Here is the stone which Skippy found in the shallows off the coast of the Rip Wrap site. When Skippy fished it up from the underworld and Kenny could see it in the light, Slag screamed: "Testiculous habet et bene pendentes!" So we just call it the Pope Stone. You can't tell from the picture but the stone is `larger than life.' Before we can get to the Shekhina we must lay the foundation for what it is we will have to say about the Spirt of God in its feminine form. So take a look at the letter "A" below. That's a Celtic version of the letter to the left and to the right is a short visual history of the changes in the letter over the centuries. Oddly enough the letter "A" did not begin as a vowel but as a "soft consonant." Say "oh-oh" out loud 5 times in a row. Did you hear the "sudden stop" in the middle? That's the original sound of the letter in the earliest layer of the Semitic - and it's still present in Middle Eastern speech today. The letter has evolved from an Egyptian hieroglyph - the `aleph' - which was the character for an Ox. The last form of the letter shown below is a Roman typeface from the 1st century AD. The Egyptian is from the 20th century BC - so you are looking at 2,100 years of the evolution of the Majuscule letter "A." You can no longer see the Ox in the modern letter and certainly all the meaning of Ox-ness has been abstracted and hidden. Not lost, but hidden. They've gone steganographic - the entire history of the letter is in plain site in any one rendition: the Phoenician, the Greek, the Etruscan, the Roman, but only to those who already know the code.
Mr. Spock, the Science Officer of the Starship Enterprise, had an interesting verbal tic - whenever anything tweaked his over-logical mind Spock would say: "Fascinating." So look at the Roman amulet below: it measures about 3" by 2.5" and like the last letter "A" above, it too is Roman and also from the 1st century AD. It is called a Fascinus and it has essentially 3 purposes or meanings: first, it's functional; it operates as a clasp to secure the Roman soldier's cloak called the Sagum, though some of the Etics argue that it was used as a part of a horse's bridle where it would also be used as a clasp. Second, it's Apotropaic - that is it also functions to ward off the evil eye, a constant problem in the historic Mediterranean. Third, it's symbolic of Fertility & outright Studliness. A young troop would wear the Fascinus like a Hell's Angel Biker wears a red "69" - as an advertisement of his manly powers. The modern word "fascinate," has evolved from this ancient Latin emblem and had as its primary meanings: to bewitch, to cast under a spell - meanings which have not strayed far from the word's modern denotations: to be of interest, to attract, to hold spellbound. Like the letter "A", the fascinus has abstracted and evolved away from the context of its original meanings but without having lost them altogether. Those meanings are hiding in plain site; they are right there, on the surface, but only a Menschenkenner can still see them. To all the rest, those original meanings are lost and their code has broken.
Trinity College is a brilliant place to contemplate the shaky relationships between the Sacred and the Profane. Or maybe it's just the Irish themselves who have made the subject their own and wear it like hearts on a sleeve or a fascinus to hold their scarves. Skippy lost himself on campus, spending time in the ancient Long Room of the old Library getting up close to the Book of Kells, the most beautiful book in the world, or the Books of Armagh or Mulling. The Mulling manuscript is the oldest of the 3, dating from the 8th century. Kells and Armagh are 9th century tomes - heavily illustrated with some of the earliest Celtic Iconographic motifs. They reminded Pooler of the Voynich Manuscript and its inpenetrable codes. Celtic knots are mesmerizing, fascinating, bewitching. They suck you into your lower consciousness. In the Berkeley, Skippy found a book on American Shaker "Gift" Drawings - these were free-association sketches done by Shaker women who could achieve Trance and Seance states and channel the Holy Spirit. It was during the Shaker revival known as "Mother Ann's Work," or the "Era of Manifestations," around the 1840s, when women - mostly low social status younger women - began to experience periods of intense communion with the godhead and believed that they were being used as a medium thru which the Holy Spirit could give them "gifts" of images, songs, and texts which they wove together into complicated drawings and paintings. The possessed girls would dance and shriek and babble in tongues, after which they would record the song or the drawing which was the gift of the Shekhina. They range in size from 2" by 2" squares to sheets of paper pasted together and spanning yards. They range in complexity from things which look like simple needlepoint to surreal images which rival things by Bosch & Dali. The interesting part is that up until the "gifts" started coming from the Spirit, all imagery and icons were frowned upon and condemned in austere Shaker society. But suddenly, with this massive eruption from the unconscious depths of these women, Images became important and exalted - they were not considered to be individual images done from the vanity of ego. They were thought to be Spiritual Bequests, visions, prophecies, from a part of god himself.
Pooler got in a fist fight with 3 tourists in the Temple Bar. He was making loud declarations that now we had both a Nazi Pope and an American Grand Inquisitor - Archbishop William "Burn 'em Billy" Levada of San Francisco had been appointed to Papa Ratzi's old job as head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, aka The Holy Office, aka The Inquisition - so the Axis of Evil was drifting from the raghead regions back to the Catlickers. Shit like that - very loudly - in a country full of Catholics and American tourists. 3 of them begged to differ with Pooler and that's usually suicide. Pooler led them outside and thumped the biggest one of them before he had a chance to acclimate to the bright light of midday. The other two were gone down the lane before the big one hit the sidewalk
We needed to catch up to the new plan. Out with the Mulmist, in with the model we now call Shekhina's Calendar. The new spike would stand 9 feet tall and be composed of geometric planes: circles, spheres, lines, triangles, trapezoids, rectangles, squares, and a 2 points. On this Euclidian scaffolding we would afix 18 1' square mirrors and aim their faces at cardinals and decans. The mirrors would be set in three concentric meridian rings around the sphere. Kenny settled on 18 Mirrors when he remembered that among certain Jews and some gentiles the emanations of the Shekhina are celebrated and placed at 18 different Holidays which circle the Seasonal Year.
The yearly journey of the Shekhina is placed in the context of the agricultural world on which the journey is based. All holidays are like Shaker Gift Images - they are renderings of the movement of the Spirit. The dying and resurrecting gods of the agricultural mideast, like Attis, and Adonis, and Osiris & Jesus are renderings of the Great Cycle, the yearly incarnation, birth, growth, death, and resurrection of the Seed. Neolithic religions like Judaism and Christianity cannot help but encode the Spirit of the Seasonal Round. There's a reason Christ is born at the Winter Solstice. There's a reason that Easter and All Soul's Day follow the biography of the crops.
Iwojima is 100% Irish but he smokes like the French. He gives the act insouciance & other attitudes. He's clamping a 9" square mirror plate on one of the 6 ribs of the 4' Sphere. Each rib will bear 3 mirrors spread over 60° of azimuth. Only after all 18 of the plates are aligned and aimed and welded to the ribs will we come back and glue the 1' square mirrors to the plates.
When Slag welds you can stare straight into the fierce light and begin to see colors outside our octave of the electromagnetic wavelength spectrum. Skippy swears that he has seen the Face of God in the center of the white heat and that even long after the welding stops he can still see entopic and construal dramas on the back of his eyeballs. Wild dancing girls! Speaking in Tongues! Giving Gifts! Shakers & Skreechers. Monkeys have been getting those gifts ever since their minds were deep enough to sense the Great Cycle - the wheeling sun walking his calendar stick across the celestial elliptic, arcing out a moving sphere as time takes the seed from the root to the flower to the fruit. And then it falls, back into the earth, which like god's wife waits for the quickening seed. It's a good plan. You can use it as a model.
"We have lingered in the chambers of the sea ..." Eliot said. And then he locked his wife up in Bedlam. One of the most common forms of the Mermaid complex is that of the halfling holding a Mirror and a Comb. Old timers will tell you they are emblems of Vanity and therefore the image functions as a warning. And that's the reason you find this image all over Christian media like Tympana and Stoops, Choir Stalls & Illuminated Manuscripts. In mosaics and frescoes, on the Cornice or serving as a Boss. That must be the reason the image is ubiquitous - it's just a warning to keep us away from Vanity.
Guys like Jung chuckle at this decoding of the Covertext and mistaking it for the message. Most of the time the "A" in a word like Asshole is not a bearer of meaning. It's only a part of the covertext for the larger word it makes up. And most of the time when Mr. Spock said "fascinating," he was not referring to the Apotropaic powers of a stiff dick. Leonard Nimoy is an expert on the Shekhina as his beautiful book well illustrates, but I'm betting the etymology of Fascinus is news to him. A Menschenkenner is literally a Judger of Men, he's part Shaman & part Prophet. He must see deeper into meanings than the drowned.
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