The Three Worlds – Heaven, Earth, and the Dwat

More than once readers of “The Horizon Keeper” have asked me to delve into the Cosmogony of the Black People. In other words, readers want to know what the Ancient Egyptians’ model concerning the coming-into-existence (i.e. origin) of either the Cosmos, or the “reality” of sentient beings (namely, humans) was all about. Readers do get an inkling from Neruamun’s adventures that there are several worlds out there – planes of existence or consciousness – and that these are more mysterious than what appears in print on the face of the page.

Being a novelist, my preference is to keep the metaphysical to a minimum and the action to a maximum. This way, when I deal with the higher stakes, with the “big picture,” with the “greater questions,” I don’t drag or slow the story down. That’s why I play around with and speculate on such lofty matters exclusively on my blog, instead of in my work.

So what was their model? Basically, the Three Worlds were all-encompassing spheres (akin to Aristotle’s “Crystal Spheres”) originating in Heaven (1^st World) and descending down through the Dwat (2^nd World) and then so far down until we reach our terrestrial globe, the Top of the Earth (3^rd World). There are four “Shadowlands,” yet the Dwat consisted of three of them, namely, the Earth Shadow, Lunar Shadow, and Solar Shadow. Schematically, the Three Worlds seem to adhere to a series of concentric circles, and conceptually might have looked something like this:

 

Sacred Science as Comparative Religion

The more we compare cosmological functions, concepts, and the metaphysical bent of varying cultures – between peoples, across continents, over the great span of the ages – the more these “religious” concepts resemble one another. Essentially, the Black People, like all other peoples of the world, developed from earliest time, from their onset, a “religious framework” – a Sacred Science – the “Knowledge of the Things in the Dwat.” With it, they explored the Cosmos and the various planes of consciousness, and thus fulfilled themselves as human beings.

Then, once everything checked out, they propounded the idea of a whole series of subtle planes or worlds (dimensions of existence) which, from a centre (the First Source), interpenetrate themselves and the physical globe upon which we live. This cosmogony includes the solar system (which they knew well through the “seven planets” of Hermetic tradition), and all the other denser, physical structures of the universe. Naturally, as with the Hindus before them, this cosmological interpenetration of planes culminates in the universe itself as a physical structured, dynamic and evolving emanation (through a series of steadily denser stages, becoming progressively more material and embodied).

Heaven, the First World, is where the Dwellers of the Horizon “live,” the neteru, the perfected “gods” (purified beings with an evolved, higher consciousness) who teach and guide humankind (albeit, indirectly in this day and age). As incomprehensible as Heaven may be, like “infinity,” we are more accustomed to this concept because it is often imitated in the West through Christian tradition. Heaven to us is a kind of Nirvana… a sort of “terminal” or “end stop” in evolution (although in reality everything continues to even more sublime hierarchies and further incarnations of worlds or “lokas” to come).

The Dwat (2^nd World), on the other hand, is subtler and more complex. This “loka” is composed of what we in the West would regard as the lower Spiritual Plane (in Hindu and Jain esoteric tradition there would be many “spiritual regions” or “lokas” that would overlap the Egyptians’ concept of the Dwat).

As I mentioned above, of the Four Shadowlands (Sky, Solar, Lunar, Earth Shadows) the Dwat is composed of the last three. Roughly, they can be compared to Buddhist cosmology and their Kama, Rupa, and Arupa lokas (in Western esotericism, they have similar Hindu names, and represent aspects of the Mind and Astral Planes, as in Kamaloka, Rupaloka, and Arupaloka).

Not to get buried by the labels for unnameable things, let us just say that the regions encompassing the Dwat, for example, the Solar, Lunar, and Earth Shadow (in descending order), would be analogous to the Astral Plane and the lower regions of the Dwat (the lower Lunar and Earth Shadows) would be the Etheric Plane, until we reach the hard, rocky crust of the Earth, or the Material Plane at the “Top of the Earth” (3^rd World), as the Black People called it.

One can’t be but mindful and alert to avoid confusion when investigating the esoteric aspects of religious experience, in its many forms, which are universal to all human beings. It’d be nice if this brief exposition could clear up some conceptual doubts, but it can just as easily create new ones… Which explains why I don’t spell these things out in the narrative! I’d rather have you “see” the Shadowlands as one enters them at death, or through the heka of the Pure Ones, rather than tell you about it… as I’m doing now…

But since I’m in an expository mood, let us continue and see how much we can garner of the Sacred Science (religion + science) of the Black People. Keep in mind that the Ancient Egyptians were “masters of secrets” and they knew what the Cosmos was composed of (consciousness) and that they developed Sacred Geometry, Mathematics, Medicine, Engineering, and many other branches of the Seven Arts we today call “science.” The Greek philosophers merely inherited all of this good stuff from the Kemetian Temple, although some (e.g., Plato, Pythagoras, etc.) were initiated in the secrets of their Sacred Science…

In The Beginning There Was The Word…

What was the Ancient Egyptians’ cosmogonic myth? What did they believe constituted the origin and development of the universe, the solar system, or the earth-moon system? To begin with, it should be noted that the Black People believed “Creation” was an ongoing phenomena and that it was continuously expanding throughout the universe (like the expanding shockwave of the theoretical Big Bang).

Often, I want to fathom the secrets of their Sacred Science, but I find myself floundering in the depths of their Metaphysics (and I can hardly tread water in the shallows, much less at the deep end). The Black People, of course, had more than one Creation Myth, probably more than a half-dozen “origin” tales or myths, depending on the deity worshipped in each city and in each of the forty-two sepats (provinces) lining the banks of the Great River.

Lord Ptah, the old creator neter from Men-nefer (Memphis) and the Delta region (Lower Egypt), for example, is one of the key players in the more popular stories. Ptah was also known as the “First Source,” or the “First of the Neteru,” and he may have been a later hybridization of the primordial neteru Tatenen and Sokar – and there’s a whole other story in that fusion!

According to the Memphite Theology, Ptah conceived the world by thinking with his heart (wisdom-of-the-heart) and gave ankh (life) through the heka (magic) of his Word (his hekau). It’s worthwhile to note that this version of Creation coincides neatly with John 1:1 in the New Testament: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Sometimes we don’t know where true inspiration comes from… 

Lord Ptah was the neter of Creation, as well as the patron of craftsmen and coppersmiths, since these artisans created material objects by thinking, feeling, and willing. In other words, by thinking, feeling, and then using their hands (the will), just as Ptah did in creating the Cosmos, the artisan recreates the cosmos on Top of the Earth (i.e., “will to power” is still, onto this day, the only way to create anything in the material world).

If you are the creative type, I hate to burst your bubble – especially for those who believe they “create” anything in the virtual world of the digital, in cyberspace – you ain’t doing diddly-squat! Consider first that you can’t create without the use of your hands (i.e., punching the keys on a keyboard is not the “hands on” part of the process I’m referring to). Without your hands active in its development, you can’t create objects with any substantiality or permanence for anyone to enjoy either… It’s only Art when it’s “plastic”; i.e., made manifest in the material world through the use of your hands (and then only after much thinking, feeling, and willing has gone into it, in order to transform matter through the divine force inherent in your soul).

What did I tell you? We’re into the Metaphysical realm now – the rabbit hole where words to describe phenomena we may experience are found wanting. We’re in the demesne where descriptions don’t cut it – where comparisons are tenuous and misleading.

Yes, we live in an age of materialism that is both shallow and superficial (i.e., in a world that is a mile wide and an inch thick). Foreground events, mostly of an illusory nature (Maya) titivate our five senses and keep the real world from entering into our consciousness – into our thinking, feeling, and willing – where we can grasp “reality” and thus become more human.

Nevertheless, if your blood is thicker than water, then you may appreciate where the Black People were coming from – from the plenitude of a noble heart and the most practical aesthetic imaginable.

A Little Messier Than the Big Bang

Basically, Ptah THOUGHT and then using his hands, MASTURBATED in order to bring forth the Cosmos (i.e., the Three Worlds). Again, another story has it that it was Atum, the Creator Neter of the south, who created Shu (air) and Tefnut (water, moisture), and who, by masturbating brought forth the entire Universe. Thus Atum became the “underlying substance of the world,” what I call “dark matter” – the stuff of the Cosmos.

Now that we got the messy part out of the way, and the first act of Creation completed, then a variety of things occurred. From that First Source (divine semen) the whole Cosmos sprang forth. It’s a more realistic and more practical approach than the Big Bang, yet it’s nothing short of the Big Bang in its power and scope. I just love the image of the splattering jism of Ptah, or Atum, the old stud, still flowing out there, floating to spread in cosmic space… very much ankh in its most primordial and substantial sense… everlasting, still creating, pure puissance!

To the Black People the Cosmos was One. The world (Earth), the sky (Heaven), and what lay in between, the Dwat (Shadowlands), were, like everything else, part of a “trinity” of forces, functions, and processes they understood intimately. The Three Worlds, Heaven, Earth, and the Dwat, like all the theological “trinities” up and down the Nile, responded to the same Numerical logic that everything else in the Cosmos answers to.

From the One came Three – not Two!

The One begat Three… From Ptah’s ejaculation the Cosmos emerged. If we use sacred number to figure it out, we can see that Ptah (the First Source) released his semen, spit, tears, or whatever other bodily function you care to imagine (the Second Source), and in their divine combination, created the Third Source – namely, the Cosmos or the Three Worlds. Another way to look at it is – Spirit (Willing) brought forth semen (the “inner life” of (Feeling) and this “combination” transformed itself into the world (Thought). That pretty much sums up Evolution.

The "Trinity" of Ancient Egyptian cosmogony (as in Christian theologies) was represented holistically and symbolically by the joining of the male principle (Father or neter) to the female principle (Mother or neterit), which begat the "Son" (the third principle or neter, and the resultant "creation" of the material world). That pretty much wraps up yet another theological derivative we've expropriated from the Black People and have made our own.

“Let us beware of thinking the world is a living organism. Likewise, let us beware of believing the universe is a machine,” thus Nietzsche would have it. That the Earth is a living being is obvious, because we treat it like all living organisms – with malice and hostility. The Black People harboured no antipathy towards the natural world, none of the contemptible scorn we heave upon nature today… In the past four decades, the world has lost 50% of its vertebrate wildlife (and let's not even think about the medicinal plant species that have gone the way of the dinosaur). We're "anti-Life" and that is essentially the difference between us and the Black People!

We violently trash the world, like greedy materialist that we are. Preferring to make believe that the Earth, the entire Universe, is a ghost-less machine. This we do in order not to feel the pangs of conscience or any remorse for our actions and omissions. Should we see the Earth as a living organism, it is only to see it exploited – enslaved like all the other organisms upon its surface (this we call “stewardship” of natural resources). Now that the gears have come off, all that's left to us and our progeny is a useless heap of garbage. 

[Let me stand on my soap box for a moment: “There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke,” as Bob Dylan once told us. Beware of these herd-animals, these materialists who think they’re here once for a spin on the merry-go-round and who give a gnat’s ass for what they leave behind them. Yes, you know who they are, those who profess most loudly the modern religion (of the moral equivalency of Capitalism with Christianity). They are the ones who’ll burn the Earth down in an instant for their fifteen minutes of “fame and fortune” – who are themselves mostly grotesque versions of living organisms (i.e., those pudgy, white males of the corporate and political class, and their female impersonators).]

Now that we’ve had our bit of fun skewering the godless and getting in a sideways elbow jab at the arrogant few… let me conclude by saying that we’ll explore the Three Worlds of the Black People in greater detail in the near future. Ancient Egypt holds many secrets, and even a cursory understanding of Heaven, Earth, and the Dwat, will illuminate many other aspects of their cosmogony as well as their Sacred Science, and that can only work to our benefit in future discussions on the subject.

The Cecil B. DeMille Director's Cut

We all know, from Hollywood and popular culture (well, they’re the same thing, aren’t they? It’s what passes for “culture” nowadays) that the Ancient Egyptians were a greedy, cruel bunch of slave owners (not to mention slave drivers). We also know beyond a shadow of a doubt, because we saw it on the silver screen, that they used hundreds of thousands of extras around to build their pyramids in order to glorify their petty egos. In short, a disgusting, idol-worshipping race that has been – thankfully – obliterated from the face of the Earth!

If you still believe this “official” version of History, you need not read any further. You’ll be disappointed.

In my July blog, we’ve recovered a little perspective – a tiny bit of “historical sense.” Now we can proceed to look into the facts of a project like the Great Pyramid (Khufu’s pyramid) and see if we can disentangle it from the Cecil B. DeMille version of History.

Just the Facts, Ma’am,

The sublime monument was build, around 2,560 B.C. Last year it was older, but things “change,” finds are made, new theories expounded, and the “chronoscope” is shrunk along with it (the idea being that if the pyramids were build “nearer” to our time, it exalts us as modern people). In my humble opinion, the Pyramids, and especially the Sphynx, are far older. But who cares about what I think?

Egyptologists have been grappling with “how” the pyramids were built since the 19^th Century (well, since Napoleon arrived in 1799). We’ll delve into that aspect of the project – the engineering – at another time. When I was growing up, the story went something like this: there were hundreds of thousands of slaves working year round, for God knows how long, to construct the Great Pyramid. Thousands of slaves died in the process. Today, Egyptologists have made progress in excavating “workers’ villages” near Giza and other finds, and as a result, they’ve modified the Hollywood version slightly.

Now they believe some 100,000 men laboured several months out of the year, for 18-20 years, quarrying 2,300,000 blocks of stone averaging 2.3 metric tons (2.5 tons) a piece, and moving them downriver from Swenet (Aswan) to Giza, approximately 675 kilometres (about 422 miles) to the north.

So far so good... The fact is they were built during Akhet (the Season of Inundation), the four months out of the year during which the Nile flooded and then receded – and they did it in 18 years! Depending on the size of the flood, the season would be extended or reduced below the “official” four months. Why during Akhet? That was when the land was “fallow” and it was impossible to do the real work at hand – farming – i.e., feeding one’s brothers and sisters (what a concept!).

To get an idea of what building these pyramids entailed, we have to consider not just time, but timing. The major lifting was done during a seasonal “window,” which coincided with the Inundation. The 2.3 million blocks raised up may not seem like much to us today, because we believe we’ve gone to the moon… But 2.5 tons (2,300 kg.) is what two large female hippopotami weigh. Or to keep things more modern, about what a Honda Civic LX weighs.

When Do You Want It? Yesterday?

It took the Ancient Egyptians approximately 2,160 days to build the Great Pyramid (4 months x 18 years = 72 months of 30 days each). If they could have worked right through the year, they would have finished the pyramid in less than six years. I’d like to see any modern conglomerate of construction companies sign up to that project and still come in on time and under budget!

I was just reading about the Panama Canal expansion fiasco, wherein the international engineering and construction consortium has gone way over budget with cost overruns and delays… and thinking, what these people need is a couple of Ancient Egyptians to run things for them!

Greed, bad financial partners, poor labour relations, weather, malaria, all these things may be throwing a monkey wrench into the Panama Canal expansion project, but that would never happen to the Black People. Of course, our “business as usual” and our “coincidences” would not be plaguing the ancients (not even the ten plagues did). They simply made their offerings to the neteru, set the completion date, got to work, and the whole thing got done.

How was it possible for the Ancient Egyptians to finish such a huge project in a mere 2,160 days? Well, that’s hard to say, but I believe it had a lot to do with their sacred science and a dash of “attitude.” To the Black People nothing that was manifest on Top of the Earth (in the material plane) was an accident. In other words, the concept of “coincidence” was an alien one to them.

The number of days it took the Ancient Egyptians to build the Great Pyramid is extremely significant from an esoteric point-of-view also, because that is exactly the number of years it takes for a solar age to transpire; i.e., for the sun to pass from one Zodiac sign to the next in the precession of equinoxes (we’ll discuss this in more detail in the near future). It’s also the length of time (on average) that a human soul takes to reincarnate.

Hey, These Stone Blocks are Heavy!

The next issue before us is: What exactly did these hundreds of thousands of “extras” the Egyptologists believe built the Great Pyramid (or any other monument, if you will), actually doing there? Besides getting in the way of completing the job, I mean. What’s their excuse for being there in the first place? Is it that Egyptologists are firm believers in “strength in numbers,” or what?

Clearly, to finish within the allotted time, the sandstone blocks – these 2.3 million Hondas (or 4.6 million hippos) – were raised up at an astounding rate. Each day, 1,065 blocks were set in place… Even if we were to take into account an unrealistic 12-hour working day (I guarantee the Black People didn’t work that long – maybe 6 hours a day tops!), they raised 89 blocks an hour! Approximately one every two minutes!

Phew! I get exhausted doing the math… Think of what THEY went through to get the thing done! Maybe they gained some “economies of scale” by building Khufu’s, Khafre’s, and Menkaure’s pyramids all at the same time (father, son, and grandson)… But I doubt it.

Hollywood Casts the Crew

I can hear Cecil B. DeMille croaking through his megaphone on the set… “We need more extras!” Hundreds of thousands of them in fact because first you needed to build “the ramp” the Egyptologists imagine was completed before work was begun on the real thing. In other words, a huge earth works project was built by moving millions of cubic metric tons of dirt in what amounts to another pyramid before the pyramid was actually started.

Fine, first we need lots of folks with picks, shovels, and baskets to move massive amounts of dirt up the hill. For that we’ll need slaves. Being a Hollywood producer casting slaves is cheaper for me because they only wear a loincloth and I don’t have to go over budget with the costumes department. I save on make-up too. Being slaves, I don’t have to feed them at the chow wagon either – at least, not much.

Finally, as a film director, I want to be historically accurate, but I don’t want to waste money on doing any research. I’ll just use the Bible as my source and that’ll also get me past the censors and the fundamentalist zealots won’t be boycotting when I premier the movie.

For a Hollywood epic, that’s all fine and good, but the Great Pyramid is not fiction – it’s actually there! Someone built it, and I put my money on the Ancient Egyptians being the builders. And, they didn’t use anything to do that with but the most rudimentary stone, wood, and copper tools. (I’m not one to denigrate the Black People by casting them as slaves, or slaves of extra-terrestrials either! I don’t think they had access to or used “sophisticated” technology of either an earthly or alien nature). Naturally, one can’t discount their ace in the hole – Heka! – as a contributing factor to their success. But that’s a whole other story.

Less is More – An Ancient Egyptian Virtue

In my experience building things like houses and large buildings, I always found that the fewer people you actually had at a job site, the faster the work would get done. Obviously, Archaeologists and Egyptologists have never actually built anything... so these subtleties of construction may be lost on them.

Many years later, when I worked in the software industry the same fact was brought home to me again – the more programmers you threw at a project the longer it would take to get done and to boot, the more bugs the program/application would have. Yep, the mythical “man-month” is a myth!

Unlike us modern knuckleheads, who live in abstractions and in flighty things that are not real, the Ancient Egyptians lived in the real world. They were nothing if not practical! Just because they wore skirts doesn’t mean they were dumb! Does anyone seriously believe they didn’t know that the more people you threw at a job the slower it would go? Of course they did! They knew they would have to give instructions, make everyone at the building site an “intelligent worker” – they had to “communicate”!

They had quality control, for chrissake! I challenge anyone to drill a hole in granite as straight as they did (or as fast!) with stone tools. In fact, I challenge anyone with the most modern equipment to do it! If we know anything, it’s because THEY knew it before us!

History According to Cecil B. DeMille

Now we have hundreds of thousands of slaves crawling around the job site causing nothing but trouble. Heck, if they were real slaves (i.e., people taken to the site against their will) they’d be in constant revolt – sabotaging the building and the works at every turn! What overseer (or project manager) needs that headache?

No one takes being a slave sitting down (we have recent American and South African history to vouch for that!). The singular exception to this fact of human nature seems to come from the Bible itself (our only source material), wherein the Jewish slaves seemed to be inexplicably quiescent and submissive under the whip (especially in light of later Jewish revolts during the Roman period).

Personally, if I’d been a Jewish slave at the site, climbing “the ramp,” once I got the top, I’d let go of the rope. The ramp would have been chalk full of blocks and slave drivers (with a block up the ramp every two minutes, it’d be busier than an airport tarmac during rush hour!). Then I’d push the 2.5 ton block on its rollers back down – killing everyone on that ramp. Thus I would set my people free – and that evil Pharaoh would have to start his tomb all over again. Talk about the “domino theory” that actually works... It’d be a cinch!

Wouldn’t you? After all, what would be your real life-expectancy as a slave at the site? How any trips up that ramp could you muster before you died of exhaustion, or worse? One, two, maybe three? Hell, before I end up dead carrying those block up, I’d take as many down with me as I could!

So how did these stupid, greedy, egotistical Ancient Egyptians control all these smart, self-less, and industrious slaves? This would have had to have been the ultimate in crowd control. Mind you, on the Hollywood set we have more slaves than the number of Black People who actually lived in their capital in Men-nefer (Memphis)...

Our response is the same as our narrow “historical sense.” The Victorians asked themselves: How do we do it in the Colonies? Send in the ships – bomb them, and then send in the troops – that’s how! We still do it that way today, ergo, those skirt-wearing savages must have done the same!

It’s true, with slaves you always have to bring force and violence to bear. You always have to kill the ones you believe are the “ringleaders” – those that stand up. Just like they did in America and in South Africa, in China, Indochina and in India, in the Caribbean and Latin America (no worries, this is the short list!).

What other answer is there? I’m not going to break a sweat thinking about it... When you lack imagination and you have reversed all the values, there’s no other game in town. Today violence is the antidote to Freedom – it must have been that way always, right?

Deadly Force Is Needed To Quell Slave Revolts

No doubt about it. You always have to bring force and violence to bear on slaves (since they’re not going to be willing participants in your theft of their labour).

Let’s assume, for argument’s sake that the Egyptologists are right. One hundred thousand slaves is a lot of slaves! That’s one heck of a plantation the Ancient Egyptians had going there. A lot of mouths to feed, a lot of orders to be given (whips are notoriously ineffective hearing aides) and presumably, these were Jewish slaves, so there was also a “language barrier” to contend with. How did they get them to “pull” on those ropes and climb “the ramp”? (Keep in mind, the Black People didn’t use the wheel!) Was it just the persuasive power of the whips?

How many troops would you need to keep the slaves in line? How many whips would you have to manufacture? It’s not a trivial matter, since you couldn’t go to China (or to Amazon.com) to get a boat load of cheap whips for the thousands of troops you’d need to “keep the peace.” To begin with, you’d have to skin the oxen first! And, that would mean less food to feed the troops over the length of the project... (Not a smart move!)

But isn’t it just like “modern” academics not to think things through? The Victorians certainly were the prototype of the herd-animal of today – dumb, dull, dreadfully stupid and energetically wasteful of human and natural resources. Seems to me, the Victorian Egyptologist were just projecting their values onto the Egyptians (to use a Freudian term), and these were not “nice” values. In other words, they just made the stuff up about the slaves in Egypt – right off the top of their heads because England was a slave society (and still is!). Britain was, in the 19^th Century, the “top of the pops” and therefore there was no alternative.

The Bible as the Sole Source

Besides the Bible, what other source is there for this slander and defamation of the Ancient Egyptians? Well, we have Herodotus (484 B.C. – 425 B.C.), although his “Histories” were concerned with the Greco-Persian Wars. I remember my Herodotus, he did say Egyptians had slaves. But then again, there were slaves in Egypt since the Persian conquest in 525 B.C., so it should not come as surprise to us.

Can’t say scholars aren’t diligent. They also used Josephus (37 A.D. – 100 A.D.) as a source. He certainly wrote about “slaves” in the “Classical Age” (about 2,600 years after the pyramids were built). Josephus lived in the heyday of Roman slavery. Was he about to deny a consummated fact? One of the Roman virtues? He had to kowtow to his Roman masters – after all, he was a Jew – an enemy of Rome. As a defector to the Roman side he had to watch what he said, as well as make history conform to his masters’ racial profiling.

Hey, I’m not knocking it – it’s hard to be impartial on a moving train! Everyone has to choose sides... I just would take all these accounts with a grain of salt. To adjudicate slavery to the Ancient Egyptians, especially in the Bronze Age, when the pyramids were built, is a leap though.

I’d need to see some real proof of slaves building anything to be convinced! In all of human history slaves have never built any significant structure, much less one as complex as the pyramids. Here again, the only source for slaves having built the pyramids is the Bible (which is divine revelation and not to be confused with actual historical events – at least not events in chronological order).

To me, it sounds like instead of doing the heavy lifting the academics just used “prior source” and figured they’d get by. Hey, if there was slavery back in 500 B.C., in 450 B.C., in 100 A.D., in 2015 A.D. – then, there was always slavery, right? They’ve gotten by with this “fable” so far, not only that, they’ve hoodwinked the whole planet with this malarkey. (And isn’t that exactly as the powers-that-be wish it, in order to continue to justify slavery in modern times as something “natural” to human nature?).

Greed, Violence, and Slavery Are In Our DNA

One of the most pathetic arguments coming from our overlords today is that slavery is part of our human nature. The logic runs something like this: We all have our human failings – the ancients just had more of them than we do. At least, that’s our excuse. With dull thinking of this sort, is it any wonder they always come up with the WRONG interpretation? To me, it sounds like “guilt” baggage... and not very credible at that.

Well, what do we know? To keep slavery going you have to have and use force – deadly force! It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out. The 19^th and 20^th Century (not to mention this millennium too) has been nothing but bloody proof of it.

The Colonies are still there, the plantations/factories, the slavery, everything! We may not see the slaves in their ghettos as the Victorian could have in the 19^th Century – they certainly had the sweatshops! We don’t “see” slavery on TV or in our quaint suburban neighbourhoods because all these things have been “off-shored,” but they’re still there (and in far greater numbers than at any time in History).

Back to the pyramids! There are now one hundred thousand slaves that need to be punished on an ongoing basis – 24 x 7. Who’s going to do the dirty work? Storm troopers, of course! What else? Elite, highly-trained, “Gestapo-like” Egyptian troops were used in their thousands to keep the slave hordes under the whip. Of course, you still have to arm, clothe, feed, organize, and command these goose-stepping morons. But that’s just a detail... According to our modern way of thinking the laws of Physics can be inverted to justify slavery. There were no famines or shortages back then... no setbacks. The Ancient Egyptians could afford to mismanage and misspend the harvests and the taxes they collected by throwing good “wealth” out after bad to build a Police State just to build a stupid tomb. Just because our slave drivers today need a Police State to stay in power doesn’t mean the Ancient Egyptians needed one! (And, you’d have to have that Police State long before you started to even dream of putting one stone on top of the other...)

Us and Them…

Psychologically we know ourselves to be inferior, yet we still strive to see ourselves reflected in the “mirror” of the Ancient Egyptians’ greatness... in their pyramids! We want to badly measure up to our past. We want our modern, decadent Slave State (all Police States are Slave States) to resemble theirs.

The Great Pyramid was built during the times when there was surplus food (why waste that food on a Police State?). There must have been a great deal of “surplus” at that time... To pull it off, the Ancient Egyptians must have been phenomenally rich! On the whole, they built the thing without starving anyone. They must have been way richer than we are today.

Yet today, we don’t care about starving our own, as long as a few at the top of the economic “pyramid” get more than their fair share. We waste many times our GDP on armaments annually, because our overlords need to keep us under the boot. Do they justify this believing the Ancient Egyptians did the same? To arm themselves against their purported slaves?

How many storm-troopers would you need on the Giza plateau to maintain order? Ten, twenty, thirty thousand? How many would you need to subjugate 100,000 men? (Ostensibly, these were young men, stout and strong, since they were going to be pulling big blocks up the ramp all day long until they died.). What ratio of guards to slaves would you need?

No one knows, but it’s estimated that in Roman times (when slavery was at its apogee) the slave population was 30-40% of the entire population of Italy (there were less slaves outside of Italy!). One would have to figure out how many centurions they needed for every slave in order to “keep control.” But even if we had a figure, it would be misleading. We have to remember that the Romans used slaves for a quite different set of activities, and mostly in household service and agricultural production (exactly like in the Old South). As a result, the comparison would not be very useful for our purposes (in Ancient Egypt we’re building the pyramids, not planting cotton!).

One or Two Hundred Thousand Slaves at the Giza Site?

Or would you need more than a 2:1 ratio for replacements? And herein lies another conundrum – to replace the dead, did they have another 100K slaves waiting on the side-lines? Where did they keep them captive? Or did they wait until the next year to make a war and capture a few more?

Keep in mind that you can’t kill the slave to punish him – that's a direct and immediate economic loss... Our modern lack of management skills in human resources always misses out on that fine point. As a slave owner, you don’t even have the luxury of “firing” the slow-moving slave... Unless the Ancient Egyptians had huge unemployment lines, it’d be hard to come by slaves at all. In fact, slaves could only be procured through war... so you would need a war first in order to get a new batch of “fresh” slaves (even if you bred them on purpose as slaves from your existing stocks).

But war back then was an expensive business, and if farmers died (the guys at the top of the pyramid) you’d end up starving and your civilization wouldn’t last the year (much less 10,000 years!).

For argument’s sake, let’s assume that you only need a third of the number of slaves for riot control – 30,000 troops to keep an entire “city” of 100,000 slaves in check. Now you have 130,000 mouths to feed just in the west bank. Plus the more than 100,000 people that live across the Nile (the folks in Memphis). The Black People aren’t going to starve during 18 years so that the guy at the bottom of the pyramid can have his little “fling” with immortality, now are they? Who will feed them?

You got 230,000 people to clothe, feed, shelter, give tools and materials to... It doesn’t add up. The “math” simply doesn’t work. Every time you add a slave, you slow the project down (how long of a delay can you afford? A month, a year – or more? With slaves, the pyramids would have taken many more inundations to build than eighteen!

And again, what kind of quality control would you have? A pyramid built by slaves would last about as long as a pair of Nike shoes – stuff built by slaves just doesn’t cut it. There’s no craftsmanship involved, no “pride” of work. It’s so obvious a three-year-old can tell it’s a nonstarter.

Only slave owners could possibly imagine such a thing! The Victorians thrived thanks to their Colonies, to their slave trade (that’s where they made their margins – what happened to the slave owner in the Colonies themselves, they didn’t give a gnat’s ass about). Why? Because they could always pass “the cost of doing business,” the enormous “losses” of their mismanagement were borne by those at the bottom of the pyramid – the poor (just as the Corporate State does it to this day!). But the Black People couldn’t afford to be so “laissez faire.” The gods wouldn’t let them!

To be fair, the Victorians were not half as bad as we are... They were certainly more “liberal” and the majority were even “abolitionists.” They certainly didn’t use slaves to build the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park in 1851, did they? Why would they assume the Ancient Egyptians would?

Unfortunately, the fairy tale doesn’t stand the smell test. There were no slaves building the pyramids. Slavery was not practiced in Ancient Egypt at any time during its long history. The conquest of Egypt by Cambyses II in 525 B.C., changed all that because it turned some Egyptians into slaves. Historical events are a lot subtler than we imagine. Even the Persians didn’t practice slavery as the Romans did. The Persians introduced slavery as an institution into the Nile, yet, it was only the nobles who could have and hold slaves, and these were usually war booty. Once established, slavery grew, and by the time Alexander the Great conquered the Two Lands in 332 B.C., slavery was perpetuated by his Greek generals during the rest of the Ptolemaic period.

Our lack of “historical sense” makes us attribute modern maladies to ancient peoples. It’s lazy thinking. Not to mention, it’s poor interpretation of our past to attribute all our “reversed values” on peoples of antiquity. In the Late Bronze Age there was no slavery in Ancient Egypt (and probably no slavery as we understand it today on our entire planet). Slavery is a fairly “new” invention... and it needed the great “reversal of values” to come into its own, the reversal only the modern cancer of Capitalism could bring to full and perfect fruition...