You can see this any day. It is both time and place at once. It is of transcendent beauty. It is the agent of all transformation. It is the origin of all things. It is so familiar that it is known by all. Yet so familiar it is forgotten and unseen. But even forgotten it is the one essential thing: the dawn.
But to go back, or forward, to the night: Orion rises in the sky, a giant man of light. There is an implicit angle in his rising, a diagonal, a path. In a single night on this path he will sail across the sky. There are the unmistakable brilliant three stars, Al Nilam, the string of pearls, that are his belt, and beneath it the short clustering dimmer line that goes down, Orion’s sword, the great Orion nebula, the green swirling clouds of space.
Above Orion on the diagonal is the red star in the root of the horn of Taurus, and below on the diagonal is Sirius, the sapphire star, the brightest star in the sky.
Anyone can see them, the jewellike stars going around the sky night after night, year after year, marking with exact geometrical precision, slightly altered each night by moments in time and geometrical degrees on the horizon that equal them, the progression of the night, of the season, and, coming back to its same coordinates, the year.
Thus the sky is an elegant clock, turning with visible arms, the Dippers swinging around the North Star, marking the deeply and gorgeously integrated life of everything on earth. If you were in China tomorrow it would mark the hours in precisely the same way that it does in upstate New York today, for the hours, horae, are stars.
This is a geometrical grid that anyone can see. Geometry in the truest sense: It measures the earth minutely. It has a life of its own. It is not abstract. It is not human. But you can know it. And to know it, to see it, belongs to a deep aesthetic sense that transcends what is human. The wail of the wild dog rises with the moon in the cold night air.
There is no need to look to anyone to explain it, this numinous world. The properties that extract us from it and render us back into it—the miracles of conception, birth, and death—are properties belonging to all that exists. Pure energy, the nature of light, underlies all. We emerge from and dissolve back into this radiant ground. Not only can you know this, you are this.
Poetry and religion arise from the same source, the perception of the mystery of life. Early Egyptian writing belongs to this universal language. The vehicle at work is associative thinking, in which metaphors act as keys to unlock a primeval human sense of the integrated living world. The meaning may not come across on the pedantic level, but on the poetic level it is transparent. Animal-headed gods, for example, seem alien, indeed ridiculous. When you think of them not as gods but as signifying the qualities of the animals themselves, they take on a different meaning. They resonate with an innate sense of animal motion, symmetry, force, color. What is al-chem-y, literally “the Egyptian thing,” or, as The American Heritage Dictionary defines it, “the Egyptian practice of transmutation”? What or where is the gold? One looks to the writing of Egypt to find out.
The task is to take a medium that is proverbially indecipherable and to enter it, as though entering a pyramid with a lamp that gradually illuminates what is there. The first step is to look at the words themselves, and then in the second step, through them, as though through an uncovered lens, to see what is written on the walls of the hidden book. The third step is to ask what it means, to seek the deeper design that is the key to this primary early religion. Hence this book has three parts—the language, the translation, and seeking the deeper design.