The terms selected for this glossary, with the exception of ‘deinanthropus’ and ‘nostos’, are taken from the glossaries found in Dreamtime, the Turtle trilogy and Invoking Ireland.
Aaron: Brother of Moses, with whom he led the children of Israel out of Egypt.
Actaeon: In Greek mythology, a hunter who surprised the virgin goddess Artemis bathing with her nymphs in a pool. In punishment Artemis turned him into a stag; not recognizing him, his hounds gave chase and tore him asunder.
Adityas: In Indo-European mythology Adityas are releasers, while Danavas are restrainers.
Advaitally: An adverb formed from the Sanskrit advaita – a-dvaita meaning ‘not two’, ‘non-dualism’. Advaita Vedanta is a doctrine of radical monism. It insists that multiplicity is an illusion. Only the Divine One is.
Aeon: Greek word meaning ‘an age’.
Aill na Mireann: Located at Uisneach, the traditional centre of Ireland, it literally means ‘the stone of the divisions’, the divisions in this case being the provinces of Ireland.
Akhty: Of the horizon.
Al Hallaj: Muslim mystic, crucified in a square in Baghdad in AD 922.
Altamira: Palaeolithic limestone cave near Santander in northern Spain containing rock art, c. 13,500 BC.
Altjeringa, or Alchurunga: The Dreamtime as Australian Aborigines understand it.
Anaconda: A constrictor snake, reaching in some cases a length of thirty feet, that inhabits the Amazonian rainforest.
Anadyomene: Greek mythology tells of a war between Titans and Olympians. The Titans were the old, established gods. The Olympians, a new generation of gods, challenged them for supremacy. In the course of the ensuing conflict one of the Titans was castrated. Thrown into the sea, his testicles were carried out by the still-potent primordial waters, where they underwent a transformation into Venus, the goddess of love. And Venus came towards us out of the sea. And Venus coming towards us out of the sea is called Venus Anadyomene.
Anahata Shabda (mantra): Metaphysical sound or unstruck sound, the word is applied to OM.
Anantasayin: Recumbent on the coils of the great snake Ananta, a figuration of infinity.
Anantashaya: Ananta is a Sanskrit word meaning ‘endless’ or ‘infinite’. In this context it signifies the infinite Abyss pictured as a snake upon whose coils the recumbent god Vishnu dreams the universe.
Anaximenes (b. 585 BC, d. 528 BC): Pre-Socratic philosopher, born in Miletus.
Ani: An ancient Egyptian official whose funerary papyrus is one of the most important editions of the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Anima Mundi: The world’s soul.
Anodos: The way back up from the underworld, the opposite of Kathodos.
A’noshma: Turtle, in the Maidu story of origins.
Anthropus: The Greek word for ‘Man’, meaning human kind.
Apophis: The great serpent enemy in the Egyptian underworld.
Argo: Ship in which Greek heroes, including Orpheus and Heracles, sailed to Colchis to bring home the Golden Fleece.
Aruni: An Upanishadic sage.
Athena: Patron goddess of Athens, she is owl-eyed and therefore theranthropic.
Atreidae: See Atreus.
Atreus: King of Mycenae, a lion-gated citadel of the Argolid in the Peloponnese. He and his descendants were known as the Atreidae, a family doomed in its generations. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides tell portions of the story in their tragic dramas.
Atum: A name of the Egyptian sun god.
Aurignacian: A flint culture of the Palaeolithic period in Europe, when some of the cave paintings of south-west France (Lascaux) and northern Spain (Altamira) were executed.
Ayahuasca: Hallucinogenic drink brewed from the yaje vine in Amazonia.
Bacon, Francis (1561–1626): Elizabethan writer and philosopher, his Novum Organum of 1620 set out his ‘true directions concerning the interpretation of nature’.
Bakhu: In Egyptian mythology, a mountain on the eastern horizon from which the sun rises.
Baqa: Arabic word used by Sufis meaning ‘abiding in the godhead’.
Bardo: A state of consciousness, one of the several that Tibetan Buddhists talk about.
Beagle: Ten-gun brig in which Darwin spent five years as a naturalist sailing around the world, calling at the Galapagos in the Pacific where he made the observations that would finally give rise to the theory of evolution.
Behemoth: A mythical beast like a rhinoceros in the Book of Job.
Beowulf: Scandinavian who slew Grendel.
Berkeley, George (1685–1753): Irish bishop and idealist philosopher born in Kilkenny.
Beulah: A phase of The Fall in William Blake’s cosmology. See Isaiah 62:4.
Bhakta: Passionate devotee of a goddess or god in Hinduism.
Bhuvaneshvar: Temple complex in India.
Birdreign: The reign of Conaire Caomh, a king of Ireland, reigning from Tara in early medieval times. His reign is known as the Birdreign, Enfláith in Gaelic, for the simple reason that his supernatural father appeared to Meas Buachalla, his mother, in the form of a bird. Taking off his bird form, he lay and mated with her in human form.
Bit Akitu: The temple outside the walls of ancient Babylon in which the New Year festival was celebrated.
Black Elk (1863–1950): Oglala medicine man of the Sioux tribe who, at the age of nine, was assumed into the heavenly world. There he participated in a great healing drama, which released the waters. This he and his people later re-enacted on the bank of the Tongue River in Montana in the 1880s.
Blake, William (1757–1827): English poet, painter and mystic, born in London to an Irish hosier.
Blue Thunder Tipi: Tipi that the chief of the Thunder Bears permitted Wolf Collar to erect and live in.
Boann: The river Boyne conceived of as a goddess.
Bodhi Tree: Tree under which the Buddha found enlightenment. The word bodhi suggests enlightenment.
Boehme, Jacob (1575–1624): German Protestant mystic.
Book of Gates: Ancient Egyptian book which provides the spells and words of power that will enable the soul to pass safely through the twelve pylons and gates of the underworld.
Borobudur: A great Buddhist temple in Java. In shape it resembles a low, stepped pyramid. Architecturally, it is as if the world mountain had accommodated itself to our desire to ascend into enlightenment or nirvana.
Bozeman: A settler who led a famous migration across the American prairies to Montana in 1864.
Brahma: One of the three great gods of Hinduism (Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva).
Bright Angel Trail: One of the winding trails that leads down to the floor of the Grand Canyon in Arizona.
Brontë, Emily (1818–48): Yorkshire-born poet, novelist, stoic and mystic.
Browne, Thomas (1605–82): English physician and author of Religio Medici (1635).
Buddh Gaia: The temple built on the spot where the Buddha won enlightenment is known as Buddh Gaya. Buddh is a Sanskrit word that is etymologically cognate to the Sanskrit words for ‘enlightened one’ or ‘enlightenment’. Calling her Gaia, ancient Greeks thought of the Earth as a goddess; and so, echoing Buddh Gaya, Buddh Gaia suggests that the Earth is both divine and enlightened.
Bunyan, John (1628–88): English Dissenter and author of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666).
Ces Noidhen: Literally, ‘the pangs of childbearing’ (found in the Táin Bó Cuailnge).
Cetus Dei: As in Agnus Dei, ‘the lamb of God’. Cetus Dei means ‘the whale of God’.
Chakras: Centres or lotuses of awareness-energies, of non-ordinary consciousness in our subtle bodies.
Chalcedon: Small town on the Bosphorus, where a Christological definition about Jesus’ two-natures-in-one-person was elaborated at a council of the Church in AD 451.
Chandogya: Title for one of the great Upanishads.
Chonyid bardo: In the Tibetan Book of the Dead the antarabhava, or state between death and rebirth, is thought to fall into three bardos or stages: the chikhai bardo, the chonyid bardo and the sidpa bardo. In the chikhai bardo, we ‘experience’ the clear light of the Void. In the chonyid bardo we experience our karmic propensities dawning upon us as peaceful and wrathful deities. In the sidpa bardo we experience yearning for rebirth and yielding to it, if that’s what we do, we approach a womb door.
Chuang Tzu (369 BC to 286 BC): Great sage who gave his name to one of the classics of Taoism.
Cittamatra: ‘Merely mind’ or ‘consciousness only’. Epistemological doctrine of radical idealism, in Mahayana Buddhism.
Coatlicue: The Aztec Earth Mother.
Corpus callosum: A distinct area or structure of the brain.
Crinoids: Plant-like creatures living in the carboniferous seas.
Cú Roí mac Dáire: God and gatekeeper of the Celtic Otherworld. A great shape-shifter, among the most uncanny of Celtic gods. In one of his apparitions, he is a great churl, wearing a grey mantle. In another, he is known as Terror, son of Great Fear. He lived in a high castle called Temair Luachra in Kerry.
Deinanthropus: Uncanny or unhomely man. Prefixing the Greek word deinos, meaning ‘frightful’, ‘terrible’, ‘uncanny’, ‘strange’, ‘inordinate’, that and more, to the Greek word anthropus, meaning ‘man’, ‘human’, Moriarty coins the word deinanthropus.
Demeter: In Greek religion, the Corn-Mother.
Democritus (c. 460 BC to c. 370 BC): Pre-Socratic philosopher born in Abdera in Thrace. The subject of Karl Marx’s PhD thesis.
Desana: A tribe of north-western Amazonian Indians.
Descartes, René (1596–1650): French rationalist philosopher and mathematician. In Dreamtime he is thought of as the plenipotentiary of Gorgon among us.
Desert of Zin: Desert into which the children of Israel came, having passed through the Red Sea. See Book of Numbers 20.
Deucalion: In Greek mythology, the survivor of the Flood.
Dichosa Ventura: Line from a poem by St John of the Cross, meaning ‘Oh happy venture’.
Dike: The immutable, almost impersonal, order and law of things in Greek thinking.
Dionysus: Greek god of wine, called Bacchus by the Romans. Son of Zeus.
Diotima: Wise woman from Mantineia, quoted by Socrates in Plato’s dialogue, The Symposium.
Divine (Un) Grund: Ground out of which all things emanate. German word meaning ‘no ground’, the no-ground that grounds.
Dover Beach: Poem by Mathew Arnold.
Duat: The underworld as ancient Egyptians named it and know it.
Eckhart, Meister (1260–1327): Rhineland mystic.
Eleusis: A sacred centre not far from ancient Athens where mysteries were enacted.
Engwura: Among Australian Aborigines, the rite of passage during which, separated from their mothers, boys are inducted into manhood.
En-Sof: In Jewish mysticism, the name given to the Divine Ungrund or Ground out of which the hierarchal world order emanated. It might be translated as the Divine No-thing-ness.
Enuma Elish: The first two words of the Babylonian creation epic, which give its title to the entire text. These two words are commonly translated into English as ‘When above’.
Eo Fis: The salmon god of wisdom who lives in the river Boyne.
Eohippus: Literally, ‘dawn-horse’. The little dog-sized animal from which over the last sixty million years the modern horse has evolved.
Epona: The Celtic horse goddess. Her Welsh name is Rhiannon, her Irish name is Macha.
Epoptai: Beholders of the mystery or of the secret signs and sacraments in the initiatic rites at Eleusis outside Athens in ancient Greece.
Erinyes: Literally meaning ‘the angry ones’. Terrible furies who pursue murderers in ancient Greek mythology and literature.
Esagila: The great central city temple of ancient Babylon.
Europa: Abducted Asian maiden who gave her name to Europe.
Eurydice: Wife to Orpheus, who when she died descended to Hades in an effort to bring her back.
Evangelanta: Newly coined word. In Hinduism there are collections of sacred texts called the Vedas. They are, so to speak, a first revelation, heard in times long past, heard and remembered. Other texts, constituting a further ‘revelation’, were written later. These are the Upanishads, and the many developments of, and from them, continue to this day. Collectively, these latter texts are called Vedanta. The word Vedanta is a compound of veda and anta, literally ‘after the Vedas’. In Christianity we have the initial Good News, the Greek word for Good News is Evangel. As in Hinduism there is Veda and Vedanta, so in Christianity is there Evangel and Evangelanta. Coming as they do, after the Evangel, the writings of the Christian mystics constitute Evangelanta.
Fana: Arabic word used by Sufis meaning our passing away into the godhead.
Farid, Al-Din Attar (1140–1233): Muslim mystic born near Nishapur.
Fénelon, Francois de (1651–1715): French prelate, writer and champion of Madame Guyon.
Fenrir or Fenris wolf: The great malevolent wolf, who, at the beginning of Ragnarok, bursts his chains and runs free. So great is his gape that he can swallow the sun.
Fern Hill: The farmhouse that gave its name to the famous title of a poem by Dylan Thomas.
Fintan Mac Bóchra: There is a largely fictitious history of Ireland which claims that the first people to come to this country were a band of fifty persons, mostly women, led by a woman called Cessair. Fintan Mac Bóchra was one of the few men among them. They came in antediluvian times. Fintan survived the Flood by becoming a salmon. He lived on into several later ages. Becoming a hawk, he would sometimes overfly the whole country, witnessing everything that was going on. In the end he was, as it were, the memory of the race.
Fisher King: The wounded keeper of the Grail.
Fjalar: One of the three cocks whose crowing announces Ragnarok in Nordic mythology.
Fodhla: One of the triple goddesses (with Éire and Banba) of Irish sovereignty. Like the others she gave her name to the country.
Frazer, James George (1854–1941): Glaswegian, social anthropologist, classicist and folklorist who taught at Cambridge and Liverpool. His most famous book is The Golden Bough (1890) rewritten in 12 vols, (1911–15), named for the sacred grove at Nemi.
Garbhagriha: The womb-chamber in a Hindu temple. The chamber that houses the linga and yoni.
Gawain: A nephew of King Arthur. One of the great knights of the Round Table.
Gilgamesh: A Sumerian king, a bringer of culture and founder of many great cities.
Ginnungagap: In Norse mythology, the great yawning emptiness or void.
Glaucus: Sea-god in Greek myth who figures in Plato’s dialogue, The Republic.
Gnostic: Literally, ‘someone who knows’. Historically, Gnostics were active in the east Mediterranean at the beginning of the Christian era.
Gnothi seauton: The famous Socratic dictum, ‘Know thyself’.
Goldcomb: One of the three cocks whose crowing announces Ragnarok in Nordic mythology.
Golgotha-Borobudur: Literally, a place of the skull, the hill on which Christ was crucified on Good Friday, and a Buddhist temple in Java: an amalgamation of the Christian and the Buddhist pyramidal temple.
Gorgocogito: A compound word conjoining Gorgo and cogito. Descartes, the French philosopher, sought to display and elaborate all knowledge as a totally deductive system. To this purpose he started with an indubitable first statement, Cogito ergo sum (‘I think therefore I am’). The word Gorgocogito implies that our thinking is Gorgo thinking, turning everything that we think about and look upon into stone.
Gorgon: In Greek mythology, a being so terrible in appearance that anyone who looked at her turned to stone. Her Abyssinian desert homeland was littered with the petrified people who came her way. In this book this desert is equated with the res extensia universe that Descartes, Cartesians and Ulropeans perceive.
Goshen: Land of Goshen in the Bible, from which Moses led the children of Israel. Synonym for Egypt.
Grail Quest: At the feast of Pentecost four hundred and fifty-four years after Christ’s Passion a most marvellous vessel covered in white silk entered the hall of the Round Table in Camelot. Proceeding round the table it offered to each knight in turn the food he best liked and then it departed. This vessel is known as the Grail and on the following day one hundred and fifty knights set out on a quest to see it more openly. See Malory’s The Quest of the Holy Grail.
Gyrans gyrando vadit spiritus: ‘Spiralling in a spiral, the spirit moves.’
Haeckel, Ernst (1834–1919): A famous nineteenth-century German embryologist, influenced by Darwin.
Hanble Ceyapi/Hanblečeya: ‘Crying for a vision.’
Harrowing of Hell: Medieval belief that on the night of Good Friday, Jesus went down into Hell and led out all the souls of the pre-Christian dispensation who had lived good or exemplary lives. This episode in the great drama of Christian redemption was frequently enacted on the medieval stage. The version quoted here is from the Chester cycle of Mystery Plays.
Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976): German philosopher, born in Messkirch, Baden, to a Catholic sexton.
Heilgeschichte: A German word meaning ‘sacred history’, as the Bible understands it.
Hill of the Koshaless Skull: Golgotha. In Hebrew the word Golgotha means ‘place of the skull’. Here it is taken to mean place of Adam’s empty skull at the foot of Christ’s Cross. Being empty, a Hindu might say of that skull that it is koshaless, meaning it is without the veiling or obscuring power of our senses and faculties. Kosha is Sanskrit for ‘veil’ or ‘obscuration’. As Hindus think of them, our senses and faculties do not reveal ultimate reality, which for them is Divine, but instead obscure it. That is why, seeking the Divine, we must practise being beyond the senses, as Adam’s empty skull at the foot of Golgotha Cross is beyond them.
Hilton, Walter (d. 1396): English mystic.
Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich (1776–1843): Romantic poet and Hellenist, born in Lauffen, Germany.
Horakhty: Horus of the Horizon, the sun god emerging victoriously over the horizon in the morning.
Horsehead Nebula: In galaxy M83 there is a nebula which has in it an aura of fire and cloud that looks astonishingly like a horse’s head. In this book we have imagined that it was from such a nebula that our own solar system evolved.
Horus: The Egyptian sun god in his morning appearance. He is often depicted as a falcon with the sun-disc on his head.
Idola tribus: Literally, ‘idols of the tribe’. Bacon suggested that in our search for the truth, there are four types of idol or illusion we must guard against: idola specus, idola tribus, idola fori, and idola theatri – ‘idols of the cave’, ‘the tribe’, ‘the market-place’ and ‘the theatre’.
Idumea: An ancient kingdom bordering the Holy Land. See Isaiah 34.
Ilissus: River that flows beside Athens. See Plato’s Phaedrus.
Indra: King of the gods, in the Hindu pantheon. The greatest of the adityas.
Iru-to: The great earth-snake in ancient Egyptian mythology.
Ishmael: Narrator of Melville’s Moby-Dick.
Jivanmukta: Sanskrit word meaning ‘one who is liberated in this life’.
Jnana Yoga: Hindu word cognate to the Greek word gnosis, meaning a particular kind of knowledge concerning the divine and our relationship to it.
Job: Fictional protagonist in the biblical Book of Job.
Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804): German philosopher and critical idealist born in Königsberg, Prussia, to a saddler.
Kathodos: Road going down or the way down or journey down, into the underworld.
Kedron: The stream on the outskirts of Jerusalem that Jesus crossed on his way to Gethsemane. See the Gospel according to St John 18:1.
Kenosis: Greek for ‘self-emptying’.
Kepler, Johannes (1571–1630): Astronomer, teacher and author of Harmonices Mundi (1619).
Kierkegaard, Søren (1813–55): Danish philosopher and existentialistic religious thinker.
Konarak: A famous sun-temple in Orissa, India.
Kosha: A Sanskrit word meaning ‘veil’ or ‘obscuration’. According to Hindus, our senses, our minds and our passions are veils, veiling ultimate divine reality from us.
Kundalashakti: The coiled power in the Muladhara chakra at the base of the spine. The power we seek to awaken in Kundalini yoga. Ultimately, Kundalashakti and Mayashakti are the same.
Kundalini: There are Hindus who believe that within us, starting below at the base of the spine, there is an ascending series of spiritual centres called chakras. In the muladhara or lowest chakra there is coiled energy, sometimes thought of as a snake and called Kundalini. The awakening of Kundalini, who in most of us is dormant, and her ascent through the other chakras is an event that many Hindus think of us as our ultimate spiritual blossoming.
Kuo Hsi (Guo Xi): A painter of the Northern Sung Dynasty in China. His sole surviving painting is the astonishing ‘Early Spring’. In it we can see that, following a precursor, he painted mountains as though they were clouds.
Kwakiutl: Indian people, living on the north-west coast of North America.
Labdacidae: The ruling royal family of ancient Thebes, of whom Kadmus, Laius and Oedipus were most conspicuous.
Land of Goshen: Israelite name for the Egypt in which they were enslaved.
Lao Tze: The Chinese words mean ‘Old Man’. The likelihood is that there was historically no such person, but to him is ascribed authorship of a famous Chinese religious/philosophical classic called the Tao Te Ching.
Lascaux: A cave at Montignac, Dordogne, south-western France, in which there are Paleolithic paintings, c. 15,000 BC.
Lauds and Nones: Traditionally, in a Christian monastery, there were, each day, seven times of formal prayer called: matins, lauds, terce, sext, nones, vespers and compline.
Law, William (1686–1761): English clergyman from Kingscliffe, Northamptonshire, born to a grocer. He refused to take the oath of loyalty to King George 1. Disciple of Boehme.
Leviathan: ‘On that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan the crooked serpent, and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea,’ Isaiah 27:1. Not to be equated with anything biologically alive in our oceans today. A great and terrible sea monster.
Linn Feic: The most sacred pool in the river Boyne.
Little Girl Lost: See Lyca.
Liz de la Mervoille: Bed of wonders and terror in Chateau Merveil.
Longinus: Roman soldier who speared Jesus on Good Friday.
Lucy Gray: Young woman about whom Wordsworth wrote a poem of that name.
Lyca: Name of ‘Little Girl Lost’; title of a poem by Blake.
Mabinogion, The: The collective name for eleven medieval Welsh folktales commemorating ancient strata of Celtic myth and history, first published in English 1838–49.
Magma: Geological term for lava outflow that has solidified.
Mahavakya: A great Upanishadic saying, such as tat tvam asi (‘that thou art’). The canonical number of such sayings is six.
Mahayana Buddhism: Literally, the greater-vehicle or vessel used to designate northern Buddhism, as opposed to Hinayana or lesser-vehicle Buddhism, which is southern Buddhism.
Maidu Raft: The Maidu are an Indian tribe living in California. The raft in question is the one which appears in their story of origins ‘Turtle Was Gone a Long Time’.
Malory, Sir Thomas (d. 1471): A Warwickshire knight of uncertain identity, author of Morte D’Arthur which was written in prison.
Mandukya Upanishad: Canonical Hindu text from which philosophical monism derives.
Manu: In Egyptian mythology, Manu is the western mountain into which the sun descends, beginning its underworld journey, every evening.
Marduk: One of the great Babylonian gods, slayer of Tiamat. His name means ‘son of the sun’.
Mayashakti: A Hindu goddess who is the source of maya, or the world illusion.
Mayflower: Ship in which the Puritan pilgrim fathers sailed to the New World, making landfall at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts, New England.
Mayin: A master of illusion in Hinduism.
Medulla: One of the oldest and deepest lobes of the brain.
Medusa: Chief of the three Gorgons of ancient Greece, who, when she looked at anything, turned it into stone. The only one that was mortal, she was slain by Perseus.
Megalonyx: One of the large fossil animals that Darwin discovered at Punta Alta.
Merlin: A magician, a woodsman. The wood he is a woodsman in, is mostly an externalization of the human unconscious, the Earth’s unconscious. This book thinks of him as the last inheritor of Nordic and trans-Nordic shamanism.
Mesehtiu: An adze-shaped instrument used in the ritual called the Opening of the Mouth in ancient Egypt.
Mesektet boat: The night barque in which the Egyptian sun-god journeyed through the underworld.
Metanoesis: As metaphysics means beyond the physical, so does metanoesis means beyond mental activity, beyond mind.
Minotaur: Half-bull, half-man that Pasiphae gave birth to.
Miriam the prophetess: Hebrew prophetess who took a timbrel and danced and sang having come through the Red Sea.
Mitakuye Oyasin: Native American saying, uttered by Black Elk, meaning ‘To all my relatives.’
Moksha: A Sanskrit word meaning ‘liberation’, a goal of spiritual endeavour
Mona Melencolia Europa: Conflation of Leonardo’s ‘Mona Lisa’ and Dürer’s ‘Melencolia’.
Morgan Le Fay: A euhemerized goddess, in this book equated with Mayashakti.
Moses and Aaron: Brothers who led the children of Israel out of Egypt.
Mount Abu: The highest peak in the Aravalli Range of Rajasthan state in western India. Home to a number of Jain temples.
Mount Palomar: Observatory site of a five metre reflector telescope in southern California.
Mo Wei: A Chinese doctrine proposing that nothing or no one has caused, or continues to cause, the universe.
Mucalinda Buddha: A Buddha about whom the serpent king, Mucalinda, is coiled. Coiled about him not to constrict or kill him, but to protect him from the assaults of Kama-Mara. In contradistinction to this Buddhist image, there is the Christian image of Mary standing on the head of the serpent to crush it.
Nacht und nebel: Literally, ‘night and fog’ in German; the trains that carried the Jews and gypsies to the concentration camps.
Narada: Protagonist in a Hindu parable.
Navajo: Tribe of Indians living in the south-west of North America.
Nave: Technically, the body of a Christian church, from the Latin word meaning ‘boat’, and therefore thought of as the ship, or ark, that would take us through the turbulent waters of time to the shore of Eternity.
Nekuia: A Greek word meaning ‘journey to the underworld’.
Newton, Isaac (1642–1727): English author of the laws of gravity, his most famous book being Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687).
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900): German philosopher, born in Röcken, Saxony, to a Lutheran pastor.
Niffari: An Egyptian Muslim mystic.
Night of Brahma: According to Hindus there is a night of Brahma during which the whole universe is reabsorbed without trace, and a day of Brahma in which the universe re-emanates.
Nirguna Brahman: The Brahman without attributes.
Nirvikalpasamadhi: A state of contemplation in which there is no object of awareness. In it we have gone beyond the subjective and objective divide.
Nostos: A Greek word meaning ‘homecoming’. Its plural form, nostoi, relates to an extensive body of literature in ancient Greece about the Greek heroes who returned from the Trojan Wars. For instance, The Odyssey describes Odysseus’ harrowing homecoming to Ithaca. For Moriarty, nostos entails more than a return to one’s home or homeland, it involves a homecoming to Divine Ground, whereby the Earth is revealed as Buddh Gaia.
Nunatak: Eskimo word meaning that portion of a mountain which protrudes above the ice.
Oedipus: King of Thebes in ancient Greece, who discovered that he had killed his father and married his mother.
Oglala: Sept of the Sioux.
Olduvai: A reach of the Rift Valley in Africa associated recently with fossils that have a bearing on our lunar origins.
Orpheus: A Greek god or hero, who singing and playing his lyre, assuaged the savagery of man and beast.
Osiris (Ani): Egyptian God of the Fields of Yaru, an Otherworldly replica of this world.
Ouroboros: The world-encircling snake.
Padmasambhava: Sanskrit word meaning ‘lotus-born’. Born purely of the lotus. The lotus, like our own water-lily, has its roots in the mud (of the passions), has its stem in the lucent water, and has its flower, fully opened, in pure sunlight.
Parousia: In Christianity, the Second Coming of Christ in judgment and glory.
Pascal, Blaise (1623–62): French mathematician, theologian and man of letters, born in Clermont-Ferrand. Champion of the Jansenists against the Jesuists; his Pensées appeared posthumously in 1670.
Pashupati: The horned divine Lord of animals.
Pasiphae (calving-ground): Wife of Minos, king of Crete. She mated with a bull from the sea and gave birth to the Minotaur.
Pequod: Whale ship in which Captain Ahab and his crew pursued the white whale called Moby-Dick. Also, a tribe of Indians from the Massachusetts region, massacred by white settlers in 1639.
Pericles: The man under whose inspired leadership Athens flourished in the fifth century BC.
Perseus: The Greek hero who slew Medusa using Minerva’s shield, rescued Andromeda from the sea-monster and married her. (After her death she was placed among the stars.)
Pert em hru: ‘Coming forth by day.’
Peyote: Small desert cactus whose fruits are hallucinogenic. Mescaline is an extract.
Pleroma: Greek word meaning ‘fullness’.
Polla ta deina: First three words of Sophocles’ second stasimon in Antigone.
Porete, Margeurite: Mystic from Hainaut in Belgium, she was author of a mystical text written in Old French called The Mirror of Simple Souls. Charged with heresy, she was burned at the stake in 1310.
Propaedeutic: An introductory teaching.
Protarchos ate: Greek term meaning ‘the primal act of madness’. See The Oresteia by Aeschylus.
Psalm eight: Psalm in which a biblical definition of man is elaborated.
Psychopompos: A Greek word meaning the guide of souls in their after-death journeys.
Psyverse: Compound word, psy(che) and (uni)verse, suggesting the universe is a psyche.
Punta Alta: In geological times, for about seventy million years, the North and South American land-masses were separated, and during this time their faunas evolved in isolation from each other. When the land-bridge was restored, the great predators that had evolved in the north moved south, and events ominous unto extinction for many wiped out whole species, among them Megatherium, Megalonyx, Scelidotherium, Toxodon, Mylodon and Machrauchenia. Darwin found fossils of these animals in and at the base of a cliff called Punta Alta on the coast of Argentina.
Purana: Hindu mythic tale.
Python: A dragon with a lair in Delphi, where Apollo slew him and established an oracle.
Ragnarok: In Nordic mythology, Ragnarok is the name given to the cataclysms, upheavals, wars and conflicts in and through which a universe comes to an end.
Res Extensa: Literally, ‘extended matter’. In the seventeenth century philosophers and scientists distinguished between primary and secondary qualities, the former being extension and motion, the latter touch, taste, colour and smell. Only the primary qualities belonged to reality. All else was projection.
Rig Veda: Collection of Hindu sacred texts.
River of the White Hippopotamus: One of the rivers of the Egyptian underworld, taken here to be the karmic equivalent of the Colorado.
Rustred: One of the three cocks whose crowing announces Ragnarok in Nordic mythology.
St John of the Cross (1542–91): Spanish mystic.
St Teresa of Avila (1515–82): Spanish mystic and Carmelite from Old Castile.
Samadhi: Sanskrit word meaning ‘contemplation’.
Sea of Typhoons: Eastern sea into which the Pequod sailed and foundered.
Sefirah: In the Cabbala, one of the first ten emanations from the Divine.
Shabda Brahman: The Brahman of sounds. Brahman as he exists in mantras and hymns.
Shakti: Sanskrit word meaning ‘energy’ or ‘power’. Personified, it is always female.
Shaman: Siberian term now adopted to denote a medicine man or woman.
Shantih: Sanskrit word meaning ‘peace’.
Shiva: Third person of Hindu Trinity, representing the destructive, and regenerative, principle.
Shulamite: The heroine of the Song of Songs in the Bible.
Sidpa bardo: According to the Tibetan Book of the Dead there are three states, called bardos, through which we pass between death and rebirth. In the third of these, the sidpa bardo, we yearn for rebirth, and going with that yearning we arrive once again at a womb door.
Siduri: Name given to a wife of Noah in this book.
Sila Ersinarsinivdluge: An Eskimo phrase that translates as ‘Don’t be afraid of the universe.’
Silam Inua: An Eskimo or Inuit concept signifying something like the world soul as Plato or Plotinus understood it.
Simeon: The man who, when he saw the Christ-child presented in the temple, uttered the words, ‘Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace,’ – in Latin, Nunc dimittis. See Luke 2.
Socrates (469 BC to 399 BC): Founding father of Greek philosophy, born in Athens.
Soma: A psychoactive substance used among Hindus in Vedic times, derived, we now think, from the Amanita muscaria mushroom.
Sophocles: (c. 496 BC to 405 BC): One of the great Athenian tragedians.
Stasimon: A song of the Chorus in ancient Greek tragedy.
Stevens, Wallace (1879–1955): Pennsylvania-born insurance executive and poet.
Sulcus primogenius: The first and sacred furrow that will enclose the new city.
Sumpatheia ton hollon: Stoic phrase meaning ‘the sympathy of all things with all things’.
Sunda Straits: Straits in an eastern sea through which the Pequod sailed to its doom.
Sunyata: The Mahayana Buddhist doctrine of emptiness.
Sushumna: In Hindu belief, the channel in the subtle body along which chakras are located.
Suso, Henri (1295–1365): Rhineland mystic.
Sutra: From a Sanskrit word meaning ‘thread’, ancient aphoristic manuals with rules for systems of philosophy and grammar, directions for religious rituals and ceremonial customs. In Buddhism, any book containing or believed to contain teachings of the Buddha.
Sutton-Hoo: Site of a Saxon-ship burial (in East Anglia).
Ta’doiko: First ground onto which, in the Maidu story of origins, Turtle, Earth-Initiate and Father-of-the-Secret-Society, emerged.
Taijasa: The state of dreaming.
Tai-wer: In ancient Egyptian mythology, the first land or mound out of primordial waters.
Takanakapsaluk: One of the most sacred and famous Eskimo stories describes how she became the mother of sea-beasts – of seals, walrus, dolphins, porpoise, whales. She lives on the floor of the ocean.
Taliesin (fl. 550): The most archetypal bard in Welsh mythology.
Tao Te Ching: Translated by Arthur Waley (1934) as The Way and its Power, a Taoist sacred text attributed to Lao Tze (c. 604 BC to 523 BC.) consisting of eighty-one short chapters of poetry and philosophical reflection – profound and beautiful, sometimes paradoxical. It proposes a view of life equivalent to the lily-of-the-field sections of the Sermon on the Mount in the Bible.
Tauler, Johannes (1300–1361): One of the great Rhineland mystics of the fourteenth century.
Techne: Greek word for the manufacture and use of tools.
Tehom: Hebrew word meaning ‘the Great Deep’.
Te Kore: Maori word meaning ‘the Void’.
Tenebrae: A ritual re-enactment of the darkness of Good Friday, and the Passion and death of Christ.
Tep-Zepi: In ancient Egyptian mythology, the First Time.
Thales: The first of the pre-Socratic philosophers, who lived in Ionia on the coast of Asia Minor.
Thebes: Troubled city in ancient Greece, which, more than most, illustrates our difficulties in attempting to civilize ourselves, in attempting to live civically. Oedipus was the most famous of its kings.
Theranthropic: From two Greek words, ther, ‘animal’ and anthropus, ‘human’. Used descriptively of beings who, anatomically, are an organic conjunction of animal and human parts. Anubis, for instance, the mortuary god of the ancient Egyptians, has a jackal’s head but is otherwise human in form.
Theriomorphic: Having the shape of an animal.
Theriozoic: Alive in the way that an animal is alive (a neologism).
Thermopylae: In Greece, meaning ‘the hot gates’, the famous pass between the mountains and the sea where the Greeks under Xerxes stood against a horde of invading Persians, led by Leonidas of Sparta, in the fifth century BC.
Theseus: Greek hero who slew the Minotaur.
Tiamat: In Babylonian mythology, Tiamat is the primordial female monster of the Abyss. Marduk, a god held in the highest esteem by the citizens of Babylon, did battle with her. Slaying her, he sliced her down the middle, elevating the upper fillet so that it became the sky, spreading out the lower fillet so that it became the Earth.
Tohu Wavohu: The Hebrew word for ‘chaos’, the waste of dark, destructive waters against which the biblical God set up constraining bars and doors.
Tongue River: River that flows into Yellowstone through Wyoming and Montana.
Torrent: The brook, otherwise known as Kedron, Jesus crossed on his way into Gethsemane.
Traherne, Thomas (1637–74): English mystic and poet born to a shoemaker in Hereford. Author of Centuries of Religious Meditations.
Triduum Sacrum: The three sacred days, Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Saturday.
Tsetsekia: Winter ceremonies of the Kwakiutl.
Turiya: According to the Mandukya Upanishad this whole universe is Brahman. The innermost core of our being, called atman, that too is Brahman. This atman, which is Brahman, has four states: the waking state, the dreaming state, the state of dreamless sleep, and also a state called Turiya, a Sanskrit word that means ‘the fourth’. (As a river is absorbed, losing its identity in the ocean, so, in this fourth state, is the individual soul absorbed into Brahmanirguna. The Tehom we are biblically in dread of is the Turiya that we upanishadically yearn for.)
Udana: Hymn or song – especially as spoken by the Buddha on the morning of his enlightenment.
Uisneach: Ancient ritual centre of Ireland, a hill in County Westmeath east of the village of Ballymore.
Ulro/Ulropeans: The Fall, which William Blake envisaged as a descent through four distinct states of mind: Eden, Beulah, Generation and Ulro. The latter is our condition.
Uluru: The world’s largest monolith in central Australia, popularly known as Ayer’s Rock.
Ungrund or Urgrund: A German mystical term denoting the divine no-ground that grounds. It arises in Boehme’s attempt to explain the origin of things, especially the existence of evil.
Upanishads: Sanskrit for ‘a sitting down’ (at another’s feet); sacred Hindu texts on the nature of man and the universe, part of Vedic writings dating back two and a half millennia.
Urizen: Character in Blake’s prophetic poems.
Utnapishtim: Sumerian survivor of the Flood (of Noah and Deucalion).
Uvavnuk: Inuit medicine woman.
Vedas: The four sacred books of the Brahmans (Rig, Yajur, Sama and Atharva), collections of prayers and hymns of ancient scripture; veda means ‘knowledge’ in Sanskrit.
Viksepashakti: Mental power by which we project something illusory onto reality. Shakti signifies female power in a goddess or god.
Vishnu: Major Hindu deity, the second member, with Brahma and Shiva, of a triad of gods manifesting cosmic functions of the Supreme Being. A preserver of the universe and embodiment of goodness and mercy, his descents (avataras) include appearances as Rama and Krishna.
Vishvarupa: The Hindu god Vishnu when he is seen to contain within himself all the myriad forms of reality.
Vishvayuga: Form that contains all ages.
Vrindavan: A region in India associated with Krishna and the Gopis. Krishna was an incarnation of the god Vishnu and sometimes at night he would play flute music and hearing it the Gopis, the wives of the cowherds, would come yearningly to him, each of them seeking his embrace, each of them finding it because, in response to their great desire for him he would multiply himself so that always there were as many Krishnas as there were Gopis who came.
Vritra: In Hindu mythology, a dragon who imprisoned the waters in his coils.
Waga chun: A sacred tree (rustling tree, cottonwood); central image in Black Elk’s great vision.
Waters of Nun: Primordial waters of Egyptian mythology.
Whaleman’s Chapel: Located in New Bedford, Connecticut, mentioned in Melville’s Moby-Dick.
Wirikuta: Mexican desert in which the Huichol seek peyote.
Wolf Collar: Blackfoot medicine man.
Wordsworth, William (1770–1850): A Cumbria-born poet, his ‘Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ first appeared in Poems in Two Volumes (1807).
Wu-hsin: Chinese word of Zar Buddhist provenance meaning ‘no mind’, or ‘beyond mind’.
Wu Wei: In Taoist philosophy, action by inaction.
Yahweh: One of the personal names for the God of the Old Testament. See Psalm 74:14.
Yaje Woman: The woman associated with the yaje vine, a powerful hallucinogenic Amazonian plant.
Yajnavalkya: An Upanishadic sage.
Yakut: People of Siberia.
Yam: Canaanite Leviathan.
Yana: A word that means ‘vessel’ or ‘vehicle’, in the sense of ship or ark. Buddhism has for centuries now been growing in two quite different ways, the way called Linayana or the lesser vehicle and the way called Mahayana or the greater vehicle.
Yatra na anyat pasyati, na anyat srinoti, na anyad vijanati, sa bhuma:
‘Where one sees nothing else, hears nothing else, knows nothing else, that is fullness.’ Chandogya Upanishad, VII, XXIV.
Year One Reed: In the Aztec Calendar, the year in which Cortez and his cohorts came (1519 in our calendar). The year therefore in which our religion and culture are overthrown. The year of our Gottedammerung. The Ragnarok of our way of life.
Yeats, William Butler (1865–1939): Dublin-born poet, playwright, founder of the Abbey Theatre, senator and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
Yggdrasil: In Nordic mythology, the World Tree. It was believed to have nine worlds in it, some under its roots, some on its branches.
Yu Wei: In Taoist philosophy, deliberate, self-conscious action.
Zoas: A word from Blake’s poem ‘The Four Zoas’. Vast forms of life. Forms of life that are vast not in the sense of exceptional magnitude but in the sense of exceptional energy.