Somehow the West has ignored our origins in 'black' Africa. It still does not acknowledge it roots, locked as it is in a secular, empirical, dualistic, 'Scientific' worldview that persists in denying a spiritual dimension to life.

It continues to ignore the Hermetic tradition where alchemy as it is known in the West, had its roots. Such a tradition embodies the quest for a philosophy, integrating body, mind, spirit and the Soul – the ultimate truths about the Universe and our place in it. It also displays the connection between Chinese and African spirituality – yin [dark] and yang [light]; as above [heaven] so below [earth]; macrocosm [Cosmos] and microcosm [individual]; as within so without non-locality]; and most importantly, unity in diversity, the underlying raison d’etre of the Concord Multicultural Festivals I ran throughout Britain in the 1960’s.

Pythagoras, the founder of philosophy and presiding genius of Western culture and originator of many of its guiding principles, studied in the Temples of Egypt for twenty  one years.   In the book, Homage to Pythagoras, edited by Christopher Bamford, there is this quote: “Pythagorean thought is the seminal mystery of Greek civilization and recurs everywhere, impregnating almost all religion, poetry, philosophy, music, architecture, not to mention the ‘sciences’ which in many ways are still those of today” 

On his return to the country of his birth, the first thing Pythagoras did was to found his own school, known as the Cenobites or Pythagoreans. Its teaching was that in order to achieve harmony with oneself and with the kosmos, or universal order, one must follow the disciplines of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.  According to the Greek Philosopher, Iamblichus, Pythagoras was the first to call himself a philosopher, someone  with a love for wisdom, a science of objectified truth.

Pythagorean philosophy is based on Egyptian mathematical and religious pantheistic principles, grounded in a Nilotic concept of force, a force vitale, that unifies the whole of creation, animate and inanimate. This was the same life force the ancient Chinese Taoists cultivated and applied to all areas of their lives. The yin/yang symbol of union with the Cosmos is enfolded in the wu chi void of the supreme ultimate resolving all polarity. It is the same life force, force vital or modimo of African spirituality.

The DNA double helix is also a symbol of the unity of life, demonstrating   that there is indeed a script, and so meaning, to Life.  Another striking representation  of this unity is that of the intertwined snakes of the Caduceus, the therapeutic symbol of the Roman god of medicine, Aesculapius, which today is a symbol of the medical profession.
Fortunately, many modern Western scientists and thinkers are at last catching up with this ancient wisdom - that we live in a holographic Universe, that everything is enfolded in everything else and that an evolution of planetary consciousness is taking place. The latest scientific theory describes a ‘Zero Point’ field of energy,  stating that out of the so- called nothingness of space everything is manifest – energy and matter, the stars and galaxies and our own planet earth – thus confirming the ancient wisdom of the Tao, which records ‘out of the one came the ten thousand things’.
Today’s palaeontologists, archaeologists and the geneticists are finally piecing together the fact that we all came out of Africa.

[See Humanity’s greatest journey, New Scientist, 27 Oct 2007; and THE INDEPENDENT article 19 July 07, '"The skulls that prove we all came out of Africa" by Steve Connor, Science Editor - [ click here to read the online ]

Africa, the largest continent, (the whole greater than the sum of its parts) has been rejected as the dark continent of the Western psyche. But it is where, as we have seen, the hermetic tradition of Alchemy originated as did Western medicine.

It certainly was the inspiration for the Black Power movement and the struggle for Civil Rights in America and the popular slogan Black is Beautiful, which  in turn has direct links with the Women’s Liberation movement. It has been the moral imperative of Black thinkers, leaders like Frantz Fanon, the great Martiniquan  psychiatrist , philosopher ,, and author of Les Damnes de la Terre [The Wretched of the Earth], as well as his mentor Aimé Césaire, also from Martinique,  author of  Cahier d’une Retour aux Pays Natal [Return to My Native Land] and those they inspired – people like Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and now President Barack Obama --  who have changed and are changing the consciousness of the planet.

Fanon was  the pre-eminent black thinker of the twentieth century. . Although influenced by the Négritude  movement, his  works famously described the mechanics of the process of colonialism, inspiring the anti- colonial   liberation movements  throughout the world for more than four decades, but making it explicit that Consciousness was not just about being black, arising instead from political and social situations that affected colonized peoples of any racial category.

The moral imperative of the lives of these men changed or is changing the landscape of white dominance in the twentieth century and for all time. It proposes a new context for their work in Western society, outside the usual terms of ‘black versus white‛, one which realises that wholeness lies in an eternal balance of dark and light – in unity in diversity.