Welcome to Melanie's work
The research presented in the thesis began primarily in 1990 while I was completing my Masters Degree of Fine Arts. I was focused upon the potential for a reconciliation of opposites. Having worked on a thesis dedicated to the study of alchemy and the creative process, my primary motive concerned the possibility of unifying antithetical relationships with reference to the process of individuation, an inner alchemy of divine marriage between the inner masculine and feminine attributes of the self. The fundamental attributes of such a process are relationship, complementarity, and non-dual-duality. Instead of seeing opposites as whole and discrete entities, complementary relationship recognizes the unity of each as aspects of the whole.
It was from here that I worked on the numerous problems involved in locating a satisfactory geometrical structure that could realise the unification of opposites. It was obvious from the outset that no platonic geometry provide satisfactory results and that only higher-dimensional topologies would suffice.
Although I had amassed a significant knowledge of alchemical symbols and motifs, it was not until 1995 when I had the great pleasure of being in the audience of Shiela Morgan, as she presented to the philosophy department of Newcastle University, her explorations of the diagonally woven Möebius strips and Klein bottle, that I was able to make the extraordinary connections between these topologies and the most significant symbolic forms of alchemy.
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The pelican flask is well known as a signifier of the Mercurious, however nowhere in the alchemical literature was it referred to as a Klein bottle. Felix Klein had made it his own in the late 1880's, and from that point on it was known as a mathematical topology thought to be previously undisclosed and considered to be impossible to construct without breaching its significant properties of a singularity at the point of penetration of its form, that is, where the neck penetrates the surface, both the point of penetration and the dimensionality of the neck at that point are of "zero" dimensions. For the alchemists however, it was constructed as the alembic flask, used in the alchemical process of chemical transformations and was considered to be the supreme vessel of the universe. The neck maintained dimensionality and allowed the condensation to collect in the inner chamber of the flask. |
I was immediately intrigued as I recognised this structure and contemplated its deep history as a significant symbol of creation and regeneration. Shiela had no knowledge or interest in alchemy but was focused on the challenge to create a perfect Klein bottle through diagonally weaving a single geodesic thread that generated a mesh through repeated double circuits around the form, allowing the neck to penetrate the body through the weave itself therefore overcoming the problem of breaching its surface and providing a way of mapping the entire structure. Both the Möebius strip and the Klein bottle have the significant property of unifying their surfaces through twist into a higher dimension so that the inside and the outside flow into a continuous whole.
In the extensive research of Carl Gustave Jung, the primary symbols of the universe or the Mercurious, were known to him as the Pelican Christus, usually shown feeding seven young with the blood of its breast: a symbol that has remained in religious iconography as signifying the blood sacrifice of Christ, and the Ouroborus or snake eating its tail.
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The Pelican Christus |
The Ouroborus |
However, while Jung knew of the relationship between these symbols, and now of the structure of the alembic flask, he did not see them as signifying different postures of the same topological shape.
Watching Shiela Morgan manipulate her material Kleinbottle models revealed to me that the different postures of the Kleinbottle corresponded directly with the primary symbols of the universe found throughout religious and alchemical iconography and literature. The implications of which are significant in understanding the esoteric history of the West; the relationship between geometry, cosmology, architecture and iconography; the principal of complementarity; higher-order epistemological constructs; wave-particle duality; non-dual-duality; ancient mythologies and a whole lot more.
The 2006 doctoral thesis titled "Towards A New E.R.A.: Epistemological Resolution Analysis By Through and From Klein-Bottle Wholeness and Transdisciplinary Education." takes the reader on an excursion into the realm of higher-order understandings about Ultimate Reality. It provides a sketch that is a work in progress, that will added to and developed as time goes by.
Shiela Morgan's work presents a major extrapolation of Kleinbottle, torus and mobius topological relationship and applications to contemporary cosmology. Her work was achieved in isolation, unaware of the research undertaken by others, except for that which I have developed here. It presents one aspect of Kleinbottle metaphysics necessary for understanding Ultimate Reality.
Dr. Steven Rosen, a pioneer of Möebius and Kleinbottle philosophy and science, contacted me in 2001 after he had found some of my research on the internet. His work particularly "Science, Paradox and the Möebius principal" is a seminal critique of contemporary science, cosmology and consciousness.
What I provide here is unique and original analysis of the Kleinbottle, its novel and until now unknown history, and the implications of such a history, adding a significant dimension to the research of Rosen and Morgan.
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