Part 2: The Saturn Myth...The Polar Sun..Saturn’s Cosmos

 The Saturn Myth

A reinterpretation of rites and symbols illuminating 

some of the dark corners of primordial society

By David Talbott III: 

The Polar Sun 

Saturn’s mythical history includes two themes which not only contradict the planet’s visible appearance today, but seem to mock the canons of modern astronomy: 

1. Saturn, not the solar orb, was the authentic “sun”-god of ancient ritual. 

2. Throughout Saturn’s reign this sun-planet remained fixed at the north celestial pole. These two themes, affirmed by the straightforward testimony of ancient sources, compose a global memory: in the beginning Saturn did not move on its present remote orbit, but ruled as the central sun around which the other heavenly bodies visually revolved. Of this tradition early man has left us evidence far too numerous to cover fully in this volume. I offer below a summary of the principal sources.

Sun And Saturn 

The myths and rites celebrate Saturn as the primeval sun. 

Today, few mythologists looking back across several millennia to the beginnings of astral religion see anything more than worship of the rising and setting sun, the solar orb. This preoccupation with the solar orb is evident in popular surveys: “The preeminence of the Sun, as the fountainhead of life and man’s well-being,” writes W. C. Olcott, “must have rendered it at a date almost contemporaneous with the birth of the race, the chief object of man’s worship . . . It was sunrise that inspired the first prayers uttered by man, calling him to acts of devotion, bidding him raise an altar and kindle sacrificial flames.” “Before the Sun’s all-glorious shrine the first men knelt and raised their voices in praise and supplication, fully confirmed in the belief that their prayers were heard and answered.”[128] 

Not without reason do scholars identify the Greek Helios, Assyrian Shamash, or Egyptian Ra with the solar orb. Can it be doubted that Helios, radiating light from his brow and mounted on a fiery chariot, is our sun? That helios became the Greek word for the solar orb is beyond dispute. 

In Egypt countless hymns to the god Ra extol him as the divine power opening the “day.”[129] “The lords of all lands . . . praise Ra when he riseth at the beginning of each day.” Ra is the “great Light who shines in the heavens . . . Thou art glorious by reason of thy splendours . . .”[130] Such imagery would seem to leave no question as to the god’s solar character. 

Yet if the preceding analysis of the great father is correct, Ra (or Atum) is not the solar orb but the planet Saturn. The Golden Age of Ra was the age of An, Yama, or Kronos. One thus finds of interest an Egyptian ostrakon (first century B.C.) cited by Franz Boll: the ostrakon identifies the planet Saturn as the great god Ra.[131] 

Taken alone, this identification could only appear as a very late anomaly divorced from any solid tradition. But many scholars notice that among the Greeks and Latins there prevailed a mysterious confusion of the “sun” (Greek helios, Latin sol) with the outermost planet. Thus the expression “star of Helios” or “star of Sol” was applied to Saturn.[132] Though the Greek Kronos was the Latin Saturn, Nonnus gives Kronos as the Arab name of the “sun.” Hyginus, in listing the planets, names first Jupiter, then the planet “of Sol, others say of Saturn.”[133] Why was the planet most distant from the sun called both “sun” and “Saturn”? 

Concerning the confusion of the sun and Saturn among classical writers, a simple explanation was offered: the Greek name Helios so closely resembles the Greek transliteration of the Phoenician El that classical authors confused the two gods; since El is the Greek Kronos—and is so translated by Philo—Kronos/Saturn came to be confused with Helios, the sun.[134] Yet, as noted by Boll, the identification is more widespread than generally acknowledged and is much more than a misunderstanding of names.[135] The “confusion” is also far older than Philo, who lived in the first century of the Christian era. In the Epinomis of Plato (who lived in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.), there is an enumeration of the planets, which, as customarily translated, entails this un-startling statement: “There remain, then, three stars (planets), one of which is preeminent among them for slowness, and some call him after Kronos.”[136] Yet the original reading is not Kronos but Helios[137]—which is to say that Plato (or his pupil Phillip of Opus, to whom some ascribe authorship of the Epinomis) gave the name Helios to Saturn. But copyists, who could not believe that Helios was anything other than the sun, “corrected” the reading to “Kronos.” Moreover, writes Boll, this practice of “correcting” the name Helios to Kronos was not uncommon among later copyists. [138] Originally, Boll concludes, Helios and Saturn were “one and the same god.”[139] 

The equation of sun and Saturn is very old, with roots in Sumero-Babylonian astronomy. Of the Babylonian star-worshippers the chronicler Diodorus writes: “To the one we call Saturn they give a special name, ‘Sun-Star.’”[140] Among the Babylonians the “sun”-god par excellence was Shamash, the “light of the gods,” whom scholars uniformly identify with the solar orb. But M. Jastrow, in an article entitled “Sun and Saturn,” reports that in the Babylonian astronomical texts the identification of Shamash with Saturn is unequivocal: “the planet Saturn is Shamash,” they boldly declare.[141] 

In support of this identity Jastrow notes numerous examples involving “the interchangeable application of the term ‘Samas’ to either the great orb of the day or the planet Saturn.”[142] 

The apparent equivalence of Saturn and the “sun” goes back to Sumerian times, as is evident in the dual aspect of the creator god Ninurta. Langdon deems Ninurta both the sun and Saturn: “. . . the sun god Ninurta . . . in the original Sumerian Epic of Creation, defeated the dragon of chaos and founded cities . . . In Sumero-Babylonian religion he is the War-god and planet Saturn.”[143] 

It is not difficult to see why Ninurta, or Ningirsu, though identified with the planet Saturn in the astronomical texts, came to be confused with the solar orb. “Ningirsu, coming from Eridu, rose in overwhelming splendour. In the land it became day.”[144] Saturn, as Ningirsu, is “the god who changes darkness into light.”[145] The priests of Lagash invoke him as “King, Storm, whose splendour is heroic.”[146] This unexpected quality of the planet led Jensen to designate Saturn as a symbol of the “eastern sun” or “the sun on the horizon,” though he offered no explanation for the proposed connection.[147] 

The sunlike aspect of Saturn prevails from the earliest astronomy through medieval mysticism and astrology. “Saturn with its rays sends forth transcendent powers which penetrate into every part of the world,” wrote an Arabic astrologer of the tenth century.[148] When the alchemists, inheritors of ancient teachings, spoke of Saturn as “the best sun,”[149] it is unlikely that they themselves knew what to do with the idea. But that the tradition was passed down from remote antiquity is both indisputable and crucial. 

In claiming that the great father Saturn, presiding over the lost epoch, was the primeval “sun,” I do not propose that our sun was absent—rather, that it simply did not preoccupy the ancients. To avoid confusion on this point I must indicate here a conclusion for which I intend to cite additional evidence in a later section. 

Day And Night 

Those scholars who notice the identification of the ancient sun and the planet Saturn usually speak of Saturn as a mythical “night sun” or “second sun.”[150] But in truth, Saturn was the sun-god pure and simple, for the body we call “sun” today was not a subject of the early rites. 

The problem is to discern the original meaning of “day” and “night.” Many hymns to Shamash and Re —the celebrated suns of Mesopotamia and Egypt—describe these gods coming forth at the beginning of the ritual day, and the terminology often appears to signify the rising solar orb. One of the chapters of Book of the Dead, for example, is “The Chapter of Coming Forth by Day.”[151] Does this not refer to the solar orb rising in the east? 

A quite different interpretation is possible. Considerable evidence suggests that, to the ancients, the day began with what modern man calls “night”—that is, with the setting of the solar orb. It is widely acknowledged that the Egyptian day once began at sunset.[152] The same is true of the Babylonian and Western Semitic days.[153] The Athenians computed the space of a day from sunset to sunset, and the habit appears to have prevailed among northern European peoples.[154] 

This widespread custom poses a special problem for solar mythology. If, originally, the day began with the disappearance of the solar orb and the coming out of other heavenly bodies, who is the great god who shines at the beginning of this day? The explicit answer comes from the Sumerian texts identifying Saturn as god of the “dawn.” Saturn “came forth in overwhelming splendour. In the land it became day.”[155] This does not (as Jensen proposed) equate Saturn with the “sun [solar orb] on the horizon.” It means that the coming forth of Saturn inaugurated the archaic day, which began at sunset. So long as the solar orb was visible, the fiery globe of Saturn remained subdued, unable to compete with the sheer light of the former body. But once the solar orb sank beneath the horizon, Saturn and its circle of secondary lights acquired a terrifying radiance. 

Therefore, in archaic terms, Saturn was the great god of the “day,” not the “night sun” as scholars usually propose. But obviously, the eventual shifting of the “dawn of day” from the solar sunset to the solar sunrise could only create a widespread confusion of day and night and morning and evening. On this distinction among the Egyptians, Budge writes, “At a very early period, however, the difference between the Day-sky and the Night-sky was forgotten.”[156] Under normal circumstances would one likely forget this distinction? 

If there is confusion, it is because radically different celestial orders separate the present age from the former. The primeval sun was the solitary god of the deep, the one god of archaic monotheism, the planet Saturn. Only in a later age did Saturn come to be confused with the solar orb. 

There is, in fact, a decisive difference between the primeval god and the body we call the sun today: unlike the rising and setting solar orb, the original sun-god never moved. 

Saturn And The Pole 

In ancient ritual Saturn appears as the stationary sun or central fire at the north celestial pole. 

When Saturn ruled the world, his home was the summit of the world axis: with this point all major traditions of the great father agree. Even today, in our celebration of Christmas, we live under the influence of the polar Saturn. For as Manly P. Hall observes, “Saturn, the old man who lives at the north pole, and brings with him to the children often a sprig of evergreen (the Christmas tree), is familiar to the little folks under the name Santa Claus.”[157] 

Santa Claus, descending yearly from his polar home to distribute gifts around the world, is a muffled echo of the Universal Monarch, the primordial Osiris, Yama, or Kronos spreading miraculous good fortune. His polar abode, which might appear as an esoteric aspect of the story, is in fact an ancient and central ingredient. Saturn, the “best sun” and king of the world, ruled from the polar zenith. But while popular tradition located Santa Claus at the geographical pole, the earlier traditions place his prototype, the Universal Monarch, at the celestial pole, the pivot of the revolving heavens. 

The home of the great father is the cosmic centre—the “heart,” “midst,” or “navel” of heaven. As the earth rotates on its axis the northern stars wheel around a fixed point. While most stars rise and set like the sun and moon, the circumpolar stars—those which describe uninterrupted circles about a common centre—never fall below the horizon. The invisible axis of the earth’s rotation leads directly to that central point—the celestial pole—around which the heavens visually turn. All of the ancient world looked upon the polar centre as the “middle place,” “resting place,” or “steadfast region” occupied by the Universal Monarch. 

One of the first writers to recognize the pole as the special domain of the great god was W. F. Warren, who wrote in Paradise Found (published in 1885): “The religions of all ancient nations . . . associate the abode of the supreme God with the North Pole, the centre of heaven; or with the celestial space immediately surrounding it. [Yet] no writer on comparative theology has ever brought out the facts which establish this assertion.” 

In the following years a number of scholars, each focusing on different bodies of evidence, reached the same conclusion. The controversial and erratic Gerald Massey, in two large works (The Natural Genesis and Ancient Egypt), claimed that the religion and mythology of a polar god was first formulated by the priest-astronomers of ancient Egypt and spread from Egypt to the rest of the world. In a general survey of ancient language, symbolism, and mythology, John O’Neill (The Night of the Gods) insisted that mankind’s oldest religion centered on a god of the celestial pole. 

Zelia Nuttall, in Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilizations, undertook an extensive review of ancient Mexican astronomy, concluding that the highest god was polar. From Mexico she shifted to other civilizations, finding the same unexpected role of a polar god. 

Reinforcing the surprising conclusions of the above researchers was the subsequent work of others, among them Uno Holmberg (Der Baum des Lebens), who documented the preeminence of the polar god in the ritual of Altaic and neighbouring peoples, suggesting ancient origins in Hindu and Mesopotamian cosmologies;[158] Leopold de Saussure (Les Origines de l’Astronomie Chinoise), who showed that primitive Chinese religion and astronomy honour the celestial pole as the home of the supreme god; Rene Guenon (Le Roi du Monde and Le Symbolisme de la Croix), who sought to outline a universal doctrine centering on the polar gods and principles of ancient man. 

That these and other researchers, each starting down a different path, arrived at much the same conclusion concerning a supreme polar god of antiquity should have been sufficient to provoke a reappraisal of long-standing assumptions. Is it possible that, as these writers claimed, the ancient star-worshippers paid greater heed to a god of the pole than to the solar orb? Rather than respond to the question, solar mythologists diplomatically ignored it, thereby assigning the above investigators to an undeserved obscurity. 

I want to reopen the question, but to approach it from a different perspective. Most of the aforementioned writers possessed a common—if unspoken—faith in the ceaseless regularity of the solar system, seeking to explain the polar god in strictly familiar terms: the centre of our revolving heavens is the celestial pole; the great god of the centre and summit must have been the star closest to this cosmic pivot. 

But as observed in the previous pages, the great father was not a mere “star”; he was the planet Saturn, recalled as the preeminent light of the heavens. Moreover, the Saturn myth states that the planet-god resided at the celestial pole![159] 

In the myth and astronomy of many lands Saturn’s connection with the pole is direct and unequivocal. Chinese astronomers designated the celestial pole as “the Pivot,” identifying the “Genie of the Pivot” as the planet Saturn.[160] Saturn was believed to have his seat at the pole, reports G. Schlegel.[161] This strange and unexplained image of Saturn caught the attention of de Saussure (one of the foremost experts on Chinese astronomy), who added an additional startling fact: the Iranian Kevan, the planet Saturn, also occupies the polar centre.[162] 

But the theme is older than Chinese or Iranian tradition, for it finds its first expression in the Sumero-Babylonian An (Anu), the highest god, acknowledged as the planet Saturn. Each evening, at Erech, the priests looked to the celestial pole, beginning their prayer with the words, “O star of Anu, prince of the heavens.”[163] 

Saturn ruled from the summit of the world axis.[164] I must note, however, that I am not the first to observe this general principle. A recent volume by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, entitled Hamlet’s Mill, offers the revolutionary conclusion that according to an ancient doctrine Saturn occupied the celestial pole. 

But the authors, maintaining an unqualified attachment to the uniformitarian premise, exclude in advance any extraordinary changes in the solar system. Instead they speak of Saturn’s polar station as a “figure of speech” or astral allegory whose meaning remains to be penetrated. 

“What,” they ask, “has Saturn, the far-out planet, to do with the Pole? . . . It is not in the line of modern astronomy to establish any link connecting the planets with Polaris, or with any star, indeed, out of reach of the members of the zodiacal system. Yet such figures of speech were an essential part of the technical idiom of archaic astrology, and those experts in ancient cultures who could not understand such idioms have remained helpless in the face of the theory.”[165] 

If one could find, in the present order of the heavens, a possible inspiration for the widespread tradition of Saturn’s polar station, then the historians and mythologists, operating on uniformitarian principles, would have something concrete to work with. But the primordial age, as defined by universal accounts, stands in radical contrast to our own era. One can no more explain Saturn’s ancient connection with the pole by reference to the present arrangements of the planets than one can explain, within the uniformitarian framework, Saturn’s image as the Universal Monarch, the Heaven Man, or the primeval sun. Yet the fact remains that throughout the ancient world these images of Saturn constituted a pervasive memory which many centuries of cultural evolution could not obliterate.

The Unmoved Mover 

In the sixth century B.C. Xenophanes of Colophon offered this definition of the true god: 

“There is one God, greatest among gods and men, neither in shape nor in thought like unto mortals . . . He abides ever in the same place motionless, and it befits him not to wander hither and thither.”[166] 

A remarkable parallel occurs in the Hindu Upanishads: 

There is only one Being who exists, 

Unmoved yet moving swifter than the mind; 

Who far outstrips the senses, though as gods 

They strive to reach him, who, himself at rest, 

Transcends the fleetest flight of other beings. 

Who, like the air, supports all vital action. 

He moves, yet moves not.[167] 

To the supreme power in heaven Aristotle gave the name “Unmoved Mover,” a term which expressed succinctly the paradoxical character of the god One: though turning the heavens, he himself remained motionless. According to the general tradition, the god stood at the stationary cosmic centre, imparting movement to the celestial bodies which revolved about him. 

A fact which conventional interpretation cannot explain is that the very terms which ancient astronomers apply to the celestial pole are applied also to Saturn. Consider the image of the pole: 

I am constant as the northern star, 

Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality. 

There is no fellow in the firmament. 

So declared Shakespeare’s Caesar. [Emphasis added.] Many centuries before Shakespeare, Hipparchus spoke of “a certain star remaining ever at the same place. And this star is the pivot of the Cosmos.” Among the Chinese, the pole star is the “star of the Pivot,”[168] to the Polynesians it is the “Immovable One.”[169] The Pawnee call it “the star that stands still”; this star, they say, “is different from other stars, because it never moves.”[170] To the Hindus, the star is Dhruva, “firm.”[171] 

Consider now the image of the planet Saturn. In China, as noted above, Saturn rules “the Pivot.” The Sumero-Babylonian Ninurta—Saturn—is the god of the “steady star” and of “repose.”[172] Enki, also the planet Saturn, is “the motionless lord.”[173] Mithraic teaching portrays the planet as the cosmic man Aion, the “resting” god.[174] In Sanchuniathon’s description of the Phoenician El (Saturn) the god “flew while at rest and rested in flight.” To this description, O’Neill responds: “Just the symbolism of the Polar Power whirling the heavens round, but ever reposing himself at the motionless centre.”[175]

Saturn’s stationary character is the trait most overlooked by conventional mythologists. The reason is that the mythologists expect the image of the primeval light god to fit the rising and setting solar orb, while in fact ancient ritual and myth portray the god as a central sun at the polar zenith. 

To the modern mind nothing could be less “scientific” than a polar sun. Yet the unmoving sun is the ancient tradition, as noted by E. A. S. Butterworth: “[The primeval sun] is not the natural sun of heaven, for it neither rises nor sets, but is, as it seems, ever at the zenith above the navel of the world. There are signs of an ambiguity between the pole star and the sun.”[176] 

If Butterworth is correct we have a convergence of three vital truths: Saturn was the primeval sun; Saturn occupied the celestial pole; the primeval sun occupied the pole. Each of these points contradicts modern understanding, yet each finds verification in the independent research of specialists, none of whom seem to have been aware of the work of the others. (That is, de Santillana and von Dechend, while documenting Saturn’s connection with the pole, seem unaware of the planet’s identity as sun; Jastrow and Boll, though perceiving the equation of Saturn and sun, ignore Saturn’s polar station; Butterworth, though recognizing the polar sun, fails to notice that he is dealing with the planet Saturn.) 

On the tradition of the polar god or polar sun numerous traditions concur. 

Egypt 

If there is an orthodoxy among Egyptologists, it is the belief that the Egyptian great god has his inspiration in the rising and setting sun. Atum, Re, Osiris, Horus, Khepera, and virtually all the great gods of the Egyptians are explained as symbols of the solar orb—either the sun of day, or the sun “during its night journey.” 

Because the Egyptian concept of the “sun” involves many complexities which might distract from the present general inquiry, I shall reserve many details for treatment in later sections. I cite below, however, a few of the evidences indicating the polar station of the Egyptian supreme god. 

1. Of the Egyptian great father there is no better representative than the mighty Atum, whom Egyptologists usually regard as a sun-god shining at night. He is the acknowledged alter ego of the primeval sun Ra, founder of the lost Golden Age. 

The Coffin Texts say: 

The Great God lives, 

fixed in the middle of the sky 

upon his support.[177] 

The reference is to Atum, whom the eminent Egyptologist R. T. Rundle Clark calls “the arbiter of destiny perched on the top of the world pole.”[178] 

The creation legend states that when Atum came forth alone in the beginning, he stood motionless in the cosmic sea.[179] His epithet was “the Firm Heart of the Sky.”[180] To the Egyptians, states Enel, “Atum was the chief or centre of the movement of the universe” at the celestial pole, for the Egyptians knew the pole as the “midst” or “heart” of heaven—“the single, immovable point around which the movement of the stars occurred.”[181] 

Clark tells us that “the celestial pole is ‘that place’ or ‘the great city.’ The various designations show how deeply it impressed the Egyptian imagination. If god is the governor of the universe and it revolves around an axis, then god must preside over the axis.”[182] Clark is so certain of the great god’s polar station that he writes, “No other people was so deeply affected by the eternal circuit of the stars around a point in the northern sky. Here must be the node of the universe, the centre of regulation.”[183] (As we will see, Clark underestimates the influence of the polar centre in other lands.) 

Atum was the “Unmoved Mover” described in Egyptian texts many centuries before Aristotle offered the phrase as a definition of the supreme power. The Egyptian hieroglyph for Atum is a primitive sledge , signifying “to move.” To the god of the cosmic revolutions, the Book of the Dead proclaims “Hail to thee, Tmu [Atum] Lord of Heaven, who givest motion to all things.”[184] But while moving the heavens Atum remained em hetep, “at rest” or “in one spot.” 

2. Moreover, and contrary to nearly universal opinion, the great god Re has little in common with the solar orb. Unlike our ever-moving sun, Re stands at the stationary “midst” or “heart” of heaven.[185] He is the motionless sun “who resteth on his high place.”[186] 

His home is the polar zenith: . . . 

May your face be in the north of the sky, may Ra summon you from the zenith of the sky.[187] 

My father ascends to the sky among the gods who are in the sky; he stands in the Great Polar Region and learns the speech of the sun folk. Ra . . . sets his hand on you at the zenith of the sky. [188] 

Concerning the enigmatic symbolism of the Egyptian sun-god, Kristensen tells us that “the place where the light sets is also called the place where it rises.”[189] In reference to the solar orb the statement appears meaningless. But the notion that Ra rises and sets in one spot is inseparable from the vision of Ra as the lord of hetep, “rest.” In fact the god does not literally “rise” or “set” at all. With the phases of day and night his light “comes forth” and “recedes”; the god “comes out” and “goes in.” When we say today that the moon “comes out” at night we do not mean that it rises in the east; we mean simply that the moon grows bright. Precisely the same meaning attaches to the Egyptian words which so often receive the translation “rise” (uben, pert, un).[190] 

Thus, rather than a moving sun, Ra is the central pivot round which the lesser gods revolve. “They [the companions of Ra] go round about behind him,”[191] states one text. The deceased king aspires to attain the great god’s position so that “these gods shall revolve round about him.”[192] 

Figure 2. The resting Osiris. 

3. The god-king Osiris, an obvious counterpart of the primeval sun Re, is the god of the tet, “firmness” or “stability.” “He is always a passive figure,” notes Budge. “As a cosmic god he appears as a motionless director or observer of the actions of his servants who fulfil his will.”[193] In this he is the prototype of the terrestrial king, who takes up symbolic residence at the cosmic centre. 

Thus is Osiris the stationary heart of heaven: “Beautiful is the god of the motionless heart,” proclaims the Book of the Dead.[194] The hymns extol Osiris as the lord of hetep, “rest,” or as “the resting heart.” One Egyptologist after another seeks to understand the imagery in terms of a night sun “resting” in an imagined underworld. But numerous Egyptian sources show that the place of rest is the motionless centre and summit. Osiris is “exalted upon his resting place,”[195] or “in the heights.”[196] 

The hieroglyphs portray a column of steps leading to the polar zenith; it is here that the hymns locate Osiris: “Hail, O Osiris, thou hast received thy sceptre and the place whereon thou art to rest, and the steps are under thee.”[197] The deceased beseeches the great god: “. . . May I be established upon my resting place like the Lord of Life.”[198] 

It is also futile to interpret Osiris’ “rest” or “motionless heart” as mere symbols of death. The state of rest, one must remember, belongs to the living or resurrected Osiris, for the texts apply the term hetep, “rest,” to Osiris em ankh, “as a living being.”[199] It should be clear to all who consider the language of the hymns that the unmoving heart means the unmoving god, for the heart is the god (as when the texts describe the heart “upon its seat”).[200] Osiris, the motionless heart, is the central, stationary sun: “O still heart, Thou shinest for Thyself, O still heart.”[201]

4. The stationary sun, the sun at the polar zenith, also occurs under many other names in Egyptian religion, including: 

—Horus, the “firm and stable” god who “takes his place at the zenith of the sky.”[202] 

—Ptah, “in the great resting place.” 

—Iemhetep, whose name means “the one who comes forth while standing in one place.”[203] 

—Sepa, whose name means “stable.”[204] 

—Men, whose name means “fixed,” “abiding,” “stable,” “firm.”[205] 

—Tenen, connected with the root enen, meaning “motionless,” “rest,” “inactivity.”[206] 

—Kheprer, the Turning One, who spins around while occupying the same stationary position.[207] 

Thus, in the hieroglyphs, all of the Egyptian great gods appear as firmly seated figures. This immovable posture— —which corresponds to divine imagery in many other lands is no accident. The seated or resting god is the Unmoved Mover. 

5. That the Egyptians conceived the cosmic centre as the source of celestial motions is clear from the terminology of the centre. The “heart” of heaven is ab , a word which has the concrete meaning of “centre” or “midst.” But as noted by Renouf, ab also conveys “the sense of lively motion.”[208] In the latter usage, the determinative appears to depict a human figure turning around while standing on one foot, i.e., in one place, at rest. Denoted by the word ab is the resting but ever-turning heart of heaven. Similarly, while the term men means “fixed” or “abiding,” in reference to the god of the stable centre and summit, mennen means “to go round.”[209] 

To the great god, as the steadfast centre or foundation stone of the Cosmos, the Egyptians gave the name Benben (see discussion of The Foundation Stone). But ben alone “is a verb of motion, and particularly of ‘going around’” This dual, seemingly paradoxical relationship of motion and rest occurs throughout the Egyptian texts and becomes intelligible only when one recognizes the central sun, the Unmoved Mover, as the source of the imagery. “I am the Heir, the primary power of motion and of rest,” reads the Book of the Dead. Though the words have a modern sound, Renouf assures us that they express the literal sense of the hieroglyph text. It is in the root character of every polar god to “move” while at “rest.”[210] 

6. Inseparable from the Egyptian motion of “rest” is the concept of “silence.” The motionless centre of the heavens is the Still Place or Region of Silence. (Our English word still accurately conveys the close relationship between the concepts unmoving and silent.) 

[The great god is] King of the Tuat . . . Noble Body whose rest is complete in the Region of Silence. [211] 

King is he who rests in the Silent Region.[212] 

But those experts who connect the solar orb with the great god have nothing to say concerning such language. The god who stands at rest in the Silent Region is Ra, the sun-god par excellence; yet the entire concept contradicts the image of our wandering sun. 

7. What often prevents generalists from perceiving the stationary character of the primeval sun is the translator’s unfortunate habit of substituting vague and intangible terms for literal meanings. Budge follows a common practice when he renders a hymn to Re in these words: “Homage to thee, O thou who art in peace.”[213] From such terminology one could hardly be expected to formulate a clear concept of the god. But the phrase “in peace” actually conceals a vital meaning, for the Egyptian original is em hetep. Literally, the hymn celebrates the god who shines “at rest” or “while standing in one place.” (In seeking to interpret Egyptian sources I have found that specific, literal, and concrete meanings of the original texts are uniformly preferable to the more general and abstract language so often chosen by translators. Of this truth, the reader will find many examples in the following sections.) 

Mesopotamia

Like the central sun of Egypt, the primeval light god of Sumero-Babylonian religion “comes forth” (shines) and “goes in” (declines, diminishes) at the “centre” or “midst” of heaven (Kirib sami; Kabal sami), which is also the zenith (ilatu). “In the centre he made the zenith,” states one text.[214] Residing at the centre and summit, the great god is the “firm” or “steadfast” light.[215]

The oldest representative of this stationary sun is the polar god An (Anu).[216] An fills the sky with his radiant—even terrifying—light: “the terror of the splendour of Anu in the midst of heaven.”[217] Thus does Robert Brown, Jr., term the polar god a nocturnal sun, the “Lord of the Night.”[218] 

All principal forms of An appear as stationary gods. Enki is “the motionless lord” and the god of “stability.”[219] A broken Sumerian hymn, in reference to Ninurash (a form of Ninurta) reads: 

Whom the “god of the steady star” upon a foundation. 

To . . . cause to repose in years of plenty.[220] 

Failing to perceive the concrete meaning of such terms, solar mythologists like to think of a place of “repose” as a hidden “underworld” beneath the earth, a dark region visited by the sun after it has set. But the place of repose is no underworld. It is: 

The lofty residence . . . 

The lofty place . . . 

The place of lofty repose . . .[221] 

Ninurta, in his “place of lofty repose,” is the precise equivalent of the Egyptian Ra, who “resteth on his high place.” That both gods are identified with the planet Saturn further confirms the striking parallel. What, then, of the great god Shamash, whom one expert after another identifies with the solar orb alone? The prevailing consensus cannot hide the fact that Shamash, like Ninurta and Anu, is addressed as the planet Saturn (“Shamash is Saturn,” say the astronomical texts). Thus Shamash sends forth his light from the immovable centre or “midst” of heaven: 

Like the midst of heaven may he shine![222] 

O Shamash . . . suspended from the midst of heaven.[223] 

O Sun-god, in the midst of heaven . . .[224] 

I have cried to thee, O Sun-god, in the midst of the glittering heaven.[225] 

Let there be no misunderstanding as to the literal and concrete meaning of the “midst.” It is, states Robert Brown, the stationary centre, “that central point where Polaris sat enthroned.”[226] Accordingly, in the symbolism of the ziggurat and other “sun” temples, Shamash occupies the “summit house,” the “fixed house,” or the “house of rest.”[227] The top of the ziggurat, a symbolic model of the Cosmos, is the “light of Shamash,” and the “heart of Shamash,” denoting (in the words of E. G. King) the pivot “around which the highest heaven or sphere of the fixed stars revolved.”[228] 

The Babylonian tradition of the polar sun has been preserved up to the modern era in the tradition of the Mandaeans of Iraq. In their midnight ceremonies these people invoke the celestial pole as Olma I’nhoara, “the world of light.” With the following words they beseech the polar god: “In the name of the living one, blessed be the primitive light, the Divinity self-created.” This polar god, states one observer, is the “primitive sun of the star-worshippers.”[229] 

India 

The Hindu Dhruva, whose name means “firm,” stands at the celestial pole—“a Spot blazing with splendour to which the ground is firm, where is fixed the circus of the celestial lights of the planets, which turn all around like oxen round the stake, and which [the Spot] subsists motionless.”[230] What remains to be explained by mythologists is that the “obviously solar” god Surya “stands firmly on this safe resting place.”[231] Surya, states V. S. Agrawala, “is himself at rest, being the immovable centre of his system.”[232] And just as the Egyptian primeval sun “rises and sets” in one place, Surya occupies samanam dhama—“the same place of rising and setting.”[233] 

Another name for the stationary sun is Prajapati. “The sun in the centre is Prajapati: he is the horse that imparts movement to everything,” writes Agrawala.[234] 

The motionless Dhruva, Surya, and Prajapati compare with the light of Brahma, called the “true sun,” which, “after having risen thence upwards . . . rises and sets no more. It remains alone in the centre.”[235] Brahma, observes Guenon, is “the pivot around which the world accomplishes its revolution, the immutable centre which directs and regulates cosmic movement.”[236] 

In fact, every Hindu figure of the primeval sun appears as the fixed mover of the heavens. The Hindu Varuna, “seated in the midst of heaven,” is the Recumbent,” the “axis of the universe.”[237] “Firm is the seat of Varuna,” declares one of the Vedic hymns.[238] In him “all wisdom centres, as the nave is set within the wheel.”[239] One of Varuna’s forms is Savitar, the “impeller.” While the rest of the universe revolves, the impeller stands firm. “. . . Firm shalt thou stand, like Savitar desirable.”[240] 

Occupying the same resting place is the supreme god Vishnu “who takes a firm stand in that resting place in the sky.”[241] The location is the celestial pole, called “the exalted seat of Vishnu, round which the starry spheres forever wander.”[242] Vishnu is the polar sun or central fire: “fiery indeed is the name of this steadfast god,” states one Vedic text.[243] 

A fascinating and archaic form of the Hindu great god is Aja Ekapad, originally conceived as a one legged goat, the support and mover of the universe. Observes Agrawala: “The question arises as to the meaning of ekapad. It [Aja] is called ekapad or one-footed for the reason that ekapad or one footed denotes the absence of motion.”[244] Agrawala calls this supreme being or principle that of “Absolute Static Rest.”[245] “The principle of Rest,” writes the same author, “is inexhaustible and the source of all motion.”[246] 

The sacred ground occupied by the Hindu great god is the “middle place,” “the steadfast region,” or “the motionless heaven.”[247] In the Brahmanist tradition it is Nirvana, “the Supreme Resting Place” at the centre and summit. 

To the Buddhists this is the nave of the cosmic wheel, the throne of the Buddha himself. It is acalatthana, the “unmoving site,” or the “unconquerable seat of firm seance.”[248] The Buddha throne crowned the world axis, states Coomaraswamy. 

China 

The ancient Emperor on High, according to a universal Chinese tradition, stood at the celestial pole. Chinese astrologers, according to Schlegel, regard the polar god as “the Arch-Premier . . . The most venerated of all the celestial divinities. In fact the Pole star, around which the entire firmament appears to turn, should be considered as the Sovereign of the Sky.”[249] The supreme polar god was Shang-ti, the first king. His seat was “the Pivot” and all the heavens turned upon his exclusive power. 

Raised to a first principle, the polar god became the mystic Tao, the motor of the Cosmos. The essential idea is contained in the very Chinese word for Tao, which combines the sign for “to stand still” with the sign “to go” and “head.” The Tao is the Unmoved Mover, the god One who goes or “moves” while yet remaining in one place. 

Chinese sources proclaim the Tao to be the “light of heaven” and “the heart of heaven”[250] that is, the central sun. “Action is reversed into non-action,” states Jung. “Everything peripheral is subordinated to the command of the centre.”[251] Thus the Tao rules the “golden centre,” which is the “Axis of the World,” according to Erwin Pousselle.[252] Yet while many writers have observed the polar station of the Chinese supreme power, few indeed have noticed that Chinese astronomers identify this central sun as the planet Saturn. Saturn, according to the astronomical texts, is “the Pivot,” his primeval seat the celestial pole. It is Saturn, states Schlegel, who imparts motion to the universe.[253] 

One of the few writers to notice Saturn’s connection with the pole is de Saussure, who tells us that Chinese astronomy places the planet in the Centre, around which all secondary elements and powers revolve: “. . . the Centre represents the Creator, Regulator of the entire Cosmos, the Pole, seat (or throne) of the supreme Divinity.”[254] Saturn, states de Saussure, “is the planet of the centre, corresponding to the emperor on earth, thus to the polar star of Heaven.”[255]

The Americas 

In southern Peru the Inca Yupanqui raised a temple at Cuzco to the creator god, the authentic sun, who was superior to the sun we know. Unlike the solar orb he was able to “rest” and “to light the world from one spot.” “It is an extremely important and significant fact,” writes Nuttall, “that the principal doorway of this temple opened to the north.” (Since the north celestial pole is not visible from Cuzco, 14-deg below the equator, Nuttall assumes that this tradition of a polar sun was carried southward.)[256] 

In Mexico a form of the central light is Tezcatlipoca, who, though said to “personify the Sun,” yet resides at the pole—as does Quetzalcoatl, the “sun,” first king, and founder of civilization, who Nahuatl priests say inaugurated the era of “the Centre.”[257] 

Figure 7. Resting Xiuhtecuhtli. 

Burland tells us that, among the Mexicans, “the nearest approach to the idea of a true universal god was Xiuhtecuhtli,” recalled as the Old, Old One who enabled the first ancestors to rise from barbarism. Xiuhtecuhtli appears as the Central Fire and “the heart of the Universe.” “Xiuhtecuhtli was a very special deity. He was not only the Lord of Fire which burnt in front of every temple and in the middle of every hut in Mexico, but also Lord of the Pole Star. He was the pivot of the universe and one of the forms of the Supreme Deity.”[258] An obvious counterpart of this central sun is the Mayan creator god Huracan, the “Heart of Heaven” at the celestial pole. 

The Pawnee locate the “star chief of the skies” at the pole. He is the “star that stands still.” Of this supreme power they say, “its light is the radiance of the Sun God shining through.”[259] The American Indians also have a counterpart to the Egyptian Still Place and the Hindu Motionless Heaven. A Zuni account relates that long ago the heart of the great father Kian’astepe rested in a sacred spot called the Middle Place. Here, at the cosmic centre, the holy ancestors “sit perfectly still.”[260] It does not take a great deal of imagination to see that this is, once more, the stationary pivot of the heavens. 

From one land to another one encounters the same connection of the great father or primeval sun with the celestial pole. To the traditions cited above, one might add the following: 

In the Persian Zend Avesta the sun god Mithra occupies the summit of the world axis, a fixed station “around which the many stars revolve.”[261] The common identification of Mithra with the Zoroastrian Zurvan/Saturn cannot be ignored. 

Iranian cosmology, as reported by de Saussure, esteemed the celestial pole as the centre and summit of heaven, where resided “the Great One in the middle of the sky.” who is equated with Kevan, the planet Saturn.[262] Throughout the ancient Near East, states H. P. L’Orange, the “King of the Universe” appears as a central sun, “the Axis and the Pole of the World.”[263] 

The Greek sun-god Helios, in an old tradition, resides at the centre of the Cosmos, with the heavenly bodies revolving around him.[264] Upon evaluating the imagery of Helios in Homer’s Odyssey, Butterworth concludes that the mythical sun remained always at the zenith, the celestial pole.[265] What gives meaning to the tradition is the identity of Helios and the planet Saturn, as earlier documented. “According to Jewish and Muslim Cosmology,” writes A. J. Wensinck, “the divine throne is exactly above the seventh heaven, consequently it is the pole of the Universe.”[266] 

Thus Isaiah locates the throne of El (originally the planet Saturn) in the farthest reaches of the north.[267] 

The alchemists regarded the pole as the dwelling place of “the central fire,” the motor of the heavens. “. . . The whole machinery of the world is drawn by the infernal fire at the North Pole,” notes Jung. [268] An alchemical text proclaims: “At the Pole is the heart of Mercurius, which is the resting place of his Lord.”[269] “Most important of all for an interpretation of Mercurius,” Jung writes, “is his relation to Saturn. Mercurius senex [the aged Mercurius] is identical with Saturn.”[270] 

Records of numerous nations around the world stand as a collective witness to a strange, yet consistent idea—an idea which finds no explanation in the heavens we know. Global myths insist that when the first civilizations rose from barbarism a brilliant light occupied the celestial pole. This steadfast light was the ancient sun-god, repeatedly identified as the planet Saturn, the Universal Monarch. 

Is it possible to reckon with this extraordinary memory in terms acceptable to the modern age? Mythologists and historians of religion always assume that archaic astral traditions, though filled with imaginative explanations, nevertheless refer to the very celestial order which confronts us today. The entire Saturn myth challenges this long-standing assumption. Could it be that Saturn’s image as the polar sun—however strange, however difficult to reconcile with present physical theory—represents true history? 

IV: 

Saturn’s Cosmos 

The ancients preserved more than mythical-historical accounts of Saturn’s rule. From one section of the world to another the planet-god’s worshippers drew pictures of the Saturnian configuration, and these pictures become the universal signs and symbols of antiquity. 

In the global lexicon of symbols the three most common images are the enclosed sun , the suncross , and the enclosed sun-cross . It appears that every ancient race revered these signs as images of the preeminent cosmic power. In Mesopotamia and Egypt the signs occur in the earliest period. 

Prehistoric pottery and rock carvings from Crete, China, Scandinavia, Africa, Russia, Polynesia, and the Americas suggest that numerous ancient rites centered on these simple forms—which became the most venerated images in the first hieroglyphic alphabets. 

But what did these signs signify to the ancients? With scarcely a dissenting voice, scholars routinely tag them as solar symbols. They tell us that such renderings of the sun are perfectly natural (that is, they must be “natural” ways of representing the sun because one sees the signs everywhere!) 

Though everyone seems to agree on the solar origins,[271] many disagree as to what the signs depict. In the image , does the outer band represent a parhelion (atmospherically caused halo around the sun)? Or does it stand for “the circle of the sky”? Some commentators suggest that the outer circle is itself the sun, leaving open the question of the meaning of the enclosed dot.[272] 

Similarly, in evaluating the sign , the experts cannot agree whether the four arms of the cross denote rays of the sun or four quarters of the world. It is also said that the four arms depict spokes of an imagined sun wheel rolling across the sky each day. 

Is it necessary to point out that these differences of opinion immediately throw into question the common claim that the signs are natural solar emblems? So long as the meaning is uncertain one can hardly state that a symbol is a natural expression of anything. Yet surely those experts who debate the significance of the “sun” symbols must wonder why the ancients, with one accord, inscribed the same images the world over. 

Consider the relatively complex sign . The basic form occurs along with many variants on every continent. Whatever it may signify, it is more than a simple drawing of the sun. If it is a solar image, then one must assume not only that the sun worshippers around the world instinctively adopted the sun to a more complicated abstract form, but that every ancient sun-cult drew upon the same abstraction. Why? 

The enclosed sun-cross is not an abstraction. It simply records what the ancients originally saw. It is a literal drawing of the polar sun, passed down from earliest antiquity: the image of Saturn, the Universal Monarch. 

Rarely do archaeologists, seeking to interpret the widespread “sun” symbols, consult ancient mythology. Yet the myths explain the symbols, and the symbols illuminate the myths. Largely overlooked by archaeologists are the hundreds upon hundreds of myths and liturgies focusing on the cosmic images , , and . Ancient sources reveal a world-wide concern with a concrete celestial form—an ideal configuration identified as the great god and his heavenly dwelling. The subject is not the present world order, but the former. The symbols, legends, and sacred hymns attempt to preserve a memory of Saturn and the primeval Cosmos. 

The Enclosed Sun 

When Saturn appeared alone in the cosmic waters, a brilliant band congealed around the god as his celestial “island.” This band was the original Cosmos, often portrayed as a revolving egg, a coil of rope, a belt or a shield enclosing the central sun. 

The sacred hymns and creation legends of ancient Egypt say that when the creator arose from the cosmic sea, a vast circle appeared around the god, forming the original Place—“the place of the primeval time,” or “the Province of the Beginning.”[273] This primeval dwelling was the “island of Hetep [Rest],”[274] a steadfast, revolving enclosure. Egyptian texts of all periods offer vivid images of this enclosure on the waters—called “the golden Pai-land,” the “Island of Fire,” “the divine emerging primeval island,” or “the island emerging in Nun [the cosmic waters].”[275] 

Diverse sources agree that the island of creation stood at the cosmic centre and that it was the residence of the creator himself, the central sun. Thus, while Osiris is the “motionless heart” in the Island of Fire, Atum, the stationary Heart of Heaven, is “the Sole One who is alone . . . , who made his heart in the Island of Fire.”[276] 

In the following pages I shall attempt to show that Egyptian sources depict the band as something seen—the god’s visible dwelling in heaven. Indeed, the Egyptians—and all other ancient races—were so preoccupied with the Saturnian band that they elaborated a vast symbolism presenting the same enclosure under wide-ranging mythical forms. 

Yet standard treatments of ancient myth and religion say little or nothing of the enclosure. And even less do writers on the subject seem aware that the pictograph of the enclosure sun is a straightforward portrait of Saturn and his legendary home. It is not for want of evidence that the experts have missed this connection. The only obstacle is the a priori world view of the researchers themselves—who presuppose that all references to the primordial light god can only signify the solar orb. In connection with our sun today, the ancient language of the enclosure will appear esoteric or meaningless. 

Of Ra, the Coffin Texts say, “We honour him in the sacred enclosure.”[277] Ra is the “sender forth of light into his Circle.”[278] “I am the One who is in his Circle,” he announces.[279] What could this terminology signify in relationship to the solar orb? Since our sun possesses no perceptible relationship to an enclosure or circle, the translators will likely ignore the terms or contrive a complicated metaphysical concept to explain them. 

Though the Egyptian hieroglyph for Ra is , and though this sign, taken literally, immediately illuminates the foregoing references, no one seems inclined to take the sign—or the texts—literally. 

To the enclosure round the sun the Egyptians gave the name Aten, a term familiar to every student of Egyptian religion. “Spacious is your seat within the Aten,” read the Coffin Texts.[280] One of Re’s titles is am aten-f, the “dweller in his Aten.” Both Atum and Horus possess the same title. Similarly, the Book of the Dead invokes Osiris: “O great god who livest in thy divine Aten.”[281] Since the Egyptian pictograph of the Aten is or , it should be clear that the term refers to a circular enclosure housing the sun-god. 

But from the beginning Egyptologists have attempted to explain the Aten as the sun itself, translating the word as “the solar disk.” Rather than clarify the Egyptian concept, such a translation only confuses the sun-god with his celestial dwelling. One Egyptologist, for example, states that the Aten was the sun, and that the sun was conceived as “the window in heaven through which the unknown god, ‘Lord of the Disk,’shed a portion of his radiance upon the world.”[282] [There is a Eternal Son who never leaves his place, for all eternity he is the Eternal Son of God, the last revelation taught this, so yes there is definitely truth about this sun in a circle, and that they have changed day and night on us, only further complicates the effort needed to stay focused and present in the current moment. I have a hunch the changing of night and day involve control in a way advantageous to those who do such things to others. So much we do not know DC]   

Having identified the Aten with the solar orb, the writer concludes that the god who resides in the Aten is an invisible god. Budge voices a similar opinion when he calls the Aten “the material body of the sun wherein dwelt the god Ra”[283] as if Ra himself were an invisible power and the solar orb the visible emanation and dwelling of the god. 

It is impossible to reconcile such metaphysical interpretations with the concrete imagery of the Aten in Egyptian texts. The Aten is indeed the visible “window in heaven” and the “body of the sun,” but this “window” or “body” is surely not the solar orb. It is, as the Aten sign  indicates, a band housing the sun. And the primeval “sun” is Saturn. 

The same misunderstanding occurs in the case of the Egyptian terms khu and khut. The terms refer to “the circle of glory” or the “brilliant circle,” conceived as a fixed place—“the place where the [primeval] sun shines forth.” Though the Egyptians regarded this circle as the visible emanation of the creator, standard translations render khu as “Spirit” or “Soul” (implying an unseen power) and khut as “horizon” (suggesting the place of the solar sunrise). Both translations violate the literal sense of the words: literally, the khut (written with the sign ) is the “Mount of Glory.” 

The circle of the khu or khut was the “glory,” “halo,” “nimbus,” or “aureole” of the creator—what the Hebrews called the Shekinah (the encircling “glory” of God) and the Greeks stephanos (circle or crown of “glory”). Indeed, every figure of the creator stands within the luminous ring, always considered as his own emanation. The band is not only the god’s “halo,” but his dwelling at the cosmic centre.[284] “In diagrams of the Cosmos” observes J. C. Cirlot, “the central space is always reserved for the Creator, so that he appears as if surrounded by a circular or almond-shaped halo.”[285]

If one accepts the immediate sense of the archaic terminology, the enclosure was no abstraction. It was Saturn’s shining band. The Babylonian Anu—Saturn—was “the High One of the Enclosure of Life,”[286] his dwelling “the brilliant enclosure.” (Here, too, the enclosure becomes the place of the primeval “sunrise.”)[287] The Maori of New Zealand know the planet Saturn as Parearau, whose name conveys the meaning “circlet” or “surrounding band.” From this name of Saturn, Stowell concluded that the natives could see the present Saturnian ring with the naked eye—something all astronomers know to be impossible today.[288] 

When the African Dogon draw Saturn they depict it as an orb within a circle—a fact which Robert Temple, in his book The Sirius Mystery, cites as evidence for seemingly inexplicable Dogon astronomical knowledge (which he contends was introduced to the ancients by extra-terrestrial visitors!). But no one asks whether the order of the solar system may have changed, allowing for a once-visible Saturnian band.

The Lost Island  

For the primeval enclosure the Egyptians employed a variety of interrelated symbols. The circle of the khu or Aten was nothing other than the Island of Fire, the Province of Beginning. A single spell of the Coffin Texts thus identifies Ra as “the noble one who is at the land of the Island of Fire,” but also calls Ra the god “who is in his Aten.”[289] The subject is not two different enclosures but one enclosure under two different titles. 

And this identification of the central sun as an enclosed or encircled god appears to throw light on the endlessly repeated myth of the lost island. What the Greeks called Ogygia (the island of Kronos/Saturn in the farthest north) occurs under many different names the world over. The white island, the floating island, the revolving island—may not these primeval dwellings simply echo the Saturnian enclosure? One recalls the words of Dionysius of Halicarnassus: 

Haste to the realms [rings] of 

Saturn shape your course, 

Where Cotyle’s famed island wandering floats 

On the broad surface of a sacred lake [the Abyss].[290] 

Not of our earth, the lost isle floated in the sea of heaven. Japanese legends recall the ancient cradle of life as Onogoro, a floating island (“the drifting land”) which congealed on the waters. This was the isle of the Congealed Drop. Its location, states a native commentator, was originally the North Pole, from which it eventually moved to its present position.[291] O’Neill properly relates the Japanese isle to the floating island of Delos raised from the sea by Poseidon. Another name for this island was Ortygia, which O’Neill connects with the Latin verto, Sanskrit vart, “to turn.”[292] Answering to the same tradition are the Floating Islands of the Argonautica, called the Strophades, or “Islands of Turning.” 

In the voyages of the Celtic divine hero Maelduin the adventurer encounters a fabulous isle in the midst of the sea: “Around the island was a fiery rampart, and it was ever wont to turn around and about it.”[293] 

Examples are too numerous to receive elaborate treatment here: the primeval, revolving islands of Rhodes and Corcyra, spun on the cosmic spindle; the primeval isle of the Cyclos, “wheel,” which gave its name to the Cyclades; the “white island” of Zeus “in the midst of the sea”; the floating Hindu white island (Shweta-dwipa) at the polar centre; the lost Toltec “white island” of Tula, the centre of the world.[294]

Without exception, the shining, floating, revolving islands are esteemed as the place where history began and seem to answer to the same archaic tradition as the Egyptian Province of the Beginning, the revolving enclosure around the central sun. Is it possible that the ancients saw the mythical island— that the isle was not a geographical location, but a visible band enclosing Saturn? One must consider several closely related images, which also imply a visible band around the ancient sun-planet. 

The Egg 

A hymn from the Egyptian Coffin Texts reads: 

I was he who came into existence as circle, 

he who was the dweller in his egg. 

I was the one who began everything, 

the dweller in the primeval waters.[295] 

Here the reference is to Atum as the creator of the egg, but other traditions say of the great god Ptah that he “created the egg which proceeded from Nun [the cosmic waters].[296] 

In the Book of the Dead the light god shines as “the mighty one within the egg.”[297] “Homage to thee, O thou holy god who dwellest in thine egg.”[298] 

As the stationary light god “turns round about” his egg revolves around him. “I am the god who keepeth opposition in equipoise as his Egg circleth round.”[299] “O thou who circlest round, within thine Egg.”[300] Atum, as governor of the revolving egg, is the lord of Time, for “time is regulated by the motion around the egg,” Clark tells us.[301] 

Similar to the egg of Atum is the revolving sphere produced by the Orphic Chronos (Time, who is Kronos, Saturn): 

The great Chronos fashioned in the divine 

Aether [the fiery sea] a silver egg. 

And it moved without slackening in a vast circle.[302] 

To this revolving egg compares that of the Society Islands’ creator Ta’oroa, “the ancestor of all the gods,” who sat “in his shell in an egg revolving in endless space.”[303] 

The same egg appears in Hindu myth, set in motion by the central sun Prajapati.[304] Mircea Eliade finds recollections of the cosmic egg in Indonesia, Iran, Phoenicia, Latvia, Estonia, West Africa, Central America, and the west coast of South America as well.[305] 

Certainly, none of the later traditions improve upon the Egyptian texts which describe the egg as the enclosure round Atum-Re. But one can hardly fail to be impressed by the consistency of the tradition. And even the alchemists, much of whose teachings descended from Egypt, remember the connection of the egg with Saturn. They recall the egg as a fiery enclosure on the primordial sea—a circle with a “sun-point” in the centre (i.e., ). This “world-egg is the ancient Saturn,” they say.[306] 

Is not this cosmic egg the band which the Egyptians called Aten? “O thou who art in thine egg, who shinest from thy Aten,” reads the Book of the Dead.[307] Just as the Egyptian god-king is “the ruler of all that the Aten encircles,” so also is he “powerful in the egg” or “ruling in the egg.”[308] 

In celebrating the primeval egg, the priests commemorated the island of beginnings. Budge summarizes the Egyptian tradition: “The first act of creation began with the formation out of the primeval watery mass of an egg, wherefrom issued the light of the day, i.e., Re.”[309] Concerning the identity of this egg and the island or “Province of the Beginning,” the texts from the temple of Edfu remove all doubt: another name for the Province of the Beginning was “the Island of the Egg.”[310] Egyptian sources thus suggest this equation: 

Aten (enclosure of the central sun)=Cosmic Egg=Primeval Island. 

The Bond. To reside within the Aten is to reside “in the coil” or “in the cord.” The Hieroglyphs depict the Aten as a cosmic bond or knot, indicated by an enclosure of rope with the ends tied together (shen ). (Thus shen, “coil,” “bond,” may be written with the determinative , the Aten sign.) The bond signifies both a boundary—distinguishing the unified domain of the Universal Monarch from the rest of space—and order, marked by ceaseless, stable revolution round the central sun. It is the “bond of regularity” (shes maat), protecting the god-king from the surrounding waters of Chaos. Accordingly, the Egyptian king, considered as the incarnation of the Universal Monarch, takes up symbolic residence within the celestial cord, acquiring the great god’s power as “ruler of all that the Aten encircles.” The priests indicated this power of the terrestrial ruler by placing his hieroglyphic name within the shen-coil . And in order to accommodate longer names they eventually expanded the coil to an ovoid form, which yielded the familiar royal cartouche in which the names of all later kings were inscribed. 

Of this cosmic bond or knot the hieroglyphics offer many signs (among them ). But each possesses the same root meaning as a protective boundary defining the original dwelling of the creator in heaven. The symbols convey the sense “to circumscribe,” “to set the bounds.” The creator, as the Measurer, prescribes the limits and measures out the sacred enclosure by “stretching the cord” round about, producing a unified dwelling (the primeval island), protected from the evils of Chaos and darkness.[311] 

That the ancient mythmakers conceived Saturn’s enclosure as a cord binding together the god’s dwelling will explain why the Babylonian Ninurta, Saturn, holds the markasu or “bond” of the Cosmos. Langdon writes: “The word markasu, ‘band,’ ‘rope,’ is employed in Babylonian philosophy for the cosmic principle which unites all things, and is used also in the sense of ‘support,’ the divine power and law which hold the universe together.”[312] The Orphic poet thus celebrates Saturn (Kronos) as “Father of the blessed gods as well as of man . . . you who hold the indestructible bond . . .”[313]

It is easy for contemporary writers to speak of Saturn’s bond as an invisible principle holding “the universe together,” but in the original symbolism one sees the bond as the shining boundary of Saturn’s dwelling (the true Cosmos). It was not in Egypt alone that the cord signified the “edge” or “border.” What the Greeks called peirata, “rope” or “bond,” possesses the additional meaning “boundary.” The Latin ora, “cord,” means also “edge.”[314] A similar meaning attaches to the “noose” of the Hindu Varuna and Yama. The bond delimited and protected the sacred space occupied by the Universal Monarch, and its connection with the sign links it directly with Saturn’s island egg. 

The Garment. Mythmaking imagination also appears to have conceived the Saturnian band as the god’s girdle, collar, or belt. “I am the girdle of the garment of Nu, shining, shedding light,” states a hymn from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.[315] The great god is “the Girdled and the Mighty one, coming forth triumphantly.”[316] A common hieroglyphic determinative of the “girdle” or “collar” is the cord sign . 

The Shield. All creation legends involve a struggle between the light god and the destructive powers of the Abyss (Chaos). The mythic enclosure provides the god’s defense against the turbulent waters which originally prevailed. The Egyptian enclosure, states Reymond, “had the function of protecting the sacred area from the evil coming from outside.”[317] Aten was one of the numerous Egyptian names for this defensive rampart in heaven: “The Aten makes thy protection,” states the Litany of Re. [318] The cosmic egg serves as the same fortress: “I am Horus . . . , whose protection was made within the egg; the fiery blast of your mouths [the fiery water of Chaos] does not attack me.”[319] 

The band of the Aten , as the protective boundary, was the great god’s “shield,” fending off what the texts call “the fiends” of disorder. It is this mythic history of the band which explains why, in the hieroglyphs, the shield sign signified sacred space in general. All who resided within the shield’s enclosure occupied the safe and stable ground. 

Cord, belt, and shield converge. The great father wears the cord as a girdle: it protects him as a shield—not merely in Egyptian symbolism, but in the international language of symbols. Why, for example, did divine figures from Babylonia to Greece to Mexico wear a sacred belt of rope, and why was the belt conceived as an impenetrable defense? Mexican illustrations of the divine shield show it to be nothing more than a circle of rope. It was certainly not practical experience which suggested the magical powers of a shield so conceived! But the mythical imagery of the enclosed sun is quite sufficient to explain such anomalies: the great god’s shield and the celestial cord signified one and the same protective enclosure. 

If the ancients actually saw a band around Saturn, it is clear that the enclosure fostered diverse but interrelated mythical interpretations. A literal reading of Egyptian and other texts will confirm an extraordinary equation:

Enclosure of the central sun=primeval island=cosmic egg

=cord (bond)=girdle (belt, collar)=shield. 

Concerning the overlapping images much more needs to be said. The signs and the myths become comprehensible only when one relates them to the heavens of ancient times. Celestial island, egg, cord, girdle, and shield mean nothing more than a shining, revolving enclosure around the great god. Was this band real or imaginary? The question can be answered by exploring certain other aspects of the enclosure.

The Cosmos And The Divine Assembly 

The sign of the enclosed sun portrays a circle of secondary lights revolving about the stationary god and forming Saturn’s Cosmos. The mystic traditions of the great father present an apparent paradox: he is the god One, the solitary god in the cosmic sea; yet he is the All, embracing a company of lesser gods. 

This is not a contradiction. In the first phase of creation the god brought forth a circle of secondary lights: these issued directly from the god to become his visible limbs. It is the fundamental character of the god One—the Heaven Man—to unite in a single “body” all the secondary powers of the Cosmos. 

In Pythagorean, Neoplatonist, and Gnostic systems the primal figure is “the One, the All,” whose symbol is the enclosed sun . Hindu mysticism offers the latter sign as the image of the primordial unity, and the same interpretation is repeated by the alchemists. 

Today one naturally thinks of “the All” as boundless space. The terms which translators render as Cosmos, heaven, firmament, sky, or universe suggest to the modern mind a limitless arena of the sun, moon, planets, and constellations. But the original meaning of the All is bounded space—a place (the place, or place par excellence). The Cosmos simply means the province of the god One, who, as Lord of the All, governs and is the “whole and its parts.” Having overlooked this restricted sense of the terminology the translators replace concrete meanings with ambiguity (in the guise of modern sounding metaphysics). The once-visible dwelling of the central sun thus becomes, in the translations, “all existence.” 

Almost without exception the translators fail to notice 1) that the creator was Saturn, recalled as the central sun; and 2) that the sign of the central sun and the sign of the All were the same image . The true Cosmos was Saturn’s enclosure. And nothing else is necessary in order for one to understand the ancient characterization of Saturn as the Heaven Man whose “body” encompassed the Cosmos. When Hildegard Lewy reports that the Sumero-Babylonian priests of Saturn regarded the planet-god as “the embodiment of the whole universe” the modern mind boggles: could the ancients have been so frivolous as to identify Saturn—the present, barely discernible point of light—with “the whole universe”? The answer is that Saturn was not a mere speck of light, but a gigantic globe at the polar centre; and the “universe” did not mean the open heavens but Saturn’s dwelling, the an-ki or band of the Cosmos. Saturn’s towering form “filled the an-ki.” 

Zoroastrian texts describe the original Cosmos as the body of Zurvan (Time, Saturn), a revolving wheel called the Spihr, which remained ever in the same position. The fall of the stationary wheel coincided with the collapse of the primordial era.[320] The image suggests, not unlimited “space,” but the tangible configuration of the enclosed sun. 

Accordingly, the later mystic traditions, as reviewed by Jung, describe the image as the cosmic form of Adam, the Anthropos, the Original Man or Man on High—identified as Saturn.[321] Always the “body” of this primal man means “Cosmos.” 

The interrelated myths and symbols of Saturn’s Cosmos receive remarkable clarification in the creation accounts and the liturgies of ancient Egypt. Though I briefly touched on the Egyptian texts in earlier discussions of the Heaven Man, amplification is necessary.

The Circle Of The Gods 

Whether called Atum, Re, Osiris, Horus, Khepera, or Ptah, the Egyptian great god sits enthroned within a circle of secondary deities, satellites of the central sun. The gods are the Glorious Ones, Never-Resting Ones, or Living Ones; the Circle of Fire, Divine Chiefs, Apes of Dawn, Holy Ancestors, or Revolving Ones; the Followers of Horus, the Followers of Re, or the Followers of Osiris. 

While the divine assembly possessed many names, its singular character stands out in the texts of all regions. There is no Egyptian company of the gods other than that which revolves round the central sun—a fact uniformly ignored by writers on Egyptian religion. 

The texts repeatedly confirm the same relationship of the assembly to the great god: 

This is the Circle of gods about Re and about Osiris.[322] 

The satellites of Ra make their round.[323] 

Thy followers circle about.[324] 

Ra maketh his appearance . . . with the cycle of gods about him.[325] 

His Ennead [circle of gods] is around about his seat.[326] 

I am Ra amidst his Ennead.[327] 

Go ye round about me, O ye gods.[328] 

Hail to you, Tribunal . . . O you who surround me . . .[329] 

Divine is your name in the middle of the gods.[330] 

These gods shall revolve round about him.[331] 

Glorious is your sah [brilliant form] in the midst of the living Ones.[332] 

These are the “stars who surround Ra.”[333] 

When it is light all faces adore him, the Brilliant One, 

he who arises [shines] in the midst of his Ennead.[334] 

The dilemma for solar mythology is obvious: seeing the references to the great god in the above lines, no one would think of denying that the subject is a visible power (which all presume to be our sun). But the descriptions of the god’s revolving companions are equally explicit. To what visible powers do they answer? No circle of lights appears to revolve about the body we call sun today. 

Egyptian descriptions of the celestial assembly take us back to the remote age, separated from the present by a wide chasm. Every Egyptian cult possessed mythical accounts relating to the birth of the divine assembly in remote times. Despite numerous versions of the legend, it is impossible to ignore the coherent pattern. From a study of the numerous fragments, I offer the following reconstruction and interpretation of the myth. 

In the primordial epoch the creator first appeared in the Abyss, alone, wandering, without a resting place. “I found no place to stand—I was alone,” states the god.[335] After his appearance the god “uttered words” and these utterances possessed a visible form as the kheperu, the first things created. The kheperu “came forth from my mouth.”[336] These visible “words” flowed from the creator as the waters of Chaos, the sea in heaven upon which the creator floated or wandered. To reckon with the tradition in its own terms one must think of the primordial sea as a fiery “ocean of words” in heaven, emitted by the god in a prolonged and resounding explosion. 

An Egyptian term virtually identical to kheperu is pautti, often translated as “primeval matter.” The pautti issued directly from the creator in the form of radiant speech, forming a fiery, watery mass. The creator brought forth this primeval matter and, paradoxically, “produced himself” in it (“I produced myself from the primeval matter which I made”).[337] 

For a time the creator wandered in the luminous sea but eventually came to rest at a point of stability, the cosmic centre. Two events followed: an island congealed around the god as his “place of rest,” and the circle of the gods came into being, embracing the creator. The two events are synonymous. 

From the unorganized sea of words—the kheperu or pautti—the creator brought forth an organized dwelling. He “gathered” the enclosure together as a barrier against the watery Chaos which he himself had created. The fiery particles of the newly formed enclosure composed the circle of the gods. That is, the gods stood on the enclosure’s “edge” or “border”—the “shore” of the celestial isle . In one text these are “the gods who belong to the Shore. They give an island to the Osiris NN.”[338] This was the Cosmos, formed by the “Council of the gods who surround the Island of Fire.”[339] 

Vital to this interpretation of the myth is the identity of the divine assembly with the kheperu or pautti “uttered” by the creator. The secondary gods are themselves the shining “words” or “names” spoken by the creator and organized into a revolving circle. Kheperu thus means “the revolving ones,” while pautti signifies “the primeval ones,” who inhabit and give form to the Island of Fire.[340] 

What, then, do the texts mean when they say that the kheperu or pautti, though erupting from the creator, “produced” the great god? The answer is clear-cut: the circle into which the constituent particles (visible words) congealed was the creator’s “body.” The god One “collected” or “gathered together” his own limbs (“I united my members”). He “produced himself.”[341] 

The Coffin Texts depict the creator alone in the primeval sea: 

I was, he who had no companion when , or until 

my name came into existence . . . I created my limbs in my “glory” 

I was the maker of myself . . .[342] 

Literally, the limbs which the god produced are “my limbs of my khu.” The phrase is of sweeping significance. An Egyptian sign of the khu was the hieroglyph . The term, in explicit reference to the creator’s “circle of glory” (halo, aura, Aten), means at once “words of power” and “brilliant lights.” Depicted by the hieroglyph is the island of creation, around which are ranged the secondary deities (khu) produced through the creator’s “speech.” In bringing forth this divine assembly the creator became the maker of his own body. “O Khepera . . . whose body is the cycle of the gods forever,” proclaims the Book of the Dead.[343] The same texts speak of “the souls of the gods who have come into being in [or as] the members of Osiris.”[344] 

The entire symbolism focuses on the celestial form of the enclosed sun . Individually, the fiery lights which compose the enclosure (island of the Cosmos) are the creator’s “limbs” (plural), but as a unified circle, the assembly forms his “body” (singular). Correspondingly, the respective lights are the creator’s multiple “names” or “words” (“the names of his limbs”), while as an organic whole (the All) the circle is the god’s singular “Name.” When the hymn cited above states that the god was alone “until my name came into existence,” the meaning is concrete, not abstract. The creator remained alone until he brought forth the circle of the khu, his visible Name in heaven. 

That the god’s Name was his tangible dwelling—his circle of glory—is a fact absolutely essential to a comprehension of the enigmatic symbolism. “I have made firm my name, and have preserved it that I may have life through it.”[345] The reference is to the enclosure of life, the Island of Fire “made firm” at the stationary cosmic centre, when the creator ceased to wander in the Abyss. Thus the hieroglyphic determinative of “name” (ren) is the shen sign , the sign of the celestial enclosure or circle of the Aten. To possess a “name” is to reside within the Aten . A single hymn from the Book of the Dead provides a remarkable summary of the related symbols: 

I am the great god who came into existence by himself. 

This is Nu who created his names paut neteru as god. 

Who, then is this? It is Ra, who created the names of his limbs. 

There came into existence in the form of the gods 

who are in the following of Ra . . . 

Who, then, is this? 

It is Tem [Atum] in his Aten.[346] 

The self-generated god in the above lines is Nu, whose hieroglyph identifies him as both the source and the substance of the cosmic waters. The text says not only that the great god “created his names” but that these “names” are the paut neteru—the circle of the gods. 

But why is the assembly called the paut, or primeval matter? It is because the revolving gods erupted directly from the creator, eventually forming the organized enclosure. The secondary gods, as words or names spoken by the creator, composed the god’s own “limbs,” so that the text can say the god “created the names of his limbs.” That these “came into existence in the form of the gods who are in the following of Re” means simply that they formed the revolving assembly. 

Who, then, is this god who shines within the circle of his own limbs? “It is Atum in his Aten.” The priests could not have stated more emphatically the equation of the celestial assembly and enclosure of the primeval sun . Here is the formula set forth by the Egyptian texts: 

Cosmos (enclosure of the central sun)=primeval matter (sea of words) 

in its organized form=circle of the gods=

limbs or body of creator=creator’s visible Name. 

That the circle formed by the divine assembly is the cosmic dwelling of the creator is a truth affirmed not by one local cult alone, but by all streams of Egyptian ritual. Below I list a few of the Egyptian words that connect the assembly with the enclosure of the central sun: Khu. In the creation, as noted above, the khu erupt from the creator as “words of power” or “brilliant lights.” This “circle of glory” the body of Osiris or Re composes the god’s celestial home, the Aten . Thus khus means “to fashion a dwelling.”  

Tuat. The term refers to the “resting place” of the creator at the summit. The hieroglyphic symbol of the Tuat shows the light god within a celestial band which the texts equate with the circle of the Aten, “The Mysterious Soul, which rests in its Aten, rests in the Tuat of Re.”[347] In the hymns and in art, the Egyptians depicted the Tuat as the body of Osiris or Re. But Tuat means also “the circle of the gods”; the enclosure, the “body” of the sun-god and the divine assembly are synonymous. 

Shen, shenit, sheniu, shenbet. The shen signs and portray the central sun’s enclosure as a cord of rope—the bond of the Cosmos. Shen means “to revolve,” in reference to the revolving band of the Aten. (The shen sign and the Aten sign function as interchangeable glyphs.) Hence, the sheniu is the great god’s cosmic “chamber” while the shenit are the “chiefs” or “nobles” on high who travel the circuit round the shen. Shenbet, meaning “body,” is the bet or “place” marked out by the shen. Again, enclosure, “body,” and assembly converge. 

Tchatchat. The tchatchat are the “chiefs” or “heads”—the council of gods revolving around the stationary sun. But tchatchat also signifies “boundary,” “enclosure,” or “holy domain.” The circuit traversed by the chiefs is the boundary of the celestial enclosure . 

Rer, reri, rert. While rer means “to revolve or encircle,” rert means “men”—the inhabitants of the primordial domain. The reri are “the revolving ones” (comparable to the kheperu), who collectively enclose the sacred space. Accordingly, rer possesses the additional meaning “the enclosed domain.” 

Paut, pat. The secondary gods are the pautti, the “primeval matter” which (as stated above) congealed into the creator’s revolving dwelling. Paut thus signifies the creator’s “body.” Obviously related are the pat, the primeval gods whose name conveys the sense “to go round like a wheel or in a circle.” It is no coincidence that the hieroglyphic determinative of the pat is an egg : the circle around which the pat revolve is the egg of the Cosmos, and this egg is the “body” of the god Seb. 

Tchet, tchetu. While tchet means “to speak,” tchetu signifies “words,” “things spoken.” In the creation the great god uttered visible “words” in the form of the lesser gods. That the creator’s words became his dwelling is reflected in the term tchet, the “house” or “chamber” of the great god. Tchet also means “body.” 

Shes, shesi. An Egyptian name of the cosmic bond is shes, written with the hieroglyph . The Tuat ( , dwelling of Re or Osiris) is the shes maat, the “bond of regularity” (or of stable, ceaseless revolution). The texts also speak of celestial shesi, divine “warriors” who protect the great god. They “protect” the god because, collectively, they form the defensive rampart, the cosmic shield. The language and symbolism of the celestial assembly reveal an underlying idea connecting the separate traditions. The secondary gods are not merely ill-defined “companions,” or “assistants” (as so many Egyptologists seem to assume); rather, they possess concrete form as the enclosure of life, the very enclosure which the priests celebrate as the island of beginnings, the revolving bond, or the cosmic egg (all figures of the Cosmos). 

The Cosmos, in other words, has nothing to do with “all existence.” The concept relates to an organized domain—“the whole and its parts”—fashioned by the creator out of previously unorganized cosmic debris (primeval matter). An Egyptian word for the unified domain is temt, which means “all” or “complete” and also “to collect,” “to gather together.” Clearly related is the word Temtiu, one of the names of the secondary gods. It is the secondary gods themselves that the creator “collects” or “gathers together” to form the cosmic island. 

Pertaining to the same root concept are the terms tema, “to unify, join together”; temi, “shore,” “bank,” or “border”; and temen, “all,” “totality.” The unified All (Cosmos) is contained within the border of the enclosure, and the border is the shore of the cosmic island . 

The Saturnian band is thus the pathway traversed by the secondary gods. The gods revolve around the shore, or around the bond, or around the egg. “Every god who is on the border of your enclosure is on the path . . . ,” states a Cof in Text.[348] 

The testimony could not be more explicit. The road traveled by the secondary gods is the uat, the “way” or “path,” denoted by the glyph . But the same glyph signifies the tcher, “boundary.” The path of the gods and the boundary of the unified Cosmos (the All) are synonymous. Thus the phrase er tcher (“to the tcher” or “to the boundary”) means “all,” “the whole.” The great god, as Neb-er tcher—“he who rules to the boundary”—is the ruler of the whole, lord of the revolving Cosmos. It is the same thing to say that he governs “all that the Aten  encircles.” The whole range of images challenges orthodox interpretations. 

But the symbolism of the Cosmos and divine assembly reaches far beyond Egypt. Do not all supreme gods sit enthroned within the circle of secondary divinities? Ninurta, Kronos, El, Yama, Huang-ti and every other Saturnian figure has his “sons,” “councilors,” “spies,” “followers,” “assistants,” or “warriors” seated round about him. The Mesopotamian sign is a self-evident image of the celestial assembly. It is this Cosmos—not boundless space—which Saturn’s “body” encompassed. What the mystics knew as “the universe” organized within Saturn’s “bond” or “cord” (Babylonian markasu) becomes meaningful only as the visible Saturnian band, or circle of the gods.[349]           

The Great Mother 

The sign of the enclosed sun also portrays Saturn, the generative Seed, within the womb of the mother goddess. As the female personification of the Cosmos, the great mother is inseparable from Saturn’s “body.” 

The mysteries of the mother goddess give rise to an endless debate. What is the fact in nature which will explain the cosmic union of Isis and Osiris, Tammuz and Ishtar or Kronos and Gaea? One scholar after another puzzles over the goddess’ varied forms, finding her everywhere and nowhere. If to one writer she is the fertile earth around us, to another she is the moon and to another “the universe,” the “sky,” or the morning star. The diverse interpretations seem to suggest that there were many goddesses with a singular figure—the heavenly consort of the great father. Here, for example, is one statement, offered as the words of the Egyptian goddess Isis to Apuleius: . . 

My name, my divinity is adored throughout the world, in divers manners, in variable customs, and by many names. For the Phrygians that are the first of all men call me the Mother of the gods of Pessinus; the Athenians, which are sprung from their own soil, Cecropian Minerva; the Cyprians, which are girt about by the sea, Paphian Venus; the Cretans, which bear arrows, Dictynian Diana; the Sicilians, which speak three tongues, infernal Prosperpine; the Elusinians, their ancient goddess Ceres; some Juno, others Bellona, others Hecate, others Ramnusie . . . ; and the Egyptians, which are excellent in all kind of ancient doctrine, and by their proper ceremonies accustomed to worship me, do call me by my true name, Queen Isis.[350] 

In their cosmic rites the Egyptians seemed unwilling to distinguish Isis from such local figures of the great mother as Nut, Hathor, Mut, or Neith. Each local goddess bore identical or similar epithets (“the Eye of Re,” “the mother of Re,” “the Lady of the Holy Land,” etc.). 

But if the ancients acknowledged a common personality of the goddess, what was that personality’s underlying trait? There is one universal attribute: the great goddess possesses the form of an enclosure—a circle or womb—housing and “giving birth to” the great father. Neumann perceived this trait when he described the goddess’ “elementary character” as “the Great Round” or “the world containing and world-creating uterus.”[351] From his exhaustive study of the great mother G. S. Faber concluded that every goddess appears as a protective enclosure sheltering the great father. Of this truth there is no shortage of evidence.[352] 

The god Tammuz sits within the womb of Tiamat, “the mother of the hollow.” “Mother-womb” is the epithet of the Sumerian goddess Gula, while Ishtar’s name means “womb.”[353] Hindu sources describe the great mother as the yoni or “womb” and the great father as “he enveloped in his Mother’s Womb.”[354] Agni is the male god “shining in the Mother’s eternal womb.”[355] 

Similarly, the Norse Odin is “the dweller in Frigg’s bosom.”[356] In Orphic doctrine the receptacle housing the great father is the goddess Vesta. The Gnostics remembered the old god as the “Ancient of Days who dwelt as a babe within the womb.”[357] Among the Maori the great mother is the “Shelter Maid” or “Haven Maid.”[358] 

Descriptions of the primeval womb show that the ancients recall the goddess as a visible band—what Hindu texts call the “golden womb,”[359] and Babylonian “the jeweled circlet” (a title of Ishtar). [360] The imagery pertains directly to the enclosed sun . In Hinduism the latter sign depicts “the male seed-point or bindu in the cosmic womb,” states Alan Watts.[361] “The Father is like the centre (Nabhi) of the circle and the Mother the circumference (Paramanta),” notes Agrawala.[362] The same male-female symbolism of the enclosed sun occurs in European stone carvings discussed by V. C. C. Collum.[363] That the Hebrews regarded the Shekinah (the creator’s encircling “aura,” “anima,” or “glory”) as “the Mother”[364] leads to the same conclusion: the great god’s halo was his own spouse. Accordingly, the Tibetan ritual invokes the great god as “the centre of the Circle, enhaloed in radiance, embraced by the (divine) Mother.”[365] 

This conception of the great mother receives compelling support from ancient Egyptian sources. The Egyptian sun-god has his home within the womb of his mother and consort, the “Great Protectress.”[366] Of Re, the Book of the Dead proclaims, “Thou shinest, thou makest light in thy mother.”[367] Elsewhere Re appears as the sun “in the womb of Hathor.”[368] 

Osiris shines forth from the enclosure of his mother Nut: “Homage to thee, King of kings, Lord of lords, Prince of princes, who from the womb of Nut hath ruled all the world.”[369] The abode of Horus is his mother Hathor, whose name means “the House of Horus.” And the goddess Nekhbet is said to personify the primeval abode of the sun.[370] 

As earlier noted, the Egyptians portrayed the celestial dwelling as the shen bond . 

But this enclosure was really the womb of Nut, states Piankoff.[371] (Thus the goddess Shentit takes her name from the shen bond.) 

The mother goddess was not our earth, not the open sky, not the moon, but the dwelling of the central sun, the enclosure of the Aten : “My Aten has given me birth,” states the god-king.[372] This direct connection of the mother goddess with the sun’s enclosure will explain why the Aten sign , though serving as the glyph of Re, also denotes “mistress,” in reference to the god’s celestial consort. [373] The god’s mistress was his own emanation, his halo of “glory” or “splendour.” The priests who invoked the great god’s khut or “circle of glory” also celebrated the goddess Khut, who was the same circle. 

Residing within the enclosure, the central sun is the shining seed impregnating the great mother. “I am indeed the Great Seed,” declares Re.[374] “O Re, make the womb of Nut pregnant with the seed of the spirit which is in her,” reads a hymn of the Pyramid Texts.[375] The same texts celebrate “the womb of the sky with the power of the seed of the god which is in it.”[376] And again, “Pressure is in your womb, O Nut, through the seed of the god which is in you.”[377]

In his coming forth within the cosmic womb the sun “copulates with” or “impregnates” the mother goddess, and this relationship expresses itself in the language. The Egyptian nehep means “to copulate” while nehepu means “to shine.” Though beka denotes “the coming forth” of the sun, the same word means “pregnant.” Thus the union of the primal pair is renewed daily (or with each “dawn” of the central sun). 

But the same coming forth receives mythical interpretation as the birth of the light god. Nut is at once RA’s spouse and his mother, who “bears Ra daily”:[378]

I am exalted like that venerable god, the Lord of the Great House, and the gods rejoice at seeing his beautiful comings forth from the womb of Nut.[379] 

His birth is wonderful, raising up his beautiful form in the womb of Nut.[380] Hail, Prince, who comest forth from the womb.[381] 

Conception and birth are thus confused. The impregnating Seed (father) is also the Child. It is this equation which yields Re’s title as “Man-Child.”[382] He is the prototype of “the son who impregnates his mother,” or the “father who gives birth to himself.” 

But the confusion does not end here, for the mother goddess, as the great father’s encircling aura, is herself the emanation of the masculine power. The solitary god brings forth the womb of heaven unassisted. In this sense the goddess is the great father’s “daughter,” so that if one considers the entire range of possibilities, three relationships to the goddess—father, husband, and son—are united in one figure. 

Imagery of this sort runs through all of the religious texts of ancient Egypt. Amon-Ra is “he who begets his father.”[383] The goddess Hathor becomes “the mother of her father and the daughter of her son.”[384] Atum-Kheprer “brought himself into being upon the thigh of his divine mother.”[385] In the ritual of the Karnak temple Re’s “daughter” Mut encircled “her father Re and gave birth to him as Khonsu.”[386] The same goddess is “the daughter and mother who made her sire.”[387] 

Equation of father and son is explicit in the case of Osiris and his “son” Horus. The Pyramid Texts describe Osiris shining “in the sky as Horus from the womb of the sky.”[388] “The king is your seed, O Osiris, you being potent in your name of Horus who is in the sea.”[389] The gods, in the Book of the Dead, recall the ancient time of Horus “when he existed in the form of his own child.”[390]

Because the terrestrial king symbolically acquires the attributes of the Universal Monarch, the rites show the local ruler uniting with the mother goddess and reproducing himself within the cosmic womb. He announces that he has been “fashioned in the womb” of the great mother,[391] and after invoking “the womb of the sky with the power of the seed of the spirit which is in it,” then proclaims: “Behold me, I am the seed of the spirit which is in her.”[392] “O Nut . . . it is I who am the seed of the god which is in you.”[393] 

Frankfort deals with the subject at length, showing that the king’s impregnation of the mother goddess and simultaneous birth in the womb was central to Egyptian ritual. The king “enters her, impregnates her, and thus is borne again by her”[394] exactly as the great god himself. 

If the king receives his authority on earth through personification of the Universal Monarch, it is through the same identification that he attains the heavenly abode of the goddess upon death, taking up his residence within the sheltering womb as an Imperishable One. In a hymn to Nut, King Pepi beseeches the goddess, “Mayest thou put this Pepi into thyself as an imperishable star.”[395] “Mayest thou transfigure this Pepi within thee that he may not die.”[396] 

Frankfort comments: “. . . the notion of a god who begets himself on his own mother became in Egypt a theological figure of thought expressing immortality. The god who is immortal because he can recreate himself is called Kamutef, ‘bull of his mother.’”[397] The king aspires to duplicate the feat of the Universal Monarch, giving birth to himself in the womb of Nut. Though the divine marriage and its imitation in kingship ritual involve many complexities and enigmas, the underlying theme remains clearly defined. Symbolically, the king has his home in the cosmic womb; he simultaneously impregnates the goddess and is “born” by her. The source of the ritual is celestial, for it reenacts the First Occasion when the great father, the fiery Seed, took to wife the band of “glory” which congealed around him. The sign of the primordial union is everywhere before us but rarely recognized. It is the sign of the enclosed sun . 

Womb And Thigh 

In connection with the symbolism of the mother goddess one notes that the “womb” is generally synonymous with the “thigh” or “lap.” When ancient reliefs depict the god or king on the lap of the great mother, they refer to the primeval union, in which the father of the gods resides within the goddess’ protective enclosure. 

An Assyrian tribute to Assurbanipal reads: “A meek babe art thou, Ashurbanipal, whose seat is on the lap of the Queen of Ninevah [Ishtar].”[398] Thus the Sanskrit yoni, the female enclosure and dwelling of the great father, may be translated either “lap” or “womb.” The Latin word for “thigh”—femen, feminis—means “that which engenders.”[399] A similar connection occurs in Egypt, where Khepesh, “thigh,” means the womb of Nut housing Osiris or Ra. 

Many gods—in Hindu, Greek, and European myth—are thus “born from the thigh,” like the Egyptian Kheprer who “brought himself into being upon the thigh of the divine mother.”[400] 

This overlapping symbolism of womb, lap, and thigh will be met more than once in the following sections.

Womb And Cosmos 

To identify the mother goddess as the band of the enclosed sun is to equate the goddess with Saturn’s Cosmos, the revolving company of the gods. The goddess Nut is “the representation of the cosmos,” states Piankoff.[401] Thus while the Egyptian khut signifies the “circle of glory” formed by the secondary gods, Khut also means the mother goddess. And though the shenit are the “princes” in the divine circle, the goddess is Shentit; both words derive from the shen, the bond of the Cosmos. 

Figure 14. The Man-Child on the lap of 

the mother goddess. (a) Cyprus; 

Figure 14. (b) Egypt; 

Figure 14. (c) India; 

Figure 14. (d); 

Figure 14. (e) British goddess Gwen. 

The religious texts confirm the equation. “He is the one who cometh forth this day from the primeval womb of them [the secondary gods] who were before Ra,” reads the Book of the Dead.[402] “I have come forth between the thighs of the company of the gods.”[403] What the Book of the Dead calls “divine beings of the Thigh”[404] means the celestial assembly, the secondary gods who collectively form the womb of cosmic genesis. 

But the interrelated symbolism does not stop here. Every Egyptian priest knew that the mother goddess was the revolving egg housing the central sun. Indeed, the hieroglyphic image of an egg at the end of the divine name means “goddess.” Of Osiris the goddess Isis declares: “His seed is within my womb, I have molded the shape of the god within the egg as my son who is at the head of the Ennead.”[405] The god within the womb is the god within the egg, who is the god ruling the Ennead (circle of gods). 

By the same equation the womb becomes the garment or belt girdling the sun: the deceased king prays that he may be girt by the goddess Tait,[406] or announces that “My kilt which is on me is Hathor.”[407] In the case of the goddess Neith the womb becomes the shield. (The shield is the hieroglyph for Neith.)[408] Though the symbols of the primeval enclosure differ, each is presented as a form of the great mother, whose entire character answers to the visible Saturnian band . 

The Hermaphrodite 

In the Great Magical Papyrus of Paris, dated around the first half of the fourth century A.D., appears the Oracle of Kronos. The recommended prayer invokes Kronos as “Lord of the World, First Father,” but also bestows on the god the peculiar title “Man-Woman.”[409] Kronos is Saturn, the primeval sun. To what aspect of the god did this title refer? 

In Saturn the primal male and female principles unite, yielding the hermaphrodite, or androgyne. Few of the preeminent deities of antiquity are free of this duality. The Sumerian Anu, Ninurta, Tammuz, and Enki; the Hebrew El; the Hindu Vishnu, Brahma, and Shiva; the Iranian Zurvan; the Mexican Quetzalcoatl—all reveal a female dimension. Their spouse is never wholly separated from their own body. 

The Egyptians esteemed Atum as “that great He-She,”[410] while celebrating Amen as the “Glorious Mother of gods and men.”[411] The Egyptian word for this primeval unity is Mut-tef, or “Mother-Father.” From what has been established in the previous pages concerning the symbolism of the enclosed sun there can be little doubt as to the concrete meaning of the Mut-tef. The word signified the organized Cosmos,[412] the central sun and its enclosure, considered as the male and female parents united in a single personality: the great father’s body was also the god’s spouse, the womb of heaven. 

This duality finds expression in the Egyptian term khat, which may be translated either “body” or “womb.” The man-child Horus, who dwells in the womb of Hathor, is Khenti-Khati, at once “the dweller in the body” and “the dweller in the womb.” The Litany of Ra proclaims that “the khat [body] of Re is the great Nut,” the mother goddess.[413] 

Egyptian artists showed the body of Osiris forming the circle of the Tuat, the abode of Osiris or Re. [414] But every student of Egyptian religion knows that the Tuat, house of rest, was the womb of Nut. The hermaphrodite, then, personifies the original Cosmos, which means Saturn and his visible dwelling . G. S. Faber, in his comprehensive study of ancient ritual, notes that the great father (“the Intelligent Being”) “was sometimes esteemed the animating Soul and sometimes the husband of the Universe, while the Universe was sometimes reckoned the body and sometimes the wife of the Intelligent Being: and, as the one theory supposed a union as perfect as that of the soul and body in one man, so the other produced a similar union by blending together the husband and wife into one hermaphrodite.”[415] 

With Faber’s assessment it is impossible to disagree, so long as one remembers that to the ancients, the “universe” (Cosmos) meant Saturn’s home, not a boundless expanse. That Saturn’s Cosmos acquired a dual character as the god’s “body” and as his “spouse” is sufficient to explain the primordial Father-Mother. 

The hermaphrodite or androgyne, Eliade tells us, is “the distinguishing sign of the original totality [i.e., the All].” Its customary form is “spherical,” he notes.[416] We thus arrive at the following equation: 

Band of the enclosed sun=Cosmos (island, egg, cord, girdle, shield, circle of the gods)=body of the great father=womb of the great mother.

next

The Holy Land

NOTES

[128] Olcott, Myths of the Sun, 141-42. 

[129] Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, 627. 

[130] Ibid., 76. 

[131] Boll, “Kronos-Helios,” 343, R8. 

[132] Bouché-Leclerq, L’Astrologie Grecque, 93, note 2. 

133] Hyginus, Poetica astronomica II, 42. 

[134] This explanation is tentatively accepted by Bouché-Leclerq, op. cit., 93, note 2. 

[135] “Allein seither ist völlig klar geworden und wohl auch allgemein zugestanden, dass die Gleichsetzung von Kronos, dem Gotte des Planeten Saturn, mit dem Sonnengotte weit vor jedem möglichen griechischen Missverständnis liegt: es handelt sich um ein altes und durch Keilinschriften vollkommen sicher bezeugtes Stuck des babylonischen Sternglaubens . . . ” Boll, op. cit., 343. 

[136] Plato, Epinomis, 987c. 

[137] Ibid. 

[138] “Ich habe seitdem die gleiche Variante noch an verschiedenen Stellen beobachtet: in Ptolem. Tetrab, p. 67, 8 schreiben die zwei alten Ausgaben Kronon während die beste Hs. V (Vatic. 1038) hlion hat; bei Rhetorios in Catal, codd. astrol. VII 203, 9 steht in dem Hss. R V Kronon, in T hlion: gemeint ist hier wie bei Ptolemaios der Planet Saturn. auffallender und wohl kaum ursprünglich ist die gleiche Variante in dem Pinax des Kebes, wo die 3. Hand des sehr späten Cod. C (XV. Jahr.) und dije Hs. Meibojms am Rande zweimal (p. 1, 1.2, 7 Pr.) den Namen (Kronon) des Gottes, dem der Tempel mit jenem Pinaz geweiht ist, durch ‘Hlion ersetzen.” Op. cit., 344. 

[139] “So viel ist aber sicher, dass nach einer oft bezeugten Vorstellung der Babylonier und Syrer Kronos und Helios eine und dieselbe Gottheit sind, die sich in den zwei mächtigsten Gestirnen des Tages und der Nacht offenbarte,” Ibid., 345-46. It must be emphasized, however, that the proposed distinction between day and night sun is unnecessary. There is only one primitive sun: Kronos-Helios. 

[140] Diodorus II. 30-33. 

[141] Jastrow, “Sun and Saturn “, 163-78. 

[142] Ibid., 171. 

[143] Semitic Mythology, 55. [Emphasis added.] 

[144] Albright, “The Mouth of the Rivers,” 165. 

[145] Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, 57. 

[146] Hildegard Lewy, “Origin and Significance of the Mâgen Dâwîd,” 335. 

[147] Die Kosmologie der Babylonier, 115-116, 136f . 

[148] Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, 129. 

[149] Schwabe, Archetyp und Tierkreis, 492. 

[150] This is, for example, the opinion of both Boll and Jastrow, in the articles cited above in notes 131 and 141. 

[151] Chapter II. 

[152] E. Neumann, for example, speaks of a presolar ritual in which “the reckoning of time begins and ends with nightfall. Even in Egypt the evening is the time of ‘birth,’ and the morning, when the luminous world of the stars vanishes, is a time of death, in which the day-time sky devours the children of night. This conception, which was universal among early mankind, becomes understandable if we free ourselves from the correlation day=sun.” The Great Mother, 26. One of the many peculiarities of the Egyptian sun-god is that he not only brings the day, but shines at “night.” The Book of the Dead reads, “I am that god Re who shineth in the night.” To the “father of the gods” the Egyptians sang, “ . . . thou lightest up the habitation of the night . . . ” Re Harmachis, in the Dendera temple inscriptions appears as “the shining Horus, the ray of light in the night.” Budge, op. cit., Chapter CXXXI; Jung, Symbols of Transformation, 269; Brugsch, Thesaurus Inscriptionum Ägyptiacarum, 16. In this connection one cannot fail to notice the number of ancient gods whom scholars customarily deem “night suns.” Egypt is a good example. The popular god Osiris is almost always termed a sun of night, as is Ptah Seker. Budge, op. cit., 7n, follows a well-established practice when he designates Atum “a form of Re and the type of the night sun.” The same appellation is given to the Sumero-Babylonian Tammuz, the Hindu Varuna and Yama, the Iranian Yima, and the Greek Dionysus to name a few of many examples. In the conventional view Saturn, for reasons which remain unspecified, is the planetary representative of the night sun. 

[153] On the original priority of the night among the Hebrews and Arabs see Ignaz Goldziher, Mythology Among the Hebrews, 62-74. In Babylonia it was in “later times” that “the reckoning of time was altered to the extent of making the day begin with sunrise, instead of with the approach of night.” Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, 78. 

[154] Faber, The Origins of Pagan Idolatry, Vol. I, 236-37. 

[155] Albright, op. cit., 165-66. 

[156] Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians, Vol.II, 102. 

[157] An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolic Philosophy, LXXIX. [Emphasis added.] 

[158] See Uno Holmberg, Die Religiösen Vorstellungen der Altaischen Völker, 37. 

[159] Quoted in Faber, A Dissertation on the Cabiri, Vol. I, 134. 

[160] Schlegel, L’Uranographie Chinoise, 630-31. 

[161] Ibid., 631. 

[162] De Saussure, “Le Système Cosmologique Sino-Iranienne,” 235-97; “La Série Septénaire, Cosmologique et Planétaire,” 333-70; see discussion of de Saussure’s findings. 

[163] Langdon, op. cit., 94. 

[164] On Anu as the ruler of the celestial pole, see also Jensen, op. cit., 17-19. 

[165] Ibid., 136. 

[166] Quoted in Campbell, Occidental Mythology, 243. [Emphasis added.] 

[167] Quoted in O’Neill, The Night of the Gods, 737. [Emphasis added.] 

[168] Schlegel, op. cit., 631. 

[169] Makemson, The Morning Star Rises, 5. 

[170] Alexander, North American Mythology, 95. 

[171] Coomaraswamy and Nivedita, Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists, 378. 

[172] Langdon, Sumerian Liturgical Texts, 137. 

[173] Lenormant, Origines de l’Histoire, Vol. I, 393. 

[174] Schwabe, op. cit., 8, 388. 

[175] Op. cit., 748. 

[176] The Tree at the Navel of the Earth, 124. [Emphasis added.] 

[177] Clark, Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, 59. 

[178] Ibid., 41. 

[179] Budge, Gods, Vol. I, 309. 

[180] Piankoff, The Shrines of Tut-Ankh-Amon, 36. 

[181] Les Origines de la Genèse et l’Enseignement des Temples de l’Ancienne Egypte, 20-21, n.2. 

[182] Clark, op. cit., 58. 

[183] Ibid., 58. 

[184] Renouf, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, 147. 

[185] Faulkner, The Coffin Texts, Spell 257. 

[186] Budge, From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, 394. 

[187] Pyramid Texts 1016. 

[188] Pyramid Texts 1168-70. 

[189] Quoted in Piankoff, Mythological Papyri, 29. 

[190] Hence Re not only “comes out” in the Tuat, but “rests” there also. Piankoff, The Litany of Re, 25. 

[191] Budge, The Book of the Dead, 398. 

[192] Ibid., 644. [193] From Fetish to God, 190. [Emphasis added.] 

[194] Renouf, op. cit., 120. 

[195] Budge, The Book of the Dead, 260. 

[196] Renouf, op cit., 7. 

[197] Budge, The Book of the Dead, 388-89. 

[198] Ibid., 251. 

[199] Budge, The Papyrus of Ani, 123, 134. 

[200] Ibid., 105. 

[201] Budge, Gods, Vol, I, 332. 

[202] Pyramid Text, 854. 

[203] Massey, Ancient Egypt, 426. 

[204] Énel, op. cit., 117. 

[205] Budge, A Hieroglyphic Vocabulary to the Theban Recension of the Book of the Dead, 174. 

[206] Budge, Gods, Vol. I, 508-9. 

[207] Renouf, op. cit., 151. 

[208] Ibid., 67. 

[209] Ibid., 45. 

[210] Ibid., 113. 

[211] Piankoff, The Tomb of Ramesses VI, 106. [Emphasis added.] 

[212] Piankoff, The Litany of Re, 40-41. [Emphasis added.] 

[213] Budge, From Fetish to God, 401. [214] Jensen, op. cit., 11. [215] Ibid., 16-19; Brown, Researches into the Origins of the Primitive Constellations, Vol. I, 269; Vol. II, 191. 

[216] Langdon, Semitic Mythology, 94; Jensen, op. cit., 17f . I certainly cannot accept, however, Jensen’s identification of Anu with the pole of the ecliptic. 

[217] Sayce, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, 482. 

[218] Op. cit., Vol. II, 184, 190. 

[219] Lenormant, op. cit., 393. Ea (Eriki) was the “king of destinies, stability and justice.” O’Neill, op. cit., 490. 

[220] Langdon, Sumerian Liturgical Texts, 137. [Emphasis added.] 

[221] Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, 172. 

[222] Sayce, op. cit., 177, note 1. [Emphasis added.] 

[223] Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 387. [Emphasis added.] 

[224] Sayce, op. cit., 177, note 1. [Emphasis added.] 

[225] Ibid., 173. [Emphasis added.] 

[226] Op. cit., Vol. II, 191. 

[227] Jastrow, op. cit., 638-41. [Emphasis added.] 

[228] Akkadian Genesis, 24, quoted in O’Neill, op. cit., 78. 

[229] Nuttall, Fundamental Principles, quoting an article in the London Standard, October 19, 1894, entitled “A prayer meeting of the star-worshippers.” [Emphasis added.]

[230] Bhagavata Purana, Chapter 4. 

[231] Eggeling, Satapatha-Brahmana IV, 3, 4, 9. [Emphasis added.] 

[232] Agrawala, Sparks from the Vedic Fire, 82-83. [233] Velanker, Rigveda Mandala VII, 147. 

[234] Agrawala, op. cit., 66. 

[235] Chatterji, The Bhagavad Gita, 145. 

[236] Études sur l’Hindouisme, 19. 

[237] Keith, The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads, Vol. I, 96; Coomaraswamy, A New Approach to the Vedas, 8, 60-61, 92, note 71. [Emphasis added.] 

[238] Perry, Lord of the Four Quarters, 122. [Emphasis added.] 

[239] Ibid., 121-22. 

[240] Whitney, Atharva Veda, XIX, 45.4. 

[241] Eggeling, Satapatha Brahmana, III, 6.3.15. [Emphasis added.] 

[242] Quoted in de Santillana and von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill, 138. 

[243] Velanker, op. cit., 219. [Emphasis added.] 

[244] Op. cit., 40, citing Rig Veda X.82.6. 

[245] Ibid., 70. 

[246] The Thousand Syllabled Speech, Vol. I, 112. 

[247] Eggeling, Satapatha Brahmana II.5.1.14; see also note 4, p. 36; Coomaraswamy, A New Approach, 68. 

[248] Coomaraswamy, Elements of Buddhist Iconography, 42-43. Ibid., 43-45, 52, 55. Comparable to the firmly seated position of the Egyptian great god is the position of the “resting” or “meditating” Buddha. The Buddha “sat himself down cross-legged in an unconquerable position, from which not even the descent of a hundred thunderbolts at once could have dislodged him.” Quoted in Campbell, Oriental Mythology, 16. [Emphasis added.] 

[249] Schlegel, op. cit., 507. 

[250] Jung, Alchemical Studies, 20. [Emphasis added.] 

[251] Ibid., 25. 

[252] “Seelische Führung in Lebenden Taoismus,” in Yoga und Meditation im Ostem und im Westen, 193. 

[253] Op. cit., 631. 

[254] “La Série Septenaire, Cosmologique et Planétaire,” 342. 

[255] “Origine Chinoise de la Cosmologie Iranienne,” 305. 

[256] Op. cit., 161, emphasis added. 

[257] Ibid., 42, 56, 95; Burland, The Gods of Mexico, 94. 

[258] Op. cit., 77; see also p. 80. [Emphasis added.] 

[259] Alexander, op. cit., 95-96. [Emphasis added.] 

[260] Stevenson, The Zuni Indians, 46, 80. 

[261] Darmesteter, The Zend Avesta, Miher Yast XII, 49-50. 

[262] “Le Système Cosmologique,” 292-3. 

[263] Studies in The Iconography of Cosmic Kingship, 13. [264] Bloch, “Le Symbolisme Cosmique et les Monuments Religieux dans l’Italie Ancienne,” 24-25; see also L’Orange, op. cit., 29. 

[265] Op. cit., 28-29. 

[266] “The Ideas of the Western Semites Concerning the Navel of the Earth,” 55. 

[267] Isaiah 14: 13-14. 

[268] Aion, 135. 

[269] Jung, Alchemical Studies, 209, note 8. [Emphasis added.] 

[270] Ibid., 226. 

[271] B.L. Goff, for example, discusses the sign (here) as an “explicit” solar form in Mesopotamia. Why explicit? Because “it is surrounded by rays.” Goff, Symbols of Prehistoric Mesopotamia, 22. 

[272] This has, in fact, become the popular explanation of the Egyptian Aten. 

[273] Reymond, The Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple, 12-13, 65-67, 86. 

[274] Ibid., 12-13. 

[275] Ibid., 185; Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods, 38, note 21. 

[276] Faulkner, The Coffin Texts, 100. 

[277] Lacau, Traduction des Textes des Cercueils du Moyen Empire, 30. 

[278] Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians, Vol, I, 340. 

[279] Lacau, op. cit., 43. 

[280] Faulkner, op. cit., 43. 

[281] Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, 382. Tem is also “the dweller in his disk.” Ibid., 94. 

[282] Piankoff, The Shrines of Tut-Ankh-Amon, 11. [Emphasis added.] 

[283] Gods, Vol. II, 69. 

[284] The Hebrew Shekinah was a “cloud of glory,” recalled as the visible dwelling of God. Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, 138-40. 

[285] A Dictionary of Symbols, 40. This is what a Babylonian text recalls as the “veil of gold in the midst of heaven”; the texts compare it to a crown. Sayce, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, 274. To the Hindus this was the Khvarenah, “the Awful Royal Glory.” Perry, Lord of the Four Quarters, 143. 

[286] Brown, Researches into the Origins of the Primitive Constellations, 185. 

[287] Lenormant, Les Origines de l’Histoire, Vol. I, 13. The Babylonian sun-god “rises” within the enclosure, but “sets” within it also. Sayce, op. cit., 171, 513. The subject is the central sun. 

[288] Best, The Astronomical Knowledge of the Maori, 35-36. 

[289] Faulkner, op. cit., 102. 

[290] Ant. Rom. lib. i cap. 23 quoted in Faber, A Dissertation on the Cabiri, 66. [Emphasis added.] 

[291] O’Neill, The Night of the Gods, 32. 

[292] Ibid., 32. 

[293] Massey, Ancient Egypt, 373. 

[294] See O’Neill, op. cit., 32-35, 615f . Guenon, Formes Traditionelles et Cycles Cosmiques, 38; Le Roi du Monde. 

[295] Clark, Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, 74. 

[296] Major Sandman Holmberg, The God Ptah, 119. 

[297] Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, 577. 

[298] Ibid., 493. 

[299] Renouf, Egyptian Book of the Dead, 108. 

[300] Ibid., 133. 

[301] Op. cit., 56. 

[302] Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion, 137, citing Orphic Hymn 71. 

[303] Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, 413. 

[304] Agrawala, Sparks from the Vedic Fire, 23f . 

[305] Op. cit., 413-415. 

[306] Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, 46-47; Alchemical Studies, 82. 

[307] Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, 104. 

[308] Frankfort, op. cit., 44. 

[309] Gods, Vol. I, 291, summarizing the research of Brugsch. 

[310] Reymond, op. cit., 66. 

[311] On the rite of “stretching the cord” see ibid., 239, 308f . 

[312] Semitic Mythology, 109. 

[313] De Santillana and von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill, 132-133, citing Orphic Hymn 13. [Emphasis added.] 

[314] Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 317. 

[315] Budge, The Papyrus of Ani, 182. 

[316] Renouf, op. cit., 203. 

[317] Op. cit., 239. 

[318] Piankoff, The Litany of Re, 52. 

[319] Faulkner, op. cit., 126. 

[320] Zaehner, Zurvan: A Zoroastrian Dilemma, 111f . 

[321] Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, 11, 12, 44f . 

[322] Renouf, op. cit., 51. 

[323] Ibid., 258. 

[324] Piankoff, The Wandering of the Soul, 12. 

[325] Renouf, op. cit., 264. 

[326] Piankoff, The Wandering of the Soul, 27. 

[327] Piankoff, Shrines of Tut-Ankh-Amon, 34. 

[328] Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, 189. 

[329] Faulkner, op. cit., 4. 

[330] Hassan, Hymnes Religieux du Moyen Empire, 100. 

[331] Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, 644. 

[332] Hassan, op. cit., 54. 

[333] Pyramid Text 732. 

[334] Piankoff, Mythological Papyri, 14.

[335] Budge, Gods, Vol. I, 309. 

[336] Ibid., 308. 

[337] Ibid., 314. 

[338] Piankoff, Wandering of the Soul, 87. 

[339] Piankoff, The Tomb of Ramesses VI, 192. 

[340] Reymond, op. cit., 119. 

[341] Thus, the Litany of Re invokes the god as “the One Joined Together.” 

[342] Clark, op. cit., 74. 

[343] Renouf, op. cit., 39. 

[344] Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, 561. 

[345] Renouf, op. cit., 116. [Emphasis added.] 

[346] Budge, The Papyrus of Ani, 29. 

[347] Piankoff, The Tomb of Ramesses VI, 29; see also Piankoff, The Litany of Re, 29. 

[348] Lacau, op. cit., 33. 

[349] It can hardly be doubted that the assembly in heaven served as the prototype of all sacred assemblies on earth: just as the king represented the Universal Monarch, his councilors or assistants answered to the circle of secondary divinities around the central sun. Among the Greeks, notes Onians, “a circle appears to have been the ritually desirable form for a gathering.” Op. cit., 444. Similarly, the Sumerian GIN, “to assemble,” possesses the sense “to circle, turn, enclose.” Langdon, A Sumerian Grammar, 216. This aspect of the sanctified assembly is, of course, universal. (Even today we speak of a circle or band of assistants, followers, or companions without really knowing why.) 

[350] Campbell, Occidental Mythology, 43. 

[351] The Great Mother, 227. 

[352] The Origins of Pagan Idolatry. 

[353] Allegro, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, 92. 

[354] Agrawala, The Thousand Syllabled Speech, 115. 

[355] Coomaraswamy, Elements of Buddhist Iconography, 23. 

[356] MacCulloch, Eddic Mythology, 174. 

[357] Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, 281. 

[358] Best, op. cit., 

[359] Eggeling, The Satapatha Brahmana, Part II, 394. 

[360] Brown, op. cit., Vol. I, 268. 

[361] Preface to Perry, op. cit. 

[362] Thousand Syllabled Speech, 127. 

[363] “Die Schöpferische Mutter Göttin,” 221-324. 

[364] Patai, op. cit., 239. 

[365] Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, 127. 

[366] Pyramid Text 838. 

[367] Budge, Egyptian Book of the Dead, 4. 

[368] Bleeker, Hathor and Thoth, 48. 

[369] Budge, From Fetish to God, 30; see also Pyramid Text 1607. [Emphasis added.] 

[370] Brugsch, Religion, 324. 

[371] Mythological Papyri, 6. 

[372] Piankoff, The Tomb of Ramesses VI, 92. 

[373] See, for example, the use of the sign (here) in Budge, Papyrus of Ani, 71. 

[374] Faulkner, op. cit., 258. 

[375] Pyramid Text 990. 

[376] Pyramid Text 532. 

377] Pyramid Text 1416. 

[378] Pyramid Text 1688. 

[379] Renouf, op. cit., 148. 

[380] Budge, From Fetish to God, 416. 

[381] Budge, Gods, Vol. II, 260. 

[382] Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, 180. [383] Frankfort, op. cit., 177. 

[384] Budge, Gods, Vol. I, 431. [385] Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, 134. 

[386] Frankfort, op. cit., 180. 

[387] Ibid., 177. 

[388] Budge, Osiris: the Egyptian Religion of Resurrection, 68. 

[389] Pyramid Text 1505. 

[390] Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, 337.

[391] Frankfort, op. cit., 42. 

[392] Pyramid Text 532. 

[393] Pyramid Text 1416-17. 

[394] Frankfort, op. cit., 177. 

[395] Ibid., 177; see Pyramid Text 782. 

[396] Ibid., 177. 

[397] Ibid., 180. 

[398] Ward, The Cylinder Seals of Western Asia, 154. 

[399] Onians, 182. 

[400] Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, 134. 

[401] Piankoff, Mythological Papyri, 6. 

[402] Renouf, op. cit., 265. 

[403] Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, 594. 

[404] Ibid., 392. 

[405] Faulkner, op. cit., 125. 

[406] Renouf, op. cit., 205. 

[407] Pyramid Text 108. 

[408] Budge, Gods, Vol. I, 451. 

[409] De Santillana and von Dechend, op. cit., 147. 

[410] Clark, op. cit., 41. 

[411] Énel, Les Origines de las Genese et l’Enseignement des Temples de l’Ancienne Egypte, 13, note 4. 

[412] Ibid., 11f . 

[413] Piankoff, The Litany of Re, 54. 

[414] Schafer, “Altägyptische Bilder der Auf- und Untergehenden Sonne,” 20. 

[415] Origins, 165. [Emphasis added.] 

[416] Patterns, 423. See also Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return.