The Æsclepius, Properly Interpreted
Excerpt from the Æsclepius quoted by Graham Hancock
Text
“Are you not aware, Æsclepius, that Egypt is the image of heaven, or rather, that it is the projection below of the order of things above? If the truth must be told, this land is indeed the temple of the world.
Commentary
This introduction to the ‘prophecy’ is an overview of the Law of the Macrocosm-Microcosm duality.
In this example, the microcosm is Egypt, which should be seen as a stand in for the entirely of the world that humans inhabit.
“That which is below is like that which is above, and that which is above is like that which is below, to accomplish the miracle of One Thing.”
The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus
Text
Nevertheless, since sages ought to foresee all things, there is one thing you must know; a time will come when it will seem that the Egyptians have adored the Gods so piously in vain, and that all their holy invocations have been barren and unheeded.
Commentary
The desire to understand nature will fade. The attempts acquire a better understanding of nature will be perverted or abandoned outright.
Consider a few of the organized efforts to block free scientific inquiry today.
ONE – The delusion called Creationism is openly being taught to children by parents, clerics, and even in public schools. In other parts of the world, this control of education by religious zealots is much worse. In many countries, science is completely rejected, replaced by a literalist interpretation of religious texts as the final authority on nature. Billions of children are indoctrinated into delusion and are completely ignorant of how the natural world actually functions.
TWO – Free thought and critical thinking are openly being called evil. In some countries, merely speaking/writing about anything that contradicts religious pronouncements is severely punished by the state.
THREE – Our sound understanding of geophysics is being dismissed as evil by people who insist, not only that the Earth is six thousand years old, but that it is actually flat.
FOUR – Man made climate change is an exhaustively documented fact. It is being denied by those who continue to have have the most effect in accelerating the global rise in temperature–the same individuals who have the most power to halt and even reverse its devastating effects on the planet. By the Hermetic Scientist’s view, we are literally killing the body of God.
FIVE – Many whose sexual natures do not fit the man/woman/heterosexual dynamic have, for centuries, suffered public condemnation and even violence for not pretending to be like everyone thinks they’re supposed to be. Great advances in human psychology have led to a flowering of all our sexual natures yet at every turn, conservative forces, denying the validity of the science, still seek to demonize these humans.
The Text
Divinity will quit the Earth and return to heaven, forsaking Egypt, its ancient abode, and leaving the land widowed of religion and bereft of the presence of the Gods.
Commentary
Note the use of the word ‘Divinity.’ God is abandoning humanity. But, remember that, to the Hermetic Scientist, ‘God’ is just another word for nature.
Nature is turning on us. Rising temperatures (and the resultant droughts, storms and rising sea levels), mass extinctions, famine, the pollution of the air, water and soil, and the wars that result when there’s too little to go around, are just the beginning of the disasters that await our disregard for that which makes our existence possible.
Authoritarian forces, intent on clinging to power at all costs, are responsible for a great deal of damage being done to nature. In many cases, they are being egged on by religious authorities, clueless of the damage their ‘revelations’ are doing to the Earth, as well as to the otherwise innocent psyches of their ‘flocks’ and ‘submissives.’
It is happening in many nations, that science has been relegated to a subservient role by government supported religion.
Countering this are the efforts of many nations—the richest and most secular—to fight off the ideological takeover of the state and to continue to support science’s efforts to help us better understand nature, so that we may fight against its destruction the better.
The retrograde forces of religion, even here, have power and use every measure at their disposal, including violence, to fight the erosion of their influence.
The Text
Strangers will fill the Earth, and not only will sacred things be neglected, but – more dreadful still – religion, piety, and the adoration of the Gods will be forbidden and punished by the laws.
Commentary
Okay, it’s a bit awkward, I know.
To say that this passage actually refers to science and not to religion at all—though I maintain that’s exactly what it means—sounds like I’m agreeing with the specious notion of ‘Scientism,’ an annoying false equivalence perpetrated by Evangelicals in a transparent attempt to validate their delusions.
Two things make this assertion unsupportable.
ONE – Religion began as an attempt to understand nature. In other words, as an investigation into nature, however messed up that original attempt may have become.
TWO – Hermes’s lament is precisely that the original purpose of religion (his words for the Hermetic Sciences) will be perverted in precisely the way we have seen with the sciences today.
The Text
Then, this Earth, hallowed by so many shrines and temples, will be filled with sepulchers and with the dead. O Egypt! Egypt! there will remain of your religions only vague legends that posterity will refuse to believe; only words graven upon stones will witness to your devotion! The Scythian, the Indian, or some other neighboring barbarian will possess Egypt! Divinity will return to heaven; humanity, thus abandoned, will wholly perish, and Egypt will be left deserted, forsaken of men and of Gods!
Commentary
In this passage, Hermes foretells a time after scientific investigation has been legally curtailed (or outright banned) when what science has discovered about nature will be lost to history, except in myths that will no longer be believed.
The Text
“To you I cry, O most sacred River, to you I announce the coming doom! Waves of blood, polluting your divine Waters, shall overflow your banks; the number of the dead shall surpass that of the living; and if, indeed, a few inhabitants of the land remain, Egyptians by speech, they will in manners be aliens! You weep, Asclepius!
Commentary
In new Dark Age, no survivors of the Age of Science will even remember, much less lament, the loss of rigorous scientific investigation.
The Text
But yet sadder things than these will come to pass. Egypt will fall into apostasy, the worst of all evils. Egypt, once the holy land beloved of the Gods and full of devotion for their worship, will become the instrument of perversion, the school of impiety, the type of all violence.
Commentary
Something called “Science” will remain, but it will be a perversion, a defacto religion bereft of the investigative urge, just as the Hermetic Sciences degraded to became the religions of the world.
The Creation Science Museum and the teaching of Creationism as a legitimate alternative to Evolutionary Biology, are precursors of this.
