DWill wrote:Robert Tulip wrote:It is purely simple, empirical and coherent. The star patterns are embedded in the figures in the same order as they appear in the sky. I am truly amazed that you cannot see this.
I did look at the Powerpoint, Robert. Let me explain first that I don't desire to disprove your theory. I couldn't do that anyway; you are too well prepared.
Hi DWill, firstly let me say how much I appreciate your honest opinions here, since to be questioned is far better than to be shunned. I hope this conversation will inspire others to actually look at the content, since it opens a path to a new cultural and scientific paradigm. I understand that it sounds arrogant for me to say such things, but my claim is that inability to disprove my theory rests on the simple fact that it is true.
The Last Supper Zodiac Template hypothesis is as obvious, once you study it, as Galileo’s argument that the earth orbits the sun. The problem is that acknowledging the possibility of such an unseen counter-intuitive ‘Da Vinci Code’ implies major revisions of prevailing cultural paradigms, with big questions about why it has not been seen before.
Galileo’s letter to Kepler, quoted above, expressed his frustration at the refusal of people to look through his new-fangled telescope. Critics were unwilling to open themselves to the possibility that there might be craters on the moon, due to the traditional belief that the moon was a perfect sphere, and the political fear that admitting Galileo was correct would entail having to advocate for him based on evidence, something that would be personally dangerous.
Likening any modern ideas to a giant like Galileo is widely mocked, yet this example demands the comparison. The science is so incredibly simple once you have the courage to look, as were Galileo’s discoveries, and the cultural barriers today against the observation of the zodiac template in The Last Supper are just as intense as the papal intransigence of Galileo’s day.
DWill wrote:
I responded because it seemed that you were attributing people not taking up your discovery to cultural conditioning they can't shed. While that could always be a factor, I thought that the reluctance to agree with your interpretation of the painting can stem from an honest difference in view.
Did the Pope who condemned Galileo have “an honest difference of view” about the earth going around the sun? Yes indeed he did, due to placing traditional authority above logic and evidence as the basis for his opinion. In a case where the evidence is clear, as I maintain it is for Leonardo’s zodiac method, there is no real difference between cultural conditioning and honest disagreement.
A big part of this cultural conditioning that prevents people from seeing my point here is the pervasive modern loathing for any mention of the zodiac other than as frivolous entertainment. Hard as it may be to see this, my observation that Leonardo used the star path of the sun to find his shapes for the twelve disciples involves no astrology whatsoever, and can be explored on a simple empirical basis. Even his depiction of Jesus Christ using the stars of Pisces has a simple Gospel basis in the extensive fish imagery for Jesus. While an astrological meaning is possible with the idea of Christ as avatar of the Age of Pisces, based on observation of precession of the equinox, this is only possible and not definite. In his painting
The Baptism of Christ, Leonardo also modelled the pose of Jesus Christ on the stars of Pisces, with John, in the act of pouring water, modelled on the matching stars of Aquarius the water bearer. This use of star templates is a method that Leonardo used more than once.
DWill wrote:In reply to your third sentence above: no, I don't see the arrangement of the star patterns within and on the edges of Da Vinci's figures as having enough weight to make me disregard the need to consider the full context of Da Vinci's "Last Supper,' his culture, his technique, his primary challenge in creating such an amazing work of art.
To suggest the historical context might cast doubt on this hypothesis is not a strong argument. Many people hold the prior belief that the simple zodiac method is outlandish and impossible, making them unwilling, as it were, to look through the telescope to put their cultural conditioning at risk.
My observations here are as clear and distinct as Galileo’s observation that the earth orbits the sun. None of the templates are “on the edges” as you put it. All involve specific intentional decisions by Leonardo on the placement of hands in the same positions and in the same order as observable zodiac star groups along the path of the sun, with six figures also involving placement of heads.
There is no need to “disregard” the cultural context and technique. Indeed, the Renaissance ambition of an integrated worldview totally reinforce this new interpretation, rescuing Leonardo’s scientific genius from the barren visions of both Christian theology and modern materialism, and showing his real empirical plan. The real “disregard” is seen in how the scientific enlightenment promoted a mechanical vision that rejected Leonardo’s method of seeing the human life and the universe as intimately connected, and equally in how the church maintained its supernatural theology against the empirical temper of the Renaissance.
Leonardo’s most famous statement was that “man is a model of the world”. This is exactly proved as his intentional method in The Last Supper, using Jesus and the twelve as a model for the main observable patterns of the visible universe seen in the path of the sun. The Florentine Renaissance involved an enormous rekindling of ancient learning, especially through writers such as Pico and Ficino, whom Leonardo must have known well, although much of this work was suppressed by the church and by subsequent mechanical science, which kicked away the intellectual ladder its forebears had climbed.
DWill wrote: I'm not talking about what I know, but mostly about what I don't know--and what I'm not sure of must give me pause and makes me unable to agree that your conclusion that Da Vinci used the Zodiac in the painting to express his understanding of a mystery far beyond the Christianity of the Church.
Leonardo’s method is not a “mystery” compared to Christianity, with its incredible supernatural miracles and evidence-free political claims. His zodiac template method is at one level as simple as the detailed observation he used for his
anatomical drawings. Where the complexity enters is the shuddering disjunction between this observation and the generally accepted claims of Christian theology.
Essentially, Leonardo is standing on the side of Gnostic heretics, showing how the Jesus story encodes an astral message, and even opening the way to the modern re-evaluation of the historical existence of Jesus Christ, by showing how Christ and the twelve are primarily symbolic, referencing the orbital relationship between the sun and moon, the two great lights, with their twelve to one ratio between the year and the months. The political unacceptability of this message is the only explanation why this simple observation has remained hidden in plain view for so long.
DWill wrote:
I assume you would not disagree with the historian's view that Da Vinci's artistic challenge was to take a scene that had been rendered statically in previous art and imbue it with drama and movement.
Modern humanistic dynamism is only a small part of the scope of the artistic challenge in the Last Supper, which again is best approached through Leonardo’s famous statement that man is a model of the world. An “artistic challenge” is not just a matter of aesthetics, but also embeds the thinking behind the work, the philosophical message it aims to convey. As a Renaissance Magus, Leonardo sought a comprehensive worldview that would respect the newly rediscovered ancient wisdom of the classical world, effectively subordinating the literal mythology of the Gospels beneath the deeper wisdom of the ages, with its recognition that divinity only works through natural processes.
DWill wrote:The individuation of each figure is also remarkable for any age.
Against this agenda of individuation, Leonardo's depiction of the Gospel moment of crisis against the observable encompassing reality of the visible cosmos also served this dramatic movement task you mention. The star groups themselves have the natural diversity of shape that lends itself to serving as his source for the great variety of the stances in the painting.
DWill wrote:Da Vinci worked on the painting for several years, producing studies for it, though apparently only one complete sketch is known, and it is much different from what he put on the wall of the monastery in Milan. It is dificult for me to think that in rising to the challenge of depicting the commotion resulting from Jesus' prediction of betrayal, Da Vinci worked in a secondary (or do you say a primary?) aim of having the painting reflect the movement of the stars across the sky.
To suggest that a pietistic portrayal was Da Vinci’s primary motive, even updated to use modern perspective and personality, sells short his brilliance as a philosopher. His primary aim, as I see it, was to portray the glory of God reflected in the visible order of the cosmos, presenting the Lord’s Prayer, thy will be done on earth as in heaven, in direct symbolism, such that Jesus Christ as the King of Ages (Rev 15:3) represents the annual path of the sun through the stars.
On a point of detail, the meaning is not “the movement of the stars across the sky”, which occurs on a daily basis, but rather the annual movement of the sun against the background stars.
DWill wrote:Not impossible; the artist was a genius after all, but then we come to the problem of what we know, or rather don't know, about Da Vinci's connection to astrotheology. Am I on solid ground in saying that we have no writings from him on the subject? If you counter that he could not utter or write such things for fear of church reprisal, I trust you appreciate that is little proof of his having such views.
Expanding his line that man is a model of the world, Leonardo wrote in his extant notebooks that our body can be compared to the observed motions of the planet.
Harper’s Magazine has the following quote likening the tides to the rise and fall of human breath, rocks to bones, and ocean currents to the circulation of the blood. Here we see the astral philosophy reflected in the Last Supper.
Leonardo Da Vinci wrote:By the ancients man has been called the world in miniature; and certainly this name is well bestowed, because, inasmuch as man is composed of earth, water, air and fire, his body resembles that of the earth; and as man has in him bones as the supports and framework of his flesh, the world has its rocks as the supports of the earth; as man has in him a pool of blood in which the lungs rise and fall in breathing, so the body of the earth has its ocean tide which likewise rises and falls every six hours, as if the world breathed; as in that pool of blood veins have their origin, which ramify all over the human body, so likewise the ocean sea fills the body of the earth with infinite springs of water. The body of the earth lacks sinews and this is, because the sinews are made expressly for movements and, the world being perpetually stable, no movement takes place, and no movement taking place, muscles are not necessary.–But in all other points they are much alike.
—Leonardo da Vinci, from the Codex Leicester in: The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, vol. ii, p. 179 (Jean Paul Richter ed. 1883)
DWill wrote:"Weight of evidence" is a good metaphor for the brain's process in deciding whether or not to endorse a claim. For me the evidence for your claim doesn't weigh as heavily as evidence that seems to cast doubt on it. But as I said, a large part of why I can't agree is awareness of other questions to which I would need to have better answers.
I have quite simply taken the line drawings of the twelve zodiac constellations, and shown how each is embedded in turn in its expected position in the painting. It seems that some sort of intellectual paradigm shift is needed to remove the blinkers that prevent people seeing this simple fact, which is both as obvious and as obscure as the astronomical proof that the earth orbits the sun. The real “weight of evidence” against this discovery is just that it has never been observed over the five centuries since the painting was completed, a failure too embarrassing for human intelligence to be readily credited. So the task is to explain why it would have been ignored in plain sight. The reasons boil down to pervasive cultural prejudices, on the part of both science and religion, both of which for their own reasons deny and ignore the Renaissance goal of an integrated philosophy, showing how humanity relates to the cosmos.
