Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization

13 R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz’s Magnum Opus

The Keys to Understanding the Wisdom of the Ancients Have Been Preserved

Joseph Ray, Ph.D.

From time to time, significant events occur unbeknownst to virtually everyone. Great discoveries, formidable inventions, and even profound legacies have been delivered to humanity in relative obscurity and sometimes against its unconscious collective will. Such an event occurred in late 1998 with the publication of R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz’s greatest work, The Temple of Man.

The Temple of Man is an accomplishment of truly Herculean proportions. Nothing written in the past two hundred years, with the exception of only one book, even approaches it in enormity of purpose, scope, subject matter, majesty, and profundity. It is also physically enormous, as well as beautiful, and to read it properly is a year’s commitment. To comprehend it and finally to understand it may require additional years of effort, rereading, pondering, and, most significantly, revelation.

One needs to learn to read this book and then immerse oneself in it. Were one to do this, and assuming diligence, sincerity, determination, and some ingenuity by the reader, the outcome toward which all human life is aimed, the evolution of consciousness, is ensured. “Consciousness cannot evolve unconsciously,” said G. I. Gurdjieff. His great work, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, conveys much of the occult and profound teachings set forth in The Temple of Man, requires similar effort, and can exert a similar effect upon the reader.

Essential in both is the reader’s open-mindedness and state of receptivity, produced by consciously suspending mental reactions until the teachers (the ancient sages whose mode of thought is being transmitted) have completed their work and the transcribers of this knowledge, the authors, have exhausted their understanding.

Every man who attempts to fathom the profound expresses himself about it uniquely. This includes his turns of phrase, the ordering of his thoughts, and the very manner in which he thinks (by hops, leaps and bounds, one rung at a time, or in a direct line). To become his student, which is to say to place oneself in a state of maximum sensitivity to the ideas he expresses, one must familiarize oneself with his turns of phrase and mode of expression. To the extent that one becomes able to think, reason, and ponder in a fashion similar to one’s teacher, a psychological fusion can occur. This fusion, by a sort of inner “resonance” in the reader-student, metaphorically speaking shakes loose the embedded knowledge from its innate repository, the “Intelligence of the Heart” and a fresh understanding emerges.

The more subtle, oblique, and ineffable knowledge is, the less suited is the cerebral intelligence to it and the more it will react against it. “Knowledge (or even elements of the knowledge) cannot be conveyed through writing alone; the symbolism of the image is indispensable,” Schwaller de Lubicz says. The “symbolique,” then, is “the concrete image of a synthesis that cannot be expressed in time . . .” and it is these images that evoke the synthesis. It may sound awkward, but the process is straightforward. True symbols appeal to the Intelligence of the Heart, where they draw knowledge from it. Ordinary language and the thought expressed in it, the currencies of cerebral intelligence, are ill suited to this knowledge and always distort it.

However, not only the pharaonic mode of thought but its mode of perception, as well, differed from our own. We are, says Schwaller de Lubicz, the victims of our own “mechanistic mentality” and as such suffer from a materialistic misunderstanding of nature. (It is worth noting that, ever since Schwaller de Lubicz’s time, materialism has further extended its grip on human thought. Today, despite inaccuracy and verbal inefficiency, practically everything is described in terms of “amount”—e.g., a “fair amount” of: knowledge, accuracy, time, skill, speed, and/or any psychological resource. Not everything is quantity or volume!)

To become adept in the pharaonic mode requires effort, suffering, and experiment. Two shorter works by Schwaller de Lubicz, Nature Word and The Temple in Man, are desirable precursors to The Temple of Man, either new or in rereading. Casual readers need not be deterred either, for they may discover themselves being hooked by the beauty, interconnectedness, and depth of these extraordinary teachings of the ancient sages. This knowledge is for those willing to struggle, and Schwaller de Lubicz warns against concluding “that the ancients meant to say something that we understand; rather one should try to find out why they expressed themselves thus.”

The Temple of Man is not a straightforward presentation of ancient teachings. Nor is it Schwaller de Lubicz’s own path, recounted in somewhat objectified form but based upon his personal discoveries and illuminations. It is both and much more. Schwaller de Lubicz assimilated what the ancients taught: He allowed himself to be affected (impacted emotionally) by the symbolic language transcribed into the Temple of Luxor. This language transcends ordinary language, is vital and not dead, and thus is the only means of transmitting the ineffable to future humanity free of distortion.

The Temple of Luxor is a pedagogical device, built to embody and encode knowledge through the use of a variety of subtle cues (e.g., the representation of an incorrect anatomical detail such as two left hands, a missing detail present on the other side of a wall). Painstakingly, the ancients integrated occult knowledge into visual, auditory, conceptual, and architectural symbolic expressions. In so doing, they specifically intended to bypass cerebral intelligence.

Their goal was to evoke from the student the sublime, evanescent knowledge they knew to be embedded in the student’s Intelligence of the Heart. This true education, involving experience, emotional impact, and work (action), causes the student to become the knowledge, as opposed to remembering something. As Gurdjieff said, “A man is what he knows.”

True education is an end in itself, yet is also a means of consciousness evolution, for it incorporates its own form of suffering. The Temple of Man can teach the reader by means of Schwaller de Lubicz’s experience rendered as his understanding. Our experience will be less rich, but understanding can develop because the ideas themselves vivify.

How will the “scholars” within the Egyptological establishment react to this seminal work? A handful may peruse it; many will avoid (i.e., feign ignorance of) The Temple of Man. Some may describe the work as a concoction of Schwaller de Lubicz’s fertile imagination. In this regard, it needs to be stated: No mere mortal ever, in history or in the future, could have an intelligence so vast, an imagination so fecund, and an integrative capacity so complete as to have made up, somehow or other, the contents of The Temple of Man.

It proves itself in its very unimaginability. Moreover, many of the teachings and unifying conceptions in it can be found in sources entirely independent of ancient Egyptian thought. Consider the “science of correspondences”—knowledge that underlies the ancients’ selection of symbols.

Swedenborg, who lived during the eighteenth century and never visited Egypt, wrote at length on the subject of “correspondences,” and it became the title of one of his books. A section of Heaven and Hell is devoted to the subject. “The most ancient people, who were celestial men, thought from correspondence itself, as the angels do”; “The whole natural world corresponds to the spiritual world . . .”; “the knowledge of correspondences is now wholly lost.”

Indeed, the seminal Anthropocosmic principle, upon which correspondence depends and that underlies pharaonic teaching, is considered extensively by Swedenborg, who described the universe as “The Grand Man” and humanity as this in miniature. Schwaller de Lubicz uses the phrase “Colossus of the Universe” as he confirms and amplifies all that Swedenborg told us in 1758.

The Temple of Man is organized into six parts. It contains forty-four chapters and is presented in two large volumes. Chapter 27 onward concerns the particular architecture of the Temple of Luxor: These chapters contain 101 plates and about a third of the book’s three hundred figures.

These latter chapters include commentaries on the plates and their subject matter. Occasionally, the style of presentation varies, as required by the topic. The earlier chapters form a basis for many of the later discussions. Some are difficult and some possibly are of lesser interest. When I felt that rereading a chapter would facilitate the growth of my understanding of it, I did so immediately. One must not be deterred by an apparent opacity of the text and the ideas therein that may be beyond present comprehension: Mental alchemy can and will occur.

Schwaller de Lubicz warns that “effort” is required. This effort is a form of suffering. And the ancient sages stated clearly that suffering is the engine for the evolution of consciousness: “It is suffering that causes the widening of consciousness,” where suffering “is understood as a profound experience brought about by the conflict of consciousness, not as sorrow.” Acquiring just some of the pharaonic mentality is suffering itself as the modern, “mechanistic mentality presents a formidable barrier,” in Schwaller de Lubicz’s words. He describes the nature of cerebral intelligence, ordinary thought, as constrictive and “centripetal.”

Indeed, most of us live within the cage of ordinary consciousness established and maintained by the cerebral intelligence. Conversely, pharaonic mentality, the “noncerebral” Intelligence of the Heart, is expansive, synthetic (as opposed to analytic), intuitive, noncomparative, direct, and innate, and thus evoked. Getting there is one’s personal death and life story: Suffer gladly.

Schwaller de Lubicz wrote The Temple of Man “. . . first to show the means of expression used by the ancients to transmit knowledge,” and “. . . second, to present an outline of the doctrine of the Anthropocosmos, the guide to the way of thinking of the sages.” To fulfill this goal required the consideration and discussion of subjects seldom seen in occult, esoteric, or spiritual writings: Anthropocosmos, Pharaonic Calculation, Cosmic Principle of Volume, The Covered Temple, The Head, Crossing, The Knees, Receiving and Giving are examples.

One must acquire a good feeling for Elements, Consciousness, and Irreducible Magnitudes, as well as Symbolique, to begin to fully appreciate all of these latter chapters. This may take some time. As mentioned, however, even casual readers—that is, nonstudents—will find wise statements everywhere, conjectures verified now by time (this book is more than forty years old), and remarkable insights: The pages contain much spiritual food, some of which may be ingested raw.

“The Anthropocosmic doctrine [holds that] each plant and animal species represents a stage in the evolution of consciousness . . .” Man is a microcosm of the macrocosm. “Thus the Universe is incarnate in man and is nothing but potential Man, Anthropocosmos.” In this system, creation and generation are central; the forces of genesis and the moment of expansion are the subject matter.

Humanity, by the way, procreates but creates nothing. In applauding our pseudo-understanding of life because we genetically engineer a plant, clone a sheep, or grow a human pinna (ear) on a mouse’s back, we succumb to pride and self-delusion, our great foibles.

Were modern humanity not so disordered in life, out of touch with nature, and imbalanced as well, gaining pharaonic insights would still be difficult. But we have developed the “cult of convenience” to a high order and live by another modern principle, that of “something for nothing.” Inasmuch as, in the spiritual realm, payment is a principle, such a worldview further amplifies the impediments toward pharaonic mentality.

Those who have seen, generally, the hollowness of modern thought must be at pains to discover its effects in themselves, so invidious is its process. The need to be surrounded by people, sound, activity, even noise, arises in the psychological consciousness of the cerebral intelligence, which subsists on stimulation. Says Schwaller de Lubicz, most modern people (as of the 1950s) could not have “stood” the serenity that prevailed in ancient Egypt.

Schwaller de Lubicz tells us that, in order to grasp the essence of the Anthropocosmic teaching, we need to reestablish in our minds a proper notion of the term symbol. A symbol is not merely “any letter or image that is substituted for the development of an idea.” Instead, a symbol is “a summarizing representation, which is commonly called a synthesis.” This process “feels” like something, often exhilaration.

The ancients selected these symbols knowing virtually everything about the natural counterpart (the correspondent) from gestation to its death. Mental caution is necessary, however, and the tendency to “fix,” by definition, the essence of the symbolic representation must be avoided. The qualities of a symbol are many and varied and not to be linguistically rigidified any more than molten lava. The symbol is alive, vital, and dynamic, because Anthropocosmic doctrine is a vitalist philosophy.

“To explain the Symbol is to kill it . . .” and, indeed, the landscape of academic Egyptology is everywhere strewn with the carcasses of dead, unheard symbols. “Rational thinkers” believe we’ve passed beyond simplistic thinking. Rather, in the last two millennia, we have fallen into it.

Many concepts of modern thought are defined and understood differently in The Temple of Man—so many, in fact, that scientists, academics, and people generally, having unconsciously espoused a mechanical rationalism, will be forced to reject these ideas out of hand. “Cause and effect are not separated by any time.” There exists a “principle of the (present moment), mystical in character, that modern science ignores,” says Schwaller de Lubicz.

These and other similar statements cannot be reconciled with the current and opposing worldview. But one may examine the modern socio-scientific-technological state of the world in light of these ideas and, from so doing, draw tentative conclusions concerning the relative merit of the ancients’ teachings.

The history of science demonstrates that we seldom build upon the great discoveries of preceding generations of scientists. Few physicists today know Kepler’s laws of planetary motion; even fewer mathematicians appreciate that his unconventional use of the fractional notation of powers (e.g., X2/3 power) and the unique position he accorded the number 5 (which led to this) were a part of pharaonic mathematics thousands of years earlier. Modern science is as “pouring from the empty into the void,” to quote Gurdjieff. Modern science, Schwaller de Lubicz says, is founded upon incorrect premises. We know kinetic energy, not vital energy, and we tamper with forces, powers, and processes we do not and cannot now understand: We are the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

Cerebral intelligence is based upon the sensory information conveyed to it by the major sensory systems. These are understood by the ancients in terms of both their natural, exoteric function (to provide the brain with information) and their esoteric, spiritual function. One cannot but be amazed, again, at the subtlety of the insights they conveyed. For example, “the faculty of discernment, located in the olfactory bulb, is the seat of judgment in man . . .”

Well, the olfactory bulb is a so-called primitive structure of the brain with no direct connections to the cortex, the “advanced” gray matter. Nevertheless, apparently in deference to its unique anatomical characteristics, the ancients accorded olfaction one of the three secret sanctuaries in the head of the Luxor temple, Room V.

The moral sense, sexuality, and the physiological distribution of vital energy are combined in the relevant symbol, the cobra. Here in Room V of the temple is located “conscience.” Goodness has a spiritual fragrance (a fact noted by Swedenborg, who mentioned that the ancient Egyptians were the last to fully understand the science of correspondences).

Subtlety is all the more difficult to acknowledge and recognize when what is taught conflicts diametrically with what people already believe. Ironically, we seldom have evidence that appears to contradict the ancients’ teachings, which typically go beyond our accepted facts.

Schwaller de Lubicz includes a lengthy discussion of the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus. This papyrus (from Luxor in 1862) was translated after 1920 by the renowned Egyptologist J. H. Breasted. The effort convinced him of the elevated status of ancient Egyptian science and mathematics (as it did others) but apparently modern Egyptologists remain uninfluenced by his writing. An extensive anatomical dictionary of the skull, head, and throat (also in hieroglyphics) enables the reader to comprehend the many cases of head injury described in the papyrus. Despite the ancients’ lack of a really good source of head injury cases (e.g., automobile accidents), their knowledge of clinical neuroanatomy was detailed and correct, without the benefit of EEGs, CAT scans, and magnetic resonance imaging.

The ancients described a human as comprising three interdependent beings, each having its own body and organs. Of course, all were essential and important. However, the head was especially so, for it was the seat of the spiritual being. There, the blood was spiritualized, infused with vital energy prior to coursing through the corporeal and sexual bodies. These bodies, vivified by the spiritual being, live a lifetime without knowing it in a state of ignorance or self-delusion.

Modern humanity has struck an iceberg of its own making. Those forces we have tampered with and let loose, but which we do not understand, threaten our annihilation. We have a role in cosmic metabolism but are unable to fulfill it. We must cease fiddling while our planet burns, cease occupying ourselves with liposuction, with killing birds to kill insects, with poisoning the soil to kill weeds, with polluting air and water. Any sane person can see our way of “life” has become unnatural, a condition the ancients foresaw.

Everyone’s consciousness needs to expand, to evolve: We need to become aware of a great deal that, right now, escapes us. This can occur by choice— the price is some suffering. “And now that the temple of Luxor has shown us the way to follow, let us begin to explore the deeper meaning of the teaching of the pharaonic sages,” wrote Schwaller de Lubicz. We shall discover along the way what a trivial price we are asked to pay.