After the post in December dealing with Plutarch’s reflections on the nature(s) of Good and Evil, I thought I would inaugurate the New Year on a somewhat lighter note — and yes, I am starting my New Year now, after twenty days of Christmas and seven of a dreadful influenza. That note consists in numbers, some striking and beautiful numbers which have, for reasons unknown to me, shown up below several of my 2024 posts here on Academia.edu, and what could put a Platonist in a better mood than those divine digits?
They make me regret the fact that I never could bring myself to love mathematics, or, to put it more precisely, that I never recovered my nascent enthusiasm for calculations after been been told by the teacher, at the impressionable age of eight, that I had completed far too many exercises and assignments much too quickly, and that I should have waited patiently and meekly for the rest of the class.
I am still able to enjoy the sight of a great cipher, though, in spite of the fact that I will probably never understand them. 🙂 Here is a list of the appearances I have in mind:
Queen Hatshepsut and the Speos Artemidos inscription: 410
Porphyry and Phoenicia: 303
Plato, Atlantis and the Younger Dryas: 245
Porphyry’s tribute to Plotinus: 220
St. Augustine, Cicero’s Hortensius and the Eye of the Soul: 33
Eriugena, emanations and the Notre Dame Rose Window: 333
These are the final view counts for these posts — final in the sense that they have stayed exactly the same for several months now. I have no idea what this could mean — all I can say is that there is manifestly something curious going on here. If it had happened only once, I would have dismissed the event as a coincidence, but three view counts involving two or more three-s, for example . . . that seems downright weird. I am once again reminded of the Jungian concept of Synchronicity, even though the apparitions of these numbers cannot be said to be a classic case of that phenomenon, which Jung thought due to «an acausal connecting principle». (I decided to start reading this: https://archive.org/details/x-the-interpretation-of-nature-and-the-psyche)
The most suitable image I could find in my archive of photographs is one I shot while exploring the dangerous (high)ways of Eire a little over a Decad ago — while walking in the footsteps of the young William Butler Yeats, I suddenly came across a wall adorned with these lovely and intriguing, almost mystical tiles. Can you guess where?
This post was originally published on my profile at Academia.edu in January 2025. It was liked by the user Newton After Blake.
Edmund Schilvold: Skribent, fotograf, filosof, friluftsentusiast 