Grid of the Gods (51 page)

Egypt, in other words, was functioning with the exact same topological metaphor as was Vedic India, and Mayan and Aztec Meso-America.

A closer look at this “primordial” or “primary” mystic triad or ternary is in order.

C. The Primary Scission and the Primordial Triad
1. The Primordial Triad

The primordial differentiation, which Scwhaller calls the “primary scission,” is evident in the Memphite myth, which we may understand as yet another “paleophysical metaphor,” i.e., as a profoundly sophisticated physics metaphor disguised in religious terms. There, the primary scission is, as in the Vedic tradition, expressed in the generation of the gods from the primordial ocean, or Nun:

The revelation of Heliopolis… is the mysterious divine action of the scission of Unity in Nun (the milieu likened to the primordial Ocean), which coagulates into the first earth, incarcerating the invisible fire of Tum.

This is the heveanly fire fallen into earth, which in the mystery of Memphis takes the name Ptah. This metaphysical fire produces its effects in nature by materializing the principles enunciated at Heliopolis, but not as yet manifested.

The appearance of Tum implies the becoming of the three principles and the four essential qualities philosophically called the constituent elements of matter, but their “corporification” takes place only upon the appearance of the first Triad: Ptah, Sekhmet, and Nefertum.
¹⁵

While the emergence of the number four may, at this juncture, seem ad hoc and completely arbitrary, we shall see in a little while that it contains yet another physics metaphor.

For the moment, however, our focus must remain on the emergence of the primordial triad of Ptah, Sekhmet, and Nefertum, for “Immanent in every being is a faculty of numbering that is an
a priori
knowledge of Number. The very fact of distinguishing between the I and the other is an enumeration.”
¹⁶
In other words, for Schwaller, implicit in the primary scission is its relationship to consciousness and its Unity-in-Diversity. Schwaller explains the primary scission this way:

Thus, at the origin of all creation, there is a Unity that, incomprehensibly, must include within it a chaos of all possibilities, and its first manifestation will be through division. At the origin of all concepts, there is One and Two, being Three principles where one explains the other, incomprehensible in itself.

…

Here is the divine Trinity that is infallibly found at the origin of all things, all arguments and reasoning; the Trinity that supports everything, the foundation on which the world is built, as everything stems from it.

The original Unity contains all possibilities, of
being
and of
nonbeing
. Consequently, it is of androgynous nature.
¹⁷

We have already made reference to this peculiar “primordial androgyny” — the subject of a whole other book — but again, what Schwaller is pointing out is that in the topological metaphor of the “differentiation of a primordial Nothing,” the inevitability of a One
Three always results: two regions of bracketed nothing sharing a common surface.

Thus we may add the names Ptah, Sekhmet, and Nefertum to our previous table, indicating a common conceptual inheritance lays behind Egypt and the Vedic culture:

1) Ptah =
>;

2) Sekhmet =
>;

3) Nefertum =
>.

Our table now looks like this, revealing the commonality of the metaphor:

>

As already mentioned, why the ancients should so consistently view this primordial differentiation in androgynous terms is the subject of another book which we eventually hope to write, but for now it is worth noting in this regard something else that Schwaller points out:

Do you care to translate this as Father, Spirit, and Son or Osiris, Isis, and Horus? or Brahma, Siva, and Visnu?

You may, but if you are wise and wish not to be led astray, you will say, One, Two, which are Three. This has been
represented
by initiates for those who need images, so that they may
rally around a tradition
, and be bound by what is called “religion.”
¹⁸

In other words, once one comprehends the fact that the assignation of various gods’ names to the topological metaphor is just that, an assignation, then one understands that any assertion of a primordial trinity is, in fact, not the consequence of religious revelation or metaphysics, but a scietifico-philosophical first principle needing no faith, but rather, a kind of belief in the character of the formally explicit metaphor, for that metaphor can be described in the highly abstract symbolisms of topology itself.

Which again raises an important question, one that Schwaller touches upon, and that we have already noted: why do the ancient cultures and civilizations insist on assigning predominantly
masculine
images to describe what is otherwise understood as an androgyny, including, as he avers, even the Christian doctrine of the Trinity? Again, any commentary on this aspect of the perplexing choice of images would require another entire book in order to reconstruct the process of reasoning that led to it, but it is important at this juncture to point out that Schwaller was indeed alive to the fact that this was both a
topological
and a
sexual
metaphor:

Absolute Unity is the hidden God of the Jews, the unknown God who is incomprehensible; the Unutterable of the Egyptians. It is
sat
, the “Being” of the Brahmans…

…

A surface, the first incomprehensible form,
must have at least three sides. Three sounds form the perfect chord; male, female, and issue form the species; two elements and one mean
term are the fundament of all reasoning, all aesthetics, all calculation, and so forth.

…

It is the God of Gods.
¹⁹
The world emanates from the God of Gods by the mere fact that “he contemplates his own face,” which is the
splitting in two
, the scission, the first of all functions:
division
.This much holds for all living things…
²⁰

Note the close connection, once again, between the physical medium in this metaphor, and to consciousness itself in Schwaller’s view. As soon as the first primordial differentiation occurs, there arises, in Schwaller’s words, “generation, cause, and condition of becoming, and hence there is harmony,” that is to say, analogy.
²¹
The medium in effect, in this process, creates information, and becomes par excellence the transmutative “Philosophers’ Stone.” It is because of this constant activity of differentiation, of the endless creation of more and more information, that one may speak of the primary scission or differentiation as being the ultimate metaphor of non- equilibrium, and of the fact that information, once created, is never lost. This is the basis for the ancients’ belief that immortality was less a matter of faith, than of fact, or, as Schwaller put it, “it is impossible to kill a being
born within Nature
, be it mineral or man,”
²²
for such creations emerge first as ever more refined differentiations of Nothing; they have specific information content.

Schwaller’s emphasis on number as a
function of the topological metaphor
and of geometry is crucial. Number is a function because it emerges simultaneously with the first primordial trinity: “it has its
function
because it exists only as relationship.”
²³
It thus inhabits that Platonic world of the “eternal ideas,” for number-as-topological function “shows us intelligibly that all proceeds from Unity and
returns to it through
diversity
. This diversity is precisely our world created in the image of the Eternal World’s example.”
²⁴

2. The Tectratys, and Pyramids as Analogical Machines

At this juncture, we must consider the origin of the number four, and what
its
function is within the esoteric Egyptian cosmology. No esoteric symbol more perfectly epitomizes the
functional
significance of this number than does the Sacred Tectratys of the Pythagoreans, which Schwaller discusses at length. The symbol is simplicity itself:

>

This symbol, as we shall see, contains within it yet more deeply encoded “paleophysics” and is yet another expression of the topological metaphor.