Book Reviews

Giza’s Industrial Complex: Ancient Egypt’s Electrical Power and Gas Generating Systems

James Ernest Brown, Dr. J.J. Hurtak, and Dr. Desiree Hurtak
Pagosa Springs, Colo.: Ancient Energy Research Center and Academy for Future Science, 2019. 150 pp., paper, $35.99.

Ancient Egypt has arguably been the source of more fringe speculation than any other historical culture, from tales about ancestral links to Atlantis to theories about pyramid-building aliens. Although modern scholarship has worked hard to throw cold water on the more extravagant variants, there is still no shortage of vexing mysteries involving this civilization, which even hard-nosed moderns continue to grapple with.

How did the Egyptians manage to move such large stone blocks, sometimes hundreds of miles overland? Why does Egyptian culture seem to have reached its peak near the earliest stages of its development? How did they achieve such extraordinary precision with some of the hardest stones on earth, as evidenced not only in works like the famed seated statue of Khafre in the Cairo museum but the many gargantuan sarcophagi down in the Serapeum of Saqqara? How does one explain the astonishing holes bored in hard stones around the Giza plateau, which look like the result of advanced machine tooling? The list goes on.

One of the most enduring mysteries of all, of course, is the Great Pyramid. What exactly was it used for? Despite its official reputation as a tomb, no pharaonic body was ever found inside it. This massive structure incorporates a series of extraordinary alignments, both geometrical and astronomical. Some claim that it served as initiation chamber and consciousness-raising device, while others point to the peculiar sonic properties in various parts of the structure. Having experienced some very strange acoustical phenomena in it myself, I have no doubt there is far more than meets the eye to this monument.

In recent years a growing chorus of voices has been suggesting that the monuments of the Giza plateau represent a kind of advanced technology normally associated with modern industrial societies. This school of thought was spearheaded in recent years by engineer Chris Dunn (The Giza Power Plant) but has been developed in a different vein by authors James Brown and J.J. and Desiree Hurtak in their new book.

The potentials of water play a pivotal role in this work. The authors propose that various structures around (and beneath) the Giza plateau were designed to activate sophisticated processes of “water splitting,” which in turn could exploit the enormous potential of hydrogen as a fuel source. Though we normally experience water in its liquid, gaseous, or solid states, they suggest another possible form: electrified or energized water. They go on to say that there is “good evidence that the Great Pyramid was a gigantic water processing plant to create electrified water and other chemical transformations.” It all sounds very space-agey, of course, but as the authors point out, the Egyptians “had the technology to build extensive pyramid structures, why could they not produce something as simple as energy from salt water batteries or hydrogen gas from water that high school students can do today?” We already know as a result of such discoveries as the so-called Baghdad Battery that some ancient cultures had devised ways of generating electricity, so it’s conceivable that the Egyptians could have developed related technologies.

What exactly would they have used this energy for? One possibility would have been electric lighting sources for their temples or for use in constructing tombs and tunnels deep underground. The authors theorize that structured or energized water could have also been utilized for agriculture, health and healing purposes, or ritual applications. As they point out, sacred water has long played a role in the ceremonies of religious cultures, from baptism to ritual purifications and cleansings.

Much of what the authors are proposing is speculative, of course, but as someone steeped for decades in highly speculative writings—including Theosophical ones—I admittedly have a high tolerance for far-out ruminations. What distinguishes this book from several others, however, is the science. While I don’t have an extensive enough background in electronics or chemistry to pass final judgment on the finer details of their research, I have just enough to suspect that they may well be on to something and that their work merits serious attention. The book could open the door to important insights into this ancient culture and our collective history.

A good-sized chunk of the book is technical in nature, which could make it tough sledding for non–technically minded readers. For them, I’m tempted to suggest skipping ahead to the conclusion, then going back to the beginning and reading forward from there. I’d like to think the authors might consider publishing a more accessible version of their research down the road in order to reach a wider audience.

In the end, their work brought me back to an idea I’ve pondered for years about the ancient Egyptians myself—namely, that they likely employed a more holographic way of thinking about the world, which operated on multiple levels simultaneously (like Egyptian hieroglyphics, which can be read on several levels). For that reason, I suspect their extraordinary structures may have served multiple purposes–spiritual, aesthetic, magical, geometrical, as well as technological. So should we view impressive structures like the Great Pyramid as deeply spiritual temples or as highly advanced machines? It may well be that they were both.

Ray Grasse 

Ray Grasse worked on the editorial staffs of Quest magazine and Quest Books during the 1990s. He is the author of several books, including The Waking Dream, An Infinity of Gods, Urban Mystic (excerpted in Quest, fall 2019), and Under a Sacred Sky. His website is www.raygrasse.com.

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Cursed Britain: A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times

THOMAS WATERS
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2019. 350 pp., hardcover, $65.

This is what many people believe about witchcraft: In the Middle Ages, the Catholic church cracked down on survivals of the old pagan nature religion. Its practitioners were labeled as witches and persecuted, often burned. This antiwitch rampage lasted into the eighteenth century, when the Enlightenment convinced the world that witchcraft had no effects; those who practiced it were simply deluded. After that point, belief in witchcraft died out until it was revived in the mid-twentieth century.

As this book, which focuses on witchcraft beliefs in Britain from the eighteenth century to the present, shows, much of this view is simply wrong.  It is true that Britain's Witchcraft Act of 1735 eliminated penalties for witchcraft per se, although it created penalties for those claiming to practice it. But popular belief in witchcraft never went away. It diminished somewhat, especially in the early twentieth century, but came back in full force during the century’s second half. In fact, witchcraft has been alive and well in Britain from the earliest days to today.

Neither the British government nor the Church of England played any role in perpetuating witchcraft beliefs; indeed they did everything they could to stomp them out. But belief persisted. Nor was it merely a matter of scary stories told around a fire. Witchcraft accusations were leveled by local people at local people, and these locals often took vengeance into their own hands. One example was a man from Westminster in 1831, who, “though living within sight of Parliament,  tried to shoot his neighbour—a woman who, he claimed, had bewitched him for the previous four years.”

 Witchcraft has many, often contradictory, meanings. Today some people call  themselves witches because they believe they are continuing the Old Religion. Wicca, the best-known version, derives its name from the Old English word wicca (pronounced witcha), which means male witch. (A female witch was a wicce, and the practice was wiccacraefte). Oddly in light of all this, today Wicca (pronounced wicka) is an abstract noun referring to the reconstructed present-day religion.

In the minds of the British common people, however, witchcraft generally meant doing harm to others through occult powers. This could range from causing cows to dry up to inflicting illness and death on the victims themselves. By contrast, individuals who used these methods to heal or protect people from witchcraft were commonly known as cunning-folk.

The authorities’ position was ambiguous. The Witchcraft Act (not repealed until 1951) was based on the idea that witchcraft was nonsense. On the one hand, this meant that the magistrates tried to protect people (usually women) accused of it. On the other hand, it meant that they often prosecuted cunning-folk who were trying to heal or rescue people from witchcraft.

Waters tries to connect his story with the larger history of occultism, but a short and perfunctory chapter entitled “Occultists Study Dark Arts” shows only the most basic knowledge of Theosophy, Christian Science, and the occult revival of the late nineteenth century.

Otherwise, Cursed Britain is well informed and well told. On a more theoretical level, it leaves a great deal to be desired. Waters does not satisfactorily explain why beliefs in witchcraft persisted so doggedly in an age of science and supposed enlightenment. He falls back on two suggestions. One is belief: “for it to work, you must quash your doubts.” But there are cases in which people suffered from the effects of witchcraft without believing in it or knowing that anyone had put a curse on them. He also relies heavily on the idea that this “imaginative, uncanny, and wishful way of thinking” is chiefly due to a human desire to make sense of the inexplicable. These do not do full justice to the evidence.

Waters is a lecturer in history at University College, London, who published this book with Yale University Press, so he is unlikely to give any explanation that does not line up with rationalistic materialism. But his theoretical arguments are neither forceful nor convincing: the reader suspects that he himself is baffled by the phenomenon—perhaps because he has researched it so thoroughly.

Waters bemoans the rise of belief in witchcraft in present-day Britain and wonders what should be done about it. Again, he does not come up with much of an answer, writing, “Witchcraft reached its lowest ebb in modern British history when  the state clamped down on the market for alternative health care, with targeted regulation and more policing. Perhaps a similar campaign could be mounted today, against the most unscrupulous spiritual healers operating in Britain.” An updated version of the Witchcraft Act, perhaps?

Richard Smoley

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Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being

Agustin Fuentes
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2019, 206 pp. Hardcover, $28.

In this book, Agustin Fuentes, chair of the department of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, addresses belief, why we believe, and how our beliefs shape ourselves and the world around us. He explores belief in three areas: religion, economies, and love.

Fuentes takes us on an anthropological deep dive into what makes us human and how the “human niche” developed. He gives a detailed time line of this development, as well as the evolution of plants and animals and the construction of the “human place.” He stresses that “the capacity for belief is not rooted simply in neurobiology.”

One third of the way through the book, Fuentes defines human culture as a system of the “distinctive processes of humanity that evolves as a central component of the human niche.” He tells us that “how we believe is explicitly an aspect and outcome of human culture . . . and why it is central to the processes of belief.”

To believe, explains Fuentes, “is to invest in something, utterly, wholly, and authentically such that it is one’s reality. So cultural constructs are real for those who hold them.” He goes on to say, “Much of what humans do is structured by what they believe.” Evolution of culture is ongoing largely because “becoming human is ongoing . . . We are humans evolving past, present, and future.”

The human mind enables belief by giving us our ability to imagine. According to Fuentes, imagination consists of “mental representations of objects or events not present in the subject’s current or recent external context.” Obviously our idea of God would be a mental representation as well.

In Fuentes’s view, belief, especially religious belief, “is not about being fooled.” Indeed it can be a “certainty of something that cannot be seen.” He considers religious belief to be just a small part of what humans believe, although “it is a major element in the human story.” Indeed religious beliefs, perhaps more than any other kind except love, have shaped our world and culture. As he says, religious belief “has massive impacts on the processes and experiences of humanity, and thus is central to an understanding of becoming and being human.”

Fuentes goes on to address belief in economies, which has relevance for us today, given the dissonances regarding the role of government in the economy and the economic system that best serves our needs. Economic systems, Fuentes says, “are not naturally occurring features of the world. Economic systems and ideologies . . . are human made, certainly creative and imaginative and very real, but the products of human society. They exist because we created them, and they are maintained because we believe in them.”

When it comes to love, Fuentes says that “belief and love are intertwined” and that “humans have to believe in some, or many, forms” of love. Perhaps love is the form of belief that is most vital for becoming human. “Our capacity to believe emerges from evolutionary processes and is intrinsically tied to our abilities to imagine, to be creative, to hope and dream, and to infuse the world with meaning. This enables us to love.”

Does belief matter? Fuentes concludes that it does: “Knowing why and how we believe is central to making belief matter for the better in the future.”

Does what we believe matter? Again, Fuentes says it does—in matters such as climate change, social justice, and inequality. He notes that “patterns of . . . inequality, driven by beliefs, are not uncommon.” Fuentes deplores fundamentalism in both religion and in “scientism,” writing that fundamentalism is “an abuse of the human capacity to believe.”

If you are looking for Fuentes to enter the realm of truth in his discussion, you will be disappointed, because the truth of belief is far beyond the anthropologist’s purview. The most beneficial act might be for us to learn to hold our beliefs lightly as we constantly progress in the act of becoming human.

Clare Goldsberry

Clare Goldsberry, of the Phoenix Study Group, is a freelance writer and author of The Teacher Within: Finding and Living Your Personal Truth.

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English Illuminati

ALASTAIR McGAWN LEES
Shepperton, Middlesex, U.K.: Lewis Masonic, 2019; 224 pp., casebound, $43.95. 

A more commercially minded publisher would have titled this Final Secret of the Illuminati.

Whether that’s accurate or not, this book gives us a deep look into the European occult revival of the late nineteenth century and some of its key figures—practically all of whom were connected to the Theosophical Society.

The story starts in 1776, when Adam Weishaupt, a law professor at the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria, started a quasi-Masonic secret society called the Illuminati. The society’s goal, among others, was to promote liberal ideals in an age when monarchy and ecclesiastical dominance were crumbling rapidly.

These aims did not suit the Elector of Bavaria, who had the organization shut down only a decade later, in 1786. But he failed to extinguish rumors about the Illuminati, and in the subsequent decades, authors such as the Abbé Barruel and John Robison blamed them for the French Revolution and related social unrest. Twentieth-century conspiracy theorists asserted that the Illuminati were a secret elite bent on world domination. (You can draw your own conclusions about these claims.)

In 1880, a German esotericist named Theodor Reuss tried to revive Weishaupt’s Illuminati.  He succeeded for a couple of decades. In 1900, he even managed to interest William Wynn Westcott, an English physician, Mason, and Theosophist (best known as cofounder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn), into creating an English branch.

This volume centers on the rituals for the English Illuminati, which Westcott had translated and adapted from Reuss’s rituals. These papers had been buried unknown for decades in the archives of the British Masonic organization Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, but were accidentally discovered by author Alistair Lees. In this volume, Lees publishes the papers, along with a fascinating array of other material about the ins and outs of the Masonic organizations, lodges, and degrees that proliferated at the time.

In the end, nothing came of the English Illuminati project. In a 1902 letter to Reuss, Westcott wrote, “The Illuminati system as a whole may suit your country, but I could not work it here.” Lees explains: “England did not traditionally have such a rich tapestry of haut-grade or high grade orders and rites such as Europe had enjoyed for the previous three hundred years.”

This, at any rate, is a bare-bones account of the panoply of figures, degrees, organizations, charters, and paraphernalia that appear in this book. It is ideally not for beginners but for those who already have some basic idea of these figures and their milieu. Readers interested in Masonic history will find it most valuable.

For others, one of the most useful sections is Reuss’s history of the Illuminati, which he portrays not as “a new creation of this man [Weishaupt] but rather as an institution which we can trace back to the oldest time.” He cites connections ranging from Moses and the ancient Mysteries to the Spanish Alombrados and the Rosicrucians of the early modern era.

Another useful part is a series of short biographies of the leading figures in the book, including Westcott, Reuss, the English Mason John Yarker, and Gérard Encausse (Papus), founder of the Martinist Order in France.

The book has its drawbacks. There are many typos and glitches in editing, and it is often frustrating to have Lees jump back and forth between the story of his own discoveries and the historical narration. But it is richly illustrated and gives the reader an idea of the visual aspect of these lodges—their documents, paraphernalia, and diagrams, many of them elaborate.

Many of the rituals and documents are reproduced, but they do not reveal a great deal of esoteric knowledge to the reader. There are small items here and there. The ceremonial of initiation to the Rose-Croix Grade, for example, tells us that the word INRI has several meanings: its familiar one (an acronym of Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”); a more esoteric, alchemical one (Igne Natura Renovatur Integra: “By fire is nature restored to wholeness”); and a yet more esoteric one, “the climax of all occult sciences according to the poem of Hermes”: Ioithi, Nain, Rasith, and Ioithi, referring respectively to the “active creative principle . . . the passive principle . . . a combination of the two principles, and the constant eternal transformation of all created things,” and “again the creative, godly principle as a symbol of the eternal circle of the world and all things created.” This resembles the exposition of the Tetragrammaton YHWH in Papus’s Tarot of the Bohemians.

The book does not answer the chief question it is likely to raise: what were all these men on about? Why did they chase back and forth across Europe, exchanging degrees and initiations (many of which they had invented themselves) like boys swapping Pokémon cards? The interchanges are so intricate that Lees had to create two detailed diagrams just to show the flow of orders in 1901 and 1902.

The answer—that they were simply charlatans—does not hold up. They did not profit from these degrees, and most of them had prominent and successful careers outside the initiatic world. 

Nevertheless, I think the answer is partly sociological. No one today can imagine the hold that titles of nobility held over nineteenth-century Europe. I suspect that one motivation for this panoply of quasi-Masonic titles and degrees was to create a kind of alternative aristocracy, because the conventional aristocracy was nearly impossible to enter.

In addition, the Western esoteric traditions, after centuries of repression, were beginning to shake themselves and move into the present. Because Masonry was no doubt the key inspiration for this awakening, many of the newly proliferating forms used Masonic terms and titles.

Today there seems to be a revival of interest in fraternal orders, especially Masonry, among those with serious esoteric interests. This is no doubt to be welcomed. Lees’ book illustrates how those esoteric lodges functioned in the past—as well as mistakes that lodges of the present can avoid.

Richard Smoley

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