Sun King

[sus]

 

[sus]

the connection between psychology and landscape in this book is beautiful. most importantly, the “triassic sun” looming above and the “time sea” lying below. at first i found this duality a bit confusing: is it the ocean or the sun that’s making them crazy? but the magic image (appearing on the first page, and near the end) is their interaction: the sun igniting the water, illuminating its depths and reflecting off its surface. the water being, as kerans realizes in a dream, his bloodstream; the great murky repository of “pre-uterine” memories. and the sun being, you know, the sun: an incomprehensibly vast and powerful nonhuman force. the lizard-populated max ernst jungles are the eerie and beautiful results, the world/worldview arising from this confluence.

desert monotheism vs. forest polytheism

Rainforest dwellers specialise in a proliferation of spirits and gods, whereas monotheism was an invention of the desert. This makes sense. Deserts teach big singular things, like how tough a world it is, a world reduced to simple, furnace-blasted basics. "I am the Lord your God" and "There is but one God and his name is Allah" - diktats like these proliferate. In contrast, think of tropical rainforest people, in a world with a thousand different kinds of edible plants, where you can find more different species of ants on a single tree than you would find in all the British Isles. Letting a thousand deities bloom in the same sort of equilibrium must seem the most natural thing in the world.

 

[sus]

 

[ver$hy ver$h]

'Napoleon as Sun Myth'

 

[sus]

Inti, in Inca religion, the sun god; he was believed to be the ancestor of the Incas. Inti was at the head of the state cult, and his worship was imposed throughout the Inca empire. He was usually represented in human form, his face portrayed as a gold disk from which rays and flames extended.

 

[sus]

Art history professor David Stuart argues that the image on the Aztec Sun Stone is more than a calendar or a simple representation of the sun god, but rather a named portrait of the ruler Montezuma II as a “sun king,” dedicated a few years before the arrival of Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés.

“The face on the Aztec Sun Stone is not either the face of a sun god or a portrait of Montezuma, but both,” Stuart said. “Montezuma looks out from the center of the stone as a personalized representation of time and space. It’s a metaphysical depiction of royal power.”

 

[sufi]

Order of the Solar Temple - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[sufi]

 

[sus]

The idea of "Trump as Napoleon" has been circulating, so "Trump as sun king" closes the triangle nicely. And indeed, he did up the Oval Office like Versailles...

 

[sus]

I want to visit this Brooklyn Museum exhibit on Gold. Because Gold is the Sun of the Earth. If you wear a gold crown you are saying, I Am The Sun King.

 

[sus]

The problem with dwarves is they're going the wrong way. Fool's gold is to gold as gold is to sun. It is a false idol to worship. You n eed to transcend/ascend to the heavens. Commune with the sky god. The dwarves keep digging digging digging burrowing. They get deeper and deeper til they burn up in the heat of the core, i.e. find the Balrog. I think Wagner's Rheingold is about this

 

[hmg]

 

[ver$hy ver$h]

The idea of "Trump as Napoleon" has been circulating, so "Trump as sun king" closes the triangle nicely. And indeed, he did up the Oval Office like Versailles...

In a more general sense we may say that the mirror is a symbolic object which not
only reflects the characteristics of the individual but also echoes in its expansion
the historical expansion of individual consciousness. It thus carries the stamp of
approval of an entire social order: it is no coincidence that the century of Louis XIV
is epitomized by the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles,

Baudrillard, The System of Objects

 

[ver$hy ver$h]

I want to visit this Brooklyn Museum exhibit on Gold. Because Gold is the Sun of the Earth. If you wear a gold crown you are saying, I Am The Sun King.​

​

 

[luka]

Alchemical theory contended that metals were anxious to improve their status but were forced into hierarchy, by way of a connected chain of correspondences, with gold as their Sun King.

 

[Murphy]

Gold is the metal with the broadest shoulders