THE ARK AND THE DELUGE

The treatment of the symbolism behind the figure of the ark and the deluge in the Christian Bible naturally belongs in the chapter on the baptism and the crossing of the water. But this allegory conveys a recondite message of such luminous beauty and cosmic majesty that it merits a chapter in its own right. It need hardly be announced at the start that the ark was not a wooden structure and the deluge had nothing to do with water. They are ideotypes of the most cogent intellectual suggestiveness. They are cosmographs, or figurative sketches of grand universal truth, sublime in conception and challenging in the sweep of their import.

From one angle of approach the ark symbolism duplicates or parallels that of the two boats analyzed in the previous chapter. For the exegesis here again manifests the dual aspect of the meaning portrayed, and shows two arks pertinent to man’s life, one floating on the terrestrial water, the other soaring across the celestial sea of crystal. The one above is the paraphrase for Apollo’s glorious chariot of the sun climbing across the sky by day; the one below is the raft, boat or ark in which the "dead" soul makes its passage by night across the Styx of the nether world, with Horus, Charon or Christ for pilot. In short, the upper one is man’s body of glowing spiritual light; the lower is his ark or temple of flesh. And the peculiarity of the operation of the great Law of the Two Truths comes to view here in the fact that in the alternate arcs of the cycle each body becomes in turn the ark that houses and preserves the other. In the earth cycle the physical body becomes the ark that contains and treasures the spiritual; conversely, in the discarnate cycle the spiritual body contains and treasures the seeds of the physical. It exemplifies the eternal alternation of spirit and matter, soul and flesh, discarnate and incarnate existence in the universe of life.

The one thing that is definite beyond dispute is that the legend of the ark and flood could never have had reference to a physical vessel bearing living animals and humans on the breast of a world-ocean raised to the mountain tops. For thousands it will be a gratuitous labor to point out the features of impossibility and absurdity in accepting the account as objective or literal history. They are in this case so glaringly preposterous that their brief review for the sake of shaking thousands of stubborn minds loose from literalism appears to be pardonable.

In the first place no vessel of the size described could house the number of living creatures--two of every species of "unclean beasts" and fourteen of every species of "clean beasts"--that Noah was ordered to take with his family into the ark. It would take a well-equipped army of many thousands of men at least a year to go over the earth now and collect the two or fourteen specimens of every living creature. And many types of animal and insect can not live when transported to different climatic habitats. Many insects live only a few hours and so could not possibly be taken a long journey to the ark. Noah and his family were given by the Eternal just seven days to make this collection, impossible to begin with! Then, if by some miracle there were space on board for all the animals, birds and insects (not to say fish and reptiles), there certainly could not be found space for the supply of food necessary to tide them over one hundred and fifty days’ imprisonment in the ark. And nearly all animals and insects require different kinds of food, impossible to provide, even to know what to secure and where to find it. Carnivorous animals would have to be given other animals to eat. And the imagination can depict the living conditions on such a boat after a few days.

Then as to the rain of forty days and nights, alleged to have raised the ocean over the whole world to the mountain tops! This is allegorism pure and simple, since forty thousand days of rain could not raise the ocean an inch! Rain is moisture that has been taken out of the ocean to begin with, and only returns to it, keeping its level constant. To raise the entire ocean of the globe, water would have to be brought here from the "canals" on Mars or other celestial body. Literally the story is as chimerical as the star of Bethlehem and Jonah’s whale.

In addition to all this, an examination of antecedent deluge traditions and accounts will demonstrate that the Biblical version is but one of numberless presentations admittedly allegorical, and its historical authenticity will be seen to effervesce away in the profounder import of the whole cycle of such mythical heritage. Consistent study of Comparative Religion through the centuries would have prevented Christianity from wresting its allegories and spiritual constructions in the scripture so utterly apart from kindred material of the pagan world in frightful distortion of their meaning.

When we transfer the reference from external symbol to subjective reality, the myth is seen to be a somewhat fanciful but lucid pictorialization of the reciprocal relation of the two bodies of man’s constitution, physical and spiritual, as well as a formula for the routine of evolutionary growth. In life the material body is the ark in which the soul is carried over the sea of sense and realism; in the heavenly state the ark is the spiritual body that enwombs the seeds of physical creation. From the moment of first entry into incarnation the soul is borne across the waters of earthly existence, from west gate of life to east gate through the dark underworld, in the ark of the physical body. But when the six water signs of the zodiac have been traversed, and the soul comes to the point of emergence from the sea, it then embarks anew on the ark of Ra on the eastern marge and is borne up the ascent of heaven to the Paradise about the Pole, to join the company of the gods and the stars (souls) that never set (incarnate). The ark below matches and reflects the structure of the ark above, but in inverted form. The tabernacle was to be fashioned after the pattern of things in the mount. And the lower and the higher tabernacles were to enwomb each other in turn.

The figure of the womb as matching the ark-type is by no means an impertinent fancy. There is no sense in which the ark symbol can be better understood in its truest reference to cosmology and anthropology than in its character as the womb. Ancient religion tended to take on phallic coloring because all living process is a birthing, and life passed from one womb to another. It swings from a gestation in matter to a gestation in spirit. The soul is incubated in the physical body; but the form of the next body is incubated in the deep womb of the soul after death. Mind gestates in body, but body also gestates or is engendered in mind. Intelligence conceives the creation, matter gives it birth. We must be born of water (matter) and the spirit. Life has two wombs, and every sun-god had two mothers. All life is conceived in the womb of Nut or Isis and given manifest birth in the body of Nephthys, Egypt told us five millennia ago. The great Ritual of that land condenses this mighty truth into a sentence in the discourses to Pepi: "O Ra, the womb of Nut is filled with the seed of the Spirit which is in her." Our word "nut," the fruit of the tree, may be derived from this venerable source. The Hindus had their Argha-Yoni, the feminine or uterine symbol of all creative source. And Argha is cognate in root derivation with "ark." The ark is the inner shrine and most holy sanctuary of life, from which the worlds issue.

Matter has been conspicuously published as being the Mater or mother of spiritual manifestation, but the correlative truth that in the opposite swing of the cycles of life and death, spirit likewise in its arc of the round becomes the gestating mother of the next expression in matter, has apparently become too abstruse for popular conception and has been lost out of the theological picture. Spirit goes into the cabin of the boat of the physical body to be gestated to new birth there. In turn, the body, going to dissolution outwardly, sends its principles into the inner shrine, or ark of the covenant, to be incubated there for its new birth in the next generation. Matter and soul eternally reciprocate dominance and leadership in living nature. And the flesh is no more the ark of the soul than soul is the ark of the flesh. Spirit conserves the gains in matter, to reproduce them in later forms, as matter does those of spirit.

As soon as Life bifurcates into its two opposite but complementary nodes, there is set in motion the operation of mutuality and reciprocity, rhythm and balance, between the two. Deep inside the ark was the shrine for Deity; buried in the secret depths of every physical man is Amen-Ra, the hidden Lord. But when the form of material man has vanished off the scene, deep within the heart of the god is the conception of the next organic form to be deployed into the visible world. And it is worth a moment’s comment in passing, to assert that a familiarity with the truth of this mutual and alternate birthing of soul and body in the order of life would have saved the western world the degradation of descent into the modern age of materialism now happily passing out. As noted in the first chapter of our study, modern science has now announced that all evolution is but the unfolding from within the geneplasm of qualities that were already implicit in the system of nature. Had vision not been beclouded by crass theological obsessions, and symbolic science not obliterated, these great truths could have been descried in Biblical texts in one or another form. In Exodus (25) the Lord’s instruction to Moses is given: "Inside the ark you must place the laws I give you." This is not an order to deposit documents in a chest, as childish orthodoxy might suppose. It is the divine decree that bids mankind imprint the laws of life, learned from mundane experience, indelibly upon the inner tablets of the human spirit. Says the Eternal: "I will write my laws upon the hearts, and in their minds will I write them." The lessons of truth must be engraved upon the eternal memory of the seminal divinity within. Thus, when the outer body of life is dissolved, the imperishable soul preserves the fruits of all past living in the unseen world of ideal archetypal forms.

Inside the physical matrix there hides the form of the god. Inside the god (when not embodied) hides the form of the (next) body. Each will give birth to the other in the cycle. To carry the image of birth in and from water, the boat or ark symbol was introduced. And the vastly important identity between the ark of the Biblical flood and the ark of the covenant in the Old Testament--the boat on the water and the chest in the temple--has been entirely lost sight of. Egypt kept the intimate relation in view when the chest from the sanctuary was carried on the shoulders of priests in procession in the shape of a boat or inside a boat. The tabernacle was a combined boat and shrine, or ark sanctuary. The fire on the altar or the shrine in the holy of holies was the symbol of divine mind nestling imperturbably in the heart of every material form.

When the Ritual expounds that the womb of Nut (nature) is filled with the seed of the spirit to which she is to give birth, the passage gives us the one central clue to full comprehension of the whole structure. It is found in the word "seed." Here is indeed our Ariadne thread by which to reach understanding. The entire scope and full force of the meaning can not be seen without viewing it through the analogy of the function of the seed in relation to its parent tree or plant. The ark is the seed of life. The analogy must be drawn in full.

Life, as said, ceaselessly alternates shuttle-like between the two nodes of manifestation and withdrawal, activity in matter and rest in spirit. From the heart of invisible being it issues forth to express its creative pleasure in building the universe. But it operates rhythmically in cyclic rounds, for it is never static; and its periodic activity is focalized in time, and runs its course to an end, at which the forms built up to express its nature are dismantled and vanish away. The Hindu Trinity expresses aspects of truth that the Christian Trinity has never conveyed. There was Brahma, the Creator, and opposite him Shiva, the Destroyer; and between them Vishnu, the Preserver of the eternal balance between them. The vast and vital function of Shiva has not been given due place in theology. Life has power to build forms, but if it did not also have power to destroy them, it would have to remain forever prisoner to its own formations! Nothing would be worse than that it should have to live eternally in the forms it first built. There could be no evolution. Life’s power to destroy a present construction and build a "more stately mansion" for its dwelling is its guarantee of advance to more abundant richness.

But provision then had to be made for preserving its grains at the end of each cycle when Shiva’s force brought all material forms to decay. Nature’s provision for this contingency is of course the seed. Every living organism has inherent in it the marvelous capability of nucleating on its outer periphery, just before the end of its career or of each "year" of growth, a miraculous embryonic reproduction of itself, its child in its own image and likeness, which has implicit within it the potentiality of renewing its parent’s life in complete stature in the next generation. In a word, every organic being, before death, is able to pack all its essential attributes into a tiny chest--Pandora’s box--in which is harbored the possibility of its living organically again in the next cycle, when the present corpus of matter is gone. This is its going into the ark, for the ark is the seed. It is that tiny vessel of sheer potentiality into which the living qualities now expressed in organic body can retire unseen, and be preserved in safety during the period when dissolution sweeps like a deluge over all the "earth" and washes all forms away! Earth here is a type of materiality, as heaven is the type of spiritual consciousness. The astute reader will already have divined that the Flood or Deluge is nothing other than the tide of Shiva’s force that, under the water typology, sweeps away all living forms and creatures. When that flood has washed away all foothold for soul or life to stand upon in cosmic waters, matter being the resting place for spirit, the indestructible nucleus of consciousness must retire into the invisible worlds and find a locale in structures of spiritual tenuity.

The innermost vessel of purely spiritual substantiality in the invisible realms is the ark shrine of man’s life, and is at the same time his seed vesicle, for in it are condensed as in a capsule the capability of renewal and reproduction of every character of his present life, to start a fresh expression in due course.

The great Flood, then, is the tide of dissolution of forms at the end of each cycle. Massey comes close enough to the significance of the Deluge legends to assert correctly that the Flood marks the end and the new beginning of a cycle. Life must go on; there must be a next cycle. The ark is the inner shrine or seed body--in the tree visible, in man invisible and spiritual--into which the life principles of any being retire to be tided to security over the period when the waters of dissolution wash away all other foothold on earth. And at the end of the Flood it will emerge from the ark to set foot on or in matter once more, and renew the living creatures on "earth."

The clue and the certification to the correctness of this interpretation lie in the very meaning and origin of the word "ark." The dictionaries give the source of the word as from the Greek arkein, "to keep off, ward off, fend, defend, protect in an enclosure," such as a palisade or corral. Moses’ ark of bulrushes is a typical mythical usage of the idea. The seed is just that enclosure of safety into which it withdraws when the waters of menace to its continuity are swirling around.

But who shall find authority strong enough to deny that the Greek arkein is not a slight variant or modification of the primary stem arch-? In this stem at any rate is the source of the basic meaning of the typism underlying the ark symbolism. For arche (Greek) means, most significantly, "the beginning"; and the seed is the beginning of the new generation, as it is the end of the preceding growth! When the cycle is ended and life has had its development and withdrawn from the form, it goes into rest for a night, after which it begins another cycle to gain further advance in enrichment. And here life operates according to a methodology that is basic for knowledge of its laws. In every new life period the indwelling and animating principle of soul begins its new career back at the point of the original beginning of all evolution itself. Every minor cycle becomes a miniature and reflection of the whole cycle of life in manifestation. It starts each new round at the point where first life started, or as the first word in the Greek Bible (Genesis) has it, en arche (Hebrew B’rashith), "in the beginning" of all creation. Each round starts from the same arche, for it has retired into that arche, or first primeval state of being, at the end of the preceding cycle, and must issue thence at the beginning of the next. More quickly, however, in each succeeding round it recapitulates its initial stages of growth. It is itself the Ancient of Days, a spark of that Infinite Being which is neither young nor old, but is ageless. Its new physical vehicle in each generation, however, traverses the successive stages of the entire evolution up to the point which the soul had achieved in the last activity, to go on a step farther from there. The immortal principle of soul retires into the primordial abysmal arche at the end of each active period, and emerges from it at each new beginning. And while in retirement in this arche it is tided safely over the waters of dissolution of form. Life does nothing else endlessly but go in and out of the arche. From manifest appearance in the worlds of actuality it retires into just what Plato denominated it, its archetypal form in noumenon. It comes out of this bosom of primordiality and withdraws into it in endless turn. It shuttles between adult growth in one cycle and embryonic seed beginnings in the next.

What characters, then, should we expect to find going into the ark to ride the flood? The names of Noah and his sons have not been competently etymologized, and much of the sequel is found here. The Greek word for the divine Mind is Noë, a feminine form of the universal cosmic Intelligence, the Nous--though Massey traces it from the Egyptian Nu or Nnu. The feminine form of the word, Noë, is quite significant, since it is in its feminine form in the Hebrew language that it comes to its form of No-ah, ah being a feminine termination. The no- is the stem of our own word "know," and of course the basis of such a word as "Gnosis." Noah is therefore the name of the divine intellectual principle, which, having projected itself into matter for the period of the active cycle, withdraws into the arche at the dissolution of its outward forms, as the spirit of the oak tree retires into the acorn before the storms crash its form to molder away. The French word for "Christmas" derives from the same stem, being No-el, which reads "(the birth of) God-Mind." And who are Noah’s three sons, who go with him into the ark?

This divine principle of mentality manifests or deploys outward into the cosmic field of creation, not as one ray, but divided into three, which give ancient religions their "solar triads" of mind-soul-spirit, three aspects or modifications of the one single first emanation of cosmic mind. They find Biblical typing in the persons of the three angels who visited Abraham under the oaks of Mamre, the three men in the fiery furnace in Daniel, and the three magi who come with the incarnating Messiah to "adore" him. They even find a physiological replica in the threefold segmentation of the spermatozoa of the male creative fluid, which is often the type of creative mind. Noah’s three sons, Ham, Shem, and Japheth, must be taken as the three primal segmentations of the first ray of divine consciousness. They are sometimes equated with the first three patriarchs of Israel, Abraham-Isaac-Jacob. Since a twelvefold progeny eventually issued from their cosmic activity, Jacob’s parentage of a race of twelve groups of Israelites is in line with the graph of the emanations. So, then, when the conscious principle is called upon to retire into its aboriginal arche at the "end of the aeon"--most disastrously translated "the end of the world"--it is quite clear that the intellectual entity could not disappear off the scene without absorbing his three radiations back into himself to disappear with him. Likewise their three shakti or materially implementing forces, or "wives," accompanied them into "the ark."

Then they were given "seven days" in which to build their structure of safety and gather the fourteens and twos of all creatures together. To be sure, the period for accomplishment of the work to be consummated in every cycle of life is "seven days." Life could not withdraw from its outward manifestation in matter before the end of the cycle, which is seven "days" of creative activity. Thus the allegory is in utter true conformity with ancient cosmology.

The collection of seven (presumably of each gender) of "clean beasts" and but two of each kind of "unclean beasts" into the ark has been an item of puzzlement to exegetists. This is simple enough. To be "clean," the lower animal nature would have had to be perfected by its development and purification attained at the end of the entire cycle of seven sub-cycles. Those that were figured under the number of the primal duality, which represents the condition in which they begin the cycle, when purgation of evil has but only begun, were the "unclean." The "sevens" were finished and "clean"; the "twos" were still imperfectly developed and "unclean."

The forty days of rain types the period of the "inundation," which is another glyph for the incarnation or incubation in the womb of matter. The grain of Egypt was considered to be forty days in the ground before germination, when planted in the overflowing waters of the inundated Nile. The germ of human life incubates forty weeks in the womb of the mother before birth. The 120 days of durance in the ark seems to represent this typical period of forty, number of incubation, considered as threefold, in conformity with the kindred emblemism of the three days in the tomb, that is, forty taken three times. The basic significance of the three numbers--three, seven and forty--which occur endlessly in Bible symbolism, is uniformly that of the gestation of incarnation. It is buried in the three lower kingdoms, mineral, vegetable and animal; it works in matter through the seven cycles of any period; and it lies latent through the forty days of prenatal growth.

The dove is the emblem of spiritual fire as in the baptism at the Jordan. As divinity sent out its Son, so likewise it sent out, figuratively, its dove, which could not find a landing to settle on the earth until the waters had ceased raging and the time of the new cycle was at hand. The raven is the type of the first, natural, carnal nature, the animal Adam, and obviously, as Paul says that is first which is natural, the raven was sent forth first as the forerunner and preparer of the way.

And lastly comes the significance of the landing place of the ark when the flood of dissolution had ended and the principles could move out into material organization once more. This is a most important item of the allegory, and that it has been missed utterly bespeaks the gaucherie of centuries of Bible elucidation. Again the name reveals the hidden sense. In the case of a human being, the principles at death flee from earth habitat to heaven or higher consciousness. When the time is ready for their next embodiment in flesh, they return from heaven and land again on earth, where alone a body of requisite character is available. There is, then, only one place indicated as appropriate for the ark to land after the flood has subsided, and that is--on earth. And that is precisely what the word "Ararat" means! Life fled into the ark when the earth was obliterated and washed away. If it is to be active again, it must return to earth and let the principles out to begin creation anew at the point and place where they had left off at the end of the previous cycle. Many times in old scriptures, indeed in the Bible, the earth is designated at "the mount of earth"; and at any rate it was typed under the figure of a mound or mount amid the water of space, a landing place amid the waters of the abyss, a station of security or foothold for life based on matter. We have seen it as Mount Sinai, and we shall see it as the "mount of the horizon." It is that Mount of the Lord on which the Christos delivers his "sermon" or divine message to humanity. This is no far-fetched alignment, but the downright meaning of the various Biblical mounts. And Ararat is the patent, obvious, direct word "earth" itself. The present Hebrew word for "earth" is arets. And one reliable authority states that it was earlier areth, or practically the English "earth." Mt. Ararat is just this old earth, on which life had to "land" in order to express itself in its next turn at physical existence. And in the light of this exposition it is to be hoped that the befuddlement of the western mind by bigoted literalism may be washed away in the flood of the dissolution of the incrustations of ignorance by a rain of ideas and symbols that will bring the ark of sanity back again to land on "Mount Ararat."

The ship or ark was also the navis, from the Latin stem na-, which has already yielded for us the cognate ideas of "to swim" and "to be born,"--the new birth in water. In Egyptian the ark was the theba, or teba; whence can be seen the origin and implication of the word Thebes, as a city name, carrying this whole segment of meaning in the uranograph. As Abydos and Annu were cities named to portray the death and rebirth of the sun-god, so Thebes was named to convey the idea of the soul’s voyaging over the waters in the ark of the body, and finding its new birth therein.

The sacred chests that play a part in many myths of creation find their clue in relation to the ark. In them always are kept the most holy things, as in the ark of the covenant. In the Mysteries of Bacchus a sacred box was carried in procession. There is the legend of Pandora’s box containing the seeds of all good and evil; the Argo of Jason; the moon-shaped boat in which Isis floated over the waters and gathered together the dismembered limbs of Osiris; and the whole list of coffins and chests out of which the various gods rose from a state of death for the redemption of the world. That the ark was identical with the coffin and mummy-case is attested securely by that remarkable line quoted before, the utterance of the Manes: "I am coffined in an ark like Horus, to whom his cradle is brought." The ark, as the physical form in the lower lake carrying the soul across the sea, is the coffin and tomb, as it is the womb; the tomb of death and the womb of new life all in one. The boats, arks and coffins alike evidently refer to the mystic womb of nature, typed by that of woman, and are symbols of salvation amid the "defluxions" of mortal life, as Plato intimates. The Manes says: "I have not been shipwrecked, I have not been turned back on the horizon, for . . . the Osiris-Nu shall not be shipwrecked in the great Boat."

There is a secondary imputation of meaning in the flood or deluge allegorism that can be delineated briefly. It is possible that the deluge epic can be taken, in a poetic sense at any rate, to adumbrate the release of the higher water (or fire) of spirit and intellectuality by the god upon the animal part of man after incarnation; and conversely, in its opposite phase, the release of the lower water (sensualism) upon the god by the lower animal man. Each flooded the other with their respective higher and lower forces, and this is in some sense an implied connotation of the deluge, as of the baptism. Revelation does say expressly that the Dragon loosed a water flood to overwhelm the Woman who fled from heaven to this refuge, and that earth swallowed up the flood and helped the Woman. We have seen that this interchange of influences underlay one meaning of the baptism, god and man reciprocally baptizing each other, the one with water, the other with fire. It could be extended to the deluge symbolism. Likewise god and man intoxicate each other, the one with spiritual, the other with sensual, wine of life. The gods were almost submerged under the mighty tide of sensuality that swept in upon their souls at their entry into animal bodies. A deluge of passion and beastliness broke loose to engulf all humanity and carry the Christ principle down into the "belly" of fleshly instinct.

A mass of legends center about the fact that in the early stages of human history an Eden of happiness was submerged under a deluge that covered the Mount. An initial Paradise was overthrown and buried under waters that flooded the earth. Various people even localized this drowned garden under the waters nearest them. The Black Sea, Lake Van in Armenia and Lake Copais in Egypt were a few of the seas on whose bottoms the sunken Eden might be found. A typical deluge myth that preserves the sunken Eden feature is one related by a Miztec tribe of Indians, to the effect that "in the day of obscurity and darkness the gods built a palace that was a masterpiece of skill, and made their abode on the summit of a mountain. The rock was called ‘the Place of Heaven.’ It was the primary dwelling of the gods. The children of the gods then planted a garden of fruit trees." But the universal fate of such gardens overtakes it: there comes a deluge; the garden of delight is submerged and "many sons and daughters of the gods are swept away" (Bancroft: Native Races, Vol. 3, p. 71). Massey says that "inevitably at times our earth gets substituted for the mound (mount), island," or eminence of whatever name that stands for a refuge of stability and security amid chaos. Naturally enough; for the reason that the "mount" was the earth. The celestial mount was transferred to earth by and with the arrival of the gods. The gods sank the Eden of spiritual mindedness and semi-Nirvanic blissful dreaminess under the deluge of the carnalism that the Dragon released to overwhelm them as they enter the lower sea of bodily life. There was for a time a Golden Age of angelic delight on the globe itself. But this was in the incipient stages of the descent, when as yet the higher mind hovered over, rather than fully inhabited, the physical constitution. Then it passed away under the encroaching waters of sensualism, as the angels were swept deeper into the coils and toils of incarnation. The gods transferred their focus of consciousness and interest from the heaven world of intellect down into the belly of sense and lust for physical life. They moved from the regions of air and fire down into the morasses of earth and water, all, however, within the frame of man’s material existence. Egypt and Plato both remind us that through intellect we are gods in heaven, while through body we are animals on earth. The god may descend from his tower or parlor to live in his stable. The submergence of Eden was the shift from divine mentation to gross carnality. To transfer Paradise from heaven to earth was for the gods merely to undergo the drastic delimitation of their scope of consciousness necessary to achieve incorporation in bodies of lower capacity.

The baptism or deluge from above on life below was well imaged by the Nile inundation in Egypt. The fresh water poured down from heaven in the upper ranges of the hills of source in Central Africa and flooded the land of Lower Egypt. And whether one takes this deluge in an evil or a good sense is only a matter of judging temporary burial of the land against lasting enrichment. Similarly with the human deluge. It flooded lower man, but with the waters of more abundant life. It is as the gentle rain from heaven, that blesses the earth. The deluge was the descent of the fiery solar god, through the air, in the form of water to nourish and make fertile the earth. And this is the outward description of the history of the human soul. Likewise it was the central theme of Mystery drama.

The mount of heaven was the original place of bliss and security; later the mount of the earth became the refuge of safety. It afforded a firm landing place for souls destined to wrestle with matter’s inertia to achieve greater power.

The sunken Eden is not a stranger to Bible pages. It is definitely alluded to by Ezekiel as lying in the nether parts of the earth, typed now as Assyria instead of the usual Egypt:

"To whom art thou thus like in glory and in greatness among the trees of Eden? Yet shalt thou be brought down with the trees of Eden into the nether parts of the earth. Thou shalt be there in the midst of the uncircumcised"--obviously the still animal races.

The Ovaherero, an African tribe, say that the sky was once let down in a deluge by which the greater part of mankind was drowned. This falls into agreement with the general Egyptian conception of the downfall of stellar hosts due to the shifting of the polar axis and the resultant dropping of many stars below the horizon. All this was set forth in Egypt as the superseding of the earlier gods, Nnu, Seb, Shu and Taht by Ra, the supreme god of Intelligence, or their reduction to subserviency under him. Ra rose to hegemony over all the elemental powers when he "resolved to be lifted up in an ark or sanctuary." This was the spiritual inner body of light now being formed within us, as Paul says, in which the principle of Mind could rule the natural creation in and through man.

The deluge from heaven brought down seven great powers to be submerged under the lower waters. The seven great pole stars fell one after the other, as the end of each aeon brought a shift in the axis. At each turn of the cycles one of the seven mountains was submerged, one of the seven provinces inundated, one of the seven rulers dethroned. These seven were imaged under many forms of description, as seven kings, seven heads, seven horns, seven mountains, seven islands, seven lampstands, seven stars, seven eyes, seven pillars and seven angels. The dragon that falls from heaven and goes to perdition is none other than these seven collectively. The fall of the seven as islands sinking in the abyss is stated with surprising clearness in Revelation (16:20): "Every island fled away and the mountains were not found." They had gone down to earth. We have seen that the mountain went down into the sea and turned it into blood.

In Wales there is the legend of the destruction of the seven divisions or provinces of Dyfed, when the drunken Seithenkin let in the deluge and drowned the land. The Mangaians recognize the seven islands of the Hervey group as the seven islands of Savaiki (Sevekh!), which they say lie in the underworld, or beneath the waters.

We read of the "deluge that afflicted the intrepid dragon." The seven heads of the Dragon were cut off one by one and thrown down as the seven cycles rolled around. The crowning stroke of creational activity was the dethronement of the last of the elemental seven by the solar god, who slew and succeeded the Dragon, after cutting off its seven heads. The overthrow of the Dragon by the solar god is one of the most ancient traditions of Greece. Apollo overcame the Dragon and took his place as guardian and inspirer of the oracle. In Babylonia Bel became a solar god and conquered the Dragon. Michael conquered him in Revelation. In the place of the outcast seven powers, devils, giants, ogres, "the god of the bright crown created mankind." This was the seventh creation, and astronomically it was marked by the passage of the pole from Lyra, the Harp, into the constellation of Herakles, the man, typing the inception of the reign of intelligence.

One of the labors of the all-conquering sun in his journey through the underworld is to obtain command over the lower water. One of his claims to vindication at the judgment is that he has prevailed over the deluge! In the Ritual (Ch. 136A) there is this: "He turneth back the water flood which is over the thigh of the goddess Nut at the staircase of Seb"--or the ascending grades of evolution on earth, in the thigh or womb of matter.

The Nile inundation begins in late June (Cancer) and was pouring out the fullness of its waters in July, the sign of the Lion. Hence the universally adopted symbol of the lion, or two lions, from whose mouths gush streams of water in fountains!

Horus, who was born of the water, has given his name to the month in which the waters of the inundation have their birth in Egypt. June in Egyptian nomenclature is Mesore. Mes is "to be born," "to be reborn"; Hor(Har) is the divine child, Har-Makhu, Har-Tema. Mes-Hor or Mesore is, then, the godly child born of the June waters. Many hints in old tomes point to the sign of Scorpio (October-November) as the true beginning of the year. This was in congruity with the typology of the Nile flood, as the inundated earth re-emerged from the waters at that time. In sculptures at Karnak the autumn equinox is represented as one of the divinities and the first month of the year; the vernal equinox appearing as the seventh month, when the seven principles of deity were born, or perfected.

From the deluge imagery rises the symbolism of a ladder, mound or tower, tree or rock, that should be built high enough to be beyond the reach of the flooding waters. This is but another variant of the Rock of Ages, that eternal principle of divinity in man, which though cast into the midst of the sea of turbulent natural forces, becomes the ark of safety or the rock of stability outlasting all decay and movement. Bab-El means "the gate of God," and equates Cancer in the zodiac, the northern gate of heaven. In the cyclic round of incarnations the soul ascends after each dip into matter and resurrection therefrom up to the high gate of heaven to dwell in the bosom of deity. But as the summer turns to fall, it is cast down again to earth, its unitary mentality is dissipated and its divine unity of speech scattered into many various dialects.

A Thlinkeet tradition recounts a deluge from which men saved themselves in a large floating structure. When the waters subsided the building drove on a rock and broke in two by its own weight. There is a detail omitted from the Ararat story in Genesis. Again it corroborates the reading of the earth for Mount Ararat, as deity does break into two aspects, male and female, when it lands on earth. This bifurcation is the meaning of the first verse of Genesis, "heaven" and "earth" standing for spirit and matter.

An Indian saga says that in the deluge a virgin caught hold of the foot of a bird as it flew above her and was carried up out of the water where all were drowning. As the bird is the universal image of the soul, the implication is that man’s lower nature saves itself by catching hold of the foot (heel?) of the soul’s power as it sweeps down close to the level of physical life and being lifted up thereby.

But a strange and at first unaccountable element of mystery and oddity enters the many deluge traditions with the frequent mention of the monkey. For instance, the Tlascalans say that after the deluge those who were preserved were changed into monkeys, who later evolved into human beings. In the Codex Chimalpopoca the result of the great hurricane was to change men into monkeys (Bancroft). A belief of the Catalans is that after the deluge those who had been previously changed into monkeys were subsequently transformed into men. An Arawak rendering is very curious. It recites that the waters had been confined in the hollow bole of an enormous tree by means of an inverted basket. The mischievous monkey saw the basket and believing it contained something good to eat, he lifted it up, whereupon the deluge burst out from the tree. A Guiana story runs much to the same effect. The waters were pent up in the stem of the tree of life, to be let forth in appropriate measure to fill every lake and stream with water for the fish. But Warika, the mischievous monkey, forced open the magic cover that held back the waters, which then gushed out to sweep away not only the meddling culprit, but all living things besides. The points of similarity of these fables with that of Pandora should be noted. Many other legends charge the monkey with being the villain in the deluge piece.

What is the significance of this connection? In the cosmic sense adumbrated by the astrological mythology, Hapi, the ape, was one of the four (of the seven) elemental powers holding up the four corners of the earth. The Kaf-Ape, Hapi, personated the element of air, and it is from the powers embosomed in the air that an outpouring of water takes form. Hapi is typed as the fury of the air in motion, engendering the hurricane and the deluge. Hurricane, we have seen, is a derivative of the name of the Quiché deity of the storm wind, Hurakan (French ouragan), he who brought life to man through breath, Shu. The ape was the zoötype of Shu. Hapi, the Ape, is one of the four who are, in Ezekiel’s vision, the eagle, bull, lion and man; in Revelation the lion, calf, bird and man; and in Egypt Amsta, Hapi, Tuamutef and Kabhsenuf. Amsta was the human, Hapi, the ape, Tuamutef the jackal and Kabhsenuf the hawk. These, so mystifying and so confusedly presented in various forms, must be conceived to represent the four basic supports of man’s life, the four elemental essences, earth, water, air and fire, of each of which substances man has a body. These four are placed symbolically at the four corners or cardinal points of the zodiac, the two solstices and equinoxes. Massey locates Hapi, the ape, at the autumn equinox, yet in the tables of the four elementaries he is found at the spring equinox. His position on the horizon at the equinox is vastly appropriate. The horizon is the dividing line between two realms, and the monkey stands there as the type of man because he himself is on the dividing line between the animal and the human kingdom, and thus symbols man, who in his turn is on the dividing line between the human and the divine.

Yet it is possible that still another meaning of momentous import lurks behind the figure of the monkey in deluge mythology. The culpability of the monkey may be seen from the angle of anthropology. In other connections reference has already been made to the "harlotry" so vehemently reprobated by the Lord in the Old Testament, and to the miscegenation perpetrated by the early sons of God with some of the higher animals after the descent. The result of this transgression of natural restrictions upon procreation was the generation of the various monkey types. They were the offspring of male humans and female animals, according to much evidence in such old books as Enoch, the Avesta, the Gilgamesh Epic, the Bundahish and the Vedas. The monkey is by parentage equally man and beast, and can stand as the type of man, who is man and god together. When the legends hint that the result of the deluge was to change men into monkeys, and as in one version to restore men, changed into monkeys, back to human form, it is, in the guise of a Märchen, the statement of a great anthropological datum, for the truth of which science is still groping. The gods were told not "to marry the women of that place" or to "make alliances with the natives of that land." But it seems they did so, and the miscegenation that is marked by the existence of the monkey was apparently used to typify the letting loose the deluge of carnal lust that swept over the world in consequence. The monkey would therefore vividly personify the deluge that swept the gods down to the very depths of sensuous riot. He would stand as the badge of the god’s biological sin, that released the flood of the lower waters to enmire the feet of deity, and bring the "destruction" of mankind. Archaic fable reports that early races and continents had to be destroyed as a result of the breach in evolutionary law, for it is stated that there were bred monsters terrible and great. Paul has told us that wickedness changed the image of the incorruptible god into the likeness of loathsome beasts and creeping things. The monkey is the living sign of this degradation.

. . . . . . .

There has been substantially covered the body of arcane wisdom touching the coming of transcendent celestial power to earth to perform a mighty segment of evolutionary work in this sphere. The god had descended to the bottom of his arc, his evolutionary nadir, and would go no further. He stands at that point poised in the balance with material inertia, gripped in the tentacles of matter, locked in a tense struggle with opposing powers. He is engaged in the great Battle of Armageddon, which is fought, says the Ritual, at midnight and on the horizon. To modern thought, for the first time, is to be revealed the momentous significance of the mighty Egyptian symbol of the Horizon.