Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 29 -- The Underground River as Metaphor
Once, in my travels, I saw a whole river disappear under ground, and, miles below, it
reappeared. The surface of the country, however, gave no evidence that a river was rolling
beneath, no more than the faces of some present, while conviction for sin, like that
SUBTERRANEAN RIVER, is rolling through their heart. I have known enough of people during
and after a revival, and sufficiently of some present, to warrant me in making a very pointed
application of the same. -- Arrows from my Quiver: Pointed with the Steel of Truth and Winged
by Faith and Love Selected from the Private Papers of Rev. James Caughey (1868)
In this National Council of Women... we have only another illustration of the outreach of human
hearts toward each other and toward humanity, stimulated by the almost universal desire to
better the conditions of human life for the suffering of the children of men... The desire had
been hidden like an UNDERGROUND STREAM from the day when Miriam first gathered
women together to dance to the sound of the timbrel and to "sing to the Lord a new song." --
Mary Lowe Dickinson, The Arena, February 1897
"It's an UNDERGROUND RIVER of money," says John Davis of State Affairs. "It's very hard to
find. And it's absolutely legal." -- "Attorneys' Rising Political Clout (Political Donations to
Judges by Plaintiffs' Lawyers)," Nation's Business, February 1998
Holy Blood
The motif of an UNDERGROUND STREAM seems to have been extremely rich in symbolic
and allegorical resonances. Among other things, it would appear to connote the "underground"
esoteric tradition of Pythagorean, Gnostic, Cabalistic, and Hermetic thought. But it might also
connote something more than a general corpus of teachings, perhaps some very specific
factual information -- "secret" of some sort transmitted in clandestine fashion from generation to
generation. And it might connote an unacknowledged and thus ‘subterranean’ bloodline. --
Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, Holy Blood, Holy Grail (1982)
For those anxious about such conspiracies, may we
suggest The Arcana of the Grail Angel, The Spiritual
Science of the Holy Blood and of the Holy Grail, A Study
developed out of the work of Rudolf Steiner of the
UNDERGROUND STREAMS of Esoteric Christianity
which flowed from the Brotherhood of the Holy Grail to the
Order of the Knights Templars and the True Rosicrucian
Order (1999) by John Barnwell.
Inevitability
Even as an enormous UNDERGROUND RIVER of people flows south to north across the
American continent -- the vast human tide of illegal immigration from Mexico flowing north
across the Rio Grande -- it is counterbalanced almost perfectly by another vast
UNDERGROUND RIVER flowing north to south: a flow of capital, in remittances from workers
back to their families at home. -- Affordable Housing Institute, internet posting, June 8, 2007
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