"Our family lodge had been built at about this same period in the prior century, by neighboring tribes, for my great-great-grandmother, a pioneering mountain lass. Constructed of hand-hewn rock and massive tree trunks chinked together, it was a huge log cabin that was shaped like an octagon-- patterned after a hogan or sweat lodge-- with many-paned windows facing in each cardinal direction, like a vast, architectural compass rose.
........
From here on the mountaintop, fourteen thousand feet atop the Colorado Plateau, I could see the vast, billowing sea of three-mile-high mountain peaks, licked by the rosy morning light. On a clear day like this, I could see all the way to Mount Hesperus-- which the Diné call Dibé Nitsaa: Black Mountain. One of the four sacred mountains created by First Man and First Woman.

Together with Sisnaajinii, white mountain (Mt. Blanca) in the east; Tsoodzil, blue mountain (Mt. Taylor) in the south, and Dook’o’osliid, yellow mountain (San Francisco Peaks) in the west, these four marked out the four corners of Dinétah-- 'Home of the Diné,' as the Navajo call themselves.

And they pointed as well to the high plateau I was standing on: Four Corners, the only place in the U.S. where four states-- Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona-- come together at right angles to form a cross."

"John Updike is the great genial sorcerer of American letters. His output alone (60 books, almost 40 of them novels or story collections) has been supernatural. More wizardly still is the ingenuity of his prose. He has now written tens of thousands of sentences, many of them tiny miracles of transubstantiation whereby some hitherto overlooked datum of the human or natural world-- from the anatomical to the zoological, the socio-economic to the spiritual-- emerges, as if for the first time, in the complete­ness of its actual being."

"'I was brought up in a very strong Catholic community,' Sting says. 'My parents were Catholic, and in the Fifties and Sixties, Catholicism was very strong. You know, they say, "Once a Catholic, always a Catholic." In a way I'm grateful for that background. There's a very rich imagery in Catholicism: blood, guilt, death, all that stuff.' He laughs."

RS 597, Feb. 7, 1991

Last night's 12:00 AM
Log24 entry:

Midnight Bingo From this date six years ago:

From this morning's newspaper,
a religious meditation I had not
seen last night:



Related material:

Juneteenth through
Midsummer Night, 2007

and

Church of the Forbidden Planet

"... with primitives the beginnings of art, science, and religion coalesce in the undifferentiated chaos of the magical mentality...."

-- Carl G. Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," Collected Works, Vol. 15, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, Princeton University Press, 1966, excerpted in Twentieth Century Theories of Art, edited by James M. Thompson.

"Yes, you'll be goin' loco
  down in Acapulco,
  the magic down there
  is so strong."

"The major structures of the psyche for Jung include the ego, which is comprised of the persona and the shadow. The persona is the 'mask' which the person presents [to] the world, while the shadow holds the parts of the self which the person feels ashamed and guilty about."

-- Brent Dean Robbins, Jung page at Mythos & Logos

MacTutor biography of Neumann

Variety (Universal Algebra) at Wikipedia

Preface to Varieties of Groups (1967), by Hanna Neumann

Biography (1974 obituary) of Hanna Neumann

Peter M. Neumann home page

Dynamic and algebraic compatibility of groups (1985 Dec. 11)

Groups related by a nontrivial identity (1985 Nov. 17)

Transformations over a bridge (1983 Aug. 16)

Group identity algebras (1983 Aug. 4)

"In the version of the myth told by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, Phaeton bragged to his friends that his father was the sun-god. One of his friends, who was rumored to be a son of Zeus, refused to believe him and said his mother was lying. So Phaeton went to his father Helios, who swore by the river Styx to give Phaeton anything he should ask for in order to prove his divine paternity. Phaeton wanted to drive his chariot (the sun) for a day. Though Helios tried to talk him out of it, Phaeton was adamant. When the day came, Phaeton panicked and lost control of the mean horses that drew the chariot. First it veered too high, so that the earth grew chill. Then it dipped too close, and the vegetation dried and burned. He accidentally turned most of Africa into desert, burning the skin of the Ethiopians black. Eventually, Zeus was forced to intervene by striking the runaway chariot with a lightning bolt to stop it, and Phaeton plunged into the river Eridanos. His sisters the Heliades grieved so much that they were turned into poplar trees that weep golden amber.

This story has given rise to two latter-day meanings of 'phaeton': one who drives a chariot or coach, especially at a reckless or dangerous speed, and one that would or may set the world on fire." --Wikipedia

"In the version of the myth told by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, Phaeton bragged to his friends that his father was the sun-god. One of his friends, who was rumored to be a son of Zeus, refused to believe him and said his mother was lying. So Phaeton went to his father Helios, who swore by the river Styx to give Phaeton anything he should ask for in order to prove his divine paternity. Phaeton wanted to drive his chariot (the sun) for a day. Though Helios tried to talk him out of it, Phaeton was adamant. When the day came, Phaeton panicked and lost control of the mean horses that drew the chariot. First it veered too high, so that the earth grew chill. Then it dipped too close, and the vegetation dried and burned. He accidentally turned most of Africa into desert; burning the skin of the Ethiopians black. Eventually, Zeus was forced to intervene by striking the runaway chariot with a lightning bolt to stop it, and Phaëthon plunged into the river Eridanos. His sisters the Heliades grieved so much that they were turned into poplar trees that weep golden amber.

This story has given rise to two latter-day meanings of "phaeton": one who drives a chariot or coach, especially at a reckless or dangerous speed, and one that would or may set the world on fire." --Wikipedia

--

"Who would have dreamed that when socialism finally came to the U.S.A. it would be brought not by Bolsheviks in blue jeans but Wall Street bankers....?"

"The consequences of Lehman's fall were apparent within days, yet key policy players have largely wasted the past four weeks. Now they've reached a moment of truth: They'd better do something soon-- in fact, they'd better announce a coordinated rescue plan this weekend-- or the world economy may well experience its worst slump since the Great Depression.

Let's talk about where we are right now."

"One must join forces with friends of like mind."

Macquarrie's connection in this journal to the I Ching is, like that book itself, purely coincidental.  For details, click on the figure below.

The persistent reader will
find a further link that
leads to an entry titled
"Notes on the I Ching."

McKenna's writing was of value to me for its (garbled) reference to a thought of Alfred North Whitehead:

"A colour is eternal.  It haunts time like a spirit.  It comes and it goes.  But where it comes it is the same colour.  It neither survives nor does it live.  It appears when it is wanted."

-- Science and the Modern World, 1925