Symbolica
Symbolica / Readings

Readings

Essays built only from works this archive holds. Every quotation names who said it, in what book, when, and each reading lists the records it stands on. Where a source is a transcription rather than a page read with our own eyes, it says so.

  1. As above, so below: three printings of the sentence, and they do not agreeFour words in English, out of a text of about fifteen sentences, and they have travelled a long way from it.Reading 11 · about 7 minutes
  2. Which part of the body belongs to your star sign, on a wheel printed in 1678The lists go round and round: Aries the head, Pisces the feet, ten more in between, and hardly anywhere a source.Reading ten · about 6 minutes
  3. The upside down pentagram got its meaning in 1856, from one man, in one paragraphAsk what a five pointed star means and the answer comes back the same from every direction: one point up for good, two points up for evil.Reading nine · about 6 minutes
  4. The black cube of Saturn: every piece of it is old, and no book here joins themSaturn is lead in the Encyclopedie, blackness in Maier, the outermost sphere in Fludd and Dee, and Fear on Kircher's tree.Reading eight · about 12 minutes
  5. The tarot on the Tree of Life, and the fork in the chartEvery chart that hangs the twenty two trumps on the twenty two paths presents one system as the fact, and there is more than one.Reading seven · about 9 minutes
  6. Nolan changed the Odyssey. So had everyone by 1648.Circe as a warning about harlots, Sirens with fish tails, and a magic herb that turns out to mean public speaking.Reading six · about 8 minutes
  7. Eyes Wide Shut: the ceremony is in a book anyone could buy in 1826. The masks are in none.The star in Ziegler's hall, the password Nick Nightingale hands Bill Harford, the circle, the chequered floor, the censer, the eye.Reading five · about 8 minutes
  8. Baphomet wears its star point upward, and the man who drew it wrote the rule that makes that matterEliphas Levi made the figure that modern pictures of the devil keep going back to, signed it, and then spent two pages explaining it part by part as a diagram of balance.Reading four · about 7 minutes
  9. The eye on the dollar bill was explained in 1782. The thirteen bricks were not.Charles Thomson wrote down what every part of the Great Seal was for, and Congress voted on the explanation along with the picture.Reading three · about 8 minutes
  10. When God appears, he appears as a handAcross three centuries and four different books in this archive, the divine is drawn the same way: not a face, not a body, a hand coming out of a cloud.Reading two · about 5 minutes
  11. The Hand of the Mysteries, and the two men who read itThe same seven signs on the same seven places, explained twice, two and a half centuries apart.Reading one · about 5 minutes