Kaulakau Καυλακαῦ, Σαυλασαῦ, Ζεησάρ

Kaulakau, Saulasau, Zeesar are called the three exceedingly great words in the Naassene report, and each is assigned:

• Kaulakau — the one above, Adamas
• Saulasau — the one below, mortal
• Zeesar — the Jordan that flowed upward

They are Hebrew, from Isaiah 28:10 and 13 — qav lāqāv, ṣav lāṣāv, zeʿêr šām, “line upon line, precept upon precept, a little there” — transliterated into Greek. This identification is long established in the scholarly literature and is not an observation of this edition: it appears in G. R. S. Mead’s Thrice-Greatest Hermes (1906) and in standard reference works, and Irenaeus independently attributes Caulacau to the Basilideans.

What has happened to the verse

In Isaiah the phrase is a taunt. The prophet mocks the drunkards of Ephraim by reproducing the way their teaching sounds to them — baby-talk, deliberately close to meaningless. Here that same meaningless sound has become three words of power on which, the report says a few lines earlier, the coherence of the world depends.

Why they are not translated

The report treats them as opaque. Rendering them back into “line upon line” would destroy the fact that a scriptural phrase has been converted into names, which is the whole point of the passage. They are on the glossary’s forbidden-rendering list for that reason.

One adjacency worth noting

Isaiah 28 is quarried twice by this report. Verse 10 supplies these three words; verse 16 supplies the foundation-stone quoted at Refutatio 5.7.35 as “I set an adamant into the foundations of Zion” — with stone replaced by adamant so that it becomes the Primal Man. Whether that double use has been discussed in the literature is not known to this project, and the expected answer is that it has.

Hekhal Editorial. "Kaulakau." Hekhal: An Open Reference for Esoteric Tradition. Last modified May 2, 2026. https://hekhal.org/lexicon/kaulakau.

Hekhal Editorial. 2026. "Kaulakau." Hekhal: An Open Reference for Esoteric Tradition. https://hekhal.org/lexicon/kaulakau.

Hekhal Editorial. "Kaulakau." Hekhal: An Open Reference for Esoteric Tradition, May 2, 2026, hekhal.org/lexicon/kaulakau.

Hekhal Editorial. (2026). Kaulakau. Hekhal: An Open Reference for Esoteric Tradition. https://hekhal.org/lexicon/kaulakau

@misc{hekhal-lexicon-kaulakau-2026,
  author       = {{Hekhal Editorial}},
  title        = {{Kaulakau}},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {{Hekhal: An Open Reference for Esoteric Tradition}},
  url          = {https://hekhal.org/lexicon/kaulakau},
  urldate      = {[date accessed]}
}