Forwarded from Robert who is out of posts for the day. ****************************************************************************** *********************************** "Welcome to the desert of the real." Morpheus, "The Matrix". "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of seas of infinity, and it is not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." H.P.Lovecraft; "The Call of Cthulhu"
I'm replying offlist because I've hit my limit for the day. I don't think anybody's every really figured out just what all those heads were. All of the possibilities you've listed have been seriously suggested. Judith Tarr's version of the Gerbert story has a demon imprisoned in the head by a Moorish sorceror to whom Gerbert is apprenticed and from whom he steals the head. "Baphomet" seems to have been a badly scrambled rendering of an Arabic name; what the original was and what its significance to the Templars, if any, was are anybody's guess. It's entirely possible that the Inquisitors made the name up out of whole cloth. Bacon's head may indeed have been a mechanical device of some kind--he was the kind of man who could have experimented along those lines--but was more likely a "magical calculator" for divining, like the "Lull Engine" of Ramon Lull. If you want a *really* scholarly take on all of this, hunt up Thorndike's *History of Magic and Experimental Science*; it's old but still extremely valuable. > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Sent: Friday, December 10, 1999 6:19 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: [CTRL] Y1K and GERBERT, the First "European" > > -Caveat Lector- > > In a message dated 12/10/99 12:02:46 PM Eastern Standard Time, > [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > > > It's related to Baphomet, and also to the talking brass head that Roger > > Bacon is supposed to have had. BTW, for an excellent historical fantasy > > based on the Gerbert story, see Judith Tarr's *Ars Magica*--a > well-written, > > meticulously-researched novel by a trained medievalist. > > > > Thanks for the tip. Incidentally what is with all of these talking > heads?!?! > Is their some alchemical or Kabbalic underpinning or other occultic > significance? Is the head "possessed" by something or someone? Or is it > a > piece of technology just responding to input like a computer or some such. > I > was just curious if anyone has any input on this topic, where did all the > talking heads come from and what is the "magical" significance to them? > (Besides the fact that they ARE heads and that they DO talk which is > "magical" in itself). >
