Aegypt, O Aegypt Cardinal Bessarion John Crowley's neglected 1985 novel "Aegypt" (first in a trilogy) is a convenient compendium of European imaginative ideas about the East, of which "Egypt" is only a tiny part...hence it is a novel of "deep time" in general. Crowley, combining info from Giorgio di Santillana and Hertha von Dechend's "Hamlet's Mill" and Frances Yates' and D. P. Walker's various writings about the birth of Renaissance Hermetism and the so-called Rosicrucian Enlightenment, creates a mythic world in which the popular origin of the Gypsies, not in Egypt but in "Aegypt" is taken to represent the birth of wisdom in a fabled land of the imagination, someplace older than and farther in than the merely literal Egypt. Crowley's narrator regards the Egyptians as disgusting literalists of the preserved body, as distinct from the tribe of nomads out of the reaches of Asia who carried the Real Stuff, astrological knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes and the relation between the body and the sky above. This comes, in popular imagination, from someplace around the Altai Mountains, far beyond and before anything Egypt ever produced. That's the model as it got sorted out in 19th century occultism, which has its own peculiar history--very peculiar, in fact. Crowley does wonderfully weird things with all this in the novel. However, "Aegypt" is the amalgam under which it all reached Europe, more or less around the time of the fall of Byzantium to the Turks. And Aegypt is the place where Hermes Trismegistus produced his books of wisdom, according to Renaissance beliefs. It was the 17th-century textual proof that the Hermetic books are late Greek forgeries dating from the Christian era that undid the dream of the Egyptian Magus and made the Scientific Revolution an imaginative possibility. "Aegypt," the concept, was discarded as egregious tosh, except by the Freemasons and the like, for whom an adroit mixture of Egypt, Enoch, and the discovery of documents in a vault was a way of imaging the growth of the soul through a slow symbolic education. (The documents in a vault, of course, reminds us of the "ludibrium" of the Rosicrucian Manifestoes that were promulgated a significent number of decades before the birth of the first recorded Lodge. The Rosicrucians, according to Yates in "The Rosicrucian Enlightenment," were Central European intellectuals seeking to undo religious intolerance who needed something so much older than the Protestant-Catholic divide that Europe could unite around it, and stop quarreling over the Papacy and the Real Presence in the Eucharist.) This is Eurocentric in a self-involved rather than self-congratulatory way; even though it places the sources of real wisdom elsewhere (and indeed, got the wisdom from elsewhere), it is a fiction created in Europe and for Europe. The real, physical Egypt has nothing to do with it except insofar as it adds local color. Big rocks with big pictures on them were a neat way of symbolizing forgotten secrets so long as hieroglypics remained either undeciphered or deciphered by a fundamentally erroneous method of scholarship. They were certain much sexier than the dinky little realistic statuary coming out of the ground in Renaissance Italy. The flat-footed Romans were boring dorks compared to the Egyptians, and thus its culture was happily available to have real mysteries from elsewhere projected upon it. Which does not mean, I repeat, does not mean, that there were no Egyptian mysteries, or that Egypt did not originate mathematical insights built upon later by Pythagoras. No, no, no, of course the revisionary histories of Egypt are a story to be studied and pondered and incorporated into History. But as Crowley's novel puts it, "There is more than one History," and there is not only more than one History, there is more than one Egypt. That fact has troublesome consequences and endless confusions, just as, according to "Hamlet's Mill," the fact that much of world mythology deals with events in the sky and not events on earth (or is it "As above, so below," as the fabled Smaragdine Tablets have it?) has caused endless confusion about the highly technical and observation-based nature of mythic narrative. Myth may not be just stories of the soul, but stories of the sky as well; likewise, Egypt is both a place in Africa and a location or locution in the European imagination, and that makes for big trouble in intellectual history. We have only begun to get the garbles straightened out.