Legominism and the Three Worlds

Above: Altaic shaman’s drum depicting the cosmos

The general ordering of the cosmos throughout history was phenomenological, following the very apparent division between the sky and the earth, with the living principle between called a “middle earth”. A summation of its symbolism was placed within Dante’s trilogy The Divine Comedy; of an inferno, purgatory and paradise which were the three worlds of the geocentric experience. But how does it come about that the phenomenological was translated into ancient literature, buildings or, as Gurdjieff names these, legominisms in the literal sense of being made of meaning-making and the naming of things – a power given to Adam but not the angels.

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The Many Faces of Great Time

Figure 7.5 The widespread tradition of a God who changes the astrological Age, through the Precession of the Equinoxes: Top left, Mithras as Sol Invictus; top right, Mithras slaying the Age of Taurus; bottom left, Aion, God of Ages; and bottom right, Orphic God Phanes. Mithras slaying the Age of Taurus (photo by Tim Prevett courtesy of the Segontium Museum, 2005)

This article has been extracted from my 4th book Sacred Number and the Lords of Time as being a fairly self-contained read. The “great time” in the heading is the Precession of the Equinoxes or Great Year of Plato, in which god-like human figures are posited in ancient times as governing the Age named after the Zodiacal sign in which the sun sits at the spring equinox, today the age of Pisces is about to become the age of Aquarius, but the Current Era corresponds to the age of Pisces, inaugurated by the birth of Jesus, hence also called A.D. for “anno dominie” or “year of Our Lord”.


Figure 7.4. The conceptual model of Great Time as two bands at right angles, joined at the equinoctial points where the celestial meridian of the Age crosses the equator and ecliptic

In this model of precession (figure 7.4), a north-south ring of ages, explains an enduring feature within at least some of the mysteries found in late antiquity. In Greco-Roman times some mystery cults presented their god within a vertical elliptical band upon which the zodiacal constellations were marked (see figure 7.5).4 these all represented a god who could command time and affect what happened upon the earth. the iconography of these gods and their associated myths reveals the many aspects of such a god’s powers and intruded upon many aspects of the religious iconography and mythology of the ancient world, as was demonstrated by the authors of Hamlet’s Mill.

The clear relationship to the zodiac, when shown in a vertical setting for such a god, suggests that the above model of precessional time had been developed and become widespread in the preceding thousand years. this precessional iconography showed an epoch-making and hence history-making godhead who could bend the everyday powers of Helios-Ra, the sun, by moving the equinoctial crossing points of the sun and affect the world by moving the ecliptic and displacing the stars relative to the framework of heaven. Perhaps the clearest presentation of such a precessional cult in late antiquity was that of mithras.5

The cult of Mithras gave the precessional god the name “of Persia”, as if from there. But he appears adapted from the Greek god Perseus, who rode the winged horse Pegasus and killed the Gorgon (of solar imagery) while rescuing Cassiopeia (held in chains as a sacrifice to a sea monster). This cult took as its main image the Tauroctony, a tableau in which a youthful Mithras, in his signature Phrygian cap and cape, is killing a bull while looking away.

Figure 7.6. Tauroctony in Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Precessional god
Mithras presents his killing of the bull Taurus, at what was then the spring equinox. He is shown between his two equinoctial Dioscuroi, spring on the viewer’s right and autumn on the left, Cautes and Cautopates. The diametrically opposite constellation of Scorpio is shown below.

In the tableau above, Mithras has two important attendants to right and left. both have their legs crossed indicating the points of crossing for the sun on the celestial equator and each carrying a torch that represents the movement of the sun at each of these equinoxes (see figure 7.6). on the right side the figure, Cautes, represents the spring equinox, with the sun torch pointing upward to how that the summer lies ahead. The light of Cautes’ torch is shown touching he mouth of the bull of Taurus, indicating the scene takes place at the spring equinox. on the left side we find Cautopates, the fall equinox, whose torch is pointing downward to the left indicating the winter to come. at the feet of Mithras is the Scorpion (the constellation of Scorpio) and serpent carrier Orpheuchus, both diametrically opposite the constellation of Perseus in the sky.

Figure 7.7. The constellations of Perseus (top) and Serpens/Orphiuchus (bottom), opposite each other in the celestial Earth. They formed part of the new meridian after the vernal equinox, and hence the precessional meridian, left Taurus. From Urania’s Mirror, a boxed set of 32 constellation cards engraved by Sidney Hall, published in 1825

In the constellation of Perseus, we find Perseus holding the Medusa’s
head (the variable star Algol), which is iconic of the sun in Taurus at the spring equinox being cut off by the precessional god who stands above Aries, the new world age. Perseus is therefore part of the vertical colure or meridian of that age, presented upon the celestial earth of the stars. Such stellar iconography developed without sculpture or scriptural myths, since the night sky and its named constellations could illustrate the story.

The well-educated Jesus stood at the end of a dying age. Within the walls of a new temple mount, he was aware that the Jewish people were expecting a new dispensation and also that the mystery sects, popular with the Greeks, Romans, and Jews, were actually religious remnants of an astronomical fact, that the equinoctial sun had moved on before and was moving now from Aries to Pisces. Within four centuries the Roman empire would be declared Christian, but this would involve a Christianity quite unlike the early church, a Jesus quite unlike the original person, and a Christian scripture quite unlike those that circulated among early Christians. Where Mithras, aeon, Phanes, and Sol Invictus had once stood, Jesus would come to stand, as “Christ in majesty,” shown with the same precessional iconography that once accompanied the earlier precessional deities.

Figure 7.8. The central western gate at Chartres Cathedral holds Jesus as Cosmocrator exactly following the form of the ancient Mystery cult precessional iconography. The elliptical has been replaced by a vesica pisces, especially suited to the Gothic style of this early thirteenth-century cathedral.

On later icons Jesus was depicted as Lord of the World, the Pantocrator or cosmocrator (see figure 7.8). He was shown on a majestic throne, usually with his feet on an orb representing the earth, within a vesica pisces (instead of the elliptical of mystery cult iconography) and surrounded by the evangelists, these being openly associated with the fixed signs of the zodiac: Aquarius (the man), Leo (the Lion), Taurus (the ox), and Scorpio as an eagle.* Jesus came to be known in the early church as the fish because the Greek for fish ΙΧΘΥΣ (ichthys) is an acronym for Ίησοῦς Χριστός, Θεοῦ Υἱός, Σωτήρ, (Iēsous Christos, Theou Yios, Sōtēr), which translates into English as “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior.” this iconic acronym was compatible with his being the Lord of the age of Pisces and a fisher of men. his mother was represented, within the first three gospels, as the constellation opposite to Pisces, Virgo the Virgin. “the Virgin” was a common motif within Greek myths of parthenogenesis (παρθένος, parthenos, meaning “virgin,” and γένεσις, genesis, meaning “birth”), applied when a god gives birth to a hero through a mortal woman or as when Athena emerged from the head of Zeus.

There needed to be sufficient cosmological compatibility for an agreed form of Christianity to be accepted by the adherents of the other important mystery schools as the single religion of Rome. Thus Jesus came to be born on Mithras’s birthday of December 25th, three days after the winter solstice. This must have reassured the initiates of the Mithraic mysteries, many of whom were Roman legionnaires or other people of position in the Roman empire. Many other signature features of Mithras were incorporated into Jesus as well, such as the virgin birth, his death at the age of thirty-three, and so on, so as to make him recognizable as a precessional hero, something not widely recognized today.

extracted from Sacred Number and the Lords of Time, chapter 7: From Egypt to Jesus pp 182-187 by Richard Heath (Inner Traditions 2014), available worldwide – see top right sidebar.

Sir Francis Bacon and Codes

from Digital Codes and Converters, the 1961 Ph.D. Thesis of F.G. Heath at the Victoria University of Manchester. Read optically for a colleague many years ago, it is provided here as interesting; touching upon the authorship of Shakespeare and other Elizabethan texts and poems. It also shows how cryptography then awaited the computer to create the modern digital world of information.

1.2 Sir Francis Bacon

There are reports going back to 200 B.C. (Polybius: a semaphore) for instances where combinations of symbols having only a few alternatives have been made into an alphabet. The man who undoubtedly wrote the first proper description of such a code was Sir Francis Bacon.

Bacon was primarily interested in ciphers, and in 1605 wrote “Of the Advancement of Learning” which describes vaguely a cipher termed OMNIA PER OMNIA, the best possible, and mentions that it is quintuple infolded but gives no useful details. In 1623 he described this cipher precisely in “De Augmentibus Scientiarum” written in Latin. Fortunately, a contemporary English translation exists, prepared by Gilbert Wats in 1640, and facsimiles of the important pages are shown in Figure 1.1.

Bacon claims that he invented this cipher himself, observing that if a binary property is used, then five symbols give 32 alternatives (25) which is sufficient for 24 letters of the alphabet (v and j were not separate at that time). He then constructed two slightly different type fonts, assigning to each type font one of the binary alternatives. Then, by using these two separate sets of type he made each five letters of an innocent message carry five binary digits which identified one letter of the ciphered message. It will be noticed in Fig. 1.1 that if we replace a by 0 and b by 1 that the simple binary sequence is obtained.

Figure 1.1 Code of Sir Francis Bacon. (a) above and (b) below

This might seem to be the point where Sir Francis Bacon leaves the story, having provided a binary code for the early telegraph engineers. Such is not the case. Bacon used another cipher (where a keyword indicates significant phrases) and in 1894 Dr. Orville W. Owen in the U.S.A. prepared the second volume of his book” The cipher story of Sir Francis Bacon” about this system, assisted by Elizabeth Wells Gallup. In the winter of 1895-6 Mrs. Gallup studied the binary cipher which has already been described, and found that it was incorporated in the first folio editions of Shakespeare’s plays. She naturally set about deciphering messages and a summary of the career of Sir Francis Bacon as revealed in them in Ref. 2. If the deciphered messages are true, then history books need a complete revision for the period of Elizabeth 1.

The various ciphered messages may be summed up as follows:-

Elizabeth, while imprisoned in the Tower, married Leicester secretly and gave birth to two children, the first Francis Bacon, the second Richard Deveraux, afterwards Earl of Essex.  Francis was cared for from birth by Mistress Ann Bacon, and was reared and educated as the son of Nicholas Bacon (Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England). At sixteen he found out his true parentage, and was sent to France, returning two years later. In Mrs. Gallup’s own words, “The proofs are overwhelming and irresistible that Bacon was the author of the delightful lines attributed to Spencer – the fantastic conceits of Peele and Greene – the historical romances of Marlowe – the immortal plays and poems put forth in Shakespeare’s name, as well as the Anatomy of Melancholy by Burton”.

There is no point joining the argument* as to the truth or otherwise of Mrs Gallup’s decipherment: in Vol. III her publishers give a summary of her career and show that she was not a person to promote false knowledge lightly. During one spell in the British Museum she damaged her eyesight, partly by overwork and partly by the poor lighting. Three things are worth noting however.

*However, the news is not so good, since The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined: An analysis of cryptographic systems used as evidence that some author other than William Shakespeare wrote the plays commonly attributed to him, OUP, William F. Friedman 2011 suggests (I believe) that the notion of a typographical code in print was impractical given the state of typesetting in Elizabethan England.

CIPHERS

Bacon, from childhood, was intended for a public career. At that time all diplomatic, and much personal correspondence was committed to cipher. Among the substantial benefits incurred upon mankind by Bacon was the invention, while in France, of what is known as Baconian or Bi-lateral Cipher, which is adaptable to a multitude of means and uses. It may not be generally known that this Cipher is the basis of nearly every alphabetical code in use in telegraphy, and in the signal service of the world. It is in brief, an alphabet which requires only two unlike things for its operation. These may be two slightly differing fonts of type on a printed page, as illustrated in the example given at length in his De Augmentis, published not long before his death; or it may be a dot or a slight disfigurement in a single font, or the alternating dot and dash or short and long sound space of the Morse telegraphic code, or the alternating long and short flash of light as in the heliographic system; the “wig-wag” of a flag or signal light, or two coloured lights alternately displayed; in short any means whatever alternating two unlike or unequal signs, sounds, motions or things. Under the rules of of arithmetrical progression almost innumerable alphabets can be constructed, by these means undecipherable without its particular key. It has no limitations upon its usefulness, and has never been surpassed in security, ingenuity or simplicity. Bacon himself called this the Omnia-per-omnia, the all-in-all cipher, and the name is completely descriptive [though bi-literal in now used-ED].

(Extract from Ref. 2)

The second point of interest is a forward in volume 3 by Mrs Gallup’s publishers which contains the statement “she has either deciphered it from the labors of Francis Bacon, or it is a creation of her own. There is no middle ground”. The idea of signal/noise ratio would not be familiar in 1910, and we ought to just check that the deciphered messages have a low probability of being “noise” generated between two different type fonts used at random.

It turns out that the publishers were correct, since Mrs Gallup deciphered 500 pages, all intelligible and consistent, giving perhaps 30,000 letter (coded) or 150,000 letters in the original plays. this situation can only arise once in 2150,000 or 1050,000, and it is obvious that lopping off a few 0’s for various reasons will not make the noise hypothesis tenable.

It may seem strange that Mrs Gallup’s work has left such a small impression: her name will not be found in its alphabetical place in the Encyclopedia Britannica for instance. It appears that her work is considered erroneous by scholars because one of her decipherments was a particular translation which did not exist in Bacon’s time3. Whatever the truth of this, Mrs Gallup’s book is interesting, the fascinating part of the story (to an electrical engineer) being that all this evidence in the Bacon v. Shakespeare controversy was written down in five digit binary code.

Although direct evidence is hard to find, there seems little doubt that Gauss was the man who applied Bacon’s code to a telegraph system, date around 1833. It does not seem that Gauss deviated from his other work for long enough to describe this work in detail: reference 7 states that Gauss and Weber proposed the five-digit code for telegraphy, and 1833 is given as the date, but the only paper published by Gauss and Weber at that time was on Terrestrial Magnetism

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A Yoga drawn from Celestial Metaphor

  • The sun of the mind at dawn rises from the grip of not knowing.
  • The sun of the mind at dusk drops into exhausted non-attachment.

This “metaphor” was all too real in the India that gave birth to Yoga, since the light of the sun illuminates the objects conceptualized by the mind. Through the illumination of objects, the mind attaches the desire to participate, own, use and identify with objects and scenarios concerning them and other persons.

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Evolving Intelligence of the Biosphere:

An Essay from DuVersity Newsletter 35 – 2014

The Light and Dark, as Value and Fact, could be viewed as reconciled by an evolved mind, within the biosphere. They could indeed be the cause of the arising of proto-minds, since existential situations in the Biosphere are of value for its beings whilst being factual. As Bennett points out, sex and death are innovations of the biospheric world, and we can now date their arrival during the Cambrian “explosion” (around 542 million years ago) when plants and animals (multicellular life forms) innovated sex to reproduce their organisms as a whole as well as regenerating their cells through cell division. Animals, unlike single-celled algae, are able to express action but must die to benefit from generational improvement by natural selection. Only by such means could the three brains of humans, motive, emotive and cognitive, be selected through their effectiveness in adaptation to living conditions within a variety of different biomes.

But there have been problems for humans in their maintaining a shared cultural harmony towards nature and the biosphere, due to the success of their cognitive brain capacity to solve environmental problems based upon facts. Technologies can arise whose consequences may conflict with social values that are somewhat weakly held to. Arguments can break out over values and the impact of technologies and those that wield them, but the factual benefits generally dominate other human views. The environmental argument is being lost whilst technology becomes an ever stronger threat to the biosphere as we know it. The modern world is simply the latest and greatest in which actions often clearly go against valuing the environment over the wealth it can create, and better-off populations have become used, inured and psychically hardened to human and biospheric tragedy.

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