The Sun Is The Key
The Sun Is The Key
Discovery of the Origins of the Hebrew Alphabet
Designed as Astronomer’s Notation
from a Cryptogram
in the Xth Column of the Manual of Discpline
of the Dead Sea Scrolls
Original research by
Kathleen Moore Pageot
Dedicated to the scholars who before me expounded their wisdom on the Scrolls and their meaning.
Dedicated to those scribes, scientists, astronomers and mathematicians who composed the Scrolls and who before and after them, communicate, preserve and understand the unique language of the traditions which inform them.
Dedicated to those who answered and heartened the research:
Robin Skelton
Francis Huxley
John Allegro
John Trever
Peter Redgrove
Gwendolyn MacEwen
First Publication:
© 1983, 1993, 1994, 1995, 2021, 2023, Kathleen Moore Pageot
Nota Bene: By default, I am using the uppercase Greek and Hebrew letters for legibility, and rendering the Hebrew left to right when illustrating English letters, but right to left when rendering words. I have used Hebrew and Greek unicode characters in the HTML of this page.
THE SUN IS THE KEY
(An Unfinished Symphony)
Unlocking the Xth-Column Cryptogram
in the Manual of Discipline
— AMN —
“During the ages which ‘ (א, Alef) has prescribed… when the luminaries shine from the holy zenith at the time when they are brought together into a mansion of glory at the entry (coming) of the fixed seasons into the days of the new moon, He (sc God) renews their circuit (rotation) at the time of their conjunction with one another; when they renew themselves (are newly in conjunction), the M [מ, Mem] is great (significant) for all that is most holy and the sign/letter of N [ן Nun] is for the unlocking of (or) to serve as the key to His eternal acts of enduring love.” (DX 1-5)
Over the years, debate has been fascinating and lively on the interpretation of the three letters forming the cryptogram in the above passage. Two of the most interesting theories have been proposed by W. H. Brownlee and A. Dupont-Sommer. To date, both scholars’ ideas on the subject have appeared mutually exclusive, and irreconcilable. I am therefore especially pleased to offer a solution to the cryptogram which confirms the intuition of Dr. Millar Burrows, who said “it may be that there is truth in the ideas of both Brownlee and Dupont-Sommer”.
The Gnosticism of Johannine writings in the New Testament has already been recognized; in proposing the sun as focal to a solution of DX 1-5, I align the informing tradition of this text with that which underlies the Revelation of John the Divine: the Spring equinox. Moreover, the sun is depicted the same way in Revelation as in cultures so diverse in time and place as the Chamulas of Mesoamerica, the Icelanders in their Elder Edda’s “Song of the Sybil”, and the Sumerians in their conception of celestial compass points as navigational aids; it is this same depiction which I see in the Xth-Column cryptogram. Moreover, the tradition most nearly antecedent and influential to the Column passage is found in Babylon during its greatest renaissance in the century immediately prior to the Jewish Captivity: the cult of Marduk, god of the Spring sun and conqueror of Tiamat in the Creation epic, Enuma Elish. DX 1-5 also bears the influence of mystical currents containing the basic principles of later Kabbalistic thought; currents which surface in the evolved Kabbala and in the tradition of Tarot, with clear correspondences to the conceptualizations of the sun in Revelation and DX 1-5.
But first, let us review the conclusions of Brownlee and Dupont-Sommer, relying on the graciousness of Dr. Millar Burrows for an extended quotation from his book, The Dead Sea Scrolls, where he has summarized them neatly.
“The first five lines [of the Xth Column of the Manual of Discipline] contain three mysterious letters in which Brownlee has discerned an acrostic on the three consonants of the Hebrew word amen (‘mn). The aleph (א) is attached in the manuscript to the end of the verb “decreed” (if it is a verb); Brownlee takes this letter, however, as the initial consonant in the Hebrew word for God, ‘elohim’, though he mentions also other possible explanations. The M מ appears in the obscure statement, “The M is large”; the N ן in the equally mysterious statement, “the letter N is for the unlocking of his eternal mercies.” Noting that the shape of the N in this script is like that of an ancient key, Brownlee sees in the passage a probable reference to the Messiah, who with the “key of David” will unlock “the sure mercies” (Isaiah 55:3) of “the God of Amen” (Isaiah: 65:16). Dupont-Sommer rejects Brownlee’s interpretation and asks what a reference to the Messiah would be doing in the midst of an enumeration of sacred times. He regards the aleph of Brownlee’s acrostic as an Aramaic form of the feminine ending of a noun meaning “decree”. What Brownlee takes to mean “the M” is thought by Dupont-Sommer to be either a mistake in the text or the pronoun “they,” emphasizing the suffix in the preceding “their renewing themselves.” Not very likely at best, this explanation involves two or three grammatical difficulties
For the letter “N” Dupont-Sommer offers a striking and attractive explanation of his own.
The letters of the alphabet in Hebrew, as in the Greek alphabet were used as numerals, and the letter N stood for the number 50. Among the Pythagoreans and various Gnostic groups the number 50 was considered especially sacred. Dupont-Sommer quotes two passages from Philo, pointing out that in a right-angled triangle with sides measuring 3 and 4 the hypotenuse measures 5, and the sum of the squares of these three numbers is 50. The number 50 was therefore regarded as the perfect expression of the right-angled triangle, the symbol of the “supreme principle of the production of the world,” as Philo says. In the passage in the Manual of Discipline, Dupont-Sommer connects “the letter N” with the preceding words, the “holy of holies”, reading “the holy of holies and the letter N.” This he takes to be a hendiadys indicating not two things but one, like “this day and age.” The expression “holy of holies and the letter N” means therefore “the supreme sacredness of the number 50.” Brownlee, more plausibly, I think, construes the “holy of holies” with the preceding words “and the letter N.” Dupont-Sommer’s explanation of the N, however, does not stand or fail with this particular detail of interpretation.
For the expression, “the key of his eternal mercies” also Dupont-Sommer finds an explanation in the statement of Philo, for if the number 50 has the supreme sacredness Philo attributes to it, it may well be called the key to God’s eternal mercies. Since the whole passage deals with the observance of festivals, the reference to the number 50 implies that the calendar embodies all the sacredness of the right-angled triangle.
It may be that there is truth in the ideas of both Brownlee and Dupont-Sommer concerning this passage, which is at best extremely obscure and perhaps deliberately so. Barthèlemy points out that the three letters of Brownlee’s acrostic have a total numerical value of 91 (1 + 40 + 50), the number of days in each of the four seasons of the calendar of Jubilees. This indicates, Barthèlemy thinks, that the author of the closing psalm of the Manual of Discipline meant the three letters to be understood as an acrostic.
This may well be so, but it does not exclude the particular significance seen by Dupont-Sommer in the N. Not only the total value of the three letters in the acrostic but also each letter by itself may have had a mystical meaning for the poet.”
Brownlee’s “key of the Messiah” and Dupont-Sommer’s “Pythagorean 50”, can be reconciled primarily by means of the Revelation of John the Divine. G. R. Driver hit upon some of the key material in Revelation without noticing the connection between the texts, while discussing them to illustrate similarities in ciphering techniques used in the Dead Sea Scrolls. He shows how certain passages of Revelation employ cipher to “insist” upon the letters AMN (Greek), which are ן מ א in Hebrew. These passages and others in the Apocalypse reveal how both it and DX 1-5 not only share Amen and the Key of David, but grew out of the same traditions, drawing on the Sumero-Babylonian mythologies — Flood and Creation myths — concerned with the same cosmic event: the rebirth of the sun at Spring equinox. But more importantly, they are the literal key to the “Key of David” that Brownlee sees in the DX 1-5 Nun, and to the full understanding of Amen, so that this paper turns out, in part, to be an extended etymology of the absolute meaning of Amen in Hebrew and Greek, where AMN is a highly compressed and abstracted symbol for the Creation of the world renewed each Spring. The letters of which it is composed are compressed notations for certain mansions of the sky and positions of the sun.
The Key of David will be explored only after several steps of interpretation have been completed, centering on an introduction to Amen, and a study of Alef and Mem in the acrostic. This will allow a further permutation to be derived from AMN by Kabbalistic methods, so that the cryptogram may be read also as Yod, Mem, Nun [נ מ י, Hebrew, here right-to-left] (Yamin) essential to a complete solution of the passage, and connecting it with another important element in Revelation (the “right hand” of the Messiah figure) as well as with other Spring-sun cosmologies.
— AM(e)N —
For now, it will suffice to point out the passages in Revelation that establish that both this text and DX: 1-5 place special emphasis on Amen and the Key of David.
“Both devices [notariqon and gimatrya]… can be traced from the Exile…. Instances of conveying information by means of… ciphers can be found in both Testaments…. the author of the Greek Apocalypse… begins by declaring that his message is ‘from him which is and which was and which is to come… and from Jesus Christ who is the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead…; to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen. Behold! he cometh with clouds… Even so, Amen. I am Alpha and Omega, saith the Lord God…. the Almighty’; and he [John] goes on to tell how he saw ‘seven golden candlesticks and in the midst… one like unto a son of man… who said to him ‘I was dead and behold, am alive for evermore, Amen, and have the Keys of death and hell.’ The writer begins and ends with ‘Amen‘, which is to all intents and purposes otiose; but he immediately plays on the word when speaking of the ‘faithful witness’, so that the reader at once suspects something cryptic.
If then the passage is clothed in Hebrew words, the three letters making up ‘amen‘ (namely alef, mem, and nun) become insistent: the first is the initial letter of “I (‘ani)’, of ‘Alpha (‘alef)’ and of ‘last (‘aharon)’; the second is that of ‘Christ (Masiah)’ of ‘candlesticks (m’norot)’ and ‘angels (mal’akim); of ‘keep (maftehot)’ and of ‘death (mamet)’; and the third is that of ‘faithful (ne’eman)’. Finally ‘amen‘ serves as a substitute for the speaker’s name in ‘these things saith the AMEN‘; for the Hebrew letters for ‘amen have the same value as those for certain names of God. This cipher, then, is based both on the initial letters of the key-words and on their numerical value and are arranged in such a way that the words beginning with those letters are distributed throughout the various clauses, recalls that in Discipline; thus each illustrates the other.”
“…and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength/ And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as one dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not: I am the first and the last:/ I am he that liveth, and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.”
“These things saith he that is holy, he that is true, he that hath the key of David…”
— ALEF —
and Calligraphy of Alef
It was during the Babylonian Captivity that the Hebrew alphabet is said to have been given its final form. From Alef to Tav, the basis of the letters’ meaning and symbolism was here established for all time, within the walls of the City of Marduk, god of the Spring sun, and hero of the liturgical text, the Enuma Elish.
In the century prior to the Jewish Exile, Marduk — who like most other gods experienced his ups and downs in popularity with the tides of war and custom — rose to a place of prominence unequalled since the first inception of his cult around the time of the reign of Hammurabi. I propose that the Marduk cult renaissance of 626 B.C. shed its powerful rays down the scant decades to the Captivity, directly illuminating the formalizing of the structural design of the Hebrew alphabet. The war and creation feats by which Marduk rose to power, according to the Enuma Elish, seem to me clearly crystallized in the shape of the alef, while their telling in the ritual epic includes a preview of the fixing of the sacred times in DX 1-5 by the paths of sun, moon and stars.
In the creation epic, Marduk defeats the great Mother-goddess of the universe, Tiamat, “creator of all”, splits her lengthwise with an arrow, and recreates the world from her corpse. One half he raises above to be the heavens; with the other he establishes the Earth.
“And he shot the arrow that split the belly, that pierced the gut and cut the womb…. The lord rested; he gazed at the huge body, pondering how to use it, what to create from the dead carcass. He split it apart like a cockle shell; with the upper half he constructed the arc of sky, he pulled down the bar and set a watch on the waters…. He crossed the sky to survey the infinite distance…. He stretched the immensity of the firmament, he made Eshara [Earth], the Great Palace, to be its earthly image….”
Structural comparison of the Epic passage with the symbolic tradition of Alef offers striking similarities between the cosmic struggle and the derived shape of the Hebrew letter, so that Alef seems to encompass the Babylonian battle and creation in a graphic cipher. Rabbi Michael L. Munk, in The Wisdom in the Hebrew Alphabet, says:
“…by use of the letters [Alef-Beis], the Holy One, Blessed is He, created all the worlds.”
Moreover:
“[Aleph], the first of all the Holy Letters of the Aleph-Beis, is more than one letter among many others, more even than the first among equals. It is the leader and master of the letters. It is the prime factor in the combinations and constellations that form the very elements of creation….”
and:
“The graphic form of the א [Aleph] symbolizes the infinite, eternal nature of God. It consists of three parts. Its upper right segment is a י [Yod]; its lower left segment is a י [Yod]; and these two letters are connected by a diagonal ? [Vav].” (Wisdom, p. 44)
And Alef, like…
“Every Holy Letter serves as a channel to connect heaven and earth. The א [Aleph] is seen as a ladder placed on the ground reaching heavenward. It consists of an upper י [Yod] and a lower י [Yod], the upper one denoting the celestial and the lower one the mundane.” (Wisdom, p. 54)
Just as Marduk divided Tiamat into heaven and earth, and “pulled down the bar” and “set a watch” to secure the rift, a bar ו (Vav) symbolically divides heaven from earth in the Merubah form of the Hebrew letter, Alef: א is seen as a ladder.
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VAV with its hook does not render in unicode; this is what it looks like. |
The ו (Vav) in Alef may stand not only for the “bar”*, but also for the arrow which slew Tiamat, of whom it has been said:
“Below thou art mighty, yeah! lofty above!”
For, every Hebrew letter, in addition to its tradition of meaning, has a pictograph ascribed to it, and that of the Vav is a hook; a barbed instrument not unlike the fatal arrow. Moreover, Munk discloses a tradition in which Alef is viewed as “a ladder placed on the ground reaching heavenward…. The symbolism… is manifested in Jacob’s dream (Genesis 28:12) as a… vehicle by which angels — messengers of God — ascend and descend to establish communication between earthly and heavenly spheres.” (Wisdom, p. 54)
So, not only is Vav the bar (or bars) restraining the upper waters, but also the weapon of Marduk linking above and below through the Centre, which is, itself, symbolized, for example, by the stone Jacob took for his pillow.
Stone, altar, house, palace and temple are all images of the Center. The paired Yods, reflecting and ‘mirroring’ one another across the bar, confirm this and recall the exultation of Marduk in the Enuma Elish: “I have made Earth as the mirror of Heaven” (Poems of Heaven and Hell, p. 13); for “he made Esharra to be its earthly image”. Just as Alef was “leader and master of the letters”, so did the “rule” of Marduk surpass that of the “gods” (Sun Songs, p. 178).
Again, like Alef in DX 1-5, Marduk was the “prime factor in the combinations and constellations that form the very elements of creation…”, for after severing Tiamat into heaven and earth, he…
“established the stations of the great gods. The stars and the constellations he fixed; he ordained the year, and marked off its sections. Twelve months he divided by three stars. And when the days of the year he had fixed according to the stars, he established the station Nibir [Jupiter] to mark their bounds, that none of the days might deviate, nor be found lacking. The mansions of Bel and Ea he established with Nibir. He opened great gates on both sides of the firmament, made strong the bolts on the left and on the right. In the midst of heaven he placed the zenith. Nannar, the moon-god, he brought forth and intrusted the night to him; he placed him there, as the luminary of night, to mark off the days; month after month he fashioned him as the full moon, saying: “At the beginning of the moon, when evening begins, let thy horns shine to mark off the heavens.”
How like the function of Alef in the Manual of Discipline, which ‘prescribes’ the ages “when the luminaries shine from the holy zenith at the time when they are brought together into a mansion of glory at the entry of the fixed seasons into the days of the new moon…”. By virtue of its first-phase “horns,” the earliest symbolism of the moon identifies it with the ox or bull; “the Babylonian god, Sin, was called ‘the powerful calf of Enlil’, while Nannar, the moon god of Ur, was described as a ‘powerful young bull of the sky…’ … ‘the young bull with strong horns,’ etc. In Egypt, the lunar divinity was ‘the bull of the stars’.” And it is the moon that is commemorated in the ancient Hebrew or Canaanitish alphabet, among whose pre-Exilic letters we find an early Alef as the pictograph of an ox or bull.
The Canaanitish immediately predates the square or Merubah form of the Hebrew alphabet which came into use after the Babylonian captivity; and the Merubah form clearly defines the solar-cult ascendancy in what I call not merely the Merubah form but the new “Marduk-Alef,” while retaining its lunar origins of the ox or bull from the Canaanitish. For, in order to maintain the economy of the sacred, the old tradition had to be assimilated, not eliminated; thus the companion pictograph ascribed to the post-Exilic Alef is the ox, ensuring the continued representation of both the solar and lunar cycles, with the solar usurping ascendant power, and the moon – at least in function – retaining pride of place, as was established in the Enuma Elish:
“New Moon, when you rise on the world, six days your horns are crescent, until half-circle on the seventh, waxing still phase follows phase, you will divide the month from full to full.
Then wane, a gibbous light that fails, until low down on the horizon sun oversails you, drawing close his shadow lies across you, then dark of the moon — at thirty days the cycle’s second starts again and follows through for ever and for ever.
This is the road you take, and when you close the sun, speak both of you with justice judgment uncorrupt…”
Though this passage gives primacy to the Moon as regulator of times, its concluding line echoes that of the solar-oriented passage in 1 Enoch lxxiv 12 (an acknowledged influence on DX 1-5), “And the sun and the stars bring in all the years exactly, so that they do not advance or delay their position by a single day unto eternity; but complete the years with perfect justice in 364 days.”
Brownlee has suggested that the Alef in DX 1-5 must be an abbreviation of the “el” or “elohim”, making “God” or some similar word the subject of “has prescribed”. Whether as an abbreviation or alone, the Marduk-Alef more than adequately fulfills this task; for the congregation of the gods in Enuma Elish unanimously accords his title to the victorious Marduk:
“They shouted together,
GREAT LORD OF THE
UNIVERSE!
this is his name, in him we trust.”
Moreover, the title and sentiment expressed in this passage recall the notariqon of the acrostic AMN: “The Lord and faithful king,” so that whether one regards the DX 1-5 Alef as an abbreviation for God, the subject of “has prescribed,” or as an element of the cryptogram, the meanings ultimately agree.
If DX 1-5 intends to “harmonize” the motions of sun and moon, as proposed by Prof. Bowman and Dr. Obermann, this may not only be a Samaritan feature, but a trend toward solarization of the sky deity originating in the Marduk tradition handed down from the Babylonian captivity.
Marduk’s character is not purely solar, either; he bears obvious attributes of his father, Ea, the god of storms, also infused into the new Marduk-Alef by its affinity with the swastika, symbol not only of the sun, but of whirling air. Kabbalists consider “Alef… symbolic of air & [state that it] may be thought of as a breath-spirit” — …for air is the energy of the fundamental element-letter A”.
“Bel-Marduk… made a flash of lightning to go before him whose midst he filled with destructive fire… The four winds he set… The south wind and north wind, the east wind and west wind he brought near…. He created the evil wind, the storm, and the hurricane, The fourfold wind, the sevenfold wind, the whirlwind, the wind without equal; Then he let loose the winds which he had created, seven in all, To destroy the life of Tiamat…. Then Bel (the lord) grasped the “storm,” his mighty weapon, harnessed to it the four fiery steeds…” [Emphases added]
Though solar in nature, the swastika also partakes of the whirlwind because of its rotation upon its axis; and, like the Marduk-Alef, affects the quaternary, the four corners from which Bel calls up his battle-winds. Asserting the Cardinal directions as inherent in the swastika, René Guénon sees it therefore also as a ‘sign of the pole’ or world-axis [cognate with the sacred mountain (where, for example, Ea, father of Marduk, makes his home in the apsu).] Since the axis mundi, or mystic centre coincides with the source of being, it follows that the swastika ‘signifies the action of the Origin upon the universe’; and in this case, Marduk is that principle. Indeed, the spirit of creation in Genesis I:2b manifests as air, hovering over the waters before dividing light from darkness, and the celestial waters from the lower waters: “And the Spirit of God [Ruach Elohim; feminine, from the root “to breathe”] moved upon the surface of the waters” in that same passage whose opening lines are anticipated by the first words that also give its title to Enuma Elish:
When on high the heaven had not been named,
Firm ground below had not been called by name,
Naught but primordial Apsu (Sun), their begetter,
(And) Mummu-Tiamat, she who bore them all,
Their waters commingling as a single body;
No reed hut had been matted, no marsh land had appeared,
When no gods whatever had been brought into being,
Uncalled by name, their destinies undetermined-
Then it was that the gods were formed within them.
Just as the originally feminine spirit stirs the preformal waters of creation in Genesis under the guise of male Godhead in the patriarchal tradition, so Marduk takes to himself the feminine function of creation when he supplants Tiamat and gives the sun the upper hand in the luni-solar order. Moreover, in the Kabbalistic tradition, the Sefer Yetsirah imputes the element Air particularly to Alef:
“…creation as it is and all creation to come are already or will be formed by the twenty-two letters (II, 2); … Air, Water and Fire proceeded from the Three Mother Letters, Aleph, Mem and Shin…”
Yetzirah also says, “…Fire…and Water…the Air [was created] from the Spirit that mediates between the two”, while “…the element air (aleph) corresponds with the seasons of Spring & Autumn” so that the function of keeping the heavens divided from the earth is clearly expressed in the Vav bar which mediates the mirroring Yods of Alef; and more importantly to our interpretation of Alef with regard to DX 1-5, not only does the new Alef cipher Marduk’s conquest of Tiamat and her division into heaven and earth, it signifies the division of the year along a solar axis defined by Spring equinox (Yod) and Autumn Equinox (Yod).
— YOD —
and Calligraphy of Yod
From Spring to Fall, the sun’s transit — as the line extended to divide the year — is like that description of Yod in the Kabbala Denudata:
“…it is simple, is something single and primary… like the number ‘1’ which, among numbers and as a point, is the first of all bodies. But the point, by moving along its length produces a line, namely vau.” (Vol. I, Part 3, Diss. VII, 1, p. 142.)
And thus we have the Vav-bar/arrow which is the fulcrum of Alef, and which “symbolizes completion in time and space…”. (Wisdom, p. 159)
But Yod, the point on either side of the Vav which is its two-dimensional extension as well as the solar axis dividing the bipartite year, is also a fire symbol; in particular, the “spark” with which God engraved the creation:
“In the beginning, was the Will of the King, prior to any existence which came into being, through emanation from this Will. It sketched and engraved the forms of all things, that were to be manifested from concealment into view; in the supreme and dazzling light of the Quadrant. And there went forth, as a sealed secret, from the head of Ain Soph; a nebulous spark of matter without shape or form… but when it took the measure of the structure to be erected (i.e., the celestial temple), it made the colours to give light therein (Above), for the production of colours Below.”
That this creative point is indeed the Yod is confirmed, quoted in C.G. Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis: “When the wisdom of the Blessed One saw that even in this splendour the worlds could not be manifested, since the Light was still too weak there, he again signalled to this letter yod that it should once more descend and break through the sphere of splendour and give forth its light, which was a little denser.” The point is the “inner Sapientia (Hokhma): “It scattered light and an eminent influence on that Wisdom.”
Like the fiery Marduk who strode the measure of heaven before erecting the heavenly palace, the kabbalistic spark takes the “measure of the structure to be erected… the celestial temple”. Like Marduk who sets the luminaries in their paths to give light to the world, the spark makes the colours “to give light”. Like Marduk who divides the cosmos with the body of Tiamat into Above and Below, so the spark makes light above that light may be generated in the world below. Alef in DX: 1-5 contains two Yods, the yod of Above and the yod of Below (also recalling its double-descent in the previous passage), like fiery drill-bits in the whirling swastika blazoning the path of the ecliptic in the verse which sets the luminaries in their courses (the sun’s trail) for the coming year.
That the Yod on some level represents the solar principle is inescapable; its position on either side of the Vav in Alef suggests the Spring and Fall nodes at either pole of the solar axis that halves the year; and which divided the Babylonian year into the two seasons of enten and emesh (winter and summer).
That the sun is vital in Alef, as it is in the Babylonian creation, and that it also is vital in DX 1-5, can be further shown by application — as the scribes would have done — of gematria. Alef corresponds with the number 1; Yod with the number 10. Because 1 = 1 + 0, Yod and Alef are gematrically equivalent. This permits the acrostic in DX 1-5, read as AMN (Amen), to be read also as YMN (Yamin). “Yamin” means “right hand” in Hebrew, and not only right hand but also “to turn to the right” and “south”. In his renowned A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, Dr. Ernest Klein proposes that the word “south” derives from roots related to the word “sun“, and properly means “the region of the sun”. Moreover, Klein continues that south is related to the Teutonic root meaning “strong; healthy; right“, and says that in “…the sense of this derivation south would prop. denote the region to the right of him who faces east (as at the time of prayer).” For sense development, Klein further refers us to “Heb. yamin, Arab. yamin, ‘the right hand’; the south‘”. Indeed, in the Book of Creation, when God established the directions among the Sephiroth, “He sealed south. He turned right and sealed it with HYV.”
The perspective of ethnoastronomy supports this analysis of south and yamin conveyed in the gematric equivalent of AMN: a number of traditions are recorded which associate the south with the right hand in order to orient their cosmologies to the movements of the sun. An Icelandic account attributes a “right hand” to the sun, as does Revelation (first above-quoted), while the Mesoamerican variant infers an anthropomorphic sun who must be imitated by his worshippers, who orient themselves so that their right hands parallel the right hand of the sun, which coming up from the south-east, faces north-west. Our first example is from Mesoamerica:
“…Chamulas say that they move east-north-west-south in ritual circuits precisely because this is dictated by the motion of the sun. They move to their own right in ritual circuits in space because that is the direction of the solar movement in time and space, if one views the sun god as an anthropomorphic being who faces his universe from the eastern horizon. This solar orientation is further confirmed by the words for “north” and “south” respectively in Chamula Tzotzil: Sokon vinahel ta bac’i k’ob [“the edge of heaven on the right hand”] and Sokon vinahel ta c’et k’ob [“the edge of heaven on the left hand”]. This makes sense, of course, only if one stands “as the sun” on the eastern limit of the universe, looking westward.”
Compare that with a source known by other references to have been influenced by the writings of the Dead Sea at the time they were compiled and hidden in the caves: Revelation: “…and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength/…And he laid his right hand upon me, saying… Amen… [I] have the keys of hell and of death. In so saying, the Messiah-figure confirms himself in the character of the sun, who because “shining in his strength,” must be at zenith; as are the sun and moon in DX 1-5 which says the “luminaries [plural] shine from the holy zenith.”
It is luminaries, and not merely the sun alone at holy zenith, because this is the moment of the spring node, when sun and moon meet in the heavens. As to the keys of hell and death which the visionary figure claims to hold, Eliade expands:
“Helios is not only pythios, chthonos, titan, and so on; over and above all this, he is in communication with the chosen world of darkness; sorcery and hell… the entry into Hades is called the ‘gate of the sun’.”
Somewhere in DX 1-5, then, must lie the heavenly door into which the key of David, the key of the Messiah, will slide and fit like the sun at zenith in the spring of the year, unlocking fertility, rebirth and spiritual renewal.
This entry point, or better, exit point — the gate of the sun — is also the world-center, axis mundi or celestial mountain, the point of whose summit — like that of the triangle or geometric pyramid — represents the spacio-temporal moment prior to a radical change of state.
The Revelation Messiah, now rendered in the Enochian imagery of the Lamb, stands upon this point of communication between Above and Below; like Marduk, in that third place between them which links together Hades and Heaven, the point of transmutation, or of transformation: Sion.
Not only does the sun-figure arise from equinoctial south, and therefore is aptly identified by his raising his right hand, but John has fallen at his feet, facing him. If John were facing rather than standing as the messianic Lamb and sun-figure, as if he looked at the sun as it rises, he would be looking east and his “right hand” (yamin) would be aligned with the north, with the “edge of heaven [normally] on the left hand” of the celebrant facing west as if he were the sun. If we put ourselves in John’s place, and then “turn to the right” (yamin)” (as Klein says in his
Likewise, the feminine sun portrayed in the poem written down as “Song of the Sybil” from the Elder Edda, is right-handed:
“When Ymir lived long ago/ Was no sand or sea, no surging waves,/ Nowhere was there earth nor heaven above,/ But a grinning gap and grass nowhere,// The Sons of Bur then built up the lands,/ Moulded in magnificence Middle Earth:/ Sun started from the south on the stones of their hall [another celestial temple!]/ From the ground there sprouted green leeks,// Sun turned from the south, Sister of Moon,/ Her right arm rested on the rim of Heaven;/ She had no inkling where her hall was,/Nor Moon a notion of what might be had,/ The planets knew not where their places were.”
What is most exciting about the Eddic source is that after locating the Sun in the south, with her right arm on the rim of heaven, before the beginning of time (“Nowhere was there earth nor heaven above,/ But a grinning gap and grass nowhere.”), it goes on to say that the “High Gods gather in council and divide and appoint the times of day and the years: “To Night and to Nightfall their names gave,/ The Morning they named and the Mid-Day,/ Mid-Winter, Mid-Summer, for the assigning of the years” In like fashion, the Alef in DX 1-5 prescribes (“appoints”) the ages, while Marduk appoints the seasons and courses for the planets and stars; and Amen/Yamin infers “right hand” and “South”, and in the lines unfolding therefrom, the planets and luminaries are renewed in their circuits in the paths assigned to them at the beginning of time.
A last example of the origins of stellar directions is found among the records of ancient Sumeria, whose mariners oriented their navigation by also aligning the right and left of the human body standing facing the sun, which for example is the direction rowers would face were they travelling by day, following the path of the sun:
“… In the cuneiform text under examination, constellations were visualized as sailing across the heavenly vault from east to west. With west thus straight ahead, “right” meant north and “left” meant south. “To the rear” signified east, of course. This imagery was used to help identify certain star groups by their relative position to each other. It was a narrowly focused, special purpose method that did not necessarily have any similarity to the system by which various peoples of antiquity designated the cardinal points of the compass. As a purely functional device, it is best understood in a nautical context, where “starboard” is substituted for right and “port” for left.” [Emphasis added]
It may be illuminating to consider that in the portrayal of the sun’s transit as a movement from right to left, underscored by the concept of the re/creation of the world at the moment of Spring Equinox, may lie the reason why Hebrew, with its creation-empowered alphabet, is written from right to left: in the act of writing, the writer stands as the sun-god. For, the “…creation of the cosmos is the result of the creation of language. The alphabet is the instrument of creation itself.” This present author’s research into the Xth column and its usage of the Hebrew cryptogram AMN/YMN leads directly to the discovery that the alphabet of creation was indeed more than a poetic embellishment invoked by the ancient scribes to enhance their own status; it represents an empirical system adopted by those ancients, and perhaps by their cultural inspirators, for denoting in a consistent and definitive manner the fundamental cosmic processes which measured the divine and mundane year.
— MEM —
and Calligraphy of Mem
in the Upper and Lower Waters
Every creation has its womb, including the ritually renewed cosmos of DX 1-5, which tells us: “… the M is great (significant) for all that is most holy…”.
Professor Bowman has logically suggested that M may be read as an abbreviation of migdol (castle; constellation), while Driver notes that m’aon or “mansion” would be appropriate, too, since the conjunction of the luminaries in DX 1-5 must occur while both are “in one mansion”. But as an element of the cryptogram, M also finds its place through affinity with the liturgy of Marduk and Tiamat. Indeed, the M, which is “large” or “great”, is the hypostatisation of Tiamat.
N.K. Sandars has this to say about the nature of Tiamat as the cosmic waters:
“…she is… a moist monster, a vast mollusc that separates like a clam to form the arc of heaven and the ring of earth… She is the bitter water of ocean and she is also in some way the sweet waters under the earth which well up as springs and rivers to reach the fields and villages of men.”
And she is all these things even before Marduk enacts not an actual creation but a ritual recreation of the universe to legitimate his rise to power among the gods in heaven and men on earth, dividing and projecting Tiamat first above, then below, before setting the stars and planets in their courses upon the great dome that was the body of the “mother of the gods” and the “… mother of the deep… creator of all.”
“Tiamat” and “tehom” in Hebrew are, in fact, etymologically linked; both mean “the deep”; while tehom is recognized from the creation in Genesis i.2a: “And the earth was waste and void: and darkness was on the face of (the) deep.”
When Marduk, triumphant, “…passed through the heavens, inspected the regions thereof…” and commanded the watchmen “not to let out its waters too freely”, he was striding the measure and ensuring the stability of creation laid upon tehom. In DX 1-4 when Alef prescribes the ages, M must be “great”, for M is tehom, retaining its origin as the birth waters of creation through the pictogram paired with it in the Hebrew alphabet: water; and in the name of water: mayim, and in the name of the skies: hashamayim, these latter two in the common language even now recalling that Tiamat/tehom are the waters of the upper as well as of the lower realm. Mayim is also the description of the pictogram paired with it in the Hebrew alphabet: water, echoing the linguistic pictogram from which Mem developed: its appearance that of wavy lines, like ripples on the sea.
G. R. Driver has objected to Dupont-Sommer’s “introduction of the Pythagorean doctrine of fifty as a sacred number” to interpret Nun in DX 1-5 because the Manual is so “intensely Jewish a document”, and because no solution for M = 40 was then forthcoming within the same Pythagorean theme and tradition. First of all, that which is “intensely Jewish” arose shaped by and from the Babylonian Captivity; secondly, Philo himself provides a corresponding thematic by which M may be interpreted: and this agrees with M as tehom/Tiamat. (We shall presently see why Dupont-Sommer’s “50” is correct.) We need only view the letter as the scribes would have done, in light of gematria, which is M = 40 = 4 + 0 = 4. Regarding the number 4, Philo says:
“For what the decade is in actuality [the perfect number]… the number four… is in potentiality, at all events if the numerals from the unit to four are placed together in order [1 + 2 + 3 + 4], they will make ten, which is the limit of the number of immensity, around which the numbers wheel and turn as around a goal.“
Philo continues:
“There is also another power of the number four which is a most wonderful one to speak of and to contemplate. For it was this number that first displayed the nature of the solid cube, the numbers being assigned only to incorporeal things. For it is according to the unit that the thing is reckoned which is spoken of in geometry as a point [remember Yod in Alef]; and a line is spoken of according to the number two, because it is arranged by nature from a point [remember י (Yod) in Alef extending in a line to become Vav]; and a line is length without breadth. But when breadth is added to it, it becomes a superficies, which is arranged according to the number three [remember, there are three elements to the acrostic, three parts to the Marduk-Alef]. And a superficies, when compared with the nature of a solid cube, wants one thing, namely depth, and when this one thing is added to the three, it becomes four… four is the first number which is a square, being equal on all sides, the measure of justice and equality. And that it is the only number the nature of which is such that it is produced by the same numbers whether in combination, or in power. In combination when two and two are added together; and again in power when we speak of twice two (thus 2+2=4, or 2×2=4) and in this it displays an exceedingly beautiful kind of harmony, which is not the lot of any other number.” [Emphases added]
As the “limit… of immensity“, both 4 and the M from which it is gematrically adduced, are certainly “great“. Moreover, the number 4, like Mem, is depth, just as Tiamat/tehom are depth and “the deep” in Enuma Elish and Genesis. And Mem, as the equivalent of Tiamat/tehom, through its number by gematria (i.e., 4), adds depth to its own square thus ciphering the vault of the ancient heavens upon its own square basis: for the Chaldeans themselves believed the foundation of the heavens was “square”, i.e., “equal in length and breadth”. In essence, the ecliptic is that “square”, the plane defined by the four stations of the sun in the year: the equinoxes and the solstices; and thus the heavens (the limit of immensity) when laid upon the square, are a cube. (Obviously, the ecliptic is not static, but a spiral unwinding as the earth proceeds through space; the ancients may or may not have known this.)
Besides consisting in the plane bounded by the sun’s 4 extremes, the “Great Square” was projected upon the constellations and given its own immortalized place in the figures of the Zodiac near the vernal equinoctial point [Nisan: The seventh month of the civil year; the first month of the ecclesiastic year (in March and April)]. Defined by the three brightest stars of the Pegasus formation plus the brightest star of Andromeda, the Great Square “is said to be the star of Babylon, and the heavenly pattern of Marduk’s temple Esagila… on the fourth day of Nisan the high priest stood facing the north [as the sun; his right hand aligned with its equinoctial rising] and recited a hymn entitled by its opening lines “O Canal star [i.e., Iku], thou Esagila, likeness of Heaven and Earth”. The Chaldeans called the square Iku, patterning their square-field measure upon it, which they also called “iku” (and which is equivalent to 100 times the sar — a field measure distinct from the sexagesimal number sar of 3600 — itself equivalent to one square gard-(du) (the etymological origin of the word “garden”) as the basis for all surface calculations and the foundation of temples (assimilated to the centre). (“Gard-(du)” tantalizingly suggests that the “Garden of Eden,” as the First Creation, may indeed be an anthropomorphic rendering of an essentially celestial and astronomical metaphor.)
According to another account of the Marduk creation, he “founded Esagila ‘in the midst’ of the Deep … on the bosom of the nether sea… “Moreover, Iku was thought to be encompassed by the four rivers of paradise, symbolized by the water sign Pisces, the last sign of the Zodiac confirming both involution (the end of a cycle) and evolution (the beginning of a new cycle) in which water (and fire) always have a part in cycle myths); thus the 4 rivers of Life, the elements of the primal Garden (gard(du)) ‘issue forth’ form the celestial square which is the number 4 in Philo, who says, “For the four elements, out of which this universe was made, flowed from the number four as from a fountain”. Philo also equates the number 4 with the four rivers because he says of 4 that it was given “pre-eminence” in nature, and of the rivers that: “… the greatest river from which the four branch off is generic virtue… [which derives] its beginnings… from a principle of pre-eminence.” What other letter, then, could be better enunciated to receive and house the Pythagorean holiness of Nun (the number 50), whose coincidence in M heralds the New Year, than the “exceedingly beautiful… harmony, which is not the lot of any other number”: 4(0); M.
Philo tells us that the number four “…was the foundation of the creation of the whole world…. [and] the seasons of the year are also four…” Later Kabbalistic thought supports the number’s ‘pre-eminence’: “…The first four Sephiroth [Kether, Hokmah, Binah, Gevurah] represent the four elements of the entire world” and the third, Binah, seems to fulfil the function of Vav in Alef and of the cross-bar in the Enuma Elish, where the foundation of the world is synonymous with the fixing of the volatile Tiamat in place with a bar, or in some recensions, with bars (plural), (a bar being a line of extension from two dimensions where all is potential, to three-dimensional materiality where the potential is manifested): “The name of this Sefira, Binah, [the “supernal mother“, i.e., womb] can be taken to signify… ‘that which divided between the things’, i.e., differentiation”, while the foundation of the world in Jewish tradition is accomplished by holding back the waters of tehom with a cube–shaped stone represented in the Temple holy of holies by the cubic altar.
Traditions of the cube are widespread, and include the affirmation that it represents the Great Mother par excellence. We know Her as a confluence of images — Tiamat / tehom / and Mem among them — whose ontological function is to situate the center of the world where the axis mundi links earth with heaven and the underworld, but lies directly below the center of the heavens, and is thus called&nbap;— for example in Islam where the stone emerges as the Ka’aba, the “gate of heaven”, similar to the titles given Marduk’s city of Babylon: “House of the foundation of heaven and earth,” and “Bond between heaven and earth,” for its name meant, literally, “Gate of God” (“Bab Il”). 
The cube, the Great Mother, and the ka’aba, again, are like Jacob’s pillow-stone, anchoring the ladder Alef [supra]) which, in his dream, reaches to Heaven, implying the attribution of both a psychological and an astronomical function to a mythic phenomenon that is at once cosmic symbol and epiphany. It may be of interest that if the cube is approached as a puzzle, to be opened but not dismantled, there is only one possible shape: that of a cross. Thus, not only is the life-giving sun born of the Great Mother, it exits the world the way it has come. The image of the Christian crucifixion, so often depicted with Mary, the Great Mother, the Great Gate Mem, at the base of the fundamentally cubic cross, may well connect these concepts by anthropomorphosis.
In Revelation, the cube reappears as the celestial city of Jerusalem, which receives the Sun-Messiah (Key of David) at the end of time (that is, at the end of the Great Year when the precessional sun completes the full circle of the ecliptic or zodiac). The length, depth and breadth of the “City” are equal (Rev. 21:16), and thus it is the cube, the heavens set upon: tehom, Tiamat, Mem, encountering the sun at the end of one Great cycle, which is also the point of beginning again. In Mesopotamia, the cube is an ark built, depending on the version, by Utnapishtim or by Parnapishtim, Sumero-Babylonian types of Noah, while the Covenanters’ calendar begins New Year 50 days after the date commemorating Noah’s release from the waters of the Flood). The cubic city is 120000 furlongs in each measure, the ark 120 cubits; so that if 12, 12 and 12 are added (length, depth and breadth), the 36(0) days of the Temple year, or the 36(0) degrees of the ring of heaven, are implied.
Irving Friedman, in one of his commentaries, says: “The directional scheme of the Book of Creation has been summarized as a cube of space. The axes of the cube constitute the six directions…,” and, “in this scheme, the north and south and the two equinoxes in the east and west… The east-west directions of the equinoxes are usually associated with the dawning or ebbing of light, and therefore of life.”
Thus, in the Book of Creation, the cube of heaven — Babylonian in origin — stands upon the “square: of the four cardinal points, and contains the ecliptic in the east-west thrust of the equinoxes. That this concept of heaven rising foursquare in a cube of space was brought to earth in the Sumerian square measure called iku after the constellation praised at the Akitu festival as commemorating the sun-squared plane of the ecliptic, is clear if one mathematically “cubes” the iku, one of whose equal edges was equivalent to 12 Sumerian kus: adding depth in this way, we obtain the celestial figure seen before in the ark of Utnapishtimm and the City of Revelation: 12 x 12 x 12.
Moreover, through M, DX 1-5 agrees with I Enoch, which says: “first there goes forth the great luminary, that is the sun;… In this way he rises in the first month in the great gate, which is the fourth gate” (lxxii 4-6). In other words, the Spring \sun rises in Nisan and meets the moon in the fourth M/ansion (Migdol), so that while Mem is ‘depth’ and ‘the deep’ in general, it is the fourth gate in particular, the very holy of holies symbolized by the “cube” of the foundation which fixes the centre of creation and “around which the numbers wheel and turn as around a goal”.
As the fourth gate, Mem is indeed the “great gate” implied by DX 1-5 when it says “the Mem is great”. In the subsequent phrase in that passage, the Hebrew word for “unlocking” — derived from the same root as the Samaritan word for the “opening” or “gate” of the festive and joyous seasons — is thoroughly and appropriately used in “unlocking” the great fourth gate of Mem (particularly, as will be seen, in light of ancient hymns to the sun which could not have escaped notice by the predecessors of the Scroll authors in their captivity in Babylon, where those hymns, from time immemorial, had been sung).
We also note that the primordial point of the solar Yod made its double descent in the “supreme and dazzling light of the Quadrant“, invoking the quadriform YHVH, for as Munk says “the Talmud explains that God created the universe with the letters [yod] and [heh] which form the Divine Name YAH [the root of YHVH]. With the letter [yod] He created the World to Come, while with the [heh] He created This World”. In the religions which have descended from this ancient cradle of the civilized world, it is the simplicity of school children which teaches that the “world to come” (heaven) is in the “sky” — “above”; while this world, the here and now, is here “below”. Furthermore, if we return, by gematria, to the Hebrew alphabet for the other letter-equivalent of Mem, reduced from 40 to 4 by 4+0, we find Dalet, whose name, dalet, is cognate with deles (“door”) and whose paired pictogram is, in fact, a door. Moreover, “with its numerical value of four, [the dalet] represents the physical world that extends in four directions…” [the physical world into whose manifestation we enter when we, standing as the sun, enter the gate or door], that square basis of the celestial cube.
The Holy of Holies of the Jewish Temple “was a cube” with “no windows” but only a door leading into the temple hall.” In the case of DX 1-5, the “door” is in [or is] the celestial Holy of Holies, Mem, which itself is both cube and gate at once; a door opened, as we can no longer doubt, by the key of Nun: the sun rising in Nisan, in conjunction with the moon. For the “Gate of God/Bab-Il”, and the “great gate“, is none other than the “gate of the sun“.
— NUN —
and Calligraphy of Nun
Sun, Moon & Nun: The Spring Node
Why the letter Nun? Because a major conjunction or eclipse “occurs… [at] the so-called ‘nodes’ of the moon… in spring and autumn, when the orbit of the moon intersects the ecliptic of the sun, and the sun and moon are “gathered, brought together” N(e’saf) in the “fourth gate”. Or, more simply and straightforwardly because the passage specifically mentions N(isan), the first month of the Samaritan solar year. Both are apt and elegant; but the latter in particular leads us toward the empirical nature of Nun, and the reason why the solar Nun is precisely 50. Indeed, in view of the depth of meaning in Alef and Mem, we can expect no less from Nun.
The precession of the equinoxes or general precession is the motion of the Earth’s axis caused by the differential gravitational forces of the Sun and Moon pulling the Earth’s equator nearly perpendicular to the ecliptic. Because of the Earth’s own force of motion, it does not yield to the pull, but like a spinning top, causes its axis to slide along the surface of an imaginary cone, perpendicular to the ecliptic, and with a half-angle at its apex of 23-1/2o. The path traced by the celestial pole on the rim of the imaginary cone describes the belt of stars called the Zodiac; and because its axis continually shifts along this path, the Sun, rising at the same point with respect to the Earth each Spring, does so against a gradually changing belt of stars.
A complete round of the “cone” is achieved in a mean period of 25,920 years (also called a Platonic or “Great” Year); while the annual rate of movement of the shifting backdrop, measured against the sun, and called the constant of precession, is 50 arc-seconds. Mythology symbolizes every complete cycle of the precession by a creation and destruction of the world, whether by flood and fire as in the Sumero-Babylonian and Judeo-Christian myths and apocalypses; or by a great war at time’s end such as that fought in the Icelandic Poetic Edda between the Wolf and the armies of Odin who personify the forces of time as a new cycle conquers and arises victorious out of the chaos of the old, dis/integrating that dispensation.
Popular tradition says the Greek, Hipparchus, discovered the precession in the mid-second century B.C.; however, he measured it inaccurately at 46 seconds. Yet, as early as the reign of Hammurabi, Marduk of Babylon, God of the Spring sun, whose creation epic is structurally condensed in the creational blueprint of Alef, was given the 50 titles of the Annunaki, the gods he conquered in the ritual process of defining creation and setting time in motion – with all its divisions into day, month and years, and ultimately into the Great Year. In a later period, the Babylonian scribes emphasized the paramount importance of the 50 when they “…added a seventh book to the epic commenting upon the fifty names of Marduk…. This book has an epilogue stating that these fifty names had been handed down to men by the ancients, that father must teach them to son and [that they must] never be forgotten.
Although the Marduk liturgy was unique to Babylon, the 50 names arise from the Sumerian substratum where the pantheon was “conceived as functioning as an assembly with a king at its head”; the most important groups in this assembly consisted of seven gods who ‘decree the fates’ and fifty deities known as the “great gods”. At this level, one may well complain that the Sumerians, in the habit of ascribing symbolic numbers to their gods and planets, had given the moon (named Sin) the number 30, and the sun (named Samas) only 20. But the spring node brings together the sun and moon, so that 20+30=50; a number which, in the pre-solar traditions must have signified not simply the sun alone as pre-eminent in the patriarchal order of creation and the civilization rationalized to reflect it, but the sun and moon together, in conjunction in the fourth, great gate.
The solar cult of Marduk has evidently served to elevate Samas, always the “key” of heaven in the ancient prayers, so that eventually in the Jewish tradition inspired by the Captivity, the sole full value of both sun and moon at Spring node are attributed to Nun; and this has passed into the Xth Column, as well as into the Hebrew alphabet developed in the Captivity, in both of which Nun is always the constant sun; and not an arbitrary cipher chosen on one occasion or by merely one sect as the repository of secrets known to it alone. Nun is the permanent solar fixture of Jewish (gnostic) esoteric lore; and as shall be seen, of Pythagorean lore as well.
— ן —
Dupont-Sommer sees no justification for deriving a reference to the Messiah from an “enumeration of sacred times” that DX 1-5 provides. Yet, Brownlee’s interpretation that the Xth-Column Nun is the “key of David”, the “Messiah”, has everything to do with the rejuvenation of the year, of the generations and of the spirit of man.
The Messiah springs from the tradition of the great sun-heroes, and whose image Brownlee correctly discerned in the shape the scribe gave to the Xth-Column Nun. In the New Testament, the Messiah shadows forth the “gate” function of the sun saying, “I am the way, the truth and the life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by me,” (John 14:6) (The “way” is the gate; the “truth” is Amen; and the “life” is Yenon.) In Revelation, the Messiah “clothed with the sun” — who calls himself “Amen” in the cipher-passage illuminated by Driver — holds the “key of David” as well as the “keys of hell & death”: these are the dark-side component of the sun, its chthonian aspect which rules in the underworld, and sits at the right hand of the throne of God in his ancient sun-function as arbiter of justice, judging those who shall enter through the gate of the cubic city, and those who shall be turned away. In Kabbalism, the sun, called both Rahamin and Tifereth, placeholds the centre of the Tree of Life, and its stated function, like that of the ancient Sumerian sun Utu, or Babylonian sun Samas, is to mediate between justice and mercy. A Chaldean hymn to the sun recounts all the qualities we have so far attributed to the Messiah:
He who establishes truth in the thoughts of the nations, is thyself.
Thou knowest the truth, thou knowest what is false.
Sun, the supreme judge of heaven and earth is thyself…
Sun, the supreme judge of the countries, is thyself.
The Lord of living beings, the one merciful to the countries, is thyself.”
Moreover, the sun of Tifereth, mediating between the pillars of the Tree of Life, might as easily paraphrase the words given in John 14:6 — ‘no one rises to the throne but through me’: the merkavah mystic descending through the paths of the diagrammatic Tree must set foot in Tifereth before reaching the seat of God in the Supernal Triad at whose base repose “50 gates“, familiar as the precessional number and as the number of the sun-key, Nun.
Justice and mercy, the prerogatives of the sun-god, have given their names to the Kabbalistic Pillars of Mercy and of Judgment, respectively the left and right supports of the Tree of Life, known also as the pillars of Solomon. We are reminded that King David prayed, “… for his son, King Solomon, and his descendant, the Messiah … May his dynasty [ye
Nun’s further connection to the Messiah is found in its pictograph: a fish. An interesting clue involves Mem, and is indirectly given by Charles Poncé in Kabbalah:
“The letter mem belongs to the class of mutes, letters which are not accompanied by any sound in their production. The pronunciation of this letter is a pressing together of the lips. The reasoning behind the association of this letter with the element water is more difficult to see at first sight: in all creation, the creature most symbolic of silence or muteness is the fish, & the fish is the chief occupant of water.”
Since we already know that Mem is indeed water — the cosmic waters sprung from the wounds of the fixed and vanquished Tiamat/tehom; and that the Nun-sun conjuncts with the moon in the fourth gate at the heart of the cosmic waters; then Nun, with its piscine pictograph emerges clearly as the “fish” of the sun swimming silent as the mute mother letter in whose womb he drifts, the depths of Mem. How is our cosmic fish then connected with the Messiah? Early Christians drew from the Greek spelling of the word “fish”, ἰχθύς, or ΙΧΘΥΣ, an acronym comprised of the first letter of each of five Greek words: Iesous Xristos Theou Yios Sotare which means Jesus, Christ, Son of, God, Savior. The Redeemer they worshipped in this guise had his earliest manifestations in Sumerian myth, whose EA (grecianized in Berossos to “Oannes“) is the divine half-man/half-fish who sponsors Utnapishtim in his cubic ark to save mankind from the Flood.
The volume of the famous cubic vessel, (120x120x120) plus its area (120x120x6) equals the total number of years in the Great Year; while Cirlot says of the fish:
“‘Schneider notes that the fish is the mystic Ship of Life… at all times spinning out the cycle of life after the pattern of the lunar Zodiac.'”
Thus, once again, an ancient metaphor (the Flood) employs water as the cosmic element, in this case for the juncture marking the end of one, and the beginning of another mythic “Great Year” or, as we know, the empirical precessional cycle. At that urgent moment, Pisces, the fish, closes the precessional round as the last sign of the circuit of the sky.
Nun: sun, fish, Messiah and key. Sumerian hymns to the Sun confirm the identity of the key “that is for the unlocking of his eternal acts of enduring love,” and reiterate the word for gate or door which passed into Hebrew and Greek aptly as the fourth letter of the creational alphabets.
“A number of… terms, namely handuh samê, sikkat samê, and sikkur samê, indicate a lock-and bolt metaphor for the heavens. The two terms handu samê and sikkat samê occur in Babylonian ‘gnomon’ instruction texts. The ‘bolt’ (literally, peg) of heaven (sikkat samê) and its parallel sikkur samê, also cosmic “bolt” (or some kind of locking device), are further attested in religious contexts and associated with Samas, the deity who lifts the peg of the cosmic locks. The lock metaphor utilized in religious texts also encompasses the dalat samê, “doors of heaven,” also consistently associated with the sun god. Its usage in the Samas hymns and prayers shows the opening of the locked doors of heaven to be a poetic metaphor for the breaking of day…“
The metaphor is augmented to include the dawning of the great cosmic day that is the beginning of a new Great Year, and a new precessional round. Rochberg-Halton also footnotes further singular examples of the sun-key:
“When you (Samas) lift the peg of the key in the lock of the pure heavens”;
“You (Samas) open the locked bolts of the sky”;
“Samas, you opened the bolt of the doors of heaven”;
“and “the one who opens the gate (and) bolt of the heavens, who opens wide the doors of the earth…. thong, lock-pin, latch, and door handle”.
The chapter on “Chaldean Hymns to the Sun” in Babylonian and Assyrian Literature offers two more renditions of the same theme in the First Hymn and Fourth Hymn respectively:
Sun, from the foundations of heaven thou art risen;
thou hast unfastened the bolts of the shining skies;
thou hast opened the door of heaven.
– – –
Great Lord, from the midst of the shining heavens at thy rising,
valiant hero, Sun, from the midst of the shining heavens, at thy rising,
in the bolts of the shining heavens, in the entrance which opens heaven, at thy rising
in the bar of the door of the shining heavens, when thou openest it,
in the highest (summits) of the shining heavens…”.
Moreover, the Fourth Hymn opens with an echo which illuminates the reference in DX 1-5 to the N as “the key to His eternal acts of enduring love”, sometimes translated as “the key to His eternal mercies”, showing the sun-god as “Lord, illuminator of darkness, who piercest the face of darkness,/ merciful god, who settest up those that are bowed down, who sustainest the weak…” [Emphasis added] It is in his mercy and his love for them that the sun-god, later assimilated into YHVH, uplifts the downtrodden and sustains the weak – presuming, of course, that they are faithful to his liturgy and his name.
Hibbert in The Hibbert Lectures, 1887, provides the ancient synergy which directly links the Sun-god of the great gate to Semitic thought as it evolved and developed at a crystallising moment in its era:
With the spread and fame of the empire of Sargon, the worship of Samas [the sun] spread and became famous also. The empire and the cult were alike Semitic; wherever the Semite planted himself, the Sun-god was worshipped under some form and name.
The extent therefore of the worship of the Sun-god marks the extent and power of Sargon’s kingdom… It is to Sippara in all probability that the hymns addressed to the Sun-god belong.
They are the product of an age of new ideas and aspirations. They represent the meeting and amalgamation of Semitic and Accadian thought. The scribes and poets of Sargon’s court were partly Semites, partly Accadians; but the Semites had received an Accadian education, and the Accadians had learnt the language and inherited the style of their Semitic masters.
Though the originals of most of the old hymns are written in the language of Accad—a language that had become sacred to the Semites, and in which alone the gods allowed themselves to be addressed—the thoughts contained in them are for the most part Semitic…. It is thus that we read:
“Lord, illuminator of darkness…
Merciful god…
Smiting their head they look to the light of the midday sun….
Men far and near behold thee and rejoice.”
“Mighty lord, from the midst of the shining heaven is thy rising;
O Sun-god, valiant hero, from the midst of the shining heaven is thy rising;
In the enclosure of the shining heaven is the weapon of {they falchion.}
Where in the shining heavens is thy palace (kummi)? [1]
In the great gate [2] of the shining heavens, when thou openest (it) [3], is the highest (summits) of the shining heavens [4] when thou passest by….
O Sun-god, utter thy voice at the lifting up of my hands [5]….
Like a king may thy judgment adjudge [6]….
And abide thou, O Sun-god, the light of the mighty gods.”
[1] Palace, Mansion, as in “Fourth Gate”
[2] “In the great gate” of the shining heavens: i.e., confirms that this is indeed, the “M” of the Xth-column cryptogram
[3] “when thou openest (it)” i.e., when you “unlock” it
[4] “in the highest (summits) of the shining heavens,” i.e., at the zenith in the apsu or abyss of heaven, especially at the time of the Spring equinox.
[5] “the lifting up of my hands”: the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls raised their right hand to the sun.
[6] “Like a king may thy judgment adjudge”: i.e., the Messiah as sun-god appears in Revelation as a King at the Last judgment.
— NUN —
Theorem
Dupont-Sommer has suggested that N in the cryptogram of DX 1-5 is a reference to the same concept as the power of the triangle with sides 3,4,5 seen by Pythagoras as the ‘Holy of Holies’. Dalet, through its Greek counterpart, Delta, Δ, may serve as our “gate” from M to an even better understanding of N, to which Dupont-Sommer has given a Pythagorean interpretation, as follows:
“…vu que les lunaisons se renouvellent et croissent
selon la suprême saintêté du signe
N 2,
selon la Clé de Ses grâces
éternelles,
selon les débuts des saisons en tout temps à venir…” 2 La lettre noun, dont la valeur numérique est 50. Le nombre 50, ainsi que l’atteste Philon d’Alexandrie, était considéré par les Pythagoriciens comme ‘le plus saint et le plus substantiel des nombres, vu qu’il est constitué par la puissance (le carré) du triangle rectangle, lequel est le principe de la génération de l’universe’. Il semble que le calendrier essénien, essentiellement fondé sur le principe de la division de l’année en quatre saisons de trois mois, ait été mis en rapport, à l’aide de quelque raisonnement subtil, avec ce nombre sacrosaint.”
In fact, there are two triangles of particular importance to Greek cosmological thought: (i) the equilateral (imaged in the 4th Greek letter, Delta) and also in the form of the tetraktys picked out in the pebble figure of the number ten (the ‘full potential’ of 4); and (ii) the right-angled triangle having sides 3,4,5 whose power is 50 and therefore attracted the attention of Dupont-Sommer to its significance for Nun.
Delta, the fourth Greek letter, is written as an equilateral triangle: A B C (Δ) [It doesn’t appear very equilateral on this keyboard!]. The word “delta” comes from delph, meaning uterus, the source of the waters of life which cradle and nourish the growing embryo. The significance is transposed to the English word “delta”, meaning the alluvial mouth of a river where it breaks up and delivers its waters into several branches, as did the river that “went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads” (Genesis 11:10, emphasis added). The four heads arising from the single river recall the situs of dalet and delta in their respective creational alphabets, as well as Philo’s assertion that “…the four elements out of which this universe was made, flowed from the number four as from a fountain.”
Moreover, the pre-Exilic or Temple Era form of Dalet was an equilateral triangle, like delta; and in the descent of the alphabet charted by Egyptologists, all these forms of the letter are also related to the Egyptian glyph for a door (which, as we have seen, is the signification of the Hebrew name of the Dalet) represented in that early form by a lintel). Says Eliade, “The Pythagoreans regarded the triangle as the arché geneseoas because of its perfect form and because it represented the archetype of universal fertility.” He also says that the Δ in Greece represented woman. The universal appropriateness of the triangle as a symbol for gynaeocracy is attested by the natives of the Amazon, who carve it into rock, adding a cleft to represent the female ‘pudenda’. Even this latter term derives from the Babylonian word, pu, meaning both “source of a river” and “vagina”; while the stylized triangle with cleft also served the Sumerians as a pictograph standing alternately for the word “sal” (pudendum) and “munus” (woman).
The river of Eden, a natural metaphor for Eve, “mother of all living” (Genesis III:20) is an especially apt and poetic rendering of the Pythagorean tetraktys. The four rivers are the four basic numbers which compose the three sides of the holy triangle, and whose combinations produce the rest of the primes, from 5 through 9. The rivers of Eden, naturally, must issue from a Δ-shaped delta named for the primordial Mother; and in support of this, Muslim tradition says Eve’s children are not two, but four; two male-female pairs, twin brother-sister pairs – like Pythagoras’s male and female, odd and even numbers self-enclosed in the primordial image, the arché geneseoas of the tetraktys. In this way, Eve personifies the extension from two- to three-dimensional reality; the leap across the abyss from breadth to depth, from plane to cube; producing on earth the human microcosm in echo of the starry world brought forth from the womb of Mem. In Sumerian cosmogony, too, four pre-empts the privilege of creation, for exactly “four deities created every other cosmic entity in accordance with plans originated by them.”
If Delta can thus be seen as the source of creation, is this the expression of an extra-Pythagorean school of thought, or can it be reconciled with the Pythagorean proposition which it seems to echo, expressed in the right-angled triangle having sides 3, 4 and 5, and the power of 50, called by Philo “the principle of the origination and condition of the whole”?
Sumero-Babylonian mathematics reconciles the delta/tetraktys with Pythagorean triangle 3,4,5 through the astronomical meaning conveyed by its properties as an equilateral. But this is really no surprise, since scholars have observed that “the Sumerians, from whom the Chaldeans/Babylonians inherited their culture practically piecemeal, already knew the Pythagorean theorem; and that the Pythagorean sciences of algebra and geometry were based on a learned system of Sumerian origin“.
The Babylonians worked with a decimal and a sexagesimal number system, reserving the latter alone for the pursuit of astronomy. The base of 10 is 2×5; but the base of 60 (the sexagesimal unit) is 3x4x5, the single most important factor which makes the sexagesimal system superior to the decimal for computation. It cannot but be obvious that Pythagorean triangle 3,4,5 represents the base of 60. Moreover, the properties of an equilateral triangle (Delta/Temple-Era Dalet) supply it with internal angles each equal to 60o. According to Rawlinson, Babylonian notation used the same symbol to represent the number 1, the number 60, the powers of 60, and 10 times the powers of 60. In some manner, then, all these figures conveyed unity to the Babylonian mind. The Pythagorean triangle 3,4,5 (the base of 60) stood, par excellence, for the One from which the many are derived; while the equilateral Delta, as the womb of the Great Mother, also expresses the abundance of creation from the source of One. Both triangles can be reconciled through this symbolic equivalence based on their relationship to Babylonian mathematics, but their particular meaning is even clearer in light of the general precession of the equinoxes, as will be seen.
The Spring sun, which is taken as the precessional constant, is ciphered in the power of the Pythagorean triangle whose proponents worshipped Apollo Hyperion, god of the Sun. Delos was the birthplace of Apollo according to one account, and Delphi by another; yet both share the same root as Dalet: uterus, womb. Apollo (who slew the Python just as Marduk slew Tiamat), opens the womb of Delphi (first dedicated to the Great Mother — the Earth-Mother, Gaea. Delphi was renowned for its sacred stone, the Omphalos, a cleft rock cognate with the foundation stone or cube fixing the waters of tehom. Sunk deep in the earth, it was said to mark the centre of the world, and was called, euphemistically, “the navel stone”, belying the nature of the “cleft” through which Apollo was delivered, just as Nun is delivered into the new-born year through the womb of the “great” Mem, that cryptic cornerstone containing and perhaps one in essence with, the door of heaven.
Thus, Delta may represent astronomical knowledge under the pre-solar cult, the cult of the Goddess; while triangle 3,4,5 crystallizes the ascendancy of the solar cult of the ruling father and his redeemer son. This would be one explanation for the rejection or rather repression of the equilateral triangle (Dalet) in the creation of the post-Exilic alphabet: giving primacy to a masculine sun, it would have been politically expedient to eliminate the visible presence of the ancient symbol of the formerly pre-eminent Great Goddess.
Tiamat/tehom/Dalet/Delta/Mem, the fourth letter, appears now as a triangle, now as the square basis of the cube of heaven, and also calculates the precession. In the Sumerian Flood-myth, (myth of the depths — the story of the dissolution and recreation process undergone by the Yod-spark), the cube is a ship measuring 120x120x120; in Revelation, it is a city, celestial Jerusalem measuring 12,000/12,000 and 12,000 furlongs (21:16-17). The “smaller” cube will serve our purposes here, since its volume, 120x120x120 = 17,280, while its surface area, 120x120x6 = 8,640. These figures when added together total the number of years in the precession of the equinoxes: 25,920.
Moreover, if 120 is taken to be a number of degrees in the circle of heaven, it is coordinated with 8,640 years of the precession, so that 3 (height, depth & breadth) x 120 degrees = 25,920; while 3×120 degrees is 360: the complete ring of the sky, of the year, and of the Great Year.
Further, if there are 50 arc-seconds in the precessional constant based in one year, then there are 25,920 x 50 arc-seconds, or 1,296,000 arc-seconds in the Great Year; but the fourth (Dalet/Delta) power of the equilateral angle, 60, (seen as equivalent with 1 by the Babylonians) is 12,960,000, a tens’ place larger) than the figure for all the arc-seconds in the precession; so that the natural operation of the sexagesimal system yields a number which implicitly conveys 1 complete, “mathematically found” Great Year of arc-seconds.
Moreover, the figure 12,960 is also half the number of years in the whole precession: 12,960 x 2 = 25,920. Thus, the triangle which illustrates the Pythagorean proposition and whose power is 50, is both the root of the precession (50 arc-seconds’ annual lag x 25,920) and the whole precession (1,296,000[0] arc-seconds in the Great Year) (3x4x54 or 604), where again we see that the number four, the square basis required for the production of the world which manifests the realities of extension seen in 60 and in 3x4x5, serves as the womb of the mathematical and astronomical operation that produces both measurable empirical time and the mythic Great Year.
If triangle 3,4,5 conveys the measure of years and precession through its power 50, and its 3x4x5 base of 60, then the sum of its sides counts the months of the year and the signs of the Zodiac: for 3 + 4 + 5 = 12; which even recalls the 12 double-hours of early Babylonian daily time-keeping, making of the day a paradigm for the Zodiac and the Great Year.
Philo says that “the Creator, of necessity adorned the heaven by the number four…”, and that he did so, among other things, in order to divide “the times of the seasons of the year, and above all… days and nights, months and years, which are the measures of time.” Dalet, the tetraktys, and triangle 3,4,5 all express the natural measurement apparently imposed on time by number. Moreover, the number 1,296,000 is the basis of “all the multiplication and division tables from the temple [Holy of Holies] libraries of Nippur and Sippar and from the library of Ashurbanipal”. And again, 1,296,000 is the measure still in use today by astronomers who divide the celestial sphere into 1,296,000 arc-seconds, unaware of the figure’s apparent empirical origin in the most ancient division of the Great Year by the sun’s annual constant of precessional lag:
“…à propos de la division du ciel en degrés, minutes d’arc et secondes d’arc (“arc-seconds”). L’origine de cette division (tout-à-fait arbitraire) remonte aux Babyloniens qui étaient… les plus grands astronomes et mathématiciens de leur époque.” [Emphasis added; this quotation is from a letter to me by an astronomer at the Dow Planetarium (name omitted) in 1992.]
Walter Burkert has said, “The suspicion remains that the [Pythagorean] theorem had more than a mathematical significance in Pythagoras’ school.” That special significance is now clear. Together with the tetraktys, it symbolizes the Apollonian Sun (50 seconds of lag basic to the precession) in conjunction with the Delta or womb of the Great cosmic Mother. In her, the blessing of life symbolically comes to fruition with the sun born from the abyss whose limit is surpassed in the year at winter solstice, and in the Great Year at the passage of the precession out of the last and into the first sign of the Zodiac.
Triangle 3,4,5 with power of 50 may not be alone in its specific reference to the Sun. Taking four from Delta/Dalet‘s position in the alphabet, and multiplying it by the power of its own three angles (4 x 603) gives the figure 864,000, which just happens to be the actual diameter of the Sun in miles, that anyone may verify in a modern edition of Larousse.
The power of the Delta’s angles also stands on its own merit when the famous equilateral is found twinned by its own reflection in that potent symbol of ancient descent and lineage (Yenon), the hexagram.
Known as the “Pythagorean Star”, and particular symbol of that school of thought; known again as the “Seal of Solomon” said to be generated within the tetraktys, in turn generating the 10 Sephiroth of the Kabbalists called also the “10 crowns of the Great King” (cognate with the 10 kings on the heads of the beast in Revelation, and bearing at its heart the square name of God with which the Universe was created (YHVH) ( —thus reminding us of the original square field, the iku/gardu/garden [of Eden] —); and again known as the Tantrik mandala of India representing the 10-limbed Goddess — the mystic hexagram (comprised of two Deltas) yields the combination of their powers as 603 + 603, or 432,000, which among many other vital and marvellous things, is the actual radius of the Sun in miles (check your Larousse!), as well as the length in years of the “mythical” aeon spanned by the reigns of the mythic 10 antediluvian kings of Sumer and Babylon.
Moreover, the Star of Pythagoras/Seal of Solomon/Tantrik Mandala, inscribed within a circle (image of the sky), divides it into 60-degree arcs; and if this is considered as a schema for the precession, each such arc represents the distance of precessional shift traversed by the pole in 4,320 years. The total of all 6 arcs = 25,920 years, the mundane figure for the general precession. It is no wonder the Pythagoreans saw ontologic substance in number; for space, time and distance (at least in this neck of the cosmic woods) all are governed by the same canonical figures inherent in sexagesimal operation, as reflected in the Xth column of the Manual of Discipline of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the cryptogram AMN.
— ENOCH —
It is no coincidence that the books ascribed to Enoch, patriarch of the Pentateuch who lived 365 years in imitation of the 365 days of the solar calendar, provide us with parallels to the passage in DX 1-5. The legends of Enoch continue to respond to the theme of the Messiah hinted at in the key-shape of the Nun in DX 1-5, for his story is a stunning development in the evolution of sun-heroes and the history of the gods, who although they often descend to earth to become half-human, rarely ascend to heaven to become fully divine. Enoch did precisely that.
Mythical sibling of Marduk, Apollo and the Lamb-Messiah of Revelation, Enoch’s manifestation as heir to the sun-god is called Metatron, the new name given to reflect his consummate transformation through his triumphant descent to the 7th heaven, where he obviously had to have the “key” required to pass the 50 gatekeepers who stand at the foot of the supreme throne of God.
Metatron figures prominently in the hopes of kabbalists who practice Throne mysticism by imitating Enoch to achieve what Enoch is said to have accomplished: a face-to-face vision of the ultimate God astride his cubic Throne, an image of the space-time cosmos radiating in the 6 directions of space from the supernal branches of the Tree of Life on whose middle limbs the sun-god dies in order to rise and claim the height. In fact, the objective is to not only see God on the Throne, but to become the Deity and sit upon that Throne in dominion over the whole creation through a god-like gnostic oneness with the mysterious powers of creational alphabets and infinite numbers wheeling like stars.
Thus, the story of a Sun-Messiah descended from heaven to rule from the summit of the celestisal mountain Sion, over a holy CUBIC city at the end of time, is, first, an astronomical account, in allegory, of the arrival of the Sun God in the Great Gate of Mem at the end of a Great precessional Year, necessarily followed by a New Great Year. The earth is millions and millions of years old, and has gone through this cycle countless times, albeit at faster rates, for the earth used to rotate more quickly, and therefore the year was shorter. Conceivably, it once consisted of 360 days of the sacred or Temple year, and not the current 365 plus a continually growing atomic fraction, as astronomers will be the first to attest. It would be an interesting task for physicists to calculate precisely at what period of historic or prehistoric time the Earth’s rotation on its axis in fact produced a 360-day year in consonance with the sexagesimal division of the circle into degrees.
Secondly, this astronomical process has been taken by mystics as a metaphor for the human condition: birth, death, and the hope of some form of continued or new life. It is, in short, a spiritual model for personal transformation.
Kathleen Moore Pageot
Montreal, 5 August 2007
Revised slightly 13 January 2009.
Touch-ups on 27-28 Feb 2023 and 2 and 3 March 2023.
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- Isaiah 65-16
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- Isaiah 55-3
