Fire, Page Fifteen

The Transfiguration of Egypt

Now this brings us to the reason for these several pages of digression, which is to help us come to appreciate the relationship of our Era to the Chaldo-Egyptian. We can see from the parabola that we are to retrace the same evolutionary, spiritual stratum as that traversed during the earlier Era of the Pharoah with its pyramids, Sphinx and glorification of the mineral-physical body by mummification and elaborate entombment, the age when the "I AM" was first identified to Moses during the descent, and when Moses and the priesthood of the ancient mysteries still had clairvoyance. But in retracing all these, we are charged not with merely regaining what was lost but with transforming all of it into a higher state. We seek not the clairvoyance and mystic power belonging to the guidance by external spiritual beings and atavisms, but the manas (manna) state of Spirit Self, the purified astral body, when the "I AM" has gained complete control over it. We need not give up acquired intelligence and hard-won experience, going back to near perfect memory (including past lives). Rather we need to bring to what we have acquired over the ages the new clairvoyance and sight into the spiritual world. To get there, we need a new understanding of "the straight and narrow path" described in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 7,13-14). It is a path revealed to us by the modern prophet, Rudolf Steiner.

I attempted in the "Egypt" essay (in The Burning Bush) to address essential aspects of this. But a fuller appreciation of what we face in our Era is essential if we are to comprehend the meaning of the fire that Christ came to cast upon the Earth. Only by raising our consciousness into that etheric fire will we recognize the Christ's second coming, already upon us.

Steiner indicated that mathematics represents something existing in the spiritual world. Geometrical forms, for instance, are not things we perceive with our senses. We discover them by what he calls "pure thinking," that is thinking in the lowest realm of the spiritual world. But our thinking is not what creates the forms, for they were always there to be discovered. It is, therefore, entirely appropriate that these spiritual world creatures be contemplated for the truths they can reveal to us of the activity of the higher dimensions. It was in Egypt that these things came to be known. We honor Pythagoras as their founder, but Pythagoras was initiated into the mysteries of the Egyptian temple.⁶³ And even those insights were presented to him during a time when the more glorious insights were fading (cf. 2 Cor 3,7,13). Built into the Great Pyramid, the Sphinx and the temples was the reflection of spiritual realities long since faded away. These must be regained with the even greater splendor that awaits humanity's development of the purified astral body. The new clairvoyance will come through a loosened etheric body, but a purified astral body is the doorway to it. The manna of old, the Chaldo-Egyptian clairvoyance (Ex 16,31; Rev 2,17) must be regained and transformed now in our present Cultural Era (Rev 3,1-7; Jn 6,31,49; 1 Cor 10,3; Heb 9,4). Christ said, "You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free" (Jn 8,32). Emancipation of the etheric body from the veil of the physical is the "freedom" that will make direct perception of the truth possible. Steiner, with this direct perception, has brought us that "truth" so that by earnestly pursuing it we can also become "free."

Steiner aside, I know of no modern student who has penetrated so deeply into the consciousness of the Egyptian mind and soul as René Schwaller de Lubicz. Some four centuries ago Kepler acknowledged reaching back into that consciousness ("I have stolen the golden chalice of the Egyptians") in divining his third law of planetary movements.⁶⁴ But today's Egyptologists, as well as its scientists and theologians, tend to think of human consciousness and intelligence in that ancient time as resting on the same essential mind and soul foundation, cultural environment and experience aside, as they do today. At great length Steiner has shown us that this is not so. Vol. 1, The Burning Bush, makes this point throughout (see I-24). In his excellent Secrets of the Great Pyramid (SGP), Peter Tompkins cites Schwaller de Lubicz repeatedly on most critically important points. To read Schwaller's work is to transport oneself back in time to a consciousness far different from today's, to a time when signs and symbols were themselves a language, archetypal in nature. It might be well to contemplate that the biblical assertion "the whole earth had one language and few words" (Gen 11,1) fell between the time of Noah (when human evolution moved from Atlantis to other continents) and that of Abraham (almost midway into the Chaldo-Egyptian Cultural Era; see I-19). Moses came later in this same time frame, and Paul refers to his soul consciousness as one of "fading splendor" (2 Cor 3,7,13), that phenomenon in human evolution that Isaiah was later commanded to announce (Is 6,9-13) in terms that ring loudly through the New Testament. In the light of that phenomenon, the command to the angel of the fifth church (our own Cultural Era) to "Awake" for he "will come like a thief" sounds loud and clear, and the haunting sound of Isaiah as the Chaldo-Egyptian Cultural Era came to a close (see I-19 and I-25) rings down to us as the angel of our "church" closes its message to us: "He who has an ear, let him hear" (Rev 3,6).⁶⁵

Schwaller, like Steiner, requires a type of disciplined contemplation that has not proved very inviting to modern materialistic thinking in either science or religion. But it offers a means of piercing the veil of matter and permitting a higher view of reality where both domains become one.

Our tendency, when we see the marvels of geometric analysis relating to phi, is to think of phi in mathematical terms. But Schwaller sets us right on this, saying, "The golden section is not a product of mathematical imagination, but the natural principle of the laws of equilibrium."⁶⁶ And earlier, "The golden number, or sacred number (designated by the symbol ø ), is to be regarded as a creative or separating power; it is the power that provokes the scission, and consequently is not derived arithmetically from the root of 5, because the power five is not a cause but a result of this function phi."⁶⁷ And since phi expresses itself outwardly in phenomena, in ways that are the most pleasing of all, we must conclude that it is a primal creative law, not caused but merely observed mathematically. When Schwaller speaks of it as a "creative or separating power" he sounds like Paul, in Hebrews 4,12: "The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow," the same two-edged sword of Rev 1,16.

We don't have the luxury of dwelling long on Schwaller. But before moving on, there is a further mathematical expression of higher reality that he reveals to us by his interpretation of the figure of a royal mummy in the tomb of Rameses IX in the Valley of the Kings at Thebes. It portrays the Egyptian king as the hypotenuse of a sacred 3-4-5 triangle formed by a snake. As shown below, the king has his arms raised above the head the length of one royal cubit.⁶⁸ One of the expressions of phi in the human body is that the navel in an adult is the golden section dividing the body height so that the upper portion is one and the lower is phi or 1.618. Since one plus phi equals phi squared,⁶⁹ it follows that the total height is phi squared. On p. 103 of EM, Schwaller says:

The figure of Ramses IX, representing the King, obtains the value Five as diagonal, as hypotenuse of the sacred triangle. Thus it is that this figure reveals a function that measures the cycle, namely the height of the King, worth 5 plus one cubit (or theoretically, plus one-fifth his height), which, in conjunction with the Golden Section, gives the numbers

ø² squared plus its fifth part or 2.618 / 5 X 6 = 3.1416.

This is the value of the coefficient Pi, equal to 1.2 ø squared, or 12 ø squared for a diameter of ten, being 31.416. . . .

"Thus twelve royal Men measure the cycle of heaven."

The function ø resides in the original impulse of becoming, and the Golden Mean yields functionally the only real value for the cyclical coefficient, being itself a cyclical number. Our rational calculations of Pi, based on the average of inscribed and circumscribed polygons, attempt to define a curve by straight lines and lead to infinite absurdity.

We simply must contemplate how the Lord, the Word of God (Jn 1,1-3), the twelve, and the circle, are portrayed in this beautiful expression of the relationship of phi (1.618…) and pi (3.1416…). We've already discussed the relationship of the creative fire of phi to the Word. But let us look at a few passages indicating how the Bible expresses these same things:

Gen 15,5: And he brought him outside and said, "Look toward heaven, and number the stars. If you are able to count them," he added, "so shall your offspring be."⁷¹

Job 26,10: He has described a circle upon the face of the waters at the boundary between light and darkness.

Prov 8,27: When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep. . . .

Job 38,33: Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? Can you establish their rule on the earth?

The Book of Enoch also speaks of "the entire law of the stars" (Enoch 80,7). See also Ps 19,1-7a; 119,89; 123,1 and 148,3-6. Then in Rev 22,1-2, we are told that the "water of life … flow[s] from … the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city" and that on each "side of the river, the tree of life [stands] with its twelve kinds of fruit. . . ." It seems significant that the living water flowing from the Lamb, the Golden Mean, is described as flowing in the "middle of the street of the city," for the "mean" is always in the middle.

We have already, in discussing gnomonic growth, seen something of the emergence of the circle. Schwaller speaks of the derivation of this as "the throne of the world and the royal pharaonic throne, symbolized by a square divided into four, that is, 1 and 3 making 4, with one fourth being added to the four others to make the gnomon of 4 to 5," and then he draws in the arc of one quadrant of the circle (top figures below).⁷¹ Tompkins then shows us (bottom figures below) how the Great Pyramid depicts the sphere of our Earth, being designed to incorporate not only pi (3.1416…) but also

Fire, Page 14

Fire, Page 16