From the book Nada Brahma: Music and the Landscape of Consciousness by Joachim-Ernst Berendt 

 

   En ărchên en ho lógos --- "In the beginning was the Word" --- is written in the Gospel of John. "In the beginning was OM" is what the Tibetans say. The two ideas are related. In the preceding chapter we that the transition between mantric sound and the spoken word is fluid. When human sound takes on a mentally comprehensible meaning, it becomes a word. Wassily Kandinsky found that "the word is an inner sound." Jean Gebser writes:

 

               

As we come closer to the magic structure, the images fade away.... Only one means remains for approaching it more closely: sound. Or, if you will, we must attempt to render audible certain specific and highly differentiated primordial sounds....The question is, How do we find these values? It would not be amiss if we were to seek them in the sound of the word root.

 

   The German linguist Arnold Wadler writes: "The opening of the Gospel of John, 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,' meant an entirely real truth for ancient man; he was still aware of the nature and origin of the word."

   In the Book of Genesis we read: "And God said...." The word spoken by God was the word light: "And there was light."

   This word light, as well as English loud and Greek "logos" (which, if you remember, means both "sound" and "word") all go back to the same primal root leg. Gebser has pointed out the central importance of this root. Some of the countless words stemming from it are: Lux (Latin,"light"),light, logos, lynche (Greek, "lamp"), lex (Latin,"law"), language, legein (Greek, "to gather, to collect, to talk, to read, to count"); the last names, in turn, is the root of the Latin word re-ligio (which became our word religion). All this, and more, has developed out of the syllable leg. On the other hand, it also gave rise to the Germanic word lug, which is related to our English lie ! One should bear that in mind: Light and logos, loud, and lie all go back to the same primal root, a root that left its traces in many kinds of languages on all continents. The same word is liuhat in Gothic, l'ikhuta among the Aymara Indians in Peru, laki in Melanesia, lang in Micronesia, langit among the Khmer of Cambodia, langgit in Malaysia, lucidus in Latin---; and (by way of the common substitution of r for l ) rucit in Sanskrit, langi and rangi in Polynesia, ra in ancient Egypt, la'atu in Assyria, larang-ai in one of the Aboriginal languages of Australia, lagat in Cornish-Celtic, llygat in Cymric (which became our English look !)--- and all these words stand for related concepts: for light and heaven and sun, for lightening and look and eye.

   Linguists have shown that many primal roots have a so-called mirror root, which does not simply negate the meaning of the primal root but rather reflects it into new dimensions. The mirror root of leg is regh. (In many languages, l and r are interchangeable. Some cultures --- those of the Japanese, the Chinese, and certain South American Indians --- do not even differentiate between them.) From it developed the Latin words rex ("king") and regula ("rule"), but also our right (for both "law" and the opposite of "left") and the Greek word orégein ("to stretch or pull, to endeavor") which, in turn, is related to the word ărchè ("beginning").

   Bearing all this in mind, we find that En ărchên en ho lógos, "In the beginning was the Word," is an etymological tautology: the word is the beginning. Both crucial elements of the sentence grew out of syllable leg and its mirror syllable, regh: "beginning" = Greek ărchê(from orégein), and "word" = Greek lógos, related to light  and to the Egyptian sun God Ra, but also to loud ("sound"), the mantric germ cell.

   We need to take language literally ("by the word"). Language has known from the beginning that the word is light is loud (sound) is the beginning.

   This process of considering linguistic-semantic-philosophical connections has been known to mankind for as long as humans have dealt with the mysteries of language. As the American Sinologist Sukie Colgrave has pointed out, Confucious considered that

 

 while words contain genuine meanings which reflect certain absolute truths in the universe, most people have lost contact with these truths and so use language to suit their own convenience. This led, he felt, to lax thinking, erroneous judgments, confused actions and finally to the wrong people acquiring access to political power.

 

   Although coming from a different word source, the following example also flows directly into the stream of this chapter: The Latin word cantere is generally translated as "to sing." Its original meaning, however, was " to work magic, to produce by magic." One can sense the transition that must have taken place somewhere in time: in the process of working magic through primal sounds, evoking metamorphoses through sounds, man musicalized these sounds --- he sang. Carmen, the Latin word for "poem," originally meant "magic formula," and it still is that today in many cultures. Mexico's Huichol Indians use the Spanish word cantor  to mean "magician, shaman." Thus they have taken it back to where it had come from in Latin. Clearly they listened the language, to the primal meaning of its words.

   The words for "poet,""singer," and "magician" go back to the same linguistic root not only in Latin but in many other languages. Quite often they all have the same meaning, which makes sense when one considers the magician's main tool, language --- or more precisely: the word. More than magic potions or charms, more than gestures or magic herbs, it is the word that produces the magic: usually not a complete sentence, but a single word that becomes effective as sound and as mantra. In this aspect, too, the sound possesses the effective power: in the world as religions as logos and mantra, for magicians and shamans as magic word or magic formula, with all imaginable intermediate stages and shadings from one extreme, the divine word that creates the world, to the other, the shaman's sounds that produce magic for love or for hunting.

   All this, again, is true for all languages and word stems. It is the "name" which has the power. For example, let us look at the English word name. In this word, too, (just as in the wholly different word cantare) lies the changing, "magic" power of the word. In Hebrew, nam meant not only "to speak" but also the solemn proclamation of an oracle; nabha and nawa still mean the prophetic word, the creative vision. In Latin, numen not only referred to the heavenly sign but also to the "oman" written in the sky that wields power over human fate. And even in the Edda, the ancient Germanic myth, we find nef-na, which means not only "to name" but also "to solemnly proclaim." The word stem nam, nef, num also appears in Far Eastern languages, most impressively in the nembutsu of Japanese Buddhism, the "name of the Buddha." This term signifies precisely what we have been talking about: naming alone invokes the Buddha; merely pronouncing the divine name is sufficient. The word as such has the power, all the more so when it is the word Buddha (Butsu). In Nichiren Buddhism,nam is the first sound of the "roar of the lion": Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, the mantra that leads to enlightenment.

   Even in our contemporary brains there smolders a remnant of awareness that name is not mere designation: that behind the act of giving someone a name there lies something meaningful and mysterious, something creative. It would be difficult to find a father or a mother who really did not care whether his or her daughter was named Mary, Nancy, or whatever --- although in purely rationalistic terms the name really has no other function but to differentiate one child from another. In reality, however, the name does have a deeper meaning; few know today what it is, but parents sense its influence when with each new birth they discuss the question in all seriousness: What shall we name our child?

   Carl Friedrich von Weizsȁcker writes: "It is never enough to speak about language. One has to have a conversation with the dialogue about what language is saying." Let us do just that, let's talk with and about the word speak. In Latin, preces means "prayer" as well as its opposite, "curse"; the related Sanskrit word is brihaspati , which is related in turn to Brahma, to whom people pray: and Brahman is the sacred word! The spoken ( the prefixed s is a later addition) language knows: God creates with His word. Man prays (or: should pray?) when he speaks. Brahma is phonetically related to the name Bragi, the son of Odin, who in Germanic mythology is the god of the word of poetry. In Hebrew, Brahma became beracha, a blessing! (editor's note: notice the relation to the ECKist blessing Baraka Bashad) The spoken word prays. Both key words in this sentence, speaking and praying, go back to the same root. Thus, the mere word already signals that the spoken word is to be treated with veneration, not merely chattered forth.

   Despite the claims of certain narrow-minded linguists, one should not believe that a word series of this sort --- which Wadler traced to the Aztecs, to Australia, and to the South Sea Islands --- came into being "by chance." Since the advent of the computer, we can now figure out with the aid of the laws of probability whether an event can possibly be accidental. If we do so here, we will find that "chance" would not have had enough time, because the phenomenon of human language is simply not old enough. For the god of chance to have created not only sporadic, random word similarities across our planet but a series of the complex order described above, the dinosaurs would have had to have a language --- a human language --- long before Homo sapiens came into existence, millions of years before the appearance of Homo erectus.

   The old concept of relationships existing solely between languages of the so-called "Indo-European family" cannot be held up any longer. As the new science of paleolinguistics has shown, there is only one language family, the family of human languages --- period. Like so many other myths, the myth of the Tower of Babel is true: In the beginning, there was only one language!

   However, let us continue to listen to the primal words --- with Confucious's words in mind --- to the word word. Where does it come from? Astonishingly, the answer to this question leads us to the same result that we reached earlier when following the series logos---light---loud---beginning.

   Two out of the three Norns, the ancient Norse goddesses of fate, had names derived from the same stem: Urth and Verthandi. Gothic wairth. Anglo-Saxon weordh, and Old Nordic verdh all go back to the Sanskrit root vrt. All these words mean: "to unroll, to become, to come into being." Aramaic varda and Arabic vard signify the rose, and the Hebrew word wered means both the bud (that which comes into being) and the rose (that which has become). In the (literal) sense of the word, word is rose, bud, and flower. The word is urth ("fate") and verthandi ("future"). And in everything i have just said lies the Indian root vrt; it is as if I had been repeating the same word over and over again. As improbable as it may seem, this Indian root can be found even in the word rose. In Greek it is still rhódos -- by way of linguistic deterioration of the  v ( which often becomes t,d,s, etc.) and by advancing the r. In tracing this development, we can still sense the Arabic vard (rose) in it, along with its Aramaic, Hebrew, Gothic, and Old Nordic relatives. The "feedback" (as linguists call such etymological lines) goes like this: vrt---vard---wered---wairth---wort---word---rod(hos)---rose.

   Arnold Wadler concludes his pioneering work on primal words with the following statement: "As the deepest, mightiest expression of this primeval stem, as widest paragon of eternal life and eternal being, another name crowns this series, the mental rose: w-o-r-d."

 

Taken from: The World Is Sound: Nada Brahma - Joachim-Ernst Berendt