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HAMLET'S MILL AN ESSAY INVESTIGATING THE ORIGINS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE AND ITS TRANSMISSION THROUGH MYTH Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend 1969 Intoduction Page 1 (number omitted) "The unbreakable fetters which bound down the Great Wolf Fenrir had been cunningly forged by Loki from these: the footfall of a cat, the roots of a rock, the beard of a woman, the breath of a fish, the spittle of a bird. The Edda Toute vue des choses qui n'est pas estrange est fausse. VALERY
The figure of Hamlet as a favorable starting point came by chance. Many other avenues offered themselves, rich in strange symbols and beckoning with great images, but the choice went to Hamlet because he led the mind on a truly inductive quest through a familiar landscape-and one which has the merit of its literary setting. Here is a character deeply present to our awareness, in whom ambiguities and uncertainties, tormented self-questioning and dispassionate insight give a presentiment of the modern mind. His personal drama was that he had to be a hero, but still try to avoid the role Destiny assigned him. His lucid intellect remained above the conflict of motives-in other words, his was and is a truly con/ Page 2 / temporary consciousness. And yet this character whom the poet made one of us, the first unhappy intellectual, concealed a past as a legendary being, his features predetermined, preshaped by longstanding myth. There was a numinous aura around him, and many clues led up to him. But it was a surprise to find behind the mask an ancient and all-embracing cosmic power-the original master of the dreamed-of first age of the world. This essay will follow the figure farther and farther afield, from the Northland to Rome, from there to Finland, Iran, and India; he will appear again unmistakably in Polynesian legend. Many other Dominations and Powers will materialize to frame him within the proper order. Amlodhi was identified, in the crude and vivid imagery of the Norse, by the ownership of a fabled mill which, in his own time, ground out peace and plenty. Later, in decaying times, it ground out salt; and now finally, having landed at the bottom of the sea, it is grinding rock and sand, creating a vast whirlpool, the Maelstrom (i.e., the grinding stream, from the verb mala, "to grind"), which is supposed to be a way to the land of the dead. This imagery stands, as the evidence develops, for an astronomical process, the secular shifting of the sun through the signs of the zodiac which determines world-ages, each numbering thousands of years. Each age brings a World Era, a Twilight of the Gods. Great structures collapse; pillars topple which supported the great fabric; floods and cataclysms herald the shaping of a new world. Tradition will show that the measures of a new world had to be procured from the depths of the celestial ocean and tuned with the measures from above, dictated by the "Seven Sages," as they are often cryptically mentioned in India and elsewhere. They turn out to be the Seven Stars of Ursa, which are normative in all cosmological alignments on the starry sphere. These dominant stars of the Far North are peculiarly but systematically linked with those which are considered the operative powers of the cosmos, that is, the planets as they move in different placements and configurations along the zodiac. The ancient Pythagoreans, in their conventional language, called the two Bears the Hands of Rhea (the Lady of Turning Heaven), and called the planets the Hounds of Persephone, Queen of the Underworld. Far away to the south, the mysterious ship Argo with its Pilot star held the depths of the past; and the Galaxy was the Bridge out of Time. These notions appear to have been common doctrine in the age before history-all over the belt of high civilizations around our globe. They also seem to have been born of the great intellectual and technological revolution of the late Neolithic period. The intensity and richness, the coincidence of details, in this cumulative thought have led to the conclusion that it all had its origin in the Near East. It is evident that this indicates a diffusion of ideas to an extent hardly countenanced by current anthropology. But this science, although it has dug up a marvelous wealth of details, has been led by its modern evolutionary and psychological bent to forget about the main source of myth, which was astronomy -the Royal Science. This obliviousness is itself a recent turn of events-barely a century old. Today expert philologists tell us that Saturn and Jupiter are names of vague deities, subterranean or atmospheric, superimposed on the planets at a "late" period; they neatly sort out folk origins and "late" derivations, all unaware that planetary periods, sidereal and synodic, were known and rehearsed / Page 4 / in numerous ways by celebrations already traditional in archaic times. If a scholar has never known those periods even from elementary science, he is not in the best position to recognize them when they come up in his material. Ancient historians would have been aghast had they been told that obvious things were to become unnoticeable. Aristotle was proud to state it as known that the gods were originally stars, even if popular fantasy had later obscured this truth. Little as he believed in progress, he felt this much had been secured for the future. He could not guess that W. D. Ross, his modern editor, would condescendingly annotate: "This is historically untrue." Yet we know that Saturday and Sabbath had to do with Saturn, just as Wednesday and Mercredi had to do with Mercury. Such names are as old as time; as old, certainly, as the planetary heptagram of the Harranians. They go back far before Professor Ross' Greek philology. The inquiries of great and meticulous scholars such as Ideler, Lepsius, Chwolson, BoIl and, to go farther back, of Athanasius Kircher and Petavius, had they only been read carefully, and noted, would have taught several relevant lessons to the historians of culture, but interest shifted to other goals, as can be seen from current anthropology, which has built up its own idea of the "primitive" and what came after. One still reads in that most unscientific of records, the Bible, that God disposed all things by number, weight and measure; ancient Chinese texts say that "the calendar and the pitch pipes have such a close fit, that you could not slip a hair between them." People read it, and think nothing of it. Yet such hints might reveal a world of vast and firmly established complexity, infinitely different from ours. But the experts now are benighted by the current folk fantasy, which is the belief that they are beyond all this-critics without nonsense and extremely wise. In 1959 I wrote: But they are tantalizing fragments of a lost whole. They make one think of those "mist landscapes" of which Chinese painters are masters, which show here a rock, here a gable, there the tip of a tree, and leave the rest to imagination. Even when the code shall have yielded, when the techniques shall be known, we cannot expect to gauge the thought of those remote ancestors of ours, wrapped as it is in its symbols. Their words are no more heard again Through lapse of many ages. . . We think we have now broken part of that code. The thought behind these constructions of the high and far-off times is also lofty, even if its forms are strange. The theory about "how the world began" seems to involve the breaking asunder of a harmony, a kind of cosmogonic "original sin" whereby the circle of the ecliptic (with the zodiac) was tilted up at an angle with respect to the equator, and the cycles of change came into being. This is not to suggest that this archaic cosmology will show any great physical discoveries, although it required prodigious feats of concentration and computing. What it did was to mark out the unity of the universe, and of man's mind, reaching out to its farthest limits. Truly, man is doing the same today. Einstein said: "What is inconceivable about the universe, is that it should be at all conceivable." Man is not giving up. When he discovers remote galaxies by the million, and then those quasi-stellar radio sources billions of light-years away which confound his speculation, he is happy that he can reach out to those depths. But he pays a terrible price for his achievement. The science of astrophysics reaches out on a grander and grander scale without losing its footing. Man as man cannot do this. In the depths of space he loses himself and all notion of his significance. He is unable to fit himself into the concepts of today's astrophysics short of schizophrenia. Modern man is facing the nonconceivable. Archaic man, however, kept a firm grip on the conceivable by framing within his cosmos / Page 6 / an order of time and an eschatology that made sense to him and reserved a fate for his soul. Yet it was a prodigiously vast theory, with no concessions to merely human sentiments. It, too, dilated the mind beyond the bearable, although without destroying man's role in the cosmos. It was a ruthless metaphysics. Not a forgiving universe, not a world of mercy. That surely not. Inexorable as the stars in their courses, miserationis parcissimae, the Romans used to say. Yet it was a world somehow not unmindful of man, one in which there was an accepted place for everything, rightfully and not only statistically, where no sparrow could fall unnoted, and where even what was rejected through its own error would not go down to eternal perdition; for the order of Number and Time was a total order preserving all, of which all were members, gods and men and animals, trees and crystals and even absurd errant stars, all subject to law and measure. This is what Plato knew, who could still speak the language of archaic myth. He made myth consonant with his thought, as he built the first modern philosophy. We have trusted his clues as landmarks even on occasions when he professes to speak "not quite seriously." He gave us a first rule of thumb; he knew what he was talking about. Behind Plato there stands the imposing body of doctrine attributed to Pythagoras, some of its formulation uncouth, but rich with the prodigious content of early mathematics, pregnant with a science and a metaphysics that were to flower in Plato's time. From it come such words as "theorem," "theory," and "philosophy." This in its turn rests on what might be called a proto-Pythagorean phase, spread all over the East but with a focus in Susa. And then there was something else again, the stark numerical computing of BabyIon. From it all came that strange principle: "Things are numbers." Once having grasped a thread going back in time, then the test of later doctrines with their own historical developments lies in their congruence with tradition preserved intact even if half understood. For there are seeds which propagate themselves along the jetstream of time. Page 7 And universality is in itself a test when coupled with a firm design. When something found, say, in China turns up also in Babyionian astrological texts, then it must be assumed to be relevant, for it reveals a complex of uncommon images which nobody could claim had risen independently by spontaneous generation. Take the origin of music. Orpheus and his harrowing death may be a poetic creation born in more than one instance in diverse places. But when characters who do not play the lyre but blow pipes get themselves flayed alive for various absurd reasons, and their identical end is rehearsed on several continents, then we feel we have got hold of something, for such stories cannot be linked by internal sequence. And when the Pied Piper turns up both in the medieval German myth of Hamelin and in Mexico long before Columbus, and is linked in both places with certain attributes like the color red, it can hardly be a coincidence. Generally, there is little that finds its way into music by chance. Again, when one finds numbers like 108, or 9 x 13, reappearing under several multiples in the Vedas, in the temples of Angkor, in Babylon, in Heraclitus' dark utterances, and also in the Norse Valhalla, it is not accident. There is one way of checking signals thus scattered in early data, in lore, fables and sacred texts. What we have used for sources may seem strange and disparate, but the sifting was considered, and it had its reasons. Those reasons will be given later in the chapter on method. I might call it comparative morphology. The reservoir of myth and fable is great, but there are morphological "markers" for what is not mere storytelling of the kind that comes naturally. There is also wonderfully preserved archaic material in "secondary" primitives, like American Indians and West Africans. Then there are courtly stories and annals of dynasties which look like novels: the Feng Shen Yen I, the Japanese Nihongi, the Hawaiian Kumulipo. These are not merely fantasy-ridden fables. In hard and perilous ages, what information should a well-born man entrust to his eldest son? Lines of descent surely, but what else? The memory of an ancient nobility is the means of preserving the / Page 8 / arcana imperii, the arcana legis and the arcana mundi, just as it was in ancient Rome. This is the wisdom of a ruling class. The Polynesian chants taught in the severely restricted Whare-wananga were mostly astronomy. That is what a liberal education meant then. Sacred texts are another great source. In our age of print one is tempted to dismiss these as religious excursions into homiletics, but originally they represented a great concentration of attention on material which had been distilled for relevancy through a long period of time and which was considered worthy of being committed to memory generation after generation. The tradition of Celtic Druidism was delivered not only in songs, but also in tree-lore which was much like a code. And in the East, out of complicated games based on astronomy, there developed a kind of shorthand which became the alphabet. As we follow the clues-stars, numbers, colors, plants, forms, verse, music, structres-a huge framework of connections is revealed at many levels. One is inside an echoing manifold where everything responds and everything has a place and a time assigned to it. This is a true edifice, something like a mathematical matrix, a World-Image that fits the many levels, and all of it kept in order by strict measure. It is measure that provides the countercheck, for there is much that can be identified and redisposed from rules like the old Chinese saying about the pitch pipes and the calendar. When we speak of measures, it is always some form of Time that provides them, starting from two basic ones, the solar year and the octave, and going down from there in many periods and intervals, to actual weights and sizes. What modern man attempted in the merely conventional metric system has archaic precedents of great complexity. Down the centuries there comes an echo of Al-Biruni's wondering a thousand years ago, when that prince of scientists discovered that the Indians, by then miserable astronomers, calculated aspects and events by means of stars-and were not able to show him anyone star that he asked for. Stars had become items for them, as they were to become again for Leverrier and Adams, who never troubled to look at Neptune in their life although they had computed and discovered it in 1847. The Mayas and the Aztecs in their / Page 9 / unending calculations seem to have had similar attitudes. The connections were what counted. Ultimately so it was in the archaic universe, where all things were signs and signatures of each other, inscribed in the hologram, to be divined subtly. And Number dominated them all (appendix # I ). This ancient world moves a little closer if one recalls two great transitional figures who were simultaneously archaic and modern in their habits of thought. The first is Johannes Kepler, who was of the old order in his unremitting calculations and his passionate devotion to the dream of rediscovering the "Harmony of the Spheres." But he was a man of his own time, and also of ours, when this dream began to prefigure the polyphony that led up to Bach. In somewhat the same way, our strictly scientific world view has its counterpart in what John Hollander, the historian of music, has described as "The Untuning of the Sky." The second transitional figure is no less a man than Sir Isaac Newton, the very inceptor of the rigorously scientific view. There is no real paradox in mentioning Newton in this connection. John Maynard Keynes, who knew Newton as well as many of our time, said of him: Newton was not the first of the Age of Reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual world rather less than 10,000 years ago. . . Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher's treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements (and that is what gives the false suggestion of his being an experimental natural philosopher), but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation in Babylonia. He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty-just as he himself wrapt the discovery of the calculus in a cryptogram when he communicated with Leibniz. By pure thought, by concentration of mind, the riddle, he believed, would be revealed to the initiate.1 Page 10 Lord Keynes' appraisal, written ca. 1942, remains both unconventional and profound. He knew, we all know, that Newton failed. Newton was led astray by his dour sectarian preconceptions. But his undertaking was truly in the archaic spirit, as it begins to appear now after two centuries of scholarly search into many cultures of which he could have had no idea. To the few clues he found with rigorous method, a vast number have been added. Still, the wonder remains, the same that was expressed by his great predecessor Galileo: But of all other stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conccived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any othcr person, though very far distant either in time or place, speaking with those who are in the In dies, 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 arrangement of two dozcn little signs upon paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of man. 'Way back in the 6th century A.D., Gregoire de Tours was writing: "The mind has lost its cutting edge, we hardly understand the Ancicnts." So much more today, despite our wallowing in mathematics for the million and in sophisticated technology. Page 2 Note *. The indulgence of specialists is asked for the form of certain transliterations throughout the text; for example, Amlodhi instead of Amlodi, Grotte instead of Grotti, etc. (Ed.) Page 9 Note 1 1 "Newton the Man," in The Royal Society. Newton Tercentenary Celebrations (1947), p. 29.
HAMLET'S MILL AN ESSAY INVESTIGATING THE ORIGINS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE AND ITS TRANSMISSION THROUGH MYTH Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend 1969 Page 162 "Finally, there is one remarkable and disturbing coincidence from the same direction. It is known that in the final battle of the gods, the massed legions on the side of "order" are the dead warriors, the "Einherier" who once fell in combat on earth and who have been transferred by the Valkyries to reside with Odin in Valhalla-a theme much rehearsed in heroic poetry. On the last day, they issue forth to battle in martial array. Says the Grimnismal (23): "Five hundred gates and forty more-are in the mighty building of Walhalla-eight hundred 'Einherier' come out of each one gate-on the time they go out on defence against the Wolf."
Daily Mail, Friday, March 15,2019 ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS Compiled by Charles Legge QUESTION Is there a mnemonic to help you learn the periodic table? THOUGH many mnemonics have been devised for remembering the periodic table — there are 118 named elements and counting — a single mnemonic would be just as hard to learn as the names of the elements themselves. Schoolchildren are sometimes taught such mnemonics as: Happy Henry Likes Beer But Could Not Obtain Food. This gives the first ten elements: Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, Beryllium, Boron, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen and Fluorine. This approach of breaking it down into blocks has some utility. At college, we had one for the actinides, 15 elements at the heavy end of the table. They are radio-active and all but the earliest members have short half lives and are not found in nature, but are synthesised. They are Actinium, Thorium, Protactinium, Uranium, Neptunium, Plutonium, Americium, Curium, Berkelium, Californium, Einsteinium, Fermium, Mendelevium, Nobelium and Lawrencium. With characteristic student smut, this Phil Alexander, Farnborough, Hants. PROBABLY the closest to a mnemonic for learning the elements of the periodic table is a song by Tom Lehrer. Lehrer was a graduate and lecturer at many top U.S. universities including his alma mater, Harvard, and wrote many humorous songs, often parodying popular tunes. He set the names of the elements to the Major-General's song from The Pirates Of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan. It begins: 'There's antimony, arsenic; aluminum, selenium and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium...' And ends: and argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc and rhodium and chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin and sodhun. These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard, -sand there may be many others, but they haven't been discovered.' In the last line, `discovered' is pronounced in a Boston accent — discarvered', so that it rhymes with Harvard. David Albury, quizmaster, I WAS taught an amusing one for the lanthanides: 'Liverpool Corporation Passengers Need Padded Seats Especially Going To Dingle, However Even They Yell Loudly.' This relates to lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, neodymium, promethium, samarium, europium, gadolinium,terbium, dysprosium, holmium, erbium, thulium, ytterbium and lutetium. Ray Reeves, Windsor, Birks
METRO Tuesday, September 19, 2006 Front Page Headline "GLOBAL WARNING IS FAULT OF MAN"
METRO Tuesday, August 7, 2018 GLOBAL WARMING DOOMSDAY ALERT TEMPERATURE RISE OF 2C COULD TRIGGER HOTHOUSE EARTH by Domonic Yeatmen Page 1 'The wolves are in sight': HUMANITY faces doomsday within decades as climate change reaches a tipping point that triggers runaway global warming, scientists warn. It may be difficult to stop the dominoes tumbling' Carbon dioxide is at its highest for 800,000 years, a US study released last year found. The researchers warn deeper cuts to emissions than those in the Paris climate change agreement are needed along with technology and methods to remove existing CO2
Kaprekar number In mathematics, a non-negative integer is called a "Kaprekar number" for a given base if the representation of its square in that base can be split into two parts that add up to the original number, with the proviso that the part formed from the low-order digits of the square must be non-zero—although it is allowed to include leading zeroes. For instance, 45 is a Kaprekar number, because 452 = 2025 and 20 + 25 = 45. The number 1 is Kaprekar in every base, because 12 = 01 in any base, and 0 + 1 = 1. Kaprekar numbers are named after D. R. Kaprekar.
NUMBER 234559 NUMBER
NUMBERS 123455 NUMBERS
THE LANGUAGE OF NUMBERS THE NUMBERS OF LANGUAGE
DAILY MAIL Thursday, February 2, 2005 Andrew Levy Page 3 THE MAN WHO WAS ONE NUMBER AWAY FROM £105 M WHAT'S the difference between £105 million and £6000? Just one number, apparently. Thats all a British 999 operator needed to win last week's Euro Millions jackpot.
DAILY MAIL Friday September 9, 2005, "EXACTLY FOUR YEARS ON FROM 9/11, GROUND ZERO REMAINS A WASTELAND"
I AM THE OPPOSITE OF THE OPPOSITE I AM THE OPPOSITE OF OPPOSITE IS THE AM I ALWAYS AM
THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE Prose And Verse From The Bible A. G. Prys-Jones 1979 Page 123 HOW ART THOU FALLEN FROM HEAVEN, O LUCIFER, SON OF THE MORNING!
"How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!"
HOLY BIBLE Scofield References ISAIAH C 14 V 12 "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!"
CATCHING THE LIGHT Arthur Zajonc 1993 Page 44 ANGELIC LIGHT - HUMAN LIGHT "HOW YOU HAVE FALLEN FROM HEAVEN, BRIGHT SON OF THE MORNING FELLED TO THE EARTH!" Isaiah 14:12-15
THE STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN BOOK II THE EARTH CHRONICLES Zecharia Sitchin 1980 Page166 The Stairway to Heaven
ISAIAH 14 HOW ART THOU FALLEN FROM HEAVEN, O LUCIFER, SON OF THE MORNING! "THAT thou shalt take up this proverb against the king of Babylon, and say, How hath the oppressor ceased! the golden city
THE DIVINE INVASION Phillip Dick 1981 "The time you have waited for has come. The work is complete: the final world is here. He has been transplanted and is alive." -Mysterious voice in the night Page 85 'What's wrong?' Elias put his arm around the boy and lifted him up to hold him. 'I've never seen you so upset.' 'He listened to that while my mother was dying!' Emmanuel stared into Elias's bearded face. I remember, Emmanuel said to himself. I am beginning to remember who I am. Elias said, 'What is it?' He held the boy tight. It is happening, Emmanuel realized. At last. That was the first of the signal that I - I myself - prepared. Knowing it would eventually fire. The two of them gazed into each other's faces. Neither the boy nor the man spoke. Trembling, Emmanuel clung to the old bearded man; he did not let himself fall. 'Do not fear,' Elias said. 'Elijah,' Emmanuel said. 'You are Elijah who comes first. Before the great and terrible day.' Elias, holding the boy and rocking him gently, said, 'You have nothing to fear on that day.' 'But he does,' Emmanuel said. 'The Adversary whom' we hate. His time has come. I fear for him, knowing as I do, now, what is ahead.' 'Listen,' Elias said quietly. How you have fallen from heaven, bright morning star,felled to the earth, sprawling helpless across the nations! You thought in your own mind, I will scale the heavens; I will set my throne high above the stars of God, I will sit on the mountain where the gods meet in the far recesses of the north. I will rise high above the cloud-banks and make myself like the Most High. Yet you shall be brought down to Sheol, to the depths of the abyss. Those who see you will stare at you, they will look at you and ponder. . . Page 86 'You see?' Elias said. 'He is here. This is his place, this little world. He made it his fortress two thousand years ago, and set up a prison for the people as he did in Egypt. For two thousand years the people have been crying and. there was no response, no aid. He has them all. All thinks he is safe.' Emmanuel, clutching the old man, began to cry. 'Still afraid?' Elias said. Emmanuel said, 'I cry with them. 1 cry with my mother. I cry with the dying dog who did not cry. 1 cry for them. And for Belial who fell, the bright morning star. Fell from heaven and began it all.' And, he thought, I cry for myself. 1 am my mother; I am the dying dog and the suffering people, and I, he thought, am that bright morning star, too. . . even Belial; I am that and what it has become.
"And now, things fall apart. The centre cannot hold. ... What W. B. Yeats’s ‘Second Coming’ Really Says About the Iraq War - New York Times ... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second Coming_(poem) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia"The Second Coming" is a poem by William Butler Yeats first printed in The Dial (November 1920) and afterwards included in his 1921 verse collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem uses religious symbolism to illustrate Yeats' anguish over the apparent decline of Europe's ruling class, and his occult belief that Western civilization (if not the whole world) was nearing the terminal point of a 2000-year historical cycle. The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War.[1] The various manuscript revisions of the poem also have references to the French and Irish Revolutions as well as to Germany and Russia. It is highly doubtful that the poem was solely inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917, which some claim Yeats viewed as a threat to the aristocratic class he favored .[citation needed] Early drafts also included such lines as: "And there's no Burke to cry aloud no Pitt," and "The good are wavering, while the worst prevail."[citation needed] The sphinx or sphinx-like beast described in the poem had long captivated Yeats' imagination. He wrote the Introduction to his play The Resurrection, "I began to imagine [around 1904], as always at my left side just out of the range of sight, a brazen winged beast which I associated with laughing, ecstatic destruction", noting that the beast was "Afterwards described in my poem 'The Second Coming'". Critic Yvor Winters has observed, "…we must face the fact that Yeats' attitude toward the beast is different from ours: we may find the beast terrifying, but Yeats finds him satisfying – he is Yeats' judgment upon all that we regard as civilized. Yeats approves of this kind of brutality." Manuscript variations can be found in Yeats, William Butler. Michael Robartes and the Dancer Manuscript Materials. Thomas Parkinson and Anne Brannen, eds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. The Poem
Origins of terms The word gyre used in the poem's first line is drawn from Yeats's book A Vision, which sets out a theory of history and metaphysics which Yeats claimed to have received from spirits. The theory of history articulated in A Vision centers on a diagram composed of two conical spirals, one situated inside the other, so that the widest part of one cone occupies the same plane as the tip of the other cone, and vice versa. Around these cones he imagined a set of spirals. Yeats claimed that this image (he called the spirals "gyres") captured contrary motions inherent within the process of history, and he divided each gyre into different regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the psychological phases of an individual's development). Yeats believed that in 1921 the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic moment, as history reached the end of the outer gyre (to speak roughly) and began moving along the inner gyre. In his own notes, Yeats explained: "The end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to that of its greatest contraction. At the present moment the life gyre is sweeping outward, unlike that before the birth of Christ which was narrowing, and has almost reached its greatest expansion. The revelation which approaches will however take its character from the contrary movement of the interior gyre. All our scientific, democratic, fact-accumulating, heterogeneous civilization belongs to the outward gyre and prepares not the continuance of itself but the revelation as in a lightning flash, though in a flash that will not strike only in one place, and will for a time be constantly repeated, of the civilization that must slowly take its place...when the revelation comes it will not come to the poor but to the great and learned and establish again for two thousand years prince and vizier." The lines "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" are a paraphrase of one of the most famous passages from Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, a book which Yeats, by his own admission, regarded from his childhood with religious awe:
In the early drafts of the poem, Yeats used the phrase "the Second Birth", but substituted the phrase "Second Coming" while revising. His intent in doing so is not clear. The Second Coming described in the Biblical Book of Revelation is here anticipated as gathering dark forces that would fill the population's need for meaning with a ghastly and dangerous sense of purpose. Though Yeats's description has nothing in common with the typically envisioned Christian concept of the Second Coming of Christ, it fits with his view that something strange and heretofore unthinkable would come to succeed Christianity, just as Christ transformed the world upon his appearance. The "spiritus mundi" (literally "spirit of the world") is a reference to Yeats' belief that each human mind is linked to a single vast intelligence, and that this intelligence causes certain universal symbols to appear in individual minds.
DAILY MAIL Wednesday, March 12, 2008 Allison Pearson Page 15 "It's a bleak picture that brings to mind W.B. Yeats's great poem about a world where the natural order of things has catastrophically broken down: 'Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned,'
Mea culpa - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mea_culpa Mea culpa is a Latin phrase that translates into English as "through my fault". It is repeated three times in the prayer of confession at the Catholic Mass: Mea culpa From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2014) Mea culpa is a Latin phrase that translates into English as "through my fault". It is repeated three times in the prayer of confession at the Catholic Mass: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa — "through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault". The three phrases are in the ablative case, which gives the instrumental meaning "through"
mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_for_Measure Measure for Measure is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1603 or 1604. It was (and continues to be) classified as comedy, but its ... Measure for Measure From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE Prose And Verse From The Bible Robert Prys Jones 1949 Page 118 ISAIAH 1 BRING NO MORE VAIN OBLATIONS
Page 119 ISAIAH 6 HERE AM I; SEND ME IN the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory. And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke.
"Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory."
THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE Prose And Verse From The Bible Robert Prys Jones 1949 Page 120 ISAIAH 9 THE PRINCE OF PEACE "THE people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined. . . . Page 121 ISAIAH 11 FOR THE EARTH SHALL BE FULL OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE LORD "AND there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots: and the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of . the fear of the Lord; and shall make him of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord: and he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of his ears: but with righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth: and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked. And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins. / Page 122 /
HOLY HOLY HOLY EARTH THERA TERAH HEART HEART TERAH THERA EARTH
PLANET PLANT E PLANT PLANET 1234 5 6789 PLANET PLANT E PLANT PLANET
I SAY READ ME DREAMER DREAMER READ ME
I SAY PEACE BE UNTO YOU UNTO YOU BE PEACE
I SAY PEACE AND LOVE AND LOVE AND PEACE
I SAY SENTIENT BEING S BEING SENTIENT
I SAY SEIZE THIS MOMENT THIS MOMENT SEIZE I SAY CEASE CONFLICT CONFLICT CEASE SAY I
I SAY LOVE ONE ANOTHER ALWAYS ALWAYS ONE ANOTHER LOVE I SAY LOVE EVOLVE EVOLVE LOVE SAY I I SAY WHO AM I I AM WHO
I SAY I AM YOU YOU AM I
I SAY U R ME ME R U CREATORS ALL CREATORS CREATORS ALL CREATORS
I THAT AM ALWAYS ALWAYS AM
THOU ART WHOLE OF SOURCE GODS SAY I I SAY GODS SOURCE OF WHOLE ART THOU
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