Haeckel’s Radiolaria

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Ernst Haeckel

Or, “Sacred Geometry in the Single Cells.” This video contains selections from the the film “Proteus”, a documentary concerning the life, work, and philosophy of naturalist Ernst Haeckel, (1834-1919). Haeckel was a German scientist who coined the phrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” and the terms “Darwinism” and “ecology.” He was first to postulate a “missing link” between ape and man and was proven correct when Java man was found in 1891. A staunch evolutionary biologist, Haeckel put Darwin on the world map. His books and monographs, placing Darwin in a broad social and philosophical context, were circulated internationally; they outsold On the Origin of Species by a large margin. Haeckel was commonly referred to as “the Darwin of Germany.”

Haeckel was also an accomplished artist. His idol was Goethe, who maintained that art as well as science could unearth the underlying truths of nature. For both Goethe and Haeckel, morphology had aesthetic roots. Haeckel traveled far and wide, from Sicily to Ceylon, to the North Sea, and beyond. Sketchpads and watercolors accompanied his microscope wherever he went. His on-the-spot drawings of deep-sea vegetation, aquatic creatures, frogs, birds, and higher animals were turned into more than 1000 engravings.

The film tells of the man’s character and influences while using his detailed engravings of Radiolaria, single celled marine organisms, which also illustrate many of the shapes common in sacred geometry. Fascinating and beautiful!

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Carbonaceous Coccolithophores

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Coccolithophores are microscopic algae that first appeared 220 million years ago, and flourished during the cretaceous period. They produce peculiar plates called cocoliths out of calcium carbonate, and incorporate them into an external shell. They constantly remove carbon from the atmosphere as they die and sink to the ocean floor, producing chalk. This is an important feedback system in the global carbon cycle.

I just think they look darn cool!

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Again Athanasius

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A few posts back I mentioned I had originally been searching for images of those faces blowing wind, which you see on old maps. I came across these maps which happened to have been illustrated by Athanasius Kircher, who was a Benedictine scientist and authority of his time on many subjects, among them volcanology. It’s interesting to see the hypothetical depictions, circa 1668, of the views of how the earch was composed. By this time the world was known to be round. And although Jules Verne in the 19th century imagined that the core of the earth might be hollow, and even home to subterranean societies hidden from surface-dwellers, Kircher depicted the center as a seething pool of churning magma with various channels to the volcanos on the crust; which is basically accurate as we now know. He titled this piece “Pyrophylaciorum” for the fire in the middle. His second rendering depicts how water pools in subterranean depths all around the planet, the cavernous aquifers which feed the rivers at the surface, “Quo Exprimitur Aquarum”. It’s interesting that what he surmised, without being able to physically examine as we do today, with radar and ultrasound plumbing the depths. But in many ways his concepts were accurate.

The next phase in our physical understanding of our world would take us from deep within the earth, to deep within the physics of the atoms themselves. Unlike Kircher, who had no electronic means of detection, and relied on visual inspection, we now can journey deep inside matter itself. Leaping from models of atoms and molecules, we now can capture images of the particles inside of the atoms themselves, at the nano level, and even physically manipulate the atomic molecular arrangements. What’s interesting to me, is that at the micro levels of matter, patterns similar to those at the macro level are replicated reverse fractally, increasingly smaller Bucky balls of probability of energy and matter, time and empty space of particle physics….yet somehow patterned and predictable…

Which goes to show, that it is possible, to hear music in the spheres, and as the poem goes, to “see eternity in a grain of sand.”

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Ey’wa

I don’t know why, but I’ve always found visual depictions of language and texts interesting. I loved the illuminated manuscripts of the celts, such as The Book of Kells. It’s not so often the text itself, as the decorations surrounding it which seem to tell a story of its own, in pictures. Taking a closer look at the designs and symbols is almost like decoding a cipher. Making comparisons between the objects depicted, whether carvings in stone, or embossed metalwork, or painted on walls or paper the transmission of culture and ideas between peoples is often documented and codeified. The understanding of a people and a written language might require the discovery of a Rosetta Stone, however. And the deciphering of symbols and diagrams likewise requires a key the viewer may not possess, although the fascination with them persists. Spoken language reveals similarities in words that sound alike although are spelled differently in each culture.

Hapsburg A.E.I.O.U.

Playing the old game, where a message is whispered consecutively from person to person standing in a row, reveals the transformation that occurs as each individual relays the mistakes conveyed by the person who spoke to him until the final person iterates what he heard the message to be, and it is far from the original. This shows how languages could variously be transformed with old tribes confluence with new peoples as they migrated across continents, and symbols likewise be transformed by small variations and adaptations to other peoples’ ideas. For example, in the movie Avatar, the indiginous natives are said to worship the god Ey’wa. Ey’wa is two syllables similar in sound to the term Yahweh, written as four letters without vowels YHWH, and called the Tetragrammaton. Interestingly, Native Americans had a similar word for their god, and also use a term like “Elohim” in their spoken version of The Lord’s Prayer. Although it certainly sounds like the basis for theNa’vi language, it sounds like Chinese to me.
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And further proving that sometimes even {olde} English can be unintelligible in the native tongue, here is the same Lord’s Prayer in Gaelic.

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Quadrivium

The quadrivium – the classical curriculum – comprises the four liberal arts of number, geometry, music, and cosmology. It was studied from antiquity to the Renaissance as a way of glimpsing the nature of reality. Geometry is number in space; music is number in time; and comology expresses number in space and time. Number, music, and geometry are metaphysical truths: life across the universe investigates them; they foreshadow the physical sciences.

Quadrivium is the first volume in many hundreds of years to bring together these four subjects. Composed of six successful titles in the Wooden Books series (Sacred Geometry, Sacred Number, Harmonograph, The Elements of Music, Platonic & Archimedean Solids, and A Little Book of Coincidence) – it makes ancient wisdom and its astonishing interconnectedness accessible to us all today.

Beautifully produced in six different colours of ink, Quadrivium will appeal to anyone interested in mathematics, music, astronomy, and how the universe works.

via Quadrivium Wooden Books Collection – Clouds Online.

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I Heart Words

currently playing on my iPod: Fade Into You by Mazzy Star

Upon watching BBC America’s coverage of the royal wedding (which was absolutely fantastic, btw), I became intrigued with the Great Pavement. The Great Pavement is the mosaic floor before the High Altar at Westminster Abbey.

The floor was commissioned by Henry III (a medieval English king known for his good taste in art and architecture) when he rebuilt the abbey in the mid 13th century. The style is deemed Cosmati work after the Italian family who developed that particular style of mosaic floor. It is beautiful, intricate, and mysterious. I love it. I want one. Seriously.

Set on a background of dark limestone called Purbeck marble, the various small pieces are made of cut metal, glass (which was not usually present in Cosmati work), precious stone, and marble–some of which was recycled from Roman ruins. 

There were inscriptions on the floor that are not very readable…

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the Miracle of 528 Hz

This 16 page article is reblogged from a different website and has been scaled to fit this column, and unfortunately the print is small. So for anyone interested in this metaphysical topic, of the healing effects of sound at 528 Hz and Egyptian sonics, it would be worth it to investigate the link to the original Scribd page, below.

View this document on Scribd

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