Shamanism and the Drug Propaganda: Phoinikeia

The Egyptian name for their hieroglyphs, originally used only for sacral purposes, was 'speech of the gods.' We have 8,000 year-old stamp seals from Macedonia designed to leave their geometric impressions in wet clay, that is, moveable type. We also have Macedonian cylinder seals, that is, cylinders designed to be rolled over the wet clay. This script is found only on figurines, thrones, temple models, altars, communion vases, sacred bread models, pendants, plaques and spindle whorls found in temples. Its purpose was to trigger magical communication, automatic speech, not accounting. Spindle whorls were often used as temple ornaments since the Goddess, like the Spider, the Wasp and the Bee, was a weaver of, and carried the sting of, magical plants. Below is a Queen's pendant, Knossos, c.2000 BC.

The 'sacral' ivy-leaf, a standard device of Cretan potters for millennia, became a letter in both Linear A and B. Gimbutas, organizing linguistic work that began with Evans, has graphed 68 Old European signs that can be shown to be identical to either Cretan Linear A or Classical Cypriot syllabic phonemes, the two great island survivals of this Old European, pre-Indo-European, language. Classical Cypriot is deciphered, Linear A only fragmentarily. This script, which predates the earliest evolved temple-palace script of Old Sumer by 2000 years, isn't a bureaucratic device designed to manage the tax rolls, as in Sumer, but magical script, produced only on religious items. The Near Eastern scripts, of course, also originated in their predecessor Neolithic communities, thus the evolution is contemporaneous.

Both the Greek and Hebrew alphabets were immediately derived from their great Phoenician trading partners, and Phoenician was immediately derived from Ugaritic. In fact Ugarit was discovered, in 1928, when a Syrian farmer plowed into a Mycenaean Greek tomb. Although it is 'alphabetic,' that is, phonetically pictographic, the 22-letter Phoenician alphabet is an exact match of its 27-letter cuneiform Ugaritic mother, after the extra five phonemes, which converged with other Phoenician sounds, are eliminated. Hebrew coincides exactly with Phoenician, in the same order, and Greek almost exactly:aleph, beth, gimel, daleth:alpha, beta, gamma, delta:ox, house, camel, door. From Phoenician, or, as they used to be called, 'Moabite' phonemes, developed not only Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, but Latin, Arabic, Ethiopic, Cyrillic and, ultimately, the written forms of all Western and Semitic languages. In fact a,b,d,h,k,l,m,n,p,q,r,t in English are in the same order as in Ugaritic.

Phoenicia's great trading center of Ugarit left behind a wealth of diplomatic, commercial and liturgical archives on clay tablets, written in the alphabetic cuneiform called Ugaritic. Other scripts found include Cypro-Minoan Linear A, Mycenaean Linear B, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Hurrian (Mitannian-Syrian) cuneiform and Hittite hieroglyphs.

Tablets with Akkadian syllabic cuneiform, the diplomatic lingua franca used by all the powers, were also found in great abundance. Since we have their vocabulary lists, we know that advanced scribes had to qualify in four languages, including the ancient Sumerian, from which Akkadian was derived. The commercial motivation to simplify this confusing array of scripts was very strong.

The two main Ugaritic scripts were the diplomatic Akkadian and the more common everyday Ugaritic, both 'cuneiform,' that is, 'wedge-shaped' simplified pictographs. They were inscribed with a stylus on clay. In use for thousands of years, these proto-syllables took on completely abstract phonetic values, and were thus transferable from one language - Sumerian, Akkadian, Ugaritic - to another.

An inherent conceptual advantage of Egyptian writing was that it was painted on papyrus paper, not gouged into clay. The scribes below were immortalized in limestone c.1350 BC.

Ba'al's mother was Ba'alat, the Lady, the Mistress, called Hathor, the Horned Mother, by the Egyptians, Lady of the Turquoise. She was worshipped in the southern Sinai in 1500 BC by the Egyptians and the Semitic turquoise miners they employed. It is here that the earliest Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, Hebrew phonemes derived from pictures, are found. This is a Semitic extrapolation of a linguistic advance already made by the Egyptians and the Akkadians. Thus the oval, ro, 'mouth' in Egyptian, stood for 'r'; zt, 'snake,' for 'z'; and the rectangle, shy, 'lake,' for 'sh.' These phonetic pictographs were combined to form completely abstract words.

Phoenician, the great trading language, itself is partly derived from its Egyptian, Cretan, Akkadian and Hittite-Luvian (Anatolian) trading partners. Early Egyptian pictographs themselves were heavily influenced by those of its trading partners, Sumer and Crete. And Egyptian, Cretan and Sumerian, moreover, are derived from their magical Neolithic mothers. Greek, an Indo-European language, and Hebrew, a Semitic language, thus have common ancestors not only in Phoenician, a Semitic language, but in Hittite pictographic and cuneiform, an Indo-European language; Akkadian cuneiform, an originary Semitic language; Egyptian pictographic and phonetic, a Hamitic language; Sumerian cuneiform, a Semitic-influenced Ural-Altaic language; and Cretan, an Old European language.

The definitions, therefore, of 'Semitic' and 'Indo-European,' are, evolutionarily, artificial boundaries, since cultural contact was contiguous and intense. The distinction between English and Greek is also artificial, since much English is in fact Greek, and much Greek is in fact Sumerian, Egyptian, Akkadian, Cretan or Hittite-Luvian.

'Etymology' in Greek means 'the logos of the truth,' from etymos, 'true.' By tracing the original meaning of a word we contact the archetypal picture, the unconscious content or bio-historical truth connected to the earth, our automatic selves. The Egyptian hieroglyph for 'King' is a beautifully drawn bee, thus indicting that it was originally the hieroglyph for 'Queen.' There are no king bees, as Egyptian beekeepers knew perfectly well.

Historein, 'history,' is a combination of histor, 'to judge or measure,' and idein, 'to see or apprehend.' The Greeks understood etymology as history: phoinikeia, 'phonemes,' 'letters,' literally means 'Phoenicians.' Herodotus: "These Phoenicians who came with Cadmus...brought to Greece, when they settled in it, various matters of learning and, very notably, the alphabet, which, in my opinion, had not been known to the Greeks before..."

Cadmus is the legendary founder of Mycenaean Thebes. The Mycenaean Greeks, Homer's Danaans, and the Welsh are related via the Tuatha de Danaan, the 'People of the Goddess Danae,' Mycenaean settlers of Denmark and Britain, c.1500 BC. 'Denmark' is 'the Kingdom of the Danaans.' The eldest of the Danaid priestesses, Albina, 'The White Goddess,' gave her name to Albion, as Britain was called by the ancients. This is the same Druidic Albion that imported Egyptian beads from Akhenaten's capitol city into Salisbury Plain, along with the Egyptian astronomical sophistication evident at Stonehenge. The floating mushrooms, below, were engraved on stone #53 by Stonehenge's builders. The Rillaton gold cup, c.1450 BC, taken from a chief's grave in Cornwall, is virtually identical to the gold cups taken from the shaft graves at Mycenae. The Celtic Arianrhod was the Mycenaean/Cretan Ariadne.

Over the centuries Britain was visited with numerous Greek immigrations, including that of the Milesians, who hit Ireland in about 1250 BC. As Apollodorus put it, Iason, 'the man of the drug,' "built a ship of fifty oars named Argo after its builder; and at the prow Athena fitted in a speaking timber from the oak of Dodona." 'Oak' is drys in Greek, derwen in Welsh, dur in Gaelic. The Gaelic plural duir, derwydd in Welsh, 'Druid,' means 'oak-seer.' The Druids buried their dead in oak boats, like the one described by Apollodorus. Odysseus was a Druid: "The man himself had gone up to Dodona/to ask the spelling leaves of the old oak/what Zeus would have him do - how to return to Ithaka/after so many years - by stealth or openly."(Od:19:290)

In all Celtic languages, trees means letters; to cast a spell thus had pharmaco-shamanic as well as phonetic implications. That is, the Druidic, the Cadmean letters that the Mycenaeans brought with them in their oak boats, were the spelling letters of the leaves. The Druidic mysteries, which could be communicated alphabetically, consisted largely of the correct use of the various berries, leaves, barks, saps and woods in the appropriate season. That was the alphabet taught to Cadmus by the Queen Bee.