Stellar Alchemy, the Aerial Ropes

These aerial strings are said to be in perpetual motion and reach as far as the moon. See Alchemy & Light, Known Authors and Lunar Alchemy.

According to the ancient Greeks, one name summed up the movement of the stellar aerial strings: Zeus, the King.

True. Form becomes matter for the next one. See Alchemy & Light, Known Authors.

For Al-Kindi, rays are like straight lines: the straighter they are, the more powerful they are.

For Al-Kindi the most powerful ray is the one that hits the centre of the earth, and becomes weaker as the radius of incidence increases. but, be careful, don’t imagine a straight line… because even a modern astronomer would not represent stellar emissions as straight lines.

For Al-Kindi, rays also emanate from the earth towards the cosmos. So the cosmos becomes a coming and going of rays. The comfortable, for us, representation in too simplistic straight lines demonstrates here all its inadequacy.

It is our imagination that makes Al-Kindi’s words contradict – besides the fact that for the ancients contradicting themselves was not a problem, as it is today. In fact we are making a graphic representation of the Universe according to Al-Kindi, while he is trying to explain something that cannot be represented graphically. Al-Kindi is not Kepler.

In fact, modern astronomers speak of a coming and going of “packets of energy,” not straight rays.

What is “straight”, even in our imagination, if not original form? The first instinctive form that a child draws is “dragging” the pen or the stick on a surface. The interpretation that we must therefore give to “straight” is “original, primary, archaic, archetypal, before the times”.

Just like that. Central doctrine in the Neoplatonists and which will be described in great detail in the work of Damascius.

It was not easy for Al-Kindi to give a “mechanical” representation of the idea that the Many contains the starting One, just as it was not easy for the neoplatonist Damascius to philosophically discern an analogous doctrine. This today would be the domain of physicists, quantum or otherwise. Not of philosophers, or opticians.The ancient sages of the Mediterranean area or the Arabian peninsula were forced to fit into the idea that everything contained everything “in potential” and that something had to intervene to arrive at development or “act” Aristotle was the first to use this lexicon and this example.

But even this representation of a “chain” is not easy for us to understand, since it is more “numerical” than “mechanical”. Al-Kindi speaks of a chain made of causes and effects. But this is not a chain of immediate understanding – being numerical and not mechanical. So, each previous link is the cause of the following link which effect reside at the points of contact between one link in the chain and another: since each ring can only be a cause generating an effect at the point of “rubbing and contact”.

Thus the rays differ from the effects and not from the causes.

Exemplum in Latin can be better translated as “specimen” or piece of comparison of something. In ancient Greek mathematics it was the gnomon, an instrument and function of growth or decrease.

We have already met this spark – and we have said that it needs a corporeality that engulfs it in a flowing ray. See Alchemy and Modern Physics Particles, Palingenesis, Seeds in the Wind and Doubles, Resonances, Unions, Seeds, Embryos, Births, and Processions.

Aerial ropes that with the adjective “aerial” can only be made of air. Or rather, of the alchemical element air. But also of atmospheric air, of course. See Alchemy, the Dust and Air Alchemy, the Fabric.

We saw in Alchemy & Light, Known Authors that a line joins two points placing them exactly opposite each other. When we have to consider several points opposite each other we have to represent it with the surface, however thin. This is called the “extension” of the influence of a ray. Everything that has an extension has a surface, with the property of rippling and changing. The surface that best represents the stellar influence is therefore water. See also Water Alchemy.

Is it true that drawing the stellar ropes as straight lines led to the consequence of having to look for a “fixed” starting point in the cosmos?

True. Given that perspective was a projection of strings from a point or plane, the consequence of imagining the star ropes lines as straight led to the comparison with the new architectural perspectives on a flat basis. Note that the ancient perspective (before Renaissance) was instead from visual angles and not from distances, and therefore on a curved and not flat base.

True. The ancients said that aerial ropes linked the stars to the earth. But what we struggle to conceive today is that these chords for the ancients were curved and not straight. From the Renaissance onwards, the concept of a stellar “ropes” was diverted to a linear geometry and no longer curved for the simple fact that a luminous origin was attributed to these aerial chords. In fact, light propagates in a straight line.