The great figure in esoteric Egyptology is Schwaller de Lubicz. He represents a major impulse to understand the consciousness of the ancient world. I have taken insights from The Temple of Man, Sacred Science and The Egyptian Miracle. I have also had the pleasure of sailing up the Nile to visit the major Egyptian sites with many of the most popular modern writers in the field, including Robert Bauval, Graham Hancock, Robert Temple and Colin Wilson. On one occasion I found myself exploring a secret passageway behind the altar of one of the great temples of Egypt in the company of Michael Baigent. Of particular relevance to this work is Bauval’s latest book, The Egypt Code, referenced in the text. There, I believe, he finally cracks the numerical, astronomical code behind Egyptian architecture. Robert Temple is someone who can certainly access supernatural levels of intelligence. The Sirius Mystery, The Crytsal Sun and Netherworld are authoritative texts on astronomical symbolism in myth and initiation lore. See also The Mysteries by Ita Wegman, Mystery Knowldege and Mystery Centres by Rudolf Steiner, In the Dark Places of Wisdom by Peter Kingsley. I first read Colin Wilson’s The Outsider at the right age — 17 years old — and was introduced to Rilke and Sartre. Later my philosophy tutor — sometimes talked of as the cleverest don in Oxford — dismissed Sartre’s work as not being real philosophy, and I’ve no doubt he’s say the same of Wilson. But I see Wilson as an intellectual in the highest sense, in that he struggles to understand the great questions of life and death and what it means to be alive now with complete intellectual honesty and remarkable intellectual energy. His intellectual heirs in the next generation were Michael Baigent and Graham Hancock. Baigent co-wrote with Henry Lincoln and Richard Leigh The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail the book that created the cultural climate into which any book on the subject of the secret societies must emerge. I explain in my text where I believe it is wrong, giving a materialistic interpretation of a genuine but more spiritual tradition regarding the relationship between Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. Like Baigent and Leigh, Hancock is adept at using the techniques of suspense fiction to pull readers through quite difficult ideas. His books, particularly Fingerprints of the Gods, have begun to shift the paradigm, to convince a mass readership that they should question the version of history handed down to them by their elders and betters. His latest book, Supernatural, takes extraordinary intellectual risks, but is written with all the rigour you would expect from a man who was formerly one of Britain’s top financial journalists.
The archeologist David Rohl would perhaps slightly distance himself from some of those I have just mentioned, as he is an academic as well as the bestselling writer of A Test of Time, Legend: the Genesis of Civilization and The Lost Testament. His arguments on dating, particularly as they relate to the area where Egyptian archeology matches biblical texts, will, I believe, come to be accepted by his elders in the academic establishment over the next ten years.
Something that has struck me during the writing of this book is just how many academics working in their separate fields are coming up with results which are anomalous as regards the ruling paradigm, both in terms of the materialistic hegemony and the conventional view of history. One of the things I’ve tried to do in this book is to bring together many different groups of anomalies to create a complete, anomalous world-view. Some of the senior academics mentioned in this book I know personally, but most I do not, and I have no way of knowing if they have, or had any private interest in the esoteric. The important point is this: no esoteric allegiances are evident in their texts, but their books bolster the esoteric world-view: The Origin of Consciousness in the breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, The Wandering Scholars by Helen Waddell, Les Troubadors et le Sentiment Romanesque by Robert Briffault, The Art of Memory, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances Yates, Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human and Where Shall Wisdom be Found? by Harold Bloom, Why Mrs Blake Cried by Marsha Keith Suchard, Isaac Newton, the Man by John Maynard Keynes, Name in the Window by Margaret Demorest (on John Donne), The School of Night by M.C. Cranbrook, Hamlet’s Mill by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, The Roots of Romanticism by Isaiah Berlin, Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas, Church And Gnosis by F.C. Burkitt, Emperor of the Earth by Czeslaw Milosz, The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism by Octavio Paz, John Amos Comenius by S.S. Laurie, Meditations on Hunting by Jose Ortega y Gasset.
Other key sources include:
The Book of the Master by W. Marsham Adams
The Golde Asse of Lucius Apuleius translated by William Adlington
Love and Sexuality by Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov
Francis of Assissi: Canticle of the Creatures by Paul M Allen and Joan de Ris Allen
Through the Eyes of the Masters by David Anrias
The Apocryphal New Testament edited by Wake and Lardner
SSOTBME an Essay on Magic by Anon
Myth, Nature and Individual by Frank Baker
Les Diaboliques by Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly
History in English Words by Owen Barfield
Dark Knights of the Solar Cross by Geoffrey Basil Smith
The Esoteric Path by Luc Benoist
A Rumour of Angels by Peter L Berger *
A Pictorial History of Magic and the Supernatural by Maurice Bessy
The Undergrowth of History by Robert Birley
Radiant Matter Decay and Consecration by Georg Blattmann
The Inner Group Teachings by H.P. Blavatsky
Studies in Occultism by H.P. Blavatsky
A Universal History of Infamy by Jorge Luis Borges
Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair by John Bossy
Letters from an Occultist by Marcus Bottomley
The Occult History of the World Vol 1 by J. H. Brennan
Nadja by André Breton
Egypt Under the Pharaohs by Heinrich Brugsch-Bey
Hermit in the Himalayas by Paul Brunton
A Search for Secret India by Paul Brunton
Egyptian Magic and Oriris and the Egyptian Resurrection by E.A. Wallis Budge
Legends of Charlemagne by Thomas Bulfinch
Studies in Comparative Religion by Titus Burckhardt
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino*
Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell