 |
The
Four Elements, Page Five
Chapter
End Note
We
are told that the Greek philosopher Thales (ca. 624-546 B.C.)
concluded that water was the essence of all matter, thus the single
basic element. If Thales ever reduced his teaching to writing,
none survives, nor is the substance of his teaching based upon
the writing of any contemporary source. We are further told that
in the next two centuries, Greek philosophers concluded that Thales
was wrong in attributing all matter to water; rather it was seen
to derive from the four basic elements listed above.21
Historians
of science have thus deduced, based upon those later writings
alone, that the ancient knowledge of the four elements was first
born between the sixth and fourth centuries B.C. I suggest that
this is not the case, but rather that this ancient knowledge was
primordial in human evolution, and that what Thales taught expressed
what was developing, among all peoples of that time, in humanity's
long, slow transition from its ancient clairvoyance and blood-related
memory to its grappling with the intellectual handling of observed
phenomena.22
It was the gradual, evolutionary transition from the Garden to
the laboratory. Something was gained (intellectual analysis and
reasoning) at the price of something being lost (memory and understanding).
This is what Isaiah had said only shortly before, at the commencement
of the Cultural Age of Aries, the "Lamb" (Is 6,9-10):
9 And
[the Lord] said, "Go and say to this people: 'Hear and hear, but
do not understand; see and see, but do not perceive.' 10 Make
the heart of this people fat, and their ears heavy, and shut their
eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears,
and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed."23
According
to modern scholarship, it was essentially at the time of Isaiah
(i.e., "First Isaiah") that the oral teachings of Moses, which
even earlier had come from the "fading [primordial] splendor"
(2 Cor 3), were first reduced to writing. And what was said of
Moses? It was said, according to the Mosaic myth, that he was
called Moses because he came out of the water (Ex 2,10).
The
full significance of this, as an expression of human understanding
of that time, can probably best be seen in what, in its present
written form, is known as The Apocalypse of Adam, whose
roots must surely lie with this particular phase of the evolution
of the human mind/soul (consciousness). It was first discovered
among the Coptic manuscripts in the gnostic library found at Nag
Hammadi in 1945. Its expressions relate to those of this particular
era, though its extant written form is dated to early in the first
century B.C.24
It purports to describe the coming of humanity's great "Illuminator"
in fourteen stages. The first thirteen accounts (incarnations)
conclude with the statement, akin to that said of Moses, "And
thus he came on the water." The fourteenth, according to Welburn,
is the Christ, who is described as having been chosen by God "from
all the aeons . . . out of an alien air, out of a great Aeon."25
We
shall see the relationship of these four elements one to another
as this volume proceeds. For now it is well to observe that as
the senses (the instrument of the astral body) developed, the
human being was able to perceive in the mineral world what had
previously been known in the spiritual world.26
The five senses we normally recognize came progressively, as Genesis
shows us.27
But water was the first element that could be perceived by all
five of the senses, for fire (warmth) and air could not be perceived
by the sense of sight. As the first fully sensually perceivable
element it may thus have been noted by Thales in his effort to
express these matters to the human intellect. This does not mean
that he did not understand the prior states out of which "matter"
was born, but merely that he did not fasten upon them the point
at which all human senses were able to observe it. It was only
shortly after Thales that Heraclitus (ca. 540-480 B.C.) spoke
of the logos and of fire as the essential material uniting all
things, and of a hidden connection between all things.28
The
evidence strongly suggests either that Thales himself comprehended
the finer elements from which the fully tangible water element
derived, or that he was not a sufficient peg upon which to date
ancient human understanding of the elements. The very existence
of the pyramids, whose "name" according to Plato means fire, and
whose construction and purpose still baffle modern humanity, suggests
human understanding of the character of the most basic element,
fire, at least two millennia before Thales. Indeed the very mysterious
phenomenon of the Great Pyramid of Giza (among others), built
so soon after the commencement of writing, itself suggests the
fading of an ancient memory and intuited knowledge commensurate
with the gradual increase of intellect.29
In
fastening upon Thales' identification of water as the basic element
and thus the point from which knowledge of the four elements commenced,
our historians of science have overlooked far more compelling
evidence to the contrary. Solon (ca. 640-559 B.C.) was a slightly
older contemporary of Thales. And Plato, in Timaeus, quoting
Critias' statement to Socrates, says of Solon that "he was the
wisest of men and the noblest of poets." He then recounts how
Solon had gone to Egypt and there communed with the priests "who
were most skillful . . . about antiquity," and who, after Solon
had related the Greek understanding of the origins of things,
said to him, "O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything
but children, and there is not an old man among you . . . there
is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition,
nor any science which is hoary with age." Clearly in ancient Egypt
and earlier prehistoric times, science and religion were one.
How they could be so, and how such marvelous things were done
then that are beyond modern understanding, can only be understood
in the light that spiritual beings were guiding humanity then.
This guidance, originally innate with every human, devolved in
the Atlantean Epoch upon the priests as evolution progressed.
In chapter three of The Spiritual Guidance of Man (SGM),
Steiner tells of how the earliest Cultural Ages of the post-Atlantean
Epoch were guided by higher, more fully evolved spiritual beings
than the later, diminishing right down to the time of the Greco-Roman,
the Cultural Age of Aries, the Lamb, when humanity was left to
fend for itself, and the Christ incarnated. It was then, and in
this very Timaeus, that Plato lays out so extensively the
activity of the four elements, starting with fire, which he equates
to the pyramidal form and thus Egyptian science.
Surely
no Egyptologist has penetrated the ancient Egyptian mind so deeply
and thoroughly as René Schwaller de Lubicz.30
The inherence of the knowledge of the four elements in ancient
Egypt is shown in The Egyptian Miracle (EM), Chap. 6 ("Elements
and Triangles"), and is profusely shown in the large work The
Temple Of Man (TOMN). Schwaller starts chapter twenty-three
("The Architectonics of the Pharaonic Temple") as follows:
The master builder said to the disciple:
"You come from the earth, it has nourished you, and you will return
to the earth. This element holds and keeps the other elements.
"Know that everything that, of itself, diffuses outward without
form needs a receptacle. Thus, Air retains the Fire of the Universe,
and Water retains Air, as Earth is the vase that holds Water and
gives it form. Thus, Earth is the container of All. I speak to
you of the earth upon which you tread, the gross image of the
spermatic Earth of which you are made.
"Always see, in the lower things that your senses reveal to you,
the image of the things that your spirit alone can conceive when
your senses are closed to the world of transitory appearances."
We
shall see how well this is elaborated by Steiner and anthroposophy
in the essays that follow.
Schwaller
(1887-1961), though Germanic, gives no indication of having been
associated in any formal way with either Steiner or anthroposophy,
nor even of having been exposed to it. However, his writings seem
fully compatible with, and even illustrative of, the reality of
anthroposophical understanding. And clearly they show that there
existed in ancient Egypt a far deeper comprehension of the four
elements and of the nature of creation and evolution than science
of today enjoys, even if what existed then was more a matter of
direct perception than intellectual knowledge. Humanity (the Prodigal
Son) today (in the fifth post-Atlantean Cultural Age) retraces
its experience in the Egyptian Cultural Age (the third post-Atlantean)
in its parabolic journey back to the spiritual world whence it
all began. Guided now by the Christ, the highest spiritual being,
we must regain, and in the process transform, these ancient insights.
The
ancient Egyptian knowledge of the fire element, encapsulated in
the pyramid, will be more fully explored in the "Fire" essay below.
|
