The knowledge revealed in the following article is little understood among society, even, to my wonderment, among professional linguisticians. I am a theologian, not a linguistician, yet the facts revealed herein are so easily demonstrated that I am surprised that they have not been set forth before. We begin with the Russian word bog, which, appearances to the contrary, means not ‘swamp’ but ‘god’. How can this be? Surely so basic a word as ‘god’ ought not to be confused with ‘swamp’ (although I note that many learned scholars have sought to locate the Slavonic homeland in the Pripet Marshes). No, swamps are clearly a red herring, and the actual answer is that, by the well-known principle of boustrophedal transposition, bog is clearly identical to the English word god. (Note that the letter g, when reversed, still looks more or less like a g, and o is the same as its mirror image).

So the Russian word for ‘god’ is the same as the English one. Given the relatively low cultural level of the early Slavs compared to the early Germans (the Slavs did not even have bread before the Germans introduced it to them!), it is plain that the Slavs took the word from the Germans. But here we face another conundrum. English, according to the Encyclopædia Brittanica, is a Germanic language, meaning that it descends from German. Yet the German word is Gott, not god. It seems obvious that the English has undergone an expressive alteration, with loss of one t and change of the other t to d. The difficulty is that, according to Collins New World Atlas, England is FARTHER from Russia than Germany is! Nevertheless, the Russian word is certainly bog, not tog. I cannot at present explain this discrepancy, though perhaps it has something to do with seaborne trade between England and Muscovy in the 17^th century.

Returning to the word god, we should now investigate its origins. Germanic languages, according to numerous books on the subject, are notable for the dental past, which means a d or a t added to the end of a word to make it past tense. In fact, it occurs to me now that perhaps that accounts for the alteration of the word in English, where the original t suffix was changed to a d suffix to make the word look like other past tenses. And perhaps the Russians, confused, did the same thing before they enacted boustrophedal transposition. I think that we can safely regard the double tt of German as adorational in origin, an indication of the great majesty and power of the deity.

So if the word is originally the past tense of go, how are we to understand the underlying religious concept? The key is that a god is one who has gone before us, leading the way, and thus is our leader, our head, our chieftain. The early Germans being a wandering tribal people, they saw their gods as the ones who led them through the trackless northern forests, spearing the occasional moose and sleeping in holes dug under fir trees. (I mean that the Germans were spearing moose and sleeping under fir trees, not their gods. Gods presumably slept in heaven. Actually, I don’t think gods sleep, but I don’t think the early Germans knew that.) In the early days, no doubt, the Germans were polytheists, but it is interesting to note that they early shifted to pure monotheism, so that Gott is ALWAYS spelled with a capital G in German. In English, it is spelled with a capital G only by monotheists; in Russian, I don’t know, because I can’t read the Cyrillic alphabet (which is a corrupted version of the Old Germanic Runes, on which I am currently engaged in writing another article about the theological correlations associated with runic writing by the Germanic people).

Perhaps I should mention here the other common word for ‘god’, Greek theos and its Latin derivative deus (Latin is a descendant of Greek mixed with the native Italian languages that the Greeks encountered when they colonized Italy). However, these words do not concern us, since after all the classical peoples were pagans, and our interests here are the theological insights to be gained from linguistical analysis. To reiterate, the crucial finding is that God is to be understood as ‘He Who Went First”. Astute readers will notice the parallel to the first words of the Gospel of John, as well as to certain key passages in the Bhagavad Gita.

Respectfully submitted by the Right Reverend Michael Ramachendra, Doctor of Humane Theology and Priest-President of the Threesquare Church of the Rediscovered Dispensation

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