(no subject)

Many thanks to queenofhalves who made it possible for me to go to the Museum of Fine Arts on Tuesday! She had two tickets to share and so she and I and queen_of_wands and childling I. (I'm unclear on the relation?) got to see all sorts of interesting old stuff. :)

The museum was too big to take in all at once, so while picnicing on the lawn we talked to see which parts were most interesting. We all agreed that what held the most fascination for us was the ancient material, so we decided to focus on the sections of the museum with ancient Egyptian, Nubian, near Eastern, Japanese, Asian, and Islamic art.

Towards the end we also took in Mesoamerican, African, and south Asian art, and a room with musical instruments from various times and places.

One thing that struck me was the three-dimensional intricacy of Indian sculpture. These sculpures utilize three-dimensional negative space in a way one doesn't find in western sculpture. A photographic representation does this sculpture no justice -- it simply has to be seen in person to be fully appreciated.

I also got to see some samples of Mayan hieroglyphic writing up close! One of the listed interests on my info page about which I think I've never posted before is Mayan hieroglyphs. The Maya developed a pictorial writing system which, like the Japanese system of writing, combined unique glyphs for people, places, and things with grammatical glyphs marking noun and verb modifiers and a syllabic system for representing the sound of a word. Over 800 glyphs have so far been identified, but interpretation thereof remains an imprecise art because the Spaniards destroyed so many Mayan artifacts, and no one among the present day Maya read or speak the classical Mayan language. Even so, amazing progress has been made in learning to read ancient Mayan.

The Mayan hieroglyphs are captivating, though, because of their intricacy. Whereas most other hieroglyphic and pictographic systems are notable for their parsimony of form and stylized abstraction, Mayan writing was stylized without becoming abstract or parsimonious. It's believed that parsimony and abstraction in pictographic writing is something that develops over centuries, and it seems that classical Mayan civilization did not last that long. (Some sort of economic collapse befell the Maya long before the Spanish arrived; most probably, their population boomed to a level the land couldn't support.)

So, Mayan writing is made of pictures of recognizable woven baskets, heads and faces, animals, bugs, even rather gruesome elements like severed hands.

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There are also some excellent pages on Mayan writing:

John Montgomery's Dictionary of Maya Hieroglyphs
Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing
Omniglot's article on Mayan Script
MesoAmerican Writing Systems

Seven-Macaw the arrogant god

Tuesday's visit to the MFA also brought to my attention a Mayan permutation of the Gnostic myth. It's long been my belief that the Gnostic mythology points to such a fundamentally universal aspect of the human condition that some form of it will almost inevitably appear in any mythological scheme. In Greek mythology, for example, Zeus overthrew the arrogant and overblown Chronos.

In Mayan mythology the overblown arrogant deity is Itzam-Yeh, which translates as "Seven-Macaw." The image shown above is Itzam-Yeh sitting in a World Tree which represents the Milky Way, and the interloper-hero Hunahpu (associated variously with the sun and with the morning star).

I found a synopsis of the myth here:

Seven Macaw is a character in the Mayan epic The Popul Vuh. In the darkness before the world's dawn, Seven Macaw was helpful to humanity, guiding them with his light. However, arrogance leads him to brag that he is more important than the sun and the moon. One day the twin heroes of the The Popul Vuh [Hunahpu and Ixbalanque] teach him a lesson. They hide beneath the fruit tree where he feeds and hit him with a blowgun dart, knocking him over the tree top and down the other side. In the latitude of Guatemala where the Mayans lived, this describes the trajectory of the constellation [the Big Dipper] through the sky — once a day making an arc up through the sky and descending to the horizon. Anthropologist Dennis Tedlock also thinks that Seven Macaw must be shot because he offends the Hurricane god. In July, the constellation is out of sight in those latitudes, and mythologically speaking, this clears the way for Hurricane to bring the summer rains.

Compare this to the Gnostic myth of the demiurge, Yaldabaoth, who is in some ways a good and helpful god, but who becomes arrogant with his power and declares there is no god before him.

Hunahpu and Ixbalanque are described as heroic brothers who, because of their good deeds, were deified and became the sun and moon. As a deity, though, Ixbalanque seems to have become female, at least partially, because they are described as the parents of the first humans. They seem therefore to be similar in concept to a syzygy.

(no subject)

After I came down with chickenpox last year I swore I would not curse a pox on anyone's house ever again, even in jest. I'm breaking that vow today.

USA Today, a pox on your house!

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has greater concerns than finding $18 million to replace the grass on the Great Lawn.

He knows what these same protesters (under different banners) did to downtown Seattle during the 2000 meeting of the World Trade Organization. Wearing ski masks, the WTO protesters turned over police cars, set fires, broke windows, disabled buses and fought with the police. That cost local businesses more than $2 million in damages and $9 million in lost sales.

New York City, which has a duty to keep its citizens and their property safe, knows that the protesters are more interested in violent confrontation than civil rights. And it is acting accordingly.

from Mayor acts wisely

checking in with my concept of the divine

For a couple of weeks I've been wanting to post about my spiritual thoughts and inclinations, since they have evolved.

I recently described my views as closest to atheistic and I suppose that's basically correct. That is, there is no room in my views (if there ever really was) for a distinct being that possesses volition and intelligence and which guides the cosmos. However, there is a presence that I have felt in moments of stillness which I call for lack of a better word divine.

One of my inquiries regards the "substance" out of which the divine presence could be composed. To put that in more specific terms, what is it precisely that meaningfully distinguishes divine presence from mundane presence? The answer I keep coming back to is perception, which is why I continue to self-identify as "gnostic" (gnosis = perception). The presence of divinity is distinguished primarily by the (subjective or perhaps intersubjective) perception thereof.

In short, divine presence is distinguished against the background of the cosmos solely via human consciousness, and, as best we can determine, nothing else. That means that God is, in terms of the manifest cosmos at least, made of nothing, but it is a meaningful nothingness. I've arrived at this answer before, with allusions to the Kabbalistic idea of ein sof. (It's also possible that "Allah" translates to "the no," or distinct nothingness.)

A description of the divine which I read once in challenging_god (offered I think by lasa) describes the divine as "creating by withdrawing." This corresponds closely to my observation that the divine presence operates by providing the potential whereby things occur. IOW, God creates a void of potential, into which nature/the cosmos "flows." The Tao is compared to the "watercourse way," and water runs downhill because potential exists whenever water can flow. The idea of the watercourse way, notably, suggests not the presence of a being with will that directly acts, but a harmonious sort of interbeing whereby nature provides for itself, summarized in the translation: "the Tao is that which never acts, yet leaves nothing undone."

Consider for example recent inquiries into the processes whereby things in the cosmos evolve and become more complex. Cellular automata and replicators, information theory and chaos and bifurcation points and catastrophe theory. It all points to a simple and harmonious self-consistency in the cosmos -- a kind of self-reflective morphic resonance. What causes complexity to develop is the opening of a niche or the existence of a system in a state of heightened dis-equilibrium. Either way we have the creation of what can be conceptualized as a void that will soon be filled.

Another concept that can be thrown in the mix here is the "holomovement," David Bohm's depiction of the cosmos as a mostly folded-up (or implicate) unbroken whole. Consciousness is tied in with the unfolding of the implicate order -- and the enfolded aspect of reality can be thought of as the potential for unfolding. The idea of the holomovement describes a cosmos made entirely of movement and of process, and in which every relevated thing is interconnected with every other relevated thing. From the perspective of any particular object, that object can be seen to be a hologram of the entire cosmos.

While I can see parallels in the Tao Te Ching and even the Upanishads to this idea of the cosmos as holomovement, I've found a very clear depiction thereof in Neil Douglas-Klotz's interpretation of the teachings of Jesus. I'll try to find a way to present that in a coherent way.

Now, I hold all this in one part of my mind while another repeats the disclaimer that any conception I hold of god is only a limited eidolon (image or shadow) thereof.