Talk:ATD 792-820
P. 796
By dusk . . . running-lights
An enigma. The ordinary way of analyzing it: Make a model, say a flashlight, an orange and a toothpick mooring line with a raisin balloon at the top. As the orange rotates toward the east and the flashlight appears to set in the link title west, what gets dark first? The base of the toothpick, the shadow progressing upward. But the text says the raisin does, the shadow arc moving downward.
It's very curious that immediately following this apparently topsy-turvy paragraph Miles says "As above, so below." Significant?
Are the Chums watching from above?..."as the boys watched"..."as above,so below."?--[User: MKohut] January 28, 2007
- I suggest there's no error, and the "ordinary way" is not the right way to understand the text. It definitely is worth looking for a way that the narration--and Miles' benediction--can be technically as well as thematically correct.
In wizardry (developed from shamanry) Hermes Trismegistus wrote an Emerald Tablet on which he wrote his wisdom (9-14 precepts). Sir Isaac Newton translated one precept as: "That which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below."
So, magic? Wiki
--User:mrplong 13:36, 31 January 2007 (AST)
The only way that the described phenomenon: the order in which the cargo balloons become enshadowed, could be true is if it was the darkness that was advancing as a physical force. It's as if the definitions of light and dark have been reversed. A rising sun (light source) will illuminate the highest objects first, a rising "dark source" would enshadow the highest objects first, too.
In addition to all the other references stated, I believe Miles' comment refers to the cargo balloons and their tethers to the ground, echoing the Inconvenience and its links to its Earth based masters. [mwm]
The precept has been linked to numerology [1]; These words circulate throughout occult and magical circles, and they come from Hermetic texts. The concept was first laid out in The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, in the words "That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above, corresponds to that which is Below, to accomplish the miracles of the One Thing."[24]
In accordance with the various levels of reality: physical, mental, and spiritual, this relates that what happens on any level happens on every other. This is however more often used in the sense of the microcosm and the macrocosm. The microcosm is oneself, and the macrocosm is the universe. The macrocosm is as the microcosm, and vice versa; within each lies the other, and through understanding one (usually the microcosm) you can understand the other.[2]. Card I of the Major Arcana of the Waite Tarot Deck (alluded to throughout AtD) shows The Magician, simultaneously pointing up toward the sky and down toward the earth.
- Spoiler (if not a total dud of a suggestion):
- Two Earths close together. On Earth-1 the balloons are moored. The pair of planets rotate so that Earth-2 casts a descending shadow. The demo requires an extra orange.
- It is crazy.
- But we do have some indications—I would go further and call them proofs—that action in AtD is taking place on a minimum of two Earths anyway.
- Lew passes through the dynamite blast; Neville, Nigel and Nookshaft proceed on the assumption that he came to them from another world ("Couldn't have been the same world as the one you're in now")
- Lew celebrates his Gemini birthday in the autumn after the blast
- Sirius rises in the midsummer evening (see also the next bullet)
- Inconvenience pretty explicitly passes from one world to another, pp. 1018-21
- More to come, possibly.
How about Randolph, page 9? The remark about going North so far one is going south again? "Not exactly" [answers Randolph] "No. Another 'surface', but an earthly one" "You'll see. In time, of course". MKOHUT 07:39, 20 June 2007 (PDT)
Yes. That early passage, I think, is packed with hints about how to understand the rest of the work. One has to trust a narrator who may seem unreliable at first glance.
