From the Narrow Desert

This past July, ben, who comments here, alerted me to the fact that William Wright, who (as WW) wrote that interesting guest post for Bruce about orcs, had started a blog of his own, called Coat of Skins. Mr. Wright assumes that both the Book of Mormon and Tolkien's Legendarium are true and writes about how they interrelate -- Abinadi was the reincarnation of Faramir, the Book of Ether contains a hidden reference to the Brother of Jared opening the gates of Khazad-dûm, that sort of thing. It's a bit fringe even by my standards, but I find it interesting and have been reading it regularly.

One of the early posts was "The Liahona as a Palantir (the Anor Stone)" Palantiri are generally black, but Mr. Wright argues that the name Anor Stone (anor being Sindarin for "sun") suggests that this one had a golden appearance, matching the description of the "brass" Liahona in the Book of Mormon. This caught my attention because back in December 2020, I had some syncs (documented in "Red Sun, Yellow Sun") connecting the Liahona with the Sun.

Early on in my reading of Coat of Skins, I Googled an unfamiliar name used in a since-deleted post there and discovered the work of Daymon Smith, who I had never heard of before. He's a Mormon linguistic anthropologist who has written extensively about the Book of Mormon, and whose most recent work also involves treating the works of Tolkien as non-fiction and trying to integrate them with the Book of Mormon. I read a few pages of his Jaredites-from-Numenor story The Words of the Faithful but couldn't get into it. Then I discovered his sprawling Cultural History of the Book of Mormon, which I have found absolutely fascinating. I bought all eight books (it consists of five volumes published as eight books, whatever that means!) and am currently reading the final (eighth/"fifth") one.

Enthroned amid the radiant spheres,

He glory like a garment wears ;

To form a robe of light divine,

Ten thousand suns around Him shine.

You follow your feelings, you follow your dreams,

You follow your leader into the trees

"I am that I am" must be saying something about Language, capital L.

Maybe L and the Word, and what-ever-Is-is are really "just" light?  Different kinds of Light?

How can we understand L? or EL?

I recently posted on A.E.'s "language of the gods" -- the attempts of the Irish mystic who wrote under that name to intuit the "true" meanings of the individual letters or sounds of which language is composed.

After laying out his alphabet, A.E. goes on to imagine some of the primitive words our distant ancestors may have created. He gives six or seven examples of such words, the first of which -- obviously suggesting to the mind the Semitic word for "God" -- is El.

I imagine a group of our ancestors lit up from within, . . . feeling those kinships and affinities with the elements which are revealed in the sacred literature of the Aryan, and naming these affinities from an impulse  springing up within. I can imagine the spirit struggling outwards making of element, colour, form or sound a mirror on which, outside itself, it would find symbols of all that was pent within itself, and so gradually becoming self-conscious in the material nature in which it was embodied, but which was still effigy or shadow of a divine original. I can imagine them looking up at the fire in the sky, and calling out "El" if it was the light they adored, or if they rejoiced in the heat and light together they would name it "Hel." . . .

Approximately three days after posting on A.E.'s alphabet, I happened to be reading Serendipities, a translated collection of essays by Umberto Eco, which I had picked up at a used bookstore probably in March or April (when I was writing about the Wheel of Fortune) on the strength of its appropriately serendipitous cover art, which featured (or so it appeared at first glance; more on this below) a Hieronymus Bosch painting which had recently come to my attention during my meditations on that card.

The second essay in that book, called "Languages in Paradise," deals with the evolution of Dante's thoughts regarding the original language spoken by Adam -- specifically with how they changed between De Vulgari Eloquentia and Paradiso -- and speculates about the possible influence of the Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia.

In De Vulgari Eloquentia, writes Eco,

Dante thought that the first sound emitted by Adam could only have been an exclamation of joy that, at the same time, was an act of homage toward his creator. The first word that Adam uttered must therefore have been the name of God, El (attested in patristic tradition as the first Hebrew name of God).

In Paradiso, though, Dante has Adam say that he had originally called God I (thus in the Italian; a single vowel, not the first-person pronoun) and that he became El only later. Eco's translator William Weaver provides what he calls a "literal translation" of the passage in question (Paradiso XXVI, 133-138).

Before I descended into the pains of Hell, on earth the Highest Good was called I, from whence comes the light of joy that enfolds me. The name then became EL, and this change was proper, because the customs of mortals are like leaves on a branch, one goes and another comes.

Having just read A.E.'s account of the ancients "calling out 'El' if it was the light they adored," I was surprised to find the name El here again associated with "the light of joy that enfolds me." I also thought it odd that I didn't remember Dante's ever using that particular turn of phrase -- and, sure enough, he didn't. Looking back at the original Italian, I saw that Weaver's translation was indeed quite literal -- with the single exception of the reference to "light," which does not appear in the original! Dante wrote simply "onde vien la letizia che mi fascia," translated by the peerless Allen Mandelbaum (the gold standard for Dante translations) as "from which derives the joy that now enfolds me." Weaver's addition of "light" is quite unaccountable. Verse translators who fall short of Mandelbaum's virtuosity might fudge like that to meet the demands of meter, but Weaver's translation is in prose and professes to be strictly literal.

The juxtaposition of El and Hell -- echoing the El and Hel of the A.E. passage -- is, obviously, also an artifact of translation.

Eco goes on to speculate as to where Dante got the name I and suggests Abulafia.

[F]or Abulafia, each letter, each atomic element, already had a meaning of its own, independent of the meaning of the syntagms in which it occurred. Each letter was already a divine name: 'Since, in the letters of the Name, each letter is already a name itself, know that Yod is a name, and YH is a name' . . . Paleographers say that in certain codes [sic; codices?] of the Divine Comedy I is written as Y. Why can this not lead us to suppose that the I of Dante was the YOD of Abulafia, a divine name?

This passage, with its reference to each letter having a meaning of its own, was actually the first parallel to A.E. that I noticed. Only after noticing it did I go back and see the various related coincidences discussed above.

Serendipities cover (left) with detail (right) showing its owllessness

Sunset, by A.E.

I first encountered the Irish mystic George William Russell, who wrote under the pseudonym A.E., in the pages of Ulysses, where Stephen Dedalus borrows money from him and then quips, "A.E.I.O.U." I thought that was a pretty good pun but, compared to some of the other work of the greatest punster ever to walk the face of the earth, nothing spectacular.

Only recently (as in this week) have I actually gotten around to reading any of A.E.'s work. I found that in The Candle of Vision he makes the letters of the alphabet an object of mystical contemplation, considers the vowels separately from the consonants, and takes pains to get the letters in what he considers to be the correct order. Given that the Candle was published just two years before Ulysses, and that the two authors knew each other, I can only conclude that the allusion to A.E.'s alphabetical mysticism was deliberate.

So, Joyce, I apologize for having underestimated you here. Despite everything (and there's a lot to forgive!), you were, in your own way, God.


On pp. 116-118, A.E. explains his project of "brooding upon the significance of separate letters":

I was first led to brood upon the elements of human speech by that whisper of the word "Aeon" out of the darkness, for among many thoughts I had at the time came the thought that speech may originally have been intuitive. I discarded the idea with regard to that word, but the general speculation remained with me, and I recurred to it again and again, and began brooding upon the significance of separate letters, and had related many letters to abstractions or elements . . . . I then began to rearrange the roots of speech in their natural order from throat sounds, through dentals to labials, from A which begins to be recognisable in the throat to M in the utterance of which the lips are closed. An intellectual sequence of ideas became apparent. This encouraged me to try and complete the correspondences arrived at intuitively. I was never able to do this. Several sounds failed, however I brooded upon them, to suggest their intellectual affinities, and I can only detail my partial discoveries . . . .

In the following chapter, he lays out these partial discoveries, which may be summarized thus:

1. A: the self, God; a circle
2. R: motion; red; a vertical line
3. H: heat; orange; a triangle
4. L: fire, light, radiation; a shape like an upside-down Y
5. Y: binding, concentration, condensation, gravitation, the will; yellow; a triskelion
6. W: liquidity, water; green; the lower half of a circle, a smile-like shape
7. G: earth; a square
8. K: mineral, rock, crystal, hardness; a square crossed by a diagonal, so oriented that the diagonal is vertical
9. S: impregnation, inbreathing, insouling, the genesis of the cell; a circle with a horizontal line through the center, like the letter theta
10. Z: multiplication, division, reproduction; a circle with a cross in it, like the astronomical symbol for Earth
11. TH: growth, expansion, swelling
12. SH: scattering, dissolution, decay
13. T: individual action, movement, initiative, ego, extroversion; a symmetrical cross, like a plus sign
14. D: silence, sleep, immobility, abeyance, inwardness; the upper half of a circle, with a horizontal line joining its ends, like the letter D rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise
15. J: --
16. TCH: --
17. V: life in water, all that swims; blue
18. F: what lives in air and flies; blue
19. P: masculine life, paternity; indigo
20. B: feminine life, maternity; indigo
21. N: continuance of being, immortality; violet
22. M: close, limit, measure, end, death; violet

A.E. writes, "In all there are twenty-one consonants which with the vowels make up the divine roots of speech. . . . I despair of any attempt to differentiate from each other the seven states of consciousness represented by the vowels." I am not sure why A alone is discussed together with the consonants. At first I had thought it must, like the Hebrew aleph, represent a glottal stop, but A.E. clearly says that there are 21 consonants, which means A is a vowel.

The selection of sounds, and the order in which he puts them, are highly idiosyncratic. These 22 sounds correspond neither to any alphabet I know of nor to the phoneme inventory of any language with which I am familiar. It appears to be based on the sounds of English, as understood by someone deeply ignorant of phonetics. Many native speakers of English do not realize that there are two different "th" sounds (as in thy and thigh, respectively), that the "s" sound in vision is a distinct sound, or that "ng" is not just a combination of the "n" and "g" sounds.

The placing of R in second place implies that A.E. used a uvular ("guttural") "r" sound, as in French. According to Wikipedia, "A guttural/uvular [ʁ] is found in north-east Leinster. Otherwise, the rhotic consonant of virtually all other Irish accents is the postalveolar approximant, [ɹ]." A.E. was from County Armagh, adjoining north-east Leinster, so it is possible that he spoke this way -- or it could be just another sign of his general confusion regarding where in the mouth different consonants are articulated.

The consonants from 7 to 22 appear in pairs, often but not always representing voiced and voiceless versions of the same sound. Sometimes the voiced sound comes first (G-K, J-TCH, V-F), and sometimes the voiceless (S-Z, T-D, P-B). TH and SH are paired, presumably because A.E. was not aware that each had its own voiced counterpart, and because these two "orphan" fricatives seemed vaguely similar. N and M are paired because they are the only nasal consonants of which he was aware. I surmise that A.E. had no knowledge of the voiced/voiceless distinction but simply put together those consonants that seemed intuitively to be similar in sound.

Despite his use of such terms as "dental" and "labial," and despite his account of how he brooded over these sounds, repeating them to himself again and again, A.E. seems not to have been very clear on what was going on in his mouth when he pronounced them. The sounds are supposed to be organized according to place of articulation, from back to front, but there are many puzzling exceptions. L is an alveolar sound, articulated in the same place as T and D, but it is placed far in the back. When he repeated the L sound to himself, he must have been saying "ull, ull, ull" -- giving the consonant its "dark," velarized pronunciation, rather than the "clear" pronunciation found in "luh, luh, luh." The "dark l" sound is unusual in Hiberno-English but apparently does occur in some Ulster dialects.

The placing of the palatal sound Y in the back, behind the velars, is incorrect but understandable. Since the tongue only comes close to the hard palate without actually touching it, the sound's palatal character is not easy to discover by self-observation. In fact, we can see that A.E. put all approximants in the back, regardless of place of articulation, perhaps because it was not easy to observe how they were pronounced.

The interdental TH and the post-alveolar SH, J, and TCH are also also misplaced, less understandably. (I assume this is tch as in Tchaikovsky, thus spelt to differentiate it from ch as in Bach.) If you pronounce TH, S, and SH in succession, I think it's pretty easy to observe the tongue moving from the front of the mouth toward the back.

But the most obvious exception is N, which is placed with the labial consonants apparently on the strength of its similarity to M.


These amateurish errors, together with the incompleteness of the mappings, demonstrate the sincerity with which the project was carried out. I have not the slightest doubt that A.E. did just what he said he did: brooded over these sounds for a long time and wrote down only those correspondences which were confirmed by intuition. Sometimes he didn't get anything (as with TCH and J), and other times his results were only tentative. (Although my summary does not show it, many of the correspondences are qualified with "I think," or "it vaguely suggested itself to me.")

On one level, this whole list of correspondences seems to be obvious nonsense. Aside from the linguistic difficulties, what does it even mean to say that R corresponds to motion, the color red, and a vertical line? What would follow from such a statement's being true or false? It seems like a classic example of an assertion that is (as Wolfgang Pauli would put it) "not even false." I am reminded of Valentin Tomberg's statement that the traditional planet-metal mappings of astrology (Sun to gold, Moon to silver, Venus to copper, etc.) have been confirmed for him time and again by experience. What sort of experience, I wondered when I read that, could possibly confirm such a thing? What properties of tin unfolded themselves to his understanding when he reflected on the "fact" that tin corresponds to the planet Jupiter? Or what light did tin shed on the nature of Jupiter?

Some of A.E.'s mappings did ring true, but it's hard to be sure why. For example, when I read about F ("what lives in air and flies"), I thought of English fly, flap, flutter, fowl, and feather; of Chinese fēi and Hebrew 'af, both meaning "fly"; and of T. H. White's geese singing "Free, free: far, far: and fair on wavering wings" -- but of course this is just picking cherries, and most flight-related words in most languages do not feature the "f" sound. Does the abundance of such words in English mean that Anglophones have historically been particularly sensitive to the "true" meaning of their consonants? Do Anglophones think "better" or more clearly about flight because they call it flight? Is that why it was the English-speaking Wright brothers who invented the airplane? (On the other hand, the Montgolfier and Breguet brothers were French, and the great American ornithologist Audubon was born Jean Rabin in French-speaking Saint-Domingue.) Or, more likely, are A.E.'s intuitions unconsciously influenced by the vocabulary of his native language? One feels that the influence of English is also at play in A.E.'s mapping of R to red and Y to yellow. (Both of those mappings were found to be particularly common in Sean Day's survey of 43 colored-letter synesthetes, qv; Day regrettably neglected to record the languages spoken by his subjects.)

Still, despite these very deep misgivings, both about the general meaningfulness of the questions A.E. was asking and about the validity of his specific answers, I found that I reacted to many of his mappings with delight, and with a sense that, somehow and for some reason, his project was after all worth doing. I suppose what I am reacting to, more than to anything specific, is the general attitude of taking things seriously, of refusing to take arbitrariness and meaninglessness as the null hypothesis.


Incidentally, the bit about the alphabet is only a few pages long; the bulk of The Candle of Vision is a serious and sustained meditation of the phenomena of imagination and clairvoyance and on what they mean. It's definitely something I'll be rereading.