21. The Sepher Bereshith
Moses married Zipporah, daughter of Jethro, and sojourned many years with the wise man of Madian. Thanks to the Ethiopian and Chaldean traditions which he found in this temple, Moses was able to complete and master what he had learned in the Egyptian sanctuaries, to study the most ancient cycles of humanity and by the process of induction to plunge into the distant horizons of the future. It was at the home of Jethro that he found two books on cosmogony mentioned in Genesis: The Wars of Jehovah and The Generations of Adam. He studied them with great care.
It was necessary to gird his loins well for the work he was considering. Before him Rama, Krishna, Hermes, Zoroaster and Fo-Hi had created religions of the people; Moses wished to create a people for the everlasting religion. A strong foundation was necessary for such a courageous, new, gigantic undertaking. For this reason Moses wrote his Sepher Bereshith, his Book of Beginnings, a concentrated synthesis of the science of the past and a framework for the science of the future, a key to the Mysteries, a torch of the initiates, a rallying-point for the entire nation.
Let us try to see what Genesis was, according to Moses' way of thinking. Certainly in his thought Genesis radiated a different light, it embraced worlds which were much more vast than the naive conception of the tiny earth which appears in the Greek translation of the Septuagint, or in St. Jerome's Latin translation!
The Biblical exegesis of the nineteenth century made fashionable the idea that Genesis is not the work of Moses, that this prophet may not even have existed, and that he may have been merely an entirely legendary character invented four or five centuries later by the Jewish priesthood in order to give itself a divine origin. Modern criticism bases this opinion on the fact that Genesis is composed of various fragments (Elohistic and Jehovistic) pieced together, and that its present editing is posterior by at least four hundred years to the time when Israel left Egypt. The facts established by modern criticism as regards the time of editing the texts that we possess today are accurate; the conclusions it draws from them are arbitrary and illogical. It does not follow from the fact that the Elohist and Jehovist wrote four hundred years after the Exodus, that they were the inventors of Genesis and that they did riot work on an earlier document, perhaps poorly understood. From the fact that the Pentateuch gives us a traditional account of the life of Moses, it does not follow that it contains nothing true. The mission of the prophet is explained when he is seen in his native environment, the solar temple of Memphis. Finally, the depths of Genesis are revealed only in the light of torches snatched from the initiation of Isis and Osiris.
A religion is not formed without an initiator. The judges, the prophets, all the history of Israel, give proof of Moses; Jesus himself cannot be conceived of without him. Moreover, Genesis contains the essence of the Mosaic tradition. Whatever changes it has undergone, beneath the dust of centuries and priestly wrappings the venerable mummy must contain the basic idea, the living thought, the testament of the prophet of Israel.
Israel gravitates around Moses as surely, as inevitably as the earth turns around the sun. But once this is established, it is something else to know what the basic ideas of Genesis were, what Moses wanted to will to posterity in this secret testament of the Sepher Bereshith. The problem can be resolved only from an esoteric point of view, and is as follows: In his role as an Egyptian initiate, the intellectuality of Moses had to be on a par with Egyptian science which, like ours, accepted the permanence of the laws of the universe, the development of worlds by gradual evolution, and in addition had extensive, exact and rational ideas about the soul and invisible nature. If such was Moses' science -- and how could a priest of Osiris not have had it? -- how can one reconcile this with the naive ideas of Genesis concerning the creation of the world and the origin of man? Might not this story of creation which, when taken literally, makes a modern schoolboy laugh, conceal a profound symbolic meaning? Is there a way to unlock the latter? What is this deep meaning? Where can one find the key to it?
That key is to be found: 1. in Egyptian symbolism, 2. in the symbolism of all the religions of the ancient cycle, 3. in the synthesis of esoteric teaching from Vedic India to the Christian initiates of the early centuries.
The Greek authors relate that the priests of Egypt had three ways of expressing their thoughts. "The first was clear and simple; the second, symbolic and figurative; the third, sacred and hieroglyphic. At their wish, the same work assumed a literal, a figurative or a transcendent meaning. This was the genius of their language. Heraclitus expressed the differences perfectly in designating them as speaking, signifying and concealing."
In the theogonic and cosmogonic sciences the Egyptian priests always used the third mode of writing. Their hieroglyphs had three distinct meanings. The last two could not be understood without a key. This enigmatic, concentrated style of writing was related to a fundamental tenet of Hermes' doctrine, according to which one and the same law rules the natural world, the human world and the divine world. This language of extraordinary conciseness, unintelligible to the common man, had a singular eloquence for the adept, for, by means of a single sign it evoked the principles, causes and effects radiating from divinity into blind nature, into the human consciousness and into the world of pure spirits. Thanks to this writing, the initiate embraced the three worlds in a single glance.
Considering Moses' education, there is no doubt that he wrote Genesis in Egyptian hieroglyphs with three meanings. He entrusted the keys and oral explanation to his successors. When, in Solomon's time, Genesis was transliterated into Phoenician characters, when, after the Babylonian Captivity, Esdras edited it in Chaldaic-Aramaic characters, the Jewish priesthood could make but very imperfect use of these keys. At last, when the Greek translators of the Bible appeared, they had no more than a vague idea of the esoteric meaning of the texts. Despite his serious intentions and his great mind, when St. Jerome prepared his Latin translation from the Hebrew text, he could not fathom the basic meaning, and could he have done so, it was right that he remained silent. Therefore, when we read Genesis in our translations, we have only the elementary, inferior meaning. Whether they will or no, the exegetes and theologians themselves, orthodox or free thinkers, see the Hebrew text only through the Vulgate. The comparative and superlative meaning, which is the profound and true sense of Genesis, escapes them. It remains no less mysteriously hidden in the Hebrew text, which by its roots dips down into the sacred language of the temples, remolded by Moses.
This sacred language is one in which each vowel and each consonant has a universal meaning in harmony with the acoustic value of the letter and the state of consciousness of the man who produced it. For the intuitive this profound meaning sometimes bursts forth like a spark from the text; for the seer it shines in the phonetic structure of the words adopted or created by Moses: magic syllables, where the initiate of Osiris let his thought flow like sonorous metal into a perfect mold. Through the study of this phonetic alphabet which bears the impress of the holy language of the ancient temples, by means of the keys which the Kabbala provides, some of which date back to Moses, finally through comparative esoterism, today we are allowed to penetrate into and rediscover the real Genesis. Thus the thought of Moses emerges, shining like gold from the furnace of the centuries, from the scoria of a primitive theology and the ashes of negative criticism.35
Two examples will shed broad light upon what the sacred language of the ancient temples was, and how the three meanings in the symbols of Egypt and those of Genesis correspond to one another. On a great many Egyptian monuments one sees a woman wearing a crown, holding in one hand the crux ansata, the symbol of everlasting life; in the other hand she holds a scepter in the form of a lotus flower, the symbol of initiation. This is the goddess ISIS. Now Isis has three different meanings. Literally, she personifies Woman, and from this the universal feminine gender. Comparatively, she personifies the fullness of terrestrial nature, with all its reproductive powers. In the superlative, she symbolizes celestial and invisible nature, itself the element of souls and spirits, spiritual light, intelligible in itself, which initiation alone confers.
The symbol which corresponds to Isis in the Genesis text and in the Judeo-Christian mind is EVE, Heva, the Eternal Feminine. This Eve is not only Adam's wife, she is also the wife of God. She constitutes three-quarters of His being. For the name of the Eternal IEVE of which we have incorrectly made Jehovah and Javeh, is composed of the prefix I and the name Eve. The high priest of Jerusalem pronounced the divine name once a year, enunciating it letter by letter in the following manner: Yod, he, vau, he. The first expressed the divine thought36 and the theogonic sciences; the three letters of Eve's name expressed the three orders of nature, the three worlds in which this thought is realized, and then the cosmogonic, psychic and physical sciences which correspond to them.37 The Ineffable encloses deep within Itself the Eternal Masculine and the Eternal Feminine. Their indissoluble union make for His power and mystery. This is what Moses, sworn enemy of all images of divinity, did not tell the people, but recorded figuratively in the structure of the Divine Name when he explained it to his adepts. Thus in the Judaic cult an esoteric nature is hidden in the very Name of God. The wife of Adam, strange, guilty, charming woman, reveals to us her profound affinities with the terrestrial, divine Isis, the mother of the gods, who manifests through her deep womb the turbulence of souls and stars.
Another example: A character which plays a great role in the story of Adam and Eve is the Serpent. Genesis calls it Nâhdâsh. Now what did the serpent mean in the ancient temples? The mysteries of India, Egypt and Greece reply with a single voice: The serpent arranged in a circle means universal life, whose magic agent is starlight. In a still deeper sense, Nâhdâsh means the power which puts life in motion, the attraction of self for self. In the latter meaning Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire saw the basis for universal gravity. The Greeks called it Eros, Love, or Desire. -- Now apply these two meanings to the story of Adam, Eve and the Serpent, and you will see that the Fall of the first couple, the celebrated original sin, suddenly becomes the vast revealing of divine and universal nature with its kingdoms, its classes and its species, in the tremendous, ineluctable cycle of life.
These two examples have enabled us to glance for the first time into the depths of the Mosaic Genesis. We already see in part what cosmogony was for an ancient initiate, and what distinguished it from cosmogony in the modern sense.
For modern science, cosmogony is reduced to a cosmography. One will find in it the description of a portion of the visible universe included in a study dealing with the chain of physical causes and effects in a given area. For example, it will be Laplace's 'system of the world where the formation of our solar system is hypothesized only on the basis of its present functioning and from matter in movement. It will also be the history of the earth, whose irrefutable evidences are the various strata of the soil. Ancient science was not unaware of this development of the visible universe, and if it had less accurate ideas on it than has modern science, nevertheless intuitively it had formulated the general laws.
But for the sages of India and Egypt this was merely the outer aspect of the world, its reflex movement. They sought the explanation of the world in its inner aspect, in its direct and original movement. They found in it another order of laws which reveals itself to our intelligence. For ancient science, the limitless universe was not dead matter governed by mechanical laws, but was a living whole, endowed with intelligence, soul and will. This great divine being had innumerable organs, corresponding to its infinite faculties. As in the human body movements result from the thinking mind and the acting will, so in the eyes of ancient science the visible order of the universe was but the reflection of an invisible order, that is, of cosmogonic forces and spiritual monads, kingdoms, classes and species, which through their perpetual involution into matter produced the evolution of life. Whereas modern science considers only the external, the surface of the universe, the science of the ancient temples had the task to reveal the internal, to discover hidden movements. It did not conclude that intelligence derives from matter, but matter from intelligence. It did not describe the universe as born of the blind dance of atoms, but it generated atoms through the vibrations of the universal soul. In short, it moved in concentric circles, from the universal to the particular, from the Invisible to the visible, from Pure Spirit to organized substance, from God to man. This descending order of powers and spirits in inverse proportion to the ascending order of life and bodies, was the ontology of science, of intelligible principles, and formed the basis of cosmogony.
All the great initiations in India, Egypt, Judea and Greece, those of Krishna, Hermes, Moses and Orpheus knew in varied forms this order of elements, powers, souls and generations which descend from the First Cause, from the Ineffable Father.
The descending order of incarnations is simultaneous with the ascending order of lives, and this alone makes it understandable. Involution produces evolution and explains it.
In Greece the male, or Doric temples, those of Jupiter and Apollo (especially that at Delphi), were the only ones which possessed the essential knowledge of the descending order. The Ionic, or feminine temples had but imperfect knowledge of it. The entire Greek civilization being Ionic, science and the Doric order became more and more veiled. Nevertheless, it is incontestable that its great initiators, its heros and philosophers, from Orpheus to Pythagoras to Plato and from the latter to the Alexandrians, depend upon that order. All recognized Hermes as their master.
Let us return to Genesis. According to Moses, that other son of Hermes, the first ten chapters of Genesis constituted a real ontology, based upon the order and relationship of beginnings. All that begins must end. Genesis simultaneously described evolution in time and creation in Eternity; the only creating worthy of God.
In the section on Pythagoras I shall give a picture of theogony and esoteric cosmogony in a less abstract setting than that of Moses, and closer to the modern mind. In spite of the polytheistic form, in spite of the extreme diversity of symbols, the meaning of this Pythagorean cosmogony, on the basis of Orphic initiation and the sanctuaries of Apollo, will be basically identical with that of the prophet of Israel. In Pythagoras the latter will be as though lighted by its natural complement, the doctrine of the soul and its evolution. The latter was taught in the Greek sanctuaries by means of the symbols of the myth of Persephone. It was also called The Earthly and Heavenly Story of Psyche. This narrative, corresponding to what Christianity calls redemption, is entirely absent from the Old Testament. This is not because Moses and the prophets did not know about it, but because they considered it too difficult for popular teaching, reserving it for the oral tradition of the initiates. The divine Psyche was hidden for a long time beneath the hermetic symbols of Israel, only that it might be personified in the ethereal, luminous appearance of Christ.
As for the cosmogony of Moses, it unites the incisive brevity of Semitic aptitude with the mathematical precision of Egyptian genius. The style of the narrative reminds one of the forms which decorate the interior of the kings' tombs; erect, cold, severe, they conceal an impenetrable mystery in their sharp bareness. The general effect makes one think of a Cyclopean building, but here and there, like lava flowing between the giant blocks, the thought of Moses bursts forth with the impetuosity of an initiate fire between the trembling verses of the translators. In the first chapters of incomparable grandeur, one feels the breath of Elohim pass by, turning the heavy pages of the universe one by one.
Before leaving them, let us look again at some of the mighty hieroglyphs composed by the prophet of Sinai. Like the door of an underground temple each of them opens upon a gallery of esoteric truths which, with their unflickering lamps, light the succession of worlds and ages. Let us attempt to enter it with the keys of initiation. Let us try to see these strange symbols, these magic formulas in their evocative power as the initiate of Osiris saw them, as they emerged in letters of fire from the furnace of his thought.
In the crypt of Jethro's temple Moses is meditating alone, sitting upon a sarcophagus. About him the walls and pilasters are covered with hieroglyphs and paintings, representing the names and forms of the gods as conceived by all peoples of the earth. These symbols summarize the history of vanished cycles and foretell future ones. A lamp placed upon the ground dimly lights these signs, each of which speaks its language to him. But already he no longer sees anything of the external world; he is seeking within himself the word of his book, the form of his work, the Word which will be Action. The lamp has gone out, but before his inner eye in the night of the crypt flames the name:
IEVE
The first letter, I, has the white color of light; the three others shine like a changing fire, in which all the colors of the rainbow revolve. And what a strange life is in these characters! In the initial letter Moses perceives the masculine principle, Osiris, Creative Spirit par excellence. -- In Eve he observes reproductive power and the Celestial Isis who is a part of it. Thus the divine faculties which contain all the worlds in their power, unfurl and become regulated in the Heart of God. Through their perfect union, the Father and the ineffable Mother form the Son, the Living Word, which creates the universe. This is the Mystery of Mysteries, hidden from the senses but speaking through the sign of the Everlasting as Spirit speaks to Spirit. And the sacred Tetragrammaton shines with an ever more intense light. Moses sees the three worlds, all the kingdoms of nature and the sublime order of the sciences burst forth in a tremendous effulgence. Then his glowing eye centers upon the masculine sign of the Creative Spirit. It is this that he calls upon so that he may pass through the orders of creation, and draw from the Supreme Will the strength to accomplish his own work after having viewed the work of the Everlasting.Now in the shadows of the crypt shines another divine name:
ELOHIM
For the initiate this means, "He, the Gods, the God of Gods."38 It is no longer the Being retiring within itself, dwelling in the Absolute, but the Lord of Worlds, Whose thought spreads out into millions of stars, moving spheres of floating universes. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." But at first these heavens were only the thought of endless time and infinite space, filled with emptiness and silence. "And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the deep."39 What will come forth from Him first? A sun? An earth? A cloud? -- Any substance whatever of this visible world? No! What was born from Him first was A ur, light. But that light is not physical light, it is intelligible light, born of the trembling of celestial Isis in Infinity's womb; that universal soul, that starry light, that substance which makes souls, from which they blossom in an ethereal fluid; that subtle element by which thought is transmitted to infinite distances; that divine light which is anterior and posterior to that of all suns. At first it spreads into infinity, for it is the powerful respir of God, then it returns to itself in a movement of love, the deep aspir of the Everlasting. Upon the waves of the divine ether the astral forms of worlds and beings throb as though covered by a translucent veil. And all this is summarized for the magi-seer in the words he pronounces, and which light up in the darkness in shining characters:
RUA ELOHIM A UR40
"Let there be light, and there was light." -- The breath of Elohim is light!
From the heart of that first non-material light burst the first six days of creation, that is, the seeds, the principles, the forms, the life-soul of everything. It is the Universe existing in power before the letter and according to the Spirit. And what is the last word of Creation, the formula which summarizes Being in action, the Living Word in which appears the first and last thought of the Absolute Being? It is
ADAM – EVE
The Man-Woman. In no way does this symbol represent (as is taught in our churches and as our exegetes believe) the first human couple of our earth, but God in action in the universe and human kind personified; it represents universal Humanity through all the heavens. "God created man in his own image; male and female created he him." This divine couple is the universal Word, for which Ieve reveals His true nature in the worlds. The sphere it originally inhabits and which Moses embraces with powerful thought is not the Garden of Eden, the legendary terrestrial paradise, but the limitless, temporal sphere of Zoroaster, the higher earth of Plato, the universal celestial kingdom, Heden, Hadama, the substance of all lands. But what will the evolution of mankind be in time and space? Moses views it in a disguised form in the story of the Fall. In Genesis, Psyche, the human soul, is called Aisha, another name for Eve.41 Her homeland is Shamaim, heaven. She lives there happily in the divine ether, but without knowledge of herself. She enjoys heaven without understanding it. For in order to understand it, it is necessary first to have forgotten it and then to remember it; it is necessary to have lost it and to have found it again. She will know only by suffering; she will understand only by falling. And what a deep and tragic fall, quite different from that of the childish Biblical account of which we read! Drawn to the dark gulf by desire for knowledge, Aisha lets herself fall . . . She ceases being pure soul, having only a sidereal body and living in the divine ether. She is clothed in a material body and enters the circle of births. And her incarnations are not one, but one hundred, one thousand, in bodies which are more and more crude, depending upon the bodies she inhabits. She descends from world to world . . . She descends and forgets . . . A black veil covers her inner eye; in the thick tissue of matter, drowned is the divine consciousness, darkened is the memory of heaven. Pale as a lost hope, a weak recollection of her former happiness shines within her! With this spark she must be born again and must regenerate herself!
Yes, Aisha still lives in the naked couple who find themselves defenseless upon a wild earth under a hostile sky where thunder roars. Is Paradise lost? The vastness of the veiled heaven stretches behind and before her!
Moses thus views the generations of Adam in the universe.42 Next he considers the destinies of man on earth. He sees the past and present cycles. In earthly Aisha -- in the soul of humanity -- the consciousness of God once had shone with the fire of Agni in the land of Cush on the slopes of the Himalayas.
But now it is about to be extinguished in idolatry, in infernal passions beneath Assyrian tyranny amidst foreign peoples and alien gods who consume one another. Moses pledges himself to rekindle it by establishing the cult of Elohim.
Mankind as a whole, like man as an individual, ought to be the image of leve. But where are the people to be found who will embody Him, and who will be the living word of humanity?
Then Moses, having imagined his book and his work, having probed the darkness of the human soul, declares war on terrestrial, weak-natured, corrupt Eve. In order to fight her and reform her he calls upon the Spirit, the original, all-powerful Fire, Ieve , to whose source he wishes to return. He feels that its effluvia are setting him afire and are tempering him like steel. Its name is the Will.
And in the dark silence of the crypt, Moses hears a voice. It comes from the depths of his consciousness, it flickers like a light, saying, "Go to the mountain of God, to Horeb!"
Notes for this chapter:
35. The true restorer of Moses' cosmogony is a man of genius almost forgotten today, to whom France will do justice when esoteric science, which is integral and religious science, is reconstructed on its own indestructible foundations. Fabre d'Olivet could not be understood by his contemporaries, for he was at least a hundred years ahead of his time. His universal outlook encompassed in equal degree three faculties whose union creates transcendental intellects: intuition, analysis and synthesis. Born at Ganges (Hérault) in 1767, he undertook the study of mystical doctrines of the Orient after having acquired an extensive understanding of the sciences, philosophies and literatures of the Occident. Count de Gébelin, through his Primitive World opened for him the first vistas of the symbolic meaning of the myths of antiquity and the sacred language of the temples. In order to become initiated in the doctrines of the Orient, he learned Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic and Hebrew. In 1815 he published his major book, The Hebraic Tongue Restored. This book includes: 1. An introductory dissertation on the origin of speech; 2. A Hebrew grammar, based on new principles; 3. Hebrew roots viewed according to etymological science; 4. A preliminary discourse; 5. A French and English translation of the first ten chapters of Genesis, which contain the cosmogony of Moses. This translation is accompanied by a commentary of the greatest interest. I can only summarize here the principles and substance of this very revealing book. It is permeated with the deepest esoteric spirit and is constructed according to the most rigorous scientific method. The method Fabre d'Olivet uses to fathom the secret meaning of the Hebrew text of Genesis is a comparison of Hebrew with Arabic, Syriac, Aramaic and Chaldean from the point of view of basic common roots, of which he furnishes us an admirable lexicon supported by examples taken from all the languages, a lexicon which can serve as a key for sacred names among all peoples. Of all esoteric books on the Old Testament, Fabre d'Olivet's gives the surest keys. In addition, he gives an enlightening account of the history of the Bible and the apparent reasons why its hidden meaning was lost, and even today is utterly unknown to science and official theology.
I shall say a few words about another, more recent work. This is The Mission of the Jews, by Saint-Yves d'Alveydre (1884). Saint-Yves owes his philosophical initiation to Fabre d'Olivet's books. His interpretation of Genesis is essentially that of the latter's book, The Hebraic Tongue Restored; his metaphysics, that of The Golden Verses of Pythagoras; his philosophy of history and the general setting of his work are taken from The Philosophical History of the Human Race. (These works of Fabre d'Olivet published by Putnam's, N.Y. 1921-9.) From these basic ideas, adding his own materials and shaping them to his liking, he constructed a new building of great richness. His purpose is twofold: to prove that the science and religion of Moses were the necessary result of religious movements which preceded them in Asia and Egypt, which Fabre d'Olivet had already brought to light in his brilliant works; next, to prove that the ternary government by arbitration, composed of three powers, economic, judiciary and religious or scientific, was in every age a corollary of the doctrine of the initiates and a constituent part of religions long before Greece. Such is Saint-Yves' own idea, a pregnant idea worthy of the highest consideration. He calls it synarchy, or government according to principles; he finds in it the social, organic law, the sole salvation of the future. It is not our task here to discuss to what extent the author has historically proved his thesis. Saint-Yves does not like to quote his sources, but his book, of unusual value, based upon a vast knowledge of esoteric science, abounds in pages of great inspiration, in great descriptions and in many new ideas. My views differ from his on many points, especially in regard to the concept of Moses to which, in my opinion, Saint-Yves has given too great and legendary proportions. However, beyond this I wish to point to the great value of this extraordinary book, to which I owe much. I would refer the reader also to his Mission of the Sovereigns and True France, where Saint-Yves did justice, though a bit late, and in spite of himself, to his teacher, Fabre d'Olivet.
36. Spinoza's natura naturans.
37. This is how Fabre d'Olivet explains the name IEVE: "This name, first of all, incorporates the sign indicative of life when doubled and forming the basically productive root EE. This root is never employed as a noun, and is the only one which has this prerogative. From its formation, it is not only a verb, but a unique verb from which the others are only derivatives: In short, the verb EVE, to be, being. Here (as can be seen, and as I took care to explain in my grammar) the intelligible sign VAU (V) is in the middle of the root of life. Moses, taking this verb par excellence to form from it the proper noun of the Being of beings, adds to it the sign of potential manifestation and of Eternity I and obtains IEVE, in which the facultative being is placed between a past without origin, and a future without end. This marvelous name, therefore, means exactly The Being who is, was and is to be. (For further details, see Fabre d'Olivet, The Hebraic Tongue Restored, trnsl. by Redfield, Putnam's, New York, 1921 -- Ed.)
38. "Elohim is the plural of Elo, a name given to the Supreme Being by the Hebrews and Chaldeans, and itself derived from the root El, which pictures elevation, strength and expansive power, and which means in a universal sense, God. Hoa, that is, He, is one of the sacred names for divinity in Hebrew, Chaldaic, Syriac, Ethiopian, Arabic." -- Fabre d'Olivet, The Hebraic Tongue Restored, N.Y. 1921.
39. "Ruah Elohim: The Breath of God, figuratively indicates a movement of expansion, dilation. In a hieroglyphic sense it is the force opposed to that of darkness. Thus, if the word darkness characterizes a compressing power, the word ruah characterizes an expanding power. One will find in both words that eternal system of two opposing forces which the wise men and scientists of all ages from Parmenides and Pythagoras to Descartes and Newton saw in nature and called by different names." -- Fabre d'Olivet, Hebrew Tongue Restored.
40. Breath . . . Elohim, Light. These three names are the hieroglyphic resumé of the second and third verses of Genesis. The following is the transliteration of the Hebrew text of the third verse: Wa-iaomer Aelohim iehi-aour, wa iehi aour. This is the literal translation Fabre d'Olivet gives: "And-he-said (declaring his will) HE-The-Being-of-beings: There-shall-be light; and-there-(shall be)-became light (intellectual elementizing)." The word ROUA, meaning breath, is found in the second verse. The word AOUR, which means light, is the word ROUA in reverse. The divine Breath, returning back upon itself, created intelligible Light.
41. Genesis 2:23. Aisha, the Soul, here resembling Woman, is the wife of Aish, the Intellect resembling Man. She is taken from him, she constitutes his inseparable half, his volitional faculty. The same relationship exists between Dionysus and Persephone in the Orphic Mysteries.
42. In the Samaritan version of the Bible, the adjective universal, infinite, is added to Adam's name. Therefore this name is a matter of the human species, of the rule of man in all the heavens.