Hip Knox, an Eye, and a Nipple walk into a bar....

So this guy Hip Knox wears a shower cap and in this caper, a queer machine, with a suggestive yoni slash lingam at his crotch and on his chest, an eye.  It's in the middle, but in this shot it appears to replace a nipple.  This eye-nipple connection is something we've covered quite a bit, but here we just present this example for your pleasure.

Hip Knox himself is a pretty crazy comic book hero, but instead of reinventing the wheel, check out this article.  An injured baby is left on the doorstep of a scientist who experiments on said baby, giving him hypnotic powers he uses to defeat and subsequently humiliate his nemesis -- making him flop about on the ground like a fish, for example. Weird stuff.

TRULY GONE & FORGOTTEN : HIP KNOX, THE SUPER HYPNOTIST

Be sure to check out previous posts covering the theme of the eye and the nipple 

• Look into my eyes

• The eyes have it

• Eye Nipples

All Eyes on Me

 

In 2016, LoS reported about the well-meaning Spanish woman who tried to restore an old painting of Jesus and it ended up looking like a monkey.  Ecce Homo, meet Ecce Mono!

Now, in what has been called a "lapse of sanity" a security guard in a Russian museum has made news for "improving" Soviet artist Anna Leporskaya's modernist "Three Figures" by crudely drawing eyes on the faceless figures.  Maybe he was afraid the painting, Ouija board-like, would call up Slender Man? 

("In most stories his face is white and featureless, but occasionally his face appears differently to anyone who sees it....")

The painting is valued at 1 million USD and restoration at 3400 USD.  That's a lot of security guard hours.  And a lapse of sanity to boot.  

Or an homage to Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q..  Or maybe just an irresistible will to whimsy, a return to childhood.  Tell me you've never given a supermodel a blackened tooth or an eye-patch.... never put a Hitler mustache on a Rotarian! 

Maybe a security guard being paid crap wages was making a statement about the irony of a Soviet artist's painting being worth so much.  And knowing that repairing it would cost more than a few month's salary. 

I'm an art lover. When paintings are vandalized I'm scandalized. But for some reason this made me giggle.

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.
.

 

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.

The Temple Circuit within the Eye of Your Brain

Whereas, having recently gone back into the archives to write up things which had been percolating for a while, being otherwise bereft of any new ideas; and, taking into account carlessness in frigid weather as an important de-motivating factor, let it be hereby resolved that I shall scribble down a sparse little ditty to present this week.

Last week I saw a couple of pics on Bookface which caught my attention, independently.  But they pretty much do the same thing:  juxtapose ancient images with something unexpected; visual metaphor as a means of speculating about the source of ancient knowledge.

The first of these is an artist's rendition of an aerial view of Teotihuacan, specifically the ceremonal axis of the Pyramid of the Sun, side by side with a detail of a printed circuit board (PCB).  Pictured this way, there is indeed a similarity, but why shouldn't there be?  I don't think that someone was looking at a PCB and exclaimed "Eureka" after noticing is was almost an exact re-creation of the temple complex.  More likely is that the PCB detail, which isn't a photograph but an illustration, was created specifically to imitate the latter.  So there's nothing amazing about it.  A first view might lead to raised eyebrows and a murmured "wow,"  but really, any decent artist could make the image after making the visual connection.  Would make great raw material for R.A.W. material....Pyramid of the Simon Moon?  It's a striking visual metaphor, but certainly not "proof" that the Aztecs had some knowledge of computers or that their pyramids were landing sites for UFOs, as quite a few sites are claiming.  Unfortunately I skimmed through these before I had a notion to do this post, and I'm feeling too lazy to go back and find the links.  As the Buddha said, you can't eat the same tripe twice.

The History Channel logo at bottom right indicates that the image probably comes from the channel's Ancient Aliens series, which addresses the question:

"Is it possible that extraterrestrials with superior knowledge of science and engineering landed on Earth thousands of years ago, sharing their expertise with early civilizations?"

Well, yes, I suppose it is possible.

A fun question, sure, and one guaranteed to attract a decent-sized audience.  Over the years I've heard lots of theories like this, it's a well-entrenched part of our shared pop mythology:  certain Inca monuments are revealed to be giant animals only visible from the air; an image of a Mayan king from Palenque appears to be reclining and surrounded by "dials" indicating that the king was in fact an astronaut; the perfect cut and tight joints of the massive blocks forming the Egyptian pyramids could not have been effected by human, especially ancient human hands.  All this was given wide circulation by Swiss author Erich von Däniken, whose bestseller Chariots of the Gods? (1968 in the US) litters my childhood memories.  Däniken wasn't the first to espouse the theory that ancient civilizations were in contact with ET, but an industry has flourished under his inspiration since the 70s.  All very neat, but it's harder to swallow when we learn the man himself has been arrested several times and convicted on charges linked to fraud, embezzlement, forgery....  

By the by, I think it was Charles Fort in The Book of the Damned (1919) that first discussed this theory, without actually espousing it.  This from a little digging about.  Add another book to the wish list. 

Some of course will simply see the arrests as efforts by "the Man" to supress Däniken's ideas.  One could be generous and say he merely wanted to fund his travels and research in order to sustain his mission, at any cost, like an independent filmaker selling pot to fund his films.  Less generous would be to say the man's a clever bullshit artist who wanted to live the life of a "playboy" (to use the words of the Swiss high court), funding his endeavours one paperback at a time.  That along with "repeated and sustained" criminal activity linked to being a thief and a liar.  Not to mention that on at least one occasion he has admitted to using fraudulent evidence...

Hell, I like Stargate as well as the next guy, but I'm sure it's a bit annoying to those Egyptians and various groups of Amerindians to read that their ancestors weren't clever enough to build great monuments and understand the movements of the stars....

Origin of the image unknown.  Apologies to its maker, but this one appears to have gon viral....

A second image which caught my fancy compares the Eye of Horus, forerunner of the Eye of Providence used by Catholics, Freemasons and the Illuminati, to the structure of the human brain...I suppose this is more "objective" than our first image....one simply cannot redesign the Eye or the brain to make them match, but I haven't seen the proposition but forth by any professional Egyptologists.  One site included this image in its "proofs" of ancient alien contact...how could the Egyptians have had such "astonishing " knowledge?   

This isn't astonishing at all.  I don't propose that the Eye of Horus is a diagram of the brain, but the Egyptians were certainly, perhaps above all other ancient civilizations, in a good position to have had this kind of knowledge.  After all, their priests were also skilled morticians; removing human organs for preservation in canopic jars was an important part of the mummification process.  Apparently, the brain was an exception; they pulled it out through the nose after mashing it into a liquid state with a special tool.  They didn't consider the brain to be of the utmost importance, so using such an important symbol of divinity to represent it wouldn't have made much sense. So for us, this is a real no-brainer.  Heh heh.  One would have to imagine, however, that at some point during the millennia they practiced mummification, they'd have taken a good look at a human brain.  So while I think they were knowledgeable enough to have modelled the Eye of Horus on the human brain, I don't think they would have.  If anything, they would have modelled it on the heart,  which they believed "to be the center of a person's being and intelligence."

What the image above doesn't show is the pineal gland, found  just below the rear of corpus callosum.  This gland is often referred to as the "third eye," by Blavatsky, among others.  Indeed, the gland "produces the serotonin derivative melatonin, a hormone that affects the modulation of wake/sleep patterns and seasonal functions." Nifty metaphorical function aside ("waking up" as in "becoming aware" or even "enlightened"), isn't seratonin a major factor in the influence of mood whose level is affected by the use of mind-altering drugs, sex, meditation....?  OK, I'm not a neurochemist, but isn't it interesting that the structure said to be represented by the Eye of Horus contains the third eye?  Even if the Egyptians didn't see it that way?

Which is probably enough to show that I know just about fuck all when it comes to the human brain.  Or the Eye of Horus.  And I'm betting most of these people claiming that one represents the other are in the same boat.  Which is really, all I wanted to say on this subject, admittedly interesting, fraught with the pitfalls of bad science, bad archeology and "bad" thinking....

The eyes have it

A few days ago in Viareggio, Italy, a 46-year-old man stood up during Mass and gouged his own eyes out with his hands.  Exclamation point.

According to the surgeon who treated the man, the parishioner heard voices telling him to do it.

I popped a link to this article on my Facebook page and a friend was quick to link to the Wikipedia entry on Saint Lucy, a.k.a. Santa Lucia (c. 283-304 CE) .  Given that The Gid mentioned this saint a while ago, I'm chagrined I didn't think of her myself.  Back then we were investigating the symbolic conflation of eyes and breasts.  Lucy, often depicted holding a platter of eyes, is often associated with Agatha (c. 231-251 CE), often depicted holding a platter of breasts.

Agatha was a virgin martyr who suffered the gruesome fate of having her breasts sheared off before being cooked alive.  She is a typical saint of her genre:  having dedicated herself to Christ, she rejects the advances of a pagan suitor and for her refusal suffers torture and death.  Interestingly, in the legends of  virgin martyrs Saints Liberata and Quiteria, which I've previously examined, the story involves nine sisters persecuted for the same reasons as Agatha.  I've just learned that Agatha at one point was given over to a brother as part of her punishment, owned by a woman with nine daughters.

Lucy is basically the same tale.  Wooed by a pagan, she refuses to break her vow of chastity to Christ and refuses to sacrifice to the emperor.  Part of her sentence, like Agatha, was to be defiled in a brothel.  She too suffered torture and death.  The tradition of her eyes being gouged out appears to be absent from her story until the 15th century, which may indicate a conscious modeling on the Agatha legend.  Both after all, are Sicilian in origin, Agatha hailing from Catania and Lucy, from Syracuse, only 63 kilometers to the south.

In Sweden, a procession on St. Lucy's feast day is led by a young girl elected to be Lucy for the year.  In addition to the procession, a "St. Lucia Bun" is eaten.  Some pictures show this bun resemble a pair of eyes.  I had a conversation with woman in Catalonia who recalled that on St. Agatha's day, her village elected an Agatha and had a procession.  A bun, formed into a pair of breasts, was cooked, taken to the church to be blessed and then taken home again.

The metaphor of light is an important feature of the processions in the Scandinavian countries; the elected Lucy wears a crown of candles.  Her day, December 13th, was once (incorrectly) believed to be the shortest day of the year.  There is thus something of a pagan antecedent going one here in the commemoration of the winter solstice.  In this it is not so far from other Christmas and indeed Hannukah ("Festival of Lights") traditions: menorah, Yule log, Christmas lights, etc.

Lucy is a patron of the blind and is prayed to by those at risk of going blind.  Her name is derived from "lux" ("light") and her function is thus also a metaphor for God's grace, in the sense of "seeing the light" or having one's vision restored, as in the song Amazing Grace. ("Was blind but now I see.")  She  has in effect given her eyes so that others may see, brought into the light by her example of faith and sacrifice.

I am also reminded of the legend of St. Fris (previously discussed here).  His legend is also intimately connected to the winter solstice.  When his incorrupt body was discovered, a team of oxen were employed to move his sarcophagus to a new resting place, yet it could not be budged.  Lucy's legend has it that when she was to be taken off to the brothel, a team of oxen could not move her.  Whether or not this common element of solstice and oxen represents a common wellspring, however, I cannot say.

****

So Lucy had her eyes gouged out, which is indeed gruesome.  But gouging out one's own eyes is a different tale.  Another friend posted this tale in response to my Facebook blurb:  In 2005 R&B singer Houston gouged one of his eyes out with a plastic fork.

"....He said he had to get the devil off of his back and that’s the only way he could kill the devil."

Houston, whose full name is Houston Summers IV, is a Los Angeles native. He was raised strictly Christian and was "constantly at odds with the temptations that come with success in the music business" [a post-gouging statement read].

Not to be facetious, but we wonder if this might have something to do with a saying by Jesus found in both Matthew 5:29 and Mark 9:47 (KJV): 

And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire....

It's not out of the question to imagine that a mentally unbalanced person in an extreme state of agitation would take these words literally.

And then there's this guy.  In 2009, death row inmate Andre Thomas gouged out his remaining eye and ate it.  He was awaiting execution for killing his estranged wife and two kids, and then cutting their hearts out.

I'm pretty sure that one didn't come from Jesus.

Then again, there is that business with the Sacred Heart....

Finally, the only other mythological precedent I know of offhand is the story of Oedipus.  He unknwoingly killed his father and wed his mother.  When he later discovered what he'd done, he gouged his eyes out with a brooch from his mother/wife's robe.  Could Freud help explain what's going on in such cases?

[The Sandman].... lent support to his [Freud's] view that the feeling of uncanniness is directly related to the sight of the female genitals, particularly those of the mother. He stressed the frequent unconscious equivalence between the eyes and the genital organs, and between blindness and castration. Blinding oneself, like Oedipus, is an attenuated form of self-castration, but it also makes one the bearer of a blind eye, which represents the other sex while disfiguring the face. In his theory, Freud, with a single word, übersehen, which means both to look and to overlook, successfully condensed the story of Oedipus.

The link between the eyes and the breasts, which seems clear from the Agatha/Lucy parallels, supports Freud's analysis.  The man cuts out his own eyes, which are linked to the breasts, that intimate first connection between mother and child (milk and semen also being life-bringing fluids).  He not only castrates himself for these sexual feelings for his mother, but he mutilates her as well as punishment for arousing him.  The eyes are a sexual organ, the breast filling the infant vision as he suckles, deriving both oral pleasure, nutrition and an undeveloped sexual arousal.

Is it merely coincidence, that in our Italian case, the man was attending mass with is mother?

Georges Bataille, in The Story of the Eye, further elaborates upon the eye as a sexual organ.  In his book, the eye is interchangeable with testicles and eggs, and is frequently sexualized along with bodily fluids:  milk, urine, semen, blood, etc.

In one scene a young priest is seduced.  An kind of orgy ensues which involves a  parody of the Eucharist in which the bread and wine is desecrated with urine and semen.  The priest is murdered during orgasm.  One of his eyes is extracted and a character inserts it into her vagina while she has sex with the narrator.

I'm not going to embark on a full-blown psychoanalytic trip here or try to say what these things symbolize.  I think it's clear enough that the sex/death/eyeball trip is something to be considered and that when someone tears out their own eyeballs, it's more than mere "weird news".  Though it is that too.

We'll be keeping our eyes peeled for more of this sort of thing; in the meantime we'd appreciate any thoughts you might have on these matters....

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.

Eye Nipples: What is this?

In response to a recent post, Daurade's "Staff of Life" (which sounds sort of perverted when you put it that way), I noted St. Lucy's tray of eyeballs resembled St. Agatha's tray of breasts, and I mentioned the possibility that the historiographies of these saints may have been conflated. Daurade wondered if we could find other example of conflating eyeballs & nipples.Well I googled for images of "eye nipple", & I found this wonderful image.

But what is it?

It's a beautiful picture. To me the woman looks Hellenist, but I barely know what that word means, so I'm probably wrong. I see a lion's head draped across her head, and the lion's paws across her breast. And I think, but am not sure, that the "breast" is actually some object that she may be holding in her left hand. And the "breast" appears to to have rays emanating from it, as if it were a sun or a meteor; the rays seem to express upward as if fanning from an object hurtling from the heavens. There's clearly lots of symbology that I'm just not getting--which is why I'm asking for your help!

The image itself points to a bizarre little page that also shows a relevant Rene Magritte (see below), quotes Shakespeare's King Henry VI ("At their mother's moist'ned eyes babes shall suck"), and provides deadlinks to "the chapter Before the Milk of the World: Nipple-Eyes out of N. Hilton’s Lexis Complexes.

But the page doesn't say what this image is! So I ask again:

What is it

Anubis

Soon, if you’re flying out of Denver, you’ll pass a "26-foot-tall replica of Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead" before boarding your plane. Nice!

I can imagine three reactions:

1. Twittering glee. "Cool! Egypt!" The statue is, after all, ostensibly erected to celebrate/advertise the King Tut exhibit headed to the Denver Art Museum.

2. Shot nerves. "Aaargh! We’re doomed!" Nervous fliers, you know, might not be so into walking past gods of the dead. I mean, what’s next? Perhaps stocking the seatbacks with a guide to surviving a fall from a plane without a parachute (which is, incidentally, brief enough--it claims--to actually be followed, step-by-step, while plummeting to Earth in free fall)?

3. Bug-eyed whispers. "Now They’re just f-in’ with us, man!" It's almost as if it were designed to feed the conspiratorial minded who have pulled together a rather impressive body of symbology (Nazi, Masonic, etc.) to support fears of a cabal plotting the fate of the world from within secret underground tunnels beneath Denver International Airport. (Here's a skeptic's response.)

Let’s take a moment to consider option 3.

Twilight Language?

Take a few steps back--before strolling by Anubis, airport visitors are greeted by an enormous, murderous, blue stallion. "What’s this?" you ask. “How can a statue kill?” Well, legend has it that a part of the statue fell and crushed its own maker, leading him through the gateway to death. A sacrifice to the gods? An ominous omen? Coincidence?


Only after strolling by the killer horse do we see Anubis.


But Who Is Anubis?

The Denver statue is, I believe, a replica of a statue of Anubis that was placed prominently in King Tut's tomb. While Anubis is commonly referred to as the "Egyptian god of the dead", this title seems to obscure the richness of his mythology, which evolved over time during ancient Egypt's long history. (Think of how Christianity has evolved, for example, and then pause to consider that Egyptian religion extended over a longer period of time).

For me, one of the more interesting roles that Anubis played was that of a gatekeeper to the afterlife, meeting and judging the dead. From Wikipedia:

In the Hall of Two Truths, Anubis weighed the heart of a person against Ma'at, the goddess of truth, who was sometimes depicted symbolically as an ostrich feather. If the heart was judged to be impure, Ammit would devour it, and the person undergoing judgment was not allowed to continue their voyage towards Osiris and immortality.

That image of a scale--ostrich feather on one side, heart on the other--is chillingly beautiful to me. They say that "an ostrich's eye is larger than its capacity for love"--and I'm quite certain that my heart would tip the scales.

These days, of course, security guards play the gatekeeper between heaven and Earth, carefully judging the pureness of each departing soul--those judged pure are allowed to board their flights upward, while the impure are cast downward into security cells to be devoured.

Speaking of creepy-eyed statues and all-seeing security (x-ray scans and what-not), Chicago is also planning a whimsical new installment:


Big brother? Perhaps this is not just coincidence.

The 4th Way

I opened with 3 potential reactions to Anubis welcoming you to the friendly skies--but all this talk of big brother and Kafka-esque security has opened my eyes to a 4th reaction.

What if Anubis is part of a larger movement in public art installments that are reflecting back our fear and paranoia? Consider the USA as a nation of people who feel themselves coming disjoined by attacks from a host of threats, threats that pile upon each other, new ones seemingly each day: mail bombs, buildings exploded, school shootings, cyber attacks, dirty bomb threats, fertilizer bombs, shoe bombs, airplanes as bombs, cyanide envelopes, snipers on freeways, father and son sniper teams in our capital, the great recession, government-sponsored torture, nebulous wars without end...

Surely we should not be surprised to find our airports and cities filling up paranoid and threatening images--from the giant eyeball of Chicago to the god of the dead and the towering demonic stallion of Denver?

May I suggest that it might actually be much odder if we were to find, instead, happy, playful art, stuff that made you giggle and feel warm inside?

There’s a quick way to test this hypothesis--take a quick glance around to see if our public places are filling up gleeful glib or fun house mirrors.

Oh wait ... Welcome home, my friends! ...

Why Widescreen?

So I was wondering ... why are screens wide? Why not tall-screen TV? Or round?

I came up with a simple explanation. Our eyes are side-by-side. Which means that our vision captures a wide field. You can imagine some alien species with one eye above the other. Their vision would be tall--can't you picture their corresponding HD 9:16 tall-screen TVs?

But to take this back a step, why on earth are our eyes side by side? I think that it's because of gravity. For the most part, from our perspective, we're operating on flat surface that spreads long to the left and right. We scan left and right -- so our eyes are side to side.

Of course this beggars the question: why don't flying things have eyes one above the other?

Well, if you consider insects, they sort of do. But let's ignore them. You're left with things of flight that evolved from walking, crawling things. Birds and bats have side-by-side eyes because they evolved from earth-bound creatures.

And that beggars the question, didn't all the walkers evolve from swimmers? Why do swimmers have side-by-side eyes instead of up and down?

Well, again, I have to guess. It seems like fish bodies are mostly symmetrical across the Y axis -- that is, the left half is pretty much the same as the right.

It's been pretty well established that symmetrical outputs are a function of gene coding efficiencies, but the relevant question to our inquiry here is -- why symmetry along the Y axis instead of the X?

It seems to me that this happened because gravity pulls the fish down, so a simple bladder mechanism allows for up and down movement. You know--add air to the bladder to rise, release air to sink. So up and down movement seems "easy" to conquer. Left and right, however, require powered thrusts -- so fish have fins to control motion on the Y axis. Once you've got this need for symmetry across the Y axis -- of course the eyes would follow.

So, I suggest: we have widescreen because gravity left our concerns on the horizon, which led to binocular vision working best (from a spot-the-prey or hunter perspective) when scanning the horizon instead of the ... there's no word for it? ... the "vertizon".

Now, imagine what spider TV would look like ...