A

MAZE

IN

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THE

MAGICALALPHABET

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA

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Page 22

LIGHT AND LIFE

Lars Olof Bjorn 1976

Page 197

"By writing the 26 letters of the alphabet in a certain order one may put down almost any message (this book 'is written with the same letters' as the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Winnie the Pooh, only the order of the letters differs). In the same way Nature is able to convey with her language how a cell and a whole organism is to be constructed and how it is to function. Nature has succeeded better than we humans; for the genetic code there is only one universal language which is the same in a man, a bean plant and a bacterium."

"BY WRITING THE 26 LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET IN A CERTAIN ORDER

ONE MAY PUT DOWN ALMOST ANY MESSAGE"

"BY WRITING THE 26 LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET IN A CERTAIN ORDER

ONE MAY PUT DOWN ALMOST ANY MESSAGE"

THIS IS THE SCENE OF THE SCENE UNSEEN

THE UNSEEN SEEN OF THE SCENE UNSEEN THIS IS THE SCENE

THE

FAR YONDER SCRIBE

AND OFT TIMES SHADOWED SUBSTANCES WATCHED IN FINE AMAZE

THE

ZED ALIZ ZED

IN

SWIFT REPEAT SCATTER STAR DUST AMONGST THE LETTERS OF THEIR PROGRESS

NUMBER

9

THE SEARCH FOR THE SIGMA CODE

Cecil Balmond 1998

Cycles and Patterns

Page 165

Patterns

"The essence of mathematics is to look for patterns.

Our minds seem to be organised to search for relationships and sequences. We look for hidden orders.

These intuitions seem to be more important than the facts themselves, for there is always the thrill at finding something, a pattern, it is a discovery - what was unknown is now revealed. Imagine looking up at the stars and finding the zodiac!

Searching out patterns is a pure delight.

Suddenly the counters fall into place and a connection is found, not necessarily a geometric one, but a relationship between numbers, pictures of the mind, that were not obvious before. There is that excitement of finding order in something that was otherwise hidden.

And there is the knowledge that a huge unseen world lurks behind the facades we see of the numbers themselves."

FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

A QUEST FOR THE BEGINNING AND THE END

Graham Hancock 1995

Chapter 32

Speaking to the Unborn

Page 285

"It is understandable that a huge range of myths from all over the ancient world should describe geological catastrophes in graphic detail. Mankind survived the horror of the last Ice Age, and the most plausible source for our enduring traditions of flooding and freezing, massive volcanism and devastating earthquakes is in the tumultuous upheavals unleashed during the great meltdown of 15,000 to 8000 BC. The final retreat of the ice sheets, and the consequent 300-400 foot rise in global sea levels, took place only a few thousand years before the beginning of the historical period. It is therefore not surprising that all our early civilizations should have retained vivid memories of the vast cataclysms that had terrified their forefathers.
Much harder to explain is the peculiar but distinctive way the myths of cataclysm seem to bear the intelligent imprint of a guiding hand.l Indeed the degree of convergence between such ancient stories is frequently remarkable enough to raise the suspicion that they must all have been 'written' by the same 'author'.
Could that author have had anything to do with the wondrous deity, or superhuman, spoken of in so many of the myths we have reviewed, who appears immediately after the world has been shattered by a horrifying geological catastrophe and brings comfort and the gifts of civilization to the shocked and demoralized survivors?
White and bearded, Osiris is the Egyptian manifestation of this / Page 286 / universal figure, and it may not be an accident that one of the first acts he is remembered for in myth is the abolition of cannibalism among the primitive inhabitants of the Nile Valley.2 Viracocha, in South America, was said to have begun his civilizing mission immediately after a great flood; Quetzalcoatl, the discoverer of maize, brought the benefits of crops, mathematics, astronomy and a refined culture to Mexico after the Fourth Sun had been overwhelmed by a destroying deluge.
Could these strange myths contain a record of encounters between scattered palaeolithic tribes which survived the last Ice Age and an as yet unidentified high civilization which passed through the same epoch?
And could the myths be attempts to communicate?

A message in the bottle of time"

'Of all the other stupendous inventions,' Galileo once remarked,

what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very distant either in time or place, speaking with those who are in the Indies, speaking to those who are not yet born, nor shall be this thousand or ten thousand years? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangements of two dozen little signs on paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of men.3

If the 'precessional message' identified by scholars like Santillana, von Dechend and Jane Sellers is indeed a deliberate attempt at communication by some lost civilization of antiquity, how come it wasn't just written down and left for us to find? Wouldn't that have been easier than encoding it in myths? Perhaps.
Nevertheless, suppose that whatever the message was written on got destroyed or worn away after many thousands of years? Or suppose that the language in which it was inscribed was later forgotten utterly (like the enigmatic Indus Valley script, which has been studied closely for more than half a century but has so far resisted all attempts at decoding)? It must be obvious that in such circumstances a written / Page 287 / legacy to the future would be of no value at all, because nobody would be able to make sense of it.
What one would look for, therefore, would be a universal language, the kind of language that would be comprehensible to any technologically advanced society in any epoch, even a thousand or ten thousand years into the future. Such languages are few and far between, but mathematics is one of them - and the city of Teotihuacan may be the calling-card of a lost civilization written in the eternal language of mathematics.
Geodetic data, related to the exact positioning of fixed geographical points and to the shape and size of the earth, would also remain valid and recognizable for tens of thousands of years, and might be most conveniently expressed by means of cartography (or in the construction of giant geodetic monuments like the Great Pyramid of Egypt, as we shall see).
Another 'constant' in our solar system is the language of time: the great but regular intervals of time calibrated by the inch-worm creep of precessional motion. Now, or ten thousand years in the future, a message that prints out numbers like 72 or 2160 or 4320 or 25,920 should be instantly intelligible to any civilization that has evolved a modest talent for mathematics and the ability to detect and measure the almost imperceptible reverse wobble that the sun appears to make along the ecliptic against the background of the fixed stars..."

"What one would look for, therefore, would be a universal language, the kind of language that would be comprehensible to any technologically advanced society in any epoch, even a thousand or ten thousand years into the future. Such languages are few and far between, but mathematics is one of them"

"WRITTEN IN THE ETERNAL LANGUAGE OF MATHEMATICS"

But one last word about mankind's romance with number coincidences.The antagonist in John Updike's novel, Roger's Version, is a computer hacker, who, convinced.,that scientific evidence of God's existence is accumulating, endeavours to prove it by feeding -all the available scientific information. into a comuter. In his search for God 'breaking, through', he has become fascinated by certain numbers that have continually been cropping up. He explains them excitedly as 'the terms of Creation':

"...after a while I noticed that all over the sheet there seemed to hit these twenty-fours Jumping out at me. Two four; two,four.Planck time, for instance, divided by the radiation constant yields a figure near eight times ten again to the negative twenty-fourth, and the permittivity of free space, or electric constant, into the Bohr radiusekla almost exactly six times ten to the negative twenty-fourth. On positive side, the electromagnetic line-structure constant times Hubble radius - that is, the size of the universe as we now perceive it gives us something quite close to ten to the twenty-fourth, and the strong-force constant times the charge on the proton produces two point four times ten to the negative eighteenth, for another I began to circle twenty-four wherever it appeared on the Printout here' - he held it up. his piece of striped and striped wallpaper, decorated / Page 209 / with a number of scarlet circles - 'you can see it's more than random.'19
This inhabitant of the twentieth century is convinced that the striking occurrences of 2 and 4 reveal the sacred numbers by which God is speaking to us.

So much for any scorn directed to ancient man's fascination with number coincidences. That fascination is alive and well, Just a bit more incomprehensible"

OF TIME AND STARS

Arthur C. Clarke 1972

FOREWORD

"'Into the Comet' and 'The Nine Billion Names of God' both involve computers and the troubles they may cause us. While writing this preface, I had occasion to call upon my own HP 9100A computer, Hal Junior, to answer an interesting question. Looking at my records, I find that I have now written just about one hundred short stories. This volume contains eighteen of them: therefore, how many possible 18-story collections will I be able to put together? The answer ­as I am sure will be instantly obvious to you - is 100 x 99. . . x 84 x 83 divided by 18 x 17 x 16 ... x .2 x 1. This is an impressive number - Hal Junior tells me that it is approximately 20,772,733,124,605,000,000.

Page 15

The Nine Billion Names of God

'This is a slightly unusual request,' said Dr Wagner, with what he hoped was commendable restraint. 'As far as I know, it's the first time anyone's been asked to supply a Tibetan monastery with an Automatic Sequence Computer. I don't wish to be inquisitive, but I should hardly have thought that your - ah - establishment had much use for such a machine. Could you explain just what you intend to do with it?'
'Gladly,' replied the lama, readjusting his silk robes and carefully putting away the slide rule he had been using far currency conversions. 'Your Mark V Computer can carry out any routine mathematical operation involving up to ten digits. However, for our work we are interested in letters, not numbers. As we wish you to modify the output circuits, the machine will be printing words, not columns of figures.'
'I don't quite understand. . .'
'This is a project on which we have been working for the last three centuries - since the lamasery was founded, in fact. It is somewhat alien to your way of thought, so I hope you will listen with an open mind while I explain it.'
'Naturally.'
'It is really quite simple. We have been compiling a list which shall contain all the possible names of God.'
'I beg your pardon?'

Page16

'We have reason to believe,' continued the lama imperturbably, 'that all such names can be written with not more than nine letters in an alphabet we have devised.'
'And you have been doing this for three centuries?'
'Yes: we expected it would take us about fifteen thousand years to complete the task.'
'Oh,' Dr Wagner looked a little dazed. 'Now I see why you wanted to hire one of our machines. But what exactly is the purpose of this project?'
The lama hesitated for a fraction of a second, and Wagner wondered if he had offended him. If so, there was no trace of annoyance in the reply.
'Call it ritual, if you like, but it's a fundamental part of our belief. All the many names of the Supreme Being - God Jehova, Allah, and so on - they are only man-made labels. There is a philosophical problem of some difficulty here, which I do not propose to discuss, but somewhere among all the possible combinations of letters that can occur are what one may call the real names of God. By systematic permutation of letters, we have been trying to list them all.'
'I see. You've been starting at AAAAAAA . . . and working up to ZZZZZZZZ . . .'
'Exactly - though we use a special alphabet of our own. Modifying the electromatic typewriters to deal with this is, of course, trivial. A rather more interesting problem is that of devising suitable circuits to eliminate ridiculous combinations. For example, no letter must occur more than three times in succession.'
,'Three? Surely you mean two.'
'Three is correct: I am afraid it would take too long to explain why, even if you understood our language.' "

BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE.

An Indian History of the American West.

Dee Brown.

First Published in Vintage 1991.

"I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from the high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the blood and mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A peoples dream died there. It was a beautiful dream…the nations hoop is broken and scattered. There is no centre any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.

Black Elk

www.archives.govThe Declaration of Independence: A Transcription

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.-That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.-Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

ADVENT 849 ADVENT