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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-
31
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,
_______
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
34
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
35
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.
36
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
37
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
38
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-
39
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
40
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-
41
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
42
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
43
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
45
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-
46
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. |