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This beautiful and groundbreaking book examines the use of sacred geometry and cosmology in Gothic cathedral design. Renowned geometer and lecturer Tom Bree demonstrates how medieval Master Masons combined their knowledge of the practical building arts with ancient cosmological knowledge to endow their constructions with profound spiritual meaning. Wells Cathedral, the focus of this book, was England's first Gothic cathedral, and its design symbolises the soul's cosmic journey from Earth and underworld to the heavens. Bree shows how the medieval Christian fascination with the knowledge of the ancient world laid the foundations for the more recent mythos involving the Templars, Freemasonry and Pyramidology. Packed with rare illustrations and original diagrams, this is a book to treasure.
J. David Lewis-Williams is world renowned for his work on the rock art of Southern Africa. In this volume, Lewis-Williams describes the key steps in his evolving journey to understand these images painted on stone. He describes the development of technical methods of interpreting rock paintings of the 1970s, shows how a growing understanding of San mythology, cosmology, and ethnography helped decode the complex paintings, and traces the development of neuropsychological models for understanding the relationship between belief systems and rock art. The author then applies his theories to the famous rock paintings of prehistoric Western Europe in an attempt to develop a comprehensive theory of rock art. For students of rock art, archaeology, ethnography, comparative religion, and art history, Lewis-Williams' book will be a provocative read and an important reference.
Mindsteps to the Cosmos shows how modern global civilization depends on giant leaps of understanding that have been made in the past. Science and technology have been inspired and formulated by the sky ? the cosmos in which we live. Human development could not have taken place on a cloud-shrouded planet. Mathematics was invented to track the movements of the sun, moon and stars even though back then these were thought to be gods. The space program has taken us beyond the earth, and satellite systems are exploring to the ends of the visible universe. This book provides the reader with algorithms to construct personal computer programs for finding the position of the moon and planets, and for calculating dates through historic periods in the Egyptian as well as the old and new style calendars.
“A mock self-help book designed not to help but to provoke . . . to inveigle us into thinking about who we are and how we got into this mess.” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Filled with quizzes, essays, short stories, and diagrams, Lost in the Cosmos is National Book Award–winning author Walker Percy’s humorous take on a familiar genre—as well as an invitation to serious contemplation of life’s biggest questions. One part parody and two parts philosophy, Lost in the Cosmos is an enlightening guide to the dilemmas of human existence, and an unrivaled spin on self-help manuals by one of modern America’s greatest literary masters.
The Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland, and Brittany by Aubrey Burl Pdf
The spectacular stone circles of western Europe, some nearly 6000 years old, have intrigued viewers through the ages. This beautiful book about these megalithic rings explores their ancestry, methods of construction, and eventual desertion. A substantially revised version of Aubrey Burl's highly praised work The Stone Circles of the British Isles, it offers new insights into the purpose of stone circles. It also provides a new interpretation of Stonehenge and of Callanish in Scotland, the first overview of the cromlechs in Brittany, a discussion of the problems of archaeoastronomy as related to stone circles, a greatly expanded Gazetteer, and an up-to-date list of radiocarbon dates and recent excavations.
An Archaeology of the Cosmos by Timothy R. Pauketat Pdf
An Archaeology of the Cosmos seeks answers to two fundamental questions of humanity and human history. The first question concerns that which some use as a defining element of humanity: religious beliefs. Why do so many people believe in supreme beings and holy spirits? The second question concerns changes in those beliefs. What causes beliefs to change? Using archaeological evidence gathered from ancient America, especially case material from the Great Plains and the pre-Columbian American Indian city of Cahokia, Timothy Pauketat explores the logical consequences of these two fundamental questions. Religious beliefs are not more resilient than other aspects of culture and society, and people are not the only causes of historical change. An Archaeology of the Cosmos examines the intimate association of agency and religion by studying how relationships between people, places, and things were bundled together and positioned in ways that constituted the fields of human experience. This rethinking theories of agency and religion provides readers with challenging and thought provoking conclusions that will lead them to reassess the way they approach the past.
State and Cosmos in the Art of Tenochtitlan by Richard F. Townsend Pdf
Townsend offers an interpretation of Mexica monumental art by identifying three interrelated themes: the conception of the universe as sacred structure, the correspondence of the social order and the territory of the nation with the cosmic structure, and the representation of Tenochtitlan as historically legitimate successor to past civilization.
The Sculptor and His Stone by Archbishop Chrysostomos Pdf
This book argues, from a distinctly Eastern Orthodox perspective, for the inseparability of classical Hellenism from the Greek patristic tradition, postulating a common striving for truth in both domains and laying emphasis on the contributions of the ancients and Greek paideia to Christian learning and culture. The essays contained in the volume provide a fruitful strategy, in the spirit of the late Werner Jaeger, for looking anew at the Greek classical world and Christianity through the eyes of the Greek fathers, the direct inheritors of the ancient Greek worldview. Collectively, the author and contributors forcefully demonstrate that, conflated with the visionary insights of the Jewish prophets and of Jewish messianism, the wisdom of the ancients served to pave the way for the unfolding of the fullness of Christian teaching and its spiritually enlightening revelation.
Argues that theoretical physics and cosmology can provide a key to overcoming race-related problems, explaining how they enable a means for discussing individual and communal quests for fulfillment beyond racial, ethnic, class, and sexual barriers. Original.
Through myths and legends, the knowledge of the power of certain gems and crystals has been preserved over generations. However, the practical aspects of how to use these precious stones to promote spiritual development have been lost to all but a few initiates. In Steps on the Stone Path, Robert Sardello offers strategies and rituals for recapturing that lost power. Sardello starts with guided meditations and rituals for developing awareness of, and the ability to experience, stone qualities such as deep silence, form, transparency, and color as modes of spiritual consciousness. Entering these modes of silent, creative consciousness requires befriending the elemental angelic beings embodied in stones. Sardello develops these initial practices into a sensory yoga of stones, in which the connection between the self and the Divine Self manifests through the medium of stone-awareness. He encourages readers to wear certain gems or to keep specific crystals close to their body, allowing them to enter the world of spirit. Steps on the Stone Path explores the possibility of uniting our soul being with the soul of specific stones, reveals unknown inner qualities and dimensions of humankind, and presents a dazzling theory of stones as critical tools in the making of a New Heaven and a New Earth.
Foundation Stone Meditation by Sergei O. Prokofieff Pdf
Meditative reflection--strengthening thinking and feeling through the will--is one of the main methods of experiencing Anthroposophy. Prokofieff writes: "The best path to this goal is inner work with the Foundation Stone Meditation, because this meditation is the quintessence of the whole of Anthroposophy, given in meditatively inspired form by means of earthly words." Rudolf Steiner described the substance of the "Foundation Stone Meditation" as spoken by him "out of the will of the spiritual world," and as "verses heard from the Cosmic Word." Owing to its spiritual and mantric form, the text of this meditation represents an archetype and is thus a key to the most diverse areas of world and human existence. Depending on "which spiritual portal is opened with this key," explains Prokofieff, "one arrives at one result or another, and one and the same line of the meditation becomes a reply to the most varied questions." The author applies this method in this work and, in the process, illuminates and opens up many dimensions of spiritual science. His research embraces, among other aspects, the relationship of the "Foundation Stone Meditation" to the being Anthroposophia, the spiritual hierarchies, human karma, the Rosicrucian, Michaelic and Grail streams, the Mystery of Golgotha, the two Jesus children, the three spiritual sources of Anthroposophy, and even the Constitution of the General Anthroposophical Society.
Stone maps the force, vivacity, and stories within our most mundane matter, stone. For too long stone has served as an unexamined metaphor for the “really real”: blunt factuality, nature’s curt rebuke. Yet, medieval writers knew that stones drop with fire from the sky, emerge through the subterranean lovemaking of the elements, tumble along riverbeds from Eden, partner with the masons who build worlds with them. Such motion suggests an ecological enmeshment and an almost creaturely mineral life. Although geological time can leave us reeling, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that stone’s endurance is also an invitation to apprehend the world in other than human terms. Never truly inert, stone poses a profound challenge to modernity’s disenchantments. Its agency undermines the human desire to be separate from the environment, a bifurcation that renders nature “out there,” a mere resource for recreation, consumption, and exploitation. Written with great verve and elegance, this pioneering work is notable not only for interweaving the medieval and the modern but also as a major contribution to ecotheory. Comprising chapters organized by concept —“Geophilia,” “Time,” “Force,” and “Soul”—Cohen seamlessly brings together a wide range of topics including stone’s potential to transport humans into nonanthropocentric scales of place and time, the “petrification” of certain cultures, the messages fossils bear, the architecture of Bordeaux and Montparnasse, Yucca Mountain and nuclear waste disposal, the ability of stone to communicate across millennia in structures like Stonehenge, and debates over whether stones reproduce and have souls. Showing that what is often assumed to be the most lifeless of substances is, in its own time, restless and forever in motion, Stone fittingly concludes by taking us to Iceland⎯a land that, writes the author, “reminds us that stone like water is alive, that stone like water is transient.”
Portrait of a Scientific Racist by James G. Hollandsworth, Jr. Pdf
In the years after Reconstruction, racial tension soared, as many white southerners worried about how to deal with the millions of free African Americans among them -- an issue they termed the "negro problem." In an attempt to maintain the status quo, white supremacists resurrected old proslavery arguments and sought new justification in scientific theories purporting to "prove" people of African descent inherently inferior to whites. In Portrait of a Scientific Racist James G. Hollandsworth, Jr., reveals how the conjectures of one of the country's most prominent racial theorists, Alfred Holt Stone, helped justify a repressive racial order that relegated African Americans to the margins of southern society in the early 1900s. In this revealing biography, Hollandsworth examines the thoughts and motives of this renowned man, focusing primarily on Stone's most intensive period of theorizing, from 1900 to 1910. A committed and vocal white supremacist, Stone believed black southern workers were inherently lazy, a trait he attributed to their African genes and heritage. He asserted that slavery helped improve the black race but that opportunities still existed during Reconstruction to mold the freedmen into efficient workers. Stone's central -- yet unspoken -- goal was to devise a way to maintain an obedient, productive labor force willing to work for low wages. Writing from both Washington, D.C., and his cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta, Stone published numerous essays and collected more than 3000 articles and pamphlets on the "American Race Problem" -- including those written by bitter racists and enthusiastic "race boosters." Though Stone lacked the credentials typically associated with scholarly experts of the time, he became an authority on the subject of black Americans, in part because of his close friendship with fellow scientific racist and statistician Walter F. Willcox. An early member of the American Economic Association and other academic groups, Stone went on to serve as head scholar of a division for race studies within the Carnegie Foundation. Interestingly, Stone recruited W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington to collaborate with him on a major study for the Foundation, continuing his tendency to incorporate all perspectives into his study of race. Hollandsworth uses Stone's extensive correspondence with Willcox, Du Bois, and Washington, as well as his personal writings -- both published and unpublished -- to reveal the secrets of this misguided, yet fascinating, figure.