We dismiss the ancient sages as “superstitious” at our peril.
What did they know that we have forgotten?
We may think of Daoism as a deep insight into human nature and the human condition. But historically, Daoism has been inseparable from various magical practices, especially divination, but also various recipes for warding off evil spirits and other “superstitious and magical thinking.”
We respect the spiritual insights of ancient sages, Patanjali and Socrates, Lao Tzu and Elijah and Jesus — but we know that their belief systems were polluted with superstitions. They believed in ghosts and spirits and we can’t take seriously the miraculous events that they recounted.
So we separate their philosophy from the events they recount and analyze the former with due seriousness, while making excuses for the latter — they must have been under the influence of primitive belief systems of their culture.
Isn’t this a bit arrogant, to assure ourselves that we now have the Truth in the form of our scientific world-view, while these sages of the past were all subject to delusion? Let’s consider the possibility that their accounts of ghosts and spirits and magical powers were real, and that we see less of these phenomena today either because we no longer believe the testament of our own eyes, or because the spirits have abandoned us.
3000 years ago, said Thoth to Asclepius:
I foresee that, in times to come, clever intellectuals will mislead the minds of men, turning them away from pure philosophy. It will be thought that our sacred devotion was ineffectual and the heart-felt piety and assiduous service with which we Egyptians honor Atum was a waste without reward.
Egypt is an image of the heavens, and the whole Cosmos dwells here, in this its sanctuary – But the gods will desert the earth and return to heaven, abandoning this land that was once the home of spirituality.
The ancients quarried stones that are ten times larger than anything that we could even lift with our monster cranes today. They cut brittle, extra-hard diorite paper-thin and formed it into shapes with precision typical of today’s computer-guided lathe. What did they know that we don’t know?
The ancient tech is to me the most mindboggling thing of this world aside from the origins of the cosmos and life. It's incredible that people spend decades studying this stuff, paying huge sums for advanced degrees, and are not able to see that the explanations offered don't come anywhere near the truth of how or why these structures came to be. It seems to me they are related to energy harvesting and transmission systems, most obvious in the antenna on ancient pagodas and spires on cathedrals and mosques that all bear undeniable resemblance to various types of modern antennae, capacitors, and resonators. How they quarried, machined, moved, and placed the megaliths seems "supernatural", or at the very least of a technology far beyond what we have today.