A Decrepit Beacon of Enlightenment

Blagnac Histoire & Memoire is an historical society dedicated to the history of, ta-da! Blagnac, a small city and suburb of Toulouse. It's a wealthy city with lots of tax revenue generated by Airbus and its well-paid employees, so the association gets a decent subsidy from the Mairie in order to print their review, Blagnac, Questions d'Histoire. In 2013 the association published a special edition exploring the histories of the city's street and place names. Almost an entire page is dedicated to the Place de la Révolution, discussed many times here on LoS because of the curious monument located there which has been dubbed the "Illuminati Pyramid" but is officially named Le Temple de la Sagesse Supreme. Oh what a monster we unleashed upon the English-speaking world! (I can't tell you how many sites reproduce several of my photos and field observations without attribution. The French pull these little tricks as well....I just tried to right-click and save an image of the world map from another website but they'd blocked that function and a little message popped up to tell me the image was protected by copyright.  Fair enough, but I took the g-dam photo in the first place! The author had copied a photo I took and had the nerve to claim copyright!)

I've decided to translate the entry regarding this curious plaza for your edification. For further elaboration, feel free to peruse our posts bearing this tag. 

 

RÉVOLUTION FRANÇAISE (Place de la) F7 

Conceived as the Southern port of entry into the Grand Noble quarter, this plaza was built in 1989 as a solemn commemoration of the bicentennial of the French Revolution; it is also officially known as the Place du Bicentenaire, (Bicentennial Plaza). It displays more or less easily identifiable symbols that recall one of the great founding acts of our history.

A large rectangle, delimited by monumental arcades, the plaza combines a play of circles, ovals and spokes. It starts as a central tumulus, crowned with a pyramid pierced by a window, inserted into a frame in the form of a house.  The pyramid is a fountain where from hundreds of holes water gurgles into a basin in the form of a double hemisphere world map.  In front of the pyramid, bronze stelae represent the cosmos and bear the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.  Facing the pyramid on the North is a large belvedere-gallery and to the South an ensemble with a long shaft surmounted by a tricolor flag and a votive column wearing a Phrygian cap and a cockade.

When he presented his project in 1988, architect Jean-Philippe Dubourg, winner of the contest organized by the city, explained that all these are linked: 

"The belvedere emits a laser, a ray of light pure and abstract, on a North-South axis....This light will modulate, taking on the essence of the Rights of Man as it passes through the Temple of Supreme Wisdom (the pyramid) and the House (allegory of the Homeland)...Thus symbolically metamorphosed, the ray of light will be refracted in the parabola (the cockade) of the votive column of the French Revolution, spreading the incontrovertible truths contained in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen into the ether....the central tumulus is a also a subtle botanical garden, metaphor of France as a gentle garden of liberty, planted with a Liberty Tree and a multitude of perennial plants, from gaillardia to santolina, plants dating from the Revolution."

In the opinion of his colleagues and fellow architects, Jean-Philippe Dubourg's project paid homage to Enlightenment philosophy and to the revolutionary ideals which it inspired; without a doubt, through the pyramid, to Freemasonry (whose role in the genesis of the Revolution has been greatly exaggerated); and finally to the great architects of the 18th century (Boullée, Ledoux and Lequeu); all the while applying the precepts: 

"A rational architecture using simple geometric forms and having a moral bearing on Man."

My photo, borrowed and copyrighted!

Since 1989 the plaza has suffered from the wear and tear of time and from technical failures.  The laser, victim of recurrent outages, never really functioned.  The double hemisphere world map has disappeared under a coating intended to plug leaks.  On the stelae, one looks in vain for the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen; the support panel is loose and damaged...Perhaps it will one day recover its place?  Finally, the garden has lost its luxuriance, the maintenance requiring too much care....Despite all this, the plaza has retained a certain allure.

The plaza has gained, despite itself, a renown well beyond the limits of Blagnac, thanks to the Internet.  According to Internauts fond of esotericism, it symbolizes the "New World Order", a world dominated by a small elite of initiates: the Illuminati.  This thesis hasn't failed to astonish and amuse the citizens of Blagnac; perhaps they are flattered to discover that a monument in their city illustrates such a remarkable plan? 

B.Q.H n. 1-2-3-4-8

My Bologne has a first name:

L'obelisque

When I moved to Toulouse in April, 2002, I lived a few hundred yards away from this plaza and for over a year regularly frequented the restaurants and bars nearby.  My best pal Alex's office is just around the corner and the plaza provides a convenient shortcut to the hopping/happening Place St. Pierre.

Which is why it's kind of odd that I must have seen this plaza fewer times than I can count on one hand.

The few times I had been there I must have

dithered about as if in a dream, 
some kind of hapless mote 
floating through on a sunbeam

(from Burning Pizzle by J. Trenchwheat)

because I'd never really quite grokked -- done the spit-take as it were -- the fact that there's an obelisk fountain at the dead center.  And if there's anything I'd grok, it's an obelisk fountain.  This quiet, almost hidden plaza in the midst of one of Toulouse's hubbiest bubs features an obelisk and, as Prof. Freedom Williams once said, "I'd never even gone "hmmm."")

The Place de Bologne is relatively new, so it's jut another indication that the Egyptian Revival is still going strong in Toulouse  (I've written extensively about plethora of contemporary pyramid monuments in the metropolitan area).  Egypt remains a source of inspiration for architects, developers, and builders as it has since the Phoenicians, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans -- times when Egyptian civilization was the antiquity of what we consider our own antiquity.

Place de Bologne as seen from the LoS helicopter

Take a S.I.P.

Imagine how geeked out I got when after seeing the obelisk I took a look at the office doors facing it and saw a triangle logo for home builder (an outfit called S.I.P.)  I have explored the links between Freemasonry, the Egyptian Revival(s), the triangle and/or pyramid logo, and the French real estate and construction industries.  In this case I was doubly geeked:  facing this first S.I.P. was another be-triangled business:  Groupe Osiris (!) is a developer and real estate manager.

Osiris has the cool-for-us title of the "Lord of Silence" -- but he was also known as the "Lord of the Dead" and the "King of the Living".  Interesting -- perhaps the Groupe seeks to evoke the importance of urban planning and lodging as a controlling force in our lives.  Haussmann certainly understood the relationship between urban geography and political liberty when he designed wide boulevards favorable to army forces and cannon at the expense of the narrow streets favorable to building blockades and defending the poor quarters with rusty rifles and kitchen knives.

King of the Living Room

When Toulouse performed the same kind of "remodeling" (at about the same as Haussmann), the city's motivations were probably less strategic than practical in terms of everyday traffic.  In any event, if an urban zone is defined by the constant reconstitution of its component parts (to paraphrase T.A. Wilson), a city is in a constant state of degeneration, regeneration, and transformation.
Osiris worship was in essence a cult of regeneration and rebirth, and a city it essentially an entity which is dying and re-birthing itself at every second of every day.  The city is its own mother, father, and child, a family coiled-up into a convoluted relationship which at its mutating center is a kind of cosmic incest.  (If in fact we can speak of a center at all; perhaps it's less inaccurate to speak of something so folded up in upon itself that it's all periphery.

Given the increasingly restrictive circles in which the elite travel, and -- like boolean ovals -- intersect through various boards, clubs, business groups, Lodges -- tighter and tighter as we head towards the tip of the pyramid -- it's no small wonder these increasingly reduced and therefore intimate business bedfellows move with ease within the nomenclature of this incestuous Egyptian genealogy: Horus, Osiris, Cheops....

One of the many challenges facing urban planners is how to move a city forward without totally destroying its past.  One can't forbid any and all new construction in an historic city or we end up stunting a city's dynamism.  We have a static showpiece where we can't even put in a new skylight because it doesn't mesh with the surrounding 19th century character, for instance.

That said, I'm a firm believer in taking the time and spending whatever is necessary to properly investigate new construction sites and thinking long and hard about what we're destroying.  When in the 19th century the city of Toulouse plowed through the medieval warren of the centre ville to create a logically straight pair of central axes, they did indeed facilitate movement through the center of town; they also forever destroyed  its medieval character.  The neighborhoods around these axes remain today among Toulouse's most beautiful streets.  Imagine what has been lost.

In my own time, during the renovation and construction of the new Palais de Justice, the remains of the palace of the Counts of Toulouse were found; minimal archaeological investigation was carried out and what we might have learned from it has probably been lost forever.
  

Not so far from there, the destruction of a building attached to the Church of the Dalbade revealed a medieval cemetery underneath.  This was also investigated, but then, poof, a new building appeared and the cemetery was lost forever.

The Place de Bologne is another such place, which "represents in an edifying manner the problems posed by a certain kind of urbanism" (here).  Some of the buildings were renovated for use in the current plaza, but some very old buildings, in one of the oldest parts of Toulouse, were simply destroyed.  If we were dealing with some run-of-the-mill urban building, we could shrug it off as acceptable change.  "Urban Renewal" has been used to put lipstick on the pig of various corrupt and disruptive schemes dreamed up by developers eager to squeeze every last coin from every last square foot, but if we look past the abuse of this doctrine, we'll find it's a necessary and even positive part of urban evolution.  Without renewal, there is no urban stasis, only decay.

But the ruins here were in fact the last vestiges of the palace of the Visigoth kings of Toulouse, before various depredations obliged them to remove to Toledo (Spain, not Klinger's hometown).

This is an important and relatively under-known period of the city's history:  the Dark Ages, the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages -- the Visigoths being one of the tribes who brought that about -- in the epicenter of Gallo-Roman France.  The Visigoths had sacked Delphi and Rome and legend has it that they made off with the spoils of Solomon's Temple.  They built the first Church of the Daurade in an octagonal, Byzantine style, so-named for its golden mosaics.  Their kingdom extended from Andalusia to the Loire and Toulouse was their capital; Place de Bologne was the epicenter.

The worst part is what they destroyed it all for; the architecture is unremarkable and the entrances to the plaza are gated, giving the impression of a private rather than a public space.  Indeed, all the buildings on the plaza are a tightly controlled development, not really an organic residential zone but operated by one of the powerful developers which have had so much power in determining the ever fluid urban and suburban landscapes of French cities and villages

As one site puts it "the result of these errors makes this place close, cold, without life.  With a century of history destroyed beneath our feet."  Interesting now that I think of it.  Another one of these "dead zones" is Compans Caffarrelli, which, incidentally, is another big plaza surrounded by high-rises, a public space privatized, basically, but with a cold and inert feeling despite the fact that several hundred people probably live there.

One must also consider the chilling effect of all this not only on street life, but free speech.  Consider this anecdote from a few years ago:

Taking pictures of this pyramid and architecture, Daurade was approached by a squat little security guard, a little nervous and scowling, who informed him that taking pictures is forbidden. So there you have it. On the city streets one is free to photograph what one wants. But as all this public space is enclosed and privatized, public inquiry and expression are somewhat less free. In fact, taking a photo is forbidden. Whatever the reason for this, security probably, it still doesn’t eclipse the fact that in this new world order everything will be for sale, and those with money to buy are welcome. As long as the money keeps flowing in the right direction: up towards the pinnacle.

The fountain isn't remarkable:  an obelisk in an octagonal basin, accessed by three steps which form the octagonal base.  The plaza itself is paved in the same form.  I suppose one could read something into the three steps in terms of Freemasonry, but that may be pushing it!  It occurs to me that this is the second thing in this post described as octagonal; it's possible the form of the plaza is a reference to the original Church of the Daurade which sat in roughly the equivalent position at the other end of the Quai Lucien Lombard.

I've already mentioned in a few posts how the Count of Montalambert called Toulouse the "home of vandalism".  Part that vandalism isn't just the destruction of history, but replacing what has been destroyed by shite architecture.  Toulouse has recently been obliging people on the outskirts to sell their homes so they can be razed and big dumpy apartment blocks put in their place.  The whole quasi-rural character of vast tracts close to the dead center of Toulouse have been sucked into a cold and sterile, inorganic mess of character-less, undifferentiated buildings.

So, I was attracted by the Egyptian obelisk and, sniffing around for anything vaguely Masonic, came across the two developers using triangles -- a subject to which I've already dedicated both a post and a Picasa album -- one of these developers specifically evokes Osiris.  A curious choice, given the theme of death and rebirth.  They certainly killed something off here -- a piece of history which could furnish much-needed detail about the Visigoth period of Toulouse -- but whether something worthwhile has been born from this remains to be seen.

Merry Clackamas

Yesterday a young man killed two people before turning the gun on himself in an Oregon mall.  He was 22 and his name was Jacob Tyler Roberts.  (article)

What is Loren Coleman going to say about this one....

Two things that strike me.  It took place in Clackamas, a name which sounds like some parody of the word Christmas.  Articles on the shooting never fail to mention Christmas shopping, naturally, and of course, mall Santas.

Second is that the shooter's name is Jacob, which in Arabic is يَعْقُوب, or ‎ Yaʿqūb, sometimes said to mean...."leg-puller"!  What actually struck me first is that his middle name, Tyler, is also the title of the guardian of a Masonic Lodge.

I call it coincidence.  Others will go to town and call it "synchromysticism."  I've gone into this topic quite a bit in the past, so I won't repeat myself here.  Needless to say, one doesn't need a Masonic "link" to call it part of a conspiracy.  But it helps get the ball rolling.

Curiously, Tyler has appeared on LoS before.  John Tyler was mentioned by the Gid back in January and in 2009 we wrote about Tyler Hayes Weinman, falsely-accused of being a serial cat killer.

Clackamas is named after a local Indian tribe.  On another LoS-related note, a fallen stone called the Willamette Meteorite

was apparently venerated by the Clackamas tribe inhabiting the area where it was found. The Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon, a confederation of Native American tribes, used the meteorite, which they call Tomanowos, in ceremonies.... 

Tomanowos, or the Sky Person, is believed to be a messenger from the sky god.  It is also considered to be a union of heaven, earth and the waters.  While some might tempted to scoff at this as a kind of dumb animism, please take a look at Journey to the Center of the Earth, where we take a look at the idea of the stone as axis mundi, or "world navel" (omphalos) which has an important place not only in Greek and Roman mythology, but in Islam (al-Hajar-ul-Aswad), Judaism (the Foundation Stone) and Christianity (St. Peter).  Of course, a messenger from God is just another way to describe a prophet or patriarch, like Jacob.  The stones we mention here are believed to be the center of the world.  The shooting was at Clackamas Town Center....

I seem to be in the process of becoming a nexus myself--Toulouse has a Grande Ronde (looking all the world in satellite photos like an enormous circumpunct, symbol of the Illuminati and an emphasis on the center).

The Clackamas tribe also operates an enormous casino called Spirit Mountain....

A lot more could be constructed on the topic; I could easily search for more coincidences and construct some weird Fortean scenario.  I seem to see the number 20 appearing a lot in this story.  The of course there's Jacob's Ladder, a 1990 film about Vietnam Vets flipping out years after having been the unknowing guinea pigs in mind control experiments involving powerful psychedelics administered by the US government....

Even weirder, though, really, is that the US continues to experience so many shootings of this nature.

Coleman will be interesting to follow on this one as an exercise in controlled paranoia.  There are apparently some similarities to the shootings in Aurora, Colorado, such as the looming presence of a Century cinema, the black military vest and mask worn by the shooter, his eerily calm demeanor, a nearby military base.  This latter, Camp Withycombe, was originally known as Clackamas Rifle Range.  The mask is being described as a hockey mask, white like Jason's in Friday the 13th.  As in the case of James Eagan Holmes, said to be imitating the Joker from the Dark Knight film, this fact may be used as grist for the mind-control-via-cinema game.

I wouldn't be surprised if Roberts had been seeing a psychiatrist, or that he had some scientific or military connection.  I wonder too if he's wearing a keffiyeh (black and white for Palestine) in that photo above, and what, if anything will be made of that.  I also wonder what people will say about his ethnicity, whose features have a distinct Asian [or native American?] appearance.  I wonder if his father will turn out to be a soldier?  What will be made of his announcement:  "I am the shooter" ?  The shooter.  As if he were turning up to say he was the pool guy.

We'll let more motivated people get busy on this story.  These are just some random observations.  If everything is connected, that's natural.  We have after all, on some level chosen what to perceive and then associate.  One more footnote in my ongoing theses that perception is by it's very nature an organizing process, of simultaneous removal and addition.  After all is constructed and written, nothing can seem random.  We are tessellating, or tiling nature.

2D → 3D → ?

Mystical origami

A recent post, a bit of poetic sport, was inspired by the image above, which I ran across during my ongoing and peripatetic work on my Scout/Freemasonry book.  (The source post, btw, is pretty good:  Temple Building part two)  Looking for the image's provenance via Google image search, the diagrams in the last post were offered as similar results.

The Google search feature often yields surprises; it'd be a worthy esthetic concept to explore further.

The image above seems to be unique on the web, it only comes up where I originally found it (and used on LoS without permission, but I believe it falls under Fair Use).

I've seen the Latin cross/cube configuaration before, may have even used it to make cubes, dice perhaps, but don't recall having an explicit "huh" kind of reaction.  Perhaps I did.  On the other hand, as far as I can recall, this is the first time I've seen the pyramid broken down into the cross "pattée" recalling alternate versions of the Maltese Cross or the St. George Cross used by the Swedish Rite of Freemasonry (a  Christian rite which is practiced in all the Scandinavain countries, name notwithstanding).  Not to mention the similar Templar variant. 

At the mention of Templars, I can't help but recall mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, a self-styled Templar and now-expelled member of the Norwegian Order of Freemasons, who practice the Swedish Rite and use a red cross pattée in their coat of arms.  This thought is inevitable given the events in Aurora, Colorado which occurred after this post was started. (I actually wrote it about 10 days ago, just after the recent DARPA post mentioned at the start of this one, and publish it today after a few additions.  It was, btw, written before my last post, a few brief thoughts about the theories surrounding the recent shootngs in Aurora, Colorado.)

InTemple Building part two, the author states "The Maltese Cross is the expression of the Higher World, the Latin Cross of the Lower World."  Perhaps this is true; the crosses in the image do appear to form a stylized figure of a human figure.  Intriguingly, "many crowns worn by monarchs have jewelled cross pattée (or pattée) symbols mounted atop the band.....A cross pattée is particularly associated with crowns in Christian countries."  Maybe this is because it does represent the "Higher World" associated with the head.  In our stylized human it "is" the head.

I'm not informed enough to write about the intersection of mathematics, geometry and mysticism, but I do know that science and mysticism have gone hand in hand like chocolate and peanut butter, from Pythagoras to Isaac Newton.  Numerology, though often an insipid banality pushed by synchromystics, actually has an interesting and venerable history.  I recall reading The Chosen by Chaim Potok, a novel about the relationship between two Jewish kids, among other things.  One of these boys wants to become a mathematician, which gives hims a certain deftness with numbers that impresses his friend's rabbi father when bandying about numbers in order to find the esoteric meanings of Biblical texts.  I later learned this was called gematria, defined by Wackelypoolia as:

(Hebrew: גימטריה‎ gēmaṭriyā) is a system of assigning numerical value to a word or phrase, in the belief that words or phrases with identical numerical values bear some relation to each other, or bear some relation to the number itself as it may apply to a person's age, the calendar year, or the like. It is likely that the term derives from the order of the Greek alphabet, gamma being the third letter of the Greek alphabet (gamma + tria) Alternatively, the word "gematria" is generally held to derive from Greek geōmetriā, "geometry", which was used as a translation of gēmaṭriyā, though some scholars believe it to derive from Greek grammateia, rather; it's possible that both words had an influence on the formation of the Hebrew word. It has been extant in English since the 17th century from translations of works by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Although ostensibly derived from Greek, it is largely used in Jewish texts, notably in those associated with the Kabbalah.

It is interesting that the word is derived in all likelihood from the word "geometry", a composite of two ancient Greek words: γεωμετρία; geo- "earth" and -metria "measurement" ergo "measurement of the earth."

Mysticism and geometry, of course, come together most forcefully in Freemasonry, whose mystical and ethical system is expressed in geometrical metaphors regarding shapes and the tools that draw them.

Size matters

"Kohr principles" is an interesting article (from the NYT's equally interesting "Borderlines" series) about the ideas of Leopold Kohr.  Kohr was a 20th-century academic interested in how the size of countries determines their interaction with other countries.  He proposed various new maps for Europe and North America which he figured would be closer to an ideal setup than what he saw before him.  Wrong or right, it's worth checking out.

Wikipedia sez:

Kohr described himself as a "philosophical anarchist." Kohr protested the "cult of bigness" and economic growth and promoted the concept of human scale and small community life....His vision called for a dissolution of centralized political and economic structures in favor of local control.

From Leopold Kohr's most popular work The Breakdown of Nations:

[...] there seems to be only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness. Oversimplified as this may seem, we shall find the idea more easily acceptable if we consider that bigness, or oversize, is really much more than just a social problem. It appears to be the one and only problem permeating all creation. Whenever something is wrong, something is too big. [...] And if the body of a people becomes diseased with the fever of aggression, brutality, collectivism, or massive idiocy, it is not because it has fallen victim to bad leadership or mental derangement. It is because human beings, so charming as individuals or in small aggregations, have been welded into overconcentrated social units.

Personally, I found a lot of merit in these ideas....at least insofar as I can see here.  Not having read the man, I can't endorse him wholeheartedly, but he seems to articulate things which I have been thinking about quite a bit over the last few years.

I think Kohr would agree that "bigness" is an obsession of Imperialist, Fascists....and the kind of Predatory Capitalists that have recently run the global economy into the ground.

Growth is the key to survival, according to these businessman gamblers....making a profit is no longer good enough.  I can't tell you the number of times over the years that students of mine in management positions have repeated this mantra.  A small company can stay small and survive, but once it gets to a certain size it must grow even more....or die.  And it cannot simply be profitable, it must make more profit every year.  And even more the next, and the next, etc.  It seems self-evident that unemployment, inflation and environmental destruction are the inevitable outgrowths of such a position.

This article from The Guardian puts it nicely:

Bigness, predicted Kohr, could only lead to more bigness, for "whatever outgrows certain limits begins to suffer from the irrepressible problem of unmanageable proportions". Beyond those limits it was forced to accumulate more power in order to manage the power it already had. Growth would become cancerous and unstoppable, until there was only one possible endpoint: collapse.

We have now reached the point that Kohr warned about over half a century ago: the point where "instead of growth serving life, life must now serve growth, perverting the very purpose of existence". Kohr's "crisis of bigness" is upon us and, true to form, we are scrabbling to tackle it with more of the same: closer fiscal unions, tighter global governance, geoengineering schemes, more economic growth. 

It's all about the coin....European Union had a common currency before a political constitution....a constitution, btw, rejected by the French people in a referendum but then later rammed through parliament.

Ask Spain, Ireland and Greece how it's all working out for them.

Too big to fail you say?  Where've we heard that one?  Bigness is not the key to survival.  Whither the dinosaurs whilst the insects live on?

More than g-strings and sex changes

The strange tilt mirrors the natural formation to it's right (Sugarloaf Mountain).  It is nature regularized.  Perhaps an explicit reference to the doctrine of the rational imposition of order upon nature, defying it or improving it.  Something Gid's been looking at in the checkerboard motifs, echoed in images of regular furrows in plowed fields and perpendicular fences, perhaps as a reflection of a Pietist doctrine.  Perhaps this also implies the doctrine of human perfectibility.  It would also imply a civilizing mission....

The theology of turning the wilderness into a garden has most explicitly been vocalized by Protestants, but this idea was also present in Catholic thinking, excited by the discovery of the New World.  Which is what this pyramid celebrates: it is a monument to Estácio de Sá (1520-1567), the Portguese soldier who founded Rio de Janeiro.  Rio, like many another New World burg, doesn't have an origin lost in the mists of time, thus given a mythical founding.  Romulus and Remus for Rome.  Isis for Paris.  No.  In the Americas we have dates, concrete starting points for cities founded out of whole cloth, laid out in orderly grids.  The utopian impulse in urban planning.  The fresh start.  Regeneration.  "Order and Progress" as the flag of Brazil states.  Rationality and improvement, the themes we began with.

Now, I might be willing to write this monument off as just another pyramaid, albeit one with a nifty lilt; nothing esoteric here, folks....but damn it all if this one doesn't have, like our old friend in Blagnac, 13 layers.  I'm sorry, but artists and architects mean something.  This isn't just random chance, coincidence.  This pyramid is trying to communicate something.  Given that 13 colonies formed the basis of that utopian experiment of order and progress to the north, it's hard not to create a link.  Weaving spiders and whatnot.

Before the pyramid is a glass triangle on the ground which lets light into an underground "crypt", where a reproduction of Sá's tomb, the city seal and sand is illuminated from above.  (A picture of this can be found here:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/leonardomartins/5770910215/).

No need to go back into the solar connections of the pyramid, obelisk and pyramidion, but this aspect of the monument does call to mind the Voortrekker monument, which also has a cenotaph illuminated from above by natural sunlight.  The Voortrekker Monument also celebrates a hearty band of colonists looking to create a new life out of whole cloth and more specifically, a group which thought it had a special covenant with God.  In addition to the theology of human improvement and the mastery over nature, New World theology is also one of covenant theology.  You'll have to take my word for that.

This Sá monument was designed by Lúcio Costa, a Brazilian architect in love with modernismwho privileged Brazil's Portuguese architectural heritage over the contributions of other cultures, resulting in losing a significant amount of non-Portuguese urban architecture over the years he held sway in these matters.  Costa, incidentally, was the chief designer of Brasilia, capital of Brazil.  Brasilia holds the distinction of being the world's only major metropolis inexistent at the beginning of the 20th century.  It was designed and constructed where nothing had existed before, rife with utopian idealism, much like the early colonial cities of the New World.

Costa lived to ripe old age, a visionary, a schemer and a political hack.  Sá died at 46 after an arrow went through his eye.

Tessellation of the Plane ... and Beer (Again)

The Midwest is awash in independent breweries--and that's good. Jesus, after all, turned water into wine, and the good St. Kevin turned water into beer!

Millstream Brewing Co. is one of the older independents in the midwest. They're in Iowa, bordering me (Minnesota) to the south.

Maybe it's just the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, or maybe it's that I'm their new target penetration market--but I feel like I've been reading about and seeing their beer every time I take a left turn these days.

May I speculate fancily? It seems to me that the rise of the independent brewery is somewhat akin to the Protestants splitting off the Catholics. It gets hard to say if new movements destroy the old movements (anti-tessellation), or if new movement further sub-divide the old, a sort of hyper-tessellation.

Anyhow, I picked up a twack of Millstream the other day, and I was delighted by this label:

Good beer & an interesting label

Good beer & a good label! Let's talk about the label.

Let's Talk About the Label

I was startled to see mountains. And a mill. In Iowa. But damned if Google don't have Iowa mountains and Iowa mills, so pardon my ignorance. Quite frankly, every time I talk to anyone about Iowa, I leave the conversation with two thoughts:

1. Iowa's a much better place that I imagined. 
2. I'm sometimes a bit of a condescending dumbass, which is especially stupid for someone living in Minnesota (not because there's something wrong with Minnesota, but because so many dumbass condescenders direct their condensation our way).

But back to that label. It's a very cool pastoral scene they evoke.

And it contrasts, for me at least, so strongly with their coat of arms.

Granted, there is something definitely medieval feeling about a mill--but that's not what I'm trying to get at here. See, the coat of arms draws my mind immediately to feudalism, and the checkerboard pattern draws my mind even further into the way that feudalism tessellated the land, i.e., dividing it up like a checkerboard for the ruling class.

Meanwhile, the image of the U.S. plains with the mountains in the background and nary a barbed wire fence draws my mind to cowboys and the open frontier. "Open frontier." It's so cliche that it's easy to forget what it means. Even the idea of a stream-powered mill in this image might be taken as an example of someone using the land without a striking sense of ownership--I mean, the stream keeps flowing, after all, free and open for anyone down stream to use. Turner claimed (in his famous Frontier Thesis) that this frontier shaped the U.S. character, made it different from Europe.

Now this is where my thinking gets a little weirded out. I suggested that a prominent aspect of the U.S. frontier is no fences, graze the cattle where you want and don't dam up the streams--and this is started to sound rather communal, nobody owns the land, share and share alike. Too much like a European commons to be the root of the U.S. character?

So we not only have the frontier as an area that is not governed, we also have the frontier as an area that is shared by all and owned by none. (Native peoples, of course, rightfully view this quite different.) This strikes me as closer to anarchy, an idea militantly discouraged by the U.S. government--not an idea that is typically considered the expression of the U.S. character.

On top of that weirdness, we have the tessellated coat of arms mapped atop the image.

Well, what to make of these contrasts?

I bumped this by Daurde, and he pointed me to where we are in this image: according to label, Amana, IA.

Let's Talk About Amana

Amana was a religious colony founded by German Pietists. The Amanians lived communially up until the the 1930s. They cooked and ate in communal kitchens and labored in jobs that were rewarded in credits for Amanian goods and services.

How'd they end up in Iowa? The group started in Germany/Switzerland. They splintered off the Lutherans--depending on your point of view they either tried to bust up the tessellation of Christianity, or they were hyper-tessellators. Anyhow, they fled religious and governmental persecution in Europe and went to the U.S. In the U.S., they initially settled near Buffalo, NY, but eventually found the area too crowded, bringing too many worldly attractions too close to hand and also making it too expensive to expand as their membership flourished.

So, in the 1850s, they fled to the frontiers of Iowa and settled into a new commune.

Let's Tie it Together 

We have an image invoking a communal and government-free frontier. We also have the historical site of a commune settling on to the frontier as part of an escape from official prosecution and from worldly trappings.

Not bad.

But what to make of that coat of arms in the image? It creates a sense of dissonance in the image. Likewise, Amana, a commune, is dissonantly placed on the frontier.

In 1923, under economic and internal social stresses, the Armanian Elders (yes, they actually had Elders with a capital "E") met to vote on disbanding the commune. They ended up with a peculiar half-disbanding, expressed by Wikipedia as:

The Amana Society, Inc., corporate heir to the land and economic assets of communal Amana, continues to own and manage some 26,000 acres (105 km²) of farm, pasture and forest land. Agriculture remains an important economic base today just as it was in communal times. Because the land was not divided up with the end of communalism, the landscape of Amana still reflects its communal heritage.

Is the Amana Society, Inc. the feudal shield stamped atop Iowan frontier?

"Nah," is what I'm totally thinking to myself, "they just drew a pretty picture of the hometown and thought a cool looking knight's shield would be nice, kind of awesome, touch."

Could be--I might be right on that point.

Let's Have Another Beer

On the other hand, I grabbed another Millstream beer from my mixed twak tonight. Get a load of the label on this puppy.

Another good beer and another interesting label

For Pete's sake: Why the tessellating checkerboard blanket tossed across the very image of openness?

Let's grab another beer.

Yet another good beer with an interesting label!

Okay, so for serious foax. I know your thinking I saw all these labels before I wrote any of this, but really, I didn't!

As you can see:

• This label shows the mill encroached upon by a farm, the fence running through the formally open prairie, and the land across the fence is tessellated by a plow (though the buck runs free).
• Other labels show a feudal shield and a tessellated picnic blanket dropped upon the frontier.
• Amana was a commune dropped on the frontier.
• The Amana Society, Inc., dropped a corporate heir upon the land and economy of communal Amana, but the land was not divided.

Am I imaging things? Tell me what you think!