Where The River Bends

Where the River Bends: Continuity, Twists, and the Mythopoetic Spine

The Egyptian system was clunky, although incredibly poetic, and it refined itself over thousands of years, throughout which original meanings have been lost. Reinterpreted projections replaced onto it; misunderstandings were made. There were reformations.

It came to the point of Cleopatra, when she encountered Rome—where you had an empire based on mathematical precision, and an empire which had that historically but also allowed for the flexibility.

The two civilisations were not a perfect mirror of the other, in the same way that men and women are not perfect mirrors for each other, because if they were, they’d cancel each other out. What we are is perfectly balanced in a different sense, which is more like the rook, the horse, the knight in chess; that moves two steps sideways and one step forward. It is that perfection is in part because it’s not such a perfect mirror that will cancel each other out, rather that it’s got a twist in it which keeps it perpetually moving forward, and therefore it does not cease to exist.

With Rome and Egypt, Cleopatra did a thing; she saw the logic, but it was also the masculine domination over the yielding feminine principle. In Mayan terms of the ‘battle of light and dark’ at the end of each cycle, which decides what the next cycle is going to be; it was some form of that, played out on a massive scale, it being the world as they knew it. It’s why Mark Antony and Cleopatra were so important historically (and although many other equally as important and amazing lifetimes and cycles happened which are not on the records, that’s the one whose records survived, which is foundational to where we are now; so historically that is the continuity).

While there are alternative understandings of history, you can take a side or the other: you can say the end of Egypt was terrible, or you can say the end of Egypt was necessary.

At any rate, a lot of knowledge was lost. The burning of the library of Alexandria is a symbolic point. It was not just that event; it was all the temples which fell under the sand and the priesthood failed to continue its overcomplicated knowledge to the next generation; the fact that we forgot how to read the hieroglyphs, and interpret the hidden and intended meanings of them. Although modern scholars have translated them, it’s only one understanding of it, the surface layer. They are intentionally layered. There are deeper hidden mysteries within it.

Which is partly what I’ve been attempting to express and explore myself, not only with Egyptology but with the Hermetic European Western traditions and others, the Maya. Which the more I research, the more I discover affirmation of a direct continuation, with twists and turns. It is those twists and turns which form the link; changing in the continuation.

Where the river bends over by here, means that it flows differently over there. We can see it by researching all of this stuff, but I can’t be prejudiced. I can’t only say “the West is superior” or “Rome was superior” or “Egypt was superior” or “Mesopotamia or Mesoamerica were superior,” any more than I can say Paganism or Spiritism or Christianity or Islam are superior. They’re all components of a bigger story. They’re all necessary bricks in the brickwork, to build the building. If you take any of them out, the whole thing is weakened.

There are within this, structures; which are the continuity. This requires flow, and flow occurs between Stability, which contains it and enables it to flow, and the Flexibility for it to do so.

This is why the river is such a beautiful symbolic metaphor. This is why the Nile is so important as a symbol, which of course the Nile being also the lotus flower because the Delta is the blossoming of the flower; the Nile being the spine. Then you’ve got the chakras which are sacred sites located up the spine of the Nile, and it’s also the Djed pillar, which holds together the body of knowledge of that.

This is why Akhenaten and the Amarna period is at the heart, the flowering of the heart, of Egyptian civilisation’s continuity. Cleopatra recognised that, and she understood, and she obeyed the forms. Akhenaten with the Aten was not the flowering of the crown chakra. It being the most artistic and poetic era, of which very little is remained, but some has remained, enough that it can mythologise; and that’s part of the poetry.

The importance of mythologising history as part of the poetry. We can explore that happening in the Irish in a very clean way (The Irish Book of Invasions, Lebor Gabála Érenn). That is why mythologisation (and mythopoeia) are so important and significant, as we see with the developmental processes of the stories of the Arabian Nights.

It is why you have to be a polymath to put all of it together from fragments and remnants of the past and from ongoing cultures. It’s why you have to put all these bodies together to see the cohesion. Why one civilisation spanning hundreds or thousands of years becomes itself a block-chunk symbol for referring to other things, so that we can understand better what it is we’re dealing with, what it is that happened, and with foresight, what we may be able to do in the future and how that might be better than what we’ve had in the past.

The Age of Pisces was about that distillation process of complexity being refined into singularity for ease of transmission of information. Block-Chunks become Runes.

See Also: Where The River Bends

See Also: Circling The Square