EGYPT: It is significant that the word 'alchemy', which will recur throughout this website, derives from the Arabic alkmiya, which almost certainly comes, via the Greek chemeia, from the old name for the Nile Delta in Egypt, khem, which means 'black earth': the deeply fertile, life-giving soil, dark silt from the Nile, amidst the arid desert. The allegorical connotations are unlikely to be accidental.

Although the true alchemy is the transformation of the soul, it should not be forgotten that the first (and the later) alchemists were also chemists. (Similarly, the distinction between astrologers and astronomers is relatively recent.) Those who knew the often spectacular effects of adding different amounts of different powders to each other, and heating them to specific temperatures, could combine being a scientist and a showman; and for outside observers, for ordinary people, both are forms of magic.

As far back as 2900 BC, the Egyptians had discovered the secret of refining gold, which, as a precious metal difficult to obtain, was reserved for royalty. The priests who guarded this secret were not just metal-workers but, in effect, early chemists. Religion, magic, secrecy, scientific knowledge, and the physical production of gold have thus been linked together for millennia. Egyptian mythology is complex. As with all mythologies, it evolved over the centuries. But in contrast with Judaism, which developed into universal monotheism, it appears that the familiar pantheon of Osiris, Isis, Anubis and the rest was a later development, and that the earliest Egyptian belief was in one God, the Sun God Re or Ra.

In one of the earliest versions of the Egyptian creation myth, the Creator God Atum-Re, who has risen out of the primeval chaos alone, masturbates to create life.

In early religion, sex was seen as a potent force. With humans, as with all animals, sex gives birth to new life; with the Gods it must surely be the same. Sexual energy, and the sexual fluids, are life-giving, powerful, sacred.

Just as Pythagoras travelled around the Middle East and possibly the Far East in his search for knowledge, and eventually settled his school in a Greek community in Italy, other philosophers spent years in countries not their own, learning and studying, comparing and assimilating knowledge.

The study of comparative religion of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is nothing new; 2,000 years ago or more, scholars around the Mediterranean - i.e. the whole civilized, cultured world - looked at their Gods and the Gods of their neighbours and drew comparisons. The Roman and Greek Gods were easy enough to match up, the Egyptian Gods a little less so, though when the Greeks ruled Egypt they were happy to identify Atum-Re, the Creator God, with their own Zeus.

Christianity spread into Egypt from its very beginning. Unlike the Greeks and Romans, the early Christians could not allow any other Gods under any other names; they could not accept that God the Father of Jesus could be identified with Zeus or Jove or Amun-Re as the One Creator God. In addition, the early Christians looked at the openly sexual nature of Egyptian mythology and were horrified. Origen, an Egyptian Christian, castrated himself in order to purify himself. The sinfulness, guilt and shame which Christianity has attached to sex from the time of the Church Fathers onwards quite possibly originated in an over-reaction against the religion of Egypt, and a determination to show itself to be different.

More