The Tower of Babel & The Confusion of Tongues

The Confusion of Tongues The Lost Language

Humanity attempting to climb too high without a proper foundation.

Climbing too high into divinity without truly earning it… Building a technology that you are not morally and spiritually advanced enough to handle.

When you build a tower too tall into the sky without a strong foundation, it will fall.

The Confusion of Tongues -

The Tower of Babel is an eternal story archetype. A people obtain enough technology and knowledge to be dangerous, but not enough moral/spiritual wisdom to wield it intelligently. And so they create a monster, they build a tower that rises too high and therefore must fall.

The Tarot trump the Tower - if you create a tower with a weak foundation, it will eventually fall.

Did God destroy the tower and confuse the tongues because humanity was corrupt, or did he do it because he didn’t want humans to become themselves gods?

What does it take for humanity to work together to build a tower that reaches into the heavens? Resources, time, knowledge, coordination….

What could humanity accomplish united and directed towards a common good and common goal?

"nothing will be impossible for them”

The primordial nature of language was that it was the actual sound and creation of reality itself…. The Name and the Thing are not separate. To share the Adamic language is to know the secret names of all things… and to share a common reality-making power. The confusion of tongues fragments the capacity for collective theurgic operation. operating with something closer to divine creative power through unified Logos.

Esoteric traditions treat the restoration of the primordial language (whether as Enochian, as Kabbalistic combination of letters, as the lost Word of Masonry, as the Logos restored in Christ, etc) as the actual eschatological event.

The Story & History

According to the story, a united human race speaking a single language migrates to Shinar (Lower Mesopotamia),where they agree to build a great city with a tower that would reach the sky. Yahweh, observing these efforts and remarking on humanity's power in unity, confounds their speech so that they can no longer understand each other and scatters them around the world, leaving the city unfinished.

Some modern scholars have associated the Tower of Babel with known historical structures and accounts, particularly from ancient Mesopotamia. The most widely attributed inspiration is Etemenanki, a ziggurat dedicated to the god Marduk in Babylon, which in Hebrew was called Babel. A similar story is also found in the ancient Sumerian legend, Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, which describes events and locations in southern Mesopotamia.

Genesis 11:9 attributes the Hebrew version of the name, Babel, to the verb balal, which means to confuse or confound in Hebrew. The first century Roman-Jewish author Flavius Josephus similarly explained that the name was derived from the Hebrew word Babel (בבל), meaning "confusion”

The phrase "Tower of Babel" does not appear in Genesis nor elsewhere in the Bible; it is always "the city and the tower"[c] or just "the city".[d] The original derivation of the name Babel, which is the Hebrew name for Babylon, is uncertain. The native Akkadian name of the city was Bāb-ilim, meaning 'gate of God'. However, that form and interpretation itself are now usually thought to derive from Akkadian folk etymology applied to an earlier form of the name, Babilla, of unknown meaning and probably non-Semitic origin.

Per the story in Genesis, the city received the name "Babel" from the Hebrew verb bālal,[e] meaning to jumble or to confuse, after Yahweh distorted the common language of humankind.[11] According to Encyclopædia Britannica, this reflects word play due to the Hebrew terms for Babylon and "to confuse" having similar pronunciation.

God was concerned that humans had blasphemed by building the tower to avoid a second flood and so God brought into existence multiple languages, rendering humanity unable to understand each other

The Book of Genesis does not specify the tower's height; the phrase "its top in the sky" (11:4) was an idiom for impressive height, rather than implying arrogance.[17]: 37  The Book of Jubilees 10:21 mentions the tower's height as being 5,433 cubits and 2 palms (2,484 m; 8,150 ft; 1.54 mi), about three times the height of Burj Khalifa. The apocryphal Third Apocalypse of Baruch mentions that the "tower of strife" reached a height of 463 cubits (211.8 m; 695 ft), taller than any structure built in human history until the construction of the Eiffel Tower in 1889, which is 324 metres (1,060 ft) in height.

And they began to build, and in the fourth week they made brick with fire, and the bricks served them for stone, and the clay with which they cemented them together was asphalt which comes out of the sea, and out of the fountains of water in the land of Shinar. And they built it: forty and three years were they building it; its breadth was 203 bricks, and the height [of a brick] was the third of one; its height amounted to 5433 cubits and 2 palms, and [the extent of one wall was] thirteen stades [and of the other thirty stades].

— Jubilees 10:20–21, Charles' 1913 translation

Mesopotamian analogues

There are similar stories to the Tower of Babel. In the Sumerian myth Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta,[8] Enmerkar of Uruk is building a massive ziggurat in Eridu and demands a tribute of precious materials from Aratta for its construction, at one point reciting an incantation imploring the god Enki to restore (or in Kramer's translation, to disrupt) the linguistic unity of the inhabited regions—named as Shubur, Hamazi, Sumer, Uri-ki (Akkad), and the Martu land, "the whole universe, the well-guarded people—may they all address Enlil together in a single language."[33] The Eridu Genesis, an ancient Sumerian flood myth, includes a passage about the unity of human speech before the gods intervened. During the Neo-Assyrian period, a fragmentary text found in Nineveh, from the library of Ashurbanipal (r. 668–627 BCE), which contains parts of the Eridu Genesis, along with the general interest Ashurbanipal's library had in preserving older traditions, suggest that these stories of language confusion and divine intervention were still relevant during this period.

Now it was Nimrod who excited them to such an affront and contempt of God. He was the grandson of Ham, the son of Noah, a bold man, and of great strength of hand. He persuaded them not to ascribe it to God as if it were through his means they were happy, but to believe that it was their own courage which procured that happiness. He also gradually changed the government into tyranny, seeing no other way of turning men from the fear of God, but to bring them into a constant dependence on his power... Now the multitude were very ready to follow the determination of Nimrod and to esteem it a piece of cowardice to submit to God; and they built a tower, neither sparing any pains, nor being in any degree negligent about the work: and, by reason of the multitude of hands employed in it, it grew very high, sooner than any one could expect; but the thickness of it was so great, and it was so strongly built, that thereby its great height seemed, upon the view, to be less than it really was. It was built of burnt brick, cemented together with mortar, made of bitumen, that it might not be liable to admit water. When God saw that they acted so madly, he did not resolve to destroy them utterly, since they were not grown wiser by the destruction of the former sinners [in the Flood]; but he caused a tumult among them, by producing in them diverse languages, and causing that, through the multitude of those languages, they should not be able to understand one another. The place wherein they built the tower is now called Babylon, because of the confusion of that language which they readily understood before; for the Hebrews mean by the word Babel, confusion. The Sibyl also makes mention of this tower, and of the confusion of the language, when she says thus:—"When all men were of one language, some of them built a high tower, as if they would thereby ascend up to heaven; but the gods sent storms of wind and overthrew the tower, and gave everyone a peculiar language; and for this reason it was that the city was called Babylon." - The Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus, in his Antiquities of the Jews (c. 94 CE)

Midrash

Rabbinic literature offers many different accounts of other causes for building the Tower of Babel, and of the intentions of its builders. According to one midrash the builders of the Tower, called "the generation of secession" in the Jewish sources, said: "God has no right to choose the upper world for Himself, and to leave the lower world to us; therefore we will build us a tower, with an idol on the top holding a sword, so that it may appear as if it intended to war with God" (Gen. R. xxxviii. 7; Tan., ed. Buber, Noah, xxvii. et seq.).

The building of the Tower was meant to bid defiance not only to God, but also to Abraham, who exhorted the builders to reverence. The passage mentions that the builders spoke sharp words against God, saying that once every 1,656 years, heaven tottered so that the water poured down upon the earth, therefore they would support it by columns that there might not be another deluge (Gen. R. l.c.; Tan. l.c.; similarly Josephus, "Ant." i. 4, § 2).

Some among that generation even wanted to war against God in heaven (Talmud Sanhedrin 109a). They were encouraged in this undertaking by the notion that arrows that they shot into the sky fell back dripping with blood, so that the people really believed that they could wage war against the inhabitants of the heavens (Sefer ha-Yashar, Chapter 9:12–36). According to Josephus and Midrash Pirke R. El. xxiv., it was mainly Nimrod who persuaded his contemporaries to build the Tower, while other rabbinical sources assert, on the contrary, that Nimrod separated from the builders.[26]

According to another midrashic account, one third of the Tower builders were punished by being transformed into semi-demonic creatures and banished into three parallel dimensions, inhabited now by their descendants.

In Gnostic tradition recorded in the Paraphrase of Shem, a tower, interpreted as the Tower of Babel, is brought by demons along with the great flood:

And he caused the flood, and he destroyed your (Shem's) race, to take the light and to take away from faith. But I proclaimed quickly by the mouth of the demon that a tower come up to be up to the particle of light, which was left in the demons and their race – which was water – that the demon might be protected from the turbulent chaos. And the womb planned these things according to my will, that she might pour forth completely. A tower came to be through the demons. The darkness was disturbed by his loss. He loosened the muscles of the womb. And the demon who was going to enter the tower was protected so that the races might continue to acquire coherence through him.

The Confusion of Tongues

confusio linguarum

“It is the Hebrew alphabet that represents, you could say one of the earliest languages that your western languages are based off of. So you could say the Sanskrit is the root language for the East and it is the Hebrew that is the root language for the West. Sanskrit is how the beings of the underworld create. It is a serpentine, lunar path, a yogic path. The Eastern path, these are lunar paths, they are serpent paths. They involve the perspectives of the Kundalini beings raising consciousness all the way up to the source. Then you have the idea of the Abrahamic traditions, which draw heavily upon the Hebrew language. And this represents a transition away from that Lunar perspective, the underworld and the human in the underworld rising up. This new, you could say, Western approach is all about the idea of the promise of the evolution from moon into sun, foreshadowing Christ, foreshadowing the covenant between the upper world and earth. Before that covenant Earth is seen as a chaotic place ruled by desires, ruled by giants, the Nephalim. Who are these beings? These are the serpentine beings we are referring to that helped to develop the Sanskrit language. Yes, these are the beings that oversaw the earth, and they had dominion over the earth. And there were a lot of positive things about this, very matriarchal, but there were also some imbalances about this. So the masculine principle was being summoned in at that time representing the cosmic light coming down, representing fire descending from above, transforming the world - paradoxically through a flood through a forgetting. But what caused that flood? All of that light flashing from the upper worlds, causing a temporary forgetting a temporary amnesia. It was your very enlightenment as a species that caused your forgetting. You understand? It was your enlightenment, the great flash of clarity from the upper sources that caused your species to experience the Tower of Babel crumbling. You have spent every moment since that time period until now sorting out all of that information. That is the power of the Yod He Vau He. It is a power you have been digesting for over 2,000 years. And now you are finally coming to terms with this power. And now you're blending it with the serpentine power. And this represents a new language forming - it is a blending of the Hebrew language and the Sanskrit. They are now coming together forming a super tongue.” - From private session with Ryokah channeled by Tyler Ellison

This is the archetypal Tower experience as depicted in Trump XVI of the Tarot