After thirty years of studying the medieval legacy in religious, hermetic, and esoteric fields, R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz recognized in the monuments of Egypt a vital heritage that had remained veiled. As a result of this discovery, he spent fifteen years studying the Temple of Luxor. His work represents the first major breakthrough in our understanding of ancient Egypt since Champollion’s discovery of the Rosetta Stone, and he identifies Egypt, not Greece, as the cradle of Western thought, theology, and science.

Central to the pharaonic mentality is the royal principle in humanity and nature. It is this principle that is capable of transforming all the “kingdoms”; thus mineral becomes gold and man becomes pharaoh, or King (the image of man’s cosmic accomplishment and the exaltation of the species). This science of transformation, held sacred by the sages of ancient Egypt, is the theme of the Egyptian texts cited in these pages.

Among the topics explored by de Lubicz are Pythagorean thought (also of Egyptian origin) and its influence on Copernicus and Kepler; Egyptian symbolism and myth and their echoes in modern folk and fairy tales; the redefinition of magic, medicine, and faith; and the Egyptian calendar and the zodiac of Denderah seen from an astronomical prospective, showing Egypt as the mirror of heaven.

Egypt maintained itself at the highest level for thousands of years through a conviction that death is but a change within the continuity of life. The Sacred Science of which Schwaller de Lubicz writes is ever-present and needs no discoverers. Constantly changing, it needs no revision. The keeper of time and genesis, it is never dated.

R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz (1887-1961), was one of the most important philosophers, mathematicians, and Egyptologists of the 20th century. His elucidation of the temple at Luxor and his presentation of the Egyptian understanding of a special quality of innate consciousness form a bridge that links the sacred science of the Ancients to its rediscovery in our own time.