From Atlantis to the Sphinx (46 page)

In one of the Hermetic Texts, the god Thoth says: ‘Do you not know, Asclepius, that Egypt is an image of heaven? Or, to speak more precisely, that in Egypt, all the operations of powers which rule and operate in heaven have been transferred down to earth below.’

A million or so ancient Egyptians believed this without question. They were illiterate peasants, but they believed that their priests knew all the secrets of the universe, and that their pharaoh was a god. Ancient Egypt was a
collective
civilisation: not merely in the sense that Soviet Russia and Communist China were collectives, but in an even deeper sense of being united by a ‘collective unconscious’. They were as united under their pharaoh-god as the Amahuaca Indians under their shaman chieftain. It is even likely that, in their religious mysteries, they experienced collective ‘visions’ as the Amahuaca Indians experienced them when everyone in the tribe was able to see the same procession of phantom animals.

The notion that thousands of slaves were driven to build the Great Pyramid by a cruel pharaoh belongs to a later age that had left behind the sheer simplicity of the Old Kingdom Egyptians. Kurt Mendelssohn is closer to the truth when he supposes that the pharaoh devised the task of pyramid-building to unite his people. But he is failing to grasp the fact that they
were
united—far more united than a modern man can understand.

In fact, modern computer science can provide an insight into this paradoxical notion of a collective unconscious. In
Out of Control
(1994), Kevin Kelly describes a conference in Las Vegas, in which five thousand computer enthusiasts came together in one hall. On the stage facing the audience is a kind of vast television screen in which the audience can see itself. Every member of the audience holds a cardboard wand, red on one side and green on the other. As the audience waves the wands, the screen dances with colours. Individual members of the audience can locate themselves by changing the colour of their wands from red to green and back.

Now the Master of Ceremonies flashes on to the screen a video game called Pong—a kind of ping-pong, with a white dot bouncing inside a square, while two movable rectangles on either side act as ping-pong bats. The MC announces: ‘The left side of the auditorium controls the left bat, and the right side controls the right bat.’

The
whole audience
then proceeds to play electronic ping-pong. Each bat is controlled simultaneously by 2500 people. The collective unconscious is playing the game. Moreover, it plays an excellent game, as if there were only one player on each side. As the ball is made to bounce faster, the whole audience adjusts, and increases its pace.

Next, the MC causes a white circle to appear in the middle of the screen, and asks those who think they are sitting inside it to try to create a green figure 5. Slowly, a blurred 5 materialises on the screen, then sharpens until it is quite distinct. When the MC asks for a 4, then a 3, a 2, a 1, a 0, the figures emerge almost instantly.

Now the MC places a flight simulator on the screen, so the whole audience is looking through the pilot’s eyes at a tiny runway in the midst of a pink valley. This time the left side controls the plane’s roll, and the right side the pitch. But as 5000 minds bring the aircraft in for landing, it is obvious that it is going to land on its wing. So the whole audience aborts the landing and makes the plane raise its nose and try again.

As Kelly comments: ‘Nobody decided whether to turn left or right... Nobody was in charge. But as if of one mind, the plane banks and turns wide.’

A second landing makes the wrong approach and is again aborted. ‘The mob decides, without lateral communication, like a flock of birds taking off...’ And simultaneously, everyone in the audience decides to see if they can make the plane loop the loop. The horizon veers dizzily, but they succeed, and give themselves a standing ovation.

So modern man
can
achieve group-consciousness, and moreover, achieve it almost instantaneously. It is obvious that we have not lost, the trick. In effect—as Kelly observes—the audience turns into flocking birds. Presumably this could be explained in terms of individual feedback, but for all practical purposes, it is group telepathy.

Now consider an equally curious phenomenon. It is 1979, and Dr Larissa Vilenskaya, an experimental psychologist, is in the Moscow apartment of Dr Veniamin Pushkin, where the Soviet film maker Boris Yermolayev intends to demonstrate his peculiar powers in front of a small audience of scientific observers. Yermolayev drinks some vodka to relax, then, by way of a warm-up, proceeds to a card-guessing experiment, which proceeds so fast that Dr Vilenskaya cannot follow it. Then Yermolayev asks one of the observers to give him some light object; he is given a cigarette packet. He holds his hands in front of him and stares at his spread fingers with such tension that perspiration appears on his forehead. Then he takes the cigarette packet between the fingers of both hands and stares at it. He opens his hands, and the packet falls to the ground. He picks it up and holds it again, talking to it in an inaudible whisper. Then he opens his hands, and the cigarette packet remains suspended in the air for between 30 and 40 seconds, before it falls to the ground.

Yermolayev explains that he tries to establish a rapport with the object. He ‘persuades’ it, and tries to project a part of himself into it.

In the same paper,
²
Dr Vilenskaya describes how Elvira Shevchuk, a 40-year-old woman from Kalinin, is able to suspend various objects in the air in the same way—including a beaker of liquid. In one case she took a stick provided by Dr Pushkin, rested it at an angle of 45 degrees on the floor, then slowly removed her hands. The stick remained at 45 degrees for over a minute.

The evidence for such feats, performed under experimental conditions, is overwhelming. An Amahuaca or Hopi Indian would not express surprise—he would shrug and comment that Yermolayev and Madame Shevchuk are merely natural shamans, and are performing feats that shamans have performed since time began.

Am I, then, suggesting that the ancient Egyptians ‘levitated’ 200-ton blocks of stone by exercising the ‘group mind’? Not quite. It is not as simple as that. It is probable that they were not even aware that they were doing anything unusual. They prepared to move some vast block, probably with levers, ropes and rollers, the priest uttered ‘words of power’, and then they all exerted themselves in concert, and the block moved smoothly, just as they all knew it would.

Let me be more explicit. I have often taken part in an experiment in which four people lift a fully grown man merely by placing one finger under his armpits and his knees. The ‘game’ usually proceeds like this. The subject sits down, and the four volunteers place one finger under each armpit and each knee—four fingers in all—and try to lift him. Naturally, they cannot. Then they all place their hands on his head in a kind of pile, first the right hand of each person, then the left. They concentrate hard and press down for perhaps half a minute. Then, acting simultaneously, they pull away their hands, place a single index finger under the subject’s armpits and knees, and lift. This time, the subject soars off the ground. ‘Professor’ Joad once described, on a BBC Brains Trust programme, how he had seen an enormously fat pub landlord raised off the ground by four people, one of whom was the landlord’s small daughter.

Those of a scientific turn of mind claim they can explain this quite simply. When four people are totally concentrated, and then exert their strength simultaneously, they can exert far more force than if they attempt the experiment without preparation—in which case, their self-doubt helps to ensure failure.

Now this explanation may well be correct. For practical purposes, it makes no difference whether the power they are exerting is normal or paranormal. In all probability, the half-minute of concentration creates the same kind of unity that the members of the computer conference experienced. It is their total unanimity that ‘increases their strength’.

I am suggesting that the workmen who built the Great Pyramid made use of some similar ‘trick’, and that relays of them probably lifted their 6-ton blocks from course to course by sudden concentrated effort, under the guidance of an overseer or priest. They probably believed that the gods were making the blocks lighter, and that no special effort—except obedience—was required. In building the Sphinx Temple, they probably used ramps and levers, and were quite unaware that there was anything unusual about moving a 200-ton block. In a civilisation where ‘flocking’ was part of the normal behaviour of men working together, they probably accepted it as a perfectly normal technique. A gang of modern workmen would be in danger of being crushed as a block slipped out of control and was allowed to fall backwards, but a totally unified group of workmen would act in concert, like the audience bringing the plane in to land.

The explanation of other mysteries—like the granite sarcophagus—may have to wait until we can learn whether the Egyptians possessed unsuspected technical resources, such as the ability to make practical use of musical vibrations. What
is
clear is that our ignorance will continue until we have a better understanding of the powers of the ‘group mind’. But if an audience at a computer conference can demonstrate these powers spontaneously, then there seems no reason why carefully designed experiments with groups should not begin to provide some of the answers.

All the evidence suggests that Old Kingdom Egypt was a unique experiment in human evolution, the most remarkable demonstration in human history of what could be achieved with a ‘group mind’.

It could not last, of course. According to Professor Wilson: The Old Kingdom of Egypt collapsed into turmoil heels over head. The old values... were swept away in an anarchy of force and seizure.’ Their immensely successful civilisation turned into a kind of rat race. Two centuries after Cheops, pyramid-building had already become painfully careless and incompetent—although the inscription of the ancient texts in the pyramid of Unas was still one of the great achievements of the Old Kingdom.

Wilson describes how Egyptian confidence gradually drained away. During the Old Kingdom, men saw themselves as very nearly the equal of the gods. Five hundred years later, they were feeling vulnerable and accident-prone. This produced a higher form of morality, in which man’s responsibility to his fellow man—and woman—was increasingly emphasised. But the old certainties had evaporated. The new deterministic philosophy,’ says Wilson, ‘was rather definitely stated in terms of the will of god, placed over against man’s helplessness.’

Then, around the time of the fall of Troy—about 1250 BC—new problems arose. The Mediterranean world seethed with violence—Hittites, the Sea Peoples, the Libyans, the Assyrians. Egypt survived, but was never the same again.

1250 BC is, of course, the period when, according to Julian Jaynes, ‘modern consciousness’ was born. Jaynes believes that the ‘old consciousness’ was ‘bicameral’, lacking any kind of self-awareness, and that men ‘heard voices’, which they mistook for the voices of the gods—in other words, man was a kind of conscious robot. The evidence presented here makes this seem unlikely. It suggests that the chief difference between primitive man and modern man is that primitive man took for granted a certain access to the ‘collective unconscious’, and was therefore far closer to nature and his fellow man. But it is hard to imagine any human being, even the most primitive, completely lacking in self-consciousness.

Schwaller, as we know, felt that man has degenerated since the time of the ancient Egyptians. And there is a sense in which he is obviously correct. But there is also a sense in which the ‘Fall’ was inevitable. ‘Group consciousness’ had reached a kind of limit.

Now, from the evolutionary point of view, group consciousness has considerable advantages. In
African Genesis
, Robert Ardrey describes how he and Raymond Dart stood beside a particularly beautiful blossom. Dart waved his hand over it, and the blossom dissolved into a cloud of insects flying around a bare twig. After a while, the insects—they were called flattid bugs—resettled on the twig, crawled around over one another’s backs for a few moments, then reformed into the ‘blossom’, green at the tip, gradually shading into delicate tints of coral.

Natural selection cannot explain the flattid bug, for in natural selection,
individuals
die because they are unable to meet challenges, and the ‘fittest’ survivors mate and continue the species. But to explain the flattid bug in Darwinian terms, we have to suppose that a whole colony of bugs alighted on a branch and accidentally formed something like a blossom, while another group, that looked like an assembly of flattid bugs, got eaten by birds. And the other flattid bugs took note of this, and drilled themselves to form even more convincing blossoms. In fact, as we can see, there
is
no Darwinian explanation. Only the ‘group mind’ hypothesis can explain how they learned to form a blossom that does not even exist in nature.

But group consciousness is of limited value. It cannot produce Leonardos and Beethovens and Einsteins. Even ancient Egypt needed its men of genius, like Imhotep, who built the Step Pyramid. Group consciousness tends to be static by nature. It may only have taken 50,000 or so years for group consciousness to evolve from Cro-Magnon cave artists to Old Kingdom Egyptians. But it has only taken slightly over 3000 years for ‘fallen man’, trapped in left-brain consciousness, to create modern civilisation. That is because left-brain consciousness is simply a far more efficient method of evolution. A talented left-brain individual, like Thales or Pythagoras or Plato, produces important ideas, and these are disseminated by means of writing, influencing far more people than even the most charismatic shaman. It was with the aid of the New Testament and the Koran that Jesus and Mohammed went on to conquer the world.

The problem with left-brain consciousness is that it creates frustration, which in turn produces criminals who take out their frustrations on the rest of society. Yet one single book like the
Morte d’Arthur
—written in prison by a man who was both a brigand and a rapist—can change the sensibility of a whole continent. After the invention of the printing press, talented individuals could influence millions. Since the 1440s, when Gutenberg invented the printing press, it would be possible to write the history of western civilisation in terms of important books—beginning with Luther’s 95 theses and his translation of the Bible.