Brainstorm: Ra / Mer / Isi and the Light-Water-Color-Power Web
This is raw material, not evidence. Nothing below has been fact-checked the way the working table entries were. Some of these connections are solid, documented etymology. Some are just two words that sound alike and might lead nowhere. That's the point of a brainstorm: cast wide, sort later. Anything that survives a real check moves to the working table with its actual tier attached. Nothing here should go in the book as-is.
RA (sun, light, radiance, kingship)
Strongest documented anchor: Egyptian Ra/Re, sun god, root of pharaonic divine kingship.
Candidates to chase, no filtering yet:
Ray (light beam) — English, from Old French rai, from Latin radius. Worth checking whether Latin radius itself has any deep root worth comparing to Ra, or whether this is coincidence dressed as cognate.
Radiance, radiant, radio, radiate — all from the same Latin radius family. If radius connects, this whole modern cluster rides along.
Ra as syllable inside other sun/light words worth listing and checking: Aurora (Roman dawn goddess), Amaterasu (Japanese sun goddess, "-terasu" is a real Japanese verb "to shine," worth checking if the ra syllable is doing any real work there or is coincidental within an unrelated language family).
Raphael ("God heals," Hebrew) — the "Ra" here is almost certainly not the Egyptian sun root, worth flagging as a likely false friend to check and probably discard.
Ratri — Sanskrit/Vedic goddess of night (interesting because it's the opposite of solar, worth checking whether "ra" clusters show up on both day and night goddesses, which would undercut a pure sun-root reading).
Regal, royal, reign, rex, raj (Sanskrit "king") — an entirely different, well-documented Indo-European root (*h₃rēǵ-, "to rule") that happens to start with a similar sound. Real linguists already connect raj/rex/regal to each other. Worth being honest that this family is not the same root as Egyptian Ra, even though it's tempting to fold them together. Two separate true things sitting near each other, not one thing.
Amun-Ra — worth tracing how the Ra element got grafted onto Amun over Egyptian history, since that's a documented case of one solar name absorbing an older one, potentially a model for how sound-clusters spread through political consolidation rather than pure linguistic descent.
MER (two candidate roots, keep separate)
Branch 1 — Egyptian mr(y), "beloved": candidate root behind Mary, Miriam, Maria.
Mary, Miriam, Maria, Marie, Miryam — worth mapping every attested ancient form back as far as the textual record actually goes, not just assumed.
Merit-Amun, Meritaten — real Egyptian royal names built on this root ("beloved of Amun," "beloved of Aten"), strong anchor point since these are attested, dated names, not reconstructions.
Amara, Amora (love-root names in various languages) — worth checking whether these connect to mer- at all or are a separate love-root entirely (Latin amor family).
Branch 2 — Indo-European mer-/mar-, "sea": almost certainly unrelated to Branch 1, but worth naming since it keeps showing up in the same brainstorm space.
Mare, mar, mer, marine, maritime, Marina — Latin/Romance sea-root.
Mary as "Star of the Sea" (Stella Maris), the Christian Marian title — genuinely interesting because it may represent a real historical merger of the two unrelated mer- roots (beloved-Mary and sea-mer) happening inside Christian devotional language itself, worth treating as a case study in how two false-friend roots can fuse into new meaning over time rather than assuming ancient unity.
Mermaid, Miriam-as-water-figure (Miriam's well in rabbinic tradition, a well that followed the Israelites through the wilderness) — a genuinely interesting water-and-a-woman-named-Miriam pairing worth checking on its own terms, independent of the sound question.
ISI (already your strongest documented chain)
Isis/Aset — anchor.
Isis cult spread across the Roman Empire, temples as far as Britain and the Rhineland, worth mapping against Hezingen/Yeavering geography just to see if there's any real overlap worth noting (probably coincidental timing, worth checking before using).
Isa — used as a title/name in multiple, unrelated contexts (Arabic Isa = Jesus; Sanskrit isha = lord). Worth treating these as almost certainly separate and unrelated to Isis, but noted since they keep surfacing.
Ishara — Bronze Age Near Eastern goddess of love and oaths, less famous than Ishtar, worth a real look since she's an actual attested deity with a close sound and an underexplored profile.
Color, textile, and light as a religious economy (the strongest, most defensible thread here)
This is the part of the brainstorm most likely to hold up under a real check, worth prioritizing.
Tyrian purple — murex-snail dye, eastern Mediterranean, restricted by law and cost to royalty and priesthoods across multiple cultures (Roman, Byzantine). A genuinely documented case of color-as-sacred-power.
Saffron yellow/gold — costly, associated with priestesses and temple dress in multiple documented cultures (worth checking Vestal and Buddhist monastic-robe traditions as two separate, unrelated instances of the same color-status logic, good test case for "does the pattern recur independently or is it one borrowed idea").
Kermes and cochineal red — insect-derived reds, luxury and ritual textiles, worth checking use in Mesoamerican contexts specifically since cochineal is originally Mesoamerican and could tie usefully to the Coatlicue/Tonantzin material already in the table as a genuinely separate, non-sound-based point of contact.
Indigo and blue — famously rare as a color word across ancient languages (the "no word for blue" observation from comparative linguistics), worth checking whether blue's rarity as a named color correlates or doesn't correlate with its sacred status, since that would be a real testable question, not just an association.
Gold itself as "frozen sunlight" — worth checking how many separate cultures independently describe gold this way (Egyptian, Inca, and others reportedly do), since independent convergence on the same metaphor across unconnected cultures is exactly the kind of pattern the book is built to find, and this one doesn't depend on any contested sound-cluster at all.
White specifically — worth being honest that "white as purity" is a very well-worn, almost cliché association across many cultures, which cuts both ways: it might mean it's a genuine deep pattern, or it might mean it's just an easy, obvious association that would show up anywhere and proves less than it feels like it proves. Worth flagging that ambiguity rather than resolving it in advance.
Weaving and spinning as women's sacred labor — genuinely well-documented across many independent cultures (the Fates spinning thread, Neith as weaver-goddess in Egypt, Spider Grandmother in several Indigenous American traditions, Athena's weaving contest with Arachne). This is a real, citable, cross-cultural convergence around textile-making as divine feminine labor, independent of any sound-cluster question, and may be the single strongest thread in this whole brainstorm.
Sorting questions for next pass
Which of these are sound-only (interesting resonance, unproven descent) versus which are documented cognates versus which are purely thematic/functional patterns with no sound claim at all? Right now this document mixes all three freely, on purpose, but the working table can only accept the ones that get sorted out.
Worth flagging up front which candidates are most likely to be false friends once checked (Raphael, Isa, the mer-branches) so a real check can knock them out fast rather than let them linger.
The weaving/textile-labor thread and the Tyrian purple/saffron economy thread both stand on their own without needing any sound-cluster argument at all. Those might be worth developing as their own piece regardless of what happens to ra/mer/isi.