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there was neither death nor immortality. There was not a sign of day and night. This one breathed according to its own law without currents of air. Everything else but this was not present. In the beginning darkness was hidden in darkness... The life-powerful that was enclosed by the void, the one, was born by the might of its hot urgency ... We should take especial notice of the phrase 'the life-powerful ... was enclosed by the void'. As twentieth-century men we can hardly recognise this Song of Creation as anything but an account of a But who can explain convincingly why ancient peoples all over the world, who did not know of each other's existence, told stories of the creation with the same basic core? 'The meaning that one can invent is not the eternal meaning. The name that one can name is not the eternal name. Beyond the nameable lies the beginning of the world. On this side of the nameable lies According to this definition, too, the 'beginning of the world' lies outside our spheres; on this side, this side of the nameable’, lies only the ‘birth or creatures’. Egyptian priests provided the mummified dead in the tomb with texts containing instructions for their future behaviour on the other side. These books of the dead were very detailed; they contained advice covering every conceivable situation. The directives were meant to lead to reunion with the god Ptah. One of the oldest prayers in an Egyptian Book of the Dead runs: 'O world-egg, hear me. Iam Horus of millions of years. Iam lord and master of the throne. I am always delighted when I can 'prove' textual interpretations with pictures or, better still, tangible works by stonemasons. And circles, spheres and balls can be found in abundance. In the Tassili mountains in the Algerian Sahara figures in strange suits can be seen painted in hundreds of places on the rock face. They wear round helmets with antennae on their heads and seem to be floating weightlessly in space. I should make special mention of the Tassili sphere, which the Frenchman Henri Lhote discovered on the underside of a semi-circular rock. In a group of floating couples—a woman is pulling a man behind her—a sphere with four concentric circles is clearly visible. On the upper edge of the sphere a hatch is open and from it a thoroughly modern-looking TV aerial protrudes. From the right half of the sphere stretch two unmistakable hands with outspread fingers. "Was there an above, was there a below? ... Who knows for sure, who can say here whence they originated, whence this creation came?’ space journey. In the old Chinese classic Tao-te-king there is one of the most beautiful definitions of the origin of the cosmos, life and earth: the birth of creatures." Freed from evil, I traverse the ages and spaces that are endless.’