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ashore in Alexandria to look at the tomb of Rameses IX. There he was struck by a revelation as he looked at a picture of the pharaoh represented in the form of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle whose proportions were 3:4:5, while the upraised arm represented an additional unit. Clearly, the Egyptians knew about Pythagoras’s theorem centuries before Pythagoras was born. Suddenly, Schwaller realised that the wisdom of the medieval craftsmen stretched back to ancient Egypt. For the next fifteen years, until 1951, he remained in Egypt, studying its temples—particularly the temple at Luxor. The result was his massive geometrical opus The Temple of Man , in three volumes, and his last book The King of Pharaonic Theocracy , translated into English as Sacred Science .

    All this will undoubtedly strengthen in the reader’s mind the suspicion that John Anthony West must have been slightly insane—or perhaps only appallingly misguided—to take Schwaller’s judgement on the erosion of the Sphinx seriously, although in his defence it might be argued that a devotion to mystical ideas does not necessarily imply that there was anything wrong with Schwaller’s eyesight. In fact, Schwaller’s observation was based upon his conviction—already noted—that Egyptian civilisation had to be thousands of years older than 3000 BC, because the knowledge encoded in the temples could not have developed in a mere six hundred years. The comment about water erosion was thrown off rather casually in Sacred Science , and his friend and disciple André VandenBroeck, the author of the remarkable memoir Al-Kemi , gathered the impression that Schwaller thought the erosion had occurred when the Sphinx was submerged under the sea. Whatever the misunderstanding, it awakened in West the conviction that water erosion was a notion that could provide the scientific confirmation or refutation of Schwaller’s theory about Egyptian civilisation.
    But Schwaller’s significance goes far beyond his theories about the age of the Sphinx. After all, there is a sense in which it hardly matters whether the Sphinx is five or ten thousand years old. It would certainly be interesting to know that there was a great civilisation that pre-dated ancient Egypt, but surely it would make no practical difference to our lives—the kind of difference that was made by splitting the atom or the invention of the microchip?
    If Schwaller is correct, such a view represents a total failure to grasp what lies behind the Egyptian temples and the medieval cathedrals. Hermetic tradition claims that this knowledge was kept hidden for thousands of years—and why should it be kept hidden if it has no practical value?
    The sceptic will reply: because the ancient priests deceived themselves about the practical value of their religious nonsense—or wished to deceive other people.
    To which Schwaller would reply: you are wrong. This knowledge is practical. You wish me to give you an example? Then consider the stained red and blue glass of Chartres cathedral. Scientific analysis has been unable to identify the pigments used. This is because there is no pigment. The staining involved an alchemical process which involved liberating the colour from the metals that contained it...
    (In fact, there is reason to believe that this was the ‘oeuvre’ completed by Schwaller and Fulcanelli at Grasse.)
    Schwaller was careful to make no such statement in his books. This information was passed on verbally to André VandenBroeck in 1960—the year before Schwaller died, in December 1961. During the final decade of his life, Schwaller lived in retirement in Grasse, not far from Cannes, his name totally unknown to the general public. André VandenBroeck, an American artist living in Bruges, came upon one of Schwaller’s early books, Symbol and the Symbolic , published in Cairo in 1951, and was instantly fascinated. It seemed to VandenBroeck that Schwaller was talking about a question that had