René Adolphe Schwaller de Lubicz (1887–1961) was a prominent 20th-century alchemist and Egyptologist. More precisely, he was an alchemist-Egyptologist: his understanding of Ancient Egypt was rooted in the dimension of Sacred Science, just as his alchemical practice revolved around the same symbolic order he discerned within Egyptian forms and expressions.
It is not difficult to see why Schwaller de Lubicz’s writings are rarely taken seriously by Egyptologists—except, perhaps, for their purely external or architectural aspects. This is because the science of Egyptology, like Western thought as a whole, is founded upon the mistaken “belief of knowing” that Socrates already denounced. Plato, in the Sophist (246 B), even turns this into a jest when he speaks of “those who believe only in what resists the touch.” Upon this same ontological and hermeneutical ground—saturated with the coarsest materialism—modern sciences, both humanistic and natural, have unfolded. They became ever more entangled in the rationalistic mentality that Hegel finally carried to triumph with his harsh dialectic, battering concepts together until some synthesis emerged by sheer force. What is real is rational, and what is rational is real, Hegel declared—never was there a more comforting formula for minds wandering amid events, once it is established that whatever one happens to think must therefore be true.
Unlike the mental materialism that holds to be true only what it sees—and believes that what it sees must therefore be true, a circular reasoning that defines a mind bound to representation and calculative reason—Schwaller de Lubicz followed another path. This path had remained uncorrupted even within the folds of the West itself: in Hermetism, Gnosticism, Alchemy, and the Qabbalah, down to our own day.
Schwaller de Lubicz’s studies on ancient Egypt thus stem from this very current. He is usually described as a “symbolist Egyptologist”, a label interpreted quite differently according to the bias of whoever employs it. The reductionist view takes it to mean that he simply reduced whatever he pleased to his preferred symbols, weaving an arbitrary fabric of fanciful associations. At the opposite extreme stand the zealous readers of esoteric literature, who imagine that every line must contain the nebulous and numinous meanings they themselves blissfully project into it—what Plato, in the same passage of the Sophist, calls “the friends of Ideas”. Both attitudes—the first denigrating, the second self-exalting—understand symbolism in the same way: as the substitution of one thing for another for the sake of mere evocation. And that, after all, is the usual meaning of “symbolism” in ordinary language and in contemporary thought.
Schwaller de Lubicz’s symbolism is not the kind commonly understood by that name. It differs for two essential reasons, the first of which already implies the second. For Schwaller, the correspondences he discovered were real and effective; they were not his personal interpretations, but actual facts—facts belonging to a different order from those of the senses. He could call them facts only because, as a practicing alchemist, he had verified through experience that reality is not limited to what appears to the five senses and to the rational elaborations of the mind. Consequently, this is precisely what makes Schwaller de Lubicz so difficult to read: if one approaches him from within the rationalistic mentality of the West—or from its naïve religious counterparts—one can only reject or, conversely, idolize his pages for being “extra-material".
It is also essential to consider the context in which every esoteric thinker works. Just as Christian saints, in their ecstasy, behold God the Father, and as in India the yogin, depending on his path, merges into Brahman, Śiva, or Nirvāṇa, so Schwaller de Lubicz was steeped in the European culture of the early twentieth century. In that era, symbolism was conceived as a category of the spirit rather than as a sterile linguistic mechanism, as it is today. From this alone it should already be clear that when Schwaller de Lubicz spoke of symbols, he meant something entirely different from what we now mean by that word. Even a work such as J.A. West’s The Serpent in the Sky has the great merit of presenting a coherent synthesis of Schwaller de Lubicz’s writings and ideas. Yet it also carries a risk: that his profound symbolism—which he viewed as inherent rather than merely representational—may be misunderstood and reduced to the mechanistic language of our time. As with every thinker of genuine weight, one should first read his own texts, and only afterwards—if at all—their commentaries or reductions.
After so many subtle arguments, a practical example may help. Schwaller de Lubicz is known to have spent more than a decade measuring every stone and every distance of the Temple of Apet of the South, better known as the Temple of Luxor. His monumental work, The Temple of Man, is the result of that long study. He held that the temple—built in successive stages by different pharaohs—mirrors the physical and nervous structure of the human body. Already this is considered heresy among Egyptologists, who insist that each pharaoh built according to his own purposes, without any overarching architectural plan.
The human figure represented in the Temple of Luxor, however, lacks the cranial vault. Schwaller de Lubicz devoted many pages to this fact, explaining how it accords with the Egyptian conception of wisdom, according to which the true center of intelligence is the heart rather than the brain (in the sacred texts, the heart is denoted by the hieroglyph ib, while in medical texts it is referred to by the different sign haty): for this reason, Schwaller de Lubicz Schwaller de Lubicz is fully justified in naming the higher dimension and source of knowledge for the Egyptians the “intelligence of the heart". Crucially, this is confirmed by the practice of embalming: the brain was almost the only organ discarded, while the heart was the only one left inside the body.
Such an idea is, of course, difficult to accept. How could the Egyptians—master engineers and builders, skilled surgeons, and refined thinkers—not have realized that thought seems to reside in the head? Yet, if we turn to the tantric doctrines of the East, we encounter a similar conception. In many yogic traditions, the principal cakra is anāhata, the heart center, seat of knowledge. The chakras of the head—ājñā, at the center of the brain, and sahasrāra, at the crown—are indeed fundamental, but they serve to open access to modes of knowledge beyond the human. Pure wisdom, which belongs innately to every human being, remains in the spiritual heart—not in the muscle, needless to say, but slightly behind it, near the thymus gland, the thymos that once inspired the heroes of the Iliad.
In the more advanced stages of the Tantras of the Mind—beyond the exercises of concentration and meditation that form the esoteric yet still discursive and preparatory phase—the cerebral region is experienced as empty. To examine this fully would require another occasion, as Plato’s Socrates remarked when confronted with matters of excessive subtlety. What concerns us here is that the “man without a skullcap” of the Temple of Luxor would appear to an Indian or Tibetan yogin as a perfectly coherent image of the process of realization in Sacred Science.
This, then—operative and in its essence tantric—is the key to Schwaller de Lubicz’s reading of Egypt. All his symbolism draws its meaning from this psycho-organic dimension, which he knew intimately as a practicing alchemist; so much so that, according to tradition, he succeeded in producing the famous red of Chartres by natural means.
What has been sketched here is only a glimpse of an operative interpretation of Schwaller de Lubicz’s work—one that has the merit of giving concrete and effective meaning to his view of the functional energies embodied by the Egyptian Neteru. For only by mastering one’s own subtle energies can one experience the vaster subtle forces of the cosmos, as both the yogin of India and the alchemists of every age have taught.
Lastly, any account of Schwaller de Lubicz must recall that the theory of the Sphinx’s erosion by rainwater originated with him, mentioned incidentally in his work The Pharaonic Theocracy. J.A. West later took up the idea, commissioning the young geologist R. Schoch to test its validity. Today it remains one of the most debated hypotheses concerning the enigmatic monuments of the Giza Plateau—made all the more so by the fact that, for decades now, the Egyptian authorities have forbidden any new excavations on the site.