Friends and Players:
I would like to suggest that there is a Glass Bead Game played day and night within our field of vision, in astronomical space. It is a very simple game indeed, having only two moves -- and yet it is also extremely subtle, even reticent. What I aim to do here is to begin to discuss the links between the two moves, as though they had been played in a HipBone-style game by a player or players unknown who left no record of the order in which they were played, nor commentary on the links between them.
The two moves I am thinking of are Sun and Moon -- and I would emphasize that it is their appearance *in our field of vision* which constitutes the play.
I find this a peculiarly appropriate game to discuss, because Sun and Moon are like two pearls, two marbles -- two glasperlen -- rolled across the field of vision, across the sky, and thus do not require *other* glass beads to represent them.
Moves in Juxtaposition
Sun and Moon
Links:
- Seen from earth, the sun and moon have the appearance of being the same size: they subtend the same angle at the human eye. It is this fact -- the extraordinarily close correspondence between the *apparent* sizes of the two bodies -- which allows a solar eclipse not just to be total (if the moon subtended a much larger angle than the sun, this would still be possible) but also so exact that the solar corona / solar flares can still be viewed around the eclipse. When we consider the radical difference in real size between the two objects, and the no less radical difference between the distances which separate our earth from them both, the close similarity between their sizes as we see them -- their apparent sizes -- is nothing short of extraordinary.
Futher contemplation of this link would lead to the consideration of synchronicity (apparently fortuitous connections), and also of the difference between fact and appearance -- which at least in this instance correlates with the difference between a human- or perceptually-based view of the world and an objective one ... and here we are on the verge of the distinction between a painterly view of reality and a scientific one, or between the mythic and modern worldviews.
- From a human point of view, these two bodies serve the same function, nicely expressed in the Upanishads (I believe) in terms of lamps: the sun is our lamp by day, the moon our lamp by night. Less poetically, sun and moon can be thought of as defining day and night for us, being the characteristic lights of each -- and again, it is the fact that each appears to us as a disc of the same size which gives force to this sort of *pars pro toto* definition: if sun and moon were not, so to say, a matched pair, they would hardly serve this purpose.
Further meditation on this link might include consideration of the hot light of the sun vs. the cool light of the moon.
- While the sun always appears the same, the moon passes through phases, and the two bodies can therefore be considered as opposites representing the principles of stability and mutability respectively: similarly, the sun is known to us as the source of its own radiance, while the moon derives its radiance from the sun and reflects it ...
- The hieroglyphic used to represent the sun in alchemy is identical to that used to represent gold, while that used to represent the moon is identical to that for silver. This in itself is not so strange, and would not in my opinion constitute a valid link, since each of the planets is held to correspond with a metal, in such a way that the metal is viewed as a condensation at the level of earthly matter of a principle whose celestial embodiment is the planet in question: however the impact of this view (an expression of the Hermetic principle "as above, so below") extends in historical human praxis to the valuation of the two metals gold and silver in a ratio corresponding to the periodicity of the two planets.
In the words of Norman O. Brown:
Keynes also recognizes that the special attraction of gold and silver is due not to any of the rationalistic considerations generally offered in explanation but to their symbolic identification with Sun and Moon...
Heichelheim, the authority on ancient economics, concurs on the essentially magico-religious nature of the value placed on gold and silver in the Ancient Near East. Laum states that the value ratio of gold to silver remained stable throughout classical antiquity and into the Middle Ages and even modern times at 1 : 13. It is obvious that such a stability in the ratio cannot be explained in terms of rational supply and demand. The explanation, says Laum, lies in the astrological ratio of the cycles of their divine counterparts, the Sun and Moon. The solar year and lunar month, then, direct not only the poet's fancy, but also the fluctuations of the marketplace in metals.
This fourth link is of particular interest from the perspective of the Glass Bead Game since it indicates the pre-existence of a suitable hieroglyphic language of the sort Hesse envisions -- although for the transcription of this link into such a language, additional signs to distinguish the celestial bodies from *their* metals would be required.
What I hope and trust we have here is a convenient illustration of the kind of thinking which goes into a Glass Bead Game -- and which I believe is in fact quite natural to the human mind as it goes about the business of comparing and contrasting sorting and symbolizing what the Chinese would call the ten thousand things in ways that prove illuminating -- applied to two moves which are not in fact ideas but celestial bodies: in other words to two data or givens of human experience.
It is my contention, in other words, that human beings will already tend to have thought of Sun and Moon as, at the very least, a *matched pair* in some sense, and that they will even in childhood have begun the process of extending that underlying insight into some of the kinds of metaphoric and symbolic connections discussed here ... so that this particular Game is one with which, so to speak, they will already be familiar: our example here may serve to illustrate how links in the Game can be formally developed and expressed, but the Game itself can be recognized as a natural human activity.
As an illustration of Glass Bead Game thinking, this particular example has the added virtue of the marble- or pearl-like quality of the two bodies as they appear to us, and the fortuitous benefit of there being a hieroglyphic language to hand to give us some concept of how such a Game language might appear.
Finally, I should mention that the image of the moon as a pearl is in no sense original with me. I suspect that it is a widespread usage, and in any case was gratified to discover --as though finding a confirming instance of a long-held intuition.
Edward H Schafer writes in Pacing the Void: T'ang Approaches to the Stars
A shining pearl in the folds of a mollusc's body is a true moon. Its empathy with the sky-moon is complete.
A final meditation might consider the implications of Schafer's word empathy here, as descriptive of the very heart of analogical thinking.
Comments, amplifications and clarifications requested.
Best wishes,
playable variants on
Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game
