Egypt Was the Image of Heaven on Earth and Temple of the Whole World

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Atlantean Realities Series · 76 pages

At seventy-six pages this is the longest study in the Atlantean Realities series, and its thesis is stated in the title: Egypt as the image of heaven on earth and the temple of the whole world. Blavatsky's contention is one of direction. Egypt, she writes, sent no agents through the world to learn what others knew — the wise men of neighbouring nations came to her. Ancient India and Egypt are treated as the oldest group of nations, and the Egyptian pyramids as antedating the upheaval of the Sahara and the other deserts.

From there the argument becomes a claim about decline. Ancient Greece, on this account, owes everything to Egypt, and there is no comparison to be drawn between the Egypt of old — its arts, sciences and religion, its cities and monuments and swarming population — and the Egypt of the nineteenth century, peopled with strangers. History, she argues, caught its first sight of the ancients only when their arts were already degenerating fast; the further back one goes, the finer those arts become. The supporting sections take specific cases: ancient knowledge of thunder, lightning and electricity antedating modern discovery, and Egyptian writing appearing perfect and complete from the first, in use as early as the days of Menes, the protomonarch.

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