7 Books Published by Inner Traditions on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

More than 700 photographs and line illustrations documenting the ancient Egyptian temples of Karnak

• A magnificent excursion that explores the monuments, ruins, statues, and bas-reliefs from the ancient and highly developed civilization of Egypt

• The only complete photographic record available of this important acheological treasure

• Contains 600 photographs by two top French award-winning photographers

This book is a magnificent excursion led by R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz to the monuments, ruins, statues, and bas-reliefs of the temples of Karnak. With nearly 600 photographs by Georges and Valentine de Mire, more than 450 of which are full-page plates, this volume is the only complete photographic record of this important historic site. Because of recent vandalism many of the artifacts are no longer intact, and it is no longer possible to see many of the details captured in these images.
This promenade through the temples of Karnak reveals the remains of a world devoted to an unimpeachable faith in the afterlife, a faith whose conviction seems to have exalted its builders and artists, as was the case for several brief centuries with those who constructed the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. One did not work at fashioning these stones, nor were these works sculpted under someone’s strict authority; here it was necessary to act out of the heart. Every gesture in the depictions, every arrangement in the buildings, is a hieroglyph from the symbolic language of the sages who spoke to spirit and consciousness.

The monumental Temple of Man represents the most important breakthrough in our understanding of Ancient Egypt since the discovery of the Rosetta stone. This exhaustive and authoritative study reveals the depths of the mathematical, medical, and metaphysical sophistication of Ancient Egypt. Schwaller de Lubicz’s stone-by-stone survey of the temple of Amun-Mut-Khonsu at Luxor allows us to step into the mentality of Ancient Egypt and experience the Egyptian way of thinking within the context of their own worldview.

His study finds the temple to be an eloquent expression and summary—an architectural encyclopedia—of what the Egyptians knew of humanity and the universe. Through a reading of the temple’s measures and proportions, its axes and orientations, and the symbolism and placement of its bas-reliefs, along with the accompanying studies of related medical and mathematical papyri, Schwaller de Lubicz demonstrates how advanced the civilization of Ancient Egypt was, a civilization that possessed exalted knowledge and achievements both materially and spiritually. In so doing, Schwaller de Lubicz effectively demonstrates that Ancient Egypt, not Greece, is at the base of Western science, civilization, and culture.

To understand the temple of Luxor, twelve years of field work were undertaken with the utmost exactitude by Schwaller de Lubicz in collaboration with French archaeologist Clement Robichon and the respected Egyptologist Alexandre Varille. From this work were produced over 1000 pages of text and proofs of the sacred geometry of the temple and 400 illustrations and photographs that make up The Temple of Man.

The Temple of Man is a monument to inspired insight, conscientious scholarship, and exacting archaeological groundwork that represents a major contribution to humanity’s perennial search for self-knowledge and the prehistoric origins of its culture and science.

We lack direct consciousness of Space and Time. We can know of them only indirectly by mass, force, and energy, and by the intermediary of phenomena such as may be tested by our five senses. Without direct awareness of Space or Time, human beings lack two “senses” necessary for the knowledge of all causes. From this imperfection, of which we are always being made aware, is born our need to simplify. Thus we reduce everything to fundamental properties, without paying any attention to the underlying universal organization, the effects of which are all around us.

The result is that the science of numbers, the most wonderful guide to the constant creation of the universe, remains an enormous hypothesis so long as its use has not awakened in us the higher consciousness of a universal order. By deepened knowledge of things and their process of becoming, we must come to recognize Numbers as a truth, and to experience with our senses the living relation of a cause to an effect, this relation being truer and more real than the effect could ever be.

Published in 1917 under the author’s given name of René Schwaller, A Study of Numbers is the first expression of the teachings we have come to associate with his later and better known name, R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz. It is a masterly account of the living, universal, qualitative, and casual reality of numbers.

Starting from the irreducible one, Schwaller deals with the unfolding of creation through the cycles of polarization, ideation, and formation. Topics covered include: numbers, values, and relations; the disengagement of numbers; the harmonic basis of numbers; the development of values; and the establishment of harmony.

This is an initiation into the tone, structure, and mentality of Egyptian knowledge, the basis of all Western theology and science. It is a redefinition of those concepts which are basic to the pharaonic transmission—the glory of ancient Egypt. The author explores the "process of becoming" as related to consciousness and revealed in nature; the kinship between man and the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms; the stages of awareness leading to "Cosmic Consciousness"; and the mystery of the formation of substance into matter.

R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz (1887-1961), one of the most important Egyptologists of this century, links the sacred science of the Ancients to its rediscovery in our own time. Sacred Science represents the first major breakthrough in understanding ancient Egypt and identifies Egypt, not Greece, as the cradle of Western thought, theology, and science.

This book contains the first published results of Schwaller’s 12 years of research at the temple of Luxor and its implications for interpreting the symbolic and mathematical processes of the Egyptians through their sacred architecture.

Symbolism is the intuitive means of overcoming the limitations of reason. Here Schwaller explains how true progress in human thought can be made only if we call upon the "symbolizing" faculty of intelligence, developed and refined in the temple culture of ancient Egypt and reflected in its hieroglyphs.