— ART WARS —
Mental Health Month, Day 25:
Matrix of the Death God
Having dealt yesterday with the Death Goddess Sarah, we turn today to the Death God Abraham. (See Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, University of Chicago Press, 1996.) For a lengthy list of pictures of this damned homicidal lunatic about to murder his son, see The Text This Week.
See, too, The Matrix of Abraham, illustrated below. This is taken from a book by R. M. Abraham, Diversions and Pastimes, published by Constable and Company, London, in 1933.
The Matrix of Abraham
A summary of the religious import of the above from Princeton University Press:
“Moslems of the Middle Ages were fascinated by pandiagonal squares with 1 in the center…. The Moslems thought of the central 1 as being symbolic of the unity of Allah. Indeed, they were so awed by that symbol that they often left blank the central cell on which the 1 should be positioned.”
— Clifford A. Pickover, The Zen of Magic Squares, Circles, and Stars, Princeton U. Press, 2002, pp. 71-72
Other appearances of this religious icon on the Web:
A less religious approach to the icon may be found on page 393 of R. D. Carmichael’s Introduction to the Theory of Groups of Finite Order (Ginn, Boston, 1937, reprinted by Dover, 1956).
This matrix did not originate with Abraham but, unlike Neo, I have not yet found its Architect.
I used to have some friends who lived in a big warehouse space they had converted into the hippie flop house to end all hippie flop houses.
It used to be a cookie factory, for Mother’s cookies, before the developer bought it and started renting out sections of it to hippie warehouse collectives such as my friends. Their section was Unit Nine, so they called it Mother’s Nine, and they, themselves, were the Niners.
All the walls and furniture and various sleeping quarters were constructed out of recycled materials. Scrap lumber and anything else they could find. Most folks lived in rooms they’d built in the rafters, and they’d have to climb a ladder to get to their private part of the warehouse.
They had the word MATRIX in big letters over one of the doors, and no one would explain to me why. Finally I figured it out, and I even got the chance to not explain it to a newer initiate.
Comment by HomerTheBrave — Monday, May 26, 2003 @ 3:30 am