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.
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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