The pattern shown in every story of Genesis

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I'm working my way through the Matthieu Pageau book The Language of Creation: Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis, and it's a real mind blower. The symbolism is pretty simple, but not self-evident to people raised in a materialistic culture that has lost the understanding of this code of symbolism. I'm going to try to explain it here as well as I can. Jonathan Pageau in his videos always seems to leave important parts out, and even Matthieu leaves some things out that need to be understood. I can fill some of it in from my studies into things like Hermeticism and Esotericism, and one very revealing thing I learned from a book about the wisdom of the Tarot.

Here's the basic pattern that's essentially repeated in every story:

The wisdom of God filters down from Heaven above, stage by stage, all the way into the very ground of the Earth, and from there it must be raised up stage by stage until it becomes the knowledge of man. And this knowledge must include moral deliberation in order to become wisdom that mirrors that of God.​

God's wisdom always comes down in the form of some kind of seed. That makes sense, since it's seed that takes root in the earth and grows, but it requires sunlight as well as good nutrition and rain. Keep in mind that heaven is the realm of pure idea, pure thought—which is of the spiritual or immaterial, and Earth is the material, the physical. In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth. The two realms we exist in. Our bodies are physical and our minds (spirit, soul) are immaterial and capable of conscious thought and moral choices. But the two realms exist together, and really only in Man, the only living thing of the Earth capable of conscious thought and moral deliberation. I'll use the image of a candle, a physical body made of material taken from the earth, that if lit will have a flame at the top of it. Flame is a representation—a symbol of sunlight—and the sun itself is a symbol for God's wisdom. It exists above us in the sky, unreachable and unknowable, and it provides not only illumination but certain necessary components for life to exist on Earth. Without sunlight there would be no plants, which the animals eat, and then people eat both plants and animals and generate the conscious mind, the only thing in the known universe capable of awareness and moral deliberation. That flame, that conscious awareness that flickers within us as a society and each of us as individuals, is the crown of Creation in an important way. Without it life on Earth is just mindless devouring and mating and there's no morality. Animals respond to instinct, they don't make moral choices. Even human beings don't make moral choices until they've grown to a certain extent and the mirror neurons develop, which are respnsible for empathy. Before empathy children aren't capable of thinking about others as living beings just like themselves who have their own needs and desires and can be hurt by our actions.

That bit about the energy of the sun coming down and fructifying the earth and being the source of all life—vegetable and animal—and thus the origin of conscious thought and of wisdom—that's the part I got from the book by Paul Foster Case called The Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the Ages.

So much amazing stuff in that book! Tarot is a Hermetic book of wisdom in the form of a pack of cards, with all the meaning encoded visually. The thing to understand is that Hermetic and Esoteric wisdom spring from the same original sources as the world's great religions, though they may take different approaches. Early Orthodox iconography uses the same kind of visual encoding of symbols that the Tarot does. This is apparently why the Pageaus understand it so well, or at least Jonathan, because he's an icon carver. Somewhere along the way he learned about this code of symbolism used in the Orthodox icon paintings and carvings. The idea behind all of these ancient disciplines is that much of the great wisdom is buried in what is today known as the unconscious, and must be gotten out by certain means that bypass conscious awareness. One of these is through visual imagery, and another is through poetic riddles that one must ponder. The conscious mind isn't very good as a container or transmitter of profound wisdom—it comes through the unconscious much better—but it must be teased out with some help in the form of stories and iconic imagery we can ponder. This is why in a materialistic age almost nobody understands this kind of imagery. We put all our faith into the conscious mind and the facts of science, which aren't related to moral wisdom but only to understanding how things work and what they're made of.​

Apparently in those long ago days people had a much better understanding of how to interpret this kind of imagery and these riddles.

Ok, that'll do for an introdution. I'll add entries below to detail some of the stories and how they're interpreted by the Pageaus and others who have the understanding.

EDIT—The book where I learned about the sun as source of all life and life on earth being a chain from the ground (mineral) on up through plants (vegetable) and animal until finally culminating in human consciousness might actually have been The Book of Tokens: Tarot Meditations, also by Paul Foster Case. I believe that probably was the one in fact. It has black-and-white images of each card as chapter headings that you color while meditating on the information about that card and the timeless wisdom it represents. This is intended to help you remember it better, to really lock it into your mind. Lol, apparently it worked, but unfortuantely I didn't lock in which book it came from.

SECOND EDIT—Nope. I just flipped through Key to the Wisdom of the Ages. It's the one with the b&w chapter headings for the reader to color. It must also be the one I got that bit of wisdom from. Both are excellent books on the very esoteric and hermetic art of the Tarot.