The Lineage of the Weaving

§ 01The one art before the Forgetting

The working art of the Net began as a single inheritance. The early world held more than one civilization, and one art ran through them all, Heka, the art of making a true change by focused will and the ordered word. Netism's own lineage runs back to one of those first civilizations, and carries its line still. When that first world went under, the one art broke into fragments, and the fragments were carried into every civilization that rose in the age afterward.

The trace is still legible, because the same form surfaces on every continent, among peoples who never met and could not have copied one another. Three marks recur wherever the record reaches back far enough. First a flood or catastrophe ends a first age and clears the world. Through the break comes a sage bearing the arts of ordered life. The change itself moves by a bounded rite of purification and the sung word, a passage out of ordinary life and back into it. One art, scattered into many hands, leaves exactly this pattern behind.

Egypt named the source age Zep Tepi, the First Occasion. Netism knows it as the Age of Coherence, the high dawn of the present cycle. Each of these lands kept a piece of that art, worn down in its own way.

§ 02Egypt: the First Occasion

Egypt kept its shard on stone. The building texts of the Temple of Horus at Edfu, published by Émile Chassinat and read by André Barucq and Ragnhild Finnestad, tell of a watery beginning from which the first ground rises, a mound that is at once the world's first foothold and the model for the temple itself.^[1] The Egyptians called this the First Occasion, sp tpy, and their cult renewed it, founding the temple on first ground again and seating the god in an ordered place again. Paul Frandsen shows how the first act and its ritual repetition were held as one sacred time.^[4]

Founders belong to that beginning. The Edfu texts name a company of creative powers, the Shebtiu, who raise and secure the sacred places^[2], and a separate Egyptian tradition at Esna sets seven creative powers at the making of the world^[3]. The operative art itself Egypt called Heka, carried by the trained voice of the lector and the acts of the temple. What Edfu records is a people who remembered a first ordering of the world and built their holiest house as a return to it.

§ 03The Near East and India: the sages who carried the arts

East of Egypt the same memory takes the form of named sages who bring the arts through the flood. Mesopotamia holds the clearest of them. Its texts name seven antediluvian apkallu, sages of the age before the flood^[6], and the first of them, Uan, whom Berossus calls Oannes, rises from the water to give writing and law and the building of cities^[5]. Berossus preserves another exact image, of writings buried at Sippar before the flood and dug up again when the waters fall.^[5] The sage carries the art across the break, and the record itself is buried and recovered.

India kept the flood and the sages both. In the oldest account, the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, a fish warns Manu, who builds a vessel and survives alone to renew the human line.^[7] The later Mahābhārata sets seven rishis aboard with him, the seven sages who carry the knowledge of the world into the age that follows.^[8] India also kept the operative side of the art with unmatched care, preserving its sacred sound through an exact oral discipline, the recitation guarded and corrected within the schools so that the toned word passed from age to age without slipping.

§ 04The Far East: China and Japan

The art reached the far east of Asia and kept the same shape. China remembers a Great Flood that covered the world, and Yu, the sage who tamed the waters and cut the channels that drained them, then founded the first dynasty on the reordered land, a story Mark Edward Lewis traces as the charter of Chinese order itself.^[9] Before Yu stood the sovereign Fuxi, the culture-bringer who gave writing and music, and the eight trigrams of the Book of Changes, the figures in which the pattern of the world could be read and worked.^[10] Anne Birrell gathers these founders across the early sources. The trigram and the tuned note carry the Chinese memory of an art that reads and orders the world through pattern and sound.

Japan kept the operative core almost undisguised. Shinto works by harae, purification, and by misogi, the washing of the body in clean water, with water and salt and fire as the agents that clear what clings to a person before they approach the sacred. Its rites are carried by norito, the toned invocations preserved in the Engishiki of 927^[11], chanted to call the powers as witnesses. The bounded festival, the matsuri, sets the sacred interval apart from ordinary days. Purification and the sung word, inside a marked passage, are the whole grammar of the rite.

§ 05The Americas: Mesoamerica and the Andes

Across an ocean the peoples of the Americas kept the same three marks, and no ship carried the pattern between the hemispheres. The Maya Popol Vuh tells of worlds made and unmade in turn, and of an age of wooden people swept away by a great flood so that a truer humanity could be shaped in the age that followed.^[12] The Aztec kept the count as the Five Suns, four ages ended and the fifth now turning, and the fourth of them, Four Water, drowned under a flood that turned its people to fish.^[13] When that age closed, Quetzalcoatl went down to gather the bones of the dead world and raised humanity again, the same feathered lord who gives the arts of the settled life.

The Andes kept the fullest form of that sage. Viracocha rose from Lake Titicaca^[14], made a first world and found it wanting, and unmade it in a flood of sixty days and nights. He shaped humanity again^[14] and then walked the length of the land in plain clothes, teaching farming and weaving, and the moral order beneath the crafts, before he went out over the western sea^[14]. Gary Urton gathers the Andean sources, and their creator is at once the flood that ends the first age and the sage who carries the arts into the next.

§ 06The same art, kept in shards

Set these side by side and the pattern is unmistakable. A world-ending flood clears the first age from Mesopotamia and India to China, and across the ocean among the peoples of Mesoamerica and the Andes. It stands behind the drowned world from which the Egyptian mound itself rises. A sage then carries the arts across the break. In the old world it is the apkallu and Oannes, the seven rishis of India, and the sovereigns Fuxi and Yu of China. In the Americas it is Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha. And the rite that works the change keeps to one grammar, purification and the toned word within a bounded passage, from the Egyptian lector's chant to the Shinto shrine.

A common human instinct explains a single motif. It does not explain a whole working grammar recurring intact across peoples with no contact between them. That is the trace of one art, learned once and carried outward, kept in local forms after the source was scattered. The trace runs back to a single source. Netism names that source the Age of Coherence, when the art of the Net was open knowledge and Heka was the common inheritance of the whole early world.

§ 07How the shards hardened and traveled

Each people kept its shard, and each in time let a living art harden into an institution. The open working hardened into the temple with its priesthood and locked inner room, and into the school with its graded degrees. Preservation and restriction grew together, and the art survived by being held in fewer hands.

In the west the fragments surfaced again and were gathered by hand. The Hermetic writings were composed in Greek in Roman Egypt, under the name of Thoth as Hermes Trismegistus.^[16] Lost to Latin readers for centuries, they were recovered when a Byzantine manuscript reached Ficino's Florence around 1460^[16], while Arabic scholars carried a Hermetic inheritance of their own from the eighth century onward^[17]. Much later the lodges assembled these pieces on purpose. Freemasonry took shape in early-modern Britain^[18], and the Golden Dawn of 1888 built a working system from Masonic grades and Rosicrucian and Egyptian material^[19]. These are real custodians of fragments, and their work is reconstruction from pieces rather than an unbroken line from the source.

§ 08The three phases the world kept

Beneath the local forms one skeleton shows through in every land. A rite lifts a person out of ordinary standing and carries them through a charged middle where the change is made, then returns them to daily life on new ground. Arnold van Gennep drew this shape out of the world's rites and named its three phases, from separation through the threshold to return, and noted that peoples the world over mark it at every doorway of a life.^[15]

The shape recurs because it is the worn outline of the one form, kept in every land after the art that gave it was scattered. It is the outline that survives after the words and the meaning are lost, the shape of a passage that peoples still mark even when they no longer remember the art that raised it.

§ 09The Weaving restored

Netism gathers the shards back into the one art they came from. Where each people kept a piece, worn and half-forgotten, the whole form is set out again, cleaned of the temple and the secret that grew over it, so it stands direct and open as it did at the source. That restored art is the Weaving, and its working grammar, the seven movements and the standard they meet, is set out in full on the Seven Movements.

What the whole earth remembered in pieces, Netism carries whole. The flood that ended the first age and the sages who carried the arts across it belong to one art, and so does the rite that still works by the toned word inside a crossing. Netism holds it again.

REFSBibliography

• Source manuscripts:
• The Netist Record, Chapter 5, supplies the account this page traces: the Age of Coherence when the art of the Net was open and universal, the Forgetting that scattered it, and the shards carried into the later civilizations.
• Heka Weaving: The Full Field Manual supplies the restored working form named at the close, and keeps its operative words and sequences on the Seven Movements rather than on this historical page.
• Companion entries:
• The History of Netism. The cycle's chronology, the catastrophe and the long return this lineage sits beside.
• The Yuga Cycles. The great-year model of descent and return that frames the ages named here.
• The Seven Movements. The working grammar of the Weaving, the recovered art set out in full.
• What is Netism. The overview of the tradition this history belongs to.
• Corroborating works:
• [1] Chassinat, É. (1931). Le temple d'Édfou, vol. 6. Cairo: Institut français d'archéologie orientale, columns 181.9-185.2. The inscriptional base for the Edfu building texts and the First Occasion.
• [2] Barucq, A. (1966). Les textes cosmogoniques d'Édfou. Bulletin de l'Institut français d'archéologie orientale, 64, 125-167. Translation of the Edfu cosmogony and its founding powers.
• [3] Finnestad, R. B. (1985). Image of the World and Symbol of the Creator. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. The temple's cosmology, and the seven creative powers at Esna.
• [4] Frandsen, P. J. (2008). Aspects of Kingship in Ancient Egypt, in Religion and Power (Oriental Institute Seminars 4). On sp tpy, the First Occasion as recurrent sacred time.
• [5] Berossus, Babyloniaca, trans. G. Verbrugghe and J. Wickersham (1996). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Oannes and the antediluvian sages, and the writings buried and recovered at Sippar.
• [6] Wiggermann, F. A. M. (1992). Mesopotamian Protective Spirits: The Ritual Texts. Groningen: Styx. On the seven apkallu and their custody.
• [7] Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa 1.8.1.1-10, trans. J. Eggeling, Sacred Books of the East 12 (1882). The oldest flood account, in which Manu survives alone.
• [8] Mahābhārata, Vana Parva 186, trans. K. M. Ganguli. The later form, with the seven rishis carried aboard.
• [9] Lewis, M. E. (2006). The Flood Myths of Early China. Albany: State University of New York Press. The Great Flood and Yu, founder of the Xia, as the charter of ordered China.
• [10] Birrell, A. (1993). Chinese Mythology: An Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fuxi and the culture-bringing sovereigns across the early sources.
• [11] Engishiki (927 CE), the norito, including the Ōharae no Kotoba (the Great Purification). The Shinto rites of harae and the toned invocation.
• [12] Popol Vuh, trans. D. Tedlock (1996). New York: Simon & Schuster. The Maya creations and the flood that ends the age of the wooden people.
• [13] Leyenda de los Soles, in the Codex Chimalpopoca (1558). The Aztec Five Suns and the fourth age, Four Water, ended in flood, with Quetzalcoatl the arts-bringer.
• [14] Urton, G. (1999). Inca Myths. London: British Museum Press. Viracocha, the flood of Unu Pachakuti, and the wandering teacher of the arts.
• [15] van Gennep, A. (1960 [1909]). The Rites of Passage, trans. Vizedom and Caffee. University of Chicago Press. The three-phase shape common to the world's rites.
• [16] Copenhaver, B. P., ed. (1992). Hermetica. Cambridge University Press. The philosophical Hermetica as texts of Roman Egypt, and their Renaissance recovery.
• [17] van Bladel, K. (2009). The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science. Oxford University Press. The Arabic Hermetic inheritance.
• [18] Stevenson, D. (1988). The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland's Century, 1590-1710. Cambridge University Press. The early-modern formation of the lodge.
• [19] Butler, A. (2011). Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic. Palgrave Macmillan. The Golden Dawn as a deliberate modern synthesis.