17

Tamil Word Forms

Dravidian culture and religion, expressed in the Tamil language, are considered to have been major formative influences of the creation traditions and philosophies of India. Both the culture and its religion are understood to have been pre-Vedic, and evidence suggests that their influences were profoundly felt in all regions of India and throughout its history. Appropriate to our studies, the modern centers of ethnic and religious influence of the culture lie in southern and eastern India, in regions that include Orissa, which is also considered to be the home of the Sakti cult. The roots of the Dravidian people were associated with mountains and the rise of agriculture, and Siva is deemed to have originally been a Tamilian/Dravidian deity. Likewise, the tradition gave rise to the goddess Uma, whom we associate with the Dogon deity Amma.

Our success in relating the Tamil word for “elephant,” pilu, to the Dogon concept of the po pilu suggests that, like the modern-day Turkish language, the Dravidian-based Tamil language might provide yet another source of comparative word meanings that could be useful to our study. Based on that, it seems worthwhile to explore the possible extent of correspondences between Tamil words and key terms of our cosmology. For the purposes of this discussion, Tamil word meanings will be drawn from an online translation site found at www.tamildictionary.com.

Our Tamil word comparisons begin with Amma, the name of the creator god of the Dogon tradition. The Dogon priests describe Amma as being both male and female, while Brighenti tells us that in the Sakti tradition, Amma is female and identified with an archaic goddess named Uma. There, also, in the Sakti tradition, the processes of creation are understood to derive from a female principle that manifests the male principle, and so Amma, who initiates the processes of creation, would also be female. From this perspective, it makes sense that the Tamil name Amma means “mother.” The Dogon priests assign a second set of definitions to the name Amma that mean “to grasp, hold firm, or establish.” The similar Hebrew term amen, a word that is directly equated to Amma in languages of North Africa, comes from a root that means “to establish” and is used in the context of prayers to mean “so be it” or “make it so.” So it seems sensible that in the Tamil language the word amen also means “be it so.”

The Tamil word aku, which means “to become” or “to see,” calls to mind the Egyptian and Dogon words for “light,” aakhu and ogo. We previously discussed the Turkish term ak, meaning “white,” and its possible associations with the light and with the concept of deity in Buddhism and in the Sakti tradition. We also noted how the phoneme ak appears in Turkish words for “vulture” and their name for the Dog Star, Sirius, itself.

In the Dogon tradition the term po pilu refers to the egg of the world, a fundamental component of the atom-like po. In the Tamil language, the term pilu is actually a word for “atom.” It is also a term for an “arrow,” an object that represented both Tana Penu in India and the mother goddess Net/Neith in predynastic and dynastic Egypt. We have mentioned that the Tamil term pil, or pilu, can also mean “elephant.” The Tamil word pil also means “to burst (as a fruit), to break open or to fall off,” definitions that seem appropriate to the final “bursting” stage of the Dogon po pilu. The Tamil term piluvatam refers to “a system that assumes that the world was made from atoms.” We argued in The Science of the Dogon, based on biologically related descriptions given by the Dogon priests, that the Dogon term kikinu referred to the genes of a cell that first divide during the process of meiosis, then combine to form a zygote. The Dogon word ki means “nose” and is pictured as a pointed nose-like shape that looks like a single gene as it divides during the processes of biological reproduction.1 It could be this process that is referred to by the Tamil word kinu, which means “to cut into slices.”

The Tamil term penu, which we associate with the archaic sister goddesses Dharni Penu and Tana Penu, means “to honor and respect, honor as a father and a mother, take care of, nurture, and cherish.” These are all meanings that fit well with the concepts of mothers, revered ancestors, mother goddesses, and the notion of the embrace that we associate with the hugging Ganeshas, and with the dual arms on the pillars at Gobekli Tepe. It comes from the root word pen, which means “woman” or “girl.”

In Egypt and among the Dogon we equate the root tem with the idea of “completion” and with the scientific concept of mass and the cosmological concept of earth. The term earth is given both in a cosmological sense and in relation to the actual terra firma of our world. Tem is also the Egyptian phonetic value that seems to relate to so many of the symbolic elements that are found at Gobekli Tepe. Tem is also understood in Egypt as the name of an archaic earth god, essentially a male counterpart to Tana Penu in the Sakti tradition. In the Tamil language, the word tem means “place, location, room, land or country.”

We have said that the Sakta goddess Tana Penu may relate to the mythical teachers of the Dogon, who were said to have brought skills of civilization such as weaving and agriculture to humanity and to have eventually left. From that perspective, Tamil words that are based on the phonetic root ta seem to make sense. These include the root ta itself, which means “to give, grant or bestow,” the word tanai, which refers to the concept of “cloth,” and the word tana, which means “to depart” or “leave.”

We have made reference here and in The Cosmological Origins of Myth and Symbol to a priestly tribe from the Tibetan/Chinese border called the Na-Khi, or Naxi, whose name implies celebration of the principle of the mother goddess Na. This is the same essential principle that we see reflected in the concept of the fertility cult of the female yoginis within the Sakti cult of Orissa. In the Tamil language, we encounter the term nacci, reminiscent of the name Naxi, which refers to “a class of seven female deities.” The name is founded on the same root as the Tamil term nacai, which defines the concepts of “desire, lust, and affection.” We also commented that the Na-Khi define their honored ancestor-teachers as Mu ancestors, a term that, if we entertain the notion that ours might not have been the first civilization to have ever emerged on our planet, could harken back to the memory of an earlier society. Perhaps in that same regard, the Tamil word mu refers to “that which was before.”

In The Science of the Dogon, we mentioned that the native Maori of New Zealand define a concept called po that is quite similar to the Dogon atom-like component of matter, also called po. However, for the Maori, the term also has connotations that relate to the concept of death. (Dogon and Egyptian references are to “primordial time,” a period that fell conceptually “before creation” and “before life.”) Based on multiple discrete definitions, we correlated the Dogon word po to the Egyptian terms pau, paut, and pauti. From this perspective, it seems understandable that the Tamil term pautti also means “death.” A related Tamil word, pautikam, is a name for the Rig Veda, one of the eight Puranas and one of the earliest known ancient texts.

The Tamil language includes a word, nunukkam, outwardly formed from two or more cosmological roots that are familiar to our studies of cosmology. This word defines the concepts of “fineness” or “minuteness,” comparable to how we might describe the processes of creation in the microcosm. A related term, nunakkam, refers to “a flexure or movement” that calls to mind the complex pivoting motion that characterizes the earliest stages of creation in our cosmologies.

There are other Tamil words whose meanings fit the expected mold of our cosmology without the need for special interpretation and so reflect the likely influence of this same system of cosmology. One is the word stupi, which refers to “the top of a temple,” comparable to the idea of a Buddhist stupa or a Christian steeple. Another is the word Om, which is defined as a mystic name for a deity and can be applied to Vishnu, to Siva, or to Brahma. These meanings could also relate to the word olam, which means “sound, noise or invocation” and defines the very essence of the Buddhist concept of Om. And finally there is a Tamil word, meru, which refers to the familiar mythical Mount Meru, a symbol of cosmology that was said to reside at the center of the Earth.