This extract is a sequel of the preceeding post of The Alchemical Brothers
Personal note;
The Temple of Luxor’s NFT entered it’s (anthropocosmic) designing stages after absorbing and digesting the (abundant) published works of de Lubicz. Every illustration from the opus ’Temple of Man’ was shared in the submission, and can be publicly viewed in the 2nd post of this thread.
In 1934, the Lubiczs set out on the Mediterranean on a hydrodynamic yacht designed by Schwaller. In the same year they settled on the Spanish island of Majorca in a hospice dating to the time of Ramon Lull (1232-1315), and a period of isolation ensued. In 1936 however, with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the Lubiczs were forced to move on and their affinities drew them to Egypt, where they would remain for the next fifteen years. In Egypt, Schwaller had a crucial impression that crystallised the connection between Egyptian civilisation and the Pythagorean-Hermetic tradition, thereby bringing his alchemical quest directly into contact with its perceived Pharaonic sources.
The experience occurred in 1936 in the tomb of Ramses IX, where Schwaller beheld an Osirian mural depicting Ka-Mut-Tef, the ‘bull of his mother’. Here the Pharaoh is shown as the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle, simultaneously embodying both the masculine-generative and the feminine-gestative power of the cosmos. This theme—in which an ‘agent’ becomes both the father and mother of itself, lay at the very heart of his alchemical metaphysics—the Trinitarian theory of sulphur-mercury-salt. From that moment on, Schwaller knew he had found the true symbolique of his magnum opus: Le Temple de l’homme (The Temple of Man, 1957-8), a work that gestated over a dozen years of on-site measurement, decipherment and study of the temple of Amenemopet at Luxor, Upper Egypt, confirming for Schwaller that this lineage was indeed the font of the Hermetic, Pythagorean and alchemical tradition of which he was already a seasoned—and practicing—adept. In order to devote himself to this tradition, Schwaller and his entourage set themselves up in a wing of the Winter Palace on the Nile at Luxor—where, over a period of twelve years, he was able to live in daily contact with the Egyptian temples.
Kamutef (‘the bull of his mother’), Tomb of Ramses IX. Reproduced from R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, The Temple of Man: Apet of the South at Luxor. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International, 1999. In this image, Schwaller saw the Pythagorean principle of tri-unity. In Egyptian theology, ka (‘bull’, ‘spirit’) indicates the active masculine force in the triad; mut, the ‘mother’, represents the feminine receptive force; while the child or son represents the product. The paradox that binds the three aspects of this lineage into a triangular unity lies in the fact that the son, by recapitulating (indeed reincarnating) his father, becomes thereby the bull (spirit and inseminator) of his mother. In short, he is the father of himself. Rather than being a simple ‘product’, he exists both in a primary state, ‘before’ the separation or differentiation into gendered polarity (male-female) and in an ultimate state, ‘after’ the two poles have been differentiated and then recombined (the alchemical conjunctio or cohabation).
Schwaller’s alchemical reading of the French cathedrals—long understood as architectonic images of Christ—Hermetically disposed him to approach the New Kingdom Egyptian temple as a codification of the incarnation of god as man—the mystery of the anthropocosmos. Against the fine grain of conventional Egyptology, Schwaller provided an elaborate symbolic reading of the temple of Amenemopet. He maintained that the foundational teaching underpinning every symbolic detail of the temple, governing and shaping its entire structure at every level, from its foundation and its axes to its material substances and its form, was ‘the doctrine of the anthropocosmos’. In no uncertain terms, Schwaller calls the temple at Luxor ‘the temple of man’. This is not merely because the structure of the temple could be correlated with the biometrical proportions of the royal corpus—the image of the pharaoh—but because the Egyptian divine temple itself, like the pharaoh, is the structure that supports the incarnation of divinity. The temple of man corporifies the divine functions or principles (neteru), both as a physical edifice created according to divine proportions of gnomonic growth, and literally through the embodiment of the divine in man, which was in fact the raison d’être of Luxor temple. For Schwaller, human physiology is a physical product of metaphysical principles; as such, the organs of human perception, from the physical to the subtle, are at the same time the instruments of divine self-perception. Overall, Schwaller emphasised how a profound anthropocosmic philosophy was encoded in every physical aspect of the construction of the Egyptian divine temple, and, more than this, that a profoundly intuitive, arational intelligence, superior to our own divisive rationalism, lay at the heart of Egyptian civilisation.
These views clashed dramatically with the attitudes of contemporary Egyptology. Despite this, the sheer gravity of Schwaller’s research and the compelling originality of his interpretations attracted a significantly high calibre of support from both the academic and artistic communities. Schwaller’s key associates during this period became known as Le Groupe de Louxor (not to be confused with the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor). Among others, Luxor Group was comprised of Egyptologist Alexandre Varille, Architect Clément Robichon, and the official guardian of the Valley of the Kings, Alexandre Stoppeläre. The Groupe de Louxor supported and participated with Schwaller in the generally unknown but virulent polemic that transpired during this period between the ‘symbolist’ approach to Egyptology (represented by Schwaller and Varille) and the hostile climate of conservative Egyptology headed by the highly influential Catholic abbot, archaeologist and Director of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo, Étienne Drioton. In 1949, avant-garde dramatist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau entered this milieu and, perceiving the significance of the symbolist method, popularised de Lubicz’s cause in the French literary media. Figures such as André Rousseaux, Raoul Jahan, Pierre Rambach and François Hébert-Stevens followed suit, and as a result of this, Schwaller would be invited to present at André Breton’s Congrès de Symbolistes (1956-1959) upon his return to France. Although scholars such as Arpag Mekhitarian called for a balanced appraisal of the actual evidence to resolve the impasse, the appeal was treated with a front of silence. Ultimately, despite being reviewed and published in the most prestigious of Egyptological journals, Schwaller’s work was tacitly ignored by mainstream Egyptology.
Tragically, in 1951, Alexandre Varille died in a car accident, and without the support of their chief academic spokesperson, the symbolists were forced to secede. Notable works published by the symbolists during this period include Varille’s Dissertation sur une stèle pharaonique (Dissertation on a Pharaonic Stele, 1946), alongside two short works by Schwaller: Le Temple dans l’homme (The Temple in Man, 1949), a short ‘preface’ to the three-volume magnum opus of 1957; and Du Symbol et de la symbolique (On Symbol and Symbology, 1951) in which Schwaller articulates his concept of symbolique.