Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) did not believe his great discoveries in physics and mathematics were new. He thought this knowledge was known to thinkers of the ancient world such as Plato and Pythagoras. He believed these ideas had come into being long before the Flood, when they constituted part of a body of knowledge known in high antiquity as the Prisca Sapientia—the Pristine Wisdom.

Newton believed that knowledge of physical reality was only a part of the Prisca. He believed the Pristine Wisdom also contained knowledge of the soul of man. In numerous writings on alchemy, Biblical interpretation, Christian history and comparative mythology, Newton sought to reconstitute that part of the Prisca Sapientia that embodied knowledge of the soul. He thought that originally this knowledge and that of physical reality had formed a single whole. His aim was to recreate the Prisca Sapientia in its entirety as a ‘unified field theory’ of all knowledge. In so doing, he hoped to counteract the negative effects he saw stemming from a science shorn of spirituality; he foresaw the coming of technology. Newton failed in his efforts to balance science with spirituality. His unified field theory was never completed.

The Sovereign Soul: Sufism: A Path for Today by Phillip Gowins is Volume Two of New Paradigm Books’s THE NEWTON SERIES of books on Ancient Wisdom in the Modern World. Sir Isaac would have seen in the ritual dances of Sufism’s whirling dervishes—which in Rumi’s time were meant to emulate the movements of the planets—the descendent of the movements of the priests of ancient Egypt around a central fire (or “sun”) in the worship ceremony Newton called the Religion of the Prytaneum. Sir Isaac believed this religion had been brought by Noah through the Flood and that it had originally been organically linked to the knowledge of the soul of man of the Prisca Sapientia. He would have seen in the beliefs and practices of the Sufis of today the survival of a profound body of spiritual knowledge going back to the beginnings of mankind. He would have welcomed the wisdom of the Sufis as one of a number of gentle correctives to the negative effects of technology in the modern world.

Volume One of THE NEWTON SERIES of books on Ancient Wisdom in the Modern World is In Search of the Unitive Vision: Letters of Sri Madhava Ashish to an American Businessman, 1978-1997, compiled with a commentary by Seymour B. Ginsburg (New Paradigm Books, 2001). It contains an account of the insights into the primordial knowledge of mankind of Sri Madhava Ashish and G. I. Gurdjieff.
 

NEW PARADIGM BOOKS, 22491 Vistawood Way, Boca Raton, FL 33428,  Tel.: (561) 482-5971, Toll-Free: (800) 808-5179, FAX: (866) 212-0445, <darbyc@earthlink.net> <johnhalifax@bellsouth.net> <http://www.newpara.com>