The story of Jonah is such a challenge to reason one would think it would arouse in us a demand to know what it really means, and why it’s in the scriptures at all. The reason it has not, is the mentality of Western man. Having no knowledge of the creative process, he cannot see this in it. To him, if a story isn’t literally true, it has no meaning at all. Such to him are the myths, the deepest source of truth we have.
Briefly, the story is this: Jonah, the son of Amittai, is commanded by God to go down to Nineveh, another wicked city, which is to be destroyed in forty days, unless it repent of its sins. Here he was to preach and prophesy its doom that it might turn from its ways and be saved. But Jonah refused the commission, and instead, took ship at Joppa for Tarshish, somewhere in the West, by which disobedient act he hoped to escape.
4. But the Lord sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken (the Deluge of this myth; Chap. 1).
The crew, suspecting Jonah was the cause, threw him overboard, but he was not lost for, 17. Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights (Chap. 1).
10. And the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land (Chap. 2).
So far Mother Goose has nothing on the Book of Jonah, but occultly it is the same old creation mythology. Jonah is also the Life Principle; the ship he takes is the Ark; the tempest, the Deluge, and the “dry land,” earth. Thus Jonah is but a revolutio of Noah, the Creator from the third to the seventh plane in Involution. As such his God is quite superfluous, his refusal but that of the angels who refused to create. This account does not tell us the fish was a whale, but in the New Testament Christ refers to it as such. But no matter what, the fish is just another ark symbol, another life vehicle. Apocryphal accounts say there were two whales, a male and a female, thus implying generation. The whale is a water sign and as a constellation is known as Cetus. This account does not tell us the name of Jonah’s whale either but the Shalshelet ha-Kabbalah does; it calls it Cetos. Later we will meet it again under a strangely similar name. The three days Jonah is in the whale’s belly are the three prephysical periods after which comes earth, the “dry land.” Onto this the whale vomited Jonah, and Cronus, having swallowed his children, vomited them out also. In the creative process matter “swallows” genetic consciousness in Involution, then “vomits” it out again in Evolution (Genesis and Exodus).
Now this “dry land” was the goal Jonah set out for in the first place. The author calls it Tarshish, but this Tarshish is the Tharshish of the Solomon myth, and both are Tartarus, a place lower even than Hell, the sun, hence the earth. That this Hell is the sun, Tarshish the earth, and the earth and the whale are one is obvious from the second chapter. “Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord his God out of the fish’s belly. . . Out of the belly of hell, cried I, and thou heardest my voice . . . And the Lord spake unto the fish and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.” Just another version of “captivity” and “deliverance.” “I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me for ever: yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption” (2:6). And this is the nature of scriptural corruption—matter, God’s work not man’s.
There is nothing new in this story, only the Hebrew version of a very ancient myth. In the Heracleid we learn that Hercules was swallowed by a whale, and strange to say, at precisely the same place, Joppa: and that he too remained in the whale’s belly exactly three days. And the Persians tell us that Jamshyd, their hero, was devoured by a sea monster that later vomited him out safely upon the shore. Then there is the other Greek myth of Arion, the musician, who on being thrown overboard for causing a storm, was saved by a dolphin. And back beyond all these is a similar tale from India. In the Samadeva Bhatta we learn of Saktadeva who was swallowed by a fish and later stepped out unharmed when it was opened. And there is Vishnu, the Avatar; he is shown rising from the mouth of a fish. Practically all the saviors of the world are fish men; and such was Jonah the savior of Nineveh, earth. He is the Noah of this myth; even his father’s name, Amittai, carries a hint of this. Amittai is a derivation of Amriti, the Hindu “waters of life,” and Jonah is Nârâyana, “the mover on the waters.” The name Jonah was also common among all the ancient races. The Persians had their Jawnah, the Basques, their Jawna, the Chaldeans, their Ionn or Jonn. From these come the familiar name John, which we are told means ram, that is Aries the first generative element. Others say Jonah means dove, but even as such Jonah is still Noah, for Apocryphal books say that the dove of the ark was Noah himself. And why not since all within the ark was but the monadic host in Involution. This, after three pre-physical stages, became dense matter. This was God’s creation yet branded wicked by mythologists, hence personified as a wicked city, Nineveh.
That this wicked city is God’s creation is implicit in the name. Nineveh was named for Ninus, its legendary founder, but both Ninus and Nineveh are derived from Niniv, one of the Assyrian Elohim. Collectively these Elohim were the founders of another wicked city, Babel, and Nimrod its scriptural founder is but the Hebrew’s Niniv.
That this Nineveh is symbolic only is obvious since it took three days to cross it. Now it would not take three days to cross any man-made city, but it took three cosmic “days” for the Life Principle to cross from spirit to matter and the physical sun. This is the sinful Nineveh, and its sins are but those of Noah’s day; those wicked sons of God are again consorting with the daughters of men, hence under condemnation. And here we see the nonmoral nature of such condemnation. These sins are necessary to Creation, yet the Creator, as in scripture, is opposed to them. This is but a mythologist’s way of stating the ancient concept that matter is vile and creation a crime.
This wicked city is to be overthrown in the usual “forty days,” unless it repents. And the repentance is like the condemnation. The turbulent and adulterous elements come to rest on the fourth material plane, and out of this comes a sober and repentant earth. This is postsolar and hence the planetary “morning after,” so naturally there is repentance. That it is planetary is obvious since not only the people repent, fast, sit in sackcloth and ashes, but the flocks and herds do also. They too are ashamed of themselves, and so, like those in Noah’s day, are archetypes. The ashes part is very apt for the earth is the ashes of the solar fire.
10. And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not (Chap. 3).
And God too repents of his evil, and is rebuked by a mortal much wiser than he. Nor is this the first time; Moses also made him see his error. Jonah even throws back in his face his gift of life. “O Lord take, I beseech thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live” (4:3). And so prayed Job and Elijah. What greater indictment of God is there than this? What greater rebuke than condemnation of his purpose? Is this the prophets’ truer vision? Yes.
Jonah saved the city but only to be persecuted for his trouble; in less canonical books we find him suffering all the torments of Job, his counterpart. However, in the natural course of events, 6. . . . the Lord God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief . . . (Chap. 4).
These other sources tell us this gourd was so enormous it completely covered Jonah. Now as Jonah is the Creative Principle, a gourd of such dimensions can be none other than the earth itself; it is, in fact, the growing stone of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. But this would never do; under it Jonah was much too comfortable, so God repented again and “prepared a worm when the morning rose next day, and it smote the gourd (earth, with radiation) that it withered.” No doubt you have heard of “the worm that never dies,” and you assume it is the human soul or spirit. Here we see what it really is—the genetic principle. This died not even when entombed in dense matter; on the contrary, it destroyed this matter, the mythical gourd, with radiation, after which it created organic forms and thereby brought upon itself still further miseries, real, this time, for now it inhabited sentient matter. It is of this torturous nature of life and its tormentive cause the myth is trying to tell us.
Under it, Jonah finally fainted, but he did not take it lying down; he accused his Creator of evil; and Job declared himself more righteous than God. When elsewhere we said that man is God’s moral superior no doubt it sounded like blasphemy, yet it is the prophets’ truer vision. As the creator of morals, man is morally superior to that which created him.
Though He’s belted you and flayed you,
By the livin’ God that made you,
You’re a better man than He is, Gunga Din
(with apologies to Kipling).
Our preachers hurl their anger at man and hymn their praise of God, but if they would just reverse the process they would show some evidence of enlightenment, like the prophets. They would also see in Jonah themselves and act accordingly. We are all Jonahs, life, and we are all in wicked Nineveh, God’s savage construct; our shelter has been taken away, the heat of battle is upon us and the cold of death around us. This is life—a period of light in a parenthesis of darkness. Jonah preferred the latter, and even death. Death, God’s final insult to his creature.
9. And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto death (Chap. 4).
But we, no matter what happens—war and pestilence, quake and eruption, even death—it’s all for some divine purpose beyond our calculation, including cancer and polio. How long must we live in this ignorance of Reality? Is there no one to see these monstrous “acts of God” are not the work of divine wisdom but only the blind motions of the planetary organism and the predacious life upon it; therefore thou doest well to be angry. As Huxley said, “Know the truth and the truth will make you mad,” and someone else said “make you sick.” Well, we’re all sick but we haven’t sense enough to be angry.
Nothing, I suppose, could be more futile than human anger at Causation, yet at least it would imply we know what it is not—love and mercy. These are our creations and once we realize it righteous anger will arise in us whenever the ruthless God-force tries to assert itself. We feel such outrage in war and call it a virtue, but it takes a war to make us feel it, because we haven’t the wisdom to practice it in peace. Our religion has so intimidated us we haven’t even courage enough to cuss the weather. Though it has killed millions, “He tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,” What mockery! The shorn lambs of this world are the poor, and the suffering one cold winter causes them damns such doctrines in the eyes of intelligence. The ones that suffer not are those who shear the lambs, because they temper the winds to suit themselves. These violent forces of nature kill millions every year, so as far as Cosmolupus is concerned we are all lambs, or is it Little Red Riding Hoods?
To many this commentary on Jonah will seem brutal and pessimistic, but actually it is scriptural and very optimistic, for in it lies an opportunity greater than man has ever yet perceived. Had this world been created by Perfection, it would be perfect, ourselves included. But where can you go from perfection?
What would there be for us to do? With the knowledge now at hand, we can go far and do much; we can go from savage Nineveh to civilized Utopia. We can even do what Omar only wished, take this sorry scheme of things and mold it nearer to our heart’s desire. That’s what we’re here for, not worship. This world is God’s “unfinished business”; our task is to complete it. “Life is a gift of nature; but beautiful living is the gift of wisdom.” Greek proverb.