Posts Tagged ‘sphinx’

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We both use intuition when visiting the ancient sites of Egypt. Mine is more an intuitive echo, an attraction towards a certain area, a doorway, a stone or a patch of sunlight, which might hold a secret, whereas Robert, the cosmic detective, deduces and concludes, measures, seeks out and finds clues and evidence from the ancient archive. He picks up stardust, magnetic hints which zoom into his head like comets.

He is Sherlock Holmes and I am his Dr Watson. His brain can almost be heard whizzing around like clockwork and waves of energy seem to surround him like sonar. When he is on the track of something he is unstoppable and has no idea of time passing. Atmosphere pulls me into a haze, a trance, a stream of consciousness, a meditative inner state where receptors are open to unseen currents and tensions, ley lines and whispers of the collective memory. Between us we navigate the furrows and folds of ancient invisible boundaries and scoop up the residue of forgotten plans.

Thus it was that upon seeing the Great Sphinx for the first time we both gulped because we saw things as they once had been. Anubis, crouching, his slim body stretched out in guardian repose, long legs forward, spine straight, a guard dog. No lion – even in the imagination. We sensed a watery place, a navigation, an inundation, not rain, but flood. The dumpling head that sits there now seemed to scream out like a denial. The pharaoh’s face, that Mona Lisa enigmatic smile: Above it in our inner eye loomed the sharp and listening ears of Anubis.

This was how it started. The search for clues. Collecting and reading, in many cases, translating early travellers’ tales, which we collected from all over the world, with their descriptions of the small chamber hidden in the haunches of the body, and these descriptions not made by experts or Egyptologists or even archaeologists, but by ordinary adventurers, travellers writing home with descriptions of what they had seen. They saw what we can never see because the restoration work, as it is called, has succeeded in covering up all the interesting bits in 1926 with tons of modern cement and concrete.

Many times we tried the patience of the Inspectors who accompanied us into the sphinx enclosure and the Valley Temple. We stayed too late, we strayed too far, Robert leapt across rooftops and slithered into pits and trenches, immune to everyone and everything, not hearing whistles or the clanking of keys telling him it was time to leave, or noticing the light fade. The keys that we sought were not those that close and lock but those that open and reveal. We hope that we have opened a whole new dawn for the silent sphinx and that other people will follow up the story and help to solve the Sphinx Mystery…..

Listen to the interview with Kala and Robert and Olivia Temple on The Explore Your Spirit with Kala Show. The show airs on May 29th, 2009 and can be found in the archives here: http://exploreyourspirit.com/Media/shows2.shtml#TEMPLESPHINX

More About Robert and Olivia Temple:
Professor Robert Temple is author of a dozen challenging and provocative books, commencing with The Sirius Mystery. His books have been translated into a total of 44 foreign languages. He combines solid academic scholarship with an ability to communicate with the mass public. He is Visiting Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and previously held a similar position at an American university. For many years he was a science writer for the Sunday Times, the Guardian, and a science reporter for Time-Life, as well as a frequent reviewer for Nature and profile writer for The New Scientist. He is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, and has been a member of the Egypt Exploration Society since the 1970s, as well as a member of numerous other academic societies. He has produced, written and presented a documentary for Channel Four and National Geographic Channels on his archaeological discoveries in Greece and Italy, and he was at one time an arts reviewer on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Kaleidoscope’. In 1993, his translation of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh was performed at the Royal National Theatre in London. With his wife, Olivia, an author and artist, he is co-author and translator of the first complete English version of Aesop’s Fables, which attracted a great deal of international press attention at the time of its release, as the earlier translations had suppressed some of the fables because of Victorian prudery. OLIVIA TEMPLE is an artist and writer, who has contributed to many well known magazines in the UK. She was co-author with her husband of Aesop: The Complete Fables (Penguin Classics). She organised the Egyptian, Greek and Italian archaeological research trips for the Project for Historical Dating, and took part in all the archaeometric dating work in Egypt with the permission of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities. She works closely with her husband, she translated all the French early travellers’ reports on the Sphinx, consulted on and edited the book, and took many of the photos which appear in The Sphinx Mystery. She has co-designed this website. Olivia is also director of an opera and theatrical design archive. More info at: http://www.sphinxmystery.info

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