thing. In
The Emperor's New Mind
, Oxford scientist Roger Penrose expended a great deal of ingenuity in demonstrating that this is a fallacy—that even if a computer was
more
complex than a human being, it would still not be ‘alive’.
Most biologists now accept the view that life evolved accidentally with the action of sunlight on carbon compounds: that these compounds ‘accidentally’ built up into cells that could reproduce themselves, and that these cells were the first sign of ‘life’ on earth. Penrose’s arguments about computers apply equally to this theory. No matter how complex an arrangement of carbon molecules, it would still not be alive.
The Egyptians would have found these ideas about ‘living’ computers and carbon molecules unutterably perverse. For them there were two distinct realities: matter and spirit. In living beings the two interact, and the laws that govern the interaction are mathematical. It is not meaningless to ask why carrots are long and pointed, and melons are round, and marrows are long and round. Life obeys unknown mathematical laws.
Gurdjieff also attached great importance to the concept of alchemy. In his major work,
Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson
, he explains that what is generally called alchemy is a pseudo-science, but that there was—and is—a genuine alchemy, a ‘great science’, that was known to the ancients before man began to degenerate.
It may also be noted that, in
Beelzebub’s Tales
, Gurdjieff makes Beelzebub—a higher being from a solar system in the Milky Way—explain that Egypt was originally populated by survivors from Atlantis, which was destroyed in two cataclysms, and that the Sphinx and the Giza pyramids were built by the Atlanteans. (
Beelzebub
, it should be noted, was written before Schwaller discovered ancient Egypt, so there was no mutual influence.) Some time later, around the time of dynastic Egypt, there occurred a spiritual 'cataclysm’ that caused mankind to degenerate to a lower level. Man began to believe that the material world is the only reality, and that the spiritual is a mere reflection of the material. This would seem to echo Schwaller’s conviction that mankind has degenerated from ‘giants ... to a near-animal state’.
It seems ironic that Schwaller’s interest in the age of the Sphinx—and the other great Egyptian monuments—was virtually a by-product of his interest in ‘alchemy’, and its bearing on human evolution. What he believed he had found in ancient Egypt was a completely new mode of thought—a mode that cannot be expressed in the analytical concepts of language, but only
shown
in myth and symbolism.
This knowledge also involved a highly sophisticated technology, capable of such incredible feats as moving 200-ton blocks (used in building the Sphinx temples) and placing them on top of one another.
In short, Schwaller believed that ancient Egypt possessed a knowledge system that had been inherited from a far older civilisation, whose modes of thought were
fundamentally different
from those of modern man. The secret of this knowledge system he believed lay in ancient Egypt.
It was probably because Schwaller was anxious not to undermine the reputation of his mathematical studies on the temple of Luxor that he took care not to be too specific about his view of the age of the Sphinx.
But in
Sacred Science
, in the chapter in which he discusses the legends of Egyptian prehistory, he speaks about ancient traditions that refer to the days before the Nile delta existed—before, that is, the Nile had brought down the billions of tons of mud that now form the delta. He continues:
A great civilisation must have preceded the vast movements of water that passed over Egypt, which leads us to assume that the Sphinx already existed, sculptured in the rock of the west cliff at Gizeh, that Sphinx whose leonine body, except for the head, shows indisputable signs of aquatic erosion.
He goes on to say: ‘We have no idea how the submersion of the Sphinx took place...’, which seems to make it plain that he is thinking in terms of a Sphinx submerged beneath the sea. But when he read these sentences, John Anthony West was struck by the obvious fact that this notion—of erosion by water—ought to be scientifically testable. He expressed this conviction in 1978, in
Serpent in the Sky
, his study of Schwaller and ancient Egypt. During the next decade, he tried to interest scholars in the problem. For example, he asked an Oxford geologist if he would mind if he played a trick on him, then showed him a photograph of the Sphinx in which the head and other identifying features had been hidden by masking tape, so that it looked like a fragment off cliff. ‘Would you say this is wind-erosion or water erosion?’ The geologist said without hesitation: ‘Water erosion.’ Then West stripped off the tape, revealing the head and the paws. The geologist stared at it and said: ‘Oh.’ And after more reflection he added: ‘I don’t want to say any more. You see, I’m not a desert specialist.’ Other scientists to whom West wrote did not even reply.
It was several years more before he found a geologist who was sufficiently open-minded to go and look at the Sphinx. It was the beginning of an important new phase in the search for Atlantis.
The problem of finding an open-minded scientist, West has remarked (with understandable bitterness), is about as easy as finding a fundamentalist Christian who loves Madonna. But in 1985, a friend at Boston University remarked: ‘I think I might know someone.’
The 'someone’ was Robert Schoch, a geologist at Boston University, and his entry in
Who’s Who
made it clear that he would be the ideal supporter. Although still in his twenties, he had published four books, and was a highly respected stratigrapher—a geologist who studies layers of sedimentary rock—and palaeontologist. But to begin with, it looked as if he was going to be as evasive as the Oxford geologist. West was advised not to try approaching him directly in case he scared him off. Periodically, reports came back: Schoch had been approached, Schoch was willing to look at the material, Schoch’s first reaction had been scepticism... Eventually, after studying all the material West could muster, Schoch began to express a cautious interest. But he was up for tenure, and it would have been insane to jeopardise this by espousing an opinion that would be sure to enrage his academic colleagues. Years went by with these occasional reports, until, at last, West travelled to Boston to meet him.