For the ancients, memory could influence the surrounding air.
For a long time it was believed that the writer’s essence could be preserved in a manuscript.
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“The air is molded in the same way that the wax was pressed and compressed.” – Democritus.
The ancient Greeks believed that the eye itself projected rays onto objects. And the image was formed at the intermediate point.
If the imprint on the air is comparable to the seal’s stamp in wax, then “erode to the bottom of the wax, to erase deeply.”
From Desiderius Erasmus, Adagia 3842: It was said that it eroded right through to the wax, to erase it so deeply that not even a trace of the ancient memory remained. It derives from those who wrote on wax tablets, who had the habit of incising the wax on the tablet with the tip of the stylus, so that traces of the previous writing remained; at other times they erased deeply.
The ancient Greeks believed that the eye itself projected rays onto objects. And the image was formed at the intermediate point. This imprint on the air is comparable to the seal’s mold in wax. “The air is molded in the same way that the wax was pressed and compressed.”
X Studying the origin of the universe isn’t just about looking back.
X It means understanding whether that origin is still present, in some form. if the conditions are right, how plausible is it that “the other” not only has already happened, but is already part of our present..
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Studying the origin of the universe isn’t just about looking back. It means understanding whether that origin is still present, in some form. Whether it continues to resurface in the most remote reaches of the cosmos. And in those places—invisible, unstable, distant—a question arises that science poses cautiously: if the conditions are right, how plausible is it that “the other” not only has already happened, but is already part of our present.
Ego sum Vermis, et non Homo
Renaissance physiologists rendered the place of memory as a worm, and they actually drew it as a protuberance inside the skull. Its name was vermis, worm in all respects.
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… the recollection argument aims at establishing the thesis that our learning in this life consists in recollecting knowledge the soul acquire before being born into a body, by using the thesis that there exists forms as a premise. These entities, the forms, are incorporeal, immutable, and transcendent in the sense that they exists separately from material perceptibles, which in turn are related to them through participation and by being caused by them in some sense. But the property of transcendence, immutability, and incorporeality are sufficient to signal forms, and so the thesis that there exist forms claims that there exists entities with at least these three properties..
X For the Ancients, only a box could contain Sky and Earth in a map.
X Perspective is to box, to make a box
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In the period on the border between the end of late antiquity and the beginning of the Byzantine and Arab Middle Ages, a box-like representation, an actual three-dimensional map, was an accepted way to reproduce a universe map: the sky could not simply be spread over a plane, as was done for the earth. Everything was inside a box, including the mountains and the earth’s seas. And, since a box always recalls the idea of an outside, Okeanos was expected outside, which enveloped everything.
Non-mathematical but seminal numbers kept the world from evanescence.
Ancient arithmetic and geometry did not have the task of describing or simulating real things but instead providing a foundation for reality.
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Luca Pacioli – the Italian mathematician pupil of Piero della Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci’s close friend – called the compass “sexto”, sixth, because everything could be done with it. All numbers could be calculated, given Pacioli’s linear and, therefore, the geometric conception of arithmetic operations. In conclusion, to which class of simulacra can the law of the sixth, the compass. The compass included both the inside and the outside.
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X The Sun is the Architect of Sound. Sound has as much importance among musicians as the point has among geometers or the unit, that is, the one, among arithmeticians.
X Martianus Capella states that sound is the space of tones, therefore sound is architecture in itself, while we mean the energy that hits our ears.
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X More Night than Moon. It should not be surprising if the cosmic night also generated two fundamental rhythms
X Hecate is often seen as the “keeper of the thresholds”, carrying the key to the passage between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
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Yet, everything can only be understood in its entirety.
Unfortunately, due to our mind’s field limitations, we walk in segments, and if we go too far, we get lost in an explosion of points. Beyond the knowledge acquired from individual sciences, and despite philosophical views continuing to fluctuate from one system to another, we are left with the task of understanding, unless we transform ancient learning into meaningless chaos.
Métis
Her name meant Wisdom, but also a skill – or the intelligence of cunning – Métis was exercised on very different levels, but always for practical purposes: the bricklayer, the politician, the helmsman, the weaver. All protean realities that did not lend themselves to the immutable reasoning of abstract philosophical conjecture, and one which philosophers hastened to reject as ‘non-knowledge’. Even today it is incomprehensible to us that ancient symbolism is based on the practice of ancient crafts. Furthermore, the scholar must accept that a good percentage of esoteric symbolism reflects the science of matter, i.e. Alchemy.
Theurgy
If the word Alchemy is relatively recent, so is the word Theurgy. First attested in the fragmentary Chaldean Oracles and widely respected and used by later Neoplatonic philosophers, the meaning of Theurgy is disputed. Although it means “work of God” or “divine work”, it also designates a set of ritual routines coupled with a lifestyle based on ethical and intellectual practices. The aim of Theurgy was contact, assimilation, and, ultimately, union with what was defined as “divine”. In some ancient cultures Theurgy was considered such a complex discipline that it became a “sacred game”. Indeed, an actual “sacred hunt”, given the difficulty for the deities to capture a human being.
Sacred Game
Had it not been a real sacred game, we need to deepen why the ancient Celtic and Hittite deities who presided over the Chthonic world were often portrayed with gaming boards. However, the prohibition of practicing on the ritual board for purely recreational purposes was well known. It is easy to say that the gambling part of this priestly game soon entered the popular imagination: a ritual that puts the living in contact with the underworld can only be defined as “taking a huge risk” or at least “enduring a great fright”. Which humans, needless to say, find very exciting
Alchemy is Physics.
A bare hands Physics, within the reach of the Neolithic, but Physics nonetheless.
Unknowingly, Alchemists called their physics a “living organism”.
Alchemy works in a strange way, to the point that its goals seem alien to common belief. Neolithic historians tell us of a primordial vision of the world without disconnections or separations, where the air was imagined as teeming with life, however ineffable. They told us that the ancients did not have our conception of time as an ineluctable vector, but rather of an eternal present that must slavishly repeat the instructions received from legendary beings. Paradoxically, a modern alchemist today has the opportunity to better understand the archaic worldview through the discoveries of physics: particles, quasiparticles, wave functions, spintronics, quantum entanglement, nonlocality, protyposis, and even the properties of sound. Through the complex mathematical and engineering representations that constitute the substantial difference between us and the ancients, perhaps we can grasp that “private channel” concept which best defines Alchemy.
Hecate, Common Fire and Common Water.
… at midnight. This was Hecate’s favorite
hour…