How have the idea and ideals of the House of Life survived the end of Ancient Egyptian civilisation?

No-one would deny the achievements that have arisen from religion; the Christian religion inspired the great works of engineering that are the Romanesque and Gothic Cathedrals of Europe, and the rock-hewn basilicas of Ethiopia, which demanded a thorough grounding in mathematics, engineering, astronomy and geology, as well as in Christian doctrine and esoteric Christian understanding. Islamic culture allowed for developments in mathematics, medicine, astronomy as well as some stunning architecture and feats of engineering. These were born out of societies where religion and science were not separated, but were considered part of a same sacred world-view. Yet it is undeniable that Christian and Muslim dogma at their most rigid have hampered scientific research and rejected the findings of science in several key areas, notably the origins of life and – in an earlier time – the cosmology of the universe, and the solar system in particular, where it contradicted religious dogma.

The response of science to such dogmatic strictures was – very reasonably – to sideline religion. Over the past three centuries in Europe and North America, this led to a divorce between sacred and secular science, a gradual erosion of spirituality from the centre of daily life and finally – a triumph of secular science to the point where the very word “science” has been monopolised by secular science, the notion of sacred sciences forgotten, and in the dominant Western and Westernised cultures, spirituality has overall been equated to superstition or woolly thinking. The few who ally both in their lives and work, like the biologist and Jesuit spiritual thinker Teilhard de Chardin, have had their legacy split between the scientists, who cordon off and praise the scientific thinking; and the spiritual followers, who embrace the spiritual message but divorce it from a cool scientific mind that makes them uncomfortable. Philosophers have attempted to keep the whole scientific-spiritual heritage of Teilhard de Chardin intact, but approaching it from a purely rational-intellectual perspective, they miss the very heart of it – its spiritual imagination.

Religious dogmas, far from disappearing in the face of triumphant secular science, have continued as the ideological and political battlegrounds they have been since the rise of the monotheisms in the centuries between the death of Christ and the triumph of the Muslim caliphate in the Middle East, North Africa and Southern Europe.

So what can Ancient Egypt teach us on how we acquire and pass on knowledge and wisdom? We know that Egyptian religion was pervasive and touched all areas of life, every bit as much as religion did in Mediaeval Europe. Does that mean that religious dogma prevented the free pursuit of knowledge in Egypt, in the same way it did in Europe?

The development of Egyptian cosmology over thousands of years, the varying myths that proliferated, apparently contradicting each other, the fluid nature of the Neteru (gods and goddesses), all suggest that the opposite might have been the case: instead of the various branches of knowledge, and science in particular, being hampered in their development by religious dogma, spiritual understanding evolved and developed as knowledge expanded. Sacred knowledge revealed in altered states of consciousness and practical or abstract knowledge gained through reasoning, observation and empirical evidence grew together.

For instance, the evolving myths of Osiris and Isis seem to have grown out of astronomical observations and a better understanding of stellar precession. The subtle understanding of Isis both as a bright and gentle mother, and Black Isis, an older, less visible but extremely powerful magical goddess, seems to be related to the astronomical knowledge of Sirius A (bright Sirius) and its binary partner Sirius B, a small but very dense and powerful white dwarf *. Astronomers observed and calculated these cosmic phenomena; mystics dreamt and explored in meditation their mythical counterparts and symbolic imagery. But unlike today, mystics and astronomers worked together and could be the same people. The physical and spiritual understanding of the cosmos were held as equally valid and interdependent: both demonstrated the greatness of Maat – cosmic balance.

It would have made no sense to an Egyptian priest-scholar to say: “we cannot change the written stories of the Neteru, they are factual and doctrinal – therefore science must bow down to these existing stories and demonstrate their literal truth.” Because myths were regarded as greater cosmological truths that affected both the macrocosm (the cosmos) and the microcosm (life on earth) – and not as historical and literal facts, the scribes of the Houses of Life considered it entirely natural that myths evolve. Different religious centres propagated different versions of the same myths and different myths that contradicted other myths. Myths were understood to explain the operations of the cosmos and the complexity of existence, and were probably the result of the explorations of priests (including the Pharaoh, as the representative of the Neteru on earth) while in what we would call today different states of consciousness – meditation, shamanic journey, astral projection and dreams.

Much as the ancient Rishis, the wise of India, had explored the fabric of the universe and of life in states of deep meditation, so did the religious initiates of Ancient Egypt. These journeys and moments of revelation during meditation complemented studies and reasoning made with the conscious intellect and gave to all branches of knowledge a spiritual underpinning. A physician would have looked at a disease from various angles, all of which amounted to a holistic approach: studied what his predecessors had written about a disease, made his own conscious observations of the physical and mental state of the patient, but also examined the dreams of his patient, relied on his intuitive sense and gone himself into a dream-state so as to understand the spirit of the disease. A disease was seen as a physical manifestation of a spiritual disorder (though not necessarily a punishment – rather it revealed a spiritual imbalance, which might or might not have been caused by an action committed by the patient). To restore order, that is, spiritual balance and physical health, both levels had to be diagnosed and treated together.

The funerary works that have come out of Ancient Egypt – either the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts, or the New Kingdom Book of the Dead – suggest the intense shamanic work that some priestly initiates from the Houses of Life must have undertook in the Duat to return with such detailed imagery. This work would have stood as the most advanced level of initiation, but also allowed those priests to bring back the knowledge that would allow them write the appropriate spells, poems and incantations to guide and help the dead in their transformational travels through the Duat (the underworld), and share with with a select number among the living the secrets of the transformations undergone by the soul after death.

Where now do we find the successors of the Houses of Life?

The most obvious answer is: the universities. These are the repositories of knowledge, matrices of research and production of new knowledge, and centres of learning and training in both vocational fields like medicine or engineering, intellectual areas such as history or secular science such as physics or astronomy. Like the Egyptian Houses of Life, they have massive libraries and pride themselves both on their continuity and their innovation. But the separation between mind and soul, between secular and sacred knowledge that is the Western heritage is very obvious in universities – the knowledge that is studied, propagated and created in universities the world round is overwhelmingly secular, and there is no place for spiritual knowledge or the sacred sciences. Worse: the sacred has been depreciated in universities to the point that intense spiritual experiences can end up being pathologised in psychological studies.

Religious leaders – whose work is mainly outside of the university, but who have some links to universities – have taken one of several approaches: they are either aggressively anti-scientific and perpetuate the split in the other direction; they have disguised a literalist religious dogma with an approximation of secular science – but which “real” secular scientists discard on the whole as pseudo-science: this is the case of Creationism; or, in an attempt to woo the agnostic leaders of the dominant culture, they have distanced themselves from spiritual and mystical experiences, paying lip service to mysticism without encouraging it: in other words, they have secularised religion. There are some religious leaders who have embraced the need for spiritual imagination and mystical experience alongside study, piety and living a morally prescribed life, but these are few and it is rarely for their spiritual work that they are known and honoured**.

Well apart from the universities, smaller, far less prestigious – and for the most part marginalised by the secular centres of culture in Western or Westernised societies and by religious institutions – are the schools and centres that still teach, research, practice and create the sacred sciences. These tend to follow one philosophy or belief set, rather than teaching a range of sacred sciences: and so we have reiki schools, yoga schools, Chi Qong schools, shamanic practice schools, schools that teach Hawaiian healing techniques and others that teach crystal therapy or tarot. Some schools teach kabbalah, while other organisations look at the Western esoteric tradition (including the Hermetic Qabalah, an offshoot of Jewish Kabbalah), and ritual magic, a form of theurgy: their aim is to recreate in modern form the mystery schools of late antiquity. Increasingly, inspired by the still-living practices of many African cultures and Native Americans, there is an interest among all those who practice the sacred sciences, in ancestral practices, the honouring of ancestors, folk rituals as living spiritual practices and a non-physical exploration of the land and its spirits, which naturally leads to reverence and respect. A few of the mystery schools have taken up the challenge of studying the range of subtle energies of body and earth, native and hermetic traditions and several strands of occult knowledge, while openly encouraging intellectual study – at the risk of being called synchretic or overly eclectic by the others***.

In the West, and increasingly throughout the world, this disparate body of sacred science as a whole is called “New Age” and is not considered “knowledge” at all, far less science. Some of this criticism is fair, as there are New Age publications that present the results of spiritual imagination and revelation as historical or scientific fact (in the secular sense). Some New Age thinking and practices suffer from a notorious lack of intellectual soundness. Nevertherless, much of what is lumped under the label “New Age” has its roots or its inspiration long before our amnesiac era and many of its branches, such as Kabbalah or Yoga, have developed over time exceptional intellectual, physical and spiritual rigour, which serves as an example to the newer forms of spiritual expression, such as Reiki.****

There is no single institution in the world that replicates the full range of activities and above all, the holistic, unifying philosophy of the Ancient Egyptian Houses of Life. No place where a student can study both Western medicine and shamanic or subtle energy healing techniques, each understood thoroughly at their own level and given equal weight; no research centre where a microbiologist can conduct a double-blind experiment to study the physical conditions of cancerous cells, and also discover the spiritual condition of those same cancerous cells through lucid dreaming. Nowhere can a legal class consider the development of the law of Human Rights and contemplate the greater cosmological order at macrocosmic and microcosmic levels – what the Egyptians called the Ma’at – which underlies all rights and responsibilities. Nowhere can historians study and compare primary written sources and also enter imaginatively a period of history and its specific culture through oral traditions, storytelling and visualisation.

Indeed, the very idea makes scientists, lawyers and historians giggle (or lose their temper, depending on their mood); it also puts spiritual practitioners on edge, as many have reacted to being sneered by turning on secular, orthodox knowledge and rejecting even its effective results. Those scientists and intellectuals that have dared openly to breach the barrier between secular knowledge and sacred science in their work, especially their scientific work – Rupert Sheldrake, James Lovelock, Deepak Chopra, R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, the scientists that ran the PEAR experiments in Princeton – have attracted attacks from the mainstream of secular science.

In the face of such attacks or distortions, it’s not surprising that few scientists or intellectuals – even those who are interested in the sacred sciences and do imagine the possibility of reconciliation between secular and sacred knowledge – dare to raise their heads above the parapet. In time, I think more will do so. As the excesses of the New Age revolution die down, as intellectuals and scientists learn they can meditate and dialogue with the invisible without becoming woolly-headed or loosing their capacity for sound judgement (quite the opposite!), the more thorough branches of sacred science will remain and develop more openly. Will they ever be fully admitted to university or in the mainstream of culture? A handful already are: healing practices that incorporate the knowledge of subtle energies, such as shiatsu or acupuncture, are taught in a few universities; yoga has come out of the closet not only as physical exercise, but as a sacred body of wisdom, one of India’s greatest exports as well as perennially popular at home. Training to become an acupuncturist or a yoga teacher takes years of hard work, made all the more difficult because the student must attain both intellectual and spiritual mastery.

Alongside these encouraging developments are some less encouraging signs. The Western esoteric tradition continues to be looked at with suspicion – and even outright hostility – by many who make mainstream culture in the universities or the media. Despite the fashion for “Kabbalah” launched by Madonna, Jewish mysticism and Hermetic Western occultism – by their association with oracular traditions, astrology and magical ritual – are regarded variously as forms of dark-age superstition, methods for hoodwinking the public, devil-worship or cults. Mention honouring your ancestors anywhere outside of Africa or the more traditional Asian families, and you are likely to receive a blank stare, a chuckle or a horrified look (and sometimes all three). Mention ancestral cellular memory and that reaction increases, despite the fact that those people who have most discussed and researched the phenomenon are medical doctors and biologists.

So what can a modern seeker do, who wishes to bridge the gap between secular and sacred knowledge? How can someone, today, become a yogi and a doctor and combine those two bodies of knowledge into an overarching healing practice, that seeks to heal the soul as well as the body? How can an architect learn to build according to the spiritual cosmic laws as well as applying sound engineering techniques, as his Egyptian predecessors did? How does a writer learn to ally literary skill and spiritual rigour?

The Egyptian House of Life grew out of a holistic but unified world-view and spiritual tradition, attached to temples that everyone in the land respected. In today’s mostly multicultural societies, where many world-views compete and complement each other, such an institution couldn’t exist in the same way. To find a comparable mix of cultures in the Ancient world, we have to look not to the world of Pharaonic Egypt, but to the brash, spiritually and intellectually exciting world of Alexandria, where much of the scientific and intellectual foundation of our present culture was concentrated and brought together from all areas of the (then) known world. The Alexandrian schools brought all this knowledge together and left a legacy of universalism and respect for mutliculturalism that is with us still; ideas, religions, sciences were syncretised. But the Alexandrian schools, for all their neoplatonic bias, lacked the spiritual foundation of the Houses of Life. Inquiring into their subjects purely with their reason, they lost the broader imaginative view of the meditator and dreamer.

In Western and Westernised societies over the past few hundred years (and indeed, for longer – starting with the Greeks), too much emphasis has been placed on the second quality at the expense of the first. There is an imbalance in our minds and world that the Egyptians would have recognised as an attack on Maat – cosmic balance. Too little – if any – emphasis is given to spiritual and imaginative development in education at any level; hardly any in the workplace or in social interaction. People who have integrated the spiritual imagination fully into their lives are often regarded as cranks (I know, I am one!). Yet we cannot do without it! Societies are sick, our planet is sick – because we have sacrificed this vital part of our human experience, and forgotten that spiritual imagination and secular reason are equal partners in our evolution.

For the most part, the House of Life has become, of necessity, an individual institution – a one-man band, where a single individual must look to teachers, mentors, colleagues and like-minded researchers in more than one place and seek to combine within himself secular and sacred knowledge. This demands rigour in many ways: practice of meditation and other states of consciousness alongside intellectual and secular scientific pursuits in one’s chosen field, to which must be added physical exercise practiced mindfully, for the benefit of body and soul; understanding of subtle energies as well as physical energy. Most importantly, a flexibility of mind, a freedom from dogma that allows both forms of knowledge to co-evolve and feed each other, without one compromising the other: and all that in the midst of a culture that pressures to keep them apart, piles ever more distractions, expenses and responsibilities on the shoulders of individuals and deems spiritual pursuits to be mere hobbies.

In my imagination, I see another kind of House of Life: institutions of research and learning that are as multicultural and open to a diversity of influences and traditions as the Alexandrian schools; but have the strong, heart-based spiritual foundation of the Egyptian Houses of Life; where, alongside a curriculum of secular science and humanities, we can practice the sacred sciences of contemplation, meditation, yoga, chi Qung, shamanic journeying, lucid dreaming and the understanding of dreams; where we can dance, make music and poetry; where we learn to be sensitive to and manipulate subtle energies; and these unifying practices would balance the separating activities of intellectual discrimination and secular scientific research. The researchers and teachers would be scientists, historians, mathematicians, poets, dancers, musicians, yogis, churchmen, imams, rabbis, lamas, saddhus, Sufi masters, reiki masters, kabbalists, hermeticists, shamans, diviners, doctors, lawyers, midwives, witches, singers, craftsmen and women, film-makers, human rights campaigners, novelists, martial arts practitioners, mask-makers, mediators. The young people schooled in such a way would be whole, no longer split between spiritual and secular, able to think clearly and feel deeply, to reason and to meditate, to trust their intellect and their intuition, feel at ease in their bodies, their minds and their souls. Just as we need both hemispheres of our brain to work in sync, so we need both the organising work of secular reason and the unifying work of spiritual imagination.

Notes

*We have only circumstantial evidence from myths that the Egyptians were aware of Sirius B. However the Dogon of West Africa have known of it for millenia and it is reasonable to conclude that its existence was deduced (if not observed) by other great African civilisations, including the Egyptian, as it affects Sirius A, a star which was closely observed by the Egyptians to the point that it guided much of their agricultural and architectural science. Sirius was the star of Isis as well as a goddess in her own right.

** As well as the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, mentioned above, another such exception is the late Michael Mayne, Dean of Westminster Abbey, who was able to ally the office of a high churchman in the Anglican communion and an open – and open-hearted – spiritual and imaginative life, which he wrote about in a number of books (This Sunrise of Wonder; Learning to Dance; The Enduring Melody). Archbishop Desmond Tutu has also written about the need for an integrated spirituality: indeed, he is clear that without such a strong spiritual underpinning, he would not have had the courage to campaign for human rights and take on the perpetrators of apartheid so courageously.

*** I have experienced and can recommend three such places of learning: Sentiers de Sagesse, the Way of Wisdom, ran by Marie-Noelle Anderson, an inspiring teacher, shaman and holistic healer, who works deeply with myth (available in English and French); Hallowquest – ran by John and Caitlin Mattews, who work at researching and educating on both native British and Irish traditions and the Western esoteric tradition; and The House of Life Mystery School, a modern mystery school ran by the wonderful Naomi Ozaniec, an Egyptian-inspired school which allies both a solid intellectual knowledge of several traditions, with a heart-based spiritual approach.

****The best known form of Reiki is the original Usui Reiki, first taught by Master Usui in Japan in the 1920s. Although the training in this form of subtle energy was always rigorous, prescribing many hours of meditation and practice, in the West it has suffered in three ways: slackness in practice (many teachers don’t consider it necessary to meditate or practice much, some teachers in fact don’t teach at all, but simply attune the students, even at a distance); factual inaccuracy about the origin Reiki (Master Usui was transformed from a former Buddhist monk into a Christian, in order to be more “acceptable” to Americans in the 1950s, when Reiki was first brought to the West); and some teachers have priced their teachings outrageously high. As a result, several self-governing bodies have grown around the world to try and bring consistency and quality among Reiki Masters and in the teaching of Reiki as a sacred science, and moderate any cult-like tendencies to rip people off. I was fortunate to be taught by a gifted and serious-minded teacher, Markus van der Westhuizen in Cape Town, South Africa. His thoughts on Reiki can be discovered on Reiki World, a website he runs and which does much to raise both the intellectual and spiritual standards of Reiki. The best books on Reiki make it clear that Reiki is a spiritual science that demands commitment and daily practice.

Copyright Sophie Nussle 2010