The Melchizedek Teachings in the Levant

95:2.1The orig­i­nal Mel­chiz­e­dek teach­ings re­ally took their deep­est root in Egypt, from where they sub­se­quently spread to Eu­rope. The evo­lu­tion­ary re­li­gion of the Nile val­ley was pe­ri­od­i­cally aug­mented by the ar­rival of su­pe­rior strains of Nod­ite, Adamite, and later And­ite peo­ples of the Eu­phrates val­ley. From time to time, many of the Egyp­tian civil ad­min­is­tra­tors were Sume­ri­ans. As In­dia in these days har­bored the high­est mix­ture of the world races, so Egypt fos­tered the most thor­oughly blended type of re­li­gious phi­los­o­phy to be found on Uran­tia, and from the Nile val­ley it spread to many parts of the world. The Jews re­ceived much of their idea of the cre­ation of the world from the Baby­lo­ni­ans, but they de­rived the con­cept of di­vine Prov­i­dence from the Egyp­tians.

95:2.2It was po­lit­i­cal and moral, rather than philo­sophic or re­li­gious, ten­den­cies that ren­dered Egypt more fa­vor­able to the Salem teach­ing than Mes­o­po­ta­mia. Each tribal leader in Egypt, af­ter fight­ing his way to the throne, sought to per­pet­u­ate his dy­nasty by pro­claim­ing his tribal god the orig­i­nal de­ity and cre­ator of all other gods. In this way the Egyp­tians grad­u­ally got used to the idea of a super­god, a step­ping­stone to the later doc­trine of a uni­ver­sal cre­ator De­ity. The idea of mono­the­ism wa­vered back and forth in Egypt for many cen­turies, the be­lief in one God al­ways gain­ing ground but never quite dom­i­nat­ing the evolv­ing con­cepts of poly­the­ism.

95:2.3For ages the Egyp­tian peo­ples had been given to the wor­ship of na­ture gods; more par­tic­u­larly did each of the two-score sep­a­rate tribes have a spe­cial group god, one wor­ship­ing the bull, an­other the lion, a third the ram, and so on. Still ear­lier they had been totem tribes, very much like the Amerinds.

95:2.4In time the Egyp­tians ob­served that dead bod­ies placed in brick­less graves were pre­served—em­balmed—by the ac­tion of the soda-im­preg­nated sand, while those buried in brick vaults de­cayed. These ob­ser­va­tions led to those ex­per­i­ments which re­sulted in the later prac­tice of em­balm­ing the dead. The Egyp­tians be­lieved that preser­va­tion of the body fa­cil­i­tated one’s pas­sage through the fu­ture life. That the in­di­vid­ual might prop­erly be iden­ti­fied in the dis­tant fu­ture af­ter the de­cay of the body, they placed a burial statue in the tomb along with the corpse, carv­ing a like­ness on the cof­fin. The mak­ing of these burial stat­ues led to great im­prove­ment in Egyp­tian art.

95:2.5For cen­turies the Egyp­tians placed their faith in tombs as the safe­guard of the body and of con­se­quent plea­sur­able sur­vival af­ter death. The later evo­lu­tion of mag­i­cal prac­tices, while bur­den­some to life from the cra­dle to the grave, most ef­fec­tu­ally de­liv­ered them from the re­li­gion of the tombs. The priests would in­scribe the coffins with charm texts which were be­lieved to be pro­tec­tion against a “man’s hav­ing his heart taken away from him in the nether world.” Pres­ently a di­verse as­sort­ment of these mag­i­cal texts was col­lected and pre­served as The Book of the Dead. But in the Nile val­ley mag­i­cal rit­ual early be­came in­volved with the realms of con­science and char­ac­ter to a de­gree not of­ten at­tained by the rit­u­als of those days. And sub­se­quently these eth­i­cal and moral ide­als, rather than elab­o­rate tombs, were de­pended upon for sal­va­tion.

95:2.6The su­per­sti­tions of these times are well il­lus­trated by the gen­eral be­lief in the ef­fi­cacy of spit­tle as a heal­ing agent, an idea which had its ori­gin in Egypt and spread there­from to Ara­bia and Mes­o­po­ta­mia. In the leg­endary bat­tle of Ho­rus with Set the young god lost his eye, but af­ter Set was van­quished, this eye was re­stored by the wise god Thoth, who spat upon the wound and healed it.

95:2.7The Egyp­tians long be­lieved that the stars twin­kling in the night sky rep­re­sented the sur­vival of the souls of the wor­thy dead; other sur­vivors they thought were ab­sorbed into the sun. Dur­ing a cer­tain pe­riod, so­lar ven­er­a­tion be­came a species of an­ces­tor wor­ship. The slop­ing en­trance pas­sage of the great pyra­mid pointed di­rectly to­ward the Pole Star so that the soul of the king, when emerg­ing from the tomb, could go straight to the sta­tion­ary and es­tab­lished con­stel­la­tions of the fixed stars, the sup­posed abode of the kings.

95:2.8When the oblique rays of the sun were ob­served pen­e­trat­ing earth­ward through an aper­ture in the clouds, it was be­lieved that they be­to­kened the let­ting down of a ce­les­tial stair­way whereon the king and other righ­teous souls might as­cend. “King Pepi has put down his ra­di­ance as a stair­way un­der his feet whereon to as­cend to his mother.”

95:2.9When Mel­chiz­e­dek ap­peared in the flesh, the Egyp­tians had a re­li­gion far above that of the sur­round­ing peo­ples. They be­lieved that a dis­em­bod­ied soul, if prop­erly armed with magic for­mu­las, could evade the in­ter­ven­ing evil spir­its and make its way to the judg­ment hall of Osiris, where, if in­no­cent of “mur­der, rob­bery, false­hood, adul­tery, theft, and self­ish­ness,” it would be ad­mit­ted to the realms of bliss. If this soul were weighed in the bal­ances and found want­ing, it would be con­signed to hell, to the De­vouress. And this was, rel­a­tively, an ad­vanced con­cept of a fu­ture life in com­par­i­son with the be­liefs of many sur­round­ing peo­ples.

95:2.10The con­cept of judg­ment in the here­after for the sins of one’s life in the flesh on earth was car­ried over into He­brew the­ol­ogy from Egypt. The word judg­ment ap­pears only once in the en­tire Book of He­brew Psalms, and that par­tic­u­lar psalm was writ­ten by an Egyp­tian.