Stop the Press!

I have a piece in process, so I welcome any comments or ideas. I don’t even have a First Draft to show you yet. The theme I want to pick up comes from boredom with the whole Freemason thing. Did they evolve from Operative Mason Guilds (who built the Gothic Cathedrals) or do the Speculative Mason’s rites actually go all the way back to Egypt? If they do, does that mean the highest initiates really have to challenge all their own taboos by child sacrifice, etc – or should we just see all those stories as desperate Christian propaganda (they used to say the same sort of things about the Jews) aimed at any radical humanists or freethinking educators? Anyway. Bored with all that stuff - like they held the fort, and no other groups got involved. Yeh, right. I have more interest in actors and writers as subversives.

Having got into printing presses through McLuhan and the Gutenberg Galaxy, I got interested in paper-making (which seems to have come out of the same Southern France where intelligence seems to have had its supporters – the Cathars, the Troubadours, the Spanish Cabbalists, etc.) Muslim Spain and the Languedoc had universities and other high IQ intentions and practices until the Inquisition threw us ALL back in the dungeon of ignorance. Huguenot papermakers (later Protestants, same area of Europe) had to run away from similar persecution, and took their skills with them. Whether the Vose part of my family come from the de Vaux papermakers I have no idea (unproven romantic connection). Harold Bayley has a whole theory linking the watermarks in paper to heretics and subversives.

So I have two areas of interest. Craft Guilds, and the subversive nature of printing.

Guilds of settled communities tend to specialise and control local business (capitalism, shop-keepers, closed shop unions, etc), but Guilds of itinerant workers needed to recognise each other and confirm relevant qualifications wherever they went. Musicians and actors audition each other, of course. The commitment to a bogus stone mason (dodgy builder), however, could cost you a lot of money and waste a lot of time, so the codewords (jargon) and ability with tools and even secret handshakes, etc became quite important.

As to paper makers and printing – the people involved in such work seem to have often felt like a threat to the Church and the State. For a start, they could read and write (always dangerous). Secondly, printing meant they could mass-produce pamphlets, newsletters and other scurrilous items for a newly literate public. So the powers-that-be have often controlled printing presses as tightly as they could. Many secret ones continued to function, however. And this still continues to this day (think of Samizdat publications in the USSR, while strict censorship still got enforced by people like the KGB.)

I feel particularly drawn to Harold Bayley - he may think Bacon wrote Shakespeare, and he may have a point, but his work on watermarks and their secret significance certainly intrigues me. Look at this very modern looking but enigmatic fool's cap watermark, for instance - yeh Cathars, troubadours, jesters, sufis, you got it. Oh and foolscap paper, too, of course...

Any ideas and relevant stuff - to help me with an article for either the Blog or the Winter Solstice MQ - gratefully received.

A MAGICIAN

The Crash of Symbols

I came across this 'Symbols' picture from Zach aka Dak (the guy who did the cover for the current edition of MQ) which I guess I grabbed from the Forums.

It seems to sum up a lot of themes around the MLA. (click pic to enlarge)

We have a lot of creative people around, and most of us seem interested in collaborations or, at the very least, sparking each other. No-one knows where this multimedia interaction might end up, but the process feels pretty satisfying, just on its own - and the current forum-fun-project of contemplating making a Tarot set (or 5) has triggered some great ideas. See Bobby's Fool and his Magician elsewhere in the blog (use the Imperfect Index under Tarot or Bobby, if necessary)
Dak has offered a special 23rd card for RAW, a Sacred Chao numbered Trump 22 (the Fool has no number remember? Zero)

Four Idols

We have had a discussion about Bacon/Shakespeare - arising from our reading Finnegans Wake. I want to post a few interesting bits from a discussion we had about Bacon last year, as they seem relevant to the Maybe Logic and General Semantics interest in the things that facilitate or inhibit clear thinking. 'Idols' is a term which Bacon used figuratively for fallacies which block or distort men's perception of reality and their pursuit of truth. They are psychological barriers - prepossessions, prejudices, and delusions, emotional and sentimental biases. In short, they include all the imaginings which prevent men from seeing the object 'as it really is'. Most of this summary got culled from this excellent site, which goes into the Idols in more detail, with examples - I have jotted notes of my own amongst them.

Novum Organum
Aphorisms concerning The Interpretation of Nature and the Kingdom of Man.
Aphorism XXXIX. There are four classes of Idols which beset men's minds. To these for distinction's sake I have assigned names, -- calling the first class Idols of the Tribe; the second, Idols of the Cave; the third, Idols of the Market-place; the fourth, Idols of the Theatre.

Idols of the Tribe: (Human Chauvinism - sensory limits - bodymind?)

A person's education:
The books a person reads:
The people a person admires: (try not to end up with their bad habits, too)
A person's experiences:
Our need to seek more and more regularity in the world than there really is: (23s and The Law of Fives?)
Our tendency to seek out evidence of that which we already believe to be true: (self-fulfilling prophecy, The Prover proves what the Thinker thinks)
Our tendency to see personal truths as universal: (opinion disguised with isness)
Our belief in empirical data: (only part of the spectrum)
Our tendency to let emotions rule reason: (faith-based vs experiment-based)

Idols of the Cave: (Personal reality-tunnels)

People see things in light of their own special knowledge and opinions:
Some of us are governed by similarities, others by differences:
Those who love the past and those who love the possibilities of the future obscure the knowledge of the present:
Some of us see only the details and others see only the global:
Bacon advised students to hold in suspicion any idea which particularly appealed to them

Idols of the Marketplace: (General Semantics and NLP)
Words are misused or misunderstood:
Words have a true and a vulgar meaning: (slang and jargon)
Words cannot be defined because we need words to define them:
Names of things which do not exist confuse our understanding: (nominalizations)
'Idols of the Market Place are the most troublesome of all'
'It is not possible to divorce ourselves from these fallacies and false appearances, because they are so inseparable from our nature and condition of life'

Idols of the Theatre: (The State - true believers - ready-made fictions)
Dogma:
Religion:
Political systems (democracy, communism, etc.):
Education:
Political parties:

Systems of dogma or philosophy which have been invented with little or no regard to realities: they resemble the fictions of stage plays which distract audiences from 'what is' to illusory worlds. Such systems may be sophistical, extracting a great deal from a few facts, or empirical, extracting a little from many things, or superstitions, mixing philosophy with theology and tradition. All of these are errors because they do not see knowledge truly. The Sophists do not consult experience; the Empiricists are too easily satisfied; and the Superstitious contaminate knowledge and spread their fallacies widest of all. The Idols of the Theatre also influence the mind into excesses of dogmatism or denial.

A FOOL