The thought of wisdom, which at first ignites our curiosities, our youthful desires, our imaginative ponderings, our first questions, our first order ontologies, our investigations into the meaning of being, our methodologies toward knowledge, toward a formal description of existence and non-existence, our historical understanding of being, our originations and their hermeneutical, historical contributions toward human understanding—all of these contribute toward our understanding toward the original contribution, that which comes from the Love of Wisdom itself.
What does the love of Wisdom teach us, who are her ardent students? How does one qualify to be a proper and adequate lover of wisdom? What does she want to teach us? A very controversial question indeed. For why should we regard Wisdom as a lady if not because we ourselves wished to seduce her? But the image of Wisdom as a lady is an idol, a symbolic image of divinity—a way to direct the eye toward-the-heavens.
We ask then about the origins of our calendars: the origins of the concept of Time. To investigate this globally, we need look to the hermeneutical principles which guide the adequate and scholarly interpretation of the history of this concept; for it tells us much about a decisive era in the earlier history of mankind. The great Indo-European civilization, which was to forever impact the course of the history of the world, gave rise to a certain historical part of that question in South Asia. Her contributions to the overall history of the concept of Time do provide us with key cyphers in cultivating a deeper understanding of the history of this concept globally.
The Indian (or South Asian) experience of Time remained, for a time, geographically remote from European history. Yet we see all about us, in their own myths, evidence of the foreigners, which brought with them their stories, their narratives, their heuristic devices (all technologies which could even at that time be shared through the proper channels of understanding; i.e., horology).
The formation of calendars, or cultural chronicles of annual events perhaps even itself gave rise to the closer study of the stars. Calculating the year was a formidable task, at one point in proto-history. Today, it is as if second nature; reduced to the status of mere (or primitive) instinct. But at one time, this was a grand task; and it would behoove us to attend to the question of its historical formation in India, as this provides another, advanced cypher into the greater historical question of the meaning of Time. We could as it were unlock another ur-historical period to greater historical understanding.
To do this we require to understand this history of calendars, by means of relating them to historically early forms of polytheism and the myths that preserved their cultural forms. The knowledge of the stars is a knowledge of this grand civil exchange, a sort of intercultural horology. The travellers, Traders and Businessmen, made it a common practice to take the services of a horologist, or as they were known, astrologers, navigators, metehoroscopoi. Plato himself indicates in his great Republic the secret but central status of the naval navigator. One who knows the stories of the stars and can thereby unlock the mysteries of Time and Space. This image of the astrologer is very often spurned by the pretenses of rigor in the academy, because it would appear to reject the historical accomplishments of the academy—it would seem to reject science in favor of superstition and wild inference. But we are not concerned with reviving into practice this failed prescience; we are only concerned with the resuscitation of an early historical epoch that centers upon the theme of Time by accounting for the role astrology played in early history.
An academic criticism of horology would simply be an adequate accounting for its arising within the greater history of mankind. To take astrology academically serious and methodologically rigorously, is simply to account for it in an academic light, an historical light. But all evidence suggests that astrology also happens to play a key role to the early development of the history of Time; it played no small part in making Time first intelligible to us, and so played a crucial role, a formative role, in human history. As such, we may appear at first to be at a great academic disadvantage, for the rigors of resuscitating to the light of historical scrutiny such an arcane beast would no doubt require greater work than could be accomplished in a single lifetime by a single scholar; much criticism and consideration for this topic is yet to be had.
No doubt, this fear might, had I the foresight of prior experience, have intimidated me into a smaller project (fools rush in where angels fear to tread). Yet my earliest intuitions on this matter remain to all appearances sound: Time remains the key question: what is its meaning, and how do we best approach that question? My intuition suggests we look at a history of horology, a history of the accounting for time and the production of calendars, grounded in annual and seasonal rituals (cf., the monthlong Bengali adoration of Devi while the Sun is in Virgo). The practicality of the matter simply asks us to attend to ancient stories in such a wise that we know what to look for; and this turns out to require very specific things: one needs to find evidence in the charts and stories about them, the evidences of borrowing, of which we have accumulated much.
In the style of Jan Gonda, we have accumulated a sizeable compendium of notes on various constellations across horological cultures and which I should eventually like to publish; approximately half of these notes were taken in the year of my comprehensive exams on Buddhism, Hinduism, and Methodology; the other half were taken in the year of my field research in Northern India and Nepal.
While in Southern Kolkata, I stayed near Jadabpur University, where I spoke with both faculty and students on the topics of Hinduism, history, and astrology. I attended the month long Goddess (Devi) festival in honor of the conjunctions of the Sun with Virgo, visiting many of the city's temporary yet decorous deity installations. The goddess's persistent iconography disclosed the sectors of the sky, when Virgo overtakes the powers of Taurus, who descends beyond the horizon as Virgo reaches the zenith of the day. She stands upon a Lion much as Leo sits directly beneath Virgo. She stabs the bull with a trident, perhaps after the fashion of Cancer or Gemini. Her attendants are all about her. The vision is almost invariably astrological, even though the night sky has long since been lost to fog and smog in the region of Kolkata.
While in Delhi, I met with the chair of the Sanskrit department at the University; I spoke to him about my research interests, and within a week, he assembled the entire Sanskrit department, along with all of the grad students, to listen to an hour-and-a-half Powerpoint presentation I spent the week preparing regarding the question of the history of South Asian horology with respect to the origin of the yuga cycles. The entire department expressed deep appreciation for my work, and the very next year, the University of Delhi held its first open conference on the general topic.
I also spoke with the entire faculty at the University of Rajasthan at Jaipur. I related an early exegetic exercise, in which I suggested how the Kṛṣṇa-mūrti's formality as kāliya-dhāmana, the Chastiser of Kaliya might have taken its form from known constellations. The headmaster was elated when I made the patent suggestion that Kṛṣṇa took his form from the constellations Hercules and Draconus, and demonstrated through a slide show, why I thought so. I also spoke on the substantive probabilities of the earliest period of the 30-section muhūrta, which took many of its names from various and specifically identifiable constellations in the northern sky.
I had the curious fortune of being the only scholar to show up for a Mahābhārata Conference that had been cancelled at the last moment. I spoke to the original organizer, who assembled the two dozen members of the faculty of the school within an hour. I had only wished to attend, and so had to impromptu speak from a compiled slideshow. I took this from a file in which I kept various artifacts of symbology which helped me to build my narrative, while using modern applications such as Stellarium, to show these scholars how one might familiarize oneself quickly with multiple astrological narratives across the globe using a cutting-edge and informative night sky emulation application; one had immediate access to numerous horological narratives across the globe and could quickly compare them across Time and Space.
The impromptu presentation was a watershed for them. I showed just how the metallic form of Kṛṣṇa, the mūrti aligned itself with the cosmic variant, as if pramā and pratimā. I explained how similar patterns can be seen in Greek and Roman variants of horological myth. I've written extensively about this matter in this very blog (as for example, in the near identity of Hanuman and Hercules iconography, or the "esoteric" suggestions of the trapezoid in Vaiṣṇava iconography qua Jagannath et al and a multi-sect Vaiṣṇava tīlaka). The evidence is written in forms that do not speak; unless to the educated mind, the knower of time, the horologist.
I spent a month in the ancient capital of Nepal, Bhaktapūra, learning from locals how to paint the ancient kala-cakra-maṇḍala, and learned from their popular narratives that the image of the Bhava-cakra conformed well as a calendar to the months of the year through the symbolic content of the 12 links in the Buddha's teaching regarding the chain of pratityasamutpada. The six realms too displayed such a tendency, reflecting large sectors of the visible night sky. Indeed, though I learned this art by spending six eight-hour work days per week in the company of local artists and discussing the matter with them as far as language allowed. A local Buddhist monk denied the story, considering it a popular corruption to the original wisdom of the Buddha. This might suggest an earlier synthesis of Hindu horological tropes with Buddhist ethical teachings via some regard for heuristic phronesis, practical wisdom, or upāya.
Overall, the culture of astrology remains a palpable and normative part of Hindu culture; it is metaphysically embedded in the theological abstractions which depart from it toward the transcendental; the temporal historically grounds the eternal in both Hinduism and Buddhism. Reincarnation is itself a way of thinking eternity through sempiternity, never-ending Time.
I am simply trying to decypher the earlier history of this problem of accounting for calendars, which did in time complexify itself and produce greater and greater problems of the production of accuracy and reaccounting for its passing, itself driving the invention and revision of the clock and calendar, and leading to the arising of horology as among the first truly human sciences, until giving rise later and in many respects to technology itself. But what concerns me most is its relation to the concepts of divinity and transcendence.
A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami treats these two religious and ritual categories as ordered in the face of eternity, with transcendence being originary and divinity being derivative. But what if the opposite were true? What if the very vision of the transcendent were derivative of the divinities observed overhead from the down below? This should even go further to suggest much about the historical nature of some of the most popular forms of religious thinking in Indo-European civilization, both early and late.
Yet this is merely one of the roots of the question concerning Technology. Indeed, we won't really know if we can reverse Time until we've gotten clear about what it is. Without getting clear about the meaning and nature of the history of the concept of Time, it will remain in crucial ways difficult to get entirely clear what technology is up to next—or what is more, what its long-game is when we imagine ourselves building time machines.
What does the love of Wisdom teach us, who are her ardent students? How does one qualify to be a proper and adequate lover of wisdom? What does she want to teach us? A very controversial question indeed. For why should we regard Wisdom as a lady if not because we ourselves wished to seduce her? But the image of Wisdom as a lady is an idol, a symbolic image of divinity—a way to direct the eye toward-the-heavens.
We ask then about the origins of our calendars: the origins of the concept of Time. To investigate this globally, we need look to the hermeneutical principles which guide the adequate and scholarly interpretation of the history of this concept; for it tells us much about a decisive era in the earlier history of mankind. The great Indo-European civilization, which was to forever impact the course of the history of the world, gave rise to a certain historical part of that question in South Asia. Her contributions to the overall history of the concept of Time do provide us with key cyphers in cultivating a deeper understanding of the history of this concept globally.
The Indian (or South Asian) experience of Time remained, for a time, geographically remote from European history. Yet we see all about us, in their own myths, evidence of the foreigners, which brought with them their stories, their narratives, their heuristic devices (all technologies which could even at that time be shared through the proper channels of understanding; i.e., horology).
The formation of calendars, or cultural chronicles of annual events perhaps even itself gave rise to the closer study of the stars. Calculating the year was a formidable task, at one point in proto-history. Today, it is as if second nature; reduced to the status of mere (or primitive) instinct. But at one time, this was a grand task; and it would behoove us to attend to the question of its historical formation in India, as this provides another, advanced cypher into the greater historical question of the meaning of Time. We could as it were unlock another ur-historical period to greater historical understanding.
To do this we require to understand this history of calendars, by means of relating them to historically early forms of polytheism and the myths that preserved their cultural forms. The knowledge of the stars is a knowledge of this grand civil exchange, a sort of intercultural horology. The travellers, Traders and Businessmen, made it a common practice to take the services of a horologist, or as they were known, astrologers, navigators, metehoroscopoi. Plato himself indicates in his great Republic the secret but central status of the naval navigator. One who knows the stories of the stars and can thereby unlock the mysteries of Time and Space. This image of the astrologer is very often spurned by the pretenses of rigor in the academy, because it would appear to reject the historical accomplishments of the academy—it would seem to reject science in favor of superstition and wild inference. But we are not concerned with reviving into practice this failed prescience; we are only concerned with the resuscitation of an early historical epoch that centers upon the theme of Time by accounting for the role astrology played in early history.
An academic criticism of horology would simply be an adequate accounting for its arising within the greater history of mankind. To take astrology academically serious and methodologically rigorously, is simply to account for it in an academic light, an historical light. But all evidence suggests that astrology also happens to play a key role to the early development of the history of Time; it played no small part in making Time first intelligible to us, and so played a crucial role, a formative role, in human history. As such, we may appear at first to be at a great academic disadvantage, for the rigors of resuscitating to the light of historical scrutiny such an arcane beast would no doubt require greater work than could be accomplished in a single lifetime by a single scholar; much criticism and consideration for this topic is yet to be had.
No doubt, this fear might, had I the foresight of prior experience, have intimidated me into a smaller project (fools rush in where angels fear to tread). Yet my earliest intuitions on this matter remain to all appearances sound: Time remains the key question: what is its meaning, and how do we best approach that question? My intuition suggests we look at a history of horology, a history of the accounting for time and the production of calendars, grounded in annual and seasonal rituals (cf., the monthlong Bengali adoration of Devi while the Sun is in Virgo). The practicality of the matter simply asks us to attend to ancient stories in such a wise that we know what to look for; and this turns out to require very specific things: one needs to find evidence in the charts and stories about them, the evidences of borrowing, of which we have accumulated much.
In the style of Jan Gonda, we have accumulated a sizeable compendium of notes on various constellations across horological cultures and which I should eventually like to publish; approximately half of these notes were taken in the year of my comprehensive exams on Buddhism, Hinduism, and Methodology; the other half were taken in the year of my field research in Northern India and Nepal.
While in Southern Kolkata, I stayed near Jadabpur University, where I spoke with both faculty and students on the topics of Hinduism, history, and astrology. I attended the month long Goddess (Devi) festival in honor of the conjunctions of the Sun with Virgo, visiting many of the city's temporary yet decorous deity installations. The goddess's persistent iconography disclosed the sectors of the sky, when Virgo overtakes the powers of Taurus, who descends beyond the horizon as Virgo reaches the zenith of the day. She stands upon a Lion much as Leo sits directly beneath Virgo. She stabs the bull with a trident, perhaps after the fashion of Cancer or Gemini. Her attendants are all about her. The vision is almost invariably astrological, even though the night sky has long since been lost to fog and smog in the region of Kolkata.
While in Delhi, I met with the chair of the Sanskrit department at the University; I spoke to him about my research interests, and within a week, he assembled the entire Sanskrit department, along with all of the grad students, to listen to an hour-and-a-half Powerpoint presentation I spent the week preparing regarding the question of the history of South Asian horology with respect to the origin of the yuga cycles. The entire department expressed deep appreciation for my work, and the very next year, the University of Delhi held its first open conference on the general topic.
I also spoke with the entire faculty at the University of Rajasthan at Jaipur. I related an early exegetic exercise, in which I suggested how the Kṛṣṇa-mūrti's formality as kāliya-dhāmana, the Chastiser of Kaliya might have taken its form from known constellations. The headmaster was elated when I made the patent suggestion that Kṛṣṇa took his form from the constellations Hercules and Draconus, and demonstrated through a slide show, why I thought so. I also spoke on the substantive probabilities of the earliest period of the 30-section muhūrta, which took many of its names from various and specifically identifiable constellations in the northern sky.
I had the curious fortune of being the only scholar to show up for a Mahābhārata Conference that had been cancelled at the last moment. I spoke to the original organizer, who assembled the two dozen members of the faculty of the school within an hour. I had only wished to attend, and so had to impromptu speak from a compiled slideshow. I took this from a file in which I kept various artifacts of symbology which helped me to build my narrative, while using modern applications such as Stellarium, to show these scholars how one might familiarize oneself quickly with multiple astrological narratives across the globe using a cutting-edge and informative night sky emulation application; one had immediate access to numerous horological narratives across the globe and could quickly compare them across Time and Space.
The impromptu presentation was a watershed for them. I showed just how the metallic form of Kṛṣṇa, the mūrti aligned itself with the cosmic variant, as if pramā and pratimā. I explained how similar patterns can be seen in Greek and Roman variants of horological myth. I've written extensively about this matter in this very blog (as for example, in the near identity of Hanuman and Hercules iconography, or the "esoteric" suggestions of the trapezoid in Vaiṣṇava iconography qua Jagannath et al and a multi-sect Vaiṣṇava tīlaka). The evidence is written in forms that do not speak; unless to the educated mind, the knower of time, the horologist.
I spent a month in the ancient capital of Nepal, Bhaktapūra, learning from locals how to paint the ancient kala-cakra-maṇḍala, and learned from their popular narratives that the image of the Bhava-cakra conformed well as a calendar to the months of the year through the symbolic content of the 12 links in the Buddha's teaching regarding the chain of pratityasamutpada. The six realms too displayed such a tendency, reflecting large sectors of the visible night sky. Indeed, though I learned this art by spending six eight-hour work days per week in the company of local artists and discussing the matter with them as far as language allowed. A local Buddhist monk denied the story, considering it a popular corruption to the original wisdom of the Buddha. This might suggest an earlier synthesis of Hindu horological tropes with Buddhist ethical teachings via some regard for heuristic phronesis, practical wisdom, or upāya.
Overall, the culture of astrology remains a palpable and normative part of Hindu culture; it is metaphysically embedded in the theological abstractions which depart from it toward the transcendental; the temporal historically grounds the eternal in both Hinduism and Buddhism. Reincarnation is itself a way of thinking eternity through sempiternity, never-ending Time.
I am simply trying to decypher the earlier history of this problem of accounting for calendars, which did in time complexify itself and produce greater and greater problems of the production of accuracy and reaccounting for its passing, itself driving the invention and revision of the clock and calendar, and leading to the arising of horology as among the first truly human sciences, until giving rise later and in many respects to technology itself. But what concerns me most is its relation to the concepts of divinity and transcendence.
A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami treats these two religious and ritual categories as ordered in the face of eternity, with transcendence being originary and divinity being derivative. But what if the opposite were true? What if the very vision of the transcendent were derivative of the divinities observed overhead from the down below? This should even go further to suggest much about the historical nature of some of the most popular forms of religious thinking in Indo-European civilization, both early and late.
Yet this is merely one of the roots of the question concerning Technology. Indeed, we won't really know if we can reverse Time until we've gotten clear about what it is. Without getting clear about the meaning and nature of the history of the concept of Time, it will remain in crucial ways difficult to get entirely clear what technology is up to next—or what is more, what its long-game is when we imagine ourselves building time machines.
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