In the Egyptian sense, it is SIRIUS the Dog-Star, the Star or Isis-Sothis. Around it are the Stars of the Seven Planets each with its seven-fold counterchanged operation. (Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn)

Regardie, in his commentary above, never saw the image on the Phaistos Disk. He is commenting on these mystery school images below, which come from much later times in history, their origins considered to be very mysterious. Below left, Keys in the Enochian Language by John Dee (16th c. CE), (Click on image for larger view); 2nd left, Osiris altar, Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 20th c.; 3rd left, ceiling of the tomb of Christian Rosenkreuz, 18th c. CE, Roscicrucian; 2nd group, left, floor of the tomb of Christian Rosenkreuz, 18th c. CE, Roscicrucian; 2nd left, Keys in the Enochian language, geometry design, bottom right, star of the Phaistos Disk.

The most mysterious, and the one that resembles the Phaistos Disk image the most, is Keys in the Enochian Language (left, my tracing with color.) The story of the creation of this design is fascinating. When Queen Mary of England, Bloody Mary, imprisoned her half-sister Elizabeth in a nice country estate, Elizabeth was never sure that she would live to adulthood. In 1551, she met the renowned scholar, traveler and astrologer John Dee and asked him for a horoscope. Dee correctly predicted Elizabeth would rise to a high place in the kingdom and live to old age and that Queen Mary would die childless. When Elizabeth gained the throne of England, she made Dee court astrologer and a wealthy man.

In 1581, Dee had an experience in which "there suddenly glowed a dazzling light, in the midst of which, in all his glory stood the great angel, Uriel." Uriel told Dee that if he would obtain a "shewstone" (crystal) and gaze into it, he could communicate with otherworldly beings. Dee complied but he never could see anything, so he hired a series of scryers, all unsuccessful until he hired Edward Kelley, an alchemist and Hermeticist who wrote Theater of Terrestrial Alchemy. Kelly scryed into a black obsidian disk and said he saw an image in the crystal that hung there while he made a wax copy of it. He called it "The Keys in the Enochian Language," the image above, left. He said it contained the language of angels and of the inhabitants of the Garden of Eden (script, below left and right of the tablet). Dee and Kelley believed it to be a pre-Hebraic language, which they learned to speak. Kelley would look into the crystal and see a "Spiritual Creature, like a pretty girl of seven or nine years of age." She called herself Madimi, and Dee named one of his daughters after her. The spirit Madimi pointed out to Kelley letters and symbols on the Keys design, and Kelley relayed the information to Dee.

Similarly, the Phaistos Disk was found with a Linear A tablet (left, but not the one found with the disk) containing an undecipherable script that is considered to be the precursor to the Linear B script, which has been deciphered. These scripts evolved into the Greek language alphabet. That both these pent/hept symbols would involve undecipherable scripts seems to me to be more than coincidence. Resemblances are obvious on comparison of the symbols on the Keys in the Enochian Language with the symbols of Linear A, although it seems neither advances the other in terms of my understanding of what they mean. Maybe someone else would have better luck. Certainly, Linear A qualities as a pre-Hebraic language, and Minoan Crete, though remarkably idyllic, was not the Garden of Eden, although from Dee's perspective it could have seemed that way. Will Linear "A" ever be deciphered? It is a very mysterious language indeed.

At Phaestus we find a kind of prehistoric printing: the hieroglyphs of a great disk unearthed there from Middle Minoan III strata are impressed upon the clay by stamps, one for each pictograph; but here, to add to our befuddlement, the characters are apparently not Cretan but foreign; perhaps the disk is an importation from the East. (Will Durant referencing two writers, G. Glotz, Aegean Civilization, 1925, and Jas. Baikie, Sea-Kings of Crete, 1926.)

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LINEAR A

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LINEAR "A FOR ARGOTHIC"?

Is the legendary Argothic Language portrayed on the tablet (above) as Linear A? The Argothic Language (Langue Argotique, Language of the Argos) is said to be the Secret Language of Jason and the Argonauts. Perhaps there is a clue here as to the origin of Linear A when wordplaying the name Jason to Jesus. By those correlations, the language may be the "language of the angels."

Argothic Language, which may have been a type of picture writing, might have involved the Constellation Argos and other ships of the sky (constellations) that seem to be revolving around the Pole Star and along the ecliptic. As the stars spin overhead, they create relative positions that were plotted by seafaring Minoans in Crete. Many of these became the constellations we know today. Mariners at Phaistos, Crete, probably dotted the location of each star and connected the dots with lines. The intersecting lines were an invisible matrix in space. From this matrix came the constellations and the mariners' ability to predict the movement of the stars.

Perhaps from this matrix came the secret language, a mariners' language based on the movement of stars, star groups, and constellations, that developed from their special knowledge and that perhaps they wore as skin tattoos. This language, derived from early nautical methods of keeping time and location while on the Aegean, is a dead language in the most literal sense. It perhaps was written as skin tattoos worn by Minoan sailors, and when they died, it died with them. This could explain why no archaeological evidence of it can be found save the Phaistos Disk, on which it was preserved. The same clay stamps used to create the disk could also be applied to the skin with a special stain, and then the pictographs were etched by tattoo artists into designs or were simply freehanded without the stamps.

But the perishable nature of the materials on which picture-writing, having for most part only a temporary value, was usually wrought has been fatal to the survival of primitive European pictographs on any large scale. If we had before us the articles of bark and hide and wood of early man in this quarter of the globe or could still see the TATTOO marks on his skin we should have a very different idea of the part once played by picture-writing on European soil. As it is, it is right that the imagination should supply the deficiency of existing evidence. (Sir Arthur Evans, Cretan Pictographs and Prae-Phoenician Script)

Perhaps the Argothic Language was perceived as a gift from the gods who were also perceived to be residents of stars overhead if not the stars themselves. The language of the stars was divinely given to the Argonauts, but only the mariners could understand it - the language of the skin tattoos was the language of the stars - and they could, as a result of this great gift, navigate the ocean. They could also keep track of daytime hours, nighttime hours, and the day and month if they had a version of the Phaistos Disk with them, a clay disk baked so hard that the spray of salt water could not destroy it.

Therefore, the Argothic Language was not a spoken language, not a written language, but was perhaps a picture writing language worn on the skin - as in the stars, so on the skin. It was a language that defined the wearer as an Argonaut, a divine sailor bound to that which is above and that which is below - the ships of the stars on the rolling waves of Oceanus.

Try to learn to read the Argothic Language, by doing the following: Connect the identical dots or pictographs with lines. This will reveal the star groups and constellations. Read the pictographs in light of what you know about the Minoan Civilization and about Jason and the Argonauts.

1.	2.	3.	4.	5.	6.
7.	8.	9.	10.	11.	12.
13.	14.	15.	16.	17.	18.
19.	20.	21.	22.	23.	24.
25.	26.	27.	28.	29.	30.
31.	32.	33.	34.	35.	36.
37.	38.	39.	40.	41.	42.
43.	44.	45.	46.	47.	48.

The rope truss was a unique nautical technology advancement of the Bronze Age, used to stiffen the beam of the ship (above). No other such use of the truss is known until the days of modern engineering. Does this pictograph (left) show a sailor with a rope truss tattoo on his cheek? According to mythology, the original Cretans or "Curetes" were Argonauts (Sailors of the Argo). They were the Minyae who established the Minoan civilization. Perhaps the rope truss tattoo symbolizes the sailor's lineage as descendant of the Argonauts.

The art of rowing can first be discerned upon the Nile. Boats with oars are represented in the earliest pictorial monuments of Egypt; and although some crews are paddling with their faces towards the bow, others are rowing with their faces towards the stern. (H.G. Wells)

Phaistos Disk with pictographs color-coded.

The World Soul is a concept in mysticism credited to Plato but that may have originated in Bronze Age Crete as an early triumph in philosophy. It simply states that behind the physical world lies the spirit world, and further that the physical world emerges from the pre-existant spirit world, in the way that the individual souls emerge from Rhea. But this ancient concept was derived from an even more archaic source, from Sumer or Persia perhaps, expressed as the Three Primordial Principles. It was supposed to be part of a widespread number philosphy during the Bronze Age. The Three Primordial Principles were said to be the cause of the creation of the universe that came into being as a result of the interplay between the two opposing principles and the intermediate principle of unity (left).

The two opposing principles usually were light and dark but they also could be male and female. In our world of electromagnetism, this world that seems built on extreme polarity, we can see why we think this way. It is just the way our minds work. Therefore, any philosophy we come up with as young humanity is bound to be based on this a priori condition. This image from ancient sumer (right) shows the two opposing principles, the light, human female and the dark, male bullgod, and the intermediate principle, the palm tree, which we might philosophically say is the Tree of Life.

During the Bronze Age we elaborated on this realization that it takes not two but three to make the world go round, literally (left), and physics demands it. Given enough time to develop the idea, several thousand years, we turned it into a field of study. It became pervasive throughout the Aegean world as the scientific philosophy of the day, and later on in time we called it the Holy Trinity. In the Bronze Age we begin working on the mathematical and geometrical applications of it and sharing with our neighbors in Egypt, Babylon, Assyria and Crete, by stealing the information back and forth. We needed thousands of years to do this because we did not have radio, television, telephones, automobiles or internet. But we did have Dodona in northwestern Greece, developing as the media hub of this ancient world, accessible to all by the Aegean Sea, and we had many other sanctuaries throughout the Aegean world.

The number philosophy that eventually developed from the concept of the Three Primordial Principles and which supposedly was widespread in the Bronze Age, had at the heart of it a religious science that apparently was shared by the astronomer-priests of the Aegean world. It was built upon early astronomy because the stars were the immortals. This astronomy, involving the study of the properties of a circle and the geometry of a sphere, comes under the antique study of "containment of geometrical arrangements." This concept of containment as being sacred is with us still in the legend of the Holy Grail, the cup containing the water of life.

To the ancient astronomers and geometers, containment was sacred because the goddess created circles and spheres, triangles and quadrilaterals, all geometrical forms intending both to build us a universe and bring us to knowledge of Her via the construction. Therefore, to study these sciences is a great privilege because it involves both cosmogony and cosmology. The student becomes a participant in the ongoing creation of the universe by merging with the process of creation via inspiration, and from this can come a great inventor like Daedalus who reinvents the world by inventing things and ideas for it. In the Minoan world, this religious philosophy explained the origin of the universe and our place within it by describing a perfect goddess in terms of Her science. For the students of this religious science, whether in the Bronze Age or the modern age, that has not changed. Back then it probably was the basis of the widespread number philosophy of the Bronze Age.

In the beginning, this goddess in the higher realms of light began to emanate the world, which flowed out of her, and thus exists as a reflection of her realm in an as above, so below reality. This goddess, who exists as queen of the heavens, the brightest star, began to spin the world out of her in a spiral, which is evidenced in the motion of the constellations around her. Later on in time, this concept takes an abstract form to become Mind and Idea, with the concept that the Creator, who is beginning to be conceived of as male, exists alone in the universe and has the idea to create a world to keep himself company. But this world he creates is illusory, a reflection of him and existing as his idea. In the Bronze Age, the goddess emanated the world but it was real, not illusory, and patterned on her reality that contained 60 archetypes (Argotypes), made of 48 soul types (Oarsmen).

In Emanationism, God had the idea to create a universe and that was all it took. The universe is the Idea, and it takes something the size of a universe to be a true reflection of God. The universe is set in motion by God thinking and thus is a moving reflection of the still Mind of God from which it emanated. The Phaistos Disk can be used to demonstrate this. Connecting the two Thysri pictographs on side 2 creates diameter. From the physical spin of the diameter comes an illusion, something that is both real and unreal. (My exact tracings of the disk, color inverted, animated gif.)

One (Mind)

Two (Idea/Reflection)

The animation creates an equal-arms cross, in which length and width are the same, so that, with the addition of spin, these original two principles, Mind and Idea, produce a third principle -- That Which Contains/That Which is Contained, the whole concept demonstrated by this Minoan symbol of the Goddess of the Double Axes (Axis?). (right) From this idea comes the antique science of containment of geometrical arrangements, and perhaps this further defines the origin and age of the cross as symbol. Much later on in early common era Gnosticism, the cross was Horos-Stauros, Horus Star or Eye of Horus.

Through this transformation of myth via the ancient sky god Horus, son of the god Osiris, the star Sirius makes its transition from being a great goddess to being a symbol of the birth of the son of God -- the Star of Bethlehem. Sirius maintains its status as the Eye of God/dess. Making this transition with the symbol is the associated idea that the son of God has the ability to regenerate the human being to an eternal Soul or Spirit-Soul. Included here are two images demonstrating these ideas, the first from the papyrus of Amon-M-Sut and the second from the papyrus of Ta-Shed Khonsu, Cairo Museum.

In the first, Horus is symbolized by an upside-down falcon that is magically regenerating an individual using stars and disks, the 5-pointed star representing Sirius. Above him is the fount and symbol of his magic, the winged disk in the boat of Ra. In the second image, the individual is regenerated and now can travel to the higher dimensions, supported by the winged disk and the eyes of Horus.

That the disk is winged only makes sense, given that the supernatural being who intervenes to perform a miracle typically has wings. The disk as That Which Contains contains all the necessary geometry to perform the regeneration. The idea of the angels as angles is an old one, derived from this ancient religious science. Geometry is a spiritual component of the physical world because it exists in potentia and is "invoked" like spirit when we begin connecting points with lines. Knowing these religious sciences as well as he did, Daedalus probably conceived of a clever way to invent images that were both astounding to those who saw them and instructive as well. Most likely, he was highly educated in the study of containment of geometrical arrangements, their relationship to numbers (below), and the development of "method of exhaustion."

Method of exhaustion shows how to 'exhaust' the area of a circle by means of an inscribed polygon; if we successively double the number of sides in the polygon, we will eventually reduce the difference between the area of the polygon (known) and the area of the circle (unknown) to the point where it is smaller than any magnitude we choose. This method made it possible to calculate the area of a circle to any desired degree of accuracy; with a little further development, it could be used to calculate the area within (or under) other curves as well and to calculate the area bounded by certain spirals, and the surface area and volume of a sphere. (David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science, pp.88, 89)

The method of exhaustion was probably borrowed by Euclid from his predecessor Eudoxus, (Ibid) (400-355 BCE), a Greek astronomer and mathematician credited with this inventive method of calculating proportion. The Phaistos Disk, containing the geometry of a pentagram inside a heptagon (the big star Sirius), seems to show exhaustion in use 1200 years before Eudoxus.

The number philosophy, shown in the table below, makes of a circle, in the mystical sense and in terms of mysticism of a much later period, an alchemical vessel, a Mixing Bowl, in which can be seen and analyzed the alchemical stages in the action of the Absolute in differentiating Self into a phenomenal universe through geometry. Each alchemical stage is introduced with 1-13 of the 13 precepts of the Emerald Table of Hermes Trismegistus, a legendary alchemical enigma and text puzzle from a much later period in history. Various cultures claim to have discovered the Emerald Table-Tabula Smaragdina. In one account of discovery, Alexander the Great found the table in the tomb of Hermes (Thoth). In another account, Sarah the wife of the biblical Abraham, found the entombed Hermes holding in his hands his table. Alternately, the precepts may have been written in Syriac.

These precepts of Hermes were cherished with a kind of religious fervour by the adepts (of alchemy), who looked upon them as summarising in a concealed form the fundamental secrets of alchemy and of the Philosopher's Stone. (John Read, F.R.S., From Alchemy to Chemistry)

In this geometry theology, ultimate reality is numerical, number is the key to the universe, and triangles are the fundamental building blocks of the cosmos; therefore, geometry is sacred. Included in the table are the precepts of Hermes.