Ross A. Laird

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This guide is intended as an online companion to the book and is organized in similar fashion, with three main sections each addressing a thematic core of consciousness and mythology. The websites referenced in the book appear as links below, as do further resources and sites of interest. Additionally, each section is preceded by a short excerpt form the book.

Part 1: Emergence, Proyet

The dreams and myths to which I have been drawn ’ sea of beginnings, well of fire, black stone spinning ’ originated with people who called themselves the Kem. Their culture is now long gone, though their country remains: wide desert, red cliffs, black earth. They were already vanishing more than two thousand years ago, and they were gone by the time Christianity began. A few hundred years before Christ, the Greeks, whose civilization borrowed substantially from the Kem, called the land of their cultural forbearers Khemia. That name journeyed through ages of forgetting, of secret flame, and was delivered, intact with its essence of mystery, as the modern word alchemy. The land of the Kem is one place, the beginning place of burnished sky and deep river: Egypt.

From a craftsman’s point of view, ancient Egypt is the most compelling place on earth. In stonework, in monumental architecture, in artistic finesse, the Kem achieved a level of astounding refinement. In temples, statuary and sculpture, they were capable of matching ’ and in some cases, exceeding ’ what we can accomplish today. Their endeavors, which now lie strewn across the desert, buried and fallen into ruin, served the aims of an enigmatic spirituality about which we know many facts but few truths.

The consciousness of those vanished people is so fantastically distant from our own that we can hardly grasp it. It has been lost on the road of the world’s unfolding, somewhere between the present and the crossroads of beginning. The impulse that drew me into a dream and up the mountain involves walking back along that road, reading the signposts in the way that I know ’ through the work of my hands ’ trying to discover the traces of a lost age. That odyssey begins with stone.

The rebel Egyptologist: Rene Schwaller de Lubicz and the intelligence of the heart
The Pyramid Texts, or the Book of Illumination
More on the Pyramid Texts
Egyptian temples and mythology
The Edfu temple
Horus
Esoterica of ancient Egypt
The Shebtiw and other strange matters
Chris Dunn on the technology of ancient Egypt
Alchemy
More alchemy
Fulcanelli and other strangeness
Folklore and mythology electronic texts, page 1
Folklore and mythology electronic texts, page 2
The properties of meteorites
Want to buy a meteorite?
Meteors and ancient catastrophes
Egyptian ritual and magic
An introduction to the Corpus Hermeticum
Thoth, the great sage
Hermes Trismegistus
Thoth’s prophecy of Egypt
The Metropolitan Museum of Art: The Egyptian Collection (The Jasper Queen)
Akhenaten and the Jewish history controversy
A history of the aluminum cap of the Washington Monument
Ancient continents and the Acasta region
The Blombos caves

Part 2: The Journey Outward, Exodus

After the age of Khafre, twenty-five hundred years before Christ, the radiant stone faded from tales of the Kem. It went underground, as the mythic landscape came to be populated by warriors and ghosts. But the stone did not disappear: it migrated instead, taking with it much of the archaic Kem mythology. It lifted itself from its foundations, like the wandering stones of the desert, and followed the people of the exile. They took it in, sheltered it, and made it a part of their tangled history. They cradled it within their own legends of origin, though it was a child of their enemies, and delivered it to the center of their own cosmology. Those wanderers, the people of the dream, were the Hebrews...

The Hebrews, like the Kem, were a hinge upon which human consciousness turned. The Kem faced forward into the past; the first Hebrews faced backward into the future. For the Kem, everything rolled toward the origin. Their vision stretched deep into the well: ancestors, a stone, a god whose wing covers the sky. The Hebrews were different. Their destination lay in the future, in a new world not yet manifest but already made by the hand of The Unnameable. Memory was the most important aspect of Kem spirituality ’ the art of memory, as it would come to be called. For the Hebrews, conversely, prophecy was theurgy. Promised land, covenant, messiah, kingdom of heaven: these are the touchstones of a future-oriented religion begun in the wake of the Kem’s decline.

During the formative age of the Hebrew religion (the first and second millennia BCE, roughly), the consciousness of the Kem gave way to something entirely opposite. Relics passed away. In the Hebrew tradition, every object fashioned at twilight on the sixth day of creation is a tool for the future. With these objects ’ ram, shamir, tablets ’ the arc of prophecy was begun. "Behold," says the Book of Isaiah, "I create new heavens and a new earth; and the former things shall not be remembered, nor come into mind."

After thousands of years of history and tradition, the Jews today are steeped in the past; the existence of the country of Israel and the turmoil that surrounds it are based on the pedigree of that past. Upon the mountain, The Unnameable appeared to Jacob and promised to his people possession of "the whole of Palestine." Furthermore, "God promised that Jacob should spread out to the west and to the east, a greater promise than that given to his fathers Abraham and Isaac, to whom He had allotted a limited land. Jacob’s was an unbounded possession." This Hebrew prophecy is one mythological source of the enmity between Jews and Palestinians, those intractable enemies who are, in fact, one people.

A prophecy is a dream halfway to becoming a myth. It hovers above the earth, rises on currents of air, meanders across peaks and over a restless ocean. The dream lifts the dreamer, making the old world new again, new for the first time. Prophecies, dreams, and myths suffuse the first nine books of the Hebrew bible, the scriptural core of Judaism (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings). These narratives trace the history of the Hebrew people from creation to the end of the Babylonian exile, in the sixth century BCE, when the myths were first rendered into written form by an unknown editor. These myths were crafted by exiles who had survived invasion and the destruction of their temple. They had lost almost all their sacred artifacts ’ ark, shamir, foundation stone. Only the eldest among them even remembered the temple. They were bereft, in the way that many of the world’s aboriginal peoples are today: removed from the sacred land, relieved of the artifacts of memory, tethered by the conqueror. In this situation, a culture must choose either to surrender and be subsumed by its surroundings, or to remake the mythological world with itself as the first and chosen people.

The emergent myths crafted during the Hebrews’ captivity in Babylon establish, perhaps for the first time in the history of the West, the conception of time as linear ’ as an arrow, a metaphor later popularized by the Greeks. In the Hebrew cosmology, the Kem’s rolling wheel of time is pierced by a stone at the crossroads, then unrolled into a single line that stretches toward the infinite. In this conception, each slice of time occupies a unique point on the line; there are no overlapping rhythms and overtones, no resonances from previous cycles. For the Hebrews, the bull’s-eye of this arrow of time is the celestial kingdom ’ far in the future, held aloft by prophecy and a covenant.

Time as a linear construct is so integral to the modern Western consciousness (though not to aboriginal societies) that it is impossible for most of us to conceive of it any other way. Of course time moves in one direction only; we are both its witnesses and protagonists. But linear time is a cognitive construct, not a physical law. It has developed, like every tale we tell, from a dream into a myth. The Kem invented individuality, but the Hebrews invented time.

The Legends of the Jews, by Louis Ginzberg
Bible Gateway (online bibles)
Hymn to the Aten
First monotheism: The Aten
David Rohl’s new chronology
David Rohl and biblical archaeology
Kenneth Kitchen’s response to Rohl (referenced on page 289)
Thoughts on biblical chronolgy and the exodus
The Stone of Scone
Albrecht Durer
Durer’s Apocalypse
A version of the tale of the shamir
More on the shamir
Moses and the Egyptian priesthood
The two pillars of the temple
Esoteric thoughts on the ark
Esoteric thoughts on Solomon’s temple
The Book of Enoch
Ancient traditions of the Messiah
Hiram of Tyre
The Tetragrammaton in the Jewish tradition
The Tetragrammaton of Madame Blavatsky
Notre-Dame-des-Victoires Church
The Salem witch trials of 1692
Cotton Mather texts
Salem witchcraft texts

Part 3: Pilgrimage, Hajj

I slowly come awake. Tentative, uncertain of my direction, I ease myself from slumber. As the Taliban tear down their own ancestral sanctuaries, seeking to do away with their mythic heritage (which is also my own), the impulse for preservation grows in me. I must fight back: by means of the stone on my workbench, by way of tales ghosting within me. I must sustain the link that joins my children to the well of origin.

I tell Rowan and Avery about an old temple in the desert, a place of sacred pilgrimage that pre-dates Muhammad by thousands of years. I describe to them the Kaaba sanctuary, in Mecca, Islam’s holiest site: a flat-roofed building, fifty feet high, walls of mortared blue-grey stone on a foundation older than memory. Kaaba means "cube" (though two of the walls are forty feet long while the others are thirty-five). The building is empty, save for hanging votive lanterns and three pillars supporting the roof. There is a single door, seven feet above the ground, in the face of the northeastern wall. In modern times, the structure is draped with black brocade, made yearly in Egypt, embroidered in gold with passages from the Qur’an. (The Holy of Holies in Jerusalem, the shrine crafted by Hiram with the shamir, where the ark rested upon the foundation stone, was also a cube, of the same approximate dimensions.)

At the kitchen table, over oatmeal and bagels, I try to explain to my children why the Taliban would destroy or proscribe everything not in keeping with their radical interpretation of Islamic law. The reasons are not complicated: the pious always wish to destroy the Other ’ the neighbor, the guest, the awkward ancestor ’ to flood time with their own myths, to scrape the horizon clear of old tales. They never succeed.

Myths cannot be excised from their origins: the Kaaba is a relic of the Other, of the Hebrew Abraham, of the three crones who were once venerated throughout the Arabian Peninsula. The Islamic guardians of the Kaaba sanctuary are still called Beni Shaybah, the sons of the Old Woman. In the beginning, when Islam was fresh with revelation, when the messenger Mohammed wrestled with the angel Gabriel on the mountain, Jews and Christians and devotees of the three crones were all recognized as followers of The Unnameable’s many forms. Later, when the scriptures were collected and codified, the old imperatives crept in: racism, exclusion, violence urged upon the Other. This is the shared heritage of the religions of the Book: in the passage from revelation to scripture, from glimpse to certainty, animosities proliferate.

Prayer is better than sleep, says the Islamic call to devotion, and storytelling is a kind of prayer: for the enduring, for the mythic, for the ancestral and the numinous. The stories of the infidel and pagan past are at once the objects of the Taliban’s ire and the foundation of their own religious culture. In telling these tales ’ stones, fire, goddesses in the desert ’ I resist the Taliban’s impulse for erasure...

The exiles, led by a pillar of fire, fleeing Babylon and the furnace of Nebuchadnezzar, found the Kaaba rebuilt by Abraham and Ishmael. Courses of green stone, uncut and nestled together like the humps of camels, rose from the old foundation. The ashlars of the doorway stood upright. The radiant stone, bound by a silver frame in the shape of an eye, remained bound to the outer wall; it looked southeast, to where the Shebtiw had vanished.

The nomads who appeared to the exiles ’ all of a sudden, like mirages from out of the empty lands ’ called the Black Stone Alhajar Al-Aswad. Today, the black stone of the Kaaba and the foundation stone of the Hebrews are the last of the sacred stones. Their archaic companions ’ the benben stone of the Kem, the shamir of Solomon ’ are gone. Perhaps it’s true that the Kaaba stone, now broken and fragmented, held together by a silver ligature, is a fragment of the original benben stone that fell from the sky before the time of Khafre. No one knows. But the two persistent stones ’ one venerated in Mecca by Muslims, the other in Jerusalem and venerated by both Jews and Muslims ’ still lie at the center of devotion. Millions of Jews and well over a billion Muslims preserve and cherish these relics. Even the Christian tradition remembers them: the church is said to be founded upon a rock, and identifies Jesus as the cornerstone rejected by the builders of Solomon’s temple. In the modern age, so removed from ancient practices and symbols, the stone of origin remains.

The exiles were drawn into the circle of the Bedouins. They settled down beside one another and became one people: wandering the landscape, reading the horizon for the approach of sandstorms, each year returning to the Kaaba on their pilgrimage to the holy places. They preserved the scared rite, begun by Abraham, of walking seven times around the old temple. And when the sisters appeared to them, as to the travelers of previous ages, the Bedouin learned the true names of things.

The desert people maintained the sacred site. They cleaned its dark stones, swept sand from the lintel, placed boundary markers around the enclosure. They guarded the well that Ishmael had unearthed, made narrow paths upon the hills that Hagar had climbed, searching for redemption. They worked the stones of the outer court with whispering sand brought from Sinai: made of clear quartz crystals, hard enough to polish basalt, known for the soft songs it made when blown by the wind.

The Kaaba has been continuously renovated since the time of Abraham; most recently by the construction firm of the bin Laden family, of which Osama is the exiled son.

In antiquity, the Kaaba’s most notable caretakers were the desert tribe called the Quraysh; one of their number, Muhammad, assisted with renovations undertaken in 605 CE. At that time, the three sisters were still venerated. They had not yet departed the temple, following the old gods out of the world. During the life of the Prophet, new courses of blue-grey stone were laid down and mortared above the stones of Abraham (themselves built upon an older foundation). The portal was raised high off the ground, the roof replaced by a shipwrecked carpenter of the Kem. The black stone was removed and cleaned. Tradition attests that Muhammad resolved the question of who would have the honor of returning the stone to its mountings: he laid it upon a cloak, handed a corner to each of the groups who has assisted in the renovation, and together they lifted the stone into place. Muhammad seated it with his own hands.

The devotion of the desert peoples to the cubic sanctuary, to the black and radiant stone, to the surrounding circular plaza and the minarets they added to the enclosure, spread with them in their later religious conquests. Islamic architecture evolved from the rough-hewn temple of the sisters into complex geometric forms based on the cube, to filigrees and domes and rhythms of enclosed space. The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, home of the foundation stone and site of Solomon’s temple, was their creation. In Europe, Islamic arches and arabesques inspired the gothic cathedrals. While renaissance mystics contemplated the philosopher’s stone, the spirit of the Kaaba’s black stone made its way among them.

That spirit thrives in the architecture of today: in the geometric patterns of the modern, in the rectilinear forms of urban plazas, in the soaring and slender shapes of minarets in the guise of office towers. In one modern example, the Japanese-American architect Minoru Yamasaki’s design for a commercial district was intended to reproduce, in proportion and symbol, the Kaaba sanctuary. Yamasaki’s buildings were based on the geometry of the cube, delineated by arches at the base and extruded heavenward. He provided a fountain to represent the sacred well, and a radial circular pattern for the grounds, mimicking the enclosure surrounding the Kaaba. The office buildings were wrapped with steel filigree, as the Kaaba is wrapped in brocade embroidered with gold. Yamasaki’s project was completed in 1976 in lower Manhattan, and was called the World Trade Center.

The Koran at the Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia
Islamic mythology
More Islamic mythology
Religion and history of Islam
The Kaaba stone
At the Edge: goddess of the black stone
The Kaaba sanctuary
More on the Kaaba sanctuary
Hadith
More on Hadith
The Noble Sanctuary
The Dajjal
The Night Journey of Muhammad
More on the Night Journey
Even more on the Night Journey
Muhammad riding Buraq (painting)
The Royal We (shared ancestry)
United Kingdom Commission Report on the Western Wall (search full text using title)
"The Mosque to Commerce": bin Laden and the World Trade Center
One perspective on Islamic myth and history
Another perspective
And another
The Dome of the Rock and Temple Mount
Who owns Jerusalem? A Christian Perspective
Who owns Jerusalem? An Islamic perspective
Who owns Jerusalem? A Jewish perspective