THE

LANGUAGES OF ALL THE PEOPLE

COULD IF NEED

BE BE

WRITTEN WITH A HANDFUL OF THESE SIGNS

 BY

WRITING

THE

26

LETTERS

OF

THE

ALPHABET

IN A CERTAIN ORDER ONE MAY PUT DOWN ALMOST ANY MESSAGE

 

A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1+0

1+1

1+2

1+3

1+4

1+5

1+6
1+7
1+8

1+9

2+0

2+1
2+2

2+3
2+4
2+5

2+6
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

 THE

SILENT

TRANSMITTER

 

3

SUN
54

 
9

 
9
5

EARTH
52

 
25

 
7
4

MOON
57

 
21

 
3
12

 
163

 
55

 
19
1+2

 
1+6+3

 
5+5

 
1+9
3

 
10

 
10

 
10

 

 
1+0

 
1+0

 
1+0
3

 
1

 
1

 
1

 

 

THE

BOWMAN

 

9
T
H
E
B
O
W
M
A
N

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
8

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
8

 
8
EIGHT
8

 
T
H
E
B
O
W
M
A
N

 

 

 

 

 

 
8
6
5
+
=
19
1+9
1
ONE
1

 

 

 

 

 

 
6

 
5
+
=
11
1+1
2
TWO
2

 

 

 

 

 

 

1+5

 
1+4

 

 
8
15
14
+
=
37
3+7
1
ONE
1

 
T
H
E
B
O
W
M
A
N

 

 

 

 

 

 
20
8
5
2
15
23
13
1
14
+
=
101

1+1
2
TWO
2

 
2+0
1+5
2+3
1+3
1+4

 

 

 

 
2

 

 

 

 
6
5
4
5
+
=
22
2+2
4
FOUR
4

 
8
5
2
1
+
=
16
1+6
7
SEVEN
7
T
H
E
B
O
W
M
A
N

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE

RA - IN - BOW - MAN

 

 ADD TO REDUCE REDUCE TO DEDUCE

 

11
S
A
G
I
T
T
A
R
I
U
S

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
9

 

 

 

 
9

 

 
+
=
18
1+8

 
9
NINE

 

 
S
A
G
I
T
T
A
R
I
U
S

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
1

 

 
9

 

 

 

 
9

 
1

 

 
20
2+0
=
2

 

 

 
10

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
10

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
1+9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
1+9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
19

 

 
9

 

 

 

 
9

 
19

 

 
56
5+6
=
11
ELEVEN
11

 
S
A
G
I
T
T
A
R
I
U
S

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
19
1
7
9
20
20
1
18
9
21
19
+
=
144

1+4+4
=
9

 

 

 
19

 

 

 
20
20

 
18

 
21
19
+
=
117

1+1+7
=
9
NINE
9

 

1+9

 

 

 
2+0
2+0

 
1+8

 
2+1

1+9
+
=
36
3+6
=
9

 

 

 
10

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
10

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1+0

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1+0

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
1
7
9

 

 
1

 
9

 

 
+
=
27
2+7
=
9
NINE
9

 
S
A
G
I
T
T
A
R
I
U
S

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
1
1
7
9
2
2
1
9
9
3
1
+
=
45
4+5
=
9
NINE
9

 

 

 

 
9

 

 

 
9
9

 

 
+
=
27
2+7
=
9
NINE
9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1+8

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
18

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
S
A
G
I
T
T
A
R
I
U
S

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
1
2
3

 
5
6
7
8

 
10
11

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
S
A
G
I
T
T
A
R
I
U
S

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

THE

A

MAZE

IN

MAGIKALALPHABETICAL

NUMBER

OF

SAGITTARIUS

ISISIS

9

 

A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1+0

1+1

1+2

1+3

1+4

1+5

1+6
1+7
1+8

1+9

2+0

2+1
2+2

2+3
2+4
2+5

2+6
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
 

A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

 

A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

 

HEAVEN ABOVE HEAVEN BELOW

STARS ABOVE STARS

BELOW

ALL

THAT IS OVER UNDER SHALL SHOW

HAPPY ART THOU

THAT

THIS RIDDLE SHALL KNOW 

 

16
S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S

 
19
9
18
9
21
19

 
15
19
9
18
9
19

 
9
19
9
19

 
1+9

 
1+8

 
2+1
1+9

 
1+5
1+9

 
1+8

 
1+9

 

 
1+9

 
1+9

 
10

 
9

 
3
10

 
6
10

 
9

 
10

 

 
10

 
10

 
1+0

 

 

 

 
1+0

 

 
1+0

 

 

 
1+0

 

 
1+0

 
1+0

 
1

 

 

 

 
1

 

 
1

 

 

 
1

 

 
1

 
1

 

 
9

 
9

 

 

 

 

 
9

 
9

 

 
9

 
9

 

 
1
9
9
9
3
1

 
6
1
9
9
9
1

 
9
1
9
1

 
S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S

 
S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S

 
9

 
9

 

 

 

 

 
9

 
9

 

 
9

 
9

 

S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S

1
9

 
9

 
1

 
6
1
9

 
9
1

 
9
1
9
1

16
S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S

 
19
9
9
9
21
19

 
15
19
9
9
9
19

 
9
19
9
19

 
S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S
 

S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S

19
9
18
9
21
1

 
15
19
9
18
9
19

 
9
19
9
19

S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S

16
S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S

 
1
9
9
9
3
1

 
6
19
9
9
9
1

 
9
1
9
1

 
S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S

 
1

 

 

 

 
1

 

 
1

 

 

 
1

 

 
1

 
1

 
S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S

 

 

 

 

 
3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
6

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S

 

 
9
9
9

 

 

 

 

 
9
9
9

 

 
9

 
9

 

 
S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S

 

20
S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S

 
I
R
I
S

 
19
9
18
9
21
19

 
15
19
9
18
9
19

 
9
19
9
19

 
9
18
9
19

 
1+9

 
1+8

 
2+1
1+9

 
1+5
1+9

 
1+8

 
1+9

 

 
1+9

 
1+9

 

 
1+8

 
1+9

 
10

 
9

 
3
10

 
6
10

 
9

 
10

 

 
10

 
10

 

 
9

 
10

 
1+0

 

 

 

 
1+0

 

 
1+0

 

 

 
1+0

 

 
1+0

 
1+0

 

 

 

 
1+0

 
1

 

 

 

 
1

 

 
1

 

 

 
1

 

 
1

 
1

 

 

 

 
1

 

 
9

 
9

 

 

 

 

 
9

 
9

 

 
9

 
9

 

 
9

 
9

 

 
S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S

 
I
R
I
S

 
1
9
9
9
3
1

 
6
1
9
9
9
1

 
9
1
9
1

 
9
9
9
1

 
S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S

 
I
R
I
S

 

 

 

 
S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S

 
I
R
I
S

 
19
9
18
9
21
1

 
15
19
9
18
9
19

 
9
19
9
19

 
9
18
9
19

 
S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S

 
I
R
I
S
20
S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S

 
I
R
I
S

 
1
9
9
9
3
1

 
6
1
9
9
9
1

 
9
1
9
1

 
9
9
9
1

 
S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S

 
I
R
I
S

 
1

 

 

 

 
1

 

 
1

 

 

 
1

 

 
1

 
1

 

 

 

 
1

 
S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S

 
I
R
I
S

 

 

 

 

 
3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S

 
I
R
I
S

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
6

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S

 
I
R
I
S

 

 
9
9
9

 

 

 

 

 
9
9
9

 

 
9

 
9

 

 
9
9
9

 

 
S
I
R
I
U
S

 
O
S
I
R
I
S

 
I
S
I
S

 
I
R
I
S

 

HORUS

THINE HOUR

IS

 

 

 

A

MAZE

IN

ZAZAZAENTERZAZAZA

ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAAZAZAZAZAZAZAZ

ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZ

THE

MAGIKALALPHABET

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA

12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262625242322212019181716151413121110987654321

 

 

THE

UPSIDE DOWN

OF

THE

DOWNSIDE

UP

ZXSONIHHINOSXZZXSONIHHINOSXZZXSONIHHINOSXZZXSONIHHINOSXZ

987654321999999999123456789 ZXSONIH987654321999999999123456789 HINOSXZ87654321999999999123456789

H I N O S X Z Z X S O N I H 8 9 14 15 19 26 26 19 15 14 9 8 H I N O S X Z Z X S O N I H

8 + 9 + 5 + 6 + 1 + 6 + 8

10
P
U
R
E
S
T

L
O
V
E
+
=
10
1+0
=
1
ONE
1

16

21

18
5

19
20

12
15
22
5
+
=
153

1+5+3
=
9
NINE
9

P
U
R
E
S
T

L
O
V
E

 

153 x 12

ISISIS

1836

 

 

10
P
U
R
E
S
T

L
O
V
E
+
=
10
1+0
=
1

1
ONE
1

16

21

18
5

19
20

12
15
22
5
+
=
153

1+5+3
=
9

9
NINE
9

P
U
R
E
S
T

L
O
V
E

16
21
18
5
19
20
+
=
99

12
15
22
5
+
=
54

9+9

5+4

18

9

1+8

9

9

P
U
R
E
S
T

L
O
V
E

9

9

=
18
1+8
=
9
NINE
9

P
U
R
E
S
T

L
O
V
E

 

TWO EYES YOU ARE TWO EYES YOU BE I SEE YOU HAVE TWO EYES FOR ME

 

16
S
I
R
I
U
S

O
S
I
R
I
S

I
S
I
S

9

9

9

9

9

9

S
I
R
I
U
S

O
S
I
R
I
S

I
S
I
S

 

S
I
R
I
U
S

O
S
I
R
I
S

I
S
I
S

9
9
9

9
9
9

9

9

S
I
R
I
U
S

O
S
I
R
I
S

I
S
I
S

 

O
S
I
R
I
S

S
I
R
I
U
S

I
S
I
S

I
R
I
S

9
9
9

9
9
9

9

9

9
9
9

O
S
I
R
I
S

S
I
R
I
U
S

I
S
I
S

I
R
I
S

 

O
S
I
R
I
S

S
I
R
I
U
S

I
R
I
S

I
S
I
S

9
9
9

9
9
9

9
9
9

9

9

O
S
I
R
I
S

S
I
R
I
U
S

I
R
I
S

I
S
I
S

I
S
I
S

19

I
R
I
S

18

I
S
I
S
9

9

I
R
I
S
9

9

 

THE DOG GOD

ANUBIS

A

NUMBER

IS

 

16
S
I
R
I
U
S

O
S
I
R
I
S

I
S
I
S

19
9
18
9
21
19

15
19
9
18
9
19

9
19
9
19

1+9

1+8

2+1
1+9

1+5
1+9

1+8

1+9

1+9

1+9

10

9

3
10

6
10

9

10

10

10

1+0

1+0

1+0

1+0

1+0

1+0

1

1

1

1

1

1

9

9

9

9

9

9

1
9
9
9
3
1

6
1
9
9
9
1

9
1
9
1

S
I
R
I
U
S

O
S
I
R
I
S

I
S
I
S

 

16
S
I
R
I
U
S

O
S
I
R
I
S

I
S
I
S

19
9
9
9

19

19
9
9
9
19

9
19
9
19

S
I
R
I
U
S

O
S
I
R
I
S

I
S
I
S

 
S
I
R
I
U
S

O
S
I
R
I
S

I
S
I
S

I
R
I
S

9

9

9

9

9

9

9

9

20
S
I
R
I
U
S

O
S
I
R
I
S

I
S
I
S

I
R
I
S

19
9
18
9
21
19

15
19
9
18
9
19

9
19
9
19

9
18
9
19

1+9

1+8

2+1
1+9

1+5
1+9

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THE RECURRENT DREAM

A
B
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F
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THE ENLIGHTENMENT

NATHAN

THE WISE

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

1729-81

 Page

24

" She has one dream - a fancy, if you like,

Most dear to her. It's that her Templer

No mortal man, no son of mortal man,

But one of the angels, whom her young heart

From childhood onwards loved to think of as

Her own protector. Stepping from the cloud

Which veiled him, hovering round her even in

The fire, he suddenly appeared in Templar's

Form - don't smile at her! - Who knows? or if

You smile, let her at least emjoy a dream

Where Christian, Jew and Muslim can unite

As one - a dream that is so sweet!

 

NATHAN THE WISE

Page

77

Scene

5

 Saladin and Nathan

SALADIN Come closer, Jew - closer - right up to me.

Don't be afraid.

NATHAN That's for your enemies!

SALADIN You call yourself Nathan?

NATHAN Yes.

SALADIN The wise Nathan?

NATHAN No.

SALADIN You may not; but the people do.

NATHAN The people! Possibly.

SALADIN You surely don't

Believe that I despise the people's voice?

For some time now I've wished to meet the man

Whom all the people call the Wise.

NATHAN And if

They call him that in mockery? If wise

78

Means to the people nothing more than shrewd,

And shrewd just means aware of his own interest.

SALADIN You mean his own true interest, I presume?

NATHAN Then the most selfish man would be the shrewdest.

Then shrewd and wise would be the same.

SALADIN I hear You proving what you wish to contradict.

Humanity's true interest, which the people

Cannot understand, you understand.

At least you've tried to understand it.

You have reflected on it. That alone

Makes a man wise.

NATHAN But everybody thinks

He's wise.

SALADIN That's quite enough of modesty!

To hear this all the time when what I seek

For is sober reason fills me with disgust.

(He gets up quickly)

Now let's come straight to the point. But, first of all Be honest with me, Jew! Be honest!

NATHAN Sultan

You can rely on me. I'll serve you, and

Prove worthy of your further patronage.

SALADIN You'll serve me? How?

NATHAN I promise you the best

Of everything, and at the cheapest price.

SALADIN What are you talking about? Surely not

About your goods? My sister may well haggle

With you sometime. (That's in case she's listening!)

I have no business with you as a merchant.

NATHAN In that case, I expect you want to know

What news about the enemy I gathered

On my travels. It is true the enemy

Is active once again, and to be frank...

SALADIN No, that was not my aim in meeting you.

I know already everything I need

To know of that. - In short -

NATHAN Command me, Sultan.

SALADIN I want your teaching on another subject.

Something quite different. Since you are so wise, Tell me, what kind of faith, what kind of law

Has seemed most plausible to you?

79

NATHAN Sultan

I am a Jew.

SALADIN And I a Muslim. And

The Christian is between us. Of these three

Religions only one can be the true one.

A man like you does not remain, where chance

Of birth has cast him: if he does, he stays

From insight, reason, choice of what is best.

So, share with me your insight. Let me hear

The reasons which I haven't had the time

To ponder for myself. Tell me the choice

Determined by these reasons - in the strictest

Confidence, you understand - so I

Can make that choice my own. I see you hesitate.

You look me up and down. It may well be

That no Sultan has ever had this kind

Of whim before. And yet it does not seem

Unworthy of a Sultan. Do you think? -

Speak! - or do you want a moment to

Collect your thoughts? Very well, you may.

(I'll go and see if Sittah's listening

And hear if I've done it right.) Now think!

Think quickly. And I'll soon be back.

(He goes into the ante-room where Sittah went)

Scene

6

Nathan

(Nathan alone)

NATHAN How strange!

How do I stand? What does the Sultan want?

I come expecting money. And he wants

The truth. The truth! and wants it so - straight out.

In cash, - as if it were a coin! If it

Were ancient coinage, valued by its weight --

That might have passed. But such new kinds of coin

Valued by their stamp, which you must count

Out on a board, are not like truth at all.

Can truth be counted out into our heads

Like money in a sack? Now who's the Jew? -

He or I? And yet I wonder. Is

He truly searching for the truth at all?

Should I suspect that he is only using

Truth to trap me? That would be too petty.

Too petty? Nothing is too petty for

A great man. And, of course he rushed right in,

80

Like someone bursting through the door. But when

You're visiting a friend, you knock and listen

First. I must be on my guard. But how?

I can't insist that I'm a Jew; but to

Deny that I'm a Jew would be still worse.

Then he could simply ask, "If not a Jew,

Why not a Muslim?" That's it! That can save me!

It's not just children who can be fobbed off

With fairy tales. He's coming. Let him come!

Scene

7

Saladin and Nathan

SALADIN (And so the coast is clear) - I hope I've given

You enough time for reflection. Have

You finished ordering your thoughts? Speak!

Not a soul can hear us.

NATHAN I don't mind

If the whole world were to hear us.

SALADIN Nathan

Is so certain of his case? That's what I call

A wise man! One who never hides the truth.

A man who, for its sake, will gamble everything

His blood and land, life and limb.

NATHAN Yes, if it's needed and of use.

SALADIN I hope

I may in future earn the right to bear

One of my titles; "The Reformer of the World

And of the Law."

NATHAN A truly splendid title!

But before I tell you all my thoughts,

Sultan, would you allow me to relate

A little tale?

SALADIN Why not? I've always loved

To listen to a story, if it is

Well told.

NATHAN I must confess I'm not the man

To tell it very well.

SALADIN A' Your pride and modesty

Again! Go on, just tell the story, now.

NATHAN Once long ago, a man lived in the East

Who had a ring of priceless worth, a gift

81

From someone dear to him. The stone was opal,

Shot through with a hundred lovely colours.

The ring had secret power to gain favour

In the sight of God and humankind

For anyone who wore it and who trusted

In its power. No wonder that the man

Would never take it from his finger; and

He made provision that the ring should stay

Forever in his dynasty. And so

He left it to the dearest of his sons,

With firm instructions that he, in his turn,

Should leave it to the son he loved the most.

In this way, by the power of the ring,

Without respect of birth, the dearest son

Should always be the master of the house.

You understand me, Sultan?

SALADIN Yes, go on!

NATHAN And so the ring passed down from son to son,

Until it reached a father of three sons.

All three alike were dutiful to him.

And he was therefore bound to love all three

Sons equally. And yet, from time to time,

When each in turn was with him on his own,

And did not have to share his overflowing heart

With his two brothers, then the one who stood

Before him seemed most worthy of the ring.

And thus by loving weakness he was led

To promise it to each of them in turn.

So matters rested for a while, until

The father's death drew near; and then the worthy

Man was in a quandary. He could

Not bear to hurt two of his sons, who'd trusted

In his word. So what was he to do?

He sent in secret for a craftsman who

Was ordered to devise two further rings,

Exactly on the pattern of his own,

Whatever cost or effort was required,

To make each ring precisely like the first.

The craftsman did well. When he brought the rings

82

The father was unable to distinguish

The original. With joyful heart

He called his sons, but each one on his own.

To each he gave his blessing and his ring.

And then he died. - You hear me, Sultan?

SALADIN (turns away disconcerted) Yes,

I hear! - Just finish off your fairy tale.

I hope you're near the end.

NATHAN That is the end.

It's obvious what follows. Scarcely had

The father died, than each comes with his ring,

And each one claims to be the master of

The house. There are enquiries, arguments,

Complaints. In vain. There was no way to prove

Which ring was true.

(After a pause in which he waits for the Sultan s answer)

Almost as hard as now ! For us to prove the one true faith. 1

SALADIN Is this 1

To be the answer to my question?

NATHAN

I Apologize - I cannot trust myself

To tell the difference between the rings,

Because the father had them made precisely

So that no one could distinguish them.

SALADIN The rings! - Don't play with me! I should have thought

That the religions which I named to you

Were easy to distinguish. Even by

Their clothing; even down to food and drink.

NATHAN But not the grounds on which they rest.

For are they not all based on history,

Handed down or written? History

We take on trust, on faith. Is that not true?

In whose good faith can we most put our trust?

Our people's, those whose blood we share, and who,

From childhood on have proved their love for us,

Who never have deceived us, save, perhaps,

When it was good for us to be deceived?

Can I believe less in my ancestors

Than you believe in yours? Or vice versa,

Can I demand of you that you accuse

Your own forebear of lies, just so that I

Don't contradict my own? - or vice versa.

The same is true of Christians, isn't it?

83

SALADIN (Upon my lifel the man is right.

I must be silent:)

NATHAN Let us now come back

To our three rings. I said before: the sons

Accused each other, each swore to the judge

He had received his ring directly from

His father's hand - and it was true. - And he'd

Been promised by his father long ago

That one day he would have the privileges

Of the ring - and that was also true.

The father, each declared, could not have been

So false to him; and rather than allow

Suspicion of deceit to fall on his

Beloved, father; he preferred to charge

His brothers with deceit, although he would

In general believe only the best

Of them; and vowed that he would find a way

To expose the traitors and to take revenge.

SALADIN And what about the judge? I want to hear

What you will make him say to this. Go on!

NATHAN The judge pronounced: Unless you bring your father

Here to me at once, I shall dismiss you

From my court. Do you think that I am here

For solving riddles? Or do you expect

For the one true ring to speak up for itself?

But wait! You tell me that the true ring has

The magic power to make beloved; to

Gain favour in the sight of God and humankind.

That must decide it! For the false rings cannot

Have this power. Which brother do two

Of you love most? Come on, speak up! You're silent?

Do the rings work only inwards and

Not outwards? So that each one only loves

Himself the best? All three of you are then

Deceived deceivers; none of your

Three rings is genuine. The one true ring

Has probably been lost. To hide the loss,

As substitute, your father had three rings

Made to replace the one.

SALADIN Splendid! Splendid!

NATHAN And so the judge went on, if you do not

Want my advice instead of judgement, go!

But my advice is this: accept the case

Precisely as it stands. As each of you

84

Received his own ring from his father's hand,

Let each believe for certain that his ring

Is the original. Perhaps the father

Did not want to suffer any more

The tyranny of one ring in his house.

Certainly he loved all three of you,

And loved you equally. He could not injure

Two of you and favour only one.

Well then! Let each one strive to emulate

His love, unbiased and unprejudiced.

Let each one of you vie with the other two

To bring to light the power of the stone

In his own ring. And may this power be helped

By gentleness, sincere good nature,

Charity and deepest of devotion to God.

And when in time, the power of the stone

Shall find expression in your children's children's

Children, I invite you in a thousand,

Thousand years to come again before

This court. A wiser man than I will then

Sit in this chair and speak. Now go! - so said

The modest judge.

SALADIN God! God!

NATHAN Saladin,

If you should feel yourself to be this promised,

Wiser man ...

SALADIN (who rushes to him and seizes his hand and does not let go again until the end)

I who am no more than dust?

Than nothing? God!

NATHAN What is it Saladin?

SALADIN Nathan, my dear Nathan! The thousand,

Thousands years of your wise judge have not -

Yet passed. His judgement seat is not the one

On which I sit. Go! - Go! - But be my friend.

NATHAN And is there nothing more that Saladin

Would say to me?

SALADIN Nothing.

NATHAN Nothing?

SALADIN Nothing

 

 

NUMBER 9

THE SEARCH FOR THE SIGMA CODE

Cecil Balmond 1998

Page 12

Talisman

Enjil slept uncomfortably, his mind full of torment in fear of the Examination to come. He was standing in front of the Elders, those of the supreme rank, and he had nothing to say! He had not found a proof or a clever hypothesis to place before them on this auspicious day. And the day could not be put back - it marched right up to him, dragging him out brutally into the open, while the Elders, in their crimson robes, sat at the high table waiting for him. They motioned him to come up. He climbed up the steps and went to the blackboard and picked up the dry chalk in his wet, nervous hands.

Villagers crammed the square to see him perform. Word had gone out that the boy with the limp had magic powers; for when he lay dying from smallpox a strange bird had suddenly flown in and settled on his fevered brow, pecking at it. Superstition said it was the devil who seized a person's brain at such times, to give out great powers only to suck it back again at the moment of death, to prevent that tender soul from being re-born. And amazingly, as the bird flew away Enjil recovered and began talking in strange languages and writing down sheets of numbers, confusing everyone with ideas that they had never heard of

Page 13

Stories travelled through the mountain communities about the boy with the pockmarked face. How could the child be so precocious if not for some super-natural power? (No-one mentioned the devil's name for that would bring bad luck down on all of them!)

Enjil's beleaguered parents took him to the temple and gave him away to the priests, who in turn gave him away to the Academy and the Elders, these same Elders who now were laughing in his face- "Where is the cleverness that brought you here?", they mocked. "You insult us with your silence. We know who you are; The Devil's Child, a horrible trick; a wretch we now must throw out from this place of learning - Go! Only scholars are admitted here, true scholars like Vivek, who can work out the symmetry of magic squares better than you. " The insults came thick and fast like poisoned darts thrown at him, tipped with venom.

But the boy had nothing to say, his hand stuck fixed in the air with the chalk wet in his fingers. And the villagers became angry at being deceived. Provoked by Vivek, Enjil's older rival for the title of Master; the villagers aroused themselves into a riot. As the mob hurtled towards him Enjil woke up with a scream, his heart racing. The sweat poured off him; he felt he was dying. But framed in his window the night moon shone brightly, the wind rustling the leaves like waves washing the shore. There was no mob, there were no accusing Elders. Everything was quiet and peaceful. There was really nothing wrong with the world, or him. The Examination was still days away; and he was well prepared!

Page 14

His thesis was done - he had a proof written out in the higher algebra which his mentor had said would easily give him the title of Master; it was the sort of thing the Elders would like, for it was similar to the studies each of them had done. "It is not about being original, Enjil", his mentor said, "for you must not sit uncomfortably in your superiors minds. If you present something they do not understand, or agree with as high learning, they will fail you. Conform, and then privately get on with your real discoveries. That is what we all do. " His teacher shrugged at the way life was at the Academy and worry grew on the old man's face at the thought of what his stubborn student might do. But Enjil had listened, he had conformed - his thesis was as fine a piece of complicated mathematics as one could wish for; deliberately put together in an obscure way so that difficulties abounded in every line of the argument. In truth, Enjil had a much simpler proof but it would appear too easy. So he had put it to one side and applied himself to obscurities in the demonstration of his thesis, knowing this approach would be more favoured by the Elders. And the peace of the night said he had nothing to worry about but go back to sleep and wait happily for that day of the Examination.

As he lay there looking up at the moon, his mind began to wander over the ideas he really loved to think about, like the expansion of3t. Was there a pattern to it? Or how many unlike squares could fit into a rectangle or another square? This was a problem no one at the Academy could solve, though /Page 15/ Enjil had come near. Was every even integer the sum

of two prime numbers as ten was the sum of three plus seven?

And there was more - the multiplication patterns along diagonals used by the Chinese or the elegant ratios used by the ancient geometers that gave beauty and shape to the spiral and to the growth of the leaves around a stalk or the petals in a flower.

As he roamed through the numbers in his mind a strange thing then happened. A moon beam suddenly reached out to him and dropped to Earth and turned into a shining woman. "So here you are!", she said smiling. "I have kept looking out for you. I find you here of all places, in a musty old Academy or is it a temple?" She Wrinkled up her nose at the small room he slept in. The woman stroked his leg- "Does your leg hurt? I saw you as a child, limping, dragging your leg through the sand, making patterns that were wonderful-my friends still talk about you. I am Soma. Do you still play such games? You gave me and my companions a lot to think about that day, about the possible patterns in a matrix, instead of just the straight across and up and down. And now here you are, almost fully grown, yet still only a boy and sitting for the Examination of Master! Hah, that will sound fine - Master Enjil, Master Mathematician! How'd you like that?"

She patted him on the head and stroked his hair. Enjil could see the beautiful colours in her eyes. Her energy flowed into him. She took his thoughts away and she spoke to him:

Page16

"There are the cumbersome proofs you follow that only the few will ever understand. Your proofs are carrion for those vultures, the Elders. So why don't you do something else, something amazingly different for your Examination? You are capable of it! Why give the elders what they want, such a narrow outcome from your learning; why not something that everyone can enjoy?

Imagine even the villagers following your every sign on the blackboard, understanding it and seeing a simple but great truth unravelling right before their eyes. Something that lies under their noses, wouldn't that be fun?

How about drawing the many different shapes of squares it takes to fit in just one square. Ah - I know you were thinking of this already. You see I know your thoughts - so I count them out. And I'll spoil it for you anyway, I'm going to give you the answer; twenty-four! Yes, don't look so amazed, it takes that many different squares to fit into one square. You want to know the size of the square that allows this to happen? Ah, that is harder. That you must work out for yourself ." She smiled teasingly and added, "Do you know the answer to the simpler problem; how many different squares does it take to fit in one rectangle? I'll tell you: It's nine! Nine unequal squares go to make up a rectangle."

"But why bother about geometry; why not something simpler than that? What is it that everyone knows and feels expert about? I'll tell you. It's numbers of course! Imagine the village folk clapping hands and cheering as they see you, their /Page17/ new master; working with the humble materials of numbers, the tools they use every day of their lives to count coins and goats and sacks of grain from the harvest. Let your mind dwell on this: numbers! Take the most simple ones. Think of their make up. Don't be afraid of the Elders; they are not bad men, but men with too much oldness stuffed into their brains. Take them back to their childhood, let them smile again and hop, skip and jump through your constructions; what do you think of that? You smile? Do I take that as yes? Good! Then here is the riddle you must solve. And remember I will be watching, now that I have found you; but I won't help. I will only give you a signal when you succeed. Remember the only thing that will slow you down or stop you is the amount your mind has grown up to be like the Elders, the brain of an expert. The problem I set is for a child, with a mind that in innocence questions everything and finds new beginnings. I too, believe it or not, am like that. I live in the moon and each night I set a new day. The turning of a fresh beginning uplifts me. It keeps me from falling into endings and dull repeat reasonings. Think about that. In your dreams I will speak to you, I will help. My spirit will be with you. But now I must go for I have to set another day. And this is the question I leave you with:

What is the fixed point in the wind?"

The woman withdrew along the moonbeam and vanished as if she had never been.

/Page18/

Enjil sat up. He looked hard at the moon, staring into the white disc of cold light - and the moment of magic vanished. Was it a trick? Was Vivek his arch rival for the title of Master trying to hypnotise him from a distance? If he listened to the woman it would be like suicide. Standing in that great open courtyard and speaking about simple things that did not need proofs would have the Elders laughing at him, baying like jackals at his feeble efforts. Certainly he would be thrown out. This must indeed be a hex put on him by his enemies!

But what was the fixed point in the wind? The question intrigued and teased him. How can something be unmoving in the swirling wind; what was its fix, if indeed there was such a point? For hours he lay awake struggling with these thoughts until his tired brain came to a stop and wanted rest. Finally Enjil fell asleep. The woman in the moon entered his dreams.

And he woke up with a new conviction - the doubts and torments of the night well behind him. He whistled and even smiled at Vivek, winking at his arch rival as if to say he had prepared a brilliant proof Enjil laughed to himself when he thought of the title he would introduce to his Elders on the day of the Examination. He would wear the yellow robe of scholarship, go up to the blackboard and announce in his most stern voice the customary words, "My respectful Elders and Seniors. I submit for your Examination and proper adjudication this thesis I have now prepared for the award of the Most Expert Master of Mathematics, the honour I now seek, /Page 19/ and pronounce as the title of my learned subject: 'The Fixed Points in the Wind'." He could see them writhing in agony, splitting their sides with laughter and thirsting for his blood. The images made him break out in a cold sweat. But a small voice spoke inside saying, "Don't be afraid - of course you can do it - after all it is an easy question - so solve it like a child, think like one, just like I said."

To solve the riddle Enjil went to a secluded spot and sat in the shade of a banyon tree and blanked everything he knew out of his mind. The great blackness descended. Nothing moved. Shadows went into deeper shadows, layer into layer. A black disc grew. First as a dot, then a circle, then a rushing blind movement. Then the numbers cameout, tumbling one over the other; rolling the patterns over in his head. There were the star patterns, zigzags, squares, cubes, seesaws and the weaving patterns going in and out, all twisting over each other. Mindful of the woman spirit, he looked at the simplest numbers; he followed their trails, the white and black patterns, some, dotted with colour; moving like the wind, changing shape and turning all the time. And there in the simplest patterns were points that did not move or change, no matter what the numbers were. And they were fixed points. When the woman in the moon had talked of the wind Enjil knew she must have spoken of numbers, jumping over each other in gusts of multiplications or blowing steadily in ordered breezes of additions and subtractions. But within these patterns, there was one number and point through which all the others /Page20/ seemed to gather- it indeed must be the fixed point. Could that be the answer to the riddle?

Then Enjil opened his eyes and composed his thesis. It was so simple that he laughed out loud. Never mind the Elders - they would have to love it, for he would draw the movements of all numbers in one simple diagram. What was clever about it was the method he had in his mind. He would take the secret code the Elders knew about but had never thought of using to look beyond their rituals of prophecy, for they would take the letters of someone's name and use such secret numbers to divine the character of that person. But Enjil vowed to go beyond this.

That night he wrote out his thesis. When he had finished he went out into the deserted courtyard and held up each page to the moon. "Look ", he said to the woman in the moon, "I have finished - the task is done. I pray these are the answers."

A shape seemed to move across the face of the yellow disc though he could not be sure. But the woman did not appear. The wind picked up, the night chill made him shiver. Tomorrow was the day, and Vivek would be hoping for his downfall; and his teacher would fret to the last moment as the Elders assembled, sharpening their wits in readiness to humble the nervous candidate. The crowd would gather and settle. Everyone would be waiting, watching.

Still, Enjil was at peace. His ideas were simple, innocent; he believed they would shine through no matter what. While Vivek performed great feats /Page 21/ of algebra Enjil would offer to the Elders and the gathered crowd the four precious mirrors of arithmetic. They could all laugh or puzzle at the reflections he would show them, but in time their doubts would vanish or be blown away, just as the gusting wind cleans out the dirt lying on the ground.

Suddenly a bright light flared, lighting up the compound for an instant, and then faded. Had the woman come to him and acknowledged his answer? Enjil rolled up the pages of his thesis and held up his hand, just in case, to the night sky in salute and farewell and then went to bed. He slept the peace of the innocent, a fixed point himself in that night of swirling anxieties and jealousies. Tomorrow would be a new beginning.

I wear Enjil's Talisman now, whenever I calculate and look into numbers, and remember the mathematician who was a boy. He inspires me to look afresh at things.

Enjil went on to be famous. He surprised the Elders with his arguments of the fixed point in numbers; he astonished the crowd. And if not for them cheering as they did at what was being drawn on the board, the Elders would surely have failed him - the old men being insulted that there was no high algebra or long- winded, obscure complications to be resolved. Enjil's workings were just basic arithmetic, they grumbled, which even a nine year old could follow, they whispered to each other. It was laughable; it was ridiculous and all too simple. But the crowd cheered and cried out, "Master, Master," so many times, that the Elders /Page 22/ gave in. On the boy's shoulders they placed the purple sash of Master embroidered with winding circular motifs in gold thread, and then they held up Enjil's hand to the crowd who in turn roared, "Mas-Ter, Mas- Ter". The four syllable chant rocked the compound. When the dust cleared and the noise subsided and the courtyard was empty, the temple still hummed long into the night with stories of the new Master's cheek and sheer luck.

So Enjil went on to be the real Master of the Academy, outshining everyone and everything. He proved many things, much of it beyond the best minds in that Academy of high learning. But he kept faithful, from what we know of his teachings, to the simple and straightfoward, and always the beautiful and intriguing. The Master saw patterns where others only saw calculations.

Then disaster struck. In the wars that ravaged the country the Academy was set on fire and the intellectuals speared to death. Enjil and his papers and all the great library of learning in the Academy were lost forever. No one found the young mathematician's body. Soon the story went out confirming Enjil as a spirit child, one that visited Earth now and then to remind us of the greater glories that hid elsewhere. Others said it was the work of the devil, who flew in to collect the soul that he had claimed for himself long ago, when the little boy had lain dying from a fierce attack of smallpox.

Whatever the truth of it the crooked smile and limping walk of the Master was no more, severely missed by those who loved him. Those who were there /Page 23/ on that day of the Examination told others. And the words and diagrams spread. The ideas travelled from community to community; changes and additions were made along the way. But the basic structure Enjil proposed is still there in the teaching.

Modem ways have swept across the culture of this great land and hand calculators and computers have taken away the simple romance of numbers, but in remote parts of the highlands, in locked away villages, young mathematicians still look at Enjil's patterns and meditate for half an hour before doing any serious mental computation.

What follows is a trace of the young Master's working, gleaned from private study and old village stories. With Enjil we move towards finding the magic of numbers and that special point, which though full of movement itself, remains unmoving and stationary; just as a fixed point does in the wind.

 Page73

Armed with the code we go on to look into the precious mirrors of arithmetic, the four infinite planes of adding, subtracting, dividing and multiplying, that manipulate all numbers.

The sigma code lays down a trace of how numbers work in secret, we can peer into their basic patterns. But it is only when these patterns are seen as a whole that the beauty of the code is revealed and the astonishing truth of number nine at the heart of our number system.

(And here we must thank zero for even allowing the sigma code to exist. For without zero the process of reduction would not work. Adding digits to pare down to a single digit is dependent on our unique placement value system of units, tens, hundreds, etc. Zero allows the code to be bound within the range 1-9)."

 

4
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THE BIBLE CODE

Michael Drosnin 1997

CHAPTER FOUR

THE SEALED BOOK

 

Page 61

"The two great Biblical Apocalypses, the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, are predictions of unprecedented horror, to be fully revealed when a secret book is opened at the 'End of Days.'

In Revelation, it is the book sealed by 'seven seals' that can be opened only by the Messiah: 'And I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the throne a book written within and on the backside, sealed with. seven seals. And no man in Heaven; nor in Earth, neither under the Earth, was able to open the book, neither to look thereon.'

In Daniel, which is the original version of the same story, an angel reveals the ultimate future to the Hebrew prophet, and then tells him, 'But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book until the time of the End.'

It was these two verses that caused Isaac Newton to look for a code in the Bible.

The End is foretold four times in the original five books. I checked the first, where the patriarch Jacob tells his twelve sons 'what will befall you in the End of Days.'

In the Bible code, '5756' appeared in the same place.

'In 5756' ran right across 'in the End of Days.' It is the year in the ancient Hebrew calendar that began in September 1995 and ended in September 1996. No other year in the next ten matched. The odds that the current year would be encoded with the 'End of Days' by chance were 100 to 1.

I could not believe that the Apocalypse started now.

I checked the second statement of the End Time in the Bible. Here Moses tells the people of Israel 'all the things that will come upon thee at the End of Days.' It was encoded with the Rabin assassination

Page 62 .(Diagram omitted)

I checked the third. Just before Moses died, in his final speech to the ancient Israelites, he again warned that 'evil will befall you in the End of Days.' That was also encoded with the Rabin assassination.

I checked the fourth, where the mysterious sorcerer Balaam tells an ancient enemy of Israel 'what this people shall do to thy people in the End of Days.'

His Apocalyptic vision had a frightening ring of reality. It foretold a great battle in the Middle East, a future war between Israel and the Arabs, a terrible conflict that would bring many nations 'everlasting ruin..'

I see it, but not now,' said Balaam 3000 years ago. 'I behold it, but it is not near.'

In the Bible code, that prediction of the 'End of Days' matched 'atomic holocaust' and 'World War.'

There was one other way the 'End of Days' was foretold in the Bible. It was in the very last words of the Book of Daniel, right after the angel refuses to tell the prophet the details of an Apocalypse he says will last three and a half years.

'Go thy way, Daniel, for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the End,' says the angel. 'You will stand up for thy inheritance at the End of Days.'

I checked this final Biblical expression of the End Time in the Bible code. It also matched the current year, 1996. The odds that 'in / (Page63 Diagram omitted) Page64 / 5756' and 'End of Days' would again appear together by chance were more than 200 to 1.

I did a computer run of more than a hundred years. No other year in the next century matched both Biblical prophecies of the 'End of Days.'

The Bible code clearly stated that the End started now - that the current year, the year that in the modern calendar began in late 1995 and ended in late 1996, was the beginning of the long-prophesied Apocalypse.

But the code did not say when the 'End of Days' would end.

I looked again at the last chapter of Daniel, where the secret book is sealed shut. There it is stated that the 'sealed book' will reveal the details of a greater horror than the world has ever seen: 'And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation.'

The Bible code did appear to be a warning of the ultimate catastrophe. It was not clear when it would happen, but the code did seem to state that there would be a third 'World War,' an 'atomic holocaust,' the real Armageddon.

For more than four years I had been investigating the Bible code, and from the beginning I had known that both of the two major predictions of the End Time said that it would be fully revealed when a secret book was opened.

But until this moment I never realized that the Bible code might be the secret book.

Yet, if the Bible code was real, it could have only one purpose- to warn the world of an unprecedented danger.

Nothing short of that could explain a 3000-year-old code in the / Page 65 / one book most central to the world. And the danger must be right upon us, or we would not be finding the Bible code now.

Some intelligence that could see the future encoded the Bible. It knew when the danger would exist. It designed the code to be found by a technology that would noexist until then.

Could the Bible code be the 'sealed book'? It was sealed, with a kind of time-lock, that could not be opened until the computer was invented.

Had we really opened the 'sealed book'? Could this really be the 'End of Days'?

I remembered Eli Rips' caution that the Bible code was like a giant jigsaw puzzle with thousands of pieces, and we had only a handful. A picture was clearly emerging, but it was too large, and too horrifying to believe.

I flew back to Israel, and met again with Rips at his home in Jerusalem.

We looked together at the place in the Bible where the two Biblical statements of the 'End of Days' were encoded together, and where they both were encoded with the current year.

'Can you believe this is real?' I asked Rips.

'Yes,' he said quietly.

'Do you think that the Bible code might be the "sealed book"?' I asked.

The mathematician who discovered the Bible code had also never realized that the code might be the prophesied 'sealed book,' the secret text that the Bible itself states will be opened as a final revelation in the 'End of Days.'

'Obviously, if the danger that is encoded is real, if there is an "atomic holocaust," it would fulfill the prophecy in Daniel,' said Rips.

He opened his Bible, and read aloud the famous words: 'And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation.'

The secret book, Rips agreed, had been designed to be opened now. 'That is why Isaac Newton could not do it,' said Rips. 'It was "sealed until the time of the End." It had to be opened with a computer.'

Page 66 .(Diagram omitted)

I told Rips that I did not really believe that there would be an 'End of Days,' much less that it would begin now.

'I am convinced that the ancient commentary is true,' said Rips. 'It states that there will be a terrible time before the coming of the Messiah.'

I told Rips that I could not believe in a supernatural salvation. I was certain that the only help that we were going to get was the Bible code itself. I could hardly believe even that.

I looked again at the place where the 'End of Days' was encoded with 'in 5756.' Two other words stood out in that code matrix. The name of Rabin's assassin, 'Amir.' And the word 'war.'

'Amir' was spelled out in the same skip sequence as 'End of Days,' right where it crossed the year Rabin was killed. And right below the year was the word 'war.' .(Diagram omitted)

It was not clear when the predicted 'war' would begin, but it was clear that the code was intended for this moment in time.

The 'End of Days' was no longer some mythical event in the distant future. According to the Bible code, it had already begun. This was the beginning of the long-prophesied Apocalypse.

But both the danger and its prevention seemed to be encoded. 'Plague' was there, but also 'peace,' and a word that could be read either as a plea or a command - 'Save!'

Page 67 .(Diagram omitted)

Rips opened his Bible to Daniel again, and pointed to the words that immediately followed the prediction of an unprecedented 'time of trouble' - 'And at that time thy people shall be rescued, everyone who shall be found written in the book.' .

Had the 'sealed book' been opened, perhaps just in time, to'warn us of the ultimate danger, the long-threatened 'End of Days'?

I could not believe it.

I never believed there would be an Apocalypse. I had always assumed that it was an empty threat, the club all religions used to keep people in line.

All through history doomsayers thought they saw in the Bible predictions that the world would end in their own times. They read the words of Daniel and Revelation and were sure it was a picture of the present moment.

The keepers of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the zealots who hid copies of nearly all the books of the Bible in caves above the Dead Sea more than 2000 years ago, were certain that the Final Battle was right upon them.

The early Christians believed that the New Testament clearly stated that the End would come in their own lifetimes. Did not Christ warn, 'This generation shall not pass till all these things have happened'?

In every succeeding age someone arose to say the End was now. At the first millennium, in the year 1000 AD. At every time of war / Page68 / and crisis. And they always quoted the Bible, and they were always certain that they had pierced the veil, seen through the symbolic language and knew exactly when the End was coming.

And they were always wrong.

But no serious scientist had ever before found a computerized code in the Bible, a mathematically proven fact that had been confirmed by every other scientist who actually examined it.

And no one had ever found a code that accurately predicted real events in the real world. No one before had found names and dates in advance. No one before had found the name of a comet and the day it would strike Jupiter. No one before had found the name of a Prime Minister, and the name of his assassin, and the year he would be killed. No one before had found the exact day a war would begin.

The Bible code was different.

If the Bible code was a warning to this world, where did it come from? Who could look 3000 years ahead, and encode the future into the Bible?

The Bible itself, of course, says that God is the author, that he dictated the original five books to Moses on Mount Sinai: 'And the Lord said to Moses, Come up to me to the mountain, and I will give thee the tablets of stone, and the Torah.'

It was, according to the Bible, a startling encounter. .

In the pre-dawn stillness of the desert, there was suddenly a terrible thunder, and the black mountain towering above was illumi- nated by an explosive flash of lightning. Great flames shot out from the mountain top, as if the peak itself had been set afire, and in the growing light, the vast expanse of desert around it began to quake.

Startled awake by the thunder and the lightning, and the shaking of the ground beneath them, 600,000 men, women, and children rushed out of their tents, and stared up in terror at the mountain that now shook violently and smoked like a furnace. A ram's horn sounded above the thunder, and one man stepped forward toward the mountain.

Suddenly a voice called out to him from nowhere: 'Moses, come up to the top of the mountain.'

It was 1200 BC. According to the Bible, on the top of Mount Sinai Moses heard the voice we call 'God.' And that voice gave him the / Page 69 / ten laws that defined Western civilization, the Ten Commandments, and it dictated to him the book that we call the Bible.

But when God says, 'Behold, I make a covenant before all thy people I will work miracles,' the code says 'computer.'

The word 'computer' appears six times in the plain text of the Bible, hidden within the Hebrew word for 'thought.' Four of the six anachronistic appearances of 'computer' are in the verses of Exodus that describe the building of the Ark of the Covenant, the famous 'Lost Ark' that carried the Ten Commandments.

The code suggests that even the writing of the laws on the two stone tablets may have been computer-generated. 'And the tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets,' states Exodus 32:16. But encoded in that same verse is a hidden message: 'it was made by computer.'

(diagram omitted)

The code must be describing a device far beyond any we have yet developed. The New York Times recently reported that mankind may be ready to take the next leap, to harness the world inside atoms and create 'an information-processing method so powerful that it would be to ordinary computing what nuclear energy is to fire.' This 'quantum computer,' said the Times, could perform in minutes calculations that would take the fastest super computers we now have hundreds of millions of years to complete.

Page 70

The astronomer Carl Sagan once noted that if there was other intelligent life in the universe some of it would have certainly evolved far earlier than we did, and had thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions, or hundreds of millions of years to develop the advanced technology that we are only now beginning to develop.

'After billions of years of biological evolution - on their planet and ours - an alien civilization cannot be in technological lockstep with us,' wrote Sagan.

'There 'have been humans for more than twenty thousand centuries, but we've had radio only for about one century,' wrote Sagan. 'If alien civilizations are behind us, they're likely to be too far behind us to have radio. And if they're ahead of us, they're likely to be far ahead of us. Think of the technical advances on our world over just the last few centuries. What is for us technologically difficult or impossible, what might seem to us like magic, might for them be trivially easy.'

The author of 2001, Arthur C. Clarke - who envisioned a mysterious black monolith that reappears at successive stages of human evolution, each time we are ready to be taken to a higher level - made a similar observation: 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.'

What the Bible code suggests is that behind the 'miracles' of the Old Testament there was an advanced technology.

The code calls it a 'computer.' But it may only be using the language we can understand. 'History suggests that each age appeals to its most impressive technology as a metaphor for the cosmos, or even God,' states the Australian physicist Paul Davies in his book

The Mind of God

Since the root of the same word that means 'computer' in Hebrew also means 'thought,' when the Bible code reveals a 'computer' behind the 'miracles' it may actually be revealing a 'mind.'

But not a mind like ours, anymore than a computer like ours.

The one basic shared belief of all major religions is the existence of an outside, non-human intelligence, God.

If the Bible code proves one thing, it is that a non-human intelligence really does exist, or at least did exist at the time the Bible was written. No human could have looked thousands of years ahead, / Page 71 / and encoded in that ancient book the details of today's world.

We have forgotten that the Bible is our best known story of a close encounter. The long-awaited contact from another intelligence actually took place long ago.

According to the Bible, it happened when a voice spoke out of nowhere to Abraham, and again when it spoke to Moses from a burning bush.

The Bible code is, in fact, an alternative form of contact scientists searching for intelligent life beyond this planet have suggested: 'the discovery of an alien artifact or message on or near Earth.'

Physicist Davies theorized that the 'alien artifact' might be 'programmed to manifest itself only when civilization on Earth crossed a certain threshold of advancement.' That perfectly describes the Bible code. It had a time-lock. It could only be opened once computers had been invented.

The rest of Davies' vision is again a precise description of the Bible code: 'The artifact could then be interrogated directly, as with a modern interactive computer terminal, and a type of dialogue immediately established. Such a device- in effect, an extraterresttial time capsule - could store vast amounts of important information for us.'

Davies, winner of the Templeton prize for science and religion, imagines 'coming across the artifact on the Moon or on Mars' or 'discovering it suddenly on the Earth's surface when the time is right.'

In fact, we have always had it. It is the best known book in the world. We have just never recognized what it really was.

What Moses actually received on Mt Sinai was an interactive data base, which until now we could not fully access.

The Bible that 'God' dictated to Moses was really a computer program. First it was carved in stone and written on parchment scrolls. Then it was bound into a book. But in the code it is called 'the ancient computer program.'

Now the computer program can be played back, and reveal the hidden truth about our past and our future.

The 'Bible code' itselfis encoded in the Bible, and the same words also mean, 'He hid, concealed the Bible.' The suggestion is that /Page72/ there is another Bible encoded within the story that is openly told in the Old Testament.

The computerized code clearly confirms that it is the 'seal,' the time-lock that until now has protected the hidden secrets. 'Sealed before God' actually crosses 'Bible code.' (diagram omitted)

And 'computer' is encoded in the last chapter of Daniel, starting in the very verse that commands the prophet to 'shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the End.'

(diagram omitted)

The Bible code is the secret 'sealed book.'

Prophecy, of course, is not unique to the code. It happens all through the Bible. The patriarch Jacob tells his twelve sons what will happen in the distant future. Moses reveals two possible futures to the ancient Israelites.

In fact, Jack Miles in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of God states, 'It is the miracle of prediction - fortune-telling at / Page 73 / the international level - rather than any battlefield miracle that is expected to bring everyone to the worship of the true God.'

But the Bible code for the first time gives us a direct line to the future. Instead of relying on prophets who see visions and interpret dreams, we can now access by computer an ancient code hidden in the Bible.

The code's existence is actually revealed in two well-known stories of ancient prophecy.

The best known fortune-teller in the Bible is Joseph. Sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, he rose to become the virtual ruler of Egypt, by telling the Pharaoh the future.

Joseph alone knew that the Pharaoh's dream of seven fat cows and seven lean cows foretold a great famine. His prediction saved all of Egypt from starvation.

'Can there be another person who has God's spirit in him as this man does?' the Pharaoh asks his court. And he says to Joseph, 'Since God has shown you all this there is none so wise; according to thy word shall all my people be ruled.'

The Pharaoh makes Joseph his regent and gives him a new name: 'Zaphenath-Paneah.'

It is always written that way, in every translation of the Bible, and, even in the original Hebrew, always treated as a name. Over the millennia, there have been many learned speculations on its meaning. Some say it is the Hebrew translation of an Egyptian name originally written in hieroglyphics. Scholars have guessed that it means 'revealer of secrets.' Others say it means, 'the god speaks, and lives.'

But, in fact, the supposed name has a very clear meaning in Hebrew: 'decoder of the code.' Perhaps no one has seen it before, because no one knew there was a code in the Bible.

So, the Bible calls Joseph 'decoder of the code.' An alternate translation suggests that he created the code for us to find now: 'Joseph encoded, you will decode.'

But Joseph cannot be the encoder. The Bible did not even exist until 'God' dictated it to Moses on Mount Sinai hundreds of years after Joseph was dead.

Joseph's name in Hebrew means 'it will be added.' The full hidden text in Genesis 41:45 therefore really reads, 'The code will be added, you will decode it.'

Page 74

Again in the Book of Daniel, what seems to be a story of ancient prophecy is really a revelation of the Bible code.

There, too, God awes the greatest ruler on Earth, the King of Babylon, by revealing the future. He foretells the rise and fall of ancient kingdoms.

'Truly your God must be the God of gods and the Lord of kings, and the revealer of secrets, to have enabled you to reveal this secret,' the King tells Daniel.

But the same words that in Hebrew mean 'revealer of secrets' also mean 'secret scroll.' And the full hidden text states: 'He revealed the secrets enough that you were able to reveal this secret scroll.'

The Bible code is the 'secret scroll.'

Is the same 'God' who revealed the future to Joseph, who revealed the future to Daniel, now through the Bible code also revealing the future to us?

It seemed to be once more, as Miles put it, 'fortune-telling at the international level.'

The Rabin assassination, and the year it would happen, were revealed in advance. The Gulf War, and the date it would start, were precisely foretold. But I did not yet know if the predictions of a third 'World War,' of an 'atomic holocaust,' of the 'End of Days' were also accurate.

And I wondered why 'God' would reveal the danger, rather than simply prevent it.

'The God who is assisting Joseph,' notes Miles, 'was great enough to know what was going on, but not great enough to determine what would go on.'

The same might be true of whoever encoded the Bible. He could see the future, but he could not change it. He could only hide in the Bible a warning.

The Book of Daniel, suggests Miles, presents human history as 'a vast reel of film whose contents can be known before it is projected.' God can 'provide a preview.'

The question was whether we by seeing the movie could change it, whether we by opening the 'sealed book' could only know the horror of the 'End of Days,' or also prevent it.

Page 75

'Even within a world created by an all-powerful and benevolent God, there can be a struggle between good and evil, whose outcome is uncertain,' says Eli Rips.

The Bible code may be a set of probabilities. The sealed book might hold all our possible futures. Each predicted event appears to be encoded with at least two possible outcomes.

Rips agrees that the Bible code might have a positive and a negative strand, two opposing statements of reality intertwined: 'As in court, an Advocate, and an Accuser.'

'Possibly there are two opposing statements always encoded to preserve our free will, and it may be that the Bible code is written as a debate,' said Rips. 'According to the Midrash, the world was created twice - it was first conceived from the point of view of absolute judgement, right and wrong. Then God saw that the world could not exist this way, that there was no room for human imperfection, and he added mercy.

'But it's not like mixing hot and cold water and getting lukewarm, it's like mixing fire and snow and each preserves its separate. existence. That may be the two strands in the Bible code.'

Rips, however, does not believe that there are two encoders. 'The Bible must have been encoded all at once by one mind,' he insisted. 'But it may encode two different points of view.'

He opened the Bible to Isaiah 45:7, and read it to me: 'I am the Lord and there is none else, I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I, the Lord, do all these things.'

For Rips, as a mathematician and as a devout Jew, there is no need to ask the question, Who is the encoder?

The answer is obvious. The encoder, the Advocate and the Accuser are all one. It is God.

For me, it was not that simple. I had proof there was a code, but not proof there was a God. If the Bible code came from an all-powerful God, he would not need to tell us the future. He could change it himself.

The code seemed, instead, to be from someone good, but not all- powerful, who wanted to warn us of a terrible danger so we could prevent it ourselves.

The Book of Revelation states that the Final Battle will come by / Page76 / surprise, like a thief in the night. In fact, the words that come right before Armageddon are, 'Behold, I come as a thief.'

The Bible is a warning of sudden and inevitable doom.

But the real message of the Bible code is just the opposite. A warning is encoded in the Bible so that we can prevent the threatened Apocalypse.

The truth is hidden in the last chapter of Daniel, the verses that describe the 'sealed book.'

They reveal that the secret book was designed to be found now. This year, 1997, in the ancient Hebrew calendar 5757, is encoded with the words, 'He sealed the book until the time of the End.' Right above that the hidden text states, 'for you, the hidden secrets.' And crossing '5757,' again those same words, which also mean 'for you, it was encoded.'

But who was the encoder?

The last words spoken to Daniel - 'Go thy way till the end be, for thou shalt rest, and stand up for thy inheritance at the End of Days' - have a second meaning.

They also tell the story of someone who has been struggling all through time to prevent a foreseen disaster, and bring history to a good end: .

'You will persevere for the fate of everyone to the End of Days.' Someone hid in the Bible a warning - the information we need to prevent the destruction of this world."

 

THE BIBLE CODE

Michael Drosnin 1997

CHAPTER FOUR

THE SEALED BOOK

 Page 133

" 'It is what is stated in the Midrash,' said Rips, referring to the ancient commentary on the Bible. 'It is perhaps the "exile under Ishmael" just before the "End of Days." Some of the Midrash say that at a time of Arab domination, 80% of the Israeli population will be killed.'

We were both silent for a moment. 'This may be what you are finding in the code,' said Rips.

I had not known of the ancient prophecy. Ishmael was the first son of the patriarch Abraham, the one he sent away. According to the Bible, he is the forebear of all Arabs. Abraham's second son, Isaac, was the chosen inheritor. He is the forebear of all Jews. The family feud had been going on for 4000 years, and was predicted to come to a terrible end.

In January 1997 Netanyahu and Arafat did shake hands on shared control of Hebron, the city where Abraham is said to be buried, and set a timetable for a broader settlement. But the most difficult issue, the final status of Jerusalem, which both the Israelis and the Palestinians claim as their capital, remained unresolved. And there was no way to know if the stiff handshake at 3 AM on 15 January would lead to a real peace, or a new outbreak of violence.

In March 1997 the peace began to unravel. Arafat rejected the first step in Israel's planned withdrawal from the occupied territories. Netanyahu announced that he would build a Jewish neighborhood in the heart of East Jerusalem, seen by the Palestinians as the capital of their future homeland.

'The saddest reality that has been dawning on me,' Jordan's King Hussein wrote Netanyahu as the tensions began to build, 'is that I do not find you by my side in working to fulfill God's will for the final / Page 134 / reconciliation of all the descendants of the children of Abraham.'

And on 21 March, violence did erupt in Tel Aviv,Jerusalem, and Hebron. A Palestinian suicide bomber killed three and wounded forty at a Tel Aviv cafe, the first terrorist attack since Netanyahu was elected. On the same day, riots broke out in Hebron, and in Arab East Jerusalem at the site of the Jewish housing project, Har Homa.

'Har Homa' is encoded in the most sacred text of the Bible. It appears with no skips in the Mezuzah, the fifteen verses that were preserved in a separate scroll and posted on the door of every home in Israel.

And encoded with 'Har Homa' are the ominous words, 'All his people to war.'

'All his people to war,' the words in the Bible code originally found with the Rabin assassination, and found again with the wave of bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that shattered the peace Rabin had forged with Arafat, had once more in September 1996 and March 1997 become a reality. And those same words also appeared with the ultimate danger, 'atomic holocaust.'

Each spark that might set off the holocaust was foreseen, but until each crisis came to an end there was no way to know if it was just another skirmish in a 4000-year-old feud, or the beginning of Armageddon.

It may be impossible to know both what and when.

'Physics has given up,' said Richard P. Feynman, the Nobel laureate many consider the greatest scientist since Einstein. 'We do not know how to predict what will happen in a given circumstance. The only thing that can be predicted is the probability of different events. We can only predict the odds.'

And yet quantum physics is a highly successful branch of science. It works. Perhaps because it recognizes uncertainty as part of reality."

RA ATUM

"In the same way, the Bible code works. Again, because it recognizes uncertainty as part of reality.

'Our world is clearly reflected in it,' said Rips. 'It is as if we were looking into a mirror. Our efforts to see the future and to do something about it both probably play a role. I think that it is a very complicated, interactive event.'

Page 135

Rips said that when he was working at his computer, searching for information in the code, he sometimes felt like he was on-line with another intelligence.

'The Bible code is not really responding now,' he explained, 'it just foresaw everything all at once, in advance.'

According to Rips, the whole Bible code had to be written at once, in a single flash. 'We experience it like we experience a hologram - it looks different when we look at it from a new angle - but the image, of course, is pre-recorded.'

It is the history of the human race recorded more than 3000 years ahead of time. It does not tell the story sequentially, but all at once. Modern events overlap ancient events, the future is encoded in verses that tell of the Biblical past. One verse might contain within it the stories of then and now and a hundred years from now.

'The problem is how we decipher it all,' said Rips. 'It is very clearly non-random, but it is as if we had an intelligence report in which we can read only one of every twenty words.'

Rips was, as always, cautious. 'This is the product of a higher intelligence,' he said. 'It may want us to understand, but it may not want us to understand. The code may not reveal the future to us unless we are worthy.'

I didn't agree. If the world was really in danger, it hardly mattered whether we were worthy. The encoder, if he was good, would surely warn us.

At the end, there was an unbridgeable gap. Rips was religious. I was not. For me there was always a question - who encoded the Bible, what was his motive, where was he now? For Rips there was always an answer - God.

At the end of my five year investigation I did find final proof that the Bible code itself is real. And chilling evidence that the world may have come closer to disaster in 1996 than we will ever know.

Our narrow escape in 1996 was clearly stated in the plain text of Isaiah, the first Apocalypse, the one book of the Bible found intact among the Dead Sea Scrolls, the one that seemed to predict an atomic attack on Jerusalem.

It was not hidden in a code. It was openly stated in the plain words of the 2500-year-old scroll.

Page 136

The year was revealed in a unique verse, one that told the future backwards.

The foremost translator of ancient Hebrew texts, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, the man Time magazine called 'a once-in-a-millennium scholar,' pointed that verse out to me.

I went to see Steinsaltz when I first heard about the Bible code. The rabbi is also a scientist, and I wanted to see what he thought about a code in the Bible that predicted the future, foretold events that happened thousands of years after the Bible was written, reported in detail a future that did not yet exist.

'In the Bible time is reversed,' said Steinsaltz, noting an odd quirk in the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament. 'The future is always written in the past tense, and the past is always written in the future tense.'

'Why?' I asked.

'No one knows,' he said.

'We may be moving against the stream of time,' said Steinsaltz, noting that the laws of physics are 'time-symmetric,' that they run just as well backwards as forwards in time.

He opened his Bible, looking for a passage from the first of the prophets, Isaiah. 'Here, in Isaiah, it says that you need to look backwards to see the future,' he said.

'Where Isaiah says, "Tell the things that are to come hereafter," you can translate the same words to read, "They told the future backwards."

'In fact, you can translate the same words to read, "Tell the letters in reverse." It's like mirror writing.'

I looked at the letters backwards, but found no startling revelation. Only years later, after I discovered that Isaiah seemed to foretell an atomic attack, did I look at that same verse again.

Isaiah 41:23 states, 'Tell the things that are to come hereafter, and we will be dismayed, and behold it together.'

And now when I looked at the letters in reverse, the future told backwards, I saw that the mirror writing spelled out a year - '5756.'

It was not in a code. It was just there.

In the 2500-year-old verse that 'told the future backwards,' 1996, the year of the threatened 'atomic holocaust,' was plainly stated.

And so was the delay

Page 137

(diagram omitted)

The question asked by the same Hebrew letters that spell the year 5756 - 'Will you change it?' - had been answered decisively in the most ancient vision of the Apocalypse.

The answer was openly stated in the verse we are told to read backwards - 'You will change it.'

More than 2000 years ago, in the first Apocalypse, the first prophet, Isaiah, foretold the year of the real Armageddon, 1996, and also the delay.

One question remained unanswered - until when?

I saw Eli Rips one last time on New Year's Eve 1996. We looked again at the statistics for the two years most strongly linked to all the events of the Apocalypse.

The years 2000 and 2006, in the ancient calendar 5760 and 5766, were the only two years in the next hundred that matched both 'atomic holocaust' and 'World War.' All the dangers stated in the code - 'the End of Days,' 'holocaust of Israel,' even 'great earth- quake' - also matched 'in 5766.' Rips calculated the odds. They were at least a thousand to one.

Page 138

'It is something exceptional, really remarkable,' said Rips. 'Someone intentionally put this information into the Torah.'

That much was clear. But neither of us knew if the danger was real. I told Rips that I could not fully believe it because I still could not accept the open prophecy of the Bible, I still could not accept that there really would be an End of Days.

'If you accept the hidden statement in the Torah,' said Rips, 'then you should also accept the open statement.'

There was a logic to what he said. There was no doubt that the computerized code appeared to support the long-known prophecy of the Bible, and yet for me there was a difference. I had seen one come true, and not the other.

'I believed the Bible code was real the day Rabin was killed,' I explained, recalling the moment.

'I was at a train station, leaning against a wall, talking to a friend on a pay phone. Suddenly he interrupted and said, "Wait a minute, I want to hear the news about Rabin." I had been out all day, I hadn't heard anything, but I instantly knew that the prediction had come true, that Rabin was dead.

'I slid down the wall, all the way to the floor. And I said, to myself but out loud, "Oh my God, it's real.'"

Rips said he understood. 'It was my own feeling, exactly, when the Scud missiles were fired at Israel on the second day of the Gulf War, on the date we found three weeks in advance in the Bible code,' he said.

'I was in a sealed room with my whole family. My wife, my five young children, and I were all wearing gas masks. We could hear the air-raid sirens outside. It was 2 AM on the 3rd of Shevat,]anuary 18th 1991. That was the day that had been encoded.

'I knew the missiles were flying at us, we heard that Tel Aviv had already been hit, and all I could think was, "It works! The code works!" ,

Rips had been investigating the Bible code for six years by the time the Gulf War started, as predicted, when predicted. But it was not until the night the Scuds hit Israel that he fully believed it was real, just as I had not fully believed it until Rabin was assassinated, as predicted, when predicted.

'I believed it before as a mathematician,' said Rips. 'But this was / Page 139 / quite another perspective. It was an odd moment of joy in that sealed room, waiting for the missile to strike.'

Another scientist had once told me of similar mixed feelings, how he had felt when he discovered that all life on Earth might be doomed. I wrote the first cover story about that Apocalyptic warning, Sherry Rowland's discovery that the ozone was being destroyed by man-made chemicals, at a time when he was dismissed as a crackpot, when everyone was calling him 'Chicken Little.' And now I remembered what he told me when he was proven right, and won the Nobel prize."

 

6
E
U
R
E
K
A

5
21
18
5
11
1
+
=
61
6+1
=
7

5
3
9
5
2
1
+
=
25
2+5
=
7
SEVEN
7

6
E
U
R
E
K
A

ADD

5
21
18
5
11
1
+
=
61
6+1
=
7
TO

2+1
1+8

1+1

REDUCE

3
9

2

5

5

1
+
=
11
1+1
=
2

5
3
9
5
2
1
+
=
25
2+5
=
7
SEVEN
7

 

'There was no moment of Eureka! really,' said Rowland. 'I just came home one night and told my wife, "The work is going very well, but it looks like the end of the world." '

Now, on New Year's Eve in Jerusalem, in the city that the Bible code warned would be the target of an atomic attack that might trigger the real Armageddon, I told Eli Rips that story, and we both laughed.

But I could not forget that, according to the Bible code, within ten years an 'atomic holocaust' in Israel might trigger a third 'World War,' that we might already be in the real 'End of Days.'

There is no way to ignore the clear fact that a computerized code in the Bible, confirmed by some of the most famous mathematicians in the world, a code that accurately predicted the Gulf War, the collision of a comet with Jupiter, and the assassination of Rabin, also seems to state that the Apocalypse starts now, that within a decade we may face the real Armageddon, a nuclear World War."

 

 IN

THE

NAME OF GOD

THE COMPASSIONATE THE

MERCIFUL

THE

LORD BLESS THEE AND KEEP THEE THE LORD

MAKE HIS FACE TO SHINE UPON

THEE AND BE GRACIOUS UNTO THEE

THE

LORD

LIFT UP HIS COUNTENANCE UPON

THEE AND GIVE THEE

PEACE

973AZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZA 973

ISISISISISISISISISISISIS 919919919919 ISISISISISISISISISISISIS

999181818181818181818 AZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZ818181818181818181999

122333444455555666666777777788888888999999999888888887777777666666555554444333221

999999999AUMMANIPADMEHUMAUMMANIPADMEHUMAUMMANIPADMEHUM999999999

 

 

THE

ZEDALIZZED

SPINS BY THE RAINBOW LIGHT OF A DIFFERENT DREAM

ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZA

 

IN

OBEISANCE TO THAT SOON TO BE ARRIVED MOST PRECIOUS OF QUINTESSENTIAL MOMENTS

THE

ZEDALIZZED 

BEGAN AT ONE AND THE SAME TIME TO RECITE THE WISDOM OF THE MANY

WEAVING

THE

THREAD OF THAT GOLDEN WEB

9

NINE

973

I AM THAT I AM

I THAT NINE AM THAT NINE I AM

zazazazazAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZazazazazaz

BLESSED

IS THAT NAME THAT IS

ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZ

ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAzazaza GAIA NINE 9 NINE TAO zazazaAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZ  

 ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZA

999999999AUMMANIPADMEHUM999999999

 7777777333999999999AUMMANIPADMEHUM9999999997777777333

ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZA818181818181818181 9 181818181818181818AZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZ

 

 

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

 

KEEPER OF GENESIS

A

QUEST

FOR THE HIDDEN LEGACY OF MANKIND

Robert Bauval Graham Hancock

1996

Return to the Beginning

Page 283

 

'I stand before the masters who witnessed

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 (Norrnandi Ellis translation)

 

'I STAND BEFORE THE MASTERS WHO WITNESSED THE GENESIS, WHO WERE THE AUTHORS OF THEIR OWN FORMS, WHO WALKED 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 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...'

 

The dictionary tells us that, separately from its modem usage, the word 'glamour' has a traditional meaning roughly equivalent to 'magic spell' or 'charm', and is the Old Scottish variant of: 'grammar . . . hence a magic spell, because occult practices were popularly associated with learning.'

Is it possible that men and women of great wisdom and learning cast a 'glamour' over the Giza necropolis at some point in the distant / Page 284 / past? Were they the possessors of as yet unguessed-at secrets that they wished to hide here? And did they succeed in concealing those secrets almost in plain view? For thousands of years, in other words, has the ancient Egyptian royal cemetary at Giza veiled the presence of something else - something of vastly greater significance for the story of Mankind?

One thing we are sure of is that unlike the hundreds of Fourth-Dynasty mastaba tombs to the west of the Sphinx and clustered around the three great Pyramids, the Pyramids themselves were never designed to serve primarily as burial places. We do not rule out the possibility that the Pharaohs Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure may at one time have been buried within them - although there is no evidence for this - but we are now satisfied that the transcendent effort and skill that went into the construction of these awe-inspiring monuments was motivated by a higher purpose.

We think that purpose was connected to the quest for eternal life wrapped up in a complete religious and spiritual system that the ancient Egyptians inherited from unknown predecessors and that they later codified in their eerie and other-worldly funerary and rebirth texts. We suggest, in short, that it was the goal of immortality, not just for one Pharaoh but for many, that the corridors and passages and hidden chambers and concealed gates and doorways of the Giza complex were ultimately designed to serve. Depicted in the Book of What is in the Duat as being filled with monsters, these narrow, claustrophobic, terrifying places, hemmed in on all sides by sheer stone walls, were in our view conceived as the ultimate testing ground for initiates. Here they would be forced to face and overcome their most horrible and debilitating fears. Here they would pass through unimaginable ordeals of the spirit and the mind. Here they would learn esoteric wisdom through acts of concentrated intelligence and will. Here they would be prepared, through practice and experience, for the moment of physical death and for the nightmares that would follow it, so that these transitions would not confuse or paralyse them - as they might other, unprepared, souls - and so that they might become 'equipped spirits' able to move as they wished through heaven and earth, 'unfailingly, and regularly and eternally'.1

Such was the lofty goal of the Horus-King's quest and the ancient / Page285 / Egyptians clearly believed that in order to attain it the initiate would have to participate in the discovery, the unveiling, the revelation, of something of momentous importance - something that would bestow wisdom, and knowledge of the 'First Time', and of the mysteries of the cosmos, and of Osiris, the Once and Future King.

We are therefore reminded of a Hermetic Text, written in Greek but compiled in Alexandria in Egypt some 2000 years ago, that is known as the Kore Kosmu (or Virgin of the World).2 Like other such writings, this text speaks of Thoth, the ancient Egyptian wisdom-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 disclose and to give explanation. For what he knew, he graved on stone; yet though he graved them onto stone he hid them mostly. . . The sacred symbols of the cosmic elements [he] hid away hard by the secrets of Osiris. . . keeping- sure silence, that every younger age of cosmic time might seek for them!

The text then tells us that before he 'returned to Heaven' Hermes invoked a spell on the secret writings and knowledge that he had hidden:

O holy books, who have been made by my immortal hands, by incorruption's magic spells. . . free from decay throughout eternity remain, and incorrupt from time. Become unseeable, unfindable, for everyone whose foot shall tread the plains of this land, until Old Heaven doth bring forth meet instruments for you. . .'

What instruments might lead to the recovery of 'unseeable and unfindable' secrets concealed at Giza?

Our research has persuaded us that a scientific language of precessional time and allegorical astronomy was deliberately expressed in the principal monuments there and in the texts that relate to them. From quite an early stage in our investigation, we hoped that this language might shed new light on the enigmatic civilization of Egypt."

Page 139

8

The Clues of Duality

 

'Newton. . . was the last of the magicians. . .

Why do I call him a magician? Because he

looked at the whole universe and all that is in

it as a riddle, as a secret that could be read by

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 the initiate. . .'

John Maynard Keynes, The Royal Society, Newton Tercentenary 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

'Great is the Cosmic Order, for it has not changed since the time of Osiris who put it there'

Ptahotep, a high priest of the Pyramid Age

"My kingdom is not of this world. . . ."

JOHN

18:36

 

 THE

HOLY BIBLE

Scofield Reference

Page 1141

JOHN AD 33

18:36

Jesus

answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not 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 this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice.

18:38

Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he 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 peril to the honour of humanity, that man should bow down before a lower than the highest. 'Mighty art thou,' he said to Shamash-Marduk':Bel, 'and mighty is 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 it witnesses. The greater the witness, the greater the fault in me if I let myself 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 to which it more mightily bears witness than even itself, and whose heat is greater than the heat of the sun.' "

"Mother," Amenhotep whispered, without turning his eyes from Joseph, "what did I say? No, no, I did not say it, I only knew it, it was said to me. When of late I had my seizure, and revelation was vouchsafed 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 voice and 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, then know that the name itself stands in need of improvement. When you call me so, 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, and even the silence made him forget. Pharaoh has set truth in his heart, for the 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 and purification, until at last it consist only of the pure truth, might mean to make it unteachable. This is a sore concern which no one can understand save one on whom as much responsi-bility rests as on Pharaoh. For others it is easy to say: 'You have not set truth in your heart, but rather the teaching.' Yet the teaching is the sole means of bringing men nearer the truth. It should be im- / Page967 / proved; but if one improve it to the extent that it becomes unavail-able as a medium of truth - I ask the Father and you: will not only then the reproach be justified that I have shut up the teaching in my heart to the disadvantage of the truth? Pharaoh shows mankind the image of the revered Father, made by his artists: the golden disk 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 to you 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 would I spare your simplicity. But it must be: Therefore I say to you: Not the image shall you worship when you worship, not to it sing your hymns when you sing; but rather to him whose image it is, you understand, the true disk of the sun, my Father in the sky, who is the Aton, for the image is not 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 further effort must I urge upon you for the sake of truth, however much it pains me for your simplicity. For the image is but the image of the image and witness to a witness. Not the actual round sun up there in the sky are you to think of when you burn incense to his image and sing-his praise - not this, 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 one understands. Only Pharaoh himself understands, who is outside of all count, and yet he is supposed to teach the many. Your forefather, soothsayer, had an easy task, although he made it hard for himself. He might make it as hard as he liked, striving after truth for his own sake and the sake of his pride, for he was only a wanderer. But I am King, and teacher; I may not think what I cannot teach. Whereas such a one very soon learns not even to think the unteachable."

Here Tiy, his mother, cleared her throat, rattled her ornaments, and said, looking ahead of her into space:

"Pharaoh is to be praised when he practises statesmanship in mat-ters of religious belief and spares the simplicity of the many. That is why I warned him not to wound the popular attachment to Usir, king of the 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 have told them what was wholesome, and wisely left in ~he realm of the mysteries what 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 deprecating bow. "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 different things. My Majesty speaks of the fetters which the teaching puts upon the thoughts of God; yours refers to priestly statecraft, which divides teaching and knowledge. But Pharaoh would not be arrogant, and there is no greater arrogance than such a division. No, there is no arrogance in the world greater than that of dividing the children of our Father into initiate and uninitiate and teaching double words: all-knowingly for the masses, knowingly in the inner 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 be made hard for him by the teaching. And still it has been said to me: 'Call me not Aton, for that is in need of improvement. Call me the Lord of the Aton!' But I, through keeping silent, forgot. See now what the Father does for his beloved son! He sends him a messenger and dream-interpreter, who shows him his dreams, dreams from below and dreams from above, dreams important for the realm and for heaven; that he should awake in him what he already knows, and interpret what was already said to him. Yes, how loveth the Father his child the King who came forth out of him, that he sends down a soothsayer to him, to whom from long ages has been handed down the teaching that it profits man to press on towards the last and highest! "

"To my knowledge," Tiy coldly remarked, "your soothsayer came up from below, out of a dungeon, and not from above."

"Ah, in my opinion that is sheer mischief, that he came from below," cried Amenhotep. "And besides, above and below mean not much to the Father, who when he goes down makes the lower the upper, for where he shines, there is the upper world. From which it comes that his messengers 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 of the East, from whom you spring, did not stop at the sun, but pressed on above it?"

"Yes, in spirit," answered Joseph smiling. "For in the flesh he was but a worm on this earth, weaker than most of those above and below him. And still he refused to bow and to worship, even before one of 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 the spirit of whom it bears witness. How could I commit so great a folly and burn incense to a witness, be it never so weighty - I, who am consciously a witness, whereas the others simply are and know it not? Is there not something in me of Him, for which all being is but evidence of the being of the Being which 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, and yet /Page969/ his rays are here. But He who shows the sun the way hither is further than far, yet near in the same measure, nearer than near. Near or far is all the same to Him, for He has no space nor any time; and though the world is in Him, He is not in the world at all, but in heaven."

"Did you hear that, Mama?" asked Amenhotep in a small voice, tears in his eyes. "Did you hear the message which my heavenly Father sends me through this young man, in whom I straightway saw something, as he came in, and who interprets to me my dreams? I will only say that I have not said all that was said to me in my seizure, and, keeping silent, forgot it. 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 is of the sun in the sky; it must needs be changed, to say: "My Father who art in heaven" !' So heard I and shut it up within me, because I was anxious over the truth for the sake of the teaching. But he whom I took out of the prison, he opens the prison of truth that she may come forth in beauty and light; and teaching and truth shall embrace each other, even as I embrace him."

And with wet eyelashes he worked himself up out of his sunken seat, embraced Joseph, and kissed him.

"Yes, yes!" he cried: He began to hurry once more up and down the Cretan loggia, to the bee-portieres, to the windows and back, his hands pressed to his heart. "Yes, yes, who art in heaven, further than far and nearer than near, the Being of beings; that looks not into death, that does not become and die but is, the abiding light, that neither rises nor sets, the unchanging source, out of which stream all life, light, beauty, and truth - that is the Father, so reveals He Himself to Pharaoh His 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 Him not. 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 though now 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. Immaterial is God, like His sunshine, spirit is He, and Pharaoh teaches you to worship Him in spirit and in truth. For the son knoweth the Father as the Father knoweth him, and will royally reward all those who love Him and keep His commandments -he will make them great and gilded at court because they love the Father in the son who came out of Him. For my words are not mine, but the words of my Father who sent me, that all might become one in light and love, even as I and the Father are one. . . ."

 Page 979

Chapter IV

THE TIME OF ENFRANCHISEMENT

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 he was made great in the West - this famous and yet almost unknown conversation which the great mother, who was present, not unaptly called a conversation of gods about God, has now been re-established from beginning to end in all its turnings, windings, and conversational episodes. Well that it has been set down with exactitude once and for all, so that everyone can follow the course which in its time it pursued in reality; so that if some point or other should slip the memory, one need only turn back and read. The summary nature of the tradition up till now almost makes it, however venerable, unconvincing. For instance upon Joseph's interpretation and his advice to the 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 the most extravagant honours and dignities. There is too much abridgement and condensation about this, it is too dry, it is a drawn and salted and embalmed remnant of the truth, not truth's living lineaments. Pharaoh's inordinate enthusiasm and favour seem to lack foundation and motivation. Long ago when, overcoming the shrinking of our flesh, we pulled ourselves together for the trip down through millennial abysses, down to the regions below, to the field and the fountain where Joseph was standing; even so long ago what we were actually after was to listen to that very conversation and to bring it back with us in all its members as it really came to pass and took place at On in Lower Egypt.

Of course, there is really nothing against condensation in itself. It is useful and even necessary. In the long run it is quite impossible to narrate life just as it flows. What would it lead to? Into the infinite. It would be beyond human powers. Whoever got such an idea fixed in his head would not only never finish, he would be suffocated at the outset. Entangled in a web of delusory exactitude, a madness of detail. No, excision must play its part at the beautiful feast of narra- / Page 980 / tion and recreation; it has an important and indispensable role. Here, then, the art will be judiciously practised, to the end of getting finally quit of a preoccupation which, though after all it has a distant kinship with the attempt to drink the sea dry, must not be driven to the extreme and utter folly of actually and literally doing so.

What would have become of us, for instance, when Jacob was serving with the devil Laban, seven and thirteen and five - in short, twenty-five years, of which every tiniest time element was full of a life-in-itself, quite worth telling? And what would become of us now without that reasonable principle, when our little bark, driven by the measuredly moving stream of narration, hovers again on the brink of a time-cataract of seven and seven prophesied years? Well, to begin with, and just among ourselves: in these fourteen years things were neither quite so definitely good nor so definitely bad as the prophecy would have them. It was fulfilled, no doubt about that. But fulfilled as life fulfils, imprecisely. For life and reality always assert a certain independence, sometimes on such a scale as to blur the prophecy out of all recognition. Of course, life is bound to the prophecy; but within those limits it moves so freely that one almost has one's choice as to whether the prophecy has been fulfilled or not. In our present case we are dealIng with a time and a people animated by the best will in the world to believe in the fulfilment, however inexact. For the sake of the prophecy they are willing to agree that two and two make five-if the phrase may be used in a context where not five but an even higher odd number, namely seven, is in question. Probably this would constitute no great difficufty, five being almost as respectable a number as seven; and surely no reasonable man would insist that five instead of seven could constitute an inexactitude.

In fact and in reality the prophesied seven looked rather more like five. Life, being living, put no clear or absolute emphasis on either number. The fat and the lean years did not come up out of the womb of time to balance each other so unequivocally as in the dream. The fat and lean years that came were like life in not being entirely fat or entirely lean. Among the fat ones were one or two which might have been described as certainly not lean, but to a critical eye as certainly no more than very moderately fat. The lean ones were all lean enough, at least five of them, if not seven; but among them there may have been a couple which did not reach the last extreme of exiguity and even half-way approached the middling. Indeed, if the prophecy had not existed they might not have been recognized as years of famine at all. As it was, they were blithely reckoned in along with the others.

Does all this detract from the fulfilment of the prophecy? Of course not. Its fulfilment is incontestable, for we have the fact - the /Page981/ facts of our tale, of which our tale consists, without which it would not be in the world and without which, after the snatching away 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 adjacent regions, years-long fat and years-long more or less lean, and Joseph had plenty of chance to husband the plenty and distribute the crying lack, and like Utnapishtim-Atrachasis, like Noah the exceeding wise one, to prove himself 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 his dealings 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-wanderer as his own great-grandfather - though such an idea is to be sternly excluded from the realms of the possible. He himself was perfectly aware, on the ground of much and varied instruction, that the position was one of far wider bearings. Not so wide, however, that that mighty man of the earth whose boundary stones, adorned with representations of the signs of the zodiac, the man from Ur had put behind him, had actually been Nimrod, the first king on earth, who had begotten Bel of Shinar. No, for according to the tablets, this had been Hammurabi, the Lawgiver, restorer of those citadels of the sun and moon; and when young Joseph put him on a level with that prehistoric Nimrod, it was by a play of thought which most charmingly becomes his spirit but which would be unbecoming and hence forbidden to ours. The same is true of his occasional confusion of the man from Ur with his father's ancestor and his, who had borne the same or a similar name. Between the boy Joseph and the pilgrimage of his ancestor in the spirit and the flesh there lay, according to the system of chronology which his age and sphere rejoiced in, fully twenty generations, or, roughly speaking, six hundred Babylonian years, a period as long as from our time back into the Gothic Middle Ages - as long, and yet not so long either.

True, we have received our mathematical sidereal time handed down to us from ages long before the man from Ur ever set out on his wanderings, and, in like manner, shall we hand it on to our furthest descendants. But even so, the meaning, weight and fullness of earthly time is not everywhere one and the same. Time has uneven measure, despite all the objectivity of the Chaldean chronology. Six hundred years at that time and under that sky did not mean what they mean in our western history. They were a more level, silent, speechless reach; time was less effective, her power to bring about change was both weaker and more restricted in its range - though certainly in / Page 8 / those twenty generations she had produced changes and revolutions of a considerable kind: natural revolutions, even changes in the earth's surface in Joseph's immediate circle, as we know and as he knew too. For where, in his day, were Gomorrah, and Sodom, the dwelling- place of Lot of Harran, who had been received into the spiritual com-munity of the man from Ur; where were those voluptuous cities? Lo, the leaden alkaline lake lay there where their unchastity had flour- ished, for the whole region had been swept with a burning fiery flood of pitch and sulphur, so frightful and apparently so destructive of all life that Lot's daughters, timely escaped with their father, though he would have given them up to the lust of the Sodomites instead of certain important guests whom he harboured, went and lay with their father, being under the delusion that save themselves there were none left upon the earth, and out of womanly carefulness for the con-tinuance of the race.

Thus time in its course had left behind it even visible alterations. There had been times of blessing and times of curse, times of fullness and times of dearth, wars and campaigns, changing overlords and new gods. Yet on the whole time then had been more conservatively minded than time now, the frame of Joseph's life, his ways and habits of thought were far more like his ancestors' than ours are like the crusaders'. Memory, resting on oral tradition from generation to generation, was more direct and confiding, it flowed freer, time was a more unified and thus a briefer vista; young Joseph cannot be blamed for vaguely foreshortening it, for sometimes, in a dreamy mood, per-haps by night and moonlight, taking the man from Ur for his father's grandfather - or even worse. For It must be stated here that In all probability this man from Ur was not the original and 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 of Uru; it had been his father who had gone thence north-wards, towards Harran in the land of Naharain. And thus it was only from Harran that this falsely so-called man from Ur, having received the command from the Lord God, had set out towards the country of the Amorites, together with that Lot, later settled in Sodom, whom the tradition of the community vaguely stated 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 of Harran, 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 make a nephew out of his proselyte Lot, was a kind of dreamy toying with ideas which, while scarcely permissible in broad daylight, yet makes it easier to understand why young Joseph fell naturally into the same kind of game.

He did so in the same good faith as governed, for instance, the / Page9 / star-worshippers and astrologers at Shinar, in their prognostications according to the principle of stellar representation, and exchanged 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 the chain of events to which he belonged encountered the same difficulty that it always does: the fact that everybody has a father, that nothing comes first and of itself, its own cause, but that everybody is begotten and points backwards, deeper down into the depths of beginnings, the bottoms and the abysses of the well of the past. Joseph knew, of course, that the father of 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 in tents and keep. sheep. Thus even the exodus from Shinar afforded him only one particular and conditioned beginning; he was well instructed, by song and saga, how it went on further and further into the general, through many histories, back to Adapa or Adama, the first man, who, indeed, according to a lying Babylonian saga, which Joseph more or less knew by heart, had been the son of Ea, god of wisdom and the water depths, and had served the gods as baker and cup-bearer - but of whom Joseph had better and more inspired knowledge; 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 of confusion and chaos, by the might of the Word, which moved above the face of the deep and was God. But this, too, was it not only a conditioned and particular beginning of things? For there had already been forms of existence which looked up to the Creator in admiration and amaze: sons of God, angels of the starry firmament, about whom Joseph himself knew some odd and even funny stories, and also rebellious demons. These must have had their origin in some past aeon of the world, which had grown old and sunk and become raw material- and had even this been the very first beginning?

Here young Joseph's brain began to reel, just as ours does when we lean over the edge of the well; and despite some small inexactitudes which his pretty and well-favoured little head permitted itself but 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 long ago he already gazed. He was a human being like ourselves, thus he must appear to us, and despite his earliness in time just as remote as we, mathematically speaking, from the beginnings of humanity (not to speak of the beginnings of things in general), for they do in actual fact lie deep down in the darkness at the /Page 10/ bottom of the abyss, and we, in our researches, must either stop at the conditioned and apparent beginnings, confusing them with the real beginning, in the same way that Joseph confused the man from Ur on the 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 pretty Babylonian verses which originally came from a written tradition of great extent and full of lying wisdom. He had learned them from travellers who touched 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 probably enjoyed doing) with that Eliezer who was the oldest servant of the original wanderer and who once had wooed the daughter of Bethuel for Isaac at the well. Now we know these verses and legends; we have texts of them, written on tablets found at Nineveh, in the palace of Asshurbanipal, king of the universe, son of Assarhaddon, son of Sennacherib; some of them, preserved in graceful cuneiform characters on greyish-yellow clay, are our earliest documented source for the Great Flood in which the Lord wiped out the first human race on account of its corruption, and which played such an important role in Joseph's own personal tradition. Literally speaking, this source itself is not an original one; these crumbling tablets bear transcriptions made by learned slaves only some six hundred years before our era, at the command of Asshurbanipal, a sovereign much addicted to the written word and the established view, an "exceeding wise one," in the Babylonian phrase, and by a zealous accumulator of the fruits of exceeding wisdom. Indeed they were 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 understand as for us to-day a manuscript of the time of Charlemagne. Written in a quite obsolete and undeveloped hand, a hieratic document, it must have been hard to decipher; whether its significance was wholly honoured in the copy remains matter 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 a document out of God knows what distant time; upon which, then, though without precisely knowing where, one might rest, as upon a true original, if it were 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 text lying again who knows how far back in time; though what they probably did was further to transmogrify the original wisdom of his text. And thus I might go on - if I were not convinced that my readers already understand what I mean when I speak of coulisses and abysses.

The Egyptians expressed it in a phrase which Joseph knew and himself used on occasion. For although none of the sons of Ham were tolerated in Jacob's tents, because of their ancestor the shamer of his sire, who had turned black all over, also because Jacob entertained religious doubts on the score of the morals of Mizraim; yet the eager- minded lad had often mingled with Egyptians, in the towns, in Kirjath Arba as well as in Shechem, and had picked up this and that of the tongue in which he was later to bear such brilliant witness. The Egyptians then, speaking of something that had high and indefinite antiquity, would say: "It comes from the days of Set." By whom, of course, they meant one of their gods, the wily 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 the river, and afterwards torn him to pieces like a wild beast and killed him entirely, so that Osiris, the Sacrifice, now ruled as lord of the dead and everlasting king of the lower world. "From the days of Set"; the people of Egypt had many uses for the phrase, for with them the origins of everything went back in undemonstrable ways into that darkness.

At the edge of the Libyan desert, near Memphis, hewn out 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 its headcloth the kingly serpent rearing itself. The huge paws of its cat's body 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; and of an age when its nose had not been blunted, or when it had not crouched there, there was no memory at all. Thothmes the Fourth, Golden Hawk and Strong Bull, King of Upper and of Lower Egypt, beloved of the goddess of truth and belonging to the eighteenth dynasty which was also the dynasty of Amun-is-satisfied, by reason of a command received in a dream before he mounted the throne, had had the colossal statue dug out of the sands of the desert, where it lay in great part drifted over and covered up. But some 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 and made sacrifice to the sphinx - had found it half in ruins; and of any time when it had not been known, or even known with a whole nose, there was no knowledge at all.

Was it Set who himself hewed out of the stone that fabulous 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, for Set, as /Page 12/ likewise Osiris the Sacrifice, had probably not always been a god, but sometime or other a man, and indeed a king over Egypt. The statement is often made that a certain Menes or Horus-Menes some six thousand years before our era founded the first Egyptian dynasty, and everything before 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 white crown, and ruled as first king over Egypt, the history of which began with his reign. Of this statement probably every word is false; to the penetrating eye King Menes turns out to be nothing but a coulisse. Egyptian priests told Herodotus that the written history of their country went back eleven thousand, three hundred and forty years before his era, which means for us about fourteen thousand years; a reckoning which is calculated to rob King Menes' figure of all its primitiveness. The history of Egypt alternates between periods of discord and impotence and periods of brilliance and power; epochs of diverse rulers or none at all and epochs of strongly concentrated power; it becomes increasingly clear that these epochs alternated too often to make it likely that King Menes was the earliest ruler over a unified realm. The discords which he healed had followed upon earlier unification and that upon still earlier disruption. How many times the "older," "earlier," "again" are to be repeated we cannot tell; but only that the first unification took place under dynastic deities, whose sons presumably were that Set and Osiris; the sacrifice, murder apd dismemberment of the latter being legendary references to quarrels over the succession, which at that time was determined by stratagem and crime. That was a past of a profound, mythical and theological character, even to the point of becoming spiritualized and ghostlike; it became present, it became the object of religious reverence in the shape of certain animals- falcons and jackals - honoured in the ancient capitals, Buto and Nekheb; in these the souls of those beings of primitive time were supposed to be mysteriously preserved.

4

"FROM the days of Set" - young Joseph relished the phrase, and I share his enjoyment; for like the Egyptians, I find it most applicable, and to nearly everything in life. Wherever I look, I think of the words: and the origin of all things, when I come to search for it, pales away into the days of Set.

At the time when our story begins - an arbitrary beginning, it is true, but we must begin somewhere, and fix a point behind which we do not go, otherwise we too shall land in the days of Set - at this time young Joseph already kept the flocks with his brethren, though only 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 and kine 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 same peaceful and familiar beasts, at the same stage of development as those we know. The whole history of cattle-breeding - for instance of the domestic ox from the wild buffalo -lay even in young Joseph's day so far back in the past that "far" is a feeble word to use in such a connection. It has been shown that the ox was bred in the stone age, before the use of metal tools, that is before the bronze age; this boy of the Amurruland, Joseph, with his Egyptian and Babylonian culture, was almost as remote from those dim 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 "long ago." It must have been completely domesticated "in the days of Set." And the breeding of the horse, the ass, the goat and the pig - out of that wild boar which mangled Tammuz, the young shepherd - all that was accomplished in the same remote and misty past. Our historical records go back some seven thousand years - during which time no wild animal was still in process of domestication. There is no tradition nor any memory of such events.

If we look at the cultivation of wild grasses and their 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 nourished the youthful Joseph - have been cultivated so long that no botanist can trace the beginning of the process, nor any people boast of having been the first to initiate it. We are told that in the stone age there were five varieties of wheat and three of barley. As for the cultivation of the vine from its wild beginnings - an incomparable achievement, humanly speaking, whatever else one may think about it - tradition, echoing hollowly up from the depths of the past, ascribes it to Noah, the one upright man, survivor of the flood, the same whom the Babylonians called Utnapishtim and also Atrachasis, the exceeding wise one, who imparted to Gilgamesh, his late grandchild, hero of the legends written on the tablets, the story of the beginning of things. This upright man, then, as Joseph likewise knew, was the first to plant vineyards - nor did Joseph consider it such a very upright deed. 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 Joseph imagined all that to have happened not so very long ago, that miracle of the grape, perhaps some dozen of generations before his "great-grandfather," his ideas of time showed themselves to be hazy indeed; the past. which he so lightly invoked being actually matter of remote and primeval distances. Having said /Page 14/ thus much, it only remains to add - however much we may pale at the thought - that those distances themselves must have lain very late in time, compared with the remoteness of the beginning of the human race, for them to have produced a civilization capable of that high emprise, the cultivation of the vine.

Where then do they lie in time, the beginnings of human civilization? How old is it? I put the question with reference to young Joseph, whose stage of development, though remote from ours, did not essentially differ from it, aside from those less precise habits of thought of his, at which we may benevolently smile. We have only to enquire, to conjure up a whole vista of time-coulisses opening out infinitely, as in mockery. When we ourselves speak of antiquity we mostly mean the Graeco-Roman world - which, relatively speaking, is of a brand new modernity. Going back to the so-called "primitive population" of Greece, the Pelasgians, we are told that before they settled in the islands, the latter were inhabited by the actual primitive population, a race which preceded the Phrenicians in the domination of the sea - a fact which reduces to the merest time-coulisse the Phrenician claim to have been the first seafaring folk. But science is increasingly unfavourable to all these theories; more and more it inclines to the hypothesis and the conviction that these "barbarians" were colonists from Atlantis, the"lost continent beyond the pillars of Hercules, which in times gone by united Europe with America. But whether this was the earliest region of the earth to be populated by human beings is very doubtful, so doubtful as to be unlikely; it is much more probable that the early history of civilization, including that of Noah, the exceeding wise one, is to be connected with regions of the earth's surface much older in point of time and 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 peoples of the east behaved with a piety equal to their wisdom when they ascribed to the gods their first knowledge of a civilized life. The red- hued folk of Mizraim saw in Osiris the Martyr the benefactor who had first given them laws and taught them to cultivate the soil; being prevented finally by the plotting of the crafty Set, who attacked him like a wild boar. As for the Chinese, they consider the founder of their empire to have been an imperial half-god named Fu-hsi, who introduced cattle into China and taught the priceless art of writing. This personage apparently did not consider the Chinese, at that time - some two thousand, eight hundred and fifty-two years before our era - to be ripe for astronomical instruction; for according to their annals they received it only about thirteen hundred years later, from the great foreign emperor, Tai-Ko-Fokee; whereas the astrologers of Shinar were already several hundred years earlier instructed in /Page 15/ the signs of the zodiac; and we are told that a man who accompanied Alexander of Macedon to Babylon sent to Aristotle Chaldrean astronomical records scratched on baked clay, whose antiquity would be to-day four thousand, one hundred and sixty years. That is easily possible, for it seems likely that observation of the heavens and astronomical calculations were made in Atlantis, whose disappearance, according to Solon, dated nine thousand years before that worthy's own time; from which it follows that man attained to skill in these lofty arts some eleven and a half thousand years before our era.

It is clear that the art of writing is not younger than this, and very possibly much. older. I speak of it in particular because Joseph entertained such a lively fondness for the art, and unlike his brothers early perfected himself in it; being instructed at first by Eliezer, in the Babylonian as well as in the Phrenician and Hittite scripts. He had a 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 recognizing him 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 and the patron of science, whose office was regarded in those parts as higher than all others; that sincere, solicitous and reasonable god, who was sometimes a white-haired ape, of pleasing appearance, sometimes wore an ibis head, and likewise had certain tender and spiritual affiliations with the moon which were quite to young Joseph's taste. These predilections the youth would not have dared confess to his father Jacob, who set his face sternly against all such coquetting with idols, being even stricter in his attitude than were certain very high places themselves to which his austerity was dedicated. For Joseph's history proves that such little departures on his part into the impermissible were not visited very severely, at least not in the long run.

As for the art of writing, with reference to its misty origins it would be proper to paraphrase the Egyptian expression and say that it came "from the days of Thoth." The written roll is represented in 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 which even then was supposed to be so old that it was said Sendi had inherited it from Set. When Sneferu and that Cheops reigned, sons of the sun, of the fourth dynasty, and the pyramids of Gizeh were built, knowledge of writing was so usual amongst the lower classes that we to-day can read the simple inscriptions scratched by artisans on the great building blocks. But it need not surprise us that such knowledge was common property in that distant time, when we recall the priestly account of the age of the written history of Egypt.

If, then, the days of an established language of signs are so unnum- /Page 16/ bered, where shall we seek for the beginnings of 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 as hasty as any other; and that there existed a still older mother-tongue which included 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 and faint coulisse still dimly visible to our eyes, but which itself can scarcely be the original home of articulate man.

5

CERTAIN discoveries have caused the experts in the history of the earth to estimate the age of the human species at 'about five hundred thousand years. It is a scant reckoning, when we consider, first, how science to-day teaches that man in his character as animal is the oldest of all mammals and was already in the latter dawn of life existing upon this earth in various zoological modes, amphibious and reptilian, before any cerebral development took place; and second, what endless and boundless expanses of time must have been at his disposal, to turn the crouching, dream-wandering, marsupial type, with un-separated fingers, and a sort of flickering pre-reason as his guide, such as man must have been before the time of Noah-Utnapishtim, the exceeding wise, into the inventor of bow and arrow, the fire-maker, the welder of meteoric iron, the cultivator of corn and wine, the breeder of domestic cattle - in a word, into the shrewd, skilful and in every essential respect modern human being which appears before us at the earliest grey dawn of history. A priest at the temple of Sais explained to Solon the Greek myth of Phaeton through a human experiencing of some deviation in the course of the bodies which move round the earth in space, resulting in a devastating conflagration on the earth. Certainly it becomes clearer and clearer that the dream memory of man, formless but shaping itself ever anew after the manner of sagas, reaches back to catastrophes of vast antiquity, the tradition of which, fed by recurrent but lesser similar events, established itself among various peoples and produced that formation of coulisses which forever lures and leads onwards the traveller in time.

Those verses which Joseph had heard and learned by heart related among other things the story of the Great Flood. He would in any case have known this story even if he had not learned of it in the Babylonian tongue and version, for it. existed in his western country and especially among his own people, although not in quite the same form, but with details differing from those in the version current in the land of the rivers; just at this very time, indeed, it was in process of establishing itself in a variant upon the eastern form. Joseph well knew the tale: how all that was flesh, the beasts of the field not ex- /Page17/ cepted, had corrupted most indescribably His way upon the earth; yes, the earth herself practised whoredom and deceivingly brought forth oats where wheat had been sown - 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 a last trial of patience, of a hundred and twenty years, could no longer bear it 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 knew that too and knew the day on which the creatures entered the ark; it had been the tenth of the month Marcheswan, and on the seventeenth the fountains of the great deep were broken up, at the time of the spring thawing, when Sirius 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 often had this day come round since then? He did not consider that, nor did old Eliezer; and here begin the foreshortenings, the confusions and the deceptive vistas which dominate the tradition.

Heaven knows when there happened that overwhelming encroachment of the Euphrates, a river at all times tending to irregular courses and sudden spate; or that startling irruption of the Persian Gulf into the solid land as the result of tornado and earthquake; that catastrophe which did not precisely create the tradition of the deluge, but gave it its final nourishment, revivified it with a horrible aspect of life and reality and now stood to all later generations as the Deluge. Perhaps the most recent catastrophe had not been so very long ago; and the nearer it was, the more fascinating becomes the question whether, and how, the generation which had personal experience of it succeeded in confusing their present affliction 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 surprise nor contempt. The event consisted less in that something past repeated itself, than in that it became present. But that it could acquire presentness rested upon the fact that the circumstances which brought it about were at all times present. The ways of the flesh are perennially corrupt, and may be so in all god-fearingness. For do men know whether they do well or ill before God and whether that which seems to them good is not to the Heavenly One an abomination? Men in their folly know not God nor the decrees of the lower world; at any time forbearance can show itself exhausted, and judgment come into force; and there is probably always a warning voice, a knowledgeable Atrachasis who knows how to interpret signs and by taking wise precautions is one among ten thousand to escape destruction. Not without having first confided to the earth the tablets of knowledge, as the seed-corn of /Page 18/ future wisdom, so that when the waters subside, everything can begin afresh from the written seed. "At any time": therein lies the mystery. For the mystery is timeless, but the form of timelessness is the now and the here.

The Deluge, then, had its theatre on the Euphrates River, but also in China. Round the year 1300 before our era there was a frightful flood in the Hoang-Ho after which the course of the river was regulated; it was a repetition of the great flood of some thousand and fifty years before, whose Noah had been the fifth Emperor, Yao, and which, chronologically speaking, was far from having been the true and original Deluge, since the tradition of the latter is common to both peoples. Just as the Babylonian account, known to Joseph, was only a reproduction of earlier and earlier accounts, so the flood itself is to be referred back to older and older prototypes; one is convinced of being on solid ground at last, when one fixes, as the original original, upon the sinking of the land Atlantis beneath the waves of the ocean - knowledge of which dread event penetrated into all the lands of the earth, previously populated from that same Atlantis, and fixed itself as a movable tradition forever in the minds of men. But it is only an apparent stop and temporary goal. According to a Chaldrean computation, a period of thirty-nine thousand, one hundred and eighty years lay between the Deluge and the first historical dynasty of the kingdom of the 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 was only a repetition, the becoming- present of something profoundly past, a frightful refresher to the memory, and the original story is to be referred back at least to that incalculable point of time when the island continent called "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. Rather it is time's abrogation and dissolution in the alternation of tradition and proph- ecy, which lends to the phrase "once upon a time" its double sense of past and future and therewith its burden of potential present. Here the idea of reincarnation has its roots. The kings of Babel and the two Egypts, that curly-bearded Kurigalzu as well as Horus in the palace at 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 myth became in them a mysterium, and there was no distinction left between being and meaning. It was not until three thousand years later that men began disputing as to whether the Eucharist "was" or only "signified" the body of the Sacrifice; but even such highly super- erogatory discussions as these cannot alter the fact that the essence of the mystery is and remains the timeless 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 feast of the burning of lamps, the feast of Tammuz, amid much wailing of flutes and joyful shoutings relived in the explicit present the murder of the lamented Son, the youthful god, Osiris-Adonis, and his resurrection, there was Occurring that phenomenon, the dissolution of time in mystery which is of interest for us here because it makes logically unobjectionable a method of thought which quite simply recognized a deluge in every visitation by water.

 

6

PARALLEL with the story of the Flood is the tale of the Great Tower. Common property like the other, it possessed local presentness in many places, and affords quite as good material for dreamy speculation and the formation of time-coulisses. For instance, it is as certain as it is excusable that Joseph confused the Great Tower itself with the temple of the sun at Babel, the so-called E-sagila or House of the Lifting of the Head. The Wanderer from Ur had doubtless done the same in his time, and it was certainly so considered not only in Joseph's sphere but above all in the land of Shinar itself. To all the Chaldaeans, E-sagila, the ancient and enormous terraced tower, built, according to their belief, by Bel, the Creator, with the help of the black men whom he created expressly for the purpose, and restored and completed by Hammurabi, the Lawgiver; the Tower, seven stories high, of whose brilliantly enamelled splendours Joseph had a lively mental picture; to all the Chaldaeans E-sagila signified the present embodiment of an abstract idea handed down from far-away antiquity; the Tower, the sky-soaring structure erected by human hands. In Joseph's particular milieu 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 the dispersal. 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 such associations whatever with the Midgals or citadels of their cities, but rather the contrary, seeing that Hammurabi, the Lawgiver, had expressly caused it to be written that he had made their summits high in order to "bring together again" the scattered and dispersing people under the sway of "him who was sent." But the moon-man was thereby affronted in his notions of the deity, and in the face of Nimrod's royal policy of concentration had dispersed himself and his; and thus in Joseph's home the past, made present in the shape of E-sagila, had become tinctured with the future and with prophecy; / Page 20 / a judgment hung over the towering spite-monument of. Nimrod's royal arrogance, not one brick was to remain upon another, and the builders thereof would be brought to confusion and scattered by the Lord God of Hosts. Thus old Eliezer taught the son of Jacob, and preserved thereby the double meaning of the "once upon a time," its mingled legend and prophecy, whose product was the timeless present, the Tower of the Chaldaeans. .

To Joseph its story was the story of the Great Tower itself. But it is plain that after all E-sagila is only a time-coulisse upon our endless path toward the original Tower. One time-coulisse, like many another. Mizraim's people, too, looked upon the tower as present, in the form of King Cheops' amazing desert tomb. And in lands of whose existence neither 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 pretentiousness calculated 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 this mighty structure. They declared it to be the work of giants, strangers from the east, they said, a superior race who, filled with drunken longing for the sun, had reared it up in their ardour, out of clay and asphalt, in order to draw near to the worshipped planet. There is much support for the theory that these progressive foreigners were colonists from Atlantis, and it appears that these sun-worshippers and astrologers incarnate always made it their first care, wherever they went, to set up mighty watch-towers, before the faces of the astonished natives, modelled upon the high towers of their native land, and in particular upon the lofty mountain of the gods of which Plato speaks. In Atlantis, then, we may seek the prototype of the Great Tower. In any case we cannot follow its history further, but must here bring to 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 the tree of evil and was driven forth or actually drove himself forth and dispersed himself? Young Joseph knew this as well as he knew about the flood, and from the same source. It made him smile a little when he heard dwellers in 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 lay among fruit orchards and charmingly watered gardens nestled between, majestic mountain range and spreading seas of meadow, full of bustling folk of all races and the commerce of rich wares. And for politenss' sake he shrugged his / Page 21 /shoulders only inwardly when men of Mizraim asserted that Egypt had been the earliest home of man, being as it was the centre and navel of the world. The curly-bearded folk of Shinar, of course, they too believed 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 the world-navel Joseph had better and more precise in- formation, drawn from the 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 unexpectedly and 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 House of God, because, fleeing from Esau, he had there been vouchsafed that greatest and most solemn revelation of his whole life. On that height, where Jacob had set up his stone pillow for a mark and anointed it with oil, there henceforth was for Joseph and his people the centre of the world, the umbilical cord between heaven and earth. Yet not there lay Paradise; rather in the region of the beginnings and of the home - somewhere thereabouts, in Joseph's childish conviction, which was, moreover, a conviction widely held, whence the man of the moon city had once set out, in Lower Shinar, where the river drained away and the moist soil between its branches even yet abounded in luscious fruit-bearing trees.

Theologians have long favoured the theory that Eden was situated somewhere in southern Babylonia and Adam's body formed of Babylonian soil. Yet this is only one more of the coulisse effects with which we are already so familiar; another illustration of the process of localization and back-reference - only that here it is of a kind extraordinary beyond all comparison, alluring us out beyond the earthly in the most literal sense and the most comprehensive way; only that here the bottom of the well which is human history displays its whole, its immeasurable depth, or rather its bottomlessness, to which neither the conception of depth nor of darkness is any longer applicable, and we must introduce the conflicting idea of light and height; of those bright heights, that is, down from which the Fall could take place, the story of which is indissolubly bound up with our soul-memories of the garden of happiness.

The traditional description of Paradise is in one respect 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 the Ganges; it flows about all India and brings with it gold. The Gihon is the Nile, the greatest river of the world, that encom- / Page 22 / passeth the whole of Ethiopia. But Hiddekel, the arrow-swift river, is the Tigris, which flows towards the east of Assyria. This last is not disputed. But the identity of the Pison and the Gihon with the Ganges and the Nile is denied with considerable authority. These are thought to be rather the Araxes which flows into the Caspian Sea, and the Halys which flows into the Black Sea; and accordingly the site of Paradise would still be in the Babylonian sphere of interest, but not in Babylon itself, rather in the Armenian Alpine country north of the Mesopotamian plain, where the two rivers in question have their sources close together.

The theory seems reasonably acceptable. For if, as the 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 more than take the step to the next-following fact; in other words, we have come only one more coulisse further on.

God, so old Eliezer had instructed Joseph, gave the world four quarters: morning, evening, noon and midnight guarded at the seat of the Most High by four sacred beasts and four guardian angels, which watch over this fixed condition with unchanging eyes. Did not the pyramids of Lower Egypt exactly face with their four sides, covered with shining cement, the four quarters of the earth? And thus the arrangement of the rivers of Paradise was conceived. They are to be thought of in their course as 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 a site in Near Asia, but familiar to us in another place, now lost; namely, in Atlantis, where, according to Plato's narrative and description, these same four streams went out from the mount of the gods towering up in the middle, and in the same way, that is, at right angles, to the four quarters of the earth. All learned strife as to the geographical meaning of the four head waters and as to the site of the garden itself has been shown to be idle and received its quietus, through the tracing backwards of the paradise-idea, from which it appears that the latter obtained in many places, founded on the popular memory of a lost land, where a wise and progressive humanity passed happy years in a frame of things as beneficent as it was blest. We have here an un- mistakable contamination of the tradition of an actual paradise with the legend of a golden age of humanity. Memory seems to go back to that land of the Hesperides, where, if reports say truth, a great people 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 original home and of the Fall; it is only a coulisse and an apparent goal upon our paradise-seeking pilgrimage in time and space; / Page 23 / and our archaeology of the earth's surface seeks for Adam, the first man, in times and places whose decline and fall took place before the population of Atlantis.

What a deluded pilgrimage, what an onward-luring hoax! For even if it were possible, or excusable, however misleading, to identify as Paradise the land of the golden apples, where the four great rivers 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 is our next and furthest time-coulisse; a scene wherein the tortured larva of the human being - our lovely and well-favoured young Joseph would have refused with pardonable irritation to recognize himself in the picture - endured the nightmare of fear and lust which made up his life, in desperate conflict with scaly mountains of flesh in the shape of flying lizards and giant newts? That was no garden of Eden, it was Hell. Or rather, it was the first accursed state after the Fall. Not here, not at the beginning of 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 to its depths, and not yet reached our goal: the history of man is older than the material world which is the work of his will, older than life, which rests upon his will.

8

A VERY ancient tradition of human thought, based upon man's truest knowledge of himself and going back to exceeding early days 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 completely human man, the Hebraic Adam qadmon; conceived as a youthful being made out of pure light, formed before the beginning of the world as prototype an abstract of humanity. To this conception others have attached themselves, varying to some extent, yet in essentials the same. Thus, and accordingly, primitive man was at his very beginning God's chosen champion in 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 earthly and fleshly existence by a second emissary of the deity, who in some mysterious way was the same as himself, his own higher self, and restored to the world of light, leaving behind him, however, some portions of his light, which then were utilized for the creation of the material world and earthly creatures. Amazing tales, these, wherein the religious element of redemption is faintly visible behind the cosmogonic frame. For we are told that the original human Son of God contained in His body of light the seven metals to which the seven planets correspond and / Page 24 / out of which the world is formed. Again it is said that this human light-essence, issuing from the paternal primitive source, descended through the seven planetary spheres and the lord of each partook of his essence. But then looking down he perceived his image mirrored in matter, became enamoured of it, went down unto it and thus fell in bondage to lower nature. All which explains man's double self, an indissoluble combination of godlike attributes and free essence with 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 clarification is complete at the point where the descent of the Child of God from His world of light into the world of nature loses the character of mere obedient pursuance of a higher order, hence guiltless, and becomes an independent and voluntary motion of longing, by that token guilty. And at the same time we can begin to unravel the meaning of that "second emissary" who, identical in a higher sense with the light-man, comes to free him from his involvement with the darkness and to lead him home. For the doctrine now proceeds to divide 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, whose real protagonist is the soul of mankind, adventurous and in adventure creative, a mythus, which, complete by reason of its combination of oldest record and newest prophecy, gives us clear leading as to the true site of Paradise and upon the story of the Fall.

It is stated that the soul, which is to say the primevally human, 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 little that, though dwelling in the nearness of God, in a lofty sphere of happiness and 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 physical desires. But the yearning and pain of its passion did not diminish after the soul had let itself be betrayed to a descent from its home; they were heightened even to torment by the circumstance that matter sluggishly and obstinately preferred to remain in its original formless state, would hear nothing of taking on form to please the soul, and set up all imaginable opposition to being so formed. But now God intervened; seeing nothing for it, probably, in such a posture of affairs, but to come to the aid of the soul, His errant concomitance. He supported the soul as it wrestled in love with refractory matter. He created the world; that is to say, by way of assisting the primitive human being He brought forth solid and permanent forms, in order that the soul might gratify physical desires upon these and engender man. But immediately afterwards, in pursuance of a considered plan, He did something else. He sent, such / Page 25 / literally are the words of the source upon which I am drawing, He sent out of the substance of His divinity spirit to man in this world, that it might rouse from its slumber 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 enterprise had been a sin, as a consequence of which the creation of the world was to be regarded. What in truth the spirit ever strives to make clear to the human soul imprisoned in matter, the constant theme of its admonitions, is precisely this: that the creation of the world came about only by reason of its folly in mingling with matter, and that once it parted therefrom the world of form would no longer have any existence. To rouse the soul to this view is the task of the reasonable spirit; all its hoping and striving are directed to the end that the passionate soul, once aware of the whole situation, will at length reacknowledge its home on high, strike out of its consciousness the lower world and strive to regain once more that lofty sphere of peace and happiness. In the very moment when that happens the lower 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 ever did 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," reached the remotest human past, fixed upon Paradise and tracked down the story of the Fall, of knowledge and of death, to its pure and original form. The original 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 always been and likewise matter. As for the intelligent spirit, in whom we recognize the "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 all not quite the same, for it is younger: a missionary sent by God for the soul's instruction and release, and thus for accomplishing the dissolution of the world of form. If in some of its phases the dogma asserts or allegorically indicates the higher oneness of soul and spirit, it probably does so on good ground; this, however, does not exclude the conception that the human soul is originally conceived as being God's champion against the evil in the world, and the role ascribed to it very like the one which falls to the spirit sent to effect its own release. Certainly the reason why the dogma fails to explain this matter clearly is that it has not achieved a complete portrayal of the role played by the spirit in the romance of the soul; obviously the tradition requires filling out on this point.

In this world of form and death conceived out of the marriage of soul and matter, the task of the spirit is clearly outlined and unequivocal. Its mission consists in awakening the soul, in its self-forgetful / Page 26 / involvement with form and death, to the memory of its higher origin; to convince it that its relation with matter is a mistaken one, and finally to make it yearn for its original source with ever stronger yearning, until one day it frees itself wholly from pain and desire and wings away homewards. And therewith straightway the end of the world is come, death done away and matter restored to her ancient freedom. But as it will sometimes happen that an ambassador from one kingdom to another and 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 the other's habits of thought and favouring its interests, settling down and adapting himself and taking on colour, until at last he becomes unavailable as a representative of his own world; this or something like it must be the experience of the spirit in its mission. The longer it stops below, the longer it plies its diplomatic activities, the more they suffer from an inward breach, not to be concealed from the higher sphere, and in all probability leading to its recall, were the problem of a substitute easier to solve than it seems is the case.

There is no doubt that its role as slayer and grave-digger of the world begins to trouble the spirit in the long run. For its point of view alters, being coloured by its sojourn below; while being, in its own mind, sent to dismiss death out of the world, it finds itself on the contrary regarded as the deathly principle, as that which brings death into the 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 own proper attitude, that to which one is obligated from home; otherwise there is bound to occur the phenomenon which I objectively characterized as corruption, and one is alienated from one's natural duties. And here appears a certain weakness in the spirit's character: he does not enjoy his reputation as the principle of death and the destroyer of form - though he did largely bring it upon himself, out of his great impulse towards judgment, even when directed against himself - and it becomes a point of honour with him to get rid of it. Not that he would willfully betray his mission. Rather against his intention, under pressure, out of that impulse and from a stimulus which one might describe as an unsanctioned infatuation for the soul and its passional activities, the words of his own mouth betray him; they speak in favour of the soul and its enterprise, and by a kind of sympathetic refinement upon 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 attitude does the spirit any good, and whether he cannot help serving, even by that very conduct, the purpose for which he was sent, namely the dissolution of the material world by the releasing of the soul from it; or whether he does not know all this. and only thus conducts him- / Page 27 / self because he 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 the soul explains the allegorical tendency of the tale,. according to which the "second emissary" is another self of that light-man who was sent out to do 'battle with evil. Yes, it is possible that this part of the tale conceals a prophetic allusion to cer- tain mysterious decrees of God, which were considered by the teachers and preachers as too holy and inscrutable to be uttered.

9

WE can, objectively considered, speak of a "Fall" of the soul of the primeval light-man, only by over-emphasizing the moral factor. The soul, certainly, has sinned against itself, frivolously sacrificing its original blissful and peaceful state - but not against God in the sense of offending any prohibition of His in its passional enterprise, for such a prohibition, at least according to the doctrine we have received, was not issued. True, pious tradition has handed down to us the command of God to 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 already earthly event, and with human beings who had with God's own creative aid been generated out of the knowledge of matter by the soul; if God really set 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 from issuing a prohibition which, being disobeyed, would simply add to the malicious joy of His angelic host, whose attitude towards man was already most unfavourable. But the expression "good and evil" is a recognized and admitted gloss upon the text, and what we are really dealing with is knowledge, which has as its consequence not theability to distinguish between good and evil, but rather 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 principally the 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 which it voluntarily drew upon itself and which indeed was outweighed by the might of its desire. It is even clear that He was seized if not by understanding at least by pity, when He saw the passion of the soul. Unsummoned and straightway He came to its aid, and took a hand personally in the struggles of the soul to know matter in love, by making the world of form and death issue from it, that the soul might take its pleasure thereupon; and certainly this was an attitude of God in which pity and understanding are scarcely to be distinguished from one another.

/ Page 28 / Of sin in the sense of an offence to God and His expressed will we can scarcely speak in this connection, especially when we consider the peculiar immediacy of God's relation with the being which sprang from this mingling of soul and matter: this human being of whom the angels were unmistakably and with good reason jealous from the very first. It made a profound impression on Joseph, when old Eliezer told him of these matters, speaking of them just as we read them to-day in the Hebrew commentaries upon early history. Had not God, they say, held His tongue and wisely kept silence upon the fact that not only righteous but also evil things would proceed from man, the creation of man would certainly not have been permitted by the "kingdom of the stern." The words give us an 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 not decisive way, for He preferred not to tell them what was going on, out of fear lest they make Him difficulties, and only revealed some things and kept others to Himself. But does not this indicate that He was interested in the creation of the world, rather than that He opposed it? So that if the 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 from the 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 majestic caprice; it piqued them, indeed, for they saw in it, probably with some justice, a certain disgust with their own psalm-chanting purity. Astonished and reproachful questions, such as: "What is man, 0 Lord, that Thou art mindful of him?" are forever on their lips; and God answers indulgently, benevolently, evasively, sometimes with irritation and in a sense distinctly mortifying to their pride. The fall of Shemmael, a very great prince among the angels, having twelve pairs of wings whereas the seraphim and sacred beasts had only six apiece, is not very easy to explain, but its immediate cause must have been these dissensions; so old Eliezer taught - the lad drank it in with strained attention. It had always been Shemarel who stirred up 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 by their names, they did indeed comply with the order, some scowlingly, others with 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 beings created of the effulgence of glory to bow down before those made out of the dust of the earth. And thereupon took place his faIl- Eliezer described it 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 caused them 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, as in Sodom and Gomorrah and at the time of the Flood, there was rejoicing among the angels and corresponding embarrassment to the Creator, who found His hand forced to scourge the offenders, though less of His own desire. than under moral pressure from the heavenly host. But let us now consider once 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 of the 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 soul in order to act the part of grave-digger to the world of forms created by it with God's connivance. The mystery is perhaps a different one, residing in that part of the doctrine which says that the "second emissary" was no other than the first light-man sent out anew against evil. We have long known that these mysteries deal very freely with the tenses, and may quite readily use the past with reference to the future. It is possible that the saying, soul and spirit were one, really means that they are sometime to become one. This seems the more tenable in that the spirit is of its nature and essentially the principle of the future, and represents the It will be, It is to be; whereas the goodness of the form-bound soul has reference to the past and the holy It was. It remains controversial, which is life and which death; since both, the soul involved with nature and the spirit detached from the world, the principle of the past and the principle of the future, claim, each in its own way, to be the water of life, and each accuses the other of dealings with death. Neither quite wrongly, since neither nature without spirit nor spirit without nature can truly be called life. But the mystery, and the unexpressed hope of God, lie In their union, in the genuine penetration of the spirit into the world of the soul, in the inter-penetration of both principles, in a hallowing of the one through the other which should bring about a present humanity blessed with blessing from heaven above and from the depths beneath.

Such then might be considered the ultimate meaning and hidden potentiality of the doctrine - though even so there must linger a strong element of doubt whether the bearing of the spirit, self- betraying and subservient as we have described it to be, out of all too sensitive reluctance to be considered the principle of death, is calculated to lead to the goal in view. Let him lend all his wit to the dumb passion of the soul; let him celebrate the grave, hail the past as life's unique source, and confess himself the malicious zealot and murderously life-enslaving will; whatever he says he remains that / Page 30 / which he is, the warning emissary, the principle of contradiction, umbrage and dispersal, which stirs up emotions of disquiet and exceptional wretchedness in the breast of one single man among the blithely agreeing and accepting host, drives him forth out 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-coulisses of the past, where memory may pause and find a hold whereon to base its personal history - as Joseph did on Ur, the city, and his forefather's exodus therefrom. 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 paid it the tribute of recognition when he recited aloud those verses from the tablets which ran:

Why ordainest thou unrest to my son Gilgamesh,

Gavest him a heart that knoweth not repose?

Disquiet, questioning, hearkening and seeking, wrestling for God, a bitterly sceptical labouring over the true and the just, the whence and the whither, his own name, his own nature, the true meaning of the Highest - how all that, bequeathed down the generations from the man from Ur, found expression in Jacob's look, in his lofty brow and the peering, careworn gaze of his brown eyes; and how confidingly Joseph loved this nature, of which his own was aware as a nobility and a distinction and which, precisely as a consciousness of higher concerns and anxieties, lent to his father's person all the dignity, reserve and solemnity which made it so impressive. Unrest and dignity - that is the sign of the spirit; and with childishly unabashed fondness Joseph recognized the seal of tradition upon his father's brow, so different from that upon his own, which was so much blither and freer, coming as it chiefly did from his lovely mother's side, and making him the conversable, social, communicable being he preminently was. But why should he have felt abashed before that brooding and careworn father, knowing himself so greatly beloved? The habitual knowledge that he was loved and preferred conditioned and coloured his being; it was decisive likewise for his attitude towards the Highest, to Whom, in his fancy, he ascribed a form, so far as was permissible, precisely like Jacob's. A higher replica of his father, by Whom, Joseph was naively convinced, he was beloved even as he was beloved of his father. For the moment, and still afar off, I should like to characterize as "bridelike" his relation to Adon the / Page31 / heavenly. For Joseph knew that there were Babylonian women, sa- cred to Ishtar or to Mylitta, unwedded but consecrated to pious devotion, who dwelt in cells within the temple, and were called "pure" or "holy," also "brides of God," "enitu." Something of this feeling was in Joseph's own nature: a sense of consecration, an austere bond, and with it a flow of fantasy which may have been the decisive ingredient in his mental inheritance, and which will give us to think when we are down below in the depths beside him.

On the other hand, despite all his own devotion, he did not quite follow or accept the form it had taken in his father's case: the care, the anxiousness, the unrest, which were expressed in Jacob's unconquerable dislike of a settled existence such as would have befitted his 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 Shaddai had made his father rich in Mesopotamia, rich in cattle and multifarious possessions; moving among his troop of sons, his train of women, his servants and 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 the spirit, as "nabi," which is: the prophesier; as a wise man, full of knowledge of God, "exceeding wise," as one of the spiritual leaders and elders upon whom the inheritance of the Chaldaen had come, and who had at times been thought of as his lineal descendants. No one approached Jacob save in the most respectful and ceremonious way; in dealings and trade one called 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 the cities, in Hebron itself, Urusalim or Shechem, in a house built of stone and wood, beneath which he could bury his dead? Why did he live like an Ishmaelite or Bedouin, in tents outside the town, in the open country, not even 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 from hour to hour he must be awaiting the word which should make him take down huts and stalls, load poles, blankets and skins on the pack-camels, and be off? Joseph knew why, of course. Thus it must be, because one served a God whose nature was not repose and abiding comfort, but a God of designs for the future, in whose will inscrutable, great, far- reaching things were in 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, a God of cares, who must be sought for, for whom one must at all times keep oneself free, mobile and in readiness.

In a word, it was the spirit, he that dignified and then again he / Page 32 / that debased, who forbade Jacob to live a settled life in towns; and if little Joseph sometimes regretted the fact, having a taste for pomp and worldly circumstance, we must accept this trait of his character and let others make up for it. As for me, who now draw my narrative to a close, to plunge, voluntarily, into limitless adventure (the word plunge being used advisedly), I will not conceal my native and comprehensive understanding of the old man's restless unease and dislike of any fixed habitation. For do I not know the feeling? To me too has not unrest been ordained, 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 pauses only tent- wise, awaiting further directions, and soon feels his heart beating high, 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 adventures which 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 behind us the station where we briefly paused, we have forgotten it, and as is the fashion of travellers have begun to look across the distance at the world we are now to enter, in order that we may not feel too strange and awkward 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 pale as we leave the light of day and descend into the unsounded depths of the past.

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- and not only with eagerness but still more with physical fear? Is not the past the story-teller's element and native air, does he not take to it as a fish to water? Agreed. But reasoning like this will not avail to make my heart cease throbbing with fear and curiosity, probably because the past by which I am well accustomed to let myself be carried far and far away is quite another from the past into which I now shudderingly descend: the past of life, the dead-and-gone world, to which my own life shall more and more profoundly 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 first time, life. For the essence of life is presentness, and only in a mythical sense does its mystery appear in the time-forms of past and future. They are the way, so to speak, in which life reveals itself to the folk; the mystery 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 mystery of the / Page 33 / eternal presentness of the soul, and that all life belongs to it, so soon as death shall have broken its solitary prison cell. I taste of death and knowledge when, as story-teller, I adventure into the past; hence my eagerness, hence my fear and pallor. But eagerness has the upper hand, and Ido not deny that it is of the flesh, for its theme is the first and last of all our questioning and speaking and all our necessity; the nature of man. That it is which we shall seek out in the underworld and death, as Ishtar there sought Tammuz and Isis Osiris, to find it where it lies and is, in the past.

For it is, always is, however much we may say It was. Thus speaks the myth, which is only the garment of the mystery. But the holiday garment of the mystery is the feast, the recurrent feast which be- strides the tenses and makes the has-been and the to-be present to the popular sense. What wonder then, that on the day of the feast humanity is in a ferment and conducts itself with licensed abandon? For in it life and death meet and know each other. Feast of story-telling, thou art the festal garment of life's mystery, for thou conjurest up timelessness in the mind of the folk, and invokest the myth that it may be relived in the actual present. Feast of death, descent into hell, thou art verily a feast and a revelling of the soul of the flesh, which not for nothing clings to the past and the graves and the solemn It was. But may the spirit too be with thee and enter into thee, that thou mayest be blest with a blessing from heaven above and from the depths beneath.

Down, then, and no quaking! But are we going at one fell swoop into the bottomlessness of the well? No, not at all. Not much more than three thousand years deep - and what is that, compared with the bottom? At that stage men do not wear horn armour and eyes in their foreheads and,do battle with flying newts. They are men like ourselves - aside from that measure of dreamy indefiniteness in their habits of thought which we have agreed to consider pardonable. So the homekeeping man talks to himself when 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 have been before, only a day or so away from home. And thus we too speak, with reference to the country which awaits us. Is it the land of no- where, the country of the moon, so different from aught that ever was on sea or land that we clutch our heads in sheer bewilderment? No, it is a country such as we have often seen, a Mediterranean land, not,exactly like home, rather dusty and stony, but certainly not fantastic, and above It move the familiar stars, There It lies, mountain and valley, cities and roads and vineclad slopes, 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 fairy tale. Perhaps you closed your eyes, on the Journey down; open them now! We have arrived. See how the moonlight-sharpened shadows lie across the peaceful, rolling landscape! Feel the mild spring freshness of the summer-starry night!

 

 

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 the many acres of beautiful reliefs that decorate its towering walls. Located at Abydos, eight miles west of the present course of the Nile, this is the Temple of Seti I, a monarch of the illustrious nineteenth Dynasty, who ruled from 1306-1290 BC.1

Seti is known primarily as the father of a famous son: Ramesses II (1290-1224 BC), the pharaoh of the biblical Exodus: In his own right, however, he was a major historical figure who conducted extensive military campaigns outside Egypt's borders, who was responsible for the construction of several fine buildings and who carefully and conscientiously refurbished and restored many older ones! His temple at Abydos, which was known evocatively as 'The House of Millions of Years', was dedicated to Osiris,4 the 'Lord of Eternity', of whom it was said in the Pyramid Texts:

You have gone, but you will return, you have slept, but you will awake,

you have died, but you will live . . . Betake yourself to the waterway,

fare upstream. . . travel about Abydos in this spirit-form of yours

which the gods commanded to belong to you."

 

 

A

TREASURY OF TRADITIONAL WISDOM

MYSTERIUM MAGNUM

Page

998

THE GREAT MYSTERY

"Of the heaven which is above the heavens, what earthly poet ever did or ever will sing worthily? ... There abides the very 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, the whither and the whence, the manner and quality of its being, are unknown to us: It moves in absolute stability, and its stability moves within it."

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 relalizable as a separate thing, but as the unity of all things, yet not composed of them; of one taste, and transcendent over differentiation."

Padma-Sambhava

"Sameness is differentiation, differentiation is 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 from your substance, and the end will arrive three days afterwards. The substance will be granulated, like atoms of gold (or motes in the Sun), and turn a deep red - a red the intensity of which makes it seem black like very pure 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 pass through the stage of the Elixir of Whiteness (i.e. of silver). . . . After it has become dry. . . it becomes fixed in the colour of purple, and is waxy, fusible, soluble, stable. One part of it is capable of transforming into gold a thousand parts of mercury which has been fixed by means of the Elixir of Silver. Similarly if you wish to project it upon silver it 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 terrestrial essence so as to render them unable to draw will in the mystery of God."

Boehme

 

"But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God 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 Being is contained in Him; He doth not possess Being, but Being possesses Him; He is the Eternity, the Beginning, and the Measure of Existence, being anterior to Essence and essential Existence and Eternity, because He is the Creative Beginning, Middle, and End of all things. . . . He is not This without being That; nor doth He possess this mode of being without that. On the contrary He is all things as being the Cause of them all, and as holding together and anticipating in Himself all the beginnings and all the fulfilments of all things; and He is above them all in that He, anterior to their existence, super-essentially transcends them all. Hence all attributes may be affirmed at once of Him, and yet He is no Thing. He possesses all shape and form, and yet is formless and shapeless, containing beforehand incomprehensibly and transcendently the beginning, middle, and end of all things, and shedding upon them a pure radiance of that one and undifferenced causality whence all their fairness comes."

Dionysius

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=
45
4+5
=
9

NINE
9

 

 

9

DIONYSIUS

135

45

9

8

DIONYSUS

126

36

9

 

 

PLUTARCH

MORALIA

VOLUME V 

 English Translation Frank Cole Babbitt 1936

Page

79-81

ISIS AND OSIRIS

363 - 364

"At Sais in the vesti-bule of the temple of Athena was carved a babe and an aged man, and after this a hawk and next a fish, and finally an hippopotamus. The symbolic meaning of this was: "O ye that are coming into the world and departing from it, God hateth shamelessness." The babe is the symbol of coming into the world and the aged man the symbol of departing from it, and by a hawk they indicate God, by the fish hatred, as has already been said, because of the sea, and by the hippopotamus shamelessness; for it is said that he kills his sire and forces his mother to mate with him.

That saying of the adherents of Pythagoras, that the sea is a tear of Cronus, may seem to hint at its impure and extraneous nature.

Let this, then, be stated incidentally, as a matter of record that is common knowledge. (33.) But the wiser of the priests call not only the Nile Osiris and the sea Typhon, but they simply give the name of Osiris to the whole source and faculty creative of moisture, believing this 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,' in general, and antagonistic to moisture. Therefore, because they believe that he was personally of a reddish sallow colour, they are not eager to meet men of such complexion, nor do they like to associate with them.

Osiris, on the other hand, according to their legend-ary tradition, was dark, because water darkens everything, earth and clothes and clouds, when it comes into contact with them. In young people the presence of moisture renders their hair black, while greyness, like a paleness as it were, is induced by / Page 83 / dryness in those who are passing their prime, Also the spring-time is vigorous, prolific, and agreeable; but the autumn, since it lacks moisture, is inimical to plants and unhealthful for living 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), is black and has honours second only to Apis. Egypt, moreover, which has the blackest of soils,. they call by the same name as the black portion of the eye, "Chemia," and compare it to a heart; for it is warm and moist and is enclosed 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 not use chariots, but boats in which to sail round in their courses; and by this they intimate that the nourish-ment and origin of these heavenly bodies is from moisture. They think also that Homer, like Thales, had gained his knowledge from the Egyptians, when he postulated water as the source and origin of all things; for, according to them, Oceanus is Osiris, and Tethys is Isis, since she is the kindly nurse and provider for all things. In fact, the Greeks call emission apousia and coition synousia, and the 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 have heard Osiris pronounced Hysiris by the priests, for he regularly spells the name in this way, deriving it, in all probability, from the nature of Oiris and the ceremony of finding him a

35. That Osiris is identical with Dionysus who could more fittingly know than yourself, Clea? For you are at the head of the inspired maidens of Delphi, and have been consecrated by your father and mother in the holy rites of Osiris. If, however, for the benefit of others it is needful to adduce proofs of this identity, let us leave undisturbed what may not be told, but the public ceremonieses which the priests perform in 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 skins of fawns about themselves, and carry Bacchic wands and indulge in shoutings and movements exactly as do those who are under the spell of the Dionysiac ecstasies. For the same reason many of the Greeks make statues of Dionysus in the form of a bull; and the women of Elis invoke him, praying that the god may come with the hoof of a bull and the epithet applied to Dionysus among the Argives is "Son of the Bull." They call him up out of the water by the sound of trumpets, at the same time casting into the depths a lamb as an offering to the Keeper of the Gate. The trumpets they conceal in Bacchic wands, as Socrates has stated in his treatise on The Holy Ones Further- / Page 87 / more, the tales regarding the Titans and the rites celebrated by night agree with the accounts of the dismemberment of Osiris and his revivification and regenesis. Similar agreement is found too in the tales about their sepulchres. The Egyptians, as has already been stated, point out tombs of Osiris in many places, and the people of Delphi believe that the remains of Dionysus rest with them close beside the oracle; and the Holy Ones offer a secret sacrifice in the shrine of Apollo whenever the devotees of Dionysus wake the God of the Mystic Basket. To show that the Greeks regard Dionysus as the lord and master not only of wine, but of the nature 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 prohibited from 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 water jar in honour of the god heads the procession.! And by the picture of a rush they represent a king and the southern region of theworld,g and the rush 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 a statue of which the male member is triple; for the god is the Source, and every source, by its fecundity, multiplies what proceeds from it; and for "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 used by 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 primal material substances, Earth, Air, and Fire. In fact, the tale that is annexed to the legend to the effect that Typhon cast the male member of Osiris into the river, and Isis could not find it, but constructed and shaped a replica of it, and ordained that it should be honoured and borne in processions, plainly comes round to this doctrine, that the creative and germinal power of the god, at the very first, acquired moisture as its substance, and through moisture combined with whatever was by nature capable of participating in generation."

Page83 

"Dionysus also they call Hyes since he is lord of the nature of moisture; and he is no other than Osiris."