The Source

A telling of Genesis

In the beginning; at the source. That is where the story starts. In Hebrew, Bereshit; in Greek, en archē. By these words were two great lines of ancient wisdom wed.

Bethlehem and Athens kissed, scions of old tribes long since interbred. Before a word of black Hebrew touched lambskin, the speakers of God’s favoured tongue had lived under Egypt and Babylon, among Canaanites, Medes and Chaldees, their wisdom’s cup well-mixed with fine and foreign wines. And the Greeks, before they ruled the Hebrews and taught their dancing Attic strains, had known the Persians and Egyptians too, and of the naked sages of the Ganges. Some would march to India in Alexander’s day.

Neither Greek nor Hebrew owned their signs. Both sibilant and square were loaned by the Phoenicians, older scribes. But whether Alpha-Beta or Aleph-Beth, the ordering of words and world came from a distant and unlettered source. The words now bound in paper, once in parchment, earlier in skin and clay but first of all in stone, all stemmed from forgotten speech, writ on air in hanging breath. For all speech has one source. It is a song, whose falls have echoed through the four winds of the world. Borne from lands of pyramid and olive grove to the ashes of dark Albion, it has flown as far on ravens’ wings as those of eagle, dove or angel. And there those words, bereshit, en archē, are sung: “in the beginning.” They are not enough, but then, words never are.

The English tongue is straight and speaks in lines, the English eye reads left to right, the English hand turns pages, opened at one and closed at the last. English words are written in wood, pulped, and pulped again or burned when readers tire of broken spines and dog ears. Bookmarks for us are markers in time, dustcover to dust.

But the Hebrew tongue is square, carved first by God’s finger and on stones which broken, only God could replace. Thereafter the whispering of angels were inscribed in hide, bought with blood. When sounded, with due ritual and reverence, the Hebrew word was never opened, but unfurled. The four-lettered Speaker who causes being has no present tense. He always will be, always was, but will not be bound to now.

The Greek tongue ever curled and speaks, with Eastern tones, not in lines but circles. At first it writhed from left to right and back again. A Greek beginning is not a point on a line of time but an ever-present source that ebbs and flows, a round font overflowing. The beginning passes time. The archē is eternal.

The kiss of those two older tongues yields the song’s true flavour. It reveals the Code that underwrites creation. Unfurl the Hebrew line in Greek circles and the tongue learns to spiral. This is the deep harmony.  It is the pattern of the angels’ dance.

The Code

Bereshit, in the beginning, at the source: the first words of the Codebearer Moses’ first Book, by which it gained its Hebrew name. The Greeks would call it Genesis, since it shows the birth of things. At the source, Moses reports, God made the sky and earth. The earth was unseen and unshaped. Darkness was above the abyss. The Breath of God alighted atop the water.

At the source, God spoke: Let there be light. And there was light.

Darkness, liquid, earth, air, light: layered from beneath, spoken from above.

At the source, God made, for God is by essence maker and unconstrained by anything other than Who He Is. He made by Breath and by Word; by dabar and by ruach; by pneuma and by Logos. By Breath and Word He shaped the shapeless, made the unseen seen, gave first light and line. From the source the first division came; light and dark, the primal binary, the one and the zero without which not even nothing can be, the source code of reality. God the Coder, His Word the Code that runs His logic-Logos through all things, His Breath the electric animating surge that conducts Life to life. And the zero and the one make two, inalienably other, while their sum yet remains one. From zero to one flow sequence. Oneness, difference, relationship = one, two, three: three cascades from two and one while the circling Source, all-giving Zero, abides unchanged. Zero begets one, and through the one the second proceeds. Sameness, otherness, life-giving bond: this is the logic that shapes all things, the harmony of the song of songs.

At the source, God the eyeless saw, and saw that the Light was Beautiful and Good; kalon to Phōs. Kai to kalon kallei, Light’s beauty calls and kindly guides all to the well from which it flows. As it flows, it too divides. A myriad lesser lights refracted from the One pierce the dark shell of heaven. Fiery wanderers, serpents and spheres, dot and line, their ellipses join the cosmic dance. They too proclaim and herald God, and come the day will guide the eyes and feet of Man as yet unborn. But now they hymn the beauties of the world below, the fruit-clad trees, the fish and fowl and prowling beasts and crawling things that bear in their division and their motley hue the coded image of their Shaper.

Above all, striking through the canopy, the mother of all trees they praise, the tree of the fruit which eaten yields Wisdom’s nectar, and whose unfathomed roots bring living water to the world.

The Copy

The Radiant Word and Living Code descends to walk in Paradise; the lights of heaven flicker. For what is this? He stoops and scoops up dust, the clay that is the world’s own flesh, and from it shapes anew. A five-limbed thing, it shares His code. Through Him, the Source breathes, and zero is made one, in lesser form: boundless imagination, bounded in flesh, ensouled. 1, 2, 3.

As each branch mimes its parent tree, so the Human mimes his Maker. A fair copy, too, seed nursed and trained by a master craftsman. The Human’s heart is imprinted with the Code, and by that Code he names the things around him, gives voice to their patterns, weaves the subcode, carries on the song.

From his copy, the Code extracts another, flesh of flesh and bone of bone, not from head or feet but from the Human’s side, dividing It into Him and Her, to stand beside the other as helpmate and companion. She is woman, Eve, Life-giver, multiplier. If he is closer to the Code, then she is to the Breath, but both are needing. For the Code dictates that the two must return to one, so that the third and fourth and more may become. Of one flesh were they made and to be one flesh is their end in this world. By their coupling they will fill the earth and reign as viceroys of their King. They are children yet and do not know.

The Glitch

But the singers know; the Watchers see. And when the Radiant Word bids them bow and serve the heaven-earth hybrids shaped of spirit and of dust, some seraphim quit the choir, schism and sing instead a separate, sibilant song. They fight and fall, spiralling through the seven skies. One such lands in Eden, behind enemy lines. His dragon tongue drips honeyed poison. Fallen he may be, but his voice is sweet and bears the power of angels. He knows the harmony and sings close to it, close enough that Eve’s untutored ear cannot discern the discord. Take, eat, says the serpent. Words so close to the Word, such minute deviation from the Code. Lies more plausible by proximity to Truth. Take, eat, be one with God in Wisdom. Taste and see. Live forever.

So they taste and see and know – that they are naked. They see and know too much, too soon. And by that sight and knowledge is the Code within them broken. Time would have come when the fruit was ripe and they were fit to eat it, but they ate too soon. They broke the founding rule, the base of the code, the binary of one and zero which kept their proper distance from the Source. The code cannot usurp the Coder. The Lord is Lord and man is man. Break that bond and chaos ensues. All Law is lost. No likeness left, but sheer identity: identity without otherness, diversity without sequence, and so all things the same; isolated units, atoms in collision in the void, bones raised, corpses piled in final parity. Dust imbued with life returns to dust, the many swallowed by nothing. The soil itself is cursed. Death creeps through the gaps and the dragon coils tight around the Tree.

The Fix

The Code does not desert his flawed creation. He patches the punctures with skins of beasts, the first blood shed on earth spilt by the Word of Life. Eve and Adam had made themselves garments of the trees. But these were too weak for outside Eden. The Code clothed them in hide. He called a loyal Wanderer down from the skies to guard the gate to Paradise with flaming sword and stop the sons of man from taking again the fruit of the fateful tree, until the ripe time come. Then man and woman were made wanderers themselves, guided through their exile by the lesser lights. The Radiant Word did not walk with them now. But the Dragon slithered secretly in their stead, seeking chance to bite their heel. Dust would be his food and his abode, that dust from which man made and to which he would return. Once high among the fiery Seraphim, the Dragon’s curse was to be Death-eater and Worm.

Man toiled and tilled but brought forth only thistles. Woman bore. Two became four. Their boys, Cain and Abel worked the land and tended flocks. Priests all then, they offered their firstfruits to God, and learnt hard the Word’s delight. The firstborn of Abel’s flock passed through the angel’s flaming sword and reached the Lord in Paradise; Cain’s grain He refused. And so the Dragon sang again, hissed his song of wrath to Cain, who danced to his refrain. Better than the blood of beasts, he thought to give. That first murder became a curse that would corrupt the code of men forever more. Cain was driven from the company of Man, and Seth born in his stead of Eve to mend the code.

The Virus

Even and Adam’s was the first evil, Cain’s the second, but those two evils begat far more. The breaking of the code corrupted what came after. And the Disrupter, the Dragon, was ever ready to hack and tamper with the slightest changes, subtlest variations on the song, small goods that cascade to greater evils. His kin, cast down already to the earth, crawled forth to Cain, weighed down by lust. Possessing pagan priests, they bred with his daughters, and taught the ways of root and herb, medicine and magic, the mining of ore and making of metal, the arts of building and of war. The sons of Cain and daemons were called giants, Gaia’s children: gigantes, Nephilim, earth-born, in stature great. Greeks and Chaldees thought these hybrids heroes. Men gloried in the gifts they bore and revelled in their daemon-power and thought all these things good. And good they might have been, were they given by the Code at the right time; but stolen and gifted out of time by fallen angels, what might have brought increase worked corruption. The sons of Cain were cursed to trap their copy of the Living Code in dead machines. Man became the machines’ slaves, addicted to the Dragon’s gifts, ruled by his technocracy. Their worship was of weapons, wealth and lust. Murder was their sport.

Corruption so cascaded that in ten generations almost nothing was left of the Code in men. Another patch, another skin would not suffice. The old skin burst, new skin was needed. The Coder chose to reset and to start again, to let the abyss delete creation. Let the cities drown and all the daemon-kin within them; make Atlantis a watery gaol for the sons of Dagon and Poseidon.

But of the line of Seth, one man was found uncorrupt. His name was Noah, Rest-restorer. As man’s curse had come from the tree, by trees would man be saved. An ark of life-giving wood would house a new creation, a microcosm rebuilt on the Source Code’s plan, two of all things Adam named saved within to reboot the song of zero, one, and two. The Living Code flowed as the waters fell and rose. Embedded in the flesh of things and housed in wood He yoked the waves and rode with the Rest-restorer toward the promised land of rest.

Forty days and forty nights the foetal re-creation cut through water in the Ark cocooned. Forty days and nights the flood flowed ere man and beast and all God’s things were cleansed, re-membered, their code repaired, restored. God breathed again. From the Source the ruach, Spirit, rolled down hilltops, over the waves and gave them calm. The heavens closed. Sensing the stillness of the waters Noah rose and opened the Ark to the firmament and sun. Two birds he sent to spy out land, Dove and Raven, white and black, life-bringer and death-feaster, a binary of fowl.

Dove brought back the olive frond, whose bitter fruit gives oil that cleans the skin, and binds the bread, and lights and heats the home. And home the Rest-restorer found. This olive mount would serve until Gethsemane and the final pressing of the true Olive who, crushed on wood, would be the light and life and laver of the world.

Of Raven, it would fall to peoples far from Ararat to tell in later days. Carrion birds, feasters on the dead, his offspring would serve many masters. The unnamed birds who mauled the offerings of Abraham worked the will of Azazel, daemon of the wilds, to deny the Lord His due. Huginn and Muninn were said to fly from Odin’s shoulders to bear him news as he hung speared on the Tree of Truth that his folk call Yggdrasil, but we by other names. And of Odin’s line, the English saint-king Oswald would be helped in life and death by one of Raven’s kin. But that is for another telling.

The Reset

Noah has found land. By altar and by sacrifice is Sabbath rest restored. The best of everything passing through the flame reenters Paradise and makes sweet aroma for the Lord. The Code is reset. The Lord of Hosts rests on His throne, sets His bow in the sky, makes covenant: no more will His shafts rain carnage on the world. More, Man may now eat meat, and join in the Lord’s feast. His sons will grow strong without recourse to dragons’ wiles. The Radiant Word and Primal Code, the ordering Logos will dwell with them. The Word will be their strengthening bread, their life-giving wine.

But once again, Man takes the gifts too soon. First the apple, now the grape: by wine was Noah undone. While Noah slept, Ham, his second son, entered his tent and uncovered flesh that was his father’s, the flesh made one with his father’s flesh, the flesh of her by whom Ham and his brothers had been born. By incest Ham defiled the code, and it became a curse for him, passed to his son Canaan.

The Sons of Man were wanderers again, their code unravelling. And once again, they sought to return to oneness by their own designs. Some say it was Nimrod, a giant born of Ham and Canaan’s cursed line with demon hybrids that survived the Flood, who built the lofty citadel of Babel, God-gate. By brick and steel the Babylonians ruled the earth; with their ziggurat, they meant to rule the heavens too, preserving the daemon-lore that gave them might and saving their lords from future floods. Thus technocracy returned to seize the code and build its own machine once more. Imposing their one tongue on the enslaved nations, the men of Babel thought to penetrate the waters above and rip the Divine Word out untimely to their servitude. They would rape the heavens as they had the earth.

Their machinations failed. The nations would share one tongue only when the Word saw fit to breathe His Spirit from his lonely wooden tower, and fifty days after outpour the Source’s fire on His Mother and the chosen in the Upper Room. Whitsun was not man’s to take by storm. The Word indeed descended from the Source to Babel, but not to serve in peace: He came with sword in hand to smash their tower and to scatter them across the earth, giving the seventy nations an angel each to guard them.

A Surge

Of Noah’s three sons, one was cursed, but two retained their father’s blessing. Sem and Japheth were their names. And after ten generations of the Semite line, in the eastern Chaldees’ city Ur, Abraham, Father of Nations, roamed questing for the Source. Impotent and aged, unable by his own strength to find that which he sought, he called out for mercy. Answering, the Radiant Word came: Go out, and I will show you.

Led by the Word, following the Code, Abraham and his kin reached the lands later called Judaea. There dwelt their cursed kinsfolk, Canaanites, the seven tribes of Ham. This the Word promised Abraham as the inheritance of his seed. Of his and his wife’s aged bodies, by nature no seed would bear fruit. But the Word pointed to the wandering man the wanderers of the heavens, the lesser lights who dot and streak the sky. By the power of the Word, through Abraham and Sarah, the sons of man would be as the Sons of God, the angels who light the night sky, not only in number but in kind. One day, men would equal angels, even surpass them, granted rule in the Kingdom and holy council of heaven.

Abraham believed the Word. A portion of his flesh was taken, the flesh that yields the seed of generation, a sign of trust in the power of the Word to give life over man’s treasured tower of flesh. God had given Adam skins; now He took skin from Adam’s sons. The straight was cut round, the line circled. This would be the sign of faith henceforth for Abraham’s seed. Circumcision became the Semites’ flesh’s encoding. A potent part of Adam’s garment of skin, the part most needed to obey God’s first command, was henceforth to be shed in trust that fullest life comes from the Word alone.

Many times the Radiant Word came to Abraham in angel form, and kept him to the Code. God gave all and demanded all; even Sarah’s firstborn son, the boy called Laughter, Isaac. Strange jest to test a man by sacrifice of his long-promised heir. Yet all comes from the Source, and to the Source we render. As a lamb to the slaughter, the willing victim lay upon the wood and waited for the flames. The lad made no complaint. By his self-offering and his father’s faith, he was saved. For both realised the deeper code, willed to live it to the full, and through that will the Code Himself set them free. The Word who would one day lie on wood, make Himself the offered lamb, spoke from the sky and stopped the hand of Abraham: and Abraham saw, heard, and obeyed.

Of Isaac was born Jacob. He would earn the name God-Seer, Israel, and see a vision of the heavenly city, many-staired and rising to the sky, flocked with angels, true temple of which Babel had been but base counterfeit. Of Israel were born twelve sons to found the tribes. In hunger, their father led them into Egypt to seek store. Their number grew, according to God’s Word.

But they had left the land which they were promised and submitted to the foreign Pharoah’s rule.