The History of Knowledge

[Richard Amiel McGough]

I'm reading a book called A History of Knowledge: Past, Present, and Future by Charles Van Doren. It's genre is that of Universal History - it is a very ambitious project which purports to be "a compendium of everything that humankind has thought, invented, created, considered, and perfected from the beginning of civilisation into the twenty-first century."

I picked it up for a buck at a library sale in Seattle a few years ago, and just popped it open again. I noticed my comments in the margin highlighting this quote from the Introduction (pg xvi) where he wrote this:

We will never forget the new ideas about just government that were advanced and fought for during the revolutions of the eighteenth century in England, America, and France.

I included this in my discussion of the correlation about Spoke 18. On the next page Van Doren mentions the Scientific Revolution of the Seventeenth century, which also I long have had documented on my site (see here). I wrote those articles a couple years before discovering the BC/AD correlation of history with the Bible Wheel which I document in my article called Aleph-Tav: The Key to the Kingdoms:





Now I have had a nagging thought in the back of my mind for some years that there was some connection between the events spanning the 15th-17th centuries (which includes the invention of the printing press, Reformation, Renaiscence, and the Scientific Revolution) with the corresponding BC centuries. This intuition is confirmed by Van Doren in the second chapter of his book called "The Greek Explosion" which opens with these words:

THERE HAVE BEEN two knowledge explosions in human history, not just one. The second began four or five centuries ago and is still going on. THE first began in Greece during the sixth century BC.

The Greek explosion also had a long life. Llike ours, it spread quickly and finally affected the entire known world. Like ours, it commenced with the discover of a new communications device and a new method for acquiring knowledge, continued with the help of striking avances in mathematics, and culminated in revolutionary theories about matter and force.

The centuries spanning the "two knowledge explosions" appear symmetrically on the "Key to the Kingdoms." They span the letters Samek, Ayin, Pey on both the BC and AD portions of the Key.

I encourage anyone with similar insights to post them here.

Richard

[Victor]

When we move from Spoke 14 to Spoke 15 of the Bible Wheel, a lot takes place: in 2 Chronicles, everything is very concentrated in the Promised Land but, from Ezra onward, things are much more dispersed. The Jews undergo a Diaspora. In Ezra and Nehemiah we read about several international correspondences going back and forth and Book 17, Esther, takes place all outside Canaan!

Similarly, in the second Cycle of the Wheel, Spokes 15-17 correspond to the post-exilic Prophets. In the third, we read of the "twelve tribes dispersed" in James and find similar language in 1 Peter (and 2 Peter has the same recepients as the first letter).

This corresponds to the Hebrew Letters that govern Spokes 15, 16 and 17, Samek, Ayin and Pey. These three Letters spell the word Saw'af, which has the meaning of "segmenting", "lopping off a branch". The first and last letters combine with Resh to form the word Paras, which means "to disperse".

So the idea of dispersion and segmentation is very strong on Spokes 15 through 17. Similarly, there's a lot in common between these concepts and what took place in the centuries governed by Samek, Ayin and Pey on the Wheel of History. When we move from the 7th to 6th century BC and from the 14th to the 15th century AD, things are not as much linear as they were. Up to the 6th BC/14th AD centuries, the narrative was too centered around Israel and the Catholic Church, but after that there is an outburst of events in History. There's a knowledge explosion in the world. It doesn't mean that there was not plenty of knowledge before. Scientific knowledge in our age, for example, was too concentrated in the Catholic Church who was the sole promoter of prodution and preservation of knowledge. But starting with the 6th century BC and the 15th century AD, there's a knowledge dispersion; indeed, an explosion.

Curiously, even the word chosen by the author reveals the alphabetic integration with the Alphabet: the letter Pey transmits this idea of exploding, breaking forth. The search for knowledge was pulverized and segmented.