02.06. Turning Water into Blood

TURNING WATER INTO BLOOD

All this analysis may have seemed to take the theme far from its base in the Red Sea. But as this symbol represents the human body, or its blood, and this constitutes the very basis of human life, and the body is inseparably linked with the soul, the Red Sea may be said to be the chief ingredient in all human problems, whether physical, religious, philosophical or psychological. If the human body is not an essential element in all man’s problems, it would be so only under the conditions that Hindu religion seems so strongly to suggest to us mortals, that we may so spiritualize our consciousness that we may release the soul completely from the incubus of the flesh. We need to be reminded here of St. Paul’s pointed assertion of the connection our souls sustain to the body, when he says: "For God, who has caused the light to shine out of the darkness hath shined in our hearts,...but we have this treasure in earthen vessels (2 Corinthians 4:6-7)." This can be taken also in close connection with the statement of Greek philosophy: "I am a child of earth and the starry skies, but my race is of heaven alone." Yes, heaven is our true, original and basic home; but the Father sends us forth periodically from "that imperial palace whence we came," since it is the function of spirit or soul to impregnate matter with the dynamic of the divine Mind, so that all life, all the universe may reflect the thought of the creative brain. The Judeo-Christian Scriptures -- the "Bible" -- do not contain material elaborating the semantic potential of the Red Sea symbolism comparable to what we find in the Egyptian, and doubtless other, literature. Yet there are touches which are decidedly significant, which, when taken in connection with those found especially in the great Book of the Dead, go far to corroborate the thesis herein developed. The most direct and surely a most cogent affirmation that the human body blood is sea water, in fact a most astonishing confirmation of it, is found in Revelation 8:8. Here indeed is a positive statement to the effect that the divine fire of soul went down into the sea "which is on the border of the earth" and did two things to it that should have meant far more to our slumbering cognitive faculties than they have appeared to do. First, it set the sea on fire; and, second, it turned the sea into blood.

Perhaps one of the most direct allegorical references to the expulsion of the Sons of God from heaven and their incarnation on earth is found in the eighth chapter, fifth verse of Revelation: "And the angel took the censer and filled it with fire of the altar and cast it into the earth (Revelation 8:5)." This was the sending of fire from the empyrean (pyr means "fire" in Greek) down to earth in the form of the host of angelic beings that were born of the mind of God, thus "immaculately conceived," that is, generated purely by spirit or mind energy unixed, "uncontaminated" with gross matter. This is matched in the Old Testament by the first emanation of the Ab-ra(m) power, the First Light out of Ur, the "city" of the Chasadim, and his going "west then south" into earthly incarnation, or "Egypt." Both Ra and Ur means "fire," the first an Egyptian spelling and the second Babylonian. "Ur" is the original Chaldean word for "fire," becoming pur (pyr) later in Egypt. (Pur is the Greek word for "fire" still.) These heaven-conceived, mind-born Sons of God were called in Hindu systems the Agniswatha Pitris, fathers of the fire emanations, as agni is "fire" in Sanscrit. They have become immemorially poetized as the "Divine Flames," "the Divine Sparks." Man’s soul is a spark or ray of the divine creative Fire of Mind, as all profound religion declares.

"I come from the Sea of Flame," exclaims the soul in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, "from the Lake of Flame and the Sea of Fire; and I live." Speaking in the Egyptian drama the soul declares: "I am the Great One, son of the Great One; I am Fire, son of Fire, to whom was given his head after it was cut off." (The symbolism here represents the idea that, even as Plato depicted it, the soul, as it were, loses its head, its higher dimension of consciousness, when it descends into incarnation, and has to recover it by evolution here -- Paradise lost, Paradise regained.)

We have all the legends of fire flaming forth out of the mouth, or the nostrils of God, consuming his enemies. This is often poetized as the "wrath of God" devastating all things. In Deuteronomy (Deuteronomy 32:1-52) we find the Deity telling of the awful power of his mind energy: "My wrath has flared up, flaming to the nether world itself, burning up the earth and all it bears, setting the roots of the hills ablaze (Deuteronomy 32:22)." And again: "From Sinai came the Eternal....blazing in fire from the south." We remember how his presence on Mount Sinai was accompanied by lightning, smoke and flame. The seven golden candles in Revelation typify the seven rays of the divine emanation as it poured forth to create a seven-branched tree of life. The old English ritual of burning the Yule log on the hearth was to symbolize the lighting up and final transfiguration of the natural body and nature of man by the transforming power of the divine flame of spirit. The ropes binding Samson’s arms, when "the spirit of the Eternal inspired him nightly, became like wax that has caught fire, the bonds melted off his hands." The Egyptians called the watery body of man "the Pool of the Double Fire," the dark, murky, smoky, smudgy fires of low sensualities; and the pure, clear, beautiful flame of compassion and love. The lower flares of the animal passions, it need hardly be pointed out, were the fires of hell. Happily no one need fear the prospect of being tortured in the fires of a post-mortem Hades, as we are living in all the "hell" we will ever experience right here on earth. That fire in our blood is all the hell we will ever have to dread. But we had better dread it now. All we need to do is to transmute those fires that burn in the blood with smudge, soot and smoke into the pure flames of a beauteous life. "For wickedness burneth as a fire. It shall devour the briars and thorns, and shall kindle in the thickets of the forests." These are the coarse underbrush of the hatreds, greeds and evil motives of our lives. If reason and discipline will not burn them out, pain eventually will.

Says the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: "Man is a portion of cosmic Fire, imprisoned in a body of earth and water." John the Baptist said that whereas he will give us the lower baptism of (earth and) water, the Christ coming after him will baptize us "with the Holy Air (spiritus, Latin, means "air.") and with fire." Jesus said: "I come to scatter fire upon the earth;" also "I beheld Satan like lightning fall from heaven." All these are references to the angelic hosts, God’s own Sons, whom the Father dispatched to earth to do his work with his earthly children. "He hath made his angels messengers and his ministers a flame of fire." Spirit was universally symbolized by the element of fire, as was mind by air, emotion by water and sensation by earth. Our souls are sparks of the divine Flame. The fiery nature of spirit is indicated in the symbolism by the figure of incense and the censer, the latter being the miniature "stove" in which the heavenly fire burned and gave off its pleasing incense for God’s delectation. The censer, as a vessel which could contain and transport the fire of soul to earth, must refer to what St. Paul calls our "spiritual body." Within man’s outer physical body all religions of the arcane wisdom asserted that he has several finer bodies of sublimated essence, still in a sense material, but not of the gross physical matter familiar to our senses. Science now knows of the existence of matter in many ethereal-spiritual forms, impalpable and invisible, yet quite literally real; and these inner bodies hold or convey the central nucleus of soul when the outer physical body is thrown off, or not yet assumed. The intimation of the text of Revelation, then is that the "angel," the power of God, having packed the soul in a finer spiritual body, whisks it off the altar and transports it down to earth.

Then two verses later on in that eighth chapter of Revelation the text says that the seven angels (creative life energy is always projected forth from the hearth (altar) of God’s fire in seven impulsions) "prepared themselves to sound." "And the first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth." Here is the first mention of the divine fire’s connection with blood. But once these sparks, or units, of the fiery mind essence were ensconced in the bodies of animal creatures here on earth, they became in a very real sense the fiery power of the body blood, the generators of the electric dynamism found in the blood. "For in the blood is the life of the soul," says the Scripture. Drain out a person’s blood and the spark and fire, the dynamo of his life, is gone. The fire has gone out on his hearth. But then in the next (eighth) verse comes the crowning statement of the truth we are enunciating: "And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea; and the third part of the sea became blood." The second century Christian protagonist, Justin Martyr, says that at the baptism of Jesus by John, "a fire was kindled in the waters of the Jordan." The actuality of the meaning hinted at by such poetic figures can be caught in quite realistic form when one says of some outrage that "it makes one’s blood boil with indignation." Through the avenue of beautiful conceptual imagery we can come to a realization of what ancient poets meant when they speak of a fire blazing within the sea, and, as fire always does to water, converting it into steam or vapor and so enabling it to rise in the air. The tenth verse rounds out this phase of the incarnation symbolism by saying: "And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers and upon the foundations of water." The fifth angel’s blast also brought a falling star to earth. This is the lightning streak of Satan falling to earth which Jesus says he beheld. So the divine fire of soul migrating to earth, says the great allegory in Revelation, set the sea on fire, made it glow all red and turned it into blood. Will the Fundamental literalist, who insists that every word of the Scriptures is to be taken in its bald physical sense, protest to us that the Pacific Ocean is blood? A thing of this sort is quite happily available to reduce the claims of literalism to their proper category of ribald nonsense. But because such a construction of poetic fancy collapses into preposterous fol-de-rol when its literal actuality is insisted upon, let no one think that it therefore is to be discarded and put out of court as irrelevant and valueless. Its dynamic value only emerges when its claimed actual factuality is dropped and a truth structure is revealed to discerning vision deep within the frame of the outer allegory. Such was the form and method by which the ancient wise men depicted truth by symbol and allegory. Hence, truly enough, not in the seven seas of our globe, but on the very hearth of the life of mortal men, the heavenly fire conveyed to earth by God’s own Sons, does dip down into the sea which is the watery essence of these mortal bodies of ours, and does set them aflame with a fire of life and soul and does turn them into blood. Who has not read over and over those mystifying verses of Revelation’s flaring allegorism and wondered what those words really meant? Here at any rate is one luminous key that can turn on the light of intelligible, rational meaning. But it is when we turn to old Egypt’s prodigious tomes of hoary wisdom that we see the symbolism more openly and clearly at work. In commenting on Chapter 176 of the Book of the Dead, Budge, the noted Egyptologist, writes: "As fire and boiling water existed in the underworld (our earth) he (the soul) hastened to protect himself from burns and scalds by reciting these chapters." For the titles of these several chapters are: "Of drinking water and not being burned by fire in the underworld," and "Of not being scaled with water." Showing how closely Old Testament material must have related to its antecedent Egyptian sources, we find this symbolism very closely matched in Isaiah 43:1-28 : "When thou passest through the waters I shall be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee; when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle on thee." The imagery here, drawn straight from nature, from chemistry and physics, tells us in effect that when the celestial fire of God’s mighty spirit is, by incarnation, introduced into the natural watery elements of the body, this fire is going to heat up this water, cause it to boil and seethe, so that we see a man in passion burning with hot zeal over some injury or affront. A burning within the sea, sure enough; the ocean on fire; the bush all aflame, yet was not consumed. If the soul, the god himself, who himself contributed the fire that heated the body blood, was not sufficiently in control, he stood a fair chance of being "scalded" by his own fiery rage. So the allegories represent the god-soul as being able to allay the storms on this sea of life, and fittingly enough, represent the tempests as raging when he, the power within the ship, lies fast asleep down in the "hold." So the Manes, or "shade" of the person in this underworld, prays in the Egyptian Ritual that he "may have power over the water and not be drowned." Emerging from his dangerous journey across the sea in victory, he chants: "I am the being who is never overwhelmed in the waters." Sargon of Assyria, who was picked up out of a wicker basket floating in the reeds (the "Reed Sea") by the river’s brink by the king’s daughter long before the same legend was repeated with Moses, exclaims: "My mother gave me to the river, which drowned me not." "Moses" means "drawn out of the water." The Scriptures were found to give authoritative support to the symbolism of the sea being turned into blood, but it seemed unlikely that they would be found stating directly that this change came about as a result of the transfer of the stream of the earth’s biological evolution of life forms from the oceans to the land. Yet even a direct statement of that effect was encountered in the course of recent searching for the data supporting the theses of this essay. Modern biological science and ancient fanciful semanticism find themselves in amazing accord in some verses in the early chapters of the book of Exodus. The fact of the change coming from the shifting of the evolution chain from sea to land finds absolutely astonishing literal confirmation in Exodus 4:9. The ancient allegorist -- or perhaps it was the translator -- substitutes the word "river" for "sea," but that in no way alters the sense. It is still the earth’s great water-body that is referred to. Speaking to Moses for the children of Israel, the Lord directs him to "take of the water of the river and pour it upon the dry land: and the water which thou takest out of the river shall become blood upon the dry land." The idea is hinted at again in Exodus 7:17, the Lord speaking: "I will smite with the rod that is in mine hand upon the waters which are in the river, and they shall be turned to blood." Again in Exodus 7:19 the Lord commands Aaron to stretch out his rod and his hand over the waters of "Egypt" "that they may be blood throughout all the land of Egypt." (Most high-ranking scholars regard this "Egypt" of the Exodus narrative as a glyph for the earth and the human body, being the nadir point to which souls descend for incarnation, and also as the fabled "underworld" of mythology.) As it is obvious that the Pacific Ocean has not turned to blood anywhere else than in the human bodies of earth’s people, one must realize that the piercing vision of the seer of old had hidden a salient truth of biological evolution beneath the allegory. If our Bible is found to be talking about this kind of truth we had better read it a bit more closely and with an eye alert to pierce semantic veils for the discovery of more cryptic reference.

Then there is (in Exodus 7:21) the statement that the catalytic power of the "rod" of spiritual fire so changed the water of the river that the Egyptians could no longer drink of it, because it "stank," which is obvious enough reference to its unpotable brackish taste. So then "the Egyptians digged round about the river for water to drink." If a spiritual interpretation of this last symbolism is sought, it may be perhaps found in the idea that, as the sea water stands for the basic natural life of man, this life of sense, animalism and lower appetencies will in the course of time and evolution become repugnant to the soul and it seeks refreshment from the purer aspirations of the spirit. Could anything in the sacred writings be more significant and illuminating than the announcement that man undergoes two baptisms, and as it were, two births, first that of water, then that of fire? (Ancient insight always assigned two mothers to the Christ figures.) As water not only typifies, but virtually is the body, the first baptism depicts the experience the soul undergoes when its divine fire of spirit is submerged in the waters of the Lower Nun, that is, incarnated in earthly watery body. This phase of the incarnational ordeal involves all the forms of experience that can accrue to man through the intermixture of the two sides or segments of his dual being, his body and his soul, and could only be symbolized adequately by all the phenomena that are generated when fire meets and combats water. For a long time the "watery" elements of consciousness, sense and emotion (earth and water), predominate and rule the individual’s life. But gradually, and all too slowly, the pure and more powerful flames of reason and love gain the ascendency. Inevitably in the end the more powerful element must win out, and this at once introduces the great symbolism of fire drying up the water. And here we have the ground of all those allegories of the God-power drying up the waters of a sea or river in order that the Sons of God (in the Old Testament the Israelites -- who incidentally are not the Hebrews as a nation or race, but purely a spiritual grouping) may cross over without being drowned. When the "sea" starts to burn, it will in the end be dried up. And with this comes one of the most startling revelations of esoteric significance in all the realm of symbolic depiction of truth: the truth as to the conversion of sinful man into man sinless and divine. For as the "sinning" nature of the first and unredeemed Adam is symbolized by water, and water by nature falls, the action upon it by the application to it of the fiery power of the divine soul, which will vaporize it, converts it into a state analogous to steam, a form in which it, too, like fire, shall rise again. What moral lesson could be more cogent than the realization that if man lives in the realm of base passion, he will continue to fall; but that if he will purge his carnal sensualities of their gross selfish character, he will arise! So St. Paul descants endlessly on the theme that the indulgence of the interests of the flesh means death, whereas the cultivation of the interests of the spirit means life and peace. To descend into and remain bound under the "watery" nature of the body and its sensual instincts is, in the great theology of the Greeks, a virtual death; to "dry out" these heavy, sluggish motivations by the superior power of the rational soul is to achieve the resurrection. The Scriptures speak figuratively of the power of God as "rebuking" the sea and "smiting the sea," confounding the sea. This depicts the spirit’s power to check, change and ultimately destroy the force of the lower motivations of the "flesh," the "Old Man of the Sea." Doubtless this is the origin of the poetic phrase, "to suffer a sea change." Translated into terms of modern psychology, this typism would have relevance to the function of the superconscious power of the great "unconscious" in man to check, control and redirect the energies of the conscious part of his psychism. When the interpreters of the Scriptures can show that the meaning so cryptically disguised under glyph and symbol has immediate pertinence to the psyche and the spiritual life of all mortals, the great legacy of ancient Holy Writ will be able to reassert its benignant influence