The Hounds Of Love
Hexagram 51:Zhen
I know it’s been a while. And, I hope this makes up for it. This is a massive offering. It's over 8,500 words. And, really, if you get through it, you will indeed deserve a medal. I would suggest ingesting some coffee and marijuana.
As a reminder, for those who really don’t have this kind of time, you really can learn everything you need to know about life from listening to pop music videos. Ninshubur is no exception. In that spirit, I hope you enjoy the TL/DR below.
And, for those with weak constitutions: Don’t Panic! You can always make it stop by simply looking away.
But, y’all don’t need that warning. Y’all are tough.
This is Grade-A Spinterlady Kook Shit. And, in a the spirit of fairness, I have included a kook score card you can use to play along with at home. You can access it by clicking here. If you actually use this, please be so kind as to submit your score in the comments.
Ninshubur is my fucking favorite. I hope you enjoy her as much as I do.
Ninshubur and the Beast of Compound Interest. Part One
Now, it will come as no surprise that you can actually tell this story dozens of different ways. The route in the Babylonian creation myth The Enuma Elish, or The Seven Tablets of Creation, explicitly says that we were created by the second generation of an intergalactic space colony for the general purpose of slavery. That yarn is actually a narrative that is written in stone. It’s older than almost every other written “Just So” story that has ever existed. Just Mr. Jesus, this is a story that requires no in situ evidence to be taken serious. I bring it up because I just think it’s very important everyone know that the whole “people explicitly come from space aliens” theme is something that we’ve always thought an awful lot about. Mostly, It’d be great if people who weren’t financially invested in “The Twelfth Planet of Nabu” looked at it.
And, this myth is also an important product of urbanization. Turns out that nearly every culture that gets to “having a city” also gets to has a “Star-Childe/God is an alien” fantasy. This is not something you find in hunter gather, pastoral, or purely agricultural societies. One suspects that the psychological impact of “free-trade” extends to the creation of these sorts of “just so” stories. That relative cultural diversity, in itself, might make the idea of alien overlords seem as plausible as the far more sensible ideas of gods in trees and people originating from corn.
(Don’t get me wrong. There are gods in trees and we do originate from corn. But, aliens are, of course, a “fringe” concept and therefore right the fuck out.)
Besides, it is one of the most fun ways to tell an atheistic secular creation narrative.
As splendid as that story is, I feel like it has been told many times elsewhere. There are hundreds of different testimonies that can tell you all about it. Among my personal favorites is the gnostic materialist cannon of one Sir Ridley Scott. I simply cannot beat the Ubermench glory of David. Nor can I sink to the white washing bullshit that is that Moses film. And, I am not going to even try.
So, this is a different route.
But, in case you’re like me and you simply can’t get enough of that kind of stuff, here is like six post-Prometheus minutes you’ve probably not seen.
The Beast of Compound Interest.
Just to break it to everyone right away:
Usury and compound interest have existed since before the written word. In fact, there’s evidence many complex financial instruments (such as commodities trading, reverse mortgages, and mutual funds) all existed before written words. In fact, one might suggest that complex financial transactions are the reason we have words and numbers at all. See, the words flow from the numbers and the numbers flow from the need to perform complex transactions, measurements, and calculations. We like to think that the words enabled us to extend our thoughts. But, as any Netizen can casually observe, this is simply not the fucking case. Words, as we all have lived to learn, primarily extend our emotions.
Eventually, though, they had words for compound interest. And, the Sumerian word for compound interest is “mash” and it means “interest upon interest” and it also the word for calves. The Egyptian word is very similar and it means “to give birth”.
That’s all painful to know, I agree. It means, among other things, that Finance Bros are literally doing The Lawd’s Work. And, it means that the horrible use of puns is systemic bullshit. For me, it means that many effects I happen to despise are baked into to what it means to be civilized. As we soldier on, it will become plain that these two are probably among the least of all the horrible ways the ancients saw fit to fuck us over. No fool’en.
However, if you’re looking for an exposition on economic history, (from the beginning of recorded time to the Bronze Age Collapse), you have come to the wrong kook. It is important to know that we have always been about our money. And, I can give you dozens of excellent resources. But, that is not what we are about today. Today, we are about the part that means "To Give Birth.”
Ninshubur, The Queen of The East.
Nobody really knows where she comes from. There are stories of her great starship crash landing into the Gulf of Kuwait and coming to shore, in Eridu, fully formed and lovely. There are seriously credible stories that she comes from Europe. Still others claim she hails from Elam. And, given her epic adventures, the general flow of the Halaf-Ubaid period, and her total lack of nautical symbolism, she most probably comes from Elam before Eridu.
She’s got your numba regardless.
(From last month, you'll recall the numbers flow from Proto-Elamite->Shang->Brahmi->)
But, I also want to tell you about Dilmun.
So, in this story, she is an Elamite math genius who comes to Eridu by way of Dilmun. And, in Dilmun, she was goddess, who owned the all the gifts of civilization in her own right. But, she got bored and found leadership to be a real drag. So, she chose the move to Eridu to bum around and give the gifts of civilization to others.
Dilmun was located on what is now called Bahrain. And, it is where the story of the Garden of Eden first comes from. In one of the earliest stories, Enki, the Sumerian creator god, gets cast out of Bahrain, for attempting to solve Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox by fucking successive generations of his own daughters. His banishment is entirely understandable as that is super fucking gross. And, his house, the first city of Eridu is subsequently “raised down from Heaven, in the place where the salt water and fresh water meet”.
I suppose Dilmun’s loss is ultimately humanity’s gain here. But, if you ask me, I’d have much rather some other set of cultures been the “first to go all the way”. Because, whoa these people are seriously awful.
The fine Sumerian people of Eridu legitimately thought that dynastic incest was a supreme technological innovation and power move. They thought it was such a fine arrangement that they introduced this and slavery to everyone they “uplifted” to the palatial stage. Like, it was a prerequisite to becoming “more human than human” or as more e Erudite, people like to say, civilized. (funny how things change). I admit that this sort of familial continuity does stabilize certain types of trade agreements. But, it has also has had the unfortunate consequence that, for the last 6,000 years or so, the vast majority of civilization has been run by successive generations of inbred retards. Apparently, that shit is also part of the Grand Master Plan.
I would like to submit to the record the fact that WWI was initially a familial squabble between cousins. You see the Kings of Britain, Russia, and Germany were all first cousins. During the events leading up to The Great War, Kaiser Wilhelm remarked “To think that George and Nicky should have played me false! If my grandmother had been alive, she would never have allowed it.” His grandmother was the late Queen Victoria. You can read the Willy-Nicky Telegrams here.
Good thing for us that familial power dynasties are a thing of the past!
A most common story is that Enki (Capricorn), a goat fish from outer space, created the ME (gifts of civilization) and eventually they were “stolen” in a drunken seduction play by his niece the goddess Inanna. But, given the earlier creation stories, this could not possibly be the case. In the first place, Inanna is initially an Elamite metaphor. And, in the second, it is obvious that Dilmun had the basic gifts of civilization first and therefore all the colonies of Dilmun also possessed the ME. (See Jericho, Damascus, Aleppo etc.)
Dilmun happens to be where the Phoenicians come from. And, it’s the civilization that made all the early trade with the Indus Valley possible. The early people of Dilmun ultimately controlled and traversed all the waterways between Egypt and India. And, like the ancient culture of Crete, they favored women, double headed axes, and bulls. Also, like the Minoans and the Phoenicians, they were “sea people” whose entire civilization was based off of trade. And, we know they both thought that commerce & trade was the key to enlightenment, luxury, and civilization.
We know that all three civilizations saw themselves as confederacies, as opposed to empires. We know they had the exact same main gods. We know that a couple of thousand years before the Phoenicians, Dilmun had overlapping trade ports and colonies with the Minoans and the preceding Cycladic culture. And, we know that by 2500 BC Dilmun and the Minoan culture were the two cultures that controlled all the waterways and trade.
But, here’s the thing, we have no concrete evidence, beyond matching symbolism, social structure, religion, and cultural values that they ever actually interacted. So, for many people with 60k in student loans and with the bitchy game of tenure to worry about, it’s a controversial notion. Still, I think there’s more than enough evidence to soft sell the idea that they informed one another to vast degree. (Were it up to me, I would strongly state “that’s a fact Jack”. But, I’m a middle-aged kook and what I think doesn’t count.) Specifically, I’d suggest, Dilmun informed the pre-palatial culture of Crete. After all, when Dilmun and Minoa were abandoned, many of their former inhabitants became Phoenicians. And, when the Phoenicians dissolved, much of what was left of them became Celts.
Also, one can consider that the first proper naval battle in the All The History We Can Currently Reasonably Know About, was The Irate Sea People vs. The Bitchy Egyptians. This Battleship Royal Alpha occurs at approximately the same time of the Cretan collapse and the rise of Phoenicia proper. But, it makes you wonder; just how is that the Sea People are such a darn mystery to any interested party anyway?
I mean we all know that Phoenician is just a fancy word for Phoenix.
In this particular beginning, Dilmun came first and so did Ninshubur. Ninshubur is god and man’s best friend. She can hunt. She goes ahead in battle. She is musical and loves dogs. She contains a surplus inside herself and thus is without any external need. Everyone just loves her because of that, and so she is chosen to measure out every God’s celestial portion. She is able travel freely across all the worlds. She is the first bridge between god and man. She is the gate of Heaven. She is the first liminal state. She is a goddess of fidelity, communication, wisdom, and concentration. She is the rational arts.
She’s also a big ole gay. And, she has the additional virtue of not being related to anyone in the UR pantheon. Lucky for us, that means there will be no inbred retarding coming from her. By virtue of that alone, my guess is she’s now your fucking favorite too.
(Not even the Bible bans lesbianism. Islam only bans it in the Hadith. Even Abraham’s god knows dykes are fucking awesome.)
She’s just packed with symbolism.
Later assignations associate her with the God of Mercury in the guise of Nabu. And, in fact, by the time the Ur-wisdom and the Ur-pantheon finish propagating, Hermes and Hermes Thrice Great is indeed her place. Though, as mentioned earlier, previous to this, she was associated with the sign of Virgo (yod 10). Her association as proto-Apollo/Artemis is why Virgo is associated with Mercury in the first place.
But, before all that, she was associated with Betelgeuse in Orion, Procyon in Canis Minor and Sirius in Canis Major constellation. Canis Major and Minor are her dogs first. And, depending on how you draw her, Orion’s Belt is either her back or her bow. You see to these early cultures, “The East” is a synonym for “The Beginning.” So, really, she’s the Queen of the Beginning. She is called the "The Heavenly Shepherd" and "True Shepherd of Anu." So, as far as the Ancient Lords of Arabia and Venerable Persian Cats are concerned, she’s what sets it all in motion.
(NOTE: Click on the pictures to enlarge!)
But, they aren’t the only ones. In Crete, she is the goddess of the Double Headed Axe. In Crete, circa 2000 BC, the rising of Sirius with Orion over the Atlas Ridge, occurred at the Autumn Equinox and started off their calendar year. (The Cretan calendars are fantastic and we will discuss them later.)
At one point in time, pretty much everyone started their year off or ended it with her. It’s fair to say, everyone was tremendously invested. Even today, she’s still celebrated as the start of the Chinese New Year. And, in that context, she is 猎户座 (liè hù zuò) "the hunter constellation."
Even South America gets into the game.
The stars Sirius, Betelgeuse, and Procyon form an asterism called “The Winter Triangle.” (Mem)
The Winter Triangle does a great many number of things. Mainly because it’s part of every source culture’s astro-theology. One of its main roles was as part of three seasonal anthropomorphic asterisms that include The Spring Triangle (Aleph)
There was a ton of variation on this one depending on culture. The Sping Triangle is often emphasized as the Diamond of Virgo. And, overall this is what the Cretans, Indians, and Egyptians favored.
And The Summer Triangle. (Shin). Crete loved the shit out of the Summer Triangle. Their main stellar cultic ritual revolved around Vega, as opposed to Betelgeuse and Sirius.
These were nearly universal mainstays of celestial navigation for several thousand years. People still use them for simple navigation over sea, sky, and sand. So, it’s not like this knowledge is lost or in any way unknown.
Anyway, in middle stage Egypt, The Winter Triangle constituted the Trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus.
As you might have heard, the Egyptians were very into all of this; especially Sirius.
Sirius is one of the most important stars to all of early civilization. (It’s actually a binary star system. But, who’s counting?) It has a 1461 year cycle that only varies, at any given point, by about 4 days. Like the sun, Sirius has a 365 ¼ side real rotation. (Its rotation is exactly one minute longer than our sun’s) And, like the Sun, it accumulates an extra day every four years. So, after wandering, ever so slightly +/- 2 ° it ultimately, returns back to exact same spot every 1461 years. (1461/4 = 365.25). This means that Sirius is one of the most persistent objects in the night sky. And, the fact that it mirrors the sun’s movement is part of why it has been called the “spiritual sun” or the “black sun.”
{The sun performs this same trick, with the moon every 19 years. (19^2 = 361) This is called the Metonic cycle and it is the foundation of our ability to precisely tell time. You look at Ptolemy’s work to see a more precise explanation of how all the celestial bodies of the known cosmos were cycled together inside this 19 year harmony. But, this works out for a calendar year because 19^2 is 361 and as an approximation of the degrees of a circle. That alone allows you to easily map the year and any sphere, on a square. }
In Egypt, Sirius’s helical rising foreshadowed the flooding of the Nile. They called it Sopdet. That means “triangle”. And, since the position of Sirius helps map the rotation of Venus, it was often depicted as a five pointed star or pentagram.
As David Lynch will tell you, “The Spice must flow.” And, as everyone also knows, one simply can’t have an Empire without either having a drug cartel or arms dealing to fuel it. But, the very best Empires have both. The Winter Triangle via Ninshubur and Sirius does both. Sirius’s position in the night sky, specifically between December 25th and January 15th, is universally recognized as the ideal time to plant the opium.
This Triangle is also part of a larger asterism called “The Winter Hexagon” and this is where ultimately, everyone decided “Babylonian Olympus” was located. At first, homes of the gods were accessed through portals in the mountains and the earth. (Shamballa Holla!) But, after Ninshubur gets to town, The Winter Triangle becomes the gateway to the heavenly abode. As you can see below, Ninshubur is over there with her Hounds guarding the Space Yurt which undoubtedly was some ancient asshole’s idea of Heaven.
These people were adorable.
Utopias are invariably limited to the technological level of the people dreaming them up. That means there are nearly zero examples of an ideal city or state that presages subsequent concrete technological developments. Rather, the Utopias change to accommodate the new POV that emerges through technological (and ideological) discoveries. People’s ideas about “heaven” and the “spirit world” are invariably similarly ruled. In fact, the main differences regarding any given “heaven” over a “Utopia” are that all heavens include immortality, a lack of disease, and a general lack of want. “Advanced heavens” invariably turn “general beings” into balls of “consciousness and light” and their doctrines describe concrete forms as flawed or illusionary.
And, if all that’s generally true. And, we can easily see that it is. It would strongly indicate that Ninshubur and the Hexagram are so old, they come from a time when having a really awesome tent represented the height of human attainment.
From this, The Winter Triangle becomes the origin of the triangle that’s in “daleth”, “delta”, and the letter “D”. Betelgeuse becomes the origin of the Mesopotamian “Eye in The Sky” and Sirius , ultimately shifts, in Egyptian Culture to help construct the Eye of Horus.
Winter Hexagon
The Semitic and Arab Cube of Space or Celestial Kaaba.
Egypt’s version
A version favored by Elam, India, Tibet, Phoenicia, and Crete.
China and (sorta) Greece’s version.
As far as the Primordial Tradition is concerned, this is the most important asterism ever. I personally think it’s the most important anthropomorphic artifact of all times. But, my people are prone to exaggeration. So, I don’t want to test credulity.
Still…
This is a summary of all terms used thus far. Here I’d complain about Thelema, if I were still into that type of complaining. Make of it what you will. But, aside from the outer triangles, which were used, really, this is just some shit I made up.
An Experiment: Go outside tonight, look at the night sky, and see all this stuff for yourself. It's the right time of year for it.
-A Giant Digression-
[Spoiler (click to open)]
Also, you might also be wondering, if this is the case, then just how the fuck does the Hexagram get associated with Saturn (and Abrahamic monotheism) anyway? Well, it’s mainly all a bunch of begets.
In the Ur-Pantheon, the story of Zeus (Jupiter) killing the Titans finalizes with the tale of Marduk (Jupiter). And, Marduk defeats the Hordes of Tiamat, who are named “Unskilled Labor” with a magical “ultra-weapon” called “Concentration.” (Really. That is the plain facts as they are written in stone.) While there probably was never an actual God named Marduk, I think we can all agree that “Focus and Concentration” are the literal superior technological antidotes to “Unskilled Labor”.
But, this story is a later version of an earlier story with Ninurta (Saturn). And, that story is a later version of the same tale told with in Enki (Mercury), which is a later version of the story first told with Inanna (Venus), which is itself a later version of the story of Ninshubur (Orion).
And, that makes sense because Ninshubur is our first Merlin/Cronos figure. And, her technological gifts are domesticated dogs, archery, and proto-time management. Meanwhile, Marduk’s end game gifts are the missile sling, the domesticated cat, and the first universal institutional calendar (ie The Zodiac) as we know it today. All of which come after irrigation, urbanization, and mono-cropping (Enki). And, they come after literacy, farming, advanced trade networks, and institutional warfare (Inanna). And, they come after the copper mace, institutional slavery, mass manufacture, total war, and a recognizable - to us - version of fermented beer (Ninurta).
By Ninurta’s story, everyone generally agrees that Ninshubur has already become Nabu. In fact, an academic case has been made that Ninurta is actually a direct erasure of Ninshubur. (More on that below.) While not at all fringe, this perspective doesn’t currently have high consensus. So, I’m not going with it. Currently, it is generally understood that her messenger-guardian form is now as Ninurta’s magical talking mace that’s named “Shuar” or “Shubur.”
The Copper Age mace is a significant technological development over the basic club. It was viewed as a magical weapon. General access to metal smelting and the mass production of this type of mace was what enabled the destruction of most major institutions in the “Bronze Age Collapse.” General access to this sort of mace, the missile sling, and metal bullets were the weapons that destroyed the totalizing military advantage of the spoked wheeled chariot and archery. So these weapons are literally what give rise to the era of Total War.
Total War is shitty. But, it keeps the general population down, which saves the winners, at least, from starvation. And, in turn, Total War is what enables the dominance of a heretofore fundamentally new human mating and social strategy. You’ve undoubtedly heard of it. It’s the one more lovingly known as “the patriarchy.” Say what you will about the patriarchy, I certainly have. But, 3000 years ago that was some innovative shit. And, it’s arguably, what saved that section of humanity’s ass during things like the 200 year drought, various plagues, and other “acts of god.”
See, it turns out that all the He-man Woman hating bullshit is the new shit. The old shit looks far more like the gender-bending-polyamorist- pansexual-feminist humanist world that our so-called ultra-civilized progressives are currently trying to implement today. This is, in the larger scheme of things, actually a Traditionalist Conservative impulse. Realistically, it’s a whole lot closer to our “Initial Primordial” state. For what it’s worth, evolutionary biologists have determined that is no evolutionarily biological advantage for sexism or monogamy. There’s loads of evidence for wide-spread gender equality, along with gender and sexual plurality, throughout all corners of the ancient world. Everything we know about our previous selves, from genetics to found objects, tells us that this is the actual case.
It turns out, we’ve been living in the Nation of Gilead this whole entire time.
The sad part, of course, is that everyone’s vehement allegiance to “enlightened” or “traditional” points of view are far more determined by biological imperative (mating strategy) than they are by anyone’s idea of what constitutes a considered and thoughtful set of personal beliefs. But, in this world, it doesn’t matter why you’re right. It mostly just matters that you get on the currently winning team.
Anyway, what we call patriarchy really only goes back to the Bronze Age Collapse and not a whole lot further. And, what’s more, outside the bounds of the Imperial Cults, there’s no evidence that it has ever actually been a universal phenomenon. This shocked me when I first learned about. Because, for years, I had, despite searching for it, found absolutely no evidence that any other form of social organization had ever dominated. But, it turns out that our view of the past largely depends on whose lens you’re using to view it from. Also, It turns out that destroying evidences, lying, and making shit up is not a new human phenomena. Them ancients were a bunch of lying antiquities destroying propagandists too. That’s just how we’ve always rolled.
You can see evidence of it in Ninurta’s name. Nin- means lady. Every time. Whenever you’re looking at this ancient names, and you see “nin” or “in”, assigned to a male gender, you’re looking at a goddess or a set of goddesses (as in Ninurta’s case) that has been combined and folded into a newer male identity. Occasionally, you’ll see gender matching for various types of companions. But, overall, those are instances of transition where the power of the deity, hero, or demi-god has not yet been passed along to the men.
All told, as members of high culture, we have all been brainwashed, over a couple of thousand years, by ancient propaganda that we’ve called “Tradition” and “self-evident truths” or “invariable conditions”. When you follow the genetic evidence, it becomes apparent that our current “truth to power equality moment” is simply taking us back to an earlier biological mode. It’s not taking us beyond our beginnings. Nor is it taking us beyond our biology. We aren’t even doing anything especially new. The cultural evidence that we have, from all over the world, clearly indicates that we have, at one time or another, institutionalized and fetishized most forms of sex and practically any social configuration one can reasonably imagine.
The evidence also tells us that no empire has ever been a monoculture. Every proper empire that has ever existed has always held within it a plurality of human conditions, modes of being, sexualities, and beliefs. The idea that there has ever been a dominant Imperial narrative that was also the only existing narrative is simply a myth and lie. That has just never been the case.
What we appear to be doing right now is setting our species up for long term stability.(ie The Myth of the Thousand year Reich and similar junk like that) The thing is that wholly patriarchal cultures are instable as fuck. They do not last as continuous institutions. They are invariably revolutionary and are at best contiguous regimes. And, if we’re going to have a real global dominion, that goes beyond the stars, and that lasts for a really long time, we are going to have to switch to a more flexible polyandrous mating strategy. Given, our history, that’s just how we seem to roll.
Ultimately, the real somatic wisdom of our current age is that, despite thinking that we do, none of us have any real conscious control over any of this. Also, this is not in any way a fringe narrative. If you talk to futurists, sociologists, and evolutionary biologists, they will tell that, to the degree that we can predict this stuff, this is pretty much what’s going on. I find all that incredibly interesting and supremely creepy.
Anyway, it’s during Ninurta’s turn at the wheel that we get the symbolism of the Saturnalia Earth Cube. The fact that the planet Saturn has a giant hexagon on its pole is just another very creepy coincidence. However, this hasn’t stopped billions of people from making a big ole deal out of it anyway.
Ninurta and the Bronze Age Collapse are interesting figures that are totally worth discussing in greater detail. That’s an epic set of stories all of their own. Ladies, I promise we will do that at some other time. Just not today.
However, If you find that you simply can’t wait for the eternity it takes me to post, here is a fact based hour and a half that attempts to outline the second half of that drama.
All this might seem really arbitrary. And, one supposes that in some sense it is. Other than stellar brightness, the degree of similarity in asterisms largely depends on sidereal observation and cultural contact. Additionally, you can literally make triangles out of any three points. On the surface, the post-modernists seem right; this stuff could be based off of anything.
But, really, that is not the case.
Almost every single source culture sees these specific triangles and shapes. And, really, you can create a credible argument that this is simply because high civilization first developed in the Northern Hemisphere. You could suggest that it would be markedly different had culture first developed in the Southern Hemisphere. Many people have made a case for some sort of essentialist “a-historicity” on that basis.
But, the problem with that is the fact of the Olmec and the Norte Chico cultures. You see they both arose from the Southern hemisphere. And, when you examine their math, it turns out that they do roughly the same shit as everyone else. So, you’re stuck with the problem of just why the heck things are like that. You can answer that by suggesting the South American societies somehow got their basic knowledge system through diffusion and trade, like everyone else. (ie the kinda racist Honky-Khmetic-Indris Valley-Space-Colony hypothesis) Or, you can posit that we, as humans, must have a biological “will to power” that is active regardless of whether or not we are consciously aware of it. (Unskilled Labor and bicameralism)
Either of these solutions put you squarely in the land of Jupiter (tradition) or Saturn (somatic boundaries). This dichotomy strongly suggests that, irrespective of how you might otherwise choose to solve this issue, post-modernism is fundamentally mistaken. The symbols all mean something and none of this stuff is all that arbitrary.
As seen above, most solutions that include Jupiter are pretty darn wacky. That doesn’t make them untrue. There are loads of crazy things, done for silly reasons, which have actually occurred. Most of those things have seemed perfectly credible (even reasonable) at one time or another. A lot of that general wackiness is some pretty good stuff.
Still, with few exceptions, much of what we call “Tradition” has an essential reality that dissolves once you pierce the veil of “History” and examine things with and eye towards “Evidence” and “Consistency.” Currently, we just don’t have the most magnificent evidence chain for Jupiter. That’s why we, in the west, had the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution. It’s why living in a secular open society is currently seen as optimal. And, it’s why we ever bothered with Post-Modernist examinations in the first place.
Really, I would argue that this was ultimately a very fruitful and necessary step. But, there has also been a giant wad of bullshit produced from that point of view. And, the facts are that we now actually do know better. So, it’s a bardo that I think we should all abandon as soon as humanly possible.
But, with Saturn, it’s different.
With Saturn, the reason we make these shapes and signals is due to biological imperative. With Saturn the answer for “why” is because we have a hexagonal lattice, made of grid, boundary, and place cells, sitting inside our heads. And, that means that nearly all human cultural activity can be examined and reduced to a game of anthropomorphic matching between the outside world and the imaginary world that is biologically projected from inside of our heads. (!)
We could have suspected as much seeing as the Real vs. Ideal is an age old religious-philosophical conundrum.
In fact, all the animals we’ve ever tested have grid and place cells that function just like this too. And, this is just the first layer. There are at least 3-4 feedback representational systems happening at the same time. Thankfully, though, all of this works very similarly to 4-dimensional orthographic projections. And, lucky for us, we all have some real world practice with that. (I digress)
The place cells, which are made of pyramid cells (so called because they are shaped like pyramids) are organized in a generalized slew. And, they fire off at a particular rate based on the position of your head. (As in what direction you’re facing, where your head is in relationship to the ground, if you’ve tilted your head etc.) Like so:
The grid cells then activate and form spontaneous modules that let your body interpret where stuff in the “outside” world is.
So let’s say you had a goal. Not a big one. Just like the basic desire to walk from one end of the room to another. This is a basic diagram what’s going on. More or less, you keep the “goal” in mind, while the rest of you automatically tracks your current position. Makes sense, right?
Except that all happens several hundred times a second over multiple modules of cells.
The firing vectors are modular to the cells. And, they scale to the size of whatever “space” your body registers as “being an actual thing” They do not all fire at once. Otherwise, we suspect, you wouldn’t be able to parse “reality” very well.
These cells control core aspects of your memory and spatial awareness. Our entire perception of reality and our ability to navigate reality has evolved to depend on this. And, so has what we choose to anthropomorphize with our imagination The patterns, that this feature of consciousness generates, are actually what causes us to “like” all the basic shapes and patterns that we happen to like. This is why, even though we could theoretically choose anything, we always seem to select certain options.
The smallest modular unit of these matrices is a triangle.
It’s why we find dissymmetry unattractive. It’s why memory palaces are so effective. And, it’s why we have had any number of somewhat unsatisfactory solutions to most of Zeno’s paradoxes for the last couple of thousand years.
This system satisfactorily solves most of Zeno’s paradoxes in one fail swoop. Unfortunately, it does so by saying “Bitch, you only think shit works like that because I have been bullshit lying to you, this whole entire time.”
(!)
Below is a chart of how your brain attempts to parse external information (ie outside world) inside of this system.
But, that’s just one aspect of the system. There are four currently known spatial modes and they all work together to fully form the physical aspects of our basic perception of reality. We do not fully understand how they all work together. (We are just working with perspective “B” here) Here’s what the others look like.
When you take psychedelics, have the right sort of head injury, or are into viewing optical illusions, your brain gets confused and fires off in the ‘wrong” areas. It then attempts to compensate for you. It does this by either editing out information or by forcing you to see “everything in everything.”
For Example, An Experiment:
There are 12 dots. But, you can only see 3-4 of them at a time. You can train yourself to see more than that. But, your basic perception will initially be partial.
See, what’s happening, when you look at that, is that you’re having a low level hallucination. And, that’s occurring because your brain doesn’t know how to scale all the information on the grid. It’s just getting mixed signals.
Grid cell orientation is determined by the cardinal access points of your environment. So, in this instance, part of you is saying that you’re in a space that the rest of you says doesn’t exist. And, to compensate, your brain is editing your reality and only allowing you to see a little bit of it at once.
But, it gets worse.
Moser from his 2014 nobel prize talk:
"7.5 degrees is the offset that minimises symmetry between the grid pattern and the axes of the environment; it is the orientation that causes maximal dissimilarity between patterns along the two wall axes In contrast, at 0 and 15 degrees, the box and the grid have common axes, and the grid pattern would look similar along some of the wall pairs. It might be then, that the offset is developed and maintained by the fact that it causes maximal disambiguation of activity patterns across similar regions of the environment."
Not for nothing, but it turns out that the number 7 is hard to work with, in arithmetic and casual mathematics because the number 7 is physiologically hard to work with. The ancients thought that anything that difficult to work with must be important and holy. And, they were right. And, that is why Chiron is not a planet and why the lunar nodes have never really caught on.
That whole setup is the “because” for the “whys” of ancient architecture, base 60 mathematics, all the astronomical anthropomorphism, and our universal love for certain ratios. It even splits the difference between our love of an octave and our universal obsession with the number seven. The logistics of our geometrical positioning system of space and place, pretty neatly gives us the answers for the symbolic structure of everything.
(God Bless St. Marshall Mcluhan)
I must admit, this is a pretty dazzling development.
But, also, that has also got to be the biggest bit of bullshit fuckery that I’ve ever personally heard of. This right here means that not only is “The map not the territory” but that, in fact, you’ve never ever actually been cognizant of the territory. That “knowing the territory” is collectively a biological impossibility.
Not just for you. But, for everyone who has a brain. It is highly probable that even our future alien overlords will find themselves similarly incapable of knowing just what the fuck is going on. In fact, if you at any point are experiencing true situational awareness, it’s likely that something has gone horribly wrong (or you're a god-dammed deviant). By definition, that would have to be the case. To that end, I’m not sure whether this actually solves a particularly giant “reality plot hole” or if it just exacerbates it.
One implication seems to be that the vast bulk of human expression is pretty much just a bunch of narcissistic self-referential artifacts that are generated by and for the positional system that exists inside of us. Another is that almost everything we “know” can be reduced to a series of taxonomies that can then fundamentally be summarized as nothing more than a bunch of maps of maps.The third implication, loved by none but the super kooky, is that the entire world is, at every level, a product of our imagination. That’s massively unsettling, I agree. But, according to our best known facts, it also appears to be the actual brass tacks.
Obviously, all the above means that the world, as we know it, is made of magic. Just color me delighted.
It must be. Just go look up anyone's definition of the word "magic". It fits. We are creatures with 100%-wall-to-wall-hallucinations baked into our very crumpet of being. And, we have somehow managed to hoof it to outer-motherfucking-space. We did that by projecting our imaginary mind powers onto a world that is physically impossible for us to have any accurate perception of whatsoever. If you don't find to be totally supernatural, then, bless you're heart, you must not understand what that word actually means.
The impulse here is going to be to say “Oh, well it’s a good enough compensation system. You are overreacting. That’s no big deal. We have plenty of good information about what’s really happening, after all we Science!”
But, you’d be wrong.
[Spoiler (click to open)]
It’s really arguable how much we really even Science! in the first place. In the year of our lord 2017, we still don’t know what light is. We don’t know what sound is. And, we don’t really know what matter actually is. Most of what we call “Science” is really just philosophical problem solving and engineering.
What you have at the origin of all our Modern Science, really, is 300 years (at the very most) of a bunch of educated middle class agents, who were all mostly some form of Rosicrucian or Theosophist, throwing a bunch of shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. None of that is even remotely an exaggeration. In fact, the only thing that sentence undersells is exactly how much of that activity can be reasonably categorized as a form of “White Male Corporate Oppression.” But, I think we all generally agree that it was quite a lot.
Anyway, as this pastime became increasingly secularized, the overall value of what sticks, has been largely determined by practical applications and money. But, see, “Money and Applications” are more appropriately titled under the heading of engineering. Scientists, ideally, work from theories and are generally unconcerned with failure. But, engineers, on the other hand, thrive off of skirting the margins of failure and their whole reason for being is working out solutions.
That’s not bad; it’s just a completely different thing.
There is no unified theory of physics or mathematics. In fact, there has never been a working rationalization of either field. (Same with chemistry, biology, and medicine) That’s a core reason why every STEM field, with the exception of computer science, is having a “Crisis of Replication.”
What most people work from is a set of ideas and principles that have been codified as Popper’s Philosophy of Science. This is good stuff. But, it’s filled with innumerable reality plot-holes. (See Bertrand Russell). Loads of other people have noticed this too. And, so loads of competing ideas have been presented, ideas such as Logical Positivism. Logical Positivism is actually what most people generally think it means To Science! But, outside of the 8th grade, Logical Positivism is not used in any real scientific context. You see Logical Positivism is also a paddywack of bullshit and half-baked ideas. These days Logical Positivism is considered ridiculous fringe shit.
There’s legitimately more real world evidence for the Power of Positive Thinking and a lot other New Age junk than there is for Logical Positivism. With the Magical Thinking-New Age stuff, you can at least hide under the umbrellas of “Psychology” and “Tradition”. There’s legitimate evidence that Psychic Phenomena is real. On the other hand, Logical Positivism leaves your ass hanging in the breeze the moment things get more complex than admiring what a keen system The Scientific Method has turned out to be.
The simple fact is that despite all our good machines, all our marvels, and, all advancements, we really don’t really know what the fuck is going. And, we have no explanation for the phenomena of existence as it naively exists. More than that, throughout the ages, we have, for one reason or another, systematically dis-incentivized actually finding out. This is not a conspiracy. It’s just a mass intersection of human stupidity, limitation, and utilitarianism.
Also, we used to have God to lampshade the lot of it for us. But, these days, for most of us, God is dead or, at least, incredibly quiet. So, now we are just left with a bunch of loose ends and giant reality plot holes that, most of the time, we try not to think very hard about.
Thinking about it is uncomfy.
Every decent scientist and mathematician knows this. There’s this idea that eventually Theoretical Physicists will develop a Unified Theory that actually works. The exact moment this happens, The All will become clear. The Greatest Mystery Ever-Ever will be solved. Everyone will then proceed to hang all their shit from that and we will all live happily ever after. Well, we will live at least as happily as Science! has calculated as being probabilistically permissible.
That all sounds like a bunch of monotheistic messianic bullshit, if you ask me.
I love my stories. And, that particular story is The Tale of Rock Candy Mountain. And, unless it involves heavy opiates, in almost every instance, The Tale Rock Candy Mountain winds up being a lame fuckaround. More or less, if you find Heaven a hard concept to buy into, you should find the idea of a working “Quantum Unified Field Theory” just as suspect.
Nobody fully understands Quantum Mechanics. That’s the truth. Anyone claiming a complete understanding of Quantum Physics is full of shit; especially if they aren’t an actual theoretical physicist. Most Theoretical Physicists strongly agree with me here. But, some will argue that “Hey! At least we understand the math”. They are dealing with this problem at a much higher order. So, we can probably just trust them on this. After all, it is their field of expertize.
But, in case, you need further explanation or just like to read these rants:
[Spoiler (click to open)]
-A quick note on Quantum vs Classical Physics-
You can conceptualize the difference between QM and CM by saying “if Classical Physics limits the calculation of Pi to 3.14, then Quantum Mechanics, via different but intimately related math, concludes that Pi is infinite and then proceeds to calculate that infinity to 70,000 places.” And, everything that happens after “4” is where the salient differences arise.
(This is but a metaphor. In reality, Pi is an uncontroversial mathematical concept and both fields understand Pi with similar precision)
--
There are more than 30 branches of physics, operating across 4-8 broad domains. The beauty of quantum mechanics is that, in large part, it usefully ties together and informs them all. Without quantum theory, so many of the things we love and have learned to depend on do not exist. Without it, there’s no internet, no personal computers, no satellites, no wifi, no such thing as nuclear medicine, and no project genome. The transistor, which is the bedrock of all modern electronics, was invented based on quantum theory. It helps explains stuff that simple observation and classical mechanics can not. It really is one of the most useful and marvelous philosophies we have ever given birth to.
There innumerable diabolical parts to Quantum Physics. (more on that later)
Here are but two:
First, there are around 18 different categories of theory for Quantum Mechanics. None of them are wholly correct and many of them are mutually exclusive. So, you’re looking at a set of “whys” that don’t agree, that will yield different probabilistic results based on whichever theoretical approach you use. But, depending on the applied context, most of them work “well enough” to better explain “What make shit happen?”
Second, results in quantum theory are based on probability. In classical physics, generally speaking, you either get a result or you don’t; same with experiential reality. But, in the quantum realm, you achieve a probable result. For instance, in any given field, photon can move in one of six basic ways and, in any given context, we can generalize the probability of where it’s going to go. Most of the time, you can predict the outcome with great precision and the outcome aligns with what we call “reality”; just not always. This is fine.
The problem is that probability theory is conceptually out of phase with determinism. And, almost everything credible about quantum mechanics says that the universe is deterministic. To address that, we have concepts like the “many worlds” theory. But, the problem with concepts like “many worlds theory” is that it sets up a loop of infinite recursion, that itself disagrees with rest of quantum cosmology. ie. To date, you can’t actually “Many Worlds” your ass back to the Big Bang. You need extra math for that. And, currently, the “extra math” involved is considered “janky as fuck”.
(These are all technical terms, of course.)
It’s not just you. That does sound like a bunch of bullshit. And, that is a bonafide “reality plot-hole”. On the upside, all the work in this area wholly supports the ancient concept that we exist in some form of Monad. Like, Monad qua Monad circa . (This is not like, but is related to, how people try to push the modern concept of the atom into the ancient concept of the atom.) Here, you advance the math, exchange “Holy Fire” with “electromagnetism,” and you’re pretty much good to go.
The religious among us find this fact a great comfort. They suggest that all the quantum stuff that’s like this “proves” the existence of god. And, you gotta know, there really is an awful lot of “quantum stuff” that’s like this. But, it might eventually occur to people that, if the kooks invented this science, then maybe this science is actually predicated on giving us a ton of kook explanations. That perhaps “the math” isn’t as ideologically neutral as one might naively suspect. That perhaps Alfred Korzybski makes an excellent point.
Quantum Mechanics is simply another child of Ninshubur. Our most advanced theories of everything are simply outgrowths of our ole timey imperial cults. You can show that with “Jupiter” and list the truckload of people who have turned their consciousness into Imperial Bedrooms. And, with Jupiter, you can list the chain of intellectual transmission going back to the “most ancient of days.” And, you can, with “Saturn”, and show that all our “stuff” is a geometrical propagation of forms that stem from our biological system of space and place. With Saturn, we learn that everything has a biological governor that directs the flow of our thinking and limits our base capacity of perception. With Saturn, every form of distinction is literally generated from mind. In other words, based on our somatic limits, reality is actually a product of your projected imagination. Everything is magical thinking.
(See part 2 for more)
An Experiment:
Find a plausible set of answers to the concepts included in the following question, that does not, at any fundamental point, include mentioning that these concepts are all products of human imagination. “What are logic, reason, measurement, numbers, and words? “
Look it, I’m pessimistic about your chances for success with this one. But, trust, I’m over here rooting for you anyway.
“We are made of magic” just happens to be the best evidence based theory currently available. And, I get it. The idea that reality is magic really is some “God of the gaps” garbage. But, in this story, it is not so much that the “God” lives in the ever decreasing gaps. It’s more that the gaps themselves are representative of the god. And, that's not so bad. Just like Achilles and the Turtle, that's a god you can actually work with for forever.
Just like this.
Everything we do is done with a whole lot of help from Ninshubur. Unfortunately, man’s best friend; Ninshubur has only a passing acquaintance with The Truth. But, like all dogs, she is incredibly useful, loyal, and likeable. She’s the best companion we’ve ever had. We literally couldn’t get rid of her if we tried; she’s the Heaven inside us.
We should not exist, yet, here we are dipping our toes in outer space, making baby robots, and learning how to live forever. (We are fantastico) Our relative success, as a species, posits an altogether bigger mystery and presents a more miraculous reality than any Eye of Fatima or garden variety virgin birth ever presented. (Really, if our messiahs of record had all been female, we’d have solved these sorts of mysteries with parthenogenesis ages ago anyway.) It is merely a creepy literary coincidence that the goddess, who starts all of this, happens to be a Holy Virgin, with an all seeing eye, who contains a perpetually propagating infinity inside of herself.
Lucky for us, having a complete understanding of this stuff is irrelevant for today’s purposes. But, it does mean that, from womb to tomb, we have no actual idea just what the hell is happening. This epistle isn't trying to change that. This is merely an ode to the little gnostic piece of business that has been riding in your head this whole entire time.
I know it’s been a while. And, I hope this makes up for it. This is a massive offering. It's over 8,500 words. And, really, if you get through it, you will indeed deserve a medal. I would suggest ingesting some coffee and marijuana.
As a reminder, for those who really don’t have this kind of time, you really can learn everything you need to know about life from listening to pop music videos. Ninshubur is no exception. In that spirit, I hope you enjoy the TL/DR below.
And, for those with weak constitutions: Don’t Panic! You can always make it stop by simply looking away.
But, y’all don’t need that warning. Y’all are tough.
This is Grade-A Spinterlady Kook Shit. And, in a the spirit of fairness, I have included a kook score card you can use to play along with at home. You can access it by clicking here. If you actually use this, please be so kind as to submit your score in the comments.
Ninshubur is my fucking favorite. I hope you enjoy her as much as I do.
Ninshubur and the Beast of Compound Interest. Part One
Now, it will come as no surprise that you can actually tell this story dozens of different ways. The route in the Babylonian creation myth The Enuma Elish, or The Seven Tablets of Creation, explicitly says that we were created by the second generation of an intergalactic space colony for the general purpose of slavery. That yarn is actually a narrative that is written in stone. It’s older than almost every other written “Just So” story that has ever existed. Just Mr. Jesus, this is a story that requires no in situ evidence to be taken serious. I bring it up because I just think it’s very important everyone know that the whole “people explicitly come from space aliens” theme is something that we’ve always thought an awful lot about. Mostly, It’d be great if people who weren’t financially invested in “The Twelfth Planet of Nabu” looked at it.
And, this myth is also an important product of urbanization. Turns out that nearly every culture that gets to “having a city” also gets to has a “Star-Childe/God is an alien” fantasy. This is not something you find in hunter gather, pastoral, or purely agricultural societies. One suspects that the psychological impact of “free-trade” extends to the creation of these sorts of “just so” stories. That relative cultural diversity, in itself, might make the idea of alien overlords seem as plausible as the far more sensible ideas of gods in trees and people originating from corn.
(Don’t get me wrong. There are gods in trees and we do originate from corn. But, aliens are, of course, a “fringe” concept and therefore right the fuck out.)
Besides, it is one of the most fun ways to tell an atheistic secular creation narrative.
Click to viewAs splendid as that story is, I feel like it has been told many times elsewhere. There are hundreds of different testimonies that can tell you all about it. Among my personal favorites is the gnostic materialist cannon of one Sir Ridley Scott. I simply cannot beat the Ubermench glory of David. Nor can I sink to the white washing bullshit that is that Moses film. And, I am not going to even try.
So, this is a different route.
But, in case you’re like me and you simply can’t get enough of that kind of stuff, here is like six post-Prometheus minutes you’ve probably not seen.
The Beast of Compound Interest.
Just to break it to everyone right away:
Usury and compound interest have existed since before the written word. In fact, there’s evidence many complex financial instruments (such as commodities trading, reverse mortgages, and mutual funds) all existed before written words. In fact, one might suggest that complex financial transactions are the reason we have words and numbers at all. See, the words flow from the numbers and the numbers flow from the need to perform complex transactions, measurements, and calculations. We like to think that the words enabled us to extend our thoughts. But, as any Netizen can casually observe, this is simply not the fucking case. Words, as we all have lived to learn, primarily extend our emotions.
Eventually, though, they had words for compound interest. And, the Sumerian word for compound interest is “mash” and it means “interest upon interest” and it also the word for calves. The Egyptian word is very similar and it means “to give birth”.
That’s all painful to know, I agree. It means, among other things, that Finance Bros are literally doing The Lawd’s Work. And, it means that the horrible use of puns is systemic bullshit. For me, it means that many effects I happen to despise are baked into to what it means to be civilized. As we soldier on, it will become plain that these two are probably among the least of all the horrible ways the ancients saw fit to fuck us over. No fool’en.
However, if you’re looking for an exposition on economic history, (from the beginning of recorded time to the Bronze Age Collapse), you have come to the wrong kook. It is important to know that we have always been about our money. And, I can give you dozens of excellent resources. But, that is not what we are about today. Today, we are about the part that means "To Give Birth.”
Ninshubur, The Queen of The East.
Nobody really knows where she comes from. There are stories of her great starship crash landing into the Gulf of Kuwait and coming to shore, in Eridu, fully formed and lovely. There are seriously credible stories that she comes from Europe. Still others claim she hails from Elam. And, given her epic adventures, the general flow of the Halaf-Ubaid period, and her total lack of nautical symbolism, she most probably comes from Elam before Eridu.
She’s got your numba regardless.
(From last month, you'll recall the numbers flow from Proto-Elamite->Shang->Brahmi->)
But, I also want to tell you about Dilmun.
So, in this story, she is an Elamite math genius who comes to Eridu by way of Dilmun. And, in Dilmun, she was goddess, who owned the all the gifts of civilization in her own right. But, she got bored and found leadership to be a real drag. So, she chose the move to Eridu to bum around and give the gifts of civilization to others.
Dilmun was located on what is now called Bahrain. And, it is where the story of the Garden of Eden first comes from. In one of the earliest stories, Enki, the Sumerian creator god, gets cast out of Bahrain, for attempting to solve Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox by fucking successive generations of his own daughters. His banishment is entirely understandable as that is super fucking gross. And, his house, the first city of Eridu is subsequently “raised down from Heaven, in the place where the salt water and fresh water meet”.
I suppose Dilmun’s loss is ultimately humanity’s gain here. But, if you ask me, I’d have much rather some other set of cultures been the “first to go all the way”. Because, whoa these people are seriously awful.
The fine Sumerian people of Eridu legitimately thought that dynastic incest was a supreme technological innovation and power move. They thought it was such a fine arrangement that they introduced this and slavery to everyone they “uplifted” to the palatial stage. Like, it was a prerequisite to becoming “more human than human” or as more e Erudite, people like to say, civilized. (funny how things change). I admit that this sort of familial continuity does stabilize certain types of trade agreements. But, it has also has had the unfortunate consequence that, for the last 6,000 years or so, the vast majority of civilization has been run by successive generations of inbred retards. Apparently, that shit is also part of the Grand Master Plan.
I would like to submit to the record the fact that WWI was initially a familial squabble between cousins. You see the Kings of Britain, Russia, and Germany were all first cousins. During the events leading up to The Great War, Kaiser Wilhelm remarked “To think that George and Nicky should have played me false! If my grandmother had been alive, she would never have allowed it.” His grandmother was the late Queen Victoria. You can read the Willy-Nicky Telegrams here.
Good thing for us that familial power dynasties are a thing of the past!
A most common story is that Enki (Capricorn), a goat fish from outer space, created the ME (gifts of civilization) and eventually they were “stolen” in a drunken seduction play by his niece the goddess Inanna. But, given the earlier creation stories, this could not possibly be the case. In the first place, Inanna is initially an Elamite metaphor. And, in the second, it is obvious that Dilmun had the basic gifts of civilization first and therefore all the colonies of Dilmun also possessed the ME. (See Jericho, Damascus, Aleppo etc.)
Dilmun happens to be where the Phoenicians come from. And, it’s the civilization that made all the early trade with the Indus Valley possible. The early people of Dilmun ultimately controlled and traversed all the waterways between Egypt and India. And, like the ancient culture of Crete, they favored women, double headed axes, and bulls. Also, like the Minoans and the Phoenicians, they were “sea people” whose entire civilization was based off of trade. And, we know they both thought that commerce & trade was the key to enlightenment, luxury, and civilization.
We know that all three civilizations saw themselves as confederacies, as opposed to empires. We know they had the exact same main gods. We know that a couple of thousand years before the Phoenicians, Dilmun had overlapping trade ports and colonies with the Minoans and the preceding Cycladic culture. And, we know that by 2500 BC Dilmun and the Minoan culture were the two cultures that controlled all the waterways and trade.
But, here’s the thing, we have no concrete evidence, beyond matching symbolism, social structure, religion, and cultural values that they ever actually interacted. So, for many people with 60k in student loans and with the bitchy game of tenure to worry about, it’s a controversial notion. Still, I think there’s more than enough evidence to soft sell the idea that they informed one another to vast degree. (Were it up to me, I would strongly state “that’s a fact Jack”. But, I’m a middle-aged kook and what I think doesn’t count.) Specifically, I’d suggest, Dilmun informed the pre-palatial culture of Crete. After all, when Dilmun and Minoa were abandoned, many of their former inhabitants became Phoenicians. And, when the Phoenicians dissolved, much of what was left of them became Celts.
Also, one can consider that the first proper naval battle in the All The History We Can Currently Reasonably Know About, was The Irate Sea People vs. The Bitchy Egyptians. This Battleship Royal Alpha occurs at approximately the same time of the Cretan collapse and the rise of Phoenicia proper. But, it makes you wonder; just how is that the Sea People are such a darn mystery to any interested party anyway?
I mean we all know that Phoenician is just a fancy word for Phoenix.
In this particular beginning, Dilmun came first and so did Ninshubur. Ninshubur is god and man’s best friend. She can hunt. She goes ahead in battle. She is musical and loves dogs. She contains a surplus inside herself and thus is without any external need. Everyone just loves her because of that, and so she is chosen to measure out every God’s celestial portion. She is able travel freely across all the worlds. She is the first bridge between god and man. She is the gate of Heaven. She is the first liminal state. She is a goddess of fidelity, communication, wisdom, and concentration. She is the rational arts.
She’s also a big ole gay. And, she has the additional virtue of not being related to anyone in the UR pantheon. Lucky for us, that means there will be no inbred retarding coming from her. By virtue of that alone, my guess is she’s now your fucking favorite too.
(Not even the Bible bans lesbianism. Islam only bans it in the Hadith. Even Abraham’s god knows dykes are fucking awesome.)
She’s just packed with symbolism.
Later assignations associate her with the God of Mercury in the guise of Nabu. And, in fact, by the time the Ur-wisdom and the Ur-pantheon finish propagating, Hermes and Hermes Thrice Great is indeed her place. Though, as mentioned earlier, previous to this, she was associated with the sign of Virgo (yod 10). Her association as proto-Apollo/Artemis is why Virgo is associated with Mercury in the first place.
But, before all that, she was associated with Betelgeuse in Orion, Procyon in Canis Minor and Sirius in Canis Major constellation. Canis Major and Minor are her dogs first. And, depending on how you draw her, Orion’s Belt is either her back or her bow. You see to these early cultures, “The East” is a synonym for “The Beginning.” So, really, she’s the Queen of the Beginning. She is called the "The Heavenly Shepherd" and "True Shepherd of Anu." So, as far as the Ancient Lords of Arabia and Venerable Persian Cats are concerned, she’s what sets it all in motion.
(NOTE: Click on the pictures to enlarge!)
But, they aren’t the only ones. In Crete, she is the goddess of the Double Headed Axe. In Crete, circa 2000 BC, the rising of Sirius with Orion over the Atlas Ridge, occurred at the Autumn Equinox and started off their calendar year. (The Cretan calendars are fantastic and we will discuss them later.)
At one point in time, pretty much everyone started their year off or ended it with her. It’s fair to say, everyone was tremendously invested. Even today, she’s still celebrated as the start of the Chinese New Year. And, in that context, she is 猎户座 (liè hù zuò) "the hunter constellation."
Even South America gets into the game.
The stars Sirius, Betelgeuse, and Procyon form an asterism called “The Winter Triangle.” (Mem)
The Winter Triangle does a great many number of things. Mainly because it’s part of every source culture’s astro-theology. One of its main roles was as part of three seasonal anthropomorphic asterisms that include The Spring Triangle (Aleph)
There was a ton of variation on this one depending on culture. The Sping Triangle is often emphasized as the Diamond of Virgo. And, overall this is what the Cretans, Indians, and Egyptians favored.
And The Summer Triangle. (Shin). Crete loved the shit out of the Summer Triangle. Their main stellar cultic ritual revolved around Vega, as opposed to Betelgeuse and Sirius.
These were nearly universal mainstays of celestial navigation for several thousand years. People still use them for simple navigation over sea, sky, and sand. So, it’s not like this knowledge is lost or in any way unknown.
Anyway, in middle stage Egypt, The Winter Triangle constituted the Trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus.
As you might have heard, the Egyptians were very into all of this; especially Sirius.
Sirius is one of the most important stars to all of early civilization. (It’s actually a binary star system. But, who’s counting?) It has a 1461 year cycle that only varies, at any given point, by about 4 days. Like the sun, Sirius has a 365 ¼ side real rotation. (Its rotation is exactly one minute longer than our sun’s) And, like the Sun, it accumulates an extra day every four years. So, after wandering, ever so slightly +/- 2 ° it ultimately, returns back to exact same spot every 1461 years. (1461/4 = 365.25). This means that Sirius is one of the most persistent objects in the night sky. And, the fact that it mirrors the sun’s movement is part of why it has been called the “spiritual sun” or the “black sun.”
{The sun performs this same trick, with the moon every 19 years. (19^2 = 361) This is called the Metonic cycle and it is the foundation of our ability to precisely tell time. You look at Ptolemy’s work to see a more precise explanation of how all the celestial bodies of the known cosmos were cycled together inside this 19 year harmony. But, this works out for a calendar year because 19^2 is 361 and as an approximation of the degrees of a circle. That alone allows you to easily map the year and any sphere, on a square. }
In Egypt, Sirius’s helical rising foreshadowed the flooding of the Nile. They called it Sopdet. That means “triangle”. And, since the position of Sirius helps map the rotation of Venus, it was often depicted as a five pointed star or pentagram.
As David Lynch will tell you, “The Spice must flow.” And, as everyone also knows, one simply can’t have an Empire without either having a drug cartel or arms dealing to fuel it. But, the very best Empires have both. The Winter Triangle via Ninshubur and Sirius does both. Sirius’s position in the night sky, specifically between December 25th and January 15th, is universally recognized as the ideal time to plant the opium.
This Triangle is also part of a larger asterism called “The Winter Hexagon” and this is where ultimately, everyone decided “Babylonian Olympus” was located. At first, homes of the gods were accessed through portals in the mountains and the earth. (Shamballa Holla!) But, after Ninshubur gets to town, The Winter Triangle becomes the gateway to the heavenly abode. As you can see below, Ninshubur is over there with her Hounds guarding the Space Yurt which undoubtedly was some ancient asshole’s idea of Heaven.
These people were adorable.
Utopias are invariably limited to the technological level of the people dreaming them up. That means there are nearly zero examples of an ideal city or state that presages subsequent concrete technological developments. Rather, the Utopias change to accommodate the new POV that emerges through technological (and ideological) discoveries. People’s ideas about “heaven” and the “spirit world” are invariably similarly ruled. In fact, the main differences regarding any given “heaven” over a “Utopia” are that all heavens include immortality, a lack of disease, and a general lack of want. “Advanced heavens” invariably turn “general beings” into balls of “consciousness and light” and their doctrines describe concrete forms as flawed or illusionary.
And, if all that’s generally true. And, we can easily see that it is. It would strongly indicate that Ninshubur and the Hexagram are so old, they come from a time when having a really awesome tent represented the height of human attainment.
From this, The Winter Triangle becomes the origin of the triangle that’s in “daleth”, “delta”, and the letter “D”. Betelgeuse becomes the origin of the Mesopotamian “Eye in The Sky” and Sirius , ultimately shifts, in Egyptian Culture to help construct the Eye of Horus.
Winter Hexagon
The Semitic and Arab Cube of Space or Celestial Kaaba.
Egypt’s version
A version favored by Elam, India, Tibet, Phoenicia, and Crete.
China and (sorta) Greece’s version.
As far as the Primordial Tradition is concerned, this is the most important asterism ever. I personally think it’s the most important anthropomorphic artifact of all times. But, my people are prone to exaggeration. So, I don’t want to test credulity.
Still…
This is a summary of all terms used thus far. Here I’d complain about Thelema, if I were still into that type of complaining. Make of it what you will. But, aside from the outer triangles, which were used, really, this is just some shit I made up.
An Experiment: Go outside tonight, look at the night sky, and see all this stuff for yourself. It's the right time of year for it.
-A Giant Digression-
[Spoiler (click to open)]
Also, you might also be wondering, if this is the case, then just how the fuck does the Hexagram get associated with Saturn (and Abrahamic monotheism) anyway? Well, it’s mainly all a bunch of begets.
In the Ur-Pantheon, the story of Zeus (Jupiter) killing the Titans finalizes with the tale of Marduk (Jupiter). And, Marduk defeats the Hordes of Tiamat, who are named “Unskilled Labor” with a magical “ultra-weapon” called “Concentration.” (Really. That is the plain facts as they are written in stone.) While there probably was never an actual God named Marduk, I think we can all agree that “Focus and Concentration” are the literal superior technological antidotes to “Unskilled Labor”.
But, this story is a later version of an earlier story with Ninurta (Saturn). And, that story is a later version of the same tale told with in Enki (Mercury), which is a later version of the story first told with Inanna (Venus), which is itself a later version of the story of Ninshubur (Orion).
And, that makes sense because Ninshubur is our first Merlin/Cronos figure. And, her technological gifts are domesticated dogs, archery, and proto-time management. Meanwhile, Marduk’s end game gifts are the missile sling, the domesticated cat, and the first universal institutional calendar (ie The Zodiac) as we know it today. All of which come after irrigation, urbanization, and mono-cropping (Enki). And, they come after literacy, farming, advanced trade networks, and institutional warfare (Inanna). And, they come after the copper mace, institutional slavery, mass manufacture, total war, and a recognizable - to us - version of fermented beer (Ninurta).
By Ninurta’s story, everyone generally agrees that Ninshubur has already become Nabu. In fact, an academic case has been made that Ninurta is actually a direct erasure of Ninshubur. (More on that below.) While not at all fringe, this perspective doesn’t currently have high consensus. So, I’m not going with it. Currently, it is generally understood that her messenger-guardian form is now as Ninurta’s magical talking mace that’s named “Shuar” or “Shubur.”
The Copper Age mace is a significant technological development over the basic club. It was viewed as a magical weapon. General access to metal smelting and the mass production of this type of mace was what enabled the destruction of most major institutions in the “Bronze Age Collapse.” General access to this sort of mace, the missile sling, and metal bullets were the weapons that destroyed the totalizing military advantage of the spoked wheeled chariot and archery. So these weapons are literally what give rise to the era of Total War.
Total War is shitty. But, it keeps the general population down, which saves the winners, at least, from starvation. And, in turn, Total War is what enables the dominance of a heretofore fundamentally new human mating and social strategy. You’ve undoubtedly heard of it. It’s the one more lovingly known as “the patriarchy.” Say what you will about the patriarchy, I certainly have. But, 3000 years ago that was some innovative shit. And, it’s arguably, what saved that section of humanity’s ass during things like the 200 year drought, various plagues, and other “acts of god.”
See, it turns out that all the He-man Woman hating bullshit is the new shit. The old shit looks far more like the gender-bending-polyamorist- pansexual-feminist humanist world that our so-called ultra-civilized progressives are currently trying to implement today. This is, in the larger scheme of things, actually a Traditionalist Conservative impulse. Realistically, it’s a whole lot closer to our “Initial Primordial” state. For what it’s worth, evolutionary biologists have determined that is no evolutionarily biological advantage for sexism or monogamy. There’s loads of evidence for wide-spread gender equality, along with gender and sexual plurality, throughout all corners of the ancient world. Everything we know about our previous selves, from genetics to found objects, tells us that this is the actual case.
It turns out, we’ve been living in the Nation of Gilead this whole entire time.
The sad part, of course, is that everyone’s vehement allegiance to “enlightened” or “traditional” points of view are far more determined by biological imperative (mating strategy) than they are by anyone’s idea of what constitutes a considered and thoughtful set of personal beliefs. But, in this world, it doesn’t matter why you’re right. It mostly just matters that you get on the currently winning team.
Anyway, what we call patriarchy really only goes back to the Bronze Age Collapse and not a whole lot further. And, what’s more, outside the bounds of the Imperial Cults, there’s no evidence that it has ever actually been a universal phenomenon. This shocked me when I first learned about. Because, for years, I had, despite searching for it, found absolutely no evidence that any other form of social organization had ever dominated. But, it turns out that our view of the past largely depends on whose lens you’re using to view it from. Also, It turns out that destroying evidences, lying, and making shit up is not a new human phenomena. Them ancients were a bunch of lying antiquities destroying propagandists too. That’s just how we’ve always rolled.
You can see evidence of it in Ninurta’s name. Nin- means lady. Every time. Whenever you’re looking at this ancient names, and you see “nin” or “in”, assigned to a male gender, you’re looking at a goddess or a set of goddesses (as in Ninurta’s case) that has been combined and folded into a newer male identity. Occasionally, you’ll see gender matching for various types of companions. But, overall, those are instances of transition where the power of the deity, hero, or demi-god has not yet been passed along to the men.
All told, as members of high culture, we have all been brainwashed, over a couple of thousand years, by ancient propaganda that we’ve called “Tradition” and “self-evident truths” or “invariable conditions”. When you follow the genetic evidence, it becomes apparent that our current “truth to power equality moment” is simply taking us back to an earlier biological mode. It’s not taking us beyond our beginnings. Nor is it taking us beyond our biology. We aren’t even doing anything especially new. The cultural evidence that we have, from all over the world, clearly indicates that we have, at one time or another, institutionalized and fetishized most forms of sex and practically any social configuration one can reasonably imagine.
The evidence also tells us that no empire has ever been a monoculture. Every proper empire that has ever existed has always held within it a plurality of human conditions, modes of being, sexualities, and beliefs. The idea that there has ever been a dominant Imperial narrative that was also the only existing narrative is simply a myth and lie. That has just never been the case.
What we appear to be doing right now is setting our species up for long term stability.(ie The Myth of the Thousand year Reich and similar junk like that) The thing is that wholly patriarchal cultures are instable as fuck. They do not last as continuous institutions. They are invariably revolutionary and are at best contiguous regimes. And, if we’re going to have a real global dominion, that goes beyond the stars, and that lasts for a really long time, we are going to have to switch to a more flexible polyandrous mating strategy. Given, our history, that’s just how we seem to roll.
Ultimately, the real somatic wisdom of our current age is that, despite thinking that we do, none of us have any real conscious control over any of this. Also, this is not in any way a fringe narrative. If you talk to futurists, sociologists, and evolutionary biologists, they will tell that, to the degree that we can predict this stuff, this is pretty much what’s going on. I find all that incredibly interesting and supremely creepy.
Anyway, it’s during Ninurta’s turn at the wheel that we get the symbolism of the Saturnalia Earth Cube. The fact that the planet Saturn has a giant hexagon on its pole is just another very creepy coincidence. However, this hasn’t stopped billions of people from making a big ole deal out of it anyway.
Ninurta and the Bronze Age Collapse are interesting figures that are totally worth discussing in greater detail. That’s an epic set of stories all of their own. Ladies, I promise we will do that at some other time. Just not today.
However, If you find that you simply can’t wait for the eternity it takes me to post, here is a fact based hour and a half that attempts to outline the second half of that drama.
All this might seem really arbitrary. And, one supposes that in some sense it is. Other than stellar brightness, the degree of similarity in asterisms largely depends on sidereal observation and cultural contact. Additionally, you can literally make triangles out of any three points. On the surface, the post-modernists seem right; this stuff could be based off of anything.
But, really, that is not the case.
Almost every single source culture sees these specific triangles and shapes. And, really, you can create a credible argument that this is simply because high civilization first developed in the Northern Hemisphere. You could suggest that it would be markedly different had culture first developed in the Southern Hemisphere. Many people have made a case for some sort of essentialist “a-historicity” on that basis.
But, the problem with that is the fact of the Olmec and the Norte Chico cultures. You see they both arose from the Southern hemisphere. And, when you examine their math, it turns out that they do roughly the same shit as everyone else. So, you’re stuck with the problem of just why the heck things are like that. You can answer that by suggesting the South American societies somehow got their basic knowledge system through diffusion and trade, like everyone else. (ie the kinda racist Honky-Khmetic-Indris Valley-Space-Colony hypothesis) Or, you can posit that we, as humans, must have a biological “will to power” that is active regardless of whether or not we are consciously aware of it. (Unskilled Labor and bicameralism)
Either of these solutions put you squarely in the land of Jupiter (tradition) or Saturn (somatic boundaries). This dichotomy strongly suggests that, irrespective of how you might otherwise choose to solve this issue, post-modernism is fundamentally mistaken. The symbols all mean something and none of this stuff is all that arbitrary.
As seen above, most solutions that include Jupiter are pretty darn wacky. That doesn’t make them untrue. There are loads of crazy things, done for silly reasons, which have actually occurred. Most of those things have seemed perfectly credible (even reasonable) at one time or another. A lot of that general wackiness is some pretty good stuff.
Still, with few exceptions, much of what we call “Tradition” has an essential reality that dissolves once you pierce the veil of “History” and examine things with and eye towards “Evidence” and “Consistency.” Currently, we just don’t have the most magnificent evidence chain for Jupiter. That’s why we, in the west, had the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution. It’s why living in a secular open society is currently seen as optimal. And, it’s why we ever bothered with Post-Modernist examinations in the first place.
Really, I would argue that this was ultimately a very fruitful and necessary step. But, there has also been a giant wad of bullshit produced from that point of view. And, the facts are that we now actually do know better. So, it’s a bardo that I think we should all abandon as soon as humanly possible.
But, with Saturn, it’s different.
With Saturn, the reason we make these shapes and signals is due to biological imperative. With Saturn the answer for “why” is because we have a hexagonal lattice, made of grid, boundary, and place cells, sitting inside our heads. And, that means that nearly all human cultural activity can be examined and reduced to a game of anthropomorphic matching between the outside world and the imaginary world that is biologically projected from inside of our heads. (!)
We could have suspected as much seeing as the Real vs. Ideal is an age old religious-philosophical conundrum.
In fact, all the animals we’ve ever tested have grid and place cells that function just like this too. And, this is just the first layer. There are at least 3-4 feedback representational systems happening at the same time. Thankfully, though, all of this works very similarly to 4-dimensional orthographic projections. And, lucky for us, we all have some real world practice with that. (I digress)
The place cells, which are made of pyramid cells (so called because they are shaped like pyramids) are organized in a generalized slew. And, they fire off at a particular rate based on the position of your head. (As in what direction you’re facing, where your head is in relationship to the ground, if you’ve tilted your head etc.) Like so:
The grid cells then activate and form spontaneous modules that let your body interpret where stuff in the “outside” world is.
So let’s say you had a goal. Not a big one. Just like the basic desire to walk from one end of the room to another. This is a basic diagram what’s going on. More or less, you keep the “goal” in mind, while the rest of you automatically tracks your current position. Makes sense, right?
Except that all happens several hundred times a second over multiple modules of cells.
The firing vectors are modular to the cells. And, they scale to the size of whatever “space” your body registers as “being an actual thing” They do not all fire at once. Otherwise, we suspect, you wouldn’t be able to parse “reality” very well.
These cells control core aspects of your memory and spatial awareness. Our entire perception of reality and our ability to navigate reality has evolved to depend on this. And, so has what we choose to anthropomorphize with our imagination The patterns, that this feature of consciousness generates, are actually what causes us to “like” all the basic shapes and patterns that we happen to like. This is why, even though we could theoretically choose anything, we always seem to select certain options.
The smallest modular unit of these matrices is a triangle.
It’s why we find dissymmetry unattractive. It’s why memory palaces are so effective. And, it’s why we have had any number of somewhat unsatisfactory solutions to most of Zeno’s paradoxes for the last couple of thousand years.
This system satisfactorily solves most of Zeno’s paradoxes in one fail swoop. Unfortunately, it does so by saying “Bitch, you only think shit works like that because I have been bullshit lying to you, this whole entire time.”
(!)
Below is a chart of how your brain attempts to parse external information (ie outside world) inside of this system.
But, that’s just one aspect of the system. There are four currently known spatial modes and they all work together to fully form the physical aspects of our basic perception of reality. We do not fully understand how they all work together. (We are just working with perspective “B” here) Here’s what the others look like.
When you take psychedelics, have the right sort of head injury, or are into viewing optical illusions, your brain gets confused and fires off in the ‘wrong” areas. It then attempts to compensate for you. It does this by either editing out information or by forcing you to see “everything in everything.”
For Example, An Experiment:
There are 12 dots. But, you can only see 3-4 of them at a time. You can train yourself to see more than that. But, your basic perception will initially be partial.
See, what’s happening, when you look at that, is that you’re having a low level hallucination. And, that’s occurring because your brain doesn’t know how to scale all the information on the grid. It’s just getting mixed signals.
Grid cell orientation is determined by the cardinal access points of your environment. So, in this instance, part of you is saying that you’re in a space that the rest of you says doesn’t exist. And, to compensate, your brain is editing your reality and only allowing you to see a little bit of it at once.
But, it gets worse.
Moser from his 2014 nobel prize talk:
"7.5 degrees is the offset that minimises symmetry between the grid pattern and the axes of the environment; it is the orientation that causes maximal dissimilarity between patterns along the two wall axes In contrast, at 0 and 15 degrees, the box and the grid have common axes, and the grid pattern would look similar along some of the wall pairs. It might be then, that the offset is developed and maintained by the fact that it causes maximal disambiguation of activity patterns across similar regions of the environment."
Not for nothing, but it turns out that the number 7 is hard to work with, in arithmetic and casual mathematics because the number 7 is physiologically hard to work with. The ancients thought that anything that difficult to work with must be important and holy. And, they were right. And, that is why Chiron is not a planet and why the lunar nodes have never really caught on.
That whole setup is the “because” for the “whys” of ancient architecture, base 60 mathematics, all the astronomical anthropomorphism, and our universal love for certain ratios. It even splits the difference between our love of an octave and our universal obsession with the number seven. The logistics of our geometrical positioning system of space and place, pretty neatly gives us the answers for the symbolic structure of everything.
(God Bless St. Marshall Mcluhan)
I must admit, this is a pretty dazzling development.
But, also, that has also got to be the biggest bit of bullshit fuckery that I’ve ever personally heard of. This right here means that not only is “The map not the territory” but that, in fact, you’ve never ever actually been cognizant of the territory. That “knowing the territory” is collectively a biological impossibility.
Not just for you. But, for everyone who has a brain. It is highly probable that even our future alien overlords will find themselves similarly incapable of knowing just what the fuck is going on. In fact, if you at any point are experiencing true situational awareness, it’s likely that something has gone horribly wrong (or you're a god-dammed deviant). By definition, that would have to be the case. To that end, I’m not sure whether this actually solves a particularly giant “reality plot hole” or if it just exacerbates it.
One implication seems to be that the vast bulk of human expression is pretty much just a bunch of narcissistic self-referential artifacts that are generated by and for the positional system that exists inside of us. Another is that almost everything we “know” can be reduced to a series of taxonomies that can then fundamentally be summarized as nothing more than a bunch of maps of maps.The third implication, loved by none but the super kooky, is that the entire world is, at every level, a product of our imagination. That’s massively unsettling, I agree. But, according to our best known facts, it also appears to be the actual brass tacks.
Obviously, all the above means that the world, as we know it, is made of magic. Just color me delighted.
It must be. Just go look up anyone's definition of the word "magic". It fits. We are creatures with 100%-wall-to-wall-hallucinations baked into our very crumpet of being. And, we have somehow managed to hoof it to outer-motherfucking-space. We did that by projecting our imaginary mind powers onto a world that is physically impossible for us to have any accurate perception of whatsoever. If you don't find to be totally supernatural, then, bless you're heart, you must not understand what that word actually means.
The impulse here is going to be to say “Oh, well it’s a good enough compensation system. You are overreacting. That’s no big deal. We have plenty of good information about what’s really happening, after all we Science!”
But, you’d be wrong.
[Spoiler (click to open)]
It’s really arguable how much we really even Science! in the first place. In the year of our lord 2017, we still don’t know what light is. We don’t know what sound is. And, we don’t really know what matter actually is. Most of what we call “Science” is really just philosophical problem solving and engineering.
What you have at the origin of all our Modern Science, really, is 300 years (at the very most) of a bunch of educated middle class agents, who were all mostly some form of Rosicrucian or Theosophist, throwing a bunch of shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. None of that is even remotely an exaggeration. In fact, the only thing that sentence undersells is exactly how much of that activity can be reasonably categorized as a form of “White Male Corporate Oppression.” But, I think we all generally agree that it was quite a lot.
Anyway, as this pastime became increasingly secularized, the overall value of what sticks, has been largely determined by practical applications and money. But, see, “Money and Applications” are more appropriately titled under the heading of engineering. Scientists, ideally, work from theories and are generally unconcerned with failure. But, engineers, on the other hand, thrive off of skirting the margins of failure and their whole reason for being is working out solutions.
That’s not bad; it’s just a completely different thing.
There is no unified theory of physics or mathematics. In fact, there has never been a working rationalization of either field. (Same with chemistry, biology, and medicine) That’s a core reason why every STEM field, with the exception of computer science, is having a “Crisis of Replication.”
What most people work from is a set of ideas and principles that have been codified as Popper’s Philosophy of Science. This is good stuff. But, it’s filled with innumerable reality plot-holes. (See Bertrand Russell). Loads of other people have noticed this too. And, so loads of competing ideas have been presented, ideas such as Logical Positivism. Logical Positivism is actually what most people generally think it means To Science! But, outside of the 8th grade, Logical Positivism is not used in any real scientific context. You see Logical Positivism is also a paddywack of bullshit and half-baked ideas. These days Logical Positivism is considered ridiculous fringe shit.
There’s legitimately more real world evidence for the Power of Positive Thinking and a lot other New Age junk than there is for Logical Positivism. With the Magical Thinking-New Age stuff, you can at least hide under the umbrellas of “Psychology” and “Tradition”. There’s legitimate evidence that Psychic Phenomena is real. On the other hand, Logical Positivism leaves your ass hanging in the breeze the moment things get more complex than admiring what a keen system The Scientific Method has turned out to be.
The simple fact is that despite all our good machines, all our marvels, and, all advancements, we really don’t really know what the fuck is going. And, we have no explanation for the phenomena of existence as it naively exists. More than that, throughout the ages, we have, for one reason or another, systematically dis-incentivized actually finding out. This is not a conspiracy. It’s just a mass intersection of human stupidity, limitation, and utilitarianism.
Also, we used to have God to lampshade the lot of it for us. But, these days, for most of us, God is dead or, at least, incredibly quiet. So, now we are just left with a bunch of loose ends and giant reality plot holes that, most of the time, we try not to think very hard about.
Thinking about it is uncomfy.
Every decent scientist and mathematician knows this. There’s this idea that eventually Theoretical Physicists will develop a Unified Theory that actually works. The exact moment this happens, The All will become clear. The Greatest Mystery Ever-Ever will be solved. Everyone will then proceed to hang all their shit from that and we will all live happily ever after. Well, we will live at least as happily as Science! has calculated as being probabilistically permissible.
That all sounds like a bunch of monotheistic messianic bullshit, if you ask me.
I love my stories. And, that particular story is The Tale of Rock Candy Mountain. And, unless it involves heavy opiates, in almost every instance, The Tale Rock Candy Mountain winds up being a lame fuckaround. More or less, if you find Heaven a hard concept to buy into, you should find the idea of a working “Quantum Unified Field Theory” just as suspect.
Nobody fully understands Quantum Mechanics. That’s the truth. Anyone claiming a complete understanding of Quantum Physics is full of shit; especially if they aren’t an actual theoretical physicist. Most Theoretical Physicists strongly agree with me here. But, some will argue that “Hey! At least we understand the math”. They are dealing with this problem at a much higher order. So, we can probably just trust them on this. After all, it is their field of expertize.
But, in case, you need further explanation or just like to read these rants:
[Spoiler (click to open)]
-A quick note on Quantum vs Classical Physics-
You can conceptualize the difference between QM and CM by saying “if Classical Physics limits the calculation of Pi to 3.14, then Quantum Mechanics, via different but intimately related math, concludes that Pi is infinite and then proceeds to calculate that infinity to 70,000 places.” And, everything that happens after “4” is where the salient differences arise.
(This is but a metaphor. In reality, Pi is an uncontroversial mathematical concept and both fields understand Pi with similar precision)
--
There are more than 30 branches of physics, operating across 4-8 broad domains. The beauty of quantum mechanics is that, in large part, it usefully ties together and informs them all. Without quantum theory, so many of the things we love and have learned to depend on do not exist. Without it, there’s no internet, no personal computers, no satellites, no wifi, no such thing as nuclear medicine, and no project genome. The transistor, which is the bedrock of all modern electronics, was invented based on quantum theory. It helps explains stuff that simple observation and classical mechanics can not. It really is one of the most useful and marvelous philosophies we have ever given birth to.
There innumerable diabolical parts to Quantum Physics. (more on that later)
Here are but two:
First, there are around 18 different categories of theory for Quantum Mechanics. None of them are wholly correct and many of them are mutually exclusive. So, you’re looking at a set of “whys” that don’t agree, that will yield different probabilistic results based on whichever theoretical approach you use. But, depending on the applied context, most of them work “well enough” to better explain “What make shit happen?”
Second, results in quantum theory are based on probability. In classical physics, generally speaking, you either get a result or you don’t; same with experiential reality. But, in the quantum realm, you achieve a probable result. For instance, in any given field, photon can move in one of six basic ways and, in any given context, we can generalize the probability of where it’s going to go. Most of the time, you can predict the outcome with great precision and the outcome aligns with what we call “reality”; just not always. This is fine.
The problem is that probability theory is conceptually out of phase with determinism. And, almost everything credible about quantum mechanics says that the universe is deterministic. To address that, we have concepts like the “many worlds” theory. But, the problem with concepts like “many worlds theory” is that it sets up a loop of infinite recursion, that itself disagrees with rest of quantum cosmology. ie. To date, you can’t actually “Many Worlds” your ass back to the Big Bang. You need extra math for that. And, currently, the “extra math” involved is considered “janky as fuck”.
(These are all technical terms, of course.)
It’s not just you. That does sound like a bunch of bullshit. And, that is a bonafide “reality plot-hole”. On the upside, all the work in this area wholly supports the ancient concept that we exist in some form of Monad. Like, Monad qua Monad circa . (This is not like, but is related to, how people try to push the modern concept of the atom into the ancient concept of the atom.) Here, you advance the math, exchange “Holy Fire” with “electromagnetism,” and you’re pretty much good to go.
The religious among us find this fact a great comfort. They suggest that all the quantum stuff that’s like this “proves” the existence of god. And, you gotta know, there really is an awful lot of “quantum stuff” that’s like this. But, it might eventually occur to people that, if the kooks invented this science, then maybe this science is actually predicated on giving us a ton of kook explanations. That perhaps “the math” isn’t as ideologically neutral as one might naively suspect. That perhaps Alfred Korzybski makes an excellent point.
Quantum Mechanics is simply another child of Ninshubur. Our most advanced theories of everything are simply outgrowths of our ole timey imperial cults. You can show that with “Jupiter” and list the truckload of people who have turned their consciousness into Imperial Bedrooms. And, with Jupiter, you can list the chain of intellectual transmission going back to the “most ancient of days.” And, you can, with “Saturn”, and show that all our “stuff” is a geometrical propagation of forms that stem from our biological system of space and place. With Saturn, we learn that everything has a biological governor that directs the flow of our thinking and limits our base capacity of perception. With Saturn, every form of distinction is literally generated from mind. In other words, based on our somatic limits, reality is actually a product of your projected imagination. Everything is magical thinking.
(See part 2 for more)
An Experiment:
Find a plausible set of answers to the concepts included in the following question, that does not, at any fundamental point, include mentioning that these concepts are all products of human imagination. “What are logic, reason, measurement, numbers, and words? “
Look it, I’m pessimistic about your chances for success with this one. But, trust, I’m over here rooting for you anyway.
“We are made of magic” just happens to be the best evidence based theory currently available. And, I get it. The idea that reality is magic really is some “God of the gaps” garbage. But, in this story, it is not so much that the “God” lives in the ever decreasing gaps. It’s more that the gaps themselves are representative of the god. And, that's not so bad. Just like Achilles and the Turtle, that's a god you can actually work with for forever.
Just like this.
Everything we do is done with a whole lot of help from Ninshubur. Unfortunately, man’s best friend; Ninshubur has only a passing acquaintance with The Truth. But, like all dogs, she is incredibly useful, loyal, and likeable. She’s the best companion we’ve ever had. We literally couldn’t get rid of her if we tried; she’s the Heaven inside us.
We should not exist, yet, here we are dipping our toes in outer space, making baby robots, and learning how to live forever. (We are fantastico) Our relative success, as a species, posits an altogether bigger mystery and presents a more miraculous reality than any Eye of Fatima or garden variety virgin birth ever presented. (Really, if our messiahs of record had all been female, we’d have solved these sorts of mysteries with parthenogenesis ages ago anyway.) It is merely a creepy literary coincidence that the goddess, who starts all of this, happens to be a Holy Virgin, with an all seeing eye, who contains a perpetually propagating infinity inside of herself.
Lucky for us, having a complete understanding of this stuff is irrelevant for today’s purposes. But, it does mean that, from womb to tomb, we have no actual idea just what the hell is happening. This epistle isn't trying to change that. This is merely an ode to the little gnostic piece of business that has been riding in your head this whole entire time.