Prospero's Books

Be wanderers

In Sunday school, many of us learned a piece of Bible trivia--that the shortest verse in the King James Bible is John 11:35: "Jesus wept."

I was struck this week by another two-word Bible verse: Verse 42 of Barnstone and Meyer's translation of the Gospel of Thomas.

The verse evokes Gilgamesh and Odysseus, Abraham and Moses, the Buddha and Muhammad, Dante's Dante and Shakespeare's Pericles and Joyce's Leopold Bloom, Jesus himself. It resembles language of the Master Mason degree, repeated by Masons when they suspect that a stranger is a brother. It warns us not to become too attached to the material world. It charges us to be as the homeless on this earth.

The verse is spoken by Jesus. In some translations it is rendered "Be passersby." Barnstone and Meyer are, I think, more poetic:

"Be wanderers."

Meditations on the Tarot 5: The Pope

(This post is fifth in a series on the book Meditations on the Tarot. See the first for explanation.)

5. The Pope

• The number 5: The number 5 stands, according to Eliphas Levi, for "the domination of the mind over the (four) elements" (106). For the author of Meditations on the Tarot, the number also represents the five wounds of Christ, and the five senses "though which the objective world, withot regard to our will, imposes itself on us." The author continues, "But the senses are organs of perception, not of action. Imagine that the five organs of action--the limbs, including the head in its function as a limb--were to have analogous wounds, i.e. that the five currents of will of which they are an expression were to give access to an objective will which would be to personal desires what sense perceptions are to play of fantasy" (110).

• The Pope: The Pope is performing a blessing, a benediction: "the putting into action of divine power transcending the individual thought and will of the one who is blessed as well as the one who is pronouncing the blessing" (100).

• The two columns (and the two acolytes): "The Cabbala compares the role of prayer and benediction to the double movement, ascending and descending, similar to the circulation of the blood. The prayers of humanity rise toward God and, after having been divinely 'oxidised', are transformed into benedictions which descend below from above. . . . The two blue columns behind the Pope symbolise in the first place this twofold current." They also symbolize "the two columns of the Sephiroth Tree [of the Kabbalah], the pillar of Mercy and that of Severity, and similarly the two pillars of the Temple of Solomon, Jachin and Boaz" (100).Just as prayer and benediction are analogous to the circulation of the blood, they are also analogous to respiration, breathing out and breathing in. Respiration, says the author, can be "horizontal" (taking place between "outside" and "inside") or "vertical" (taking place between "above" and "below"). "The 'sting of death' . . . is the abrupt passage from horizontal to vertical respiration. Yet he who has learnt vertical respiration whilst living will be spared from this 'sting of death'" (100). "The law of horizontal respiration is: 'Love your neighbour as yourself'"; that of vertical respiration is "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind'" (101). 

• The Pope's triple cross: The three-level cross represents the "three levels of horizontal respiration . . . : love of Nature; love of one's neighbour; love of the beings of the spiritual hierarchies," and "the three stages of vertical respiration . . . : purification (by divine breath); illumination (by divine light); mystical union (in divine fire)" (101). Two other sets of three are also featured in this chapter. One set comprises the traditional monastic vows of obedience, poverty, and chastity (112-114). The other set comprises the journey "from the natural state ('limbo') and from the state of human suffering ('purgatory') to that of the blessedness of the divine state ('paradise')" (115-16).  [This journey parallels Dante's journey, as well as Joseph Campbell's monomyth, the journey of the hero. It is also the pattern of open systems, moving from a relatively organized status quo, through the threat of disorganization, to a new level of organization.]

Needed: a Dante for the Hubble

At Science Musings, Chet Raymo meditates on the various "billions" that are needed to describe life and the universe. Science, he writes, "lays before us a stupendous story of creation—a gigamyth—sweeping in its grandeur, myriad in its dimensions, and we can only shake our heads in incomprehension." He concludes:

I have the Hubble Ultra Deep Field photograph as the desktop on my computer. The photo is the deepest view we have ever had into space. It shows a part of sky equal to the intersection of crossed straight pins held at arm's length. The shutter of the camera was open for a total of 11.3 days. Nearly 10,000 galaxies are visible in the photo. The most distant galaxy in the photograph is about 12 billion light-years away.

The Hubble photo is before me as I write, filling the margins of the screen around the edges of my word-processing document with hints of gigatude.

Each of the specks of light on the photograph is a galaxy of stars and planets. Within each speck there are a thousand billion universes such as the one that Dante traversed in the Divine Comedy. And the grandeur of that cosy little universe stretched Dante's powers of description.

Who will take us on an equal tour of the universe of the Hubble and teach us to feel at home? Carl Sagan gave his best shot but he was not Dante's equal. We await our first great gigapoet.

An ancient scroll, preserving secrets of eternity

I've been rereading parts of James Gleick's 1987 book Chaos (see What I've Been Reading), and I'm blown away by two sentences about Edward Lorenz's equations that gave birth, in 1963, to chaos theory:

Years later, physicists would give wistful looks when they talked about Lorenz's paper on those equations--"that beautiful marvel of a paper." By then it was talked about as if it were an ancient scroll, preserving secrets of eternity (30). (emphasis mine)

Although I had completely forgotten that simile, it may well have been what started me on putting "signs, stories, systems, spirit" together in my writing, my teaching, and, more recently, this blog.

The work being done on complex, nonlinear systems has, for me, the same quality I find in the Book of Ezekiel, The Gospel of Thomas, The Revelation of St. John the Divine, The Zohar, the rituals of Freemasonry, the Divine Comedy, the plays of Shakespeare, Joyce's Ulysses, Meditations on the Tarot. That quality is the sense that these books--Prospero's books--both conceal and reveal the deep hidden truths of the Cosmos.

Houses of more than one story

In The Sacred Art of Shakespeare (see What I've Been Reading), Martin Lings makes a point about drama that I've never thought of before:

Unlike the writer of epic, the dramatist has a very limited space at his disposal. Consequently, he often chooses to build a house of more than one story (23).

Lings goes on to discuss Shakespeare's plays as multileveled, open to Dante's four levels of meaning: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical.

Because ritual, in any tradition, is a kind of drama, it too has to build on limited real estate and thus construct multistory edifices of meaning. As I've worked through the first two degrees of Freemasonry in the past year, I've been struck by the recurring metaphor of the levels of Solomon's Tample, with different lessons to be learned on each floor.

"The right language to complete the journey homeward"

One relationship among signs, stories, and spirit is defined by Stephen Sicari in his book Joyce's Modernist Allegory (see What I've Been Reading for more information on this book):

Joyce's Ulysses is a sustained and profound meditation on the very same problem Dante presents in canto 26 of Inferno and meditates upon throughout the Divina Commedia: the potential for language to be used fraudulently and the extraordinary difficulty of finding the right language to complete the journey homeward, the journey toward a fundamental truth on which we can base our lives. (x)