The Edge of the Wood.: The Hidden Secret of the Alphabet.

The Hidden Secret of the Alphabet.

Sacred Language.
Secret Language.

There is more to language than meets the eye (or ear) and to delve into its mysteries will reveal some extraordinary truths about the world we live in. Language is not only a tool but it is also a key. There is something remarkable about our language waiting to be discovered. This chapter doesn’t pretend to have discovered the ultimate secret of language, only hopefully, to alert my reader that there is a secret to be discovered and the hope that perhaps one day it will be revealed.

Let us look at the word ‘live’. It has often been observed that the true meaning of the word ‘evil’ is that which is contrary to life and if you read the word ‘live’ backwards it makes ‘evil’ Both words are from the same linguistic Germanic roots. Indeed the word ‘devil’ is only the word Evil with a D in front of it. The Semitic consonant letter D was originally a pictogram which represented a ‘door’[i]and suitably ‘D’, is still the first letter of this word.

Similarly, the letter C was original called ‘gimel’ and etymologists claim that the C pictogram represented had two meanings: ‘Camel’ and ‘throwing stick’. Indeed the Arabic word for camel is gamal. This became what the Greeks called ‘Gamma’, the third letter of the Greek alphabet. This word also shows how the guttural G sound has softened over the millennia to a C sound. For the word ‘Gamal’ has softened to a C, just as the G of ‘gamma’ has softened to the modern day C. Still the third letter of the alphabet.

If we observe we can see that the letter C, just like other letters of our alphabet, has a similar form in some of the most ancient languages including ancient Egyptian, Hebrew and Arabic, and we perhaps realise that our languages are not quite so alien to one another as we may previously have thought:

Below is the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for a curved boomerang style throwing stick, notice the proto letter 'C' in the final part of the hieroglyph which represents the shape of the object itself, the bird symbol represents the flying aspect of the stick.

"Throw-stick"

word: "Ga”.

We consider the boomerang to be an essentially aboriginal hunting weapon but the same technology was used by the ancient Egyptians to hunt wild fowl in the marshes of the Nile delta: many examples were found buried with the pharaoh Tutankhamen. The Egyptian throwing sticks were designed to be thrown so as to return to the feet of the thrower for a second attempt at hunting birds.

Below is a throwing stick as found in the funerary goods of Tutankhamen.

So the humble letter C has just shown us that the ancient Egyptians and the Aboriginals both used boomerangs, which should lead us to wonder how the boomerang ended up all the way in Australia. And this is but a small example of the many mysteries which our language alludes to, but hidden in plain sight where no one would think to look for it.

Originally each letter was what is called an ideogram. A little like hieroglyphs and the Chinese Kanji script: each symbol is both a letter and a word or an idea. Our alphabet, like all European alphabets, has its origins in the Middle East. It is said that the Phoenicians created the first alphabet.

The word ‘Live’ is very close to ‘love’ and differs only in the vowel, or ‘breath of life’ which animates the word. The difference is only one vowel and each vowel has its own properties and origins.

The way the word God seems to be contained within Good. A correspondence which also exists in German with their Got and Gut near homonyms. There is something unusual about the English language. The fact that the word ‘Spell’ describes a magical incantation but also the fact of putting the correct letters together to make a word. When you spell a word you are putting together the correct utterance to make a magical form, full of meaning and power: a word.

There are further mysteries: Son / Sun, Temple (as in the area of the side of the head and the stone religious building) Solar plexus / Sol / Soul, Re-member[ii](tale of Osiris) Light (as in sunlight) Light as in buoyant, Grave as in dead and gravity as in heaviness.

A whole hidden initiatic instruction can be reconstructed from these secrets locked in the English language. Language is a living museum of ancient lore custom and teaching, but one which few people little suspect even exists. Language is the DNA of our culture and history, and from a single letter we can recreate a whole people and history. Perhaps by examining the whole alphabet and the questions it raises perhaps many mysteries of the world and our origins can be clarified, but this is another task for another time.

English is not an entirely naturally grown language like perhaps Latin, French and say Turkish are, but is in particular a consciously created language through the selective pruning and cross pollination of several different languages. Writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer who basically created ‘Middle English’ as a new synthesis of Romance French (which was the language of the court) and Germanic Old English (the language of the people) and Sir Francis Bacon and his ‘Shakespeare’. The process of the creation of English as we know it began in roughly the 14^th Century when the old thoroughly Germanic Anglo-Saxon tongues spoken by the populace became combined with the more courtly French dialects spoken by the court and the nobility: a clear and oft cited example of this contrast are the words ‘beef, lamb and pork’: and the Anglo-Saxon words which are used for the animals themselves: ‘cow, sheep and pig’, indicating that it was the non-French speaking peasantry who reared the animals their French speaking Lords ate.

I feel certain that many of the strange synchronicities in English are not coincidental but are actually an attempt to encode some of the ancient teachings and mysteries of the ages by the sages and scholars of the past. The opportunity was certainly there and one thing we can be sure of about this strange cabal running the world then as they are now, is that they never miss an opportunity. So we have the word ‘holy’ and its relationship with being ‘whole’, whole-ly or wholeness or whole-liness. Being ‘whole’ and one with God and no longer divided or separated from the awareness of God. It is essential that you become ‘holy’ or whole again, through contact with the solar (soul) light in the area of the solar plexus and also the third eye. While the heart chakra or solar plexus, allows you to feel the light with the centre of your being, the third eye allows you to directly see the light in your mind.

When you experience this you are more or less awake but at the same time in a state of rest and relaxation and happiness, the vision seems dreamlike, then suddenly alarmingly real and powerful, often one breaks off one’s focus at the magnitude of the awareness that the sun has just spoken to you and it seem a little overawing, not to mention bright and piercing. Any negative thoughts at this point such as irreverence or over self-criticism, will break off the connection and the vision will drop out of consciousness. Marijuana makes this process much more readily available however, it is perfectly possible without weed, it just takes rather longer and requires more concentration. That is concentration on ‘nothing’ in order to achieve emptiness and true transcendental bliss: Nirvana, heaven, whatever its name.

What we have very much forgotten about words is not just their dual and hidden natures but also their sound. The music of the spheres, or the ‘forgotten tongue’ the original ‘lost name’ of God. The tongue of Mordor, or the ‘black tongue’ is a language littered with swear words and their hard edged consonants. Listen to the word ‘friction’ is this word not a clear example of a word sounding like what it means. The hard saw-tooth waveform of the ‘f’, the word ‘friction’ is made by the friction of the air from the lungs blowing across the lips.

The Masonic concept of the ‘the lost word’ indeed the Biblical Judeo Christian concept of ‘the word’ rely on the hidden and forgotten power of sound, in particular sounds produced by the tongue: language. Words resonate not only on the semantic level but also on the sonar. Draw two ven circles. Now repeat various words of your choosing to yourself. Try not to think about the literal meaning of the words as this will try to dominate your perception and you will fail to hear the sounds of the words. Which words actually sound nice and which sound harsh? After completing this exercise you will probably have your ‘nice’ circle filled with: ‘love’; ‘sang’; ‘word’; ’world’; ‘sea’; ‘seek’; ‘search’. And many more. The words in your harsh circle will invariably be: ‘stain’, ‘stab’ ‘stamp’ in fact pretty much anything beginning with ‘st’ or short abrupt consonants. Words like: ‘cut’ and ‘tear’, ‘pain’ and ‘sad’. While longer words with more vowels, words like :’Harmonious’ are clearly positive in their sound and meaning. Just try it. Read out all the vowels. It creates a tune. Like notes of the musical scale. Being aware of this as newspaper journalists are only subconsciously aware, leads them to create headlines with an onslaught of consonants and few vowels in order to ‘strike’ and ‘attack’ the reader’s perception.

The phonetic combination ‘mass’ seems also to be evoke pleasing and healing sensations. Just try it. Repeat the word to yourself in your mind again and again. Compare your sensations on the sound of the word in contrast to a word like Cat. Although Cat is a word which shows no particularly negative connotations (except for people who dislike cats perhaps) it is clear that the bluntness of the two consonants and the shortness of the vowel lead to a feeling, not one of harmony and melody, but of blunt sound. As if the word is trying to tell us something about the animal. Although I am fond of cats I realise that the word ‘cat’ is not a nice word, like the word ‘dog’, although dogs are popular animals the word ‘dog’ is still a word which evokes little of value. The hard consonants are almost redolent of a term of abuse.

Mass is a very different word. And let us look at the words which have the harmonious ‘mass’ as prefix: We have massage, and the word itself feels very much like a kind of sonic massage. However from the same root we have the word : ’massacre’. Notice the ‘cr’ combination, a combination which many words of a particular ‘negative’ meaning seem to have. For example: creep, crime, cripple, crook. What we have here is not a series of odd coincidences, but instead a reminder of the origins of our language, and possibly ALL Earth languages. Namely that letters or more specifically: sounds themselves represented particular ideas. English originates from the proto-Canaanite languages which include Arabic and Hebrew and there are many examples of shared ideas.

Look at the Arabic letter B. The Arabic letter B was originally the design of a house with a door and a window, and indeed the Arabic word for house is Beet (notice how it is nearly identical in sound to the Greek letter Beta). This tradition is still alive in languages which have retained their pictographic alphabet like Chinese but English seems to have forgotten this connection even if it is still very much present. That is why our society is pretty much falling apart. We basically are all driving a runaway train of culture and history which few people understand how to operate and so we can expect nothing more than to steam from one crash to another. Notice the ‘cr’ in the word crash which creeps up again.

It is no exaggeration to say that words are spells and this is why the word ‘spell’ is used to describe the correct formation of words from letters. We are so used to words and they have become so mundane and commonplace that they seldom hold any magic for us, except perhaps for those who appreciate the harmonious and near magical qualities of some poetry and the plays of Shakespeare. However whether we are awake to the possibility or not, language affects our thoughts, our minds and ultimately, our state of being.

The letter F in particular is arguably the most resonantly negative letter in the English language and indeed many others. Words such as fight; fist; fail; fall; fallow; fraught; frail, and many more, all depict something of the character of the F pictogram which originally represented a weapon.

As the Hebrews and Arabs are aware, the vowel is the breath of life, this is the fairly well known reason that these languages are written without vowels. The Japanese written language of Kanji is the same. The reason being that the breath of life is something sacred, and in a similar way of thinking to the Iconoclasts and Muslims, is too holy to be reproduced or symbolised by man’s art.

The intentional symbolism and deeper significance of language is a known fact by Hebrew scholars and this explains why is the book of Genesis we are told ’Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.’[iii]

The sentence seems to be a bit of a non-sequitur to the contemporary English reader but in Hebrew the name Eve is ‘Chavah’ yet it is also the word for the verb ‘to breathe’ . Some remnant of the original linguistic code remains in English but it is harder to find due to the inevitable entropy of the original code by new words, neologisms and changes in usage which develop over time and have altered the original interconnected structure and symmetry of the language. But still we notice the word ‘Live’ and ‘Eve’ both have the ‘ve’ ending and Eve even rhymes with the word ‘breathe’. In the next chapter of Genesis we find the story of Cain and Abel, and so from the name ‘Abel’ who was preferred by God because he was able to rear animals and provide a sacrifice for Jahweh, so we have the homophone ‘able’.

Indeed we see the word ‘rainbow’ has retained its symbolic meaning for the thousands of years since the writing of the book of Genesis, both in English and in French and other languages. In French the word is ‘arc-en-ciel’ which translates as arch-in-the-sky. The word ‘bow’ is interchangeable with ‘arch’ and this is why in archery the archer uses a bow. After the flood Jahweh promises Noah and the rest of humanity that he will never again destroy mankind and the rainbow is a sign from God of this new covenant or agreement: ‘And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: and I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.’[iv]

Some famous stars are also aware of this strange magic. When commenting on Mark Radcliffe’s BBC radio Two rock n’ roll show,[v]Iggy Pop commented on why he chose the name The Stooges for his band. Apart from commenting that they felt like the Three Stooges and so named themselves after them, he also added: ‘it’s got the double O, it’s magical, when you do that ‘ooooooh’, you’re already letting us in.’

Clearly Iggy Pop understands much about these kind of things, perhaps said in jest or half seriously, shows nevertheless that clearly our rock n’roll heroes are really clued up to mystical and metaphysical possibilities.

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