Encyclopedia of Earth Myths: An Insider's A-Z Guide to Mythic People, Places, Objects, and Events Central to the Earth's Visionary Geography

by Richard Leviton

Overview

Discover what secrets myths from twenty-one different cultures from around the world reveal about our planet in this A to Z guide.

Richard Leviton has become the pre-eminent authority on sacred sites and visionary geography. Through books such as Signs on the Earth, The Emerald Modem, and The Galaxy on Earth, he has explored both the personal and universal aspects of our connection to the planet. Now he shows in Encyclopedia of Earth Myths how many of the oldest and most evocative of the world’s myths contain a secret about the Earth. They tell something vital about its make-up and history and our long-standing human relation to it.

Encyclopedia of Earth Myths offers a unique blueprint for understanding world mythology. Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell tutored us in the psychological relevance of myths and the universality of their themes. Now Richard Leviton shows us how they reveal hidden clues about the Earth’s spiritual landscape.

Using clairvoyance and scholarship, Leviton examines 153 mythic topics in A-Z fashion drawn from twenty-one cultures to tease out their information about Earth’s secret landscape. Each entry shows how something considered merely mythic—dragons, giants, the Minotaur, Holy Grail, Fountain of Youth, Golden Apples—actually decodes and illuminates the planet’s esoteric make-up.

Whether it’s African, Tibetan, Native American, Hindu, Peruvian, Egyptian, Greek, or one of fourteen other cultures, myths of many cultures all point to the planet. It’s as if clues about the Earth’s visionary geography have been scattered in all cultures, awaiting our retrieval and decoding.

Encyclopedia of Earth Myths is also a practical tutorial for a new subject: our Earth. But this is virtually a new planet we’re being introduced to here. The result is an essential reference for anyone interested in world mythology who wants to look beyond the cloak of mythic symbolism and see the world anew.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781612832982
Publisher:	Red Wheel/Weiser
Publication date:	06/23/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	724
File size:	1 MB

Read an Excerpt

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EARTH MYTHS

An Insider's A-Z Guide to Mythic People, Places, Objects, and Events Central to the Earth's Visionary Geography

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By RICHARD LEVITON

Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.

Copyright © 2005 Richard Leviton
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61283-298-2

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CHAPTER 1

ADAM

The created container for human individuality before separation into genders, one capable of bearing the highest spiritual principle called the Aleph within the blood and physical matter of the body.

Also known as Adam of Light, Adapa, First Man.

Description: Adam is well known to the world as the first male human being created by God in His image in the Garden of Eden, and mate to Eve, the first woman. He found his first wife, Lilith too wild and feral to be a suitable mate. Adam's name is traditionally interpreted to mean red or ruddy.

Adam is credited with having named the creatures God created. Genesis recounts how Adam stood by passively while Eve got them expelled from Paradise by tempting him to eat the forbidden fruit, presumably a golden apple, from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

In the Gnostic scriptures, Adam is called Adam of Light, described as the luminous man of blood. One document, called the Apocryphon of John, says that 365 angels contributed to the creation of Adam, one making the spine, another the arteries, and so forth, so that Adam was a composite of this range of angelic input. Adam lived to age 930, Eathering, with Eve, Cain and Abel; he was buried on Mount Hebron or possibly Golgotha, "the place of the skull" in Jerusalem. Judaism says that after death humans must go through the Cave of Machpelah, Adam's domain, as he was the first human to die, before reentering Eden.

Explanation: The biggest obstacle to understanding Adam is taking Genesis literally in fundamentalist terms. It is a complex symbolic narrative written in Qabalistic code, based on the Hebrew, or earlier Aramaic language.

There are three most important facts about Adam. First, Adam was not the first male, but rather the archetypal, pregenderized container into which the soul was placed, later differentiated into male and female aspects. Second, Adam must be interpreted in terms of Qabalistic code (called gematria) to make sense of the concept: It means the Aleph (A) immersed in the blood (DAM). Third, there were two Adams because humanity has been generated twice: The first Adam did in fact marry Lilith, one of the Edomites (see Kings of Edom) later removed or aborted from Creation; the second Adam was the Supreme Being's second, successful attempt to create a balanced human.

Lilith was Adam's first "wife" in the sense that "she" was the first attempt to blend or "marry" the physical-emotional aspects of being a human (the soul in matter, run amok ultimately) with the pure spiritual container, Adam.

In Hebrew, Aleph is the first letter of the 22-letter alphabet and is considered the container for the highest spiritual principle in existence. Blood, expressed as dam (you can see that to say that Adam means only red or ruddy misses the complexity of the matter), is the human physical body and all its molecular, organic, living processes. The intent with Adam was to enable the highest point of Spirit to survive and flourish within a material form. This is beyond self-aware consciousness; the Aleph is about God consciousness.

The name Adam also can be written as the number 1440. In Hebrew gematria, the letters each have a number equivalent; the final zero can be dropped or added with no distortion of the basic meaning. In this case, Adam refers to the 144,000 who will one day stand with the Lamb (Christ) on Mount Zion (in Revelation). These 144,000 individualized humans, or Adams, will earn their place beside the Christ (more precisely, in Christ consciousness) by virtue of spontaneously opening their Emeralds, the heart within the heart chakra. The Emerald, in myth, was the gift of the gods' fire that Prometheus gave to humanity.

The Aleph immersed in the blood of humanity is the starting point for this process, much as the Star of Bethlehem guided the Magi to the newborn Christ. In essence, the outer Star and the inner Aleph are identical (see Garuda). The Harmonic Convergence of August 1987 at which millions of people gathered at sacred sites was an early gathering and attunement of the 144,000 of Adam.

The Gnostic elaboration of the angelic contribution to the human makeup (Adam's body) means the macrocosm (galaxy and spiritual worlds) is copied in the microcosm (Adam and human being). This is the basis of the Hermetic axiom "As above, so below," and makes an alignment in consciousness with both possible.

Adam, as a being created by 365 angels, is templated on Earth in the form of a geomantic feature called a landscape zodiac (see White Cow). This is a hologram of the galaxy expressed as a flattened star map across the landscape. The culmination of the zodiac—that is, what you get when all the stars in it are illuminated, the inverse of the 365 angels who made Adam—is a cosmogonic figure variously called an Albion, Ymir, P'an-Ku, and Purusha. Adam is the inner Albion within each human accessed through its outer expression in the landscape zodiac.

See also: Albion, Emerald, Fall of Man, Garden of Eden, Garuda, Golden Apple, Harmonic Convergence, Kings of Edom, Prometheus, Purusha, Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, White Cow, White Sow, Yggdrasil, Ymir.

AGHARTA

A name to describe the actual alternate human civilization inside Earth, limited in numbers but advanced in consciousness and technology, maintained by Gaia, the Earth's Spirit, as a fallback position.

Also known as Agartha, Agarttha, Agharti, Hollow Earth, Land of Advanced Races, Symmes' Holes, Subterranean World.

Description: The term Agharta comes from Buddhism and denotes a presumed subterranean civilization inside the Earth, presumed to be hollow. Some theorize that Agharta was colonized millennia ago by fleeing survivors of the continent and civilization of Atlantis as it was being destroyed. One legend has it that Agharta was colonized by humans leaving the surface many thousands of years ago, led by a holy man who guided the group underground. Human residents of Agharta are postulated to be at a higher stage of civilization, technological development, even spirituality than humans living topside, and Agharta is presumed to be the source of some of the UFOs sighted around the Earth.

In the seventeenth century, two prominent European scientists put forward the theory of a Hollow Earth. Dr. Edmond Halley (the comet was named after him) said that beneath the Earth's crust was a hollow void and that all planets are hollow. Leonard Euler, a mathematician, said there is a central Sun inside the Earth that lights a "splendid" subterranean civilization. In the early nineteenth century, John Symmes, an American lay researcher, proposed that the Earth comprises four concentric spheres with wide openings to the center of the Earth, which were later dubbed Symmes' holes. Speculation about a hollow Earth has continued since then.

Some strands of the Buddhist belief about a hollow Earth include the theory that in the cities inside the planet where millions of humans live is the seat of the Supreme Ruler of the Empire or King of the World. He controls Earth from Agharta by way of secret tunnels that connect the subterranean world with a primary outpost topside, possibly in Tibet, and possibly known as Shambhala. A variant of this theory says Agharta is a highly secret and advanced center of esoteric initiation, the true center of world government, and an impregnable fortress of the world's wisdom, connected by many tunnels with Shambhala. Agharta is also described as a subterranean kingdom beneath the landmass of Asia, connected to all the planet's continents by tunnels and passageways; this description tends to blur the distinctions between Agharta and Shambhala.

Speculation on Agharta and the Hollow Earth has been relegated in mainstream perception to the disrespected fringes of New Age belief, but some specific entrances (Symmes' holes) have been proposed, including Mount Shasta, California (which gives access to Telos, an Aghartan city); Mammoth Cave in Kentucky; somewhere in Matto Grasso, Brazil; Mount Epomeo, Italy; and Kathmandu, Nepal (said to have many concealed entrances into the mountains), among others.

Lending credibility to the subject is the long-standing and widely held belief among Native Americans that their ancestors originally arrived on the surface of the Earth by climbing up ladders, stairs, and tunnels from inside the Earth where they once lived. These emergence points on the surface of the planet are generally called sipapuni and are reflected in the traditional cosmological design of the kiva, a partly submerged round ceremonial space used by some tribes, especially the Hopi and the Anasazi.

Explanation: Included in the planet's visionary geography are 360 actual, physical entrances to the inside of the Earth. I call them sipapuni in honor of the Native Americans who sincerely and against Western ridicule stand fast in their claims to the existence of such. Inside the Earth, there is indeed a civilization of humans, though in smaller numbers than usually put forward: about 17,000.

The Navajo of the American Southwest, for example, say they emerged into the Fifth World (our present physical reality and landscape) from the Fourth World inside the Earth by climbing up a pole and emerging at its top onto an island in a lake surrounded by four snow-peaked mountains. They say this is in the San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado, and call it Hadzinaí or Ni-hoyos-tsá-tse ("Place of Emergence" or "Land Where They Came Up").

If this legend is taken literally, which is plausible geomantically, that means some tribes of Native Americans were originally Hollow Earth dwellers.

The humans inside the Earth on occasion come through the sipapunis to visit our civilization, or at least observe it, and some humans topside on occasion go down to visit theirs, known variously (topside) as Agharta or Telos. The humans inside are, demonstrably, at a more sophisticated stage of evolution and consciousness; some of the UFOs observed topside come from inside the Earth. On other occasions, representatives from both human civilizations meet topside.

The purpose of a second human civilization inside Earth is to give Gaia, the Spirit of the planet, a fallback position if topside humanity severely compromises either its own conscious development or the viability of organic life on the planet and the Earth itself (as by the detonation of nuclear bombs in an all-out war).

Selected locations of sipapuni include Truckee, California; Salt Cave, Grand Canyon, Arizona (the Hopi emergence point); Hessdalen, Norway (a prime UFO anomaly site); Frijoles Canyon, Bandelier U.S. National Monument, (near) Los Alamos, New Mexico; Kluskap's Cave, Cape Dauphin, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada; and Mount Balsam Cone, Waynesville, North Carolina.

See also: Gaia, Shambhala.

ALBION

An expression of the cosmic totality of humanity over time, expressed in multiple copies on Earth with a landscape body made of stars.

Also known as Adam Kadmon, Anthropos, Eternal Man, Fallen Man, Gayomart, Grand Man, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE), Manzasiri, Microprosopus, P'an-Ku, Primordial Man, Purusha, Universal Man, Ymir.

Description: Albion is an ancient name for the island of Britain after a fabled aboriginal giant who first conquered the island and named it after himself. But in the poetic vision of William Blake (Jerusalem and The Four Zoas), it is the name for the "Ancient Man," an Ur-human, like a cosmological model for all humanity, as in Emanuel Swedenborg's Grand Man. Albion, Blake says, is the Eternal, Fallen Man, the father of all humankind, the Patriarch of the Atlantic continent. His wife is Brittannia, the folk-soul image for the country.

Blake's Albion is forlorn and despairing, having turned his back on the "Divine Vision" and in turn on his own progeny, his sons and daughters, which are usually interpreted as the tribes, races, and groupings of humanity.

Blake gave Albion a geomantic aspect, saying his giant form covers all the British Isles, with his right elbow leaning on Ireland and with London between his knees. However, all the "Starry Heavens" have departed the limbs of Albion, Blake says, suggesting that the island's sacred sites somehow had lost potency. Blake was the chief of the British Druids from 1799 to 1837, and it is not surprising that he would make this esoteric link between Albion, the spirit of the land, and the variety of holy sites laid upon it (or him). Blake prophesied that one day Albion would arise from his fallen state and once again hear the "Voice Divine."

Explanation: Albion is an expression templated across the Earth of the original archetypal design and composition of the Human, known in Qabala as Adam Kadmon. All the stars, constellations, and celestial beings and intelligences that on a macrocosmic level contributed to the creation of the original container for consciousness, variously called Anthropos, Eternal Man, Purusha, and others, is expressed microcosmically on Earth as Albion. Conveniently, for easy reference, Albion's name can be read as A Light Being in Our Neighborhood.

Albion's "home" is threefold: Around and within the entire planet is one Albion; within each of the 12 major geometric divisions of Earth's energy body lies an Albion; and within each of the planet's 432 landscape zodiacs (miniature interactive hologram of the galaxy—see White Cow, White Sow) is an Albion.

The three levels of Albion on Earth are also containers for the totality of human conscious and unconscious life and existence since the inception of the Earth. The planetary Albion and the 12 Albions have never awakened in the history of the Earth, but in the twenty-first century it is likely they will, one by one.

James Joyce, in his mythopoeic Finnegans Wake, calls Albion HCE, a protean character whose name keeps morphing throughout the tale (Here Comes Everybody, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker). All of Dublin is HCE's body.

Albion represents several important things for humanity. For one, Albion is the point of consciousness that experiences the creation of duality out of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. As such, Albion is an aspect or emanation of Lucifer, Lord of Light, and the ultimate embodiment of this Tree. Each landscape zodiac is templated on Earth like an apple cut in two; Albion is thus split in two as well and is reunited only when a zodiac is illuminated.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EARTH MYTHS by RICHARD LEVITON. Copyright © 2005 Richard Leviton. Excerpted by permission of Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction,

Adam,

Agharta,

Albion,

Ancient of Days,

Antichrist,

Anubis,

Anunnaki,

Argonauts,

Asura,

Atlas,

Avalon,

Azhi Dahaka,

Balor of the Evil Eye,

Beast of the Apocalypse,

Behemoth,

Bifrost,

Black Eye of Horus,

Bran the Blessed,

Brigit's Mantle,

Camalate,

Candlemas,

Cattle of the Sun,

Chakravartin,

Connla's Well,

Cosmic Egg,

Cyclops Polyphemus,

Da Derga's Hostel,

Djinn,

Dolorous Stroke,

Dragon,

Dreamtime,

Earth Changes,

Einherjar,

Emerald,

Epiphany,

Eriu,

Europa,

Excalibur,

Fairy Queen,

Fall of Man,

Fionn MacCumhaill,

Fisher King,

Floating Bridge of Heaven,

Flood,

Forest of Bliss,

Fountain of Youth,

Gaia,

Ganesh,

Garden of Eden,

Garuda,

Gesar of Ling,

Ghost Dance,

Giants,

Glass Mountain,

Golden Apple,

Golden Fleece,

Grail Castle,

Grail Knight,

Grail Maiden,

Green Knight,

Griffin,

Guinevere,

Hanuman,

Harmonic Convergence,

Heimdall,

Hitching Post of the Sun,

Hollow Hill,

Holy Grail,

Holy Mountain,

House of Atreus,

Huitzilopochtli,

Hurqalya,

Hyperboreans,

Indra,

King Arthur,

Kings of Edom,

Klingsor,

Kokopelli,

Lady of the Lake,

Land of Milk and Honey,

Leviathan,

Ley Lines,

Lucifer,

Manu,

Marduk,

Medusa,

Menehune,

Mephistopheles,

Merlin,

Michaelmas,

Minotaur,

Monster-Slayer,

Morgan le Fay,

Mount Meru,

Nagas,

Navel of the World,

Nymph,

Ocean of Milk,

Oranyan's Staff,

Orpheus's Lyre,

Pan,

Pandora's Box,

Peaches of Immortality,

Peacock Angel,

Pele,

Philosopher's Stone,

Phoenix,

Prometheus,

Purusha,

Quetzalcoatl,

Ragnarok,

Rainbow Serpent,

Raksasas,

Ravana,

Rhinegold,

Rising Rock,

River God,

Round Table,

Royal Hall of the King of the Dovrë Trolls,

Rustam,

Saehrimnir,

Salmon of Wisdom,

Sengen-Sama,

Seven Rishis,

Shambhala,

Simurgh,

Srin-mo Demoness,

Sword in the Stone,

Tezcatlipoca,

Thunderbird,

Tower of Babel,

Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,

Trickster,

Trolls,

Thatha de Danann,

Underworld,

Valhalla,

Valkyries,

Vishnu's Discus,

Vocub Caquix,

Wasteland,

White Bull,

White Cow,

White Eye of Horus,

White Horse,

White Mount,

White Sow,

Wild Hunt,

Yeti,

Yggdrasil,

Ymir,

Zep Tepi,

Ziz,