Binah: It means "understanding," and is the Sephirot of deductive reasoning.
Krupskaya: The girl who married Lenin.
Freemasons: they have existed for centuries and no one is really sure where they came from. They share a declared belief in a Supreme Being.
Baphomet: supposedly a pagan deity, in reality, an invention of Christians after someone mistranslated Mohammed. It was also used to describe some pagan idols. Christians believed that it was a real deity, and it was drawn in cartoons as a kind of winged goat looking creature.
Manichean: a once very widespread and popular Iranian Gnostic religion in which there is a very elaborate cosmology about a fight between the good spiritual world of light and the evil, material world of darkness.
Cathars: perhaps inspired by the Manicheans, this heretic movement appeared in France in the 11th century and incorporated a belief about two gods (dualism). There was an all powerful, all-good god, that they worshipped, and a chaotic god, who actually created the world, which was evil.
Kundalini: In Indian yoga, the energy that resides at the base of the spine, sometimes associated with desire and libido and sometimes with the natural energy of the Self.
Teutonic Knights: a German order set up to help pilgrims on the way to the holy land and also to set up hospitals, and also to do fighting.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Foucault's Pendulum Study Guide: Hokhmah
Hokhmah: The sephirot of wisdom, the first manifestation of intellect in creation.
Abulafia: a Medieval philosopher whose ideas became the basis for prophetic Kabbalah. His writings talked a lot about meditation techniques to achieve this state of uniting with God, and also of manipulating the letters of the Torah. When he was alive, he promoted himself as a messiah of sorts, his ideas were banned in some places but posthumously adapted into Sufism.
Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade: the Maltese Falcon, supposedly a figurine covered with jewels, is a MacGuffin, never shows up in the course of the book, but motivates everyone's actions anyway.
Notarikon, temurah, gematria: the three techniques used by the Kabbalists to rearrange the words in the Torah to arrive at another meaning or find the name of God or something. Notarikon is taking the first and/or last letters of a word and using them to form other words, temurah is exchanging some letters in a word with other letters (like shifting all letters 12 down the alphabet), gematria is assigning a numerial value to words or letters. The Hebrews never developed their own way of writing down numbers, so it was all done with letters.
Tetragrammaton: the four-letter name of God (YHWH). The vowels are omitted in the Hebrew alphabet. Observant Jews write but do not speak this name aloud because it is too sacred to be used everyday.
St. Thomas and the five paths: St. Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican priest who wrote the Summa Theologia in which he examines the justifications for the existence of God. He said there were five ways: God is simple, God is perfect, God is infinite, etc. He is part of a tradition of scholasticism which was originally an attempt to temper classical philosophy with medieval theology, using reason.
Ennoia: talking around something without really explaining anything but still hinting at what is meant.
Exu: the god of chaos and trickery in the Yoruba mythology.
Abulafia: a Medieval philosopher whose ideas became the basis for prophetic Kabbalah. His writings talked a lot about meditation techniques to achieve this state of uniting with God, and also of manipulating the letters of the Torah. When he was alive, he promoted himself as a messiah of sorts, his ideas were banned in some places but posthumously adapted into Sufism.
Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade: the Maltese Falcon, supposedly a figurine covered with jewels, is a MacGuffin, never shows up in the course of the book, but motivates everyone's actions anyway.
Notarikon, temurah, gematria: the three techniques used by the Kabbalists to rearrange the words in the Torah to arrive at another meaning or find the name of God or something. Notarikon is taking the first and/or last letters of a word and using them to form other words, temurah is exchanging some letters in a word with other letters (like shifting all letters 12 down the alphabet), gematria is assigning a numerial value to words or letters. The Hebrews never developed their own way of writing down numbers, so it was all done with letters.
Tetragrammaton: the four-letter name of God (YHWH). The vowels are omitted in the Hebrew alphabet. Observant Jews write but do not speak this name aloud because it is too sacred to be used everyday.
St. Thomas and the five paths: St. Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican priest who wrote the Summa Theologia in which he examines the justifications for the existence of God. He said there were five ways: God is simple, God is perfect, God is infinite, etc. He is part of a tradition of scholasticism which was originally an attempt to temper classical philosophy with medieval theology, using reason.
Ennoia: talking around something without really explaining anything but still hinting at what is meant.
Exu: the god of chaos and trickery in the Yoruba mythology.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Foucault's Pendulum Study Guide: Keter
Keter: the topmost Sephiroth in the Tree of Life in the Kabbalah. See, already we can't even have a normal conversation without having to define everything. All the chapters in this book are named after these Sephiroths, which are the "attributes" in Jewish mysticism of God, through which he reveals himself and expresses his creative force. If you look for a diagram of this Tree of Life paradigm, you'll see that the 10 Sephiroths are arranged in a very precise pattern, and this structure of relationships is supposed to reveal the essence of divinity and is the key to understanding the mystery of life, the Universe, and everything. So I gather. It's all a bit murky. The first Sephiroth, Keter, the topmost point, is the point which existed before there was anything else to call a creation, it existed before existence itself, and thus is completely incomprehensible. This bodes well for the book, indeed.
Foucault's Pendulum: This experiment was actually designed to prove the Earth's rotation. It is basically just a big pendulum that swings from a point suspended above the ground. As the Earth rotates, the plane of the swing seems to change (it makes these ellipses), but in reality, the plane of the swing doesn't move, the Earth moves under it, giving it the illusion of moving. At the poles, a full rotation in the plane of the swing takes 24 hours; everywhere else, it takes longer. Wikipedia has a nice animated gif about it.
The fixed point of reference seems to be treated with some special reverence in this first chapter, as it is a fixed point that in fixed with respect to...well, everything. Also, I suspect that it's featured because the pattern the swings make over the course of a full rotation draw out a rose pattern when viewed in time-lapse from directly overhead.
Atlantis and Mu: They are both fictional "lost continents" that sunk into the ocean. Sometimes Atlantis is identified as Mu. There was a theory that the people that fled the ruins of either/or continents migrated to other parts of the world and founded the Egyptians and the Mayans.
Agartha: A fictional city or country located at the Earth's core, with Shamballa or "Shangri-La" as its capital, supposedly located somewhere in Tibet or the Himalayas (although how it can be at the center of the world and in Tibet is anyone's guess. Maybe I'm just not enlightened enough to understand). It is ruled by the Masters, the keepers of all the world's secrets. The concept is popular in Vajrayāna Buddhism, also known as Tantric Buddhism. Supposedly, it was the location of the original Garden of Eden and all its wisdom will be shared with the world when we finally reach the state of purity in the Ten Commandments, "when the Anarchy which exists in our world is replaced by the Synarchy."
Avalon: The mythical island where King Arthur's sword Excalibur was forged and where he went to rest and sleep to recover from his wounds. Supposedly it was where Morgan le Fay, who seems like one of the woman druids, a sort of Celtic shaman figure who worshipped female Earth and fertility goddesses, and her sisters lived (some kind of druidic commune?). The story about how King Arthur never really died but is only sleeping and will one day return sounds an awful lot like the Jesus myth (someone suggests later in the book that the Jesus myth is stolen from Celtic legends). It has parallels with the Greek Hesperides, a mythical garden where beautiful women tended apples. Apples have something to do with Avalon, too.
Panta Rei: Apparently Eco just made up this secret society. Its name, in Greek, means "everything flows" -- as in, everything is connected, there are no coincidences, everything has a meaning. Also, a great band name, if it's not already taken.
EinsOf: Kind of a name for God, in his incomprehensible form, in Kabbalah. It literally means the "infinite," or the "nonexistent," in the sense that God is so far above human comprehension that it is as if he doesn't exist.
Armand Dufaux: a famous Swiss aviator, one of the first, who flew Lake Geneva.
Baal: It is actually sort of an honorific title in Hebrew, but somehow things got twisted along the way. Baals were the names of the little idols that people worshipped back in the day of polytheism, before Judaism with its one God thing became popular; when the Bible was being assembled, the Baals were confused for all referring to the same persona (false gods, all of them),
and became associated with a high ranking lord of Hell, even Satan himself.
Maiden of Nuremberg: a famous Iron Maiden, which was a torture device with pointy sharp things in it, used to force people to confess to heinous crimes like praying to the wrong piece of wood.
Francis Bacon, House of Solomon, New Atlantis: Francis Bacon was a philosopher and politician who is credited with inventing the scientific method. He did a lot of things. Somehow he found time to write this book called the New Atlantis, which describes a utopian society governed by knowledge and reason. The House of Solomon was his design for a modern university where people learned things and conducted experiments and stuff. However, he also describes a section of the university that features exhibits meant to confuse the senses, show illusions, falsehoods, which is what Causubon is equating the museum he is hiding in to.
Legion of Honor: The highest decoration in France, established by Napoleon.
Empedocles: a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher (apparently they were interested in finding a more reasonable explanation of how the world worked, and so wrote a lot about the essences of things) who wrote that the world was composed of four essential elements. He also believed in reincarcation. He supposedly died because he threw himself into a volcano, believing he would come back as a god afterwards. However, the volcano spit back one of his sandals, meaning that his body hadn't transcended after all, or something.
Alhazen: an Arab scientist who studied optics at the turn of the millenium, some people say he is the first real scientist. Long before Einstein, he was saying light had a finite speed and was made up of particles.
Demiurge: A Platonic concept for someone who is a kind of caretaker for the physical parts of creation, although not the supreme creator himself. The Gnostics, a bunch of mystics predating Christ who believed the Universe was created by an imperfect being who is either actually evil or is just imperfect, associate the God of the Hebrews with this Demiurge. According to them, there is an even higher God, an actual perfect Godhead, above this Demiurge. "Gnosis" means "to know," and it refers to someone achieving through mysticism and esoteric knowledge an understanding of eternity and creation and the perfection of the immaterial.
Basilides: an early Gnostic leader who is also associated with the origin of the Kabbalah.
Hermes Trismegistus: the blend of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth (god of wisdom).
Notarikon: a method in the Kabbalah by which you take the first or last or whatever of a word and form new words out of it.
Yaldaboath: one of the Gnostic archons, the Demiurges who made the world but trapped man's essence in material form, with a lion's head and a serpent's body, sort of a demon.
Sophia: The all powerful all knowing mother-virgin-seat-of-all-mysteries goddess of the Gnostics. She was the good part of the "God", who wanted to create the world, and urged on the Demiurge, who, not able to correctly manipulate the base matter, trapped her inside the world.
Pleroma/ogdoades: the Gnostic word for the totality of all the divine powers. There is some concept of a heavenly pleroma, which is where all the divine beings live, and with the help of aeons like Jesus and Sophia, humans can reunite with these divines and learn their wisdom and the meaning of life. Or something like that.
Foucault's Pendulum: This experiment was actually designed to prove the Earth's rotation. It is basically just a big pendulum that swings from a point suspended above the ground. As the Earth rotates, the plane of the swing seems to change (it makes these ellipses), but in reality, the plane of the swing doesn't move, the Earth moves under it, giving it the illusion of moving. At the poles, a full rotation in the plane of the swing takes 24 hours; everywhere else, it takes longer. Wikipedia has a nice animated gif about it.
The fixed point of reference seems to be treated with some special reverence in this first chapter, as it is a fixed point that in fixed with respect to...well, everything. Also, I suspect that it's featured because the pattern the swings make over the course of a full rotation draw out a rose pattern when viewed in time-lapse from directly overhead.
Atlantis and Mu: They are both fictional "lost continents" that sunk into the ocean. Sometimes Atlantis is identified as Mu. There was a theory that the people that fled the ruins of either/or continents migrated to other parts of the world and founded the Egyptians and the Mayans.
Agartha: A fictional city or country located at the Earth's core, with Shamballa or "Shangri-La" as its capital, supposedly located somewhere in Tibet or the Himalayas (although how it can be at the center of the world and in Tibet is anyone's guess. Maybe I'm just not enlightened enough to understand). It is ruled by the Masters, the keepers of all the world's secrets. The concept is popular in Vajrayāna Buddhism, also known as Tantric Buddhism. Supposedly, it was the location of the original Garden of Eden and all its wisdom will be shared with the world when we finally reach the state of purity in the Ten Commandments, "when the Anarchy which exists in our world is replaced by the Synarchy."
Avalon: The mythical island where King Arthur's sword Excalibur was forged and where he went to rest and sleep to recover from his wounds. Supposedly it was where Morgan le Fay, who seems like one of the woman druids, a sort of Celtic shaman figure who worshipped female Earth and fertility goddesses, and her sisters lived (some kind of druidic commune?). The story about how King Arthur never really died but is only sleeping and will one day return sounds an awful lot like the Jesus myth (someone suggests later in the book that the Jesus myth is stolen from Celtic legends). It has parallels with the Greek Hesperides, a mythical garden where beautiful women tended apples. Apples have something to do with Avalon, too.
Panta Rei: Apparently Eco just made up this secret society. Its name, in Greek, means "everything flows" -- as in, everything is connected, there are no coincidences, everything has a meaning. Also, a great band name, if it's not already taken.
EinsOf: Kind of a name for God, in his incomprehensible form, in Kabbalah. It literally means the "infinite," or the "nonexistent," in the sense that God is so far above human comprehension that it is as if he doesn't exist.
Armand Dufaux: a famous Swiss aviator, one of the first, who flew Lake Geneva.
Baal: It is actually sort of an honorific title in Hebrew, but somehow things got twisted along the way. Baals were the names of the little idols that people worshipped back in the day of polytheism, before Judaism with its one God thing became popular; when the Bible was being assembled, the Baals were confused for all referring to the same persona (false gods, all of them),
and became associated with a high ranking lord of Hell, even Satan himself.
Maiden of Nuremberg: a famous Iron Maiden, which was a torture device with pointy sharp things in it, used to force people to confess to heinous crimes like praying to the wrong piece of wood.
Francis Bacon, House of Solomon, New Atlantis: Francis Bacon was a philosopher and politician who is credited with inventing the scientific method. He did a lot of things. Somehow he found time to write this book called the New Atlantis, which describes a utopian society governed by knowledge and reason. The House of Solomon was his design for a modern university where people learned things and conducted experiments and stuff. However, he also describes a section of the university that features exhibits meant to confuse the senses, show illusions, falsehoods, which is what Causubon is equating the museum he is hiding in to.
Legion of Honor: The highest decoration in France, established by Napoleon.
Empedocles: a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher (apparently they were interested in finding a more reasonable explanation of how the world worked, and so wrote a lot about the essences of things) who wrote that the world was composed of four essential elements. He also believed in reincarcation. He supposedly died because he threw himself into a volcano, believing he would come back as a god afterwards. However, the volcano spit back one of his sandals, meaning that his body hadn't transcended after all, or something.
Alhazen: an Arab scientist who studied optics at the turn of the millenium, some people say he is the first real scientist. Long before Einstein, he was saying light had a finite speed and was made up of particles.
Demiurge: A Platonic concept for someone who is a kind of caretaker for the physical parts of creation, although not the supreme creator himself. The Gnostics, a bunch of mystics predating Christ who believed the Universe was created by an imperfect being who is either actually evil or is just imperfect, associate the God of the Hebrews with this Demiurge. According to them, there is an even higher God, an actual perfect Godhead, above this Demiurge. "Gnosis" means "to know," and it refers to someone achieving through mysticism and esoteric knowledge an understanding of eternity and creation and the perfection of the immaterial.
Basilides: an early Gnostic leader who is also associated with the origin of the Kabbalah.
Hermes Trismegistus: the blend of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth (god of wisdom).
Notarikon: a method in the Kabbalah by which you take the first or last or whatever of a word and form new words out of it.
Yaldaboath: one of the Gnostic archons, the Demiurges who made the world but trapped man's essence in material form, with a lion's head and a serpent's body, sort of a demon.
Sophia: The all powerful all knowing mother-virgin-seat-of-all-mysteries goddess of the Gnostics. She was the good part of the "God", who wanted to create the world, and urged on the Demiurge, who, not able to correctly manipulate the base matter, trapped her inside the world.
Pleroma/ogdoades: the Gnostic word for the totality of all the divine powers. There is some concept of a heavenly pleroma, which is where all the divine beings live, and with the help of aeons like Jesus and Sophia, humans can reunite with these divines and learn their wisdom and the meaning of life. Or something like that.
Foucault's Pendulum Study Guide: Intro
Foucault's Pendulum is a book by an Italian professor of philosophy named Umberto Eco, which has been described as "the thinking man's Da Vinci Code." It is littered with philosophical, historical, and literary references -- so many, in fact, that Anthony Burgess said it needed an index. None exist. Even Neuromancer has a high-page-ranked "study guide" on Google. Well, fair enough; these days, anyone can write a study guide.
Neuromancer merited a study guide for a variety of reasons, one being that the world in which it was set was as much a protagonist of the story as any of Gibson's actual characters. Another was that the informational overload in his prose style was symbolically meaningful as well as narratively load-bearing ; in the world of his creation, informational overload was the norm, as well as culture shock, generation gapping, and just about every other form of societal and personal alienation and neurosis that a world could inflict on a person. So it makes sense that you would feel like a foreigner, visiting his world.
Eco, on the other hand, littered his book with all these obscure references perhaps to make a point about the intellectual snobbery of people who, like his narrator, can argue about Kant in everyday conversation with a straight face but still believes that the world is united in this mystical enigma that has been a secret since the Middle Ages. Maybe he also did it to discourage casual readers, such as those who might enjoy the Da Vinci Code, for example, from reading his book. He liked Borges and wasn't above screwing with his readers in such a way, the entire premise of his book is that scholars of history invent a game that, unwittingly, changes history. The whole book is like a commentary about how even the most learned and elitist of intellectuals can still fall prey to the same beliefs in mysticism and magic that people in medieval times did. And then again, maybe he just actually writes like that.
So this is my poor man's Foucault's Pendulum study guide. I have no idea if I'm even going to be able to find all these references; I wouldn't even put it past this guy to just make some stuff up out of thin air. As usual, these posts will be more for myself than for anyone in particular. And you don't really need a study guide to enjoy the book, it's still a good read even if you don't know all the obscure people he name drops. You've been warned. So come, I dare you, turn the page.
Neuromancer merited a study guide for a variety of reasons, one being that the world in which it was set was as much a protagonist of the story as any of Gibson's actual characters. Another was that the informational overload in his prose style was symbolically meaningful as well as narratively load-bearing ; in the world of his creation, informational overload was the norm, as well as culture shock, generation gapping, and just about every other form of societal and personal alienation and neurosis that a world could inflict on a person. So it makes sense that you would feel like a foreigner, visiting his world.
Eco, on the other hand, littered his book with all these obscure references perhaps to make a point about the intellectual snobbery of people who, like his narrator, can argue about Kant in everyday conversation with a straight face but still believes that the world is united in this mystical enigma that has been a secret since the Middle Ages. Maybe he also did it to discourage casual readers, such as those who might enjoy the Da Vinci Code, for example, from reading his book. He liked Borges and wasn't above screwing with his readers in such a way, the entire premise of his book is that scholars of history invent a game that, unwittingly, changes history. The whole book is like a commentary about how even the most learned and elitist of intellectuals can still fall prey to the same beliefs in mysticism and magic that people in medieval times did. And then again, maybe he just actually writes like that.
So this is my poor man's Foucault's Pendulum study guide. I have no idea if I'm even going to be able to find all these references; I wouldn't even put it past this guy to just make some stuff up out of thin air. As usual, these posts will be more for myself than for anyone in particular. And you don't really need a study guide to enjoy the book, it's still a good read even if you don't know all the obscure people he name drops. You've been warned. So come, I dare you, turn the page.
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