RoyalCraftiness

The front page refers to the Queen as "that bright Occidentall starre".

Is it best treated in the hands of talented creative writers who want to have popular success in a drama series? What do we know about the recipe for drawing viewers in with pop culture treatments of speculative history? I submit it is often about maximizing the intrigue and the mystery in the suggestions. There's a real possibility it will go and take from many places where there is enough overlap in interest to capture a wide audience. We' ll have to see what they propose for the Rosy Cross. It's not clear to me what they have in mind simply from looking at what Peter Amundsen's series suggested. He got chased off of Oak Island before for trying to make it about what he believed it to be. I'm afraid of the religious relics fandom...They desperately have pinned so much down on theories they feel they might be able to exploit.

I sympathize with your plight. You have to try and understand the beliefs of your ancestors and then try and make sense of why the beliefs persisted in time and remained a big part of the family identity. I don't like to think it is your destiny to try and prove them right or wrong. Stay focused on you. I suspect that you will find that the heraldry is informed by the beliefs and that there is a big difference between what is truth and what is believed (unconditionally accepted). When the desire to keep bloodlines pure meets the desire to have beliefs be truth there can come out of it something like what you are describing. Keeping bloodlines pure is a recognizable early Jewish preoccupation. It will later serve Henry VIII when he will suggest that the English are really one of the lost tribes of Israel in order to give legitimacy to his Church. The idea of a pure lineage going back to the flood was quite enticing to those who had claims to power. Some of what you describe is familiar to me, because it is one of the origin stories that one can come across for the Royal Craft which is said to be part and parcel of Scottish operative Masonry. Some people believed exactly what you suggest, that is to say that the Royal part of Royal Craft can be worked all the way back to the cult of the Aten in Egypt. This is a belief that is found in some French Freemasonry and that is in a timeline for what is called Scottish rite today. It is however, not the only origin story. I mentioned before that there are about as many as there are cultures who claim a link to Freemasonry. Your story fits into what is termed Western Esotericism. It is shrouded in a mystery that we must suspect is myth to a large degree. I do not doubt that the lineages exist from a point onward, but it is going to be increasingly difficult to know anything for sure beyond a certain time. Many names were taken, and many ideas were also taken with them. In theory you should not be able to go beyond the 4th century AD, because that is when the Roman Christian Church's dogma was synthesized. A lot of what is assumed to be older does not predate this time except in a different way of seeing things. It is therefore highly unlikely that something which was true to Egyptians and Greeks was taken up by the Church of Rome and then passed on into Christianity in a pure way. One could say that Christianity is suppressing something, but it is really more like it was rapidly evolving away from one Philosophy to another. Rome wasn't interested in the Platonic or the Jewish. One way to define religion is to think of it as Philosophy expressed with the use of symbols. I do not doubt that many a man in history has discovered that old symbols were reused to advance new suggestions by the Church of Rome. It is one of the reasons why we have had a Renaissance with an esoteric/gnostic revival and a Western Reformation later. Scholarly looks into writings showed that things took on a totally new interpretation, and this is perfectly useful to suggest that was was older was in fact better and should not have been reformulated. The "prima theologia" can be sought, and it is useful to have it be tied to some tradition that has never been altered (retains its purity). That way one can access a degree of confidence. It is a great thing to allege it and have it be accepted. The Templars are interesting in the sense that they were likely the origin of some important modern myths. It is well known that they made a great business of selling religious relics to Western Kingdoms who greatly benefited from the various pilgrimages those brought on. The modern study of some of these relics has shown them to not be what they purported to be. In a sense the Church was using the Templars to propagandize and grow the faith. One of the things that the Templars presumably discovered is that you could become rich and powerful in the maintaining of the pilgrim trail, something the Knights Hospitalier institution continued to do in the fortified Mediterranean until the institution eventually descend into modern piracy/privateering in the 17th century. It is they who are assumed to have started the practice of banking with notes, allowing for more notes to exist than the supply of the underlying. The relationship between the Templar Knights and the Church was mutually beneficial until it wasn't. It became threatening when the beliefs of one side became a challenge to the power of the other. All the charges of heresy that we can look to are examples of belief systems which seem to have been taken up in some places along the pilgrim trail East. In France there was an esoteric cult of Mary Magdalene which has interesting ties to the cut of Isis, but it was also a bastion of Jewish culture and Gnosticism also. It may suggest that a voyage East may have first dropped off some Eastern ideas in the South of France when pilgrims returned West. The wings in the heraldry are a symbol from Pauline Christianity which is said to refer to the ascension (of the winged chariot/solar wheel), a theme that is found in the early Jewish literature and Paul's personal experience/revelation which he used to cement his reputation). They are also more overtly the wings of a bird. The two stars are sometimes referred to as first star and second star. One is the great Oriental Star and the other is the great Occidental star. In history there have been different interpretations of these. To an Egyptian the Great Oriental star may have been Sirius. In time it will come to refer to Sol which rises in the East. The Great Occidental star appears to have been Deneb in Cygnus for some (atop the great Summer triangle) who used it to sail West. Cygnus and Cassiopeia are the celestial locations of the appearance of the Novas of 1572 and 1600. Cassiopeia became a symbol for Elizabeth I in such a way that both the events of 1572 and 1600 were used to suggest omens for her reign and death/ascension and to tie her with the story of the bloody red rose and the cross. This I mention because it is showing how symbols can be appropriated. With Cygnus one can capture all of the ancient myths about the charioteer and we can also equate a lot of that with the story of Apollo. In theory, wherever there is a possible syllogism we ought to expect that a borrowing from a myth is possible. The bird can be the swan (a symbol of Zeus) and he could be the Phoenix which happens to be a great symbol for death and resurrection. I prefer to think of the wings as reference to ascension/salvation and the idea of the peace that comes with that. The handshake is said to be one the richest forms of symbolic currency. It signifies a sealed union, an alliance, a commitment, a covenant, an agreement or a power brokerage. To go hand in hand with God is likely the meaning to be taken. This is something we can imagine would be included in any sort of heraldry that defines itself with a commitment to a specific relationship with God. If Freemasonry interests you then there is the notion of the Holy Royal Arch which is being protected and allowed to travel through history because of the commitment of men to it. The arch is a symbol of a strong structure which anchors us as well as our architecture. It has a corresponding geometric knowledge component that is found in the lineage of the cathedral builders of Europe. If you are on the quest for the meaning of symbols and syllogisms then you are certainly going to feel a kinship here. Bacon lived in a time when there was a newly minted tension between an existing thesis (a religious cosmology) and the emerging scientific view, the antithesis as it was seen by the Church. What the world needed at this time is what Hegel would later refer to as a synthesis. It is worth noting that the synthesis that is said to come from the tension between religion and science is found in the political realm. We don't quite think of politics like that, but it is one very important realization. Bacon was a great statesman, and what we can surely take from him is that there was a need for a political solution to the religious bloodshed that was going on in Europe. America, as it turns out, was envisioned by some as a great political project to resolve the tension between religion and science. You could achieve that by giving religious freedom and by institutionalizing the advancement of science (protecting it and allowing it to flourish). Its not a Utopia, per se, but it is in the direction of a final synthesis. With the voyages West beyond the pillars of Hercules the Egyptian myth of Atlantis was revisited. Bacon loved that one. If we go back in history we are bound to enter the story at a particular time when the thesis as it existed for Bacon in his time isn't even that well defined yet. Your family was devoted to the crafting of a thesis or an antithesis, depending on the point of view. They were fighting causes that were opposed to it. I suppose we all are doing that still today if we look at how polarized we are and in need of synthesis. It is said that only in one's own self realization are you reaching the final synthesis. That is to say, you are not the beliefs of your ancestors. You are you, and you are free to explore the landscape of what the divine faculty of the mind artistically allows. We are in full in the creative process when we escape the master-slave dialectic that affects our ingrained thinking. So said Hegel. Of course, this is part of a great romantic current of Philosophy we are still on. I do not think it is useful to view any ideas from the past as better because they came first. That lends itself to seeing the world as one that is going all to Hell as it corrupts itself in time (an anti-Rosicrucian view, incidentally). That is not what is happening. Synthesis is happening. Great tensions keep reappearing, but we are supposed to not take sides in order to be able to find the thing that unites both views in order to progress without pulverizing ourselves in the struggles caused by the tensions. My ancestors were murderous barbarians if I want to go back far enough. I have no interest in knowing how true to the natural condition that is. We have escaped that after much bloodshed and there is more to use our names for to be done now. It is likely how Bacon thought, and he was not against getting rid of the God concept all together. It needed to be able to bridge the differences, though. In Freemasonry you see his more basic idea of a belief in a supreme being. That is a sort of concession.

How inspired is this going to be on Amundsen's previous wild exposes? Does this revelation worry anyone? As far as I have applied myself to checking the things he has claimed, there is not a bedrock of knowledge there to anchor a story line on. It's only an evolution in conjecture. It bothers me that this individual has suggested a search for physical religious relics (and has involved local governments here), which are more apt to be found in myth, based on his interpretations of cryptic clues which are not distinguishable from a clever effort to generate them. It really does make me wonder how they are going to start off this drama. Is it going to be a displaced Scottish conspiracy to hide the Ark of the Covenant and protect the menorah? Will it favor one idea over another about Freemasonry's origins that involves Templars? Has anyone here followed the controversy around Amundsen since his series? I, for one, would not like it if it was said he spoke for me. What are they going to have Bacon do or portray in this series? The possibilities are ripe with opportunity for the sensational which will overwhelm the defenses of those who might not be as grandiose in their reinterpretation of history. There is enough about Bacon that can be shown to have an interesting series about him. I just have a sick feeling in my stomach that this will err on the side of being interesting in the current "shock and awe" pop culture climate. I hope it is kept quite tame as to allow at least an entry for those who are not completely sold on the depth of the conspiracy that some suggest and popularize. I hope it has a lot of verifiable historical content and treats what he has in fact said overtly.

Humans have symbolic culture. It is presumed no other animal does. The Monas Hieroglyph you are showing is made up of alchemical symbols for astronomical bodies. We would be wise to think that the first human observers who looked above and looked below took note of the shape of things as they crafted their origin stories and sought to represent them. If we take the circle, there are visible reasons in the sky to want to emulate its life giving powers. People lived in circles where they had the fire/hearth in the middle, they were buried in circle mounds where they were placed in the middle after life. These do not appear to be arbitrary preferences, and they suggest we were modeling our behaviors (mimicking natural phenomena). Who has not seen a pond of still water disturbed by a stone dropped in it and wondered why it is that the circular emanation seems to originate in the middle long after a disturbance was created there (it persists in time like a life which fades in the same way). Enclosing things in circles is a very ancient practice, and it was also still in vogue in our symbolic culture much more recently. It is said that the cross represents the emanation to the four cardinal points from the center (in all directions). Another way to represent that would be with concentric rings. If you look at how our friends in the pre scientific age imagined the cosmology of the Universe one can see that this idea was used there. Bacon still favored a system of such "rings", although he could have by then have changed his ideas. It is therefore possible that he very much preferred the idea that there was a deep and fundamental geometry to things. What seems to get shown to us in the crafting of the imagery in his works is testifying to how much God as Grand architect of the Universe was following rules that men could decipher if they just looked at them (examined the construction technique). You could know God better by studying the world. If we are honest, a lot of this symbolism can be traced back to the Proto Indo European group cultures, and they presumably evolved from a common idea about the sky father and mother (the anthropomorphism of what we see in the heavens) with Sun and moon. We have taken our own human relationships and extended them to the observable phenomena and then declared that what is above is as below and vice versa. In a sense it is ,because we can see the same forms in nature on every scale. Some cycles seem to match in duration above and below...7, 28, 40. There are some obvious ones. What we should be left with is the idea that humans were wondering about the origins of things pretty early on. It is human to ask a question and it is human to seek an answer in some sort of syllogism that is stated and used as a golden rule. When we could not possibly have known, there was nothing to stop us front crafting stories that couldn't be thoroughly denied or disproven. The degree to which we can know has changed more than a bit over time. There are things that no longer satisfy as explanations, but it is also true that there are still questions we cannot answer which we try and reach with mathematical syllogism. We have declared that one to be perfect, and in doing so we have decided that the Universe and reality has a fundamental computational and statistical aspect. Something that we cannot show (the non physical nature of number) is said to be informing everything. It is enough to make one's head hurt. Because of this difficulty I imagine that the world is still comfortable with stories which are soothing in many ways. The world still turns around in circles on many levels, and to reach the end of that would be to know the number of turns. Men have understood that concept for a while. And things ought to come full circle if we are indeed governed by circles.

I think he did have an appreciation for symbolism to the degree that he went looking as far back as he could to see where things originated, and that must have extended to a "prima theologia" or oldest, truest religion "given" to men. He wasn't able to go back as far as we can, though. On the question of how we can know things he was pretty astute to suggest that it is not by bad syllogism and that there needed to be a method. This is where symbolism can come an bite one in the rear end. One symbol does not map back to one idea or reality (we can always favor one or another in our crafting of stories), and if it did once we are hard pressed to know exactly why, where and how. Nevertheless, in the times we are talking about there were philosophical currents starting which were restating that the Christian God was the light of the Sun in works like Jacob Boehme's Aurora. This is a sort of blending of proto scientific ideas with Reformed religious ones, but it is also a revisiting of ideas like the Egyptian Aten. It allows one to ask if there wasn't once a knowledge that had been lost, but that is not really a good question. A better idea is to state that we come around to the same sort of ideas if the whole thing is constantly evolving. We can rediscover older forms of "logic" by what we call intuition. I feel Bacon knew it (God) was evolving and that there was an opportunity to shape religion and what people believed in such a way that positivism and scientific advancement would be possible. It could not be like what happened to Bruno in 1600 if men were to advance. We do know that he wrote about the wisdom of the ancients and that he had fondness for other cultures. In New Atlantis there is a theme of living together in harmony with older ideas and different people. When Jefferson was writing eloquently at the birth of the US about how America could be, there was an "enlightened" view of the venture. It was a useful to appeal to many different religious voices, but it is also true that he felt that the project had not lived up to its lofty ambitions pretty early on. In that regard, it is why we are often told by US presidents that the project is a work in progress. We have not yet arrived to where we want to sail on this globe.

I wish them luck in dramatizing what is conjectured by some. If it is not well done it will be damaging, because it will be picked apart and ridiculed at every opportunity as a serious statement. That is the downside of this. You can be certain that it will invite a high level of scrutiny that will demand an accountability for the claims made. The Rosy Cross, if it predates German Rosicrucianism would seem to imply the published ideas traveled from England to Germany, and that is not how scholars see it. It is most likely a name taken which which is borrowed (if it is was borrowed) at the time of the frenzy around Rosicrucianism on the continent. We don't even know the Rosy Cross was a thing. Amundsen shows RC watermarks and is quick to make the connection with Rosicrucianism nd Bacon, but what is to stop that from being a trade mark or a reference to the Royal Craft (RC) that is traceable to some operative Masonic ideas in Scotland? Are we going to get the origin story that begins with operative Freemasonry becoming Speculative Freemasonry in England ca. 1600? I suspect the entire thing will begin with a certain amount of given which is not at all known to be a fact. There are many things which one can equate if one wants to. There certainly were groups of men who met and discussed the advancement of learning or the direction of society, for example. I am not one to take glee in the idea that it is possible to recruit for various ideas based on the popularity of them. It would be great if people were exposed to this AND it was true, but if it is not and it is building an energetic faction then there is only a tempest of opiniated views to be harvested from it. Rosy Cross has a significance that is more than an implied group of men. The Rose and the Cross are old symbols with a religious story to tell when paired. Those who used them earliest were Christian zealots above all. Rosicrucianism is more complicated than that. It is upsetting in many ways to the Christian dogma. Anyway, I hope it is well researched and not just a pop culture rehashing of ideas which exploits mystery. The story told is seldom as nuanced as it would have to be, and we all love to think we can know things from simple considerations.

Here is a post that captures well how Western esotericism works. It alleges hidden knowledge based on secrets travelling through time using symbols as one wants to use them to cross pollinate ideas all over the world. The symbol of the holy grail here is taken to be literal, and it is suggesting you get on a pilgrim's trail to finding it. By now we ough tto understand that the holy grail is a symbol from Carolingian literature. Were it not that it was romanticized then I doubt that we would be talking much about it. The cross used profusely here is a symbol that is worth studying in itself. It doesn't start with Christianity. In fact, it was a solar cross or a solar spoked wheel long before it was taken by the Greeks in the form of the Chiasmus and brought into Christianity in another form. The various Jewish myths about ascension in a winged chariot are often displayed in art with the winged solar wheel. This was known, allegedly, to Paul of Tarsus through his personal experience. We know he communicated his "revelation" to the Corinthians in a way that was novel to these stories. Very few were supposed to be able to experience this in the original Jewish myths (only the most informed). Paul preached that it was available to all. The precessionary cults in Alexandria saw a meaning for the chiasmus in the intersection of cycles (the ecliptic plane with the galactic plane or the axial tilt plane. In the center was the Earth (heliocentrism). If we are crafting an esoteric story there are many ways we can interpret a cross since it has been used and reused many times in our history. Jung calls it a archetype form. One almost has to agree with him since the optical phenomena that gives it when looking at light that is highly diffracted is demonstrable and repeatable. It has natural sort of permanence as a symbol for humans whi have always observed it. It suggests light emanating from a center, and that is a symbol of origins like the monad's center. The ancient Greek root Khrysos (emanating of a golden light) was paired with the chiasmus (solar cross) and the solar disk (an Egyptian monotheistic religious motif) in the early depictions of that being(s) of light that we call god(s) which later find the form Christos (its etymology is not Jewish as the Christian apologists often maintain. It's root is related to the emanation of golden light). The Coptic Church depicted Christ with a golden Sun disk around his head. Some variations have a solar cross. One Greek way to execute was to be hung on a Chiasmus, stretched out. We can see how Roman Christianity may have sought to bring all the symbolism together in the 4th century AD when Hellenism (the dominant religion of the ancient world since Alexander) was essentially killed off by the recrafting of stories revisiting the same themes. The Tau cross was used instead, and its importance we can glean from the story of Saint Anthony and Saint Paul (the hermit) to the early Christian Church. The mark of Tau was the mark identified the worthy man (for resurrection) long before there was a story of Christian crucifixion. Tau gets weaved into the story, and it is an important Jewish detail to the Reformers in Germany and England who sought to differentiate themselves from the Church of Rome. As for Reine-le-Chateau, there is no mystery there that isn't new. There was for long a cult of Mary Magdalene in the South of France which was a hotbed of esoterism, but there was also much more than just that. What we know of the story there today is mostly the result of modern fabrications of Pierre Plantard who sought to craft a mystery of his own which ended up catching more than a generation in its spell, and it brought Templars to our TV sets and to various places like Oak Island afterwards. Chase that stuff at your own peril. Better to look into what Plantard was using to trap the gullible. In that there is a great history. People have been doing what he was doing for a very long time. For him it was a game, but for others it was more about delusion and faction building.You can capture people with these stories, and they can become allies. From a purely geometric point of view the "templar" cross can be visualized by the distribution of Pythagorean triples spatially on a Cartesian plane. I find this to be very elegant and also incredibly coincidental since much of the esoteric field is an extension of the Pythagorean cult of number, but it is still just a coincidence. In the physical sense it is a light phenomena.

"His sisters were ingeniose and well-bred; they well understood the Use of the Globes..." This is a nice detail. It underscores how important knowledge of the globe was to the scientific minds of this age. This was, in fact, a very high priority in Tudor England. There was a great need for development of alternate methods of navigation that did not rely on complicated and detailed celestial observation to quickly and easily pin down longitude (a measure of time away from London). Capturing time mathematically (geometrically) was the prize. Great circle navigation helped, but it wasn't until Harrison's invention of the marine chronometer (from the roots- to assist in the measurement of Chronos). Global navigation waas an important intellectual concern for Bacon.

I'm not really in possession of anything worthy of being guided by. Men in general have come to their conclusions which I must consider and possibly reiterate. Attempts at programming me were made from a very early age, and they look a lot like just being raised by a father and a mother who wanted harmony in their household and despised being opposed or questioned by a young fluff. What I may say is certainly not anything worth dividing the world into factions about. We all suffer from having been trained to think in one way or another. I was, from an middle adolescent age, trained by non family members of the academic variety to tear apart arguments to see if they can bear the scrutiny of the look as a way of going about my craft. This is a great way to have a science in things, but it is a horrible way to build personal relationships between people who are more about protecting their way of thinking. Still, I would rather you questioned the things I say than have you accept them unconditionally. I think there is more to be gained by being honestly opposed and critical than by being cajoled by people who see something appealing in agreeing with you to grow a base of power. The real taxing duality in the world is in between the condition of belief that is magically arrived to and the condition of knowing one has very real limitations in knowing. It is a monumental problem to know what it means to know. The situation is seldom helped by witnessing for one's salvation. If it was we would all by now be more prone to be labeled as Jehova's Witnesses who do witness dutifully as part of their rite. People get helped by their beliefs in ways that have nothing to do with the veracity of them. How that works is the stuff of internal harmony. Your internal dialogue must at least be constructive to you and your selected loved ones. It would be futile for me to argue that having this or that belief has not helped people get on with their lives. It has. But it has not helped people to have belief pass as THE highest of virtues. This is exactly how the domains of things that hinge on belief would want you to see things. There are things even I would want to believe. I think I go through life hoping they will go away so I can be free of feeling I have to concede something which I cannot support or defend. If I take these things to only be suggestions then I am not as ruffled by them. I can, if I wish, conditionally accept things and retain the peace of mind that I will gladly change my views (flip-flop) if that is warranted. It's helpful to be shown why we should not believe unconditionally. It is hard to not take this approach in a world with so many suggestions in it. The saddest of realities is that we really do not have a science for what is not empirical. There are many things we are stuck only having feelings about. And we are not wrong to feel that we know what works for us. We often are greatly helped by simply being entertained.

There is no truth for the masses. The masses always mimetically follow some suggestion made to them by some who claim to know. What passes for the largest truths has always been very dubious things if history is a teacher to us. The truths have always recruited well, aided by convincing people with convincing arguments that disarm and satisfy. There are only those suggestions and the means to have them be put in front of you and appeal to your sensibilities. Machiavelli understood this and popularized it, but we act as if we had never been made aware about this sort of human behavior. It is a mistake to allow one's self to be recruited into a faction which is based in unconditional acceptance of ANY suggestion. If you are for the study of ANYTHING you must also be willing to accept, and welcome the idea, that you are wrong or that your position is unfalsifiable as given. It is easiest to show that someone may be wrong. It is hardest to satisfy all criticisms. The only truths we have satisfy all honest criticisms. That is to say, we don't have many that aren't empirical. To a certain degree all we seem to accept are the validity of numbers and logic as the framework for understanding. On the Shakespeare authorship question all sides who make claims that are not well received by the largest faction (those who don't even think there's an authorship question to begin with) are being laughed at as heartily as DeVere and Bacon proponents are laughing at each other in their exchanges. You understand that, right? More are laughing at you than are not. It surely cannot be about who's being laughed at hardest, so why partake in it? Laughing at someone is a mimetic recruitment strategy. The view here is far from the mainstream view. Can we have quotes from those people who make fun of both Bacon and DeVere authorship theories, and of others, in order to stay humble? To an outsider all sides are playing the same clever games, using the same sort of "evidence" which, to be honest, does not count as evidence in many people's idea of empirical science. As is often the case the entire thing can seek to elevate its prospects by institutionalizing itself to raise its profile and create beneficial perceptions. With religions they have gone as far as to create their own Universities and publications/journals to publish in. It is the attempt to make the truth be one's truth. I am reminded of Robert Frost's poem "The Road not Taken" and how there came to be two sides with views about whether of not the poet was expressing regret or satisfaction about the choice. All claim to be able to read the clues in between the lines. Everyone's argument seems reasonable. To Frost the distinction was never made. What do we learn about subjective takes in reading someone's words from that? How is it that we can all read the same thing and largely come out wrong about what we have read? Who wrote Shakespeare? Why does it matter? The zealots behind the popularizing of the works of Shakespeare more than likely thought God wrote it. It wasn't Shakespeare, Bacon or DeVere; and even it was it would have been the same output because the words were believed to be willed by God if you believe their worldviews. They would also have you believe King James was just channeling God too. We are all just wearing a mask in that way of seeing things. It is God or the Devil at work. That is how foolish these people still were in these times. It's all imposture. Even the idea of British manifest destiny can be traced back to the same God delusions. Anecdotally, I came to study some recent aspects of this authorship suggestion game as an exercise in disproving what was being said by Peter Amundsen about Shakespeare (me doing the easy stuff in the face of his conjecture). In my mind there ought to have been more than was meeting the eye with his sleight of hand. It has led me to another type of question, though. There are things which show intent in some aspects of Bacon's known/accepted works. It is not clear what that intent was, but it appears to have been about modernizing the idea of God to allow for the coming scientific age. Bacon, to me, was chasing and ideal of peace and harmony and writing overtly about how to achieve that politically. He seems to have been taken by the idea of men self governing out their own morality which was to be founded in a unifying God concept (the placeholder of morality). In the end I will never know, because I was not there as a witness to it all. Because this is history I am limited in my ability to know by what confidence I have about what I can show. The sum of what we can know is, sadly, quite small. We have to accept that. We have an unlimited ability to feel one way of another, though, but that is not the same thing. I should be able to be here and partake in this as well as I would anywhere else if it is an ongoing study. If it meant I had to first believe in something unconditionally and then be told what to believe then what is even the point of studying something? That would be the stuff of Bible study. Stop acting like all this has been determined already. In the spirit of Hermes you must be a clever witness to it. Hermes only "teaches" you something (the things that get carved in stone) when you have been duped. That is to say, he has achieved a magic trick by having you believe you have knowledge. Hermes is at the gate of the Temple of wisdom that way. To enter there needs to be a magic trick operating on you. We all have this prankster in us wanting to create beliefs (what we think we know). When I encounter belief I get instantly discouraged. We ought to just deal in suggestions honestly. There is so much to explore which is beneficial for us to work on in building our own experiences.

That's a much clearer image than what I was considering. Aren't there 12 blue circles? The symmetry has clearly been removed to fit 12, and that would suggest something like the 12 disciples inspired by the ten regular polygons that make up the first 12 numbers with the point and the line. What looked to me like just a triangle with a center point in it is more like a cup in a chalice with two points on each side of it. We might then have the suggestion of a circle in the cup which is like a host depicted with the blood of Christ in the chalice (a call out to the eucharist). You made an interesting remark about Sirius. It's declination is - 16 degrees 42 minutes 58 seconds. It is highly possible that what we might think is about 16.5 degrees in an elongated triangle is relating that to us. A curious thing can be observed in the Armada Portrait of Elizabeth. There are two great circles showing on the globe. One of them is presumably an equator, the other is very approximately 16.5 degrees inclined from it. John Dee's son is a very interesting potential T.T. candidate isn't he? Date of birth is interesting. One can only imagine Dee had the astrology all worked out. It's something to look into with a consideration of Sun, moon and the five visible planets. Now that Sirius is mentioned in relation to T.T. I am reminded of the strict Egyptian practice of locating their temples by using the angles that mimicked observed celestial angles with Sirius. The 5 major temple sites of Egypt were arranged in this fashion: The tools to accomplish this planning are said to have been stored in the "barque of Amun" (a box carried around on poles) which was housed in the temple and paraded around on religious dates. These would presumably be surveying tools used by the high priests who would have carried on in the same tradition as Imhotep (Egypt's older version of the Greek Hermes), he who had planned the first monuments at Saqqara by including such measures in Djoser's pyramid and temple site there. This is evocative of what we can show by drawing a circle and showing the elongated triangle of periods. This sort of thing is what passed and still passes as Ancient knowledge to us, but they are simply basic angles related to terrestrial locations. Sirius was Isis' celestial home. The Great Oriental star was Sirius. What we see in the title page of the KJV is Elizabeth being referred to as that bright Occidental star. What that star might actually have been referring to is believed to be related to the apparition of the Novas of 1600 or 1604 in the esoteric minds of some. Of note, Sirius is located near the galactic plane in such a way that it is near that line of Novas that occurred in 1572, 1600 and 1604. This is what presumably made it so charged as a suggestion. It has been suggested by some that the fertile band of the Nile was used as a visible symbol of the galactic plane on land. Saqqara being just next to it mimics what is seen above. These are some of the things that Dee may have fished from. Who knows? The esoteric is pretty wild.

What can one say about the imagery in the title page? We have a cartouche containing something that is reminiscent of a constructed hieroglyph in the way of a monas. We have an eternity knot which is mathematically defined by 9 points which has been fit into a circle of 10 points (a decad) by fudging the turnaround points on the intervals between points. The knot is an ancient symbol that can have the meaning of the endless cycles of suffering, or death and rebirth. It is also a symbol of the mutual dependence of religious doctrine and secular affairs. The 6th point is in the center of triangle (trinity centered upon the monad's center) which is atop what one can imagine to be an upside down T. There are 4 flowers in the ring at the cardinal points. With the pairing of 4 and 10 we ought to recognize the Greek idea of the relationship of the tetrad to the decad which one can see depicted in the tetractys where the position of 6 is central (called the monad number). The T could be thought of as ten, but it can also be imagined to be a Tau, the mark of those worthy of being saved and given eternal life. We can think of ten points and a T as 20 and the 4:10 idea somehow evocative of 40 which is the number associated with all periods of important change/transformation in the Hebrew texts and in the Bible. In the knot there is the relation of point 2-7 and 8-1 which are usually part of the grouping of 27, 54, 81 and 108 that is associated with the Masonic square later. From a point of view of page layout we can see this: There are three periods in this image which form an elongated triangle we can place on a circle. The small angle formed is 16.5 degrees or half of 33. If we draw the other half of it we can notice that we are capturing the T at AT on it's edge extremities. The line from period to period straight down is capturing the t in Robert. We have the familiar T.T. suggestion on the bottom. Above we can notice that the three lines project to the extremities of the letters A N E. Together with T T we could potentially infer the word Tanet which is the ancient Celt/Brython name for the Isle of Thanet. Its etymology is supposed to relate to an island of fire/light. In this we could potentially see a parallel with the Phoenix' island. Of course we can think of the Sun as such a place or even of the place where one resides in eternity. It's more of the same esoteric references we seem to keep encountering.

We really don't know anyone left them. Someone seems to have left something which is recognizable with some level of informed scrutiny. The overt symbolism we do see is usually fishing in the esoteric imagery (via Jewish mysticism) and it is also clearly still Christian and German Protestant with a focus on end times. There is an undeniable desire to invoke God as a geometric creator and a desire to relate to us cosmological details that are informed by older Ptolemaic epicentric systems (pre 1608 scientific ideas) as well as modern observation of celestial phenomena. It is exploiting basic Euclidian geometry and finding parallels with alchemical ideas. This fits the description of Western esoterism at the beginning of the scientific age. We know the Tau is a cornerstone in the symbolism of the Holy Royal Arch. This is an institution that is really without a body ca. 1600 but it is hosting those who are dedicated in spirit to spreading a worldview that is very tolerant of Judaism and the idea of shaping humans though an initiatory process. We know this sort of current to be more prevalent in England starting with Henry VIII. By the 1650s The Jews will have been reintegrated and there will be a very strong current of Zionism in English Protestantism. I don't know if you can fit Bacon into that. There are plays written at this time that are doing this kind of work. All I can really say is that the imagery and subject matter in some of Bacon's works does appear to fit with the ideas of Jacob Boehme and Heinrich Kunrath and others from the Tubingen school of astronomers and philosophers on some level, and yet Bacon seems to be very careful to tell us that all this stuff is just imposture. The Truth to him was to be found in studying nature.

TAV is Tau, and it is the mark (TAW) placed in prominence on the forehead of those who are to be saved as instructed in Ezekiel 9:4. Some people still make a cross symbol (as instructed by the Church) on their foreheads to mimic the story detail. The symbol of Tau is used throughout the mysteries that are attached to the Holy Royal Arch and it relates to the man who is saved or protected from the wrath of God despite his evil/sinful ways. Saint Anthony of Egypt is the character most associated with the wearing of the Tau (he who is the symbol of acts of redemption and repentance). He passed on a cloak to St Paul which was marked with the Tau. Tau is sometimes called Saint Anthony's cross. As a subject matter St Anthony and St Paul were quite popular during the early 17th century. This paining by David Teniers is well know for its use of rich symbolism and geometric composition to relay a heretical message that was popular after the Italian Renaissance. The Church did not like this sort of treatment. It depicts the Tau on the cloak and the cross of crucifixion which is clearly not a Tau (The Church would have had you believe that one was the symbol of the other). This treatment is making a distinction between the Jewish writings/teachings and the Roman Church's take on it. One can assume the Church would have preferred to see a cross worn as the symbol of salvation. Using the Tau is giving importance to the Hebrew text and the Greek letter, and we know there was no love lost between the Roman Church and the Jews (or the Hellenes) who had more or less been neutered in Europe by Rome since the 13th century for the insolence (among other things) for not accepting Jesus Christ as the messiah and promoting the wildly popular alternate mystery teachings of the Kabbalah in Spain (A Catholic Kingdom). To have a Tau in prominence atop a text is informing you of the belief system of the author if it has any meaning at all. To see a text headlined with a TAU in England at this time is not surprising. This is a fun painting to try and deduce the composition/planning if that interests you.

There's a theme that can extracted from Sonnets 27, 54, 81 and 108 about love, the symbolof love (the rose), the dying of the beloved and what is lasting. There is also a sort of building up to a conclusion about what remains after death for eternity. When the Rose dies there is still a sweetness that is not about its show. When the poet dies there is still a memory of him, but not so of his beloved. His words of love for his beloved are always new. They are like an eternal prayer for the living. We can forget about the principal actors and always find something in the words of love of the poet which rings true to everyone. It is a roundabout way to say that we will always long for reunions after death, and that is the promise of the Rose of the bloody red cross.

The same thing can be said about Christmas, no? This does happen by a "magic" that is helped by a cultural grooming. The Church has a set calendar and it is made to lead up to the days which are raised to a monumental symbolic importance. The important period leading up to it is always 40 days in the orthodox versions of the faith. Then there are three days to a rising. With Christmas it is the rising of the Sun from it's lowest point in the sky (the year reborn after 2 days of solar pause and a third showing ascension), and with Easter it is the symbolic rising of the man-God (the anthropomorphic equivalent of the rising of the Sun) which exploits the Spring equinox. The Church did its best to recruit you at birth and then to immerse you in a life long narrative that is ritualized to constantly reinforce the suggestions that you ought to be accepting unconditionally. In that regard it is very much about magic, because magic is about creating an unconditional acceptance from a suggestion. No one really knows why or how it happens, but it happens. Once we acquire a belief there is no place for other suggestions. It happens more so to some than others, but then mimetic programming kicks in to work on all others. The child who is born to it is destined for at the first part of his life to be guided by the parent's belief. In the Anglo West we all have remnants of this programming in our culture. Even when we let go of this ritualized story there are still the memories we have that we cherish. I am reminded of the Johnny Cash song "Sunday Morning Coming Down" where the wretch who is having beer for breakfast is still pondering the reason why he has fond memories of a Sunday. We' ll, these are part of us. There is something in a Sunday and a Christmas and an Easter that we really like from early on in life. It is very hard to start disliking the things that we loved so much in youth. All efforts to make these days extra special were taken if you think about it. Easter to me, here, is the time by which I hope all the snow has melted and the Robins have arrived. In that regard it is also about welcoming the Sun again in our lives. Soon the grass will grow, and I can again start to see the tips of the rhubarb.

Are those three swans in the Andrea Blazon at the top left? There are 20 Blazons showing of which 4 are repeated. The Sun and moon symbol are showing on each side, presumably telling us something about Andrea's male and female lineages. The Effren blazon next to the mother symbol (moon) is appropriate as the genealogy shows. I can't find the etymology for the Effern name. It is perhaps tied to the German word Eifern which means means one who strives or works to accomplish something. The animal symbol atop it at the bottom right is the elephant which symbolizes strength, wisdom and courage in heraldry. The other blazon has a goat/ram above it. Its a symbol of practical wisdom and an emblem of a man who wins victories through diplomacy means, rather than by force, It may also represent own who is willing to work hard for high honors. The Moser name is Jewish in origin I believe. That's his mother's name. It is a word meaning "informer". You can get a combined meaning of "striving to inform" from the pairing of the maternal names, which is what these men were up to. Combined with the skull above there are the crossed bones below. This is a traditional memento mori pairing. "Remember death" is one of the chief warnings of not only the Rosicrucians, but of later Freemasons. You ought to be mindful of your eternal judgement above all. The promised treasure awaits; act accordingly! Of interest and probably only tangent, Andrea was from Wurttemberg. This is the area of Germany the English went to get the first population of German loyals to resettle Nova Scotia in the 1750s. These subjects were related to the British monarchs. They were settled at what they chose to call Lunenburg at Mahone Bay in honor of the Duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg who had become King George II. The Canadian Province of New Brunswick was also named for this reason in 1784 when that part of Nova Scotia received the American Loyalists after the American Revolutionary war. The British were very careful who they brought into the empty colony after the French Deportation event, fishing also in Rhode Island where there was religious tolerance and freedom from the controlling behaviors of New England Puritanism who clashed with Protestants. The desire was to repopulate the territory with "good stock" which they referred to as "planted seed" (the early settlers were called Planters), and by good stock we can assume we are talking of a recognizable Protestant faith that was defended by the British colonial government and military made up of high ranking Freemasons. There was a visceral hated of Catholics in NS that one can trace firmly back to the German Reformation. The project to reestablish the colony from the ashes was recognized by the earliest NS Masons as something equivalent to the raising of the Phoenix in myth. It was going to be a proper God-fearing colony to carry on the vision of the Holy Royal Arch. I like to think of this period of colonialism as one where the idealism and humanism of Rosicruciansim and the earliest speculative Masonry was lost. Bacon would likely not have approved of such things as he was quite tolerant of other faiths, and of Puritans. The FB pairing is sometimes seen as a musical reference because the key of F has only one flat note in it which is B. The key is of F is a symbol of serenity and calm which is said to accompany those who are not afraid to go to their deaths. Nicholas Poussin used it symbolically. The muse which plays from the lyre tuned to the key of F is there to calm the shepherds contemplating the tomb in the "The Shepherds of Arcadia". They've lost their sheep and have come across a tomb (death). The message relayed is to not worry as the shepherd above will come and find his lost sheep. I've not studied this image, but it looks like it has some things to say.

Don't be too disappointed there Eric. It is interesting, yes. Give it a shot. I have such overlays. You likely won't be disappointed in your efforts. I'm satisfied with mine, but it takes some consideration to give it your best shot. You' ll face the same limitations I faced. The rectangle in the SS image used is deformed ever so slightly. You' ll have to modify the image using a perspective tool functionality in editing software to account for the slightly non-parallel sides. Ultimately, we are dealing with images on mediums that are prone to small degrees of movement, but that does not mean we are left with nothing today. You' ll also have to settle on a degree of certitude which accounts for line widths for your dimensions. I've used pixel counts to generate the rectangle in Geogebra based on average line widths. Ultimately, this sort of planning with dynamic symmetry is only just a guide for an artist anyway. There is no requirement that it ought to satisfy the mathematical rigorousness of any rigid constructs we impose with our tools. That being said, it is a very pleasing result. The features I was most interest in locating in relation to the frame at the time were the circular stereoscopic Earth projection in the middle and its corresponding circle center. The circle is itself slightly deformed in the image shown. It's center is offshore, just East of Brazil on the projection map. This is the suggestion of the eclipse location of 1651 again. You know, the eclipse George Stirk ended up chasing as a result of studying the alchemical literature. I suspect Bacon was just as interested in it. It's part of the empirical aspect of what he has played with in his Geo-metric consideration of the globe. I know you like these types of studies. Why don't you look into it? It would be more productive to compare findings than to have me show you what I have produced. The absolute worst thing is to be contaminated by the bias of what someone else thinks he is seeing. I can guarantee you that you will see relationships I don't. I've not dived so far into this that I can account for all the typical armatures one would consider. I've gone into this critically, and it is worth knowing what else others might think we ought to also worry about in trying to work things back to a planning. It's unclear exactly why the main frame would be chosen to have the dimensions it does, but one can assume that there is a desire to have some angles come out of the mix. The large isosceles triangle pinching the center circle here is 71.31 degrees at the base. It may have been intended for it to suggest 72 degrees and for it to relate to an internal pentagonal geometry. The angle of the wedge which is given by the dropped arc is the compliment of the angle of the arc suggested by the Droeshout portrait when one uses the tips of the points of the collar and the arc they form in that image. That is to say that the angle BAO here is suggesting that same angle (a curious similarity in the construction of the images that doesn't necessarily have a meaning). I'm talking of the pairing of 42 and 48 here. 48 is an interesting number as far as its references to knowledge in the Jewish esoteric tradition. These are things we can consider and wonder about subjectively, but the frame itself is subject to a more empirical study.

Nothing to do? Respectfully, that's woefully wrong. Sacred Geometry is simply geometry, and tessellation certainly involves geometry. It's a geometry of symmetry groups. The "sacred geometry" of Islamic art is full of tessellations. The last chapter of a very well known work on sacred geometry I am looking at today concerns tessellation and symmetry groups. Shall we contact the author and demand they recant?

I located a precise study I did with Geogebra which shows a few things about Sylva Sylvarum's illustration composition. It's showing the main diagonals and armatures as dotted lines. The large rectangle ABDC contains a small base rectangle BKLA. Using its corners you can locate the squares ABNP and ABOQ. OQ is a segment on which the biblical text is placed. On NP there is A1 on the central divider which is the tip of the ray of light. TU is the water line. From A on line AO one can project an arc which connects with point C, informing us the length of the chosen large rectangle was selected carefully. Point W on the main divider is located on the horizontal joining the armatures. It's the center for the circular stereographic projection in the image. BVA is an interesting triangle made from joining the base corners to the mid point above. Its sides are tangent to the circle centered at W. Point V is also a circle center for circle with tangents given by the main armatures. This actually just the beginning of it. The amount of careful placing of features in the illustration goes far beyond a simple consideration. There is a very complex circular armature configuration in the image which one can show. If you recall, I previously showed that the ancient Greek geometric demonstration for the building up from a point to a pentagon (the vase of life construction shown below) is used to inform the composition too. One can also say a lot about the placement of the columns. Safe to say the image was not thrown together by fortuitous elegance. It is not unlike the Droeshout portrait that way. Someone spent a lot of time planning these images. The reason is that one can extract a symbolic meaning from it which is very closely tied to a philosophy and a cosmology of the Universe. The pentagon here is mapping onto the central circle. Point K on this image corresponds to the midway point on the base.

The seven pillars are labeled with the symbols of the seven visible astronomical bodies. The suggestion here is that what is above (superius) has a counterpart below (inferious). That's a Hermetic idea. There is a temple above and a temple below in this way of thinking (Western esotericism). The light emanations of these celestial bodies are reaching us and they are illuminating us with a divine luminosity which is the seat of the greatest wisdom, as it is imagined. They exert an imagined influence on us via astrology (alchemical idea). The Pillars of wisdom here are Joachin and Boaz (tree of life reference). The central pillar is the one which projects upwardly from the center of the circular temple here. The temple represents the human body. The compass is the idea of a divine compass which guides the human. The seat of earthly wisdom is in you and you are under the influence of what is higher than you. It's a very specific way of thinking. Western esotericism - Wikipedia

If you apply the dynamic symmetry principles to Bacon/Rawley's Sylva Sylvarum you will begin to understand how the image was put together. For example, the circles/arcs in that image are all nested in between diagonals. Locating the squares that at the basis of the framed rectangle containing the image yields important lines also. The height of the practice of this was in the Baroque period from the early 1600s to the 1750s. It is one of the features of Western esotericism. It went so far as to suggest that all great art was based in these considerations. The art had much to do with the geometric considerations, because the Royal Craft also did (God as a geometric architect). That is to say that unless your work was steeped in this sort of consideration it wasn't really great art. In time there were movements that sough to destroy this idea, but artists like Picasso, for example, still relied heavily on it. The dynamic symmetry of reoccurring squares is a relevant aspect of cubism.

The art of composition : a simple application of dynamic symmetry : Jacobs, Michel, 1877-1958- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive Is an excellent resource for anyone looking to deduce composition in a work suspected of containing it.

I don't know who designed this before it was executed and put to paper. We are given only the name of the engraver. I don' t know who the likeness is supposed to represent. I don't think it's main function is to present a very good likeness. It appears to have been more important that the features be guided by the geometric composition that may have been handed to an engraver.as a starting point. What got produced is something rather stiff and cartoonish. Altrnatively you could suggest that the engraver did this on his own. The geometric feature with the most obvious intent is the positioning of the 80,60,40 triangle. It's center is also the center of the rectangle which contains the image. That tells you it was engineered to be that way. It is elegant enough that it was made to come out, but to have it be concentric means it was likely started with. That's about all I have to say about it. This we can show. The point of it is another story. The main composition is guided by a geometric idea for what Bacon and Brahe accepted as the cosmology of our solar system. It was an improvement over Ptolemy's system of epicenters, but it is still wrong. I doubt that Shakespeare would have had any opinion about that, but he could have. I don't know why anyone would have wanted to show that even if WS did hold that belief. It appears to me to be the idea of someone still living who has a hand in the production of the folio, and of someone who had an acute interest in the Summer triangle asterism. As you know, I feel we are well within our abilities to show that Bacon imagery was utilizing this triangular asterism as a celestial beacon in other places. I also think he used Triangulum. I feel we can show that someone was suggesting the use of this pairing. It's never more suggested than in Sylva Sylvarum, a work that was Bacon's Swan Song. What it all means is something I can only speculate about. If something is detectable and elegant, does it have a meaning? It must have had a meaning to someone.