Symbolist Egypt – the Meaning Behind the Magic

This video features John Anthony West speaking at a conference; it only recently became available on the web. The video was excerpted from a conference called Return to the Source : Rediscovering Lost Knowledge and Ancient Wisdom.

In the lecture, he explains his theories on ancient Egypt, detailing the manner by which his truly independent perspective was developed: his influences, experiences and how his understanding of symbolist Egypt evolved over the many years of his career.

Architecture does in stone what music does in sound; in other words, its visual vibrations that are affecting us. We’re inside the symphony, as it were, when we’re inside a sacred space. We’re being affected emotionally by the vibrational nature of that particular building.

So when we go into an Egyptian temple, we are resonating to its harmonies and proportions and so-on. The great sages of the past understood that each of the cosmic principles, which are the gods as it were. The gods are not some strange animal headed beings, they are the embodiments of cosmic principles and those cosmic principles are inextricably related to certain interplay of numbers which give rise to geometry, harmony, proportion and measure.

When you know the secrets of the numbers and secrets of the principles, you are able to produce a building that will evoke within the emotional center of the beholder, that particular principle.

–John Anthony West