2

Ley of the Land

PP. 18-47

[quoted from Devereux Oct 1996] "From 1960 the ley theory took on a new lease of life, one that has led to the modern New Age notion of 'ley lines'. An ex-R.A.F. pilot, Tony Wedd, was very interested in flying saucers, or UFOs. He had read Watkins' The Old Straight Track and also a French book, Flying Saucers and the Straight Line Mystery (1958) by Aime' Michel,

in which it was (falsely) suggested that the locations where flying saucers landed or hovered very low ... fell into straight lines or "orthotenies". {It was really absurd to conjecture that such vastly advanced non-material divine technologies as those of flying saucers would confine themselves to such a triviality as flight along "straight lines".}

{Although ordinary human-built aircraft (which tend to fly along straight lines from one airport to the next), flying saucers tend, instead, to fly on exceedingly irregular zigzagging courses, often abruptly changing direction while flying at many hundreds of miles-per-hour (which is impossible for any material object, proving that they are not of the mere material universe); they do, however, exhibit certain very curious flight-patterns, often confining themselves within the bounds of a single political jurisdiction (political state) on any one day, demonstrating that they are well-aware of human political geography.}

Wedd ... had also read an American book by Buck Nelson called My Trip to Mars, the Moon and Venus (1956) ... . ...

{Not only do flying saucers often fly (in a few minutes traveling hundreds of millions of miles) to other planets with mortal humans as passengers, but also fly with mortal passengers to other planetary systems a great many light-years distant (likewise in a few minutes). For non-material substances and immaterial entities, such is easily feasible.}

Wedd formed the Star Fellowship, which aimed to contact the Space Brothers. The members of the club enlisted the aid of a psychic called Mary Long in their ley hunting, and she started referring to 'lines of force' and magnetic nodes in the landscape. She also channelled communications from

a Space Being called 'Attalita'." {praesumably signifying 'an inhabitant of Attalia' : "a coast-town of Pamphylia, mentioned (Acts 14:25) It was built by Attalus Philadelphus, king of Pergamos, and named after the monarch." (S:DB, s.v. "Attalia")}

{This could readily have been intended as an erudite allusion to Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, and thus intended as a recommendation of Quakerism as a pacifistic way of life.}

{[continuation of the same article by Paul Dereveux :] "In 1967 John Michell wrote his first book, The Flying Saucer Vision, in which he talked about UFOs, ancient sites, Alfred Watkins and leys. In 1969 he produced his seminal work, The View Over Atlantis, in which he brought his erudition and insight to bear on the ley theory, and mixed it with ancient, sacred geometrical and number systems, and much else besides, particularly the Chinese systemof landscape divination called Feng shui. He also speculated about dowsing. This book had a profound influence on the new generation of ley hunters."}

"Von Da:niken considered it impossible that primitive people could have constructed such massive and complex structures as the Egyptian pyramids, the Naza lines, Mayan temples, the Easter Island, and so forth, so he proposed that these structures had been constructed with help ... ."

{"Primitive"? The 5th-dynasty political state TL-MRJ consisted of million of highly organized people, similar to any major modern European state. The Maya states consisted each of 10s of 1000s of well-organized people. Rapa-nui (Easter Island) was likewise well-organized, not "primitive". All such political states were severely under stringent control of ruling classes, each including a royal dynastic family, as forceful as the ruling classes of modern capitalist Europe. }

"Erik von Da:niken ... adduced the lack of later monuments on the scale of Tiahuanaco, Stonehenge, or the Great Pyramid."

{Factually, the monuments at Tiwanaku ("Tiahuanaco") were built some 3,000 years later than Stonehenge and the 5th-Dynasty pyramids. Closer in time to Stonehenge and the 5th-Dynasty pyramids, the Western-Han-Dynasty pyramids (which approximate the size of the TL-MRJ pyramids) were built some 2,000 years later.}

"Eliade's ... contact with the sacred, ... an AEgypt in which gods walked among men ... projects that ... as central to human religiosity.

{It is generally accepted by pious persons that divinities (or angels) are often praesent, closely observing us for signs of piety.}

That is, Eliade conceives of religious man -- homo religiosus -- as perpetually nostalgic for mythic time, for illud tempus."

{It is customary among pious persons to have considerable regard for the mythology, and for the details described therein.}

p. 25

"after receiving her master's {ought to be labelled "mistress's"} degree in French theater at University College, London, in 1926 ... almost entirely through correspondence study ... She began primarily as a Shakespeare scholar, but over the late 1930 and '40s ... she first visited and then joined the staff and then the faculty of the Warburg Institute ...,

in 1947 publishing French Academies of the Sixteenth Century,

in 1959 The Valois Tapestries, and

in 1964 Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, which ... catapulted her to academic stardom. ...

p. 26

Immediately after Giordano Bruno, Yates at last received her LittD from London University, then retired as an honorary fellow from the Warburg in 1967 ...; she ... was made Dame of the British Empire in 1977.

In 1969 she published Theatre of the World, a study of ... Elizabethan public theaters; in 1971, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, a controversial reconstruction of a secret intellectual tradition in the seventeenth century ... . [p. 190, n. 2:20 "Frances Yates, Ideas and Ideals in the North European Renaissance : Collected Essays, vol. 3 (London : Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), contains a complete bibliography."]

At the time of her death in 1981, Yates was controversial but admired ... for her groundbreaking work."

The idea that Yates may have had occult sympathies has little to recommend it. Yates denied the claim, and nothing in her work suggest that she practiced magic." {Unless, or course, by "practiced magic" we may mean (or include) "read about and contemplated the significance of magic".}

{Reading and commenting on occult litterature is (or can be regarded as) in-and-of itself a variety or brand of ritual "magic", even if this may not be entirely identical with what is more popularly construed as "magic" workings. All the most prominent "sorcerers" known to history were to a very great extent themselves readers and commentators, and regarded such reading and commenting an integral part of their "magical" work.}

"Yates strives in her books to reactualize Bruno's magic ... .

{She wrote extensively about Giordano Bruno mainly because of the sensational influence of his writings. His actual philosophy was not as faithful to antient models of myth and ritual as were the philosophies of some other Renaissance authors.}

It is no surprise that ... Yates as an occult practitioner ... attempts to make magic a living worldview once more."

{This sort of promotion of revitalization of ante-Christian religions would be the primary duty of a restorer of the non-Christian ways of antiquity.}

[Vickers, p. 304, quoting Yates : The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 198] "The adept who had mastered the formulae could move up; and down the ladder of creation, from terrestrial matter, through the heavens, to the angels ... ."

[Vickers, p. 305, quoting Yates : The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 223] In Rosicrucianism "magic was a dominating factor, working as a mathematics-mechanics in the lower world, as celestial mechanics in the celestial world, and as angelic conjuration in the supercelestial world."

p. 29

"the most recent scholarship has quietly, tentatively ... begun to revive Yates's arguments. One sees this clearly a conferences on early modern

p. 30

science and history : Yates ... of the spirit of her work continues to inform scholarship on occultism."

"bricolage, anaogically applied, is a means of observing and classifying phenomena in order to put them to use. The interrelations of objects, particularly concrete objects of nature, become the categorical means by which to impose and also read meaning. That is, human events and structures are granted meaning by seeing them in relation to natural formations. Events over time are similarly classified in terms of this extrahuman and fundamentally nontemporal (synchronic) structural formation, such that the event becomes structure and history ... ."

"as Gatti [1999] shows, "Bruno never succeeded in creating a system of mnemonic images or signs capable of providing new answers about the ... universe he envisaged, thus obliging him, in the more scientific parts of his discourse, to fall back on a mythologized version ... .""

"it is impossible to call the sun, or the earth for that matter, the center. ... properly speaking the sun is not the absolute center, {but is} only a relative one. ...

{This type of geometry may be otherwise described (defined) as a ("GIS"; cf. EU:MSN, p. 238) "sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere." ("Book of the 24 Philosophers, 12th Century [Christian Aira]")}

To analyze such a universe mathematically would require a completely different sense of mathematics itself. ...

{It would require a different sense of geometry itself : a geometry which is not limited to 3 spatial dimensions, but is 4-dimensional.}

Such a mathematics appears impossible to Bruno ... ." {He is in error : it is possible.}

{4-dimensional geometry is just as feasible mathematically as is 3-dimensional geometry.}

"Bruno points out that ... finite mathematics can only apply by weak and deceptive analogies. The only proper mathematics would be one capable of, and indeed founded on, the infinite."

{FALSE! Only finite mathematics can be realistic, whereas anything allegedly dealing in "infinite" quantities must of necessity be nonsensical gibberish (as, in particular, is all theology so artificially contrived by Bruno, that misguided mangler of logic).}

p. 39

"In both Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition and The Art of Memory, Yates leans on the ars memorativa and the occult tradition of Ficino and Agrippa to explain Bruno's Copernicanism. ... By internalizing this system through the locative memory arts described in

p. 40

De Umbris Idearum and De Imaginum, the operative magus is enabled to manipulate the forces and powers of the universe."

"Yates ... claims Bruno has recognized that the Ficinian image-magic and the later ... (... Agrippan) ... require the mediation of imagination and the mind, and that powerful use of such techniques must therefore operate by drawing down celestial forces into the mind and transmitting them to other minds; Bruno's ... De Vinculis in Genere (On Links in General, 1590-91) would seem to fit this account reasonably well."

"Bruno's rereading ... adds a new twist : if the universe is truly infinite ..., then there is no means by which to step outside. {Infinitudes are so utterly unthinkable, that it would hardly be possible to suggest whether anything in particular is inside of it, or is outside of it, or is both inside and outside of it, or is neither inside nor outside of it.}

{In 4-dimensional finite geometry (such as accepted in "Relativity Theory"), there is no ready means of exiting from the finite but unbounded universe; it hath the projection every straight line-segment returning to itself from the opposite direction.} {However, within a closed 3-dimensional region of this 4-dimensional space, it is nevertheless possible to exit the region without opening it : "as Professor Newcomb demonstrated in the first volume of the American Journal of Mathematics, by rotating a flexible sphere in the fourth dimension, one can turn it inside out without tearing it." ("H4SD", p. 6)}

"Bruno thus rejects any formally delimited and schematic system ..., such as mathematics."

{Any even partially sane person would recognize that what must be rejected is not the logic of mathematics, but, instead, the unreasonable illogic of nonexistent infinitudes.}

"Bruno recognizes ... that ... AEgypt's nature is precisely such that ... would require that we ... perceive it by linguistic means utterly alien to us, in its original perfect hieroglyphs ... by analogy ... ." {FALSE! In no way at all is that ordinary, commonplace phonetically-written language "utterly alien to us".}

{Once that the key to that so-called "fallen language" (which, incidentally, is, even to-day, in commonplace daily employment in the form of ordinary Coptic) was discovered in the form of the Rosetta Stone, its phonetic-alphabetic hieroglyphs were very swiftly deciphered by Champollion and successors.}

"If Hermes suggests that "as it is above, so it is below,"

{It is quite true that each detail of the material universe is controlled by entities abiding the divine worlds.}

Bruno proposes that as the cosmos is infinite, so too is the atom properly infinitesimal."

{Actually, no "cosmos" can be of infinite magnitude, nor can any "atom" be of infinitesimal smallness.}

"Gatti corrects Yates : "The ... temples ... are thus neither abstract entities nor magical seals.

{The religious temples are, indeed, intended to illustrate both divine archetypes (which are a variety of "abstract entities") and ritual implements for sealing initiates with sacramental sanctifications.}

They are rather intellectual coordinates or the measuring devices through which the mind approaches the physical world.""

{They are, of course, for approaching divine worlds. From a religious point-of-view, the material universe is merely illusory except insofar as it is able to promote worship (by mortal souls) of the divine entities who abide in non-material planes-of-existence.}

"Eliade wants to view the "archaic ontology" from within, "experientially," and

Yates wants to interpret Bruno in his [i.e., Bruno's] own terms."

p. 46

"Comparative methods, which always ... mingle the synchronic and the diachronic, are thus not only useful but necessary. ...

But the pseudohistorical claim against comparison as intrinsically bad method is bigotry masquerading as rigor."

p. 193, n. 2:65

"For a spirited defense of comparison on logical grounds, see Robert A. Segal, "In Defense of the Comparative Method," Numen 48, no. 3 (2001):339-73."