Original subtitles

>>The sheer beauty and sophistication

of Egyptian artifacts entrances us.

How can we unlock the code embedded

in every object they made?

How does the symbolism in Egyptian art

illuminate their cultural values?

What ancient secrets still lie hidden in plain sight?

Our understanding of ancient Egyptian culture is limited.

Looking at the artifacts left behind by the ancients,

it is obvious that they had different values, customs,

and beliefs from ours today.

History books are filled with stories of war,

invasion of territories, and patriarchal ways

of being and thinking.

Yet it seems that ancient Egypt enjoyed

long periods of peace and prosperity

and a profound connection with nature and spirit.

Is there a way to understand the shift?

>>So what we refer to as history that

began some 6,000 years ago was really

the advent of a different style of social organization

that's typified by hierarchies of dominance,

you know, warring deities, warring mythologies,

and control systems.

>>Vedic culture from ancient India

speaks of a grand and measurable cycle of 26,000 years,

consisting of ascending light ages and descending dark ages.

>>In the higher ages, you see this philosophy

of living in tune with nature.

People talk about speaking with the gods

and a lot of interaction.

Virtually every ancient culture has stories about the gods

if you go back far enough.

And you see a lot of matriarchal cultures

if you go back far enough.

You know, the dark age times, you

have this very brutal, paternalistic type of ruling.

>>I think it's difficult for us to understand

the ancient Egyptians because we've

got the paradigm of the patriarchal structures

on top of it, and we're looking through

our own cultural lenses.

>>Has world culture always been male dominated and patriarchal?

If not, what would a matriarchal system look like?

Matriarchy is not the opposite of patriarchy,

with women dominating and controlling men.

It is based on balance between the masculine and feminine

and harmony with nature.

This was exemplified in ancient Egypt, which

was known in the old language as the land of Khent.

Hakim Awyan received teachings about the Khenesian people

in the distant past.

>>The ancient life system in Asia

came, the commission tradition being passed down

through the mother.

Mother is the teacher.

Not the father, like patriarchy system.

This is matriarchy.

She is the goddess.

She is everything in the house.

>>Based on the countless artifacts

that show the high status of the feminine,

it seems that women have the same status

as men, if not a higher status.

>>In the museum, you have statues.

You notice that the woman put the arm

around the man's shoulder.

And that shows are they equal?

No.

Woman was the upper head in the family.

When she put her arm around the man's shoulder, she's saying,

this is mine.

You also see that the sculpture in the old days

put the feminine wig on a man's head

when he promoted more to a woman than a man.

>>Men's wigs were layered in different lengths, like steps.

Women's wigs were parted in the middle, smooth, and all one

length.

When a man wore a woman's wig, it was an indication

that he had high status.

>>Only men with wisdom would wear the women's wig.

So these are the scribes, and the physicians,

and the rest of them.

>>What you can do is go back into the Old Kingdom.

And what you find is obviously a fair amount of equality,

where the goddesses are revered as reverently as the gods.

And there's even the instance, for example,

of Hathor, the exception in that she's the only deity that

has a temple column all to herself,

So the great mother, the great feminine principle,

occupies a very important part in

the whole Egyptian symbology, the whole Egyptian doctrine.

There's absolutely no doubt about that.

Women could own property, had as much rights as the men.

They could divorce as easily as the men.

Of all the known sophisticated civilizations

that we have access to, probably women were better off in Egypt

than they were anywhere else.

>>Perhaps we are looking at ancient Egypt

from a patriarchal viewpoint.

We should let the symbolism and the artifacts

tell their own story.

The frescoes we see lining temple walls

in Egypt and on stone slabs in museums around the world each

tell their own story.

We see the same images repeated again and again

in Egyptian art.

By learning to decode these symbols,

we can look back in time, peeling back

the layers of patriarchy that cloud

our understanding of ancient history.

Then, we can begin to decipher the messages

that the ancients left us.

>>You have to accept that we're dealing with a period that

occurred at least 5,000 years ago.

And the little we know of it comes

from archaic texts that were written

in a very occult and esoteric manner.

And they weren't meant for you and me.

>>The secrets of the ancient Egyptians

were not for the commoners.

>>But for a very, very small group

of elites who had to be initiated over many, many years

to appreciate what these texts said.

>>They were for the high-level initiates,

which were people who were trained.

And they would go through different initiations, tests

that would help them be wise, that

would help them confront their fears, that would balance them,

balance them in the body, mind, and emotions.

>>Initiates were students who were

given rudimentary instruction on the mystery

traditions of Mayan and Egyptian cosmic cycles.

>>As they approached higher levels of consciousness,

they came to respect different aspects of themselves that

were represented in the feminine and the masculine.

But they went further and called it

sacred feminine and sacred masculine, which

meant the purest form that was actually connected to the two

hemispheres of the brain.

>>Feminine consciousness corresponds

to the right hemisphere of the brain

and the left side of the body.

In contrast, masculine consciousness

corresponds to the left side of the brain

and the right side of the body.

Patriarchal consciousness focuses

on history, linear time, dogma, rationality, waking reality,

and science.

Matriarchal consciousness focuses

on eternity, cycles of time, ritual, magic, altered states,

and art.

If we examine the art, we can see the characters

almost always have one foot slightly forward.

In some instances, they take a big step forward.

In each scene, the goddess has her left foot slightly leading,

showing awareness of the feminine principles

of timelessness and magic.

The pharaoh, however, takes a large step with his right foot.

This shows that he is grounded in the masculine.

Similarly, we often see images with two left hands.

It has been suggested that this is just a stylistic convention.

But we should not impose our ideas on Egyptian art.

Left hands suggest giving, while right hands suggest taking.

>>In our culture, we've practically erased the feminine

in favor of the masculine, reading, writing,

and arithmetic.

Art, music isn't as important.

And our society is completely unbalanced because of it.

The ancients knew that you could not

achieve high states of consciousness

without these being in balance.

And so they revered the pure qualities of either.

And so when we say sacred feminine and sacred masculine,

this was the highest form of respect

so that the female would have both feminine and masculine

balanced within her, and the male

would have both feminine and masculine balanced within him.

>>Balance between the sacred feminine

and the sacred masculine runs deep in Egyptian symbolism.

We see gods and goddesses carrying a crook, a flail,

and a staff in various combinations.

The crook represents the balance of the emotions.

The flail symbolizes the balance of the mind.

And the staff depicts the balance of the body.

Once balance of the body, the mind, and the emotions

was achieved, consciousness could develop.

Notice the staff always has the head

of a bird and a forked base.

The staff never touches the ground.

This indicates that we are spiritual beings having

an Earth experience.

We are incarnated here, but our souls

can go beyond the Earthly plane.

Egyptian temples were places where spiritual work was done.

An arch with a winged disk is always found at the entrance

to temples.

The winged disk depicts a vulture and a snake.

>>Snake been taken as a symbol of masculine,

and the vulture is feminine.

>>The feminine and the masculine had to be in balance.

The lower self was to surrender to the higher self

in order to enter the sacred space.

This meant that the ego of the everyday world

had to step aside while the higher self connected

with cosmic energy.

>>Vulture can fly.

Snake can't fly.

But both have the same glands.

System of life is based on glands.

>>The glands were the most important features

of the human being.

>>One of the most misunderstood functions of the human body

today is our glandular or endocrine system.

Glands secrete hormones that trigger reproduction.

Fertility and procreation had high value

in Egyptian ideology.

>>The ancients were very much in tune

with how the energy systems in the body,

or the chakras as the East Indians would talk about them,

were connected to the glands.

>>Ancient teachings speak of seven energy centers

in the body called chakras.

Parallels occur between the concepts of chakras,

or energy centers in the body, and our glands.

It appears they are two ways of describing the same thing,

through spirituality and through science.

Ancient Egyptians had a holistic understanding

of the significance of the glands and their central role

in reproduction and in consciousness.

If we can decode the symbols, we see

that the sacredness of procreation

is readily visible in ancient Egyptian art.

>>When you see a boy or a man, you

see a kind of a bottle on his head.

That is not a bottle, or not a white crown

symbolizing Upper Egypt, as my colleagues and scholars say.

No.

This is a gland in the human body known

as the thymus, located behind the lungs.

>>The thymus is most active when a baby is in utero.

It continues to be active until puberty.

Then it begins to shrink and is atrophied

when we stop being fertile.

It was a critical activator of consciousness.

>>The crown is another.

It's the womb, the placenta.

The thymus and the womb are connected

for the cycle of life.

When you see the double crown, the red crown

is the womb and the placenta.

The white crown is the thymus, who

has its influence on the womb.

That's the symbol of one of the glands.

>>In the early 1900s, alchemist Schwaller de Lubicz

presented a work called The Temple of Man.

It demonstrated that the architects of the Luxor Temple

used sacred geometry, which reflected

the exact proportions of the human body.

As in all Egyptian temples, the most sacred space

was located at the back of the temple, the Holy of Holies,

which corresponded to the pineal gland.

When activated, the pineal gland is

said to stimulate the evolution of higher

states of consciousness.

If the temples were metaphors of the human body,

the pineal gland corresponded with the Holy of Holies.

At the entrance to the most sacred part of the temple

stand tall pillars representing the masculine and the feminine,

papyrus and the blue lotus.

The papyrus and the lotus reflect the balance

between the feminine and the masculine principles

and are shown together throughout

ancient Egyptian art.

>>The blue lotus is a symbol of life,

and this plant, blossom, flower, it grows in the water,

like water lilies.

It's where the ancient commissions

believe that life starts in water and in that lotus form.

>>We have seen there are always multiple layers of meaning

embedded in ancient Egyptian symbols.

Is there another reason why the blue lotus was so important

in Egyptian ceremonies?

In ancient Egyptian art, we see countless instances

of part animal, part human forms.

What were the ancients trying to convey by these curious images?

>>There's a technical term for such creatures

that anthropologists use.

They call them therianthropes.

And that's from the Greek, therian, which

means wild beast, and anthropos, which means man.

They are combinations of beast and man.

It's not an accident that all of the gods of Egypt

are therianthropic.

They have, of course, fully human forms.

But in most cases, they also have

forms that are part animal and part human.

So you may consider Horus, the head of a hawk

and the body of a man.

You may consider Sekhmet, a lioness with a human body

and a lion's head.

Or Anubis, of course, the guide of souls,

who is part jackal and part human.

>>Egypt isn't the only place where

these half animal, half human images have been found.

Half a world away, we find clues to decode

these mysterious symbols.

>>Throughout the Amazon today, shamans

working with the powerful visionary brew, ayahuasca,

a combination of two plants-- very frequently,

they will, after their visions, when

they return to the normal, alert, problem-solving state

of consciousness, they will actually sit down

and, recollecting what they saw in the visionary state,

will paint and draw the images that they saw.

And the most common motif of these ayahuasca visions

is the therianthrope, creatures that

are part animal and part human in form.

This specific characteristic of the ancient Egyptian gods

is one of the things that tells me

that our ancient Egyptian ancestors were using

altered states of consciousness to explore

the realms of spirit.

>>Again we see images of blue lotuses.

Is there another, less obvious interpretation of this symbol?

>>Altering of consciousness has been

done by a variety of different methods and techniques,

most commonly in shamanistic cultures.

Still to this day, it's done by using hallucinogenic plants

which, as it were, switch the receiver

wavelength of the brain and allow us

to tune in to other realities.

Of course, there are a range of non-drug techniques,

rhythmic dancing, certain kinds of music.

Certain kinds of spaces have an effect on human consciousness.

But there's a great deal of evidence

that they made use of a potion involving

the blue lotus and the mandrake root,

possibly also the opium poppy as well,

to enter a visionary state, and in that visionary state

to explore, navigate, and learn about the realm that

lies beyond death.

And they had very concrete and specific ideas

about this, which are expressed in the ancient Egyptian books

of the dead, going right back to pyramid texts.

This was not a work of imagination

on the part of the priests.

This was a work of documentation of

their out-of-body exploration of realms

that lie beyond the merely physical.

>>Is it possible for us to learn to access other realms today?

Can we expand our capacity to perceive?

Do we need new ways to describe these phenomena?

>>If I can say I show you in my dream.

You can ask, what did you see?

Then I say the dream.

Now, did I saw you?

The verb see is not there because I did see you

in my dream, but not with my eyes, because I was asleep.

So how did that happen?

It must be a sense put all this vision to me without my eyes.

But I said when I speak, limit vocabularities,

to say I saw you in my dream.

No, I didn't see you, but there's no other way to say.

>>Could the ancients have mastered innate human abilities

that we have forgotten?

>>You can tell if that bird on the tree

is happy or frightened from a cat.

Yeah?

You can tell that the donkey's annoyed or happy

by the vibration and the sound.

And that's what we want us to notice, the sound.

It's not the word you said.

It's how being said.

You can tell if this vibration, the truth or not truth.

It's natural.

It's healthy.

People, they use all the senses, the full capacity of senses.

>>The five senses as we know them today

were symbolized by the scarab.

>>And when you see the scarab, you

are looking at a human skull.

It divides three sides, three sections.

The front head, symbolized by ancient people as seven.

Seven openings.

Two, four, six, seven.

That is the front head.

And these are the receivers.

You see with, you hear with, you taste with.

Everything.

On the left side is the consciousness side,

and that is the daily deeds digested

every moment you look at things.

But the other side is subconscious side,

something you are unable to explain what's going on.

>>It seems clear that the ancients

knew about the subconscious mind.

They had the power to reach beyond the senses, something

we began to be aware of with the writings of Freud

and the advent of psychology in the early 1900s.

>>Don't compare people of today like the people

of the ancient days.

The people of ancient days were healthy,

they able to use their senses.

We looking at things as a crippled people.

We only have five senses.

We supposed to have 360 senses.

360.

And only five is recognized.

We've got the glands of the senses.

But we didn't use it.

And any muscles you don't use, it shrink.

Oh, yes.

>>How can we begin to imagine that the ancients had

the capacity of 360 senses?

Perhaps a metaphor for the full spectrum senses

could be a sphere.

Is it possible for us to move beyond our five senses today?

>>Our five familiar senses have been evolved by evolution

to connect us to the physical and material realm.

But we have, I like to think of it as a secret doorway

inside our own minds, which can be opened

in altered states of consciousness through which we

may project our consciousness into other realms

and dimensions, and those then become accessible to us.

>>Could it be that the ancient Egyptians

were accessing supernatural realms through heightened

perceptions that came from full spectrum senses?

>>I've come to the conclusion that it's really impossible

to understand ancient Egyptian civilization

and ancient Egyptian spirituality and religion

until you get to grips with the fact

that the priests of that religion

were deliberately, and in a targeted way,

cultivating altered states of consciousness

in order to access the supernatural realm.

They know what shamans all over the world still know today,

that in the alert, problem-solving state

of consciousness that is particularly

valued by Western industrial society,

you are not going to have supernatural or spiritual

experiences of any kind.

It doesn't mean that the supernatural and spirit

realms are not there, because they are.

They are all around us all the time.

But our senses cannot tune into them.

>>It seems that the ancients must

have been tuned into something that allowed them to build

sacred structures using monumental architecture.

Today, we consider ourselves to be highly educated,

yet engineers are at a loss when they

try to build even a small pyramid.

Has our system of education diverted us

from what was common knowledge in ancient times?

>>There were no schools and universities

like what we have today.

We've been influenced by this system of teaching.

Today, we think it's a primitive life, that no education,

they haven't been to school, and how can they build a pyramid.

They don't know figures.

How can they build this?

But we don't know that the senses we have

make the impossible possible.

The impossible to us, which is based on

ignorance make it possible because knowing

is a very great power, just to know.

>>The most important ceremony for teaching the populace

how to live well was the weighing of the heart.

It reveals what the ancients believed

happened in the moments after death.

>>Initially in the ceremony of the weighing of the hearts,

the deceased would meet Anubis, who would say, you're dead.

Let's have your heart.

We're going to weight it against the feather of truth.

If your heart was heavy because you had done something immoral,

you weren't allowed to go to the other side.

So the populace learned that they had to be light of heart

in order to live well.

>>As ancient Egypt slipped into patriarchal ways of being

and thinking, the old spiritual ideology became codified,

and organized religion became dominated

by the Amun priesthood.

>>The Amun priesthood had a lot of power.

And they were in a position to have

people pay for their salvation.

It used to be that your heart was

weighed against a feather of truth.

But in later pictures of the ceremony

of the weighing of the heart, you'll

see Horus holding onto the scale.

And you could pay the priesthood for shabti dolls.

And the more of them you had, the more likelihood

you could buy the lightness of heart

instead of being light of heart.

Well, this is a fundamental change

in terms of how to live well.

And I think that we still are living in that way.

>>History is written by its victors.

And as the patriarchy took hold, much effort

was put into suppressing Egypt's matriarchal past.

>>There's a few pharaohs who were

erased from the kings list.

Hatshepsut was one, Akhenaten was one,

and Tutankhamen was another.

>>The legacy of the controversial pharaoh Akhenaten

was almost lost forever with the complete destruction

of the city he and Nefertiti had founded at Amarna.

>>Now, very little was known about Amarna

until there was an earthquake, and the pylons at Karnak

were filled with these little blocks that had been cut up.

And they used them from Amarna to just put--

as filler inside the pylons.

So when archaeologists found them and started putting them

back together, they realized there was a very large story

here.

>>For the ancients, life on Earth

mirrored the motion of the stars in the sky.

>>What the ancients did is they would

have the capital be at Heliopolis in the north,

for 2,160 years.

And then they would the capital be

at Thebes, which is now Karnak, for that length of time.

When Akhenaten came into power in the New Kingdom

of the 18th Dynasty, it was right at the time when

things were supposed to shift.

>>During this time, the patriarchy

gained momentum, with the Amun priesthood steadily

becoming more powerful.

>>Akhenaten happened to have been

born at one of these points of return or beginning.

He believed that he was subjugated, like all pharaohs,

to a cosmic law, to the law of Ma'at.

What happens up there, they believed,

was controlling matters on Earth.

And things happened up there that dictated to Akhenaten

that he had to move his base.

And had to reinstall the original rituals.

>>When it came time for Nefertiti and Akhenaten

to change the capital, they knew that the Amun priesthood was

in power, and that they would really fight them on this.

>>If he had moved Heliopolis, there

would have been civil war.

If he had stayed in Karnak, he would have not

performed what he had to perform to follow the law, cosmic law.

He finally settles for a mid-point.

>>So instead of moving the capital back north,

they decided to take a point exactly in the middle,

between the two.

And this was Amarna.

>>Art created by artisans in the Amarna period

is exquisite and markedly different

from the art in other periods.

For the first time, Egyptian royal art

depicted the pharaoh and his family

all together and clearly showing affection for each other.

>>They built this wonderful place.

And they had gorgeous palaces.

And people were creative.

It was peaceful.

There were flowers and nature.

And people lived a leisurely life.

But what it was was a return to true spirituality.

He ruled with his coregent, Nefertiti.

The feminine was honored.

>>In this transition, Akhenaten and Nefertiti

rejected the established religion

of the corrupt Amun priesthood.

They had a profound respect for solar energy,

known as the Aten.

>>And so returning to this was a big threat

to the Amun priesthood.

And so they plotted to take Amarna down.

>>They eventually brought it down,

and they destroyed his city.

And they reinstalled the ancient gods,

with all their iconography.

>>They simply destroyed everything,

every trace of them.

If they didn't find the ruins of Akhenaten's temples used

as fill, rubble fill, in the walls of Karnak,

there'd be almost no sign of Akhenaten.

>>Amarna was a peaceful society with great creativity

and beauty.

Yet scholars in traditional Egyptology

continue to portray Pharaoh Akhenaten

as a deformed, renegade, heretical leader.

>>They see him as a heretical king-- it's quite the opposite.

The heretics were the priests.

He was not heretical.

He, in fact, was somebody who was determined

to adhere to the divine laws.

And he went to the cross for it.

>>After the fall of Akhenaten, Tutankhaten,

a boy of only nine years old, became pharaoh.

>>Now, because we found Tutankhamen's tomb intact,

we know a lot about him and the life that he lived.

Now, he was raised at Amarna.

Now, some people say that Akhenaten was his father.

We don't have DNA tests.

We haven't found the mummy of Akhenaten.

We don't know that for sure.

But it's interesting that he started out as Tutankhaten,

because at Amarna, they worshipped the Aten.

But after he took the throne, they opened the temples again.

They moved away from Amarna.

It seems that as soon as the Amun priesthood found out

that he actually was of the Aten,

they changed his name to Tutankhamen,

that suddenly he disappeared.

>>After 10 years of leadership, when Tutankhamen was 19,

he died mysteriously.

His mummy was x-rayed, revealing a fractured skull,

suggesting a blow to the back of the head.

>>It seems that he was buried in a rush.

His tomb is very small, and close to it,

there were a whole lot of mummies

that were moved in a cache and put aside.

So it's almost like there were several mummies

from other dynasties that were in the tomb

that he ended up in.

And then they took furniture from Amarna

and buried him there.

>>Though the tomb of King Tut left us many clues,

his fate remains a mystery.

Another casualty of the patriarchal retelling

of history is the story of Queen Hatshepsut.

>>Hatshepsut came earlier in the 18th Dynasty.

She started out by being a queen.

And then she became pharaoh.

Hatshepsut was a wise and powerful leader

who reestablished trade networks with Egypt's neighbors,

building the prosperity of the 18th Dynasty.

>>She was certainly ruling for a long time

at a period of tremendous peace and prosperity.

The artwork was never better than under her reign.

>>Had she been male, she would likely

have been remembered in history books

as the best ruler of Egypt.

Regardless of her success as a leader, she is still an enigma.

There has been much controversy about Hatshepsut.

it could be due to the patriarchy having

little tolerance of images of an empowered woman.

No one seems to agree on who the real Hatshepsut was.

>>There have been massive books written on Hatshepsut.

And again, there are no real conclusions.

Obviously, Hatshepsut must have been a very able ruler

because she stayed there apparently for 22 years.

>>But somehow, about 20 years after she passed,

her statues were broken and all put into a pit.

When they found them, they started

putting them back together.

But, like Akhenaten and Nefertiti, the Amarna period,

they were largely forgotten because the people who

came after were very threatened.

And they somehow wanted to destroy all trace.

Hatshepsut, Nefertiti and Akhenaten, Tutankhamen, they

were the ones that really understood spirituality

in some way.

I suppose there was no money to be

made if you weren't selling salvation.

>>We may never know how the high courts of ancient Egypt

were run.

It seems likely that the stories passed down

through the patriarchal institutions

of the 19th and 20th centuries may have misled us.

The peace and prosperity of the 18th Dynasty,

particularly in the time of Hatshepsut, Nefertiti,

and Akhenaten, had to do with honoring the feminine

in balance with the masculine.

Looking at Egyptian artifacts and frescoes,

it is clear that the feminine principle

played a prominent role in society

and was cherished and revered.

The feminine principle was articulated

in the concept of a great mother who

was central to the ancient Egyptian worldview

and was echoed by other world cultures.

>>The Milky Way in the sky is mythologized in various ways,

in various traditions, in various cultures

around the world.

And it's often thought of, almost universally thought

of, as a great mother principle, the great cosmic mother

in the sky.

>>In ancient Egypt, biology meant cosmology,

and both were considered sacred.

>>When you look at the cosmology in terms of biology

as describing events that happen inside of a womb.

And the womb happens to be the womb of the mother goddess.

>>In both Mayan and ancient Egyptian cosmology,

the center of the Milky Way Galaxy is where stars are born.

Metaphorically, it is the womb of the great cosmic mother,

represented as Isis giving birth.

>>We keep looking at how the ancient Egyptians thought.

And everything fed biology and procreation.

How we got here, how we came into existence, biology.

And then how we left and how our soul continues to live.

And we can see that there aren't really that many symbols that

aren't pertaining to balance of the body, mind, and emotions,

and to balance between the two hemispheres of the brain.

Once we can embrace that, then it's

easier to understand the Egyptians.

>>That switch from matriarchy to patriarchy,

I think it's the cause of what's on the world now of conflicts

and disagreement and showing of power.

Yeah.

>>Already, at the beginning of the First Dynasty

of ancient Egypt, Egypt was moving

from being matriarchal to coming into more

patriarchal ways of being and thinking.

There were a few periods where the ancient, ancient knowledge

was remembered.

But it's important to remember that there

was a lot of ancient Egypt prior to the dynasties

and in the early periods that did not represent those values.

So the parts of Egypt that I find the most interesting

come from the memory of times that came further back.

>>I've said many times that healthy people,

they got the power which is-- unhealthy people

haven't got it.

And I want you and all my friends

and all my beloved to know that you have it.

And when you know that, you will work on it

so it can bring you to stronger.

As I said before, the senses, just like muscles.

If you don't use, it shrink and go.