Socrates died, in order to preserve the three most powerful principles of understanding, first demonstrated in ancient Egypt’s Weighing of The Heart ceremony. The power of these 3 principles is expressed in all the greatest creations of antiquity. These three principles are so powerful, that merely uttering them puts fear in every tyrant.
What is power?
Is it the power of a tyrant? The power of life and death over yourself and others? Plato's dialogue Gorgias proves this not to be the case. What does Gorgias demonstrate?
The greatest power of all is understanding. And further, that the freedom to choose is futile without the prerequisite understanding needed to make good judgements. Without a metric for determining value, and the ability to apply that metric, the freedom to choose, may even, at times, work against an individual or group. A suitable case study of tyrannical power is that of the Pharaoh's. There are many indications including the weighing of the heart ceremony, that the Pharaoh's or the cultures that gave rise to them, understood the idea. In fact they lived and died by this principle. No self-respecting pharaoh would go to his grave having a copy of "The Coming Forth by Day and by Night," book of spells that includes the 42 Negatives Confessions, as well as the Weighing of the Heart ceremony, that we will discuss shortly, demonstrates the importance place on this principle. It is worth noting that in death, the only place where their wealth and privilege have no impact on the desired outcome the Pharaoh's turned to this principle.
What principle?
A Pharaoh's ability to live a virtuous life was directly dependent on their understanding of principles of action, as well as their ability use those principles lawfully. Understanding or lack thereof would impact the Pharaoh's choices and thus their actions. And those actions or periods of inaction in turn have an impact on the soul of the Pharaoh, which in turn impacts their legacy. This impact on the soul was discovered to be lawful and therefore measurable, though not directly. The soul itself cannot be measured directly but only by proxy, much in the same way that much of the lawfulness of the universe cannot be observed directly but only by proxy, which is to say that the lawfulness is implied by the multiplicity and variability of the expressed forms. Which brings us the proxy of the soul and to the heart with the weighing of the heart ceremony. We will use the lawful changes of the heart to demonstrate the third of the three principles of Ideal Judgement. (Note: We are talking about a spiritual idea, not actually cutting someone's heart out to weight it on a scale.)
The 3 principles of Ideal Judgment are as follows:
The Principles of Ideal Judgment
1. The universe is lawful.
2. The forms we observe are reflections of that lawfulness with a tendency toward it.
3. All lawful change must reflect a tendency toward the forms which themselves reflect universal lawfulness.
The principles of Ideal Judgment, demonstrated in the ancient Egyptian Weighing of the Heart ceremony, were likely passed on to the many Greek scholars who studied the craft of Amen-Ra, because it clear in examining Plato's Gorgias, that Plato was well acquainted with them.
The Weighing of the Heart ceremony
3. All lawful change must reflect a tendency toward the forms, which themselves reflect universal lawfulness.
We all understand the metaphor of the heavy heart. We associate a heavy heart with feeling bad, while we associate a lightness of heart with feeling good.
No human heart has likely ever existed exclusively as one or the other, the heart is constantly changing. We all understand the effects guilt, and we all know the effects of love. From this, we get a lawful relation between our actions and a feeling of either weightlessness or heaviness that affects the tendency of the heart and thus its nature. It follows from this, that our good deeds and evil deeds leave a measurable impact on the soul. This is to say that the heart, as a proxy of the soul, cannot lie as its actions must follow lawfully, irrespective of whether a person has been trained, or compelled, to lie with their mouth. This impact on the soul is reflected in the spiritual mass of the heart. This is not to say the spiritual mass at any particular moment, as the heart changes continuously. We are talking about the general trend that defines the tendency of the heart. Okay? So put your poetry hat on for a minute. Which brings us the possibly the earliest recorded demonstration of a lawful method for measuring change. It was necessarily the case that the Pharaoh's and their intellectual descendants in renaissance Athens, understood both that lawful change had an identifiable tendency, and that this tendency could be measured.
The ancients understood that lawful changes must tend toward a specified quality or combination of qualities. The forms as Plato describes them are representations of specified qualities, with identifiable tendencies. Which brings us to The Feather of Truth.
The Feather of Truth
2. The forms we observe are reflection of that lawfulness with a tendency toward it.
The Nubian ostrich feather, the standard by which the heart of the Pharaoh should be measured, is not representing a particular ostrich feather but is instead representing a general quality common to all feathers that is personified by the ostrich feather. The quality of near weightlessness. It make little to know impact when added or subtracted from a more substantial mass- or virtually any mass at all. Perhaps the first articulation approaching the concept of the infinitesimal. As with Plato's forms, ideals or standards are personifications of eternal or unchanging qualities applicable to all elements within a set. Therefore it is the quality of change that makes it lawful or unlawful, a determination that cannot be made without having some understanding of the nature of change, as well as the importance of taking into account the tendency of the change. It is necessary to understand the lawful tendency of a particular process of change, in order to determine an appropriate standard of measurement.
Misunderstanding this identifiable lawful tendency of change, as Gorgias and the later Aristotle both did, makes it impossible to determine a lawful standard. This is a possible reason that they both, as flatterers themselves, argued against the idea of standards all together. Aristotle's attack on Plato's theory of forms is an exemplary case. Perhaps this is the reason that Tahuti (Thoth) God of Measurement, the mental process etc. is conducting the ceremony, as he might prevent such an error. Now who is Tahuti?
Tahuti, Djehuti or Thoth
God of Mind, Thinking, Measurement, Science
It was Tahuti that created this system of measurement. He has spawned many movements including the cult of Hermes. The followers of this tradition deal mostly with alchemy and magic, but the only magic we will be discussing here is the magic of the human mind. Now returning to Tahuti, why would a scientist or the personification of the ideal scientist be given such a noble responsibility? It is clear, that for the pyramid builders, morality was of the province of science.
The Ceremony
During the ceremony, under the watchful eye of Osiris, 12 Judges, nobles and his assistants, such as Anubis and others , Tahuti use the scales of Maat to measure the spiritual mass of the heart against the feather of truth as the Pharaoh recites the 42 Negative confessions. I have not killed, I did not tell lies, I have not added mass to this scale...The heart that balances the scales with the feather of truth, is one reflecting, in its tendency towards weightlessness, a quality of goodness in the heart, from which Tahuti hypothe sized the necessary existence of a good soul. But one might ask: What makes a particular standard viable?
Natural Law Theory
1. The universe is lawful
Long before Thomas Aquinas or even Plato ever attempted to describe the form of natural law, the idea was implied in the depiction of the Weighing of the Heart ceremony. The design of the test constructed by Tahuti assumes without question that the forms we see occurring on earth and by extension in the universe, are examples of what works. This is simply to say, that the universe perpetuates that which is appropriate, in the sense of which functions well, and destroys or allows for the lawful destruction of, that which is inappropriate for serving no function. The ideals or forms, are just examples of what works. What has worked and will continue to work by law. Unfortunately lack of understanding might allow a clever person to declare evil as just simply because it exists or has existed, as indeed, many today would have you believe. But this is the fraud of an individual who has no Philo-Sophia or love of or friendship with wisdom. Understanding, as we shall explore more deeply with our Gorgias Series, proves that evil perpetuates itself on the back of the good. It has no power in itself, but it is the power of the good that sustains it. Lawful change must tend toward the good, with the good representing universal lawfulness.