THE EGYPTIANS AND HUMAN EVOLUTION

THE EGYPTIANS AND HUMAN EVOLUTION

Meanwhile, Darwin's theory of evolution had been published . When Egyptology began, most scholars, as dutiful sons of the Enlightenment , were atheists, materialists or only nominally religious . Most were convinced they represented an apogee of civilisation. But the process was not yet regarded as inevitable and automatic ; the most renowned intellects of the time did not yet regard themselves as advanced apes. It was not yet heretical to suggest that ancient people had actually known something .

There are of course enormous gaps in our knowledge, but I believe the origins of life can now be discussed fruitfully within the framework of modern chemistry and evolutionary biology. It must be admitted from the beginning that the way in which condensation reactions occurred on the primitive earth is not understood.
But as the theory of evolution became dogma , it became (and remains) impossible to attribute exact knowledge to ancient cultures without undermining the faith in progress. Thus ,lumped in with the pyramidologists , incapable of supporting sound insight with ironclad proof, the many early Egyptolo gists who were men of breadth and vision gradually lost ground . In retrospect, this can be seen as inevitable.

Most complicated inorganic objects and these simplest living organisms that provides most of the intellectual challenge of the problem of the origin of life .. . We know very little about the chemistry of the organisms that lived on earth three billion years ago . . . The conditions that existed on the primitive earth are very different from those that are usually used by organic chemists.
Although many of the constituents of cells can be synthesised in the laboratory, a few of the most important cannot yet be made under prebiotic conditions . It is even harder to join the simple organic molecules together to form polymers similar to proteins and nucleic acids.

Consequently, a great deal of work will have to be done before we can propose a single complete theory of the origin of life and show by experiment that each step could have occurred on the primitive earth . . . We do not understand much about the later stages in the evolution of the code. We do not know whether the structure of the code is an historical accident or n o t . . . The genetic code is the result of an elaborate series of adaptations . . . Virtually nothing is known about the successive steps in this adaptation . . . We have seen that the idea of natural selection is a very simple one and that it completely eliminates the need to postulate any internal or external ' will' that directs evolution . . . Today , to many biologists, the law of natural selection seems almost a tautology.

Helena Blavatsky was a woman of great personal power and prodigious learning . Her claim was to effect a synthesis of the esoteric traditions of the world, but the result is for some readers more conglomeration than synthesis. Yet, a century later, some of her more outrageous sounding statements look luminously prophetic , while the initial distrust engendered by her ecstatic and convoluted prose style abates significantly upon rereading .

Without exception, these men were working in the dark. The mystical and metaphysical verities that nourish a true civilisation were, in Europe , obscured, ossified or forgotten (although Fenelon, Goethe, Fechner and a few alchemists had kept their tradition alive). The crude science of the day supported the depressing billiardball universe postulated by Laplace. It was possible then , as it is now , to walk into Chartres Cathedral and to be struck with the unconquerable conviction that,
in some way, this is what human life on earth is about. But to explain that conviction , to put it into communicable terms, was impossible one hundred years ago . To 'prove' it is still impossible. Though corrupt and decadent, the 19th century civilisations of the Orient were flourishing compared to Europe . But they were accessible to Westerners only through the garbled prolixities of Blavatsky, or in books by Western scholars imbued with progressive notions of the Enlightenment and therefore blind to the inner meaning of the words they pretended to communicate . What is now readily available to every student was then unavailable to the most erudite. It was impossible to study first hand the authentic works of Zen masters, Sufis, yogis, to read the Bardo Thodol , the Tao Te Ching , the Philokalia , the Christian mystics, alchemists, Cabbalists and Gnostics; to compare these to the myths of Egypt; and to recognise above and beyond their differences the bond that unites all these traditions.