SATURNO=CRONOS=TOROIDE=ANILLO=20 DE ABRIL ("MAQUINA DEL TIEMPO")=CUBO - Secreto Masonico

Part 1 of 2

A friend asked that this article be posted on the website. I hereby honor his request. —H.B.

Sun rises over monolith in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 (1968).

Two men looked out through prison bars
One saw mud—the other, stars.

— Frederick Langbridge

In the beginning was the Monolith.

There it stood, at the dawn of mankind, entrancing Moon-Watcher and his fellow apemen, doing strange things to them, preparing them for intelligence and civilization. There it (or rather, its counterpart) stood again, eons later, as Heywood Floyd beheld it, this time on the moon, under the name of Tycho Magnetic Anomaly-1. It was a vertical slab of jet-black material, about ten feet high and five feet wide: a perfect, symmetrical rectangular block, reflecting almost no light at all. And it stood yet again on the surface of Japetus, a moon of Saturn (the movie version has it floating in space near Jupiter), this time as the mile-high big brother of TMA-1: TMA-2, beheld by astronaut David Bowman.

“Call it the Star Gate,” says Arthur C. Clarke in his novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), so brilliantly depicted by Stanley Kubrick in the movie of the same name. Clarke also calls it “the Sentinel,” after his 1948 short story on which the novel was based. As astronaut Bowman watched, the thing inverted, turned itself inside out; it was no longer a rectangular block but a hollow shaft, and Bowman had time for just a single broken remark: “The thing’s hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God—it’s full of stars!”

“The Star Gate opened,” writes Clarke. “The Star Gate closed.” And that was the last Mission Control back on earth ever heard of Bowman.

What follows in the movie is the most dazzling sequence of images that depict a transfinite celestial journey, unsurpassed even after all these years of development in cinematographic technology and computer graphics. What Kubrick shows us on the screen is nothing less than a view of a spiritual Ascension, even if still only a pale copy of the latter.

Beyond time and space, Bowman is transported to a location where he ages prematurely—old age is perennially understood to be a sign of wisdom—and, on his deathbed (“Die before you die”—Mohammed), comes face to face for the last time with the black Monolith, which acts as midwife in his rebirth as the “Star-Child” in the vicinity of the earth.

As Master Ahmet Kayhan explained: "I experienced Observation of the Compassionate. Thank God. I became real with the Real, thank God. I became one day old. I knew and saw my Lord. The universe ceased to exist, it became ashes, it burned up, only God remained. The name ‘Ahmet’ remained, he himself ceased to exist. Only God was left. The universe was filled with joy.” (Bayman, The Teachings of a Perfect Master (2012), p. 453. Emphasis added.)

What is it in 2001 that held generations of movie-goers spellbound? What was the reason for its astounding success?

A symbol, according to psychologist Carl G. Jung, is something that is never directly comprehensible at first glance. It excites the psyche of man in a way that does not readily lend itself to logical analysis. And Kubrick was careful to film the movie so that many of the clues in the novel were left out, as primarily a visual experience which let watchers view it without tying it down finally to anything definite—which is what made 2001 a great work of art. But this brings up the further question of the role in modern society of the science fiction genre as a whole.

Most science fiction, of course, projects the present into the future tense. It rephrases contemporary issues of society and technology in a future setting. But science fiction at its most profound—like all great works of art and literature—speaks to the mythic dimension in man. With all due respect to Freud and his achievements, rockets and aliens address depths of the psyche unplumbed by Freudian symbolism. Why does sci-fi enthrall many of us to such a degree? Because at its best,science fiction is,whether we realize it or not, the mythology of our time. In ages past, myths and fairy tales referred back to a previous time or beginning. In keeping with our contemporary progressive world view, science fiction is forward-looking, but this really does not make much of a difference, for what is in our past is in our future as well: as the Koran puts it, “You have come from God, and you shall return to Him.” Perhaps, in situating major themes in the future instead of the past, it is even more apt; for what is past is past, and for us the really significant things still remain in the future.

Science Fiction as Future-Oriented Myth

To the perceptive eye, great science fiction betrays mythological sources from the very first step. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the first work of fiction to bear all the characteristics of the genre, is a retelling, in physical terms, of the Cabalistic legend of the Golem. In Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Mike’s return recalls the Second Coming of Christ; in Walter Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz, Rachel’s primal innocence recalls the Creation story. InChildhood’s End, another Clarke novel, Karellen the alien, with his “sheer size” and “voice like an organ” upon whom “no man may look and live” (Exodus 33:19), plays God to Stromgren’s Moses. The Overlords, to whose race Karellen belongs, are like angels in that unlike man, they cannot attain immortality but can only act—in a similar way to 2001—as midwives in his rebirth, and hence are finally inferior to him. The “Total Breakthrough” which spreads through mankind like an epidemic at the end of the book recalls apokatastasis (the restoration of all souls to a state of blessedness) and the Descent of Grace: “In a real sense, those no-longer-humans floating off into space are entering a heaven.” [1] In George Lucas’ Star Wars movie series, Luke Skywalker plays the archetypal role of the hero; it comes as no surprise that director George Lucas was studying the works of mythologist Joseph Campbell at the time. And “the Force,” according to Lucas, is “a distillation of a lot of mythological religious teachings.” [2]

As a further example, just consider H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine. The Time Traveller goes hundreds of thousands of years into the future, there to find the earth transformed into a Garden of Delights and inhabited by the peaceable Eloi, while beneath the earth, in infernal regions, dwell the repulsive and brutal Morlocks. What are the Eloi but angels in Heaven, and the Morlocks demons in Hell?

Naturally, all these authors tap rich sources of the Western cultural heritage, although when it comes to myth, we find that similar themes are sounded in all the mythologies of the world. But something is going on here that lies deeper than the inheritance or imagination of any science-fiction writer. Mankind has always had stories of other worlds and other beings. But whereas these worlds and beings were originally located in the spiritual realm, they are now transposed, due to modern man’s alienation from his spiritual wellsprings, into the physical universe. The “higher worlds” have now become planets circling stars in other galaxies, and there are two types of aliens: angelic (such as Spielberg’s E.T.) and demonic (the whole class of bug-eyed monsters). Is it a coincidence that, just when we erased the spiritual world from our minds, we began to think about extraterrestrial life in three-dimensional space? Is it a coincidence that, just when we decided to dismiss fairies, elves, demons and the djinn, people began reporting UFOs and alien abductions? (The two form an almost unbroken temporal continuity.) Having renounced another, invisible, parallel world accessible to his consciousness, modern man now projects such things into the physical world. This may not only be erroneous, in the sense that we have misplaced these objects of our attention—extraterrestrial physical life may not actually exist and thus continue to remain unproved. It may also be dangerous, in the sense that forming the wrong conception about a phenomenon prevents the possibility of coping with it effectively.

The Symbolism of the Monolith

So let us return to 2001. In this novel, Clarke has made use of four major mythical/spiritual themes. The first is the death-rebirth experience of the soul, common to all the major traditions of humanity. The second is the Star-Child—the Child of the Heart (walad al-qalb) of Islamic Sufism, the Golden Child (hiranyagarbha) of Hinduism, etc., which is the outcome of the rebirth. The third is the Ascension that one experiences as the result of this spiritual rebirth. These all indicate that Clarke is tapping the deepest levels of the human psyche. There remains only one theme to discuss: the Monolith. Inscrutable, enigmatic, it baffles any immediate attempt to unwrap its mystery. What can it symbolize?

We obtain a clue when we realize that Clarke has endowed this black stone, resembling nothing so much as a flattened and elongated United Nations building, with the proportions of 1-4-9, or 1²-2²-3². Thus it stands, Clarke tells us, for the squares of the first dimension (width), the second dimension (length), and third dimension (height), respectively, and he goes on to imply that the sequence is continued beyond three dimensions. Hence, we discover that the Monolith has to do with dimensionality, and if we do not square them, we have the sequence 1-2-3. Note that the notion of “squaredness” is implicit in Clarke’s numbers: we have a square in length, a square in width, and a square in height. Now these squares naturally lead one to think of an object whose faces are composed of squares, which is a cube. Moreover, in three dimensions the simplest regular geometrical solid resembling the Monolith is a cube, and in two dimensions the simplest corresponding figure is a square, both of which are mathematically simpler and aesthetically more appealing than the slab. Our problem is thus reduced to a treatment of the square/cube, and its blackness. Let us tackle the square first.

Kazimir Malevich: Black Square, 1915. Malevich declared it to be
the “zero of form,” and claimed that it eclipsed all previous art.

Square, Circle, Cube, Sphere

As soon as we “renormalize” Clarke’s rectangular prism to the square/cube, we find ourselves on familiar ground. For in addition to its geometrical import, it has frequently been used as a symbol of the psyche in many cultures and traditions. Closely related to the square is the circle in two dimensions and to the cube, the sphere in three dimensions, which are perhaps of even greater symbolic significance.

In what follows we shall make use of—but not confine ourselves to—the findings of Jungian analysis. [3] To begin with, the square (and often the rectangle, like Clarke’s “panel”) represents the four classical elements (Air, Water, Earth, Fire) and is thus a symbol of earthbound matter, of the body and physical reality. Its four corners suggest differentiation, and thus the created universe. Furthermore, Pythagoras associated the square with the soul; the saying that the soul is a square and that four is the number of all living things was attributed to him by his pupils. The quadrangle also stands for the realization of wholeness in consciousness.

The Black Cube, first exhibited in 2010. Its website states: "It is black – deep and mysterious. It is cubic – shiny on every side with sharp edges, it has the most rational and most perfect shape. It is nicely crafted – high-quality materials, premium finish, beautiful and elegant, pure class. Its versatility is endless... just start dreaming and then turn this thing into whatever you might desire it to be. It is what we all have secretly been waiting for, for such a long time – an overdue revelation... [the] conclusion of the process of modernization."

The Black Cube "was created by an anonymous collective of German designers who[se] agenda is to develop radical design solutions for a sustainable future... Stepping into its showroom one could already sense a sublime atmosphere. Sacral sounds were filling the air... the cube could be used [as] a fetish object or an altar."

The cube is the extension of the two-dimensional square into three dimensions. Cartesian in its simplicity, the cube is the basic building block of Euclidian 3-space and architecture. It thus symbolizes matter, and more specifically, solid stone. The cube is also the simplest structure that is architecturally feasible. Now stone, whether precious or otherwise, is a symbol of the Self. According to Mircea Eliade, the stone is an archetypal image expressing absolute reality, [4] out of which relative or conditioned reality is born; for the Chinese Taoists, the entire universe proceeded out of the “uncarved block.” Man is mortal; stone is impervious to the passage of time and hence a symbol of immortality (just remember the pyramids of Egypt). The medieval alchemists, who were psychologists and mystics more than chemists, symbolized their famous “philosopher’s stone” by a cube, because of the perfection of its proportions. The philosopher’s stone is the stone that transmutes other materials into gold when it comes in contact with them, and symbolizes—gold being the most precious metal—the Purified Self of the Master, the Perfect Man or Universal Man of the Sufis or the True Man of the Chinese, who perfects the souls of other human beings when allowed to shine on them. The cube is thus the symbol of completion and perfection.

The Star of David (also called the Seal of Solomon), the Jewish symbol, is composed of two equilateral triangles inscribed in a hexagon, one standing on its base (symbolizing Fire) and the other on its apex (symbolizing Water). Thus the Star as a whole, like the Chinese Tai-gi-tu, symbolizes the union of opposites. Now the hexagon in which it is inscribed can also be seen as a cube in three dimensions, viewed directly from above one vertex; and the cube itself unfolds to yield the Latin Cross, composed of six squares in two dimensions. If either the top or the bottom is omitted, the cube unfolds into a Greek Cross with equal branches. Thus, the cube is a synthesis in three dimensions of the two-dimensional symbols of Judaism and Christianity.

The New Jerusalem or Heavenly Jerusalem (Revelation 21:1-10) is often depicted in the form of a cube, much like the Kaaba. Of course, it is conceived to be much larger, and could cover almost 60 percent of the continental United States. It could be a veiled reference to the original Kaaba in Heaven, the House of Splendor (Bayt al-Mamoor), which God, if He so wished, could expand to any size.

In the Biblical Book of Revelation, the Heavenly Jerusalem has a square ground plan. No temple is at its center, for God’s immediate presence is the center of it. St. John of the Cross describes how, in a vision, he saw the Heavenly City in the form of a perfect cube, equal in length, breadth and height. The “Holy of Holies” (Sanctum Sanctorum), the inmost sanctuary of the Hebrew Temple, was likewise constructed in the form of a perfect cube, symbolizing Heaven and the wholeness of God. It contained the Ark of the Covenant, and was entered only once a year, by the High Priest alone. [5] Since the Temple plans were revealed to David by God (2 Chronicles,28:19), we have to conclude that it, too, was part of God’s Revelation. And Solomon affirms that the altar is “a resemblance of the holy tabernacle which Thou hast prepared from the beginning” (Wisdom of Solomon, 9:8).

Like the stone cube, the circle, too, is a symbol of the Self. It is a symbol of Unity because, unlike the straight line which has two ends, its ends are united as one. Its roundness stands for wholeness, whether psychic or natural. It expresses the totality of the psyche in all its aspects. In Zen, it stands for enlightenment and human perfection. In contrast to the sharp-cornered square, it suggests nondifferentiation and is thus a symbol of the divine. Because one can go around and around it forever without any interruption, it also stands for infinity and eternity, or eternal return and cyclic time. Further, stretched out into three dimensions, circular motion provides the basis for the spiral, the helix, and the rhythmic oscillation of the sine wave. The ring and the tail-eating serpent ouroboros are “isotopes” of (types of equal value as) the circle. The Chinese tai-gi-tu disk comprises both Yin and Yang, thus representing Totality. In non-Christian cultures, sun-wheels are a frequent occurence, which leads us on to the sun disk, considered to be divine ever since the Egyptians. Gold takes its color from the sun, and thus stands for solidified light. The ancient Indian texts never tire of telling us that “gold is immortality.”

Gold sphere over black cube.

The dazzling globe of the sun provides our entry point for a discussion of the sphere, the three-dimensional counterpart of the circle. (Sipihr in Persian originally meant the hemisphere of the sky.) Like the circle but even more so, it is a symbol of completion and perfection, encountered frequently in nature (such as in planets, stars, and various kinds of fruit). For Plato, the sphere symbolized the psyche. Empedocles thought of God as the sphairos, “a rounded sphere enjoying a circular solitude.” [6] This precedes the remark by such luminaries as St. Bonaventure and Nicholas of Cusa that “God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” For a long time, the sky was conceived as a hemisphere covering the earth.

In this connection, the ovoid is also worth mentioning, obtained when the sphere is distorted into an oval shape. This is the “Cosmic Egg” from which the universe was created, according to the conception of many peoples. In modern science, it still commands our attention as the Primordial Fireball or “white hole” that exploded with the Big Bang to produce the physical universe.

Now it is interesting that human beings have always and everywhere not remained content with only the circle or only the square, but have striven to combine the two. For the Chinese, the symbol of Heaven is a circle, while the symbol of earth is a rectangle. [7] The simplest such combination, appealing in its symmetry, is a square inscribed in a circle or a circle inscribed in a square. This is the basic “mandala” form, evidenced everywhere from the sand paintings of the Amerindians to Hindu and Buddhist India and Tibet, while in the Chinese Secret of the Golden Flower the “golden mandala” is a squared circle. The vision and understanding of the Hermetic philosophers likewise led to the concept of the squared circle, and the alchemists were for a time preoccupied with the mathematically insoluble problem of “squaring the circle.” This may strike us as quaint nowadays, but to them it represented a valid—if unattainable—symbol, and those who knew that it signified the descent of spirit into matter or the divine into the human (and thus psychic completion—what Jung calls “individuation”) never bothered with the geometrical exercise at all—just as they disdained the mundane aspiration to transform physical lead into physical gold. For mundane gold was mere chickenfeed to them, compared to the incomparably nobler and more exalted goal of cultivating the “Star-Child,” the “glorious body” (which recalls the “diamond body” of the Buddha), the True Gold of which the ordinary version was only a simile.

An old alchemical drawing depicts a square nested in a circle, with a small circle at the center, out of which radiate, along the diagonals of the square, four lines dividing the figure into four sections. As Jung has shown, these correspond to the four classical elements, while the disk in the middle is the quintessence, the fifth element. The Chinese accepted gold as this fifth element (their classification contains five elements, not four), and as the alchemists have always cautioned: “Our gold is not ordinary gold.”

The attempt to realize the combination of the square and the circle in the basic mandala form was evident in many ancient cities and temples (also mausoleums, as the two photos at bottom far right attest), and is visible even in their present-day survivals. The Ottoman style of mosque-building is perhaps the most ambitious of such attempts, in that it combines the cube and the sphere, but only the combination of a hemisphere resting on a cube is architecturally feasible—the best solution, perhaps, to “cubing the sphere,” or bringing heaven and earth together. [8]

We can conclude, then, that the square, the circle, the cube and the sphere constitute a family of related and more or less interchangeable symbols. But if one asks where on earth is to be found the earliest, most prominent and simplest example of divine architecture combining the circle and the square (or, more precisely, the circle and the cube), the answer has to be—the Kaaba.

Ahmed Mater: Magnetism III, 2012

http://hbayman.blogspot.com.ar/2015/02/2001-3001-and-cube.html

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