The Cy Grant Website

In the pursuit of scientific knowledge, molecular geneticists believe that they have traced the genetic history of the human race back to a common ancestor along maternal lines of descent to a woman who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. They named her the Mitochondrial Eve. If they are right*, it would seem that mankind’s common DNA spirals backwards in time to our earliest origins in Africa. The DNA double helix has been seen as a symbol of the unity of life - that there is indeed a script, and so meaning, to Life. Another striking symbol 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.
Yin-Yang

*Now the palaeontologists, archaeologists and the geneticists are finally piecing it together – 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 version]

In the pursuit of wisdom, beauty and truth, Pythagoras, the Greek Philosopher and founder of philosophy and “presiding genius of Western culture and originator of many of its guiding principles”, had studied in the Temples of Egypt for twenty-one years. Pythagorean philosophy was holistic and non-dual. Aristotle states that “Plato and Pythagoras think that being and unity are not something else, but that this is their nature; namely that their essential being is just to be one and to be being”. However, Peter Kingsley, in Ancient Philosophy, Mystery & Magic, suggests that it was Aristotle himself, along with Plato, who ‘consciously corrupted’ this non-dualism. Dualism inevitably became the fingerprint of the Western paradigm and its purely scientific and quantitative approach to Reality.

Pythagoras’ Music of the Spheres was most likely derived from the Egyptian sidereal musical scale which was connected to the movements of the planets. It bears testimony to his adherence to Cosmic forces as from a natural fountain or root. The deep structure of music was the deep structure of everything. There was indeed an implicate order – what was above was below. Music was a central discipline for the Pythagoreans and Pythagoras, himself was credited with discovering the overtone harmonic series in music.

I became interested in the overtone series, when I was asked to write a book on the Trinidad Steelpan [Ring of Steel, pan sound & symbol, Macmillan 2000]. It was a life changing experience as it led me to Pythagoras and his long sojourn in Africa, in the Temples of Egypt. This in turn, led to a retrospective overview of the extraordinary synchronicities that occurred during a lifetime in which I have been searching for meaning. The great grandson of a slave, my experience of racism heightened my search for identity: my discovery of Africa and my alienation from Europe which has consistently claimed the moral high ground in all matters, without acknowledging its debt to other cultures. I began to discover Europe’s need to impose its institutions on these cultures; its materialism, its need to control nature and to dominate; its dualism; its biased historiography and denigration of Africa.

In the Cahier D’un Retour Au Pays Natal (Return to my Native Land) Aime Cesaire extolled the concept of negritude, a concept which is generally misunderstood even by black intellectuals. Wole Soyinka, famously observed that ‘a tiger does not extol its tigritude.’ Of course, a tiger does not have to proclaim its intrinsic nature. A tiger epitomises awareness of environment; it is relaxed, cautious but confident, exuding grace and power in its every movement. The black man has been so dehumanised and traumatised by white domination that it becomes a necessary first step for him to redefine himself, to rediscover his humanity, his roots in Africa where the genetic journey of the whole human race began. Asserting his blackness is not only to challenge his perceived place in the over- all scheme of things but to rediscover his own history – the greatness of ancient African civilizations like Nubia, and Ethiopia, Benin and Egypt, that existed whilst Europe still slumbered in the dark ages. Egypt was where Pythagoras, the father of Western civilisation had studied for 21 years and where he coined the word ‘philosophy’, the search for truth.

We also now know that Egyptians, not Greeks, were the true founders of Western medicine. Scientists examining documents [medical papyri written in 1,500BC] dating back 3,500 years have found proof that the origins of modern Western medicine lie in Egypt and not with Hippocrates and the Greeks. [KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology at Manchester University]

The Cahier remains an impassioned plea for the emergence of a new man with new values other than the purely materialistic rationale of the West. It is also a call for a return to Nature. On the face of it, it may appear to be just an oppositional stance to white power, but at its deeper and more significant level, it articulates a fundamental sacred connection to a force vital, a panpsychism or animism that informs him, that pleads for a return to his native land, to the natural state of things, and the sacredness of existence, something that is made explicit in the Tao Te Ching.