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Mysteries taught to a few "Jedi" by Priests/Priestesses who had taken vows of secrecy in a hierarchy of degrees of training. (Neophytes, Hierophants, Adepts; today its Padawans and Jedi Masters, etc.) The Egyptian Mysteries were said to be the key to a complete knowledge of the universe and man which was preserved in the Hermetic (Thoth) Books; however, in the 17th Century many of these books were proven to be a fraud; they were written by anonymous Greeks living in Egypt in the 2nd and 3rd Centuries; must have come from the Dark side of the Force. There still remains "The Emerald Tablet" of Hermes which is considered the Bible of Alchemy and Hermetic teachings. Its origins are vague and there is much debate over that issue; however, it appears in the West around 800 AD in the translation of a book of advice to Kings. Babylonian dualism (Zoroaster) and Egyptian Hermetics were picked up and spread to Greece and Rome by various philosophers like Plato and Pythagoras.

The earliest civilizations of Sumer/Babylon developed the Babylonian Doctrine of Apsu or the pre-existence of matter in the Primal Ocean; Plato, Pythagoras and others expounded on this idea which developed into the Doctrine of Emanations. "God" a force, the All, emanated out of itself into this physical world. Some Christians mixed this doctrine with their beliefs and voila....Gnostics were born. The Eleusinian mysteries and Jewish Kabbalah sprang from these philosophies. The Egyptian doctrine of Heka or the divine creation force explains all creation from a sacred mound which contained a Cosmic Egg from which the Sun god came. We won't get into all the phallic symbolism here; however, sexual energies play an enormous role in the belief system. Recent discoveries in Egypt of paintings of Babylonian style boats suggest that the Egyptian civilization possibly came directly from Babylon. Some histories note that Shamans were the first appearance of this doctrine of initiation into secret knowledge. Death and spiritual rebirth permeates all the mysteries in one way or another. The Shamans would ingest a psychedelic substance and "travel" to the Above in a visionary dream state where they usually experienced dismemberment and a rebirth of their bodies from a magical substance; they definitely were in a Galaxy far, far away. They became the "go-between" for the tribe administering knowledge and healing. So, you have the ancient shamans and philosophies of the Sumer/Babylonian culture spreading the schools

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