Look into my eyes

I saw a post from Juxtapoz on Facebook the other day about Spanish photographer Ángela Burón and the following photograph caught my breast, er, I mean eye:

Mírame a los ojos cuando te hablo, 2014

A striking bit of photoshoppery; take a fine female form in what would otherwise be sexy as hell and Blam!  You wanted to look at what is being revealed, taking a delicious pleasure in admiring such a form....but you find it's staring right back at you.  Busted, fella.

Qu’est-ce que le Surréalisme? (What is Surrealism

Generally, a regular guy scoping out a woman is gonna try to steal a sideways glance or ogle from afar; unseen, you can get away with it.  But what happens when you're caught in the act?  Uncomfortable, to say the least.  A bit embarrassed, maybe even ashamed.  A sort of visual violation has been thwarted.  And what if rape is, as is said, a crime not of sex, but of power?

But why this talk of violation and rape?  Juxtapoz refers to Buron's work as "sneaky surrealism" and that's the trigger.  LoS has dealt with the conflation of the breast and the eye in a number of posts; the Gid's introduction to the subject featured Magritte's Le Viol from 1934, in which the replacement of the nipples with eyes is reversed.  Le Viol means "The Rape."

In the painting, a woman's face has become transformed into a nude female body.  Her mouth is a vagina, her eyes have become breasts.  The organs of sight and speech have been rendered into the principal objects of male lust.  Blind and mute, Magritte's feminine form is rendered powerless.  Thus, the rape.  His interest in the concept was such that he painted other versions in 1945 in 1948, both also entitled Le Viol.  He also drew it for André Breton's Qu’est-ce que le Surréalisme? in 1934 and a second drawing from 1945 was discovered relatively recently.  Though the head is "facing" slightly left as opposed to right, the drawings most closely resemble the 1934 version.  This page includes a more thorough interpretation of the image.

Qu’est-ce que le Surréalisme? (What is Surrealism

Le Viol, 1934

Contrast Magritte's painting with Burón's photo, which reverses the metamorphosis; Burón imbues the female form with power by turning the breasts into the watchful guardians of her image; interesting too that the lower part of the torso is revealed to such a point that her sex must lie but a millimeter south of where the frame ends.  The gateway is out of sight.  After all, it's self-evident:  the photographer controls what we see....and what we don't.

In at least two posts (The Eyes Have It and There and Back Again), we've looked at the iconography of two Sicilian saints:  Agatha carries her breasts on a plate and Lucia carries her eyes.  In this Medieval Catholic context, the women are victims, martyred for refusing the advances of an unwanted pagan suitor.  In a time when women were the pawns of men, who used marriage to create alliances and in all cases to consolidate their power, the breasts and eyes are inert, disembodied.  Sex between a royal couple might have little to do with love or desire but everything to do with providing an heir or to consummate a marriage -- a deal brokered by others.  In either case, for reasons of power.  Is it such that we can call this rape?

Gid's initial post also features an 18th-century engraving of a woman with an eye in glory representing Reason in the place where her breast should be.  Perhaps there's a pun involved, the areola being the circle of flesh around the nipple proper and the aureola a radiant cloud of light around a sacred personage.  Not so odd when you consider Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830), in which Marianne rallies the troops, leading with a prominent exposed breast.  Then there's Honoré Daumier's 1848 sketch entitled The Republic, in which Marianne nurses two children.  This is the state and it's values, foremost among them Reason, which nurtures and elevates the people.  The breast leads, the breast nurses, the breast is generous.  A controversial re-boot of Marianne in a local Mairie as recent as 2011 had to be replaced because her prominent set was causing a bit of a ruckus in the village.  "I made the breasts prominent to symbolize the generosity of the Republic" said the artist.  In this case, the breast symbolizes a form of power.

In our previous posts, we talk a little about why the eyes and breasts are conflated, but we suggest reading our source, N. Hilton's Before the Milk of the Word:  Nipple-Eyes, for a more thorough treatment of the topic.  He deals with Magritte and our Revolution-era engraving.  The association is not really as outlandish as it seems.  Imagine a kid's drawing with a circle and a dot in the middle; basically the same simple pictograph one would use to represent an eye or a breast.  But it is much more than a visual metaphor.  A nursing baby gets a windshield full of tit....before gazing up into its mother's eyes and letting out a satisfied belch, fed and secure.  Primordial images, an association all breast-fed kidlets make from day one.  Also makes me think of the time I was talking to a colleague and must have been staring chestward, because she said, "Hey, my eyes are up here!"  And lo and behold, during my second run through this text I discovered that Burón's photos is called Mírame a los ojos cuando te hablo:  "Look me in the eyes when I talk to you."  When I talk to you.  Not you talk to me.  When I (eye?) talk to you....

But I'm just being lazy; read the Hilton article; he or she gives a good overview of the subject.

Then there's Ken Russell's Gothic.  Required viewing for the budding bohemian/AP English film geek.  One of the more disturbing hallucinations brought to the screen include the following; Percy Shelley is licking lips lustily over Claire Claremont's breasts and Blam!  They're staring back, bub:

I seem to recall Claire is acting out Shelley's fantasy, "baring her breast and entreating him to look into her eyes", but when her nipples blink he turns away in terror.  Those haggard peepers would set anyone off a bit of nipple play for a while I'd wager, but it's worth stating the obvious:  the transformation of the nipples into eyes re-calibrates the balance of power.

Then there's this image I scanned from an article in a French magazine about sexual predators on the Internet.  I uploaded this before in an article about Little Red Riding Hood but didn't include it in the original article.  The eyes are rather wolf-like, which could indicate that women need to become like hunters themselves, in order to root out and destroy those who might otherwise prey on them.  That this is all represented by the eyes is perhaps tied to the natural fact that the hunter always tries to see everything while remaining unseen to its prey.  It's much more likely that the hunter will be successful if its prey isn't aware that it's being stalked.  In this image the usually oblivious mammary becomes something vigilant, determined, if not a tad menacing.
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Anyway, I don't have anything more to say on these images with regard to eye-nipple iconography than I've already said.  Burón's photo struck a chord with me and since she was gracious enough to let me use it, I wanted to share it in terms of this question of power, that hadn't really occurred to me before.

I'm not much of an art critic, but I find her work to be at turns playful, sultry and erotic.  She often reassembles the female form in a way that brings to mind the dolls of another Surrealist, Hans Bellmer, but without the undercurrent of violence and sadism his work emanates.  On the contrary, her work is serene and not self-exploitative, she always remains in control of her image.  She often looks the viewer right in the eye; in some, her camera is turned towards you.  This is especially effective in a shot where she lies naked, her back to the viewer.  But while she is out of focus, the camera in the foreground, trained upon the viewer, is not.  Her camera, her eye, thus serves, in a manner we've already evoked, as a kind of protection.  She is vulnerably naked, she can't even see you.  But her camera can.  You might ogle, but will probably turn your head when you realize you've been caught in the act.  The viewed voyeur vanishes.

You can check out more of Burón's photography on her flickr photostream at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/040710/

On a final note, a post script if you will, this makes me think of an organization based NYC called Hollaback!, whose goal is to end street harassment by, among other means, filming or photographing people who catcall, leer or make unwelcome advances, then putting it on the net.  (Full disclosure, I'm an old friend of their Deputy Director's partner).  In Burón's photos, she reminds us that she decides how and when she can be approached; she is in control of her image and thus, her physical body.  A scene often used in cinema is that of the underling squirming uncomfortably under the silent gaze of another character; it's a perfect representation of both character's perception of the power relationship between the two.  The women in Hollaback! want to be the ones doing the looking.  Looking someone in the eye can be discomfiting and that, in the end, is powerful.

There and back again: A week in Italy and Provence

I spent three years in Italy as a child, in the late-Seventies (the "years of lead", so-called because of all the political violence) and had studied there for a Summer back in 1990, so I was excited to be heading back for the first time as a family.  My wife went to Naples and Sicily, where she has roots, two years ago, but the kids and I stayed home for that one and felt jealous.

Our destination was Apricale, named one of Italy's most beautiful villages, which is saying something.  And it was indeed a beautiful old town, perched upon a small mountain, built for defense, a reminder of the time when "Italy" didn't exist, but a collection of small feuding states, some of them merely cities.  It's still a hard place to govern, which is partly by design; as a re-constituted republic (1946) recovering from Fascism, the constitution created a weak executive.  Governing Italy requires creating and then leading coalitions.  In a parliament with many small parties, this leads to political instability.  If one small party leaves a coalition, the government can fall and a new one needs to be put together.  Which has happened around 60 times since 1946.  But for the most part, the country "works".

Italy is an ancient place, rich in traditions which lend a continuity to daily life one might not expect if only the number of governments is considered.  And for all the differences between the north and south, as soon as you cross the border you know you're in Italy.  Nice was until relatively recently part of Italy.  I've never spent time there, but I can imagine that like Toulouse is France's "Spanish city", Nice's is France's "Italian city".  Which is to say that although you can feel the Spanish vibe in Toulouse, it is first and foremost French.  Likewise, I'm sure, with Nice.  Borders may be the result of history's vagaries, maybe somewhat arbitrary, but they do generally conform to natural boundaries more ancient than human:  the Pyrenées in the Southwest and the southernmost peaks of the Alps in the Southeast.  Despite very strong regional attachments, Italy does have a strong national identity and in Apricale, a few kilometers across the border, you feel its heart beating just as strongly as if you were in Florence, Naples or Rome.

Our route led us due east to Narbonne, then along the coast past Sète, Montpellier, Nîmes, Arles, Marseille, Cannes, Nice, Monaco and then in Italy, Ventimiglia.  A short jog north and you're in the canyon over which Apricale and a handful of other small towns are perched.  The older parts of these towns are small warrens of alleys that are not only formed by two buildings, but are often cut right through one of them.  It's as if you are both inside and outside at the same time.  You'd be hard-pressed to get an army far enough into the town to get to the top; possible, of course, but a hard slog.  I'm sure in some of these towns the streets ran with blood on at least one occasion.

It's kind of hard to imagine though, because these towns are very friendly places.  Each of them has a lower part built along the river and if you kept to the main road and didn't stop, park and venture across the necessary bridge, you'd see a town built choc-a-bloc upon the hillside, but unless you already knew the local architecture, you wouldn't expect such a labyrinthine series of alleys, some leading into pitch blackness, other upwards towards the light, others covered by white-washed groin vaults with doors leading into houses, shoppes and bars.  There are fountains and piazze, of course, usually before the church and city hall, which are, as in France, often on the same plaza and more often than not, include a café.  This area was rather touristy, not in a tacky way at all, so maybe that explains why there seem to be far more cafés in an Italian village than in a French village of approximately the same size.  Aucamville has about 1000 residents and there is only one café.   Isolabona, where our campground is to be found, has 716 residents and at least two cafés, in addition to a restaurant.  The people seemed much more sociable than in our village; on our last night we strolled through town and the cafés were bustling with old men playing cards, teenagers looking on, some small families.  On the stoops and benches sat groups of women, young and old, chatting, peaceful and animated, in the deepening dusk, a fountain echoing softly off the walls, a small electric candle glowing in an iron mesh-covered niche with flowers, ex-votos and a statue of the virgin.  But in these towns, it didn't seem likely that people had yards and who wants to stay inside all the time?

This is an interesting theory, come to think of it; the characteristics of the people, the everyday sociability, the nightly ritual of coming together to gossip and joke, to talk, etc. is in these towns determined by the urban design.  I'd hesitate to use the word planning, the towns feel more organic than planned, but no one's the worse off for it.  In Dolceacqua, a larger village but more or less the same urban pattern, I'd marveled that the buildings and balconies are connected and reinforced (recall that we're on a rather steep small mountain) with numerous small "bridges".  Perhaps they are flying buttresses in this case, I'm not sure if the term here is accurate, but the effect is the same, each building is connected at several point to the one above it, so that what would in a flat city be an alley, open to the sky, is here part alley, part tunnel.  The effect is a kind of perpetual dusk, gloomy but without the negative sense of the word; they're rather lively places, but not prone to echoes and an abrasive hurdy-gurdy of sound.  Thus, pleasant places to chat, where you can raise your voice and not pollute the atmosphere.  The women chatting were grouped around the piazza and the roads/alleys leading up to it, relatively open spaces, where you get out of the gloom and as the sun sets, see some stars.  Farther from the church, the stoops were empty and the only sounds we heard were tin-can sounds of someone's radio playing some kind of mellow soccer game, the sound of cutlery and dishes being shifted, a mewling cat.

In these parts of town, one can often catch a whiff of the old sewers.  Nothing overpowering or rancid, but not exactly pleasant either.  Centuries of humidity and cloaca leave their traces, impregnate the cut stones.  There’s no disguising it.  This is what leads a lot of Americans to call these old towns “dirty” but they’re actually pretty clean.  We’re talking about places whose origins lie in the Bronze Age, if not earlier.  Give Sacramento a few more years, especially after their water is in such short-supply they’ll have to flush it all away with grey water.  Then it’ll really merit the moniker “Excremento”.

I had the opportunity to see an old amphitheater, the top of which must have made for a structure of considerable height.  Not these days, as the top now sits a few meters below street level.  When one digs a new basement or parking garage in a city like Ventimiglia, the shovel isn’t removing gravel, but cut stones and brick.  One doesn’t dig into the earth, but through the stratified remains of millennia.  In Cortona, Tuscany, my last (three-month) home in Italy, the city walls were layered like a cake:  topped by Renaissance construction, built upon medieval brick, in turn Roman and finally, when the earth was low enough to permit it, Etruscan foundations.  I swear, one day I came across a stone so ancient it would destroy a medium’s mind like the Russian villainess in the Crystal Skull film and there, in faded Enochian letters were the words “Adam + Eve 4ever” scratched crudely within a rough-hewn heart.  (Full disclosure:  I’m lying).

I also made an impulsive stop in Dolceacqua to visit the municipal cemetery which was much like the French style, with a mix of small above-ground tombs and quite grand mausoleums.  Two or three especially caught my eye because they showed that in this small and rather obscure town the Egyptian revival had made an impact on local funerary architecture.  One had a pyramid, another featured obelisks and a third had ornaments on the corners of the roof inspired by Egyptian models, such as those previously discussed on LoS with regard to Toulouse’s Terre Cabade Cemetery and the parish church at Ondes.  You can see these on the pyramid-roofed mausoleum as well.  I still don't know what this element is called, so if anyone out there has an idea....Also, being a fool, I neglected to note the dates.   If we compare with the examples in Ondes, Terre Cabade and Lisbon, I'd wager they date to the first half of the 19th century, probably sometime between 1830 and 1850.  The Egyptian revival was especially strong in Italy, or at least early.  In France it was kicked off in earnest after Napoleon's colonialist adventures in Egypt, whereas the Italians had been erecting obelisks since the days of the Roman Empire.  An obelisk was transferred to Rome by Caligula in 37 CE and placed in its current location in 1586; Bernini later designed St. Peter's Square so that the obelisk stood at it's center.  Bernini also put an obelisk at the center of his design for the Piazza Navona; it sits atop the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi (1651).  Both obelisks evoke the axis mundi; Eden was said to lie at the center of four great rivers, at the very center of the world, hence the quattro fiumi, or "four rivers".

I came across another LoSian topic in Isolabona inside a church dedicated to Nostra Signora delle Grazie, in the form of a statue of Santa Lucia, the Sicilian saint whose eyes were plucked out.  She is depicted gore-free with closed eyes, holding the orbs on a plate in front her.  Seeing her there, so serene, made me think of how I grimace and groan at the slightest of aches.  Of course, no one who's had their eyes plucked out could be so calm, but it was rather humbling nonetheless.  The Gid and I have discussed Lucia in connection with Saint Agatha, another Sicilian saint, a virgin martyr, who, having dedicated herself to Christ, was brutally murdered for refusing the advances of a pagan suitor.  Agatha, however, had her breasts shorn off.  Gid first started an investigation into the link between the imagery of breasts and eyes in this little post, coming across a section of a book entitled Before the Milk of the Word: Eye Nipples by N. Hilton.  This is a fascinating essay and instead of summarizing it here, I encourage you to read it.  I was also intrigued to see a boat hanging from the ceiling of the nave;  I can only imagine that the name of this sanctuary, "Our Lady of Thanks" refers (in part) to the answered prayers of those who had husbands, sons or fathers set out to sea; Isolabona, is, after all, only minutes from the Mediterranean.  I've seen this in Spain (Tossa del Mar) and in such land-locked places as Rocamadour (with several model boats suspended from the ceiling) and Montaigut, in the form of a votive painting.

Tossa, Rocamadour and Montaigut all have what can be called Black Virgins and I'd hoped to see two more exemplars on our return trip.  I missed the one at St. Paul because I'd been expecting to stay nearby in Tourettes-sur-Loup, making it possible to pop out during our stay and have a look.  but alas!  Our real destinations was Tourettes, an hour away.  We didn't turn back.  Another watches over the cemetery at the town of St. Jean-Cap- Ferrat (I Googled it and it's about four humans tall!) but somehow, concentrating on a map perhaps, we blew right past it.  This town is between Nice and Monaco, you could almost smell the money in the air.  The French Riviera may be fabled and storied but you know, it is damn beautiful.  The town of Menton, between Monaco and the Italian border is, coming at it from the east, particularly impressive.  The Virgin at St. Jean also has an association with Cocteau, who wrote "There is a mysterious youth in the oldest stones of St. Jean."  So, if you're ever out that way....

Dolceacqua also featured a shrine to Mary where she was placed in a grotto.  This may be a reference to Lourdes, or could be a native tradition.  Mary associated with a cave also appears in Spain, at Covadonga (from Cueva Doña, I believe), which is also, like Lourdes noted for its healing waters.

Our two nights in Provence were spent drinking and chatting and really......a lot of drinking.  In the daytime, it was hours by the pool.  No mysteries, history, culture or anything worth reporting from an LoS standpoint.  But have no fear.  I'm off to Morocco in a month and I can already feel something Burroughsian and Gysinian in the wind....

Coming soon:  Photo-essay of my collection of Argentine folks saints (all four of 'em!) and an interview with original Discordian Hope Springs.

The Chalice & The Sewer, or a Miracle in South St. Paul

A Catholic church in St. Paul, Minnesota, may have a bleeding eurcharist on their hands. This quote from the Star Tribune caught our interest as the chalice & the sewer are both subjects of LoSian concern:

...it [the dropped eurcharist] was placed in a chalice-like container with water so it would dissolve. Then it was to be poured into a special sink not connected to the sewer system.

The miracle was reported by a former soldier priest who took the pics at the top of this post--two callings that require incredible personal sacrifice, but immediately reminds us of the Knights Templar and sets our lizard brains to conspiracy-minded reflexive defensive posturings ("Duck! Xe's got us lined up in their Trijicon!").* An encounter with an army chaplain supposedly kick-started Heller's "Catch-22". I can imagine why.

At any rate, the supposed miracle is being investigated by biologists. I have no idea why biologists would investigate this. What possible good outcome can they envision? If they report it as natural phenomena, well, they just crushed the spirits of the hopeful. And if they report it as a miracle, won't their biologist badges be revoked? And who pays for the lab time?

The "miracle" will almost certainly wind up to be another case of serratia marcescens, a bacteria that looks red and keeps popping in these cases, apparently altering the course of human history.

It seems to be relevant to this story that 21 churches are slated to close in twin cities--including St. Augustine which has reported the possible miracle. When I asked Daurade for his take on this story, he said that "I'd like to see you talk about the merging of churches and how a miracle could boost one church's claim against another. then relate the numerous examples where this was happening, dueling claims to have a certain saint's relics, the traffic of relics etc....something like that?" Well, yeah, I'd like to see something like that, too, but I lack the historical knowledge, so I'll let you share your own stories in the comments.

Meanwhile, the Virgin's appeared in Green Bay, WI!

And boy-oh-boy don't them there pics that the chaplain took look like an eye-nipple?

_______
* An interesting game (that I suspect David Foster Wallace of playing) is to see how many characters (i.e., not letters) you can type in a row without breaking standard grammatical conventions. I have to take this moment to brag on the !").* 5-character combo that led to this footnote. I confess that the asterisk is pushing it (conventions-wise), but 5 in a row is pretty damn good.

The Found Symbol

 

In a comment following our Staff of Life post, the Gid pointed out the similarities between the iconography of Saints Agatha and Lucia, one holding a platter of eyes (Lucia) and the other, of breasts (Agatha). I responded that "....a circle with a dot in the middle could be an eye....or a breast....", proposing that perhaps there was a visual metaphor at play here.

But Gid, ever clever, responded with an entire post (Eye Nipples: What is This) and a comment on that post with a very good link to an article about the origin of the eye/breast association (Before the Milk of the Word: Nipple-Eyes). It's a good survey and has very interesting pictures, all the more fun to look at cuz, well: boobs.

The circle with a dot in the center, however, has also appeared on LoS in the past, a fact I forgot at the time. It was first mentioned in a post about the Voortrekker Monument in South Africa (Hier staan ons voor die Heilige God van hemel en aarde) as a solar symbol, that of Ra. I then stumbled across the same symbol upon the grave of Scouting's founder Lord Baden-Powell (not the Brazilian musician!). In traditional Scouting trail signs it means that the trail has ended and the Scout has gone home; a meaning BP used to mean his own death.

The symbol, it seems, kept....keeps....popping up. I've just received Terry Melanson's book on the Bavarian Illuminati, Perfectibilists (so far, so good, btw) and in the prologue what do I see but the very same symbol. Apparently the Illuminati chose it perhaps because of this very solar connection: power--Illuminating power--radiating outward from a very definite center.* This solar symbolism can be found in a variety of revolutionary contexts--a sun graces the flags of Uruguay and Argentina, for example. It goes without saying Freemasons played an integral part in the independence movements of both countries.

It occurs to me this symbol is also the origin of such Masonic, Revolutionary and other Enlightenment-era symbols as the Eye of Providence (here seen as a nipple!) and the radiating triangle, earlier defined on LoS:

"....as is most usual in the Masonic symbol, the rays emanate from the center of the Triangle, and, as it were, enshroud it in their brilliancy, it is symbolic of the Divine Light. The perverted ideas of the Pagans referred these rays of light to their sun-god and their Sabian worship.

But the true Masonic idea of this Glory is, that it symbolizes that Eternal Light of Wisdom which surrounds the Supreme Architect as a Sea of Glory, and from Him as a common center emanates to the universe of His creation."

So, aside from being an Egyptian (and ancient Chinese?) solar symbol, the "circled dot", or circumpunct, has a variety of other meanings, many from the mystic arts. (It is also Dan Brown's Lost Symbol). Apparently, according to Wikipedia, Freemasons themselves use it to symbolize control over the passions, although I've never seen it used in this context.

I consulted my copy of Mackey's Encylopedia of Freemasonry (a tattered, two-volume deal) and it makes no such claim about passions and the control thereof. What it does describe in the Masonic context is more startling because it refers back to the idea of double pillars and serpents, two other obsessions from past LoS posts, but not before outlining what "we may collect from the true history of its connection with the phallus of the Ancient Mysteries".

Copied/pasted from our pal Dave Lettelier at Phoenix Masonry, here's Mackey's take on the Point Within a Circle:

  

"....it is useless to multiply examples of the prevalence of this symbol among the ancients. Now let us apply this knowledge to the Masonic symbol.

We have seen that the phallus and the point within a circle come from the same source, and must have been identical in signification. But the phallus was the symbol of fecundity, or the male generative principle, which by the ancients was supposed to be the sun, they looking to the creature and not to the Creator, because by the sun's heat and light the earth is made prolific, and its productions are brought to maturity. The point within the circle was then originally the symbol of the sun; and as the lingam of India stood in the center of the lunette, so it stands within the center of the Universe, typified by the circle, impregnating and vivifying it with its heat. And thus the astronomers have been led to adopt the same figure as their symbol of the sun.

Now it is admitted that the Lodge represents the world or the universe, and the Master and Wardens within it represent the sun in three positions. Thus we arrive at the true interpretation of the Masonic symbolism of the point within the circle. It is the same thing, but under a different form, as the Master and Wardens of a Lodge. The Master and Wardens are symbols of the sun, the Lodge of the universe, or world, just as the point is the symbol of the same sun, and the surrounding circle of the universe.

An addition to the above may be given, by referring to one of the oldest symbols among the Egyptians, and found upon their monuments, which was a circle centered by an AUM, supported by two erect parallel serpents; the circle being expressive of the collective people of the world, protected by the parallel attributes, the Power and Wisdom of the Creator. The Alpha and Omega, or the Will representing the Egyptian omnipotent God, surrounded by His creation, having for a boundary no other limit than what may come within his boundless scope, his Wisdom and Power. At times this circle is representedby the Ananta (a Sanskrit word meaning eternity), a serpent with its tail in its mouth. The parallel serpents were of the cobra species.

It has been suggestively said that the Masonic symbol refers to the circuits or circumambulation of the initiate about the sacred Altar, which supports the three Great Lights as a central point, while the Brethren stand in two parallel lines."

 As for those Parallel Lines, Mackey writes: 

"In every well-regulated Lodge there is found a point within a circle, which circle is imboridered by two perpendicular parallel lines. These lines are representative of Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist, the two great patrons of Freemasonry to whom our Lodges are dedicated, and who are said to have been "perfect parallels in Christianity as well as Freemasonry" In those English Lodges which have adopted the Union System established by the Grand Lodge of England in 1813. and where the dedication is "to God ad his service," the lines parallel represent Moses and Solomon. As a symbol, the parallel lines are not o be found in the earlier instructions of Freemasonry. Though Oliver defines the symbol on the authority of what he calls the Old Lectures, it is not to be found , any anterior to Preston, and even he only refers to ne parallelism of the two Saints John."

So, I apologize for not extrapolating on this in a convoluted essay, but I'm in the first third of three of my five weeks paid vacation. Vive la France!

Notes: A post script....

* I mentioned this reference to the circumpunct to Terry in a private email and he had this to say (quoted with his permission, natch): 

"I only mentioned the circumpunct a few times in the book - twice I think. Later on though, I write a bit about Weishaupt's philosophic debt to Leibniz. The latter was a bit obsessed with the symbol, which he called the Hieroglyphic Monad....Weishaupt, as a philosopher, would have been alluding to the Monad more than anything."

A further email: 

"Also, Einige Originalschriften is online for the first time; scanned and posted at Scribd. It includes copious examples of [the circled-dot's] use in the wild. The square too was used in their communications, to symbolize a Masonic Lodge."

A few days later....

You will recall that I referred to my copy of Mackey's Encyclopedia (Revised 1917 version) as "tattered". An old pair of volumes, they are bound in embossed leather; trouble is, the leather on the spines, still tenuously clinging to the binding when I got them, has since fallen off in several pieces (I bought them to use, not to look at on the shelf!) This is why I failed to notice that the circumpunct, with the two parallel lines, is embossed on the leather of the spine. Fortunately I still have those scraps of leather lying about.

One must only assume that Mackey, or at least his publisher, found that this symbol was worth using to represent the entire book at a glance as it sat on the shelf. The front cover, incidentally, features the square and compasses with an Eye of Providence in place of a "G", the sun and the moon, a hand bell and a Delta. Funny thing is, this is the first time I've ever remarked upon the circumpunct as a Masonic symbol (there are so many, after all), triggered by reading about the Illuminati.