Engaging with globality through "triple crown" cognition?

Engaging with Globality through Cognitive Crowns (Part #3)

[Parts: First | Prev | Next | Last | All] [Links: To-K | From-K | From-Kx ]

Triple crown significance: Curiously significance continues variously to be attached to a "triple crown". As noted in Dimension 2, it is a feature of the Papal Triple Tiara. It also features in the Swedish coat of arms and in a wide variety of sporting and other awards (including the 'Triple Crown' of college diplomacy and the Triple Crown of Acting). The group Global Knowledge has, for example, received a newly launched Microsoft award (Introducing Redmond's Triple Crown, Redmondmag.com, January 2009).

In it most commonly recognized form, triple crown cognition is a recognition of excellence (from the Latin excellentia) in relation to "rising above" the ability or qualities of others -- offers the intriguing possibility that ordinary cognition (thereby transcended) might be usefully indicated by "cellence". In the light of the limitations of Dimension 2, the cognitive "circlets" might be understood as delimiting cognitive "cells" -- with triple crown cognition emerging only in 3D. This implies that "cellence" is an indication of "in-the-box" cognition -- with out-of-the-box cognition appropriately indicated by ex-cellence and recognized in terms of a triple crown (award). This offers new implications for the EU approach to collective intelligence through its enabling of "networks of excellence" based on think-tanks (Meta-challenges of the Future for Networking through Think-tanks, 2005).

Historical significance: In Jewish tradition, Moses is naturally recognized as having emerged from the shadow of the throne of the Pharaohs to inspire Jews to move out of their state of bondage. He has been described as having "put on the triple crown of a prophet, a warrior and a legislator" -- suggesting quite different modes of cognition, although the "crown" was in this case virtual. [more]

In the case of the three-crowned Papal Tiara, the first representation is found in a statue of Benedict XII, who died in 1342. It is not known why a third crown was added. One interpretation of its Latin name triregnum (meaning triple rule) suggests that the crowns represented authority over heaven, earth, and hell.

Curiously although much is made of the double-crowned Pharaohs, reference to their triple crowning is less common. However one of the earliest feminist historians, Matilda Joslyn Gage (Woman, Church and State, 1893) even notes:

Upon the monuments of Egypt... queens alone are found wearing the triple crown, significant of ecclesiastical, judicial and civil power, thus confirming the statement of Diodorus that queens were shown greater respect and possessed more power than kings: the pope alone in modern times claiming the emblematic triple crown.

The Uraeus, a cobra in attack position, often formed part of the royal headdress, sometimes as double or even triple Uraeus crown. It symbolized the sun god's eye.

It is doubtful whether any unusually enhanced understanding is now held to be associated with a form of crowning that dates back to ancient Egypt -- whatever faint echoes of such are associated, through crowning at that time, with an enhanced relationship to the gods. This situation is however to be contrasted with a masonic ritual asserting:

Man is a god in the making, and as in the mystic myths of Egypt, on the potter's wheel he is being molded. When his light shines out to lift and preserve all things, he receives the triple crown of godhood and joins that throng of Master Masons who, in their robes of Blue and Gold are seeking to dispel the darkness of night with the triple light of the Masonic Lodge. (Manly P. Hall, The Lost Keys of Freemasonry, 1976).

In the case of the Rose Croix freemasons, the head of the traditional compass is surmounted by a triple crown. Given the early association of the USA with freemasonry through George Washington and others, attention has focused on United States presidents who were freemasons, or perceived to be such (Adam Phillips, 14 US presidents also freemasons, 19 February 2007).

Various claims, necessarily unsubstantiated, have been made asserting that Barack Obama is a freemason of high degree. His election as president is all the more significant given the traditional mutual disregard of black and white masons in the USA. His references to slavery in his inauguration speech are also significant as indicative of closure of an historic cycle relating to the darker history of the American dream -- perhaps to be understood in psychoanalytic terms as a degree of integration of the "shadow".

Enhanced significance: Irrespective of these considerations, of interest is any unusual mode of cognition that might be associated with "triple crowning" or expected of those crowned in this way. As a person from whom world leadership is expected, Obama's "coronation" might be fruitfully considered as such a triple crowning. There are expectations amongst his idealistic and enthusiastic supporters that his cognitive approach should combine those of archetypal philosopher-king-poet. His rhetorical skills have reinforced such expectations. Commentators on his inaugural speech were surprised at his avoidance of the poetic style it was expected he might use -- as he has previously done so successfully.

In a country where faith plays such an important part in politics, and the perception of politicians, the fact that George W. Bush was recognized as "born-again" was of considerable significance to his electoral support. Those "twice-born" in this way are held to benefit from a form of enhanced cognition through their relationship to divinity. Many would now argue that this cognition was seemingly totally inadequate to a presidency that ended in humiliation -- indicative of a form of cognition from which the world could ill-afford to benefit again.

The question however is whether more might be understood through this process and the further enhanced cognition purportedly associated with being "thrice-born" rather than simply "twice-born". The condition has been variously recognized as a feature of cultural mytho-poesis as discussed elsewhere (Web Resources on Being "Born Again", 2004). It features in: Norse mythology (Gullveig), Greek mythology (Dionysos, Athena), Celtic mythology (Taliesin), Christian references to Hermes Trismegistus, Assyrian mythology (Semiramis), and Wiccan mythology.

Entheogenic implications: Whether or not the pharaohs, as original wearers of the Triple Crown (notably the triple Atef crown), are to be considered as having benefitted thereby from the cognition of the "thrice-born" (as the masonic tradition would appear to imply), the unusual nature of such cognition is suggested in a study by Stephen R. Berlant (The entheomycological origin of Egyptian crowns and the esoteric underpinnings of Egyptian religion, Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 2005). With respect to the design argument here, of particular interest is his presentation of textual and graphic evidence that the Egyptian White and Triple Crowns (pschent, hemhem) were originally primordia of the entheogenic Psilocybe (Stropharia) cubensis.

Entheogens are psychoactive substances used in a religious or shamanic context or outside such structures. He stresses how entheogenic plants can affect the user's world view and how they have traditionally been used ritualistically to commune with ancestors who, in many cases, were deities. He contrasts the regard in which ancients Egyptians held the effects induced by psychotropic plants with the implicit tendency of Egyptologists to regard such substances disdainfully -- thus introducing a cultural bias in the review of widely available evidence. Berlant argues that:

Accordingly, there are grounds for believing that the Pharaohs - who also served as high sem, or herbal, priests - were essentially shamanic herbalists, whose well-documented belief in their own divinity and immortality was induced by Psilocybe cubensis ingestion, and that these monarchs then paid homage to the Psilocybe cubensis, first by wearing various stages of it on their heads and, later, by wearing representations of those stages as crowns.

Cognition appropriate to global challenges: Nothing is however said about the way in which such substances enabled the pharaohs (as wearers of the Triple Crown) to be cognitively empowered to see and engage with the world otherwise -- or any disciplines associated with doing so. More might be expected in this respect from the Pope, wearer of the Triple Tiara -- although many would argue that, under the papacy, the Catholic Church has failed (as with George W. Bush) to exhibit a mode of cognition appropriately responsive to the global challenge. The declarations Urbi et Orbi are presumably a measure of this.

The binary logic ("you are either with us or against us"), used to reinforce unfruitful good/evil polarization and demonization, has undermined the emergence of new and more appropriate modes of cognition. Given their acknowledged association with power and finance in a global society, to the extent that freemasons of high degree are characterized by some form of thrice-born insight (as seemingly implied above), it is appropriate to ask to what extent such insights are fruitfully applied in response to the dramatic challenges of the times, most notably through the influential World Economic Forum (Emergence of a Global Misleadership Council: misleading as vital to governance of the future? 2007).

Indigenous insight: With respect to the knowledge derived from entheogens in a shamanic context, especially valuable is the anthropological work of Jeremy Narby (The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the origins of knowledge, 1999; Intelligence in Nature: an inquiry into knowledge, 2005). The sense in which DNA may be understood as a "coiled, coiled, coil" is suggestive of a higher order of self-reflexivity (discussed below***) that may be associated with being thrice-born (DNA Supercoiling as a Pattern for Understanding Psycho-social Twistedness, 2004).

Undoubtedly modern explorers of such psychedelic substances would claim analogous insights, as argued by Myron Stolaroff (Misreported Science, 1999):

They mainly function to open the door to the unconscious mind, which can expose an enormous range of possible experiences. This includes repressed psychic material and the release of a wide range of positive functions, including intuition, creativity, and the crowning experience of directly perceiving the ultimate nature of reality. It is possible to discover the Divine nature of all of creation, and even achieve the most cherished experience possible to mankind, direct union with the Godhead.

However it is not apparent how these have contributed to more appropriate responses to the emerging challenges of global governance.

[Parts: First | Prev | Next | Last | All] [Links: To-K | From-K | From-Kx ]