Pagan classical authors from Plato to Plutarch credited the ancient Egyptians with being the most spiritually sophisticated culture. Later, in early Christian times, the church fathers singled out Egyptian religion for mockery and vilification as the best example of paganism's emptiness. The tension between these two authoritative traditions helped make Egypt seem attractive to the first mystics who attempted to find an alternative to Christianity, in the late fifteenth century ce. Following their lead, Egypt has continued to occupy a privileged placc in the alternative religious traditions of the west. In the 1990s, with the growth of conccrn about ecology and the environment, Native American belief systems compete with Egypt for the title of pre-eminently spiritual, but ancicnt Egyptian religion is still the one which many mystics want to study as they embark on their spiritual odysseys. A visit to any occult or New Age bookshop will verify this: there are whole shelves of publications on ancient Egyptian religious mysteries, explaining their lessons for one's spiritual expansion.
The relationship of these works to conventional histories of Egyptian religion is ambiguous. Certainly many esoteric books have the apparatus of scholarship, equipped with indiccs, footnotes and citations to authorities that corroborate their arguments. A closer look at them reveals some oddities that are not immediately clear, however. One of the most prolific authors of alternative religious works on Egypt, Murry Hope, refers to one James Bonwick as an Egyptological expert in her Practical Egyptian Magic, citing an edition of his up-to-the-minute- sounding book Egyptian Belief and Modern Thought dated 1956. In fact, Egyptian Belief and Modern Thought is a Thcosophical work first published in 1878, and Bonwick was a Tasmanian schoolmaster born in 1817, whose other books include Curious Facts of Old Colonial Days, Astronomy for Young Australians and Mike Howe, the Bushranger of Van Diemen's Land. Many other writers on esoteric subjects, including Hope, also use sources that were once academically respectable but are now quite out of date, like the works of Budge. By and large, however, mystic writers arc far less interested in documenting their work than Afroccntrists.
To look for scholarly scrupulousness in these books, however, is to miss the point, since their authors often regard conventional academic Egyptology as a conspiracy designed to disguise the true profundity of ancient Egyptian spirituality. My epigraph to this section shows how this idea had already crystallised in the
mind of Helena Pctrovna Blavatsky (1831 91), the founder of Theosophy, as
early as the 1870s, before Egyptology was even an academic discipline taught in universities. Furthermore, modern mystics do not need the writings of academic Egyptologists to describe their spiritual quests, because they have actually experienced what they describe and can make these experiences meaningful in their own terms. The symbols of Egyptian religion can come to mean what you want them to mean. As one esoteric source puts it, this 'is an attitude that may occasionally steer us into some appalling inaccuracies as far as die-hard Egyptologists are concerned, but we will make otherwise dead symbols come to life within us, and enrich ourselves accordingly'.24 The relationship between Egyptologists and mystic writers is like the difference between reading about a dish in a cookery book, and actually preparing and eating it. One adjusts the seasoning to suit one's own taste, and modifies the ingredients according to what is in the larder - experience rather than scholarship becomes the touchstone of authority. Members of esoteric groups are bound together by the common conviction that they are cognoscenti to whom a hidden truth has been disclosed. Their bonds arc strengthened when non-members react with incredulity, scorn and derision, and that shared truth becomes an all-important survival strategy, making them psychologically inclined to interpret the world in congruence with their beliefs. Exactly the same, of course, is true for academic Egyptologists, who are themselves initiates into a body of arcane knowledge and often react with horror when their position as ordained interpreters of that knowledge is questioned.
