From Atlantis to the Sphinx Page 4
The ‘occult’ tradition is based upon the notion that there existed in the past a science that embraced religion and the arts—including architecture—and that this knowledge was restricted to a small caste of priests and initiates, and was ‘encoded’ by medieval stonemasons in the great Gothic cathedrals. One of the classic expositions of this idea, The Canon by William Stirling (published in 1897) states:
From the times of ancient Egypt this law [the Canon] has been a sacred arcanum, only communicated by symbols and parables, the making of which, in the ancient world, constituted the most important form of literary art; it therefore required for its exposition a priestly caste, trained in its use, and the guilds of initiated artists, which existed throughout the world till comparatively recent times, were instructed in it. Nowadays, all this has changed...
The essence of this art, says Stirling, is ‘working symbolically’.
Schwaller was in his early twenties when he met, in the Closerie des Lilas, in Montparnasse, an alchemist who called himself Fulcanelli (and whose real name seems to have been Champagne) and they discussed the ‘Oeuvre’, the Great Work of transmutation. Fulcanelli was surrounded by a circle of disciples, who called themselves The Brothers of Heliopolis; all were dedicated students of the works of Nicolas Flamel and Basil Valentinus. They combed the second-hand bookshops of Paris looking for old alchemical texts. In an ancient volume he was cataloguing for a Paris bookshop, Fulcanelli had come across a six-page manuscript written in faded ink, and stole it. It indicated that colour played an important part in the secret of the alchemists. But Fulcanelli, whose approach to alchemy was materialistic, failed to understand it. Schwaller was able to help him in his interpretations. He also showed Fulcanelli his own manuscript on medieval cathedrals, at which Fulcanelli became excited, and offered to help find a publisher. In fact, Fulcanelli borrowed the manuscript for a long time, and eventually stole most of its central insights for his own Mystery of Cathedrals, published in 1925, which has achieved the status of a modern classic.
Schwaller had meanwhile become friendly with a French poet—who was also a Lithuanian prince—called Luzace de Lubicz Milosz. During the First World War, Schwaller worked as a chemist in the army, and after the war Milosz bestowed on him a knighthood for services to the Lithuanian people, and the right to add ‘de Lubicz’ to his name. (It is not clear what right Milosz had to go around bestowing knighthoods.) At this point Schwaller also received the ‘mystic name’ AOR. He and Milosz founded a political organisation called Les Veilleurs (‘watchmen’ or ‘vigilant ones’) based upon Schwaller’s notions of élitism, of which Rudolf Hess was at one time a member (as well as of a German magical order called the Thule Society). But Schwaller seems to have grown tired of involvement in politics—recognising, like most mystics, that it is a form of entrapment—and moved to Suhalia, in Switzerland, to pursue his esoteric studies with a group of like-minded friends, particularly studies relating to stained glass. This lasted until 1934, when financial problems led to the dissolution of the Suhalia community.
By this time, Fulcanelli was dead. According to Schwaller, he had invited Fulcanelli to his home in Grasse, in the south of France, to attempt the magnum opus and they were wholly successful. Convinced that he now knew how to bring about the alchemical transformation, Fulcanelli returned to Paris and repeated the experiment several times—failing each time. The reason, said Schwaller later, was that he had chosen the right moment and the right conditions for the experiment, and Fulcanelli was ignorant about such matters. Fulcanelli now decided to break the vow of silence he had taken, and to communicate what he had learned to his disciples. He ignored Schwaller’s pleas and turned down his offer of renewed financial support in exchange for silence. But he became ill, and died of gangrene the day before he was going to divulge the ‘secret’ to his disciples. Schwaller declared that this was an inevitable consequence of breaking the alchemical vow of secrecy.
Schwaller spent the next two years on his yacht, apparently at something of a loose end. His wife Isha—who had come to him as a disciple in the early days (drawn to him, she claims, by some telepathic link)—had always been fascinated by ancient Egypt, but Schwaller had failed to share her interest. Now, in 1936, he allowed himself to be persuaded to go ashore in Alexandria to look at the tomb of Rameses IX. There he was struck by a revelation as he looked at a picture of the pharaoh represented in the form of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle whose proportions were 3:4:5, while the upraised arm represented an additional unit. Clearly, the Egyptians knew about Pythagoras’s theorem centuries before Pythagoras was born. Suddenly, Schwaller realised that the wisdom of the medieval craftsmen stretched back to ancient Egypt. For the next fifteen years, until 1951, he remained in Egypt, studying its temples—particularly the temple at Luxor. The result was his massive geometrical opus The Temple of Man, in three volumes, and his last book The King of Pharaonic Theocracy, translated into English as Sacred Science.
All this will undoubtedly strengthen in the reader’s mind the suspicion that John Anthony West must have been slightly insane—or perhaps only appallingly misguided—to take Schwaller’s judgement on the erosion of the Sphinx seriously, although in his defence it might be argued that a devotion to mystical ideas does not necessarily imply that there was anything wrong with Schwaller’s eyesight. In fact, Schwaller’s observation was based upon his conviction—already noted—that Egyptian civilisation had to be thousands of years older than 3000 BC, because the knowledge encoded in the temples could not have developed in a mere six hundred years. The comment about water erosion was thrown off rather casually in Sacred Science, and his friend and disciple André VandenBroeck, the author of the remarkable memoir Al-Kemi, gathered the impression that Schwaller thought the erosion had occurred when the Sphinx was submerged under the sea. Whatever the misunderstanding, it awakened in West the conviction that water erosion was a notion that could provide the scientific confirmation or refutation of Schwaller’s theory about Egyptian civilisation.
But Schwaller’s significance goes far beyond his theories about the age of the Sphinx. After all, there is a sense in which it hardly matters whether the Sphinx is five or ten thousand years old. It would certainly be interesting to know that there was a great civilisation that pre-dated ancient Egypt, but surely it would make no practical difference to our lives—the kind of difference that was made by splitting the atom or the invention of the microchip?
If Schwaller is correct, such a view represents a total failure to grasp what lies behind the Egyptian temples and the medieval cathedrals. Hermetic tradition claims that this knowledge was kept hidden for thousands of years—and why should it be kept hidden if it has no practical value?
The sceptic will reply: because the ancient priests deceived themselves about the practical value of their religious nonsense—or wished to deceive other people.
To which Schwaller would reply: you are wrong. This knowledge is practical. You wish me to give you an example? Then consider the stained red and blue glass of Chartres cathedral. Scientific analysis has been unable to identify the pigments used. This is because there is no pigment. The staining involved an alchemical process which involved liberating the colour from the metals that contained it...
(In fact, there is reason to believe that this was the ‘oeuvre’ completed by Schwaller and Fulcanelli at Grasse.)
Schwaller was careful to make no such statement in his books. This information was passed on verbally to André VandenBroeck in 1960—the year before Schwaller died, in December 1961. During the final decade of his life, Schwaller lived in retirement in Grasse, not far from Cannes, his name totally unknown to the general public. André VandenBroeck, an American artist living in Bruges, came upon one of Schwaller’s early books, Symbol and the Symbolic, published in Cairo in 1951, and was instantly fascinated. It seemed to VandenBroeck that Schwaller was talking about a question that had absorbed him for years: that of precisely what art represents.
It might simplify the matter it we translate this into musical terms. No one has any doubt that the music of Beethoven is ‘saying’ more than the music of Lehár. But how would we answer a Martian who asked us: ‘What is it saying?’ Beethoven remarked to Elizabeth Brentano: ‘Those who understand my music must be freed from all miseries that others drag around with them. Tell Goethe to listen to my symphonies, and he will see that I am saying that music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher worlds of knowledge...’ Beethoven had no doubt that his music represented knowledge, yet quite clearly it would be impossible to take a single bar of his music and declare: ‘What this is saying is...’
Now, VandenBroeck had been influenced by a friend, Andrew Da Passano, who tried to ‘prove’ the existence of higher states of consciousness by referring to the work of Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg. VandenBroeck had been reading Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematical and it seemed to him that his own idea about knowledge might be expressed in mathematical terms. Most knowledge is a function of the method you use to achieve it; for example, if you want to know how many people there are in a room, you count them, and the knowledge you arrive at is a function of counting. But, reasoned VandenBroeck, you simply cannot say that the ‘higher knowledge’ Beethoven was talking about was arrived at by some ‘method’ like counting or reasoning. VandenBroeck felt that this insight was an important breakthrough, and he wrote a short paper in which he tried to express this notion of a knowledge that precedes method in terms of symbolic logic.
Schwaller had begun his book on symbols and symbolism by remarking that there are two ways of reading ancient religious texts: the ‘exoteric’ and the ‘esoteric’. The ‘exoteric’ consists of meanings, which you could look up in a dictionary or work of history; but this only serves as a foundation for the esoteric meaning, which Schwaller calls the ‘symbolique’—that is to say, a system of symbols.
Clearly, Schwaller’s ‘symbolic system’ was what VandenBroeck meant by higher knowledge, the knowledge that comes from the depths of the soul, and is not achieved by ‘method’. Yet Schwaller appeared to be saying that this knowledge was not some religious insight—the equivalent of ‘Love your neighbour’—but is practical and scientific. VandenBroeck was so excited that he lost no time driving from Bruges to the south of France, and presenting himself on Schwaller’s doorstep.
He found Schwaller living on an impressive country estate that left no doubt that he had a considerable private income. It was a curious household, made up of the tall, grey-haired, 72-year-old sage, his ‘psychic’ wife Isha, who made VandenBroeck think of a gypsy fortune teller, and Isha’s two children from a former marriage, Dr Jean Lamy and his sister Lucie, who had devoted her life to being Schwaller’s amanuensis. Isha assumed that VandenBroeck had come there to speak to her about her ‘occult’ ideas—an understandable mistake, since her husband was virtually unknown, whereas she—by reason of a skilful novel about ancient Egypt called Chick Pea—had a considerable reputation.
VandenBroeck and his wife were invited to lunch, where Isha continued to assume that VandenBroeck was there to sit at her feet, and to monopolise the conversation. Yet the few words he managed to exchange with Schwaller convinced VandenBroeck that they were on the same wavelength, and that Schwaller had a great deal to teach him. He decided to leave Bruges and move to Grasse.
On his way back to Bruges, VandenBroeck stopped at Lyon and bought a copy of The Temple of Man. Although slightly taken aback by the geometrical diagrams, VandenBroeck was soon absorbed in the first volume, which brought him a continual sense of ‘vistas on to a well-known but forgotten landscape’ ... ‘We spoke the same language.’
Back in Grasse, the VandenBroecks were soon regular visitors in the Schwaller household. It took some weeks as Isha’s student—reading the Chick Pea novels, and listening to her reading from her latest opus, a work of ‘esoteric fiction’—before his sense of her ‘gentle imposure’, and his inborn distaste for ‘spiritual’ mumbo-jumbo led him to detach himself tactfully and spend more time with Schwaller (whom everyone addressed as ‘Aor’.)
There was also in Schwaller ‘a grey zone of speculation where true and false did not apply’—for example, in his conviction that mankind has not evolved, but ‘devolved’, from ‘giants who once walked the earth to a near-animal state ... vowed to cataclysmic annihilation, while an evolving élite gathers all of human experience for a resurrection in spirituality.’ Schwaller was also convinced that the Nile is a man-made river, deliberately directed into the Nile valley, to form the basis of Egyptian civilisation. But VandenBroeck felt that he could take or leave such beliefs. Far more important was Schwaller’s insight into the nature of the knowledge system of the ancient Egyptians. This was also élitist in conception: ‘at its head, the enlightened priesthood, the perfect identity of science and theology, its main duties cognition of the present moment.’ This Schwaller saw as the ‘Absolute from which we constantly draw our power’.
This notion is central to Schwaller’s ideas, perhaps their most significant feature. One way of explaining it would be to say that human beings imagine they live in the present, yet their basic mental state might be described as ‘elsewhereness’, like a schoolboy looking out of a window instead of paying attention to the lesson. It is, in fact, incredibly difficult to be ‘present’, since we live in an interpreted world. We cannot even ‘see’ without preconception—‘that is so and so’. Our most basic frame of mind is that of spectators; we look out at the world like someone in a cinema. When a man awakens to present reality—as Dostoevsky did when stood in front of a firing squad—the whole world changes. Everything suddenly becomes real. But his vision of himself also changes: he becomes aware of himself as a dynamic force rather than as a passive entity.
This, VandenBroeck discovered, is also the essence of Schwaller’s notion of alchemy. Alchemy, according to Schwaller, is derived from Kemi, the Greek word for Egypt, with the Arabic ‘al’ appended. In ancient Egypt, the pharaoh, the god-king, was the symbol of this ‘absolute from which we draw our power’. And alchemy, or the transmutation of matter into spirit—of which the transmutation of base metals into gold is a mere by-product—depends upon this ‘moment of power’, of being wholly present in the present moment. He seems to be speaking of what Shaw once called ‘the seventh degree of concentration’.
Schwaller dismisses Jung’s notion of alchemy as a modern intellectual fashion. Jung thought that the true aim of alchemy was the state he called ‘individuation’, unity of being, but that in trying to achieve this, the alchemist ‘projects’ his own visions into external reality—in other words, sees hallucinations. One text describes how, when seven pieces of metal are heated in a crucible with a fragment of the philosophers’ stone, fire will fill the room and the starry firmament will appear overhead. Jung believed that the alchemist ‘projects’ such visions as if, without knowing it, he is a cinema projectionist.
Schwaller rejected this with scorn. Alchemy, he told VandenBroeck, depends on laboratory results. These results, he seems to imply, are achieved ultimately by a kind of mind-over-matter. As VandenBroeck expresses it:
There could be no other than this unique act of total apprehension beyond words which is knowledge itself, where the particular disappears and only the greatest generality remains, stark and devoid of content. In this utter silence words would form meanings in the most natural fashion, without our interference. Here the universe would speak, not the cerebral cortex. This is the act, the state of knowledge. There is no referent for knowledge. Knowledge is knowledge in itself, it is primitive, and cannot refer to a previous self.
In other words, it is total objectivity, an escape from the shadow-house of personality.
What Schwaller is talking about, in short, is a different kind of knowledge. In The White Goddess, Robert Graves speaks about ‘lunar’ and ‘solar’ knowledge. Our modern type of knowledge—rational knowledge—is ‘solar’; it operates with words and concepts, and it f
ragments the object of knowledge with dissection and analysis. But ancient civilisations had ‘lunar’ knowledge, an intuitive knowledge that grasped things as a whole.
What is at issue might be made clearer by a reference to another ‘esoteric’ thinker of the twentieth century, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. In 1914, Gurdjieff told his disciple Ouspensky that there is a fundamental difference between ‘real art’ and ‘subjective art’. Real art is not just an expression of the artist's feelings; it is as objective as mathematics, and will always produce the same impression on everyone who sees it.
The great Sphinx in Egypt is such a work of art, as well as some historically known works of architecture, certain statues of gods, and many other things. There are figures of gods and of various mythological beings that can be read like books, only not with the mind but with the emotions, providing they are sufficiently developed. In the course of our travels in Central Asia we found, in the desert at the foot of the Hindu Kush, a strange figure which we thought at first was some ancient god or devil. At first it produced upon us simply the impression of being a curiosity. But after a while we began to feel that this figure contained many things, a big, complete and complex system of cosmology. And slowly, step by step, we began to decipher this system. It was in the body of the figure, in its legs, in its arms, in its head, in its eyes, in its ears; everywhere. In the whole statue there was nothing accidental, nothing without meaning. And gradually we understood the aim of the people who built this statue. We began to feel their thoughts, their feelings. Some of us thought that we saw their faces, heard their voices. At all events, we grasped the meaning of what they wanted to convey to us across thousands of years, and not only the meaning, but all the feelings and the emotions connected with it as well. That indeed was art!2