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  Heliopolis was the principal religious centre of the Pyramid Age, and its theology - the first organised system of religion and cosmology known in Egypt - inspired and motivated the building of the great monuments at Giza. To people of that time and place, theology represented the sum total of all knowledge. All that existed was God: everything was a manifestation of Him/Her, and everything was imbued with the divine spark. Therefore the study of anything was in itself a glorious religious act. To learn was to worship and at the same time to progress along one’s own path to godhood. Heliopolis is indelibly linked with Giza, which lies some 12 miles to its south-west. Indeed, the three pyramids are arranged so they point to Heliopolis.4

  As ‘the chosen seats of the gods’ and ‘the birthplace of the gods’, Heliopolis was the most sacred site of Egypt. It contained temples to the creator god Atum, to Ra - the sun god himself — and to Horus, as well as to Isis, Thoth and the Nile god Hapi. One of the city’s most renowned buildings was the hwt-psdt, the Mansion of the Great Ennead. Another structure was the House of the ,Phoenix, which may have contained the sacred ben-ben stone, Egypt’s most holy ‘relic’, which was possibly meteoritic in origin.

  The priesthood of Heliopolis was famed for its learning and wisdom. Two of its greatest achievements were in the fields of medicine and astronomy — its high priests held the title ‘Greatest of Seers’, generally understood to mean ‘Chief Astronomer’.5 Its priests were still regarded as the wisest and most learned in Egypt at the time of Herodotus (fifth century BCE) and even remembered in Strabo’s day, as late as the first century CE. The priesthood was even famed among the Greeks, and it is said that, among others, Pythagoras, Plato, Eudoxus and Thales went to Heliopolis to study. And although we know few of the names of the great Egyptians who were its graduates, we do know that Imhotep, the genius who designed the first pyramid - the Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara - and was venerated as a god for his medical knowledge, was a High Priest there.6

  Significantly, the priesthood probably included women. An inscription of the Fourth Dynasty, roughly contemporary with the Giza pyramids, refers to a woman in the Temple of Thoth holding the title ‘Mistress of the House of Books’.7

  It is possible to piece together the main elements of the Heliopolitan religious beliefs from the Pyramid Texts. The earliest text, in the pyramid of Unas, dates from around 2350 BCE, some 200 years after the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza is believed to have been built. In fact most Egyptologists agree that the Pyramid Texts are much older than the earliest surviving inscriptions, and that they - and the religious and cosmological ideas — existed at the beginning of the First Dynasty, the ‘official’ birth of Egyptian civilisation, around 3100 BCE.8 The Pyramid Texts are the oldest surviving religious writings in the world.9

  Customarily divided into short ‘chapters’ called ‘utterances’ by Egyptologists, these ancient texts form descriptions of the funeral rites and afterlife journey of the king (strictly speaking, ‘pharaoh’ is a much later term). There is every reason to believe that the Pyramid Texts are not, in fact, merely funeral texts, nor is the wisdom embedded in them relevant solely to the kings of a long-dead civilisation.

  The central theme of the texts is the afterlife, or astral, journey in which the king, identified with Osiris, ascends to the heavens where he is transformed into a star. He also encounters various gods and other entities, and is finally accepted into their ranks. He is then reincarnated as his own successor, in the form of Osiris’s son, Horus, thus ensuring the literal divinity of the royal line and maintaining the continuity of Egyptian culture.

  The Pyramid Texts are undoubtedly the product of the Heliopolitan priesthood,10 and represent the only surviving unadulterated expression of their religion, and probably the only writings of the religion ever inscribed outside of Heliopolis itself at that time. The same ideas underpin later funeral inscriptions, such as the Coffin Texts (written inside sarcophagi of the Middle Kingdom, 2055-1650 BCE) and the so-called Book of the Dead, though these were also influenced by other, rival religious systems. The Pyramid Texts hold the key to reconstructing the beliefs of ancient Heliopolis.

  A further problem arises as the Pyramid Texts were intended for a specific purpose, not as a general dissertation on theology. One analogy is with a Christian funeral service today. Obviously it would feature references to Christian beliefs, such as Jesus dying on the cross to save us, which Christians understand, while anyone unfamiliar with the religion would feel completely lost. The Pyramid Texts, in much the same way, are not the equivalent of a Heliopolitan Bible, but more like a prayer book.

  A study of the underlying beliefs of the Pyramid Texts reveals an extraordinarily sophisticated yet economical theology and cosmology that can be read on many levels. Several complex concepts are expressed simultaneously in its imagery. There are many academic reconstructions of Heliopolitan thought, but the one we believe to make most sense of the data is that of the American professor of religious history, Karl W. Luckert, as described in his seminal book Egyptian Light and Hebrew Fire (1991). According to this, the system is one of deceptive simplicity, hiding a rich and awesome complexity. We came to realise that Heliopolitan beliefs concerning the nature of the universe, consciousness, life and what happens after death are both mystical and practical, yet also incorporate knowledge that rivals that of the most cutting-edge modem science.

  It has long been recognised that the Pyramid Texts contain astronomical material. Recent books have argued that these ideas are neither primitive nor superstitious — as many academics still believe - but reveal a detailed and sophisticated understanding of the movement of heavenly bodies. They even take into account the phenomenon known as the precession of the equinoxes, a heavenly cycle of nearly 26,000 years that was deemed to have been discovered as late as the second century BCE by the Greeks (who even then got it wrong).11 This civilisation existed at least five millennia ago. On such a timeline our own superstitious Dark Ages, when the world was believed to be flat, seem like yesterday.

  The most fundamental revelation of the Pyramid Texts is that, despite our preconceptions, the Heliopolitan religion was essentially monotheistic. Its many gods, often animal-headed, were understood to represent the manifold aspects of the one creator god, Atum.

  The Heliopolitan religion incorporated the concept of a mystical union with the ‘higher’ god forms, and even with the source of all creation, Atum himself. This union was the true objective of the process described in the Pyramid Texts, the destination of the soul’s ultimate journey. According to the standard view, this was relevant only to the king in his afterlife state, but we believe it was not a journey reserved only for royalty — nor even for the dead. The Pyramid Texts in fact describe a secret technique for enabling a man or woman to encounter God and - dead or merely out of the body - to discover some of his knowledge for themselves.

  Atum stood at the apex of the Great Ennead, or the nine primary gods of Egypt. However, exemplifying the concept of ‘one god, many god forms’, the nine themselves were considered as One, the other eight representing different aspects of Atum.12 This is a similar idea to that of the Christian Trinity. As Professor Luckert says: ‘The entire theological system can be visualised as a flow of creative vitality, emanating outward from the godhead, thinning out as it flows further from its source.’13

  Before Atum’s act of creation, the universe was a formless, watery void, called Nun. Out of this void emerged a phallic-shaped hill, the sacred Hill of Atum. Although a metaphor, it was also believed that this landmark was a physical place, the real site of the beginning of all things. Atum’s temple in Heliopolis was probably built on this hill, although some Egyptologists have recently argued it was actually the rising ground of the Giza plateau. Others suggest that the pyramids themselves were intended to represent the Primeval Mound.14

  The writings of Victorian — and even more recent — Egyptologists have been notably coy or tight-lipped about the story of Atum’s act of creation.
In fact, he ejaculated the universe as a result of masturbating himself to an explosive orgasm. Though this inevitably invites jokes about the ‘Big Bang’, it is actually rather an accurate image. Atum’s life-giving burst of energy seeded the void of Nun, pushing back its boundaries to give way to the expansion of material creation. In the original story, Atum was considered to be androgynous: his phallus represented the male principle, while his hand represented the female principle. This defines one of the fundamental tenets of the Heliopolitan system and all Egyptian thinking, namely that of the eternal and quintessential balance of male and female, the yin-yang polarity without which, they believed, chaos would rule.

  From Atum’s arching semen the universe proceeded to unfold, gradually becoming manifest in the physical, material world that we inhabit, but only after passing through several other stages. From the creative act, two beings, Shu and Tefnut, emerged in the dividing of the first principle. Shu is male, representing the creative power, and Tefnut is female, representing a principle of order that limits, controls and shapes Shu’s power. Tefnut is also represented as the goddess Ma’at, ruler of eternal justice.15 Together, Shu and Tefnut are sometimes jointly called the Ruti, represented in physical form as two lions (or rather, a lion and a lioness).

  From the union of Shu and Tefnut were born Geb (the earth god) and Nut (the sky goddess), representing the elements of the visible cosmos, more manifest forms of their ‘parents’. Geb and Nut, in turn, gave birth to two pairs of brother-sister twins: the famous quartet of Isis and Osiris and Nepthys and her brother-consort, Set. They express the principle of duality in two ways: male and female, and positive-negative/light-dark. Nepthys is the ‘dark sister’ of the beneficent Isis, while Set is the destructive, obstructive force opposing Osiris’s civilising and creative character. These four deities were considered to be closer to us and the material world, than their forebears, although still inhabiting the world of spirit beings ‘behind the veil’. Luckert says that they ‘exist low enough to participate more intimately in the human experience of life and death’ and that they operate ‘on a smaller and more visible scale than their parent(s)’.16

  Collectively, these nine gods make up the Great Ennead, but they remain only expressions of Atum, reaching through the levels of creation from the first emergence from the void to the world of matter we inhabit. In a sense, Osiris is Geb and Shu and Atum, just as Isis is Nut and Tefnut/Ma’at and Atum. Even Set was perceived as more complex than a simple embodied, archetypal evil, such as the Devil of Christianity.

  The system continues. The Great Ennead itself leads on to another series of gods, the Lesser Ennead. The link - or ‘go-between’ — is Horus, the magical child of Isis and Osiris. He is regarded as the god of the material world, his role here echoing that of Atum in the universe. The foremost of the Lesser Ennead, who are believed to exert a direct influence over humankind, are the wisdom god Thoth — scribe to the Great Ennead - and Anubis, the jackal-headed god who guards the gateway between the worlds of the living and the dead.

  This level is the province of many other deities, each dealing with a specific aspect of human life. It is probable that it incorporated local gods and goddesses worshipped in Egypt before the Heliopolitan religion was established. Luckert calls this the ‘Turnaround Realm’, the meeting point of the world of matter and the ‘other dimensions’ of the gods, where the reverse process can be experienced by an individual — either at death, or by mystical experiences in life — as an ‘inner journey’, back to union with the creator. This is the process that is the main theme of the Pyramid Texts, which - far from being ‘primitive’ — exceeds newer religions in both authority and sublimity, besides being strikingly similar to the traditions of shamanism.

  Further significance can be derived from this elegant system. In an association of imagery, the emergence of Atum’s Primeval Mound from Nun was equated with the rising of the sun, the source of all life in the material world. This is why Atum is associated with Ra, the sun god, sometimes referred to as Ra-Atum. This is also why Horus, as lord of this world, is also associated with, and sometimes personified as, the sun. The daily ‘birth’ of the sun is a ‘microcosm’ of the original creative explosion that gave birth to the universe, so it can be associated with both Atum and Horus. Like so much of the Pyramid Texts, the imagery works on several levels at once.

  An objective reading of the Pyramid Texts involves much more than poetic symbolism. For example, its system of creation is a remarkable parallel to modern physicists’ conception of the creation and evolution of the Universe. It literally describes the ‘Big Bang’, in which all matter explodes from a point of singularity and then expands and unfolds, becoming more complex as fundamental forces come into being and interact, finally reaching the level of elemental matter. (Significantly, the leading American Egyptologist Mark Lehner, in his 1997 book The Complete Pyramids, uses the term ‘singularity’ when referring to Atum’s place in the myth.17) The system also includes the concept of a multidimensional universe, represented by the different levels of creation as embodied in the god forms. In the Pyramid Texts, the higher gods, such as Shu and Tefnut, still exist, but remain essentially unreachable by humankind without going through the intermediaries of the lower gods.

  Yet another level of imagery lies within the creation story. While discussing the sophistication of the ideas in the Pyramid Texts with our friend, the Belgian writer-researcher Philip Coppens, he pointed out that certain very new discoveries of modern science are an implicit part of the story. As we have seen, Atum emerged from a formless void, imaged in the form of the primordial watery chaos called Nun. This is often regarded as being based on the way land emerges from the Nile flood as the annual inundation recedes, but this is not really the concept expressed in the Heliopolitan image. As Egyptologist R.T. Rundle Clark says:

  It was not like a sea, for that has a surface, whereas the original waters extended above as well as below ... The present cosmos is a vast cavity, rather like an air-bubble, amid the limitless expanse.18

  This is an elegantly clever way of expressing the complex concept of a sea that represents, on the one hand, the void - nothing - yet at the same time stands for unlimited potential - infinity. There may be another reason for choosing this image, though. Scientists have only recently announced the discovery that water can be found in interstellar space in far greater quantities than has ever been expected. Atum represents not just the ‘Big Bang’ of creation, but also the sun: and scientists are only now realising that the enormous clouds of water throughout the universe play a vital role in the creation of stars such as our sun. In fact, they are now beginning to believe that stars are actually created from such clouds of water ...19 It has also been pointed out that, on a terrestrial level, the myth expresses the idea that life originated in the seas.20 All this suggests the possession of exceptionally sophisticated knowledge by the Heliopolitans.

  Significantly, on 12 September 1998, the leading British scientific magazine New Scientist published the ground-breaking research of a NASA team led by Lou Allamandola into the origins — and requirements — of life in the universe. Previously scientists had found it impossible to assemble the right ‘ingredients’ out of which to create even the most basic form of life, but this team had succeeded in creating some of the complex molecules necessary by recreating in the laboratory conditions similar to those found inside clouds of gas in interstellar space. They discovered that creating those complex molecules in those circumstances is extremely easy - in fact, virtually inevitable - whereas trying to do so in strictly terrestrial circumstances is impossible. The most striking example is that of molecules called lipids which make up the walls of individual cells, without which the cell, the basic building block of living things, could not exist. Now that scientists know that this can be done so easily in these conditions, the implications are enormous. It looks increasingly as if life originated in deep space and was then ‘seeded’ on to planets, probably by comets, an
d that, even in its most primitive form, it is probably found everywhere throughout the universe. As Lou Allamandola says, ‘I begin to really believe that life is a cosmic imperative.’

  This, however, is only part of the story, as Philip Coppens pointed out to us. It may be that Allamandola’s team are by no means the first to comprehend the requirements for the creation of life. He cites the ancient Egyptian myth of Atum’s explosive orgasm that created the universe: his ejaculation can be seen to symbolise, with astonishing accuracy, the idea that all the basic ingredients for life existed from the very first and that the universe, as it continues to expand, carries them within it. The imagery of the Atum myth also encompasses perfectly the concept of ‘seeding’ the universe with life. Did the Heliopolitan priests really know how life originates and spreads throughout the universe?20 21

  This, then, was the ‘primitive’ religion of ancient Egypt, which was governed by the Great Ennead, the Nine who represented all life and all wisdom. The ancient Egyptian civilisation, so often underestimated even by our most learned scholars, continues to fascinate with mysteries that call to us from antiquity. But we were to discover that something new is afoot, a sudden, unexplained interest in the lost secrets of the Egyptians and a flurry of mysterious activity among their most venerable ruins. Something intriguing is going on at Giza, something that is intimately connected with the preparation for the Millennium and the start of the twenty-first century. People and organisations are searching for the lost knowledge of the worshippers of the Nine for their own purposes. They are about to undertake a momentous, perhaps even a catastrophic venture: to hijack the mysteries for their own ends, even daring to attempt the unthinkable — to exploit the ancient gods themselves.