The beginning of now…

When we look at the art of ancient times it is striking how the world is represented in two dimensions. From the beautiful court scenes from Mogul India, Japanese and Chinese evocations of nature, the wall paintings of Egypt and Mayan and Aztec relief sculptures of Central America.

At the same time and for too long, the world was conceived as a flat plain. If you travelled too far you would fall off. It’s an understandable world view, yet the believers in this theory never questioned how deeply a well could be dug before a hole appeared.

This perceptual paradigm was founded in a vague adherence to the dominion of the Divine Male. The Old Testament God was a man – naturally. Animals marched into Noah’s perfectly measured Ark, 2×2 and cells have been splitting that way ever since.

Roman armies marched in two step time and in battles formed orderly squares allowing all round defence.

Sacred buildings were rigidly formal and measured, such as the Parthenon in Ancient Athens. The Ancient Egyptians were equally inspired by formal and exact right angled geometry.

This male principal permeated the theory of design and practice and in doing so formed a reliable and solid ground work for our modern era.

When I became a student of architecture the tutors ask us on our first day what we would bring to architecture. Somewhat naively and immodestly I said I would bring the curve back to architecture. Even headlights on cars in the 1970’s, headlamps on cars were changing from being round to square.

I had a feeling of a ‘brave new world’ which indeed has happened even if I had to let the brilliant Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid, steal my thunderbolts.

As a boy I used to cycle down to the south coast of England where the land meets the sea in tall chalk cliffs. Creeping along the grass to perch on the precipice to look down at the black pebble beaches far below, I was like a seer peeping over the edge of a flat world, into a third dimension.

Whether we see it or not, we are also now creeping warily into a fourth dimension represented by the principal of the ‘sacred feminine’.

This has nothing to with ‘Votes for Women’, a movement that swelled at the beginning of the nineteenth century perhaps as a natural protest against the male principled dominance of society since for ever. The First world war was perhaps, the last breath of that male principal. It briefly stopped the feminine protests and sent women to factories to build the instruments of war, but the corner had been turned. Women drove buses and ambulances and had tasted freedom from domesticity.

Mothers watched their sons march into the sunset, over the horizon and would never forgive the folly of the male Generals and politicians.

If you hold a ball in front of a child and ask, ‘where does this ball begin?’ the child will look at you as if you only have half a brain and explain that a ball has no beginning.

The question is a Koan and like all koans, challenges the rational, logical and formal pathways of thought.

Many dogmatic religious thinkers hold to the notion that the world could possibly end and proponents of this will present you with a date. Presently it is 13^th August 2025 ‘according to Nostradamus’ and this date will, no doubt, pass without incident just as did the Christian Calendar’s year 2000 BCE.

Learning about the sacred feminine is a ‘learning curve’ upon which we still struggle, like young penguins sliding ungracefully up the steep slopes of an iceberg.

Ask an Astrophysicist when the Universe began and they will generally reply based on the so called ‘Big Bang’ theory. Yet the question is as absurd as guessing when and how the Universe will end. Anticipating the common sense of children observing the universe, I would expect they will say it never began and will never end.

That is the beauty of the child’s mind. It still retains the influence of the Divine Mother, before it is sent to the (male) military styled regime of education.

Yet I feel the influence of the Divine Feminine is more influential in modern Western societies than ever before. Parliaments and Judge’s benches are becoming equally filled with women as men.

From Ancient India we are given the map of the idea of the cyclic Yugas; eras circling around 25,000 years in which the world is alternately destructive and creative.

In the view of many, the Age if Aquarius is happening now and introducing the Feminine Principal into all areas of life and knowledge. Exceptions abound of course, as the process is gradual and takes two steps back for each three forward.

The benefit for humankind will be to realise when the pendulum is suspended equally between the two Divine Genders. Modern Feminism becomes flawed when and if it tips the balance too far and unnaturally dominates the male principal.

In Ancient times there are a limited number of symbols that appear in wall paintings and petroglyphs literally, around the world. One of them is the spiral. This remains one of the most easy to comprehend illustrations of an idea that defies logic; infinity. A spiral apparently starts from nowhere and disappears into nowhere.

If something were an mass moving through a void, it would need a circular motion combined with a constant, weak tangental vector, nudging it ever off a circular orbit out of sight.

For a time in history, philosophers were perplexed with the puzzle in geometry of ‘squaring the circle’; famously illustrated by Leonardo de Vinci in his depiction of the ‘Vitruvian Man‘.

Yet in my view the spiral is a better symbolic representation of that state in matter and spirit, where the feminine is truly in harmony with the male.

In every aspect of nature, from the principals of the growth of the fractal tree and sea shores, to the spiralling movements of the moons, planets, stars, galaxies and universes, we can measure in observation the wonder of creation by two complementary Divine potter’s hands; one male, one female.

Humans were made from clay on the spinning potter’s wheel and the principal known as the anima mundi, is the final result of Divine genius – the Soul of the Whirled.