Pyramid Quest (29 page)

In monarchical Europe, Freemasonry’s Egyptian connection manifested itself more in art. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) joined the Masons in Vienna and tapped into his Masonic learning when he composed the music for
Die Zauberflöte
(The Magic Flute). The opera, whose libretto was written by Mozart’s fellow Mason Emanuel Schikaneder, features the mysteries of Isis and dramatizes initiation inside a pyramid.

In 1797 Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), Goethe’s close friend and collaborator, published an influential poem entitled “Das verschleierte Bild zu Saïs” (The Veiled Image at Sais) that is still studied in college classes on German classical literature. The poem tells of a young would-be initiate in the temple of Isis at Sais. By reputation, the temple’s statute of Isis bore an inscription saying “I am what is, and what will be, and what has been. No one has lifted my veil. The fruit I bore was the sun.” Schiller’s initiate, a headstrong young man certain of his indestructibility, slips into the temple at night and raises the veil. Unprepared for what he sees, he falls mortally ill and warns everyone else against approaching ultimate truth while still in a state of guilt and un-cleanness. Egypt’s secret knowledge held both allure and danger.

Although distinct from both the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians, the theosophists borrowed heavily from their ideas. Of all the inheritors of hermetic knowledge, they considered themselves sufficiently cleansed of wrongdoing to approach the ancient image and lift the veil without fear of an untimely death. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), the central figure in the founding of the theosophist movement, titled her masterwork
Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology
(1877). She intended to dare what had killed Schiller’s rash initiate: to see into the occult power of nature, and to open Christianity to the truths of eastern religious philosophies.

Blavatsky had a colorful and peripatetic background. The daughter of an imperial army colonel and a noblewoman, she was born in the czarist Ukraine in 1831 and as a young woman married well, to the vice governor of Yerevan in Armenia, then also a part of the Russian empire. The marriage, though, lasted only a few weeks. Blavatsky fled to Constantinople, beyond the reach of the Russian authorities, and later appeared in Cairo. She claimed to have spent seven years in Tibet studying as an initiate under a master, although this story may have been a fabrication. Blavatsky came to the United States in 1873, departed some years later for India and Europe, then settled in England, where she lived until her death in 1891. During her time in England she befriended a great many influential people, including William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet and Nobel laureate.

Blavatsky argued that ancient cultures contained a sacred, lost wisdom that needed to be brought to light again. In part, she was drawing from the textual history created by the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians. But she was also making use of the writings of serious students of Egyptology, which had begun with the work of the French
savants
and extended to such nineteenth-century scholars as Richard Proctor and William Flinders Petrie. This scholarly work was revealing—by pulling back the veil, in a manner of speaking—the complexity and sophistication of ancient Egypt. She drew, too, on religious traditions outside Egypt, particularly Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Blavatsky attempted to distill them all into a spiritual essence that could hold its own against the materialist scientific determinism of her day.

She even went so far as to reconstruct the early spiritual history of humankind. Blavatsky placed Adam, Eve, and the Garden of Eden on the lost continent of Lemuria, and described Atlantis in detail in
The Secret Doctrine
(1888), her second major book.

As fits a philosopohical (and arguably religious) movement that took its inspiration from the great mother goddess of all, Theosophy possessed a strongly feminist message. Rather than accept a husband she disliked, Blavatsky abandoned her marriage and her country for a life on her own terms. That willful energy attracted Annie Besant (1847-1933), a prominent English feminist who shared something of Blavatsky’s history. As a young woman she had married a clergyman and borne two children, but she soon found that her independent spirit clashed with her husband’s orthodoxy. When she refused to attend communion, he threw her out of the house. Completely rejecting Christianity, Besant became an ardent advocate for birth control, the rights of the oppressed, and the cause of socialism. She joined the Theosophical Society and became Blavatsky’s closest collaborator. Besant moved with Blavatsky to India, where she learned Sanskrit, and after Blavatsky’s death she wrote
The Ancient Wisdom: An Outline of Theosophical Teachings
(1897). Although she was drawn primarily to Indian teaching, Besant published works on Hermes Trismegistus, including the
Gospel of Hermes
, by Duncan Greenlees.

The educator and mystical scholar Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was an early theosophist who drew heavily from Blavatsky’s and Besant’s writings and saw Egypt as spiritual homeland for all human beings. In a long series of lectures, Steiner indicated his belief in reincarnation by saying that “we ourselves probably once lived in ancient Egypt.”
⁸
Since ideas, like souls, recycle, he also said that “our modern truths are reborn Egyptian myths” and that “all modern culture seems to us to be a recollection of that of ancient Egypt.”
⁹

As Edward Said points out, much of the history of the East, and of the ideas swirling about the Great Pyramid, is a textual invention. Working less with a microscope than a mirror, various thinkers, writers, and philosophers have attached their ideas to ancient Egypt and the pyramids as a way of giving them the patina of antiquity and authority. Now those ideas have taken on a life of their own quite apart from what we know empirically of the Great Pyramid, and of ancient Egypt itself. This doesn’t mean, however, that every idea that has come down through the hermetic and theosophical traditions is wrong. In fact, the hermetic traditions may have preserved elements of the initiatory and theological aspects of antiquity that would have otherwise been overlooked or disregarded by the materialistic approach that came to dominate academic Egyptology. Add to the hermetic interpretation a close look at the accounts of experiences inside the Great Pyramid, and the idea of this monument as a site of ritual and initiation takes on even deeper meaning.

AN ENTRY INTO THE MYSTERIES

FOR NAPOLEON, EGYPT REPRESENTED NOT ONLY A STRATEGIC possession but also a way of placing himself alongside the great men of history. As the occupier of Egypt, he joined the ranks of conquerors like Alexander the Great and Augustus, and he raised France to the same level as the fabled Macedonian and Roman empires. No doubt such impressive historical company was on his mind when, on August 12, 1799, Napoleon visited the Great Pyramid in the company of a Muslim cleric and a group of French officers and soldiers. Entering the King’s Chamber, he asked to be left alone with his thoughts.

Some time later, he emerged, pale, faint, unwilling to speak. When one of his aides asked whether he had seen anything mysterious, Napoleon refused to say anything in detail, intimating only that he had experienced a preview of his fate. Throughout his rule he kept silence about what happened inside the King’s Chamber. Just before his death from cancer on St. Helena in 1821, Napoleon appeared on the verge of telling a close friend what had happened 22 years earlier in the King’s Chamber. Then he stopped. “No,” he said with a shake of the head. “What’s the use? You’d never believe me.”
¹

Both before and after Napoleon’s time, the Great Pyramid has been seen as a place of initiation, a mechanism to receive visions and knowledge, a conduit to the sacred and estoreric, an entry to the mysteries, a pathway to the gods.

Unlike Napoleon, Paul Brunton (pen name of Raphael Hurst, 1898-1981) trusted that we would believe him and so wrote of his experiences in the Great Pyramid. A Briton by nationality, Brunton began his career as a journalist, then turned to writing about Eastern religion and mythology. His 13 books were instrumental in introducing yoga and meditation to the West and explaining their philosophical backgrounds in lucid, nontechnical language. One of his books,
A Search in Secret Egypt
(1936), contains Brunton’s detailed account of a night spent in the King’s Chamber, as alone as Napoleon.

After convincing the local police that he would pose no danger to the pyramid and the pyramid no danger to him, Brunton was locked inside at nightfall—standard practice to protect the structure against thieves and vandals. After exploring the various passages, Brunton made his way into the King’s Chamber, carrying a thermos of hot tea, a couple of water bottles, a notebook, and a pen. Taking off his shoes and hat, folding his jacket, and turning off his flashlight, Brunton settled in for the night.

First there was the darkness, absolute and palpable, and the feeling that the chamber had “a strong atmosphere of its own, an atmosphere which I can only call ‘psychic.’ ”
²
Brunton became acutely aware of the silence, both outside and inside: “The stillness which descended on my brain rendered me acutely cognizant of the stillness which had descended on my life.”
³

As time passed, Brunton grew cold, both because temperatures plummet at night in the desert and because he had fasted for the three days prior to his night in the pyramid, leaving him with little fortification against the chill. As Brunton shivered, the still, dark space of the King’s Chamber turned ominous and dangerous. It filled with unseen beings, the spirits, Brunton thought, that guarded the pyramid. Then it got worse. The guardian spirits gave way to hostile, evil beings that filled Brunton with dread and apprehension. One of these images advanced on Brunton and gave him a long, sinister look.

“At last the climax came,” he wrote. “Monstrous elemental creations, evil horrors of the underworld, forms of the grotesque, insane, uncouth and fiendish aspect gathered around me and afflicted me with unimaginable repulsion.”
⁴

Then, suddenly, it was over. Brunton became aware of a new presence within the chamber—two tall figures wearing white robes and sandals, the regalia, Brunton decided, of an ancient Egyptian cult. One of these figures asked Brunton if he wished to continue on, even though he risked losing contact with the mortal world. When Brunton said yes, the speaker left, and the silent one told Brunton to stretch out on a stone.

Brunton fell into what he described as a total paralysis, and his soul separated from his physical being, entering, he was sure, into the realm beyond death. “I was but a phantom, a bodiless creature sojourning in space. I knew, at last, why those wise Egyptians of old had given, in their hieroglyphs, the pictured symbol of the bird to man’s soul-form.”
⁵
Brunton sensed he too had become a soul with the ability to exist apart from the body.

The old priest reinforced that notion. He spoke to Brunton, saying, “ Thou hast learned the great lesson.
Man, whose soul was born out of the Undying, can never really die.
Set down this truth in words known to men.”
⁶
He went on to tell Brunton of the lost records of an ancient civilization buried in the Great Pyramid, and explained that Atlantis sank because of the evil and spiritual blindness of its inhabitants. As if to prove his statement, the old priest conveyed Brunton out of the King’s Chamber. “I knew perfectly well that I was inside or below the Pyramid, but I had never seen such a passage or chamber before. Evidently they [
sic
] were secret and had defied discovery until this day,” Brunton wrote.
⁷

The old priest reminded him that his journey led not only to a physical passage but also to a secret place within his own soul.

Brunton awoke back in the King’s Chamber, his soul returned to his body. He looked at his watch. Both hands rested on the 12; it was precisely midnight.

In contemporary parlance, Paul Brunton experienced what we would call a vision quest—the spiritual pursuit that draws people to places like Sedona, Arizona, and Mount Shasta, California, to experience an internal awakening at a charged intersection of geography and psychology. There exist similar accounts. Taken together, I believe they indicate that there is something significant about the Great Pyramid: like other sacred sites in history—whether the imposing mounds contsructed by Native Americans, the megaliths produced by the early Celts, or the cathedrals that bridged the gap between the end of Rome and the dawn of European civilization—the pyramids pose an inexorable pull on the human psyche. The Great Pyramid is a sacred site.