Toyin:
A few comments on your commentaries on AMORC to which you had a fleeting affiliation.
The argumentation seemed rambling in several instances and conclusions did not follow premises. Stated goals were not followed through. The goal of achieving similar esoteric system to AMORC in the African milieu evaporated in the write up only to resurface again as unrealized goal in a couple of lines toward the end. Your reference to Babatunde Lawal , Annenechkwu and Wariboko was just that : undeveloped reference. This essay is just an evaluation of AMORC.
Readers may want to know why pharaoh Akhnetan was an artistic and religious revo lutionary and how this connects to AMORC. No information provided.
You questioned the validity of the links of AMORC and the mystery schools indeed the existence of such schools. It is an undisputed fact they once existed and their work was mysteriously destroyed in the inexplicable fire that gutted the Library at Alexandria( some even allege western master minded arson to put monopoly of such knowledge in western hands. )Their scientific discoveries definitely affected early modern Europe at the time of Isaac Newton. You thought AMORC was only influenced by them. That may not be true. The alleged secret manuscript on the spiritual development of Jesus in the hands of AMORC which you queried may be part of evidence for that history. You did not stay long enough in AMORC ( as usual) to progress to a point at which you could verify the truth and commented only largely as an outsider as you did regarding Ifa and Ogboni (a dilletante).
Soyinka is presented as your initiator; name dropping as usual to suggest a facetious link to African esotericism. It turns out he is an influence just like he is to legions who read his Myth Literature and the African World and just like Harvey Soencer Lewis of AMORC is to you. His relationship to Toyin Adepoju is therefore not in any way special.
The other flippant use of terminology is Oshugbo.(from Ogboni,) It is eyymologically an ' ara oke' Yoruba North (probably Ekiti ) neologism. Please explain to the reader what you mean by its usage in this context.
Your analysis of the life of Isaac Newton shed some light on your topic but the two other parts of alchemy and Christian life which would have sewn everything together ( as alchemy refers to early modern chemistry and physics and some names in the Bible which Newton discovered were said to stand for alchemical code words, and these are the links between literature and science) is missing. Your interpretation of the iconography of Newton's head is however fascinating.
You need to frame clearly at the outset in the abstract in a nutshell the parameters along which you are developing a comparative cognitive system between AMORC and African esotericism and flesh that out in the body of the essay. It appears at the moment to be just a rambling inadequately structured essay. Fine tune your goals first then you develop a tightly knit essay.
OAA
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>Date: 11/12/2019 00:45 (GMT+00:00)To: usaafricadialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>, Politics Naija <naijapolitics@yahoogroups.com>, nigerianworldforum <NIgerianWorldForum@yahoogroups.com>, Talkhard <talkhard@yahoogroups.com>Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Adapting to Africana Esotericisms theAchievements of Harvey Spencer Lewis and his Rosicrucian Collaborators
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Adapting to Africana Esotericism the Achievements of Harvey Spencer Lewis
and his
Rosicrucian Collaborators
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Harvey Spencer Lewis
Founder of AMORC
Visionary and pragmatist, mystic and institution builder, deeply imaginative yet conservatively debonair, creator of inspiring fictions harboring an inward flame, uniter of cultures, Western esotericist with global affinities
Abstract
This essay depicts my love for esoteric knowledge, represented particularly by my efforts to contribute to building African esotericisms, an effort partly inspired by my exposure to the Western esoteric school AMORC and its strategies of self creation as focused through its founder Harvey Spencer Lewis and the visual and verbal advertisements he is described as creating to advance his vision of the school, visual and verbal projections selections from which I present and the significance of which I draw out in accompanying commentary. These AMORC expressions are complemented in this essay by other images that incidentally resonate with the AMORC vision, a correlation I describe in my commentaries on the images.
The Inspiration of the Esoteric
I have long been inspired by the idea of the cosmos as harbouring mysteries beyond full human understanding. Stories of cosmological and terrestrial mysteries thrilled me from my first encounters with them in comics, in accounts of intelligences in outer space, of transformative magic on Earth and beyond Earth, of fantastic forms of science, magical in their arcane beauty and power, of such eldritch and shadowy practices as alchemy.
Later on, expanding my cultural scope into African art and literature from the middle class African universe represented by immersion in Western cultural forms such as the US Marvel Comics and the UK Lion and Thunder comics, I thrilled to stories of the numinous, of strange allurings breaking the boundaries of the known, in the spirit of the address to the Elesin Oba embarking on a voluntary journey to the world of death in Wole Soyinka's Yoruba cosmology grounded Death and the King's Horseman, " Are the drums on the other side tuning skin to skin with ours in Oshugbo? Does the deep voice of gbedu [the regal drum] cover you , like the passage of royal elephants? Is there a streak of light at the end of the passage, I light I dare not look upon? Does it reveal whose voices we often heard, whose touches we often felt, whose wisdoms come suddenly to the mind when the wisest have shaken their heads and murmured, 'it cannot be done'?"
At a pivotal point in my teenage years, I moved from being only thrilled by what I would later understand as the esoteric, to seeking it, a journey taking me across various Asian, Western and African spiritualities.
AMORC and the Visual and Verbal Evocation of Arcane Knowledge
I love this advertisement for its suggestion of intelligence beyond Earth, evoked by the distant majesty of the celestial bodies, a cosmic expanse stirring human curiosity, alluded to by the figure gazing into space.
Seeking African Esotericisms
I understand esotericism in terms of an interpretation of the Yoruba concepts, "awo", mysteries dealing with the essence of existence, mysteries necessitating the cultivation of "oju inu," inward vision, ranging from reflection to mystical perception, relating what is perceived to the source of existence.
This perspective adapts the culture specific but universally valid conceptions superbly outlined by Babatunde Lawal on Yoruba cosmology, by John Annenechkwu Umeh on Igbo thought and by Nimi Wariboko on the intersection of Kalabari and Pentecostal philosophies, ideas resonant with ideas from Asia, the West and other continental cultures.
AMORC and the Visual and Verbal Evocation of Arcane Knowledge
Superb visual/verbal art evoking the human being as linked to the glory of the cosmos, standing between Earth and the magical immensity beyond Earth.
From Western to African Esotericisms
Western and Asian esotericisms are very visible and deeply studied in an expanding outflow from practitioners and scholars. African esotericisms, however, with particular reference to Nigeria, which I am best informed about, continue to exist largely in the shadows, some defined more by rumour than by fact, some associated in the public mind more with the dubious, and, at times, the inhuman, than with the elevating, inspiring and sublime, positive values evident in these esotericisms if carefully examined.
I am reworking classical African esotericisms in order to take them from secretive depths to public understanding in relation to the luminosity, the opaque beauty, of their esoteric cores, these remaining intact even as these configuring systems and the power of these esoteric centres are better understood.
In doing this, I am inspired by the achievements of Harvey Spencer Lewis, his collaborators and their descendants, in founding and developing the Western esoteric Rosicrucian school known as AMORC, the Ancient Mystical Order of the Rosy Cross.
AMORC's foundations are in Western culture and history, correlated with the symbolism of ancient Egyptian religion, developing a global range of ideas and practices from those foundations.
I am doing something similar in African centred esotericism and mysticism, building a universalistic, multi-cultural vision from an indigenous inspiration.
AMORC and the Visual and Verbal Evocation of Arcane Knowledge
A magician at work? Mysterious powers at play? The mind its own universe, the greatest power on Earth?
This drawing, aided by the verbal text, evokes superbly the sense of potent mystery at the core of humanity's quest for that which underlies being and becoming, that beyond the intellect and the senses ordinarily understood...awo....the deep darkness where being is transformed, as understood in Yoruba thought...
These figures may just as well be my maternal great grandfather Olukoyi Ojemu and I, as I called on him at the beginning of my journeys in classical African spirituality, using a staff and a traditional style shirt as points of contact with a man famed as a great figure of spiritual knowledge in the classical African context, invoking his presence within my shrine in Benin, a shrine composed of a big tree trunk in the centre of the room, wooden staffs on the wall, a tortoise shell, and a picture of my initiator, Wole Soyinka, having been initiated into that world by Soyinka's book Myth, Literature and the African World.
The shrine is now transposed to my mind, where I commune with the ancestors at will...
Vision, Culture and Achievements of Harvey Spencer Lewis
"The cosmic mind does not contain the particulars of human knowledge and experience, but is an exalted level of evaluation", Harvey Spencer Lewis states in The Rosicrucian Manual.
Mystic as scholar, mystic as person of the world yet beyond the world, mystic as person of culture, mystic as world citizen, mystic as multi-creative entrepreneur, mystic as person of learning, mystic as creator of knowledge and social systems yet sensitive to the rhythms of the soul, mystic as cultivator of social and cognitive structures of learning and fellowship that outlive one, mystic as forward looking adapter of ancient knowledge to new developments, all these Lewis represents for me, in the great achievement demonstrated by both his person and his creation of AMORC with his collaborators, in terms of a vision continually renewed decades after into a new century.
Harvey Spencer Lewis as scholar and administrator
Picture by AMORC
Fact and Fiction in AMORC History
In taking advantage of Lewis's legacy, however, it is vital for me to understand how he and his collaborators constructed AMORC, as different from the claims made by himself and the Order.
AMORC and Ancient Egypt
Is AMORC really a modern development of a school further advanced by the religious and artistic revolutionary, ancient Egyptian pharaoh Akhnaton, building on an earlier foundation by a previous pharaoh, as Lewis claimed and as his successors have sustained, even though, at times in a modified manner?
In responding to this question, I have difficulty, in relation to AMORC's efforts over the years, in distinguishing between attempts to perpetuate the claim of an unbroken physical succession from ancient Egypt and the different idea of an inspirational, rather than a physical succession from that civilization.
Its almost impossible for the claim of physical succession to be true on account of there being no evidence of such far reaching historical continuity in spite of claims of hidden records to the contrary, if I recall AMORC'S claims of such records correctly.
The idea of such an ancient mystery school having existed in the first place seems to me to be an invention by Lewis and his compatriots.
It is more likely that they were inspired by ancient Egyptian religion and culture, particularly as this religion is magnificently adapted to Western magic by the older and perhaps the most influential modern Western esoteric school, the fellow Rosicrucian order, the Golden Dawn.
AMORC's focus on Akhnaton within the sweep of ancient Egyptian history concretises the mystique, wonder and cultural and specifically religious and artistic achievements of ancient Egypt in terms of a historical individual, whose innovations of thought and action are thus held up as demonstrating the individual creativity and civilization shaping impact inspiring to people who desire to see the world with eyes richer than society enables and who possibly aspire to shape society creatively, values central to AMORC.
Although the ultimate validity of Akhnaton's achievements in this regard are quite controversial, such finer points about his legacy would be immaterial in the light of his being used as an exemplar in the manner in which AMORC develops his image, an inspiringly imaginative manner of constructing a lineage of aspiration and historical continuity through identification with a lofty ancient source.
Art Evoking the Arcane Mystique of Ancient Egypt
Is AMORC really descended from an ancient Egyptian mystery school?
Does hidden knowledge, thousands of years old, emerging at the beginning of high civilization at the time of the pharaohs, rest in AMORC's teachings and archives, knowledge adapted by AMORC to modern needs?
These are the kinds of intriguing perplexities that the early AMORC advertisements, such as this one above, sought to provoke.
AMORC and Jesus Christ
How factual is Lewis' The Mystical Life of Jesus, charting in detail the spiritual development of Jesus Christ within a carefully structured initiatory and teaching system in a school that mandated his mission, an account of Jesus' spiritual development described by Lewis as based on secret manuscripts in the keeping of AMORC, if I recall correctly?
As an account of Jesus' life the book is a work of fiction, very different in spirit from the individualistic revolutionary and even anarchic drive of Jesus. It succeeds, however, in depicting the structured system of initiation and learning of AMORC and of esoteric schools generally.
However, AMORC's emphasis on personalized, individualistic development through individual study and practice of its ideas and exercises enables a personal creativity, that, to some degree, balances its generalized teaching across members of the same level of exposure to its study materials in its weekly lessons called monographs.
A book so precious, its contents so arcane, it has to be not only hidden from sight, but, through a custom made lock, kept inaccessible except to a few.
The book rests on a compass, evoking mathematical sciences of precise measurement, suggesting intellectual activities in investigating reality.
In the background are visible further symbols of arcane knowledge, the mortar and pestle of the alchemist, a practice midway between science and the occult.
Further shaping the visual space is an hourglass, evoking both a means of measuring time as well as being another image of human quantitative creativity as the compass.
The ancientness of use of the hourglass, however, evokes both cultural penetrations into a distant past and the mysteries such a past enfolds.
A globe of the earth in the background suggests aspiration to universally valid knowledge, or to unifying breadth of understanding of terrestrial phenomena through human cognitive faculties.
A spider's web dominates the background of this collection of objects, suggesting knowledges hidden in ancient spaces.
The art's evocation of the allure and hiddenness of the arcane thought that AMORC promotes is amplified by the explicit expressions of such arcana in the accompanying verbal text.
AMORC's Relationship with Great Figures in Western Cultural History
The AMORC vision is one of a steady permeation of society by creative influences represented by such figures in European cultural history as the writer Dante Alighieri and the philosopher and scientist Rene Descartes, a line of Western thinkers, artists and scientists AMORC describes as past Rosicrucians.
Were such illustrious figures truly Rosicrucian, figures AMORC invokes as Rosicrucian forebears dramatizing the imprimatur of AMORC's elevated foundations?
I don't think so because such accounts are not supported by the historical record and, even though Rosicrucianism was partly secretive in its early emergence in 17th century Europe, the time span for its existence being claimed by AMORC goes further back than that, as with the example of Dante, making the AMORC timeline for the existence of Rosicrucianism look more opportunistic than factual.
This is a strategy of anchoring AMORC, not only within the larger Rosicrucian conception but concretising this conception in terms of figures who are the finest fruits of Western and particularly European artistic, intellectual and scientific culture.
This strategy facilitates AMORC's shaping of an image of aspiration, of cultural synthesis represented by the diverse achievements of those historical figures.
This ideal is reflected in the contents of AMORC's monographs, its private teachings to its students as well as in its public publications, such as the Rosicrucian Digest.
The monographs and the Digest are constructed as inter-disciplinary organisations of knowledge drawn from across cultures and temporal zones, though grounded in Western cultural history, a unity of cultural foundations reworked in terms of the vision of a modern movement.
Sam Falconer's magical visualization, above, of scientist Isaac Newton's life and works is deeply in the AMORC spirit of the allure, esoteric and yet accessible to the dedicated mind, of the mystical quest as a unification of diverse streams of knowledge, correlating cosmic mind and human mind.
It is a panoramic evocation of Newton's life and work and its continuing impact into the future, centuries after his time, a multi-level panorama generating a spatial sequencing of the temporal progression of his life and work and its impact.
This begins from the lowest compartment evoking Newton's earlier days trying to herd sheep in his family's farm even as he was distracted by his passion for study, suggested by the book holding figure leading the sheep in beautifully shaped fields.
This level also shows a figure in the foreground standing by a tree at the bottom of which is a red fruit, evoking the famous story of Newton being alerted to the puzzle of why the apple does not rise up rather than fall down as striking him as he stood under a tree from which an apple fell as he was home when school was closed during his undergraduate years at Cambridge, a puzzle that ultimately led to his discovery of the theory of gravity decades later, a theory encapsulating the apple, the earth, the moon, the sun and all celestial bodies, a cosmological unity dramatized in the third level through the balance of moon and earth in relation to space travel, cosmological unifications grasped and journeys in outer space made possible significantly through Newton's work.
The lowest level thus encapsulates the roots of Newton's movement from country youth to cosmological genius, suggested by the book reading sheep herder and the tree gazing figure, and as focused through the ladder reaching from the house in the lush fields to a pedestal high up in the air on which seats an open book, like a sacred text on a lectern, suggesting perhaps Newton's devotion to science as a means of penetrating the workings of the divine intelligence that shapes the cosmos, a vision explicitly demonstrated in the closing section of his greatest work, on gravity and the laws of motion, the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.
From the text on the 'lectern' pedestal, a tower of thought, crowned powers of reflection, adapting expressions from W.B.Yeats' "Blood and the Moon", mathematical calculations and elegant mathematical diagrams flower out like a plant's blossoms to provide a base on which stands the second level of the panorama, evocations of the work of his mature years, in optics, the famous prism experiment in his Cambridge rooms through which he discovered the conflation of various colors in white light.
The background of this second level is evocative of the networks of stars as seen from the earth, suggesting moving towards the achievements represented by the third level, a level emblematised by a telescope akin to that built by Newton through which he studied the celestial bodies, facilitating his arriving at the understanding of the finely tuned gravitational forces holding the celestial bodies in relation to each other, represented by the near concentric circles uniting earth and moon, the moon on which the telescope is positioned facing the earth in an imaginative inversion of history since Newton watched the moon from the earth, an inversion suggesting the expansions of perception Newton's work has contributed to enabling, enablements dramatized by the depiction of astronauts walking that moon, space explorers who are beneficiaries of Newton's gravitational laws in relation to his laws of motion that enabled them to make the calculations facilitating their escaping earth's gravity, reach the moon and operate successfully within its very different gravitational environment, achievements unthinkable for many in Newton's time or understood as pure fiction in the unlikely event they were so imagined.
Again, the background of the third level is the starry depths of outer space, suggesting the ascent of Newton's historical impact, beginning from his life on his family's farm and country home to professional scholar dealing with universal physical phenomena, such as light and celestial configurations, as a natural philosopher, the kind of science practiced in Newton's 17th century Europe, a philosopher whose work continues to shape understanding and action and most likely will always do so in relation to humanity's engagement with the cosmos as long as anyone exists who understands his work and how to apply it.
This panoramic evocation of Newton's life and work, an evocation of time in terms of space, within the mind of the figure depicted, as suggested by the entire panoramic progression taking place with a silhouette of his head, incidentally suggests the AMORC focus on what, in another context, the literary scholar Isidore Okpewho describes as the 're-creative, reconfigurative power of the human mind expressed in various degrees of intensity' [ "What is Myth?", African Literature Today: Myth and History and Myth in Africa].
The entire tableau of dazzling colours, vividly realized scenic shifts yet held as a simultaneous display delighting the eye with its visual and evocative force, a symbolic mirror opening to the viewer in terms of not only its beauty but through an understanding of the Newton story in its near mythic resonance, a life lived in time but significantly reshaping time through making possible the otherwise impossible in the management of space and its relationship with time, evokes the magic of this epic yet intimate and yet public story.
Falconer does not present explicit evocations of Newton's deep involvement in alchemy and Christian theology, which, along with what is now known as science, constitute the tripartite scheme of his mutually inspiring research agendas, his quest for "mysterious wisdom won by toil", within the solitary concentration represented by a lofty tower window illuminated as the thinker works within, as Yeats depicts such visions in "Phases of the Moon, adapting Milton's thinker in "II Penseroso" aspiring to "let my lamp at midnight hour/Be seen in some high lonely tower/ Where I may out-watch the Bear [ a constellation of stars] With thrice great Hermes"[ founder of Hermeticism, allied to alchemy] , references correlative with Newton's explorations in arcane knowledge and recondite sacred lore.
Such evocations would have rounded off Falconer's visualization of Newton's inspirational streams, bringing his picture of Newton explicitly into alignment with the map of knowledge developed by AMORC.
AMORC's cognitive configurations run from such Western esoteric systems as alchemy and its relation to Hermeticsm, to intellectual, artistic and religious cultures across space and time, even as the AMORC vision in its study of cosmic laws is correlative with the resonant summation from the Emerald Tablet, the originating Hermetic text, "As Above, So Below", a conception of celestial and terrestrial, spiritual and material correspondences which might have influenced Newton's thought.
Netwon's development of the theory of gravitational force in constructing a conception of celestial and terrestrial alignments may be seen as a development from occult conceptions of action at a distance without intervening agents of transmission, a seemingly magical idea which he precisely quantified and thus made into a science, as Richard Westfall seems to argue in his 1992 print and current online Encyclopedia Britannica article on Newton, a distillation of his Newton biographies, Never at Rest : A Biography of Isaac Newton and the shorter The Life of Isaac Newton.
AMORC and the Mystique of French Culture
Was Lewis really initiated by Rosicrucians in France, as is claimed for him in such texts as his son's biography of him, Cosmic Mission Fulfilled, and mandated to carry on the work of Rosicrucianism in the modern US, a work also related to older Rosicrucian immigrants on US soil?
I am sceptical of the French connection and even more so of the US Rosicrucian one, the latter not being supported by known history, to the best of my knowledge, but those likely fictional historicisations are useful.
The modernizing innovations of AMORC break significantly with previous Western esotericism as I understand it, developing a pragmatism and an adaptation to modern living in a middle class context, that look more like the fruit of its US origin than of any strong link with older orientations emerging from Europe.Lewis' invocation of a French initiatory root for AMORC looks to me more like the questionable claim of a similar German background by the founders of the older Rosicrucian school founded in England, the Golden Dawn.
France, in the earlier years of the 20th century when AMORC was founded, was better associated with images of refined and mystical cultures than the newer, more commercially correlated US where AMORC was born, and was thus a helpful frame for the values of worldly refinement within transcendental aspiration that AMORC cultivates.
These values are developed in the context of the effort to depict AMORC as less of a new creation in the brash modernity of the US but a modern development of ancient wisdoms passed on through the selfless dedication of devotees across cultures, spanning the earliest emergence of civilization, as it was understood in Western thought of the time, in Egypt, to its later manifestation in Europe and now in the US.
An evocation of the cosmic vision of Dante Aligheiri's epic poem the Divine Comedy,a universe much of which he traverses with the help of his guide, Virgil.
Esoteric schools such as AMORC may depict the study of their ideas and practice of their exercises as facilitating the aspirant's quest on a philosophical and spiritual journey with cosmological undertones, dramatizing a more subtle equivalent of the journey of refinement of self and expansion of vision Dante undergoes in his poem.
The Creativity that Constructs AMORC
In sum, having gained a little but foundational exposure to AMORC, as an active member for about a year and reading their literature in comparison with others across a broad spectrum of Western, Asian and African esoteric and other spiritualities and philosophies, AMORC looks to me like the work of very creative people, expert builders of cultural connections, with a keen eye for a balance between depth, simplicity and effectiveness in developing and presenting mystical and occult ideas and practical techniques in a manner readily assimilated by the person active in the modern world of work and immersion in society, an individualistic society based on the modern Western template where science, rationality, imagination, the arts and spirituality forcefully coincide.
This originating vision leads to the pragmatic AMORC model of mystical and occult texts received through the mail and now through the Internet, studied in the privacy of one's home with the option of group interaction with other members in lodges named after inspirational figures in the Order's understanding of the history of mysticism, though the focus remains on individual study.
Buddhism, Hinduism, various aspects of Western and other cultures, all these are seamlessly integrated in AMORC's style of teaching, rich but never burdensome for the reader, always correlated with practical exercises in contemplation, meditation, breathing and ritual in a system that is contemplative and scholarly, practical and ritualistic, artistic and philosophical.
Taking Forward the Flame
I am emulating the vision of AMORC, among other inspirational sources, in my development of classical African systems of thought in their potential as forms of esotericism.
Leonardo da Vinci, great artist and visionary scientist and engineer, shown above in a contemporary recreation of the 15th century European figure with one of his engineering models, his enigmatic creativity perennially engaging, is invoked in at least one AMORC advertisement shown earlier in this essay, as demonstrating a hidden knowledge that enabled his mysterious creativity, a mysterious achievement of a kind that is linked in that advertisement with the also mysterious creativity represented by the pyramids of Egypt, the mode of building those elegant colossi still unknown after centuries.
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Thursday, December 12, 2019
Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Adapting to Africana Esotericisms theAchievements of Harvey Spencer Lewis and his Rosicrucian Collaborators
OA, That is a thoughtful
critique that will no
doubt assist Toyin in fine tuning.
Ancient Egyptians were
masters in building technology,
mathematics and medicine but they
were also masters in spirituality, and
what some called the occult - and at
the most, had very fertile
IMAGINATIONS about other
possibilities .
In their narratives we hear of the
manipulation of
wax crocodiles to devour enemies
and the manipulation and feats such
as the parting of water bodies.
Egyptian "magicians" were
legendary. It is not just about
Akhenaten but a system of ideas
evolving between around 4000 BCE
and the date of Persian,
Greek, Roman and Arab conquests -
in that order, after around 500BCE.
How do we tie this into AMORC,
if at all.
Gloria Emeagwali
Casablanca
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