The world of the traditional mind is a world infested with free-living atmospheric spirits seeking bodies to possess and bodies seeking animate spirits to be possessed. The noise of the traditional mind world is the commercial bargaining of spirits and bodies for contracts of “heterosexual” relationships.
The “bodies” whose maiden beauty charms the single blue-blooded spirits acquire the highest degree of genetic blood affinity with the gods, while, in turn, the more eligible single spirits attract the “bodies” of single maiden women. beautiful. The variety of bodies and spirits is not random.
“Let us form man according to the pattern of our morphological (” image “) and dynamic-functional (” likeness “) features,” says the Hebrew deity in the Genesis creation story. But for the traditional mind, the morphological and dynamic functional properties of the ideal conceptions of the mind that we call gods are not limited to a select few at creation. The attributes of divinity are manifested in all things: the difference is only of degrees.
The anthropocentrism of man convinces him that he reflects the “image” and the “likeness” of the gods above all things in nature. The ethnocentrism of the ancient southern Egyptian convinced him that he was the reflection of the attributes of divinity above all other races. He styled himself rot-na-roma: man-par-excellence. In his wall art, he depicted the hierarchy of races with himself (the man par excellence), standing next to the ancestral deity Horus in an upright, self-aware, dignified pose, much like that of the god. The other races, “Namu”, “Tamhu” and “Nehesi” come behind in varying degrees of beast-like behavior. When the Ancient Egyptian priest went to the presence of the gods, in the temple, he rubbed his earthy reddish-brown skin in red ocher to further enhance his genetic blood affinity with the ancestral deity who, according to the Hebrew scriptures, was formed from starting from the top layer of the hematite-stained soil of the Great Earth Mother; because the reddish reddish brown color was the color of bodies infused with divine essence as represented in the Afro-Asian root ‘-dm.
For the ancient Afro-Asian mystical thinker, it would not seem a coincidence that the vitalizing-virilizing principle (the heme group) which, in combination with the “breath of life” (ne-sama-ah chayy-iym), imparts red color to blood (Hebrew; dammit), is related to the element of hematite that imparts a reddish tint to the upper layer of the soil. Hemoglobin (blood), Hematite (soil), Ham (son of Noah), (k) ham (the name by which the ancient Egyptians referred) seem to be cognate terms.
In Hebrew thought, your “angel” or “doppelganger” is your double in a world of a grosser kind, minus your full spiritual attributes. Thus, human beings are the “angels” of the ancestral god Adam. According to the holy grails of Nazism, the “untermenschen” are the “angels” of the Aryan “herrenmenschen”.
We can remember the incident in the Book of Acts, when Peter returned with his fellow Christians to the home of Mary, Mark’s mother, after escaping from prison. The maid Rhoda, who saw him for the first time, ran to tell the others that Peter was at the door. They answered incredulously: “It must be his angel.” We can also recall the repeated references to the “angel of the presence of the Lord” who guided the Israelites, in the form of a pillar of light and cloud, in their nightly escape from slavery in Egypt.
The “angel” of a god or person is sometimes the appearance of a ghost and sometimes a simulated zombie or a mannequin model of the man or god. Oduyoye points out the association of the Afro-Asian root “slm-“, from the Hebrew word “selem”, in the Chadic language group, with the concept of double, twin or doppelganger. The gods have their selem-doppelganger in the “herrenmenshen” of humanity; and the “herrenmenshen”, in turn, has selem-doppelganger in the “untermenschen”. The “untermenschen” will presumably regard monkeys as their selem-doppelganger, for such is the endless hierarchy of higher and lower; the real and its imitation in the order of creation.
The relationship between a divine character and his selem is a master-servant relationship (“kyrios-doulous”). The selem lives in the service of its divine alter ego. He is twice his divine alter ego on a lower level of existence, even when the first man, Adam, was twice the Hebrew God, made in the “image” and “likeness” of his creator. The entire existence of a god’s doppelganger is dedicated to fulfilling his assignment set by the god on a higher level of existence.
From the perspective of modern human scientific-technological thinking deeply fascinated by the possibility that human beings create artificial intelligence versions of themselves from android robots, we could conceptualize the account of the genesis of man, made by God in his “image” and “likeness”, like the story of a divine nerd who designs an Artificial Intelligence “droid” version of himself in man.