bradford said:
Hi-
I think maybe the reason we're on such different pages here is that so much of my studies are outside of the Western Mystery Tradition, into languages like Chinese that have no alphabets, and others outside the Indo-European family.
I'm half Buddhist myself (in an ancient rather than modern sense) and consider Gautama a true Gnostic. And incidentally my current research is in the area of (non-Indo-European) Biblical Hebrew and Chaldean (late Aramaic) terminology (which includes many Arabic and Syriac and a few Samaritan and Ethiopic roots as well) and the ancient Egyptian roots listed by Gardiner in his
Egyptian Grammar, my quest being after how these support or refute my current understanding of the root meanings of the letter-sounds themselves.
While Indo-European appears to be one of the three most important strands of the bardic corpus, it is the Hebrew alphabet that preserves the 22 letter-symbols in their most potent form, and it is
Biblical Hebrew whose language- or root-structure
most completely reflects bardic 'guidance', that is, that is based on a deep understanding (i.e. one that at least approaches the universal) of the meanings of the individual sounds and a resistant to surrendipitous developments veering away from said meanings.
This has sort of set me in search of human universals instead of historical and cultural connections, doing work based more on phonemes than letters.
This is most laudible! It is the universals I seek as well, but I found that Chinese characters, since they express a language in such an advanced state of decay (much like ancient Egyptian), and since they are not wedded to phonemes but rather to meanings (
unlike ancient Egyptian), did not suit my particular purpose. This in
spite of the fact that some of the most profound insights I have come across concerning alchemy are the work of an 18th-century Chinese Taoist.
But I do not see how the simple
fact that our capital
B and miniscule
m both show the lips touching in
making these sounds can be construed as merely historical-cultural:
ALL humans must put the lips together to make these sounds, n'est ce pas? Much of the bardic corpus
does have a solid universal basis methinks, which is why the Keltic poet's grasp of human psychology had
orders-of-magnitude more depth than that of modern academics, in my estimation (though the Jungian thrust of the last century did carry things perhaps within one order of magnitude, at least). Still, it is true that modern de-education (university and secondary-school
deconstruction of what is inherent in the human condition, based merely on the hair-brained theories of the academics themselves) has produced generations of humans whose majority has a hard time relating to the heroic-versus-satiric (i.e. bardic) mold. A minority still does, though (which proves its resilience).
It also has me outside looking in on the whole WMT mindset and set of assumptions.
If you mean that of moderns,
me too! as they appear to have completely lost touch with the root understandings that spawned the alphabet.
It really has nothing to do with "anything goes." But this approach has not obligated to take the Western belief sets seriously unless they can be empirically and not just tautologically or self-referentially verified.
Again, utterly laudible. Please carry on (and let me know what you find).
We're just working in entirely different fields of endeavor with superficial similarities.
I should think that if our fields are indeed as disparate as you suggest, then any
similarities in what we find would be much more likely to point to universals than whatever
differences we find, n'est ce pas?
Still, I'd like to see someone ask - Where does Ox go? Where does Fish go?
Yes, these are the kinds of questions that have fascinated me for my entire adult life.
[One might make the case that Fish should be placed on the letter
D, since Irish Dylan was a fish, and so was Semitic Dagon as I recall. But
D's being XII LePendu only relates it to water's reflective quality, the sea itself being Mem (and its surface
N, judging by the Egyptian hieroglyph
n from whose hieratic version Semitic nun evidently derives).
]