Sunday 17 March 2019

a higher plane of existence

Any time reason and enlightenment encroach upon superstition and mystery, especially in the late Victorian Era, there will be some notable movements in counter-reformation, as Public Domain Review explores, like in sรฉance and mysticism and perniciously in opening up a new realm as the last refuge of miracles and the supernatural.
Sort of like how the indeterminacy and unknowability of quantum mechanics provides a hold-out for the magical (I’m guilty of this sort of thinking as well, from time to time) in those days, people looked towards the extra dimensionality outside of our perception and experienced—only briefly intersecting as for the denizens of Flatland (1884), not flat-Earthers but rather two-dimensional beings that could not imagine a realm of geometric solids, and these unexplainable encounters inspired maths lecturer William Anthony Granville to author a sort of Euclid’s Elements in 1922 that went about trying to axiomatically prove assertions in Christian text rather than the nature of polygons. Read Granville’s entire The Fourth Dimension and the Bible at the link up top and find out more about the precursor works that led up to it.