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…

The Kavad of a Sacred Geometer

Suzanne Wind Gaskell has hit one out of the park on this exhibit at Wesleyan University. She’s built and illustrated the Kavad of a Sacred Geometer, a study of the geometry and training of a traditional, non-literate artisan in a mathematical tradition. I did not hear her talk, unfortunately, but this object is an occult and esoteric masterwork, as well as being a mathematical wonder.

A Kavad, for reference, is a storyteller’s box or shrine from India or Pakistan. It’s a small box, in this case somewhat smaller than a portable sewing machine case, that has a number of doors, drawers and compartments. In a traditional kavad, these panels are illustrated with scenes and characters from a storyteller’s repertoire. By degrees, the storyteller would open the box to an audience, and the audience members in appreciation would put money in the kavad’s bottom drawer. Once fully opened, the kavad could be a shrine of the Rig Veda or the Upanishads, a life of Muhammad or some Islamic saints.

Ms. Gaskell has taken this form — the kavad, for a non-literate storyteller to explain epic tales to a largely non-literate audience — and created a mathematical treatise. The kavad she’s designed and built is covered inside and out with mathematical proofs and complex geometric constructions; the money drawer is filled with almost-talismanic painted tiles showing traditional floor layouts and iterative techniques of geometrical layout. The inside panels explain points, lines, and circles, the vescia piscis and more. The innermost compartments show the relationship between a vibrating string and musical notation, and contain two dimensional and three dimensional explanations of the five platonic solids. Panels on the back and top demonstrate how the one side of a polygon iterates from a triangle to a square to a pentagon, all the way out to a decagon.

It’s singularly awesome. Awesome in the old sense of the word, “struck down or filled by a sense of awe”.

And of course, I want to build one. Because this is a storyteller’s tool par excellence, a simple cube that, when opened, reveals itself to be no less than a shrine of the building blocks of the universe. Figuring out what to put into a kavad, and figuring out how to build one, represents a deep mastery of many subtle and powerful matters.