Who Were Abraham and Sarah? Decoding the Symbolism, Astro-Theology and Ancient Roots
Abraham and Sarah stand at the foundation of the Old Testament, the patriarchs through whom the entire biblical lineage descends. Their names, their journey, and their place in scripture carry layers of meaning that scholars, mystics, and seekers have explored for centuries.
In Inner Whirled 10, Chance and co-host Dylan Saccoccio dig into the symbolism, the etymology, and the ancient context of one of the most foundational stories in the Bible.
Plus+Full episode · 3h 17m
InnerVerse Plus+Hear the full 3h 17m episode
133 more minutes of this conversation, plus the complete Plus+ archive, premium video and a private podcast feed for your app.
Cancel any time.
Get tuned with Chance
Tuning forks find where energy is stuck in the field around your body and bring it back into flow. Sessions over Zoom, recorded for you to keep.
30 Minute Consultations
Have something to look at, or looking for guidance? We can consult oracular tools, read your chart, or just talk through whatever you choose.
In this episode
Core themes
The Head Hidden in Rosh Hashanah
Recording on Rosh Hashanah, Saccoccio argues the holiday name is transparent once you drop the transliteration: Rosh is the head or the start, shanah the year, with the hey acting as a definite article. He traces resh, or rash as he prefers it, back through Phoenician to a pictogram of a head, and hears the Essenes and the Egyptian Therapeutae inside Hashanah itself. Garton links that to their previous episode on oracular heads, where the Chaldean creator Belus severs his own head so mankind can be formed from its blood and endowed with logos.
Abram, Abraham and the Missing Vowels
Working from Robert Taylor's astronomical lectures, pages 188 and 189, the hosts follow Abram, son of Terah, out of Ur of the Chaldees and through the Genesis 17 renaming to Abraham, father of many nations. Since early synagogue Hebrew carries no vowel points, Saccoccio contends the consonants aleph, bet, resh and mem could be voiced several ways, and he connects them to Ivri, the root of Hebrew, said to mean one who has crossed over or an initiate, and to Chavah, Eve, meaning life. Taylor's conclusion: no nation can claim literal descent.
Sarai as Sirius and as Ceres
Sarai, spelled shin resh yod, carries the same letters and numerical value as resh, the letter esoteric tradition assigns to the Sun card of the major arcana. From there they contend the name opens outward: Sri, the Hindu honorific for radiant deities, and Sri Lanka; Al Shira, the Arabic name for the star Sirius, which Taylor says literally signifies a star; and Ceres or Demeter, harvest goddess and Queen of Heaven, whose lion and virgin mark the sun's passage from Leo into Virgo just before harvest. The only change Genesis makes is yod into hey.
One Sun Root Across Every Language
Much of the hour is spent chasing a single fiery root, esh or ash, through supposedly unrelated traditions. Saccoccio walks from Tyre, spelled tsade resh, where sur means rock and by extension Lord, out to Asherah, the Hindu solar deity Surya, the Etruscan Suri and Aisar, the Norse Aesir, the Irish aesar, and even Tolkien's Elessar. Garton adds that Surya is resh written back to front, the letter given correspondence to the sun. They read Yod Hey Vav Hey as Jove and Jupiter, the Latin Iu Pater or all father, and hear Hades inside Adonai.
Chaldean Astronomy and the Charge of Plagiarism
Taylor treats Kasdim, translated as Chaldeans, as a professional rather than a national name, meaning magicians, astrologers and soothsayers, and leans on Abydenus, Apollodorus and Berossus, priest of Belus, for dynasties spanning 36,000 and 144,000 years. Saccoccio reads 144 as the degrees of the zodiac, 72 of them above the horizon following the sun and 72 conspirators killing Osiris. Because Abraham surfaces in books of Jewish origin only after the Babylonian captivity, Taylor calls the whole story a plagiarism, though the hosts push back on motive, arguing the astronomer priests knew exactly what they were building.
Quotes
“The more pieces of the puzzle that you can grasp and that you have a memory link to, the more you see how it all fits together.”
“It's a reboot where they use all the same themes, the same pacing, the same ideas, even the same characters in a lot of the same situations.”
“This goes back to the formation of the word Hebrew, the etymology being Ivri, not to mention that Eve is the mother of all humanity and this is the father of nations.”
“This is why the mythos is important. It's not just to tell stories, it's to signify times of the year where you do certain things for survival.”
“Let's get through the rest of your free section. We got a long way to go, we got so much gravy.”
“There's going to be 72 degrees following the sun or Jesus, and 72 conspirators killing the sun or Osiris, the god of the underworld.”
“John McHugh just does a really great job of showing too how the Old Testament miracle stories are plagiarized from the same system of astro-theology as what appears in the cuneiform Babylon tablets.”
“It's a position that I will be willing to change in light of better evidence, but if you're going to provide evidence, it can't be entangled with this astro-theological nonsense.”
Dylan Saccoccio is the author of the Spirit Whirled series, The Real Universal Empire, and the Tale of Onora. After chasing language back as far as possible, he now explores other avenues to prove cultural diffusion of the ancient universal empire of priests, navigators, masons, and merchants. Find his latest of many hundreds of articles on Substack.
See all Dylan episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
