Ironically, it was Isha, not René, who first felt the pull of Egypt. Concerned with alchemy, matter, and the evolution of consciousness, Schwaller hadn't thought much about Egypt. But Isha knew they had to go. In 1936, on a visit to the tomb of Rameses IX in Alexandria, Schwaller had a kind of revelation. A picture represented the pharaoh as a right-angle triangle with the proportions 3:4:5, his upraised arm adding another unit. Schwaller thought it demonstrated the Pythagorean theorem, centuries before Pythagoras was born. From the picture it was clear to him that the knowledge of the medieval masons had its roots in ancient Egypt. For the next fifteen years, until 1951, Schwaller de Lubicz remained in Egypt, investigating the evidence for what he believed was an ancient system of psychological, cosmological, and spiritual knowledge.


Most of Schwaller’s work was done at the temple at Luxor, his study of its remarkable architecture and design a natural outcome of his early fascination with the mystery of number. On his first visit in 1937, Schwaller was impressed with a tremendous insight. The temple, with its strange, "crooked" alignments, was, he was certain, a conscious exercise in the laws of harmony and proportion. He called it the Parthenon of Egypt—somewhat anachronistically, since he believed Luxor was concrete proof that the Egyptians understood the laws of harmony and proportion before the Greeks.


Schwaller searched Luxor for evidence of the golden section, phi. If the golden section had been used, that would prove the Egyptians had knowledge of it much earlier than the Greeks, a revelation that alone would cause an uproar in orthodox Egyptology. But as John Anthony West in The Serpent and the Sky (1978), a study of Schwaller de Lubicz, points out, phi is more than a central item in classical architecture. It is the mathematical archetype of the manifest universe, the means by which we have an "asymmetrical" "lumpy" world of galaxies and planets, and not a bland, homogenous sameness, a question that contemporary cosmologists are also concerned with. Schwaller linked phi to the orbits of the planets, the proportions of Gothic cathedrals, and the forms of plants and animals. It was a "form constant," a blueprint for reality, a law of creation. And the Egyptians knew it.


The Egyptians knew much else: the precession of the equinoxes, the circumference of the globe, and the secrets of pi. The knowledge of the Egyptians indeed made the Greeks seem like children. Their forgotten mathematical wisdom led Schwaller increasingly to realize that Egyptian civilization must be far older than we suspect--the clear evidence of water erosion on the Sphinx also suggests that. He concluded that their knowledge may have been inherited from vanished Atlantis. But more important than any of those conclusions, was his growing conviction that the Egyptians had a radically different consciousness from ours. They viewed the world symbolically, seeing in nature a "writing" conveying truths about the metaphysical forces behind creation—"the Neters," as Egyptian gods are called. It was a vision Schwaller believed we desperately need to regain.


At the center of this vision was Conscious Man, the King. For the ancient Egyptians, Conscious Man was the crown and aim of the universe, a perception many nature-centered mystics would dispute. But Conscious Man was not "man as we know him." He was the individual in whom the "intelligence of the heart" has awakened, one who has had the experience of "functional consciousness.
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Functional Consciousness
Schwaller believed Luxor was a kind of living organism, a colossal compendium of esoteric truth, whose every detail, from its total design down to its very materials, voiced one central revelation: that Conscious Man was the goal of cosmic evolution. "Each individual type in Nature is a stage in the cosmic embryology which culminates in man," he wrote. Different species, Schwaller believed, developed various "functions"—what the Egyptians called "Neters" and we translate as "gods"--which have their apotheosis and integration in Conscious Man.


The essence of Schwaller's evolutionism has to do with what he calls "functional consciousness," an idea we can benefit from understanding, regardless of our opinions of elites or theocracies. And although Schwaller developed his ideas about functional consciousness in an Egyptian context, that context is ultimately not necessary. The essence of those ideas goes back to Bergson and intuition. Needless to say, Schwaller took this basic insight and, with his Egyptian revelations, developed an original, powerful, and imaginatively thrilling symbolic system.


"Functional consciousness" is a way of knowing reality from the inside. Schwaller believed ancient Egypt was based on this inner knowing, very unlike our own outer-oriented one. The ancient Egyptians, he argued, were aware of the limitations of purely cerebral consciousness, the Set mind that "granulates" experience into fragments of time and space and is behind our increasing abuse of nature and of each other. Granulated experience produces our familiar world of disconnected things, each a kind of "island reality." From this perspective, when I look at the world, I see a foreign, alien landscape, which I can know only by taking it apart and analyzing it. As the poet Wordsworth wrote, "We murder to dissect.
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But as Schwaller wrote in Nature Word (134), "The Universe is wholly activity." There is another way of knowing, one very similar to Taoist forms of perception, which can heal the ruptures of cerebral consciousness, without recourse to dubious ideas of elites or theocracies. In a section called "The Way" (135), Schwaller advises us to "leave all dialectic behind and follow the path of the Powers.
" Poetically, he continues by calling on us to

Tumble with the rock which falls from the mountain.


Seek light and rejoice with the rosebud about to open:

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labor with the parsimonious ant;

gather honey with the bee;

expand in space with the ripening fruit.

All of those injunctions are classic examples of the kind of "knowing from the inside" that Bergson had in mind in his talk on intuition. In this way, we participate with the world, rather than hold it at arm's length, objectifying it, as modern science is prone to do. With recent developments in genetics, this "objectification" is now dangerously focused on ourselves.


My aim is not to reduce Schwaller's remarkable achievement to a simple variation on Bergson. Understanding what "functional consciousness" is and developing methods of achieving it are two different things. Schwaller's immense work on an entire civilization devoted to "inner knowing" entails ways of reaching this deeper perception, and we would be wrong to ignore it. But I think it's important to bring the essence of Schwaller's thought to an audience possibly put off by his talk of elites. The "intelligence of the heart" may be difficult to acquire, but it is something we and the whole world—not only a select group of enlightened theocrats— can benefit from by experiencing. In the long run, Schwaller himself understood this. "To be of the Elite," he wrote (Nature Word 102), "is to want to give and to be able to give . . . to draw on the inexhaustible source and give this food to those who are hungry and thirsty." With his study of ancient Egypt, this is a truth Schwaller de Lubicz took to heart.