Magical Egypt - Episode 7: Illumination
This is the first full-length program that John Anthony West has done since the groundbreaking NBC special, Mystery of the Sphinx. Here, he fully presents the architectural and cultural evidence of a sophisticated ancient ancestor culture. Abu Simbel, a marvel of engineering and a masterpiece of symbolic architecture, marks the furthest, southern extent of the Egyptian empire during the time of Ramses II (most of the 12th century B.C.). Even though the monument featuring, as it does, massive statues of Ramses may seem to make a very boastful statement, West doesn't believe, in fact, that is what it is. Instead, he thinks Ramses II was saying, Here the forces of Light begin.  We enter Abu Simbel listening to the ambient recording of chirping birds and we see the four statues highlighted by the sun s rays. West tells us, The overriding theme that fueled Egypt for 3000 years of almost uninterrupted peace and prosperity was the doctrine of immortality the idea that we human beings are of divine origin and through our own internal efforts we can re-establish that connection within ourselves and become divine.  The embodiment of that principle was the pharaoh himself. Ramses II, one of the greatest of the Egyptian pharaohs and certainly one of its most prodigious builders, proclaimed himself in that role. On October 22 and February 22, supposedly the birthday and coronation day of the king, we see a phenomenon that is what you might call the physical manifestation of illumination. Again, we are directed toward the four sunlit statues. The temple is aligned in such a way as to capture the first rays of the sun on these two days and seems to have been engineered so. On these days the sunlight penetrates the temple to its very heart. Robert Bauval (whose latest book Talisman, co-authored with Graham Hancock, explores ancient magical technology) comments on the temple as a talisman that needs to be activated by one s presence. He says a temple is only stone if one doesn't understand its symbolism and if one doesn't integrate with it. He adds, Today we're standing here alone...we re being affected, partially, by the symbolism we see, by the harmony of the architecture, but in no way to the degree a full initiate would be. In short, we re inside the hardware, but we re not charged with the software whereas, had you been initiated in the full sense of temple initiation, then you would have (contained) software programmed to interact with the temple. You wouldn't be here talking to me; you d be exploding with the statuary and the symbols you would explode in here directly and spiritually!  Hieroglyphs are explained as misunderstood technology that works with the brain of the initiate to evoke a matrix of meanings and associations. They are charged, condensed ideas where even entire schools can be collapsed into a single image. To the initiate, who has been given the keys to understanding the many visual and geometric clues, they are magical and capable of exploding into a whirlwind of ideas, associations, understandings, and lessons. As the narrator explains, Like computers use of hierarchy, hieroglyphics are icons, they are folders containing as much as we have loaded into them through the process of successive initiations. They are magical icons that command and cause a desired brain state. They are programs which perform to the extent that we have installed the upgrades. Bauval says that the ancient Egyptians understood that the mind responds to talismans and that they cleverly combined it with architecture. Along these lines the video examines hieroglyphs as logos, in much the same way that corporate logos communicate a vast amount of information in an easy-to-remember image. --Atlantis Rising Magazine