My Guide in Much of This is Robert Graves
However, psychic and scholar Alice Hickey saw the total ground that Graves covered as being much larger than poetry. She said to me one day,
"...Graves has a great deal to say about ....the Mother Goddess. He contends the Goddess dominated preliterate cultures, and that the celebrations of her power as Mother, Lover, Creator and Destroyer of Life can be detected across cultures....."
I have used somewhat the same approach in this blog and it has proved immensely fruitful. See Wikipedia's evaluation of Graves' thinking and methodology Let me give you some quotes from Graves himself that I particularly admire and try to adhere to:
“....that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to to keep civilization alive.”
“Fact is not truth, but a poet who willfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.”
I employed something like Graves' analeptic thinking when it was clear to me that something critical was missing from the "factual" evidence I had accumulated on a particular matter. I'll cite some of these intuitive/psychic insights later, because I found out that some of them were substantiated by archeological findings I was not aware of at the time. At any rate, the scenario I've been laying out for you as to when and why the Sphinx was carved, is also based on the following more "factual" information in addition to whatever was supplied to me by analeptic thinking, :
1) the artistic evidence indicating a very probable preliterate carving of face.
2) the spiritual/psychic nature of the Proto-Egyptian culture, and indeed, any preliterate culture.
3) the few preliterate historical facts that are available, e.g., weathering and the 6000 B.C. Mt. Aetna tsunami.
I might add that there was a great deal of whistling and eye rolling when Graves' book first came out, but it has long since stopped because none of the whistlers have ever proved his contentions to be in serious error. In addition, the work of archeologist Marija Gimbutas on Mother Goddess cultures was not available at the time the White Goddess was written (Graves' editions appeared in 1948, 1952 and 1961). Gimbutas' archeological proof of the actual existence of preliterate Mother Goddess Cultures gave even greater credence to Graves claims and squashed most archeological criticisms.
Gimbutas' books on Mother Goddess cultures were: The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974); The Language of the Goddess (1989), The Civilization of the Goddess (1991), all of which were based on her documented archeological findings and presented an overview of her conclusions about Neolithic cultures across Europe: housing patterns, social structure, art, religion, and the nature of literacy. The Civilization of the Goddess articulated what Gimbutas saw as the differences between the Old European system, which she considered goddess- and woman-centered (gynocentric), and the Bronze Age Indo-European patriarchal ("androcratic") culture which supplanted it. According to her interpretations, gynocentric (or matristic) societies were peaceful, they honored homosexuals, and they espoused economic equality.
It didn't help that Graves called most of the scholars in his field barbarians, and that ignited most of the academic criticism. It also just about sums up my own feeling about our establishment theorists. What Graves was really talking about was not their behavior, after all most were academics, but their barbarous thinking, that is, thinking that ignores more subtle forms of evidence: artistic, spiritual and social/cultural. It is a profound weakness in the scientific method when it is applied to areas of study like this, i.e., while the scientific method may be very good for developing and proving theories about particle physics, it is not very good for developing theories about the origin of the Sphinx.
So much for the open mind of science and the academies. Their grounds for initially rebuffing Bauval (outside of the fact that they had never taken the time and effort to investigate the obvious positional similarity of the Giza complex and the Orion constellation) was their firm but mistaken conviction that Dynastic Egypt was not a star-oriented culture but a sun-oriented culture.
This imitation was not done just for the fun of it, or as a show of majesty. The imitation was intended to be a physical representation of the spiritual journey of the Pharaoh's soul to become one with Orion/Osiris as described in the Pyramid Texts.
This finally forced the establishment theorists to totally revise their thinking about the sophisticated nature of Egyptian spirituality (and astronomical knowledge.) More importantly, it made all theorists face once and for all what I believe is absolutely essential to really understanding both Pre-Dynastic and Dynastic Egypt, namely that Egyptian spirituality from its very beginning was totally obsessed with the soul and its journey to immortality, because this was what the Dynastic imitation was all about.
It also made those same theorists face the fact that the Egyptians were prepared to do whatever was necessary to keep themselves in total harmony with the world of the Gods by artistically, spiritually, physically and socially imitating it in every possible way.
This muthos approach of imitation continued right into the logos culture of literate Dynastic Egypt and is the distinctive mark of Egyptian spirituality along with its Male/Female Balance. Egypt never succumbed to logos consciousness to the extent the Greek and Hebrew cultures did. It always remained balanced between logos consciousness and muthos consciousness. If you can begin to understand this, you can begin to understand ancient Egypt.