What is culture?

Our aim is not to try to give a new definition to the word “culture” but rather to replace it back in its original scope. As opposed to nowadays understanding of it (the “accumulation” of knowledge), its etymology refers to a very special type of attitude regarding knowledge.

Culture comes from the Latin cultura which means working the land, as in agriculture. It was most of all hard working, with one’s own hands, the will to make the land flourish, to take care of life and to learn through sustained effort. The concept has thus little to do with the soft and cozy circles of today’s “cultivated” people!

Another Latin word having the same root is culter: a plowshare, used to open furrows in order to sow the seeds. Beyond the tool, the symbol of the plowshare had classically a tremendous importance: in Ancient Egypt, it was associated with “opening the ways”, the action of a person, through hard work, to open a way for others or new possibilities.

All our cultural activities tend towards this ideal: a culture in action, where the aim is not to fill one’s mind with information (culture for the sake of culture), but to constantly define the purpose of it and find ways of implementation.

These include:

• Lectures (*)
• Seminars (*)
• Visits to museums and archeological sites
• Building a library which currently holds more than two thousand books (El-Madrasa is one of the few NGOs that has the authorization by the Ministry of Social Affairs to act as a library).
• Theater and other artistic activities

Some of the lectures and seminars given at El-Madrasa in the past years:

• The legend of Hermes Trismegistus
• Lost civilizations and world enigmas
• The one thousand faces of Râ
• Mokhtar and the Renaissance of Egypt
• The Tao of Philosophy
• Could Don Quixote ride again in our streets?
• Deciphering the “Da Vinci Code”
• The untold story of Rome
• Magic and Medicine in Ancient Egypt
• Women are from Venus, men are from Mars
• The occult reasons for the feeling of hopelessness
• Dialog or clash of civilizations
• Magical music of Ancient Egypt
• The mysteries of the legendary Silk Road
• The land of Punt
• Mystical foundations of Martial Arts
• Prophecies about the end of the world
• The Secret Key to Egyptian Astrology
• Amenhotep son of Hapu
• Cats dogs and other animals in Ancient Egypt
• Alternative VS Conventional medicine: a moral conflict?
• NLP: Science or hoax?
• Echoes from the Tibetan Voice of the Silence
• Secret societies: The Enigma
• Feng-Shui: real science, genuine art, total magic
• Debunking Evolutionary Theory, a modern challenge
• From the light of Ahmose to the shadow of Salah El Din
• Magical stones and talismans
• Alchemy: The Ultimate Power of Transformation
• At the doors of a new collapse of civilization
• Uncovering the mysteries of the Golden Number
• Quantum Physics: Believe the Unbelievable
• Another Inconvenient Truth
• The Wisdom of the Numbers
• Socrates, the man who gave birth to souls
• Mounting robots or forming individuals, Education in the 21^st century
• The Wisdom of the Stars
• The Last Ancient Egyptian Philosopher
• The law of right relationship
• Inception: Is your mind the scene of a crime?
• The Myth of Osiris and the Rebirth of Egypt
• How to rebuild Egypt in 10 lessons with Plato?
• Media Literacy: The Age of Lies
• The Wisdom of Music