|
discovering ... a formatted earth
 Planet Earth is a too big and complicated body for man to get any easy survey of. It takes weeks or even years to make its circumference, and oceans and mountains, deserts and ice, gravity and climate produce immense obstacles.
Travelling on a map is much easier. A map is a poor and very limited translation, however. You lose most problems and most pleasures.
Moreover, a map isn't spherical. Therefore, it doesn't only simplify reality; it also falsifies it.
One special map, however, is a falsifier par excellence. Its translation of the global surface is one great lie. Still it is of a special interest to us.
The map in question was invented by a Flemish geographer, Gerhard Kremer, known as Mercator. Publishing his invention at the time when Galileo Galilei was still a three year old boy, he truly was ahead of his time.
The Roman Church had recently been forced to admit that the Earth is no pancake; it is a planet, a sphere on its voyage in a vast space. These shocking news were still warm when Mercator re-made the world's image, explaining it as...flat. Just as if saying, we haven't finished with that flatness business yet.
His mendacious map conceals a great truth - and reveals it. It picks up and translates information from planet Earth which the planet cannot render by itself.
It is an instrument for the reading of Earth's symbolic secrets. But the Earth had to become round (as it had been for many a century already to Babylonian, Chinese, Indian, Arab, Maya or Inka observers; even Pythagoras possessed that knowledge) to make Mercator re-translate it to the European eye.
To an awakening global mind this was a marvellous conquest. The whole pedagogy unfolded is sort of a 'multistorey story'.
The two-dimensional Mercator map projection seems to 'remember' many a quality of its lost third dimension. At the same time new and quite different qualities are included. Mercator's map reveals information hidden in the invisible potentials of the globe.
The key to this fact is that each straight line on Mercator's map has a constant bearing. It doesn't change like the bearings of the great circles do (except for the equator or the meridians).
A direct flight from Calcutta to Oslo, following the shortest course of the great circle, draws a curve on Mercator's map.
The straight Mercatorian line is no such short cut. Its special quality is that its reference of direction isn't Earth's centre but the apex of the heavens. It is adjusted to what we may name absolute North (or South).
In other words, a straight line on Mercator's map has a more absolute reference than the globe's great circles have. Its ability as a symbol-bearing means is unique, and angles of direction as well as linear proportions bear information about otherwise unrelated qualities.
 back
to the table of contents
|