That Obscure Object of Symbolognosis

I am told that a chasqui will be arriving swiftly across the desert later today with my anxiously awaited copy of The Lost Symbol.  In the meantime, I will take advantage of the hours before my anticipated fortnight of total absorption in Brownian thought to return to the programmatic material inscribed into two loci classici of symbological fiction, with the aim of clarifying an important matter, an apparent paradox at the core of our field that has led many seekers after truth astray.  The matter could be phrased, imperfectly but bluntly, in the following manner: what is the object of symbolognosis?  To put it more allegorically: if an immortal symbologist were to follow the chain of symbols to its end, where would he or she arrive?    

The first text under examination is the terse and pointed "The Six Ramsean Stones and the Pillars of the World," by Professor Max T. Epper of Trinity College, Dublin, interpolated into the third section of Matthew Reilly's riveting The Six Sacred Stones.  Beneath Epper's sparklingly pellucid prose lurks a series of bewilderingly elliptical and paratactic structures of thought - his writing, to quote the Inca sage Juan de Espinosa Medrano, "embozando misterios, descoge humildes las cláusulas y llano el estilo" - which it behooves us to bring out into the light of day in order to illuminate their import.  

Epper begins with "the mystery of the circles," a matter that he poses iconically rather than discursively, placing before the reader a square containing a dazzling circle enclosing numerous concentric circles, one after another, whose perfect self-contained symmetry is marred only by the presence of a dark spot of the same size as the innermost circle, hovering just outside the outermost circle.  

What is this strange, smoldering blemish?  Instead of informing us straight away, Epper shifts, as is his manner, from the synchronic to the diachronic, declaring portentously that "the end of the world [. . .] may be nearer than we think" (67).  

Again without providing further elucidation, Epper moves onto a litany of deceptively bland "scientific" facts: "our planet exists in concert with our sun and the other planets of our solar system" (67).  He himself, he tells us, had occasion to empirically verify this remarkable fact during the Tartarus Event of 2006, but he was not the first: "Certain ancient civilisations also knew about these relationships: the Maya, the Aztecs, the Egyptians, even the Neolithic peoples of Britian; all of them saw patterns in the night sky" (67).  "Patterns": meaning; a web, perhaps, of meaning. Leaving the reader to detect the pattern of his text, much like a Neolithic Briton contemplating the firmament, Epper again shifts the focus of his discussion, now from physics to metaphysics: "For life [or anything, we might add] to exist, there must be balance.  Balance implies the harmonic existence of two things, what philosophers call 'Duality'" (68, italics in text).  He adds: "But not only must there be two of everything - man, woman; heat, cold; light, darkness; good, bad - but inside the good there must be some bad, just as inside the bad, there must be some good" (68).  

Let us attempt to disentangle the threads that have so far been woven into Epper's text.  First, an unnamed, luminous structure which, when examined closely, does not possess the self-sufficiency that is initially evident, thus provoking our opening question - what can be the outside to this perfect inside?  Apparently eluding this question , we instead find it transposed from space onto time: if we exist in time and only in time, what can be the end of time?  How can there be an outside to time?  Similarly, when we contemplate the harmony of the celestial spheres and recognize, like the ancients, the symbolic patterns which permeate them, we must ask: how can this not be perfect and self-sufficient?  Which is the same as asking: how can this come to an end?  

It is here that the troubling nature of Epper's perhaps superficially reassuring metaphysical propositions comes to light: not only can there be an outside to every inside, a Yin to every Yang, there must be, in order for it to exist at all.  Even for harmony itself to exist, it must exist in harmony with disharmony.  It is only a necessary consequence of this that "[o]ur Sun's dark twin now approaches, bringing with it our destruction" (69).

But for every destruction, there must be a non-destruction.  Epper calls this non-destruction "The Machine."  The "knowledge crucial to our salvation" - that is, both the knowledge of the Sun's dark twin, and the knowledge of the non-destruction enables the very being of this destruction by balancing it out - is nothing other than the knowledge of the operation of this "Machine": tout court, the "Machine" is nothing other than that which is in the harmonious solar system beyond the harmonious solar system, the minimal difference by way of which it offers itself to us, as to the Aztecs and the Neolithic Britons, as the object of symbolognosis.

In all the writings of "the great men and women who have held pieces of this knowledge," from Laozi and his student Confucius to Rameses II and Imhotep II to Cleopatra to the great Mayan king Pakal to Isaac Newton and Jean Cocteau, "the Machine is always represented by the same image, but what the image actually means, remains elusive" (69, italics added).

Thus: we know there is something, the knowledge of which was once a common, unified field of knowledge among the ancients, but we still do not know what that something is.  Almost apophatically, we may declare that the Machine is that which enables and is the non-destruction of the world and the non-discontinuity of time.      

Is the Machine simply, or not simply, Being itself?  

Epper does not tell us.  We must look elsewhere.

In Coelho's The Alchemist, the words are different but the meaning is the same, only more obvious.  Perhaps the shepherd Santiago will lead us where we wish to go.  On his journey, this seeker of the always-already known learns that alchemy is nothing other than fluency in the "Language of the World": "that language that doesn't depend on words" (45), "the universal language, understood by everybody, but [always-]already forgotten" (72).  Fluency in this language is nothing other than knowledge of the "Soul of the World."          

Why does the meaning of the images of the Machine remain elusive?  "Because people become fascinated with pictures and words, and wind up forgetting the Language of the World" (89), Coehlo tells us.  The logos of speech is as suspect as the graphos of "drawings, coded instructions, and obscure texts: "I don't know why things have to be transmitted by word of mouth [. . .] It wasn't exactly like they were secrets; God revealed his secrets easily to all his creatures" (88-9, italics added).  How can we account for this startling coincidence of the secret and the non-secret?  How can that which is most obvious (offenbar) not disclose itself to us in "intuition: the sudden immersion of the soul in the universal current of life" (76), and instead conceal itself? 

Once, the alchemist tells us by way of a parable, "the Master Work could be written simply on an emerald.  But men began to reject simple things, and to write tracts, interpretations, and philosophical studies" (127).  But does not the primordial mistake lie in the inscription, or perhaps in the emerald itself, which begets the temptation to inscribe?  "You don't even have to understand [. . .] all you have to do is contemplate a single grain of sand, and you will see in it all the marvels of creation" (129).  But is not the grain of sand also an obscure text?  When the world contemplates itself, is it not already its own dark twin?