John Anthony West - Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt

by Peter Tompkins

In the current joust between materialist and metaphysician, with admirers of the former screaming for blood from the latter, John Anthony West has taken up the banner in support of the Alsatian philosopher R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz. It is the thesis of de Lubicz, lucidly developed by West, that the builders of ancient Egypt had far more sophisticated understanding of metaphysics and of the laws which govern man and this universe than most Egyptologists have been willing to admit.

It is a striking thesis, but unpopular with orthodox scholars who have deliberately ignored it for twenty years, though they proffer no argument against it other than that it contravenes accepted dogma.

R. A. Schwaller who in real life was knighted de Lubicz by the Lithuanian Prince Luzace de Lubicz for his contribution to the liberation of Lithuania from both the Russians and the Germans at the end of World War I has mustered an overwhelming argument in favor of the scientific and spiritual development of the ancient Egyptians; but the argument is complex. Assembled over a period of ten years after a sojourn of fifteen years in Luxor (1936-1951), the evidence is based on the incredibly painstaking measurements and drawings of the stones and statuary of the great Temple of Luxor made by his stepdaughter, Lucie Lamy. This material he incorporated into several published works, of which the most important are the three massive volumes of Le Temple de l'Homme . Unfortunately, this work came out in a limited edition, is hard to find and is not easy to read in the original French, though an English translation is now at the printers.

Even so, it remains difficult until one has grasped the fundamentals of de Lubicz' philosophy, a task which West renders much easier by carefully digesting the bulk of de Lubicz' work and by consulting at length with Lucie Lamy, an invaluable aid not only because of her intimate understanding of her stepfather's thought but because of her role as trustee for his unpublished works.

In his daring defense of de Lubicz, West battles for a wisdom kept alive through centuries, despite doctors, lawyers, priests and undertakers who wished to dissect it into carrion. With a stylish lance, refined as a novelist and playwright, West also pricks the bombast accumulated about Egypt and other ancient civilizations that they were mounted by crude and idolatrous priests, primitive and superstitious.

West says he took up the gauntlet in the cause of de Lubicz because he regards de Lubicz' contribution as the most important single work of scholarship of this century... one which calls for a total revision of modern man's conception of history and of human social evolution.

Since the phonetic values of Egyptian hieroglyphs were discovered by Champollion at the beginning of the last century, the writings of the Egyptians have been interpreted by Egyptologists with as little understanding of the thoughts and beliefs expressed in them as have modern academic teachers of English understood the hermetic philosophy enshrined in Shakespeare. As it happens, the data are the same in both.

De Lubicz was well versed in hermetic wisdom, with a solid founding in the religions of the East, passed on through Hindus, Chinese, Buddhists, Theosophists, Anthroposophists, and Yogis. De Lubicz soon found the same wisdom built into the glyphs, statues, and temples of Egypt.

By interpreting the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs as symbolic carriers of a hermetic message, de Lubicz discovered in Egypt the earliest known source of a Sacred Science which forms the basis of what has come to be known as the Perennial Philosophy, fragments of which have been kept alive among the Gnostics, Sufis, Cabalists, Rosicrucians, and Masons, but primarily by a series of enlightened and clairvoyant masters.