Thursday, May 1, 2014

NOAH: The Movie, The Legend and the Esoteric Tradition




What is behind the first classical End of the World as we knew it? What are its biblical origins? Those and other questions were raised after I decided to watch the movie currently shown on cinemas (2014).
As soon as I left the screen room I started to google on the subject. Below is an excellent summary of the NOAH plot given on Rooten Tomatoes and Wikipedia:

Summary
"God is saddened at the wickedness of mankind and sends a great flood to destroy all life on Earth, but instructs Noah, a man "righteous in his generation," to build a wooden ark and save a remnant of life from the Flood. Noah builds the ark and saves his family and representatives of all animals from the massive flood waters which cover the Earth." (Rooten Tomatoes)

Detailed Plot


 "Noah is a young boy, standing on a hill with his father Lamech. Lamech is about to give him the serpent's skin of the original serpent in Eden, which has been passed down for generations. Suddenly, a large crowd approaches, led by a young king named Tubal-Cain, who wants to make that hill into a mine. Seeing Lamech, Tubal-Cain kills him and takes the serpent's skin, while Noah runs.
Many years pass. Noah is living with his wife Naameh and his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, when he sees a small miracle: a drop of water hits the ground and a flower grows instantly. That night he has a dream where he sees the mountain his grandfather Methuselah lives on, and water covering the earth. He realizes that the Creator is trying to send him a message. He and his family run to visit Methuselah. On the way, they find a group of recently killed humans, and among them, a girl that is still alive, named Ila, and they adopt her. Also, Tubal-Cain's men chase them, but they are afraid to enter the dark region that is inhabited by Watchers, fallen angels who look like six- armed stone golems.
It is recounted that the Watchers are friends with Methuselah because he saved them once. They came to earth to help the humans after the Creator had banished humans from Eden, but the Watchers too were punished for disobedience by the Creator, who bound them to the earth and forced them to take form as stone creatures. But after learning from them, the humans tried to enslave and kill them. They tried to run, and Methuselah helped their escape by fighting the waves of human soldiers with a burning sword.
Noah speaks with Methuselah and receives a seed passed down from the Garden of Eden. He plants the seed on a plain, and an entire forest grows upon it within seconds. This miracle convinces the Watchers that Noah is chosen by the Creator. Noah announces that all the wood will be used to build an ark, and they start to help with the construction work.

Roughly eight years pass. As the Ark nears completion, animals start to leave the forests and walk into the ark, where they are put to sleep by incense that Noah prepares.
Meanwhile, the surrounding lands have been running short on food, and the humans, led by Tubal-Cain, are beginning to eat human flesh. A horde of about 200 men, led by Tubal-Cain, approaches the Ark, and Tubal-Cain threatens to storm it, but the Watchers force him to turn back.

All of Noah's family gets in the Ark except for Methuselah, who chooses to die in the flood. As the Ark gets launched, all the Watchers sacrifice themselves fighting the endless human waves. This allows them to return to their original forms and return to their Creator, who has forgiven them.
After the Flood reseeded, and the Ark crashed landing on Mont Ararat, Noah and his "(...) family stands atop a cliff face and Noah blesses them all as the beginning of a new human race. They watch as the Creator sends a rainbow from the sky, covering all of the Earth, signaling his promise to never destroy mankind with a flood again." (Wikipedia).

Main Elements of the Plot



Now with all the elements from the plot I started to mixing them with my own observations.
  • The director chose to approach the legend of the  Great Flood from Hebrew point of view who passed the account of that catastrophic event down to their generations into the Biblical Old Testament.
  • Noah, the main character on the movie is a person confused by the rules given by his ancestors and the visions of the upcoming catastrophe. Images of Sin against God (Yehovah) perpetrated by current humanity and the Original Sin were flashing into his mind. 
  • Images of Adam, Eve, the Tree of Knowledge and the Serpent are part of his vision of the Original Sin.
  • The skin of the original Serpent of the Paradise was used by both clans of Cain and Abel to anoint their descendants. 
  • He understands that he and his family was chosen to survive and all others were damned to perish. He allowed only people chosen by him to stay in the Ark.
The main characters of the Flood story are:

 Noah: Descendent on the line of Seth, first son of Adan and Eve. His progeny choose to preserve their roots simply adapting themselves to the environmental with minimal changes, been vegetarian and non-violent. Noah as a character in the movie developed a extreme hate against human kind and agrees with his god " (...) to put filthy humans in their place so, as Crowe’s Noah rasps, “creation will be left alone — safe. Beautiful”

 Tubal-Cain - Descendent on the line of Cain, second son of Adan and Eve. Cain killed his brother Seth and was punished by Yehovah. In the movie his lineage was the one who choose to transform the Earth according to Man's will.

 Lamech - Noah's father killed by the clan of Tubal-Cain who wants to exploits the land.

 Methuselah - Noah's grand-father and one of the last survivors of the first clans. According to the Bible's account he lived more than 1000 years, or approximately the 10 generations since the beginning of humankind (according to the Bible).

 Watchers - Depicted in the Bible as the Fallen Angels whom decided to help humankind banned from the Garden of Eden and were punished by Yehova to stay Earth bound until their redemption.

Movie Critics


 Today I opened the Herald Sun and found a full page article criticising the movie. The main points were:

 "But Aronofsky’s (the movie's director) “creator” puts humans last. In Noah, we see a pre-flood planet which humans in coarse furs, carrying spears and living in huts, have improbably managed to utterly destroy with what we’re told is their “great industrial civilisation".

 Some of these polluters kill Noah’s saintly father (Lamech) for trying to stop them mining what he protests is “the creator’s land”, but Noah keeps the family tradition alive. “Noah was the first environmentalist,” Aronofsky has said.

 Noah rebukes a son for plucking a flower and even kills men he finds hunting an animal.

 So killing animal, bad. Killing men, not so. This is a deity with radically different priorities, and they don’t include man — not according to Noah.

 In fact, one of God’s most famous lines in the Old Testament, telling us to “subdue” nature and “have dominion over ... every living thing”, is in Aronofsky’s film said by the chief villain, who even munches on one of Noah’s animals as he declares nature is “something you take dominion over, you subdue it” (...) As Crowe-Noah tells his family: “We have been chosen to save the innocent. The animals. When the flood passes, there will be no men to “destroy the garden”. (Bolt, Andrew, 2014)

But that is not the first movie to sell this extreme environmental approach. Do you recall the Knowing (film)? The aliens came, took, like for the Ark, a pair of every living thing, including a boy and a girl (psychic advanced), saying that all remaining humankind should be erased from the face of the Earth to save Nature. If we are not part of the Nature, what are we?


See also  The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008 film) were the aliens came to the same conclusion about the human species and decided for their extermination.

 From the movie plot:
"A space ship descends from the sky. Jonathan is refused entry but allows his son to leave with the strangers, who are revealed to be otherworldly beings strongly. The ship departs with the children and a pair of rabbits, and a distant shot shows many similar vehicles leaving Earth.

 The next morning the skies are on fire from the solar flare. Jonathan drives calmly while listening to classical music through the chaotic streets of Boston, arriving at his estranged father's home. They embrace as the solar flare burns away the atmosphere and incinerates the surface of the Earth, destroying all life on the planet.

 Caleb and Abby are deposited by the beings on an Earthlike planet. In the final scene they are seen running through a beautiful field of grass towards a giant white tree which resembles the tree of life." (Wikipedia)

Original Sources

American Hopi Tradition

Hopi Four Worlds Myth

Hopi legend tells that the current Earth is the Fourth World to be inhabited by the human creations of  the Creator/Sun god, Tawa. 

The story essentially states that in each previous world, the people, though originally happy, became disobedient and lived contrary to Tawa's plan; they engaged in sexual promiscuity, fought one another and would not live in harmony. 

Thus, the most obedient were led (usually by the goddess, Spider Grandmother) to the next higher world, with physical changes occurring both in the people in the course of their journey, and in the environment of the next world. 

In most stories, these former worlds were then destroyed along with their wicked inhabitants.

The more prevalent version of how the people emerged into the current world, after its last destruction is that Spider Grandmother caused a hollow reed (or bamboo) to grow into the sky, and the people then climbed up the reed and emerged in the Fourth World at the location known today as the Grand Canyon.

The Hopi settled in their desert land in Arizona at the behest of the deity, Masauwu (Master of the Fourth World) so that they would have to depend upon the scanty rainfall, which they must evoke with their power and prayer, and so preserve always that knowledge and faith in the supremacy of their Creator who had brought them to this Fourth World after they had failed in three previous worlds.

Source: Forbidden Knowledge TV

Middle East Sumerian Tradition


According to Zecharia Sitchen (ZS): "The search for answers started with linguistic questions.
  • The Hebrew text does not speak of “Men” who began to multiply, but of Ha’Adam—“The Adam,” a generic term, a human species. 
  • It does not speak of the sons of “God,” but uses the term Bnei Ha-Elohim—the sons (in the plural) of The Elohim, a plural term taken to mean “gods” but literally meaning “The Lofty Ones.” 
  • The “Daughters of The Adam” were not “fair,” but Tovoth—good, compatible . . . " (ZS 2010)
Continuing, ZS gives us the origin of the Great Flood:
"The (archaeologist John Peters, 1887) expedition’s finds at Nippur, deemed by some to be “of unparalleled importance,” included the discovery of nearly 30,000 inscribed clay tablets (or fragments thereof) in a library of what had apparently been a special Scribal & Science quarter of the city, adjoining the Sacred Precinct. Hilprecht planned to publish no less than twenty volumes with the tablets’ most important texts, many with “mythological” context, others dealing with mathematics and astronomy and dating back to the 3rd millennium B.C. Among the Nippur inscriptions that were transcribed, translated and published was a remnant of the original Sumerian tale of the Deluge, naming its “Noah” Ziusudra (= ‘[His] Lifedays Prolonged’)—the equivalent of the Akkadian Utnapishtim.

 In this Sumerian inscription (known to scholars by its reference number CBS 10673), it is the god Enki who reveals to his faithful follower Ziusudra a “secret of the gods”—that, at the instigation of an angry Enlil, the gods decided to “destroy the seed of Mankind by the Deluge” that was about to happen; and Enki (‘Cronos’ in the Berossus Fragments) instructs Ziusudra (the ‘Xisithros’ of Berossus) to build the salvaging boat." (ZS 2010).

 Archetypical situations found in the Flood story
  • The knowledge gained from the Tree (the Kabbalistic Tree of Life) was seem as bad for mankind.
  • The Paradise was a place were the human race was face by a choice of living in ignorant bliss or search out for knowledge. 
  • Abel (the good son) descendants were identified with the lineage of Noah, the faithful.
  • Cain (the bad son) descendants were identified with the progress of humankind, the industrial society and with Sin.
  • As per Watchers, the Fallen Angels who decided to assist the humankind, were punished. 

 According to an article published by the News.com.au on January 25, 2014 mentioned:

The British Museum yesterday put the recently deciphered clay tablet from ancient Mesopotamia - now Iraq - on display. It's claimed to be one of the most important archaeological discoveries ever. What it contains are specifications for the legendary Ark which was said to have saved two of each animal - and a handful of humans - from a catastrophic flood. The 4000 year old clay tablet containing the story of the Ark and the flood stands on display at the British Museum in London during the launch of the book 'The Ark Before Noah' by Irving Finkel, curator in charge of cuneiform clay tablets at the British Museum.

    Esoteric Interpretation Of the Legend


     The original texts that describes the Great Flood (The Deluge) epic are all related to sacred texts and from Sumerian origins. As such they convey an esoteric meaning leaving the tale for the non-initiated.
    "Noah’s ark represents the causal body. For those of you who aren’t familiar with theosophy and other esoteric literature, the causal body is the storehouse for all the permanent qualities of the human soul. These permanent qualities are developed over many lifetimes, and they represent the real you. A new personality is possible through the process known as reincarnation because of everything that’s stored in the causal body. Although the personality that manifests each lifetime dies at death, there are qualities attained that you learned through experience in every lifetime that are permanent. These certain qualities are stored in the causal body after the dissolution of the physical body. Therefore the causal body is immortal as far as humanity is concerned. Of course one day humanity will evolve and even the causal body will be discarded in favor of something greater, but this is quite a long way off. We shouldn’t be concerned with that now.

     Shed in this light, we can see that Noah’s Ark is a symbol for the preservation of our individuality. But the story isn’t just about the preservation of our individuality, it’s also about the preservation of the individuality that attains higher consciousness. This is what is really meant when the Biblical author states that:
    “…Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God.”

     All those who “walked with God” in scripture represent the individual who attains higher consciousness.

     Since Noah is the archetype of the individuality of the soul, his ark is the bodily vehicle (the causal body) that makes the evolving soul possible. Because Noah has earned the status of being obedient and righteous before the LORD, the ark/causal body is lifted up to manifest higher consciousness.

     The causal body is part of the higher mental plane and the ark’s description fits this perfectly. According to Gaskell’s Dictionary:
    “The ‘lower, second, and third stories’  are the three higher subplanes of the mental plane; as the casual body is situate on the higher mind plane above the lower consciousness which perceives it not.”

     “The lower consciousness which perceives it not” is simply fancy language for the waking conscious activity of the individual manifested on the lower planes of mind, emotions, and the physical body."

     (Tilghman, Joshua, 2013)

    Conclusions


     As always the imagination seems to propels science. With all the fuzz on the Hollywood movie the Legend is getting a momentum, particularly with the recent translation of a Babylonian tablet by Irving Finkel, curator of the Mesopotamian section of the British Museum a new light was shone in the legend placing it far in the past unveiling another peace of our lost history on this planet.  

     Also quotin Joshua:
    "We cannot deny the fact that a global flood exists in most ancient cultures all over the world. Many Christians see this as an opportunity to proclaim the Genesis account is literal. But the flood stories differ greatly in the details. Literally, these highly differing details seem to say that we cannot trust any of them as being based in literal fact. However it does make more sense to say that they contain a kernel of universal spiritual truth; rather than saying they prove a literal flood, I propose that they provide evidence of a universal truth buried deep within the human psyche and subconscious: namely, that the flood story represents the evolution of individual consciousness.

     I believe that the earth has been through some cataclysmic changes (like major flooding) as a result of global warming and cooling trends over the last tens of thousands of years. There is scientific evidence for this. But to say that Noah’s flood was a reality is ludicrous.

     In conclusion, I believe we must admit that the Bible and its sacred stories are much more powerful and productive if we view them as promoting universal spiritual truths about the soul rather than as literal stories." (Tilghman, Joshua, 2013)

     At least the radical approach given by the NOAH (film) director and others, give us a moment of reflection and a rising awareness on our missing history, the history of humankind never been told to us. As we are approaching a global information boom we are almost ready to make the final synthesis - a synthesis that need to be done through the Inner Silence, when we stop learning and start to Understand. Only after that we can Create.

    Bibliography

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