The anthropocentric universe Part II (The Center of Attention)

Now, I like parties as much as the next man. And I enjoy them even more when they are being held in my honour and people pay attention to me not because of anything I’ve said or done, but simply because I’m there.

If a grand, humdinger of a party were to be held in an otherwise quite corner of the Universe and all life forms were to be invited, including man, then I can tell you now that all eyes (and other alien sensory organs) would be upon us, for we would be the centre of attention at that party, simply for being there.

Before you get me wrong, I must hasten to add that looks will have nothing to do with all the interest we will generate. The reason we will be honoured and paid lavish attention to, is none other than the fact that if not for us, the Universe, as we know it, wouldn’t exist.

You may find this piece of information a little strange and rather hard to come to grips with, but it is in fact a contention countenanced by a great many cosmologists and physicists including Britain’s own Stephen Hawking.

All this has come about from science’s attempts to answer the question “Why are we here?”. Now, there’s nothing very new about this question. It has been asked before and a rather mediocre philosopher and wizard named Bolus of Mendes, an Egyptian who lived in Hellenistic Greece in 200 BC, wrote a book trying to answer just that.Bolus’ book became a best-seller, sparking off a minor revolution in the magical circles of its time. Its message was so intuitive and so simple that it probably predated its formal statement by several hundred thousand years.

What Bolus wrote was that man was a microcosm or ‘little world’ and that within him he contained, on a somewhat smaller scale, all the levels of being in the Universe. Wizards in Bolus’ time visualised the Universe as being spherical, comprised of an almost endless array of ever narrowing concentric spheres that began with the gods and narrowed down to planet Earth. Now Bolus placed man squarely in the centre of that fixture, able to influence anything he chose to direct his attention to.

That was about 3,000 years ago and it became the basis for the tradition of sympathetic or corresponding magic; according to which great effects can be set in motion simply by activating their corresponding element on Earth, which in turn will activate its corresponding element in the next sphere and so on. Before you laugh, remember that every time you touch wood to ward off bad luck, while surrounded by the high-tech fruits of 20th century technology, you too become part of that tradition. Wood was sacred in the ancient world for its ability to float on water and burn in fires. It was vital for building shelters against the elements, keeping oneself warm, and as a raw material for tools, implements and amulets! To the minds of the people it was both alive and dead, it could grow out of the ground and attain great size but its death did not diminish it. By touching wood then, they evoked the life-force of the spirit that lived in it.

I’m not suggesting that we all start wearing amulets and worship trees, but there are, often little understood urges in us, which account for the grip of superstition on our minds. By the same token, magic, and science today, enjoy a similarly strong grip.Modern science can, of course, now produce theories which are a little more refined than your average magical one. To thank for this we have the unstinting efforts of Francis Bacon, an English mathematician and one time Lord Chancellor to James I, who in the early 17th century with the intention of becoming a “second Aristotle” argued for the establishment of the experimental method which has become the basis of the scientific approach. Beneath all the dressing, however, the messages science has to give us today are restatements of theories wizards and magicians have championed since the dawn of history and they hark back upon a past where, as we shall see, intuition was the sole guiding principle.