...and a partridge in a pear tree.
Jan. 26th, 2005 01:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wombat1138Monotheism gets all the big press these days; at best, I consider myself a rabid agnostic, at least in the sense of paradoxical certitude that if there is a God, obviously He decided I would be a better person if I didn't believe in Him. (Anti-conversion capsule: you'd think that God would be pretty good about answering childhood prayers to stop being such a klepto, but evidently if there was a Master Plan for my salvation, it depended on my reasoning that stealing was bad because it hurt the former owners of the property in question, and even if they were profiteering capitalist pig-dog scum, they'd just pass on the extra costs to other consumers.)
So as somewhat of a segue from last entry, I've decided to noodle around various forms of cosmological polygons, if that's the right term for it. These are more in the sense of dividing the world into N general domains, rather than personifications of nature, and at the moment I have no particular idea what to do with them other than play around.
Dividing the world into halves (more or less) is pretty easy, although I have certain issues with the current political tendency toward Manichaeanism. It's just so darn easy to say "My side is Good and your side is Bad (or at least Stupid)" that it simply can't be correct, although contrarily I've always been fond of the saying, "There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't." The Taoist division of Yin and Yang is somewhat more nuanced, in terms of each half needing the other for completion and also containing the seeds of its opposite, but it's also common enough that I don't feel the need to go into it much right now.
Sets of three have also been pretty popular in religion. There are the Christian and (neo-)pagan same-sex trinities, of course, but also there are more general (i.e., non-personified) cosmological divisions into earth, sea, and sky. This set is reflected in the eventual fate of Tolkien's Silmarils, frex; the three great Japanese Imperial Treasures (mirror, jewel, and sword) are surrounded by similar Shinto traditions and often reappear under various guises in anime/manga. Each element can also be broken into smaller triplets: sky = sun, moon, and stars; sea (or more generally, water) = clouds, rain, ice; and so on. As a completely irreverent aside, I'd like to point out that inasmuch as the latter represents the three phases of gas, liquid, and solid, obviously in Christianity, God the Father is the gaseous phase (hey, he's everywhere, which means that he conforms to Boyle's Law and expands into all available space), the Holy Spirit is the liquid (as the aspect which poured into the sacred vessel of Mary), and Jesus was the solid (incarnated into handy nailable format). This also suggests that Mary was not just a sacred vessel but also had certain condenser-like properties, yea verily a sacred popsicle mold, and I am *so* going to hell.
At some point, Jung suggested that the Trinity really ought to be expanded into a Quaternity with the addition of Satan, "the Left Hand of God" as some of Tanith Lee's stories refer to him. Backing aside from really blatant heresy for now, I'll simply note that from an elemental aspect, this kinda matches up with the traditional Western elemental quartet of fire, air, earth, and water. There are other foursomes that're often mapped onto it in various ways, such as Hippocrates' four anatomical humours and what're sometimes called the "psychological primary colors of red, blue, yellow, and green. Most recently, the Keirsey school of thought wrt Myers-Briggs personality typology (which was in turn based on some of Jung's theories) has divided the four-axis system into similar quartets, even providing handy totem animals for each one.
Keirsey hasn't attempted to add geographical directions to his personality map, though. There definitely are four universal (well, planetary) directions: east, where shiny things pop up into the sky; west, where the shiny things go back down again; north, where the shiny things at night don't move very much all year (at least if you're in the Northern Hemisphere); and south, the other way from night-shiny-things-not-moving (unless that was south, in which case this is north). I'm not sure whether there's a consistent directional map of the Western elemental set, but there is for the Eastern one.
However, the Eastern elements don't match up with the Western ones, even when you take into account that the former is a quintet instead of a quartet. Instead of fire, air, earth, and water, the Eastern system has fire, water, earth, metal, and wood. Sometimes this is diagrammed in a pentacle to show the cyclical relationships among them, but really the layout is supposed to be the four cardinal directions plus the center (earth) as the fifth point. In this case, each element definitely has its own assigned color, direction, totem animal, and so on, but to further illustrate the incompatibility of the two systems, even the elemental colors don't much overlap-- I suppose fire will always be red, but the other three directions are represented by white (metal), black (wood), and, well, grue (water). Charmingly (?), the color term that's traditionally assigned here in both Chinese (qing) and Japanese (ao) dates back to a period when there wasn't a clear linguistic distinction between blue and green-- a bit like the Welsh adjective "glas", I suppose.
Most cosmological divisions up from here are based on multiples of N | N = 2...5, except for the ones based on seven. The only seven-based system I was going to natter about was the Seven Deadly Sins, but since that's really a separate topic I'll lay off for now.
So as somewhat of a segue from last entry, I've decided to noodle around various forms of cosmological polygons, if that's the right term for it. These are more in the sense of dividing the world into N general domains, rather than personifications of nature, and at the moment I have no particular idea what to do with them other than play around.
Dividing the world into halves (more or less) is pretty easy, although I have certain issues with the current political tendency toward Manichaeanism. It's just so darn easy to say "My side is Good and your side is Bad (or at least Stupid)" that it simply can't be correct, although contrarily I've always been fond of the saying, "There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't." The Taoist division of Yin and Yang is somewhat more nuanced, in terms of each half needing the other for completion and also containing the seeds of its opposite, but it's also common enough that I don't feel the need to go into it much right now.
Sets of three have also been pretty popular in religion. There are the Christian and (neo-)pagan same-sex trinities, of course, but also there are more general (i.e., non-personified) cosmological divisions into earth, sea, and sky. This set is reflected in the eventual fate of Tolkien's Silmarils, frex; the three great Japanese Imperial Treasures (mirror, jewel, and sword) are surrounded by similar Shinto traditions and often reappear under various guises in anime/manga. Each element can also be broken into smaller triplets: sky = sun, moon, and stars; sea (or more generally, water) = clouds, rain, ice; and so on. As a completely irreverent aside, I'd like to point out that inasmuch as the latter represents the three phases of gas, liquid, and solid, obviously in Christianity, God the Father is the gaseous phase (hey, he's everywhere, which means that he conforms to Boyle's Law and expands into all available space), the Holy Spirit is the liquid (as the aspect which poured into the sacred vessel of Mary), and Jesus was the solid (incarnated into handy nailable format). This also suggests that Mary was not just a sacred vessel but also had certain condenser-like properties, yea verily a sacred popsicle mold, and I am *so* going to hell.
At some point, Jung suggested that the Trinity really ought to be expanded into a Quaternity with the addition of Satan, "the Left Hand of God" as some of Tanith Lee's stories refer to him. Backing aside from really blatant heresy for now, I'll simply note that from an elemental aspect, this kinda matches up with the traditional Western elemental quartet of fire, air, earth, and water. There are other foursomes that're often mapped onto it in various ways, such as Hippocrates' four anatomical humours and what're sometimes called the "psychological primary colors of red, blue, yellow, and green. Most recently, the Keirsey school of thought wrt Myers-Briggs personality typology (which was in turn based on some of Jung's theories) has divided the four-axis system into similar quartets, even providing handy totem animals for each one.
Keirsey hasn't attempted to add geographical directions to his personality map, though. There definitely are four universal (well, planetary) directions: east, where shiny things pop up into the sky; west, where the shiny things go back down again; north, where the shiny things at night don't move very much all year (at least if you're in the Northern Hemisphere); and south, the other way from night-shiny-things-not-moving (unless that was south, in which case this is north). I'm not sure whether there's a consistent directional map of the Western elemental set, but there is for the Eastern one.
However, the Eastern elements don't match up with the Western ones, even when you take into account that the former is a quintet instead of a quartet. Instead of fire, air, earth, and water, the Eastern system has fire, water, earth, metal, and wood. Sometimes this is diagrammed in a pentacle to show the cyclical relationships among them, but really the layout is supposed to be the four cardinal directions plus the center (earth) as the fifth point. In this case, each element definitely has its own assigned color, direction, totem animal, and so on, but to further illustrate the incompatibility of the two systems, even the elemental colors don't much overlap-- I suppose fire will always be red, but the other three directions are represented by white (metal), black (wood), and, well, grue (water). Charmingly (?), the color term that's traditionally assigned here in both Chinese (qing) and Japanese (ao) dates back to a period when there wasn't a clear linguistic distinction between blue and green-- a bit like the Welsh adjective "glas", I suppose.
Most cosmological divisions up from here are based on multiples of N | N = 2...5, except for the ones based on seven. The only seven-based system I was going to natter about was the Seven Deadly Sins, but since that's really a separate topic I'll lay off for now.