geckzilla wrote:
Picture of me in front of a life-size model of my favorite telescope at the Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C.
I thought it was funny that the baffle at the top was shut. They never shut the real one!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Emily Dickinson (1830-86). Complete Poems. 1924.
Part Four: Time and Eternity
So I must baffle at the hint
And cipher at the sign,
And make much blunder, if at last
I take the clew divine.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
From The Secrets of the Tarot , by Barbara Walker;
12. The Hanged Man: Hanging from a gallows by one foot
was a medieval custom known as "baffling." . . . .
<<The female World figure on the last trump showed the same pose right
side up as the Hanged Man upside down: one foot bent behind the other
knee, so the legs form a triangle.... suggestive [of] the Egyptian
hieroglyph of a stick figure with legs arranged in this same design.
As a verb, this hieroglyph meant "to dance." As a noun, it meant the
AB or "heart soul," the most important of an Egyptian's seven souls:
the one given by the mother's blood, the one that would be
weighted in the balances in the underworld of Maat.....
Normally a disgraceful punishment (like crucifixion), baffling seems
to have been used by secret sects as a step toward mystic initiation.
A person hanging upside down for any extended time becomes
acutely conscious of his own heartbeat, for it throbs its ceaseless
"I am, I am, I am" through the pulse beating in his head.>>
--------------------------------------------------------------------
All those unpronounceable names that I'll never remember. But there was one with red legs with black joints, that has a yellow body that reminds me of a smilie. 
