04

Chapter IV

1. Persia “belongs” to Aries according to Paulus Alexandrinus. See Boll’s Sphaera, pp. 296f., where it is stated that this was the oldest scheme. It is still to be found in the Apocalypse. Moses’ ram’s horns stand for the same world-age.

2. In his Seventh Letter (341C-344D) he denies strongly that scientific “names” and “sentences” (onomata, rèmata) could assist in obtaining essential insight. Cf. also Clemens Alexandrinus, Stromata 5-9-58.

*. Still, there have been modern attempts deserving the name of myth. One, of course, is Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, which has taken on so much meaning through the centuries. We realize today that it, too, was partly oracular. And we should not forget Alice in Wonderland, the perfect nonsense myth, as significant and as nonsensical as the Kalevala, itself. This parallel will appear relevant at the end of the appendices. Today, there is Austin Wright’s Islandia, which appeared in 1942, and its present sequel,The lslar, by Mark Saxton, to be published in the autumn of 1969.

3. M. Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmêli (1965), pp. xiv- vii.

INTERMEZZO

1. In optics, “hologram” is the interference pattern of light with itself; i.e., every part of an image is displayed at every point, as if every point looked at every source of light.

2. D. Zahan and S. de Ganay “Etudes sur la cosmologie des Dogon,” Africa 21 (1951), p. 14.

3. In a similar sense, Perronius’ Trimalchio says about the month of May: “totus coelus taurulus fiat” (the whole sky turns into a little bull").

4. These constellations were, originally, called “bicorporeal” for reasons very different from those given by Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos 1.11.

5. Pancasiddhantika, chapter XII (Thibaut trans., p. 69): “The round ball of the earth, composed of the five elements, abides in space in the midst of the starry sphere, like a piece of iron suspended between magnets.”

6. “Gibt es astronomische Fixpunkte in der ältesten babylonischen Chronologie?” OLZ 15 (1912), col. 104.

7. Il Zodiaco di Dendera Illustrato (1822), p. 17.

8. “Zur astronomischen Deutung del Maya-Inschriften,” SPAW (1936), p. 85.

9. In several of his addresses to the “Versammlungen deutscher Naturforscher und Arzte.”

10. Pensées, no’s. 92, 93 (Trotter trans. [1941], p. 36).

11. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 3 (1952), pp. 112ff.

12. Hon-t, rer het-neb; see J. Duemichen, “Die Bauurkunde der Tempelanlagen van Edfu,” Aeg. Z. 9 (1871), p. 28.

13. See Aeg.Wb. 2, pp. 55f. for the sign of the heart (ib) as expressing generally “the middle, the center.”

14. S. Mowincke1, Die Sternnamen im Alten Testament (1928), p. 12.