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DESCENDANTS OF
THE ANCIENT EGYPTIAN SCHOOL
By
DR. ROBERT L. UZZEL, FPS (TX)
A speech delivered to Lone Star Lodge #85, F.&A.M. (P.H.A.) At the Annual Scholarship Banquet Prairie View A&M University, Prairie View, Texas, February 9,2001
The teachings of Freemasorny are and always have been quite eclectic, incorporating elements from various religions, philosophies, and cultures. This is especially the case with the Scottish Rite, which seeks to teach the Wisdom of the Ages. One of the many sources for Scottish Rite ritual and philosophy is the truly fascinating culture of ancient Egypt.
The idea of Freemasons as descendants of the Ancient Egyptian School is hardly a new idea. The first known association of. Egypt with Freemasorny is found in the Cooke MS, which is dated from the 15th century and is housed in the British Museum. According to this text, Freemasorny began in Egypt and then went out "from land to land and from kingdom to kingdom." In 1880, M.D. Weisse made the same connection in his book Obelisk and Freemasonry. Other interesting works on this theme include Albert Churchward's 1910 work Signs and ~j'ymbols of Primordial Man and Manly P. Hall's Freemasonry and the Ancient Egyptians, which first appeared in 1937 and, by 1980, was in its fifth printing.
In his celebrated commentary on the 29 degrees ofthe Scottish Rite, Morals and Dogma, Albert Pike revealed a fascination with Egypt. In Pillars of Wisdom, the noted Pike scholar Rex Hutchens observed:
Much of the connective tissue between Egyptian mythology and modem Freemasorny consists of parallel allegories, particularly ... between the legend of Hiram and the legend of Isis and Osiris; for example, the common association of the All-Seeing Eye and Osiris so often found in antiMasonic literature is also attested by Pike ... As well, Pike specifically attributes the sprig of acacia to Egypt as part of the Isis and Osiris myth ....
Pike believed the myth of Isis and Osiris began as an explanation of events in the heavens. Particular constellations were identified with particular personalities in the Egyptian pantheon ....
Pike also acknowledges the influence of what he called the Orient -- Persia and India -- on Egyptian mythology ....
It should be pointed out that Pike, in keeping with the 19th centmy ethnocentrism which captivated him and so many of his contemporaries, saw the great religious ideas of India and Persia as the creation not of the indigenous populations but of mythical Aryans from northern Europe. Contemporary scholarship has done much to refute the theory of the Aryan invasion of India.
Hutchens further wrote:
While Pike comments frequently in Morals and Dogma on Egyptian myth and religion, the greatest Egyptian contribution seen in the Scottish Rite is in the 31°. This Degree, comprised of various Egyptian deities, is enacted to explore the concepts of justice and truth. In the judgment scene of this Degree, the balance contains the heart of the deceased which is weighed against the feather of Ma 'at, the Egyptian goddess of truth. The soul of the deceased makes a negative confession, swearing he has not done evil. Having affirmed its righteousness, the soul is united with the gods in the land of light.
While Pike would have never dreamed of acknowledging ancient Egypt as a black nation, one of his contemporaries, Martin Delany, a Prince Hall Mason, wrote a treatise on Freemasonry in which he argued that the Egyptians were a branch of the Ethiopians. He declared:
In the earliest period of the Egyptian and Ethiopian dynasties, the institution of Masonry was first established .... From whence could Moses ... have learned his Wisdom, if not from the Ethiopians? ... To deny to black men the privileges of masonry is to deny to a child the lineage of its own parentage. From whence sprang Masonry but from Ethiopia, Egypt, and Assyria: ....
There can be no doubt that Freemasonry influenced the writing of the popular 1954 book Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy Is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy. The author, George G. M. James, was a Prince Hall Mason and professor at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. He was highly critical of most Greek philosophers and even called for the abolition of all Greek letter fraternities and sororities. Nevertheless, he described Socrates as a true "Master Mason" and a "Brother Initiate of the Egyptian Mysteries." He referred to Egypt a~ the cradle of the Mysteries and of the Masonic Brotherhood."
Stolen Legacy is a very interesting book which has been the object of many interesting reviews, some highly complimentary and some highly critical. One of the more critical scholars is Mary Lefkowitz of Wellesley University, who wrote:
The notion of an Egyptian legacy was preserved in the literature and ritual of Freemasonry. It was from that source that Afrocentrists learned about it, and then sought to fmd confirmation for the primacy of Egypt over Greece in the fantasies of ancient writers .... James's idea of ancient Egypt is fundamentally the imaginary "Mystical Egypt" of Freemasonry. He speaks of grades of initiation. In these Mysteries, as the Freemasons imagined them, neophyte initiates must learn self-control and self-knowledge. He believes that Moses was an initiate into the Egyptian mysteries, and that Socrates reached the grade of Master Mason .... He speaks of the Masonic symbol of the Open Eye, which based on an Egyptian hieroglyph but in Masonry has come specifically to represent the Master Mind ... .it is not true that the Greeks stole their philosophy from Egypt; rather, it is true that the Greeks were influenced in various ways over a long period of time by their contact with the Egyptians. But then, what culture at any time has not been influenced by other cultures ..... ?
Egyptian influence on both Christianity and Freemasonry can especially be seen in the fascinating figure of Isis, one of the most important deities of ancient Egypt. Research indicates that Isis, her husband Osiris, and their son Horus originated in Ethiopia and that Ethiopians played an important role in Isis worship throughout the Roman Empire. In an article entitled "Egypt's Isis: The Original Black Madonna," Eloise McKinney-Johnson wrote:
In worshipping her as "She Who Weeps," the ancient Egyptians acknowledged Isis as the source of their prosperity. Indeed, as Herodotus has recorded, "Egypt is the gift of the Nile." The Egyptians believed that the Nile began with Isis' tears splashing from the heavens as she mourned her murdered husband Osiris. They believed, too, that she resurrected him at great sacrifice and, thus, initiated the whole concept of resurrection. Osiris is, indeed, the first of a long line of resurrected gods .... Isis, her husband Osiris, and their son Horus, a divine Black family of Afro-Ethiopian! AfroEgyptian origin, have exerted an outstanding positive influence upon world history and world civilization.
Today, the religion of Isis in its pure form is extinct. However, its influence survives in the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary in both Eastern and Western Christendom and in an important African American sorority.
In The Gods of the Egyptians, or Studies in Egyptian Mythology, E. A. Wallis Budge observed:
It is clear that in Plutarch's time the Egyptians believed that Osiris was the son of a god, that he lived a good life upon earth and ruled as a wise and just king, that he was slain by the malice of evil men, that his body was mutilated, and that his wife Isis collected his limbs which had been scattered throughout Egypt by Set, or Typon, and that Osiris by some means obtained a new life in the next world, where he reigned as god and king. The llieroglyphic texts contain abundant testimony that the statements of Plutarch are substantially correct, and from first to last Osiris was to the Egyptians the god-man who suffered and died, and rose again, and reigned eternally in heaven.
As the Egyptian Isis was transformed into a universal goddess, her devotees could be found in many lands beyond Egypt. The name of Isis was known in Phoenicia as early as the seventh century B. C. and was communicated thence to other parts of the world. The Greeks saw Isis and her mysteries as an analogue to Demeter and the Eleusinian mysteries. They identified Osiris with Dionysius and Horus with Apollo. Under the Ptolemies, her worship was established in Athens, with a temple erected at the foot of the Acropolis. Soon the word "Isis" was part of the names of Greek citizens and Greek ladies were depicted in the character of Isis. In Corinth, a spring festival of Isis was held.
By the second century B.C., the Romans knew about Isis, as her worship thrived at Delos, Sicily, Pompeii, and other cities. Despite several episodes of persecution in Rome itself, the religion eventually prospered in the imperial city. In 616 A.D., the last known Isis festival was held in the Roman Empire. At the end of his study of Hymns to Isis in Her Temple at Philae, Louis V. Zabkar wrote:
But this is not the end of her story. In spite of her power, prestige, care for the people, and the familial appeal that she exerted to the Egyptians, she could not face the Greek world before her first Greek devotees who sang her praises humanized some of her features: the destiny of every man then depended on the goddess who, in her love for the suffering, oppressed, imprisoned, and imperiled, became a succor and savior of mankind. It was this hellenized Isis who conquered the Mediterranean world and who successfully competed with Mithra and Christ for the conscience and loyalties of men. After more than five centuries of worship and personal devotion to her, her appeal gradually diminished, her image paled almost into insignificance. But even then, as a simple mother with child, she remained for a while a symbol of a new divine motherhood, of another God's Mother, who, in the belief of many, gave to the world what Isis could not and was not expected to give: Redemption through Love.
Most scholars agree that the early Christians bestowed some of Isis' attributes on the Virgin Mary. Pictures and sculptures of Isis suckling Horus formed the foundation for Christian figures and paintings of the Madonna and Child. Several stories of the wanderings of Mary and Jesus in Egypt which are found in the Apocryphal Gospels reflect scenes in the life of Isis as described in texts found on the Metternich stele. Many of the attributes of the Mother of Christ are no doubt attributes of the Mother of Horus. It appears that the writers of these non-canonical works perceived the teachings of ChristianitY as reflections of the best and most spiritual doctrines of the Egyptian religion.
According to Budge:
Knowledge of the ancient Egyptian religion which we now possess fully justifies the assertions. that the rapid growth and progress of Christianity in Egypt were due mainly to the fact that the new religion, which was preached there by Saint Mark and his immediate followers, in all its essentials so closely resembled that which was the outcome of the worship of Osiris, Isis, and Horus that popular opposition was entirely disarmed. In certain places in the south of Egypt, e. g., Philae, the worship of Osiris and Isis maintained its own until the beginning of the fifth century of our era, though this was in reality due to the support which it received from the Nubians, but, speaking generally, at this period in all other parts of Egypt, Mary the Virgin and Christ had taken the places of Isis and Horus, and the "Godmother," or "mother of the god" was no longer Isis, but Mary whom the Monophysites styled Oeotokos.
The word Oeotokos ("God-bearer") is the Greek translation of the Egyptian word Netermut.
As previously stated, Isis is the original Black Madonna. It is interesting to note the presence of Black Madonnas on every continent. According to Jungian analyst Nancy Qualls-Corbett:
Perhaps the most celebrated Black Madonna is called Our Lady Under the Earth, found in the cathedral of Chartres, south of Paris. The actual statue replaces a much older one which according to legend was venerated by the Druid priests long before Christ's birth. In fact, the church today stands on the very foundations of an ancient Gallo-Roman sanctuary .... The Black Madonna, associated with both the earth and fertility, is an image of the divine feminine reflecting the ancient connection between women's nature and the goddess of love. Through her, the Great Goddess still lives in Christianity.
Another Jungian analyst, Ean Begg, described Isis as the queen of the night for Freemasons and Rosicrucians and Paris as the city selected by Isis as her sacred capital.
In 1907, when the Ancient Egyptian Arabic Order of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine--also known as the Prince Hall Shriners-convened in Richmond, Virginia, the foundation was laid for the establishment of an auxilia'ry open to wives, widows, mothers, sisters and daughters of Shriners. In view of Isis' great importance to both Freemasonry and the African continent, it was quite appropriate that the name of this auxiliary should be the Daughters of Isis. In more recent years, when Prince Hall Shriers decided to organize in Rockville, Maryland, they selected the name of Anwar Temple, in honor of the late black president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat.
The land of Egypt has always fascinated popular imagination. Egyptian religion, whether traditional, Coptic Christian, or Muslim, has had a profound impact on world religion and world history. Egypt has influenced other cultures and has been influenced by them. It is quite appropriate that Freemasons, Prince Hall and otherwise, should study the Egyptian Mysteries. While there is no proof of any direct transmission, Freemasons are, nevertheless, the spiritual descendants of the Ancient Egyptian School.