Coincidence? You Decide
In Wu Cheng En, Monkey faces the four directions, paying obeisances, upon being born from the stone egg. The dieities in Jade Heaven must take him seriously, even before he eats the Empresses' Peaches of Immortality.
Milarepa is set to building four towers for his guru, Marpa, the Translator (another function of the Hermes type). The first is round, the second a crescent (the shape of Navajo peyote fire altars), the third triangular, the fourth foursquare and final on the appropriate, difficult site.
The numerology of Egypt is strikingly characterized by emphasis on the numbers four and seven. Stecchini relates the septenary system to the dynastic module of the Royal Cubit, invented by Imhotep, perhaps, or by Menes the First Pharoah. Akhenaten revives the pre-dynastic modulus of the geographic cubit--and using it for the reckoning, establishes his capital half way along the prime meridian of Egypt. With four points of the compass and two axes, Egypt used the net of coordinates for mapping the surface of the earth. This is an abstract, algebraic system for indexing precise locations on a spheroidal surface. Egyptian computations--the most accurate made up until their confirmation in the so-called Age of Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries A.D.--corrected for the flattening of the earth at the poles, and some slight bulges in the temperate climes. They marked off longitudes from the prime meridian, which passed through the tip of the delta at Giza. Now we use Greenwich. But the latitudes today use the same bench mark, the equator. An expedition in the Fourth Dynasty charted the headwaters of the Nile, a few degrees south of the equator. The source of the White Nile is on precisely the same meridian of longitude as the western tip of the Nile delta near Alexandria--as wondrous a coincidence as the occurrence of the first Cataract at the same latitude at the Tropic of Cancer. A geodetic point was established at Giza, earlier at Saqqara, where was set the sokar, or omphalos, to mark the navel of the world.
The eastern meridian of longitude, parallel to the prime Meridian and to that of the Western longitude, ran through Thebes. That is what the Greeks called the city, the Egyptians called it al Wast. To the west of Thebes, from the oasis of Siwa, legend recounts two black doves flying north to Greece, landing first at Dodona, then at Delphi. Dodona is 2/7 the distance from the equator to the pole, Thebes (in Egypt) 1/7. Integration of ancient geography, by sevens. Seven gated Thebes, the Seven against Thebes in literature. Thebes in Greece was also where Cadmus sowed dragon's teeth that sprang up as armed warriors. Caedmon invented English poetry, having been a shepherd outside the Abbey of Whitby [photo top of page] in the year 665 A.D. He is the gleeman, uninitiated in the sacerdotal tradition of information control--his to keep it alive, language returned to the form of prakrit, the popular speech, necessitated by the bureaucrati corruptions of the sanskrit (although it was Roman Latin) the official
language of the priests and court bards.
Jonathan Harker set sail for Castle Vlad of Dracula from the port of Whitby.
Kurt von Meier
ca. 1976