Symbols

8 Arks and Towers

The world is going to die and Noah is told to build an ark. It's in units of 10 x 10 x 10. Very tetractian, sephirotic that. There's a lot of 10 x 10 x 10 to come. 30 cubits high by 50 cubits wide by 300 cubits long. As any number of people have pointed out, an impossible size for an ocean going wooden ship. It would hang between two swells and break up in no time. OK, this is not history, not fiction, not allegory but recursive parallelism. The arc is three by five by thirty. Three tetractys high for the three aspects of recursion. Five tetractys wide for the five single vowels and the five double vowels. Thirty tetractys long for the entire alephbet. In other words it contains everything. The potential, the actual and the recursive. And the animals enter. Sevens each of the animals of potentiality, the ones that can be sacrificed, seven is the entirety of potentiality. Two each of the animals of actuality, the ones that can't be sacrificed, two is the number of stability. And eight of the people of recursion, four couples - think two by two by two. There is a confusion of waters, a flood, and we float around for a while and come to rest in the seventh month. Send out a raven, the bird of the tree of knowledge, check things out. The bird flies around to and fro and up and down in the earth but doesn't find anything but mud. Knowledge is insufficient. Then two trips for a dove, the bird of the tree of life. Comes back on the second trip with an olive leaf, the tree of the tree of life. Reconciliation is at hand. Noah goes out, cultivates the vine, the tree of life, and gets lively. Consequences result. That is all Tohu Bahu. From death to life.

Along comes Nimrod, which Blavatsky's Ebionites read as "like a tiger". A tower at Babel is built, punning with confusion, to reach to the heavens. To the extent that Babel is Babylon, that would be the ziggurat, Etemenanki, the house of the foundation of heaven and earth, which has seven major levels, one for each of the planets, in order, and colored appropriately. And a little house on the top level that adds an eighth level on its roof, as well as several rooms within. Very tetractyl. The result is a confusion of tongues, of speech, of languages and a major dispersion of everybody. More consequences. This is Bahu Tohu. From life to death.

The world of antiquity is the result. Out of the nations a people of herders, of the tree of potentiality, of life, of the animals of potentiality, is chosen and chooses. A people to be recursive to themselves and the world. To nonpreferentialize the good and to potentialize the evil. To gardener the world.