Everything Old is New Again -- Man and the Anthropocosm

It is nothing human and personal that we are short of. What we lack is cosmic life, the sun in us and the moon in us.
-D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse

Man is not a ‘product' of the universe nor a 'scale model' of it; he is to be regarded as an embodiment, its 'essence' incarnated in physical form.
-John Anthony West, Serpent in the Sky

Starting with a single revelatory observation in Egypt in 1937, the preeminent Egyptologist, R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, over the course of some twenty years, was able to piece together the sacred science of the ancients and present it in rigorously documented fashion.

As John Anthony West retells it: "Schwaller’s work concerned mainly the New Kingdom temple of Luxor, which he called "the Temple of Man." In its measurements, geometry, harmonies, and proportions, he discovered the elements of a profound spiritual cosmology in which art, religion, philosophy, and science were fused into a single comprehensive doctrine—the sacred science of the ancient world.

"All those bizarre animal-headed gods were not figments of the primitive imagination or carry-overs from still more primitive animistic religions, as was commonly believed, but rather were embodiments of cosmic principles—the "Ideas" through which Universal Consciousness descended into the manifest universe. It is precisely the recognition of such principles that is lacking in our own technologically brilliant, but philosophically naive and spiritually empty secular science.

"Fertilization, gestation, birth, growth, maturity, senescence, death, rebirth, and resurrection are the principles of the organic world. Polarity, relationship, substantiality, potentiality, time-and-space, and process are among the principles of the cosmological world. These, given appropriate names and forms were the "gods" of Egypt. Each was associated with its own number symbolism, which in turn commanded the geometry of the temples erected to commemorate that "god" and to evoke in the eye and heart and intellect of the beholder communion with that principle or set of principles.

"Schwaller called the Egyptian sacred science the "Doctrine of the Anthropocosm" (or human-cosmos). We embody within us, as human beings, all the laws and principles that operate within the greater, divine cosmos that sustains and embraces us. And our intelligence, correctly deployed, gives us access to the knowledge of all there is. Acquisition of that knowledge holds the promise of eternal life, immortality, and entry into the Higher Consciousness responsible for our being here."

Perhaps the greatest difference between us and the pagans lies in our different relation to the cosmos. With us, all is personal. Landscape and the sky, these are to us the delicious background of our personal life, and no more. Even the universe of the scientist is little more than an extension of our personality, to us. To the pagan, landscape and personal background were on the whole indifferent. But the cosmos was a very real thing. A man lived with the cosmos, and knew it greater than himself.

Don't let us imagine we see the sun as the old civilisations saw it. All we see is a scientific little luminary, dwindled to a ball of blazing gas. In the centuries before Ezekiel and John, the sun was still a magnificent reality, men drew forth from him strength and splendour, and gave him back homage and lustre and thanks. But in us, the connection is broken, the responsive centres are dead. Our sun is a quite different thing from the cosmic sun of the ancients, so much more trivial. We may see what we call the sun, but we have lost Helios forever, and the great orb of the Egyptians still more. We have lost the cosmos, by coming out of responsive connection with it, and this is our chief tragedy. What is our petty little love of nature— Nature!!—compared to the ancient magnificent living with the cosmos, and being honoured by the cosmos!
-D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse

The Egyptian philosophy of the Anthropocosm found its way into two familiar sayings, the Hermetic 'As above, so below' and the Biblical 'God fashioned man in His image'. "But both these sayings," as West informs us in his masterful study of de Lubicz and his work, Serpent in the Sky, "while true, incline to misleading interpretations. The first lends itself to too sharp a distinction, while the second lends itself to too close a commingling. Man is not exactly a little universe to be regarded as distinct from a greater universe. On the other hand, the Biblical phrase lends itself to pictures of a muscular God with a long grey beard, which is not right either."

To the ancient consciousness, Matter, Materia, or Substantial things are God. A great rock is God. A pool of water is God. And why not? The longer we live the more we return to the oldest of all visions. A great rock is God. I can touch it. It is undeniable. It is God.

Then those things that move are doubly God. That is, we are doubly aware of their godhead: that which is, and that which moves: twice godly. Everything is a " thing ": and every " thing " acts and has effect: the universe is a great complex activity of things existing and moving and having effect. And all this is God.

Today, it is almost impossible for us to realise what the old Greeks meant by god, or theos. Everything was theos; but even so, not at the same moment. At the moment, whatever struck you was god. If it was a pool of water, the very watery pool might strike you: then that was god; or the blue gleam might suddenly occupy your consciousness: then that was god; or a faint vapour at evening rising might catch the imagination: then that was theos; or thirst might overcome you at the sight of the water: then the thirst itself was god; or you drank, and the delicious and indescribable slaking of thirst was the god; or you felt the sudden chill of the water as you touched it: and then another god came into being, "the cold": and this was not a quality, it was an existing entity, almost a creature, certainly a theos: the cold; or again, on the dry lips something suddenly alighted: it was " the moist", and again a god. Even to the early scientists or philosophers, "the cold", "the moist", "the hot", "the dry" were things in themselves, realities, gods, theoi. And they did things.

With the coming of Socrates and "the spirit", the cosmos died. For two thousand years man has been living in a dead or dying cosmos, hoping for a heaven hereafter. And all the religions have been religions of the dead body and the postponed reward: eschatological, to use a pet word of the scientists.
-D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse

As West concludes: "It is my own conviction that no human civilization worthy of that name is possible if it is not founded on an understanding that the human soul is immortal by nature or (as Hermes Trismegistus puts it in the Hermetica) "may strive to become so." The lunatic asylum we live in at present is the result of three centuries of materialistic science and a deluded rationalism supposedly (though not actually) based on that science. Through Schwaller's work in developing the Doctrine of the Anthropocosm, it becomes apparent that the ancient sacred science is indeed a science. It is not credulous superstition. It is not belief. It is not even faith (emotional experiential knowledge, as opposed to belief). It is a science.

"If we are to escape from the asylum (a.k.a. the Church of Progress), it can only come through the reestablishment of that sacred science on this earth. While we surely will not be building pyramids or Temples of Luxor again, or mummifying our pharaohs either, the principles upon which the Egyptian doctrine were founded are eternal. It is not impossible that, before it is too late, a way will be found to reestablish that Doctrine on earth in a context and form appropriate for our upcoming Age of Aquarius."

Who says the sun cannot speak to me! The sun has a great blazing consciousness, and I have a little blazing consciousness. When I can strip myself of the trash of personal feelings and ideas, and get down to my naked sun-self, then the sun and I can commune by the hour, the blazing interchange, and he gives me life, sun-life, and I send him a little new brightness from the world of the bright blood. ...

Now this may sound nonsense, but that is merely because we are fools. There is an eternal vital correspondence between our blood and the sun: there is an eternal vital correspondence between our nerves and the moon. If we get out of contact and harmony with the sun and moon, then both turn into great dragons of destruction against us. The sun is a great source of blood-vitality, it streams strength to us. But once we resist the sun, and say: It is a mere ball of gas!—then the very streaming vitality of sunshine turns into subtle disintegrative force in us, and undoes us. The same with the moon, the planets, the great stars. They are either our makers or our unmakers. There is no escape.

We and the cosmos are one. The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great gleaming nerve-centre from which we quiver forever. ...

When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos.—It is nothing human and personal that we are short of. What we lack is cosmic life, the sun in us and the moon in us.
-D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse

Commenting on R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz’s masterwork, The Temple in Man, the translator, Robert Lawlor writes: “As a civilization, Egypt certainly holds up to us a model of this reintegrated expression of the various planes and parts of our individual natures and of the cosmic life of our universe, and thus may prove of greater value in the spiritual crisis now confronting us than the religions of transcendence adapted from various ancient Eastern cultures. Egypt was not of the lineage that advocates transcendence and denial of material existence; it taught, rather, transformation. The ancient name for Egypt was ‘Kemi’, meaning, ‘Black Earth,’ the field of vital transformation; the Arabs, Schwaller de Lubicz points out, called Egypt ‘Al-Kemi’. Thus we find in its very name that age-old, universal doctrine so often disguised in symbols and parables. This doctrine encompasses a vision so the principle of matter as a field of existence responsive to and capable of being transformed by spiritual influences brought about through the evolution of embodied and individualized consciousness. The West today could benefit from a philosophy of spiritual depth that does not suppress, diminish, or deny our intellectual and material nature, but rather fulfills our commitment to the meaningfulness of human life and this material expression of the universe.”

“This lost alchemy, the pursuit of which extends back to its flowering in ancient Egypt,” continues Lawlor, “can be seen as the hidden esoteric roots of both civilization and individuals throughout recorded time. It is this same alchemy which is at the core of the vision of the anthropocosm—of Man as being and containing within himself the entire universe. This vision which is introduced by Schwaller de Lubicz in these pages and expanded and brought to life in his major work, The Temple of Man, leaves us with a single, enduring message; the inevitable resurrection of the spiritual essence which has involved itself in matter in the form of organic creative energy.”

“This resurrection depends upon the transformation ofthe material universe—or to express the idea more as Egypt left it imprinted in the stones of Luxor: the birth of divine man (symbolized by the Pharaoh) depends upon the transformation of the universal mother (materia prima). This transformation was considered the sole cosmic goal. Every human birth participates in this alchemy, either in an awakened manner through the intentional perfecting and expression of one’s higher nature, or unawakened, through the tumult and suffering of karmic experience leading eventually to a spiritual self-awareness, the temple in man. The intensification and heightening of human consciousness was believed to cause biological and even cellular change in the physical body of the initiate. This divinization of the individual body, on the microcosmic level, comprised the goal and purpose of the evolution of human consciousness in general.”

Or, as Lawrence more succinctly summed it up, unifying the old and the new in a singular vision:

What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his "soul". Man wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.
- from Apocalypse

Posted by Upwinger at October 2, 2005 09:27 AM