THE EGYPTIAN AKH AND SAH

The fact that the Hebrew KBLH can be explicated in terms of the Vedic alphabetical model suggests that the Vedic seers somehow preserved the original meanings of the phonemes used at the dawn of history to record and describe the ancient science.

After the end of the early period, known variously as satya yuga (the age of truth) in the Vedic tradition and zep tepi (the first time) in the Egyptian tradition, when men began to babble in various tongues corresponding to grammatical languages, the original phonemic language appears largely to have been lost. In some cases, however—especially with respect to important spiritual concepts and words—the original phonemic meanings shine through.

For example, consider the Egyptian terms Akh and Sah, which were the words used to denote the immortal soul and its universal body, respectively. In the Vedic alphabetical model, the letter a was likened to the infinite self standing above and beyond all the metaphysical layers. When the soul realizes the infinite self and thereby becomes truly immortal, its awareness then extends from a to k— from the infinite form of the self (the divine A realized at the end of the path) to the first form of the self (the divine Ka cognized at the beginning of the path). This presents the downward-looking view of the self when it becomes established in the infinite.

The upward-looking view, by means of which the self realizes its identity with divine Ha and then becomes identified with the Creator, is represented by the sequence of thirty-three consonants from k to h. Because the immortal soul includes within itself both views (downward and upward), it can be represented by the sequence of letters a + k + h = akh. This presents an explication of the Egyptian Akh (the immortal soul) in terms of the original, phonemic language preserved by the sequence of letters in the Sanskrit alphabet.

The universal body possessed by such an immortal soul was denoted by the Egyptian word Sah. This body corresponds to the cosmic egg, whose two aspects are cognized on the scale of the thirty-second and thirty-third layers above the half measure. These correspond to the letters sa and ha, which represent the golden yolk and white, respectively. In Sanskrit the word saha means “together”—the Sa and the Ha taken together constitute a single cosmic body or a single cosmic egg. In the Egyptian tradition, the cosmic body was thus called the Sah (sa + h).

These hidden phonemic meanings can be found within a system of correspondences between the phonemes and certain spiritual-cosmological categories of experience related to the metaphysical layers. Because all the ancient seers experienced the layers in the same way, they shared an understanding regarding the meanings of the phonemes. Here, we are not assuming that the ancient phonemic system was invented by the Vedic seers; we discover only that the system appears to have been better preserved in the Vedic tradition than in the other traditions farther West, perhaps due to its isolation on the Indian subcontinent.