Yet Another Ghost Story

It’s that frightening time of year again... No, not tax time! Although that’d be close. 

It’s Halloween, and that brings us face to face with our not-so-hidden fears. Whether your beliefs tilt towards the traditional and the Pagan or the “Christian” variety, it makes little difference. Irrespective of your superstitious tendencies, you’re also coming up on the “Day of the Dead” (the first of November for those prone to the latter). For Hallows’ Eve always precedes that ominous day – the ultimate “day after.” Where will you spend those twenty-four hours?

One thing about our decadent Western Civilization, we certainly don’t want to deal with the dead and the issues they leave behind. The consequences of History, you might say (especially our own “personal history”). We have our friends’ ‘tweets’ to look at instead, which are more “pressing”…

And here’s a fact that ought to raise some hairs and pimple your skin. We modern Westerners are the most ignorant and superstitious people that have ever walked the surface of this planet (and I include the Neanderthals in that grouping). In humanity’s entire history (not to mention evolution!) no one has ever had so many fears and foibles to deal with on a day to day basis.

Our superstitions have their origins, of course. They come from our past. Therefore, we attribute OUR superstitions to those that went before and blame them for our “unfounded” fears. Well, you know what happens when you blame ghosts for your own shortcomings. Yep, they come back and bite you in the ‘you know where’…

And to make matters worse, we have no “coping mechanism” to deal with ghosts. Sadly, no Ghostbusters’ hot line to call. That’s because no human culture before ours paid so little heed to the dead as we do. We simply have no respect for them.

The Day of the Dead

Why should we? We had no respect for the dead while they were alive, why waste our time now? Isn’t that like closing the barn after the cows have gone? Our shallow values and our bromidic culture have no place for them or for our ancestors either. Unlike our ancestors, whose lives were guided by their progenitors across countless generations, we’re more than glad that they’re not around to tell us what to do!

I still don’t know why people hang their skeletons in the closet, instead of burying them in the backyard, under the tulips or guardiolas, like respectable people do. Closets, especially built-in ones, are so small these days, and skeletons take up a lot of otherwise useful space in there, that you’d think people would be more practical about these matters. And under the guardiolas is apropos, I might add, since these beautiful flowers are native to Mexico, where they do celebrate the “day of the dead” (el día de los muertos/difuntos). We gringos don’t know what we’re missing.

We keep piling things on… Evermore, like the Raven said. More bad Karma on top of bad, especially vis-à-vis the dearly departed. In light of the fact that every lie is a murder – another skeleton in the proverbial closet – we ought to be a little less disdainful. All the big and little lies we’ve told, the frauds we’ve perpetrated, that’s something else we carry around, dangling from our necks, adding to our unease. Another shibboleth that betrays our fears and gives us away.

But that’s not good news for us, if you think about it, because the deeds of the past don’t go away. Unless, of course, we do something about them… like “burning off” the Karma we’ve heaped up during our short existence – especially the bad variety – by doing some “good” somewhere. Take that as a “moral lesson,” if you will.

Yeah, I know, you scoff…  Because you tell yourself that these fears and superstitions are “existential.” We have turned these fears into novels and horror movies, but that little sleight-of-hand on our part – this childish attempt to fool ourselves – doesn’t mean they aren’t there. We can, of course, disown them more readily when they’re “collective” and in the cultural milieu, and that’s how we keep our petite superstitions from overwhelming us during our waking day. But there they are, nonetheless, in their manifold appearances (manifesting themselves in everything from headaches to clinical depression) and they’re not going away.

You’re probably saying: Why bother? I’m having too good of a time lying, ripping people off, and kill anything that moves (I have to eat, don’t I?). I’ll take care of the bad stuff once I’m on the “other side.” In the meantime, I’m going to enjoy my one and only time in the spotlight.

You have no idea what a spotlight that is…

It’s no skin off of my nose if you do or don’t, but it’ll be skin off of YOURs. Despite your brave face (from here, it looks like a noseless one to me), everyone pays the piper. The ghosts and denizens that “live” there, in the “hereafter,” the ones who’ve suffered your “fun and games,” are waiting patiently for you to arrive in all your splendour.

Consider that a heads up…

What Are Ghosts?

Ghost, ghouls, and goblins, demons and hellions, eidolons and other incorporeal beings are always there, on the other side of that invisible veil that separates the living from the dead. And what are ghosts if not some glimmer or trace of what’s left of the dead?

If you were living 5,000 years ago (or earlier), you’d know exactly what a ghost was. Ancient Egyptians knew them to be the memory of the dead, namely, what was left of their ka-doubles (the “etheric remnant” of light which ignited the living person’s experiences while alive, including their memories). That’s why it was important to the Black People to keep their identity after death – to remember what they had NOT done (the negative confession they were to give while their hearts lay on the Scales of Ma’at (Truth) in the Land of Amentet, in the Dwat.

Their thoughts, feelings, and deeds, were remembered through their “secret name,” the name that would identify them to the denizens of the “netherworld” as a “resurrected Osiris,” blameless of all wrongdoing. They didn’t have to recant their misdeeds because they enumerated the 42 things they did not do (btw, these 42 items were eventually dwindled down by those who followed to the Ten Commandments – a kind of memory mnemonic for those lost in the Netherworld). Without your secret name you’d be lost in the darkness of ignorance, completely unconscious, from the instant you entered that lightless world without the aid of your sense perceptions. How could you have any sensorial perceptions once you left your physical body (the khat) behind?

But that’s not scary enough, is it?

Technically speaking, ghosts don’t actually last as long as we imagine. In ancient times they were gone in a matter of days, so people had little trouble from ghost and other eidolons. If someone died back then, and you hadn’t lied to them, cheated them, or worse, they’d be gone in a few days and no one would be the wiser for it. In fact, if you prayed to them when they died, and gave them bread (they were called “offering loaves”) they would stay away from you until you yourself died, and then they’d be nice enough to accompany you and guide you to the Guardian of the Threshold (that would be Lord Anpu (Anubis) or Lord Wepwawet, the Opener of the Ways).

But that was then, and this is now – thousands of years later. Things have changed quite a bit since then (more than a few “reversals of values” later, you might say). And, when you think about how many people you’ve lied to in the course of one day (which is tantamount to a violent murder to any ghost in the world of the spirits), and then multiply that by all the days you’ve been around people on this planet, your list of ghost could be quite long. And, God forbid if you’ve done worse than lie, like actually murder someone… Well, now that’s a little scarier…

The key to understanding ghosts, even in our day, is if we understand them as a “memory.” That’s why they “come back,” because they forgot something, someone, a thought, a feeling, an unseen object (to the ghosts themselves, naturally). And, it’s that memory which brings them back to haunt the place where they died. But ghosts, like people, are very mobile these days. Did I mention that they’re also prone to haunt the person that lied to them?

Yes Virginia, they also come back because they remembered something… that “little white lie” you told them, which in the “other world” is a gigantic axe cleaving their forehead!

It’s all very mysterious to us in this present age of materialism, because we believe that there’s nothing that exists which can’t be seen or touched (by our sense organs). And conversely, nothing exists if it can’t be seen or touched. So logically, ghosts don’t exists. Have you touched any ghosts lately?

You probably have…

They’re In The Attic

You may not have seen them, but you have certainly heard them… they’re usually in the attic, where you keep the objects of your own memory. That’s why they’re up there, scrounging around, like rats, which is what you think you really hear when they scamper over the ceiling joists. They’re ghosts, not rats, trust me.

And when you get the nerve to go up there with a torch and point its narrow beam of light around in the dark, and you actually see rats, be assured that the pesky rodents are being “guided” by that very same ghost you lied to. The ghost just happens to be looking for something… and yes, they’re up there every night. Of all the nights of the year tonight and tomorrow night should be the hairiest in that regard.

That’s because the dead come to us every night and feed on our dreams… that’s where we keep count of the many and varied lies we’ve told. But, it’s best not to think about that… especially, this time of year.

What Do THEY Want?

Ghosts want what everyone wants. In two words – “pay back.” Just like the living, the dead thirst for Justice. Herein lies another lesson we ought to take from antiquity.

The Black People were, above all practical people, and therefore, “harmonious” people. They knew how to deal with this “balance” between the Dwat and the Top of the Earth (i.e., the dead and the living), and they did so by first “keeping the peace” in the Land of the Living (in their own Black Land and between all the living Black People). Over time, the problem was doing the same with their neighbours (the so-called Nine Bows), the Red People, the White People, and the Green People. But that’s another story – what Hagel called the “aim of history” – the story behind “history” itself (if you believe in such things).

That’s why one of the most highly regarded, and venerated, neteru in the Land of Love was Lady Ma’at (she’s the goddess of Truth and Collective Justice). Why “collective justice”? Because Justice, like Truth, is never a matter that concerns a single individual or a small group of individuals (that’s one of the fundamental errors we make as a result of our short-sightedness, our vacant values, and our superficial, modern thinking). Despite what “Relativism” or “Positivism” tell us, the ancients knew there was but one Truth. There can never be one “truth” for one person and another “truth” for another. Likewise, there can’t be “justice” if it’s only for one individual. If one individual (or small group, like a class in our society) enjoys “justice,” then no one else enjoys it and there’s effectively no justice at all. In other words, Justice concerns every individual, it has to inform the totality of humankind. It can’t be an “individual” matter. (Only in our decadent society can such an aberration be conceived, which explains why we enjoy neither justice nor peace.)

Every soul that dies today screams out for Justice. One can be poetic about it and say they clamour for Peace (since one can’t happen without the other). They want “peace on earth” above all things because they keep suffering what we suffer while we’re doing what we’re doing. And, what are we doing? We’re killing one another in hordes. We think the lies we tell are just “words” blown in the wind and will disappear the second we utter them… We’ve always been good at lying to ourselves first (it’s that little rehearsing we do before we lie to the next guy).

The dead are like the lies we speak, they never go away. Those who have gone before us are waiting there on the other side of that gossamer veil. The souls of the dead keep coming back and they want justice. We ignore them at our peril – especially in this day and age! This has to do with the “economy of the universe,” something that we don’t quite have a grip on. Somehow we still believe we can get more than we put it.

This “economy” between the living and the dead, was always known in antiquity, because the only way the dead could “rest in peace” was if there was some kind of peace among the living. But, as I said earlier, today we don’t give a gnat’s ass what the dead want. How can we? We don’t even care about the living! As a matter of fact, we’re dispatching the living to the “other side” at such a dizzying rate that the noise level over there in the Netherworld is getting rather loud. (If you really want to know the true cause of “Global Warming,” my friend, start looking into that!)

Don’t forget, all ghosts want but one thing – Justice!

Now you can be very afraid…

Funny, that’s what the living want too. I don’t know what the disagreement is all about. Do you?

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...

How I Spent My Summer Vacation.

I haven’t written one of these since I was in the 6^th grade, so bear with me…

It’s the end of August, and here in Europe, at least, the summer is winding down. Traditionally, it’s the end of the summer “vacation” season. Never mind that the planet’s circuit around the sun still has another 21 days to go before the summer is actually over – when the equinox returns us to daylight parity once again.

Why let facts get in the way, right? Twenty-some-odd days to go under the sun, with the surf and the sand still there. While one watches the crowds at the beach beginning to thin – those with employment have to return to the city – those without… Well, outside of the locals without, there are probably not that many at the beach to begin with. That's because going on vacation with the kids is probably the second largest expenditure in a family household (after the mortgage), at least, it used to be for me.

Like the Greeks after the 2008 “Greatest Depression,” the poor Spaniards (I live near Barcelona, Catalonia) can’t spend their vacations out and about in the world at large any more. They now flock to the local beaches, long enjoyed by those who came from Germany, the U.K., and points farther afield. And naturally, what’s left of the petite bourgeoisie, whose bank hasn’t reclaimed and confiscated their second and third vacation homes – they’re back to where they started vacationing 30 years ago.

Well, this got me musing about how absurd our whole approach to work and leisure really is. Especially now, when we have to live with the “new normal” – i.e., with a shrinking economy, loss of employment, and its consequent diminished standard of living. Even if one is to believe in the published GDP numbers as Gospel, it doesn't look good (the criteria for those who are Polyannish or bullish about economic prospects in the long-run is usually summed up in categorical denial and suspension of disbelief), Even India’s GDP is only 7% – i.e., not much work or production going on there either! China’s GDP shrunk last year to 7.4%).

A Life of Idle Pleasures

Back to Spain. The majority of people who are in their most productive years (18-35) and at their highest-earning potential are unemployed. In Spain that age group has a 62% unemployment rate. Talk about wealth elimination and another “lost generation.” GDP, of course, doesn’t tally the costs of the unemployed on society (with its concomitant boozing, drug addiction, gender-violence, shootings, depression, destruction of the family unit, etc.), these negative social effects actually add to GDP growth! How dysfunctional can you get? Keeping up appearances can be a costly endeavour.

For good or ill, people have finally been made free by the System (made “redundant” would be the more accurate word). I would imagine a pealing cheer of joy ought to be heard around the world as the chains of slavery are heaved off and a future of couch potato-ing and leisure can resume. NOT!

It’s no longer a matter of choice, especially in the West. The System doesn’t need “workers” only enough refugees and immigrants to keep wages painfully low (and thus keep wealth distribution, as always, to its barest minimum). 

As a result tens of millions are forced to enjoy a life of idle leisure, penniless…

One would think that in a post-industrial world spending time on leisure would be the ultimate in “self-fulfilment.” After all, didn’t they promise us a “jobless” economy? Why the financiers and the captains of industry have certainly delivered on that one! But where are the robots and wonderful technology that was going to make life easy as eating cake? Where are the innovations that actually produce something and which would free us from drudgery and boredom? We always want to grow fat, dumb, and happy (or some unreasonable facsimile of it), and there's no better time than the present for it.

Judging by the great amount of flabby flesh pouring out over the skimpy bikinis and swimming trunks at the beach, it appears to me that the “fat and dumb” portion of the program is right on schedule… Capitalism seems to have delivered more than it promised. So why aren’t we happy about it?

Got Time on My Hands

This set me thinking about how different the approach to leisure and economic life must have been in the past, especially in antiquity. The Ancient Egyptians, for one, had a “production” based economy, probably the last one to have actually worked well in our planet’s history. Yet they had far more leisure time (and time to themselves) than we do… Didn’t they build the pyramids on their time “off”?

They had so much time on their hands that even as they were made idle, during the Season of Inundation (Nile flooding), they built huge monuments. And, here is precisely where the difference between us is most appallingly great – wider than the Grand Canyon. Even in their leisure time, the Ancient Egyptians were nothing if not productive. Just like the bees build their honeycombs during their “down time” (when they’re not foraging and gathering honey), the Ancient Egyptians built up their sacred infrastructure outside of their “working hours.” In other words, in their leisure time – they “worked for fun.”

What a concept! That’s another good habit we’ve lost as we’ve become a sedated and sedentary people.

Actually, the Ancient Egyptians made of their work an offering. An offering they made with desire and joy in their hearts (because they wanted to, not because they were slaves, as we’ve been told by historians). And, since there was no money involved, the offering gave much in the form of dividends for life. (Money made a very late appearance in human affairs, and in Europe, not until the end of the Renaissance in any measurable or practical way).

What's Your Work Schedule Like?

So what did the Ancient Egyptian's “work schedule” look like? From what Egyptologists and archaeologists have found, labouring appears to have had the following rhythm, especially during the New Kingdom (but most likely from much earlier in their civilization):

·         The year had 12 months.

·         The year is divided into three seasons.

·         Each season was 4 months long.

·         The month was divided into 30 days.

·         Each month was divided into its third – ten days – or three "decans” (a long week).

·         Out of this “decan,” two days were reserved for leisure and rest. These were called “offering days.”

·         A full season (four months) during the year there was no “work” done. (Season of Akhet or Inundation Season.).

Funny how working 24 x 7 with barely 10 days off a year, we can’t feed a single town! In fact, with our System, we manage to starve, at least, 50 million people a year. The Ancient Egyptians fed over 4-5 million souls every year (estimated population during the New Kingdom) and probably two or three times that number year in and year out for 15,000 years! We have very few relics and archaeological samples to go on to even make a good guess on population counts… But keep in mind that without the modern invention of war and disease, and taking into account the far longer lifespans of individual members of the group (72 years was only 1 year of Râ), as well as higher fertility rates, ancient peoples were likely more numerous than our modern research reveals.

What Are You Doing On Your "Offering Days"? 

Needless to say, this is not the “conventional” view. It is, however, the way it was. Like in every beehive, there are no more and no less bees (workers, drones, or queens) than are absolutely necessary to the harmony of the hive. Otherwise, nothing can be accomplished.

During these two “offering days” – the Egyptians’ weekend – they “kept going,” because this was the time one had to him-herself. What did they do during their “free time”? It’s difficult to know with any precision what the Ancient Egyptians did for pleasure. But there’s no doubt that they were both as wise and intelligent, and infinitely practical, in their work as they were in their play.

The Ancient Egyptians probably invented many ways to give themselves pleasure, both spiritually, emotionally, and physically. Seemingly they converted “work” into a kind of play. And the reason for this, I believe, is linked to the concept of work as being nothing other than one’s offering to the Neteru (the gods) – not something lucrative. And this making play out of “work” is probably what made the Ancient Egyptians so dog-gone intelligent.

Next time, we’ll get back to the slavery polemic – and who actually built the pyramids.

Historical Sense and the Reversal of Values

Or, Did Ancient Egyptians Let Slaves Build Their Pyramids For Them?

This is the second in a series that I’ve started on the subject of Slavery. Unlike most modern folks, I’m not an adherent to the fable that slavery has been abolished – on the contrary – it’s stronger now than at any prior time in History. As promised, I wanted to deal in this blog with the touchy issue of slavery in Ancient Egypt. But it could be about any other matter related to History or ancient civilizations because my criticism is broader than that leveled against modern Egyptologists and archaeologist (poor folks, they’re just trying to get a job done!).

I feel I should disclose right up front that I’m not in the least interested in changing people’s “belief systems.” You can believe whatever tickles your fancy, and that’s perfectly alright with me. I’m not in the brainwashing business (I leave that to the powers-that-be who already excel in that department). If you believe in Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny, and Little Red Riding Hood – that’s fine too. It’s certainly less harmful to do so than to believe any number of other fairy tales that pass for “unconditional truth” in our modern age.

My only concern is to make sense of what nonsense I read and hear... Unfortunately, that’s not that easy given the copious amounts of gobbledygook that passes for “non-fiction” these days, especially in archaeology and history books. We live in a muddled-up, unthinking age in which History is not based on facts or actual events, not even on memory or oral tradition, but on the made-up fairy tales we’re told in school and which are reinforced through the media.

Our modern culture is opaque, not transparent as most folks believe. It’s not even a question of how much of any film, novel, or whatever the general public has read in the non-fiction section at the local library, is actually historically accurate. With respect to Ancient Egypt, with very few exceptions (and there are only a handful of them!), almost none of the interpretations made by scholars and academics are particularly accurate, reliable, or credible. And the reason it isn’t accurate is because everything has a “modern” focus – everything is seen from a modern perspective (and judged “good” or “bad” merely on that basis). All else is discarded...

No effort is made to actually THINK. Our modern interpretation of past actions, especially very old ones, tends to become a kind of “knee-jerk” reaction. If it’s very old we feel we are obliged to judge the ancient culture more harshly, as if we are capable of judging anything that presents itself before us from the distant past. But our prejudices are typical surface judgments, full of errors and absurd notions that hold no water. No effort is made to “walk a mile” in someone else’s shoes – not even the very subjects of the academic studies undertaken. It’s not so much that the “facts” are “wrong” as much as the interpretation(s) are way off the beam.

I suppose that much of this error can be laid at the doorstep of the Victorian Egyptologists of the 19^th Century, with all of their prejudices and “a priori judgments.” They simply couldn’t come to grips with a Civilization so advanced that wore skirts. Their prejudice was that only people wearing trousers were capable of “greatness” (they were, of course, referring to themselves – that’s how our “historical sense” became so narrow and pithy). As a result, men wearing kilts was not their idea of “intelligence” or “manly” virtue, etc. Any wonder why the Scots want their independence?

Who Built The Pyramids? Aliens or Slaves?

Clearly, according to our modern view – anyone but the Egyptians themselves built them! I don’t find such notions even whimsical (because they’re not). What misplaced craving makes us seek to explain the real with the unreal? Are we so attached to the abstract and to flighty notions that we can’t come to grips with anything real, “earthy,” or manifest?

We have one glaring fact before us – human beings built these incredible stone monuments in the form of a pyramid. From this singular fact Egyptologists have made their interpretations. These are not very revealing since they usually have to coincide neatly with what is acceptable to the academic institution that hires them. If anyone believes it is otherwise, for example, that there’s such a thing as “academic freedom” in the modern world, I have a nice red bridge I want to sell you... yep, it crosses San Francisco Bay...

Therefore, all the interpretations fall effortlessly in line with the “fable agreed upon” by those who went before (or those who pay for the meal ticket). And Egyptologists are wonderful in this sense too, they tend to “circle the wagons” whenever an “alternate” interpretation is possible. It’s to be expected.

After the initial laugh, I’m always left cold with the “alternative” interpretations which reach the same conclusion: Only alien spacemen – why not spacewomen? – built the pyramids.

Unfortunately, some of these “alternative” interpretations, are no less silly than those proffered by alleged “scientists,” academics, scholars, and archaeologists. It seems to come down to this: The pyramids were built either by slaves or aliens (the aliens turned everyone into slaves first – that’s how little imagination enters into “thinking” these days). In other words, the “alternative theory” is just the “establishment theory” regurgitated by folks that should have better things to do with their time.

Neither the “scientists” nor the “alternatives” are much interested in “truth” or “facts,” they’re only interested in “interpretations” that match their world view (i.e., their ‘a priori’ judgments). In the case of academics, they also have to match their bosses’ prejudices as well as their corporate sponsors’ opinions. And, need I add, that the latter are generally of a “racist” nature, in the vain of: “Africans couldn’t have possibly built these things” and opinions of that ilk, which are still very much with us.

Inquiry for “truth” along these lines is a clear “reversal of values” from the Enlightenment Age, when Science took its greatest strides forward. But we all know we don’t live in an age of “enlightenment” any longer, but rather in its opposite (i.e., a “dark age” of ignorance and neglect).

The “fable agreed upon,” the breakthrough of modern Egyptology, is that slaves built the pyramids! This modern interpretation is insisted upon even when the facts aren’t there to back it up. Even when Egyptologists have unearthed entire “middle class” craftsmen’s villages in the Giza plateau with interior plumbing! (The only thing missing is the satellite dish!)

Why is the proposition that slaves built the pyramids wrong? There are many reasons why... Not the least of which is that as modern herd-animals we don’t care to exercise our faculty of thinking! We’re not just physically couch potatoes – we’re mental “couch potatoes.” Thinking is indeed heavy lifting! Who wants to break a sweat these days? It’s not cool... and it stains your undergarments.

As a result we have no “historical sense.” Not even the historical sense that people had in the 17^th Century – at the beginning of the Enlightenment. Consider what the literacy rate was back then – in England and France it was about 30% max! For women, the perennial “second class” citizens, half that! Therefore, “books” and “learning” had little to do with creating in people a historical sense.

Perhaps we were made of sterner stuff then and people knew instinctively that the “golden age” was in “the past” and that back then, things were better. Who can blame them? Europeans of that time, after emerging from the Middle Ages (“Dark Ages”) and then passing into a cultural “dream,” which was the Renaissance, knew well they were the dregs of the Greeks and Romans, since they didn’t live anywhere close to their standard of living. And, the “intellectuals,” the learned of the Church (the Scholastics and their universities) from the Middle Ages on knew and felt it most keenly – they were doing the “learning” from the Greeks and Romans directly (well, more accurately through the learning of the Arabs!).

Therefore, even since the Enlightenment there has been a “reversal of values” – about 180° – with respect to “scientific truth” and its diligent pursuit. We stand on the shoulders of giants and we think we’re better than those giants. We actually believe we’re better than people in the past and we barely have indoor plumbing!

Indoor Plumbing and the Standard of Living

In my mind, indoor plumbing is a good gauge of the “advancement” of a civilization. Forty years ago, we certainly had less indoor plumbing per capita than the Ancient Egyptians had. I checked! I walked from Greece to Thailand (Indochina) and found few toilets on the way – literally a dearth of indoor plumbing. I doubt that even today we have bested that earlier high standard of living of the Late Bronze Age. They certainly produced far fewer poor people than we do! And it’s because they produced far fewer rich people too!

Talk about a “reversal of values” – Egyptologists believe that the Ancient Egyptian society was structured like a “pyramid” with the Pharaoh on top and everyone else down the line – at the base of the “pyramid.” Even if you look at children’s books about Ancient Egypt (I’ve looked at probably around 50 titles) 90% of them have this nice little graphic – a pyramid with Pharaoh on top and then the priests, scribes, and soldiers, and the peasants at the bottom. Is this some kind of criminal conspiracy?

Again, it’s just faulty historical sense. Much of this erroneous thinking can be attributed directly to the Victorians of the 19^th Century – many of the renowned names in Egyptology. Since they lived in such an absurdly “pyramidal” society themselves, with strict, straight-jacket hierarchies, it was only natural to assume that a pyramid was the right “structure” to run a society (easier to keep the rabble under control). It was certainly obvious to Queen Victoria, sitting with her fat bum at the very top, that it was the right thing for her – and that everyone else throughout history would have the same exact social structure (after all, didn’t Britannia rule the waves?). I’m sure the Egyptian pyramids were a great comfort and inspiration to the Victorians.

Of course, this was another up-side-down interpretation of the facts. In Ancient Egypt what we would call today the “peasant class” or “caste” was at the “top” of the pyramid – Pharaoh was “at the bottom”! That’s why the King (or Queen) was called the Life, Health, and Strength of the Two Lands. The Pharaoh was the “servant” and the peasant was the “master.” Or said another way, everything Pharaoh did from his station in life was to make life “easier” for the farmer.

The most important “individual” in Ancient Egyptian society was not the Sun King, but the farmer (or peasant). Why? Ancient Egyptian civilization was NOT structured like Victorian England, or like a modern American corporation, wherein the CEO makes 5,000 times the salary of the skilled worker who designed the dumb shoe (i.e., the “intelligent” worker) and a billion times more money than the most productive worker in the organization (i.e., the child slave in Pakistan making the crappy shoe itself).

Because we’re in love with Slavery (it gives us all these gadgets!) we have to turn the world up-side down to justify it. But that doesn’t mean the Ancient Egyptians had such a social structure! The Black People didn’t have to conform to our false values – they had real values! Why waste precious time and resources just to make a cheap lie true?

What am I trying to say? Simply, that the hubris we feel as modern herd-animals that we are the “greatest” and most “advanced” civilization on earth has its comeuppance when we first encounter the Ancient Egyptians and their long-standing culture and achievements.

Why? Because we know intuitively that we can’t do anything that they accomplished – not even the most inconsequential of things (such as making sure that everyone has decent shelter and food to eat). Since we’re shallow herd-animals we feel they can’t be better than us... That’s our pride talking. Hold on to your britches – they were not only more advanced in every conceivable measure (including indoor plumbing!) but they were so to a sublime degree!

How did they pull it off? That’s gist for another mill. The fact is, we just don’t understand them because we have exactly the opposite values that they had! And because we don’t “get it,” we relegate them to the trash heap of history.

Yeah... I’ve heard all the arguments. They’re the typical bleating noises of modern sheep – the holier than thou crackpots out there. And some of this squealing comes from people who should know better... It goes something like this: Look what a piece of shit – forgive my French – this 6,000 year old clay pot is (an artifact in a museum, let’s say). (The fact that it’s likely that that clay pot was made by a teenager (or younger) should give us fodder for many further discussions.)

Well, that clay pot may not be up to your modern tastes (but then again, do modern herd-animals have taste?). Let’s say that whatever clay pot you can make (oops, you can’t make a clay pot can you?) won’t last two years of daily use... even with reverential care, should be a wakeup call. And guess what? Neither will your laptop or TV set! (And the laptop is yet something else you can’t make!) You’re lucky if your car, dishwasher, or any other “tool” of modernity lasts ten years...

Frankly, I’m unimpressed. I fail to see any proof of our vaunted superiority... On the other hand, everything the Ancient Egyptians made, from the most simple of tools, utensils, clothes – even paper! – have lasted millennia!

One could say that the Black People’s “motto,” back in the day, was something like this: “Deal with the real and the rest works itself out...” or “Make your offerings to the Neteru (gods) and they will make it happen for you.” Unfortunately, these things got reversed and we only got: “God helps those who help themselves.” And not surprisingly, the folks at the “top” of the pyramid today “help themselves” alright!

The Bees Do It

Fortunately, for the Ancient Egyptians, their civilization was structured in a “circle,” or better said, as an “oval.” Ancient Egyptian society was structured exactly like a beehive... What happens in a beehive?

When all the buzzing is done, we see the result of their collective intelligence in a by-product – honey! This honey is possible because of one overriding “drive” (or instinct, if you will), the beehive acts in the present (here and now) for the benefit of the future. That’s the “prime directive.”

For the Ancient Egyptians, it went beyond the proposition “do no harm,” which the Greeks adopted from them. It’s the opposite of our modern “prime directive” – i.e., short-term profits!

The arrangement of the hive is such that it feeds the worker bees first! In fact, as they fly back to the hive, the worker bees are already turning pollen into honey! As in any sane arrangement of individuals into a whole, the one who does the work, gets the goodies first – then the larvae in the honeycombs are fed next (because they’re the future). The Ancient Egyptians, who used the Bee as their symbol (even as a royal symbol), knew this also: the queen gets fed LAST! The “master” only eats after the “servants” are fed.

Gee, I don’t see that happening today. Do you? I only sense the reversal of those values – the opposite of what needs to happen for things to work out on the material plane... in “reality.”

You can see now how we fall into error when interpreting “facts.” We can see how we modern herd-animals have everything upside down – especially our vaunted “values.” In antiquity, values were reversed. Even Christ taught us such when he washed his disciple’s feet! Not to mention that truth which all Christians denounce as a vile lie – “The meek shall inherit the Earth.”

Who is really the “master”? That’s a question we never ask because we don’t like to hear the answer to it. To be a “master” means to serve – that’s why “slaves” (or better said “servants”) were the real masters. And this explains why there were no slaves to begin with – it’s a modern invention!

Now that we have the facts straight, we can proceed. Next time, we’ll take a practical example to determine, once and for all, why the pyramids where NOT built by slaves, and why they could never have been built by them.