The Temple of Man

The Temple of Luxor in the town of Luxor in Upper Egypt (actually the southern part of the country), known in Pharaonic times as Thebes, the sacred capital of Egypt's New Kingdom golden age, is one of the most beautiful and significant of Egypt's "Houses of Life" as the Egyptians called their temples.

Huge libraries have been filled with the work of scholars attempting to get inside the ancient Egyptian head. Mostly they make it sound about as mundane as it could be and still have something to do with ancient Egypt. In fact sometimes they make it all sound so ordinary that you can feel a little silly for being intrigued with ancient Egypt at all.

I haven't read much conventional Egyptology, but in what I have, the scholars never start with the effect that an encounter with ancient Egyptian art and architecture has upon contemporary men and women. Because ever since tourists started regularly visiting Egypt in the 18th century,the effect has been pretty much the same--they're blown away. What's the scholarly interpretation of that?

Here's the thing, and this is true, it's just that for some reason scholars aren't particularly interested in it--the architecture of sacred places is consciously and carefully created to have an effect on you, to transmit pieces of a vision to you even if you cannot read or write a word of the language. This is what the Pyramids of Giza do, it's what the Gothic cathedrals of Medieval Europe do, it's what the great stone circles of the British Isles do, it's what the Indian mounds of North American do, and I'm sure all these have their counterparts in Asia.

The first thing that can be said is that it's really fun being in these places. I think that if a kind of exhilaration isn't your first response then either the original builders forgot some of the important principles, or you should try again another day. Just being in the precincts sort of puts things in a healthier perspective. You--with all your list of worries and concerns that loom so large --suddenly seem blissfully small and unimportant. You're here to explore a new and bigger world. If I'm sure of anything, I'm sure this effect was part of the builders' intent.

Anyway, I've never been to Luxor, but I think Luxor Temple is probably an especially potent example of this whole thing. In the middle of the 20th century, an amateur French Egyptologist named R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz spent fifteen years poking around, measuring, sketching, photographing and meditating on Luxor Temple. He decided that Luxor was the height of the Egyptian science of sacred architecture, the "Parthenon of Egypt" and, as he ended up calling it, the Temple of Man. de Lubicz believed that one of the principals of sacred architecture is that its structures are in some sense "alive." And nowhere was this more true than at Luxor. He came to decide that the temple was symbolically a huge human body. Laying a medically accurate rendering of an adult male skeleton over a plan of Luxor Temple--head at the top by the Holy of Holies, feet at the bottom by the Pylon Gate--he believed he found a key to the design and function of the temple.

The first section of the Temple of Luxor, the Court of Ramesses the Second, corresponds to the legs from the knees down. What do you find in the Court of Ramesses the Second? You're surrounded by statues of Ramesses in an unusual striding position with the lower leg from the knee down extended forward so that at certain times of day the shin, alone of the whole statue, catches the light.

At the point in the Temple where the skeleton overlay indicates the genitals, there is a wall carving of a pharaoh with a huge erection ("ithyphallic" the Egyptologists call it. ) Where the navel should be is an inscription that says,"Here is the true birthplace of the Pharaoh." At the point where the first of the twelve vertebrae begins is a depiction of twelve interlinked horsedrawn chariots. Moving up into the Hypostyle Hall, you enter the domain of the lungs. The lungs are governed by the moon in Egyptian microcosmology, and the bases of the pillars in the Hall depict the moon processing through its full cycle. The Hall of the Twelve Columns corresponds to the eyes, and is dedicated to solar symbolism, the light by which we see. Two more final steps along the way take you to the triple sanctuary, whose three interlinked holy of holies shrines form a band across the top of the skull, Finally, the dome of the skull rises to enclose and complete the sanctuaries, the very top of the skull rising out of the top of the temple to absorb the power of the Egyptian sun and start it circulating through the body of the Temple again.


I wouldn't be at all surprised if this was true. After all, it seems to me that the purpose of these places is to coordinate the little cosmos--you--with the big cosmos--the universe.To show how you fit into the really big picture. I've noticed on more than one occasion that the first sensation when entering some sacred precinct is that I felt bigger. They stretch you and pull the kinks out, like a spiritual chiropractor.