May 12, 2002
Ken,
You know I have to like this....
You sent me something a long time ago, asking Old Sea People?, but it wasn't this....
The picture alone hooked me. I put men like me there, related it all to our number glyphs, and showed that 2, on the hand (palm and fingers to symbolize the torso and arms, and then some -- with closed fist, full of potential pointings, as live 0), ...invented not only trigonometry and the geographical angle, ...BUT the sextant. Haven't read it all, but it's moved to Favorites. Prehistory is the time, maybe Bucky is an (I think) unacknowledged source, or he may cave into Atlantis idiocies and all ...but I like the opening, I like the Celtic cross MAYBE bein' old sea people (he even as an interesting prime meridian, though here we may get Atlanteans or visiting folks from Sirius and too advanced a trig ...and Giza Egypt is not real pre-history, now, is it?
Anyway, ONE idea comes out of this for my peripheral thinking, since my core thinking is about how the human mind, in a given context COULD HAVE been functioning, in an earlier era of "consciousness" than, say, Jayne's origin of the present one between the writing of Iliad and the writing of Odyssey (See Origin of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind). From sighting along the hand to ...inventing a sextant. His one (there may be others) idea, is that those rafters MAY have built something more substantial than an idea to pass from hand to hand. From abacus (one example) to sextant, or at least the cross on a wheel....
On the sea at night, nothing to look at but each others' ugly mugs (with talking mouths in 'em) and that mind-in-the-sky....
Then, in our simple geometry. Mark the equator and two 90-degree meridians (three great circles) that map the planet. In each of the six points where two of the three circles intersect, make a node. Draw the chords connecting the nodes. You've an octahedron (12sys3, the cube or hexahedron being a 12sys4). Your pyramids are, of course, half-octahedra. See how tempting it all gets to be...?
It's all about attending (objectified as attention)....
If there's a god, it's the personified attendings out of which everything is created.... (That's be why we personify it, in calling it "he")....
If that cross is a locking down of attending into surface navigating, well...!
Celtic ...getting up toward Viking land. A lot of years ago, I got to playing with the swastika (in a 20th century context, i.e., with TV weather pictures). We think of it as an American Indian symbol, as a German Nazi symbol, as a.... But, a cross on a wheel, in fact two crosses with a wheel between 'em, whether or not the arms are bent MIGHT represent those two polar meridian crossings and the equator.
So, given those bent arms, let's attend to the promise of a dynamic, of a coriolis bending, of St. Ezra's vortex....
There are, up in the Viking region, two swastika's ...the arms bent in opposite directions....
So, a seafarer's (http://www.home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/The_Seafarer.htm) concern with winds as the usually-not-discussed third party, with sea and sky, in navigation, suggests that the bending of the weather (high to low) coming to the equator from the poles, as Earth spun eastward, was modeled. So a live (as winds are) model or symbol. Can't draw animation then (except in the imagination), so, a sketched bendING....
Don't underestimate what wind c'n do to grow consciousness. Nobody'd ever have dreamed up notions of "invisible forces" if it wasn't for all our experience of wind....
Winds seem to have been stirred up within me.... So I'll let em wind down, now....
Gene
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ken Sawyer" <... >
To: "Gene Fowler" <... >
Cc: "Carlos" <... >
Sent: Saturday, May 11, 2002 12:18 PM
Subject: The old sea peoples?