Circle VII - Round II

Overview

This is the location of Dante's famous Wood of Suicides (The Violent Against Themselves), where we find some of the most striking imagery in his story. In The Infernova it has a similar feel to it, as it is full of half-tree, half-human beings that were Conspiracy Theorists in their lifetimes. Just as they twisted incomplete histories about momentous events into fanciful stories, so are they half-made up, while their wood is patrolled by a herd of centaur-like beasts, counterparts to the Minotaur, but using the other halves of the bulls and men. The trees don't get to grow indefinitely, though, for there is a hideous, and fitting use to which they are put.

Comments

I recall reading The Inferno and going through the categorization of The Violent in this Seventh Circle, and thinking of how so many Bad Ideas out there are Evil Twins of an associated branch of Science or learning. I realized that Astrologers could be considered The Violent Against Astronomy, and that Creationists are the violent against Geology. Well shall get to them shortly. But I think this is a good place to discuss one notorious group that I failed to explicitly mention in the book. The reader should know that they certainly deserve a place in The Infernova, probably somewhere around the Wood Of Conspiracy Theorists. The group I am referring to are The Numerologists, the Violent Against Statistics.

This sort of thing has long gone on, and there are many variations on it. I'll give a couple of examples here.

The first is rather whimsical. While browsing an encyclopedic textbook on modern cults, I came across a short account of a woman named Solara (go ahead, Google her) and her teachings about the mystical properties a particular time of day: 11:11. I suppose it applies to both AM and PM versions.

According to what I glean from her site, there is some kind of mystical doorway that opened on January 11, 1992 and is "scheduled to close" on November 11, 2011.

Solara explains that 11:11 is "a pre-encoded trigger placed into our cellular memory banks prior to our descent into matter."

Expanding on this, she writes:

"Millions of people have one thing in common; they keep seeing the numbers 11:11.These people come from all countries, all races, walks of life, and levels of awareness. Even schoolchildren have a knowing that when they see 11:11, it's time to make a wish. At first, it seems like a mere coincidence; then it becomes uncanny. 'I started up my car at exactly 11:11.' 'Why do I always wake up at 11:11?' Finally, it becomes undeniable: 'All my clocks froze at 11:11.' Something very strange IS indeed happening."

I could go on but the rest is pretty much the same. Visit her site and you can learn about the different mystical properties of many numbers.

This woman seems nice enough, and her pages are filled with all manner of calls for love and understanding and peace. I'm all for that. But why not just celebrate those things? Why wrap them up in a cocoon of inane babble about magical properties of numbers that is obviously nothing but the ramblings of a fevered imagination? How would one test or validate any of her assertions about, say, the number 88?

A more popular and "important" variant on this sort of non-thinking mathematical masturbation os exemplified by the former New York times bestseller, The Bible Code by Michael Drosnin. Below are excerpts from what the publisher advertised about the book in an earlier edition:

"For three thousand years a code in the Bible has remained hidden. Now it has been unlocked by computer -- and it may reveal our future. The code was broken by an Israeli mathematician… This book is the first full account of a scientific discovery that may change the world, told by a skeptical secular reporter who became part of the story. The three-thousand-year-old Bible code foretells events that happened thousands of years after the Bible was written. It foresaw both Kennedy assassinations, the Oklahoma City bombing, the election of Bill Clinton -- everything from World War II to Watergate, from the Holocaust to Hiroshima, from the Moon landing to the collision of a comet with Jupiter.
In a few dramatic cases detailed predictions were found in advance -- and the events then happened exactly as predicted. The date the Gulf War would begin was found weeks before the war started. The date of the Jupiter collision was found months before the blast.

The author of this book, investigative reporter Michael Drosnin, himself found the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin predicted in the Bible more than a year before the murder -- and personally warned the Prime Minister.
After the assassination happened, as predicted, when predicted, he was asked to brief the new Prime Minister of Israel and the chief of its famed intelligence agency, the Mossad.
The book is based on Drosnin's five-year investigation. The author interviewed all the experts, here and abroad. He spent many weeks with the world-class mathematician who discovered the code, Dr. Eliyahu Rips, and he met with famous mathematicians at Harvard, Yale, and Hebrew University. He talked to a senior code breaker at the top secret U.S. National Security Agency, who confirmed that there is a code in the Bible that does reveal the future.
No one yet knows if the Bible code accurately foretells what is yet to come. But the code may be a warning to this world of unprecedented danger, perhaps the real Apocalypse, a nuclear World War.
In any event, the Bible code forces us to accept what the Bible itself can only ask us to believe -- that we are not alone.
And it raises a question for us all -- does the code describe an inevitable future, or a series of possible futures whose ultimate outcome we can still decide?"

Now this all sounds very intriguing, doesn't it? But once you understand the trick, it is considerably less impressive. And he trick boils down to this: If you take a string of words and letters and go through a great number of different arrangements, and you only look for sequences of letters that hint at something that you want them to, then you'll eventually find something. How do you go through these different arrangements? Simple - change the width of the paragraph, because every time, the vertical and diagonal alignments will shift. If you consider the total number of letters in a book as large as the bible, and then go through all the permutations of such arrangements, and only look for the kinds of clues you want to see, you will find them. 
However, the best way to demonstrate this is by example, and that is exactly what was done at the wonderful Assassinations Foretold in Moby Dick page.