Ancient Egypt and Modern Psychotherapy

Sacred Science and the Search for Soul

Todd Hayen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317307471
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychothérapie

In Ancient Egypt and Modern Psychotherapy, Todd Hayen explores what the spiritual concepts of the enigmatic ancient Egyptians can teach us about our own modern psyches and the pursuit of a meaningful life.

Hayen examines the ancient Egyptians' possession of a concept contemporary academics have labeled "consciousness of the heart": an innate knowledge of the entirety of the universe. While all human beings possess this consciousness of the heart, our modern culture has largely lost the ability to tap into this inborn knowledge. By examining the material accomplishments of ancient Egypt, and how their seemingly deeper awareness of their inner world created a harmonious outer world, we can begin to understand how modern psychotherapy, through a Jungian perspective, could be instrumental in achieving a more profound and meaningful personal experience of life.

Ancient Egypt and Modern Psychotherapy will be insightful reading for analytical psychologists in practice and in training, Jungian psychotherapists and psychologists, and academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies and ancient spirituality.

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1

WHY ANCIENT EGYPT?

The small six-seater tour bus bounced noisily along the washboard road as we approached the Serapeum excavation in the northwestern part of Egypt’s Saqqara, the burial site for the sacred Apis bulls. Nothing could be seen ahead of us but an off-white blanket of sizzling sand almost too bright to look at. The undulating shimmer of desert heat that sat seemingly a foot or so off the desert’s surface was just as much felt as seen. The heat seemed to permeate everything and rippled through our bodies just as it rippled across the desert creating the glowing mirages often seen dancing on the barren landscape.

At the time of our visit in 1993 the Serapeum was not a usual tourist attraction, and it took some coercion, and a few Egyptian pounds, to get our tour guide to include it on our final day of adventure in Egypt. Our small group of intrepid travelers included my first wife Janice, me, and our friends Frank and Tracey, who had decided to tag along when we announced one evening over dinner that we had finally decided to do something really crazy and travel to Egypt. We all worked together in the film music business in Hollywood, and after many years of having our noses glued to the grindstone of endless work and focus on career, we felt that we needed to get completely off the grid, at least for a moment. “Let’s do something really exotic!” I proclaimed, after a particularly exhausting day of back-to-back recording sessions. “Let’s go to Egypt!” Much to my surprise, Janice agreed, after what seemed to be negligible consideration. Soon we were sharing the news with our friends who were equally ensconced in the mind-numbing pursuit of “the next gig” in the jungles of the Hollywood movie industry. Before any of us could change our minds, the plans for the trip were finalized, and we found ourselves in one of the most exotic and intriguing places on earth.

The little dilapidated bus skittered to a halt on the loose sand and gravel of the small parking area, after what seemed to be hours of bumpy driving in the expansive Egyptian nowhere-land. The entrance to the attraction looked to be only a moderate pile of rocks placed a few steps away from the parking lot. There was a little sign stuck in the sand at the far edge of the pile that read in both Arabic and English: Serapeum. Although more than likely untrue, one got the impression that the hand-lettered placards that accompanied all Egyptian tourist attractions were created during the Victorian time of French- and English-dominated Egyptology more than 150 years ago. We all stepped out of the bus and brushed off the ubiquitous sand that seeped into any space, enclosed or not, and headed for the entrance to the Serapeum, which consisted of an unwieldy-looking set of makeshift stairs that plunged steeply into the dark, but ultimately cooler, recesses of subterranean Egypt.

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The Serapeum, we were told by our tour guide, is an underground labyrinth of small chambers that each held a large granite sarcophagus presumably intended to hold the mummified remains of the Apis bull. Twenty-four such sarcophagi exist at this site. Although undeniably interesting, such a place did not seem uniquely mysterious before we actually were in it, other than what is characteristically felt to be mysterious regarding ancient Egypt’s culture and customs in general.

We unsteadily descended the stairs and, after several minutes of precarious footwork, entered into the cavernous anteroom of the Serapeum itself and stopped to catch our breath. We stood huddled in a small group looking down an adjacent corridor lit by a string of old, clear light bulbs suspended from the ceiling by twisted, rusting wire ties. A large black granite box about the size of a small car stood in the narrow passage almost blocking it—its presence there never adequately explained by our tour guide. The oppressive nature of the space was palpable, and although a dozen or so degrees cooler than the desert floor where we had left the bus, the air was hot and fetid. Our physical senses registered and measured all of these things as best they could, but something else was being felt in that space. For me, it was a sense of magic, mystery, and profundity that I can in no way adequately describe in words. I felt I was in a sacred space, which contained sacred things with a sacred intent.

We walked down the dim corridor, the flickering bulbs overhead, passing small largely unlit chambers, which lined each side of the passageway. Most of them were empty, but within several were clones of the large granite box we had seen in the antechamber. We were guided into one of these rooms, and although the space was small, we all managed to place ourselves in some sort of order around the large, unearthly stone presence placed in the center of the room. One thing that struck me as intriguing as I visited each site in Egypt was how its description as presented in books and other literature paled in comparison to the actual experience of seeing, in front of oneself with one’s own eyes, the monument, temple, or artifact that had been described. The Serapeum was no exception.

As if all of us in the room were being channeled the same question simultaneously, each of us looked around at our surroundings and the 80-ton granite box in front of us and said, “How did this get in here?” I would suppose that most visitors asked the same question, and for a question that undoubtedly was asked hundreds of times, the tour guide had no answer.

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This was a question for me that simply wouldn’t go away. I kept looking at the entrance, the large box—which measured approximately 13 feet long, 7½ feet wide, and 10 feet high—as well as the narrow walkway around it, which was about 5 feet wide from the edge of the sarcophagus to the stone-and-dirt wall of the enclosing room, and wondering how it had all occurred. The ceiling was cut from the rock and dirt as well, so there was no possibility of lowering the box into the space. At that time, I had no knowledge of the work of the machining engineer Christopher Dunn, who had conducted preliminary research in Egypt regarding ancient technology and engineering techniques. Dunn, who visited the Serapeum a few years after our visit to measure production tolerances on the granite boxes, determined that the accuracy of construction on the sarcophagi was simply too precise to reason, with their supposed purpose and nature of creation. This information, if I had had it at the time, would have unquestionably added to the mystery.

What, exactly, were we looking at? And how and why was it there?

The final veil of mystery regarding this enchanting place lightly fell over my awareness, and my engulfment by its wonder was complete. Was this merely a matter of highly advanced materialist engineering and technique, or did it include in its making something nonmaterial—some sort of mysterious and ineffable power—that was not considered at all by modern archeologists and scientists in their efforts to explain? Several alternative theories suggest that many of these artifacts and ancient sites predate dynastic Egypt and were actually inherited by the Egyptians and utilized in their religion and culture. More mainstream researchers, however, have insisted that these things are purely Egyptian but obviously are beyond our current, conventional view of the ancient Egyptians’ abilities, technology, and scientific acumen.

After several minutes of further exploration and discovery, we all crawled out of the hole in the desert and returned to our wobbly tour bus. No one said much during the long drive back to civilization. The tour guide unwrapped a stick of gum and, after carefully folding it in half, put it in his mouth and began chewing. He looked out the window at the passing sameness of desert sand, seeming to be completely unconcerned about the mystery that still lay guarded and unanswered in the dark tunnels of the Serapeum. I gazed out the window as well and considered how difficult it seems to be to understand something that is so foreign, based on things with which I am familiar. After the initial shock of being faced with an impossibility that sits squarely in front of me, I tend to allow it to meld in with the rest of my internal unknowns—like the dog who looks up at a hot air balloon for the first time in amazement and confusion but quickly takes the position that it simply does not matter. I shook off the compulsion and was determined not to allow the excitement and intrigue of this experience to fade away. This land held secrets I wanted to explore.

Seeing first hand the marvels of Egypt in her art, architecture, engineering, and spiritual perspective of life and death during that first trip, I was continuously in awe of the accomplishments of this historically primitive culture. It was difficult to comprehend the feats accomplished here by a civilization that at the time of the supposed construction of the pyramids had not yet adopted the use of wheeled carts. Also in the Saqqara, at the mortuary temple, I stood in front of massive stones, which I had been informed were between 60 and 200 tons in weight, perched high above the desert floor atop other equally massive stones. I could not accept, in all of my objective reasoning, the curt and precise explanation that modern mainstream Egyptologists have given as to how these structures were engineered and constructed. It simply belied reason. Most other researchers intrigued by such phenomena look for the material means of their manifestation, often proclaiming sensational theories involving alien technology or tools and devices with laser-precision capabilities that have been lost to antiquity. My thoughts instead went to the potential powers of the mind. I pondered a nonmaterial solution—something more magical and, clearly, more metaphysical.

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As I left the desert lands behind after our 1993 ten-day tour, I felt even more bewildered by Egypt’s mysteries. Stepping out onto the tarmac at the Cairo airport to board our return flight to the United States, I filled my lungs with the dry Egyptian heat of early morning, just as the sun was beginning to ascend from its nightly transformative journey through the underworld. I felt as if I was leaving my real home in a certain sense. Many people in past-life regression therapy have described Egypt as the location of one of their distant early lives. Considering the overall effect this place had on my psyche, I possibly could have been one of them. I took in a deep breath and felt a familiar warmth in my lungs, as the hot air of Kemit filled my soul with awareness, energy, and life.

The ensuing years after this initial visit were personally difficult for me, as my wife of 28 years fell ill to cancer and, after a noble confrontation with the disease, succumbed to it four years after her diagnosis. Six years after her death, I fell in love with a woman I had met while attending graduate school, and soon after our initial meeting, we decided to share a trip to Egypt. This time I was a bit more prepared for what I experienced, at least from an objective, scientific point of view—I don’t think I could ever have prepared enough for the spiritual experience I was sure to encounter. During the years between visits, I had become an amateur student of Egyptology—but not conventional Egyptology. I favored an alternative perspective. As odd as it sounds, the esoteric theories regarding the design and building of the many amazing structures in Egypt simply seemed more rational to me. Theories abound regarding the techniques actually utilized to build the pyramids, the temple structures, and the obelisks, and to perform the dozens of other seemingly impossible tasks the ancient Egyptians obviously accomplished. Some of these theories are comprehensible and seem rational and coherent, and a seemingly equal number do not.

Once I had discarded much of the conventional thought surrounding these construction methods due to their obvious physical problems, I had a much more plausible idea of how things had to have been done. Or did I? The plausible how I was now faced with defining was not explainable by our current known science. Regardless of the actual mechanism used (whether it fit within the confines of Newtonian laws of physics or not), there seemed to be something clearly missing from most of these more esoteric formulations. It didn’t seem to me to be so important to know the physical mechanism whereby these accomplishments came to be in the physical world. What did seem important was the human consciousness behind the mechanism, if there even was physical mechanism per se.

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Most theories of Egyptian construction and execution endeavor to explain how something may have been accomplished physically—whether it be a conventional procedure such as building a ramp beside a pyramid structure to pull large stones up to their final position or an unconventional methodology involving antigravity devices and techniques. Both of these procedures, albeit radically different in their perspectives, still fall within a cause-and-effect paradigm: one, the more conventional, stays within the confining laws of our current known science; the other relies on something unseen and yet undiscovered (assuming it is even discoverable) and contradictory to our current understanding of how things are in a materially based universe.

What I was looking for was a radically different perspective. I struggled with this conundrum for quite some time until I discovered the works of two prominent authors and researchers on ancient Egypt. One was Robert Bauval (1999), who says, in his seminal book on the mysteries of Egypt, Secret Chamber: The Quest for the Hall of Records:

Egyptology is not a “science,” it is a sacred science. The Great Pyramid is not only an engineering structure conforming to clear geometrical rules, but a sacred temple of initiation into the mysteries of cosmic existence. To be sure, the ancient architect–priests used a geometrical canon to design their monuments, but this canon was an intrinsic part of the sacred science of initiation. Geometry was sacred. Art was sacred. Architecture was sacred. Hieroglyphs were sacred. Astronomy was sacred. They were all part and parcel of a sacred science taught to high initiates in the temple. The mind of man, which they deemed the most sacred thing of all creation, was to be made adept to this science or knowledge in order to find God. (pp. 53–54)

Bauval presents in this statement what I believe to be the true fundamental nature of the ancient Egyptian culture. In our current post-Enlightenment, materialist paradigm, the meaning of physical expression other than art is to be found through objective measurement: height, length, weight, precision, and functionality. Indeed, even art is measured through the senses. In this materialist paradigm, music is of no use if it cannot be heard with the ears, as well as painting, sculpture, and architecture being useless if they cannot be seen and thus quantified by sight. Bauval points out that there may have been another nonobjective, nonmaterial value present in Egyptian creative efforts—that being its sacredness in execution and presentation.

In the preceding pages of his book, Bauval (1999) recounts a description his brother read at a gathering of Egypt enthusiasts of hunting a certain type of Egyptian bird that his brother, as a young boy growing up in Egypt, used to hunt and trap. Bauval describes his brother as a professional architect adept at the ancient teachings of sacred architecture. His reading went, in part, as follows:

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There is a small bird, a type of wagtail, known to the Egyptians as Abu Deil, “Father of Tails,” which comes from Central Africa. Each year, in late September, this bird migrates north to the Egyptian shore of the Mediterranean. . . . Late September is, of course, the time of the autumn equinox, when the sky is clear and the air very still. The waters of the Nile are receding after the flood period in August, and there is a feeling of renewal of the vegetation and the thick and rich alluvial soil of the Nile Valley. The Abu Deil appears, as if by magic, at dawn, with the equinoctial sun rising due east. It likes the open desert, perching always on small rocks, watching, and communicating with the environment with the constant wagging of its tail. (p. 50)

The wagtail appears as a common occurrence in the form of a glyph in the hieroglyphic alphabet of the ancient Egyptians. Bauval explains that it would be impossible to know the true meaning of the symbol if one did not live the experience of the wagtail. He suggested:

The full knowledge of the appearance of the wagtail in Egypt should evoke the idea and the mo...