Christmas 2001
Every year, in one way or another these Christmas Cards deal with definitions of the divine. I have genuinely sought to peal away the religious trappings of that which humans would think of as God, and reveal the essential light that is the actual truth. I don’t think our discoveries in science actually endanger the truth’s our ancestors so urgently wrote and preserved. Rather the road science is on is a road after truth, which will add new truth to what our ancestors understood in simpler terms. One of these “terms” is God, which until these times has been vague enough to allow any charlatan to exploit. To this day the average civilized American is capable of quaking with fear on his knees while praying to Almighty “God”, to save his miserable hell-bound soul if their situation becomes desperate enough. But who is this God character and how does he continue to enlist loyalty with such a miserable track record when it comes to responding to prayer? It is the intent of these definitions of G-d to liberate the mind for the seeker of G-d. To open the eyes of understanding to the true nature of G-d so they can embrace modern thinking without becoming an atheist. At the same time these cards intend to nurture a spiritual integrity confident enough in personal Gnostic faith to tell the spiritual bullies of all the satanic religions of the orthodox to go to hell. So this year’s card features the Golden Rectangle of the ancients in an 8X5 ratio. Inside the margin of the card written in Hebrew is a Golden Rectangle 8 inches by 5 inches. Knowledge of this fascinating shape goes back to at least the ancient Greeks and was inspiration to the Pythagoreans who pioneered many of the theorems of geometry. The nature of these rectangles is that if one side is divided into a perfect square then the remaining section will become another Golden Rectangle and so on, and so on to infinity. A more complicated explanation of this ratio is that the side is divided so that the shorter part is to the longer part as the longer part is to the whole. The ancients found this fascinating for many reasons. For instance, this year’s card has been divided in this way and one may ponder that just as surely as there can be another Golden Rectangle expanding outward, so also the rectangles appear to get smaller forever. This brought many an ancient’s mind into deep ponderous focus on the concept of infinity. Ancient man also understood infinity to be the territory of the divine. At the time they didn’t have the technology to calculate how right they were. The ancients were able to draw the curve created by these expanding squares. Ancients believed in the divine nature of these rectangles because they saw its manifestation in nature. On this year’s card, the waters of the sea are parting to reveal a Conch Shell representing the golden mean in nature. To the left of the Conch Shell is the curve created to represent the golden mean. The golden mean is the number that a Golden Rectangle ratio approaches when the smaller number is divided into the larger number. First of all, Golden Rectangle ratios are easy to calculate because they happen to be consecutive Fibonacci Numbers. Fibonacci numbers are calculated beginning at one; 1+ 1= 2, next 1+2 = 3, next 2+3 = 5, next 3+5 = 8, next, 5+8 = 13, next 8+13 = 21, and so on to infinity. Now the larger this series gets, the closer they come to the golden mean when divided. For example 8 divided by 13 = 1.6. Now the next two numbers in the series are 13 divided by 8 = 1.625. And so on until the number these ratios approach is attained, and that can never happen because that number of the golden mean is actually an infinite number.
That infinite number is called Phi after the Greek letter. This infinite number begins as 1.6180339887499… and I have recorded the first 216 digits of phi beginning near the smallest squares. This golden mean, or Phi is a mysterious natural number, which arises out of the basic structure of the Universe. For instance there is a documented occurrence of Fibonacci Numbers naturally in reproductive patterns of rabbit, cow, and bee populations. Sunflowers produce 55 seeds in a flower, which happens to be one of the Fibbonacci Numbers. This is because of the ideal nature of these ratios. It echoes in the arrangements of flower petals and leaves. This list goes on and on and many great websites are out there with more information. Phi has proven to work best in nature because Phi reflects an underlying harmony based on universal expansion. Phi proves again and again to appear regularly and precisely with all that grows and unfolds in nature. Plants that form new cells for branches through the main stem, rotate cells in an angle of Phi to produce maximum exposure of leaves to the sun with a minimum blockage of the sun’s precious light to the leaves below. This infinite number, (Phi), is associated with the natural structure of the Universe that even appears to expand mathematically in a Phi based equation. The ancients observed these facts about Phi before scientific technology could calculate the first hundred decimal places of this number that reaches into infinity. The ancient Pythagoreans believed that everything from our own bodies to the farthest reaches of the Cosmos was governed by an order which human reason was capable of understanding. This claim has its place in the foundation of our entire Western Civilization. The Greek’s testament to that claim was the Parthenon, also known as the Temple of Athena Parthenos. It is featured on this year’s Christmas card. The Parthenon on the Card however, has been relocated on a small island in the sea of our history and memory that has been parted. The Card shows the front of the Parthenon within the Golden Rectangle, which has been used as an architectural theme and also to bring this holy temple into harmony with the divine design of the Cosmos. The actual Parthenon lies atop the Acropolis in Athens. It was the largest building there. Serving originally as a temple to Athena. This card does feature the Parthenon in the ruined state it currently resides in. Historically it was designed by Ictinus and Callicrates, and before the great calamity it featured artistic renderings of the Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs. In its later history it was a Byzantine Church, and a Roman Catholic Church. After its Christian years, architecture loving Muslims made it a Turkish Harem, then a Turkish Ammunitions Dump. During its ammunition dump days on September 16, 1687, the Parthenon suffered a direct hit in the Turkish Venetian War, igniting the gun powder inside, and blowing it up along with whatever Muslim radicals were there fighting for the expansion of the nation of Islam. The resulting explosion has left us with the Parthenon we have today, although some credit belongs to the Greek archaeologist Nicolas Balanos, who restored a number of columns and parts in 1922. Our country has suffered a similar calamity from warriors of Islam, who in an unbelievably precise, calculated, organized, and financed attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon with some box cutters, have left those buildings also in ruins. The rest is history too late to change. At the time of this writing, which is exactly a week from the September 11, 2001 date of the event, there is much talk of a Holy War. In fact, war has been declared, (although we’re not exactly sure who with,) and an unbelievable, yet genuine resolve has arose from the people to take this godlike judgment back to the fowl evil sorry assed excuses of religious FREAKS that want to impose their fucked up Islam idea on the rest of us. As a Gnostic, I would look at such a “Holy War” as a clash of demiurgical ideas of God. I know which demiurge I’m rooting for, and I don’t care if we send Allah to hell. I definitely don’t want to live in His fucken Islam. After the terrorist attack I caught rumor of a Nostrodamus prophecy, which sounded exactly like the event. It was unbelievably uncanny. As it turned out, Nostrodamus didn’t actually write the prophecy. It was, however, patched together from different scattered quatrains by Nostrodomus into the reading that would definitely raise the sale of his book if it were truly his writing. Even though that explains it, I have also heard that the passage was actually written by someone 4 or 5 years ago to demonstrate how to make false Nostrodamus predictions by mix-n-matching the lines. It may not be an example of how accurate Nostrodamus was but it may demonstrate a method of divination that may have communicated a genuine prediction. A similar feeling can occur when one reads Revelation Chapter 18. This is about the fall of Babylon and as I read it I could imagine a Muslim highjacker may have believed he was fulfilling this prophecy since they do allow the Christian Bible to be read. It’s just not as holy as their Koran. Such a reader of Revelations Chapter 18 might have believed that the next Chapter 19 was about the Islam Kingdom of God ushering in the millennium after the fall of Babylon. This kingdom is far from fallen however, and the only millennium to be expected from this group of superstitious, and oppressive thugs, is a trip back to the dark ages of Emperor worship. I could just as easily interpret the 19th Chapter as the millennium established after this mostly Christian nation eradicates the world of terrorism. This year’s Card was designed with the Parthenon to demonstrate how our ancients regarded the Golden Rectangle and sought to live in harmony with it, in the same way all of nature aspires to this divine foundation of eternity. The connection of it with the tragedy of the year 2001 is one of those coincidences, which have always haunted these cards. I’m inclined to mention that last year’s card was created, printed, and posted to the website at least a week before that election fiasco, which won’t be mentioned further here because its not this year’s subject. The ancient mathematician called Luca Pacioli (1445-1517) wrote of the golden mean in a book called Divina Proportione, ( On Divine Proportion). The Golden Rectangle influenced Leonardo Davinci’s paintings and was repeatedly used by him as a standard for composition. This is echoed in the artistic teaching of never centering a painting subject. Instead, the artist should move it a little to the left or right bringing it within this golden ratio to make it more naturally pleasing to the eye. The natural art of the cosmos also agrees. The square in the upper left corner of the card features a typical galaxy of stars in the heavens with the same Phi based curves. It took the technology of modern man to finally document these giant conch shells in the heavens.
Modern man has also discovered the infinite nature of this number as well as
other infinite 
numbers
such as e and pi. Phi can be
graphically illustrated as a curve that constantly aspires to straightness by
exponentially growing, however since it always curves by a right angle with
each exponential growth, it becomes a spiral and will never become straight. Thus it is infinite by nature and relates to
a force of aspiration and expansion in the Universe. This force may have just been discovered this year. There has long been a debate in physics
about whether we live in an expanding Universe that will expand forever, or
will that mysterious force we do know about called gravity pull the whole
Universe back in on itself again.
Physicists this year unanimously announced that we live in a Universe
that is not only expanding, but it is speeding up. It used to be the popular theory that this all depended on how
many neutrinos existed in the spaces between the stars. This either determined a finite or infinite
Universe according to how much gravity these neutrinos added to the
equation. Earlier this year some
astronomical observations of distant nebulae to determine how much the Universe
was slowing down instead revealed to the astronomer’s surprise, that our
Universe is actually speeding up. The
current explanation of this is tackled by modern quantum theory. In quantum physics we understand that, not
only are there neutrinos and other subatomic particles in the spaces between
stars, but that they are always colliding with each other and creating new
particles thus more matter for just an instant. The effect of this, expanded to the scale of the whole Universe
is causing an expanding force.
Personally I never thought a collapsing Universe had much of a chance as
long as there was an animal like humanity evolving in it. There does seem to be a force that grows and
becomes in the Universe, and all of nature perseveres in harmony with it. Just as an infinite number implies this
force, the infinite number known as Pi, after the Greek letter , seems to echo
from the force of gravity. Gravity
aspires to the sphere, which is demonstrated by the orchestra of stars and
planets in the Cosmos. Pi is the
diameter of a circle divided by its radius, creating another infinite
number. This area, squared, creates the
sphere that gravitational influence tends toward. The perfect circle is only aspired toward because Pi is infinite
and can never be attained in an infinitely finite universe. This is why Pi becomes the gravitational
foundation of this year’s card by displaying the first 216 digits across the bottom
of the card. This year’s card
illustrates the dynamic between the natural number of the circle (Pi) upon
which matter and gravity are based and the natural number of the spiral force
(Phi) upon which growth, evolution, and overall expansion is based. This brings us to the other Phi shaped wave
on the right side of the card representing the creative potential of human
evolution. This wave in the parting sea
stirs in response to this years Child of the Pentagram. The child this year has matured and looks
more like an adolescent in harmony with the force of growing and becoming,
which we associate with Phi. This year
the child walks the sands of severity, which has been revealed by the parting
of the subjective sea, revealing an objective shore. He walks within the circle because he is fixed in the ever
present now. There, he walks upon the
objective sands while the subjective sea parts the way to the future, and then
closes back in on the shore behind him, engulfing it in waters of memory. Like this child we all walk a similar path
from the past to the future in the incessant now. Like the spiral force of Phi, he extends beyond the circle to
affect the sands and the sea with his Cup of Understanding and Lance of
Wisdom. From the cup pours waters of
mercy to irrigate the harsh sand of severity.
Here a puddle is formed symbolizing our human experiences turning these
dry sands into moist soil capable of producing life. In the child’s other hand is the Lance of Wisdom set ablaze with
the fires of severity. He dips this
lance into the waters of the sea of subjectivity to produce steam. Steam is the airy form of water and
symbolizes thought itself. These steamy
vapors of human thought rise up to new heights, ultimately to the Phi like
spiral symbol of Yin and Yang implying an essential unity of male and female
energies beyond where everything now exists.
Here, everything exists in the now, divided into a dualistic
reality. The Cup of Understanding and
the Lance of Wisdom represent these male/female energies in the form of Lignum
and Yoni. They also symbolize the two
pillars, which represent the Pillar of Severity and the objective as well as
the Pillar of Mercy and the subjective Universe. The child stands between them where the middle Pillar of Mildness
is. These outer pillars are represented
on the card by a pronoun and the symbol U.
The pronoun is the word IT that represents a definite something while
remaining vague enough to mean just about anything. It’s a very transcendental word.
I use it to symbolize the Pillar of Severity that the child
irrigates. It’s where harsh reality
rears its ugly head. These mystical
pillars are natural and manifest in our worlds. Television is an obvious manifestation of the Pillar of
Severity. The more we look toward it,
the more severe it seems to become. The
terrorist attack was so vivid an image on television of severity that Hollywood
couldn’t have topped it with millions of dollars of special effects. There has been no survivors found in the
last week but we should chase that hope to its bitter end, because it still
would only take a typical miracle to find someone buried and still alive. A Holy War would be a clash of the great
demiurges. These Christmas cards try to
look beyond them to reveal the true nature of the divine. Beyond the gods of this world and the
religious FREAKS who follow them. From
the time of this writing a war with Afghanistan looks eminent. They are discussing over there whether or
not to declare a Holy War on us.
They’re holy like the Mafia. It
looks like Iraq all over again. The
truth of the matter is, we ourselves made this mess. It would be more precise to say the CIA made this mess when we
fed a bunch of thugs’ food, money, and weapons to stop Russian expansion. Now its time for us to clean up that mess of
some of the most empowered bloodthirsty losers we will have ever fought. Perhaps we’ll get our humor back when we
discover that they’re more bark than bite.
We can chuckle as they wave their arms and surrender begging for their
lives. Sure a lot of them are willing
to die and we should kill them, since the American soldier isn’t going to die
for no GOD DAMN BODY. A drill sergeant
once told me that. We moved on Iraq for
similar reasons. We fed that thug a
bunch of food, money, and weapons so he’d kill Iranians and afterwards we had a
mess to clean up. And it ain’t clean
yet. These Middle Eastern people resent
our free society but it is what makes us great and mightier than them. We know our society doesn’t suck like theirs
does. Maybe we have a President who,
like his father, likes to solve all problems with a nice vicious war. A lot of Muslims think Islam sucks and you
know they just won’t let that go to a vote.
They resent us for living good lives and blame us for their own fucked
up governments. It’s Sodom Hussein who
doesn’t care about his own people although we haven’t been angels in that
mess. It was our own CIA that let these
terrorist thugs run amok and that just seems right in character. Now the winner of an election where the best
thief won is going to get a major makeover and the loyal love of these newly
united Americans. Hopefully we aren’t
all being tricked by another Pearl Harbor episode orchestrated by the CIA and a
lot of dirty Republicans who want to destroy our freedoms and civil
rights. All the media wants to do is
tell us how much we want our civil rights removed for the sake of security, and
they aren’t even subtle about encouraging the country to hurry up and start
killing innocent Afghani’s and Middle Easterners so we can ‘even up’ the
score. We are nothing but a nation of
stupid brainwashed lemmings if we don’t demand an investigation of the CIA’s
“Intelligence failure” over this, when it’s an established fact that Osama bin
Laden would be nothing but a spoiled rich Muslim brat if the CIA hadn’t sent
their “handlers” to him, probably while he was in college here in America, to
make him what he is today. Our freedom
and way of life is only worth defending if that is what we still have when it’s
all over. Enough about severity, there
was another pillar here. If television
represents the Pillar of Severity, then radio must be the Pillar of Mercy in
this world. Music is more subjective
than television and does tend more toward mercy. I represented it on the card by a capital U. This isn’t really a word but as a letter it
qualifies as a symbol. As a letter, U
also represents a sound. It implies a
word, and that word, (you), also wonderfully implies the subjective. Ironically, the majority of songs on the
radio are sung to “You”, although they couldn’t have possibly been written for
you in particular. So in a sense these
songs from this radio pillar are sung to U and U becomes the object of rock and
roll worship like another definition of god.
Maybe my pillar theory is true or maybe it is not. Actually truth can never be communicated
because it is what is looked upon to acquire the explanation. I offer it as an explanation of two pillars
in this world, which I affectionately name IT and U. Maybe I’m preaching some new kind of idolatry here, but I highly
recommend a lot of U worship in the bathtub where the acoustics are good. To include a sacrament of lots of bong hits,
and music, whether it’s the radio or a more subjective channel created by tapes
or CD’s. There is one final definition
of G-d on this year’s card that is the 216 Hebrew letters around the margin of
the card. Within these symbols are
represented every one of the Hebrew letters in their alphabet except for Gimel which
equals 3. Three is the key to these
letters dividing them into 3 verses.
They happen to be Exodus 14:19, 20, and 21 and say, “19) And the Angel
of the Elohim, that went before the camp of Israel removed and went behind
them; and the pillar of cloud removed from before them and stood behind
them. 20) And it came between the camp
of the Egyptians and the camp of Israel; and it was a cloud and darkness to the
first but it gave light by night to these and the one came not near unto the
other all the night. 21) And Moses
stretched out his hand over the sea, and the Lord drove back the sea with a
strong east wind all that night and made the sea dry land, and the waters
divided.” This is where the parting of
the sea theme on the card originated. I
present these 216 letters on the card because these three verses are from an
ancient Kabalistic tradition called the Shemhammaphoresh or the 72 Names of
God. These three verses are arranged on
top of each other to create 72 columns of three letters each according to rules
known as Temura. Then appropriate
letters are added to the end to create the 72 names of God. These 72 names also each correspond to
5-degree segments of the Zodiac. Also
72 degrees is the angle of each segment of the circle divided by the 5 points
of the Pentagram inside it. Just
another definition of G-d.
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