You've just entered the theater of an alien sky.
If the words and images seem strange to you, there's a reason for this.
Our world was once a vastly different place.
To experience this won't hurt you and there is nothing to fear.
Symbols of the World Mountain
For well over a century the documented traditions of the world mountain
have invited scholarly attempts to explain them.
The mountain rolls along the world axis to the visual center of the sky at the celestial pole.
But do any of the proposed explanations actually work?
That question can only be answered by penetrating to the core idea
across a wide range of imaginative images.
The celestial reference was not just seen as a mountain
but as much more than that.
By following the theme back to its earliest expressions, we can reconstruct
the concrete celestial form beneath the full range of mythic symbols.
The complex ancient images of a cosmic mountain can only find meaning
in a human experience that is not occurring today.
Events in the skies above our early ancestors
provoked an explosion of mythic content.
In its first form, human witnesses saw the great mountain as a cosmic pillar,
the visual support of the sky.
Its summit was the seed of a power remembered as the universal sovereign.
In the most archaic traditions, the great column served as
the perch, pedestal, or resting place of the creator god himself.
The ruler on the mountaintop was the primeval Sun,
the central luminary of the sky, not the body we call Sun today.
Ancient chronicles of kingship name this luminary as the Father of Kings,
the first in the mythic line of kings, the one from whom kingship itself descended.
In ancient Mesopotamia, this was the Sumerian An, the Babylonian Anu.
For the Egyptians, it was Atum-Ra.
For the Greeks, the god Kronos.
As we've observed in earlier episodes of this series,
ancient astronomical traditions identify this archaic dominating power
as the planet Saturn.
Our present sky is not the key to the past.
Always the cosmic mountain appears as the site of mythic creation,
and the mount itself is part of that creation story.
Early traditions describe the mountain as a cosmic pillar,
arising out of luminous ejecta
that exploded from the primeval Sun as the central act of creation,
a great shout producing a cloud of chaotic debris.
In the archaic creation accounts, this explosive outflow was the raw material,
or primeval matter, from which the unique form of creation emerged.
Human imagination interpreted this ejecta in many ways.
It saw the clouds or waters of chaos,
or an army of barbaric or frenzied warriors yet to be controlled.
The same ejecta was seen as the creator's luminous speech.
Visible words shouted into existence and gathered into concrete form,
the world mountain providing the creator with the support
that served as his own lower limbs.
Imaginative contemporary illustration of the Primeval Hill, the Akhut
The Egyptian creation account describes the appearance of
the world mountain from this ejecta as a defining moment.
It meant the emergence of the far-famed Primeval Hill, the Akhut.
Akhut, the name itself came directly from the ejecta,
called Akhu, signifying the radiant words of power erupting as the primeval shout of creation.
The text recall the creator Atum or Ra alone
wandering to and fro in the heavens before finding a stationary resting place.
"I found no place where I could stand,"
the god recalls in the Egyptian creation account.
"I was alone. No other worked with me."
For context the words are critically important.
This celestial resting place was in fact the Akhut, the world mountain.
Thus, the hieroglyph for the idea "to stand" conveys the sense of support and stability.
"That was before a perch had been formed for me to sit on," the god states.
The perch, described by its hieroglyph, was the cosmic mountain or pillar,
the very pillar that the Egyptians personified as the god Shu.
It was a common Egyptian practice to place emblems of the creator on the perch sign
as a testament to the critical role of Shu
as the emerging pillar of the sky in the creation accounts.
The equation of the god's pedestal, the Pillar of Shu,
and the Mount of Creation is unequivocal in the Egyptian language.
The god Osiris, enthroned upon the Primeval Hill,
"was like an exalted one upon thy pedestal."
And the god Anubis, the god "who is on his mountain"
was called also, "the god who is on his pedestal."
But the symbolism of the cosmic column ranges across many mythic interpretations.
It includes the hieroglyphic image of the god Sept, a close counterpart of Shu.
It includes the twin-peaked mountain, Akhut, that we previously discussed.
And it includes all Egyptian words relating to the etheric wind
or fountain at the region below the creator.
This luminous column served as the resting place of Atum,
as made clear by the coffin texts.
"The Great God lives, Fixed in the middle of the sky Upon his support."
This pervasive language of a cosmic pillar and resting place
constitutes a profound challenge to all common assumptions
about the origins of ancient thought.
Egyptian creation accounts consistently refer
to a time before the appearance of this resting place.
But concrete translations are essential if we are to capture events seen and heard.
The texts make clear that in his original condition, Atum was alone.
"I was alone. I had not spit in the form of Shu, [the pillar of the sky.]"
"I had not poured out Tefnut, [first form of the feminine power.]"
"No other worked with me."
"Then I laid the foundation with my own heart."
"I poured out the primeval Akhu in the form of Shu..."
The literal references is to explosive outflow,
interpreted most emphatically as visible speech,
called "words of power" shouted by the primeval Sun god.
But the same outflow is interpreted as masculine seed, water, fire, and wind.
This primeval matter, the Akhu,
is always identified as the raw material of creation in events seen and heard.
Though our focus here will be on the emergence of the towering column
personified as the god Shu, the Egyptian priests insisted that
the same explosive events gave birth to the first form of Shu's counterpart,
the goddess Tefnut, appearing as the spiraling life breath of creation;
a subject to which we'll devote considerable attention in due course.
The creator announces: "I could find no place to stand."
"Words of power came forth from my heart to lay a foundation."
It was from this shout of visible words of power that the column of Shu emerged.
"I am Life, the Lord of Years, living forever...
the eldest one that Atum made in his words of power,"
the Akhu, "in giving birth to Shu."
Or again Shu announces: "I came into being in the limbs of the Self-Creator."
"He formed me through the activity of his heart
and he created me in his words of power [the Akhu]."
Any attempt to interpret the fiery words of power as an abstraction
can only distort the explicit awe and terror of the human experience.
The Egyptian priests clearly knew that the pillar god Shu,
who held aloft the resting Atum,
was the perch or pedestal upon which the creator eventually rested.
So while one coffin text reads:
"I'm raised aloft on my perch above yonder places of the Abyss,"
another speaks of the great perch: "I do not fall on account of Shu."
This resting place was also called the foundation of Ma'at.
A stylized glyph of Ma'at is, in fact, an image of the Primeval Hill.
Often the glyph is simply read as the pedestal of the great god.
In its root meaning, Ma'at denotes the stable enduring foundation,
the source of cosmic regularity.
The creation texts say that the creator "rests upon Ma'at."
Repeatedly, we see that the concept of support or foundation
merges with the mountain or hill. The word "thes," for example,
means "support, to bear or lift up" but also "mountain."
The reason for this is that the only mountain
with which the ritual celebrations were concerned
was the cosmic mountain, the foundation of heaven.
One finds no exceptions to this.
"May I endure in the sky like the cosmic mountain, like the primeval support,"
reads a hymn of the Pyramid Texts.
For this celestial peak, the Egyptians continually look back in their myths and rites.
On behalf of the deceased king,
the priest poured a heap of sand on the floor inside the pyramid,
placing atop the sand a statue of the king and reciting a prayer which began:
"Rise upon it, this land which came forth from Atum... Assume your form upon it."
The sand poured out meant the primeval matter
and the hill so formed meant the Primeval Hill.
And so, according to T. Rundle Clark,
"Osiris sits in judgment in a palace in the Primeval Mound,
which is the center of the world."
"May I be established upon my resting place like the Lord of life," the king declares.
One of the most familiar representations of the Primeval Hill is the obelisk.
The small pyramidion on top of the obelisk denoted the Benben stone,
the living soul of the creator, Atum.
"Atum-Khepri, thou wert high as the Hill.
Thou didst shine forth as Benben."
Thus, the obelisk came to be employed as an idiograph for the Egyptian word "men."
The word meant the "mountain" or "pedestal."
But it also meant "stability" and "to rest in one place."
Derived from the same root is the Egyptian word "mena"
or "menat, the celestial "mooring post."
The Egyptians conceived this stationary pillar
as the stake around which the secondary powers of heaven revolved.
That's the meaning of Mena Uret, "The Great Mooring Post,"
connecting the masculine post to the complementary symbolism of the mother goddess,
whom we shall identify as the spiraling life breath of creation.
As we delve more deeply into the symbolism, we'll return to the special nuances
of the cosmic column as world axis, the post, peg, stake, nail, or anchor of creation.
The distinguished authority, Henri Frankfort, understood the principle well:
"Everywhere the site of creation, the first land to emerge from chaos,
was thought to have been charged with vital power.
And each god counting as Creator was made to have some connection with this Hill."
If the significance of this idea is to truly register on human consciousness,
it must be seen as something more than an obscure regional experience or abstraction.
It is a worldwide memory preserved through competing imaginative interpretations
all pointing back to a singular experience.