Ancestral knowledges. The Minoan legacy of ancient Greek science

By Nicola Bizzi

Around 276 B.C. a poet from Cilicia had the great honor of coming into the favor of Macedonia’s King Antigonus II Gonatas, who firmly wanted him at his court. His name was Aratus (Ἄρατος), and he is also known as Aratus of Soli. Described as a «cosmic philosopher and Homeric poet», Aratus was born in Tarsos around 315 B.C. and completed his studies in Athens, where he was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries and was a student of the Stoic philosopher Perseus of Cytium. He is mostly remembered today for a didactic poem entitled Phainòmena, made of a total of 1154 verses and divided into two parts: the first one, the actual Phainòmena, made of 732 verses, and the second one entitled Diosemeîa (whose meaning is “Predictions” or, better, “Signs from Heaven”). But Aratus’ Phainòmena was nothing more than the transposition into poetic verses of an astronomical treatise, now lost, by the great astronomer Eudoxus of Cnidus, who lived almost two centuries before Aratus. A treatise that hid ancestral knowledges transmitted by secret initiatory schools, knowledges dating back to the ancient Minoan civilization.
This new essay by the historian Nicola Bizzi is a journey into the secrets and mysteries of an ancient forgotten science, which over the centuries has become the exclusive heritage of secret initiatory orders.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edizioni Aurora Boreale
• Release date: Apr 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9791255042808

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Τεληστήριον

NICOLA BIZZI

ANCESTRAL

KNOWLEDGES

THE MINOAN LEGACY

OF ANCIENT GREEK SCIENCE

LOGO EDIZIONI AURORA BOREALE

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

Title: Ancestral knowledges.

The Minoan legacy of ancient Greek science

Author: Nicola Bizzi

Publishing series: Telestérion

Editing and illustrations by Nicola Bizzi

English translation by Umberto Visani

ISBN: 979-12-5504-280-8

LOGO EDIZIONI AURORA BOREALE

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

© 2023 Edizioni Aurora Boreale

Via del Fiordaliso 14 - 59100 Prato - Italia

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CHAPTER I

THE KEY OF A LOST ANCESTRAL KNOWLEDGE

Those ancient scholars and researchers that modern culture aseptically refers to as scientists – no matter if they were astronomers, mathematicians, geometers, geographers, engineers, physicians, or enthusiasts of the natural sciences – not only belonged to the educated elite to whom they usually addressed their teachings and for whom they wrote their treatises, but were also, and above all, great initiates. In ancient times, indeed, there was no such thing that could be even remotely compared to that secular science that characterizes our age and has its roots in the 18th-century Enlightenment. There was a Knowledge, even in the field of science, largely held, guarded and handed down by initiatory orders and mystery schools, and it was by no means apart from the sphere of the Sacred, since human beings lived much more in symbiosis with the forces of nature. Those were times when, as I will explain more thoroughly in one of the next chapters, man was closer to the Gods and, at the same time – in a real exchange and union – the gods were closer to man.

As I have repeatedly explained in some of my essays, including Da Eleusi a Firenze: la trasmissione di una conoscenza segreta

¹ and La Via di Eleusi

², one of the main limitations suffered by modern historians and scientists in understanding the ancient world is merely cultural. Two thousand years of Christianity and the prevailing monotheistic culture on the one hand, and the cultural ravages of the Enlightenment on the other, have indeed shaped the consciences and forma mentis of Western man to such an extent that he, in dealing with topics like spirituality, religiosity and science of the ancients, fails to fully comprehend how the Greeks and Romans conceived and lived the relationship with the Transcendent and often falls into the trap of the supposed moral superiority of Christianity, of the worst Christianized Aristotelianism, of the lucubrations of Immanuel Kant and René Descartes, of both Positivism and Materialism. A trap that, precisely because of the cultural training acquired, both at the school and family levels, leads him to mistakenly consider monotheism as a natural evolution of Western spirituality and an overcoming, in a positive and qualitative way, of ancient myths and ancient superstitions based on ignorance and materialism as the only possible basis of science. A trap that both scholars with a secular approach and those with a Catholic, or at least Judeo-Christian, background inexorably fall into. After all, both base their studies, research and interpretations on the denial of the existence of the Gods and on the consequent assumption that, in the context of the ancient rites, They did not really manifest themselves in the eyes of the faithful and initiates. And, consequently, on the denial of the assumption that it was precisely from the Gods that men of the past had received precise teachings, rules and doctrines and the answers to the greatest questions that mankind, since its emergence from the caves, had begun to ask: Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?

Modern historians and scientists (including religious historians and anthropologists) have always given little weight to the myths and legends of the ancient peoples, failing to consider how much such narratives, far from springing from the irrational sphere of man, often conceal – in addition to the description of historical facts and events that actually happened – important scientific knowledge and truths. Myth has thus been relegated by modern culture, like disciplines such as Magic and Astrology (which, however, are still secretly practiced at a high level by certain power elites), to the dark and poetic side of humanity. Ironically, people still study Greek and Latin philosophy and literature, but deliberately ignore what is often precisely one of their foundations. So you blatantly forget one of the fundamental keys to reading and understanding the texts of classical authors.

A great politician and philosopher of late Roman times, Saturninus Secundus Salustius, a personal friend and collaborator of Emperor Julian, left us these keen remarks: «Why did the ancients ever express themselves in myths? It is worth asking ourselves this question and drawing from myths already a first advantage: to foster the attitude of inquiry and prevent laziness of mind»³. And, more than two centuries earlier, the great initiate Plutarch of Chaeronea expressed a similar concept: «Myth is nothing but a reflection of a transcendent reality, which forces our intelligence to turn towards other objects»⁴.

The Egyptian Goddess Maat

Not only did all ancient cultures express themselves in myths, but fundamental studies, such as those carried out by Jean Richer⁵, Giorgio De Santillana and Herta Von Dechend⁶, showed how most of such ancient myths display deep astronomical connotations derived from an ancestral knowledge of the sky and the motion of the stars.

The greatest civilizations of the past, from the Mediterranean to the Near East, from America to Asia, have always placed Astronomy at the center of their knowledge, and almost all of the ancient temples, shrines and buildings of worship were built according to very precise criteria, both astronomical and of sacred Geography, which took into account the solstices, precessional motion and the positions of the stars, according to a mirroring logic: Gods, indeed, (though not all) resided in Heaven, and their homes on Earth were to be faithful mirrors of their celestial abodes.

It was from the observation of the sky that ancient peoples derived their metrics, the laws of Mathematics and Geometry, and knowledge of both the Geography of the Earth and the motions of the stars and planets, acquiring and consolidating a scientific interpretation of the cosmos. Certain knowledge, which had always been the prerogative of the priestly castes and initiatic schools, was skillfully translated into the language of myth so that it was not understandable to all, but only to those who held the correct keys to reading and interpretation and was transmitted according to strict and selective initiatory rules. At the same time, a secular and popular key to reading the myths, meant for the masses, was also spread and nurtured. And it is precisely the latter that modern philologists and historians of religions attempt to understand and interpret – to no avail –, often grasping at straws.

In ancient Egypt it was the Goddess Maat who oversaw measuring. Indeed, it was She herself, as the personification of truth, balance, order, harmony, law, morality and justice, and being responsible for the natural arrangement of constellations, seasons, human as well as divine actions, who was the measure and measurer, but also the separator. Seen as the order of nature and society, both in the earthly world and in the afterlife, Maat is well described in the Unis pyramid texts, dating back to the Old Kingdom. Later, she was considered the female counterpart or bride of the God Thot, the Great Scribe, Lord of Wisdom and overseer of Arithmetic and the measurements of Heaven and Earth, the visible and the invisible, and thus assimilated with the Goddess Seshat, who presided over writing, measurements and Architecture. Sent into the world by her father, the Solar God Rha, so that she would banish chaos forever, she was depicted with a feather on her head and was believed to weigh souls in the Judgment Chamber by placing a feather on one of the two plates of her scales to measure the faults committed in life by the deceased.

Maat in the land irrigated by the River Nile was also the personification of the craftsman’s cubit, on the basis of which everything was measured correctly and, according to some interpretations, it is from its very name that the word Mathematics is derived. Which, as I will explain, is perfectly plausible. Mathematics in fact comes from the word μάθημα (máthema), which can be translated as science, knowledge, learning (so much so that in ancient Greek μαθηματικός [mathematikós] means inclined to learn) and in the Greek