In The Beginning
Mercury &
Memory
VArchive.org
The
Confusion Of Languages
The sequence of events as presented in the
Book of Genesis places the catastrophe of Babel next after the Deluge.
And the whole land was of one language and of
one speech. . . . And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower
whose top may reach unto heaven. . . . And the Lord said, behold, the people
is one, and they have all one language. . . . Go to, let us go down, and
there confound their language that they may not understand one another’s
speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all
the earth.
The rabbinical sources explain that the
purpose of the Tower was to secure a shelter for the city of Babel in case the Deluge should occur
another time:
The men who were before us God has destroyed
with a deluge; if he shall again think fit to be wroth with us, and seek to
destroy us even with a deluge, we shall all perish to a man. But come, let us
prepare bricks and burn them with fire, that they may withstand the waters
and building them together with asphalt, let us make a high tower the top of
which shall reach to heaven, in order that being delivered from the deluge we
may find safety in the tower.
This purpose of the builders is found also in
an account of this catastrophe which the aborigines of Central
America transmitted from generation to generation. Ixtlilxochitl, after narrating the story of the Deluge
which brought to a close the first world age, Atonatiuh,
and destroyed most of mankind, described the catastrophe which ended the
second age or Ehecatonatiuh—"the sun of wind.”
And as men were thereafter multiplying they
constructed a very high and strong Zacualli,
which means “a very high tower” in order to protect themselves
when again the second world should be destroyed. At the crucial moment their
languages were changed, and as they did not understand one another, they went
into different parts of the world.
The same author also gives another version of
the same catastrophe:
When 1715 years had passed since the Deluge
[men] were destroyed by a violent hurricane (Uracan)
which carried off trees, mountains, houses and people, and great buildings,
although many men and women escaped, especially those that were able to take
refuge in caves and places where this great hurricane could not reach.
Similarly wrote Gomara
(ca. 1510-1560): “The wind which occurred at that time was so great and of
such force that it overthrew all buildings and trees, and even broke
mountains apart.”
Many of the sources which recount the
destruction of the Tower
of Babel maintain, in
close accord with the Mexican account, that the
catastrophe was caused by a violent wind. Thus the Sibyl is said to have prophecied:
When are fulfilled the threats of the great
God With which he threatened men, when formerly In the Assyrian land they
built a tower, And all were of one speech, and wished to rise Even till they
climbed unto the starry heaven, Then the Immortal raised a mighty wind And
laid upon them strong necessity; For when the wind threw down the mighty
tower, Then rose among mankind fierce strife and hate. One speech was changed
into many dialects, And earth was filled with divers
tribes and kings.
In the Book of Jubilees it is said
that “the Lord sent a mighty wind against the tower and overthrew it upon the
earth.”
The Babylonian account, as transmitted by Abydenus, tells that once men “built a high tower where
now is Babylon,
and when it was already close to heaven, the gods sent winds and ruined
the entire scheme. . . . and men, having till then
been all of the same speech, received [now] from the gods many
languages.”
Other accounts give the impression that a
strong electrical discharge—possibly from an overcharged ionosphere—found a
contact body in the high structure. According to a tradition known to the
twelfth century traveler Benjamin of Tudela, “fire from heaven fell in the midst of the tower
and broke it asunder.” In the Tractate Sanhedrin of the Babylonian Talmud it
is said: “A third of the tower was burnt, a third sank [into the earth] and a
third is still standing.”
The Tower of Babel
story was found in the most remote parts of the world prior to the arrival of
missionaries in those places, thus before the Biblical account became known
to the aborigines.
For instance, on the island of Hao, part of the Puamotu (or Tuamotu) islands in Polynesia, the people used to tell
that after a great flood the sons of Rata, who survived, made an attempt to
erect a building by which they could reach the sky and see the creator god Vatea (or Atea). “But the god
in anger chased the builders away, broke down the building, and changed their
language, so that they spoke divers tongues.”
The question of Biblical influence was
discussed by the folklorist: “They [the natives of Hao]
declared that this tradition existed already with their ancestors, before the
arrival of the Europeans. I leave to them the responsibility for this
declaration. All I can certify is that this tradition contains many ancient words
which today are no longer understood by the natives.”
Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Quiche Mayas, narrates that
the language of all the families that were gathered at Tulan
was confused and none could understand the speech of the others.
The Kaska (Indian)
story makes the result into the cause. The Indians narrate that “a great
darkness came on, and high winds which drove the vessels hither and thither.
The people became separated. Some were driven away. . . . Long afterwards,
when in their wanderings they met people from another place, they spoke
different languages, and could not understand one another.”
With this exception—the Kaska
story may refer to any great upheaval and is actually an effect of
large-scale migrations—the traditions of the peoples make the catastrophe the
immediate cause of the confusion of languages and the dispersion as well.
While the account in Genesis,
and that given by Abydenos and various other
sources connect the story with a certain place in Mesopotamia,
other traditions localize it in many different countries.
In each case the entire population of the world is said to have been
affected. If the nature of the catastrophe was cosmic, the same occurrence
could have taken place in different countries. In this case the existence of
similar traditions in many corners of the globe is of no avail for tracing
the migration of ancient tribes. The Arabic tradition makes South
Arabia the scene of the upheaval, followed by confusion of
languages and migrations. Similar experiences could have
been brought about by one and the same cause in many places.
It appears that after the Flood the plain of
Mesopotamia became one of the few cultural centers
of the world. Another flood would have caused the utter destruction of the
human race, and this was feared because the memory of the Flood a few
centuries earlier was very vivid. Observations of the movements of the
heavenly bodies may have provided a warning of a new catastrophe and large
structures were built for refuge. But when the event came, the structures
were overwhelmed and destroyed by hurricanes and powerful electrical
discharges.
In the rabbinical concept of the seven
earths, molded one out of another in successive
catastrophes, the generation which built the Tower of Babel inhabited the
fourth earth; but it goes on to the fifth earth where the men become
oblivious of their origin and home: those who built the
Tower of Babel are told to forget their language. This generation is called
“the people who lost their memory.” The earth which they inhabited was “the
fifth earth, that of oblivion (Neshiah)
In the ancient Mexican traditions it is told
that those who survived the catastrophe of the “sun of wind” lost “their
reason and speech.”
The characteristic of this catastrophe was
its influence upon the mental, or mnemonic, capacity of the peoples. The
description of it, as told by many tribes and peoples, if it contains
authentic features, arouses the surmise that the earth underwent an electromagnetic
disturbance, and that the human race experienced something that in modern
terms seems like a consequence of a deep electrical shock.
The application of electrical current to the
head of a human being often results in a partial loss of memory; also a loss
of speech may be induced by the application of electrodes to specific areas
of the brain.
Mercury
It can be assumed with a fair amount of
probability that the planet that caused the disturbances described above was
the planet Mercury, the Greek Hermes, the Babylonian Nebo.
To each of the planets is ascribed a world
age, and the ages of the other planets—Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, and
Mars—are well discernible; the dominion of Mercury must be looked for in one
of the world ages, and one of the world cataclysms was apparently ascribed to
this lesser planet. Mercury was a feared god long before Mars (Nergal) became one. As the name of Mount Sinai refers to
Sin, the Moon, so the name of Mount Nebo in Moab where Moses died was called
already in that early time by the name of the planet Mercury. Later in the
seventh and sixth centuries before the present era, this god was much
venerated, especially by the Chaldeans and other
peoples of Mesopotamia, as the names of Nabopolassar and his son Nebuchadnezzar prove. In earlier
times Mercury was known to the Sumerians as Enki.
Equally pronounced was the position of Thoth, the planet Mercury of the Egyptian pantheon, the theophoric part of the name Thutmose.
For the northern peoples, Mercury was Odin.
It is characteristic that in many
astronomical texts Mercury, the Greek Hermes, the Babylonian Nebo, the
Egyptian Thoth, is portrayed as the planet-god
which had in his dominion the physiological capacity of memory in man, as well as that of speech. According to Augustine, “speech is
Mercury.”
Direct information that confirms our
assumption is provided by Hyginus. Hyginus wrote that for many centuries
men “lived without town or laws, speaking one tongue under the rule of Jove.
But after Mercury explained the languages of men (whence he is called hermeneutes, ‘interpreter,’ for Mercury in
Greek is called Hermes; he, too, divided the nations) then discord arose
among mortals. . . .”
The Romans as well as the Greeks pictured
Mercury with wings, either on his headgear or at his ankles,
and with an emblem, the caduceus, a staff with two snakes winding. The double
serpent (caduceus), the emblem of Mercury, is found in ornaments of all
peoples of antiquity; a special treatise could be written about this subject;
I found the caduceus all around the world. Mercury, or
Hermes of the Greeks, was a messenger of the gods that speeded on his errand,
sent by Jupiter.
Among the satellites that presently orbit
each of the giant planets are bodies comparable in size to Mercury, or even
larger. Abraham Rockenbach, whose De Cometis Tractatus Novus Methodicus we had
occasion to quote when investigating the causes of the Deluge, included in
his treatise also the following entry:
In the year of the world one thousand nine
hundred and forty-four, two hundred and eighty-eight years after the Deluge,
a comet was seen in Egypt
of the nature of Saturn, in the vicinity of Cairo, in the constellation of Capricorn,
and within the space of sixty-five days it traversed three signs in the sky.
Confusions of languages and dispersals of peoples followed. On this the text
of the eleventh chapter of Genesis speaks in more detail.
From the annals of modern astronomy we know
of cases when a comet traveling on an elongated
orbit was “caught” by the planet Jupiter, by which is meant the change of the
cometary orbit to one of a short period, with the
sun in the focus of its orbit.
It is possible to reconstruct the planetary
disturbances of that age with some approximation. In my understanding Mercury
was once a satellite of Jupiter, or possibly of Saturn. In the course of the
events which followed Saturn’s interaction with Jupiter and its subsequent
disruption, Mercury was pushed from its orbit and was directed to the sun by
Jupiter. It could, however, have been a comet and the entwined snakes of the
caduceus may memorialize the appearance it had when seen by the inhabitants
of the Earth. At some point a contact occurred between the magnetospheres of
Mercury and the Earth, described in the traditions of various nations.
That the Earth was once a satellite of a
giant planet is nothing more than a surmise; we dealt with it only as with a
hypothetical construction, requiring further elucidation. But with a greater
show of support derived from the mythological and folkloristic sources we
have tried to demonstrate on the case of Mercury that once it had been a
satellite of one of the giant planets and was “directed” by Jupiter closer to
the sun.
The claim therefore is that Mercury has traveled on its present orbit for only some five or six
thousand years. This view conflicts with both the nebular and the tidal
theories of the origin of the planetary family, and with the assumption that
the planets have occupied the same orbits for billions of years.
Jupiter Of The
Thunderbolt
2005 - St.Clair
Foundation Online
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