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Immram Brain, c. 8th cent. An extraordinary beauty it is for Bran in his coracle across the clear sea: but to me in my chariot from a distance it is a flowery plain on which he rides about. What is clear sea for the prowed skiff in which Bran is, that is a delightful plain full of flowers to me in a chariot of two wheels….The sparkle of the expanses that you go over, the brightness of the sea, on which you row about, yellow and blue-grey-green are spread out, it is earth that is great. Speckled salmon leap from the womb of the shining sea, on which you look; they are calves, beautifully colored lambs at peace without strife . . . The expanse of the plain, the number of the host, beauties shining with bright quality….A pleasant game, most delightful, they play in fair contention, men and gentle women under a bush, without sin, without crime. Along the top of a wood has floated your coracle across ridges, there is a beautiful wood with fruit under the prow of your little boat. A wood with blossom and fruit, on which is the vine’s true fragrance…We are from the beginning of creation without age, without decay of earth-freshness. we do not expect weakness from decline. The sin has not come to us.
Desert ascetic practice and cosmology (intepretant) Otherworld trope Regional environment of archipelago
“Triadic” Trinitarian Formula (Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, “desert fathers,” Eriugena and the original Irish Stowe Missal) Father Holy Spirit (proceeding) Son (begotten) Divine energies/logoi in nature (the “sunshine” from “the sun”) express all three together, associated with the Holy Spirit in the physical world.
Filoque Dyadic Trinitarian Formula (officially adopted in West in Scholastic/High Middle Ages, based in Augustine) [ Father Son ] Holy Spirit Logoibecome archetypal ideas in God’s mind, centered in the Father-Son, more instrumentally directed and objectified than relational with nature.
Julia Kristeva on Triadic/Dyadic Medieval Trinitarian Symbols The triadic view of the Trinity: “defined through germinal, floral, nutritional, and erotic metamorphoses that imply, beyond the cosmic energy theory often viewed as specific to the East, the openly sexual fusion with the Thing at the limits of the nameable . . . the Spirit merges with the two other centers and, by the same token, endows them, beyond their value as distinct identities or authorities, with an abyssal, breathtaking, and certainly also sexual depth, where the psychological experience of loss and ecstasy finds its place.” The dyadic Trinitarian structure of the filiqoue formula: “had the advantage of providing a basis for the political and spiritual authority of the papacy on the one hand, and on the other for the autonomy and rationality of the believer’s person, identified with a Son having power and prestige equal to that of the Father. What had thus been gained in equality and therefore in performance and historicity had perhaps been lost at the level of the experience of identification, in the sense of a permanent instability of identity. Difference and identity, rather than autonomy and equality, did on the contrary build up the Eastern Trinity, which consequently became the source of ecstasy and mysticism.”
Psychoanalytic Semiotic View of Trinitarian Formulas (ing Kristeva) Real Triadic Symbolic Imaginary Dyadic [Real = Imaginary] Symbolic
Observation from the Objective Perspective(adapted from Vehkavaara following Peirce) Observer/Researcher Observed Mind Represented Object of Observed Sign or Sign
Observation from the Transcendental Perspective(adapted from Vehkavaara following Peirce) [Observed Mind/Observer Mind] Represented Object
Triadic Third Nature/Literature (adapting Kull):Umwelt (Second + First) in closer relationship with Zero Nature Second Nature Zero Nature First Nature
Dyadic Third Nature (Literature) [Second Nature—First Nature] =Umwelt Zero Nature
Inverse/”stereographic” perspective of early medieval Logos-icon(Mount Sinai, c. 6th century/Iona, Scotland (?), c. 800)
The Lord of the Rings They were standing in an open space. To the left stood a great mound, covered with a sward of grass as green as Springtime in the Elder Days. Upon it, as a double crown, grew two circles of trees: the outer had bark of snow white, and were leafless but beautiful in their shapely nakedness; the inner were mallorn-trees of great height, still arrayed in pale gold. High amid the branches of a towering tree that stood in the centre of all there gleamed a white flet. At the feet of the trees, and all about the green hillsides the grass was studded with small golden flowers shaped like stars. Among them, nodding on slender stalks, were other flowers, white and palest green: they glimmered as a mist amid the rich hue of the grass. [Frodo’s companion Sam notes:] “I feel as if I was inside a song, if you take my meaning.” “Frodo felt that he was in a timeless land that did not fade or change or fall into forgetfulness. When he had gone and passed again into the outer world, still Frodo the wanderer from the Shire would walk there, upon the grass among the elanor and niphredil in fair Lothlórien. They entered the circle of white trees. As they did so the South Wind blew upon CerinAmroth and sighed among the branches. Frodo stood still, hearing far off great seas upon beaches that had long ago been washed away, and sea-birds crying whose race had perished from the earth. Haldir had gone on and was now climbing to the high flet. As Frodo prepared to follow him, he laid his hand upon the tree beside the ladder: never before had he been so suddenly and so keenly aware of the feel and texture of a tree’s skin and of the life within it. He felt a delight in wood and the touch of it, neither as forester nor as carpenter; it was the delight of the living tree itself.
His Dark Materials At once she saw that something strange was happening in the sky. She thought it was clouds, moving and trembling under a nervous agitation, but Pantalaimon whispered: ‘The Aurora!’ Her wonder was so strong that she had to clutch the rail to keep from falling. The sight filled the northern sky; the immensity of it was scarcely conceivable. As if from Heaven itself, great curtains of delicate light hung and trembled. Pale green and rose-pink, and as transparent as the most fragile fabric, and at the bottom edge a profound and fiery crimson like the fires of Hell, they swung and shimmered loosely with more grace than the most skillful dance. Lyra thought she could even hear them: a vast distant whispering swish. In the evanescent delicacy she felt something as profound as she’d felt close to the bear. She was moved by it: It was so beautiful it was almost holy; she felt tears prick her eyes, and the tears splintered the light even further into prismatic rainbows. It wasn’t long before she found herself entering the same kind of trance as when she consulted the alethiometer. Perhaps, she thought calmly, whatever moves the alethiometer’s needle is making the Aurora glow too. It might even be Dust itself. She thought that without noticing that she’d thought it, and she soon forgot it, and only remembered it much later. And as she gazed, the image of a city seemed to form itself behind the veils and streams of translucent color: towers and domes, honey-colored temples and colonnades, brought boulevards and sunlit parkland. Looking at it gave her a sense of vertigo, as if she were looking not up but down, and across a gulf so wide that nothing could pass over it. It was a whole universe away.
Irish Colors of Martyrdom Now there are three kinds of martyrdom which are counted as a cross to man, that is to say, white martyrdom, and blue-grey martyrdom, and red martyrdom. This is the white martyrdom to man, when he separates for sake of God from everything he loves, although he does not suffer fasting and labor thereat. This is the blue-grey-green martyrdom to him, when by means of them [fasting and labor] he separates from his desires, or suffers toil in penance and repentance. This is the red martyrdom to him, endurance of a cross or destruction for Christ’s sake, as happened to the apostles in the persecution of the wicked and in teaching the law of God. These three kinds of martyrdom are comprised in the carnal men who resort to good repentance, who separate from their desires, who pour forth their blood in fasting and in labor for Christ’s sake.
Irish Colors of the Winds (Saltair Na Rann c. 9th cent.) NORTH black jet dark grey piebald WEST dun purple EAST green yellow glas (sea) red white (Colors of Martyrdom) (Otherworld) SOUTH
Evan Thompson on homologic biological processes: “In the past few decades structures previously taken to be unrelated…have been discovered to be related at deeper levels of genetic and developmental conservation… findings of homogeneous genes for analogous processes and structures [in which the] new notion of ‘homology of process’…pertains to similarities of dynamic interactions at the level of developmental mechanisms.”
