I believe in the contiguity and the homeopathy; I believe in the Ether.
The Fountain (2006 Aronofsky, Director) covers quite a bit of magical ground in a great simplistic beauty. I think most people expect truth to be complex and rational. I expect truth to be simple and intuitive, and cumulative. In The Fountain, Izzy(Rachel Weisz) gives Tom, (Hugh Jackman) a magical record, a book which details a fictional account of a Conquistador searching for the Fountain of Youth. Isabel (Izzy), is Queen Elizabeth, who embodies the Tree of Life, and represents the fountain of youth, as the tree-tomb/womb, the canvas of creation and the natural source of renewed life in childbirth. Izzy writes the book, allegedly, to help herself and Tom cope with her impending death from cancer. I see Izzy’s book as a magical journal, which in reading causes Tom to remember his past life, and possibly his future lives as well.
Magical Memory is a Crowlean (and Castanedan) concept which describes techniques for remembering past lives. The technique recommends listing (journaling) all your past history, who you’ve met and when, and is intended to initiate a “great remembering” of past lives. Past lives are perhaps a misnomer to start with, perhaps contiguity of lives better states the experience. I am a bit enamored of the idea that we live all our incarnations simultaneously, and perhaps to a lesser degree, live out any and all possible individual life choices as tree branches of parallel realities.
“My father’s house has many rooms.”
The Memory Theatre is another similar, mnemonic concept which Frances Yates discusses in her The Art of Memory. The technique consists of making an imaginal estate with many rooms, filled with memory cueing action and imagery. While Yates describes famous feats of memory and the life and times of several famous mnemonic masters, (Llull and Giordano Bruno, for example) Yates leaves out any relevant discourse as to how one might use (or be used) by this mnemonic art. For that we can go to Science Fiction and Mythology:
Turings Apples, by Stephen Baxter is an excellent science fiction short story, the gist of which is that You are the memory component in the universe. Fascinating ideas…
Myth: as mnemonic device, anyone?
A similar theme is given to this Art of Memory below, but with a very Robert Graves (a la Greek Myth) kind of twist on this website:
“Greek mythology, with its archetypal gods of nature, was in fact Llull's 'universal theatre,' developed thousands of years earlier by musical-astrological philosophers to help society remember 'the great book of the universe.' As personifications of the forces and geometries underlying harmonic physics, the Greek gods must have been designed as memory objects to help store knowledge about nature in the theatre of the human mind. The mythical gods' ancestry, traits, marriages and affairs were used to symbolize their place in the cosmic theatre, forming a holographic and hierarchical cast of characters that could be retrieved and retold through Greek fables. Lullism was nothing less than the ancient Greek worldview, originating from the study of harmonic science and music perception just as I had found while writing my book. Perhaps it was no coincidence that Llull had been a traveling troubadour in his youth, telling stories and singing songs. […] But it will always be the people who are the actors in this passion play. As nature's very own cast of memory objects, it is still our job to help nature remember what it learns by remembering what we learn. Let us never forget that we are nature too – we are nature's memory.”
So, if we extrapolate that Izzy is the canvas of creation, inspiration and wife, then Tom is the Protector, the memory component of the universe; the Magician as King and husband.
In the conquistador section of The Fountain storyline, we see the conquistador changing places with the last guardian of the chalice/grail or fountain of youth, in a duel-to-the-death, as in Indiana Jones the Last Crusade. (Itself a fountain of youth yarn)
Continuing the Frazer Quote: “It is natural, therefore, to conjecture that they [these kings] stood to the goddess in the grove in the same way Virbius stood to her; in short, the mortal King of the Wood had for his queen the woodland Diana herself. If the sacred tree which he guarded with his life was supposed, as seems probable, to be her special embodiment, her priest may not only have worshipped it as his goddess but embraced it as his wife.”
Such is the symbolism of the chalice or Parcival’s Grail, and also the Tree of Life itself. Now, this is all philosophy, and right it should be, but it is also an intuitive Geometry, of an ancient sort:
“Plato describes three kinds of being:
1.)that which is uncreated and indestructible, changeless, eternal, imperceptible to any sense, open only to the contemplation of the intelligence, and this is the principle of the Father [spirit], the ideal or formal essence of the world;
2.) that which is sensible and created and always in motion, the Child [matter], the world of change and life;
3.) the Mother [spacetime], like the Father, is eternal and admits not of destruction. She provides a home for all created things, and is apprehended 'without the help of sense, by a kind of spurious reason, and is indeed hardly real.'
This mothering space is the cause of the determinism of nature. Plato identifies it as the material element of being. As pure matter, it is purely indeterminate, but it is receptive. The four elements, earth, air, fire and water, are formed from it, for 'the mother substance becomes earth and air, insofar as she receives the impressions of them.'
Plato's conception of the formation of these elements from the original substance was as purely mathematical as are our modern physical notions. 'God fashioned them by form and number,' he says: and the forms which he assigned were the forms of the regular solids. Thus the form of the fiery element is the pyramid, of air, the octahedron; of water, the icosahedron; of earth, the cube. “
The fifth solid, the dodecahedron, is the form of the universe as a whole, or perhaps one might say the scaffold upon which the spherical universe is constructed. “
2.) that which is sensible and created and always in motion, the Child [matter], the world of change and life;
3.) the Mother [spacetime], like the Father, is eternal and admits not of destruction. She provides a home for all created things, and is apprehended 'without the help of sense, by a kind of spurious reason, and is indeed hardly real.'
This mothering space is the cause of the determinism of nature. Plato identifies it as the material element of being. As pure matter, it is purely indeterminate, but it is receptive. The four elements, earth, air, fire and water, are formed from it, for 'the mother substance becomes earth and air, insofar as she receives the impressions of them.'
Plato's conception of the formation of these elements from the original substance was as purely mathematical as are our modern physical notions. 'God fashioned them by form and number,' he says: and the forms which he assigned were the forms of the regular solids. Thus the form of the fiery element is the pyramid, of air, the octahedron; of water, the icosahedron; of earth, the cube. “
The fifth solid, the dodecahedron, is the form of the universe as a whole, or perhaps one might say the scaffold upon which the spherical universe is constructed. “
Salvador Dali’s Dodecahedron Last Supper has an interesting backdrop, as Jesus is pictured crucified to a tree/dodecahedron!
This painting, by Salvador Dali, (Which is in D.C., I’ve seen it!) shows the dodecahedron structure of the universe as promulgated by Frater Achad, Buckminster Fuller, and Plato. The lights in the picture are a reflection from the glass covering the painting off the lights in the room, but this is about the right coloring; it is quite a dark painting.
Another topic I would like to touch on is soul-binding, or the relationship between the King of the Wood and his sacred tree. According to Frazer,” Kings of the Wood, who regularly perished by the swords of their successors, and whose lives were in a manner bound up with a certain tree in the grove, because so long as that tree was uninjured they were safe from attack.”
This theme we see to a lesser and greater extent in The Fountain and also in HBO’s Carnivale miniseries. Hugh Jackman’s character, Tom is compelled to eat of the tree (twice), first for the promise of eternity with his beloved, and second to actually survive that eternity.
In Carnivale, the Demonic Preacher is one bound to a tree on a “holy hill” overlooking his ministry and church, then when it comes time to injure him, his only weak point in battle is his tattoo of the same tree, on his chest. This sympathetic connection between himself and the tree makes the preacher a “King of the Wood” in Frazerian myth. There was, of course, some overlay with another common Frazerian meme: the “corn-king” myth. Carnivale also refers to Ben Hawkins as "John St. John," which is the title of one of Crowley's "Libers" which refers specifically to the method of recovering "magical memory."
Placing a holy tree on a hill outside of town goes back to ancient Israel and the worship of Asherah, God’s wife. Worship of Asherah took place on a “Bamah,” Hebrew for high place. Bamah later became synonymous with altar and is represented inside modern churches as a raised dais or pedestal. Worship of Asherah, consort of the old god El, came to be Biblically associated with the grove or tree, but early worship predominantly consisted of worshipping a simple wooden pole, known simply as an Asherah.
From the Bible, Song of Solomon 4.12-16
“A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.
Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard,
Spikenard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees frankinsense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices:"
"A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon.
Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.”
“A fountain sealed” is another phrase which Crowley associated with The Tower Tarot card. The fountain that is woman dries up in pregnancy, as the seed of new life has been planted in the womb. The pomegranate is the dodecahedron, the symbolic seed from which the Tree of Life blooms.
The very first picture in this blog post is the Fountain of Youth by Cranach the Elder. On it, I’ve superimposed the hidden sacred geometry of the dodecahedron, which is less subtly drawn within Salvador Dali’s The Last Supper. I did the same, with a less dramatic result with The Fountain’s Garden of Eden screenshot. (In the movie the Garden of Eden is atop an Aztec temple)
I don’t have any trouble at all connecting the fountain with the tree. Trees themselves are ephemeral fountains of sorts, using the natural levitative energies of water to act as heat syncs for climatic control. Another look at the Aztec temple scene adds some more insight, connecting the fountain to the death principle, the Thanatos. We see Tom confronted by the guardian of the fountain, who states “death is the road to awe,” before appearing to give a lethal blow with a flaming sword.
The connection between the dodecahedron and the pomegranate has to do with the mathematical concept of the closest packing of spheres, discussion of which inevitably draws comparison to beehives as well. A brief Internet search will turn up several serious scientific articles with such headlines as: “The universe is a soccer ball, so say scientists.” Johannes Kepler's studies of the latticework of closely packed spheres prefigures Buckminster Fuller's study of the way energetic systems blossom. Simply stated: spheres squished together predict the synergetic shape of the universe; and atomic structures, to boot.
The Titans Goblet:
The ultimate concept garnered by all this speculation is can be esoterically (?) summed up as:
Nuit (Nut) or, to take a page from M. Bertiaux’s Voudon Gnosticism:
“…the “Black Goddess of Space,” Binah, the emanation of Mother/Father/Space/Time called “Saturn” by the Classicists, and “Geudhe Nibbho” by the preists of Voudoo science. The consort of the Black Goddess of Space is Death, the God of All Transformations, known as Mystere Royale (Desak’karum), who shines his supreme eye through Saturn when in Scorpio, “whose throne is in the east.””
John St John, Crowley: http://hermetic.com/crowley/libers/lib860.html
Article on Kepler's Six cornered snowflake, closest packing of spheres article: http://www.keplersdiscovery.com/SixCornered.html
(?) = not sure about coinage of the word esoterically
