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Historical Overview of the Esoteric Tradition

Before we begin to evaluate any potential relationship between Maori practices and those of the ancient esoteric tradition we have been pursuing, it makes sense to review the progression of that tradition as we understand it to have unfolded historically. This history is typified by several distinct eras, each with its own likely influences on ancient cultures and each with its own characteristic elements and specific points of reference. Knowledge of these eras and their signature attributes creates a kind of conceptual framework within which to interpret the symbolic elements we encounter in any given culture. The overview we have set down here represents a kind of consensus viewpoint of various cultures whose traditions we have explored, cross-compared, and attempted to reconcile.

Perhaps the greatest threat to the work of a comparative cosmologist lies with his or her own predisposition toward wishful interpretation. The human brain seems essentially “wired” to seek out, find, and try to make sense of patterns, sometimes even in cases where no objective pattern arguably exists. It is on this principle that psychological tools such as the Rorschach test are based. The Rorschach test is the classic psychological exercise in which a person is shown the shape of an inkblot and is asked to interpret the image it presents. The underlying presumption is that the test subject’s own internal psychology will cause him or her to perceive the random blob of spilled ink as an image. For a researcher such as myself, the best defense against wishfulness has been to simply impose a rule that, wherever possible, interpretations must begin with an overt statement of how the studied culture perceived a particular concept, symbol, word, or practice. This approach to interpretations offers an even stronger defense against unintended wishfulness when we can demonstrate that two or more cultures with the same practice shared the same understanding of a particular concept or symbol. However, one potential downside to this approach is that it also obliges the researcher to consider any seemingly unlikely interpretations that might be put forth and affirmed by more than one culture.

The earliest cosmological references we can firmly identify in our studies date to the time of the close of the last Ice Age, which places those references in an era sometime prior to 10,000 BCE. Due to the lack of surviving evidence, these kinds of references automatically take on the appearance of being mythical, since they can only have passed down to us through generational stories or through images carved in or painted on stone. Examples of references in this category include Homer’s descriptions of the catastrophic sinking of the island continent of Atlantis and claims for the existence of pre–Ice Age cultures such as Mu or Lemuria.

Perhaps the earliest cosmological references that can be objectively evaluated by us originated in the era of Gobekli Tepe, the mountaintop megalithic site in southeastern Turkey, located in the region of the Fertile Crescent. The Gobekli Tepe site is firmly dated by archaeologists to the era of around 10,000 BCE. The site encompasses a diverse set of symbolic elements that include standing stones, megalithic pillars, stone circles with stone benches and stone walls, a wide range of expertly carved animal images, pillars with anthropomorphized features, and several enigmatic symbolic shapes. Among the carved images prominently featured at Gobekli Tepe are animals that later came to be adopted as iconic symbols of deities and monarchs in classic ancient cultures. These include such creatures as birds of prey, scorpions, serpents, and bulls.

During the era of Gobekli Tepe and in the same immediate vicinity, the first evidences of certain civilizing skills make their detectable appearance. These include the cultivation of grains, the domestication of farm animals, the weaving of cloth, the art of pottery, the art of metallurgy and metalworking skills, and stonework and stone carving skills; these are arguably the same set of skills specifically claimed by various ancient cultures as having been imparted to humanity as part of an ancient instructed civilizing plan. Furthermore, the skills appear in proximity to the mountaintop sanctuary of Gobekli Tepe, the same type of setting as is described by ancient cultures for this ancient instruction. The suggestion is that there may have been direct associations between the Gobekli Tepe site, Buddhism’s mythical Vulture Peak, where Buddha ostensibly first imparted knowledge to humanity, and the mythical First Time of ancient Egyptian memory, which is referred to as Zep Tepi.

In a previous volume of this series, called Point of Origin, we pursued linguistic clues to trace the symbolic elements found at Gobekli Tepe to an archaic matriarchal tradition in India called the Sakti Cult. The cult is understood to have originated in the north and west of India (in the direction of southeastern Turkey and the Fertile Crescent) and to have been ancestral to the Vedic, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions. Language and DNA studies indicate that this cult then spread outward from there in all directions. Evidence of the cult’s influence extends as far to the southeast as Australia and as far to the west as Europe. Likely influences of this cult can also be inferred in cultures like predynastic Egypt by around 4000 BCE, most significantly in the region of Elephantine, an island situated at what was originally the first cataract or waterfall of the Nile River.

The Sakti Cult is most closely associated with two Mother Goddesses named Tana Penu and Dharni Penu, twin sisters who together were deemed to be the two mothers of the dancing elephant god Ganesha. Over the centuries, thousands of localized surrogate names were evolved for these goddesses. In later eras, influences of this same cult were evident in relation to the god Siva (or Shiva) and his consort, the goddess Sati, who from the Hindu perspective was also deemed to have been the mother of Ganesha.

It is possible that the Sphinx at Giza could be a remnant of the 10,000 BCE era, since it is thought to have been carved from a natural outcropping of stone and that approach to sculpture was a known practice of the Sakti Cult. The Orion correlation theory of ancient Egypt researcher Robert Bauval proposes that the three largest pyramids at Giza aligned astronomically with the three belt stars of Orion in the era of 10,000 BCE. Some researchers think that the Sphinx was created as a pointer to mark the constellation of Leo in that same era. If we credit those theories, then we are left with only two reasonable possibilities: that at the very least the alignment, if not the actual construction of these structures, did actually date to the era of 10,000 BCE, or else that some later culture was somehow capable of calculating retrospectively what the proper alignments should have been.

By the much later era of 3200 BCE, the construction of a series of megalithic structures was initiated on Orkney Island in Northern Scotland, the earliest ones linked by a road to the Neolithic farming village of Skara Brae. In a previous volume of this series, The Mystery of Skara Brae, we argued that these structures were of a cosmological nature and were intended to reflect (on a life-size scale) the same progressive stages of creation that are reflected in the base plan of a Buddhist stupa shrine. The suggestion is that these Orkney Island structures constituted a kind of walk-through training ground for concepts of cosmology and that the island itself might have been compared to a kind of college campus. Associated with these megalithic sites was a set of eight stone houses at Skara Brae, set alongside an actual working farm, that we believe served as housing for class-groups of initiates and their families. Our outlook is that, during the period from 3200 BCE to 2600 BCE, this farm was used to instruct these same initiates in the skills of agriculture. Orkney Island is situated at the northernmost flow of the mid-Atlantic Ocean currents and hosts easily navigated harbors. The implication is that groups from various regions of the world may have been brought to this very accessible, campus-like setting in order to be trained in civilizing skills.

Shortly thereafter, at around 3100 BCE, monarchies, founded on functional systems of agriculture, began to appear in various regions of the globe. These included the emergence of dynastic kingship in Egypt, the appearance of the earliest emperors in China, and likely kingships in Ireland and Peru. At about that same time, distinct revisions or reversals occurred in the form of ancient cosmological symbols and concepts. Archaic matriarchal religious traditions came to be supplanted by patriarchal traditions. Creator gods such as Ra and Amen in Egypt and Siva in India came to take precedence over long-revered Mother Goddesses. These changes crossed cultural boundaries and so seem to reflect the action of some regionally capable (or perhaps even globally capable) influence.

At around this same time, symbolic systems of writing first came into use, often flatly claimed by the cultures who adopted them as having been gifts from the gods. Many of the early glyph images took the form of well-defined cosmological shapes from a preexisting orally transmitted esoteric tradition and were often understood to represent the same cosmological meanings. Fundamental similarities can be shown to have existed between the first symbolic written languages in ancient Egypt and in ancient China, where certain hieroglyphic words were formulated in matching ways. Cosmological information that had long been passed from generation to generation as part of an oral tradition began to be placed in writing and was now passed down generationally in the form of written texts.

At about 1500 BCE, the first evidence of monotheistic religion (in the modern sense) appeared. The massive eruption of Thera on the island of Santorini in the Aegean Sea near Greece, which occurred around this time, is seen by some to relate historically to the biblical story of Moses and the Exodus from Egypt. It is also the approximate era of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhnaten and his efforts to establish monotheistic religion during the Eighteenth Dynasty in ancient Egypt.

According to Dogon and Buddhist sources, the ancient civilizing plan was intimately linked to a creation tradition, and each of the instructed civilizing skills was tagged to a concept or process of creation. The associated symbolic concepts pertained to three distinct creational themes: the formation of the universe, the formation of matter, and the processes of biological reproduction. These three themes represented processes that were conceptually parallel and were seen as being so fundamentally similar to one another that, within the ancient tradition, they could be described using a single progression of symbols. Consequently, any given symbol might carry specific nuances of meaning in relation to each of the three creational themes. For example, just as the processes of biological reproduction begin with a fertilized egg, so the formation of the universe was conceived of as beginning with a cosmogonic egg. Likewise, the processes that initiate the formation of matter were said to begin with a figure akin to the Egyptian and Chinese sun glyph, , which the Dogon characterize as the egg-in-a-ball.

In the ancient cosmology, creation is said to rest on two fundamental principles, those of duality and the pairing of opposites. The processes of biological creation clearly illustrate these two principles: during biological reproduction, a fertilized egg results when a feminine energy (in the form of a woman’s unfertilized egg) comes together with a masculine energy (in the form of a man’s sperm.) From this perspective, the processes of biological life are catalyzed by an act of conception that promotes the union of these two elements—an event that, in the mind-set of the cosmology, is characterized as an embrace. By comparison, the processes of the formation of matter are said to rest on a similar set of principles: our material universe is seen as a masculine energy and is said to be paired with a nonmaterial universe that is conceptualized as a feminine energy. An act of perception unites the two energies in an embrace, comparable to that of biological conception, which is then understood to catalyze the processes of the formation of matter.

During the archaic period from 10,000 BCE until the first appearance of written language around 3000 BCE, the symbolic meanings of the cosmology were passed down orally and resided with a base set of root phonetic values, rather than written glyphs. Relationships between cosmological words appear to have been defined based on common pronunciation, rather than (as modern Egyptologists often infer) on similarity of glyph structure. Permutations of these root phonemes are evident in the languages of the various groups we have studied, and the possible shades of meaning they convey become more evident as we explore and compare the words of additional cultures who shared aspects of the same cosmology. The consistency with which the phonemes can be shown to relate to the intended meaning often makes it possible to predict the cosmological implications of a given word based solely on its phonetic structure.

Included among these symbolic phonemes were:

ak = light

am = knowledge (or the biblical notion of conception)

ar = ascension

ba = place, soul, or spirit

da = mother

de or di = to apprehend or learn

ga = doorway or gate, or empty of

ia = existence

ji = vibration

ka = duality or the concept of an embrace

ke = nonexistence coming into existence

ma = sight or perception

mu = ancestor

na = woman or feminine relative

nu = water or waves

pa = ancestor

pe = mouth or the concept of space

po = atom or matter

ra = symbolic of the sun, gravity, and the material universe

sa = Orion

si = symbolic of Sirius and the nonmaterial universe

ta = earth or mass

va = speak or say

ve or vi = to come

yi = transformation or a change in the physical state of something

These and other significant phonemes were then combined with one another to define larger words and to express more complex concepts. For example, someone with an awareness of how these phonemes work might have recognized that the Dogon term nummo was likely to combine the root phonemes nu and ma and so implied the notion of matter in its wavelike state being perceived. The first name of the Sakti Earth Mother goddess Tana Penu combines the phonemes ta (“earth”) and na (“mother”). The Chinese term yijing or i ching (which we interpret as referring to the changes that matter in its wavelike state goes through as it is transformed into particles) combines the phonemes yi (“change in the state of something”) and ji (“vibration”). Knowledge of how these phonemes worked in various ancient cultures to create cosmological words can give us a significant head start when trying to interpret the cosmological words of an as-yet unfamiliar culture.

It is of great benefit to our studies that the Dogon place a very high priority on the purity of language and take great care with their definition and pronunciation. In the opinion of Edward Shortland, a nineteenth-century doctor and linguist who studied the Maori, the same can be said to be true of them. He writes in Maori Religion and Mythology, “The Maori language is essentially conservative, containing no principle in its structure facilitating change. The component parts or roots of words are always apparent.”¹

One pivotal aspect of the archaic cosmology as it has survived in various cultures rests on a set of complex phonemes that could carry two or more different pronunciations when used under different circumstances. Over time, these seemed to have retained one phonetic form for some cultures and another form for others. At least four of these complex phonemes are still recognized within the Hebrew language, and the Kabbalists actually recognize the existence of seven dual letters in Hebrew.² The net consequence of these phonemes being used for various words of our cosmology is that to properly correlate words between two cultures, we may need to look on these phonetic values as being functionally equivalent to one another. For example, ancient root words for “elephant” may be pronounced pil or fil. An archaic word for “temple” may be pronounced get, het, or even chet or chait. Furthermore, certain phonetic sounds seem not to have been represented in certain languages, and so a predictable set of alternate phonemes may sometimes be substituted. For example, an R in the language of one culture might be expressed as an L or as a W by another. What this means for our studies is that we must allow a certain amount of “wiggle room” as we explore likely resemblances between the cosmological words of various cultures.