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Myth of Noah

Posted in agnoticism, Atheism, Atheist, belief, Bible, Christianity, culture, faith, random, religion, thoughts with tags , , , on October 7, 2010 by chouck017894

All Genesis myths were presented to make them appear as sequential happenings, but they are really parallel tales that personify aspects of the Creation processes.  The story of Noah, the “Flood,” and the ark is undoubtedly the most obvious mythic presentation.  The story of Noah appears in Genesis, the book of  beginnings, from chapters five through ten.  Chapter five begins, “This is the book of the generations of Adam,” and quickly moves from Seth, Adam and Eve’s last son, through an alleged genealogy listing to Methuselah and his son Lamech who “begat” Noah.  Methuselah is presented as having lived 969 years, and his son Lamech lived 182 years.  Thus is the illusion of time accounted for in mythological staging.

Noah, in many respects, is cast as the second Adam.  By chapter 6:9 God found Noah to be “…a just man and righteous in his generations…”  Some translations say he was perfect in his generations.  “In his generations” is the sacred language way to represent the energies that involve to produce formations in which life is to take on its creative potential.  This is why in the next verse it is quickly added that Noah walked with God, which is the mythographers’ way of stressing that the story is set in the primordial stages of Creation.  But God allegedly judged the whole earth to be corrupt and filled with violence: which really refers to the violent energy aspects issuing out of Source which function as an amoral creative power and therefore the prototypes of planetary formation are yet to be established as the supportive means of matter manifestation.

The cleansing “Flood” of the Noah myth explains in an entertainment way the condensing of electrodynamics configurations that flood out of Source and are borne into visibility.  This process of Creation forces can be assessed as the rescuing and delivering element that is buoyed upon unlimited waters (primal energies).  This rescuing and delivering element has served as the motivation for over four hundred myths of world inundation in which chosen ones were carried in an ark, chest or ship to be cast upon the summit of matter.  Hindu myth has the vessel Argha; Greek myth has the Cista or the Argo; scriptural myth calls it the ark—a word borrowed from Egyptian language, etc.  The Life Principle is borne into matter, and this development is then  personified with regional names.  In Babylonian myth the Life Principle is personified as Utnapishtim; to the Persians it was Yima; the Chaldeans knew it as Xesuthras; the Greeks named it Deucalion; the Hindu version was Vaivasvata; the Mexican personification was Nata; and the Hebrew myth personified it as Noah.  Unfortunately, not even the name Noah is original with the Hebrews; it was taken from the Chaldean name Nuah, which served to identify the third person of the Chaldean Trinity as well as being the third sign of their Zodiac.

The “Flood”of Hebrew scriptures is said to have occurred in Noah’s 600th year (Genesis 7:11).  The number six has a tradition of representing perfection and/or fulfillment.  God created all things in six days, for example.  Noah, like Adam and other starring characters of Genesis, is one of the many personifications of the Life Principle that is used throughout Genesis, only this time it dramatizes its movement upon the violent aspects of the Creation energies that flood out of Source toward manifestation as matter.  And as with Adam, God’s first command to Noah and his sons after the flood (Genesis 9:1) is exactly the same as the command to Adam and Eve: Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.

The highlight of the Noah tale is his implied fall from grace, which occurs very soon after touching upon Mount Ararat (solid matter).  The  first thing that Noah allegedly did, beside build an altar and offer up prayers of thanksgiving, was to plant a vine which, by evening, had borne fruit from which Noah had already made potent wine.  Perhaps all he did was transplant a mature vine carried in the ark, and yet there is still the problem of making a full-bodied wine by evening.  Anyway, Noah got blotto-drunk.  In other words, primal energies have been transformed into the “wine of life” and Noah becoming intoxicated signifies his embodiment of matter life.  This is identical in meaning as other Genesis characters, Jacob for instance, falling asleep and thereafter assuming a new identity (Israel/matter).  In this version, however, the Noah character personifies planetary life.

As the energy manifestation as a new planetary identity, he is portrayed as in a stupor with life and is naked.  The story element of his sons walking backwards to cover their father’s nakedness simply personifies the planet being clothed with vegetation.  His sons, Japheth and Shem, represent the still manifesting pre-physical energy elements with which the Life Principle is clothed as matter, which is why the sons are said to move backwards to do it (Genesis 9:23)—they cannot yet see the evolutionary results of their actions.  Feeling himself being lightly covered, “Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his little son had done unto him.” (Genesis 9:24)  Discovering someone naked is not something that is done to them.  If things have seemed a little strange so far, it now becomes bizarre.  Noah’s “little son” is cursed by Noah for accidentally seeing Noah naked.  But it is the grandson of Noah, named Canaan, son of Ham, who receives the curse!   Something is being covered up here, and it isn’t Noah.

There are a number of myths from different ancient cultures with a similar plotline, but they adhered more closely to scientific principles of the creative process in their telling.  In those myths the elder god, as he lay sleeping, is castrated by his youngest son.  In Greek myth, for example, the young god Cronos (personified time, which is relative only to the matter plane) castrated his sleeping father Uranus (personification of first light that attends elementary conditions).  In an older scriptural version, Noah suffered the same fate of castration by his son Ham, but this was purged from “revealed” word;—and in the process the meaning of matter elements being severed from primordial conditions was removed and replaced with the absurd sense of false shame for being seen in the natural state.  God hadn’t seen anything wrong with nakedness in the Garden of Eden.  The priest-authors attempted some originality in their desperation to clean up the borrowed myth elements, which is why the grandson, who had not seen Noah naked, illogically wound up receiving the curse.  The curse laid upon Canaan was that he was condemned to be the servant  to his uncles Shem and Japheth.   If any logic can be said to be found in this, it is that the grandson of Noah personifies the next developmental phase in lifeforms, thus figuratively he “serves” them by continuing the energy process into matter. 

Noah’s tale then gets a quick conclusion, saying that he lived 350 years after the Flood and died at the age of 950.

Related post: Possible Background of Flood Myths

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Possible Background of Flood Myths

Posted in Atheist, Bible, history, nature, prehistory, random, religion, thoughts with tags , , on October 7, 2010 by chouck017894

A world flood is not something that the Hebrew assemblers of scripture or their ancestors could have personally experienced.  The account of flood-like conditions presented in the Noah myth was “borrowed” from a Chaldean source, and then possibly flavored with details from Chinese flood accounts.  Remember, for generations before the 7th century BCE composing of scripture there had been vast migrations of people everywhere due to unsettled conditions around the world.  So the authors would know, if only at random, the myths of far east people.  The most likely historical time of the alleged worldwide flood would be c. 20,000 BCE when glacial problems and polar imbalance resulted in planetary disaster.

As recently as 20,000 BCE the North Pole of planet Earth was situated in the area now known as Hudson Bay in NE Canada.  This was the age of massive glaciations, and around 19,000 BCE (most likely 18,612 BCE) the tremendous weight of the glaciers began to strain the planet’s landmasses to their breaking point.  The total volume of ice that then covered the Northern Hemisphere has been estimated to have been around six million cubic miles.  There was, in addition, extensive glaciations in the Southern Hemisphere.  Consequently the  oceans of the world were around four hundred feet lower than in our modern world.  This was the setting for an unimaginable catastrophe for the planet.

For some reason in this period of time there was a sudden increase by about six to ten degrees centigrade in the temperature of the surface waters in the Atlantic Ocean.  This may have been caused by internal friction as land plates collapsed from the weight of the glaciers.  The great volumes of ice that had taken around forty thousand years to accumulate began to melt.  As billions of tons of ice became liberated, various sections of the Earth’s crust that had been pressed down by the weight began to rise, sometimes with sudden disastrous results.  There had been clear signs everywhere that planet-wide changes were building.   

Ancient Assyrian clay texts give an account of pre-deluge conditions; in that account the god Enlil ordered that a famine should prevail in the world, and so a lack of rain followed which led to the failure of the irrigation systems. Rather rapidly human life became so desperate that people were eating grass, but even plant life quickly became depleted.  Everywhere people begged heaven for water.  Families broke apart in sheer madness of hunger, and eventually this resulted in cannibalism.  As inconceivable as it may seem, the bulk of the world population that had long endured such drought and suffering would perish in an onslaught of water. 

As the ancient ice melted, glacier slippage began across the Northern Hemisphere, and landmasses started to bobble upward.  In the Southern Hemisphere a continent-sized chunk of ice plunged into the South Polar region which set off horrendous consequences.  An immense tidal wave was suddenly triggered in the Antarctic waters, and the avalanche of water rushed northward into the waters of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans.  This sudden change generated massive violent storms that released torrents of rain that swept ahead of the tidal wave.  According to the ancient clay texts, a great flooding of Earth was loosed “…on the seventeenth day of the second month to the month of Addar”—or lasting to the twelfth month.  In an older Noah version, Noah opened the hatch of the ark on the first day of the first month, which corresponds to the watery catastrophe lasting into the twelfth month.  So the inundating waters prevailed for five months.

Of this disastrous period the more ancient Sumerian Kings List reported that 120 “shars” had been wiped away virtually overnight by the flood.  A “shar,” researchers tell us, was equivalent to 3,600 years!  So 120 “shars” amount to 432,000 years!  This happens to match exactly with claims made by the Babylonian priest-astronomer named Berosus.  Berosus, using archives in the temple of Bel at Babylon, wrote in Greek three books of Babylonian-Chadean history.  Berosus died c 260 BCE.

When the North Pole shifted c. 20,000 BCE from where it had been located in what is today the Hudson Bay region, and moved to its present location, incomprehensible havoc overwhelmed the entire Earth from a double whammy.  The planet’s relatively thin crust was strained everywhere.  And the greatest continental rift that occurred in that timeframe is still visible down the length of the African continent.  It stretches from about 36 degrees north latitude in Syria to about 28 degrees south latitude in east Africa.  The jagged fracture line almost follows along a meridian, stretching for over one-third of the distance from pole to pole.  The sinking of this strip of Earth’s crust created the longest land valley on the planet.  This fracture begins in Syria, in the  Orontes River Valley, and jags back at Baalbek (Lebanon), extending to the Litani River Valley.  From there the break-line traces to Lake Hulch in Palestine, continues along the Jordan River to the Sea of Galilee, and on to the Dead Sea.  From there the rift courses along the Araba Valley to the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea and extends across this area into Africa. It is here that the rift is exposed in its enormity, tracing from the Sabie River in Transvaal and extending eastward to the Gulf of Aden, and then westward to Tanganyika and the Upper Nile.  This great rift culminates in the central Congo, marked by Lake Moeris and Lake Upemba.

Is it simply coincidence that a number of the sites mentioned along this great rift happen to play prominent roles in Hebrew and Christian scripture?

Related post: Myth of Noah

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