the Black Widow
“How long would it seem burning! Let there pass
A minute, ten, ten trillion; but the blaze
Is infinite, eternal: this is death,
To die and know it. This is the Black Widow, death.”
—Robert Lowell, Mr. Edwards and the Spider. Found in Poets & Poems, Goldstone & Cummings, 1967.
Synesthesia.
“Representation of one sense impression in terms which apply to another sense, as a “blue note” in music. . . . Edith Sitwell writes that The morning light creaks down . . . and the French poet Baudelaire speaks of perfumes . . . green as grasslands.”
—Poets & Poems, Goldstone & Cummings, 1967.
Dawn disrobes like a woman leaving her bath
“Dawn disrobes like a woman leaving her bath:—Dawn who has woven the loveliest of cloths.”
—a Vedic invocation to Usha, the Dawn, as quoted by Edouard Schur’ in The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religions, translated from the French by Gloria Rasberry, 1961.
O Agni
“O Agni, Holy Fire! Purifying fire! You who sleep in the wood, and ascend in shining flames on the altar, you are the heart of sacrifice, the fearless wings of prayer, the divine spark hidden in everything, and the glorious soul of the sun!”
—Vedic Hymn, quoted by Edouard Schur’ in The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religions, translated from the French by Gloria Rasberry, 1961.
Soma
“What clearly proves that Soma represented the absolute feminine principle is the fact that the Brahmins later identified it with the Moon. As the Moon symbolizes the feminine principle in all ancient religions, so the Sun symbolizes the masculine principle.”
—Edouard Schur’, The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religions, translated from the French by Gloria Rasberry, 1961.
an inseparable couple
“With the conception of Agni, the divine fire, we are very close to the core of the doctrine [of the Vedas] and its esoteric, transcendent foundation. In fact, Agni is the cosmic agent, the principle of the universe, par excellence. ‘It is not only the terrestrial fire of lightning and the sun. Its true domain is the unseen, mystical heaven, temporary dwelling-place of the eternal light and of the first principles of all things. . . . Agni is the eldest of the gods, ruler in heaven as well as on earth, and he officiated in the abode of Vivasvat (they sky or sun) long before Matharicva (the lightning) brought him to mortals. . . . Master and generator of the sacrifice, Agni becomes the bearer of all mystical speculations of which sacrifice is the purpose. He engenders the gods, he organizes the world, he produces and preserves universal life; in short, he is cosmogonic power.
Soma is the teardrop of Agni. In reality it is the drink of a fermented plant poured as a libation to the gods during the sacrifice. But, like Agni, it has a mystical existence. Its supreme abode is in the depths of the third heaven where Surya, daughter of the sun, filtered it, and where Pushan, food-giving god, bound it. It is from there that the Falcon, a symbol of lightning, or Agni himself went and snatched it . . . and brought it to men. The gods drank it and became immortal; men also will become immortal when they drink it in the home of Yama, dwelling-place of the happy. In the meantime, here below it gives them vigor and fullness of life. . . . It nourishes, permeates plants, invigorates the semen of animals, inspires the poet and provides wings for prayer. Soul of heaven and earth, . . . with Agni, it forms an inseparable couple; this couple that lighted the sun and stars.’”
—Edouard Schur’, quoting heavily from the Vedas, I think, in The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religions, translated from the French by Gloria Rasberry, 1961.
The Light was in the world
“The Light was in the world, and the World was made by it, and the world knew it not.”
—The Holy Bible, John 1:10, as quoted by Edouard Schur’ in The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religions, translated from the French by Gloria Rasberry, 1961.
four successive, primitive races
“[The] division of mankind into four successive, primitive races was accepted by the oldest priests of Egypt. They are represented by four figures of different types and skin colors in the paintings of the tomb of Seti I at Thebes. The red race bears the name Rot; the Asiatic race with yellow skin, Amu; the African race with black skin, Halasiu; the Lybico European race with white skin and blond hair, Tamahu.”
—Edouard Schur’, a footnote to The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religions, translated from the French by Gloria Rasberry, 1961; citing Lenormant, History of the Peoples of the Orient, Vol. 1.
[The blind spot]
“[T]he seeming continuity of consciousness is really an illusion. . . .
[The blind spot] is due to a two-millimeter gap on the nasal side of the retina where the optic nerve fibers are gathered together and leave the eye for the brain. The interesting thing about this gap is that it is not so much a blind spot as it is usually called; it is a non-spot. . . . [Y]ou cannot see any gap in your vision at all, let alone be conscious of it in any way. Just as the space around the blind spots is joined without any gap at all, so consciousness knits itself over its time gaps and gives the illusion of continuity.”
—Julian Jaynes, from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976.
seeing any object
“In seeing any object, our eyes and therefore our retinal images are reacting to the object by shifting twenty times a second, and yet we see an unshifting stable object with no consciousness whatever of the succession of different inputs or of putting them together into the object. An abnormally small retinal image of something in the proper context is automatically seen as something at a distance; we are not conscious of making the correction. Color and light contrast effects, and other perceptual constancies all go on every minute of our waking and even dreaming experience without our being in the least conscious of them.”
—Julian Jaynes, from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976.