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WISE WISDOM LOST AT SEA DROWNED IN A SEE OF KNOWLEDGE
A MAZE IN ZAZAZA ENTERS AZAZAZ AZAZAZAZAZAZAZZAZAZAZAZAZAZA ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZ THE MAGICALALPHABET ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA 12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262625242322212019181716151413121110987654321
...
BEYOND THE VEIL ANOTHER VEIL ANOTHER VEIL BEYOND
GOD WITH US AND US WITH GOD
HALLELUJAH HURRAH FOR RAH FOR RAH HURRAH HALLELUJAH
A MAZE IN ZAZAZA ENTER AZAZAZ AZAZAZAZAZAZAZZAZAZAZAZAZAZA ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZ THE MAGICALALPHABET ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA 12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262625242322212019181716151413121110987654321
A HISTORY OF GOD Karen Armstrong 1993 The God of the Mystics Page 250 "Perhaps the most famous of the early Jewish mystical texts is the fifth century Sefer Yezirah (The Book of Creation). There is no attempt to describe the creative process realistically; the account is unashamedly symbolic and shows God creating the world by means of language as though he were writing a book. But language has been entirely transformed and the message of creation is no longer clear. Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet is given a numerical value; by combining the letters with the sacred numbers, rearranging them in endless configurations, the mystic weaned his mind away from the normal connotations of words."
THERE IS NO ATTEMPT MADE TO DESCRIBE THE CREATIVE PROCESS REALISTICALLY THE ACCOUNT IS SYMBOLIC AND SHOWS GOD CREATING THE WORLD BY MEANS OF LANGUAGE AS THOUGH WRITING A BOOK BUT LANGUAGE ENTIRELY TRANSFORMED THE MESSAGE OF CREATION IS CLEAR EACH LETTER OF THE ALPHABET IS GIVEN A NUMERICAL VALUE BY COMBINING THE LETTERS WITH THE SACRED NUMBERS REARRANGING THEM IN ENDLESS CONFIGURATIONS THE MYSTIC WEANED THE MIND AWAY FROM THE NORMAL CONNOTATIONS OF WORDS
..........
THE LIGHT IS RISING RISING IS THE LIGHT
THIS IS THE SCENE OF THE SCENE UNSEEN THE UNSEEN SEEN OF THE SCENE UNSEEN THIS IS THE SCENE
THE FAR YONDER SCRIBE AND OFT TIMES SHADOWED SUBSTANCES WATCHED IN FINE AMAZE THE ZED ALIZ ZED IN SWIFT REPEAT SCATTER STAR DUST AMONGST THE LETTERS OF THEIR PROGRESS
NUMBER 9 THE SEARCH FOR THE SIGMA CODE Cecil Balmond 1998 Cycles and Patterns Page 165 Patterns "The essence of mathematics is to look for patterns. Our minds seem to be organised to search for relationships and sequences. We look for hidden orders. These intuitions seem to be more important than the facts themselves, for there is always the thrill at finding something, a pattern, it is a discovery - what was unknown is now revealed. Imagine looking up at the stars and finding the zodiac! Searching out patterns is a pure delight. Suddenly the counters fall into place and a connection is found, not necessarily a geometric one, but a relationship between numbers, pictures of the mind, that were not obvious before. There is that excitement of finding order in something that was otherwise hidden. And there is the knowledge that a huge unseen world lurks behind the facades we see of the numbers themselves."
FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS A QUEST FOR THE BEGINNING AND THE END Graham Hancock 1995 Chapter 32 Speaking to the Unborn Page 285 "It is understandable that a huge range of myths from all over the ancient world should describe geological catastrophes in graphic detail. Mankind survived the horror of the last Ice Age, and the most plausible source for our enduring traditions of flooding and freezing, massive volcanism and devastating earthquakes is in the tumultuous upheavals unleashed during the great meltdown of 15,000 to 8000 BC. The final retreat of the ice sheets, and the consequent 300-400 foot rise in global sea levels, took place only a few thousand years before the beginning of the historical period. It is therefore not surprising that all our early civilizations should have retained vivid memories of the vast cataclysms that had terrified their forefathers. A message in the bottle of time" 'Of all the other stupendous inventions,' Galileo once remarked, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very distant either in time or place, speaking with those who are in the Indies, speaking to those who are not yet born, nor shall be this thousand or ten thousand years? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangements of two dozen little signs on paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of men.3 If the 'precessional message' identified by scholars like Santillana, von Dechend and Jane Sellers is indeed a deliberate attempt at communication by some lost civilization of antiquity, how come it wasn't just written down and left for us to find? Wouldn't that have been easier than encoding it in myths? Perhaps. "What one would look for, therefore, would be a universal language, the kind of language that would be comprehensible to any technologically advanced society in any epoch, even a thousand or ten thousand years into the future. Such languages are few and far between, but mathematics is one of them" "WRITTEN IN THE ETERNAL LANGUAGE OF MATHEMATICS"
THE LIGHT IS RISING NOW RISING IS THE LIGHT
MATHEMATICS A LANGUAGE OF LETTERS AND NUMBERS
MATHEMATICS A LANGUAGE OF LETTER AND NUMBER
The Upside Down of the Downside Up
THE DEATH OF GODS IN ANCIENT EGYPT Jane B. Sellars 1992 Page 204 "The overwhelming awe that accompanies the realization, of the measurable orderliness of the universe strikes modern man as well. Admiral Weiland E. Byrd, alone In the Antarctic for five months of polar darkness, wrote these phrases of intense feeling: Here were the imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos, harmonious and soundless. Harmony, that was it! I could feel no doubt of oneness with the universe. The conviction came that the rhythm was too orderly. too harmonious, too perfect to be a product of blind chance - that, therefore there must be purpose in the whole and that man was part of that whole and not an accidental offshoot. It was a feeling that transcended reason; that went to the heart of man's despair and found it groundless. The universe was a cosmos, not a chaos; man was as rightfully a part of that cosmos as were the day and night.10 Returning to the account of the story of Osiris, son of Cronos god of' Measurable Time, Plutarch takes, pains to remind the reader of the original Egyptian year consisting of 360 days. Phrases are used that prompt simple mental. calculations and an attention to numbers, for example, the 360-day year is described as being '12 months of 30 days each'. Then we are told that, Osiris leaves on a long journey, during which Seth, his evil brother, plots with 72 companions to slay Osiris: He also secretly obtained the measure of Osiris and made ready a chest in which to entrap him. The, interesting thing about this part of the-account is that nowhere in the original texts of the Egyptians are we told that Seth, has 72 companions. We have already been encouraged to equate Osiris with the concept of measured time; his father being Cronos. It is also an observable fact that Cronos-Saturn has the longest sidereal period of the known planets at that time, an orbit. of 30 years. Saturn is absent from a specific constellation for that length of time. A simple mathematical fact has been revealed to any that are even remotely sensitive to numbers: if you multiply 72 by 30, the years of Saturn's absence (and the mention of Osiris's absence prompts one to recall this other), the resulting product is 2,160: the number of years required, for one 30° shift, or a shift: through one complete sign of the zodiac. This number multplied by the /Page205 / 12 signs also gives 25,920. (And Plutarch has reminded us of 12) If you multiply the unusual number 72 by 360, a number that Plutarch mentions several times, the product will be 25,920, again the number of years symbolizing the ultimate rebirth. This 'Eternal Return' is the return of, say, Taurus to the position of marking the vernal equinox by 'riding in the solar bark with. Re' after having relinquished this honoured position to Aries, and subsequently to the to other zodiacal constellations. Such a return after 25,920 years is indeed a revisit to a Golden Age, golden not only because of a remarkable symmetry In the heavens, but golden because it existed before the Egyptians experienced heaven's changeability. But now to inform the reader of a fact he or she may already know. Hipparaus did: not really have the exact figures: he was a trifle off in his observations and calculations. In his published work, On the Displacement of the Solstitial and Equinoctial Signs, he gave figures of 45" to 46" a year, while the truer precessional lag along the ecliptic is about 50 seconds. The exact measurement for the lag, based on the correct annual lag of 50'274" is 1° in 71.6 years, or 360° in 25,776 years, only 144 years less than the figure of 25,920. With Hipparchus's incorrect figures a 'Great Year' takes from 28,173.9 to 28,800 years, Incorrect by a difference of from 2,397.9 years to 3,024. Since Nicholas Copernicus (AD 1473-1543) has always been credited with giving the correct numbers (although Arabic astronomer Nasir al-Din Tusi,11 born AD 1201, is known to have fixed the Precession at 50°), we may correctly ask, and with justifiable astonishment 'Just whose information was Plutarch transmitting' AN IMPORTANT POSTSCRIPT Of course, using our own notational system, all the important numbers have digits that reduce to that amazing number 9 a number that has always delighted budding mathematician. Page 206 Somewhere along the way, according to Robert Graves, 9 became the number of lunar wisdom.12 This number is found often in the mythologies of the world. the Viking god Odin hung for nine days and nights on the World Tree in order to acquire the secret of the runes, those magic symbols out of which writing and numbers grew. Only a terrible sacrifice would give away this secret, which conveyed upon its owner power and dominion over all, so Odin hung from his neck those long 9 days and nights over the 'bottomless abyss'. In the tree were 9 worlds, and another god was said to have been born of 9 mothers. Robert Graves, in his White Goddess, Is intrigued by the seemingly recurring quality of the number 72 in early myth and ritual. Graves tells his reader that 72 is always connected with the number 5, which reflects, among other things, the five Celtic dialects that he was investigating. Of course, 5 x 72= 360, 360 x 72= 25,920. Five is also the number of the planets known to the ancient world, that is, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus Mercury. Graves suggests a religious mystery bound up with two ancient Celtic 'Tree Alphabets' or cipher alphabets, which as genuine articles of Druidism were orally preserved and transmitted for centuries. He argues convincingly that the ancient poetry of Europe was ultimately based on what its composers believed to be magical principles, the rudiments of which formed a close religious secret for centuries. In time these were-garbled, discredited and forgotten. Among the many signs of the transmission of special numbers he points out that the aggregate number of letter strokes for the complete 22-letter Ogham alphabet that he is studying is 72 and that this number is the multiple of 9, 'the number of lunar wisdom'. . . . he then mentions something about 'the seventy day season during which Venus moves successively from. maximum eastern elongation 'to inferior conjunction and maximum western elongation'.13 Page 207 "...Feniusa Farsa, Graves equates this hero with Dionysus Farsa has 72 assistants who helped him master the 72 languages created at the confusion of Babel, the tower of which is said to be built of 9 different materials We are also reminded of the miraculous translation into Greek of the Five Books of Moses that was done by 72 scholars working for 72 days, Although the symbol for the Septuagint is LXX, legend, according to the fictional letter of Aristeas, records 72. The translation was done for Ptolemy Philadelphus (c.250 BC), by Hellenistic Jews, possibly from Alexandra.14 Graves did not know why this number was necessary, but he points out that he understands Frazer's Golden Bough to be a a book hinting that 'the secret involves the truth that the Christian dogma, and rituals, are the refinement of a great body of primitive beliefs, and that the only original element in Christianity- is the personality of Christ.15 Frances A. Yates, historian of Renaissance hermetisma tells, us the cabala had 72 angels through which the sephiroth (the powers of God) are believed to be approached, and further, she supplies the information that although the Cabala supplied a set of 48 conclusions purporting to confirm the Christian religion from the foundation of ancient wisdom, Pico Della Mirandola, a Renaissance magus, introduced instead 72, which were his 'own opinion' of the correct number. Yates writes, 'It is no accident there are seventy-two of Pico's Cabalist conclusions, for the conclusion shows that he knew something of the mystery of the Name of God with seventy-two letters.'16 In Hamlet's Mill de Santillarta adds the facts that 432,000 is the number of syllables in the Rig-Veda, which when multiplied by the soss (60) gives 25,920" (The reader is forgiven for a bit of laughter at this point) Thee Bible has not escaped his pursuit. A prominent Assyriologist of the last century insisted that the total of the years recounted Joseph Campbell discerns the secret in the date set for the coming of Patrick to Ireland. Myth-gives this date-as.- the interest- Whatever one may think-of some of these number coincidences, it becomes. difficult to escape the suspicion that many signs (number and otherwise) -indicate that early man observed the results.. of the movement of Precession . and that the-.transmission of this information was .considered of prime importance. 'With the awareness of the phenomenon, observers would certainly have tried for its measure, and such an endeavour would But one last word about mankind's romance with number coincidences.The antagonist in John Updike's novel, Roger's Version, is a computer hacker, who, convinced.,that scientific evidence of God's existence is accumulating, endeavours to prove it by feeding -all the available scientific information. into a comuter. In his search for God 'breaking, through', he has become fascinated by certain numbers that have continually been cropping up. He explains them excitedly as 'the terms of Creation': "...after a while I noticed that all over the sheet there seemed to hit these twenty-fours Jumping out at me. Two four; two,four.Planck time, for instance, divided by the radiation constant yields a figure near eight times ten again to the negative twenty-fourth, and the permittivity of free space, or electric constant, into the Bohr radiusekla almost exactly six times ten to the negative twenty-fourth. On positive side, the electromagnetic line-structure constant times Hubble radius - that is, the size of the universe as we now perceive it gives us something quite close to ten to the twenty-fourth, and the
strong-force constant times the charge on the proton produces two point four times ten to the negative eighteenth, for another I began to circle twenty-four wherever it appeared on the Printout here' - he held it up. his piece of striped and striped wallpaper, decorated / Page 209 /
with a number of scarlet circles - 'you can see it's more than random.'19 So much for any scorn directed to ancient man's fascination with number coincidences. That fascination is alive and well, Just a bit more incomprehensible"
All about the planets in our Solar System. The nine planets that orbit the sun are (in order from the sun): Mercury,Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, ... www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/astronomy/planets Our solar system consists of the sun, eight planets, moons, dwarf planets, an asteroid belt, comets, meteors, and others. The sun is the center of our solar system; the planets, their moons, the asteroids, comets, and other rocks and gas all orbit the sun.The nine planets that orbit the sun are (in order from the sun): Mercury,Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto (a dwarf planet). A belt of asteroids (minor planets made of rock and metal) lies between Mars and Jupiter. These objects all orbit the sun in roughly circular orbits that lie in the same plane, the ecliptic (Pluto is an exception; it has an elliptical orbit tilted over 17° from the ecliptic).
THE LIGHT IS RISING NOW RISING IS THE LIGHT
Thomas Mann 1875 - 1955 Page 660 "In the evening, on the stroke of ten, they gathered privily, and in whispers mustered the apparatus Hermine had provided, consisting of a medium-sized round table without a cloth, placed in the centre of the room, with a wine glass upside-down upon it, the foot in the air. "Round the edge of the table, at regular intervals, were placed twenty-six little bone counters, each with a letter of the alphabet written on it in pen and ink." "ROUND THE EDGE OF THE TABLE, AT REGULAR INTERVALS, WERE PLACED TWENTY-SIX LITTLE BONE COUNTERS. EACH WITH A LETTER OF THE ALPHABET WRITTEN ON IT IN PEN AND INK."
Page 287
Page 287
"BY WRITING THE 26 LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET IN A CERTAIN ORDER ONE MAY PUT DOWN ALMOST ANY MESSAGE" (THIS BOOK IS WRITTEN WITH THE SAME LETTERS AS THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA AND WINNIE THE POOH, ONLY THE ORDER OF THE LETTERS DIFFERS). IN THE SAME WAY NATURE IS ABLE TO CONVEY WITH HER LANGUAGE HOW A CELL AND A WHOLE ORGANISM IS TO BE CONSTRUCTED AND HOW IT IS TO FUNCTION. NATURE HAS SUCCEEDED BETTER THAN WE HUMANS; FOR THE GENETIC CODE THERE IS ONLY ONE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE WHICH IS THE SAME IN A MAN, A BEAN PLANT AND A BACTERIUM. 1 000 000 000 'LETTERS'."
AND DNA AND DNA AND DNA AND DNA AND DNA AND DNA AND DNA AND DNA AND DNA
I ME
THE TIME IS COMING AND NOW IS
LOOK AT THE 5FIVE5S LOOK AT THE 5FIVE5S LOOK AT THE 5FIVE5S THE 5FIVE5S THE 5FIVE5S
JULY 2011 JULY
LOOK ABROAD THROUGH NATURE'S RANGE NATURE'S MIGHTY LAW IS CHANGE
OSIRIS THAT SON SETS THAT SON SETS THAT SON OSIRIS THAT SON
OSIRIS THAT SON SETS THAT SON SETS THAT SON OSIRIS THAT SON
SO RISES THAT SUN SO SETS THAT SUN SO SETS THAT SUN SO RISES THAT SUN
SO RISES THAT SUN SO SETS THAT SUN SO SETS THAT SUN SO RISES THAT SUN
SO RISES THAT SON SO SETS THAT SON SO SETS THAT SON SO RISES THAT SON
SO IRIS OSIRIS ISIS OSIRIS IRIS SO
ANUBIS A NUMBER IS
SO I RISE SO I SET SO I SET SO I RISE
SET OSIRIS ISIS OSIRIS SET SETS ARISES SETS SO IRIS OSIRIS IRIS SO
THE HOURS OF HORUS
THIS IS THE SEEN OF THE SCENE UNSEEN THE UNSEEN SEEN OF THE SCENE UNSEEN THIS IS THE SCENE
THE HOURS OF HORUS IS
ENNEAD AND ENE AND ENNEAD ENNEAD AND 555 AND ENNEAD ENNEAD AND ENE AND ENNEAD
ENTERS THE E THE E ENTERS ENTERS THE FIVE THE FIVE ENTERS
Word Records > Longest Words This is the longest word in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Interestingly the most common letter in English, E, does not appear in this ...
What is the most common letter? | Answerbag What is the most common letter? the bills they keep sending me. ... Im Alec. The most common letters in the English language are, in order, ETAOINSHRDLU. ...
Herbert S. Zim, in his classic introductory cryptography text "Codes and Secret Writing", gives the English letter frequency sequence as "ETAON RISHD LFCMU GYPWB VKXJQ Z", the most common letter pairs as "TH HE AN RE ER IN ON AT ND ST ES EN OF TE ED OR TI HI AS TO", and the most common doubled letters as "LL EE SS OO TT FF RR NN PP CC".[1] "ETAON RISHD LFCMU GYPWB VKXJQ Z"
THEN WE ALL STARTED SINGING LOOK AT THE FIVES LOOK AT THE FIVES LOOK AT THE FIVES THE FIVES THE FIVES AND THEN LO AND BEHOLD YOU GOT THE MESSAGE AND YOU STARTED TO LAUGH AND SING AND SUDDENLY OUT OF NOTHINGNESS WOWEEWOW WE WERE ALL LAUGHING SINGING AND DANCING WOW O WOW NOW WE KNOW KNOW WE NOW IF THAT ISN'T INNER MAGIC FOR YOU WHAT IS
John Michell 1983 Page 144 "The problem is to establish the ideas and intentions of the builders. Stecchini has suggested that the apex was designed to be slightly off-centre with each base side of slightly different length, and with different angles of slope, thus providing four base-height relationships, each exhibiting a particular mathematical formula. By this means the functions of both..." Pi and the ratio of the 'golden section' "...could be demonstrated together in the one structure. In addition, there was another device by which the Egyptians were able to incorporate different mathematical expressions within a unified nework. That device was the pyramidion, a miniature form of the Pyramid itself, which provided its apex. Other pyramids and obelisks Egypt are known to have been topped by a pyramidion, made of gold or some other metal, which glowed in the sun. Tompkins and Stechini quote a reference by a second-century BC Greek writer, Agatharchides of Cnidus, to a pyramidion at the apex of the Great Pyramid, which could be included in calculations or omitted, thus providing a variety of mathematical demonstrations." Page 149 "...If, as its legend states, the Pyramid was designed to monumentalize the entire code of ancient scientific knowledge, its makers would have needed to grade the pyramidion by scoring it with horizontal lines to represent different versions of the height or even by separating it into detachable sections. The image here is of an inscribed marble capstone, its tip formed of another, miniature pyramid, perhap made of some other material. This, and perhaps other sections of the upper part of the pyramidion, could be removed or put in place as required. But why should such a thing ever in practice be required, and why should such trouble be taken over capstone, pyramidions and minute rariations of length? These are questions which need to be discussed in relation to the Pyramid's practical function. The Golden Tip As the literature of the Pyramid measurers shows, many large volumes can be filled with estimates of the Pyramid's external and internal iimensions and speculations about their geodetic, astronomical and prophetic symbolism. The study is so obsessively fascinating that researchers are inclined to lose sight of the most important question of why the whole vast edifice was built. There is no doubt that within the Pyramid's fabric are encoded many scientific laws and formulas, but the preservation of such knowledge can scarcely have been the only motive of its builders. Its numerical properties must surely have had some practical purpose in relation to the form of science which the Pyramid was designed to serve. There has been much talk in recent years of 'pyramid power' and the possible function of the Great Pyramid as an accumulator and trans-former of cosmic energies. The idea certainly accords with the :raditional use of the Pyramid in connection with initiation, magic and nysticism, and it is supported by the occurrence of symbolic or 'magical' number series in its dimensions. The use of symbolic numbers in ancient temples was to procure the invocation of the god or aspect of cosmic energy which those numbers symbolized. Pyramid investigators ire confronted with an instrument designed for a type of science which today is no longer recognized. It is not, however, beyond recovery, for its records are preserved in the language of number, built into the Pyramid's dimensions, and these provide certain clues to the nature of the Pyramid's original function. All Pyramid measurers, and all who study its dimensions, purpose or any of its other aspects, find themselves inexorably drawn to the matter of its apex. Many of the clues within the Pyramid's geometry / Page 150 / and numbets point towards it, and several investigators have expressed the feeling that these clues were deliberately contrived, as if the builders were concerned to leave a record of their scientific code in monumental form, to be interpreted and put to use again by some future generation. Peter Lemesurier, the latest and most convincing of the interpreters of Pyramid chronologies and. prophecy, gives detailed reasons in his Great Pyramid Decoded for claiming that the historical outline of the six thousand years following its building in 2623 BC is recorded in the dimensions of the Pyramid's interior spaces. They are said to foretell the collapse of the present civilization in about the year AD 2004, followed some thirty years later by the Messianic return and the birth of a new order. That, according to other readers of Pyramid prophecy, is the time when the 'stone that the builders rejected', the missing capstone on the Pyramid, will be restored to the apex, reactivating the entire structure in accordance with its original purpose..." 2 x 6 x 2 x 3 = 72 Page 150 "Were it not for the common but inappropriate use of metric units in publishing details of antique weights, that feature would be more generally recognized."
"A series of clues to the composition of the final pyramidion at the very apex of the Pyramid begins with an observation in A.E. Berriman's Historical Metrology on the antiquity of the British or Imperial inch. There are a number of old Egyptian weights in the British Museum, and others from Greece and Babylon, whose standard of reference has proved to be the cubic inch of gold. Were it not for the common but inappropriate use of metric units in publishing details of antique weights, that feature would be more generally recognized. Five is the number chiefly associated with the pyramid form; which has five faces and five corners, and if 5 cubic inches of solid gold are modelled into the shape of a miniature Great Pyramid, the height of that model proves to be the very interesting measure of 0.152064 ft., which is a tenth part of the Greek cubit (1.52064 ft.), the unit in terms of which / . 152 ft A cubic inch of gold, actual size, in pyramid form. Height = one tenthof a Greek cubit. Page 151 / the area of the Pyramid's side measures 100,000 square cubits. That this small gold pyramidion was an integral part of the Pyramid's design is evident from the figures. Without it the dimensions are not quite complete, for if it were removed, the area of the Pyramid's side would be 99999.99 square cubits only. With the 5 cubic inches of gold pyramidion in place, the figure of 100,000 square cubits represents the total area..."
Without it the dimensions are not quite complete, for if it were removed, the area of the Pyramid's side would be 99999.99 square cubits only." "Without it the dimensions are not quite complete, for if it were removed, the area of the Pyramid's side would be 99999.99 square cubits only." "for if it were removed, the area of the Pyramid's side would be 99999.99 square cubits only." "the Pyramid's side would be 99999.99"
9999999
THE NEW VIEW OVER ATLANTIS John Michell 1983 Page 150 "A series of clues to the composition of the final pyramidion at the very apex of the Pyramid begins with an observation in A.E. Berriman's Historical Metrology on the antiquity of the British or Imperial inch. There are a number of old Egyptian weights in the British Museum, and others from Greece and Babylon, whose standard of reference has proved to be the cubic inch of gold. Were it not for the common but inappropriate use of metric units in publishing details of antique weights, that feature would be more generally recognized. Five is the number chiefly associated with the pyramid form; which has five faces and five corners, PYRAMID = 86 = PYRAMID PYRAMID = 41 = PYRAMID PYRAMID = 5 = PYRAMID Five is the number chiefly associated with the pyramid form; which has five faces and five corners,
PYRAMID P MARY ID ID P MARY PYRAMID Y RAM MARY MARY Y RAM MARRY MARY MARY MARRY P MARY ID PYRAMID PYRAMID ID MARY P
KEEPER OF GENESIS A QUEST FOR THE HIDDEN LEGACY OF MANKIND Robert Bauval Graham Hancock 1996 Page 196 Duality The Splendid Place of the 'First Time' We left the cosmic Horus-King standing in the sky with the solar disc between the 'paws' of the celestial lion, the constellation of Leo - on the spot marked by the star Regulus, In the Pyramid Age Regulus rose at approximately 28 degrees north of due east.59 It is from this spot therefore that the Horus-King in the sky must somehow travel - on one of the 'roads'to Rostau - to reach Orion's belt. Now we transpose again to the Horus-King in his earthly form at Giza, standing between the paws of the great Sphinx. It is the moment of dawn on the summer solstice in the epoch of 2500 BC, with Leo rising at 28 degrees north of due east, and we immediately notice that something is wrong with the sky-ground pattern. The Sphinx gazes due east, i.e. he does not gaze at Leo, his celestial counterpart. And the causeway connecting the central Pyramid to the Sphinx complex is directed 14 degrees south of due east - i.e. far to the right of the spot where the cosmic Horns-King is supposedly at his station between the paws of Leo and ready to travel to Rostau. So why is the sky-image in the 'wrong place' on the eastern horizon? Or to express the problem the right way round, and in the correct dualistic terminology, why is Hor-em-Akhet, Horus-in-the Horizon .: i.e, the Great Sphinx - not in alignment with Horakhti, Horns-of-the-Horizon, i.e.rhe constellation of Leo? Why, too, is the causeway of the Sphinx not-directed to the rising sun was to 'link-up' the Horus-King with his cosmic solar counterpart? There is, it seems, a curious 'dislocation' between the ground and the sky at the summer solstice in the epoch of 2500 BC. Moreover, as the reader will recall from Chapter 8, this sense of the entire arrangement being out of kilter is not confined to the Sphinx and Leo in that epoch but involves the three great Pyramids of Giza as well. It may be the case that the solution to the riddle has all along been staring us in the face. Inscribed on the granite stela that the Sphinx holds between its own heavily eroded paws - a stela that was placed there in honour of Thutmosis IV, a mighty Horus-King of Egypt - we read the following impressive royal titulary: Page 197 The Majesty of Horus, Mighty Bull Begetting Radiance, Favourite of the Two Goddesses, Enduring in Kingship like Atum, Golden Horus, Mighty of Sword, Repelling the Nine Bows; King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Son of Re, Thutmosis ... given life, stability, satisfaction ... for ever. Live the Good God, Son of Atum, Protector of Horakhti, Living Image of the All-Lord, Sovereign ... , beautiful of Face like His Father, who came forth equipped with the form of Horus upon him ... Son of Atum, of his body, Thutmosis ... Heir of Horus Upon His Throne .. :60 Does this sound like a man who did not have a due, as some Egyptologists suggest," as to what the great Sphinx and the other monuments of Giza really represented? Surely not. So what, then, did the majestic Horus-King declare this sacred domain to be?"
ATUM 1234 ATUM HORUS = 9 = HORUS HORAKHTI = 9 = HORAKHTI THUTMOSIS = 9 =THUTMOSIS SPHINX = 9 = SPHINX THE LIONS LOINS Page 198 Duality, In one simple, powerful phrase, as the reader.will recall he stated 'that it was 'The Splendid Place of the "FirstTime" ' 62 Is it not likely, when he uttered these words; that Thutmosis, 'Heir of Horus Upon His Throne' was repeating what every Horus-King before him had dedared the Giza plateau to be? Is it not likely that he called it 'The Splendid Place of the "FirstTime" because that was exactly what it was remembered to be in traditions that 'had been handed down from remotest, almost incomprehensible, antiquity? Could this be why the sky of 2500 BC seems to be so badly out of kilter, somehow skewed and twisted, i.e. 'in the wrong place'? Could it be not so much in the wrong place as at the wrong time? Should we set our computer to search for another-time that might match the monuments to the sky, a time long before Thutmosis, long before Khafre and Khufu, the 'time' when Osiris established his 'kingdom on earth - in other words, the 'FirstTime'? When was the 'FirstTime'?
A FIRE PYRE A PYRE FIRE FUNERAL REAL FUN FUN REAL FUNERAL
I ME FIRE PYRE FIRE PYRE AMID PYRAMID AMID PYRE
THE PATH OF PTAH
KEEPER OF GENESIS A QUEST FOR THE HIDDEN LEGACY OF MANKIND Robert Bauval Graham Hancock1996 Chapter 14 Space-Time Co-ordinates Becoming equipped Page 232 The Utterances conventionly numbered 471, 472 and 473 in the" ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts contain information of an extraordinary nature. In view of the importance of this information,we set it out in full below: I am the essence of a god, the son of'a god, the messenger of a god. [says the Horus-King]. The Followers of Horus cleanse me, they bathe me, they dry me, they recite for me the Spell [formula] for Him who is on the Rightway, they recite for me the Spell of Him who Ascends, and I ascend to the sky. I will go aboard this-Bark of Re [the Solar Bark] ... Every god will /Page 233/ rejoice at meeting, me as they rejoice at meeting Re [the-sun] when he ascends from the eastern side of the sky inpeace, in peace. The sky quivers, the earth quakes before me, for I am a magician, I possess magic . . . I have come that I may glorify Orion; that I may set Osiris at the head, that I may set the gods upon their thrones. O Mahaf, Bull of the gods [Taurus-Hyades], bring me this [solar bark] and set me on yonder side . . . The reed-floats of the sky are set down for me by the day-bark that I [the solar Horus-King] may go up to them to Re at the Horizon. The reed floats of the sky are brought down to me by the night bark that I may go up on them to Horakhti at the Horizon. I go up to the eastern side of the sky where the gods are born, and I am born as Horus, as Him of the Horizon . . . I have found the Akhus with their mouths equipped . . . 'Who are you?' say they [the Akhus], with their mouths equipped. I am an Akhu with my mouth equipped,' 'How has this happened to you,' say they, the Akhus with-their with their mouths equipped, 'that you have come to-this place more noble than any place?' 'I have come to this place more noble than any place because: The reed-floats of the sky were set down- for Re [the sun disc and the emblem of the Horus- King] that Re might-cross [the Milky Way] on them to Horakhti at the Horizon . . . '8 These Utterances appear to describe an important part of the HorusKing's initiatory journey - an ordeal of questions and answers based on astronomical science - wrapped.up in esoteric symbols. The inquisitors are the 'Followers of Horus', also .known as the Akhus (the 'Venerables', the 'Shining Ones', the 'Transfigured Spirits', etc., etc.). Moreover, as we would expect, the Horus-Kings cosmic journey begins in the Taurus-Hyades region of the sky, on the right bank of the Milky Way and-proceeds along the ecliptic path to end at Leo i.e. 'Horakhti', at the horizon. Here, at this place more noble than any place', the Akhus greet him - indeed he claims to have become an Akhu himself - and give him the final, instructions or directions that he will need to complete his quest. What we have to consider is the possibility that these, final instructions might somehow have 'equipped' the Horus-King 'to make the necessary journey back in time, to the 'First Time' and-into the cosmic Kingdom of Osiris when sky and ground were united in perfect harmony."
WHO ARE YOU SAY THEY THE AKHUS WITH THEIR MOUTH EQUIPPED ? I AM AN AKHU WITH MY MOUTH EQUIPPED
Page 219 "Akhu, meaning variously, the'Shining Ones', the 'Star people' or the 'Venerables'. In this way they will lead us back to the trail of the 'Followers of Horus' and to the notion that for thousands of years - spanning both the prehistoric and the historic periods - the members of a hidden academy may have been at work behind the scenes in Egypt, observing the stars with scientific rigour and manipulating men and events according to a celestial timetable . . ." Page 244 Secret spell We suspect that for thousands of years before the Pyramid Age, hundreds of generations of Heliopolitan astronomer priests had kept the constellation of' Orion continuously under observation, paying particular attention to its place of meridian-transit - i.e. the altitude above the horizon at which it crossed the celestial meridian. We think that careful records were kept, perhaps written, perhaps orally encoded in the ancient 'mythological' language of precessional astronomy.20 And we suppose that note was taken of Orion's slow precessional drift - the effect of which was that the constellation would have seemed to be slowly drifting northwards along the west 'bank' of the Milky Way. It is our hypothesis that the mythical image of the vast.body of Osiris slowly being.carried to the north, 'i.e.'drifting' on the waters of the Nile, is a specific piece of astronomical terminology coined to describe the long-terrn changes being effected' by precession in Orion's celestial, 'address'. In the Mephite Theology.as the reader will recall, this drift was depicted as havig commenced in the south, symbolically called Abydos (in archaeological 'terms the. most southerly 'shrine' of Osiris), and to have carried the 'body' of'the dead god to a point in the north symbolically called Sokar, i.e. the Memphite necropolis (the most northerly shrine: of Osiris), As we saw in Part III, the Shabaka Texts tell Us that when he reached this point: Osiris was drowned in his water. Isis and Nepthys looked out, beheld him, and attended to him, Horus quickly commanded Isis and Nepthys to grasp Osiris and prevent his [submerging]. They heeded in time and brought him to land. He entered the hidden portals in the glory of the Lords of Eternity. Thus Osiris came.into.the earth at the Royal Fortress [Memphisj, to the north 'Of the land to which he had come [Abydos].21. In the light of what we now know it is hard to-imagine that the reference to Osiris coming 'into the earth' (or down to earth?) could signify anything other than the physical construction of the body of Osiris on the ground' on the west banks of the Nile - in the form of the great Pyramid-fields of the sprawling Memphite necropolis. Since Osiris is Orion the desire to achieve such an effect would more than adequately explain why the, three Pyramids of Giza should have been arranged in the pattern of.the three stars of Orion's belt. Moreover, since we know that the stated goal of the Horus-King's quest was not only to find the astral 'body' of Osiris but to find it as it was in the 'First Time', we should not be .surprised by the fact that the Pyramids, as we saw in Part I, are set out on the ground in the pattern /Page246/that they made at the beginning (i.e. 'southernmost point') of that constellation's upward (i.e. 'northerly') precessional half-cycle. So we wonder whether it is possible that the quest of the Horus King might have had as its ultimate objective the acquisition of knowledge concerning the 'First Time' - perhaps even the acquisition of specific knowledge from that remote epoch when the gods had walked the earth? Several passages in the Pyramid Texts invite such speculation, For example, we.are told that the Horus-King must 'travel upstream' - i.e. must push against the natural drift of 'time' - in order to reach Orion-Osiris in his proper 'First Time' setting: Betake yourself to the Waterway, fare upstream [south], travel about Abydos ill this spirit-form of yours which the gods command to belong to you; may a stairway I road] to the Duat be set up for you to the Place Where Orion Is _ . . . 22 They have found Osiris ... 'When his name became Sokar' [Memphite necropolis).. :. Wake up [Osiris] for Horus . . . raise yourself . .. fare southward [upstream] to the lake, cross over the sea [sky'], for you are he-who stands untiring in the midst of Abydos ... 23 Betake 'yourself to- the Waterway, fare upstream . . .traverse Abydos. The celestial portal to the Horizon is open to you ... may you remove yourself to the sky, for the roads of the celestial expanses which lead up to Horus are cleaned for you . . . for you have traversed. the Winding Waterway [Milky Way] which is in the north of the sky as a star crossing the sea which is beneath the sky _ The Duat has grasped your hand at the Place Where Orion Is . . . 24 Likewise there is a striking passage in the Coffin Texts which refers to some secret 'spell-or formula to allow the deceased' to use the 'path of Rostau' on the land-and in the sky (i.e. the path to the. Giza necropolis on land and to Orion's belt in the sky) in order to 'go down to any sky he wishes to go down to' . . . 26 I have passed on the path of Rostau, whether on water or on land, and these are the paths of Osiris [Orion], they are in the limit of the sky: As for him who knows the spell [formula] for going down into them, he himself is a god in the suite of Thoth [meaning he is as wise as Thoth, 'the controller of the stars'"] [and] he will go down-to any sky he wishes to go down to . . . 26 Page 247 Special numbers We suspect that the phrase to 'go down to any sky' suggests an awareness - and recording - of precessionally induced changes in the positions of the stars over long "periods of time. And we also note its implication that if the chosen initiate was equipped with the correct numerical spell then he would be able to work out - and visualize the correct positions of the stars in any epoch of his choosing, past or future. Once again Sellers stands out amongst Egyptologists for being the first to have entertained such apparently outlandish notions. 'It is possible', she writes, 'that early man encoded in his myths special numbers; numbers that seemed to reveal to initiates an amazing knowledge of the movement of the celestial spheres.' 27· Such numbers, she argues, appear to have been derived from a sustained, scientific study of the cycle of precession and a measurement of its rate and, puzzlingly, turn out to be extremely 'close to the calculations made with today's sophisticated procedures'. Intriguingly, too, there is evidence not only 'that these calculations were made, and conclusions drawn', but.alsothat'they were transmitted to others by secret encoding that was accessible only to an elite few':28 In short, Sellers concludes, 'ancient man Calculated a special number that he believed would bring this threatening cycle [of precession] back to its starting point .. .' 29 The 'special number' to which Sellers is referring to is 25,920 (and multiples and divisions of it) and thus represents the duration, in solar years, of a full precessional cycle or 'Great Year'.30 She shows how it can be derived from a variety of simple combinations of other numbers - 5, 12, 36, 72, 360, 432, 2160, etc., etc. - all of which are in turn derived from precise observations of precession. Most crucially of all, she shows that this peculiar sequence of numbers occurs in the ancient Egyptian myth of Osiris where, notably '72 conspirators' are said to have been-involved with Seth in the murder of the God-King.3' As was shown in Fingerprints of the Gods; the sun's perceived motion through the signs of the zodiac at the vernal equinox proceeds at the rate of one degree every seventy-two years. From this it follows that a movement of the vernal point through 30 degrees will take 2I60 /Page 248/ years to complete, 60 degrees will take 4320 years, and a full 360- degree cycle will require 25,920 years." Curiously enough, as the reader will recall from Part I, the Great Pyramid itself incorporates a record of these precessional numbers - since its key dimensions (its height and the perimeter of its base) appear to have been designed as a mathematical model of the earth's polar radius and equatorial circumference on a scale of 1:43,200. The number 43,200 is, of course, exactly 600 times 72. What we have in - this remarkable monument, therefore, is not just a scale model of a hemisphere of the earth but also one in which the scale involved incorporates a 'special number' derived from one of the key planetary motions of the earth itself - i.e. the rate of its axial precession. In short it seems that secret knowledge is indeed available in the myth of Osiris and in the dimensions of the Great Pyramid. With this secret knowledge, If we wanted to fix a specific date- say 1008 years in the future - and communicateit to other initiates, then we could do so with the special number' 14 (72 x l4 = I008).We would also have to specify the 'zero point' from which they were to make their calculations - i.e the present epoch - and this might be done with some kind of symbolic or mathematical marker to indicate where the vernal point presently is, i.e. moving out.of Pisces and into Aquarius. A similar exercise could likewise be carried out in reverse. By following the 'eastwards' direction along the ecliptic path we can 'find' (calculate, work out) where the vernal point was at any epoch in the past. Thus if today we wished to use the precessional code to direct attention towards the Pyramid' Age we would need to confide to other initiates the 'special number' of 62.5 (72 x 62.5 = 4500 years ago = approximately 2500 BC). Again, we could rule out any ambiguity as to the zero date from which the calculations were to be made if we could find a way to indicate the present position of the vernal point. We have seen that this is what Sneferu appears to have done with the two Pyramids at Dahshur, which map the two sides of the head of the celestial bull - the 'address' of the vernal point in his epoch. And in a sense, though with a great deal more specificity and precision, this could also be exactly what the builders of the Great Pyramid were doing when they deliberately targeted the southern shafts of the King's and Queen's Chambers on the meridian-transits of such /Page 249/ significant stars as Orion and Sirius in the epoch of 2500 BC.To be clear about this, it seems to us well worth investigating the possibility, that by setting up such obvious and precise 'time markers' they. were trying to provide an unambiguous zero point - circa 2500 BC .; for calculations that could only be undertaken by initiates steeped in the mysteries of precession, who were equipped by their training to draw out the hidden portents concealed in certain 'special numbers'. We note in passing' that if the Horus-King could have' been provided with the 'special number' III.III, and had used it in the way described above; it would have led him back to (72 x III.III years =) 7,999.99 years before the specified 'ground zero', i.e. to almost exactly 8000 years before 2500 BC - in short, to 10,500 BC . We know this seems like wishful numerology of the worst sort - i.e, 'factoring in' an arbitrary.value to a set of calculations so as to procure - spurious 'corroboration' for a specific 'desired date (in 'this case the date of 10,500 BC, twelve and a half thousand years before the present, that we have already highlighted in Chapter 3 in connection with the Sphinx and the Pyramids of Giza). The problem, however, is tliat the number III.III may well not be anarbitrary value . At any rate, it has long been recognized that the main numerical factor in the design of the Great Pyramid, and indeed of the Giza necropolis as a whole, is the prime number II - a prime number being one that is only divisible by itself to produce the whole number I. Thus II .divided by II, i.e. the ratio II:II, produces the whole number I (while II divided by anything else," i.e. any other ratio, would, of neccessity, generate a fraction). What is intriguing is the way that the architecture of the Great Pyramid responds to the number rr when it is divided, or multiplied, by other whole numbers. The reader will recall, for example, that its side length of just over 755 feet is equivalent to 440 Egyptian royal cubits - i.e. II times 40 cubits." In addition, its height-to-base ratio is , 7:II.34 The slope ratio of its sides is 14:11 (tan 51 degrees 50').35 And the slope ratio of the southern shaft of the King's Chamber - the shaft that was targeted on Orion's belt in ,2500 BC - is II:II (tan 45 degrees)." Arguably, therefore, the ratio II:II, which integrates with our /Page 250/ 'special number' III.III, could be considered as a sort of mathemati cal key, or 'stargate' to Orion's belt, Moreover,as"we shall see, a movement of III.III degrees 'backwards 'along the ecliptic from 'ground-zero' at the Hyades-Taurus, the head of the celestial bull, would place the vernal point 'underneath' the cosmic lion. Is it not precisely such a location, underneath the Great Sphinx, that the Horus-King is urged to investigate as he stands between its paws 'with his mouth equipped' and faces the questions of the Akhus whose initiations have led' him this far? Indeed, does it not seem probable that the 'quest-journey' devised by the 'Followers of 'Horus' was carefully structured so as to sharpen the mind of the initiate by requiring him to piece together all the clues himself until he finally arrived at the-realization that somewhere underneath the Great Sphinx of Giza was something,(written or pictorial records, artefacts, maps.astronomical charts) that touched on 'the knowledge of a divine origin', that was of 'irnmense importance, and that had been concealed there since the 'First Time'? ,In consideririg such questions, we are reminded of the Hermetic doctrines which transmit a tradition of the wisdom god Thoth who was said to have 'succeeded in understanding the mysteries of the heavens [and to have] revealed them by inscribing them-in sacred books' which he "then hid here on earth, intending that: they should be searched for by future generations but "found only by the fully worthy'37 Do the 'sacred books of 'Thoth', or their equivalent, still lie in the bedrock beneath the Great Sphinx of Giza, and do the 'fuIly worthy' still seek them there? Seekers after truth Other questions, too, have been raised implicitly and explicitly in the foregoing chapters: I Were the Great Sphinx and the great Pyramids of Giza designed to serve as parts of-an immense three-dimensional 'model' of the sky of the 'First Time'? 2 Could other features of the necropolis also be part of this model? 3 If so, then has enough survived for us to compare the model with computer simulations of the skies above Giza in previous epochs /Page 251/ and thus. arrive at an accurate archaeoastronomical dating for the 'First Time', i.e. for.the true .'genesis'of the extraordinary civilization of Egypt? By looking at-simulations of the ancient skies would we not, to use the language of the Egyptian funerary texts, be 'going down to any sky we wished to go down to'? , Is it an accident that so many of these iexts~have survived for thousands of years, or could their compilers have intended them to survive and carefully designed them in such a way that human nature would ensure their copying and recopying down the ages (a process that has been promiscuously resumed 'in the last century and.a half since the decipherment of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, with the Coffin Texts, the Pyramid Texts, the Book of the Dead, etc., etc., now translated and reprinted in dozens of modern languages and editions - and even available on CD-ROM)? 6 In other words, is it not possible in our readingsof the texts, in our analysis of the rituals to which they were linked, that. we have stumbled upon a message of primordial antiquity that was composed not: just for the Pyramid Age, and not just for the Horns-Kings of ancient Egypt, but for all 'seekers after the truth' from any culture, in any epoch, who might-be 'equipped' to put texts and monuments together and to view the skies of former times? Page 252 (number omitted) Chapter 16 Message in a Bottle? 'We have reached this fascinating point in our evolution. . . we have reached the time when we know we can talk to each other across the distances between 'the stars . . . ' Dr John Billingham, NASA Ames Research Center, 1995 Together with the ancient-texts and rituals that are linked to them, could the vast monuments of the Giza necropolis have been designed to transmit a message from one culture to another - a message not across space but across time? Egyptologists reply to-such questions by rolling their eyes and hooting derisively. Indeed they would not be 'Egyptologists' (or at any rate they could not long remain within that profession) if they reacted with anything other than scorn and disbelief to suggestions that the necropolis might be more than a cemetery, that the Great Sphinx might significantly predate the epoch of 2500 BC, and that the Pyramids might not be just 'royal tombs'. By the same token, no selfrespecting Egyptologist 'would be prepared to consider, even for a moment, the outlandish possibility that some sort of mysterious 'message" might have been encoded into the monuments. So whom should we turn to for advice when confronted by what we suspect may be a message from a civilization so far distant from us in time as to be almost unknowable? . Anti-cipher The only scientists actively working on such problems today are those involved in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligencec- SETI for /Page253/ short . They endlessly sweep the heavens.for messages from distant civilizations and they have therefore naturally had to give some thought to what might happen if they ever did identify such, a message. According to Dr Philip Morisson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: To begin with we would know very.little about it. If we received it we would not understand what we're getting. But we would have an unmistakable signal full of structure, full of challenge. The best people would try to decode it, and it will be easy to do because those who have constructed it would have made it easy to decode, otherwise there's no point. This is anti-cryptography: 'I want to make a message for you, who never got in touch with any symbols of mine. no key no clue, nevertheless you'll be able to read it . . .' I would haveto fill it full of clues and unmistakable clever devices. . . 1 In his book, Cosmos, Professor Carl Sagan of Cornell Universersity rnakes much the same point - and does so, curiously enough, with reference to the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic system. He explains that the 'Egyptian hieroglyphics are, in significant part a simple substitution cipher. But not every hieroglyphic is a letter or symbol. Some are pictographs . . .' When it comes to transhition, this 'mix of letters and pictographs caused some grief for interpreters . . .' In the early nineteenth century, however, a breakthrough was made by the French scholar Champollion who deciphered the famous 'Rosetta Stone', a slab of black basalt bearing identical inscriptions in Egyptian hieroglyphics and in Greek. Since Champollion could read the Greek, all he needed was some kind of 'key' to relate specific hieroglyphs to specific Greek words or letters. This key was provided by the constant repetition in the Greek text of the name of Pharaoh Ptolemy V and an equal number of repetitIons in the Egyptian text of a distinctive oblong enclosure - known as a cartouche containing a repeated group of hieroglyphs. As Sagan comments: The cartouches were the key . . . almost as though the Pharaohs of Egypt had circled their own names to make the going easier for Egyptologists two thousand years in the future. . . What a joy it must have been [for Champollion] to open this one-way communication channel with another civilization, to permit-a culture that had been /Page 254/ mute for millennia to speak of its history, magic, medicine, religion, politics and philosophy.2 Professor Sagan then offers a comparison that is highly apposite to our present inquiry. 'Today,' he says: we are again seeking messages from an ancient and exotic civilization, this time hidden from us not only in time, but in space. If we should receive a radio message from an extraterrestrial civilization, how could it possibly be understood. Extraterrestrial intelligence will be elegant, complex, internally consistent and utterly alien. Extraterrestrials would, of course, wish to make a message sent to us as comprehensible as . possible. But how could they? Is there in any sense an interstellar Rosetta Stone? We :believe there is a common language that all technical civilizations, no matter how .different, must have. That common language is science and mathematics, The laws of Nature are the same everywhere? It seems to us that if there is indeed a very ancient 'message' at Giza then it is likely to be expressed in the language of science and mathematics that Sagan identifies - and for the same reason. Moreover, given its need to continue 'transmitting' coherently across thousands of years (and chasms of cultural change), we think that the composer of such a message would be likely to make use of the Precession of the Equinoxes, the one particular 'law of Nature' that can be said to govern, and measure - and identify - long periods of terrestrial time. Durable vehicles The Pyramids and the Great Sphinx at Giza are, above all else, as elegant, as complex, as internally consistent and as utterly 'alien' as the extraterrestrial intelligence that Sagan envisages (alien in the sense of the tremendous, almost superhuman scale of these structures and of their uncanny - and in our terms apparently unnecessary precision). Moreover, returning briefly to Dr Philip Morisson's remarks quoted earlier, we think that the Giza necropolis also qualifies rather. well for the description 'packed full of clues and unmistakable clever devices'.4 Indeed, it seems to us that a truly astonishing quantum of /Page 255/ ingenuity was invested by the Pyramid builders to ensure that the four fundamental aspects of an 'unmistakable' message were thoroughly elaborated .here: I the creation of durable, unequivocal markers which could serve as beacons.to-inflame the curiosity and-engage the intelligence of future generations of seekers; 2 the use of the 'cominon language' of precessiona astronomy; 3 the use of precessional co-ordinates to signal specific timereferents linking past to present and present to-future; 4 Cunningly. concealed store-rooms-or 'Halls of Records' that could only be found and entered by those who were fully initiated in the 'silent language' and thus could read and follow its clues. In addition, though the monuments are enabled to 'speak' from the moment that their astronomical context.is understood, we have also to consider the amazing profusion of funerary texts that have oome down to us from all periods of Egyptian history - all apparently emanating from the same very few common sources.5 As we have seen, these texts operate like 'software' to the monuments' 'hardware', charting the route that the Horus-King (and all other future seekers) must.follow, We recall a remark made by Giorgio de .Santillana and Hertha von Dechend in Hamlet's Mill to the effect that the'great strength of myths as vehicles for specific technical information is that they are capable of transmitting that information independently of the knowledge of individual-story-tellers.6 In other words-as long as a myth continues be told true, it will also continue to trailsmit any higher message that may-be concealed within its structure - even if neither the teller or the.hearer understands that message. So, too we suspect, with the ancient Egyptian funerary texts. We would-be surprised if the owners of'many of the coffins and tomb walls onto-which they were copied-had even, the faintest inkling that specific astronomical observations and directions were being duplicated at their expense. What motivated. them was precisely what the texts offered - the lure of immortal life. Yet by taking that lure did they inot-in fact guarantee a kind-of immortality for the textss themelves? Did they not ensure that so many faithful copies would /Page 256/ be made that some at least would-be bound to survive for many thousands of years? We think that there were always people who understood the true 'science of immortality' connected to the texts, and who were able to read the astronomical allegories in which deeper secrets, not granted to the common herd, lay concealed. We presume that these people were once' called the 'Followers of Horus', that they operated as an invisible college behind the scenes in Egyptian prehistory and history, that their primary cult centre was at Giza-Heliopolis, and that they were responsible for the initiation of kings and the realization of blueprints. We also think that the timetables they worked to - and almost everything of significance that they did - was in one way or another written in the stars. Hints and memories The powerfully astronomical character of the" Giza necropolis, although ignored by Egyptologists, has been recognized by openminded and intuitive researchers throughout history. The Hermetic Neoplatonists of Alexandria, for example, appear to have been acutely sensitive to the possibility of a 'message' and were quick to discern the strong astral qualities of the textual material and the monuments.' The scholar Proclus (fifth century AD) also acknowledged that the Great Pyramid was astronomically designed - and with certain specific stars in mind. Indeed, in his commentary on Plato's Timaeus (which deals with the story of the lost civilization of 'Atlantis'), Proclus reported strangely that 'the Great Pyramid was used as an observation for Sirius'." Vague memories of an astronomically constructed 'message' at Giza appear to have filtered down to the Middle Ages. At any rate the Arab chroniclers in this period spoke of the Great Pyramid as 'a temple to the stars'. . ." Page 278 Treasure map We said earlier that in the architectural-astronomical system of the Pyramid builders the position of the vernal point along the ecliptic which denoted the 'Splendid Place of the "First Time'" was considered to be 'controlled' by the position of Osiris-Orion at the meridian: 'slide' Orion's belt up from its location at 2500 BC and the vernal point is 'pushed' westwards around the ecliptic (and forward in time) in the direction Taurus -) Aries Pices - Aquarius; 'slide' it down and the vernal point is pushed 'east', i.e. back in time, in the direction Taurus - Gemini - Cancer - Leo. So in 10,500 BC, with the belt stars fully 'slid down' to their lowest possible altitude above the horizon, how far around the ecliptic has the vernal point been 'pushed? We know it is in Leo. But where in Leo? Computer simulations show that it lay exactly III. III degrees east. of the station that it had occupied at 2500 BC. Then it had been at the head of the Hyades- Taurus close to the right bank of the Milky Way; 8000 years earlier it lay directly under the rear paws of the constellation-of Leo. As we have hinted, this is a location that is likely to have a terrestrial 'double'. The three stars of Orion's belt have their terrestrial doubles in the form of the three Great Pyramids. The constellation of Leo Horakhti has its terrestrial double in the form of Hor-em-Akhet, ie.. the Great Sphinx. The 'Horizon of the Sky' has its terrestrial double in the form of the 'Horizon of Giza'. And the Great Sphinx crouches literally within this 'Horizon'. Page 279 It was to the breast of the Great Sphinx, at the summer solstice in the Pyramid Age, that the quest of the Horus-King led. There he encountered the Akhus: 'How has this happened to you', say they, the Akhus with their mouth equipped, 'that you have come to this place more noble than any other place?' 'I have come . . . because the reed floars.of the sky were set down for Re [the sun-disc and cosmic 'double' of the Horus King] that Re might cross [the Milky Way] on them to Horakhti at the Horizon' 18 In other words, the Horus-King has successfully understood and used the clues provided in the ritual. He has noted and followed the path of the sun during the solar year from its starting point - designated in the texts as being beside the Hyades-Taurus, i.e. 'Bull of the Sky' - and thence across the MilkyWay until the moment of its conjunction with Regulus, the heart-star of Leo. He has then taken this celestial treasure map, transposed its co-ordinates to the ground, made his way across the River Nile and ascended to the Giza plateau, coming eventually to the breast of the Sphinx. We think that he received there the necessary clues or instructions to find the entrance to the terrestrial Duat, to tlie 'Kingdom ofOsiris' on the ground - in short to the 'Splendid Place of the "First Time" ' where he would have to go in order to complete his quest. And we suggest that these clues were designed to encourage him to track the vemal point, just as we have done, to thel ocation that it would have occupied in 10,500 BC when Orion's belt had reached the lowest point - its precessional cycle. In other words it is our hypothesis that the Giza monuments, the past, present and future skies that lie above them, and the ancient funerary texts that interlink them, convey the lineaments of a message. In attempting to read this message we have done no more than follow the initiation 'journey' of the Horus-Kings of Egypt. And the ancient Horns-Kings we, too, have arrived at a most intriguing crossroad. The trail of initiation has guided us, directed us finally lured us to stand in front of the Great Sphinx and, like Oedipus, to confront the ultimate riddles: 'Where did we come from?' are we to go to?'
Page 283 (number omitted) Conclusion Return to the Beginning I stand before the masters who witnessed. the genesis, 'who were the authors of their own forms, who walked the dark, circuitous passages of their own becoming ... I stand before the masters who witnessed the transformmation of the body of a man into the body in spirit, who were witnesses to resurrection when the corpse of Osiris entered the mountain and the soul of Osiris walked out shining . . . when he came forth from death, a shining. thing, his face white with heat . . . I stand before the masters who know the histories of the dead, who decide which tales to hear again, who judge, the books of lives as either full or empty, who are themselves authors of truth. And they are Isis and Osiris, the divine intelligences. And when the story is written and the end is good and the soul of a man is perfected, with a shout they lift him into heaven . . .' Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (Normandi Ellis translation) The dictionary tells us that, separately from its modern usage the word, 'glamour' has a traditional meaning roughly equivalent to 'magic.spell or 'charm', and is the Old Scottish variant of: 'grammar . . . hence a magic spell, because occult 'practices were popularly associated with learning.' Is it possible that men and women of great wisdom and learning cast a 'glamour' over the Giza necropolis at some. point in the distant / Page 284/ past? Were they the possessors of as yet unguessed-at secrets that they wished to hide here? And did they succeed in concealing those secrets almost in plain view? For thousands of years, in other words, has the ancient Egyptian royal cemetary at Giza veiled the presence of something else - something of vastly greater significance for the story of Mankind? One thing we are sure of is that unlike the hundreds of Fourth Dynasty mastaba tombs to the west of the Sphinx and clustered around the three great Pyramids, the Pyramids themselves were never designed to serve primarily as burial places. We do not rule out the possibility that the Pharaohs Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure may at one time have- been buried within them - although there is no evidence for this - but we are- now satisfied. that the transcendent effort and skill that went into the construction of these awe-inspiring monuments was motivated by a higher purpose. We think that purpose was connected to the quest for eternal life wrapped up in a complete religious and spiritual system that the ancient Egyptians inherited from unknown predecessors and that they later codified in -their eerie and other-worldly funerary and rebirth texts. We suggest, in short, that it was the goal of immortality , not just for one Pharaoh but for many, that the corridors and passages and hidden chambers and concealed gates.and doorways of the Giza complex were ultimatelydesigned to serve. Depicted in the Book of What is in the Duat as being filled with monsters, these narrow, claustrophobic, terrifying places, hemmed in on all sides by sheer stone walls, were in our view conceived as the ultimate testing ground for initiates. Here they would be forced to face and overcome their most horrible and debilitating fears. Here they would pass through unimaginable ordeals of the spirit and the mind. Here they would learn esoteric wisdom through acts of concentrated intelligence and will. Here they would be prepared, through practice and experience, for the moment of physical death and for the nightmares that would follow it, so that these transitions would not confuse or paralyse them - as they might other, unprepared, souls - and so that they might become 'equipped spirits' able to move as they wished through heaven and earth, 'unfailingly, and regularly and eternally'.1 Such was the lofty goal of the Hems-King's quest and the ancient /Page 285/ Egyptians clearly believed that in order to attain it the initiate would have to participate in the discovery, the unveiling, the revelation, of something of momentous importance - something that would bestow wisdom, and knowledge of the 'First Time', and of the mysteries of the cosmos, and of' Osiris, the Once and Future King. We are therefore reminded of a Hermetic Text, written in Greek but compiled in Alexandria in Egypt some 2000 years ago, that is known as the Kore Kosmu (or Virgin of the World).2 Like other such writings, this text speaks of' Thoth, the ancient Egyptian wisdom-god, but refers to him by his Greek name, Hermes: Such was all-knowing. Hermes,who saw all things, and seeing understood, and understanding had the power both to disclose and to give explanation. For what he knew .he graved on.stone; yet though.he graved them onto stone he hid them mostly . . . The sacred symbols of the cosmic .elements [he] hid. away hard by the secrets of Osiris . . . keeping sure silence, that every younger age of cosmic.time might seek for them..3 The text then tells us that before he retumed to Heaven' Hermes invoked .a spell on the secret writings and knowledge that he had hidden: O holy books, who have been made by my immortal hands, by incorruption's magic spells . . . free from decay throughout eternity remain, and incorrupt from time. Become unseeable, unfindable, for every one whose foot shall tread the plains of this land, until Old Heaven doth bring forth meet instruments for you . . .4 What instruments might lead to the recovery of, 'unseeable and unfindable' secrets concealed at Giza? Our research has persuaded us that a scientific language of processional time and allegorical astronomy was deliberately expressed in the principal monuments there and in the texts that relate to them. From quite an early stage in our investigation, - we hoped that this language might shed new light on the enigmatic civilization of Egypt. We did not at first suspect, however, that it would-also turn out to encode specific celestial co-ordinates or that . . . these. would. transpose onto the ground in the form of an arcane /Page 286/ 'treasure map', directing the attention of seekers to a precise location in the bedrock deep beneath the Sphinx. Nor did we suspect, until we met them, that others such as the Edgar Cayce Foundation and the Stanford Research Institute - see Part II - might already.he looking there. Osiris breathes Throughout this investigation we have tried to stick to the facts, even when the facts have been very strange. When we say that the Sphinx, the three Great Pyramids, the causeways and other associated monuments of the Giza necropolis form a huge diagram we are simply reporting a fact. When we say that this diagram depicts the skies above Giza in 10,500 BC we.are reporting a fact. When we say that the Sphinx bears erosion marks which indicate that itr was carved before the Sahara became a desert we are reporting a fact. When we say that the ancient Egyptians attributed their civilization to 'the gods' and to the 'Followers of Horus' we are reporting facts. When we say that these divine and human,civilizers' were remembered as having come to the Nile Valley in Zep Tep - the 'First Time' - we are reporting a fact. When we say that the ancient Egyptian records tell us this 'First Time' was an epoch in the past were thousands of years before the era of the Pharaohs\we are repotrtin a fact: Our ciivilization has had the scientific wherewithal to get. to grips with the many problems of the Giza necropolis for less than two centuries, and it is only in the last two decades that computer technology has made it possible for us to reconstruct the ancient skies and see the patterns and conjunctions that unfolded there. During this period access to the site, and knowledge about it, has been monopolized. by members of the archaeological and Egyptological professions who have agreed amongst themselves as to the origin, and age, and function of the monuments. New evidence which does not support this scholarly consensus, and which might actively undermine it, has again and again been overlooked, or sidelined,and sometimes even deliberately concealed from the public. This; we assume, is why everything to do with the shafts of'the Great Pyramid /Page 287/ their stellar alignments, the iron plate, the relics, and the discovery - of the' door' - has met with such peculiar and inappropriate responses from Egyptologists and. archaeologists. And. we assume that-. it explains, too, why the same scholars have paid such scant attention to the solid case that geologists have made for the vast antiquity of the Sphinx.5 The Giza monuments are a legacy for Mankind, preserved almost intact over thousands of years, and, outside the privileged circles of, Egyptology and archaeology, there is today a broad-based expectation that they .might be about to reveal a remarkable secret. That expectation may or may not prove to be correct. Nevertheless in an intellectual culture polarized by public anticipation and orthodox reaction, we feel it is only wise that, future explorations at the necropolis should be conducted with complete 'transparency' and accountability. In particular the opening of the 'door' inside the southern shaft of the Queen's Chamber, the videoscopic examination of the northem shaft, and any further remote-sensing: surveys conducted around the Sphinx, should. be carried out under the scrutiny of the international mass media and should not be subjected to bizarre and inexplicable delays. We cannot predict what new discoveries will be made by such research, or even whether any new discoveries will be made. However, after completing our own archaeoastronomical investigation, and following the quest of the Horus-King, we are left with an enhanced sense of the tremendous mystery of this amazing site - a sense that its true story has only just begun to be told. Looking at the awe-inspiring scale and precision of the monuments we.feel, too, that the purpose of the ancient master-builders was sublime, and that they did indeed find a way to initiate those who would come after thousands of years in the future - by making. use of the universal language of the stars. They found a way to send a message across the ages in a code so simple and so self-explanatory that it might rightly be described as an anti-cipher. Perhaps the time has come to listen to that clear, compelling signal that beckons to us out of the darkness of prehistory. Perhaps the time /Page 288 / has come to -seek- the buried treasure of our forgotten genesis and destiny: Stars fade like memory-the instant before dawn. Low-in the east the sun appears, golden as an opening eye, That which can be named must exist. That which is named can be written. That which is written.shall be remembered. That which is remembered lives. In the land of Egypt Os iris breathes.
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THE HOURS OF HORUS LIGHT LIVING HEAT LIVING LIGHT BLACK B LACK OF LIGHT OF LACK B BLACK TWILIGHT TWO IN ONE LIGHT ONE IN TWO TWILIGHT EARTH HEART HEAT R HEAT HEART EARTH TWILIGHT TWO IN ONE LIGHT ONE IN TWO TWILIGHT
Mobile phone message from Dennis dated Friday, January 21, 2011. Timed at 16:36:13 "This year we will experience 4 unusual dates......... 1/ 1/ 11. 1/ 11/ 11. 11/ 1/ 11 and 11/ 11/ 11. NOW figure this out.........Take the last 2 digits of the year you were born plus the age you will be this year and it WILL EQUAL 111..."
Search ResultsThis year we will experience 4 unusual dates..1/1/11..1/11/11..11 ...6 answers - 18 Jan answers.yahoo.com › ... › News & Events › Other - News & Events - Cached More results from answers.yahoo.com »
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This year we will experience 4 unusual dates | openUReyesopenureyes.org.nzThis year we will experience 4 unusual dates. Thu, 02/03/2011 - 00:38 — smashdracs. 1/1/11, 1/11/11, 11/1/11, 11/11/11 .... NOW go figure this out.... take ...
KEEPER OF GENESIS A QUEST FOR THE HIDDEN LEGACY OF MANKIND Robert Bauval Graham Hancock 1996 Page 249 "Arguably, therefore, the ratio II:II, which integrates with our /Page 250/ 'special number' III.III, could be considered as a sort of mathematical key, or 'stargate' to Orion's belt What is intriguing is the way that the architecture of the Great Pyramid responds to the number when it is divided, or multiplied, by other whole numbers. The reader will recall, for example, that its side length of just over 755 feet is equivalent to 440 Egyptian royal cubits - i.e. II times 40 cubits." In addition, its height-to-base ratio is , 7:II.34 The slope ratio of its sides is 14:II (tan 51 degrees 50').35 And the slope ratio of the southern shaft of the King's Chamber - the shaft that was targeted on Orion's belt in ,2500 BC - is II:II (tan 45 degrees)."
Revelation 22 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2 In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. 3 And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him: 4 And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads. 5 And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever. 6 And he said unto me, These sayings are faithful and true: and the Lord God of the holy prophets sent his angel to shew unto his servants the things which must shortly be done. 7 Behold, I come quickly: blessed is he that keepeth the sayings of the prophecy of this book. 8 And I John saw these things, and heard them. And when I had heard and seen, I fell down to worship before the feet of the angel which shewed me these things. 9Then saith he unto me, See thou do it not: for I am thy fellowservant, and of thy brethren the prophets, and of them which keep the sayings of this book: worship God. 10 And he saith unto me, Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book: for the time is at hand. 11 He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still. 12 And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be. 13 I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. 14 Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city. 15 For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie. 16 I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star. 17 And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely. 18 For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: 19 And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book. 20 He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. 21 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.
AMEN From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This article is about the Hebrew word; for other meanings see Amen (disambiguation).The word Amen (Tiberian Hebrew (Sign omitted) Amen "So be it truly", Standard Hebrew (Sign omitted) Amen, Arabic (Sign omitted) Amin, Ge'ez' Amen) is a declaration of affirmation found in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and in the Qur'an. It has always been in use within Judaism and Islam. It has been generally adopted in Christian worship as a concluding formula for prayers and hymns. In Islam, it is the standard ending to suras. Common English translations of the word amen include: "Verily", "Truly", "So be it", and "Let it be".
BIBLE USEAGE Three distinct Biblical usages may be noted 1. Initial Amen, referring back to words of another speaker, e.g. 1 Kings 1: 36; Revelation 22;20 2. Detached Amen, the complementary sentence being suppressed, e.g. Neh. v.13; Revelation v. 14 (of Corinthians xiv. 16) 3. Final Amen, with no change of speaker, as in the subscription to the first three divisions of the psalter and in the frequent doxologies of the New testament Epistles The word 'amen' is the value 99 in Greek numerals and appears in the Bible (Old and New testament) 99 times.
HOLY BIBLE REVELATION C 13 V 16 13 I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. 16 I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.
HOLY BIBLE REVELATION C 13 V 16 I AM ALPHA AND OMEGA THE BEGINNING AND THE END THE FIRST AND THE LAST I AM THE ROOT AND OFF SPRING OF DAVID AND THE BRIGHT AND MORNING STAR
In Greek mythology, Prometheus 1] is a Titan, culture hero, and trickster figure who is credited with the creation of man from clay, and who defies the gods and ... Prometheus From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This article is about the Greek mythological figure. For other uses, see Prometheus (disambiguation). In Greek mythology, Prometheus (/prəˈmiːθiːəs/; Greek: Προμηθεύς, pronounced [promɛːtʰeús], meaning "forethought")[1] is a Titan, culture hero, and trickster figure who is credited with the creation of man from clay, and who defies the gods and gives fire to humanity, an act that enabled progress and civilization. Prometheus is known for his intelligence and as a champion of mankind.[2] The punishment of Prometheus as a consequence of the theft is a major theme of his mythology, and is a popular subject of both ancient and modern art. Zeus, king of the Olympian gods, sentenced the Titan to eternal torment for his transgression. The immortal Prometheus was bound to a rock, where each day an eagle, the emblem of Zeus, was sent to feed on his liver, which would then grow back to be eaten again the next day. (In ancient Greece, the liver was thought to be the seat of human emotions.)[3] In some stories, Prometheus is freed at last by the hero Heracles (Hercules). In another of his myths, Prometheus establishes the form of animal sacrifice practiced in ancient Greek religion. Evidence of a cult to Prometheus himself is not widespread. He was a focus of religious activity mainly at Athens, where he was linked to Athena and Hephaestus, other Greek deities of creative skills and technology.[4] In the Western classical tradition, Prometheus became a figure who represented human striving, particularly the quest for scientific knowledge, and the risk of overreaching or unintended consequences. In particular, he was regarded in the Romantic era as embodying the lone genius whose efforts to improve human existence could also result in tragedy: Mary Shelley, for instance, gave The Modern Prometheus as the subtitle to her novel Frankenstein (1818). Contents [hide] 1.2 The Athenian Tradition of Prometheus: Aeschylus and Plato 1.2.1 Aeschylus and the Ancient Literary Aesthetics of Prometheus 1.3 Other authors 2 Religious symbolism in late Roman antiquity 5.2 The aesthetic Post-Renaissance tradition 5.2.1 Classical music, opera, and ballet 6 Notes Myths and legends[edit] Greek deities Titans Titans The Twelve Titans: The oldest legends of Prometheus among the Ancients[edit] The four most ancient sources for understanding the origin of the Prometheus myths and legends all rely on the images represented in the Titanomachia, or the cosmological climactic struggle between the Greek gods and their parents, the Titans.[5] Prometheus himself was a titan who managed to avoid being in the direct confrontational cosmic battle between Zeus and his followers against Cronus, Uranus and their followers.[6] Prometheus therefore survived the struggle in which the offending titans were eternally banished by Zeus to the chthonic depths of Tartarus, only to survive to confront Zeus on his own terms in subsequent climactic struggles. The greater Titanomachia depicts an overarching metaphor of the struggle between generations, between parents and their children, symbolic of the generation of parents needing to eventually give ground to the growing needs, vitality, and responsibilities of the new generation for the perpetuation of society and survival interests of the human race as a whole. Prometheus and his struggle would be of vast merit to human society as well in this mythology as he was to be credited with the creation of humans and therefore all of humanity as well. The four most ancient historical sources for the Prometheus myth are Hesiod, Homer, Pindar, and Pythagoras. Hesiod and the Theogony[edit] The Prometheus myth first appeared in the late 8th-century BC Greek epic poet Hesiod's Theogony (lines 507–616). He was a son of the Titan Iapetus by Clymene, one of the Oceanids. He was brother to Menoetius, Atlas, and Epimetheus. In the Theogony, Hesiod introduces Prometheus as a lowly challenger to Zeus's omniscience and omnipotence.[7] In the trick at Mekone, a sacrificial meal marking the "settling of accounts" between mortals and immortals, Prometheus played a trick against Zeus (545–557). He placed two sacrificial offerings before the Olympian: a selection of beef hidden inside an ox's stomach (nourishment hidden inside a displeasing exterior), and the bull's bones wrapped completely in "glistening fat" (something inedible hidden inside a pleasing exterior). Zeus chose the latter, setting a precedent for future sacrifices.[7] Henceforth, humans would keep that meat for themselves and burn the bones wrapped in fat as an offering to the gods. This angered Zeus, who hid fire from humans in retribution. In this version of the myth, the use of fire was already known to humans, but withdrawn by Zeus.[8] Prometheus, however, stole back fire in a giant fennel-stalk and restored it to humanity. This further enraged Zeus, who sent Pandora, the first woman, to live with humanity.[7] Pandora was fashioned by Hephaestus out of clay and brought to life by the four winds, with all the goddesses of Olympus assembled to adorn her. "From her is the race of women and female kind," Hesiod writes; "of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble, no helpmeets in hateful poverty, but only in wealth."[7] Prometheus Brings Fire by Heinrich Friedrich Füger. Prometheus brings fire to mankind as told by Hesiod, with its having been hidden as revenge for the trick at Mecone. Hesiod revisits the story of Prometheus in the Works and Days (lines 42–105). Here, the poet expands upon Zeus's reaction to the theft of fire. Not only does Zeus withhold fire from humanity, but "the means of life," as well (42). Had Prometheus not provoked Zeus's wrath (44–47), "you would easily do work enough in a day to supply you for a full year even without working; soon would you put away your rudder over the smoke, and the fields worked by ox and sturdy mule would run to waste." Hesiod also expands upon the Theogony's story of the first woman, now explicitly called Pandora ("all gifts"). After Prometheus' theft of fire, Zeus sent Pandora in retaliation. Despite Prometheus' warning, Epimetheus accepted this "gift" from the gods. Pandora carried a jar with her, from which were released (91–92) "evils, harsh pain and troublesome diseases which give men death".[11] Pandora shut the lid of the jar too late to contain all the evil plights that escaped, but foresight remained in the jar, giving humanity hope. Angelo Casanova,[12] Professor of Greek Literature at the University of Florence, finds in Prometheus a reflection of an ancient, pre-Hesiodic trickster-figure, who served to account for the mixture of good and bad in human life, and whose fashioning of humanity from clay was an Eastern motif familiar in Enuma Elish; as an opponent of Zeus he was an analogue of the Titans, and like them was punished. As an advocate for humanity he gains semi-divine status at Athens, where the episode in Theogony in which he is liberated[13] is interpreted by Casanova as a post-Hesiodic interpolation.[14] Homer, the Iliad, and the Homeric Hymns[edit] The banishment of the warring titans by the Olympians to the chthonic depths of Tartoros was documented as early as Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey where they are also identified as the hypotartarioi, or, the "subterranean." The passages appear in the Iliad (XIV 279)[15] and also in the Homeric hymn to Apollo (335).[16] The particular forms of violence associated especially with the Titans are those of hybristes and atasthalie as further found in the Iliad (XIII 633-34). They are used by Homer to designate an unlimited, violent insolence among the warring Titans which only Zeus was able to ultimately overcome. This text finds direct parallel in Hesiod's reading in the Theogony (209) and in Homer's own Odyssey (XIX 406). In the words of Kerenyi, "Autolykos, the grandfather, is introduced in order that he may give his grandson the name of Odysseus."[17] In a similar fashion, the origin of the naming of the "titans" as a group has been disputed with some voicing a preference for reading it as a combination of titainein (to exert), and, titis (retribution) usually rendered as "retribution meted out to the exertion of the Titans."[18] It should be noted in studying material concerning Prometheus that Prometheus was not directly among the warring Titans with Zeus though Prometheus's association with them by lineage is a recurrent theme in each of his subsequent confrontations with Zeus and with the Olympian gods. Pindar and the Nemean Odes[edit] The duality of the gods and of humans standing as polar opposites is also clearly identified in the earliest traditions of Greek mythology and its legends by Pindar. In the sixth Nemean Ode, Pindar states: "There is one/race of men, one race of gods; both have breath/of life from a single mother. But sundered aurora collett us divided, so that one side is nothing, while on the other the brazen sky is established/a sure citadel forever."[19] Although this duality in strikingly apparent in Pindar, it also has paradoxical elements where Pindar actually comes quite close to Hesiod who before him had said in his Works and Days (108) "how the gods and mortal men sprang from one source."[20] The understanding of Prometheus and his role in the creation of humans and the theft of fire for their benefit is therefore distinctly adapted within this distinguishable source for understanding the role of Prometheus within the mythology of the interaction of the Gods with humans. Pythagoras and the Pythagorean Doctrine[edit] In order to understand the Prometheus myth in its most general context, the Late Roman author Censorinus states in his book titled De die natali that, "Pythagoras of Samos, Okellos of Lukania, Archytas of Tarentum, and in general all Pythagoreans were the authors and proponents of the opinion that the human race was eternal."[21] By this they held that Prometheus's creation of humans was the creation of humanity for eternity. This Pythagorean view is further confirmed in the book On the Cosmos written by the Pythagorean Okellos of Lukania. Okellos, in his cosmology, further delineates the three realms of the cosmos as all contained within an overarching order called the diakosmesis which is also the world order kosmos, and which also must be eternal. The three realms were delineated by Okellos as having "two poles, man on earth, the gods in heaven. Merely for the sake of symmetry, as it were, the daemons --not evil spirits but beings intermediate between God and man -- occupy a middle position in the air, the realm between heaven and earth. They were not a product of Greek mythology, but of the belief in daemons that had sprung up in various parts of the Mediterranean world and the Near East."[22] The Athenian Tradition of Prometheus: Aeschylus and Plato[edit] The two major authors to have a distinctive influence on the development of the myths and legends surrounding the titan Prometheus during the Socratic era of greater Athens were Aeschylus and Plato. The two men wrote in highly distinctive forms of expression which for Aeschylus centered on his mastery of the literary form of Greek tragedy, while for Plato this centered on the philosophical expression of his thought in the form of the various dialogues he had written and recorded during his lifetime. Aeschylus and the Ancient Literary Aesthetics of Prometheus[edit] Prometheus Bound, perhaps the most famous treatment of the myth to be found among the Greek tragedies, is traditionally attributed to the 5th-century BC Greek tragedian Aeschylus.[23] At the center of the drama are the results of Prometheus' theft of fire and his current punishment by Zeus; the playwright's dependence on the Hesiodic source material is clear, though Prometheus Bound also includes a number of changes to the received tradition.[24] Before his theft of fire, Prometheus played a decisive role in the Titanomachy, securing victory for Zeus and the other Olympians. Zeus's torture of Prometheus thus becomes a particularly harsh betrayal. The scope and character of Prometheus' transgressions against Zeus are also widened. In addition to giving humankind fire, Prometheus claims to have taught them the arts of civilization, such as writing, mathematics, agriculture, medicine, and science. The Titan's greatest benefaction for humankind seems to have been saving them from complete destruction. In an apparent twist on the myth of the so-called Five Ages of Man found in Hesiod's Works and Days (wherein Cronus and, later, Zeus created and destroyed five successive races of humanity), Prometheus asserts that Zeus had wanted to obliterate the human race, but that he somehow stopped him. Heracles freeing Prometheus from his torment by the eagle (Attic black-figure cup, c. 500 BC) Prometheus Bound also includes two mythic innovations of omission. The first is the absence of Pandora's story in connection with Prometheus' own. Instead, Aeschylus includes this one oblique allusion to Pandora and her jar that contained Hope (252): "[Prometheus] caused blind hopes to live in the hearts of men." Second, Aeschylus makes no mention of the sacrifice-trick played against Zeus in the Theogony.[23] The four tragedies of Prometheus attributed to Aeschylus, most of which are sadly lost to the passages of time into antiquity, are Prometheus Bound (Desmotes), Prometheus Delivered (Lyomens), Prometheus the Fire Bringer (Pyrphoros), and Prometheus the Fire Kindler (Pyrkaeus). The larger scope of Aeschylus as a dramatist revisiting the myth of Prometheus in the age of Athenian prominence has been discussed by William Lynch.[25] Lynch's general thesis concerns the rise of humanist and secular tendencies in Athenian culture and society which required the growth and expansion of the mythological and religious tradition as acquired from the most ancient sources of the myth stemming from Hesiod. For Lynch, modern scholarship is hampered by not having the full trilogy of Prometheus by Aeschylus, the last two parts of which have been lost to antiquity. Significantly, Lynch further comments that although the Prometheus trilogy is not available, that the Orestia trilogy by Aeschylus remains available and may be assumed to provide significant insight into the overall structural intentions which may be ascribed to the Prometheus trilogy by Aeschylus as an author of significant consistency and exemplary dramatic erudition.[26] Harold Bloom, in his research guide for Aeschylus, has summarized some of the critical attention that has been applied to Aeschylus concerning his general philosophical import in Athens.[27] As Bloom states, "Much critical attention has been paid to the question of theodicy in Aeschylus. For generations, scholars warred incessantly over 'the justice of Zeus,' unintentionally blurring it with a monotheism imported from Judeo-Christian thought. The playwright undoubtedly had religious concerns; for instance, Jacqueline de Romilly[28] suggests that his treatment of time flows directly out of his belief in divine justice. But it would be an error to think of Aeschylus as sermonizing. His Zeus does not arrive at decisions which he then enacts in the mortal world; rather, human events are themselves an enactment of divine will."[29] According to Thomas Rosenmeyer regarding the religious import of Aeschylus, "In Aeschylus, as in Homer, the two levels of causation, the supernatural and the human, are co-existent and simultaneous, two way of describing the same event." Rosenmeyer insists that ascribing portrayed characters in Aeschylus should not conclude them to be either victims or agents of theological or religious activity too quickly. As Rosenmeyer states: "[T]he text defines their being. For a critic to construct an Aeschylean theology would be as quixotic as designing a typology of Aeschylean man. The needs of the drama prevail."[30] In a rare comparison of Prometheus in Aeschylus with Oedipus in Sophocles, Harold Bloom with more than simple irony has quoted Freud as stating that, "Freud called Oedipus an 'immoral play,' since the gods ordained incest and paracide. Oedipus therefore participates in our universal unconscious sense of guilt, but on this reading so do the gods. I (states Bloom) sometimes wish that Freud had turned to Aeschylus instead, and given us the Prometheus complex rather than the Oedipus complex."[31] Plato and the Philosophical Interpretation of Prometheus[edit] Olga Raggio in her study "The Myth of Prometheus" for the Courtauld Institute attributes Plato in the Protagoras as an important contributor to the early development of the Prometheus myth.[32] Raggio indicates that many of the more challenging and dramatic assertions which Aeschylean tragedy explores are absent from Plato's writings about Prometheus.[33] As summarized by Raggio, "After the gods have moulded men and other living creatures with a mixture of clay and fire, the two brothers Epimetheus and Prometheus are called to complete the task and distribute among the newly born creatures all sorts of natural qualities. Epimetheus sets to work, but, being unwise, distributes all the gifts of nature among the animals, leaving men naked and unprotected, unable to defend themselves and to survive in a hostile world. Prometheus then steals the fire of creative power from the workshop of Athena and Hephaistos and gives it to mankind." Raggio then goes on to point out Plato's distinction of creative power (techne) which is presented as superior to merely natural instincts (physis). For Plato, only the virtues of "reverence and justice can provide for the maintenance of a civilized society -- and these virtues are the highest gift finally bestowed on men in equal measure."[34] The ancients by way of Plato believed that the name Prometheus derived from the Greek pro (before) + manthano (intelligence) and the agent suffix -eus, thus meaning "Forethinker". In his dialogue titled Protagoras, Plato contrasts Prometheus with his dull-witted brother Epimetheus, "Afterthinker".[35] In Plato's dialogue Protagoras, Protagoras asserts that the gods created humans and all the other animals, but it was left to Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus to give defining attributes to each. As no physical traits were left when the pair came to humans, Prometheus decided to give them fire and other civilizing arts.[36] The Athenian tradition of religious dedication and observance[edit] It is understandable that since Prometheus was considered a Titan and not one of the Olympian gods that there would be an absence of evidence, with the exception of Athens, for the direct religious devotion to his worship. Despite his importance to the myths and imaginative literature of ancient Greece, the religious cult of Prometheus during the Archaic and Classical periods seems to have been limited.[37] Writing in the 2nd century AD, the satirist Lucian points out that while temples to the major Olympians were everywhere, none to Prometheus is to be seen.[38] Heracles freeing Prometheus, relief from the Temple of Aphrodite at Aphrodisias Pausanias recorded a few other religious sites in Greece devoted to Prometheus. Both Argos and Opous claimed to be Prometheus' final resting place, each erecting a tomb in his honor. The Greek city of Panopeus had a cult statue that was supposed to honor Prometheus for having created the human race there.[36] The Aesthetic tradition of Prometheus in Athenian art[edit] Prometheus' torment by the eagle and his rescue by Heracles were popular subjects in vase paintings of the 6th to 4th centuries BC. He also sometimes appears in depictions of Athena's birth from Zeus' forehead. There was a relief sculpture of Prometheus with Pandora on the base of Athena's cult statue in the Athenian Parthenon of the 5th century BC. A similar rendering is also found at the great altar of Zeus at Pergamon from the second century BC. The event of the release of Prometheus from captivity was frequently revisited on Attic and Etruscan vases between the sixth and fifth centuries BC. In the depiction on display at the Museum of Karlsruhe and in Berlin, the depiction is that of Prometheus confronted by a menacing large bird (assumed to be the eagle) with Hercules approaching from behind shooting his arrows at it.[45] In the fourth century this imagery was modified to depicting Prometheus bound in a cruciform manner, possibly reflecting an Aeschylus inspired manner of influence, again with an eagle and with Hercules approaching from the side.[46] Other authors[edit] Creation of humanity by Prometheus as Athena looks on (Roman-era relief, 3rd century AD) Prometheus watches Athena endow his creation with reason (painting by Christian Griepenkerl, 1877) Some two dozen other Greek and Roman authors retold and further embellished the Prometheus myth from as early as the 5th century BC (Diodorus, Herodorus) into the 4th century AD. The most significant detail added to the myth found in, e.g., Sappho, Aesop and Ovid[47] — was the central role of Prometheus in the creation of the human race. According to these sources, Prometheus fashioned humans out of clay. Although perhaps made explicit in the Prometheia, later authors such as Hyginus, the Bibliotheca, and Quintus of Smyrna would confirm that Prometheus warned Zeus not to marry the sea nymph Thetis. She is consequently married off to the mortal Peleus, and bears him a son greater than the father — Achilles, Greek hero of the Trojan War. Pseudo-Apollodorus moreover clarifies a cryptic statement (1026–29) made by Hermes in Prometheus Bound, identifying the centaur Chiron as the one who would take on Prometheus' suffering and die in his place.[36] Reflecting a myth attested in Greek vase paintings from the Classical period, Pseudo-Apollodorus places the Titan (armed with an axe) at the birth of Athena, thus explaining how the goddess sprang forth from the forehead of Zeus.[36] Other minor details attached to the myth include: the duration of Prometheus' torment;[48][49] the origin of the eagle that ate the Titan's liver (found in Pseudo-Apollodorus and Hyginus); Pandora's marriage to Epimetheus (found in Pseudo-Apollodorus); myths surrounding the life of Prometheus' son, Deucalion (found in Ovid and Apollonius of Rhodes); and Prometheus' marginal role in the myth of Jason and the Argonauts (found in Apollonius of Rhodes and Valerius Flaccus).[36] Modern scientific linguistics suggests that the name derived from the Proto-Indo-European root that also produces the Vedic pra math, "to steal," hence pramathyu-s, "thief", cognate with "Prometheus", the thief of fire. The Vedic myth of fire's theft by Mātariśvan is an analog to the Greek account. Pramantha was the tool used to create fire.[50] Religious symbolism in late Roman antiquity[edit] The three most prominent aspects of the Prometheus myth have parallels within the beliefs of many cultures throughout the world; see creation of man from clay, theft of fire, and references for eternal punishment. It is the first of these three which has drawn attention to parallels with the biblical creation account related in the religious symbolism expressed in the book of Genesis. As stated by Olga Raggio,[51] "The Prometheus myth of creation as a visual symbol of the Neoplatonic concept of human nature, illustrated in (many) sarcophagi, was evidently a contradiction of the Christian teaching of the unique and simultaneous act of creation by the Trinity." This Neoplatonism of late Roman antiquity was especially stressed by Tertullian[52] who recognized both difference and similarity of the biblical deity with the mythological figure of Prometheus. The imagery of Prometheus and the creation of man used for the purposes of the representation of the creation of Adam in biblical symbolism is also a recurrent theme in the artistic expression of late Roman antiquity. Of the relatively rare expressions found of the creation of Adam in those centuries of late Roman antiquity, one can single out the so-called "Dogma sarcophagus" of the Lateran Museum where three figures are seen (in representation of the theological trinity) in making a benediction to the new man. Another example is found where the prototype of Prometheus is also recognizable in the early Christian era of late Roman antiquity. This can be found upon a sarcophagus of the Church at Mas d'Aire[53] as well, and in an even more direct comparison to what Raggio refers to as "a coursely carved relief from Campli (Teramo)[54] (where) the Lord sits on a throne and models the body of Adam, exactly like Prometheus." Still another such similarity is found in the example found on a Hellenistic relief presently in the Louvre in which the Lord gives life to Eve through the imposition of his two fingers on her eyes recalling the same gesture found in earlier representations of Prometheus.[55] In Georgian mythology, Amirani is a culture hero who challenged the chief god, and like Prometheus was chained on the Caucasian mountains where birds would eat his organs. This aspect of the myth had a significant influence on the Greek imagination. It is recognizable from a Greek gem roughly dated to the time of the Hesiod poems, which show Prometheus with hands bound behind his body and crouching before a bird with long wings.[56] This same image would also be used later in the Rome of the Augustan age as documented by Furtwangler.[57] In the often cited and highly publicized interview between Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers on Public Television, the author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces presented his view on the comparison of Prometheus and Jesus.[58] Moyers asked Campbell the question in the following words, "In this sense, unlike heroes such as Prometheus or Jesus, we're not going on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves." To which Campbell's well-known response was that, "But in doing that, you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there's no doubt about it. The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules [...] No, no! Any world is a valid world if it's alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself." For Campbell, Jesus mortally suffered on the Cross while Prometheus eternally suffered while chained to a rock, and each of them received punishment for the gift which they bestowed to humankind, for Jesus this was the gift of propitiation from Heaven, and, for Prometheus this was the gift of fire from Olympus.[58] Significantly, Campbell is also clear to indicate the limits of applying the metaphors of his methodology in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces too closely in assessing the comparison of Prometheus and Jesus. Of the four symbols of suffering associated with Jesus after his trial in Jerusalem (i) the crown of thorns, (ii) the scourge of whips, (iii) the nailing to the Cross, and (iv) the spearing of his side, it is only this last one which bears some resemblance to the eternal suffering of Prometheus' daily torment of an eagle devouring a replenishing organ, his liver, from his side.[59] For Campbell, the striking contrast between the New Testament narratives and the Greek mythological narratives remains at the limiting level of the cataclysmic eternal struggle of the eschatological New Testament narratives occurring only at the very end of the biblical narratives in the Apocalypse of John (12:7) where, "Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. The dragon and his angels fought back, but they were defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven." This eschatological and apocalyptic setting of a Last Judgement is in precise contrast to the Titanomachia of Hesiod which serves its distinct service to Greek mythology as its Prolegomenon, bracketing all subsequent mythology, including the creation of humanity, as coming after the cosmological struggle between the Titans and the Olympian gods.[58] It remains a continuing debate among scholars of comparative religion and the literary reception[60] of mythological and religious subject matter as to whether the typology of suffering and torment represented in the Prometheus myth finds its more representative comparisons with the narratives of the Hebrew scriptures or with the New Testament narratives. In the Book of Job, significant comparisons can be drawn between the sustained suffering of Job in comparison to that of eternal suffering and torment represented in the Prometheus myth. With Job, the suffering is at the acquiescence of heaven and at the will of the demonic, while in Prometheus the suffering is directly linked to Zeus as the ruler of Olympus. The comparison of the suffering of Jesus after his sentencing in Jerusalem is limited to the three days, from Thursday to Saturday, and leading to the culminating narratives corresponding to Easter Sunday. The symbolic import for comparative religion would maintain that suffering related to justified conduct is redeemed in both the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament narratives, while in Prometheus there remains the image of a non-forgiving deity, Zeus, who nonetheless requires reverence.[58] Writing in late antiquity of the fourth and fifth century, the Latin commentator Marcus Servius Honoratus explained that Prometheus was so named because he was a man of great foresight (vir prudentissimus), possessing the abstract quality of providentia, the Latin equivalent of Greek promētheia (ἀπὸ τής πρόμηθείας).[61] Anecdotally, the Roman fabulist Phaedrus (c.15BC - c.50AD) attributes to Aesop a simple etiology for homosexuality, in Prometheus' getting drunk while creating the first humans and misapplying the genitalia.[62] The allegorical tradition of the Middle Ages[edit] Perhaps the most influential book of the Middle Ages upon the reception of the Prometheus myth was the mythological handbook of Fulgentius Placiades. As stated by Raggio,[63] "The text of Fulgentius, as well as that of (Marcus) Servius [...] are the main sources of the mythological handbooks written in the ninth century by the anonymous Mythographus Primus and Mythographus Secundus. Both were used for the more lengthy and elaborate compendium by the English scholar Alexander Neckman (1157-1217), the Scintillarium Poetarum, or Poetarius."[63] The purpose of his books was to distinguish allegorical interpretation from the historical interpretation of the Prometheus myth. Continuing in this same tradition of the allegorical interpretation of the Prometheus myth, along with the historical interpretation of the Middle Ages, is the Genealogiae of Giovanni Boccaccio. Boccaccio follows these two levels of interpretation and distinguishes between two separate versions of the Prometheus myth. For Boccaccio, Prometheus is placed "In the heavens where all is clarity and truth, [Prometheus] steals, so to speak, a ray of the divine wisdom from God himself, source of all Science, supreme Light of every man."[64] With this, Boccaccio shows himself moving from the mediaeval sources with a shift of accent towards the attitude of the Renaissance humanists. Using a similar interpretation to that of Boccaccio, Marsilio Ficino in the fifteenth century updated the philosophical and more somber reception of the Prometheus myth not seen since the time of Plotinus. In his book written in 1476-77 titled Quaestiones Quinque de Mente, Ficino indicates his preference for reading the Prometheus myth as an image of the human soul seeking to obtain supreme truth. As Olga Raggio summarizes Ficino's text, "The torture of Prometheus is the torment brought by reason itself to man, who is made by it many times more unhappy than the brutes. It is after having stolen one beam of the celestial light [...] that the soul feels as if fastened by chains and [...] only death can release her bonds and carry her to the source of all knowledge."[64] This somberness of attitude in Ficino's text would be further developed later by Charles de Bouelles' Liber de Sapiente of 1509 which presented a mix of both scholastic and Neoplatonic ideas. Prometheus in the Renaissance[edit] After the writings of both Boccaccio and Ficino in the late Middle Ages about Prometheus, interest in the titan shifted considerably in the direction of becoming subject matter for painters and sculptors alike. Among the most famous examples is that of Piero di Cosimo from about 1510 presently on display at the museums of Munich and Strasburg (see Inset). Raggio summarizes the Munich version[65] as follows; "The Munich panel represents the dispute between Epimetheus and Prometheus, the handsome triumphant statue of the new man, modeled by Prometheus, his ascension to the sky under the guidance of Minerva; the Strasburg panel shows in the distance Prometheus lighting his torch at the wheels of the Sun, and in the foreground on one side, Prometheus applying his torch to the heart of the statue and , on the other, Mercury fastening him to a tree." All the details are evidently borrowed from Boccaccio's Genealogiae. The same reference to the Genealogiae can be cited as the source for the drawing by Parmigianino presently located in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City.[66] In this drawing, a very noble rendering of Prometheus is presented which evokes the memory of Michelangelo's works portraying Jehovah. This drawing in the Morgan Library is perhaps one of the most intense examples of the visualization of the myth of Prometheus from the Renaissance period. Writing in the late British Renaissance, William Shakespeare uses the Promethean allusion in the famous death scene of Desdemona in his tragedy of Othello. Othello in contemplating the death of Desdemona asserts plainly that he cannot restore the "Promethean heat" to her body once it has been extinguished. For Shakespeare, the allusion is clearly to the interpretation of the fire from the heat as the bestowing of life to the creation of man from clay by Prometheus after it was stolen from Olympus. The analogy bears direct resemblance to the biblical narrative of the creation of life in Adam through the bestowed breathing of the creator in Genesis. Shakespeare's symbolic reference to the "heat" associated with Prometheus's fire is to the association of the gift of fire to the mythological gift or theological gift of life to humans. The Post-Renaissance tradition[edit] Mythological narrative of Prometheus by Piero di Cosimo (1515) The myth of Prometheus has been a favorite theme of Western art and literature in the post-renaissance and post-Enlightenment tradition, and occasionally in works produced outside the West. The literary Post-Renaissance tradition[edit] For the Romantic era, Prometheus was the rebel who resisted all forms of institutional tyranny epitomized by Zeus — church, monarch, and patriarch. The Romantics drew comparisons between Prometheus and the spirit of the French Revolution, Christ, the Satan of John Milton's Paradise Lost, and the divinely inspired poet or artist. Prometheus is the lyrical "I" who speaks in Goethe's Sturm und Drang poem "Prometheus" (written c. 1772–74, published 1789), addressing God (as Zeus) in misotheist accusation and defiance. In Prometheus Unbound (1820), a four-act lyrical drama, Percy Bysshe Shelley rewrites the lost play of Aeschylus so that Prometheus does not submit to Zeus (under the Latin name Jupiter), but instead supplants him in a triumph of the human heart and intellect over tyrannical religion. Lord Byron's poem "Prometheus" also portrays the Titan as unrepentant. As documented by Olga Raggio, other leading figures among the great Romantics included Byron, Longfellow and Nietzsche as well.[67] Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein is subtitled "The Modern Prometheus", in reference to the novel's themes of the over-reaching of modern humanity into dangerous areas of knowledge. Goethe and the Prometheus-Ganymede poems[edit] "Prometheus" is a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in which a character based on the mythic Prometheus addresses God (as Zeus) in a romantic and misotheist tone of accusation and defiance. The poem was written between 1772 and 1774. It was first published fifteen years later in 1789. It is an important work as it represents one of the first encounters of the Prometheus myth with the literary Romantic movement identified with Goethe and with the Sturm und Drang movement. The poem has appeared in Volume II of Goethe's poems (in his Collected Works) in a section of Vermischte Gedichte (assorted poems), shortly following the Harzreise im Winter. It is immediately followed by "Ganymed", and the two poems are written as informing each other according to Goethe's plan in their actual writing. Prometheus (1774) was originally planned as a drama but never completed by Goethe, though the poem is inspired by it. Prometheus is the creative and rebellious spirit rejected by God, and who angrily defies him and asserts himself; Ganymede, by direct contrast, is the boyish self who is both adored and seduced by God. As a high Romantic poet and a humanist poet, Goethe presents both identities as contrasting aspects of the Romantic human condition. "Prometheus" The poem offers direct biblical connotations for the Prometheus myth which was unseen in any of the ancient Greek poets dealing with the Prometheus myth in either drama, tragedy, or philosophy. The intentional use of the German phrase "Da ich ein Kind war..." ("When I was a child"): the use of Da is distinctive, and with it Goethe directly applies the Lutheran translation of Saint Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, 13:11: "Da ich ein Kind war, da redete ich wie ein Kind..." ("When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things"). Goethe's Prometheus is significant for the contrast it evokes with the biblical text of the Corinthians rather than for its similarities. In his book titled Prometheus: Archetypal Image of Human Existence, C. Kerenyi states the key contrast between Goethe's version of Prometheus with the ancient Greek version.[68] As Kerenyi states, "Goethe's Prometheus had Zeus for father and a goddess for mother. With this change from the traditional lineage the poet distinguished his hero from the race of the Titans." For Goethe, the metaphorical comparison of Prometheus to the image of the Son from the New Testament narratives was of central importance, with the figure of Zeus in Goethe's reading being metaphorically matched directly to the image of the Father from the New Testament narratives. Percy Bysshe Shelley and Prometheus Unbound[edit] Percy Shelley published his four-act lyrical drama titled Prometheus Unbound in 1820. His version was written in response to the version of myth as presented by Aeschylus (described in the Section above) and is oriented to the high British Idealism and high British Romanticism prevailing in Shelley's own time. Shelley, as the author himself discusses, admits the debt of his version of the myth to Aeschylus and the Greek poetic tradition which he assumes is familiar to readers of his own lyrical drama. For example, it is necessary to understand and have knowledge of the reason for Prometheus's punishment if the reader is to form an understanding of whether the exoneration portrayed by Shelley in his version of the Prometheus myth is justified or unjustified. The quote of Shelley's own words describing the extent of his indebtedness to Aeschylus has been published in numerous sources publicly available. The literary critic Harold Bloom in his book Shelley's Mythmaking expresses his high expectation of Shelley in the tradition of mythopoeic poetry. For Bloom, Percy Shelley's relationship to the tradition of mythology in poetry "culminates in 'Prometheus'; the poem provides a complete statement of Shelley's vision."[69] Bloom devotes two full chapters in this book to Shelley's lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound which was among the first books Bloom had ever written, originally published in 1959.[70] Following his 1959 book, Bloom edited an anthology of critical opinions on Shelley for Chelsea House Publishers where he concisely stated his opinion as, "Shelley is the unacknowledged ancestor of Wallace Stevens' conception of poetry as the Supreme Fiction, and Prometheus Unbound is the most capable imagining, outside of Blake and Wordsworth, that the Romantic quest for a Supreme Fiction has achieved."[71] Within the pages of his Introduction to the Chelsea House edition on Percy Shelley, Harold Bloom also identifies the six major schools of criticism opposing Shelley's idealized mythologizing version of the Prometheus myth. In sequence, the opposing schools to Shelley are given as: (i) The school of "common sense", (ii) The Christian orthodox, (iii) The school of "wit", (iv) Moralists, of most varieties, (v) The school of "classic" form, and (vi) The Precisionists, or concretists.[72] Although Bloom is least interested in the first two schools, the second one on the Christian orthodox has special bearing on the reception of the Prometheus myth during late Roman antiquity and the synthesis of the New Testament canon. The Greek origins of the Prometheus myth have already discussed the Titanomachia as placing the cosmic struggle of Olympus at some point in time preceding the creation of humanity, while in the New Testament synthesis there was a strong assimilation of the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew prophets and their strongly eschatological orientation. This contrast placed a strong emphasis within the ancient Greek consciousness as to the moral and ontological acceptance of the mythology of the Titanomachia as an accomplished mythological history, whereas for the synthesis of the New Testament narratives this placed religious consciousness within the community at the level of an anticipated eschaton not yet accomplished. Neither of these would guide Percy Shelley in his poetic retelling and reintegration of the Prometheus myth.[73] To the Socratic Greeks, one important aspect of the discussion of religion would correspond to the philosophical discussion of 'becoming' with respect to the New Testament syncretism rather than the ontological discussion of 'being' which was more prominent in the ancient Greek experience of mythologically oriented cult and religion.[74] For Percy Shelley, both of these reading were to be substantially discounted in preference to his own concerns for promoting his own version of an idealized consciousness of a society guided by the precepts of High British Romanticism and High British Idealism.[75] Mary Shelley and Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus[edit] The author of Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley, wrote the famous version of her short novel in the 19th century. It has endured as one of the most frequently revisited literary themes in twentieth century film and popular reception with few rivals for its sheer popularity among even established literary works of art. The primary theme is a parallel to the aspect of the Prometheus myth which concentrates on the creation of man by the titans, transferred and made contemporary by Shelley for British audiences of her time. The subject is that of the creation of life by a scientist, thus bestowing life through the application and technology of medical science rather than by the natural acts of reproduction. The short novel has been adapted into many films and productions ranging from the early versions with Boris Karloff to much later versions featuring Kenneth Branagh among others. Prometheus in the Twentieth Century[edit] Prometheus (1909) by Otto Greiner According to the first, he was clamped to a rock in the Caucasus for betraying the secrets of the gods to men, and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was perpetually renewed. This short piece by Kafka concerning his interest in Prometheus was supplemented by two other mythological pieces written by him. As stated by Reiner Stach, "Kafka's world was mythical in nature, with Old Testament and Jewish legends providing the templates, and it was only logical (even if Kafka did not state it openly) that he would try his hand at the canon of antiquity, reinterpreting it and incorporating it into his own imagination in the form of allusions, as in 'The Silence of the Sirens,' 'Prometheus,' and 'Poseidon.'"[77] Among contemporary poets, the British poet Ted Hughes wrote the a 1973 collection of poems titled Prometheus On His Crag. The Nepali poet Laxmi Prasad Devkota (d. 1949) also wrote an epic titled Prometheus (प्रमीथस). In his 1952 book, Lucifer and Prometheus, Zvi Werblowsky presented the speculatively derived Jungian construction of the character of Satan in Milton's celebrated poem Paradise Lost. Werblowsky applied his own Jungian style of interpretation to appropriate parts of the Prometheus myth for the purpose of interpreting Milton. A reprint of his book in the 1990s by Routledge Press included an introduction to the book by Carl Jung. Some Gnostics have been associated with identifying the theft of fire from heaven as embodied by the fall of Lucifer "the Light Bearer".[78] The artificial element Promethium was named with the myth in mind. The aesthetic Post-Renaissance tradition[edit] Classical music, opera, and ballet[edit] Works of classical music, opera, and ballet directly or indirectly inspired by the myth of Prometheus have included renderings by some of the major composers of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this tradition, the orchestral representation of the myth has received the most sustained attention of composers. These have included the symphonic poem by Franz Liszt titled Prometheus from 1850, among his other Symphonic Poems (No. 5, S.99).[79] Alexander Scriabin composed Prometheus: Poem of Fire, Opus 60 (1910),[80] also for orchestra.[81] In the same year Gabriel Fauré composed his three-act opera Prométhée (1910).[82] Charles-Valentin Alkan composed his Grande sonate 'Les quatre âges' (1847), with the 4th movement entitled "Prométhée enchaîné" (Prometheus Bound).[83] Beethoven composed the score to a ballet version of the myth titled The Creatures of Prometheus (1801).[84] An adaptation of Goethe's poetic version of the myth was composed by Hugo Wolf, Prometheus (Bedecke deinen Himmel, Zeus, 1889), as part of his Goethe-lieder for voice and piano,[85] later transcribed for orchestra and voice.[86] An opera of the myth was composed by Carl Orff titled Prometheus (1968),[87][88] using Aeschylus' Greek language Prometheia.[89] In film[edit] The recent 2012 science fiction fantasy film titled Prometheus by Ridley Scott has a resemblance to the myth largely through a coincidence of name.[90] Of the three principal mythological themes associated with the myth of the titan Prometheus, that is, the eternal punishment, the theft of fire, and the creation of man, it is with this latter theme that the film seems to be at least partially concerned. In the science fiction film, one of the wealthy lead characters in the future spends vast sums of money in order to locate the extraterrestrials who he believes were responsible for the creation of man. His hope is that if he finds his 'creators,' they will be able somehow to extend his life. In this belief he is straightforwardly disappointed. Benji Taylor writing in an extensive three-part essay on the science fiction film titled Prometheus, published between 22 June 2012 and 17 July 2012, identified the eight key themes in understanding the film as including: "Aliens Seeded Life On Earth," "Insignificance and Futility," "Interwoven Notions of Creation and Destruction," "Parental Issues," "The Nature of the Soul," "Existential Loss," and "Science and Religion."[91][92][93] Of these themes covered in the film, Taylor identifies that only the theme of "Parental Issues" appears to have a general reference point to the myth of Prometheus stating that in the "mythology between the titan Prometheus and the chief Olympian Zeus but on a more global level it's an echo of the tribulation embodied in the Titanomachy -- the archetypal war between parent and child which was the great 'War of the Titans and Olympians' that shook the Greek mythological world to its core."[94]
PROMETHEUS MET ORPHEUS MET PROMETHEUS
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THE BALANCING I 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 I 2 3 4 FIVE 6 7 8 9 9 8 7 6 FIVE 4 3 2 1 I 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PROMETHEUS MET ORPHEUS MET PROMETHEUS
ORPHEUS MET PROMETHEUS MET ORPHEUS MET PROMETHEUS
Prometheus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia In Greek mythology, Prometheus 1] is a Titan, culture hero, and trickster figure who is credited with the creation of man from clay, and who defies the gods and ... Prometheus From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This article is about the Greek mythological figure. For other uses, see Prometheus (disambiguation). In Greek mythology, Prometheus (/prəˈmiːθiːəs/; Greek: Προμηθεύς, pronounced [promɛːtʰeús], meaning "forethought")[1] is a Titan, culture hero, and trickster figure who is credited with the creation of man from clay, and who defies the gods and gives fire to humanity, an act that enabled progress and civilization. Prometheus is known for his intelligence and as a champion of mankind.[2] The punishment of Prometheus as a consequence of the theft is a major theme of his mythology, and is a popular subject of both ancient and modern art. Zeus, king of the Olympian gods, sentenced the Titan to eternal torment for his transgression. The immortal Prometheus was bound to a rock, where each day an eagle, the emblem of Zeus, was sent to feed on his liver, which would then grow back to be eaten again the next day. (In ancient Greece, the liver was thought to be the seat of human emotions.)[3] In some stories, Prometheus is freed at last by the hero Heracles (Hercules). In another of his myths, Prometheus establishes the form of animal sacrifice practiced in ancient Greek religion. Evidence of a cult to Prometheus himself is not widespread. He was a focus of religious activity mainly at Athens, where he was linked to Athena and Hephaestus, other Greek deities of creative skills and technology.[4] In the Western classical tradition, Prometheus became a figure who represented human striving, particularly the quest for scientific knowledge, and the risk of overreaching or unintended consequences. In particular, he was regarded in the Romantic era as embodying the lone genius whose efforts to improve human existence could also result in tragedy: Mary Shelley, for instance, gave The Modern Prometheus as the subtitle to her novel Frankenstein (1818).
METAMORPHOSIS GODS METAMORPHOSIS 4+5+2+1+4+6+9+7+8+6+1+9+1= 4+5+2+1+4+6+9+7+8+6+1+9+1 METAMORPHOSIS GODS METAMORPHOSIS
CODE DE CODE C+O D+E D+E C+O D+E 9+9+9+9+9 C+O D+E D+E C+O D+E CODE DE CODE
Oh what a tangled web we weave, Sir Walter Scott, Marmion, Canto vi. Stanza 17.
EGYPT 57772 EGYPT EGYPT 777 EGYPT 5+2 = 7 7 = 5+2 EGYPT EGYPT 57772 EGYPT EGYPT EGYPT 57772 EGYPT
YIN YANG YIN YANG YIN YANG 795-7157 YIN YANG YIN YANG 795 7157 YIN YANG YIN YANG YIN YANG
Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. 3: I. Excerpts by Stobæus: Commentary - 12:48pm
Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. 3, by G.R.S. Mead, [1906], at sacred-texts.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COMMENTARY ARGUMENT 1. The “Virgin of the World” is a sacred sermon of initiation into the Hermes-lore, the first initiation, in which the tradition of the wisdom is handed on by the hierophant to the neophyte, by word of mouth. The instructor, or revealer, is the representative of Isis-Sophia, and speaks in her name, pouring forth for her beloved son, the new-born Horus, the first draught of p. 135 immortality, which is to purge away the poison of the mortal cup of forgetfulness and ignorance, and so raise him from the “dead.” This pouring-forth explains that the divine economy is perfect order, mystery transcending mystery,—each state of being, and each being, a mystery to those below that state. This order no mortal intellect can ever grasp; nay, in the far-off ages, when as yet there were no men, but only Gods, those essences that know no death, the first creation of the World-creator,—even these Gods, these mysteries to us, were in amazement at the glories of the greater mysteries which decked the Heaven with their unveiled transcendent beauty. Even these Gods did not know God as yet. 2. The Gods were immortal, but unknowing; they were intoxicated with Heaven’s beauty, amazed, nay awestruck, at the splendour of the mysteries of Heaven. Then came there forth another outpouring of the Father over all; He poured the Splendour of His Mind into their hearts and they began to know. 1 With this representation is blended a mythical historical tradition which suggests that all this was brought about for an “earth” on which our humanity had not as yet appeared, in far-off distant days when apparently our earth was not as now, ages ago, the purest Golden Age when there were Gods, not men. In that race of Gods, those of them in whom the ray was no low-burning spark, but a divine flame, were the instructors in the heavenly wisdom. 3. Of these was Hermes, a race or “being” rather p. 136 than an individual; these “Sons of Fire” left the record of their wisdom engraved on “stone” in symbol, in charge of others of the same race but less knowing than themselves; and so they ascended to Heaven. 4. Those that succeeded them had not the flame so bright within their hearts; they were of the same race, but younger souls—the Tat-race. Hermes could not hand on the direct knowledge to them, the “perfect sight” (θεωρία), and so recorded the wisdom in symbol and myth. Still later the Asclepius-race joined themselves to the Tat-souls. All this, however, took place many many ages ago, long even before the days of the men-gods Osiris and Isis; for the real wisdom of Hermes was so ancient that even Isis herself had had to search out the hidden records, and that too by means of the inner sight, when she herself had won the power to see, and the True Sun had risen for her mind. 5. But the strain of reconstructing the history of this far-distant past, as he conceived it to have been, is too much for the writer. He knows he is dealing with “myths,” with what Plutarch would have called the “doings of the daimones;” he knows that in reality these primæval “Books” of Hermes have no longer any physical existence, if indeed they ever had any; he knows that no matter what legends are told, or whatever the general priesthood may believe about ancient physical inscriptions of the primæval Hermes,—all this has passed away, and that the real wisdom of Hermes is engraved on the tablets of the æther, and not hidden in the shrines of earth. The “Books” are engraved in the “sacred symbols of the cosmic elements,” and hidden away hard by the “secrets of Osiris”—the mysteries of creative fire, the light that speaks in the heart. The true Books of p. 137 [paragraph continues] Hermes are hidden away in their own zones, the pure elements of the unseen world—the celestial Egypt. 6. This wisdom was held in safe keeping for the “souls” of men; it was a soul-gnosis, not a physical knowledge. Hereupon the writer begins the recital of his tradition 1 of the creation of the “souls” of men in their unfallen state, all of which is derived from the “Books of Hermes.” The soul-creation runs as follows: The Watchers 2 approach the Creator. The hour has struck for a new Cosmic Dawn, for a new Day. The time has come for Cosmos to awake after the Night. 3 The Creative Mind of the universe turns His attention, His thought, to a new phase of things, a new world-period. 7. God smiled, and His laughter thrilled through space, 4 and with His Word, called forth into the light the new dawn from out the primæval darkness of the new world-space. His first creation, transcendental or intelligible Nature, stood before Him, in all the marvel of her new beauty, the primal plērōma, or potential fullness, of the new universe or system, the ideal cosmos of our world, for there were many others,—the Gods who marvelled at the mystery. Straightway this Nature fell from one into three, herself and Toil and their fairest child Invention, to p. 138 whom God gave the gift of being, themselves producing ideal form alone. The first creation, then, was the bringing forth of potencies and types and ideas, to whom God gave the gift of being; it was as yet the world “above,” the primæval Heaven, in ultimate perfection, thus constituting the unchanging boundaries of the new universe that was to be. These things-that-are were filled with “mysteries,” not “breaths” or “lives,” for these were not as yet. 8. The next stage is the breathing of the spiritual (not the physical) breath of lives into the fairest blend of the primal elements that condition the world-area. This blend or soul-substance is called psychōsis. The primal elements were not our mixed earth, water, fire, and air, but “knowing fire” (perhaps “fire in itself,” as Hermes elsewhere calls it, or intelligible fire, perchance the “flower of fire” of the so-called “Chaldæan Oracles” 1) and unknowing air, if we may judge from the phrase (7): “Let heaven be filled with all things full, and air and æther [? = fire] too!” It is Heaven or the ideal world that is so filled; even earth-water was not yet manifested, much less earth and water. It seems, then, that these souls (souls corresponding above with the subsequent man-stage below) were a blend of the three: spirit, knowing fire, and unknowing air,—triads, yet a unity called psychōsis. 9. They were moreover all essentially equal, but differed according to some fixed law of numbering; they were also apparently definite in number, one soul perchance for every star, as with Plato, according to the law of similarity of less and greater, of within and without. 10. These souls, then, were “sacred (or typical) men,” p. 139 a creation prior to that of the “sacred animals”; their habitat was in Upper Nature, the “all-fairest station of the æther”—the celestial cosmos. 11. They were appointed to certain stations and to the task of keeping the “wheel revolving,”—that is, as we shall see, they were to fashion forms for birth and death, and so provide means of transmission for the life-currents ever circulating in the great sphere. This was their appointed task, the law imposed on them, as obedient children of the Great King, their sire. So long as they kept their appointed stations they were to live for ever in surroundings of bliss and beauty, in full contemplation of the glories of the greater universe, throned amid the stars. But if they disobeyed the law, bonds and punishment await them. 12. We next come to a further creation of souls—a subject somewhat difficult to follow. These souls are of an inferior grade to the preceding, for they are composed of the primal water and earth, of “water in itself” and “earth in itself” we must suppose, and not of the compound elements we now call by these names. These are the souls of certain “sacred animals” or lives, which bear the same relationship to the souls which “keep the wheel revolving” as animals do to man on earth. They are, however, not shaped like the animals on earth, nor possess even typical animal forms, but bear the forms of men, though they are not men. 13. Still was the divine “water-earth” substance unexhausted, and so the residue was handed over to “those souls that had gone in advance and had been summoned to the land of Gods,”—that is to say, those stations near the Gods, in highest æther, of which mention has just been made. These souls are, of course, the man-souls proper. Out of this residue these Builders were to fashion p. 140 animals, after the models the Creator gave them,—certain types of life, below the “man” type proper, ranged in due order corresponding to the “motions of the souls.” That is to say, there were various classes of Builders according to the types of animals which were to be copied. The Builders were to fashion the forms, the Creator was to breathe into them the life. 14. Thus these Builders fashioned the etheric doubles of birds, quadrupeds, fish and reptiles, and not their physical bodies, for as yet the earth was not solid. 15. And so the Builder-souls accomplished their task, and fashioned the primæval copies of the celestial types of animals. Proud of their work, they grew restive at the restraints placed upon them by the law of their stations, and overstepped the limits decreed by the Creator. 1 Whereupon the punishment is pronounced, and the Creator resolves to make the human frame, therein to imprison the disobedient souls. And here we learn incidentally that all of this p. 141 psychogenesis which has gone before was the direct teaching of Hermes to the writer; of no physical Hermes, however, but of that Hermes whose “Books” are hidden in the zones (5), of the Hermes whom the writer, as he would have us believe, came to know face to face only after his inner vision was opened, and he had gazed with all-seeing eyes “upon the mysteries of that new dawn” (4). 16. For the new and mysterious fabrication of the man-form, all the seven obedient Gods, to whom the man-souls are kin (17), are summoned by the chief of them, Hermes himself, the beloved son and messenger of the Supreme, “soul of My Soul, and holy mind of My own Mind.” 1 17. All of the seven promise to bestow the best they have on man. 18. The plasm out of which the man-form is to be modelled is the residue of the mixture out of which the Builders had already made the animal doubles. But the Builder of the man-frames was Hermes himself, who mixed the plasm with still more water. 19. Here the writer inserts a further piece of information concerning the source of his tradition. It is no longer as before what Hermes himself reveals to him in vision, but what the writer was told at a certain initiation called the “Black Rite.” This rite was presided over by Kamēphis, who is called the “earliest of all,” or perhaps more correctly the “most primæval of [us] all.” Kamēphis is thus conceived as the representative of a more ancient wisdom than that of Isis, and yet even he but hands on the tradition of Hermes. 2 20. The souls are “enfleshed,” and utter loud complaints. Apparently not all at first can speak articulately; most of them can only groan, or scream, p. 142 or hiss. The leading class of souls can, however, so far dominate the plasm as to speak articulately, and so one of their number utters a desperate appeal to Heaven. 21. They have now lost their celestial state, and Heaven is shut away from them; no longer can they see “without the light.” They are shut down into a “heart’s small compass”; the Sun of their being has become a light-spark only, hidden in the heart. This is, of course, the logos, the inmost reality in man. 22. The souls pray for some amelioration of their unhappy lot, and the conditions of the moral law are expounded to them. They who do rightly shall, on their body’s dissolution, reascend to Heaven and be at rest; they who do ill, shall work out their redemption under the law of metempsychosis, or change from body to body, from prison to prison. 23. Details of this metempsychosis are then given with special reference to the incarnations of the “more righteous,” who shall be kings, philosophers and prophets. Such souls apparently, for it is not expressly so stated, shall, in passing round the wheel of rebirth, when out of incarnation in a human body, have some sort of life with the souls of the leading types of animals, which are given as eagles, lions, dragons, and dolphins. Or, if we are unjustified in this speculation, such souls shall in their animal parts have intimate relation with the noblest types of animal essence (24). 25. There now comes upon the scene the mighty Intellect of the Earth, a veritable Erdgeist, in the form of Mōmus, who speaking out of affection for him (28), urges Hermes to increase ills and trials upon the souls of men, so that they shall not dare too much (25-27). And thereon Hermes sets in motion the instrument or engine of unerring fate and mechanical retribution (28, 29). p. 143 29. Now all these things took place at the dawn of earth-life, when all as yet was inert, as far as our now solid earth is concerned. We must then suppose that as yet our present phase of existence on earth had not yet been manifested; that all was as yet in a far subtler or more primitive state of existence, when earth was still all “a-tremble,” and had not yet hardened to its present state of solidity;—that is to say, that the man-plasm was in an etheric state (30). 31. The earth gradually hardens. Into the now more solid earth, the Creator and His obedient sons, the Gods who had not made revolt, poured forth the blessings of nature. This is described by the beautiful symbol of the hands of blessing, figured in Egypt as the sun-rays, each terminating in a hand for giving light and life. 1 The imprisoned souls, the kinsmen of the Gods obedient, continue their revolt; they are the leaders of mankind, of a mankind far weaker than themselves, a humanity, apparently evolved normally from the nature of things and as yet in its childhood. Instead of teaching them the lessons of love and wisdom, the Disobedient Ones use them for evil purposes, for war and conflict, for oppression and savagery. 32. Things go from bad to worse; the earth is befouled with the horrors of savage man, until in despair the pure elements complain to God. They pray that He will send a holy emanation of Himself to set things right (32-34). 35. Hereupon God sends forth the mystery of a new birth, a divine descent, or emanation, an avatāra, as the Aryan Hindu tradition would call it, a dual manifestation. 2 And so Osiris and Isis are born to help the p. 144 world, to recall men from savagery, and restore the moral order (35-37). It was they who were taught directly by Hermes (37) in all law and science and wisdom. Their mission meets with success, and the “world” is filled with a knowledge of the Path of Return. But before their ascension into Heaven they have a petition to make to the Father, that not only earth but also the surrounding spaces up to Heaven itself may be filled with a knowledge of the truth. Thus then they proceed to hymn the Sire and Monarch of all in a praise-giving which, unfortunately, Stobæus did not think fit to copy.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The original text of the “Virgin of the World” treatise is obviously broken only by the omission of the Hymn of Osiris and Isis, and Excerpt ii. follows otherwise immediately on Excerpt i. The subject is the birth of royal souls, taken up from the instruction given in K. K., 23, 24 above. 39. There are four chief spaces: (i) Invisible Heaven, inhabited by the Gods, with the Invisible Sun as lord of all; (ii) Æther, inhabited by the Stars, of which for us the Sun is leader; (iii) Air, in which dwell non-incarnate souls, ruled by the Moon, as watcher o’er the paths of genesis; (iv) Earth, inhabited by men and animals, and over men the immediate ruler is the Divine King of the time. 40. The king-soul is the last of the Gods but the first of men 1; he is, however, on earth a demigod only, for his true divinity is obscured. His soul, or ka, comes from a soul-plane superior to that of the rest of mankind. The ascending souls of normally evolving humanity are thought of, apparently, as describing ever widening p. 145 circles in their wheelings in and out of incarnation, rising, as they increase in virtue and knowledge, at the zenith of their ascent in the intermediate state, before they turn to descend again into rebirth, ever nearer to the limits of the sensible world and, the frontiers of Heaven. 41. But there is also another class of descending royal souls, who have only slightly transgressed, and therefore descend only as far as this grade of humanity. 42. For the royal or ruling soul is not only a warrior monarch; his sovereignty may be also shown in arts of peace. He may be a righteous judge, a musician or poet, a truth-lover or philosopher. The activities of these souls are not determined, as is the case with souls of lower grades,—that is, those souls which have fallen deeper into material existence,—by what Basilides would have called the “appendages” of the animal nature; they are determined by a fairer taxis, an escort of angels and daimones, who accompany them into birth. 43. The description of their manner of birth, however, is, unfortunately, lost to us, owing either to the hesitation of Stobæus to make it public, or to its being cut out by some subsequent copyist. 44. We are next told that sex is no essential characteristic of the soul. It is an “accident” of the body, but this body is not the physical, but the “aery” body, which air, however, is not a simple element, but already differentiated into four sub-elements. 1 45. Moreover the sight, or intelligence, of the soul also depends upon the purity of certain envelopes, which p. 146 are called “airs,”—“airs” apparently more subtle even than the aery body (45). 1 46. Next follows a naïve reason for the excellence of Egypt and the wisdom of the Egyptians (46-48). Here the writer seems to be no longer dependent directly on the Trismegistic tradition, but is inserting and expanding popular notions. 49. The remaining sections of the Excerpt are taken up with speculations as to the cause of delirium (49, 50), and Stobæus brings his extract to a conclusion apparently without allowing the writer to complete his exposition. SOURCES? The discussion as to the meaning of the title, which has so far been invariably translated “The Virgin of the World,” will come more appropriately later on. How much of the original treatise has been handed on to us by Stobæus we have no external means of deciding. Our two Extracts, however, plainly stand in immediate connection with each other, and the original text is broken only by the unfortunate omission of the Hymn of Osiris and Isis. The first Extract, moreover, is plainly not the beginning of the treatise, since it opens with words referring to what has gone before; while the second Extract ends in a very unsatisfactory manner in the middle of a subject. What we have, however, gives us some very interesting indications of how the writer regarded his sources,—whether written or oral, whether physical or psychic. He of course would have us take his treatise as a literary unity; and indeed the subject is so worked up that it is very difficult to discover what the literary p. 147 sources that lay before the writer may have been, for the story runs on straight enough in the same thought-mould and literary form, in spite of the insertion of somewhat contradictory statements concerning the sources of information. When, however, Reitzenstein (p. 136) expressly states that the creation-story shows indubitable traces of two older forms, and that this is not a matter of surprise, as we find two (or more precisely four) different introductions,—we are not able entirely to follow him. It is true that these introductory statements are apparently at variance, but on further consideration they appear to be not really self-contradictory. THE DIRECT VOICE AND THE BOOKS OF HERMES The main representation is that the teacher of Isis is Hermes, who saw the world-creation, that is, the creation of our earth-system, and the soul-making, with his own spiritual sight (2). Isis has obtained her knowledge in two ways: either from the sacred Books of Hermes (4, 5); or by the direct spiritual voice of the Master (15). The intention here is plainly to claim the authority of direct revelation, for even the Books are not physical. They have disappeared, if indeed they ever were physical, and can only be recovered from the tablets of unseen nature, by ascending to the zones (5) where they are hidden; and these zones are plainly the same as the soul-spaces mentioned in S. I. H., 8. At the same time there is mention of another tradition, which, though in later details purporting to be historic and physical, in its beginnings is involved in purely mythological and psychic considerations. When the first and most ancient Hermes ascended to Heaven, he left his Books in the charge of the Gods, his kinsmen, p. 148 in the zones, and not on earth (3). On earth there succeeded to this wisdom a younger race, beloved of Hermes, and personified as his son Tat. These were souls as yet too young to understand the true science face to face. They were apparently regarded as the Tat (Thoth) priesthood of our humanity, who were subsequently joined by wisdom-lovers of another line of tradition, the Imuth (Asclepius) brotherhood, who had their doctrine originally from Ptah. 1 This seems to hint at some ancient union of two traditions or schools of mystic science, perhaps from the Memphitic and Thebaic priesthoods respectively. 2 What, however, is clear is that the writer professes to set forth a higher and more direct teaching than either the received tradition of the Isiac mystery-cult or of the Tat-Asclepius school. This he does in the person of Isis as the face to face disciple of the most ancient Hermes, 3 thus showing us that in the Hermes-circles of the Theoretics, or those who had the direct sight, though the Isis mystery-teaching was considered a tradition of the wisdom, it was nevertheless held to be entirely subordinate to the illumination of the direct sight.
p. 149 KAMEPHIS AND THE DARK MYSTERY In apparent contradiction to all this we have the following statement: “Now give good heed, son Horus, for thou art being told the mystic spectacle which Kamēphis, our forefather, was privileged to hear from Hermes, the record-writer of all deeds, and I from Kamēphis when he did honour me with the Black [Rite] that gives perfection” (19). 1 Here Reitzenstein (p. 137) professes to discover the conflation of two absolutely distinct traditions of (i) Kamephis, a later god and pupil of Hermes, and (ii) Kamephis, an older god and teacher of Isis; but in this I cannot follow him. It all depends on the meaning assigned to the words παρὰ τοῦ πάντων προγενεστέρου, which Reitzenstein regards as signifying “the most ancient of all [gods],” but which I translate as “the most ancient of [us] all.” I take it to mean simply that, according to the general Isis-tradition, the founder of its mysteries was stated to be Kamephis, but that the Isis-Hermes circles claimed that this Kamephis, though truly the most ancient figure in the Isis tradition proper, was nevertheless in his turn the pupil of the still more ancient Hermes. The grade of Kamephis was presumably represented in the mystery-cult by the arch-hierophant who presided at the degree called the “Dark Mystery” or “Black Rite.” It was a rite performed only for those p. 150 who were judged worthy of it (ἐτίμησεν) after long probation in lower degrees, something of a far more sacred character, apparently, than the instruction in the mysteries enacted in the light. I would suggest, therefore, that we have here a reference to the most esoteric institution of the Isiac tradition, the more precise nature of which we will consider later on; it is enough for the moment to connect it with certain objects or shows that were apparently made to appear in the dark. As Clement of Alexandria says in his famous commonplace book, called the Stromateis 1: “It is not without reason that in the mysteries of the Greeks, lustrations hold the first place, analogous to ablutions among the Barbarians [that is, non-Greeks]. After these come the lesser mysteries, which have some foundation of instruction and of preliminary preparation for what is to follow; and then the great mysteries, in which nothing remains to be learned of the universe, but only to contemplate and comprehend nature [herself] and the things [which are mystically shown to the initiated].” 2 p. 151 KNEPH-KAMEPHIS But who was Kamēphis in the theology of the Egyptians? According to Reitzenstein, Kamephis or Kmephis, that is Kmeph, is equated by Egyptologists with Kneph, who, according to Plutarch, 1 was worshipped in the Thebaid as the ingenerable and immortal God. Kneph, however, as Sethe has shown, 2 is one of the aliases of Ammon, who is the “bull [or husband] of his mother,” the “creator who has created himself.” Kneph is, moreover, the Good Daimon, as Philo of Byblus says. 3 He is the Sun-god and Heaven-god Ammon. “If he open his eyes, he filleth all with light in his primæval 4 land; and if he close them all is dark.” 5 Here we have Kneph-Ammon as the giver of light in darkness, and the opener of the eyes. Moreover, Porphyry 6 tells us that the Egyptians regarded Kneph as the demiurge or creator, and represented him in the form of a man, with skin of a blue-black tint, girt with a girdle, and holding p. 152 a sceptre, and wearing a crown of regal wings. This symbolism, says Porphyry, signified that he was the representative of the Logos or Reason, difficult to discover, hidden, 1 not manifest 2; it is he who gives light and also life 3; he is the King. The winged crown upon his head, he adds, signifies that he moves or energizes intellectually. Kamephis, then, stands in the Isis-tradition for the representative of Agathodaimon, the Logos-creator. He is, however, a later holder of this office, and has had it handed on to him by Hermes, or at any rate he is instructed in the Logos-wisdom by Hermes. HERMES I. AND HERMES II. In this connection it is instructive to refer to the account which Syncellus 4 tells us he took from the statement of Manetho. Manetho, says Syncellus, states in his Books, that he based his replies concerning the dynasties of Egypt to King Ptolemy on the monuments. “[These monuments], he [Manetho] tells us, were engraved in the sacred language, and in the characters of the sacred writing, by Thoth the First Hermes; after the Flood they were translated from the sacred language into the then common tongue, but [still written] in hieroglyphic characters, and stored away in books, by the Good Daimon’s son, the Second Hermes, the father of Tat, in the inner shrines of the temples of Egypt.” p. 153 Here we have a tradition, going back as far as Manetho, which I have shown, in Chapter V. of the “Prolegomena” on “Manetho, High Priest of Egypt,” cannot be so lightly disposed of as has been previously supposed,—dealing expressly with the Books of Hermes. This tradition, it is true, differs from the account given in our Sermon (3-5), where the writer says nothing expressly of a flood, but evidently wishes us to believe that the most ancient records of Hermes were magically hidden in the zones of the unseen world, and that the flood, if there was one, was a flood or lapse of time that had utterly removed these records from the earth. For him they no longer existed physically. Manetho’s account deals with another view of the matter. His tradition appears to be as follows. The oldest records were on stone monuments which had survived some great flood in Egypt. These records belonged to the period of the First Hermes, the Good Daimon par excellence, the priesthood, therefore, of the earliest antediluvian Egyptian civilization. After the flood they were translated from the most archaic language into ancient Egyptian, and preserved in book-form by the Second Hermes, the priesthood, presumably, of the most ancient civilization after the flood, who were in time succeeded by the Tat priesthood. That this tradition is elsewhere contradicted by the Isis-tradition proper, which in a somewhat similar genealogy places Isis at the very beginning prior even to Hermes I., 1 need not detain us, since each tradition would naturally claim the priority of those whom it regarded as its own special founders, and we are for the moment concerned only with the claims of the Hermes-school. p. 154 The main point of interest is that there was a tradition which explained the past on the hypothesis of periods of culture succeeding one another,—the oldest being supposed to have been the wisest and highest; the most archaic hieroglyphic language, which perhaps the priests of Manetho’s day could no longer fully understand, 1 was supposed to have been the tongue of the civilization before the Flood of Hermes I. It may even be that the remains of this tongue were preserved only in the magical invocations, as a thing most sacred, the “language of the gods.” The point of view, however, of the circle to which our writer belonged, was that the records of this most ancient civilization were no longer to be read even in the oldest inscriptions; they could only be recovered by spiritual sight. Into close relation with this, we must, I think, bring the statement made in § 37, that Osiris and Isis, though they themselves had learned all the secrets of the records of Hermes, nevertheless kept part of them secret, and engraved on stone only such as were adapted for the intelligence of “mortal men.” The Kamephis of the Isis-tradition, then, apparently stands for Kneph as Agathodaimon, that is for Hermes, but not for our Hermes I., 2 for he has no physical p. 155 contact with the Isis-tradition, but for Hermes II., who was taught by Hermes I. THE BLACK RITE But what is the precise meaning of the “black rite” at which Kamephis presides? I have already suggested the environment in which the general meaning may be sought, though I have not been able to produce any objective evidence of a precise nature. Reitzenstein (pp. 139 ff.), however, thinks he has discovered that evidence. His view is as follows: The key to the meaning, according to him, is to be found in the following line from a Magic Papyrus 1: “I invoke thee, Lady Isis, with whom the Good Daimon doth unite, 2 He who is Lord ἐν τῷ τελείῳ μέλανι.” Reitzenstein thinks that the Good Daimon here stands for Chnum, and works out (p. 140) a learned hypothesis that the “black” refers to a certain territory of black earth, between Syene and Takompso, the Dedocaschœnus, especially famed for its pottery, which was originally in the possession of the Isis priesthood, but was subsequently transferred to the priesthood of Chnum by King Dośer. Reitzenstein would thus, presumably, translate the latter half of the sentence as “the Good Daimon who is Lord in the perfect black [country],” and so make it refer to Chnum, though indeed he seems himself to feel the inadequacy of this explanation to cover the word “perfect” (p. 144). But this seems to me to take all the dignified meaning out of both our text and that of the Magic Papyrus, and to introduce p. 156 local geographical considerations which are plainly out of keeping with the context. It is far more natural to make the Agathodaimon of the Papyrus refer to Osiris; for indeed it is one of his most frequent designations. Moreover, it is precisely Osiris who is pre-eminently connected with the so-called “under world,” the unseen world, the “mysterious dark.” He is lord there, while Isis remains on earth; it is he who would most fitly give instructions on such matters, and indeed one of the ancient mystery-sayings was precisely, “Osiris is a dark God.” 1 “He who is Lord in the perfecting black,” might thus mean that Osiris, the masculine potency 2 of the soul, purified and perfected the man on the mysterious dark side of things, and completed the work which Isis, the feminine potency of the soul, had begun on him. That, in the highest mystery-circles, this was some stage of union of the man with the higher part of himself, may be deduced from the interesting citations made by Reitzenstein (pp. 142-144) from the later Alchemical Hermes-literature; it clearly refers to the mystic “sacred marriage,” 3 the intimate union of the soul with the logos, or divine ray. Much could be written on this subject, but it will be sufficient to append two passages of more than ordinary interest. The Jewish over-writer of the Naassene Document contends that the chief mystery of the Gnosis was but the consummation of the instruction given in the various mystery-institutions of the nations. The p. 157 [paragraph continues] Lesser Mysteries, he tells us, commenting on the text of the Pagan commentator, pertained to “fleshly generation,” whereas the Greater dealt with the new birth, or second birth, with regeneration, and not with genesis. And speaking of a certain mystery, he says: “For this is the Gate of Heaven, and this is the House of God, where the Good God 1 dwells alone, into which [House] no impure [man] shall come; but it is kept under watch for the spiritual alone; where when they come they must cast away their garments, and all become bridegrooms obtaining their true manhood through the Virginal Spirit. For such a man is the Virgin big with child, conceiving and bearing a Son, not psychic, not fleshly, but a blessed Æon of Æons.” 2 In the marvellous mystery-ritual of the new-found fragments of The Acts of John, lately discovered in a fourteenth century MS. in Vienna, disguised in hymn form, and hiding an almost inexhaustible mine of very early tradition, the “sacred marriage” is plainly suggested as one of the keys to part of the ritual. Compare, for instance, with the “casting away of their garments,” in the above-quoted passage of the Naassene writer, the following: “[The Disciple.] I would flee. [The Master.] I would [have thee] stay. [The Assistants.] Amen! [The Disciple.] I would be robed. [The Master.] And I would robe [thee]. [The Assistants.] Amen! [The Disciple.] I would be at-oned. p. 158 [The Master.] And I would at-one. [The Assistants.] Amen!” 1 BLACK LAND. But to return to the “mysterious black.” Plutarch tells us: “Moreover, they [the Egyptians] call Egypt, inasmuch as its soil is particularly black, as though it were the black of the eye, Chemia, and compare it with the heart,” 2—for, he adds, it is hot and moist, and set in the southern part of the inhabitable world, in the same way as the heart in the left side of a man. 3 Egypt, the “sacred land” par excellence, was called Chemia or Chem (Ḥem), Black-land, because of the nature of its dark loamy soil; it was, moreover, in symbolic phraseology the black of the eye, that is, the pupil of the earth-eye, the stars and planets being regarded as the eyes of the gods. 4 Egypt, then, was the eye and heart of the Earth; the Heavenly Nile poured its light-flood of wisdom through this dark of the eye, or made the land throb like a heart with the celestial life-currents. Nor is the above quotation an unsupported statement of Plutarch’s, for in an ancient text from Edfu, 5 we read: “Egypt (lit. the Black), which is so called after the eye of Osiris, for it is his pupil.” Ammon-Kneph, too, as we have seen, is black, or blue-black, signifying his hidden and mysterious p. 159 character; and in the above-quoted passage he is called “he who holds himself hidden in his eye,” or “he who veils himself in his pupil.” This pupil, then, concludes Reitzenstein (p. 145), is the “mysterious black.” Is this, then, the origin of this peculiar phrase? If so, it would be connected with seeing, the spiritual sight, the true Epopteia. THE PUPIL OF THE WORLD’S EYE But Isis, also, is the black earth, and, therefore, the pupil of the eye of Osiris, and, therefore, also of the Chnum or Ammon identified with Osiris at Syene. Isis, therefore, herself is the “Pupil of the World’s Eye”—the κόρη κόσμου. 1 Reitzenstein would, therefore, have it that the original type of our treatise looks back to a tradition which makes the mystery-goddess Isis the disciple and spouse of the mysterious Chnum or Ammon, or Kneph or Kamephis, as Agathodaimon; and, therefore, presumably, that the making of this Kamephis the disciple in his turn of Hermes is a later development of the tradition, when the Hermes-communities gained ascendancy in certain circles of the Isis-tradition. This is very probable; but dare we, with Reitzenstein, cast aside the “traditional” translation of κόρη κόσμου, as “Virgin of the World,” and prefix to our treatise as title the new version, “The Pupil of the Eye of the World”? It certainly sounds strange as a title to unaccustomed ears, and differs widely from any other titles of the Hermetic sermons known to us. But what does the “Virgin of the World” mean in connection with our treatise? Isis as the Virgin Mother is a p. 160 familiar idea to students of Egyptology 1; she is κατ᾽ ἐξοχὴν, the “World-Virgin.” THE SON OF THE VIRGIN And here it will be of interest to turn to a curious statement of Epiphanius 2; it is missing in all editions of this Father prior to that of Dindorf (Leipzig, 1859), which was based on the very early (tenth century) Codex Marcianus 125, all previous editions being printed from a severely censured and bowdlerized fourteenth century MS. Epiphanius is stating that the true birthday of the Christ is the Feast of Epiphany, “at a distance of thirteen days from the increase of the light [i.e. December 25]; for it needs must have been that this should be a figure of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself and of His twelve disciples, who make up the thirteen days of the increase of the Light.” The Feast of the Epiphany was a great day in Egypt, connected with the “Birth of the Æon,”—a phase of the “Birth of Horus.” For Epiphanius thus continues: “How many other things in the past and present support and bear witness to this proposition, I mean the birth of Christ! Indeed, the leaders of the idol-cults, 3 filled with wiles to deceive the idol-worshippers who believe in them, in many places keep highest festival on this same night of Epiphany [= the Manifestation to Light], so that they whose hopes are in error may not seek the truth. For instance, at p. 161 [paragraph continues] Alexandria, in the Koreion, 1 as it is called—an immense temple, that is to say the Precinct of the Virgin—after they have kept all-night vigil with songs and music, chanting to their idol, when the vigil is over, at cock-crow, they descend with lights into an underground crypt, and carry up a wooden image lying naked on a litter, with the seal of a cross made in gold on its forehead, and on either hand two similar seals, and on either knee two others, all five seals being similarly made in gold. And they carry round the image itself, circumambulating seven times the innermost temple, to the accompaniment of pipes, tabors and hymns, and with merry-making they carry it down again underground. And if they are asked the meaning of this mystery, they answer: ‘To-day at this hour the Maiden (Korē), that is, the Virgin, gave birth to the Æon.’” He further adds that at Petra, in Arabia, where, among other places, this mystery was also performed, the Son of the Virgin is called by a name meaning the “Alone-begotten of the Lord.” 2 Here, then, at Alexandria, in every probability the very environment of our treatise, we have a famous mystery-rite, solemnized in the Temple of the Virgin, who gives birth to a Son, the Æon. This, we shall not be rash in assuming, signifies not only the birth of the new year, but also still more profound mysteries, when we remember the words of the Naassene Document quoted above: “For such a man is the Virgin, big with child, conceiving and bearing a Son,—not psychic, not fleshly [nor, we may add, temporal], but p. 162 a blessed Æon of Æons”—that is, an Eternity of Eternities, an immortal God. We should also notice the crowing of the cock, which plays so important a part in the crucifixion-story in the Gospels, 1 and above all things the stigmata on the image, the symbols of a cosmic and human mystery. THE MYSTERY OF THE BIRTH OF HORUS In our own treatise the mysterious Birth of Horus is also referred to (35, 36) as follows. Isis has handed on the tradition of the Coming of Osiris, the Divine emanation, the descent of the efflux of the Supreme, and Horus asks: “How was it, mother, then, that Earth received God’s efflux?”—where Earth may well refer to the “Dark Earth,” a synonym of Isis herself. And Isis answers: “I may not tell the story of [this] birth; for it is not permitted to describe the origin of this descent, O Horus, [son] of mighty power, lest afterward the way of birth of the immortal Gods should be known unto men.” Here I think we have a clear reference to the mysterious “Birth of Horus,” the birth of the gods,—that is to say, of how a man becomes a god, becomes the most royal of all souls, gains the kingdom, or lordship over himself. This mystery was not yet to be revealed to the neophyte—Horus—and yet this Birth is suggested to Tat by Hermes—C. H., xiii. (xiv.) 2—when he says: “Wisdom that understands in silence [such is the matter and the womb from out which Man is born] and the True Good the Seed.” The womb is the mysterious Silence, the matter is p. 163 [paragraph continues] Wisdom, Isis herself, the seed is the Good, the Agathodaimon, Osiris. But in our treatise Horus has not yet reached to this high state; Isis, as the introductory words tell us, is pouring forth for him “the first draught of immortality” only, “which souls have custom to receive from gods”; he is being raised to the understanding of a daimon, but not as yet to that of a god. All of this, moreover, seems to have been part and parcel of the Isis mystery-tradition proper, for as Diodorus (i. 25), following Hecatæus, informs us, it was Isis who “discovered the philtre of immortality, by means of which, when her son Horus, who had been plotted against by the Titans, and found dead (νεκρόν) beneath the water, not only raised him to life (ἀναστῆσαι) by giving him life (ψυχήν), but also made him sharer in immortality.” Here we have evidence to show that in the mystery-myth Horus was regarded as the human soul, and that there were two interpretations of the mystery. It referred not only to the “rising from the dead” in another body, or return to life in another enfleshment, but also to a still higher mystery, whereby the consciousness of immortality was restored to the memory of the soul. The soul had been cast by the Titans, or the opposing powers of the subtle universe, into the deep waters of the Great Sea, the Ocean of Generation, or Celestial Nile, for as the mysterious informant of Cleombrotus told him, 1 these stories of Titans concerned daimons or souls proper, not bodies. 2 p. 164 From this death in the sea of matter, Isis, the Mother Soul, brings Horus repeatedly back to life, and finally bestows on him the knowledge of immortality, and so raises him from the “dead.” 1 This birth of the “true man” within, the logos, was and is for man the chief of all mysteries. In the Chapter on “The Popular Theurgic Hermes-Cult,” we have already, in elucidation of the sacramental formula, “Thou art I and I am thou,” quoted the agraphon from the Gospel of Eve concerning the Great Man and the Little Man or Dwarf, and lovers of the Aupaniṣhad literature of Hindu-Aryan theosophy need hardly be p. 165 reminded of “the ‘man,’ of the size of a thumb,” within, in the ether of the heart. 1 “ISHON” But what is of more immediate interest is that the same idea is to some extent found in the Old Covenant documents, especially in the Prophetical and Wisdom literature, which latter was strongly influenced by Hellenistic ideas. Ishon, which literally means “little man” or “dwarf,” 2 is in A.V. generally translated “apple of the eye.” 3 Thus we read in a purely literal sense, referring to weeping: “Let not the apple of thine eye cease” (Lam. ii. 18). It was, however, a common persuasion, that the intelligence or soul itself, not merely the reflection of the image of another person, resided in the eye, and was made manifest chiefly by the eye. Thus the “apple of the eye” was used as a synonym for a man’s most precious possession, the treasure-house as it were of the light of a man. p. 166 And so we read: “He [Yahweh] kept him [Israel] as the apple of his eye” (Ps. xvii. 8)—where ishon is in the Hebrew further glossed as the “daughter of the eye”; and again: “Thus saith the Lord of Hosts: . . . He that toucheth you toucheth the apple of his eye” (Zech. ii. 8). The “apple of the eye” (ishon) was, then, something of great value, something very precious, and, therefore, we read in the Wisdom-literature that the punishment of the man who curses his father and mother is that “his lamp shall be put out in obscure (ishon) darkness” (Prov. xx. 20)—that is, that he shall thus extinguish the lamp of his intelligence, or perhaps spiritual nature, “in the apple of his eye there will be darkness”; and this connects with a passage in the Psalms which shows traces of the same Wisdom-teaching. “In the hidden part 1 [of man] thou shalt make me to know wisdom” (Ps. li. 6). But the most striking passages are to be found in that pre-eminently Wisdom-chapter in the Proverbs-collection, where the true Israelite is warned to remain faithful to the Law (Torah), and to have no commerce with the “strange woman,” the “harlot”—that is, the “false doctrines” of the Gentiles. 2 “Keep my law as the apple of thine eye” (Prov. vii. 2), says the writer, speaking in the name of Yahweh, for he has seen the young and foolish being led astray by the “strange woman.” “He went the way to her house, in the twilight, in the evening; in the black (ishon) and dark night” (Prov. vii. 9). That is to say, p. 167 his lamp was put out; there was dark night in his eye, in that little man of his, which should be his true light-spark understanding the wisdom of Yahweh. Here, I think, we have additional evidence, that the idea, that the pupil of the eye was the seat of the spiritual intelligence in man, was widespread in Hellenistic circles. 1 But even so, can we translate κόρη κόσμου as the “Apple of the World-Eye”? It is true that Isis is the instrument or organ of conveying the hidden wisdom to Horus, and that it is eventually Hermes or the Logos who is the true light itself, which shines through her, the pupil of Egypt’s eye, 2 out of that mysterious darkness, in which she found herself, when she received illumination at the hands of Kamephis; but is this sufficient justification for rejecting the traditional translation of the title, and adopting a new version? On the whole I am inclined to think, that though the new rendering may at first sight appear somewhat strained, nevertheless in proportion as we become more familiarized with the idea and remember the thought-environment of the time, we may venture so to translate it. Isis, then, is the “Apple or Pupil of the Eye of Osiris.” On earth the “mysterious black” is Egypt p. 168 herself, the wisdom-land. Isis is the mysterious wisdom of Egypt, but in our treatise she is even more than this, for she is that wisdom but now truly illumined by the direct sight, the new dawn of the Trismegistic discipline of which she speaks (4). To a Greek, however, the word κόρη would combine and not distinguish the two meanings of the title over which we have been labouring; but even as logos meant both “word” and “reason,” so korē would mean both “virgin” and “pupil of the eye”; but as it is impossible to translate it in English by one word, we have followed the traditional rendering. THE SIXTY SOUL-REGIONS We now turn to a few of the most important points which require more detailed treatment than the space of a footnote can accommodate. There are, of course, many other points that could be elaborated, but if that were done, the present work would run into volumes. The number of degrees into which the soul-stuff (psychōsis) is divided, is given as three, and as sixty (10). If this statement stood by itself we should have been somewhat considerably puzzled to have known what to make of it, even when we remembered the mystic statement that 60 is par excellence the number of the soul, and that he who can unriddle the enigma will know its nature. Fortunately, however, if we turn to S. I. H., 6 (Ex. xxvii.), we find that according to this tradition the soul-regions also were divided into 60 spaces, presumably corresponding to the types of souls. They were in 4 main divisions and 60 special spaces, with no overlapping (7). These spaces were also called zones, firmaments or layers. We are further told (6) that the lowest division, that p. 169 is the one nearest to the earth, consists of 4 spaces; the second, of 8; the third, of 16; and the fourth, of 32. And still further (7), that there were besides the 4 main divisions 12 intervallic ones. This introduces an element of uncertainty, for, as far as I am aware, we have no objective information which can enable us to determine how the intervallic divisions were located in the mind of the writer; speculation is rash, but a scheme has suggested itself to me, and I append it with all reservation. First of all we have 4 main divisions or planes, separated from one another by 3 determinations of some sort, for the whole ordering pertains to the Air proper, and perhaps the 4 states of Air were regarded as earthy, watery, aery, and fiery Air. The 3 determinations may perhaps have been regarded as corresponding to the three main grades or florescences of the soul-stuff, which were apparently of a superior substance. Each division of the 4 may further have been regarded as divided off by three intervallic determinations; so that we should have 3 such intervals in the lowest division, subdividing it into 4 spaces of 1 space each; 3 in the second, subdividing it into 4 spaces of 2 spaces each; 3 in the third, subdividing it into 4 spaces of 4 spaces each; and 3 in the fourth, subdividing it into 4 spaces of 8 spaces each. The sum of these intervals would thus be 12. PLUTARCH’S YOGIN In this connection, however, I cannot refrain from appending a pleasant story told by Plutarch. 1 p. 170 The speaker is Cleombrotus, a Lacedæmonian gentleman and man of means, who was a great traveller, and a greedy collector of information of all sorts to form the basis of a philosophical religion. He had spent much time in Egypt, and had also been a voyage beyond the Red Sea. On his travels Cleombrotus had heard of a philosopher-recluse, who lived in complete retirement, except once a year when he was seen by “the folk round the Red Sea”; then it was that a certain divine inspiration came upon him, and he came forth and “prophesied” to the nobles and royal scribes who used to flock to hear him. With great difficulty, and only after the expenditure of much money, Cleombrotus discovered the hermitage of this recluse, and was granted a courteous reception. Our old philosopher was the handsomest man Cleombrotus had ever met, deeply versed in the knowledge of plants, and a great linguist. With Cleombrotus, however, he spoke Doric, and almost in verse, and “as he spake perfume filled the place from the sweetness of his breath.” His knowledge of the various mystery-cults was profound, and his intimate acquaintance with the unseen world remarkable; he explained many things to Cleombrotus, and especially the nature of the daimones, and the important part they played as factors in any satisfactory interpretation of ancient mythology, seeing that most of the great myths referred to the doings of the daimones and not of mortals. Cleombrotus, however, has told his story merely as an introduction to the quotation of a scrap of information let fall by the old philosopher concerning the plurality of worlds 1; thus, then, he continues: p. 171 “THE PLAIN OF TRUTH” “He told me that the number of worlds was neither infinite, nor one, nor five, but that there were 183 of them, arranged in the figure of a triangle of which each side contained 60, and of the remaining 3 one set at each angle. And those on the sides touch each other, revolving steadily as in a choral dance. And the area of the triangle is the Common Hearth of all, and is called the ‘Plain of Truth,’ 1 in which the logoi and ideas and paradigms of all things which have been, and which shall be, lie immovable; and the Æon [or Eternity] being round them [sc. the ideas], time flows down upon the worlds like a stream. And the sight and contemplation (θέαν) of these things is possible for the souls of men only once in ten thousand years, should they have lived a virtuous life. And the highest of our initiations here below is only the dream of that true vision and initiation 2; and the discourses [sc. delivered in the mystic rites] have been carefully devised to awaken the memory of the sublime things above, or else are to no purpose.” p. 172 This statement I am inclined to regard as one of the most distinct pronouncements on the nature of the higher mysteries which has been preserved to us from antiquity, and the locus classicus and point of departure for any really fruitful discussion of the true nature of the philosophic mysteries, and yet I have never seen it referred to in this connection. Our old philosopher was well acquainted with the Egyptian mystery-tradition, for Cleombrotus obtained information from him concerning the esoteric significance of Typhon and Osiris, and what I have quoted above falls naturally into place in the scheme of ideas of the tradition preserved in the treatise which we are discussing. 1 It, indeed, pertains to a higher side of the matter, for it purports to be the highest theoria of all, and possible for the souls even of the most righteous only at long periods of time. Of course the representation is symbolical. The triangle is no triangle; it is the “plain of truth,” the “hearth of the universe.” The triangle, then, pertained to the plane of Fire proper and not Air. Still, the ordering of the “worlds” is similar to that of our soul spaces. The triangle is shut off from the manifested world by the Æon; it is out of space and time proper. Time flows down from it. The worlds proper are 3 worlds or cosmoi, each divided into 60 subordinate cosmoi, in choral dance, or orderly harmonious movement of one to the other. Our soul-spaces, then, may have been regarded as some reflection of these supernal conditions. One is almost tempted to turn the plane triangle p. 173 into a solid figure, a tetrahedron, 1 and imagine the idea of a world or wheel, at each of the four angles, and to speculate on the Wheels of Ezekiel, the prototype of the Mercabah or Heavenly Chariot of Kabalism, the Throne of Truth of the Supreme, but I will not try the patience of my readers any further, for doubtless most of them will have cried already: Hold, enough! THE BOUNDARIES OF THE NUMBERS WHICH PREEXIST IN THE SOUL Perhaps, however, it would be as well, before dismissing the subject, to consider very briefly what Plato, following Pythagoras, 2 has to say concerning the “boundaries” of all numbers which pre-exist in the soul. These soul-numbers are 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 27 (the combination of the two Pythagorean series 1, 2, 4, 8 and 1, 3, 9, 27), or 1, 2, 3, 2², 2³, 3², 3³. Of these numbers 1, 2, 3 are apportioned to the World-Soul itself, in its intellectual or spiritual aspect, and signify its abiding in (1), its proceeding from (2), and its returning to itself (3); this with regard to primary natures. But in addition, intermediate subtle natures or souls are “providentially” ordered in their evolution and involution, by the World-Soul; they proceed according to the power of the fourth term (4 or 2²), “which possesses generative powers,” and return according to that of the fifth (9 or 3²), “which reduces them to one.” Finally also solid or gross natures are also “providentially” ordered in their procession according to 8 (2³), and in their conversion according to 27 (3³). 3 p. 174 From all of which we get the following scheme of circular progression and conversion of the soul, the various main stages through which it passes: With this compare the “Chaldæan Oracle” (ap. Psellus, 19): “Do not soil the spirit, nor turn the plane into the solid”—μὴ πνεῦμα μολύνῃς μῦτε βαθύνῃς τὸ ἐπίπεδον (ed. Cory, Or. clii., p. 270); where the four stages correspond to the point, line, plane, and solid. It is also to be remembered that since x0 = 1, 20 = 1 and 30 = l. That these are the boundary numbers of the soul, according to Pythagoreo-Platonic tradition, is of interest, but how this can in any way be made to agree with the ordering of the soul-spaces in our treatise is a puzzle. That by adding these numbers together (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 8 + 9 + 27) we get 54, and by farther adding the numbers of the World-Soul proper (1 + 2 + 3) we get 6, and so total out the whole sum of the phases to 60, savours somewhat of “fudging,” as we used to call it at school. It is by no means convincing, for we are here combining particulars with universals as though they were of equal dignity; still the ancients frequently resort to such combinations. That, however, there is something more than learned trifling in these numbers of Plato may be seen by the brilliant study of Adam on the “nuptial number” of Plato, 1 which was based upon the properties of the p. 175 [paragraph continues] “Pythagorean triangle,” a right-angled triangle to the containing sides of which the values of 3 and 4 were given, the value of its hypothenuse being consequently 5; and 3 × 4 × 5 = 60. The numbers 3, 4, 5, together with the series 1, 2, 4, 8, and 1, 3, 9, 27, were the numerical sequences which supplied those “canons of proportion” with which the Pythagoreans and Platonists chiefly busied themselves. Still, as far as I can see, this does not throw any clear light on the ordering of the soul spaces as given in our treatise, and we are therefore tempted to connect it with the tradition of the mysterious 60’s of Cleombrotus. But what that choral dance was which ordered the subordinate cosmoi into 60’s, and whether they proceeded by stages which might correspond to 3’s and 4’s and 5’s, we have, as far as I am aware, no data on which to base an argument. It may, however, have been connected with Babylonian ideas; the 3 may have been regarded as “falling into” 4, so making 12, and this stage in its turn have been regarded as “falling into” 5, and so making 60. THE MYSTERIOUS CYLINDER It is to be noticed, however, that before the souls revolted, the Demiurge “appointed for them limits and reservations 1 in the height of Upper Nature, that they might keep the cylinder a-whirl in proper order and economy” (11). They were, then, confined to certain orderings and spaces. But what is the mysterious “cylinder” which they were to keep revolving? So far I have come across nothing that throws any p. 176 direct light on the subject. However, Proclus 1 says that Porphyry stated that among the Egyptians the letter χ, surrounded by a circle, symbolized the mundane soul. It is curious that Porphyry should have referred this idea to the Egyptians, when he must have known that Plato, to whom Porphyry looked as the corypheus of all philosophy, had treated of the significance of the symbol X (in Greek χ) in perhaps the most discussed passage of the Timæus (36B). 2 This letter symbolized the mutual relation of the axes and equators of the sphere of the “same” (the “fixed stars”) and the sphere of the “other” (the “seven planetary spheres”). Porphyry, however, may have believed that Plato, or Pythagoras, got the idea in the first place from Egypt—the common persuasion of his school. This enigma of Plato is described as follows by Jowett in his Introduction to the Timæus 3: “The universe revolves round a centre once in twenty-four hours, but the orbits of the fixed stars take a different direction from that of the planets. The outer and the inner sphere cross one another and meet again at a point opposite to that of their first contact; the first moving in a circle from left to right along the side of a parallelogram which is supposed to be inscribed in it, the second also moving in a circle along the diagonal of the same parallelogram from right to left 4; or, in p. 177 other words, the first describing the path of the equator, the second, the path of the ecliptic.” We should thus, just as the Egyptians, according to Porphyry, symbolized it, represent the conception by the figure of a circle with two diameters suggesting respectively the equator and the ecliptic. But what is the rectangular figure to which Jowett refers, but which he does not further describe? The circles are spheres; and, therefore, the rectangular figure must be a solid figure inscribed in the sphere “of the same.” If we now set the circle revolving parallel to the longer sides of the figure, this “parallelogram” will trace out a cylinder, while the seven spheres of the “other,” the “souls” of the “planets,” moving parallel to one of the diagonals of our figure, and in an opposite direction to the sphere of the “same,” will, by their mutual difference of rates of motion, cause their “bodies” (the souls surrounding the bodies) to trace out spiral orbits. All this in itself, I confess, seems very far-fetched, and I should have thrown my notes on the subject into the waste-paper basket, but for the following consideration: Basil of Cæsarea, in his Hexæmeron, or Homilies on p. 178 the Six Days of Creation, declared it “a matter of no interest to us whether the earth is a sphere or a cylinder or a disk, or concave in the middle like a fan.” 1 The cylinder-idea, then, was a favourite theory with regard to the earth-shape in the time of Basil, that is the fourth century. This cylinder-idea, however, I am inclined to think was very ancient. In the domain of Greek speculation we first meet with it in what little is known of the system of Anaximander of Miletus, the successor of Thales. Anaximander is reported to have believed that “the earth is a heavenly body, controlled by no other power, and keeping its position because it is the same distance from all things; the form of it is curved, cylindrical, like a stone column; it has two faces; one of these is the ground beneath our feet, and the other is opposite to it.” 2 And again: “That the earth is a cylinder in form, and that its depth is one-third of its breadth.” 3 Now I have never been able to persuade myself that the earliest philosophers of Greece “invented” the ideas ascribed to them. They stood on the borderland of mythology and mysticism, and, in every probability, took their ideas from ancient traditions. p. 179 [paragraph continues] Anaximander himself was in every probability indirectly, for all we know even directly, influenced by Egyptian and Chaldæan notions; indeed, who can any longer doubt in the light of the Cnossus excavations?” 1 Anaximander is thus said to have regarded the earth-cylinder as fixed, whereas in our treatise the cylinder is not the earth and is not fixed; it is, on the contrary, a celestial cylinder and in constant motion. Can it, then, possibly be that this cylinder notion was associated with some Babylonian idea, and had its source in that country par excellence of cylinders? In Babylonia, moreover, the cylinder-shape was frequently used for seals, fashioned like a small roller, so that the characters or symbols engraved on them could be impressed on soft substance, such as wax. Further, the Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations were, as we know, closely associated, and pre-eminently so in the matter of sigils and seals. In the Coptic-Gnostic works, translated from Greek originals, and indubitably mainly of Egyptian origin, the idea of “characters,” “seals,” and “sigils,” as types impressed on matter, is a commonplace. Can our cylinder, then, have some connection with the circle of animal types, or types of life, of which so much is said in our treatise? The souls of the supernal man class would then have had the task of keeping this cylinder in motion, so that thereby the various types were continually impressed on the plasms in the sphere of generation, or ever-becoming—the wheel of genesis? This may be so, for in P. S. A., 19, we read: “The air, moreover, is the engine, or machine, through which p. 180 all things are made . . . mortal from mortal things and things like these.” So also in K. K., 28, Hermes says: “And I will skillfully devise an instrument, mysterious, possessed of power of sight that cannot err . . . an instrument that binds together all that’s done.” Here again we have the same idea, all connected with the notion of Fate or Heimarmene; the instrument of Hermes is the Kārmic Wheel, by which cause and effect are linked together, and that too with a moral purpose. 1 Finally, in connection with our cylinder, we may compare the Âryan Hindu myth of the “Churning of the Ocean,” in the Viṣhṇu Purāṇa. The churning-staff or Pillar was the heaven-mountain, round which was coiled the cosmic serpent, to serve as rope for twirling it. The rope was held at either end by the Devas and Asuras, or gods and dæmons. There is also a mystic symbol in India which probably connects with a similar range of ideas. It is two superimposed triangles (⧖), with their apices touching, and round the centre a serpent is twined,—a somewhat curious resemblance to our X and cylinder-idea. And so much for this puzzling symbol. THE EAGLE, LION, DRAGON AND DOLPHIN We now pass to the four leading types of animals, connected with souls of the highest rank—namely, the eagle, lion, dragon, and dolphin (24, 25)—which it may be of interest to compare with the symbolism of some of the degrees of the Mithriac Mysteries. 2 p. 181 [paragraph continues] In one of the preliminary degrees of the rite, we are informed, some of the mystæ imitated the voices of birds, others the roaring of lions. 1 All of this was interpreted by the initiates as having reference to transmigration or metempsychosis. Thus Porphyry 2 tells us that in the Mysteries of Mithras they called the mystæ by the names of different animals, so symbolizing man’s common lower nature with that of the irrational animals. Thus, for instance, they called some of the men “lions,” and some of the women “lionesses,” some were called “ravens,” while the “fathers,” the highest grade, were called “hawks” and “eagles.” The “ravens” were the lowest grade; those of the “lion” grade were apparently previously invested with the disguises and masks of a series of animal forms before they received the lion shape. Porphyry tells us, further, that Pallas, who had, prior to Porphyry’s day, written an excellent treatise on the Mithriaca, now unfortunately lost, asserts that all this was vulgarly believed to refer to the zodiac, but that in truth it symbolized a mystery of the human soul, which is invested with animal natures of various kinds, 3 p. 182 according to the tradition of the Magi. Thus they call the sun (and therefore those corresponding to this nature) a bull, a lion, a dragon, and a hawk. It is further to be remembered that Appuleius, 1 in describing the robe with which he was invested after his initiation into the Mysteries of Isis, tells us that he was enthroned as the sun, robed in twelve sacramental stoles or garments; these garments were of linen with beautiful paintings upon them, so that from every side “you might see that I was remarkable by the animals which were painted round my vestment in various colours.” This dress, he says, was called the “Olympic Stole.” MOMUS Finally, it may perhaps be of service to make the reader a little better acquainted with Momus. Among the Greeks Momus was the personification of the spirit of fault-finding. Hesiod, in his Theogony (214), places him among the second generation of the children of Night, together with the Fates. From the Cypria 2 of Stasimus, 3 we learn that, when Zeus, in answer to Earth’s prayer to relieve her of her overpopulation of impious mankind, 4 first sent the Theban War, and on this proving insufficient, bethought him of annihilating the human race by thunderbolts (fire) and floods (water), Momus advises the Father of gods and men to marry the goddess Thetis to a mortal, so that a beautiful daughter (Aphrodite-Helen) might be born to p. 183 them, and so mankind, Greeks and Barbarians, on her account be involved in internecine strife—namely, the Trojan War. Further, the Scholiast on Il., i. 5, avers that it was Momus whom Homer meant to represent by the “will” or “counsel” of Zeus. Sophocles, moreover, wrote a Satyric drama called “Momus,” 1 and so also Achæus. 2 Both Plato 3 and Aristotle 4 refer to Momus. Callimachus, the chief librarian of the Alexandrian Library, from 260-240 B.C., in his Ætia, 5 pilloried his critic and former pupil Apollonius Rhodius as Momus. Momus, moreover, was a favourite figure with the Sophists and Rhetoricians, especially of the second century A.D. In Æl. Aristides, 6 Momus, as he could find no fault with Aphrodite herself, found fault with her shoe. 7 Lucian makes Aphrodite vow to oppose Momus tooth and nail, 8 and makes Momus find fault with even the greatest works of the gods, such as the house of Athene, the bull of Zeus, and the men of Hephæstus,—the last because the god-smith had not put windows in their breasts so that their hearts might be seen. 9 And, interestingly enough in connection with our treatise, Lucian, in one of his witty sketches, 10 makes p. 184 [paragraph continues] Momus one of the persons of the dialogue with Zeus and Hermes. Momus finds fault because Bacchus is reckoned among the gods, and is commanded by Zeus to refrain from making ridicule of Hercules and Asclepius. The popular figure of Momus was that of a feeble old man, 1—a very different representation from the grandiose Intelligence of our treatise, a true Lucifer. Some representations give his one sharp tooth, and others wings. The story runs that Zeus finally banished him from Olympus for his fault-finding. 2 The Onomastica Vaticana 3 connects Momus with Mammon; but this side-issue need not detain us. 4 THE MYSTIC GEOGRAPHY OF SACRED LANDS With regard to the symbolic figure of the Earth of §§ 46-48 of the second K. K. Extract, and the persuasion that Egypt was the heart or centre thereof, we may append two quotations on the subject from widely different standpoints. The first is from Dr Andrew D. White’s recent volumes 5: “Every great people of antiquity, as a rule, regarded its own central city or most holy place as necessarily the centre of the earth. “The Chaldeans held that their ‘holy house of the gods’ was the centre. The Egyptians sketched the world under the form of a human figure, in which Egypt was the heart, and the centre of it Thebes. For the Assyrians, it was Babylon; for the Hindus, it was Mount Meru; for the Greeks, so far as the civilized p. 185 world was concerned, Olympus or the temple of Delphi; for the modern Mohammedans, it is Mecca and its sacred stone; the Chinese, to this day, speak of their empire as the ‘middle kingdom.’ It was in accordance, then, with a simple tendency of human thought that the Jews believed the centre of the world to be Jerusalem. “The book of Ezekiel speaks of Jerusalem as in the middle of the earth, and all other parts of the world as set around the holy city. Throughout the ‘ages of faith’ this was very generally accepted as a direct revelation from the Almighty regarding the earth’s form. St Jerome, the greatest authority of the early Church upon the Bible, declared, on the strength of this utterance of the prophet, that Jerusalem could be nowhere but at the earth’s centre; in the ninth century Archbishop Kabanus Maurus reiterated the same argument; in the eleventh century Hugh of St Victor gave to the doctrine another scriptural demonstration; and Pope Urban, in his great sermon at Clermont urging the Franks to the crusade, declared, ‘Jerusalem is the middle point of the earth’; in the thirteenth century an ecclesiastical writer much in vogue, the monk Cæsarius of Heisterbach, declared, ‘As the heart in the midst of the body, so is Jerusalem situated in the midst of our inhabited earth,’—‘so it was that Christ was crucified at the centre of the earth.’ Dante accepted this view of Jerusalem as a certainty, wedding it to immortal verse; and in the pious book of travels ascribed to Sir John Mandeville, so widely read in the Middle Ages, it is declared that Jerusalem is at the centre of the world, and that a spear standing erect at the Holy Sepulchre casts no shadow at the equinox. “Ezekiel’s statement thus became the standard of orthodoxy to early map-makers. The map of the world at Hereford Cathedral, the maps of Andrea Bianco, p. 186 [paragraph continues] Marino Sanuto, and a multitude of others fixed this view in men’s minds, and doubtless discouraged during many generations any scientific statements tending to unbalance this geographical centre revealed in Scripture.” So much for the righteous indignation of modern physical science; now for cryptology and mysticism. M. W. Blackden, in a recent article on “The Mysteries and the ‘Book of the Dead,’” writes as follows 1: “One other key there is . . . without which it is useless to approach The Book of the Dead with the idea of discussing any of those gems of wisdom for which old Egypt was so famous. . . . The knowledge of its existence is no recent discovery: it is simply that ancient nations such as the Egyptians, Chaldees, and Jews, had a system of symbolic geography. . . . “The Jewish and Egyptian priestly caste endeavoured to map out their lands in accordance with their symbols of spiritual things, so far as the physical features would permit. This symbolism of mountain, city, plain, desert, and river extended from the various parts and furniture of the Lodge, to use Masonic phraseology, up to the spiritual anatomy, as it were, of both macrocosm and microcosm. “Thus in the Jewish Scriptures it is not difficult to distinguish, in the prophetic battles of the nations that were to rage round about Jerusalem, the same symbolism as we have more directly expressed in a little old book called The Siege of Mansoul, the author of which was the John Bunyan of The Pilgrim’s Progress, a man who could well grasp the excellence of geographical symbolism. “I cannot, of course, here enter at length into the geographical symbols of Egypt, it would take too long; but as I have given Jerusalem as a symbol, I may say p. 187 further that Jerusalem as a symbol corresponds to the Egyptian On, or Heliopolis, and so astronomically to the centre of the world and of the universe, and in the microcosm to the spiritual Heart of Man. 1 “But there is one difference between the Hebrew and Egyptian city; for whereas the actual Jerusalem corresponds among the Hebrew prophets to that Jerusalem that now is, and is in bondage with her children, Heliopolis corresponded among the Egyptian priesthood to that city which was to come, the Heavenly City, the New Heart, that should be given to redeemed mankind.” Here then we have a thesis that deserves a volume to itself; and so I leave it to him who has a mind to undertake the labour. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Footnotes 137:1 Or rather apocalypse; see § 15: “As Hermes says when he speaks unto me.” 137:2 Cf. the Egregores of The Book of Enoch; see Charles’ Translation (Oxford; 1893), Index, under “Watchers.” 137:3 The new Manvantara following a periodical Pralaya, to use the terms of Indo-Aryan tradition. 137:4 The creation is figured in one Egyptian tradition as the bursting forth of the Creator into seven peals of laughter,—a sevenfold “Ha!” 138:1 Cf. the “florescence” of § 10. 140:1 Cf. the same idea as expressed by Basilides (ap. Hipp., Philos., vii. 27), but in reversed order, when, speaking of the consummation of the world-process, and the final ascension of the “Sonship” with all its experience gained from union with matter, he says of the remaining souls, which have not reached the dignity of the Sonship, that the Great Ignorance shall come upon them for a space. “Thus all the souls of this state of existence, whose nature is to remain immortal in this state of existence alone, remain without knowledge of anything different from or better than this state; nor shall there be any rumour or knowledge of things superior in higher states, in order that the lower souls may not suffer pain by striving after impossible objects, just as though it were fish longing to feed on the mountains with sheep, for such a desire would end in their destruction. All things are indestructible if they remain in their proper condition, but subject to destruction if they desire to overleap and transgress their natural limits” (F. F. F., p. 270). 141:1 Cf. Cyril, C. Jul., i. 35; Frag. xvi. 141:2 Cf. §§ 29 and 37. 143:1 Cf. Hermes-Prayer, iii. 3. 143:2 This is of special interest as showing how the Egyptian tradition, in this pre-eminent above all others, did not limit the manifestation to the male sex alone. 144:1 Cf. C. H., xviii. 8 ff. 145:1 The “spirituous” or “aery” body, or vehicle, is composed of the sub-elements, but in it is a predominance of the sub-element “air,” just as in the physical there is a predominance of “earth.”—Philoponus, Proœm. in Aristot. de Anima; see my Orpheus (London, 1896), “The Subtle Body,” pp. 276-281. Cf. also S. I. H., 15, 20. 146:1 Compare this with the prāṇa’s of Indian theosophy; see C. H., x. (xi.) 13, Comment. 148:1 Cf. Diog. Laert., Proœm., i.: “The Egyptians say that Hephæstus (Ptah) was the son of Neilus (the Nile), and that he was the originator of philosophy, of that philosophy whose leaders are priests and prophets”—that is to say, a mystic philosophy of revelation. 148:2 Thus Suidas (s.v. “Ptah”) says that Ptah was the Hephæstus of the Memphite priesthood, and tells us that there was a proverbial saying current among them: “Ptah hath spoken unto thee.” This reminds us of our text: “As Hermes says when he speaks unto me.” 148:3 The type of Isis as utterer of “sacred sermons,” describing herself as daughter or disciple of Hermes, is old, and goes back demonstrably to Ptolemaic times. R. 136, n. 4; 137, n. 1. 149:1 ὁπότ᾽ ἐμὲ καὶ τῷ τελείῳ μέλανι ἐτίμησεν. This has hitherto been always supposed by the philological mind simply to refer to the mysteries of ink or writing, and that too without any humorous intent, but in all portentous solemnity. We must imagine, then, presumably, that it refers to the schooldays of Isis, when she was first taught the Egyptian equivalents for pothooks and hangers. This absurdity is repeated even by Meineke. 150:1 The more correct title of this work should be “Gnostic Jottings (or Notes) according to the True Philosophy,” as Clement states himself and as has been well remarked by Hort in his Ante-Nicene Fathers, p. 87 (London, 1895). 150:2 Op. cit., v. 11. Sopater (Dist. Quæst., p. 123, ed. Walz) speaks of these as “figures” (σχήματα), the same expression which Proclus (In Plat. Rep., p. 380) employs in speaking of the appearances which the Gods assume in their manifestations; Plato (Phædr., p. 250) calls them “blessed apparitions,” or beatific visions” (εὐδαίμονα φάσματα); the author of the Epinomis (p. 986) describes them as “what is most beautiful to see in the world”; these are the “mystic sights” or “wonders” (μυστικὰ θεάματα) of Dion Chrysostom (Orat., xii., p. 387, ed. Reiske); the “holy appearances” (ἅγια φαντάσματα) and “sacred shows” (ἱερὰ δεικνύμενα) of Plutarch (Wyttenbach, Fragm., vi. 1, t. v., p. 722, and De Profect. Virtut. Sent., p. 81, ed. Reiske); the “ineffable apparitions” (ἄρρητα φάσματα) of Aristides (Orat., xix. p. 416, ed. Dindorf); the “divine apparitions” (θεῖα φάσματα) of Himerius (Eclog., xxxii., p. 304, ed. Wernsdorf),—those sublime sights the memory of which was said to accompany the souls of the righteous into the after-life, and when they returned to birth. Cf. Lenormant (F.) on “The Eleusinian Mysteries” in The Contemporary Review (Sept. 1880), p. 416, who, however, thinks that these famous philosophers and writers bankrupted their adjectives merely for the mechanical figures and stage-devices of the lower degrees. See my “Notes on the Eleusinian Mysteries” in The Theosophical Review (April, May, June, 1898), vol. xxii., p. 156. 151:1 De Is. et Os., xxi. 151:2 Berl phil. Wochenschr. (1896), p. 1528; R. 137, n. 3. 151:3 R. 133, n. 2. 151:4 προτογόνῳ—cf. the προγενεστέρου πάντων above. 151:5 Epeius, ap. Eusebius, Præp. Ev., i. 10, p. 41 D. 151:6 Ap. Euseb., Præp., iii. 11, 45, p. 115. 152:1 Cf. the epithet “utterly hidden” found in the “Words (Logoi) of Ammon,” referred to by Justin Martyr, Cohort., xxxviii., and the note thereon in “Fragments from the Fathers.” 152:2 Typified by the dark-coloured body. 152:3 ζωοποιός—typified, presumably, by the girdle (the symbol of the woman) and the staff (the symbol of the man). 152:4 Chron., xl. (ed. Dind., i. 72). 153:1 Varro, De Gente Pop. Rom., ap. Augustine, De Civ. Dei, xviii. 3, 8; R. 139, n. 3. 154:1 It is said that with regard to ancient archaic texts which are still extant, modern Egyptology is able to translate them with greater accuracy than the priests of Manetho’s day; but this one may be allowed to question, unless the ancient texts are capable solely of a physical interpretation. 154:2 The Hermes, presumably, who was fabled to be the son of the Nile, not the physical Nile, but the Heaven Ocean, the Great Green, the Soul of Cosmos, and whom, we are told, the Egyptians would never speak of publicly, but, presumably, only within the circles of initiation. This Nile may be in one sense the Flood that hid the Books of Hermes in its depths or zones; but equally so the son of Nile may be the first Hermes after the Flood. 155:1 Wessley, Denkschr. d. k. Akad. (1893), p. 37, l. 500. 155:2 So R., though this is a meaning to which the lexicons give no support; the verb generally meaning “to defer” or “assent to.” 156:1 Compare also the mystery ritual in The Acts of John: “I am thy God, not that of the betrayer” (F. F. F., p. 434). 156:2 As the Gnostic Marcus would have called it. 156:3 On this ἱερός γάμος or γάμος πνευματικός, see Lobeck (C. A.), Aglaophamus (Königsberg, 1829), 608, 649, 651. 157:1 That is, the Agathodaimon. 157:2 That is, the “Birth of Horus.” Hippolytus, Philos., v. 8 (ed. Dunk, and Schneid, pp. 164, 166, ll. 86-94). see “Myth of Man in the Mysteries,” § 28. The last clause is the gloss of the later Christian over-writer. 158:1 The text is to be found in James (M. R.), Apocrypha Anecdota, ii. (Cambridge, 1897), in Texts and Studies; F. F. F., pp. 432, 433. 158:2 De Is. et Os., xxxiii. 158:3 Cf. this with K. K., 47, where Egypt is said to occupy the position of the heart of the earth. 158:4 Cf. K. K., 20: “Ye brilliant stars, eyes of the gods.” 158:5 Cited by Ebers, “Die Körperteile in Altägyptischen,” Abh. d. k. bayr. Akad. (1897), p. 111, where other references are given. 159:1 Compare also the Naassene document, § 8, in the “Myth of Man” chapter of the Prolegomena, where Isis is called “the seven-robed and black-mantled goddess.” 160:1 Cf. “Isis, the Queen of Heaven, whose most ancient and distinctive title was the Virgin Mother.” Marsham Adams (F.), The Book of the Master, or the Egyptian Doctrine of the Light born of the Virgin Mother (London, 1898), p. 63. 160:2 Hær., li. 22. 160:3 And pre-eminently, therefore, for Epiphanius, the Egyptians. 161:1 That is, the Temple of Korē. This can hardly be the Temple of Persephonē, as Dindorf (iii. 729) suggests, but rather the Temple of Isis. 161:2 Cf. D. J. L., pp. 407 ff. 162:1 Though some have conjectured that the “cock” was the popular name for the Temple-watchman who called the hours. 163:1 See below, where the story is given from Plutarch’s Moralia. 163:2 Compare The Book of the Dead, lxxviii. 31, 32; Budge’s Trans. (London, 1901), ii. 255: “I shall come forth . . . into the House of Isis, the divine lady. I shall behold sacred things which are hidden, and I shall be led on to the secret and holy things, even as they have granted unto me to see the birth of the Great God. Horus hath made me to be a spiritual body through his soul, [and I see what is therein].” Compare the last sentence with C. H., i. 7, and xi. (xii.) 6, where the pupil “sees” by means of the soul of his Master. 164:1 This passage, I believe, affords us an objective point of departure for the reconsideration of C. W. Leadbeater’s statement, in his Christian Creed (London, 1898), p, 45, that “Pontius Pilate” is a pseudo-historical gloss for πόντος πιλητός, the “dense sea” of “matter,” into which the soul is plunged. See for a discussion of this hypothesis D. T. L., pp. 423 ff. In connection with this a colleague has supplied me with an exceedingly interesting note from Texts and Studies, iv. 2, Coptic Apocryphal Gospels, p. 177, Frag. 4. The Sahidic text is found in Rendiconti della R. Accademia dei Lincei, vol. iii., sem. 2, pp. 381-384 (Frammenti Copti, Nota Via), by Ignazio Guidi (1887). The legend runs that the Devil taking “the form of a fisherman,” goes fishing, and is met by Jesus as He was coming down from the Mount with His disciples. The Devil announces that “he who catcheth fish here, he is the Master. It is not a wonder to catch fish in the waters, the wonder is in this desert, to catch fish therein.” They then have a trial of skill, but the MS. unfortunately breaks off before the result is told. It is in this Fragment that the following remarkable sentence occurs: “Now as Pilate was saying these things before the authorities of Tiberius, the king, Herod, could not refrain from setting Pilate at naught, saying, ‘Thou art a Galilæan foreign Egyptian Pontus.’” The literal translation from the Coptic runs: “Thou art a Pontus Galilæan foreign Egyptian.” 165:1 Compare, for instance, Kaṭhopaniṣhad, Sec. ii., Pt. ii., iv. 11, 12: “The Man, of the size of a thumb, resides in the midst, within in the self, of the past and the future the lord; from him a man hath no desire to hide. This verily is That. “The Man, of the size of a thumb, like flame free from smoke, of past and of future the lord, the same is to-day, to-morrow the same will he be. This verily is That.”—Mead and Chaṭṭopādhyāya’s Trans. (London, 1896), i. 68, 69. Here “to-day” and “to-morrow” are said by some to refer to different incarnations; the “Man” (puruṣha) being the potential Self, destined finally to become, or grow into the stature of, the Great Self (Maha-puruṣha). 165:2 See the article, “Theosophic Light on Bible Shadows,” in The Theosophical Review (Nov. 1904), xxxv. 230, 231. 165:3 The minute image of a person reflected in the pupil of the eye of another may to some extent account for the popular belief underlying this identification. 166:1 The same idea which we found above in connection with Ammon. 166:2 To go “a-whoring” after strange gods and strange doctrines was the graphic figure invariably employed by Hebrew orthodoxy; “to commit fornication” not unfrequently echoes the same idea in the New Testament. 167:1 For the latest study on the subject, see Monseur (E.), “L’Âme Pupilline,” Rev. de l’Hist. des Relig. (Jan. and Feb. 1905), who discusses the significance in primitive religion of the reflected image to be seen in the pupil of the eye. This “little man” of the eye was taken to be its soul, and to control all its functions. 167:2 Cf., for the idea in the mind of the ancients, Tim. 45 B: “So much of the fire as would not burn, but gave a gentle light, they formed into a substance akin to the light of every-day life; and the pure fire which is within us and related thereto they made to flow through the eyes in a stream smooth and dense, compressing the whole eye, and especially the centre part, so that it kept out everything of a coarser nature, and allowed to pass only this pure element.” 169:1 De Defectu Oraculorum, xxi., xxii. (42lA-422C), ed. G. N. Bernardakis (Leipzig, 1891), iii. 97-101. See my paper, “Plutarch’s Yogī,” in The Theosophical Review (Dec. 1891), ix. 295-297. 170:1 In this referring to the passage in the Timæus, (55 C D), which runs: “Now, he who, duly reflecting on all this, enquires whether the worlds are to be regarded as indefinite or definite in number, will be of opinion that the notion of their indefiniteness is characteristic of a sadly indefinite and ignorant mind. He, however, who raises the question whether they are to be truly regarded as one or five, takes up a more reasonable position” (Jowett’s Trans., 3rd ed., iii. 475, 476). 171:1 Cf. S. I. H., 3: “Now as I chance myself to be as though initiate into the nature that transcendeth death, and that my feet have crossed the Plain of Truth”; and K. K., 22: “The Monarch came, and sitting on the Throne of Truth made answer to their prayers.” The locus classicus is, of course, Plato, Phædrus, 248 B. 171:2 Cf. K. K., 37: “’Tis they who, taught by Hermes that the things below have been disposed by God to be in sympathy with things above, established on the earth the sacred rites o’er which the mysteries in heaven preside.” 172:1 Our difficulty, however, is that Plutarch, in the words of one of his characters, rejects the idea of this numbering being in any way Egyptian, and ascribes it to a certain Petron of Himera in Sicily,—thereby suggesting a probable Pythagorean connection. 173:1 See the section, “Some Outlines of Æonology,” F. F. F., pp. 311-335. 173:2 See my Orpheus (London, 1896), pp. 255-262. 173:3 Cf. Taylor (T.), “Introd. to Timæus,” Works of Plato (London, 1804), p. 442. 174:1 Rep., viii. 545C-547A. See Adam (J.), The Nuptial Number of Plato: Its Solution and Significance (London, 1891). 175:1 Which may have been regarded as the prototypes of the soul-spaces. 176:1 Comment. in Plat. Tim., 216C; ed. C. E. C. Schneider (Vratislaviæ, 1847), p. 250. 176:2 A passage which Proclus, op. cit., 213A (ed. Sch., p. 152) further explains by means of the “harmonic canon” or ruler. 176:3 Jowett (B.), Dialogues of Plato (3rd ed., Oxford, 1892), iii. 403. 176:4 Cf. text 36C: “The motion of the same he carried round by the side to the right, and the motion of the diverse diagonally to the left,”—that is the side of the rectangular figure supposed to be inscribed in the circle of the “same,” and diagonally, across the rectangular figure from corner to corner; and 38D, 39A: “Now, when all the stars which were necessary to the creation of time [i.e. the spheres of the sun, moon, and five planets] had attained a motion suitable to them, and had become living creatures, having bodies fastened by vital chains, and learned their appointed task, moving in the motion of the diverse, which is diagonal, and passes through, and is governed by the motion of the same, they revolved, some in a larger and some in a lesser orbit. . . . The motion of the same made them turn all in a spiral.” With these instruments of “time,” surrounded by the sphere of the same, compare the idea of time flowing down on the worlds, from the Æon, in the story of Cleombrotus. 178:1 So quoted in Andrew Dickson White’s History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (New York, 1898), i. 92. Dr White, unfortunately, does not give the exact reference. The “fan” is, of course, the winnowing fan, a broad basket into which the corn mixed with chaff was received after threshing, and was then thrown up into the wind, so as to disperse the chaff and leave the grain. 178:2 Alexander of Aphrodisias, Comment. on Aristotle in Meteor., 91r (vol. i., 268 I d); Diels, Doxographi Græci (Berlin, 1879), p. 478. Cf. Aëtius, De Placitis Reliquiæ, iii. 10 (Diels, 579). 178:3 Plutarch, Strom., 2 (Diels, 579). See Fairbanks (A.), The First Philosophers of Greece (London, 1898), pp. 13, 14. 179:1 Delitzsch also, in his Babel und Bibel, states that the great debt of early Greece to Assyria will be made clear in a forthcoming work of German scholarship. 180:1 I have also got a stray reference, “κύλινδρος, Plut., 2, 682 C, Xylander’s pages,” but I have not been able to verify this. 180:2 See Cumont (F.), Textes et Monuments figurés relat. aux Mystères de Mithra (Bruxelles, 1899), i. 315. 181:1 Ps. Augustine, Quæstt. Vet. et Nov. Test. (Migne, P. L., tom, xxxiv. col. 2214 f.). 181:2 De Abstinentia, iv. 16 (ed. Nauck, p. 253). 181:3 Cf. Clement of Alexandria on the Basilidian theory of “appendages,” remembering that the School of Basilides was strongly tinctured with Egyptian ideas. “The Basilidians are accustomed to give the name of appendages (or accretions) to the passions. These essences, they say, have a certain substantial existence, and are attached to the rational soul, owing to a certain turmoil and primitive confusion. On to this nucleus other bastard and alien natures of the essence grow, such as those of the wolf, ape, lion, goat, etc. . . . And not only do human souls thus intimately associate themselves with the impulses and impressions of irrational animals, but they even initiate the movements and beauties of plants, because they likewise bear the characteristics of plants appended to them. Nay, there are also certain characteristics [of minerals] shown by habits, such as the hardness of adamant” (F. F. F., p. 276). 182:1 Metamorphoses, Book xi. 182:2 Which Pindar and Herodotus ascribed to Homer himself. 182:3 See Frag. I. from the Scholion on Hom., Il., i. 5 ff. 182:4 See K. K., 34. 183:1 Frag. 369-374B (ed. Dind.); the context of which some believe to be found in Lucian’s Hermotimus, 20. 183:2 Frag. 29, from the Scholion on Aristophanes, Pax, 357. 183:3 Rep., vi. 487A: “Nor would even Momus find fault with this.” 183:4 De Partt. Animal., iii. 2. 183:5 And also at the end of his Hymn to Apollo, ii. 112; also Epigram. Frag., 70. 183: 6 Or., 49; ed. Jebb, p. 497. 183:7 Cf. Julian, Ep. ad Dionys. 183:8 Dial. Deor., xx. 2. 183:9 Hermot., xx.; cf. Nig., xxxii.; Dial. Deor., ix.; Ver. Hist., ii. 3; Bab. Fab., lix.; and Jup. Trag., xxii. 183:10 Deor. Consil, iv. 184:1 Philostratus, Ep. 21. 184:2 For the above and other references, see Trümpel’s art. “Momus,” in Roscher’s Lexicon. 184:3 Lug., 194, 59. 184:4 See Nestle’s art. “Mammon,” in Cheyne’s Encyclopædia Biblica. 184:5 Op. supra cit., i. 98, 99. 186:1 The Theosophical Review (July, 1902), vol. xxx. pp. 406, 407. 187:1 “There is an old map of the world in the British Museum which demonstrates both these significations. See also Mappa Mundi, ‘Ebsdorf,’ 1284, and that in Hereford Cathedral made by Richard of Haldingham, one of the Prebends, 1290-1310.”
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THE PROPHET Kahil Gibran Page 83/84/85/86 The veil that clouds your eyes shall be lifted by the hands that wove it, And the clay that fills your ears shall be pierced by those fingers that kneaded it. And you shall see And you shall hear. Yet you shall not deplore having known blindness, nor regret having been deaf For in that day you shall know the hidden purposes in all things, And you shall bless darkness as you would bless light. After saying these things he looked about him, and he saw the pilot of his ship standing by the helm and gazing now at the full sails and now at the distance. And he said: Patient, over patient, is the captain of my ship. The wind blows, and restless are the sails; Even the rudder begs direction; Yet quietly my captain awaits my silence. And these my mariners, who have heard the choir of the greater sea,they too have heard me patiently. Now they shall wait no longer. I am ready The stream has reached the sea, and once more THE GREAT MOTHER holds her son against her breast. Fare you well, people of Orphalese. This day has ended. It is closing upon us even as the water-lily upon its own tomorrow. What was given us here we shall keep, And if it suffices not, then again must we come together and together stretch our hands unto the giver. Forget not that I shall come back to you. . A little while, and my longing shall gather dust and foam for another body. A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman shall bear me. Farewell to you and the youth I have spent with you. It was but yesterday we met in a dream. You have sung to me in my aloneness, and I of your longings have built a tower in the sky. But now our sleep has fled and our dream is over, and it is no longer dawn. The noontide is upon us and our half waking has turned to fuller day, and we must part. If in the twilight of memory we should meet once more, we shall speak again together and you shall sing to me a deeper song. and if our hands should meet in another dream we shall build another tower in the sky. So saying he made a signal to the seamen, and straightaway they weighed anchor and cast the ship loose from its moorings, and they moved eastward. And a cry came from the people as from a single heart, and it rose into the dusk and was carried out over the sea like a great trumpeting. Only Almitra was silent, gazing after the ship until it had vanished into the mist. And when all the people were dispersed she still stood alone upon the sea-wall, remembering in her heart his saying: A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman shall bear me.'
FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS A QUEST FOR THE BEGINNING AND THE END Graham Hancock 1995 Chapter 32 Speaking to the Unborn Page 285 "It is understandable that a huge range of myths from all over the ancient world should describe geological catastrophes in graphic detail. Mankind survived the horror of the last Ice Age, and the most plausible source for our enduring traditions of flooding and freezing, massive volcanism and devastating earthquakes is in the tumultuous upheavals unleashed during the great meltdown of 15,000 to 8000 BC. The final retreat of the ice sheets, and the consequent 300-400 foot rise in global sea levels, took place only a few thousand years before the beginning of the historical period. It is therefore not surprising that all our early civilizations should have retained vivid memories of the vast cataclysms that had terrified their forefathers. A message in the bottle of time" 'Of all the other stupendous inventions,' Galileo once remarked, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very distant either in time or place, speaking with those who are in the Indies, speaking to those who are not yet born, nor shall be this thousand or ten thousand years? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangements of two dozen little signs on paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of men.3 If the 'precessional message' identified by scholars like Santillana, von Dechend and Jane Sellers is indeed a deliberate attempt at communication by some lost civilization of antiquity, how come it wasn't just written down and left for us to find? Wouldn't that have been easier than encoding it in myths? Perhaps. "What one would look for, therefore, would be a universal language, the kind of language that would be comprehensible to any technologically advanced society in any epoch, even a thousand or ten thousand years into the future. Such languages are few and far between, but mathematics is one of them"
"WRITTEN IN THE ETERNAL LANGUAGE OF MATHEMATICS"
The FULCANELLI Phenomenon Kenneth Rayner Johnson 1980 The Praxis Page 190 Theoretical physics has become more and more occult, cheerfully breaking every previously sacrosanct law of nature and leaning towards such supernatural concepts as holes in space, negative mass and time flowing backwards ... The greatest physicists ... have been groping towards a synthesis of physics and parapsychology. - Arthur Koestler: The Roots of Coincidence, (Hutchinson, 1972.)
Middle Eastern Mythology S. H. Hooke 1963 Middle Eastern Mythology Recent Sumerian studies 5 have shown that the conception or a divine garden and of a state when sickness and death did not exist and wild animals did not prey on one another is to be found in Sumerian mythology. The description of this earthly Paradise is contained in the Sumerian poem which Dr Kramer has called the Epic of Emmerkar: The land Dilmun is a pure place, the land Dilmun is a clean place The land Dilmun is a clean place, the land Dilmun is a bright place In Dilmun the raven uttered no cry, The kite uttered not the cry of the kite, The lion killed not, The wolf snatched not the lamb, Unknown was the kid-killing dog, Unknown was the grain-devouring boar ... The sick·eyed says not '1 am sick-eyed', The sick-headed says not '1 am sick-headed', Its (Dilmun's) old woman says not 'I am an old woman', Its old man says not 'I am an old man', Unbathed is the maid, no sparkling water is poured in the city, Who crosses the river (of death?) utters no ... The 'wailing priests walk not about him, The singer utters no wail, By the side of the city he utters no lament. Later, in the Semitic editing of the Sumerian myths, Dilmun became the dwelling of the immortals, where Utnapishtim and his wife were allowed to live after the Flood (p. 49). It was apparently located at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. According to the Sumerian myth the only thing which Dilmun lacked was fresh water; the god Enki (or Ea) ordered Utu, the sun-god, to 'bring up fresh water from the earth to water the garden. Here we may have the source of the / Page 115 / mysterious 'ed of which the Yahwist speaks as coming up from the ground to water the garden. In the myth of Enki and Ninhursag it is related that the mother-goddess Ninhursag caused eight plants to grow in the garden of the gods. Enki desired to eat these plants and sent his messenger Isimud to fetch them. Enki ate them one by one, and Ninhursag in her rage pronounced the curse of death upon Enki. As the result of the curse eight of Enki's bodily organs were attacked by disease and he was at the point of death. The great gods were in dismay and Enlil was powerless to help. Ninhursag was induced to return and deal with the situation. She created eight goddesses of healing who proceeded to heal each of the diseased parts of Enki's body. One of these parts was the god's rib, and the goddess who was created to deal with the rib was named Ninti, which means 'the lady of the rib'. But the Sumerian word ti has the double meaning of 'life' as well as ' rib', so that Ninti could also mean 'the lady of life'. We have seen that in the Hebrew myth the woman who was fashioned from Adam's rib was named by him Hawwah, meaning 'Life'. Hence one of the most curious features of the Hebrew myth of Paradise clearly has its origin in this somewhat crude Sumerian myth. Other elements in the Yahwist's form of the Paradise myth have striking parallels in various Akkadian myths. The importance of the possession of knowledge, which is always magical knowledge, is a recurring theme. We have seen that the myth of Adapa and the Gilgamesh Epic are both concerned with the search for immortality and the problem of death and the existence of disease. These and other examples which we have cited will serve to illustrate the point that the Akkadian myths were concerned with the themes which appear in the Yahwist's Paradise story.
IN SEARCH OF EXTRA TERRESTRIALS Unsolved UFO sightings... strange secrets of the moon... new evidence that alien astronauts are exploring the earth Alan Landsburg 1976 Page 79 " The words of J. B. S. Haldane came back to haunt me. He once wrote, "Now my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy myself, and must be my excuse for dreaming."
REACH FOR TOMORROW Arthur C. Clarke 1956 Introduction to 1989 Edition "However I have made some interesting discoveries; for instance, on the very first page of the first story, I see the number 9000. Ive no idea why I selected it again for HALs serial number 20 years later. . . " I see the number 9000 Ive no idea why I selected it again for HALs serial number 20 years later. . . "
THE LOST WORLDS OF 2001 Arthur C. Clarke 1972 Page179 "A long time ago," said Kaminski, "I came across a remark that I've never forgotten-though I can't remember who made it. 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.' That's what we're up against here. Our lasers and mesotrons and nuclear reactors and neutrino telescopes would have seemed pure magic to the best scientists of the nineteenth century. But they could have understood how they worked-more or less-if we were around to explain the theory to them."
Page 189 "The other is Clarke's Third* Law "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
GODS OF THE DAWN Peter Lemesurier 1997 "As Arthur C. Clarke's perceptive Third Law puts it: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
THE SECRET HISTORY OF ANCIENT EGYPT Herbie Brennan 2000 "The British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke is said to have commented that "any sufficiently high technology is indistinguishable from magic"
THE BIBLE CODE Michael Drosnin 1997 Chapter Four THE SEALED BOOK Page 70 "The astronomer Carl Sagan once noted that if there was other intelligent life in the universe some of it would have certainly evolved far earlier than we did, and had thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions, or hundreds of millions of years to develop the advanced technology that we are only now beginning to develop. 'After billions of years of biological evolution - on their planet and ours - an alien civilization cannot be in technological lockstep with us,' wrote Sagan. 'There 'have been humans for more than twenty thousand centuries, but we've had radio only for about one century,' wrote Sagan. 'If alien civilizations are behind us, they're likely to be too far behind us to have radio. And if they're ahead of us, they're likely to be far ahead of us. Think of the technical advances on our world over just the last few centuries. What is for us technologically difficult or impossible, what might seem to us like magic, might for them be trivially easy.' The author of 2001, Arthur C. Clarke - who envisioned a mysterious black monolith that reappears at successive stages of human evolution, each time we are ready to be taken to a higher level - made a similar observation:'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.' Page 163 pages 69-75 Chapter notes,
"The astronomer Carl Sagan suggested that an advanced alien technology 'might seem to us like magic' in Pale Blue Dot (Random House, 1994), p. 352.
The author of 2001, Arthur C. Clarke, made a similar observation: 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic' (Profiles of the Future, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984). Paul Davies' imagined 'alien artifact' is described in his book Are We Alone? (Basic Books, 1995), p. 42. Stanley Kubrick, in his famous movie version of Clarke's 2001, showed a mysterious black monolith that seemed to reappear at successive stages of human evolution, each time we were ready to be taken to a higher level. When I told him about the Bible code, Kubrick's immediate reaction was, 'It's like the monolith in 2001.' "
FIRST CONTACT THE SEARCH FOR EXTRA TERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE Edited By Ben Bova and Byron Preiss1990 SEIZING THE MOMENT A UNIQUE MOMENT IN HUMAN HISTORY Michael Michaud ANTHROPOCENTRISM GOOD-BYE Page311 "The most profound message from the aliens may never be spoken: We are not alone or unique. Contact would tell us that life and intelligence have evolved elsewhere in the Universe, and that they may be common by-products of cosmic evolution. Contact would tend to confirm the theory that life evolves chemically from inanimate mat- ter, through universal processes,implying that there are other alien civilizations in addition to the one we had detected. We might see ourselves as just one example of biocosmic processes, one facet of the Universe becoming aware of itself. We would undergo a revolution in the way that we conceive our own position in the Universe; any remaining pretense of centrality or a special role, any belief that we are a chosen species would be dashed for- ever, completing the process begun by Copernicus four centuries ago.
The revelation that we are not the most technologi-cally advanced intelligent species could lead to a humbling deflation of our sense of self-importance. We might reclassify ourselves to a lower level of ability and worth. This leveling of our pretensions, this anti-hubris, could be intensified if we were confronted with alien technology beyond our understanding. (Arthur C. Clarke has observed that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic.) "ANY SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY IS INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM MAGIC"
THE SUPERGODS Maurice M Cotterell 1997 Page 118 "Sacrifice at first appears as penance, difficult and tortuous, attracting few followers. In the Hindu holy book, the Bhagava-Geeta, the teacher Lord Krishna supports this view saying: Hear further the three kinds of pleasure. That which increases day after day and delivers one from misery, which at first seems like poison, but afterwards acts like nectar - that pleasure is pure, for it is born of wis-dom. That which is at first like nectar, because the senses revel in their objects, but in the end acts like poison - that pleasure arises from pas-sion. While the pleasure which from first to last merely drugs the senses, which springs from indolence, lethargy and folly - that pleasure flows from ignorance. (BG, 18:36-9) "(BG, 18:36-9)"
HARMONIZED Page number omitted THE STUDENT'S ASSISTANT ASTRONOMY AND ASTROLOGY ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR FIXED STARS, FOR PAST AND FUTURE YEARS. PREFACE "A work of this kind may not be so amusing to some individuals as a pleasing romance; yet it is hoped will prove to the Astronomical Stu-dent and learner, gratifying and instructive. At the request of a select number of students, the present laborious calculations were made, in order to give others and themselves an opportu-nity of more perfectly understanding the appa-rent motions of the superior Planetary bodies herein mentioned, together with an illustration of the various phenomena the above planets present to us, the observers on this Earth, caused by the revolution of the planets and the earth, around the Sun, as the centre and great point of attraction tion to the Solar System. I have given a correct Table of the longitude and latitude of 144 fixed stars, calculated up to 1836,..." "Table of the longitude and latitude of 144 fixed stars, calculated up to 1836,..." Page 9 (number omitted) INTRODUCTION TO ASTRONOMY. "THIS Introduction is merely intended to con-vey a sufficient idea to those who are not already acquainted with the solar system, the propor-tional distances of the Planets' orbits from the Sun, and the Earth, together with the apparent motions of the superior planets, as viewed from this Earth, called their geocentric places or motions. The path of the Planets or circles which their orbits describe in the heavens, is called the Zodiac. Suppose it a belt 20° wide with the Ecliptic, orbit, or path of the Earth in the centre thereof; in as much as a planet's orbit differs from the exact plane of the Ecliptic, or orbit ,of the Earth, so much is the planet's latitude in degrees and minutes; the points where these imaginary circles intersect the Ecliptic, are cal!ed the nodes: The ascend-ing node is that point which the planet enters / Page 10 / for north latitude, the opposite is the descending node for south latitude. The Zodiac is divided into 12 Constellations, called signs, each sign divided into 30 degrees, each degree into minutes and seconds."
UNCONDITIONAL LIFE MASTERING THE FORCES THAT SHAPE PERSONAL REALITY Deepak Chopra 1991 A Mirage of Miracles Page 89 "The Mask of Maya" "...denoting the ability of gods to change form, to make worlds, to assume masks and disguises." "Maya also means magic a show of illusions" "Maya also denotes the delusion of thinking that you are seeing reality when in fact you are only seeing a layer of trick effects superimposed upon the real reality True to its deceptive nature, Maya is full of paradoxes. First of all it is everywhere, even though it doesnt exist. It is / Page 90 / often compared with a desert mirage, yet unlike a mirage Maya does not merely float "out there" The Mysterious One is nowhere if not in each person. Finally Maya is not so omnipotent that we cannot control it - and that is the key point Maya is fearfull or diverting all powerful or completely impotent depending on your perspective." "The fearfull illusion becomes a wonderful show if only you can manipulate it."
QUO VADIS
Quo vadis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Quo vadis? is a Latin phrase meaning "Where are you going?" or "Whither goest thou?". The modern usage of the phrase refers to a legend in Christian ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quo_vadis Quo vadis? is a Latin phrase meaning "Where are you going?" or "Whither goest thou?". The modern usage of the phrase refers to a legend in Christian tradition, related in the apocryphal Acts of Peter (Vercelli Acts XXXV), in which Saint Peter meets Jesus as Peter is fleeing from likely crucifixion in Rome. Peter asks Jesus the question; Jesus' answer, "I am going to Rome to be crucified again" (Eo Romam iterum crucifigi), prompts Peter to gain the courage to continue his ministry and eventually become a martyr. The phrase also occurs a few times in the Vulgate translation of the Bible, notably including the occurrence in John 13:36 in which Peter also asks the question of Jesus, after the latter announces he is going to where his followers cannot come.
Quo Vadis. I fled by night and in the grey of dawn met on the lonely way a man I knew but could not name. He said “Good morning”, I the same .. rtnl.org.uk/now_and_then/html/242.html
Quo Vadis
Quo vadis is a Latin phrase meaning "Where are you going?" It is used as a proverbial phrase from the Bible (John 13:36, 16:5). ... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quo_Vadis -
THE WHITE GODDESS Robert Graves 1948 Page 337 Chapter Eighteen THE BULL FOOTED GOD "Isis is an onomatopoeic Asiatic word, Ish-ish, meaning 'she who weeps', because the Moon was held to scatter dew and because Isis, the pre-Christian original of the Mater Dolrosa, mourned for Osiris when Set killed him."
THE WHITE GODDESS Robert Graves 1948 Page 149 Chapter Nine GWIONS HERESY "The Essene initiates, according to Josephus, were sworn to keep secret the names of the powers who ruled their universe under God. Were these powers the letters of the Boibel-Loth which together, composed the life and death story of their demi-god Moses? 'David' may seem to belong to a later context than the others, but it is found as a royal title in a sixteenth century B.C inscription; and the Pentateuch was not composed until long /Page 150/ after King David's day Moreover, David for the Essenes was the name of the promised messiah."
HOLY BIBLE Scofield References C 1 V 16 THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLESPage 1148 (Part quoted) "MEN AND BRETHREN THIS SCRIPTURE MUST NEEDS HAVE BEEN FULFILLED WHICH THE HOLY GHOST BY THE MOUTH OF DAVID SPAKE"
I ME ANOTHER YOU ME I ME YOU ANOTHER I AM THE ROOT AND THE OFFSPRING OF DAVID AND THE BRIGHT AND MORNING STAR
CHEIRO'S BOOK OF NUMBERS Circa 1926 Page106 The question has been asked again and again, Is there some means of knowing when the moment has come to take the tide at the flood?
THE QUESTION HAS BEEN ASKED AGAIN AND AGAIN IS THERE SOME MEANS OF KNOWING WHEN THE MOMENT HAS COME TO TAKE THE TIDE AT THE FLOOD
YOU ARE GOING ON A JOURNEY A VERY SPECIAL JOURNEY DO HAVE A PLEASANT JOURNEY DO
KEEPER OF GENESIS A QUEST FOR THE HIDDEN LEGACY OF MANKIND Robert Bauval Graham Hancock 1996 Page 254 "...Is there in any sense an interstellar Rosetta Stone? We believe there is a common language that all technical civilizations, no matter how different, must have. That common language is science and mathematics. The laws of Nature are the same everywhere:..."
THE WINDMILLS OF YOUR MIND Round, Like a tunnel that you follow Keys that jingle in your pocket Like a circle in a spiral
THAT OLD WHEEL (Chorus) That old wheel is gonna roll around once more When love is gone and the one you thought would stay (Chorus) There’ll be times, hard to control (Chorus x 2) Roll around, around, again, again
SEE ME SEE REAL COLOUR THE COLOUR OF MAGIC
THE NUMBER OF GOD
LETTERS TRANSPOSED INTO NUMBER REARRANGED IN NUMERICAL ORDER
OUT OF ZERO COMETH ONE
..........
BEYOND THE VEIL ANOTHER VEIL ANOTHER VEIL BEYOND
REVELATION C 21 V 1 And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. 2 And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. 4 And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. 5 And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful. 6 And he said unto me, It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely. 7 He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son.
I THAT AM THE HE AS IN SHE THAT IS THEE
THE PROPHET Kahil Gibran Page 82/83/84/85/86 "If these be vague words, then seek not to clear them. Vague and nebulous is the beginning of all things, but not their end, And I would have you remember me as a beginning. Life, and all that lives, is conceived in the mist and not in the crystal. And who knows but a crystal is mist in decay This would I have you remember in remembering me: That which seems most feeble and bewildered in you is the strongest and most determined. Is it not your breath that has erected and hardened the structure of your bones? And is it not a dream which none of you remember having dreamt, that builded your city and fashioned all there is in it? Could you but see the tides of that breath you would cease to see all else, And if you could hear the whispering of the dream you would hear no other sound. The veil that clouds your eyes shall be lifted by the hands that wove it, And the clay that fills your ears shall be pierced by those fingers that kneaded it. And you shall see And you shall hear. Yet you shall not deplore having known blindness, nor regret having been deaf For in that day you shall know the hidden purposes in all things, And you shall bless darkness as you would bless light. After saying these things he looked about him, and he saw the pilot of his ship standing by the helm and gazing now at the full sails and now at the distance. And he said: Patient, over patient, is the captain of my ship. The wind blows, and restless are the sails; Even the rudder begs direction; Yet quietly my captain awaits my silence. And these my mariners, who have heard the choir of the greater sea, they too have heard me patiently. Now they shall wait no longer. I am ready The stream has reached the sea, and once more THE GREAT MOTHER holds her son against her breast. Fare you well, people of Orphalese. This day has ended. It is closing upon us even as the water-lily upon its own tomorrow. What was given us here we shall keep, And if it suffices not, then again must we come together and together stretch our hands unto the giver. Forget not that I shall come back to you. A little while, and my longing shall gather dust and foam for another body. A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman shall bear me. Farewell to you and the youth I have spent with you. It was but yesterday we met in a dream. You have sung to me in my aloneness, and I of your longings have built a tower in the sky. But now our sleep has fled and our dream is over, and it is no longer dawn. The noontide is upon us and our half waking has turned to fuller day, and we must part. If in the twilight of memory we should meet once more, we shall speak again together and you shall sing to me a deeper song. and if our hands should meet in another dream we shall build another tower in the sky. So saying he made a signal to the seamen, and straightaway they weighed anchor and cast the ship loose from its moorings, and they moved eastward. And a cry came from the people as from a single heart, and it rose into the dusk and was carried out over the sea like a great trumpeting. Only Almitra was silent, gazing after the ship until it had vanished into the mist. And when all the people were dispersed she still stood alone upon the sea-wall, remembering in her heart his saying: A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman shall bear me.'
THE LURE AND ROMANCE OF ALCHEMY. A history of the secret link between magic and science 1990 Page# 31 / 32 note 1 Julius Ruska ,Tabula Smaragdini 1926 "THE EMERALD TABLE OF HERMES: " "True it is, without falsehood certain most true.That which is
Freiheit - Keeping The Dream Alive lyrics. From the Original Motion Picture ... In my fantasy I remember their faces The hopes we had were much too high ... www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/f/freiheit/keeping_the_dream_alive.html
Mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm.
I SAY IS THIS THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GREAT DIVIDE ? NO ITS OVER THERE I HAVE JUST BEEN OVER THERE AND THEY SAID ITS OVER HERE
Did Spacemen Colonise the Earth? Robin Collyns 1974 Page 206 "FINIS"
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN Thomas Mann 1924 THE THUNDERBOLT Page 715 "There is our friend, there is Hans Castorp! We recognize him at a distance, by the little beard he assumed 'while sitting at the " bad" Russian table. Like all the others, he is wet through and glowing. He is running, his feet heavy with mould, the bayonet swinging in his, hand. Look! He treads on the hand of a fallen comrade; with his hobnailed boot he treads the hand deep into the slimy, branch-strewn ground. But it is he. What, singing? As one sings, unaware, staring stark ahead, yes, thus. he spends his hurrying breath, to sing half soundlessly: "And loving words I've carven He stumbles, No, he has flung himself down, a hell-hound is coming howling, a huge explosive shell, a disgusting sugar-loaf from the infernal regions. He lies with his face in the cool mire, legs. sprawled out, feet twisted, heels turned down. The product of a perverted science, laden with death, slopes earthward thirty paces in front of him and buries its nose in the ground; explodes inside there, with hideous expense of power, and raises up a fountain high as a house, of mud, fire, iron, molten metal, scattered fragments of humanity. Where it fell, two youths had lain, friends who in their need flung themselves down together - now they are scattered, commingled and gone. "Its waving branches whiispered and thus, in the tumult, in the rain, in the dusk, vanishes out of our sight. FINIS OPERIS
Fragments of an Unknown Teaching P. D. Oupensky 1878 - 1947 Page 217 'A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake.' Gurdjieff
I AM THE OPPOSITE OF THE OPPOSITE I AM THE OPPOSITE OF OPPOSITE IS THE AM I ALWAYS AM ZERO ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX SEVEN EIGHT NINE HEARKEN THEE THAT SILENT VOICE THAT SPEAKS IN ALL TONGUES
JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS Thomas Mann 1875-1955 Page 935 "Come nearer, my friend," he said, as the bee studded curtain closed behind them, "pray come close to me, dear Khabiru from the Retenu, fear not, nor startle in your step, come quite close to me! This is the mother of god, Tiy, who lives a million years. And I am Pharaoh. But think no more of that, lest it make you fearful. Pharaoh is God and Man, but sets as much store by the second as the first, yes he rejoices, sometimes his rejoicing amounts to defiance and scorn that he is a man like all men, seen from one side; he rejoices to snap his fingers at those sour faces who would have him bear himself uniformly as God." Page 968 "But we are speaking of two different things. My Majesty speaks of the fetters which the teaching puts upon the thoughts of God; yours refers to priestly statecraft, which divides teaching and knowledge. But Pharaoh would not be arrogant, and there is no greater arrogance than such a division. No, there is no arrogance in the world greater than that of dividing the children of our Father into initiate and uninitiate and teaching double words: all-knowingly for the masses, knowingly in the inner circle. No, we must speak what we know, and witness what we have seen. Pharaoh wants to do nothing but improve the teaching, even though it be made hard for him by the teaching. And still it has been said to me: 'Call me not Aton, for that is in need of improvement. Call me the Lord of the Aton!' But I, through keeping silent, forgot. See now what the Father does for his beloved son! He sends him a messenger and dream-interpreter, who shows him his dreams, dreams from below and dreams from above, dreams important for the realm and for heaven; that he should awake in him what he already knows, and interpret what was already said to him. Yes, how loveth the Father his child the King who came forth out of him, that he sends down a soothsayer to him, to whom from long ages has been handed down the teaching that it profits man to press on towards the last and highest! "
THISISTHESCENEOFTHESEENUNSEENTHEUNSEENSEENOFTHESCENEUNSEENTHISISTHESCENE
SECRET CHAMBERS Robert Bauval 1 999 MAGICAL RELIGION Page 120 "A century or so after the rediscovery of the Corpus Hermeticum, a strange regeneration of , Egyptian' mysticism was taking place in Western culture. The Hermetica was being circulated among scholars, the educated classes and even royalty.19 A new breed of 'Hermetic' philo- sophers, cabalists, alchemists, magicians, seers and wizards of all sorts began to emerge.20 In Chapter 2 we saw the bizarre involvement of the Papacy with Hermeticism and how some misguided scholars attempted to convince the Church not only that Hermes- Thoth was a prophet of Christianity, but also that his 'books' should be canonised and embraced as 'gospels' of the Roman Catholic Church. Others, more radical in their demands, went as far as to preach the return of the 'Egyptian' religion as the true religion of the world. Among the most forceful and influential of these new Hermetic activists was a mysterious Italian scholar from the Nolan region called Giordano Bruno. ..The classical art of mnemonics is to learn how to create such an icon yourself and store it in the mind; then, at a later date, unleash it at will to bring back the desired memory stored in it. A very simple example of this is when you tie a string on your finger in order to remind you of something later. on. This works so long as the item you wish to remember is simple and straightforward. What if the subject matter involved remembering a complex chain of events such as a Shakespeare play or a lecture on atomic physics? A far more sophisticated method would be needed, and that is where the art of mnemonics can be applied. One of the techniques is to imagine a house that you are familiar with, and allocate in chronological order the memory of each event to a room or item in this house. Later you can visualise yourself walking around the house along a predetermined route, entering the rooms and, as you encounter each item or 'icon', the memory that it 'stores' begins to unfold. It takes many years of practice to become a master of the art of memory, and those few who have the ability and intellect to become adepts will develop tremendous insight, which in turn can be converted into enormous power of influence and manipulation. Vast memory that can be controlled, like that of a powerful computer, translates into vast reservoirs of knowledge. Knowledge, as we all know, is power. The greater the memory and the more refined the means to store and control it, the greater the power of the magician.
GIORDANO BRUNO MAN OF GOD
The SETI League makes an annual award honouring the memory of Giordano Bruno to a deserving person or persons who have made a significant contribution to the practice of SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence). The award was proposed by sociologist Donald Tarter in 1995 on the 395th anniversary of Bruno's death.
The Hermetica: The Lost Wisdom of the Pharaohs To the memory of Giordano Bruno, 1548-1600. Mundus Nihil Pulcherrimum By Tim Freke & Peter Gand
Giordano Bruno Giordano Bruno was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, poet, cosmological theorist, and Hermetic occultist. He is known for his cosmological theories, which conceptually extended the then-novel Copernican model. Wikipedia Born: 1548, Nola, Italy Died: 17 February 1600, Campo de' Fiori, Rome, Italy Influenced: Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Arthur Schopenhauer, James Joyce, Molière Influenced by: Nicolaus Copernicus, Nicholas of Cusa...
LETTERS TRANSPOSED INTO NUMBER REARRANGED IN NUMERICAL ORDER
Giordano Bruno Giordano Bruno (/dr'd??no? 'bruno?/, Italian: [dor'dano 'bruno]; Latin: Iordanus Brunus Nolanus; born Filippo Bruno, January or February 1548 – 17 February 1600) was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, poet, cosmological theorist, and Hermetic occultist. Cause of death: Execution by burning Era: Renaissance philosophy Notable ideas: Cosmic pluralism School: ?Renaissance humanism; Neoplatonism; ... Statue · Category: Giordano Bruno · Cosmic pluralism · Art of memory Born: 1548, Nola, Italy Died: 17 February 1600, Campo de' Fiori, Rome, Italy
MARTYR IN THE HOLY CAUSE
GIORDANO BRUNO
Martyr a person who is put to death or endures great suffering on behalf of any belief, principle, or cause: martyr to the cause of social justice. a person who undergoes severe or constant suffering:
THE COSMIC MIND BOGGLING BOOK Neil McAleer 1982 "The crater Giordano Bruno is believed to be one of the youngest craters on the moon..."
Giordano Bruno From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This article is about the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno.Giordano Bruno Giordano Bruno Campo dei Fiori.jpg (image omitted) Born Died Cause of death Era Region School https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno Giordano Bruno born Filippo Bruno, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, poet, and astrologer. He is remembered for his cosmological ... Influenced[show] Giordano Bruno (Italian: [d?or'dano 'bruno]; Latin: Iordanus Brunus Nolanus; 1548 – 17 February 1600), born Filippo Bruno, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, poet, and astrologer.[3] He is remembered for his cosmological theories, which conceptually extended the then novel Copernican model. He proposed that the stars were just distant suns surrounded by their own exoplanets and raised the possibility that these planets could even foster life of their own (a philosophical position known as cosmic pluralism). He also insisted that the universe is in fact infinite and could have no celestial body at its "center". Beginning in 1593, Bruno was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on charges including denial of several core Catholic doctrines, including eternal damnation, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and transubstantiation. Bruno's pantheism was also a matter of grave concern.[4] The Inquisition found him guilty, and he was burned at the stake in Rome's Campo de' Fiori in 1600. After his death, he gained considerable fame, being particularly celebrated by 19th- and early 20th-century commentators who regarded him as a martyr for science,[5] although historians have debated the extent to which his heresy trial was a response to his astronomical views or to other aspects of his philosophy and theology.[6][7][8][9][10] Bruno's case is still considered a landmark in the history of free thought and the emerging sciences.[11][12][13] In addition to cosmology, Bruno also wrote extensively on the art of memory, a loosely organized group of mnemonic techniques and principles. Historian Frances Yates argues that Bruno was deeply influenced by Arab astrology (particularly the philosophy of Averroes[14]), Neoplatonism, Renaissance Hermeticism, and legends surrounding the Egyptian god Thoth.[15] Other studies of Bruno have focused on his qualitative approach to mathematics and his application of the spatial concepts of geometry to language.[16] Life[edit] Early years, 1548–1576[edit] Born Filippo Bruno in Nola (in Campania, then part of the Kingdom of Naples) in 1548, he was the son of Giovanni Bruno, a soldier, and Fraulissa Savolino. In his youth he was sent to Naples to be educated. He was tutored privately at the Augustinian monastery there, and attended public lectures at the Studium Generale.[17] At the age of 17, he entered the Dominican Order at the monastery of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples, taking the name Giordano, after Giordano Crispo, his metaphysics tutor. He continued his studies there, completing his novitiate, and became an ordained priest in 1572 at age 24. During his time in Naples he became known for his skill with the art of memory and on one occasion traveled to Rome to demonstrate his mnemonic system before Pope Pius V and Cardinal Rebiba. In his later years Bruno claimed that the Pope accepted his dedication to him of the lost work On The Ark of Noah at this time.[18] While Bruno was distinguished for outstanding ability, his taste for free thinking and forbidden books soon caused him difficulties. Given the controversy he caused in later life it is surprising that he was able to remain within the monastic system for eleven years. In his testimony to Venetian inquisitors during his trial, many years later, he says that proceedings were twice taken against him for having cast away images of the saints, retaining only a crucifix, and for having recommended controversial texts to a novice.[19] Such behavior could perhaps be overlooked, but Bruno's situation became much more serious when he was reported to have defended the Arian heresy, and when a copy of the banned writings of Erasmus, annotated by him, was discovered hidden in the convent privy. When he learned that an indictment was being prepared against him in Naples he fled, shedding his religious habit, at least for a time.[20] First years of wandering, 1576–1583[edit] Bruno first went to the Genoese port of Noli, then to Savona, Turin and finally to Venice, where he published his lost work On the Signs of the Times with the permission (so he claimed at his trial) of the Dominican Remigio Nannini Fiorentino. From Venice he went to Padua, where he met fellow Dominicans who convinced him to wear his religious habit again. From Padua he went to Bergamo and then across the Alps to Chambéry and Lyon. His movements after this time are obscure.[21] The earliest depiction of Bruno is an engraving published in 1715 in Germany, presumed based on a lost contemporary portrait.[22] In 1579 he arrived in Geneva. As D.W. Singer, a Bruno biographer, notes, "The question has sometimes been raised as to whether Bruno became a Protestant, but it is intrinsically most unlikely that he accepted membership in Calvin's communion"[23] During his Venetian trial he told inquisitors that while in Geneva he told the Marchese de Vico of Naples, who was notable for helping Italian refugees in Geneva, "I did not intend to adopt the religion of the city. I desired to stay there only that I might live at liberty and in security." Bruno had a pair of breeches made for himself, and the Marchese and others apparently made Bruno a gift of a sword, hat, cape and other necessities for dressing himself; in such clothing Bruno could no longer be recognized as a priest. Things apparently went well for Bruno for a time, as he entered his name in the Rector's Book of the University of Geneva in May 1579. But in keeping with his personality he could not long remain silent. In August he published an attack on the work of Antoine de la Faye, a distinguished professor. He and the printer were promptly arrested. Rather than apologizing, Bruno insisted on continuing to defend his publication. He was refused the right to take sacrament. Though this right was eventually restored, he left Geneva. He went to France, arriving first in Lyon, and thereafter settling for a time (1580–1581) in Toulouse, where he took his doctorate in theology and was elected by students to lecture in philosophy. It seems he also attempted at this time to return to Catholicism, but was denied absolution by the Jesuit priest he approached. When religious strife broke out in the summer of 1581, he moved to Paris. There he held a cycle of thirty lectures on theological topics and also began to gain fame for his prodigious memory. Bruno's feats of memory were based, at least in part, on his elaborate system of mnemonics, but some of his contemporaries found it easier to attribute them to magical powers. His talents attracted the benevolent attention of the king Henry III. The king summoned him to the court. Bruno subsequently reported
In Paris Bruno enjoyed the protection of his powerful French patrons. During this period, he published several works on mnemonics, including De umbris idearum (On the Shadows of Ideas, 1582), Ars Memoriae (The Art of Memory, 1582), and Cantus Circaeus (Circe's Song, 1582). All of these were based on his mnemonic models of organised knowledge and experience, as opposed to the simplistic logic-based mnemonic techniques of Petrus Ramus then becoming popular. Bruno also published a comedy summarizing some of his philosophical positions, titled Il Candelaio (The Torchbearer, 1582). In the 16th century dedications were, as a rule, approved beforehand, and hence were a way of placing a work under the protection of an individual. Given that Bruno dedicated various works to the likes of King Henry III, Sir Philip Sidney, Michel de Castelnau (French Ambassador to England), and possibly Pope Pius V, it is apparent that this wanderer had risen sharply in status and moved in powerful circles. England, 1583–1585[edit] Woodcut illustration of one of Giordano Bruno's less complex mnemonic devices
In April 1583, Bruno went to England with letters of recommendation from Henry III as a guest of the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau. There he became acquainted with the poet Philip Sidney (to whom he dedicated two books) and other members of the Hermetic circle around John Dee, though there is no evidence that Bruno ever met Dee himself. He also lectured at Oxford, and unsuccessfully sought a teaching position there. His views were controversial, notably with John Underhill, Rector of Lincoln College and subsequently bishop of Oxford, and George Abbot, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury. Abbot mocked Bruno for supporting "the opinion of Copernicus that the earth did go round, and the heavens did stand still; whereas in truth it was his own head which rather did run round, and his brains did not stand still",[25] and reports accusations that Bruno plagiarized Ficino's work. Nevertheless, his stay in England was fruitful. During that time Bruno completed and published some of his most important works, the six "Italian Dialogues," including the cosmological tracts La Cena de le Ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper, 1584), De la Causa, Principio et Uno (On Cause, Principle and Unity, 1584), De l'Infinito, Universo e Mondi (On the Infinite, Universe and Worlds, 1584) as well as Lo Spaccio de la Bestia Trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, 1584) and De gl' Heroici Furori (On the Heroic Frenzies, 1585). Some of these were printed by John Charlewood. Some of the works that Bruno published in London, notably The Ash Wednesday Supper, appear to have given offense. Once again, Bruno's controversial views and tactless language lost him the support of his friends. John Bossy has advanced the theory that, while staying in the French Embassy in London, Bruno was also spying on Catholic conspirators, under the pseudonym 'Henry Fagot', for Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth's Secretary of State.[26] Bruno is sometimes cited as being the first to propose that the universe is infinite, which he did during his time in England, but an English scientist, Thomas Digges, put forth this idea in a published work in 1576, some eight years earlier than Bruno.[27] Last years of wandering, 1585–1592[edit] In October 1585, after the French embassy in London was attacked by a mob, Bruno returned to Paris with Castelnau, finding a tense political situation. Moreover, his 120 theses against Aristotelian natural science and his pamphlets against the mathematician Fabrizio Mordente soon put him in ill favor. In 1586, following a violent quarrel about Mordente's invention, the differential compass, he left France for Germany. Woodcut from "Articuli centum et sexaginta adversus huius tempestatis mathematicos atque philosophos," Prague 1588
In Germany he failed to obtain a teaching position at Marburg, but was granted permission to teach at Wittenberg, where he lectured on Aristotle for two years. However, with a change of intellectual climate there, he was no longer welcome, and went in 1588 to Prague, where he obtained 300 taler from Rudolf II, but no teaching position. He went on to serve briefly as a professor in Helmstedt, but had to flee again when he was excommunicated by the Lutherans. During this period he produced several Latin works, dictated to his friend and secretary Girolamo Besler, including De Magia (On Magic), Theses De Magia (Theses On Magic) and De Vinculis In Genere (A General Account of Bonding). All these were apparently transcribed or recorded by Besler (or Bisler) between 1589 and 1590.[28] He also published De Imaginum, Signorum, Et Idearum Compositione (On The Composition of Images, Signs and Ideas, 1591). In 1591 he was in Frankfurt. Apparently, during the Frankfurt Book Fair,[citation needed] he received an invitation to Venice from the patrician Giovanni Mocenigo, who wished to be instructed in the art of memory, and also heard of a vacant chair in mathematics at the University of Padua. At the time the Inquisition seemed to be losing some of its strictness, and because Venice was the most liberal state in Italy, Bruno was lulled into making the fatal mistake of returning to Italy.[29] He went first to Padua, where he taught briefly, and applied unsuccessfully for the chair of mathematics, which was given instead to Galileo Galilei one year later. Bruno accepted Mocenigo's invitation and moved to Venice in March 1592. For about two months he served as an in-house tutor to Mocenigo. When Bruno announced his plan to leave Venice to his host, the latter, who was unhappy with the teachings he had received and had apparently come to dislike Bruno, denounced him to the Venetian Inquisition, which had Bruno arrested on 22 May 1592. Among the numerous charges of blasphemy and heresy brought against him in Venice, based on Mocenigo's denunciation, was his belief in the plurality of worlds, as well as accusations of personal misconduct. Bruno defended himself skillfully, stressing the philosophical character of some of his positions, denying others and admitting that he had had doubts on some matters of dogma. The Roman Inquisition, however, asked for his transfer to Rome. After several months of argument, the Venetian authorities reluctantly consented and Bruno was sent to Rome in February 1593. Imprisonment, trial and execution, 1593–1600[edit] During the seven years of his trial in Rome, Bruno was held in confinement, lastly in the Tower of Nona. Some important documents about the trial are lost, but others have been preserved, among them a summary of the proceedings that was rediscovered in 1940.[30] The numerous charges against Bruno, based on some of his books as well as on witness accounts, included blasphemy, immoral conduct, and heresy in matters of dogmatic theology, and involved some of the basic doctrines of his philosophy and cosmology. Luigi Firpo lists these charges made against Bruno by the Roman Inquisition:[31]
The trial of Giordano Bruno by the Roman Inquisition. Bronze relief by Ettore Ferrari, Campo de' Fiori, Rome.
Bruno defended himself as he had in Venice, insisting that he accepted the Church's dogmatic teachings, but trying to preserve the basis of his philosophy. In particular, he held firm to his belief in the plurality of worlds, although he was admonished to abandon it. His trial was overseen by the Inquisitor Cardinal Bellarmine, who demanded a full recantation, which Bruno eventually refused. On 20 January 1600, Pope Clement VIII declared Bruno a heretic and the Inquisition issued a sentence of death. According to the correspondence of Gaspar Schopp of Breslau, he is said to have made a threatening gesture towards his judges and to have replied: Maiori forsan cum timore sententiam in me fertis quam ego accipiam ("Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it").[32] He was turned over to the secular authorities. On 17 February 1600, in the Campo de' Fiori (a central Roman market square), with his "tongue imprisoned because of his wicked words", he was burned at the stake.[33] His ashes were thrown into the Tiber river. All of Bruno's works were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1603. Inquisition cardinals who judged Giordano Bruno were: Cardinal Bellarmino (Bellarmine), Cardinal Madruzzo (Madruzzi), Cardinal Camillo Borghese (later Pope Paul V), Domenico Cardinal Pinelli, Pompeio Cardinal Arrigoni, Cardinal Sfondrati, Pedro Cardinal De Deza Manuel, Cardinal Santorio (Archbishop of Santa Severina, Cardinal-Bishop of Palestrina).[citation needed]Physical appearance[edit] Physical appearance[edit] The earliest likeness of Bruno is an engraving published in 1715[34] and cited by Salvestrini as "the only known portrait of Bruno". Salvestrini suggests that it is a re-engraving made from a now lost original.[22] This engraving has provided the source for later images. The records of Bruno's imprisonment by the Venetian inquisition in May 1592 describe him as a man "of average height, with a hazel-coloured beard and the appearance of being about forty years of age". Alternately, a passage in a work by George Abbot indicates that Bruno was of diminutive stature: "When that Italian Didapper, who intituled himselfe Philotheus Iordanus Brunus Nolanus, magis elaborata Theologia Doctor, &c with a name longer than his body...".[35] The word "didapper" used by Abbot is the derisive term which at the time meant "a small diving waterfowl".[36]
BELOVED OF GOD OF GOD BELOVED
THE SCULPTURE OF VIBRATIONS 1971
AFRICAN NIGHTMARE (SPECTRE OF FAMINE 1975
NAMASTE
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