Translation of the hieroglyphs still presents difficulties. In
any Egyptological journal, half the articles generally concern
unsolved problems of meaning, grammar and syntax. As it
stands, the hieroglyphs can be 'deciphered', but it is unjust to
say that they can be exactly 'translated'.
Champollion himself did not believe that he had revealed
all that the hieroglyphs conceal. But death prevented him
from following up his presentiments and subsequent scholars
have not done so either, contenting themselves with refinements
upon his original work. This failure has resulted in
translations that miss the spirit and sense of the texts. But
because Egyptologists have not found the metaphysical basis
of the whole of Egyptian civilization, they attribute the in coherence
of the texts to primitive and 'uninvolved' Egyptian thinking rather
than to fundamental shortcomings of their own.

As is so often the case with solved mysteries, once the solution
is provided it is difficult to see how it should not have been
discovered long ago. But though simple enough to explain
and illustrate, the symbolic key to the hieroglyphs requires a
kind of thinking that is diametrically opposed to the analytic
spirit of modern thought. The analytic mind rebels and refuses
to countenance a symbol that contains within a single sign a
complete hierarchy of meaning from the literal to the most abstract.
But this is what the hieroglyphs do.
Curiously enough, if Egyptologists stuck rigidly to an absolutely
literal translation of the texts, the underlying symbolic meaning would
almost force itself upon them; but by approaching the texts
cerebral, by trying to turn them into an equivalent of our
'literature', they effectively covered over this inner meaning.
Thus, the sign for 'bird' shows a bird. But the constant use of
this symbol in sacred texts suggests that the literal meaning
does not tell the whole story. And the ubiquitous symbol for
the 'soul' (the ba, a bird with a human head) provides the clue
to the symbolic meaning of 'bird'.
The sign refers not only to the physical bird, but also to
all the functions and properties that are contained within the
'idea' of bird: the ability to fly, to escape from the earth, and
hence the principle of volatility which ultimately implies 'spirit'.
When, in religious texts, the Egyptians carefully drew scenes of
men drawing closed a net full of wild birds, they were not merely
reminding the hovering disembodied dead of the pastimes of earth,
but performing a magic rite reminding him of the exigencies of the
spirit; of the need to capture, to 'draw the net' around the
volatile aspects of the spiritual self. The failure to understand
both the purpose of myth and its underlying verity contributes to the
current unsatisfactory picture of ancient Egypt.
Consonant with evolutionary thought, modern scholars regard myth as
either a quaint early attempt by primitives to rationalize the
baffling physical world, a romantic effort to escape from harsh,
matter of fact realities or as a clumsy artistic endeavor to
communicate historical and political realities.
Even Jung, who often saw wisdom where others saw only
superstition, attributed the universality of myth to the workings
of a mysterious 'collective unconscious'.
Schwaller de Lubicz comes to a contrary conclusion and substantiates
his claim. Myth may be the earliest known means of
communicating information related to the nature of the cosmos,
but it is also the most precise, the most complete, and perhaps the best.
Myth dramatizes cosmic laws, principles, processes,
relationships and functions, which in turn may be defined and
described by number and the interplay between numbers