Tree of Life Geometry, Revisited

I’m not entirely sure this will work. But here goes.  Thanks to Gordon’s recommendation to try out VINE, I was able to produce a trio of short videos today, including this one on the traditional geometry of the Tree of Life.  It’s fast, because Vine only allows six-second videos.  But it’s kinda cool, and if you watch it a few times, you can probably figure out how the geometry of the Tree fits together.  Enjoy!

Vine: Video of the Tree of Life

Update: Apparently you have to go to Vine’s website to view it, because I can’t embed it on a WordPress site.  Alas.  Enjoy anyway.

Tai Chi Y2D65: unfolding

I’m working on this pair of paintings called, appropriately enough, “Black Pillar” and “White Pillar”. They’re pretty much meditations on geometry, with the White Pillar holding three mandalas or roundels (I like roundel better, actually. It’s a more western word.) The three roundels on White Pillar are they in-yang symbol at the top, a square turned on its point in the middle, and two nested seven-pointed stars at the bottom. White Pillar, as a painting, is about 80% finished.

Last night I began laying out the detailed painting guides on “Black Pillar”. This is the bottom roundel on that pillar, a meditation on the number 8, and as you can see, it’s a pair of nested eight pointed stars (one is actually composed of two inter-locking squares) inside an octagon. It’s a considerable change in geometry from 2, and 3, deceptively simple and yet relying on what one learned from the earlier shapes and geometries. It’s an unfolding, of sorts, as larger numbers reveal much more complex patterns and allow greater interactions and relationships.

What does this have to do with tai chi?

Well, daily practice is an unfolding, of sorts. The natural habit of our minds and bodies is to ossify and tighten up, to reject new things, and to limit the adoption of new concepts or new technologies. I’m neither a painter nor a math teacher, nor a martial artist (once upon a time, I wouldn’t have said I was a magician either, but that title is growing on me).

In any case, what’s going on here is an unfolding. The creaks in my body rarely trouble me past the first two or three movements — I’m not reversing the aging of my body, but I’m slowing it down. Many of the creaks and pops that were ever present when I started, are gone.

Unfolding, in this instance, means breaking out of the shell. Letting the egg hatch. Pinocchio becoming a real, live boy. It’s growing up, in a sense. It’s growing out, in another sense. It’s delving deep, or reaching high… Some Christians use the prayer of Jabez, “O God, increase my territory.” And others remember the prophet Isaiah (I think it’s Isaiah), “enlarge the place of your tents, strengthen your cords, lengthen the stakes in the ground.”

A tent is useful only in potential when it’s stored in the bag. A human too tight in his skin is only partially useful. Or strong. Or happy. Or healthy.

I feel that I’m unfolding, these days.

Painting the White Pillar

I’ve been working on and off for a few years on this tall, thin painting. Some of it was learning geometry first. Turns out that heptagrams are kinda complicated. Squares in circles, not so much, but yin-yangs are deceptive — they look easy but there is an undergirding complexity.

The statue at the base is by my friend, Albert Sussler. He’s a much better artist than I am: an American, Japanese-trained, master potter.

Part of me is reluctant to put my painting on display like this, half finished. It’s not done. It may never be done. Oh well — that’s how these things go sometimes. The point is that te artist and the designer are creators, principally. Sometimes teu create work within an existing theme, as here; sometimes they create utterly unique and semi-original works. The artist makes for himself; the designer makes for others— yet both are committed o the core act of making. Of shaping. Of calling something into being.

I had help, of course. Geometry teacher is Andrew Sutton — I learned from his book,
Ruler and Compass. The pillars came from the western mystery traditions by way of English esoteric training in magic, apparently. The paint came from Michael’s supply, the brushes and canvas the same.

Where is your creative power taking you? Or is it just sitting over there on the ground?

Compartments, measurement, geometry

My evolving druidry kit
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Over the last few days, while working on other things, I’ve been fussing and sawing and sanding and gluing small bits of wood into place to make this little box.

I’m a member of a couple of druidic organizations, namely AODAand DOGD, and I’ve noted that the more of these kinds of ritual groups and ritual paths that I practice, the more that my house and life gets cluttered up with stuff… stuff that’s difficult to pack, difficult to put away, difficult to sort or keep separate, and difficult, frankly, to explain in short order.

Plus, there’s the Hermetic Kavad, which is going to take more carpentry skills than I currently have, to finish in any appreciable way that people are going to find useful or interesting. So there’s the need to practice those skills, and this is a good way to do it.

I need more practice. Clearly.

Part of it is that carpentry is not pure geometry, nor pure measurement. The thickness of the wood worked matters; so does its flexibility and strength. The rules for assembling pieces are not hard and fast – there are knots in the wood, there’s the fact that a piece of wood which has straight sides is not perfectly straight, and there’s the challenge that cutting a piece of wood that looks flat may in fact warp it — particularly if it’s these tiny thin pieces that make up the internal walls of this box.

Also, this was about making sure that certain objects fit, and fit snugly, inside the box, without a lot of wiggle room (Some of them are fragile, after all). It’s not pure geometry by any means. Actually, most of it was done with a straight-edge, with only inches marked and not to any degree of accuracy (no quarter or half inches).

And you know what? It turned out ok. Not perfect by any means. But not bad. Not beautiful. But functional. Acceptable. A suitable learning experience.

A good beginning.

If you’re further interested in the contents of the kit, click on the picture, and visit the Flickr page… there’s about 20 notes about the contents of the box, but you have to be on Flickr to read/see them.

Via Flickr:
(Roll over the image to read the notes.. but on Flickr, not here.)

I had it in mind to build a small box for the tools and equipment of druidic practice in the DOGD. I got the box from Michael’s Arts & Crafts, and I’m in the process of laying out a Celtic knot-work pattern on the outside, along with spaces for the four animals of the directions (hawk, stag, salmon, bear), the sixteen geomantic characters, and the various other sigils of this society.

One of the big problems was the red cross and the green ring. The standard 5″ diameter one doesn’t fit in the box. I’ve now tried making a 3×3″ ring and cross, but the scale of the two parts seems off. Time to remember my proportional rules, and try again.

Inside the box are compartments for incense and candles, a small egg cup ‘chalice’, a crystal ball, three candlesticks, two cauldrons, a wand, and (tucked out of sight) four geomantic “Druid wands” for casting geomancy charts. There are also two bottles which will eventually hold Spagyric preparations, and space for several more. Although I don’t think this box will ever be able to hold all 17 spagyrics that the order has on offer… by then it will probably be time for a new box…

Vervain Spagyric

Filtering Spagyrics

Alchemical Spagyric of Vervain

This is a preparation of common vervain (Verbena officinalis) made using Bulgarian from Mountain Rose Herbs.   In a Spagyric tincture, the herb is macerated or soaked in high-proof alcohol, and then strained after several weeks to produce a menstruum or herb essence-infused alcohol. The herbal residue is calcinated or burned to black or white ash. The ash and the menstruum are then recombined for a period of cohobation, before the ash is re-filtered out, and the resulting spagyric bottled.

Vervain is also known as van-van, and is a common ingredient in hoodoo and other rootwork. It is an ancient herbal cure for eye strain, and a relaxant of some kind. A few drops in a large amount of water is a strong dose.   I produced this as part of my initiatory work in the Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn. I’m not at all sure that I’m ready to drink even a few drops of it, actually.   I mean, it’s black. With this tinge of green around the edges where light can pass through.

Except, when I hold it up to the light, it has this green color which is somewhere between the traditional color of Venus, and the green glass of a bottle of Rolling Rock Beer. After several strainings through cotton balls and coffee filters, it is nearly cloudless; there are no remaining films or mists of particulate left in it, and it is vaguely emerald in color.

The residue

One is reminded of the Emerald Tablet, and the wisdom of Hermes Thrice Blessed.

So, from a Design perspective…

So, from a design perspective, this is dumb.  I mean, what’s to be gained from soaking a bunch of herbs in alcohol for weeks, burning the remaining herbal mess, recombining the ashes with the herb-infused alcohol, and then letting it sit for a week.  Add a teaspoon of wine to a barrel of sewage, you get sewage.  Add a teaspoon of sewage to a barrel of wine, you  get… sewage. Seems utterly dumb, right?

And yet the symbolism, both alchemically and chemically, as well as the value of the actual nutrients left over in the ashes, is kind of important.  The soaking part, what alchemists call the menstruum, is where you get all the easy stuff to make the switcheroo from being solid to being liquid. The alcohol becomes a solvent which makes it easy for the plant essentials to cross over from being plant to being something else.

But there’s a whole crowd of things in a plant that can’t make the crossover that easily.  You have to break them down, break them out, smash them up, and mash them up, and then recombine those shattered, broken-down bits back into the easy stuff.  This process is called Calcination.  In alchemy you do it by putting the oven on 500°F and then putting all the soaking-wet alcoholic leafy bits in there, and watching them burn.  It’s pretty.  It’s ugly.  It’s hot.  You’re making sure the dross burns off — all the crappy parts of the design.  Some writerly type said, “Kill your darlings.” Harlan Ellison said, “don’t write crap.” Stephen King said, “Cut 10% of everything you write in the first draft.”  The Alchemists did that too.  Dump the bad stuff, and reduce the waste to ash.  Make it utterly black, make it gray, make it white.  Heat it up, and burn away everything but the essentials.

Then dump that ugly black ash, the leftovers of your furious cutting-away, back into that beautiful green, herb-infused alcohol.  And leave it in the darkness for a while, bringing it out only a couple of times a day to shake it and stir it and make a mess of it all over again.  It will turn so black and so dark, you won’t be able to see light through it.  It will become utterly opaque.  That’s cohobation.

And then filter it.  The coffee filters, or the cotton balls, will be ugly and slimy and burnt-looking.  It will be crusty and black.  And the liquid will still look black from the side.  Tilt your head funny at great design, and you can see the magic that’s being used against you in the final product, and the ghastly waste that went into producing something that amazing… it’s like following the production chain of an Apple product back to the iridium mines in Africa and the sweatshops of Shanghai, that leftover teaspoon of ashen-black liquid tar leftover at the end of a spagyric operation.  It’s the difference between good design and great design.  It’s the difference between taking twenty minutes on a project and twenty months.

But that’s where excellence comes from. From the reuse and the burning up of ideas, from the consumption of materials, from the willingness to apply tools and heat to a problem.  Getting the low-hanging fruit — getting the base chemicals to cross from plant to alcohol — that’s easy.  Getting the raw chemical building blocks of the world into the spagyric… that requires a different kind of effort.  A deeper one, a heartier one, a more dedicated one.  Separate, Dissolve, Burn Up the Leftovers, take the Ashes and dump them back in, Recreate the Work Fresh and New.

It’s a beginning.

From A Teaching Perspective…

The Filtration Process continues

From a teaching perspective, this is hard.  The rewards of a spagyric tincture aren’t really meant to be shared. They can’t be, really — nominally, this is medicine, but medicine from a style and philosophical approach to medicine that is no longer common nor approved.  The techniques require access to tools and materials that we no longer accept that students should work with.

And yet the process!

“Take something natural — using human gifts, dissolve the easily-gotten parts, and break them down — using other human gifts, shatter what remains into miniscule pieces — burn those pieces to release the even stranger bits — recombine with the easily-gained bits — leave them alone a while, except for a little gentle stirring — filter out the raw bits.”

Isn’t that what we ask students to do with their writing? Or their lab reports? Or when correcting mathematical errors in a piece of homework? Don’t we teachers sit like coffee filters over open jars, to collect the black bile that students spew out, and find a way to make sure the pure essence of their work, and the pure essence of their personhood, reaches the page or the presentation or the planning book? Don’t we occasionally apply too much pressure, and the filter breaks, and we say terrible words, and reach for the paper towels, and call in the heavy hitters and have to re-filter the whole batch?

Does anyone get what I’m trying to say?

There’s richness is the reminders here.

The Full Neo-Orphic Hymns

I’ve gathered together all seven of these Neo-Orphic Hymns that I’ve written, to the seven planets as they’re understood in the Hermetic philosophy.  And they’re now available on a single page for your reference and readability.  If you do make use of them, please let me know!

3D Printing: Sketch to SketchUp, 30 minutes

This evening, I bumped into a guy I know, who talked to me about a project he’s working on. Turns out that he could use a template for this project. Basically, he needs a jig.  A jig is a three-dimensional object that serves as a template:  Slide the unaltered main part into the jig, use the guides on the jig to attach the relevant bits in exactly the right place, slide the newly altered part out of the jig, and boom! Done!

But describing the jig — a template for a part that requires repeated steps to assemble in exactly the same way every time — this bit of tape here, that cut there, and so on.  It’s a very difficult task.  He was trying to describe it in words, and not doing very well.

So, I whipped out my iPad, and started up Paper by fiftythree.com, and in a few minutes we’d worked up a passable sketch.  I left him, and walked home, and used the remaining thirty-five minutes of battery power to design the jig for his project.  A short while later, I’ve gotten an e-mail back from him, and he’s seen the .JPGs of his rough idea, rendered in SketchUp, and approved the design.

I’ll try doing a rough printout for him tomorrow on our cupcake printer, Moira.  And he’ll be able to try out his design, and talk to his project partners, on Friday or Monday.

Think about the power of that for the future of manufacturing:  A rough design of a part, from sketch to SketchUp or other 3D Modeling software, in 35 minutes. Another hour or two to print the design — twenty minutes of that time spent calibrating the Frankenstein’s Monster of a cupcake printer (Love you, “Moira!”) and warming her up to 220° C for printing, instead of waiting six to twenty days for the part to be designed, mis-manufactured, shipped, corrected, shipped back, re-manufactured, and then be useful.  Wow.

And now, add in the potential that your kid in third grade is doing that work.

A kid in third grade doesn’t even know what the X-Y-Z axis means, let alone how to measure precisely along those axes.  He doesn’t know what a cam or a jig or a template or a gauge is, or how to put calibration markers into his design, so he can compare the first print with the model, and determine how much of a margin of error is created between the digital model and the final product.

But he could.  And he will, with enough practice.

In the meantime, there are going to be two prints of this object — one for my friend, and one to show the new teachers who are coming to my school to attend a class on how to teach Design Thinking.

Because, as Scott says, “A picture is worth a thousand words. But a part is worth a thousand pictures.”  And so it proved.  I took my friend’s words, about a thousand of them, and I structured them into a rough sketch, and then into a SketchUp model.  And tomorrow, I’m going to take two hours of time I could be writing, to dedicate my computer to the task of printing two copies of this model, to make a part.

A hundred thousand words — a hundred thousand x-y-z axis calibrations and a semi-precise amount of melted plastic later — and my friend will have his part.

It’s hard to believe I’ve done the equivalent amount of thinking, as if I’d just written a third of a Stephen King novel, but I have.  We should do a better job of teaching kids that drawing is thinking.  We should do better than that, really: We teachers should believe it ourselves.

An Artistic Endeavor Now for Sale

One of my little projects, to learn how to draw the Geomantic Figures and their attendant visualizations, has yielded some fruit.  It’s now available as a poster for sale through my store on Zazzle.com.

I must admit, I don’t know yet whether the poster will print nicely or not; or if the image is quality enough to try to offer for sale as a poster/print.  But it couldn’t hurt to try, right?  Fortune favors the bold!

Know the Power of Image

How to make Google your allied spirit….

Chances are pretty good that somewhere on your hard drive is an image whose provenance you don’t know. Maybe it’s a picture of a Greek ostraka with a name that looks suspiciously like “Pericles” but you don’t remember where you downloaded the picture.  Or maybe, there’s an unattributed statue picture in one of your slideshows for class.  Or maybe one of your students doesn’t know the bibliographic data for a picture in her slideshow.

You should know how to find that information.  Here’s how.

First, go to Google’s homepage, Google.com.  Then find the button that takes you to Google Image.  Go there.  In the search bar, notice the little icon of the camera.  Click on that.  Upload the image with the missing provenance data, and search for the photo.  My friend Craig was looking for the identification of this goddess — surrounded by crooked Sunwheels, and dogs, and gees, and bullheads. Who was she?

Potnia Theon — mistress of animals. SOrry about the crooked crosses: does it help that they date to 680 BC? probably not.

My almost-thirty-year old memory of such things is that this was Geometric ware from ancient Greece, but older than the Parthenon, although younger than the Trojan War. That gave me a window, of call it 900 BC to 700 BC. Turns out that this is from Boeotia, near the ancient city of Thebes (of the seven gates, and the Sphinx riddling to Oedipus on the road). It dates from 680 BC, and she’s a Potnia Theron — a Mistress of Animals, akin to Artemis.  The original is in the Archaeological Museum in Athens.

We wouldn’t have known any of this without Google Reverse Image search, a Flickr user named Julianna (thank you!) , and my curious friend Craig.

But now we do.

Reflecting on this, I realized that if I’d wanted to answer Craig’s question fifteen years ago, I’d have had to find an art history library, and slog through books of Mycenaean and early Greek pottery for several hours. Instead, I had an answer in fifteen minutes… and that answer was not dependent AT ALL on what I’d previously known.  In college (actually, in grad school) I spent several hundred dollars on books, and probably a few thousand dollars on tuition, in order to learn the basic framework of Hellenic pottery patterns… and in the clutch, twenty years on, I was wrong.

Google was right, and able to construct the knowledge path from the visual image alone, to the etherial data of the photographer, to the more etherial data of the physical location of the object photographed, and to the even more etherial data of where and when the original potter had worked.  That’s a bizarre and alien sort of efficiency.

And yet, it’s the core efficiency of the Palace of Memory technique, for example.  Your brain is much better at remembering pictures than words, and better at remembering places than abstract information.  And it turns out that Google Images is capable of helping you construct those lines of connection between place and image quite rapidly.

And suddenly, the power of images becomes quite clear.

Pretty girl, all made of geometric patterns with inappropriate crooked crosses, geese, a bull’s head and a shaggy dog or two?  Boeotian, 680 BC ± 10 years?  Potnia Theron, or Mistress of Animals. Sure, I know her. She’s in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens… Why do you ask?

Well, sure I know that.  You have to know these things if you’re a magician…

Only, you don’t need to know that.  You need to be able to construct the path to that knowledge, but not necessarily what the knowledge is.  There may come a time when there will be no Google to call upon.  In the meantime, use it. Trace your imagery back to its sources. Learn what the external brain has to say about the images you treasured enough to keep, but not enough to keep the bibliographic data solidified.

You might surprise yourself.

John Keats, Cultural Appropriation, and Drawing

Chapman’s Homer: a poster
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Via Flickr:
The eighth grade was writing poems and creating illuminations or illustrations of them, after having read a number of poems by Rumi in a book called The Illuminated Rumi. The idea was that by asking them to think about the visual images in the Rumi poems, and comparing them to the illustrations, they would see how important visual imagery is to the development of poetic language.

Then, of course, they wrote and illuminated their own poems. It was a great little design thinking project — how does a set of word provoke a set of images? How does a set of images provoke a set of words? How can words and images together provoke new feelings?

I didn’t wish to make a poster for one of my own poems, but I figured I’d illustrate one of the poems that I have memorized, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” by John Keats who died in 1827. My deal with the English teacher in question was that I would leave in the pencil guidelines and planning marks, so that students could see my design process to some degree, and have a sense of my construction process. As I described it to her and to her class, the poem is about a book, so the illustration includes a book. On the pages of the book itself are two illustrations which are themselves illustrating the second half of poem. Both of the images are about the astonishment and amazement of discovery of unexpected sights in the natural world, so someone — the current reader, perhaps? — has illustrated the margins of the book with examples of local plants and a dragonfly. The cycle of discovery continues and grows richer and deeper. Thus, Keats’s words inspire SEVERAL layers of discovery: the possibility of delving into the writings of an ancient Greek poet; the willingness to investigate history (the “Cortez” image) and astronomy (“Watcher of the skies”); and finally the natural world and the skill of drawing (the plants in the margin notes of the book, and the poster itself).

I recently said something dumb on Balthasar’s blog which I shouldn’t have said, and I apologize here, publicly… For as I made this poster, I was uncomfortably aware of the degree to which this poem — which I’ve always liked — can be read in another way as part and parcel of a bit of cultural appropriation. Keats’s poem comments on an English translation of an ancient Greek epic, and in the process of describing that work… Keats claims both Homer, and several islands dedicated to Apollo, for the English language and the English-speaking peoples. The astronomer is in one sense gazing upon the sky in wonder, but in another he’s laying claim to the heavens. And Cortez — well. It was actually Balboa who stood at Darien in Panama, and gazed at the Pacific — but the cultural -appropriation (and -destruction) of the power- and wealth-hungry captain of the Aztec conquest should be self-evident.

But I’m not sure I would have read this poem that way without drawing it out first. I needed the opportunity to create the poster before I would have seen the cultural complexities the poem raises. And in good design fashion — the solution to one problem also raises several new problems on its own. As my friend Josh says, “There’s no better or faster way to generate problems than to create a solution.”

We discover things about the world through the thought processes we use to investigate it, and any means that we use to do that — writing, or reading, or drawing, or visualizing, or ritualizing, or glamorizing — will help us make new and deeper discoveries. It’s remarkable the things that we uncover as we go through these processes. As the poet said, “pull a thread, and find the whole world attached to it.”