(10-07-2021, 10:56 PM)Barbrey Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Word of God is like a wind on the waters
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Egypt
Seems to me this would support the upper righthand rosette being south. The Nile flows south to north, such that the Egyptians thought of north as down and south as up. Furthermore, the southern wind brought warm air to Egypt and the Levant, allowing life to thrive. So to the native inhabitants of Egypt it makes sense that a higher power which willed life into being, would popularly be thought of as residing "somewhere south of here", and sustaining us creations with a constant flow of life-affirming grace from the south.
I remember reading the novel
Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, which involves a crew of special forces astronauts boarding and entering an apparently crewless alien starship that has coasted into our solar system. It's pretty much a McKendree cylinder, which is a massive drum that rotates fast enough to simulate gravity on the inner surface of its curved face. One of the main characters, standing on this surface and facing in the direction of rotation, looks at the upsloping land ahead of him, expecting to see hills that give way to sky. But instead, to his great astonishment, he realizes that no, the upsloping land
becomes the sky. I can't help but wonder if this is how at least some Egyptians conceived of the place of the stars and their inhabitants in their cosmology — so high up, as one travels south, that the world curves up and over the place where we live, allowing the goodness of heaven to both flow down to us from a southernly direction, but also rain down on us every now and then. As above, so below indeed!
I came across this idea when I was exploring a different mystery — the purpose of the air shafts in the Great Pyramid of Khufu. As much as I wanted to believe they were part of a ram pump, making the pyramid into a public fountain or the constant source of a hauntingly deep bass reverberation, the answer I found most convincing came from an actual credentialed historian of Ancient Egypt, who was fairly familiar with the worldview of the Egyptians around Khufu's time: The shafts were for the celestial waters which flow down onto our land from the south every night. The southern shaft is an inlet to flood the tomb of the deceased pharaoh, float his soul, and pour out the north shaft carrying the soul, on the northern journey downstream and back up to the heavens. Water sloshing around in an agitated or rolled cylinder (or a torus, like a hula hoop or the vestibular system of the inner ear), is the easiest way I can picture this cosmology, though I have no idea how historically accurate this might be.
If this whole Christian Hermetic (possibly apophatic) line of thought is on the right track, it wouldn't surprise me to find that the rosette for north, which I say is the bottom lefthand one, at the very least references the Nile Delta / land of Goshen. This was where the waters, winds, and divine graces drained into the sea, and from there presumably back up to the heavens.
I'm a big fan of both Hermeticism and apophatic theology, and happy you brought it up, @Barbrey. I think both are mental exercises that can be a big help to the right people in being at peace with themselves and the world around them. Psychotherapy, particularly cognitive behavioral therapy, has an undeniable influence from the mysticism of the world of classical antiquity. It's not surprising that many psychotherapists I've known share a relationship of mutual respect with practitioners of arts that are explicitly mystical even today (for example, Zen). Both are forms of inner alchemy, aimed at enacting an inner change, which in turn motivate actions which change the external world. From people I've spoken with, and my own experience, reading apophatic theology puts one in a very similar mindset as pondering a
koan. Good stuff.