Merlin’s Garden Astronomical and Philosophical Stuff

Written and Curated by Wynn Wolfe, 2012

This is an 1880 gouache painting by the British artist Edward Burne-Jones titled The Magic Circle. This is how I want to introduce you to Merlin -- our gardener, mariner guide, and astronomer extraordinaire. Anthropologists place him in all sorts of teacher guises in the stretch of history. Here Merlin shows up as a Mariner attracted by the inner call of the astonished person on the right.

His first action to all who call is to draw a circle -- the most natural way to organize one’s thinking. It gives outline to all facts and theory -- remember, theory means “to see.” Here he uses the circle to show us, on a grand scale, the whole of our garden universe.

This is the all-sky picture of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation imaged by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). It is an orbiting satellite probe built to measure things which are known not isotropic or symmetrical. Hence, the colors show tiny temperature fluctuations in the microwave background radiation which is an echo of the Big Bang and the fertile ground of our universal garden.

Here’s a piece of another circular diagram that reads from left to right starting with our cosmic era in the modern universe looking back in time (or into our universe’s light-echo) towards the so-called Big Bang. This chart shows the Hubble Space Telescope, left center, focused and resolved back to just under 1 billion light years (the purple band locating the Ultra-Deep Field image).

This mind-boggling image is the Hubble Space Telescope’s Ultra-Deep Field view of the universe that we just saw indicated within the purple band. This modern historic image is comparable to the Dead Sea Scrolls of ground-based antiquity scholars! The orbiting Hubble telescope looks back in time approximately 13 billion light years, and is used by other ground-based antiquity scholars (astronomers) to search for galaxies that existed at that time.

As the ancient Gnostic Simon Magus put it (he’s the one in black in the upper right):

“Things in the cosmos come into being through an image in order that it should appear in all its essence, virtue, grandeur, and effects.”

Since the Greek mathematician Archimedes proclaimed: “Give me the leverage and I’ll lift the world,” astronomers, cosmologists, physicists at Cern, and artists of all types, have been hard at work trying to change it to: “Give us the image and we’ll lift the world.”

Following are several “images” and quotes as fuel for your personal search engine:

As a teaser for what were going to see on the tour of Merlin’s garden, this picture (a news release in February, 1995), is the Hubble Space Telescope’s unprecedented view of the Cygnus Loop -- a supernova remnant, a nebula, in the constellation Cygnus. What we’re looking at is the fine structure of shockwaves from a stellar explosion -- also known as shock fronts, and blast waves. They are caused by a dying star that exploded out into intergalactic space all the congealed elements and gases that were -- high speed stellar winds blowing sometimes up to thousands of kilometers per second. As you’ll see later these shockwaves forge and give shape to future garden plots for the perennial flowers of the cosmos. (the colors are added by astrophysicists to help identify the elements and gases that make it up.

Interestingly, one-hundred-eight years prior to the aforementioned NASA news release, was the evidently prophetic 1888 news release of H.P. Blavatsky’s THE SECRET DOCTRINE. Its two well-referenced volumes on the Cosmos and Man includes a curious statement about Supernova remnants, stellar explosions, shockwaves, etc., in that time periods vernacular: “The ‘fiery wind’ is the incandescent cosmic dust which only follows magnetically as iron filings follow the magnet, the directing thought of the ‘Creative Forces.’”

Let’s listen to Edna St. Vincent Millay’s personal discovery of the cosmos taken from her 1912 poem Renascence: “…The sky, I thought, is not so grand; I 'most could touch it with my hand! And reaching up my hand to try, I screamed to feel it touch the sky. I screamed, and -- lo! -- Infinity Came down and settled over me…”

As one modern philosopher put it “...these very stars are manifestations of the Hierarchy of Compassion, bringing light, and love, and wisdom into the dark realms of nature’s material sphere.”

Furthermore, the 15th century alchemist philosopher Paracelsus tells us “the stars attract from us to themselves, and we again from them to us...Everything pertaining to the metaphysical or spiritual worlds must come to us from the stars, and if we are in friendship with them, we may obtain [learn] the greatest magical effects.”

Can we really converse with the stars?

Let’s listen in on Alice who went Through the Looking Glass, who finds herself on a garden path --

“O Tiger-lily!” she said, addressing herself to one that was waving gracefully about in the wind, “I wish you could talk!” “We can talk,” said the Tiger-lilly, when there’s anybody worth talking to.”

Sometimes, when we look at someone else’s version or perspective of truth whether we believe it or not, helps us along our own path to understanding. “As above and so below,” is the befitting maxim from antiquity.

Here is the warp and woof of the electromagnetic spectrum of radiation -- the loom of evident and hidden threads or amplitudes of light! Here are the discovered wavelengths of light’s energy forms which astronomers and astrophysicists use to peer into our wondrous universe.

From left to right we see Gamma-rays, X-rays, the Ultraviolet, then Visible Light, Infra-red, Microwaves, Radio/TV waves, and Long-waves.

Breaking News!NASA Headline News, March 16, 2012: Mysterious Objects at the Edge of the Electromagnetic Spectrum.

...“Outside the realm of human vision is the entire electromagnetic spectrum of wonders. Each type of light - - from radio waves to gamma-rays -- reveals something unique about the universe.

“NASA has many telescopes "working the wavelengths" up and down the electromagnetic spectrum. One of them, the Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope orbiting Earth, has just crossed a new electromagnetic frontier...

Before the Fermi Telescope was launched in June 2008, there were only four known celestial sources of photons (light particles) in the gamma-ray energy range. "In 3 years plus, Fermi has found almost 500 more,” says astrophysicist Dave Thompson at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. What lies within this new realm? "Fermi is picking up crazy-energetic photons," says Thompson, "and it's detecting so many of them we've been able to produce the first all-sky map of the very high energy universe.”

“This is what the sky looks like near the very edge of the electromagnetic spectrum, between 10 billion and 100 billion electron volts.”

“The light we see with human eyes consists of photons with energies in the range 2 to 3 electron volts. The sky [is] a frenzy of activity.”

“About a third of the new sources can’t be clearly linked to any of the known types of objects that produce gamma rays... We have no idea what they are,” says Thompson. [It is a mystery].

Remember that sometimes when we look at someone else’s version of the truth, whether we believe it or not, can help us to get a hold of an idea or concept?

Well, I have taken some artistic liberties here to put this image from Coxhead and Hiller’s book: DREAMS, Visions of the Night, since the extent of the electromagnetic spectrum is now in question. Let’s take a closer look...

At the bottom left is Krishna, picturing (imagining) Vishnu, the god of sustenance in his sleep — just a the gnostic Simon Magus mentioned. From this particular primal (and unsuspected) radiant fountain-source, the creative principle of all worlds and evolving entities grow out of the navel of the dreaming god in the mythical instant of the creation of the universe!

Coincidently, the modern cosmologists Stephen Hawking and Neil Toruk proposed (imagined) that a universe comes into being from nothingness in the form of a ‘instanton’ -- a radiant particle of space and time -- “It’s not so much a thing as an event,” they say.

Science writer K.C. Cole reminds us, “Most cosmologists never look up. It's the power of ideas that strike them dumb."

Suddenly, our Mariner Gardner Merlin speaks up and begins to recite the last few lines from his namesake poem MERLIN AND THE GLEAM by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

“Launch your vessel...

“Launch your vessel…ere it vanishes…After it, follow it,

Follow The Gleam.”