THE ANCIENT SPIRITUAL SCIENCE

Here, we will discover that, hidden behind all the religious language and arcane symbolism used by the ancients, there was a genuine spiritual science that was once shared by many ancient cultures around the world.

This idea is not new. It has been advocated by a number of independent researchers and authors who have devoted themselves to a study of ancient texts and monuments. Most notably, Graham Hancock has promoted this notion in a series of popular books revolving around a mysterious sky-ground dualism found at many ancient sites. In Heaven’s Mirror he makes this broad generalization:

A great pan-cultural theory of the meaning and mystery of death and the possibility of eternal life illumined the ancient world. Linked to it was a science of immortality that sought to free the spirit from the gross encumbrance of matter. In its own way, this science was every bit as rigorous and empirical as astrophysics, medicine, or genetic engineering. Unlike modern science, however, it appears from the very beginning, to have been as old as the hills—fully evolved, with its adepts and teachers already present and at work at the dawn of history as far afield as northern Europe, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Vedic India, the Pacific, Japan, China, Southeast Asia, and the Americas.²

Our concern here is not so much with the historical origin of the ancient science, but with its substance. Yet there is a problem that must be overcome: Unlike modern scientific theories, which are typically expressed in well-defined mathematical formulas and published in peer-reviewed journals, the ancient spiritual theories were expressed in arcane symbolic formulas unique to each culture. To get at the essential teachings of the sages, we must therefore penetrate the veils of symbolism—something easier said than done. Unfortunately, the symbolic systems used by the ancients were a closely guarded secret.

This was not a popular or public science; it was an elite or secret science, which was generally passed down along hereditary lines through strict oral traditions. The French mathematician and ardent Egyptologist Schwaller de Lubicz expressed it this way:

The Ancients never “popularized” anything; to the uninitiated they provided only the minimal useful teaching. The explanation, the philosophy, the secret connection between myth and the sciences were the prerogative of a handful of specially instructed men. Did not Pythagoras wait twenty years before being admitted into the Temple? Did he not, in his own teaching, impose silence on pain of death? Therefore, this teaching was not written down.³

The myths and legends that surround the ancient science suggest that rather than being developed over time through experimentation, it was a body of knowledge received originally from a mysterious group of gods or from godlike sages who walked the earth during the predawn history of the human race. The myths go on to suggest that this ancient, revealed body of knowledge was then preserved over the course of millennia by the elite descendants or followers of the original sages, who eventually assumed the role of the royal and priestly classes during the historical epoch.

Apparently, it was this elite group, possessed of the science of their own “divine” ancestors, who administered the earliest civilizations on earth and shaped those civilizations for their own purposes over the course of thousands of years. Upon studying the sacred monuments of ancient Egypt, Schwaller de Lubicz commented:

Obviously, no one would build such monuments, and in such great numbers, over thousands of years, for uncultivated peasants. The work is of necessity that of an elite, and, even more remarkably, an elite that never ceased to renew itself, an elite that seems to have been uniquely endowed with a wealth of scientific knowledge, including an understanding of the laws of Life.... We are dealing here not with an evolution of science, but rather, on the contrary, with an immutable basis... from the time of the earliest dynasties.... What we see is not the beginnings of research, but the application of a Knowledge already possessed.⁴

Modern physical science has persisted for a few hundred years and provided the basis for one of the most rapidly changing and turbulent periods in human history. By contrast, the ancient spiritual science persisted for thousands of years and served as the basis for some of the most stable and enduring civilizations the world has ever known.