What is ‘eternal knowledge’? Sir Isaac Newton, father of modern science, referred to eternal knowledge as “prisca sapientia”, and others, such as Aldous Huxley, as the ‘perennial philosophy’. They believed that there are certain kinds of spiritual and scientific knowledge that have always existed. Bronze Age city cultures that first appeared over 7,000 years ago were the first we know of who built their societies on this knowledge.
This is timeless and sophisticated knowledge known to the ‘advanced’ city-based civilisations of the Bronze Age which could be useful to us today. From agriculture to architecture, metaphysics to physics, harmony and healing, the Bronze Age ancients knew how to address the needs of the city dweller and still have with respect for the Earth and the natural world. So, as we look for ideas about how to go forward, now is the time to look back and reconnect, because much of what they knew has been lost or forgotten.
Does the ancient past have anything to teach us? All too often we dismiss old societies as backward and primitive. And yet, some of us find ancient history fascinating – and in particular, the Bronze Age.
Why the Bronze Age? Because it was then that the first cities emerged, that civilisation as we know it began, that amazing feats of engineering such as the Great Pyramid in Egypt were built. These developments have shaped the world we live in now helping us to become sophisticated and progressive people. Thanks to the Bronze Age, we began to move away from our hunter gatherer way of living.
But is there more to the ancient past than we perhaps realise? Are there lost civilisations with secrets to tell? Have we understood it all? Were pharaohs shamans and was that the reason for their use of psychedelics? And how does it relate to the Modern Age? Is there timeless knowledge that was known about in the Middle Ages, or in the C17th with the Rosicrucians? What can Sacred Geometry, for instance, teach us? What is the relevance of the Hermetica, the ancient body of Egyptian wisdom? Is there a connection with Tarot? What did Carl Jung know about the Hermetica? And how could we do it better in the modern state?
The accepted consensus is that, in Ancient Egypt, 100 ton obelisks and blocks of granite were cut from the bed-rock, and shaped using diorite pounding balls, copper tools and sand. But these crude methods are so unlikely to have produced the visible results as to be, at best, simply a guess. The elegant and sophisticated artifacts seen across Egypt from Giza to Luxor to Aswan and displayed in the great museums of the world, are testament to whatever techniques were used in their creation.
Today, this technology is a mystery to us. Stylised human/animal statues carved from granite, intricate hieroglyphs cut into granite obelisks and perfectly flat, interlocking blocks of granite are some of the proof for this technology. The rain forests of South America might be the place to start looking for answers.
The Pantheon of Egyptian Neteru (gods and goddesses) actually symbolize aspects and/or forces of nature with multi-dimensional meanings and significance– including being representative of the 360 senses that the indigenous say we all once had, in a higher dimensional Golden Age called the “Age of Aten”.
But maybe we have been purposely given false interpretations of many of the ancient symbols and mythologies. Many of the original meanings have been transformed and retold throughout different time periods, geographical areas and from differing cultural perspectives. Mythologists and symbologists often forget that the myths and symbols have been formed and transformed over thousands, if not, tens of thousands of years of history. And not only this –the secrets were hidden through layers of different interpretations directed toward different groups of people. The most powerful secrets were only entrusted to a select few.
There is a heritage that has been passed down through the ages via an oral tradition of indigenous Egyptian (mostly female) wisdom keepers. They speak of a time in “pre-history” –10,000 – 65,000 years ago or more when there was a highly advanced civilization living here during a great Golden Age on the planet. This was a matriarchal civilization that revered the strength and wisdom of the “mother”– who they related to the creation energy of all that is. Everything is vibration; everything exists in waveform—the sin wave. It is the Neter, Hathor (primordial mother energy) that gives this sin wave the spark of “life” through Sound!
This is why so many cultures revere the serpent energy which is the basis for all that exists in our three dimensional reality including our very own DNA.
The Egyptian Pantheon of Neteru were not created to be worshiped like the gods of our current “religions”. They were multi-level aspects or forces of Nature—that combined to symbolize all that is, was or ever will be; and they represent –as well as the spiraling cycles – cycles within cycles of our existence. The indigenous in Egypt concur with the wisdom keepers from around the globe. We are transgressing through the end of a long Dark Age, and moving into the dawning of a new Golden Age that the indigenous call the Age of Kheper, symbolized by the Winged Scarab.
When we trace the migration of symbols and legends back through the ages we make many fascinating discoveries. The truth of who we are and what we are capable of is beyond our scope of understanding—but the implications are mind boggling. We (not aliens), were the “Gods” and “Goddesses” that built and created the megalithic monuments and pyramid networks as “energy devices”. The abilities we deem to be supernatural or godlike are perfectly natural gifts that we have all forgotten we once had and can have again.
There is evidence of the crystal technology and engineering used in Ancient Egypt. Ancient sites could have harnessed natural subtle forces, including sound, which have an effect on our consciousness when visiting these sites today. These power centers in Egypt and elsewhere across the Planet, can still help our spiritual development.
There is research being conducted at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center, Stanford University, and other universities around the world which is starting to shed light on ancient engineering enigmas related to sound. UCLA have been using an EEG to understand how different sound frequencies impact the mind and body. It appears our distant ancestors were using principles modern science is only just starting to understand.
And then there is the evidence of ‘Sacred Geometry’. Whether we view Revelation as coming ‘down from above’, ‘bubbling up from below’ or moving from ‘within to without’, we are aware that the development of spiritual knowledge requires a movement from ‘another world’ into ‘this world. Geometric patterns are beautiful because they are ‘True’. They reveal to us the mathematical order of the universe. But whereas these laws of number are eternal, their unveiling in this world comes and goes, thus acting as a beautiful but transient reminder of the Reality from which we have come and to which we will return.
So why were skilled guild artisans, as well as certain troubadours and travelling minstrels targeted and/or attacked at times by the Inquisition? Why were the arts ‘controversial’? The great variety of heresy-related trials and alleged ‘heretics’ and ‘heresies’ in the late medieval period remains of interest to many today — especially those that clustered in southwestern France in the cultured, civilised area known as the Languedoc.
Although more well-known groups such as the Cathars, Knights Templars, or the gifted troubadours of the Languedoc have often been given ‘most of the space’ in history books through the centuries, there was actually much else going on in the High Middle Ages at the time as well. Why was this area in particular – one of the most artistic in all of Western Europe – persistently labelled a ‘hotbed of heresy?’ And what happened with the downfall of the courageous Cathars, those who bravely went into the flames rather than forcibly convert or compromise their beliefs, which culminated in the dramatic siege of the famed fortress of Montsegur in 1244? Detailed analysis of a number of the historical records shows a broad variety of factors affecting this tumultous era. The memory of the medieval troubadours and Cathars still remains today, and the civilising effects on medieval Western European society of the music, poetry and arts and crafts in this area in the High Middle Ages is legendary — as is their enduring legacy down into our own time, providing renewed inspiration today for a re-’greening’ of the creative spirit. The seeds of a ‘new Story’ began long ago…
After the Middle Ages, it was not until the Renaissance that ideas began to change and fed into the great movements of the C17th that produced geniuses like Sir Isaac Newton. When the Rosicrucian movement was born in the early 17th century it called for what we would now call a “holistic” form of knowledge, bringing together religion, science and the arts, and informed by the inner esoteric traditions of Hermeticism, alchemy, Kabbalah etc. That moment was a missed opportunity to bring about a more holistic way of thinking, and that the time has come for a renewed attempt to do so.
The Hermetic myth speaks of a divine revelation given to Hermes Trismegistus at the dawn of time. One way for us to share in this knowledge today is to study the Hermetic texts and interpret them according to modern consciousness. But if this knowledge is eternal, it should still be available to us at its source, unmediated and alive. One modern thinker who believed this was the psychologist Carl Jung, who devised a method of consciously entering the realm of revelation, what he called the archetypes. Did Jung make contact with Nous, the Eternal Mind, who passed on his knowledge to Hermes? Or was his descent into the unconscious merely a psychotic breakdown? Jung’s discipline of ‘active imagination’ can possibly allow us today to share in Hermes’ revelation and what this means for the evolution of consciousness.
If anything, it can lead us to a different way of viewing the modern state. The news media depends upon war and conflict almost as much as do politicians and the arms industry. Sadly, we have come to see organized strife as a natural part of being human – as something traditional and inevitable. But suppose that our natural tendency is to cooperate and live with each other in a state of peace and harmony, unburdened by state bureaucracy, its military establishment and the cost of their support? We have done it, we can do it, and today more than ever before we have the tools with which to effectively govern ourselves from the bottom up.
In order to explore these questions and more, some of us have organised an ‘Eternal Knowledge Festival’, a festival of ideas, with talks and workshops in order to explore this lost knowledge. Eternal Knowledge Festival has grown out of a local interest in ancient knowledge in East Anglia. The inspiration for the event has come in part from Lucy Wyatt’s book ‘Approaching Chaos – could an ancient archetype save C21st civilization?’ (www.approachingchaos.co.uk); and in memory of John Agnew’s popular ‘Stars & Stones’ conference series at Rougham (Bury St Edmunds) following his death in June 2011. We ran the first one on a farm in Suffolk in April 2012 and are now holding the second one at a Swedenborg centre near Atherstone, not far from the geomantic heart of England in Warwickshire, 4th-6th July (www.eternal-knowledge.co.uk). This event is also open to anyone with an interest – no specialist knowledge needed.
This time we are focussing on the links between ancient societies, like the Egyptians, and the Hermetic (eternal) wisdom that has influenced European culture through the centuries. We will have talks and workshops on ancient technology, Egypt and the stone of destiny, psychedelics and pharaohs, Medieval heresies, C17th Rosicrucianism, Carl Jung and hermeticism, concepts of the state ancient and modern, Tarot and the Hermetica, and sacred geometry. There will be a general forum discussion with speakers at the end of the weekend.
With thanks to Marcus Allen, Patricia Awyan, Gary Evans, Tom Bree, Dr Christopher McIntosh, Dr Karen Ralls, Gary Lachman and Greg Sams for contributions to this article" for more information, please attend their lectures at our upcoming event or find their books on Amazon.
Lucy Wyatt
Co-organiser
Eternal Knowledge Festival
4th-6th July 2014
Purley Chase, Atherstone, Warwickshire