BODIES do not just fall toward each other, they also cease falling. A theory of gravity should explain both of these phenomena, and it should do so based solely on a single albeit complex principle, a single yet complex belief, a single but extremely complex mystery.
Hence the word gravity should connote not only falling but also standing, not only black holes but also atoms, not only unity but also multiplicity. And most deeply it should connote, yes, the spiritual.
Indeed we should ask, what are the bodies — the substances, the real things — that are at once falling and standing (or rising, as it were, á la the Phoenix)? Following Leibniz we have little choice but to recognize these bodies as souls, i.e. particles (quanta) of experience. Each soul is unique; nevertheless each is in relation with all the others; and the number of souls is best considered infinite. Leibniz thought these units must be monads, each a sort of monarchy. I think they must be pleiads, each a crudescence of the whole cosmos, each consisting not only of itself but influenced by and structurally (physically) resonant with all others. Indeed, I will argue that our understanding of merely physical objects — i.e. of the structure of experience rather than experience itself — should be derived from this principle of plenitude, a holistic and holographic principle of the extreme relation of real things. Such principle, I assert, is the ultimate principle of relativity. My Gravity trilogy is based only upon this truly general principle.
Falling, rising, generality, difference, relation. These are extremely profound notions; people for countless millennia have naturally meditated upon them. Indeed via mythology and etymology we will discover — or reconstruct — the original and in fact prehistoric theory of quantum gravity, the prehistoric theory of everything. Likewise we will learn that this antique Holy Grail, if you will, interfaces naturally with the theory of everything nascent in our contemporary world. In the process we will recognize that we owe as much or more to the likes of James Joyce as to the likes of Leibniz and Einstein.
Note that the principle of relativity involves a fundamental trinity: unity, separation, and plenitude. Indeed, physics, mythology and in turn history are precisely understandable in terms of this trinity. Perhaps the most beautiful and seemingly the most common set of terms which mythology — or mytho-logic, as I like to call it — attaches to this trinity consists of the colors white, red and black, respectively. In the 1960s, American linguists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay studied the universality and evolution of basic color terms in eighty-eight diverse languages. They discovered that the least embellished languages, those spoken by the bushmen of southern Africa and the aborigines of Australia, had distinct color-words for white, red and black only. Moreover, these colors alone were common to all those eighty-eight languages.
To emphasize the exceeding symbolic importance of these colors, I render their names in capital letters. Of this trinity, the Black is the most important. The Black is reality: existence, facticity, the supposed plenum, the set of others, the matrix — what I call the “Present Mother” and the “Baroque.” The Black’s attributes include passion, pain and pan(ness) as well as the cognate passivity, peace and patience. The White and the Red are rather ideal — by this word I mean conceptual — in comparison.
The White begins from the notion of simple unity. Which is to say, the White emphasizes continuity — as in evolution, continuum physics, e.g. field physics, and as in whole number mathematics coupled to the concept of zero. Hence the White attempts to achieve a monadic, monarchic, autonomous, progressive, pure, simple, free existence (i.e. free from the influence of others). The White is analytical rather than wise, epic rather than romantic, linear rather than circular, otherworldly rather than this-worldly. The White idolizes ideas, concepts, knowledge. The chief concept employed by the White is the concept of space, i.e. space-as-container, outer space. The White conceives of its separations in terms of space: the separation of one mind from another, i.e. the localization of mind in terms of space and matter, yet the White program aims to reduce to space the description of matter. Likewise the White asserts the utter incommensurablity (and in this sense the simple duality) of minds and physics — although the White aims to reduce Mind (in the singular), i.e. God, to space/physics/Nature. In this sense the White believes that reality is essentially comprehensible but that no mind (and hence no set thereof) — i.e. no mere facet of Mind/God/Nature — can possibly comprehend it perfectly. Hence the White does not believe that a truly final physics can ever be achieved. Spinoza remains the chief philosopher of the White, while Newton, Einstein and Schrödinger remain its chief physicists. The White does not believe in irreducible complexity, i.e. in quantumness, hierarchy, archetypes, destiny. Neither does the White believe in intuition, for intuition implies real, magical yet commensurate relation to others. … In accord with Nietzsche’s early classic The Birth of Tragedy, and for reasons that will become clear, I alternatively call the White the “Apollonian.” Apollo was the god of distance.
The Red, conversely, begins from the complex notion of multeity-in-unity, i.e. from the principle of (real, magical, commensurate) relativity. In a word, the Red begins with the end: it is cyclic, or, better put, quasi-cyclic, temporally as well as numerically quantum. Hence the Red, in marked contrast to the White, understands choice by way of emphasizing intuition over analysis, wisdom (which means “turning, cyclic”) over knowledge, destiny over mere chance, hierarchy over mere equivalence-become-identity, archetypes over vanishingly different aspects, liberty (implying bondage) over mere freedom. Yet the Red thus subsumes the White. Leibniz remains the chief philosopher of the Red, while Bohr and Heisenberg remain its chief physicists. As I suggested above, Red mathematics is complex, holistic, fractal, non-whole number, fundamentally quantum. Likewise the ultimate Red physics is essentially non-local and final. The archetypes of myth correspond to such mathematics and physics. … Again following Nietzsche, I alternatively refer to the Red as the “Dionysian.” Dionysus was a god not only of intuition but also of the (Black) forest. He was a broken yet resurrected god, a god of cycles. God of the vin, he is Finn. God of the tree, he is Three. God of the forest, he is Pan, he is the Green Man. Finesse, finality, multeity-in-unity, non-locality (i.e. acausality, ubiquity): these are his accidental qualities.
The White/Apollonian embraces the simple. The Red/Dionysian embraces the complex, the messy — in hopes of understanding its beauty, i.e. its combination of order and variety. The White believes in a cosmic war of Good versus Evil — destined to be won (if never finally) by Good. The Red believes that Good and Evil are better considered a fundamental, irreducible duality. Thus the Red not only affirms the carnal, the here-and-now, but considers this middle ground of sorts more profound, more holy, than anything else — even, we might fairly say, more holy than God, for God accordingly remains but a member of the set of others, albeit the greatest/limiting member, and therefore is an object of faith/belief/principle rather than an identified soul. Such God is neither self-sufficient nor creative. Rather such God is but another person, to use the word in its most general sense, and is thus very much indeed like a father or mother.
Given the ideal nature of both the White/Apollonian and the Red/Dionysian, we may call each a paradigm. Yet we will do well to consider these the most natural paradigms of all, and we should recognize that the White/Apollonian is more ideal, more paradigmatic than is the Red/Dionysian.
Because these paradigms are so natural, each entity — whether a person, a business, an industry, a government, or a religion — fundamentally subscribes to both, yet each entity is paradigmatically either chiefly White or chiefly Red. Christianity, for example, is chiefly Red/Dionysian, but within it the Protestants are White relative to the Roman Catholics (i.e. the orthodoxy), and likewise the evangelical Apocalyptic Christian is White relative to the the common Christian. Generally speaking, Christianity is a re-expression of the prehistoric pagan, Red/Dionysian cosmology but under the tremendous influence of White/Apollonian Zoroastrianism. By way of contrast, Islam is chiefly White/Apollonian, but within it the Sunnis are Red relative to the Shiites, and likewise the Islamic evangelicals/extremists are White relative to the common Muslim.
Not only do extremes meet, as Red/Dionysian William Blake said, but there are also natural affinities between all entities. In a word, there is natural peace to be recognized between all entities. What’s more, according to the truly general principle of relativity there is the general peace — the absolute relativity, the absolute interconnectedness, the absolute co-existence — between all souls.
Mythology tends to represent the White/Apollonian paradigm in terms of a youngest sibling (often of twins): a rather naïve upstart, a warrior, masculine, the prodigal son, decidedly free and at least in this sense pure, but eventually to be empowered and wounded/humbled/corrupted/experienced, i.e. sacrificed (cuckolded, for instance) and thus transformed into a complex, complete, relatively feminine, Red/Dionysian figure. Meanwhile the Red/Dionysian is represented in terms of an eldest sibling. This relatively mature figure is typically a poet, a priest, a wizard, a guide, a trickster, a cad (as in caduceus), even a villain.
In this light consider the legend concerning Merlin’s childhood. During the Saxon invasion the Briton warlord Vortigern — a Pelagian who had originally invited the Saxons to Britain — retreated to mountainous North Wales and there in the shadow Snowdon tried to re-establish his power by building a castle. Construction of the castle was cursed, however: almost all the work which Vortigern’s craftsmen performed each day collapsed mysteriously during each night. Vortigern consulted his wise men or wizards about the problem. They informed him that the curse would continue until the castle ground had received the sacrificial blood of a child who had no mortal father. The king therefore launched a search for such child. In Carmarthen, in South Wales, some members of the search overheard a youth named Dinabutius taunt a boy named Merlin for having no father. Merlin, it turns out, was the son of the daughter of the king of South Wales. Merlin's father was said to be an incubus demon. This mysterious royal boy was brought northward to stand before Vortigern on the castle grounds. There the discoverers of Merlin shared with Vortigern the story of the boy’s birth. Facing imminent death, Merlin attempted to save himself by offering to show Vortigern the reason why the castle walls kept collapsing. Young Merlin straightaway led the warlord and company to a secret cave inside the mountain. The cave had a lake. Merlin advised Vortigern to drain the lake, for in its depths was to be found the cause of the castle's curse. Thus were discovered in the lake a white dragon and a red dragon, doing battle. The white dragon seemed about to win, then the red dragon, then the white, then the red, then the white, then finally the red drove away the white, making 3 times the red dragon overpowered the white. The king and his wizards stood awestruck as the prophetic boy Merlin explained all this to them: The two dragons represented forces in fundamental dynamic conflict with each other. Merlin elaborated: native Britain (Red/Dionysian, we can say) was presently suffering conquest at the hands of the Saxons (White/Apollonian), but Vortigern (White/Apollonian, a Pelagian and virtually a traitor to Britain) would be killed by fellow native Ambrosius (a Catholic, Red/Dionysian); in turn the pseudo-native Uther Pendragon (White/Apollonian) would rise to power, followed by the great native Arthur (Red/Dionysian), and thanks to Arthur the natives would gain the upper hand over the Saxons; then the Saxons in Britain would be invaded by the Normans, and finally the native Britons would drive out all invaders. Merlin’s prophecy caused Vortigern to flee for Ganarew, where Ambrosius destroyed him.
In a sense the Red/Dionysian character is not only mature and powerful but a falling/fallen character in contrast to an ascending/ascended White/Apollonian character. But merely White/Apollonian ascension is a sort of extreme separation which meets extreme unity. Red/Dionysian descension is a closing of a circle involving ascension/separation; its unity is complex, a magical equality of unity and multiplicity.
Despite the distinct differences I’ve pointed out between the White/Apollonian, the Red/Dionysian and the Black/Baroque, each of these aspects reference what I call the “Absent Father,” i.e. God, Allah, Brahman. The Absent Father is the ultimate White/Apollonian figure. He stands singularly and extremely distant from the rest of the cosmos, which set of others (the rest of the pleiads) may all but fundamentally be considered His creation. That creation is Red/Dionysian in the sense that it is equivalent to the self-sacrifice of the Absent Father. This equivalence implies 3 components: White absence (above, as it were), Black absence (below), and Red tangible presence (inbetween): White = Red = Black. Really, however, the Black/Baroque matrix includes the Absent Father as the single greatest soul (pleiad). In this sense the Absent Father, too, is fallen, Red/Dionysian, demiurgic. As such, the notion of creation is superfluous, merely ideal, and we are left with the Leibnizian, Existentialist notion of a com-union of souls (i.e. real quanta) that are best considered as existing concomitantly with each other rather than as creations. Although the Absent Father is considered the single greatest soul and is precisely inasmuch the Absolute, He is precisely less than the whole set of souls, which whole set may be called the Present Mother. Absent Father and Present Mother are contrasting but inseparable, like White/Apollonian and Red/Dionysian, like particle and wave in orthodox quantum physics.
The only complete and consistent appreciation of the White, Red, Black trinity is the perennial philosophy I call the Golden/Legal. (Leibniz coined the term “perennial philosophy” and it was famously expounded upon by Aldous Huxley.) The Golden/Legal philosophy naturally accommodates both the antique and the presently nascent theories of everything (i.e. of quantum gravity). This philosophy is more than a paradigm, in the sense that it is the only paradigm capable of truly addressing the Black/Baroque. I hinted at this philosophy when I described the holistic nature and holographic essence of the true principle of relativity and when I emphasized the natural affinities — peaces — between all entities.
In Albrecht Altdorfer’s famous little painting “Saint George in the Forest” we see the Golden/Legal philosophy referenced precisely in terms of White, Red and Black. The silver-armored knight St. George is seated on his white horse while prodding — but not killing — with lance a rather lowly red dragon of oddly human size, both figures all but overwhelmed in a deep, dark, primeval forest nevertheless opening in the distance onto a bright, golden landscape.
Alte Pinakothek, Munich
As the legend of St. George goes, a kingdom was plagued by a dragon blowing poisonous, fiery breath and requiring sheep be sacrificed daily to its terrible maw. Eventually the king’s store of sheep was exhausted by this demand. Therefore the king had no choice but to offer to the dragon human sacrifices instead. Before long the king’s own daughter drew the short stick in this horrible respect, prompting a certain young George, significantly young and of rather lowly birth, to ride forth, lance the dragon — but again I stress, not kill it — and collar the beast with the princess’s girdle.
Importantly, the name George is closely related to the Sumerian root gi — equivalent to ja, ya, ji, yi, ga, ge, je, jo, u, o etc. — which means not only “young man” but also “small and thin like a reed” and “to reject, dislike; to return, come back, send; to answer, restore.” The Ge- prefix in German signifies commonality, collectiveness, but inasmuch plurality. In contrast the -org suffix signifies individuality, singularity, but inasmuch unity. Of course the Ge- prefix also signifies the Earth, as in geo and Gaia. Typically the name George is said to mean “earth-worker.”
Not only does the legend of St. George smack of Adam and Eve and the serpent; it also smacks of Perseus and Andromeda — daughter of (Phoenician) Ethiopia’s Cepheus and Cassiopeia — and the sea monster Cetus; and it likewise yet even more poignantly smacks of the nuclear family unit, the sacred family, if you will. In this latter sense the dragon corresponds most strikingly to the baby. Talk about an Oedipus complex! Seriously, consider Gaudi’s famous cathedral in Barcelona, the Expiatory Church of La Sagrada Família — The Sacred Family — still under construction. In emphasizing the Holy Family — i.e. not only Mary and baby Jesus but also Joseph — it virtually places Joseph on an equal footing with Mary and Jesus and is thus perhaps the most pagan work under the aegis of Christianity. The origins of La Sagrada Família go back to 1866, the year when Barcelona bookseller Josep Maria Bocabella i Verdaguer founded the Spiritual Association of the Devotees of St Joseph. From 1874 the Association — some 50,000 members strong — promoted the construction of an expiatory church dedicated to the Holy Family. The foundation stone was laid on 19 March 1882, the feast of St Joseph, at a solemn event presided by the bishop of Barcelona, Josep Urquinaona. That year was the year following the millenium of the famed Catalonian monastery of Montserrat, home to Catalonia’s patroness, the famed Black Virgin of Montserrat, and, some say, home to the Holy Grail as well. In Wolfram von Eschenbach's telling, the Grail was kept safe at a castle called Munsalvaesche (mons salvationis, alias Corbenic), entrusted to Titurel, the first Grail King. Eschenbach describes the Grail as a stone which fell from Heaven (called lapsit exillis) and which had been the sanctuary of the Neutral Angels who took neither side during Lucifer’s rebellion. Some, including Goethe and Schiller, have identified Munsalvaesche castle with the real sanctuary of Montserrat in Catalonia, Spain. Regardess and by no mere coincidence, the patron saint of Barcelona is none other than St. George (whose day is 23 April). Meanwhile the patroness of Barcelona is St. Maria del Mar, Mary of the Sea (whose day is 24 September).
The Feast of Saint George is celebrated by Palestinian Christians, whose patron saint is George, and by many Palestinian Muslims — especially in the areas around Bethlehem, where he is believed to have lived in his childhood. St. George and the Dragon are ubiquitous in Bethlehem, especially in and around the ancient Church of the Nativity. Christian houses in Bethlehem can be identified with a stone-engraved picture of the saint (known as Mar Jiries, i.e. Mars Jiri/Juri/Uri etc., where Jiri is another version of the name George) in front of their homes. Muslims call him Al-Khiḍr — Arabic for "the Green One." Greek Orthodox Christians from Bethlehem march in procession to the nearby town of al-Khader to baptize newborns in the waters around the Monastery of St. George and to sacrifice sheep in ritual. Al-Khader is also well known in the area for its peaches, grapes and apples; it hosts its annual Grape Festival every September. Al-Khiḍr also figures into the Alexander Romance as a servant of Alexander the Great. Al-Khidr and Alexander cross the Land of Darkness to find the Water of Life. Alexander gets lost looking for the spring, but al-Khiḍr finds it and gains eternal life. That legend of Alexander echoes the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The St. George legend involves a rather unfortunate but very natural historical twist which I, following Joseph Campbell, refer to as the “Great Reversal”: an especially severe and enduring yet doomed White/Apollonian represssion/simplification of the Red/Dionysian. The Great Reversal is of a kind fundamental to the Golden/Legal philosophy, but it is an extreme and inasmuch rather unhealthy instance of such reversal. In the next chapter we will trace this especially extensive and still lingering but nevertheless profoundly mordant repression to its beginnings in the 4th century BCE.
Of course the elemental mythological trinity White–Red–Black — where the cyclical progression, in contrast to merely White/Apollonian linearity, is from White to Red to Black and so on — calls to mind among myriad theological trinities the Christian trinities Father–Son–Holy Ghost, spirit–soul–body, God–angels–people, and Father–Son–Mother. It also recalls the Islamic trinity angels–jinn–people. According to the Qur’ân, angels are made of light, jinn of fire, people of clay; Satan, Iblis, is described as an especially powerful jinn. The Black–White–Red further corresponds to the early Gothic maxim: “God hath shapen lives three,/Boor and knight and priest they be.” Likewise we are reminded of the plebes, consuls, and senators of Rome; Black, White, and Red, respectively. According to Greek mythology the hero Theseus introduced federal government to Athens, which had otherwise been divided into 12 nearly autonomous communities that occasionally warred with each other; and in so doing he recognized precisely 3 classes within the happily burgeoning population: the Demiurges or “artificers,” by far the most numerous (Black); the Georges or “farmers” (each farm being characteristically autonomous, a little monarchy); and the Eupatrids, who managed law and religion and enjoyed the highest status. Medieval society emerged upon a similar tripartite footing: peasants, monarchs, and aristocrats; Black, White, and Red, respectively. Hence we have the British House of Commons, the Royals, and the House of Lords. Hence too we have the United States of America’s House of Representatives, the White House, and the Senate. The role of the aristocrats/senators is Red in the sense that it represents a profound middle, an extremely heroic balance between multiplicity and unity, a radical conservatism. Generally the federal government of the U.S.A. is addressable in terms of the people, the executive branch, and the legislative branch (including the judicial): Black, White, Red. Note, however, that the Commander in Chief, the President of the U.S.A. — as the very title President suggests — is rendered a complex, Red/Dionysian figure, more a high priest than a warrior king, more Red than White, for that officer is profoundly and significantly lamed, sacrificed, as it were, from the start. (Likewise as the Middle Ages developed and concomitantly the mediating power of the aristocrats and in turn the gentry rose, kings increasingly took on the signifance of priests.)
In this deep, complex but likewise extremely precise sense the United States of America is in fact a theocracy. …
A note regarding humility and theory:
James Joyce once commented about his artistic production, “I have a grocer’s assistant’s mind,” and “I have learnt to arrange things in such a way that they become easy to survey and to judge.” His father exclaimed about him, “If that fellow was dropped in the middle of the Sahara, he’d sit, be God, and make a map of it.” The Gravity trilogy is my map, an ironically personal cosmic cheat sheet. Yet I think you will find this device remarkably useful.
Near the beginning of his Summing Up, Somerset Maugham writes:
If in the following pages I seem to express myself dogmatically, it is only because I find it very boring to qualify every phrase with an 'I think' or 'to my mind.' Everything I say is merely an opinion of my own. The reader can take it or leave it. If he has the patience to read what follows he will see that there is only one thing about which I am certain, and this is that there is very little about which one can be certain.
This passage largely expresses the way I feel about the Gravity trilogy. Still I recognize — and I expect my readers to do the same — that a theorist is obliged to postulate, to eventually present at least a single postulate as if it is simply true, and to build his/her theory as much as possible on the minimum number and simplest expression of such postulates. These foundational postulates are what we call principles. Good science is ultimately reckless in this deepest, principled sense. Aldous Huxley in his Literature and Science notes the same with respect to literature, pointing out “the ultimate magic — the magic of what might be called verbal recklessness.” Principles are the highest codification of magic. A theorist is a poet. Yet contrariwise Maugham says, "to write good prose is an affair of good manners.” I intend my writing to be an appropriate and pleasing balance between the poetry of theory and the prose of practical discourse, i.e. between the unexpected and the expected. Similarly I intend this book to express the fact that I respect my readers and that I feel humble in relation to them as individuals and as members of their communities and nations (civic and religious).
The Great Reversal
From the dawn of humanity through the dawn of history and down to the present day, the cyclical White–Red–Black trinity has been — and will continue to be — the basis of individual and society. I consider this assertion a corollary of the truly general principle of relativity: the notion that reality is a set of countless related souls, a multeity-in-unity. I see this principle as being at bottom of a prehistoric, essentially universal, and indefatigable philosophy I term the Golden/Legal. In the present chapter I explain how human society was most severely tested — indeed, all but torn asunder — by a set of closely related impulses that burst on the world almost simultaneously c. 3200 BCE and which gave the White (warrior) aspect (of individual as well as society) a nearly preternatural advantage over the Red (priestly) and the Black (feminine). Naturally the Golden Legal philosophy accommodated this sea change; but this accommodation was a reversal or inversion, in the sense that the Golden Legal generally favors the Black over the Red over the White. Thus the Great Reversal, as I call it, temporarily granted to the masculine ostensible and unprecedented dominion over the feminine. History, in turn, is chiefly the story of the Golden Legal philosophy’s redress of this reversal, the story of humanity’s return to a Golden Age.
The set of nearly simultaneous impulses which engendered the Great Reversal c. 3200 BCE are the following: the invention of bronze metallurgy; the invention of the plow; the invention of the wheel; the domestication of the horse; and, perhaps most importantly, the initial emergence of the acute infectious epidemic diseases influenza, smallpox, measles, etc. Mounting evidence suggests that this list should also include catastrophic impacts between the Earth and members of a certain group of comets and meteors known as the Taurid Complex, which group seems to be the debris from a single object originally some 100 kilometers wide that first arrived in the immediate vicinity of the Earth just before or during the retreat of the last Ice Age and has ever since been in a periodic relationship with the Earth — a relationship punctuated most severely during the centuries immediately prior to 3200 BCE. Only after I had nearly completed writing this chapter (and the initial draft of this book) did this extraterrestrial component come to my attention. As such, the fact that this book points precisely yet generally to c. 3200 BCE as being an extremely crucial point in human history is a fact that should be considered further evidence of said “giant comet hypothesis.”
This set of impulses was able to all but reverse human culture because each of these impluses was intimately related to the crux of human culture: cultivation. The word culture and the word cultivation are close cognates of the Greek kyklos, meaning “wheel.” A brief survey of the long history of cultivation will function as an excellent point of departure toward a thorough understanding of both the Great Reversal and the overarching, cyclical Golden/Legal philosophy.
Cultivation may generally be described as the manipulation of plant life cycles such that certain kinds of plants are favored relative to others in proportion to the benefits perceived in them. More poignantly put, cultivation is weeding. Whether by hand, hoe, machete, fire, etc. — humans have always been cultivators. The slash-and-burn method of cultivation compounds these approaches: it succeeds insofar as it allows sunlight to energize crops planted in a forest floor absent (for a mere year or so) the choke of competing vegetation. Apparently this method arose independently in several places worldwide by 10,000 BCE. The domestication of crops is merely another kind of cultivation/weeding. By around 8500 BCE in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, people had domesticated a certain small set of crops, including barley, millet and wheat. These domestications mark the beginning of the so-called “agricultural revolution.” Located upon the spatial center of this revolution — the apex, as it were, of the Fertile Crescent — is the ancient town of Haran, high-point of Abraham’s journey from Ur. As we progress in our understanding we will increasingly recognize Haran as representing the mythological moment: the transition from White to Red and hence to Black.
(For good measure several historical towns, regions
and empires are shown anachronistically.)
Technically speaking, cultivation performed without the use of a plow is called horticulture (from the Latin hortus, “garden”). In contrast, cultivation performed with a plow is called agriculture (from the Latin ager, “field”). As these particular words suggest, agriculture is characterized by the considerably larger plots of land consequent of plow technology. Predicated on the strength of the bronze blade, the plow initially emerged in the Middle East, sometime between 3500 BCE and 3000 BCE. In most non-forest habitats at least twice as much surface area can be cultivated using such primitive plow instead of a hoe; and the plow disturbs the soil to a much greater depth, destroying most of the weeds — roots and all — while in like measure facilitating the growth of the crops’ roots. (Exceptions include North China, where the loess soil is easily broken up, and the Americas, where the high, per-acre calorie yield of the endemic maize and potato — in contrast to the Middle East’s suite of crops — obviated the need for an ancient plow.) Said doubling (at least) is crucial. Why? Because it allows half of the cultivated land to be fallowed. What does this mean? Fallowing is a special kind of weeding. With respect to fallowing William McNeill of the University of Chicago writes in his fascinating Plagues and Peoples:
It is a testimony to humanity’s animistic propensities that most textbooks still explain how fallowing allows the earth to restore fertility by having a rest. A moment’s thought will convince anyone that whatever processes of geological weathering and consequent chemical change occur in a single season would make no noticeable difference for the following year’s plant growth. To be sure, in the case of “dry farming,” soil kept in bare fallow can store moisture that would otherwise be dispersed into the air by passage of water from the soil through the roots and leafy parts of plants. In regions where deficient moisture limits crop yields, a year’s fallowing can, therefore, increase fertility by letting subsoil moisture accumulate. Elsewhere, however, where moisture is not the critical limit to plant growth, the great advantage of fallowing is that it allows farmers to keep weeds at bay by interrupting their natural life cycle with the plow.
Scholars think that ancient plows were too unwieldy for most women to operate. Indeed, the obsolescence of the hoe relative to the plow corresponds to societal shifts from matriarchy to patriarchy. These sudden and inasmuch truly revolutionary shifts do not coincide with the establishment of the “agricultural revolution” — which term is a double misnomer, for the change it signifies was horticultural and remarkalby gradual. From the Near East the “wave” of domestication reached Greece and Cyprus and the Indian subcontinent around 6500 BCE, Egypt around 6000 BCE, central Europe around 5000 BCE, and Britain around 3500 BCE — some 5000 years after the “revolution” began and a few hundred years before the plow was invented and patriarchy began to generally eclipse matriarchy.
Ironically, the very slowness of domestication’s spread suggests that people generally intuited the true revolution nascent in it. People who chose to tend domesticated plants and animals did, therefore, immediately experience a specific new pressure to embellish the age-old Golden/Legal philosophy such that the inevitable, agricultural technologies and concomitant social organizations could be reconciled with it. The following outtake from Joseph Campbell’s Primitive Mythology touches upon this pressure — and points up where the key to the accommodation thereof was largely to be found:
Among the paleolithic nomads the groups were relatively small and the demands of dharma [the cosmic order] relatively simple. Furthermore, the roles to be played accorded with the natural capacities of the male and female organisms, which had evolved and been gradually shaped under conditions of the hunt during the course of a period of some six hundred thousand years. With the turn, however, to agriculture … and the … development then of sedentary, highly differentiated, and very much larger social units (up to, say, four or five hundred souls), the problem not only of enforcing but also of rationalizing a dharma in which inequality and yet coordination were of the essence became acute. It was then — by a stroke of genius — that the order of the universe, in which inequality and coordination are of the essence, was taken as a model, and mankind was put to the school of the stars.
Rather unlike Campbell, I think even the earliest humans diligently studied the order of the universe fully insofar as that dharma was obvious to them; and I think they did so to affirm the principle of relativity that I explained in the initial chapter of this volume. But like Campbell, I think that that the culmination of this prehistoric science did nearly coincide with the advent of agriculture c. 3200 BCE and thus with the advent of history. Campbell continues in his Oriental Mythology — and the recognition he makes here is extremely important:
An overpowering experience of order not as something created by an anthropomorphic first being but as itself the all-creative, beginningless, and interminable structuring rhythm of the universe, supplied the wind that blew … civilization into form. Furthermore, by a miracle that I have found no one to interpret [my emphasis], the arithmetic that was developed in Sumer as early as 3200 B.C., whether by coincidence or by intuitive induction, so matched the celestial order as to amount in itself to a revelation. The whole archaic Oriental world, in contrast to the earlier primitive and later Occidental, was absolutely hypnotized by this miracle. The force of number [in the sense of discrete, quantum, Red/Dionysian mathematics] was of far greater moment than mere fact; for it seemed actually to be the generator of fact. It was of greater moment than humanity; for it was the organizing principle by which humanity realized and recognized its own latent harmony and sense. It was of considerably greater moment than the gods; for in the majesty of its cycles, greater cycles and ever greater, more majestic, infinitely widening cycles, it was the law by which gods came into being and disappeared. And it was greater even than being; for in its matrix lay the law of being.
Thus, mathematics in that crucial moment of cultural mutation met the earlier-known mystery of biological death and generation, and the two joined. The lunar rhythm of the womb had already given notice of a correspondence between celestial and terrestrial circumstance. The mathematical law now united both. And so it is that, in all of these mythologies, the principle of maat, me, dharma, and tao, which in the Greek tradition became moira, was mythologically felt and represented as female. The awesome, wonderfully mysterious Great Mother, whose form and support dominate all the ritual lore of the archaic world, whom we have seen as the cow-goddess Hathor at the four quarters of the festival palette of Narmer, and whose dairyland goddess of the cow, Ninhursag, was the nurse of the early Sumerian Kings, is equally present in the heavens above, in the Earth beneath, in the waters under the Earth, and in the womb. And the law of her generative rhythm was represented for the entire ancient world in those units and multiples of 60 of the old Sumerian sexagesimal arithmetic, which had caught the measure at once of time and of space.
I will later address and greatly expound this awesome quantum mathematical structure and order of the cosmos, especially as it was apparent to the early Sumerians, to their coevals, and, I think, to their intellectual precursors — who may have hailed from outside the Middle East, perhaps even from Southeastern Asia or the British Isles.
But clearly something critical happened to destabilize this virtually prehistoric understanding of the Black cosmos. Once again Campbell, from his Oriental Mythology:
… in the first centuries of the second millennium BCE a new note of dissonance becomes apparent in the writings of Egypt and, more emphatically, Mesopotamia. …
Do we not hear in this the prelude of the Buddha’s First Noble Truth: “All life is sorrowful,” and to the judgement of Aquinas: “It is impossible for man’s happiness to be in this life”? As Nietzsche has observed: “The sick and perishing: it was they who despised the body and the Earth, and invented the heavenly world and the redeeming drops of blood. … Beyond the sphere of their body and this earth they now fancied themselves transported, these ungrateful ones. Yet to what did they owe the convulsion and rapture of their transport? To their body and this earth.”
I [Campbell continues] shall term this crisis The Great Reversal, whereby death was no longer viewed as a continuance of the wonder of life but as a rescue from its pain: “like the recovery of a sick man,” “like the home that a man longs to see.”
Although Campbell never does suggest an answer to this extremely important question, he happens to mention the chief culprit twice in the immediately preceding passage. That culprit is sickness, disease — namely the acute infectious epidemic diseases I suggested above. Each of these diseases jumped to humanity from domesticated animals. As I will explain, all of these jumps finally took hold and spread within the human population at rather precisely c. 3200 BCE.
To address the extremely important role that such disease has played in history — especially in connection with said Great Reversal — I will first bring into focus the Proto-Indo-European (P-I-E) culture as it existed c. 3200 BCE centered spatially on what is now the Russian steppe. The remarkable expansion of that culture seems to be the initial expression of the Great Reversal. Nevertheless, P-I-E culture was naturally imbued and was indeed an expression of the Golden/Legal philosophy. Bruce Lincoln, University of Minnesota Professor of Humanities and Religious Studies — and one of the world’s leading specialists concerning Indo-European religion and society — notes in his essay “Indo-European Religions,” published in the compendium of his essays Death, War and Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology and Practice:
At the beginning of time — so the P-I-E cosmogony held — there were two brothers, a priest whose name was “Man” (*Manu) and a king, whose name was “Twin” (*Yemo), who traveled together accompanied by an ox. For reasons that are not specified, they took it upon themselves to create the world, and toward that end the priest offered up his brother and the ox in what was to be the first ritual sacrifice. Dismembering their bodies, he used the various parts to create the material universe and human society as well, taking all three classes from the body of the first king who … combined within himself the social totality.
(The asterisk pretending the P-I-E words above signifies the fact that the P-I-E language was only spoken and sung, not written. Often in what follows I abandon this convention for purposes of immediate clarity and for economy.) The epithet *Yemo implies not only identity but also “twin of,” i.e. younger twin brother of Manu. (Of course even among twins there is a 1st born and a 2nd born.) As the above passage from Professor Lincoln indicates, P-I-E society was divided into 3 distinct classes: priests, warriors, and commoners. Here again we have Red, White, and Black. The king (*rēg-s; hence the English words regal, regent, regulate, right, etc.; and likely cognate with the prefix re-) generally emerged from the warrior class but was supposed to represent and exemplify all 3 classes. The high priest nevertheless wielded power over the king. In this sense the otherwise White/Apollonian king was reduced to a sacrificed, Red/Dionysian figure. Which is to say, the king was completed, rendered fully complex, insofar as he subjected himself to the high priest and hence to the commoners, i.e. to existence in general. (Likewise the warrior class subjected itself to the priestly class — in large part, it seems, by paying taxes that supported the intellectual activities of the priestly class, which class was not required to pay taxes.) It was in this rich, White–Red–Black sense that the king more than any other individual in P-I-E culture corresponded to the Absent Father, P-I-E *Dyeus, which name derives from *deywo-s, “celestial, luminous, radiant.” This *Dyeus corresponds etymologically and otherwise to Dios and Zeus of the Greeks; Deus, Diespiter, Dis Pater (Father Dis) and Ju-piter of the Latins; and Dyaus of the Indian subcontinent.
Consider in this light the following from Julius Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul:
The Celts all claim to be descended from the god of the underworld whom they call Father Dis. For this reason they measure time not by day but by night and in celebrating birthdays, the first of the month, and New Year’s Day, they go on the principle that the day begins at night.
This favoring of night over day corresponds to the favoring of the priestly class over the warrior class, the Red/Dionysian over the White/Apollonian, and likewise to the favoring of the feminine over the masculine, the Black over both the Red and the White. By the same logic autumn was favored over spring. New Year, for instance, was celebrated in the autumn. Such favoring is a primary characteristic of what I will shortly distinguish as “proto-mythology.” Later I interpret James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as being an especially proto-mythological address and expression of the Golden/Legal philosophy.
Father Dis is metaphorically described as a fallen god, a sacrificed god, a sacrificed king. Predominantly White/Apollonian, he is dominantly Red/Dionysian. It’s as if He has sacrificed himself and thus created the world. Father Dis is Joyce’s Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. He is also Humpty Dumpty, *Neptno, Nehushtan, Neptune, Poseidon, the Phoenix (which name means “shining red”), Finn (note the similarity to Phoenix), the Deity, the Devil (note the Dev- root, as in Deus), and Lucifer (stemming from Latin lucēre, “to shine,” this being closely related to the Greek leukos, “white”).
I’ve pointed up the tripartite social order of Europe’s emergent Middle Ages: peasants, aristocrats, and monarchs: Black, Red, White, or Black, White, Red, depending on whether you emphasize the mediating or challenging aspect, respectively, of the aristocrats. Wrapped up in these aristocracies and monarchies — especially in the Merovingian dynasty — is a legendary group of families who considered themselves descendents of the Jewish high priest Aaron (Red/Dionysian brother of chiefly White/Apollonian Moses) and conversely of (chiefly White/Apollonian) David — and thus of Jesus of Nazareth — and who likewise considered themselves descendents of the Jewish Sadducees, i.e. of the Zadokites, a proto-mythological “sect” which was sympathetic to the Romans but disappeared when Judaism became chiefly White/Apollonian during the first few centuries CE. This bloodline is known as Rex Deus, i.e. Redux, Red–White, Priest–Royal. Legend has it that these families instigated the first Crusade and established the Knights Templar to recover — especially from the site of (proto-mythological) Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem — the lost knowledge of the Sadducees. In fact the famously enigmatic seal of the Knights Templar depicts a single horse ridden by 2 knights; and it was for proto-mythologically emphasizing the complexity of old Black–White–Red Father Dis that the Templars were suppressed by the Catholic Church. Precisely this complexity seems to be the so-called secret at bottom of Freemasonry and likewise it is the reason why the government of the United States separates church and state while emphatically involving God and state.
Regarding the Merovingians, note that they were referred to as the “long-haired kings” owing to their symbolically unshorn hair. Their hair was also said to be red. What did this long, red hair symbolize? Well, the Greeks called the Pleiades constellation — a cluster of what to the naked eye seems 6 stars but is mythologically said to be missing 1 star — the kometes, “long-haired,” which word is the basis of our comet. Later I will explain that the Pleiades and comets proto-mythologically represent the college of king-killing, Red/Dionsyian nymphs, especially the likes of the chief nymph Aphrodite. By no mere coincidence, I think, does the name Magdalene — as in Mary Magdalene, she who had “7 demons cast out of her” — mean “one who builds up hair.” The congressional essence of hair, the Pleiades, and comets is the meaning of the Greek and Latin word komes, “companion, bound (by oath),” and more generally of the prefix com-, as in commoner and plebe, which latter — like the word plenty, as in Saturn’s wife Ops, goddess of work/plenty/eye/light/face/snake/power/voice/opera/covering/ancestors/ aristocrats/summits — is especially akin to Pleiades. Thus we have the complex basis of the Italian conte, the French comte and the English word count, i.e. earl (from the Old Norse jarl), aristocrat. In Danish this word is Greve; in Dutch it is Graaf. These words are curiously similar to the English gravity, grieve, and grail. In Polish the word for count is Hrabia; in Czech it is hrabě. These are similar to the English hair, which derives from the proto-Germanic *Hæran. Thus we seem to arrive again at Abraham’s Haran, the apex of the journey, the moment of transition, of king-killing, as it were, the complex moment of quantum gravity, of rising–falling — the essence of all existence. Mongolian nomads upon attaining the crucial mountain pass of a journey tie to the “omoo” which marks the pass — i.e to the cairn there, the herm — a piece of hair from the mane of each horse present; thus they essentially honor Hermes, god of passage. Here we have a basis of Buddhist prayer flags and of flags (and flagellants) in general, the word flag moreover being cognate with plague and plaint and planet. The word *Hæran is clearly cognate with Hermes; less clear but just as intriguing is its close kinship with the Lithuanian šerỹs, “bristle.” The English word bristle is cognate with the Old High German burst of the same meaning, and these are linked closely to the English burst and to the following poignant cognates: the Indo European bhrstí-s, “point, peak, border,” the German Berg, “mountain,” the Welsh bryn, bre, “hill,” the Old Irish barr, “point, peak,” the Frankish *baro, “king’s man” (as in baron), the English barrow and barley (the latter as in John Barleycorn; barley being the Red grain, whereas wheat, as its very name means, is the relatively White grain) and bear (in both senses of the word), and the Latin fastīgium, “top, peak,” fascinum, “evil spell,” fascis, “bundle,” and fasces, “a bundle of rods borne before ancient Roman magistrates as an symbol of authority” — this Latin root fasc furthermore being the basis of Fasching, alias Carnival. The word bristle is akin to the Latin carne, “meat” and the English carry, which stem from the Indo European kēr-, a prefix closely linked to the Greek mythological figure Core (daughter of Demeter/Ceres; alias Persephone/Proserpine) and to the English word corn and to the Sanskrit carati, “he moves, wanders,” and cakra, “wheel,” as in the synonymous Indian terms karma and Meat Wheel, and thus to the aforementioned Greek kyklos (as in circle, cultivate and culture). The Old Norse word for wheel is hvēl, akin to the English hovel and to the Norse Hel, she who rules the underworld from her circular redoubt. The English word hell stems from this name and likewise from the Old High German helan, “to conceal,” which in Latin is celare and in Greek is kalyptein — as in Kalypso and Callisto and Calliope and the Hindu Kali and the P-I-E *Kolyo. Kalypso is Helen is Core/Persephone is the femme fatale Aphrodite is the Black Madonna.
According to the Golden/Legal philosophy every individual is fundamentally a duality. Each person — indeed each entity — consists of an original, pure, sophomoric, masculine, extending, ascending aspect (White/Apollonian) and a mediating, worldly, mature, feminine, introverting, descending aspect (Red/Dionysian). Here we have the warrior and the priest, the virgin and the nymph, the Yang and the Yin. Every male duality is thus considered as inhering a female aspect, and vice versa. Hence, too, the duality male–female corresponds to the trinity White–Red–Black. The Black — or as I prefer to call it, the Black/Baroque — is the vegetal, the existential, the real in contrast to the ideal; it is more feminine than masculine; it corresponds to the Crone yet it also corresponds to Black Dis, alias Father Dis, Aides, Hades; it is tomb and womb and night; it is the set of souls, i.e. the set of real things, real quanta.
I distinguish as being proto-mythological the expressions of the Golden/Legal philosophy which not only emphasize a complex (i.e. non-simple) pole of sorts (i.e. a White–Red, Yang–Yin essence) within that philosophy but which also enforce a cyclical directionality: White to Red to Black (to White). Relative to the convention established by the Great Reversal, this directionality is counter-clockwise; yet according to both proto-mythology and the Golden/Legal philosophy, this directionality is the true clockwise directionality. The proto-mythological is identical the Golden Legal except that the latter allows the White/Apollonian apparent domination over the Red/Dionysian insofar as circumstances call for such inversion; i.e. the Golden/Legal allows said directionality to be temporarily arrested and even reversed while still generally conserving it. Likewise the Golden/Legal more than either mere paradigm (or aspect, or essence) emphasizes the ultimately Black/Baroque nature of all individuals. The Great Reversal is great to the extent that it occurred (and occurs) on a grand scale, but in truth such reversals are elementary to every moment of existence.
The following graphical depictions of the above distinctions may prove useful as a reference.
Yang is White, Yin is Red; their basis, the plenum
or matrix — which is real, material — is Black;
the directionality is “counter-clockwise.”
Yin is Black or just dark, Yang is White;
their basis is immaterial, otherworldly, past or
potential; the directionality is “clockwise.”
The same profound complexity essential to and evident in mythology, history and psychology characterizes physics as well. However, both the White/Apollonian and Red/Dionysian camps of physicists, i.e. the continuum and quantum camps, championed respectively by Newton/Einstein/Shroödinger and Bohr/Heisenberg, have been all but ineluctably wedded to whole-number mathematics and therefore to continuum mathematics. Heisenberg almost broke fee of this continuum by dropping the commutative law of multiplication in relation to sets of classical physical parameters which are conjugal with each other (such as position and momentum). Thus he made room to accommodate the “quantum” of action — which is in truth a function (i.e. an irrational “number”), not a quantum (i.e. not a ratio and precisely inasmuch not a true number). We can write Heisenberg’s move in terms of mathematical symbols as follows: qp ≠ pq or qp - pq ≠ 0, where q and p are any classically conjugate variables (the product of which always has the dimensions of classical “action”). The difference of this pair of products is then forced (i.e. set) to be equal to Planck’s constant (divided by 2, for merely historical reasons) flagged by the imaginary number symbol i signifying the fundamental difference between space and time and likewise signifying the complex, truly quantum essence of reality, and the function 1/Pi signifying a function which is itself significant of quantum mathematics. As such, we have the now physical equation (a functional relationship, to be more precise) qp – pq = i (h / 2 Pi). Thus the classical set of variables (and likewise the continuum) is in a sense conserved, but they are now not considered variables representing reality but rather as representing the classical concepts necessary to determine the fundamental notion of measurement (i.e. control, “observation”) and as merely happening to correspond to a pure, self-referential mathematics, i.e. to purely mathematical symbols rather than to mathematics which is supposed to symbolize something (e.g. reality) other than mathematics. This is the sense in which Heisenberg understood — and I think deeply misunderstood — a comment Einstein had earlier made to him, that “it is theory which first determines what can be observed.” This famous comment proferred by Einstein seems to stem from the following equally famous statement by Schelling: “Every experiment is a question addressed to nature that nature is forced to answer. But every question contains a hidden a priori judgement; every experiment which is an experiment is a prophecy; experimentation is itself a production of the phenomena.” In making the above comment to Heisenberg, Einstein was saying that symbols should refer not to observations but to a reality which is supposed, i.e. postulated, addressable in terms of principle only. … Conserved in orthodox quantum theory along with the classical set of variables is Hamilton’s canonical, action-principle formulation of mechanics (the most beautiful expression of Newtonian physics; based on the analogy between mechanical and optical problems), for each component of Heisenberg’s equation qp – pq = i (h / 2 Pi) has the dimensions of action. The value of the new entity, however, Planck’s constant, goes unexplained; it is simply forced into the equation so that the equation accords with all measurements of atomic phenomena.
Unlike Schrödinger and Einstein, Heisenberg abandoned the classical, White/Apollonian notion of particle orbit (although, let me repeat, he conserved the classical continuum mathematics), which notion — especially as applied by Bohr to the hydrogen atom — was largely based on analogy with the planets. Heisenberg’s principle was that physical structure is identical to measurement theory, which theory is a refinement of classical notions. Put simply, Heisenberg believed that physics is measurement theory, that physics must stop profoundly, quantumly short of addressing reality. In contrast Schrödinger and especially Einstein, following Spinoza, believed that physics must aim to address nothing less than God. Any physics which does not aim to do this is was considered by Einstein incomplete.
In the early 20th century the way ahead for both camps of physicists was illuminated by Louis de Broglie inasmuch as he postulated that all matter — not just so-called radiation, i.e. light, as Einstein had earlier usefully postulated — fundamentally harbors particle–wave duality. De Broglie suggested that the quantum condition (i.e. the imposition or forcing of the quantum of action) in Bohr’s by then archaic, planetary model of the hydrogen atom (which model was of course largely the point of departure for both Heisenberg and Schrödinger) should be explained in terms of the wave aspect of matter, because a stable wave around a nucleus can only be a stationary wave and therefore the perimeter of the particle aspect’s orbit must be an integer multiple of the wave aspect’s length. This suggestion conserved the classical, White/Apollonian notion of a continuous orbit, a fundamental path of sorts; for otherwise according to the postulate/principle of particle–wave duality the quantum of action would, it seemed, be completely inexplicable, a Red/Dionysian mystery.
Einstein applied to quantum theory the same approach he successfully applied in developing his special and so-called general theories of relativity: he radically conserved; i.e. he did not abandon fundamentals that did not need to be abandoned. This steady approach was and is courageous by nature; likewise it tends to be practiced almost utterly alone. I think Einstein failed in this approach because he could not in connection with Spinozs’s philosophy justify abandoning whole-number, continuum mathematics and the concomitant classical set of physical variables.
Forgive me, I’ve gotten ahead of myself. The preceding discussion of physics belongs largely to the following chapter and the penultimate chapter of this book and especially to the next volume of the Gravity trilogy. Yet such discourse serves us presently insofar as it indicates that the proper determination of the Golden/Legal philosophy should be an absolutely quantum mathematics — i.e. a mathematics different than whole-number mathematics — symbolic of a set of real, related things (the Black/Baroque, the matrix; in contrast to abstract and in this sense physical, measurable, controllable, secondary, merely essential things).
Returning to mytho-logic … note that the Red/Dionysian emphasizes the self-sacrificed (metaphorically speaking) aspect of God, i.e. of the Deity and likewise every soul — especially of the king. According to proto-mythology, this understanding calls for regicide, the literal sacrifice of the king. However, according to reversals akin if not identical to the Great Reversal, surrogates are sacrificed in place of the king. To the degree these surrogates are unlike the king, the king is a mere king, unlike and ruling without the authority of God.
In this respect consider the following description of the Gauls, from Pomponius Mela’s De Situ Orbis, c. 40 CE:
… at one time they were so savage that they believed a man to be the best and most pleasing sacrificial victim for the gods. … Still, they have their own eloquence and their masters of wisdom, the Druids. These ones profess to know the size and form of heaven and earth, the motion of sky and stars, and what the gods desire. They instruct the noblest of their race in many things secretly and at length, twenty years, either in a cave or in remote woodlands.
That’s right: 20 years, the equivalent of a modern doctorate. These Gauls and their coevals were generally illiterate. Their priests cultivated the art of memory, and thus the priestly class functioned as the cultural database. The priests shared their knowledge with the rest of the people, but they did so fractally, holographically, you might say, keeping the great bulk of the information to themselves, communicating it to the people in watered-down form, with various determined degrees of precision that amounted to mere adumbrations of the sharp yet general edge the priests themselves wielded. Thus a metaphor suggests itself: hard-won priestly knowledge as great, magical sword akin to the blade which the Absent Father originally wielded upon Himself, creating the cosmos, rendering Himself the Deity (Dis). Giambattista Vico is largely correct when he writes in his classic New Science: “the priests of every nation kept their sacred teachings arcanely hidden from the masses of their plebeians … This is why all nations refer to their religious doctrine as sacred, which is synonymous with secret.”
The priestly power seems to have achieved its greatest possible antique precision and generality and thus its pinnacle just prior to 3200 BCE. Evidence of that pinnacle stems mostly from Europe and the Middle East, especially from the British Isles and Mesopotamia. But in Mesopotamia this apex coincided with the space–time epicenter of the aforementioned complex of impulses — and especially with the seemingly most random, unfathomable, and unprecedented component thereof: acute infectious epidemic diseases. The Mesopotamian priesthood — most notably the priesthood of the Sumerians — must have been largely discredited by these invisible, seemingly lawless foes and by the consequent and similarly random attacks which raiders from the desert and steppe (Semites and P-I-E Aryans, respectively) waged upon the physically and spiritually weakened populace. The same wits who could predict the movements of the heavenly bodies could do almost nothing to accurately predict the essentially random attacks that were crippling the incipient agri-culture.
The Sumerians, I should add, seem to have arrived in the region of southern Mesopotamia (alias Sumeria) just prior to c. 3200 BC and with their culture already fully developed. Where they came from nobody knows; but they called their place of origin Dilmun. The Sumerian language, like the Basque, seems to be a language unto itself; it is, for instance, neither Semitic nor Indo European. The name Sumer (Shumer, Shinar) is Akkadian (Semitic). The Sumerians referred to themselves as the Sag-gi-ga, which name is commonly interpreted to mean “Black-Headed People” and likely signifies a proto-mythological recognition of the Black/Baroque as the basis of culture in general.
Acute infectious epidemic diseases and comet and/or meteor impacts were the categorically terrible impulses among the closely related set of impulses which resulted in the Great Reversal. The other components of that set were largely considered boons — although they rather directly caused the emergence and spread of acute infectious epidemic diseases and thereby and otherwise weakened the Red/Dionysian relative to the White/Apollonian, in ways that I will shortly describe. Again, these largely beneficial components are the following: the invention of copper alloys (bronzes), the invention of the plow, the invention of the wheel, and the domestication of the horse — especially for riding. The latter technologies were dependent on and almost immediately emergent from bronze metallurgy; bronze was the only extant material strong enough to be transformed into reliable plow blades and wheels, and it made efor superior weapons which — coupled to the wheel and horsemanship — made for superior, ultra mobile warriors. Copper itself had been collected in the form of pure nuggets (not altogether uncommon in certain places, such as Anatolia) and, more generally, smelted (i.e. refined from simple copper oxides such as azurite and malachite) since c. 9000 BCE. But mere copper was too malleable, too weak, to suffice for plows and wheels and swords. Copper alloys, on the other hand — i.e. bronzes, which involve tin (a bluish-white or silvery-white metal, exceedingly rare) and zinc or other rare metals, plus the element arsenic — are tricky to make, but they are much stronger than pure copper, and they tend to flow into molds much more nicely (greatly facilitating complex castings). The process of creating bronze was invented in the Near East c. 3300 BCE. Bronze stands in marked contrast to iron. Bronze is much stronger and much more shiny than iron. Moreover, bronze, unlike iron, lends itself to polishing. Furthermore iron is brittle, and it rusts (i.e. turns weak and reddish). Nevertheless, by 1200 BCE iron — being very abundant throughout the world and not involving relatively rare metals such as tin — had become by far the most commonly used metal. Bronze was the metal of the upper and middle classes, iron the metal of the lower. To the extent a society had gone over to the Great Reversal, the society’s upper classes were rendered White/Apollonian. Bronze therefore is White/Apollonian, iron Red/Dionysian.
The Caucasus Mountains, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, were to the ancient world a major source of tin and hence they were a natural nexus for the spread of bronze metallurgy and related technologies — especially the wheel. Just to the north of these mountains is the steppe, which stretches from the plains of what is now Hungary through what is now Mongolia. The nomadic tribes who lived on the steppe adjacent to the Caucasus adopted the wheel quickly. The steppe does not lend itself to cultivation and therefore is rather sparsely populated; but it does lend itself to the horse. Wild horses were plentiful on this steppe but utterly absent from the Middle East and southern Europe and rare in northern Europe. The domestication of the horse on the steppe began, most likely, with the keeping of orphaned wild horses as pets. Slowly there developed an art of breeding these pets. Of course this breeding produced increasingly docile and large animals, beasts which could be trained and ridden. These completely domestic horses facilitated the management of sheep, goats and cattle over much larger areas than were otherwise manageable. Likewise the domestic horse facilitated lightning-like raids upon horseless and inasmuch defenseless enemies. And with the arrival of the wheeled cart, which was, however, typically drawn by oxen, whole nomadic communities and tribes of this steppe region became completely mobile, able to follow and support their equestrian warriors, who plundered horseless communities in both directions on the steppe. To the west, the Dnieper River (note the essentially ne- prefix), which flows south to the Black Sea, had previously marked the cultural boundary between the nomads of the steppe and the neolithic farmers of Europe. But c. 3200 BCE the nomads began breaching that boundary, probably in multiple waves punctuating several hundred years. These invaders of course brought with them the tool which of all tools is the easiest to carry: their language. This language is now called Proto-Indo-European, its speakers having introduced it and, more importantly, their extremely potent suite of cutting-edge technologies — especially horsemanship — wherever they eventually conquered, east and west: India, Western China, Europe, Anatolia, and Iran (Persia).
Upon reaching the plains of Hungary and there the very western frontier of the steppe itself c. 3000 BCE, the westward arm of the P-I-E people’s expansion ceased. Not only did this cessation spatially coincide with the edge of the steppe, ittemporally coincided with the world’s initial explosion of acute infectious epidemic diseases among humans, these diseases being the now familiar influenza, smallpox, measles, etc. Originating in Mesopotamia, this nasty congeries of diseases surely spread with phenomenal ease along the international trade routes that were now especially active due to the demands of the burgeoning bronze industry. Indeed, the spread of P-I-E peoples — in contrast to their language and the horsemanship it attached to — may have been stopped more by disease than by their native affinity for the steppe. Nevertheless, early Bronze Age Europe west of the steppe was rendered a protean milieu. As Jared Diamond notes in his Guns, Germs and Steel: “around and after 3000 B.C. … a bewildering array of other [European] cultures [are] developing … [They] combine steppe elements like horses and militarism with old western European elements, especially settled agriculture [horticulture].”
From southeast Europe, P-I-E language and horsemanship coupled to bronze metallurgy — in terms of the wheel, agricultural implements, and especially weaponry — spread westward, morphing of course yet nearly suffocating aboriginal languages and cultures. Only the Finno-Ugrian language (now of the Finns, Lapps, and Estonians) and Basque (now of far southwestern France and north-central Spain) survived this burgeoning of the Indo-European. Inasmuch, we can assume that the Finn-Ugrian and Basque cultures survived as well, each distinguishing itself as Red/Dionysian relative to a fresh, White/Apollonian mantel that covered the rest of the continent and, eventually, the British Isles and Ireland. A nearly general inversion had occurred — a Great Reversal. The masculine, militaristic, White/Apollonian paradigm had filed for divorce from the Red/Dionysian and hence from Black/Baroque reality itself.
Naturally the relatively complex, Red/Dionysian aspect of each society that was affected by the set of impulses we’ve been discussing — that aspect conserved by the priestly keepers of language, legend, legacy, legality, and science, as it were — greatly resisted said petition for divorce. But while the White/Apollonian aspect was especially bolstered by the new technologies, the priests were especially discredited — not only by their failure to foresee and offer protection against human invaders who arrived on horses and armed with bronze weapons, but perhaps more importantly by their similar failure in regard to the aforementioned extraterrestrial invaders (comets) and especially in regard to the invisible invaders: the acute infectious epidemic diseases.
Indeed, I suspect that the Great Reversal may never have occurred if not for these especially insidious, extremely random microbial invaders. As such, these diseases warrant our further attention. Again Jared Diamond, from his Guns, Germs and Steel:
The major killers of humanity throughout our recent history — smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, and cholera — are infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals. … Because diseases have been the biggest killers of people, they have also been decisive shapers of history. … Studies show that measles is likely to die out in any human population numbering fewer than half a million people. Only in larger populations can the disease shift from one local area to another, thereby persisting until enough babies have been born in the originally infected area that measles can return there. … To sustain themselves, [these acute infectious epidemic diseases] need a human population that is sufficiently numerous, and sufficiently densely packed, so that a numerous new crop of susceptible children is available for infection by the time the diseases would otherwise be waning. Hence measles and similar diseases are known as crowd diseases [or childhood diseases, as they are now commonly called]. … the crowd diseases … could have arisen only with the buildup of large, dense human populations. That buildup began with the rise of agriculture starting about 10,000 years ago and then accelerated with the rise of cities starting several thousand years ago.
William McNeill, from his Plagues and Peoples:
… in view of the figure of half a million needed to keep measles in circulation in modern urban communities, it is noteworthy that a recent estimate of the total population of the seat of the world’s oldest civilization in ancient Sumeria comes to exactly the same figure. It seems safe to assume that the Sumerian cities were in close enough contact with one another to constitute a single disease pool; and if so, massed numbers, approaching half a million, surely constituted a population capable of sustaining infectious chains like those of modern childhood diseases. … Person to person, “civilized” types of infectious disease could not have established themselves much before 3000 B.C. …
… Infectious bacterial and viral diseases that pass directly from human to human with no intermediate host are therefore the diseases of civilization par excellence: the peculiar hallmark and epidemiological burden of cities and of countryside in contact with cities. They are familiar to almost all contemporary humankind as the ordinary diseases of childhood: measles, mumps, whooping cough, smallpox and the rest.
Measles, tuberculosis, and smallpox seem to have originated in cattle (initially domesticated c. 6000 BCE), measles perhaps stemming also (or instead) from the dog (initially domesticated c. 10,000 BCE). Influenza, on the other hand, stems from birds, especially from ducks, geese and chickens; but it often enters the human population via a mammalian intermediary, especially the pig (initially domesticated c. 8000 BCE). An especially nasty strain of influenza was the culprit in the most deadly single epidemic in human history: the influenza epidemic of 1918–1919 CE, which infected 1/5 of the world’s population and killed some 20–40 million people or more. The history of this extremely deadly strain remains a mystery; but John Oxford, Professor of Virology at St. Bartholomew’s and the Royal London Hospital, suggests there is compelling reason to think it initially emerged during the winter of 1916–1917 CE in the overcrowded British base camp at Etaples, in Northern France, where some 100,000 soldiers per day — many sick, wounded or otherwise immunologically stressed — lived in proximity to and some perhaps in immediate contact with all the aforementioned animal carriers as well as mutagenic gases.
Imagine. Before c. 3200 BCE none of these diseases existed in the human population. Then suddenly they arrived en masse. Their typical affects on an individual back then tended to be much more severe than today, for humanity had never before played host to such diseases and consequently possessed little immunity to them. Whereas many of these diseases afflict only children now, they each would have originally afflicted all ages — perhaps even young adults especially, as was the case with the 1918–1919 CE influenza epidemic. Nearly everywhere agriculture existed a huge portion of the population would have been wracked with vomiting, diarrhea, fever, coughing, horrible sores, etc. Until then such symptoms had been virtually absent from the human condition. In all likelihood ⅓ or more of the agricultural human population of the world c. 3200 BCE died from this complex impulse, as it were, of unprecedented plagues. What’s more, this impulse seemed to be extremely random, largely because it was microscopic and thus invisible. The peoples affected by these plagues were therefore wont to attribute them to the disfavor of the gods if not to hordes of evil spirits unleashed upon the Earth — much less an evil nature of wordly existence in general. The Red/Dionysian, priestly class, whose job it was to understand and affirm worldy existence and to explain-away seeming disorder, must have been deeply and widely discredited by the plagues alone, not to mention the nearly coincident onslaughts of human and perhaps cometary invaders. … As a young teenager I became extremely interested in the apocalyptic literature of the Bible. In church I would mostly ignore the sermons and such and instead would intently read the Bible. I’m reminded of at least one episode when, from my seat near the rear, I observed the herd-like congregation with my eyes fascinating on the decrepit individuals and my ears pricked to the desultory coughing and crying which severely marked the otherwise silent ambience. “How fallen, how wretched, how pathetic human beings are!” I thought to myself. “Hopefully the end will come soon!”
History records a similarly complex and devastating impulse in connection with the arrival of Europeans in the Americas. Scholars estimate that the aforementioned diseases plus a few others, such as typhus, killed off nearly 90 percent of the native American population immediately following the initial arrival of Europeans. Previously the Americas had been phenomenally free of parasitic, bacterial and viral diseases, this largely because the dog and the llama were the only domesticated animals on the American continents, and also because native American cities were few and far between. As such, native Americans generally possessed little or no immunity to the Indo European diseases. Neither did native Americans possess similar endemic diseases with which to serendipitously infect the European invaders. The result was a unilateral, effectively biological war: Europeans and their diseases against the native Americans. Consider in this respect the following from Jack Weatherford’s little gem of a book entitled Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World: “In this agonizing and slow genocide, the [otherwise remarkably, even tremendously successful] Indian doctors found most of their cures impotent and were thrown back increasingly on the meager resources remaining to them — prayer and magic. They chanted, danced, mumbled, and searched for magical solutions to ailments that they had never before encountered. The great accomplishments of Indian medicine have been forgotten.”
This sort of biological warfare — which tends to be waged unknowingly at the start but soon thereafter with a considerable degree of intent — similarly characterized the expansion of the early agricultural societies of the Middle East. Again, McNeill:
When civilized societies learned to live with the “childhood diseases” that can only persist among large human populations, they acquired a very potent biological weapon. It came into play whenever new contacts with previously isolated, smaller human groups occurred. Civilized diseases, when let loose among a population that lacked any prior exposure to the germ in question, quickly assumed drastic proportions, killing off old and young alike instead of remaining a perhaps serious, but still tolerable, disease affecting small children.
The disruptive effect of such an epidemic is likely to be greater than the mere loss of life, severe as that may be. Often survivors are demoralized, and lose all faith in inherited custom and belief which had not prepared them for such disaster. Sometimes new infections actually manifest their greatest virulence among young adults, owing, some doctors believe, to excessive vigor of this age group’s antibody reactions to the invading disease organism. Population losses within the twenty-to-forty age bracket are obviously far more damaging to society at large than comparably numerous destruction of either the very young or the very old. Indeed, any community that loses a substantial percentage of its young adults in a single epidemic finds it hard to maintain itself materially and spiritually. When an initial exposure to one civilized infection is swiftly followed by similarly destructive exposure to others, the structural cohesion of the community is almost certain to collapse. In the early millennia of civilized history, the result was sporadically to create a fringe of half-empty land on the margins of civilized societies.
On the home front, cities sought to maintain their populations and thus their power by encouraging people and entire peoples to emigrate to urban ground. McNeill:
The striking way, for example, in which Sumerian-speakers gave way to Semitic-speakers in ancient Mesopotamia during the third millennium B.C. is probably a direct consequence of this kind of population movement. Speakers of Semitic tongues presumably migrated into Sumerian cities in such numbers that they swamped speakers of the older language. Sumerian lingered on as the language of learning and priestcraft, but for everyday purposes, the Semitic Akkadian took over.
Farmers and desert warriors alike were drawn to the cities. Farmers were especially affected by the new dynamic; not only were they forced to supply the city with food, they were also pressured to supply the city with people. A high rural birth rate resulted. Indeed, early marriage and a large number of offspring became, among the peasants, symbolic of success. As such, however, any prolonged duration free of disease, famine and war would result in acute rural overpopulation. Wars of conquest were an obvious solution to this problem, for even if these wars failed to secure new lands they would certainly cause a tremendous number of human deaths. From Campbell’s Creative Mythology:
… it was precisely at this point of space and time, in the Near East, and specifically in Sumer, c. 3500–3000 B.C., that the evidence first appears among the ruins of those earliest city-states — Kish, Uruk, Ur, Lagash, and the rest — first, of a disciplined social order imposed from above by force, and next, of deliberate expeditions of military conquest against neighbors: not the mere annihilation raids of one tribe or village horde against another, in a spirit of plunder, malice or revenge, but deliberately progressed campaigns of systematic conquest and subjugation.
The natural contrast between elder and younger siblings was exacerbated by this new state of affairs. Younger sons especially tended now to move not to neighboring tribes — where according to proto-mythologic they would marry and stay, thus building strong familial bridges (of peace) between tribes — but rather to a city, thus destabilizing the polity of the countryside while breaking their native bond to the traditional, dominantly Red/Dionysian and proto-mythological way of life. In the city, young people would tend to subscribe to the notion that city life — in all its White/Apollonian splendor and freedom (“city air makes one free,” says a German adage), and with its absence of antique obligations — is superior to the old way of life. The males would tend to join the military. These soldiers (from the Latin solidus, “pay”) would thus assume a rather artificial yet ornate and considerably powerful White/Apollonian persona as traveler, sophisticate, and military man. Thus the native rift between Red/Dionysian and White/Apollonian — elder and younger — increased to a hugely unprecedented degrees, with the White/Apollonian establishing and institutionalizing likewise unprecedented dominance over the Red/Dionysian within and without the city.
The primary and perhaps chief role that disease has played in shaping world events has gone phenomenally underappreciated. “Until modern times,” notes McNeill, “… surviving records simply do not take notice of what happened to the weak and unfortunate neighbors of civilized people.” Not only were the affected peoples nearly wiped out and extremely demoralized, the few people who could write, regardless of which side they were on, possessed minimal knowledge of the underlying biological processes of disease. To put it simply, the victims hardly knew what had hit them. Likewise the victors failed to recognize that their greatest strength was other than their gods, their culture, their military and such. Indeed, writes McNeill, the conquerors “naturally enough, tended to assume that the expansion of civilization (their own, of course) was only to be expected, since its charms and value were self-evident.” Even in the modern world there remains an overwhelming tendency to disregard the import of disease. Susan Sontag notes the “near-total historical amnesia about the [aforementioned] influenza pandemic of 1918–19.” Yet the events in Mesopotamia c. 3000 BCE are perhaps indicated in the opening chapter of the Iliad, where Homer tells us that Apollo sent a “deadly plague” to punish Agamemnon’s discourtesy to a priest of Apollo. Homer similarly refers to the disease of the “dog-star” time. The Dog Star, as we will come to understand precisely, is a prime signifier of proto-mythology.
We’ve been addressing class distinctions with a remarkable generality and simplicity. The extremely complicated caste system which largely characterizes India stands in contrast to such simplicity. But even that system stems from the initial wave of acute infectious epidemic diseases. This wave spread very well in temperate or northerly regions; but it eventually met nearly insurmountable resistance in the tropical jungle of India, an environment in which primates and in turn humanoids (if not homo sapiens sapiens) evolved and which therefore holds many an old and relatively complex biological adversary. Again, McNeill:
In that subcontinent, a civilized level of society arose initially in the semi-arid Northwest, where the Indus River runs through increasingly desert lands from the high Himalayas to the sea. Such a landscape was similar to that of Mesopotamia and Egypt, and the irrigation agriculture that supported Indus civilization was probably very like that of the two ancient Middle Eastern civilizations. The basic pattern of Indian history was defined by massive barbarian (Aryan) invasions after 1500 B.C., followed by a slow reassertion of civilized patterns of life.
… the forest [jungle] peoples in India did not crumple up and disintegrate as might have been expected. Instead, they had their own epidemiological riposte to the biological armament of civilization. Various tropical diseases and parasitic infestations that flourished in moist and warm climates protected them against the temperate zone pattern of civilized encroachment. As was true later in Africa, death and debility lurked in too many forms to allow massive or rapid invasion of moist, warm regions by civilized personnel from India’s drier North and West. A sort of epidemiological standoff ensued. Forest folk might be decimated by infections arising from contacts with civilized peoples, but civilized intruders were equally vulnerable to contacts with the tropical diseases and infestations familiar among the forest folk.
The upshot is well known. Instead of digesting the various primitive communities that had occupied southern and eastern India in the manner that was normal north of the Himalayas, Indian civilization expanded by incorporating ex-forest folk as castes, fitting them into the Hindu confederation of cultures as semi-autonomous, functioning entities. Local cultural and social traditions were therefore not destroyed before being fitted into Indian civilized social structures. Instead, a vast variety of primitive rites and practices survived for centuries.
… the taboos on personal contact across caste lines, and the elaborate rules for bodily purification in case of inadvertent infringement of such taboos, suggest the importance fear of disease probably had in defining a safe distance between the various social groups that became the castes of historic Indian society. Only after a prolonged process of epidemiological encounter, during which antibody immunities and tolerances of parasitic infestation were gradually equalized (or initial differences sharply reduced) did it become safe for Aryan-speaking intruders to live side by side with speakers of Tamil and other ancient tongues.
Jungle diseases are typically caused by complex, multicellular parasites, organisms such as worms and protozoa in contrast to the relatively simple bacteria and viruses which cause infectious epidemic diseases. Such complex parasites can circulate seamlessly within the non-gregarious (i.e. non-herd) host populations endemic to jungles, for ususally such parasites neither kill the host quickly nor trigger the host’s immune system. Moreover, the high ambient moisture and heat of a jungle are conducive to the evolution of these small yet complex organisms, some of which eventually incorporate into their life-cycle long durations spent outside as well as inside another organism or organisms. These life-cycles and the interrelationships they involve tend to become extremely elaborate and, as I mentioned, usually non-lethal to the hosts. (Many of these diseases are however onerous. And occasionally, when some threshold or another is passed, they, too, are deadly.) All told, it’s fair to categorize acute infectious epidemic diseases — i.e. herd diseases, diseases of the plains, “childhood” diseases, simple diseases — as being White/Apollonian. This characterization is especially true relative to said complex parasitic diseases — i.e. sluggish, introverted diseases, jungle diseases, adult diseases — which are, by way of contrast, Red/Dionysian.
Primates, including humanoids, having evolved in jungle environments, became naturally involved in symbiotic relationships with a rich array of typically non-lethal, complex parasites. Human biology has of course remained susceptible yet accommodating to such parasites. By the same token the savannah, plains and steppe naturally harbored parasites — especially of the simple, White/Apollonian sort, i.e. bacteria and viruses, typical of herd animals — which could pose a severe threat to human biology. This threat was attenuated insofar as prehistoric humans lived non herd-like populations and in very loose connection with herd animals. As such, the only herd parasites which actually tended to harm human physiology were of the complex, non-epidemic variety. Take, for instance, the trypanosome parasite. Carried by the tetse fly, which lives among the herds of ungulates on the savannah, this complex parasite causes sleeping sickness throughout much of Africa. “It is, in fact, mainly because sleeping sickness was and remains so devastating to human populations,” writes McNeill, “that the ungulate herds of the African savannah have survived to the present. Without modern prophylaxis, humans simply cannot live in regions where the tsetse fly abounds.” When humans migrated to temperate climates outside the range of the tsetse fly, however, they found themselves in simpler environs largely absent the sort of the complex, Red/Dionysian parasites that had checked them for eons. In fact the archaeological record of human prehistory testifies to the phenomenally good health these humans typically experienced outside Africa. McNeill:
Except for formidable illnesses traceable to recent contacts with the outside world, these peoples … seem to have been quite free from infectious disease and from infestation by multicelled parasites. Anything else would have been very surprising, for there was not enough time for the slow work of biological evolution to devise organisms and patterns of transfer from host to host suitable for cool and dry conditions such as would be needed to maintain a tropical level of infection and infestation among the small and relatively isolated communities of hunters who penetrated the world’s temperate and sub-Arctic climates.
Consequently the human population outside Africa exploded. What’s more, because the typically microscopic parasitic pressures on human evolution never had been literally seen by humans and largely inasmuch therefore never had been fathomed and acted upon by human intelligence, evolution selected for human brain power in inverse proportion to the waning importance of microscopic parasites. Typically macroscopic threats were now of the greatest import to humanity in general. And it is precisely such obvious threats that human intelligence was geared to address and to act upon. Human intelligence was surely now the single chief aspect of human physiology that evolution was selecting for. Altogether the consequence would have been a nonlinear increase in both the human population and the typical human intelligence. …
Now, the seminal epidemics chiefly if not entirely responsible for the Great Reversal have an especially remarkable historical counterpart in Europe’s so-called Black Death of 1348 CE. That epidemic was in fact a complex of 3 plagues — bubonic (which is the “black” plague, its victims marked by black spots and a black tongue), septicemic (i.e. of the blood; Red), and pneumonic (of the lungs; White) — which killed about 35 percent of the European human population over the course of just a few years. Before analyzing the aftermath of those terrible years, we’ll do well to briefly address them in terms of the Dark and Middle Ages.
As I will later explain, Rome was markedly Red/Dionysian. The fall of Rome was naturally followed by a multiplication of political entities. This multiplication was famously countered by Charlemagne (c. 800 CE) but it nevertheless resulted in hundreds of European states. Such states were likewise rather powerless to prevent such multiplication within themselves. Inasmuch, local chieftans emerged on rather equal footing with yet in striking contrast to the monarchs. Thus the complex power which was Rome became primarily conserved not only in terms of the Roman Church and hundreds of monarchical goverments (especially the Merovingians) but also most poignantly in the relatively unfamiliar terms of myriad newly landed and legitimized aristocrats — especially in Northern France. This aristocracy began life not only a (supposed) parvenu but also a meritocracy, thus further contrasting with the monarchs — who represented (in one sense or another) the antique blood-aristocracies. In this important sense the new aristocracy was ironically more proto-mythological than the ostensibly mytho-logical monarchies, whose regents were at least ceremoniously considered high-priests of sorts (as in the aforementioned term Rex Deus) and were increasingly wont to claim powers of healing. In terms of the dawning of the Middle Ages an especially complex historical moment had been reached, and inasmuch it naturally corresponded to the proto-mythological transition/balance of power. As Fareed Zakaria writes in his outstanding Future of Freedom:
In practice if monarchs wanted to do anything — start a war, build a fort — they had to borrow and bargain for money and troops from local chieftains, who became earls [i.e. counts], viscounts, and dukes in the process.
Thus Europe’s landed elite became an aristocracy with power, money, and legitimacy — a far cry from the grovelling and dependent courtier-nobles in other parts of the world. This near-equal relationship between lords and kings deeply influenced the course of liberty. As Guido de Ruggiero, the great historian of liberalism, wrote, “Without the effective resistance of particular privileged classes, the monarchy would have created nothing but a people of slaves.” In fact, monarchs did just that in much of the rest of the world. In Europe, on the other hand, as the Middle Ages progressed, the aristocracy demanded that kings guarantee them certain rights that even the crown could not violate. They established representative bodies — parliaments, estates general, diets — to give permanent voice to their claims. …
The English aristocracy was the most independent in Europe. Lords lived on their estates, governing and protecting their tenants. In return, they extracted taxes, which kept them both rich and powerful [but also obliged them to serve the people in like measure]. It was, in one scholar’s phrase, “a working aristocracy”: it maintained its position not through elaborate courtly rituals but by taking part in politics at all levels. England’s kings, who consolidated their power earlier than did most of their counterparts on the continent, recognized that their rule depended on co-opting the aristocracy — or at least part of it. When monarchs pushed their luck they triggered a baronial backlash. Henry II, crowned king in 1154, extended his rule across the country, sending judges to distant places to enforce royal decrees. He sought to unify the country and create a common, imperial law. To do this he had to strip the medieval aristocracy of its powers and special privileges. His plan worked but only up to a point. Soon the nobility rose up in arms — literally — and after forty years of conflict, Henry’s son, King John, was forced to sign a truce in 1215 in a field near Windsor Castle. That document, the Magna Carta, was regarded at the time as a charter of baronial privilege, detailing the rights of feudal lords. It also had provisions guaranteeing the freedom of the church and local autonomy for towns. It came out (in vague terms) against the oppression of any of the king’s subjects. Over time the document was interpreted more broadly by English judges, turning it into a quasi constitution that enshrined certain individual rights. But even in its day, Magna Carta was significant, being the first written limitation on royal authority in Europe.
Clearly the estates of the English lords correspond to the states of the United States of America. Likewise the lords correspond to the senators of the United States Congress. Again, the role of the aristocrats/senators is Red in the sense that it represents a profoundly complex middle, an extremely heroic hierarchical balance between multiplicity and unity. The impetus of the White/Apollonian, on the other hand, is toward multiplication, utter freedom, populism, absolute equality, pure relativism, pure democracy if not anarchy — thus terminating in an all too simple sort of unity, e.g. monarchy. Remember Blake’s rule: extremes meet. The impetus of the Red/Dionysian is toward unification; yet wisely in accord with Blake’s rule, the Red/Dionysian directs this impetus short of unity, aiming rather for hierarchy, meritocracy, federalism, republicanism, representative democracy. The Golden/Legal philosophy demands one or another balance be struck between these contrasting idealities. Although generally such balance is natural — i.e. Black/Baroque, existential — and therefore ineluctable, extreme care must be taken to create and maintain a proper Golden/Legal balance. It is instructive to note that when the mythical hero Theseus introduced federal government to the 12 virtually autonomous communities of Athens, he found the serfs and yeomen (Black) naturally prepared to follow him, and he persuaded the major landowners (Red) by promising to abolish the monarchy (White) and replace it with a democracy pure (White) save for his own role as commander-in-chief and supreme judge (Red).
Early in the development of Medieval Europe the former European lands of the Roman Empire were remarkably land-locked: in the north and west by the powerful Viking traders and pirates and in the south and east by the Islamic powers and by ultra conservative, ultra formal Byzantium. Consequently this Europe was overwhelmingly agrarian and self-sufficient, its industry and commerce rather negligible. But as the European monarchs and nobles inevitably indulged dreams of intra-European unifications/acquisitions and of interaction with the impressive world beyond, they increasingly required of their subjects monetary currency rather than the relatively non-liquid produce of the land. Inasmuch Europe’s feudalism — which stemmed from an ethos of regal, White/Apollonian self-sufficiency — was giving way to a market economy and likewise to the general, proto-mythological upward mobility of the peasant class. Thus a cultured gentry began to emerge, a new middle class, as it were — a new chief exponent of proto-mythology, that is to say — under the aegis of the previous middle class, the aristocracy. The contemporaneous aristocracy, I should put in, itself had likewise emerged under the aegis of the previous middle class: the monarchies that had altogether functioned as a proto-mythological, mediating force between the Roman Empire and the aboriginal peasantry. Rome, too, had originally elevated itself insofar as it was a proto-mythological, mediating force, a middle class, as it were. The Medieval emergence of the gentry was exceedingly impressive in England, home to Europe’s most powerful and likewise locally involved aristocracy. Hence we have the now famed English gentleman, a phenomenon/character of truly mythic proportions. … Meanwhile on the battlefields the newly invented crossbow and Welsh longbow — both capable of throwing missiles that could penetrate armor — rendered the previously indefatigable, aristocratic, warhorse-borne knight all but obsolete. Thus the gentry — and the peasantry it represented — gained further power relative to aristocracy and royalty.
Similarly, however, the Roman Christian Church was absorbing much of the power lost by the monarchies and aristocracies. Among these Christians, the Knights Hospitaller of St. John (now known as the Knights of Malta) greatly benefited from the internecine suppression/sacrifice in 1307 of the relatively proto-mythological Knights Templar, receiving most of the Templar’s great wealth — including especially their myriad properties. The Roman Church in fact came to own about 30 percent of the land in England. With the remaining Templars gravitating to the gentry, the stage was set for a showdown.
And then, via the Kipchak Mongols fighting the Genoese on the coast of Crimea in 1347 CE, the Black Death came knocking. Camille Paglia, in her Sexual Persona, points up some of the consequences:
Boccacio describes the breakdown of law and government, the desertion of child by parent and husband by wife. A wellborn woman who fell ill was nursed by a male servant: ‘Nor did she have any scruples about showing him every part of her body as freely as she would have displayed it to a woman …; and this explains why those women who recovered were possibly less chaste in the period that followed.’ The Black Death weakened social controls. It had a polar effect, pushing some toward debauchery and others, like the flagellants, toward religiosity.
The Athenian plague, I have argued, brought high classicism to an end. The Black Death worked in reverse, giving birth to the Renaissance by destroying the Middle Ages. Philip Ziegler says, “Modern man was forged in the crucible of the Black Death.” Christianity’s failure to protect the good damaged Church authority and opened the way for the Reformation. I think the grossness and squalor of the plague broke the Christian taboo on display of the body … Public ugliness and exhibitionism unmoralized the body and prepared it for its reidealization in painting and sculpture. Boccacio’s plague-framed Decameron, the first work of Renaissance literature, is an epic of cultural disintegration and renewal.
There’s also the fact, emphasized especially by James Burke in his Connections, that the survivors of the Black Death were, on average, far more wealthier than before; this because they inherited the economic capital of the dead and, what’s more, found themselves highly valued within a labor-scarce economy. In terms of labor the peasant was now worth 2 to 3 times what he had been. At last he could afford some of the niceties in life, which at the time included linen garments — most notably underwear. Underwear, as you know, soon becomes rags. Burke:
The bone collector, who had previously travelled from village to village collecting bones to be ground up for fertilizer, now included in his round the collection of linen rag, and became the rag-and-bone man familiar throughout the following centuries. Linen rag was, of course, excellent raw material for high-quality, durable paper. …The demand for paper was high because it was comparatively cheap in relation to its competitor on the market, parchment. Between two and three hundred sheepskins or calfskins were needed to produce enough material for a large Bible, and the preparation of the skins was timely and therefore costly.
At last the circumstances were favorable for a machine meant to print literature. Thus in Germany of the 1400s CE emerged yet another element empowering the peasant: the printing press — natural conservator and exponent of proto-mythology. The Reformation was in the offing. Likewise we can fairly say that the American experiment was in the offing, for as the European middle class had shifted from monarchy to aristocracy to gentry it was now becoming identified with the population as a whole. This identification was itching be institutionalized and legalized, expressed in the virtually unalterable form of government itself. That expression occurred first in England, but only the Americans were in a position physically and culturally to shake off feudalism altogether and begin the process of making the expression purely: a market economical, middle class world, essentially proto-mythological and philosophically Golden/Legal — a world which had been anticipated in terms of Troy and Rome with respect to a lost Golden Age.
The “curiously spontaneous” English Peasant Revolt of 1381 CE presaged Luther and the Americans. This revolt seems to have been spurred by the remnants of the Knights Templar, who had fled France and found refuge in Portugal, England and, especially, in Scotland. Indeed, the inaugural Knights Templar preceptory (outside Palestine, that is) was constructed near Edinburgh, at a place called Temple, on the land of the family St Clair. This aristocratic Norman family, which had arrived in Ireland and Scotland c. 1062 CE, is a member of the aforenoted Rex Deus group of European (and perhaps Sadduceen) families. According to legend, the Templars in 1140 CE removed to Killwinning, Scotland, certain important artifacts excavated from below Jerusalem’s Mosque of Omar (the “Dome of the Rock”) on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which mosque the Templars considered as occupying the site of Solomon’s Temple (destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE), which is also the site of the Second Temple (built when of the Jews returned from Babylonian captivity, c. 536 BCE) as well as the site of Herod’s Temple (a massive expansion of the Second Temple; destroyed by the Romans under Titus in 70 CE). In 1118 CE, in the wake of the 1st Crusade, the Templars founded their order in this mosque, converting the structure into their headquarters. They renamed the building Templum Domini and christened themselves the Order of the Poor Brothers-in-Arms of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon. The Knights Templar (or Templars), as they are more simply known, gained great wealth and power during the subsequent 150 years or so, especially inasmuch as they became a major international bank. (A person could deposit currency with the local Templars, receive from them a promissory note in the amount of the deposit, travel — perhaps internationally — to another such Templar repository, and exchange the note for an equivalent amount of currency.) But back in Europe the popularity of crusading — from which vocation the power of the Templars largely derived — was waning. By 1296 CE the sultan of Egypt had pushed the Christians out of the Holy Land. The Templars retreated to (Aphrodite’s) Cyprus, where they planned a new crusade. The relatively White/Apollonian King Philip IV of France — being in great monetary debt to the Templars — determined to seize the Templar treasure and eliminate the Templars forever. Philip’s initial machinations in this regard succeeded in placing his man on the throne of Saint Peter as pope Clement V. The new pope then set the trap by indicating to the Templars that he desired another crusade. Taking the bait, the Templar leadership returned to France in 1307 CE to plan the crusade. At dawn on Friday the 13th of October, all the Templars in France were sought for arrest and imprisonment. The Templars who were consequently captured were tortured, and on this pain many “admitted” to heresy. However, a large number of the Knights Templar in France avoided arrest and fled, as I noted, to Portugal, England, and Scotland. Having been horribly betrayed by their Christian brothers — and understandably self-transformed into an underground society trusting in “Deity” rather than Church — the Templars some 74 years later seem to have decided that the time was right to begin rebuilding their public power. The English “Peasant” Revolt was on.
It seems reasonable to believe that the Templars finally revealed themselves in 1717 CE: as the Freemasons. The Freemasons continue to espouse religious freedom, the separation of church (in contrast to Deity or God) and state, secular education, market economics, and representative democracy — all according to the principle of “liberty.” Of the 56 signers of the American Declaration of Independence, at least 8 — including Benjamin Franklin and John Hancock — were avowed Freemasons. The list of other avowed Freemasons among the American revolutionaries includes George Washington, Paul Revere, Ethan Allen, and John Paul Jones. The general list of Freemasons is more interesting still, including as it does the following: Louis Armstrong, Mustapha Kamal Ataturk, all 4 of Napoleon Bonaparte’s brothers (but not the emperor himself), Omar Bradley, Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Edward Gibbon, Winston Churchill, Mark Chagall, Nat King Cole, Conan Doyle, Gustav Eiffel, John Glenn, Goethe, Haydn, Harry Houdini, King Hussein, Rudyard Kipling, Meriwether Lewis, Douglas MacArthur, George Marshall, Montesquieu, Mozart, Alexander Pope, Alexander Pushkin, Stamford Raffles (founder of Singapore), Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Schiller, Walter Scott, Ernest Shackleton, Jan Sibellius, James Smithson (founder of the Smithsonian Institute), Jonathan Swift, Harry Truman, George Bush Sr., Mark Twain, Voltaire, Arthur Duke of Wellington, Oscar Wilde …
It was Wilde who said, “There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.” Disease, which we’ve focused on in this chapter, is a sort of suspension between these essentially ideal poles. As such, in and of itself disease — or more generally woundedness, aging, cyclicity — is precisely not tragedy but rather passion, the sad yet exhilerating human condition, the existential, the Black/Baroque, the middle class world. In a sense, then, disease is Hermes the middleman, Ulysses tied to the mast, Odin on the tree. Nietzsche distinguished the human being as “the sick animal.” The Golden/Legal philosophy is ultimately the coming to terms with the general cyclicity which disease especially presents. “The gods,” Carl Jung said famously, “have become diseases.” “In your pathology,” writes contemporary psychologist James Hillman, “is your salvation.” Robert Bly: “Wherever a person’s deepest wound exists, that is where his greatest gift to the community lies.” Theodore Roethke asks rhetorically, “What is madness but nobility of soul/At odds with circumstance?” Perhaps this is why we see so much disease about us still, much of it manufactured by self-destructive habits. The so-called agricultural revolution led not only to the aforenoted plague of acute infectious epidemic diseases but also to severely increasing rates of tooth decay, bone disease, and cancer. Dieticians attribute these increases largely to the switch from the prehistoric, nomadicultural/horticultural diet to an agricultural diet dominated by carbohydrates. I suggest a further, more fundamental phenomenon: Inasmuch as the White/Apollonian and Red/Dionysian are promoted from their true status of ideality to a false status of reality, people gravitate toward disease — for disease is real, Black/Baroque. “Schopenhauer has said,” writes Thomas Mann, “that without death on earth there could scarcely be philosophy. Also, there could hardly be any ‘education’ on earth without it. Death and disease … are … great teachers, great leaders toward humanity.” Susan Sontag, from her Illness as Metaphor:
As a character in The Magic Mountain explains: “Symptoms of disease are nothing but a disguised manifestation of the power of love; and all disease is only love transformed.”…
Consumption [in the 1800s CE] was understood as a manner of appearing, and that appearance became a staple of nineteenth-century manners. It became rude to eat heartily. It was glamorous to look sickly. … The TB-influenced idea of the body was a new model for aristocratic looks — at a moment when aristocracy stops being a matter of power, and starts being mainly a matter of image. (“One can never be too rich. One can never be too thin,” the Duchess of Windsor once said.) Indeed, the romanticizing of TB is the first widespread example of that distinctively modern activity, promoting the self as image.
… It is with TB that the idea of individual illness was articulated, along with the idea that people are made more conscious as they confront their deaths, and in the images that collected around the disease one can see emerging a modern idea of individuality that has taken in the twentieth century a more aggressive, if no less narcissistic, form. Sickness was a way of making people “interesting” — which is how “romantic” was originally defined. … This idea — of how interesting the sick are — was given its boldest and most ambivalent formulation by Nietzsche in The Will to Power and other writings, and though Nietzsche rarely mentioned a specific illness, those famous judgements about individual weakness and cultural exhaustion or decadence incorporate and extend many of the clichés about TB.
… Perhaps the main gift to sensibility made by the Romantics is not the aesthetics of cruelty and the beauty of the morbid (as Mario Paz suggested in his famous book), or even the demand for unlimited personal liberty [freedom], but the nihilistic and sentimental idea of “the interesting.”
Sadness made one “interesting.” It was a mark of refinement, of sensibility, to be sad. That is, to be powerless.
… The myth of TB constitutes the next-to-last episode in the long career of the ancient idea of melancholy — which was the artist’s disease, according to the theory of the four humours. The melancholy character — of the tubercular — was a superior one: sensitive, creative, a being apart.
… The TB sufferer was a dropout, a wanderer in endless search of the healthy place. Starting in the early nineteenth century, TB became a new reason for exile, for a life that was mainly traveling.
… It is not an accident that the most common metaphor for an extreme psychological experience viewed positively … is a trip.
Travel is a “bug.” Travel is the absence of a teacher, the absence of ideality. Kerouac from his On the Road: “And they knew this when we passed, ostensibly self-important moneybag Americans, on a lark in their land; they knew who was the father and who was the son of antique life on earth, and made no comment.” Travel, we may fairly say, is being with a woman, with the Black/Baroque. Kant: “Woman does not betray her secret.” Nietzsche: “From a woman you can learn nothing of women.” Lawrence Durrell: “There are only three things to be done with a woman: You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.” White, Red, Black, or Red, White, Black, depending on whether you consider love or suffering the more ideal. Let's say suffering is the more ideal. As travel is different than tourism, so disease, pain, passion are different than suffering. Consider Chrétien de Troyes speaking of courtly love:
From all ills mine differs;
It pleasures me;
I rejoice in it;
My illness is what
I want
And my pain is my health!
I don’t see, then
of what I complain,
For my illness comes to
me of my own will;
It is my own wish
that becomes my ill,
But I find so much
pleasure in wishing thus
That I suffer
agreeably,
And so much
joy within my pain
That I am sick
with delight
Such “love” is more suffering than pain/passion. Whereas pain or passion are communication, suffering is not. Henry Miller: “Suffering has never taught me a thing; for others it may still be necessary, but for me it is nothing more than an algebraic demonstration of spiritual inadaptability.” Somerset Maugham: “I have never found that suffering improves the character. Its influence to refine and ennoble is myth. The first effect of suffering is to make people narrow … [W]e learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.”
Black is the color of travel, of the journey, the quest, of communication, of experience itself. Black is the color of disease, pain, passion. Black is ultimately the color of the hero, the middleman Odin/Odysseus/Hermes, the tree, the mast. Black is the color of the forest and its horticultural garden in contrast to the slave-worked field. Black is the color of the matrix, the Present Mother. This mother, the Black/Baroque, does not explicitly teach but she is understandable and determinable (i.e. her structure is quantum, it can be perfectly symbolized) — yet she is precisely not controllable. She is heuristic, providential. She is the nature of the of the middle class world, the world in which every (unique) soul is most extremely related, every soul a commoner, a peasant yet inasmuch at least a potential hero.
Speaking of Odin and his existentially suspended kind, I’ve kept you in suspense about the emerging “giant comet hypothesis” according to which several very large members of a certain group of comets and meteors impacted with the Earth catastrophically c. 3200 BCE. As I emphasized in this extremely important respect above, I gained knowledge of this hypothesis only after I had otherwise completed writing this book. Therefore, let me say again, the fact that this book points precisely yet richly to c. 3200 BCE as being an extremely crucial juncture in human history is a fact that should be considered further evidence supporting this hypothesis. One of the chief advocates of the giant comet hypothesis is Duncan Steel, Professor of Space Technology at the Joule Physics Laboratory, University of Salford, England, and author of Rogue Asteroids and Doomsday Comets: The Search for the Million Megaton Menace That Threatens Life on Earth. Dr. Steel suggests that said group of comets and meteors is the so-called Taurid Complex and that this complex — featuring the comets Encke and Oljato — is the debris from a single extremely large object (roughly 100 kilometers wide) that first arrived in the immediate vicinity of the Earth somewhat before or during the retreat of the last Ice Age. This initial encounter seems to have occurred c. 18,000 BCE and resulted in a partial break-up of the original object. Apparently the encounter was repeated with similar consequences c. 12,000 BCE and c. 7600 BCE, when Encke and Oljato finally emerged as separate comets. The subsequent repetition seems to have occurred c. 3200 BCE. Presently comet Encke has a trail (not tail) of debris nearly 100 million kilometers long, and Oljato seems to be on an orbit which coincided with the Earth’s orbital plane c. 3200 BCE. Earth’s initial encounter with this otherwise extraterrestrial nemesis may have reversed the planet’s last Ice Age; and the re-encounter that occurred c. 7600 BCE may have directly caused the swift and extremely mysterious “quaternary extinctions” of myriad megafauna worldwide — especially in North America — at the end of the Pleistocene epoch. (Most of the species lost to this extinction “event” had survived through the previous 1,000,000 years, a duration that included 6 transitions between ice ages and warm ages, the ice ages on average lasting much longer than the warm ages.) This c.-7600-BCE encounter and/or the c.-3200-BCE encounter, insofar as they involved deep-sea impact, might have caused the massive flooding described with remarkable consistency in legends worldwide. Consider in this respect the following from Duncan Steel’s paper “Before the Stones: Stonehenge I as a Cometary Catastrophe Predictor”:
RAS observations have indicated that Comet Encke has a trail (not tail) of debris some tens of millions of kilometres long, presumably produced since its latest period of activity began about 200 years ago. One may further presume that the Taurid meteor showers we observe in this epoch are the result of the dispersal of trails produced in previous activity cycles which must stretch back to about 20,000 years ago. When the comet, accompanied by such a trail, has a node close to 1 AU [astronomical unit, the distance between the Sun and the Earth], one expects intense meteor storms to occur, perhaps accompanied by multiple Tunguska-type events if the disintegrating comet spawns massive lumps of debris. Determination of the epochs of such events from backwards integrations is impossible due to (i) Chaotic orbital evolution; and (ii) Non-gravitational forces; but pairs of intersections (one at the ascending node, the other descending) are to be expected a few centuries apart and separated by 2500–3000 years. It is suggested here that one such pair occurred in 3600–3500 and 3200–3100 BC, provoking the construction of the Great Cursus and Stonehenge I. From Stonehenge I, apparently the first construction at the famous site, as the comet neared the Earth it would have appeared to rise in the evening with a huge bright stripe crossing much of the sky, originating in the north-east. Passage through the trail would then result in celestial fireworks (and maybe worse); afterwards the comet and trail would have passed in the direction of the Sun, partially blocking sunlight for a few days. In order for terrestrial intersection to have occurred in that epoch (late fourth millennium BC) the mean orbital period of the comet over the past 5,000 years would need to have been slightly less than at present, and might then be expected to have produced a 19 year periodicity in meteor storm events (six cometary periods). It is suggested that Stonehenge I was built by the Windmill Hill people to allow the prediction of such events ….
Dr. Lonnie Thompsen and his team from the Ohio State University have shown that the tropics worldwide suffered an extremely severe drought precisely c. 3200 BCE. Separate, dendrochronological analysis has revealed that the Irish oak has extremely thin growth rings at 3195 BCE. Research from Switzerland has demonstrated that from 3202–3187 BCE a highly unusual pause occurred in the construction of Swiss lake settlements; and immediately prior to this pause there was a similarly unusual change in the orientation of villages — suggesting a general change in the wind pattern and likewise in the pattern of major ocean currents. Measurements of the Greenland GISP2 ice core reveal extremely high sulfate levels in the ice from 3200–3100 BCE, presumably owing to the deposition of open-water biogenic sulphate upon the permanent sea ice off the Greenland coast. I could go on, but you get the picture.
Schrödinger’s Color
Why are the primary mythological colors black, white and red? Perhaps because black and white can be considered at once different in kind from each other and different in kind from color itself, while red is the most profound color proper, at least inasmuch as it’s the color of blood and thus of life in general. Similarly the Earth is black, the stars white, and the planets often red. Color theory itself can be precisely if rather crudely based on such a trinity: “brightness” is a measure of the amount of black coupled to a color, “saturation” is a measure of the amount of white likewise coupled, and “hue” is a measure of the amount of the color itself.
Among the all-time great color theorists are England’s remarkably White/Apollonian Sir Isaac Newton and Austria’s famous, aforementioned, chiefly White/Apollonian physicist Erwin Schrödinger. Schrödinger became nearly as well known for his Vedic advocacy of the unity of minds/consciousnesses — indeed the singularly prime existence of Mind, fairly considered identical to Spinoza’s concept of God/Nature — as he was for his physics. Color theory, as Schrödinger’s biographer Walter Moore emphasizes, “stands at the crux of the ancient mind–body problem.” According to the Red/Dionysian paradigm the mind–body problem is better considered the mind–body duality or complementarity, akin to yin–yang, Red–White, particle–wave. Indeed the philosopher/physicist Rene Descartes’ great discovery, stemming from the work of Giordono Bruno (first to employ the word monad) and Galileo, was that mind and extension are incommensurate, extension being the essence of body (matter) according to Descartes. Newton — conserving the notion of extension as physically fundamental — exiled (but did not kill) Descartes’ theory of mind. Newton and extension were St. George; Descartes and mind, the dragon. Noam Chomsky, from his Language and Thought:
As is well-known, the Cartesian program collapsed within a generation. It is commonly derided today as the belief that there is “a ghost in the machine.” But that conclusion mistakes what happened. It was the Cartesian theory of body that collapsed; the theory of mind, such as it was, remained unaffected. Newton demonstrated that the Cartesian theory of the material world was fatally inadequate, unable to account for the most elementary properties of motion….
Returning to Newton’s demolition of the common sense theory of body, the natural conclusion is that human thought and action are properties of organized matter, like “powers of attraction and repulsion,” electrical charge, and so on. The conclusion was drawn very soon, most forcefully by La Mettrie, a generation later by the eminent chemist Joseph Priestley, though neither attempted to deal with the properties of mind identified by the Cartesians, just as they have been put aside in the revival of “cognitive science” since the 1950s….
Here’s Schrödinger, from his Mind and Matter:
… The material world has only been constructed at the price of taking the self, that is, mind, out of it, removing it; mind is no part of it, obviously, therefore it can neither act on it nor be acted on by any of its parts. (This was stated in a very brief and clear sentence by Spinoza [“the greatest philosopher of the seventeenth century,” as Schrödinger refers to him; here’s the sentence Schrödinger refers to, from Spinoza’s Ethics, Pt III, Prop. 2: “Neither can the body determine the mind to think, nor the mind determine the body to motion or rest or anything else (if such there be).”] …)
It is very difficult for us to take stock of the fact that localization of the personality, of the conscious mind, inside the body is only symbolic, just an aid for practical use.
Descartes’ mind–body theory was Aristotelian. The Aristotelian is fundamentally complex, Red/Dionysian, involving as substance both “body” (matter) and “form” (soul, mind) and moreover being hierarchical, plenist, providential — in a word, organic. This is to say, Aristotle’s cosmos is holistic, holographic: the whole expresses the parts and any part expresses the whole. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — the Red/Dionysian German philosopher, mathematician, contemporary and chief rival of both Spinoza and Newton — not only conserves this complexity, he makes it a principle of his cosmology, the “principle of macrocosm and microcosm,” he calls it, whereby each of his real particles (“monads”) is a “universe in prototype.” The Vedic doctrine “All is One” (Atman is Brahman), says Leibniz, is best considered complementary to the doctrine “One is All.” Modern physical theories are similarly complex insofar as they fundamentally involve dualities: e.g. position and momentum, space and time, particle and wave, real and imaginary number components. Yet mind remains exiled from physics, even from atomic theory, which is bounded by the notions of randomness and “observer-created reality” only inasmuch as these notions are involved in one or another interpretation of the theory’s 2 equivalent but not identical — indeed deeply contrasting — mathematical formalisms, these being Heisenberg’s Red/Dionysian matrix (alias quantum, as in monad) mechanics and Schrödinger’s White/Apollonian wave (as in continuum, unity) mechanics.
The pair of orthodox atomic formalisms are together a duality that resonates with the dualities each contain. Naturally the question suggests itself: Is one of these formalisms fundamentally better? If so, which? Both formalisms chiefly address the concept of difference. Heisenberg’s does not allow difference to be vanishingly small. Schrödinger’s does. Which is to say, Heisenberg’s is quantum, Schrödinger’s continuum. Heisenberg’s is based upon said dualities whereas Schrödinger’s is based on mathematical points. Heisenberg is telling us that there is something extremely complex — indeed, absolutely mysterious — about difference. Whereas Schrödinger is telling us that the extreme multiplicity of the wave-mechanical “configuration space” of mass points meets its opposite: a simple, comprehensible unity. With Schrödinger difference takes a back seat to unity. With Heisenberg we see a way to the following, contrary resolution of the mind–body problem: although extension is not commensurate with mind, difference can be!
Leibniz used precisely this commensurability between real difference and mind to conserve Aristotle’s organic philosophy vis-à-vis Spinoza’s and Newton’s expressions of monism. Leibniz termed this conservation his “system of pre-established harmony.” We will do well to consider this system a theory of relativity, i.e. a theory of difference. Likewise we should recognize Leibniz and Heisenberg as being at once the greatest mystics and the greatest defenders of orthodoxy the world has ever seen; whilst Spinoza and Newton and in turn Schrödinger and Einstein are to be considered the greatest gnostics ever, for they assert that there is nothing fundamentally unfathomable, incomprehensible — nothing (or next to nothing) fundamentally mysterious — about experience.
Schrödinger termed Leibniz’s system of pre-established harmony a “doctrine of Monads” and called it “unappealing,” “fearful,” even “horrible.” Why? Because the quanta of this system — the monads, as Leibniz indeed calls them, i.e. minds/souls — are related to each other in terms only of the pre-established harmony which they altogether amount to. As Leibniz said, these real quanta are “windowless.” The infinite set of monads is maximally a community, but it is a community which harbors absolutely no actual communication. You could say the communication between monads is all pre-established. Why does Leibniz call these quanta monads and describe them as being related to each other in such a massively yet exclusively parallel way — indeed, in a purely mystical way? Because logically a true quantum (i.e. unit) harbors no true parts, and logically there can be no mechanical/localizeable connection between quanta. In other words, there is no logical way to describe these quanta as mechanically/locally interacting with each other. (A translation of Leibniz’s remarkably concise Monadology is available free of charge online.)
Plurality implies mystery. Leibniz tried to conserve plurality and reason — and himself. In 1714 he wrote to a correspondent:
[I]t is precisely by means of the monads that Spinozism is destroyed. For there are as many true substances — as many living mirrors of the Universe, always subsisting, as it were, or concentrated Universes — as there are Monads; whereas, according to Spinoza, there is but one sole substance. He would be right, if there were no Monads.”
Plurality is Leibniz’s chief principle and therefore his only principle. Leibniz is better known as an advocate of the principle of sufficient reason, stated in his words as follows:
[I]t is necessary to refer everything to some reason, and we cannot stop until we have arrived at a first cause — or it must be admitted that something can exist without a reason for its existence, and this admission destroys the demonstration of the existence of God and of many philosophical theorems.
If Leibniz would have described God as being not a creator of the monads but merely a member — albeit the greatest member — of the Existential set of real quanta, he not only would have lost his ultimate reason for the existence of the quanta, he would have been widely branded a heretic (perhaps even a greater heretic than Spinoza) and may have been executed for it — a fate indeed suffered by many of his coevals. Leibniz ultimately conserved the principle of sufficient reason to save his neck. In truth he is the greatest mystic ever. In my opinion if Leibniz could have completely given himself over to the mystery which is truly the singular basis of his system, he would have been able to argue that the quanta thereof do interact with each other albeit in an absolutely mysterious way. Indeed, such generally mystical interaction — such non-local and indeed extreme causation, such extreme-action-despite-separation — seems but corollary of the very principle of plurality, i.e. of the true principle of relativity, alias, you might say, a principle of plenitude.
The depth, antiquity and richness of the principle of plenitude — that is, of Black/Baroque community — is exceedingly remarkable, as A. O. Lovejoy explains so well in his classic Great Chain of Being. Consider in this respect the word cornucopia. This word derives from the Latin words corn, “horn,” and cōpia, “plenty,” the latter consisting of co + opia/ops, as in the Latin opus and the Sanskrit apas — both meaning “work” and both being closely related to the Greek apis, “honey bee” — and as in the goddesses Ops/Rhea, Eur–Opa, Penel–Ope, Op–Helia (Ophelia, Ops–Helen), where ops is typically taken to mean “eye,” “light,” “face,” “voice,” “snake,” and “power” (altogether as in Medusa) but is also equivalent to the P-I-E opi and the Greek epi, “back,” as in Epimetheus, he who thinks of the past. Leonard Shlain notes in his insightful Art and Physics:
The preclassical Greeks did not distinguish between “eye” and “light”: either word could be used to describe something beloved or admired. Eyes seemed to emanate light and sources of light were as large eyes. The sun could be called an eye and one’s eye was referred to as a light.
Yet the Sun has a dark side: The P-I-E Ops — Kolyo — is beautiful to behold from the front, yet her whole backside is writhing of snakes and worms. The root op- is the basis of the English root af-, as in after — the letters p and f being closely related. The title/name Aphrodite — who, incidentally, is associated with the initial metal worked by humans, copper — is equivalent to Op-ro-dite, wherein the ro signifies redness, running, periodic movement and dite signifies whiteness, brightness, as in Diana (Di-Ana). Similarly if we consider the Ap prefix symbolic of the White/Apollonian, we see her name as literally White–Red diety; and recognizing Ap as being just as equivalent to Ops, we see her as the Black–White–Red diety. Aphrodite’s association with sea foam, Greek aphro, is on analogy with the surf’s dark power and periodicity as well as its white, semen-like essence, and only secondarily on analogy with its whiteness. Her association with the horse — ros, as in Aphrodite’s flower, the red rose — is on analogy with running horses and sea foam, as in the horses leading Poseidon’s chariot and as in the periodicity exhibited by animals of the herding sort, i.e. of the gregarious sort, this latter word from the P-I-E ger. This ger is basis of the Greek word meaning “crane,” geranos, and is closely related to the name Cronus (alias Kronos, Saturn) — i.e. Ger–anos, the annual (periodic) herding animal in general. Geranos contrasts with Ur–anos, Uranos being father of Cronus. Similarly Cronus’s mother, wife of Uranos, is Gaia, whose name is cognate with ger and likewise cognate with ge, as in geo and meaning “commonality, community, plurality,” i.e. the Black/Baroque. Cronus = Aphrodite. Here we have the basis of the word grail. Among other germane relatives are Greece, grey (as in the grey-eyed goddess Athena) and the P-I-E gherd, “to surround, enclose, hedge, gird,” and ghordo, “enclosure,” and likewise the Sanskrit grhá, “enclosure,” and the Lithuanian gardas, “pen” or “fold.”
Similarly we have the Latin opera, meaning “a peasant’s day’s labor,” and operire, “to cover,” which words are closely related to the Old High German helan (cognate with Helen), “to conceal,” and the Greek kalyptein, “to hide,” as in eclipse and apocalypse, and kalos, “beautiful,” and are likewise related to the Black/Baroque names Kalypso, Kali, and Kolyo, the latter being the chief P-I-E goddess. The very title Latin comes from latere, “to hide.” Virgil says this title signifies Saturn/Kronos’s (profound) concealment in that peninsular countryside, the god hiding himself from his upstart son Jupiter/Zeus. Likewise Atlas, another Titanic equivalent to Zeus, is positioned by Zeus underneath the world (ostensibly holding it up). The Titans Epimetheus (past-thinker) and Prometheus (future-thinker) famously sided with Zeus against Cronus and Atlas and the other Titans; thus they participate in several trinities akin to Past–Present–Future: Epimetheus–Cronus–Prometheus, Epimetheus–Atlas–Prometheus, Epimetheus–Zeus–Prometheus. …
Another important cognate is the Latin optimus, equivalent to the Greek aristos, as in Aristotle and aristocrat. This word refers not only to the high, Apollonian social position characterizing aristocrats but also to the land and more generally the property they own, property being the basis of aristocracy. Looking at the etymology of property we see that it stems from the Latin translation of the Greek idiòtēs, meaning “peculiar nature, specific character.” An aristocrat, then, is essentially an eccentric, a man with qualities. In a word, he believes himself to be a unqiue quantum. Which is to say, he believes in quantum theory, in plurality, in the principle of relativity, hence he can believe in hierarchy. Moreover, he believes in prophecy, which word — apparently cognate with property — comes to us from the Greek prophēteíā, meaning not the ability to predict essentially random future events but rather the gift of interpreting the will of the gods, i.e. the gift of understanding destiny. Here we have the meaning of the adage, “Character is destiny.”
According to the Golden/Legal philosophy, property — as well as the cosmos it can at best be thought to signify — is ultimately providential and hierarchical. Importantly, however, this philosophy does not believe property can really be possessed, for the only thing that can be possessed is one's quantum self — and even that possession is crucifed for better and worse on an infinity of other selves. Property, according to this philosophy, is rather akin to physics: it is secondary, derivative; nevertheless in its purest form — namely art — it is significant of reality.
All this goes to say that every circumstance is naturally an opportunity. This is the meaning of the word optimism. And this is the most important meaning of the myth of the Golden Age. Optimism focuses neither on the future nor on the other; it focuses on the present and the self, albeit with the aid of and interest in all time, all others. Optimism is the recognition that one is vested in everything yet eternally in possession of only one’s self.
Now, if Leibniz had considered plenitude in this more general, prehistoric, magico-providential sense — i.e. in this fully optimistic sense — maybe he would have considered the non-vanishing differences (or, you might say, nothingnesses) between monads, i.e. extrinsic to any single monad, as having corollaries intrinsic to a monad and thus being pseudo-divisive and pseudo-integral to that monad. Those corollaries seem to correspond to Leibniz’s idea of the physical as being secondary though not illusory. The physical is perhaps best considered the structure of any single monad (i.e. observer). A monad whose structure (physics) is quantum in a way which reflects the plurality of monads is perhaps better considered not a monad but a pleiad. Such soul/observer could thus find a virtual confirmation of its belief that it is not alone. Which is to say, such physics would be an extreme solace and likewise a perfect expression of the principle of relativity.
Fairly calling the difference between such souls curvature, we can recognize here the basis of Gauss’s Theorema Egregium, each soul being a sort of quantum geometry embedded in a quantum geometry. As the experts on Einstein’s general theory of relativity know, the structure of that theory corresponds quite perfectly to Theorema Egregium. At once window and light, the holographic structure which I suggest is native to the soul/observer/pleiad would subsume all the primary entities of orthodox physical theory: “radiation,” “particles having rest mass,” and “space.”
Physics as such would be a sort of picture or, better, symbol of real, plural plenitude. What’s more, this physics would correspond to the magical admittance of real action-despite-separation and would therefore be a sort of symbol thereof. Furthermore, this physics would be in contrast but not opposition to mind; it would literally be commensurate with mind. Such structure would not be a creation of mind, not merely mathematical; it would, rather, be concomitant with mind (i.e. with the plenum); it would be the structure of experience, of existence, the absolute and discrete (rather than continuous) rock bottom of physics; and as such it would be precisely heuristic — signifying the extreme mysteriousness of existence.
Leibniz was the greatest mystic of all time, but he was not mystic enough. He developed his philosophy largely and perhaps chiefly to counter the monism of Spinoza and of Newton. “Spinoza’s teaching,” concludes Matthew Stewart in his notable Courier and the Heretic, “is that there is no unfathomable mystery in the world.” Of this trinity, perhaps only Spinoza fully extended his own principles. Leibniz and Newton were holding back, if not disimulating in the highest degree.
Newton — atomist, puritan, known for his prematurely white hair, a lifelong virgin — postulated absolute space and absolute time as fundamental (mathematical) entities of physics and as “attributes” of God. He constructed his physics not according to the (holistic) organic analogy but merely according to mathematical description of observation. Such divorced mathematics could not be considered significant of God; at best (or worst) it could only be attributed to God. Likewise, and after the fashion of (White/Apollonian) Zoroastrianism and courtly love, Newton considered God a different kind of entity than are human minds/souls — this especially in contrast to Leibniz, who once asserted in a note to himself that “God is a certain substance, a person, a mind,” and much later formally and publicly called God the “monad of monads,” thus implying purposefully or otherwise that God did not create the other monads but is merely co-existant with them. Newton considered God chiefly in terms of apocalyptic prophecy. Nearly an expert regarding the Bible, Newton calculated that Jesus Christ the son of God would return in the year 2060. Nevertheless, Newton (heretically) concluded that God Himself is fundamentally singular rather than fundamentally a trinity. Newton’s essentially continuum physics corresponds precisely to this monism. God is the only substance. Human and other souls are not real, quantum particles, not true substances, rather they are merely aspects of the only such particle — God — and that particle must be a continuum. Newton was moreover the greatest alchemist of his day, a fact which further marks him a neo-Zoroastrian, a sort of Manichaean or Cathar. In his Psychology and Alchemy Carl Jung, who studied alchemy for decades, intimated the Zoroastrian thrust of alchemy:
For the alchemist the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter. Only as a secondary consideration does he hope that some benefit may accrue to himself from the transformed substance as the panacea, the medicina catholica, just as it may to the imperfect bodies, the base or "sick" metals, etc. His attention is not directed to his own salvation through God's grace, but to the liberation of God from the darkness of matter. By applying himself to this miraculous work he benefits from its salutary effect, but only incidentally. He may approach the work as one in need of salvation, but he knows that his salvation depends on the success of the work, on whether he can free the divine soul. To this end he needs meditation, fasting, and prayer; more, he needs the help of the Holy Ghost as his paredroz [ministering spirit]. Since it is not man but matter that must be redeemed, the spirit that manifests itself in the transformation is not the "Son of Man" but as Khunrath very properly puts it, the filius macrocosmi. Therefore, what comes out of the transformation is not Christ but an ineffable material being named the "stone," which displays the most paradoxical qualities apart from possessing corpus, anima, spiritus, and supernatural powers. One might be tempted to explain the symbolism of alchemical transformation as a parody of the Mass were it not pagan in origin and much older than the latter.
The substance that harbors the divine secret is everywhere, including the human body. It can be had for the asking and can be found anywhere, even in the most loathsome filth.
Virtually the same could be said of Spinozism. (Still, there’s fundamental room to interpret alchemy according to the anti-Spinozist belief in a plurality of substance/soul. Indeed, Leibniz himself was deeply and vigorously interested in alchemy.) Likewise another famous Swiss, Denis de Rougemont, writes in his classic Love and the Western World: “The condemnation of the flesh, which is now viewed by some as characteristically Christian, is in fact of Manichaean and ‘heretical’ origin. … Catharist dualism issues in an eschatological monism.” The ideal of unity with a lover anticipates the ideal of unity with God. Courtly love anticipates Spinoza and Newton and hence modernism, Musil’s Man without Qualities — and Erwin Schrödinger.
Newton lived by himself in a Cambridge house where all the furnishings were colored red. Schrödinger was a deuteroanomalous trichromat: his perception of the color red was much greater than normal, a condition occurring in about 2 percent of the human population. Among Schrödinger’s favorite stories was Poe’s Masque of the Red Death. And among his favorite paintings, Dürer’s Adoration of the Trinity, alias All-Saints. It’s as if Newton and Schrödinger were naturally wedded to the color, complexity and mysticism antithetical to their White/Apollonian idealism/monism, like children who are strangely attracted to the most mysterious, frightening character of a fairy tale.
Schrödinger worked chiefly on color theory from 1918 to 1920, at the University of Vienna. Through 1925 he continued to publish papers on the subject — becoming recognized as the world authority.
Schrödinger’s extreme interest in color theory is all too often explained-away as a philosophical indulgence. But Schrödinger — following Einstein — sought to base his physics on principle, i.e. on philosophy, namely on a principle of reality (if not relativity). It seems he expected that both atomic theory and Einstein’s general relativity could be understood as generalizations of color theory. In this respect, the following outtake from Moore’s excellent biography of Schrödinger (which outtake I’ve embellished with several of my comments, in brackets) is extremely interesting:
Erwin based his analysis of color vision on the three-color theory of Thomas Young (1806), surely the most prescient work in all of psychoanalysis, which was rediscovered, developed, and extended by Hermann Helmholtz in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The Young–Helmholtz theory is based on the hypothesis (since proven) that the normal (trichromat) human retina contains three types of receptors, each with a particular spectral response curve; these may be called red, green, and blue receptors on the basis of their response curves. Any spectral color (light) F or any mixture of such colors can be matched by a linear combination of the three basic colors, R, G, B, so that one can write F = x1R + x2G + x3B.
… The geometry of color space is not the ordinary Euclidean variety that we learn in high school. It is more general geometry, called affine geometry, of which the Euclidean variety is a special restricted case. Affine [cognate with the word affinity] geometry deals with those properties of figures which are unchanged when the original coordinates of the points, x, y, z, are transformed to new coordinates, x′, y′, z′, by a system of linear [my emphasis] equations [i.e. it deals with properties that are “invariant”] .
x′ = a11x + a12y + a13z
y′ = a21x + a22y + a23z
z′ = a31x + a32y + a33z
This set of linear equations with constant coefficients aik defines an affine transformation, which plays the role in affine geometry that the concept of congruence has in Euclidean geometry. A general affine transformation corresponds to a displacement (e.g., translation, rotation, reflection in a plane) plus a dilation, i.e., an expansion or contraction of space in three mutually perpendicular directions. A dilation transforms each line into a parallel line. The importance of affine geometry is greatly enhanced owing to the fact that [its] more general transformations become linear in the limit of very small displacements. Thus any geometry that deals with infinitesimal displacements, i.e., differential geometry, is necessarily affine. [Importantly, the reverse is not true: a geometry which is affine is not necessarily differential. Schrödinger comments: “The color space owes its existence as well as its affine structure to the equality relation [i.e. transformation within any single dimension] quite without reference to the vectorial or point space which serves for its elucidation.” Which is to say, the concept of transformation is a principle whereas the number and kind of dimensions to which this principle applies is merely conventional. This is Einstein’s expression of the relativity principle.]
In affine geometry, the basic elements are points A, B, C, etc. [i.e. coincidences], segments AB, BC, etc. [i.e. lengths], and the idea of intermediacy, e.g. of B in a segment ABC. In affine geometry, lengths of segments can be [meaningfully] compared only if they are collinear or lie on parallel lines. …
Schrödinger pointed out that the empirical data of elementary color theory are derived exclusively from sensations of equality between color samples, which are best compared by presenting two adjacent color areas to the observer. It is possible to match one of the qualities of hue, brightness, or saturation, when the other two are kept the same. When one of these qualities is altered continuously, the observer does not perceive a change until a certain minimal difference has been presented; this is called the threshold of distinction. All colors that are at the same threshold of distinction from a given color are said to be at the same distance from it. Thus the difference in stimulus required to reach the threshold of distinction defines a unit length along any vector in color space. By proceeding with stepwise matches it is thus possible to compare lengths along collinear vectors by the number of thresholds required to cover the distance in question.
Elementary color theory is not so simple as it may seem. There is an infinity of different spectral distributions of energy (or of reflectances or transmittances) which can match any given color in the visible range. Helmholtz was the first really to understand this fact. The visual system performs a formidable job of reductions of physical data before it presents a color sensation to the mind. …
Advanced color theory is concerned with questions such as how to measure a difference of brightness between two colors that have different hues ... Instead of trying to match two closely neighboring colors exactly, Helmholtz introduced [my emphasis] a “principle of greatest similarity” [i.e. he imposed a constraint, a condition]; all those colors that appear equally most similar to a given color are said to be at the same distance ds from it. He wrote ds because the colors are very close together and the finite distance is approximated by the differential. [Here we have the essence of ds as Einstein, and Newton before him, famously used it: vanishing, non-quantum difference. The differential stands in contrast to Leibniz’s quantum (i.e. discrete) difference dx — which dx corresponds to Leibniz’s monads. In a major contribution made recently, contemporary English physicist and cosmologist Julian Barbour, whose career is closely linked to Schrödinger’s, has shown that the concept of “greatest similarity” — which Helmholtz felt obliged to impose upon affine geometry — is inherent in (i.e. a property of) affine geometry in general; there is no need to impose it — unless, that is, you want it (i.e. the property of similarity between any 2 lines in the geometry) to be essentially quantum.] The differential distance or line element is expressed as
ds2 = aik dxi dxk [aik = aki]
(The usual convention of summation over repeated subscripts is followed, with the sums from i, k = 1 to 3.) [The condition aik = aki is the aforementioned commutation postulate (i.e. law) of multiplication. The absence of this postulate — which absence, I say, is corollary of the generally quantum essence of experience — is the crux of Heisenberg’s matrix (a.k.a. “quantum”) mechanics.] In advanced color theory, therefore, a metric has been introduced, and the geometry is no longer affine, but Riemannian. It is interesting that this is the same kind of geometry used by Einstein in his general theory of relativity, although his space is four-dimensional (space–time) whereas the color space is three-dimensional. [The ds2 term is “generally,” i.e. in Riemannian geometry (which itself is clearly a mere subset of geometry), called the metric form and the aik term is called the metric tensor.]
The [meaningful] difference between any two colors X and Y can now be calculated as the integral of ds along the shortest path between them …, provided this integration can be carried out. The shortest path or geodesic, is the one that requires the least number of steps of greatest similarity …
On May 1, 1925, [Schrödinger] published another article on color in Die Naturwissenschaften, “On the Subjective Colors of the Stars and the Quality of Twilight Sensitivity.” …
At the very end of this paper he included a remark that must have made [his fellow Viennese] Mach turn over in his grave. “The remarkable difference of twilight colors for normal and anomalous trichromats … can, I believe, be explained by difference in the daylight system alone, while the rod color itself is ‘in reality’ the same for both — and apparently for all — types of eyes.”
You can see that it was largely by analogy with color theory that Schrödinger — and likely Einstein as well — considered the quantum of action a mere phenomenon, an illusion of sorts, whereas they considered the essence of experience and implicitly reality itself a continuum. This notion of experience as being a continuum is an extreme which meets the ostensibly opposite notion: reality as an extreme plurality (i.e. of totally, radically separate, self-contained, self-sufficient quanta). According to the Golden/Legal philosophy, on the other hand, reality is best considered an extreme plurality-in-unity, an extreme and paradoxical multeity-in-unity. As Leibniz pointed out, the (clearly White/Apollonian) notion of a set of totally separate quanta is philosophically meaningless; the members of any meaningful plurality must be fundamentally unique yet fundamentally related — and extremely so. Leibniz invoked his principle of pre-established harmony to bind his otherwise totally separate quanta together.
In the present light consider paragraph 739 in part 5 of (Red/Dionysian) Goethe’s Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors):
True observers of nature, however they may differ in opinion in other respects, will agree that all which presents itself as appearance, all that we meet as phenomenon, must either indicate an original division which is capable of union, or an original unity which admits of division, and that the phenomenon will present itself accordingly. To divide the united, to unite the divided, is the life of nature; this is the eternal systole and diastole, the eternal collapsion and expansion, the inspiration and expiration of the world in which we live and move.
Thus Goethe, too, expressed the principle of relativity via color theory.
Surely Bohr and Heisenberg and company understood Leibniz’s and Goethe’s indefatigable position regarding the conservation of plurality. But why did they assert that the quantum of action must be considered at once eternally fundamental and singular, a sort of unity? Doesn’t the correspondence between Leibniz’s dx and his set of monads couple to a self-evident analogy between dx and the quantum of action such that Bohr and Heisenberg would expect the quantum of action to be in truth a set of quanta of action akin to the set of monads? The answer involves measurement (or control) theory. Supposedly, measurement of an atom — and indeed measurement in general — is determinable (controllable) using essentially thermodynamical, classical abstractions. In other words, measurement — control, communication — is defined in classical, abstract terms; it is itself a classical, abstract concept, a White/Apollonian concept. These abstractions (in the literal meaning of the word: “out-takes”) and the mathematics they are coupled to leave room for but a single “quantum” of action. (Again, I use the scare-quotes to indicate that the quantum of action is in truth a function and is thus a potential symbol of a multeity-in-unity.) Likewise said abstractions do not signify some underlying — or outlying — merely postulated reality but are instead referential to (one’s) experience only. It is a principle of Bohr and Heisenberg and company’s Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum theory that physics, as it were, is complete in terms merely of measurement (control); i.e. physics is neither a model of nor some conception regarding reality nor is it even symbolic of some principle of reality, for physical principles concern what is ostensibly controllable not what is uncontrollable — and reality itself is uncontrollable, utterly mysterious, incomprehensible.
This is not to say, however, that the entire set of possible measurements cannot be consistent with a principle of (real) relativity. And it is not to say that perhaps only such principle along with a corollary symbol thereof considered an intrinsic metric is the only principle which is so consistent. Besides, it is theory, as Einstein said, that first determines what can be observed (i.e. controlled, measured). Perhaps a new theory will provide a new basis for measurement. But even if no such basis is discovered a theory could be discovered whose variables are, according to that very theory, unmeasureable (i.e. unobservable, uncontrollable) yet which theory is at once as successful as the presently orthodox quantum theoretical formalisms at accounting for atomic phenomena and is derived from a more profound principle or set of principles. Such theory would be more elegant — more beautiful, i.e. more simple if perhaps just as general — and would therefore be superior despite its “hidden variables.” In this precise sense, it is possible that a so-called hidden variables theory can be superior to orthodox quantum theory, which orthodox theory pointedly does not involve hidden variables. What’s more, if such new theory were to stem from a principle of relativity — ideally, I say, only from a principle of relativity — it would naturally subsume Einstein’s general theory of relativity and thus be superior in this general sense as well. Such theory would literally point to (i.e. signify, symbolize) not the naïve, classical notions and corollaries of control; rather it would point in the other direction, in the deeper direction, the direction of soul, of substance, toward that which cannot be controlled. In a word, such theory would point in the direction of the gods.
Despite the continuing success of the Copenhagen Interpretation, there remains the possibility that we can start from a principle of relativity, symbolize that principle mathematically and thus determine physics from below, as it were. Nobody understands this fact better than does Julian Barbour. During the last decade or so, Barbour has been joined in this deepest respect by American physicist Lee Smolin, author of the popular Life of the Cosmos and Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. Here's Barbour from his own End of Time:
[Lee] proved very receptive to the ideas of Leibniz and Mach to which I introduced him, while he encouraged me to see what application they might have to the problem to which he had decided to devote himself — quantum gravity. We met several times in the next few years, and collaborated on an attempt to formulate Leibniz’s philosophical system, his ‘monadology’, in mathematical form. I think we made some real progress. … As far as I am aware, Leibnizian ideas offer the only genuine alternative to Cartesian–Newtonian materialism which is capable of expression in mathematical form. What especially attracts me to them is the importance, indeed primary status, given to structure and distinguishing attributes, and the insistence that the world does not consist of infinitely many essentially identical things — atoms moving in space — but is in reality a collection of infinitely many things, each constructed [if you will] according to a common principle yet all different from one another. Space and time emerge from the way in which these ultimate entities mirror each other. I feel sure that this idea has the potential to turn physics inside out — to make the interestingly structured appear probable rather than improbable.
To use Einstein’s terminology, a bottom-up formulation would be complete precisely insofar as it conserves the notion that there is an essentially comprehensible (if infinitely, not irreducibly complex) reality, where the word reality means something independent of control, independent of measurement, i.e. a substance (if perhaps the only substance). In a letter to M. Laserna dated 8 January 1955 Einstein commented in this extremely important respect:
It is basic for physics that one assumes a real world existing independently from any act of perception. But this we do not know. We take it only as a programme in our scientific endeavors. This programme is, of course, prescientific and our ordinary language is already based on it.
Einstein’s use of the word act here implies the classical physical parameter action and therefore the very closely related notions of control, free will, plurality, Mach’s principle, the uncertainty principle, and the Copenhagen Interpretation. In the context of quantum theory an “act of perception” is more a measurement (i.e. an act of control, an abstraction dependent on classical physical theory) than a mere perception. I like to say we can control only what we cannot understand and we can understand only what we cannot control. This, I think, is physicist John Bell’s distinction between “observable” (i.e. controllable) and “beable.” The distinction is akin if not identical to Kant’s distinction between a thing and a thing-in-itself: a distinction, I say, between order and structure. All such distinctions adumbrate a fundamental difference between information and reality, where information is determined according to the “principle of separation” — no action-at-a-distance, or, more poignantly, no action whatsoever — sacred to Einstein. “Action,” I assert, means the uncontrollable, indescribable co-influence existing between otherwise separate substances (quanta, souls). …
Schrödinger seems to have discounted the extremely important role color theory played in his formulation of atomic theory. His dissimulation in this respect can largely be understood insofar as his focus during the early 1920s shifted to the study of ideal gases. This field was the prime legacy of the Red/Dionysian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who was also Viennese and was a prime scientific hero of Schrödinger’s. Boltzmann advocated the reality of physical atoms in and of themselves (and was an ardent supporter of Darwinism), this in contrast to the paradigm championed by that other Viennese — and Schrödinger’s only other scientific hero: the White/Apollonian Ernst Mach. According to Mach, atoms are merely provisional, conceptual devices useful in treating of a more fundamental continuum of “energy.” Here’s Walter Moore on the deep contrast between Boltzmann and Mach:
In 1895, at a conference in Lübeck [Germany], an attempt was made to resolve these conflicting views of the fundamental structure of the world. The report in favor of energetics [i.e. Mach’s paradigm] was given by Georg Helm of Dresden; behind him stood Wilhelm Ostwald of Leipzig, the leader of physical chemistry, and behind both was ranged the powerful positivist philosophy of the absent Ernst Mach. The leading opponent of energetics was Boltzmann, seconded by the mathematician Felix Klein. Arnold Sommerfeld [who collaborated with Klein, mentored Heisenberg at Munich, and first recognized the need for a “fine structure constant”] reported that the struggle between Boltzmann and Ostwald equalled outwardly and inwardly ‘the struggle of the bull with the supple matador [or the dragon and St. George, the serpent and Adam]. But this time the bull conquered the matador despite all his finesse. The arguments of Boltzmann drove through. All the young mathematicians stood on his side.’
Boltzmann’s temperament would today be diagnosed as bipolar disorder. He himself attributed his remarkable mood swings to the fact that he was born during the night between Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday. While on holiday at the Bay of Duino near Trieste, Italy, in 1906, and while his wife and daughter were swimming in the sea, Boltzmann hanged himself. Schrödinger was left broken hearted; he had expected to begin studying under this beloved master within a few months. …
Above all else, Boltzmann was the founding master of statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics — both of which are consistent with if perhaps not based on the atomic hypothesis. Building on Boltzmann’s work, Bose and Einstein in 1924 and 1925 achieved together a fundamental understanding of the statistics appropriate to the particular (in contrast to wave) essence of light (which aspect of light later came to be called the photon). Einstein recognized that this statistics must apply not only to light (i.e. to carriers of force in general), but also to emitters/reflectors/absorbers of light (protons, electrons, molecules, etc). Thus a way had opened toward the notion that force and the stuff it works on (“matter”) are fundamentally the same kind of thing — i.e. that physics is light, that it is the description of force only. It was on this path — within earshot, as it were, of Bose and Einstein — that Louis de Broglie “all of a sudden” realized that he should postulate a fundamental particle–wave duality: photons, electrons, protons, atoms, molecules, chairs, universes, what have you — they are all best described as essentially dual, at once particles and waves. Schrödinger was nearby on this same path and was more inclined than were his colleagues to think that the apparent need for this postulate — a need stemming from Boltzmann’s consideration of statistics as being fundamental, i.e. of randomness as being fundamental to analysis (if not being an element of reality itself) — was more importantly significant of a fundamental reconcilability between the quantum-biased Red/Dionysian paradigm (advocated by Boltzmann) and the continuum-biased White/Apollonian paradigm (advocated by Mach). Schrödinger got swept up in the excitement attaching to both the de Broglie postulate and the Machian continuum and thus sailed fully beyond the complex Red/Dionysian sea into open, White/Apollonian waters. Schrödinger went so far as to describe particles in general as merely a phenomenal sort of “whitecap” [Schaumkamm] atop a continuum reality best described as a wave/force only (in the naïve sense of, say, a water wave). To Schrödinger’s chagrin this tack failed (and famously so), lending further credence to the notion that the essence of all physical elements is fundamentally dual or otherwise irreducibly complex. Although de Broglie’s postulate that particles are waves and waves are particles remains a primary truth of quantum theory, so too does the distinction between particles and forces, this because the theory still harbors two kinds of elementary particles (not to mention the multiplicity of particles within each set of kindred particles): those that go to constitute emitters/reflectors/absorbers (i.e. matter; these are called fermions) and those which go to constitute forces (which are called bosons).
In terms of said failure, Schrödinger nevertheless expressed very well a notion that neither he nor, to a markedly lesser degree, Einstein would abandon (chiefly lone wolves, they maintained a tenuous if not tentative collaboration with each other) and which in their professional circumstances they seemingly had no need to abandon: the notion that physics should be considered a Spinozistic, Machian address of a singular, essentially comprehensible yet unfathomable reality, one substance only, one entity only, namely identical to God whether nor not it be called a matter or a force. Such physics must therefore be based on continuum mathematics.
Continuum mathematics is equivalent to mathematics based on the set of whole numbers coupled to the concept of zero. Yet we can fairly say that the concept of zero is akin to a special frame of reference and inasmuch is contrary to Einstein’s expression of the principle of relativity. As Schrödinger writes in his masterfully concise Space–Time Structure, “Zero is the only number with a charter, a sort of royal privilege.” (This fact is commonly stated as the law prohibiting division by zero.) The chief assertion of a transformation equation, Schrödinger likewise emphasizes, is always this: a certain number is zero. Schrödinger here implies that the notion of a “transformation equation” — indeed, the very notion of an equation in general — must be fundamental to physics; equations must be the only way to determine (i.e. express) the notion of invariance at bottom of Einstein’s expression of the principle of relativity and therefore at bottom of Einstein’s general relativity. This assumption is what justifies the special status of the concept of zero and in turn the concept of infinite divisibility, i.e. the continuum. Indeed, the concept of zero is akin to Newton’s absolute space and absolute time.
But according to my understanding of the relativity principle, the notion of an equation is purely secondary. Symbolism is singularly primary. Physical invariance is a mere corollary of the supposed Black/Baroque reality, i.e. of multeity-in-unity, of the set of pleiads, and it should be determined via the single best symbol of that supposed reality. Consider in this respect the following from Arthur Fine’s reknowned Shaky Game:
I think the failure of [Einstein’s] space/time project did lead Einstein to take seriously the idea that the physics of the future may not be spatio-temporal at all.
In his review article of 1936, Einstein calls such a non space/time physics “purely algebraical” and, because the mathematical concepts for such a theory had yet to be invented, in 1936 he rejects the idea as “an attempt to breathe in empty space” (Einstein 1936, p. 319). Nearly twenty years later he is no more enthusiastic, and for exactly the same reason. “My opinion is that if the objective description through the field as an elementary concept is not possible, then one has to find a possibility to avoid the continuum (together with space and time) altogether. But I have not the slightest idea what kind of elementary concepts could be used in such a theory.” If we read these remarks in conjunction with his reply to Karl Menger in 1949 (“Adhering to the continuum originates with me not in a prejudice but arises out of the fact that I have been unable to think up anything organic to take its place.” [Schlipp 1949, p. 686]), then I think it clear that a non-spatio-temporal kind of realism (a “purely algebraical” realism) would be an acceptable alternative for Einstein to his own pet idea for a continuous field theory, even if one not so highly prized.
Paul Dirac, more strongly than Einstein, anticipated such utterly new, “purely algebraical” — i.e. quantum — physics. Among the laconic Dirac’s “pet ideas,” as his biographer Helge Kragh remarks, was the notion that the basis of mathematics in general is due for a change. Yet like Einstein, Dirac simply couldn’t conceive what this change should be. In 1979, a few years before his death, Dirac wrote regarding orthodox atomic theory: “I think it is very likely, or at any rate quite possible, that in the long run Einstein will turn out to be correct, even though for the time being physicists have to accept the Bohr probability interpretation, especially if they have examinations in front of them.” With respect to Schrödinger, Dirac in 1977 had written:
… of all the physicists that I met, I think Schrödinger was the one that I felt to be most closely similar to myself. I found myself getting into agreement with Schrödinger more rapidly than with anyone else. I believe the reason for this is that Schrödinger and I both had a very strong appreciation of mathematical beauty, and this appreciation of mathematical beauty dominates all our work. It was a sort of act of faith with us that any equations which describe fundamental laws of Nature must have great mathematical beauty in them. It was like a religion with us.
Yet Dirac was torn. In 1965, several years after Schrödinger’s death, Dirac had written: “All references to Schrödinger wave functions must be cut out as dead wood.” Dirac emphasized this assertion in his last lecture, delivered in the early 1980s. The professionals recognize this assertion as something of a mystery. Why, after all, did Dirac favor Heisenberg’s quantum-mechanical formulation of atomic theory over Schrödinger’s wave-mechanical formulation thereof? The answer certainly involves the Hamiltonian. As the outstanding physicist Eugene Wigner — Dirac’s brother-in-law — said in 1963: “Dirac was a captive and is now a captive of the Hamiltonian formalism and he thinks extremely strongly in terms of the Hamiltonian formalism.” The Hamiltonian is an exceedingly beautiful (i.e. simple yet general) formulation of the so-called action principle, the notion that classical physical action (e.g. position x momentum, or energy x time, or spin) is always an extremum (i.e. fundamentally describable as a minimum or maximum). The action principle comes down to us via Aristotle, Hero of Alexandria, Fermat, Leibniz, Maupertuis, Euler, Lagrange, Gauss, Hamilton, Jacobi, Dirichlet, Helmholtz, Planck, Dirac, and others. “In this development,” writes Ernst Cassirer in his Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics, “the question of the metaphysical basis for the principle of least action [i.e. the action principle] was more and more lost from view.” As I pointed out earlier, action basically means interaction between quanta. The notion that the essence of nature is extreme action — and the fact that the Heisenberg formalism is a codification of this notion in terms of non-commutativity, the so-called “quantum” of action (the very meat of quantum/matrix mechanics), and the Hamiltonian — suggests that the Heisenberg formulation is destined to be reduced to a function of action (i.e. to the quantum of action unpacked, as it were, unfolded) and that this function is destined to be recognized as the ultimate physical mathematics and the ultimate formulation of the Hamiltonian, i.e. the ultimate formulation of the action principle. Such function and the interpretation(s) thereof — as being symbolic of an outlying, quantum reality, a set of souls — would be identical to physics in general. This function seems to be the irreducibly complex, middle road which Dirac intuited and inclined toward but never actually set foot upon.
Dirac appreciated the Hamiltonian as being not a constraint (i.e. secondary, forced upon something else more fundamental) but rather an essentially pure (i.e. self-referential) mathematics that happens to correspond to the classically controllable structure of experience. Similarly the Heisenberg formulation of atomic theory is a purely mathematical symbol which happens to correspond to what is controllable. The Schrödinger formulation, on the other hand, is not self-referential but symbolic of a supposed reality; it is pictorial, mimetic, a model, a metaphor — precisely as any geometrical description of fundamental physicality (including Einstein’s general theory of relativity) is a metaphor implying that physical space is best described as being a geography of sorts. Therefore the Schrödinger formalism seems to place mathematical beauty second to naïve realist postulation, short-circuiting Dirac’s program. In this sense the Schrödinger approach damns the Hamiltonian to the status of a constraint upon superfluous metaphysical indulgence. To be sure, the Hamiltonian is also applied as a mere constraint to the Heisenberg formulation, in terms of the diagonal matrix. But because the Heisenberg formulation is merely a mathematical formalism and not as well a model, and because it directly corresponds to classical action, the way is at least open for this formulation to be simplified such that it becomes identical not only to the Hamiltonian but also to Dirac’s equation of the electron, i.e. to his inchoate equation of particles in general — including particles of space and time. Recognizing, again, that the quantum of action is in fact a function, we can therefore fairly say Dirac is suggesting or at least intuiting that both the Heisenberg formulation and the Hamiltonian are destined to be reduced via mathematical considerations — which may involve Einsteinian realism and a principle of relativity — to a function of action and that this function in and of itself will be physics.
Thus the mystery of the quantum of action — that is, the mystery of the very existence of atoms — could be reduced to the principle of relativity, i.e. to the mystery not only of one’s existence but also of the supposedly concomitant existence of an unlimited number of unique souls (absolute, radical others) which are nevertheless (extremely) related to each other. The existence of atoms in any single I’s experience would be explained in terms of the postulated existence of an unlimited number of other, related I’s. No mechanism could be invoked to explain this relatedness. According to the principle of relativity, we need not — indeed cannot and should not — explain this relatedness; rather we postulate this relatedness, this greatest of all possible mysteries, as our only principle.
In regard to the core of quantum theory, Bohr famously commented: “If a man does not feel dizzy when he first learns of the quantum of action, he has not understood a word.” Einstein mockingly called the action-at-a-distance (or non-locality, or “entanglement”) which is a prime (and general) corollary of that theory “spooky” and “telepathy” and he argued that there is no need to interpret the equivalent pair of quantum theoretical mathematical formalisms (Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics) and Schrödinger’s wave mechanics as complete (per the Copenhagen Interpretation) — if, that is, we can interpret them otherwise and thus conserve the principle of separation, i.e. the principle of local causality, i.e. the principle that action requires a medium, i.e. the principle of action-by-contact, the notion that there is no action-at-a-distance. “I consider the renunciation of a spatio-temporal setting for real events to be idealistic-spiritualistic,” wrote Einstein to Schrödinger, derogatorily and in commiseration with Schrödinger. Yet it seems to be increasingly clear that the way forward involves recognizing the principle of relativity as precisely idealistic-spiritualistic. The noted dizziness and spookiness are heuristic. Henri Matisse said about art: “The only valid thing in art is the one thing that cannot be explained.” Ultimately, I think, the only valid thing in physics is the principle of relativity, understood as being identical to the principle of action and equivalent to the “quantum” action.
Thus the heroic path before us can be illumined such that we see it open onto the greatest possible mystery. Regarding that path, I’ll do well to note a few things about the boyish German genius Werner Heisenberg, Schrödinger’s most poignant counterpart. Heisenberg was something of a lifelong Boy Scout. In the Germany of Heisenberg’s youth the equivalent of the Boy Scouts was called the Neupfadfinder (New Path Finders). Consider the following from David Cassidy’s excellent biography of Heisenberg, Uncertainty:
For the Neupfadfinder [of which Heisenberg was a local leader], the coming third Reich was to be the culmination of centuries of German history, the final realization of the ideals of the first Reich, the Holy Roman Empire. Numerous petty princes and political parties would happily coexist within one apolitical empire, ruled by a single, trustworthy, God-appointed Führer. He would ensure the peace and well-being of the German people — especially, of course, of the cultured upper middle class — in the same way a [local] group Führer for his small Gemeinschaft [a group of about 10–15 people, typically men].
… As [Heisenberg’s Gemeinschaft] conceived it, the coming Third Reich bore a striking resemblance to the Christian concept of the coming kingdom of God …
The Holy Roman Empire was established over the course of some hundred years following the 843 CE Treaty of Verdun, which treaty split the Frankish kingdom of Charlemagne — the so-called Carolingian Empire, covering much of modern-day France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and northern Italy — into 3 parts to be shared by Charlemagne’s 3 surviving grandsons: Charles, Lothair and Louis.
The Holy Roman Empire (or, might we say, the Holy Carolingian Empire
— as in Joyce’s H.C.E, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker?) emerged from the eastern realm. The legacy of this
eastern realm — in contrast to the
western, which was to become France — was
tribal German rather than Romanized Gaulish; hence it was much more federal,
far less centralized, than the western realm. Simply put, the eastern realm
was chiefly Red/Dionysian, the western White/Apollonian. Typically the
king of the eastern realm was elected. Indeed,
over the decades and centuries he happened to become increasingly obligated to his
electorate. In this sense the Holy Roman Empire was more akin to England
than to France. Only when coronated by the pope, however, did the
eastern realm’s king become
emperor. This profound, Rex–Deus-like irreducible complexity occasionally took the form
of near conflict between king and pope.
Generally the coronation (as in corona and Cronus) was considered a transfer of God’s
power from the Romans to a new empire. Likewise it was considered akin to
the transfer of power from Troy to Rome and (or so I will
theorize) from Crete to Troy and from Canaan to Crete and from Egypt to
Canaan and from Saturn’s otherwise lost Golden Age (represented in part
by the legend of Atlantis) to Egypt and from the previous
Great (or Platonic)
Year to the Golden Age and from Uranus to Cronus.
The Investiture Controversy of the 10th and 11th centuries saw Pope Gregory VII assert the singular universality of the papal power. In turn he excommunicated and officially if not effectively deposed German King and Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV — a move welcomed by the German aristocracy (which felt that the king had been too autocratic, too White/Apollonian you might say) and nearly fatal to the empire. Although severely and permanently weakened, the Holy Roman Empire largely recovered following Henry’s invasion of Rome; for the pope reacted to that invasion by calling in Norman allies from their presence in southern Italy, and although they saved the pope they also sacked Rome, provoking the Roman citizens to rise against the pope and force him and the Normans south, where the pope soon died. The Holy Roman Empire was not officially dissolved until 6 August 1806, when Francis II abdicated following military defeat by Napolean. Francis and his heirs nevertheless continued their political career as emperors of Austria, until 1918.
But let’s get back to Charlemagne’s roots. As you may have discerned, Charlemagne stems from the Merovingian dynasty. The Merovingian dynasty is named after its founder Merowig (c. 450 CE). Legend says Merowig was truly, fully conceived when the already pregnant wife of his ostensible father Clodio — the “Long-haired” or “Hairy,” equivalent to Claudius, “lame,” as in Hamlet’s “evil,” Set-like uncle — encountered one of Poseidon’s sea monsters, a shape-shifting so-called Quinotaur, while she swam in the North Sea. The monster ravished her and thus added his seed to the mix. Thus Merowig was a duality, a son of 2 fathers. This story — with its poignant love triangle — resonates with those involving Zeus/Poseidon and Europa and Asterius (“Star Man”); Cetus and Andromeda and Perseus; the sea monster and Hesione and Hercules; the dragon and the princess and George (or Tristan or Sigurd …), the snake and Eve and Adam, Jesus and Mary and Joseph, and the legend of Merlin’s conception. The irreducibly complex offspring of such encounter, in this case Merowig, is equivalent to the hero who slays the monster/father/king to secure the lover/mother — just as Cronus emasculates Uranos at the behest of Gaia (or Chthon) and thus creates the universe, Aphrodite emerging from those severed, sea-borne genitals, which genitals are equivalent to her husband/son Hephaistos (alias Mark, counterpart and in this sense equivalent to Tristan/Mars). Likewise said offspring is equivalent to the monster/father and the lover/mother, which implies that the lover/mother, too, is equivalent to the monster/father.
The hero/girl meeting the monster is the hero/girl not only equated to but also identified with the monster — and with each other. If there is a single key that unlocks all mythology and likewise all psychology and sociology, these seemingly pedestrian identifications amount to it.
As for the particular identity of the Merovingian monster, the term Quinotaur is extremely mysterious. The prefix Quino- signifies 5-ness, 100-ness, dogishness/wolfishness (as in the Greek word kynós), smallness (as in the diminutizing suffixes -kin and -chen), change (as in kindle and kinetic and the Cynaen Rocks, alias the Planctae, this as in the planasthai, “wanderers,” i.e. the planets), blueness (as in the Greek word kýanos, “dark blue enamel, lapis lazuli,” and as in cyanide and also the blueish Pleiades), kinship/kingliness (from the Proto-Germanic *kunjá, “family, race,” and *kuningaz, “one descended from noble birth,” these being cognate with the Latin genus and the Sanskrit jánas, “kin,” as in Janus), and cynosure, which word means “center of attraction or attention” and formerly also meant “guiding star.” This last word stems from the Latin Cynosūra, “Ursa Minor,” from the Greek kynósura, “dog’s tail.” Ursa Minor — with its guiding star Polaris — is, I suggest, the adze of the famous Egyptian Opening of the Mouth ceremony (and likewise of the ceremonial cutting of the umbilical cord), and in this sense it represents Anubis and Upuat (“Opener of the Way”) and Fenrir and Hermes and Homer’s “wiley” — i.e. viley, vixeny, foxey — Ulyssses, as well as Finn of Irish lore and likewise Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn of American lore. The Chambers Etymological Dictionary states: “[Fox] is cognate with … Gothic faúhō. Outside the Germanic languages fox is cognate with Lithuanian paustìs, animal hair, the Russian and Polish puch woolly hair, tuft, fluff, and Sanskrit púccha-s tail … from Indo-European *puk-/pouk- (Pok.849).” Huck Finn, you see, is Tom Sawyer is Faustus is Puck, the latter from the Old Norse pūki, “devil.” Finn is Vin is Dionysus. The Pleiades — alias the Kometes, “Long-haired,” as in comets, and as in the Merovingians — correspond to this Little Dipper. In fact the Pleiades themselves — which are typically considered feminine — are constellated in the form of a dipper or adze. Proto-mythology, doggishness, wolfishness, foxeyness, the absent/tiny/fallen father and the totemic animal in general are likewise considered feminine.
Indeed, the number 5 is the number of Aprhodite/Venus and likewise the number symbolizing sacred, priestly knowledge. The number 100, on the other hand, is associated with the ascendant challenger, the White knight and his cohort or fellow centurians. We should be especially reminded here of the wise and learned centaur Chiron — “The Hand,” as in the 5-ness of the hand and as in Roman emperor Constantine’s 5-pointed Chi–Rho symbol. Constantine considered the Chi–Rho symbolic of Christ and of the Sun. (Moreover, he thought that Christ — like Ares/Mars and like Odin/Woden — can determine victors in battle.) Chiron, who lives in a cave on Mount Pelion, is tutor to Diomedes, whom he renames Jason, “Healer.” Chiron is also tutor to Jason’s son by the sorceress Medea, Medeius, eventual ruler of the Medes; and to Hippolytus (the Latin Virbius), son of Theseus and Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons; and to the sea-god Achilles. The hand is closely related to the Latin carpo, “to pluck, seize, lay hand(s) on,” and to the Greek karpos, “fruit.” Of course the infamous scene in the Garden of Eden comes to mind, but so too does the story that Jesus's father was a carpenter. Chiron’s father is Centaurus (alias Quinotaurus?), son of Ixion, son of Ares/Mars. Here, then, we see a striking equivalency between Ares/Mars/Odin/Hermes, Ixion, Centaurus, Chiron, Jason, Medeius, Hippolytus (Virbius), Achilles, Jesus and Merowig. Let’s follow this lead.
Thinking he is ravishing Hera, Chiron’s grandfather Ixion ravishes Nephele (note the Ne- prefix), whom Zeus supposedly created as a phantasmal Hera look-alike. Nephele then gives birth to all the centaurs — each being half horse or bull (or more generally a totem animal of any sort) and half man. The centaurs worship Dionysus. For the attempted rape of Hera, Zeus binds Ixion to a rolling wheel and damns him to Tarturus and the close company there of Sisyphus and Tantalus. Tantalus is father of Pelops, whom we will meet shortly. In all these connections we should furthermore be reminded of the centaur Nessus, who rapes Hercules’ 2nd wife Deianira and then effectively curses him to death at the hands of Deianira — although Zeus plucks Hercules from near death atop the funeral pyre and transports him to Olympus, as Zeus did with Pelops and as Zeus eventually does with the Trojans Ganymede/Aquarius and Aeneas. Now, Neptune/Poseidon — who built Troy’s famed walls — was symbolized by the (gregarious, periodic) horse, as was Nephele/Hera. So, too, probably, was Hippolyta, the root hippo meaning “horse” and, as I will later explain, being identifiable with the name Poseidon and likewise with the Egyptian Hp/Hapi (the Greek Apis), a bull-god equivalent to the human-like god of the Nile, who goes by the same name but is pictured an androgynous old man with pendulous breasts. Here we again have the Op/Ep/Ap prefix, this in a form which is more clearly equivalent to the Hep- of Hephaistos. The actual bull representative of Hp was selected for being black yet bearing a white, crescent-like mark on its neck. Let me add that Odysseus/Ulysses in the wooden horse/bull is akin to the Quinotaur: he proto-mythologically impregnates Troy/Aphrodite, dying in the process (hence to “live” with Kalypso and eventually by way of return/resurrection to Penelope, i.e. Penel-Ops). The fleeing Aeneas — legendary father of the Romans — is the offspring of that meeting/sacrifice; he is equivalent to Poseidon, equivalent to Odysseus, equivalent to Jesus, equivalent to Merowig.
The black and white bull representative of Egypt’s Hp brings us back to the story of Europa, daughter of King Agenor of Tyre, Canaan. Son of Poseidon and Lybia — and (younger) twin brother of Belus (i.e. Bel, the fire god; alias Hephaistos, Set) — Agenor had proto-mythologically left his homeland of Egypt to settle in Canaan, where he married Telephassa/Argiope (“Distant White Light of Power”; i.e. Iseult; i.e. Gatsby’s green light across the bay, the light of the dock of Daisy’s “red-and-white” mansion). Robert Graves, from his Greek Myths:
Zeus, falling in love with Europe, sent Hermes to drive Agenor’s cattle down to the seashore at Tyre, where she and her companions used to walk. He himself joined the herd, disguised as a snow-white bull with great dewlaps and small, gem-like horns, between which ran a single black streak. Europe was struck by his beauty and, on finding him gentle as a lamb, mastered her fear and began to play with him, putting flowers in his mouth and hanging garlands from his horns; in the end, she climbed upon his shoulders, and let him amble down with her to the edge of the sea. Suddenly he swam away, while she looked back in terror at the receding shore; one of her hands clung to his right horn, the other still held a flower-basket.
Wading ashore near Cretan Gortyna, Zeus became an eagle and ravished Europe in a willow-thicket beside a spring; or, some say, under an evergreen plane-tree [with its 5-pointed leaves, the plane-tree was sacred to Helen/Aphrodite]. She bore him three sons: Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Sarpedon.
Agenor sent his [5] sons in search of their sister, forbidding them to return without her.
According to proto-mythology, the hero must venture from his original land/tribe to another and there find a woman he desires. There he must win her love, marry her, and remain with her people to ascend to their kingship and to eventually sacrifice himself at the behest, chiefly, of his wife. Zeus’s contrary abduction of Europa signifies the reversal of this custom; and especially it signifies the Great Reversal. The flowers with which Europa garlands him are the flowers typically lavished upon a bull before it is sacrificed; they are akin to the palms of Palm Sunday, the leis of Hawaii, the beads of Mardi Gras.
As we will later see, Agenor and Telephassa/Argiope correspond to Evenor and Leucippa, the original Atlanteans, whose daughter Clito corresponds to Europa. Clito’s 5 sets of twin sons by Poseidon (initial among them Atlas and Gadirus) correspond to Europa’s 5 brothers (including Cadmus and Phoenix).
Meroweg, like Poseidon/Hp/Hapi/Apis/Hephaistos and like Agenor and like Odysseus-in-the-horse and like Aeneas, signifies proto-mythology. The name Merowig smacks of earwig and Earwicker and the Welsh Evrawg, son of Bron and father of Peredur/Percival — Evrawg’s 7th son, as in the 7 planets, and as in Hephaistos, i.e. Hp. Similarly the name Agenor smacks of Plato’s original Atlantean Evenor, husband of Leucippe (“White Horse”). The prefix Ear-/Evra-/Eve-/Eur- is closely linked to the Latin aevum, “lifetime.” Furthermore Meroweg smacks of Mercury, the shape-shifting Latin equivalent of Hermes, Odin, Odysseus — and the closest planet to the Sun, never straying from her by more than 28 degrees of arc (which number 28 represents the college of Aphrodite’s nymphs, alias the Pleiades). The prefix mer — as in Mark and Mars and Mary — means “sea” and “(female) horse” and “daughter, woman” and “short” (the English merry, “pleasant,” stems from the P-I-E root mreĝhu-, “short”) and “memory, mindfulness” and “merchant, trader” and “martyr” and “boundary, sign” (as in marsh, moor, mark, Hermes and Janus). Meanwhile wig means “change, path, life, enliven,” stemming from the P-I-E *weik/wik, “set apart, strive against a foe,” and *wig, “bend, turn,” these being the basis, too, of the modern English weed and weak and the 7-day, 7-planet week — again, the planets in Greek being literally the planasthai, “wanderers.”
Regarding the Merowig/earwig connection, it’s interesting to note that so-called wizards, as Robert Graves points out, commonly claimed that their ears had been licked clean by serpents, “which were held to be incarnate spirits of oracular heroes and … [wizards] were thus able to understand the language of birds and insects.” Athena, it is said, after blinding Teiresias, was emotionally moved by his suffering and therefore detached from her aegis — originally a bag akin to Ouranos’s severed genitalia, i.e. akin to an ark — the serpent Erichthonios and ordered it to, “Cleanse Teiresias’s ears with your tongue that he may understand the language of prophetic birds.” Erichthonios is Eri–Chthonios, “heather of Gaia.” The bees on the heather are the serpents in the ear are (Red/Dionysian) Aphrodite–Hephaistos in the sea-borne genitals/ark. Erichthonios is the snake/fish-tailed son of Hephaistos and Gaia, equivalent to his father and to Kronos/Cronus/Saturn and to the charioteers Poseidon and Auriga and Pelops, as well as Ganymede/Aquarius, Aeneas, Mercury, and Merowig. Precisely 300 golden bees were found in the tomb of Merowig’s son Childeric I. Napolean selected these bees to replace the Bourbon fleur-de-lys as symbol of his French Empire.
Erichthonios was abandoned by Gaia and found by (relatively White/Apollonian) Athena, who reared him under/in her own aegis, literally. In time he became the initial king of Athens — and, what’s more, had a namesake/equivalent involved in the Trojan line of royalty, that line being as follows: Dardanos (a Latin; most beloved mortal son of Zeus, by the missing, i.e. 7th, Pleiad Electra, daughter of Atlas), Erichthonios, Tros (after whom Troy is named), Illus, Laomedon, and Ganymede. Because Dardonos’s father is Atlas, 1st son of Clito and Poseidon, the Trojan royal line is directly connected to the royal line of Atlantis. … Likewise we have the Hebrew mother (Gaia), Moses (Erichthonios), and the Egyptian princess (Athena). In a mythological sense, therefore, Merowig is Moses. Similarly Merowig is Noah in the ark/aegis is the ill infant Ali-the-son-Husayn left lying in the tent in Karbala: i.e. a representative of pre-Flood civilization, a representative of the ancestors, a representative of Atlantis. In fact the Merovingians did claim direct descent from both the Trojan royal line and from Noah. The main, proto-mythological legend about the founding of Troy says this city-state was established by the 1/3 of Crete’s population who fled that island nation under pressure of famine, led by Prince Scamander. Recall, Zeus/Poseidon had “abducted” Europa from Canaan to Crete, where she married the local ruler Asterius (“Starman”), who adopted her 3 sons by Zeus/Poseidon: Rhadamanthys, Sarpedon, and Minos (who became the cuckolded step-father of the Minotaur and hence commissioner and resident of Daedalus’s labyrinth).
Thus we have a strong connection running from Atlantis (i.e. the Golden Age) to Egypt (ancestral home of Europa’s father Agenor, Egypt was originally named Kehmet, the “Black,” in contrast to Deshret, the “Red” desert) to Canaan (alias Phoenicia, the “Red Land”) to Crete to (Red) Troy to (Red) Italy to the (Red) Merovingians to (Red) Charlemagne.
Merowig’s grandson King Clovis I — alias alias Clodowech (as in Clito?) or Chlodwig, the modern French “Louis” and the modern German “Ludwig,” as in Loki and Lucifer and Leucippe — is considered the initial French king. He died in 511 and his 4 sons divided the kingdom among themselves. The eldest, Theuderic I, rightfully claimed the better part of the kingdom. With its capital at Reims, this relatively Red/Dionysian north and eastern realm was called Austrasia. The remaining, relatively White/Apollonian realm — with Orléans, Paris, and Soissons as its prime urbanities — was split between the other brothers and generally named Neustria. Soon, intermittent yet protracted conflict emerged between this pair of kingdoms, weakening the (White/Apollonian) royalty in relation to the (Red/Dionysian) aristocracy. The climax came in 613 when old Queen Brunhilda of Austrasia proclaimed as king one of her great-grandsons and thus motivated her aristocracy to revolt against her. They allied themselves with her Neustrian nephew King Clotaire II and eventually delivered her to him. Clotaire had her tortured on the rack for 3 days and then, the chief legend goes, torn apart by 4 horses.
Brunhilda’s life became imbued with that of the mythical Brynhild — a virginal, Athena-like female warrior (“shieldmaiden”) and moreover a Valkyrie, the latter especially being goddesses and “servants” of Odin — and thus formed a basis of the Tristan and Iseult story, Wagner’s Brunhilde, and Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. Brynhild, the myth says, was obliged to decide a conflict between a pair of kings. Although Odin preferred the elder king, Brynhild decided for the younger. Therefore Odin condemned her to mortality What’s more, to a coma behind a ring of fire impenetrable to all but the greatest man, who alone could wake her and marry her. That man turned out to be Sigurd, whose magical sword — his father’s, a gift from Odin — was named Gram (note the Gr- prefix). Sigurd was foster son of Regin — note the Re- root and the curious similarity to the aforementioned P-I-E mreĝhu-, “short” — who was smith (as in Hephaistos) of the Danish court. Regin had reforged and improved the previously broken Gram, armed Sigurd with it, and sent the young hero to recover the famed hoard of gold — including especially the magical, gold-making ring Andvarinaut — kept greedily by the smith’s own brother Fafnir, who had become an increasingly horrible dragon out of his cursed love for the gold and the ring at bottom of it. Originally the ring belonged to the dwarf Andvari, who — á la la Hephaistos — lived as a fish in an underground lake. The ring had entered human affairs by way of Loki, who had journeyed down to Andvari and threatened him such that Andvari surrendered the ring to him. But in so relenting, Andvari laid a curse on the ring: that it bring destruction to all who think they possess it.
As Sophocles said, “Nothing that is vast enters into the life of mortals without a curse.” And as Henry Miller wrote in Tropic of Capricorn:
Everything that happens, when it has significance, is in the nature of a contradiction. Until the one for whom this is written came along I imagined that somewhere outside, in life, as they say, lay the solution to all things. I thought when I came upon her, that I was seizing hold of life, seizing hold of something which I could bite into. Instead I lost hold of life completely. I reached out for something to attach myself to — and found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not looked for — myself. I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live — if what others are doing is called living — but to express myself. I realized that I had never the least interest in living, but only in this which I am doing now, something which is parallel to life, of it at the same time, and beyond it.
Similarly, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Crack-Up: “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
The Andvarinaut and its curse resonate with the curse placed by Odin upon and around Brynhild. They also resonate with the curse placed by the mythical Greek figure Myrtilus — who is etymologically linked to the Myrmidon sea-god Achilles, myrtle meaning “ever green” — upon the house of Pelops and hence on Agamemnon and Menelaos. Myrtilus is a son of (Odin-like) Hermes — as Ixion is a son of (Odin-like) Ares/Mars (rival/counterpart of Hephaistos), and as Remus and Romulus are twin sons of Mars by the Vestal priestess (i.e. Pleiad) Rhea Silvia, a descendant of Troy’s Aeneas. Like Hephaistos and Poseidon, Myrtilus is a charioteer. And like his rival and successor Pelops, he is a lover of Hippodameia. Myrtilus was likely considered crowned with green oak leaves, like Pelops’ grandfather Tmolus. The crown, like a ring, represents a profound curse, for it signifies its wearer’s identity as Tree Man, sacrificial man, and is likewise akin to the garlands placed by Europa on Zeus, the palms of Palm Sunday, the leis of Hawaii, the beads of Mardi Gras. The title Myrmidon is said to mean “ant person”: this as in Andvari and Ger-anos, Cr-onus, Ur-anus; and as in the Latin prefix ante-, “before”; and the Greek antí, “against, instead”; and the Proto-Germanic *ai, “off,” present in Aides/Hades, i.e. the missing father, literally the “goat-deity,” the scapegoat; and giant, i.e. Gaia-Ant; and the Greek ánthos, “flower,” from the Indo-European *ándhos, “bloom,” as in the name Antony and the title Adonis, both of which mean, among other things, “Lord,” and as in the aforementioned Erichthonios, “heather of Gaia.” Similarly we have the modern German Anderen, “others.”
The ant people are the before people, the contrasting people, the people from before the Flood, from before the Great Reversal. They are people who in myth are typically represented as fish/snake/short-people, like Andvari and like lame Noah and bow-legged, red-haired Odysseus and Erichthonios and Hephaistos and Enkidu and fairies and trolls, and like the 7 sage fish-men — master craftsmen — who, before the Flood, founded Gilgamesh’s Uruk and built its great walls (just as Poseidon built the walls of Troy). The suffix -vari in Andvari is cognate with the Latin varus, “bow-legged, bent,” with the Old Icelandic ver, “fishing place,” and verja, “to defend,” with the Albanian varr, “grave,” with the Tocharian B warto, “garden, forest,” and with the P-I-E wer/war, “to cover, close up, protect.” Contemporary English cognates include veer, variety, weir, weird, warm, thermal, terminus (i.e. boundary, as in herm and Hermes), and war. … Generally the ant people are the ancestors. They are especially the ancestors from before the present Platonic (or Great) Age/Year, i.e. from before the last Zodiacal age of Leo (c. 10,800 BCE), which as I will soon explain is just beyond the celestial Pillars of Hercules. These ant people are the people of memory and of dream. They are Gaia’s people of the flowering heath, among whom are the Neanderthals. Even more generally however, the ant people are the others — i.e. others in general, the infinite mystical contrary kin of the “I.”
The craving for the ring is a sort of ironic deathwish, a Thanatos, to use Freud’s term. For the curse is not just the desire to possess or save the other, it is the desire to be the other and in turn all others and to thus be God, an extremely simple, reducibly complex, merely White/Apollonian God. This is the God of Spinoza and, I think, of Newton and Schrödinger and, to a considerably lesser degree, of Einstein.
The Norse fertility goddess Freya’s craving for the mysterious Brisingamen comes to mind. Note the Bri-/Bry- prefix. The Brisingamen was a golden necklace owned by the likewise mysterious Brisings or Bristlings, perhaps as in the aforenoted bristle/Pleiades connection and perhaps as in Achilles’ most notable lover, Briseis. The nymph Freya procured the necklace by having intercourse successively with its 4 dwarf makers (which number may place Freya especially in the age of Aries, 5th in the Zodiacal cycle), a promiscuity that disgusted her partner Odin — she, a proto-mythological Valkyrie, being to Odin as Aphrodite is to Hephaistos as Penelope is to Odysseus/Ulysses as Helen is to Menelaos as Daisy is to Gatsby. She is likewise the love potion levied by Iseult’s sorceress mother upon Iseult and Tristan. And she is the underwater herb of immortality which Gilgamesh — in reaction to the death of his hairy (indeed red-haired) rival/friend Enkidu — sought and briefly possessed until a serpent rose from a well and snatched it away, returning to the depths.
Freya’s intercourse with the dwarves implies their self-sacrifice for her, and it likewise corresponds to Odin’s destined enchantment with her, i.e. to his self-sacrifice for her. Yet Freya herself suffers from the same sort of craving, her craving for the Brisingamen. Thus she — the object of the cursed cyclical hero — is all but identified with that hero. The profound implication here is that Freya represents true otherness; she is at once separate from and related to the hero. She represents the mystical multeity-in-unity. She is not the ring, not the necklace; rather she is the Holy Grail. The Grail does not represent the curse; it represents one’s acceptance of the curse by way of belief in otherness, in quantumness, in a Black/Baroque reality which would be humiliating were it not identical with all others (souls) together, including God. The Grail symbolizes not possession; it symbolizes understanding of that which cannot be possessed. In other words, the Grail symbolizes the quest, the holographic, quasic-cyclic, fractal and in these senses irreducibly complex quest. The hero is the knight, the princess, the dragon, the quest, the Grail.
In this light consider the following from near the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby:
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. … And one fine morning —
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Let’s take a harder look at the Pelops myth in connection with that of Sigurd, Loki, Andvari and company. The beautiful boy Pelops is dismembered by his father Tantalus and presented to the Greek gods as food — with only Demeter partaking, and Zeus in turn damning Tantalus and resurrecting Pelops to replace the goddess Hebe as his own cup-bearer, just like Zeus does later with the Trojan Ganymede, alias Aquarius. Similarly the Norse boy/god Ottr is a cannibalized youth at bottom of Andvari’s curse. Note the similarlity between the names Andvari, Atlantis, and Tantalus, and likewise between Ottr and Odin, Attis, Atlas, apple, Apollo, Aphrodite, Hp/Hapi, Apis. This last name means “bee” and is the original name — Apia, “Land of Bees” — of the Greek peninsula which the resurrected Pelops eventually conquers and renames the Peloponnese, “Pelops’ Island.” Andvari is also equivalent to Athena’s proto-mythological North African precursor Anath/Tanith/Neith, i.e. the nether goddess whose symbol was an open hand — as in Chiron, Chi–Rho, the 5 twins of Clito, the 5 brothers of Europa, and Helen/Aphrodite’s plane-tree. In other words, Andvari equals Freya equals Andromeda. Andromeda is Persephone is Core — the latter as in the Indo-European *kor-, “turn, bend,” hence the Middle Irish cor, “circle,” and the English crown, and hence, too, curse.
Loki’s journey to Andvari was required by Ottr’s father, the sorcerer/farmer Hreidmar (note the reid and mar roots), because Loki and Odin and Honir had mistook Ottr for a mere otter and had killed him and served him to Hreidmar as a victual in exchange for lodging. Discovering this awful fact, Hreidmar demanded an impossible sum of gold in return for the freedom of his guests-become-hostages. He let Loki search for that gold. Hence Loki’s journey to Andvari — i.e. to Atlantis, the flooded/sunken age, the Golden Age, the age when the waning king and not the waxing son was sacrificed and eaten, when the finity, the mortality, the quantumness of life and love were recognized, honored, and institutionalized, instead of rejected in favor of some impossible, White/Apollonian quest for immortality and unity and likewise for perfectly blissful, simple love rather than irreducibly complex, Red/Dionysian love. Loki gave the ring and gold to Hreidmar, who was consequently killed by his son Fafnir, brother of Ottr, this with the aid of their other brother Regin, who planned to retrieve this loot from Fafnir by way of the young hero Sigurd assassinating Fafnir. But Sigurd intuited Regin’s intention, killed him, and thus kept Andvarinaut — ignorant, though, of the curse it carried. In turn Sigurd rescued Brynhild, and the pair fell instantly in love. After giving Andvarinaut to Brynhild, Sigurd was bewitched by the sorceress Grimhild, queen of the Niebelungs (note the Nie- prefix), such that he forgot Brynhild and married Grimhild’s daughter Kriemhild/Gudrun instead. Gudrun’s brother Gunnar therefore wanted to court Brynhild. (Both these names, by the way, mean “white” and “war, killing,” as in Guinevere, Gwyneth, Igraine, Athena.) But Brynhild was still imprisoned behind the ring of fire, and Gunnar couldn’t penetrate it. Sigurd, however, under a spell cast by Grimhild, shape-changed himself to look exactly like Gunnar, passed through the fire, took Andvarinaut from Brynhild, and gave it to Gudrun. Still under Grimhild’s power, Sigurd furthermore helped Gunnar court and win Brynhild. But upon seeing Andvarinaut on Gudrun’s finger, Brynhild fathomed Sigurd’s betrayal and plotted his murder. Hence Gunnar’s brother murdered Sigurd, while Brynhild killed Sigurd’s 3-year-old son and then herself. You can’t keep a fatal femme down. …
The Merovingian’s internecine strife continued despite the death of Brunhilda. Concomitantly their (White/Apollonian) royal power became eclipsed by that of their house officials (essentially representing of the quantum, Red/Dionysian aristocracy). Thus the majordomo — Latin for “major one of the house,” translated “Mayor of the Palace” in English, whereby dom and dame and palace and Pallas equivalencies are especially evident — became the effective ruler. In Austrasia this title became hereditary following the majordomo Pippin (or Pepin) of Hertsal (Pippin the Middle, Pippin II). It was his forebear Pippin of Landen (Pippin the Elder), original Austrasian Mayor of the Palace, who, under the powerful influence of Bishop Arnulf of Metz, had led the aristocratic revolt against Brunhilda. (Pippin II was the son of Pippen the Elder’s daughter Begga and Arnulf’s son Ansegisel.) Likewise Pippin II’s son Charles Martel — instead of Merovingian King Theoderic IV — led the defeat of the Moors at Poitiers in 732. Martel fathered Pippin “the Short.” This Pippin III garnered support from the aristocracy for a change of dynasty. When the pope asked him for assistance against the Lombards, Pippin made the deal contingent upon the pope coronating him. Seemingly for legitimacy’s sake, Pippin first married a Merovingian princess. The pope then annoited him king. Hence in 751 the last Merovingian, Childeric III, was deposed and exiled to a monastery — with his long hair cut (indeed tonsured). In 768 Pippin III died, having named as heir both his male children by said Merovingian princess: the elder Charles and the younger Carloman. But in 771 Carloman died and Charles — who, like his father, married a Merovingian princess — proceeded to achieve exceeding military and cultural successes: he expanded his father’s Austrasian kingdom; he promoted a liberal renaissance; and all the while he advocated the (Red/Dionysian) Roman (i.e. Western Orthodox) Christian Church in contrast to the (relatively White/Apollonian) Byzantine (i.e. Eastern Orthodox) Christian Church based in Constantinople, and also, of course, in contrast to certain heresies, most notably Arianism. Charles was sole king of the Franks until 814. It was during Christmas Day mass in the year 800, in Saint Peter’s Church in Rome, that Pope Leo III seemingly surprised Charles by placing the solar crown upon Charles’ head and coronating him Emperor of Rome. Hence we have Charles the Great, Charlemagne in French, Karl der Gross in German, Carolus Magnus in Latin (and thus the adjectival form Carolingian).
The circumstances of Charlemagne’s coronation — occuring on a primary Red/Dionysian holy day in a primary Red/Dionysian city and church and conducted by a Red/Dionysian leader with, as we will see, a Red/Dionysian name, Leo, just as the name Charles/Karl/Carolus itself, like carne and Carnival, is Red/Dionysian — are telling. Charles’ coronation was his Mardi Gras, his fattening for sacrifice. The solar crown is akin to Andvari’s ring and to the wreath of oak worn by Tantalus’s father, the river god Tmolus, who is involved along with Dionysus and that great exponent of a marvelously advanced but now sunken continent, the drunken satyr Silenus, in the story of Gordian King Midas — he of the cursed golden touch. Likewise the crown represents the eclipse of the Sun by the Moon, i.e. the Meeting of the Sun and the Moon, the Female and the Male, the Priest and the Warrior, the pope and the king. The crown — as in the word corona and the title Cronus (Kronos, Geranos) — completed Charlemagne as a duality, a Rhea–Cronus, Ops–Saturn, Aphrodite–Hephaistos, Sun–Mercury, Venus–Mercury, Sun–Moon, Rex–Deus; it sealed his fate as an irreducibly complex persona who according to the cosmic order — and hence for the greatest good — naturally and preternaturally sacrifices himself in every moment, eventually to the point of death itself. Rhea is equivalent to the Egyptian Re (or Ra), who is proto-mythologically female, just at the German word Sonne is feminine while Mond (as in monad) is masculine.
The Sun-disc itself the Egyptians called not Re but Aten (alias Aton, Itn) — as in the Greek god Adonis and the Norse Ottr. This mere disc per se corresponds to the full/fat, masculine Moon. The Sun in its full, warm, life-giving complexity is, however, proto-mythologically female. Re is Rhea/Ops, wife of Cronus/Saturn, mother of Zeus/Jupiter. She is “the face,” “the eye,” “the light,” “the voice,” “the snake,” “the power”: Europa, Penelope, Ophelia, Helen, Hel, Helios, Demeter, Core, Persephone, Aphrodite. She is “the beautiful coverer/destroyer”: Kolyo, Kali, Kalypso, Callisto, Calliope — as in the Greek kalos, “beautiful,” and eclipse and apocalypse. She is “the beautiful face and voice covered,” “the veiled one,” the Sun eclipsed by the Moon, the Sun at once in mourning for and hidden behind the ever dying and rejuvenating, proto-mythologically masculine Moon.
The coronation is an eclipse, a signification of quantum complexity; it represents the irreducibly complex moment, the mythological apex — and likewise Aphrodite, and Ops, and apis, “bee,” and Apia, “Land of the Bee” (renamed the Peloponnese), and Hp/Hapi, and Hephaistos, and Epimetheus …. Later I will explain that the ancient Egyptians considered the Nile delta ironically the mythological high-point of their kingdom, which kingdom consisted of Lower Egypt and Upper Egypt, Red and White, respectively, connected by the Black Nile. The king of Lower Egypt, which realm was called Shemau (as in Joyce’s Shem) and included the Nile delta, was titled bit, “bee” or “he of the bee,” usually translated into English as “King of Lower Egypt.” I theorize that the Egyptians considered this king equivalent to Ptah — their bound, Hephaistos-like god of creation — and that this Ptah is equivalent to Peter (and hence the pope), as the name itself suggests. The Egyptians imagined honey bees the tears of Re. Such tears correspond to the ululations and semi-crocodile tears shed by women over the sacrificed hero. In other words, these tears correspond to the Meeting of the Sun and the Moon. This meeting, this apex, this Haran, is the moment of both rising and falling, White and Red — the irreducibly complex moment of triumph, of quantum gravity. This is the nature of every moment, really: eclipse, coronation.
In this light, note that Myrtilus’s curse fell most heavily on the house of Pelops’ eldest son Atreus, father of Menelaos and Agamemnon. Atreus, legend says, was the first astronomer to correctly predict using mathematics an eclipse of the Sun by the Moon.
Similarly, recall that the twins Remus and Romulus are descendents of Aeneas, through their mother; their father is Mars. Julius Caesar believed that his own family descended from Ascanius, son of Aeneas and Creusa. Spengler reports of a typical Roman consul on the day of triumph: “[he] wore the armour of Jupiter Capitalinus, and in early days his face and arms were even painted red ….” The pigment used was red lead. Lead — cubic lead — is the metal of Saturn. The very word triumph stems from the Greek thriambos, meaning a hymn to Dionysus, sung in processions in his honor, and also an epithet of the god himself, the Red god of the vine/tree/threeness/middleness/carnality/carnivale/rebirth/cycles. The Roman consul, like a U.S.A. President, was essentially a dual figure, an Aeneas, an Ulysses, a Remus–Romulus, a self-sacrificer, a Kronos, a Dionysus, a Hermes, a Saturn, a Solomon, an Oðinn, a Humpty. Frazer expounds on the Roman associations with Jupiter:
… down to imperial times victorious generals celebrating a triumph, and magistrates presiding at the games in the Circus, wore the costume of Jupiter, which was borrowed for the occasion from his great temple on the Capitol; and it has been held with a high degree of probability both by ancients and moderns that in so doing they copied the traditionary attire and insignia of the Roman kings. They rode a chariot drawn by four laurel-crowned horses through the city, where every one else went on foot: they wore purple robes embroidered or spangled with gold: in the right hand they bore a branch of laurel, and in the left hand an ivory sceptre topped with an eagle: a wreath of laurel crowned their brows: their face was reddened with vermilion [i.e. mercuric sulfide, or another red pigment, such as the aforementioned red lead]; and over their head a slave held a heavy crown of massy gold fashioned in the likeness of oak leaves. In this attire the assimilation of the man to the god comes out above in the eagle-topped sceptre, the oaken crown, and the reddened face. For the eagle was the bird of Jove, the oak was his sacred tree, and the face of his image standing in his four-horse chariot on the Capitol was in like manner regularly dyed red on festivals; indeed, so important was it deemed to keep the divine features properly rouged that one of the first duties of the censors was to contract for having this done. The Greeks sometimes painted red the face or the whole body of the wine-god Dionysus. These customs may have been a substitute for an older practice of feeding a god by smearing the face, and especially the lips, of his idol with the blood of a sacrificial victim. Many examples of such a practice might be adduced from the religion of barbarous peoples. As the triumphal procession always ended in the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, it was peculiarly appropriate that the head of the victor should be graced by a crown of oak leaves, for not only was every oak consecrated to Jupiter, but the Capitoline temple of the god was said to have been built by Romulus beside a sacred oak, venerated by the shepherds, to which the king attached the spoils won by him from the enemy’s general in battle. We are expressly told that the oak crown was sacred to Capitoline Jupiter; a passage in Ovid proves that it was regarded as the god’s special emblem.
The Roman leader participating in a triumph was Mars on Mardi Gras, Mars’ Day Fat, Fat Mars on Fat Teusday, on Fat Two’s Day, the fattened cow, the Full White Moon (Monday, One’s Day) ready on that New Year’s Day for sacrifice on Red Wednesday, Woden’s Day, Oðinn’s Day, Three’s Day, the New Year’s Day, his destiny the cubic crypt of Black Saturday, Saturn’s Day, Six’s Day — from which he will rise again, ever participating in all the cycles of the cosmos. A slave was typically employed during the triumph to stand behind the leader and whisper to him, “Sic transit gloria mundi,” meaning, “Thus passes the glory of the world.” General George Patton famously commented:
For over a thousand years Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of triumph, a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeteers, musicians and strange animals from conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conquerors rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children robed in white stood with him in the chariot or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror holding a golden crown and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting.
Christian Meier, acclaimed biographer of Julius Caesar, notes that the supplicatio for Caesar’s victories in the civil war was 40 days long; his triumphal chariot was drawn by 3 white horses, and it was preceeded by 72 lictors. These numbers, as we will learn, are meant to resonate with the cosmic cycles. Meier emphasizes that in Caesar’s final year or so honors were heaped upon the de facto king Caesar as adornments are traditionally heaped upon the body of an animal before it is sacrificed. It is said that shortly before his death Caesar publicly bared his neck and chest to signify his respect for the republican notion that whoever sought kingship deserved execution. From 222 BCE to 153 BCE the Ides of March had been the day when the Roman consuls were inaugurated; and precisely in this respect, as Duncan Steel stresses, 15 March was, like 1 March and 1 January and 1 November and Rosh Hashanah (as early as 5 September and as late as 5 October), a New Year’s Day. (The U.S.A. Presidential election is held on the first Tuesday of November which is not 1 November, the Day of the Dead.) Probably this is why the augur Spurinna had been warning Caesar to beware the Ides of March. The augur surely knew or at least intuited that New Year’s Day was, in times of old, the day of regicide.…
I see the Atlantaean/Merovingian legacy passing from the Carolingians into the dawning Middle Ages via St. Anselm (1033–1109) and especially via the aristocratic St. Bernard (1090–1153) and hence to the synod at aptly named Troyes, now in northeastern France. In 1128 Bernard, who in the Investiture Controversy sided with the pope, was invited from his Clairvaux to Troyes, only some 30 miles distant. He soon played a prime role there in establishing the synod’s new order — which order we now know as the Knights Templar. Indeed, Bernard is said to have drawn up the very rules of the Knights Templar. These rules stem from St. Benedict’s rather desultory and expressive 12 acts of humility via St. Anselm’s contrastingly progressive and introspective 7 steps-toward-God and St. Bernard’s own Cistercian program of progress from body (Black) to soul (Red) to spirit (White), which religious program was echoed in the secular romantic literature expounded by Chrétien of Troyes, according to which the hero is obliged to leave the comradery and comfort of the court (Black) and endure a personal (if not lonely) and life-long quest (Red) toward unattainable, perfect love (White). Owing to St. Anselm, the Cistercian program emphasized the humanity of Christ and thus the importance of Mother Mary. This Red/Dionysian religious emphasis corresponds to the contemporaneous secular emphasis upon the quest — including all the romantic baroqueness thereof. The Cistercians believed they could — chiefly through exploration of the self — recognize a fundamental resonance or duality if not union of logic and feeling, precision and soul, external and internal, divisibility and individuality, exceptionality and universality, transcendence and immanence/relativity, White and Red. Such duality is represented in the seal of the Knights Templar and is akin of course to the famous dualities of orthodox physics. …
Of Heisenberg’s Gemeinschaft (Gruppe Heisenberg), only one member — not of course Heisenberg — is recalled as having joined the Nazi party. The Nazis consciously played upon old mythological themes, selecting, for instance, the swastika and the colors red, white and black for their symbol. Germany in the 1920s and 1930s was looking for a new Charlemagne, a new Rex–Deus. The Nazis understood this need but they didn’t believe in such irreducible complexity, such multeity-in-unity, such relativity, such Golden Age and a return thereto. They didn't want to believe that Nietzsche’s principle of eternal return should be applied to every moment, every scale, not only to the universe as whole — and that return in general is therefore merely quasi, fractal. The Nazi leaders believed in an extremely simple return relative to which local ascendancy was virtually unchecked and therefore a matter almost entirely of will to power. In a word, they believed all existence was a monad, a simple, White/Apollonian unity. Rather than submitting to Andvari’s ring and thus eternally (in every moment) returning it to Andvari, the Nazis thought they could possess it, control it, without suffering the concomitant curse. They were monism at its worst.
The constitution of the Weimar Republic, established in Germany soon after World War I, was a beautiful, Golden/Legal document, a paean to Andvari. In this sense at least the stage was set for the requisite knight to emerge. If he had emerged, he would have come from the Red/Dionysian likes of the Neupfadfinder, not from the Nazis. Again, Cassidy:
… the Bavarian Neupfadfinder often equated the white knight with St. George the dragon slayer. As a constant reminder of their calling, a portrait of St. George as white knight slaying the evil dragon … hung over the door of the Bavarian ski hut built by Gruppe Heisenberg in the early 1920s. It was still there when Niels Bohr visited the hut over a decade later.
Although the contemporaneous German youth movement, including the Neupfadfinders, was to a considerable degree determined to advocate the Golden/Legal philosophy, the movement was too much a “freedom movement” away from the demeaning effects of industrialization, of mass civilization, of the city, which effects altogether seemed to suggest that the heroic (middle) ground lay outside the bourgeoisie. This was the flip side of communism. Superfluous fear of the White/Apollonian — in this case, over communism especially — had caused the Neupfadfinder and the like to lose their way, precisely as fear over terrorism is doing today. With over-intellectual youth (and in large part their mentors) actually taking to the hills, and with France (i.e. Neustria, you might say) and England and the USA — but especially France — bringing to bear against Germany (i.e. Austrasia) the Allied victory of World War I, the Gunnar-like Hitler was selected White Knight of Germany. Amid economic depression and hyperinflation, the Nazis came to power democratically. In the crowded political field of 1930, only 11 years after their founding, the Nazis received a full 18 percent of the vote — 2nd place. In 1932 a pair of national elections were held, the Nazis winning 1st place in both, with 37 and 33 percent of the vote. Finally, in 1933 the Nazis received 44 percent of the vote, as much as their 3 closest rivals combined. Therefore the Nazis were invited to form the government.
I’ve digressed from Schrödinger, who spent the years of World War II in Dublin, Ireland, at the new Dublin Institute for Advanced Study. If we look back at his early life in Vienna, we see Erwin snubbed by the aristocratic family of his initial love, Felicie Krauss. He was 25, she 17. Reared a nominal Protestant (White/Apollonian) in extremely cosmopolitan Vienna, Schrödinger eventually married a Catholic (Red/Dionysian) girl from Salzburg: Annemarie Bertel. She was a teenager (in pigtails) when he met her. She seemed to him a peasant, but her father was a man of considerable standing in Salzburg. Unlike Felicie, Anny was homely and masculine; yet she was intelligent and wise. Her birthday was New Year’s Eve (Sylvesterabend).
In 1930 Erwin and Anny attended a carnival-time (alias Shrovetide or Faschingzeit) ball in Berlin dressed as the pharaohs Akhenaten and Nefertiti. The ancient Egyptians equated the husband–wife duo of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. (Note the Ne- prefix.) The ancient Egyptians equated this royal husband–wife duo with that of Shu and Tefnut, the first sexually differentiated offspring of the androgynous god of creation. As you may know, Akhenaten (c. 1350 BCE) is famous for promoting the worship of Re — now commonly though rather eroneously considered a masculine, White/Apollonian Sun god — over the other prime Egyptian gods, especially over Amen (alias Amon), equivalent to Zeus/Jupiter, which aspect of the Triple God, as we have seen, is chiefly Red/Dionysian although Zeus/Jupiter is White/Apollonian relative to Kronos/Saturn. Inasmuch, Akhenaten is commonly — although, again, rather erroneously — considered a monotheist, indeed the initial monotheist. According to a similar line of reasoning, his Sun worship is the basis of Judaism. Akhenaten is also famous for promoting androgynous and otherwise rather mimetic art forms. And so to the modern eye Akhenaten seems a chiefly White/Apollonian figure, significant more of unity than of duality, much less of quantum complexity. Yet his partnership with Nefertiti the ancients associated with the pair Shi and Tefnut (equivalent to Kronos/Saturn and Rhea/Ops and likewise Hephaistos and Aphrodite and also Hp/Hapi). In a sense this androgyny, and even this emphasis on the Sun, which is proto-mythologically female (note the similarity between Rhea/Ops and Re), signify a naturally, characteristically and quantumly complex man. Perhaps he attained and/or became attached to rather unprecedented White/Apollonian dimensions insofar as his wife was, in contrast, a remarkably Red/Dionysian figure, a femme fatale, and Aphrodite/Freya/Neith/Andromeda/Persephone. Upon Akhenaten’ss death Nefertiti became the first female pharoah.
Akhenaten, c. 1350 BCE, at left looking a lot like Hp/Hapi — and rather Asian.
Nefertiti. The Egyptian Museum, Berlin.
The equivalency with Demeter is noteworthy. The name Demeter is cognate with the Cretan deai, “barley” — which word is linked to the English day and degree and barleycorn. Cognate is the Greek moira, which means “share, phase, degree, fate, destiny,” as in the Moirai, i.e. the 3 Fates, the Triple Goddess, and as in the tao, me, maat, etc. A barleycorn is 1/360 of a meter and generally represents smallness yet genuineness and potential, as in seed, grain, and Quino, and as in the absent father, Andvari, the snake, the dog/wolf, the ancestors. Demeter is likewise closely related to the Greek dêmos, “common people, district,” which Greek word was originally dâmos, as in dame and dom and the Old Irish dām, this latter meaning “a following, crowd.” These words all stem from the Indo European *dâmos, meaning “division of the people, root”; and more generally from the root *dâ/də, “divide,” which root is present too in names/titles like Aphrodite, Diana, Odysseus, Odin, and Dien — as in Dienstag, i.e. Tuesday, Tiwes’ Day, Mars’ Day, Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, Full Moon Tuesday, Full Moon Day, Full Monday.
The Meeting of the Sun and the Moon — especially perfect in terms of the weirdly identical apparent areas of the face of the Sun and the face of the Moon as seen from Earth — is a most profound duality, a feminization of the male, literally a coronation representing the cyclic transition from White to Red to Black, i.e. representing culture itself. Such coronation corresponds to a returning of the Andvarinaut to Andvari, a literal submission — Andvari and his ring symbolizing not only a Golden Age, not only the previous Great Year, not only dream and the dream-time but ultimately the extreme mystery of existence, the Golden principle of relativity.
Akhenaten and Nefertiti, Erwin and Anny, Mach and Boltzman, Spinoza and Leibniz: these White–Red dualities are equivalent to Charlemagne, Merowig, Moses and Aaron, Isaac and Ishmael, Sarah and Hagar. Such dualities characterize the true heirs of the German kingdom. In a sense, Anny was the true Fürher from Austrasia/Austria.
Erwin, nevertheless, was always especially attracted to teenage girls, and he engaged in several affairs with such during his middle age. In his copy of Thornton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey (note the Luis and Rey) the following passage was underlined: “Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but there may never be two that love one another equally well.” Schrödinger had probably read this book during the spring of 1933, when he was deeply in love with Hilde March. He was also very fond of Somerset Maugham’s Summing Up, near the end of which memoir Maugham offers the following observation similar to Wilder's: “[W]hen La Rochefoucauld discovered that between two lovers there is one who loves and one who lets himself be loved he put in an epigram the discord that must ever prevent men from achieving in love perfect happiness.” Earlier in that book Maugham notes:
When novelists began to disclose the diversity that they had found in themselves or seen in others, they were accused of maligning the human race. So far as I know the first novelist who did this with deliberate intention was Stendhal in Le Rouge et le Noir. Contemporary criticism was outraged. Even Sainte-Beuve, who needed only to look into his own heart to discover what contrary qualities could exist side by side in some kind of harmony, took him to task. Julian Sorel is one of the most interesting characters that a novelist has ever created.
Eventually Erwin and Anny separated, but they did get back together in the end. “Joy and sorrow has bound us so closely together in the past 41 years,” Anny wrote while they were still living apart, “that we don’t want to be separated during the few remaining years of our lives.” During the month or so before his death Erwin was wont to say to her, “Oh since I have you again, everything is good again.” His last words were, “Anniken, stay with me — so that I don’t crash.”
and 
. (Unless I note otherwise, the
numbers presented in this volume are of course base-10 numbers.) The initial symbol
serves for both 1 and 60; the other serves for 10. The number 7, for instance,
is written 
;
the number 12 is written 
; the number 74 is written 
; the number 100 is written 
; the number 2159 is written 
(where the 
(where 
