YHVH: Yahweh

[taijasi]

Sancho, I may have gotten confused what you were saying about Yahweh relative to "the Lord" in such translations as the KJV. What you are saying, if I get you correctly, is that just as the term `worthy of praise' (Allah) appeals to the Muslim more than others (like Ted, or Fred, or Ralph) ... so Yahweh, almost (but not quite) regardless of its source and linguistic connections, appeals to you more than a somewhat sterile or generic sounding, "the Lord."

If that is the case, I would go a different direction. I would suggest that we should explore the mysterious identity of that being with perhaps a different starting point. A different approach might shed more light on the relationship we have with such a Being(s), and vice versa.

For instance, although the translation I grew up hearing was something like, "Tell them I AM sent you ... I AM THAT I AM," I find this bold assertion to be much less useful, or personable, than something I have come across in the past couple of years. The Wiki article on Yahweh borrows from a recent publication of the Encylopedia Britannica in clarifying that the most likely meaning of Yahweh is something like, "He Brings Into Existence Whatever Exists."

This fits very much with another translation I know, which is rendered simply: "I am BECOMING." This short and perhaps most direct translation says to me that God is not so unlike us that we cannot relate. God, like us, is an evolving, unfolding, progressing Being, even if the scale and order of magnitude of God's Being is far, far in advance of our own.

This, however reluctant some may be to consider it, is Christ's own Teaching, found in St. Paul's Letter to the Romans, ch.8 v.29:

"For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren."
​

There is an esoteric tradition, also, which I would point out. Many students believe that the Lord of the World (by whatever name we would call this Being) does actually exist within a body or form which it is possible for an individual to encounter. While some such believers are members of the Mormon Faith, many others are not. Yet there are definite caveats which pertain to this teaching which the esotericists hold.

One such caveat is that a person cannot behold the Countenance of this Being directly until a very advanced spiritual state. Christ Himself taught us this, for in the Sermon on the Mount He told us, "Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God."

This purity for many of us refers to the treading of the Spiritual Path with such adherence, Faith and determination that - following upon the 2nd Birth - one eventually reaches the stage of readiness for the same Baptism by Fire and by the Holy Spirit which St. John the Baptist and Christed Jesus referred to.

This condition was symbolized by the Christ when he came to see John, yet was told, "I cannot Baptize you, for you are without sin." Jesus told John to Baptize him, as this was a symbolic gesture and meant to convey the inner truth of the transformation of our Being whose consummation means relative Purity, vs. what we would call various forms of iniquity.

The Baptism, however, is only the completion of this stage of transformation ... not its beginning, which is actually the moment of the Birth of the Christ within.

Following the Baptism, wherein a man is enabled to work with a Purity which enables his spiritual efforts to meet with much greater empowerment and success, there are new requirements set before him for the entire transformation of the remainder of his personal consciousness (mind, body and emotions) ... into a vehicle worthy to receive the direct impress, stimulus or impetus of the Divine. And this refers to the Transfiguration.

Once again, Jesus symbolized this for us as Jesus ... although the esoteric teaching is that he attained such a degree of empowerment in a previous birth. And the disciples knew this, they clearly believed in rebirth, they even ASKED him if he was Elijah reincarnated, to which he replied, NO! - telling them that Elijah had alrady come, had been John the Baptist, and they had not perceived this truth!

Jesus enacted the Transfiguration for us, and in the artwork of Raphael, et al, we can see the symbolism which he carefully prepared and left for us. The disciples who accompanied Jesus unto the Mount are given as Peter, James and John, the `inner three.' These are the physical, emotional and intellectual nature of Jesus (though I do not say, respectively) ... and these are the portions of our lower or mortal nature which must become Spiritually transfigured, even after we have been purified.

"Blessed are the Pure of Heart, for they shall see God."

Moses beheld a burning bush. Early on, even as an Initiate, he did not SEE God. Even later, when God was revealed atop Mt. Sinai, Moses had to shield himself from God's Majesty - yet we are told that even his very APPEARANCE was literally transformed as a result of his encounters with the Divine. And elsewhere we are told that Moses DID speak with the Lord, even `face to face.'

Jesus went up the Mount of Xfiguration, and as the artwork shows, Peter - James - John came toppling DOWN. This is because the Christ within, the True Self of Jesus of Nazareth, was being exalted. Jesus was raised up, while the three lower elements of our being were thrown down. Some of the religious icons down through the centuries have also shown this symbolic relationship, perhaps better than Raphael's art. Regardless, this is a universal stage of our progress, and something which every human soul is called to undergo, even if it lies far ahead on the path of spiritual growth.

Jesus himself is said to have experienced this as an earlier Joshua. Yet the connections only come full circle, and the full significance of all this, can only become apparent, if we consider just how much of a family affair all this really is (or may be). The first appearance of Jesus in the Bible is taught in certain places as having been Joshua, Son of Nun, who was third in line of succession (Parampara Guru) after Moses, then Aaron, his brother.

Aaron gives us the Priestly Blessing, which Mr. Spock and every Vulcan on Star Trek has also shared with us (half of it, anyway), the hand symbols being presented every time the Blessing was conferred. The blessing of Aaron, as both Jews and Christians alike have known it for up to 3000 years and more, runs:

May The Lord bless you and keep you.
May the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you.
May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.​

Here, in the words "make his face shine upon you," as well as "lift up his countenance upon you," we have the secret which connects an important thread of the esoteric tradition, with the true identity of Jesus of Nazareth, hinting at the inner and universal signifance/nature of the Christ ... and also at the identity of the Being(s) Whom & which is/are `God' (in Whom we live and move and have our being).

Yes, that's a lot to take in, or ponder, and it doesn't sound like what we hear from week to week in Sunday school ... but it isn't supposed to!

In Sanskrit, the term deva means `Shining Ones,' and it refers to a certain order of celestial beings (... here we go with orders and hierarchies again ). The relevance to Christianity and Judaism should be obvious enough. Aaron made clear, direct reference to this Order in the Priestly Blessing ... yet because we are here referring to God in the Highest (for planet Earth), it should be apparent why it is useful to delineate between an example of these `shining ones,' the term (deva) in connection with the whole group of orders as considered together, and the head of that Order as it is considered relating to planet Earth ... aka, God.

Aaron was directing our attention to the One God, as Moses had encountered `Him,' and Jesus was reminding us that utmost purity of Heart is a requirement of the spiritual path, long before we may - one day - find ourselves literally standing FACE TO FACE (please ponder the Blessing again). Elsewhere, in more modern esoteric teachings, it is clarified that only at the Transfiguration stage (or 3rd Initiation) of spiritual growth are we prepared, in both our inner and outer being, to come into such a tremendous, empowering and Awesome PRESENCE (sic!). Any direct encounter beforehand would pretty much be like the end of the movie Dogma, and would be far too much for the unprepared human to experience. Thus, God has always appeared in symbols, with full Glory greatly veiled, so that the experiencer could live to tell the tale ... and hopefully INSPIRE, others.

It is sad, imho, that even while the Teachers of modern times have tried to explain all of this most clearly for the serious student, and even as careful steps for treading the Path of Initiation have been laid down (leading us to Spiritual Birth, Baptism, Transfiguration and beyond) ... the ecclesiastical `authorities' (authorities over WHAT, and BY WHOM?) have chosen by & large to reject what has been given out, and have preferred to retreat into creeds & dogmas, narrow interpretations, and all manner of folly in the name of tradition.

As the Christ has said, "Respecting a grandfather, one need not drink out of his cup."

I have worn out this poor soapbox, and my neighbors' ears, perhaps your patience, so that is all I have to say. In studying the Aaronic Blessing, which came forth in Moses' own day and is used today in perhaps 95% of Christian liturgical services (?), as well as in Judaism, I think we can come to a much greater understanding of God, of ourselves and of the relationship between us. We are more alike than different, but what this means we will need to discover ... for ourselves.

Peace ...

 

[bob x]

Not at all. But you could try, "Would you please explain x?" or "What did you mean by y?" ... or if we must be terse, "What are you trying to say by z?"

I have done so. I asked what you meant to claim that Saturn was the center of the solar system (a statement that seems, on its face, absurd in terms of either modern or ancient views), and what you found relevant about "Parampara". Your replies were haughty and unhelpful.

I may come across like a know-it-all

It's worse than that: "tain't what a man don't know makes him a fool, it's what he do know that just ain't so." You make simple blunders on points of fact. In your discussion of the Shahada, you claim that "Allah" means "worthy to be praised." No it doesn't: it means "THE God", emphasizing that there is one and only one. You were making this very point, and yet missing how directly the Shahada says it: "there is no god but the God." Aside from the meaning of the words, the poetic form, with its repetition of the L sound like the repetitive T in "Tat tvam asi", is drawing the mind to consider the essential unity. Both the meaning of the name YHWH, and its poetic form (all "semivowel" consonants) are intended to emphasize that the reference is to "the god of Existence", not to "the god of the planet Saturn" or "the god of fire" or "the god of mountains" or "the god of this-that-or-the-other particular entity", not one in a list of a bunch of entities but the sum total of all of them.

Again, you claimed that Herschel saw "Vulcan". No, the planet he discovered was URANUS, in 1784; he was dead by the time "Vulcan" was postulated in the 1830's, to account for anomalies in Mercury's orbit which are now known (since 1916) to be precisely the corrections which relativity demands to Newton's law. Since these corrections to Mercury's orbit have long been understood, it is IMPOSSIBLE for there be a body in a sub-Mercurian orbit large enough to be called a "planet", or it would already be known, if not through observation then through unaccounted-for perturbations of Mercury's orbit of which there are none. There are some "sun-grazing asteroids", which might account for 19th-century claims to have seen Vulcan briefly and lost it, but these are just small rocks; if we call any of them "planets" we have to call the tens of thousands of other asteroids "planets" too.

But these different orders of elohim are not the same as the highest orders, which include the Planetaries, or Seven Spirits before the Throne. The days of the week very much do reflect a Heavenly Order, so that we may have a practical, observable understanding thereof. And the ancient Greeks knew this, the ancient Egyptians, the Hebrews and Chaldeans, the Hindus, the Zoroastrians, etc.

No. The seven-day week arose in the specific context of a time-keeping system which divides the lunar month into four phases. The Greeks and Egyptians did not do it this way: they divided the month into three phases, "waxing", "full", and "waning", and so instead of a "week" of approximately seven days (to make four weeks equal a month exactly, it is necessary for some weeks to have eight days; the Hebrews and the Chaldeans independently decided to make the week seven days always, drifting against the quarter-phases), the Egyptians and Greeks had "decans" of approximately ten days (Greece shortened some decans to nine, so that three make a month; Egypt lengthened some to eleven, so that 36 make a solar year). India and China only used two phases "waxing" and "waning", so their intermediate-sized unit of time is best translated as "fortnight"; the Germans probably originally used fortnights too (here we are handicapped by their lack of early literacy). India and Germany borrowed the seven-day week very late; in India, until the Muslims and then the British forced people to pay attention to this cycle, it was tangential to the time-keeping system: an astrologer might calculate the "vaari" (weekday) of a particular day as one more bit of information to go into the horoscope, but the common people had no reason to know or care what weekday it was.

Not every astrological system thought there were seven planets, either. The Greeks and Phoenicians believed that the Morning and Evening Stars (Phosphor and Hesperos in Greek, Shachar and Sholom in Phoenician) were not a single planet "Venus", but rather a pair of planets, twins but rivals, only one of whom was allowed to appear at a time; the Greeks at least believed in a lesser pair of twins (Apollo and Hermes) in place of the planet "Mercury", although we don't have a record of how the Phoenicians viewed that. India also had "nine" planets, including the sun-eater Rahu and the moon-eater Ketu, whose motions caused eclipses.

EVERY tradition speaks of a Sacred Seven

No, no, no. ONLY the Mideastern cultures did, and where we find it elsewhere it is a patently late borrowing from the influence of the Mideastern religions. This is what I insist you try to understand: different cultures were DIFFERENT! A concept that was major in one culture's view may have been minor, or not thought of at all, in another's.

Yet I can quote for you the astronomers who HAVE SEEN IT DIRECTLY ... and - if I am not mistaken, you will happily dismiss that as insubstantial, irrelevant, etc. N'est pas?

For God's sake, if you have any information to share, share it. But this is a subject which I already know a great deal about.

There was a correspondence, I say, betwen the Elohim associated with (expressing through and `upon') Saturn ... and the `God of the Jews,'

The very concept that you are advancing here, that YHWH should be identified just with "Kaiwan" (the Hebrew word for the planet Saturn), did indeed crop up in late Israel, and was explicitly denounced and rejected by the prophets.

By the way, MONDAY=Moonday, and TUESDAYis from the Old English and Proto-Germanic for `Tiw's Day,' referring to Tyr, the Norse God of War(umm, MARS).

Tyr/Tiw/Tiuz is in fact the Germanic reflex of the Indo-European for the sky-god seen in Sanskrit as Dyaus, in Greek as Zeus or Zeopater, and in Latin as Jupiter. If the Germans had *anciently* had any such planet/weekday associations, therefore, "Tuesday" is the name that should have been assigned to "Thursday". The fact that this name was arbitrarily chosen as a translation for Mars is one of the indications that this concept was borrowed into the Germanic culture very late, when the original nature of Tiuz had been long forgotten.

WEDNESDAY, if you research this, has the same connections with the Norse mythology as Tuesday, and thus corresponds, in its English derivation, with Mercury.

Mercury was the god of merchants; but this class was not prominent enough in early Germanic culture to have a particular god associated with it. Woden/Odin was a heroic ancestor of major royal families; as a god, he was generally likened to Hercules in the Greco-Roman; he was certainly not at all like Mercury, but was arbitrarily drafted since he was too prominent a god not to be given some place in the system.

Thursday refers to Thor's Day in the Norse mythology

He is a personification of Thunder ("Thor" is an eroded form; the Anglo-Saxon name was "Thunor"). As such, he seemed a reasonable translation for Zeus/Jupiter, since Tiuz had lost that associations.

FRIDAY is the day of Frigg, or Freyja, but again in Sanskrit we can see a direct reference, as in the Romance languages, to the planet Venus.

The word "zukra" used in Sanskrit Zukra-vaari "Friday" actually means "semen"! And the word "soma" used in Sanskrit Soma-vaari "Monday" actually means a sacred drug ("chandra" means "moon"). The other five are all planet-names; why these two are so weird is a puzzlement.

SATURNDAY, I mean umm, SATURDAY, has such a direct linguistic correspondence with SATURN in the English that I think the point could be missed only by the most obtuse ...

And yet I think you've missed it. In this case the Germans did not translate the name at all, just carried over the Latin name, because they had no name for the planet, and they had no god who could reasonably be likened to the god Saturn either. This is another sign that we are dealing here just with a very late borrowing of a concept which originally played no role in Germanic culture whatsoever.

while SUNDAY is not simply the `Sun's Day' in Romance languages, it is, once again, a reference to Surya, the Sun God, in the Indic languages.

Uh, no, in the Sanskrit Ravi-vaari "Sunday", ravi is just the generic word for "sun", not a god of the sun.

 

[taijasi]

I have done so. I asked what you meant to claim that Saturn was the center of the solar system (a statement that seems, on its face, absurd in terms of either modern or ancient views), and what you found relevant about "Parampara". Your replies were haughty and unhelpful.

And I have since then replied in careful detail ... and so your choice to belabor this here serves what purpose?

It's worse than that: "tain't what a man don't know makes him a fool, it's what he do know that just ain't so." You make simple blunders on points of fact. In your discussion of the Shahada, you claim that "Allah" means "worthy to be praised." No it doesn't: it means "THE God", emphasizing that there is one and only one. You were making this very point, and yet missing how directly the Shahada says it: "there is no god but the God."

Then in this case, your correction is most helpful!

And I see upon looking that the word (`Allah') has more in common with its Hebrew cognate - eloah - than I had noticed! So indeed, it helps make the case ...

Both the meaning of the name YHWH, and its poetic form (all "semivowel" consonants) are intended to emphasize that the reference is to "the god of Existence", not to "the god of the planet Saturn" or "the god of fire" or "the god of mountains" or "the god of this-that-or-the-other particular entity", not one in a list of a bunch of entities but the sum total of all of them.

Then we are speaking of the Sun God!

Again, you claimed that Herschel saw "Vulcan". No, the planet he discovered was URANUS, in 1784; he was dead by the time "Vulcan" was postulated in the 1830's, to account for anomalies in Mercury's orbit which are now known (since 1916) to be precisely the corrections which relativity demands to Newton's law. Since these corrections to Mercury's orbit have long been understood, it is IMPOSSIBLE for there be a body in a sub-Mercurian orbit large enough to be called a "planet", or it would already be known, if not through observation then through unaccounted-for perturbations of Mercury's orbit of which there are none. There are some "sun-grazing asteroids", which might account for 19th-century claims to have seen Vulcan briefly and lost it, but these are just small rocks; if we call any of them "planets" we have to call the tens of thousands of other asteroids "planets" too.

Well bob, here it just ain't so.

You're right about Herschel; I had that mistaken!
Maybe I simply had the discovery of Uranus (to the moderns) confused. But when it comes to Vulcan, it's time to consider some - revisions. Allow me to help:

It is only with the theories of such men of learning as Kepler, Kant, Oersted, and Sir W. Herschell, who believed in a Spiritual world, that Occult Cosmogony might treat, and attempt a satisfactory compromise. But the views of those physicists differed vastly from the latest modern speculations. Kant and Herschell had in their mind's eye speculations upon the origin and the final destiny, as well as the present aspect, of the Universe, from a far more philosophical and psychic standpoint; whereas modern Cosmology and Astronomy now repudiate anything like research into the mysteries of being. The result is what might be expected: complete failure and inextricable contradictions in the thousand and one varieties of so-called scientific theories (The Secret Doctrine, v.1 p.589)
​

Science will one day vindicate this author on so many points that her wisdom will be acknowledged, and her authority(ies) known as precisely that. Meanwhile, fools like me will continue to share what we know along these same lines. Perhaps you should reconsider your convictions in this matter, bob. Sometimes, it's ok to be ahead of the curve ... an `early adopter.'

For the record, there's more than this material world, and in the world of physical ethers (the densest state of which includes or overlaps with modern science's PLASMA) ... you will find Vulcan, and other planets not immediately visible to the naked eye. Then again, the NASA space program has known about ET visitors here, and their existence `out there' for decades ... and do you think they're just dying to get this info out in a PR, day after tomorrow? Uh-huh. So, there's more under heaven ...

No. The seven-day week arose in the specific context ...
Not every astrological system thought there were seven planets, either.

I like how you conveniently dismiss everything I've said along these lines, simply replacing it with what you're familiar with, yet making no effort to integrate what you `know' with what I've said ... and thus, choosing the familiar, ostrich in the sand approach. Umm, bob, that doesn't really make it go away.

You see, I am happy to consider that there is plenty more we can learn about how the days of the week came to be thus named and regarded, yet you don't seem to see it like that ... Sorry, friend.

No, no, no. ONLY the Mideastern cultures did, and where we find it elsewhere it is a patently late borrowing from the influence of the Mideastern religions. This is what I insist you try to understand: different cultures were DIFFERENT! A concept that was major in one culture's view may have been minor, or not thought of at all, in another's.

Now, now, calm down. It's gonna be fine. The Seven may have been known in different contexts ... and if by Mideastern you mean originally Indic and from the Hindu sub-continent, then sure, that's where we can find such ancient (relatively ancient) notions - as from the Saptaparna, Saptarishis, 7 & 10 Prajapatis, etc.

You see, I have no problem agreeing that different cultures are different, that some systems acknowledged 7 AND/OR 10 Elohim, or even 12 (hmm, is THAT a familiar number for ya?). Certainly they had different understandings, and their mythologies and spiritual & cultural traditions reflect this. But what they're describing was/is/are/were the same Greater Reality(ies) ...

And surely we ought to know that by now. Shame, shame.

I said:

Yet I can quote for you the astronomers who HAVE SEEN IT DIRECTLY ... and - if I am not mistaken, you will happily dismiss that as insubstantial, irrelevant, etc. N'est pas?
​

You said:

For God's sake, if you have any information to share, share it. But this is a subject which I already know a great deal about.
​

Just look up Vulcan on Wiki; you'll find everything there you need.
You'll find that numerous astronomers have observed Vulcan, just a bit later than - Herschel. It's okay, your research one day will help make it aaaaall fit together.

The very concept that you are advancing here, that YHWH should be identified just with "Kaiwan" (the Hebrew word for the planet Saturn), did indeed crop up in late Israel, and was explicitly denounced and rejected by the prophets.

We are all free to reject anything we like, including the fact that earth is roughly spherical and not actually the center of our solar system. The comment I made about Saturn as that center early on ... was meant as sarcasm. As in, if X is true, then I'm Ronald Reagan, or some such.

Tyr/Tiw/Tiuz is in fact the Germanic reflex of the Indo-European for the sky-god seen in Sanskrit as Dyaus, in Greek as Zeus or Zeopater, and in Latin as Jupiter. If the Germans had *anciently* had any such planet/weekday associations, therefore, "Tuesday" is the name that should have been assigned to "Thursday". The fact that this name was arbitrarily chosen as a translation for Mars is one of the indications that this concept was borrowed into the Germanic culture very late, when the original nature of Tiuz had been long forgotten.

Now you're just being obtuse ... and the rest of what you share shows me that I'm not the real `KNOW-IT-ALL' here, so I really should stop being so apologetic.

Bob, bob, bob ... it's time to meditate on some bumper-sticker wisdom for awhile:

MINDS ARE LIKE PARACHUTES;

THEY ONLY FUNCTION WHEN THEY'RE OPEN​

Pull rip-cord. Pray. If it don't work the first time (old habits are hard to break), pull the emergency chute cord. Pray again. Then, hopefully, SMILE!

I think I'm done here, and you know what you can do with your, "Oh, I see you're happy to admit defeat and slink away." Let me SAVE YOU the keystrokes, buddy!

No bob, I'm tired of your crap. I'm getting the **** out of Dodge while I still have my composure about me. Please lecture someone else for awhile.

May the Jehovah's Witnesses find you promptly, and may the encounter never end until someone comes out of it having learned a life's lesson or two. AMEN

 

[bob x]

Let me try being nicer to you:

On "Parampara": I could not tell whether you were using the Sanskrit word generically in the sense of "lineage"; or whether the capitalization meant that you were referring to some author by that name (if so, I cannot find him), or whether the capitalization meant that you intended some particular lineage as THE Parampara and were testing me to see if I would know which one you meant. Gratuitously using a foreign word, rather than just saying "lineage" in English, gives the impression that you were showing off your erudition, or intentionally obfuscating communication, or using it as a "secret handshake" to decide whether I was worthy enough for you to condescend to speak to me; I apologize if none of these impressions was correct.

The way to invoke a lineage is to name names, like so: I learned my Buddhism from the Karma Kagyud lineage; my teacher was Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche; his teacher in turn was Kalu Rinpoche, whose teacher was Jamgon Kongtrul Rinpoche. I am not a good Buddhist anymore, scarcely even meditate, and am so out of touch that I do not even know if Khenpo-la is still with us; he was at Karma Thegsum Cho:ling monastery (also named "Karma Triyana Dharmacakra" in Sanskrit) up Mead Mountain road above Woodstock and Kingston, NY (I helped pour the concrete foundation), and if Khenpo-la has passed on, Bardor Tulku Rinpoche would be the abbot in his place, also an excellent man. Why am I no longer a Tibetan Buddhist? The overlay of medieval peasant superstition was too much for my rationalistic hyper-critical mind; I could take all the stories as "symbolic" and see the wisdom in them, but knowing that my gurus believed them all quite literally, to their very guts, made it feel hypocritical for me to call them "gurus" and not buy the stories. It was valuable to me, Khenpo-la always has a place in my heart, and I still pay respects to his picture, but in many ways I have moved on.

Now, if you consider yourself part of a "lineage", please do not tell me that your teacher is a spirit being that only you have direct contact with. The whole concept of "lineage" is that you restrain the ego's tendencies to inflation and confabulation by letting another human being (a tangible, present, older human being) tell you when you are full of it, and accepting that without question.

On "Saturn in the center": I do know a meaning for that, and am guilty of playing the "secret handshake" game, wanting to see if you knew anything about the stuff that I know about. It is of course quite possible (surprising as it may be to me, if not to anyone else) that you, also, know things that I do not. If we are to get anywhere with each other, how about if I just dump out what I know about how the Chaldeans came to the seven planetary names for the weekdays? Your numbering (Sun, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Moon) puzzles me, and I would like to know (seriously; not looking for an excuse to fault you or mock you) how you get to it.

My understanding is: the Chaldeans sorted the planets by sidereal speed (they may or may not have understood the principle of relativity, that it makes no difference whether you say the heavens rotate around the earth or the earth rotates around its axis; but they measured planetary motion relative to the "fixed stars") in the order Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon. This is not from center out, but au contraire from periphery in, as the ancients (poorly) understood the spatial distribution. In that order, repetitively, they assigned a ruling planet to each hour of the week: there are 24x7 = 168 hours before both cycles (24 hours to a day; 7 names repeating in a loop) come back around. Each day was named for the planet ruling its opening hour: 24 hours later, all seven names would have been used three times over, plus three remaining, so the names of the days skip through the list by threes. This is how it worked out Saturn ("day 0"), Sun ("day 1"), Moon ("day 2"), Mars ("day 3"), Mercury ("day 4"), Jupiter ("day 5"), Venus ("day 6"), back to Saturn ("day 7" = "day 0" of the next week).

There is more to it than this. The "Chaldean pegboard" has seven holes arranged at the three corners of an equilateral triangle, the three mid-edges, and the center; these seven points being joined by seven lines each going through three of the points, namely the three edges of the triangle, the three bisectors (from a corner, through the center, to the opposite mid-edge), and a circular "line" joining the three mid-edges. The seven pegs (I saw a picture, which I now cannot find, of a beautiful Chaldean pegboard from Sassanian-era Persia, made of gold, for which the ivory pegs had different-colored gems as capstones) have to be placed so that the seven lines each contain one of these triples (in whatever order):
Saturn - Jupiter - Moon
Saturn - Mars - Mercury
Saturn - Sun - Venus
Jupiter - Mars - Venus
Jupiter - Sun - Mercury
Sun - Moon - Mars
Moon - Mercury - Venus
[a modern notation for this: number the planets in binary as Saturn 111, Jupiter 110, Mars 101, Sun 100, Venus 011, Mercury 010, Moon 001; now if you "add" any two planets, turning a "2" back into a "0", you get the third member of that triple]

There are 168 legal positions of the pegboard; that is, each hour of the week had not just a "ruling" planet (namely-- I believe, though the rules of the "game" have long ago been lost-- the planet in the center) but a whole configuration. I think the start position was: Saturn in the center (yes indeed!), Jupiter in the upper corner (forcing Moon on the bottom mid-edge), and Sun in the lower-right corner (forcing Mars in the lower-left corner, Mercury on the right mid-edge, Venus on the left mid-edge). You see that any of the 7 can occur in the center (and will, 24 different ways, over the course of the week); and then any of the remaining 6 can be placed in the upper corner, but then this forces the outcome in the bottom mid-edge; so that leaves 4 which can be placed in the lower-right corner, forcing the outcome in the remaining three slots; this is how the number of legal positions works out to 7x6x4 = 168. I do not know how they were assigned to the hours, however, and have tried to figure out some plausible "rules of the game", but there are many ways the assignments could sensibly have been made and I don't know how to tell which plausible answer was right.

The 168 "transformations" of the board (that is, those permutations of the 7 positions which will always take a legal position to another legal position: the number has to be 168 again, as we can see by choosing a "start" position as I have done above, and identifying each transformation with the position that results from applying that transformation to the start position; the "null" or "identity" transformation, that is, the permutation 1234567 to 1234567 that doesn't move anything and thus quite obviously takes a legal position to a legal position, is identified with the start position itself) form what is called in abstract algebra a "finite simple group", an important kind of mathematical object which some of the ancients (unfortunately not including either the Greeks or the Indians, who have left us the most literature) apparently understood reasonably well, but which were not rediscovered until the work of Lagrange in the late 18th century and the tragic young genius Evariste Galois in 1830 (he wrote down all his ideas the night before he anticipated, correctly, that he was going to be murdered).

The finite simple groups include the "prime cyclics" (one for every prime number), the "alternating groups" (also an infinite series, of which the first two are of orders 60 and 360, also sacred numbers to the Chaldeans), a bewildering variety of "diagrammatic" groups (of which the order-168 group is the smallest), and then some "sporadic" groups which do not belong to infinite series (the smallest is "Mathieu-11" of order 7920=11x10x9x8; there is no evidence that the Chaldeans or any other ancients knew anything about the five Mathieu groups or any of the other sporadics; Fisher and Greiss proved in the 1980's that there are exactly 26 sporadics and no more). The full classification of the "diagrammatics" was completed by Weyl, Chevalley, and Dynkin in the early 20th century: there are six "meta-series" (a meta-series is an infinite series of diagrams, each diagram giving an infinite series of groups) and ten "exceptional series" (ten special diagrams, each giving a series). The ancients surely did not get that far, but I do believe they knew more diagrammatics than just the 168-group: there is one involving 13 points, connected by 13 lines each passing through 4 points, with the property (as with the "Chaldean pegboard") that any two points are on exactly one line and any two lines meet at exactly one point, whose intricacies I believe have something to do with how the Tarot deck was created.

 

[bob x]

I see that while I was composing my long post (which I managed to double-post; so I am editing away the redundant second copy), you composed your own.

Glad that you accept that I am correct about what "Allah" means: here is, obviously, how you got it garbled, you ready? MUHAMMAD in Arabic means "worthy to be praised"!

As for "Vulcan", I'm sorry, but if I do not think it proper to dignify the name of "planet" a body which contains very little matter, like the sun-grazing rocks which have occasionally been observed, I most certainly do not think the word should properly be used for something not made of matter at all! Madame Blavatsky, in whatever spiritual realm she may be hanging her hat nowadays, can imagine whatever she wants: I consider her a con-artist on the level of Joseph Smith, no more.

The "seven Rishis", and multiple Prajapatis (of any number) are very late, not early In the Vedic texts, the circumpolar stars were called "the bears" (as in Greek or Latin); and there was "Prajapati", but not more than one of him. The number seven had no particular role in Indic numerology or astrology prior to the borrowing of the Chaldean ideas, which remained tangential in any case.