From Religion to Science in the Constitution of Ritual Archives: Between Toyin Falola's African Ritual Archives and the Pirate Site and Pre-Eminent Knowledge Space Z-Libraryand Scientific Cosmology and its Artistic Evocation in Gayle Hermick's Wandering the Immeasurable: Power and Paradox in a Personal Journey through a Miniscule Fraction of Awesome Knowledge Cosmos

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

                                            

                                                           

                                                               

                                          From Religion to Science in the Constitution of Ritual Archives

                                                   Between Toyin Falola's African Ritual Archives

                                                                                and the 

                                         Pirate Site and Pre-Eminent Knowledge Space Z-Library

                                                                                    and 

          Scientific Cosmology and its Artistic Evocation in Gayle Hermick's Wandering the Immeasurable 

Power and Paradox in a Personal Journey through a Miniscule Fraction of Awesome Knowledge Cosmos

                                                             Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                              Compcros

                                     Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

                       "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

This essay dramatizes an encounter with a digital book archive and its relationship to the idea of the cosmos and the means and outcome of its exploration as a sacred archive.

These interpretations are inspired by Toyin Falola's essay ''Ritual Archives'' on African religious archives, the evocative force of which text motivates my interpreting it beyond its immediate meanings.

The journey begins with a bibliophilic celebration in the depth of paradox, of gratitude in the midst of sensitivity to the dilemma of being fed by goods less than justly acquired, in nourishment by the oasis represented by shadow libraries, among whom Z-Library is preeminent, resources sharing freely the creative capital of others without their permission or profit, a contradictory existence enmeshing a seeker of truth who is compelled to drink from offerings that cannot be described as completely just, in the name of nourishing himself.

''What is this universe in which humanity finds itself?'' is the central question the seeker explores in journeying through the castles of paradox, questionably acquired goods he feasts upon, as he learns from Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei and their successors in the inter-generational struggle to understand the material structure and dynamism of the cosmos.

This encounter with masters of modern scientific cosmology as encountered on Z-Library, the book archive of questionable justice in making books and articles freely available for reading and downloading without the permission  of the writers or publishers, making it the castle of paradox previously referred to, is mediated through an exploration of the universal and multidisciplinary significance of Toyin Falola's essay ''Ritual Archives'', on African archives of religious significance.

 

The Paradoxical Glory of Z-Library

One of the most fruitful ways in which one can spend one's time is in rummaging through the free book and article download site Z-Library, clicking on colorful book covers to read scintillating book synopses, downloading books and chasing down the infinitely unfolding recommendations of other books at various stages of relationship to each book accessible through the site.

Z-Library is the best scholarly book and scholarly article information archive I have encountered, from Google to scholarly databases such as Google Scholar, JSTOR, Sage, Project Muse, to library information systems such as the London wide library network, the name of which I have forgotten.

The problem with Z-Library is that it is a site for sharing books and articles without the permission of or profit to their writers and publishers. 

Here I am, in my house in Ikeja, Lagos, gleefully downloading at no cost some of the most powerful books from some of the most accomplished of Western publishers, books which have little or no visibility in the three bookshops and the three bend-down-booksellers who display their books on the street pavement,  known to me to sell  sophisticated non-fiction in this large local government in Nigeria's economic capital, yet an area housing the local and international airports. There may be one to three public libraries in Ikeja to be found with careful searching but I am yet to visit them.

Sitting in front of my computer, Z-Library takes me to soaring book descriptions of scientific achievement, making my head spin with the sheer glory of human creativity.

Why do Objects Move, on Earth and Beyond Earth?

Danilo Capecchi's The Problem of the Motion of Bodies : A Historical View of the Development of Classical Mechanics is described as focusing  "on the way in which the problem of the motion of bodies has been viewed and approached over the course of human history. It is not another traditional history of mechanics but rather aims to enable the reader to fully understand the deeper ideas that inspired men, first in attempting to understand the mechanisms of motion and then in formulating theories with predictive as well as explanatory value.''

     Isaac Newton's Achievement

This description takes me closer to appreciating Isaac Newton's achievements in answering the questions, ''why and how do objects move?'' and ''is there a relationship between how and why objects move on Earth and in the material universe as a whole, such as the motion of the Earth on its axis and of planets around the sun?''

These explorations enabled him develop laws of motion and his gravitational theory describing the forces influencing how and why objects move on Earth and in the universe beyond Earth, enabling space travel centuries later, though hardly dreamt of in his 17th century, and the transformative influence of space exploration in technology and society, among other Newtonian impacts in the various fields he contributed to. 

Who was this man who explored things everyone observes but not all examine-the movement of objects and their terrestrial and cosmic implications?

''Isaac Newton was born in a stone farmhouse in 1642, fatherless and unwanted by his mother'' states the description, on the same site, of James Gleick's Isaac Newton, using what may be described as exaggerations nevertheless highlighting Newton's domestic challenges attested by his standard biographical image. 

''When he died in London in 1727 he was so renowned he was given a state funeral—an unheard-of honor for a subject whose achievements were in the realm of the intellect. During the years he was an irascible presence at Trinity College, Cambridge, Newton imagined properties of nature and gave them names— mass , gravity , velocity —things our science now takes for granted. Inspired by Aristotle, spurred on by Galileo’s discoveries and the philosophy of Descartes, Newton grasped the intangible and dared to take its measure, a leap of the mind unparalleled in his generation'' continues the book description.

Where can these wonderful Newtonian creativities be found?

''In his monumental 1687 work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, [ Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy ]  known familiarly as the Principia'' goes the introduction to  Anne Whitman's English translation of that book, with Bernhad Cohen's introduction, on the same site, '' Isaac Newton laid out in mathematical terms the principles of time, force, and motion that have guided the development of modern physical science. Even after more than three centuries and the revolutions of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, Newtonian physics continues to account for many of the phenomena of the observed world, and Newtonian celestial dynamics is used to determine the orbits of our space vehicles.''

How is one to understand the complex processes by which a human mind, ''working alone, thinking alone, and experimenting alone'', ''obsessively determined to find out how things worked'', as stated by a book review, on the same site,  of another printing of Gleick's Newton book, was able to work out how the Earth and other planets are correlated through principles that also affect motion on Earth?

Subrahmanijan Chandrasekhar's Newton’s Principia for the Common Reader , again on Z-Library, is described as analysing  ''150 propositions which form a direct chain leading to Newton's formulation of his universal law of gravitation'',  arranging Newton's proofs ''in a linear sequence of equations and arguments''.

Between Science and Aesthetics

I see below the description of the Chandrasekhar book, among the mosaic of colourful book covers automatically presented by the site as having some relationship to the book being described, that Chandrasekhar's Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science is also available, along with the other texts accessible through a search for that author's name.

The truth, beauty, aesthetics and motivations book in science is very promising, indicating facilitating moving through wonder at scientific creativity to appreciating its driving forces in relation to quests for truth and beauty, issues that led me to the accidental discovery of these texts on Z-Library in search of  Danilo Capecchi's The Problem of the Motion of Bodies, to which I had been led by a Google image search for the following form, which I later learnt is astronomer Johannes Kepler's drawing of the orbit of the planet Mars as seen from Earth, recorded from 1580-1596:

                                                                                        

                                                              

                                                                                           

 

My interest in the image is inspired by its inscription in Gayle Hermick's Wandering the Immeasurable, a steel sculpture tracing  part of the history of scientific and technical knowledge worldwide, as seen at the Swiss side of the border spanning institution CERN (European Institute for Nuclear Science) .

Julien Marius Ordan's  picture of the construct, directly below,  emphasizes the structural power of its  monumental form, amplified through framing by the atmospheric beauty of the sky's expanse:

                                                                                     

                                                                                  

                                                                        

                                                                                                  

Running round the coiling and uncoiling sculpture  are myriad geometric and other mathematical symbols amidst a galaxy of names of people and inscriptions, all in various languages, the angle of the photograph making the structure look like a tower reaching towards the infinite through the  immense expanse of  sky, an impression consonant with its name Wandering the Immeasurable, the immeasurable being the cosmos, the wanderers being those whose names and ideas are inscribed on the coiling and uncoiling steel, inscriptions tracing the history of science and technical accomplishment across the world from ancient beginnings to the present, showcasing the names and efforts of enquirers trying to measure what cannot be measured in its fullness, the distance between their aspirations and the reality of what they are trying to grasp being so vast they may be understood as wanderers, seekers who have no clue about the ultimate orientation of their activities, rendering them  unguided enquirers  rather than purposeful seekers, so vast is the gap between their knowledge and their reality, the reality in which they are enframed even as they try to understand it, as the title of that sculpture may be interpreted.

What led me to trying to find out the meaning of that geometric symbol in Wandering the Immeasurable?

The Quest for Totalistic Knowledge

I had stumbled upon the anguished self address by Faust in the German writer Goethe's poem of that name, agonizing over how much he had learnt, yet how little he actually knew, and his efforts to go beyond this barrier between scope of learning and true knowledge through the study of magic in order to understand, not just the outer, extrinsic identity of the universe, its material forms and their complementation by human created knowledge, but ''the inmost force which binds the world, and guides its course'', as translated from Goethe's German by Bayard Taylor,  its essence, unifying force and directive power.

Faust's cognitive hunger is temporarily fed by  his elevating encounter, in a book of magic, with a symbol of the macrocosm, the unity of the cosmos, opening his understanding to how all its parts feed each other in a harmony of heaven and earth.

This symbol, as visualized by the Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn's etching of the scene, shares with a global sequence of symbols of the macrocosm as  diversely perceived in various cultures, from Hindu yantras to Buddhist mandalas, Yoruba opon ifa, Native American medicine wheels, and perhaps even scientific diagrams, the use of a circle in suggesting relationships between diversities held in balance:

                                                                             

                                              

                                                       Dr Faustus in His Study, 1652 by Rembrandt

                                                                      From Rembrandt Paintings

                                                                     

"Why not use geometric images", I thought, "particularly circles as inscribed in Gayle Hermick's Wandering the Immeasurable, as a guide to making the point I am developing in an essay I am writing on the universal and multidisciplinary significance of  Nigerian-American scholar Toyin Falola's essay 'Ritual Archives', his study of African religious archives?"

         Between Spirituality and Science in the Quest for Cosmic Knowledge

Is Faust's yearning to understand cosmic unity, not, at its roots, similar to the  drive propelling the quest for cosmological unity in science? Is it not akin to the orientations driving mythic and religious cosmologies and mystical aspirations but expressed in science in terms of being filtered through the intellect and a circumscription to the material cosmos?

Is this orientation towards understanding cosmic totality not related to the sense of awe, of wonder, at the overarching power of the universe and its empowerment by the critical consciousness of the human being, orientations likely strategic to modern science even if no more expressed in strictly scientific texts, as they may have been when science and philosophy were closely correlated in Europe in the discipline Natural Philosophy, though better expressed since the 20th century in popular science books by scientists?

May the cosmos not itself be understood as an archive of wonders,  the history of science another archive demonstrating the exploration of those wonders, the tools of science ritual instruments through which the archive of nature is explored, creating archives of knowledge, the entire enterprise shot through with the sense of entering into an awesome space of infinitely expanding knowing every bit as inspiring as a cathedral, temple, shrine or sacred forest, the kind of progression into awesomeness Gayle Hermick's sculpture may be seen as dramatizing?

Who am I writing this?

The Wanderer of the Immeasurable

A wanderer of the immeasurable, moving from place to place in search of knowledge, hungry for that understanding  sought by Faust, compelled to rely on an organ of questionable justice, Z-Library, in feeding this thirst, the wealth of knowledge I need being beyond my reach due to my location and my pocket, in Nigeria, physically and economically distant from the global centres of knowledge, where a significant part of what is known by humanity is developed, processed and transmitted to the rest of the globe through books and articles.

                                                            

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Running round the coiling and uncoiling sculpture  are myriad geometric and other mathematical symbols amidst a galaxy of names of people and inscriptions, all in various languages, the angle of the photograph making the structure look like a tower reaching towards the infinite through the  immense expanse of  sky, an impression consonant with its name Wandering the Immeasurable.

The immeasurable is the cosmos, the wanderers those whose names and ideas are inscribed on the coiling and uncoiling steel, inscriptions tracing the history of science and technical accomplishment across the world from ancient beginnings to the present, showcasing the names and efforts of enquirers trying to measure what cannot be measured in its fullness.

The distance between their aspirations and the reality of what they are trying to grasp is so vast they may be understood as wanderers, seekers who have no clue about the ultimate orientation of their activities, rendering them  unguided enquirers  rather than purposeful seekers, so huge is the gap between their knowledge and their reality, the reality in which they are enframed even as they try to understand it, as the title of that sculpture may be interpreted.

What led me to trying to find out the meaning of that geometric symbol in Wandering the Immeasurable?

The Quest for Totalistic Knowledge

I had stumbled upon the anguished self address by Faust in the German writer Goethe's poem of that name, agonizing over how much he had learnt, yet how little he actually knew, and his efforts to go beyond this barrier between scope of learning and true knowledge through the study of magic in order to understand, not just the outer, extrinsic identity of the universe, its material forms and their complementation by human created knowledge, but ''the inmost force which binds the world, and guides its course'', as translated from Goethe's German by Bayard Taylor,  its essence, unifying force and directive power.

Faust's cognitive hunger is temporarily fed by  his elevating encounter, in a book of magic, with a symbol of the macrocosm, the unity of the cosmos, opening his understanding to how all its parts feed each other in a harmony of heaven and earth.

This symbol, as visualized by the Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn's etching of the scene, shares with a global sequence of symbols of the macrocosm as  diversely perceived in various cultures, from Hindu yantras to Buddhist mandalas, Yoruba opon ifa, Native American medicine wheels, and perhaps even scientific diagrams, the use of a circle in suggesting relationships between diversities held in balance:

                                                                             

                                              

                                                       Dr Faustus in His Study, 1652 by Rembrandt

                                                                      From Rembrandt Paintings

                                                                     

"Why not use geometric images", I thought, "particularly circles as inscribed in Gayle Hermick's Wandering the Immeasurable, as a guide to making the point I am developing in an essay I am writing on the universal and multidisciplinary significance of  Nigerian-American scholar Toyin Falola's essay 'Ritual Archives', his study of African religious archives?"

         Between Spirituality and Science in the Quest for Cosmic Knowledge

Is Faust's yearning to understand cosmic unity, not, at its roots, similar to the  drive propelling the quest for cosmological unity in science? Is it not akin to the orientations driving mythic and religious cosmologies and mystical aspirations but expressed in science in terms of being filtered through the intellect and a circumscription to the material cosmos?

Is this orientation towards understanding cosmic totality not related to the sense of awe, of wonder, at the overarching power of the universe and its empowerment by the critical consciousness of the human being, orientations likely strategic to modern science even if no more expressed in strictly scientific texts, as they may have been when science and philosophy were closely correlated in Europe in the discipline Natural Philosophy, though better expressed since the 20th century in popular science books by scientists?

May the cosmos not itself be understood as an archive of wonders,  the history of science another archive demonstrating the exploration of those wonders, the tools of science ritual instruments through which the archive of nature is explored, creating archives of knowledge, the entire enterprise shot through with the sense of entering into an awesome space of infinitely expanding knowing every bit as inspiring as a cathedral, temple, shrine or sacred forest, the kind of progression into awesomeness Gayle Hermick's sculpture may be seen as dramatizing?

Who am I writing this?

The Wanderer of the Immeasurable

A wanderer of the immeasurable, moving from place to place in search of knowledge, hungry for that understanding  sought by Faust, compelled to rely on an organ of questionable justice, Z-Library, in feeding this thirst, the wealth of knowledge I need being beyond my reach due to my location and my pocket, in Nigeria, physically and economically distant from the global centres of knowledge, where a significant part of what is known by humanity is developed, processed and transmitted to the rest of the globe through books and articles.

                                                            

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