ebo or the
Nabhi of Vishnu."(80)

80) Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names, vol. i., p. 237.

Inman relates that once when a friend of his was conversing with a very
high-caste Hindoo he casually uttered this word Amm or Om, whereupon
the man was so awe struck that he could scarcely speak, and, in a voice
almost of terror, asked where his friend had learned the word. Of this
word Inman says:

"To the Hindoos it was that incommunicable name of the Almighty, which
no one ventured to pronounce except under the most religious solemnity.
And here let me pause to remark that the Jews were equally reverent with
the name belonging to the Most High; and that the third commandment was
very literal in its signification."

The same writer remarks that in Thibet, too, where a worship very nearly
identical in ceremony and doctrine with that of the Roman papists exists
amongst the Lamas, the name of Om is still sacred.

The Iav of the Jews was equally revered, but in the later ages of their
career they seem to have lost sight of its true meaning.

According to Inman's testimony and that of other etymological students,
the true signification of the cognomen Jacob is the female principle.

It is believed by various writers that the story of Jacob and Esau as
related in Genesis has an esoteric as well as an exoteric meaning--that
Jacob has reference to the female creative energy throughout Nature,
or, rather, to the great mass of people who in an early age of the human
race believed in the superior importance of the female in the office of
reproduction, and that Esau signifies the male. Attention is called to
the fact that Esau is represented as a "hairy" man, rough-voiced and
easily beguiled, while Jacob, on the other hand, is smooth-faced,
soft-voiced, and the favorite of his mother.

There is indeed much in this myth which seems to indicate that it is
an allegory beneath which are veiled certain facts connected with the
struggle between two early contending sects regarding the relative
importance of the sexes in reproduction. Of this Inman says:

"My own impression is that Esau, or Edom, and Jacob are mystic names for
a man and a woman, and that round these, historians wove a web of fancy;
that ultimately the cognomen Jacob was recognized, and that to allow the
Jewish people to trace their descent from a male rather than a female,
the appellation of Israel was substituted in later productions."(81)

81)