Jeffrey Gibson

Recently Robert Tulip, with reference to the materials cited by AS and others to support their claims about Isis being thought by Egyptians to be a perpetual virgin, declared"Leaving aside the questions of (a) how he knows that mind set of academic Egyptologists (RT is well outside of Academia, isn't he, and has little to no contact with academic Egyptologists, or departments of Egyptology at Universities, or attends academic conferences on ancient Egypt or reads any, let alone all, all of professional journals that publish articles on ancient Egypt, yes?); (b) that there is an actual thought police group out there and that they are hunting down astrotheologists or censoring academic egyptologists who show sympathy towards it; and (c) if it's true that no academic Egyptologist has ever cited "this material" -- I'd like to ask a few questions about this claim.


1. Is "terror of being cast out of their narrow guild" really the reason academic Egyptologists "don't cite this material"? Can he he produce relevant evidence (e.g., interviews with academic Egyptologists) in support of this claim? Is such evidence, if it exists, any good?

2. Is "terror of being cast out of their narrow guild" really the only reason academic Egyptologists "don't cite this material". Might they not have other reasons for doing so?

If the answer is no to any of these questions, then how valid (not to mention informed) is Robert's claim? What reasons would we (or anyone) have to accept it?

Jeffrey

Robert Tulip

Hello again Jeffrey, thank you for starting this thread. Apologies for using the somewhat inflated language of ‘thought police’; I meant this rhetorically. No one hunts astrotheologists, they just ignore and suppress them. I think the culture of Egyptology is a worthwhile topic for discussion, and would hate to see it neglected by others on this board.

I would not say I am ‘well outside academia’, since I have three degrees and interact with academics nearly every day in my work. My father was the head of the school of religious studies at Sydney University, so I do have a background of connection to scholarly analysis of religion, but I have found that my views seem too heretical for anyone to take an interest in talking to me.

The history of the academic study of Egypt is itself a fascinating subject which I fear has not been given as much attention as it deserves, although I stand happy to be corrected by those more knowledgeable on the topic than me.

In ancient times the Greek philosophers and historians had a great fascination for the land of the Pharaohs and the pyramids, already old beyond counting in their day. From the visits of Solon and Herodotus, through Plato and Pythagoras and later through the work of Plutarch, there was a recognition of how Egypt was an intellectual and cultural source for civilization. But even then, the status of Egypt was contested. The geometer Euclid and the astrologer Ptolemy both lived in Alexandria, as did some of the greatest Christian theologians, such as Origen and Clement. But the Greeks had a visceral dislike of animal gods, and the cult of Serapis was established as a modus vivendi between Osiris and Zeus, retaining Egyptian lore and myth within the new anthropocentric Greek paradigm. Another anthropocentric paradigm that contributed to disfavour towards Egypt was the Jewish bible, with its demonising of pharaoh in the Exodus story.

The loss of hieroglyphs for more than a thousand years is an extraordinary indicator of how western racism had a prejudicial attitude towards Egypt. The rediscovery of Egyptian ruins in the wake of Napoleon’s invasion, especially the Rosetta Stone and Champollion’s decoding of it, opened up a new virgin world of human thought for analysis. The pioneering work in the nineteenth century took a range of approaches, from the tabula rasa view that Egypt held a lost magical key to divine knowledge, across to the Christian view that pagan heresy deserved suppression.

Even before Napoleon, the contest over Egypt is shown in the work of Sir Isaac Newton, who translated the Emerald Tablets of Thoth as the axiomatic foundation of his cosmology, as above so below, revealed in the law of gravity. Giordano Bruno was burnt by the pope in Rome in 1600 for his view that Egypt was the source of true religion. John Milton’s puritan Paradise Lost reinforced Christian tradition that Egypt was on the side of Satan in the cosmic battle of good versus evil.

Martin Bernal’s Black Athena is a key work to explore the status of Egyptology. Bernal was a Professor at Cornell University. Controversially, he argues that the academic subject of classics is mired in politics and racism, and that classics traces its birth to what we might call a ‘jingo for empire’ culture with an implicit neo-Nazi view that only whites are human. This is not to say classics scholars are Nazis, but rather that their forebears’ intellectual horizons were framed in a racist context, which still has a subtle but strong influence in the academy, disdaining suggestion of eastern influence on the west. Edward Said explored related themes in Orientalism. To put my assertion more precisely, the question here turns on whether there are secret selection criteria for entrance to the guild. There are many topics which scholars rightly shun as ‘woo’. Modern science was born in the suppression of Hermetic ‘woo’ by the enlightenment. The Renaissance had rediscovered ancient texts, but as these were assessed, it was rapidly found that a big Hermetic strand was heretical in Christian terms, and was linked to the campaign against witchcraft. Bruno was one cautionary casualty of this discovery.

Leonardo da Vinci has an instructive viewpoint. He wrote the cryptic statement “Hermes the Philosopher” in his extant notebooks, but we do not know if Leonardo expanded this recognition of the hermetic tradition in his lost work. Leonardo’s reference to Hermes, despite being Greek, appears to allude to the thrice great Thoth, and his cosmology later celebrated by Newton.

Today there is a chasm between popular writers on Egypt and the academy. I believe Hornung’s book, mentioned previously here, gives some good background, but I have not yet read it. I have however read widely in the more esoteric side of Egypt studies, in the works of those that the head of antiquities in Cairo charmingly intimidates as “pyramidiots”. This work is obviously highly variable in quality. I regard Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval as excellent scholars. Andrew Collins is interesting. Less reliable work is found in the writing of John Anthony West and Ralph Ellis. The eminence gris of woo, Madame Blavatsky, haunts the field with her theosophy.

My impression from reading such work is that much good analysis is shunned by the mainstream academic establishment, and that anyone wanting preferment in career terms is counselled to avoid the topics these writers discuss. For example Bauval's Orion Correlation Theory is viewed with disdain, despite its plausibility against Newton’s views on Thoth. The same disdain applies in academic views toward the writing of DM Murdock (Acharya S), whose Christ in Egypt I consider a brilliant work of pioneering genius.

Murdock’s recent analysis of Buddhist influence in ancient Egypt is a great case in point. Working together with a scholar in the field, she explores how the therapeuts of Alexandria may link to the theraputta Buddhist missionaries sent from India to Egypt by Ashoka in the third century BC. I have heard it said that the similarity between theraputta and therapeuts is mere coincidence, and that the Greek term owes nothing to Indian ancient monastic tradition. Acharya disputes this dismissal, as do I. This area of research is considered too speculative for academic interest. “Terror” may be a hyperbolic term, but it points to a real problem.

It seems there is an intellectual join-the-dots exercise at work serving to narrow the field of acceptable topics. Comparative mythology opens speculative heresy about Christian origins, which is distasteful to conventional Christians, who still retain much influence in studies of ancient topics. Then, the existence of weakly grounded speculation among magical thinkers serves to throw associated sound speculation into extreme doubt, such that these topics are ignored despite their intellectual merits and value.There is already a conditioning by training and selection, like in agricultural husbandry. You don’t get university tenure on the basis of speculative inter-disciplinary hypotheses. You have to specialise, leaving inter-disciplinary work for later, as seen in Bernal’s career. Now, when astrotheology comes along and says that the entirety of western civilization is built upon a lie, because the Gospels are fiction and Christ is allegory for the sun, the audacity and scale of this suggestion means it is rejected out of hand as the subject of what Orwell coined ‘crimestop’, the newspeak facility of avoiding dangerous thought. To say Mary was modelled on Isis is one example of an idea rejected by crimestop. Thanks again Jeffrey for raising these important questions. I hope I have not bored readers by explaining how I approach them. It is simply that the conditioning of academic Egyptology predisposes a narrowing of research focus, such that wider philosophical questions raised by Egyptian evidence find few accepted avenues for discussion other than in popular culture.