Ancient Egyptian Religion and the Unconscious

That which is called Christian Religion existed among the ancients, and neverdid not exist, from the beginning of the race until Christ came in the flesh, atwhich time the true religion which already existed began to be calledChristianity.

—Saint Augustine

Dream Visions Light the Way

Jung once had a dream of rows of corpses that descended through the centuries toa medieval layer. At the end of this row, he came upon the corpse of a Crusaderwhose forefinger moved, thus presaging Jung's discovery of the unconsciousarchetypes, which had become largely activated in medieval alchemy. I too had astrange dream that also concerned layers of corpses, only this involved diggingthem up in an ancient temple, which quickly became a graveyard of very earlyEgypt. I had first come to a layer involving the Pharaohs, to a stele depictingthe gods in gold leaf and, as archaeologists stood around watching, they werespeechless at my discoveries. As I dug even deeper, I came to corpses of thevery earliest period, and this left the scholars awestruck. (I am merely statingthe dream here.)

Just as Jung then studied medieval alchemy after his dream, coming to somestartling conclusions, I too have come to realize certain things concerning theunconscious processes at work in both the early Egyptians and the Jews, of whichmodern Egyptologists and biblical scholars seem little aware. This is due in themain to their lack of knowledge of the collective unconscious and its archetypalprocesses.

It is also some years since I had another dream, in which Jung demonstrated tome how a royal line of blue blood—divine incarnations of the Higher Self—reachesback to the beginnings of ancient Egyptian culture, through the Hebrew prophets,and up to Christ. In fact, in my dream, Jung was to me "the personification ofspirit," to use one of his terms. The coming forth of these immortal figures isdue to certain initiates undergoing Jung's individuation process, and indeed, wecan see how this is so from both the Egyptian sources and the biblical texts,once we grasp that both are actual records of archetypal processes in andthrough the unconscious.

It is of paramount importance for us to realize that these processes not onlyoccurred, and occur, from the historical past to the present day, on the samedeveloping line, but that they involve direct experiences of God, forming theessence of a prolonged covenant with Him through the unconscious. Modern Man hasbroken that covenant, and it is imperative that it be restored. Man's verysurvival depends upon new understanding of his religious heritage, for only thencan the covenant with the spirit be renewed with the knowledge that it isauthentic.

Here is my second dream concerning the royal line of true blue blood and itsinterpretation. This will show that the concept was not primarily my own idea,but rather the facts as presented to me by unconscious/spirit reality.

I have a vision of a stream of blue blood that starts at the unrecordedbeginnings of ancient Egypt in a sort of lake. This runs through the Egypt ofthe Pharaohs, through the Israel of the prophets, and up to Christ. It becomesstuck there, however, and does not develop further as it is meant to do.

A giant-size Jung is overhead, but just from the waist up, and his mighty armsare outstretched to span the stream of blue blood, which is a royal line fromEgypt to the present. Jung says, "The royal line unites," but it must, I gather,be brought up to the present. Where the stream becomes stuck two thousand yearsago, I see Christ crucified. It is not on a hill, as always depicted, but in asmall public square surrounded by buildings.

The stream of blue blood is the royal line of spiritual kings, not kings of thisworld, but successive developments of the Higher Self as Son of God through thecollective unconscious. Egyptian kingship was based on the phenomenon of theHigher Self, or rather on the divine Father and Son archetype ("Out of theFather comes the Son," as an earlier dream of mine had said; see The Four GoldKeys), as were many gods and culture-heroes around the world. Abraham, Moses,Joseph, David, Solomon, Enoch, Ezekiel, and Daniel, the latter three with theirSon of Man figures, were of the line, and Jesus with the Son of Man, or theChrist, was possibly the highest development of it ever.

The Pharaohs were worldly kings, of course, but each of them was said to beHorus in human form, with the High God, Ra, as Father. This is what Jung meantwhen he said that Jesus as a man equals ego-consciousness, while Christ as a godequals the Higher Self. Iu-em-hetep was, in the cult at Memphis, divine Son ofPtah, and, in another form, son of Atum at Annu (also son of Atum-Ra). Iu-emhetephas since been demoted to the merely human Imhotep, whom we can now takeas the human initiate, corresponding to the man Jesus. Imhotep, builder of thefirst step pyramid in Egypt, was vizier and High Priest to Pharaoh Djoser (c2668-2649 B.C.). Imhotep was always considered a god by scholars until a partialstatue of Djoser was unearthed (only the feet remained), bearing the titles ofImhotep on the base.

So Pharaoh/Horus/Ra, Imhotep/Iu-em-hetep/Ptah, Daniel/Son of Man/ Ancient ofDays, and Jesus/Christ/God are all based on the same developing model.Melchizedek, the mysterious priest-king from whom Abraham receives bread andwine, who has "neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like untothe Son of God" Ps. 110:4; Heb. 5:6), is certainly the Higher Self of Abraham.Samson with his great strength, which is actually the power of the Higher Self,is another version, while the story of Moses is full of symbolism of processesthat can only involve the Higher Self and God.

The roots of Christianity, as well as lying far back in the ancient past, alsoand primarily lie rooted deep in the collective unconscious and ultimatelyinvolve God but must undergo further development. This, if it occurs, will be agreat leap forward and will bring the royal line up to date. The effects of thiswill continue the relationship, the covenant, of Man with God, which began somany thousands of years ago. This must involve the Higher Self in all itsaspects, including the divine Father/Son incarnation, as well as the recognitionof the lower depths of the unconscious, the Lower Self, the World Soul, whetheras the Virgin Mary as goddess or otherwise. (Mary as goddess will be explainedlater.)

The further development must also involve the dark underside of the unconscious,which alchemy revealed to us. Spirit/soul reality through the unconsciousreveals itself to be not solely of the light; the instinctual, chthonic dragondepths also simmer there. There is a chthonic trinity that counter-matches thehigher trinity of spirit, which the poet Dante experienced, and which I haveexperienced several times myself. The higher spirit itself has its dark side,however, and may be destructive.

But the development must also include such things as reincarnation and Jungiandepth psychology. In fact, it is with the knowledge and understanding of depthpsychology that we can now understand all that has gone before. We must alsoinclude the valuable experiences not only of the alchemists, but also of all theother esoteric Mysteries based on the unconscious processes, while keeping tothe central royal line that is our heritage.

Other royal lines are just as valid. Buddhism developed out of Hinduism, forinstance, but neither speak the language of the Western collective unconscious,just as ours does not speak theirs, even if the symbolism is similar, expressingthe same basic archetypal truths. No matter what our conscious attitudes andbeliefs may be, Vishnu, Krishna, and the Buddha do not speak to the depths ofthe Western collective unconscious, for it thinks in terms of Christ and thelower spirit of Mercurius and their respective realms.

These are not just my own conscious ideas, or even Jung's, but the facts aspresented to me by the unconscious during my years undergoing the individuationprocess. I was even instructed a couple of times in dreams to send all of thisinformation to the pope as evidence of these things, and of what must be done,but I never did. Perhaps I should have, for the unconscious was quite adamantabout it.

One further thing worth mentioning concerning the Higher Self as divine Son waspointed out by Gerald Massey. He said that the first divine Son in its firstphase in Egypt was Son of the Mother, but in its second phase was Son of theFather. The Egyptians termed the High God Ra, the "male mother" in that aspect,because the second divine Son issues from the Father alone. It is true thatHathor is Mother of Horus when Ra is Father, but this is in other myths. This iswise and fits in with the Higher Self processes in the unconscious, who in thefirst phase is born of the feminine soul depths, but in the second phase is bornof the higher spirit—Son of the Mother in lower form, but Son of the Father inhigher form.

Both Horus and Christ are born of the Mother first, but are later claimed by theFather, who says in both cases, roughly speaking, "This is my beloved son."Looked at from the view of the whole process, however, the divine inspirationfrom above comes first. In my own case, it involved visitations from Christ indreams, instructing me to spiritualize the lower depths, which must be won overto the higher spirit in the great task.

The Beginnings of the Royal Line

The roots of ancient Egyptian civilization stretch back into the distant past,and its high culture endured for over three thousand years before the birth ofChrist. There was probably a period of development prior to this elsewhere toaccount for the great blossoming of culture that otherwise seems quite sudden,for it is a fact that by the time of the first dynasties, the carved hieroglyphswere of such a fine quality they were never equaled in any other periodafterward. The myths also reveal an already highly developed association withthe spirit, evidence that the royal line of direct experience of the spirit wasalready well under way.

Everything was recorded on stone or papyrus; the Egyptians had such greatreverence for the sacred texts that, even when ideas did change, they would addthe new writings to the old ones so that the latter were never erased. Sincethis continued to occur over a period of thousands of years, we can understandhow it confused modern scholars and perhaps the later Egyptians themselves.Nevertheless, the earlier religious ideas and teachings from the Old Kingdomwere higher and purer than at any time later. We today could live by Ptah, theHigh God, and the world would be a much better place; in fact, we would beliving in an essentially Christian way.

Foreigners apparently took the early high culture to Egypt, though there isevidence of more than one source of influence. Many early Egyptologists were ofthe opinion that invaders sailed around the tip of southern Arabia, arriving atsouthern Egypt by way of the Red Sea, and, indeed, the latest evidence is thatnorthern Egypt around the Delta was conquered by a more advanced culture fromthe south. There may also have been some influence from the westerly directioninvolving writing and building and even mummification. It is also said that DNAtests have revealed close connection between the peoples of North Africa andancient Britain.

But whatever the situation, the figures depicted from the first dynasties of theruling strata of the culture look Indo-European, and at least one or two of thepainted statuettes have blue eyes, seeming to show that some influence may havebeen a type of Celt, as some have suggested. Egyptologist Walter A. Fairservis,in The Ancient Kingdoms of the Nile and the Doomed Monuments of Nubia, wrotethat a dark, long-faced, Mediterranean type of people inhabited Egypt first, andinvaders who brought the higher culture apparently then conquered them.

Victorian archaeologists of Massey's time believed solidly in "diffusion," thetheory that civilization began in just one place and then spread around theglobe. This idea was due to the fact that myths are almost identical instructure the world over, though at different levels of development, suggestinga common origin. But we now know that the common source is the collectiveunconscious, shared by all peoples, and that primitive Man spread across theworld much earlier than the formation of the developed myths.

William Flinders Petrie, regarded as the father of modern Egyptology, unearthedmuch evidence to suggest that a primitive culture in Egypt had suddenly beentaken over by a more advanced one. In fact, there were signs that the primitivepeople had practiced cannibalism, as Petrie uncovered the scattered bones ofhuman skeletons with the marrow extracted, some of the bones having teeth marksthat could only have been made by other humans. Petrie was thereby led to theconclusion that a "Dynastic Race" had traveled to Egypt by boat from Sumeria,sailing around southern Arabia—thus agreeing with a number of other scholars.

Little pieces of evidence, which I give later, seem to support this. Certainly,some of the mythic/religious concepts, such as of the Underworld, are the samein both Egyptian and Sumerian cultures, and a number of key words are verysimilar, although the Egyptian mythos is more highly developed than theSumerian. But then, the Egyptian culture came later, and had had time todevelop.

All of this may be interesting, of course, but you are entitled to ask, what hasit to do with processes of the unconscious? The answer is that with these firstcultures of the Middle East, humankind suddenly took a giant leap forward. Itwas to happen a little later in India and China, and even in the Americas, sothe latest evidence suggests. But it had to happen first somewhere, and that wasin the Middle East, around the Fertile Crescent, as it has been termed, andfertile in a deeper sense than solely the agricultural. For what was involvedwere the workings of the spirit; spirit caused the leap forward, and theevidence is there in all of the myths.

A suitable physical environment was necessary, as was a sufficient level ofbasic culture growth, but these were not the real causes of the tremendous leapforward. The truth is, Man had reached a level where he could be inspired; thisoriginally meant "filled with and moved by spirit," that is, "inspirited." Asthe soul reached up through a type of evolution in matter, finally producing Manto a sufficiently fine degree, the creative spirit from above was able todescend to do its work, although this largely happened behind the world ofmatter, so to speak, through the collective unconscious.

I shall explain this further later, but as I said earlier, I have beenexperiencing the spirit forces of the unconscious for decades and on this basisI can see they are clearly discernible in all early myths, and, indeed, laterones. The original Bible texts speak of the Elohim, or angels, which Revelationlater calls the creative "Seven Spirits of God" (Rev. 4:5), and we find theirequivalents in myths worldwide, following the same archetypal pattern. Irecently came across a sentence by H. P. Blavatsky, the nineteenth-centurymystic and authority on the esoteric Mysteries, where she speaks of how the"first human races evolved with the help of the Dhyan Chohans" (Blavatsky 1888),the Hindu seven divine creative powers that equal the Elohim or archangels ofthe Bible, and this is precisely what I mean.

These are the same creative forces of spirit accessed through the unconscious,in that spirit/soul other reality, working on Man from behind, so to speak, andwe shall see them later and often. These Seven Powers have been known to manypeoples of the world, bringing about forward leaps in nature and culture,amazingly as the Bible and other ancient texts always insisted.

As the origins of the early peoples of Egypt are something of a mystery toscholars, so too are its gods. In The Phoenix Solution, Alan F. Alford statesthat no consensus of opinion has ever been reached as to the origins of theEgyptian gods, and he ponders if they were early kings deified, or, to keep themasses in line, the inventions of priests. Or are their origins something elseentirely? Alford asks. Jung largely solved the mystery as early as 1912,expressed in his revolutionary Symbols of Transformation (Psychology of theUnconscious), though few people listened or understood, certainly notEgyptologists. But Jung demonstrated how all myths and genuine religions arerooted in the realm of the unconscious, though by no means are they limited to anarrow concept of unconscious reality. Jung still had much to learn at thattime, and so some of his theories were a little undeveloped, though it isnevertheless an astounding work for the time.

Jung's scope of vision grew ever wider as the years passed, and he came torealize that myths are a gold mine of information concerning direct experienceof unconscious processes, which are by no means limited to the personal level—rather,the opposite. It is a fact that the archetypal symbols are actuallyproducts of spirit/soul reality itself, which is why myths have a fairytale-likequality. These symbolic experiences were naturally developed and elaborated byconscious Man over long periods of time, becoming the stuff of myth and thedogma of religions, but the mythic foundations were always deeply rooted in therealm of the unconscious. Jung stressed that only by calling the eternal forcesexperienced through the unconscious "gods" do we do them justice and expresstheir true nature and, although we find different forms of the gods all over theworld, they nevertheless express the same archetypal forces and patterns.