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A further research into the controversy over the ethnicity Cleopatra VII ... with a surprising revelation about the origin of existence from Eygptian glyphs.
AN EGYPTIAN APOLOGIA
Eugene Stovall
One will build the Walls of the Ruler,
To bar Asiatics from entering Egypt:
They shall beg water as supplicants,
So as to let their cattle drink.
Then order will return to its seat,
While chaos is driven away,
Rejoice he who may behold, he may attend the king!
As quoted by Asa Hilliard in
Egypt Revisited
1.
After the distribution of my controversial essay, Why Cleopatra Was Definitely Not Black! I received a number of friendly suggestions. Some of them believed that my opinions might be more acceptable … if not more authentic … if I could use authorities in the field … including some of the leading afrocentrists. Actually, I had submitted my essay to Manu Ampin as well as Runoko Rashidi, two afrocentrist scholars of note. Professor Ampin is an Egyptologist who has conducted several tours to Egyptian monuments and temples at Luxor, Karnak and Dendera. Professor Ampin participated in the symposium on "Egypt: Africa's Glorious Daughter” held at Fort Lauderdale’s African-American Research Library & Cultural Center. Last October, I had accompanied Professor Ampin on his San Francisco tour of the Hatshepsut Exhibit. I found his comments to be informative and provocative. Professor Rashidi, most recently, was the keynote speaker at Cornell University’s Africana Center that was celebrating Afrika Week 2006.
I have admired afrocentric work for some time having read such leading afrocentrists such as Asa Hilliard, Maulana Karenga and Theophile Obenga. However, it was not from these afrocentrists that my own Kemetic beliefs emerge. So it would not be fair to them if I claimed that my statements about a civilization whose mysteries and secrets have intrigued the western world for over two millennia came from them. The west’s most brilliant minds have studied the mysteries of ancient Egypt. Anyone, such as I, who must rely on translations and interpretations from experts in the field certainly runs the risk of making gross errors with regard to facts as well as assumptions. Anyone who has poured over Martin Bernal’s Black Athena knows that views about the secrets of ancient Egypt diverge greatly between Aryan tomb robbers and afrocentrists thinkers.
In addition, my opinions differ somewhat from mainstream afrocentrist thought. While I have an interest in understanding the Kemetic secrets, I am much more interested in how the Europeans seized control of a 4000 year old civilization … and did it without so much as a whisper. To this day, Egypt remains under the boot of European civilization. In discussing past glories, the afrocentrists seem to ignore how the past is responsible for current affairs.
I also differ with a major afrocentrist authority, George G. M. James. In his Stolen Legacy. James says that Alexander’s “… invading army would first loot the Royal Library of Alexandria and then would turn their attention to the Menephtheion at Thebes.” A careful reader might have a problem with James’ statement.
There is no dispute that Alexander was a looter and pillager … however, Alexander could not have looted the Royal Library of Alexandria since, at the time Alexander took control of Egypt, Alexandria did not yet exist. It was Alexander who ordered the construction of Alexandria after which the Royal Library of Alexandria was established. Afterwards works pillaged from other parts of Egypt including, it might be assumed. ‘the Menephtheion at Thebes’ were deposited at Alexandria’s royal library. There is even a need to rethink the term “invading army” since Alexander’s control of Egypt resulted from his victory over Darius. Up to that time, the Persians controlled and ruled over Egypt. All the encyclopedias generally agree that Artaxerxes III was the king of Persia for twenty years before he defeated the Egyptians and became the first ruler of Egypt’s thirty-first dynasty. Artaxerxes, known as Ochus, ruled over Egypt for six years before his own commander, Bagoas, murdered him, in the summer of 338 BC.
Diodorus wrote in the first century A. D. in Book XVI of his Bibliotheca Historia : Artaxerxes, after taking over all Egypt and demolishing the walls of the most important cities, by plundering the shrines amassed a vast quantity of silver and gold and carried off the inscribed records from the ancient temples, which later on Bagoas returned to the Egyptian priests on the payment of huge sums. Then when he had lavishly rewarded the Greeks who had accompanied him on the campaign, each according to his deserts, he dismissed them to their native lands; and having installed Pherendates as satrap of Egypt, he returned with his army to Babylon, bearing many possessions and spoils and having won great renown by his successes.
When Alexander defeated Darius III in 332 BC, he seized Egypt from the Persians and absorbed Egypt into his own empire. In the first part of 331 BC, shortly after being crowned Pharaoh in Memphis, Alexander sailed northwards down the Nile and there, prompted by a dream, built a fortified port on the natural harbor near Rhacotis.
The Macedonian conqueror named this fortified port city, Alexandria. In the bay fronting his city, the island of Pharos, split the Mediterranean Sea into two parts. Alexander ordered that Pharos be connected to Alexandria’s main fortifications by a 1,300-meter causeway called the Heptastadion. Once the Heptastadion was completed, Alexandria boasted of two great harbors. Finally rising out of the twin harbors and towering over all of Alexandria was built the Pharos Lighthouse, guiding the way of Europeans coming to carry off the Egyptian loot. So powerful was the lighthouse at Pharos that it became known as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Alexander, himself, did not stay in Egypt long enough to see a single building of his new city. Once he gave his orders, he immediately returned to his conquest of Asia. Before he left Egypt, Alexander installed his general, Ptolemy, as satrap and ruler.
Another matter that concerns me is slavery. No matter how glorious their accomplishments, ancient Egypt still remains a slave society. No matter its glories and accomplishments, one must remember that this civilization drove, starved, separated and worked its own people as slaves. The ancient Egyptian masses hauled stone from the rock quarries and rowed great galleys down the Nile. Others toiled in the fields gathering the foodstuffs and linen produced by the bountiful Nile. Still others labored deep underground in the mines digging out gold and precious stones to adorn the mistresses of their slave masters. For of thousand years, the building and maintaining of the gigantic Egyptian monuments and temples, pyramids and tombs was the sole occupation of entire populations of impressed slaves.
The only escape from this life of perpetual toil was to join the army. But the terrible wounds suffered by the soldiers as described in the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, certainly did not make military life any more appealing. Of course, it is easy to speak of that idyllic state of Maat enjoyed by priests, artisans and the royal family. But only a paltry few enjoyed the idyllic state of Maat while the vast majority of Egyptians were reduced to slavery.
We must come to grips with slavery as an essentially African institution in order to account for the fearsome 20th century spectacle of Africans butchering their own people as happened in Rwanda between the Tutsis and Hutus and in Nigeria between the Ashantis and Ibos. Ancient Egypt’s society seems very similar to present Africa where the few rulers and military strong men enjoy luxuries while the majority of their people starve. Most importantly African-Americans must recognize the crimes committed by the former African-American slaves from the United States against the indigenous peoples of Liberia. In 1923, the African American rulers of Liberia borrowed $5 million from the Firestone Rubber Company. In order to repay the loan, the African Americans passed a forced labor law that enslaved the natives and condemned them to toil on Firestone’s rubber plantations for the remainder of their short, miserable. By the time the African American rulers of Liberia condemned the indigenous natives to perpetual toil for white plantation owners, slavery in the United States had been abolished for almost 60 years.
With these differences in perspective, I would not expect that afrocentrist scholars would support my thesis that Alexandria was a segregated Greek enclave city that only allowed eunuchs … castrated Egyptian and other non-Greeks … within her borders.
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2.
Since I could not use the afrocentrists to support my assertions, it was suggested that, The Temple of Man by R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz might provide some intellectual support. As written, The Temple of Man is an arithmetic, mathematical and geometrical treatise on the Egyptian temple at Luxor. One reason this work might support my thesis was that, during his short rule, Alexander’s priests had sectioned off the holiest part of the temple at Luxor and made it the chapel where Alexander, himself, was worshipped as a god.
In this work, Schwaller set out to prove that the ancient Egyptians viewed the world in anthropocosmic terms. The Egyptians, according to Schwaller that human agency, seen and unseen, controls all. In studying the ancient Egyptians through their temples, monuments and papyri, Schwaller found that the ancient Egyptians believed that cosmic man was the last stage in the evolution of creation.
Schwaller claims that the temple at Luxor when examined using precise mathematical, geometrical and arithmetic measurements is a perfect symbolic representation of cosmic man … the human being who is perfect in all aspects, spiritually, mentally and physically. In other words, Schwaller claims … just as wife, Isha Schwaller, does in her book, Her-Bak: The Living Face of Ancient Egypt … that the temple at Luxor is … or at least was … a living. being.
Schwaller says that the Egyptians built The Temple of Man as a perfect replica of the human body including skeleton, organs and brain. The hieroglyphs, monuments and sacred writings all support the fact that the temple at Luxor can completely describe and demonstrate every physical part of man inside of his body as well as outside. Hieroglyphs and monuments found at the temples of Karnak and Dendera confirm the discoveries found at Luxor. Schwaller’s findings in the temple at Luxor are confirmed by modern descriptions of the human body, primarily the head, as well as certain mathematical and geometrical principles stated in the Ebers Papyrus, the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus and the Rhind Papyrus.
In using The Temple of Man as an authority I hoped to find that the rule of the Egyptian Ptolemaic Dynasty served as a period of transition for establishing European political and cultural domination. The first stage of this Greek ‘occupation’ was the imposition of a ‘materialist’ order on the Egyptian people. The Ptolemies had merged the Egyptian gods to the Greek religious practices. Then they created the syncretic combination of Greek and Egyptian worship that resulted into the syncretic cult of Serapis and Isis. The next stage was a complete substitution of the Olympian gods in their Roman guises. The masses did not challenge to this ‘new world order’ since the existing political and religious order had already reduced them to the level of slaves. And so, by the time, Cleopatra seized control of the throne becoming last Ptolemaic ruler, Europeans has come to consider Egypt and her treasures their own. And the final absorption of ancient Egypt into the Roman Empire … that decayed human cesspool of corruption and evil which Cleopatra hungered to be a part of … was completed. However, instead finding support for my thesis in The Temple of Man, I discovered something far more important … and amazing.
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3.
In the bible, the act of creation is contained in the Word which in The Temple of Man Schwaller calls the Verb. But before the Word or the Verb can manifest itself, it must clothe itself in symbolism. It is this process of symbolization that Schwaller calls creation. In this way, reality results from a interweaving of reason with symbolism.
Schwaller says that man creates because he can reason … not just, as Descartes asserts, because he can think. Man thinks because he is one of the higher animals. Science has demonstrated that many other animals think as well. Man not only thinks, but reasons. Man must reason because he is not God. So the only way that Man knows what God, the First Creator, knows is by reasoning through a process of manipulating certain symbols. Schwaller says that the ancient Egyptians believed and practiced this specific process of reasoning. According to Schwaller, the Egyptians continually manipulated those symbols that represented to them the Creator’s essence because they believed that when man is reasoning he is creating. The more perfect the symbol that man manipulates, the more man is able to approach the Creator’s perfection.
Today we see this practice of manipulating symbols in the practice of the abstract reasoning associated with mathematics. Once these mathematical symbols are manipulated properly, the actual process of creation begins with the consistent and rational application of arithmetic, geometric and trigometric formulas. Thus all that western civilization has created … from buildings to engines, from microscopes to telescopes, from airplanes to wonder drugs … results from the same idea of manipulating symbols … in this case mathematic, geometric and arithmetic formulas or theorems. These symbols represent the essence of the Creator’s word. Up to now, there was no doubt that the Word was representative of the divine Creator, itself, with nothing else in between. In the beginning was the Word …
With the forgoing in mind, Schwaller says that the entire Egyptian temple at Luxor is a symbol of cosmic man. And cosmic man … as well as all reality … exists through an intuitive processing of the mathematical, arithmetic and geometrical formulations representing an exact symbolizaton of reality. To most modern scientists these mathematical, arithmetic and geometrical formulations are truth … and though certain anomalies continue to manifest themselves … the certainty of scientific truth has led to the assertion that western civilization can match the creative output of the original Creator, himself. R.A. Schwaller asserts in The Temple of Man that these exact scientific formulations, these same mathematical, arithmetic and geometrical progressions, were known and used by the ancient Egyptians five thousand years ago. He proves his assertions in his detailed study the temple at Luxor … the Temple of Man. Furthermore, Schwaller found that when the ancient Egyptians of the XIXth Dynasty built the Temple of Man, they used it as a research laboratory where they conducted amazing studies on the cosmic … or the perfect … man.
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4.
Cogito, ergo sum!
--Descartes.
As soon as man discovered the truth of his own existence, he quickly discovered that he had better make good, rational decisions or his life … not to mention his very existence … might end very quickly. Man uses his rational faculties … his brain, his intelligence … to discriminate and choose between what is right and what is wrong for his own self preservation. Since he isn’t God, man must continually make rational decisions. God, the Creator … the All … has no fears; the Creator is immortal and does not need to choose or make decisions which guarantees his existence. Man must choose, must rationalize, in order to preserve and protect that which is not of the Creator. Man must act ratonally because part of him is not immortal. His consciousness and awareness uses his rational powers for but one purpose … to preserve that which does not partake of the Creator’s immortality. Man seeks to protect his physical existence. Work for man is not just a rational activity; work is survival. Man’s brain allows him to distinguish between predator and prey. It is from his conscious awareness that he knows that if he is not the predator, he is certainly the prey. Man’s rational intelligence discriminates in order to preserve and protect … a function of which God, the Creator, has no need.
What the Creator does have … and what all of creation, including man, needs, according to Schwaller, is what the ancient Egyptians called an intelligence of the heart. This intelligence of the heart is an intuitive intelligence. This intelligence has no connection to rationality and is that which connects all of life to the source of Life … the All. It is the single connection between the Creator and his creation. The intelligence of the heart is the sustaining power that regulates life in the individual as it regulates the life of the All … and everything in between. No man … nor any other creature …uses his rational intelligence to live. That which regulates life whether it be the vital organs, the nervous system or the blood that flows within the arteries and veins comes from the All. That which regulates all of Life partakes of the intelligence of the All and is known as the intelligence of the heart … an intuition into the essence of the All.
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5.
In describing the Egyptian belief of how life came about, Schwaller posits a creative urge that at one and the same time is instantaneous and continuous. Schwaller says that the Creator … All That Exists … set creation in motion through a process of scission … that is from one came two. It can be called an exhalation or a ‘big bang’ or the uttering of the Word, but after all the explanations are stripped of their religious, scientific and rational components, what remains is that the Creator became aware of an ‘other’ that had become separated from itself. And since the Creator has no intelligence, it reacted to the discovery in the only manner possible … it counted. One, two …
The All may not have known what two since it is the sum of all meanings, but the All knew that somehow things were not the same as they were before… and it continued to count One, two… Thus the ancient Egyptians believe that reality unfolded from the All in a series of progressions that had at its very beginning a mathematical preciseness. One, two …
But once it began, other progressions proceeded from the All, as well. The arithmetic was not the only reaction of the All to the other; there were other progressions from the All … each symbolizing perfection … took place as well. There were mathematic, geometric and trigonometric progressions. According to Schwaller, the ancient Egyptians carefully studied these progressions and found that they were absolute symbols of perfection. And Schwaller discovered that the ancient Egyptians decided to preserve these perfect symbols of the All. The Egyptians preserved these symbols in the temples, monuments, tombs and inscriptions that became the hallmark of their civilization. They preserved these symbols so that their connection with the All would stand for all eternity. Thus in studying the Egyptian temple at Luxor, Schwaller discovered, what he believed to be, the root of all scientific symbols as well as the source of scientific certainty.
In his investigations of the temple at Luxor conducted over a fifteen year period, Schwaller made a range of discoveries from the microcosm within us to the solar system around us. Schwaller calibrated ancient mathematical formulations preserved in the temple against modern scientific measures and devices. The accuracy of Egyptian formulations in many cases were just as good as modern instruments … and in some cases even better, After four thousand years, Schwaller discovered that the temple at Luxor held preserved within its precincts the tools necessary for complete scientific studies. And furthermore, he found that what the ancients studied using these perfect mathematical, arithmetic and geometrical axioms preserved in stone was a perfect man standing as a symbol of the Creator, himself.
****
6.
Egyptian monuments, temples and rooms with their symbols and hieroglyphs give evidence, Schwaller decides, of the Egyptians’ unique insights into the workings of the cosmos from the beginning of time. This insight, Schwaller declares, can be applied in many areas including surgery, social organization, economic behavior and construction.
From these discoveries. Schwaller asserts, that the world of the ancient Egyptians is anthropocosmetic. Cosmic conciousness, at its highest level, is a consciousness of mankind. Therefore, the world is real only because man thinks and makes the rational decisions that maintains its reality. All other beings and organism find their reality in playing the role that nature intended. Accordingly they have no purpose or role other than to serve man. On the other hand, man has the ability to be whatever he wills himself to be. Therefore, man is a perfect symbol of the All … the Creator.
Schwaller asserts that the Egyptians believed that life unfolded from the creator in a purely mathematical way as an expression of the Word. The most sublimely perfect formulations and progressions possible proceed from the All as an expression of a creative urge. The initial reaction of the All to his creative impulse and his awareness of an other was to count… one, two. And Schwaller says that the All created the Word in response to his awareness of the other … an initial awareness and a consciousness of the me and the not-me. And according to Schwaller, the ancient Egyptians believe that the All counted and continues to count, one, two. From this counting comes the Egyptian principle of number. From number proceeds measure and from measure proceeds proportion … and from number, measure and proportion comes the Egyptian concept of Life.
Using these formulations of the ancient Egyptians, Schwaller examined the temple at Luxor to discover exact mathematical and geometrical symbols of cosmic man … the perfect man … internally and externally. In painstaking detail, Schwaller examined the architecture, monuments, inscriptions, hieroglyphs … even the joints and pieces, to understand mathematically every aspect of the temple at Luxor. And in his examination, Schwaller makes an important discovery: the reason why after 4000 years the temple at Luxor can provide better mathematic, geometric and arithmetic formulations than many of the scientific tools available today is because the temple at Luxor was alive when it was constructed during the period of the XIXth Dynasty … and remains alive today.
Schwaller learned from his intense study that the Temple of Man not only had the rational intelligence of a brain, it also had intuitive intelligence of a heart …the intelligence that requires neither permission nor participation from the brain to execute its functions and carry out its will.
**********
7.
In the end, however, R.A. Schwaller rejects his own discovery. The best he can do is assert that the creative urge is not the WORD … instead he calls it the VERB. However, his wife, Isha, carries on in her work, Her-Bak: Egyptian Initiate .
“We have seen that an infinite number of triangular forms is possible starting from a given angle. The angles themselves can go from zero … to a right angle … . This is philosophically correct, but the created thing is tangible and distinguishes itself from creative unity by the fact of being definable, for it has boundaries. It is to this that what I call the Pythagorean cosmic harp alludes—that is, the proportional foundation of types, the basis of all forms.
“While making use of the sacred triangle, 3:4:5, which is necessarily right-angled, we have a side a that equals 4, a side b that equals 3, and a side c—or hypotenuse---that equals 5 and plays the role here of a vibrating string. By dividing each of the three parts of the side either by 3 or by 5, there are divisions of 1/3, 1/9, and 1/15. This gives all the fractions necessary for the whole musical scale. Side a will give us fa with 3/4 of the string and the octave of the original do with 1/2 of the string. It suffices to divide the hypotenuse, which equals 1, into 8/9 for re, 4/5 for mi, 3/4 for fa, 2/3 for sol, 3/5 for la, and 8/15 for ti. When the hypotenuse is divided into two equal parts, each will give the octave of the first do.”
Isha Schwaller attributes the perfection of the arithmetic, geometric and mathematic theorems not directly to the All … as Creator. But the perfection of these mathematical progressions comes from an intermediary source: the perfection of the cosmic harp … and ultimately the perfection of a single note. From one note comes the scale from which is derived all mathematics and ultimately all rational judgment. Since rational judgment comes from the recognition of perfection measured in precise mathematical, geometric and trigometric terms ... we have found that rather than creation being derived from the Word of the Creator through a rational intelligence, creation evolves from the intelligence of the heart. The Word is derived from that the mind that recognizes and chooses perfection as determined by mathematical, geometrical and arithmetic progressions. But the source of perfection is not found in the Word; it is found in the Note.
Rational consciousness measures all acts by its approximation to perfection. Perfection manifests itself in the underlying arithmetic, geometric and mathematical progressions which determine realtiy. But before these progressions can become meaningful … before these progressions can symbolize the All as Life … these progressions must be harmonized. Thus it was that I discovered that the original creative urge was not a Word … a series of perfect mathematic, geometric and arithmetic progressions. Before the Word was the Note …a perfect note that shattered the void of nothingness and created within itself the sublimity of mathematic progressions harmonized into what is known as a perfect reality. It is the urge of form to hold to the sounds of the cosmic harp within a individualized consciousness that is what the ancient Egyptians called Life.
****
8.
My original purpose for investigating R.A. Schwaller’s Temple of Man was to find support for my pet theories. But after I completed my research, my discovery completely surpassed my original purpose. I discovered that the creative urge was the sounding of the one perfect note and with it came the harmonious response along every scale in every octave and in every key … and thus is Life.
The discovery that the ancient Egyptians based all their scientific formulations on the Note and perfection of the cosmic harp could only mean one thing:. In the beginning … under the power of a creative urge issuing forth from the All … flowed a note that has such a perfect memory of the All, itself, that a world is born. The true desire to rejoin the All is a memory born of the sublime harmonizing of the Word in its various mathematical progressions. This sound is so perfect that proportion … in accordance with principles of geometry and trigonometry … desires to hold onto this exquisite representation of the All for itself and thus live separate from the All. As the All counts, one, two independent life continues to be inspired by the perfect symbolization of the All in the harmony of its Word and the pulse, one, two, of the Creator. Proportion eagerly clutches at the wondrous sounds containing the mathematical incantations of perfection. Perfect memories of the All . harmonic progressions, accompanied by mathematical, arithmetic and geometrical representations of perfection urge beings to form themselves all in accord with the basic rhythm of life, one, two In time, beings form and live in accordance to their own heart’s remembrance of the note that was the Creator’s gift of Life. In the beginning was the Note …
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"Egyptian Apologia"
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| Reviewed by Green Sorceress (Reader) |
7/23/2009 |
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| Well Eugene I think you know what you're talking about, it sounds convincing. The ancient Egyptians were very manipulating. You had to be since kingdoms were established and the hunters and gatherers disappeared in order to control the people you ruled. You know every kingdom has their own karma. And the Egyptians were no exceptions. However, I do disagree with your theory of Cleopatra's race. Her mother was Egyptian and Persian and her father was Egyptian and Greco-Macedonian. Her father had Cleopatra V either repudiated or she died since she is not mentioned after 69 BC and he married an Egyptian-Persian noble woman, that does not make her European. |
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| Reviewed by Dave H |
8/17/2008 |
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| Hi Eugene, I have always been fascinated with ancient history particularly Egyptian. Thank you for your insights. I’m in my 50’s and given the way I have seen history created and reworked in my short time on earth one can only imagine what has transpired over thousands of years. Though human beings seem to have exhibited beauty in thought and action sporadically through the ages, collectively we must realize the whole of history defines who we are without regard to location, race or time. I’m not feeling proud. Dave |
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