02.04. An Ocean on Fire

AN OCEAN ON FIRE

It is next to inconceivable how blind the intellect of a world has been! How obtuse to a reality that the allegory pressed upon it in the plainest terms! So close to us is this red sea over whose storm-tossed billows we must swim to reach a happier land that it could not be brought any closer to us.

Closer is he than breathing,
Nearer than hands and feet,-- sang the poet Tennyson of the divine Self within us. And just as close to us is this very red sea of life. For, far down into the depths of an actual body of water, incarnation has plunged these souls of ours that are as oblivious of the watery element they swim in as they are of the air they breathe. So true is this, both as allegory and as fact, that ancient poetic genius typified the soul as a great fish swimming about in the sea, the soul of life immersed in water. Early Christianity still carried this symbol, as both Augustine and Tertullian said that the Christ was the great fish in the sea and his Christian followers were the little minnows. The fish, as symbol of divinity, was universal in the arcane typology and in mythology. And when souls had descended into incarnation they were aptly likened unto fish in the sea. In actuality, souls are immersed in a vessel of living potential that is seven-eighths water, and it is sea water! And, open a vein and let it out and the oxygen immediately turns it red! The Red Sea! At last the astounding truth strikes home to the mind of a surprised world: this "Red Sea" which all Sons of God, the only "Israelites" ever spoken of in the Holy Scriptures, have to cross -- is the human body blood! With a clear, sharp sense of understanding will any deep-thinking mind now realize the dynamic force and literal truth adumbrated by the allegorical figure of our souls having to sink down in, wade through, swim across or be transported over a body of water, which on the side of a poetic figure, the Reed Sea, is green, but on the side of physical reality is actually red. Every life of eighty years entails an immersion of the fiery element of soul in these bodies of water and crossing them to the farther shore. Eventually, in the war between the fire of soul and the water of body, which incarnation precipitates, the unquenchable fire of soul must dry up the "moist elements" and permit the soul to cross without "getting its feet wet." So we have the beauty of the divine parable which could not be caught as long as allegory was mistaken for alleged Jewish history, most of which, if it is looked at closely and realistically as presumed actual event, is seen as preposterous and impossible.

If a skeptical reader insists upon challenging the truth of the declaration that the human body blood is sea water, and not only in poetry but in chemical constituency, the authority back of the statement is that of science, of biology, of anthropology, of evolution, of chemical analysis verified in the laboratory. The human blood is ocean water, declared so by chemistry, salinity and all, so that analysis can find no essential character difference between the two. One could logically infer this fact even without verification by chemical analysis, from a basic knowledge that the stream of biological life in its evolution came originally out of the oceans. For a long, early period confined to the sea, it later became transferred to the land; the sustenance of bodily energy through the chemical properties of water was replaced by the elements in air; gills were exchanged for lungs. Yet, the lymphs, plasms and humors in the organisms retained the primal character of what they had been from the start, -- sea water. The action of oxygen on substances tends to give them a red coloration. Indeed we do retain the original heritage of the sea in our veins. Our blood is this "Red Sea." The ocean is our common mother; and half of the goddesses of mythology and the Scriptures actually perpetuate their identity with the sea in their names, most prominently Thallath (Greek word for "sea") and Mary (Latin for "sea," Maria).

Language is the deep mine of occult meaning which must be worked constantly if one is to bring up the precious ore of living truth in the arcane science of old. If the writers of the Hebrew Old Testament had wanted to speak of the Red Sea explicitly, instead of the iam suph, they would have written iam adom, for "red" in Hebrew is adom. The Hebrew word for "blood" is dam. Adam’dam means "reddish," admoni means "red-haired." The word for "ground, earth" is adamah; hence, as adam is the word for "man," but was included in the word adamah, meaning "ground, earth," the name Adam was given the meaning of "red earth." And in one way that is exactly what man is, his earthy body mixed with red blood. By a mere switch of vowels, adam became Edom, and Edom is the patronymic of Esau, who was "red, hairy." We find that connection of Edom with red in the first verses of the 63rd chapter of Isaiah: "Who is this that comes from Edom, with his garments dyed red from Bozrah? Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him that treadeth in the winevat (Isaiah 63:1-2)?" But this is only the beginning of what etymology, philology can do for us in this green-red symbolism. It is no wonder, incidentally in passing, that green and red are the two colors typical of the Christmas season and its symbolism, as green stands for the natural man, and red, as the color of fire, typifies the spiritual man, and it is the ultimate marriage of these two components in man’s nature that gives birth to the Christ consciousness.

Back there in ancient Egypt we come upon another precious nugget of language revelation. In fact it becomes the basis of the gist of this treatise. We find there the origin of the word "sea" itself, a most illuminating item of knowledge. The fundamental predication of the great Egyptian wisdom structure was the interaction of the two polarized energies of spirit and matter, on a web of force suspended between which the axis of the universe is conceived as turning. The Egyptian spiritual or cosmogonic mythology traced the generation of the two universal creative energies of life in a semantic structure which said that the God Tum (in one version, Kepher in another) with his hand produced from his generative power his seminal seed, "and from the drops of blood which fell upon the earth, were born the gods Hu and Sa" (in another version Shu and Tefnut). And these twins, god and goddess, brother and sister, Hu and Sa, became the progenitors of mankind. These two short names stood to the Egyptian seers as Hu for spirit, and Sa for matter. And as fire was the universal symbol of spirit, so water, its chemical antagonist, was the symbol of matter. This gives us the association of the word sa with water. But in the Egyptian system of hieroglyphics the tonal symbol of fire was the letter of the alphabet, sh. The evidence of this, beside many other items, is that the Hebrew word for fire is esh. As the unit of conscious being, what would be the ego-consciousness, or I-consciousness, was alphabetically embodied in the capital letter "I," and this self-consciousness was embodied, as far as this earth is concerned, in the creature man, the Hebrew word for "man" combined the "I" of divine consciousness with the "sh" of fire, so that "man" in Hebrew is ish. As "Hu" was the unit of spiritual life, man thus became the Hu-man being. And since this Human entity tenants a body of water, we have a suggestive ground for the words humid, humidity and the "humors" of the body. We shall now look at the words derived from the Sa stem and shall find them interesting and illuminating indeed.

Immediately it seems indubitable that we have here the true origin of the word "sea" itself. Since Sa was matter, and water its symbol, the great water mass on the earth was the s(e)a. Possibly some one introduced the "e" into the Sa to hide its derivation from the latter, in the esoteric spirit which motivated all ancient religious literature. This ruse was often resorted to, the "Red Sea" itself being an instance of it. But what is that element in the composition of sea water that is most directly associated with it? Salt, of course! And salt is sodium chloride, no less. Sa,sea,salt! And salt is used as a preservative. In man’s constitution, say all the great Scriptures, is an element, a divine principle, that is described as the "salt of the earth," and hence is that which saves man and is the rock of his salvation. So we have the words save, safe, salvation, salvage, (probably) saliva, sane, salud (Spanish word for "health"), salute, salad, salubrious, salutary, salacious, and by a poetic stretch, sail (over the bounding main, as the old school song has it), and others. As salute is to hail, sail equates hail, and in fact "s" and "h" interchange places between words in different languages or even in the same language thousands of times, as in the Hindu Asura and the Persian Ahura. It is quite a likely fact that the presence of salt in the world oceans maintains chemically a balance between elements that keeps the world atmosphere "salubrious." All the muck of the continents is carried by rivers into the briny deep, and it is that saline component of our seas that preserves the purity of our air, one must suppose. So then, if salud (health) and salute (generally an inquiry about a person’s health), and sail and hail are kindred in original meaning, we have at once a connection of hail with hale, and also with heal and the German heil (hail) and heilig, "sacred, holy". Doubtless this chain extends further. At least two allegorical constructions in the Bible introduce this element of salt and they now become most significant. Could it be pure "coincidence" that the strange incident of the turning of Lot’s wife into that pillar of salt (which Josephus said was still standing in his day, the first century A.D.!) occurred at a city called Sodom (Genesis 19:26)? Here the hint thrown out above comes in for consideration. Are we stretching things too far if we identify Sodom with sodium(chloride)? When it is remembered that in the ancient Hebrew manuscripts and the original Egyptian scripts back of them vowels were few and virtually nondescript and almost indistinguishable, there is nothing authoritatively to be introduced against the identity. (Vowels only later in the Greek came to distinctness, and the Greek has the full complement of seven.) If, in passing, the question of the esoteric significance of the pillar-of-salt allegory is raised, perhaps the interpretation is that if on the soul’s "fleeing" from the condition of embodiment in bodies composed mainly of sea-salt water, it does not continue straight ahead in its evolution toward spiritual heights, but turns to look back and seek again the attractions of life of body, it will be drawn back for further incarnations in salty bodies, the body being poetized as this pillar of salt. If this is not the significance, the real meaning must lie much deeper indeed.)

Then in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis the first verses tell of a battle between five kings on one side and four on the other, waged in "the vale of Siddim, which is the salt sea (Genesis 14:1)." (Another version has it, "at the salt marshes," -- the Reed Sea.) Not only do we have Sodom connected with the salt sea, but now Siddim, and vowels not to be considered of any decisive importance. Nor does the doubling of the "d" make any difference, as consonants were constantly being doubled, according to certain euphonic principles. Sodium, Sodom, Siddim, and all very saline! Can one be simply in error in affirming, then, that all these allegorical flourishes are ancient semantic devices hiding in their cryptic methodology the flat meaning that the great battle of life, the war between the carnal and the spiritual elements in man’s nature, is fought out right here in the sodium chloride in the blood of these bodies of ours? There is, indeed, reinforcement for the idea in the Bible’s repeated statement that "in the blood is the life of the soul (Leviticus 17:11)." A piquant phrase of universal usage in referring to strong character and sterling quality as being in a person’s blood, is seen to have a basis here. And ancient Egypt speaks up in this connection, too. In referring to the universal duality of spirit and matter, it poetizes the two polar energies as the Pool of the Sun and the Pool of the Moon; the Pool of the North and the Pool of the South; and again the Pool of Natron and the Pool of Salt. This natron is intriguing; for it starts with na-, and the chemical formula for salt is NA-CL. Obviously the na is for sodium. Chemistry might tell us of some connection here that would again assure us that these ancient Egyptians knew more occult truth than we have ever given them credit for. Some one could tell us more about natron and its properties. Na- is significant as beginning both "nature" and "name," and, oddly enough, in Scriptural usage, name and nature were close to identical in meaning. The patriarchs always called upon the name of the Lord. One’s name was an intrinsic part of one’s identity, one’s nature. A new name was always given when the candidate in the Mysteries was assumed to have put on the new nature of divinity. This is directly stated in Revelation.

Turning from Egyptian to Latin, we find this na introducing us to a new range of striking significance. In this language it is the base of one of the shortest verbs, whose stem is simply N- in the "A" conjugation, -- that is, its accompanying vowel is "a" and not "e" or "i." This verb built up on the na stem, nare, means two things that at first do not suggest any kinship or connection. It means both "to be born" and "to swim." From it on the side of "born" we get name, native, nature and natal; on the side of "swim" we have navy, naval, navel, natatorium (a swimming pool), and probably our natron also. And how are being born and swimming connected? Any mother should know, or any physician: all birth is out of water, even that of all life on the earth out of the sea. "Moses" means drawn "out of the water." The Egyptian word for "birth" was mes. We find it in such Pharaonic names as Thothmes ("the born Thoth") and Rameses (the born god Ra) and others. But more to the point, we have it in the word Messiah, the born Iah (Jah), the three letter name of Jehovah. The human babe comes forth swimming in a sack of water. That Na speaks very clearly to our intelligence indeed. Jesus said that the "natural man" is born of water, while the "spiritual man" is born of air, as the Latin word "spiritus" means "air." How faithfully nature matches this spiritual history in her procedures! For the soul of life on our planet was born out of the water into the air, and the human foetus at birth steps out of water into the air! This transition was by the ancient sages made the type-figure of the regeneration of man, when evolution brought him to the point of graduation from the reign of animal instinct, under the influence of natural as distinct from spiritual forces, over into the realm of mind (always symboled by air); and this becomes brilliantly illuminating if we keep before us the symbolic relation of the na of natural to water, and that of spirit to air, in the Latin verb spiro, I breathe. And if we seek the absolutely first origin of this na’s connection with water, we have it, beyond all controversy of grammarians, back there in ancient Egypt’s wondrous symbolic creatings, in the hieroglyph that means water. In this archaic and arcane symbol-system, right in the Egyptian alphabet, the letter N is written in the form of seven wavelets of water, one might say it pictures the ocean agitated by the wind in seven waves, -- And the primary name attached to the divine ego-soul incarnated in matter-water-body was this letter thrice repeated, -- NNN. Also the primitive name of the cosmic soul of being immersed in matter was Nu. This was the masculine form of the name, while the great universal mother-matter form of the name was Nut, and the form that indicated the universal undifferentiated essence of primal being at the start was the Nun. When the Palestine religionists reformulated the body of their religious concepts, which they drew from ancient Egypt, they switched the alphabetical sign of water from N over to M, and just about all words signifying water-matter begin with M ever since. The reasons for this transfer the present writer has not discovered anywhere in his research. But there is no gainsaying the fact of it. Our own written English M still represents three of these original seven waves of water (printed form only two), and our written and printed N still represents two waves. While the Hebrew word for water in the sense of the sea is iam, the Hebrew word for water as such is mayim, which, being a plural (ending in im) would really be waters or waves. And how vividly instructive this pursuit of meaning in the construction of words can become is well illustrated here when we consider the Hebrew word for "heaven." The first chapter of Genesis speaks of the general concept of heaven in the phrase translated "the waters of the firmament (Genesis 1:6-8)." But the firmament, that is, the underlying indestructible first essence of all creation, was always represented as dual, divided into the firmament above and the firmament below. The Egyptian savants had divided the creation into the Upper Nun and the Lower Nun. This would refer to the division of the primordial undifferentiated homogeneous matter -- the NUN -- into the masculine (spiritual) NU and the feminine (material) NUT, in life’s universal polarity in the periods of manifestation, when it is not dormant in its phase of unmanifestation, called by the Hindus pralaya. This would give precisely what Genesis does give in its very first verse: "In the beginning God created the heavens (the Upper Nun) and the earth (the Lower Nun) (Genesis 1:1)." Now all things pertaining to the material or Lower Nun side of life’s eternal duality, were symbolized by the two "lower" elements, earth and water; likewise all things pertaining to the Upper Nun side were symbolized by the two "higher" elements, air and fire. How clearly nature both sanctions and typifies this is seen in the fact that on the earth below we have earth and water, while above we have air and (the sun’s) fire. Also we have fire in the upper air in the form of lightning, in a thunderstorm.