Note that Achilles was not doubting the reality of life after death, but his conception of it evidently did not go beyond the dreary, half-life of the sub-lunar sphere. A vision of the heavenly spheres above had been lost to him.
We can see this turning point in consciousness from another angle if we ask ourselves who out of the heroes really won the battle of Troy for the Greeks? It was not the brave, strong hero Achilles, the almost-invincible last of the demi-gods. It was Odysseus ‘of the nimble wits’, who defeated the Trojans by tricking them into accepting the gift of a wooden horse, which had soldiers hidden inside.
To today’s sensibility the story of the Trojan Horse seems almost completely implausible. From the point of view of modern psychology it just seems unrealistic to suppose that anyone could be so gullible.
But at the time of the Trojan war, people were only just beginning to emerge from the collective mind we followed earlier walking through the ancient wood and have just seen Jaynes define. Before the Trojan war everyone shared the same world of thoughts. Others could see what you were thinking. No such lie would have been possible. People interacted with a terrible sincerity. They had a sense that we have lost that in everything they did they were taking part in cosmic events.
…
12. THE DESCENT INTO DARKNESS
EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION IS PERHAPS THE most successful in recorded history, lasting over three thousand years. Compare this with European-American, Christian civilization, which has so far lasted only about two thousand years. Another notable thing is Egypt’s extraordinarily well preserved historical records, which have survived on temple walls, on tablets and in papyri. These have been vital in placing neighbouring civilizations that have left less complete records and remains, in a chronological context.
The Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt has traditionally been placed in the reign of the pharaoh Ramasees II, one of the greatest and most expansive rulers of Egypt. A great builder at Luxor and Abu Simbel, his monuments also include the gigantic obelisk currently standing in La Place de la Concorde in Paris. In the Romantic poet Shelley’s
A worthy opponent for Moses, you might think. Cecil B. De Mille certainly thought so. But a problem has arisen. Archaeologists discovered that if you look for traces of the Hebrews in the reign of Ramasees II, or if you look, for example, for traces of the fall of Jericho or the Temple of Solomon in the corresponding archaeological layers, you find absolutely nothing.
This led to a consensus among academics that the epic myths of the origins of the Jews were ‘just myths’, in the sense that they had no basis in historical reality.
Is it worth pausing for a moment to wonder how much these people
In the 1990s a group of younger archaeologists, based in Austria and London and led by David Rohl, began to question the conventional chronology of Egypt. More particularly they came to realize that in the period of the Third Intermediate Dynasty, two king lists which had been understood to run one after the other should really be understood as running concurrently.
This had the effect of ‘shortening’ the chronology of ancient Egypt by approximately four hundred years. Known as the ‘New Chronology’, it is gradually gaining ground even among the older generation of Egyptologists.
An incidental side effect of the New Chronology — I say ‘incidental’ because these scholars have no religious axe to grind — was that when field archaeologists began to search for traces of the biblical stories some four hundred years earlier, they made sensational discoveries.
The human condition gives us extraordinary latitude for believing what we want to believe, but for anyone who does not have a strong ulterior motive for believing that the biblical stories are ‘just fairy tales’, this new evidence is quite compelling.
It shows that Moses did not live in about 1250 BC contemporary with Ramasees II. Instead he was born in about 1540 BC, and the Exodus took place in approximately 1447 BC. Using astronomical retro calculations, Venus observations recorded in Mesopotamian texts that cross-reference both the Bible and also surviving Egyptian records, David Rohl has provided strong evidence to show that Moses was brought up an Egyptian prince in the reign of Neferhotep I in the mid-sixteenth century BC. Rohl has found complementary evidence in an account by Artapanus, a Jewish historian of the third century BC who may well have had access to now lost records from the Egyptian temples. Artapanus related how ‘Prince Mousos’ became a popular administrator under Khenephres, Neferhotep I’s successor. Mousos was then was sent into exile when the pharaoh became jealous of him. Finally Rohl has shown that the pharaoh of the Exodus was Khenephres’s successor, Dudimose. Excavations at the Dudimose level have revealed the remains of a foreign settlement of slaves or workers — such as are also referred to in the Brooklyn Papyrus, a royal decree authorizing transfer of just such a group at just this time. This settlement may have been built for and by the Hebrews. There are also death pits and evidence of hasty, mass burials which may be traces of the biblical plagues.
Unearthing stone remains may ground us in historical reality, but in order to understand what was really important in human terms,
AS AN EGYPTIAN PRINCE MOSES WAS initiated in the Egyptian Mysteries. This is recorded by the Egyptian historian Manetho, who identified Heliopolis as the Mystery school. It is confirmed in Acts 7.22, where the Apostle Stephen says, ‘And Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.’
The teachings of Moses are steeped in Egyptian wisdom. For example, Spell 125 in the
It is no denigration of Moses to point this out. His teaching could not have done otherwise than grow out of the given historical milieu. What is historically significant about Moses is the way he reframed the ancient wisdom with the aim of leading humankind into the next stage of the evolution of consciousness.
When Moses fled into exile in the desert, he encountered a wise, old teacher. Jethro was an African — Ethiopian — high priest, keeper of a library of stone tablets. When Moses married his daughter, Jethro initiated him to a higher level. This is what is being alluded to in the story of the burning bush. When Moses saw the burning bush not being consumed by the fire, this was a vision of the self that is not destroyed by the purging fire that awaits on the other side of the grave.
A sense of mission arose out of Moses’s vision of the burning bush, an impulse to work for the greater good of humanity, to lead us all to a land flowing with milk and honey.
But then, as Moses hesitated before the magnitude of the task in front of him, God stiffened his resolve: ‘And thou shalt take this rod in thy hand, wherewith thou shalt do signs.’ As Moses journeyed back to Egypt, he intended to ask the pharaoh to ‘set my people free’.
As Moses and his brother Aaron stood in the throne room, Aaron suddenly threw his rod down to the ground. It changed, magically, into a snake. The pharaoh ordered his court magicians to match this feat, but as they did so Aaron’s snake swallowed theirs.
As the battle of wills between Moses and the pharaoh unfolded, Moses used his own rod — or wand — to direct the course of events: to bring fire and hail down from the sky, to bring on a plague of locusts, to part the Red
