A couple of people have asked me about the source material for my Revelation project so I thought I would explain a couple of things about what I am pulling into the pages. My friend Carla asked me about the Golden Mean references. As I said in my previous post all of my Revelation pages are based on the Golden Rectangle which relates to Phi (1.6180339887…..etc, to infinity), the never repeating number of the Golden Ratio (not to be confused with Pi). All of the Math diagrams in my Revelation pages somehow relate to this Golden Ratio. As I said, the pages of my “book” are the proportion of this ratio and if you look at the first image I posted you can see the Golden ratio proportion placed vertically within the overall proportion of the page.
Let me say that I am not a Math person at all (beyond Geometry). That is to say, I did not perform well in Math class and Mrs. Durrell and Mrs. Frye had to basically drag me through high school Algebra. I am interested in Math though, at least how it relates to cultures, the construction of the Universe and the big man behind the curtain. Almost all of my Golden Mean fascination comes from a wonderful little book by Mario Livio entitled “The Golden Ratio”. Although the book is written from a secular point of view, Livio doesn’t shrink from attributing a Holy status to the Golden Mean. He mentions several times that this special number and proportion is often known as God’s signature or The Divine Proportion. This is because it is so prevelant in His creation…from the spiral of the galaxy and the shell on the beach to the pattern in seeds in a sunflower. If you have seen the movie Pi you know what I’m talking about.
How does all of this relate to John’s Patmos Revelaton visions? Well, if you have ever watched 10 minutes of Jack Van Impe (brilliant and possibly mad doomsday Revelation interpretor televangelist that I have linked to the right) you know that the study of numbers and the Bible goes back 5,000 years. Again, see the movie Pi which actually has some historical basis in the Torah / numerology section of the film. The book of Revelation is a particular hotbed of number speculation. If you are into Norwegian black metal bands like Gorgoroth (like my Mom is, she loves cookie monster vocals) then you will know…666 is the number of the Dark One, right? Revelation was written in numerical and symbolic code. An example of this connection is 666 itself as described by Thomas Cahill in “Desire of the Everlasting Hills”:
In his (John’s) world, letters were used as shorthand to represent numerical values, as is the case with the Roman numerals we are still familiar with. So we need only find a well-known historical figure (the writer implies clearly that it is a ‘man’ known to everyone) whose name ‘adds up’ to 666. The Hebrew alphabet contained now vowels. The name of the emporer under whom the Jesus Movement’s two greatest ‘prophets’ were executed wasNero Caesar, in Greek Neron Kaisar, in unvoweled Hebrew nrwn qsr or, giving these consonants their conventional numerical value, 50 + 200 + 6 + 50 + 100 + 60 + 200, which equals 666. The Beast is the Roman empire - more precisely, all the cruelties of Roman political domination – personified by Nero Caesar. "
John himself claims in Revelation that his vision “calls for insight; but anyone with discernment may figure out the number of the Beast. It is the number of a man, the number Six Hundred Sixty-Six.” It is the multiple levels of meaning and the elastic symbolism that make Revelation so interesting for me. I also love how the Revelation throw out timelines and chronology all together and enters directly into a world of dreams….as Cahill also points out “Christ, the slaughtered lamb, is first seen in heaven, after which the Savior is given birth by Isreal”. I will reference more of this symbolism later. The more I haved delved into Revelation the more I have seen the cleverness of the symbols that are, again, not always as murky as people assume. The challenge to illustrating the Book is that it is so amazingly dense in its references. To illustrate every detail mentioned would be to cram a page beyond recognition.
In looking at Artist’s who have taken on Revelation I have found one who, for me, is the golden standard (pun intended). And he seems to have pulled off doing what intimidates me…cramming in a gonzo number of references (including the Golden Mean!). This artist is Albrect Durer (see below example), a German Northern Ren. Artist who lived in the 15 th century. His mind-blowing woodcuts are full of detail and he found so many creative ways to include even the most abstract symbols (a lamb with seven eyes and seven horns who is given to opening a scroll with seven seals for instance). He was close to being a contemporary of Heironomous Bosch if that tells you anything about the day and age he lived in. His work would be extremely detailed if it were pen drawings, the fact that they are woodcuts are unfathomable. Anyway, I am actually including or referencing (or stealing) some of Durer’s prints in my Revelation work and I will point out what is his to give the dead guy some credit when I post them. Just remember before you judge that Warhol did an entire series using DaVinci’s “Last Supper” and no one cracked wise on the little white wigged man.
Durer is included in the aforementioned book “The Golden Ratio” along with a variety of other artists throughout the ages. Actually, I will conclude by saying I am especially amazed by the information about all of the artists who incorporated the Golden Mean in their work. It isn’t too unpredictable that Da Vinci used it but what astonished me was that this kind of thing had precidence to him. Several early Renn. works are shown to precisely inscribe the ratio in the figure or composition in the 13 th century. A famous more contemporary example is “Sacrament of the Last Supper” by Dali…the paintings proportion is the Golden Ratio (105.5 X 65.75) and to make it as freakin’ obvious as possible he included a huge dodecahedron behind Christ. A dodecahedron is a 12 sided regular solid in which each side is a pentagon…most importantly it is directly related to the Ratio. I will let the conspiracy theorists note the pentagon and take it from there.
Let me say that I am not a Math person at all (beyond Geometry). That is to say, I did not perform well in Math class and Mrs. Durrell and Mrs. Frye had to basically drag me through high school Algebra. I am interested in Math though, at least how it relates to cultures, the construction of the Universe and the big man behind the curtain. Almost all of my Golden Mean fascination comes from a wonderful little book by Mario Livio entitled “The Golden Ratio”. Although the book is written from a secular point of view, Livio doesn’t shrink from attributing a Holy status to the Golden Mean. He mentions several times that this special number and proportion is often known as God’s signature or The Divine Proportion. This is because it is so prevelant in His creation…from the spiral of the galaxy and the shell on the beach to the pattern in seeds in a sunflower. If you have seen the movie Pi you know what I’m talking about.
How does all of this relate to John’s Patmos Revelaton visions? Well, if you have ever watched 10 minutes of Jack Van Impe (brilliant and possibly mad doomsday Revelation interpretor televangelist that I have linked to the right) you know that the study of numbers and the Bible goes back 5,000 years. Again, see the movie Pi which actually has some historical basis in the Torah / numerology section of the film. The book of Revelation is a particular hotbed of number speculation. If you are into Norwegian black metal bands like Gorgoroth (like my Mom is, she loves cookie monster vocals) then you will know…666 is the number of the Dark One, right? Revelation was written in numerical and symbolic code. An example of this connection is 666 itself as described by Thomas Cahill in “Desire of the Everlasting Hills”:
In his (John’s) world, letters were used as shorthand to represent numerical values, as is the case with the Roman numerals we are still familiar with. So we need only find a well-known historical figure (the writer implies clearly that it is a ‘man’ known to everyone) whose name ‘adds up’ to 666. The Hebrew alphabet contained now vowels. The name of the emporer under whom the Jesus Movement’s two greatest ‘prophets’ were executed wasNero Caesar, in Greek Neron Kaisar, in unvoweled Hebrew nrwn qsr or, giving these consonants their conventional numerical value, 50 + 200 + 6 + 50 + 100 + 60 + 200, which equals 666. The Beast is the Roman empire - more precisely, all the cruelties of Roman political domination – personified by Nero Caesar. "
John himself claims in Revelation that his vision “calls for insight; but anyone with discernment may figure out the number of the Beast. It is the number of a man, the number Six Hundred Sixty-Six.” It is the multiple levels of meaning and the elastic symbolism that make Revelation so interesting for me. I also love how the Revelation throw out timelines and chronology all together and enters directly into a world of dreams….as Cahill also points out “Christ, the slaughtered lamb, is first seen in heaven, after which the Savior is given birth by Isreal”. I will reference more of this symbolism later. The more I haved delved into Revelation the more I have seen the cleverness of the symbols that are, again, not always as murky as people assume. The challenge to illustrating the Book is that it is so amazingly dense in its references. To illustrate every detail mentioned would be to cram a page beyond recognition.
In looking at Artist’s who have taken on Revelation I have found one who, for me, is the golden standard (pun intended). And he seems to have pulled off doing what intimidates me…cramming in a gonzo number of references (including the Golden Mean!). This artist is Albrect Durer (see below example), a German Northern Ren. Artist who lived in the 15 th century. His mind-blowing woodcuts are full of detail and he found so many creative ways to include even the most abstract symbols (a lamb with seven eyes and seven horns who is given to opening a scroll with seven seals for instance). He was close to being a contemporary of Heironomous Bosch if that tells you anything about the day and age he lived in. His work would be extremely detailed if it were pen drawings, the fact that they are woodcuts are unfathomable. Anyway, I am actually including or referencing (or stealing) some of Durer’s prints in my Revelation work and I will point out what is his to give the dead guy some credit when I post them. Just remember before you judge that Warhol did an entire series using DaVinci’s “Last Supper” and no one cracked wise on the little white wigged man.
Durer is included in the aforementioned book “The Golden Ratio” along with a variety of other artists throughout the ages. Actually, I will conclude by saying I am especially amazed by the information about all of the artists who incorporated the Golden Mean in their work. It isn’t too unpredictable that Da Vinci used it but what astonished me was that this kind of thing had precidence to him. Several early Renn. works are shown to precisely inscribe the ratio in the figure or composition in the 13 th century. A famous more contemporary example is “Sacrament of the Last Supper” by Dali…the paintings proportion is the Golden Ratio (105.5 X 65.75) and to make it as freakin’ obvious as possible he included a huge dodecahedron behind Christ. A dodecahedron is a 12 sided regular solid in which each side is a pentagon…most importantly it is directly related to the Ratio. I will let the conspiracy theorists note the pentagon and take it from there.
posted by jym d at 00:32
1 Comments:
i just saw this on a forum i post at, but i found the bottom of the article the most interesting, about revelation being a political issue, what do you guys think about that last part? starting with "it has very little to do with the devil"
Chris Wattie of The National Post has issued the following report:
Satanists, apocalypse watchers and heavy metal guitarists may have to adjust their demonic numerology after a recently deciphered ancient biblical text revealed that 666 is not the fabled Number of the Beast after all.
A fragment from the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament, dating to the Third century, gives the more mundane 616 as the mark of the Antichrist.
Ellen Aitken, a professor of early Christian history at McGill University, said the discovery appears to spell the end of 666 as the devil's prime number.
"This is a very nice piece to find," Dr. Aitken said. "Scholars have argued for a long time over this, and it now seems that 616 was the original number of the beast."
The tiny fragment of 1,500-year-old papyrus is written in Greek, the original language of the New Testament, and contains a key passage from the Book of Revelation.
Where more conventional versions of the Bible give 666 as the "number of the beast," or the sign of the anti-Christ whose coming is predicted in the book's apocalyptic verses, the older version uses the Greek letters signifying 616.
"This is very early confirmation of that number, earlier than any other text we've found of that passage," Dr. Aitken said. "It's probably about 100 years before any other version."
The fragment was part of a hoard of previously illegible manuscripts discovered in an ancient garbage dump outside the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus. Although the papyrus was first excavated in 1895, it was badly discoloured and damaged. Classics scholars at Oxford University were only recently able to read it using new advanced imaging techniques.
Elijah Dann, a professor of philosophy and religion at the University of Toronto, said the new number is unlikely to make a dent in the popularity of 666.
"Otherwise, a lot of sermons would have to be changed and a lot of movies rewritten," he said with a laugh. "There's always someone with an active imagination who can put another interpretation on it.
"It just shows you that when you study something as cryptic and mystic as the Book of Revelation there's an almost unlimited number of interpretations."
The book is thought to have been written by the disciple John and according to the King James Bible, the traditional translation of the passage reads: "Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six."
But Dr. Aitken said that translation was drawn from much later versions of the New Testament than the fragment found in Oxyrhynchus. "When we're talking about the early biblical texts, we're always talking about copies and they are copies made, at best, 150 to 200 years after [the original] was written," she said.
"They can have mistakes in the copying, changes for political or theological reasons ... it's like a detective story piecing it all together."
Dr. Aitken said, however, that scholars now believe the number in question has very little to do the devil. It was actually a complicated numerical riddle in Greek, meant to represent someone's name, she said.
"It's a number puzzle -- the majority opinion seems to be that it refers to [the Roman emperor] Nero."
Revelation was actually a thinly disguised political tract, with the names of those being criticized changed to numbers to protect the authors and early Christians from reprisals. "It's a very political document," Dr. Aitken said. "It's a critique of the politics and society of the Roman empire, but it's written in coded language and riddles."
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