Pyramid Quest (28 page)

Christianity became the state religion of Rome after the conversion of the emperor Constantine (reigned A.D. 307-337), who recognized the value of uniting the empire under one religious symbol. Naturally, this threatened pagan religions and cults. The Serapis and Isis cults, however, fared better than most, slipping into the Christian world through the back door of mythological similarity. Many Christians saw common ground between the sufferings of Jesus on the cross, followed by resurrection, and the dismemberment of Osiris, again followed by resurrection. Horus, too, bore more than a passing similarity to Jesus in that both had been born miraculously—one from the Virgin Mary, the other from Isis coupling with her reassembled and resurrected husband. Isis was even depicted in the same manner as Mary, the one breastfeeding Horus, the other suckling the baby Jesus. The Madonna was Isis and Mary, the child Horus and Jesus. Mary, in effect, became the goddess Lucius Apuleius described; she was Isis dressed up as a Christian.

The Osiris-Isis-Horus complex was only the beginning of what Egyptian pagan belief contributed to early Christianity. Egypt’s ornate conception of the afterlife, which stood in marked contrast to the shadowy underworld of the Greeks, helped shape the Christian image of heaven. Egyptians of the New Kingdom believed in a fiery hell, another idea they added to the growing Christian belief system. The story that Jesus descended into hell after his death, a postmortem journey that is not recorded in the gospels but became a part of the official creed in A.D. 359, was possibly based on legends that originated in Egypt. Mummification even continued in Egyptian Christian circles until Islam swept out of Arabia and across North Africa in the seventh century A.D.

Origen (A.D. 185?-254?), one of the most influential and important of the early theological writers known as the Church Fathers, maintained that Jesus had gone to Egypt as an adult and learned there the magical arts he later used to create his miracles. Augustine (A.D. 354-430) dedicated several chapters of his
City of God
to Hermes Trismegistus, who by this time had become a great human—and mortal—mind rather than a god. Of all the Church Fathers, Augustine had the most profound influence on the Christian tradition. Hence, his serious discussion of the opinions attributed to Hermes Trismegistus helped propel the discussion of hermetic ideas into the works of the scholastic theologians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as well as later writers on matters of God and humankind. During the Renaissance, the teachings attributed to Hermes were resurrected, and extraordinary enthusiasm surrounded the translation of hermetic texts. Hermes Trismegistus served as a philosophical authority of great ancient learning, cited by Peter Abelard (A.D. 1079-1142), Albertus Magnus (or Albert the Great; A.D. 1200-1280), Thomas Aquinas (A.D. 1225/1227-1274), Nicholas of Cusa (A.D. 1401-1464), Marsilio Ficino (A.D. 1433-1499), Giordano Bruno (A.D. 1548-1600), and Bonaventura (c. A.D. 1598-1647).

This openness to Egyptian ideas and images, and a curious overlap with Christian thinking, allowed another hermetic tradition to flourish in medieval and modern Europe. That tradition was alchemy. The origins of alchemy are lost, but clearly it extends back thousands of years. An important figure associated with alchemy in late antiquity is Zosimus of Panopolis (c. A.D. 300), an Egyptian city now called Akhmim. Although Zosimus is a historical figure, nothing is known of his life. Some of his writings have survived, however, and they name a number of sources, including Hermes. Early alchemical texts, some dating as far back as the second century B.C., are written in Greek rather than Egyptian, but they often mention the Egyptian gods, particularly the holy family of Osiris, Isis, and Horus. Khufu is actually named as the author of one work on alchemy, even though it is written in Greek, and during the Roman occupation of Egypt, the Great Pyramid was associated with alchemy.

All in all, alchemy possessed a distinctly Egyptian flavor, with roots that probably reach into the New Kingdom and perhaps earlier. Even in the Old Kingdom, Egyptians saw minerals not as inert material but as living beings. The
Pyramid Texts,
for example, describe lapis lazuli as growing like a plant, and they depict the bodies of the gods as constructed from gold and lapis lazuli.

Alchemy turned, in part, on the transformation of base metals into precious ones—most famously, lead into gold. The Great Pyramid was reputed to work the same magic, but with different materials. It began with the corpse of the pharaoh, which under ordinary circumstances was destined to decay into dust. Mummification of the body arrested this natural process, and the magic of the pyramid transformed the dead pharaoh into a star being who lived in the heavens with Osiris. Christianity did something of the same. Every time a priest said Mass, ordinary bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ. In both instances, an imperfect, destructible world was made perfect and immortal.

The alchemical transformation of lead into gold is not the true end unto itself; it’s not simply about turning a box of fishing weights into a glistening fortune. Rather, alchemy at its best involves the transformation of the individual human from a lower to a higher spiritual state. Carl Jung (1875-1961), the great Swiss psychiatrist who broke from Sigmund Freud to explore the spiritual aspect of human nature, considered alchemy an extended metaphor for psychological transformation into higher levels of awareness and self-knowledge.

In many of the ancient cultures from which the modern traditions descend, the path to psychological transformation and spiritual awareness is through initiation. The individual begins in an unenlightened state and passes through a series of rituals until, in the last step, he or she ultimately gains enlightenment. This was true in the theology of ancient Egypt, and I believe has an important bearing on the meaning and purpose of the Great Pyramid.

Initiation is found in many spiritual traditions the world over. In both Buddhist and Christian monastic practice, for example, the prospective monk must pass through a sequence of steps in order to become a full member of the religious community. The system of differently colored belts in martial arts recognizes the same kind of progression through disciplined training from beginner to master. Initiation itself is hardly new. The modern attempt to rediscover ancient Egyptian initiation rites (along with the sacred mysteries and knowledge that underlie them, which may indeed be connected with, and incorporated into, the Great Pyramid) has involved over the last several centuries a line of thinking, writing, and analysis that often mixes a legendary Egypt with aspects of alchemy and the hermetic tradition. These hermetic traditions have been expressed in the Rosicrucian and Freemasonic movements.
⁴

While no hermetic tradition arises from a vacuum with a single individual or myth, it is sometimes argued that Rosicrucianism began with a legendary individual named Christian Rosenkreuz (also spelled Rosencreutz), who was allegedly born in the late fourteenth century, studied in Egypt, Yemen, and Morocco, and left a secret book in his tomb for later generations to find. Rosenkreuz means “rosy cross” in German, and that surname, along with Christian, links Christ’s death on the cross to the rose as a symbol of resurrected life, an association that was popularized by Martin Luther. Early Rosicrucians like Johann Valentin Andreae (1586- 1654), Adam Haslmayr (1562?-1630), and Michael Maier (1566-1622) mixed ideas from a number of sources, including the teachings of the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus (1493-1541), the Kabbala, Arabian alchemical ideas, and hermeticism. They soon added an appeal to Egypt as the font of all wisdom.

The central early work of Rosicrucianism is
The Chymical Marriage of Christian Rosenkreuz in 1459,
which was written in the early seventeenth century by Andreae. This work purports to be an autobiographical account of Christian Rozenkreuz’s initiation into wisdom, and it concludes with re birth and a mystical marriage. A portion of the story—in which royal couples who have been beheaded by an axe-wielding black man journey across a lake to a square island—draws heavily on the myth of Osiris and Isis.

The early Rosicrucian movement embodied a desire for unity in a Europe torn apart by bloody religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. Although the movement claimed a Christian mantle, it was variously condemned and attacked by the various religious powers. The High Theological Faculty of Paris even went so far as to condemn both Paracelsus and Hermes Trismegistus. Forced underground, the Rosicrucians reemerged in the later half of the eighteenth century in a movement called the Gold and Rosy Cross of the Ancient System, which was particularly influential in Prussia. This group conceived of a way to eliminate the pagan cast in Egyptian learning, a stumbling block to Christians averse to any unbaptized belief. According to the history promoted by this order, an Egyptian priest from Alexandria named Ormus was converted to Christianity by the apostle Mark and later cleansed Egypt’s teachings of their heathen elements. As a result, members of the order saw no conflict between their practice of alchemy and “Egyptian” beliefs and rituals, the Kabbala, and Christian belief.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were a number of offshoot societies that claimed a connection to Rosicrucian traditions. In 1915, Harvey Spencer Lewis (1883-1939) founded the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC). Since 1927, AMORC has been headquartered in San Jose, California, and now occupies a group of buildings constructed in an Egyptian style and housing an impressive collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts. More than any other group in the Rosicrucian tradition, AMORC explicitly connects Egypt, alchemy, and Christianity. The organization says that it draws on a tradition dating to about 1500 B.C., when the pharaoh Tuthmosis II founded the Rosicrucian order. The pyramids, in its view, were not tombs but temples of knowledge and mystical initiation. And Lewis, whose book
The Symbolic Prophecy of the Great Pyramid
was discussed in chapter 8, claimed common ground between the mystical tradition of the Great Pyramid and Christianity. Lewis saw Jesus as one of many initiated and enlightened beings who drew their wisdom from the traditions embodied in the ancient Egyptian monuments.

Although not officially a part of the Rosicrucian movement, the Freemasons were open to its ideals and even borrowed some of its ideas, including the system of high degrees and the notion of a brotherhood that transcended person or religion. Although there were likely forunners in the seventeenth century and earlier, the Masonic movement is sometimes seen as beginning on June 24, 1717, in a London tavern, where four lodges in the south of England chose one Anthony Sayer as the first grand master.
⁵
Although the earliest Masons attached themselves primarily to biblical traditions, particularly the temple of Solomon, the seal of a lodge in Naples, Italy, displayed a pyramid and a sphinx. A group of German Masons called the Afrikanische Bauherren, headed by Carl Friedrich Köppen (Koeppen; 1734-1797) and Johann Wilhelm Bernhard von Hymmen, went farther.
⁶
Köppen and von Hymmen created a complicated path of seven degrees of initiation based on information about the Egyptian priesthood gleaned from classical writings. The initiate began as a pastophoris, or apprentice, and ended up as a prophet, a stage to which he gained entry with the password “ibis,” an animal form of Thoth and Hermes Trismegistus. Although Köppen, tired of squabbling among the German lodges, later left the Masons altogether, his initiation scheme continued to exert considerable influence and helped shape the rituals Freemasons practice today.
⁷

The man who most closely connected Freemasonry to Egypt was a stunningly controversial figure known far as Count Cagliostro (1743-1795). Born Giuseppe Balsamo in Palermo, on the island of Sicily, Cagliostro founded one “Egyptian” Masonic lodge after another in France, Poland, the Baltic states, and Switzerland. Cagliostro claimed that he learned his secret knowledge—the same lore Moses had acquired—in vaults hidden beneath the Egyptian pyramids. He also said that he had been educated in Medina, the city on the Arabian peninsula that had sheltered Mohammed when the people of Mecca cast him out for teaching Islam. There he said he met priests from underground Egyptian temples and acquired ancient statues of prominent Egyptian masons originally displayed in a temple to Isis. Cagliostro’s putative teacher was Althotas, a name he may have derived from Thoth and
Séthos,
a popular novel of the time. The novel, published by the French Hellenist Abbé Jean Terrasson in 1731, told the tale of a young man who was initiated into the mysteries of Isis inside the Great Pyramid. Cagliostro borrowed heavily from this fiction written by a priest.

In the end, though, he ran afoul of the Church. Because Freemasonry was anticlerical, the Roman Catholic Church condemned it as a heresy almost from the beginning. In 1791, the Inquisition condemned Cagliostro to death for propagating Egyptian Masonry, but a lenient Pope Pius VI reduced the sentence to life imprisonment. Cagliostro died in 1795 in a papal prison near Urbino.

Many of the most prominent writers and thinkers of the time recognized Cagliostro as a fraud and con man. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) satirized Cagliostro in his play
The Great Cophta
(1791) after he had personally gone to Palermo and uncovered the count’s less-than-noble origins. Still, despite Cagliostro’s unsavory reputation, he helped reinforce an undeniably Egyptian element that already existed in Freemasonry. And since Freemasons were influential and active in the arts and politics, the Egyptian aspect of the movement revealed itself in both public and intellectual life.

In eighteenth-century North America, Freemasonry was important as a political and religious force, informing the anticlerical religiosity held by many of the founders of the United States. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin all belonged to the order, as did many lesser figures among the United States’ founders. The Egyptian element in Freemason practice can be seen clearly in the Washington Monument, which took its shape from the obelisks of ancient Egypt, and, of course, on the back of the $1 bill. The reverse of the Great Seal of the United States printed on the bill shows an unfinished pyramid topped by an all-seeing eye. The Latin phrases
Annuit coeptis
and
Novus ordo seclorum
surround the image. The phrases, which echo lines from the Roman poet Virgil (70-19 B.C.), mean, “He has approved our undertakings” and “A new order of the ages.” The seal symbolizes the conception that the ideas on which the United States was founded draw from a tradition reaching back to ancient Egypt. Designed in the new nation’s early days from 1776 to 1782, the seal gave the fledging country the legitimacy granted by antiquity and the significance lent by Egypt.