• First the ‘way’ of the stars: these appear to ‘drift’ in the sense that their place and day of rising at the horizon changes, accompanied by corresponding changes in their altitude at the meridian.
• Secondly the ‘way’ of the sun, which also appears to ‘drift’—in this case ‘westwards’ along the ecliptic path so that the ‘pointer’ of the vernal equinox appears to ‘sweep’ slowly through each one of the twelve zodiacal signs every 2160 years.
In the coded astronomical language of the ancients of Heliopolis, we will argue that the notion of following the sun’s westward drift through the zodiac translates as ‘Following the Way of Horus (the sun) across the ages’. And we will show that the ‘Followers of Horus’ are most likely to have acquired their enigmatic title because it described precisely what they did and stood for. They were, we suspect, astrologers and astronomers par excellence who had been following and recording the position of the vernal point across the ages from the epoch of the ‘First Time’ to the epoch of the historical kings of Egypt.
Last but not least, we also propose as a hypothesis for further testing that at a well-defined and predetermined historical moment ‘written in the stars’ the ‘Followers of Horus’ may have taken steps to mobilize the native inhabitants of Egypt, unite them into a theocratic state and harness their energies to the further fulfilment of a cosmic blueprint in which the great Pyramids on the west bank of the Nile were to play a pivotal role ...
Chapter 12
Sages and ‘Followers’
‘The introduction to the first Edfu cosmological record discloses the tradition that the contents of these records were the “words of the Sages”. We are told that this sacred book was believed to be a “Copy of the writings which Thoth made according to the words of the Sages” ...’
E. A. E. Reymond, The Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple, 1969
It is a convention amongst modern scholars that myths do not count as historical evidence—and, as we saw in the last chapter, this convention is particularly strongly adhered to by Egyptologists.
Yet there are several well-known cases in archaeology where myths that have been dismissed as ‘unhistorical’ were later proved to have been entirely accurate. One example concerns the world-famous Troy of Homer’s Iliad (a great prose-poem compiled from earlier oral sources circa 800 bc). Until not long ago most scholars were convinced that Troy was a ‘mythical city’—i.e. entirely a figment of Homer’s fertile imagination. In 1871, however, the ‘buccaneer’ German explorer Heinrich Schliemann proved orthodox opinion wrong when he followed geographical clues contained in the Iliad and discovered Troy in western Turkey near the Dardanelles (the ancient Hellespont)—exactly where Homer had said it was located. Schliemann and two other intrepid researchers, the Greek scholar Kalokairinos and the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, then went on to cap this achievement by following up myths concerning the great ‘Minoan’ civilization that was said to have existed on the island of Crete. These myths, too, were dismissed as unhistorical by orthodox opinion but were vindicated when Schliemann and his team excavated the remains of a highly advanced culture now firmly identified as that of the ‘Minoans’.[489]
Similarly, in the Indian subcontinent, the great body of ancient Sanskrit scriptures known as the Rig-Veda contains repeated references to a high civilization, living in fortified cities, that had preceded the Aryan invasions more than 4000 years ago. Again these references were universally dismissed as ‘mythical’—until, that is, the ruins of the great ‘Indus Valley’ cities such as Harappa and Moenjodaro began to be unearthed in the twentieth century and proved to date back as far as 2500 bc.[490]
In short, the record shows that whole cities and civilizations which were once classified as mythical (and therefore of no historical interest) have a habit again and again of suddenly materializing from the mists of obscurity and becoming historical realities.
Could the same thing be about to happen in Egypt?
Guardians of records
Amongst other peoples such as the Romans and the Greeks, who were considerably closer to ancient Egypt than we are, it was held to be axiomatic that the Pharaohs and their priests were the guardians of accurate records concerning certain highly significant events that had taken place long, long ago. Indeed these records were actually seen and studied, at the sacred city of Heliopolis, by such distinguished visitors as Herodotus (fifth century bc), the Greek lawmaker Solon (640-560 bc) and his fellow countryman the scientist Pythagoras (sixth century bc).[491] From their reports derived the Greek impression of Egypt reported by Plato:[492]
We Greeks are in reality children compared with this people with traditions ten times older. And as nothing of precious remembrance of the past would long survive in our country, Egypt has recorded and kept eternally the wisdom of the old times. The walls of its temples are covered with inscriptions and the priests have always under their own eyes that divine heritage ... The generations continue to transmit to successive generations these sacred things unchanged: songs, dances, rhythms, rituals, music, paintings, all coming from time immemorial when gods governed the earth in the dawn of civilization.[493]
We have already made frequent mention of Zep Tepi, the supposedly mythical ‘First Time’ of the Gods—a remote epoch with which the ancient Egyptians associated the origins of their civilization. And in the last chapter we noted that Manetho’s fabled History, and a number of inscriptions known as king-lists, also refer back to distant golden ages when the gods, and then subsequently the mysterious ‘Followers of Horus’, ruled in the Nile Valley. Before immersing ourselves in the next chapter in the truly immense chronology of which all the lists speak, our objective here, as Plato prompts, is to take a look at the ‘walls of temples’—specifically at the so-called ‘Building Texts’ (circa 200 bc) inscribed on the walls of the Temple of Edfu that stands in Upper Egypt midway between Luxor and Aswan. These texts, which contain a series of extraordinary references to the ‘First Time’, are accepted by scholars as the only surviving fragments of a much more ancient, much larger, and much more coherent body of cosmogonical literature—now long lost—that once incorporated a complete ‘mythical history’ of Egypt, of its gods and of the temples built to honour them.[494] In the texts, the ‘Followers of Horus’ are equated and merged with other ‘mythical’ beings, sometimes seemingly divine, sometimes human, who are always portrayed as the bringers and preservers of knowledge down the ages—as an élite brotherhood dedicated to the transmission of wisdom and to the quest for resurrection and rebirth ...
Memories of the dawn
The Temple of Edfu in its present form was erected over a two hundred-year period between 237 bc and 57 bc but incorporates parts of much earlier structures dating back to the Pyramid Age (for example portions of the inner and outer western enclosure wall). Moreover, like all major temples, it was built ‘on hallowed ground’ and there attaches to it a recollection of vast antiquity and of momentous antecedents.[495]
Thus, on the face of things, the Building Texts appear to be nothing more than a history of the Edfu Temple itself, together with descriptions of its rooms and halls and of their ritual purpose and significance.[496] A closer look, however, as E. A. E. Reymond of Manchester University has demonstrated, reveals a subtext which hints:
at the existence of certain mythological events ... where the foundation, building and bringing to life of the historical temple [of Edfu] is interpreted as happening in a mythical age. The historical temple is interpreted as the work of the gods themselves, and as an entity of a mythical nature. This ... seems to indicate a belief in a historical temple that was a direct continuation, projection, and reflexion of a mythical temple that came into existence at the beginning of the world ...[497]
Needless to say the ‘beginning of the world’ is a synonym in the Edfu Texts for the ‘First Time’, also known as the ‘Early Primeval Age’. In this epoch, we learn, the ‘words of the Sages’ were copied down by the wisdom-g
od Thoth into a book that codified the locations of certain ‘sacred mounds’ along the Nile. The title of this lost book, according to the texts, was Specifications of the Mounds of the Early Primaeval Age, and it was believed to have contained records not only of all the lesser ‘Mounds’, or temples, but also of the Great Primeval Mound itself, the place where time had supposedly begun.[498]
Several points of interest arise:
1. The ‘Great Primeval Mound’ has recently been associated by Professor I. E. S. Edwards with the natural outcropping of rock that is known to lie under the Great Pyramid of Egypt and to have been incorporated into its lower courses of masonry.[499] This analysis appears to reinforce the connections that we have already established in Part I between the Giza necropolis and the ‘First Time’.
2. The ‘Sages’ referred to in the Edfu Building Texts were seven in number. Their special role was as ‘the only divine beings who knew how the temples and sacred places were to be created’. And it was they who initiated construction work at the Great Primeval Mound. This work, in which Thoth also participated, involved the setting out and erection of the original ‘mythical’ temple of the ‘First Time’.[500]
3. Also constructed under the direction of the ‘Seven Sages’ was an edifice specified as hwt-ntr, ‘the mansion of the god’: ‘ “Speedy of construction”, men called it by name. The sanctuary is within it, “Great Seat” by name, and all its chapels are according to the norm.’[501]
4. When all these works were complete ‘the magical protection (swr mdw) of that site was made by the Sages’.[502]
5. In the whole corpus of ancient Egyptian writings, the Edfu Building Texts preserve the only references to the ‘Seven Sages’ that have survived to the present day. Egyptologists have therefore paid little attention to the identity of these beings beyond conceding that that they appear to have played a part in ‘a much wider and more general theory concerning the origin of sacred domains and their temples’.[503] In our opinion, however, there is something notable about the context in which the Texts describe the Sages. This context is marked by a preponderance of ‘Flood’ imagery in which the ‘primeval waters’ (out of which the Great Primeval Mound emerged) are depicted as gradually receding.[504] We are reminded of Noah’s mountain-top on which the Ark settled after the Biblical Deluge, and of the ‘Seven Sages’ (Apkallu) of ancient Babylonian tradition who were said to have ‘lived before the Flood’ and to have built the walls of the sacred city of Uruk.[505] Likewise is it an accident that in Indian tradition ‘Seven Sages’ (Rishis) are remembered to have survived the Flood, their purpose being to preserve and pass down to future generations the wisdom of the antediluvian world?[506]
In all cases the Sages appear as the enlightened survivors of a cataclysm that wiped the earth clean, who then set about making a fresh start at the dawn of a new age—which, in ancient Egypt, was referred to as the ‘First Time’. As Reymond confirms in her masterly study of the Edfu Texts:
the first era known by our principal sources was a period which started from what existed in the past. The general tone of the record seems to convey the view that an ancient world, after having been constituted, was destroyed, and as a dead world it came to be the basis of a new period of creation which at first was the re-creation and resurrection of what once had existed in the past.[507]
Wisdom and knowledge
According to the Edfu Texts the Seven Sages and the other gods came originally from an island,[508] the ‘Homeland of the Primeval Ones’.[509] As noted above, the texts are adamant that the agency that destroyed this island was a flood. They also tell us that it came to its end suddenly[510] and that the majority of its ‘divine inhabitants’ were drowned.[511] Arriving in Egypt, those few who survived then became ‘the Builder Gods, who fashioned in the primeval time, the Lords of Light ... the Ghosts, the Ancestors ... who raised the seed for gods and men ... the Senior Ones who came into being at the beginning, who illumined this land when they came forth unitedly ...’[512]
It was not believed that these remarkable beings were immortal. On the contrary, after they had completed their tasks they died and their children took their places and performed funerary rites on their behalf.[513] In this way, just like the ‘Followers of Horus’, the generations of the ‘Builder Gods’, or ‘Sages’, or ‘Ghosts’ or ‘Lords of Light’ described in the Edfu Texts could constantly renew themselves—thus passing down to the future traditions and wisdoms stemming from a previous epoch of the earth. Indeed, the similarities between the ‘Senior Ones’ of Edfu and the Shemsu Hor of Heliopolitan tradition are so marked it is hard to escape the conclusion that both epithets, and the numerous others that exist, are all descriptions of the same shadowy brotherhood.
This impression is strengthened by the constant references in the Edfu Texts to the ‘wisdom of the Sages’ (wisdom being one of the defining characteristics of the ‘Followers of Horus’) and the repeated emphasis that their special gift was knowledge—including, but not limited to, the knowledge of architecture.[514] Likewise it is noteworthy that the Sages are said to have specified the plans and designs that were to be used for all future temples—a role frequently accorded in other contexts to the ‘Followers of Horus’. For example, the temple of Dendera (a little to the north of Edfu) is inscribed with Building Texts of its own which state that the ‘great plan’ followed by its architects was ‘recorded in ancient writings handed down from the “Followers of Horus” ’.[515]
Heliopolitan origins
The earliest-surviving references to the ‘Followers of Horus’ occur in the Pyramid Texts. It is therefore unlikely to be an accident that the notion in the Edfu Texts of the Great Primeval Mound emerging from the waters of a universal deluge coincides exactly with imagery that has also been preserved in the Pyramid Texts in which, as E. A. E. Reymond summarizes: ‘The Earth in its earliest shape was pictured as a mound which emerged from the primeval water. This mound itself was then considered as a divine being, and as the original terrestrial configuration on which the creator, Atum, dwelt.’[516]
As is well known, the compilation of the Pyramid Texts was undertaken by the priests of Heliopolis.[517] It may therefore be of relevance that ancient Egyptian traditions attribute the founding of Heliopolis to the ‘Followers of Horus’—in a period long before the beginning of Dynastic times—and that there is an Egyptian papyrus, now in the Berlin Museum, which clearly suggests that Heliopolis in some way ‘existed before the earth was created’.[518] Once again, this interlinks closely with a central proposition of the Edfu Texts, namely that the ‘new world’ created by the Sages after the Flood was conceived of and designed by its makers as ‘the resurrection of the former world of the gods.’[519]
There are other links too. For example what Reymond calls ‘the manifestation of the resurrection of the first holy world’ took the form in the Edfu Texts of an upright column or rod, ‘the Perch’ on which a great bird, the Divine Falcon, rested.[520] In Heliopolis there stood a pillar (indeed Innu, the Egyptian name for Heliopolis, actually means ‘pillar’[521]) on which it was believed that another ‘Divine’ bird—the Bennu, or phoenix—periodically rested.[522] And interestingly the hieroglyph for Heliopolis—a column surmounted by a cross above (or beside) a circle divided into eight parts[523]—is virtually identical to a hieroglyph depicting the Edfu ‘Perch’ that is reproduced by Flinders Petrie in his Royal Tombs of the Earliest Dynasties.[524]
For all these reasons, and many others, Reymond concludes that ‘the Edfu documentary sources offer ... one argument more in favour of the theory that the ritual of the Egyptian temple was Heliopolitan in origin ... We are of the opinion that the Edfu records preserve the memory of a Predynastic religious centre which once existed near to Memphis, which the Egyptians looked on as the homeland of the Egyptian temple.’[525]
What better candidate is there for that ‘Predynastic religious centre near to Memphis’—that ‘homeland’ of the Egyptian temple—than the sacred city of He
liopolis and its associated Pyramids and other structures on the Giza plateau? Moreover, as the reader will recall, the Giza/Heliopolis complex lies to the north of ancient Memphis. In this light a well-known text on the inner face of the enclosure wall of the temple at Edfu takes on a special meaning, for it tells us that the temple was built ‘at the dictates of the Ancestors’ according to what was written in a certain ‘book’ which had ‘descended from the sky to the north of Memphis’.[526]
There is of course a sense in which the cosmic monuments of Giza could themselves be said to be a kind of ‘book’ written in stone and ‘descended from the sky’—for, as we now know, the three great Pyramids are the terrestrial counterparts of the three stars of Orion’s belt and the Sphinx draws down to earth the regal image of Leo, the celestial lion.
Cycle of the phoenix
The Primeval Mound, identified with the Great Pyramid and with the natural mound of rock that is incorporated into the foundations of that monument, is envisaged in the Pyramid Texts as a place at once of birth and death, and also as a place of rebirth.[527] These ideas fit well with the ancient Egyptian rituals for ‘awakening Osiris’ and attaining astral immortality—and with the quest of the Horus-King—that we have described in earlier chapters. They also accord with the sense that the texts convey of a cyclical rhythm at work in the universe as the vast ‘Mill’ of the zodiac grinds out the destiny of world ages.