General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Every religious text has language... [View all]Hestia
(3,818 posts)aren't aware of, (3,000 years worth, minimum) though there is scads more left to be translated.
The texts are of the human history and not of any particular race.
You'll be amazed at how very little human thought has changed over the millennium. 70% C students; 20% B students; 1% A students.
Ancients bitched about how stupid people were then and didn't want to change their lives for the better; workers were lazy; wives nagged too much, etc. The things we think about today, they thought back then too.
Each country had their State Deities, then Local Deities, then your Household Deities. There was room for everybody. Romans fell in love with Isis/Aset (her real name, which it looks like we are all going to have to go back to - Isis is a Greek word), and She is the most traveled Goddess in the ancient world.
What is astounding, though, is their spiritual thoughts. http://www.sacred-texts.com has a lot on their website for you to peruse.
Heck, even the Alchemists were not what people today think - their workbooks are coded - in English, which didn't exist as a whole and was refined during the Renaissance and why English is an amalgam of different languages tacked onto it. When they discuss "turning lead into gold" they are discussing the soul or spirit - rising from the dross (lead) and rising towards enlightenment (or whatever you want to call it). Yeah, they had to pretend for their benefactors they were working on physical gold, but they knew there was no way. They just wanted the freedom to study and be paid for it. Because of their studies, they developed the branch of science called Chemistry.
The Corpus Hermeticum was brought from Arabia to Italy and the Medici's paid to have it translated. It exploded in the inner circles of the rich and worked it way down to the middle class, helping to bring for the Renaissance and loosen the power of the church.
Kinda ticks me off that because Hermeticism is not Ancient Egyptian, but 1st Century Alexandrian, that the thought process of Hermetics should be discounted. It just wasn't written down until the 1st Century. Copies of the Corpus Hermeticum were found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi scroll finds, and other places around Israel/Judea and the rest of the world.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/index.htm
http://www.sacred-texts.com/grim/index.htm
One thing to be aware of when you some of these texts is the term "sacred marriage" "Hermetic Marriage", etc. The symbolism is a Sun & Moon interposed on each other. Sun represents "male/active/consciousness", Moon represents "female/the unconscious". It means the attainment of integration of the spirit and persona into a higher state of superconsciousness & genderlessness. Unfortunately, until we accomplish this Great Work, we come back, reincarnation after reincarnation, until we get it right.
Adam McLean, Scottish researcher, has been studying alchemical texts for decades and he does have a correspondence course on how to read the symbolism. It's another language and you need to learn the vocabulary. Most people are too lazy to go and try to read these texts for themselves, it's hard hard work. It ain't easy and it takes a lifetime.
So think of this way - while others may grovel on their knees in fear of their mister (literal translation of the word lord), the rest of us are standing on our own two feet discovering for ourselves (hopefully) some attainment of wisdom, because in the end, we're all going to have to do it anyway.
There is a whole wealth & world of knowledge out there and it doesn't begin or end with the Big 3.