Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt
This month I’m reading ancient history, but this weeks book is a spin on ancient Egypt and is it Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt by John Anthony West.
Serpent in the Sky is, in brief, a synopsis of the work of R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, a French…or at least, his books were written in French so I’m assuming French, Egyptologist who wrote Le Temple de L’Homme, which translates as The Temple of The Man.
The entire premise of the book is that the monuments in Egypt were built well before the pharaonic dynasties, the pharaoh’s merely inherited them. This includes the pyramids, the Sphinx, and the temple complex at the sphinx. De Lubicz is the originator of the idea that water is responsible for the erosion of the Sphinx.
It’s not a very long book, and it opens with Pythagoras. Now, I know Pythagoras is Greek, and that’s the point West is going for. Greece is basically credited with the creation of Western Civilization. West is arguing that all the pieces of western civilization existed well before Pythagoras was even a thought, and those pieces are found in Egypt. And he has a point. I mean, Pythagoras lived roughly between 570 and 495 BCE, and while there is clearly some debate about the age of the Sphinx and Pyramids, no one would dispute that at the bare minimum, they were around as early as the Pharaoh Khafre, aka Chephren, who lived and reigned around 2570 BCE, so about 2000 years before Pythagoras.
And he does provide some interesting points about the very specific layout of the monuments of Egypt. And given that modern thought has it that civilization more or less starts with the Greeks, the precision of the monuments specifically calls that belief into question. And one of the more interesting aspects of this book are the footnotes. Although they’re not technically ”footnotes” but more like heavy excerpts from other books, some of which are used to support the central theories, some of which are opposing points of view. The supporting excerpts are pulled from many different fields, including math, medical, geodesy, art, architecture.
West builds a narrative, using de Lubicz’s work, about how advanced Egypt was, and well before Khafre came on the scene. He points out many reasons that civilization started way before Khafre, and it’s most likely that Khafre simply restored the Sphinx, but did not build it. West lays a solid ground work for a far advanced civilization that vanished at some point, and was replaced by the pharaoh’s, whose task was to restore and preserve what was left behind.
Now, a lot of this book, especially the early chapters, go into sacred geometry. I’m fine with the sacred part, I’m a witch, we live in the liminal spaces of sacredness. But Geometry and I have had a cordial dislike for each other since about the 6th grade, so my eyes kind of glazed over a bit there. But my interest perked back up once we got past the math parts and West started digging into the medicine used. Especially as, ever so slowly, east meets west in the medical fields, and things like acupuncture and massage therapy are acknowledged by western doctors to be highly beneficial.
His discussion of the Sphinx and the erosion patterns was particularly interesting, and this is what sparked Dr. Schoch’s interest in the matter as well. And even without reading Schoch’s specific, water erosion, conclusions, West does an outstanding job explaining why sand and wind erosion is unlikely. Namely, that for large periods of time, the Sphinx was buried under the sands of Egypt. Erosion, by it’s very nature, requires movement across surfaces. It’s the difference between placing a piece of sandpaper, grit side down, on a piece of wood. Just setting it there does nothing—it’s the back and forth motion that erodes and smooths the plank of wood.
If the Sphinx was buried, erosion could not have happened. And we know it was buried, because when Napolean worked his way to Egypt, the Sphinx was buried up to it’s neck, and was only slowly uncovered over the next century, and once it had been uncovered, the erosion was already there. There were a host of other reasons provided as to why wind and sand were unlikely culprits in the erosion, but one of the appendices addresses Schoch’s contributions briefly, and mentions many other geologists who agree that water erosion is the source of the damage. Including one of West’s most vigorous critics.
However, that critic, and I don’t recall his name, got his own geologist, who hypothesized that the erosion was caused by ground water seeping up. Not a geologist here…obviously…but even without West’s decimation of that hypothesis, my bullshit meter went off. In a desert environment, ground water would have to struggle awfully hard to erode anything. And honestly, if groundwater existed at the degree needed to cause erosion, anything capable of growing in the temple compound, likely would have sprung up. And we know things CAN grow in Egypt…just look at the Nile. Lot’s of things grow along the Nile, and the Sphinx is not that far from the Nile.
Anyway, this book covers a lot of ground, from sacred geometry to symbolic language. It raises a lot of questions that have yet to be answered, mostly due to academia stonewalling any theories outside the norm. The good news is, academia has been consistently shooting itself in the foot over the last decade at least. As more people doubt the qualifications of academics, more people will do their own research. West does include the point that people still put a lot of emphasis on that academic credential. But this book was released in the early 1990’s. That emphasis on credentialling is rapidly losing it’s validity as…again, to repeat the point…”experts” lose their credibility through fanaticism the “church of progress” as West calls it.
This book was a mixed bag for me. I enjoyed the premise. But the math…I know Pythagorean theorem. A^2 + B^2 = C^2. I know the speed of gravity is 9.8 meters/second^2. I know pi is 3.1415 and phi, the golden ratio, is 1.618. That sums up my knowledge of math. I will say this is like a highly condensed version of West’s documentary series, Magical Egypt. And if you struggle with math like I do, Magical Egypt is a little easier to digest.
But there’s good information in here, information that definitely makes me think about the far distant past, so far distant it most likely pre-dates Gobekli Tepe, and about which we will never know more, than the monuments they left behind.
