The Secret History of the World

The Cabala is as broad a church as a major world religion, and we will be returning to different aspects of it.

^{The udja eye as a series of fractions.}

^{In sacred idealism the human form is a microcosm of the universe. The divine proportions can be found not just in ammonites and nebulae but also in the human body. The renegade Egyptologist R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz spent fifteen years on site tracing the divine-mathematical proportions of the Temple of Luxor. He showed how the ritual laying of the foundation and consecration of the temple was called the ceremony of Giving the House to its Master. Likewise in Hinduism, he wrote, the building of a temple in the form of a human body was a magical process. It was believed that if the overseer of the work of building a temple had made a mistake in the construction of a particular part of a temple, he would suffer an illness or injury in the corresponding part of his own body.}

Again, it is no denigration of Moses or the Cabala to point out that it grew out of an older tradition, the mystical number system of the Egyptians.

Reams of mathematical calculations have not come down to us from ancient Egypt, but their understanding of higher mathematics has survived in Egyptian art. For example, the eye of Horus was often represented as the udja eye, which we now know was made up of a number of hieroglyphs representing fractions which add up to a total of 63/64. If you reverse this and divide 64 by 63, you come up with what has been called the greatest secret of the Egyptians, a number called the Comma of Pythagoras.

Highly complex numbers like the Comma of Pythagoras, Pi and Phi (sometimes called the Golden Proportion), are known as irrational numbers. They lie deep in the structure of the physical universe, and were seen by the Egyptians as the principles controlling creation, the principles by which matter is precipitated from the cosmic mind.

Today scientists recognize that the Comma of Pythagoras, Pi and the Golden Proportion as well as the closely related Fibonacci sequence are universal constants that describe complex patterns in astronomy, music and physics. For example, the Fibonacci sequence is a series in which each number is the sum of the two preceding it. Spirals are built up according to this sequence. It is rampant in nature in the spirals of galaxies, the shape of ammonites and the arrangement of leaves on a stem.

To the Egyptians these numbers were also the secret harmonies of the cosmos, and they incorporated them as rhythms and proportions in the construction of their pyramids and temples. A building made in this way would be ideal. A hall, a doorway, a window which had the Golden Proportion built into it, would be ineffably pleasing to the human spirit.

The great temples of Egypt are, of course, bursting with vegetable forms, such as the bulrush-shaped pillars of the great hypostyle at Karnak. But it was the vegetable life that gives proportion to human limb, the vegetable life that turns ribs and makes them curve according to a pleasing mathematical formula that the temple-builders were particularly concerned to reproduce.

The point is that Egyptian temples were built in this way because the gods were no longer able to inhabit bodies of flesh and blood. A temple was built to be the body of a god, no less. The god’s spirit lived inside the vegetable and material bodies that the temple embodied, just as the human spirit lives inside its vegetable and material bodies.

^{Hypostyle hall at Karnak.}

THE HEBREWS HAVE NOT LEFT A RICH architectural heritage like the Egyptians. Their number mysticism has come down to us encoded in the language of the books of Moses.

The great book of the Cabala is The Zohar, which is a vast commentary on the first five books of the Old Testament, traditionally ascribed to Moses. If the world is materialized thought then, according to the Cabala, words and letters were the means by which this process happened. God created the world by manipulating and making patterns out of the Hebrew letters of the alphabet. Hebrew letters, therefore, have magical properties and the patterns they make in scripture open up layers, indeed vistas, of hidden meaning.

Exodus chapter fourteen contains three verses — 19, 20 and 21 — which each consist of 72 letters. If you write these verses on top of one another so that the 72 letters appear in columns, then reading a column at a time, you will discover the secret 72 Names of God.

Each Hebrew letter is also a number. Aleph, the Hebrew A, is one, Beth is two and so on. There are complex connections here. The Hebrew word for father has a numerical value of 3 and the word for mother has a value of 41. The Hebrew word for child is 44, the combination of Father and Mother.

It gets more mind-blowing.

The numerical value of the Hebrew phrase for the Garden of Eden is 144. The numerical value of the Tree of Knowledge is 233. If you divide 233 by 144, you get very close — to four decimal points — to the value to the golden ratio phi!

In the last few decades mathematicians have applied themselves to the task of finding messages encoded in the text of the books of Moses. Breakthrough work by Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg aimed at discovering transcription codes using equidistant letter sequences. The published results include some names of post-biblical historical figures from Hebrew history, but as yet no propositions, no sequences of sentences or anything that could be read as a message. Again, it is not my secret to reveal, but one Cambridge-based statistician has shown me the results of applying an extremely complex ‘skip code’, a code verified as valid by a Cambridge University professor of mathematics. The fragments he showed me were reminiscent of the Psalms.

Imagine if a whole other book — or series of books — were encoded in the text we have! Would each of these texts have different layers of meaning too?

Such an achievement is beyond the capacity of normal human intelligence.

Recent research by an occult group has shown that J.S. Bach composed some of the world’s most beautiful melodies — such as the famous Chaconne — while at the same time giving each note the value of a letter of the alphabet. Bach’s music spells out secret, Psalm-like messages. This again is surely something beyond normal human intelligence?

In esoteric circles language which is imbued by initiates with layers of meaning is sometimes called the Green Language or Language of the Birds. Rabelais and Nostradamus, contemporaries at Montpellier University, as well as Shakespeare, are all said to have written it. Wagner refers to it when he alludes to the tradition that Siegfried learned the Language of the Birds by drinking dragon’s blood.

One last possibility while we are still on this topic. Perhaps we all speak the Green Language all the time? Perhaps the only difference between us and great initiates like Shakespeare is that they do it consciously?

SIGMUND FREUD WAS DEEPLY INTERESTED in the Cabala. As we will see, it was a formative influence on his thought. But he got hold of the wrong end of the stick when he argued that the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten was the source of Moses’s monotheism. We now know Moses came first. Akhenaten’s ideas of monotheism were subtly but dangerously different.

At the height of the Egyptian New Kingdom, the reign of Akhentaten’s father, Amenhotep III, seemed to signal a new era of even greater peace and prosperity which, even if didn’t match the unique achievement of the Great Pyramid, would see the construction of the most magnificent temples of the ancient world.

After the birth of three daughters Queen Tiy gave Amenhotep a son. Perhaps because he had been long awaited, perhaps partly because it was clear his father did not have long to live, the boy who was to become Akhenaten was brought up inside the temple precincts and grew up with a sense of cosmic mission.