by starroute » Wed Mar 15, 2006 1:22 pm
My take?<br><br>Certain things grab the human mind in a peculiar way. They tantalize with hints of a higher meaning that is just beyond the reach of rational understanding. As a result, they can have a Zen koan-like effect of leading the mind to higher levels of integration.<br><br>However, those things work in this consciousness-expanding way only when they are still new and surprising and a little too large for our present understanding to encompass. Once they become known and familiar, they no longer have the same effect. <br><br>Much of religion -- all religions -- consists of the fossilized remains of what were at one time "active" systems and are now merely jujus or sentimental reminders.<br><br>Sacred geometry was an active system at the time when people were first discovering what wonders you could perform with a straight-edge and a compass -- say, from about 2500 to 1000 BC. Many of our current religious symbols, from the Star of David to the yin-yang symbol to mandalas in general, derive from that period of discovery. But by the time Euclid wrote down his "Elements," sacred geometry was no longer magical. It had been rationalized and reduced to punitive exercises for school children.<br><br>In a similar way, when people first started writing with alphabets -- whose letters could be freely rearranged and swapped with numbers -- they became entranced by the possibilities of anagrams and gematria for suggesting higher levels of connection and meaning, beyond those of ordinary appearance. But that was 2000 years ago. It's been a long time since anybody gained enlightenment from an anagram.<br><br>One additional function for these systems -- even when they're starting to show their age -- is that they're useful as codes and cyphers for expressing heresies in times of enforced orthodoxy. I believe that's why so many of them remained popular through the Middle Ages and the early modern era.<br><br>But once the witch-hunts and the burning of heretics ceased in the late 1600's, the need for that sort of encypherment did as well. A lot of the hidden systems went public then. The Invisible College became the Royal Society. The Freemasons stepped out of the shadows. And the old occult symbology and word-games became just a relic of times past.<br><br>The impulse that produced them is still around -- but its points of focus always move on. Throughout the 20th century, people tweaked their sense of higher connectivity with Einsteinian relativity and quantum theory. In the 1950's, the Boomers projected their half-formed dreams of subversion and liberation onto the incomprehensible lyrics and nonsense refrains of rock 'n' roll. <br><br>But it's been a long time since we saw the development of a highly organized system of deliberate occult references similar to sacred geometry or gematria -- and I don't know what sort of conditions (if any) could bring something like that about again. <p></p><i></i>
