From Atlantis to the Sphinx by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

‘vistas on to a well-known but forgotten landscape’ ... ‘We spoke the same language.’
    Back in Grasse, the VandenBroecks were soon regular visitors in the Schwaller household. It took some weeks as Isha’s student—reading the Chick Pea novels, and listening to her reading from her latest opus, a work of ‘esoteric fiction’—before his sense of her ‘gentle imposure’, and his inborn distaste for ‘spiritual’ mumbo-jumbo led him to detach himself tactfully and spend more time with Schwaller (whom everyone addressed as ‘Aor’.)
    There was also in Schwaller ‘a grey zone of speculation where true and false did not apply’—for example, in his conviction that mankind has not evolved, but ‘devolved’, from ‘giants who once walked the earth to a near-animal state ... vowed to cataclysmic annihilation, while an evolving élite gathers all of human experience for a resurrection in spirituality.’ Schwaller was also convinced that the Nile is a man-made river, deliberately directed into the Nile valley, to form the basis of Egyptian civilisation. But VandenBroeck felt that he could take or leave such beliefs. Far more important was Schwaller’s insight into the nature of the knowledge system of the ancient Egyptians. This was also élitist in conception: ‘at its head, the enlightened priesthood, the perfect identity of science and theology, its main duties cognition of the present moment .’ This Schwaller saw as the ‘Absolute from which we constantly draw our power’.
    This notion is central to Schwaller’s ideas, perhaps their most significant feature. One way of explaining it would be to say that human beings imagine they live in the present, yet their basic mental state might be described as ‘elsewhereness’, like a schoolboy looking out of a window instead of paying attention to the lesson. It is, in fact, incredibly difficult to be ‘present’, since we live in an interpreted world. We cannot even ‘see’ without preconception—‘that is so and so’. Our most basic frame of mind is that of spectators; we look out at the world like someone in a cinema. When a man awakens to present reality—as Dostoevsky did when stood in front of a firing squad—the whole world changes. Everything suddenly becomes real . But his vision of himself also changes: he becomes aware of himself as a dynamic force rather than as a passive entity.
    This, VandenBroeck discovered, is also the essence of Schwaller’s notion of alchemy. Alchemy, according to Schwaller, is derived from Kemi , the Greek word for Egypt, with the Arabic ‘al’ appended. In ancient Egypt, the pharaoh, the god-king, was the symbol of this ‘absolute from which we draw our power’. And alchemy, or the transmutation of matter into spirit—of which the transmutation of base metals into gold is a mere by-product—depends upon this ‘moment of power’, of being wholly present in the present moment. He seems to be speaking of what Shaw once called ‘the seventh degree of concentration’.
    Schwaller dismisses Jung’s notion of alchemy as a modern intellectual fashion. Jung thought that the true aim of alchemy was the state he called ‘individuation’, unity of being, but that in trying to achieve this, the alchemist ‘projects’ his own visions into external reality—in other words, sees hallucinations. One text describes how, when seven pieces of metal are heated in a crucible with a fragment of the philosophers’ stone, fire will fill the room and the starry firmament will appear overhead. Jung believed that the alchemist ‘projects’ such visions as if, without knowing it, he is a cinema projectionist.
    Schwaller rejected this with scorn. Alchemy, he told VandenBroeck, depends on laboratory results. These results, he seems to imply, are achieved ultimately by a kind of mind-over-matter. As VandenBroeck expresses it:
    There could be no other than this unique act of total apprehension beyond words which is knowledge