A deluge being an ending of a cycle in time, we can understand the [Page 546] language of the Codex Chimalpopoca (translated by the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg) concerning the flood, when it says, “Now the water was tranquil for forty years plus twelve.” “All was lost. Even the mountains sank into the water, and the water remained tranquil for fifty-two springs.” In this account, the well-known Mexican cycle of fifty-two years is measured by means of a deluge at the end of the period. In Inner Africa the year was reckoned by the periodic great rain; in Egypt by the inundation; and a deluge, we repeat, became the natural type of an ending in time in the uranographic representation. In India, a solar pralaya, in which the waters rise till they reach the seven Rishis in the region of the pole, is of necessity kronian, and applies solely to the keeping of time and period astronomically. The Assyrian deluge is described as lasting seven days. This agrees with the seven days’ silence in the Wisdom of Esdras, by which the consummation of the age, or ending of the period, was to be commemorated “like as in the former judgments,” deluges, or endings of the cycle or age in time. The flood of Noah is on the scale of the year or thereabouts. The deluge of time, as it was called by the Chaldean magi, is a breach of continuity, a phase of dissolution. It was a period of negation that was filled in with a festival as a mode of memorialising the dies non or no time. It was a condition of the lawlessness of misrule, of promiscuous intercourse, of drunkenness, that characterized the saturnalia by which it was celebrated.

There is a Kamite prototype in “the destruction of mankind” for the woman who is the reputed cause of a deluge in the Egyptian mythos. This is Sekhet the avenger. She is the very great one of the liquid domain. No one is master of the water of Sekhet, which she lets loose as an element of death and destruction. She was the great mistress of terror in fire and flood. In “the destruction of mankind” it is said, “There was Sekhet, during several nights, trampling the blood under her feet as far as Heracleopolis.” Ra, the solar god, “ordered the goddess to slay the evil race in three days of navigation.” “And the fields were entirely covered with water through the will of the majesty of the god; and there came the goddess (Hathor) in the morning, and she found the fields covered with water, and she was pleased with it, and she went away satisfied and saw no men” (i.e., none of the exterminated evil race). This is a form of the Egyptian deluge designated a great destruction, but with no earthly application to the human race. In the African legend relating to the origin of Lake Tanganyika, that was told to Stanley by the Wagigi fishermen, it was a woman, to whom the secret of the water-spring had been entrusted, who was the cause of the deluge. Possibly this woman was the earth as mother of the waters, seeing that Scomalt is the earth-mother of the Okanagaus, and that she also was charged with letting in the deluge. Scomalt is a form of the primordial genetrix, equivalent to Apt in Egypt. Long ago, they say, when the sun was no bigger than a star, this strong medicine-woman ruled over what appears to have become a lost continent. Her subjects rose against her in rebellion. Whereupon she broke up the land, and all the people but two met with their death by drowning. A man and a woman escaped in a canoe and arrived on the mainland, and from this pair the Okanagaus are descended (Bancroft, vol. III, 149). [Page 547]

A starting-point in various deluge-legends is from the world all water. This originated with the firmament as the celestial water that was called the Nnu, or Nun. Now one meaning of the word Nun in Egyptian is the flood. Thus the water of heaven is synonymous with the deluge. In one aspect the deluge, as a figure in the sign-language of the astronomical mythology, was a mode of representing the sinking of the pole in the celestial ocean which was figured as the world of water. This is the world all water in the legendary lore. The flood upon which Jehovah sat as king was no other than the firmamental Nun (Ps. XXIX. 10). So the throne of Osiris was based upon the flood, that is upon the Nun. In the vignettes to the Ritual Osiris sits upon the throne in Amenta as the great judge and ruler, and his throne is “balanced” as it is described, upon the flood. Water being the primary element of life, it was also based on figuratively; and Osiris with his throne resting on the water takes the place of the earlier Nnu, or later Noah, resting in his ark as master of the deep. Nnu was god of the celestial water. The wateress in one form was the goddess Nut. This, then, and nothing short of it, is the root of the matter when, as in the Navajo-Indian legend, certain persons, who are so often one female and one male, make their escape from the overwhelming waters by climbing up a reed to the land of life which, as a land of reeds, was the primal paradise, or the fields where the papyrus was in flower above the waters of a universal deluge, as represented in the veriest drawing of mythology.

We have to learn the sign-language before we can understand the nature of mythology. When it is said that Horus inundates the world like the sun each morning, that is with the light as the deluge of day. There is a white water and a black, equivalent to the white bird of light and the black bird of night, as opposite figures of Sut and Horus for the dark and the day. The evil Apap, who drinks the water cubit by cubit at each gulp as the sun goes down, is slain by Horus at daybreak, when he once more sets free the waters of light which are designated the waters of dawn. In like manner, the waters of day rush forth when Indra slays the serpent of darkness, who was thought of as the swallower of the light=water of heaven. Osiris is called the “over-flower,” the “great extender,” the “shoreless one,” who in this imagery of the deluge “brings to its fulness the divine force which is hidden within him” (Rit., ch. 64, 13-15, Renouf). Thus, in continuing the primitive mode of thinging the concept, Osiris is the water-force personified, instead of being represented as a crocodile, which was also one of the primal types of water.

“The deluge” is only single as a type. There are various deluges known to mythology, and various agents who are held responsible for causing them. In one legend or folk-tale it was the mischievous monkey. In another it was the tortoise, who sank in the waters and drowned the people who had their dwelling-place upon its back. In another it is caused by the killing of a sacred bird, which might be the vulture or cygnus. In a fourth the fountains of the great deep are opened by the taking out of the star, whereupon the deluge follows. A cause of the deluge is attributed to the star-gods, Sut in Egypt and Bel in Babylonia. It was caused by a failure in keeping time, and the failure is followed in a number of legends by the [Page 548] new heaven, in which the supreme time-keeper is the moon or the lunar divinity who is Taht in the Kamite representation.

Some most precious remains of the primitive wisdom now extant outside of Egypt are preserved by the oldest races of the world. Much of the matter is found amongst the people of the Polynesian islands, far more to the purpose than anything to be found in the Hindu or the Hebrew sacred books. The Samoans have what may, in a symbolical sense, be termed a deluge legend. Tangaloa, the originator of the heavens, was the builder. Of old the heavens were always falling down when they consisted of water without any bulwark or embankment. To put a limit, to build or make any firm enclosure, was to circumscribe the waters and secure a place of refuge from the dreaded deluge. In the time of Ptah, their great architect, the Egyptians were advanced enough in craftsmanship for the enclosure formed by him to keep out the waters of the deluge in Amenta to be made of either iron or steel, called the ba-metal. An ark was a primitive enclosure formed in the celestial water. This, as Egyptian, is the ark of Nnu, and Nnu is heaven, as water, also a name for the deity of the celestial water. In the Samoan legend, an ark is built before there was any water or water-flood, or before the firmament had been figured as water. ”Tangaloa of the heavens and his son Lu=Shu built a canoe or vessel up in the heavens.” When the vessel was finished there was no water to float it. Gaogao, the ancient mother, told her son Lu to have the vessel ready and she would make the water. She then gave birth to a lake, or the water of life, and also to the salt water, as it is said there was no sea at that time.” The lake we identify with “the lake of the thigh,” or the meskhen of the water-cow. Sea and lake imply both salt and fresh water, the two waters of earth and heaven that were repeated in the two lakes of Amenta. The Samoan deluge lasted until the seventh day, like the Babylonian. As it is said of Lu, “He was not many days afloat, some say six, when (on the seventh) his vessel rested on the top of a mountain called Malata” (Turner, Samoa, p. 12). In a papyrus at Turin the god who claims to be self-existent says, “I make the waters and the Mehura comes into being. ” That is heaven as the celestial water. In a hymn to Ptah it is said, “The waters of the inundation cover the lofty trees of every region.” These, however, are the waters of Nnu or the Nun (Renouf, H. L., pp. 221-2), and not the overwhelming flood of water on the earth. When the mehura first came into existence it was a heaven imaged as the water that was undivided by the astronomers, the islands or other land-limits that were figured in the aerial vast; and heaven as the celestial water was the Nnu or Nun. A “true explanation of the world-wide deluge myths” no longer need be sought for in the book of Genesis or in the tradition of a great flood that swept the plains of Mesopotamia; nor in any vast cataclysm that might have been caused by the melting of the ice at the close of the glacial period (Huxley, Nineteenth Century, 1890, pp. 14-15). We find by the Egyptian wisdom that “the deluge,” as it is commonly termed, belongs neither to geography, nor geology, nor history. Geology, the latest of the sciences, was comparatively unknown to the early world. Geology did not furnish the kind of fact with which the ancient science was concerned. Whatsoever [Page 549] the Egyptian “mystery-teachers of the depths” may have known of mines and metals, mythology was not geological in the least degree. Neither did the Kamite chronology include the computation of geological time.

It was confidently asserted by Bunsen that the deluge legend was unknown to the Egyptians. But they had all the deluges that ever were, as the Hir-Seshta informed Solon, including the “great deluge of all,” whereas the Greeks could only muster two. But in no case were these geological catastrophes. M. Lenormant asserted that the story of the deluge was unknown to the black race, and that “while the tradition holds so considerable a place in the legendary memories of all branches of the Aryan people, the monuments and original texts of Egypt, with their many cosmogonic speculations, have not afforded one even distant allusion to this cataclysm.” The statement sounds authoritative, but it is not true. Professor Sayce, following Lenormant, asserts that “no tradition of a deluge had been preserved by the Egyptians” (Fresh Light from the Monuments, p. 47). This comes of raking for human history, and for nothing else, in the Semitic débris of the Kamite astronomical mythology. Both are wrong, and both were equally misled through looking for the deluge with the Semitic versions for their determinatives. Bibliology has gone perilously near to ruining Assyriology and Egyptology for the first generations of students in this country. It is fortunate for genuine scholarship that there are livers out of Bible-burdened Britain.

In the chapter by which the ship is sailed in the nether-world, the speaker not only sails across the water of Nnu, for he says, “I come from the lake of fire and flame, from the field of flame,” and he stands erect and safe “in the bark which the god is piloting, at the head of Aarru,” that is, on the summit of the mount, or final resting-place of the ark (Rit., ch. 98, Renouf), which the deceased had safely reached through fire and flood. On entering the solar bark the Osiris says, “I have come myself and delivered the deity from the pain and suffering that were in the trunk, in shoulder, and in leg. I have come and healed the trunk and fastened the shoulder and made firm the leg. And I embark for the voyage of Ra.” The leg of Osiris, like the leg of Nut or the leg of Ptah, imaged the supporting power of the pole. The manes pleads, “Let not the Osiris Nu be shipwrecked on the great voyage” (ch. 130). ‘Let not disasters reach him.” “May the steering be kept clear from misadventure.” “Let me come to see my father Osiris” (ch. 99). “O, thou ship of the garden of Aarru, let me be conveyed to that bread of thy canal as my father, the great one, who advanceth in the divine ship” (ch. 106, Renouf). “Lo, I sail the great bark on the stream of the god Hetep. I took it at the mansion of Shu” — the starry heaven (ch. 110, Renouf). “I sail upon its stream and range within the garden of Hetep” (ch. 110). When about to enter the bark of Ra, the speaker says, “O great one, let me be lifted into thy bark. Let me make head for thy staircase. Let me have charge of those who convey thee, who are attached to thee, and who are of the stars which never set “ (Rit., ch. 102). These are the seven that pull at the rope, or as we should say, that keep the law of gravitation and equipoise; the seven arms of the balance, or the seven bonds of the universe; the seven tow-ers that became the later seven rowers, sailors, or Kabiri. These are sometimes called the seven spirits of Annu, that is at the pole, the mount of glory in the stellar mythos. Four of the seven can be identified as Amsta, Hapi, Tuamutef, and Kabhsenuf (Rit., ch. 97). “Said at the bark: Staff of Anup, may I propitiate those four glorified ones who follow after the master of all things?” These are four of the seven that pulled the bark up to the landing-stage upon the summit with the primitive rope, who are afterwards stationed as the four oars at the four cardinal points, in a later heaven, and also as the children of Horus, who had previously been his brothers. There is a great bursting forth of the floods in Amenta, described in the Ritual as a vast and overwhelming inundation. This [Page 552] passage of the waters shows the deluge-legend in the Kamite eschatology. The Osiris calls upon the lord of the flood, “the great one who is shoreless,” to save him. “Do thou save me!” “I who know the deep waters” is my name. But “I am not one who drowneth. Blessed are they who see the bourne. Beautiful is the god of the motionless heart who causeth the stay of the overflowing — or the flood. Behold! there cometh forth the lord of life, Osiris thy support, who abideth day by day.” “The tunnels of the earth have given me birth.” This overflow of the great waters called the flood also occurs in Sheol amongst the other trials and tribulations of the sufferer represented in the Hebrew book of Psalms. “The channels of waters appeared, and the foundations of the world were laid bare” (ch. 18). “He drew me out of great waters.” As one means of salvation from the overwhelming waters the manes clings to the sycamore-tree which standeth in the lake of Akeb. He exclaims, “I embrace the sycamore, I am united to the sycamore-tree.” That is, to Osiris in the tree, the tat or pole, the type of fixity to be clasped for safety amid the waters rising round the soul in death and in the darkness of the nether earth. Sufficient mythical matter for a legend of the deluge and the ark may be found in the 64th chapter of the Ritual. It is recorded in the rubrical directions appended to the chapter that it “was discovered on a plinth of the god of the Hennu-bark by a master-builder of the wall in the time of King Septi the victorious.” Septi, or Seti, was a king in the first dynasty who lived and ruled in Egypt from 6,000 to 7,000 years ago. At that time the chapter was rediscovered as an ancient writing. We learn from this that the bursting forth of the waters in an overwhelming flood was based upon the natural fact of the inundation in Egypt. The imagery had been reproduced in heaven, and also in Amenta, the lower Egypt of the nether-world. A great catastrophe caused by the waters that have broken out of bounds is more than once referred to in the Ritual. The Osiris says to the powers, “Grant ye that I may have the command of the water, even as the mighty Sut had the command of his enemies on the day of disaster to the earth. May I prevail over the long-armed ones in their (four) corners, even as that glorious and ready god prevailed over them” (Renouf, ch. 60). The bursting forth of the waters is described as a great disaster. In this chapter there is an application of the deluge imagery to the sun in the mythos and the departed soul in the eschatology. With the Egyptians, the supreme type of helpfulness and charity, or of love to the neighbour, was an ark or boat that offered safety to the shipwrecked amidst the waters. Hence, when pleading in the Hall of Judgment the speaker claims to have “done the right thing in Tamerit” (Egypt), he clinches it by saying, “I have given bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothes to the naked, and a boat to the shipwrecked” (ch. 125).

The subject-matter is very ancient. It belongs to that early time when Sut was a pre-Osirian form of the Good Being, in relation to the pole, the dog-star, and the inundation of the Nile. Here the deluge of the inundation is a deluge of destruction directed against the workers of evil. In short, it does what the [Page 553] inundation did for Egypt in washing away the result of drought, in cleansing from corruption and restoring a healthy new life to the land. Hence the deceased desires to have the same command over the waters in Amenta that Sut had when they burst forth in a drowning flood. Thus, 6,000 years ago the so-called “deluge legend” was ancient in Egypt, and it belonged to the time when Sut, in command of the waters, had not lost his place in glory; and his deluge was employed to destroy the Sebau, the Sami, the Apap-dragon, the long-armed ones, and other evil enemies of God and man who were not human beings. In the same chapter Osiris has superseded Sut as lord of the flood. Further, the two divine sisters Isis and Nephthys were imaged as two birds. The ark of Nnu described in the Ritual is conducted over the Nun by two birds which represent the two sister-goddesses Isis and Nephthys. It is said to these in relation to the inundation, “Ye two divine hawks upon your gables, who are giving attentive heed to the matter, ye who conduct the ship of Ra, advancing onwards from the highest place of the ark in heaven.” It is also said to Osiris, “Thy two sisters Isis and Nephthys come to thee, and they convey to thee the great extent (of the waters) in thy name of the great extender as lord of the flood (Teta, 274).” These allusions show that there was an ark to which the two birds were attached as conductors. They are represented as hawks, but as the birds of east and west, or the earlier south and north, are equivalent to the dove of day and the raven of night in Semitic tradition. Isis was the lady or bird of dawn, and Nephthys the lady of darkness. In this, the solar phase, the passage of the ark was from west to east, where it was conducted by the two birds or goddesses of the west and east. Heaven was flooded with a deluge of light at daybreak, and the nether earth was inundated with a deluge of darkness. The ark conducted through the waters by the two birds of light and darkness, or east and west, is described in a twofold character as the shrine of Osiris in the centre of the earth, and also as the ark of Ra that reaches the highest point in heaven (ch. 64, lines 5-8). It is the ark of the “lord of resurrections, he who cometh forth from the dusk and whose birth is from the house of death,” or, from Amenta, as the re-arising solar god. The ark that rested on Mount Nizir in the Babylonian legend, or Mount Ararat in the Hebrew version, and on Mount Manu in the Hindu account, is described in the Ritual as the “ship of Ra” which attains “the highest place of the ark in heaven,” with the mount of glory for anchorage and the pole for mooring-post. The deceased in the character of Nnu repulses the water of the deluge. “He is the image of Nnu, lord of the inundation and father of the gods” (Rit., ch. 136A). He manoeuvres the ark or bark with which he voyages in heaven. “He turns back the deluge” that “devastates the leg of Nut,” and “brings back strength to the fainting gods” by such means of dealing with the waters. In this chapter of the Ritual the devastating deluge is also alluded to (in line 1) as a mode of judgment. It is directed against the rebels. Those who are in the ark or the solar bark are saved from the great cataclysm which “devastates the leg of Nut” or sweeps away the support of the celestial waters, whilst the rebels are overthrown and reduced to non-existence. The rebels against Ra are identical with the “men” or the “race” that spoke and plotted [Page 554] evil against him in another version of the deluge myth. After the deluge of devastation there is a renewal, rejuvenescence, and rebirth. Seb and Nut (earth and heaven) are pleased at heart; they grow young again. The leg of Nut, which the deluge devastated, was a very early type of the celestial pole, as the bulwark, prop, or mainstay against the waters of the firmament. In one phase the ark of Nnu is the ark of the Nun as the celestial water. It is depicted in chapter 44 crossing the water of Putrata, the lake of darkness, and cutting its way through the coils of the Apap-dragon. The speaker is one of the manes in Amenta about to embark on board the boat of souls. He says, “O thou who sailest the ship of Nnu across that gulf which is void, let me sail the ship; let me fasten the tackle in peace, in peace. Let me fasten my tackle and come forth.” “The place is empty into which the starry ones fall down headlong upon their faces and find nothing by which they can raise themselves up.” The ship of Nnu is facing the west, where it has to cross the lake of darkness, or the great gulf of the waters, by night, the lurking-place of the devouring dragon, into which the setting stars go down, also the human souls that have not attained salvation on board the ark. We learn previously that the deluge is imminent. In other words, the waters of the Nun are traversed by the ark at night with the rescued souls on board. The shrine at the centre of the earth is one with the shrine in the ark of earth, and the ark of earth in one character is the ship of Nnu in the other; it is the ark of Osiris or Ptah in Amenta, and the ark of Ra in heaven, when “it comes forth in the east.” But whether in the depth or height, the bark of inert Osiris or the living Ra would still be the bark of Nnu, the ark that swam the deluge of the celestial water. It is said that the bark of Ra is in danger of the whirlwind and storm, which affords a glimpse of the tempest commonly associated with the deluge in the legends and traditions of the great disaster. But the Osiris-Nu, or Nnu as god of the inundation, turneth back the water-flood, the deluge that has nearly overwhelmed the “leg of Nut” (or the pole) which supports the firmament; and he keeps the companions safe who are on board the bark until the resting-place is finally attained upon the summit of the mount. The land that is reached at last by the mariners in the ark of Nnu is called the “tip of heaven,” at the place of “coming forth from the swathings in the garden of Aarru,” and the “coming forth in exultation. ”These are the names of that celestial country for which the bark or ark of Nnu was sailed (ch. 99). It is also called the ship of the garden of Aarru (ch. 106). The speaker in chapter 98 says, “I stand erect in the bark which the god is piloting . . . at the head of Aarru.” This is the Aarru of spirits perfected in the eschatology, the summit of which is in the region of the never-setting stars at the highest point of heaven. In the various deluge legends the ark was stranded on the top of the mount, as it was on Ararat and Nizir, Manu and Malata. Here the ark of Nnu becomes the bark of the blessed, whose landing-place in heaven is called Mount Hetep, at the summit of the pole. The pole is the mooring-post to which the cable of the vessel was made fast. The voyage cometh to an end, and praise is uttered to the gods who are in the garden of everlasting peace and [Page 555] plenty. When the passengers approach the landing-stage, Heaven opens its embracing arms; the lamps of heaven are lighted, the Khabsu gods rise up to offer acclamations. The “old ones” and those who have gone before are said to welcome the voyagers at their arrival on the mount of assembly and reunion. These are the two classes of spirits, superhuman and human, elemental and ancestral, otherwise called “the gods and the glorified.” There was no need for an altar to be raised at this landing-stage upon the summit at the moment of debarkation to complete the parallel with the landing on Mount Ararat or Nizir in the Semitic versions.

The Ritual preserves the astral mythos in the form of drama. The voyagers who land upon Mount Hetep are souls of the departed, and not human beings. The rendering in the Ritual is not historical, not merely mythical, not simply astronomical. Sacrificial ceremonies are performed upon the altar and offerings made at the moment of debarkation. These are in two categories. In one Noah, Nnu, or the Osiris-Nu presents the oblation in propitiation to the gods upon the mount. In the second, those who have gone before as the ancestral spirits make offerings of the sacred cakes and other forms of food to the new-comers whom they welcome as their fellow-citizens to the eternal city (ch. 98, Renouf) on their landing from the ark of Nnu. Thus far we trace the deluge-legend and the ark of Nnu in the phase of eschatology by means of the Ritual.

We now turn to representations of the subject in the astronomical mythology which in earlier ages preceded those of the eschatology.

In several chapters of the Ritual a breaking forth of the celestial waters in a typical deluge is alluded to or described. In chapter 136A it is said of the god who has the mastery over the inundation, “He turneth back the water flood which is over the thigh of the goddess Nut at the staircase of Seb.” The overwhelming water has here ascended to the summit of the mount or staircase, which, like the leg of Nut, was a figure of the pole. Thus the deluge is portrayed as submerging the pole when this was figured as the leg of Nut, and the water flood was then turned back by Nnu, the lord of the celestial water, whose ark of salvation from the deluge is the ship of heaven by name. Howsoever constellated, the bark of Nnu was the ark of heaven on the celestial water. Now when the change was made from a heaven of seven divisions to one of eight, as described in the very ancient papyrus containing the hymn to the god Shu, it is portrayed as superseding the ark of seven cubits with an ark of eight cubits, or the heptanomis by the octonary. This also indicates a change of pole, the pole that was imaged by the staff of Shu the giant. The hymn to Shu includes the legend of a deluge. It is called “a chapter of the excellent songs which dispel the immerged,” that is, those who were drowned in the deluge as the evil creatures of darkness (Magic Papyrus, Records of the Past, vol. X, p. 137). It is said, “Those who are immerged do not pass along. Those who pass along do not plunge. They remain floating on the waves like the dead bodies on the inundation of the Nile, and they shut their mouths as the seven great dungeons are closed with an eternal seal.” Now, there is reason to suppose that these seven great dungeons, sealed with an eternal seal, were a form of the superseded heaven in seven divisions answering to [Page 556] the seven caves in the Mexican mount, and to the book of seven seals in Revelation. In the same papyrus there is “a book of magical spells for remaining as dwellers in the country” where the great catastrophe occurs; it is said that “Horus has given the warning cry,” ”subsidence of the country!” This, as we interpret the text, is at the cataclysmal ending in time and space that was mythically dramatized as a deluge or inundation which overwhelmed the land above and effaced certain landmarks in the celestial waters. The cubit may stand for a general measure. Four measures or cubits typified an ark of the four quarters in space. Seven cubits were a fourth of twenty-eight measures in the circle of twenty-eight lunar signs. Thus seven cubits or measures in an ark, shrine, or tabernacle formed a figure of heaven in seven divisions. And when the heptanomis was followed by the heaven of Taht, the ark of eight cubits superseded the shrine of seven cubits, and the ape became the type of Taht in the octonary instead of in the heptanomis. The ark of seven cubits was continued as a sacred type in the religious ceremonies. For instance, it is commanded by the rubric to chapter 133, Papyrus of Nnu, that this chapter shall be recited over a boat four cubits in length on which the divine sovereign chiefs of the cities have been painted and a heaven with its stars portrayed. But in the Papyrus of Ani the boat is ordered to be made seven cubits in length. This, then, is a figure of the ark of seven cubits which preceded the ark of eight cubits and the heaven of four quarters that was imaged by the boat of four cubits. The heptanomis had been figured as an ark of seven measures in the waters of heaven, and this was followed by the ark of eight measures as the shrine of the kaf-ape, a zootype of Taht the lunar god, after there had been “a subsidence of the country” and the “secret abysses of the Nun” and the foundations of the deep had been laid open at the time of the deluge.

There had been no moon established in the stellar mythos. Otherwise stated, time was not yet computed by the lunar reckoning, or by Taht, the reckoner of time. In this sense the moon was not created until after the deluge. Thus, in some of the legends the moon becomes a resting-place or ark of safety riding on the waters. At Hawaii the typical deluge was called “the flood of the moon.” Meru is likewise shown to be a form of the mythical mount that reached up to the moon. Also it is related in one of the Hebrew legends that paradise was exempt from the deluge or was preserved from the great disaster because it was planted on the summit of a mountain reaching to the moon.

In the Egyptian inscription called “the Destruction of Mankind” there is a rebellion against Ra, the sun-god, followed by a great destruction and a deluge. Atum-Ra had been established as the king of gods and men, the god by himself. There is a revolt against his supremacy. He calls the elder gods around him for consultation, and says to them, “You ancient gods, behold the beings who are born of myself; they utter words against me. Tell me what you would do in these circumstances. Behold, I have waited, and I have not destroyed them until I should hear what you have to say.” The elder gods advise that they may go and smite the enemies who plot evil against Ra, and let none remain alive. The rebels are then destroyed “in [Page 557] three days of navigation.” When the deluge of blood is over it is said by the majesty of Ra, “I shall now protect men on this account.” “I raise my hand (in token) that I shall not again destroy men.” The rebel powers, headed by the coiling and constricting Apap-reptile vomiting the deluge of the dark by night, were always in revolt against the lord of light, and this legend commemorates their overthrowal in a deluge of blood. The chief agent in the work of vengeance is Hathor, the lunar goddess, who is aided by the solar goddess, Sekhet, in executing the commands of Ra. The goddess started; she smote the enemies over all the land because they had plotted evil against the majesty of Ra. These enemies are drowned in the deluge then poured out; “the fields were entirely covered with water through the will of his majesty the god. And there came the goddess (Hathor) in the morning, and she found the fields covered with water; and she was pleased with it, and drank to her heart’s content. She saw no more of the enemies, who were sunk in the waters that represented the flood of light which was now poured forth by Ra at dawn, and in which the creatures of the dark were drowned. It is said by his majesty, living and well, to his followers, “ I call before my face Shu, Tefnut, Seb, Nut, and the fathers and mothers who were with me when I was yet in the Nun, and I prescribe to Nnu, who brings his companions with him”; these are the instructions given by the god to Nnu: “Bring a small number of them (his companions), that the beings may not see them” — these beings are the creatures about to be destroyed in the coming flood — “and that their heart may not be afraid, thou shalt go with them into the ark or sanctuary until I shall go with Nnu to the place where I stand,” or to the summit of the mount on which the legendary ark at last was safely landed. The ark or sanctuary here indicated is the figure of a newly founded heaven which follows the deluge by which a previous world was wrecked. The inscription is very dilapidated, nevertheless it obviously contains a creation of “the men,” as in the Assyrian revolt in heaven in the place of the creatures thus destroyed. When “his majesty arrived in the sanctuary,” “the men” were going forth and bearing their bows and shooting their arrows against his enemies. These were not the enemies but the defenders of Ra. Hence it was said to Ra by “the men,” “Let us smite the enemies, the rebels.”

The celestial water was primarily assigned to the female Nu or Nut. Her heaven was imaged as the cow. At first it was the water-cow, and afterwards the milch-cow. And there was Nut (with) the “majesty of Ra on her back”; she was carrying the god in her form of the cow. This mode of locomotion on the cow’s back or between the cow’s horns (see the pictures) is now to be superseded by the building of the solar bark. “Said by the majesty of the god, I have resolved to be lifted up.” “Who is it that Nut will trust with it?” i.e., with the new ark or sanctuary of the god. “Carry me, that I may see.” Said by the majesty of the god, “Let a field of rest extend itself,” and there arose a field of rest. “Let the plants grow there,” and there arose the Sekhet-Hetep, or fields of the papyrus-reed. The beings who were destroyed were Sebau and Sami, representatives of the plagues of Egypt. The men who are created in their place are of the starry race. “The majesty of the god saw the inner part of the [Page 558] sanctuary in which he had been lifted up” (or the ark in which he made his voyage over the celestial waters), and he said, “I assemble and give possession of these multitudes of men, I establish as inhabitants all the beings which are suspended in the sky, the stars,” and Nut began to tremble very strongly. “I assemble there the multitudes that they may celebrate thee,” and there arose the multitudes. These are stars in one category, and in the other souls that were collected in the ark of salvation (Rit., ch. 58) or the ark of Nnu — that is, the ark of heaven and of the god of the celestial water. “Said by the majesty of Ra, My son Shu, take with thee my daughter Nut, and be the guardian of the multitudes which live in the nocturnal sky. Bear them on thy head, and be their fosterer. This is an allusion to his raising overhead the beautiful creation of the starry firmament which Shu sustains, whether in the form of the cow of Nut, the water of the Nun, or the ark of Nnu. After the destruction there is to be a new creation, and Ra is in need of support from Nnu and his companions. “Said by the majesty of the god (or his majesty) to the majesty of Nnu, My limbs have suffered long; I cannot walk without support, or have others to support me.” This will show that Nnu occupies the place of Noah in relation to the building of the ark or sanctuary, and in accordance with the instructions received from Ra. Ra informs Nnu that he needs some other means of supporting himself than the back of the cow. He calls upon Nnu and his three sons to assist him against his enemies the rebels. Thus the cow of Nut was to be superseded by the ark of Nnu when he became the representative of the heavenly water and master of the inundation. Nut says dutifully that she will act as it seems good to her father Nnu (l. 30). There had been various kinds and forms of the celestial or astronomical ark that was at first necessitated as the means of carriage for the gods, because the heavens had been imaged as the firmamental water. The great mother Apt, who was the image of all firstness both by name and nature in the likeness of the pregnant hippopotamus, was a kind of ark, and possibly the earliest that ever crossed the waters of the Nun. She carried her young ones in the cabin that was uterine. Child-Horus on his papyrus-reed was in the ark that saved him from the waters, as the sign was constellated in the planisphere of Denderah. The Pleiades formed an ark as constellation for the Khuti; the Lesser Bear for Anup and the seven voyagers round about the pole. Orion was the ark of the holy sahus, with Horus at the look-out. The ark of Taht was in the crescent moon that sailed the azure deep by night. Then Ra, the solar deity, resolved on being lifted up as god alone, the only one, who superseded all the elder powers. A new heaven was to be his tabernacle. This was the ark of Nnu. The change from one heaven to the other implied a great destruction of the rebels. A deluge was the modus operandi, and the ark the means of safety for the few just men and true, together with their consorts, who were saved from the catastrophe. As a symbol in sign-language the ark was built by Nnu, the master of the firmamental water, for the means of safety in the world all water against the coming flood and the subsidence of land, which was the land of Nnu. [Page 559]

In space it was the ark of the four quarters that was propelled by the four paddles of Hapi, Tuamutef, Kabhsenuf, and Amsta. Hence Seb (or the earth) “abideth stably” by means of the four rudders or oars (Rit., ch. 99). Hence also the four-square box that imaged the ark of Noë on the well-known Apamean coin. In Akar, or Amenta, it was the ark of Osiris; in earth the ark of Seb; in heaven the ark of Ra. Its mainmast was the pole. The nightlight on the masthead was the pole-star. In the myth it was the ark of Ra, “the bark of millions of years”; in the eschatology it is the ark of salvation, the refuge for eternity.

The sinking ones had looked for their deliverance from the waters to the bark of Anup, voyaging round the pole; also to the crescent-shaped arc of Taht seen in the new moon; then to the ark of Horus and the “holy sahus” constellated in Orion; and finally they sought salvation in the ark which Nnu and his three sons, Shu, Taht, and Seb, were now to build for Ra, the solar god.

The Egyptian ark or ship of Nnu is the ark of heaven, or, conversely stated, the ark of heaven is the ship of Nnu; and the ark of heaven was the revolving sphere configurated as a sailing vessel with two masts as we have found it figured by the mystery-teachers in their uranographic imagery of the celestial deluge. The ark is portrayed in the act of sailing over a vast, unfathomable, hollow void of formless space; as it is said, “the place is empty.” Into this the helpless ones fall headlong unless they are saved on board the ark. In a vignette to the Papyrus of Anhai, it is Nnu that is seen uplifting the boat of the gods with seven persons on board, besides the beetle and the solar disk. The figure of Nnu in this drawing is both male and female, Nnu and Nut in one figure (Budge, Papyrus of Anhai, pl. 8). Among the Assyrian fragments there is reference to a legend which has not come down to us. In this it is said that Ishtar counselled the destruction of mankind, whereas in the extant account of the deluge the goddess bewails their destruction and grieves bitterly over the loss of her children. Now Ishtar is an Akkado-Assyrian form of the goddess Hathor, who in the Egyptian mythos counsels the destruction of the beings, and executes the judgment passed upon them by the gods, with no wailing or weeping afterwards. This points back to the Egyptian original of another Akkado-Assyrian version.

According to the Hebrew reading of the legend, the deluge was provoked by the sins of men. “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth,” and he determined to blot out and obliterate the race; . . . . “but Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord” (Gen. VI. 5-8). The Chaldean and Hindu legends know nothing of human sin as a cause of the deluge. The sin against the gods, however, is described as the cause of a deluge in the so-called “destruction of men.” Ra says to Nun and others of the elder pre-solar gods, “Behold the beings who are born of myself; they utter words against me.”That is, they are in rebellion against the one true god. But these beings in this case were elemental, not mortal, and the sin was not human. When the deluge or destruction is over and past, Ra swears that he will not again destroy men. “Said by Ra: I now raise my hand that I shall no more destroy men.” [Page 560] “I shall now protect men on account of this.” So the Hebrew deity promises that he “will not again curse the ground any more for the sake of men: neither will I again smite any more any living thing,” as in the “deluge of destruction.”

This is the same thing, only written out large and told as if it were a human history, whereas the original is mythological. It relates to the superseding of the earlier gods, Nnu, Seb, Shu, and Taht, by Ra as the supreme being, or rather these old gods and elemental powers are to become the servants of his majesty Ra in the new heaven now established for the keeping of perfect time, with Ra as the head over all.

Ra had resolved to be lifted up in an ark or sanctuary. Nnu and his small number of companions who enter the ark or sanctuary are eight in number, four male, Nnu, Seb, Shu, and Taht, and four female, Sekhet, Nut, Hathor, and Tefnut, who can be paired thus:— (1) Nnu with Sekhet, (2) Shu with Tefnut, (3) Seb with Nut (4) Taht with Hathor. Nnu was the deity of the heavenly water, and Sekhet is in possession of the water on the night of the great disaster or the deluge (Rit., 57, I, 2); Sekhet is also called the “very great one of the liquid domain” (149). These are certainly a pre-Semitic form of the eight in the ark, and as Nnu was the first-born of these gods, he may be called the father of the other three in the ark as represented in the biblical version. The whole world, however, that was divided between the three sons of Nnu, Shu, Seb, and Taht, was not on our earth; was not in Africa, Asia, or Europe. Shu was to be the guardian of the multitudes in the nocturnal sky, Seb of the serpents in the cycles of time, and to Taht were assigned the nations of the north. Taht had a double portion. Ra says, “I shall give thee to raise thy hand in the presence of the gods. I shall give thee to embrace the two parts of the sky. I shall give thee to turn thyself toward the northern nations.” This looks as if Taht were the prototype of Japheth. Shu, whose name signifies shade, and who was to be the guardian of those who are in the sky of night, agrees with Ham, the dark of colour or black. It was Shu who might have seen his father Nnu by night with his person exposed, as it was his work to lift up the nocturnal heaven or Nnu. This leaves Shem as the representative of Seb. Seb is the father of Horus on earth, and, as it was supposed, the Hebrew Messiah was to descend from Shem. Thus it is possible to identify the new point of departure for the threefold human race derived from Shem, Ham, and Japheth, considered to be the fathers of three different and diverse races of mankind. Ra describes the group of elder gods who preceded him as the fathers and the mothers. “Said by his majesty, I call before my face Shu, Tefnut, Seb, Nut, and the fathers and mothers who were with me when I was still in Nun,” or previously to his issuing from the lotus in the bosom of the heavenly water. Here we have the “fathers and mothers” of the new race or races in the new world that followed the flood ready to the hand of the “sacred historian.” These fathers and mothers are eight in number all told, who are mentioned by name: Nnu and Sekhet, Seb and Nut, Shu and Tefnut, Taht and Hathor. These are eight persons in four pairs of consorts, exactly the same as the eight consorts in the ark of Noah. [Page 561]

The moon-god Taht becomes the enlarger of the domains of Ra, as his lunar representative by night. Ra calls Taht before him: “Said by the majesty of the god (or his majesty) to Taht, Come, let us leave the sky and my abode, because I wish to make a luminary in the inferior sky and in the deep region where thou inscribest the inhabitants, and thou art the guardian of those who do evil . . . . . the followers whom my heart abhors. But thou art my abode, the god of my abode: behold, thou wilt be called Tehuti, the house of Ra. I shall give thee to send (lacuna) . . . . and there arose the ibis of Taht. I shall give thee to raise thy hand in presence of the gods, and there arose two wings of the ibis of Taht. I shall give thee to embrace the two parts of the sky with thy beauty and thy rays, and there arose the lunar crescent of Taht. I shall give thee to turn thyself towards the northern nations, and there arose the cynocephalus of Taht which is in his escort. Thou art under my dominion.” This was written in the Book of Atum-Ra, who was also the god Huhi=Ihuh. Thus, in this new creation of Ra which was established after the old heaven had been overwhelmed by the deluge, the moon-god Taht was made the enlarger of the domains of Ra. As we read in the texts, “Ra created him a beautiful light to show the name of his evil enemy,” the Apap-dragon of darkness. This enlargement turns on the moon-god becoming the ruler for Ra by night and establishing his sovereignty over the black race in the domain of Sut and in the inferior hemisphere. The “enlarging” in the Hebrew version is at the expense of Ham (=Kam, the black): “A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren,” but “God enlarge Japheth.” Ham is treated in the märchen as the “evil enemy” Apap, or the black Sut in the mythos, thus making the legend ethnical by this perversion of the meaning. Enlargement of the world denotes the formation of a heaven on a larger scale. Thus Taht, like Japheth, was the enlarger or the enlarged. Also one mode of the enlarging was by Taht becoming a luminary in the inferior sky and in the region of Amenta. And here we come upon the probable origin of the cursing of Canaan in the Semitic travesty. Ham=Kam represents the power and the people of darkness. Taht is to enlarge the borders of light at the expense of the domain of darkness. It is said to Taht by Ra, “In the deep region where thou inscribest the inhabitants, thou art the keeper of those who do evil, the followers whom my heart abhors.” These were the darkies and the “black-heads” in the dark land of Amenta, who are to be subject to the rule of Taht by night, which has been converted in the Semitic perversion of the mythos into the servitude of Canaan and the children of Ham.

When it had been discovered that the moon derived its light and glory from the unseen sun there was a change of status for them both. The moon was previously a mother to the child of light whom she was unable to affiliate. And now, as it was mythically rendered, she learned that she was a wife (hemt) as well as a mother, and that her infant was begotten by the solar god. The transaction is portrayed as one of the mysteries of Amenta in the Ritual (ch. 80). The lady who gives light in darkness by night and [Page 562] overthrows the devouring monsters describes herself as a kind of ravisher to Hu the solar god. She retires with him to the vale of Abydos when she goes to rest. She seized upon the sun-god in the place where she found him. The result of this is that the twins Sut and Horus, the powers of darkness and light, that were previously born of the mother alone, are now attributed to the sun-god Hu or Ra as his children. Hathor had been the lunar lady, the slayer of the evil powers of darkness, and now the male god Taht is equipped in the house or ark of the moon as the teller of time for Ra. He is designated the “teller of decrees which Ra hath spoken in heaven” for Horus to execute on earth and in Amenta, with Taht and Anup as his two chief witnesses.

After the deluge in “the destruction of mankind” the god Ra establishes a covenant with those who have escaped from the flood. He says that what he commanded is well done, and that the destruction of his enemies removes destruction from themselves. “Said by the majesty of Ra, It is well done, all this. I shall now protect men on account of this. Said by Ra, I now raise my hand that I shall not destroy men” i.e. not again. The making of this covenant after the deluge is followed by the establishment of the New Year’s festival under the direction of the young priestesses of Hathor. “Hence comes it that libations are made under the directions of priestesses at the festival of Hathor through all men since the days of old,” (line 25). When the lunar orb has been converted into the abode of Ra by night it is said, “And there arose the crescent moon of Taht.” Now the lunar crescent is the mythological bow (Proc. Soc. Bib. Arch., vol. VI, p. 131). The speaker in the character of the solar god issuing from the crescent moon exclaims, “ I am the lion-god issuing from the bow, and therefore I shot forth.” (Rit., ch.132) When this was written it had been apprehended that the moon derived its light from the hidden sun, and shot the arrows forth with the growing, stretching crescent that was drawn bow-like to the full with all the force of the young lion-god. It was for this that Taht the lunar deity was wanted by Ra as his bowman by night to shoot the arrows of his light with the crescent of the monthly moon for his bow. For this the bow was set in the nocturnal heaven by Ra: “And there arose the crescent moon of Taht”=the bow. The crescent moon was figured as the bow in heaven for a sign that there should be no further deluge of destruction, because the keeping of time and season did not now depend upon the setting or non-setting stars. When time was reckoned by Tehuti the teller, by means of the dual lunation, a power was established that no flood which had submerged the pole or drowned the heptanomis, or the heaven in ten divisions, could in future overwhelm. Thus the deluge in the stellar mythos being over, and the powers of darkness being defeated and destroyed, chiefly through the direct agency of the lunar goddess Hathor, the bow of Taht was set in heaven with its promise that the waters of the wrath of Ra should not again cover the earth. This, like all that is Egyptian, was true mythos, not false explanation of natural fact. It does not mean that the moon was actually created there and then to give light for the first time.[Page 563] That would not be mythology, but fictitious history. The Kamite account of this ancient wisdom is mythological; the biblical is pretended history.

It has now to be shown that the bow in the Kamite mythos, which we look upon as the original, was not the rainbow, which was afterwards substituted as more natural by those who knew no better. The lunar crescent was not only the bow of the deluge and sign of promise for all future time, it was also an ark of safety from the waters of the Nun, in which the young child of light was bosomed and reborn of the lunar virgin mother. In the Osirian cult Osiris was reborn in an ark of crescent shape which was a figure of the crescent moon. It is said to Osiris in the preparatory pangs of birth, “Taht is a protection for thee. He placeth thy soul in the lunar bark in that name which is thine of god Moon” or god An, another name of Osiris (Records, vol. II, p. 119). The ark of the new moon was a means of resurrection for Osiris on the third night after his death, if we count the 17th Athyr as one. The priests brought out the sacred coffer containing a little golden ark. They also modelled a little image of the crescent moon.

The lunar mythos followed the stellar and preceded the solar, and in this the lunar crescent was an ark. In relation to which, the twin birds of light and darkness meet as it were in one when the black and white ibis is the typical bird of the dual lunation, because, as Plutarch says, its feathers resembled the halves of the moon as the bird of light in one half and in the other half the bird of darkness. Now the ibis or hebi in Egyptian is the messenger by name, and the crescent moon was the ark of the lord of light upon the waters of night. In the “Destruction of Mankind” Ra says to the moon-god, “Thou art my abode (his lunar ark), the god of my abode; behold, thou art called Taht, the abode of Ra. And there arose the ibis. I shall give thee to raise thy hand (Taht is also the hand of the gods) in presence of the gods. And there arose the two wings of the ibis of Taht. I shall give thee to embrace the two parts of the sky.” The one white and black bird, as representative of the moon in the Egyptian rendering, was the white bird of the new moon and the black bird of the old moon, equivalent to the dove of light and the raven of darkness in the other legend. The moon was the ark on the waters as the abode of Ra by night or during the deluge of the dark. The bird that was given by Ra for Taht to send forth from the ark was the bird of light and the bird of darkness. In the latter half of the lunation, when the moon was renewed in its crescent shape, out flew the bird as messenger of light across the waters of the Nun, and in the dark half of the disk, the bird was of raven hue. Such, we suggest, was the genesis of the two birds, or the double-feathered one, that issued from the lunar ark in the original mythos, which preserved the representation of the deluge and the ark and the two birds of day and night in the cult of Osiris or of Atum-Ra and Nnu. In the Chaldean account of the deluge the swallow is sent forth from the ark in addition to the raven and the dove. This also is a bird of the two sisters. In ch. 86 the manes makes his transformation into the swallow, when Horus is in [Page 564] command of the bark (line 5). But in the Vignette (Pap. of Ani) the bird called a swallow is a martin, another type of the white and black bird in one, like the ibis of the lunar ark. There is a chapter of the Ritual to be recited “when the moon renews itself on the first day of the month,” the day, therefore, on which the lunar ark was launched upon the waters of the Nun and had to face the deluge. As it is said, “Osiris is enveloped in storm and rain; he is enveloped. But the beautiful Horus lendeth succour daily. He driveth off the storm from the face of Osiris in the moon. Behold him coming. He is Ra on his journey. He is the four gods who are over the upper region.” The Osiris arriveth at his own time, and by means of his ropes is brought to the light of day (Renouf, ch. 135). The ark of Osiris on the waters is described as a kind of house-boat with gable ends, and the gable ends suggest that from this particular form of the house and boat in one may have descended the well-known children’s toy of Noah’s ark, as the ark of Noah in which eight souls, four males and four females, were saved from the deluge, and the ark of Nnu in the Kamite astronomy.

The new heaven was established on the four quarters that were founded upon the solstices and equinoxes by the great architect Ptah. Thus the teba or square box is a figure of the heaven that was based upon the four quarters which followed the ark of seven cubits, the ark of eight cubits, and other types of the ark that floated on the celestial Nun or is said to be carried on the back of the cow (Nut). The eight on board were not human beings, but four gods and four goddesses, or eight heavenly bodies. It is not the Hebrew Noah, as such, who will account for several other Noahs in different countries, but the Kamite Nnu, the “lord of the primordial water” — Nnu who is designated the father of the gods. By aid of the Kamite Nnu we can more fully identify the Hottentot Noh, who, as they told Kolben (in 1713), “had entered the world by a sort of window.” The god Nnu of the Egyptian mythos will explain why the hero of Polynesian legend has the same name. The story is told by both Ellis and Fornander. The survivors from the deluge of Raiatea were saved on an island or mount called the tree reaching to the moon. In this version the mount and tree of the Ritual are identical, the island being named after the tree, whilst the tree that reaches up to the moon corresponds to the mount of Am-Khemen and the establishment of lunar time. In the Hawaiian version, when Nnu had left his vessel, like Noah and Xisuthrus, after the flood, to offer sacrifice to the god Kane, he looked up and saw the moon in the sky, and he thought this was the god, saying to himself, “You are Kane, no doubt, though you have transformed yourself to my sight!” so he made his offering and adored the moon. Then Kane descended on the bow and spoke reprovingly to Nnu, but, on account of it being a mistake, Nnu was forgiven by Kane, and the bow was left above in token of the god’s forgiveness.

It was natural for those who knew nothing of the Egyptian wisdom to suppose that the deluge, the ark, and the character of [Page 565] Nevid, Nav, or Nevion, in the British mythos, was derived from the Hebrew records. But the true and final explanation is that both were derived from the Egyptian on separate lines of descent. The Druids were teachers of the wisdom of Egypt in the British Isles ages before the Bible was heard of in Europe. The ark of Nnu, Noë, or Noah was the ark of the celestial waters. An ark with the Ali, or Ari, was an ark with the seven on board who were rulers in the heptanomis. This is extant as the ark of the seven Kabiri and the seven Hohgates, the seven who in Britain were the companions of Arthur in the ark. When we understand that the Hebrew ark of Noah (or ) was the ark of Nnu in Egypt, and is the ark of heaven by name in the astronomy, we are on the track for the first time to learn how certain later races of mankind could be said to issue from the ark of Noah after a particular form of the deluge in which the heaven in ten divisions was superseded by the heaven in twelve divisions, the birthplace as an ark being a geometrical figure of the contemporary heaven. The deluge legend in the book of Genesis can be directly traced to its Egyptian origin. Nnu was the master of the celestial water. Under the same name, and also as Num, lord of the inundation, he was master of the water in the Nile on earth. The deluge, all the deluges, and the whole of the arkite imagery, together with Noah himself in very person, are dependent on the beginning of creation with the water of the Nun or Nnu, and on heaven being the celestial Nnu by name in the Egyptian language. In the Adoration of the Nile it is Nnu the deity of the heavenly water that is invoked as mythical source of life and not simply the flowing river. The object of religious regard as element or place or person was the celestial Nnu or Nun, who when personified was the giver of the Nile and all its gifts. Nun or Nnu was the inundator of Egypt by means of the Nile. Moreover, the god Num who is lord of the earthly inundation was preceded by the ancient deity Nun (or Nnu), who had an ark or shrine, but was not worshipped in any temple hitherto discovered. It appears from inscriptions of Tahtmes III at Thebes that Nnu the deity of the deluge and the ark had been continued in the character of Num as the lord of the inundation of the Nile, with his ark or teba represented by the city of Thebes, that “heaven on earth,” as it was designated by the Queen Hatshepsu. From these inscriptions we learn that Tahtmes rebuilt the sanctuary of Nnu, or rather that he built the temple of Amen-Ra at Thebes on the site of the ancient shrine. This, we are told, had a circuit wall of brick, and a canal which conducted the water of the inundation “to the shrine of the god Nun (Nnu) on the arrival of his season,” which shows that Nnu was one with Num as the elder pre-solar god, and that Nun (Nnu) passed into the god Num as a solar god associated with the inundation. The temple built by Tahtmes was a shrine of Nnu and Amen, as in “No-Amen,” the name of Thebes. In laying the foundation stone of the new temple Tahtmes records the fact that he had to remove the older shrine of the god Nun (or Nnu), and divert the course of the water that flowed to the shrine of the god Nnu, because [Page 566] it was in the way (inscription cited by Brugsch, Egypt under the Pharaohs, p. 178, Eng. tr.). Brugsch calls this shrine of Nnu the temple of the god; other Egyptologists tell us that no temple was ever raised to Nnu or Num. But whether termed a temple or not, this ancient sanctuary was an ark-shrine and a type of protection from the waters. The ark of Num is called his lordly bark. It is said that with the inundation “he brings once more his lordly bark” (verse 5). Also, “Thou art the august ornament of the earth, letting thy bark advance before men and lifting up the heart of women in labour” ; “All is changed by the inundation; it is a balm of healing for mankind” (verses 9 and 11). Thus Nnu as deity of the heavenly water was represented by the Nile as river and by Num as divinity when the sun-god was united with the water-god in Num or in Amen-Ra at Thebes. But the main point here is the ark of Nnu that comes again with the inundation once a year to Egypt. And if no temple of Nnu is known, he was expressly associated with a shrine which originated in an ark that was a means of safety to the ancient lake-dwellers of Africa. In the Papyrus of Nefer-uben-f (Budge) the god of the inundation is described as “the old man Nnu.” Deceased is standing in the water and holding the sail of breath in his left hand. He prays that he may have power over the seven divine princes who dwell in the place of the god of the inundation — that is, of Nnu the lord of the celestial water as builder of the ark. He says, “I have power with my father, the old man Nnu. He hath granted that I may live.” This is the father Nnu as Egyptian who became father Noah in the Hebrew version.

Noah was a just or righteous man, and perfect in his generations. This statement is put in the forefront of the Hebrew deluge legend. In the Ritual it is granted to the Osiris Nnu that he shall “carry maat at the head of the great bark and hold up maat among the associate gods.” Maat stands for justice and rightfulness; and this is borne aloft upon the bark by the spirit of the just man made perfect, right up to the summit of the mount which is the landing-place for those who are in the ark. “And so it cometh that the Osiris-Nnu hath reached every one of his stations” in the ark that rests at last upon Mount Hetep, Mount Nizir, Mount Meru, or the Mount of Ararat. Nnu is identified with Noah by the Arab writer Murtadi (1584), who related that Num-Kufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid, dreamed of a coming deluge, and built the Pyramid as his ark of safety. He then “made his abode in the maritime pyramid along with Noah” (Nat. Gen., vol. II, p. 226). That is along with Nnu, the god of the ark and the inundation, who was earlier than Num, and who had his teba in Thebes. This points to the pyramid of Num-Kufu being also a form of the ark, or rather to the ark of earth and heaven in several of its successive forms that were ultimately combined in one consummate figure of the heavens and earth as a stupendous monument and imperishable register of the astronomical mythology. And, if so, it becomes apparent that the sarcophagus at the centre was a co-type with the coffin, shrine or ark of Osiris in the midst of Amenta. This may help to show how fragments of the astronomical mythology have been [Page 567] put together in the book of Genesis without key or clue, and the old dark sayings of the ancient wisdom repeated minus the necessary knowledge for enlightening the world.

Earlier deluges than this of Noah are alluded to in one of the Jewish Haggadoth, which relates that in the time of Enos, as in that of Cain, a great tract of land was flooded by the sea. Which is but the end of a patriarchate described in terms of the deluge. (Encyclopaedia Biblica, col. 1297.) Items from several deluges are included in the Hebrew versions. For instance, the animals are said to enter the ark seven by seven, and also two by two. Here the numbers belong to two entirely different deluges, the one from which the seven (or eight), the other from which the pair, were saved. There is no such incongruous mixture in the Avesta. In this version Yima the shining is commanded by Zarathustra to “make a circle to all four corners as a dwelling-place for all mankind,” and stock and store it against the deluge, which is the evil work of the destructive serpent of darkness. All forms of life that enter this enclosure do so in imperishable pairs. A lofty wall is to be made around it, and a window that gives light within. The one window we take to be the pole-star. The lofty wall answers to the high white hall of Ha-Ptah-Ka. It is lighted with self-created and eternal lights that shine above, and the created lights below (Farg. II, l. 131). These correspond to the Kamite Urtu-Seku, the setting stars, and the Akhemu-Seku, or stars that never set, the everlasting self-created lights. The window of Yima’s enclosure in heaven is repeated in the one light of Noah’s ark (Gen vi, I) It is related in a Jewish legend that after the deluge two animals came out of the ark which were not among the twos or sevens that went into it. These two were the cat and the pig. And they belonged to the new creation of Atum-Ra. The cat, as solar type, is a symbol of Atum-Іu. It is said in the Ritual (ch. 17) the cat is Ra himself. It was in that form of the seer by night that the sun-god overcame the evil Apap in the darkness of Amenta. The pig or boar in the Osirian mythos is a type of the evil Sut, the opponent of the Good Being in Amenta. Amenta is the lower deck of an ark in which the pig of Sut was present. This is in an ark that could not be built until Amenta had been hollowed out by Ptah, the father of Atum-Ra, who was represented by the cat. Thus the addition of the cat and pig to the previous denizens will help to identify which ark it was they came out of after the deluge of Noah. As Egyptian, it was the ark in which Ra had resolved to be lifted up as “god alone,” and the cat and pig were types belonging to the new creation that followed the “destruction of mankind.” This was the ark of Nnu. The description of Noah’s deluge is an agglomerate compounded from the mythical data and the actual inundation. The waters flowed in Egypt during a certain number of days. It is probable that the fullest flow was reckoned at forty days and nights (see Hor-Apollo). In a fragment of the Melchizedekian literature, found by Professor Sokolov, and appended to the Slavonic book of Enoch, the ark of Noah “floated forty days.” And it is added, altogether they were in the ark 120 days. This is the exact length of the water season in the Egyptian year of 360 days, which was first divided into three [Page 568] tetramenes of 120 days each. It may also be noted that outside of Egypt rain took the place of the inundation, and the deluge of Noah consists of forty days and nights of rain. Fifteen cubits of fresh water constituted a good if not a perfect Nile, and this is the measure applied to the flood of rain-water in the book of Genesis. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail, and the mountains were covered (ch. VII, 20). Fifteen cubits of water, however, could be no measure for a flood that covered all “the high mountains that were under the whole heaven” (ch. VII, 19). The waters that prevailed on the earth for 150 days are also equal to an abundant inundation of the Nile, but these have been mixed up with the waters of the celestial Nun. Also the fifteen cubits of measure on the earth would be confused with the fifteen cubits, measures, or days in the half-circle of the luni-solar month of thirty days, in which the lunar crescent was the ark that is entered by Osiris, on the third day, to spread the actual water of life and light, not that deluge of destruction which was entirely mythical.

After the deluge, according to the euhemerizing of the mythos in the book of Genesis, Noah began to be a husbandman, and planted a vineyard; and he drank of the wine and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent, and Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. And Shem and Japheth took a garment and covered the nakedness of their father (ch. IX, 20, 24). “And their faces were backward, and they saw not the nakedness of their father.” Now in the mysteries of Amenta, Osiris is covered by his son Horus to conceal his nakedness. “I am with Horus,” says Taht, “on the day of covering Tesh-Tesh,” one of the names of Osiris (Rit., ch. 1). It is also said to Horus, “O thou who coverest (or clothest) Osiris and hast seen Sut, O thou who turnest back” (ch. 28). Here the adversary of Osiris is present with Horus in this scene of concealing the father’s nakedness, and the bad character of the black, evil-minded Sut appears to have been given to Ham as a son of Noah. In the Chaldean account of the deluge a sacrifice is offered at the coming forth from the ark. Hasisadra says, “I poured out a libation. I built an altar on the peak of a mountain. Seven jugs of wine I took. At the bottom of them I placed reeds, pines, and spices. The gods collected at its burning, the gods like Sumbe gathered over the sacrifice.” (Deluge, Tab., col. 3, Smith.) The basis of the oblation in the Kamite sacrifice is the blood of the beings that have been destroyed. “Said by the majesty of the god, Let them begin with Elephantine, and bring to me the fruits in quantity. And when the fruits had been brought they were given . . lacuna.” The sekti (miller) of Annu was grinding the fruits, while the priestesses poured the juice into the vases; and those fruits were put into vessels with the blood of the beings, and there were seven thousand pitchers of drink. “And there came the majesty of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, with the gods, to see the drink after he had ordered the goddess to destroy the beings in three days of navigation.” Instead of the Assyrian seven jugs of wine the Egyptian has 7,000 pitchers of drink, and this is brewed from the blood of the massacred beings mingled with the juice of the fruits of the earth; and here, as in the later version, the gods gather over the [Page 569] sacrifice “to see the drink.” Shedding the blood of the wicked, in this great slaughter of the evil beings, was a mode of offering the oblation to the Good Being. Blood and the fruits of the earth were the two primitive forms of the offering, and these are blended together in a deluge of intoxicating drink.

A most primitive representation of this sacrifice which followed the deluge is made by the Ovaherero, an African tribe adjoining that of the Bushmen. They claim to have issued from the typical tree of the beginning, which is said by the missionary Reiderbecke to be a kind of Ygdrasil. The Ovaherero say that the sky was once let down in a deluge, by which the greater part of mankind were drowned. This they attribute to the Old Ones in heaven, whose wrath was appeased by the sacrifice of a black sheep (South African Folk-Lore Journal, vol. II, pt. 5, p. 95). When the deluge of darkness had passed away at dawn, the black sheep was offered to placate and pacify the power of darkness, which exhibits the deluge and the deluge-legend in their most primitive forms. The sacrifice does not merely celebrate the return of light, as in a later phase, but is also a petitionary offering for future protection from the deluge of the dark. Before ever man appeared on earth, a feeling of joy and thankfulness had been expressed by the apes at the return of the light, whether lunar or solar; and when man came he followed on the track of the monkey in feeling thankful for the return of day. In the Egyptian hieroglyphics the word tua, to adore, is figured as a salutation to the dawn or morrow-day, and the typical adorer is the Kaf-ape, the saluter of the gods. Primitive worship signified salutation and sacrifice from the beginning. In various traditions, Babylonian, American, Hebrew, and others, the deluge is followed by a sacrifice, and this sacrifice after the flood has been configurated in the stars of heaven in a picture of the far-off past, with the offering laid upon the altar at a point where the actual inundation in Egyptian annually came to an end. In the Hebrew account of the thanksgiving sacrifice it is said, “Noah built an altar unto Jehovah, and took of every clean beast and of every clean bird, and offered burnt-offerings upon the altar, and Ihuh smelled the sweet savour.” The typical imagery derived from the actual seasons in Egypt, repeated in the planisphere, will also account for the Hebrew story concerning Noah’s planting the vine and getting drunk immediately after the inundation. The vine that Noah is said to have planted may be seen in the decans of Virgo, where the star Vindemiatrix denotes the time of vintage in Egypt. It is a version of the mythos in which the water of the deluge was turned into wine by Horus, the ripening soul of the sun, that has been most pitifully vulgarised in the story of Noah’s intoxication after the deluge. According to the planisphere Noah was on the water of the inundation, or he might have just landed when the grapes were ripe, and he got intoxicated apparently for the purpose of cursing Ham and consigning the dark race to the doom of never-ending slavery. Hebraists tell us that the name of Noah signifies rest, which leads to nothing in Hebrew. Whereas, in Egyptian, the same word Nnu is a name of the inundation, the deity of the celestial waters, and also for rest or repose. As natural fact this was the season of rest or of Nnu because of the deluge, during which the [Page 570] god was resting in his ark upon the waters, or, as might be, in his Teba of the Southern Apta at Thebes. The natural fact was formulated in a legend such as that of Nnu, Num, Noah, or Vishnu resting on the waters during a deluge in the course of a new creation; that is, during the Hindu period of Pralaya, when this was figured on the grand scale as described in the Puranas. For instance, Vishnu is said to repose in slumber during four months of every year, borne up by the seven-headed Naga-serpent Sesha (Kennedy, Hindu Mythology, p. 228; Moor’s Hindu Pantheon). The four months of the inundation is historical in Egypt; the deluge in mythology is typical, and the type was variously applied to a natural phenomenon as a mode of measuring time. Nnu or Nu had become an Egyptian personal name. There is a papyrus of Nu in the British Museum containing various chapters of the Ritual. In these the speaker calls himself the Osiris-Nu, and, as the subject-matter shows, the manes here combines the two characters of Osiris and Nnu. Moreover, he is Nnu in the ark or bark, as lord of the inundation and victor over the deluge (Rit., ch. 36 A). The Osiris-Nnu is the speaker; not merely Nnu of the papyrus, but Nnu of the celestial water, or Nnu as THE Osiris. He says the Osiris-Nnu is strong to direct the ship of the gods, here called the boat of the sun, in which he comes forth from Amenta into heaven. Nnu saileth round about the heaven and “voyages along with Ra.” Thus the mythos merges into the eschatology of the Ritual.

The water of the deluge in the Assyrian legend was not terrestrial. It is said in the opening lines:

The legends of the deluge show that the primal paradise was an enclosure on the summit of the highest mountain, that of the pole, as a place of safety midst the celestial waters, which was typical of the refuge sought for on the hill-top when the floods were out on earth. The enclosure might be an ark, or palisade of wicker-work, a nest of reeds, or a city, walled and fortified, an island, a group of seven islands, or ten, or a zodiac, the idea of the deluge was ever present. And this had been the dominant idea in the burial of old Egypt’s dead amidst the waters of the inundation. Every figure of the ark and every mode of arking or enclosing are extant somewhere or other in the astronomical mythology. Take the cave for example. In the Mexican version the seven who are saved from the deluge found safety in the seven caves of the celestial mount, the mount which toppled over at the summit with the changing of the pole. The cave was one of the natural types of the ark that preceded any form of refuge made [Page 573] by the hand of man. And there were seven of these altogether as a figure of the celestial heptanomis. The Welsh Barddas ascribe the building of an ark to Menwyd, who is called the dragon-chief of the world in the ancient British mythology. Menwyd is described as forming the ark by means of serpents joined together (Nat. Gen., vol. 2, p. 253). An ark is the means of safety amidst the waters whatsoever its formation may have been. Such an ark may be seen in the Sesha Nag-serpent with seven heads that bears up Vishnu during the deluge. This is a figure of the fore-world which preceded a great flood. Here the seven-headed serpent is likewise a figure of the heptanomis, or heaven in seven divisions, which sank in the celestial waters. The same great serpent in the waters with seven heads is also Akkadian.

A principle of arking, so to call it, was established when the great Bear, as the mother of the revolutions or time-cycles, and mistress of the waters, made the circle of the year in turning round “the Atlantean Pole.” She, as the pregnant water-cow, was herself an ark of life that might be looked to as a divine type of safety by the sufferers from the water-floods on earth. The mother of time and station was the mistress of the firmamental waters; the mistress therefore of the enclosure in the waters which in the later rendering is a park, a garden, a paradise, or a harvest-field. In the Uganda legend it was a palisade of reeds around a spring of fresh water, the secret of which the women knew, but failed to keep. When the circle of the bear was found to be untrue, and time was more correctly measured by the moon-god Taht, she, the mother of time and the mistress of the waters, was accused of being unfaithful to her trust, of letting in the deluge and losing the primeval home. As we have seen, she philandered with the moon-god Taht, who superseded Sut in her affections and in keeping time. The twins as Sut and Horus were re-born of her as lunar in the dark and light halves of the moon — the light eye of Horus and the dark eye of Sut. Apt had been the mistress of the waters in the stellar mythos from the first, and when it was found out that she was keeping time unfaithfully and incorrectly she was charged with betraying the secret to her lover, with overthrowing the bulwark and with letting in the deluge. This supplied the matter of sundry deluge-legends.

The Egyptians always kept on building closely in accordance with some primal type like this of the ark. In the beginning the earth itself was a mount or table-land that rose up out of the abyss as a kind of ark amidst the waters of space, an ark of one story. But when Amenta had been hollowed out by Ptah the opener of an underworld, there was an ark of two stories, fixed or floating. Whether called an ark or a house, it was two-storied. It was double-decked like a ship. It was also a house of two stories for Osiris in Abydos. With heaven added over all it becomes three-storied or triple-decked, with Amenta, earth and heaven answering to the three stories of the triple-deck. Now, it is commanded that the ark of Noah, or Nnu, shall be built “with lower, second and third stories,” like the ship with three decks. This is a fragment of the genuine mythos which tends to show that it was the ark here identified as the figure of three worlds, viz., Amenta, middle-earth and heaven; a figure that agrees [Page 574] with the typical tree of the Akkado-Assyrian and the Norse mythology which had its roots in the nether-world, its stem in middle-earth and its branches high in heaven. But did the Egyptians ever launch this three-decker, and get it afloat in space? or did it remain a fixture in the mythical abyss?

It was argued in the Natural Genesis that the Kamite astronomers had measured the earth and knew it to be a globe rotating in space. It is now suggested that the ark of three stories was a compound image of the three regions built up deck by deck and completed by the arch-craftsman Ptah in a vessel that is called the ship of heaven in the Ritual. In the words of M. Lieblin, the Egyptians “knew that the earth circulated in the great ocean of heaven.” And as the earth was the sekru-bark of Osiris in Amenta, it was the ark afloat upon the waters of the Nnu (Nat. Gen., vol. 2, pp. 60-61). In the time of Neb-Ka-Ra of the fourth dynasty the fact must have been a familiar one for a common peasant to call the king “the helm, or pilot of the earth which he navigates in space as the second brother of Taht” who was the navigator of the lunar bark. The ark of Nnu, which Ra commanded to be built for him when he was about to be lifted up upon the heavenly water, may be seen on the sarcophagus of Seti, in the Soane Museum. “The boat,” says Lefébure, the translator of the text, “is supported by Nnu, whose bust and arms only are to be seen. The arms issue from the water and bear up the god. The entire scenes are surrounded by the waves of Nnu, which shows that the Egyptians looked upon the earth as a spherical body floating through the air. The boat is directed, as a passage made through the waves indicates, towards a spot where a disk is represented on a band. This band, studded with points, represents the earth as a landing-place for which the ark is bound” (Book of Hades, Records of the Past, vol. XII, p. 16). There is also a description of the ship of Nnu in the chapter of the Ritual by which one saileth a ship in the nether-world. In this the nature of the three decks as “lower, second and third stories” is described. The vessel is described in chapter 99 as the ship in which the abyss or void of Apap the devourer may be safely crossed. This is an empty space into which the starry ones fall down headlong to find nothing by which they can raise themselves up again. The manes supplicates the god: “Oh thou who sailest the ship of Nnu over the void, let me sail the ship. Let me be brought in as a distressed mariner, and go to the place which thou knowest.” As previously shown, he has to know each part of the bark by name and to repeat the name of each before he is admitted on board. From this examination in the judgment-hall we learn the nature of the Ark and its three stories. The name of the lowest story is “akar,” that is, the lower earth. The posts at stem and stern are “the two columns of the nether-world.” The ribs, also called the four paddles, image the gods of the four corners, Amsta, Hapi, Tuamutef and Kabhsenuf. These are the four who row the bark, and it is said that Seb, the earth, abideth stably by means of their rudders or oars. The “patrol who goeth round” is “he who piloteth the double earth.” The “mooring-post,” which represents the pole, is designated “the lord of the double earth in the shrine,” that is, Osiris as the power of the pole. The double earth is the earth of Amenta and the earth of Seb, or two [Page 575] of the three stories, the third of which is celestial. Hence Nut, or Heaven, is the name of the sail. Thus the three stories are identified with Amenta, earth and heaven, that were figured in the ark of Nnu which floated (earth and all) upon the waters of the firmament. This, when represented by the constellation Argo Navis, was an object-picture of the ark upon the great stream of the Via Lactea, by means of which the manes reached “the tip of heaven” at the pole, and after all the rowing and the voyaging attained the realm of rest upon the eternal shore. The Jewish Kabalists have a tradition that Noah’s ark embodied an image of the world or was a figure of the whole universe. This IS the ark of Nnu in the astronomical mythology, the ark of Nnu that is described in the Egyptian Ritual as a subject of examination in the Mysteries of Amenta.

According to the Bhâgavata Purana (1, 3, 15), the ship of Manu was the earth itself. The “ship of the world” is a title given by the Barddas to the enclosure of Stonehenge, which points to its including an image of the earth as a form of the ark amidst the waters of heaven, like that of Seb which abideth stably in space by means of the four oars or paddles at the four cardinal points. An ark of the four quarters is described in the magic papyrus. It is said, “There are four mansions of life at Abydos,” the mythical birthplace of Osiris in Amenta. In this we find another group of the four gods Nnu and Shu, Taht and Seb. The eternal city on the summit of the Mount of Glory was the final form of the ark in heaven. And after the Babylonian deluge when the ship touches the shore and its occupants have landed, as it is said, Gilgames “collected great stones,” “he piled up the great stones.” Instead of piling the mound of earth, or planting the typical tree, or launching the ark, the survivors now are the builders of a city with stones. They landed and “left the ship by the shore. They journeyed a stage of twenty kaspu. They made the stage ascent of thirty kaspu. They came to the midst of Erech Suburi.” Then follows the building of Erech, the ark-city on the summit; or the new heaven that was divided into three parts; “one measure for the circuit of the city, one measure for the boundary of the temple of Nantur, the house of Ishtar; three measures together (for) the divisions of Erech” (Records, v. 7, 148—9). In Africa a conical hut like an ant-heap is the primeval type of a dwelling made by human hands. This was continued by the Egyptians in the cone of Hathor and the conical pyramid, or Ben-Ben of Sut-Anup as a figure of Polaris or Sothis surmounted by its star. This may be seen in the lake-dwellings of Africa, which are conical huts built on piles in the water of the divine land of Puanta as portrayed in the inscriptions of Hatshepsu’s temple at Deir-el-Bahari. The reason given for such a type of house, says Sir John Kirk, is that the country at times is flooded (Lockyer’s Dawn of Astronomy, p. 348, note 3), and thus the inhabitants escape the inundation. The conical hut is common in Africa both on land and water, and this is a figure of the primitive paradise and of the celestial pole, which was continued in Egypt as the round pyramidion, a co-type with the circular mound and conical cairn. Thus an ark on the firmamental water in the shape of a cone, a figure that represents the pole, crowned with its star, is identical with the pile-dwelling of the [Page 576] African lakes, and images the same mode of escape from the waters, according to the mythos and eschatology of the Egyptians, as does the primitive lake-dwelling of the Inner Africans. The earliest ark of Nnu, or heaven, is an enclosure in the water of the Nun; the latest is a paradise on piles; we might say seven piles or poles which are co-types with the seven mountains or seven pyramids. But an ark, as a means of refuge in relation to a deluge of water, is not limited to the boat-type. The ark of Noë on the Apamean coin is figured as a box four-square. This, in Egyptian, is a Teba, Hebrew Thebah, the name of Noah’s ark, and of Thebes as a form of the eternal city. There was an ark of the sphere which is described in the Thlinkeet legend as a vast floating building. At the time of the deluge it struck on the mount, or was driven on the rock and broken in two halves by its own weight. This agrees with the division of the heaven into north and south between Sut and Horus, as their two divine domains.

In several of the legends it is made known beforehand and announced that a deluge is coming, and with the warning instructions are given to build an ark or prepare some sort of refuge and means of escape for a favoured few. According to the Marquesan version, the lord ocean, or Fatu-Noana, who is like Nnu, lord of the celestial water, when about to send the devastating deluge, allows seven days for preparation. A tall building is to be erected which will tower above the reach of the waters. Cattle of all kinds are collected in pairs and marched into a vessel called the “Long Deep Wood.” In this there is a family of four males and four females saved; the same as in the ark of Noah, and of Nnu. The storm burst. The “sacred supporter” of the universe slumbered during the night of dissolution, as does Vishnu or Brahma in the Hindu version. A coffin on a sledge was a pre-Osirian type of the ark which was periodically drawn round the walls of the great sanctuary of Ptah the coffined one in the Mysteries of Memphis. The sledge or raft was naturally earlier than the boat, and the passage through Amenta, when this was imaged as solid earth, was represented by the sun-god Sekari in his coffin resting on a sledge. In the Ritual (ch. 100) the Osiris says, “I clear the path of the solar orb and tow along Sekari (a form of Ptah) upon his sledge.” The Norsemen were accustomed to bury the bodies of their dead chiefs in boats on the hills, as a typical mode of crossing the celestial waters after death. The Garrows of Bengal, who cremated their dead, used to place the corpse in a dingy or small boat on the top of the funeral pile, for the typical crossing of the waters. The word ark in Egyptian signifies a circle, to encircle, bands, enclosings, encirclings, also number thirty, thence a month. Arkai is to appoint a limit, fix an end by decree. This was applied in measuring a cycle of time, which might be monthly, as in the Assyrian Arkhu. From this comes the arc, as part of a circle, which in Egyptian is to encircle or to make the circle. And thus the enclosure and ark are both forms of the circle. The enclosure made by Yima was an ark-circle but not an ark, or bark upon the waters. Still, the meaning is the same. It was the type of an enclosure and of safety from the deluge whether figured as stationary or afloat; [Page 577] and the heaven built upon four corners as a circular enclosure was an ark in space, we might say, the ark of space, when space was the celestial water. An ark of seven cubits was a figure of the celestial heptanomis, or heaven in seven divisions. An ark of eight cubits was a figure of heaven in eight divisions, either as Am-Khemen or the octonary of Taht. An ark of four cubits was a figure of heaven as the teba, or box of the four quarters. There was an ark of twenty-eight cubits reckoned as twice fourteen, based upon twenty-eight nights to the lunar month. This was the ark of the moon in which Osiris was reborn, or the child-Horus was preserved from the waters. The cubit was a measure in time for a day, as well as in space for a degree. Three hundred and sixty five cubits in circumference was the measure of a year of 365 days, on the tomb of Osymandyas (Diod. I, 49). Similarly, fourteen cubits were equivalent to fourteen days, or a half-moon, a tenat in the lunar month of twenty-eight days, and therefore equal to fourteen degrees. Thus the ark of the moon is not limited to the orb itself as a vessel that contained the new-born child of light. It is also the circle of a lunar zodiac, in which there were twenty-eight measures in time and space, = twenty-eight cubits that were divided into two fourteens, and four sevens. During fourteen days Osiris (or Horus) grew in glory, and during the other half of the lunation he was torn in fourteen pieces by Sut, the power of darkness. An ark of twice fourteen cubits is equal to a circle with twenty-eight stations, that is a lunar enclosure or zodiac. No dimensions of the ark are directly given in the Ritual, but there is an allusion which probably underlies the measurement of the lunar month or zodiacal circle of twenty-eight measures. One-half of the circle was marked out in fourteen divisions corresponding to one-half of the lunar houses. Also, the divine domain of Aarru was divided into fourteen sections (Rit., ch. 149), or, to put it in another way the mount of earth had fourteen steps to it: seven up and seven down. This would be the measure of one-half the circle, which was made out in twenty-eight lunar signs: fourteen in the lower and fourteen in the upper hemisphere. Sunset and sunrise were half-way round the circle, horizontally and perpendicularly, at the level called the summit of the mount. Now there is a scene at sunset described in the Ritual (ch. 108). Ra and the reptile of darkness watch each other, Ra from his ark, the monster from the mount. The depth of water underneath the solar bark at this, the level of sunset, is said to be seven cubits in its liquid part. This also serves to measure the lower half of the circle by seven cubits, or measures, downward and seven upward to the level of the mount, or the horizon. Seven steps down, applied either to the mount or to the lower half of the circle, would be identical with the course of the lunar goddess Ishtar, when she made her descent into the Assyrian Hades and was despoiled of all her ornaments and raiment as she passed through the seven gates downward, to be reclothed again in all her glory as she made the ascent through the seven upward gates. The object sought to be established here is the lunar circle divided into twenty-eight lengths of time, whether measured vertically by the mount of the earth or by the pathway of the moon. The seven measures answer to one-fourth [Page 578] of the entire circle of twenty-eight cubits or measures of time; fourteen below and fourteen above; fourteen from sunset to sunrise, and fourteen from sunrise to sunset.

The lunar measurement and ark were earlier than the solar, and these were afterwards applied to the luni-solar cycle of time. In the luni-solar month, the days, degrees, measures, or cubits, would be fifteen instead of fourteen to the half-circle. Thus, if the lower half of the circle contains fifteen measures called cubits, instead of fourteen in the lunar reckoning, there would be fifteen measures above the mountain-summit on which the level of the equinox was marked, and this may be the meaning of the Hebrew and Toltec statements that the waters of the deluge prevailed fifteen cubits above the highest mountains; the waters being celestial, the waters of Nnu or Noë.

We hear most of the ark as a teba or box, which is a figure of the four corners, and as the measures of twenty-eight, fourteen, and seven show, was a type of the lunar heaven that followed the stellar; the ark of Taht which superseded the ark of Sut; the ark of eight cubits, or the octonary, which took the place of the heptanomis. The lunar nature of the Babylonian ark is also indicated by its measures. On the deluge tablet, as rendered by Smith, the builder of the ark relates that, “in its circuit it was fourteen measures” ; “its frame fourteen measures it measured.” Now, as the cubit was the typical measure, this was equivalent to fourteen cubits. Boscawen has it: “Two sides were raised. In its enclosure fourteen ribs, also fourteen they numbered above” (The Bible and its Monuments, p. 117). In this reckoning the ark of twenty-eight measures corresponds to the circle of twenty-eight lunar measures, or stations of the moon. Thus numerically the ark is identified as one with the arc by the fourteen measures below and fourteen above, and the ark of the moon was the ark of Osiris in the lunar mythos. As the lunar circle was divided in four quarters, and these four were each subdivided into seven, that may explain the statement of the builder, who says he divided the interior seven times and (its passages or parts) seven times (later version by Professors Haupt and Sayce). This ark of abode is admittedly built” in a circuit” (col. 2), which has fourteen measures above and fourteen below, sub-divided by seven in the interior and by seven in its parts or passages. There are two fourteens sub-divided by the two sevens, equal to the lunar circle of twenty-eight measures, the two lunations of fourteen days, and the four quarters of seven days each. And if the measure of fourteen refers to one-half the lunar circle, it is possible that the measure of fifteen cubits applied to the rising waters in the Hebrew version is a measure taken from the soli-lunar month of thirty measures or days, especially as the height of Noah’s ark was to be thirty cubits. The ark of twenty-eight measures would be lunar only, the ark in which Osiris rose again on the third day after his body had been torn into fourteen parts and gathered together in the sekru (or ark) chest, coffin (teba), for the revivification and resurrection in the ark of the moon. The ark of thirty measures (a measure in the hieroglyphics is a cubit) would be soli-lunar in accordance with the thirty days to the month; this, then, would be an ark of the sun and moon, which followed the lunar ark of twenty-eight cubits. The ark of seven [Page 579] measures was the stellar heptanomis. The ark of eight measures is the octonary of Taht, the lunar god; a heaven of four quarters subdivided by eight semi-cardinal points into stations for the four wives, sisters or goddesses. Then followed an ark of the sun and moon and seven stars. Now, it is said in the Persian Rauzat-us-Safa that the Almighty fixed two luminous disks, one like the sun and the other like the moon, on the wall of the ark, and thus the hours of the day and night were ascertained (O’Neill, The Night of the Gods, p. 173). This is a mode of describing the additions made in the soli-lunar mythos to the ark of heaven, that was stellar at an earlier time, and is solar in its final phase. The arkite symbolism culminated as Egyptian in the ark of Nnu. This was the ark that was built “with lower, second, and third stories” (Gen. VI. 16), because it was a threefold figure of Amenta, earth and heaven in one, as it is represented in the Ritual. Once it is shown that Noah’s ark is a geometrical figure of the heaven, there is no further difficulty respecting its size or content. The beasts of the earth, the birds of the air, the fish of the waters, and the human beings were all represented by the four types at the four corners, by Tuamutef, the jackal; Kabhsenuf, the hawk; Hapi, the ape; and Amsta, the man. These were accompanied in the enclosure by their consorts, Isis, the cow; Serkh, the scorpion; Nephthys, and Neith. Salvation from the deluge in the under-world is sought for by the Manes in the ark, whether called the ark of Osiris, or Ra, or Nnu. The experience attributed to Osiris as the god in Amenta, is also assigned to the soul of the deceased. In setting by night into the waters, the sun-god entered into the ark of earth, which is called his coffin or sarcophagus, in which he was enclosed by Sut, the power of darkness. In one form this was figured as the coffin-mountain, or neb-ankh, that was represented by the hill, Bakhu, the dimensions of which are given in the Ritual (ch. 109). The hill Bakhu was the place of sunrise where dawn broke on the coffin-lid; and the length of this coffin, or ark of earth, was 300 cubits. It is stated in the papyrus of Nebseni that the hill is 300 cubits in breadth. In other papyri it is said to be 300 cubits in length. This is connected with the measurement of the earth. Thus the ark of Osiris in the earth, and the ark of Noah are identical in length. The ark being also a figure of heaven, the 300 countries in Yima’s kingdom are an astronomical measure equivalent to the 300 cubits of Noah’s ark, and likewise to the area of 300 cubits of the Egyptian hollow hill, or ark of earth. It is possible to identify the constellation of Argo-Navis as the object-picture in the nightly heaven of the ark that Nnu constructed for the great god Ra, and thence the ark of Noah in the Hebrew version of the legend. In the pictures of the planisphere, which still remain on the celestial globe, it may be seen that the figurehead of the vessel is a ram. This was the type of the ram-headed Num, lord of the inundation, and Num was the later form of Nnu, the god of the celestial water, who was the builder of the ark for Ra. By day the solar orb was carried on the ark of Nnu, and by night the gods and glorified were seen in Argo-Navis on its voyage, as the “collector of souls” sailed upward for the circumpolar paradise along the river of the Milky Way. Now, Argo-Navis is the only constellation that is figured hind-before on the celestial globe. As [Page 580] Aratos describes the vessel, “Argo by the great dog’s tail is drawn; for hers is not a usual course, but backward turned she comes, as vessels do when sailors have transposed the crooked stern on entering harbour; all the ship reverse. And gliding backward on the beach it grounds sternforward, thus is Jason’s Argo drawn” (Aratos, Phainomena, R. Brown, lines 342-348). But, what can be the meaning of an ark or ship that makes its voyage through the firmamental waters in this hindward way? We can but infer that it was an object-picture of the ark of Nnu, as “the bark of millions of years” receding in this backward fashion as it made the circuit of Precession.

THE WORLD’S GREAT YEAR.

Once every six-and-twenty thousand years “the world’s great age begins anew, the golden years return” (Shelley), but in no other than the astronomical sense of a re-beginning at the same point of departure as in the beginning. This will re-begin again and again in the great cycle of precession, but only as a matter of chronology. Nothing will be repeated except the cycle of time and the same phenomena belonging to the astronomical mythology. The divine fulfiller of the millennium in “the house of a thousand years,” or in any other period, will no more come in person during the next 13,000 years than it was possible for him to manifest that way in the past half of the present cycle of 26,000 years. A knowledge of the facts constitutes the sole data of the truth, and such knowledge will ultimately put an end to the great delusion of the false faith that was founded in the uttermost ignorance of the astronomical facts.

In the great year of precession there are seven stations of the celestial pole, six of which are still identifiable in the constellations of Draconis, the Lesser Bear, Kepheus, Cygnus, Lyra, and Herakles. The pole changes, and its position is approximately determined by another central star about each 3,700 years. Seven times in the great year the station of the pole was raised aloft as land-mark amid the firmamental waters in the shape of an island, or a mound; a tree, a pillar, horn, or pyramid. Whichever the type this was repeated seven times in the circuit of precession, to form the compound and collective figure of the celestial heptanomis, so that the heaven rested, or was raised, at last upon the seven mountains or seven mounds; seven islands, seven giants, seven caves, seven trees, seven pillars, or other structures of support, as seven figures of the all-sustaining pole. Seven golden isles emerged from out the watery vast, or wisdom reared the seven pillars of her house; the heavens were borne upon the backs of seven giants, or the eternal city was built upon the seven hills.

It would take some six-and-twenty thousand years to build the heptanomis on the support of the seven poles. These were added one by one and figured collectively as seven sustaining powers of the heavens, such as seven hippopotami; seven crocodiles; seven bears; seven mountains; seven mounds of earth; seven trees or a tree with [Page 581] seven branches; a serpent with seven heads; a fish with seven fins; seven horns of Sesheta the foundress; seven pillars; seven giants; seven cyclops, with polaris for a single eye; and lastly, there are the seven divinities called “the lords of eternity.” Seven periods in precession correspond to seven stations of the pole. The length of time in each when measured by the changing pole-stars is about 3,700 years. Seven times the “Atlantean pole” sank in the waters of the deluge during the great year. This was figured as the seven sunken islands of the lost Atlantis. But there is another lost land of Atlantis, that passed away in ten islands, imaging a vanished heaven in ten divisions. The first was the heptanomis of the seven kings or rulers. The second is the heaven in ten divisions which ended with the deluge of the ten kings or patriarchs in the Semitic legends. These two vanished heavens will account for two great years, or two-and-fifty-thousand years of time.

The pole and equinox are travelling pari passu, one in the upper circle of the heavens, the other in the larger lower circle of the ecliptic, and the shifting of the equinox was correlated more or less exactly to the changing of the pole-star. The power that presided over the pole as Osiris was given rebirth as Horus in the vernal equinox. The pole-star symbolized the lord of eternity. Horus in the equinox (or the double equinox) was a traveller of eternity manifesting in the sphere of time; in the Han-cycle of 120 years; in the house of 1,000 years; in the sothic cycle of 1,460 years; or in the change from sign to sign, each 2,155 years. For two thousand years and more the pole-star in the Lesser Bear has coincided with the vernal equinox in the sign of Pisces. Previously the pole in Draconis coincided with the vernal equinox in the sign of the ram or the bull. A seventh of the ecliptic, not merely a third part, was assigned to one or other of the pole-star gods who became the seven lords of eternity. This will explain how the ram could be the special constellation of the god who was at the same time the ruler of the north pole-star. So, in the celestial drama portrayed in the book of Revelation, the fall of the dragon, or, astronomically, the change of pole-star, when a-Draconis was superseded, is followed by the exaltation of the lamb upon the solar mount of glory. The longer one dwells in presence of Egypt, the older grows the face of her unveiled antiquity. Not fifty merely, but more like a thousand centuries look down upon us from her summit of attainment, the pyramid of her glory, that she built for ever in the highest heaven of her heavens. It was asserted by Martianus Capella that the Egyptians had secretly cultivated the science of astronomy for 40,000 years before it was made known to the rest of the world (Lewis, Astronomy of the Ancients, p. 264). As time-keepers, the astronomers of Egypt had thought and wrought, observed and registered on the scale of the great year of the universe. The circuit of precession first outlined by the movement of the celestial pole was their circle of the eternal, or seven eternals, that was imaged by the Shennu-ring, and likewise by the serpent of eternity, when this was figured with tail in mouth and one eye always open at the centre of the coil. They not only laid great bases for eternity in this way, they built upon the basis of all time which culminated in the cycle of precession. When Herodotus was in Egypt, the “mystery teachers of the [Page 582] heavens” told him that during a certain length of time which had been reckoned by the Egyptian astronomers, “the sun had four times risen out of his usual quarter; that he had twice risen where he now sets, and twice set where he now rises. Yet, that no change in the things of Egypt had been occasioned by this, either in the productions of the earth ‘or the river’ “ And he adds, the Egyptians say, they know these things with accuracy because they always compute and register the years (B. 2, 142 and 145). Now there is no cycle in astronomy, save the circle of the precessional movement in which the phenomena thus unwittingly described by the faithful old chronicler could occur. One such cycle is certain, two are not improbable, and three are possible. After long study of the whole matter one sees perforce that the science of astronomy in Egypt, with its observed and registered cycle or cycles in precession, is actually older than any race of men on earth outside of Africa.

The Book of the Dead (chs. 114 and 123) not only proves the ancient Egyptians to have been acquainted with the precessional movement, it also gives us an account of the actual changing of a pole-star. The god Taht, the measurer of time, by means of the moon and the Great Bear, is to be seen in the midst of his mysteries, which are here described as those of keeping the chronology for the guidance of posterity. There is a change in the position of the Maat, or judgment-hall, which in the stellar mythos was at the station of the pole, and was shifted with the shifting pole. On account of this change, Taht comes as the messenger of Ra in the soli-lunar mythos to make fast that which was afloat upon the Urnas (Greek Ouranos) water; to re-adjust the reckoning and to “restore the eye” (Rit., ch. 114) by making it ”firm and permanent” (ch. 116) once more for keeping time and period correctly on the scale of the great year. The backward motion of precession is described when Taht says to Atum-Ra, “ I have rescued the Atu from his backward course. I have done what thou hast prescribed for him.” As Renouf remarks, “I do not think any astronomer would hesitate to say that precession is meant,” by this “backward course” (Rit., ch. 123. Notes). The Atu is a mythical fish with some relation to the course of the solar bark; that is to its backward course, the course of Argo-Navis. Taht has “rescued the Atu from his backward course.” He has allowed for this retrograde motion in precession, and has made the eye firm and fixed once more by means of his reckonings as a guide to posterity. Taht also says at the same time, “I have equally balanced the divine pair, (Sut and Horus) and put a stop to their strife.” This changing of the pole occurs once every 3,714 years, or, in the round numbers of the outsiders, every 3,000 years. This is alluded to by Theopompus, who tells us that “according to the Magi,” “one of the gods shall conquer, the other be conquered, alternately for 3,000 years; for another 3,000 years they shall fight, war, and undo one the works of the other; but in the end hades will fail, and men will be happy, neither requiring food, nor constructing shelter; whilst the god who hath contrived all this is quiet, and resting himself for a time” (Plutarch, Of Isis and Osiris, 47). The conflict is identical with the battle of Sut and Horus on the grand scale. Three thousand years in round numbers with a surplus known to the Urshi, point to a period in precession [Page 583] (3,714) equivalent to a change from one pole-star to another, in the station of the pole, only the length of time is now applied to souls in the eschatology, passing through the astronomical cycle of the proverbial 3,000 years. The Chinese “peach-tree of the gods” is a magnificent image of the pole. It has seven branches that bear the fruit of immortality, the fruit which ripens once in 3,000 years. Three thousand, we repeat, being a round number for the cycle, where 4,000 would not have answered when the exact number is 3,714 years. The peaches from this tree of time or knowledge were seven in series, as is shown by the seven peaches which were brought by the mythical Wang-Mu when she visited the equally mythical Emperor Wa Ti. Also the seven peaches as total fruit of the tree tend to prove that the figure was employed as a round number in thousands, near enough for the non-initiated and the surplus allowed for in reckoning the total combination.

It is feasible to suppose that the hanging and suspending power of the firmament was an earlier source of wonderment than even the revolution of the heavenly bodies. There is a passage in the Argonauticon (2, 296) which appears to show that the notion of suspension preceded that of revolving. “And so it is that men call those isles, the isles of turning, though aforetime they called them the floating isles” (Pilotes). These were the islands figured in the firmamental sea. Thus under one image groups of the revolving stars were thought of as the golden isles afloat in the celestial waters of the firmament. A typical floating island called Chemmis was shown to Herodotus in the deep broad lake, near the precinct of the temple of Buto, where it represented the place of refuge in which the infant Horus (Apollo) was concealed and saved when sought for by the devouring Apap (Herodotus, B. 2, 156). This place of birth was first figured in the stellar mythos as a floating island of the pole. The islands of Atlantis, whether seven or ten in number, would not have become the sunken islands unless they had been floating isles at first; and they were floating as formations in the water of heaven. The earliest foothold in the infinite had been physically attained amongst the stars that do not set. This was a place of refuge and of safety from the deluge of the firmamental deep whenever the catastrophe occurred.

It may sound a paradoxical thing to say, but it is true that according to the mythical representation the earliest earth was a bit of ground solidified in the celestial waters for the planting of a stake, or tree, or building, raising a pile, or some kind of bulwark against the overwhelming water-flood. The Egyptian hieroglyphic-sign of land, locality, or station is the well-known cake, that looks like our Easter hot-cross bun, and is a figure of the land that was caked or coagulated amidst the waters. This first formation in the waters of the Nun was constellated at the place of equipoise and fixity, when this was at the pole. And in the Osirian mythos this first standing place remained as a throne of the Eternal on the mount amid the water of the upper deep. In what is termed the Japanese “Cosmology” there is a primitive rendering of this beginning. Two of the Kami-deities, Izanagi and Izanami, the brother and sister corresponding to the Egyptian Shu and Tefnut, who lifted up the paradise of Am-Khemen, [Page 584] are divinely deputed to make, consolidate, and give birth to the island of Japan. For this purpose they were provided with a heavenly spear made of a jewel; a dual figure of the pole and polaris. Thus equipped, the pair stood on the “floating bridge” of heaven, and churned the Isle of Onogoro from the waters. This is the earth or ground that was constellated in an island called “the self-curdled.” (B. H. Chamberlain, Kojiki, 18, 19.) The matter that was condensed around the spear or pole with which they churned the waters formed the land of Nippon, or Japan. Onogoro, says Hatori Nakatsune, a native commentator, was originally at the north pole, but was afterwards shifted to its present position. (E. M. Satow, Pure Shinto, p. 68.) That is when the island which was “self-curdled” in the celestial ocean gave its name to an earthly island in the Yellow Sea. To see that the jewelled spear was an emblem of the pole we have but to compare this legend with the Indian version called “the churning of the ocean,” in which a mountain (the mount of the pole) takes the place of the spear as the typical churning-stick. (Moore’s Hindu Pantheon.) But this was no cosmical creation of the earth itself amidst the waters of space. Such an interpretation is only an erroneous literalization of the legendary lore. When the primal pair of the Japanese Kami took possession of the island which had been coagulated from the deep, they stuck the spear into the ground or earth. This was a mode of planting the tree or establishing the pole as a primary foundation in the water of heaven, that was now repeated in the resting-place on earth as a likeness of the pole above. (B. H. Chamberlain, Kojiki, pp. 18, 19.) Garcilasso de la Vega relates that the Inca told him how “Our Father” sent two of his children, a brother and sister, down from heaven. He gave them a golden rod, two fingers thick and half an ell long, and when they desired to rest anywhere they were to stick this into the ground, and wherever it entered the earth at one push, there they were to halt, establish themselves, encamp, and hold their court or build the city. Here the brother and sister are another form of Shu and Tefnut. In a Dog-rib Indian myth a planting of the pole occurs. It is said that the divine hero, Chapewee, stuck a piece of wood in the earth, which became a fir tree, that grew and grew until it reached to heaven. Then Chapewee ascended the tree, and at the summit found a fine large plain and a beaten road to travel on.

The present writer contends that the deluge-legends of the world are based upon the astronomical mythology of Egypt, but that in the isolation of the primitive emigrants the ancient wisdom lapsed and the deluge as a mode of symbolism in astronomy was more or less lost sight of; and, from lack of knowledge, the mythical deluge was confused with the primitive concept of heaven as the water overhead. With the knowers the deluge was a typical figure; with the ignorant it was an actuality that might at any time recur, as did the water-flood on earth. The chief contribution made by the Semites to the astronomical mythology was in literalizing the legends which originated with the mythical mode of representation, and in putting forth an exoteric version of the ancient wisdom. Thus it was natural that in a country like Babylonia where the winter rains were held to be a curse the typical deluge of Nnu in the celestial waters should be confused [Page 585] with the flood of Bel or Noah on the surface of the earth. Pliny calls Belus the “inventor of sidereal science” (N. H. 6, 26), and Belus as the elder Bel was a form of the Egyptian Bar, a name of Sut. As Diodorus relates (I. 28, 29), the Egyptians claimed to have taught the science of astronomy to the Babylonians, and declared that Belus and his subjects were a colony from Egypt. Belus (the first Bel) being identified with Bar=Sut, this means that the colonising of Babylonia from Egypt was during the reign of Sut, or at least in the time of the primordial pole-star one great year ago, when the pole-star was previously in the Lesser Bear or the male hippopotamus. In astronomy the status of an arch-first depended on being foremost in time, and Sut was first as bull of the mother, or the male hippopotamus with the female. We hold the founder of astronomy to have been the establisher of the pole, whether as Sut, in the southern, or Sut-Apap in the northern heaven. And the most profoundly important of all the deluges was that which took place at the subsidence and submergence of the pole and changing of the pole-star, the star that fell from heaven, according to the astronomical mythology. The Book of Enoch says that, previously to the Noachian deluge, Noah saw that the earth became inclined and that destruction approached. Then he lifted up his feet and went to the ends of the earth, to the dwelling of his great grandfather Enoch (ch. 64). The “Ends of the Earth” was an expression for the two poles — he dwelling of Enoch being equivalent to that of Sut at the southern pole. The beginning, however, was not with boats or arks as a means of crossing the celestial water of the Nun. Islands were figured earlier. Typical heaps of earth were raised by the mound-builders as ground to go upon, like stepping-stones in the celestial deep. These eventually were seven in number. The structure also ranged from seven mounds at first to seven cities finally. Naturally the mount or mound of earth, the tree, the papyrus-reed, or island was a type of emergence from or amid the waters earlier than the building of a boat or an ark in the celestial sea. The first ideas were those of suspension, fixity, and foothold in the liquid vast.

In various primitive legends the bulwark was raised against the waters but was overthrown because the faithless woman failed to keep the secret with which she had been entrusted. We have already cited one or two American and African instances. In a Muyscas myth, Huythaca was the old first mother who ruled when there was as yet no sun or moon. She is described as a very wicked woman who maliciously loved to spoil the work of her husband. It was she who caused a flood from which but a few persons escaped by seeking refuge on the mountain-tops. Bochica, the solar god, then put a stop to the deluge, and, being very wroth with Huythaca, drove her from the earth and changed her into the moon. The result of the flood, in this case, was the same as in the “Destruction of Mankind,” viz., the establishment of solar time. When the earth was dry again Bochica gave the year and the periodic sacrifices and the worship of the sun to the people who survived the flood. (Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. I, pp. 318-319.)

Nut, the celestial wateress in the Ritual, was a keeper of the waters which the women of the legends failed to guard. Hence “the leg of [Page 586] Nut” is a figure of the pole. In one of the legends the children of Nut, that is the stars, have failed in keeping proper time, and been the cause of confusion and strife. This is in an address to the moon-god Taht, who succeeded Sut the star-god as reckoner of time by means of the moon. “Hail, Taht! what is it that hath happened to the divine children of Nut? They have done battle, they have made strife, they have wrought evil, they have created the fiends, they have made slaughter, they have caused trouble; in all their doings the mighty have worked against the weak. Grant, O might of Taht, that that which the god Tum hath decreed may be done. Thou regardest not evil, nor art thou provoked to evil, nor art thou provoked to anger when they bring their years to confusion, and rush in and disturb their months; for in all that they have done unto thee they have worked iniquity in secret” (Rit., ch. 175, Budge). When the pole-star changed the bulwark would be overthrown, and the mistress of the waters would be charged with causing a catastrophe by which the “bulwarks” of her consort, who was Sut in the Egyptian astral mythos, were submerged. The blame, of course, in after-times, was laid upon the woman, that is when the woman had taken the place of the primitive zootype, such as the water-cow or crocodile. In Amenta Ptah is the builder of the bulwark that was raised against the waters, or to keep out the Apap-reptile. But Sut-Anup, as a ruler at the pole, was an indefinitely earlier god who raised the bulwark to keep out the deluge. In later ages, when Anup had become the son of Ra, one name for his dwelling-place upon the mountain, that was on the solar mount of glory, is called Ut, the “Town of the Embankment,” which is equivalent to the pile of earth that was heaped up by the mythical mound-builders in seven mounds that formed the bulwarks or embankments at the seven stations of the pole in the circuit of precession. When the deluge occurred at the celestial pole the type of stability and fixed foothold on land was whelmed beneath the firmamental waters. If this was an island or a tree it sank and was lost sight of. Hence the tree of the pole had to be replanted, or the embankment was to be raised anew when the deluge was over. It is related by the Miztec tribe of Indians that “in the day of obscurity and darkness the gods built a palace which was a masterpiece of skill, and made their abode upon the summit of a mountain. The rock was called ‘the Place of Heaven.’ It was the primary dwelling of the gods. The children of the gods planted a garden with fruit-trees. But it is the old universal tale: there came a deluge; the happy garden was submerged, and many sons and daughters of the gods were swept away” (Bancroft, Native Races, vol. III, p. 71). Inevitably, at times our earth gets substituted for the mound, the island, or the earth-heap piled as a fixture for foothold in the celestial waters. The mound of earth was followed by the pyramidion of brick, wood, or stone, the earliest figure of the tower that was built to reach the sky. Thus, when the flood of Noah came to an end, the tower of brick was raised by the survivors in the land of Shinar. In this version we see the tower succeeding the mountain, and the mound as a typical figure of the station at the pole. After the Assyrian deluge the tree was replanted in the circle or enclosure, and to replant the tree was to re-establish the pole in its new station; the tree or wood that was said [Page 587] to be eternal. Noah likewise planted the tree which in his case was the vine. In the book of Enoch it is said the portion of Noah (in time) has ascended up to God, and now “the angels shall labour at the trees” (or tree) and “the seed of life shall arise from it.” This may likewise be taken to denote a replanting of the tree as symbol of the pole. Xisuthrus, the Chaldean Noah, is called the King of Surippak, the ship-city, the city of refuge that was represented by or as an ark upon the waters. The building on land was earlier than the boat upon the waters, and when the gods decide to make a deluge it is said, upon the Chaldean tablet, “O man of Surippak, son of Ubarratutu, destroy the house and build a ship.” Here the ship or ark on the waters succeeds the dwelling-place on land. And both the ark and house were united in Surippak, the ark-city, or “City of the Ship.” After the Babylonian deluge, Hasisadra says, “I built an altar on the peak of a mountain,” and there he offered a sacrifice to the gods. The altar-mound, we repeat, is a figure of the pole. The structure overthrown by the deluge is rebuilt in several ways, the types ranging from the mound to the metropolis. Not only is the typical altar of the pole erected on the mountain-peak, but the structure was finally rebuilt on the scale of the eternal city. Thus, the ark-city of Surippak is succeeded by the city of Erech-Suburi. In raising this, “great stones”; are dragged for a long distance to where the wall of the new enclosure is to be erected, on the summit of the ascent, in the midst of Erech-Suburi. Seven such structures were raised in the course of precession, at seven stages of the pole, and the journey from one stage to another is described in the legend of Gilgames (Deluge Tablet, column 6, George Smith, Records, vol. VII, p. 133). In the Noachian version the deluge is followed by the building of “an altar to the Lord” (ch. 8, 20). There is also a journey made to “a plain in the land of Shinar where the generations of Noah came to dwell. And they said one to another “Go to . . . Let us build us a city, and a tower whose top may reach to heaven, and let us make us a name lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” In this account we find three figures of the pole, the altar-mound, the tower, and the city; also the migration of the survivors to another station of the pole; which is a common feature in the astronomical mythos, particularly in the Aztec, Peruvian, and Mexican legends. So ancient was this erection and re-erection of the pole, which signified another station fixed in the celestial journeyings, that the erection of a pole in the earth became a sacred mode of marking the station and the camping-place for the wanderers over the surface of the earth, as with the two poles of the Australian Arunta, and the stave or rod of the Inca. The Tower of Babel was a symbol of the pole which had been overthrown or shifted by the waters of the deluge. To build the tower, then, was to replace the pole. The tower was the Babylonian Bab-illu, which the Hebrew writer has turned into the tower of “babble” and confusion. The story itself is found on an Assyrian tablet in the British Museum, with this difference: In the older legend the structure is a mound, whereas in the Hebrew version it is a tower built of brick. It is explained that Babylon corruptly turned to sin. “Great and small commingled on the mound.” There was a revolt against the great god Anu, “king of the holy [Page 588] mound.” The rebels are described as building a stronghold, but they were confounded in their work. What they did by day was all undone by night. The supreme god gave a command to make strange their speech. “For future time the mountain,” or the mound, was overthrown by Nu-nam-nir, the god of lawlessness or no rule, and the destruction occurred, though not in the form of a deluge (Records of the Past, vol. VII, p. 131). In the Mexican pictures there is an earlier type of the pole as a point of departure than the tower of brick. It has been called the starting-point of the Aztecs after the deluge. In this the mount or mound of earth rises from the water, like an island from the ocean, with a tree upon its summit. The mount is thus identifiable with the pole by means of the typical tree. It is likewise identified with the pole as the mount that topples over, the crooked mount Culhuacan, upon which the ark of Tezpi rested after the deluge. In one drawing the male and female pair are portrayed with the boat waiting for them on the water. In the other a man in the boat is paddling away from the point of departure. The pair are known to tradition as Cox-Cox and his consort. The picture is also said to illustrate the migration from a starting-point in Atlan, or Aztlan, the white mountain. Without recurring for the present to the beginning of astronomy in the equatorial regions, we look on Sut (or Sut-Anup), the first-born son of Apt (Kep or Kefa), the most ancient form of the Great Mother, as the founder of the celestial pole, or the eternal tree in the paradise, the garden or cultivated enclosure of the northern heaven. Sut and his mother became the primal pair in the Egyptian mythology.

Although the mother of all living things, one of whose names, Khefa, survived in Hebrew as Chavvah (Eve), the primal pair of beings were not constellated as the human parents of the human race, but as male and female hippopotami, or Behemoth and Leviathan, and later as the Greater and the Lesser Bears; she as the maker of the circle, and he as the first to plant the tree, or erect the pole, the pillar, or the mound within the circle; Job says of Behemoth, “he is the chief of the ways of God” (ch. 40, 19). Now, Behemoth is the Egyptian Bekhmut, the hippopotamus. This was female as the zootype of the Great Mother, and male as the image of Sut her son, who as the founders of the pole were “the chief of the ways” in heaven as establishers of a guiding-star at the pole. When the primal pair are represented in the book of Genesis by Adam and Eve they are the husband and wife in a later mythos that was solar. But in the primal legends the descent of the human race is traced to the primal pair when these were mother and son, or the brother and sister as represented in the Japanese creation of the pole.

The earliest flood, caused by the declination of the pole-star, set afloat a large number of legends. One of these relates that the new world which followed was peopled by a brother and sister. The Chins, on the Burma frontier, preserve the tradition of a universal deluge that was co-eval with the origin of their race. According to the Haka tradition all the hills were submerged, and every person was drowned except one brother and sister, who floated in a large earthen jar, and when the waters subsided settled on the Mun Ktlang mountain (Pioneer, Allahabad, October 22nd, 1897). The old [Page 589] earth-mother, who was represented as the bringer-forth of life from the waters in the shape of a pregnant hippopotamus, was imaged astronomically as the genetrix who brought forth her young from the firmamental water amidst the fields of papyrus-reed which formed the Sekhet-Aarru. The same in Apta at the northern pole as it was in Apta at the equator. This old mother of beginnings in the waters of earth and heaven was also repeated as the dragon-horse in the Chinese version of the astronomical uranography as well as in the Babylonian remains. It is recorded in the sacred books that a supernatural dragon-horse issued from the waters of heaven and made known the eight mystical diagrams of Tai-Hao, the first mythical or celestial ruler, who corresponds to Sut, the inventor of astronomy in Egypt, and Bel in Babylonia. The mother and son were the pair that preceded the individualising of the fatherhood; and the son was mythically represented as both the child and consort, the adult or bull, of the mother.

According to the Indian tribes of Guiana, the primal pair were a male and female, saved from the Deluge in a canoe. This is a legend of the Tamanaks. It is the same representation in the ancient British tradition. The Welsh first parents, named Dwyvan and Dwyvach, are a male and female who found safety from the Deluge in an ark. Also on the Apamean coin the pair as Nu, or Noë, and his female consort are portrayed upon the waters floating in a box or teba, accompanied by a raven and a dove. There is also a primal pair connected with the tree in a legend of New Guinea who are called “the man and his mother.” The man is so mighty that he thrusts a spear through the earth right into the heart of the rock, where the pair live in the condition of troglodytes. The spear evidently images the pole, which is mixed up, if not identified, with the tree, as is the spear of the male and female pair in the Japanese legend. The man and his mother climbed to the top of the tree, and there the strong man slew the giant, the Apap-monster slain by Horus, and the giant slain by Jack (H. H. Romily, My Verandah, p. 118). The giant is a co-type with the Apap-serpent of drought and darkness; and in another legend the monster is a serpent coiled about the tree. This may help us to understand the presence of the evil serpent with “the man and his mother” underneath the tree in the Assyrian garden of Edin. The mother is the old first genetrix, one of whose titles is “mistress of the mountains” as well as of the mount. The Samoans say that the first of the human race were a woman and her son. Turner tells us they have many tales about the doings of that woman and her son, from whom the race of men descended (Samoa, p. 330-1). Thus, man and woman originated as the mother and her son, or the sister and brother, who afterwards became the mythical mother and father in the solar legends, which reflect the later sociology. In one tradition of the Ainu it is related that the race originated with a primal pair of ancestors, who were a female bear and a dog. This is, of course, in accordance with the totemic symbolism, only the totemic symbols were not limited to the human groups. Totems of the nature-powers were also figured in the planisphere. In Africa the great first mother of all was constellated as the female hippopotamus, or as a crocodile. In [Page 590] Greece she was imaged as the female bear. Sut, her son, was represented by a jackal which became the dog through change of fauna. These can now be traced to the Greater and Lesser Bears as two surviving constellations of the Great Mother and her dog, who constitute the primal pair of the Ainu, with the bear as the Great Mother and the dog (or jackal) as her son or consort when the pole was in the Lesser Bear, we might say one great year ago.

Sut, as ruler of the primal pole-star, was the Arch-First in heaven, as a male. This is the title of Tai-Yih, the Chinese great one. It is said that among all the shin, or spirits (the Japanese shintu gods), of the heavens, the highest one dwells in the star Tai-Yih of the constellation Draco (O’Neil, Night of the Gods, vol. I, pp. 513, 517). It is not enough, however, to identify the deity with the pole in general. There were seven of these gods, and everywhere the question is, which of the seven stations of the pole was the seat at the time? Draconis was the constellation of Horus-Sebek, the crocodile-dragon. Sut was the first-born child of the great mother Apt or Khep, and those two formed the primary duad that is sometimes called Sut-Typhon, the nearest approach to which name in Egyptian would be Sut-Tept, or Sut and his mother as the primal pair. According to one account of the origins in the Book of Genesis, Seth, Set, or Sut was the first-born child of Chavvah, as he had been of Kep or Kefa in the Kamite mythos. Sut was the primary ruler or over-lord, the earliest representative of power in heaven figured in an image of the male, or the lord, whose name was first called upon when Sut became the backbone of the universe, as establisher of the pole. He was the lord as male hippopotamus and consort to the lady who was his mother as the female. And here we may perceive that a fragment of the true tradition survived in the biblical statement that in the time of Seth “Men began to call upon the name of the Lord” (Gen. IV. 26). Sut, as male, was first of the seven brothers who in the Babylonian legend “came as begetters.” This fact also is recognised in the text when it is said that “a son was born to Seth,” or Sut, Egyptian, who was the first form of the father as the elder brother with whom the fatherhood began. It is said of Ialdabaoth that, being incensed with men because they did not worship or honour him as god and father, he being the oldest brother only, he sent forth a deluge upon them that he might at once destroy them all (Irenaeus, Book I, ch. XXX, 10). Sut acquired an evil character in later times, and became the original form of an anthropomorphic Satan. He was looked upon as the fallen leader of the angelic host because he had been first in glory as the ruling power at the primary station of the pole. This is the Satan worshipped by the Izedis in Mesopotamia, for whom there is to be a restoration as well as a fall, which points to an astronomical origin in both aspects of the character. Sut, in the Ritual (ch. 175), is proclaimed as having been the first in glory. It is said “the power of Sut which hath departed was greater than that of all the gods.” He was first as primary power of the pole, the first to sit upon “the mount of congregation” as the “most high” in “the uttermost parts of the north,” or at the pole of heaven. Hence he was the reputed author of astronomy. Thus, when the pole-star of Sut in the jackal (or the hippopotamus) had fallen away from the true pole and [Page 591] lost its place as guide of ways in heaven, there was matter for the legend of a fall as a fable founded on a fact in the astronomical mythology. When so read, the fall of man from heaven is resolved into the fall of Sut, or Lucifer, the light-bringer, or the light that was uplifted at the primary station of the pole, the woman who was the foundress being charged by the Semites, the Chinese, and others with being his accomplice and instigator, a mode of unconsciously showing that she, the Great Mother, was the mover, which she was, but only as the primum mobile, not as the woman urging the man to his eternal misery. The following citation shows the primal pair as Ishtar and the elder Bel in relation to the mount of the pole and the mountains of its different stations. “O lady, mistress of the mountain, goodly stronghold of the mountains, mighty lock of the mountains, queen of the land of the four rivers. O lord, the mighty mountain, Bel!” (Tablet S. 954, B. M. Budge, Babylonian). In this imagery the Great Mother as Ishtar, is mistress of the mountain, and Bel is the lord, identical with the mount itself, which imaged the pole, when Bel was the star. In one of the Assyrian hymns this enclosure of the “lady of the eternal tree” and her comrade is spoken of as “the park of Ishtar.” Nergal, the destroyer, is thus addressed, “O lord, the park of Ishtar thou establishest not” (Sayce, “Hymn to Nergal,” Hib. Sect.), Nergal having been one of the overthrowers at the time of the Deluge. In the Assyrian hymns to the gods it is said that the lady of the eternal tree is the comrade of the bull, the great bull, the supreme bull. The tree is the pole; “the eternal wood” or Gis-Zida, which also seems to mean a mast, is the pole (Sayce). Now, it is a form of this pair of founders at the pole that we think may be dimly discerned on the Assyrian cylinder (see p. 453). The tree with seven branches represents the pole as a figure of the total heptanomis, and is consequently late. The pair beneath the tree are the mother and son, or male and female, of the legend as the primal pair who fell from heaven because they failed as keepers of the tree of knowledge at the pole. There is also a form of this primal pair to be seen in a drawing on one of the Greek vases which comes nearest to the Hebrew version of the woman tempting the man. The Great Mother is portrayed in noble nudity, Greek fashion, as divinely tall beside a youth to whom she is offering the fruit which she has plucked from the tree of knowledge, the tree that represented the pole when the knowledge was astronomical. The pair, like the female and male in the Assyrian garden, are underneath the tree, about the root of which the serpent coils.

As Kamite, or as Greek, the ancient genetrix was the teacher who in later legend is misrepresented as the tempter.

We now claim to have recovered the natural origin of the primeval paradise with the primal pair, the tree and serpent in the enclosure at the station first established at the fixed point of the celestial pole, of which so many versions and perversions are extant without one of them being scientifically correct or verifiable from lack of the long-lost data in astronomy. Egyptian mythology, the source and fountainhead of all the ancient wisdom and legendary lore, could not be understood apart from this, neither can the astronomy be explained apart from the mythology. To repeat. The garden is the enclosure at the pole that was first figured in the circle of the ancient genetrix. [Page 592]