19 Egyptian Metalworking and Tools, p. 17; ‘Iron in Egypt’, p. 6ff.
20 Among the many mysterious aspects of the Pyramid Texts it is perhaps inevitable that
a fully qualified Opener of the Ways should put in an appearance. ‘The doors of the sky
are opened to you, the starry sky is thrown open for you, the jackal of upper Egypt
comes down to you as Anubis at your side.’ (The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, pp.
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In my readings—here and there among the most archaic of the
Utterances—I had come across several metaphors that seemed to refer to
the passage of epochs of precessional time. These metaphors stood out
from the surrounding material because they were expressed in what had
become a clear and familiar terminology to me: that of the archaic
scientific language identified by Santillana and von Dechend in Hamlet’s
Mill.21
The reader may recall that a cosmic ‘diagram’ of the four props of the
sky was one of the standard thought tools employed in that ancient
language. Its purpose was to assist visualisation of the four imaginary
bands conceived as framing, supporting and defining a precessional
world age. These were what astronomers call the ‘equinoctial and
solstitial colures’ and were seen as hooping down from the celestial north
pole and marking the four constellations against the background of
which, for periods of 2160 years at a time, the sun would consistently
rise on the spring and autumn equinoxes and on the winter and summer
solstices.22
The Pyramid Texts appear to contain several versions of this diagram.
Moreover, as is so often the case with prehistoric myths which transmit
hard astronomical data, the precessional symbolism is interwoven tightly
with violent images of terrestrial destruction—as though to suggest that
the ‘breaking of the mill of heaven’, that is the transition every 2160
years from one zodiacal age to another, could under ill-omened
circumstances bring catastrophic influences to bear on terrestrial events.
Thus it was said that
Ra-Atum, the god who created himself, was originally king over gods and men
together but mankind schemed against his sovereignty, for he began to grow old,
his bones became silver, his flesh gold and his hair [as] lapis lazuli.23
When he realized what was happening, the ageing Sun God (so
reminiscent of Tonatiuh, the bloodthirsty Fifth Sun of the Aztecs)
determined that he would punish this insurrection by killing off most of
the human race. The instrument of the havoc he unleashed was
symbolized at times as a raging lioness wading in blood and at times as
the fearsome lion-headed goddess Sekhmet who ‘poured fire out of
herself and savaged mankind in an ecstasy of slaughter.24
The terrible destruction continued unabated for a long period. Then at
last Ra intervened to save the lives of a ‘remnant’, the ancestors of
present humanity. This intervention took the form of a flood which the
288-9, Utt. 675.) Here, as in other contexts, the function of the canine figure seems to
be to serve as a guide to secret hoards of esoteric information often linked to
mathematics and astronomy.
21 See Part V for full details.
22 Ibid.
23 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, p. 181.
24 The pouring fire allusion is cited in Jean-Pierre Hallet, Pygmy Kitabu, p. 185.
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lioness thirstily lapped up and then fell asleep. When she awoke, she was
no longer interested in pursuing the destruction, and peace descended
upon the devastated world.25
Meanwhile Ra had resolved to ‘draw away’ from what was left of his
creation: ‘As I live my heart is weary of staying with Mankind. I have gone
on killing them [almost] to the very last one, so the [insignificant]
remnant is not my affair ...’26
The Sun God then rose into the sky on the back of the sky-goddess Nut
who (for the purposes of the precessional metaphor about to be
delivered) had transformed herself into a cow. Before very long—in a
gyrating mill—the cow grew ‘dizzy and began to shake and to tremble
because she was so high above the earth.’27 When she complained to Ra
about this precarious state of affairs he commanded, ‘Let my son Shu be
put beneath Nut to keep guard for me over the heavenly supports—which
exist in the twilight. Put her above your head and keep her there.’28 As
soon as Shu had taken his place beneath the cow and had stabilized her
body, ‘the heavens above and the earth beneath came into being’. At the
same moment, ‘the four legs of the cow’, as Egyptologist Wallis Budge
commented in his classic study The Gods of the Egyptians, ‘became the
four props of heaven at the four cardinal points’.29
Like most scholars, Budge understandably assumed that the ‘cardinal
points’ referred to in this Ancient Egyptian tradition had strictly terrestrial
connotations and that ‘heaven’ represented nothing more than the sky
above our heads. He took it for granted that the point of the metaphor
was for us to envisage the cow’s four legs as positioned at the four points
of the compass—north, south, east and west. He also thought—and even
today few Egyptologists would disagree with him—that the simpleminded priests of Heliopolis had actually believed that the sky had four
corners which were supported on four legs and that Shu, ‘the skybearer
par excellence’, had stood immobile like a pillar at the centre of the
whole edifice.30
Reinterpreted in the light of Santillana’s and von Dechend’s findings,
however, Shu and the four legs of the celestial cow look much more like
the components of an archaic scientific symbol depicting the frame of a
precessional world age—the polar axis (Shu) and the colures (the four
legs or ‘props’ marking the equinoctial and solstitial cardinal points in
the annual round of the sun).
Moreover, it is tempting to speculate which world age was being
25 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, p. 181-5.
26 Ibid., p. 184.
27 Ibid., p. 185.
28 The Gods of the Egyptians, volume II, p. 94.
29 Ibid., p. 92-4.
30 Ibid., p. 93.
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signalled here ...
With a cow involved it could have been the Age of Taurus, although the
Egyptians knew the difference between bulls and cows as well as anyone.
But a much more likely contender—at any rate on purely symbolic
grounds—is the age of Leo, from approximately 10,970 to 8810 BC.31 The
reason is that Sekhmet, the agent of the destruction of Mankind referred
to in the myth, was leonine in form. What better way to symbolize the
troubled birth of the new world age of Leo than to depict its harbinger as
a rampaging lion, particularly since the Age of Leo coincided with the
final ferocious meltdown of the last Ice Age, during which huge numbers
; of animal species all over the earth were suddenly and violently rendered
extinct.’32 Mankind survived the immense floods and earthquakes and
rapid changes of climate that took place, but very probably in much
reduced numbers and much reduced circumstances.
The train of the Sun and the dweller in Sirius
Of course the ability to recognize and define precessional world ages in
myth implies that the Ancient Egyptians possessed better observational
astronomy and a more sophisticated understanding of the mechanics of
the solar system than any ancient people have hitherto been credited
with.33 There is no doubt that knowledge of this calibre, if it existed at all,
would have been highly regarded by the Ancient Egyptians, who would
have transmitted it from generation to generation in a secretive manner.
Indeed, it would have ranked among the highest arcana entrusted to the
keeping of the priestly elite at Heliopolis and would have been passed on,
in the main, through an oral and initiatory tradition.34 If, by chance it had
found its way into the Pyramid Texts, is it not likely that its form would
have been veiled by metaphors and allegories?
I walked slowly across the dusty floor of the tomb chamber of Unas,
noting the heavy stillness in the air, casting my eyes over the faded blue
and gold inscriptions. Expressed in coded language several millennia
before Copernicus and Galileo, some of the passages inscribed on these
walls seemed to offer clues to the true heliocentric nature of the solar
system.
31 Skyglobe 3.6.
32 See Part IV.
33 For a detailed discussion see Sacred Science: The King of Pharaonic Theocracy.
34 The issue of priestly secrecy and the oral tradition is discussed at length in From
Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, e.g. p. 43: ‘It is impossible to think that the highest order
of the priests did not possess esoteric knowledge which they guarded with the greatest
care. Each priesthood ... possessed a “Gnosis”, a “superiority of knowledge”, which they
never put into writing ... It is therefore absurd to expect to find in Egyptian papyri
descriptions of the secrets which formed the esoteric knowledge of the priests.’ See also
page 27, and Sacred Science, pp. 273-4.
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In one, for example, Ra, the Sun God, was depicted as seated upon an
iron throne encircled by lesser gods who moved around him constantly
and who were said to be ‘in his train’.35 Likewise, in another passage, the
deceased Pharaoh was urged to ‘stand at the head of the two halves of
the sky and weigh the words of the gods, the aged ones, who revolve
around Ra.’36
If the ‘aged ones’ and the ‘encircling gods’ revolving around Ra should
prove to be parts of a terminology referring to the planets of our solar
system, the original authors of the Pyramid Texts must have enjoyed
access to some remarkably advanced astronomical data. They must have
known that the earth and the planets revolved around the sun rather than
vice versa.37 The problem this raises is that neither the Ancient Egyptians
at any stage in their history, nor even their successors the Greeks, or for
that matter the Europeans until the Renaissance, are supposed to have
possessed cosmological data of anything approaching this quality. How,
therefore, can its presence be explained in compositions which date back
to the dawn of Egyptian civilization?
Another (and perhaps related) mystery concerns the star Sirius, which
the Egyptians identified with Isis, the sister and consort of Osiris and the
mother of Horus. In a passage addressed to Osiris himself, the Pyramid
Texts state:
Thy sister Isis cometh unto thee rejoicing in her love for thee. Thou settest her
upon thee, thy issue entereth into her, and she becometh great with child like the
star Sept [Sirius, the Dog Star]. Horus-Sept cometh forth from thee in the form of
Horus, dweller in Sept.38
Many interpretations of this passage are, of course, possible. What
intrigued me, however, was the clear implication that Sirius was to be
regarded as a dual entity in some way comparable to a woman ‘great with
child’. Moreover, after the birth (or coming forth) of that child, the text
makes a special point of reminding us that Horus remained a ‘dweller in
Sept’, presumably suggesting that he stayed close to his mother.
Sirius is an unusual star. A sparkling point of light particularly
prominent in the winter months in the night skies of the northern
hemisphere, it consists of a binary star system, i.e. it is in fact, as the
Pyramid Texts suggest, a ‘dual entity’. The major component, Sirius-A, is
what we see. Sirius-B, on the other hand—the dwarf-star which revolves
around Sirius A—is absolutely invisible to the naked eye. Its existence did
not become known to Western science until 1862, when US astronomer
Alvin Clark spotted it through one of the largest and most advanced
telescopes of the day.39 How could the scribes who wrote the Pyramid
35 Pyramid Texts cited in The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, p. 158.
36 Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume I, p. 146.
37 Sacred Science, pp. 22-5, 29.
38 Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume I, p. 93.
39 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 10:845.
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Texts possibly have obtained the information that Sirius was two stars in
one?
In The Sirius Mystery, an important book published in 1976, I knew that
the American author Robert Temple had offered some extraordinary
answers to this question.40 His study focused on the traditional beliefs of
the Dogon tribe of West Africa—beliefs in which the binary character of
Sirius was explicitly described and in which the correct figure of fifty
years was given for the period of the orbit of Sirius-B around Sirius-A.41
Temple argued cogently that this high quality technical information had
been passed down to the Dogon from the Ancient Egyptians through a
process of cultural diffusion, and that it was to the Ancient Egyptians that
we should look for an answer to the Sirius mystery. He also concluded
that the Ancient Egyptians must have received the information from
intelligent beings from the region of Sirius’.42
Like Temple, I had begun to suspect that the more advanced and
sophisticated elements of Egyptian science made sense only if they were
understood as parts of an inheritance. Unlike Temple, I saw no urgent
reason to attribute that inheritance to extra-terrestrials. To my mind the
anomalous star knowledge the Heliopolitan priests had apparently
possessed was more plausibly explained as the legacy of a lost human
civilization which, against the current of history, had achieved a high level
of technological advancement in remote antiquity. It seemed to me that
the building of an instrument capable of detecting Sirius-B might not have
been beyond the ingenuity of the unknown explorers and scientists who
originated the remarkable maps of the prehistoric world di
scussed in Part
I. Nor would it have daunted the unknown astronomers and measurers of
time who bequeathed to the Ancient Maya a calendar of amazing
complexity, a data-base about the movements of the heavenly bodies
which could only have been the product of thousands of years of
accurately recorded observations, and a facility with very large numbers
that seemed more appropriate to the needs of a complex technological
society than to those of a ‘primitive’ Central American kingdom.43
Millions of years and the movements of the stars
Very large numbers also appeared in the Pyramid Texts, in the symbolic
‘boat of millions of years’, for example, in which the Sun God was said to
navigate the dark and airless wastes of interstellar space.44 Thoth, the
god of wisdom (‘he who reckons in heaven, the counter of the stars, the
40 The Sirius Mystery.
41 Ibid., p. 3.
42 Ibid., p. 1.
43 See Part III.
44 The Egyptian Book of the Dead, p. cxi.
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measurer of the earth’) was specifically empowered to grant a life of
millions of years to the deceased pharaoh.45 Osiris, ‘king of eternity, lord
of everlasting’, was described as traversing millions of years in his life.’46
And figures like ‘tens of millions of years’ (as well as the more mindboggling ‘one million of millions of years’)47 occurred often enough to
suggest that some elements at least of Ancient Egyptian culture must
have evolved for the convenience of scientifically minded people with
more than passing insight into the immensity of time.
Such a people would, of course, have required an excellent calendar—
one that would have facilitated complex and accurate calculations. It was
therefore not surprising to learn that the Ancient Egyptians, like the
Maya, had possessed such a calendar and that their understanding of its
workings seemed to have declined, rather than improved, as the ages
went by.48 It was tempting to see this as the gradual erosion of a corpus
of knowledge inherited an extremely long time ago, an impression
supported by the Ancient Egyptians themselves, who made no secret of
their belief that their calendar was a legacy which they had received ‘from
the gods’.
We consider the possible identity of these gods in more detail in the