Cosmopoeia
Sections

Section

Mysticism

How religions and secret teachings put the order of the world into images, from the Kabbalah and the Rosicrucians to the throne of God.

  1. 01The tetractys in mysticism, Hermeticism and religionWhy a site that wants to give the tetractys a scientific basis deals with mysticism, and what the four elements have to do with it.
  2. 02Hermeticism: Hermes Trismegistus and the doctrine of correspondenceWhat Hermeticism is, where its writings come from and how old they really are. As above, so below, the seven spheres of the Poimandres and the path from Hermes via Pythagoras to the Rosicrucians.
  3. 03The Gnostics and the thirty aeonsWho the Gnostics were, how we know about them and why they thought in numbers: the Pleroma of Ogdoad, Decad and Dodecad, the Pythagorean tetrad in Irenaeus, Abraxas as 365 and the name Jesus as 888.
  4. 04Alchemy: the art of transformationWhere alchemy comes from, what it taught and what became of it: the four elements and their qualities, the seven metals and planets, the axiom of Maria from one to four, the Great Work, the question of inward or outward, and why lead really does turn into gold today.
  5. 05Paracelsus: physician, alchemist and wandererFour pillars of medicine, three principles, five causes of disease, man as a small world and the famous sentence that the dose makes the poison. Who Paracelsus was, what he taught, where he was right, where not, and why his influence reaches as far as Goethe and C. G. Jung.
  6. 06Goethe's Faust: number, sign and transformationThe harmony of the spheres in the first verse, a pentagram on the threshold, the four elements, the chymical wedding, the witches’ times table and the mystery gods of Samothrace: how much of this website is in Goethe’s Faust, and where Goethe himself laughs at it.
  7. 07The secret symbols of the RosicruciansA "simple ABC booklet" from 1785 full of circles, triangles and six-pointed stars, and the thesis that the fourness is explained geometrically in it.
  8. 08Freemasonry: history, degrees and symbolsFrom the masons' lodges of the cathedral builders to the lodges of the Enlightenment: how Freemasonry arose, what really happened in 1717 and 1723, how it came to Germany, what the three degrees mean and which tools and signs it took over from the craft.
  9. 09The Temple of Solomon: measure and imageSixty cubits long, twenty wide, the holy of holies a perfect cube: what the Bible reports about the temple in Jerusalem, why the molten sea gives π as three, what the pillars Jachin and Boaz mean and how the temple became the archetype of the Masonic lodge.
  10. 10Polygons and star polygons in FreemasonryTriangle, pentagram, hexagram and the blazing star are fixed elements of Masonic symbolism. Were they only signs, or was there knowledge behind them?
  11. 11The Kabbalah: the tetractys seen differentlyTen sephirot in four worlds, ten "numbers without anything" in the Book of Creation, and 231 gates from 22 letters that form a 22-gon simplex.
  12. 12Magic squares: the seal of Saturn and the tenIn the planetary magic of the Renaissance, the square of the numbers 1 to 9 belongs to Saturn. Every line gives 15, and every two numbers through the centre add up to ten.
  13. 13Éliphas Lévi: pentagram and hexagramThe 19th-century French Kabbalist made the pentagram and hexagram core symbols of modern esotericism.
  14. 14The signatures of the cathedral buildersEvery stonemason bore a mark, and many of these marks can be derived from a "mother key", a circle geometry of triangle and square. A widespread but disputed thesis.
  15. 15Christmas, the throne of God and the number 2424 elders around the throne, four creatures with six wings each, the magic circle, the Advent wreath, St John's Day and the Ægishjálmur. The number 24 in mysticism and religion.
  16. 16Quantum physics, magic and the unconsciousSymmetry as the language of physics, number as the archetype of order, and a 30-gon at the heart of the Lie group E8. Where matter, symbol and soul touch.
  17. 17Pyramids, knightly crosses, spatial latticesThe pyramid is half an octahedron, the cannonball stack a piece of crystal lattice, and the cross of the knightly orders a fourfold symmetry. Three symbols, one geometry.