ROMEOSYNE BREAKS AND LINKS SERIES NO.

TWO

IN THE BEGINNING WAS FLUID: AN INTERVIEW

WITH JAMES L. KELLEY
PART ONE: ANCIENT COSMOGONY AND AMNIOTIC
LIGHT
Leo Kelley and James L. Kelley

ROMAN I T Y

P RESS

NORMAN, OK

Leo Kelley: Okay, what we propose to do here is a series of short

interviews with James L. Kelley, the purpose being to get into the
fine grain of some of his positions on the history of religions and on
the history of various ideologies. This one will look into James'
analysis of several ancient cosmologies or cosmogonies. I know that
James is interested in finding a meso-level theme that can serve as
a foundation stone upon which to build a comparative mythology.
Once James told me that he wants to split the difference between
Joseph Campbell and Walter Burkert; that is, he wants to look at
themes that are widely present in ancient cultures, especially the
Indo-European-derived ones. If viewed from the perspective of
Eastern Orthodox theology, how does the Babylonian cosmos look?
We will get into that in our second session, I hope. Right now, I
believe, we will try to make some comments on ancient Egyptian
views of cosmic origins and hopefully some basic comparisons with
the Indo-Iranian material and wherever else we can end up. As a
final note on the format, here's what we plan on doing: James will
transcribe what we say here, edit it, and add some footnotes. So this
is somewhere between an interview and an article, or that's the idea
anyway.
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Now, James, I have noticed that, over the last few years, your work
has incorporated quite a number of new interpretive concepts. In
conversation you often mention amniotic light as a master theme
in the history of the West. What is this mysterious amniotic light?
James L. Kelley: Let's take the example of ancient Egypt. In
general, ancient accounts of creation say that earth and sky are the
end result of an earlier, more primordial process, and the ancient
Egyptian evidence follows this pattern. In the Pyramid Texts and in
the Coffin Texts the first deity, Atum, realizes that an aspect of
himself, a second god called Shu or void, has created a space or
womb inside his body. Turning his divine power of illuminative
vision toward his own suddenly androgynous midriff, Atum sees a
whole cosmos of forms that Shu has revealed to him. Atum, now
inspired, either sneezes or masturbates (depending on how you
interpret the texts). Either way, the divine fluid that exits Atum's
body turns out to be the god Shu.
The newly-externalized Shu creates a space outside of Atum's body.
This spacean external mirror-image of the womb Shu has already
made inside Atumis totally filled by the force or presence of Shu,
who remains unseen, though he makes everything else visible (and
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thus real) in the cosmos by allowing the sun to appear in his space
(some versions identify the sun with Shu, actually). Another
Egyptian text speaks of the sun as a child that opens up its eyes, and
by doing so, chase[s] away the clouds [and] repell[s] the darkness
by giving birth to his own image through what one text calls selfdeveloping.[1] Here we have a parallel between Shu being born as
a space opening up in (and out of!) Atum and the child on the lotus
bringing into being the world of rocks, trees, and oxygenated
atmosphere by being born, that is, by opening its eyes.
So, Shu makes this material world by producing Earth and Sky and
then separating them. Shu has, in a sense, replicated Atum's earlier
situation, where Atum's body floated as a mound of unformed matter
surrounded by the undifferentiated, benighted waters of chaos, or
Nun. The cosmos is a womb; bodies of gods form the outer barrier,
and inside we have a child of light that makes things move and live
and have their being by looking at them, by emitting light. Here light
is parallel to the waters of Nun in many ways. Nun is disordered and
undifferentiated; the space aspect of Shu, the relatively dry aspect,
is inseparable from the illuminating property. The Egyptian texts say
that the waters of Nun are devoid of light. But the cosmic space of
Shu is created by a wet god, since Shu is the divine moisture
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emitted by Atum. However, what has been added is air or breath, that
is, the spirit or force that pushed Shu from Atum's body. The womb
of illuminated space that is Shu is created by the drying, hardening,
solidifying action of air or breath. This is how Atum revealed
himself in the first place, as a mound of earth or congealed Nun. The
air or vital breath of his own thought is Shu. Shu is Atum's son, his
seminal thought. Thus, the world we live in is one of amniotic light.
We are in a womb of dried out air that allows ordered motion and
development, since is allows the sun to give its light. But the dried
out air, it must be stressed, is nothing more than a stabilized,
ordered counterpart to the chaotic waters of Nun, wherein all the
seeds of possible beings were mixed up and even interpenetrated
each other.
In short, the space between Earth and Sky in the Egyptian cosmology exhibits two propertiesfluidity and luminositythat make
the atmospheric womb an especially apt medium for transferring
thought and desire. We find the same thing in the ancient Greeks:
Hesiod writes that the cutting apart of the gods Heaven and Earth
created a space bounded by their bodies and filled with light. The
Greeks also understood that vision is a projection as much as a
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drinking-in. This is of course the ancient Greek conception of eidola,

according to which the human eye ejaculates simulacra or pseudomaterial species that make objects visible by touching them
physically!
Leo Kelley: So, there is, at least in some foundational Western texts,
a connection between vision, light, life, and sexual reproduction...
James L. Kelley: ...and don't forget cosmogony. The whole thing is
tied together by the life-and-light bearing fluid that is the essence of
the highest god's body, which is developed into a universe, a cosmos,
which is the god's womb, a space he opened up in himself autoerotically, or autogeneratively at least.
Leo Kelley: Right, but does this connect at all to the ancient Hindu
notion of the chakras and of the seminal fluid that becomes luminous
and life-granting if it isthrough meditation and other means
brought up the spinal column to the brain?
James L. Kelley: I want to go into the ancient Indian or Hindu cosmology and anthropology a bit later, but let me say for the moment
that, yes, the whole idea of amniotic light is reflected, I believe, in
each of the cultures that spring from the so-called Indo-Europeans.
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Now, I do not subscribe to any racist views, of course. Many people

interested in Indo-European ideas and languages drift over into odd
notions that the Indo-Europeans have some kind of superior religiocultural knowledge that later led to Europeans inventing science,
technology, and modern political forms! This kind of grand
theorizing is anathema for academic thinkers, even if it is relatively
free from so-called ethnocentrism. How much more is this Aryan
Indo-European theorizing viewed as suspect! And any person on
the street should see right through someone dividing the history of
human culture into Indo-European and non-Indo-European.
However, the same academic establishment that frowns on any
privileging of Indo-European culture (whatever that may be), has no
problem critiquing the West. For example, a Norwegian scholar
Vigdis Songe-Mller wrote a book called Philosophy Without
Women: The Birth of Sexism in Western Thought in which ancient
Greek texts are examined to show that "Western" attitudes toward
women can be traced back to their dual ideal of Truth/Beauty.[2]
This ideal was imaged by the Greek as the physical body of a free,
rational male; Songe-Mller shows that the ancient Greeks (at least
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some of them) desired the bodied of other Greek men because they
devalued the female body as being no more than a passive
receptacle. She was the vessel, the sack, wherein the mirror image of
the (male) Self was fashioned. She was passive, but the male was
active in giving birth, through his seminal fluid, to a copy of
himself! And don't forget that the Greeks saw menstrual blood as a
kind of degenerate semen: if the woman had "cooked longer" in the
womb, she would have been a boy, but she has a defective body and
her semen, her life-blood, is also deficienther reproductive fluid
and her body "failed" to rise to the level of full personhood or
maleness.
Anyway, this all leads to one thing: outside of reproduction-oriented
union with wives, some Greek men pursued sexual union with Greek
boys. The latter were on the threshold of manhood, and this
pederasty was viewed as the child's push into manhood. The point is
not that a few Greeks liked men and boys more than women; the
point is that this proclivity seems to have been inspired by the main
religio-cultural complex that the Greeks inherited from the earlier
Indo-European peoples who migrated into the Balkans before Homer
wrote (Songe-Mller does not go into the pre-Greek background,
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incidentally). So, my question is, why is it so objectionable to

identify some rough outlines of a cultural formation and call it
Indo-European, but yet, out of the other side of our politicallycorrect mouths, we speak about the West as this obvious entity that
we privilege over colonized cultures or whatever is "non-Western"?
In a way, I am doing a critique of certain aspects of the West, but
without discounting the fact that the West's roots in ancient India,
Iran, Greece, Latium, Anatolia, etc., are reflected in the religious and
cultural structures the medieval and modern West. Sometimes I
think French thinker Rene Girard is right on the money when he
complains that fat-and-sassy Westerners get rid of twinges of
conscience by publishing articles and books against ethnocentrism
[laughter].
Now, with all of this in mind, let me give a hint toward answering
your question. The word for male in a number of Indo-European
languages derives, it is thought, from the Proto-Indo-European root
*wiHrs. So we have vra in Sanskrit, wer in German and English,
fer in Irish and vir in Latin. This root word for male is where our
words virtue and virility come from. Well, it has been noted that this
vir-root, which connotes not just male but also growth, youth,
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and protuberance, also seems to refer to the male seed, the lifeliquid that ensures the immortality of the male through the
production of a son who, in a sense, is the father.[3] As for the
chakras, note that Homer used the word aion to mean something
like male seed, but also spinal fluid. Other ancient Greek and
Roman texts show a belief (very close to the ancient Indian
anthropology) that tears, sweat, semen, and spinal fluid are all the
same thing: the vital sap or fluid of life (the main analogy here was
with plants, who bleed out their life in the form of sap when cut).
As in the chakra theory, the Greco-Roman view holds that this fluid
should collect in the skull of the virtuous man; this may be behind
Athena's birth from the head of Zeus, but also remember that, in the
Egyptian Ennead, Atum gives birth through some kind of
masturbation that results in semen being sneezed out of his head. In
Homer the presence of the aion or life-fluid in the body (but
especially in the sacred sheath or spinal column) kept the flesh from
rotting, and the crushing of the spine led inevitably to the body's
decomposition. Other ancient Greek texts refer to the aion leaving
the body in the shape of a snake, which may have influenced the
Orphics and the Ophites in later times. At any rate, the important
9

connection is found in Homer's Iliad, book 19, where the goddess

Thetis causes drops of ambrosia and red nectar to drip into the
dead body of Patroclus, this process causing the corpse to remain
incorrupt.[5]
Perhaps there is an echo of this ambrosial drip-bath in the Nordic
myth of Loki's binding. A serpent drips venom onto Loki, which is
shielded from his face, but when the shielding fails and the drops fall
on his face, Loki supposedly writhes in pain. Perhaps we have here a
later Christian shifting of the story, since the sources we have for the
Loki myth are post-Christian. If we strip away the Christian
influence, which may have turned Loki into more of a demonic
figure who is punished by hellfire, we can surmise that Loki reflects
the Indo-European theme of ambrosial seed according to which the
spinal column is in some sense associated with a serpentine spirit
that produces semen, this vital liquid literally giving life to the male
whose flesh it enters. In other words, Loki was kept, I believe, in a
state of suspended animation by having drops of life-fluid dripped
into his nose, just enough to keep him in a coma until Ragnarok,
when his serpent-overseer woke him up for the big show.
If we only had time, we could linger over other details: What is the
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significance of Patroclus being Achilles' lover? Also, the texts about

Loki mention his powerrecall Athena's birth from Zeus's body and
Tuisto's birthing of Mannus in Teutonic mythto give birth to other
gods. What is this man-birth all about?[6] I think we have an issue
here, one that it is not politically correct to criticize, but one that
needs to be dealt with. I try to take a step toward doing so in my
theory of Indo-European homogenesis, which is the tendency of
these texts to eliminate the woman from the reproductive process.
Though at first it may have been a story to buttress the power of
chieftains who did not want to divide their wealth or influence, the
theme, at some point, began to influence how society and the family
was organized. Once we get to Europe and the Franks'
transformation of Roman society in the West, we get a version of
Christendom that reflects this mannerbund attitude. What does
Sparta have to do with Aachen?, one might say. [laughter] But that's
a whole different interview...
Leo Kelley: ...which we will have in a week or so, I hope. For now
though, let's sum a few things up: we have male gods giving birth
and we have societies like Athens and Sparta that view the ideal of
love as between a male father and a younger male mirror-image. But
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where does the light piece of the amniotic light theme come into
play? I see that there is fluid and water all over the place in these
Indo-European myths, but is there an equal emphasis on light?
James L. Kelley: I have found two types of references. One refers
specifically to light as the principle that allows the cosmos to exist as
a system of distinct yet interrelated beings. This is like when Hesiod
describes the separation of Earth and Heaven as the creation of a
space where beings can truly exist instead of being buried in the
Earth (literally!); the Greek poet Euripides speaks of the creation of
the amniotic space as having brought forth all things, sending into
light trees, birds...and the race of mortals.[7]
Other texts emphasize visibility, which still implies light, though the
word light may not be mentioned. For instance, in the Iliad,
Athena takes away the achlys or fog from the Diomedes' eyes, thus
allowing the latter to distinguish gods from mortals.[8] Hymn 82 of
the Tenth Book of the Rig Veda mentions the gods' original state,
floating together in the amniotic waters before the creation of earth
and heaven. Here the gods saw each other, this power of seeing
divinity being itself the sign of each god's divinity. Humans are
defined in the Hymn, contrariwise, as beings who lack divine vision,
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who lack the eye that the highest god shared with the other gods
he fathered. Humans stumble around in a misty cloud, unable to
see divine realities.[9] The parallel is this: your power of seeing
either penetrates the fluid of space without obstruction (as in the
gods, who beheld themselves together in the primordial waters), or
you see imperfectly, in a mist, as do mortals. In either case, the
semantic field is one of embryos in amniotic fluid, embryos that may
or may not see (and thus relate in an ordered manner) in the light of
the highest Truth.[10] In another session we'll talk about the earliest
Greek philosophers and physicians and their almost unanimous use
of embryology to explain the formation of the universe as a huge
living womb in which all other beings are generated or incubated.
A few parting words on this topic of the light in the cosmic lifefluid: First of all, note that the Chndogya Upanisad defines the gods
as those who neither eat nor drink. They become sated by just
looking at this nectar.[11] Secondly, note that the word most
commonly used in Greek texts for naturephysistakes its origin
from F-, meaning see. The gods know everything because
their vision takes in all of space and time with no gap or interruption.
Thus, they see the whole interrelated system of reality, both its indiv13

idual parts or beings and all possible interrelations between these

parts of the whole. Men cannot do this, but heroes like Odysseus and
Heracles become more godlike than most by seeing more things, by
going on adventures or odysseys and thereby stockpiling wisdom.
[12] In one of my books I quoted the passage in the Gnostic
Apocryphon of John where Barbelo gives birth to a holy being of
light by simply turning to look at the Father; here we have a later
manifestation of the same primordial theme that seeing is knowing
for both mortals and gods, with the difference that deities can
actually give birth to a god of light through their luminous vision.
[13]
Leo Kelley: Okay, now we are getting somewhere, but what is the
nectar spoken of in the Upanishads; is this the same thing as the
soma from the Vedas? If so, what does this have to do with the
amniotic light?
James L. Kelley: The nectar in the Upanishad verse I cited is
amrita, which means literally deathless and is another name for
soma.[14] The soma or amrita was identified with the primeval
waters that preceded all of creation in the Vedas and in the later texts
of the Hindus. The God Indra pierces the primeval hill, releasing the
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cosmic deluge, which is a mixture of fire or light, and life-giving

water.[15] This situation is parallel to the Egyptian cosmogony
where the light-water has to become externalized: It is first in Atum's
mind or womb; the cosmos is the externalization of the internal
womb, filled with light and water, air being a neutralized balance
of light and water, some Greek thinkers speaking of space or air as a
kind of mist through which light and rain flows. Anyway, Indra's
piercing of the primeval hill releases the trapped waters, which flow
into rivers and which replenish the earth by falling, in an ordered,
concentrated form, from the vault of the womb-like sky.
Simultaneously, Indra's triumph is the raising of the sun into the sky,
so that the freed waters are impregnated and vivified with fiery
virtue. One verse of the Rig Veda (I.24.7) refers to the newlystabilized cosmos as being held up by an inverted cosmic tree (which
may be the body of the god Vrtra, who is the penetrated hill), whose
branches reach out to every being in space, like light rays (and also
like streams of soma) to imbue all creatures with life and vigor, in
the process allowing ordered interaction between all beings.
Leo Kelley: I have a list here of themes we might tackle next time.
We should go into soma a little more, and also the Babylon15

ian/Sumerian cosmology (Gilgamesh and the Marduk epic). Plus,

Greek philosophy, which I know you've covered in your latest
book...
James L. Kelley: Let's do that. But just as a last thought to keep the
big picture in mind: This amniotic light theme ends up at the center
of the philosophy of Plotinus and the other neoplatonists. In the
middle ages and especially the Renaissance, a mysticism of light is
center-stage, though it is sometimes hard to see it because of the
compartmentalized spectacles through which historians look at these
periods. But, without a doubt, things are very tricky here. After all,
we still do not have decent working definitions of either
gnosticism or kabbala, and these are two conduits through
which the West receives these esoteric traditions.
Leo Kelley: Alright, thanks for taking a minute to lay the
groundwork for this exploration of amniotic light.
James L. Kelley: My pleasure.

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NOTES

[1] You chased away the clouds, you repelled the darkness, you
illuminated the Two Lands. (E. Chassinat, Le Temple d'Edfou, vol.
6 [Cairo 1931], p. 247; cited in The Gods of Egypt, translated by
David Lorton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), p.79). On
Shu and Atum and self-developing, see Coffin Texts, spell 75,
English translation James P. Allen, Genesis in Egypt: The
Philosophy of Ancient Egyptian Creation Accounts (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1988), p. 15-16.
[2] Vigdis Songe-Mller, Philosophy Without Women: The Birth of
Sexism in Western Thought, translated by Peter Cripps (London and
New York: Continuum, 2002).
[3] "In several Indo-european tongues the term for 'male' refers to
liquid emitted, i.e. the seed (e.g. hersen, cf. herse, Sanscr : large; vr
'water', vrsan- 'male', O. Norse ver 'water, sea') () I suggest that ver
meant originally the liquid or sap, seed, new growth, 'offspring'...
(Richard Broxton Onians, Origins of European Thought About the
Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1988], p. 178, footnote). Note that hersen (male)
is based in the I-E root ker-, which is also related to brain, heart,
horn or protuberance, grain pushing out of the earth, growth, heat,
and youth (kore) (The American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European
17

Roots Appendix, accessed 15 May, 2016,

https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/indoeurop.html#IR044300).
[4] That sweat...and the fluid of the joints, are one and are the stuff
of strength, vigour, appears...to have been part of the earliest Greek
physiology, which also assimilated with these the cerebro-spinal
fluid and the seed (Onians, Origins of European Thought, 191).
[5] Homer, Iliad, book 19, accessed 2 June, 2016,
http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/iliad.19.xix.html.
[6] Esther Clinton, The Trickster, Various Motifs, 472-480 in
Archetypes and Motifs in Folklore and Literature: A Handbook,
edited by Jane Garry and Hasan El-Shamy (Armonk, NY and
London: M.E. Sharpe, 2005), p. 478.
[7] Euripides, fr. 484, cited in James L. Kelley, Orthodoxy, History,
and Esotericism: New Studies (Dewdney, B.C.: Synaxis Press,
2016), p. 143.
[8] Iliad 5.127ff; cited in M.L. West, Indo-European Poetry and
Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 134.
[9] Rig Veda 10.82; English translation by Ralph T.H. Griffith,
Hymns of the Rgveda, 2 volumes (Varanasi, India: Chowkhamba
Sanskrit Series Office, 1963), 2.498. Cf. Rig Veda 10.81.23, in which
the sun-creator god Vivakarmanwho has eyes on all sides
roundopens up the heavens by seeing all (idem, 2.497).
[10] Cf. Rig Veda 10.85; Griffith, Hymns of the Rgveda, 2.501-505.
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[11] Chndogya Upanisad 3.6.1, translated by P. Olivelle; cited in

West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth, p. 157.
[12] Joel Wilcox, The Origins of Epistemology in Early Greek
Thought (Lewiston, NY and Queenston, ON: Edwin Mellen, 1994),
p. 131-132.
[13] Apocryphon of John 30.1ff.; translated by David Hill in Werner
Foerster, Gnosis: A Selection of Gnostic Texts, edited by R. McL.
Wilson, Volume 1: Patristic Evidence (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1972), p. 109; cited in Kelley, Orthodoxy, History, and
Esotericism, p. 126.
[14] Sanskrit text of Chndogya Upanisad 3.6.1 appears in Som Raj
Gupta, The Word Speaks to the Faustian Man: A Translation and
Interpretation of the Prasthnatray and akara's Bhya for the
Participation of Contemporary Man, Volume Four (Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass, 2001), p. 217.
[15] F.B.J. Kuiper, The Basic Concept of Vedic Religion, 9-22 in
F.B.J. Kuiper, Ancient Indian Cosmogony (New Delhi: Vikas, 1983),
p. 11-12.
Romanity Press May, 2016

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