text:
We have seen that there was an ancient Egyptian Chronicle accredited with containing the records of over 36,000 years[1]. The same record is recognised in another way by the tradition of the 36,500 books assigned to Hermes. Nor is there the slightest reason to doubt that the Egyptians may have kept their reckonings during that vast period of time, the whole of which is fully required to account for other actual phenomena, and no signs of numerical exaggeration have ever been detected on the monuments. The tattered condition of the Turin Papyrus cannot quite obscure the fact that it contained a chronological system corresponding to that asserted by the traditions of the stelae and the books of Taht.
There is a statement quoted by Bunsen[2] from John Malalas[3], who is followed by Cedrenus[4], and by a subsequent continuer of the Chronicon Paschal[5], to the effect that the 'Giant Nabrod' (Nimrod), the son of Kush the Ethiopian, of the race of Ham, built Babylon. Chronus ruled over Syria and Persia, the son of a certain Uranus, who reigned fifty-six years. His wife's name was Semiramis. He was succeeded by Ninus, the father of Zoroaster; after whom came Thuras, then Ares and Baal, to whom the first stelae were dedicated. The Ares and Baal here connected with the first stelae are Shu and Sut in Egypt. Ares is Mars, and the earliest Baal, the son, is Bar-Sutekh; and the Baal of the first stelae, as Sut, is one with the Hebrew Seth, to whom the astronomical pillars are ascribed by Josephus[6]. Certain stelae are also referred to as the pillars of Akikarus, called the prophet of Babylon (or the Bosphorus), whose wisdom was said to have been stolen by Democritus, and on which a treatise was composed by Theophrastus[7]. In Egyptian khekha signifies the numbers and reckonings, and is a name for the stone of memorial; ru denotes the graver of the stone; rut is to engrave, which suggests a meaning for the name of an erector of the [p.282] stelae, as Akikarus. Sut and Shu (Baal and Mars), to whom the earliest pillars were dedicated, are the two primordial recorders in the Egyptian mythology, and both are earlier than Taht, Sut being the predecessor of Taht[8]. Herodotus calls Cepheus the 'Son of Belus,'[9] and as the successor to Bar-Sut, the earliest Baal or Bel, this is the true sequence and order of descent.
By aid of the Hymn to Shu we learn that Shu was also the divine scribe, whose works were included in the records of Taht, lord of Sesen, and treasured up in the royal palace of On[10]. The bringing on of Shu the star-god as a scribe or recorder into the lunar mythos is shown by the aan, monkey (which was a type of Shu), becoming the co-scribe with Taht.
The stelae of Baal (Sut) would be records of Sothis, the Dog-star, the star of Sut, the first announcer of celestial time in relation to the Great Bear and the inundation in Egypt. Shu, in his twofold character, has been sufficiently identified with the Moses and Joshua of the Hebrew writings. Sut is Seth, to whom the pillars and stelae are attributed.
In the fifth chapter of Genesis the seven who preceded Seth are summed up in Adam, the biune parent. 'Male, and female created he them, and called their name Adam.'[11] Adam is the sole predecessor of Seth in one version of the mythos. We might just as well say Eve or Chavvah, for the first producer in mythology is the genetrix. But Adam will serve, as in the Egyptian Ritual Atum appears as a female, designated the 'mother-goddess of Time.'[12]
The mother-goddess of time is the genetrix of all the gods, for these have no other phenomenal origin than the cycles of time. The earliest name of Seb (Time) is Keb or Kheb, who in the feminine or dual form is Khebti, and whose place of manifestation was the celestial Khebt (Egypt), or earlier Khepsh (Küsh), the Ethiopia of the north, and region of the Bear.
The first Time observed and registered was Sut-Typhonian; its types were the Great Bear and the Dog-star. In this time the year began with the rising of Sothis, and the first four cardinal points of the solstices and equinoxes were in the Lion, the Scorpion, Waterman, and Bull; this year and its imagery remaining fixed in the planisphere for ever. Whatsoever was changed and added, the origins are never lost or entirely superseded; the earliest types were stereotyped, and can still be found in heaven above and on the earth below. The bear and dog (jackal, wolf, fox or coyote), the bull, lion, bird, and human figure of the four genii are among the extant witnesses of that early time which began with the genetrix and Sut, her son, to be followed by Shu and the genii of the four corners. Sut and the goddess of the seven stars were the earliest Smen, the eight, of whom Taht was made the lord, when he had superseded Sut. The records of this first time, [p.283] kept on the stelae or pillars are those of Sut or Seth, who follows the seven patriarchs, and whose son was the Anosh or manifestor, identified with the Anush or wolf-hound type of Sut.
Sut was the announcer of the Great Bear cycle, when the heaven was lower and upper, as north and south before the time of the four corners, (the revolution of the Great Bear being observed from near the equator wholly on the north side of the heavens), the records of which were the stones in the Karuadic land. The star-god Shu was an indicator of the solstices as Cepheus in the Waterman, and Regulus in the Lion, and therefore belongs to the figure of the first four quarters.
A Sun-and-Sirius year also probably began from this starting point; its representative image being Sut-Horus. Sut, in relation to Har, was assigned the earth, and Har the heaven; Sut represented the first of the Two Truths, the opening one; Har the second. This position was continued in the typology of the Ritual. In the circle of Smen, the place of preparation, it is said of the soul passing through the purgatorial trials, 'divine Horus purifies thee; the god Sut does so in turn.'[13] He was the purifier in one sense, corresponding to the feminine period of purification. The first starry type of Har in relation to Sut was probably the wolf, the Anush, which rose in the evening when the sun and moon were reunited in the sign of the vernal equinox. Diodorus describes the dog as being the type of Sut, and the wolf as the type of Makedo[14]; and Makai, in the Magic Papyrus[15], is called the son of Sut, but under the crocodile type. The dog and wolf correspond to a dual form of Sut-Anubis. The passage of the sun's entrance into the sign of the Bull was marked by the rising of the Wolf; and Sut (dog) and Makedo (wolf) are called (by Diodorus[16]) the two sons of Osiris. The present point, however, is the identification of Shu (Ares) and Sut (Baal), with the stelae of the Karuadic land existing before the flood of Noah. Shu, as a star-god, is so old in Egypt that he is called 'greater and more ancient than the gods.' He was the son of Nun, the bringer, before Taht became the reckoner and recorder of time, and in the readjustment of the myth, according to the solar reckoning, Shu is the adopted son of Ra. In this sense Shu is said to be selected by Ra as his son, previous to his own birth[17], which is exactly what occurs in Exodus. The sun-god Jah is not born or manifested in Israel until his appearance to Moses in the bush of flame[18], when he announces himself by name as Jah and Evah Asher Jah, the hitherto unknown god.
Shu made for Ra 'hereditary titles which are in the writings of the lord of Sesen,' that is in the Hermean books of Taht[19], and here, apparently, we strike upon the connection of Moses with the Psalms of David or Taht.
In addition to the five books the Jews assign eleven of the Psalms (90 to 100) to Moses. Also there are traditions of the Book of Job having been written by Moses, the Hebrew Ma-Shu. Thus the Hebrews have the writings of Shu (Moses) mixed with those of Taht (David), and Shu invented hereditary titles for Ra. Jah is one of the titles of the Hebrew sun-god, found especially in the Psalms. Now the earliest books of Shu, as we have seen, were the stelae, the stone tablets of the oldest chronology.
Moses being identified as the Egyptian god Shu of the Two Truths, represented by the two stone tablets on which the ten commandments were written, we have in these a survival of the stone stelae of Shu. Moses is the typical author of the Pentateuch; he is credited with writing the second edition of the ten commandments[20], and the register of the stations in the wilderness[21]. Moses is Shu; shu or su, in the later modification, means number five, and the five books are those of Shu. Su (shu) for five is the final development of kafi, the hand, and Kafi is a name of Shu, who, in his dual character, constituted the two hands of Ra, the sun-god, as his supporter and the uplifter of the nocturnal heaven. Taht superseded Shu as well as Sut, and this is reflected in Tut (or Tu) for the number five and a name of the hand. Moses is emphatically the hand of Jah-Adonai, and the 'Hand upon the throne of Jah' in the margin[22] has an apparent relation to Moses or Shu, the hand of the Lord with which he commanded Israel[23].
In the Egyptian development of the mythology we see Shu discrowning himself as it were to decorate the later sun-god. Horus says to his father Osiris, 'Thou receivest the headdress of the two lion-gods.' 'The lion-gods supply his headdress.' 'The lion-gods have given to me a head-attire. He has given to me his locks, he has placed his head and his neck with his great power upon me,' says the Osirian[24]. Osiris was crowned with the feathers by the lion-gods as the universal lord when the solar cult superseded the Sabean.
The change from Shu, the star-god, to Shu-si-Ra, which occurs in the creation by Ra, is marked when Moses came down from the mount and wrote all the words of the Lord, and erected an altar and twelve pillars at the foot of the mountain. These represent the solar zodiac, and here the twelve stones take the place of the matzebah, or pillar, of an earlier cult, the hieroglyphic of Sut. In the Hebrew mythology Moses reveals the solar god to Israel by the name of Jah, the El-Shadai of the five books. When the new god is elected for worship under the leadership of Joshua and a covenant is made, then 'Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of God.'[25] He plays the same part here as Moses in the other books, of whom it is said, 'It came to pass when Moses had made an end of writing the words [p.285] of this law in a book, until they were finished.'[26] Joshua then is a writer of the book of the law, in a scripture indefinitely older in form and substance than the Book of Deuteronomy. Now as the name of Joshua was altered in order that the name of the male god Jah, made known by Moses, might be compounded with that of Shu or Shua; and as Jah-Adonai is the sun-god Ra who adopted Shu as his son in the solar regime, it follows that Jah-Shua is the Hebrew equivalent of Shu-si-Ra, and the original Oshea becomes the son of Adonai-Jah, just as the pre-solar god Shu in the creation by Ra becomes the son of Ra, whereas previously he was, like Joshua, the son of Nun. Shu, in the character of Anhar, is the elevator of heaven, the bringer, the one who returns, brings back again, countervails, compels, forces a way, raises, restores, equalizes, and saves. All that can be expressed by the Hebrew אוש as uplifting, self-sufficing, enough in oneself; הוש, to countervail and equalize; בוש which denotes returning, bringing back, and restoring, is concentrated in Anhar, the typical returner and bringer; and as shva or shua indicates this character of the uplifting and self-sufficing one, who follows Moses as the servant of Jah, it is a fair inference that the full name of עושוהי means the supporter, helper, and upholder of the god Jah, proclaimed by Moses. Hitherto it has not been known that Jah needed help, and so the name has been rendered, 'Jah is help,' but in the original myth Ra adopts Shu as his son because he requires support, and his own father Nun tells Shu to become the lifter-up of the sun-god.
Joshua does not appear in the Book of Exodus, in which Moses is identified with Shu in his first character of Mashu, until the period of 'permutation' or transformation, when Anhar the bringer takes the place of Shu, the up-lifter of heaven. Also the change of Oshea's name to Joshua occurs in Numbers[27], at the point where Joshua takes up the leadership for the land of promise, or is sent forth in search and discovers the intercepting Anakim.
Shu, the god of two names, is called the double deity in his name of 'young-elder,' in his name of 'double-abode' of Ra, in his name of the youthful 'double force' in the circle of Thebes. This duality is shown by the change from the leadership of Moses to that of Joshua, and also by the two names of Oshea and Joshua. In the passage respecting the hereditary titles of Ra, Taht, the lord of Sesen, is called the scribe of the king Ra-Har-Makhu, and the writings are said to be engraved in script, under the feet of the god, in the royal palace of On, to be transmitted from generation to generation. In the exact words of the hymn, as rendered by Chabas and Dr. Birch[28], the 'substance of Shu is blended with that of Ra,' which is exactly what takes place in the change of Oshea's name into Joshua, in which Shu is blended, as explained, with Jah. lt is then said of Shu, 'He made for him (the god Ra) hereditary titles, which are in the writings of the [p.286] lord of Sesen, the scribe of the king Har-Makhu, in the palace of On, consigned, performed, engraved in script, under the feet of Ra-Har-Makhu, and he transmitted it (the scripture) to the son of his son for centuries and eternity.'[29] Here then we find the Egyptian sacred scriptures ascribed to Shu (Moses) and Taht (David), deposited in the great temple of On, to be transmitted from generation to generation for ever.
The records of Sut, transferred from the stelae, are not mentioned, as Sut had suffered his degradation and casting out, but these were brought on by Shu and Taht. When the sacred books were assigned to Taht, hieroglyphic writing had been invented. He is the earliest divine scribe as the penman of the gods, and his consort Sefekh is styled mistress of the writings. Previously the burin and the stelae of the graver had been the chief means of memorial, and the bringing on of the stone records of the past from the stelae of Sut and Shu set up in the Karuadic land, and their transcription into the hieroglyphics of Taht can be traced through the fragment from Manetho[30]. These, according to his own account, he copied from the inscriptions which were engraved in the sacred dialect and hieroglyphic characters upon the columns set up in the Siriadic land by the first Hermes (i.e., Sut), who was earlier than Shu and Taht, and, after the flood, were translated from the sacred dialect in hieroglyphic characters, and committed to writing in books (papyri) and deposited by Agathodaemon (Num), the son of the second Hermes (Shu), the father of Taht, in the penetralia of the temples of Egypt. The three Tahts are traceable as the Sabean Sut and Shu (Baal and Ares), and the lunar god, who, being the third, and superseding the previous two announcers, was knowingly called Hermes-Trismegistus by the Egyptian Gnostics. Agathodaemon, or Num, apparently adds a fourth to the divine scribes or registrars, and there is a tradition that Taht drew up commentaries from Nuh, or Num. This is alluded to in the fragment of the Hermean writings entitled Κόρη χόσμου[31] in which the virgin mother says to her son, 'Listen, my son Horus, for I teach thee a mystery. Our forefather Kamephe possesses it from Hermes, who writes the account of all things, and I received it from the ancient Kamephe when he admitted me to be initiated by black.'*
* Black, rendered atramentum, by Canter[32], or 'initiation by writing,' possibly an allusion to the Veil of Isis.
'Receive it from me in thy turn, oh, wonderful and illustrious child.' The god here called Kamephe is the god of breath, and therefore the name signified is Khneph, the Egyptian Nu, or Num. The Hermes, who preceded Num, is Sut or Hermanubis, not Taht, as Taht is the son of Num. The first god of breath was Shu, and the leopard skin is Num, a sign, like the winepress, of the lion-god; Shu was the earlier Num (or Nef), whereas the later Num-Ra was a sun-god. The three bringers-on of the records were Sut, Shu (Num), [p.287] and Taht, the star and lunar gods, before solar time began. The Kabbalist doctrine, which they term the Mystery of Ibbur or transmigration of souls, is a form of the Egyptian khepr, to transform, change, be retyped or transfigured as Khepra the beetle transmigrated into his own son. Speaking of this transformation, Rabbi Menasseh says some among the Kabbalists affirm according to the doctrine of Ibbur, that the soul of Seth, being pure and unspotted, passed into Moses to inspire him for the delivery of the law, and the soul of Moses passed into the soul of Samuel through the Ibbur[33]. This is identical with Sut, the announcer, being followed and superseded by Shu as the lawgiver and the two star-gods by the lunar logos, the divine scribe, Taht; and the solar child, one of whose names, Sem-p-Khart, is equivalent to Samuel, as Sem, the son. Seth, Moses, Samuel, and David form the Hebrew parallel to Sut, Shu, Horus, and Taht. The gathered result in the records of Sut, Shu, and Taht was deposited at On as the Hermean books.
According to the Hebrew story it was at On that Pharaoh gave Asenath the daughter of Potipherah, priest of On, to Joseph as his wife, when he was 'thirty years of age,' and 'he went out over the land of Egypt.'[34] Brugsch has referred to the fact that in Annu, the On of the Bible, there existed from very early times a celebrated temple of the sun-god Atum, or Tum, a particular local form of Ra,* and his wife the goddess Hathor-Iusaas, to which the pharaohs were wont to make pilgrimages according to ancient custom to fulfil the directions for the royal consecration in the great house of the god[35].
* He was not merely that. Atum was 'Ra in his first Sovereignty,' on a sarcophagus of the time of Amenemha. See chapter 17 of the Ritual for commentary[36].
Before considering this local northern cult of Atum-Iusaas and their son Iu-em-hept, the Jesus of the apocrypha, it will be necessary to speak of the god Atum, or Tum as he is generally called, who has already been identified with the deity of the Hebrew Thummin, and the British Tom Thumb. His familiar name of Tum is repeated as an epithet of the Hebrew deity, who is called םת (Thum), a perfect, pure one, in the tenth psalm. Tum (Eg.) means to complete and perfect in a total of two halves. This is identical with kak (Akkadian), koko (Fin), kokk (Esthonian), coke (Lap), to complete, and Kak is the form taken by Tum as the completer and finisher of the cycle. In Kak we shall find the Hebrew Jach.
Genealogically Tum is said to be the son of Ptah and Pasht. Also he is called Ra in his first sovereignty. The Ra sun was later than the Har sun. Ra denotes the Rek, the sun by which time was reckoned in the solar year. Ptah was the establisher of that year, or the four corners on which it was founded. Atum is the first [p.288] form of the sun of what may be termed the equinoctial year, hence he wears the equinoctial crown.
The usual double crown of the gods, and always of the kings of Egypt, is the white and red crown, placed the one within the other, to represent the upper and lower of the two heavens, and the two truths of mystic meaning. Atum is the only deity who wears a double crown, having the one at the side of the other instead of the two within each other. This double crown is equinoctial, the other is solstitial. The two different symbols belong to the equinoctial and solstitial beginnings of the year.
Atum represents Ra in the reckoning by solar time which followed the lunar and sidereal time. In this way he may be called the son of Ptah and Pasht, the Egyptian goddess of Pasche or Easter, whose seat of the double lioness was at the place of the vernal equinox. Tum is a visible connecting link between the sonship and fatherhood. He is a form of Har-Makhu, the sun of the double horizon, which was solstitial at first and afterwards equinoctial, and, as Har-Makhu, he brings on the name of the son, Har.
Atum was the earlier Aten, Adon, or Tammuz, the son considered as the child of the mother.
In the Stele of the Excommunication[37] Atum is recognized in his type of the Hut, the double-winged disk of Hu, who is Atum in the upper heaven, as the 'duplicate of Aten,' usually called the deity of the solar disk. But whereas the Aten was limited to the sonship and to the Har-sun, Atum was developed in one cult into the divine father and the representative of Ra, as the generator.
In the 'Per-em-Hru,' or Coming Forth By Day, Atum is addressed as the 'Father of the gods.'[38] He is hailed as the creator, god, the master of being, or visible existence. 'In thy following is the reserved soul, the engendered of the gods who provide him (it) with shapes. Inexplicable is the genesis. It is the greatest of secrets. Thou art the good peace of the Osiris, oh Creator! Father of the gods, incorruptible.'[39]
In the Egyptian gospel[40] the souls call Atum their father. In the 'Chapter of making the change into the oldest of the chiefs,' i.e., Atum, the deceased says, 'I am Tum, maker of the heaven, creator of beings (which means rendering visible), coming forth from the world, making all the generations of existences, giving birth to the gods, creating himself Lord of Life supplying thee gods.'[41]
In short, the Egyptian Atum, as the father and creator, is the divine Adam who appears on earth as the human progenitor, in the Hebrew Genesis.* In one form then Atum is of the earth, earthy.
* Tum (Eg.) denotes the race of human beings, mankind, as the created people; the word is written like the name of Tum or Atum, the Egyptian Adam. The race of Atum are the created race. Tum has an earlier form in rutem for the men[42]. Maspero[43] looks on the t in this word as an inserted dental, and considers the form rem to be the root. But the ideographs precede the phonetics, and with some signs, if not with all the phonetics, ru is an earlier rut. By omitting the t from rutem the deposit is rema, for the natives. The rutem are the original created race, and the triliteral form is first. The name of this primordial race which is earlier than that of the worn-down Tum or Atum is extant, in the Polynesian language of the rotuma. In the Maori, tama signifies the eldest son, and timata means to begin.
[p.289] It is in the earth as the lower world that the souls are embodied. Even the creation of the woman from the man is known to the mystery of Sem-Sem. In some versions of the Ritual[44], Ra says, when the circumference of darkness was opened 'I was as one among you (the gods). I know how the woman was made from the man.'
In Jewish traditions the 91st psalm is assigned to Adam, and if for Adam we read Atum, we shall recover the veritable El-Shadai as the solar son of the ancient genetrix Shadai, the suckler; he who, as Jah, is identical with Hak and Kak, the earlier Kebek, the typhonian form of the sun of night, who was brought on as Atum, the Hebrew Adam, to whom the psalm was ascribed. Also the rabbis have retained much mythic matter, which was rejected when the Hebrew scriptures were selected from such sacred writings treasured up in the temple as the Book of Jasher[45] and the Book of the Wars of the Lord[46], and those traditions and dark sayings commanded to be transmitted from father to son[47]. To them we are indebted for a further identification of the Egyptian Atum as the Hebrew Adam, in their statement that Adam was originally green![48] Green is one of the colours in which Atum was portrayed. Champollion copied from a mummy-lid a picture of Atum as the green god[49]. Green was emblematic of the invisible world out of which life sprang in the green leaf; the flesh of Ptah was also painted of this hue.
Atum is intimately connected with the lion-gods, here represented by Sut and Horus who establish a particular link between Sut and Atum.
'Oh, Tum! oh, Tum! coming forth from the great place within the celestial abyss lighted by the lion-gods.'[50]
'Tum has built thy house, the twin lion-gods have founded thy abode.'[51]
One title of Atum is Nefer, a word of many meanings, and as nef is breath, surely the nefer must include the meaning of the breather or the breathed. Nefer-Tum is the youthful, the newly-breathed form of the god. Atum is depicted with a lotus on his head, the image of reproduction and of life breathing out of the waters. 'I have been emaned from his nostril,' says the young Horus of his father, and he [p.290] is called the 'living soul (that is breath) of Atum.' Nef-ru will read 'breath of the mouth,' and the nefer ideograph (C), a musical instrument, is corroborative. There was a form of the nefer earlier than the viol, as Horapollo[52] calls it—the heart of a man suspended by the windpipe, signifying the mouth of a good man. The title of Nefer-hept, rendered 'the good peace,' may also mean 'the breather of peace.' There is a description in the Gospel of John[53] which is related to this subject. The risen Christ comes into the midst of the disciples, 'the doors being shut,' and says, 'Peace unto you.' And when he had said this he breathed, and said, 'Receive ye the Holy Ghost.' That is a picture of the Nefer-hept, whether as Atum or Khunsu. Nefer also signifies to bless, and here the blessing is breathed as 'peace.' In the chapter of 'How a person receives the breath in Hades,' the deceased cries. 'Oh, Tum! give me the delicious breath of thy nostril,'[54] the breath of renewed life. The Festival of Tum is the festival of passing the soul to the body. 'My father Tum did it for me. He placed my house above the earth: there are corn and barley in it. I made in it the festival of passing the soul to my body,'[55] the soul being the breath.
Atum supplied the breath of those to be, and reproduced the image of breathing life, he himself being that breathing image of visible existence in the renewed form of Nefer-Tum, the Iu-su. The proof that the word nefer has to do with the breath is furnished by the lily-lotus of Nefer-Atum. This lily is borne on his head, or his head appears emerging from the lily, which is mystically called the 'guardian of the nostrils of the sun and the nose of Athor.' The lily, the symbol of Tum and Athor breathing out of the waters, is the type of Tum, who, in the Stele of Excommunication, is designated the 'giver of breath to all nostrils.'[56]
The doctrine of Atum, the breather of souls, with Nefer-Atum as a form of the breathed, the continuer (nefer) of Atum, furnished the myth of the creation of Adam, in the Hebrew Genesis, of whom it is written in the English version, 'The Lord God formed man (of) the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.'[57]
Atum appears in the Ritual as a male triad in one person. It is said, in the 17th chapter, the gods, Hu and Ka, are 'attached to the generation of the sun, and are followers of their father Tum daily.' That is Atum, the god of the two heavens, whose station is equinoctial, has two manifestations, the one in the lower, the other in the upper heaven; the one as the god of light, the other as the deity of darkness. In the type of Har-Makhu he unites both; in the type of Khepra, the beetle-god, he makes his transformation from the one into the other character. The shrine, or secret dwelling, is said to be in darkness, in order that the transformation of this god may take [p.291] place[58]. The name of Ka permutes with Hak, and the original of both is found in Kak, and yet earlier Kebek. Hu is the spirit of light, the good demon of the double-winged disk, and Kak is the sun of darkness in the nocturnal heaven. Exactly the same representation occurs in the Maori, where the word iho is a correlative, and has the value of ake, and yet ake is also the converse of iho. Hu and Iho are the modified forms of Hak and Ake, just as har, the upper, is of kar, the lower. A form of this triad is shown in the passage of the Hades by a picture of the divine bark carrying the solar disk, enclosing a scarabaeus. The god Sau is at the prow, and Hakau is at the poop. The beetle represents Khepra-Ra, the transforming sun. If for these we substitute Tum, Hu, and Kak, we have the triad of the Atum cult.
In the earlier mythos of the mother and son, the child Horus had a dual manifestation in the light and dark. In this the Har-Suti, the suffering Adonis or Thammuz, was represented as the blind Horus. He is spoken of in an ancient text as sitting solitary in his darkness and blindness. In the Royal Ritual at Abydus he is introduced, saying, 'I am Horus, and I come to search for mine eyes.'[59] The eye or his sight was restored to the sun at the dawn of day, or it was remade in the annual circle at the time and place of the vernal equinox. The blind Horus was another form of Ka or Kak, who is called the god Touch, he who had literally to feel his way through the dark, and is the prototype of our 'Chache—blind-man.' Chaeich, in Irish, means a purblind fellow; caoch (Gaelic), blind, empty, void. Kak (Hak), is identified with the blind and suffering Horus by his being portrayed as Harpocrates. Kak is yet extant in the form of our Chache-blind-man and Jack-in-the-box.
For Tum is the God who is in his box, chest, ark, or sheta, out of which he comes forth from the 'great place within the celestial abyss, lighted by the lion-gods,'[60] or springs up from his box like Jack, who also personifies the green man with a black face, as he dances in green leaves on May Day.
The ancient gods, those of Israel included, are now to be mainly met with at the toymakers; the divinities of childhood still. In the chimney corner, by the nursery fire, the deities are dozing away their second childhood, save that once a week the strings are pulled, and the puppets are compelled to keep up a kind of nodding acquaintance with the world from the pulpit, which now represents their box, on Sundays.
As before shown, our 'Black Jack'—whether represented by the Jack in his box, or the sweep in his framework of spring foliage, or by the 'Black Jack' of our winter greens, or the spirit called 'Black Jack'—is identical with Kak-Atum, who is also represented by the image of a black doll, as a sign of life in the lower domain. Also the [p.292] white and black of the gods Hu and Kak have been faithfully preserved in the white surplice and black gown of the clergy; and just as Atum in his box was the black Kak, so the black gown is still put on when the pulpit is entered by the preacher in the second character. The guiding star, or the sun in the Hades, the nocturnal sun, the sun in the winter signs—these are the origins of the black god, the black Sut-Nahsi, the black Osiris, the black Kak, the black Krishna, or the black Christ.
The greater mysteries were held at midnight. In truth night was the earliest time of light, and the evening and morning were the first day. The Jewish Sabbath, beginning at night, still records this fact. Night was the mother of all the manifestors of light. The sun of night, that passed for ever through the underworld, and returned in spite of death and darkness, was the victorious one, the helper, saver, comforter, whose first manifestation was the morning; who came to evoke the religious fervour of those whom the night and its terrors had already brought into a kneeling attitude from fear. This was the particular deity made known to Moses as the sun in the Akar, or hinder-part of the celestial circle, by the name of Jah, the great god of the psalmist, who praises him by name as Jah or Jach. This name of Jah is supposed by Fuerst[61], Gesenius[62], and other Hebraists to be a word abbreviated from Ihvh (הוהי), or derived from a different form of pronunciation. But the writer of the Book of Exodus is right, and the Hebraists have never known it—Jehovah was not the same divinity as Jah. If Jehovah had been a male divinity from the first, he would have represented Khebekh, the son of Kheb the genetrix; but the positive changes in the naming preclude that from being a possibility. When, in the fourth chapter of Genesis, men began to call upon Ha-Shem-Jehovah, the name was identical with the sen of Jehovah-genetrix, who is there represented by Sut-Anush, and later by El-Shadai. Also the Hebrew carefully retains the ה terminal to the name of Jhv, for the feminine Jehovah, as in Aloah, a goddess.
If the deity made known to and by Moses had been Jehovah, he would of course have been known already by that name, and by making the name of Jah to be identical with Jehovah, the god is made to bear false witness against himself. The two names have been confused by translators; the Hebrew rabbis knew well enough that Jehovah was not Jah, but a female divinity whose name was therefore not to be uttered; and when the name was written it was supplemented by the title of Adonai, or Adonai was employed in place of it to distinguish the male god from the goddess. The name by which the deity had not been previously known is Jah. This occurs in the fragment of an ancient hymn[63], called the 'Song of Moses,' or Mashu, who 'made hereditary titles for Ra,' and in [p.293] Exodus[64], two of the oldest remains of writings, of which we have only a later réchaufe in the present Pentateuch. The name originally given in Exodus is Jah or Jach, the god of the far earlier fragments and of the Psalms and ancient poetry; the same as the Egyptian Kak. In the hard form Jah is Kak, and Jach is the intermediate spelling of the name. Kak, Hak, Jach, with other variants, will be found in many languages, including the Hebrew type-name of akh; Akh, the Assyrian moon-god, the English Jack; Kodiak, Ijak; Saraveca, Cache; Laos, Xaca; Bushman, Cagu; Loanga, Chikokke (a black idol); Ge, black sun, Chugh-ra; Erroob, Geggr; Singhalese, Jaca (the devil); Seneca, Kachqua; Port Philip, Kaker; Susu, Kige; Angami Naga, Achuche; Cuban, Jocahuna; Galla, Wak; Gonga, Yeko; Sereres, Aogue; Finnic, Ukko; Otomi, Okha; Sioux, Ogha; Arabic, Jauk; Japanese, Jacusi, god of healing; Koniaga, Evak, the evil spirit, and many more. The name depends on kak, meaning darkness, and on the light, whether as star, moon, or sun, being the deity of the dark. Kak was the solar god in the Akar; so is Jah, the divinity of the hinder-part shown to Moses. Kak is the god of darkness, and the word means darkness. So הי is annexed to a noun[65], to denote horrible darkness. Jah is the god of darkness. The god of the psalmist[66], who bowed the heavens and came down, was the descending sun, the beneficent deity of the dark; the darkness was his secret place. The god of the dark was portrayed as the black god.
In Strabo's[67] account of the exodus we are told that Moses, the Jewish teacher, was opposed to images of the deities[68]; but neither Moses nor any one else could get rid of the imagery which is still extant in the writings and reproducible for the reader. My conclusion, as easy to defend as to suggest, is that the Ashar, in Evah Ashar Jah, is a part of the proper name, equivalent to the Phoenician רסא, an epithet of Baal, the son, as consort of Asherah, the goddess of the tree and the pillar who was the object of secret adoration in Israel when the cult had been publicly suppressed. Asherah, Astarte, Ashtaroth, are finally one with Jehovah as the primordial genetrix; Asher-Jah was a form of her son, the son who in mythology grows up to become the husband of the mother and the re-begetter of himself as his own father. This was so with the earliest duad of the mother and son, whether Sabean or solar. The virgin and child were before the fatherhood was individualized on earth, and therefore before it could be typified or divinized in heaven. Now, this development of the male god from the son of the mother into her husband and the father of souls is traceable in the change from Aten to Atum in Egypt; also in the evolution of Osiris, the father god, out of As-Ar, the Har-son [p.294] of Isis; she who came from herself. The Ar-son is P-ar, i.e., Bar, Baal, and this development can be traced in Israel.
'It shall be at that day, saith the Lord {thou} shalt call me "my husband," and shalt call me no more Baali,'[69] rendered 'my Lord,' and not inappropriately, for Baal is expressly the Lord, as son of the mother. The ar or har (Eg.) means the lord. Aten, or Adon, is the lord, and the lord is the prince, son, heir-apparent, the repa of mythology, who precedes the pharaoh and represents the Har-son that was earlier than Ra. This was the Shem that men began to call upon at the time when the Anosh was born to Seth, or when Sut-Anush was made the male manifestor of the female deity.
The earliest god known to any mythology is the son of the mother, the eternal child, boy, or lad. El or Al was the supreme god of the Babylonians; the prince of gods, the lamp of the gods, the warrior of the gods (the characters of Bar-Sutekh). On Assyrian monuments Baaltis and the 'Shining Bar' are found in immediate juxtaposition.
Har-pi-Khart, distinguished from Har-pi-Kherp, is not merely Horus, the child; he is the child of the motherhood solely, that is the ar, har, or khar, with the feminine terminal to his name.
The Asar, who in Egypt was son of the mother, and later consort, is in the Phoenician רסא (Asir) the husband. In Hebrew asar means the spouse, the wedded consort, whilst ashar or gashar signifies to be united sexually, to be married. Ashar-Jah is thus Jah, the husband, distinguished from Baal, the son.
There is no other origin for the Hebrew El, a name of the supreme deity as male, because it belongs to the sonship of the motherhood. It is useless, likewise, to discuss the meaning of Al (El) apart from the earlier forms in Gal, Kal, and Kar, which alone are primary. El is the worn-down form of hal, or har, khar, and khart, extant not only in Egypt, but in the Fijian god Kalou, called Kalou-Gata, the god who fulfils what he promises; is as good as his word, the equivalent of the Egyptian makheru, or true voice; Kalevala, the Finnish divine hero; the Greek Kurios, and others, including the Cornish Golly, or Goles, who is still sworn by in England, and is represented by the uplifted hand; goll, as hand, being equivalent to the kher sign, which is the oar-sceptre, or hand of Horus in crossing the water.
Asar (Osiris) is the son of As, Hes, or Isis, so El-Shadai is the son of Shadai, the Dea-Multimammae. 'I am El-Shadai,' is the first announcement of his name and presence made in the Hebrew writings[70]. This the Targum of Onkelos renders by 'Anah chivlah sapukah.' Anah (הנא) has the meaning of being brought on by adaptation. Chivlah (הלוח), from לוח, denotes the bringerforth, the gestator, and sapukah signifies the added and joined [p.295] together, the exact equivalent of Ashar-Jah; El, son of Shadai, being brought on as the god attached and wedded to the genetrix, as in the original mythos.
The earliest Ar was Bar, or Baal, and in the Hebrew writings the name of El interchanges with Baal. Baal[71] alternates with El[72]. Baal, the supreme god of the Kheta and the Syro-Phoenician peoples, was Baal-Sutekh, the ass-headed Sut of the monuments. This was the Baal of the heavenly dwelling or the tower of Saturn in the seventh heaven, when Sut had become a planetary god, as Saturn. Al is the son, then, identified with or as Baal, i.e., the Sabean Baal, who was Baal-zebul or Baalzebub and Bar-Sutekh. Bar-Typhon (Eg.), Baal-Zephon (Heb.), Baal-Kivan (ןוכ־לעב) of the Phoenician and Babylonian mythologies, and the Baal-Kivan of the Numidian inscriptions, are each and all the son (al) of the genetrix, who was first the goddess of the seven stars, next of the moon, and lastly of the sun.
Baal is compounded with Jah in the proper name of Baaliah, i.e., Jah, the son, as Baal, Bar, or Al, and Baaliah, a Hebrew proper name[73] as a divine name, distinguishes the deity Jah as Baal, who was the earlier son (al) of the mother. The most varied abbreviations are found in compound proper names, where the beth becomes a mere sign of abbreviation. It is so made use of for the name of Baal. Fuerst[74] quotes the Phoenician םט׳ב reduced from םעט־לעב with the name of Baal represented by the beth. We have the B'Jah of Psalms 65:5, Psalms 68:5, Isaiah 26:4, which we can now read as a modest annunciation that Baal-Jah is the name signified, only Baal had then acquired a bad reputation. Moreover the B' is brief for either Baal, Ben, Bar or no. 2. These ancient significates are all essence, and this B' suffices to identify the god Jah as the son who was Baal, the manifestor, in a twofold form, the same as Sut-Har, Sut-Nubti, the dual Anubis, or the double Horus.
Philo-Judaeus, speaking of the mysteries of Baal-Peor, tells us that the votaries opened their mouths to receive the water that was poured into them by the priests[75]. Baal-Peor is called lord of the opening, which this action symbolizes. The Hebrew רועפ, rendered by the Seventy φογώρ, a hiatus or opening, is the Egyptian pekar, a gap, opening. Ar denotes that which is fundamental. Pekar also has the significant sense of being in flower; one of the Two Truths. At their period of pubescence the maidens were dedicated to Baal-Peor. This identifies Baal-Peor with Sut, or Bar-Typhon, who is designated the Opener. The year was opened by the star named after him. In the Magic Papyrus[76] the 'two great goddesses that conceive and do not breed are opened (sennt, to open the ground, make a fresh foundation) by Sut and sealed by Har.' Interpreted by the Two [p.296] Truths, this identifies Sut with the water (blood) period, and Horus with gestation or breath; the one represents the opener, the other the closer of the womb; the one flesh, and earth; the other spirit and heaven. In the planisphere Sothis was the star of the opening year and of the inundation with which the year opened; it was Bar-Sut the opener, or Baal-Peor. Sut-Har, in the first year, was represented by the wolf, or Orion. Baal was the opener as the child, son, the khart, or child of the genetrix.
The Phoenician Baal of the earliest time was known by the title of Baal-Itan, Βελιτάν[77], this was understood to mean the old Baal, the first form of Baal. Itan answers to the Egyptian Aten, the circle-maker, the sun of the disk-worshippers. In Hebrew ןתיא also identifies the old as an epithet of the highest male deity. The 'old' here signifies the first in time. Baal or Bar was the old, first, supreme star-god. The terminal kh in Sutekh has long perplexed Egyptologists, but when we find that Osiris at Thebes is called khe, the child, and that the khu, sieve, stands for a child, there can be little doubt that Sutekh is expressly the child of the mother, Astarte. Also at, the root of Aten, is the child or lad in Egyptian. Baal-Itan or Aten is the earliest form of the solar Baal and Aten, the Adon of Syria and Adonai of the Hebrews, identified as the son by the prefixed Baal. Further, by aid of the Phoenician Asar, we are enabled to identify the Hebrew El. Asar or Isar, with the divine name of El suffixed, is the Egyptian Asar, as son of the mother. Asar was an epithet of Baal, the son (Bar) or consort of Asherah (הרשא) who was a Phoenician goddess, sometimes synonymous with the Sidonian Astarte[78]. The Asherah image of 2 Kings 21:3, is one with the Asheroth of 2 Chronicles 33:3, so the goddess Asherah is identified by the Seventy and others with Ashtaroth. Asherah, read by Egyptian, is the abode (ah) of asar, the child of As (Isis), the Great Mother being personified as the abode as well as the tree—hes, or the divine abode[79]. Asir is an epithet of Adonis, who is called רסא־ינדא. El-Shadai, Adonai, Baal, are each a personification of the son of the genetrix belonging originally to the cult of Sut-Typhon, which was precisely that of the Romish Church of today, the worship of the virgin mother and her child.
Many secrets of the early religion are enshrined in Hebrew proper names. Thus Allah (הילע) or Galiah, identifies the god El, the son Al, as Jah. Adonijah identifies Adon with Jah, and Ramiah[80] identifies Rimmon with Jah.
It has now to be suggested that where Jah is announced to Israel as the new god, Evah Asher Jah, the status of the earlier El has been changed from the son to the spouse of the mother, and the divine fatherhood is intended to be introduced. Eyah Asher Jah reads: 'I am Jah, the husband,' implying the begetter of souls and [p.297] thence the divine fatherhood, as an advance on the doctrine of the earlier mother and son. El-Shadai and Jah then we take to be two of the 'hereditary titles' or designations of descent of the sun-god, Atum-Harmakhu, which were 'In the writings of the Lord of Sesen, the scribe of the king Ra-Harmakhu, in the royal palace of On, consigned, performed, engraved in script under the feet of Ra-Harmakhu.'[81]
These writings of Shu may be supposed to have contained the originals of those which are in various traditions assigned to Moses, and to have been carried forth from On into Syria, together with a version of certain writings of Taht, the Egyptian David; and from thence we infer the writings of Shu (Moses) and Taht (David) were carried into Syria and Palestine, to become the Pentateuch, the books of Joshua and Job, the Psalms, and the missing Book of Jasher[82]. In On the god Atum was worshipped with his consort Iusaas and their son Iu-em-Hept. These three form the trinity proper of father, mother, and son, in which mythology landed religion at last as it was in the worship of Osiris, Isis, and Horus, or Amen, Maut, and Khunsu; but the worship was characterized by peculiar tenets and types. In the town of Tum, Pa-Tum, the Pithom of Exodus, Tum was worshipped under the surname of ankh, one meaning of which is the living, and Brugsch makes much of the god Atum of Heliopolis being called ankh, the living god; as if the living god could only have been known to the Hebrews at Pa-Tum, in Egypt. 'This is the only case,' he says, 'in the Egyptian texts of the occurrence of such a name for a god as seems to exclude the notion of idolatry.'[83] Enough for the present purpose that Tum was expressly called the Living; this with the masculine article prefixed would be Pa-Ankh. Tum was also personified as Sutem the hearer, or hearkener, the Judge who hears truth. He is called Sutem or 'hearing' in the time of King Pepi[84], (6th Dynasty). The ear is a sign of the descent on the Sut-Typhonian line, from Sut to Piten, from Kebek to Kak, Atum having been the earlier Aten. It may be noted that the proper name of Azniah[85] signifies Jah the hearer, from azen to hear, and Jah, Jach, or Kak is a form of Atum, the god who hears or perceives in the darkness, hence the god of the dark based on the nocturnal sun. Tum-Ankh of Pithom was served not by priests like the other Egyptian divinities, but by two young girls who were sisters, and who bore the title of honour, urti, the two queens or twin-queen. A serpent was considered to be the living symbol of the god of Pithom, called in the Egyptian texts the magnificent, the splendid. According to Brugsch it also bore the name of הלנ, which he renders the smooth[86]. But as the word also signifies to reveal, disclose, open, and is applied to the open ear[87], the serpent Geleh may have been another type of Tum-Ankh as the Hearer. The consort of Atum of [p.298] On is named Iusaas; styled Regent of Heliopolis. She is a form of Isis or Hathor, to judge by her headdress. 'Her divine role,' says Pierret, 'is most obscure; her name itself is a mystery. On peut le traduire; venue de sa grandeur.'[88] But a better rendering may be found in perfect keeping with her character. She is the mother of the son whose name is Iu-em-Hept. She herself also has the title of Neb-hept, the mistress or lady of peace. The accented sa in her name implies the earlier sif; both sa and sif are names of the son who is Iu. As is a name of the genetrix, Isis; the as, the seat, chamber, house, bed, resting-place, maternal abode, the secreting part of the body. Iu-sa-as is thus the as or womb of Iu-sa, Iu-sif or Iu-su, three modes of naming the son Iu. Iu means he who comes, and Iu-sa, Iu-su or Iu-sif, is the coming son, the messiah of mythology. The hes was also represented by the sacred heifer as a type of the virgin mother. Iusaas is the cow, the chamber, the womb of the coming son, the child that is to be. There is still another meaning. Iu signifies double. The Iu was of a dual nature. In the Hermean zodiaci one mother, the virgin, is in the sign Virgo; the other, the gestator, is in the sign of the Fishes; a kind of mermaid. Iu-sa-as will read the double-son-house, double-seat of the son, or seat of the duplicated son. She is the double-seat of Atum in An, in person. Perhaps the most complete rendering of the name of Iusaas, and one that includes the mythological meaning as well as the philological, is, 'She who is great with the coming one,' that is, with her son who was Iu. The name of Iu-em-hept is variously spelt with the Ai, Aai, Iu, and Au. It was abbreviated into I-em-hept, and became the Greek ΙΜΟΥΘΟΣ. Both Iu and Aai mean to come and to bring, so that Iu-em-hept is the peace-bringer or he who comes with peace, who, as the Nefer-Hept, is the breather of peace. In the solar or luni-solar trinity there was one of the three who was for ever the coming one, the exact analogue of the expected man of America, looked forward to as the 'Coming Man.' This was the Iu, Au, Ao, Af, Yav, Yahu, Ahu, Iah, Tao, Hak, Kak, Kefekh, and other variants of the one name of the youthful god. Osiris has the title of Neb-Iu, the coming lord. Ie (Iu) was written over the door of the young sun-god Apollo at Delphi. Tum was called Tomos by the Greeks. Thomas 'which is called Didymus' renders this duality of Tum by name, and the epithet serves to identify the Didymean Apollo with the sun of the two horizons impersonated in Tum, or in Iu as the dual son. Iu-oliter is the name of a Finnish deity who not only comes but also brings fish into the nets of the fishermen of the Baltic; a form of bringing attributed to other messiahs. Hept, in addition to peace, means plenty, heaps of food. Both natures of the father and mother were blended in the later son, and before the fatherhood was founded both sexes were represented [p.299] by the dual child. The son of the mother as Iu or the double Horus personified the future of being, the becoming, and was the type of futurity presented by youth, the image of coming into being, the mythical Iusu or Iusif the coming child. Hence the doctrine goes back to the child in the womb of the Great Mother, and has to be thought out there as a beginning; hence au (Eg.) to be, and au the embryo, the coming being. It is as old as the god Ptah, who was personified as the embryo, and as Sut the ass-headed, for Iu is an ancient name of the ass. Now the worshippers of this manifestation of the eternal in time were the 'Ius,' or Jews, and the doctrine of the coming one of the heavens led to their false and fatal expectation of the Messiah on earth.
All that is expressed in Revelation[89] by the ΑΩ, 'which is, and which was, and which is to come,' is found in the Egyptian au, signifying was, is, and to be. The letter u represents the later o. A and i interchange in Egyptian, a being the English i, and in the name of Iu-em-hept the Iu has a variant in Au, the AO or alpha and omega of the Greek alphabet and of the Mexican pictographs. We are told that all who entered the temple of the epicene divinity Serapis, bore on their brow or breast the letters or signs of Io (Iu)[90].
There were different modes of indicating this double divinity and the dual nature of the Iu. For example, the dual signification of the name of the Iu or Jew would appear to have been perpetuated in a practice of the Abyssinian artists who, according to Salt[91], invariably and of set purpose drew only the profile of a Jew, the reason of this curious custom being unknown to him. It was a mode of suggesting the dual expressed by Iu.*
* The English medieval Jew-Stones were double. Another illustration of the Iu or Jew in relation to the Egyptian deity. In my identification of the god Tum, the lower minified sun, with Tom Thumb and the impostor 'Saint' Thomas, the crowning illustration was omitted. The recurrence of the shortest day reminds me that this is the day dedicated to Thomas. Also Drake relates in his Eboracum[92], that there was a custom in the city of York for a friar of St. Peter's Priory to have his face painted like a Jew and to be set on horseback with his face to the horse's tail, to ride through the city, carrying one cake in front of him and one behind. The double cake denoted the two paths of the solar orbit. The friar represented Youl in person, and was accompanied by the youth of the city shouting youl, youl. The MS cited by Drake connects the custom with the betrayal of the city to William the Conqueror who had obviously taken the place of the sun-god[93]. Tum was the sun of the hinder-part, and is represented by Youl (Iu-el) riding backwards, and the Jew or Iu, and here on Tum's (Greek, Tomos) day we find the same transformation of Tum into Iu—as shown by the accompanying Youth—taking place, that was portrayed in Egypt as occurring at the time of the spring equinox, when Tomos 'called Didymus' or dual, made his transformation into Iu-em-hept.
The dual nature of the Iu-god is correctly depicted in the person of the young man with feminine paps. Bacchus was portrayed with female breasts. In the Soane Museum there is a Greco-Roman statue of the child Horus—the first half of the double Horus—made in the image of the female. Saint Sophia, [p.300] intended for the Christ in the Roman iconography, was delineated as a bearded female[94]. The long and typically feminine robe is another sign, whether this be worn by Jewish high priest or Roman pope. Anhar, who is male-female, twin in Shu and Tefnut, is likewise a wearer of the long robe. The long garment—in which was 'the whole world'[95] in the sense now explained—was worn by Iu-emhept. He is figured at Memphis seated, and holding an unrolled papyrus on his knees, as the wearer of the long robe. We have already identified this deity as the Egyptian Jesus, to whom the 'wisdom of Jesus' is ascribed as an Egyptian writing, and of whom it is said, 'This Jesus did imitate Solomon, and was no less famous for wisdom and learning.'[96] A form of this god is found on the monuments at Biban-el-Muluk, with the name of Au or Iu. As Tum-neb-tata, he is the black wearer of the white crown[97]. His portraits were copied by Wilkinson. In one of these he is of a black complexion, in another[98] he is bull-headed, with the name of Au, or Sutem, the hearer. To denote hearing, says Horapollo[99], the Egyptians delineate the ear of the bull, and the reason given is that when the bull hears the cow lowing he hastens to respond. Au, the bullock-headed, is the hearer. He has the style of Sutemi, the hearer, resident in the House of Shu, and he is the lord of victory. Shu, be it remembered, is the Egyptian Moses, and Au (Iu), the bull-headed, is the dweller in his house. Also he is a form of the black god, otherwise Kak or Jach. He is identified with Atum as the hearer, the bull's ear having been preceded by the earlier types of the ear of Sut, who was the hearer as the long-eared ass, the prick-eared jackal, the square-eared fenekh, and who at last deposits in the hieroglyphics the ear-type of At, Sut, and Sutem. The ear, says Horapollo[100], is the symbol of a future act. He is right. Au means to be; the being who was Atum as the old (au), and Nefer-Tum, Iuem-hept, or Au, as the future of being, the coming one. Au denotes both the elder and the younger in one person, or the young-elder of the mythos. In the form of Au, Atum will supply another of the origins.
Au, as the son, is Ausu. Iu, as the son, is Iusu. And this god of Biban-el-Muluk, with the black complexion, is the black Jesus of Egypt. The black Jesus is a well known form of the child-Christ worshipped on the continent, where the black bambino was the pet image of the Italian Church, as popular as Krishna, the black Christ of India; and unless the divine son was incarnated in black flesh, the type of the black child must have survived from that of the [p.301] black Au, the black Ju, the black Kak or Jach, the black Sut Nahsi, the negro image of the earliest god.
Iu-em-hept may now be followed out of Egypt. According to Jablonski[101], Aesculapius was called Imouthos, and he thinks he was Serapis. There was an Asklepeion, or small temple of Serapis, in the Serapeum of Memphis. Ammianus Marcellinus[102] says 'Memphis boasted of the presence of the god Aesculapius.'*
* Kherp (Eg.) is a name of the prince or repa who comes, and the name of Aesculapius or Aesclepius is probably derived from Kherp-iu with the prefix as for the great, noble; or, as Aesculapius is the divine healer, the prefix may represent the Egyptian usha, a doctor, physician. Thus Aesculapius is the Prince of Peace who comes for the healing of the nations.
A bronze figure of Iu-em-hept, the Egyptian Jesus, the Jesus of the apocrypha, may be seen in the British Museum. He is represented as a youth wearing a skullcap, and is seated on a stool in the act of unrolling a papyrus; perhaps a treatise on medicine, he being the healer, or Aesculapius[103].
Wilkinson was certainly wrong in assuming that Iu-em-hept could not be the leader of the heavenly deities who is called Emph by Iamblichus[104]. The figure designated Hemphta at the centre of the Hermean zodiaci will help to identify him. Iu was the same as Hu in the Tum triad; and the winged disk, or Aten, is a form of the Teb-Hut sign of the god Hu, the manifestation of Tum in the upper heaven. The disk has the wings of the dove, the type of that peace (hept) which was brought by Iu, the coming son, who was the second Atum, and the child of the lady of peace, Iusaas Neb-Hept.
The mythos of Atum and Jesus (Iu-su) contains the original matter of Paul's doctrine of the first and second Adam; he actually quotes it. 'So it is written. The first man Adam* was made a living soul; the last Adam a quickening spirit. The first man of the earth earthy; the second the Lord from heaven:'[105] And 'as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.'[106] 'And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly.' This was represented in the worship of Atum, the red Atum, who was of the earth as the lower sun, and the lord of heaven, 'the great god, lord of heaven and giver of life,' as he is called in his second phase, typified by the hut, or winged sun. In the character of Khepra, the type of immortality by transformation, the first Atum transformed into the second as his own son Iu, i.e., Iu-su, the Greek Jesus.
* Adam, the name of man in Lughman and Curali, and Adma in Adaiel, were not derived from the Hebrew.
'We shall be changed,' is a translation of the mystery of Khepra, to change, to transform. This change, or rebirth, was also effected by the mother Nut in her name of heavenly mystery. Hippolytus[107] says the Chaldeans called the man of earth who became a living soul, Adam. [p.302] This was the gnostic Adamas, Adam the Red, as sun, or as personification, was of the earth earthy, considered as the lower of two, and he became a living soul in the mythical transformation that was first based on the physiological, in which At-mu is the child of the mother, the embryo made of the red earth, the flesh formation; and the second Adam is the Iu-su, the child after it is transformed by the quickening spirit. Moreover, the youthful god, Iu-em-hept, had become a personal being postulated as existing in spirit-world, communicating with the minds of men in this life, and prefiguring the future in dreams. On one of the Ptolemaic tablets there is a record of the fulfilment of a promise made in a dream by the god Iu-emhept to Pasherenptah concerning the birth of a son. This was as real to the Egyptian mind as that sealing spirit of promise referred to by Paul[108]. 'Henceforth,' says Paul, 'there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day; and not to me only, but unto all them also that love His appearing.'[109] Paul's crown of righteousness is the crown of justification or triumph given by Atum,* the lord, the righteous judge of the souls of the dead, at his appearing; when the deceased becomes the lord of eternity, to be reckoned 'even as Khepera' the transformer, and to be the master of the kingly crown.
* Chapter 19 called the 'Chapter of the Crown of Justification.'[110]
This crown is given to the soul when it has been justified in fourteen trials before the fourteen judgment-seats, that is, reckoning by the twenty-eight lunar houses, through one half of the circle, or the whole passage of the lower heaven. It is said to the deceased who has fought the good fight, 'Thy father, Atum, has bound thee with this good crown of triumph, with that living frontlet; beloved of the gods, thou livest for ever.'[111]**
** Compare 'Come ye blessed of my father.'[112]
The day of festival, on which was celebrated this triumph of Horus or the soul of the deceased and of putting on the crown of triumph, is designated 'Come thou to me.'
We are now able to utilize the strange-looking assertion found in the fragment from Justin out of Trogus Pompeius, to the effect that Moses was the son of Joseph. Such was the divine knowledge of Joseph, says the passage, that it 'appeared to proceed not from a mortal, but a god.' 'His son was Moses,' whom, besides the inheritance of his father's knowledge, the comeliness of his person also recommended[113]. Moses the son of Joseph! As history this is meaningless, but, as mythology, the statement is verifiably true. The bullock-god Au is the hearer who is resident in the house of Shu—the house of the lion-gods who light Atum, or Au, in and out of the abyss of darkness—and Shu is Moses; Au is the sun-god; [p.303] Shu-si-Ra is the son of the Sun. It only remains to be shown that Joseph is a form of the Iu-sif, or coming son, to prove his kinship to the mythical Moses.
First of the name. Sif in Egyptian, is the son, as well as su or sa. Iu-sif is the son who comes, and equally the dual-natured with Iu-sa and Iu-su. There has always been a sort of indefinite identity of Joseph with Jesus in Christology which this may, perhaps, explain. Iu-em-hept is supposed to be a form of Serapis, the epicene type of Apis; and it is noticeable that Au has the heifer horns, not the bull's, or rather the calf's head, as Au is the hieroglyphic calf; which may be of either sex, and so is a type of both. According to some, Serapis was a compound of Sirius and the solar Apis, a type of the Sun-and-Sirius like Sut-Nubti. Now certain of the rabbis identified Joseph with Serapis, and this offers a combination in the sonship particularly appropriate to the Hebrews. They were Sut-Typhonians at first when Sut or Baal, Bar-Sutekh, was worshipped as the son of the mother, and the dual son who united the Sabean and the solar sonship of the Sun-and-Sirius would be a natural link between the Sabean and Solar cult. But the particular duality of the Iu-sif is not here in question; enough that The Talmud calls Joseph Serapis in the treatise Avodasara[114], and that Serapis was a dual type of deity who has been identified with Iu-em-hept and Aesculapius. Serapis was the bull (or calf) of a dual nature. Au (or Iu), the son (sif) of Atum, is the bullock or calf-headed god in the house of Ma-Shu; and in the 'Blessing of Moses' he says of Joseph, 'His glory (is like) the firstling of his bullock.'[115] Au (Eg.) is the calf, which is here identified as the firstling of the bullock, or castrated bull. The name of the bullock in this place is likewise that of the cow[116], Au or Iu (and therefore Joseph as well) being of a twin-type. The dual nature of Joseph's name is shown by his being called Adonaim. Still more apparent is the myth where Rachel, in naming the child Joseph, says, 'The Lord shall add to me another son.'[117] Joseph, in the margin, is rendered adding, and iu (Eg.) means duplicating. The other child is Benjamin, son of the right hand. He was brought forth in the birthplace of the messiah, in Bethlehem-Ephrath. These are the two Horuses of Egyptian mythology, the two halves of Atum.
The two Sons of Joseph, Ephraim and Manasseh, are identical with Joseph, and both together are also called Joseph. Ephraim and Manasseh, the dual form of Joseph, are the exact equivalents of the twin brothers in all the mythologies, one of whom is the firstborn, but the other becomes the chosen heir. So when the two are brought to the blind Jacob, he stretched out his right hand and laid it upon Ephraim's head, who was the younger, and his left upon Manasseh's head, guiding his hands wittingly, for Manasseh was the firstborn, and he blessed Joseph[118] or the two sons as Iu-sif. The psalmist says: 'Let thy [p.304] hand be upon the Man of thy right hand, upon the son of man (whom) thou madest strong for thyself.'[119]
In the first bifurcation of the dual son Joseph, Benjamin, the son of the right hand, equates with the second Horus, Har the younger; Har of the right shoulder in Skhem. Hence he is reproduced as the youngest child of the mother Rachel, who dies at the time of his birth. Joseph, as the sun of the left hand, the sun that descends to the north, goes down into Egypt, into the pit, Sheol, or Amenti; Benjamin ascends to the right hand of the father, he is the sun born in Ephrath or Bethlehem, whence came the young sun-god whose goings forth had been from of old and were aeonian[120].
Joseph was thirty years of age when he went out over all the land of Egypt. If an Egyptian had been asked the age of Horus when he came of age and went forth to renew the cycle and finish his father's work, he would have said thirty years. At thirty years the man or the god became khemt, the homme fait, called the man of thirty years; as the god he was Khem-Horus, the male manifestor, the virile adult. Thirty years is a typical number for manhood.
Another name of the adult son is sheru, the pubescent, the bearded (compare sheru for barley), and this is determined by the number thirty. The best of all evidence can be adduced to show that the Joseph who went out over the whole land at the age of thirty years was the repa, the sheru, the lord of the mythos. This evidence is, the present writer conceives, irresistible and irrefutable.
The title given to Joseph[121] in the Hebrew Bible is חנעפ־תנפצ, but an entirely different version is offered by the Seventy who render it as Ψονθομφανηχ (Psonthomphanech). Josephus[122] has Ψοθομφάνηχον (Psothomphanechon). This has several variants however, in the different copies; no less than eleven forms having been found. Bernard[123] in his note on Josephus thinks the original Coptic name was Psothomonponei, which he explains by Arcanum ille mihi reclusit. Jablonski[124], in his letter to Michaelis[125], writes the title Psotempheneh. Whiston[126], L'Estrange[127], Lodge[128], and other English translators of Josephus render the first part of the name as Psothom or Psonthom, and to these two forms it may be finally reduced for the present purpose. It has been sufficiently set forth that the god Atum of Pithom was particularly entitled The Living, that is, P-ankh. In his transformation into the youthful god he was Au or Iu, the sif (son), and became the mythical Joseph. Au is Sutem, the hearer; Sutem is also the title of Atum. It was as Au or Iu-sif that he became the hearer. Thus the two titles of the god are Sutem and Pa-ankh, and according to the record made use of by Josephus, when 'Joseph was now grown up to thirty years of age he enjoyed great honours from [p.305] the King, who called him Psothom Phanech,'[129] that is, p (the) sutem (hearer), p (the) ankh (living). Sutem and P-ankh are the two titles of Atum of Heliopolis, and Joseph as the repa, the sheru of thirty years, is known to Josephus by these two titles, assumed in the solar allegory every year by the Iu-sif or son of Atum and Iu-sa-as. But the Septuagint has Psonthom instead of Psothom, and the word sent or shent is Egyptian, essentially a mystical and divine title on account of the duality which it embodies. In the Pshent crown it denotes the two heavens, or two lands. In the Pshent apron it includes both sexes. In shen or sen for the brother and sister it designates both sexes under one name. The shenti were a form of the twin-lion which was at first female and afterwards epicene. Sen also means the second of two; and the double crown of the gods indicated the second, the added and dual character of the two. To put on the shent crown was typical of attaining the upper heaven, or the zenith, which is the equivalent word in the European languages; and in the African Mandingo santo is heaven.
When Horus was khemt, or became the sheru of thirty years of age, he put on the upper crown which completed the pshent. When the virgin mother passed into the second phase as the gestator she was called sentem (Sntm); psonthom is the same word with the masculine article prefixed, and sentem indicates the dual one, whether applied to the mother with child, the wearer of the two crowns, two serpents, or to the double Horus, the youth of thirty who is composed of two halves. It is in allusion to this adding and twinning of the two in one that the bringer-forth, the 'woman,' in the Ritual[130], says, 'I have united Sut in the upper houses.' In the Tale of the Two Brothers[131], the elder brother who represents the first Horus, is said to reign over Egypt for thirty years, and thirty years is the age of the second Horus when he begins to rule. It is the typical age of the adult (sheru) god, the second of the two brothers. Now when Joseph was thirty years old he went out throughout all the land, or was made ruler over the whole of Egypt. He rode in the second (sen) chariot, a parallel to wearing the pshent crown or being entitled psonthom, literally the unified or duplicated p-ankh the living, meaning that he represented the two characters paired, blended, pshen-t in one, which took place when the divine repa became Ra, or the twofold Tum was reproduced as Iu, the sif. The Egyptian explains both Psothom and Psonthom, and the evidence is absolutely conclusive at once and for ever.
The Jews, says Petronius, in characterizing their cult, call unto Heaven's ears[132]. They did so, whether designated Egyptians in Egypt or Hebrews out of it, as the followers of Sut-Typhon, the long [p.306] eared ass, or Tum-Sutemi, or Iu (sif) the hearer, typified by the bullock. As Iusaas of On, the divine abode of Iu the son (sif), the mother, therefore, of Joseph, was a form of the goddess Neith, whom we shall find in Asenath, he would be sif-nat in Egyptian, and this is the exact rendering of the Zaphnath in Hebrew; sif-nat-p-ankh is the living son of Neith, the one of the two in the mythos who never dies. Thus we recover three Egyptian titles in sif-nat, the son of Neith, psothom the hearer, and psonthom the duplicated or added. The Hebrew ףסי for the added, contains the exact equivalent of p-sonthom, and it is applied[133] to the mother in conceiving or adding, where it expresses the sense of snatem the seeded, the gestating.
Asnath, the consort of Joseph, is recognizable as the Egyptian snat or snatem, a particular title of the mother, rendered the pleasing, reposing, sweet, agreeable, restful, peaceful. The root meaning is the bearing, the seeded (as shown by the seed-pod), and the name contains the elements of as, the great, and Neith, meaning the great or enceinte Neith. There is a full form of this name of the gestating mother in Mut-Snatem, a queen on a monument called the Statue of Turin. Iusaas, mother of the Iu-sa or Iu-sif is the Neith of On. As the goddess she would be called the daughter of Ra the sun-god, and pauti means the god or divine image. But according to the present interpretation the Jews in Egypt were worshippers of the Aten sun, the visible glory; and the Hebrew ערפ, to be prominent, stand atop or at the head, would describe the Har-sun on the horizon; this agrees with the Egyptian pra, to be visible, manifest to sight, and pehti means the glory. Pehti-pra is the visible glory of the disk-worship.
According to the psalmist the deliverer who led Israel up out of Egypt when he 'went out,' and the burden was removed from his shoulder, and his hands were set free, and his bondage ceased, was Joseph[134].
One very ancient name of the Hebrew male deity is expressed by והי Jahu or Jaho, which is also the name of a Phoenician solar god. This form enters into the name of Joseph[135], so that Joseph is Jahusif which in Egyptian is Jahu, the son. Jahu is represented by Ahu (Eg.), a name of Atum, the modeller and framer, as a variant of Hu, Au, and Iu, who is the son. Iu-em-hept was also Ahu-sif, or Atum as the son.
Joseph as the sun-god supported by Shu, the god of the bow, who is figured also as the uplifting hands of Ra, or by Moses with his hands upraised, is delineated in the astronomical chapter. 'The archers have sorely grieved him, and shot (at him) and hated him.'[136] That is a picture of the sun in the Archer, where he was diminishing daily and [p.307] losing strength. But he was sustained and protected by the lion-god of the bow. Shu with his arrow or Mâtet with his bow. 'His bow abode in strength, and the arms of his hands were made strong by the hands of the abir (ריבא) of Jacob. From thence is the shepherd, the stone of Israel.'[137] The character of Anhar is here portrayed. Shu supports the solar disk, Anhar the nocturnal heaven. 'Uplifted is the sky which he maintains with his two arms.' His hands sustain Ra in the weakness of his declining age, or in the lowest signs from the Archer round to the Fishes. He is the shepherd as the star Regulus. He is the crosser over the river Eridanus, and the abir or abar, as Egyptian, means the one who crosses, passes through willy-nilly to the other side, one who bored his way, as it appeared to the primitive men, through the earth to ascend on the side opposite. The stars that did this were the mighty ones. Anhar as Cepheus, Regulus, or Mars, was one of the Abirs or Kabirs.
Before being let down into the pit Joseph is divested of his coat of many colours. So is the sun as Tum on approaching the Pool of Pant (colours, paint). The Osirian says to this setting sun, 'Indescribable is thy colour; we are beholding all the colours of Pant.' 'Glory to thee, O Tum, setting from the land of life, in the colours of the Gate.'[138] 'Great one who journeys to the Production of Colours, ye are at the Pool (of Pant).'[139]
Tum was the sun going down into Egypt or Khebt, the north. He was Atum-Adon, and in his dual character Adonaim, as Joseph is designated. He too left behind his coat of many colours in the pit or Pool of Pant. Elsewhere, Joseph, or his Atzem, is brought up out of Egypt by Moses and Joshua.
In the account of the exodus given by Josephus from Chaeremon, the myth is manifestly mixed up with the Egyptian history of an exodus. The leaders are said to be two scribes, called Moses and Joseph, whose Egyptian names were Tsithen and Petiseph[140].
We have attempted to derive the Egyptian name of Tsithen, as the leader up, from the celestial Egypt or the Deep. That of Petiseph appears to resolve naturally enough. Atum was the son of Ptah and Peht, the lioness goddess; Iu-em-hept being a form of Atum, who as the son of Peht was Pehti-sif or Petiseph, the name of Joseph in Egyptian, as explained by an Egyptian expert. Thus we recover the solar Joseph, who was accompanied by Shu or Tsithen in the exodus of the celestial allegory, which is here mixed up by Josephus with Chaeremon's account of the expulsion of the lepers, aat, or pests of Egypt[141]. At the same time Tsithen, as Moses, supplies another illustration of his being the lion-god Shu, for Clement Alexander states that Moses had an earlier name known as Joachim[142]. Joachim, in Egyptian Iu-akam, reads, 'the shield or buckler [p.308] (akhem) of Iu.' Shu was the shield and buckler, the bowman, the spearman, the warrior in support of Ra and his multitudes. Iuakam or Jah-akam is an appropriate title for Moses, the manifestor of Jah, and leader of his people. Shu in his dual character (with Tefnut) furnished the Twins, and in an ancient Hindu zodiaci the sign Gemini consists of a human figure holding up both hands in the attitude of Shu, or Moses, bearing two shields, one on each side of him[143]. As iu (Eg.) denotes two and akam is a shield, this is IuAkam in Egyptian, and the two shields typify the double-support which Ma-Shu afforded the sun-god who here sits in the centre of the zodiacal signs as the Ao or Iu.
One name or title of Moses was Abiao.* Am (Eg.) is the leopard or cat-lion, into which Shu transformed when he made the 'likeness of Seb.' Ao is Greek for the Egyptian Au, the name of the young god in the 'House of Shu.' Abi-Au is thus identified both as Shu (or Ma- Shu) and Moses.
* Abiao. I am sure of my fact, but not of my authority[144].
The Israelites or children of Ra are the same as those who are found in the Egypt of the Hades and the wilderness of the Egyptian mythology. Their leaders are the young sun-god. Iu, Au, or Jah, and Shu, the older star-god.
Fuerst[145] says Iual, rendered 'Iu of God,' or Aliah translated 'God of Jah,' would be an absolute blasphemy. But Iu is the god Al, that is, the son-god, named as son of the mother, whilst Aliah positively identifies Jah as Al, the son, and Iu-al as Iu, the son, is synonymous with Iu-sif, or Joseph. ףסאיבא is a Hebrew proper name[146] which proclaims that God (Ab) is Joseph.
The proper name of Achiu[147] reads, God is Iu, i.e., double or twin in Egyptian, who as Iu-sif is the child who comes, and whose coming was of a dual nature, whence the personification of a biune being.
The name of Eliu-ani (ינעוילא) reads, 'to Iu are mine eyes.'[148] Iu or Au is the Iu-em-hept or Au form of Atum, who, as the son of the mother Iusaas, the child, sif, is Iu-sif, the Jewish Joseph, the twin or biune divinity.
Eloah is the name used by the ten tribes of Israel for the Elohim of the two tribes. Jehovah-Eloah[149], in the Ephraimite version, answers to Jehovah-Elohim in the version used by the ten. Because the ten, the Isharim, belonged to the cult of the genetrix, the goddess of the seven stars, in the first time, whereas Eloah denotes the god in a twofold form whom we now identify with Joseph.
Osiris (Asar), the son of Isis, is called Osiris-Eloh in the Carpentras (Phoenician) inscription; he is also the Neb-Iu on the monuments, and that is the dual or duplicative Lord who, as the son of the [p.309] mother, is the Iu-sif, the coming solar son, the exact equivalent of Joseph in Israel, the son who comes and duplicates, as Joseph reduplicates in Ephraim and Manasseh, the two sons or tribes whose divinity is Jehovah-Eloah.
It is known that the vau in הולא denotes an ancient plural, and לולא, so interpreted, signifies the dual El, as in Har the Elder, called Har-ur or Aroeris. Alala is a title of the Assyrian Tammuz. Elul also represents Har-ur as the name of this dual child of the southern solstice and the western horizon, the Iu-su or Iu-sif, who is the dual Eloah in Israel. הלא is a plural pronoun; הלא is a name for gods[150]; and these we take to be worn-down forms of הולא, the plural for the god of Jacob[151], and the Alvak of Magozim[152]. Melkart of Tyre was a form of the dual child of the mother, and he is designated the הלע (god) of fortresses. This is the same as the Alvak of Magozim in the Book of Daniel. The fortresses or rocks are the two horizons of the sun, and the Alvak Magozim, מזועמ־הולא is identical with Har-Makhu of the double horizon, or Atum in his dual seat.
Rameses III relates that he built a grand temple in the north of On for Tum, his Father Lord, and made an abode and a lake for Iusaas, and the total number of residents was 12,963[153]. The remains of this temple existed till quite lately, and were known as the Tel-el-Yahouueh, the Mound of the Jew. Our Jews had left Egypt with their Iu as Joseph, or as Adonai-Jah, before this temple of the Jew was built.
The worshippers of Iu were the Ius or Jews. It was a religious and not an ethnological name at first. The Jews were those who worshipped the son, more particularly the son of the mother, and might be Egyptians, Syrians; or Hebrews. The worship of the mother and son had extended over Palestine in early times.
'Our Bethlehem,' says Hieronymus[154], 'now our very most august spot on earth, of which the psalmist sings; "Truth has arisen from the Earth," the grove of Tammuz—that is, of Adonis—was casting its shadow: and in the grotto where formerly cried the infant Christ, the lover of Venus was being mourned.' So was it, ages before the era called Christian and the supposed incarnation of the god in mortal flesh and human form.
Rameses especially dedicates to Atum, as God the Father, rather than to Jesus as the son of Iusaas; and Atum, as previously stated, was the sun-god Ra in his first sovereignty. Precisely the same change can be traced in Israel. The dual Eloah, Iusif, was superseded in turn, as Jehovah, Elohim, Shadai, and El-Shadai had been. Hence it is written, 'Moreover he refused the tabernacle of Joseph and chose not the tribe of Ephraim, but chose the tribe of Judah, the [p.310] Mount Zion which he loved.'[155] Judah represents the god of the twin-lions, or Moses and Joshua, the god of the lawgiver. 'The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come, and unto him shall the gathering of the people be.' The deity of Moses and Joshua, in the ancient fragments, is Jah, and the name of הדוהי, implies the worship, acknowledging, or manifesting of the god Jah. Judah denotes a new kingdom distinguished from the ten tribes of Israel and the dual Ephraim, and is therefore the representative of the Twelve. But we have not yet done with the cult of Atum; tedious as this tracing may be, it is necessary to prove the religious origins of the Hebrews, with a labour far beyond the intrinsic worth of the writings, which in themselves contain but little original value or authority.
It was as Khepra, the scarab-headed god, that Atum made his transformation from the god of darkness to the lord of light. And in Psalms 80:1, we read: 'Give ear, O shepherd of Israel, thou that leadest Joseph like a flock, thou that dwellest between the Cherubim shine forth.' The Hebrew Lord, Adonai or Jah, is expressly associated with the cherubim. He rides upon the cherubim and is the Lord of Hosts that dwells between the cherubim[156]. His seat is between the cherubim[157]. Sitting, riding, dwelling, his place is between the cherubs, and these are represented as the two cherubs. It is probable, as asserted by Clement Alexander[158], that the earliest cherubs imaged the two Bears, a dual form of Jehovah as Di-Genitrix, the plural Khepti. The solar cherubs were the two scarabs of the Egyptian zodiac, placed in the sign of the Crab. These two beetles of Egypt were figured in an ark with their wings outspread, as in the description of the cherubim, whose wings covered the mercy-seat, and whose faces looked one to another, after the Egyptian pattern[159].
Josephus tells us that Moses said he had seen such things as the cherubs near the throne of God[160]. The Hebrew word cherub implies the same thing as the Egyptian Khepra, the scarab-headed image of the former and transformer. Khepra and kherf have the same meaning in Egyptian of forming and figuring. Khepra, the type of transforming by rolling and turning round, figured the circle, our cipher. Two beetles in the oldest zodiacs kept that circle of the sun at the place where the solstitial year began and ended, or in Egyptian language transformed. There was the gate that opened one way for the descent of the sun, and afterwards of the souls to the earth, the lower of the two regions; the other way being the outlet to the land of eternal birth, in the eschatological phase of the celestial Imagery. Although two beetles were pictured at times, the beetle itself was a biune image of working both ways, with hands and feet so to say, in rolling his globe, and making the circle. This has [p.311] dominated in the Hebrew for hands and feet, or the soles of the feet, kaph (ףכ), both extremities being named in the likeness of Khepra, the dual one. Kaphel, double or doubled, is the equivalent of Khepra the double-ended type of the biune deity.
Where the two beetles were placed was the join of the circle, the dove-tailing or two-oneing. It was the place of at-one-ment where the circle of the two heavens was completed; the sign of this conjunction being the two beetles or cherubs. The kaphareth, translated the mercy-seat and place of the meeting-cherubs, the tips of whose wings touched, and whose two faces looked one to another, was the seat, abode, throne of the deity, who, as the transformer at the kab (corner), was Khepra-Ptah. This goes far to identify the lord of the Hebrews, who rode on the cherubs and dwelt between them, with the beetle-god of those 'profane Egyptians.'
The nature or rather the number of the plural ending in oth (תו), as in Ashtaroth, has no determinative in the Hebrew, and yet the number in Ashtaroth-Elohim and elsewhere depends on it. Plurality in the hieroglyphics depends on the number of the gods reckoned in the godhead. One form of the plural includes nine gods. Put (Eg.) is number nine; the divine circle of the nine gods; and put is a later form of the word fut or aft for the number four, the four quarters, aft is a reduced form of hept (or khept), number seven; all because of the one beginning with the seven stars and the typhonian genetrix, who in the full form of the name of Ashtaroth-Elohim would be Hes-Taur-Hept, i.e., Isis-Taur-t of the seven stars and the ark, both of which are named hept. Khept and Hept modify into Aft (the same goddess) of the four corners. As representative of the seven, Ashtaroth is really Ashtar-hept, the plural being sevenfold. In the reduced form of Ashtar-aft (fut) the plural in Egyptian is fourfold, based on the four corners. It has now to be suggested that the plural terminal תו is the equivalent for Aft, number four, the four quarters of the ancient genetrix, called Aft in this character.*
* If, as is here maintained, the North Pole was the centre of motion first observed, the initial point of all beginning, the Great Bear would certainly be the type of number as well as reckoning, and this it will be shown to have been. The name of Kheb-ti (Sebti and Hepti) supplies a type-word for the nos. 7 and 10. When khaft has been reduced to aft (variant fut), for the four corners still represented by the ancient genetrix, we find this is a chief type-name for four. Khaft and hept have also a deposit in khat and hat for no. 4; this may be followed in the names for no. 4, as—
|Gade, Logone.
|Eketse, Lifu.
|Hoida, Woratta.
|Κατεε, Albanian.
|Kude-in, Timbora.
|Hatara, Singhalese.
|Chod, Paroparnisan.
|Wutu, Ende.
|Vots, Japanese.
|Chata, Siah Posh.
|Watsa, Netela.
|Auda, Gonga.
|Chatur, Sanskrit.
|Watchu, Chemuhevi.
|At, Karon.
|Ceithin, Scotch.
|Haat, Timur.
|At, Pome.
|Ceathar, Irish.
|Ehaat, Manatoto.
|At, Wandamin.
|Keturi, Lithuanian.
|Hatami, Palaik.
|Eat, Omar.
|Quatuor, Latin.
|Haudda, Kaffa.
|Atch, Lazic.
|Kithnucote, Kicai.
On the line of Aft or Fet, for the four quarters, we have the following names of no. 4:—
|Pette, Tsherkess.
|Apat, Tagala.
|Fat, Batta.
|Puet, Atshin.
|Ibidi, in Akkadian (for the square).
|Effat, Malagasi.
|Opat, Batta.
|Pedwar, Welsh.
|Fuddah, Maudara.
|M-Pat, Sasak.
|Boat, Amherbaki.
|Fadyg, Bishari.
|Opat, Bima.
|Evatz, Mallicollo.
|Fudu, Bode.
|Apat, Bissayan.
|Fat, Salawatti.
In the hieroglyphics the kân (earlier kafn) is the corner- [p.312] sign of the dwelling-place, the typical four corners named Aft. This kân is figured in Aft or Apt of the zodiac, where the genetrix brought forth the child. The Aft-Kan or Kan-Aft becomes the Hebrew kanphoth of the four corners, and the תו is equivalent to aft or fut, the Egyptian for number four. Thus the terminal in this case is a plural which has the value of number four, and the four corners[161], also the four quarters[162], are kanphoth. The kan, with the article suffixed, is the kanp, Hebrew kanph, to be bent or turned at the side, in relation to surrounding with a border. All is explained by the corner. The corner interchanges with the wing: we say the wing of a building. The kanphoth are the four corners, a type of the eternal; four times being an Egyptian synonym of 'for ever.' The Greek τετράγωνος ανήρ, a square man, for a complete and perfect or virtuous character, has the same primitive origin; a geometrical skeleton being thus clothed as a moral figure. 'Woe to the land of the double shadow,' says Isaiah[163], rendered 'shadowing with wings,' where the plural of kanph (םיפנכ) denotes the wings. This does not refer directly to the mountain chains of Egypt, throwing their shadows to the south and north, which was noticeable and noticed at Meroë[164]. The natural fact had been turned into a celestial figure, employed by Isaiah. The Kanphim or Kanphoth as wings, are the four wings of the two cherubs, the four wings of the two beetles of Khepra, the wings of the four corners of the circle established by Khepra-Ptah. The four quarters and wings are synonymous[165]. Four wings are equivalent to the double shadow, and these four wings, this double shadow, were portrayed in the Kaphreth, called the mercy-seat. Israel had dwelt mentally in this land of the double shadow, and therefore of darkness. 'Beyond Aethiopia' does not point to central Africa. The first land was Ethiopia or Kush in the northern heaven, the land of the north, and Khentu, the south. The next was the heaven of the four corners, first marked by the four great stars and then by the four quarters of Ptah, with the sign of the two beetles (Cancer) as the place of transformation. This is the land of the four corners or wings, and their double shadow, of the cherubim, now to be superseded by the new heaven of a later solar god whose corner is the east, and 'Damascus shall be the rest thereof, when the eyes of Israel shall turn towards the Lord.'[166] Damascus is the typical throne of Atum, whose double-seated ark was in the [p.313] corner eastward, the birthplace of the young god Iu-Su, the sun of the resurrection, and the rest answers to hept (Eg.) the peace.
In the hieroglyphics the closed right hand with thumb extended is a figure of six[167], as kefa the fist, a measure of six fingers. Also the Egyptian foot or khep is a measure of six digits. Thus, a fist and a foot were equal to twelve. Khepra was the personification of this hand and foot, with the numeral value of twelve.
The beetle may be said to he six-fingered, having six tarsi on its feet, the feet have thirty joints, corresponding to the six months of ascent and six of descent, together with the thirty days of the solar month; and it was said to live one six months underground and the other six above. Such was the image of Time, as Ter or Khepra, the beetle. Now one name of the mythical giant in Hebrew is Gibor (רובנ). This, as the Egyptian has no letter g, is a form of Khepra.
The giant when analyzed will be found to be only a repeating cycle of time, either on a large scale or culminating at the midsummer height, when the solstice was in the sign of Khepra, or Teman, in the south[168], in 'Thy Gibor, O Teman.'
The giant (Repha) of the Hebrew writings is described in the likeness of Khepra as having six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot; literally, the fingers of his hands and the fingers of his feet, six and six[169]; and again, his fingers were twenty-four, six and six[170]. These six-fingered and six-toed giants, or mighty ones, are nothing more than forms founded on the six-fingered Khepra. The particular instructions given respecting the curtains of the tabernacle are especially true to the symbolic number six (as kefa) and the principle of kabbing. 'And thou shalt double (kab) the sixth curtain in the forefront of the tabernacle.'[171] This was the tabernacle of the god of the two cherubs and of the Kaphareth.
It was in Gob that one of the giants was slain by Elhanan; another was killed in Gath; the latter name is connected with Khepra as רפח תג (Gath-Chaphr)[172]. Khat is to go round, reach the apex or height; shut and seal. In 'Khat-Khepr,' or the Crab, the circle of the solstitial year was completed and clasped. Gob answers to the Egyptian kab, the corner, angle, place of turning and doubling. The particular corner of the solstice may be in kab, the place of the inundation or libation in the sign of Cancer, and in the month Mesore.
This was the place of ending and renewal for a luni-solar year, and in the Hermean zodiaci Taht is seated in this sign. He may help us to understand how the giant was killed in Gob. In mythology an end is often represented as putting an end to, and the solar year in comparison to a moon was a giant. For instance, Khunsu is a youthful hero, like David; he is the luni-solar god, who carries the full moon on his head. He determined the circle of the equinoctial year, [p.314] which was marked as with us by the full moon of Easter; but, as the representative of monthly time he was set forth as slayer of the giant, and thence of the giants the type of a larger period.
David, the Egyptian Taht, also slays the giant in Gath, which we connect with Gath-Khepr, the sign of the beetle, where Taht represents the lunar god, and where the circle of the solstitial year ended, and the giant was slain by the lunar hero. In the astronomical chapter[173] we read: 'The Lord came from Sinai and rose up from Seir unto them He shined forth from Mount Paran, and He came with tens of thousands of saints.' And the lunar deity Taht is the god of Seir in the Egyptian mythology. Seir was the name of his temple in the southern Hermopolis. This answers to the celestial station of Taht in the sign of the Crab in the Hermean zodiac.
The lawgiver, Regulus, i.e., Cepheus, Shu and Moses, is the shepherd of the heavenly flock; the shepherd that led up Joseph like a flock; the 'shepherd[174], the stone of Israel.'[175] The shepherd, represented by the star Regulus, was also assigned a constellation, called the shepherd and his sheep; these arose when the sun entered the sign of Cancer. The one we may look upon as the shepherd in the bull calendar, the other in the ram calendar. This is doubly the domain of the celestial shepherd-king, as it was likewise the fiery region; the lion being a type of fire. Cancer, as a symbol of fire, was the antithesis and vis-a-vis of Capricorn, the representative of water. In these two signs occurred the mythical destructions by fire and flood. Enough that we identify the shepherd and the region of the sun in his fiery strength. One of the titles of Shu makes him the lord of Tarura, i.e., the furnace of the solar fire. Now when Moses, as the shepherd, was keeping his flock of sheep in Midian, he 'led the flock to the back side of the desert and came to the mountain of God, to Horeb.'[176] It was here the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush that burned, and was not consumed, and the Lord spoke to him out of the midst of the bush. This, according to the record, was the first manifestation of the god named Jah-Adonai in Israel. The place of manifestation can be observed among the celestial pictures of the planisphere.
We have seen that the initial point of the Mosaic calendar was solstitial. The year was to begin with the month Abib, the Egyptian Ab of the bull-calendar, and Akkadian Ab-ab-gar, 'fire that makes fire,' and as the solstice receded the initial point was placed in Cancer. The Egyptians made use of both. Thus there were two fixed points of commencement; one with the sun in Leo and the first zodiac of the four great stars; the other in Cancer when the zodiac of the twelve signs had been established. Ancient astrologers affirmed that Cancer was the horoscope of the world; it was, according to their tenets, the sign of commencement, of rotation, and growth. They say [p.315] further that by its creation the creation of the four elements became complete, and by their becoming complete all growth was completed. This applies to the four corners, as fixed by Taht and Ptah, following the four corners of Shu the star-god, in Leo, Scorpio, Aquarius, and Taurus. In the sign of Cancer is the ΰψωμα of Jupiter, a star of moderate nature[177]. Ptah, later Tum, is one form of the Egyptian Jupiter, and Cancer was his especial sign, the place of the two beetles. The change from what we may term the calendar and four corners of Shu to those of Ptah shifts the month of commencement from Ab (July) to Tammuz or Mesore (June). Now the Jews keep a fast in this month, in memory of the tables of the law broken by Moses on Mount Sinai. The breaking of the two tablets was followed by removing the tabernacle and changing its name to the Tabernacle of the Congregation, and afterwards the two tablets were renewed, which shadows forth the change from Abib to Tammuz, and from the sign of Leo to Cancer as the starting point of the solstitial year. This the imagery will show.
The Hebrew הנס (senah), the bush or tree, is the shenu, a thorn-bush. The shenu (Eg.) is the thorny acacia, also called the ash or tree of life. The Hebrew divinity is described[178] as הנס ינכש (shakani senah), the dweller in the bush of thorns. Our bush of thorns belongs to the man in the moon. The Negrilos of Malaya place their diviners in an arbour made of thorn-bushes, from which the divine voice is supposed to issue, as it did to Moses.
Bonwick describes a pit of a 'suggestive shape,' made use of by the Tasmanians in their religious ceremonies, which was surrounded with bushes[179]. This was their thorn-bush, whence issued the divine voice, and it was of a feminine type. But the name of Senah or Shena has other meanings. It denotes the place of turning in the circle where it is completed at the mid-heaven, therefore the place of the solstice and of recommencement in the sign of the lion. The lion, as the turner-back, is the shena. There is a star on the tip of the Lion's tail, designated the Claw of the Lion*[180] (β Leonis), called AsSarfah, the turn, because the heat turns away when it rises and the cold turns away when it disappears, and the lion shena was thus the turner away of both heat and cold.
* This claw on the tip of the lions tail has been represented by the sculptors of the lion upon Assyrian monuments[181].
The Shenti are a form of the twin lion-gods. Shenah (Heb.) and shena (Eg.) denote the place of repeating and transforming of one into another at the year's end. Shennu is the circle, orbit, circuit, enceinte, extent. Num is denominated lord of Shennu in the Ritual[182]; that is, lord of the repeatings, cycles of time, called 'Angels' or Shenan. Shennu (Eg.) means millions, crowds, attendants. The [p.316] chariots of God are twenty thousand thousands of shenan; the Lord is among them in Sinai, his holy place[183]. The Lord who rode on the heavens by the name of Jah in this psalm was a form of the sun-god, and like Num-ra, is the lord of Shennu, the region of time-cycles, the Hebrew Sinai; lord of Sheni, the Hebrew Shinan, who were the repeaters and repeatings of time and period, personified as the angels and saints of God, which, as the Assyrian Sanati, are years.
In the Persian zodiac[184] the bush or tree is visible in the sign of Leoi, but it is evidently the same (a vine) which fills the three decans of Virgoi in the Egyptian planisphere[185].
The rabbis say that Moses was bidden to put off his shoes when in presence of the burning bush because they were made of the hide of the ass[186]. The explanation is symbolical. The ass was typhonian, and belonged to the earlier cult of Kefa and Sut, the Dog-star deity, one of whose types was the ass. The pagan writers were right who contended that the Hebrew Jah, Iao, or Ieo, meant the Ass in Egyptian. Iu is a name for the ass, and the ass was an image of Sut, the earliest El or Elyon. The ass-head is an ideograph of the number thirty, the emblem of the end of a period, and equivalent to the typhonian tie. The ass belonged to the Sabean sonship, whereas Moses introduced the solar god in Jah-Adonai. Hence the typical putting off of the shoes in presence of the sun-god. The ass, as symbol of the solstice, is found in the sign of the Lion, and when the solstice receded to the sign of the Crab, or the change was made from a bull calendar to that of the ram, the ass is put off, is no longer the determinative of the year or the bearer of the coming Shiloh. The first tables were broken, the tabernacle was removed to the keeping of the cherubs or beetles, and the new god, who is not Jehovah nor Elohim, nor Jehovah-Elohim, is manifested to Moses in the mount of fire. The beetles identify the beetle-god, who is represented in Egypt by Ptah and his son Atum. The beetle Khepra, for certain reasons, was the type of transformation, and Khepra-Ra is the sun that transforms from one character into the other of his two manifestations, according as the year ended with the solstice or the equinox. The first form of the god was manifested by north and south; the later was the god of the double horizon. This is visible in the divine crowns. The crown of the north and south, upper and lower heaven, is worn by Atum crosswise, and is the equinoctial crown, showing him to be the god of both horizons, Har-Makhu, Khepra-Ra of the equinoxes; the first Khepra having been solstitial.
See how the symbols govern the sense of the Hebrew words in this case. שפכ (kaphash)[187], rendered 'He hath covered me,' is given in the margin 'hath rolled me in,' khepr, the beetle, having [p.317] been adopted as a symbol on account of its rolling its eggs into a globe of dirt to get them hatchedi. The beetle chiefly chose dung as the proper (lighter) matter to roll, and this was emblematic of the physiological fact that the seed of soul is enveloped in what would otherwise be excremental substance, the flesh-making source. The sneer of the later Hebrew writers at the dungy gods of Israel is directed against both forms of the excremental[188]. The dungy gods or gillulim (םילולג) a name of idols derived from rolling round and round about, were amongst the most familiar in Israel, as is shown by the maledictions of an after-time. They are designated the gillulim of Egypt[189]. These were images which illustrated the periodic nature of revolving time. Time in Egyptian is ter. This is a name of Khepra, the beetle being a phonetic t sign as well as an ideographic khep. Ap is likewise the beetle's name. Ter-ap, the beetle-image of Time, yields in the Hebrew plural form the teraphim, consulted in Israel for oracular answers. These might have been timepieces, to judge by the name. Ter is time, and ap is to reckon, estimate, calculate, declare, manifest, typify, or they might have been scarabaei-images of Ter-Ap, the beetle of time, and symbol of Khepra-Ra or Atum. Unfortunately for their character, however, the teraphim were related to the feminine form of time and period. The beetle that rolled up its substance as a male type was a still earlier representative of the creatoress as the beetle of the goddess and the moon[190]. And when Rachel sat on the teraphim and said the custom of women was upon her[191] she sat upon the teraph symbolically, whether there was any other image of time or not beneath her. The monthly prognosticators made use of the teraph in the secrecies of the mysteries with the Q'deshoth as their demonstrators. Hence the connection with divination, sorcery, idolatry, and iniquity[192], the teraphim that spoke vanity to the diviners of lies[193]. Looking in the liver was also a form of consulting the teraph[194], and the liver is the af (Eg.) or ab. Af is flesh, determined by a drop of blood; abt is the liver. The liver was a visible type of the fluid becoming fixed in solid blood, and therefore a symbol of the flesh-forming source, which the female rolled up as the beetle did its ball.
Ambrose[195], archbishop of Milan, identifies Jesus with Khepra, the beetle-god, when he calls him the 'Good Scarabaeus who rolled up before him the hitherto unshapen mud of our bodies,' as Khepra rolled the ball of mud or manure between his feet. This mud is the flesh-forming source of life, the physical basis derived from the mother. For this reason the two divine sisters, Isis and Nephthys, are also represented as rolling the ball before them.
Teruphah (הפורת) in Hebrew is the ailment, sore, bruise, to be [p.318] healed by the fruit of the tree of life[196]. Teruphah, from terph, is the feminine for healing, sanatio. The word terp (Eg.), as in Hebrew, has the meaning of food and sustenance, food being a synonym of giving life. The first food-giver, nourisher, sustainer, was feminine, and the blood was the life. That which was excremental in one aspect was the fostering food of life in another, as the maker of flesh, and the early physiologists began with the flesh-maker, the motherhood.
At the birth of Joseph Jacob leaves Laban, the father of Rachel, who is represented as taking away by stealth the teraphim or gods belonging to Laban. Now when we learn that Laban is an Assyrian god, who presided over certain diseases, and was worshipped as a secondary deity in the temple of Anu and Vul (or Bin) in Assur, the old metropolis of Assyria[197], we find an additional reason for the mythological interpretation of these supposed histories. This will explain the scorn of the later Jahvehists for the dungy gods, Baalzebul and Baal-zebub, of Israel. The teraphim, in one shape or other, were certainly Egyptian; for the rites of Taht are designated terp, and Taht was the lunar deity of utterance, the oracle of the gods; whilst an, the cynocephalus, the menstruating monkey, was one of his types, especially related to the determination of periodic time. They also use this symbol, says Horapollo[198], because it is the only animal that, at the equinoxes, utters its cries twelve times in the day, once in each hour. According to 1 Samuel 19:13-16, the teraph images were of the human shape and made of wood. These would very well agree with the cynocephalus or the scarab atop of the fourfold Tat of Ptah, like that found on the ceiling of the Ramession in the central position, between the first and last months of the year. The teraph then was a type of time. Time is ter (Eg.), akh means old, and in the Hebrew therach (חרת), the name of Abram's father, rendered by the Seventy, tharra, thare by the Vulgate, thara (Luke 3:34) means to turn, duration, or time. Ter (Eg.) is a time or a turn, and Khepra also signifies to turn, change, figure, form, and transform in relation to time. In the Hebrew[199] terah is actually recognized by name as old time, and the passage has had to be amended to make another sense. Terah appears as the idol-maker to whom the teraphim are attributed. Ter-ak (Eg.) also reads the Time-ruler, and the teraphim are images of Time, of Ptah, of Khepr-Ra, or Ter-Ra. The representation of Terah as the idol-maker is only a way of saying that in Israel these images were types of terah or ter, Time. The earliest form of Khepra-Ra is Ptah, the opener and circle-maker, therefore the turner. If we call him Ter as Time-god, then his two types of the beetle (ap) and the frog (ap) would be Ter-ap, in the Hebrew plural, teraphim, as images of time. [p.319] These are the types of Ptah, who is portrayed as beetle-headed and frog-headed. In one instance[200] he appears with the scarabaeus over the frog's head, and this double type of Ptah or Khepra realizes the Hebrew plural teraph, the teraphim. It is now proposed to identify terah with Ptah as Khepra or Ter, the dungy-god, who created with excrements.
The 'temple of Tara, which is the temple of the sun at Senkereh,' is described in the Inscription of Nebuchadnezzar[201] as having mouldered into ruin from extreme age, and its symbolic figures were no longer visible. Tara renders the Egyptian tera or ter, the name of time, of which the sun was one type, and Tara was also an ancient god in Babylonia.
Ptah appears on the monuments with Num and Neith. He is the son of Num, and in the Jewish traditions Terah was a prince, and a great one, in the palace of Nimrod[202]. In The Talmud[203] the wife of Terah is called Amtelai or Emtelai, daughter of Carnebo. Amtelai is the female Terah, and Car-Nebo contains the name of Num as Nebo, by permutation. Ptah was the image-maker of the gods; he formed the circle, shaped the vase, and was typified by the egg, the beetle, the imager, and the frog, the transformer. He was the divine artificer, and is depicted in the act of drawing a figure of Harpocrates, who is a type of the lower sun. Iamblichus[204] calls him the 'Artisan,' and we are told that Terah was in high favour with Nimrod, whose son-in-law he was, because he made his idols for him and was excellent in his art[205]. Ptah is called the father of the fathers of the gods, whose symbol of time, the frog or tadpole, was the sign of swarming millions. Terah was the father of the fathers of Israel, Abram, Isaac, and Jacob, whose children were to swarm in multitudes, numerous as the stars of heaven or the sands of the sea. The river Nile has also the title of 'the father of the fathers of the gods.' Now the Nile in Hebrew is Nahar, and Nahor is the father of Terah, the Hebrew Ptah. The river was the parent of Time or ter, on account of its periodic flood. They who dwelt on the other side of the river or the flood were those who used the river-reckoning, especially in a mystical sense. They were the Ibri and Cabiri, the sons of Eber, of Sutekh, of Kefa, of Sut-Typhon. Ptah is the founder of the solar circle on the four corners imaged by his tat; the circle mapped out in seventy-two divisions or duo-decans. Terah or Old Time was seventy years of age when he begat three sons in Ur of the Chaldees. This, according to the present reading of the mythological astronomy, represents the time of the seventy angels, seventy princes, seventy elders or shepherds, who presided over the seventy divisions of the heavens, called the seventy years of Terah, before he begat Abram. [p.320] Abram, the son of Terah, corresponds to Atum, the son of Ptah, under whom the change from the seventy divisions to the seventy-two was effected. Atum is the 'sun in his first sovereignty,' who wears the equinoctial crown. He is called the father of souls by the souls or gods in the Ritual. 'Atum has ordained to thee the earth,' is said by the Osirian in the Ritual[206]. The children of Abraham were to possess the earth. Atum was the bestower of the crown of justification of souls. 'Thy father Tum has bound thee with this good crown of justification, with the frontlet (or crown) of life. Beloved of the gods, thou livest for ever. Tum has ordered to thee the earth.' This is said in the chapter of the crown of justification[207]. Abram was the justifier in Israel, to whom the promises were made. The justification through Abram, expounded by Paul to the Romans, is the justification through Atum found in the Ritual, the justifier being an express form of this god as Har-makheru, the son who makes the word truth and is thus the justifier.
One of the representations of Ptah, the Hebrew Terah, is designated 'the god under his Tamarisk.'[208] This tree in Egyptian is the Asru or Aser. It is identical with the Asherah and the Eshel, both rendered 'the grove.' 'Abram planted an Eshel in the Well of Seven and called there on the name of the Lord, the everlasting God,'[209] This is one with the Tamarisk of Ptah, and the tree that stood in the Pool of Persea, the Well of the Two Truths, which had belonged to the genetrix of the gods and the seven stars, but was converted to the use of the solar cult in mapping out the zodiac. The typical tree is also called ןולא. Abram came and dwelt under the tree in the plain of Mamra. In Egyptian Mam-Ra is the sun of the dead, the mummies in the lower region. Atum was this sun of the dead that crossed from west to east, through the Hades where the mummies awaited their judgment and resurrection, or dissolution. Mam written with the two owls or two cubits is the synonym of Her-Ab, the crossing over, and of Amtu for the transit.*
* The Mam-Ra exists by name in the Maori mamaru, a name of the sun in the shades[210].
Thus the Mam-Ra is the Sun that crosses the lower region. Also mamari (Eg.) would denote the guarding and keeping of the dead; and in Japanese mamari means to guard, watch, protect, and preserve. The momboir in Dutch is a guardian. By comparing 1 Sam. 22:6, 1 Sam. 31:13, and 1 Chron. 10:12, we see that the terebinth tree of Israel is the same as the tamarisk of Egypt, the ashel of the one language and the asr of the other. The tamarisk of Ptah which is found to embower Atum in the Ritual is the same that covered Abram. According to Kimchi the name of the ashel tree or grove should be printed with six points[211]. But the recovery of the [p.321] Egyptian original will, in the present as in many other instances, enable readers to dispense with this shut-eyed mode of accenting and underlining, in which the nod is as good as (and no better than) a wink to the blind horse. The Kimchi's six points, however, may denote a relic of the ancient knowledge, as the tree was in the middle of the zodiac, the place of beginning and ending between the six upper and six lower signs. It was here the son was established in the place of the father, and Ptah transformed into Atum-Nefer-Hept, or later, Atum transformed into his son, Iu-em-hept.
The tamarisk tree is found in the 'chapter of turning away all injury,'[212] in which we read:—'I am the babe' (said four times, typical of the four corners, or for ever). 'Oh, Abaur, thou hast spoken like the sun! who preparest the block by the knowledge of thy name, for thou hast come from it for the great sinner. I am the sun preparing the obedient. I am the great god betwixt the Tamarisks; finished is Ans-Ra or the Pied at dawn. I am the creator of the obedient, the god embowered between the Tamarisks. I go out. The sun goes out in his turn.' Ans-Ra is the sun clothed in linen; that is, the mummy-sun, the Mem-Ra. He is the Pied, the Ab-ra, because dual, the transforming sun. The Ab-ra, as crosser of the waters, is Ab-aur.
There are ejaculations here which need not be strained one jot in reading them as belonging to the original of the story told of Abram the father of the obedient and his readiness to sacrifice his child. The speaker personates all the characters after the mode of the Ritual. The sun is embowered between the tamarisks; Abram dwelt under the tree. The speaker is the sun preparing the obedient for the block, as was Abram. He is the creator of the obedient; Abram was his father. The babe escapes and comes out sound. 'He it is who comes out sound: immortal is his name.'[213] Life has been given to him by the gods, as it was to the child Isaac. This scene takes place just where the sun-god puts on the white crown and 'spiritualises by the name of akh.'
The ram is said to have been caught in a sebek (ףבס), a word signifying to interweave and to bind. It is the Egyptian sefekh, a noose, a mode of capture, a bandage, a tie, and means to capture. Sefekh is the crocodile-headed god, called the capturer, and this deity assumed the ram's head when he became Sebek-Ra; therefore we infer that in the original text the true ram was Sebek, the ram-god, who was represented by the lamb, Ab. The passage out of Taurus into Aries is possibly illustrated by the story of the ram as the type of sacrifice.
A similar representation is found among the Khonds[214], but referring apparently to the earlier sign. Once they worshipped the goddess of earth, and offered human sacrifices to her, but when they changed to the religion of light and worshipped the solar god they offered up the [p.322] bull. They held a festival to commemorate the ceremonial change from the human to the animal sacrifice. At this festival in honour of the light-god, they killed a buffalo to celebrate the time when the light-deity sent a tribe-deity to crush beneath a mountain the goddess of blood, who had so long induced men to offer human victims to her, and dragged a buffalo out of the jungle, saying, 'Liberate the man, and sacrifice the buffalo.'[215] This is evidently derived from the same original as the Hebrew legend of the ram caught in a thicket, but refers to the time when the sun had left the Twins, and twin children had been sacrificed. This was common in Africa as in Galam, where a boy and girl used to be buried alive before the great gate of the city to make it impregnable.
Hitherto, when the bibliolater has met with legends like this, they have been set down to the missionaries; generally a foolish inference necessitated by a false theory. In almost every instance, from the time of the Spaniards in America, the missionaries found the traditions in the various lands. The Hawaiians have their prehistoric Lua-Nnu, who is their second Nnu, reckoned, like Abram, the tenth from the first Nnu. By command of God, he, like Abram, is to introduce the rite of circumcision, to be practised by his descendants; he is also commanded to offer a sacrifice to the Lord. 'Then Lua-Nnu inquired of God where he might find a proper place, and God told him, "Go travel to the eastward, and where you find a sharp-peaked hill projecting into the ocean, that is the hill of sacrifice." Then Lua-Nnu and his son, Kupulupulu a-Nnu, and his servant started off in a boat to the eastward, and in remembrance of this event was one of the mountains named.' This Lua-Nnu through his grandson became the ancestor of the two children of the latter, and the original founder of the Mene-hune people, from whom the Polynesians claim descent. In the parallel account of the children of Toho, the Marquesans not only enumerated the twelve sons, but also included the thirteenth child, who, like Dinah, is the one daughter[216], which means that they were in possession of the astronomical allegory, in the solar form of the Atum triad with the twelve signs of the zodiac, and of the legends in which the facts and the teachings were enshrined, and orally communicated in their mysteries. The twelve children in each case represent the twelve signs established in the first sovereignty of Ra as Atum.
Abram, we are told, buried his dead wife in Machpelah, in Hebron, having weighed the price of her grave in the balance. The balance in Egyptian is makha, which also denotes the level corresponding to the Hebrew plain. The sun-god, Har-Makhu of the double horizon, was the deity of the equinoctial level, or of the scales as its image, Atum being a form of Har-Makhu.
Then Abram took another wife, whose name was Keturah. Ketu, [p.323] later hetu[217] (Eg.), denotes one-half of the circle. In the Hindu astronomy the moon's descending node is personified as Ketu, and Ketu-Râ would be the consort of the sun in one-half the circle. Kat-Mut is an Egyptian goddess, from Khept-Mut, the genetrix of the north or hinder-part, answering to Ketu. Keturah bore six sons to Abram, corresponding to the six signs in Ketu, the half circle, or in Kheft, the hinder heaven. Keturah answers to Kidaria, a name of Demeter, and to Kutheria, a name of Venus; all three may be traced to Khebt or Kat (Mut), who personified the lower heaven, the earth or the hinder-part. We now see the meaning of the division of the whole land between Abram and Lot, in which Lot chose the right hand half and went east or journeyed east[218], leaving the other half for Abram. Of course no two men ever divided the whole land or the earth between them, and the talk about their doing so would be sheer idiocy. But the solar gods did so divide the whole earth and the heaven; the earth being the lower half and heaven the upper. Atum and Abram were the gods of the lower half; and they gave the earth to their children.
As Lot is one of the mythical twins, his nature explains his name as the adherer, the one attached (from ול, compare טל and תול), answering to the Egyptian luti (ruti) the twins, as lion-gods or as two gates.
Abram, according to Josephus, was the first to publish the opinion that there was but one God, the Creator of the universe. 'This notion,' he says, 'was the result of observing the irregular phenomena that were visible in the motions of the heavenly bodies.'[219] Which agrees with the fact that the solar deity took the place of the lunar and Sabean divinities, and to him was assigned the supreme seat when men had become the masters of solar time, as will be amply shown in the course of this inquiry. Eupolemus, according to Eusebius[220], reported that Abraham, as the inventor of astrology, taught the science of astronomy to the Phoenicians; he is also accredited with teaching this science to the priests of On (Heliopolis) in Egypt. This is valueless refuse as history, but contains true matter as mythology. Eupolemus[221] connects Abraham with the overthrow of Babel and the catastrophe of the Flood. He says, that in the tenth generation, in the city of Babylonia, called Kamarina (which by some is called the city of Urie, and signifies a city of the Chaldeans), there lived, the thirteenth in descent, Abraham. This too can be correlated when we know the nature of the Tower, and the meaning of the deluge. The covenant of Abram follows the flood of Noah, and the end of the times of the ten patriarchs. The bow or circle in heaven is one witness of a new covenant, and circumcision is another. This was connected with establishing the circle of the twelve signs, as illustrated by the twelve stones of Gilgal on the hill of foreskins. There was a tradition known to Paul[222], that [p.324] Abram in being circumcised was to become the heir of the world. Rabbi Jehuda Hakkadosh said: 'So great is circumcision that but for it the Holy One, blessed be He! would not have created the world; for it is said, But for my covenant (of the circumcision) I would not have made day and night, and the ordinances of heaven and earth.'[223] 'Abraham was not called perfect till he was circumcised. It is as great as all the other commandments put together.'[224] 'Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord hath made with you above all these words.'[225] The Jewish rite of circumcision by excising the prepuce-cover belongs to the later phase of the solar religion. With the worshippers of the sun or star as the child of the virgin mother, which preceded the cult of the fatherhood, the circumcision was by castration or by the longitudinal slit of the Maori and Fijian rite, rather than by cutting off the foreskin.
'Worship not the sun whose name is Adonai, whose name is Qodesh; and who also has names occult and not to be revealed in the world. This Adonai will choose for himself a people and congregate a crowd. Then Jerusalem shall be built up for a refuge, a city of the abortive, who shall circumcise themselves with the sword, dash their own blood against their faces, and adore Adonai.'[226]
Time was when Adon (Aten) the earlier form of Atum, as the son of the mother, was represented as the unfertile, mutilated, emasculated sun which set from the land of life, needing all the help that could be given typically from his worshippers who offered him their own emblems of virility in his effete condition. That was before there was any tread in the egg; before the fatherhood of the gods had been founded.*
* Under the Sabean and pre-solar regime, the ape, dog, jackal or fenekh, were the types of the son, the child of the mother, and these were types having tails. This may be related to the symbolical act recorded in Primitive Culture[227] of the father or father-in-law in Brazil, who, after a couple have been married, cuts a wooden stick with the knife of circumcision or a sharp flint, supposing that by this ceremony he is cutting off the tails of his future grandchildren, so that they may be born tailless. Sut signifies the tail, and the typhonian genetrix represents the hinder-part.
The solar fatherhood was established in Atum, who was Ra in his first sovereignty, as father of souls. This is marked by the introduction of the title Atef for the father, found in the style of Atum. The atef crown denotes the solar god as the father of souls in the lower world, whose substance is self-originated, and who transforms into his own son no longer born of the widow but the wife.**
** 'I am Isis, the widow.'[228]
Atum is called the 'Soul of the souls reserved in the west,' in whose following is the 'reserved soul the engendered of the gods who provided him with shapes. Inexplicable is the genesis; it is the greatest of secrets. Thou art the good peace of the deceased. Oh, Greater! [p.325] father of the gods, incorruptible.'[229] This is said when the god, with hands drooping, sets from the land of life. Yet he is accredited with power to beget the soul in the mummies of the dead awaiting their re-genesis. He is the father, the creator, the sun who is still virile, even in passing through the barren region of Anrutf. In Israel the solar fatherhood was established in the person of Abram, and its token is the covenant of the circumcision made in the blood of the male which superseded that founded in the emasculation of the male.
A curious illustration occurs in John's gospel. 'Moses therefore gave you circumcision, not that it is of Moses, but of the fathers.'[230] It was typical of and sacred to the fatherhood. Atum is the divine Father of the Egyptian genesis, who becomes the Adam of the Hebrew Genesis, the progenitor of the human beings. 'Thy servant is Being,' is said to Atum, as he descends to 'create the life of the earth' for the gods. 'Thy person is typified in Sekari.'[231] This refers to the re-genesis, in which Ptah fashions the flesh anew, and the deceased becomes a living soul. 'I am Tum, maker of the heaven, creator of beings coming forth from the world, making all the generations of existences, giving birth to the gods, creating himself lord of life supplying the gods.'[232]
In the Hebrew scriptures we find two adaptations of Atum, the great father; one as Adam, the other as Abram. And it is noticeable that the book of the generations of Adam[233] is immediately preceded by the statement, 'Then began men to call upon Ha Shem Jehovah,' or to assimilate themselves to the masculine divinity. Abram is apparently a Mesopotamian version of the same divinity as Atum. This was known to the learned among the Jews, and is acknowledged in the Kabbala Denudata. 'Know ye that the scintilla of Abraham, our father, was taken from Michael, and the scintilla of Isaac from Gabriel, and of Jacob from Uriel. These are of the substance of Adam primus, according to the mystery of repetition (revolutions) of his parts, to wit, of the right side and of the left side, and of the middle.'[234] This identifies them as the solar triad, and localizes their triple domain in the heavens.
Atum is a form of Har-Makhu, the god of the double horizon, or the right side, left side, and the middle. Har-Makhu was represented in the Kabbalah by Michael, who, in Christian art, is the god of the scales; in these he weighs the souls of the dead. Michael still presides over the equinoctial scales at Michaelmas. The scales in which the dead are weighed carry us back to Sut-Anubis, who was the Sabean Har-Makhu, and who was merged into a Har-Makhu whose type was the sphinx, and, lastly, we have the solar Har-Makhu of the Atum triad. Michael on the horizon, Gabriel in the height, and Uriel in the depth, equate with Abram in the place of Atum as [p.326] Har-Makhu, god of both horizons, Isaac in the height, and Jacob in the lower world.
Jacob is probably derived from the old god Kak, or Hak. Kak means darkness, and Kak is the deity of darkness, one with the Af-Ra, or Atum as the sun of the lower hemisphere. This agrees with the meanings assigned to בקעי; the dark, deceitful, cunning one, and the one born after. Also, akab or kakab (Eg.) is some part of the body, a tendon, possibly the tendon Achilles. The name of Jacob is sometimes derived from בקע, the heel. The heel, however, is but a type of the hinder and lower part. These significations assigned to the name lead us to the Egyptian Kheb, the lower or hinder-part or place. Kheb likewise means deceit, hypocrisy, to disguise, violate, change, and fits the character of Jacob, the cunning deceiver. The name with the ayin hard contains the elements in Jach-kheb, that is, the god Jach of the lower world (kheb), and as Jach answers to the earlier Kak, the full form is Kak-Kheb, the ancient divinity of the underworld, the sun that shone and struggled with the darkness all night long, just as Jacob is represented as wrestling with the opposing power during the livelong night; or groping through the gloom as the blind god, our 'Chache blind-man.' Jacob presents a picture of the blind Kak when he lays his hands on the heads of Joseph's children.
Kheb (Eg.) is a title, and Kak-kheb, or Jach-queb, is thus a title of Jach, the god of the Hebrews, whilst kheb, as a name for netherworld, identifies the meaning of the title. Then kheb means to change, to transform (khep) as did Khepra-Ra, the transforming sun. Jacob is the changer, the transformer, who becomes Israel.
The name rendered Isaac (קחצי) contains the elements of Itz-chaq. צי has the meaning of emanation, going forth, self-activity, and tends to identify Isaac with the manifestor of the solar triad, the sun on the horizon, the goer forth, the visible god, the shoot, the born one, the laugher and mocker, whose character is portrayed in the pastimes of the spring equinox or games of May. The kak is the old man, who became the gec or gouk of the first of April, and the object of the laughter and mockery of those who welcomed and worshipped the youthful god, who was the old sun transformed into the new: Tum into Hu, or Abram into Isaac. The significance of צי (or איצי) is found in the Egyptian ash, for emanation, emission, issue. In the Ottawa Iosco, or Ioskeha, we find another Isaac. Iosco is the white sun-god answering to Hu, god of light, the sun in the height, Atum as the white or light god. The triadic solar nature of Abram, Isaac, and Jacob is corroborated by the Jewish belief that Abram composed their morning prayers, Isaac their noonday prayers, and Jacob their evening prayers. This again agrees with Atum, on the horizon, Hu, above, and Hak, below. The Jews have a legend which relates that when Joseph told his dream of the sun, moon, and stars [p.327] bowing in salutation to him, the father said to himself, 'How did my child come to know that my name is Sun?'[235] The twelve sons also identify Jacob with the sun in the twelve signs.
With Abram as the solar god of a new covenant identical with that of Atum-Ra, in which Anhar becomes his confederate and son, we shall be better able to understand the war of the four kings against the five, ending with the victory of Abram. The four kings we take to be a form of the four genii of the four quarters, found in the Ritual, the four superior gods of the upper place, the four angels that stand at the four corners of the earth[236]; the four white men of the Book of Enoch[237], who 'came forth first,' one of whom seized and bound the star which fell from heaven and was cast out as a false watcher, and another of whom taught the white cows a mystery. The five kings we also take to represent the five intercalary days of the year of 360 days. Five deities are assigned to these five days, says Plutarch[238]—Osiris, Arueris, Typhon, Isis, and Nephthys. The war with them, as Drummond[239] suggested, relates to the readjustment of the calendar, to include the 365 days in the Abramic year. But a new reading of the passage is proposed. Twelve years they served Chedorlaomer, but in the thirteenth year they rebelled, and in the fourteenth year came Chedorlaomer and the kings that were with him and smote the Rephaims in Ashtaroth Karnaim, and the Zuzims in Ham, and the Emims in Shaveh Kiriathaim, and the Horites in their mount Seir; that is, the giants, the monsters, were smitten in all four quarters of the circle[240]. Shaveh, in Chaldaic, means the equator. The five kings, or added days, had served the four genii of the cardinal points for a time; but they rebelled, they were not true timekeepers. It was discovered that solar time consisted of 365¼ days to the year; hence the four kings fell upon the five in the Vale of Siddim and put them to rout. Chedorlaomer is particularly said to be the one they served. He, therefore, ought to be king of the quarter in which the year began and ended. He is the King of Elam, and in the Astronomical Tablets[241] we find that on the fourteenth of the month Tisri (September) the time of the autumnal equinox, and the first month of the Jewish civil year, a crown is given to the (celestial) King of Elam. The forces of Elam are in service; there is no return of peace to his men. The war with Typhon and Amalek began at the autumn equinox. The name of Chedorlaomer is explained in the Targum of Jonathan to mean the ligament which binds the sheaves[242]. The sheaves elsewhere stand for the twelve signs. So interpreted, this is the one of the four kings who girded up the sheaves, or made up the reckoning, with the five additional days which were found not to fully complete the solar year.
Now in Egyptian, in addition to the root of the name chedr, the warrior, the overthrower, there is a word khetr[243], related to the time-circle, meaning occasionally, and corresponding to the incidental days, the five days intercalated. In Assyrian 'kitar' is a name for auxiliaries or irregulars. Bearing this in mind, it appears likely that Chedor-Lagomer is named as the ruler of the intercalary five, called the five kings, who served him for a time and then rebelled. According to Berosus, cited by Apollodorus[244], there were five different Oans, or, as he calls them, Annedoti, the fifth and final one being Odacon. All these, says Apollodorus, related particularly and circumstantially whatever the typical Oannes had taught them[245]. The name is derived from an (Eg.), the fish, and to repeat, be periodic. In keeping with their nature as announcers of time, the rest of the name may be read by the Egyptian tet, speech, to speak, or utter; tet, the word, the logos; and there were five different forms of the announcers of the periods of the five planets, independently of sun and moon. In the Druidic system the planets appear as the five, the five angels, who are attendants on Hu-Gadarn. These five the present writer considers to be the five Annedoti of Berosus, and the five kings of the Book of Genesis[246], who were also superseded as time-reckoners by the god of solar time, called Atum within Egypt, and Abram out of it. The five great gods issuing from Sesen existed before Shu as Shu-si-Ra and the light of the sun, or before they reckoned the time of the stars by the sun. This agrees with the five kings who existed before the covenant of a new dispensation was made with Abram, which new covenant is now made with the sun of the zodiacal circle, the god of the equinoctial and perfect year, who is Atum in Egyptian, Abram in the Hebrew mythos, and Hu in the British.*
* The star, says Horapollo[247], is a figure of 5, because, although there are multitudes of stars in the heavens, five of them only by their motion perfect the natural order of the world.
In keeping with this rendering of the myth, the solar triad found in Atum, Kak, and Hu appear as the three Adonaim or 'my lords' in the Hebrew version. Also, the three make use of the name Jehovah, whereas Abram never does, in addressing the Lord or 'my lords.' The narrator says, 'Abram stood before Jehovah' and 'Jehovah spake;' but Abram only addresses Adonai, and says, 'Behold, I have spoken to Adonai!' Under Abram, then, was established the covenant of the solar god, the perfect male divinity, and its token was circumcision.
We shall further find that Hak (Kak or Iak-Kab) is identical with the god Jah-Nes, revealed by Moses. Kak, Hak, Iach, Jah, Iou, Iu, or Au, are all names of the black sun-god, the sun in the Ament or Sheol.
In the Turin Papyrus, among the supposed pharaohs of the thirteenth dynasty belonging to the cult of Sebek-Ra, who was the Amen of the Typhonians, there occurs the name of Ra-Nehsi[248]; that is, the black sun, or the black (neh) son (si) of Ra. The name is written with the foul black bird, 'Neh,' the later image of all uncleanness, and with the poop sign (T) for determinative, which also became a type of things foreign to the Ammonians. Ra-Nehsi is literally the nigger-god. It was the typhonian form of Amen, the concealed, or Sebek-Ra, the sun of darkness, and therefore one with Kak, whose name was modified from Khebekh (Sebek).
The altar of Jah-Nes, erected by Moses, identifies Jah as the black god, the sun in darkness, the deity of the hindward part, the lower heaven. The Hebrew הצנ, for excrement, agrees with nehsi (Eg.) the foul, and the black filthy fowl in one, the bird of night and the hindward part.
When interpreted by the mythos there still appear in the Abramic story a current and a colouring from the land of Aram or Mesopotamia. The genetrix Jehovah is superseded by the Adonaim of Abram, the divinity of a new covenant, the token of which was the rite of circumcision. This change is exactly what occurs with Moses and Joshua after the exodus from Egypt. Then Adonai, as Jah, is made known as a new deity to Moses, and the rite of circumcision is enforced by Joshua with the people who had been the reproach of Egypt. Thus the same thing, the introduction of a new divinity and the rite of circumcision, takes place (for the first time) twice over; also the different deities are identical. This proves the existence of two currents—one coming from the Mesopotamian source, the other from Egypt. But whether ethnological, and to what extent, or only mythological, is another question. The same myth may here have fresh starting points, but in the celestial allegory only can these be unified. Two sources for the same mythical matter can be established, but these only serve, so far, to prove the matter to he doubly mythical, and will not help us to make Abram, Isaac, and Jacob into historical personages. Still, we repeat there are two traceable currents, and the matter that meets in the Hebrew writings must have met there by two different channels, which appear to emanate from Egypt and Mesopotamia.
One name of the sun that crosses the Ament is Af. The Af-Ra, literally the sun that squats and crawls like the hef, a reptile, snake, or caterpillar. This is the sun whose symbol is the serpent which typified means of motion without apparent members. The particular type of Atum as the sun of the deep was the eel that makes its way through the mud of the meht, or moat, of the north. Af, Ap, and Ab interchange. Ab means to cross and pass to the opposite side, to work a passage through like the gimlet, still called the passer. Aper [p.330] (Eg.) is the crosser over. The name is applied to Anup, who is called the 'clean crosser over the place of birth.'[249] The Cabiri of seven companions, the seven stars, were the first that ever crossed over the waters, the earliest sailors. These become the ילבח, Abari and Ibri, the Hebrews. Eber, Assyrian Ebiru, is the crosser over, the passenger, as was the Af-ra when boats were built; previously he had to cross in his type of the frog, eel, worm, or snake, and crawl as best he could. Eber, or Heber, occurs by name in the Ritual as the crosser. 'I have flown as a hawk; I have cackled as a goose; I have alighted on the road of the west of the horizon as Heb-ur.'[250] This is in the chapter of making the transformation into the god Ptah. Heb-ur is the old returner, the opposite to the hawk of the east. The Osirian has crossed from the east and alighted in the west. This passage was made on wings through the air; it was the upper passage. The hut or winged disk of Hu, the sun above, was also a symbol of the crosser through the air. The lower passage was by water, or through the mud. The frog-headed Khepra could swim; he also crosses in his boat[251]; 'The divine passenger (Hebrew, Eber) of the boat of Khepra'[252] is a title of Atum as the crosser, 'speaking words to the gods in Asher-ru.'
Rem was an ancient epithet of the supreme deity. Among the Phoenicians it was a title of Baal. A Syrian god (Rimmon, ןומר) represented Adonis in his mourning phase[253]. Zechariah refers to the great mourning of Hadad-Rimmon[254]. Rem is compounded with Baal in Bal-Rem, a title of the Libyan Baal[255]. It was applied to Saturn as Baal by the Phoenicians. The name appears as ramas (Ραμας) in Hesychius[256]. Rem (Eg.) is also the fish, one of the watertypes. Baal-Rem is Sut, the son of the water-cow, or Remakh. The name of Abram, according to Apollonius Molon[257], signified 'the Father's friend.' One name of the god Rimmon is Mermer (Akk.), and in Egyptian Mer-Mer means the friend.
The Mohammedan Arabs held Abram to be identical with Saturn, and represented him in the kaaba as an old man with seven arrows, or lots of destiny, in his hand[258]. The same figure with the seven arrows was worshipped by the Arabs under the name of Hobal, who was a form of Saturn. This is important to the genealogy of Abram, because the Hebrew solar god as the father, was once the son of the mother whose earliest form was Sut, Bar-Sutekh, Saturn, Sut-Renn, or the Sabean Baal.
There was a temple dedicated to the god Rimmon in Damascus, and the monarchs of Damascus were assimilated to this god, with Rimmon in their names.
The name identifies the sun as the red (המר to be red), and weeping [p.331] (rem (Eg.), to weep).* Adonairem is the weeping Adonai, or Tammuz, whose mourning was celebrated by the women of Israel.
* Abram. Abraum is an English name for a reddish kind of clay. 'Abramcoloured' is a phrase used by Shakespeare[259] which was changed to auburn in the Folio of 1685. Abram and auburn permute as two forms of one word (see remn, Eg.) for a reddish colour.
We shall find that Rimmon and Abram, who are both of Damascus, represent a character of the same solar divinity, as the weeping, crawling winter sun, called in the solar litanies remi, the weeper, the sun who as Af-Ra struggled through the rem (Eg.), a name for the gorge, throat, or passage. Rem, or Ram, is a name in Hebrew compounded with Adonai in Adonai-ram[260]. The same name is also compounded with Iali in the Hebrew proper name of Ramiah[261]. Thus we have the god Rem, Egyptian Remi, identified with Iab and Adonai, and Adonai is Tamnmuz, the son of the mother, who became the later Atum in the character of divine father of the son.
In Hebrew racham is the womb, and in the change of the name Abram (from םרבא to םהרבא), the cheth only needs the mappiq sign to show us that Abraham is Abracham, the womb-father, hence the father of multitudes. Abram can also be identified with Atum by means of the legends.
In the Egyptian drawings the Af-Ra is portrayed as the father of the multitudes of souls. He appears as the god who navigates the lower heaven, and is represented in the act of begettal, revivifying the mummies of the beings who await their resurrection, the natural imagery being applied in expressing the eschatological ideas. As such he is the Mam-Ra.
Abram is said to have been king of Damascus, where there was a village at one time called the 'Habitation of Abram.' The Egyptian name of Damascus is Tamsakhu, or Tumnsakhu, the shrine or gate of Tum. The name of the city is said to have been taken from King Damascus in honour of whom the Syrians consecrated the sepulchre of his consort Arathis as a temple, and regarded her as a goddess worthy of the most sacred worship[262]. The goddess Arathis is the Egyptian Erta, a cat-headed Deess, and therefore a form of Pasht, who was the consort of Tum, and of whom he was reborn as the son, Nefer-Tum, or Jesus (Iu-su), in the Sakhu of Tum, the Damascus in which Israel was to find the rest or peace personified in lu-em-hept[263].
We shall likewise find the character of Remi, the Af-Ra, the sun that crossed from the west, and struggled through the Ament, portrayed in the sufferings of Job.
This book was one of the last to yield up its secret to the comparative method, the solar allegory has been so naturalized as to hide its face beneath an almost impenetrable mask. The 'Open Sesame,' [p.332] however, was found at last in the name. There is often more in a single word for the present purpose than can be found in any volume of words. Tradition[264] mentions the earlier name of Job as being בבוי (Ιωβαβ) who was an Edomite[265], one of the kings of Edom who reigned before there were any kings of Israel; the Vulgate and the Seventy also identify him as the hero of the Book of Job[266]. Fuerst[267] gets out of the name, written בוא, the meaning of the turning, returning, whence converted one. In Egyptian bab signifies to turn, circle, go round, revolve, also a hole, cavern, the pit; in Talmudic Hebrew, bib is the hollow, the pit. God is said to answer Job 'out of the whirlwind,' and Bab (Eg.) is the name of a whirlwind as well as the void of the underworld. Au (Eg.) means to be old, sad, and afflicted. The earlier form of au is af, answering to the Hebrew וי in בבוי, and Af is a name of the sun in the lower hemisphere, or bab, later bau, the hole of the tomb. Af-bab, the sun of the lower region, represents the Hebrew Iav-bab (or Iobab) and would denote the sad, old, afflicted winter sun stripped of all his power and property, and shorn of all his glory. 'Thou puttest thyself as a boundary, a limit round about the very roots or lowermost reach of my feet,' is the sense of Job[268], where the Authorised Version sets him in the stocks; and this language is particularly appropriate to the sun in the netherworld. So read, Jaybab is the equivalent of the Af-Ra, the sun that crawled (at) through the infernal region, where Satan the enemy, the accuser and tormenter, as the Apophis, was supposed to treat and torture the poor old helpless sun as badly as he is permitted to do in the Hebrew scripture only in the Egyptian there is no triad of talking tormentors.
The drama of Satan obtaining the divine permission to torment and try the spirit of Job is suggested in Psalms 109:6 where we read 'Set thou a wicked man over him, and let Satan (the adversary) stand at his right hand' to resist him. So Satan stood at the right hand to resist Joshua. So Satan, as Sut, torments the sun-god in the Hades.
In the Ritual the sun and soul are identical. Here is the suffering, tried, and tormented one.
'It is the sun himself.
Save thou the Osiris from the god, stealer of souls, annihilator of hearts, living off filth. The darkness is of Sekari; he has terrified by prostrating. It is Sut; it is the slayer.
Oh Creator, dwelling in the bark (Khepri) forming his own body (or forming his body eternally), save thou the Osiris from those who are the guardians and judges. I do not sit in fear of them. Nothing of a nature hateful to the gods has been done by me, because I am the Lord in the great hall (that is, the judge himself). The Osiris goes purified to the place of (re)birth, he has been steeped in resin (Tahn) in the place of preservation.
Kepri in his boat is the sun himself.'[269]
Job is the same personification as Remi the weeper. His 'roarings are poured out like the waters,'[270] his afflictions are reproduced in a drama of horrible physical suffering. The character of the Af-Ra is curiously correct. 'My flesh is clothed with worms and clouds of dust.' 'I have made my bed in the darkness; I have said to corruption, Thou art my father; to the worm, Thou art my mother.' 'I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls. My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat.'[271]
The Af-ra, as before said, is synonymous with the worm of darkness making its way through the earth. Af (Eg.), to squat, also denotes the matter of corruption, the blood-substance, the flesh.
This clue enables us to comprehend the mixture of doctrine concerning the hereafter. Man dies and is ended, but Job lives and will rise again; he is the Af-Ra, the Iav-bab, who completes the circle and emerges from the Nuter-Kar. 'Man dieth and wasteth away, yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? If a man die shall he live?' Evidently not. 'Man lieth down, and riseth not, till the heavens (are) no more, they shall not wake, nor be raised out of their sleep.'[272] But the speaker is not a man. He is the solar personification on whose transformation and renewal so much faith has been founded. He will assuredly rise again. 'All the days of my appointed time will I wait till my change come. Thou shalt call and I will answer thee.'[273] He asserts the resurrection for himself, whilst denying it for man. This belongs only to the solar allegory. Also the other speakers do not refer to the resurrection of man.
We are literally discovering the skeleton of mythology buried in the body of eschatology, and here and there the bones come more prominently into view.
For example, in the passage rendered 'I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth,'[274] the redeemer is the לאג or לואג, and the whole solar doctrine now contended for is to be found in this gavel, or redeemer, when rightly interpreted.
The Hebrew gavel represents the Egyptian Khepra—the beetle-headed divinity who redeemed the dead by re-begetting them in the underworld, corresponding to the grave or burial-place, which, in Hebrew, is the qeborah; Arabic, kabr; Malayan, kubur; Swahili, kaburi; Hindustani, kabr. Khepra symbolized becoming, he was the sun of morning. In a papyrus in the Louvre it is said: 'The majesty of this great god attains this region (the 12th of the subterranean world, corresponding to the 12th hour of night), where utter darkness ends.'[275] He transformed to rise again, and was the god of that metamorphosis and resurrection promised to the just. Khepra with folded wings symbolizes the metamorphosis, the [p.334] transformation. Ptah-Khepra is said to fashion his flesh anew. The process is exhibited as the fecundation of the mummies of souls awaiting their resurrection from the dead, and their change was the ransom or redemption of the later phraseology, as in the Turkish kefr, an expiation, and Hindustani kafari, a penance or expiation for sin. If we read the words of Job thus: 'I know that Khepra liveth, he who is the eternal being, the re-erector, and that he shall ultimately stand and be established on the earth or the horizon,' we recover the Egyptian doctrine of the book.
The identity of Khepra the transformer with gavel the redeemer is also shown by the cognate chavel (לוח), a name of the Talmudic phoenix[276], which transformed itself by fire every 500 years, and arose renewed from its ashes. This helps to realize the sense assigned to the word nekb (Eg. nek) in the passage 'yea, though calcined (like the phoenix in the fire), yet shall I rise again.' The image is also used by Job[277], 'Then I said, I shall die in my nest, and I shall multiply my days like the phoenix,' לואג or לאג, לוח. Gal or gavl is a frequent epithet of God in Hebrew, as the deliverer or redeemer; and this identifies the deity at last with Khepra, the god of the solar resurrection. But the Hebrews have not only the divinity of Khepra as god and as doctrine, they have the beetle likewise by the name of chargal (לגרח),* literally Khepra, the circle-maker[278]. The name answers to the doctrine of Gilgal, or the on-rolling, and Khepra was the roller on of his seed-ball, and thence of the sun and the soul. For the doctrine of Khepra, the raiser up from the dead, is at the base of the Hebrew Levirate, in which the living brother raised up seed to the dead one, and was called the gavel. Khepra signifies to assume the shape of, as the gavel did of his brother; also to generate, and gavel means to perform the marriage duty, as the redeemer or Khepra[279]. This doctrine of redemption was likewise applied in the law of Moses, where the man who had sold himself into slavery was ransomed or redeemed by his kinsman as gavel, goel, or Khepra.
* It appears to me that the beetle Khepra is referred to by Isaiah[280] 'In that day a man shall cast his idols of silver and his idols of gold, which they made for him to worship, to the chaphr (רפח) and to the ףלצע,' rendered moles and bats. But the images most probably represented the creatures they are to be thrown to, and one of these is the chaphr or Khepra, the digger of diggers. Chepsh (שפח) is a Hebrew name for the beetle[281]. The bat, according to Horapollo[282], is the symbol of a woman stickling and bringing up her children well. Its name, staakhmu (Eg.), shows it was a flying chimera, in allusion to its dual nature.
The sun that suffered and saved the world was considered to be the true sun as Makheru, the perfect as Tum, the constant in all his trials, the overcomer of the Apophis. Such is the character of Job the righteous, true and perfect man and conqueror at last. Also as the sun that rises again from his lowly state of loss and penury, he has [p.335] restored to him twofold all that had been taken from him. That also occurs only in the realm of myth. This view of the book will suggest some new readings of the text and throw some light on the old.
The use of the word רשב for the flesh indicates the image of erection and reproduction. This can be corroborated both in Hebrew and by the Egyptian shar, puberty and promise[283]. The male emblem of Khem and Mentu was the type of the sun of the resurrection, that is on the horizon, and Khepra is the re-erector. Again, as solar god Job says[284], that thou wouldst hide me in the grave, that thou wouldst keep me secret.' The word here used is tzephen (ןפצ), meaning to cover, cover closely, enclose, conceal, to be veiled, hidden, dark, to preserve or keep. But the Hebrew terms derived from the organic root are too abstract to convey the whole meaning.
Sef (Eg.) is bitumen or pitch used in sealing up the mummy, and on the theory that the original was Egyptian, the sense is, 'O that thou wouldst hide me in the grave, pitched and sealed as is the mummy.' This could not be with the suffering god; but he is here made to envy the human mummy.
The Egyptian and Coptic calendar contains many relics of the past. For example, the 17th of the month Hathor, the day on which Osiris entered the Ark, is still marked in it as the first day of the season for navigation in the Indian Ocean! This calendar will help us to establish the mythological and solar nature of Job. We read in it that on the first of the month Taht (Tout) Job took a warm bath and was healed of his sores. This was the first day of the Egyptian New Year, which remains the Coptic Norôz or New Year's day[285].
Also, the calendar contains 'Job's Wednesday,' the next before the Coptic Easter, and on this day many persons still wash themselves with cold water and rub themselves with a creeping-plant called raara eyoub or ghabeyra on account of a tradition that Job did this to obtain 'restoration to health.'[286] This restoration belongs to the sun of the equinox; the other to the solstice or the beginning of the Egyptian sacred year. These doubly identify Job with the solar god who was first the Mar-sun (Aten) of the north and south and afterwards the Ra-sun (Atum) of the equinoctial heaven.
The mythical matter of the book has been recomposed and reapplied for human use. As in the Psalms however, the grandeur of the writing is often the result of its indefiniteness, and the mental mist which our ignorance of the mythology leaves us in is one great cause of the magnificence. The solar theory may perhaps explain why the reputed home of the patriarch Job in the 'Holy Land' is a kind of Mecca for negro pilgrimages.
The Land of Uz or ץוע, if rendered in accordance with the myth, is named from the Egyptian khepsh, or at least is represented by it. With the ayin hard, the Hebrew word is gvz, an equivalent of khepsh. Khepsh is the hinder thigh, the Great Bear, the place in the north where the sun suffered and died to be reborn, corresponding to the meskar or meskhen of the solar house.
The student will perceive how closely allied to the bewailings of Job are the lamentations of Jeremiah, who seems to be the figure of Jah as Remi, the weeper, or Remiah, with the yod prefixed. His lamentations are essentially those of Remi the weeper, the suffering sun in Rem-Rem, the place of weeping. 'I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath. He hath led me and brought me into darkness. My flesh and my skin hath he made old.' 'Mine eye runneth down with rivers of water.' 'Mine eye trickleth down and ceaseth not, without any intermission.' 'Waters flowed over my head.'[287] The third chapter is an exact replica of the bewailings of Job. The words, 'All ye that pass by, behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow,' are an express utterance of the suffering Remi. In the person of Jeremiah, Remi is turned into the utterer of the oracles of Jah[288]. Remi-Jah is found elsewhere as Remi-Baal or Jerombaal.
Sanchoniathon quotes the authority of the Jewish priest Jerombaal, who was the servant of the god Ieuo[289]. If we translate Baal by Jah, Jerombaal is Jeremiah. Jeremiah was considered a kind of protecting genius to the people of Israel who was continually pleading for them before the throne of God. Remi the weeper precedes the messiah Horus, and Jeremiah was also considered to be, like Elias, a precursor of the Christ who was to come. The Psalms of David likewise give utterance to the wailings of Remi the weeper.
'I am weary with my groaning; all the night I make my bed to swim; I water my couch with tears. Mine eye is consumed because of grief.'[290]
'I am a worm and no man,'[291] corresponds to the sun that wound its worm-like way through the earth or the depths.
Abram identifies himself in Genesis[292] with the character of the sun of the netherworld, called the infertile sun of Anrutf, the barren sterile region, in his complaint of being childless. This chapter appears likewise to contain a relic of the genuine mythos in the passages: 'And when the sun was going down a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and, lo, an horror of great darkness fell upon him ... And it came to pass that when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace and a burning lamp that passed between those gnr.'[293]
It is a picture of the sun-god going down into Egypt, the Khebt of the celestial north, like Atum, as he sets from the land of life, when Nu, the firmament, seeing in her son the Lord of Terror, greatest of the terrible, setting from the land of life, becomes obscured[294]. The smoking furnace and the lamp of fire are in accordance with the legends of Abram's furnace. Also a smoking furnace may be seen in the Egyptian planispherei, as the altar with its fire[295].
Abram, in various traditions, is reported to have been cruelly persecuted and cast into a fiery furnace by the Chaldeans, from which he was saved by miracle. Ur means fire, and according to the Vulgate rendering of 2 Esdras, 9:7, Abram was delivered from the fire of the Chaldees, not from a city, and this belief or superstition, that is an uninterpreted relic of mythology, is said to be general among the Jews.
The Af-Ra was a god of solar fire, whose furnace was the Ament, out of which flew the starry sparks. But af is the earlier kaf or kep (Eg.), which means heat, light, fermentation or fire. Hence fire, in Maori, is kapura; in Assyrian gibil, a burning, and this agrees with Khepra (Ptah), who was the fire-god. Kep modifies into hep, and we have the Greek Hephaestus, the fire-god and fashioner by fire. Khepra-Ter and Terah were the fashioners by fire, and just as kepr modifies into apr or afr for fire, so does the Af-Ra follow Khepra-Ra; and Abram is the son of Terah, associated with the furnace of the lower sun, the parallel of Atum as the son of Khepra-Ptah, the Egyptian Vulcan.
The first idea of fire or heat would be derived from the sun; and the sun below the horizon, where the fire burned all night to be reproduced at dawn, was the furnace from which Abram escaped. The land of רוא was the domain of Khepra-Ra, the beetle below the earth.
The connection of Abram with Saturn can be traced through the crocodile-headed god, Sebek, or Kevekh, a son of the typhonian genetrix, whose name modified into kak. When Amestris, the spouse of Xerxes, sacrificed seven children to the god of darkness and the infernal regions[296], the number identifies the rite with the worship of this solar Sevekh, whose name signifies no. 7, and with Kak, whose name denotes darkness. He was worshipped as the ram-crocodile god at Ombos. There was a temple of Kak, built by Amenhept-Hui in the time of Amenhept III, and in the district of Kak. It is a very old name, as a King Kakau, of the second dynasty, is assimilated to the ancient Kak, the sun of darkness. Kak becomes Hak in the triad of Atum, Hu and Hak, and the black god of Biban-el-Muluk brings on the name and character, as Iu or Au.
In the Book of Revelation[297] there appears a lamb with seven horns [p.338] and seven eyes, who is represented in the character of the Lord of Lords and King of Kings, receiving the worship of the four beasts, the types of the four corners, and the four-and-twenty elders, the twenty-four judges in the Babylonian astronomy, and of the host of angels. In Egyptian, Sevekh is no. 7, and Sevekh is a form of Sebek, who became the ram-headed god of the thirteenth dynasty. The young ram is, of course, the lamb—the ram that was depicted as a lambi in the Persian zodiac[298]. It was shown in the first chapter that a mother of the Sebek-hepts was named Aaht-Abu, the abode of the Iamb. The Sebeks, therefore, adopted the lamb as their type of the ram, which means that they worshipped the male divinity in the form of the son of the mother; their cult in the solar, as in the earlier Sabean stage, being that of the virgin mother and her child. They were Typhonians because they rejected the fatherhood, and continued the pre-monogamous mythological types.
The type of the Ammonians was the ram, as begetter; the lamb represented the unbegotten, or rather the self-begotten of the mother, and not the son who proceeded from the father. Sebek, the ram-headed, was the lamb (abu or ab) who became the later lamb of God as the type of sacrifice, just as the bull had previously been. Further, there is a favourite terminal in the names of the Sebek-hepts of the thirteenth dynasty. It is that of Ab-Ra. We find in the lists: Antu-abra, Her-abra, Nefer-abra, Netem-abra, Saukh-abra Uah-abra; Ab-ra being the sun, as the lamb, or Sebek-Ra, whose name is synonymous with the number seven. Sebek or Sevekh was the solar continuity of the earlier Sut of the Dog-star in the typhonian regime. The seven (Sevekh) are to be found primarily in the seven stars or spirits of the Great Bear, and the seven horns and seven eyes of the lamb in Revelation are rightly identified with the seven spirits sent forth into all the earth, who, in the Book of Zechariah[299], are the seven eyes of Jehovah. The lamb, the hornless type, as child of the mother alone, corresponds to the first Horus, Har-pi-Khart, the dumb (kart, silent) child, and the two are blended in one image by Isaiah, in his portrait of the suffering Messiah. 'He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.'[300] In the form of Har-pi-Khart he only points to his mouth. He represents the sun born at the summer solstice, the God who descended and suffered and died; who in one myth is the blind Horus sitting solitary in his darkness and blindness; in another he is Kak (or Hak), who feels his way through the darkness by the sense of touch; in another it is the Af-Ra, the crawling lower sun, the eel, worm, or snake; and in another it is Abram. Ab denotes the young sun-god, whose type was the lamb; and rem (Eg.) the weeper, completes the title and identifies the first Abram with the other forms of the solar god, who was born [p.339] of the virgin mother, such as Aten, Sebek, Tammuz, and Duzi. This was before the change of name. That change implies the change from the son to the father: 'Thy name shall be called Abraham, for a father of many nations have I made thee.'[301]
The corresponding change was made in Egypt, when Aten, the son of the mother, was converted into Atum, the father, which was probably in pre-monumental times. The change is further illustrated by the witness of the seven ewe lambs, as token of the covenant made at the well of the seven (Shebag or Sevekh), when Abram calls upon the name of the everlasting God[302].
The Abram of the first covenant represents the sun-god Aten, the Har of both horizons considered to be the dual son of the mother. He and Lot are the two Horuses of the two heavens. In this phase Abram laments that he is not a father, and has only Eliezer of Damascus, who is not his son, to be his heir. His condition corresponds to that of Ra, when the weary god complains that he cannot go further without another to support him, whereupon Shu is given to him by Nun to be his son and supporter. 'Said by the Majesty of Ra, I assemble there (in the fields of heaven), the multitudes that they may celebrate thee, and there arose the multitudes.'[303]
'And He (the Lord) brought him (Abram) forth abroad, and said, Look now toward Heaven and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be.'[304]
'In that same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram.'[305]
The result of this covenant is that a son is given to Abram in the person of Ishmael. In the Egyptian mythos Shu is given to Ra as his first son; in the Hebrew version, Ishmael is given to Abram. Shu, in the dual form, is either Ma-Shu or Shu-Ma; a name of the Pool of the Two Truths, and Shu-ma-el is an equivalent for the name of Abram's first son, called Ishmael, born of Agar. 'Which things are an allegory,' says Paul, 'for these are the two covenants, and this Agar is Mount Sinai.'[306] We have identified Shu with Mount Sinai and the first covenant of the two tables which were broken and superseded, and Shu-ma-el is identified by Paul as the son of the first covenant, the star-son who preceded the solar son just as Ishmael precedes Isaac. Under the second covenant Isaac is born. He is the solar son, and second of the triad into which the solar god transforms. Agar has the name of the Akar, the hinder-part, the north, where Shu is the supporter of the nocturnal heaven. Thus the first covenant of Abram answers to the first creation of the sun-god, in which Shu is called Shu-si-Ra, and in the second covenant the fatherhood is established in the person of Abraham as it was in the person of Atum.
By means of Makedo[307], the wolf-type of Sut, and Makai, the crocodile-type, we are able to establish the typhonian link between Sut and Sevekh, and as Sevekh septiformis is identifiable with the lamb, and this was a type of the old Sebek, or Kebek, who became the solar Kak, the sun of darkness, and as this is in each case the true Hebrew line of the divine descent from the genetrix to the star-son, the Sabean fire-god, and thence to the solar sonship, and finally to the solar fatherhood, we are now in a position to trace the gods of Israel in a connected series.
In the beginning was the genetrix, Jehovah, who bore the first child in heaven, and was worshipped as the one and seven, Jehovah-Elohim. The son appears as Seth, the son of Chavvah, in one form of the mythos, and as the manifestor of the seven, who are the Elohim under one type, and the patriarchs under another.
Sut also appears in the person of Melchizedek. Sut, the first son of the mother, the star-god Bar, or Baal, was the primordial messiah and Anush of mythology; the first male manifestor in heaven under the type of the Dog-star, and Melchizedek is acknowledged to be the original type of the Messiah in Israel. He is the establisher of the order of the messiahship in the Hebrew cult, just as Sut, or Sutekh, is the first announcer in heaven. The messiah-son in the Psalms[308] is after the order of Melchizedek. Also the Christ of the Epistle to the Hebrews is a messiah after the order of Melchizedek. Thus the priesthood of Christ is identified with the messiahship of Melchizedek, the Hebrew form of Sutekh, the Sut of Egypt, who was phenomenally the first manifestor and announcer of time in the heavens as the Dog-star, son of Typhon, the goddess of the Great Bear. Sut was cast out of Egypt, together with his worshippers, as the unclean. He retained the good character for a while in Israel, yet it was known in after times that, as Melchizedek, he was of an unclean origin, and by degrees the good Sut, the earliest Prince of Peace, became the Moloch, the Tzud, Adversary, Satan and Devil of the later theology. 'Melchizedek,' say the Jews, was, 'in our third tradition, born of unclean parents.' 'Melchizedek was born of unclean parentage.'[309] According to Epiphanius[310], the mother of Melchizedek was Asteria or Ashtaroth, the Astarte, who is the Syrian mother of Sutekh. This is sufficient to identify him with the Sutekh of the khita, the Sydik of Phoenicia, the Sut of Egypt, son of the unclean Typhon. Also both characters meet—the good and the evil Sutekh—in Psalms 109. In the Hebrew traditions this psalm is assigned to Melchizedek[311], the ruler of unclean origin, that of Sut, the child of Typhon, who in the later cult of both Jews and Egyptians was turned into Satan. This change in the status of Sutekh, or Melchizedek, will explain why the [p.341] psalm is associated with the name of the typhonian messiah, who was degraded into the Satan and adversary of souls. Sut, or Satan, appears by name in the psalm assigned to Melchizedek, and it is said of him, 'Let Satan stand at his right hand,'[312] as the typical adversary, exactly the same as the character assigned to Sut, the accuser and catcher of souls in the Ritual.
There is a proper name in the Book of Ezra[313], Iu-Tzediq, or (קדצוי) rendered Ιωσεδεχ by the Seventy. This also contains the duality (Iu, Eg.) of Sutekh, which is portrayed in the double Sut as Sut-Har, Sut-Nubti, or the double Anubis, founded on Sut.
The most ancient worship of the mother and son in the Sabean form is that denounced by Amos as continued in the wilderness, where the Israelites made to themselves and worshipped the god of a certain star—probably the eight-rayed star—of Sikkuth and Kivan[314]. These are undoubtedly the duad of the mother and son, identical with Astarte and Sutekh, Chavvah and Seth, the Carthaginian Caelestis and Sichaeus, the duad which, in the stellar form, constituted the Sut-Typhon of Egypt.
The god Sikkuth, Greek Σικύτης, typified the emasculated or castrated divinity, who was the croot or תורכ of mythology, otherwise the child. The seki (יכס) is the castrated one. In the north of England the castrated bull is still called a seg. Usukkath (Assyrian) means to cut, to wound sacrificially; sukhat (Eg.) to cut, wound as a sacrifice. In English, sacrificing is a name for scarifying; and cutting the flesh was a sacred mode of memorizing, extending to castration in the most fanatical phase of circumcision. The identity of the male organ and the memorial under the name of zakar, which likewise means to cut, imprint, and cause to remember, is derived from early ideas of sacrifice. The Hebrew name for sacrifice, as the meat-offering of remembrance, azkerah (הרכזא) is derivable from as (Eg.), sacrifice, and kar, the male power and property; expressed by kariu for the testes, the seed that was passed through the fire to Moloch. The sinking sun was represented as being in this emasculated condition, and those who made themselves eunuchs were assimilating their condition to his; and to be kart or cut, literally gelt, was to become like this divine child of the virgin mother. The 'reproach of Egypt' consisted of this kind of circumcision. The character of the emasculated, or unvirile sun-god was still continued in Ptah-sekari, and the mutilated Osiris, after the eunuch-making had been repudiated by the Egyptians. This circumcision is denoted by the word קרח, which means disgrace and shame; it is applied to being violated and deflowered, stripped of honour, made naked, divested, to cut into, to pull or pluck the fruit, to be made desolate, an object of scorn, all of which meanings fit the eunuch. The word cherp (in Egyptian kherp), means the first [p.342] fruits, to consecrate, pay homage; and the first kind of circumcision was a dedication of the first-fruits of the male at the shrine of the virgin mother and child, which was one way of passing the seed through the fire to Moloch[315].
The Hebrew תוא modifies into תא, and the eth of Sikkuth and Kivan, as before suggested, represents the aft (Eg.) as the abode, couch, or ark of the four corners which bears the name of the typhonian genetrix. In that case the eth (Aft) would denote the portable shrine, and Sikkuth, the child-god, as the aft or apt, was the crib or cradle, a form of the meskhen, Hebrew mishkan, the tabernacle of the mother and child, the divine duad, also represented by the branch and pot of manna. The meaning of Amos is: 'Ye have carried the tabernacle of Sikkuth, your Moloch, and Kivan,'[316] the genetrix, whose particular star was Ursa Major, the star of Moloch and Kivan, or of Sut-Typhon. Moloch is commonly identified with Saturn, who is the planetary type of Sut; but the first Moloch was Bar-Sut, the MolochBar, who became the Roman god Muleiber (or Mulkiber), who is identified with the element of fire. Kivan, or Kûn, was a form of Ta-urt or Taur-Mut, the oldest mother continued under the serpent type. The serpent is an especial symbol of the great mother. The two truths, assigned to her from the first, are written with two serpents. These are the mother's hieroglyphics in her two characters of the virgin and the gestator. The two serpents form the urt crown of life, or rather of gestation and maternity. The serpent erected on the cross-pole, the stauros, is found in the form of an Egyptian standard crowned with the serpent-goddess Rennut, a type of the Two Truths. She is mounted on a Tau cross, and wears the double crown on her head the standard is the sign of the two lands[317]. Rennut (as Renen) means the virgin, and she is also the goddess of harvest—that is, of the two periods of pubescence and parturition. Hefa is the name of the great serpent of life, and Hefa (or Kefa) is identical with the Hebrew Jehovah and Kivan, who were worshipped in the typical wilderness, one of whose emblems was the serpent of fire. Fire that vivifies is an Egyptian term for the element represented by the serpent of life the Hefa; the other of the two primal elements being water. This was the serpent called the nachash, that is the serpent nak on the ash, the tree of life—the same dual figure as that of the serpent twined round the tree which has so many variants. 'The Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a seraph;' rendered 'a fiery serpent.' 'Make thee a burning,' says the Targum of Onkelos, 'and uplift it on an ensign' (or standard)[318]. In Egyptian serf signifies a flame and a burning. Ref is the serpent or reptile.
The element of fire, the fire that vivifies, was represented by the goddess Heh, who is the serpent. She is designated 'Ar-enti- [p.343] tem-un,' or the 'making of existences (invisible), creator of being (visible).'[319] She makes invisible existence become the visible being. Heh is a modified form of hefah, whence the hefa, serpent of life, and this is the Hebrew (היה) to live, exist, breathe, existence. Hih is likewise modified from hevah (הוהי), the Hebrew Jehovah, whose name denotes the being, existing, the one who calls into existence, the one whose essence is revealed in becoming, the first sign of which, as when the mother quickened, or the living breathed, was the breath of life. The title of Heh, as the maker of existences visible, which had been hitherto invisible, with breathing and heaving for the type of visibility, is the fundamental signification of היה, הוח, הוהי, and Talmudic אבה. The Egyptian goddess, Heh, earlier Kefa, is the Hebrew genetrix, creatoress, serpent-woman, Chavvah, or Eve, and the feminine Jehovah; and Heh is the serpent goddess, the serpent of life, of breath, of fire, of heaving along. For hefa (Eg.) means to heave, like the caterpillar and snake, with that amazing self-motion without ordinary members which so fascinated the primitive mind. Thus we can also identify the female Jehovah by the goddesses Heh and Rennut, whose portraits are extant, as the divine genetrix worshipped in the wilderness, and whose type in the serpent form was there looked up to as the image of life itself. This was the serpent of Tum-Ankh at Pithom, who was served by the two young girls, the sisters Urti.
One of the most perfect mirrors of the past is to be found in words, and their modifications supply us with means of measuring the stages travelled. The mythology of Israel begins with the cult of Kefa, or Kevah (the terminal is not in question), the typhonian genetrix, who, as the mother of Sut or Seth, is also Chavvah. Kef modifies into Hef, and Hevah into Heh.
The worshippers came out of Egypt, and there is a passage called the wilderness. Here we find the genetrix is exalted under the serpent type. Philology registers the change. Kefa becomes Hefa, the serpent of life, and Heh the serpent-goddess. We now know that on this line of language the hippopotamus-crocodile type was earlier than the serpent Hefa or Heh, and the change corresponds exactly to the change in Israel from the worship in Khept (Egypt) to that in the wilderness. The divinity was the same; that is, it was still the genetrix, howsoever the types may be changed. This is shown by the image of Kivan and Moloch, who are identified as Sut-Typhon that is, the mother and son; the Sabean mother and son, who passed into the lunar phase as Hes-Taurt, or Astarte and Sutekh. It is also shown by the manna. They fed on the manna during the whole sojourn in the wilderness. This, read typically, means that the children of Israel were suckled by Menât, or Menkat (Eg.), the wet-nurse, who appears in Israel, by frame and nature, as Deborah, called the [p.344] minqath (תקנימ), the wet-nurse of Rebekah, and who was primally[320] the Deborah above, or Shadai, the suckler. The manna was emblematic of the feminine reckoning and rule, and the angels' food supplied by the genetrix from the gynaecium above to the children below.
The present writer has yet to discuss the various values of the kh sign (!=sieve), as a terminal of Sefekh, the name of the goddess and the number seven.
There must have been a feminine Khevekh who was the original of Sefekh, the consort of Taht. The connecting link may be found in Hathor. The crocodile, Sevekh, is a type of the typhonian genetrix, and this, in the earliest spelling, is Khevekh. Hathor is called the hippopotamus-goddess, the directress (compare the Chinese directors, the seven stars), the feminine Sebek in An[321], and is thus doubly identified as a form of the goddess of the seven stars, the old Kefa of Khepsh, the celestial Kûsh or Ethiopia. The crocodile is the secondary form of the hippopotamus-goddess; and Kev-ekh, later Sev-ekh, denotes a secondary form of kev or sef. This value of the ekh was deposited in ki for the second, another, one more. The child (khe) is also second to the mother.
Sefekh is the later type, in relation to the moon, of her who was first in relation to the seven stars. Sefekh thus equates with Hes-Taurt, who is the second, the cow type and lunar form of Ta-urt or Kefa, of the Great Bear. Both Hathor and Sefekh are associated with Taht, the lord of the eighth region. Hathor-Sebek is Hathor-Sefekh; both are bringers-on of the typhonian genetrix, and Hathor was continued in Iusaas, as a solar goddess, the consort of Atum, and bringer-forth of the Iu-sif of On.
Hathor-Iusaas, of the great temple of the Iu at On, was the mother of the Jewish Joseph, the Iu-sif in Egyptian. Atum, in the lower world, was Kak in Kheb, or Kak-Kheb, the father of the Iu-sil called Iu-em-hept, and the original of Jacob. In this temple the writings of Taht were deposited, which contained the origins of the Hebrew mythology and scriptures, and from thence the deities and the sacred records were carried forth together.
The peculiarity of the cult of Atum at On was its continuity of the typhonian tenets and types. First the genetrix, in her Sabean phase, was Ta-urt, or Typhon, who bore the son as Sut. Next she was continued in the lunar phase as Hathor (and Hes-Taurt), who bore the child as Taht, as may be seen in the Ritual[322]; and lastly, she was personated as Iusaas, the wife of Atum, called the father-god of On, and the genetrix, as mother of the young sun-god Iusif, or Iusu, the Egyptian Joseph and Jesus in one.
All three of these phases were followed by the 'mixed multitude' that came out of Egypt; hence the pulling apart and the diversity in after times; the worship of the golden calf, of Kivan and Sikkuth [p.345] and the backslidings of Ephraim. Hence, also, the prayers of the 'prophets' entreating the people to worship God the Father, who was Atum in On, or in the Sakhu of Tum—Damascus—and their exaltation of the son in whom all was to be summed, and who was Iu-em-hept, the peace, the rest, the healer, and renewer for ever, the second or spiritual Adam (Atum), known in Egypt as Jesus, just as he is set forth in the preaching of Paul.
Thus the phenomenal origin and descent of the male divinity can be more or less traced from the genetrix Jehovah, goddess of the seven stars, whose son as a star-god is Sut, the Hebrew Elyon, and as a solar god Kebekh, or Sevekh. Sut in Israel is also Seth, the son of Chavvah; but El-Shadai is probably a form of the solar son (Al or El) of the mother who came from herself; and therefore on the typhonian line of descent he would represent Kebek, whose name modifies into Kak, and finally into Jah.
On the monuments there is a dual-natured god with the head of Sut one way and of Horus the other; this is Sut-Har, with the heads of the ass and the hawk. He is likewise represented as Sut-Nubti, the double announcer, who blends the Sun and Sirius in one dual type (after the manner of the Sabean double Anubis). We have the same combination in the British Arthur. As the companion of the seven in the ark who are saved from the deluge, and enclosed in Caer Sidi; he can be identified with Sut, the companion of the seven stars, which represented Typhon, and with Seth, who follows the seven patriarchs of the first genealogical list; he too passes into a solar god of the twelve zodiacal signs. Sut-Har unites the star-son and solar-son of the ancient genetrix on the way to becoming the solar Har-Makhu, the double Horus of the two horizons, still as the son of the mother alone.
The same combination is more or less apparent in the Akkadian and Assyrian mythology, and in the character of the ancient god Bar or Bilgi. Lenormant has shown that in the Akkadian magic books Idzubar is identified with Bar or Bilgi, the fire-god, whose name is rendered by 'the fire of the rushes,' which was not the solar fire. He is the fire of the month Ab, named in Akkadian as the fire that makes fire[323]. Now the fire of that month (July) belonged to the Dog-star, who was the Egyptian Bar, whence we connect the Assyrian Bar and Akkadian Bil-gi with Bar-Sutekh. Bar (Eg.) has the meaning of fervour, fervency, ebullition. In the Assyrian renderings of the Akkadian hymns Bar is sometimes identified with or likened to Nebo, who, we shall attempt to show, was the Egyptian announcer Nub, or Anubis, the earliest form of Mercury[324]. This combination of Sut-Har, Sut-Nubti, founded phenomenally on the Sun and Sirius as gods of time, or the god of twin-time, expressed by the name of Sebti (Sothis), supplies the origin of a Jah-Nehsi, in Israel, on the [p.346] typhonian line of descent. By which is meant that the god, whether Sabean merely, as Sut, or solar, is still considered to be the son of the mother only, and born of the hinder quarter in the north. El-Shadai, so the present writer considers, is the same solar son of the mother as Jah; there being in this case two versions of the one myth rather than a development from the god of Abram to the god of Moses.
The African mintage of the earliest current coin of the male divinity is manifest for ever in the image and hue of the black god of the negroes, Sut-Nahsi. The black Sut was continued in Sut of Ombos, named Sut-Nubti, and in Har-Sut, with the black type represented by the black bird. At Ombos we can identify the black Sut with Sebek, the crocodile-headed type. Sebek was the earlier Kebekh, that is, according to the present reading, the khe (child) of Kheb, and therefore the son of Kheb, the genetrix. The name of Kheb modified into Seb, as Khebti did into Sebti, the dual form, or the duplicator of Seb, i.e., of time, represented at first by the Dog-star. The black god was continued in the crocodile of darkness, Khebekh, Sevekh, or Sebek, and Khebekh modifies into Kak as the solar god of darkness, in which shape he re-emerges as one of the Tum triad, further abraded in the names of Hak and Ka, Jach, or Jah. To this origin in the negro god, and this line of descent through the black star-god, the black-and-golden Sun-and-Sirius god, and the black god who was the sun of the darkness, the Typhonians remained devoutly attached, no matter whether they worshipped Sut-Nahsi in Nubia, or Sutekh in Syria, or Kak in the temple and district of Kak, or Au, the black god of Biban-el-Muluk, or Jah in Israel. And although the deity changed as the representative of phenomena and type of time, this persistence on one line gives a look of monotheism to the cult; more especially as the Typhonians start at first, and preserve to the last, the line of direct descent from the motherhood. Their single god is such only as the child of the virgin mother. Sut, Sutekh, Bar, Khebekh, Har, are all names of the child of her who gave birth to the boy. They remained true to the natural beginning in physical phenomena, whilst the Osirians and Ammonians went on reforming on the line of the fatherhood. When the fatherhood was introduced at length in the Tum cult, it is Kak (Hak), the one born of the virgin, the descending, dying sun that heads the triad for the Typhonians; and this is the god Jah of the Hebrews, the god of darkness, the black divinity, who becomes the black Iu, the son of Atum, and finally the black Jesus of the Christian cult, the son of the Virgin Mother in the Romish Church, as in the pre-monogamous worship of the Africans.
Now in the passage where Moses asks for the name of the deity, that he may announce it to the people, he is told to say that Jah or Eyah has sent him to them. The form of the phrasing implies a [p.347] proper name, and this must determine the sense of the previous announcement, 'Eyah ashar eyah.' Rabbis Jehuda and Ibn Ezra both interpret the היהא רשא היהא as meaning the proper name of the divinity[325]. The proper name intended, however, cannot be Jehovah, according to the very plain statement of the text.
As before said, the present writer sees in this announcement the elevation of the young god Adon (the Aten of Egypt) into the Ashar, or husband, as the type of a god having the character of the begetter. For this is the god of a new circumcision under Joshua, as a rite of reproduction and a protest against the worship of Sikkuth, the castrator. By this same rite we can identify El-Shadai, the god of Abram, who also alternates with Jah in the Psalms, as the same god in Israel (and as Ashar-El) whom Moses announces and Joshua serves. El-Shadai also changes the name of Abram, which had been the type of the sonship under the motherhood alone, the same as Rem or Rimmon, Tammuz, Sikkuth, and Adon, to Abraham, and promotes him to the fatherhood. So in the Egyptian mythology, Atum, who is designated the duplicate of Aten[326], was elevated to the fatherhood of the gods and men, whereas Aten or Adon was the son of the genetrix before the fatherhood was founded. The child of the womb, as Abram, becomes the father of the womb, as Abraham. This will give an obvious interpretation to the Haggadistic legend which relates that Abraham possessed a precious stone; this he sacredly preserved, and wore it all his life, but when he died God took the stone and hung it on the sun.
The later Hebrew writers make most painful endeavours to establish the fatherhood on a physical basis, and irately repudiate the child, the impubescent god, who as the khart, the croot, the תורכ, could neither be the husband of the genetrix nor the begetter of his people. It happens that in Hebrew there is one word for the male sex and a memorial, רכז, and both meanings have to be taken together at times to do justice to the passage[327]. The Lord, his zachar[328], is thus a proclamation of the masculine fatherhood, in opposition to the worship of Ephraim, who bowed the knee to the virgin, widow or zonah, and dandled the child-god like any devout Mariolator. The language of Hosea concerning Ephraim cannot be understood apart from this past of Israel and the mythological origins. Ephraim was a typical name used as a periphrasis for the ten tribes, the original Isharim, whose cult was feminine from the first. The name dates from the typhonian genetrix and the north. Har-Ephraim is called the 'northerly mountain of Palestine,' and Khebt was the north. The goddess of the north is specially identified in the Jehovah-Aloah (or Alah) of the Ephraimite version. Eph is a modified keph, as eph, to bake, is from kafn (Eg.), an oven. Thus Ephraim denotes Kephraim, and comes from the mother Keph, who personified the birthplace in [p.348] the north, the celestial Khebt or Egypt. It was here that Ephraim remained in his worship. His were the idols of Egypt, the Baalim, Sut-Typhon; he served the old Zonah, whose images were the Aseb, the dove, the heifer, and the calf of Samaria. Figuratively he still dwelt in Egypt, and literally did dwell in the Egypt of mythology. He had slid back as a back-sliding heifer after the Lord had brought them forth as the husband and male God of Israel.
'They shall not dwell in Adon's land,' nor sit at Adon's feast. 'Egypt shall gather them up; Memphis shall bury them.'[329] They were to be interred with Egypt's dead. This is entirely metaphorical and belongs to the celestial allegory, by which alone it can be read.*
* In tracing the origins and the mythological allusions, the present writer does not enter into their local or later application; he is only concerned with the myth. In this instance Memphis is used as a type-name for the dwellings of the dead, and it suggests a possible derivation of the name from mem (Eg.), the dead (mena also denotes death), and pa, the city or habitation.
This Egypt, or Khebt, was in the heaven of the seven stars, the ten tribes and seventy divisions of the earliest formation. The flood of Noah is the end of a period; in fact, it is the termination of two previous periods and reckonings which are extant for us in the two lists of patriarchs, the seven ending with Seth, and the ten ending with Noah. The first heaven of the Elohim and Jehovah was afterwards mapped out in the ten-seventy divisions of the seventy princes, watchers, elders, or shepherds, for the seventy of many names have only one origin in phenomena.
Apollonius Molon, a native of Caria, who in his time was held in great repute at Rhodes and Rome, and who is attacked by Josephus as one of those who forged lies because he was hostile to the Jews, and gave other versions of their fables[330], relates that 'after the flood,' man (Adam or Edom) was driven forth with his sons from the primeval home in Armenia, and they moved on gradually through the sandy wastes to the then uninhabited mountain district of Syria. This migration took place three generations prior to Abraham, the wise, whose name signifies 'father's friend.' He had two sons, one by an Egyptian wife, the patriarch of the twelve Arab princes; the other, named Gelos (or Laughter), by a native woman. Gelos had eleven sons; and a twelfth, Joseph, from whom the third (of the patriarchs), Moses, is descended. This is quoted by Alexander Polyhistor[331], the learned freedman and friend of Scylla[332]. In this version it is the Laugher, Gelos, i.e., Isaac, who is the father of the twelve. Nor does it matter, as mythology, which of the solar triad is considered lord of the twelve signs, whether it be Jacob as the lower sun, or Isaac as the upper; Atum as Kak, or as Hu. In all likelihood this is a directly Phoenician rendering of the myth, not borrowed from the Hebrews.
In this version there are but three generations between the deluge and Abram; in the Hebrew there are ten, those of Noah, Shem, [p.349] Arphaxed, Salah, Eber, Peleg, Reu, Serug, Nahor, and Terah, which is the division by ten of the celestial allegory, and exactly the same as the ten patriarchs who were before the flood. After the deluge the 'families of the sons of Noah' are named and numbered 'after their generations, in their nations, and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood.'[333] And the number of nations into which the new world is partitioned is seventy-two; the number of duodecans into which the solar zodiac was divided. The solar triad represented by Shem, Ham, and Japhet is repeated in Abram, Isaac, and Jacob, another version of the same myth, in which the ten tribes pass into the twelve, in correspondence with the seventy divisions passing into the seventy-two.
That which followed the flood of Noah is also described as occurring under Abram, who is directly connected with the world before the flood and the primeval home in the north, the heaven of the Great Bear. For Abram is called by Isaiah the Righteous, from (חרזמ) Mizarach. Now although this became a name of the mount in the East, the solar tser of the horizon, it belonged primarily to the mitzar of the north, where we find Mitzraim[334], and identify it with the birthplace by aid of the star Mizar in the tail, the Mest-ru of the Great Bear. The two forms of the mount are referred to by Paul. The 'coming out' of Abram as the solar god, and the establishment of the triad, is nothing more than a representation of that system of the heavens which followed the end of the stellar regime of the Great Bear, the instituting of the solar triad, and the luni-solar reckoning, which was established under Atum, the equinoctial sun, and also under Noah and Abram. This triad is repeated in the Hebrew fragments. It follows the flood in the shape of Shem, Ham, and Japhet, and is equivalent to the three generations mentioned by Apollonius Molon as coming between the flood and Abraham[335]. The various versions of the same subject meet and mingle as mythology.
Now the persistent traditional number of Jacob's family, his children and grandchildren, including himself, is seventy. 'All the souls of the house of Jacob which came into Egypt (were) threescore and ten.'[336] All these souls, says the record, came into Egypt with Jacob[337]; and these were exclusive of his sons' wives, who are omitted from the reckoning. It is now claimed that the seventy belong to the celestial allegory, and are no other than the seventy princes of the heavens, here called Mitzraim, because they belong to the chart of the Great Bear, and the mapping out by seven and ten and seventy which preceded the solar zodiac.
They are synonymous with the seventy elders who judged the people of Israel, under Moses in Jeshurun of the ten and the seventy divisions of the heavens. In the mapping out of the heavens, or the separating of the sons of Adam, by Elyon, and the setting of the [p.350] boundaries of the people according to the number of the sons of El[338], this is the division of the ten (the Isharim) into the seventy, which preceded the final chart made by Moses in which the twelve tribes are established and blessed as his latest act in life[339]. There were ten patriarchs who followed the earlier seven, and these correspond to the ten divisions that followed the seven, which were again followed by the seventy. All these preceded the twelve divisions of the solar zodiac.
There were ten tribes of the apocrypha who went forth to 'keep the statutes, which they never kept in their own land.'[340] This identifies them with the timekeepers, the disposers, the interpreters of the heavens, who were deposed in favour of the later and truer watchers, when it was discovered that stellar time differed from soli-lunar time. They went forth into a region called Arsareth, to dwell there until the latter time, when they are to return again, and the waters are to divide once more for their passage through. The ten tribes who were carried away prisoners in the time of Oshea were the ten of the time when Joshua was yet known as Oshea, before his name was changed as the supporter of the sun-god, Jah.
In the extract from the writings of Nicolaus of Damascus, preserved by Trogus Pompeius, and quoted by Justin, the sons of Jacob are ten in number, not twelve. 'The Jews,' runs the account, 'derive their origin from Damascus, whence Queen Semiramis sprang. Damascus was the first king; after him Azelus, Adores, Abraham, and Israhel were kings. But a more prosperous family of ten sons made Israimel more famous than any of his ancestors. Having divided his kingdom ill consequence into ten governments, he committed them to his ten sons, and called the whole people Jews.'[341]
Moses, the lawgiver, was 'king in Jeshurun, when the heads of the people (and) the tribes of Israel were gathered together.'[342] This applies to the first foundation of the tribes, which were ten in number, and belonged to the seventy divisions of Israel in Egypt. The first children of Israel, or the Isharhim, as they are likewise called, were the ten tribes of the ten divisions in the celestial circle, and that Jeshurun which was the heaven of the reckoning by ten. Jeshurun may be read as the region of Jeshur, or the little Jeshur in relation to the ten tribes of the lesser Israel. In the Norse mythology the Asar are twelve in number, the twelve gods of the twelve signs, and the ten were followed by the twelve in the Hebrew mythos.
Here is another illustration of Jeshurun being the heaven of the seven, ten, and seventy. Gashurun (ןורשע) is the name of a measure consisting of the tenth part of an ephah. The ephah is Egyptian as the hept, and hept signifies number seven. Thus Gashurun is the [p.351] seventieth in one form of measure, and Jeshurun, according to the present reading, is the measure of the seventy. It has already been shown how the ephah is related to the number seventy-two. The change from the ten to the twelve tribes is portrayed in what is termed the 'Blessing of Moses'[343] he who had been king of the ten tribes now constitutes and blesses the twelve. 'Moses commanded us a law, (even) the inheritance of the congregation of Jacob,' he who had been king in Jeshurun. Previous to his death he is here represented as establishing and describing the twelve tribes, which may be easily identified with the twelve signs, the congregation of Jacob, and leaving it as an inheritance to the people of Israel, whose deity is the god of Jeshurun, now as Jah-Adonai; he who rideth on the heavens—traverses the circle of the signs—in their help and by the name of Jah[344]. It seems to follow that the divine name of Israel or Isarel (in Phoenician) is derived from that of the god (El) of the Isar or Asar, as the ten-total. It is true that Ashar for number ten is written with the letter ayin. But the Egyptian hes, the seat, throne, is kes in Hebrew. The full consonant is first. Taht, for example, is called the lord of divine words resident in Heshar[345]. Mut gave birth to Amen-Ra in Asher[346], the modified form of Heshar. Hes (Eg.) or as means the seat, throne, or birthplace, and har is the child. But har also signifies number ten, the equivalent of the Hebrew gashar for ten, and heshar would be the seat of the ten. If we apply this to Gesurun or Jeshurun, and treat it as a compound derived from Egyptian, it contains the seat (hes or kes) har, the ten and un or nu, the fellow-males, and Jeshurun, as place, is the seat of the ten fellow-tribes.
We are told 'The Geshurites and Maachathites dwell among the Israelites to this day.'[347] Geshur has the meaning of joining, attaching, bridging. Makha (Eg.) is the scales, level, equinox. Now Taht in Heshar may be seen in the soli-lunar Hermean zodiaci in the sign of the Crab, the place of the solstice in the Ram calendar; and it is probable that the Heshar of Taht is the Geshur of David. רושג is a region which was subject to Talmai, whose daughter became David's wife[348]. The Geshurites were among those who were not driven out by the Israelites, but who remained and mingled with them. Heshar is the upper seat, as in the expression, 'Shu ma men Hes-har; Tefnut ma men Hes-har;' Shu in the upper seat; Tefnut in the lower[349]. Alluding to this upper place or crown-house of the double heaven and the four quarters, the Osirian in the Ritual says 'He has followed Shu, he has saluted the crown, he has taken the place of Hu, enveloped in the plait which belongs to the road of the sun in [p.352] his splendour.'[350] Hu was the sun-god in Heshar, or upper seat. The Hebrew statement, read allegorically, is this: In forming the circle of the twelve signs the place of the solstices and equinoxes remained as in the old Jeshurun, or in the luni-solar mapping out. Whence we infer that the Geshur of David may be the same as the upper Heshar of Taht and Shu. Preparatory to the coming of the deluge, Yima is commanded by Ahura-Mazda to make a circle of four corners[351], as a seemly dwelling-place; corresponding to the quadrangular Caer of the British mythos. But the first circle of four corners was that of Apt or Khept, made by the Great Bear, whereas the solar circle was formed by Ptah.
Jeshurun exists by name in the Khordah-Avesta, where it is related to the four cardinal points, each of which has its genii. There are four prayers proper, addressed to the four quarters, although a fifth has been added, and the fourth is Gah-Uziren. The Zend king in Uziren is called Uzayeireina. With Uzayeireina are associated three others, designated the 'navel of the waters' (Apanmnapat), Fradat-Vira, the 'preserver of mankind,' and Daqyuma, the 'protector of the district.'[352] These answer to Moses, Aaron, Hur, and Miriam (as the navel of the waters). This helps to prove that Uziren and Jeshurun were the heaven of the four quarters simply, when it was marked only by the solstices and equinoxes. The chart is that of the bull, lion, bird, and waterer, the well known compound type of the four quarters. The Tamuli of Tranquebar Khuren, or Maid-Ashuren, was a being of vast stature, who had the horns of a bull and used to intoxicate himself with wine. He was born near the Mount Meru[353]. This looks like a form of Shu (Bes and Bacchus) or Mashu in Jeshurun.
Jeshurun, then, can be identified with the first circle of four quarters, in which the reckoning by ten preceded the twelve solar signs. Moses, Aaron, (or Aharon, Arabic Haran), Hur, and Miriam are a form of the genii of the four quarters. Heron is a name of Sut. Sut is translated Heron on the obelisk of the Serapeum, Baal-Zephon (i.e., Sut-Typhon) the later Heroonpolis, was the city of Sut as Heron. Sut was the announcer and Aaron was the mouth personified. Thus we have Shu as Moses, Sut-Heron as Aaron; Har as Hur, whilst Miriam represents the female waterer. This was Amset or Mast in the latest portrayal of the four, but the male Amset is found to have had an earlier feminine form, the original of which is the wet-nurse, the waterer in the Hermean zodiac, who is likewise represented by the goddess Uati, in the fourfold ram-type of the four corners[354]. These are the genii of the four quarters, and the four stars in the square of Ursa Major. Sut (Aaron) answering to Tua Mutef, the jackal-headed; Shu (Moses) to Hapi (the earlier Kapi). Hur (Har) to the hawk [p.353] headed Kabhsnuf, and Miriam to the Dea Multimammae of the Hermean zodiaci, whose place was taken by Amset.
The first mention of the name of Israel is made when that of Jacob is changed[355]. In this passage Jacob is elevated to the status of El, of the Isar, and the children of Israel are immediately named after him[356]. He was then the El of the ten tribes and the seventy divisions of the celestial Egypt, who became the father of the twelve sons, twelve tribes, in the character of the sun-god of the twelve signs.
In the Kabbalistic Book of Daniel the seventy take the form of seventy weeks, or periods expressed by that number[357]. The great kabir Gabriel announces that at the end of seventy weeks the vision and prophecy are to be sealed, the end will have come with the bringing in of everlasting righteousness and the anointing of the Most Holy. 'Know, therefore, and understand (that) from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah, the Prince, (shall be) seven weeks, and threescore and ten weeks. The street shall be built again, and the wall.'[358] Here we have the seven, as well as the seventy, that preceded the heaven (or temple) of seventy-two divisions, in which the young solar god, the anointed son, was, as in the Book of Enoch, elevated to the supreme seat. This messiah is to confirm the covenant with many for one week, as it is rendered. But this means the covenant of the number seven, the covenant of Sebek-Ra or of Iu-em-hept. The Hebrew masiach is the Kak or Hak of the Atum triad, who becomes the Iu-Su. Sebek passed into Kak as the sun of darkness, a form of Atum. Mas-Iach is Mas-Kak or Mas-hak. Mas (Eg.) means to anoint, but it also signifies to bring; and the word contains the dual character of Iu, who brings peace; Iu, the Su of Atum, being the masiach or Egyptian Jesus. Hept, the word for peace, also means the number seven. The Iu-em-hept brings peace with the same name as number seven, the name of the seven stars. The ark and covenant are expressed by the same word hept, and, in the Book of Esdras, when the son Jesus comes, he is to be cut off and the world is to be turned into the old silence seven days, as in the former judgments. These seven days are the equivalent of the one week in Daniel, and both are expressed by the word hept, peace, number seven, in the name of Iu-em-hept, who comes and brings this hept, whether called peace, the Sabbath, or a silence of seven days.
The Jains, who worship Buddha or Menu as the Jain-Eswara, affirm that during the golden age the supremely happy inhabitants of the paradise of earth subsisted on the produce of ten celestial trees[359]. The ten trees are identical with the ten divisions, patriarchs, and tribes under another type; also the ten trees are equivalent to the Tree of Ten, the Asherah. [p.354] Further, it has now to be suggested that the Book of Jasher[360] constituted the especial scriptures of the Isar or Iasharim in Jeshurun, under the lion-gods, Mau and Shu, Moses and Joshua, who were represented by the two lions of Judah, in the astronomical chapter[361], the old lion and the young one, just as the dual lion-god, Shu-Anhar, is called Young-Elder. David taught them the 'Ode of the Bow.' This was written in the Book of Jasher[362]. The bow is an ideograph, and represents the circle and a cycle of time. Drawing the bow is figurative for making the circle and typifying a cycle of time; hence the 'bow of Seb.' The first bow was drawn by the genetrix this came full circle in the cycle of gestation, hence the bow of Neith, and the arrow of the goddess Seti. When the bow of time was drawn by Pawin Parne, it was the bow of the Great Bear, the oldest form of the genetrix and cycle-maker in heaven. In various versions of the solar myth the hero-son is made manifest by his power to bend the bow of his father. This feat can only be performed by the one who is predestined, though obscured and unrecognized. The bending of the bow is the symbol of turning the corner at the place of the winter solstice, where the life of the old sun ebbed low and his hands relaxed, and were unable to bend the bow or make the curve of return. At this point the son or successor takes up the bow and proves his divine descent or royal lineage by drawing it and completing the circle. This bow, which is made the means of the trial-test in so many legends, is found at the entrance to the judgment ball of the Two Truths as the 'floor of the door.' 'I do not let you cross over me, says the floor of the door, unless you tell me my name.' 'The Bow of Seb is thy name.'[363] That is one form of the trial-test; drawing the bow itself was another.
The bow is an especial symbol of the lion-gods; the arrow is a sign of Shu. 'I know the name of Mâtet, his bow is in his hand,'[364] is said of one of the lion-gods. 'I am the lion-god coming forth with a bow,' says the Osiris, 'at the time when the Osiris sought the Well, going in peace.'[365] In the Hebrew mythos 'Joseph is a fruitful bough by a Well,' and his bow abode in strength, and the 'arms of his hands were made strong' when he was supported by the shepherd of Israel[366]. The bow of Joseph as the solar god was the bow of the 'shepherd of the heavenly flock' (Sib-zi-anna or Regulus, the lawgiver, in the sign of the lion), the 'shepherd of Israel, that leadest Joseph like a flock,'[367] who in the original mythos is Mashu, the bowman of the solar god. In Assyrian the star of stars, the propitious star of heaven, is called the star of the bow. The bow in Hebrew is the qasheth תשק of the Book of Jasher. 'Also he bade them teach the children of Israel the qasheth.'[368] The bow is but a [p.355] hieroglyphic figure. The arrow in Egyptian is the khesr. Khes (Eg.) means to stop, and turn back at a certain point, and return by main force, as the arrow from the bow when drawn full-circle. The Khesrs or Khesarim, as already explained, were the returning circle-makers and benders of the bow of Seb.
The book of the bow was the Book of Jasher, and with the k-sound for the yod this would be the Book of Khesr (Eg.), the arrow. The qasheth (bow) was a particular type of Israel[369], of Joseph, and of Ephraim. The great Khesr was Mashu, the bowman who in Israel was the king or lawgiver in Jeshurun, the heaven of the Isharim, the ten tribes that preceded the twelve. The present conclusion is that the Book of Jasher was that of the astronomical allegory, belonging to the ten tribes above, whatsoever relations these may have had on the earth below. The ten books or the books of the ten would be gashar or ashar (רשע). The Hebrew commandments remained ten in number, whereas those of the orthodox Egyptians attained the number of forty-two. The Egyptians ran their nomes up to the same number, and their sacred books were also forty-two. A relic of the earlier ten, however, is extant in the division of these; the books of the hierogrammatist (Rekhi-Khet) those of the Stolites and the prophets, were each ten in number, and these were the especially sacerdotal books.
The Sepher of Jasher may therefore be a reference to the ten books, and these may have been the originals of the commentaries on the Kabbalistic ten sephiroth.
The present writer infers that the ancient Book of Jasher is not so much lost as it is distributed and rewritten. We know how Josephus appeals to certain secret and enigmatical scriptures, kept in the temple, to corroborate his account of Joshua's miracles[370]. 'That the day was lengthened at this time,' he says, 'is expressed in the books laid up in the temple.' Also there was an ancient book of days or chronicles, not now extant, frequently referred to in the Books of Chronicles and Kings. This was the book of the ten tribes, and a form therefore of the Sepher of Jasher. The present scriptures have been written from such originals, which are now and again cited by name. In the process of rewriting, the celestial calendars and allegorical chronicles have almost been converted into history. Still the mythology is there, more or less, and the Book of Jasher is not altogether lost.
The same may be said of the 'wars of the Lord,'[371]. 'As it is written in the book of the wars of the Lord; at Vaheb in Suphah, and in the brooks of Arnon.' Vaheb in Suphah has been rendered the Red Sea, but that tells us nothing about Vaheb. Translators and commentators have been unable to see anything but the literal Red Sea or seaweed in the Iam-suph— [p.356] whereas the Red Sea is green and altogether free from weeds—which had to be crossed by the sun or the souls in coming out of Egypt. It was here in the marshes that Horus was born and Typhon lurked. It was here the deceased saw the sun reborn 'at the thigh of the great water,' at the place of the going forth[372]. Had Vaheb (בהו) been the word we might have derived it in accordance with the mythos from uah (Eg.) to escape; and eb (ub), to pass through, against, in opposition to, or in spite of. That would tell the whole story of the mythical coming out of Egypt and crossing the Suph. But certain MSS were known to Kimchi in which this word was written בהיתא or בהותא Athi-heb, Athu-heb or Ath-vaheb[373].
This is a find, for the athu is Egyptian, and a name of the marshes or reedy lakes, the 'Suph,' of lower Egypt, ranging round from the Sethroite to the Diospolite nome as the border of the Mediterranean Sea[374]. The Kat-en-Atha, or Womb of the Marshes, was a place near the lake Menzalch. This name for marshes is derived from athu, the rush, osier, papyrus, and other water plants. Vaheb, read by Uah-eb, to escape and pass, describes the passage of escape in accordance with the meaning of deliverance assigned to בהותא in the Targumic MSS known to Kimchi[375], and by dropping the prefix athu we have Vaheb simply. By adding it, Athu-uaheb names the well-known locality and imagery of the Kat-en-atha in the Egyptian mythos.
The Athuaheb is localized in the north, the hinder-part, and suph in Hebrew means a hinder-part[376]; it also denotes an end, conclusion, fulfilment, as does another Egyptian name (Mehu) of the north. The Athuaheb-Suph is the marsh, the source of the water-plants, out of which came the child borne on a lotus; the lake of primordial matter found in the Ritual, also called the Red Sea and Pool of Pant. Sufu (Eg.) means paints, colours; this supplies the red or paint of the pool.
It is to be feared that Brugsch will have to discover another route for the Israelites, and this, as marked out by the 'Athu' of his map, may lead them across the marshes and the Mediterranean Sea. Not only do we find the mythical source, the Athuaheb in Suph, but the pool or well follows by name; the well dug by the princes, by the direction of the lawgiver, with their staves. This is the well, the Tepht, the Pool of the Two Truths, i.e., the well of Ma-Shu, in On, or An. As this was the birthplace of Ar (Har) in On, and Ar (Heb.) is the hero, Ar-n-on, as Egyptian, correctly describes the place of Har, the Lord, in An, i.e., Arnon, or Arona. As a river, Arunun (Eg.) is that of the inundation.
It is not written in the Old Testament what the Lord did for Israel in the vale of Arnon, but the Targum of Jerusalem tells us that when the Beni Israel were passing through the defile, the Moabites were [p.357] hidden in the caverns of the valley, intending to rush out and slay them. But the Lord signed to the mountains and they literally laid their heads together to prevent it; they came together with a clap and crushed the chiefs of the mighty ones, so that the valleys were overflowed with the blood of the slain. Meanwhile Israel walked over the tops of the hills, and knew not the miracle and mighty act which the Lord was doing in the valley of the Arnon[377]. Thus the miracle of the Red Sea was reversed.
In the one case the waters stood up in heaps and were turned into hills; in the other the solid hills flowed down and fused together, whilst Israel passed over them as if they were a level plain. How beautifully the one balances the other! In the one miracle the Red Sea was turned into dry ground; in the other the dry ground was turned into a Red Sea of gore. The hills that rushed together to make a level plain are a figure of the equinox, to be found in varied forms of legendary lore.
This Book of the Wars of the Lord was first opened in Egypt, and the leaves of it were read upon the starry heavens. The Lord was one with the god of Jeshurun, whose excellency was seen on the sky, and the wisdom to interpret the mystic signs was confessedly learned from the Egyptians. Thus the book was brought into Israel ready written, and it is the relating of its various narratives as if they were being then and there enacted upon the ground already named, according to the celestial chart, which has been mistaken for veritable histories of the Hebrew people.
We cannot always recover the original matter direct from Egypt, so scarce is the literature for that purpose; but the roots are all there, and the Hebrew versions are not the only branches of the subject. The wars of the Lord were told and retold in Greece, till finally made permanent in the twelve labours of Hercules. The Phoenicians preserved the tradition of Hercules as sun-god, and his twelve labours representing the journey of the conquering sun through the twelve signs of the zodiac; the Assyrians in the twelve legends of Izdubar, and the British in the twelve battles of Arthur. The wars of the Lord were described in a work entitled Semnuthis or Semnouté, written by Apollonides or Horapius[378].
Sem (Eg.), is a name of the double plume with which the lion-gods crowned the sun. Sem-p-khart is mentioned by Eratosthenes[379] as one of the Heraclidae. Sem-p-khart (Gr. Semphucrates) indicates the young sun-god as wearer of the sem or double plume called the headdress of the two lion-gods[380], whose Hebrew equivalent is Samuel.
Attempts have been made to show that Mazaroth was the zodiacal circle of the twelve signs. But this application is unknown to the Seventy, and the earlier circle of the Great Bear has been overlooked [p.358] altogether; the circle of Khept and Mitzir or Mitzraim, the celestial Egypt, the first Sabean-circle in the north, apparently composed of ten divisions, which were subdivided into seventy. In Mitzr was the primal house, the birthplace of beginning, and the Mazaroth were its signs; these were limited to the northern heaven. The ten tribes, the Isharim, as the Kesharim, date from that quarter the ten tribes that went out into the region called Arsareth, but which is now tolerably certain to have been Asareth, a modified form of Gazareth. Gazar means to be cut off, divided, parted, parts, and gazarah (הרזג) is the separate and uninhabited land, the place apart, where the ten tribes went. Mazaroth was the circle of the northern stars opposed to the south, or rather a constellation[381] that rose in the north, which it would do, especially in very low latitudes; the region of the earliest observation and naming.
Sir John Mandeville heard, during his travels, that in countries lying east and north of the Caspian Sea, enclosed among mountains, were the lost ten tribes, 'the Jews of the ten lynages that were clepen Goth and Magothe.'[382]
There was also a tradition that those who were thus shut up were pigmies. Gog and Magog are the two giants of Guildhall whose original was Gogmagoth, the giant whose stature was twelve cubits, and who was a ruling power in Britain before the coming of Brute or Prydhain.
These legends find a fit place in the mythological allegory. The giant of twelve cubits is one with the Rapha with six fingers and six toes. The pigmies in Egypt were the seven sons of Ptah, who, like the seven sons of Sydik, may be traced to the seven stars of the Great Bear.
The ten tribes belonged to the first time, that of the Great Bear, and the reckoning by ten. This time in one myth is that of the ten patriarchs and the ten Babylonian kings whose reigns ended with the deluge; in another, the ten celestial trees in another it ends with the destruction of the giants, or the tower of seven stages built by the giants. This was the time of ten days to the week in the year of thirty-six divisions. With ten days to the week there were thirty-six weeks to the year of 360 days.
According to an account given in a papyrus, says Brugsch[383], the division of Egypt into thirty-six nomes rests on a particular view which connected the terrestrial division into nomes with the thirty-six ruling houses of the heavens in astrology; that is with the thirty-six decans of the zodiac. In the celestial Khebt, as in the terrestrial, the first nome—in this case that of the first ruler—was dedicated to the goddess of the star Sothis. The archaic Babylonian ideographic sign of a month represents it as three times ten days, and thus carries on visibly the week of ten days.
The Chinese have their thirty-six heavenly spirits called ThienKong-Sin in the Amoy dialect, who are used as messengers by the Supreme Being. The residence of such spirits is said to be especially in, or near, the constellation of the Great Bear. In the Egyptian Ritual, the spirits of the Great Bear are seven in number, identical with the seven spirits in Revelation, and the 'seven eyes' in the Book of Zechariah[384].
The Book of Judges is that of the primordial seven, the seven princes, the shepht, a form of hept (Eg.) for no. 7. This yields to the slightest pressure in applying the hermeneutical principles of the Kabbalah. The shepht, or seven, were earlier than the lunar regime; they belong to the mythical time of the Jebusites, who dwelt in the mount, and built the city afterwards called Jerusalem, the city of David, the moon-god (Taht). םובי from םבי is the equivalent of khepsh (Eg.), the hinder-part north, the region of the Great Bear, the seven gods, Elohim, Princes, or shepht, and the Jebusites are the Khepshites, the later Kushites named from the region of the seven. The shept of the monuments and the 'Judges' of the negroes date from this beginning. Hence the word shepht in Hebrew means to divide, separate, split off, just as the one divided into the seven, and the seven is one in the Sept. Shepht also means language, Kheft having been the primordial Word, and Deborah of the Judges, or shepht, is the Word of the shepht, the ancient genetrix, the mother in Israel. With the seven we find the seventy sons who rode on 'threescore and ten ass-colts,'[385] the typhonian types of the seventy divisions, ruled and governed by the seven. The celestial Mitzraim and Mazaroth have left their witnesses aloft. The star Mizar is still to be found in the tail of the Great Bear, and near it is a small star not one of the seven, called Alcor; this, according to Humboldt[386], the Arabs name 'Saidak,' a word taken to signify test or trial, because they used it as a test of the observer's keenness of sight. Saidak is Sutekh, and Sydik the father of the seven Cabiri, and Melchizedek. The star Saidak and the seven constitute the constellation of Sut-Typhon in Mesru, Mitzraim, or Mazaroth. From this Mes-ru came the name of the pigmies, the wee folk, and of the mount, high place, elevation, as Mitzar, a poetical designation of a mountain in the Holy Land; the hill Mizar[387]. This was the mount of the first oldest birthplace in the northern heaven. The north is identified with M'zar in the םירזמ of Job[388]. This mesru, mestru, meaning mouth of birth, is definitely marked by the star Mizar in the Great Bear's tail; and this was the celestial Mitzraim, or Egypt of the astronomical reckonings before the names were applied to Egypt in Africa. This can be followed in the eschatological phase of the Ritual, where [p.360] the seven cows or Hathors are a form of the seven of the Great Bear, in which is found the coffin of Osiris, i.e., the place of rebirth; and the first of these seven is named the Hat-Ka Neb-Ter, or the image-house of the entire lord, i.e., of the Horus or soul, in its two halves which were united in the meskar of new birth. It was here that the earthly Horus was refashioned in his heavenly likeness, and made whole.
In this birthplace of creation in space and initial point of motion in time, we shall find the seven, the ten, and the thirty-six—the number of patriarchs who in one of the lists are seven, in the other ten.
In the genealogy of Genesis[389], seven sons are derived from Mitzraim which has been identified in heaven and on earth as the outlet from the birthplace, the Egyptian mest-ru. The genetrix and bringerforth in this region was the goddess of the Great Bear, of the seven stars, seven Rishis, Cabiri, Hohgates, Princes, Elohim, or Patriarchs, and it is now suggested that the seven called the Ludim, Anamim, Lehabim, Naphtuhim, Pathrusim, Casluhim, and Philistim, were likewise named from the seven of the celestial Mitzraim, Khebt or Khepsh.
The ten are typified in the ten tribes, ten patriarchs, ten days to the week, ten months to the (Roman) year, ten moons of the Marquesan Poni, or year;* the thirty-six in the Chinese Thien-kong-sin, and the thirty-six divisions in the celestial and terrestrial Egypt; whilst the great Red Dragon of Revelation, the beast with seven heads and ten horns, whose tail drew to earth a third of the stars of heaven[390], is our final figure of the ancient mother, and the ten signs of the Isharim in Mitzraim, the Meskar or Mazaroth.
* The 'Typology of Time and Number'[391] will be set forth hereafter; but it should be noticed that the Marquesans have a year, revolution, cycle, or period of time, called a poni, consisting of ten moons, the ten lunar months of Menat. These, together with an inundation, would, in Egypt, make a solar year. The present writer, however, conjectures that this reckoning was based on the ten moons of the female period, in a land above the inundation of the Nile, and in a latitude where the Great Bear, the Dipper, dipped low down in the north during three months, the fact, as well as the three months' inundation, being registered for us in the three water-signs.
Probably, indeed apparently, very few of those who came out of Egypt could have understood the real purport of the writings carried off from the temple of Heliopolis; and, as these died out, the Jews of Palestine became more and more a people without a clue to their own scriptures, so the true mythos was lost to the rabbis of the Haggadah on the one hand, and, on the other, it was restored as history under the renaissance of Ezra.
In reading this sketch of the phenomenal origin of the Hebrew divinities, it should be borne in mind that only such matter can be introduced as is absolutely necessary for the purpose of comparison. [p.361] The ground is here but roughly broken, that has to be gone over again and trodden until we can finally find a new, a smooth, a permanent path.
It has now been shown that Egyptian was the Jews' language, and held on that account to be the sacred language, the language of the hieroglyphics, symbolism, the myths and the gods. The symbols go with the vocabulary, the myths with the symbols, the deities with the myths. There is no new creation to be found in the most ancient Hebrew writings, language, imagery, allegories, or divinities. They are wholly of Egyptian origin, to be read by Egyptian, to be interpreted and valued as Egyptian of the Typhonian Cult. The Jewish new departure and development were made with the oldest of all material. Only because that which is found within Egypt has been looked on as mythological, whereas the same matter out of it has been held to be historical, was it possible to assert that 'neither Hebrews nor Greeks borrowed any of their ideas from Egypt,'[392] which includes a double condemnation of the historic interpretation.
By the aid of Egyptian mythology we shall reduce the mist-magnified figures of the Jewish writings to their natural dimensions, and when the cloud has been dispersed by a gust of freer breath and fuller life, Egypt will become visible again, and the natural heavens will once more show clear blue by day and starry azure by night. It is only by removing these allegories back from earth to their native heaven that we shall ever gain the proper distance and detachment for seeing how and why it was that the universal gaze of mankind in many lands has been fixed on them in awe and wonder, instead of our having to suppose that the worldwide veneration was elicited from certain assumed historic facts that happened to an insignificant people afterwards known as the Jews of Judea.
The truth is that the later men overheard the innocent prattle of the early childhood as it babbled of heaven and the angels, the gods and the mighty ones, the messiahs and saviours, and, through not knowing the simple nature of the primitive mind, matter, and mode of expression, they have mistaken these utterances for something supernatural, mysterious, awful, divine; the oracles of Revelation, and the personal utterances of the very god himself.
During many centuries these writings have presented a problem so perplexing that it has been unparalleled in causing mental aberration and crowding the lunatic asylum of theological literature, and their expounders have been explaining what they did not understand; trying in vain to found eternal truth upon grounds which science has day by day demonstrated to be for ever false. For these expounders [p.362] of the ancient fragments, whose beliefs are based on legends which have been made to lie, the day is at hand for what the Egyptians termed the 'weighing and valuation of words,' and the ignorant upholders of the long misrepresentation of the ancient meanings, these blinded leaders of the blind, await their judgment and award; but, as it is with the uninitiated in the Ritual, there is no resurrection for them. Theirs was the past of fable and falsehood; they have no part or lot, and their teachings will find no place, in a future or a faith that is solely founded on the facts that are eternal.
This page last updated: 25/04/2014