ALVIN BOYD KUHN, Ph. D.
(3) Then the ancients were "uranographers." The "uranograph" was a chart of heaven. By this is meant a map outlined by the early sages charting the spiritual constitution and physiology of man, the psychic centers, areas of spiritual force, and all "after the pattern of things in the heavens." Man, the microcosm, is a replica of the heavenly man and the universe. From the history of man written thus in the constellation of the skies, the early religious formulators transferred the record to earth and distributed the various phenomena and localities over the national maps in accordance with the heavenly chart! All nations tried to frame their own history and geography after the pattern of things in the heavenly mount. Mainly the Egyptians and after them the Jews made this transfer almost completely. According to this chart each nation was given an upper and lower section, had a river flowing from the upper down to the lower, had a lake or sea, a central city representing the Holy City, and a score of parallel features found in every case. There was first a division into seven nomes or districts, later into twelve. Each nation thus strove to have its history interpreted as a fulfilment of the sacred allegory; and its national history, thus diverted into the form of the celestial myth, was made into the national epic. And finally came the claim on the part of several, notably the Jews, that since their history fulfilled the outlines of the sacred story, they were proven to be the "chosen people" of God. There is not a scrap of evidence anywhere to identify the Israelites as the historical Hebrews or Jews. The latter simply appropriated the distinction to themselves and fitted their history into the sacred scheme. As proof
of this it is offered that a monument in Egypt contained hundreds of Palestinian place names, afterward localized in the Holy Land of Judea,
before the "historical" Exodus from Egypt. Hence the modern discovery of a town in Palestine bearing the name of a place mentioned in the Bible does not offer a single whit of proof that the Bible is history. It only proves that the religious formulators of the national epic had given to a certain place a name already found on the uranograph or spiritual chart, much as European explorers gave sacred names such as Salem, Providence, New Haven, Canaan, Newark, Corpus Christi and Santa Fe to new towns when they came to America. Jerusalem, Egypt, Sodom and others are therefore only spiritual names transferred to the map from the celestial chart.
New Lectures on the Ancient Wisdom--No I
