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Theosophy - Book 9 of Ancient Egypt- The light of the world by Gerald Massey

 

ANCIENT EGYPT- THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD by Gerald Massey  ΔΔ

VOLUME -2- printed in 1907

BOOK - 9 - Part -2- of -2- Click here to go to Part -1-


THE ARK, THE DELUGE, AND THE WORLD’S GREAT YEAR

 

The pole itself was represented by the tree. The evil serpent symbolizes the drought, the darkness, and the dearth in physical phenomena. The reptile coils around the tree or is present in all the pictures, Egyptian, Babylonian, Hindu, Red Indian, Norse, and Greek, also as described in divers ancient legends. The mother brought forth her child of life as the opponent of the evil serpent and protector of the tree, and the saviour in the Kamite mythology was converted into a saviour in the Semitic eschatology. The Chinese have a tradition in which original sin is attributed to a woman who overthrew her “husband’s bulwarks through an ambitious desire for knowledge.” As in the Book of Genesis and the legend of the wicked Huythaca, the sin is ascribed to the woman. But we need to know what the bulwark was before we can see how it could ever have been overthrown. She was Primus, as builder of the bulwark or as planter of the pole, and, above all, as mistress of the waters which were under her control, or should have been, unless she had neglected them or entered into a league with the Apap-reptile, which was the primary evil power that overthrew the enclosure with the deluge of the dark or the waters of the firmament.

We meet with a form of the primal pair in Stanley’s legend of Lake Tanganyika, one of the oldest in the world. In this the woman had been trusted with the keeping of the waters. But she betrayed the secret to her lover and the waters broke forth in a deluge of destruction, the proof of which catastrophe remains to this day in Lake Tanganyika. The Khonds of Orissa have a divinized form of the primal pair in their ancient goddess, Tari Pennu, and her son, Buri Pennu, who answers to a pole-star god inasmuch as he was called “;the light.” These can be identified with the prototypal pair, that is with Sut the establisher of the pole and his mother, because he is credited with creating a primal paradise, and she is charged with having maliciously caused its destruction, which is elsewhere rendered as a deluge of water or a fall from heaven.

Amongst the mummeries still religiously performed in Rome, and also by the English Ritualists, which are mystical at present from lack of meaning, there is a ceremony of “the seven stations of the cross,” which is supposed to commemorate the seven resting-places of the cross on the way to Calvary. But the same, or a similar procession, was celebrated at Abydos or Memphis when the tat-cross was carried round the seven resting-places that marked and memorized the seven stations of the pole. In one of the ancient Chaldean oracles the seven stations of the pole are spoken of as the seven poles. “The Chaldeans call the god (Dionysius or Bacchus) Іao in the Phoenician tongue (instead of the intelligible light), and he is often called Sabaoth, signifying that he is above the seven poles, that is the Demiurgus” (Taylor, “Collection of the Chaldean Oracles,” Classical Journal, No. 22). As Iamblichus says of the Chaldeans, “they not only preserved the memorials of seven-and-twenty myriads of years, as Hipparchus tells us they have, but likewise of the whole Apocatastes and periods of the seven rulers of the world” (Nat. Gen., vol. II, p. 321). It certainly was so with the Egyptians. These rulers were the seven born of the Great Mother as the seven powers of earth. They were re-born of Nut, the mother-heaven, as the seven glorious ones, who [Page 593] were called the Khuti; the seven with Anup at the pole who were the executioners for the great judge; the seven wise masters of art and science in the lunar mythos with Tehuti; the seven sahus with Horus in Orion; the seven as moulders with Ptah in the making of Amenta; the seven as the souls of Atum-Ra who were the creators of man.

These are the seven that were uranographic figures in the astronomical mythology as the seven old, old ones; the seven patriarchs of enormous age; the seven giants of colossal stature; the seven rulers of the world; the seven lords or masters of eternity.

In later times the seven planets have been mistaken for the seven stars. But these ancient pole-stars we consider to be “the seven stars” of which it is related in the tradition reproduced by Plato that after many ages they would return and meet together again in their old places as in the beginning, and apparently at the time of the last deluge of all, or, as we read it, at the end of the great year.

It was these and not the seven planets that could ever return to an original station at the starting point. The planets were but five in number and not seven in the most ancient astronomy. The sun, moon, and seven stars were not the seven planets of modern science. The seven, called the first of the stars, which in the beginning were in heaven, are connected with the great year according to the book of Enoch, as is shown by their being cast out until the day of the “great consummation” in “the secret year,” also called the “period of the great judgment.”

The seven that were separate and single as rulers of the pole were also grouped together as a pictorial illustration in the planisphere. These are the seven in the constellation of the Lesser Bear who follow the bier or coffin of their lord, Osiris, in the Greater Bear. These are they of whom it is said, “Their places were fixed by Anup on the day of Come thou hither” (Rit., ch. 17), who became the seven lords of eternity, and who were looked up to as seven divine ancestors of Atum-Ra. The names of seven superseded watchers in heaven are given by Enoch as: Azazyel, Amazarak, Armers, Barkayel, Akebeel, Tamiel, and Asaradel. Here also is evidence that the seven rishis who meditated and forgot were the representatives of seven pole-stars. Dhruva was one of the rishis who was assigned a pole-star by Vishnu. He is said to have meditated himself into forgetfulness of his identity (or ceased to be a pole-star). The seven who slumbered and forgot are also represented by the seven sleepers in the cave at Ephesus with their dog, who answer to the seven with Anup and his jackal at the pole. The seven who slumbered and forgot likewise recur in the Norse mythology. These are the seven sons of Mimir who guard the land of Odainsakr, the land of the ever-living. They are represented as the smiths who forged the primitive weapons and who correspond to the seven Khnemmu or divine metallurgists of Ptah. Though sleeping till the dusk of the last day, they keep the enclosure safe until the final conflict comes betwixt the powers of good and evil. Then they are to wake and rise and help to establish the new heaven and rejuvenated earth. The seven under whatsoever name or type, watching or slumbering, are still the keepers of the world’s great year and the enclosure of the seven never-setting stars that marked the seven stations of the shifting pole. [Page 594]

Before the building of the boat the seven had to keep their heads above water as the seven mythical, immeasurable giants, equivalent in the superhuman guise to seven great mountains imaging the seven starry summits. One of these giants is Ogg in Jewish legend, who is said to have waded through the deluge, clinging with one hand to the ark to keep afloat. The seven giants, as figures of seven colossal constellations, were tall enough to hold their heads, which are the seven pole-stars, above the waters that were deep enough to drown the other people of the heavens. But when the boat was built there was an ark of safety that could float upon the waters, and the primordial seven were mythically represented as being saved from the deluge in an ark as seven companions, Ali, Kabiri, Hohgates, or other groups of the seven which had one origin in the astronomical mythology of Egypt. And when the boat was launched upon the water of earth the type could be applied to the water of heaven. Seven giants, in one rendering of the mythos, bore the world of the heptanomis upon their backs, each standing at his station as one of seven great props personified as giants. The unhuman hugeness of the giant was most naturally derived from the enormous pre-anthropomorphic types or zootypes of superhuman power. Sut, as the hippopotamus, is a giant. Sebek, as the crocodile, is a giant. Shu, as the lion, is a giant. An ape of the seven cubits and also one of the eight cubits is described as a giant. But the seven primal powers as Egyptian in the earliest human form are pigmies and not giants. Moreover, the giants were not human, whereas the pigmies are. In an Arthurian legend the Welsh Owein comes to a wide, open clearing with a great mound in it where there is a black giant, who stands upon one foot, and has only one eye in the middle of his forehead (Rhys, Arth. Legend). The mound, the giant with one foot and Cyclop’s eye are perfect figures of the pole and pole-star, which have here been grouped together in a later legend. The Irish Crom, Cromm Cruiach, “the crooked or bent one of the mound,” equates with the Mexican “crooked mountain” as the figure of a falling or deflected station of the pole. The Mexican tradition affirmed that it was in the first age of the world that the giants began to appear on the earth. These are the giants of the constellations who had been humanized as magnified non-natural men, and then transferred to our earth in the märchen that took the place of the gnosis, or science of the mythos. In the Aztec and Mexican versions of the deluge myths we find that when the great calamity occurred the land was peopled by giants. Seven of these who were brothers found safety by enclosing themselves in the seven caves of the mountain Tlaloc. The Indians of Cholula likewise relate that only seven inhabitants of this fore-world of the giants survived the deluge. In Southern California the Indians have a tradition of the beginning in which Quaor, the Lord, when he created the world, or the new order of things, placed it on the shoulders of seven sustaining giants (Nat. Gen., vol. II, p. 220). This world of the giants was the celestial heptanomis beyond the deluge. In a tradition of the American Indians it is told that at the close of the deluge the last mammoth sprang across Lake Superior at a single bound and disappeared for ever in the wilds of Canada. Thus the last of the seven astronomes, or its mammoth-type, disappeared in the great deluge of all with the last of the giants. [Page 595]

The giants, who were seven in relation to the stations of the pole, are curiously identified with the mountains themselves as places of birth by Sanchoniathon. He says they were beings of vast bulk and stature, “whose names were given to the mountains which they occupied.” Of these, he tells us, children were begotten through intercourse with their mothers, “the women of those times without shame having intercourse with any man they might chance to meet.” Here the giant and the mountain as human birthplace are identical as figures of the pole (Cory, Ancient Fragments, 1876, p. 6). These, then, are a form of those giants called the sons of God who “came in unto the daughters of men” (book of Genesis, also book of Enoch).

In the Hebrew märchen, the seven old ones who were the primordial powers, the seven wise masters, watchers, judges, rishis, manus, moulders, masi, Ali, Elohim, or Kabiri are the seven patriarchs of Genesis who lived for such enormous lengths of time. They are the typical old ones in the Ritual, the fathers in the first and highest circle of the gods. The seven patriarchs were identified in the Natural Genesis (vol. II, section 12) with the seven rishis in the lunar mythos of the Hindu astronomy. These, as measurers of the precessional movement of the pole by means of seven pole-stars, were also represented as making a revolution of the great year in the twenty-eight asterisms or mansions of the moon. The patriarchs had now been humanized. The Hindu patriarchate was a period of 71-2 years, or a mortal lifetime. Seven of these were the measure of a phoenix-cycle, a period of 500 years. Seven by seven the rishis or manus travel round the zodiac of 28 houses, in the circle of precession. Thus the time of their stay in each asterism would be a twenty-eighth part of the great year of 25,868 or, in round numbers, 26,000 years. This would give the patriarchs or manus something over 900 years in each of the 28 lunar stations, which is quite near enough as astronomical data to account for the age of the seven patriarchs in the book of Genesis. The age of Adam is 930 years. The age of Seth 912 years. The age of Enoch 905 years. The age of Kenan 910 years. The age of Jared 962 years. The age of Methuselah 969 years. Thus, the age of six of the seven patriarchs is over 900 years each, and in the first list of two the patriarchs are seven in number. No reason has been adduced for rejecting this explanation. If the seven patriarchs, like the seven rishis, the seven taasu, or the seven masi, were astronomical characters, it is certain their ages are likewise astronomical. Noah, who is tenth in the second list of patriarchs, is the man of 500 years who never could be mortal. But it can be shown in what way he was an astronomical figure, like the rest of the seven, or the ten, according to the mode of measuring by the typical lifetime. The human lifetime was reckoned at 71-2 years; the age of a patriarch in human form. Seven of these periods in precession made a phoenix-cycle of 500 years, the age, therefore, of a divine or mythical man like Noah or the Buddha. A legend of the Jayas, in the Vayu Purana, relates, in after times, that the astronomical rulers were created by Brahma as his divine assistants, but that they got lost in meditation and forgot to fulfil his ordinances. On this account they were doomed to be continually reincarnated and reborn in each manvantara or patriarchate up to the seventh, and thus they [Page 596] continued to be reborn in successive series of sevens all through the cycle of precession. The seventh was always reborn as a manu or a Buddha in the Puranas, and in the Hebrew version Noah is the man of 500 years as a typical measurer of time, and in this instance it is the particular period of time that is ended with a deluge (Gen. V. 32). Now among the Hebrew fragments of the ancient wisdom in the book of Genesis is the story of these patriarchs that was told according to the measuring by the lifetime. Previous to the deluge of Noah the lifetime of man or of the old, old ones was reckoned at something like 1,000 years. As we are told, “there were giants in the earth in those days.” But after the deluge, time, or the age of man, was to be computed by shorter lengths. This is expressed in uranographic formulae: “Yet shall his days be an hundred and twenty years,” which period as Egyptian is the double Han-cycle. Thus the change from a lifetime of 1,000 years to a period of 120 years is obviously related to the double Han-period of the Sothiac-cycle. The double Han-cycle is a period of 120 years. Consequently the lifetime of man after the deluge is measurable by the length of this period, which was made use of in reckoning the cycle of Sothis. And whether the lifetime is reckoned at 120 years in the Sothiac cycle, or at 3,714 in the circle of precession, both are astronomical. The lifetime of the patriarch was a period in precession. Noah’s lifetime was a phoenix-cycle of 500 years which ended with the Noachian deluge. After this the lifetime of man (who takes the place of the Bennu as an astronomical figure) was to be the Han-cycle of 120 years. Thus the heaven or zodiac in twelve divisions was probably based on the Sothiac-cycle. Twelve Han-cycles were twelve lifetimes in the year of Sothis, round numbers being employed and the fractions gathered up to be quoted in the total combination, or filled in with the festivals, such as the Sut-Heb. This was a seven days’ festival celebrated every thirty years. At the end of each Han-cycle it was seen that the legal year had gained a whole month on the actual year, and the 1st of Taht anticipated the heliacal rising of Sothis by thirty days. But this had been measured, allowed for, and ticked off by means of the four Sut-Heb festivals celebrated during the Hanti period of 120 years. By this intelligible change in the length of the lifetime the biblical text itself affords indubitable evidence that the lifetimes of the patriarchs were astronomical. If the Han-cycle of 120 years was a time-cycle, it is absolutely certain that the previous periods were so likewise, the one being reduced from the other by the Hebrew a-gnostic literalizers. The cutting up of time into smaller portions or shorter lengths is likewise indicated in the Chippewa legend, when the slayer of the giants is described as hacking their bodies into little bits, and saying to the fragments, “In the future let no man be larger than you are now” (Nat. Gen., vol. II, p. 240). This is equivalent to the lifetime being cut down to 120 years. Thus the lifetime of the patriarch, which in round numbers was 1,000 years in the old, was reduced to 120 years in the reckoning of the new cycle which followed the deluge of Noah.

The “seven rulers of the world” manifested one by one at great intervals of time, and were a means of keeping the reckonings on a colossal scale. The age of each, as representatives of the successive [Page 597] pole-stars, would be from three to four thousand years, or one-seventh part of 25,868 years. The seven, beginning as the Kamite Khuti, are well-nigh universal. The Japanese have seven gods of fortune and givers of good gifts, called the Shichi Fukujin, who sail each New Year’s Eve as passengers on board the ship called The Floating-Bridge of Heaven, that carries the seven magical treasures, which include the lucky coat, the hat that makes invisible, the inexhaustible purse, and other possessions which are obviously the property of spirits promised conditionally to mortals on the earth. The two groups of Hebrew patriarchs which precede the deluge, seven and ten in number, correspond to the seven and the ten in Babylonian legend, who were rulers in the antediluvian world — that is, in the fore-world of the astronomical mythology. The seven fish-men, ascending one by one at vast intervals of time from the Nun or deep that was locally represented by the Persian Gulf at Eridu, we look upon as the seven rulers of the ancient pole-stars taking their stations successively in the circuit of precession, with the fish for their zootype. Unquestionably the seven fish-men are a form of the seven prediluvian kings, hence the appearance of the Annedoti at the same time with the king, the fish as zootype being earlier than the title of king. Thus the seven as fish-men, of whose “appearances Abydenus has made no mention,” were followed by the three other rulers named Amompsimus, Otiartes, and Xisuthrus, and “so the sum total of all the kings is ten,” seven of whom had been figured as Annedoti, or divine rulers in the celestial waters, who were afterwards completely humanized as kings. So in the book of Esdras, the Son of God is seen ascending from the sea to take his stand upon the mount, here called Mount Zion, as the man “;whom God the highest hath kept a great season,” and who was to regain the fish-type as ichthus “within four hundred years” (2 Esdras, VII and XIII). The seven Assyrian masi are known to have been stars in different constellations, as were the pole-stars. One was “the star of the eagle,” one “the star of the wain,” one “the star of the shepherd of the heavenly flocks,” that might be compared with the “key of the crown” as first of the seven pole-stars in the heptanomis of Sut.

Tai Hao, the great celestial, was the first mythical or astronomical ruler in the Chinese divine dynasties. With him commenced the mystic diagrams called the Yi or changes, which were eight in number. These were revealed to him by the dragon-horse that issued from the Yellow river or the Milky Way (Mayers, Manual, 366, 44, 56). Tai Hao corresponds to Sut, the inventor of astronomy and ruler of the first pole-star; the dragon-horse answers to the water-horse that was combined with the crocodile in Apt, goddess of the Great Bear and mother of the seven rulers. According to M. Philastre in his version of the Yi king (p. 3), the name of the Chow dynasty and of the Chow Yi divining-book signifies circular movement, the revolution embracing the whole universe. This revolution, we think, does not merely mean that of the starry spheres, but the movement of the pole. Chow Yi would then mean the changes of the pole and pole-stars in the circle of precession. Thus the Chow dynasty of the sons of heaven would be the seven successive rulers of the pole, who reigned for six and twenty thousand years as scientific fact. [Page 598]

In the Vision of Scipio Cicero has preserved something of the ancient doctrine concerning the derivation of souls from above. The spirit of Africanus tells his son that souls or spirits were supplied to men from the eternal fires, which are constellations and stars. Now there are seven souls, because the elements were seven all told, and seven primary constellations, with seven stars for souls, otherwise called the seven great spirits or seven glorious ones. These became the seven begetters in the creation legend of Cutha — one to each of the seven representative constellations in which the elemental powers had acquired their souls and thus become the typical transmitters of souls to human beings. Sut, the soul of shade in the hippopotamus; Horus, the soul of light; Shu, the soul of breath; Hapi, the soul of water — such were the begetters of a soul in totemism. Thus the Ainu are the bears, the Arunta are the emus, the Zuni are the turtles. They have their totemic zootypes on earth, which also imaged the elemental spirits or souls in heaven that were represented by the constellation or the star for those who had preserved the primitive wisdom. Thus derivation from the tree and rock, which is mentioned by Hesiod and Homer, would, if astronomical, be derivation from the pole; whereas derivation from the hippopotamus, bear, vulture, ape, water-bird, jackal, tortoise, or other of the uranographic types would denote the particular station of the pole, and be a time-gauge to the beginnings according to the racial reckonings in the astronomical chronology. For instance, the Khatties of Central India trace their descent from a progenitor named Khat, who sprang from a staff that he had fashioned from the branch of a tree (Folkard). Descendants from a god whose hauling or towing force was represented by a rope would naturally be the ropemen. And the Spartans claimed to be the ropemen, from σπαρτογ=rope. As they sprang from the teeth of the dragon sown by Kadmos, it is possible that they dated from the ropeman who was ruler of the pole-star in the dragon from 4,000 B.C. to 1,000 B.C. in round numbers. When Ra calls on those who pull the rope of the solar boat in Amenta to tow him “towards the dwelling of stable things” and free themselves upon “the mysterious horizon,” they say to Ra, “The rope is with Ak”=the pole-star. The upper end of the rope was fastened to the pole, whilst the bark was being towed round the ecliptic. The imagery here does but involve one rope and one pole-star at a time; but as the pole-stars in the course of precession were seven, there were seven ropes or bonds, all reckoned, and in one character the seven primal powers are called the seven Tesu or Tasu. These are the seven who hauled at the rope and who were the makers of the seven ties, bonds, knots, or fastenings of the cable to the pole when the rope was a primitive link of connection that preceded Newton’s law of gravitation; the rope that is carried in the form of a noose by Shu-Anhur, who also carries the staff of the pole with which heaven was uplifted. The seven Egyptian Tesu are a kind of seven ropemen, who passed into the Babylonian mythology as the seven bonds by which the universe was bound and held together by the seven lords at the seven stations of the pole. In the Hindu representation the seven powers that hauled round the solar bark by means of the rope have been converted finally into the later seven horses which draw the chariot of the sun (Moor’s Hindu [Page 599] Pantheon). The seven became the first company of the gods in the Aarru fields as the rulers of the seven pole-stars, who were the formers or creators in the domains of space and time. These were the seven great in glory called the Khuti or spirits, represented by beautiful white water-birds, the prototype of Cygnus the swan. The seven Khuti still survive in the seven swans of legendary lore, more especially in India. The seven Khuti, as white birds on the celestial waters, represented souls or spirits, but as star-souls, not human souls, external to human beings, and so they became seven souls as seven swans in the folk-tales.

At every stage of development the tree of mythology has shed the leaves of legend that were blown about the world as the märchen of many lands. Before the boat was built the swimmers were water-birds, crocodiles, or hippopotami. The mode of thinking could not have been otherwise. When Anup as eighth was added as the power above the pole, and therefore the supreme one in the character of the great judge, the gods of the seven pole-stars were figured as “the seven arms of the balance” in the maat of eternal law and justice. When the boat was built and Anup became the master over the waters, the company of seven were placed pictorially on board the bark of the Lesser Bear as figures of the never-setting ones that were safe for ever from the waters of the deluge. The seven now were typical eternals in two categories of astronomical phenomena. They were stationary in the circle of the seven ancient pole-stars, and seven as rowers, boatmen, or kabiri grouped in the bark revolving round the pivot of the pole. This was in the stellar mythos. When lunar time had been made out by Taht the measurer, the typical seven were advanced in status. These are his assistants as the seven Taasu, the sages or wise masters. They appear on board the bark in the shape of seven hawks called the offspring of heaven. The bird of air had then succeeded the water-bird as the type of the seven souls on board the bark in the lunar mythos. In the solar mythos the seven are pygmies or patakoi, the little sailors on board the bark with Ptah. Martianus Capella tells us the Egyptians painted on their ships the seven pilots who were all alike and brothers, who are no doubt identical with the seven pygmy-patakoi or kabiri of Ptah. These were represented in the boat of Anup that voyaged round the pole as the seven rulers that were thus grouped together as a picture of the stars that never set. Sydik the just and the seven called his sons are the Phoenician form of Anup the judge and the seven khuti. The seven were not navigators as the seven hawks, jackals, apes, giants, planters of the tree, or builders of the mound. Navigation began with the boat or ark, and the seven in the boat, like the seven hohgates, were seen as the seven in the Lesser Bear, with Anup or Sydik, head over all, as an eighth to the seven. In one character the seven stars were regarded as watchers watching solemnly aloof. A non-setting star was imaged as a never-closing eye. In the Ainu legend of the god upon the summit, the watchers, who are the 6+1, are hares, and the hare was reputed to be so watchful that it slept with its eyes open. In Babylonia the deluge-makers are the seven with the ancient Genetrix, who is called “the mother of the seven gods,” the seven that “heaped up the seat” or [Page 600] built the mounds which were overthrown, as fabled, by the deluge. Astronomically these were the gods of the seven pole-stars whose seats were in the never-setting stars around the throne of Anu. Thus, and in no other way, the seven powers caused the deluge, and then ascended to their seats in the heaven of Anu and assumed their thrones on high as rulers in the realm of eternity. The seven survivors are exactly the same in the astronomical mythos as if they had made their escape from drowning in a boat, like the seven hohgates or kabiri, or any other group of the seven companions. But the boat or ship is here employed for the use of the human survivors who are supposed to have been carried away on board the bark of Hasisadra “to be like the gods” — that is, as manes and not as mortals. The seven who are charged with causing the deluge in Babylonian legend — Bel, Ea, Rimmon, Nebo, Marduk, Ninib, and Nerra — may be compared with the Egyptian seven — Sut, Sebek, Shu, Hapi, Tuamutef, Kabhsenuf, and Amsta.

The tradition of the seven founders of the heaven that was based upon the water went forth to the ends of the earth. They were seven children of the old Great Mother, seven brothers or companions when the social status was totemic and the fatherhood was not yet individualised. In Egypt they are “the seven children of the thigh” — the sign by which we can identify the ancient Genetrix with the birthplace of beginning astronomically in the circle of the Bear and the constellation called the Meskhen, or “the thigh.” These are the seven brethren called “seven kings,” who appear as “begetters” in the Cuthean legend. That is as begetters in group-marriage, who were the totemic fathers that preceded the father as a known individual. They are the seven companions of Arthur in the ark; the seven hohgates of the Californian Indians, who escaped from the deluge in a boat and were fixed in heaven as stars that never set; the seven dwarf-sons of the Polynesian Pinga, who correspond to the seven pygmy boatmen and builders of Ptah; the seven mound builders on the American continent, and various other sevens in the mythos that was astronomical and became universal in the legendary form. They were born as seven sons of the Great Mother, and were her boys when she was “a mither but na wife.”

No matter in what part of the world we discover this tradition of the seven founders and seven stations of the pole, it involves at least one bygone Great Year in the circle of precession independently of where the astronomical mythology originated. In the later stage of the eschatology, when Osiris was supreme as god over the pole, and all other powers had become his powers (Rit., ch. 7), there are seven arits or mansions in the great house of the eternal city. The seven watchers, of the astral mythos, dwell in these; the seven who are called the khus, the divine princes; the seven glorious ones who stand behind Osiris, and who are called the makers of the seven mansions for the god (chs. 17, 83-107, and 144). Before Osiris was, these were the seven lords of law, of right, of truth, and justice: otherwise stated, the seven lords of maat (judges), the seven arms of the balance (executioners), the seven eyes (watchers), the seven pillars (supports); and as they were also the makers of the seven arits, they are likewise the seven mythical builders of the heptanomis; the seven powers that [Page 601] can be followed as the seven with Anup, with Taht, with Ptah, with Horus, and with Ra, according to the series of phenomena.

It is now proposed to trace and tentatively localize the seven (or a seven) stations of the pole on which the heptanomis was founded in the circuit of precession. In the circle of precessional movement drawn by Piazzi Smythe, he has filled in only six out of seven stations of the pole — one in the Dragon, one in the Lesser Bear, one in Kepheus, one in Cygnus, one in Lyra, and one in Herakles, or the Man. It is here we have to reconstitute and fill in a constellation as a first one of the seven. Various legends lead us to think that there was an ancient pole-star in “Corona Borealis,” or the northern crown. A crown is a symbol of the highest, which at the pole would be the highest point. Then the star Alpha in this constellation is called “Clava Corona,” the key of the crown; and a key-star at the crowning point is, to say [Page 602] the least, equivalent to the key-stone of an arch. Moreover, “the crown of heaven” was an Assyrian title of the pole-star, which tends to identify the pole-star with a constellation called the crown of the northern heaven. Apparently the pole and crown are also connected by an Akkadian expression concerning “the Bear making its crownship” in its revolution round the pole-star. The crown of heaven, however, was by no means limited to a single pole-star, although it may have originated as the crowning-point at the pivot of the pole. The seven pole-stars in their circle formed a crown for the supreme being, of whom it is said his diadem predominates at the zenith of the starry heaven. This was his crown upon the summit of the stellar mount of glory (Rit., ch. 133).

The seven pole-stars themselves did not form one constellation, but the crown would be figured typically as a group of stars that told the story in the customary way, even as we find it in Corona Borealis. Moreover, to the naked eye the constellation of the Crown, consisting of seven large stars, would present a picture of the other seven — the crown of stars upon the summit of the mount which is so prominent in the eschatology. It is said in the Ritual, “Here is the cycle of the gods (as the seven glorious ones), and the vultures (or kite) of Osiris” (ch. 136B). This is where the balance was then erected at the place of judgment in the circumpolar maat, and also at the point where the crown of life was conferred upon the spirits perfected at the summit of the mount. It is also said of the glorified elect, “He followeth Shu and calleth for the crown. He arriveth at the Aged One on the confines of the mount of glory where the crown awaiteth him” (ch. 131). This is the eternal crown in the eschatology which had its origin in the seven never-setting stars of the mythology. In the Kabalah it is the crown of crowns pertaining to the Aged in which he had incised the forms and figures of the primordial kings who reigned aforetime in the land of Edom, but who could not preserve themselves and consequently passed away, “one after the other” (Ginsburg, The Kabalah, 21). The pole and crown are certainly associated in the May-pole with its framework of flowers always shaped in the likeness of a crown at the summit of the tree or pole. Without being able at present to prove it, we suggest that a key-stone, or key-star, to the arch or conical mount of heaven was first laid in the heptanomis as primary pole-star of the seven which formed the circle of the crown; that a figure of the crown was constellated in the somewhat circular group of Corona Borealis, and that the key to the mystery may at last be found in the star represented by name as Clava Coronae.

Now, if we take the island, for example, as the type of a station or place of landing, there was a subsidence of the land in the celestial waters, or, in sign-language, there was a deluge at each declination of the pole-star. Otherwise expressed, one of the seven mountains was submerged, one of the seven provinces or patalas was drowned, one of the seven pole-stars fell, or one of the seven rulers was dethroned in heaven. The earliest station of the pole may be assigned to Sut as the hippopotamus, or as builder of the mound; the crown would be a later figure of the highest position. There was a constellation of the hippopotamus as male, to match the mother in the Greater Bear; this was a zootype of Sut, her first-born son, however difficult it is at [Page 603] present to define the group of stars — that is, to distinguish the male hippopotamus from Draconis, which, by the bye, were two zootypes of Sut and Horus, the twin brothers. Though now unseen on the celestial globe, it is certain that there was a male hippopotamus among the circumpolar constellations, and this, as bull of the mother, represented Sut, the son of Apt, the water-cow (see “Calendar of Astrl. Observations,” Trans. Soc. of Bib. Arch., vol. III, p. 400-421). It is apparently portrayed in a miniature drawing which was copied by Lepsius (Lepsius, Auswald, 23).
The hippopotamus is figured in the tree, which here, as elsewhere, proves it to be the pole; the tree and ladder, both of which are types of the ascent. The hawk that mounts the ladder is a soul ascending to the mount of glory in the country of the tree. Moreover, the hieroglyphic is a sign of land amidst the waters; the land for which the hawk is bound, which, as the eight disks show, was the paradise of Am-Khemen that was raised on high by Shu.



As Japanese Buddhist myth, the island of Japan might be localized astronomically by means of a legend in which it is related that an Apsaras appeared in the clouds over a spot that was inhabited by a dragon. An island suddenly rose up from the sea. The Apsaras descended on the island and was wedded to the dragon, which may be interpreted as a folk-tale of the time when the island of the pole was in the constellation Draco. (Handbook, Satow and Hawes.) The dragon that falls from heaven in the book of Revelation and goeth into perdition is said to be one of the seven who are imaged as seven kings, seven heads, seven horns, seven mountains, seven islands, seven lamp-stands, seven stars, seven eyes, or seven ruling powers.

The myth of lost Atlantis is Egyptian. This was told to Solon by Egyptian priests, and afterwards retold by Plato in Timaeus. It contains the story of two heavens that were sunken in the waters of the deluge. The first was in seven, the latest in ten divisions; the heaven of the ten lost tribes, ten sons of Jacob, the ten patriarchs, and the ten Assyrian pre-diluvian kings. There is no deluge-legend of twelve islands that were lost or sunken in the sea, because the heaven in twelve divisions, based on the solar zodiac of twelve signs, was never sunk nor superseded. This has not passed away to leave the subject matter for the mythos. But there is a dragon with twelve heads to be met with in folk-lore who evidently images the solar god in the final heaven of twelve divisions which followed the heptanomis and the heaven in ten nomes. In the Hungarian folk-tale of Eisen Iaezi, the hero is identical in character with Bata in the “Tale of the Two Brothers,” and the wife of the twelve-headed dragon-king is one with the false accuser in the Egyptian story, and with Potiphar’s wife in the Hebrew version. The only point at present is to establish the fact that there is a dragon with twelve heads who is the king and father of the youthful hero. [Page 604]

As the tree was planted anew or re-erected seven times over, it follows that there is a typical group of seven trees, as well as the one tree with seven branches, to be met with in the mythological legends. Also, as the law was given at the pole or the tree, there would be seven trees of the law established in the course of Precession. Finally the celestial trees were twelve in number when the zodiac of twelve signs had been established. (2 Esdras, II, 18). The seven trees that stood around the mount of the pole are met with in a Chinese legend. Tradition says they grew upon the slopes of the Kun-Lin mountains; and one of them, which conferred the fruit of immortality, was a tree of jade, the imperishable stone that was a type of the eternal (Babylonian and Oriental Record, June, 1888). Seven would be the number in precession which were afterwards unified in the tree of seven branches. Other circles, other numbers. Seven trees would form the sacred grove or asherah-tree which is surmounted by the seven serpent hoods conventionalized on the Chaldean cylinders as co-type of the seven branches (D’Aviella, Migration of Symbols, figs. 63, 64, 79, etc.). It is probable that the tree of the pole-star was known in Egypt as the khabsu tree, or tree of the star, signifying the pole. Renouf says that khabsu is the name of a tree held sacred in various places in Egypt; and according to one reading (Rit., ch. 133), the tree of paradise that breathed the refreshing air of the north were khabsu trees. If so, these were seven in number, like all other types of the heptanomis, or the stations of the pole. There is a group of the khabsu gods who were a form of the seven great spirits, on the mount of glory and who receive the ascending spirits of the just made perfect at the summit of the hill. They are identified by name as the gods of the lamp or the light, which were seven in number in the circumpolar heaven, equivalent to the seven lamp-stands or seven-branched candlestick upon the mountain in the book of Revelation.

The seven isles of the blessed were also known as seven forms of the oasis. The lords of Thinis and Abydos bore the title of masters of the oasis (Brugsch). Thus the ruler of the pole-star would be the lord of an oasis, or later paradise. The altar-mound was also an image of the pole. And periodically the Mexicans sacrificed seven batches of children on seven hills that served for altars. The Hebrews offered seven bulls and seven rams on seven altars. The Assyrian Lu-Masi were probably represented by seven rams of sacrifice. Blood was sprinkled seven times as an oblation. Wherefore seven times? We answer, because the powers or gods propitiated thus were seven in number, and there is a consensus of evidence to prove that the seven were represented as rulers, watchers, giants, masters, ali, elohim, or lords of eternity, in the seven pole-stars of the great period of precession. The seven altars are also identified by Homer with the pole when he calls the ark-city of Mycenae “the altars of the cyclops.” Cyclops were one with the giants, which are seven in number, and thus the altars of the cyclops are equivalent to the seven mountain-altars of the Phoenicians and the Mexicans, grouped in the seven-portioned city of the ark at Mycenae. Erech is called the city of the seven stones (or zones), and seven stones [Page 605] were equivalent to the seven pole-stars (W. A. I., II, 50-55-57, Sayce.) Seven sacred black stones, possibly aërolites, were the images of the seven chief gods at Uruk, the great ones or the mighties (Conder, Heth and Moab, pp. 209, 210). Herodotus speaks of the seven stones which the Arabians smeared with blood in making a covenant (B. 3, 8.) Naturally, the stone, as the rock of eternity, remained a permanent figure of the pole, and doubtless seven precious stones were among the types. Hence we meet with the emerald mountain, the diamond mountain, the pearl mountain, the mountain of gold, the lotus mountain, with the jewel of the pole-star at the centre or “in the lotus.”

The Mexicans also worshipped a class of gods who had been turned into stone. Three of these are mentioned by name as Tohil, Avilix, and Hacavitz. And it is said of these petrified powers that they could resume a movable shape when they pleased. These gods were three in the group of seven which is so often divided into two groups of three and four each, and which are the seven rulers of the pole. Becoming petrified as stones would denote the condition in which they stood as fixed figures of the pole, and if they were figures of the pole it was known to the astronomers that all in turn would again resume a moveable shape as gods of the pole-stars. The seven stones set up at Stonehenge and elsewhere represent the giants that were also petrified and changed into enormous stones. These, too, stood for the seven stations of the pole in the circuit of precession, or the circle of Sidi. Under one title “Stonehenge” was called the circle of Sidi, or the circle of seven. These are a form of the seven giants that were turned into stone, those who were the builders of the heptanomis and the supporters of the universe, and whose megalithic monuments are found as witnesses in many lands. The seven stations sank with the heptanomis of Atlantis in the great deluge of all, but the stones remained as monuments called the “stones of the deluge,” and four of the seven powers survived in the new heaven that was raised upon the four-fold foundation of the celestial tetrapolis which followed. The Roman palladium that fell from heaven has its origin, not simply as an aërolite, but as a copy of the stone that was a type of the divine abode established at the pal, or pole. Palladia in various other shapes are said by Phylarcos to have been flung down from heaven during the war of the giants. These constituted the typical foundations of the heptanomis that was built on high and repeated by the mound builders of many lands and copied by those who heaped the earth or raised the stone and shaped the pillar as the palladia of the dead. The capital of Maha-Bali or Great Baal, once famous on the coast of Malabar as Maha-Bali-puram, had a name which signified “the seven pagodas.” These are another equivalent to the seven arits, churches, or other groups of seven sacred structures that imaged the heptanomis according to the period and the cult. The pole of heaven, as an image of sustaining power, was also figured in the constellation of Uarit, the leg. This at one time was the leg of Nut, the cow of heaven. At another it is the leg of Ptah, at another the leg of Osiris. As the leg of Nut, it is the leg of a cow, which may be seen in the drawing from the zodiac of Denderah (fig. on p. 311) in which the [Page 606] milch cow and leg are blended together in one figure. This supporting power of the pole was represented by King Hop, “lord of the heavenly hosts” in an annual ceremony of the Siamese during which the lord of the heavenly hosts, as the power of the pole, stood on one foot for three hours. If he let down his foot it betokened instability to the throne, but if he stood firm he was thought to gain a victory over the forces of evil (Frazer, Golden Bough, vol. I, p. 230). Many mysteries that were mythical or eschatological when first acted peter out finally in popular pastimes and provincial games. The writer has collected a volume of such, but will not be able to find room for them. The game of hop-scotch is a good example of the power that could stand upon one foot as that of the pole in the heaven of seven divisions. It has been suggested that the seven courts which are chalked out on the ground in this game represent the seven planetary heavens. But this explanation was put forward by a writer entirely ignorant of the celestial heptanomis and the seven heavens or astronomes that were preplanetary (paper read at the Anthropological Institute, Nov., 1885). The seven courts thus memorized we hold to be the seven courts which are identified with the seven divisions of heaven and seven stations of the pole. The question, if any, can be determined by the symbolical act of hopping on one foot. The seven footprints of Buddha also denote the seven steps in precession which are a co-type equivalent to the seven stations of the pole. The writer knows of no group of seven legs, or feet, but there is a giant who strides through space as the wearer of seven-league boots. Moreover, the Ritual positively identifies the pole with the leg by calling it the leg of the seven non-setting stars.

Now the pole-star being a star that did not set, in the course of the great year there would be seven of these that never set: the seven who are the lords of eternity. These were beyond the ken of ordinary knowledge, but an object-picture could be constellated, as in the seven stars of the Lesser Bear. Dhruva is the Hindu name of a pole-star; it is also the name of the power divinized in Dhruva, the god, who maintained himself upon one foot motionless as a stake=pole, until the earth inclined with his weight, or the station of the pole leaned over and sank down with the declination of the star that was Polaris at the time. Thus the sustainer at the pole as a power was able to stand on one foot for the period of 3,714 years on end (Bhâgavata-Purana, ch. VIII). There are seven mountain peaks and seven footprints, and a footprint on the peak is the symbol of a station in precession. Thus the footprint of Buddha upon Adam’s Peak in Ceylon tends to show that this was one of the seven annular mountains in the seven-fold system of Mount Meru. Also, when the Buddhist footprint is represented by the sacred horseshoe it has in one form seven gems or nails, which still preserve a figure of the seven prints on one image. Seven footprints were assigned to Abraham. These are depicted on the south side of the Sakhrah rock at Jerusalem, and were shown to Nasir-i-Khusran in the year A.D. 1047. (Pal. Pilgrim’s Text Society, p. 47, 1888). [Page 607]

The sun, moon, and seven stars are frequently grouped together on the Assyrian monuments. The Chinese call the sun, moon, and seven stars the nine lights of heaven. The same grouping is observable in the nine pyramids of the Mexicans — one for the sun, one for the moon, and seven small ones for the seven stars. The three pyramids of Gizeh answer to those of the sun, moon, and seven stars elsewhere. The Great Pyramid is in itself a sign of seven, comprising, as it does, the square and the triangle in one figure. There is a tradition that the Great Pyramid was designed by the Har-seshu, or servants of Horus. These were the seven Khuti in the stellar mythology who had been the rulers in the celestial heptanomis before they became the seven servants of the solar god. The seven periods of the pole-stars were also imaged by seven eyes, in consequence of an eye being a figure of the cycle. This type is presented to Joshua in the book of Zechariah in the shape of seven eyes upon one stone: “Behold, the stone that I have set before Joshua; upon one stone are seven eyes.” These are the seven eyes of the Lord; also the seven lamps, the same as in the book of Revelation (Zech. III. 9; IV. 1-12). As a mode of measuring time and period on the colossal scale of the great year, the eye came to the full, “as at first,” seven times at seven stations of the pole in the cycle of precession. As a type, the eye might be full once a month, once a quarter, once a year, once in a thousand years, in 2,155 years, 3,714 years, or, as the great eye of all, the eye of the Eternal, once in 26,000 years (Rit., chs. 140 and 144). Hence the seven eyes of the Lord in the blue stone of the firmament. The submergence of seven pole-stars involved the same number of deluges in the cycle of precession, which culminated in “the great deluge of all.” Apparently this was the deluge of Manu in the Hindu version, for the Manu, whose vessel was made fast to a stupendous horn, i.e., the pole, was Vaivasvata, the seventh Manu, and the seventh Manu corresponds to the great deluge of all, as the latest of seven cataclysms in the world’s great year. There were seven stations to the pole in measuring the circuit of precession; consequently each type or symbol of the pole may be repeated seven times, or is finally a figure of the number seven. Thus the pole, when elevated seven times as a tree, would be represented ultimately by the typical seven trees, or by a tree with seven branches; if by the mound, the mound would be erected seven times over; if by the horn, there would be seven horns — hence the dragon with seven horns; if by the fish, there would be seven fish or fish-men, finally symbolized by the fish with seven fins, or by the crocodile Sebek, whose name as Sevekh also signified the number seven. If by the star, as Stella Polaris, this would be repeated seven times and grouped as the seven stars of a typical constellation at the pole, like that of Ursa Minor or Corona Borealis. If the eye be a figure of the pole-star as direct image or as emblem of the repeating cycle fulfilled in 3,700 years, there will be seven eyes=seven stars or seven lights in the circle of precession. Seven eyes become the seven watchers, jackals, judges, urshi, or rishis; and seven lights on one stand, or a candlestick with seven branches, forms an image of the seven single pole-stars in a cluster at the pole. If the figure is a cave, there would be seven caves to the mount; if it was a hall, there would be seven [Page 608] halls in the great house; if a church, there would be seven churches; if a city, there would be seven cities. Other types might be enumerated in relation to the mystery of the seven stars. The great deluge of all was that by which the total heptanomis was finally submerged; “every island fled away, and the (seven) mountains were not found” (Rev. XVI. 20, 21). In this the giants, the dogs, the apes, the birds, the tortoises or turtles, and the “men” were drowned, and lost Atlantis sank beneath the waters at first as the heptanomis, and later as the heaven in ten which was succeeded by the heaven in twelve divisions.

The seven stations of the pole were likewise marked as seven mounds or seven mountains, each of which in turn was a type of the birthplace on high and an image of the Great Mother who brought forth her child upon the mount as the hippopotamus, the crocodile, the serpent, the vulture, the water-bird, or other type that was astronomical in heaven and totemic on the earth. One title of the Great Mother was “mistress of the mountain” when the mountain was the pole, and this celestial mountain was repeated seven times in the circle of precession; hence there are seven summits in one form or other, as mountains, mounds, altars, stones, menhirs, pillars, or pyramids, answering to the seven stations of the pole. There is an allusion to the seven stellar summits or mountains in one of the Assyrian hymns. Ishtar exalts her glory in several phases of phenomena. Hers was the glory from the beginning. She was the goddess of the double horizon, imaged in the glory of the morning and evening stars. As queen of heaven in the moon, her glory is said to “glow in the clouds of heaven” and to “sweep away (or efface) the mountains altogether,” as the flood of moonlight might put out the stars. These mountains, therefore, were celestial; only as such could mountains be obliterated by the glory of the goddess imaging the moon.

The Japanese have the group of seven mountains, which were the seats of the gods of seven pole-stars. These are Ma-Saka-Yama, Odo Yama, Oku Yama, Kura Yama, Ha Yama, Hara Yama, and To Yama (Kojiki, II, 7, 8; O’Neil, Night of the Gods, vol. II, p. 892). “These,” says O’Neil, “seem to be alternative mythical names for the heaven’s-vault mountain.” But as a figure of the heptanomis the mount of heaven’s vault was also seven-fold in seven stations of the shifting pole, determined by the seven successive stars, one for each of the seven mountain summits. At the back of Shan-ling, about sixty miles west of Canton, seven isolated limestone peaks abruptly rise up from the low green plain. These are called The Seven Stars. They were once a favourite resort for pious people, who went there to worship at the temples and the caves (Colquhoun, A. R., Across Chrysê, I, 37). These also we look upon as monuments of the seven ancient pole-stars, which are identified with seven mountains in the books of Enoch and of Revelation. There were seven mountains upon which the ark of safety rested as the place of landing from the waters during the vast cycle of precession; this may explain the Armenian tradition that Noah’s ark was visible at various times, first upon one mountain peak, then upon another, including Mount Baris, Urdhu, Gudi, Nizir, and Ararat. Probably there were seven altogether [Page 609] identified, like the seven Alban Hills, with the seven rulers of the world in their watchtowers of the celestial heptanomis. The mount, or a mount of the pole, was known as the white mountain. The Alban Hills are the white mountains. They are seven in number, and equivalent to the seven stations of the pole which were imaged by the seven mountains of the heptanomis. The Chréais or Jaray race, who inhabit the high plateau which separates Cambodia from Annam, preserve a curious commemorative custom in relation to the seven mountains. They have two mysterious monarchs, whose functions are of that mystical order which we so often find to be astronomical. The two are known as the king of fire and the king of water. They inhabit successively seven towers built upon seven mountains, and every year they pass from one tower to another, never meeting each other and never seeing a human face. The kingship lasts for seven years, and the offices are hereditary in one or two families (Frazer, Golden Bough, vol. I, pp. 55-56, who cites Le Royaume du Cambodge, by J. Moura; also Aymonier’s Notes). Seven forts erected on seven mountains are equivalent to the seven altars raised on seven mountains by the Mexicans. The two kings of fire and water correspond to the two different cataclysms by fire and flood, described by Berosos as happening in the course of the Great Year.

According to the missionary Gill, the Mangaians hold that the seven inhabited islands of the Hervey group are the body or outward presentment of another seven in the spirit-world of Avaiki (Myths and Songs of the Pacific). These correspond to the seven sunken islands of the lost Atlantis, and both are a localized earthly form of the celestial heptanomis, which sank down in the course of one Great Year. The name of Mangaia signifies peace, and Mangaia in Avaiki was the paradise of peace, like the Egyptian Hetep. This, therefore, was a form of the paradise lost in the form of seven islands sunk in the Pacific as well as in the Atlantic Ocean and other waters, which were firmamental from the first. Egypt began in the form of seven Nui, a most ancient Egyptian name for the nomes or water boundaries. And in Polynesia Nui or Rapa-nui is the native name of Easter Island, where the colossal statues left by some mysterious race of primitive builders have been found. Nui is also the name of a group of the Nui as islands=nomes, which are found as seven in number in the seven islands or islets of Onoatoa. Each one of these has its own particular name, but Onoatoa embraces the whole seven. The seven Nui as islands in a group called Onoatoa offer a parallel to the seven islands of Avaiki, with the additional fact that they have the same name as the most ancient nomes of Egypt, which were seven in number.

After the septenary of pole-stars had been identified and established in the circle of precession, six of these were ever moving with the sphere, and there was always one remaining a fixture at the centre. If we take them as representatives of the seven Manus or Buddhas, it becomes evident that the condition of the motionless or sleeping Buddha was attainable by all the six, each in turn, that moved round the stationary one; and in the seventh stage of precession the true Buddha, the prince, the Rishi or Manu, was re-born, and his birth was indicated by the stationary star that showed the new position of [Page 610] the changing pole. In his visions Enoch sees the “seven splendid mountains which were all different from each other.” These are described as six, with “the seventh mountain in the midst of them.” In furnishing the ark of testimony according to the pattern seen in the mount, instructions are given for the lamp-stand to be made with six branches going out of the candlestick. But it is added, “Thou shalt make the lamps thereof seven” (Ex. xxv. 37); this, then, was likewise a figure of six encircling the one that was a fixture in the centre. The six stars that kept revolving whilst the seventh stood or rested on one foot are to be met with in a legend of the Ainu. “Suddenly there was a large house on the top of a hill wherein were six persons beautifully arrayed, but constantly quarrelling (always in motion). Thereupon Okikurumi (a name connected with the wheel) seized a firebrand and beat each of the six with it in turn. Whereupon the six all ran away in the shape of hares” (B. H. Chamberlain, Memoirs of Tôkyô University, p. 32).

It is stated in the Chow Ritual that the Chinese rules for divining were contained in three books — the Lien-shan, the Kwei-Tsang, and the Kwei-chang. The name of the first signifies “United Mountains,” a title that is said to have been derived from its first mystical and divining six-fold sign Kan (O’Neil, The Night of the Gods, vol. II, p. 892). These united mountains, determined, as stated, by the six-fold sign, appear to be a form of the six which, with the seventh at the centre, marked the seven stations of the pole in the circle of precession. The Zuni Indian system of the seven mountains is the same. These consist of six mountains which are stationed round the central one. When Remus saw the flight of the six vultures he was standing on the rock of the Aventine Hill — that is, the Bird-hill, which looks as if it represented the seventh to the six stars; the one that was stationary on the pivot of the pole, whilst the other six were moving round it with the sphere. Thus there is a central mountain and a central land to the seven mountains. One of the seven united mountains is the tree-mountain. Elsewhere we meet with the stone-mountain, the mount of the papyrus reed, the ever-white mountain whence the Korean people came, the mount of the white wall, the pearl mountain. The mount of Saturn=Sebek, in the Dragon, was one of the seven hills in Rome. A “festival of the six” is made mention of in the Ritual (ch. 136, Pap. of Nu). This occurs in a chapter for making a spirit perfect, which memorizes the birth of a god who is called the newly-born, as the lamp in Annu at the pole. He is described as a god of the rope. It is said, “He is born, he of the strong cord. His cable is complete” (ch. 136, Renouf). This we understand to be a god of the rope that was made fast at one end to the solar boat and at the other to the star Ak at the pole. The luminaries in Annu are addressed. They are the seven Khus. One of these seven is newly-born, or his star is just lighted, as god of the lamp and likewise of the rope, and the event is celebrated at “the festival of the six” — not of the sixth. Moreover, he is called “the Prince of the inundation.” There had been a deluge, and he has turned back the water-flood which had risen over the thigh of Nut at the staircase of Seb, god of the earth.

This figure of the one at the centre of the six will enable us to [Page 611] explain a mystery of the cyclops. These in one version of the mythos were seven in number, therefore they are a form of the seven giants or powers of the pole-stars — the seven that were 6+1. Now, it was fabled that all the seven could see with one single eye, and the single eye we take to have been the pole-star for the time being that was fixed at the centre as the eye of the group. The mythical unicorn was another figure of the horn-point at the pole. As such it was a type of Sut, the founder of the pole. Sut being first as founder, his was the single horn. It was as the symbol of sustaining power stationed at the pole that the unicorn became a supporter with the lion of the royal arms in British heraldry. The unicorn has but one eye, and thus it became a co-type with the cyclop as a figure of the one star of the pole. The unicorn is associated with the tree, because the tree also stands for the pole. Sometimes its single horn is stuck fast in the tree, which position intensifies the figure of stability at the pole. Futile attempts have been made to show that the unicorn was an emblem of the moon. But though the lunar orb might be imaged as a single eye, it would not, could not, be represented by a single horn. The ancients knew the moon was double-horned when it was figured as the celestial cow. The horn is another of those figures which, being single at first, became seven-fold as types of the heptanomis. Thus there is a group of seven horns to add to the rest. This group is portrayed above the head of Sesheta, a goddess of laying the foundations, which are seven in number, as figured by means of her seven horns upon a pole.

In the heaven of the heptanomis the ancient Genetrix had seven sons. The figure is repeated in the seven sons of Japheth (Gen. ch. x), the seven sons of the divine lady of the holy mound in Babylonia, the seven sons of Quanwon in Japan, the seven sons of Albion, the white land in the north, and various other groups of the seven on board the ark, which was earlier than the foundations that were laid in the four quarters. The heptanomis came to an end with the great deluge of all; and in the book of Genesis the deluge of Noah is followed by the new kingdom that was reared on a four-fold foundation, the seven cities on the other side of the flood being succeeded by the cities of the four quarters built on this. When Nimrod or Gilgames became “a mighty one in the earth” “the beginning of his kingdom was Babel and Ereck and Akkad and Kalneh, in the land of Shinar,” and out of that land he went forth and built four other cities in Assyria. A heaven of the four quarters had then superseded the heptanomis or heaven founded on the seven stars or astronomes, and this was the figure followed in the building of the four cities on earth.

After the great deluge of all had taken place and the inhabitants of the heptanomis generally were drowned, it was seen that the seven pole-stars kept their places in the circumpolar heaven. And thus the seven gods sat in their circle round the tree of the pole, the fixed and never-setting stars for ever safe from all the deluges of time, as the seven lords of eternity. These are the seven that were saved when all the world was drowned. The Shenin in the Ritual are a group of spirits that surround the seat of the highest. The name denotes the circle of those ministers or officials that surround the [Page 612] throne of the god or the king. In one text this circle is called the shenin of fire. They are the spirits of fire=the saluting apes in the circle of the eternals. Their number is not directly given, but they are the princes who elsewhere are a form of the seven great spirits that surround the throne. Now, there is a stellar enclosure or circle of stars in the northern heaven which the Chinese recognize in the region of Draco and Ursa Major. These bear the names of ministers and officers who surround the sovereign, and therefore are identical with the Egyptian circle of the shenin. This is very probably the constellation of the Northern Crown, in which the seven were grouped as a numerical figure of the pole-star circle. The circle of the seven lords of eternity was first; the throne of the highest was erected in the centre. Thus the seven as servants (seshu), khuti, uraeus-gods, saluting apes or angels, spirits, or lamps of fire, are depicted round the throne of God according to the mystery of the seven stars in Revelation.

As already said, the earliest form of an enclosure in heaven called the Aarru is depicted as a field of reeds, the habitat of the water-cow, who brought forth Sut, her first-born bull, upon the summit in a field of reeds that rose above the waters at the station of the pole when this was represented by the bed of reeds. Thus the ancestral pair that were saved from the deluge by climbing up the reed-mountain, like the Navajo Indians, would derive their origin from the reed. The main significance of the reed as a symbol of the pole depends upon its being a plant that grows up through the water and flowers above the surface to present the type of an ark or station or other means of escape from the mythical water that flowed betwixt this world and the other. We have now to suggest that the seven stars of the rulers were neither in the Great Bear nor the Pleiades, but that they were the past representatives of Polaris in the cycle of precession, and to show that the mystery of the seven stars in the drama of “revelation” was a mystery of the celestial heptanomis in the astronomical mythology. As we have seen, in various myths the land enclosed in the celestial sea was lost because the woman betrayed the secret of the waters, which then burst forth and overthrew the bulwarks that had been erected by the male, who in the Egyptian mythos was her son, the founder Sut. In other legends paradise was lost by the unwatchful dog. This, as the jackal, was the dog of Sut. Thus in one case the deluge was let in by the mother, and in another by the son, who were the primal pair as founders of the pole. Whilst in some parts of the world it was the dog (as typical guide) who let in the deluge, in Fiji it was the race of men that had tails like dogs who were destroyed by the deluge. In other legends mankind were changed into dogs after one of the several deluges. The Bonaks or root-diggers said the first Indians that ever lived were coyotes or prairie-dogs. The Chichimecs of South America are the dogs by name. In Africa these would have been totemic jackals. But without going back so far in time and space as the submergence of the southern pole and the declination and disappearance of its star below the horizon for those who travelled northward, there is another origin possible for the legend of the dog. The jackal or Egyptian dog was also constellated as the guide of ways in Sothis, and as [Page 613] Stella Polaris at the northern pole. As the planisphere of Denderah shows, the dog’s tail in which the pole-star Cynosura shines to-day was the tail of the jackal. Twenty-six thousand years ago the position was the same. The jackal of the mythos or dog of later legend was then the watcher in the circumpolar paradise or garden of the Tree. Now, whichever zootype represented the pole-star of the period — hippopotamus, jackal, ape, bird, tortoise, or dragon (crocodile) — it might be held responsible for the loss of paradise or enclosure through letting in the waters. This would be rendered according to the mythical mode, and afterwards related in a legend or a folk-tale.

In the precessional movement the celestial pole passed out of the jackal or dog into the group of stars now called Kepheus. There were seven stations in the circle of precession, though one, as we have said, is omitted or unidentified in the diagram drawn by Piazzi Smythe, betwixt Herakles and Draconis, which we have tried to fill in with the male hippopotamus of Sut as a group of stars that included Clavis Corona, but only as a stop-gap. We now pass on to the Lesser Bear. In the Egyptian eschatology (Rit., ch. 44, 2-3) the jackal Ap-uat represents a power of salvation from the drowning deep. In crossing the gulf of Putrata into which the helpless dead fall headlong and the sinking stars are swallowed by the dragon, the manes says, “Ap-uat lifteth me up.” This power is shown to be localized in the region of the pole by the speaker saying (after being saved by Ap-uat), “I hide myself among you, O ye stars that never set” — that is, in the circumpolar paradise at the pole, where the jackal or the dog was the guide of ways. When the pole had passed from the constellation of Ursa Minor the power of salvation would have gone from the jackal to whatsoever type might represent Kepheus, and Ap-uat the guide as Cynosura would no longer be looked up to as a deliverer from the drowning waters of the deep. Commentators on the Korân repeat the ancient traditions concerning the Adite ancestors of the Arab race. These were the giants or kings of prodigious size and stature, like the monstrous figures of the primitive constellations in the heptanomis. After the deluge these were changed into monkeys. Now the Arabs claim descent from one Kahten or Kaften the Adite, and Kaften in Egyptian is a name of the great ape that was one of the seven giants of the pole-star constellations and a zootype of Shu, whom we identify with Kepheus. It is also said in the Codex Chimalpopoca that men were transformed into monkeys as the result of a deluge or great hurricane. As the pole was figured at seven successive stations in the heptanomis, it is possible that the Navajo Deluge myth contains a time-gauge. In this it is related that when “the men of a world before our own” were warned of an approaching flood they were living in “the third world” or station of the pole, and the place of refuge which they raised against the coming deluge was in “the fourth world” or station of the pole, which, according to the present reckoning, was in the constellation of Kepheus. The turkey just escaped, although the water was close enough after him to wet the tip of his tail. Now, it happens that the next position of the pole is in the constellation of the bird cygnus, also named the hen, the kite, [Page 614] and other forms of ornis. Moreover, the star Alpha was called Dzeneb in Arabic, or the tail. And this, according to the present reckoning, we consider to have been the fourth world or fourth of the seven stations of the pole. When the pole passed from the constellation Kepheus into Cygnus the swan it would give rise to a legend like that of the Gippsland blacks, who assert that the first lot of men were turned into ducks by the wicked moon. Cygnus the swan was known as Ornis the bird, the bird of Jupiter, and also as the kite. The kite is equivalent to the hawk in Egypt, and the “kite of Osiris” is mentioned in the Ritual by the speaker, who is in the region of the glorious ones, the circumpolar gods or seven great khus. He is at the place of the balance, “which is maat,” the stellar point of equipoise, otherwise at the pole. He exclaims, “Here is the cycle of the gods and the kite of Osiris” (ch. 136 B). The name of Osiris may be a later insertion, but the kite remained, and this is a name for the constellation Cygnus or the Swan, the fifth of the seven pole-stars, beginning with Corona (or its equivalent) as the first. The pole-star was in the kite some seventeen thousand years ago. And here, says the speaker who has attained the summit of the mount, “here is the cycle of the gods and the kite (=cygnus) of Osiris.”

Fourteen thousand years ago Polaris was the star Vega in the constellation now known as Lyra. Vega or Wega=Waki denotes the falling one. As vultur cadens it was the falling vulture. The Arabic name signifies the falling eagle, An-nasz-al-waki. Now, the vulture as Egyptian can be identified with the pole and possibly as a pole-star. The leg constellation was a figure of the pole. It is mentioned in the Ritual (ch. 149, 11th Aat, line 8) as the leg of the lake, and a co-type with the tree of the lake on which the glorified spirits alighted in the form of birds, and there is a chapter in the Ritual for assuming the form of a vulture and perching on the leg, a landing-place equivalent to the pole. “I am the divine vulture,” says the speaker, “who is on the leg” or the pole. And a star known as the vulture stationed on the leg of the pole must be Polaris. We see that some fourteen thousand years ago the pole was in the constellation Lyra, and the pole-star was the “falling vulture” Vega. This may have a bearing on the legend of the vulture in the Mexican tradition of the deluge. It is related of the American Noah, named Coxcox or Tezpi, that he made a bark or, still more primitively, a raft, with which he saved himself, his wife, and children from the overwhelming waters of the deluge. When the god Tezcatlipoca decreed that the waters should retire, Tezpi sent forth a vulture from the bark. The bird did not return, but stayed to feed upon the bodies of the drowned. He sent out the hummingbird, which came back with a leafy branch in its beak. Then Tezpi, seeing that land was visible and growing verdant, left his ark upon the Mount of Culhuacan. This was the mountain of the seven caves in which the seven giants or great spirits dwelt. The name denotes the mountain that leans over at the summit, as it is depicted in the Aztec documents, a picture of the pivot toppling over with the change of pole-star. If we suppose the change to have been made and the deluge to have occurred when the [Page 615] pole-star was shifted from a Cygnus to the constellation Lyra the next pole-star would be the vulture, which afterwards became the falling one. Thus the vulture indicated the new land that was growing green across the water of the deluge, the mount on which another landing-place was found; another altar was erected, and the sacrifice was offered up upon the summit of the mount by those who had escaped the great calamity, as it was mythically represented, whether the mount might be Colhuacan, Tulan, Annu, Ararat, Nizir, or Meru. And a pole-star known as the vulture would in the course of precession become the “vulture falling” whose “fall” is chronicled in the name of vulture cadens. If those who followed in the wake of the Egyptians, like the Euphrateans, Greeks, and Arabs, were not always masters of the gnosis, they could at least transliterate the ancient names and thus bring on part of the meaning. The Arabic name for the “falling vulture” was also the “falling eagle.” And in some of the legends it is the eagle that foretells the coming deluge. A myth of the Pima Indians relates that a prophet was warned by the eagle of a vast cataclysm or deluge then at hand; but the prophet took no heed, and the waters came that overwhelmed the world. This also we might call the deluge that occurred when the pole passed from its station in Cygnus into that of the eagle or vulture. The legend of the eagle is also extant amongst the Kamilaroi of Australia, who tell of a deluge from which two human beings only made their escape by climbing up a tree. And here the deluge is attributed to Pundjel, the eagle-hawk. The tree we understand to be a figure of the pole. Williams tells us that “the highest point of Koro Island has a name connected with the idea of a bird sitting there and lamenting over the submerged island.” It is said in a chant, “the quiqui laments over Koro because it is lost” (Nat. Gen., vol. II, p. 241). Thus the eagle is one of the seven constellations of the pole-stars, and in the ancient British mythology the eagle is one of the seven Welsh old ones of the world, called the eagle of Gwernabwy, who perched upon the rock he found there, pecking every evening at the stars. There he is said to have remained until the rock was worn down to the height of a man’s palm. Such legends we suggest originated when the rock of the pole was in the constellation of the Eagle, which represented one of the old ones of the seven pole-stars or rulers of the pole. The earth is sometimes described as having been created on the back of a tortoise, and when the tortoise sank in the water there was an overwhelming deluge. A Mandan medicine-man told Catlin that the earth was a tortoise carrying dirt upon its back (Nat. Gen., vol. II, p. 195). The mother of beginnings is portrayed in a legend of the Tuscarora Indians as an enceinte female in labour=Apt the pregnant hippopotamus goddess, who sank from an upper region and was received on the back of a tortoise which had a little earth upon its back, and this became an island upon which she bore twin sons, who correspond to the Egyptian Sut and Horus, and then passed away. The tortoise was a zootype of the earth itself amidst the waters of space, which was repeated as a figure of land or the landing-place in the heavens at the pole. It was once an Egyptian sign of the balance or [Page 616] scales in the zodiac at the point of equipoise where the land emerged from the deluge of the Nile. The tortoise was likewise a type of the constellation Lyra, in which the star Vega was the Stella Polaris fourteen thousand years ago (W. H. Higgins, Stars and Constellations, pp. 22, 23). In the signs of the North American Indians a landing after a voyage is typified by a tortoise. Those who found safety from the deluge on the turtle’s back or on the tortoise would reckon their descent from the mountain of the pole when it was stationed in the constellation of the Tortoise or Lyra. Thus the Delaware Indians gave precedence to their turtle clan because it descended from the great original tortoise, not from any common turtle. The Iroquois turtle clan are likewise descended from a great fat turtle which threw off its shell and gradually developed into a man. This is exactly what did occur when the tortoise Lyra sank in the waters or the turtles were drowned, and the typical man was created at the next station of the pole. If we suppose the end of the period to have come for the pole to move out of Cygnus into the constellation Lyra or the Tortoise, the next landing-stage in the course of precession, the end was with the submergence of the pole-star or a deluge; and those who escaped from drowning when this station of the pole in Cygnus went under naturally sought a place of safety on the back of the tortoise or its co-type the turtle. Evidently this was what did occur when the deluge took place in the myth of Manabozho. The deluge was let in by the “black serpent monster,” the representative of evil in physical phenomena. “At the island of the turtle or tortoise was Manabozho, the grandfather of men and beings.” As he was born creeping, he is “ready to move and dwell in turtle land.” Then “the men and beings” all go forth together “on the flood of waters, moving afloat everywhere seeking the back of the turtle.” “All together on the back of the turtle then, the men were altogether. Much frightened, Manabozho prayed to the turtle that he would make all well again. Then the waters ran off: it was dry on mount and plain, and the great evil went elsewhere by the path of the cave.” (Nat. Gen., vol. II, pp. 180, 181.) According to the Mexican version, there were seven caves in the celestial mount, which answer to the seven stations of the pole. One of these was the cave of the turtle. In another account that was preserved in pictographs it is the turtles that declare war on Manabozho and produce the deluge. Manabozho first carried his grandmother to the summit of a lofty mountain. He himself climbed to the top of the tallest pine tree and waited until the waters had subsided. Then he created an island which supported him and became a new world. This was the new station of the pole, and the tallest pine was the tree of the pole that was planted or re-erected in heaven when the flood was over. One of the most striking survivals is that of the tortoise and its legend connected with the deluge in the religious ceremonies of the Indians. They say, “The world was once a great tortoise, borne on the waters and covered with earth. One day a tribe of white men had made holes in the earth to a great depth whilst digging for badgers; at length they pierced the shell of the tortoise, and it sank.” The deluge followed, and drowned all the men but one, who saved himself [Page 617] in a boat, and when the earth re-emerged, he sent out a dove which returned to him with a branch of willow in its beak. The tortoise was a Mandan image of the ark in which people were preserved from the waters at the time of the deluge. That is, according to the ancient wisdom, when the pole was resting in the constellation of the Tortoise, after the deluge that drowned the land and submerged the mount in Cygnus or the Swan. There is no hint of the turtle in the planisphere, but the turtle and tortoise are equivalent and interchangeable types, and there is a tortoise in the heavens. The Arabic name of the constellation Lyra is the Tortoise, and but for the shell of the tortoise there would have been no Lyre. Some sixteen or seventeen thousand years ago the celestial pole passed out of the constellation Cygnus or bird, and a new guide-star was established as Vega in Lyra. In other words, when Cygnus sank the tortoise or the turtle offered its broad back for a landing place amid the waters of the deluge. Other of the American Indian tribes claim that their primeval home was in the old turtle land=the island of the tortoise. The Lenni-Lenape or Delaware Indians sing the song of the flood. In this it is related that the Being born creeping and the men all went forth from the deluge swimming afloat in the deep or crawling in the shallow water. Taking refuge on the back of the turtle or tortoise, when read astronomically according to the movement in precession, agrees with the passage of the pole out of Cygnus into the constellation of the Tortoise.

The Samoans tell a tale of the woman and child who were transformed, and afterward came to the people of the village, when called for, in the shape of turtles (Turner,Samoa p. 108). This is a co-type with the tortoise; and when the pole passed from the sign of Cygnus, the new-born child would be brought forth by the old mother in the shape of a tortoise or a turtle, in accordance with the mythical mode of re-peopling the planisphere. Thus the primal pair would be said to have been changed into turtles, as the folk that dated from the period when the pole was in the tortoise or turtle and who were affiliated to the power above, the “big brother,” the tortoise or turtle that never died, as the totemic tortoises. The “great original,” whether of the turtles or hippopotami, crocodiles or jackals, apes or vultures, and finally of men, was configurated in the heavens on one or other of the mountains or islands that represented the seven stations, nomes, or seven heavens of the pole in the celestial heptanomis. The Hindu drawings (Moor’s Hindu Pantheon, pl. 49) show a form of the pole or central conical peak that rests upon the tortoise, which, as here interpreted, denotes the pole-star in the constellation Lyra, that was otherwise known as the Tortoise. The tortoise supporting the pole in the shape of a tree=mount or island standing in the water is also a Japanese figure of the sustaining power at the pole. In the temple of Meaco there is a Japanese representation of a tortoise in the water at the bottom of a tank or artificial well, with a tree springing up from the back of the tortoise. Thus the abyss of the waters, the earth at the bottom of the abyss, and the tree of the pole are uniquely imaged in one picture.

There was a tortoise-headed god in Egypt who has left his likeness in the tombs, but nothing else is known of him. The animal itself [Page 618] was a type of immobility, therefore of sloth or fixity, as a representative of the pole. In a Chinese myth the island of Pung-Lai was brought one day in all its mass by the tortoise. A tortoise or turtle appearing from the waters of earth was appropriate, as it was primitive to image the bit of land emerging from the waters of the firmament. This, however, was the mythical not cosmical earth that was supported by the tortoise amid the waters. The tortoise beneath the tree or the mound shows it was not our earth that is supposed to rest or to have been formed upon its back in the beginning. It is possible for the tortoise or turtle as a type of the earth itself to get mixed up in the irresponsible legends with the tortoise or turtle as an astronomical figure. Still the earth, as turtle, never was submerged by the mythical deluge, whereas the tortoise or turtle that was a type of station in the celestial water did sink down when that particular station of the pole was overwhelmed.

Some fourteen thousand years ago the pole in Lyra or the Tortoise corresponded to the vernal equinox in Leo. This is probably connoted in a plate of Lajard’s Mithra, where the zodiacal lion is found with the star Radiatartakhu or Lammergeier=Vega as Polaris in Lyra (pl. 56, 3).

An instructive example of the way in which the astronomical mythos may dislimn and lose its shape in later legend is apparent in the curious narrative found on a cuneiform tablet in the British Museum. This has been called “the revolt in heaven” which occurred at some time before the creation of man. The angelic host has previously existed in a state of perfect harmony. “The god of holy songs, lord of religion and worship, had seated a thousand singers and musicians, and established a choral band who to this hymn were to respond in multitude.” “The divine being, god of the bright crown, spoke three times the commencement of a psalm. With a loud cry of contempt they broke up his holy song, spoiling, confounding his hymn of praise.” Then the god of the bright crown “stopped their service, and sent them to the gods who were his enemies” and prohibited their return. “In their room he created mankind.” This is a legend of the angels so called who fell from heaven, and of whom it is said in the book of Jude, “They kept not their own habitations” (Jude. vi). These in the book of Enoch are the seven stars which transgressed the commandment of God and came not in their proper season; and therefore they were bound and cast out until the time of the last judgment (Enoch, XVIII. XXI. XXII). It is said in the cuneiform text, “May the god of divine speech expel from his five thousand those who in the midst of his heavenly song had shouted evil blasphemies,” and the translator argues that there were but five thousand. But another reading is possible. There may have been six thousand altogether. For instance, in the Cuthean story of creation there is an allusion to another legend of the seven powers. It is said the progeny of Tiamat “grew up in the midst of the mountains and became heroes and increased in number.” “Seven kings who were brethren appeared as begetters. Six thousand in number were their armies” (col. 1), and these we take to have included the five thousand loyal angels, “his five thousand” from whom the rebel thousand are to [Page 619] be excluded thenceforth and for ever as the sixth thousand. It is said of the god Ashur that he had seen the malice of those gods who deserted their allegiance to raise a rebellion, and “he refused to go forth with them.” In one character Ashur is known to have been a representative of the pole; and according to the present interpretation he was the god of the coming pole-star, the seventh in our reckoning, the one that had not fallen away from the true pole. This would apply if Ashur at the time was a representative of the seventh polar power, the one that remained true whilst one thousand of the six thousand has risen in rebellion. As we interpret the mythos, the choral band who sang the hymn of praise, one thousand in number, are the sixth thousand of the six thousand corresponding to the sixth of the seven stars or stations in precession. At the time of the change from the sixth pole-star to the seventh the revolt of the thousand that was sixth in the series coincided with the falling away of the sixth star from the true eternal pole. Ashur as the seventh remained the god seven, who is re-born as the child considered to be the eighth; he refused to go forth with the one thousand of the past pole-star. And now follows the statement, “In their room, he, the god of the bright crown (i.e. the solar deity), created mankind.” This, the seventh creation, we associate with the passage of the pole into the constellation Herakles, or the Man. The “lyre” imaged in the constellation Lyra had been fashioned from the muscles torn from Sut by Horus during the war in heaven. Thus the condition of harmony represented by the lyre, harp, or lute corresponds to the avocations of the thousand who are expelled from companionship with the other five thousand and who are described as “a thousand singers and musicians.” These we now suggest were the denizens of “Lyra,” whose lapse in allegiance is attributable to the falling away of the pole-star when the pole was passing out of that constellation into the sign of Herakles in which occurred the creation of man. It is a saying of Orpheus, reported by Plato, that “in the sixth creation closes the order of song” (Plato, Philebus, 66). That is, according to the present reckoning, when the pole passed out of the constellation Lyra into Herakles or the Man.

In the Bundahish, the deluge or a deluge takes place in heaven before the creation of man on earth. This saying can be read for the first time on the theory that man was the latest of seven creations, and that the man figured in heaven was the seventh in the series as a ruler of the pole and pole-star. Thus interpreted, there had been six deluges prior to the creation of man. Both in the book of Genesis and in the Bundahish the prototypal pair are created “man.” Ahura-Mazda says to Mashya and Mashyoi, “You are man.” “You are the ancestry of the world.” They were now the ancestors with a human soul instead of the earlier elemental soul of life in water, air, earth, heat, plant, or animal; otherwise stated, the descent was now traced to the divine man or father in heaven instead of to Seb the god of earth, who was the representative of vegetation, and the gnosis was now applied on the scale of the Great Year. The Tlascatans say that after their deluge those who had been previously changed into monkeys were afterwards transformed into men. Now, [Page 620] if the hypothesis here put forth holds good, that the six zootypes and one human being were set in the circle of precession, it follow that at the time the pole passed into the constellation of Herakles or “the Man,” the deluge took place when the tortoises, the apes, and other forms of the zootypes were transformed into human beings. This would correspond perfectly to the seventh creation in the later legends, which was the creation of mankind.

If we take the oldest record in the world, the Egyptian, we shall find that in the mythology the creation of man was the latest. Amongst the seven primordial powers one alone is human. In the constellation-figures man is scarcely to be found. Not until the time of Seb was the producing power of earth portrayed as male. Not until the time of Atum-Ra is the divinity impersonated in the form of a perfect man. Earth had been hugely imaged as a pregnant hippopotamus, a sow as the suckler, a goose that laid the egg for food, a sloughing serpent that was an image of self-renewal, but not by man as the measure of all things, including the elemental forces and powers of external nature. And not until the image of man had been adopted as a type of divinity in place of the totemic zootypes could men have traced their descent from man in the mythology. This occurs in Egypt when the hippopotamus of Sut, the crocodile of Sebek, the lion of Shu, the ibis of Taht, the beetle of Ptah were followed by the human likeness that was perfected and divinized in Tum or Atum, the original of Adam. In the Egyptian language the word tum signifies man, mankind, created man. The Egyptians also called themselves the Ruti, or the men; the race par excellence, in contradistinction to the bulls, lions, crocodiles, serpents, apes, jackals, hawks, and other of the zootypes in totemism. They had attained this stage at the beginning of monumental times. Man, the human being, was preeminently the creation of Atum-Ra, the father-god. Various names of races signify man, or the men. The name of the Inoit, the Ainu, and other primitive folk means man, or the men. Descent from woman under the matriarchate had been represented by the zootypes, and when the fatherhood was individualized the human descent was from man. The birthland of man on high was figured astronomically as the island or nome or bit of earth, which was a station of the pole-star in the constellation of Herakles or the Man, from thirteen thousand to eleven thousand years ago, at the end of which time the great deluge caused the destruction of mankind. Instead of the races that were imaged by pre-human and totemic types, the tortoises, the apes, the birds, the dogs, it was now “the men” who were drowned in the last great deluge of all, when the pole-star in the Man or Herakles went under.

It is stated in the Chimalpopoca MS. that the creator produced his work in successive epochs, man being made from the dust of earth on the seventh day. Here again man is created or comes into existence in the last of seven periods, whatsoever the length of time or significance assigned to the cycle, which is one day in the book of Genesis and three thousand seven hundred and fourteen years in the astronomical mythology. In all the versions of the seven creations that of man was last. This is repeated when the mount [Page 621] or island of man is last of the celestial seven stations in the heptanomis. Now we can say the final word concerning “the destruction of mankind” in the great deluge of all, which put an end to the heaven in seven divisions that preceded the eight, the nine, the ten, and the twelve. At the ending in time when Vega in Lyra (the vulture and tortoise) ceased to be the pole-star, there was a deluge and subsidence of land at the pole and a change of star. The races drowned in this and previous deluges were totemic, therefore pre-human, therefore the predecessors of man in the astronomical mythology, the märchen, and legendary lore. Six races had been destroyed in half-a-dozen deluges before it came to the “destruction of mankind” that was memorized and mythically rendered in the Egyptian deluge when the pole-star was washed under in the constellation of the Man, the one of seven mighties, now for the first time in the human form. This is the one star group in all the heavens that was figured as “the man,” the last of the seven rulers of the pole, corresponding at this point to the attainment of the human image in the last of seven so-called creations, which is that of Adam=Atum in the zodiac just where the Sekhet-Aarru or garden of Eden has been localized in the solar, which followed and completed the lunar and stellar mythos. Thus we can roughly trace the point at which the last of seven pole-stars coincided with the creation of man in heaven which was succeeded by the creation of Atum=Adam (or man) at the point of a new beginning in the zodiac. Such types of the pole-stars as the tortoise or vulture (in Lyra), the swan, the lesser bear (or jackal and the dragon), were figures of those creations which preceded that of the man who was mythical and astronomical. The Samoans relate that Tangaloa was the originator of men. He is their god in the height, or the eighth heaven. As a primitive way of saying how plucky he was and of showing how the eight powers, seven plus one, were all combined in him, he is called “eight-livered Tangaloa.” A temple was built for him and termed the house of the gods, which was carefully shut up all round, and therefore is equivalent to Am-Khemen, the Egyptian enclosure of the eight great gods. These characteristics identify Tangaloa as deity of the pole and as eighth to the seven earlier powers. Now Tangaloa is said to have come over the ocean with a crew of seven others in a canoe, and to have taken up his abode in the bush inland of the settlement. Here the migration is the same as that of the 7+1 Kami, the 7+1 Kabiri, the 7+1 Toltecs, the 7+1 with Arthur in the ark. The migration in each instance is purely mythical, and the data are simply astronomical. Lastly, descent from the mount or mound, the tree or the papyrus-reed, the enclosure or paradise of the pole, was followed in the Semitic versions of the deluge legends by a descent of the human race from the ark which was stranded on the mountain top of Nizir or Ararat. The ark of Nnu had then been built to float upon the waters of the firmament and to be figured in the ascending stars of Argo-Navis. This is the ark with eight on board, four females and four males, which was indefinitely later than the boat of the Mexican primal pair or the papyrus-reed of the four brothers in Egypt.

When the seventh station of the pole subsided, the seventh island [Page 622] of Atlantis sank, and all the seven were reckoned then to be overthrown in the celestial waters. Under the other figure of the mount, the seven mountains now were totally submerged. This complete catastrophe is described by Enoch, who identifies the seven mountains with the seven stars and the seven great spirits. He likewise gives the reason for their overthrowal. “I beheld seven stars, like great blazing mountains, and like spirits (the Khamite khus are spirits), entreating me.” The stars are those which” came not in their proper season “ (ch. 18). Again, “ I beheld seven stars of heaven bound together like great mountains” (ch. 21, 3). Their crime is that they “transgressed the commandment of the most high.” Therefore they are bound until the time of the great judgment and the consummation or end of all things, which we shall find particularly recorded in the book of Revelation. From thirteen thousand to eleven thousand years ago the vernal equinox was passing through the Lion sign. Pari passu in the movement of precession, the north celestial pole was leaving its station in Lyra, or the tortoise, and passing into the sign of Herakles or the Man. Thus the creation of man or Atum in the zodiac can be partially paralleled in the cycle of precession at a certain station of the pole in the constellation of the heavenly man, who is Atum or Adam in the astronomical mythology. All the conjunctions, the mythical characters, the scenery of this beginning — the Great Bear, sun, moon, and seven stars, together with the inundation — met in that sign and were constituted a fixture for two thousand one hundred and fifty-five years.

Ten thousand seven hundred and seventy-five years ago the equinox began to move out of the Lion sign into that of the Crab, and then and there a legendary catastrophe occurred. This was the conclusion of an astronomical period which, like the year in Egypt, ended with a deluge. It occurred eight thousand two hundred and seventy-five years before the date of the conversation in Egypt betwixt Solon and the Hir-Seshta, and seven hundred and thirty-five years short of the nine thousand, but near enough when we are dealing with round numbers. The astronomical facts were so well known that in speaking of the inundation at the end of the cycle it was foretold that the “deluge would take place when the heart of the Lion entered the first minute of the Crab’s head at the declination of the star” — that is, the star Regulus, the law-giver, in the Lion sign. At this point of readjustment the great deluge of all was marked by the submergence of the last of the seven pole-stars in “the Man” just when the shifting of the pole coincided with a deluge as a typical ending in the solar zodiac. For when the heaven of Atum-Ra was established on the four corners, the typical ending previously marked by the changing pole-stars was duplicated in the zodiac by the precession of the equinoxes, and both went on together in two modes of measuring the movement. As the type of an ending in time, a mythical deluge occurred when a pole-star was submerged in the celestial waters, and the great deluge of all took place at the end of the cycle in precession called the Great Year of the World. It was mythically rendered as the sinking of Atlantis in seven islands which [Page 623] represented the seven astronomes in the celestial heptanomis. The last “great deluge of all” is the subject of the story told to Solon by the priests of Sais. Of this, and the conflagration that was caused by the fall of Phaethon, they sagely said, “This takes the form of a myth, but in reality it signifies a declination of the bodies moving round the earth in the heavens.” The astronomers knew that the deluge was mythical and the myth was astronomical, whether the end of the particular period was represented by fire or by flood. Moreover, this greatest deluge can be approximately dated. Plato’s account of what the priests of Egypt said to Solon identifies the “great deluge of all” as having occurred about nine thousand years before that time” i.e. about 9600 B.C., or eleven thousand five hundred years ago. That date was given by the Egyptian priests with particular precision. They said the city of Sais had been founded eight thousand years before the time when Solon was in Egypt. After carefully examining their sacred registers, they told him that the city of Sais was eight thousand years old, and that it was founded a thousand years after the cataclysm called the “great deluge of all.” In their account we get to the bottom of the “lost Atlantis.” According to the present diagnosis, then, the primary pole-star in the northern heaven may be Clava Coronae, the key of the crown, when this was in the enormous constellation of the male hippopotamus — that is, of Sut, the first-born of the female hippopotamus. Polaris in its second form was the star Alpha in the Dragon. The third station was in the Lesser Bear, the fourth in Kepheus, the fifth in Cygnus the Swan, the sixth in Lyra or the Tortoise, the seventh in Herakles or Man. Each of these in turn had been a station of the pole, a landing-place for foothold in the firmamental waters; each had been the sufferer from a deluge at the declination of the pole and consequent change of pole-star. Hence the number of deluge legends in the astronomical mythology, including “the great deluge of all” as the last of the seven. If we take the length of the Great Year in round numbers at twenty-six thousand years, and divide the total into seven equal parts, this gives some three thousand seven hundred and fourteen years as the time for the pole to rest in each of the seven signs. Six thousand years ago the pole-star was in Draconis. Three thousand seven hundred and fourteen years earlier the pole had entered the Hippopotamus (or Crown), and three thousand seven hundred and fourteen years earlier still it was in the constellation of Herakles or the Man.

4,000
3,714
3,714
11,428

Thus, eleven thousand four hundred and twenty-eight years B.C. the pole was represented by the last of the seven pole-stars in the constellation of the Man. The end of the Great Year determined by the great deluge of all then occurred in that sign, according to the Egyptian account, about 9600 B.C., or nine thousand in round numbers, with various surpluses to be added in the total reckoning. Naturally, the deluge that destroyed mankind instead of the totemic tortoises, jackals and dogs, vultures and swans, apes, crocodiles and hippopotami, occurred when the pole was in or was passing from the isle of the Man. Thenceforth the deluge would be looked on as a literal destruction of the human race, and was so [Page 624] construed in the Semitic legends, as it still is by the Christian clergy. This is but the rough sketch of a pioneering pen. Greater exactitude in dates must be left to the scientific astronomer who may have mastered the mythology. My suggestion is that one Great Year in the circle of precession was reckoned to have been ended with the passing of the pole from the constellation of Herakles eleven thousand years ago, which is near as need be, for the present purpose, to the time assigned by the Egyptian priests for the sinking of the lost Atlantis in the last great deluge of all.

Now, the human birthplace had been localized according to the different stations of the pole, which were seven in number altogether. There were seven countries, nomes, or cities, determined by the pole-stars. Each race claims a particular place for a starting point in the migration from the mount, or the tree, or the back of the tortoise, and various races have preserved some fragments of the stories told about the wanderings and migrations from one land to another, as in the legends of the North American Indians, the Aztecs, and the Arunta of Central Australia. The so-called “primitive cradle of the human race in Ararat or Urdhu, the district of the mountain of the world” (Trans. Society Bib. Archaeology, vol. VI, p. 535), had its prototype in the planisphere and the birthplace at the pole. Ararat is but one form of the mythical mount. We derive the name from the Egyptian root “rat,” which signifies the ascent, the steps of ascent, the footstool, the figure of ascent. In the developed form, Arrut or Ararat also denotes the staircase or steps of ascent, which is the mount of seven steps, or the staircase=the mount. In one form the ark of Ararat was the circumpolar paradise; in another it is the eternal city, like Thebes, which is called the “august staircase of the beginning of time, the utat of the universal lord” which led up to the particular region where the Eye was then at full as the figure of a period in precession. When the pole had passed into the sign of Herakles the Man, the typical mount which had been figured in the Hippopotamus, in Draconis, in the Lesser Bear, in Kepheus, in Cygnus, and in the Tortoise naturally became “the mountain of mankind” by name. This was the birthplace of the human race who descended from Atum, Admu, or Adam as the man, and eventually the men who descended from “the mountain of mankind.”

The giant with his staff who figures in the popular pastimes is probably a survival of Herakles with his club, as one of those old giants that imaged the sustaining power of the pole, the last of whom was in the likeness of a mighty man.

The mount, as a point of emergence from the waters, is looked up to and addressed by the manes in the Ritual (ch. 42) at the coming forth from Amenta. It is called “the pedestal of the gods,” “the land of the white crown,” and “the land of the rod or staff” =pole. That this is the land (Rit., ch. 42) of the celestial pole, the mount, or the tree is proved by the vignette in which the deceased is drawing a cord around the tat emblem of stability, which is another figure of the pole to which he clings for safety in the waters.

The mount of migration from which the various races claim to have descended, like the Aztecs from the island-mountain Colhuacan, is [Page 625] finally the pole which had seven starting-points and stations in the circuit of precession. According to a Norse legend, the land of the immortals was to the north of Finland, in the neighbourhood of the White Sea. That, however, does not signify the original home and birthplace of an Aryan race in Europe. It is but a local representation of the paradise in the northern heaven and the white water of the Milky Way or sea of solar light. The mythical birthplace on the mount of heaven for the people of the pole will explain how it was that the ancient Britons could claim that they were emigrants from Troy. In the true tradition this would mean the celestial, not the mundane Troy — the Troy that is still figured by seven circles cut in the sod by children in Wales. Troy was one of the forms of the enclosure on the summit, in the astronomical mythology which was Terui in Egyptian as a name of Sesennu. It is a common tradition that the human birthplace was in paradise, and the descent from thence has been misrepresented as the fall from heaven. This in the astronomical mythology was the enclosure of the circumpolar Aarru around the tree upon the summit of the stellar mount, descent from which was from the mountain, or one of the seven mountains, of the pole. One most fertile source of confusion has been the result of the mythical legends having been converted into ethnical traditions. This birthplace above belonged to the astronomical mythology, and it has been converted into the human birthplace on the mountain and high places of our earth by the human child being laid in the cradle of the beginnings that were not human. That is, by the astronomical tradition being made ethnical, the polar paradise being made geographical. Thus, the descent from the circumpolar paradise in the astronomical mythology has been the cause of a wild-goose chase in search of man’s lost heaven at the North Pole of the earth, by the usual literalizing of the legend in its Hebrew guise. The mount from which the different races claim descent has been sufficiently identified as the astronomical mountain of the north, the mount of paradise, the one fixed point for landing at, or launching from, the summit of the pole. This also is the Babylonian “mountain of the nations.” The Babylonians at first were mound-builders. The mount of heaven was imitated in the mound, the holy mound called the mound of Anu and Nebo and Ishtar. Afterwards they built the tower of Babilu, and the temple called Kharsag-Kalama, the “mount of the nations.” This shows that the name of the astronomical mount was given to the building that was afterwards reared above the mound. The “mount of the nations” was the mount of a starting-point, and of the divisions or ways in the heavens which we now trace to the station of Polaris in Herakles. The starting-point of the Aztec migration is from the mythical one-tree-hill of the pole. According to the picture-writing, both mount and tree are combined in one figure. In the Boturini and Gamelli Careri copies the mount of earth is portrayed with the tree upon the summit. The tree on the mount (a teocallis) is very rudely represented in the Aztec picture-writing as the starting-point of the migration by water from the mount in the beginning. From this point also the seven Toltecs commenced their wanderings in a boat, like the seven Hohgates, the seven Ali, Ari or Kabiri, the seven [Page 626] dwarf sons of Pinga, and other forms of the seven in the celestial heptanomis.

The point of departure for the mythical migration is made ethnical in the märchen. The Navajo Indians derive their origin from the top of the divine mountain in the north, where the pole is represented in their mythology by the great reed which saved their progenitors from the waters of the deluge in the region of the stars which never set (Matthews, “The Navajo Mythology,” American Antiquarian, 1883, p. 208). The Ainus descended from the region of the bears, which was at the summit of the very lofty mountains in the north — that is, at the pole. They likewise claim to derive their origin from the bear as their mother and the dog as their father, which can be read astronomically. The she-bear took the place of the female hippopotamus, the original Great Mother of the Egyptians, whose constellation was the Great Bear. The dog represents the earlier jackal, the zootype of Sut or Anup, as Apuat the guide of ways. The jackal=the dog in the planisphere of Denderah still remains a figure of the pole. One of the mythical Chinese emperors, Hwang-ti, was born in the bear-country and inherited the bear, the original type of which, as male, was the hippopotamus of Sut, the first deity of a pole-star. Hwang-ti was the first celestial builder, the first to construct an astronomical instrument. He is said to have been the inventor of wheeled carts; hence his name of Hien Yuan. Now Sut, in the male hippopotamus, as already explained, was the primal power of the pole-star; he was the inventor of astronomy, and first of the seven who heaped the mound and made his seat upon it. He was the first of all the star-gods, and was the fixed one at the centre of the revolution or hub of the wheel, and therefore the inventor of the wheel. The Dyak chief whose name denoted “the bear of heaven” may be claimed to have been a descendant from the celestial bear, whose title was consequently astronomical and not simply totemic (C. Brooke, Ten Years in Sarawak, vol. I, 189). The bear and wolf clans of the Iroquois descend from the primal pair who were represented by the great bear as mother and the jackal=wolf or prairie-dog as her son and consort. The types of totemism had attained to a celestial setting in the astronomical mythology. They were no longer merely of the earth, but also represented the “big brothers” in the sky, from whom descent was claimed by the totemic groups. These were the bear that lived again in future food, the serpent that renewed itself, the panes bird that never died, the turtle of eternity, and other types of superhuman powers that were constellated round the pole of heaven. Thence came the races that descended from their stations in the mount, or from the circumpolar paradise, as the bears (or hippopotami) and crocodiles, the jackals (or dogs) and apes, the swans and tortoises, each from the mount according to the period. In Greece the Meropes were the people of the thigh, and the thigh or leg of heaven was a figure of the pole: thus the birthplace of a stellar race was figured in the meshken of the “thigh,” the group of stars now represented in the northern heaven by the lady of the seat or chair in the constellation Cassiopeia. One title of the pole was the Mount of the Khuti, or Mount Khuti. Thence the Khuti or Guti would supply a [Page 627] race-name of lofty lineage for those who dated their descent from Mount Khuti. The Egyptian Khuti came to be looked upon as seven divine ancestors who did not originate as spirits of human beings, but were the ancestors of Ra. Now there is a Mount Gudi=Khuti in the north-east of Babylonia, and an ancient widely-spread tradition affirms that when the deluge was over the ark of Noah rested on this mount. The name is obviously one with that of the Guti or Khuti of the tablets; whence the gutim and the Hebrew goim as a name for mankind, and also for the mountain of mankind. Again, Mount Shennu is another title of the pole as the mount of the Shennin, who were spirits or gods of the highest order, and who might be called the upper seven, from whom we should derive the Japanese and Chinese Shin and Shintu gods, which were originally seven, as were the Shennin round the pole or mount of the Most High in Egypt. Various difficulties that have been felt regarding the other world of Homer can be met and vanquished when we know from whence the system of Greek mythology was derived. The double paradise, one in the subterranean Amenta and one in the celestial garden of the gods, will explain the duality of the Homeric other world. Hades proper, like Amenta is beneath the earth; the happy other world of the dead is across the “divine sea” or okeanos, the celestial water of the Kamite Nun. Hesiod in the Theogony describes the Greek Tartarus as being “in a recess of earth having broad ways,” which can be identified with the dark parts of Amenta. The mount of the immortals called Olympus is one with Mount Hetep in the Egyptian representation. Hence the Kimmerians of Homer may be derived from the Egyptian Khemi or Akhemu, the dwellers in the northern heaven, whether as never-setting stars or spirits of the glorified — that is, the Khuti. The city of the Kimmerians in the north is described as being covered with shadow and vapour. The sun does not behold them when he goes toward the starry heaven, nor when he turns back again from heaven to earth. It is always night in the land of the Kimmeroi. It was after sunset that the vessel reached the extreme boundary where stood the city of the Kimmerians (Odyssey, books 11 and 12). The Akhemu are the souls of the dead, or the never-setting stars that circle round about the northern pole of heaven, but not in the arctic regions of the earth nor on the horizon of the north. The dead were those who voyaged in the bark of heaven for the city of the Akhemu at the summit of the pole. When the Osiris deceased has attained the summit at the head of Aarru, he exclaims, “I stand erect in the bark which the god is piloting . . . and the Akhemu (stars or spirits) open to me, and my fellow-citizens present to me the sacred cakes with flesh” (Rit., ch. 98). In another chapter the speaker says, “I arrive at my own city.” This was the city of the glorious ones who had risen to the region of the Akhemu-Seku or never-setting stars. And this, it has now to be suggested, was the city of the mythical Kimmeroi. The voyage was the same in the Greek, the Irish, or Assyrian legends as in the Egyptian astro-mythos. And as the Khemi or Akhemu were the northerners in this polar sense, the same origin may well account for the people of the north, in Chaldea, Japan, or Britain, being named the Kami, the Gimmeroi, or the Kymry, who derived their [Page 628] northern name on earth from that celestial birthplace in the northern heaven. Lastly, the dragon-mound was known to the Druids as a type in the astronomical mythology. Thence came the Dracontiae and the serpent-mounds of Britain, which, it may be feasibly inferred, were heaped up as images of the pole and its station when a Draconis became the pole-star about 4,000 years B.C.


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