Sacred Number

The “death of Pan” was a phenomenon that occurred before or around the time of Christ in the sense that it was reported that a loud voice was heard (by sailors) that stated “Pan is dead”. As with all mythological information, at one level it is propaganda whilst at another it is history by allusion and at another it is true, especially when the culture absorbs it – in this case a culture with mythological roots right back to prehistory.

As such therefore, Pan’s death is another marker of transition at the beginning of fuller historical record keeping. This keeping of history may indeed have spelt an end to the dominance of mythological thought by the increasing use of rationality to unlock the nature of the physical world whilst banishing the complex mental world of allusion. At the same time though, Pan was manifestly not dead as he had been absorbed into the pantheon of Rome via Greece. He was a goat god that helped the Olympians overwhelm the preceeding Titans (associated with Saturn), to impose Jupiter on the celestial throne. We have encountered this process in the gap between Minoan Crete and classical Greece where Zeus appeared. In fact, Cretans came to be called liars because they retained part of the ancient matriarchal principle of the male king who must die, like the year, after a year and a day.

The illustration on the right is by Bob Jefferson. It first appeared on the cover of Talks on Beelzebub's Tales by J.G. Bennett. These talks sought to make accessible the deliberately challenging master work of G.I. Gurdjieff especially for those coming to these ideas for the first time, and originally delivered in talks to the students of the Sherbourne Academy for Continuous Education.

The Cretans not only said that Zeus was born on Crete (as per Greek myth) but also that he died there. This was infuriating for the new male order which had created immortal male gods to displace the matriarchal practices of the Mediterranean. The Goddess Metis was effectively recycled through Zeus’ head, in a virgin birth and “with a shout, fully formed”, to be reborn as Athena thus disposing of any previous divine female history. In this way her Parthenon was so called because she was born without a second parent and was always a virgin herself with resonances for the Virgin Mary. Thus, the appearance of parts of the previous pantheon into the new Olympians represents the inevitable process of reshaping the past familiar forms.

The new mind of classical times gave birth to now-familiar disciplines such as logic. In logical analysis, the facts are deduced without mechanisms such as allusion, metaphor and simile. In logic there has to be cause and effect that can be proved. It means nothing that a river looks like a snake. However, in the latter, high-level and intuitive, description there is a strong poesis that can integrate water, erosion, headwaters, and flood plains into a holistic overview. It is a powerful communication of a subtle truth not accessible to analytical thought, but communicated these days by schematic diagrams.

Download PDF of the superceded chapter 10 of Sacred Number

There was an ancient art lying behind the creation of sacred texts, known to academics who study such things but very little known to a wider audience. This art is found to exist in the Bible, Homer's classics, Islam, and most literature arriving in written form by the early historical period.

Just as today we talk about the secret codes of the renaissance and their use in secret societies, the inner knowledge of the structure of a great work appears to have been a specialist skill that helped present the story in a powerful way - the power being that by controlling the structure of a work, its integrity could be assured in its transmission and its content could have inner relationships.

The technique has been called Ring Composition, because the sequence has a circular structure where beginning and end meet at "the latch" whilst at the furthest point from beginning and end, the epitomy of the story is revealed at "the turn", at which the story begins to return to whatever was at the beginning, to reach the end.

There are quite a lot of articles and analyses on the web concerned with the ring composition of old texts and the work of Mary Douglas, the anthropologist (1921-2007) who died last May, provides a number of examples from the Bible and other works, notably within her book Thinking in Circles. 

By way of this introduction I thought that my book, Sacred Number, might contain an interesting structure presented as a ring composition. This in spite of the fact that I did not consciously engage in the technique when writing it. It remains a possibility though that inner structural rules might apply if and when you feel that a composition was arrived at that had some objective validity.

You might like to play with the idea of ring composition yourself. Or you may just find the following ring analysis of  Sacred Number interesting and more revealing than a back cover synopsis, an index, the introduction, and so on - all the usual mechanisms for trying to provide an overview or summary. One is struck however by the fact that this is essentially a visual medium and that it can reveal relationships, of polarity for example, but does not explain them. Perhaps this was also a technique of deeper thinking?

 

J.G.Bennett has, through his ideas, been a major influence on me - a situation I can only recommend to anyone interested in the meaning of the world we live in.

At the end of his life he gave some talks to a Sufi centre that were published as Intimations. The first was about the world situation and the following small part is a very useful summary of the type of thinking required to escape the delusion that history is something in which the human is a purely passive cargo. Since the early 1970s a lot has happened and much more has also come to light about prehistory, geological cycles and so on. The availability of information has also been transformed, witness the world wide web this is read through. Whilst it is familiar to catalogue world problems, it is the deeper question of our role and the how we, as humans, are being transformed by our technologies that has to be investigated now if that role is to be conscious. The present world situation is in fact an amazing "book-you-can't-put-down" once you start to understand it!

from The World Situation by J.G. Bennett from Intimations, Beshara Publications, 1975

I expect we have all sat by the shore and watched to see if it's true that every seventh wave is a specially large one. When I was told this as a child, it so fascinated me that I was determined to know whether it was true or not. And there is something like that, that from time to time the waves are greater, that is, the cycles are not the ordinary cycles of rise and fall of civilizations and cultures, but something greater in the life of man. The last very great change in the life of man occurred at the end of the Ice Ages, about ten thousand years ago, when the whole condition of life on this earth was profoundly changed. A very great part of the traces of earlier culture was wiped out. Some kinds of catastrophes, which we have no means yet of reconstructing, must have occurred because earlier cultures left much greater traces. So we have many more traces of what happened eighteen to twenty, thirty thousand years ago, than we have of the period just preceding the end of the Ice Ages when many, many animals disappeared and a great part of the human race. According to traditions such major changes occur in long periods of time. There must be some very ancient memories that made people leave behind them this tradition or legend. Today, with our much more precise knowledge with dating and with the examination of vast quantities of recorded material we can see that ten to twelve thousand year cycles really do hold good on this earth. At least we can trace that twelve thousand, perhaps twenty-five and certainly thirty-seven thousand years ago the very great changes came. The greatest of all was thirty-seven thousand years ago, when our modern race of men appeared, and the Neanderthal man disappeared.

Another great thing happened twenty-five thousand years ago at the very height of what is sometimes called the reindeer culture, when man's civilisation reached an unprecedentedly high level, and art and industry and discovery must have been very advanced. In spite of the very few traces that are left behind, there are enough to show that there was knowledge then that was not attained again by mankind until really quite recently. If the last great change happened ten thousand years before Christ that is, twelve thousand years ago, the time of the ending of the Ice Ages and the beginning of the great movements towards our modern languages, cultures and religions then maybe we are due for another change equally as great in the way in which man lives on this earth. Or, possibly we may be due for something that is even greater : really, the arriving of a new race of people. We should take this seriously. We should take it seriously because it not only comes from the evidence of tradition, and from the evidence that comes from the study of cycles, but simply from what our eyes see as we look about us.
This world cannot last as it is. 

It is worth remembering that the megalithic civilisation has somewhat survived both in monuments and in traditional arts such as myths, numerical and linguistic arts. This has a special bearing on who we are today for between the two civilisations lies the chasm within which history was written. Knowing more about the megalithic might help us understand the world situation because, in a sense, we are too close to our present culture and it is incredibly overbearing and "full of itself".

The megalithic arose out of the Stone Age(s) in which the relationship to the Earth was clear and yet great works were being conducted. We still don't know how this culture surveyed the planet to develop an accurate geodetic model or how they laid out accurate complex monuments. This is not a problem of lifting large stones really but of measuring better than a minute of a degree.

In Sacred Number I propose the ancients had developed a completely alternative world view based on number. This would have been perfectly possible to Stone Age people of high capability without modern science or occult powers. If this is the case then the "chasm of history" can be bridged through the understanding of number instead of subatomic particles, the latter always being phenomena even when part of the Big Bang.

In contrast, numbers cannot be said to have been created.