This writing details a reverie, on which I’ve been musing for some time. Though the concepts have been familiar to me for some years, their meaning has only lately taken on a sense of fullness. One could say it came full circle, for the work greatly concerns my thoughts on the symbology of the circle. With that too is the mystery of the zero and some observations about late Bronze Age termination rituals, on which I’ll elaborate first.
In a book I’ve been reading recently about the folklore customs from my home county of Norfolk, details of a particular archaeological discovery caught my attention. In the town of Caistor St. Edmund, a bronze shield was unearthed from a ditch. The ditch was one of three rings bordering the wooden defences that long ago enclosed and protected the town. You can probably imagine what the settlement would have looked like, compact and safely contained, in a high wall of wooden staves, with minimal points of entry. At some point these defences were deemed no longer necessary, they were dismantled and the ditches filled in, allowing the town to sprawl.
It is thought that the buried shield, with a hole deliberately pierced in its centre, was laid to rest as a symbol of ending or ‘termination’ in connection with Terminus, the Roman god of boundaries. I began to unravel the significance of this ceremony, the symbolism and its layers. By filling in the earth they closed a circle of protection, the act became a dissolution of the boundaries. The shield itself is a round, it having been pierced, makes it a broken article of defence laid to rest in burial. The circular ditches, are obviously intended as a physical defence but the presence of the shield proves them to be magical defence also.
This rite was conceived in a time when nearly everything we did was ritual, governed by the invisible and by our Gods. Imagine our Western world today if the action of building, changing, or leaving a mark on the land was entwined with a ceremony of reverence and gratitude, closure before new beginnings. Would we not consider with more concern what we do and its impact unfolding as a cycle, not yet complete.
Now for the mystery of the zero. The zero didn’t initially appear in numerology, though the theory of its presence was hinted at with blank spaces before it was recorded. Even the ancient Greeks did not have a functional zero. Arabic numerals originally included only 1-9. And take a look at the big old mess that is Roman numerals. Without zero as placeholder, every 10, 100, 1000, 10000 and so on needs to have its own symbol. They were representing only what they could physically count. To advance mathematically, the invention of something that symbolises nothing had to happen.
Around 2000 years ago mathematicians in India fixed the concept, leading to negative numbers, infinitesimals, symbolic algebra and of course much simpler equations. All information could eventually be reduced to either a 1 or a 0, with the invention the binary code, as simple as the positive and negative charge. The zero symbolises a space, and the nature of that space is absence. Here lies the paradox: the zero denotes everything and nothing at the same time. Take a moment to consider this, the many properties of the nothing, the power of the space that holds nothing.
Before any of that was of course the circle, the most universal and ubiquitous, of magical symbols. It is old, very very old. It is foundational in all magical and philosophical trains of thought. I could delve into the Ensō (円相, ‘circular form’) of Zen Buddhism, their symbol of enlightenment. The ritual circles made in ancient Mesopotamia, to protect from evil, called Zisurrû, or Plato’s concept of form, with the perfect circle existing only in the abstract. However I wouldn’t want to keep you all day, so will try to keep it simple. The circle holds within and keeps without. It has no demarcation of beginning or ending in its line; an eternal reoccurrence. The circle holds a precise centre, a space that’s held within. As with the zero, the nature of that space is absence. Picture if you will in your mind’s eye, the two-dimensional shape from above or below. Now rotate the aspect 90 degrees into the third dimension and you will see a cylinder. I ask you to also take the idea of eternal reoccurrence into the third dimension too, and you will discover that the cylinder has no beginning or end. What you’ve just pictured is the infinite vacuum.
Our lives are made of and governed by overlapping, concentric, revolving circles and cycles. They are the hours, days and years that delineate the passage of time. They are in the seasons conjunct with the orbit of our star, winding in the dance of planetary and galactic systems. They are in patterns of growth, change and renewal, in both the physical manifestation and the abstract. Even the things that seem linear, like our lifespans, are cyclic. Do we not gain a truer insight into our beginning as we age? There is no birth without the closing ceremony of death. I implore you to examine the circles that make you, starting with your container, your own ring of sinew and bone (says she, encircling her own cranium with a forefinger). If you’re willing to go a bit further you might start to mark some of these circles and cycles, in any way you see fit. With ritual or even prayer.
For every cycle is worthy of reverence. Though they may repeat and seem monotonous sometimes, like the days, each is blessed in its own right. When you take up the practice of revering the cycles, you’ll watch your life change. Finally I add, for those of you who sometimes feel like everything is too much and you’re wanting to jump the carousel: remember that every breath you take is a circular process, pushing oxygen around your circulatory system. The rhythm of creation is unfolding in you. You are a microcosmic expression of the pattern of the conscious universe and that expression is in every breath, no two being the same. Invoke the infinite vacuum around you and revel in the power that is both everything and nothing. A circle is cast, again and again and again and a circle is cast.