Today
I’d like to show you something really cool that I recently got: a
traditional Chinese jade disk. Of course, that by itself doesn’t
sound very impressive. What’s so cool about a jade disk, you might
ask?
This
unassuming ornament, called a bi 璧
in
Standard Chinese, is just a trinket at first glance. However,
it carries enormous historical weight, and through it we hear the
whispered voices of the sages and shamans of a time long forgotten.
This symbol was ancient when the blocks of the pyramids were
quarried. Between the fifth and second millennia BC this was a
ritual object used in burials, placed on the chest or stomach of the
deceased. It appears that they represented in some way the sky or
heaven. Consider the circular shape centered on a hollow
point—it is not difficult to see the parallel to the night sky
spinning around the North Star:
This
is my (second) favorite Journey song. This song rules so much. In
this song they tap into something extremely ancient and primordial in
the human conception of heaven and earth. The neolithic shamans and
Journey had the same idea—one expressed it with jade, the other
with Dad music.
In
placing the bi on the abdomen
of the deceased, my personal hypothesis is that it must have served
as a kind of conduit for the soul. The soul would ascend to heaven
by passing through the
aperture of the bi—and
by extension, through the
cosmos by means of the North
Star.
The
oldest jade disks found date from around 7000 years ago, a fairly
close temporal and spatial match to the Proto-Sino-Tibetans. The
design and concept may well have been familiar to them. It
is worth mentioning that in both Chinese and Tibetan mythology,
people were said to have been
able to ascend to and descend from heaven as they wished, connected
by a kind of cosmic string. In
light of these legends, along with the use of bi,
I can’t help but think of traditional Ket cosmology, wherein
people are linked, by a spiritual umbilical cord, to the sky...or,
more specifically, to the North Star.
Spooky.
Might be a coincidence, but if not we may be seeing in the bi
one expression of a cultural traditon going deep into the
palaeolithic. We too can become stewards of this tradition: and, as
a proud bi owner, it’s
now my job to keep on passing these ancient whispers, so we can
remember the places, things, and ideas that made us who we are today.
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