The Real Esoteric Investigator
So far we have seen two quite distinct views emerge on ancient Egypt. On the one hand, modern scholars tend to disregard the achievements of this civilisation as the work of primitive minds who didn’t know more than basic mathematics, and held to a very superstitious religion where they were at the beck and call of hundreds, if not thousands of different deities. On the other hand, there have always been those minds who could not dismiss the evidence before their eyes. As one writer put it:
The much vaunted flowering of Greece two thousand years later pales into insignificance in the face of a civilisation which, supposedly starting from a crude neolithic base, produced in a few centuries a complete system of hieroglyphs, the most sophisticated calendrical system ever developed, an effective mathematics, a refined medicine, a total mastery of the gamut of arts and crafts and the capacity to con struct the largest and most accomplished stone buildings ever built by man. The cautiously expressed astonishment of modern Egyptologists hardly matches the real magnitude of the mystery.
Anthony West, The Serpent in the Sky, p. 184
A revolution in our understanding of the world of ancient Egypt was begun by the work of a very unlikely man.
R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz was born René Schwaller in Alsasce in 1887. His father was a pharmaceutical chemist and so chemical experiments were part of René’s childhood. He appears to have been a sensitive child. Like Rudolf Steiner he was fond of dreaming in nature, and he also had an artistic gift, so much so that as a teenager he was sent to study with the great artist Matisse, in Paris. Here he joined a world of intellectual ferment and esoteric undercurrents. He became a member of the Theosophical Society, and then developed a passion for alchemy. He understood alchemy not as a banal pursuit of gold, but as a path to personal illumination. Carl Jung would develop this later.
In Paris René was surrounded by amazing architecture, especially the great cathedrals and he came to believe that the occult knowledge of the past had been encoded into the great gothic cathedrals. A set of notes he wrote on this came into the hands of another alchemist who published Le Mystere des Cathedrales. “The Mystery of the Cathedrals”, by “Fulcanelli”, became a classic book of alchemical and occult literature.
Schwaller became acquainted with a Lithuanian prince named Luzace de Lubicz Milosz. Stories about what happened between Schwaller and Milosz vary. One version of the tale has Schwaller healing Milosz through an alchemical preparation, another has him working for the Lithuanian people as a chemist during World War I. For whatever reason, Milosz bestowed him a knighthood, and the right to add ‘de Lubicz’ to his name. From this time on, René Schwaller became R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz.
What is an occultist, an alchemist, an artist with a detailed knowledge of architecture and building traditions going to do next?
In 1936 R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz made a visit to Alexandria and looked at the tomb of Rameses IX. In a flash of insight, he realised that the wisdom of the medieval craftsmen could be traced all the way back to ancient Egypt. There was only one thing he could do, so he packed up his belongings and spent the next fifteen years in Egypt, studying its buildings – especially the sacred architecture of the temples.
…Next time… what the occultist discovered…