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.