Enmerald Game15:43 Dec 30 2012
Times Read: 833
This is my Christmas gift and the book I`m reading now:
THE EMERALD GAME
by Culianu and Wiesner
This is an article about the book. Sorry, I couldn`t find the notes.
Sacred Symbols and Science fiction in I. P. Culianu’s literature
Emerald Game - a New Image of the Universe
IP Culianu is a well-known romanian scholar, historian of religion, ideas and culture. He was the disciple of Mircea Eliade, the famous historian of religions from Chicago University. At the age of 22, he
leaves comunist Romania for good and goes to Italy for studying. He writes studies and goes teaching in great european universities from Italy, France and Holland. Finally, he gets to the United States, where he takes over the head desk of the religion history at Divinity School, Chicago University. He dies there, assassinated, in 1991.
Culianu wrote mainly studies in history of religion (most famous The Tree of Gnosis-Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism, Psychanodia-A Survey of the Evidence Concerning the Ascension of the Soul and Its Relevance, Out Of This World. Otherwordly Journeys from Gilgamesh to Albert Einstein, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. 1484, Experiences of Ecstasy, Religion and Power) all published at famous publishing-houses, in international languages. He wrote a few misterious science fiction prose books: The Art of Running, short-tale volume, the first one wrote while he was in Romania and the second one, Emerald Collection, all published abroad. He wrote two science fiction novels Hesperus and The Emerald Game.
Generally speaking, his prose is a literary codification of the information given in his
scientific studies. He approaches psionics field and explains it through his
scientific studies. Analysing old texts, Culianu was certain that he reached
important information that should be made popular among people. He took that
responsability and delivered the forgotten information in his literature.
Emerald Game was written by the romanian writer and historian of religions IP Culianu together with his fiancee Hillary S. Wiesner. The volume founds itself on the scientific theories presented in his scientific studies, especially Out Of This World. Otherwordly Journeys from Gilgamesh to Albert Einstein[2] and Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. 1484[3].
The first theory is presented in the study Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. 1848 and comes from Ficino’s and Bruno’s ideas. Human being consists of a material body, a spiritual
one and its soul, all of them connected. The material body uses the spirit –
astral pneuma of Aristotle, a refined etheric substance, stardust – as a
communication instrument with the soul, the most refined substance. Just like a
computer, human body extracts the outer information by its senses, sends this
information to the spirit, which processes it, transform it into images
(fantasma) which become perceptible for the soul.
The second theory is analysed in detail in the study Out of This World. Otherwordly Journeys from Gilgamesh to Albert Einstein[4]. Culianu was a great fan of modern phisycs and was complettly seduced by the fourth dimenssion theory, advanced by the modern science. In his books foreword, he reffers to a series of famous phisicians theories like Albert Einstein – Relativity Theory, Charles Howard Hinton and his volumes Scientific Stories and The Fourth Dimenssion, Edwin Abbott – Platlanda and he uses them as a strong argumentation for his own theory of multidimenssioned human mind virtual space.
The author’s hypotheses is that at the basis of the most important spiritual and
religious experiences of the humanity – extathical visions, travels to other
worlds – there are phenomena like altered states of consciousness (ASC), out of
body experiences (OBE) and near death experiences (NDE). If ”from the very old
times till now, people generally thought that the dead and the extatics live an
afterlife experience”, Culianu reaches the conclusion that ”the explored
universes are mental ones”[5].
Culianu is very interested to find out what is the mental stuff, what the dreams are and what are the phenomena related to the altered states of mind.The most important question is ”where and what is the mental space?” ”The properties and the localization of the mental space are probably the most challenging misteries people were confronted with from very old times and afterwards two centuries of positivism tried to explain them as being unreal, they came back in force, together with computer sciences”[6]. In his opinion, ”visions and unexpected mystical travels which come with a great
altered state of mind are to be interpreted as a mentally glimpse over a superior reality”[7].
The mental stuff is a virtual gate to other space and time dimenssions of the universe. Mental stuff is multidimenssional, while we live in a three-dimensional environment. Thus
the altered states of mind are the only condition of getting into a superior
dimension of the universe. The main idea is that all the religious experieces
in the history were mental accessions of other dimenssions of the universe.
This is the theory of multi-dimenssioned universe.
This idea was launched in the XIX-th century and ”it delivered, for the first time,
a simple, appealing and probably scientificaly convincing explanation of various
misterious phenomena, regularly related to religion and magics”[8].
Very misterious, somewhere between The Name of the Rose and Da vinci Code written
by Dan Brown, The Emerald Game starts with a series of astrological crimes
that intends to make changes in the universe. The final victim of the crimes is
a very unusual one, the painting Springtime by Sandro Botticelli. ”I have written a historical-detective novel, having a catching intrigue, knowing that it is based on a series of crimes, committed in an astrological order, all of them related to the painting Springtime created by Sandro Boticelli”[9].
There is an obsession of the characters for the great astrological union of the
planets Mercury, Venus and Sun: ”This is the way the world started, with a
Great Union and we have a great one coming every nine hundred and sixty years
-960 –and every union means a total rejuvanation and a new beginning, a whole
new springtime for humanity”[10], this is the way Marsilio Ficino explains it
in the novel pages.
The painting, let us call it the leading character, is the symbol of this kind of
astrological union. It was painted in very peculiar circumstances, just after Botticelli fasted a
whole week, during the day of the 25-th of November, at precisely 3 o clock in the
morning, in Scorpio sign. ”The painting itself represents the image of the universe and it has got a
scientific value. Destroy it and you will destroy an epoch, that epoch that is about to appear exactly in the moment of the planets union, the beginning of the new world”[11]. To gain more authenticity, the writer makes use of historical characters like Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandolla, Amerigo Vespucci.
Culianu intends to make the modern reader get accustomed with the kind of magical way
of thinking of the Renaissance man, so he makes his characters talk in a very
accessible manner. Thus, the reader starts to understand that the great
religious experiences and prophets visions were, actually, travels to other
dimensions of the universe. The holy writings of Enoch, Gilgamesh, Sf. Paul, Mahomed
or of the ancient greeks are all different types of getting into other dimensions.
The mystical experience of Thomas Anglicus, one of the characters is, actually, a
travel in time. Having an accident, the character takes a trip into the XX th
century, where he goes by bus inside a modern town, together with a teenage
girl. There, Thomas identifies sacred spaces like paradise and hell.
The science fiction point of this historical novel is given by Thomas Anglicus time travel, due to which the reader can see the images of sacred spaces from this character point of view. Unable to understand
what’s going on there, his eyes see horrible things and the modern town becomes
the place where dead souls were punished or rewarded according to their sins.
”I have seen young women looking wild, their haircut elf-lock, wearing menly short
stockings, clearly tormented by some heavy cuffs on their legs, making their
way of walking very difficult. Most of them sufferred the scary torment of copper
goods on their eyes… The leg-cuffs had some outer latches and seemed to have
a decisive importance for the sinners”[12].
The author describes here a group of teenage girls having modern haircuts and
wearing high heeled shoes; the copper goods on their eyes are nothing but the
common sunglasses. Public means of transport are mistaken for some monsters carrying sinners from one place of torment to another: ”Dead sinners were brought on and on, carried in a very strange way by a herd of devils, dressed different than the others, riding some very unbelivable ugly,
noisy and stinky species of animals, of various sizes and colours; the sinners
stood just inside their bellies. I think they were mammels, though they looked
like some crustacee and had two huge froggy eyes. The road was crowded of those
terrible monsters which seemed to travel faster than people, although they
crawled on their knees. Devils holding round arrows and dead souls wearing torture shoes were continuously thrown up from that monsters bellies, which, going forth, awfully yelled like dragons[13]”.
Very scared, Thomas watches other terrible hell ”torments”: boungee jumping, ski,
smoking. The paradise activities are going to the beach, swimming, golf. Soda,
modern juice, becomes a goddly drink and the chocolate is a magical food. Here
is the description of soda: „The angel came to me and gracefully offered me a cupfull of a firelike drink, which seemed to boil to seethe, but was actually cold”.
„I haven’t felt anything in particular after drinking that purple water, stinging
my tongue like some very small needles. It haven’t tasted like wine or anything
familiar”[14]. Chocolate is brought by Amerigo Vespucci and described as a rare substance that cuts on
hunger: „Amerigo gave us a few small round bars, made out of a fatty matter, black or maybe dark
green, which looked like goat muck, but didn’t smell that way”[15].
This is the first image of heaven, a pool party: ”I think the first stop was in the earthly paradise,
because I have seen such a clear blue water and around and inside it there were
a crowd of completely naked people and all of them were taking pleasure in that
nice place. A lot of them were drinking something out of some cups alike the
one my angel offered me to drink just before”[16].
The second heaven was green, people having fun in the sunshine: ”People from this green and watered paradise were dressed just the same people in Eden did; they weren’t ashamed of that and didn’t try to cover their nakedness because there was nothing to be ashamed of (they wore a kind of aprons made out of huge leaves in their lower part of the body. I haven’t seen King David, the only singer was a young man up on the last stop building, before going to the Magician Mountain Peak. I guess the young man was a sinner, cose he sang his sad tune with his hoarse voice”[17].
Here is the hell, where sinners practice boungee-jumping: ”Some sinners hanged along a very steep mountain, their legs being tied and not their necks. It would have been impossible for
them to climb the mountain, so it seemed to be a kind of Sissif’s chores”[18]. And this is a a mountain resort, where people go skiing, but the visitor from past imagines this is purgatory: ”Maybe in some other parts of the purgatory it was warm, but here it was freezing cold. The sinners seemed to slide on something, holding some kind of forks in their hands in the meantime. They were grabbed by
a huge claw when they got down on a white icy meadow. Certainly they were
crashed, and not killed, but we were too high up above them to hear their
screams. The claws took them up on a steep slope which ended into a very deep
abyss, where the sinners were pushed down till they got into the very heart of
the hell, their bones broken and their flesh tore up to pieces or they simply
fell down into that icy abyss”[19].
Finally, Thomas Anglicus makes a comparison between his vision and other sacred ones and gets to the following conclusion: ”Generally speaking, there are some similarities between St Paul’s vision and mine”[20].
COMMENTS
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Halee
08:45 Dec 31 2012
Shakespear good taste