Then The Road Of Entities 2.: Other than finding a pair of 20 hole Dr Martins...

I don't really remember anything at all.

Hence the absence of recent blog-posts.

The main surprise about Christmas was (other than how nice it is to do Christmas on Christmas eve) is how big a turkey actually is.

But you know that already!

There are books I'm wading through a book about Socrates by....some one! an historian. Drood (Dan Simmonds) continues with the laudanum drenched charactor of Wilkie Collins becoming more unhinged every episode.

I wonder how fans of Collins feel about Drood?

I located a copy of Oedipus Aegyptiaci by Kircher...but it is only book 3, the one everyone who is interested in Dee and monads etc, wants.

In other words, it is not the book I really want.

I'm not very interested in monads, and I've had enough of Dee for the time being. I'm more interested in Kircher's Egyptian mythology. Kircher believed that he could read hieroglyphics- a few hundred years before the discovery of the Rossetta stone (1799) - and saw that the Egyptians were obviously Pythagorean Platonists (Hermes Trismagistos- of course!) Kircher went on to construct myths reflecting this, creating an imaginarium of myth that influenced Stukeley and Inigo Jones.

Kircher puts the Mithraic 'ladder' into Egyptian.

It was all total rubbish, but it had an effect.

It is impossible to know why people thought what they did without knowing what books they were taking as literally true...

All too often I keep on finding Kircher at the heart of many misapprehensions.

Unfortunately not only do I not have his book on myth (Hereford library- one day) but nor do I know Latin.

I can see myself sitting there with the book translating it using Google and 'Latin for Dummies' following in Kircher's footsteps of mangling fact with my own imagination!

Dee's monad:

"The Sun and the Moon of this Monad desire that the Elements in which the tenth proportion will flower, shall be separated, and this is done by the application of Fire."

Is in Kircher's book:

And the Sigillum Dei Aemeth almost...

I was pretty sure that I'd read somewhere that Kelly had given Dee the image of the Sigillium and so there was some confusion for me at least over whether or not Kircher had come up with the image before Dee.

The Oedipus was published between 1652–1655 and Dee started using the Sigillium in 1582, the 28th of April to be exact...So Kircher got it from Dee?

Count Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mather, of The Golden Dawn spent a long time pouring over this book and mixing it up with Freemasonry....