Sex as Symbol by Alvin Boyd Kuhn, PH.D.

 

CHAPTER IV

THE GODS DISTRIBUTE DIVINITY

It is an axiom of Greek philosophy that in the vast hierarchy of beings and intelligences from supreme Deity down to man each god is as it were a cell unit of the life of one superior divinity and that the total company of such cells comprising the body of the higher lord multiplies, magnifies and "distributes" the life of that more exalted being, in seed form, out over a wider range of creative activity. In this formulation Greek philosophy quite fully agrees with St. Paul, who says that we are all members of one body, of which Christ is the head. It seems difficult for world thought to grasp realistically the cogent force of this teaching. All living creatures are the component atoms in the life or body of some tremendously greater being, who lives and moves in and through the activities of his constitutive elements. Precisely as the oak renews and expands its total life by the generation and distribution of the seeds of its own being, so a larger unit of life produces in potential form a multiple progeny of its own kind in order thus to expand its own measure of total being.

But each fragmented son of parent being must start from seed potentiality and through a long process of growth eventually bring its separate life back to the level and completeness of the progenitor. Thus it comes that life proceeds from the Father and returns unto him again. Obviously the life of the son is a part of and "in" the life of the parent, and equally the life of the parent is "in" that of the son. As the life and being of the progenitor is latent in the seed, until it is finally brought to awakened consciousness in the later stages of growth, there is implicit here the entire explanatory formula for understanding the presence and nature of the uncon-

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scious in man. The unconscious is just the unawakened being of the higher parental life and consciousness of whose unitary selfhood the individual man is one organic cell.

There occurs in a sentence in an enlightening late work of psychoanalysis by a practicing clinician of wide experience and deep insight into the science a single word, which falls with the aptest, though with perhaps altogether unsuspected, relevancy into the context and support of the thesis of the unconscious here expounded. The work is The Recreating of the Individual, by Beatrice M. Hinkle, M.D. Asserting that the unconscious can not carry through any form of expression or activity that counters the rational judgment of the outer conscious mind, she writes that under the ban of such repression "the individual remains unaware of the ancient processes functioning in and influencing his present life and he cannot evolve beyond them except through greater self-consciousness or according to the immeasurably slow process of nature herself."1 This is to say that the present activities of the conscious mind overlay and keep buried under their constant play a body of innate and generic motivations which would exercise a control in the direction of the individual life if they were given free course in the conscious. It may fairly be presumed that the word "ancient" in the passage quoted carries far more significance than the author dreamed. This word, used in description of "processes functioning in and influencing . . . present life" is the prime clue to the mystery of the unconscious. For ancient indeed is the unconscious. It is, in reference to the human individual, that part of the man which is the "Ancient of Days" of the Psalmist. Wordsworth caught the vision of it when he wrote in his immortal Ode:

The soul that rises with us, our life star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar.

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

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1 This and numerous other citations from Dr. Hinkle's fine work made in this volume are reproduced with her gracious permission.

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But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From heaven, which is our home.

"The sunshine comes and goes," he says--and so does the soul of man. It comes into expression in the life and body of a human, and at the end of its cycle goes back to celestial repose, and it does this time and time again. It has had many births and "deaths," but never death. It has garnered up the fruits of vivid experience in the kingdoms of the world and in the bodies of men, and preserved them in the indestructible treasure house of its inmost spiritual body, which is safe from the rot of decay, the tooth of moth or the loot of thieves. And it comes forth for each fresh sally into the daylight of world experience, bearing the wealth of its deposits of wisdom, knowledge and genius, not to be hoarded, but to be put out to "usury" in further investment in living, for the endless enhancement of its own glory in the more abundant life promised it by its Parent. The central phrase of old theology, "for the glory of God," bears with more direct pertinence on pivotal meaning than has been surmised. The onward march of progress does indeed bring an increment of glory to the son of God within the body of the man. For as the sun-fragment of divine soul in corporeal man grows in self-consciousness, it increases the shining texture of that "body of the resurrection," that "robe of glory" integrated of the essence of solar light, which the soul weaves for itself in ever more effulgent splendor to be its spiritual temple not made with hands and in which it may dwell when the earthly tabernacle of this flesh has been discarded. There is fathomless meaning in Paul's statement that this mortal shall put on immortality and this corruptible shall be clothed in incorruption. The climactic guerdon promised by Deity to man is that the creature shall have immortal life. And to be undying, man must have wrought for himself a body which when he shall have put it on, will never decay. Hence the great object of his coming to earth is, as Plato said, to "weave together mortal and immortal natures," so that the mortal part can inherit

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immortality through its partaking the life and nature of the immortal. By charity and wisdom, all the scriptures affirm, man shall transform, transubstantiate and transfigure his being until it glows in equal radiance with the glory of the gods whose raiment shines like the sun. Man will end his earthly career by casting off the "filthy rags" of fleshly vestments of decay, and come forth arrayed in the glory of the sun. "I shall clothe thee with light as with a garment," saith the Lord in the Old Testament. We are to be made "children of the light," he again says. We are adjured to let our light shine, since we "are the light of the world." The Christos is the "Lord of light," "the life and the light of men." This has all been killed in its thrilling meaning by being shifted away from humanity at large and allocated--and hence lost--upon the person of one man in history. It was to be the possession of all the sons of earth who achieved it.

The vital truth about this glory body, this house from above, with which Paul says he waits to be clothed upon, is that it is imperishable. Once formed--and Paul says he groans and travails in pain with us until Christ be "formed" within us--it does not die; it does not disintegrate. "You shall never be dissolved," promised the Demiurgus, once the garment of shining Christhood has been woven.

And now comes the denouement of mighty truth from out these ancient scriptures that becomes the open sesame for unlocking the hidden mystery of the rationale of the unconscious. The white raiment of the redeemed is not only composed of solar essence that is imperishable, but so close is it to the heart of eternal being, so changeless in its protogonic essentiality, that an impression made upon it is forever ineradicable. The unconscious never forgets!

Here is an item of cosmic truth that even the uncertain tentatives of psychological searchings have already brought out. An impression made upon the innermost part of man which stands nearest to true being is never erased. The substance of that holy of holies of real being is changeless first matter. It partakes of the ultimate

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nature of the real. It is the primordial mind-stuff. And so the Greeks had a beautiful word for that which this mind knows, truth. Truth in Greek is aletheia, from a, "not," and lethe, "forgetfulness." Truth is therefore that which is not forgotten, can never be lost. Once gained, it is stored up in the alcoves of indestructible mind-essence. What the soul has gained of truth, she brings with her when she comes anew into body. "Truth is from heaven," declares Jesus in one of the apocryphal gospels in answer to Pilate's derisive question, an answer omitted from the four canonical Gospels. Truth is indeed from heaven, from the overworld of diviner ideality. It is inscribed upon the imperishable tablets of cosmic mind. What the individual mind grasps of its eternal principles is never lost. But at each dip of the soul into incarnation it loses its paradise of knowledge and understanding as it plunges deep into the heart of matter and is buried in the underworld of sense. Paradise must be regained each time with the return of the consciousness to the levels of former development, and new glories won. And so we have the great Plato giving us the twin doctrines of "the loss of memory of divine things" and "reminiscence," or recovery of divine memory.

The unconscious mind never forgets; yet here is Plato saying it suffers the loss of its memory. Is it contradiction? The Platonic amnesia is only a forgetfulness which is paralleled and analogized in the life of the oak, which loses its eternal memory or consciousness when it goes as a seed of future growth into the soil, but regains its full awareness of life when it attains maturity in the new cycle. For life must die to be born again, must lose its life to repossess it, must suffer loss of memory to win eternal memory. Life ever passes from the highest stage of conscious unfoldment in any cycle back into the embryo of itself to begin a new cycle. As a seed it can carry, not the adult development of its powers, but the sheer potentiality of renewing those powers. It enters earth shorn of all that it had won in the last cycle's effort, save the capability of renewing and increasing all previous winning. It must start each cycle over again from beginning. It more quickly each time recapitulates the

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range of previous development, now become "instinctive," and then takes new strides forward into infinite being. Thus all evolution moves forward through what the sage ancient teachers everywhere called the "eternal renewal" of life. Life "dies" to be born again. And the wreckage and then the loss of the intelligible structure of the ancient wisdom came through the failure of philosophic thought to retain the true reference of the words "die" and "death." Life, poetized the wise men of old, "dies" when it goes under the trammels of the flesh in incarnation. "Death" in theology is then precisely that which goes by the name of "life" in our world. Says Paul in the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans: "The command that meant life proved death to me." So the ancients regarded this life as the "death" of the soul under the sluggish waters of the river of the underworld, the river of forgetfulness--Lethe! But always it was a "death" from which there was the resurrection. Always the planted seed died and then germinated and lived again. And thus life went forward to its ever-expanding conquest of new glories, "through death to life eternal," as the Easter hymn sings it. For what the soul loses temporarily at the start of each cycle of growth, it regains and eventually holds in perpetuity. The unconscious never forgets!

The pursuit of truth through this channel leads to the open door of a revelation of one of the great Biblical allegories so sweeping in its magnitude and relevance that its disclosure may indeed promise a wholly new regeneration of scriptural interpretation. At first glimpse no two things would appear to be farther apart and remote from each other in significance than the unconscious in modern psychology and the ark and deluge story in the Bible. It happens, however, that the flood allegory in the Old Testament is the ancient esoteric glyph of the unconscious in the human constitution! Again this has never been seen because the narrative in Genesis has been taken as history, or at least quasi-history, and not for what it really is--the allegory of evolutionary method, as the Genesis story is the allegory of creational method.

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Light is gained on this cryptic scriptural representation by tracing the pivotal words employed in it back to their archaic or basic meanings. These are "ark," "Noah," and "Ararat," as well as the numbers that crept in, seven and forty. Noah was given seven days in which to build the ark and collect numberless thousands of animals of every species from all over the earth, manifestly impossible as actual history, but immensely significant as allegory. It rained forty days and nights, covering the whole earth to the highest mountain tops,--again absurd as history. The ark floated on the waters till the flood subsided, and then the occupants emerged and landed on Mt. Ararat.

Who was "Noah"? It is evident that though Hebrew in origin, at least found in a Hebrew document of antiquity, the name "Noah" is built on the stem of the word which in Greek stood for the rock principle of the universe, Mind, the mental principle in mankind. Anaxagoras' theory that the world is the production of a cosmic Mind, or of Nous, is relevant to this determination. The root of the word is that basic Greek stem, No, and the Greeks called the intellectual principle in man Noé @horizontal line over e. It is important to notice that this is feminine in form and grammatical gender. This is so because, although mind and spirit are commonly typed under masculine symbolism, yet when the spirit descended into matter and became the soul of a living organism, it was regarded as feminized through its coming under the power of matter and body, which are symbolically feminine always. The feminine ending was placed upon it to indicate that it was mind involved in and energizing matter. The ancients always affirmed that the soul entered its "feminine phase" when it incarnated. The Greek feminine ending is the long é, eta. When the Hebrews used the word they substituted on the No stem their own feminine singular ending, which is -ah. This gives No-ah, the principle of mind in body.

It is next to be noted that, in perfect accord with all ancient philosophy, the mental principle, Noah, was given three sons. In the arcane allegorism the intellectual ray from God's mind suffered

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differentiation from its primal unity into a triplicity when it established its connection with physical organisms on three linked planes of higher consciousness. It has been lost out of studentship that terms corresponding pretty closely to our three words, spirit, soul and mind, expressed this differentiation. In one Hindu system they were named atma, buddhi and manas. In astrological pictography they were represented by the three stars, most significantly known for ages as "the three kings," in the belt of Orion. They were the lower trinity of spirit, the reflection in the human microcosm of the cosmic trinity above. Mind is ever triple in its manifestation. Modern theology posits little difference between mind, soul and spirit, but the early philosophical and anthropological systematism knew of the gamut of distinct gradation subsisting among the three. Spirit held the topmost rank, more ethereal and sublimated in its nature than the other two, being the pure energy of intuitive knowledge. Soul was a further projection of that energy into matter, manifesting one step lower, and standing midway between pure intuition and concrete thinking. Mind was a still deeper injection of spirit into matter, coming to expression as the glowing rational power of conscious thought directly conditioned by the mechanistic function of the brain.

The mind-body problem has been a perplexing conundrum for human understanding, entangled in the difficulty of perceiving how an immaterial force can lay hold of and utilize a physical mechanism. But no longer should this problem offer difficulty to the modern mind that understands even remotely how the radio wave can blare through its instrument. It has been said that the repeated note of a violin string, properly attuned, could destroy a steel bridge. Really the secret of the mind-body relation has been opened to our unthinking minds ever since a piano note has been known to rattle a cup in its saucer on the old parlor mantel across the room. Caruso, the tenor, demonstrated it when, having lightly struck a delicate drinking glass with a tuning fork to get its pitch, he then shattered it with the same tone sung from his powerful vocal cords. A thought

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is just the registry of a vibration in ethereal matter of great tenuity, projected by that root energy known as will, and carried by an electric play of force generated by the chemical constitution of the blood. The human blood has in it the components requisite for the production of battery current. A modern scientific pronouncement states that the brain contains four quadrillions of minute dynamos, and these are charged by electricity carried by the blood and drawn by it out of the vast sea of static electricity in the air. Each cell of the brain is the seat of the flash of electric current between the positive and negative poles within it. These tiny currents can catch and carry the energies of primal will and thought, as the voice carries the structure of an idea. Life energizing as will or thought is at once the generator of electric force that can carry into expression its creative forms of ideas. Immaterial energy such as that of the mind can lay hold of and move matter and body, for the simple reason that its every impulse can stir the vital currents that are themselves constitutive of the very being of matter.

Understanding of the problem was thwarted as long as the blind conception prevailed that matter was inert, lifeless substance. Now that it is known that matter is itself a composition of purely etheric energies, really no longer to be conceived as matter at all, but spirit itself held in static bondage, the fundamental kinship between mind and body is readily intelligible. If lines of immaterial force can move the iron filings around the head of a magnet, it should no longer be a task to know how life works to accomplish its purposes. There is needed only the mathematically correct adaptation of structure to vibration rate and wave length to produce motion. Life manifests through an infinite gradation of such adaptations, be it in coarse substance or in finer ethereal or "spiritual" matter. And we have spiritual bodies, more than one of them, archaic science asserted. Each of these registers energy in its particular form and expression, each one conditioned by the fineness or coarseness of the material composing its organism. Sound, as the old philosophers argued, is one; yet it manifests in a million different sounds, deter-

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mined by the quality and structure of the instrument sounded through. Man's very "personality" is based on this hoary knowledge, since his "person" is the physical instrument through (Latin, per) which the higher rates of conscious vibration sound (Latin, son-) out their tones in the manifest world. The personality is the physical instrument through which the soul sounds its characteristic note of spiritual being in the world. The spirit deep within, being a ray of changeless being which is eternally one--however it manifests in variety--is not subject to division. Hence it is the "individuality," the regnant king within the personality. It is further instructive to recall that persona is the Latin word for "mask." This item illuminates intelligence with the important knowledge that the physical personality is the mask which the divine individuality puts on and through which it can sound out its proper keynote in the total symphony of being.

If the allegory was to be kept true to profound wisdom it was necessary that "Noah" should have three sons. The intellectual principle in cosmic operation must manifest in triple form. This is the explanation of the many figures of triform gods, the Trimurti of India and the gods with three heads or three faces so often found. It is likewise the lost meaning behind the legend of the three "Magi" who come with the Christos in the Christian Gospel narrative. For whenever divine Mind deploys its forces into creative expression, it generates its three distinct aspects which stand behind the great doctrine of the Trinity.

And their wives? Not even divine Thought can create worlds of manifest existence without uniting its energies with the physical power hidden in the atom of matter. Spirit must "marry" matter if it is to create concrete universes. The subjective side of life may know what it wishes to create, but it can not build structures until it has the material with which to build them. It must therefore link its directive energy with the latent power in the atom. This is its shakti, or spouse, through whose motherhood spirit alone can procreate. It became his wife, his sister, eventually his mother and

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his daughter, and it is pictured under all these characters in mythology.

But the great enlightenment comes with the elucidation of the recondite significance hidden under the symbolism of the "ark." Here again it is the language root that brings lost intelligence to view. The "ark" was, last and least of all things, not a boat or floating structure, save, of course, in a purely figurative sense, as the "flood" was not a deluge of water. It is all arcane allegorism, and this is established beyond any possible question. The true meaning of the "ark" is to be found in its derivation from the Greek noun, arché, "beginning," which is in turn from the Greek verb archo, "to begin." It is past all understanding how the scholars of many centuries have failed to discern either the etymological background of the "ark" or its implications for the Biblical interpretation. The fact that it is the first word in the Bible (preceded by its preposition "in") should in itself have gone far to open blind eyes to obvious meaning. The Bible thus starts from the point of proper departure--"in the beginning." The Greek word arché means beginning, primal state, aboriginal condition of being. It is seen in our words archaic, archangel, archetypal. God's archetypal ideas were the original ideas projected in and by his mind to give shape to the universe. So the "ark" is the primal or beginning state of a thing. For anything of objective existence to "go into the ark" is, then, its retirement back into the stage from which it emanated in the beginning of its cycle.

Next, what is the "flood" or "deluge"? Grievously has ignorance plunged into shameful asininity over this aspect of the representation. It has nothing actually to do with water, or rain and water having nothing to do with it. But it has much to do with flooding, or washing, or washing away, in the sense of a trope. For the scriptural "deluge" (found in some fifty national mythologies!) is nothing more or less than the figurative washing away of all created things by the flood-tide of dissolution which cyclically ensues at the end of each age of creation. The flood figure of description is imag-

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inative, a trope; but the washing away through dissolution is an actual event. It is the dissolution of the worlds and universes at the end of the age (Greek: teleuten aion, so tragically mistranslated "end of the world" in the Christian texts of the Bible), when infinite being absorbs back into its capacious bosom the disintegrated forms of its last cosmic manifestation, when concrete existence dissolves back into sheer be-ness. Matter disappears or is washed away from palpable existence, and spirit retires into the interior core of being. The cosmos and all its formations dissolve as the creative energy that threw them into shape runs its given course and subsides into motionlessness and silence. For life works cyclically, after the analogy of the heart beat and the life breath. It awakes, and energizes its creative effort in building. In the evening of its cycle it tires of its labor, and like us made in its image, it withdraws its energies and rests. When the animating and supporting energy of creation is withdrawn, the universe it shaped collapses and disintegrates. It dissolves. Where does it go?--since there is no "place" for it to go save where it is. It goes where a handful of salt goes when you put it into a basin of water. It goes into solution. And as the capability of bringing the salt back from invisible subsistence into visible material form again is always present, in like fashion can the dissolved universe be recreated in the beginning arc of the next cycle. The "deluge" is the tide of dissolution that washes away all forms.

Against this philological and philosophical background there is now the possibility of seeing at last the stupendous significance of the ark and flood story. When the structure of solid substance that housed and gave play to the energies of the life principle during its active period of creation is washed away--like the giant oak that has fallen and gone to decay and disappeared in dust--where, if life is not to come to an end along with the disintegration of its containing vessel, does it go to be tided over the period of dissolution and "death" till it can live again in new forms? Whither can it retire to ride out the flood? What can hold it in integration, or the possibility of new integration, when it has no mechanism, no

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organism of manifestation, no point of support in the realm of space? Life and nature have been confronting us with the clear answer to this central query through the ages and we have been too obtuse to see it. We always miss the meaning of the things that are most common in our belief that the great meanings are to be found in the extraordinary, the supernatural. Nature and life have shown us where the immaterial immanent principle of being goes when its physical embodiment disintegrates. For life provides every one of its creatures with a mechanism by which it can insure the renewal of its existence after its body dissolves. It withdraws into its beginning stage, its arché! And this is all included in our small but stupendously pedagogical reality, the seed. The seed is the "boat" in which, safe from extinction, the soul of life is tided over the flood of disintegration of form. Obviously expressed life can not be preserved in the form of its organic structural fullness of stature, in its adult body. It can not be preserved in existential embodiment, since body is dissolved. It must perforce be preserved, then, in purely potential form. Not it, but only the possibility of it in new form survives. It goes back to reside again in the ideal form and essence from whence it issued in the first instance. As it was projected thence once before, or many times, it can be sent forth again in the round of the cycle.

Here indeed is the answer to many aspects of life's great riddle. When the worlds of form dissolve away life goes back into its arché, its beginning. From thence it will begin all over again, enriched, to be sure, with the capital it has acquired in all previous adventures. Any student of ancient systems learns to know that the grandiose view of all life process is that based on the prime fact that life does nothing but endlessly renew itself. Says the soul of life in the Egyptian scriptures: "I die, and I am born again, and I renew myself, and I grow young each day." ("Day" is the term for any period, cycle or age of manifest existence; "year" is used similarly.) No more majestic passage than this stands anywhere in the "sacred" literature of mankind. It is the one assured fact

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that the human mind must know, to maintain its sanity and balance, its equanimity and courage under the press and stress, the strain and pain, of existence in body.

If the revived voice of ancient wisdom, that is fortified with the concepts of the most sagacious revelation of truth to man, dare speak to the distracted modern mind and tell it how it has come to such chaos and wreckage of its philosophy, it can be broadcast in categorical terms that the seed of all world fatuity was planted in the soil of the uncritical human thought when about the third century of the Christian history the great crucial doctrine of the eternal renewal of life, as applied to the human soul, was lost under the sweeping tide of fanatic ignorance that converted the allegories and mythologies of sapient philosophical wisdom into alleged literal sense and historical event. Clement, Origen and the learned philosophers of the early Church treated the scriptures properly as allegories. St. Paul declares that the Abraham story in the Old Testament "is an allegory." But philosophical light gave way to pietistic zealotry misguided by ignorance, and the world's ancient knowledge that would have stabilized the human psyche in its course through history was extinguished. The knowledge that a nucleus of conscious life--the human soul--can retire into its arché and subsist in latency, and thus be tided over the period of its non-existence in the inmost depths of immaterial being, to emerge again and pursue its forward course into the realities of ever more abundant life,--this is the salt that has lost its savor, the preservative without which man's psyche must lie in the foul odor of corruption.

As the intellectual principle is the first to emerge from out the ark of being onto the stage of physical existence, so it must be the last to re-enter as all things retire into the bosom of non-being. So Noah enters the ark, after the animals, and his sons and the son's wives with them. All living creatures, be it noted, must re-enter the ark.

As to the final term, Ararat, the lost meaning is simple, once the other clues are found. If life comes to manifest expression in its day

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cycles in visible matter, it must be localized somewhere in visible worlds. Such worlds are planets, primarily. So, in our case, it is "earth." When life retires to ride out the flood in its ark, the worlds disappear. The ark is lifted above the earth. Earth vanishes. But when the flood is over and the dawn of the new day-cycle swings around, where must the arché land if it is to take hold of matter again and build of it a new house to live in? Obviously it must come back to earth, it lands again on earth. And most significantly a study of symbolism and of language discloses that the cryptic meaning of the word "mount" ("mountain") in the arcane typology of the Bibles, is precisely the earth. Time and again the earth is referred to as "the mount of the earth." Much data of studentship can be presented to verify this item. It is by no means a mere guess, stretching the meaning to fit a preconceived rendering, in Procrustean fashion. It is the meaning of the term. And it needs but a moment's glance at the Hebrew language to see that "Ararat" is itself the word for "earth," juggled a bit. The present Hebrew word for "earth" is arets. An older form, states an authority, is not arets, but areth. Practically here is the English word "earth" itself. The ark lands on the mount of the earth, and the seeds of life emerge to be planted once more in the garden of the world.

If a touch of personal reference may be pardoned in this connection, it is worthy of mention, for the sake of showing how the interpretation of symbols is the true key to scriptural sense, and how unerringly its guidance will lead to true meaning, that when, from the side of symbolism purely, we had worked around to the rendering just elucidated, and felt that a startling discovery involving considerable "originality" had been made, imagine our surprise and very intense amazement when, happening to go over the text of the seventh chapter of Genesis, we found that the third verse of the story told us precisely the thing we thought had not been grasped before, and used in doing it the same word that contained the kernel of our whole abstruse conclusion,--the seed! The verse runs to the effect that Noah and his household, the animals and

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fowls, were herded into the ark "to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth." Had the clear implication of these words--or that word "seed"--been followed out to evident conclusions, there would have been no need of our remaining in gross benightedness as to Biblical meaning for sixteen centuries. The situation here unfolded must glaringly illustrate the devastation and havoc wrought upon the Western mind and its culture by the obsessions of ignorance which imposed a literal or physical meaning upon archaic symbols of recondite truths. Under this incubus no mind for sixteen hundred years has had the strength of imagination to rise above the conception of seed as just grains of corn, beans, larkspur and male fluid. The figure of "seed" as being the glyph for all renewal of life in evolutionary or cosmic sense, or the mental graph for the cyclical re-existence of the human soul, was entirely washed away by that fatal third-century deluge of philosophical doltishness, when Christianity passed from the hands of the philosophically capable Greeks into those of the practical-minded, but ignorant, Romans, who soon closed up the last of the Platonic Academies and doused the ancient gleam of world intelligence under stupid literalism.

But what has the restored light of Biblical allegorism to do with psychoanalysis and the unconscious? Pretty nearly everything vital. It puts a known history behind the unconscious, explains its origin, its presence in the human psychic constitution, and its nature and function. It reveals the important part it plays in evolution. It enlightens with the knowledge that the unconscious is the divine soul itself in the human, pursuing the course of its cyclical recurrence in the world and preserving the continuity of its unfoldment throughout the whole. It tells us where the unconscious got what it possesses, where it found or acquired its present content and where it gained the higher wisdom that it flashes in dream symbol, in moments of rare afflatus or intuitive insight, or in subtle intimations of many types, down upon the conscious mind. And ancient sagacity, supplying us also with many points of knowledge of concomitant life phenomena in its postulation of spiritual bodies inter-

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penetrating the more substantial physical in the depths of man's make-up, provides us with the rationale for understanding both how an ego can keep its impressed accruement of wisdom gained from experience and project it forward into the present existence, as well as how a "sub"-consciousness can be an actuality of man's possession apart from and in addition to his normal consciousness.

 

LOST DATA OF ANTHROPOLOGY