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A MAZE IN ZAZAZA ENTERS AZAZAZ AZAZAZAZAZAZAZZAZAZAZAZAZAZA ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZ THE MAGICALALPHABET ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA 12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262625242322212019181716151413121110987654321
BEYOND THE VEIL ANOTHER VEIL ANOTHER VEIL BEYOND
A HISTORY OF GOD Karen Armstrong 1993 The God of the Mystics Page 250 "Perhaps the most famous of the early Jewish mystical texts is the fifth century Sefer Yezirah (The Book of Creation). There is no attempt to describe the creative process realistically; the account is unashamedly symbolic and shows God creating the world by means of language as though he were writing a book. But language has been entirely transformed and the message of creation is no longer clear. Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet is given a numerical value; by combining the letters with the sacred numbers, rearranging them in endless configurations, the mystic weaned his mind away from the normal connotations of words."
THE LIGHT IS RISING NOW RISING IS THE LIGHT
....
LIGHT AND LIFE Lars Olof Bjorn 1976 Page 197 "By writing the 26 letters of the alphabet in a certain order one may put down almost any message (this book 'is written with the same letters' as the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Winnie the Pooh, only the order of the letters differs). In the same way Nature is able to convey with her language how a cell and a whole organism is to be constructed and how it is to function. Nature has succeeded better than we humans; for the genetic code there is only one universal language which is the same in a man, a bean plant and a bacterium."
"BY WRITING THE 26 LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET IN A CERTAIN ORDER ONE MAY PUT DOWN ALMOST ANY MESSAGE"
"FOR THE GENETIC CODE THERE IS ONLY ONE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE"
DNA AND DNA DNA AND DNA DNA AND DNA
DNA AND DNA DNA AND DNA DNA AND DNA
A QUEST FOR THE BEGINNING AND THE END Graham Hancock 1995 Chapter 32 Speaking to the Unborn Page 285 "It is understandable that a huge range of myths from all over the ancient world should describe geological catastrophes in graphic detail. Mankind survived the horror of the last Ice Age, and the most plausible source for our enduring traditions of flooding and freezing, massive volcanism and devastating earthquakes is in the tumultuous upheavals unleashed during the great meltdown of 15,000 to 8000 BC. The final retreat of the ice sheets, and the consequent 300-400 foot rise in global sea levels, took place only a few thousand years before the beginning of the historical period. It is therefore not surprising that all our early civilizations should have retained vivid memories of the vast cataclysms that had terrified their forefathers. A message in the bottle of time 'Of all the other stupendous inventions,' Galileo once remarked, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very distant either in time or place, speaking with those who are in the Indies, speaking to those who are not yet born, nor shall be this thousand or ten thousand years? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangements of two dozen little signs on paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of men.3 If the 'precessional message' identified by scholars like Santillana, von Dechend and Jane Sellers is indeed a deliberate attempt at communication by some lost civilization of antiquity, how come it wasn't just written down and left for us to find? Wouldn't that have been easier than encoding it in myths? Perhaps. "What one would look for, therefore, would be a universal language, the kind of language that would be comprehensible to any technologically advanced society in any epoch, even a thousand or ten thousand years into the future. Such languages are few and far between, but mathematics is one of them" "WRITTEN IN THE ETERNAL LANGUAGE OF MATHEMATICS"
THERE IS NO ATTEMPT MADE TO DESCRIBE THE CREATIVE PROCESS REALISTICALLY THE ACCOUNT IS SYMBOLIC AND SHOWS GOD CREATING THE WORLD BY MEANS OF LANGUAGE AS THOUGH WRITING A BOOK BUT LANGUAGE ENTIRELY TRANSFORMED THE MESSAGE OF CREATION IS CLEAR EACH LETTER OF THE ALPHABET IS GIVEN A NUMERICAL VALUE BY COMBINING THE LETTERS WITH THE SACRED NUMBERS REARRANGING THEM IN ENDLESS CONFIGURATIONS THE MYSTIC WEANED THE MIND AWAY FROM THE NORMAL CONNOTATIONS OF WORDS
....
THE LIGHT IS RISING NOW RISING IS THE LIGHT
THE LIGHT IS RISING RISING IS THE LIGHT
THIS IS THE SCENE OF THE SCENE UNSEEN THE UNSEEN SEEN OF THE SCENE UNSEEN THIS IS THE SCENE
THE LIGHT IS RISING NOW RISING IS THE LIGHT “THE WORLD IS BUILT UPON THE POWER OF NUMBERS”
STUVWXYZ 180 ZYXWVUTS STUVWXYZ 36 ZYXWVUTS STUVWXYZ 9 ZYXWVUTS
JUST SIX NUMBERS Martin Rees 1 OUR COSMIC HABITAT PLANETS STARS AND LIFE Page 24 A proton is 1,836 times heavier than an electron, and the number 1,836 would have the same connotations to any 'intelligence' Page 24 / 25
A proton is 1,836 times heavier than an electron, and the number 1,836 would have the same connotations to any 'intelligence'
THE DEATH OF GODS IN ANCIENT EGYPT Jane B. Sellars 1992 Page 204 "The overwhelming awe that accompanies the realization, of the measurable orderliness of the universe strikes modern man as well. Admiral Weiland E. Byrd, alone In the Antarctic for five months of polar darkness, wrote these phrases of intense feeling: Here were the imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos, harmonious and soundless. Harmony, that was it! I could feel no doubt of oneness with the universe. The conviction came that the rhythm was too orderly. too harmonious, too perfect to be a product of blind chance - that, therefore there must be purpose in the whole and that man was part of that whole and not an accidental offshoot. It was a feeling that transcended reason; that went to the heart of man's despair and found it groundless. The universe was a cosmos, not a chaos; man was as rightfully a part of that cosmos as were the day and night.10 Returning to the account of the story of Osiris, son of Cronos god of' Measurable Time, Plutarch takes, pains to remind the reader of the original Egyptian year consisting of 360 days. Phrases are used that prompt simple mental. calculations and an attention to numbers, for example, the 360-day year is described as being '12 months of 30 days each'. Then we are told that, Osiris leaves on a long journey, during which Seth, his evil brother, plots with 72 companions to slay Osiris: He also secretly obtained the measure of Osiris and made ready a chest in which to entrap him. The, interesting thing about this part of the-account is that nowhere in the original texts of the Egyptians are we told that Seth, has 72 companions. We have already been encouraged to equate Osiris with the concept of measured time; his father being Cronos. It is also an observable fact that Cronos-Saturn has the longest sidereal period of the known planets at that time, an orbit. of 30 years. Saturn is absent from a specific constellation for that length of time. A simple mathematical fact has been revealed to any that are even remotely sensitive to numbers: if you multiply 72 by 30, the years of Saturn's absence (and the mention of Osiris's absence prompts one to recall this other), the resulting product is 2,160: the number of years required, for one 30° shift, or a shift: through one complete sign of the zodiac. This number multplied by the / Page205 / 12 signs also gives 25,920. (And Plutarch has reminded us of 12) If you multiply the unusual number 72 by 360, a number that Plutarch mentions several times, the product will be 25,920, again the number of years symbolizing the ultimate rebirth. This 'Eternal Return' is the return of, say, Taurus to the position of marking the vernal equinox by 'riding in the solar bark with. Re' after having relinquished this honoured position to Aries, and subsequently to the to other zodiacal constellations. Such a return after 25,920 years is indeed a revisit to a Golden Age, golden not only because of a remarkable symmetry In the heavens, but golden because it existed before the Egyptians experienced heaven's changeability. But now to inform the reader of a fact he or she may already know. Hipparaus did: not really have the exact figures: he was a trifle off in his observations and calculations. In his published work, On the Displacement of the Solstitial and Equinoctial Signs, he gave figures of 45" to 46" a year, while the truer precessional lag along the ecliptic is about 50 seconds. The exact measurement for the lag, based on the correct annual lag of 50'274" is 1° in 71.6 years, or 360° in 25,776 years, only 144 years less than the figure of 25,920. With Hipparchus's incorrect figures a 'Great Year' takes from 28,173.9 to 28,800 years, incorrect by a difference of from 2,397.9 years to 3,024. Since Nicholas Copernicus (AD 1473-1543) has always been credited with giving the correct numbers (although Arabic astronomer Nasir al-Din Tusi,11 born AD 1201, is known to have fixed the Precession at 50°), we may correctly ask, and with justifiable astonishment 'Just whose information was Plutarch transmitting' AN IMPORTANT POSTSCRIPT Of course, using our own notational system, all the important numbers have digits that reduce to that amazing number 9 a number that has always delighted budding mathematician. Page 206 Somewhere along the way, according to Robert Graves, 9 became the number of lunar wisdom.12 This number is found often in the mythologies of the world. the Viking god Odin hung for nine days and nights on the World Tree in order to acquire the secret of the runes, those magic symbols out of which writing and numbers grew. Only a terrible sacrifice would give away this secret, which conveyed upon its owner power and dominion over all, so Odin hung from his neck those long 9 days and nights over the 'bottomless abyss'. In the tree were 9 worlds, and another god was said to have been born of 9 mothers. Robert Graves, in his White Goddess, Is intrigued by the seemingly recurring quality of the number 72 in early myth and ritual. Graves tells his reader that 72 is always connected with the number 5, which reflects, among other things, the five Celtic dialects that he was investigating. Of course, 5 x 72= 360, 360 x 72= 25,920. Five is also the number of the planets known to the ancient world, that is, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus Mercury. Graves suggests a religious mystery bound up with two ancient Celtic 'Tree Alphabets' or cipher alphabets, which as genuine articles of Druidism were orally preserved and transmitted for centuries. He argues convincingly that the ancient poetry of Europe was ultimately based on what its composers believed to be magical principles, the rudiments of which formed a close religious secret for centuries. In time these were-garbled, discredited and forgotten. Among the many signs of the transmission of special numbers he points out that the aggregate number of letter strokes for the complete 22-letter Ogham alphabet that he is studying is 72 and that this number is the multiple of 9, 'the number of lunar wisdom'. . . . he then mentions something about 'the seventy day season during which Venus moves successively from. maximum eastern elongation 'to inferior conjunction and maximum western elongation'.13 Page 207 "...Feniusa Farsa, Graves equates this hero with Dionysus. Farsa has 72 assistants who helped him master the 72 languages created at the confusion of Babel, the tower of which is said to be built of 9 different materials We are also reminded of the miraculous translation into Greek of the Five Books of Moses that was done by 72 scholars working for 72 days, Although the symbol for the Septuagint is LXX, legend, according to the fictional letter of Aristeas, records 72. The translation was done for Ptolemy Philadelphus (c.250 BC), by Hellenistic Jews, possibly from Alexandra.14 Graves did not know why this number was necessary, but he points out that he understands Frazer's Golden Bough to be a book hinting that 'the secret involves the truth that the Christian dogma, and rituals, are the refinement of a great body of primitive beliefs, and that the only original element in Christianity- is the personality of Christ.15 Frances A. Yates, historian of Renaissance hermetisma tells, us the cabala had 72 angels through which the sephiroth (the powers of God) are believed to be approached, and further, she supplies the information that although the Cabala supplied a set of 48 conclusions purporting to confirm the Christian religion from the foundation of ancient wisdom, Pico Della Mirandola, a Renaissance magus, introduced instead 72, which were his 'own opinion' of the correct number. Yates writes, 'It is no accident there are seventy-two of Pico's Cabalist conclusions, for the conclusion shows that he knew something of the mystery of the Name of God with seventy-two letters.'16 In Hamlet's Mill de Santillana adds the facts that 432,000 is the number of syllables in the Rig-Veda, which when multiplied by the soss (60) gives 25,920" (The reader is forgiven for a bit of laughter at this point) The Bible has not escaped his pursuit. A prominent Assyriologist of the last century insisted that the total of the years recounted mounted in Genesis for the lifetimes of patriarchs from the Flood also contained the needed secret numbers. (He showed that in the 1,656 years recounted in the Bible there are 86,400 7 day weeks, and dividing this number yields / Page 208 / 43,200.) In Indian yogic schools it is held that all living beings exhale and inhale 21,600 times a day, multiply this by 2 and again we have the necessary 432 digits. Joseph Campbell discerns the secret in the date set for the coming of Patrick to Ireland. Myth-gives this date-as-the interesting number of AD.432.18 Whatever one may think-of some of these number coincidences, it becomes difficult to escape the suspicion that many signs (number and otherwise) - indicate that early man observed the results of the movement of Precession and that the - transmission of this information was considered of prime importance. With the awareness of the phenomenon, observers would certainly have tried for its measure, and such an endeavour would have constituted the construction-of a 'Unified Field Theory' for nothing less than Creation itself. Once determined, it would have been information worthy of secrecy and worthy of the passing on to future adepts. But one last word about mankind's romance with number coincidences.The antagonist in John Updike's novel, Roger's Version, is a computer hacker, who, convinced, that scientific evidence of God's existence is accumulating, endeavours to prove it by feeding -all the available scientific information. into a comuter. In his search for God 'breaking, through', he has become fascinated by certain numbers that have continually been cropping up. He explains them excitedly as 'the terms of Creation': "...after a while I noticed that all over the sheet there seemed to hit these twenty-fours Jumping out at me. Two four; two, four. Planck time, for instance, divided by the radiation constant yields a figure near eight times ten again to the negative twenty-fourth, and the permittivity of free space, or electric constant, into the Bohr radius ekla almost exactly six times ten to the negative twenty-fourth. On positive side, the electromagnetic line-structure constant times Hubble radius - that is, the size of the universe as we now perceive it gives us something quite close to ten to the twenty-fourth, and the strong-force constant times the charge on the proton produces two point four times ten to the negative eighteenth, for another I began to circle twenty-four wherever it appeared on the Printout here' - he held it up his piece of stripped and striped wallpaper, decorated / Page 209 /
with a number of scarlet circles - 'you can see it's more than random.'19 So much for any scorn directed to ancient man's fascination with number coincidences. That fascination is alive and well, Just a bit more incomprehensible"
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN Thomas Mann 1875-1955 Page 466 "Had not the normal, since time was, lived on the achievements of the abnormal? Men consciously and voluntarily descended into disease and madness, in search of knowledge which, acquired by fanaticism, would lead back to health; after the possession and use of it had ceased to be conditioned by that heroic and abnormal act of sacrifice. That was the true death on the cross, the true Atonement."
THE TRUE DEATH ON THE CROSS THE TRUE AT ONE MENT
ATONEMENT
GREETINGS CITIZENS OF PLANET EARTH
FIRST CONTACT STAR TREK A novel by J.M. Dillard based on the film STAR TREK; FIRST CONTACT Story by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga & Ronald D. Moore Screenplay by Brannon Braga & Ronald D. Moore 1996 First STAR TREK FIRST CONTACT Second STAR TREK FIRST CONTACT This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Third STAR TREK FIRST CONTACT
AVATAR 3 AVATAR
BLESSED BE THE FRUIT OF THAT WOMBS FOETUS
THIRTEEN = 99 99 = THIRTEEN
BLESSED BE THE FRUIT OF THAT WOMBS FOETUS
THIRTEEN = 99 99 = THIRTEEN
THIRTEEN = 99 99 = THIRTEEN
NUMBERS REARRANGED IN NUMERICAL ORDER
LETTERS RE ARRANGED NUMERICALLY
Archetype | Definition of Archetype at Dictionary.com www.dictionary.com › browse › archetypearchetype. [ (ahr-ki-teyep) ] An original model after which other similar things are patterned. In the psychology of Car l Jung, archetypes are the images, patterns, and symbols (see also symbol) that rise out of the collective unconscious and appear in dreams, mythology, and fairy tales.
Archetype - Wikipedia The concept of an archetype /'??rk?ta?p/ appears in areas relating to behavior, historical ... The term 'archetype' is often misunderstood as meaning certain definite mythological images or motifs, but these are nothing more than conscious ... The concept of an archetype /'??rk?ta?p/ appears in areas relating to behavior, historical ... The term 'archetype' is often misunderstood as meaning certain definite mythological images or motifs, but these are nothing more than conscious ... Archetypes are also very close analogies to instincts in the sense that its impersonal and inherited traits that present and motivate human behavior long before any consciousness develops.[1] They also continue to influence feelings and behavior even after some degree of consciousness developed later on.[1] Etymology[edit] The word archetype, "original pattern from which copies are made", first entered into English usage in the 1540s[2] and derives from the Latin noun archetypum, latinisation of the Greek noun ????t?p?? (archétypon), whose adjective form is ????t?p?? (archétypos), which means "first-molded",[3] which is a compound of ???? arch?, "beginning, origin",[4] and t?p?? týpos, which can mean, amongst other things, "pattern", "model", or "type".[5] It, thus, referred to the beginning or origin of the pattern, model or type.[6] Function[edit] Usage of archetypes in specific pieces of writing is a holistic approach, which can help the writing win universal acceptance. This is because readers can relate to and identify with the characters and the situation, both socially and culturally. By deploying common archetypes contextually, a writer aims to impart realism[7] to their work. According to many literary critics, archetypes have a standard and recurring depiction in a particular human culture and/or the whole human race that ultimately lays concrete pillars and can shape the whole structure in a literary work. There is also the position that the use of archetypes in different ways is possible because every archetype has multiple manifestations, with each one featuring different attributes.[8] For instance, there is the position that the function of the archetype must be approached according to the context of biological sciences and is accomplished through the concept of the ultimate function.[9] This pertains to the organism's response to those pressures in terms of biological trait.[9] Plato[edit] Main article: Theory of Forms The origins of the archetypal hypothesis date as far back as Plato. Plato's ideas or the so-called Platonic eidos were pure mental forms that were imprinted in the soul before it was born into the world. Some philosophers also translate the archetype as "essence" in order to avoid confusion with respect to Plato's conceptualization of Forms.[10] While it is tempting to think of Forms as mental entities (ideas) that exist only in our mind, the philosopher insisted that they are independent of any minds (real).[10] Eidos were collective in the sense that they embodied the fundamental characteristics of a thing rather than its specific peculiarities. In the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas Browne and Francis Bacon both employ the word 'archetype' in their writings; Browne in The Garden of Cyrus (1658) attempted to depict archetypes in his usage of symbolic proper-names. Jungian archetypes[edit] Main article: Jungian archetypes The concept of psychological archetypes was advanced by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, c. 1919. Jung has acknowledged that his conceptualization of archetype is influenced by Plato's eidos, which he described as "the formulated meaning of a primordial image by which it was represented symbolically."[11] According to Jung, the term archetype is an explanatory paraphrase of the Platonic eidos, also believed to represent the word "form".[11] He maintained that Platonic archetypes are metaphysical ideas, paradigms or models and that real things are held to be only copies of these model ideas.[11] However, archetypes are not easily recognizable in Plato's works in the way in which Jung meant them.[12] In Jung's psychological framework, archetypes are innate, universal prototypes for ideas and may be used to interpret observations.[6] A group of memories and interpretations associated with an archetype is a complex ( e.g. a mother complex associated with the mother archetype). Jung treated the archetypes as psychological organs, analogous to physical ones in that both are morphological constructs that arose through evolution.[13] At the same time, it has also been observed that evolution can itself be considered an archetypal construct.[14] Jung states in part one of Man And His Symbols that: My views about the 'archaic remnants', which I call 'archetypes' or 'primordial images,' have been constantly criticized by people who lack sufficient knowledge of the psychology of dreams and of mythology. The term 'archetype' is often misunderstood as meaning certain definite mythological images or motifs, but these are nothing more than conscious representations. Such variable representations cannot be inherited. The archetype is a tendency to form such representations of a motif—representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern. While there are a variety of categorizations of archetypes, Jung's configuration is perhaps the most well known and serves as the foundation for many other models. The four major archetypes to emerge from his work, which Jung originally terms primordial images, include the anima/animus, the self, the shadow, and the persona. Additionally, Jung referred to images of the wise old man, the child, the mother, and the maiden.[15] He believed that each human mind retains these basic unconscious understandings of the human condition and the collective knowledge of our species in the construct of the collective unconscious. Other authors have attributed 12 different archetypes to Jung, organized in three overarching categories, based on a fundamental driving force. These include:[16] The Soul Types 1.The Explorer The Self Types 1.The Jester Dichter's application of archetypes[edit] Later in the 1900s, a Viennese psychologist named Dr. Ernest Dichter took these psychological constructs and applied them to marketing. Dichter moved to New York around 1939 and sent every ad agency on Madison Avenue a letter boasting of his new discovery. He found that applying these universal themes to products promoted easier discovery and stronger loyalty for brands.[17] Story archetypes[edit] Christopher Booker, author of The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories,[18] argues that the following basic archetypes underlie all stories: These themes coincide with the characters of Jung's archetypes. Archetypal literary criticism[edit] Main article: Archetypal literary criticism Archetypal literary criticism argues that archetypes determine the form and function of literary works and that a text's meaning is shaped by cultural and psychological myths. Cultural archetypes are the unknowable basic forms personified or made concrete by recurring images, symbols, or patterns (which may include motifs such as the "quest" or the "heavenly ascent"; recognizable character types such as the "trickster", "saint", "martyr" or the "hero"; symbols such as the apple or the snake; and imagery) and that have all been laden with meaning prior to their inclusion in any particular work. The archetypes reveal shared roles among universal societies, such as the role of the mother in her natural relations with all members of the family. This archetype may create a shared imagery which is defined by many stereotypes that have not separated themselves from the traditional, biological, religious and mythical framework.[19]
The Holy Communion, known also as the Lord's Supper, represents the greatest expression of God's love for His people.
The significance of taking the Holy Communion | The New ... 9 Apr 2017 - The significance of taking the Holy Communion. During the last supper in Mathew 26:17-29, while Jesus was reclining at the table with his ...
Religions - Christianity: Eucharist - BBC 23 Jun 2009 - The Eucharist, which is also called the Holy Communion, Mass, the Lord's Supper or the Divine Liturgy, is a sacrament accepted by almost all Christians. Christians don't say that they 'do' or 'carry out' the Eucharist; they celebrate it.
Of all seven sacraments, the Holy Eucharist, or Holy Communion, is the most central and important to Catholicism. Holy Communion is offered at every Mass, ...
THREES = 75 = THREES THREES = 30 = THREES THREES = 3 = THREES
HOLY BIBLE
They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.
NATION WILL NOT TAKE UP SWORD AGAINST NATION
What Scripture is on the United Nations building? The full quote comes from the book of the Prophet Isaiah: “He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
I AM THE OPPOSITE OF THE OPPOSITE I AM THE OPPOSITE OF OPPOSITE IS THE AM I ALWAYS AM
NINETY NINE - NINE
NINETY NINE - NINE
oldredliontheatre.co.uk/the-ninety-nine-point-nine.html The Ninety Nine Point Nine - Old Red Lion Theatre cow juice theatre presents THE NINETY NINE POINT NINE
NINE - THOUSAND - NINE - HUNDRED - AND - NINETY - NINE 5955 - THOUSAND - 5955 - HUNDRED - AND - 595527 - 5955 NINE - THOUSAND - NINE - HUNDRED -AND - NINETY - NINE
Nine-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine dictionary ... www.yourdictionary.com › nine-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-...
NINE - THOUSAND - NINE - HUNDRED - AND - NINETY - NINE 5955 - 28631154 - 5955 - 8354954 -154 - 595527 - 5955 NINE - THOUSAND - NINE - HUNDRED - AND - NINETY - NINE
ninety-nine - Dictionary Definition : Vocabulary.com adj being nine more than ninety. Synonyms: 99, ic · cardinal. being or denoting a numerical quantity but not order. Word Family. ninety-nine. the "ninety-nine" ...
What does NINETEEN NINETY-NINE mean? - Definitions.net Here are all the possible meanings and translations of the word NINETEEN NINETY-NINE
NINETEEN NINETY-NINE 5I55T555 5I55TY-5I55 NINETEEN NINETY-NINE
Nine-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine dictionary ...
nine-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine definition: Related terms 1. Ordinal: nine-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-ninth....
GREETINGS CHILD OF THE RAINBOW
THE HOURS OF HORUS THAT I OF THAT I OF THAT I THAT I AM SALUTES THE ALMIGHTY THAT IS THEE PEACE BE UNTO YOU GOODWILL UNTO ALL SENTIENT BEINGS
HEAVEN ABOVE HEAVEN BELOW STARS ABOVE STARS BELOW ALL THAT IS OVER UNDER SHALL SHOW HAPPY ART THOU THAT THIS RIDDLE SHALL KNOW
KEEPER OF GENESIS A QUEST FOR THE HIDDEN LEGACY OF MANKIND Robert Bauval Graham Hancock 1996 Return to the Beginning Page 283 the genesis, who were the authors of their own forms, who wallced the dark, circuitous passages of their own becoming. . . I stand before the masters who witnessed the transformation of the body of a man into the body in spirit, who were witnesses to resurrection when the corpse of Osiris entered the mountain and the soul of Osiris walked out shining. . . when he came forth from death, a shining thing, his face white with heat. . . I stand before the masters who know the histories of the dead, who decide which tales to hear again, who judge the books of lives as either fun or empty, who are themselves authors of truth. And they are Isis and Osiris, the divine intelligences. And when the story is written and the end is good and the soul of a man is perfected, with a shout they lift him into heaven. . .' Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (NorrnandiEllis translation)
'I STAND BEFORE THE MASTERS WHO WITNESSED THEGENESIS, WHO WERE THE AUTHORS OF THEIR OWN FORMS, WHO WALKED THE DARK, CIRCUITOUSPASSAGES OF THEIR OWN BECOMING... I STAND BEFORE THE MASTERS WHO WITNESSEDTHE TRANSFORMATION OF THE BODY OF A MAN INTO THE BODY IN SPIRIT, WHO WERE WITNESSES TO RESURRECTION WHEN THE CORPSE OF OSIRIS ENTERED THE MOUNTAINAND THE SOUL OF OSIRIS WALKED OUT SHINING... WHEN HE CAME FORTH FROM DEATH,A SHINING THING, HIS FACE WHITE WITH HEAT... I STAND BEFORE THE MASTERSWHO DECIDE WHICH TALES TO HEAR AGAIN, WHO JUDGE THE BOOKS OF LIVES AS EITHERFUN OR EMPTY, WHO ARE THEMSELVES AUTHORS OF TRUTH. AND THEY ARE ISIS ANDOSIRIS, THE DIVINE INTELLIGENCES. AND WHEN THE STORY IS WRITTEN AND THEEND IS GOOD AND THE SOUL OF A MAN IS PERFECTED, WITH A SHOUT THEY LIFT HIMINTO HEAVEN...'
The dictionary tells us that, separately from itsmodem usage, the word 'glamour' has a traditional meaning roughly equivalentto 'magic spell' or 'charm', and is the Old Scottish variant of: 'grammar. . . hence a magic spell, because occult practices were popularly associatedwith learning.' Is it possible that men and women of great wisdomand learning cast a 'glamour' over the Giza necropolis at some point inthe distant / Page 284 / past? Were they the possessors of as yet unguessed-atsecrets that they wished to hide here? And did they succeed in concealingthose secrets almost in plain view? For thousands of years, in other words,has the ancient Egyptian royal cemetary at Giza veiled the presence of somethingelse - something of vastly greater significance for the story of Mankind? One thing we are sure of is that unlike the hundredsof Fourth-Dynasty mastaba tombs to the west of the Sphinx and clusteredaround the three great Pyramids, the Pyramids themselves were never designedto serve primarily as burial places. We do not rule out the possibilitythat the Pharaohs Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure may at one time have been buriedwithin them - although there is no evidence for this - but we are now satisfiedthat the transcendent effort and skill that went into the construction ofthese awe-inspiring monuments was motivated by a higher purpose. We think that purpose was connected to the questfor eternal life wrapped up in a complete religious and spiritual systemthat the ancient Egyptians inherited from unknown predecessors and thatthey later codified in their eerie and other-worldly funerary and rebirthtexts. We suggest, in short, that it was the goal of immortality, not justfor one Pharaoh but for many, that the corridors and passages and hiddenchambers and concealed gates and doorways of the Giza complex were ultimatelydesigned to serve. Depicted in the Book of What is in the Duat as beingfilled with monsters, these narrow, claustrophobic, terrifying places, hemmedin on all sides by sheer stone walls, were in our view conceived as theultimate testing ground for initiates. Here they would be forced to faceand overcome their most horrible and debilitating fears. Here they wouldpass through unimaginable ordeals of the spirit and the mind. Here theywould learn esoteric wisdom through acts of concentrated intelligence andwill. Here they would be prepared, through practice and experience, forthe moment of physical death and for the nightmares that would follow it,so that these transitions would not confuse or paralyse them - as they mightother, unprepared, souls - and so that they might become 'equipped spirits'able to move as they wished through heaven and earth, 'unfailingly, andregularly and eternally'.1 Such was the lofty goal of the Horus-King's questand the ancient / Page285 / Egyptians clearly believed that in order toattain it the initiate would have to participate in the discovery, the unveiling,the revelation, of something of momentous importance - something that wouldbestow wisdom, and knowledge of the 'First Time', and of the mysteries ofthe cosmos, and of Osiris, the Once and Future King. We are therefore reminded of a Hermetic Text, writtenin Greek but compiled in Alexandria in Egypt some 2000 years ago, that isknown as the Kore Kosmu (or Virgin of the World).2 Like other such writings, this text speaks of Thoth, the ancient Egyptianwisdom-god, but refers to him by his Greek name, Hermes: Such was all-knowing Hermes, who saw all things,and seeing understood, and understanding had the power both to discloseand to give explanation. For what he knew, he graved on stone; yet thoughhe graved them onto stone he hid them mostly. . . The sacred symbols ofthe cosmic elements [he] hid away hard by the secrets of Osiris.. . keeping- sure silence, that every younger age of cosmic time might seekfor them! The text then tells us that before he 'returned toHeaven' Hermes invoked a spell on the secret writings and knowledge thathe had hidden: O holy books, who have been made by my immortal hands,by incorruption's magic spells. . . free from decay throughout eternityremain, and incorrupt from time. Become unseeable, unfindable, for everyonewhose foot shall tread the plains of this land, until Old Heaven doth bringforth meet instruments for you. . .' What instruments might lead to the recovery of 'unseeableand unfindable' secrets concealed at Giza? Our research has persuaded us that a scientific languageof precessional time and allegorical astronomy was deliberately expressedin the principal monuments there and in the texts that relate to them. Fromquite an early stage in our investigation, we hoped that this language mightshed new light on the enigmatic civilization of Egypt."
Page 139 8 'Newton. . . was the last of the magicians.. . Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked at the whole universe and all that isin it as a riddle, as a secret that could be readby applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher's treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the heavens. . . partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the bretheren . . . By pure thought, by concentration of mind, the riddle, he believed, would be revealed to theinitiate. . .' John Maynard Keynes, The Royal Society, NewtonTercentenary Celebrations, 1947
KEEPER OF GENESIS A QUEST FOR THE HIDDEN LEGACY OF MANKIND Robert Bauval 1996 Graham Hancock Page 238 Chapter 15 WHEN THE SKY JOINED THE EARTH Ptahotep, a high priest of the Pyramid Age "My kingdom is not of this world. . . ."
JOHN 18:36 JOHN
THE HOLY BIBLE Scofield Reference Page 1141 JOHN AD 33 Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if mykingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I shouldnot be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence. 18:37 Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To thisend was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I shouldbear witness unto the truth. Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice. 18:38 Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And whenhe had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them,I find in him no fault at all.
JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS THOMAS MANN 1875 -1955 Page 966 "The all-important thing is to avoid the great perilto the honour of humanity, that man should bow down before a lower thanthe highest. 'Mighty art thou,' he said to Shamash-Marduk':Bel, 'and mightyis thy power of blessing and cursing. But something there is above thee,in me a worm, and it warns me not to take the witness for that which itwitnesses. The greater the witness, the greater the fault in me if I letmyself be misled to worship it instead of that to which it bears witness.Godlike is the witness, but yet not God. I too am a witness and a testimony:I and my doing and dreaming, which mount up above the sun towards that towhich it more mightily bears witness than even itself, and whose heat isgreater than the heat of the sun.' " "Mother," Amenhotep whispered, without turning hiseyes from Joseph, "what did I say? No, no, I did not say it, I only knewit, it was said to me. When of late I had my seizure, and revelation wasvouchsafed me for the improvement of the teaching - for it is not complete,never have I asserted that it was complete - then I heard my Father's voiceand it spoke to me saying: 'I am the heat of the Aton, which is in Him.But millions of suns could I feed from my fires. Callest thou me Aton, thenknow that the name itself stands in need of improvement. When you call meso, you are not calling me by my last and final name. For my last name is:the Lord of the Aton.' Thus Pharaoh heard it, the Father's beloved child,and brought it back with him out of his attack. But he kept silent, andeven the silence made him forget. Pharaoh has set truth in his heart, forthe Father is the truth. But he is responsible for the triumph of the teaching,that all men may receive it; and he is concerned lest the improvement andpurification, until at last it consist only of the pure truth, might meanto make it unteachable. This is a sore concern which no one can understandsave one on whom as much responsi-bility rests as on Pharaoh. For othersit is easy to say: 'You have not set truth in your heart, but rather theteaching.' Yet the teaching is the sole means of bringing men nearer thetruth. It should be im- / Page967 / proved; but if one improve it to theextent that it becomes unavail-able as a medium of truth - I ask the Fatherand you: will not only then the reproach be justified that I have shut upthe teaching in my heart to the disadvantage of the truth? Pharaoh showsmankind the image of the revered Father, made by his artists: the goldendisk from which rays go down upon his creatures, ending in tender hands,which caress all creation. 'Adore!' he commands. 'This is the Aton, my Father,whose blood runs in me, who revealed himself to me, but will be Father toyou all, that you may become good and lovely in him.' And he adds: 'Pardon,dear human beings, that I am so strict with your thoughts. Gladly wouldI spare your simplicity. But it must be: Therefore I say to you: Not theimage shall you worship when you worship, not to it sing your hymns whenyou sing; but rather to him whose image it is, you understand, the truedisk of the sun, my Father in the sky, who is the Aton, for the image isnot yet he.' That is hard enough; it is a challenge to men; out of a hundred,twelve understand it. But if now the teacher says: 'Still another and furthereffort must I urge upon you for the sake of truth, however much it painsme for your simplicity. For the image is but the image of the image andwitness to a witness. Not the actual round sun up there in the sky are youto think of when you burn incense to his image and sing-his praise - notthis, but the Lord of Aton, who is the heat in it and who guides its course.'That goes too far, it is too much teaching, and not twelve, not even oneunderstands. Only Pharaoh himself understands, who is outside of all count,and yet he is supposed to teach the many. Your forefather, soothsayer, hadan easy task, although he made it hard for himself. He might make it ashard as he liked, striving after truth for his own sake and the sake ofhis pride, for he was only a wanderer. But I am King, and teacher; I maynot think what I cannot teach. Whereas such a one very soon learns not evento think the unteachable." Here Tiy, his mother, cleared her throat, rattledher ornaments, and said, looking ahead of her into space: "Pharaoh is to be praised when he practises statesmanshipin mat-ters of religious belief and spares the simplicity of the many. Thatis why I warned him not to wound the popular attachment to Usir, king ofthe lower regions. There is no contradiction between knowing and sparing,in this connection; and the office of teacher need not darken knowledge.Never have priests taught the multitude all they themselves know. They havetold them what was wholesome, and wisely left in ~he realm of the mysterieswhat was not beneficial. Thus knowledge and wisdom are together in the world,truth and for- bearance. The mother recommends that it so remain." "Thank you, Mama," said Amenhotep, with a deprecatingbow. "Thank you for the, contribution. It is very valuable and will for/ Page968 / eternal ages be held in honour. But we are speaking of two differentthings. My Majesty speaks of the fetters which the teaching puts upon thethoughts of God; yours refers to priestly statecraft, which divides teachingand knowledge. But Pharaoh would not be arrogant, and there is no greaterarrogance than such a division. No, there is no arrogance in the world greaterthan that of dividing the children of our Father into initiate and uninitiateand teaching double words: all-knowingly for the masses, knowingly in theinner circle. No, we must speak what we know, and witness what we have seen.Pharaoh wants to do nothing but improve the teaching, even though it bemade hard for him by the teaching. And still it has been said to me: 'Callme not Aton, for that is in need of improvement. Call me the Lord of theAton!' But I, through keeping silent, forgot. See now what the Father doesfor his beloved son! He sends him a messenger and dream-interpreter, whoshows him his dreams, dreams from below and dreams from above, dreams importantfor the realm and for heaven; that he should awake in him what he alreadyknows, and interpret what was already said to him. Yes, how loveth the Fatherhis child the King who came forth out of him, that he sends down a soothsayerto him, to whom from long ages has been handed down the teaching that itprofits man to press on towards the last and highest! " "To my knowledge," Tiy coldly remarked, "your soothsayercame up from below, out of a dungeon, and not from above." "Ah, in my opinion that is sheer mischief, that hecame from below," cried Amenhotep. "And besides, above and below mean notmuch to the Father, who when he goes down makes the lower the upper, forwhere he shines, there is the upper world. From which it comes that hismessengers interpret dreams from above and below with equal skill. Go on,soothsayer! Did I say stop? If I did, I meant go on! That wanderer out ofthe East, from whom you spring, did not stop at the sun, but pressed onabove it?" "Yes, in spirit," answered Joseph smiling. "For inthe flesh he was but a worm on this earth, weaker than most of those aboveand below him. And still he refused to bow and to worship, even before oneof these phenomena, for they were but witness and work, as he himself was.All being, he said, is a work of the highest, and before the being is thespirit of whom it bears witness. How could I commit so great a folly andburn incense to a witness, be it never so weighty - I, who am consciouslya witness, whereas the others simply are and know it not? Is there not somethingin me of Him, for which all being is but evidence of the being of the Beingwhich is greater than His works and is outside them? It is outside the world,and though it is the compass of the world, yet is the world not its compass.Far is the sun, surely three hundred and sixty thousand miles away, andyet /Page969/ his rays are here. But He who shows the sun the way hitheris further than far, yet near in the same measure, nearer than near. Nearor far is all the same to Him, for He has no space nor any time; and thoughthe world is in Him, He is not in the world at all, but in heaven." "Did you hear that, Mama?" asked Amenhotep in a smallvoice, tears in his eyes. "Did you hear the message which my heavenly Fathersends me through this young man, in whom I straightway saw something, ashe came in, and who interprets to me my dreams? I will only say that I havenot said all that was said to me in my seizure, and, keeping silent, forgotit. But when I heard: 'Call me not Aton, but rather the Lord of the Aton,'then I heard also this: 'Call on me not as "my Father above," for that isof the sun in the sky; it must needs be changed, to say: "My Father whoart in heaven" !' So heard I and shut it up within me, because I wasanxious over the truth for the sake of the teaching. But he whom I tookout of the prison, he opens the prison of truth that she may come forthin beauty and light; and teaching and truth shall embrace each other, evenas I embrace him." And with wet eyelashes he worked himself up out ofhis sunken seat, embraced Joseph, and kissed him. "Yes, yes!" he cried: He began to hurry once moreup and down the Cretan loggia, to the bee-portieres, to the windows andback, his hands pressed to his heart. "Yes, yes, who art in heaven, furtherthan far and nearer than near, the Being of beings; that looks not intodeath, that does not become and die but is, the abiding light, that neitherrises nor sets, the unchanging source, out of which stream all life, light,beauty, and truth - that is the Father, so reveals He Himself to PharaohHis son, who lies in His bosom and to whom He shows all that He has made.For He has made all, and His love is in the world, and the world knows Himnot. But Pharaoh is His witness and bears witness to His light and His love,that through Him all men may become blessed and may believe, even thoughnow they still love the darkness more than the light that shines in it.For they understand it not, therefore are their deeds evil. But the son,who came from the Father, will teach it to them. Golden spirit is the light,father-spirit; out of the mother-depths below power strives upward to it,to be purified in its flame and become spirit in the Father. Immaterialis God, like His sunshine, spirit is He, and Pharaoh teaches you to worshipHim in spirit and in truth. For the son knoweth the Father as the Fatherknoweth him, and will royally reward all those who love Him and keep Hiscommandments -he will make them great and gilded at court because they lovethe Father in the son who came out of Him. For my words are not mine, butthe words of my Father who sent me, that all might become one in light andlove, even as I and the Father are one. . . ." Page 979 Chapter IV SEVEN OR FIVE IT is well that this conversation between Pharaoh and Joseph - which led to the lifting up of the departed one, so that hewas made great in the West - this famous and yet almost unknown conversationwhich the great mother, who was present, not unaptly called a conversationof gods about God, has now been re-established from beginning to end inall its turnings, windings, and conversational episodes. Well that it hasbeen set down with exactitude once and for all, so that everyone can followthe course which in its time it pursued in reality; so that if some pointor other should slip the memory, one need only turn back and read. The summarynature of the tradition up till now almost makes it, however venerable,unconvincing. For instance upon Joseph's interpretation and his advice tothe King to look about for a wise and knowledgeable and forethoughted man,Pharaoh straight- way answers: "Nobody is so knowledgeable and wise as you.I will set you over all Egypt." And overwhelms him on the spot with themost extravagant honours and dignities. There is too much abridgement andcondensation about this, it is too dry, it is a drawn and salted and embalmedremnant of the truth, not truth's living lineaments. Pharaoh's inordinateenthusiasm and favour seem to lack foundation and motivation. Long ago when,overcoming the shrinking of our flesh, we pulled ourselves together forthe trip down through millennial abysses, down to the regions below, tothe field and the fountain where Joseph was standing; even so long ago whatwe were actually after was to listen to that very conversation and to bringit back with us in all its members as it really came to pass and took placeat On in Lower Egypt. Of course, there is really nothing against condensationin itself. It is useful and even necessary. In the long run it is quiteimpossible to narrate life just as it flows. What would it lead to? Intothe infinite. It would be beyond human powers. Whoever got such an ideafixed in his head would not only never finish, he would be suffocated atthe outset. Entangled in a web of delusory exactitude, a madness of detail.No, excision must play its part at the beautiful feast of narra- / Page980 / tion and recreation; it has an important and indispensable role. Here,then, the art will be judiciously practised, to the end of getting finallyquit of a preoccupation which, though after all it has a distant kinshipwith the attempt to drink the sea dry, must not be driven to the extremeand utter folly of actually and literally doing so. What would have become of us, for instance, whenJacob was serving with the devil Laban, seven and thirteen and five - inshort, twenty-five years, of which every tiniest time element was full ofa life-in-itself, quite worth telling? And what would become of us now withoutthat reasonable principle, when our little bark, driven by the measuredlymoving stream of narration, hovers again on the brink of a time-cataractof seven and seven prophesied years? Well, to begin with, and just amongourselves: in these fourteen years things were neither quite so definitelygood nor so definitely bad as the prophecy would have them. It was fulfilled,no doubt about that. But fulfilled as life fulfils, imprecisely. For lifeand reality always assert a certain independence, sometimes on such a scaleas to blur the prophecy out of all recognition. Of course, life is boundto the prophecy; but within those limits it moves so freely that one almosthas one's choice as to whether the prophecy has been fulfilled or not. Inour present case we are dealIng with a time and a people animated by thebest will in the world to believe in the fulfilment, however inexact. Forthe sake of the prophecy they are willing to agree that two and two makefive-if the phrase may be used in a context where not five but an even higherodd number, namely seven, is in question. Probably this would constituteno great difficufty, five being almost as respectable a number as seven;and surely no reasonable man would insist that five instead of seven couldconstitute an inexactitude. In fact and in reality the prophesied seven lookedrather more like five. Life, being living, put no clear or absolute emphasison either number. The fat and the lean years did not come up out of thewomb of time to balance each other so unequivocally as in the dream. Thefat and lean years that came were like life in not being entirely fat orentirely lean. Among the fat ones were one or two which might have beendescribed as certainly not lean, but to a critical eye as certainly no morethan very moderately fat. The lean ones were all lean enough, at least fiveof them, if not seven; but among them there may have been a couple whichdid not reach the last extreme of exiguity and even half-way approachedthe middling. Indeed, if the prophecy had not existed they might not havebeen recognized as years of famine at all. As it was, they were blithelyreckoned in along with the others. Does all this detract from the fulfilment of theprophecy? Of course not. Its fulfilment is incontestable, for we have thefact - the /Page981/ facts of our tale, of which our tale consists, withoutwhich it would not be in the world and without which, after the snatchingaway and the lifting up, the making to come after could not have happened.Certainly things were fat and lean enough in the land of Egypt and adjacentregions, years-long fat and years-long more or less lean, and Joseph hadplenty of chance to husband the plenty and distribute the crying lack, andlike Utnapishtim-Atrachasis, like Noah the exceeding wise one, to provehimself a man of prudence and foresight, whose ark rocks safe on the flood.In loyal service to the highest he did this as his minister, and by hisdealings he gilded Pharaoh over and over again."
JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS THOMAS MANN 1875 -1955 PRELUDE Page 7 "SOMETIMES, indeed, he thought of the moon-wandereras his own great-grandfather - though such an idea is to be sternly excludedfrom the realms of the possible. He himself was perfectly aware, on theground of much and varied instruction, that the position was one of farwider bearings. Not so wide, however, that that mighty man of the earthwhose boundary stones, adorned with representations of the signs of thezodiac, the man from Ur had put behind him, had actually been Nimrod, thefirst king on earth, who had begotten Bel of Shinar. No, for according tothe tablets, this had been Hammurabi, the Lawgiver, restorer of those citadelsof the sun and moon; and when young Joseph put him on a level with thatprehistoric Nimrod, it was by a play of thought which most charmingly becomeshis spirit but which would be unbecoming and hence forbidden to ours. Thesame is true of his occasional confusion of the man from Ur with his father'sancestor and his, who had borne the same or a similar name. Between theboy Joseph and the pilgrimage of his ancestor in the spirit and the fleshthere lay, according to the system of chronology which his age and sphererejoiced in, fully twenty generations, or, roughly speaking, six hundredBabylonian years, a period as long as from our time back into the GothicMiddle Ages - as long, and yet not so long either. True, we have received our mathematical siderealtime handed down to us from ages long before the man from Ur ever set outon his wanderings, and, in like manner, shall we hand it on to our furthestdescendants. But even so, the meaning, weight and fullness of earthly timeis not everywhere one and the same. Time has uneven measure, despite allthe objectivity of the Chaldean chronology. Six hundred years at that timeand under that sky did not mean what they mean in our western history. Theywere a more level, silent, speechless reach; time was less effective, herpower to bring about change was both weaker and more restricted in its range- though certainly in / Page 8 / those twenty generations she had producedchanges and revolutions of a considerable kind: natural revolutions, evenchanges in the earth's surface in Joseph's immediate circle, as we knowand as he knew too. For where, in his day, were Gomorrah, and Sodom, thedwelling- place of Lot of Harran, who had been received into the spiritualcom-munity of the man from Ur; where were those voluptuous cities? Lo, theleaden alkaline lake lay there where their unchastity had flour- ished,for the whole region had been swept with a burning fiery flood of pitchand sulphur, so frightful and apparently so destructive of all life thatLot's daughters, timely escaped with their father, though he would havegiven them up to the lust of the Sodomites instead of certain importantguests whom he harboured, went and lay with their father, being under thedelusion that save themselves there were none left upon the earth, and outof womanly carefulness for the con-tinuance of the race. Thus time in its course had left behind it even visiblealterations. There had been times of blessing and times of curse, timesof fullness and times of dearth, wars and campaigns, changing overlordsand new gods. Yet on the whole time then had been more conservatively mindedthan time now, the frame of Joseph's life, his ways and habits of thoughtwere far more like his ancestors' than ours are like the crusaders'. Memory,resting on oral tradition from generation to generation, was more directand confiding, it flowed freer, time was a more unified and thus a briefervista; young Joseph cannot be blamed for vaguely foreshortening it, forsometimes, in a dreamy mood, per-haps by night and moonlight, taking theman from Ur for his father's grandfather - or even worse. For It must bestated here that In all probability this man from Ur was not the originaland actual man from Ur. Probably - even to young Joseph, in a preciser hour,and by broad daylight-this man from Ur had never seen the moon-citadel ofUru; it had been his father who had gone thence north-wards, towardsHarran in the land of Naharain. And thus it was only from Harran that thisfalsely so-called man from Ur, having received the command from the LordGod, had set out towards the country of the Amorites, together with thatLot, later settled in Sodom, whom the tradition of the community vaguelystated to be the son of the brother of the man from Ur, on the ground, indeed,that he was the "son of Harran." Now Lot of Sodom was certainly a son ofHarran, since he as well as the Ur-man came from there. But to turn Harran,the "city of the way," into a brother of the man from Ur, and thus to makea nephew out of his proselyte Lot, was a kind of dreamy toying with ideaswhich, while scarcely permissible in broad daylight, yet makes it easierto understand why young Joseph fell naturally into the same kind of game. He did so in the same good faith as governed, forinstance, the / Page9 / star-worshippers and astrologers at Shinar, in theirprognostications according to the principle of stellar representation, andexchanged one planet with another, for instance the sun, when it had set,with Ninurta the planet of war and state, or the planet Marduk with Scorpio,thereafter blithely calling Scorpio Marduk and Ninurta the sun. He did so,that is, on practical grounds, for his desire to set a beginning to thechain of events to which he belonged encountered the same difficulty thatit always does: the fact that everybody has a father, that nothing comesfirst and of itself, its own cause, but that everybody is begotten and pointsbackwards, deeper down into the depths of beginnings, the bottoms and theabysses of the well of the past. Joseph knew, of course, that the fatherof the Ur-man, that is to say the real man from Uru, must have had a father,who must thus have really been the beginning of his own personal history,and so on, back to Abel, son of Adam, the ancestor of those who dwell intents and keep. sheep. Thus even the exodus from Shinar afforded him onlyone particular and conditioned beginning; he was well instructed, by songand saga, how it went on further and further into the general, through manyhistories, back to Adapa or Adama, the first man, who, indeed, accordingto a lying Babylonian saga, which Joseph more or less knew by heart, hadbeen the son of Ea, god of wisdom and the water depths, and had served thegods as baker and cup-bearer - but of whom Joseph had better and more inspiredknowledge; back to the garden in the East wherein had stood the two trees,the tree of life and the unchaste tree of death; back to the beginning,the origin of the world and the heavens and the earthly universe out ofconfusion and chaos, by the might of the Word, which moved above the faceof the deep and was God. But this, too, was it not only a conditioned andparticular beginning of things? For there had already been forms of existencewhich looked up to the Creator in admiration and amaze: sons of God, angelsof the starry firmament, about whom Joseph himself knew some odd and evenfunny stories, and also rebellious demons. These must have had their originin some past aeon of the world, which had grown old and sunk and becomeraw material- and had even this been the very first beginning? Here young Joseph's brain began to reel, just asours does when we lean over the edge of the well; and despite some smallinexactitudes which his pretty and well-favoured little head permitted itselfbut which are unsuitable for us, we may feel close to him and almost contemporary,in respect to those deep backwards and abysms of time into which so longago he already gazed. He was a human being like ourselves, thus he mustappear to us, and despite his earliness in time just as remote as we, mathematicallyspeaking, from the beginnings of humanity (not to speak of the beginningsof things in general), for they do in actual fact lie deep down in the darknessat the /Page 10/ bottom of the abyss, and we, in our researches, must eitherstop at the conditioned and apparent beginnings, confusing them with thereal beginning, in the same way that Joseph confused the man from Ur onthe one hand with his father, and on the other with Joseph's own great-grandfather;or else we must keep on being lured from one time-coulisse to the next,backwards and backwards into the immeasurable. 3 I HAVE said that Joseph knew by heart some prettyBabylonian verses which originally came from a written tradition of greatextent and full of lying wisdom. He had learned them from travellers whotouched at Hebron, with whom he had held speech, in his conversable way,and from his tutor, old Eliezer, a freedman of his father, not to be confused(as Joseph sometimes confused him, and even the old man himself probablyenjoyed doing) with that Eliezer who was the oldest servant of the originalwanderer and who once had wooed the daughter of Bethuel for Isaac at thewell. Now we know these verses and legends; we have texts of them, writtenon tablets found at Nineveh, in the palace of Asshurbanipal, king of theuniverse, son of Assarhaddon, son of Sennacherib; some of them, preservedin graceful cuneiform characters on greyish-yellow clay, are our earliestdocumented source for the Great Flood in which the Lord wiped out the firsthuman race on account of its corruption, and which played such an importantrole in Joseph's own personal tradition. Literally speaking, this sourceitself is not an original one; these crumbling tablets bear transcriptionsmade by learned slaves only some six hundred years before our era, at thecommand of Asshurbanipal, a sovereign much addicted to the written wordand the established view, an "exceeding wise one," in the Babylonian phrase,and by a zealous accumulator of the fruits of exceeding wisdom. Indeed theywere copied from an original a good thousand years older, from the time,that is, of the Lawgiver and the moon-wanderer; which was about as easy,or as hard, for Asshurbanipal's tablet-writers to read and to understandas for us to-day a manuscript of the time of Charlemagne. Written in a quiteobsolete and undeveloped hand, a hieratic document, it must have been hardto decipher; whether its significance was wholly honoured in the copy remainsmatter for doubt. And then, this original: it was not actually an original;not the original, when you come to look at it. It was itself a copy of adocument out of God knows what distant time; upon which, then, though withoutprecisely knowing where, one might rest, as upon a true original, if itwere not itself provided with glosses and additions by the hand of the scribe,who thought thus to make more comprehen- /Page 11/ sible an original textlying again who knows how far back in time; though what they probably didwas further to transmogrify the original wisdom of his text. And thus Imight go on - if I were not convinced that my readers already understandwhat I mean when I speak of coulisses and abysses. The Egyptians expressed it in a phrase which Josephknew and himself used on occasion. For although none of the sons of Hamwere tolerated in Jacob's tents, because of their ancestor the shamer ofhis sire, who had turned black all over, also because Jacob entertainedreligious doubts on the score of the morals of Mizraim; yet the eager- mindedlad had often mingled with Egyptians, in the towns, in Kirjath Arba as wellas in Shechem, and had picked up this and that of the tongue in which hewas later to bear such brilliant witness. The Egyptians then, speaking ofsomething that had high and indefinite antiquity, would say: "It comes fromthe days of Set." By whom, of course, they meant one of their gods, thewily brother of their Marduk or Tammuz, whom they called Osiris, the Martyr,because Set had first lured him into a sarcophagus and cast it into theriver, and afterwards torn him to pieces like a wild beast and killed himentirely, so that Osiris, the Sacrifice, now ruled as lord of the dead andeverlasting king of the lower world. "From the days of Set"; the peopleof Egypt had many uses for the phrase, for with them the origins of everythingwent back in undemonstrable ways into that darkness. At the edge of the Libyan desert, near Memphis, hewnout of the rock, crouched the colossus and hybrid, fifty-three metres high;lion and maid, with a maiden's breasts and the beard of a man, and on itsheadcloth the kingly serpent rearing itself. The huge paws of its cat'sbody stretched out before it, its nose was blunted by the tooth of time.It had always crouched there, always with its nose blunted by time; andof an age when its nose had not been blunted, or when it had not crouchedthere, there was no memory at all. Thothmes the Fourth, Golden Hawk andStrong Bull, King of Upper and of Lower Egypt, beloved of the goddess oftruth and belonging to the eighteenth dynasty which was also the dynastyof Amun-is-satisfied, by reason of a command received in a dream beforehe mounted the throne, had had the colossal statue dug out of the sandsof the desert, where it lay in great part drifted over and covered up. Butsome fifteen hundred years before that, King Cheops of the fourth dynasty- the same, by the bye, who built the great pyramid for his own tomb andmade sacrifice to the sphinx - had found it half in ruins; and of any timewhen it had not been known, or even known with a whole nose, there was noknowledge at all. Was it Set who himself hewed out of the stone thatfabulous beast, in which later generations saw an image of the sun-god,calling it Horus in the mount of light? It was possible, of course, forSet, as /Page 12/ likewise Osiris the Sacrifice, had probably not alwaysbeen a god, but sometime or other a man, and indeed a king over Egypt. Thestatement is often made that a certain Menes or Horus-Menes some six thousandyears before our era founded the first Egyptian dynasty, and everythingbefore that is "pre-dynastic"; he, Menes, having first united the two countries,the upper and the lower, the papyrus and the lily, the red and the whitecrown, and ruled as first king over Egypt, the history of which began withhis reign. Of this statement probably every word is false; to the penetratingeye King Menes turns out to be nothing but a coulisse. Egyptian prieststold Herodotus that the written history of their country went back eleventhousand, three hundred and forty years before his era, which means forus about fourteen thousand years; a reckoning which is calculated to robKing Menes' figure of all its primitiveness. The history of Egypt alternatesbetween periods of discord and impotence and periods of brilliance and power;epochs of diverse rulers or none at all and epochs of strongly concentratedpower; it becomes increasingly clear that these epochs alternated too oftento make it likely that King Menes was the earliest ruler over a unifiedrealm. The discords which he healed had followed upon earlier unificationand that upon still earlier disruption. How many times the "older," "earlier,""again" are to be repeated we cannot tell; but only that the first unificationtook place under dynastic deities, whose sons presumably were that Set andOsiris; the sacrifice, murder apd dismemberment of the latter being legendaryreferences to quarrels over the succession, which at that time was determinedby stratagem and crime. That was a past of a profound, mythical and theologicalcharacter, even to the point of becoming spiritualized and ghostlike; itbecame present, it became the object of religious reverence in the shapeof certain animals- falcons and jackals - honoured in the ancient capitals,Buto and Nekheb; in these the souls of those beings of primitive time weresupposed to be mysteriously preserved. 4 "FROM the days of Set" - young Joseph relished thephrase, and I share his enjoyment; for like the Egyptians, I find it mostapplicable, and to nearly everything in life. Wherever I look, I think ofthe words: and the origin of all things, when I come to search for it, palesaway into the days of Set. At the time when our story begins - an arbitrarybeginning, it is true, but we must begin somewhere, and fix a point behindwhich we do not go, otherwise we too shall land in the days of Set - atthis time young Joseph already kept the flocks with his brethren, thoughonly under rather privileged conditions; which is to say that when it /Page13/pleased him so to do, he watched as they did his father's sheep, goats andkine on the plains of Shechem and Hebron. What sort of animals were these,and wherein different from ours? In nothing at all. They were the very samepeaceful and familiar beasts, at the same stage of development as thosewe know. The whole history of cattle-breeding - for instance of the domesticox from the wild buffalo -lay even in young Joseph's day so far back inthe past that "far" is a feeble word to use in such a connection. It hasbeen shown that the ox was bred in the stone age, before the use of metaltools, that is before the bronze age; this boy of the Amurruland, Joseph,with his Egyptian and Babylonian culture, was almost as remote from thosedim times as we ourselves are. As for the wild sheep from which Jacob's flocks -and ours - were bred, we are told that it is extinct. It died out "longago." It must have been completely domesticated "in the days of Set." Andthe breeding of the horse, the ass, the goat and the pig - out of that wildboar which mangled Tammuz, the young shepherd - all that was accomplishedin the same remote and misty past. Our historical records go back some seventhousand years - during which time no wild animal was still in process ofdomestication. There is no tradition nor any memory of such events. If we look at the cultivation of wild grasses andtheir development into cereals, the story is the same. Our species of grain,our barley, oats, rye, maize and wheat -they are the very ones which nourishedthe youthful Joseph - have been cultivated so long that no botanist cantrace the beginning of the process, nor any people boast of having beenthe first to initiate it. We are told that in the stone age there were fivevarieties of wheat and three of barley. As for the cultivation of the vinefrom its wild beginnings - an incomparable achievement, humanly speaking,whatever else one may think about it - tradition, echoing hollowly up fromthe depths of the past, ascribes it to Noah, the one upright man, survivorof the flood, the same whom the Babylonians called Utnapishtim and alsoAtrachasis, the exceeding wise one, who imparted to Gilgamesh, his lategrandchild, hero of the legends written on the tablets, the story of thebeginning of things. This upright man, then, as Joseph likewise knew, wasthe first to plant vineyards - nor did Joseph consider it such a very uprightdeed. Why could he not have planted something useful: fig trees, for instance,or olives? But no, he chose to plant the vine, and was drunk therefrom,and in his drunkenness was mocked and shamed of his manhood. But when Josephimagined all that to have happened not so very long ago, that miracle ofthe grape, perhaps some dozen of generations before his "great-grandfather,"his ideas of time showed themselves to be hazy indeed; the past. which heso lightly invoked being actually matter of remote and primeval distances.Having said /Page 14/ thus much, it only remains to add - however much wemay pale at the thought - that those distances themselves must have lainvery late in time, compared with the remoteness of the beginning of thehuman race, for them to have produced a civilization capable of that highemprise, the cultivation of the vine. Where then do they lie in time, the beginnings ofhuman civilization? How old is it? I put the question with reference toyoung Joseph, whose stage of development, though remote from ours, did notessentially differ from it, aside from those less precise habits of thoughtof his, at which we may benevolently smile. We have only to enquire, toconjure up a whole vista of time-coulisses opening out infinitely, as inmockery. When we ourselves speak of antiquity we mostly mean the Graeco-Romanworld - which, relatively speaking, is of a brand new modernity. Going backto the so-called "primitive population" of Greece, the Pelasgians, we aretold that before they settled in the islands, the latter were inhabitedby the actual primitive population, a race which preceded the Phreniciansin the domination of the sea - a fact which reduces to the merest time-coulissethe Phrenician claim to have been the first seafaring folk. But scienceis increasingly unfavourable to all these theories; more and more it inclinesto the hypothesis and the conviction that these "barbarians" were colonistsfrom Atlantis, the"lost continent beyond the pillars of Hercules, whichin times gone by united Europe with America. But whether this was the earliestregion of the earth to be populated by human beings is very doubtful, sodoubtful as to be unlikely; it is much more probable that the early historyof civilization, including that of Noah, the exceeding wise one, is to beconnected with regions of the earth's surface much older in point of timeand already long before fallen to decay. But these are foothills whereupon we may not wander,and only vaguely indicate by that before-quoted Egyptian phrase; the peoplesof the east behaved with a piety equal to their wisdom when they ascribedto the gods their first knowledge of a civilized life. The red- hued folkof Mizraim saw in Osiris the Martyr the benefactor who had first given themlaws and taught them to cultivate the soil; being prevented finally by theplotting of the crafty Set, who attacked him like a wild boar. As for theChinese, they consider the founder of their empire to have been an imperialhalf-god named Fu-hsi, who introduced cattle into China and taught the pricelessart of writing. This personage apparently did not consider the Chinese,at that time - some two thousand, eight hundred and fifty-two years beforeour era - to be ripe for astronomical instruction; for according to theirannals they received it only about thirteen hundred years later, from thegreat foreign emperor, Tai-Ko-Fokee; whereas the astrologers of Shinar werealready several hundred years earlier instructed in /Page 15/ thesigns of the zodiac; and we are told that a man who accompanied Alexanderof Macedon to Babylon sent to Aristotle Chaldrean astronomical records scratchedon baked clay, whose antiquity would be to-day four thousand, one hundredand sixty years. That is easily possible, for it seems likely that observationof the heavens and astronomical calculations were made in Atlantis, whosedisappearance, according to Solon, dated nine thousand years before thatworthy's own time; from which it follows that man attained to skill in theselofty arts some eleven and a half thousand years before our era. It is clear that the art of writing is not youngerthan this, and very possibly much. older. I speak of it in particular becauseJoseph entertained such a lively fondness for the art, and unlike his brothersearly perfected himself in it; being instructed at first by Eliezer, inthe Babylonian as well as in the Phrenician and Hittite scripts. He hada genuine weakness for the god or idol whom in the East they called Nabu,the writer of history, and in Tyre and Sidon Taut; in both places recognizinghim as the inventor of letters and the chronicler of the beginnings of things:the Egyptian god Thoth of Hermopolis, the letter-writer of the gods andthe patron of science, whose office was regarded in those parts as higherthan all others; that sincere, solicitous and reasonable god, who was sometimesa white-haired ape, of pleasing appearance, sometimes wore an ibis head,and likewise had certain tender and spiritual affiliations with the moonwhich were quite to young Joseph's taste. These predilections the youthwould not have dared confess to his father Jacob, who set his face sternlyagainst all such coquetting with idols, being even stricter in his attitudethan were certain very high places themselves to which his austerity wasdedicated. For Joseph's history proves that such little departures on hispart into the impermissible were not visited very severely, at least notin the long run. As for the art of writing, with reference to itsmisty origins it would be proper to paraphrase the Egyptian expression andsay that it came "from the days of Thoth." The written roll is representedin the oldest Egyptian art, and we know a papyrus which belonged to Horus-Send,a king of the second dynasty, six thousand years before our era, and whicheven then was supposed to be so old that it was said Sendi had inheritedit from Set. When Sneferu and that Cheops reigned, sons of the sun, of thefourth dynasty, and the pyramids of Gizeh were built, knowledge of writingwas so usual amongst the lower classes that we to-day can read the simpleinscriptions scratched by artisans on the great building blocks. But itneed not surprise us that such knowledge was common property in that distanttime, when we recall the priestly account of the age of the written historyof Egypt. If, then, the days of an established language ofsigns are so unnum- /Page 16/ bered, where shall we seek for the beginningsof oral speech? The oldest, the primeval language, we are told, is Indo-Germanic,Indo- European, Sanscrit. But we may be sure that that is a beginning ashasty as any other; and that there existed a still older mother-tongue whichincluded the roots of the Aryan as well as the Semitic and Hamitic tongues.Probably it was spoken on Atlantis - that land which is the last far andfaint coulisse still dimly visible to our eyes, but which itself can scarcelybe the original home of articulate man. 5 CERTAIN discoveries have caused the experts in thehistory of the earth to estimate the age of the human species at 'aboutfive hundred thousand years. It is a scant reckoning, when we consider,first, how science to-day teaches that man in his character as animal isthe oldest of all mammals and was already in the latter dawn of life existingupon this earth in various zoological modes, amphibious and reptilian, beforeany cerebral development took place; and second, what endless and boundlessexpanses of time must have been at his disposal, to turn the crouching,dream-wandering, marsupial type, with un-separated fingers, and a sort offlickering pre-reason as his guide, such as man must have been before thetime of Noah-Utnapishtim, the exceeding wise, into the inventor of bow andarrow, the fire-maker, the welder of meteoric iron, the cultivator of cornand wine, the breeder of domestic cattle - in a word, into the shrewd, skilfuland in every essential respect modern human being which appears before usat the earliest grey dawn of history. A priest at the temple of Sais explainedto Solon the Greek myth of Phaeton through a human experiencing of somedeviation in the course of the bodies which move round the earth in space,resulting in a devastating conflagration on the earth. Certainly it becomesclearer and clearer that the dream memory of man, formless but shaping itselfever anew after the manner of sagas, reaches back to catastrophes of vastantiquity, the tradition of which, fed by recurrent but lesser similar events,established itself among various peoples and produced that formation ofcoulisses which forever lures and leads onwards the traveller in time. Those verses which Joseph had heard and learned byheart related among other things the story of the Great Flood. He wouldin any case have known this story even if he had not learned of it in theBabylonian tongue and version, for it. existed in his western country andespecially among his own people, although not in quite the same form, butwith details differing from those in the version current in the land ofthe rivers; just at this very time, indeed, it was in process of establishingitself in a variant upon the eastern form. Joseph well knew the tale: howall that was flesh, the beasts of the field not ex- /Page17/ cepted, hadcorrupted most indescribably His way upon the earth; yes, the earth herselfpractised whoredom and deceivingly brought forth oats where wheat had beensown - and all this despite the warnings of Noah; so that the Lord and Creator,who saw His very angels involved in this abomination, at length after alast trial of patience, of a hundred and twenty years, could no longer bearit and be responsible for it, but must let the judgment of the flood prevail.And now He, in His majestic good-nature (which the angels in no wise shared),left open a little back door for life to escape by, in the shape of a chest,pitched and caulked, into which Noah went up with the animals. Joseph knewthat too and knew the day on which the creatures entered the ark; it hadbeen the tenth of the month Marcheswan, and on the seventeenth the fountainsof the great deep were broken up, at the time of the spring thawing, whenSirius rises in the day- time and the fountains of water begin to swell.It was on this day, then - Joseph had it from old Eliezer. But how oftenhad this day come round since then? He did not consider that, nor did oldEliezer; and here begin the foreshortenings, the confusions and the deceptivevistas which dominate the tradition. Heaven knows when there happened that overwhelmingencroachment of the Euphrates, a river at all times tending to irregularcourses and sudden spate; or that startling irruption of the Persian Gulfinto the solid land as the result of tornado and earthquake; that catastrophewhich did not precisely create the tradition of the deluge, but gave itits final nourishment, revivified it with a horrible aspect of life andreality and now stood to all later generations as the Deluge. Perhaps themost recent catastrophe had not been so very long ago; and the nearer itwas, the more fascinating becomes the question whether, and how, the generationwhich had personal experience of it succeeded in confusing their presentaffliction with the subject of the tradition, in other -words with the Deluge.It came to pass, and that it did so need cause us to feel neither surprisenor contempt. The event consisted less in that something past repeated itself,than in that it became present. But that it could acquire presentness restedupon the fact that the circumstances which brought it about were at alltimes present. The ways of the flesh are perennially corrupt, and may beso in all god-fearingness. For do men know whether they do well or ill beforeGod and whether that which seems to them good is not to the Heavenly Onean abomination? Men in their folly know not God nor the decrees of the lowerworld; at any time forbearance can show itself exhausted, and judgment comeinto force; and there is probably always a warning voice, a knowledgeableAtrachasis who knows how to interpret signs and by taking wise precautionsis one among ten thousand to escape destruction. Not without having firstconfided to the earth the tablets of knowledge, as the seed-corn of /Page18/ future wisdom, so that when the waters subside, everything can beginafresh from the written seed. "At any time": therein lies the mystery. Forthe mystery is timeless, but the form of timelessness is the now and thehere. The Deluge, then, had its theatre on the EuphratesRiver, but also in China. Round the year 1300 before our era there was afrightful flood in the Hoang-Ho after which the course of the river wasregulated; it was a repetition of the great flood of some thousand and fiftyyears before, whose Noah had been the fifth Emperor, Yao, and which, chronologicallyspeaking, was far from having been the true and original Deluge, since thetradition of the latter is common to both peoples. Just as the Babylonianaccount, known to Joseph, was only a reproduction of earlier and earlieraccounts, so the flood itself is to be referred back to older and olderprototypes; one is convinced of being on solid ground at last, when onefixes, as the original original, upon the sinking of the land Atlantis beneaththe waves of the ocean - knowledge of which dread event penetrated intoall the lands of the earth, previously populated from that same Atlantis,and fixed itself as a movable tradition forever in the minds of men. Butit is only an apparent stop and temporary goal. According to a Chaldreancomputation, a period of thirty-nine thousand, one hundred and eighty yearslay between the Deluge and the first historical dynasty of the kingdom ofthe two rivers. It follows that the sinking of Atlantis, occurring only nine thousand years before Solon, a very recent catastrophe indeed,historically considered, certainly cannot have been the Deluge. It too wasonly a repetition, the becoming- present of something profoundly past, afrightful refresher to the memory, and the original story is to be referredback at least to that incalculable point of time when the island continentcalled "Lemuria," in its turn only a remnant of the old Gondwana continent,sank beneath the waves of the Indian Ocean. What concerns us here is not calculable time. Ratherit is time's abrogation and dissolution in the alternation of traditionand proph- ecy, which lends to the phrase "once upon a time" its doublesense of past and future and therewith its burden of potential present.Here the idea of reincarnation has its roots. The kings of Babel and thetwo Egypts, that curly-bearded Kurigalzu as well as Horus in the palaceat Thebes, called Amun-is-satisfied, and all their predecessors and successors,'Were manifestations in the flesh of the sun god, that is to say the mythbecame in them a mysterium, and there was no distinction left between beingand meaning. It was not until three thousand years later that men begandisputing as to whether the Eucharist "was" or only "signified" the bodyof the Sacrifice; but even such highly super- erogatory discussions as thesecannot alter the fact that the essence of the mystery is and remains thetimeless present. Such is the mean- / Page 19 / ing of ritual, of the feast.Every Christmas the world-saving Babe is born anew and lies in the cradle,destined to suffer, to die and to arise again. And when Joseph, in midsummer,at Shechem or at Beth- Lahma, at the feast of the weeping women, the feastof the burning of lamps, the feast of Tammuz, amid much wailing of flutesand joyful shoutings relived in the explicit present the murder of the lamentedSon, the youthful god, Osiris-Adonis, and his resurrection, there was Occurringthat phenomenon, the dissolution of time in mystery which is of interestfor us here because it makes logically unobjectionable a method of thoughtwhich quite simply recognized a deluge in every visitation by water.
6 PARALLEL with the story of the Flood is the taleof the Great Tower. Common property like the other, it possessed local presentnessin many places, and affords quite as good material for dreamy speculationand the formation of time-coulisses. For instance, it is as certain as itis excusable that Joseph confused the Great Tower itself with the templeof the sun at Babel, the so-called E-sagila or House of the Lifting of theHead. The Wanderer from Ur had doubtless done the same in his time, andit was certainly so considered not only in Joseph's sphere but above allin the land of Shinar itself. To all the Chaldaeans, E-sagila, the ancientand enormous terraced tower, built, according to their belief, by Bel, theCreator, with the help of the black men whom he created expressly for thepurpose, and restored and completed by Hammurabi, the Lawgiver; the Tower,seven stories high, of whose brilliantly enamelled splendours Joseph hada lively mental picture; to all the Chaldaeans E-sagila signified the presentembodiment of an abstract idea handed down from far-away antiquity; theTower, the sky-soaring structure erected by human hands. In Joseph's particularmilieu the legend of the Tower possessed other and more far-reaching associations,which did not, precisely speaking, belong to it, such as the idea of thedispersal. This is explainable only by the moon-man's own personal attitude,his taking umbrage and going hence; for the people of Shinar had no suchassociations whatever with the Midgals or citadels of their cities, butrather the contrary, seeing that Hammurabi, the Lawgiver, had expresslycaused it to be written that he had made their summits high in order to"bring together again" the scattered and dispersing people under the swayof "him who was sent." But the moon-man was thereby affronted in his notionsof the deity, and in the face of Nimrod's royal policy of concentrationhad dispersed himself and his; and thus in Joseph's home the past, madepresent in the shape of E-sagila, had become tinctured with the future andwith prophecy; / Page 20 / a judgment hung over the towering spite-monumentof. Nimrod's royal arrogance, not one brick was to remain upon another,and the builders thereof would be brought to confusion and scattered bythe Lord God of Hosts. Thus old Eliezer taught the son of Jacob, and preservedthereby the double meaning of the "once upon a time," its mingled legendand prophecy, whose product was the timeless present, the Tower of the Chaldaeans.. To Joseph its story was the story of the Great Toweritself. But it is plain that after all E-sagila is only a time-coulisseupon our endless path toward the original Tower. One time-coulisse, likemany another. Mizraim's people, too, looked upon the tower as present, inthe form of King Cheops' amazing desert tomb. And in lands of whose existenceneither Joseph nor old Eliezer had the faintest notion, in Central America,that is, the people had likewise their tower or their image of a tower,the great pyramid of Cholula, the ruins of which are of a size and pretentiousnesscalculated to have aroused great anger and envy in the breast of King Cheops.The people of Cholula have always denied that they were the authors of thismighty structure. They declared it to be the work of giants, strangers fromthe east, they said, a superior race who, filled with drunken longing forthe sun, had reared it up in their ardour, out of clay and asphalt, in orderto draw near to the worshipped planet. There is much support for the theorythat these progressive foreigners were colonists from Atlantis, and it appearsthat these sun-worshippers and astrologers incarnate always made it theirfirst care, wherever they went, to set up mighty watch-towers, before thefaces of the astonished natives, modelled upon the high towers of theirnative land, and in particular upon the lofty mountain of the gods of whichPlato speaks. In Atlantis, then, we may seek the prototype of the GreatTower. In any case we cannot follow its history further, but must here bringto an end our researches upon this extraordinary theme. 7 BUT where was Paradise - the "garden in the East"?The place of happiness and repose, the home of man, where he ate of thetree of evil and was driven forth or actually drove himself forth and dispersedhimself? Young Joseph knew this as well as he knew about the flood, andfrom the same source. It made him smile a little when he heard dwellersin the Syrian desert say that the great oasis of Damascus was Paradise,for that nothing more paradisial could be dreamed of than the way it layamong fruit orchards and charmingly watered gardens nestled between, majesticmountain range and spreading seas of meadow, full of bustling folk of allraces and the commerce of rich wares. And for politenss' sake he shruggedhis / Page 21 /shoulders only inwardly when men of Mizraim asserted thatEgypt had been the earliest home of man, being as it was the centre andnavel of the world. The curly-bearded folk of Shinar, of course, they toobelieved that their kingly city, called by them the "gateway of God" and"bond between heaven and earth' (Bab-ilu, markas same u ur- sitim:the boy Joseph could repeat the words glibly after them), in other words,that Babel was the sacred centre of the earth. But in this matter of theworld-navel Joseph had better and more precise in- formation, drawn fromthe personal experience of his good and solemn and brooding father, who,when a young man on his way from "Seven Springs," the home of his family,to 'his uncle at Harran in the land of Naharain, had quite unexpectedlyand unconsciously come upon the real world-navel, the hill-town of Luz,with its sacred stone circle, which he had then renamed Beth-el, the Houseof God, because, fleeing from Esau, he had there been vouchsafed that greatestand most solemn revelation of his whole life. On that height, where Jacobhad set up his stone pillow for a mark and anointed it with oil, there henceforthwas for Joseph and his people the centre of the world, the umbilical cordbetween heaven and earth. Yet not there lay Paradise; rather in the regionof the beginnings and of the home - somewhere thereabouts, in Joseph's childishconviction, which was, moreover, a conviction widely held, whence the manof the moon city had once set out, in Lower Shinar, where the river drainedaway and the moist soil between its branches even yet abounded in lusciousfruit-bearing trees. Theologians have long favoured the theory that Edenwas situated somewhere in southern Babylonia and Adam's body formed of Babyloniansoil. Yet this is only one more of the coulisse effects with which we arealready so familiar; another illustration of the process of localizationand back-reference - only that here it is of a kind extraordinary beyondall comparison, alluring us out beyond the earthly in the most literal senseand the most comprehensive way; only that here the bottom of the well whichis human history displays its whole, its immeasurable depth, or rather itsbottomlessness, to which neither the conception of depth nor of darknessis any longer applicable, and we must introduce the conflicting idea oflight and height; of those bright heights, that is, down from which theFall could take place, the story of which is indissolubly bound up withour soul-memories of the garden of happiness. The traditional description of Paradise is in onerespect exact. There went out, it says, from Eden a river to water the garden,and from thence it was parted and came into four heads: the Pison, Gihon,Euphrates and Hiddekel. The Pison, it goes on to say, is also called theGanges; it flows about all India and brings with it gold. The Gihon is theNile, the greatest river of the world, that encom- / Page 22 / passeth thewhole of Ethiopia. But Hiddekel, the arrow-swift river, is the Tigris, whichflows towards the east of Assyria. This last is not disputed. But the identityof the Pison and the Gihon with the Ganges and the Nile is denied with considerableauthority. These are thought to be rather the Araxes which flows into theCaspian Sea, and the Halys which flows into the Black Sea; and accordinglythe site of Paradise would still be in the Babylonian sphere of interest,but not in Babylon itself, rather in the Armenian Alpine country north ofthe Mesopotamian plain, where the two rivers in question have their sourcesclose together. The theory seems reasonably acceptable. For if, asthe most regarded tradition has it, the "Phrat," or Euphrates, rose in Paradise,then Paradise cannot be situated at the mouth of that river. But even while,with this fact in mind, we award the palm to Armenia, we have done no morethan take the step to the next-following fact; in other words, we have comeonly one more coulisse further on. God, so old Eliezer had instructed Joseph, gave theworld four quarters: morning, evening, noon and midnight guarded at theseat of the Most High by four sacred beasts and four guardian angels, whichwatch over this fixed condition with unchanging eyes. Did not the pyramidsof Lower Egypt exactly face with their four sides, covered with shiningcement, the four quarters of the earth? And thus the arrangement of therivers of Paradise was conceived. They are to be thought of in their courseas four serpents, the tips of whose tails touch, whose mouths lie far asunder,so that they go out from each other towards the four quarters of the heavens.This now is an obvious transference. It is a geography transferred to asite in Near Asia, but familiar to us in another place, now lost; namely,in Atlantis, where, according to Plato's narrative and description, thesesame four streams went out from the mount of the gods towering up in themiddle, and in the same way, that is, at right angles, to the four quartersof the earth. All learned strife as to the geographical meaning of the fourhead waters and as to the site of the garden itself has been shown to beidle and received its quietus, through the tracing backwards of the paradise-idea,from which it appears that the latter obtained in many places, founded onthe popular memory of a lost land, where a wise and progressive humanitypassed happy years in a frame of things as beneficent as it was blest. Wehave here an un- mistakable contamination of the tradition of an actualparadise with the legend of a golden age of humanity. Memory seems to goback to that land of the Hesperides, where, if reports say truth, a greatpeople pursued a wise and pious course under conditions never since so favourable.But no, the Garden of Eden it was not; it was not that site of the originalhome and of the Fall; it is only a coulisse and an apparent goal upon ourparadise-seeking pilgrimage in time and space; / Page 23 / and our archaeologyof the earth's surface seeks for Adam, the first man, in times and placeswhose decline and fall took place before the population of Atlantis. What a deluded pilgrimage, what an onward-luringhoax! For even if it were possible, or excusable, however misleading, toidentify as Paradise the land of the golden apples, where the four greatrivers flowed, how could we, even with the best will in the world to self-deception, hold with such an idea, in view of the Lemurian world which isour next and furthest time-coulisse; a scene wherein the tortured larvaof the human being - our lovely and well-favoured young Joseph would haverefused with pardonable irritation to recognize himself in the picture -endured the nightmare of fear and lust which made up his life, in desperateconflict with scaly mountains of flesh in the shape of flying lizards andgiant newts? That was no garden of Eden, it was Hell. Or rather, it wasthe first accursed state after the Fall. Not here, not at the beginningof time and space was the fruit plucked from the tree of desire and death,plucked and tasted. That comes first. We have sounded the well of time toits depths, and not yet reached our goal: the history of man is older thanthe material world which is the work of his will, older than life, whichrests upon his will. 8 A VERY ancient tradition of human thought, basedupon man's truest knowledge of himself and going back to exceeding earlydays whence it has become incorporated into the succession of religions,prophecies and doctrines of the East, into Avesta, Islam, Manichaeanism,Gnosticism and Hellenism, deals with the figure of the first or first completelyhuman man, the Hebraic Adam qadmon; conceived as a youthfulbeing made out of pure light, formed before the beginning of the world asprototype an abstract of humanity. To this conception others have attachedthemselves, varying to some extent, yet in essentials the same. Thus, andaccordingly, primitive man was at his very beginning God's chosen championin the struggle against that evil which penetrated into the new creation;yet harm befell him, he was fettered by demons, imprisoned in the flesh,estranged from his origins, and only freed from the darkness of earthlyand fleshly existence by a second emissary of the deity, who in some mysteriousway was the same as himself, his own higher self, and restored to the worldof light, leaving behind him, however, some portions of his light, whichthen were utilized for the creation of the material world and earthly creatures.Amazing tales, these, wherein the religious element of redemption is faintlyvisible behind the cosmogonic frame. For we are told that the original humanSon of God contained in His body of light the seven metals to which theseven planets correspond and / Page 24 / out of which the world is formed.Again it is said that this human light-essence, issuing from the paternalprimitive source, descended through the seven planetary spheres and thelord of each partook of his essence. But then looking down he perceivedhis image mirrored in matter, became enamoured of it, went down unto itand thus fell in bondage to lower nature. All which explains man's doubleself, an indissoluble combination of godlike attributes and free essencewith sore enslavement to the baser world. In this narcissistic picture, so full of tragic charm,the meaning of the tradition begins to clarify itself; the clarificationis complete at the point where the descent of the Child of God from Hisworld of light into the world of nature loses the character of mere obedientpursuance of a higher order, hence guiltless, and becomes an independentand voluntary motion of longing, by that token guilty. And at the same timewe can begin to unravel the meaning of that "second emissary" who, identicalin a higher sense with the light-man, comes to free him from his involvementwith the darkness and to lead him home. For the doctrine now proceeds todivide the world into the three personal elements of matter, soul and spirit,among whom, and between whom and the Deity there is woven the romance, whosereal protagonist is the soul of mankind, adventurous and in adventure creative,a mythus, which, complete by reason of its combination of oldest recordand newest prophecy, gives us clear leading as to the true site of Paradiseand upon the story of the Fall. It is stated that the soul, which is to say the primevallyhuman, was, like matter, one of the principles laid down from the beginning,and that it possessed life but no knowledge. It had, in fact, so littlethat, though dwelling in the nearness of God, in a lofty sphere of happinessand peace, it let itself be disturbed and confused by the inclination -in a literal sense, implying direction - towards still formless matter,avid to mingle with this and evoke forms upon which it could compass physicaldesires. But the yearning and pain of its passion did not diminish afterthe soul had let itself be betrayed to a descent from its home; they wereheightened even to torment by the circumstance that matter sluggishly andobstinately preferred to remain in its original formless state, would hearnothing of taking on form to please the soul, and set up all imaginableopposition to being so formed. But now God intervened; seeing nothing forit, probably, in such a posture of affairs, but to come to the aid of thesoul, His errant concomitance. He supported the soul as it wrestled in lovewith refractory matter. He created the world; that is to say, by way ofassisting the primitive human being He brought forth solid and permanentforms, in order that the soul might gratify physical desires upon theseand engender man. But immediately afterwards, in pursuance of a consideredplan, He did something else. He sent, such / Page 25 / literally are thewords of the source upon which I am drawing, He sent out of the substanceof His divinity spirit to man in this world, that it might rouse from itsslumber the soul in the frame of man, and show it, by the Father's command,that this world was not its place, and that its sensual and passional enterprisehad been a sin, as a consequence of which the creation of the world wasto be regarded. What in truth the spirit ever strives to make clear to thehuman soul imprisoned in matter, the constant theme of its admonitions,is precisely this: that the creation of the world came about only by reasonof its folly in mingling with matter, and that once it parted therefromthe world of form would no longer have any existence. To rouse the soulto this view is the task of the reasonable spirit; all its hoping and strivingare directed to the end that the passionate soul, once aware of the wholesituation, will at length reacknowledge its home on high, strike out ofits consciousness the lower world and strive to regain once more that loftysphere of peace and happiness. In the very moment when that happens thelower world will be absolved; matter will win back her own sluggish will,being released from the bonds of form to rejoice once more, as she everdid and ever shall, in form- lessness,and be happy in her own way. Thus far the doctrine and the romance of the soul.And here, beyond a doubt, we have come to the very last "backward," reachedthe remotest human past, fixed upon Paradise and tracked down the storyof the Fall, of knowledge and of death, to its pure and original form. Theoriginal human soul is the oldest thing, more correctly an oldest thing,for it has always been, before time and before form, just as God has alwaysbeen and likewise matter. As for the intelligent spirit, in whom we recognizethe "second emissary" entrusted with the task of leading the soul back home;although in some undefined way closely related to it, yet it is after allnot quite the same, for it is younger: a missionary sent by God for thesoul's instruction and release, and thus for accomplishing the dissolutionof the world of form. If in some of its phases the dogma asserts or allegoricallyindicates the higher oneness of soul and spirit, it probably does so ongood ground; this, however, does not exclude the conception that the humansoul is originally conceived as being God's champion against the evil inthe world, and the role ascribed to it very like the one which falls tothe spirit sent to effect its own release. Certainly the reason why thedogma fails to explain this matter clearly is that it has not achieved acomplete portrayal of the role played by the spirit in the romance of thesoul; obviously the tradition requires filling out on this point. In this world of form and death conceived out ofthe marriage of soul and matter, the task of the spirit is clearly outlinedand unequivocal. Its mission consists in awakening the soul, in its self-forgetful/ Page 26 / involvement with form and death, to the memory of its higherorigin; to convince it that its relation with matter is a mistaken one,and finally to make it yearn for its original source with ever strongeryearning, until one day it frees itself wholly from pain and desire andwings away homewards. And therewith straightway the end of the world iscome, death done away and matter restored to her ancient freedom. But asit will sometimes happen that an ambassador from one kingdom to anotherand hostile one, if he stay there for long, will fall a prey to corruption,from his own country's point of view, gliding unconsciously over to theother's habits of thought and favouring its interests, settling down andadapting himself and taking on colour, until at last he becomes unavailableas a representative of his own world; this or something like it must bethe experience of the spirit in its mission. The longer it stops below,the longer it plies its diplomatic activities, the more they suffer froman inward breach, not to be concealed from the higher sphere, and in allprobability leading to its recall, were the problem of a substitute easierto solve than it seems is the case. There is no doubt that its role as slayer and grave-diggerof the world begins to trouble the spirit in the long run. For its pointof view alters, being coloured by its sojourn below; while being, in itsown mind, sent to dismiss death out of the world, it finds itself on thecontrary regarded as the deathly principle, as that which brings death intothe world. It is, in fact, a matter of the point of view, the angle of approach.One may look at it one way, or the other. Only one needs to know one's ownproper attitude, that to which one is obligated from home; otherwise thereis bound to occur the phenomenon which I objectively characterized as corruption,and one is alienated from one's natural duties. And here appears a certainweakness in the spirit's character: he does not enjoy his reputation asthe principle of death and the destroyer of form - though he did largelybring it upon himself, out of his great impulse towards judgment, even whendirected against himself - and it becomes a point of honour with him toget rid of it. Not that he would willfully betray his mission. Rather againsthis intention, under pressure, out of that impulse and from a stimulus whichone might describe as an unsanctioned infatuation for the soul and its passionalactivities, the words of his own mouth betray him; they speak in favourof the soul and its enterprise, and by a kind of sympathetic refinementupon his own pure motives, utter themselves on the side of life and form.It is an open question, whether such a traitorous or near-traitorous attitudedoes the spirit any good, and whether he cannot help serving, even by thatvery conduct, the purpose for which he was sent, namely the dissolutionof the material world by the releasing of the soul from it; or whether hedoes not know all this. and only thus conducts him- / Page 27 / self becausehe is at bottom certain that he may permit himself so much. At all events,this shrewd, self-denying identification of his own will with that of thesoul explains the allegorical tendency of the tale,. according to whichthe "second emissary" is another self of that light-man who was sent outto do 'battle with evil. Yes, it is possible that this part of the taleconceals a prophetic allusion to cer- tain mysterious decrees of God, whichwere considered by the teachers and preachers as too holy and inscrutableto be uttered. 9 WE can, objectively considered, speak of a "Fall"of the soul of the primeval light-man, only by over-emphasizing the moralfactor. The soul, certainly, has sinned against itself, frivolously sacrificingits original blissful and peaceful state - but not against God in the senseof offending any prohibition of His in its passional enterprise, for sucha prohibition, at least according to the doctrine we have received, wasnot issued. True, pious tradition has handed down to us the command of Godto the first man, not to eat of the tree of the "knowledge of good and evil";but we must remember that we are here dealing with a secondary and alreadyearthly event, and with human beings who had with God's own creative aidbeen generated out of the knowledge of matter by the soul; if God reallyset them this test, He undoubtedly knew beforehand how it would turn out,and the only obscurity lies in the question, why He did not refrain fromissuing a prohibition which, being disobeyed, would simply add to the maliciousjoy of His angelic host, whose attitude towards man was already most unfavourable.But the expression "good and evil" is a recognized and admitted gloss uponthe text, and what we are really dealing with is knowledge, which has asits consequence not theability to distinguish between good and evil, butrather death itself; so that we need scarcely doubt that the "prohibition"too is a well- meant but not very pertinent addition of the same kind. Everything speaks for such an explanation; but principallythe fact that God was not incensed at the yearning behaviour of the soul,did not expel it nor add any punishment to the measure of suffering whichit voluntarily drew upon itself and which indeed was outweighed by the mightof its desire. It is even clear that He was seized if not by understandingat least by pity, when He saw the passion of the soul. Unsummoned and straightwayHe came to its aid, and took a hand personally in the struggles of the soulto know matter in love, by making the world of form and death issue fromit, that the soul might take its pleasure thereupon; and certainly thiswas an attitude of God in which pity and understanding are scarcely to bedistinguished from one another. / Page 28 / Of sin in the sense of an offence toGod and His expressed will we can scarcely speak in this connection, especiallywhen we consider the peculiar immediacy of God's relation with the beingwhich sprang from this mingling of soul and matter: this human being ofwhom the angels were unmistakably and with good reason jealous from thevery first. It made a profound impression on Joseph, when old Eliezer toldhim of these matters, speaking of them just as we read them to-day in theHebrew commentaries upon early history. Had not God, they say, held Histongue and wisely kept silence upon the fact that not only righteous butalso evil things would proceed from man, the creation of man would certainlynot have been permitted by the "kingdom of the stern." The words give usan extraordinary insight into the situation. They show, above all, that"sternness" was not so much the property of God Himself as of His entourage,upon whom He seems to have been dependent, in a certain, if of course notdecisive way, for He preferred not to tell them what was going on, out offear lest they make Him difficulties, and only revealed some things andkept others to Himself. But does not this indicate that He was interestedin the creation of the world, rather than that He opposed it? So that ifthe soul was not directly provoked and encouraged by God to its enterprise,at least it did not act a,gainst His will, but only against the angels -and their somewhat less than friendly attitude towards man is clear fromthe beginning. The creation by God of that living world of good and evil,the interest He displayed in it, appeared to them in the light of a majesticcaprice; it piqued them, indeed, for they saw in it, probably with somejustice, a certain disgust with their own psalm-chanting purity. Astonishedand reproachful questions, such as: "What is man, 0 Lord, that Thou artmindful of him?" are forever on their lips; and God answers indulgently,benevolently, evasively, sometimes with irritation and in a sense distinctlymortifying to their pride. The fall of Shemmael, a very great prince amongthe angels, having twelve pairs of wings whereas the seraphim and sacredbeasts had only six apiece, is not very easy to explain, but its immediatecause must have been these dissensions; so old Eliezer taught - the laddrank it in with strained attention. It had always been Shemarel who stirredup the other angels against man, or rather against God's sympathy for him,and when one day God commanded the heavenly hosts to fall down before Adam,on account of his understanding and because he could call all things bytheir names, they did indeed comply with the order, some scowlingly, otherswith ill-concealed smiles - all but Shemmael, who did not do it. He declared,with a candour born of his wrathfulness, that it was ridiculous for beingscreated of the effulgence of glory to bow down before those made out ofthe dust of the earth. And thereupon took place his faIl- Eliezer describedit by / Page 29 / saying that it looked from a distance like a falling star.The other angels must have been well frightened by this event, which causedthem to behave ever afterwards with great discretion on the subject of man;but it is plain that whenever sinfulness got the upper hand on earth, asin Sodom and Gomorrah and at the time of the Flood, there was rejoicingamong the angels and corresponding embarrassment to the Creator, who foundHis hand forced to scourge the offenders, though less of His own desire.than under moral pressure from the heavenly host. But let us now consideronce more, in the light of the foregoing, the matter of. the "second emissary"of the spirit, and whether he is really sent to effect the dissolution ofthe material world by setting free the soul and bringing it back home. It is possible to argue that this is not God's meaning,and that the spirit was not, in fact, sent down expressly after the soulin order to act the part of grave-digger to the world of forms created byit with God's connivance. The mystery is perhaps a different one, residingin that part of the doctrine which says that the "second emissary" was noother than the first light-man sent out anew against evil. We have longknown that these mysteries deal very freely with the tenses, and may quitereadily use the past with reference to the future. It is possible that thesaying, soul and spirit were one, really means that they are sometimeto become one. This seems the more tenable in that the spirit is of itsnature and essentially the principle of the future, and represents the Itwill be, It is to be; whereas the goodness of the form-bound soul has referenceto the past and the holy It was. It remains controversial, which is lifeand which death; since both, the soul involved with nature and the spiritdetached from the world, the principle of the past and the principle ofthe future, claim, each in its own way, to be the water of life, and eachaccuses the other of dealings with death. Neither quite wrongly, since neithernature without spirit nor spirit without nature can truly be called life.But the mystery, and the unexpressed hope of God, lie In their union, inthe genuine penetration of the spirit into the world of the soul, in theinter-penetration of both principles, in a hallowing of the one throughthe other which should bring about a present humanity blessed with blessingfrom heaven above and from the depths beneath. Such then might be considered the ultimate meaningand hidden potentiality of the doctrine - though even so there must lingera strong element of doubt whether the bearing of the spirit, self- betrayingand subservient as we have described it to be, out of all too sensitivereluctance to be considered the principle of death, is calculated to leadto the goal in view. Let him lend all his wit to the dumb passion of thesoul; let him celebrate the grave, hail the past as life's unique source,and confess himself the malicious zealot and murderously life-enslavingwill; whatever he says he remains that / Page 30 / which he is, the warningemissary, the principle of contradiction, umbrage and dispersal, which stirsup emotions of disquiet and exceptional wretchedness in the breast of onesingle man among the blithely agreeing and accepting host, drives him forthout of the gates of the past and the known into the uncertain and the adventurous,and makes him like unto the stone which, by detaching itself and rolling,is destined to set up an ever-increasing rolling and sequence of events,of which no man can see the end. 10 IN such wise are formed those beginnings, those time-coulissesof the past, where memory may pause and find a hold whereon to base itspersonal history - as Joseph did on Ur, the city, and his forefather's exodustherefrom. It was a tradition of spiritual unrest; he had it in his blood,the world about him and his own life were conditioned by it, and he paidit the tribute of recognition when he recited aloud those verses from thetablets which ran: Why ordainest thou unrest to my son Gilgamesh, On the other hand, despite all his own devotion,he did not quite follow or accept the form it had taken in his father'scase: the care, the anxiousness, the unrest, which were expressed in Jacob'sunconquerable dislike of a settled existence such as would have befittedhis dignity, and in his temporary, improvised, half-nomad mode of life.He too, without any doubt, was beloved, cherished and preferred of God -for if Joseph was that, surely it was on his father's account! The God Shaddaihad made his father rich in Mesopotamia, rich in cattle and multifariouspossessions; moving among his troop of sons, his train of women, his servantsand his flocks, he might have been a prince among the princes of the land,and that he was, not only in outward seeming but also by the power of thespirit, as "nabi," which is: the prophesier; as a wise man, fullof knowledge of God, "exceeding wise," as one of the spiritual leaders andelders upon whom the inheritance of the Chaldaen had come, and who had attimes been thought of as his lineal descendants. No one approached Jacobsave in the most respectful and ceremonious way; in dealings and trade onecalled him "my lord" and spoke of oneself in humble and contemptuous terms.Why did he not live with his family, as a property- owner in one of thecities, in Hebron itself, Urusalim or Shechem, in a house built of stoneand wood, beneath which he could bury his dead? Why did he live like anIshmaelite or Bedouin, in tents outside the town, in the open country, noteven in sight of the citadel of Kirjath Arba; beside the well, the caves,the oaks and the terebinths, in a camp which might be struck at any time- as though he might not stop and take root with the others, as though fromhour to hour he must be awaiting the word which should make him take downhuts and stalls, load poles, blankets and skins on the pack-camels, andbe off? Joseph knew why, of course. Thus it must be, because one serveda God whose nature was not repose and abiding comfort, but a God of designsfor the future, in whose will inscrutable, great, far- reaching things werein process of becoming, who, with His brooding will and His world-planning,was Himself only in process of becoming, and thus was a God of unrest, aGod of cares, who must be sought for, for whom one must at all times keeponeself free, mobile and in readiness. In a word, it was the spirit, he that dignified andthen again he / Page 32 / that debased, who forbade Jacob to live a settledlife in towns; and if little Joseph sometimes regretted the fact, havinga taste for pomp and worldly circumstance, we must accept this trait ofhis character and let others make up for it. As for me, who now draw mynarrative to a close, to plunge, voluntarily, into limitless adventure (theword plunge being used advisedly), I will not conceal my native and comprehensiveunderstanding of the old man's restless unease and dislike of any fixedhabitation. For do I not know the feeling? To me too has not unrest beenordained, have not I too been endowed with a heart which knoweth not repose?The story-teller's star - is it not the moon, lord of the road, the wanderer,who moves in his stations, one after another, freeing himself from each?For the story- teller makes many a station, roving and relating, but pausesonly tent- wise, awaiting further directions, and soon feels his heart beatinghigh, partly with desire, partly too from fear and anguish of the flesh,but in any case as a sign that he must take the road, towards fresh adventureswhich are to be painstakingly lived through, down to their remotest details,according to the restless spirit's will. Already we are well under way, we have left far behindus the station where we briefly paused, we have forgotten it, and as isthe fashion of travellers have begun to look across the distance at theworld we are now to enter, in order that we may not feel too strange andawkward when we arrive. Has the journey already lasted too long? No wonder,for this time It is a descent into hell! Deep, deep down it goes, we paleas we leave the light of day and descend into the unsounded depths of thepast. Why do I turn pale, why does my heart beat high -not only since I set out, but even since the first command to do so- andnot only with eagerness but still more with physical fear? Is not the pastthe story-teller's element and native air, does he not take to it as a fishto water? Agreed. But reasoning like this will not avail to make my heartcease throbbing with fear and curiosity, probably because the past by whichI am well accustomed to let myself be carried far and far away is quiteanother from the past into which I now shudderingly descend: the past oflife, the dead-and-gone world, to which my own life shall more and moreprofoundly belong, of which its beginnings are already a fairly deep part.To die: that means actually to lose sight of time, to travel beyond it,to exchange for it eternity and presentness and therewith for the firsttime, life. For the essence of life is presentness, and only in a mythicalsense does its mystery appear in the time-forms of past and future. Theyare the way, so to speak, in which life reveals itself to the folk; themystery belongs to the initiate. Let the folk be taught that the soul wanders,But the wise know that this teaching is only the garment of the mysteryof the / Page 33 / eternal presentness of the soul, and that all life belongsto it, so soon as death shall have broken its solitary prison cell. I tasteof death and knowledge when, as story-teller, I adventure into the past;hence my eagerness, hence my fear and pallor. But eagerness has the upperhand, and Ido not deny that it is of the flesh, for its theme is the firstand last of all our questioning and speaking and all our necessity; thenature of man. That it is which we shall seek out in the underworld anddeath, as Ishtar there sought Tammuz and Isis Osiris, to find it where itlies and is, in the past. For it is, always is, however much we may say Itwas. Thus speaks the myth, which is only the garment of the mystery. Butthe holiday garment of the mystery is the feast, the recurrent feast whichbe- strides the tenses and makes the has-been and the to-be present to thepopular sense. What wonder then, that on the day of the feast humanity isin a ferment and conducts itself with licensed abandon? For in it life anddeath meet and know each other. Feast of story-telling, thou art the festalgarment of life's mystery, for thou conjurest up timelessness in the mindof the folk, and invokest the myth that it may be relived in the actualpresent. Feast of death, descent into hell, thou art verily a feast anda revelling of the soul of the flesh, which not for nothing clings to thepast and the graves and the solemn It was. But may the spirit too be withthee and enter into thee, that thou mayest be blest with a blessing fromheaven above and from the depths beneath. Down, then, and no quaking! But are we going at onefell swoop into the bottomlessness of the well? No, not at all. Not muchmore than three thousand years deep - and what is that, compared with thebottom? At that stage men do not wear horn armour and eyes in their foreheadsand,do battle with flying newts. They are men like ourselves - aside fromthat measure of dreamy indefiniteness in their habits of thought which wehave agreed to consider pardonable. So the homekeeping man talks to himselfwhen he sets out on a journey, and then, when the matter becomes serious,gets fever and palpitations none the less. Am I really, he asks himself,going to the ends of the earth and away from the realms of the everyday?No, not at all; I am only going there and thither, where many people havebeen before, only a day or so away from home. And thus we too speak, withreference to the country which awaits us. Is it the land of no- where, thecountry of the moon, so different from aught that ever was on sea or landthat we clutch our heads in sheer bewilderment? No, it is a country suchas we have often seen, a Mediterranean land, not,exactly like home, ratherdusty and stony, but certainly not fantastic, and above It move the familiarstars, There It lies, mountain and valley, cities and roads and vinecladslopes, with a turbid river / Page 34 / darting arrowy among the green thickets;there it lies stretched out in the past, like meadows and streams in a fairytale. Perhaps you closed your eyes, on the Journey down; open them now!We have arrived. See how the moonlight-sharpened shadows lie across thepeaceful, rolling landscape! Feel the mild spring freshness of the summer-starrynight!
FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS Graham Hancock 1995 QUEST FOR THE BEGINNING AND THE END Page 419 Chapter 45 The Works of Men and Gods "Among the numberless ruined temples of Ancient Egypt,the that is unique not only for its marvellous state of preservation which(rare indeed!) includes an intact roof, but for the fine quality of themany acres of beautiful reliefs that decorate its towering walls. Locatedat Abydos, eight miles west of the present course of the Nile, this is theTemple of Seti I, a monarch of the illustrious nineteenth Dynasty, who ruledfrom 1306-1290 BC.1 Seti is known primarily as the father of a famousson: Ramesses II (1290-1224 BC), the pharaoh of the biblical Exodus: Inhis own right, however, he was a major historical figure who conducted extensivemilitary campaigns outside Egypt's borders, who was responsible for theconstruction of several fine buildings and who carefully and conscientiouslyrefurbished and restored many older ones! His temple at Abydos, which wasknown evocatively as 'The House of Millions of Years', was dedicated toOsiris,4 the 'Lord of Eternity', of whomit was said in the Pyramid Texts: You have gone, but you will return, you have slept,but you will awake, fare upstream. . . travel about Abydos in thisspirit-form of yours which the gods commanded to belong to you."
A MYSTERIUM MAGNUM Page 998 THE GREAT MYSTERY "Of the heaven which is above the heavens, whatearthly poet ever did or ever will sing worthily? ... There abides thevery being with which true knowledge is concerned; the colourless, formless,intangible essence, . . . knowledge absolute in existence absolute." Plato (Phaedrus, 247 C) "It is infinite, incomprehensible, immeasurable;it exceeds our powers, and is beyond our scrutiny. The place of it, thewhither and the whence, the manner and quality of its being, are unknownto us: It moves in absolute stability, and its stability moves withinit." Hermes "In its true state, mind is naked, immaculate;not made of anything, being of the Voidness; clear, vacuous, without duality,transparent; timeless, uncompounded, un- impeded, colourless; not relalizableas a separate thing, but as the unity of all things, yet not composedof them; of one taste, and transcendent over differentiation." Padma-Sambhava "Sameness is differentiation, differentiationis sameness." Zen Formula "St Augustine says, 'The soul has a private door into divinity where for her all things amount to naught.' There she is ignorant with knowing, will-less with willing, dark with enlightenment." Eckhart May the Great Mystery make sunrise in your heart. Sioux Indian "An unexpectedly glorious light will burst fromyour substance, and the end will arrive three days afterwards. The substancewill be granulated, like atoms of gold (or motes in the Sun), and turna deep red - a red the intensity of which makes it seem black like verypure blood in a clotted state. This is the Great Wonder of Wonders, which has not its like on earth." Philalethes page 999 MYSTERIUM MAGNUM "Know, may Allah the Exalted have mercy on thee,that the Elixir of Redness is not directly formed, but must first passthrough the stage of the Elixir of Whiteness (i.e. of silver). . . . Afterit has become dry. . . it becomes fixed in the colour of purple, and iswaxy, fusible, soluble, stable. One part of it is capable of transforminginto gold a thousand parts of mercury which has been fixed by means ofthe Elixir of Silver. Similarly if you wish to project it upon silverit will turn it into pure gold, more precious than the gold of mines." Abu 'I-Qasim al-'lraqi "I heard my noble Master say, How that manie men patient and wise, Found our White Stone with Exercise; After that thei were trewlie tought, With great labour that Stone they Caught; But few (said he) or scarcely one, In fifteene Kingdomes had our Red Stone." Thomas Norton "Those who find the Mysterium magnum will know what it is; but to the godless it is incomprehensible; because they have not the will to desire to comprehend it. They are captured by the terrestrialessence so as to render them unable to draw will in the mystery of God."
Boehme
"But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, norear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things whichGod hath prepared for them that love him." I. Corinthians, II. 9 "He (the Pre-existent) is not an Attribute of Being,but Being is an Attribute of Him; He is not contained in Being, but Beingis contained in Him; He doth not possess Being, but Being possesses Him;He is the Eternity, the Beginning, and the Measure of Existence, being anteriorto Essence and essential Existence and Eternity, because He is the CreativeBeginning, Middle, and End of all things. . . . He is not This without beingThat; nor doth He possess this mode of being without that. On the contraryHe is all things as being the Cause of them all, and as holding togetherand anticipating in Himself all the beginnings and all the fulfilments ofall things; and He is above them all in that He, anterior to their existence,super-essentially transcends them all. Hence all attributes may be affirmedat once of Him, and yet He is no Thing. He possesses all shape and form,and yet is formless and shapeless, containing beforehand incomprehensiblyand transcendently the beginning, middle, and end of all things, and sheddingupon them a pure radiance of that one and undifferenced causality whenceall their fairness comes."
PLUTARCH MORALIA VOLUME V English Translation Frank Cole Babbitt 1936 Page 79-81 ISIS AND OSIRIS That saying of the adherents of Pythagoras, thatthe sea is a tear of Cronus, may seem to hint at its impure and extraneousnature. Let this, then, be stated incidentally, as a matterof record that is common knowledge. (33.) But the wiser of the priestscall not only the Nile Osiris and the sea Typhon, but they simply give thename of Osiris to the whole source and faculty creative of moisture, believingthis to be the cause of generation and the substance of life-producing seed;and the name of Typhon they give to all that is dry, fiery, and arid,' ingeneral, and antagonistic to moisture. Therefore, because they believe thathe was personally of a reddish sallow colour, they are not eager to meetmen of such complexion, nor do they like to associate with them. Osiris, on the other hand, according to their legend-arytradition, was dark, because water darkens everything, earth and clothesand clouds, when it comes into contact with them. In young people the presenceof moisture renders their hair black, while greyness, like a paleness asit were, is induced by / Page 83 / dryness in those who are passing theirprime, Also the spring-time is vigorous, prolific, and agreeable; but theautumn, since it lacks moisture, is inimical to plants and unhealthful forliving creatures. The bull kept at Heliopolis which they call Mneuis,and which is sacred to Osiris (some hold it to be thc sire of Apis), isblack and has honours second only to Apis. Egypt, moreover, which has theblackest of soils,. they call by the same name as the black portion of theeye, "Chemia," and compare it to a heart; for it is warm and moist and isenclosed by the southern portions of the inhabited world and adjoins them,like the heart in a man's left side. 34. They say that the sun and moon do notuse chariots, but boats in which to sail round in their courses; and bythis they intimate that the nourish-ment and origin of these heavenly bodiesis from moisture. They think also that Homer, like Thales, had gained hisknowledge from the Egyptians, when he postulated water as the source andorigin of all things; for, according to them, Oceanus is Osiris, and Tethysis Isis, since she is the kindly nurse and provider for all things. In fact,the Greeks call emission apousia and coition synousia, andthe son (hyios) from water (hydor) and rain (hysai);Dionysus also they call Hyes since he is lord of the nature of moisture;and he is no other than Osiris in fact Hellanicus / Page 85 / seems to haveheard Osiris pronounced Hysiris by the priests, for he regularly spellsthe name in this way, deriving it, in all probability, from the nature ofOiris and the ceremony of finding him a 35. That Osiris is identical with Dionysuswho could more fittingly know than yourself, Clea? For you are at the headof the inspired maidens of Delphi, and have been consecrated by your fatherand mother in the holy rites of Osiris. If, however, for the benefit ofothers it is needful to adduce proofs of this identity, let us leave undisturbedwhat may not be told, but the public ceremonieses which the priests performin the burial of the Apis, when they convey his body on an improvised bier,do not in any way come short of a Bacchic procession; for they fasten skinsof fawns about themselves, and carry Bacchic wands and indulge in shoutingsand movements exactly as do those who are under the spell of the Dionysiacecstasies. For the same reason many of the Greeks make statues of Dionysusin the form of a bull; and the women of Elis invoke him, praying that thegod may come with the hoof of a bull and the epithet applied to Dionysusamong the Argives is "Son of the Bull." They call him up out of the waterby the sound of trumpets, at the same time casting into the depths a lambas an offering to the Keeper of the Gate. The trumpets they conceal in Bacchicwands, as Socrates has stated in his treatise on The Holy Ones Further-/ Page 87 / more, the tales regarding the Titans and the rites celebratedby night agree with the accounts of the dismemberment of Osiris and hisrevivification and regenesis. Similar agreement is found too in the talesabout their sepulchres. The Egyptians, as has already been stated, pointout tombs of Osiris in many places, and the people of Delphi believe thatthe remains of Dionysus rest with them close beside the oracle; and theHoly Ones offer a secret sacrifice in the shrine of Apollo whenever thedevotees of Dionysus wake the God of the Mystic Basket. To show that theGreeks regard Dionysus as the lord and master not only of wine, but of thenature of every sort of moisture, it is enough that Pindar be our witness,when he says May gladsome Dionysus swell the fruit upon the trees, The hallowed splendour of harvest-time. For this reason all-who reverence Osiris are prohibitedfrom destroying a cultivated tree or blocking up a spring of water. 36. Not only the Nile, but every form of moisture.they call simply the effusion of Osiris; and in their holy rites the waterjar in honour of the god heads the procession.! And by the picture of arush they represent a king and the southern region of theworld,g and therush is interpreted to mean the watering and fructifying of all things,and ih its nature it seems to bear some resemblance to the generative member./ Page 89 / Moreover, when they celebrate the festival of the Pamylia which,as has been said, is of a phallic nature, they expose and carry about astatue of which the male member is triple; for the god is the Source,and every source, by its fecundity, multiplies what proceeds from it; andfor "many times " we have a habit of saying "thrice," as, for example,"thrice happy," and Bonds, even thrice as many, unnumbered, unless, indeed, the word "triple " is usedby the early wvriters in its strict meaning; for the nature of moisture,being the source and origin of all things, created out of itself three primalmaterial substances, Earth, Air, and Fire. In fact, the tale that is annexedto the legend to the effect that Typhon cast the male member of Osiris intothe river, and Isis could not find it, but constructed and shaped a replicaof it, and ordained that it should be honoured and borne in processions,plainly comes round to this doctrine, that the creative and germinal powerof the god, at the very first, acquired moisture as its substance, and throughmoisture combined with whatever was by nature capable of participating ingeneration." Page83 "Dionysus also they call Hyes since he is lord ofthe nature of moisture; and he is no other than Osiris."
GOD IS HIDDEN NO MAN KNOWETH HIS FORM NO MAN HAS SEARCHED OUT HIS SIMILITUDE HE IS HIDDEN TO GODS AND MEN HE IS A SECRET TO ALL HIS CREATURES NO MAN KNOWETH A NAME BY WHICH TO CALL HIM HIS NAME IS HIDDEN HIS NAME IS A SECRET TO ALL HIS CHILDREN HIS NAMES ARE WITHOUT NUMBER HIS NAMES ARE MANY NO MAN KNOWETH THE NUMBER THEREOF OLD EGYPTIAN
IN THAT DAY SHALL THE LORD BE ONE AND HIS NAME ONE HEBREW HIS NAMES ARE MANY NO MAN KNOWETH THE NUMBER THEREOF OLD EGYPTIAN
THE PROVING OF GOD
AT THIS MOST CRITICAL MOMENT IN THE NOW OF OUR PASSING THE ZEDALIZZED TOOK TIME OUT TO ADDRESS OUR COMPANIES GOODLY MIX OF STRIVEN SOULS AND IN MANNER GENTLE THIS INCANTATION SOLD
LOVEEVOLVEEVOLVELOVETHATLOVEEVOLVEEVOLVELOVE LIGHT LIVING LOVING LIGHT LOVING LIVING LIGHT THAT IS GOD GOD IS THAT
I THAT THAT I THAT ISISIS THAT ISISIS THAT ISISIS EVERYTHING IS THATTHAT IS EVERYTHING THAT ISISIS 9 19 9 19 9 19 9 19 9 19 9 19 ISISIS THAT ISMOTHERATHERFATHERISISFARTHERRATHERMOTHERIS THATISNATURESACREDTHATISISISTHATSACREDNATUREISTHAT GODIZTHATTHATIZ GODTHATIZTHATTHATIZTHATGODIZTHATTHATIZGOD THAT IS MIND ETERNAL MIND MATERNAL MATERNAL MIND ETERNAL MIND IS THAT THAT MIND OF THINE AND THAT MIND OF MINE HATH ALWAYS SPARKLING POINT BETWEEN
MIN DOTH DREAM DREAM DOTH MIN
WHAT DOTH MIN MEAN WHAT DOTH MIN DREAM ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZ
RE LIGHT ON LIGHT RE
RELIGIONS RE RELIGIONS
GODS RE LIGHT IS ON
RELIGION RE LIGHT ON RELIGION RELIGION 95 LIGHT IS ON RELIGION RELIGION RE LIGHT IS ON RELIGION
https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/bioluminescence.htm Bioluminescence is the production and emission of light by a living
organism as the result of a chemical reaction during which chemical
energy is converted to light energy.
LETTERS TRANSPOSED INTO NUMBER RE-ARRANGED IN NUMERICAL ORDER
THE GOD LIFE
LETTERS TRANSPOSED INTO NUMBER RE-ARRANGED IN NUMERICAL ORDER
THE GOOD LIFE
LETTERS TRANSPOSED INTO NUMBER RE-ARRANGED IN NUMERICAL ORDER
THE GOOD LIFE
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