XXI - Le Monde
isthmus nekoi
jmd said:
Yes, I think this is an important point to raise. The hermaphrodite contains both sexual differences, which is to say, it does not represent a totality that knows no differentiation. The hermaphrodite is a reunification. Separation/differentiation is necessary, else this entire experiment in human consciousness has been for naught.
Glad that the spirit=matter thing has struck a chord
As far as I know, the philosophers, scientists and religious leaders are generally still at odds w/this mind-body problem. lol, if we could totally clarify the etcs we wouldn't be here, I think! I do believe that this is a movement running underground and is breaking through due to our contra-Enlightenment/contra-Modernism pomo climate. It's an idea has been forming for a long time, perhaps really taking shape first in Romanticism when the notion of the unified, discrete, rational(male) phenomenological self/mind was brought into question. Pomo is the 2nd major sustained cultural movement against the ideals and mind-body split of the Enlightenment/Modernism - hence the focus on the fetish (materialism), on the negation of the unified ego. However, theorizing about the spirit=matter thing isn't going to help as much as exploring the symbols that are arising, I think. The images produced - from Romanticism's doppleganger and Frankenstein's monster to pomo's cyberpunk cyborg and genetically tampered clones (esp prevalent in Japanese texts, much more so than Western ones*) - all call the dualist model of the mind and the nature of human consciousness into question. So if you would like to explore this area more from a symbolic perspective, I would begin w/these Romantic/pomo texts.
I would also ask the uncon for personal symbols regarding this - they are most powerful/illuminating and they are thick in the air these days, just thick....
*I have my own theories as to why Japanese texts are esp pertinent to the challenge to the unified phenomenological self, but shall save this for another time!!!! THis post is getting too long as it is lol.
Ross G Caldwell
isthmus nekoi said:
My vision - giant starbirds. Some explanation:
I used to call it "The Monstrous Vision", because it seems so alien to an anthropocentric point of view (including the scientific one, which still sees human consciousness as somehow special), and everyone who hears it thinks it means human beings mean nothing. They don't really.
For me, what we think of as "consciousness" - self awareness, thinking - is just a mesh of associations helping us survive in whatever situation we find ourselves. For a given life-form, this is brief time, and depends upon a relatively stable environment - which helped the form arise in the first place. Any change could happen which would completely overwhelm any kind of that sort of consciousness. The deepest consciousness is elemental, which does not change except in the mathematical theories of unity of all elements (such as is postulated before the "big bang", when all forces were one - according to which hydrogen formed first, and is in fact the simplest and first element).
I think the human species, a very unstable one (amphibians are another, because they live on the border of two environments, and are extremely susceptible to changes in either), arose out playing with fire, literally, and by the resuscitation re-heating of the earth's surface after the fallout from the meteoric period (and the last major round of extinctions) settled. Thus the mammals arose, much smaller than the giant lizards (because the earth is colder now). It was thus that the metals, elemental consciousness, liberated by the heat, began interfering with us (I'm only speaking from the human point of view, but the metals are really everything there is, taking home in crystalline bodies which grow upward as their aims and the stability of the body permits - so the leaves of trees turn metallic colors as they die seasonally, since the metals are found pushing out of the tree as far as they can go, etc. I guess the image is of purer elements taking up residence in more complex and less stable ones, which forms shapes=life).
The reason it all takes place at all is because of the heat in the center of the earth, which creates an effect like a boiling pot, and the elements in the deeper parts are rising out. As they rise, they take on heavier and more complex forms, which are increasingly unstable, until the surface, which is were the least stable forms emerge - life we call it, but really it is just rapidly changing forms of the same stuff. Life forms are the hot elements in colder molecular bodies, which grow and change according to necessary conditions imposed on them by whatever laws you can think of.
The elements are always trying to rise up to the nearest local source, in our case the Sun - it is the center of gravity; but earth is strong too, and death is the dissolution of a particular form when it tires (all form being unstable), returning the elements that made it up to the earth, or the atmosphere. It is thus that there appears to be a battle between the upward consciousness - which is the elemental consciousness, falling into the Sun - and the downward consciouness, toward the earth, which is much closer and in the short term a stronger force. We are all forms of earth energy in a big soup, and the various bodies that form like bubbles on the earth - all the shapes, some we call "life-forms" but really the rocks are just as alive - are moving and bubbling the hot surface of a soup (if you sped up the film, so to speak, so thousands of years passed in a second, you would see the real life of the earth, and all species would be like brief changing colors on its surface, a little in the air, and lots in the water, but all essentially surface).
The elements, the metals (for the rest, like the gasses, they have their own ways, and interact with heavier bodies only briefly (like in breathing). It is the metals that literally form all terrestrial bodies, and take what forms they can to get higher, (the gasses are trapped by the earth too, becoming the atmosphere) they are literally following an upward path to the center of solar gravity (and the solar system in its turn is following its course around a yet stronger source, the center of the galaxy, and so on...). This is why you find things like lead - a very heavy element, that has no purpose in biological functioning - staying in bodies. One it finds a moving home, it knows it can get higher by staying there (rather than being passed out).
So, if I haven't confused you or made you think I am a lunatic yet, the reason "we" turn our thoughts to the stars is because our unstable bodies, like all bodies, are home to much deeper consciousnesses, the metals, which are trying to get to the source of consciouness, the Sun (not the ultimate, but the biggy for everything that directly concerns us).
This might be getting too long for a post, but here is an "image" I once wrote down, as a sort of vision of the possible future for us. It is conscious union with the imperishable metals; your "cyborg", but not in human form. It is monstrous, I suppose.
-------------------------
You who have left the earth
Far behind, below,
As you wander among the stars,
What speck of dust, with minute history!
This shall be your heritage
to take outward; not decaying flesh,
but eternal elements.
So I imagine, by the end of the century, there will be people who have become indistinguisable from the machines they operate. There will be no more need for fleshly limbs, even most organs: nourishment comes directly from light. Photosynthesis, but in a mobile, metallic form. People will become gigantic Starbirds, taking energy and nourishment from the stellar winds, living forever. The former life, lives on earth, earthbound human form, will be thought of - if it is thought of at all, or remembered - as no life at all, an ant's life, no consciousness at all.
For us here then, now, still in human form as I write, this image is monstrous. There are of course none of the old human pleasures of sense, only the infinity of discovery in the universe will give pleasure. Vision, thought will remain. But what vision! The whole electro-magnetic spectrum, and more that will be known. Death will be impossible, since we - our consciousness - will be one with the elements that sustain us; all that we will know, will be change of form.
-----------------
So my vision - giant starbirds.
This is incidentally where I got one of my mottoes - "Man is the medium of the metals".
isthmus nekoi
Ross G Caldwell said:
Ross, thanks for being so kind as to sharing your symbol... lol, and it's not my cyborg, it's cyberpunk's I suppose
... Interesting you call the vision monstrous - for in Western texts, the cyborg has always had a monstrous component. (I think it was Jay Clayton who drew the parallel b/w Frankenstein's Monster to Bladerunner's Cyborg. I'd personally replace Bladerunner w/a more generalized Corporation (biotech anyone?) but anyways, they both represent this obsession w/the body and a problematization of a unified phenomenological mind.
However, if you look at the cyberpunk texts arising from Japan, you will find cyborgs are linked with divinity, angels, goddesses etc. (Also, greater percentage of female cyborgs - yes, it makes a dif symbolically...) If GOD has created man in his image, and man creates machines in his own - is man not then, completing the circuit of creation by recreating GOD?.... And there is not something very monstrous about GOD and Nature and Machines?........................
Since you've managed to share your image, I'll chip in a part of a dream I had
:By my house there is a large insect, about twice its height, suspended. It morphed, from a tree (e.g. branches became legs). The head and thorax are black and organic but the abdomen takes form of a high wire tower - all crisscrossing metal. From there, powerlines extend and I realize that these powerlines connect to the abdomens of other similar insects, creating a matrix of matter-consciousness. The image suggested to me the symbolism of the Age of Aquarius by which each individual pours and directs energy/matter within a greater matrix. I also see no dichotomy between Nature and Machine, although understand the difference. "God is dead; the machina lives."
This image is probably the most clear and brief one I've received. The rest contain loooooooooooong narratives
Do you find it interesting that both these images don't include the human form as we know it?jmd
In another thread on the Romance of the Rose & Language of Birds, mention is made by wildchilde of Gnostic influences on the Tarot. Similar comments have likewise been made in various posts in other threads, and a number of comments on threads within this Forum on individual Atouts.
On review, one of the considerations that I thought had here been made, especially given the often claimed hermaphrodic aspect of this card, is its possible relation to not as much Sophia as to Barbelo - the Aeon from which proceeds the first creative act, and from which emanates Father/Mother.
It is nonetheless highly interesting that the creative power of this otherwise feminine Aeon is also described as masculine - as triple male. See, as a reference, the third Hymn in the Three Steles of Seth.
For the sake of reference, some may also recall the hieropetroglyph I mentioned I cannot seem to recall where - a triple Jesus (attached with this post) from Caen Abbey denoting, one presumes, not so much this aspect of Barbelo (though one may indeed also wonder what was at work in the reflections of the stonecarvers, especially as it could easily be justified as I have earlier done myself), but rather the three-in-one-ness of God.
This aspect is one of what I consider Gnostic influence on the development of Christianity - and hence, by derivation, also Tarot.
On review, one of the considerations that I thought had here been made, especially given the often claimed hermaphrodic aspect of this card, is its possible relation to not as much Sophia as to Barbelo - the Aeon from which proceeds the first creative act, and from which emanates Father/Mother.
It is nonetheless highly interesting that the creative power of this otherwise feminine Aeon is also described as masculine - as triple male. See, as a reference, the third Hymn in the Three Steles of Seth.
For the sake of reference, some may also recall the hieropetroglyph I mentioned I cannot seem to recall where - a triple Jesus (attached with this post) from Caen Abbey denoting, one presumes, not so much this aspect of Barbelo (though one may indeed also wonder what was at work in the reflections of the stonecarvers, especially as it could easily be justified as I have earlier done myself), but rather the three-in-one-ness of God.
This aspect is one of what I consider Gnostic influence on the development of Christianity - and hence, by derivation, also Tarot.
Attachments
Fulgour
> 1........3........2 <
> I......XXI......XIII <
Aleph - Shin - Mem
Based on the above relationship, the Triadic Unity contains:
1) Positive & Negative
2) Negative
3) Positive
But since "3" is the ultimate realisation of "1" based on the
fact that by introducing "2" the reality of "3" is automatic,
the misplacement of an hermaphrodic aspect is forgivable.
I. Le Bateleur is obviously the multi-generational element,
and 'XIII' the bridge that inevitably begets XXI. Le Monde.
> I......XXI......XIII <
Aleph - Shin - Mem
Based on the above relationship, the Triadic Unity contains:
1) Positive & Negative
2) Negative
3) Positive
But since "3" is the ultimate realisation of "1" based on the
fact that by introducing "2" the reality of "3" is automatic,
the misplacement of an hermaphrodic aspect is forgivable.
I. Le Bateleur is obviously the multi-generational element,
and 'XIII' the bridge that inevitably begets XXI. Le Monde.
Fulgour
1 + 1 + 1 = 1
Because "1" is positive & negative it is all potential.
To remain positive, it can only generate a negative,
resulting in "2" (a double negative) and immediately
this duality establishes a newly created unity: "3".
Because "1" is positive & negative it is all potential.
To remain positive, it can only generate a negative,
resulting in "2" (a double negative) and immediately
this duality establishes a newly created unity: "3".
Ross G Caldwell
Fulgour said:
I would say that the mind-point which perceives the monad-point 1 is distinct already from the monad, hence 2 (at least in its own mind=self-consciousness. If there is no distinction, no self-consciousness). 2 points - a line.
How three gets there seems to be a greater mystery for me (at least within one minute of waking up this morning), but with it you have a plane - 3 points, and the simplest possible shape.
The above is the world of the "ideal" (2 dimensions)
A fourth point off the plane gives the solid (tetrahedron), and the fall into matter.
This is the world of the "real" (3 dimensions)
Change=5, the introduction of motion to the solid. With these 5 numbers are the birth of countless individualities - 6 (perhaps memory).
The essential point is that the perception of 1 IMPLIES 2, hence automatic.
(sources Euclidean geometry, Platonism, and Crowley's "Naples Arrangement".)
As a once and forever Thelemite, I=Hadit, "I am the Magician and the Exorcist... in the circle I am everywhere the centre, as She the circumference is nowhere found" SHE=Nuit, XXI/Universe. Hadit the infinite point, Nuit the infinite circle, I-XXI.
firemaiden
Sophia
I wanted to share two images that I found in "The Hermetic Museum Alchemy and Mysticism" Alexander Roob, Taschen 1996 (as was able to find links to on the web): - both are images of Sophia - and both remind me very much of Arcane XXI:
1) Sophia from the Auror consurgenshttp://www.malvern.cz/madony/image002.jpg - late 14th century. The illustration in this book bears this text from the Aurora Consurgens to accompany the image: "Turn to me with your whole heart and do not despise me because I am black and dark for the sun has burned me so and the black depths have covered my face" -- and explains "Here Sophia is standing on the full moon, whose silver pigment is oxydized over time".
This image reminds me of the various versions of the World that show a woman or an angel standing on a globe, in particular the Charles VI, (a woman standing on a globe), Ercole d'Este (a winged angel sitting on a globe), the Alessandro Sforza, Rosenwald (a winged woman standing on a globe).[see the Andrea Vitali article on Hucks site for the various world cards Iconography of the World -- note the mandorla in her center!
The Hermetic Museum explains: (page 238-9)
2) Sophia from Conrad Celtis- Philosphia The second image from this book, is a fifteenth century woodcut from Conrad Celtis "Amores"- Note the wreath and the staff and the four winds blowing.
I notice the staff shows up often in the World card - often she is holding a staff and a globe.
So what is the link between the world card and Sophia? Is Sophia another word for Anima mundi?
I wanted to share two images that I found in "The Hermetic Museum Alchemy and Mysticism" Alexander Roob, Taschen 1996 (as was able to find links to on the web): - both are images of Sophia - and both remind me very much of Arcane XXI:
1) Sophia from the Auror consurgenshttp://www.malvern.cz/madony/image002.jpg - late 14th century. The illustration in this book bears this text from the Aurora Consurgens to accompany the image: "Turn to me with your whole heart and do not despise me because I am black and dark for the sun has burned me so and the black depths have covered my face" -- and explains "Here Sophia is standing on the full moon, whose silver pigment is oxydized over time".
This image reminds me of the various versions of the World that show a woman or an angel standing on a globe, in particular the Charles VI, (a woman standing on a globe), Ercole d'Este (a winged angel sitting on a globe), the Alessandro Sforza, Rosenwald (a winged woman standing on a globe).[see the Andrea Vitali article on Hucks site for the various world cards Iconography of the World -- note the mandorla in her center!
The Hermetic Museum explains: (page 238-9)
2) Sophia from Conrad Celtis- Philosphia The second image from this book, is a fifteenth century woodcut from Conrad Celtis "Amores"- Note the wreath and the staff and the four winds blowing.
I notice the staff shows up often in the World card - often she is holding a staff and a globe.
So what is the link between the world card and Sophia? Is Sophia another word for Anima mundi?
Lee
There is an interesting entry in Wikipedia about Sophia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_(gnosticism)
It seems to me that Sophia infusing a spiritual spark into the physical world could be well illustrated by the Marseille World card, showing Sophia in the center, with her pneuma spreading out like ripples in a pond to the physical world (symbolized by the four animals in the corners).
-- Lee
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_(gnosticism)
It seems to me that Sophia infusing a spiritual spark into the physical world could be well illustrated by the Marseille World card, showing Sophia in the center, with her pneuma spreading out like ripples in a pond to the physical world (symbolized by the four animals in the corners).
-- Lee
