Ancient Future
Ancient Future
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ANCIENT FUTURE
ANCIENT FUTURE
The Teachings and Prophetic Wisdom of the Seven Hermetic Laws of Ancient Egypt
By
Wayne B. Chandler
Ancient Future
William B. Chandler
First published 1999
Published by Black Classic Press, 1999, 2013
All Rights Reserved.
Print ISBN: 978-1-57478-001-7
e-book ISBN: 978-1-57478-080-2
Black Classic Press specializes in publishing popular and academic works by and
about people of African descent and is one of the oldestindependently owned Black
publishers in operation in the United States.
www.blackclassicbooks.com
Dedication
I dedicate this book to my mother Helen R. Chandler and to my brother Brian E.
Chandler. Their undying support, confidence, and love
have allowed miraculous events to occur in my life. I also dedicate this book to my
spirits on the wind, who watch over me and havetouched the deepest part of my soul.
Contact Information
For more information or to contact the author directly about lectures and other
programs, send e-mail to the following address:
[email protected]
Preface
Along the time line of human life, we find periods of light, characterized by great
spiritual and technological achievement, considered by
many to be golden ages. Just as prominent on the timeline are periods of the
disintegration of civilization brought about by dissension,greed, war, and malice.
These are frequently known as the dark ages. We find that it is during these times
of dire disharmony that thegreatest of Earths heroes have walked among humans,
leading people from the murky darkness into the light. Many of these beings
individuals such as Buddha, Jesus, Isis, Ishtar, Muhammad, and Krishnaare
considered saviors of humanity due to the magnitude ofinfluence and change they
caused during their terms on Earth. These early heroes are often confused with
gods.
Though we live forward, we are forever looking backward; the present is viewed as
ever intolerable, full of pangs and neuroses. I grew up
hearing tomorrow will be better, like the good old days. From this chronic
contradiction, the hero arises a model of the past bound tothe present to create
the future. Such a hero is the entity historically identified as the Egyptian god
Tehuti, known to ancient Greeks andcontemporary scholars as Thoth or Hermes.
Ancient Future, though it briefly explores the man, is more concerned with the
philosophical and scientific axioms engendered by Tehuti/
Hermes and their impact on the human race, both past and present. The written work
of Tehuti has come to be known as the Hermeticphilosophy and is considered by many
to be among the most important precepts expressed in the last five thousand years.
Ancient Future comprehensively examines the Hermetic principles of Tehuti, creating
a link between antiquity and the future. Winston
Churchill was perhaps the most famous to state the truism, The farther back we
look, the further forward well be able to see.
It has been five thousand years since the great civilizations of China, India,
Kush, Southern Arabia, Mesopotamia, Sumeria, and Egypt
were eminent. Those laws found in the Hermetic philosophy comprised the scientific,
spiritual, and moral fabric of these ancient empires,bequeathing to them a wisdom
we have yet to discover in our current period. Though these axioms are still
evident in fragmented form inmany of the historical texts left to us, the
understanding that constituted the vision of our ancestors is long forgotten. Under
the darkshadow cast over our current epoch, we have forgotten who we are, where we
have been, and more importantly, where we are heading.
Thus, Ancient Future is an overview of the Hermetic philosophy, a road map to
reacquaint all members of the human race with its
unremitting challenge. It is presented with the specific mission of reaching those
who are the heirs of its principles and whose ancestorswere the guardians of time
long before the darkness of our age. This book is not a story of contributions, but
a testimony to the people ofthe first world order, who, research shows, were the
inhabitants of Egypt and Kush in Africa, India in South Asia, Brigantia in
Europe,Sumeria and Mesopotamia in West Asia, and China in East Asia. These were the
people who laid the very foundation of Earths firstcivilizations.
Modern people have fallen prey to a reductionist view of history. We have
compromised our impetus to learn, to seek our own truth
rather than being told by others what that truth is. We constrict our reality,
thereby losing opportunities to learn and benefit from systemsof mental, moral, and
spiritual resolution currently attributed to older, erudite cultures of the world
cultures that lit the way for youngernations. Without a holistic view of life, we
relinquish to others the fruits of the tree of knowledge. The greatest of these
fruits are theseven principles of Tehuti/Hermes, which originated in ancient Egypt
and were carried into all continents, and remain evident in those placesin forms as
various as Taoism in China, Jainism in India, and Buddhism in Japan (by way of
India). All civilizations have benefited, directlyor indirectly, from the knowledge
that results from an understanding of the Hermetic philosophy.
Our incessant attempts to intellectualize the accomplishments of our ancestors,
without truly understanding them as spiritually dynamic
beings, has created a dilemma for the descendants of these great cultures. Our
exclusively intellectual methods of learning will never be ableto comprehend the
kind of philosophy that incorporates both intellect and spirituality. The fact is
that the great ancient race from whichTehuti/Hermes came was made up of beings very
different from ourselves. They were giants, spiritually as well as intellectually.
Theycreated wonders that cannot be duplicated by modern science, which has yet to
fully comprehend them. Our cultural indoctrination allowsus to experience only that
which is tangible and perceptible, which unfortunately comprises but one facet of
our multidimensional reality.The seven axioms of Hermetic philosophy were innate in
Tehutis contemporaries, molding and shaping their consciousness, and allowingthem
insight into the fundamental reality that eludes most of humankind in this age.
Thus the seven axioms are doorways through time into adistant past that, when
understood and applied, can help prepare us for the future.
Ancient Future represents two decades of collecting material on Hermetic thought.
When I began my reading and research on this subject,
I had no intention of publishing it; this information was for my edification and
growth. I have been able to apply these axioms mentalism,correspondence,
vibration, polarity, gender, rhythm, and causationto general and specific events
in my own life, thereby experiencing thetransformative, constructive, and lucid
force they have to offer. These axioms of ancient Egypt are a practical guide to
obtaining clarity ofperception and of imparting this perception to every facet of
life: social, political, psychological, spiritual, and metaphysical. The wonder
ofthe Hermetic philosophy is that its message is not only eternal but
transformative, regardless of the capacity in which it is being used.Therefore its
principles may be applied to science, medicine, technology, or history and the
results will be a clear, comprehensive vision ofthe dynamics inherent in the
specific area of study. My goal in Ancient Future is to present these ancient laws
to a contemporary readershipin a focused, practical, and comprehensive fashion.
I study these laws not just for their intellectual value as an historical
phenomenon; I have opened myself to witness their manifestation
in my life, in contemporary world situations, and in the larger flows and cycles of
history. I present them here not so that they can beclaimed by one set of people as
their own, but so that they can be seen as the basic universal laws that guide all
life. They are the axioms ofthe peculiar human journey. Awareness of these laws
allows us the opportunity to recognize and rise above the mundane games of our
lives,the divisions that have been constructed for us and those that we have
created for ourselves that compartmentalize us by race, class, sex,theology, and a
plethora of other categories and identities. In fact, knowledge of these laws makes
apparent that in the universe, all things,people, and events are interrelated and
interdependent. This interdependence becomes clear when we apply the Hermetic
principles to
Acknowledgments
In ones endeavor to achieve, no matter what the achievement, one must acknowledge
the assistance given by those who helped bring to
fruition their project, their truth, their dream. The development of this book has
been no exception and I would like to thank those whoinvested time and energy,
directly and indirectly, knowingly and unknowingly, to help this book become a
reality.
First, I would like to thank Kathryn Barrett-Gaines and the Duke University School
of Cultural Anthropology for significant data used
in this book. Barrett-Gaines assistance was invaluable in this undertaking. I
would also like to thank Dr. Ivan Van Sertima of RutgersUniversity, who brought me
on board with an elite group of scholars, which for ten years allowed me to
research, write, and lecture,transforming my view of history into a more
constructive and holistic perspective. His guidance and trust opened a doorway
through whichI walked and never looked back. The influence of my friend and
colleague, Runoko Rashidi, cannot go without mention. Partaking ofRashidis
expertise in the area of ancient and contemporary Asian civilization and culture
influenced my vision of history greatly. I wouldalso like to thank historian and
author Dr. James Brunson, who stands alone in his research and contributions
regarding the impact of theAfrican presence in Asian antiquity. I must also thank
author James Granger for pertinent and valuable comments on the text. I would
liketo extend my thanks and appreciation to graphic artist, David Kennedy. Mr.
Kennedy supplied all of the geometric drawings for the firstchapter in part two of
this book and those of the grid in chapter six. Without his assistance to create on
paper what was in the cosmos andancient doctrines, there would have been countless
individuals wondering what in the world I was trying to articulate. I also send a
sincerethanks to David Oggie Ogburn, the photographer of the stars who humbled
himself enough to help me develop most of the photos inthis book. Though it was
quite an undertaking (developing pictures of statues, rocks, sculptures, and bas
reliefs can be frustrating forsomeone used to developing Sade Adu, Cher, or Tina
Turner), Oggie came through like a champion. I would also like to thank V. Hap
Smith,my uncle, for providing me with much-needed sanctuary, solitude, and advice
while I made revisions to the manuscript and my life. WhileIm on the subject of
revisions, I must thank Michelle L. Watts of the Shaker Heights Ohio Public
Library.
I have been fortunate in having great artistic, philosophical, and spiritual minds
in my life. These individuals have helped tremendously
by providing me spiritual sustenance as food for thought, thus helping define my
reality. I send a special thanks to my friend A. MatiKlarwein, probably the
greatest artist on the Earth today. His artwork adorned the album covers of
Santanas Abraxas and Miles DavisBitches Brew. Mati taught me that perfection does
exist, but outside of time. I also extend thanks to Dick Gregory for his wisdom
andassistance. I would also like to thank Swami Satchidananda, Sri Cliff Hardy, and
my yoga instructor, John Schumacher for insights, trainingand dialogue on what
constitutes a more meaningful expression of life. I must also thank Karl with a K
Sawyer, who initiated me into therealm of spiritual revelation, Jane DeAngeli for
her assistance and heart-felt wisdom, Dr. Michael Frost for insights and refinement
of myregenerative practices, and Dr. Jennifer Ann Fletcher for reinitiating me in
the path of natural healing.
I would also like to thank the LIGHT WARRIORS, those children of tomorrows dawn,
whom I have had the pleasure of knowing. I am
grateful to my spiritual brothers James Pete Jackson, Nana Kwaku Sakyi and
Michael, Silas Ashley, Greg White, and Waymond Scott.Also Rashida Tutashinda,
Sharon Butcher, Deollo and Thadeus, Kilindi Iyi, Aswan Boudroux, Marie Bouman and
Silas Smith, Karina Vogt,Tamara, Emmanuel Jennings, Joan Kelly, Denise LeCompte,
Leigh Donlan, Judy Pradier, Russel, Carol Harshaw, Dr. Lynn Locklear, MimiVreeland,
Akosua, Tony Matthews, Charles Bliss Tolbert, Hasib, Ana Paula, and numerous
other great individuals, like my homie KarenDeVaughn, that I have encountered along
the way whose names I have not forgotten but for whom space does not allow
honorable mention.Finally, I would like to thank my friend and former business
partner Mr. Gaynell Catherine, the picture takin man. We accomplished
some great things and one day, maybe the next time around, well get it back
together. Thank you all for your encouragement, support, andfriendship.
Foreword
Late one morning, fourteen years ago, I received a phone call from someone I had
never met. He informed me that he had done research
on the Olmec civilization and had discovered some startling photographs. Calls such
as these are common in my life, and somewhat tiresomeat times because these
anonymous callers rarely deliver on their promises. About a week later, I received
in the mail a photographic contactsheet with images of giant Africoid stone heads
from ancient America. Although most of these images were familiar to me, I found on
thesheet an extraordinary photo of an indisputably African face with Ethiopian-
style braids dangling from behind its head. I reached for my pento begin a letter
to the sender, but before I could finish, the phone rang. The caller and the sender
was Wayne Chandler. I invited him towrite for the Journal of African Civilizations,
and throughout the next decade, Chandler submitted photographs that were like
windows onforgotten and obscure periods of history.
Much like his photos, Chandlers writing style has a dramatic quality rare in
academia. His Journal essays fascinated us with the
exploits of Hannibal and the invasion of southern Europe by the medieval Moors and
the mysteries of Egypts Old Kingdom and itsstupendous pyramids. His information
was well researched, ran counter to the views of the academic establishment, and
was presented in astyle that made it fascinating to academic and lay audiences
alike.
In The Jewel in the Lotus: The Ethiopian Influence in the Indus Valley
Civilization (1985), Chandlers talents as both a photographer
and writer are showcased. Chandlers photography not only brings to vivid life the
African faces of these ancient times, but his dramaticnarrative conveys a sense of
the modernity of these cities, some of which blend both early Ethiopian and Asiatic
influences. We learn of thecreation of a central sewage system bathrooms with
drains that carry waste to the sewers under the main streets, every house with
itsown private well, a great public bath with carefully made floors that empty into
the underground sewers, the bath water changing at regularintervals. Chandler even
evokes the dust of passing traffic on the thirty-foot wide streets.
The Moors, according to Chandler, generated a resurgence of activity in the arts
and sciences, influenced embryonic nations like Spain
and France and even older nations like China and India, but who were they? I think
Chandler has made a more serious attempt to deal withthis complex question than
most other researchers The Moor: Light of Europes Dark Age (1986). The identity
of the Moors is a matterof great importance; and while the African element is the
major element, the Moors do not have a single-stranded identity. They are worththe
most serious and balanced analysis since they were to make a major contribution to
the European renaissance which lifted parts ofEurope from the Dark Ages.
In Hannibal: Nemesis of Rome (1988), Chandler challenges the accepted myth that
the great African general Hannibal was European.
Hannibal was the scourge of Rome for fifteen years. His tactical feats awed the
military strategists of many different lands and centuries. Hesingle handedly put
his nation on the worlds historical map. Without his exploits, argues Chandler,
Carthage would be unknown save to afew erudite scholars. But who was Hannibal?
Chandler provides images of an ancient coin with an African head on one side and
Surus, thefavorite elephant of Hannibal, on the other. Surus was among the last
elephants to survive the march across the Alps. Hannibal mounted thiselephant and
no other. Why would any artist laboriously carve out the head of an insignificant
mahout (elephant rider) on the front of a cointhat commemorated the generals
mount? It is difficult not to conclude that this is an image of the general
himself, whose epic march acrossthe Alps was captured wonderfully in Chandlers
narrative.
In his study of the Pyramid Age of Egypt Of Gods and Men: Egypts Old Kingdom
(1989), Chandler raises questions about the
chronology of Egypt. He highlights the extraordinary accomplishments of the early
Pharaohs and touched upon the moral code and characterof the Egyptian state,
exploding myths about slaves as the mainstay of the working force. His approach has
been important to students ofEgyptian history because it emphasizes that technical
accomplishments, however impressive, do not in themselves constitute
civilization.Chandler argues that, to the early Egyptian, civilization was the
humanization of the human and that the building of an ethical code of humanconduct
was just as important as the building of a pyramid. The law that ordered them to
honor the dead and give bread to the hungry, waterto the thirsty, and clothing to
the naked, reveals one of the finest qualities of old Egyptian character: pity
towards the unfortunate.
Ancient Egyptian science startles us even to this day. Scholars have expounded all
sorts of improbable theories to explain how the early
Egyptians built the pyramids. Chandler exposes the folly of these still generally
accepted assumptions, pointing out how the Japaneseexperiment in 1979 has humbled
and astounded us all. The Japanese eventually resorted to twentieth-century
technology which still fellshort of the results achieved by the ancient Egyptians.
The early Egyptian engineers aligned the stones within 1/1000 of an inch
ofmathematical perfection, a perfection achieved today only by jewelers cutting
gems under microscope. Chandlers introduction to thePyramid Age is accompanied by
a remarkable gallery of African faces. He points to the progressive intermixture
over the centuries betweenthe indigenous Africans and the other races that came
into the Nile Valley, but he holds (and here his photographic evidence is the
bestargument) that the dominant ruling figures of the age were indeed African.
In most of his contributions to the Journal of African Civilizations, Chandler
presents new and provocative information on subjects that
were previously regarded as closed. I believe it is his broad immersion in several
disciplines that allows him to approach history in anunorthodox manner. He embraces
many elementsthe religious, philosophical, and scientific of these ancient
empires. In Ancient Future,he has blended all his skills and interests to tell a
remarkable and original story. Twelve years ago, I was introduced to a promising
youngscholar who became part of a team working to revise the way African history is
told and taught. I am proud to see him finding his ownunique voice in this work, a
vision of hope born through an understanding of the need for unity and peace
between the races of man on thebrink of a new millennium.
Ivan Van Sertima, 1999
Contents
PrefaceAcknowledgmentsForeword
Part I: An Introduction to the Seven Hermetic Axioms of Tehuti
The African Concept of Mythology, The History of Thoth/Hermes and his Philosophy,
Poimandres: The Spiritual Vision ofHermes, The Significance of The Number Seven,
The Seven Hermetic Axioms of Thoth
Part II: A Comprehensive Analysis of the Seven Hermetic Axioms of Tehuti
Chapter 1. The Principle of Mentalism and the Concept of the All or God
The Divine in Western Civilization, The Ancient Religious Model, The Crusades and
the Inquisition, The Western Concept ofGod, The African Concept of the Divine, The
Hermetic Explanation of the All or God, The Definition of Spirit, The Divine
MindThe Mental Universe, Time: Linear versus Cyclic Reality, Meditation, Sacred
Geometry
Chapter 2. The Principle of Correspondence
The Star of David or the Egyptian Star of Creation, The Nature of Correspondence,
The Three Great Planes of Correspondence,The Impact of Correspondence on Our Lives,
The Establishment of Mind on All Planes of Existence, The Relation of the Mind
toCorrespondence
Chapter 3. The Principle of Vibration
The Definition of Vibration, The History of Vibration in the West, Vibration and
Its Manifestation on All Planes of Existence,Modern Scientific Views of Vibration,
The Process of Mental Induction or Influence, Mental Vibration and Telepathy,
ScientificResearch and Verification
Chapter 4. The Principle of Polarity
The African Concept of Duality, The West African Oracle of IFA, The Chinese Oracle
of I-Ching; Liebniz, Hegel, Marx, and theI-Ching, The Genetic Code as it Relates to
I-Ching, The West Asian Tablet of Destiny, The Influence of Elamite and
AkkadianCulture on Chinas First Dynasties, The Contributions of Terrien de
Lacouperie, Akkado/Sumerian Linguistics and Culture, AHermetic Analysis of the
Fundamentals of Polarity
Chapter 5. The Principle of Gender
The African Perspective on Gender, The Difference in Western and Hermetic
Perceptions of Gender, Yin & Yang, The Christianand Judeo Christian Concepts of
Gender, Social and Mental Gender, The Divisions of the Mind: Male and Female
GenderExpression, The Sociological Manifestation of Gender, The Passive and Active
Mind, The I and Me Levels of the Mind
Chapter 6. The Principle of Rhythm
The Rhythm of Socio-political and Economic Patterns, Rhythmic Cycles and the East
Indian Manvantara, The Four Great Agesof Humankind, Indo European Culture and Its
Impact on Humanity: War, Racism, Patriarchy, and the Ecosystem; The Mythosand
Prophecy of the Indus Civilization, Global Mythologies of the Great Flood, Pole
Reversal and the Changing of EarthsElectromagnetic Field, The Planetary Grid,
Cornerstone of Change and Evolution, The Egyptian Great Year, The Photon
BeltTheoryMyth or Reality, The Transformation of Consciousness (or Coming of
Christ) on a Global Scale
Chapter 7. The Principle of Causation
The Ancient Egyptian Concept of Causation, Causation as a Working Principle in
Physics, The Global Influence of Causation,The Four Noble Truths of Buddha, Action
and Reaction, Finding Balance
ConclusionNotesBibliography
PART I:
Introduction
The Principles of Truth are Seven; he who knows this, understandingly, possesses
the Magic Key before whose touch all the doors of the Temple fly open.-Kybalion
Before the dawn of the present era was a period known to the ancient historian as
antediluvian, or world before the flood. Much of
what the Western world knows of this period comes through biblical tradition. A
passage from Genesis 6:4 there were giants in theearth in those days and also
after that when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bear
children to them, the samebecame mighty men which were of old, men of renown
speaks of this era, which predated the great flood associated in the
biblicaltradition with Noah. This and several other biblical phrases allude to the
fact that the races of the Earth during this age were trulyomnipotent, or God-like
in every way. Mythological tradition holds that during this antediluvian period was
born the great Egyptian sageTehuti or Thoth. Tehuti, known to the Greeks as
Hermes/Thoth, became the principle law-giver of Egypt, or in the tongue of the
Africansof that land, Kmt (pronounced Kemet). His axioms provided humanity with a
comprehensive analysis of the nature of creation and of theuniverse. Throughout the
text of this book, the names Tehuti, Thoth, and Hermes are used interchangeably.
Western civilization considers most accounts of what transpired during this period
to be pure mythology. And because Western
influence dominates the present, we have fallen prey to a superficial, linear
approach to investigative research. This perspective on ancienthistory has left a
substantial void in our vast ancestral cultural legacy, much of which is located in
what we now call myth.
The outset of the twenty-first century demands a redefinition of much of our
present terminology. Such a redefinition will, in time,
allow for a much broader historical perspective than is presently employed by
traditional historians. The term myth as understood through aEurocentric
perspective connotes fantasy and fable in the realm of the surreal; however, in
antiquity, mythology was an ancient mode ofthinking. It was founded on natural
facts, still verifiable phenomena, and was not then, nor is it now, a mechanism
based on an irrationalperspective. Mythology is the repository of our most ancient
science, and when myth is examined within the context of an ancient culturalbelief
system, it becomes a dynamic vehicle for the transmission of truth:
The importance of mythology is, of course, that it is a form of documentation which
transcends the human record as much as it states truth rather than fact. Myth canbe
considered a form of reasoning and record keeping by providing an implicit guide
for bringing about the fulfillment of the truth it proclaims. It connects
theinvisible order with the visible order ... thought reflected in myth is
inseparable from the laws of nature.... As a reflection of the thought and
experience of a people,the analytical value of myth is that it serves as a measure
and/ or reflection of the human possibilities, PROBABILITIES, and potentialities of
a people.
1
Thus, an examination of the origin, development, and contributions of an entity
such as Tehuti from the African myth perspective
makes the incomprehensible comprehensible, and allows a true understanding of what
would have been lost as historic ephemera. Discussionon the historical reality of
Tehuti is subject to the nature of the present state of the study of history. So
regardless of fact, fiction,documentation, or myth, my particular examination of
Tehuti consists of what little testimony exists on his actual life, his own account
ofthe divine revelation of his seven basic axioms, and a study of these illuminated
laws of the universe and the higher message therein.
Tehuti is the personification of universal wisdom and truth. Egyptian tradition
holds that he imparted this truth first to the old race, the
Kushites, who would later be identified by the Greeks as the Ethiopians. The
Greeks, who considered Tehuti or Thoth the Scribe of theGods, would also change
his name to Hermes, or more accurately Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus, which means
the thrice-great, thegreat-great, the greatest-great, and master of
masters. With the spread of Western influence, this appellation remained globally
intactand Tehutis teachings have become known as the Hermetic philosophy.
The writings of Tehuti/Hermes have been known to the West since the fifth century
B.C.E. (Before the Current or Christian Era). Some
of the more popular translations have been those of Hargrave Jennings (1884), a
reprint of Everhards English version; the Greek text of C.Parthey Berolins (1854);
a German edition by J. Scheible (1855); and the earliest Latin edition of Marsilius
Ficinus (1471). It was longassumed that the earliest translation from the Egyptian
text was done in Arabic during the conquest and occupation of Egypt by the Moorsin
the ninth century C.E. (Current or Christian Era), but many fragments contained in
the Liber Hermetis, a Latin translation of Greek origin,are traceable to the third
or fourth century B.C.E. The West presently acknowledges Walter Scott and Andre-
Jean Festugiere as thecontemporary experts on Hermetica: it was they who
distinguished the popular occultist or secret writings attributed to
Tehuti/Hermesfrom the so-called learned or philosophical treatises, the latter
being more prominent in most modern translations of the Hermetica. Theproblem with
these recent translations that have flooded the West is that they have been little
more than an exercise in academia. Esteemedmore for the period in which they were
originally written than for their content, the writings of Hermetic Philosophy gave
way to the overtmundane skepticism that presently saturates the field of Western
academia. It has always been in vogue for Western academicians to standon the
periphery of what they examine, believing somehow that they may osmotically
engender the experience without actual involvement.This has been the modus operandi
from the outset of Greek civilization to our present period. It is interesting to
note the acknowledgmentof this pattern regarding the Western mindset of the ancient
Greeks by Imhotep (known to the Greeks as Asclepius), student ofTehuti/Hermes: For
the Greeks have empty speeches . . . that are energetic only in what they
demonstrate, and this is the philosophy ofthe Greeks, an inane foolosophy of
speeches. We [the Egyptians], by contrast, use not speeches but sounds that are
full of action.
2
This
examination uses the conventional or philosophical writings as well as popular
and rare nontraditional sources in Hermetic academia tounveil the truths therein.
The Hermetic teachings are found in all lands among all religions, but are never
identified with any particular creed or religious sect, thus
rising above them all. These ancient mystery systems were imparted to India and
Persia by their indigenous inhabitants but degeneratedwith the influx of the Aryans
and Indo-Iranians. In time they were lost, a result of the merging of theology and
philosophy when teachersbecame pagan priests who aspired for power amidst religious
superstition, cults, and creeds.
Extreme Greek interest in the Hermetic Philosophy led to the separation, and
eventually the removal, of these axioms and perspectives
from the larger body of Egyptian science and thought, and finally to their
placement in the Greek philosophical tradition. So thorough wasthe transfiguration
of Tehuti to Thoth/Hermes that many students and some scholars of Egyptian history
are unaware that the HermeticPhilosophy is arguably the worlds oldest doctrine,
originating not in Greece, but on the African continent.
In regard to Hermes, history has provided several suppositions, much legend, and
many myths. Hermes has been associated with many
of the early sages and prophets such as Cadmus and Enoch, the latter identified as
the Second Messenger of God. Syrian philosopherIamblichus averred that Hermes was
the author of 20,000 books; the Egyptian priest/historian Manetho increased that
number to more than36,000. Because of the astounding number of books attributed to
Hermes, some believe that he was an array of various personalities or anentire
secret society dedicated to the evolution of the human race.
According to records retained by Syncellus (a Byzantine monk of the ninth century
C.E.), which he believed were written a thousand
years earlier by Mer-en-Jehuti (Manetho), the Egyptian high priest of Sebynnetos,
there were two gods named Hermes. The first wasTehuti/Thoth, whose legacy extends
to the very dawn of African civilization. It was he who originally carved on stelae
(pillars) inhieroglyphics what became the sacred writings for the Anu, the old
race. The second Thoth, who became Hermes Trismegistus, was theson of
Agathodaimon, who seems to have ruled during the time of Imhotep (called Asclepius
by the Greeks), ca. 2700 B.C.E. Syncellus,quoting a portion of text written by
Manetho and addressed to Ptolemy II Philadelphus (282-229 B.C.E.), stated,
Manetho knew stelae in the land of Seiria. . . . inscribed in the sacred tongue in
hieroglyphic letters by Thoth, the first Hermes, and translated after the flood
from thesacred tongue into the Greek language . . . and set down in books by the
son of Agathodaimon, the second Hermes, father of Tat, in the sanctuaries of the
temples ofEgypt; [Manetho] dedicated [them] to . . . Ptolemy . . . writing thus:
. . . since you seek to know what will come to be in the cosmos, I shall present to
you thesacred books that I have learned about, written by our ancestor, Hermes
Trismegistus..This is what he says about the translation of the books written by
the secondHermes.
3
If indeed this information is historically accurate, it would explain much of what
has become the dilemma of Tehuti/Hermes and his
immense literary undertaking. There are other accounts that can be categorized as
legend or myth that enunciate the ability of Tehuti/Hermes to survive such an ample
accomplishment. It is the nature of legend that its many parts support one another,
and so it is with thelegend of Hermes. Though he is given credit for an astounding
number of published works, he is also reported to have lived 300 years, whichwould
easily allow for such a prolific literary undertaking.
Certainly most would find this life expectancy of three centuries totally
incomprehensible. Biblical references to people living to
advanced age are often interpreted as symbolic simply because they are considered
impossible to achieve. In the book of Genesis, chapters2325, the Bible states that
Abraham and Sarah had their son, Isaac, when they were both around a hundred years
old, and after Sarahsdeath at 127 years, Abraham fathered six more sons before his
own death at age 175. The question remains how could people have livedto such
ages in antiquity but barely survive to a meager seventy years in the present time?
While Tehuti still walked the Earth with humanbeings, he entrusted to his most
esteemed disciples and chosen successors his sacred book. The Book of Tehuti/Hermes
containedinformation that explained the process of biological regeneration, which
allowed the various biochemical and physiological systems in thehuman body to
undergo physical and mental restoration. This axiom was based on the premise that
all of the soft tissue systems within thehuman body are subject to this process of
revitalization every seven months, and the more fundamental or substantial tissue
systems everyseven years. The secret to attaining this level of physical mastery
was said to be the result of various breathing techniques. The work alsocontained
the secret process by which the regeneration of humanity was to be accomplished.
According to legend, the Book of Tehuti was kept in a golden box in the inner
sanctuary of a temple dedicated to Tehuti. In order to
protect it from the encroaching Christian traditions and the resulting decay of the
mysteries, the highest initiate of what came to be knownas the Hermetic Arcanum
took the Book of Tehuti to an undisclosed location in another land, and it was lost
to the world. According toHermetic tradition, this book still exists and continues
to lead Hermetic disciples of the present age into the presence of the immortals.
Thetraditions of vital regeneration and other methods contained in the book are
still practiced in India and China.
Using the aforementioned concepts of biological regeneration, one doctor, Deepak
Chopra, is revolutionizing the way science and the
medical establishment perceive the aging process. South Asian by birth, Dr. Chopra
taught at Tufts University and Boston UniversitySchools of Medicine before becoming
chief of staff at New England Memorial Hospital. Seeing the shortcomings of Western
medicine, Dr.Chopra has combined the ancient Indian tradition of Ayurvedic medicine
with Western science, achieving remarkable results. Throughunfailing example,
Chopra has begun to prove that within the human biological framework exists the
possibility of immortality: The newparadigm tells us that life is a process of
constant transformation, not decline, and therefore is full of potential for
unlimited growth.
4
With
the success of Dr. Chopras research, even staunch adherents to the old paradigm
concur that automatic biological degeneration is notprogrammed into our bodies, and
that human life is more resilient than previously imagined.
Using genetics and pioneering new avenues in cytology, Dr. Chopra has asserted that
humans have the capacity to think about being
immortal. Information obtained from radioactive isotope studies demonstrates that
ninety-eight percent of all the atoms in the body arereplaced in less than one
year. Research shows that the liver has the potential to regenerate every six
weeks, the skin renews once a month,the stomach lining changes every five days, and
our skeleton can renew itself once every three months. Dr. Chopras findings
indicate thatevery two years we replace our entire body, down to the last atom.
5
Deepak Chopras findings corroborate the ancient traditions of
longevity recorded by Tehuti/Hermes in his many writings.
Of the forty-two fragmentary writings believed to have come from the stylus of
Hermes only two remain: The Emerald Tablet and The
Divine Pymander. The loss of the balance of his works was a great tragedy to the
philosophic world. In his Stromata, Clement of Alexandriamade repeated reference to
these forty-two Hermetic works, which were housed in the magnificent Egyptian
Library of Alexandria, sonamed after Alexander the Great. In the years following
the inevitable demise of the once glorious Egyptian civilization, the Romans,
andlater the Christians, engaged in an ongoing campaign to nullify the Egyptians as
a cultural and philosophical force. The unwavering treacheryof the Romans and
Christians culminated in one of the most diabolic and nefarious acts in all of
history. Because the very hub of Egyptianculture was inextricably connected to
these ancient doctrines of Tehuti, in the year 389 A.D., Emperor Theodosius, a
Christian, gave theorder for the burning of the great Library of Alexandria,
knowing that the only way to insure the collapse of a culture was the
totalobliteration of its history. Tradition holds that the volumes of the Hermetic
Philosophy that managed to escape the fire were buried in thedesert and their
location was known only to a few initiates of the secret societies. Whatever the
nature of the being that is known as
male and female. But at the end of the period the knot of Destiny was untied by the
will of God and the bond of all things was loosened. Thenall living creatures,
including man, which had been hermaphroditical, were separated, the males being set
apart by themselves and thefemales likewise, according to the dictates of Reason.
Then God spoke the Holy Word within the soul of all things saying: Increase and
multiply in multitudes, all you, my creatures and
workmanships. Let him that is endowed with Mind know himself to be immortal and
that the cause of death is the love of the body; and lethim learn all things that
are, for he who has recognized himself enters into the state of Good.
And when God had said this, Providence, with the aid of the Seven Governors and
Harmony, brought the sexes together . . . He, who
through the error of attachment loves his body, abides wandering in darkness,
sensible and suffering the things of death; but he who realizesthat the body is but
the tomb of his soul, rises to immortality.
Then Hermes desired to know why men should be deprived of immortality for the sin
of ignorance alone. The Great Dragon answered:
To the ignorant the body is supreme and they are incapable of realizing the
immortality that is within them. Knowing only the body which issubject to death,
they believe in death because they worship that substance which is the cause and
reality of death.
Hermes bowed his head in thankfulness to the Great Dragon who had taught him so
much, and begged to hear more concerning the
ultimate of the human soul. So Poimandres resumed: At death the material body of
man is returned to the elements from which it came, andthe invisible divine man
ascends to the source from whence he came, namely the Eight Spheres. The senses,
feelings, desires, and bodypassions return to their source, namely the Seven
Governors, whose natures in the lower man destroy but in the invisible spiritual
man givelife. After the lower nature has returned to the brutishness, the higher
struggles to regain its spiritual estate. It ascends the Seven Rings uponwhich sit
the Seven Governors and returns to each their lower powers in this manner: Upon the
first ring sits the Moon, and to it is returnedthe ability to increase and
diminish. Upon the second ring sits Mercury, and to it are returned machinations,
deceit, and craftiness. Upon thethird ring sits Venus, and to it are returned the
lusts and passions. Upon the fourth ring sits the Sun, and to this Lord are
returned ambitions.Upon the fifth ring sits Mars, and to it are returned rashness
and profane boldness. Upon the sixth ring sits Jupiter, and to it are returned
thesense of accumulation and riches. And upon the seventh ring sits Saturn, at the
Gate of Chaos, and to it are returned falsehood and evilplotting. Then being naked
of all the accumulations of the Seven Rings, the soul comes to the Eighth Sphere,
namely, the ring of the fixedstars. Here, freed of all illusion, it dwells in the
Light which only pure spirit may understand.
The path to immortality is hard, and only a few find it. The rest await the Great
Day when the wheels of the universe shall be stopped and
the immortal sparks shall escape from the sheaths of substance. Woe unto those who
wait, for they must return again, unconscious andunknowing. Blessed art thou, O Son
of Light, to whom of all men, I Poimandres the Light of The World, have revealed
myself. I order you togo forth, to become as a guide to those who wander in
darkness, that they may be saved by my Mind in you. Establish my Mysteries and
theyshall not fail from this earth.
Hermes heard and replied, The sleep of the body is the sober watchfulness of the
mind and the shutting of my eyes reveals the true light.
My silence is filled with budding life and hope, and is full of good, for this is
the faithful account of what I received from my true mind, that isPoimandres, The
Great Dragon, The Lord of The Word, through whom I became inspired with the truth.
7
The Vision of Hermes is significant in several ways. Theologians will invariably
discover that many Hermetic precepts appear in and
obviously influenced the Christian Bible, which appeared several centuries later.
Orientalists familiar with the symbolic iconography ofChina and India will discover
the origin of the Dragon in Chinese mythology and culture, not to mention the
philosophical profunditiesinherent in the Yogic, Hindu, Jaina, and Buddhist
traditions of South Asia.
The Vision of Hermes, like so many of the Hermetic writings, is an allegorical
exposition of great philosophic and mystic truths. The
intention here is to unravel, or in the words of the ancients, to lift the Veil of
Isis, to expose the practical and fundamental function of theaxioms therein.
The great Hermetic principles or laws that have been left to us are seven in
number. Seven is not an arbitrary figure, but a powerful and
extremely significant symbol of divine or universal cohesiveness that permeates the
core of our very existence. The following observationsillustrate this point:
1. There are Seven Days in a week and Fifty-two Weeks in a year (5 + 2 = 7). In the
Christian Bible, the Earth was created in six days and on the Seventh Day
Godrested.2. Some psychologists have stated that Age Seven is the Age of Reason;
twice that, Fourteen, is Puberty; thrice that, Twenty-one, is Maturation.3. There
are Seven Cardinal Colors in the solar spectrum violet, indigo, blue, green,
yellow, orange, red from which all other colors are derived.4. There are Seven
Key Notes in the musical scale.5. There are Seven Continents, as there are Seven
Seas. Originally, there were believed to be Seven Planets, called the Seven
Governors by the ancients, alsoreferred to as the Seven Angels in Revelations in
the Christian Bible.6. There are Seven Holes that lead into the human body ears,
nostrils, mouth, anus, and vaginal or penile orifices. The human brain, heart, eye,
and ear are eachdivided into Seven Parts. The skin has Seven Layers.7. There are
Seven Virtues faith, hope, charity, strength, prudence, temperance, and justice
and Seven Deadly Sins pride, avarice, luxury, wrath, idleness,gluttony, envy.
It is not by chance that so many components of human life are connected to
expressions of seven. The ancients held that seven was the
most spiritually inclined of all the numbers, therefore it is befitting that there
are seven Hermetic Axioms.
The Hermetic Axioms of Tehuti/Hermes
1. The Principle of Mentalism
The All is Mind; The Universe is Mental.
8
This principle embodies the truth that the All or God is Mind. It explains that the
All is the substantial reality underlying all the visible
PART II:
COMPREHENSIVE ANALYSIS OF
THE SEVEN HERMETIC AXIOMS OF TEHUTI
1. This woman represents the Bonda, one of the oldest known cultures in India
today. Called adavasi, meaning former inhabitants, the Bonda are only 800 in
number. Speakingtheir own language, distinct from the Dravidian and other national
tongues of India, the Bonda with the exception of the Adamanese are the closest
descendants in physicalfeature to the ancient Harappans. The various tribes of
South Asia constitute forty-five million of the present population.
CHAPTER 1
influence India, but would eventually indoctrinate the world: Brahminism gave birth
to the Hindu faith, complete with religiously sanctionedracism and sexism.
The Aryan mindset was never able to grasp, much less initiate, the more lofty
philosophies of the spiritual aspirants whom they would
inevitably trample underfoot. Later, this same socioreligious ignorance would allow
such diabolical undertakings as the Crusades, in whichmilitary mercenaries set out
across southern Europe killing, torturing, pillaging, and looting, all in the name
of God. One crusading army,commanded by Godfrey de Bouillon, massacred the entire
population of Jerusalem in 1098 C.E. According to one historical account,
theCrusaders rode into the fallen holy city on horses wading knee-deep in the
blood of the disbelievers.
16
In 1204, Mephistophelian hordes
descended upon Constantinople and ravaged what was once the very sanctum of Western
Christendom. The siege ended at the Church of St.Sophia in a bloody, sacrilegious,
and iniquitous orgy of monumental proportions: The knights slaughtered a great
multitude of people ofevery age, old men and women, maidens, children and mothers
with infants, by way of a solemn sacrifice to Jesus.
17
Historians estimate
that Europe was Christianized at a cost of eight to ten million lives.
Unfortunately, this religious treachery did not expire with the Crusades.Until the
advent of Hitlers Nazis in modern Germany, neither Europe nor the world knew of a
system of organized terrorism that couldrival the five-hundred-year reign of the
Inquisition. Historian Henry Charles Lea, a leading expert on medieval Europe,
called the Inquisitiona standing mockery of justice perhaps the most iniquitous
that the arbitrary cruelty of man has ever devised. . . . Fanatic zeal,
arbitrarycruelty and insatiable cupidity [avarice] rivaled each other in building
up a system unspeakably atrocious. It was a system which might wellseem the
invention of demons.
18
The Inquisition was created primarily to force various so-called pagan populations
to accept a church and
a god they did not want. Bulgarian writers recorded that the Roman Catholic priests
were given to drunkenness and robbery, behavior thatwas not only condoned by the
church, but encouraged. Peter von Pilichdorf wrote in the early fourteenth century,
the worst man, if he be apriest, is more worthy than the holiest layman.
19
In the twelfth century, several monasteries were converted into wine shops and
gambling
houses, while nunneries became private whorehouses for the Christian clergy.
Nicholas de Clamanges, rector of the University of Paris,declared that the popes
were ravishers not pastors of their flocks;
20
and the Fraticelli, a powerful order of Franciscan monks, lamented that
the Pope and all of his successors were tainted with sin, then proceeded to label
him an Antichrist. Immediately after that comment, PopeMartin V dissolved the order
and destroyed its religious center, the town of Magnalata, which was razed to the
ground. Every resident wasslain.
21
3. Knights do battle while the inhabitants flee the city with the women
Economic greed also figured very prominently in the motives of the founding
Christian fathers. Grim humor of the time speculated that
the Church had not ten commandments, but only one: Bring hither the money. Saint
Bernard lamented the churchs greed: Whom canyou show me among the prelates who
does not seek rather to empty the pockets of his flock than to subdue their vices?
22
In 1325, Pope
John issued the Cum inter nonnullos, a religious decree that deemed heresy any
statement to the effect that Jesus and his apostles owned noproperty. Inquisitors
were ordered to prosecute those who believed Jesus was a poor man. The spiritual
Franciscans scoffed the Popesorder, thereby forcing his hand: he had 114 of their
members burned alive.
23
This perverse pecuniary attitude within the Church became religiously consecrated
with the advent of Calvinism. Calvinists believed inpredestination God would save
a chosen few, regardless of their worldly behavior. But, they felt, individual
economic success would bean indication, perhaps the only indication, of Gods
favor. Thus, the more money one accumulated, the more likely that one would be
amongthe saved.
24
During the Middle Ages, the European populace began to question Christian
interpretations of the Bible. This skepticism was prompted
by the influence of Gnostic philosophies from the East, which debunked certain
myths of the Church such as the Garden of Eden, the fallfrom grace (the original
sin), heaven and hell, the meaning of salvation, and the historicity of the
personality known as Jesus Christ. Becauseof the growing number of religious
discrepancies, the Catholic Church began to lose its stronghold in Europe; it was
at this time that thepapacy lost all of Bohemia to the formation of the Moravian
Church.
25
Two characteristics of Western religion are dramatized by these historical events:
its corrupt and perverse foundations, and its lack of
the spiritual sublimity (outstanding spiritual, intellectual, and moral worth)
ideally intrinsic in any true religion. These ideals have not beenrepresented in
the biblical interpretation that has been so pervasive in the Western hemisphere,
and thus morality has become more of atenuous apparition with each passing moment.
With a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other, missionaries still coerce the
populations ofso-called Third World countries to submit to their ideas of faith.
Catholics wage war with Protestants in Northern Ireland and with Moslemsin Bosnia,
while Moslems and Jews have been massacring each other in the Middle East for
millennia; Hindus are slaughtering Sikhs andMoslems in South Asia; and the rest of
us seem to be sitting idly by, awaiting the second coming of whomever will end the
moral deficit thatis plaguing humankind. Thus, it seems that of the major world
religions, the only God-inspired groups that are not killing or venting hostilityon
others or themselves, are the Yogis, Buddhists, and Taoists, who also happen to be
the oldest and maybe the most illuminated of themany faces of religion.
Furthermore, it should be stated that yoga and Taoism are not religions per se, but
philosophies based on a scientificmethod for transformation.
One inescapable conclusion is apparent: Western culture and Western-influenced
civilizations possess a fundamental misunderstanding
of the constitution of God and religion. As the philosophies and religious
practices of the indigenous Harrapans of ancient India becameAryanized, the
quintessence that had been passed from the ritual to the practitioner, and which
allowed the true transformation ofconsciousness, was lost. In time, true religion
was lost and then redefined in the West, along with the concept of God. Although
religion isderived from the Latin religare, to bind together, it is used to
divide and conquer. Religion, in the perception of the ancient Harappans,was an
intuitional realization of the existence of God, or the All, and their relationship
to it. The West, consummate in its cerebral, positivistapproach to life (only that
which is tangible is real), was not capable of such a spectral experience, and
replaced religion with theology the human attempt to ascribe personality and
character to God. Theology is the human theory regarding Gods affairs, will,
plans, desires,and projections for the human race. Inferences made about Him take
on a purely anthropomorphic quality, which is no more than areligious aberration.
Sigmund Freud, whose controversial theories have been greatly contested, identified
the warped perspective in the Western view of God:
The ordinary man cannot imagine this Providence [divine guidance] in any other form
but that of a greatly exalted father, for only such a one could understand theneeds
of his sons . . . or be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of
their remorse. The whole thing is patently infantile, so incongruous with reality .
. .it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to
rise above this view of life.
26
The obsession with infusing God with human qualities stems primarily from the Aryan
attempt at comprehending what was, for them,
incomprehensible. Aryan projections of God are obviously anthropomorphic in the
earliest portrayals of Brahma, complete with head,arms, legs, feet, and in the
initial biblical interpretation of God made man in his own image, which was
understood and applied literally.
As late as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, eminent European philosophers
were still grappling with the concept of God. The
work of German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-
1716) created a gauge by which this ever-growingconcern in Europes metaphysical
and religious community could be measured. Though this work remained in a formative
stage, hiscomments are worthy of reconsideration:
God is an absolutely perfect being . . . there are many different kinds of
perfection, all of which God possesses, consequently power and knowledge do admit
ofperfection and in so far as they pertain to God they have no limits. There are
many who think that God might have made things better than he has. No more am I
ableto approve of the opinion of certain modern writers who boldly maintain that
which God has made he might have done better. It seems to me that the
consequencesof such an opinion are wholly inconsistent with the glory of God. These
modern thinkers insist upon certain hardly tenable subtleties, for they imagine
thatnothing is so perfect that there might not have been something more perfect.
This is an error.
27
Leibniz deplored his colleagues superficial and materialistic approach to God. And
though he himself struggled with the idea of the
divine, he knew that there was a greater substantial reality to whatever it was
that his five material senses could not reveal.
Another spiritual revolutionary of Western civilization was Mary Baker Eddy, who
wrote at the turn of the century. Eddy was
instrumental in introducing to Europe and America the concept of Christian Science.
Born Mary Baker Glover, she was Pastor Emeritus ofThe First Church of Christ in
Boston and president of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College. Her first domestic
publication appeared in1870, and before her death she had published seventeen
highly acclaimed books on religion. Of her interest in the subject, she
explained,when quite young I was impressed that the Bible was not properly
interpreted by the preachers, for I could not conceive of a God ofwrath who was
unjust enough to allow His little ones to suffer pain, misery, and death. I had
hope, however, that some day the truth wouldbe revealed. . . .
28
Mary Baker Eddy dedicated her life to the acquisition of religious truth,
committed to the veracity of the words of the
Apostle John Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free and
the words of William Shakespeare There is nothingeither good or bad, but
thinking makes it so. Her insights into an elusive component of religion that has
managed to escape many, if notmost of our current theologians, are notable for
their qualitative correspondence to the ideas of the Hermetists of ancient Egypt.
Eddysideas on the constitution of God represented both a departure from Western
religious thought and a gateway to new and progressiveconcepts and practices in
America:
God is not corporeal, but incorporeal that is, bodiless. As the words person and
personal are ignorantly employed, they often lead, when applied to Deity,
toconfused and erroneous conceptions of divinity and its distinction from humanity.
[God is an infinite Mind], and an infinite Mind in a finite form is an
absoluteimpossibility.
29
God is Spirit; therefore the language of Spirit must be, and is spiritual.
Christian Science attaches no physical nature and significance to the Supreme Being
or Hismanifestation; mortals alone do this. Human theories are inadequate to
interpret the divine. . . . Evidence drawn from the five physical senses relates
solely tohuman reason.
30
Soul, or Spirit, is God, unchangeable and eternal; and man coexists with and
reflects Soul, God, for man is Gods image. . . . Mortals have a very imperfect
sense ofthe spiritual man and of the infinite range of his thought. To God belongs
eternal life. Never born and never dying. . . . The infinite has no beginning.
31
Eddys speculations on the constitution of God seem to, in retrospect, respond to
the criticisms of the ancient Hermetists, who
regard[ed] all the theories, guesses and speculations of the theologians and
metaphysicians regarding the nature of the All, as but the childishefforts of
mortal minds to grasp the secret of the infinite. Such efforts have always failed
and will always fail.
32
They referred to this entity
as the All, a concept which once constituted the very foundation of African
religious thought, and can be identified in the cultures thatwould be born from the
continents soil.
It is this concept that we will now explore, beginning with a statement by
Tehuti/Hermes which pertains to this entity: I cannot hope
to name the maker of all majesty, the master of everything, with a single name,
even a name composed of many names; it is nameless orrather it is all named since
it is one and all, so that one must call all things by its name or by the names of
every thing, the only and the all,completely full of the fertility of both sexes
and ever pregnant with its own will Under, and back of the universe of time, space
and change, isever to be found the substantial reality the fundamental, the All.
33
Substance here denotes that which underlies all perceptible or visible
manifestations, as in the essence, or the essential reality. The term
substantial as used in this context, means actually existing, being the essential
elements, and being real. Reality means that which is true,enduring, valid, or
permanent. The Hermetic Principle of the All, therefore, represents the universal
law that dictates that under and behindall outward appearances, there is a
substantial reality.
The Hermetists of ancient Kmt (Egypt) stated that the All, that which we call God,
is truly unknowable, for only the All itself can
comprehend its own nature and being. The question then is, how does one identify
the unidentifiable? The key to this question ishumankinds unconditional acceptance
of the unknowability of the All. Though the essential nature of the All is
unknowable, there arecertain truths arrived at through reason, with which humans
must be content:
1. The All must be All that really is. There can be nothing existing outside of the
All, else the All would not be the All.2. The All must be infinite, for there is
nothing else to define, confine, bound, limit, or restrict the All. It must be
infinite in time, or eternal it must have alwayscontinuously existed, for there
is nothing else to have ever created it, and something can never evolve from
nothing. It must exist forever, for there is nothing todestroy it, and it can never
not be, even for a moment.3. The All must be immutable, or consistent, in its
real nature to never change, for there is nothing to work changes upon it; nothing
into which it could change,nor from which it could have changed. This the ancients
held as the supreme truth, and that everything else is subject to changes,
especially things on Earth.
34
Hermes was quoted as saying, Truth alone is eternal and immutable; truth is the
first of blessings; but truth is not and cannot be on
Earth; everything has matter on it, clothed with a corporeal form subject to
change, to alteration, to corruption, and to new combinations. . .the things of
Earth are but appearances and imitations of truth; they are what the picture is to
reality.
35
The axiom of Mentalism speaks to
the All as being infinite, absolute, eternal, and above all unchangeable.
If the three truths stated previously acknowledge the various characteristics of
the All, then perhaps reason can provide a guideline by
which the All can be identified in its most transcendental form. Is the All purely
matter? The answer would have to be no; for nothing riseshigher than its own
source, and it has just been established that matter is subject to constant change,
reflecting rampant inconsistency andinstability. Physical science testifies that
matter is no more than an illusion it is merely energy, power, or force combined
at variousvibrational frequencies.
But defining the All as pure power, force, or energy would not be totally accurate
either. Energy or force as it relates to the All reflects
only a residual component of its totality because energy and force are perpetually
in a position of random flux in that they are alwayscontrolled by an outside
influence, even when they appear to be moving of their own volition. Thus, there is
no intrinsic intelligence in pureforce or the power that guides or directs it. This
is not the case with the All. What is perceived as energy and force in nature is
but anoutward manifestation, or projection, of the mind of the All. This is the
feature that allows the definition of the All as Infinite Living Mind.Now, the term
spirit is used as a means of general identification of the mind.
Most modern images of God are based on the line from the Book of Genesis, which
reports that God created man in his own image.
Ironically, people have looked at themselves and projected their own image onto
God, rather than allowing Gods image to be primary.Instead of assuming that
Genesis refers to God as a physically anthropomorphic being, we could instead
assume that the human, or thatwhich constitutes the essence of human, is a
spiritual being: imperishable, infinite, and constant, like God. Thus, if spirit is
living mind, thenhumans, like the All, have the ability to create and endure
through the power of mind, only on a more minute plane of existence. This is
theworlds best-kept secret. This was the religious reality of antiquity, which
today is unknown by most, forgotten by many, and practiced byfew.
What exactly is spirit? As previously indicated, spirit, which means real essence
in the Hermetic context, is simply a title that humans
have given to the living mind. Because spirit transcends our understanding, in our
present state of consciousness, human beings must accept
that it cannot be explained or defined. One theory is that God or the All is the
universe, but this is pure conjecture and holds no basis in fact.The theory
probably arises from the fact that the universe is the largest tangible reality
that humankind may mentally grasp and physicallyexplore, but it is still matter
that is subject to perpetual transformation. The universe seems all-pervasive in
its nature or essence; it isconnecting, binding, multidimensional with its neutron
stars, black holes and quasars, but it is not the All. The mere fact that humans
mayunderstand and explore the physical universe disqualifies it as the character of
the All, which cannot be perceived nor remotely grasped byhumankind. The conclusion
is obvious: the universe is a creation of the All.
Spiritualists, metaphysicians, and philosophers theorize that the All created the
universe from its own substance, but this is also
inaccurate because according to the ancient Hermetists, the All cannot be
subtracted from nor divided. Furthermore, if it were so, would noteach particle in
the universe be aware of its being the All? Would not we, as spiritual entities, be
born with an innate awareness of ouruniversal connectedness or oneness with all
life and with the All itself?
Some theologians and religious aspirants who acknowledge the fact that spirit or
living mind dwells within every human being, setting us
apart from other animal life forms, proclaim that I am [or we are] God. But this,
too, is an erroneous assumption, comparable to a tinyhuman corpuscle claiming I am
the body.
The process by which the All creates is very simple, and its comprehension can be
facilitated by the second Hermetic axiom, that of
Correspondence as above, so below that is based on the belief that there is a
working correspondence existing among the manyplanes of the universe. According to
the Law of Correspondence, an examination of the human process of creation will
illuminate that of theAll. Humans create in many ways. We create by utilizing
materials from outside of our beings, such as metal, wood, clay, or combinations
ofmaterials. This type of creation does not apply to the All, for there is nothing
outside of the All. Human beings also create from inside,biologically, by the
transformation of genetic substance into new beings. Once again, this is not
possible for the All, which can neithertransfer nor subtract, reproduce nor
multiply itself.
The manner of human creation that corresponds to that of the All is the human
ability to create mentally, to imagine. As we create
mentally, we use no outside materials, nor do we reproduce ourselves; yet the
spirit of thought, or living mind, pervades our mentalcreations. Thus, according to
the Law of Correspondence, we can assume that the All creates mentally. This is the
key to the Hermeticriddle: The All is Mind; The Universe is Mental.
Just as the reader may create a mental universe of her own, so the All creates
universes in its mentality. The major difference between
the two processes is that the human universe is the mental creation of a finite
mind, whereas that of the All is the creation of an infinitemind. Therefore, that
which is accepted to be the universe is just one mental creation of the All: The
All creates in its Infinite Mindcountless Universes, which exist for eons of time
and yet, to the All, the creation, development, decline and death of a million
Universesis as the time of the twinkling of an eye.
36
Creation does not take place within time; rather, time is an effect of creation.
This conception of time would, to Western culture, be considered a spatiotemporal
impossibility. But the ancient Hermetists held that
time is a mere illusion, subject to spatial manipulation by the wise who understood
its inconstancy. But in order to grasp the dynamicmechanism within which the All
creates, it is imperative to explore the concept of time and how it manifests
itself in Western civilization.The misunderstanding of time as linear is directly
related to the inability to understand the divine. Dr. Kamau Johnson, a Howard
Universitypsychologist who has done extensive research into human perceptions of
time, points out,
To the surprise of many, the sense of linear time presently experienced in the
Euro-Americas has not always been the reigning orientation of time. According
toEgyptian mythology, Thoth [Hermes ] . . . was the divider and measurer of
time . . . by observing successive patterns in nature, the Egyptians came to
perceive timeas cyclic. The sun, moon, and seasons returned with unfailing patterns
and periodicity. As did their observations of the planets. So the concept of a
cyclicworldview reflected the reliance on natural cycles . . . clever devices were
designed to measure cyclic time. Sundials and other such devices, reflected that a
cyclictime was intrinsic to nature.
37
Johnson identifies a pivotal shift in the perception of time analysis when, [in]
the mid-1600s, a Dutch scientist Christian Huygens,
invented the pendulum clock, providing . . . its own recurring cycles independent
of nature. This orientation was embraced by the westernworld . . . [and] became
firmly ingrained in Euro-American culture. Reference to time became more rooted in
concepts of hours, minutes, andseconds. . . . Today, it is assumed that time flows
rigidly from past, present to future. Languages such as English are designed to
describe alinear world . . . the tenses of English verbs indicate a rigid linear
worldview. It is thus difficult to express non-linear . . . notions in oureveryday
language.
38
Language, specifically descriptive or discursive language, is linear and
consecutive. Descriptive or discursive languages cannot begin to
capture or expound the simplest experience without depriving it of the essence that
gives it life. Therefore, to try and use such a lineardevice to understand the All
is nothing short of impossible.
Considerations of the Western perception of time as linear reinforce the inadequacy
of Eurocentric thought and language to comprehend
the cyclic nature of the divine. The cyclic nature of all natural elements on Earth
corresponds to the nature of the All and constitutes thevery hub of a universal
dynamic, which connects the various planes of existence, whether seen or unseen.
All things within the naturalscheme of life move in cycles or continuous spirals.
The double helix of DNA, the molecular basis of heredity in organic life, spirals
up andout; blood spirals through living veins. Even the follicles of human hair,
especially those of Blacks, spiral up and out of the head, creating theindividual
spiraling strands of helical, spring-like shafts so characteristic of that race.
But the growth pattern of the hair in all human beingsis cyclic in that it spirals
from the lower top of the crania in a whorl pattern, no matter what the race.
Seashells such as the nautilus arecomposed of a spiraling chain of chambers, the
planets spin as they spiral in their orbits around the sun, and tornados and
hurricanes alsospiral as they move across the landscape. According to the Law of
Correspondence, we may surmise that all of these natural phenomena arethe mental
creation of the All. In fact, the words spiral and spiritual originate from the
Latin spirare, to coil.
According to ancient belief, the All living mind or spirit creates by
projecting an incalculable number of mental images that seem
very real to us as humans, but are as illusive as the mental images in our own
minds. The birth and demise of stellar systems take place
within a fraction of a millisecond in the mind of the All, but are eons in time to
mortals.
The All creates these images through a process akin to our understanding of
meditation. In the beginning of Poimandres (the Vision of
Hermes), prior to his contact with the great Dragon, Hermes, in search for divine
truth, found himself seeking solitude. . . . He came to aplace of rest and gave
himself over to meditation. Meditation seems to induce the experience of an
altered and higher state of consciousness,and through the study and use of it,
human beings can create and achieve on a level much closer to that of the divine.
The Western meditative process differs greatly from the understanding and practice
of meditation in the East, specifically South Asia or
India. In the West, meditation means no more than to ponder or reflect, to
contemplate or focus on a specific thought. Even transcendentalmeditation is simply
an advanced technique of concentration in preparation for the meditative
experience. In the East, meditation is regardedas a manner by which individuals
encounter the nature of the divine within themselves, a procedure based on a
scientific method to liberatethe mind through serene reticence. After nearly a
decades worth of research on the biophysical advantages of meditation,
UCLAphysiologist R. Keith Wallace proved that, besides its nebulous spiritual
implications, meditation has profound effects on the human bodyand mind. He showed
that sitting in meditation induces the nervous system to enter a state of what he
terms restful alertness: the mindremains lucid and awake, but the body goes into a
state of deep relaxation. Dr. Deepak Chopra remarked that
in a state of meditation, one undergoes definite shifts toward more efficient
[biological] functioning such as lowered respiration, reduced oxygen consumption
anddecreased metabolic rate. The most fascinating aspect of this research . . . is
that the biological process of aging itself does not have to be manipulated; the
desiredresults can be achieved through awareness alone. In other words, meditation
alters the frame of reference that gives the person his experience of time . . .
simply bytaking the mind to a reality where time does not have such a powerful
hold.
39
4A. Spiral galaxy displaying the basic spiraling formula that permeates every
aspect of the creative process, which is based on cyclic or circular movement.
4B. Double helix of DNA showing spiral or coiling pattern. The word helix, from the
Greek, means anything that coils or spirals.
Dr. Chopras observations suggest the possibility of the cessation of biological
decay, or premature aging. They also tantalize us with
the prospect that we have happened upon one of the many secrets contained in The
Book of Tehuti, which is reputed to have harbored thesecret of regeneration. Dr.
June DEstelle, a psychologist who has done extensive research on meditation,
concludes the following: Throughyour thoughts, you create. With the gift of
creative thinking, you are able to mold your life and to determine your destiny.
40
Scientific
studies like these bring us closer to the realization that humankind most assuredly
reflects the divine nature of the All.
Carl Jung aided Western civilization in its understanding of mentalism by his
studies of the subconscious and superconscious parts of
the human mind. The subconscious mind is the abode of the emotions, memories,
habits, and instinct. Also called the instinctive mind, it
establishes the order and assures that the incredible complexity of bodily
processes will continue without conscious effort. Thesuperconscious mind is that
level of mind that few of us ever encounter. Here is where the divinity resides
along with the soul, the spirit, thebeing of light that spiritual teachers regard
as the true self, all-knowing and all-loving. Through this self, love is expressed
and enlightenmentis achieved.
41
Here, within the realm of the high self or divine mind, we may encounter, as
Hermes did, Poimandres, the Great Dragon and
emissary of the All. And it is here, through meditation, that human beings can
receive the key to true biological, mental, and spiritualtransformation.
The ancient Egyptians acknowledged the Alls creative procedure as being manifested
in two parts. This dual creative expression with
respect to the All also helps one to identify the unidentifiable. The first part
was the outward projection of infinite mind or spirit. Thesecond, as a result of
this projection, was the creation of the mental universe of which we are a part.
The ancient Hermetists affirmed that atthe base of this process lies a universal
dynamic that serves as a common denominator with which all substance is brought
into generation inthe mental universe. This common denominator was form, and the
form utilized was known to the Egyptians as sacred geometry. Geometryis one of the
three principle branches of mathematics, the other two being algebra and analysis.
being the prime language of reality, but the Hermetists declare that this is a
misconception, that it is actually shape that generates all thelaws of mathematics
as well as physics, language, and biology, which includes the human species. It is
imperative to understand that sacredgeometry is not just lines on a page, but
rather the sacred geometric motions of spirit in the void and in nature.
Stan Tenen, a California physicist, has after almost thirty years of research
substantiated the presence of this divine maxim. Tenen, in
his composition Geometric Metaphors of Life, has been able to identify several
key geometric patterns and formulas that seem prominentin the Alls creative
method. Out of these, he has distinguished one group of patterns whose position is
preeminent in the formation of allothers. The first figure identified by Tenen is
what is known as a tube torus. This image is acquired by rotating a circular
pattern until asmall hole appears in the center. The faster the rotation, the
smaller the hole becomes. The tube torus is the primal shape of the universe. Itis
unusual in that it moves in on itself; there is no other shape that can accomplish
this. Tenen traced the spiral of a tube torus from themiddle of its circular
pattern then removed it out of the middle. He then placed it inside a three-
dimensional tetrahedron. Tenen found thatby shining a light through it so that its
shadow appeared on a two-dimensional surface he could generate all the letters of
the Hebrewalphabet, exactly in the shape and order that they are written. Tenen
also found that by changing the shape inside the tetrahedron todifferent positions,
he could project all the Greek and Arabic letters as well. From this example, we
may see the influence geometry has onlanguage. Stan Tenen went on to equate
geometric form to the first seven days of creation as espoused in the Biblical
tradition withastounding revelations, all supported by science.
43
Another major image in sacred geometry and central to the theme of generation is
the
vesica pisces. The vesica pisces is simply a circle next to another circle exactly
the same size so that the edge of one circle passes throughthe center of the other.
The common area created by this intersection is the vesica pisces, which means
vessel of the fish. In ancientsymbolism it stood for the feminine creative force
or mother-spirit that gave birth to worlds and to the gods that maintained them.
Thevesica pisces in prepatriarchal history is found in India, where it is referred
to as the Jagad Yoni meaning womb of the world. Twopyrmordial equilateral
triangles fit inside this image.
6A. This symbol denotes the Hermetic geometric concept of spirit being projected
through the void in six directions, initiating what, in time, would become the
foundation of thecreative process. In many cultures, the number six symbolizes
creation.
6B. The next procedure in the geometric order of creation, according to the
Hermetists, was the rotation of spirit on an axis, creating a sphere. The circle
creates the parameters bywhich spirit begins to operate and create within. The
Hermetists believe that straight lines are masculine, and curved lines are
feminine. But in order to create any and all things,curved lines must be brought
into generation.
6C. With the circle or sphere now in place, inception of the seven laws, which will
create the basis of universal order, takes place. This procedure is accomplished by
connectingthe various lines and angles, which creates a specific geometric pattern
indicative of one of the seven Hermetic axioms. Each geometric symbol shown here
equates to an axiom.Not shown is the projection of spirit in the six directions,
the hub of this dynamic from which all others emerge.
6D. Vesica Pisces. The vesica pisces is the symbol for the creative feminine force
that brought the material universe into being. It represents the fundamental energy
which lies atthe basis of all creation, and without it nothing could be. To remove
its energy from all form and matter would bring about immediate disintegration of
the universe.
6E. This symbol, known in sacred geometry as the flower of life, is held by
Hermetists as the penultimate of all geometric symbolism. This symbol is comprised
of numerousvesica pisces, overlapping one another at their respective centers. The
ancient Hermetists state that everything in existence whether past, present, or
future is containedwithin this structure. It contains all of our laws of biology
and physics, as well as all languages current and obsolete. Enclosed within the
geometric expression of the flower oflife is all of creation.
6F. The following diagrams show the role geometry plays in the genesis of human
life. Science acknowledges that prior to conception the ovum is a sphere a sphere
that alsocontains the female pronucleus, which contains half of the chromosomes for
creating a human being, twenty-two plus one. When the male sperm reaches and
penetrates the ovum,conception commences. The events which lead up to this event
are extremely noteworthy in dramatizing this concept. When that one chosen sperm
penetrates the ovum, its tailbreaks off, and its head forms a sphere the same size
as the female pronucleus. These two merge, forming a perfect vesica pisces, which
contains the blueprint for all universalknowledge. The sperm and ovum pass through
one another creating the first cell identified as the human zygote, containing
forty-four plus two chromosomes. Next in the processis mitosis where opposite or
polar bodies are created that travel to opposite ends of the cell nodes, forming
northern and southern polarities. The next phase is the formation of atube
splitting the sphere and the chromosomes half going right and half going left.
6G. The zygote splits into four cells and forms a tetrahedron inside a sphere, an
expression of sacred geometry in one of its most universally primordial
dramatizations.
6H. The next division creates eight cells and a star tetrahedron, with the eighth
cell lying directly under the center cell and star tetrahedron. This affirms
conclusively thatcreation, from the formation of star systems to the development of
human beings, is a geometric process. The location of these eight cells are at the
base of the spine or perineum,where the powerful kundalini force, spoken of in
the yoga traditions of India, resides. Hermetists hold that the energy fields which
emanate from the human body originate hereat the perineum. These cells divide into
eight more cells forming a cube within a cube. At this point, development begins to
become asymmetrical. The embryo hollows, returningto the form of the sphere. The
north pole enters the hollow ball, descends, and connects with the south pole,
forming a hollow tube in the middle. One end becomes the mouth andthe other the
anus. Such is the miracle of life.
report of the illumined, those who have advanced well along the path.
45
CHAPTER 2
things that tangibly manifest on the physical plane, seen or unseen. It includes
all of what we call matter and energy from solids, liquids,and gases to heat,
light, electricity, gravitation, cohesion, and chemical affinity. The Hermetists
maintain that there are planes within thiscategory that produce higher forms of
energy not yet discovered by science. These planes create the higher vibratory
frequencies thatconnect the Great Physical Plane to the Great Mental Plane.
The Great Mental Plane and its seven subdivisions contain various living forms.
Many of these are known to science, but there are
forms, according to the Hermetists, of which we are not aware because of our
limited and underdeveloped perceptive abilities. Thesubdivisions of this plane span
from what is called mineral mind to human mind. The Hermetists profess that
minerals too are endowedwith intelligence or mind, not in the way we perceive it
perhaps, but mind nonetheless.
This concept was substantiated in 1977 by Johann Gradsky, a physicist at Berkeley
and later at Cleveland State University. During the
1970s, Gradsky was one of the worlds few theoretical physicists, part of a
movement exploring new, unproven, and controversial conceptsin the field of
physics. Gradsky pioneered a radical branch of this field, establishing the unknown
as known and the uncommon as common.Using an electron gun, he demonstrated to the
global scientific community that mind is inherent on the atomic level. In an
atomicallyimpenetrable wall within a fission chamber, Gradsky made two incisions, a
right and left, and fired an electron from the gun at the leftincision. It went
through. Gradsky then replaced the wall with one that had only one incision in it,
on the right. He refired the same electronin the direction where the left incision
had been, and a remarkable event occurred: When the electron reached the wall and
found that the holewas gone, it stopped, hesitated, and went to and through the
incision on the right. This led Gradsky to believe that not only do atomicparticles
have a degree of intelligence (recognition that the hole was no longer there), but
they have the ability to make decisions (entering thealternate incision).
What are the implications of this discovery? All matter, including minerals, rocks,
and other solid compounds, is composed of atomic
and subatomic particles. Therefore, to establish mind on an atomic level is to
acknowledge mind in these many aspects of matter.
Another subplane of the Great Mental Plane is that of plant mind. The provocative
and popular book The Secret Life of Plants by Peter
Tomkins is the culmination of years of research that prove, conclusively, not only
that plants have mind, but that in many respects theirextrasensory mechanisms are
much more developed, functional, and detectable than those of humans! To stand
under or beside a giantsequoia or redwood in the woods of California is to be
overcome by an eerie feeling of actually hearing the stories of these
ancientwonders.
51
The remaining subplanes in the Great Mental Plane are animal mind, elemental mind,
and human mind, which is composed of the many
stages of human development in both its splendor and its decadence.
52
When observing the animal mind, many factors abound. Contained within this category
are our ever-present and ongoing relationships
with domestic animals that have become our guardians, emotional cushions, and
companions. From birds such as parrots, which havespeaking capabilities, to dogs
and cats, from the exotic to the ordinary, one experience that animal owners often
share is the ability tocommunicate with their pets. Few, if any, can deny the
profound levels of comprehension consistently seen in animals, wild or
domestic,that allows animals to understand our tones, words, needs, and desires. As
humans we deem ourselves the superior species, but upon closerexamination, this may
not be the case. Animals seem extremely capable of understanding us and being
instructed or taught by us. Thoughhumans may feign a position of superiority, many
animals seem to reflect a more responsive and evolved degree of sensory perception.
Many cultures in South America, India, and Africa, profess with respect to
evolutionary status, that humankind is only fourth in an
evolutionary line preceded by whales, dolphins, and elephants. They regard these
animals as totally conscious beings, utilizing their braincapacity far in excess of
human beings. These cultures maintain that these animals are the guardians of our
planet and the mercilessslaughtering of them is one of humankinds greatest
atrocities.
The Dogon of Africa, who live near Timbuktu, retain in their ancient mythological
traditions the belief that they were imparted the
knowledge that constellations Sirius A and B exist by dolphin-like beings more than
700 years ago. The Dogon and their astronomicalcomprehension of Sirius is one of
the greatest mysteries of modern science. In studying the dolphin, scientists have
found that their speciesis approximately 35 million years old. They also believe
that dolphins were once land dwellers, but eventually returned to the sea.
Closeexamination of their frontal fins reveals human-like hands inside of them. But
the most astounding find concerning dolphin research is theirbrain capacity. Both
hemispheres of a dolphins brain function at 100 percent, indicating a fully
conscious entity. When dolphins are at rest,they suspend usage of one hemisphere in
the brain, thereby conserving power. Human beings have only half of their brain
working at anytime leaving the other half nonfunctional and dormant. Of that half
of the human brain that is operational, we use on an average only 5 to 10percent.
So from a dolphins vantage point, we are not only consciously dormant, we are also
mentally unconscious beings. This verity isevidenced daily in our struggle to
survive.
The last of the Great Planes of Correspondence is the Great Spiritual Plane.
Hermetists deem this planes entities to be
incomprehensible to humans at our present level of understanding; thus, the task of
explaining them is an impossibility. How can color andlight be described to a man
born blind? How can the taste of honey be explained to a woman who does not know
sweet, or harmony to oneborn deaf? These are questions the Hermetists would ask
rhetorically in their attempt to describe the unfathomable. We can, though,
usingthe principle of correspondence, see the unfathomable in tangible examples.
On the lowest strata of the spiritual plane dwell the adepts, arahants, sages, and
masters. These are divine angels who walk the Earth
with humankind constantly assisting in the evolution of the human race. The term
adept implies one who has mastered organic alchemy, thatis, one who has mastered
all seven bodily senses and, like the caterpillar that has transformed into a
butterfly, has become that which cantruly be considered a human being. An arahant
is one who has totally extinguished all worldly desires, thereby putting an end to
herlifetimes or reincarnations. Sages carry qualities of both the adept and
arahant, in that they have mastered the body through various spiritualausterities,
but have chosen to remain in contact with the human race, to aid and assist it.
Sages are known as tirthankaras in South Asia,
and are said to have been given the responsibility of preserving the divine word or
ultimate truth, which guides and directs those humanbeings who have chosen the path
to spiritual realization.
Bearing the titles adept and arahant are individuals such as Tehuti/ Hermes, the
Buddha, Krishna, Osiris, Isis, Jehoshua or Jesus Christ,
and the Jain saviors Mahavira and Parsava. There have been many sages who have
walked the Earth, and they too are recognizable: Imhotep,the multitalented master
of Kmts Old Kingdom; Sui Nu, the Dark Girl, who imparted the knowledge of all
things to Hwuang-Ti; Chinasgreatest emperor, Lao-tzu; Quetzalcoatl of Meso-
America; Moses; Mohammed; and Abu Bakari, among many. These are the great souls
sooften referred to as avatars, adepts, or masters. They appear upon Earth in its
darkest periods to illuminate humankind and to renew hope.They are the sentries of
what the Bible calls Heaven the gateway to the Great Spiritual Plane of
Correspondence.
As above, so below is a principle that manifests on all planes and is an integral
component of the axioms to follow. Further analysis of
the laws will actually illustrate how these dynamic principles are at work in our
daily lives, as well as their impact on times past.
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
9. Ifa oracle, which like the I-Ching is based on the binary principle. Each column
is headed by an Odu, which corresponds to a specific Orisha or deity.
10. The symbol of yin and yang encased within the oracle of the I-Ching.
11. Tieguai, one of the nine immortals of Taoism who lived during Chinas Golden
Age. It was Tieguai who aided in disseminating the I-Ching and the Tao throughout
China.An accomplished martial artist, Tieguai was known as the Iron-Staff
Immortal, whose staff when let loose into the air turned into a waterfall. Hand
painted on silk, early YuanDynasty thirteenth century C.E.
In his book Chinese Thought, Paul Cams discussed a Babylonian tablet found in the
Library of Ashurbanipal (700 B.C.E.) called theTablet of Destiny, said to contain
the Mystery of Heaven and Earth. Carus speculates that not only are the I-Ching
and the Tablet ofDestiny one and the same; but since the tablet predates the I-
Ching by several centuries, the latter may have evolved from the former.
Atranslation of a fragmented text from the Library of Ashurbanipal, identified as
the Text of Enmeduranki, stated: Enmeduranki, king ofSippar, is the seventh of the
aboriginal kings, and he declares that he received the divine tablet from Anu.
61
Sippar is located in the region
of Mesopotamia known now as Iraq and is one of the most ancient cities in that
area, which prior to the Indo-European incursions, wascontrolled and culturally
dominated by some of the oldest populations of West Asia. Carus went on to say,
Chinese sages have their owninterpretation of the phrase the mystery of heaven
and earth. They would at once associate the words heaven and earth with the
twoopposing principles yang and yin. . . . It seems not to be impossible that the
Chinese tablet in the hands of Fuh-Hi is the same as the Tabletof Destinyof the
[Mesopotamians].
62
One of the most outstanding contributors to the history and origins of the Chinese
people and their philosophies was Professor Albert
Etienne Terrien de Lacouperie. Lacouperies work in this area of investigative
study has never been rivaled, let alone surpassed. Lacouperieheld appointments as
professor of Indo-Chinese philology at the University of London, president of
Council of the Royal Asiatic Societyand Philological Society, and board member of
the Peking Oriental Society. He authored twenty-five books, among them the
provocativelytitled The Languages of China Before the Chinese, West Asian Origins
of Chinese Civilization, The Black-Heads of Babylonia and AncientChina, and The YH-
King and Its Authors. It is this last volume that documents those who introduced to
the Chinese people the concept ofduality (yin/yang) and the oracle of the I-Ching.
12. West Asian population known as the Elamites whom Lacouperie identifies as the
Bak. Limestone relief ca. 900B.C.E.
13. Akkadian ruler, thought to be the great Naram-Sin, grandson of Sargon. Naram-
Sin ruled virtually all of West Asia for thirty-seven years (22702233 B.C.E.). Sin
is depictedhere with the false beard and crown of West Asian kingship.
An accomplished philologist, Lacouperie used language and various historical
documents to launch what seems to be an impenetrable
defense for a West Asian origin of Chinas I-Ching. Lacouperie began by identifying
a group of families known as the Bak, who immigratedinto China carrying with them
the beginnings of civilization: a well-defined sociopolitical structure, writing,
philosophy, and economicfortification. Culturally, this group was intimately
related to the Meso-Sumerians of West Asia. Racially and ethnically, the Bak
weredescended from the Akkadians and Elamites of Mesopotamia:
The language of the Bak families, which under the leadership of Yu Nai Hwang-ti
(HuNak-Kunte) arrived about 2282 B.C. on the banks of the Loh River in Shensi,
14. The eight linear binary hexagrams which comprise the I-Ching, the oracle said
to unravel the mystery of Heaven and Earth. The upper portion of this oracle
corresponds toHeaven and the electromagnetic field, while the lower relates to
Earth and the biopsychic field which envelops each individual human being. The
blending of the varioushexagrams can result in sixty-four combinations and no more.
This correlates to the sixty-four combinations found within the genetic code.
15. This Mayan grid (the Tzolkin), the sacred calendar of ancient Mesoamerica,
demonstrates (like the I-Ching and DNA) that there are fundamental patterns
represented in nature,perceived but not created by humans.
Less than two hundred years ago, another German philosopher and historian, George
Hegel, acquainted himself with the binary system
of Leibniz. Hegel would go on to construct the dialectical theory of history, which
equates the rational with the real and uses dialectic tocomprehend an absolute
idea. This theory of dialectical history had a profound impact on the great social
philosopher Karl Marx, who usedthis binary concept as the foundation for his theory
of dialectical materialism.
70
Thus, in the course of several centuries, three men who
would radically effect the philosophical direction of Western civilization
inherited from their predecessors and accepted as fact thefundamental reality of
binary law as postulated and espoused by the I-Ching.
Carl Jung was attracted to the I-Ching for what he perceived as its psychological
applications. Jung believed that it confirmed many
suspicions concerning the archetypes of human consciousness as well as the notion
of synchronicity, the idea that events gain significancefrom their simultaneous
occurrence. So impressed was Jung with the I-Ching that he would eventually write
the forward to the mostauthentic translation of the book in the Western hemisphere,
the 1949 Wilhelm/Baynes edition.
Though the validity of the I-Ching had been confirmed and embraced by four of the
most influential minds of this era, the most stunning
revelation was yet to come. In 1953, two scientists, James Watson and Francis
Crick, announced to the world their discovery of the geneticcode, consisting of
sixty-four binary triplet figures called DNA codons, which correspond directly to
the sixty-four binary triplet hexagramsof the I-Ching oracle. The genetic code is
written with four nucleic acid letters, each one represented by the two basic
linear units of binarylanguage ( , ), yin and yang. Like the hexagram of I-
Ching, there are sixty-four codons, and only sixty-four such structures
possible.From these codons, the twenty amino acids are derived, which make possible
every biochemical and physiological action in the humanorganism. Thus, we are able
to say that the I-Ching contains the key to unlocking the very mystery of life
itself. Whether identified as TheBook of Changes, The Tablet of Destiny, or the I-
Ching, one thing is certain: the power of this oracle has been used consciously at
times tomold or influence specific periods of human history. That the I-Ching
derives its power from the principle of duality or polarity is theradical but
undeniable lesson here. Ironically, what the West has gained from this axiom is far
less than what it has to offer. Though manyhave acknowledged the reality of
opposites, there is a tendency to overlook or neglect the countless levels between
the two extremes.
16. Map showing the relevance of the I-Ching to terrestrial and stellar phenomena.
It also demonstrates the two different arrangements of the oracle. Fu-Hs, the
originalarrangement utilized by the Xia and Shang dynasties, pertains to Heaven
while King Wens of the Zhou, relates to Earth. In the far right, we find the chart
(Letter C) thatcorresponds to the code of genetic dialect.
17. A bronze mask depicting the visage of the inhabitants of the Chinese Shang
Dynasty (17661000 B.C.E.). The Shang were the successors of the great Xia dynasty
and carriedon their traditions until they were overthrown by the Zhou. Historians
agree that it was during the Shang dynasty that writing was developed as well as
the cultivation of thesilkworm, the silk industry, sophisticated bronze work, and
sculpture in jade. These contributions, along with the philosophical concepts
imparted via the Xia, literally laid thefoundation for Chinese culture and
civilization.
The Hermetists of ancient Egypt had a thorough understanding of the functional
dynamics of the Law of Polarity. This, the fourth greataxiom from the Hermetic
perspective, embodies the truth that all things manifested in the mental universe
have two sides, two aspects, twopoles, and a pair of opposites with multiphasic
degrees between them. Thus, everything has inherent duality or poles, which
manifest themultitudes of opposites that we encounter on a daily basis. Batteries
have an anode and a cathode, or positive and negative aspects that,when properly
connected, will generate power or electrical force. Electrical current is a flow of
actually two currents, AC (alternatingcurrent) in which the poles reverse and DC
(direct current) where the poles are constant. The expression AC-DC is also English
slang todescribe someone who is bisexual, or who alternates between their sexual
poles. Manic depressives, who exhibit wide mood swings from thedepressive pole to
the manic pole, are called bipolar. Love and hate, hot and cold, good and bad, not
to mention male and female, are allmanifestations of universal opposites that
consistently prove to us, regardless of our acknowledgment, that everything in
creation has itsopposite.
All of these opposites may at any time be transmuted, provided the practitioner
understands the law. Things belonging to differentclasses cannot be transmuted into
one another, but elements of the same class may have their positions reversed. For
example, love cannever become east or west, but it may become hate; hard things may
be rendered soft, hot things may become cold, and sharp things maybecome dull. The
principle of polarity states that like and unlike are the same, that opposites are
identical in their nature and different onlyin their degree. This can be easily
substantiated. Hermetists proclaim that spirit and matter are but two poles of the
same element, theintermediate planes are various degrees of vibration. Infinite
mind and finite mind are the same in their nature (that nature being mind), andare
different only in that the two are among the many planes of correspondence
comprising multiple vibratory frequencies. Heat and cold areidentical in nature and
are different only in degree. A thermometer registers many degrees of temperature,
the lowest point or pole being
cold, and the highest hot. Between these two points are many variances of the two
and in the absolute sense there is no place on thethermometer where heat ceases and
cold begins. The same is true of short and tall or high, and low (height); large
and small (size); wide andnarrow (breadth); and day and night, which in a twenty-
four-hour period exhibit many degrees that gradually shade into one another.
What is imperative to understand is the relativity of all of these varying degrees.
We are compelled to use these terms in a descriptive
context so that others may understand us, but they are relative from person to
person, let alone in the absolute sense. If you travel aroundthe world in an
eastward direction, you will eventually arrive in the west. If you go far enough
south you will find yourself in the north.That which we deem good and bad are not
absolutely so. The expression the lesser of two evils refers to something that is
less good thanthe next higher in the scale; but what is less good in turn is better
or more good than what is below.
Love and hate are emotions humans categorize as diametrically opposed, or
irreconcilable. But according to the principal of polarity,
there is no such thing as absolute love or absolute hate. Envision a polar scale
that measures these two emotional extremes. At any point onthe scale, there will be
more love and less hate, or vice versa. As we ascend the scale we encounter less
hate and more love, but if we descendthe scale we find just the opposite. These
intermediate areas are the jurisdiction of like, dislike, disdain, fondness,
amiability. Therefore,there are no absolutes that introduce the next subcategory.
The proclamation of the axiom, all truths are but half truths (and all paradoxes
may be reconciled), echoes many ancient philosophical
aphorisms: everything is and is not at the same time, and there are two sides to
everything. The reality is that all truths are but half truths,simply because there
are no definitive absolutes, although humans are forever trying to create them.
Though much of the principle of polarity has been discussed, the best way to
understand what remains of this principle is through
personal experience. In the human promenade through life, there is a continuous
parade of new lessons that inevitably create perspectives,convictions, and
directions in and about life. These personal realities become our truths, and we
live and relive them daily. As we grow andmature, many, if not most, of our notions
about our realities change, and what we once held to be hallowed is modified,
sometimes radically,demonstrating that our truths and realities are in a constant
state of flux. Those who are too rigid to see change on their paths
eventuallysuccumb to a fixed view of the world, making themselves and those around
them miserable.
All experiences, events, items, and emotions can be classified as positive or
negative. For example, love is positive, and hate is negative.The positive pole is
considered a higher degree of vibration than the negative pole and is therefore
dominant. The ancient Hermetists statedthat the tendency of nature is to move in
the direction of the positive pole, which is forever increasing its vibration. Here
we see that theLaws of Vibration and Correspondence work intimately with the Law of
Polarity. By understanding this relationship, the transmutativeabilities of
polarity become clear. When properly applied, the Law of Polarity leads to a
greater sense of self-awareness and clarity.
CHAPTER 5
18. The symbol of yin and yang, which characterizes gender in all its many aspects
of creation. Each part contains an aspect of the other, the phenomena which lends
itself toperpetual generation.
19. This photo exemplifies one of the great phenomena in the material Universe.
Science recognizes that most galaxies belong to groups bound together
gravitationally resistingthe over-all tendency to fly apart. But there are periods
when two galaxies will merge without sustaining damage to one another creating a
new galaxy. The HermeticPhilosophy would dictate that these galaxies are charged
with either positive or negative forces or yin and yang energy. Therefore, we see
in this example, creation throughgender, in one of its most abstract, yet dynamic,
manifestations.
In a dialogue with Thoth/Hermes, Asclepius (Imhotep) asked Hermes, Do you say that
God is of both sexes, Trismegistus? Taking
but a second to ponder, Hermes replied, Not only God, Asclepius, but all things
ensouled and soulless, for it is impossible for any of thethings that are to be
infertile. Take away fertility from all things that now exist, and it will be
impossible for them to be forever . . . .
72
This postulate is dramatized in the East Indian creation myth. The universe is
created by the Supreme Yogi Shiva, the exalted male
principle, and his consort Shakti, the active creative energy of femininity, who is
called Parvati in her benign aspect and Kali in her awesomeaspect: The whole
universe is created out of the union of Shiva and Shakti. Shiva and Shaktis love
play transforms the universe. Thesexual activity of Shiva and Shakti makes the moon
wax and wane.
73
Examples such as these that allegorically reflect the Law of Gender are
globally evident in the doctrines of the ancient world as well as present-day
societies. In ancient Kmt, there were Nu and Nut, male andfemale counterparts of
the primeval spirit. The Bambara of eastern Guinea see this as Pemba and Faro, or
Heaven and Earth, whoseinteraction brings about conservation and change. The Dogon
identify Amma and Nummo while the Fon of Dahomey identify their principleof duality
as mawu-lisa.
74
Interestingly, this principle of duality is absent in Western culture, most
probably due to the entrenched patriarchal customs and mores
of a male-dominated culture and society. The Judeo-Christian tradition attributes
the genesis of all creation to a lone male deity, God. In theChristian tradition
there is the Trinity of God three persons in one God the Father, the Son, and
the Holy Spirit (or Ghost), all ofwhom are masculine. The absurdity of the Western
notion of creation as an exclusively male activity can be traced in part to events
thattook place almost 5000 years ago: the Indo-European-ruled nations of the
historic periods, explain the creation of the universe by the maledeity or the
institution of kingship, when none had existed previously. . . .
75
This forced exclusion of the feminine aspect of creation has wreaked havoc on
virtually every individual psyche in all Western and
Western-influenced cultures and civilizations. Jungian psychologist Marion Woodman
has asserted that because of the dominant influence ofpatriarchy, our present
culture has substituted mater, the word from which we derive the term mother, for
matter, the menial expression ofour current sociocultural condition, which has
created our blind and destructive indulgence into overt materialism. Thus, with
respect tomental gender, the feminine or mother aspect has been replaced by a
masculine expression indicative of a left-brain, mundane materialexistence. It is
noteworthy that the word matter, though a corruption, is also derived from the term
mater. As human beings engage oneanother with this unhealthy and sometimes perverse
perspective of social and mental gender, a myriad of problems are created.
What are social and mental gender? Social gender is simply the way men and women
are conditioned and expected to act in the social
environment. Social gender is built into the very norms and mores of the culture;
and because of the severity of early indoctrination, it isimpossible to eradicate
these behavioral patterns completely. Mental gender is the state or condition of
mind that allows social gender to bea reality. The conventional wisdom, as a man
thinketh, so is that man, is surely applicable in this instance. Men are so
fervent in theirquest to epitomize the macho mentality that currently pervades
many societies. This behavior is self-destructive according to the Law ofGender,
which describes a reality of mind based on both masculine and feminine components.
20. Shiva and Shakti, the two eternal manifestations of gender. Shiva is the oldest
of the great gods of India, pre-dating the gods of the Hindu or Aryan pantheon by
millennia.Traces of Shiva extend as far back as 3000 B.C.E., placing him firmly in
the Indus Valley civilization. The original inhabitants of ancient India held Shiva
as the Supreme god, forhe was forever in a state of actualization due, in part, to
his constant awareness of his feminine active principle, the goddess. The ancients
of India held that Brahma and Vishnu,the Vedic gods of the Aryans, were puny
insignificant upstarts when compared to Shiva. Here Shiva is joined with Shakti to
produce the Bindu or Seed of the Universe.
Many writers have theorized on various divisions of the mind, such as conscious and
subconscious, voluntary and involuntary, passive
and active. All of these divisions announce the presence of mental duality. The
Hermetists equate the masculine principle of mind to what isnow considered the
objective or active mind. Taoists would denote this aspect as yang. The feminine
principle of mind corresponds to thesubconscious, passive, or involuntary state of
mind. For Taoists, this aspect is yin. Hermetic Philosophy labels these two states
of mindthe I and the me. The I represents the masculine principle of mental gender,
while the me is indicative of the feminine; I reflects a state ofbeing, while the
me component represents the aspect of becoming. The I or masculine mind equates to
the intellect and is that level of ourmentality that concerns itself with the work
of the will. The feminine principle of mind is much more expansive and far-reaching
in its fieldof operation. It concerns itself with the task of generating new and
innovative thoughts, concepts, and imaginative formulas. Furthermore,The tendency
of the Feminine Principle is always in the direction of receiving impressions,
while the tendency of the Masculine Principleis always in the direction of giving
out, or expressing.
76
Psychiatrist Rudolph M. Ballentine, in speaking about the I or masculine mind,
which he refers to as I-ness, says, When sensory
impressions come in via the lower, sensory-motor mind, this I-ness serves to
transform them into a personal experience by relating them toindividual identity.
It provides a sense of separateness from the rest of the world, a feeling of
distinctness and uniqueness. . . . It is theproperty of subjectivity. . . . I-ness
does not instinctively flow with nature. It makes possible the question: Whats in
it for me? and lendsthe ability to say, These are mine.
77
Though he concurs with his colleagues about the complexity of the term ego it is
much more than
egotistical behavior Ballentine draws correlations between I-ness and the ego:
I-ness is often translated ego. It thinks logically andsequentially. Ego means I
in the everyday, ordinary sense: it is the adaptive, competent, common sense self
that operates in the world ofcompetition and achievement.
78
Though the two aspects of masculine and feminine mind are similar in kind, they are
vastly different in degree. The masculine mind is
confined strictly to mundane cerebral impulses, while the feminine mind relates to
the more lofty experiences of a greater refinedconsciousness serving nature,
oneness, and humanity.
The irony before us is that men constantly deny that which is feminine within us
while women, forced to live in a patriarchal culture, areconstantly fighting for
greater expression of equality, which forces them to consistently engage the more
aggressive male-oriented patterns ofsurvival on both a mental and physical level.
Because of improper perceptions of men as being strong and women as being weak,
qualities associated with women that are
characteristic of the feminine component of the mind are suppressed in men.
Therefore, a sensitive man is perceived as weak, for men aresupposed to be macho;
for a man to cry is weak, for only women do such things. The vision of why we are
on Earth, which is contained inthe feminine mind, is muddled with the aggression,
arrogance, and insensitivity of the masculine ego. Joan Armatrading, a modern-
daypoet/musician, allowing the words man and woman to represent the masculine and
feminine aspects of the mind, has written, Man likes toown/a woman shares/man has
his needs/a woman cares.
79
Until men allow the part of their minds that is feminine to be fully engaged with
their masculine aspect, they will never understand their
true nature and connection with the divine, since they are only half-functional and
incomplete. Though gender manifests itself in all thingsand on all planes, humans
play a primary role in the evolution of those things through the evolution of our
own consciousness. The feminineaspect of mind is the doorway through which all men
must sooner or later pass. What men perceive as strength is one dimensional and
finite.The Indian goddess Tara embodies the true power of the feminine aspect of
mental gender:
I guide man to the path of the Divine
And guard him from the red W olf and the Snake.I set in his mortal hand my heavenly
swordAnd put on him the breast-plate of the Gods.I break the ignorant pride of
human mindAnd lead the thought to the wideness of the Truth;I rend mans narrow and
successful lifeAnd force his sorrowful eyes to gaze at the sunthat he may die to
earth and live in his soul.I know the goal, I know the secret route,I have studied
the map of the invisible worldsI am the battles head, the journeys star.
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CHAPTER 6
22. Two faces carved in stone from South Asia (India) dated the fourth or fifth
century B.C.E. The images depicted here are most assuredly representative of the
Harappans whooccupied the Indus Valley complex.
23. Sai Baba, a Dravidian spiritual master from India whose philosophy incorporates
the science of the Manvantara.
World War I ended this boom, and a period of economic and political gyrations
followed from 1914 to 1929. Berlin experienced a
revolution as the United States headed into the era of prohibition and racketeering
of the roaring twenties. The gross spending and illegalfinancial pursuits of the
1920s created an economic tailspin, ending in the 1929 stock market crash and the
beginning of yet anotherdepression, popularly referred to as the Great Depression.
The economic, moral, and physical despair of the 1930s ended only with theentry of
the United States into another world war in 1942.
Although America fought and defeated two enemies, World War II did not last long
enough for the country to recuperate financially. It
did, however, remove all vestiges of the depression that had engulfed the nation.
As the United States entered the 1950s, it was stillrecovering from its past
political and monetary entanglements. This was the time of the Korean War, crop
failure, a recession, and the 1954Supreme Court ruling on the unconstitutionality
of segregation and the beginning of the American Civil Rights Movement. The
tumultuous,yet economically prosperous, 1960s gave birth to another recession and
the fabricated energy crisis of the 1970s. The lavish, self-indulgent1980s were
followed by economic hardship in the 1990s.
We could cite example after example, but the point here is to dramatize the
obvious: there are cyclical patterns, rhythms that are in
operation on several levels of existence. To sociopolitical analysts, these events
may seem the cause of basic detectable patterns that reflectthe human machine and
how it functions within its environment, but such an observation would be
superficial at best. Beneath the mundanerealities of daily life lies the Principle
of Rhythm, shaping the destiny of the human race.
Of the varied cyclic manifestations of this principle, the most intriguing are the
recurrent periods of human activity upon the Earth, even
those periods that occurred in epochs now forgotten or intentionally dismissed. The
ancients believed that by understanding the nature ofthese cyclic periods one could
not only foresee the future of humankind, but could also glimpse the past.
The oldest and most accurate of these systems known at this time originated with
the indigenous population of ancient India, the
Harrapan or Indus Valley civilization, which is presently yielding carbon dates
from 7000 B.C.E.
81
The Harrapans believed that the
universe was organic and imperishable and that its existence was divided into an
ongoing and recurring infinite number of cycles, eachconsisting of a period of
improvement and a period of decline. In his book The Divine Science, P.K.
Manikkalingam reported that in a periodof improvement, people are of enormous size
and live to a very advanced age. They have no need for laws or ownership of
property.
Human beings are spiritually in touch with themselves and the divine. There are no
wars or malice of any kind.
In an age of decline, humans live a primitive life, contemplating whether they are
a product of civilization or barbarism. All true religion
is lost or falsified, and people become dwarf-like in stature, with an average life
span of only sixty to seventy years, the last thirty-five ofwhich are immersed in
physical pain and suffering. Wars and disease are rampant, and the moral and
spiritual fiber of the human race is at itslowest point. Then the pendulum begins
to swing in the opposite direction, at times following cataclysmic destruction, and
improvementbegins.
This system is still alive in India today and is known as the Manvantara, the race
cycles, as they apply to the evolution and
deterioration of the human species under the Law of Rhythm. Tehuti expressed this
phenomenon in terms of the necessity of corruption tobeget aspiration: And
corruption hath laid hold upon all things on Earth, and the Providence of the True
encompasseth, and will encompassthem. Tor without corruption, there can be no
Generation consist. For corruption followeth every Generation, that it may again be
generated.For those things that are generated, must of necessity be generated of
those things that are corrupted, and the things generated must becorrupted, that
the Generation of things being, may not stand still or cease.
82
The Manvantara speaks to this very cyclic process. The
Manvantara is divided into four yugas or ages. These ages succeed one another and
repeat themselves ad infinitum. Each age is preceded by aperiod of transition
called Sandhya or twilight, the time of pruning or purification in preparation for
the age that is to follow. The ages oryugas are as follows:
1. Krita or Satya Yuga, which lasts 1,728,000 years, is considered the golden age,
or the age of truth and purity.2. Treta Yuga, which lasts 1,296,000 years, is also
an age of purity, but of less perfection than the first.3. Dwapara Yuga, which
lasts 864,000 years, is characterized by the emergence of conflicting forces and,
though the cycle within this age begins in harmoniousaccord, it eventually exhibits
the struggle between the high and low, good and evil.4. Kali Yuga, which lasts
432,000 years, is considered by the Manvantara to be the lowest point of humanity.
The human race tries desperately to rebound from thespiritual atrocities of the
previous age. (The allegory of Adam and Eve being cast from the Garden of Eden.)
83
Right now, we are in the last of these four periods, the Kali Yuga, or the age of
darkness, which is said to have begun in the year 3102
B.C.E. with two ominous events. The first was the disappearance of the great
warrior sage Krishna, the Christ of India, whose nameliterally means Black One.
The second event was the appearance, advance, and conquest of most of Europe and
Asia by the Indo-European hordes who referred to themselves as the Hittites, Indo-
Iranians, and Aryans, the latter being a name that means the noble
ones.Originating on the Eurasian Steppes circa 4000 B.C.E., the Indo-European
advance became the mechanism to inaugurate the Kali Yuga. Withsuperior weapons and
steeds bred for speed (the Indo-Europeans introduced horses into Asia), these
hordes converged on Europe and Westand South Asia. They carried with them a
propensity for extreme aggression and violence as never before witnessed in our
epoch. To themany nations that would gather to confront them, they must have seemed
liked the legions of darkness, and they were. They traveled underthe shroud of the
age of Kali the age of darkness, and they were undefeatable.
25. Map showing the various branches which became part of the Indo-European
cultural family.
The Indo-Europeans who went West became the Greeks, Slavs, Germans, Celts,
Thracians, Baits, and Illyrians. Those who invaded the
eastern areas became the Anatolians, Phrygians, Armenians, Indo-Iranians, and
Tocharians. There were other Caucasian populations, such asthe Hurrians, Lydians,
and Assyrians, who were conquered by the Indo-Europeans infiltrating the East, and
who eventually succumbed totheir cultural influence.
From the regions of Anatolia and Iran, the Indo-Europeans continued to push
southward and eastward forcing their way into
Mesopotamia, Canaan, and finally Northwest India. All of these geographical areas
had for millennia been major centers of civilization forpeople of African descent.
The formidable foe that encroached upon them brought a message of dire change. In
India an epic poem of great
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