Kaulakau Saulasau Zeesar

by Antonio Magliabecchi on Monday, 16 July 2012 at 18:38

The following is Layton’s translation of the Saying 13, Gospel of Thomas :

(13) Jesus said to his disciples, "Compare me to something and tell me what I resemble." Simon Peter said to him, "A just angel is what you resemble." Matthew said to him, "An intelligent philosopher is what you resemble." Thomas said to him, "Teacher, my mouth utterly will not let me say what you resemble." Jesus said, "I am not your (sing.) teacher, for you have drunk and become intoxicated from the bubbling wellspring that I have personally measured out. And he took him, withdrew, and said three sayings to him. Now, when Thomas came to his companions they asked him, "What did Jesus say to you?" Thomas said to them, "If I say to you (plur.) one of the sayings that he said to me, you will take stones and stone me, and fire will come out of the stones and burn you up."

(http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/thomas/gospelthomas13.html )

As most of the commentators have surmised, the three secret sayings imparted to Thomas might be some Hebrew phrases borrowed from Isaiah 28:10, namely, “Kaulakau Saulsau Zeesar”. The following quote is the original OT verse, representing how the prophet’s teaching was parodied by the drunken religious leaders of his day:

כִּי צַו לָצָו צַו לָצָו קַו לָקָו קַו לָקָו זְעֵיר שָׁם זְעֵיר שָׁם׃

kiy tsav latsav tsav latsav kav lakav kav lakav ze'eyr sham ze'eyr sham

(New American Standard Bible: "For He says, 'Order on order, order on order, Line on line, line on line, A little here, a little there.'")

Due to the ambiguities of these onomatopes, which naturally admit diverse interpretations, it is no wonder an altogether different rendering is found in the Septuagint. Here I am not going to dwell on the different versions of Isaiah 28:10, all of which can hardly throw any light on why Jesus chose to employ these Hebrew phrases, nor what they were supposed to mean within that context. To answer these two questions, --or just the two aspects of one single question regarding the meaning of“Kaulakau Saulsau Zeesar”--, we’d better begin with the text of Hippolytus, to whom we owe the written record of how the gnostic Naassenes interpreted Saying 13. Hippolytus reported that the existence of the universe, according to Naassenes, depends on three powerful Logoi, namely, Kaulakau, Saulasau, Zeesar; that “Kaulakau was Adamas, primal man, the being above; Saulasau, mortal man here below; Zeesar, the Jordan which flows upward.” (1)

It is clear that such interpretation has no bearing on the Hebrew phrases in Isaiah 28:10. The Hebrew words were simply turned into a kind of glossolalia by the Naassenes, who probably found their onomatopoetic nature fitting in with the typical chanting of mantras. Yet it remains unclear why Kaulakau can be taken to mean Adamas etc. This linguistic puzzle is what I am attempting to solve here.

Phonetically or orthographically, there is nothing in common between “Kaulakau” and “Adamas”. So did the Gnostics just arbitrarily relate one to another? The only author, as far as I know, who has ever ventured to explain something like this is a Frenchman called Jacques Matter. In a book printed in 1843 (2), he makes a few good points which I shall sum up as follows:



1. While St Epiphanus and Theodore say that “Kaulakau” used to mean “Saviour”, St Ireneus holds that “Kaulakau” was used to signify “the world(“world”, being a gnostic term signifying a class of Intelligences and the region occupied and ruled by this class of Beings, may mean equivocally “Name”, “World”, “Essence” etc. ) in which the Saviour descends and rises again”. (Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, I, 24) Mr Matter thinks that St Ireneus’ definition of “Kaulakau” is the best one passed to us by the ancient authority, for his definition, by virtue of its relating the name to the fundamental idea of redemption, is “less incomplete” than all the others.
2. Mr Matter proceeds to argue that the gnostic Basilides seem to have derived the name “Kaulakau” from the Greek Ecclesiastes 1:6(note that the Basilides read Greek rather than Hebrew):

κυκλοῖ κυκλῶν πορεύεται τὸ πνεῦμα, καὶ ἐπὶ κύκλους αὐτοῦ ἐπιστρέφει τὸ πνεῦμα. (King James: “it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.”)

With reference to this quote, not only the linguistic similarity between “Kaulakau” and “κύκλος” (kuklos, ie, circle, ring) becomes obvious, but the sense of the former word, otherwise obscure, also strikes us as exceedingly compatible with the Basilides’ system, in which the Heavens (οὐρανοί) are represented as “circles”, and the Spirit (wind, τὸ πνεῦμα)communicated to us by the Saviour ends up returning to the starting point up there.

Having established the relationship between “Kaulakau” and “Heavens”, we are now ready to figure out the reason for the Basilides and Naassenes to associate Adamas, the Primal Man above, with that strange and barbarous name. But how about “Saulasau” and “Zeesar”? Why are they associated with “man here below” and “the Jordan flowing upward” respectively?

My speculation: the Naassenes might actually engage in a word play with Latin (instead of Greek or Hebrew). Just as “Kaulakau”, when only the first two consonants are considered, can be taken a phonetic distortion of “caelum”(with the consonants pronounced as K-L-, meaning “sky, heaven”), “Saulasau” may likewise correspond to “solum” (S-L-, earth, soil, ground), and “Zeesar” to “deus”--“z” in Ancient Greek could be read as “zd” or "dz", and therefore the pronunciation of Zeesar would resemble that of the Latin word "deus", ie, God, if the Naassenses uttered it in the Greek manner. “Deus” is the mediator between the above and the below, analogous in this respect to the Jordan River where the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus. As told by Hippolytus in Refutatio, the Naassenes held the man "god" (theos, deus) who could rise from the dead and enter through the celestial gate into heaven.

To become god (Zeesar) is therefore to ascend from the bottom (Saulasau) to the sky (Kaulakau), to defy all laws of nature in flowing upward. In a word, he must be an extravagant wanderer.

Notes

(1) Hippolytus, Refutatio omnium haeresium, v, 8: “οὗτοι, εἰσὶν οἱ τρεῖς ὑπέρογκοι λόγοι· Καυλακαῦ, Σαυλασαῦ, Ζεησάρ· Καυλακαῦ τοῦ ἄνω, τοῦ Ἀδάμαντος· Σαυλασαῦ τοῦ κάτω, θνητοῦ· Ζεησὰρ τοῦ ἐπὶ τὰ ἄνω ῥεύσαντος Ἰορδάνου.”

(2) Jacques Matter, Histoire critique du gnosticisme, tome II, ch.8

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