Page 88 - Global Freemasonry

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MATERIALISM REVISITED

I n the first chapter of this book, we looked at the regime
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of Pharaoh in Ancient Egypt and came to some impor-
tant conclusions about its philosophical underpinnings.

The most interesting feature of Ancient Egyptian thought, as we said, is that
it was materialist, that is, posited the belief that matter is eternal and uncre-
ated. In their book The Hiram Key, Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas

have some important things to say on this matter that are worth repeating:
The Egyptians believed that matter had always existed; to them it was il-
logical to think of a god making something out of absolutely nothing.
Their view was that the world began when order came out of chaos, and
that ever since there has been a battle between the forces of organization
and disorder…This chaotic state was called Nun, and like the Sumerian
…descriptions …, all was a dark, sunless watery abyss with a power, a cre-
ative force within it that commanded order to begin. This latent power
which was within the substance of the chaos did not know it existed; it
was a probability, a potential that was intertwined within the random-
ness of disorder. 59
There is a striking similarity between the myths of Ancient Egypt and
modern materialist thinking. A hidden reason for this interesting fact is

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