Symbolism and Creation, Part 10

Now that we’ve ascertained that the astral waters of creation were called “the deep,” we have a key to understanding several other such puzzling and mysterious references in scripture. For example, in Revelation, Chapter 13, we learn of a beast that rises out of the “sea.” Could this be the same reference to heavenly waters of creation as we have found in Genesis? Again, in Daniel, Chapter 7, we find four beasts rising out of “the great sea.” Curiously, Ezekiel, too, saw these same four beasts, which appears to indicate that he saw the same thing as Daniel before him and John after him. Except, in Ezekiel’s story the sea is described as a cloud. Actually he affirmed that the beast came out of a “whirlwind” out of the north, “a great cloud.”

Of course, the north is where all things significant are said to happen in ancient lore. At the risk of repeating myself, I must point out that all the creator gods were located in the celestial north, where our thesis places the planet Saturn.

As we shall see, these three references to water recall the creative waters in heaven from which all things were created, as all creation myths assert. It also strongly suggests that words such as the “deep” and the “abyss” from which such beastly images are said to emerge was an astral phenomenon, not something on or beneath the Earth. It further strengthens our assumption that the beasts themselves were originally astral in origin. Thus, we see that even the symbolism used by the prophets to describe what they saw in vision was dictated by the metaphorical symbolism derived from antiquity.

As in Ezekiel’s account, these waters of creation were more than an amorphous water-like phenomenon. They were a whirling, broiling, cloud-like phenomenon, looking much like a tumultuous whirlpool in the sky. Hence, the ancients refer to this swirling, churning mass as water that surrounded and enfolded the creator god.

This was the original Cosmos, the creative cosmic sea from which the first astral gods emerged. The Egyptians called it the “Pai-land,” the Island of Fire” and “the divine emerging primeval island.” This was the “island of Hetep (rest).” That is, while it slowly churned in place, that central place did not move.

This is the Greeks’ lost island, which they called Ogygia, which they envisioned in the north. This island was said to have floated on the sea of heaven. It is the aether (again, a fiery sea) of the Orphic Hymns and Mysteries from which came the revolving, golden “egg,” out of which came the creation. In the Egyptian coffin texts we read: “I was he who came into existence as circle, he who was the dweller in his egg. I was the one who began everything, the dweller in the primeval waters.”

Envision, if you will, a slowly rotating whirlpool of seething, boiling clouds — not those we see in the sky on a summer day, but those that roil and entwine. Moreover, these clouds seemed to have a life of their own, and they must have glowed or appeared to smoldered, as does thick smoke from hot coals. Another way to envision this creative whirlpool is to visualize an artist’s rendering of a black hole, then flip it upside down in your mind’s eye so that it is above you in perspective.

This is where the concept of the witch’s cauldron comes from, a boiling, churning mass of creative energy from which emerge fantastic creatures or powerful magic spells.

Japanese legends recall a similar celestial island to the Greeks’ Ogygia. They called it Onogora, “the drifting land.” It was the island of the “Congealed Drop”, that is, the island emerged from these celestial waters. This was the “white island” of Zeus, which revolved “in the midst of the sea.” The Hindus also remember this “white island” (Shweta-dwipa), which was located at the polar center. The Toltecs of Tula, Mexico, told of this “white island,” calling it the center of the world.

This is undoubtedly the same mythical island that Plato learned about from the Egyptians, which he called Atlantis. Although he embellished the myth greatly, the description of that legendary island civilization has all the hallmarks of a Saturn icon.

It is no less an authority on things Egyptian than Budge, who summarized the Egyptian version of the creation thusly: “The first act of creation began with the formation out of the primeval watery mass of an egg, wherefrom issued the light of the day, i.e. Re.” This was their “Island of the Egg.” He also wrote, “From various passages found in the religious, mythological and funeral texts of all (Egyptian) periods, it is abundantly clear that in primeval times, at least, the Egyptians believed in the existence of a deep and boundless watery mass out of which had come into being the heavens, and the earth, and everything that is in them.”

Thus we see that in the ancient mind, the land that arose from the heavenly waters was equated with an egg. Why? Because, that ‘egg’ eventually ‘opened’ as the embryonic cloud gradually dissipated, revealing the heretofore shrouded planet Saturn with its “golden seed,” the two planets Venus and Mars. The Earth, of course, was located at the ‘base,’ if you will, of these polarly aligned or ‘stacked’ planets.

In the Babylonian creation myth, called the “Enuma Elish,” we read, “When on high the heaven had not been named, firm ground below had not been called by name, there was naught but primordial Apsu, their begetter, and mother Tiamat, who bore them all, their waters commingling in a single body.” The name Apsu is also written Abzu, from whence came the Greek abyssos and the Roman abyssus, and subsequently our word “abyss,” the “deep” of creation and prophecy.

So, the “heaven” and the “earth” of Genesis are nothing more than allusions to different parts of this astral whirlpool or nebular disc that hovered overhead. That is, the “firmament” was the island or “earth.” The waters surrounding that heavenly land were said to be the “waters which were under the firmament” and the “waters which were above the firmament.” The egg, island, land, earth or firmament therefore “divided the waters,” since it sat in the very middle.

This also explains the otherwise contradictory use of the term “firmament” for the sky or the “vault of the heavens.” Dry land can be called “firm,” but not air and sky. Yet, when the island or land emerged in the center of the slowly rotating nebular disc, it could rightly be called “firm” or firmament. So, it is to the planet emerging in the heavens that the ancients referred when they used that term.

Of course, where the Egyptians saw an egg emerging from the waters and the Greeks saw an island, the Hebrews saw “dry land appear” when the “waters” were “gathered together unto one place.” Of course, God called this dry land “earth.” This was Saturn and its companions emerging from the plasma or gaseous envelope (Cardona calls in a “placental cloud”) that had previously hidden them from the gaze of earth-bound observers.

© Anthony E. Larson, 2008