Within Hinduism, Vishnu, the primordial “all-god” creates the universe through the sheer strength and force of his will. But this is accompanied by an explicit sexual metaphor, as Vishnu ejaculates into the primordial cosmic waters. This is paralleled in the Egyptian cosmology by Atum, who, coming forth from the primeval waters of the Nun, ejaculates into the cosmic waters.18
It is important to pause and consider the full implications of this cosmology and its explicit sexual metaphor. In both cases, the primordial condition, with the “Self-existent” Vishnu or Atum, is one where there is absolutely nothing else in existence. Thus, even the “primordial waters” are, to some extent, “part of” this self-existent “god” or “state” or “condition.” The ejaculation of semen by this god into this ocean, from which He is not distinct, is, in effect, the injection of “seed” or differentiating information into himself.
The parallels do not end there however.
4. The Topological Metaphor
As we shall see subsequently, within the Egyptian cosmology, the self-differentiation of Atum gives rise to the first three neters, a “triad” or “primordial trinitarian differentiation.” It is the same within the Hindu cosmogony, for in the Padama Purana we read:
In the beginning of creation the Great Vishnu, desirous of creating the whole world, became threefold: Creator, Preserver, Destroyer. In order to create this world, the Supreme Spirit produced from the right side of his body himself as Brahma then, in order to preserve the world, he produced from his left side Vishnu; and in order to destroy the world he produced from the middle of his body the eternal Shiva. Some worship Brahma, others Vishnu, others Shiva; but Vishnu, one yet threefold, creates, preserves, and destroys: therefore let the pious make no difference between the three.19
Note that neither in the Egyptian nor in the Hindu versions of this “primordial trinitarian homosexual ecstasy” are we dealing with any notion of a theological revelation.
We are dealing, rather, with the “topological metaphor” of the physical medium itself, as I noted in the appendix to chapter nine of The Giza Death Star Destroyed,20 and again in The Philosophers’ Stone,21 and it is worth recalling what I stated there concerning the emergence of this “trinity” from the information-creating processes of the physical medium as viewed in yet other ancient traditions, in this case, the Neoplatonic and Hermetic.
In order to understand what the ancients meant by all the variegated religious and metaphysical imagery they employed to describe this topological metaphor — in order to decode it — let us perform a simple “thought experiment.” Imagine an absolutely undifferentiated “something.” The Neoplatonists referred to this “something” as “simplicity” (απλωτης). Note that, from the physics point of view and from that of Hinduism itself, we are dealing with a “nothing,” since it has no differentiated or distinguishing features whatsoever.
Now imagine one “brackets” this nothing, separating off a “region” of nothing from the rest of the nothing (Vishnu’s ejaculation metaphor). At the instant one does so, one ends up with three things, each a kind of “differentiated nothing.” One ends with:
1) the “bracketed” region of nothing;
2) the rest of the nothing; and,
3) the “surface” that the two regions share.
Note something else. From a purely physics point of view, this occurs without time, since time is measured only by the relative positions of differentiated things with respect to each other. The “regions of nothing” and their common surface are, so to speak, still eternal, and yet, at the same instant, a kind of “time” has emerged simultaneously with the operation of differentiating itself.
In short, from a non-quantifiable “nothing,” information begins to emerge with the process of “bracketing” or “differentiating” itself, including the concept of number. On the ancient view, then, numbers do not exist in the abstract. They are, rather, functions of a topological metaphor of the physical medium.22
Now let us go further into this topological metaphor by notating our three differentiated nothings mathematically. There is a perfect symbol to represent this “nothing”, the empty hyper-set, whose symbol is , and which contains no “things” or “members.” Now let our original “nothing” be symbolized by . A surface of something is represented by the partial derivative symbol ∂, for after all, a “surface” of something, even a nothing, is a “partial derivative” of it.
So, we would represent our three resulting entities as follows:
1) the “bracketed” region of nothing, or;
2) the rest of the nothing, or; and,
3) the “surface” that the two regions share, or.
Note now that the three “nothings” are still nothing, but now they have acquired information, distinguishing each nothing in a formally explicit manner from each other nothing. Note something else: the relationship between them all is analogical in nature, since each bears the signature of having derived from the original undifferentiated nothing; each retains, in other words, in its formal description, the presence of . And this will be true no matter how many times one continues to “bracket” or “differentiate” it. On this ancient cosmological view, in other words, everything is related to everything else by dint of its derivation via innumerable steps of “differentiation” from that original nothing. It is this fact which forms the basis within ancient civilizations for the practice of sympathetic magic, for given the analogical nature of the physical medium implied by these ancient cosmologies, in purely physics terms, everything is a coupled harmonic oscillator of everything else.23 Finally, observe how this formal explicitness dovetails quite nicely with the Hindu conception that the created world is, in fact, illusion, a “nothing,” but a differentiated nothing.
Now let us take the next step in the decoding of this topological metaphor in ancient texts and cosmologies. It is understood within the kind of mathematical metaphor that we are exploring here, that functions can be members of the empty hyper-set without destroying its “emptiness,” for the simple reason that functions are not “things” or objects, but pure processes. Thus far, we have dealt with regions, and surfaces, now we add functions.
Here is what I wrote in The Giza Death Star Destroyed about the three entities when examined from the standpoint of a passage of the Hermetica:
The passage is the Libellus II:1–6b, a short dialogue between Hermes and his discipline Asclepius:
“Of what magnitude must be that space in which the Kosmos is moved? And of what nature? Must not that Space be far greater, that it may be able to contain the continuous motion of the Kosmos, and that the thing moved may not be cramped for want of room, and cease to move? — Ascl. Great indeed must be that Space, Trismegistus. — Herm. And of what nature must it be Aslcepius? Must it not be of opposite nature to Kosmos? And of opposite nature to the body is the incorporeal…. Space is an object of thought, but not in the same sense that God is, for God is an object of thought primarily to Himself, but Space is an object of thought to us, not to itself.”24
This passage thus evidences the type of “ternary” thinking already encountered in Plotinus, but here much more explicitly so, as it is a kind metaphysical and dialectical version of topological triangulation employed by Bounias and Krasnoholovets in their version in their model. However, there is a notable distinction between Plotinus’ ternary structure and that of the Hermetica: whereas in Plotinus’ the three principle objects in view are the One, the Intellect, and the World Soul, here the principal objects in view are the triad of Theos, Topos, and Kosmos (Θεος, Τοπος, Κοσµος), or God, Space, and Kosmos, respectively.
These three — God, Space, and Kosmos — are in turn distinguished by a dialectic of opposition based on three elemental functions, each of which in turn implies its own functional opposite:
So in Hermes’ version of the metaphor, the following “triangulation” occurs, with the terms “God, Space, Kosmos” becoming the names for each vert
ex or region:
This diagram is significant for a variety of reasons. For one thing, theologically informed readers will find it paralleled in the so-called Carolingian “Trinitarian shield,” a pictogram used to describe the doctrine of the Trinity as it emerged in the Neoplatonically- influenced Augustinian Christianity of the mediaeval Latin Church. Again, it must be recalled in this context that the Greek Fathers objected to this formulation of the doctrine in the strongest possible terms, and viewed this dialectical structure as not so much metaphysical, as “sensory,” i.e., as more applicable to physical mechanics than to dogmatic theology.
More importantly in this context, however, the diagram illustrates how each vertex — God, Space, Kosmos — may be described as a set of functions or their opposites:
Hermes’ version of the metaphor thus lends itself quite neatly to an analysis in terms of Hegelian dialectic, with Space itself forming the synthesis between God, the thesis, and Kosmos, the antithesis, described in terms of the functions f1, f2, f3 or their opposites.
To see how, let us extend the formalism by dispensing with Hermes’ metaphysical description of the functions f1, f2, f3 and take the terms God, Kosmos, and Space as the sigils of distinct or discrete topological regions in the neighborhood of each vertex in the diagram on the previous page, and model them as empty hypersets. Since it is possible for combinatorial functions to be members of empty sets, then letting stand for God, Kosmos, and Space respectively, one may quickly see the lattice work that results from entirely different sets of functional signatures, exactly as was the case in Plotinus, but via a very different route:
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Note that space in Hermes’ version of the metaphor, since it comprises functional elements derived from the other two regions — “God” and “Kosmos” — could be conceived as the common “surface” between the two. Thus, once again, we have our familiar three entities:
1) the “bracketed” region of nothing, or , Hermes’ “Kosmos”;
2) the rest of the nothing, or , Hermes’ “God”; and,
3) the “surface” that the two regions share, or, Hermes’ “Space”
With this in mind, let us now look once again at the passage concerning Vishnu and the Hindu version of this primordial triad, from the Padama Purana, half a world and millennia removed from the Hermetica and related texts of Egyptian provenance:
In the beginning of creation the Great Vishnu, desirous of creating the whole world, became threefold: Creator, Preserver, Destroyer. In order to create this world, the Supreme Spirit produced from the right side of his body himself as Brahmal then, in order to preserve the world, he produced from his left side Vishnu; and in order to destroy the world he produced from the middle of his body the eternal Shiva. Some worship Brahma, others Vishnu, others Shiva; but Vishnu, one yet threefold, creates, preserves, and destroys: therefore let the pious make no difference between the three.26
Once again, note that the three resulting entities, after Vishnu “differentiates himself,” are described in functional terms. So we may substitute the names Vishnu, Brahma, and Shiva for Hermes’ God, Kosmos, and Space. And again, one of these, Brahma the “preserver”, appears to be a functional “set” of “nothing” that is a common surface of the other two, Vishnu the creator and Shiva the destroyer:
Androgynous Shiva
Note in the case of the Padama Purana that the functional set identified with each region or “manifestation of Vishnu” is described by a function (creation), its inverse (destruction), or the inverse of the other two (preservation). And again, we have the same three entities:
1) the “bracketed” region of Nothing, or , Hermes’ “Kosmos”, and the Padama Purana’s Shiva;
2) the rest of the Nothing, or , Hermes’ “God” and the Padama Purana’s Vishnu; and,
3) the “surface” Nothing that the two regions share, or,
Hermes’ “Space” and the Padama Purana’s Brahma.
The implications of this sort of analysis are profound and far- reaching, for they suggest that behind certain types of metaphysical texts, particularly those suggesting triadic structures, there is a much deeper topological metaphor that such texts are designed to encode and transmit. It suggests that all such texts are capable of a deep topological analysis, and that they have nothing, really, to do withmetaphysics in the conventional philosophical or theological senses at all. They also suggest, as more and more differentiations are added to this process that account for the rise of physical creation, that there is a physics reason for the phenomenon of the world grid. They suggest that, as the physical medium is the information-creating and transmuting Philosophers’ Stone itself, that the purpose of the world grid and its constructions is one of an “alchemical architecture,” of the monumental manipulation and engineering of the medium itself, for after all, on the ancient view, once again, everything derives from that nothing and is a multi-differentiated nothing, directly tied in with everything else.
In these metaphysical and religious texts, in other words, we are looking at a profound topological and physics metaphor. We are looking at declined legacies of a very ancient, and very sophisticated, science.
5. Cosmology and History: A Hidden Elite, and a Hidden Physics?
With the “topological metaphor” in hand, let us return to Angkor Wat, and look more closely at other aspects of the Hindu cosmology memorialized in the grand and intricate stone edifice. One of the many stone reliefs at Angkor Wat portrays a Hindu cosmological conception called “the Churning of the Milky Ocean” by the five-headed Naga serpent, Vasuki.27 On one of the panels depicting Vasuki, his long body is coiled around a mountain, Mount Mandera. Mount Mandera is, in turn, one of the four mountains butressing Mount Meru in Hindu cosmology.28 These mountains are, like the “primordial mound” of Egypt’s “Zep Tepi” or “first time,” the primordial mountains of Hindu cosmology.
Vishnu himself is above this mountain, clutching Vasuki’s body with two of his four hands “and seeming to control or direct its movement.”29 Vasuki is gripped on one side of his long body by an asura or a “high-ranking demon,”30 and on the other by three gods and 85 devas “of lesser stature.”31 Between them, Vishnu is suspended, gripping Vasuki in the center of his body coiled around Mount Mandera, as if superintending this cosmic tug-of-war, as Mount Mandera “is being rotated, first one way then the other, by the opposing forces of the devas and asuras.”32
As this back-and-forth churning and counter-rotation continues, eventually there arises a foaming mass, a “Sea of Milk” or “the Milky Ocean”, from which the Moon and other celestial bodies appear, followed by the goddess Lakshmi, Vishnu’s wife.33 Mount Meru and its four buttressing mountains, including Mount Mandera, are the mountains at “the center of the world”34 and thus, from their “churning,” give rise to the physical world from the action of rotation, from a vortex.
This is a profound metaphor, and again, a distinctively physics- related metaphor, for what is being suggested is that one of the key methods by which things arise from that primordial nothing, and the means by which they are distinguished, is by complex systems of rotation and counter-rotation. Even “the Milky Sea” has a profound physics analogue in the “sea of quantum flux” or “vacuum energy,” the sea of the void of space-time, which in quantum theory is literally teaming with vast energy potential, and which, in some versions of the theory, is accessed by the rise of rotating systems. In some versions of the theory, particles themselves are but systems of rotations with this otherwise inchoate sea of energy, and anyone familiar with the vast quantum mechanical particle zoo will know at once that particle families are distinguished by, among other things, their spin or rotation.
Once again, behind the seemingly irrational religious and mythological imagery lurks a profound metaphor of very contemporary and sophisticated physics.
These observations are worth comparing with those of Hancock and Faiia, who, looking at the stone reliefs of the Churning of the Milky Ocean
at Angkor Wat, see yet another physical process:
There is a cosmological process that fits the bill: precession — the slow, cyclical wobble of the axis of the earth that inexorably changes the positions of all the stars in the sky and shifts the ‘ruling’ constellation that lies behind the sun at dawn on the spring equinox. It is this process, according to Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend in their landmark study Hamlet’s Mill, that is the subject of a whole family of myths coming down to us from remotest antiquity. The Churching of the Milky Ocean, they say, is one of these myths.
The great contribution to scholarship made by Hamlet’s Mill is the evidence it presents — compelling and overwhelming — that, long before the supposed beginnings of civilized human history in Sumer, Egypt, China, India and the Americas, precession was understood and spoken of in a precise technical language by people who could only have been highly civilized. The prime image used by these as yet unidentified archaic astronomers ‘transforms the luminous done of the celestial sphere into a vast and intricate piece of machinery. And like a millwheel, like a churn, like a whirlpool, like a quern, this machine turns and turns endlessly.’35
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