Earth and Spirituality
Magic squares are squares that contain particular numbers arranged in equal rows and columns such that the sum of each row and column (and sometimes diagonal) are the same.
The earliest known magic square appeared in China dating back to at least 650 B.C.E.(Lo Shu and the tortoise who could talk with a boy after the flood), but magic squares were represented also in Persia, India, Arabia and Europe. Read more
…and the queen gave birth to a son who was named Asterion… Apollodorus
Story goes that Phalaris, tyrant of Akragas, a Greek city on the southern cost of Sicily, in today’s territory of Agrigentum, commanded Perillos to invent and design a new torture device for executing criminals. According to Diodorus Siculus, recounting the story in Bibliotheca Historica, Perillos of Athens proposed to Phalaris a bull that was made entirely of bronze, hollow, with a door in one side. The condemned was locked inside the belly of the bull and fire was set under it, heating the metal until the person inside roasted to death. Read more
A grid, probabl
y representing parallels and meridians, divides the Earth in 33 sectors. Another special number is 11, 33 being a multiple of it. You probably wonder what it means and what relation have these numbers with the Earth.
33 appears immediately as a particular number, being a palindrome. Moreover 3×3=9; 33×3=99… another palindromic digit I like is the number 12321. If you sum all digits, you’ll obtain 9 again. Read more
Daedalus, ut fama est, fugiens Minoia regna,….posuitque immania templa….hic crudelis amor tauri suppostaque furto Pasiphae, mixtumque genus prolesque biformis Minotaurus inest.
Daedalus, so the story goes, flying the Cretan shore….built this boundless temple… here is the cruel bull’s love and the abduction of Pasiphae,…and the double hybrid nature of the Minotaurus…
From Aeneid, Book 6th
In my first issue in this blog, inside the article “Temple and Time”, I mentioned the sixth book of Aeneid and made some allusion to the temple of Apollos, built by the famous inventor Dedalus. Here Aeneas spends some time admiring the doors of the temple where various mythological scenes are depicted. There are images about Androgeos’s death, the Athenians, Cecrops descendants , commanded to pay annual tribute of seven of their youths , the Euboean shores and Pasiphae’s love and the Minotaur, the urn where the lots are kept and the Labyrint. There should have been also a representation of Icarus , but sorrow prevented Dedalus to give shape to his son’s death.Vergil tells us that Dedalus twice tried to fashion a depiction of his death in gold , but both times was overcome by emotion. Soon after this moment of contemplation , Aeneas prays the Sybil to be allowed to visit his father in the underworld.
… where land’s semicircle lies, fenced by the azur vault.
Varro’s quotation from the poet Nevio
When talking of a temple people generally imagine a building for the worship of God, but the original meaning of the term is another.
From earliest times temples have been built as scale models of the universe. The first known mention of the latin word templum is by Varro (116-27 B.C.) for whom it designated a sort of cosmic observatory.
