Oars Symbolism for Downward Flow

Dr. Steven B Halls | September 2026

This material was originally posted to Facebook on 2025-07-25 - view original post.

Oars are a symbol? Yes, downward. Here is the logic. Image A and B have the name of Muhammad, the horizontal green line is a barrier line at the horizontal plane. There is an upward symbol on the left and a downward symbol on the right, which looks like a guy sitting with his back bent, (which is also a downward symbol).

Images A to H showing oars read as a downward flow symbol: the Arabic calligraphy name of Muhammad with a horizontal green barrier line at the horizontal plane, an upward symbol on the left and a downward bent-backed figure on the right, oars marked with curved-beak-birds, and Arabic calligraphy loop-backs used as oars with little etheric lines as a barrier at the bottom of a boat.

His head is a loop-back, and you've seen it on this previous post: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16gjwAn89t/ Like Allah and Ali, (also on previous posts), Muhammad also has two polarities encoded into his name. I suspected that oars were a downward flow symbol, based on things like image D having a downward animal nose, image E have people go up on ladders but not on oars, and image F and G have oars marked with curved-beak-birds, which are downward/bidirectional flow markers.

Image C and Image H are clearly using the Arabic calligraphy loop-back as oars, so I think there is now enough evidence to confirm oars as downward symbols. Who cares? Maybe just me. I have a collection of oars used in symbolism, https://ca.pinterest.com/stevenbhalls/oar/ and now we have a basis to understand them.

They also often are like "little lines", a symbol meaning etheric/higher-density, and they seem to serve as part of the "barrier" symbol of the bottom of the boat, and its interface with ocean. On Naqada II boat symbols, there are lots of little lines, https://ca.pinterest.com/stevenbhalls/flying-carpet/ and apparently everything above them (as an etheric barrier) is higher-density. Click link to see, I jokingly named the collection as flying carpet.