The Glass Bead Game that I've been constructing on the blog now plays on. With the pacing of these posts, it may keep playing on through all of 2022 and into 2023... but no matter! Ideas are eternal. Today we see a new one posted into the foundational circle at the bottom of the board. There's a stylized picture of a rising sun that, to me, evokes the Latin phrase AD ORIENTEM.
There are quite a few religious (and other) traditions in which the participants all face themselves in a particular direction as they pray or do other important things. In Christianity, that direction has traditionally been the East. The original reasons for this choice are probably lost, but there are many possible explanations having to do with the past (the direction of Eden) or the future (how Jesus will approach Jerusalem in the second coming). There are also modern-day controversies about whether the priest in the mass should face the people (ad populum) or join with them so everyone faces the east as one Body of Christ (ad orientem).
I'm sure many of you already know that in Islam, there are daily prayers that must be said while facing the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca. There have been times in the past when the exact direction of this Qibla was not known precisely, and in some parts of the Muslim world they used other estimates like the closest of the four compass directions (i.e., facing due East isn't a bad guess if you're in Egypt), or the direction of the rising/setting of the bright star Canopus.
In Judaism, some pray facing the direction of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. In the Baháʼí faith, some pray facing the shrine of Baháʼu'lláh in the north of Israel. In the much more recent tradition of Thelema, there are ceremonies in which one must face Aleister Crowley's former manor Boleskine House in the Scottish highlands. (Fans of Led Zeppelin sometimes treat that place as a kind of Mecca, too, since Jimmy Page owned it from 1970 to 1992.)
For some reason, there's one other piece of trivia that sits in the same corner of my brain as the above: In Major League Baseball, there's a rule that says baseball fields should be oriented towards the east/northeast, so as to avoid the glare of the setting sun interfering with the players' vision. Not all parks obey that rule, but they trend around the recommended value as a statistical average. There may be no direct supernatural questions of faith involved, but the Field of Dreams can be a sacred space, too.
How do these bits of worshipful wayfinding relate to the interconnected cells on our GBG board? Hozier's Take Me To Church is certainly an exhortation to reorient one's soul to face the divine beloved. As mentioned in the previous post, one cannot mention The Gift of the Magi without thinking of "his star in the east."
We'll continue to see where this all leads, but it's clear that we must always pivot to face what life throws at us.
