Genesis 1-2 – The Law of 7 and the process of creation
I’ve never heard anyone preach on the topic of Genesis 1-2. As a historical account of creation, it has little to offer the modern world. Yet behind this frozen façade, these verses reveal one of God’s most fundamental and ever-present laws—the Law of 7.
Wikipedia notes that “the authors of Genesis 1 were concerned not with the origins of matter (the material which God formed into the habitable cosmos), but with the fixing of destinies.”
The single most striking aspect of the Biblical account of creation is that a chapter break has been inserted between the sixth and seventh days—the exact point where God ceases to labour and rests. This is neither accidental nor irrelevant.
Why? Because what Genesis 1-2 describes is not a singular event but a universal process, using a one-off event—creation of the Earth—as an example.
That process is the process by which all energy unfolds, governing all visible and invisible manifestations of life.
The Law of 7
In In Search of the Miraculous, philosopher P. D. Ouspensky relays the teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff, a Greek-Armenian mystic who travelled widely in central Asia in the late 19th century, by his own account learning esoteric wisdom, before surfacing in Russia in 1915 as a spiritual teacher.
According to Gurdjieff, “the number of fundamental laws which govern all processes both in the world and in man is very small… The first fundamental law of the universe is the law of three… The next fundamental law of the universe is the law of seven… or the law of octaves.” [Ouspensky’s italics, indicating that Gurdjieff emphasised these words]
In The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three, theologian Cynthia Bourgeault equates the first of these, the Law of Three, with the trinity. She also writes that “a seven-stage process is inherent and inescapable in every journey through time.”
Gurdjieff describes “the principle of the discontinuity of vibration… All vibrations in nature… develop not uniformly but with periodical accelerations and retardations.”
Deviation
How does the Law of 7 work? Through these periodic retardations.
Gurdjieff states that “at the moment of the retardation… a deviation from the original direction takes place… The line of the development… deviates from its original direction and goes… in a diametrically opposite direction, still preserving its former name.”
What this means in practice is that whatever is set in motion, consciously or unconsciously, always ends up taking a different course. Sound familiar?
Gurdjieff illustrates this with a telling point on Christianity: “Think how many turns the line of development of forces must have taken to come from the Gospel preaching of love to the Inquisition.”
Ouch.
Spirals
Gurdjieff states that “this law explains why there are no straight lines in nature… Nothing in the world stays in the same place, or remains what it was; everything moves, everything is going somewhere, is changing, and inevitably either develops or goes down, weakens or degenerates… It moves along either an ascending or a descending line of octaves.”
So much to unpick and unpack in those few words.
A quick glance at human life shows this process in action, from the development of an infant through adolescence into adulthood, senescence, and finally death.
For our spiritual journey Gurdjieff’s stressed words are critically important: everything inevitably either develops or goes down. This is the crux of the Bible message: if you’re not consciously working on moving upwards, you’re unconsciously moving downwards.
Thus, the line of deviations that circles back on itself laid out by the Law of 7 becomes a spiral, the key shape of the universe, manifesting in spiralling galaxies and in DNA. What spirals upwards grows in consciousness and returns to God; what spirals downwards disappears into the cosmic compost bin.
Almost as a sidenote, Gurdjieff remarks that “the Biblical myth of the creation… is also an expression of the law of octaves, or an indication of it, though an incomplete one.”
The Law of 7 in the Diatonic scale
Looking at the Law of 7 from the musical perspective unlocks the reason why the ancient authors of the Bible inserted a chapter break between the sixth and seventh days: it represents a retardation, or what Gurdjieff calls an ‘interval.’
Gurdjieff: “The seven-tone scale is the formula of a cosmic law which was worked out by ancient schools and applied to music… [It] gives a scheme of the cosmic law of ‘intervals’, or absent semitones.”
Wikipedia: “A diatonic scale is a heptatonic (seven-note) scale that includes five whole steps (whole tones) and two half steps (semitones) in each octave.” In other words, two semitones are missing from the scale.
The position of the semitones in the Diatonic scale shows us where we should look for intervals in Genesis: between mi-fa (the 3rd and 4th notes) and si-do (7th and 8th notes, i.e., the root note of the next octave).
At these points, according to the Law of 7, an energy retardation occurs—conveyed in the Bible in the famous words, “On the seventh day God rested.” It’s possibly no coincidence that ‘rest’ is used in both metaphysical and musical spheres.
The missing rest
This immediately raises a couple of questions. Firstly, on this basis we would expect a rest in Genesis 1 after the 3rd day. Secondly, Gurdjieff’s seven-step process actually spans eight notes, from the root do in one octave to do in the succeeding one.
This is why Gurdjieff caveats his link between the Law of 7 and the Genesis account as “an indication of it, though an incomplete one.” I suspect the Biblical account has been simplified to highlight its key features—the seven steps and the principle of intervals.
Intriguingly, something different does happen between the 3rd and 4th days of creation. After creating the land and the ocean, God proceeds to create vegetation. It’s the only step in the process where God takes two distinctly different actions on the same day.
This suggests that a process spanning from do to do was compressed into the simple seven-day account that everybody knows regardless of whether they’ve read the Bible—which is inextricably linked to the days of the week.
The Law of 7 and the days of the week
Wikipedia tells us that “in many languages, including English, the days of the week are named after gods or classical planets.” However, the gods honoured by weekday names are themselves linked to planets.
For instance, “the English name Friday comes from the Old English frīġedæġ, meaning the ‘day of Frig’, a result of an old convention associating the Nordic goddess Frigg with the Roman goddess Venus after whom the planet was named.”
What’s this frigging got to do with Genesis 1-2 and the Law of 7?
According to the same ancient well that Gurdjieff drew from, the solar system itself is subject to a seven-stage evolutionary process. In True Knowledge of the Christ, Rudolf Steiner writes that “the names of the weekdays… are a monument for the seven stages of Earth evolution” and, by extension, for the Law of 7.
Steiner describes exactly the same Diatonic evolutionary path (eight notes from do in a lower octave to do in a higher octave, i.e., a 7-stage teaching) that we see with Genesis 1-2 and Gurdjieff’s articulation of it.
Steiner gives the names of these stages as Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus. (We are currently in the Mercury stage, since you ask.) At the completion of this eons-long process Earth evolution will rest, just as God did on the seventh day, before continuing its evolution in a higher octave of creation.
Frozen snapshot
Simplistically viewed as a frozen snapshot of earth’s creation, Genesis 1-2 unpacks into an extraordinary revelation of fundamental building blocks of life from the macrocosmic to the microcosmic: the Law of 7, cosmic evolution, the days of the week.
Rest on the seventh day, but don’t rest too long. There is more.
Photo by Олег Мороз on Unsplash
