VOWEL MYSTERIES

Vowel as Creation : A Universal and Feminine Mystery

“Before Light, there was Sound.....

For millennia, across all civilizations, their cosmologies and also now in modern day physics ( Baryon acoustic oscillations) our universe has been understood as an extraordinarily complex vibrational field born from primordial sound waves ( which are actually like bubbles!).

This low frequency gravitational wave ‘hum’ is the very pulse that stirred the void into being and it continues its Hum through spacetime and inside us today.

In ancient texts, epic poetry, funerary liturgies, and lunar hymns, one particular archetype of primordial sound appears emphasised and utilised for a specific modality again and again: the VOWEL— a pure -tone issuing as direct communication through its various and fascinating harmonic content from our mouth.

This indicates a secret well known to our ancestors and previous advanced civilisations : the vowels are known codes of cosmic intelligence. 

We know in Egyptian, Hebrew (including the Tetragrammaton YHWH), Greek, and Gnostic traditions—as well as Hermetic, Neoplatonic, and Rosicrucian mystery schools—the vowels were revered as sacred vehicles of divine breath, holding the living essence of the ineffable Name of God.

These lineages taught that intoning pure vowels (like IAO or the hidden vowels of YHWH) was a way to awaken the soul to the vibrational Logos—the creative sound through which the universe was formed.

To sound a vowel is to open our body to its inner resonant chambers.

There is no interruption, no consonantal gate, no resistance. It is the breath given infinite voice — and therefore foundational to the field of sound healing, mantra, music, and ritual utterance. Modern linguistics verifies this: vowels are the tones that carry emotional and somatic resonance, while consonants function as boundaries or edges (2).

Emotion is vowel; structure is consonant.

However for ancient cultures, vowels were far more than that and not simply phonetic units.

They were glyphs of consciousness, the breathforms of gods, goddess-seeds, sound-spirals of creation and return.

So what actually is a vowel made from, and how does each one differ from the other?

Vowels are created when the resonant shape of the vocal tract selectively

amplifies SPECIFIC harmonics. A vowel is therefore made from complex harmonic

sounds , not based on pitch. Each vowel has a unique pattern of these harmonic

(formants),which allow us to perceive and differentiate them.

Even if pitch changes, the format relationships stay constant so the vowel

remains recognisable. In simple terms, vowels are harmonically organised

sound structures with overtones, created by the resonance of our vocal tracts ( larynx,

pharynx, oral and nasal cavity, together with muscle ,tissue like tongue, vocal

chords and palate).

Vowels are Harmonic Codes that your body literally assembles geometries

with every time they sound. They are the audible harmonics of creation, microcosm of the harmonic architecture of the cosmos.

This is the same intelligence that forms galaxies, and through the vowels

We are shaping consciousness through the human voice.

India: Sound as Shakti, Vowel as Creation Matrikas

Some of the earliest sound technology we can find emerges in the Vedas and Tantras, where the universe is described as Shabda Brahman, the Absolute as sound. The first movement of the Absolute is not light, but Nāda — an audible-almost-inaudible pulse which eventually becomes mantra, song, and form (3).

Within Tantra, vowels are recognised as the seed syllables of Goddess consciousness: Shakti Beej.

There are 16 vowels in the Sanskrit system, each linked with lunar phases, petals of the throat chakra, and feminine embodiments of wisdom and very particular divine feminine energetic frequencies (4). For example:

A: The primal womb-tone. Void. Creation.

I: The serpent sound rising through the spine, activating kundalinī.

Ū: The chalice of resonance, womb and water.

Ṛ: The vibratory contraction of becoming — the pulse of manifestation.

Tantric texts such as the Śrīcakra Pūjā Vidhi and Saundarya Lahari celebrate the vowel sounds as Divine mothers, each vibrating reality into being.

Vowels are known deeply — they are sound-beings, embodiments of Shakti.

Every mantra is born from them.

Ancient Egypt: The Unspoken Vowels of the Afterlife

In the Egyptian Mystery schools, vowels were so sacred. Hieroglyphic scripts include only consonants,

leaving vowels to be transmitted orally from priest to initiate (5). This wasn’t omission. It was reverence.

The following quotation from Demetrius, circa 200 B.C., from Aristotle, Poetic’s suggests exactly that:

“In Egypt, when priests sing hymns to the gods, they sing the seven vowels in due succession and the sound of these vowels has such euphony that men listen to it instead of the flute and the lyre.”

The Egyptians believed that vowel sounds were the of the gods, and that to speak them with precision was to invoke the living presence of divinity. In the Book of the Dead (Pert Em Hru), spells instruct the deceased in vowel-toned incantations that allow their ba (soul) to reenter the afterlife and be recognized by the gods (6).

The Egyptian god Hu, personification of divine utterance, was invoked through vowel breath more than through spoken name. The goddess Isis, in her mythic lament for Osiris, performs a wailing, vowel-rich keening that reanimates his body — making her one of the earliest documented priestesses of vocal resurrection (7).

This feminine power — the ability to sound life back into the world — echoes across all cultures as the very truth of death and re-birth.

The Seven Vowels as Celestial Ladders

In Greek Mystery Schools (especially Orphic and Pythagorean lineages), the seven vowels (A, E, Ē, I, O, Ō, Y) were regarded as the seven tones of the planetary spheres (8). Chanting them in ascending order was a ritual of cosmic alignment.

In the Gnostic text Pistis Sophia, vowels are used in long sequences to open realms and call on divine beings. One of the most striking passages reads:

“AAAEEEOOOOŌŌŌŌŌŌŸŸŸŸ”

— an ecstatic rendering of the celestial descent of spirit into form (9).

Here again, the vowel is the bridge between worlds. The voice becomes the ritual instrument. Feminine mysticism sees this not as metaphor, but embodiment: the throat as a womb, shaping the birth of sound and so all matter.

Sumer & the Gala Priests of Lament: Keening as Sonic Portal

One of the oldest recorded sound rituals is the Sumerian lament of Ur— a voiced invocation of grief, performed by the gala priests ( third-gender ritual performers). These rites, preserved in clay tablets from 2000 BCE, used the dialect Emesal, which was a softer dialect than Emegir. Emesal ,

Eme =Tongue and Sal=Thin , was a dialect restricted to direct speech of goddesses and women. The softer description of letters and words indicate increased vowels,  ululations, and breath loops to escort the dead into the afterlife while also expressing and releasing emotion from the living as the highest honour to  (10).

The laments invoked Inanna, goddess of descent and return. The voice was a shamanic vessel — especially for women. As Max Dashu writes:

“Keening was a form of spiritual authority reserved for women. Through sound, they mediated between worlds, death, and the soul.” (11)

This tradition survived into Ireland, Scotland, Armenia, and parts of Greece — always associated with women, womb, voice, and unbounded vowel sound.

Women were once the keepers of sound rites, midwives of the soul through voice. Temple singers, musicians and dancers, oracle-chantresses, tantric Dakinis, lamenters, shaman-healers — all used vowel sound as a sonic bridge between seen and unseen.

Over centuries of suppression — witch trials, colonization, literacy shifts, patriarchal religious structures, medical pathology — this feminine sound lineage was fragmented, demonized and buried.

But it was not destroyed…..

FROM MY UPCOMING EBOOK AND ACCOMPANYING AUDIO PRACTICES

 ‘ THE VOWEL MYSTERIES’