THE
IS
YOUR BLOOD
"A lifetime devoted unremittingly to the study of
the ancient
backgrounds
of our modern Western religion has established
beyond
all possibility of error the conviction that the great
Scriptures of antiquity on which our Occidental faiths
have
been
built up have had a remote Egyptian origin. The present
treatise
is an attempt to justify the truth of this statement by
the
revelation of the recondite significance covertly adumbrated
in one of
the most prominent of such archaic symbols found in
the
Bibles of both Judaism and Christianity,--the
Studied through the lens of a larger vision and a
deeper
understanding, it should, and eventually will be seen, to release
the power
of a new and far more vital message for the two
religions
that have harbored, all unsuspectingly, the hidden
dynamic
of this archaic construction of semantic genius. This
revelation
of the cryptic significance of the
usage
could inaugurate another, and the most thoroughgoing,
reformation
in Judaism and Christianity since the ancient days
of their
origin. It could engender a New Enlightenment in the
life of
religion and spiritual culture not only in the West, but in
the world at large."
Alvin Boyd Kuhn
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* Electronically typed and edited by Juan Schoch for educational research purposes. This notice is not to be removed. I can be contacted at pc93@enlightenment-engine.net. I will be greatly indebted to the individual who can put me in touch with the Estate of Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn and/or any of the following: A. B. Kuhn’s graduation address at Chambersburg Academy "The Lyre of Orpheus", A. B. Kuhn’s unpublished autobiography, The Mighty Symbol of the Horizon, Nature as Symbol, The Rebellion of the Angels, The Ark and the Deluge, The True Meaning of Genesis, The Law of the Two Truths, At Sixes and Sevens, Adam Old and New, The Real and the Actual, Immortality: Yes—But How?, The Mummy Speaks at Last, Symbolism of the Four Elements, Rudolph Steiner's "Mystery of Golgotha", Krishnamurti and Theosophy.
I also would welcome any contact with someone who has any letters of Kuhn or has any personal knowledge of him. Thank you.
Recently (January 15, 2005) I was contacted by a 15 year old student of Upton High (state and city to be determined) who wanted to interview me in regards to the life of Sir Francis Bacon (Lord Verulam). The interview was conducted and this student asked me if there was anything else. This is what I relayed:
There is a nationally and worldwide known issue of a disabled person in my state (Florida) who is being subjected to attempted murder. Her name is Theresa Marie Schindler-Schiavo. The courts say that she is in a Persistent Vegetative State when in fact she is not, they lie. Videos were shown on CNN during a live feed that prove she is not comatose. She sits up in a chair. Her husband who lives with another woman for over 9 years and who has two children with this woman is trying to say that Theresa wants to die when in fact he has been denying her rehabilitation and therapy so that she can have her own voice and be back on to the road to her recovery. He has been with several women since he caused Theresa's incident and this is his latest live-in concubine who is in collusion with him to make Theresa dead. His attorneys are attempting to accomplish a heinous starvation/dehydration death on her for the third time. One of his attorneys wrote a book in which he talks about tearing out peoples feeding tubes and says he speaks to them by "soul speak" asking them if they want to die and they tell him along the lines "Yes, I want to die! Please kill me." The Hospice of the Florida Suncoast is holding her hostage for over 4 years. This feeding tube yanker attorney was chairman of the board of this hospice. This is the worst case of domestic terrorism happening in our country right now. While we are off in other countries helping helpless and disabled people the government has been remiss to save a human life from terrorism here in my state. There is a cover-up of mass proportions and I have the evidence on a CD to prove it. This message is to you and all of your classmates and teachers who may be reading this. Please contact others if you know of others who care to stop this murder. Perhaps you, or others, including activist friends, know people who have the power to stop what is happening here in my state or bring greater attention to what is going on. Contact me at pc93@enlightenment-engine.net or call me at 407-925-4141 and I will get whatever information you may need. Help me and others to stop the return of Nazi T4 days in Florida, the rest of the United States of America and the world. We must take a stand and make our voices heard.
Please join my Alvin Boyd Kuhn Yahoo!Group and Gnosis284! http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AlvinBoydKuhn/join : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gnosis284/join
-2-
A lifetime devoted unremittingly to
the study of the ancient backgrounds of our modern Western religion has
established beyond all possibility of error the conviction that the great
Scriptures of antiquity on which our Occidental faiths have been built up have
had a remote Egyptian origin and they purveyed their profound message of truth and
wisdom in a language of semantic crypticism that has
first baffled, then deluded the minds of all the theological savants, both
Jewish and Christian, who have endeavored to interpret their esoteric
significance, for full two thousand years. The present treatise is an attempt
to justify the truth of this statement by the revelation of the recondite
significance covertly adumbrated in one of the most prominent of such archaic
symbols found in the Bibles of both Judaism and
Christianity, -- the
-3-
that have harbored, all unsuspectingly, the
hidden dynamic of this archaic construction of semantic genius. This revelation
of the cryptic significance of the
The arcane profundity of the divine
wisdom vouchsafed to early humanity by gods or at least by sages and seers of
advanced human development, "holy men of old," as the Scriptures
themselves rate them, was considered to be a treasure fit only to be preserved
in a casket constructed of the golden material of transcendent imagery and jewelled with gems of the sublimest
and most majestic symbolism. Minds open to the vision of its truth and beauty
designed that it be expressed in recondite forms and semantic devices, which,
while they obscured its purport for the immature and undeveloped masses,
intimated its dynamic significance and released its cathartic power to the
intelligent and the initiated. These devices were such literary
"genres" as allegory, myth, drama, poetry, legend, epic fiction,
imaginative tropes, number structures, star groupings and movements, and above
all, nature symbols. The outer world of nature, which the seers knew to be the
language of God's own expression of true being and which lay concreted before
our eyes, was looked to for all the expressive types needed to body forth the
archetypes of eternal verity. Nature spoke the one language which could never
utter falsehood. Hence the sacred literature abounds in naturographs,
with such elementary natural objects employed to dramatize meaning as the tree,
grass, earth, sky, water, air, fire, the stream, animal, bird, insect, reptile,
stone, wood, metal, storm, wave, tide, rain, snow, desert, mountain, flower,
bee, grape -- and the great sea. These natural objects and the phenomena of
their living existence
-4-
constituted a veritable language, and one need not
hesitate to pronounce it the most completely meaningful language available to
man. It is the tragedy of world culture that this semantic idiom has, like Latin,
ancient Greek and other tongues, become a "dead
language" and the books written in it stand as tomes of fast sealed
mystery. As a result the whole enterprise of theology and Scriptural
interpretation has, for centuries, been befogged in intellectual confusion.
It is the purpose to deal in this
essay with just one of the nature symbols that has found such general use in
the Bibles of antiquity, and the attempt will be made to bring to light the
pure gold of meaning esoterically hidden in its cryptic intimations. There is
said to be gold in the chemical composition of sea water; it is possible to say
that there is also intellectual gold of precious truth in what sea water was
intended to present to thought in the Scriptures. It is believed that one is fully
warranted in prefacing the effort with the observation that the revelation here
to be made constitutes one of the most astounding disclosures of occult
knowledge to be found in all the realm of the archaic religious literature of
the world. The
In the very same century in which
Christianity took its rise, in fact born almost in the same year as that
claimed for the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, lived the Hebrew scholar and
philosopher, Philo Judaeus. The statement will hardly
be contradicted now that he had formulated a systematic code of interpretation
of ancient sacred writings, which, if it had been followed closely by
scriptural exegetists, would have saved the science
of theology from the confusion into which it has fallen ever since his day. It
might even have prevented the schism between Judaism and its ungrateful
daughter, Christianity, which was destined to drench the pages of two thousand
years of religious history with needless rivers of blood. It would likewise
have
-5-
obviated the causes which led both religions to break
up into numberless sects and denominations, thus perpetuating the reign of
sullen hatreds and bigotries of every sort.
He elucidated the principle that the
tomes of sacred writing bequeathed to early humanity by the gods or by men of
far advanced evolutionary stature were susceptible of interpretation at four
different levels of understanding: (1) the literal-physical; (2) the
moral-sentimental; (3) the allegorical-intellectual; (4) the
anagogical-mystical. That is, the books of Holy Writ could be read as
historical events; as moral instruction; as intellectual conception of truth;
as the incitement to the most exalted spiritual mystical transports. Even
before Philo's day the great and learned Jewish scholars and interpreters of
the Torah, the Tanaim and Amoraim,
had expounded the principle that he who reads the Scriptures only at the level
of their surface meaning will never grasp the truth of the living Word of God,
that only he who pierces the coarser veils to grasp a far deeper sense and
experience a more vivid illumination of consciousness will receive the
cathartic purification of his nature. They went so far as to say that he who
was content with the surface meaning of the words was a fool and a simpleton.
As long as religions cling to the lower rungs of the scale of interpretation of
their Scriptures, there will be endless points of difference between them; if
they will lift the sense to the upper third and fourth levels, the apparent
outer grounds of difference will dissolve in the unity and harmony of a lofty
conceptual enlightenment. The later philosophers Kant and Spinoza were to
arrive at about this same basis of understanding. Philo himself so well
succeeded in elucidating Scriptural meaning at the highest level that he was
able to make a synthesis of the Hebrew Pentateuch, or first five books of the
Old Testament, with the rationalistic systematism of
the Platonic philosophy of the Greeks. It can with a great degree of
plausibility be asserted that had his interpretative achievement
-6-
been used as the basis of Biblical exegesis from
that time, the catastrophic divergence of Christianity from its parent Judaism
would have been avoided, and the world spared the gruesome horrors of two
thousand years of persecution and slaughter.
The key
and instrument for apprehension of the more exalted sense of Scripture was of
course the allegorical approach to understanding. When one understands
that one is reading a volume of spiritual truth expressed in the guise of allegories,
one looks beyond or beneath the common connotation of the words to discern a
transcendental significance that can be apprehended only mystically,
or at least with the power of abstract conception. In the late second and early
third centuries the two great Christian expositors of Scripture, Clement and Origen, successive heads of the leading academy of
Christian doctrinism, the famous school of Alexandria, endeavored valiantly to
exalt the principles of Biblical exegesis to the highest Philonic
level. Every historian of Christianity has had to devote a chapter or section
of his work to an exposition of what is spoken of as "Origen's
allegories." To the detriment of all Christian history the historians
almost with one accord, belittle the importance and significance of this
chapter of the early life of the faith. On the contrary, it will some day be
seen that the religion's failure to cultivate and perpetuate and further
develop the methodology employed by these two great Fathers has been the saddest
dereliction and most costly fatality of Christian history.
THE RETURN TO ALLEGORY
It is evident now that a keen
recognition of this unfortunate eventuality in the early development of
Christianity has taken place quite recently in the Roman Catholic branch of the
Christian establishment. The hierarchy of this great ecclesiastical system has
obviously arrived at
-7-
the decision to open the doors of Bible study to
the allegorical approach and method for interpretation. Recent public
utterances have voiced the policy of the Church of Rome that, since the Bible
authors resorted to a wide variety of "literary forms," such as
allegory, myth, drama and symbol, readers are free now to put their own
interpretation upon the textual material. Allegory is bound in the end to
convey to each reader the special sense which each is able to grasp, hence the
attempt to confine the meaning to a stated and uniform exposition is futile at
best. This move leaves every one at liberty to extract from the reading of
Scripture the particular grade of conception of which each is capable.
Few realize the epochal significance
of this strategy of the Catholic Church. It is a virtual confession that it was
a mistake to have failed to follow the lead of Philo, Clement and Origen. The deeper meaning of the great Scriptures is after
all only to be caught by each reader in proportion to his receptive
capabilities in the way of spiritual-mystical realization. The pressures
impinging upon intelligence today from the side of a more enlightened
scholarship have made this recognition and concession necessary. To contend any
longer that the Bible is to be taken with Fundamentalist literalism, and as in
all parts factual history, would leave Catholicism stranded high and dry on the
banks, while the stream of a more intelligent, more meaningful and dynamic
Scriptural exegesis has swept on by, carrying the world of culture with it out
of reach of the old method. Lately, too, the trend back to allegorism
has manifested itself sensationally in the Protestant wing of Christianity,
especially in the Episcopalian denomination.
As this essay is to reveal a series
of astounding items of lost knowledge, it might as well detonate its most
explosive datum right at the start, with the positive
-8-
declaration that the
The interested reader is by now
probably eager to know what those two Hebrew words are. It is no secret; here
they are: Iam suph.
Iam, sure enough, means water, sea; but suph never meant "red." On the
contrary it means something decidedly green. Any Hebrew dictionary
carries the information that suph means
sedge, marsh grass, swamp grass, in short, reeds! Iam
suph then means the
Suddenly, then, we are faced with
the realization, quite staggering to all in the aura of what we were told in
Sabbath Schools or read in Bible treatises, that no Bible ever said that the
children of Israel once crossed -- two and a quarter million in one night --
the geographical and
-9-
very wet
It is to be interjected here --
since the suspense may be irritating -- that, true enough, the hosts of the
true Israelites (when one knows who they really were) did cross the Red Sea
(when one knows what that truly is), and the story comes alive with
tenfold more luminous significance than the alleged physical miracle of passing
across between two walls of water ever meant or could mean. For, as now we are
staggered by the wiping away of the meaning we had attributed to the thing as
presumed history, we can be even more happily staggered by the revelation of a
veritable radiance of sublime significance which, as spiritual allegory, it was
certainly designed to convey to minds attuned to logical reasoning and mystical
apperceptions.
But now that we have washed the
"
Pff! -- the orthodox, the Fundamentalist
scholars will exclaim -- why make all this exaggerated fuss about a mere change
of name? We should not let a little quirk of literary usage like that disturb
us or shake our faith in the Scripture. The narrow section of the real
geographical
-10-
the Lord raised up an "east wind" that
pushed the shallow water off the bottom, so that the people crossed while the
wind held the water back. To a Fundamentalist nature's laws and elements
present no obstacle to belief when God is working a "miracle."
Therefore it means nothing to him to reflect that if an east wind blew
the shallow water off the bottom, it would pile it all upon the west shore
of the channel, exactly where the Israelites would have to start their
crossing! Nor does he pause to take into account the inches of mud on the
bottom. Even with a modern highway across the strait, and equipped with all
modern vehicles, an army of trained men of that number could not cross the
The next startling disclosure in the
context must wait until sufficient preliminary elucidation had been made to
render it intelligible. An allegory -- at any rate ancient Scriptural allegory
-- was a literary device designed to pictorialize a
spiritual or anagogical reality in man's subjective experience in the form of
an earthly physical narrative of fictitious events. So we are quite warranted,
without further demonstration, in assuming that the story of this crossing is
designed to carry its meaning into the area of our subjective life to work
there a proper "miracle" of understanding at the two higher levels of
Philo's scale. As to this is can be said at once that virtually all Scriptural
allegories and other semantic modes of representing exalted truth and noumenal realities have but one basic theme to dilate upon
-- the incarnation of souls in mortal bodies here on earth. That is the
ubiquitous omnipresent theme at the heart of nearly all Biblical writing. This
basic event, the essence of human life itself, is treated, enlivened,
-11-
illuminated by a great variety of imaginative
constructions, and this is possible because all living forms manifest the basic
principle from one angle or another and can be dramatized by one typology or
another. Life everywhere speaks the same language and harps upon the same
chords.
This Red Sea episode of the sacred
allegory was formulated in order to transfix the more capable human conceptual
faculty with the reality of the spiritual fact that the divine seed-soul, a
unit of God's mind-generated being, a true Son of the Father, had in
incarnation to escape from a bondage to the lower nature of the animal body in
which it was housed for its journey through this mortal life, by crossing a
place, state or condition of existence symbolized most fittingly by a body of water.
This typism is found universally in the arcane wisdom
literature. Very many instances of it could be cited, -- and have been in our
other works. If one says that in life after life, or in the complete cycle of
incarnate life, the soul has to wade through the "sea of life"
eventually to land on that "farther shore" of celestial delight and
radiance, the poetic figure sinks deeply enough into the average mind to
register the general sense of the incarnation experience. If, however, the
language of symbolism had been continuously cultivated since ancient days the
figure would release upon consciousness the vivid force of its real
significance.
But it must be forcefully asserted
at this point that those sages of old who indited our
sacred Scriptures were not merely indulging wayward fancy in light touches of
poetic imagery. Artists they were of the highest genius and adept in the
faculty of analogical representation as none others have perhaps been since
their day. Every image they conceived to pictorialize
metaphysical verity was a construction that carried the receptive mind into the
heart of a living truth and impressed it upon reflection with the
-12-
dynamic of what the Greeks called a spiritual
catharsis. In the Platonic philosophy these poetic figures stood as archetypes
of the divine thought, and deep reflection upon them awakened realizations of
the mighty transfiguring power of noumenal truth that
is the very bread of life for man's soul.
The
sagacious scribes of the archaic wisdom, then, were talking of a sea which all
souls must cross, and cross without sinking too deep in its waters; in fact a
sea on whose surface we must learn to walk without sinking, or getting our feet
enmired in the mud of its bottom; a sea again whose
waters must figuratively be dried up by the power of God so that we may pass
over on dry land. Or perhaps, under a variant figure, a great fish might catch
us up and transport us across after a three days' journey in its
"cabin." Is all this just light poetic fancy, or is there in truth
and in fact such a sea that we must cross to escape a miserable slavery and
reach a delectable land flowing with milk and honey? Is the soul actually
brought in contact with real water that might extinguish its divine fire and
drown it?
AN OCEAN ON FIRE
It is next to inconceivable how blind the
intellect of a world has been! How obtuse to a reality that the allegory
pressed upon it in the plainest terms! So close to us is this red sea over
whose storm-tossed billows we must swim to reach a happier land that it could
not be brought any closer to us.
Closer is he than breathing,
Nearer than hands and feet,--
sang the poet Tennyson of the divine Self within
us. And just as close to us is this very red sea of life. For, far down into
the depths of an actual body of water, incarnation
-13-
has plunged these souls of ours that are as
oblivious of the watery element they swim in as they are of the air they
breathe. So true is this, both as allegory and as fact, that ancient poetic
genius typified the soul as a great fish swimming about in the sea, the soul of
life immersed in water. Early Christianity still
carried this symbol, as both Augustine and Tertullian
said that the Christ was the great fish in the sea and his Christian followers
were the little minnows. The fish, as symbol of divinity, was universal in the
arcane typology and in mythology. And when souls had descended into incarnation
they were aptly likened unto fish in the sea. In actuality, souls are immersed
in a vessel of living potential that is seven-eighths water, and it is
sea water! And, open a vein and let it out and the oxygen immediately turns
it red! The
At last the astounding truth strikes
home to the mind of a surprised world: this "
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If a skeptical reader insists upon
challenging the truth of the declaration that the human body blood is sea
water, and not only in poetry but in chemical constituency, the authority back
of the statement is that of science, of biology, of anthropology, of evolution,
of chemical analysis verified in the laboratory. The human blood is ocean
water, declared so by chemistry, salinity and all, so that analysis can find no
essential character difference between the two. One could logically infer this
fact even without verification by chemical analysis, from a basic knowledge
that the stream of biological life in its evolution came originally out of the
oceans. For a long, early period confined to the sea, it later became
transferred to the land; the sustenance of bodily energy through the chemical
properties of water was replaced by the elements in air; gills were exchanged
for lungs. Yet, the lymphs, plasms
and humors in the organisms retained the primal character of what they had been
from the start, -- sea water. The action of oxygen on substances tends to give
them a red coloration. Indeed we do retain the original heritage of the sea in
our veins. Our blood is this "
Language is the deep mine of occult
meaning which must be worked constantly if one is to bring up the precious ore
of living truth in the arcane science of old. If the writers of the Hebrew Old
Testament had wanted to speak of the
-15-
"ground,
earth," the name Adam was given the meaning of "red earth." And
in one way that is exactly what man is, his earthy body mixed with red blood.
By a mere switch of vowels, adam
became
But this is only the beginning of
what etymology, philology can do for us in this
green-red symbolism. It is no wonder, incidentally in passing, that green and
red are the two colors typical of the Christmas season and its symbolism, as
green stands for the natural man, and red, as the color of fire, typifies the
spiritual man, and it is the ultimate marriage of these two components in man's
nature that gives birth to the Christ consciousness.
Back there in ancient
The fundamental predication of the
great Egyptian wisdom structure was the interaction of the two polarized
energies of spirit and matter, on a web of force suspended between which the
axis of the universe is conceived as turning. The Egyptian spiritual or cosmogonic mythology traced the generation of the two
universal creative energies of life in a semantic structure which said that the
God Tum (in one version, Kepher
in another) with his hand produced from his generative power his seminal seed,
"and from the drops of blood which fell upon the earth, were born
the
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gods Hu and Sa"
(in another version Shu and Tefnut).
And these twins, god and goddess, brother and sister, Hu
and Sa, became the progenitors of mankind. These two
short names stood to the Egyptian seers as Hu for
spirit, and Sa for matter. And as fire was the
universal symbol of spirit, so water, its chemical antagonist, was the
symbol of matter. This gives us the association of the word sa with water. But in the Egyptian
system of hieroglyphics the tonal symbol of fire was the letter of the
alphabet, sh. The evidence of this,
beside many other items, is that the Hebrew word for fire is esh. As the unit of conscious being, what
would be the ego-consciousness, or I-consciousness, was alphabetically embodied
in the capital letter "I," and this self-consciousness was embodied,
as far as this earth is concerned, in the creature man, the Hebrew word
for "man" combined the "I" of divine consciousness with the
"sh" of fire, so that "man" in
Hebrew is ish. As "Hu" was the unit of spiritual life, man thus became
the Hu-man being. And since this Human
entity tenants a body of water, we have a suggestive ground for the words humid,
humidity and the "humors" of the body. We shall now
look at the words derived from the Sa stem
and shall find them interesting and illuminating indeed.
Immediately it seems indubitable
that we have here the true origin of the word "sea" itself. Since Sa
was matter, and water its symbol, the great water mass on the earth was the s(e)a. Possibly some one introduced the
"e" into the Sa to hide its derivation from the latter, in the
esoteric spirit which motivated all ancient religious literature. This ruse was
often resorted to, the "
But what is that element in the
composition of sea water that is most directly associated with it? Salt, of
course! And salt is sodium chloride, no less. Sa,sea,salt!
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And salt is used as a preservative.
In man's constitution, say all the great Scriptures, is an element, a
divine principle, that is described as the "salt
of the earth," and hence is that which saves man and is the rock of
his salvation. So we have the words save, safe, salvation, salvage, (probably)
saliva, sane, salud (Spanish word for
"health"), salute, salad, salubrious, salutary, salacious, and
by a poetic stretch, sail (over the bounding main, as the old school
song has it), and others. As salute is to hail, sail equates hail,
and in fact "s" and "h" interchange places between
words in different languages or even in the same language thousands of times,
as in the Hindu Asura and the Persian Ahura. It is quite a likely fact that the presence of salt
in the world oceans maintains chemically a balance between elements that keeps
the world atmosphere "salubrious." All the muck of the continents is
carried by rivers into the briny deep, and it is that saline component of our
seas that preserves the purity of our air, one must suppose. So then, if salud (health) and salute (generally
an inquiry about a person's health), and sail and hail are
kindred in original meaning, we have at once a connection of hail with hale,
and also with heal and the German heil
(hail) and heilig, "sacred,
holy". Doubtless this chain extends further.
At least two allegorical
constructions in the Bible introduce this element of salt and they now become
most significant. Could it be pure "coincidence" that the strange
incident of the turning of
-18-
authoritatively to be introduced against the identity.
(Vowels only later in the Greek came to distinctness, and the Greek has the
full complement of seven.) If, in passing, the question of the esoteric
significance of the pillar-of-salt allegory is raised, perhaps the
interpretation is that if on the soul's "fleeing" from the condition
of embodiment in bodies composed mainly of sea-salt water, it does not continue
straight ahead in its evolution toward spiritual heights, but turns to look
back and seek again the attractions of life of body, it will be drawn back for
further incarnations in salty bodies, the body being poetized as this pillar of
salt. If this is not the significance, the real meaning must lie much deeper
indeed.)
Then in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis
the first verses tell of a battle between five kings on one side and four
on the other, waged in "the vale of Siddim,
which is the salt sea." (Another version has it, "at the
salt marshes," -- the
Can one be simply in error in
affirming, then, that all these allegorical flourishes are ancient semantic
devices hiding in their cryptic methodology the flat meaning that the great
battle of life, the war between the carnal and the spiritual elements in man's
nature, is fought out right here in the sodium chloride in the blood of these
bodies of ours? There is, indeed, reinforcement for the idea in the Bible's
repeated statement that "in the blood is the life of the soul." A
piquant phrase of universal usage in referring to strong character and sterling
quality as being in a person's blood, is seen to have
a basis here.
-19-
And ancient
Turning from Egyptian to Latin, we
find this na introducing
us to a new range of striking significance. In this language it is the base of
one of the shortest verbs, whose stem is simply N- in the "A"
conjugation, -- that is, its accompanying vowel is "a" and not
"e" or "i." This verb built up on
the na stem, nare, means two things that at first do not
suggest any kinship or connection. It means both "to be born" and
"to swim." From it on the side of "born" we get name,
native, nature and natal; on the side of "swim" we have navy,
naval, navel, natatorium (a swimming pool), and probably our natron also. And how are being born and
swimming connected? Any mother should know, or any physician: all birth is out
of water, even that of all life on the earth out of the sea. "Moses"
means drawn "out of the water." The Egyptian word for
"birth" was mes. We find it
in such Pharaonic names as Thothmes
("the born Thoth") and Rameses
(the born god Ra) and others.
-20-
But more to the point, we have it in
the word Messiah, the born Iah (Jah), the three letter name of Jehovah. The human babe
comes forth swimming in a sack of water. That Na speaks very
clearly to our intelligence indeed. Jesus said that the "natural
man" is born of water, while the "spiritual man" is born
of air, as the Latin word "spiritus" means
"air." How faithfully nature matches this spiritual history in her
procedures! For the soul of life on our planet was born out of the water into
the air, and the human foetus at birth steps out of
water into the air!
This transition was by the ancient
sages made the type-figure of the regeneration of man, when evolution brought
him to the point of graduation from the reign of animal instinct, under the
influence of natural as distinct from spiritual forces, over into the realm of
mind (always symboled by air); and this becomes
brilliantly illuminating if we keep before us the symbolic relation of the na of natural to water, and that of
spirit to air, in the Latin verb spiro, I
breathe. And if we seek the absolutely first origin of this na's connection with water, we have it, beyond all
controversy of grammarians, back there in ancient Egypt's wondrous symbolic creatings, in the hieroglyph that means water. In this
archaic and arcane symbol-system, right in the Egyptian alphabet, the letter N
is written in the form of seven wavelets of water, one might say it
pictures the ocean agitated by the wind in seven waves, -- @insert waves And
the primary name attached to the divine ego-soul incarnated in
matter-water-body was this letter thrice repeated, -- NNN. Also the primitive
name of the cosmic soul of being immersed in matter was Nu.
This was the masculine form of the name, while the great universal
mother-matter form of the name was Nut, and the form that indicated the
universal undifferentiated essence of primal being at the start was the Nun.
-21-
When the Palestine religionists
reformulated the body of their religious concepts, which they drew from ancient
Egypt, they switched the alphabetical sign of water from N over to M, and just
about all words signifying water-matter begin with M ever since. The reasons
for this transfer the present writer has not discovered anywhere in his
research. But there is no gainsaying the fact of it. Our own written English M
still represents three of these original seven waves of water (printed form
only two), and our written and printed N still represents two waves. While the
Hebrew word for water in the sense of the sea is iam,
the Hebrew word for water as such is mayim,
which, being a plural (ending in im) would
really be waters or waves.
And how vividly instructive this
pursuit of meaning in the construction of words can become is well illustrated
here when we consider the Hebrew word for "heaven." The first chapter
of Genesis speaks of the general concept of heaven in the phrase
translated "the waters of the firmament." But the firmament, that is,
the underlying indestructible first essence of all creation, was always
represented as dual, divided into the firmament above and the firmament below.
The Egyptian savants had divided the creation into the Upper Nun and the Lower
Nun. This would refer to the division of the primordial undifferentiated
homogeneous matter -- the NUN -- into the masculine (spiritual) NU and the
feminine (material) NUT, in life's universal polarity in the periods of
manifestation, when it is not dormant in its phase of unmanifestation,
called by the Hindus pralaya. This
would give precisely what Genesis does give in its very first verse:
"In the beginning God created the heavens (the Upper Nun) and the earth
(the Lower Nun)." Now all things pertaining to the material or Lower Nun
side of life's eternal duality, were symbolized by the two "lower"
elements, earth and water; likewise all things pertaining to the Upper Nun side
were symbolized by the two "higher" elements, air and fire. How
clearly
-22-
nature
both sanctions and typifies this is seen in the fact that on the earth below we
have earth and water, while above we have air and (the sun's) fire. Also we
have fire in the upper air in the form of lightning, in a thunderstorm.
FIRE ON HEAVEN'S HEARTH
Water, however, is not confined
solely to earth, but in the forms of vapor, visible as cloud, or rain, and
invisible as rarefied water vapor, pervades the earth's upper regions. But here
we have, in the Hebrew concept of the heavens, the idea of heaven as the place
where the waters of the Upper Firmament are associated with fire, -- sun or
lightning. Hence to the word for water, mayim,
they prefixed that great letter of their alphabet which is the symbol for fire,
the letter shin, and this gives the word for "heaven" as Sh'mayim. This would convey all that range of
meaning which flows from the idea of the original fiery power of the divine
mind or spirit of God, interfusing itself in the essence of water-matter, to
beget the universes. The waters of the Lower Firmament would be mayim,
those of the Upper Firmament would be sh'mayim.
How astonishingly these basic concepts find both illustration and
corroboration in nature is seen when we reflect that the sound of this dynamic
letter SH, meaning fire, is actually produced when one introduces fire into
water; the hissing, sizzling sound. Actually in this naturograph
we have in vivid pictorialization the basic idea
involved in the creation itself, that is, the projection from God of the fiery
power of his creative energies and their being injected into the innermost core
or womb of matter. This is what is meant by the statements found in Hindu
religious literature that the birth of creation took place or began with the
shooting of the cosmic ray of Purusha, eternal
Spirit, into the womb of Prakriti, or
matter, the eternal universal Mother.
-23-
With an explosive bang that the
human mind will never forget modern science has demonstrated the fact of
staggering significance that all matter is, one might say, on fire with energy.
And, trembling with a wondering anticipation of the next even more staggering
discovery that will forever rock the human mind, and end forever the age-old
controversy between materialism and idealism, over the question whether the
primordial energy that created the universe is merely physical force, or
the power of thinking mind, the intellect of man approaches closer and closer
to the recognition that the ultimate and original force that generated life and
being must be Mind. Science has now resolved matter back into pure force, into
energy; matter is energy that has somehow cooled down, and like anything
gaseous or fluid that cools down, it has "jelled," become static,
grown hard. It has crystallized and settled into concrete state. And having
demonstrated this stupendous fact, now the speculative prying mind of man
awaits in trembling suspense the confirmation of the next world-shaking idea,
that energy is itself the potency of Thinking Mind.
A phenomenon of modern life that has
forced itself on our attention in the midst of the endless panorama of
scientific discovery and achievement is the surprised recognition that much of
the substance of our latest attainment in knowledge seems to have been in the
possession of certain of the ancient peoples, more particularly the Egyptians,
from whom it is evident that the sagacious Greeks derived the principia of the
philosophical systematism which they developed to
such grandiose heights in the Periclean period, some
four centuries B.C. Hardly less brilliant was the rekindling of that light of
the Platonic age which flared up after the dimming of the great flame following
the fall of Athens, in the movement of what is known as Neoplatonism,
about the second century A.D., when Ammonias Saccas
established his school of "esoteric wisdom." This effort produced Numenius and Maximius of
-24-
Yes, affirm these profound thinkers,
not only is matter crystallized force, energy; that energy in turn is fluid
Mind. Buried for these many centuries in the forgotten books of these great
philosophers, to be specific, in the magnificent work entitled The Six Book
of Proclus on the Theology of Plato, there has
stood a sentence, which had it been brought out and kept in recognition, might
well have saved Europe fifteen hundred years of its Dark Ages, and brought
modern science that much sooner: "The light of the sun is the pure
energy of Intellect." No one can fail to see the redoubtable challenge
of this pronouncement out of the wisdom of the long past. It makes pertinent
the question whether, with all the present incredible scientific marvels, we
have yet caught up with the acumen of ancient
-25-
by attaching to the heads of students a
sensitive electrical device registered the generation of small quantities of
force sufficient to light up a small electric bulb and run a tiny motor.
The Scriptures have analogized the
mental creation of the universe in the Biblical phrase: "God spake,
and the worlds sprang into existence." But back of all speech is thought.
So it might be said that "what God hath wrought is what God hath first
thought." If the evidence for this connection of creative energy with
creative Mind is conclusive, we have a final -- and welcome -- settlement of
the eternal squabble over the question of the nature and constituency of the
universe; and the laurel wreath goes to idealism. The universe is the
expression of the supreme divine Intellect, its majestic ideas having become
concreted in what we have called matter. By an omnipresent instinct of
reflecting intelligence, men have universally thought of one tangible thing in
the realm of life as the appropriate symbol of all mental intelligence in the
human area of consciousness -- the thing we call LIGHT. And we have found Proclus asserting that the light of suns is the pure
radiance of Intellect. What a concept this gives us as we gaze into the
"heavens" of a clear dark night, and see the infinite hosts of those
suns twinkling through the dark of space! For if Proclus
is right, those infinite points of light are the
scintillating brain cells of the Mind of God! It is declared that a
normal human brain has four quadrillion brain cells. We can generously allow
God a few quintillions at least. We can see some billions, even if we can not
count them. We have now proved that brain cells are very, very tiny -- on our
scale of relative proportions -- units of the same energy that glows, seethes
in flames of thousands of miles dimension on the surface of the sun, yet we
know that in proportion to their size they are as far apart from each other as
the suns in the spread of space. Here is perfect analogy, and if the Scriptures
do not speak
-26-
utter nonsense when they declare that man is made
in the image of God, they mean that our brain cells match his, and his match
ours, in function and in kind.
Man is declared in the secret wisdom
of the ancient sages to be the microcosm, but still a full duplicate of the
macrocosm. And Hermes of Egypt, probably the sagest of earth's great sages,
called by the Greeks "thrice-greatest," put this basic principle of
understanding clearly before us in his ever-memorable statement: "True
without falsehood, certain and most true, that which is above is as that which
is below, and that which is below is as that which is above, for the
performance of the miracle of the One Thing." And the Sophists of Athens
said: "Man is the measure of all things." He has to be; for if he is
the universe in miniature, he has to guage all things
by himself. Hence the Greeks adjured us: "Man, know thyself, and thou wilt
know all things." Hence also the ancient seers warned men of the folly and
the danger of worshipping any supposedly divine power outside their own being
and nature, since all the power of the creation was already impounded in the
confines of a human life, needing only development to bring it to "the fullness
of the Godhood bodily."
Water below, and fire above, in the
cosmos, in man, is the manifest order of things. As for man, the below is his
body, composed seven-eighths of water; the above is the fiery energy of
thinking mind in his quadrillions of brain cells. In the phrase of the poet, in
the being of man "heaven and earth have kissed each other." More than
that, under the stress of polarity, they have entered into a mutual
relationship in which they are destined to woo, win and wed each other, and in
generation after generation give birth in their wedlock to new stages of the
creation.
-27-
In the mass of legendary fable
concocted by the semantic genius of those sages of olden times was the
tradition that when Messiah appeared, he would come up out of the sea. Truly
enough now, with our eyes conditioned to a sort of new infra-red power to
pierce the darkness in which the arcane cryptic figurism
has been enshrouded, we can see how clearly this form of legendry tells the
truth. For of course, since the "life of the soul," as the Scriptures
tell us, "is in the blood," the divine power that will rise to deify
us must come up out of the sea-water endowed with the electric potency that is
found to reside in the ocean waters. It should be realized that the blood is
electrically charged, is itself dynamic with a measure of the magic of the
suns. Were it not so, the mere physical forces of the heart's pumping could not
drive it out through the fine channels of the veins and draw it all back again.
All cells of the body share the life that animates the whole, and it is certain
that the veinous and arterial channel walls furnish
some pumping power, some constriction and expansion in rhythm to push the blood
along, in aid of the heart.
If viewed from the purely
mechanistic or purely materialistic standpoint man is just a machine. The
mistake of materialistic thought is in supposing that he is just a
machine. He is a machine that is alive and is in every cell, to its degree, a
thinking machine. We will approximate a truer view of man if we think of him as
we might of a great printing press, every part of which, not dead but
consciously alive, keeps feeling, thinking and voluntarily exerting itself to
perform its function in the economy of the whole operation of printing. Had the
world held on to this living conception of man, which it inherited from the
occult legacy of a Golden Age in early human history, when, it is the legend,
the gods still mingled with earth's inhabitants, a rosier cinematograph would
have been the panorama of the last two thousand years of the world's dark
record. The mechanistic, that is, the dead mechanistic
concept of man's
-28-
nature, has been the index of the world's, most
particularly the Western world's, degradation of man's own concept of himself.
As far as it can go, this concept takes no account of the inner spontaneous and
unconquerable instincts and feelings welling up within the human consciousness,
a hard cold posture of mind which tends to chill, to freeze and deaden the dynamic
free-acting forces generically innate in the human constitution. The influence
of the conscious mind upon the operation of the unconscious processes of the
body, such as breathing, digestion, assimilation, heart beat, is not accurately
known, but it must be unquestionably great. Therefore the thought that one's
body is a machine of purely non-living parts, which work by purely physical,
and not by biophysical laws and chemistries, is itself a force that will tend
to slow and deaden the body's living activities. How potently a philosophy that
pours into the body the power of a mental conception of its free-flowing,
self-initiating mind energies would affect well-being for the human organism
has been well attested by the more or less "miraculous" cures and healings
registered by the upsurge of faith, confidence, hope and other positive
attitudes of mind. Perhaps the most efficacious conception that the human
individual can hold with regard to his own life and well-being is the idea that
he is a dynamo of vibrant intelligent energy, a quantum of the conscious
thinking Power that has generated and eternally activates the creation. If his
thought lacks this element of the efficacy of spirit, he hardens his life and
tightens around himself the prison walls that confine the free forces of his
soul within the habitation they have built for their expression in the
incarnation process. They are turned into a rigid, cumbersome incubus on the
soul instead of being the plastic adaptive instrument for the soul's free expression.
As Browning put it, "wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in." And
another poet has spoken of the soul as "cribbed, cabined and
confined" in the body. In fact this aspect of the soul's life received
such
-29-
emphasis in the great Greek philosophy
that always the body was dramatized as not only the prison-house of the soul,
but even its grave and tomb, since, when the soul descended into body, its
subjection to the slow, sluggish tempo of the fleshly vehicle threw it into a
torpor, a coma, a kind of actual "death," from which it had in the
final outcome of its evolution to be resurrected. The Greeks in fact used
practically the same word for "body" as for "tomb," the
former being soma and the latter sema.
One can see the aptness of this
symbolism when resort is again had to the typology of water for the body
element and fire for the soul force. For naturally water extinguishes fire,
kills it.
One will find a strange face of
momentous significance in this connection right in the dictionary. It is that
the great body of verbs indicating the initiation of movement
begin with the letter "s" or its equivalent "sh." These are the letters which start, shove off all
kinds of movement, such as strike, slap, stamp, smite,
speak, slide, streak,
-30-
skate, send,
shoot, spear, slip, slump, spit, stride, step, sneak, steal, scrape, scream,
sing and scores more. That this is no happy fancy of ours is confirmed by the
definite fact that the ancient Egyptian language prefixed "s" (or
"sh") to words denoting a state or
condition, to make them mean the act of producing that state or condition. One
example is maat, truth, from the stem ma,
true, which when "s" is prefixed, becomes sma,
meaning to confirm, establish, i.e., to "make true." This must
have come from the fact that the introduction of soul into body (water) in
incarnation, producing the "s" ("sh")
sound, started all things off, set all things going for the life of the
soul. That is, the letter's sound suggested the initial step in life. The
extent to which the ancient sagacity resorted to poetic tropism of this kind
would not be believed generally.
TURNING WATER INTO BLOOD
All this analysis may have seemed to
take the theme far from its base in the
-31-
close connection with the statement of Greek
philosophy: "I am a child of earth and the starry skies, but my race is of
heaven alone." Yes, heaven is our true, original and basic home; but the
Father sends us forth periodically from "that imperial palace whence we
came," since it is the function of spirit or soul to impregnate matter
with the dynamic of the divine Mind, so that all life, all
the universe may reflect the thought of the creative brain.
The Judeo-Christian Scriptures --
the "Bible" -- do not contain material elaborating the semantic
potential of the
Perhaps one of the most direct
allegorical references to the expulsion of the Sons of God from heaven and
their incarnation on earth is found in the eighth chapter, fifth verse of Revelation:
"And the angel took the censer and filled it with fire of the altar and
cast it into the earth." This was the sending of fire from the empyrean (pyr means "fire" in Greek) down to
earth in the form of the host of angelic beings that were born of the mind of
God, thus "immaculately conceived," that is, generated purely by
spirit or mind energy unixed,
"uncontaminated" with
-32-
gross matter. This is matched in the Old Testament
by the first emanation of the Ab-ra(m) power, the First Light out of
"I come from the
We have all the legends of fire
flaming forth out of the mouth, or the nostrils of God, consuming his enemies.
This is often poetized as the "wrath of God" devastating all things.
In Deuteronomy (32) we find the Deity telling of the awful power of his
mind energy: "My wrath has flared up, flaming to the nether world itself,
burning up the earth and all it bears, setting the
roots of the hills ablaze." And again: "From Sinai came the
Eternal....blazing in fire from the south." We remember how his presence
on
-33-
golden candles in Revelation typify the
seven rays of the divine emanation as it poured forth to create a
seven-branched tree of life. The old English ritual of burning the Yule log on
the hearth was to symbolize the lighting up and final transfiguration of the
natural body and nature of man by the transforming power of the divine flame of
spirit. The ropes binding Samson's arms, when "the spirit of the Eternal
inspired him nightly, became like wax that has caught fire, the bonds melted
off his hands." The Egyptians called the watery body of man "the Pool
of the Double Fire," the dark, murky, smoky, smudgy fires of low
sensualities; and the pure, clear, beautiful flame of compassion and love. The
lower flares of the animal passions, it need hardly be pointed out, were the
fires of hell. Happily no one need fear the prospect of being tortured in the
fires of a post-mortem Hades, as we are living in all the "hell" we
will ever experience right here on earth. That fire in our blood is all the
hell we will ever have to dread. But we had better dread it now. All we need to
do is to transmute those fires that burn in the blood with smudge, soot and
smoke into the pure flames of a beauteous life. "For wickedness burneth as a fire. It shall devour the briars and thorns,
and shall kindle in the thickets of the forests." These are the coarse
underbrush of the hatreds, greeds and evil motives of
our lives. If reason and discipline will not burn them out, pain eventually
will.
Says the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: "Man is a portion of cosmic Fire,
imprisoned in a body of earth and water." John the Baptist said that
whereas he will give us the lower baptism of (earth and) water, the Christ
coming after him will baptize us "with the Holy Air (spiritus,
Latin, means "air.") and with
fire." Jesus said: "I come to scatter fire upon the earth;" also
"I beheld Satan like lightning fall from heaven." All these are
references to the angelic hosts, God's own Sons, whom the Father dispatched to
earth to do his work with his earthly children. "He hath
-34-
made his angels messengers and his ministers a
flame of fire." Spirit was universally symbolized by the element of fire,
as was mind by air, emotion by water and sensation by earth. Our souls are
sparks of the divine Flame.
The fiery nature of spirit is
indicated in the symbolism by the figure of incense and the censer, the latter
being the miniature "stove" in which the heavenly fire burned and
gave off its pleasing incense for God's delectation. The censer, as a vessel which
could contain and transport the fire of soul to earth, must refer to what
Then two verses later on in that
eighth chapter of Revelation the text says that the seven angels
(creative life energy is always projected forth from the hearth (altar) of
God's fire in seven impulsions) "prepared themselves to sound."
"And the first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled
with blood, and they were cast upon the earth." Here is the first
mention of the divine fire's connection with blood. But once these sparks, or
units, of the fiery mind essence were ensconced in the bodies of animal
creatures here on earth, they became in a very real sense the fiery power of
the body blood, the generators of
-35-
the electric dynamism found in the blood.
"For in the blood is the life of the soul," says the Scripture. Drain
out a person's blood and the spark and fire, the dynamo of his life, is gone.
The fire has gone out on his hearth.
But then in the next (eighth) verse
comes the crowning statement of the truth we are enunciating: "And the
second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was
cast into the sea; and the third part of the sea became blood."
The second century Christian
protagonist, Justin Martyr, says that at the baptism of Jesus by John, "a
fire was kindled in the waters of the
The tenth verse rounds out this
phase of the incarnation symbolism by saying: "And the third angel
sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp,
and it fell upon the third part of the rivers and upon the foundations of
water."
The fifth angel's blast also brought
a falling star to earth. This is the lightning streak of Satan falling to earth
which Jesus says he beheld.
So the divine fire of soul migrating
to earth, says the great allegory in Revelation, set the sea on fire,
made it
-36-
glow all red and turned it into blood.
Will the Fundamental literalist, who insists that every word of the Scriptures
is to be taken in its bald physical sense, protest to us that the
But it is when we turn to old
-37-
sources, we find this symbolism very
closely matched in Isaiah 43: "When thou passest
through the waters I shall be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not
overflow thee; when thou walkest through the fire,
thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame
kindle on thee."
The imagery here, drawn straight
from nature, from chemistry and physics, tells us in effect that when the
celestial fire of God's mighty spirit is, by incarnation, introduced into the
natural watery elements of the body, this fire is going to heat up this water,
cause it to boil and seethe, so that we see a man in passion burning with hot
zeal over some injury or affront. A burning within the sea, sure enough; the
ocean on fire; the bush all aflame, yet was not consumed. If the soul, the god
himself, who himself contributed the fire that heated the body blood, was not
sufficiently in control, he stood a fair chance of being "scalded" by
his own fiery rage. So the allegories represent the god-soul as being able to
allay the storms on this sea of life, and fittingly enough, represent the
tempests as raging when he, the power within the ship, lies fast asleep down in
the "hold." So the Manes, or "shade" of the person in this
underworld, prays in the Egyptian Ritual that he "may have power over the
water and not be drowned." Emerging from his dangerous journey across the
sea in victory, he chants: "I am the being who is never overwhelmed in the
waters." Sargon of Assyria, who was picked up out of a wicker basket
floating in the reeds (the "Reed Sea") by the river's brink by the
king's daughter long before the same legend was repeated with Moses, exclaims:
"My mother gave me to the river, which drowned me not."
"Moses" means "drawn out of the water."
The Scriptures were found to give
authoritative support to the symbolism of the sea being turned into blood, but
it seemed unlikely that they would be found stating directly
-38-
that this change came about as a result of the
transfer of the stream of the earth's biological evolution of life forms from
the oceans to the land. Yet even a direct statement of that effect was
encountered in the course of recent searching for the data supporting the
theses of this essay. Modern biological science and ancient fanciful semanticism find themselves in amazing accord in some verses
in the early chapters of the book of Exodus. The fact of the change
coming from the shifting of the evolution chain from sea to land finds
absolutely astonishing literal confirmation in Exodus 4:9. The ancient
allegorist -- or perhaps it was the translator -- substitutes the word
"river" for "sea," but that in no way alters the sense. It
is still the earth's great water-body that is referred to. Speaking to Moses
for the children of