Napoleon Bonaparte

The teaching

Taught from the record of his expedition to Egypt and of the lodges of his Empire, and the oracle sold under his name.

Egypt measured

What Napoleon stood for in the arts is the opposite of a mystery: Egypt was to be known by survey. With his army in 1798 went a commission of scholars, engineers and artists, and at Cairo he founded an Institute of Egypt with sections for mathematics, physics, political economy, and literature and the arts. They measured the temples and pyramids, copied the inscriptions, drew the reliefs, listed the plants and animals and described the life of the country, and the state printed the whole in three parts: the antiquities, the modern state and natural history.

The stone of Rosetta

The survey's greatest find was a slab of dark stone dug up in 1799 at Rashid, which the French called Rosetta, by soldiers rebuilding a fort. It carries one decree of the priests of Egypt in honour of Ptolemy V, written three times: in the hieroglyphs of the temples, in the demotic of daily writing, and in Greek. Because the Greek could be read, the stone was a key, and in 1822 Jean-François Champollion used it to read the hieroglyphs. From then on the Egyptians spoke for themselves, and the guesses of earlier centuries about a hidden wisdom in their signs gave way to their own words: hymns, prayers, accounts, letters and the books of the dead.

The zodiac of Dendera

In the temple of Hathor at Dendera the expedition's artist Vivant Denon drew a round zodiac carved on a ceiling, and in Paris it became a battleground: some read its stars as proof that Egyptian astronomy was many thousands of years old, older than the Bible's reckoning allowed. When Champollion could read the royal titles carved with it, they showed it to be a work of the Greek and Roman age, made after the signs of the Greek zodiac had come to Egypt, and not a relic of the first pharaohs.

The lodges as an arm of the state

Napoleon's rule for Freemasonry was use, not membership. The lodges were left free to meet and to multiply under grand officers drawn from his own family and government, so long as they kept to fraternity, charity and loyalty and left politics alone; regiments carried military lodges with them across Europe; and in return the lodges gave the Empire a network of loyal notables in every town. The craft became a part of the state's order, honoured and watched at once.

The Book of Fate

The oracle sold under his name after his death works by chance and a table. The one who consults it chooses a question from its list, then makes five rows of marks at random without counting them; each row is counted, and an odd number gives one mark and an even number two, so that the five rows make a figure, one of thirty-two. The figure and the question together point to an answer in the book. The book claims an ancient Egyptian source and says that Napoleon consulted it before his battles; it was made for the London trade, and he never saw it.