Amon-Ra is perhaps the most resolutely mystical of all the Egyptian gods. Amon was known as the ‘hidden’ god; Ra was the life-giving sun. The combination denoted the eternal and omnipresent Divine power, the hidden and invisible mystical light which permeates and animates the world.14
At some point of his journey, Alexander became lost and almost died before, eight days later, reaching his destination, Siwa Oasis. There, he was ushered into the temple of Amon-Ra closely attended by the priests. In this temple Alexander had the profoundest experience of his life, an experience which ever after influenced his actions but about which he maintained the greatest secrecy. All we know is a bald statement made by the priests that Amon-Ra had adopted Alexander as his son: he had become a ‘son of god’.
Alexandria and its Library
After the invasion Greek adventurers poured into Egypt, the majority to profit as members of a ruling class dominating an immensely wealthy country. Others came to learn what they could of the wisdom in the temples, although the priests were notoriously reticent and looked down on the Greeks as being little better than barbarians. But the Greeks loved learning: the kings built the famous library at Alexandria where scholars could live, free of charge, all their needs of accommodation and food being supplied by royal command.
All books were copied into Greek. Histories of every known country were commissioned and the finished works placed in the library. Every ship known to be carrying books which stopped at Alexandria was required to give them up to the library and accept the copies made as replacements. Private libraries throughout the empire were purchased and brought there. Learning flourished; but of a certain type. For learning also had a political dimension; it encouraged cultural domination. Much as, in the modern world, the power of Hollywood and American television has spread the English language and American values (sports shoes, silicon-enhanced breasts and round slices of processed meat in a bun) the world over.
It seems, at first, that the Egyptian priests thought that the Greeks would arrive, steal everything that moved, and eventually leave. But the Egyptians underestimated their invaders; the Greeks were resilient and masters of the political game. In time the Egyptians realized their mistake; the Greeks were not about to go. And, by virtue of the schools and libraries they had set up, the population of Egypt – especially the children – were being raised and taught Greek language, Greek culture, Greek values.
At some stage, no one knows exactly when, the Egyptian priests realized that their ancient traditions and wisdom was going to be lost. They took steps to preserve it. They changed their approach radically. They began to express their ancient teachings in the Greek language for an audience raised in a Greek culture. They began to teach and they began to initiate. They devised a system which could maintain itself beyond the temples and beyond any religious hierarchy.
In such a manner the sacred Books of Hermes Trismegistus appeared, Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes the Thrice Greatest) being the result of combining the teachings and mysteries of the Greek god Hermes with those of Egypt’s god Thoth. This is most likely to have occurred during the second century BC.15 It is not without relevance that at the cult centre for Thoth, Khemenu, there was a library renowned for its books of magic.
Thoth, who first appears in Egyptian mystery texts as the guide for the dead, in this way reappears as Hermes Trismegistus, the guide for the living.
The Books of Hermes
The Egyptian way of teaching in the temples had always been oral and personal, like a father to a son. While the mode of teaching expressed in the Books of Hermes continued this tradition, it did so in a way which no longer needed the temple ritual structure. It relied instead upon a wide network of initiated teachers, all operating independently: there was no centralized control.
While there were texts dealing with alchemy, magic and astrology, the particular Hermetic books which were focused, above all, upon the mystical path, seem to have first appeared during the first century AD, about the same time as the Christian Gospels and the later Dead Sea Scrolls – in fact, there may just possibly be an Alexandrian connection between the three traditions. These Books of Hermes were later collected into a series known as the Hermetica.
These books are dialogues generally concerning a pupil who seeks knowledge or initiation, seeks to experience the Divine mystery directly and immediately. After such an experience, the new initiate then himself – or herself – teaches others. In this way the informal but effective network perpetuates itself.
The Hermetic teachers taught by means of symbolism and allegory – in particular using the terminology of alchemy: the secret of marrying the above to the below in order to gain knowledge of the Divine source.
In these later Books of Hermes the ancient Egyptian wisdom is distilled to its very essence. While there is much magical and alchemical symbolism used, at its heart it focuses upon a divine mystery which even words, symbols and visions can only go so far in communicating. At the end, it is for the initiate to go the final distance. And this final distance is not travelled by faith, or by belief, but by direct knowledge.
One of the most succinct of these books is known historically as ‘The Divine Pymander of Hermes Trismegistus’. More accurately it is simply ‘The Poimandres’, which in Greek means herdsman, or shepherd. Recent work has shown that it derives from an earlier Egyptian title meaning ‘The Understanding or Intelligence of Ra’, the sun-god.16 Thoth was one of Ra’s sons. This text presents what is certainly the very heart of the secret teaching which emerged from Egypt. It is unashamedly mystical, telling of the Creator and the Creation, together with the experience of both, an experience of transfiguration.
‘The Divine Pymander of Hermes Trismegistus’: Poimandres
This text is presented in the first person; the writer, a student of the mysteries relates the following:
Once when I was very still and meditating upon the meaning of existence, a huge being appeared, called my name, and asked me, ‘What do you want to hear and see; what do you want to learn and know…?’
‘Who are you?’ I asked.
‘I am Poimandres,’ he said… ‘I know what you want, and I am with you everywhere.’
I said, ‘I wish to learn about the things that are, to understand their nature and to know god.’17
Poimandres replied by advising the student to keep everything that he wanted to know at the forefront of his mind. Immediately Poimandres vanished and a vast visionary perspective opened before the student.
‘I saw an endless vision in which everything became light – clear and joyful – and in seeing the vision I came to love it.’18
Shortly afterwards a darkness appeared, spreading and coiling like a snake. This darkness then became watery, ‘agitated and smoking like a fire’; out of it came a huge ‘wailing roar’. But then a holy word came out of the light and fire burst from the watery darkness to fly upwards followed by the air until the two of them, fire and air, were suspended high above the mixture of earth and water below. And upon the earth and water the holy word moved.
After this Poimandres asked, ‘Have you understood what this vision means?’19
The student replied that he should eventually come to understand it. Poimandres explained, ‘I am the light you saw… your god who existed before the watery nature that appeared out of darkness. The lightgiving word who comes… is the son of god.’ He then said to the student, ‘Understand the light, then, and recognize it.’20
Poimandres then related in great detail how the multitude of created things came about and how, even in such complex diversity, the simplicity of the one source of divinity was always accessible. And the student learned all Poimandres had to teach:
Then he sent me forth… instructed on the nature of the universe and on the supreme vision… And I began proclaiming to mankind the beauty of reverence and knowledge: ‘People, earthborn men, you who have surrendered yourselves to drunkenness and sleep and ignorance of god, make yourselves sober and en
d your drunken sickness, for you are bewitched in unreasoning sleep.’21
People gathered about and the student taught them, exhorting them to leave the ‘way of death’ and join him in the way of immortality. Some laughed at him, and left; others came and listened. ‘I became guide to my race, teaching them the words – how to be saved and in what manner – and I sowed the words of wisdom among them…’22
Through these Books of Hermes the mystical wisdom from Egypt began to spread far beyond the Nile valley.
It especially spread in its symbolic forms of alchemy, magic or astrology. The inner message, while often obscured by faulty translation or top-heavy prose, was never lost, even during the passing of many centuries.
Nevertheless, it often remained dangerous for the alchemists to speak clearly for they would have readily been persecuted by the authorities, suspicious of any deviation from the official religious viewpoint. The alchemists, then, continued to obscure their true intent in their writings; the twelfth-century adept, Artephius, wrote in his Secret Book, ‘Poor fool! Will you be simple enough to believe that we teach openly and clearly the greatest and the most important of all secrets?’23
11
The Mysterious Art of Alchemy
Terranova di Sibari is a small ragged town sitting unobtrusively at the entrance to a narrow valley which probes deeply into the rugged Calabrian mountains of southern Italy. The river Crati tumbles out of this valley and flows across a rich alluvial plain before entering the sea at the south-west corner of the Gulf of Taranto. Beyond the horizon lie Crete and Egypt.
Near to this small town are a few ruined traces of the ancient Greek colony of Thurii, notable as the city where the historian Herodotus lived out the last years of his life.
Archaeology arrived in the region early in 1879 when Francesco Cavallari began a field survey of the area looking for traces of the long-vanished city. On some lands belonging to a medieval estate he noticed a low plateau, perhaps a mile across, which seemed scattered with graves. Among them were four large mounds up to thirty feet high which he presumed covered ancient burials. He surmised – and he was in fact correct – that he had found the cemetery area of ancient Thurii. He chose to begin his excavations with the large mounds.1
As the earth was taken from the top of the most southerly mound, a covering layer of ash was found, the remnants of a ritually burned sacrifice. Beneath this another layer of earth appeared; under it was a second layer of ash from yet another, earlier, sacrifice. In all, eight layers of ash topped by earth were found, demonstrating that repeated ritual sacrifices had been conducted during the burial: the dead man had been given a hero’s inhumation. Finally, at the bottom of the mound, Cavallari discovered a tomb: a small but solid rectangular structure built from heavy stone blocks.
On Sunday 23 March 1879 Cavallari, in the presence of a local dignitary and a crowd of spectators, ceremoniously opened the tomb. Inside was revealed a male skeleton facing east with, near to his head, a thin gold plate which proved to have been folded over nine times. When it was opened it was just over thirty-one inches long and almost an inch wide; inside it Cavallari found a second folded plate about two by one inches in size. Both these gold plates held a text in an archaic script dating from the fourth century BC. Mysteriously, the text gave instructions to the dead in a manner more akin to the ancient Egyptians than to the ancient Greeks.
In December that same year another of the mounds was excavated. In it were found three stone tombs, each apparently dating from a different time. Inside each was a skeleton, similarly facing east. And each skeleton had, near its right hand, a small thin gold plate also inscribed with a short text.
Other examples of these inscribed gold plates have since been found or recognized. An English collector living in Rome possessed one which had been found in southern Italy during the eighteenth century. Six more were later found in central Crete. Two were found in graves in Thessaly, Greece. In 1969 another was found in the grave of a woman at Hipponium – now Vibo Valentia – over the mountains from Thurii, on the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Sixteen years later two more were found in Thessaly, this time in the shape of ivy leaves. In total, seventeen have been found, all except one dating from the third or fourth centuries BC.
The texts inscribed on these plates gave directions for the dead, so that they might not get lost on the journey through the next world. They promised too the supreme prize of immortality. In style and content, they bore a distinct resemblance to sections of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Both this and the Greek texts shared the same basic theme: that guardians of the underworld stop and challenge the soul of the dead and that the soul claims identity with one of the gods or with one of the stars.2 One of the plates found at Thurii praises the dead person as, ‘O fortunate and blessed one, you will be a god, no longer mortal.’3 The similarities could not be simply coincidence. Archaeologists reluctantly realized that these gold plates proved an early and close cultural connection between ancient Egypt and the Greeks, particularly in the colonies of southern Italy.
As a result, the picture of the Greek cultural heritage became a little more complicated.
A Mixture of Mystics
We should not be surprised by this connection. We tend to forget how mobile people – and their ideas – were in ancient times. Scholars, traders, workers with skills, all travelled to and fro, through every frontier, across every sea. The Greeks in particular had a close connection with Egypt; in 570 BC the pharaoh Amasis allowed them to found a special city, Naucratis, as a trading base in the Nile delta. He even allowed them to construct their own temples.
But long before this time, from at least 700 BC, the Greek island of Samos had been forging strong trading links with Egypt. Under Amasis these links became especially strong and their merchants too settled at Naucratis.4 Not long after the foundation of this city, around 558 BC,5 a Phoenician trader from Tyre settled on Samos and married a local woman. Their child was to become one of the most influential philosophers of all time: the famous Pythagoras. Like many of his fellow Samians he grew up to travel widely. But, unlike them, he did so for knowledge rather than trade: he became an initiate into the sacred mysteries of every culture he visited.
Pythagoras began his wanderings at an early age when his father sent him to Tyre in Phoenicia for his schooling. He remained there until he was twenty-two when he travelled on to Egypt, where he then lived and studied for many years. During this time he learned to read hieroglyphics, a training which included instruction on their symbolic interpretation6 – an enigmatic matter about which modern Egyptologists remain strangely silent.
In 525 BC the Persian king Cambyses mounted his invasion of Egypt and Pythagoras was taken, along with many others, into captivity in Babylon. But, once there, he soon began studying with a Zoroastrian magus. After some years he was permitted to leave, first visiting Crete and then Greece. Finally, around 518 BC, he moved to southern Italy, to the Gulf of Taranto, where he founded his famous school, initially at Croton and later further north up the coast, at Metapontum.
The Celestial Music
Much of what Pythagoras taught would have been familiar to the Egyptians: that the soul was immortal and that the dead travelled to the stars.7 He also taught reincarnation – which Herodotus explicitly states as an Egyptian belief8 – and the recall of past lives.
Pythagoras’ teaching was founded upon a belief in the dynamic harmony of the universe, an ever-changing pattern which could literally be heard as an intermingling of musical notes which Pythagoras claimed to be able to hear. The reason most others were unable to do so, he explained, was because they had become used to it: the constant movement of the planets and stars creates this music and there is no contrasting period of silence which might make it more obvious.
Pythagoras’ approach to knowledge was mystical. It was based upon revelation. But to receive this divine gift one had to become purified. And this was the reason for joining his ascetic community. Above all, Pythago
ras saw himself as a healer – of both the body and the soul. In particular, he healed by means of musical harmony. In this concern Pythagoras was intensely practical: he saw no distinction between the roles of healer, magician or philosopher. He was quite unlike the later Greek philosophers, who were typified by intellectual theory, unsullied by practical matters.
Pythagoras taught, not by reasoned argument but by the use of symbolism because he considered that to be the best means of expressing a mystical truth. Furthermore, such symbols could be published and yet remain secret; only those with the correct understanding could make sense of them. As we shall see, this is precisely the point with alchemy.
During the lifetime of Pythagoras, and later, profound changes came to Egypt. The Persian domination of 525 to 404 BC opened it to influence from the Zoroastrians and Babylonians. Almost 200 years afterwards the Greeks under Alexander the Great invaded; by then the Greek empire stretched as far east as India and sadhus came west to teach. In this manner, Indian mysticism too – Vedic and Buddhist – entered the Greek world.
By the time of the building of the great library in Alexandria, the capital of Greek Egypt during the third century BC, the city was a melting pot for mystical religious cults. At the same time traditional Egypt continued to maintain its own ancient and esoteric teachings preserved in The Book of the Dead, The Coffin Texts and The Pyramid Texts.
Out of this melting pot, this crucible, came alchemy.
From the Melting Pot
Alchemy, as we know it, first seems to appear in the work of Bolus, a citizen of Mendes, a city in the eastern Nile delta. He died around 250 BC, his life having spanned the reigns of kings Ptolemy I and II and the foundation of the Alexandrian Library. With Bolus we find two great mystical movements in combination. On the one hand, he was immersed in the mystery tradition of Egypt, in particular that of magic – his writings contain many spells, some of which necessitate the use of sound and breath control. On the other, he was committed to Pythagorean thought and healing, even though Pythagoras had been dead for 200 or more years.