The message of the Sphinx: a quest for the hidden legacy of mankind (23 page)

45. Epoch of 2500 BC, the Pyramid Age, seventy days before the summer solstice: an initiate tracking the journey of the ‘solar’ Horus, the disc of the sun, from its station on the right ‘bank’ of the Milky Way.

46. Epoch of 2500 BC, the Pyramid Age: an initiate tracking the journey of the ‘solar’ Horus, the disc of the sun, to its conjunction with Regulus, the heart-star of Leo, at dawn on the summer solstice. The ritual leaves no room for doubt that the enigmatic figure of Horakhti, so frequently referred to in the Pyramid Texts, is none other than the constellation of Leo.

The weeks pass in seconds on our computer screen and when we at last ‘reach the eastern side of the sky’—at the horizon, at the highly significant moment when ‘the gods are born’, i.e. at the exact time of rising of the star Sirius—we see that a very powerful celestial conjunction has occurred: the sun (which is now at the summer solstice point) stands exactly between the ‘paws’ of Leo.
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The solar disc is positioned near the breast of the cosmic lion where it seems to merge with the bright star Regulus—the ‘star of Kings’.
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The great celestial ‘journey’ performed by the cosmic Horus-King along the ecliptic path therefore turns out to lead quite unambiguously to one very specific place in the heavenly landscape: between the ‘paws’ of Leo and right in front of its ‘breast’.

The implications are obvious.

The enigmatic figure of Horakhti, whose identity we have been attempting to establish, can be none other than the constellation of Leo—the giant cosmic lion, or sphinx, who stands at the gates of the sky-
Duat and
who assumes the name of ‘Horus-of-the-Horizon’.

Let us now transpose the Horus-King to the land and follow his journey to the earthly ‘Horus-in-the-Horizon’—by whom, of course, we mean Hor-em-Akhet, the Great Sphinx in the ‘horizon’ of Giza.

The High Road and the Low Road

The Horus-King stands on the east bank of the Nile, near the royal residence.
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After completing certain rituals he boards a great ‘solar boat’
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—perhaps the very boat that was found in 1954 buried in a pit near the south face of the Great Pyramid—and is taken to the west bank of the river in the valley beneath the Giza plateau. He disembarks, makes his way up to the Temple of the Sphinx, and walks between the paws of the great statue to stand in front of its breast.

He is now at the Gateway to Rostau
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and about to enter the Fifth Division of the
Duat—
the holy of holies of the Osirian afterworld Kingdom. Moreover, he is presented with a choice of ‘two ways’ or ‘roads’ to reach Rostau: one which is on ‘land’ and the other in ‘water’.
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47. The ‘astral’ Kingdom of Osiris in Rostau. Artist’s impression of the correlation of the three Giza Pyramids and the three stars of Orion’s belt in
Zep Tepi,
the ‘First Time’.

The eminent German philologist, Adolf Erman, explains:

Whoever enters the realms of the dead by the sacred place of Rostau has, as we learn from a map of the Hereafter, two routes open to him, which would lead him to the land of the blessed, one by water, the other by land. Both are zigzag, and a traveller cannot change from one to the other, for between them lies a sea of fire ... Also before entering upon either of these routes there is a gate of fire to be passed ...
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Having made his choice, the Horus-King demands to be taken to see ‘his father’ Osiris in his astral form. A mediator or priest reports to Osiris and states:

It is not I who asks that he may see you in this form of yours which has come into being for you; O Osiris, someone asks that he may see you in this form of yours which has come into being for you; it is your son who asks ... it is Horus who asks that he may see you in this form ... a loving son ...
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48. Artist’s impression of the original Horus leading the way for the Horus-King initiate into the place where the ‘Seat’ of Osiris is to be found in the astral Pyramid of final initiation.

Horus then declares to the council of the gods:

The sky quivers, the earth shakes before me, for I am a magician, I possess magic. I have come that I may glorify Orion, that I may set Osiris at the head ...
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I have come to you, my father, I have come to you, Osiris ...
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Next, in a most telling manner, the council of the gods issues the following instruction:

O Horus, the King [your father] is Osiris, this Pyramid of the King is Osiris, this construction of his is Osiris; betake yourself to it ...
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And further light may be shed on the identity of the Osiris-Pyramid by a passage from the
Book of What is in the Duat
which speaks of a mysterious ‘district’ in the
Duat:
‘which is 440 cubits in length and 440 cubits in breadth’.
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Can it be a coincidence, since the Egyptian royal cubit is equivalent to 20.6 inches and 440 cubits therefore amounts to just over 755 feet, that the dimensions given are identical to those of the Great Pyramid’s square base?
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At any rate, after passing through more ordeals and adventures, the questing Horus-King finally reaches Osiris-Orion and finds him listless in the tenebrous underworld of his Pyramid. At this vital juncture, the questor’s role is to bid his ‘father Osiris’ to awake and be reborn—i.e., in dualistic astronomical terms, to rise anew in the east at dawn as Orion: ‘Awake for Horus! ... Raise yourself! ... The gates of the
Duat
are opened for you ... Spiritualize yourself ... May a stairway to the
Duat
be set up for you to the place where Orion is ...’
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Where, then, near or under the Sphinx can we find the ‘two ways’ or the ‘two roads’ of Rostau?

And why should the Horus-King be made to choose between them?

Subterranean world

One of the ancient names of the Giza necropolis, as we have seen, was
Akhet Khufu—Kherit-Neter-Akhet-Khufu
in full, usually rendered into English as ‘the necropolis of the Horizon of Khufu’. In his dictionary of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sir E. A. Wallis Budge translates the word
Kherit-Neter
as ‘cemetery, necropolis’.
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Selim Hassan, however, points out that
Kherit-Neter
can have the alternative meaning of ‘under, or belonging to a God’.
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And Budge adds that
Kherit
can also mean ‘estate’ and that the root of the word, i.e.
Kher,
can mean ‘under something’, ‘the lower part’ or ‘downwards’.
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In addition, as Hassan also reminds us,
Kherit
‘may be applied to the Underworld [
Duat
], perhaps as a lingering memory of the conception of Rostau as the Kingdom of Osiris in the tomb’.
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Could such nuances imply more than a lingering memory? In other words, is it not possible, as we have already suggested in Part I, that under the necropolis-‘horizon’ of Giza there could be an ‘estate’ of some kind—perhaps a network of subterranean chambers and passageways?

In his
Handbook of Egyptian Religion,
the German Egyptologist Adolf Erman wrote that: ‘the celebrated shrine Rostau, the gates of the ways, led directly to the underworld. It is possible that part of this shrine has survived in the so-called Temple of the Sphinx ...’
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Furthermore, commenting on the word ‘Rostau’, R. O. Faulkner, the translator of the Pyramid Texts, says that this is also ‘the term for a ramp or slide for moving the sarcophagus into a tomb, transferred to a region of the beyond’.
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Dr. I. E. S. Edwards, on the other hand, says that the causeway which links a pyramid complex with its valley temple ‘was called “place of the haul” or “entrance of the haul” (Rostau) because it was the way along which sledges bearing the body of the dead king and his personal possessions would be hauled at his funeral’.
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Linking the Valley Temple near the Sphinx with the central Pyramid on the Giza plateau, as the reader will recall, are the remains of an enormous causeway. Might not this causeway or ‘road’ be one of the ‘ways’ to the heartland of Rostau described in the ancient texts? Such causeways—though now in all cases fallen into ruin—were originally rectangular tunnels roofed over with limestone slabs and decorated with star-spangled ceilings.
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It is easy to see how symbolism of this kind would have been be appropriate in the context of the Horus-King’s cosmic quest to find the astral form of Osiris.

The causeway of the Sphinx runs to the immediate south of the monument at about the level of its shoulder and thence slopes gently upwards in a westerly direction towards the great ‘Mortuary Temple’ that stands outside the east face of the central Pyramid of Giza. Being in every sense ‘dry’, it makes sense to consider this causeway as being the ‘road by land’ to Rostau.

But where might the other ‘road’ be located—the ‘way through water’? There may be an important clue in the
Book of What is in the Duat.
In this eerie text there is a depiction of the hermetically sealed chamber of the ‘Kingdom of Sokar’—Sokar-Osiris—which is also the Fifth Division of the
Duat.
The depiction shows a tunnel filled with water passing
under the paws
of a large Sphinx (see page 148). The tunnel slopes gently upwards leading, finally, to the Sixth Division.

Interestingly enough, as we saw in Part I, geologists working around the Great Sphinx in the early 1990s identified a large rectangular chamber and other ‘anomalies’ in the bedrock directly beneath the monument’s paws. Interestingly, too, it is well known that far below the Sphinx is an underground watertable which has been constantly replenished since times immemorial by capillary action from the Nile.
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Tunnel

Dr. Jean Kerisel, the eminent French engineer whose work in the Subterranean Chamber of the Great Pyramid we are already familiar with,
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has recently taken the geological evidence further by suggesting that the Sphinx may stand over the entrance to a 700-metre-long tunnel leading to the Great Pyramid—a tunnel that was once filled or partially filled with water.
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