Dilun Hud

[ecosophia]

 (Yes, that's "Magic Monday" in Breton. Those are also Breton Druids in the photo.  I'm doing the Brythonic Celtic languages as this month's theme.) 

Once again, it's technically Monday now -- past midnight Eastern time -- and here I am on Dreamwidth, so it's time for another Magic Monday.  Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. Any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer, though it may be Tuesday sometime before I get to them all.

With that said, have at it!

This Magic Monday is now closed to new questions. Thank you, and see you next Monday! 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

JMG
I can see why number and sacred geometry are interesting (I am getting on much further with Frances Yates just now and trying to spot some of your spoor tracks ahead of me across the pages. Smile.)
My caveat for the following is that my understanding of maths and its amazing history has remained seriously deficient all my life.

You wrote last week to a correspondent on MM: “… In sacred geometry, and the number lore that goes with it, the absence of zero expresses itself in an interesting way. Do you recall the "number line" you got taught in elementary school? It runs like this...
...-3...-2...-1...0...1...2...3...
...and so on to positive and negative infinity in either direction. (What, exactly, is a "negative infinity"?) In sacred geometry, by contrast, we use a number line that centers on 1, not on 0...
...1/4...1/3...1/2...1...2...3...4...” -- ...which goes to zero on one end and infinity on the other [bold added] -and both of these are recognized as wholly imaginary constructs. Neither zero nor infinity are real, and neither one is useful in the proportional mathematics that we use in sacred geometry (and that artists and architects used to use back in the day when art and architecture were a lot less ugly than they are today."

My immediate thought was to question whether ‘your’ series in the proportional mathematics goes to ‘infinitesimal’ rather than ‘zero at one end’. Additionally it has occurred to me after a little bit of reading that ‘zero' might actually be a geometrical property, for example, ‘flat’ within a larger category of ‘slopes’. My further thought is that the concept of infinitesimal is real enough and allows logical proofs about curves and rates (time). And with curves we can see maxima and minima, tangents, slopes, the relations of square and circle; for the latter see Yates again. And eventually Calculus emerges as a tool.

Geometry seems to be about proofs – logical steps in series that one can always come back to. I am interested in recognition, identity, insight and understanding – which are intelligible but not readily explicable. I find it a necessary part of being conscious to make constant reference to my senses, and perhaps thus to what earlier cosmology referred to as macrocosm and microcosm. Question. Change seems the essential of magic, but reference to identity appears equally necessary. I once did some ‘mind experiments’ in imagination, and shrank a thought toward an infinitesimal. It seemed possible for a thought, an identification, to be extinguished, to ‘wink out’ – some kind of minimum.

I have reached the point in Yates when Fludd has a struggle with Kepler. Neither had reached to Calculus but Kepler was scathingly impatient with Fludd. Leibniz and Newton were to come. (Question)If divination, star charts and etc. ‘works’ (your word), we have a way to go yet, or as Yates says of Bruno, there is a determination to find a method for the imagination yet to come.

Hmm … I have a feeling I am going to ‘end up’ with poetry and/or staring at the back of my own head.
best
Phil H

[ecosophia]

The number line centered at 1 goes to zero on the one end the same way it goes to infinity on the other, never quite reaching either one -- in terms of the older mathematics, the opposite of infinitesimal is not infinite, but immense -- this used to be a technical term, "too big to measure," before it took on its present metaphorical sense of "huge."

And poetry isn't a bad place to end up...

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for this, I have long been fascinated by immense numbers, and having such a handy term for them is pleasing.

Ray Wharton.