Wax on, wax off

Above is the famous scene from the first Karate Kid movie (1984), in which Mr. Miyagi reveals to his student (whom he always refers to as "Daniel-San") the hidden meaning behind all of the hours of chores Mr. Miyagi has been assigning to him. 

This is perhaps one of the clearest and most-accessable examples of the concept known as "the esoteric" that can be found in popular culture.  Just about everyone has heard of "wax on, wax off," for the simple reason that it is a profoundly memorable and even moving scene, even thirty years after it was filmed.  In this case, waxing the car and all the other tasks (which Mr. Miyagi insisted must be done in a very strict and precise manner) was a way to teach something else: the "hidden" or "esoteric" meaning that lies behind the apparently mundane action of "wax on, wax off."

Although the esoteric is often defined as a "hidden meaning," note that Mr. Miyagi did not select his powerful teaching method in order to deceive Danny, or even in order to conceal something from Danny.  Mr. Miyagi taught his student that way because he knew that it was the best way to reach Daniel-San, and to convey something on a deep level to Danny's mind -- something that might have been difficult or even impossible to convey in any other way.  

Note carefully in the above scene that even when Mr. Miyagi finally reveals the esoteric meaning behind the mundane tasks, he does not do so by explaining them to Daniel-San: he forces Daniel-San to actually experience how it works, so that Danny knows what it feels like when it works.  This is a very different approach than trying to appeal to the rational, intellectual, "left brain" part of our thinking.  

If Mr. Miyagi, instead of having Danny spend days waxing the cars, sanding the floor, painting the fence, and painting the house, had tried to explain to his student what to do in order to stop a punch or a kick, then Danny would have had lots of questions as his "intellectual mind" tried to make sense of what Mr. Miyagi was telling him -- and Danny might (or might not) have believed that what Mr. Miyagi was telling him would work.  This is a very different approach, and for some very important things it is not at all the best approach (not even a good approach).  

Believing something with your mind is very different from knowing it because you experience it for yourself, the way Danny did when Mr. Miyagi started to throw punches and kicks at him while yelling fiercely!

As it turns out, there are certain concepts which are best conveyed to our mind esoterically -- and that, in fact, are difficult to properly grasp through any other method besides the esoteric.  The martial arts, in fact, are almost always taught esoterically (usually through forms which contain hidden applications that can be appreciated only after their motions are internalized).  For a variety of reasons, the sages responsible for the ancient sacred scriptures and mythology systems of the world also chose to convey the ancient wisdom of mankind esoterically, through allegorical stories which could enable the mind to grasp truths which the "intellectual mind" would choke on.  

The ancient myth systems of the world were not designed to create belief, any more than Mr. Miyagi wasted any thought asking Daniel-San in the above video clip whether or not he believed in the blocks and hand motions and whether they would be effective.  They were designed to create the experience of knowing -- which in the ancient Greek was called gnosis.

My new book, The Undying Stars, demonstrates that the ancient scriptures of the world operate in exactly the same way -- esoterically.  They are all a form of "wax on, wax off" which contain an amazing esoteric message that is "hidden" inside.  This includes the stories of the gods of ancient Greece, of ancient Egypt, of ancient India, of the Norse, of the Hawaiians and the Maori and the Maya and the Inca and the Native American tribes and nations, and of almost every other culture around the world -- and it also includes the stories found in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible.  

The masters who created these stories were not trying to deceive us, any more than Mr. Miyagi was trying to deceive Daniel-San by showing him how to wax the car or paint the fence -- and they were not trying to keep these truths "hidden" so that nobody could ever learn them.  Quite the contrary: the ancient scriptures and sacred traditions of the world were intended to lead men and women to consciousness, and to awareness of the truth about the human condition -- in fact, to gnosis.

But something most unfortunate for the human race happened along the way: for reasons of their own, a powerful group of families decided to suppress the ancient understanding and teach that they were not intended to be understood esoterically.  They argued that the ancient scriptures were intended to be understood literally first and foremost: that we were to understand the ancient stories as describing the adventures of literal and historical personages or beings, and not as metaphorical carriers of profound esoteric truths applicable to every single man and woman.  This approach can be thought of as the equivalent of telling Danny that his efforts of waxing the car or painting the fence have absolutely nothing to do with learning a martial art -- that there is no connection to learning a martial art, and that he should just focus on waxing the car and painting the fence, because that is all that there is to know about the subject.  

To be more direct, they taught people to accept the existence of a literal, historical individual called Christ rather than (as Paul says) "Christ in you" (an esoteric truth conveyed by the allegorical stories).  The original gnostic teaching of the stories of the New Testament (and the Old Testament as well) were all designed for the purpose of conveying esoteric truth so that men and women could achieve consciousness, overcome illusion and mind control, and experience gnosis.  The evidence suggests that those who wanted to suppress the esoteric truths constructed a literalist religion (built primarily upon belief rather than upon gnosis) and they married it to the military and economic might of the Roman Empire, creating an extremely powerful system of mental tyranny: using belief and illusion and propaganda and mind control, backed up by the violence.

The Undying Stars examines the evidence that these enemies of human consciousness and gnosis began a campaign to ensure that those teachers and texts imparting an esoteric and gnostic approach and opposing the literalist subversion were marginalized, burned, buried, or otherwise silenced.  Then, they expanded that campaign over the next seventeen centuries into the rest of the world, to eradicate the esoteric and shamanic teachings that had survived outside the boundaries of the Roman Empire.

Many readers of this blog, especially those with deep attachment to the Biblical scriptures or to the teachings of those who say that these scriptures are first and foremost to be understood literally, will no doubt be profoundly dismayed or even angered at such an assertion, and may decide they want nothing to do with any books that examine the evidence supporting such a view.  To them, I would say that I do not wish to insult or offend anyone's sensibilities -- I am not an "authority" and I am only offering the results and insights that I have experienced in my own personal walk.  There is a "note of caution to literalist readers" at the front of the book, explaining that the book itself examines evidence and arrives at conclusions which may be extremely damaging to the foundations of literalist belief, and some readers may prefer not to examine that evidence rather than threaten a paradigm in which they have significant personal and psychic investment.  

Some readers, however, may decide that if the books arguments and analyses are in error, they can be safely read and then rejected, but if they are correct then it might be preferable to know it.  The good news for literalist readers is that they likely are very familiar with the ancient scriptures, and this actually gives them a wonderful advantage: they have been "waxing the car" for years and years, even if no one has ever shown them how it relates to actually doing martial arts!

The fact is that the descendants of those enemies of human consciousness, who conspired to steal the esoteric teaching from humanity and get everyone focused on "waxing the car," were most likely careful to keep the ability to "do karate" for themselves!  If so, then those enemies of mankind could very well still be "doing karate" today against the rest of us, and getting away with it, because most of the world only knows how to "wax the car," without understanding the meaning behind the motions. 

Introducing The Undying Stars

It gives me great pleasure to announce the arrival of my latest book, The Undying Stars: The truth that unites the world's ancient wisdom and the conspiracy to keep it from you.

I sincerely hope readers of The Mathisen Corollary and The Mathisen Corollary blog will find it intriguing and engaging!

I welcome your honest feedback on Facebook and Twitter, as well as on Amazon.

Over the next several days, I will be introducing more of the subjects discussed in The Undying Stars.  For starters, check out the new biography on my author description page over at Amazon, which gives a broad overview to the direction of the new book.

Clear evidence of ancient trans-oceanic contact on every US map

The previous post ("The Smithsonian cover-up") discussed the "Powell doctrine" of John Wesley Powell (1834 - 1902), first director of the US Bureau of Ethnology, which declared illegitimate all attempts to connect any artifacts found in the New World  with any of the ancient peoples in "other portions of the world."  

This flatly "isolationist" policy placed all "diffusionist" lines of analysis strictly "outside the pale" of accepted academic discourse, and it remains firmly in effect to this day (diffusionist theories entertain the possibility of ancient cultural contact across the oceans and the "diffusion" of cultures and ideas between the continents prior to the time of Columbus).  

If you don't believe the Powell doctrine is still in effect, just try walking into any history department of any college or university in the United States and inquiring about a professorship, while expressing your enthusiastic support for the study of ancient trans-oceanic contact with the New World and the clear possibility of cultural diffusion between (for instance) the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean and the peoples living in the Americas stretching back to the centuries "B.C.", and see how far that gets you.  

That post also examined circumstantial evidence, in the form of Powell's dedicatory letter found in his first report (dated 1880, and covering his bureau's activities from its inception by act of Congress in 1879), that this strictly isolationist policy did not simply originate from Powell's own predilections and opinions, but that it was imparted to him by the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, and that the Secretary himself received his marching orders from some other unnamed persons, presumably persons of some power and influence.  

Powell describes his bureau's research to the Secretary in that letter in these words: "the general direction of which was confided to you" -- as in, somebody communicated the general direction of the research that the Bureau of Ethnology would pursue to the Secretary of the Smithsonian, and the Secretary of the Smithsonian passed on those instructions to John Wesley Powell.  The words "was confided" lend a somewhat mysterious air to the reference, and the passive voice of the construction allow Powell to avoid specifying the subject of the phrase (that is, allowing him to avoid naming the person or parties doing the confiding).

We can also infer that this strictly isolationist policy (and the anathema it imposed upon any diffusionist analysis) was not simply due to Powell's own preferences by the fact that this dogma has continued to guide the policy of the Smithsonian Institute, and to be enforced by the conventional academic world at large, long after the departure from this world of John Wesley Powell, his superior the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, and all the rest of his generation.

In the intervening 135 years (that is to say, an entire century plus another three-and-a-half decades) since 1879, any artifacts discovered in the New World containing inscriptions using a writing system that clearly belongs to the cultures of the Old World have either been studiously ignored (in hopes that they will go away if few enough people ever hear about them) or immediately declared to be transparent hoaxes (this method is generally employed whenever artifacts with ancient writing on them gain enough popular attention that the "ignore and hope they go away" method simply won't work).  

In some special cases, such as the case of the writing system used by the Mi'kmaq nation of First Nations native peoples, neither of the above two methods would suffice.  Their writing system, which is attested to by documents stretching back into the 1700s, so clearly resembles the ancient hieroglyphs of the Egyptians that it can neither be denied nor ignored, and it certainly cannot be declared a fraud or a hoax, and so the conventional explanation is that Christian missionaries must have created the writing system for the tribes, and they chose to create a writing system based upon Egyptian hieroglyphs.  

Why Christian missionaries in the 1700s chose to use ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs when creating a system of writing for the Mi'kmaq is hard to fathom (especially since the Rosetta Stone had yet to be re-discovered or deciphered), and how this ridiculous explanation is somehow less insulting to the Native Americans than the possibility that ancient cultures were capable of occasional (or even sustained) contact across the oceans in the time of ancient Egypt remains difficult to comprehend, but apparently the supporters of the Powell doctrine think that such a convoluted hypothesis is preferable to the alternative.

Unfortunately for those who have managed to keep this equivalent of the "flat earth theory" the only permissible worldview taught in schools (from pre-school through post-graduate school), there is simply so much evidence staring people right in the face that eventually the illusion is bound to break down.  

One of the glaring pieces of evidence can be found on any map of the United States, and it is shown on the map above -- the name of the state of Iowa.  The name of this state comes from the Native American people related to the Sioux, the Iowa or Ioway people.  Regardless of the explanations for the origin of this name found on Wikipedia, it is undeniable that the name "Iowa" has clear linguistic parallels to the sacred name used in ancient Mediterranean cultures, including the sacred name of the Hebrews which is rendered by the "tetragrammaton" or four letters and which has been sometimes expanded with vowels to be rendered as "Jehovah" and "Yahweh."  

This name was and is considered so sacred by some cultures that it cannot be pronounced or written, and it is often written in ways which distinguish it as sacred.  For example, in many ancient Hebrew documents which use the "square" Hebrew lettering, it would be written using the older, "rounder" lettering known as Paleo-Hebrew (these four letters in Paleo-Hebrew are depicted on the map above, and are written from right to left).

And, while some might argue that the Iowa tribe's name derived from some other source and has nothing to do with the ancient sacred name of the Hebrews -- that this is just a linguistic coincidence, in other words -- it is a fact that other Native American peoples used the same name or something very similar to it in ways that make coincidence less and less likely.  

For instance, in an essay discussing the "Michigan cuneiform tablets" (which are discussed tangentially in previous posts here and here and which are examined more thoroughly in a book by Henriette Mertz entitled The Mystic Symbol: Mark of the Michigan Mound-Builders), analyst and author David Allen Deal notes that: "James Adair reported that the Cherokees, among whom he lived, chanted the sacred letters: 'YO (you), He, Wa (waw),' =YHW as they danced around their sacred fire, and observed a fall harvest feast as did the Israelites" (in "The Mystic Symbol Demystified," by David Allen Deal, which is included in the above-linked book by Henriette Mertz; this quotation is found on page 170).

Also, in the record made by Frank Waters based on the oral accounts of Hopi elders which he tape recorded in the 1950s (and which those elders examined for accuracy prior to his publication of the sacred traditions in book form as The Book of the Hopi in 1963), the name of the Creator is Taiowa (see for instance pages 5 - 20).  The fact that the Cherokee and the Hopi also use the sacred name or variants of the sacred name of the Hebrew scriptures is a strong argument for some ancient contact across the oceans.  This previous post discusses evidence that inscriptions in New Mexico attest to ancient contact with Hebrew-speaking peoples in pre-Columbian times -- that post is also dependent upon the excellent analysis of David Allen Deal.

David Allen Deal also notes that the Native American name given to the "Mound Builder" cultures (whom so many among the general public during the nineteenth century wanted to believe had connections to ancient Israel, an idea which John Wesley Powell and the Smithsonian Institute wanted to suppress) was "Tallegewi" (also rendered "Allegewi" and ultimately "Allegheny," a name which is also found on modern American maps).  In an essay entitled "Michigan Solar Eclipse Tablet and Mound Builder City," which is also contained in the Mystic Symbol book linked above, David Allen Deal notes that the name "Tallegewi" for the Mound Builders was recorded among the Leni Lenape or Delaware nation by John Heckewelder (1743 - 1823), and "that name is certainly Hebrew."  

He writes: 

In Hebrew Tel means "hill or mound" (tel-y is plural) and gew-y means "my nation" or "nations" (plural again).  So Tely-gewy in Hebrew means "mound nations."  And that is what they were.  194

We can see examples of the word "Tel" in modern "Tel Aviv" and the word "gew" (for "nations") in the familiar term goyim.

These linguistic connections make it very unlikely that the word "IOWA" is simply a coincidental connection to the ancient Hebrew sacred name.

Note also that this sacred name is not found solely among the Hebrews.  The name of the supreme Olympian diety, Jove, is liguistically identical to the word "IOWA" as well.   This name is related to Zeus and to Jupiter (Ju-pater, or "Jove the Father" in Latin).  Alvin Boyd Kuhn expounds at some length on this theme in Lost Light, saying: 

For many thousands of years before Christ, the prototype of all coming saviors was the Egyptian Iusa.  The name is from Iu (Ia, Ie, Io or Ja, Je, Jo, Ju), the original name of biune divinity, combined with the Egyptian suffix sa (or se, si, su, or saf, sef, sif, suf), meaning, with the grammatical masculine "f," the male heir, son, successor, or prince.  Iusa then means the son of the divine father Iu (Ju-piter, "father god"), or the son of Ihuh (Jehovah).  He was Iu, coming as the su, or son.  His mother in the Atum cult was Iusaas.  He was God the son, the prince, the heir.  He was the original of all Jesus figures, of whom there are some twenty or more by the name of Jesus (Joshua, Jesse, Joses, Hosea, Isaiah, Isaac, Esau, Josiah, Joash, Jehoaz, Jehoahaz, Job, Jonah, Joel and others) both in the Old Testament and outside of it.  544.

There are many other ancient connections to this sacred name which is found occupying a prominent position in both the cultures of the Old World and the cultures of the "New World" in the Americas.  

The evidence for cultural "diffusion" (and against the isolationist dictums of John Wesley Powell, the Smithsonian Institute, and conventional academia) is impossible to deny, and it is staring us right in the face (every time we look at a map of the US).  It cannot be "explained away" using their usual tactics of "ignoring it and hoping it goes away," or "transparent nineteenth-century fraud or hoax," or even the special excuse of "the missionaries brought it."

There must be a very big reason why the powers-that-be find it so important to deny the clear evidence of ancient trans-oceanic contact.

link to original 1848 map in Wikimedia commons.

The Smithsonian Cover-up

John Wesley Powell (1834 - 1902, image above from Wikimedia commons) was made the first director of the Bureau of Ethnology in the United States in 1879, which was established that same year by an Act of Congress, a position he held until his death in 1902.  

That bureau, which changed its name to the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1897, was directly connected to the Smithsonian Institution, which had been established in 1846 through the will of the British chemist James Smithson (1765 - 1829) and funded by his bequest of 105 sacks of about 1,000 gold sovereigns each, and pursued the mission of organizing all the anthropological research in the nation.

In his first year as head of the Bureau of Ethnology, Powell submitted the first of his Annual Reports of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, dated July 1880 and covering the Bureau of Ethnology's efforts for 1879-1880.  The entire report can be seen online here among other places.  

Beginning on page 73 of that publication is a famous essay by Powell entitled "On Limitations to the Use of Some Anthropologic Data."  In it, Powell sets forth the doctrine which would become the guiding principle of his Bureau of American Ethnology and of the Smithsonian at large all the way through the present day, a strictly isolationist doctrine which flatly declares that it is "illegitimate" to entertain any line of analysis which attempts to connect any artifacts found in the New World with any "peoples or so-called races of antiquity in other portions of the world."  

A reproduction of the letter, with the passages emphasizing this isolationist doctrine highlighted in yellow, can be found online here as well.

The motivations behind this strict imposition of the isolationist paradigm and flat rejection of the examination of any possibility of diffusionist explanations (which propose the possibility that there was contact across the oceans prior to the arrival of Columbus) can and have been debated.  Many biographers and vignettes emphasize the "tremendous respect" Powell had for the native tribes of North America and some have suggested that his support for an isolationist doctrine was based upon that respect for the Native Americans and the view that any theory proposing ancient pre-Columbian contact with "peoples or so-called races of antiquity in other portions of the world" must automatically be disrespectful to the native peoples here, or even based upon some kind of racist animus.  

It is certainly likely from some of the episodes of Powell's life that he did in fact have tremendous respect for the Native Americans.  However, it is undeniable that Powell's own 1879 essay displays some extremely paternalistic and disrespectful generalizations, including his assertions in the second part of the essay (entitled "Picture Writing," beginning on page 75 of the above-linked version of the 1879 report) that the "pictographs" found in North America are "simply the beginning of pictorial art" and in almost all cases "simply mnemonic" -- possessed of no systematic or as Powell calls it, "conventional," structure by which ideas could be preserved using symbols that possessed a common meaning agreed upon by all who understood that system (i.e., whose meaning was agreed-upon by convention across a large number of people, thus constituting a writing-system).  

In this astonishing denial of the existence of writing systems, Powell explicitly includes even the obvious writing-systems of the Maya and the Inca and other cultures of Central and South America, whose artifacts were by no means unknown to him and to the other employees of the Bureau of Ethnology (in fact, the 1879 report contains long sections dealing with "Central American Picture Writing," and many of the other annual reports discuss the artifacts and culture of the Maya and Inca and other civilizations in detail).  Nevertheless, Powell asserts in his letter that:

To some slight extent pictographs are found with characters more or less conventional, and the number of such is quite large in Mexico and Central America.  Yet even these conventional characters are used with others less conventional in such a manner that perfect records were never made.

Such a statement is extremely paternalistic, and effectively denies the existence of any true systematic writing systems, even among the cultures of Mexico and Central America!  Based upon this false assertion, Powell then declares: "Hence it will be seen that it is illegitimate to use any pictographic matter of a date anterior to the discovery of the continent by Columbus for historic purposes."  By this declaration, Powell effectively discarded any and all artifacts containing writing from consideration of historic analysis, and in doing so protected his earlier declaration that any contact with peoples from "other portions of the world" is plainly "illegitimate."  

Thus, none of the numerous inscriptions and artifacts which clearly attest to the possibility of ancient contact -- many of which have been discussed in previous posts on this blog and many more of which have been detailed in numerous published books -- could be considered as evidence which might challenge the isolationist dogma.  Some of those artifacts containing evidence of writing which strongly supports the possibility of ancient contact are discussed in the following previous posts:

• "Have you heard of this artifact? The Grave Creek Stone"
• "Chief Joseph, 1840 - 1904"
• "Beltane and ancient inscriptions in the New World"
• "Ogham inscriptions in Colorado"
• "The staggering implications of the ancient inscriptions at Hidden Mountain near Los Lunas, New Mexico"
• "The case of the Micmac hieroglyphs: a powerful blow to isolationist theories"

And there are hundreds of other examples which could be discussed in addition to the evidence discussed in those posts.  To simply refuse to consider any such evidence at all is unscientific to the extreme, and yet it has been the implicit or explicit policy of the Smithsonian since the days of John Wesley Powell.

The fact that the Smithsonian has not changed their policy of refusing to consider any artifacts which might suggest the possibility of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact with the "New World" is evident from the controversy over the Bat Creek Stone found in 1889 in Tennessee, which the Smithsonian recently (early in 2014) called "an obvious fraud" in their response to Scott Wolter's discussion of the artifact on his America Unearthed program on the History Channel.  Scott Wolter's response to the Smithsonian's dismissive belittling of his examination of the Bat Creek Stone, and their ad hominem attacks on Wolter himself as lacking in "qualifications and reputation as a researcher," can be seen here.  His response also includes expressions of regret towards the Smithsonian's dismissal of the Bat Creek Stone from representatives of the Cherokee people, who did possess a system of writing and who told the Smithsonian that if they are so sure that the stone is a fraud, the Cherokee can take the stone back and rebury it where it was found out of respect to those who originally produced it.

Recently, a new aspect of the Smithsonian's policy of refusing to countenance any artifacts that might pose a challenge to Powell's "doctrine" of isolationism has received a lot of publicity in light of the publication of Richard Dewhurst's new book Ancient Giants Who Ruled North America: the Missing Skeletons and the Great Smithsonian Cover-Up (briefly discussed in this previous post).  Richard Dewhurst used the capabilities of modern search engines to examine the archives of US newspapers going back to the early 1800s and found hundreds of published descriptions of giant skeletons being unearthed across the North American continent, many of them containing photographs.  

He also found evidence that, while the Smithsonian in its early years was an enthusiastic documenter of such discoveries, the arrival of John Wesley Powell marked a dramatic change in the Smithsonian's attitude and policy towards such finds, to such an extent that Dewhurst was forced to conclude that: "What my research has revealed is that the Smithsonian has been at the center of a vast cover-up of America's true history since the 1880s" (3).  He documents numerous cases in which representatives from the Smithsonian arrived on the scene of any reported discoveries of giant skeletons with remarkable rapidity (sometimes within one or two days, even in the late 1800s and even when the archaeological find was in remote regions of the American west) and in which skeletons reported as being turned over to the Smithsonian were never seen again.  

Today, if one searches the internet for the terms "Smithsonian cover up," the predominant results will have to do with the cover-up of giant skeletons.   Richard Dewhurst believes that the motives for what he calls the "Powell doctrine" of suppressing and denying any archaeological evidence that could indicate the presence of other ancient peoples in the Americas or contact with ancient cultures from across the oceans may have sprang from the fact that John Wesley Powell's father was a Methodist preacher in Palmyra, New York (Powell himself was obviously named after John Wesley, 1703 - 1791, the founder of Methodism), where Joseph Smith first published the Book of Mormon in 1830 and where the early enthusiasm of the people of the area for the new revelations caused Powell's father to lose his congregation (as Richard Dewhurst explains in a footnote on page 6 as a likely motive for Powell's animus towards any diffusionist theories).

Richard Dewhurst also believes that the distasteful US policy of "Manifest Destiny" and the efforts of the federal government following the Civil War to seize the territory to the west of the Mississippi and to suppress the Native Americans who lived there played a role in the Smithsonian's (and Powell's) desire to characterize the native peoples of the continent as primitive barbarians, incapable of producing anything more than "the most rudimentary picture making," (Dewhurst, 6).  Dewhurst proposes that such a doctrine may have been deployed in order to help convince the population to support the aggressive plans to exploit the lands of the Native Americans.

If so, then the "Powell doctrine" probably did not originate with Powell himself, but would have likely been the determined policy of a number of other government officials.  At the front of Powell's first annual report (containing his essay declaring as "illegitimate" any attempts to connect any artifacts found in the New World with cultures from anywhere else) is an introductory letter from Powell to Spencer F. Baird, the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, in which Powell says the following: 

Sir: I have the honor to transmit herewith the first annual report of the operations of the Bureau of Ethnology. 

By act of Congress, an appropriation was made to continue researches in North American anthropology, the general direction of which was confided to yourself.  As chief executive officer of the Smithsonian Institution, you entrusted to me the immediate control of the affairs of the Bureau.  This report, with its appended papers, is designed to exhibit the methods and results of my administration of this trust. 

If any measure of success has been attained, it is largely due to general instructions received from yourself and the advice you have ever patiently given me on all matters of importance.

I am indebted to my assistants, whose labors are delineated in the report, for their industry, hearty co-operation, and enthusiastic love of the science.  Only through their zeal have your plans been executed.

Much assistance has been rendered the Bureau by a large body of scientific men engaged in the study of anthropology, some of whose names have been mentioned in the report and accompanying papers, and others will be put on record when the subject-matter of their writings is fully published.

I am, with respect, your obedient servant,

J.W. POWELL

While this introductory and dedicatory letter may simply be an example of "polite formalities" or conventional platitudes within a government bureaucracy, in keeping with the style and traditions of the period, it is also possible in light of the topic being discussed that it contains evidence that Powell's doctrine did not originate with Powell himself, but was part of a policy transmitted by the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution whose office was in Washington, DC, and of other men in Washington as well.  The highlighted areas (all highlighting is my own and is not found in the original document) seem to support such a possibility, with Powell referencing a "general direction" which "was confided" to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Spencer Baird by some unnamed parties (presumably parties connected with Congress, whose authorizing act for the creation of the Bureau of Ethnology was mentioned immediately prior to this mysterious assertion), and "the advice you have ever patiently given me on all matters of importance," and his declaration that "your plans [have] been executed."

The likelihood that what Dewhurst calls "the Powell doctrine" has roots far deeper than Powell himself (or even Powell's animus towards diffusionist theories due to the loss of his father's congregation) is evident from the fact that the Smithsonian's policy of refusing to entertain any possibility of ancient contact across the oceans and its haste to declare any artifacts containing inscriptions which might employ the known writing systems of ancient Mediterranean cultures as frauds or hoaxes has continued long after the death of John Wesley Powell, and continues to this day.  

This continuing refusal to examine artifacts containing inscriptions such as those mentioned in the list of previous posts above and reflexive labeling of such artifacts as either fraudulent or the products of post-Columbian contact cannot be explained by the Powell family's personal experiences in Palmyra, New York.  Nor, it seems, can the benighted and repulsive nineteenth-century belief in "Manifest Destiny" be the reason that the Smithsonian continued to enforce the "Powell doctrine" throughout the twentieth century, long after the United States had seized all of the lands of the Native Americans between the Mississippi and the Pacific Ocean, and most of the citizens of the country had forgotten that their land had once belonged to someone else.  Is it possible that there is some other motive which lies behind the Smithsonian's ongoing policy of anti-diffusionism?

Personally, I am not an expert on the "giant skeletons" controversy.  While it certainly seems, based upon the prodigious volume of reports and descriptions and even photographs (see, for instance, the photograph below from 1940 published in the San Antonio Express), that such skeletons have been found throughout the Americas in some numbers, and that the absence of any such skeletons on display at the Smithsonian National Museum is suspicious, I also believe it is a mistake to focus entirely on giant skeletons when talking about a "Smithsonian cover-up."  

The easiest way for defenders of the Powell doctrine to deflect such cover-up arguments is to argue that such "giant skeletons" were simply the remains of some isolated individuals exhibiting traits of giantism, to point out that enthusiasm over giants and the possibility of ancient trans-oceanic contact was rife in the nineteenth century (much of it fueled, it must be noted, by religious agendas and a desire to support literalist interpretations of the Bible or by the newly published Book of Mormon), and to argue that whatever skeletons may have been uncovered in those early decades were lost or crumbled to dust and were not maliciously squirreled-away in the bowels of the Smithsonian's warehouses.  

I certainly do not agree that these counter-arguments settle the case, and believe that Richard Dewhurst's analysis of the evidence of giant remains (and other such analysis by other researchers, such as the analysis in this essay found in several places on the web) is extremely valuable and worthy of careful consideration.  I also believe that all dogmatic declarations that the facts of the matter are settled and that no further analysis is legitimate (whatever the subject) should be treated with great suspicion (see discussions to that effect in previous posts such as this one, this one, this one and this one, for example).  Nevertheless, I also believe that the "giant skeleton" aspect of the "Smithsonian cover-up" question could become a huge red herring which falsely divides the debate in the eyes of the general public into two camps, those who believe America was once home to a race of giants, and those who generally side with the Powell doctrine.  

The Powell doctrine excludes a whole lot more evidence than giant skeletons, as the recent Bat Creek Stone controversy demonstrates.  There is abundant evidence that there was ancient contact across the oceans, most of it involving human beings of what we might call "normal" (or at least non-gigantic) stature.  As far as I know, no one is maintaining that the giants whose skeletons have been found throughout the Americas were the authors of inscriptions using known "Old World" writing systems including Hebrew, Egyptian (both hieroglyphic and hieratic), Phoenician/Punic, Ogham, cuneiform, runic, Iberian, Libyan, and Roman, but many of these have been found in the Americas and conventional scholars either ignore them, declare them to be frauds or hoaxes, or explain them away as artifacts which were brought to the Americas by Europeans after Columbus and either lost or given to Native Americans (this is the explanation for the small cuneiform tablet which Chief Joseph had in his possession when he surrendered to the US Army, described in this previous post linked above).  Many other forms of evidence for ancient trans-oceanic contact have been found, such as the amphorae at the bottom of Guanabara Bay in Brazil, and the mummies and other evidence listed in this previous post describing the "Calixtlahuaca head" (which is itself another artifact attesting to ancient trans-oceanic contact).

To the extent that the Powell doctrine and the ongoing policy of the Smithsonian and the rest of conventional academia ignores or devalues these artifacts, and discourages their honest appraisal by professional scholars, the search for the truth is greatly inhibited.  What professional scholar wants to risk ridicule and marginalization by publishing an examination of any of these pieces of evidence, at least one that reaches conclusions which contradict the oppressive official policy of the Powell doctrine?

Clearly, the so-called Powell doctrine did not originate with John Wesley Powell alone, and its ongoing enforcement throughout academia (and at the Smithsonian) is evidence that its roots go far deeper than John Wesley Powell himself.  Its continuing effect of suppressing open-minded examination of the evidence cannot simply be explained by Powell's personal views of the Native American peoples, or the personal impact his family may have experienced due to the "lost tribes" enthusiasms of the nineteenth century in general and the beginnings of the Mormon religion in particular.  Nor can its continuing impact be attributable to the nineteenth-century doctrine of "Manifest Destiny" (although perhaps related to the latest incarnation of that vicious doctrine).   

I believe that there is a bigger reason why powerful forces believe that evidence of ancient trans-oceanic contact must be suppressed, one that involves the spreading of illusions about history which powerful interests find extremely valuable for the public to accept.  The control of history can certainly be a form of very powerful mind control -- and the single-mindedness evident in the efforts of John Wesley Powell (and of the Smithsonian Institute since 1879) demonstrates just how important this control of history must be to someone's agenda.

U-shaped chemtrail photographed over California

Anyone who still believes that the "persistent contrails" which can be seen criss-crossing the sky above populated areas are simply the product of normal jetliners making their way to commercial destinations and leaving harmless lines of vapor should take a look at the above photograph, snapped near the California coast this morning, 04/23/2014.

Previous posts discussing this subject have included screen shots from the Wikipedia entries which continue to insist that "Scientists and engineers around the world have repeatedly needed to confirm that supposed chemtrails are in fact nothing but normal contrails" -- see screenshots in this previous post and this previous post, as well as the condescending and one-sided Wikipedia entry here.  

The denials that these long-lasting lines of cloud could be the result of deliberate spraying have not changed even after the publication in major mainstream California newspapers of stories describing government-funded weather-modification programs involving the spraying of silver iodide and other compounds from aircraft: see for example this article from the Sacramento Bee dated 11/11/2013. 

The contrail / chemtrail in the image above takes a huge U-shaped meander across the sky -- hardly the path that a commercial airliner carrying passengers between destinations would be likely to take.  See the image below which points out the path of the chemtrail using red arrows, in case it is difficult to see:

Below is another image of the same U-shaped chemtrail, taken from a slightly different vantage point just a few minutes earlier:

Again, it is difficult to come up with a hypothesis to explain the strange path of this aircraft and its persistent trail, other than the obvious explanation that this trail is the product of an aircraft deliberately dispersing particulates into the atmosphere over a target area.

Just in case someone wants to argue that there could be some kind of strong "wind shear" or atmospheric disturbance which took an originally straight trail and blew one section of it into the dramatic U-shaped bend seen in the photographs, take a look at the photograph below, taken only a few seconds after the top image and from the same location, of a number of other chemtrails being laid down in the sky just a single camera-lens away from the U-shaped trail:

These trails are perfectly straight, and they are going in the same general direction that the U-shaped trail aircraft took (before and after its dramatic meander).  They show no evidence of being blown by any wind-shear or atmospheric disturbance.  In other words, the U-shaped meander was created by an aircraft taking a big U-shaped detour, and is not the product of some kind of unusual wind-effect.

It may be difficult for some people to accept the possibility that the government of the United States (or other countries where such chemtrails are also seen regularly) would authorize the ongoing, deliberate spraying of unknown chemical particulates in massive quantities over the skies of populated areas and over the skies of croplands where food for human consumption is grown.

After all, doesn't California  law (and the laws of other states in the US) forbid citizens smoking cigarettes inside restaurants and bars and office buildings, in order to protect non-smoking citizens from the potential effects of second-hand smoke?  Doesn't California law (and the laws of other states in the US) mandate that gasoline stations affix labels to the pumps to warn citizens that pumping gasoline could expose them to gasoline vapors, which they might accidentally breathe while fueling up their vehicles?  Doesn't California law (and the laws of other states in the US, as well as federal legislation) mandate ever-more-restrictive limits on vehicle emissions, due to concerns over the health and environmental dangers such emissions might pose?

If so, how could aircraft spraying out trails of chemicals be allowed to ply the skyways over the heads of those exact same citizens for hours on end, day after day (and even through the nighttime on some selected evenings)?  We might ask the same questions about the intrusive and illegal surveillance of innocent free men and women who have not been accused of any crimes (another example of illegal activity which might have once been difficult for people to believe their governments would ever conduct on such a massive scale). 

Did citizens authorize such spraying over their heads?  Was their some legislation passed by elected representatives by which the people said their representative government could dump chemicals out of aircraft over the playgrounds of their childrens' schools?  

Obviously not, since mouthpieces of the conventional status quo such as Wikipedia can confidently declare that these chemtrails are nothing but "normal contrails."  If there had been some legislation  authorizing such spraying passed by some elected officials, chemtrail deniers would have a hard time maintaining that the spraying is not taking place (it is important to point out that, even if legislative bodies had in fact passed legislation authorizing massive spraying of chemicals over the heads of citizens, such legislation would be illegal and hence legally void, as natural-law pioneer and abolitionist Lysander Spooner argued clearly and cogently, in particular in a pamphlet published in Boston in 1850 arguing against the legality of slavery and against the legality of the Fugitive Slave Act, especially in his arguments beginning on page 27 of that pamphlet and continuing to the end of it).

But the spraying is clearly taking place (there are even a few isolated articles which admit to it, and which quote government workers whose entire careers apparently involve the coordination of such spraying campaigns).  

Apparently, then, this spraying is taking place unknown to the people who are being sprayed, and without their consent.  This is a violation of natural universal law.  It is illegal.  It is unethical.  

Such illegal activity can go on only as long as the people remain oblivious to it.  It can go on only as long as the people see it but remain in a hypnotic state in which the wrongness of the situation and the violation of their natural rights does not register in their conscious mind.  

This situation is exactly analogous to the situation in which people saw orcas being kept in captivity for decades, and in which people went to shows watching those orcas performing tricks, and saw the small tanks in which those orcas were confined and the unnatural situation in which those intelligent beings were forced to live, and yet those people remained in a hypnotic state in which the wrongness of the situation never registered in their conscious mind.  That hypnotic trance was suddenly and sharply broken for many people by the movie Blackfish, and suddenly millions of people are demanding that the mistreatment of those magnificent and intelligent whales must stop immediately.

The exact same thing can happen with the unauthorized spraying of chemicals over the heads of human beings, in clear violation of their natural-law rights.   The exact same thing can happen with any of the violations of natural universal law which are perpetrated by those who rely on the masses of people remaining in a hypnotic trance -- they can be stopped when people wake up to the wrongness of the situation and demand that the violation of natural universal law cease immediately.  This includes the illegal use of surveillance by the state over individuals who are accused of no crimes, in violation of natural universal law -- surveillance which (like the spraying of chemtrails) many people originally would never have believed their governments would conduct or permit but which has now been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be taking place on a massive scale.

At this time, there are only theories as to why so many resources are being used to deliberately spray chemicals high into the atmosphere over populated areas and over agricultural areas, using numerous jet aircraft, tons of chemicals, and probably huge sums of money.  There are only theories (rather than definitive answers) because these spraying campaigns remain largely secret, unauthorized by any public referendums or legislation, and un-debated by elected officials.  

However, some of the theories are quite disturbing, such as the theory discussed by Dane Wigington in the videos embedded and linked in this previous post.  Even more disturbing possibilities are suggested by the evidence discussed in this Red Ice Radio interview with molecular biologist Vincent Freeman.

While members of the general public cannot identify for certain the real reason behind such deliberate and widespread and long-running campaigns of high-altitude spraying, it is almost impossible to continue to deny that it is taking place, or to say that the trails covering the sky are the product of simple vapor trails or condensation trails left by regular commercial airliners taking travelers from one airport to another.  

To continue to maintain that chemtrail spraying is not taking place is irresponsible, and it empowers those who are violating natural law and potentially putting people at risk.  

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, 1937 - 2014

Yesterday, on April 20, John Artis confirmed that former boxer and outspoken advocate for the wrongly imprisoned Rubin Carter had died.  Artis had been taking care of Carter, who had announced  in 2012 that he had cancer.  Both Artis and Carter had been convicted of murder in 1966 and sentenced to life in prison.  Artis was paroled in 1981 after 14 years in prison, and Carter's sentence was overturned in 1985 by a federal judge, whereupon Rubin Carter was released after nearly twenty years in prison.

In the federal judge's decision to overturn the conviction, which can be read online here, the judge cited conflicting evidence in the original trials, changes in important testimony (particularly that of the principal witness for the prosecution, a petty criminal himself, who had identified Carter in the murder trials but later recanted his statements while in prison), records showing that the full results of lie detector tests administered to that principal witness were requested by defense but illegally not given to the defense, evidence that the unfired pistol round introduced as evidence and purportedly found in Carter's car had not been properly logged by investigators and that it in fact had a brass casing unlike the copper casings found at the scene of the murders, and finally the transcripts from the original trials showing that the prosecutor had clearly implied to the jury, over the objections of the defense, that racial animus had motivated the killings when in fact there was no evidence to back up these implications.

As the quotations from Rubin Carter played in this radio report which aired today illustrate, Rubin Carter refused to accept the designation of "prisoner," or wear prison stripes or work a prison job.  He stated:

I would not help my keepers to keep me kept.  I had only myself to work for; work for my freedom to keep my innocence alive.

And later in the same radio broadcast there is another quotation from Rubin Carter in which he states:

It would be very easy to be bitter.  I have never done things the easy way.  But if I never learned anything in my life, I learned that bitterness only consumes the vessel that contains it.  If I was bitter then the prison would have won.  And that's the thing that I cannot let happen.  I cannot give the prison a victory.

In the above video, Rubin Carter can be seen delivering a speech in 1995 arguing that the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of any human being is wrong and that we should resist the voices of those who try to declare that it is just a small problem.

These are statements which are fully in accord with natural universal law.  The stealing of the freedom of another human being is a grave violation of natural universal law, and the fact that so many of us go through our lives without even giving it much thought -- in spite of the evidence that it is taking place all around us -- is evidence that we there are powerful forces of hypnosis, misdirection, and mind control which keep us from becoming outraged about these violations, and often from even perceiving that these violations are taking place (I would say that they keep us from "seeing" that these violations are taking place, but in fact we often "see" with our eyes or other senses, without our minds even registering or perceiving what our eyes or other senses are telling us: this is why the term "mind control" is so appropriate).

For more on the connection between natural universal law and mind control, see previous posts such as:

• "Lysander Spooner, natural law, and human consciousness"
• "How to tell if you're under mind control"
• "Blackfish and mind control"

and

• "Martin Luther King and the war against consciousness" 

Rest in Peace, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, May 06, 1937 - April 20, 2014.

A Hymn to the Setting Sun, and the ultimate mystery of life

The Egyptian Book of the Dead (or the Book of Going Forth by Day, as it is often called today) refers to the texts found on numerous scrolls stretching across a period of over a thousand years, with contents that have connections to the earlier Coffin Texts painted on the sarcophagi and even earlier Pyramid Texts carved into the walls of certain surviving ancient pyramids. 

The texts found on these scrolls are not always the same "chapters" of the Book of the Dead -- there is no single "Book of the Dead," but rather many variants found on many different scrolls, each containing a selection of textual chapters (sometimes called "spells") and pictoral "vignettes."  Some of the chapters are more commonly used than others, and all of them are usually referred to by chapter numbers first established by Karl Richard Lepsius (1810 - 1884) in 1842.  You can find a listing of the chapters here.

One feature found in multiple scrolls are various Hymns to the Sun, which Lepsius generally categorized as Chapter 15 of the Book of the Dead.  There are Hymns to Rising Sun and Hymns to the Setting Sun.  A discussion of the Sun Hymns and an example of a Hymn to Ra in his Rising can be found here.  In Lost Light: An Interpretation of Ancient Scriptures (1940), discussed in this previous post among others, and available here for reading in its entirety online, Alvin Boyd Kuhn focuses on some lines from a version of "a Hymn to the Setting Sun" found in the Book of the Dead papyrus of the Eighteenth Dynasty scribe Nekhtu-Amen.

The entire text of this version of "a Hymn to the Setting Sun," translated into English by E. A. Wallis Budge (1857 - 1934), can be found beginning at the bottom of page 11 and continuing through the first part of page 13 in this 1901 collection of texts from the Book of the Dead, all translated by Budge and prefaced by an introduction from Epiphanius Wilson (1845 - 1916).  It reads, in part:

The Osiris of the gods goeth as a leader through the That (underworld), he crasheth through mountains, he bursteth through rocks, he maketh glad (?) the heart of every Khu.  This composition shall be recited by the deceased when he cometh forth and when he goeth in with the gods, among whom he findeth no opposition; then shall he come forth by day in all the manifold and exceedingly numerous forms which he may be pleased to take. [The Osiris . . . saith:] "A hymn of praise to Ra at eventide [when] he setteth as a living being in Baakha.  The great god who dwelleth in his Disk riseth in his two eyes and all the Khus of the underworld receive him in his horizon of Amentet; they shout praises unto Heru-khuti (Harmachis) in his form of Tem, and they sing hymns of joy to Ra when they have received him at the head of his beautiful path of Amentet."  He (i.e., the deceased) saith: "Praise be unto thee, O Ra, praise be unto thee, O Tem, in thy splendid progress.  Thou hast risen and thou hast put on strength, and thou settest like a living being amid thy glories in the horizon of Amentet, in thy domain which is in Manu.  Thy uraeus-goddess is behind thee; thy uraeus-goddess is behind thee.  Hail to thee, in peace; hail to thee, in peace.  Thou joinest thyself unto the Eye of Horus, and thou hidest thyself within its secret place; it destroyeth for thee all the convulsions of thy face, it maketh thee strong with life, and thou livest.  It bindeth its protecting amulets behind thy members.  Thous sailest forth over heaven, and thou makest the earth to be stablished; thou joinest thyself unto the upper heaven, O Luminary.  The two regions of the East and West make adoration unto thee, bowing low and paying homage unto thee, and they praise thee day by day; the gods of Amentet rejoice in thy splendid beauties.  The hidden places adore thee, the aged ones make offerings unto thee, and they create for thee protecting powers.  The divine beings who dwell in the eastern and western horizons transport thee, and those who are in the Sektet boat convey thee round and about.  The Souls of Amentet cry out unto thee and say unto thee when they meet thy majesty (Life, Health, Strength!), 'All hail, all hail!'  When thou comest forth in peace there arise shouts of delight to thee, O thou lord of heaven, thou Prince of Amentet.  Thy mother Isis embraceth thee, and in thee she recognizeth her son, the lord of fear, the mighty one of terror.  Thou settest as a living being within the dark portal.  Thy father Tatunen lifteth thee up and he stretcheth out his two hands behind thee; thou becomest a divine being in the earth.  Thou wakest as thou settest, and thy habitation is in Manu.  Grant thou that I may be venerated before Osiris, and come thou [to me], O Ra-Tem.  Since thou has been adored [by me] that which I wish thou shalt do for me day by day.  Grant thou victory [unto me] before the great company of the gods, O Ra who art doubly beautiful in thy horizon of Amentet, thou lord of Maat who dwellest in the horizon.  The fear of thee is great, thy forms are majestic, and the love of thee is great among those who dwell in the underworld."

All parentheticals, ellipses, and bracketed interpolations in the above quotation are found in the original passage as published by Budge in 1901.

The modern reader may find the above Hymn to the Setting Sun to be extremely obscure and difficult to interpret, and may wonder what on earth this text found in a tomb and written down over 3,200 years ago (probably from material that is even older) has to do with his or her life today!

If the modern reader has been exposed to conventional education at any level, he or she will probably also have been told numerous times and with a great degree of certainty and finality that the Book of the Dead described the journey of the soul in the afterlife, and contained spells to help the soul navigate the mysterious realms it would encounter after death.  Such opinions will only add to the opinion of most readers that the chapters of the Book of the Dead may have some cultural interest to those studying the strange beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, but nothing of practical value to anyone who does not believe that the afterlife looks anything like the one Egyptians imagined and described in their texts and their art.

Alvin Boyd Kuhn argues, however, that these modern teachings fall into the trap of literalism, and that the ancient Egyptian texts were not primarily concerned with an imagined afterlife at all: they were intended to convey profound truths about this life, and they used exquisite and carefully-conceived metaphorical and allegorical vignettes in order to do so.  In his radical interpretation, the texts in the Book of the Dead, like all other ancient sacred scriptures and all the other sacred traditions preserved around the globe, were designed to restore sleepy or amnesiac human beings to full consciousness, urgently and brilliantly presenting a vision of the human condition and the meaning of this life which the ancients believed we forget to some degree in each of our successive incarnations in the material world.

Thus, to the degree that one is interested in the question of human consciousness and what we are doing here in this life, these texts from so many hundreds of centuries ago are as pertinent today as they were when they were sealed in a tomb and slowly covered over the ages by the blowing sands of Egypt.  

But, to understand what they are trying to tell us, we must understand the language of the metaphor which the ancients were using.  One of the keys to doing so is to understand the central metaphor of descent into this life in the world of matter on the part of our spiritual nature as a kind of a "death."  This argument, which Alvin Boyd Kuhn discusses throughout the six hundred-plus pages of Lost Light and supports with overwhelming amounts of evidence, is discussed in part in the previous post entitled "The horizon and the scales of judgement," and we can immediately see that the important concept of the horizon is found in the above quoted Hymn to the Setting Sun as well.  

One of the metaphors which the ancients used in order to convey this vision of human existence as a cycle of incarnation in matter followed by re-ascent into the spiritual realm was the cycle of the heavenly bodies, including that of the sun, which plunges nightly beneath the horizon (matter) only to rise again each morning clothed in fire into the upper realm of the heavens. 

In the above hymn from the Book of the Dead, Alvin Boyd Kuhn zeroes in on just a few of the lines, found towards the end of the quoted passage, specifically: "Thou settest as a living being within the dark portal; . . . thou becomest a divine being in the earth.  Thou wakest as thou settest . . ." (Kuhn, 512).  These assertions Kuhn describes as "wisdom of transcendent importance."  He goes on to explain why:

The declarations of ancient wisdom that we are divinized on earth and that the soul awakes as it sets, or incarnates, are mighty items of knowledge for benighted morals.  But it has been set forth that the descent is a swoon and a going into oblivion, the very sleep of "death."  Now it is pictured as an awakening.  Here again is exemplified the doubleness of esoteric methodology in picturing the two aspects and movements of being.  But the paradox in all these reversals of imagery is readily solvable.  The soul does fall under a spell of Lethe when enshrouded in dense body; nevertheless it finds in that very state the beginning of its true awakening to a higher sense of reality than ever before.  This world is "the place of establishing forever," of bringing purely latent capacity to dynamic realization.  There is involved here the ultimate mystery of life, which is the necessity of the soul's "death" in matter to gain a new birth.  512-513.

The ultimate mystery of life!  That sounds like something that might be pertinent even to modern readers!  

What Kuhn is describing as this "ultimate mystery" is the question of why a soul would incarnate in this physical material world at all, and the answer expressed in this hymn from the Book of the Dead is that the soul awakens when it "sets" (enters the material world), it becomes a living being in the dark portal of the underworld (this incarnate life), it becomes "a divine being in the earth."  Somehow, the ancients taught that there are lessons and experiences which the soul can only profit from when enfleshed in physical matter, subjected to the pesky laws of physics, and placed on this earth to interact with other beings in the material realm.

Elsewhere in Lost Light, Kuhn elaborates further on this teaching, citing other ancient sources to back up his assertions, including the ancient philosopher Plotinus (AD 205 - AD 270), whose teachings have been discussed in previous posts (well worth revisiting) such as this one, this one, and this one.  Kuhn explains the importance of soul's coming into this material world on page 190 of Lost Light, saying:

The world took form upon the model of divine ideas, Plato affirms.  In us men a god is striving to stamp his lines of beauty and grace upon the features of an animal!  The God-word was fleshed so that it could preserve and finally transfigure the mummy with its splendor.  But -- and let ultra-idealists be advised! -- spirit had to have plastic matter upon which to imprint its form and comeliness, else it would have remained forever unknown.  The visible manifestation of latent wisdom, power and love could be achieved only by the spirit's encasement in a body.  Matter, so derided by extreme "spiritual" theory, is the womb in which alone divine conceptions can be brought to birth.  So that the fleshing of soul works  the miracle of its own anointing.  Flesh is the way and the means by which man, the divine thought, is christened with an ever fuller measure of the oil of beatification.

Note that Kuhn was writing in 1940 and the convention then was to say "man" or "men" to include all men and women, as in "mankind" or "humanity," and he specifically states in other passages that his assertions apply to all men and women, and that in fact bifurcation into the two different sexes is only a temporary condition that is part of this physical incarnation -- the soul in its disincarnate form is androgynous (see for instance the discussion on 229 and on pages 498-512).  He refers to the soul as "she" in the following passage, which also asserts the importance of incarnation for the soul to discover truths which could never be learned without taking on a form of matter:

The earth is thus the place of critical interest in the whole cycle.  The life wave is sent forth to return with a harvest of more abundant life.  Now it is only as spirit contacts and overcomes the inertia of matter that it brings its own potentialities to birth.  Abiding eternally on its own plane, as Platonic philosophy says, it remains non-productive.  It must go forth, seek adventure, meet with opposition, wrestle with the powers that would choke it, and achieve its new cyclical victory in a world of adversity.  As Plotinus writes, "It is not enough for the soul merely to exist; she must show what she is capable of begetting."  Here is the model and the genius of all romance, all drama.  And the earth is the scene of this conflict between the embryonic immortal and the titanic mortal forces.  And where the earth stands in the chain of planetary bodies, the physical body of man stands in the chain of vehicles or vestures which compose each individual.  The human body is the seat and arena of the great conflict of personal destiny.  Without dwelling in and mastering the body of flesh, the individual soul, as says Plotinus, would never know her powers.  She would be spiritual, as she was from the start; but she would dream her existence away without ever becoming consciously aware of her latent creative capabilities, if she did not incarnate.  Incarnation is evolution's method of setting the seal of reality upon conscious life.  This is the office of earth-life in the cycle and of incarnation for the individual soul.  And it is the crucial point in all philosophy, as it is the critical point in individual destiny.  As for the soul her pathway to heaven runs through earth, and on it she goes to her "death" to be born anew.  284.

Thus the Hymn to the Setting Sun, seemingly so obscure and so specialized to the belief-system of such a distant and mysterious civilization as that of ancient Egypt, becomes immediate and of tremendous importance to every individual inhabiting a body on this earth today!  It, along with the other ancient teachings found in every part of the globe, concerns our true nature (which we are constantly in danger of forgetting or never even learning), and our purpose for coming here in the first place.  "There is involved here the ultimate mystery of life."