The Ancient Tradition

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Music

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Listening to the ancient tradition.  A Wonk Media Production.  Music provided by Joseph McDade.  Here’s your host, Dr. Jack Logan.

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Welcome to the ancient tradition.  I’m your host, Jack Logan.

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It’s great to be with you today. It’s been a minute since our last episode.  Part of the reason for that is because I put together a second episode on the Seventh Ages.  And then after I did that, I decided that there was just too much information in that episode that was going to jump us ahead  of where we are. So I decided to shelve that episode for a couple of months until we’re ready to cover that ground. And that kind of put me behind a little bit. In terms of the podcast,

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We’ve been discussing what the ancients tell us took place during the first time. And the ancients tell us that during this time, heaven and earth were very close together. They weren’t separated like they are now. And the ancients tell us that during this time, earth was a terrestrial paradise. There was no sickness or illness or death, no corruption, no decay  and time  as we currently understand it did not exist.

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In episode number 43, Tierra in Ilo Tempere, we talked about some really important cosmological and theological reasons why the earth was in a paradisal state when it was in very close proximity to heaven. So if you’ve ever wondered why the earth was so different in the beginning than it is now, be sure and check out that episode. As we discussed in the last two episodes, episodes number 64 and 65, one of the primary ways the ancients expressed

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the closeness that existed between heaven and earth at that time during the first time was in conjugal terms as  a cosmic embrace. The ancients conceived of heaven  as female  and the earth as male or sometimes it was vice versa. So for example, in ancient Egypt, heaven was personified by the goddess Newt  and the earth was personified by the god Gab.

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in conjugal terms,  Newt, heaven, and Geb, earth, were husband and wife. In ancient Egyptian iconography,  Newt is  usually depicted in anthropomorphic form  as a naked woman. She’s usually covered in stars  and she’s arched  over a depiction of Geb, her husband, who represents the earth. Now in these depictions,

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there’s a large space between them. So they’re clearly  not in a conjugal embrace. And that’s because these images are meant to depict what heaven and earth looked like  after they had been separated. Ancient Egyptian texts like the pyramid texts imply when they mentioned that Newt and Geb were separated, that they were originally in a close  unified state.

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And we can see this in pyramid text 519. And  this is the Samuel Mercer translation. Quote, give thou these thy two fingers to end, which thou gave us to the beautiful one,  daughter of the great God, when the sky was separated from the earth. Which again, implies that at one point they were together. Now during this primordial time,  before heaven and earth were separated,

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Ancient Egyptians attested that Newt and Gab, as husband and wife, gave birth to children, the  oldest of whom was a very, very important son, Osiris, who  was the central  defining figure in Egyptian religion. On page 177 of Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, R.T. Rundle Clark writes the following of Newt and her husband, Gab,

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Osiris. And note  in this section how what Clark says is tied to so many of the other doctrines of the ancient tradition that we’ve discussed to this point in the program. The Cosmic Law, Righteousness,  the Sacred Center, and Cosmic Kingship. Clark writes, quote, from Geb and Newt came five children of whom  Osiris was the eldest.

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and heir because he emerged fully crowned from his mother’s womb. As king, Osiris is master of all living things, of government and the cosmic order, which is Ma’at. Osiris dwells  in the primeval place. His throne  is placed upon the creation mound, which is the primordial hill. He sits in judgment in a palace  on the primeval mound.

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which is in the middle of the world. He has become the master  of righteousness. Now, everything in that little passage that I just read to you  is going to be significant for today’s episode, but you’re going to have to connect the dots. All right. As we know, Osiris’s kingship and death and resurrection  served in ancient Egypt as the template or prototype for all Egyptian kings.

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upon an ancient Egyptian king’s death, the deceased king, by way of some very,  very important rituals,  joined the imperishable stars, which is symbolic in heaven,  where he  united with Osiris  and  became an Osiris, a cosmic king, and was called by Osiris’s name. For example,

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The deceased King Pepe was then known as Osiris Pepe. And as I’ve mentioned several times on the program in the ancient world,  names were used to describe the true  nature of that being. So to be given a new name, the name Osiris,  meant that the deceased King Pepe had triumphantly acquired  an exalted  nature  like

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Osiris’ nature. He’d become in character just like Osiris. He himself had victoriously become a master of righteousness. Interestingly, if you remember in our last episode,  the seven sages perfect in lofty wisdom, we learned that ancient Mesopotamians taught that the religious tradition that they practiced had been revealed to them very, very early in their history by the god Enki and by seven primordial sages.

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they described the religious tradition that was revealed to them as wisdom  and that’s because it contained  a significant esoteric component to it a body of sacred knowledge that was strictly reserved for individuals who had been fully initiated and what’s interesting about this  is that the ancient Egyptians taught  the same  thing  they attest

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that the god Thoth,  the scribe of Atubre, taught them sacred esoteric rituals that were necessary for one to become an Osiris, to take on Osiris’s exalted nature,  which was referred to in the great hymn of Osiris  as the, quote,  secret rites. Now, we’re going to talk about this more when we get into ritual, but I wanted to mention it here while we were talking about new

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and Geb’s offspring, their son Osiris.  A text known as the Great Hymn of Osiris is found  on the still of Ammon Mose, which is currently housed in the Louvre  and it’s dated to 1295 BC. It reads, starting in line one, quote, Hail to you, Osiris, Lord of eternity, King  of gods, of many names,

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of holy forms of secret rites  in the temples. So there you go. Now was a bit of  a side road, but  it serves to illustrate, like we discussed in the previous two episodes, the ancient Egyptians and ancient Mesopotamians taught that when heaven and earth were close together in cosmic union, God and his wife  gave birth to children, uh be they gods or human beings.

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or like Osiris, a god who quote,  emerged fully crowned from his mother’s womb  and who lived on earth as a human being, the first king of Egypt. We’re going to talk a lot more about Osiris  as Egypt’s first king  in an episode that’s coming up very soon. It’s important. If you’d like to see pictures of ancient Egyptian depictions of Newt and Geb or the still of Ammon Mose, you can find them on

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page for this episode. All right. So at this stage in the podcast, the earth has been fully formed. It’s in a glorious paradisal state. It’s full of flora and fauna. The heavens are full of God and his wife’s children, be they gods or spirit like children, spirit like children who we learned from the Zuni were anxious to be born on earth so that they could quote grow wiser. But at this point in the podcast,

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No human beings have been born on Earth yet. So how did we get here? How did we human beings come to be  on planet Earth? For the answer to this, we’re gonna let the ancients speak. We’re gonna let them tell us where we came from  and how we got here. As you might imagine, ancient cultures all over the world left us.

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literally hundreds of different accounts of how human beings came into existence. And when we hear them for the first time, they often sound, you know, fantastical or wild. And sometimes they even sound outright contradictory. But we know a little bit more about the ancient world now. So when we apply our understanding of ancient symbolism, we start to notice something remarkable with a few  notable exceptions.

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we find that these accounts are telling us essentially the same story about how we human beings came to be on planet earth. Two important stubborn bits emerge. The first stubborn bit, which is stubborn because we find it in  nearly every account, is that like on earth where human beings are created by other human beings, the ancients tell us that the first human beings were created by other beings.

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beings exalted in character and righteousness. Supreme beings, which  we refer to as God  or as a divine pair, a God and Goddess. They tell us that we human beings came into existence  not by chance, but by a deliberate purposeful  act, by intent. The second stubborn bit, which we find

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in a large portion of these accounts is that the first human beings originated in the sacred center of the cosmos  and were then born on earth or emerged through which we call emergence myths or first appeared on earth in the sacred  center of the world. Am I going to go through all of these accounts? That would take us way too long.

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The vast majority of these accounts fit nicely into just six categories.  So we’re going to cover four of these categories today in this episode. And then the remaining two categories we’ll cover in the next episode. The first category consists of accounts that attest that human beings are the divine offspring of the sexual union or divine marriage between God and his wife. And we discussed several of these accounts in detail in episode number 64. So I’m not going to rehash them here.

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These accounts attest that we human beings were born in heaven in the sacred center  as spirit-like children to a divine father and mother. We find these accounts among the Sumerians where human beings are the children of the high god An and his wife Ki. We find them among the Minyong where human beings are the children of the god Milo and his wife Seti. Among the Maori where human beings are the children of the god Rengi and his wife Papa.

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among several others. The second category consists of quite well-known accounts of God forming human beings out of earth, clay, or dust, where God crafts humans like an artisan or a builder or a potter, and then he breathes life or consciousness or spirit into the physical body. And we can find these accounts  in Mesopotamia,  the Bible.

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among the Yoruba in Africa, among the ancient Egyptians in the account of the god Canum, and among the Greeks in the account of Prothamesius, just to give you an idea. These accounts attest that God intentionally created physical bodies for human beings out of the elements found on the earth. In general, these accounts don’t tend to emphasize the sacred center, but sometimes they do. For example, in episode number seven,

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the king of the four corners. If you remember, we read in the book of the holy secrets of Enoch how Yahweh explained to Enoch that he gave Adam the name Adam, which in Hebrew means man or human, and which is closely related to Adama, meaning ground or earth, which evokes the idea that God formed physical bodies for human beings out of the physical elements found on earth. Yahweh

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It then goes on to associate Adam’s name with the cardinal points, north, south, east, and west. In chapter 30, Yahweh tells Enoch the following, speaking of Adam. And again, this is Yahweh himself speaking, quote, there was none comparable to him. And he’s speaking of Adam on earth from all my existing creations. I gave him a name. So there’s the importance of names again.

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And by giving him that name, he is establishing that he had a different nature than those of a different name. From the four directions, from east, from west, from north, and from south, I called his name  Adam. We’ve talked about this several times on the program. We know in the ancient world that the four cardinal directions were used and they continue to be used by religious people all over the world to designate the sacred center.

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where the north-south and east-west lines cross marks the sacred center of the world. In Greek,  Adam,  A-D-A-M, is actually an acronym for the cardinal points,  where the Greek word for east is Anatolai,  A, and west is Desis, D, and north is Arktos,  A, and south is Massimbria,  M.

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spelling A-D-A-M, Adam, which is pretty neat because it makes Adam’s name itself an acronym for the Sacred Center. And it’s in this text that  Yahweh himself gives Adam this name, associating him directly with the Sacred Center. This is a great example of an account that stresses not only that God intentionally created a physical body for human beings,

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It also emphasizes that that body was associated with the sacred center. The third category consists of accounts of human beings having originated in the cosmic egg. In many of these accounts, God emerges from the cosmic egg and then he creates human beings. We know in the ancient world, the egg symbolized the sacred center, the cosmic womb where God dwells and

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out of which all life emerges. So I want to give you an example of this in Hinduism in the Vishnu Purana, Book 1, Section 2, it reads, and this is the Horace Wilson translation, quote, this vast egg, O sage, compounded of the elements  and resting on the waters was the excellent  natural abode of Vishnu in the form of Brahma.

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And there Vishnu, the Lord of the universe, whose essence is inscrutable, assumed a perceptible form. And even he himself abided in it in the character of Brahma. So here we see that Brahma lived inside the egg, which is referred to in the passage right before this one as the womb. Now listen to what the text tells us was inside the egg or the sacred center. The text reads, quote,

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In that egg,  O Brahman, were the continents and seas and mountains, the planets and divisions of the universe, the gods, the demons,  and mankind. This text tells us that human beings were in the egg. We surmise that the human beings in the egg must have been in a spirit-like form because in the Vishnu Purana 1.7.1, it tells us that Brahma embodied those spirits.

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in forms and faculties that were derived from his corporeal body. The text reads, and again this is the Horace Wilson translation, quote, from Brahma were born mind engendered progeny with forms and faculties derived from his corporeal nature, embodied spirits produced from the person of that all wise deity.  One of Brahma’s progeny was

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Manu. Book one, section one goes on to read, quote, then Brahma created himself the Manu Swambhuva. In the Vedic and Puranic traditions, Manu Swambhuva  is the first man, the progenitor of mankind, the Hindu atom, if you will, from whom Hindu scripture tells us came the rest of the human race. In Sanskrit, Swambhuva literally means self-born.

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Schwam means self and Bhuvah means born. So why did Hindus give Manu the name  self-born? Well, they did that to make a very important doctrinal point about Manu’s origin. See, whereas the rest of the human race, you and me, were born by way of human parents through a human womb, Hindus want us to understand that Manu the first man was not. He was not

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born of human parents, he was self-born. He was self-born because he appeared on earth without earthly parents. Because his physical body had been born directly from Brahma’s corporeal body. He was a literal corporeal son of Brahma. The text says as much when it says that Brahma created progeny from his quote, corporeal nature, embodied spirits produced from the person of that all-wise deity.

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In the footnote to this text, Horace Wilson notes that this is restated in the Vedas where it says of Brahma and Manu, quote, so himself was indeed his son. Manu is Brahma’s son. In the same footnote, Wilson states, speaking of how Manu was conceived, quote,

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The commencement of production through sexual agency is here described with sufficient distinctness. This Hindu account is a good example because it contains both stubborn bits. First, it attests that we human beings lived in the sacred center inside the egg before we were born on earth. It attests  of a pre-earth existence. And second,

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It attests that God intentionally created a physical body to house Manu’s spirit, which is clear in the text when it refers to Brahma’s progeny as, quote, embodied spirits.  The Vishnu Purana goes on to state that Manu’s wife, Sattarupa, the Hindu Eve, if you will, was also self-born, having also been born of Brahma.

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The Vishnu Purana 1.7 reads,  then Brahma created himself the Manu Swambhuva, born of and identical with his original self for the protection of created beings. And the female portion of himself, he constituted Sattarupa, whom the divine Manu Swambhuva took to wife. From here, the text gives a genealogy of Manu and Sattarupa’s children.

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The Srimad Bhagavatam 3.12.57 tells us this of their children, quote, from them all the world filled with population. The Srimad Bhagavatam goes on to refer to Manu as the quote, father of mankind in 3.13.6. It reads, after his appearance, Manu, the father of mankind, along with his wife,

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thus addressed the reservoir of Vedic wisdom, Brahma, with obeisance and folded hands. So I gotta stop here for a second, because here we see that Manu and Satarupa, the Hindu Adam and Eve, from the very onset of human history, worshiped Brahma, who was, quote, the reservoir of Vedic wisdom, which clearly indicates that Manu and Satarupa had been instructed from the very beginning in a specific and well-defined

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religious tradition. For the purposes of today’s episode though, it’s Manu and Sattarupa’s origins that are of interest to us. In the passages we’ve discussed, Hindus clearly attest that Manu and Sattarupa were the direct progeny of Brahma and that they went on then to produce the rest of the human race. So it’s pretty easy to do the math here.  If Brahma gave birth to Manu,

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and Sattarupa and Manu gave birth to us, then it follows that every single one of us is the genealogical offspring of God. It attests that we human beings are of divine lineage.  And if God  is a cosmic king and God’s wife is a cosmic queen, as Hindus in most of the ancient world attest, which we’ve covered in depth on the program, it follows

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that we human beings are the royal  offspring of the king and queen of heaven. Before I leave Hinduism, I want to make one last point about Manu. See, in Hinduism, Manu Swambhuva  is a title. It can refer to a specific human being, but it’s not a proper name. It refers to a role. It refers to a male being born directly from Brahma, from whom human lineages then begin.

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The Encyclopedia of Hinduism says this of Manu, quote, Manu is the name of the first man in each of the designated ages in Indian tradition, a progenitor somewhat akin to the Western biblical atom. There have been an infinite number of ages in the past as there will be in the future. Therefore, the Manus are infinite in number.

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That’s a pretty mind bending thought. And I think it’s one worth thinking about. Like we see in this account, which attests that human beings existed inside the egg before coming to earth. We saw a similar thing, which I mentioned in episode number 64, among the Chinese belong people who attest that human beings existed inside a giant gourd, which  is

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their cultural expression of the cosmic egg or the holy of holies or the sacred center before coming to earth. Zhu Tingni in her book Chinese Myths summarized the account as follows on page 207. Quote,  when the world was created, there were no humans, just a giant gourd that stood on a mountain. Inside it nurtured thousands of humans.

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but they could not get out until a swan flew up and pecked a hole  in the thick skin, allowing them to exit. In this account, the hole the swan pecked in the gourd is important and we’ll get to that in a couple of minutes. But I also want to point out that the swan  is a bird and we talked about avian symbolism a long, long time ago in the program, but it’s worth thinking about that when you think about what’s said here. There are a lot more accounts of gourd born peoples.

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like this, especially in this region of the world in Southeast Asia among the Hmong, Yao, Yi, and Zhuang peoples. And don’t forget, as we’ve already discussed on the program, in Asia, the Gord is the functional equivalent of a cosmic arc, which was symbolized in ancient Egypt by a royal bark, in ancient Mesopotamia by a coracle, among the Hebrews by the Ark of the Covenant,

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and among some Native American peoples by a raft. Again, these symbols, the egg, the gourd, the ark, the raft, all symbolize the sacred, cosmo-sized space God created out of the chaotic Primordial waters. And it’s in the sacred center of this cosmo-sized space that God, the heavenly king, dwells, which is why the ancient Egyptians depict the high god, Re, the king of the gods, decked  in

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royal attire seated on a throne in the center of a royal bark. And as we’ve seen here in episode 64, several ancient cultures attest that we human beings were originally born in and lived in that sacred, cosmicized space before we were born on earth. And the E-Ethnic group of Southwest China attest that upon the death of the physical body,

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the soul returns to the gourd. A scholar by the name of Zuo Hong Zhang notes on pages 61 and 62 of his book, Anthropology of Aesthetics, which was published in Beijing, the following, quote, in the temple of Weishan County, Yunnan province, besides enshrining the founder, Shi Nulo of Meng, the soul collecting ancestor,

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holding a gourd in hand is placed on the right side of Xi Nülo. This signifies that even after death, a person originating from a gourd  is destined to return to the gourd. All right. The fourth category of accounts  is quite similar to this. In this category, the ancients attest that the first human beings descended to earth from the heavens, which is akin to the egg or gourd.

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Eben von Tonder, an independent researcher who studied the myths of human descent from heaven across the continents, writes,  quote,  One reoccurring theme across various mythologies is the descent from heaven to earth, facilitated by a divine or supernatural means such as a rope, chain,  web, or similar object.

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Now you might surmise if you’ve been listening to the program for a while, when the ancients talk about a rope or a chain or a web upon which humans descended to earth, they aren’t talking about an actual rope or an actual chain or an actual web. They’re using these temporal objects as a way to help us understand  an important feature of the spiritual realm.

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And since there aren’t any earthly words that can adequately express or describe this feature of the spiritual realm, they did the best that they could by comparing it to a temporal object that we could understand, a rope or a chain or a web. When we realize this, when we realize that these objects are being used symbolically, then the accounts make a lot more sense. They don’t sound so fantastical and they also start to take on greater significance.

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This  rope  is an  absolutely critical element of the ancient tradition and we’re going to talk about it a lot in coming days. For today’s episode though, this rope is significant because this rope  is what connects the center of the cosmos, the sacred center to the center of the earth. When the first human beings used this rope to descend to the earth, they

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symbolically landed in the very center of the world, the holiest place on earth. They landed or appeared right in the center of the cardinal points where the north-south and the east-west lines cut across each other, which we’ve learned on the podcast was called the Temenos by the Greeks, which was land that was cut out for the gods and from which the English word temple

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is derived. It’s  upon  this  symbolic center of the world that the peoples of the world built their holiest temples like the great temple of Ra  in Heliopolis or Enki’s temple Apsu in Sumer or King Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem or Allah’s grand mosque the Kaaba in Mecca  or the temple of Apollo in Delphi  or the Korakoncha in Cusco

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or the Temple of Heaven in Beijing or the Temple Mayor in Tenochtitlan or Stonehenge  in England or Gobekli Tepe in Turkey  or Angkor Wat in Cambodia or Akiva in Hopeland. All of these temples are either said to be built atop the sacred center of the world or they’re geographically aligned to the cardinal points or the solstice and equinoxes

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to express that they sit in the very center of the world. The entire ancient world is unanimous in its declaration that it is here in this very location, in the temple that sits atop the center of the world, that earth has the ability to unite with heaven. It’s in this temple that heaven and earth are joined together. In fact, Enlil’s temple in Nippur  dated

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clear back to 2500 BC was named Duranki, which in English means the house of the link between heaven and earth or the bond that unites heaven and earth. So when we read accounts of human beings descending to earth on a rope or a chain or a web, what those accounts are really expressing is that the first human beings who descended from heaven and landed or appeared on earth

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emerged or came out of whatever you want to call it, the inner sanctum, the cella or holy of holies of the original temple that stood on that spot. And this temple of course didn’t have to be a brick and mortar temple as we discussed in episode number four  in the Abrahamic religions, the temple that stood atop the sacred center of the world was described as a garden. So  when we keep this background in mind,

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Each of the human beings  in these accounts descend a rope or a chain from  the center of heaven to the center of earth, connecting the origin of human beings to the sacred center. With that, let’s take a look at a couple of these accounts. The first one is very short. It comes to us from  the Abuan people of Nigeria.

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It’s found on page six of a dictionary of African mythology that was published by Oxford University Press. It reads, quote, the first man to settle on the earth was Abu’a. Igule, his wife, is the mother of people. Abu’a and Igule  sent from the supreme god,  Ake, descended from heaven on a rope.

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they were the first humans on earth. The next example comes from the Crotchy people of Togo. So in this account, Wulbari  is the creator god. And this is found in the same dictionary of African mythology on pages 262 and 263. The account reads, quote, in the beginning, he, Wulbari, and man lived close together.

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and Wulbari lay on top of Mother Earth, Asassia. But as there was so little space to move about in,  man annoyed the divinity. In the very olden time, Wulbari sent down some men by means of a chain, and they settled in the kafas. A kafas is like a thicket of trees or shrubs. Between Khoi and Krochi. Now these are our locations in Nigeria.

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which are obviously cultural expressions. At the same time, he sent down some women also by a chain. Now it happened that no men were born in Crotchy and no women in the coffice. The young men did not seem to like this. And at last they arose one day and said to the elders that they were dissatisfied with their enforced celibacy, adding, let us go to the women. Therefore they arose. And that is how Crotchy came by its name.

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and how the Crotchy people originated. The next example comes from the indigenous Woro people of Venezuela, and it’s found on page 179 of Lewis Spence’s An Introduction to Mythology. In this account, the Woro people originated in a world above the sky, and a young hunter by the name of Oconorote chases a beautiful bird, hoping to shoot it with an arrow, but the arrow misses,

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and it causes a hole in the world above the sky. The account reads, quote, the walrose originally dwelt in a pleasant region above the sky where there were neither wicked men  nor noxious animals. A conorote, a young hunter having wandered far in pursuit of a beautiful bird, espied it and discharged an arrow which missed its mark and disappeared.

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While searching for his arrow, he found a hole through which it had fallen, and on looking through it decried the lower world, the earth. He made a rope by which he descended with his tribe.

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The last example that I want to share with you from this category is an account which is told among the indigenous Haudenosaunee people who lived in, and  some of them still live there,  in the Northeastern United States and in the region that’s known as Quebec and Ontario. If you’ve never heard of the Haudenosaunee people, the Haudenosaunee are actually a confederacy of six Native American tribes.  This account is known as Sky Woman.

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The recording I’m going to play was produced by the National Film Board of Canada. And it contains a recording of a Haudenosaunee woman recounting the story of Sky Woman. And she does this in her native tongue. So I’ll play the original recording in the background while I read an English translation. This is a pretty fascinating account because it includes a grand tree, a hole in heaven. It doesn’t speak of a rope or a chain, but

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It does speak of a descent from heaven into the primordial waters. The beginning of the creation of the earth out of the primordial waters, reference to North America or the earth as Turtle Island. And get this, it also includes the dance.  And for the purposes of this episode, the birth of a daughter. So here is the Haudenosaunee account  of Sky Woman.

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Long, long ago, before there was Earth, beings inhabited a world on the other side of the sky. One day, the keeper of the great tree of light became distraught when no one could interpret his dream.

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He then uprooted the great tree of light, creating  a huge hole.  A pregnant woman who lived in the sky world  fell through the hole.  Falling, she reached up and grabbed a hold of some sacred tobacco  and a strawberry plant.  As she tumbled downward, a flock of waterfowl saw her falling and flew up to catch her on their wings.  The muskrat.

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dove to the bottom of the ocean  and retrieved some mud  that he placed on the back of a giant turtle  floating on the sea,  providing a soft place for the sky woman to be placed.  The birds lowered her safely onto the back of the giant turtle.  The sky woman began dancing around and singing.  The mud spread until it covered the entire turtle’s back.

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expanding Turtle Island  to its present proportions.

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Sky Woman, our grandmother  as we know her, gave birth to a daughter,  the mother  of Codino Sony Life as we know her.

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I’m not sure if you caught what she said there. said, Sky Woman, our grandmother, as we know her, gave birth to a daughter, the mother of the Haudenosaunee life as we know it today. According to Haudenosaunee tradition, Sky Woman’s daughter then gave birth to two sons who  then  shaped and prepared the earth so that human beings from Sky World could descend  and inhabit it.

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In other words, the Hodin Ashoni attest, like we saw in episode number 64, that we human beings existed before we came to earth. They tell us that we lived in a place called Skyworld, which they describe as a real inhabited place with a social and moral order very much like, yet more balanced than life on earth. And it’s from this place that we descended to earth.

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Now I absolutely can’t move on until I draw your attention to a couple of striking features in this account. This account is remarkable because it preserves a very important teaching about the structure of the cosmos itself. One that’s going to be even more important in our next episode. In this account, we learned that a beautiful tree, the tree of light,  which I really like, grew in Skyworld. Now, although she doesn’t mention it in this account,

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We learned in other accounts that this tree stood  in the very  center of Skyworld.  In an account of Skywoman that’s housed in the Niagara Falls History Museum, as told by Kay Olin, a Mohawk Indian, we learned that this tree stood in the very center of Skyworld. Olin states,  up above there was a place called the Skyworld where there were beings who resemble human beings

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they were different. These beings had more powers and strength than human beings. They could make things happen just by thinking about it. There was a tree growing in the center of Skyworld. We called the Tree of Light. On that tree grew many different kinds of fruit and the blossoms that glowed in a most beautiful light that lit  up Skyworld.

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If you’ve been listening to the program for a while, you probably could have told me without even hearing Kay Olin’s account that this tree grew in the very center of Skyworld. That’s the only place, the only appropriate residence for this tree. And you probably could have told me without hearing  either account that this tree exuded an absolutely glorious, brilliant light. A light that Olin tells us, quote,  lit  up Skyworld.

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All of this is perfectly in keeping with the symbolism used by the ancients to teach the doctrines inherent in the ancient tradition. Now what’s important here is that when the tree in the center of Skyworld is uprooted, it leaves a large hole in Skyworld. Cosmologically speaking, this opening is very important because it’s this hole that allows passage between heaven and earth. It’s the link between heaven and earth.

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And it’s not at all inconsequential that this hole is located directly beneath the Tree of Light. In fact, that should give you incredible insight into what it is that enables passage between heaven and earth. Now I’ve purposely not spelled out  all of the symbolic meaning of the tree in the whole here, because I want you to think about it for a little bit. Practice thinking symbolically.

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If you’re new to the program and you’re feeling a bit lost, just know that there’s a whole bunch of clues in the back catalog. Now there’s one other aspect of this account that I want to mention. As we’ve already discussed on the program  and is mentioned in this account, the Haudenosaunee  used a turtle to symbolize North America or the entire earth, which they called Turtle Island. And they used a turtle because

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In real life, turtles have the ability to submerge themselves and swim in water. And the water that this turtle was swimming in is to be understood as the primordial waters. Turtles also have strong shells, which look like a little island when the turtle emerges from the water, like the earth looked when it emerged from the primordial waters. In episode number 32, Turtle  Island,

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We learned from another Haudenosaunee Indian named Tonkwe that another special tree grew in the very center of Turtle Island  or  North America or the earth. And this is found in Jasper Dankert’s diary written in 1679. In this account, Tonkwe draws a picture of a turtle in the dirt.  And then he tells Dankert the following, quote,  this said he is a tortoise.

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lying in the water around it. Again, the water here he’s speaking of is the primordial waters. And he moved his hand around the figure, continuing, this was or is all water. And so at first was the world or the earth. When the tortoise gradually raised its round back up high, the water ran off of it, and thus the earth became dry. He then took a little straw

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and placed it on end in the middle of the figure, the drawing of the turtle, and proceeded. The earth was now dry, and there grew a tree in the middle of the earth. Take a second and imagine Tonkwe doing this, drawing a picture of a turtle in the dirt and then taking a piece of straw and placing it upright, right in the center of the turtle’s back to represent the special tree that

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grew in the very center of Turtle Island or the center of the earth. This is important because here we learn that a special tree grows in the center of the earth too. Or as I’m going to argue in a couple of episodes that the tree in the center of Skyworld and the tree in the center of Turtle Island are one and the same tree. If we keep reading, Tonkwe tells us something else  very, very important.

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about the tree that resides in the center of the earth. But I’m going to save that for our next episode, cause it’s going to serve to illustrate a very important point that I want to make about the origin of human beings. But if you can’t wait until then give episode number 32 Turtle Island a listen. Well,  that wraps up this episode as a quick recap. In this episode, we started with the question,

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How did we human beings get here? And from the accounts we’ve covered so far,  we’ve uncovered two important stubborn bits. The first stubborn bit that stubbornly persists throughout the accounts is the attestation that we human beings were intentionally created  or born by another being, like we are here on earth, but in this case by a being far more exalted than we presently are.

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and whom is referred to generally  as God. And the second stubborn bit that shows up with some regularity and is going to show up much more prominently in our next episode  is the attestation that human beings are born or came into this world  through the Sacred Center, the center of the world, the holiest side on earth where the north, south and east-west lines cross and create Holy Ground, a Holy Temple.

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That’s something to think about. That’s it for me. I’ll leave you with the words of William Shakespeare. Knowledge  is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.  I’m Jack Logan.

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You’ve been listening to the Ancient Tradition.  A Wonk Media Production.