Crowley's Egg: Secret Chiefs & Scarlet Women Parts IV, V & VI

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It was hot that November and the sand glowed in the noonday sun like burnished grains of glory. The shadows hid in the shade, grey and faint, and the light moved in waves of heat shimmer and bounced in vicious glares from chunks of Old Kingdom white limestone. The old pyramid hunkered in the brightness like a stone wedding cake stripped of its icing, and the drift dunes and mounds of half exposed ruins added a somber sense of permanence. The ancient City of the Dead seemed even more impressive in the flood of light, looking as if a dream had materialized from the otherworldly glare, then melted and fell apart.

Article Continues After Illustration

Darlene and I had arrived ahead of our group, as had been our practice for the last week or so, and we were on a mission. A magickal working, the building of a Zodiacal Earth Temple, had brought us half way around the world. I had been all the way to Tibet and the holy city of Lhasa, with stops along the way at other holy cities, Katmandu, and Rishikesh on the upper Ganges. This part of my trip, and the life-changing encounters and experiences along the way, I have described in my memoir "Guru Sam and Me." (Parts of which can be read at the Tibetan forum at alternativeapproaches.com) But until now, I have never related this half of the tale.

As we left India and flew back across the Gulf to Dubai, things were not good in our small group of spiritual explorers. Our leader was unhappy, sensing that something had gone wrong with the quest, and the rest of us were down right mutinous. And, in just a few hours, we were landing in Cairo to meet the rest of group, some 90 odd people. They were waiting for glowing reports of enlightenment in the ancient East. What we had was the insight that our actions were bankrupt frauds.

Hard to put a pretty face on that...

I spent the early morning layover in Dubai on the beach, watching the US Navy cruisers and oil tankers criss-crossing the Persian Gulf. Oil citizens of the United Emirates cruised the beach in the car de jure, hot 4-wheel American utility vehicles, smoking hashish and reading brightly coloured Arab language tabloids. Across from the beach, a pastel coloured confection of a mosque filled several blocks, its garden-like grounds perfectly manicured. Everything reeked of wealth and consumption, with all physical labour done by imported workers from Pakistan and Indonesia. It was unsettling, coming after India and its teeming millions and starving children dying on the street.

Even after I got back to the airport, I didn't really want to spend any more time than I had to with the rest of the group, so I went shopping in the Dubai Duty Free shopping mall. This covered the entire basement of the airport, and included everything from furniture and French couture to Mercedes-Benz automobiles. A truly amazing place, and it added to my disjointed feeling. I was not adjusting well at all.

In a small shop however, I found a simple headdress, the naitrya or "burnoose," that was complete with scarf and skullcap, and felt authentic and solid somehow. I bought it, and in another shop, I bought a small gold talisman with the name of Allah on it. I needed something gold to wear for the upcoming ceremony. And that of course brought me back to the problem at hand. How could we keep up the farce? Just what did our leader want us to do?

When I emerged from the Duty Free shopping mall, our leader had the troops gathered a big circle near the international gate. I headed over in time to hear the early part of the rap. Seems we had a responsibility to those waiting for us in Egypt not to spoil their experience by airing our petty grievances. In the spirit of the event, our spiritual quest and all that, we should just keep what happened in India to ourselves.

Except of course, what our leader was going to say about it in a meeting scheduled for that night in Cairo. We, in the interest of those counting on us in the bigger group, should just keep quiet and go along with the game plan. Most the group was far too tired and shell shocked to disagree, and I was out of his line of sight. I didn't say anything to contradict him, and a few others looked as if they planned to pretty much say whatever they wanted.

Our flight was called, and we trooped off to the plane. A few hours later we were in Cairo, and after the usual interminable bus ride, we arrived at our hotel in Giza. On the bus, I had changed into my Arab headgear, and tried to get into the vibe. Whatever our leader managed to pull off tonight, at least we were in Egypt, somewhere I felt even more at home than in India, and my lovely Darlene was waiting for me. The rest, I could play by ear...

The meeting awaiting us was a pep rally, and our leader made the most of it. But the real pay off, the twist in the psychic con-games, came the next morning in front of the Sphinx. Our leader announced that he would choose twelve of us to be disciples, so to speak, and have a special initiation in the Great Pyramid. Even those who didn't know what happened in Tibet found this rather curious. Suddenly, being nice to the leader became the main rule of the game.

That night we had our great moment in the Great Pyramid, 130 people squeezed for twenty minutes into the King's Chamber. The heat, and the energy, was overwhelming. Sweat dripped on the floor in puddles and this effect from our group, along another large group the week before, convinced the Egyptian government to close the Great Pyramid and hire Rudolph Gantenbrink to open the airshafts. This of course led to startling discoveries.

Most the group left after the initial ceremony, and a few of us, maybe a dozen or so, stayed behind. I did the full stack of magickal procedures, and thereby becoming, as far as I know, only the second person after Aleister Crowley, to actually vibrate Enochian in the Great Pyramid. We also experienced the odd violet light Crowley reported, and all of those in the chamber had immediate effects. None of us got sick on the rest of trip.

We flew the next day down to Aswan. Our leader had cut short the time in the Great Pyramid, claiming the guard wanted more baksheesh, which considering the damage to the King's Chamber was probably true. At any rate, the rift in the group got even wider, and the favouritism shown in selecting hotel rooms in Aswan made it even worse. We spent an odd few days, visiting Elephantine Island, Abu Simbel and Philae, and a camel ride to a Coptic monastery. A small group of us returned for a sunset camel trek complete with a little magick on a rock spur in the deep desert.

And then it was time for the boat ride. Cruising on Nile steamers is a time honoured tourist tradition. Our boat was nice, the food was good, and so everyone promptly forgot any discipline. Soon, as we cruised up-river toward Luxor, everyone began to get sick. Nile water, even brushing your teeth in it, can do that to you...

The real break happened on our second day, at the Temple of Horus the Elder in Edfu. We had been staying behind to do a little magickal work charging our Earth temple crystal in various spots such as Philae. It wasn't causing a problem, and no one was trying to up-stage or out do our leader. Nonetheless, in Edfu he lashed out.

Like the event in the Great Pyramid, this was a pivotal point. In the Great Pyramid for the group initiation, and my subsequent private working, I had on my crown center my gold talisman with the name of Allah. This, I was to discover, had imprinted itself deeply into my aura. At Edu, Darlene and I remained behind the group and did our work charging the crystals. Our leader charged in as we finished and accused us of doing "black magic."

We were completely astounded at his vehemence and anger. We were not challenging his authority, or interfering in any way. We simply had something to do, and we had, apparently wrongly, thought our plans and the goals of the group were compatible. Our leader informed us that this simply wasn't the case. We were wrong, destroying the group vibe somehow.

The leader stomped out and Darlene and I wandered out of the Temple in shock. And, then, something strange happened. We were picked up by the Sufis...

I mean that literally. Within a few minutes, two fellows in green turbans had taken Darlene and I in hand and began what would be a long process of learning how to work with the remaining energy of the Temples. She was taken to the sacred well, while I was shown how to work with the residual energy of the naos in the inner sanctuary. After we finished, it was time to get back on the boat.

By the time we landed in Luxor, Darlene and I had made a decision. We were going to do our own tour, stay away from the rest of the group as much as possible. In that spirit, we reversed out itinerary. When the group was in one place, we planned on being in another.

As soon as we landed, we headed for Luxor Temple, and ran into more of our green turbaned friends. They showed us the boat of the heart and a few other spots. We didn't quite understand what was going on, but the events of the next day made it quite clear.

The group was going to Luxor Temple that morning, so we hired a horse cab and headed for Karnak. Again, a jovial guide, who took us into many odd spots in the great Temple complex, met us. We ended our tour of Karnak's energy in the 18th Dynasty Osiris shrine, doing the opening the false doors ceremony. And then our guide gestured us over to a small temple on the north wall, the Ptah temple. They were waiting for us, kept the place locked until we arrived, and so we had the opportunity to ask our question - are we doing the right thing? - to the goddess Sekhmet herself.

The rest of the group arrived as we were leaving, and so we headed back to Luxor. There we met our guide once again and he took us through the same series of ritual movements and gestures, with a few additions. As we were leaving, he told us to be back there that night at eight o'clock. We said we'd think about it. On the way out, it occurred to me that it might be a good thing to visit the mosque in the outer courtyard of the Temple complex.

And so began our connection to a mysterious group of Shi'a Sufis, and their very odd connections, both to ancient Egypt and to the modern western current. The secret was hidden in plain sight, a simple mosque sitting in an ancient temple's forecourt. Could they have been Crowley secret Islamic initiates?

Before we can resolve the issue of Crowley's Egg, and complete our story of searching for the secret, without quite knowing it, in Egypt, we must pause and look at these very real connections, and why they lead us to Crowley's "secret chiefs" involved in the Book of the Law. Without understanding this key connection, very little in the rest of the story makes sense. Yet with it, a whole new pattern of prophetic inter-twining can be appreciated.

Next: Part Five - Secret Lodges and the Family of the Prophet

©Copyright 2003 by Vincent Bridges. Printed by permission.

The word sufi - composed of three Arabic letters, the sa, the wa, and the fa - has many different connotations and derivations. To some, it means safa, or "purity." Others see it as safwe, or "the selected ones." Other contenders are saf, "line" or "row," because the Sufis follow the "straight path" of Muhammad. Suf, "wool," is also a good candidate because the Sufis often wore long woolen robes. The Greek word sophia, or wisdom, is also a possible candidate. But the inner meaning of sa-wa-fa is sufah, or "whirlwind." This inner meaning points to the process of spiritual transformation that is at the heart of Sufism. One of the later Sufi orders, the Mevlevis of Turkey founded by Rumi, made whirling or spinning one of their spiritual disciplines as an outward demonstration of this principle.

The Sufis are part of the Islamic tradition in much the same way that the Rosicrucians and other western esoteric groups are part of the Christian tradition. To understand the importance of Islam, and the depths of secret wisdom contained in certain strains of its tradition, we must look at the history of that hidden knowledge and how it ended up in the secret societies of medieval Cairo.

Forty miles or so inland from Jiddah, in what is now Saudi Arabia, the town of Mecca sits at the juncture of pre-Islamic Arabia's most important trade routes. The mile-long caravans traveling from the spice kingdoms of southern Arabia to the world markets of Mesopotamia, turned north and east through the gap in the Hejaz Mountains near Mecca. Cargo from Africa - Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, lies just across the Red Sea - landed at Jiddah and moved inland for distribution at Mecca. The town thrived on trade and travelers. This is significant because, from its founding, the town of Mecca was also an important sacred site and a destination for pilgrims.

The ancient Arabs were pantheists who worshipped the spirit, or genius, of place in a large variety of ways, including pilgrimage and animal - and sometimes human - sacrifice. They personified the sun, the moon, the sky, stars, and the desert and lived in a world filled with jinns and afreets, or spirits and ghosts. In the vast darkness of the desert, the stars became the backdrop against which the mythological drama of life played itself out. Navigating in the desert, as at sea, required knowledge of the stars and their relationship to time and movement. These factors gave rise to a complex astrological mythology. This astrology was similar, if not exactly the same, to that found in the oldest sections of the Sefer Yetzirah.

In Genesis 14:18 we are told that after a great battle, Abram, as his name was then, worshiped the God Most High with the king of Jerusalem, Melchizedek. In the Bahir, Melchizedek was thought to be Shem, a son of Noah and a survivor of the catastrophic flood. He was also Abraham's teacher and collaborator in the work of creation. The titles used in Genesis, "God Most High, Lord of Heaven and creator of the earth," are the same titles used for Baal. They are also the same as the ancient Canaanite name for the Pole Serpent, the Teli, which the Sefer Yetzirah tells us is hanging over the "universe . . . like a king on his throne." It is important to understand that all of these mythologies are essentially astronomical. Draco is the constellation that rules over all of the signs and therefore the ages and the worlds, the past and the future.

The Islamic creator Allah is simply the Arabic version of this Canaanite El. The name Baal, or Ba-el, is literally translated as "the Space-Filling God." Allah is also called "He who holds the stars in place." This God Most High can only be the constellation of Draco. Not only does Draco fill all the signs of the zodiac, it sits atop the Cube of Space very much like a king on his throne.

Before the coming of Islam, at the Kaaba in Mecca the temple of Allah contained altars to his eight wives and daughters. These ancient goddesses are clearly related to the seven planets and the earth. Al-Uzza, the mighty one, was the sun. Al-Manat, the triple faced goddess, was clearly the moon. The earth goddess, whose name was al-Lat is actually talah, or teli, spelled backward. The earth is the mirror of the Teli. Everything that occurs in the Heavens will be mirrored down on Earth. Therefore the "Tala" in space becomes al-Lat here on earth. This serves to clinch our identification of Allah with the Teli, or Pole Serpent.

But there's more - from the ground looking up, the ancient astronomers saw that Draco curved around the still point of the ecliptic pole and that its tail bent backward in the shape of the Arabic letter laam. This is perhaps the basis from which the word "El" was derived. Reflected on the earth, however, this L of the Teli or Pole Serpent is reversed. If Allah is the God Most High, the L in the sky, then his daughter the earth is the reflection of that nature. And so the masculine "El" or "Al," becomes the feminine "al-Lat."

The Quraysh, who thought of themselves as descendants of Abraham, worshiped Allah as their chief god. They referred to him as the Lord of the Soil to whom they must pay a tithe of their crops and herds. This was not quite monotheism - Allah still had his wives - but it paved the way for Muhammad's insistence that Allah was the One and only God. Muhammad, like Abraham, decided that the God Most High was the only god worthy of worship.

From the Sefer Yetzirah, we learn of the Cube of Space (the twelve edges of the cube are formed from the twelve double letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which are attributed to the signs of the zodiac) within which the jewel-like Tree of Life forms. This astrological concept is attributed to Abraham just as the building of the physical cube, the Kaaba of Mecca with its sacred Black Stone, is also claimed as his work. The Kaaba (literally, "cube," and from the same root) is the black stone meteorite that all Muslims attempt to touch at least once in their lifetime. A cube has twelve edges. Each of these edges relates to a different sign in the zodiac. The cube of space in Mecca, here on earth, is a fractal representation of the real Cube of Space.

The pilgrimage to Mecca is one of the five pillars of the Islamic faith. According to Islamic tradition, the Kaaba has been rebuilt ten times, mirroring the number of spheres on the Tree of Life. The Kether, or Crown, cube was said to have been built by the angels in heaven. It is this cube of space that is described in the Sefer Yetzirah and the Bahir.

Wisdom and Understanding, the second and third cubes, were said by Islamic tradition to have been built by Adam and his youngest son, Seth. The fourth is named Mercy, and Abraham and his son by Hagar, Ishmael, are said to have built it in an after-the-Flood restoration. It is from this point that Mecca dates its founding. Strength and Beauty are the fifth and sixth cubes that were built in Mecca. They are attributed by Arab legends to kings of the Sabean and Himyarite kingdoms. Quasy, the patriarch of the Quraysh, built the seventh cube, Victory. The eighth, Splendor, was completed during Muhammad's lifetime. The ninth and tenth cubes, attributed to the sefirot named Foundation and Kingdom, were built within sixty years of his death.

Muhammad, like Abraham, received his wisdom directly from an angelic messenger. The Koran is the collection of Muhammad's revelations. They were written down within fifty years after his death by his followers, who had memorized the words as they were pronounced. The Koran leaves little doubt about angelic intervention. Like all successful prophets and spiritual leaders, Muhammad gave a voice to the needs and longings of his time. Influenced by the Christians and the Jews who lived among them, the Arabs eagerly awaited their own messenger from God. Muhammad admired the ethical precepts of Christianity and the monotheism of the Jews.

He was also conscious of the power of a divinely inspired scripture to mold a religion. Others may have had similar thoughts. From Byzantine sources we hear of several Arab "prophets" who rose to prominence during the late sixth and early seventh centuries. Muhammad's difference, and perhaps the root of his success, lies in his connection through the Kaaba with the mysteries of creation given to Abraham. He could speak with authority because he had rediscovered the window into the cycles of time, and his proof was the Koran, which flowed from above in a torrent of revelation.

The revelations began on the night of the twenty-seventh of Ramadan in the year 610 C.E. Muhammad was alone in the great cave at the foot of Mount Hira, a few miles outside of Mecca. Thereafter, the revelations came thick and fast. Often, when they came, Muhammad would fall to the ground in a convulsion or a swoon. He would become drenched with sweat. Even his camel would become skittish when a spell hit. Muhammad was transformed by these experiences; from a shy and introspective orphan he became the patriarch of the Arab people.

His cousin and son-in-law, Ali, left us a vivid description of Muhammad a few years after his revelations began. He describes Muhammad as "of middle stature, neither tall nor short. His complexion was rosy white, his eyes black; his hair, thick, brilliant and beautiful, fell to his shoulders. His profuse beard fell to his breast. . . . There was such sweetness in his visage that no one, once in his presence, could leave him. If I hungered, a single look at the Prophet's face dispelled the hunger. Before him, all forgot their grief and pains."

For a decade, Muhammad preached in Mecca. He made little headway in converting the population, except for his immediate family and the ones that became known as the Companions. The Companions were the true believers such as Abu Bakr and Omar al-Khattab. But, just when things looked bleakest, a miracle happened, or so it seemed to Muhammad. Before he left for the city of al-Taif, Muhammad had preached to a group of pilgrims from the garden city of Yathrib. Afterward it would be forever known as Medina, or The City.

The town of Yathrib had a large Jewish population that responded to Muhammad's teachings. Because of the similarity to their own religion they accepted his teaching and began to spread the word back home. They were also willing to accept Muhammad as the messenger of a monotheistic Allah who will reign over the earth at the Last Judgment. So Muhammad fled Mecca for Yathrib, which became the City of the Prophet. The year of his departure, or hejira, became the starting point for the Islamic calendar.

Eight years later, after much skirmishing and caravan raiding, Muhammad marched back into Mecca as the conquering messenger. He cleaned out the Kaaba, removed the altars to Allah's wives and daughters, but kept the Black Stone and its ritual kiss. He then proclaimed Mecca the Holy City of Islam. For the last two years of his life, Muhammad ruled from Mecca with a gentle hand. As Islam grew, Muhammad sent letters to the capitals of the world announcing his revelation. He received no replies to these letters. Casually he watched the mutual destruction of Byzantium and Persia. There is no indication that Muhammad ever considered spreading the Islamic faith outside of Arabia.

That was not the case, however, with his heirs. Muhammad had appointed no successor, so, after a brief rivalry, the Muslim leaders elected Abu Bakr, the first Companion, to be caliph, or representative of the faithful. After his death, his fellow Companion, Omar al-Khattab, was chosen caliph. Omar encouraged what was until then a somewhat haphazard Islamic conquest. In 644 Omar was cut down by a Persian slave in the Medina mosque. But by then the Muslim armies ruled Egypt, Palestine, and Persia. The conquests continued under Othman the Unfortunate, until by the time of Ali's caliphate (656-661), the Islamic domains extended from the Atlas Mountains in North Africa to the Black Sea and the mountains of Afghanistan.

Less than thirty years after the death of the Muhammad, Islam ruled more of the earth than Rome had at its height. It is hard to imagine how a political, social, and religious shift of this magnitude could have happened. But it did. Muhammad taught of a stern, yet merciful, God in terms more than faintly reminiscent of the Bahir and the Sefer Yetzirah. In the Koran, sura 2:255, the famous Throne Verse, we find Allah described in terms remarkably similar to those used to describe the Teli, or Pole Serpent. "His Throne extends over the heavens and the earth . . . He alone is Most High and Supreme."

Muhammad apparently gave esoteric teachings on this and other verses of the Koran to his son-in-law Ali, who passed them down to his son and grandson. Ali's caliphate ended in the first great schism of Islam, when the religious and political authorities of the Arabs split away from the family of the prophet. By 680 CE, most of Muhammad's family had been killed. Only an infant son, Ali's grandson and the great-grandson of the Prophet, survived to carry on the tradition. From this came the split in Islam between Sunni and Shi'ite that still exists to this day.

For the first two hundred years or so of Islamic civilization, mysticism took a backseat - except among the Shi'ites or the "adherents" of the family of the Prophet. The caliphs became ever more corrupt as their power grew. Persecutions of the Shi'as increased. A general feeling developed that Islam had somehow conquered the world and lost its soul.22 Mansur al-Hallaj, quoted above, symbolized this defiantly mystical spirit. He was burned alive for blasphemy in 923 C.E.

But a new spiritual current emerged from the Islamic underground. Composed of fragments of all the conquered civilizations and religions, but held together by the teachings of the Prophet, the mystical tradition that in many cases far predated Islam, found a home within it. The new Sufi movement accepted the corruption of the ruling classes and set to work to renovate the human soul. Another branch of Shi'ite Sufis, however, moved from mysticism to covert political action. Their goal was to create a theocracy based on the inner teachings of Muhammad.

Fifty years after the death of Mansur al-Hallaj, Sufism blossomed. The eleventh century saw the rise of the first great Sufi teaching orders in the East and the West. As the Sufi movement grew, the more worldly and political branch of the Shi'ites almost succeeded in conquering the Muslim world.

After the first wave of Arab conquest swept over North Africa, its provinces soon became independent kingdoms. By the tenth century, three great Islamic kingdoms ruled in North Africa. They were the Idrisid dynasty in Morocco, the Aghlabid in Libya, and the Tulunid in Egypt. In the first decade of the tenth century, a Shi'ite adventurer, Abu Abdallah, gained a following in Libya and Tunisia by preaching the coming of the Mahdi, the Shi'ite savior or world ruler. Within a few years, Abdallah overthrew the Aghlabid dynasty. To fulfill his claims he invited a descendent of the Prophet, Obeidallah ibn Muhammad, to become king. Since Obeidallah was a descendent of Fatima, Mohammed's daughter, the new dynasty called itself Fatimid.

Under the Fatimids, North Africa regained a wealth and prosperity that it had not seen since the days of Carthage and republican Rome. Trade routes crossed the Sahara to Lake Chad and Timbuktu in central Africa. After the Fatimids conquered Egypt in 969 C.E., the Sudan and Abyssinia were also integrated into the Islamic trading network. Egypt became the commercial link between Europe and Asia. By the early eleventh century, the Fatimid caliph, ruling from Cairo, controlled two-thirds of the Muslim world, from Fez in Morocco to Damascus in Syria.

The Fatimid mosques of Cairo provide an important link, both architecturally and spiritually, to the Gothic cathedrals of Europe. The mosque of Ibn Tulun, begun before the Fatimid conquest, combines pointed arches and vaulting with rosette stained glass windows in stellar and geometrical patterns. This impulse reached its high point with the Al Azhar Mosque.

Jauhar, the converted Christian slave who conquered Egypt for the Fatimids, built the mosque between 970 and 972. The Al Azhar Mosque (al-azhar means "the brilliant" or "the illuminated" from the same root as the Hebrew bahir, "brilliance" or "illumination") contains the pointed arches and vaulting - supported by 380 pillars of marble, granite, and porphyry - used in the Ibn Tulun Mosque. It is also famous for its stained glass designs. The reds and blues used in the Al Azhar Mosque were duplicated in the great cathedrals of Europe. But they were never equaled for their depth and purity of color.

In 988, Al Azhar Mosque became the world's first university. The caliph Aziz provided tuition and maintenance for thirty-five scholars. As this school developed it drew students from all over the Muslim world. It continues to this day with thousands of students and hundreds of teachers. Its influence on the course of history has been profound, especially to medieval Europe.

Al Azhar's most famous scholar was the Muslim scientist known to the West as Alhazen. Mohammed ibn al-Haithan, or Alhazen, was a mathematician and engineer, a sort of Fatimid Leonardo da Vinci. His most important work is a book on optics that anticipates the telescope. Roger Bacon quotes his work extensively, as do Kepler and da Vinci. We can hardly exaggerate the importance of Alhazen for the foundation of modern astronomy.

Attached to the Al Azhar Mosque was the Dar al-Hikmah, or the Hall of Wisdom, where Shi'ite theology was studied alongside medicine and astronomy. Ali ibn Yunus, perhaps the greatest of Muslim astronomers, worked in the observatory of the Hall of Wisdom for seventeen years compiling the first accurate tables of planetary cycles, measuring the inclination of the ecliptic, and discussing the precession of the equinoxes. These are all astronomical preoccupations suggested by the Bahir and the Sefer Yetzirah, and provide the key to understanding the great cycles of time.

As the Fatimid dynasty spread, it propped up its power by gathering all of the Shi'ite sects into one grand lodge of Cairo. This vast semi-secret society was held together by complex initiations and hierarchical degrees. Its members were used for political espionage and intrigue. The forms of the order strongly influenced the rituals and organization of the Templars. It is possible that much of Western esotericism and its secret societies originated with the "Illuminated Mosque" and its Hall of Wisdom.

Muhammad's revelation transformed a nomadic and barbarian culture into a world-class civilization. The power of that revelation, as we saw above, came from its ancient roots in the astrological magic of Abraham. With the Kaaba of Mecca as its focus, Islam managed to hold onto its ancient wisdom and even transmit it to the spiritually bankrupt West. The Crusaders, especially the Knights Templar, came looking for conquests and kingdoms. They found both, but they also discovered the secret mysteries of the Cube of time. They brought this astronomical and alchemical knowledge to Europe. Because of the contact between the Templars and the Islamic scientists, Europe enjoyed an unparalleled spiritual renaissance, the era of the Gothic cathedrals.

But by the early 13th century, as those cathedrals rose in Europe, things were changing rapidly in the Islamic world. Pressed by crusading Franks and Sunni Turks, the Fatimid era was winding down. As Egypt slipped into Sunni control under Saladin's uncle, the Illuminated sages of the Grand Lodge of Al Azhar mosque decided to hide the core of the secret knowledge far up river, amid the ruins of ancient Egypt and with a group of Sufis who claimed to be the last true guardians of Egyptian sacred science.

Next: Part Six - The Sufi Brotherhood of Luxor

©Copyright 2003 by Vincent Bridges. Printed by permission.

The temple at Luxor is still magnificent. More than three thousand years after it was finished, it floats above the banks of the Nile like an apparition of man’s nearly divine imagination carved in limestone and granite, now ruined and fallen into decay, but retaining somehow the ghost of the spark that once animated a civilization.

Until the early 19th century, when the European tomb robbers and tourists arrived, al-Uqsar, Arabic for The Palaces, was a sleepy backwater town in the province of Qena. For the previous six hundred years, it’s one claim to fame had been the tomb and teaching school of the Shi’a shayik Abu al-Haggag, built amid the ruined foundations of the ancient Temple to Amun, Mut and Khonsu. With the European influx came awareness of the ancient monuments and temples, and, as they were looted, the new town of Luxor grew fat from serving the needs of archaeologists and the idle rich tourists. By the late 19th century, it was the chief town of the region, and as tourism increased - Thomas Cook & Son added it to their itinerary in 1896 - it became the fashionable spot to spend a Victorian winter.

In the mid 1800s, a series of meetings occurred in Luxor that would have far reaching consequences for the development of the western tradition. The contact began in 1838 when a French adventurer named Prisse d’Avennes arrived in Luxor. D’Avennes spoke perfect Arabic, having lived in Egypt for a decade before settling in Upper Egypt, and was a keen student of both the hieroglyphic language and Islamic mysticism. At Luxor, the quixotic Frenchman would find a connection between the two.

Champollian had just published his study of hieroglyphics a few years before, but, while d’Avennes had certainly studied Champollian’s work, his subsequent mastery of the ancient Egyptian language went far beyond it. Karl Rickard Lepsius, the Prussian archaelogist who competed with d’Avennes for temple loot, commented that d’Avennes had the greatest grasp of hieroglyphs of any man living. Coming from the “German Champollian,” whose later discovery of the Canopus Tablet confirmed Champollian’s readings, this was high praise indeed.

So where did d’Avennes learn his hieroglyphs? Apparently he gained his knowledge from the Sufis who occupied the ancient temple of Amun, Mut and Khonsu, which we will refer to it as Luxor Temple. The small village of al’Uqusar clustered around it, and the center of the village, and its claim to fame, was the mosque and tomb of Abu al-Haggag built within the temple’s forecourt; its 12th century minaret standing solidly on the base of an ancient pillar. The al-Haggagis are an oddball group of Shi’a in a Sunni country, and by tradition they retained a direct understanding of the ancient Egyptian language, as well as continuing Luxor’s oldest festival, the Procession of the Boat.

Yusuf Abu al-Haggag, the founder of the zawiyah, or mystery school, at Luxor, was a descendent of the Caliph Ali born in Baghdad around 1150. Around the age of forty, al-Haggag moved with his grown sons to Mecca, partly out of disgust with the politics of his era, and partly in search of the secret wisdom. The Fatimid dynasty had been overthrown in 1171, and a new wave of Sunnism was sweeping Islam. In Syria, these pressures had already created a split within the Shi’a community with the rise of the Ismaili and Nizari factions. This would lead to the Assassins, and the brief Ismaili state in Syria, and eventually to the near extinction of the movement. The more traditionally minded Shi’a elders of the Hall of Wisdom at Al Azhar mosque decided on a different approach.

They looked for a young man of the family of the prophet with no strong family ties and a deep understanding of the Koran and its mysteries. Abu al-Haggag apparently fit the description perfectly. On the advice of the local Shi’a elders, he moved to Egypt, settling in Luxor in 1193. A few years later, he was summoned to Cairo by the Sultan al-Aziz. Al-Haggag managed to turn down the Sultan’s offer of an official post, and soon thereafter began a series of studies with the greatest Sufi masters of the age in Alexandria.

One of these was the head of the Madyani Sufi order, Abd al-Razzaq al-Jazuli. The Madyani were even then a curious type of Sufi order, one that traced it roots to a pre-Islamic mysticism, specifically that of Egypt. One of its founders was the mysterious al-Misir, the Egyptian, who claimed knowledge of hieroglyphics and demonstrated it in the 8th century. The Madyani also included the radical mystic al-Mansur. Al-Jazuli stood at the head of a long line of mystical masters, and when al-Haggag became his student, the two currents, Shi’a secret wisdom and ancient Egyptian sacred science, blended into one.

Al-Haggag returned to Luxor and founded his zawiyah, or mystery school, in the ruins of the ancient Temple. He died in 1243, at the age of 93, and was buried in his mosque. Long before his death, he was acclaimed as one of the greatest Shaiyks of Upper Egypt, and his mulid, or feast day, 14 Sha’ban, became an Islamic version of the ancient Opet Festival. A boat, symbolizing the vehicle that conveys the secret wisdom, is paraded through the streets, from the mosque at the Luxor Temple to the even more ancient ceremonial center at Karnak and back. By the early 19th century, when Egypt was “discovered” by Europe, the al-Haggagis were the custodians not only of the ancient traditions, but also of the temples themselves.

D’Avennes lived in Luxor and studied with the al-Haggagis for six years before he returned to France and published his influential Atlas of the History of Egyptian Art. During the 1850s and 1860s, D’Avennes continued to explore his interest in mysticism, becoming friends of the French Rosicrucians, including Eliphas Levi, and the Gothic revivalists Victor Hugo and Eugene Violette-le-Duc and fellow African explorer Antonie D’Abbadie, later president of the French Royal Academy of Science. By 1858, when he returned to Egypt, d’Avennes was at the forefront of what would become the “occult revival” of the 1880s and 1890s.

This time, d’Avennes was documenting Arabic culture, including the Al Azhar mosque in Cairo. This work, The Monuments of Cairo from the 8th to the 18th Centuries, supplied many of the missing links between the European Gothic style of the 12th century and the Cairo mosques, from vaulted arches to the use of stained glass. After a brief trip up river in 1860 to visit Abu Simbel and Luxor, where d’Avennes was initiated as a full member of the al-Haggagis under his local name of Idris Efiendi, d’Avennes returned to France.

There, as Idris Efiendi, or Idris Bey, d’Avennes began to spread the idea of a new kind of initiation based on the neophyte and nine-grade plan of the Ismaili Shi-a. This never openly appeared as a working “lodge,” the word itself suggests its Fatimid and Shi’a roots, but the outline for such an initiatory scheme apparently passed from d’Avennes to Eliphas Levi and on to Fred Hockley and eventually to Westcott and Mathers.

And thereby hangs a curious mystery. When S. L. “MacGregor” Mathers met Madame Blavatsky in 1887, he asked her about her sources, in fact the name of her Egyptian contact. She responded correctly, which impressed Mathers enough that he decided to take seriously W. W. Westcott’s scheme to start a magickal society. How could the good Madame have known the answer? And why did that answer move Mathers to help start the Golden Dawn?

A younger Helena Petrovna Blavatsky washed ashore in Egypt in the winter of 1871 after twenty-three years of adventures that included everything from escaping from a brutal husband to intrigues in Istanbul and Paris, circus riding and belly dancing, and perhaps even a trip to Lhadak or Nepal. In Cairo, Helena met a few ex-patriots and began the forerunner of the Theosophical Society, the Cairo Spiritism Society, which quickly became a haven for con-men and fortune tellers of all kinds.

In the fall of 1871, as her society was falling apart from the weight of its own criminal incompetence, Helena met a real initiate. She would later refer to him as Tuitit Bey. Tuitit was a mis-transliteration of the name of the Egyptian god Tehuti, known in Greek as Thoth, and equated with Hermes and the patriarch Enoch. In Arabic, this is Idris. This individual provided her with her first experience of the “hidden masters,” a reasonable explanation of the “hidden imams” of the Ismaili Shi’a, and supplied her with the basic theme of Isis Unveiled, the secret of Egyptian sacred science and its expression in the cult of the Great Mother, Isis.

By the summer of 1872, she was back in Russia, on her way to Paris. There, in 1873, she met a follower and fellow initiate of the “masters” in Egypt. He told her to drop everything and head to America. She did, found Col. Olcott, wrote Isis Unveiled, founded the Theosophical Society and began the journey that led, after 16 years, to a young MacGregor Mathers’ question. She replied, in all probability, Idris Bey.

This of course just happened to be the name associated with the ritual structure from Hockley and Levi, kept secret and hidden by Westcott’s improbable forgeries. But the Madame knew, and Mathers was shocked and deeply impressed. Somehow, there was a connection; the idea of a secret society of hidden masters was true.

And perhaps there was in fact such a society. D’Avennes, one Idris Bey, could have been both the contact to Hockley and Levi, and the good Madame’s Paris initiate, but the original “Idris” Bey in Cairo had to be a different individual. Curiously enough, it was Rene Guenon, much later on, who revealed the connection. Following this clue, we find that there really was a western Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, with connections to both the early Golden Dawn and the good Madame.

The leader and key teacher of this group was one “Max Theon,” apparently born Maximillian Bimstein, a Russian Jew whose family migrated to Egypt in the 1840s. It was Bimstein, who also used the name Idris, who befriended Madame Blavatsky in 1871, and later as Theon started an esoteric current that would influence everyone from the Golden Dawn to Guenon and Julius Evola, and even perhaps the mysterious alchemist Fulcanelli. And it was also an “Idris” whom Crowley consulted in March of 1904.

Looking back, it is hard to focus on the thicket of personalities, but one thing is clear: all the threads lead to some kind of brotherhood or society at Luxor. Historically, this could only be the al-Haggagi Sufis. If so, and the connections above seem to make the case apparent, then who were these Sufis and what secrets did they teach that so inspired the revival of the western tradition?

Next: Part Seven - “A Light, of Neither East, nor West...”

©Copyright 2003 by Vincent Bridges. Printed by permission.