The Secret Book of the Physicians

The Secret Book of Physicians

Medicine, Magic and Bioenergetics in Ancient Egypt

By Dr. Juan Martín, M.D.

Copyright 2018 Juan Martin

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction

2. The Papyri

3. Other Papyri

3. The Pharmacopeia

4. Anatomy and Functions in the Classical Medicines

5. The Medical Profession

6. Symbolism and Mythology

7. The Classical Medicines

8. Elements and Dimensions

9. Formulation of the 4 Elements in China

10. Yin-Yang and the 4 elements in Ancient Egypt

11. The 8 Primordial Winds or Pa-Kua in China

12. The 8 primordial winds in Ancient Egypt

13. The Kidneys and their functional relations

14. The Magical Square

15. The Kidneys and the Axial Plane

16. The Chinese Energy Channels

17. The Secret Book of the Physicians

18. The Greek Delusion

Introduction

The study of the development and history of Medicine, particularly in the case of the so-called traditional medicines, has a great interest. It gives us views about the different solutions that the human being has found to face the eternal problem of the human diseases, but also offers us a vision about how the human mind locates such knowledge in time and space, in addition to showing the particular conception that each epoch and culture had.

It is not a matter of describing how the Incas used herbs or the Chinese metallic needles inserted in the skin, or how the Egyptians treated wounds, but rather to understand that accompanying it there was a peculiar way of conceiving human nature and the cosmos where it unfolds.

The usual positivist explanations on the development of Medicine, considers the origin of this science as the effort of the reason to get out of the darkness and ignorance of the past time, appealing to our admiration for that primitive man struggling against his own mental darkness, and at the same time subtly mocking the ancients and their ignorance. Such presumptuous views could be justified in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the last century, when knowledge about ancient languages and archaeology was insufficient. The archaeologists of that time looked at the remnants of pagan’s civilizations at their feet from the heights of the civilized Christian nations of the West, feeling themselves as the authentic heirs of biblical messianism. It is not strange then to find in the manuals of that time, which survived until our childhood, references to the first man that lit a fire, to the first wheel, the first... forgetting to add that it was the first one that we know, and that we are simply ignorant about possible predecessors that practiced of discovered those things.

This was the time when archaeologists such as Piazzi Smith, Royal Astronomer of Scotland, came to Egypt illuminated and carried by a sort of prophetic wind to check his preconceived thoughts. He was convinced that those degenerated Egyptians —using his own words— could never had been the builders of the pyramids, and that the famous Great Pyramid of Gizeh was the work of the chosen people, the Israelites, and that Victorian England inherited from them not only the Bible but also a special system of measures, which he had found in the Great Pyramid. Those measurements proved without a doubt, according to his views, the superiority, technical and moral, both of the original builders and the Anglo-Saxon Empire. What is even more surprising is that these data still are in use in some books to prove the wonders of the pyramids, and it is not strange to witness the resurgence of these ideas, albeit in a different format. Then again, is it really so strange? Is it not comforting to believe oneself to belong to a chosen people...?

History, just as the classics teach us, behaves like a spiral, where at the same time that, in broad lines, humanity advances, we also witness periods of partial setback. When it is said, within the positivist scheme, that there were in the past primitive African cultures, a concept that has penetrated deeply both in art and in anthropological descriptions, we forget that these same primitive peoples speak of themselves as having a glorious past and that today they consider themselves as decayed remnants of past civilizations. Here we are not in the presence of peoples in the dawn of childhood, but in many cases, of terminal, decaying peoples.

The fineness in the reasoning that we can observe in the dialogues of Plato, the thoroughness in the commentaries of the Vedas in India, the theological and symbolic complexity that surrounds many of the so-called primitive conceptions, do not detract in anything, but on the contrary, the supposed higher capability of modern man analysis. In addition, if in many cases, in mutilated translations that have saved the space of thousands of years, crossing through the ecclesiastical barbarism of the Middle Age, offer us the most beautiful example of morality and reasoning, why should we think that the man of past civilizations moved within magical reasoning full of ignorance and superstition? Is not it our blindness and disorientation that we project in the past?

When Plato says that a special light emanates from ours eyes resting on objects, and allowing the vision of things, the modern critic laughs and mocks the ignorance of the philosopher, forgetting that Plato, initiate of the temples, spoke of a superior knowledge, and that he referred to the phenomenon that we call perception today. Is it not certain, dear reader, that a special light emanating from your eyes selects these paragraphs in contrast to the darkness that reigns around, hiding from your consciousness all the thousands of objects and noises that surround you?

We consider ourselves skeptical, however, in the past, Zeno, the founder of the skeptical school, did not accept any experience that did not bear his personal seal ring on it. The old Indian schools of skepticism reached a subtlety that even today we have not reached. The senses deceive us, it is a usual sentence of our scant philosophy of distrustful men of the twenty first century. Our ancestors, wiser than us, believed that the mind deceives us, and that in any case our senses are limited, but they do not lie. Any pain we perceive, noise, vision, thought, imagination or any other natural process, internal or external, passes through our mind. We can say without fear of making mistakes that our universe is mental. For this reason, the thinkers of antiquity put as their first objective to find out how our mind works, to look for the fundamental laws of apprehension of the Universe through human reason. Let us learn to handle the instrument of knowledge, rather than the knowledge itself of things, they said. We follow an opposite path: learn from things and through this we will obtain knowledge.

That classic approach to knowledge presupposed the need to begin with the key elements, the innate ideas and their development: With the perception of Unity behind all things, of Duality, of Causation, etc. They developed concepts accordingly. It was about establishing a kind of mathematics of reason, the purpose of which was to discover the intimate mechanism of the human mind and to know how this colored our perception of the Universe. If we have to be strict, Mathematics is the purest example of Exact Science, with no need for external support to arrive at its own conclusions. Mathematics begins with fundamental concepts: the zero, the one, the series of positive numbers, the series of negative numbers, the rational numbers, the fractional numbers, etc. Based on these foundations, this science dared to explore all the possibilities of applying its resources. We observe the results around us: our technological civilization would be inconceivable without mathematical support. Maybe in another civilization of the future, or in another world, the future man could use another technology, not yet discovered by us, maybe they could make chips for their computers based on vegetable fibers, who knows the surprises that the technology can give us?... However, what it is certain that in order to apply these new technologies they will use mathematics, adding and dividing will continue to be adding and dividing, here in the 20th century or in the 30th century, on Earth or out there on Mars.

That is precisely the power of what I call Classic Medicines, which subsisted for millennia: they organized their knowledge around a fundamental trunk of unitary concepts, from which to derive the rest of knowledge. Nobody doubts that today we have advanced in the physical knowledge of diseases. However, we lack a unifying theory that allows you to place each thing in its place and in relation to the others. For a traditional Chinese doctor, it was not problematic to communicate with an astrologer, a practitioner of martial arts, a chemist, a soldier, an artist or a philosopher: they all used the same unitary system. This type of exchange allowed integrating all this knowledge into a global structure that includes all branches of human knowledge, the universe and man himself.

The Medical Science

Today we can identify and name many of the possible causes of illness on the material plane, and determine as well the material agents responsible for health disorders. However, on a subtler level, it is still very difficult to understand the ultimate reason of the existence of illnesses, their moral roots and their meaning. Too much philosophy? Maybe. Well, when one is dying I suppose that philosophy is the only real thing he can resort to. A few days before, the quantity of milligrams of antibiotic introduced in an injection, may have had some signification, but at the culminating moment of suffering, of death, man does not question about that, rather he asks himself about his own existence, for the beyond, and for the causes that led up to this end.

Does that mean that our scientific discoveries have not value? Of course, they have it, and a lot, the problem is that science has become exclusionary, trying to explain everything without leaving room for other possible experiences. Science or better scientism, has taken on the role of religion: the persecuted have become the persecutors.

It is quite common today to find someone in a dispute or conversation to appeal to science as endorsement of what he says, Scientists affirm it..., Science says so..., and it is scientific... These phrases remind us those others like the Church says this..., The Pope affirms it... A sample of that scientific interference in all fields of knowledge appeared in a recent television debate, where people of different origins and specialties, discussed about the difference between the vegetarian and normal diet. It is not necessary to be a defender of vegetarianism to understand that the tradition of thousands of years, demonstrates certain relaxing effects in the vegetarian diet and certain exciting effects in the carnivorous diet. A scientist, specialist in nutrition, categorically and complacently stated in the debate that he did not find a difference in the chemical composition of a potato or any other nutrient and that the whole issue was merely a matter of chemistry: quantities of proteins, fats and hydrates.

Certainly, from the nutritional point of view, he was right, but he cannot discard the millennial experience of millions of men from different cultures, which at certain times and specific purposes recommended the practice of a less carnivorous diet and even the practice of fasting. The experience of centuries confirms that the consumption of some type of food is the cause of certain physiological and psychological effects. What is clear is that the mind paralyzes when you eat popcorn accompanied by beer. Try to talk about something serious, or think deeply while you consume sunflower seeds, and then tell me the result of your experience. Of course, after a good roast meat, both spirit and body are more inclined to glides smoothly towards the bed than to revert to the judicious study of classic philosophy.

Another example of the lack of global vision of our modern medicine can be seen in medical journals or manuals dedicated to psychiatry. Anyone interested in knowing the causes of the depression, for example in the elderly, can review the corresponding pages of one of these dissemination texts. In them, you will find hundreds