SubscribeAugust 15th, 2011
can I get a do-over please
Yesterday was a fabulous day. I walked far, was pain free, full of energy and everything felt calm, clear, untroubled. Today everything is a-whirl. No dreams that I remember last night, no obvious reason for the change, but still, here it is.
What it’s like in my world today: In my head arithmancy is like a little whirlwind filled with the numerical litter of Greek isopsephy and the practice of assigning numbers to letters and reading epitaphs for both linguistic and numerical meaning. Then there’s that bit of papryus (Oxyrhynnchus papyrus 115) which seems to point to the mark of the beast (you know, Revelations) as 616 and not 666. That makes me giggle. I mean you might want to get the name of your archenemy right for god’s sake. Then there’s the various arcane systems of numerical meaning interpretation, the relationship between the idea of the attributes of god with number in the sephirot, Pythagoras and his magical math, oh the list goes on and on and on.
So maybe it is all the numbers’ fault. Regardless though, I think I need a do-over. I’m going home and back to bed for a nap. We’ll try this day again.
March 12th, 2011
what’s in a number
I’ve been reading a book called When Prophecy Fails. It was published in 1956 by the University of Minnesota, the study being completed by three social scientists. I read the foreward, and was immediately amused because they sign off with the date – December 21, 1956 – exactly two years after the date on which the flying saucers were to come and rescue the prophet and her group from the flood.
I suppose so many people choose the 21st as a date because it’s also the usual date of the solstices. That’s almost certainly unconscious, but it is a date that sticks with us and of which we are reminded twice a year, every year. I mean currently there is Camping and May 21, 2010 and then there is next year’s end-of-the-world thing set for December 21. Then there were the Millerites in the mid-19th century. The authors of When Prophecy Fails talk about this group and even quote Miller saying
I believe the time can be known by all who desire to understand and the be ready for His coming. And I am fully convinced that sometime between March 21st, 1843, and March 21st, 1844, according to the Jewish mode of computation of time, Christ will come, and bring all His Saints with Him; and that then He will reward every man as his work shall be.
Their day of “great disappointment” ended up being October 22, 1844. The end of a season, the beginning of another, the position and movement of the sun, these events seem to trigger a kind of metaphorically related logic: If it is so for the earth, it must be so for the non-earthly.
It would be interesting to know how long the 21st has been looming as the date-to-be.
March 22nd, 2010
The mysticism of life and science
You can see why many people are convinced of the magical nature of numbers.