Secret_History

178 The Secret History of the World
educator of both our cities. She founded your city a thousand years before ours,
receiving from the Earth and Hephaestus the seed of your race, and afterwards she
founded ours, of which the constitution is recorded in our sacred registers to be
eight thousand years old.
Yet again, the Egyptian priest is giving greater antiquity to the Greeks than to
the Egyptians! Another clue for the reader to understand that this is not an
Egyptian story! What is being said is being put in the mouth of an Egyptian priest
to “conceal”. Indeed, the worship of the goddess, is the older form of worship in
Egypt. But all of that came to an end, probably with the conquest of Narmer, the
building of the temple to Hephaestus, the demoting of the goddess and the Moon
calendar, and the instituting of the Solar worship and the solar calendar of 365
days. 94
As touching your citizens of nine thousand years ago, I will briefly inform you of
their laws and of their most famous action; the exact particulars of the whole we
will hereafter go through at our leisure in the sacred registers themselves. If you
compare these very laws with ours you will find that many of ours are the
counterpart of yours as they were in the olden time.
Here, of course, we come to the idea that there was an ancient connection and
communication between the truly “old Egyptians” and the Northern peoples.
Georges Gurdjieff once remarked that Christianity was taken from Egypt, a
statement that might suggest that he agreed with the Pan-Egyptian school. But no:
Christianity, he hastened to explain, was not taken from the Egypt of history, but
from a “far older Egypt” which is unrecorded. 95
In the first place, there is the caste of priests, which is separated from all the others;
next, there are the artificers, who ply their several crafts by themselves and do not
intermix; and also there is the class of shepherds and of hunters, as well as that of
husbandmen; and you will observe, too, that the warriors in Egypt are distinct from
all the other classes, and are commanded by the law to devote themselves solely to
military pursuits; moreover, the weapons which they carry are shields and spears, a
style of equipment which the goddess taught of Asiatics first to us, as in your part
of the world first to you.
The remark that the right function of society was “first taught to the Asiatics” is
most interesting. The reference to “Asiatics” in this context from an historical
“Egyptian Priest” is extremely questionable because, in the many Egyptian
inscriptions of historical times, the Asiatics are always referred to as “Vile”.
Nevertheless, even in historical times, it is indeed true that the Egyptians borrowed
their military equipment and war strategies from the Asiatics, but that was a much
94 Which event may have been merely another of the cyclic events assimilated to an even earlier
archetype.
95 Ashe, Geoffrey, The Ancient Wisdom, (London: Sphere 1979) p. 8-9.