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

itself, where the particular disappears and only the greatest generality remains, stark and devoid of content. In this utter silence words would form meanings in the most natural fashion, without our interference. Here the universe would speak, not the cerebral cortex. This is the act, the state of knowledge. There is no referent for knowledge. Knowledge is knowledge in itself, it is primitive, and cannot refer to a previous self.
    In other words, it is total objectivity, an escape from the shadow-house of personality.
    What Schwaller is talking about, in short, is a different kind of knowledge. In The White Goddess , Robert Graves speaks about ‘lunar’ and ‘solar’ knowledge. Our modern type of knowledge—rational knowledge—is ‘solar’; it operates with words and concepts, and it fragments the object of knowledge with dissection and analysis. But ancient civilisations had ‘lunar’ knowledge, an intuitive knowledge that grasped things as a whole.

    What is at issue might be made clearer by a reference to another ‘esoteric’ thinker of the twentieth century, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. In 1914, Gurdjieff told his disciple Ouspensky that there is a fundamental difference between ‘real art’ and ‘subjective art’. Real art is not just an expression of the artist's feelings; it is as objective as mathematics, and will always produce the same impression on everyone who sees it.
    The great Sphinx in Egypt is such a work of art, as well as some historically known works of architecture, certain statues of gods, and many other things. There are figures of gods and of various mythological beings that can be read like books, only not with the mind but with the emotions, providing they are sufficiently developed. In the course of our travels in Central Asia we found, in the desert at the foot of the Hindu Kush, a strange figure which we thought at first was some ancient god or devil. At first it produced upon us simply the impression of being a curiosity. But after a while we began to feel that this figure contained many things, a big, complete and complex system of cosmology. And slowly, step by step, we began to decipher this system. It was in the body of the figure, in its legs, in its arms, in its head, in its eyes, in its ears; everywhere. In the whole statue there was nothing accidental, nothing without meaning. And gradually we understood the aim of the people who built this statue. We began to feel their thoughts, their feelings. Some of us thought that we saw their faces, heard their voices. At all events, we grasped the meaning of what they wanted to convey to us across thousands of years, and not only the meaning, but all the feelings and the emotions connected with it as well. That indeed was art! 2
    According to Schwaller, this is precisely what the Egyptians were aiming at in their temples, monuments and statues.
    In A New Model of the Universe , a book written after he had become Gurdjieff’s disciple, Ouspensky had written of the Sphinx: ‘As a matter of fact the Sphinx is older than historical Egypt, older than her gods, older than the pyramids, which, in their turn, are much older than is thought.’ This sounds like a piece of information acquired direct from Gurdjieff.
    But how could a work of art make the same impact on everybody—even if their emotions are ‘sufficiently developed’? Surely art appeals to what is ‘personal’ in us?
    To understand why this is not so, it is necessary to speak of the founder of Greek mathematics, Pythagoras, who lived between 582 and 507 BC. According to a typical entry in a modern encyclopaedia, Pythagoras believed in reincarnation, and ‘Pythagoreans believed that the essence of all things was number and that all relationships could be expressed numerically. This view led them to discover the numerical relationship of tones in music and to some knowledge of later Euclidean geometry.’ 3 Pythagoreanism is sometimes described as ‘number mysticism’,