Grid of the Gods (50 page)

Schwaller thus views hieroglyphs as functions of the physical medium itself in their deepest analogical nature:

In order to understand the meanings of a hieroglyph
, the qualities and functions of the represented object must be sought out
; if a sign is a composite, the living meaning of its parts must enter into the synthesis.

This presumes an absolute exactitude in the figuration, and excludes any possibility of malformation or negligence. It should also be observed that symmetry is one of the modes of expression, but not to any aesthetic end.
⁴

Because of this close relationship between the hieroglyph and the actual medium itself, Schwaller points out that the difficulty for moderns in comprehending it arises from its deeply analogical nature; we fail to comprehend the nature of a hieroglyph because “out of laziness, or routine, we skirt this analogic thought process and designate the object by a word that expresses for us but a single congealed concept,”
⁵
rather than the deep and multi-layered complex phenomenon and manifestation of the medium that it is.

2. The Hieroglyph, the Unified Intention of Symbol, and the Hidden Elite

Egyptian hieroglyphs thus function as a prime example of the deliberate “unified intention of symbol,” but in a much more deliberate way than they may at first seem to do, for given the analogical and multi-layered levels and associations of meaning in them, any given hieroglyph can, as Schwaller notes, “address itself simultaneously to all as well as to a chosen few;”
⁶
it is, in other words, the writing of an elite, of a group of initiates, who are by dint of that fact, privy to all the hieroglyph’s encoded meanings. It is also the writing of an elite intending to manipulate or socially engineer the wider culture by means of the very system of writing it employs, through manipulations of the analogical thought process that each hieroglyph engenders.

B. The Physical Medium and the Role of Sympathetic Magic

As such, the hieroglyph not only links directly to the Egyptian view of the physical medium, but also to its practice of sympathetic magic, an alchemical process that would better be described as “analogical magic.”
⁷
The hieroglyph is the “concretizing image”
of a specific subset of functions or ideas within that medium
, and hence, as Schwaller puts it once again, “All the qualities and
functions
it contains must therefore be sought out.”
⁸
The reason for this view of hieroglyphical symbols as analogical symbols, as actual implements in
the practice of analogical magic, follows again from the Egyptians’ nature of the physical medium itself, for indeed, it was itself a gigantic symbol, a “macro-analogy.”
⁹

Function
or
action
is the key here, for the hieroglyph was not understood to be something static or frozen in time, but an actual activity. In one of his more abstruse passages, Schwaller has this to say about it:

…(The) analogy is not the symbol, it is the gesture that will be the symbol
evoking
the analogy; it summons it forth. This is the directive for the thousand forms of sympathetic sorcery about which much could be written, but it is also the key to sacred magic. The latter, however, demands more than a simple consideration of analogies.

In addition to knowledge of the analogues, sacred magic demands mastery of the proper gesture in the consonant ambiance and of the corresponding cosmic moment
.

He labors in vain who does not take this into account.
¹⁰

In decoding this crucial passage, it is important to remember that Schwaller was both a practicing esotericist, but also a
mathematician
. Thus, while most people would read this passage as referring to conventional occult magical practices, they ignore the mathematical clues that Schwaller plants in it: by stressing “gesture” and “function,” in addition to a proper
timing
for the performance of “analogical magic,” Schwaller is pointing, once again, to the “topological metaphor” contained within ancient cosmologies:

To know how to make the proper gesture in the correct milieu at the right cosmic moment: this is sacred magic. The consequence of this gesture is then subordinated to neither time nor space: the effects it has caused will be manifested everywhere and in everything that is harmonically related to the cause.

In this way, often unconsciously, we are magicians. Wisdom consists in knowing how to become consciously so.

…

For this the only guides are analogy and signature. This fact hasled to the establishment of “analogical tables” such as the zodiacand planetary relationships with metals and, further, with the various parts of the human body and with plant and animal types. This is not a whimsical fantasy or even simply a conclusion based on coincidences observed over long periods of time: there does exist a science based on Numbers that reveals the reasons for these coincidences.
¹¹

Or to put Schwaller’s words into slightly different diction, once again, there is a direct relationship between consciousness and the physical medium on the ancient view, and analogical magic was, as it were, a process designed to hone the consciousness to manipulate it more efficiently. The hieroglyph, that is to say, the symbol, the physical medium itself, and the performer of the magical act, exist in a complex system that is open-ended with respect to each of its three components.

De Lubicz’s final comments about number should be noted carefully, for what he is actually implying is that, behind all the tables of analogical correspondences that one finds in ancient, mediaeval, and modern esoteric literature, there lies a
hidden grammar
, an actual analogical calculus that, once known, allows one to perceive the deep mathematical relationships of analogies clearly, and therefore also allows one to dispense with the tables of analogical correspondences themselves. The possession of such a grimoire or “grammar” would make analogical operations formally explicit, and, as Schwaller also implies, be deeply related to mathematics and to
numbers as functions of the emergent topology of the medium
.

This last statement requires further elaboration.

The physical medium as the Egyptians understood it was of primary importance to Schwaller, who summarized its philosophical presuppositions and implications in a manner that directly reveals the “topological metaphor” we have previously spoken of in context with the Vedic literature of India and the legends of Meso-America:

1. Faith in an origin that cannot be situated in time and space. This is reality absolute, not to be grasped by our intelligence. This
cannot be regarded as a mystery: it is the eternal Present Moment, indivisible Unity.

2. Through an internal act, the irrational source undergoes a polarization that manifests itself in spiritual substance. This substance appears as the energy of which the universe is constituted. Such is the
mystery
of the division into two, which, with the irrational origin, comprises the mystic ternary.

3. The phenomenon of universe in all its aspects is made up of this energy substance to the various degrees of its positive (north) polarity going toward its negative (south) polarity. This becoming is accomplished by alternation, a positive-negative and negative-positive oscillation. Hence the point of equilibrium must be the return to the nonpolarized source, the Present Moment, which cannot be situated.
¹²

Schwaller is here speaking more as a mathematician than as a magician, for the image that he is invoking is that of the primordial “sameness,” that primordial nothing-everything in which no distitions exist, and which therefore exists in a timeless and spaceless or “placeless place.” By an internal function, that Nothing differentiates itself, and at once there arises what De Lubicz calls the “mystic ternary.” Each broken off or “bracketed” region of an increasingly and repeatedly differentiated “Nothing” “comprise the phenomena composing our universe.”
¹³
The implication of this analogical view of the medium is further revealed when one adds one more presupposition into the mix, namely, that the physical medium, in many ancient cosmologies,
was
consciousness. It is important that one understands the vast implications of this, for it means that consciousness is not an either-or affair, either one all-encompassing “I” or “Ego,” nor a potentially infinite series of “I’s” or “Egos,” but a both-and: a consciousness able to endlessly differentiate himself into consciousnesses, each with their own unique “I” while remaining part of a greater “I”.
¹⁴
To put it in terms of our topological
metaphor once again, the
> remains in each differentiation,
yet each differentiation of it possesses its own irreducibly unique signature
.

So how, in Schwaller’s terms, would Number emerge as a function of this metaphor? We have already seen how with the “bracketing” or “regionalization” of the primordial “nothing,” for the creation of a common surface
> between
>and
>means that the common surface has the function of 2, a mean between 1, and 3, and so on. Number also emerges thus as a specific topological
function
in Schwaller’s understanding of the Egyptian cosmology, for one designates the primordial nothing, or
first stage
, two designates the first differentiation of it, what Schwaller calls the “primary scission,” and three the end result of the process which ends in three unique versions of the same nothing.