Book of the Beginnings

The 'end of the world' is the end of an aeon, age or cycle of Time, and we have seen the prophecy fulfilled in the rare lunar and planetary conjunction which occurred on the 3rd of March. It now remains for scientific astronomy to determine the length of this particular cycle of Time and define its relationship to the period of precession.

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Excerpt:

Travellers who have climbed and stood upon the summit of the Great Pyramid of Giza tell us how all that is most characteristic of Egypt is then and there in sight. To the south is the long necropolis of the desert, whose chief monuments are the pyramids of Abusir, Dashur, and Saqqara. That way lies the granite mountain flood-gate of the waters, which come winding along from the home of the hippopotami to leap down into the Nile-valley at last with a roar and a rush for the Mediterranean Sea. To the north there is desert also, pointed out by the ruined pyramid of Aburuash. To the west are the Libyan Hills and a limitless stretch of yellow sand. Again, there is a grey desert beyond the white line of Cairo, under the Mukattam Hills.

And through these sandy stony desert borders, Egypt runs alongside of its river in a double line of living green, the northward flowing waters and their meadowy margin broadening beneficently into the Delta. Underfoot is the Great Pyramid, still an inscrutable image of might and of mystery, strewn round with reliquary rubbish that every whirl of wind turns over as leaves in a book, revealing strange readings of the past; every chip and shard of the fragments not yet ground down to dusty nothing may possibly have their secret to tell.

The Great Pyramid is built at the northern end of the valley where it relatively overtops the first cataract, nearly 600 miles away to the south, and, as the eye of the whole picture, loftily looks down on every part of the whole cultivated land of Egypt. It is built where the land comes to an apex like the shape of the pyramid itself lying flat and pointing south, and the alluvial soil of the Delta spreads out fanwise to the north. It is near to the centre of the land-surface of the globe. A Hermean fragment shows the earth figured as a woman in a recumbent position with arms uplifted towards heaven, and feet raised in the direction of the Great Bear. The geographical divisions are represented by her body, and Egypt is typified as the heart of all. They set the base of the Great Pyramid very near the heart of all, or about one mile 568 yards south of the thirtieth parallel of latitude.

There, in the stainless air, under the rainless azure, all is so clear that distance cannot be measured, and the remotest past stands up close to you, distinct in its monumental forms and features as it was thousands of years ago; the colour yet unfaded from its face, for every influence of nature (save man) has conspired to preserve the works of art, and make dead Egypt as it were the embalmed body of an early time eternized.

Once a year the deluge comes down from above, flowing from the lakes lying far away, large as inland seas, and transforms the dry land into a garden, making the sandy waste to blossom and bear the 'double-breasted bounteousness' of two harvests a year, with this new tide of life from the heart of Africa. Not only does the wilderness flush with colour, for the waters, which had been running of a dull green hue, are suddenly troubled and turned crimson. The red oxide of iron mixes with the liquid and gives it a gory gleam in the sunlight, making it run like a river of blood.

There is an antithesis to the inundation in another phenomenon almost as unique. This is found in the steady continuance of the north wind that blows back the waters and spreads their wealth over a larger surface of soil, and enables the boatman to sail up the river right against the descending current. Everything Egyptian is typical, and when we see how the people figured the Two Truths of mythology as the two factors of being, and how they personified breath and water, we shall more or less perceive the initiatory import of this wonderful arrangement of wind and tide, and its combination of descending and ascending motive power.

The Nile water is highly charged with ammonia and organic matter, which are deposited as manure. It is, for instance, three times as rich in fertilising matter, whether in suspension or in solution, as the Thames at Hampton Court.

The Great Mendes Stele says:-

'The entire wealth of the soil rests on the inundation of the Nile that brings its products.' This bounty was spread out for all by the breath of the beneficent wind. Num, Lord of the Inundation, is painted on the monument as the Green God, and the limit of the inundation was the measure of Egypt's greenness. The waters that brought the silt clothed the soil with that colour just so far as they were blown.

From the beginning Lower Egypt, the Delta, was a land literally rained down by the inundation as a gift of the gods. For the clouds arise from their several seas and sail off heavily-laden toward equatorial Africa, and there pour forth their weight of water during a rain of months on mountain slopes that drain into the fresh lakes until these are brimmed to bursting, and their northern outlet of birth is the Nile. The White Nile at first, until the Abyssinian highlands pour into it their rushing rivers of collected rain with force enough to float a mass of silt that is part of a future soil, the presence of which in the waters makes the Blue Nile; then the river becomes the turbid Red Nile of the inundation, and as it spreads out fan-wise towards the Mediterranean Sea, it drops that rich top-dressing. of soil or the very fat of land and unctuous mud-manure, every year renewed and rained down by that phenomenal flood. We shall find the whole of the deluge legends of the world, and all the symbolical deluge language used in astronomical reckoning, are bound up inseparably with this fact of the inundation of Egypt.

The universal mythical beginning with the waters, the genesis of creation and of man from the mud, are offspring of this birthplace and parentage. In no other part of earth under heaven can there be found the scenery of the inundation visibly creating the earth, as it is still extant in the land of marvel and mystery. Only in Egypt could such a phenomenon be observed as the periodic overflow of the river Nile, that not only fertilises the fields with its annual flood, but actually deposits the earth, and visibly realises that imagery of the mythical commencement of all creation, the beginning with the waters and the mud, preserved in so many of the myths.

According to Aulus Gellius, Egypt was named Aeria. The Egyptian Aur (later Aer) is the name of the river Hebrew Iar. Aeria is the land of the river, possibly with the further meaning of the pure, as ia means to wash, whiten, purify. Another name of Egypt is Tameri. Ta is to drop, heap, deposit, type; meri is the inundation, Tameri is land thus deposited. The vulgar English to ta is a child's word, and it means to deposit soil; also Ta-meri reads the gift of the inundation, the gift of the goddess Meri who has a dual form as Meri-Res (South) and Meri-Mehi (North). Egypt is also designated the Land of the Eye. The eye of the cow shedding an emblematic tear was a type of ta-ing.

It is also called Khemi, the land of the gum-tree, and the acacia gum-tree supplied another symbol of shedding substance; or, of the kamai-plant, from which the Egyptians obtained a precious oil. Khemi, Egypt, is personified as a female who wears on her head a sign which Wilkinson thought indicated 'cultivated land,' but it means the land created from the waters, determined by the sign of marshland or land recovered from the waters. The sign is the determinative of hat, chaos, or precommencement, and its true value may be found in the Cornish hatch, a dam.

Egypt is often called Kam, the Black Land, and kam does signify black; the name probably applied to the earliest inhabitants whose type is the kam or ham of the Hebrew writers. But kam is likewise to create, and this was the created land; visibly created like the gum from the tree by droppings. Kam is the root and has the value of the word chemistry, and the land of Kam was the result of Nature's chemistry, aided by the hatches or dams.

The Assyrians called Egypt Muzr. Muzau is source, an issue of water, a gathering or collecting. It is the Egyptian mes, the product of a river. Now it is important for the present purpose to wring the meaning out of Egyptian words, drop by drop, every one is portentous and symbolical. For example, mes means mass, cake, chaos, it is the product of the waters gathered, engendered, massed. The sign of this mass was the hieroglyphic cake, the Egyptian ideograph of land (U). This cake of mesi was figured and eaten as their bread of the mass, a seed-cake too as the hieroglyphics reveal. And the cake is extant today in the wafer still called by the name of the Mass, as it was in Egypt. Mes, the product of the waters and the cake, is likewise the name for chaos, the chaos of all mythological beginning. Mes, then, the mass or product of the river when caked, is the primeval land, the pure land periodically produced from the waters, the land of Mesr, whether of black mud or red.

We find a word in Ethiopic similar to metzr meaning the earth, land, soil. Mazr, or mizr, is an Arabic name of red mud. There is, however, a mystical reason for this red applied to mud as a synonym of source or beginning.

These derivations of the names from Kam, the created land; mes, the product of the river; tameri, the soil and gift of the inundation, show that Lower Egypt was designated from the soil that was shed, dropped, wept, deposited by the inundation of the Nile, and that the natives were in various ways calling it the Alluvial Land.

But the Hebrew name of Egypt, Mitzraim, applies to both lands. For this we have to go farther than Lower Egypt, and mes, the product of a river, the mud of mythology.

We may rest assured, says Brugsch-Bey, that at the basis of the designations Muzur (Assyrian), Mizr (Arabic), Mitzraim (Hebrew), there lies an original form consisting of the three letters m r s, all explanations of which have as yet been unsuccessful. His rendering of the meaning as Mazor, the fortified land, the present writer considers the most unsuccessful of all. Mest-ru and Mest-ur are the Egyptian equivalents for the Hebrew Mitzr, plural Mitzraim, and the word enters into the name of the Mestraean Princes of the Old Egyptian Chronicle. Mest (Eg.) is the birthplace, literally the lying-in chamber, the lair of the whelp; and ru is the gate, door, mouth of outlet; ur is the great, oldest, chief. Mest-ru is the outlet from the birthplace. In this sense the plural Mitzraim would denote the double land of the outlet from the inland birthplace.

There is a star 'Mizar' in the tail of the Great Bear, the typhonian type of the genetrix and the birthplace, whose name is that of Lower Egypt or Khebt. Mest (Eg.) is the tail, end, sexual part, the womb, and ur is the great, chief, primordial. Thus Mitzraim and Khebt are identical in the planisphere as a figure of the birthplace, found in Khebt or Mitzraim below. Mest-ur yields the chief and most ancient place of birth which is not to be limited to Lower Egypt.