Mel Bradley poem, The God of my World.

Originally a comment on Derry poet Mel Bradley's facebook.
 ...

Lovely poem there, Mel.

There was an interesting article in 2008 by a New York rabbi and Torah bible scholar, Mark Sameth, who spent 20 years study on the appearance of the Tetragrammaton in the Torah. The Hebrew theonym יהוה, commonly transliterated into Latin letters as YHWH, most commonly pronounced as Yahweh and Jehovah. Strict conservative Jewish traditionalists 'avoid reading it as יהוה exactly as it is spelled, either aloud or to themselves in silence, nor do they read aloud transliterated English forms such as Jehovah or Yahweh.

Instead the word and pronunciation is replaced with a different term, whether used to address or to refer to the God of Israel. Commonly substituted Hebrew forms are: hakadosh baruch hu “The Blessed Holy One” or Adonai “The Lord” or Hashem “The Name”. Such terms are believed to equally refer to the same as One as יהוה or Jehovah, in much the same way that the English terms “God”, “LORD” or the “Creator” are used to refer to the God of Israel.' (wiki)

There is no agreement on the etymological root of the Tetragrammaton, tho there's a school of thought that it comes from a triconsonantal root היה (h-y-h), a verb meaning "to be", "exist", "become", or "come to pass".

Sameth's own conclusion of his twenty year textual investigation appears in an article in the summer 2008 issue of the CCAR Journal, published by the Central Conference of American Rabbis, an association of Reform rabbis: "Who is He? He is She: The Secret Four-Letter Name of God"

He theorises that a basic druidic ogham trick is behind cracking this literate mystery, because when the Tetragrammaton is read in reverse and the four letters are flipped, the sounds become, he says, the Hebrew words for "he" and "she." So, God, is not He, Lord, etc, but He/She.

When I read Sameth's conclusion of a life long study into God, i independently had come to the same conclusion, by a different route of study. I'd been four years post-graduate, independently studying the voluminous mass of textual material that made up the bardic filidh poet-training curriculum; all in Irish, and relying on English translations, that only since the turn of the 21C it's been possible to access, all virtually. The source material i was reading, all in Irish manuscript; was pointing to the exact same thing. That God is a gender-neutral spirit, and within us all as our disembodied mind and intelligence, that in everyone, regardless of our gender, is the wholly spiritual s/he Sameth theorises he found in the Torah.

That is hidden and visible only to initiates with knowledge of a druidic trick taught to forty generations of poets in Ireland, as the very founding concept of their trade. And that they were introduced to as a newly arrived grade/level one trainee-poet, foclo (word-weaving beginner) - starting their first Samhain to Beltaine semester in the singing schools of yore. With a further six grades to go on the twelve to fourteen years of study ahead of them, before they graduated, at the seventh and final ollamh grade, and took their place as a Doctor of Poetry in the Gaelic literary tradition. (5-17C).

Robert Graves also concluded after a lifetime of deep study of Myth, and writing hundreds of books, that what he calls the 'unimprovable original' Stone Age poetic was gender-neutral. And it was only with the Greek Iron Age Appollonian falsifying of the previous more Maternal s/he religion, that all the 'God is solely male' nonsense took hold, and really made its mark with the spread of the Roman empire. Because it was grafted and forced onto the stable and peaceable s/he religion, that was a couple of thousand years old when the Mediterranean Levant civilisations began seven centuries of mass implosion and collapse, after the Minoan eruption of the island of Thera, (now called Santorini) around 1500 BC. The new deathly man-cult spread by the new Iron technology, that represented a scientific quantum leap at the time.

The new Man is God religion was spread in much the same way the deluded murderous morons of Daesh are doing now. 'Bow down and devote every waking second of your life to what our He god commands you do in life, that is the one God, or it is His will you be horrifically tortured and murdered as a non-believer, by His earthly good guys' engaged in all the genocide and proselytizing about this wholly bullshit Male God and Creator. All for the purpose of legitimizing as being divinely approved of, their acts of pedophilia, mass-murder, rape, torture and terror that is the Male death cult. What Graves calls intellectual homosexuality. The elevation and worshiping of a solely Male deity as Creator of the real world and all us men and women in it. Yeah, right.

Desmond Swords