21 januari 2025 | The Temple of the Whole World?

“Do you not know, Asclepius, that Egypt is an image of heaven…that everything governed and moved in heaven came down to Egypt and was transferred there? If truth were told, our land is the temple of the whole world.”
Or so writes the Hermetic Asclepius. Egyptian temples and their cult are perhaps the most enigmatic and iconic images of Orientalist Egypt, from the Greeks to the early 19th century European Bourgeoisie.
But what did the Egyptians themselves think constituted a temple? How was everyday land transformed into a sacred enclosure in which a cult image filled buildings with an emanation of divine presence, while at the same time, the entire cosmos with the radiance of divine manifestation?