Cetaceans are the Whales, Dolphins, and Porpoises
These wondrous mammals that have swum the oceans since long before we humans appeared on the land. Cetaceans were at home on Planet Water before we named it Planet Earth.
Cetaceans have been forever singing, and still, sing the songs of our Planet Water. Cetaceans are conscious, sentient beings. Cetaceans connect with us and fill us with profound joy. Cetaceans share themselves with us generously. Peoples the world over have been closely in tune with Whales and Dolphins for aeons.
Just a thought…
Throughout myths, legends and history of civilizations runs a recurring theme – From time to time at certain crucial turning points in humankind’s evolutionary journey to self-awareness, there has occurred a mysterious communion with the ‘people of the sea’ – cetaceans.
When this happens, a resulting spark of inspiration illuminates the ensuing phase of the civilizing process, then fades gradually from conscious memory, blending with the chatter of myriad other myths and legends until the next time.
Legends Around the World
The cetacean beings and their civilizing influence appear in the earliest human literature, ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’.
In Mesopotamia (Sumer, Chaldea, Babylonia) they are credited with creating the first human cities, kingship, and civilization.
The story recurs all around the Mediterranean, Carthage, Egypt, Nabataea, Philistia, Phoenicia, Crete, Greece, the Aegean, and Black Seas. In the earliest of these, we are looking back through the mists of time and perhaps deliberate, obfuscation. The creatures are vaguely drawn in different parts of the world, variously described as half-human and half-fish.
In Mesopotamia, the shape of a fish blended with that of a man. In India, a human figure or god rising from the mouth of a fish. Again, in Mesopotamia, as air-breathing and water-dwelling, appearing from the sea by day and returning to the deep at night, with dog-shaped heads and flippers for hands. They are blessed with the gift of prophecy and bearing the civilizing arts in Mesopotamia, Greece, and the Aegean.
In Mesopotamia, the shape of a fish blended with that of a man. In India, a human figure or god rising from the mouth of a fish. Again, in Mesopotamia, as air-breathing and water-dwelling, appearing from the sea by day and returning to the deep at night, with dog-shaped heads and flippers for hands. They are blessed with the gift of prophecy and bearing the civilizing arts in Mesopotamia, Greece, and the Aegean.
Throughout the Mediterranean, they are considered friends and saviors to humans, and guides or guardians of the spirits of the dead.
In ancient Greece, it was a capital offense to harm a dolphin. In the Arctic, Australasia and the Pacific, they are seen as progenitors of humankind Messengers to humankind in Africa.
They are known by many different names.
In Mesopotamia, they are called ‘the Seven Sages’ who created and administered the seven cities.
They were also Enki, Enkidu ‘son of a fish’, Musarus Oannes the Annedotus, Apkallu among many names, and numerous other incarnations.
Dagon the fish-god of the Philistines, whose priestly mitre, an upturned dolphin-head originating in Babylon is still in use today by the Pope and other Christian office bearers, as the cope, representing the dolphin’s skin.
The Vedas of ancient India tell of Vishnu in his first incarnation as Matsya Avatar the dolphin/fish-god of the Ganges River depicted as a man rising from the mouth of a fish, who preserved the sacred knowledge, the Vedas, through a great flood, which gave rise to this phase of Indian civilization.
In Africa, the Dogon people of Mali call the creatures O Nommo and ‘Nommo of the Pond’ who are fish-shaped, ‘have their seat in the waters’, breathe air, leave a ‘rainbow path’, and came as sacrificial victims and messengers to bring sacred knowledge and civilize a troubled and spiritually starving human race.
The creation stories of Native Americans and Aborigines from South Australia tell of being the children of dolphins or whales.
Many peoples around the globe preserve stories of culture heroes that share common or related elements.
The Inuit in the Arctic say humans were created by a cetacean that swam ashore and made love to the earth.
The Maori of New Zealand were guided to destinations on their epic sea voyages by sacred dolphins. First Nation Australians whose souls are guided and protected by dolphins, as Wuluwait the ghostly boatman transports them to their island heaven of Purelko, ‘beyond the Morning Star’.
As the stories become more recent and closer to our own time and culture, the mists of time dissipate, and the creatures appear less strange and mysterious. They emerge ever more clearly as cetaceans.
The latest manifestation climaxes with the great burst of western civilization, the millennium we call the Golden Age of Greece created by Apollo Delphinios, dolphin god, speaking through the famous Oracle of Delphi, Dolphin Town.
According to Jacques Cousteau’s extensive marine archaeological discoveries, the adoption of the dolphin as a primary symbol of Christ the Saviour for the first 300-odd years of the Christian era was replaced by the cross as a battle emblem.
In many languages, the word for dolphin translates as ‘redeemer fish’ and the word for whale is synonymous with God.
The record of this inspiring communion, this space contact between the two great intelligent mammalian races that share this unique blue speck, is encoded in the myths and legends, art and anecdotes, poetry, and literature handed down the generations.
As we pass through the current crisis of civilization, tossed about in the creative chaos of the cusp between ages, the door of perception is opening again, driven now by new knowledge, new insights, and new media of communication. The ancient mythic tales take on dramatic new meaning as science begins to plumb the depths of the meaning and significance of the whales and dolphins.
The popular imagination is again fired with #cetacean inspiration. For this is a new era – a time of synthesis, the implosion of the dream.
Now the legendary threads can be drawn together, symbolized (for those who are so inclined) by Aquarius the Fish-man who pours the individual ‘fish’ or ‘souls’ of the Piscean Age into the greater body of Piscis Australis, the so-called Fish of the South.
The next chapter of the evolutionary saga is here…
…the sheer volume and deep richness of these magnificent legends and tales…
…is Mirthquake Foundation, bringing the once and future story of our dance of consciousness with the advanced, benign intelligence inhabiting the oceanic vastness of our shared spaceship Earth.
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