Open Christaller at su and the entries don't obviously belong together.
Nsu, or nsuo — water. Osu — rain. Su — to weep, to shed tears, to cry. Weeping, wailing, lamentation. And su — species, kind, nature, quality, character. The essential nature.1
Water, rain, crying, and what a person fundamentally is.
The first three hang together without effort — water falls from the sky, water falls from the eyes, one root for both is the kind of thing languages do all the time. It's the fourth that sits oddly. What has your essential nature got to do with weeping?
Odwirafo's answer is that the connection isn't metaphorical and isn't accidental. He goes to a Kemetic text to supply it, and the text says something startling.
The passage comes from a late-period papyrus — the Book of Knowing the Manifestations of Ra and of Overthrowing Apep. The creator is speaking in the first person, describing what happened after his eye was returned to him:
"After these things, I gathered together my members, and I wept over them. And men and women sprang into being from the tears which came forth from my eye."1
Humanity is made of the creator's tears.
Not shaped from clay, not spoken into being, not born. Wept. The substance of a person is the water that came out of a god's eye during an act of grief.
And now the Akan entry stack resolves. If what you essentially are is a tear, then the word for tear and the word for essential nature being the same word is not a pun. It's a statement.
He doesn't rest it on one late text, which is worth noting because he often would.
The Book of the Heavenly Cow — attested much earlier, in the tombs of Tutankhamun, Seti and Ramesses — has Ra speaking of humanity in the same terms: "listen to these men and women who are created by my eye."1
Different composition, different period, same claim. Humanity issues from the eye.
That's a real point in the argument's favour. A doctrine appearing in a New Kingdom royal tomb and again in a late papyrus is embedded in the tradition rather than being a curiosity of one manuscript.
Here is the complication, and it changes what the argument can claim.
The tears-and-humanity connection is a documented Egyptian wordplay, and Egyptologists have known about it for a very long time. But the words involved are rmṯ — people, humanity — and rmyt — tears. The pun is rmṯ / rmyt. That resemblance is what the Egyptian text is playing on.
It is not sa / su.
So the Akan situation is a different wordplay. In Akan the linked pair is su (weeping) and su (essential nature). In Kemetic the linked pair is rmyt (tears) and rmṯ (people). Two languages, two different sets of words, landing on the same doctrine.
Odwirafo presents the Akan entries as though they were the same wordplay preserved. They aren't, and the sessions never mention the Egyptian pair. Which means the strongest available version of this argument is one he doesn't make — and it's genuinely more interesting than the one he does.
Sit with it, because the options are worth laying out and they're not all bad for the tradition.
One: the doctrine travelled and the pun was rebuilt. A people who held that humanity is made of divine tears, arriving in a language where su covered both weeping and essential nature, would find the doctrine already sitting in their vocabulary. Transmission of an idea, not of a word. That's entirely possible and is how doctrines usually move.
Two: independent arrival. Weeping is universal, water is the universal substance of life, and the metaphorical distance between what pours out of you and what you essentially are is short in any language. Two traditions could reach it separately.
Three: retrofit. The Akan entries are read together because the reader already knew the Kemetic doctrine and went looking. The senses may not be one root at all — nsu the water and su the character could simply be homophones, which a tonal language produces in quantity.
The corpus never distinguishes these. But note what happens to its own case: option one is a stronger argument for continuity than the one being made, because a doctrine surviving into a language whose words don't support the original pun is much harder to explain as coincidence than matching vocabulary would be.
One further thread, briefly, because it's where the Akan material extends beyond the Kemetic.
Osu is rain, and rain in Akan cosmology arrives with a named divinity. Odwirafo brings in Nyankonton and Nyankonpon — the arched rainbow-serpent and the circular one — as the creatrix and creator, and notes that the phrase for rain coming carries the same root.1
So the field isn't only tears → essence. It's tears → rain → the serpent that brings rain → the creator. Water falling from a sky is the same event as water falling from an eye, and both are the creator acting.
That's a coherent extension, and it's Akan-internal — it doesn't need the Kemetic text to work. It also explains why the tears-doctrine would have landed easily in this vocabulary: the language already treated falling water as divine agency.
The tightest sub-argument in the segment, and it stands on its own.
Arit Ra — usually rendered the Eye of Ra, and usually treated as naming a goddess who is Ra's instrument or consort.
Odwirafo's point is that ari doesn't only mean eye. It also means to make, to form, to fashion.1 So Arit Ra reads equally as the Maker of Ra, or she who fashions.
And then the argument for why that reading matters, which uses the corpus's habitual physiological move to unusually good effect. A male contributes; the sperm enters the ovum. But the making happens inside the woman. "What left the male, left the male" — everything after that is her fashioning. So the one who makes is not the one who contributed.
On that reading, calling her the Eye is a translation that has quietly demoted her. She isn't the organ through which Ra sees or acts. She's the fashioner, and the tears that become humanity come out of her.
Which loops back to the whole page: if humanity is wept into being, and the eye that wept is also the maker, then the essence is not incidentally watery. It is the substance of a specific creative act by a specific divinity whose title has been mistranslated as a body part.
Whether the ari polysemy holds is a philological question this page can't settle. But the reading is coherent, it's internally motivated, and it's the sort of argument the corpus makes too rarely.
You've hit a claim that two languages preserve the same wordplay.
Get both pairs. Not one — both. Which words in language A, which in language B. This is the step that fails here, and it fails silently, because a reader given only the Akan pair has no way to notice that the Kemetic pair is different.
Then ask whether what's shared is the words or the idea. They're very different claims with very different evidence requirements. Shared words need sound correspondence. A shared idea needs only contact, and is much easier to establish.
Check whether the receiving language's pun would have existed anyway. If su meant both weeping and essential nature before any contact, then the doctrine landing there is unremarkable — a good fit, not a survival.
And notice which version of the argument is stronger. Here the unstated one wins: a doctrine that survived into a language where the original pun doesn't work is harder to dismiss than matching vocabulary, because nobody could have transmitted it by rote.
Strongest evidence. Two independent Kemetic attestations of the tears-doctrine, one of them New Kingdom and royal. And an Akan lexical field that genuinely does connect water, rain, weeping and essential nature, with a rain-divinity sitting inside it.
Central tension: the puns don't match. Rmṯ / rmyt is not su / su, and the corpus presents the Akan pair as though it were the preserved original.
A second tension. The homophone problem. In a tonal language, nsu the water and su the character may simply be different words. The corpus reads the entries as one root without addressing it — the same unexamined move flagged on Aku / Akut — the Inner Eye and the Pineal Gland.
Open question. Does any Akan source, independent of this teacher, connect su the essential nature with su the weeping? If the connection is attested in Akan usage before anyone was looking for Kemetic parallels, the case is transformed. If it appears only in this corpus, the retrofit reading is hard to avoid — and Christaller, compiled in the 1880s by someone with no such project, is exactly the place to check.
The tears passage is the best-sourced moment in the six sessions. He reads the papyrus, then reaches for the Heavenly Cow to corroborate it, and the corroboration is real — earlier, independent, royal. That's the shape of an argument built rather than asserted.
Then the Akan side arrives and the same care evaporates. The entries are read out, the connection is declared, and the fact that the Egyptian text makes its point with a different pair of words never comes up.
Set against Odwirafo Source Tensions, the pattern is now familiar enough to be diagnostic rather than surprising: the Kemetic evidence gets handled well and the Akan evidence gets handled by assertion. Which is the reverse of what the project's own logic would predict, since Akan is supposed to be the living witness that settles what the dead language meant. The tradition he can check most easily is the one he checks least.
Rudrākṣa — From Śiva's Tears. In the Śaiva material, Śiva weeps — in some versions from grief, in others from compassion — and the tears that fall become the rudrākṣa seeds, which are then worn, counted, and treated as the god's substance in portable form. The name says it outright: rudra-akṣa, Rudra's eye.
The parallel is close enough to be worth stating precisely. Divine weeping, tears that become a lasting substance, and a naming convention that ties the substance back to the eye rather than to the god generally.
The insight the pairing produces is about what a tears-cosmogony is doing that other creation accounts aren't. Creation from tears specifies the creator's emotional state at the moment of making, and every other creation mode leaves it open. Speaking a world into being, shaping it from clay, dividing a primordial body — none of these say how the maker felt. Weeping does. Both traditions are therefore claiming something quite specific: that what exists is the residue of divine grief, and that grief is therefore built into the material rather than being a later intrusion into a good world. That's a substantive theological position and it explains a great deal downstream in both traditions — why suffering needs no separate account of its origin, and why the substance itself (tear-born humanity, tear-born seed) is treated as intrinsically sacred rather than as fallen.
One handshake. The concept is a creation-from-divine-tears doctrine; the closest structural parallel elsewhere is what this pairing supplies. A second would be decorative.
Sharpest implication. The strongest version of this argument is the one the corpus doesn't make. The Kemetic tears-doctrine runs on rmṯ / rmyt and the Akan lexical field runs on su / su — two different puns, one doctrine — and a doctrine that survives into a language whose vocabulary can't carry the original wordplay is far better evidence of transmission than matching words would be. By presenting the Akan pair as the preserved original, the corpus swaps a strong argument for a weak one and doesn't notice the trade.
Generative questions.
Does Christaller's 1880s dictionary — compiled by someone with no Kemetic project — connect the weeping and essence senses of su? That single check decides between survival and retrofit.
If humanity is the residue of divine grief, what does the tradition say the creator was grieving for? The Kemetic text places the weeping after the eye is restored, which is an odd moment for sorrow.