02.09. The Great Green Sea

THE GREAT GREEN SEA

It has been shown that the proper translation of the Hebrew iam suph as the Sea of Reeds, or Reed Sea, makes a drastic change in the great sea’s color. The ancients sought for nature symbols in all directions. We do find it spoken of as the Emerald Sea. We are not surprised, then, to find that the Egyptian seers definitely poetized it as green from one line of metaphorical fancy, while from another image it is red. In the great Ritual of the Egyptian religion the supreme spiritual power, Ra, gives to Teta (one of the type names of the divine soul in man) "the power to journey over the Great Green Sea." Then it is said: "Thou sailest over the Lake of Kha, in the north of heaven, like a star passing over the Great Green Sea...as far as the place where is the star Seh (Orion)."

It has been elucidated above that the stream of life, Iaru-Tana (Eridanus, Jordan) issued from the mouth of the Southern Fish and flowed north to the feet of Orion, the Christ. So here again the star of soul, circuiting in its cycles the great sea of life, reaches at last this same star of Christhood, Orion, called by the Egyptians "the great star Seh." But we need not go so far back as the Egyptians to find the imagery of this Great Sea, be its color red or green. In the fourth chapter of our Book of Revelation the metaphor presents this figure in resplendent glory indeed. "And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal." The "crystal sea" has ever been a symbol for spiritual mystics, hymnologists and rhapsodists to conjure with, as presenting some outward hint as to the pure radiancy of a more heavenly grade of consciousness than the one we normally experience on earth. And oddly enough, just as in the first chapter of Genesis this same river of life flowing forth from the throne of God divided into four heads, Gihon, Pison, Hiddekel and Euphrates, so here in Revelation, what is said immediately upon the statement of the presence of the crystal sea before the celestial throne is that "round about the throne were four beasts full of eyes before and behind." It turns out that these four "beasts," the lion, ox, man and eagle, represent four signs of the zodiac, Leo, Taurus, Aquarius and Scorpio; and these in turn represent sensation (earth), emotion (water), mind (air) and spirit (fire), the elements of the "vials of wrath" which the seven angels later pour out upon the world. How significant it is that "lo, in the midst of the throne and of the four beasts ... stood a Lamb, as it had been slain; having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth." If we can visualize, if we can penetrate obvious outward symbolism to catch the meaning in the conceptual world, we have here the picture of all that one needs to know, as the glyph and graph of the meaning of all sacred Scriptures. For we have the throne-power of God, the sea of glistening pure matter before it, the diffraction of God’s creative power into seven rays of energy dispersion to activate the creation in space (with four of these energy forms bringing their products into visible manifestation, the other three still in the invisible world) and our own life manifesting the four grades of psychic consciousness, sensation, emotion, thought and spiritual will. A most arresting detail of the picturization is that the clear glass of the crystal sea reflected the divine light of spirit which brooded over it. The watery field of life is pictured as a "crystal sea wherein the fire was reflected, and upon it there stood those who had overcome the influence of the Beast, who had not worshipped his image nor borne upon them the mark of his number." This reflection of the heavenly fire of divine spirit in the sea of life down here is most enchantingly intriguing. It is in complete accord with the main statement of the great Hermes, the mouthpiece allegedly of the body of the mighty Egyptian occult wisdom, when he says that "that which is above is as that which is below, and that which is below is as that which is above, for the performance of the miracle of the One Thing." Yes, nature, the lower world, the visible universe, reflects in its manifestations everywhere the creative forms, the archetypes of the divine Mind. Any body of still water reflects the heavens. "If thou wilt know the invisible," says Hermes, "open wide thine eyes on the visible." The frequency with which the sea is mentioned in the Scriptures would indicate that it played an important part in the symbolism of the incarnation, as it obviously stood as a glyph for the human body blood. Some of these references to it in this meaning may be scrutinized. For instance, in Exodus 14:2, the Lord speaking to Moses, instructs him to tell the children of Israel that they "shall encamp by the sea." As these children of Israel are the hosts of his own Sons, whom he has sent to earth to live in immediate contact with this sea water of the animal bodies they must tenant here, the poetic expression of camping by the seaside would be quite felicitously apt to the situation. This will not appear at all strained or far-fetched when we consider that the great Jewish autumn festival of Succoth, tabernacles, booths or tents, in which they are ordered to live before they reach the Holy Land, are likewise a reference to the physical bodies in which they will be incarnate, as being a temporary and natural tenement for a temporary sojourn before they attain to their permanent spiritual bodies at the end of the incarnation series. For there is that spiritual "body of the resurrection" of which St. Paul speaks. The fleshly body is emblemed by more than one symbolic type in ancient allegorical depiction and in mythology, such as the well (of Beer-sheba), the cave (of Machpelah), the tomb, the pit, the prison, the desert and the wilderness.

Then it is said that the Egyptians overtook them as they encamped by the sea. Naturally this would be the case, as the Egyptians are the instincts, proclivities, habitudes and impulses of the bodily nature, and to say that they overtook the Israelites as they encamped by the sea is only poetically to say that these things caught them here in incarnation. And most significantly appears in this same chapter the Lord’s injunction to Moses, who is, of course, the figure of man spiritual, to "lift up thy rod and stretch out thine hand over the sea, and divide it," so that the Israelites would be able to walk through it on the dry ground, holding off the water. The "rod" in this drama is a definite symbol of man’s inner soul power, his miracle-working force, and to stretch out the hand holding this rod over the sea was a vivid representation of man’s developing and using his inner divine Self, in the exercise of which he is able to "subdue all things unto himself" and "put all things under his feet." the idea of the spiritual "fire" in man’s nature drying out the moist nature and crossing a river or sea is very common in the ancient typology. The division of the sea into wet and dry portions would refer, by every inference, to the gradual separation of the soul and its interests from the first long subjection under the tyranny of the body and its instincts.

Very striking in its import can be the statement that the Israelites "came to Elim, where were twelve wells of water and three score and ten palm trees; and they encamped there by the waters." Universally the archaic Scriptures represented man’s divinity as coming to full unfoldment through the development of twelve aspects or attributes of his Godhood; and the physical universe is actually founded on the number seven, as nature everywhere reveals. A ruse of the esotericists to hide occult truth from the "vulgar" masses was the adding of a meaningless cipher to the cardinal number, making the seven into seventy. The name Elim is composed of el, Hebrew for "God," and the masculine plural terminal -im. So the stage at which the Israelites became full-fledged gods is indicated by twelve wells of water and seven palm trees. As the palm is a product of hot tropical lands, it suggests the ubiquitous symbol of soul, namely, fire, branching out in seven rays. The imagery employed by the Bible author indicates that the Lord raised up an east wind as his means for drying up the sea. The symbolism of east and west is too clear to be easily missed. The sun setting in the west was the nature-basis of souls sinking below the rim of the horizon of evolution into incarnation and, as it were, being immersed in the sea of life, under the picture of the sun setting in the ocean. In this state souls were overwhelmed in the body’s watery life and nature and lived in what theology conceives to be "carnal sin." Passing around the cycle -- represented by the six lower signs of the zodiac -- they reach the point of rising above the horizon on the eastern side, and thus return to heaven, to spirit, to divine life. So the Egyptian Book of the Dead declares that Pepi -- one of the synonyms of the human Ego-soul -- "cometh into the eastern side of heaven, where the gods are born." The east, of course, carries all the intimations of the Easter resurrection of divine soul so long buried in the fleshly "body of this death," if we may use St. Paul’s strong phrasing. And so runs the thrilling saga of the sea. It is understandable why the sapient sages of the past named the goddess Mothers after it, Thallath, Meri, Mary, Maya, Miriam, Mylitta and the rest; for the sea is our universal Mother. We were all born out of her capacious bosom. And, being a true mother, her infinite care will abide with us forever. When through the deep waters I call thee to go,
The rivers of woe shall not thee overflow;
For I will be with thee thy troubles to bless,
And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.
"Deep calleth under deep at the noise of thy water-
spouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me."
"For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of
the seas; and the floods encompassed me about;
all thy billows and thy waves passed over me.
The waters compassed me about, even to the soul;
the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head.
I went down to the bottom of the mountains;
the earth with her bars was about me for ever;
yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O Lord my God."
The Sea is his and he made it. Psalms 95:5 And all the waters that were in the river were turned to blood. Exodus 7:20 And the water which thou takest out of the river shall become blood upon the dry land. Exodus 4:9