Post by ruffashlar on May 23, 2005 3:25:18 GMT
Did anyone catch this TV programe on Channel 4 (UK)? It went out Saturday 21 May, at 6.55pm. It was framed and set up almost to spoof The DaVinci Code, but was in fact a very straightforward exposition of Michelangelo Buonarotti's specific creation of the painted surface in the Sistine Chapel.
An abstruse and involved panoply of prophecy revolving around the Papal family of della Rovere (who? alas so - but in their day as significant and self-important as the Borgia and Medici clans), the programme seemed at one point about to disappear up its own very considerable scholarship. In fact, at several points.
However, persevere. It emerges that the Sistine Chapel was built to a very particular design: a rectangular cuboid, twice as long as broad, with a barrel vault. In other words, a double cube. And the reason for this specific design was to be in accord with the alleged sacred geometry of the universe itself, as postulated by Cosmas Indicopleustes in his more than slightly strange 6th Century work, Christian Topography. An online copy is here -
ccat.sas.upenn.edu/awiesner/cosmas.html
Note the many original figures. The Cosmasian cosmos has East as its focal point, the location of the earthly Paradise. The earth is an oblong, divided into a half and two quarters, which are Asia, and the European and African continents, as delineated by the East-West line of the Mediterranean, and the North-South axis of the Caspian and Red Seas. An ocean - the Homeric Okeanos - quadrumnavigates the earth like the border of a carpet. A mountain stands in the world's centre, principally so the sun has something to move behind other than, as we would say, the curve of the earth, to enable lunar eclipses to happen. The entire system was deduced from Scriptural sources (often twisted out of context) to provide a Christian counter to pagan ideas of the earth's spherical nature.
As this later illustration shows -
www.henry-davis.com/MAPS/EMwebpages/202D.html
- the Macrocosm of Cosmas is substantially the same design as the prototypical Masonic temple, even so far as literally to include the blue starry canopy of heaven. This world model, so suggestive to us of a budgie cage, is directly derived from the proportions of King Solomon's Temple, and from the Tabernacle of Moses which preceded it.
The mountain in its centre must be the father of all the symbolic mountains of Alchemy, Freemasonry and Mnemonic science: the three steps of the Degrees; the "pyramid" of Masonic Additional Degrees; the mountain of Alchemical processes; Ararat, Horeb, Moriah, Sinai, even Sion itself. We speak of Opening on the Centre, and of marking that Centre with a G: the mountain is marked on Cosmas' diagrams as Ge, Earth.
It is the Mountain of Purgatory in Dante, the debris from Satan's impact. It is the island world created by the primal Egyptian gods; the phallic hill which is the god Geb, lover of Nuit; and the Hieroglyphic Determinative for "land".
Furthermore, this illustration of a Masonic carpet could be read as a schematic of the Cosmasian map -
www.daylightmasons.org/Pix/EA/ornament.gif
- featuring the encircling band of the ocean and the Centre marked here with a star. I don't mean that these things are everywhere repeated in Freemasonry in deliberate promulgation of Cosmas' long-rejected theory, merely that they unconsciously do so; as Cosmas himself was, all unawares, himself promulgating an ancient pagan, ultimately Egyptian idea of the cosmos.
We know that the lodge room is supposed to represent the world, and our initiatic rituals speak in terms of travelling the earth in search of light, from West to East; that is, from the place of the sun's descent (into the underworld, originally) where light is at its weakest, to that of its birth and greatest strength.
The Sistine Chapel, returning to the terms of the original TV programme, was arranged thus so as to make it a Microcosm of the world - an experimental temple in which to produce secular change, no less - and it was also given to Michelangelo to depict the entire symbolic history of the Earth upon it, from Genesis to Apocalypse, in order to turn it into the whole of time, as well. The della Rovere doubtless thought their time had come to advance upon the world stage.
The presenter Waldemar Januszczak puts the convincing case that they della Rovere considered themselves to be the one whom Zachariah calls The Branch, the one who will rebuild God's temple, and the king of the north. The obvious but unstated reference is of course to the Papacy of our own days, and the one called Benedict (benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini), whom Malachi calls glory of the olive.
An abstruse and involved panoply of prophecy revolving around the Papal family of della Rovere (who? alas so - but in their day as significant and self-important as the Borgia and Medici clans), the programme seemed at one point about to disappear up its own very considerable scholarship. In fact, at several points.
However, persevere. It emerges that the Sistine Chapel was built to a very particular design: a rectangular cuboid, twice as long as broad, with a barrel vault. In other words, a double cube. And the reason for this specific design was to be in accord with the alleged sacred geometry of the universe itself, as postulated by Cosmas Indicopleustes in his more than slightly strange 6th Century work, Christian Topography. An online copy is here -
ccat.sas.upenn.edu/awiesner/cosmas.html
Note the many original figures. The Cosmasian cosmos has East as its focal point, the location of the earthly Paradise. The earth is an oblong, divided into a half and two quarters, which are Asia, and the European and African continents, as delineated by the East-West line of the Mediterranean, and the North-South axis of the Caspian and Red Seas. An ocean - the Homeric Okeanos - quadrumnavigates the earth like the border of a carpet. A mountain stands in the world's centre, principally so the sun has something to move behind other than, as we would say, the curve of the earth, to enable lunar eclipses to happen. The entire system was deduced from Scriptural sources (often twisted out of context) to provide a Christian counter to pagan ideas of the earth's spherical nature.
As this later illustration shows -
www.henry-davis.com/MAPS/EMwebpages/202D.html
- the Macrocosm of Cosmas is substantially the same design as the prototypical Masonic temple, even so far as literally to include the blue starry canopy of heaven. This world model, so suggestive to us of a budgie cage, is directly derived from the proportions of King Solomon's Temple, and from the Tabernacle of Moses which preceded it.
The mountain in its centre must be the father of all the symbolic mountains of Alchemy, Freemasonry and Mnemonic science: the three steps of the Degrees; the "pyramid" of Masonic Additional Degrees; the mountain of Alchemical processes; Ararat, Horeb, Moriah, Sinai, even Sion itself. We speak of Opening on the Centre, and of marking that Centre with a G: the mountain is marked on Cosmas' diagrams as Ge, Earth.
It is the Mountain of Purgatory in Dante, the debris from Satan's impact. It is the island world created by the primal Egyptian gods; the phallic hill which is the god Geb, lover of Nuit; and the Hieroglyphic Determinative for "land".
Furthermore, this illustration of a Masonic carpet could be read as a schematic of the Cosmasian map -
www.daylightmasons.org/Pix/EA/ornament.gif
- featuring the encircling band of the ocean and the Centre marked here with a star. I don't mean that these things are everywhere repeated in Freemasonry in deliberate promulgation of Cosmas' long-rejected theory, merely that they unconsciously do so; as Cosmas himself was, all unawares, himself promulgating an ancient pagan, ultimately Egyptian idea of the cosmos.
We know that the lodge room is supposed to represent the world, and our initiatic rituals speak in terms of travelling the earth in search of light, from West to East; that is, from the place of the sun's descent (into the underworld, originally) where light is at its weakest, to that of its birth and greatest strength.
The Sistine Chapel, returning to the terms of the original TV programme, was arranged thus so as to make it a Microcosm of the world - an experimental temple in which to produce secular change, no less - and it was also given to Michelangelo to depict the entire symbolic history of the Earth upon it, from Genesis to Apocalypse, in order to turn it into the whole of time, as well. The della Rovere doubtless thought their time had come to advance upon the world stage.
The presenter Waldemar Januszczak puts the convincing case that they della Rovere considered themselves to be the one whom Zachariah calls The Branch, the one who will rebuild God's temple, and the king of the north. The obvious but unstated reference is of course to the Papacy of our own days, and the one called Benedict (benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini), whom Malachi calls glory of the olive.