Page 9  

           "The last romance of Science, the most daring it has ever tried to pen, is the Story of the Ascent of Man."

Page 162  1 + 6 + 2 = 9 

          
" Knowledge makes prodigious journeys, and what seems to us a leap in time often turns out to be a long progression from place to place, from one city to another."
"...As one example among many, the mathematics of Pythagoras has not come to us directly. It fired the imagination of the Greeks, but the place where it was formed into an orderly system was the Nile city, Alexandria. The man who made the system, and made it famous was Euclid, who probably took it to Alexandria around 300 BC.
       Euclid evidently belonged to the pythagorean tradition. When a listener asked him what was the practical use of some theorem, Euclid is reported to have said contemptuously to his slave, 'He wants to profit from learning give him a penny'.
The reproof was probably adapted from a motto of the Pythagorean brotherhood, which translates roughly as 'A diagram and a step, not a diagram and a penny'-


                                              'a step' being a step in knowledge or what I have called the Ascent of Man.


   The impact of Euclid as a model of mathematical reasoning was immense and lasting. His book Elements of Geometry was trans- lated and copied more than any other book exept the Bible right  

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into modern times..."
   "... The other science practised in Alexandria in the centuries around the birth of Christ was astronomy. Again, we can catch the drift of history in the undertow of legend: when the Bible says that three wise men followed a star to Bethlehem, there sounds in the story the echo of an age when wise men are starg-azer The secret of the heavens that wise men looked for in antiquity was read by a Greek called Claudius Ptolemy, working in Alexandria about AD 150. His work came to Europe in Arabic texts, for the original Greek manuscript editions were largely lost, some in the pillage of the great library of Alexandria by Christian zealots in AD 389, others in the wars and invasions that swept the  Eastern Mediterranean throughout the Dark Ages.
    The model of the heavens that Ptolemy constructed is wonder fully complex, but it begins from a simple analogy. The moon revolves around the earth, obviously; and it seemed just as obvious to Ptolemy that the sun and planets do the same.
( The ancients thought of the moon and the sun as planets) The Greeks had believed that the perfect form of motion is a circle, and so Ptolemy made the planets run on circles running in their turn on other circles. To us that scheme of cycles and epicycles seems both simple-minded and artificial. Yet in fact the system was a beautiful and a workable invention, and an article of faith for Arabs and Christians right through the Middle Ages It lasted for fourteen hundred years, which is a great deal longer than any more recent scientific theory can be expected to survive without radical change."

Page 142  1 + 4 + 2 = 7

"The symbolic year of destiny was just ahead, 1543. In that year, three books were published that changed the mind of Europe: the anatomical drawings of Andreas Vesalius; the first translation of the Greek mathematics and physics of Archimedes; and the book by Nicholas Copernicus, The Revolution of the Heavenly Orbs, which put the sun at the centre of heaven and created what is now called the scientific Revolution."
Page 196
                                         " In the middle of all sits the sun Enthroned. In this most beautiful temple,
                                            could we place this luminary in any better position from which he can
                                            illuminate the whole at once? He is rightly called the Lamp, the Mind, the
                                            Ruler of the Universe: Hermes Trimegistus names him the Visible God,

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                                            Sophocles' Electra calls him the All-Seeing. So the sun sits as upon a royal
                                             throne, ruling his children, the planets which circle around him

Pages 397 /398

              "Text: (1)  THE CHAPTER OF HAVING EXISTENCE NIGH UNTO RA. 1"



                            And I say, 'On every road
                                                            "and among (11) these millions of years is Ra the lord,
                                                             "and his path is in the fire; and they go round about
                                                             "behind him, and they go round about behind him

Page 98  9 x 8 = 72

 
Hereonin, yonder scribe inserted the word                              PRAYER
 
Page 104

13th    L/D        "...G. R. S. Mead, at the beginning of his work Thrice greatest Hermes,
explains fully what 'the  Trismegistic Literature' is. He calls it Tris-megistic' instead of by its earlier designation 'Hermetic' (from the name of the Greek god Hermes) in order to distinguish it from other less interesting writings such as the Egyptian Hermes prayers and also the ' Hermetic Alchemical Literature'."  

Page 105

"...Mead quotes an Egyptian magic papyrus, this being an uncontested Egyptian document which he compares to a passage in the Tris-megistic literature: 'I invoke thee, Lady Isis, with whom the good Daimon doth unite, He who is Lord in the perfect black' 34"
"...he cited this magic papyrus in order to shed comparitive light on some extra-ordinary passages in a Trismegistic treatise he translated which has the title 'The Virgin of the World'. In his comments on the magic papyrus Mead says: 'It is natural to make the Agathodaimon ("the Good Daimon") of the Papyrus refer to Osiris; for indeed it is one of his most frequent designations. Morever it is precisely Osiris who is pre-eminently connected with the so-called "underworld", the un-seen world, the "mysterious dark". He is lord there. . .  and indeed one of the ancient mystery-sayings was precisely, "Osiris is a dark God.' "  

What a majestic way to treat eyes, said the scribe.

Page 105

"...' The Virgin of the world' is an extraordinary Trismegistic treatise  in the form of a dialogue between the hierophant  (high priest) as spokesman for Isis and the neophyte who represents Horus. Thus the priest instructing the initiate is portrayed as Isis instructing her son Horus.
      The treatise begins by claiming it is 'her holiest discourse' which 'so speaking Isis doth pour forth'. There is, throughout, a b emphasis on the hierarchical principle of lower and higher beings in the universe - that earthly mortals are presided over at intervals by other, higher beings who interfere in Earth's affairs when things here become hopeless, etc. Isis says in the treatise: 'It needs must, therefore, be the the less should give way to the greater mysteries.' What she is to disclose to Horus is a great mystery. Mead describes it as the mystery practised by the arch-hierophant. It was the 'degree' (here degree' is in the sense  

/ Page 106 1 + 6 = 7  /

of 'degree' in the Masonic 'mysteries, of earlier times) 'called the Dark Mystery" or "Black Rite".It was a rite performed only for those who were judged worthy of it after long probation in lower degrees, something of a far more sacred character, apparently than the instruction in the mysteries enacted in the light.'
     Mead adds: I would suggest, therefore, that we have here a reference to the most esoteric institution of the Isaic tradition . . . ', meaning of course 'Isis-tradition', and not to be confused with the book of Isaiah in the bible (so that perhaps it is best for us not to use the word Isiac).     It is in attempting to explain the mysterious 'Black Rite' of Isis at the highest degree of the Egyptian mysteries that Mead cited the magic papyrus which I have already quoted. He explains the black Rite as being connected with Osiris being a
'dark god' who is Lord of the perfect black' which is the unseen world, the mysterious black..."
 
How To Enjoy Life
Sidney Dark 1924        " Flowers, that grow beautiful in the sunlight, whither and die in the darkness of a cellar"
 

Page 106 continues    

"  'This treatise ' The Virgin of the World' describes a personage called Hermes who seems to represent a race of beings who taught earthly mankind the arts of civilization after which: And thus, with charge unto his kinsman of the Gods to keep sure watch, he mounted to the Stars'.


Page 113

"We must return to the treatise 'The Virgin of the World' This treatise is quite explicit in saying that Isis and Osiris were sent to help the earth by giving primitive mankind the arts of civilization:        And Horus thereon said: 'How was it mother, then that Earth received God's Efflux ?'
       And  Isis said:
        'I may not tell the story of (this) birth: for it is not permitted to describe the origin of thy descent,O Horus (son) of mighty power, lest afterwards the way-of-birth of the immortal gods should be known unto men - except so far that God the Monarch, the uni-versal Orderer and Architect, sent for a little while thy mighty sire Osiris, and the mightiest goddess Isis, that they might help the world , for all things needed them.
         Tis they who filled life full of life. 'Tis they who caused the savagery of mutual slaughtering of men to cease. 'Tis they who hallowed the precincts to the Gods their ancestors and spots for holy rites. 'Tis they who gave to men laws, food and shelter. Etc.'
         They are also described as teaching men how to care for the dead in a specifically Egyptian way, which inclines one to wonder how a Greek could conceivably have written this unless during the Ptolemaic period: ''Tis they who taught men how to wrap up those who ceased to live, as they should be.'          Now anyone knows this is Egyptian and not Greek practice. What Neoplatanist would include such a statement unless it were actually taken from an early source which be used, and which had been written by someone actually living in Egypt?
          The treatsie ends this long section with:
               ''Tis they alone who,taught by Hremes in God's hidden codes, became the authors of the arts, and sciences, and all pursuits which men do practice, and givers of their laws.
               ''Tis they who, taught by Hermes that the things below have been disposed by God to be in sympathy with things above, established  

/ Page 114   /

on the earth the sacred rites over which the mysteries in Heaven preside...."
               ''Tis they who, knowing the destructibility of (mortal) frames, devised the grade of prophets, in all things perfected, in order that no prophet who stretched forth his hands unto the Gods, should be in ignorance of anything, that magic and philosophy should feed the soul, and medicine preserve the body when it suffered pain.                 'And having done all this , my son Osiris and myself perceiving that the world was (now) quite full, were thereupon demanded back by those who dwell in Heaven . . .'
 
      And in the treatise Isis claims that the 'Black Rite' honours her and 'gives perfection'. It is also concerned with the mysterious thing called 'Night'- 'who weaves her webb with rapid light though it be less than Sun's'. It is made plain that 'Night' is not the night sky because it moves in the Heaven along with 'the other mysteries in turn that move in Heaven, with ordered motions and with perids of times, with certain hidden influences bestowing order on things below and co-increasing them'      We must scrutinize the description of what is labelled 'Night' in this treatise. This description makes it perfectly clear that 'Night' is not 'night', but a code word. For it is said to have light though it be less than the sun's'.
 
Meanwhile within that other reality of The Magic Mountain, continued another story. The story of  toiL, within a tale.
At which the all and sundries of the blindfold, eyeless shadows, held on for dear life to yonder slivering thread of gold.
 

Page 88

" Hans Castorp went into his cousin's room. The corridor floor, with its strip of narrow coco matting,billowed beneath his feet, but this, apart from its singularity was not un-pleasant. He sat down in Joachim's great flowered arm-chair -
There was one just like it in his own room - and lighted his Maria Mancini. It tasted like glue, like coal, like anything but what it should taste like. Still he smoked on, as he watched Joachim making ready for his cure, putting on his house jacket, then an old overcoat, then, armed with his night-lamp and Russian primer, going into the balcony. He turned on the light, lay down with his thermometer in his mouth, and began, with astonishing dex-terity to wrap himself in the two camel's-hair rugs that were spread out over his chair. Hans Castorp looked on with honest admiration for his skill. He flung the covers over him, one after the other: first from the left side, all their length up to his shoulders, then from the right side, so that he formed when finished, a neat compact parcel, out of which stuck only his head shoulders and arms.
     "How well you do that" Hans Castorp said. That's the practice I've had Joachim answered, holding the thermometer between his teeth in order to speak. "You'll learn. To-morrow we must certainly get you a pair of rugs. You can use them afterwards at home, and up here they are indispensable, particularly as you have no sleeping-sack."
      "I shan't lie out on the balcony at night," Hans Castorp de-clared. "I can tell you that at once. It would seem perfectly weird to me. Everything has its limits. I must draw the line somewhere, since I'm really only up here on a visit. Iwill sit here awhile and smoke my cigar in the regular way. It tastes vile, but I know it's good, and that will have to do me for to-day. It is close on nine - it isn't even quite nine yet, more's the pity - but when it is half past, that is late enough for a man to go to bed at least half-way decently."  

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A shiver ran over him, then several, one after the other. Hans Castorp sprang up and ran to the thermometer on the wall, as if to catch it in flagrante. According to the mercury, there were fifty degrees of heat in the room. He clutched the radiator; it was cold and dead. He murmered something incoherent, to the effect that it was a scandal to have no heating, even if it was August. It wasn't a question of the name of the month, but of the temperature that obtained, which was such that actually he was as cold as a dog. Yet his face burned. He sat down, stood up again, and with a murmured request for permission fetched Joachim's coverlet and spread it out over himself as he sat in the chair. And thus he remained, hot and cold by tuns, torturing himself with his nauseous cigar. He was overcome by a wave of wretchedness; it seemed to him he had never in his life before felt quite so miserable.  
    "I feel simply wretched," he muttered. And suddenly he was moved by an extraordinary and extravagant thrill of joy and sus-pense, of which he was so conscious that he sat motionless waiting for it to come again. It did not - only the misery remained. He stood up at last, flung Joachim's coverlet on the bed, and got something out that sounded like a good night: Don't freeze to death call me again in the morning," his lips hardly shaping the words: then he staggered along the corridor to his own room."
"...He had thought to fall asleep at once, but he was wrong. His eyelids, which he had scarcely been able to hold up now declined to close: they twitched rebelliously open whenever he shut them. He told himself that it was not his regular bed-time;  
that during the day he had probably rested too much. Someone seemed to be beating a carpet out of doors - which was not very probable, and proved not to be the case, for it was the beating of his own heart he heard, quite outside of himself and away in the night, ex-actly as though someone were beating a carpet with a wicker beater.  

/ Page 90  9 x 0 = 9    9 + 0 = 9  /  

the little lamp in the loggias, Joachim's and the Russian pair's, fell through the open balcony door. As Hans Castorp lay there on his back blinking, he recalled an impression amongst the host received that day, an observation he had made, and then, with shrinking and delicacy, sought to forget. It was the look on Joachim's face when they spoke of Marusja and her physical characteristics - an oddly pathetic facial distortion, and a spotted pallor on the sun- browned cheeks. Hans Castorp saw and understood what it meant, saw and understood in a manner so new, so sympathetic, so intimate, that the carpet-beater outside redoubled the swiftness and severity of its blows and almost drowned out the sound of the evening serenade down in the Platz - for their was a concert again in the same hotel as before, and they were playing a symmetrically constructed insipid melody that came up through the darkness. Hans Castorp whistled a bar of it in a whisper -
One can whistle a bar of it in a whisper - and beat time with his cold feet under the plumeau.
     That was, of course, the right way not to go to sleep, and now he felt not the slightest inclination. Since he had understood in that new, penetrating sense why Joachim had changed colour, the whole world seemed altered to him, he felt pierced for the second time by that feeling of extravagant joy and suspense. And he waited for, expected something, without asking himself what..."
"...Later he went to sleep. But with sleep returned the involved dreams, even more involved than those of the first night - out
of which he often started up in fright, or pursuing some con-fused fancy. He seemed to see Hofrat Behrens walking down the garden path, with bent knees and arms hanging stiffly in front of him, adapting his long and somehow solitary-looking stride  

Page 91 /

to the time of distant march-music. As he paused before Hans Castorp, the latter saw that he was wearing a pair of glasses with thick, round lenses. He was uttering all sorts of nonsense. "A civilian, of course," he said, and without saying by your leave, drew down Hans Castorp's eyelid with the first and middle fingers of his huge hand. "Respectable civilian, as I saw at once. But not without talent, not at all without talent for a heightened degree of oxidization. Wouldn't grudge us a year, he wouldn't, just one little short year of service up here. Well, hullo-ullo! Gentleman, on with the exercise," he shouted, and putting his two enormous first fingers in his mouth, emitted a whistle of such peculiarly pleasing quality that from opposite directions Miss Robinson and the schoolmistress, much smaller than life size, came flying through the air and perched themselves right and left on the Hofrat's shoulders, just as they sat right and left of Hans Castorp in the dining room. And the Hofrat skipped away, wiping his eyes behind his glasses with a table-napkin - but whether it was tears or sweat he wiped could not be told.
"...Then sleep and dream once more overpowered him, and he saw himself in the act of flight from Dr. Krokowski, who had lain in wait for him to undertake some psychoanalysis. He fled from the doctor, but his feet were leaden; past the glass partitions, along the balconies, into the garden; in his extremity he tried to climb the red-brown flagstaff - and woke perspiring at the moment when the pursuer seized him by his trouser leg.
       Hardly was he calm when slumber claimed him once more. The content of his dream entirely changed, and he stood trying to shoulder Settembrini away from the spot where they stood, the Italian smiling in his subtle, mocking way, under the full, upward-curving moustaches - and it was precisely this smile which Hans Castorp found so injurious.
       "You are a nuisance," he distinctly heard himself say. "Get 

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away, you are only a hand-organ man, and you are in the way here. " But Settembrini would not let himself be budged; Hans Castorp was still standing considering what was to be done when he was unexpectedly vouchsafed a signal
Insight into the true nature of time; it proved to be nothing more or less than a "silent sister," a mercury column without degrees, to be used by those who wanted to cheat. He awoke with the thought in his mind that he must certainly tell Joachim of this discovery on the morrow..."
      "... In such adventures, among such discoveries, the night wore away. Hermine Kleefeld, as well as Herr Albin and Captain Mik-losich, played fantastic roles - the last carried off Frau Stohr in his fury, and was pierced through and through with a lance by Lawyer Paravant. One particular dream , however, Hans Castorp dreamed twice over during the night, both times in precisely the same form the second time towards morning. He sat in the dining-hall with the seven tables when there came a great crashing of glass as the verandah door banged, and Madame Chauchat en-tered in a white sweater, one hand in her pocket, the other at the back of her head. But instead of going to the "good" Russian table, the unmannerly female glided noiselessly to Hans Castorp's side and without a word reached him her hand - not the back but the palm - to kiss. Hans Castorp kissed that hand which was not overly well kept, but rather broad with stumpy fingers, the skin roughened next the nails. And at that there swept over him anew, from head to foot, the feeling of reckless sweetness he had felt for the first time when he tried to imagine himself free of the burden of a good name, and tasted the boundless joys of shame. This feeling he experienced anew in his dream, only a thousand-fold ber than in his waking hour.