A 297-word spell cast from ideaspace
Meet Georges Lemaître
The idea
Writing is a form of magic. It creates associations, moods, and worlds that can alter material reality.
Ideas are alive, they inhabit the imaginal realm, and they select their human channels.
We can create the reality to come by writing into association the ideas that are tapping each of us on the shoulder, asking to come through from the imaginal realm.
The first 297-word spell
Ingredients:
A wallflower at the ideas dance
The Word made flesh
The expanding universe
Meet Georges Lemaître. A Belgian Catholic priest and theoretical physicist, he originated Big Bang theory (his “primeval atom hypothesis”) and the understanding that the universe is expanding. (Perhaps you’re thinking, “That was Hubble.” But no: Lemaître hypothesized expansion in 1927; Hubble published proof in 1929. In 2018, the International Astronomical Union renamed Hubble's law the Hubble–Lemaître law.)
To Lemaître, it was not strange: to pledge submission to Christ; to posit the explosion of an atom as the origin of the universe. To vow chastity, poverty, obedience; to pioneer computing in physics and lecture alongside Einstein. The Bible and astronomy occupied different orders of reasoning. The Bible treats salvation, while science investigates the physical phenomena of the universe.
Some physical phenomena of the universe: 13.8 billion years ago, a Big Bang. Then: cold rushing. The world as a hiss, searching for the outside of itself.
A metaphysical phenomenon of the universe: Logos. A tricky word. In the New Testament, it’s translated as “the Word”, as in “the Word made flesh”, but that ain’t it. We might try “divine reason” or “orderly direction”. It’s the root of logic.
Two thousand-odd years ago, we’re told, Logos, “the Word”, was made flesh in Jesus. When God bodied himself, it was Logos he bodied.
Physics has its own Logos, supposing that there is an order to all things. But is there intention behind the order?
Picture Lemaître visiting the Vatican to urge against such comparisons; to avert a search for Logos through a telescope. Picture him—the man misremembered as a wallflower at the ideas dance: clerical collar, round glasses, fleshy face, a body bound in skin like any other, the Word of God burning eternal in his heart; his ears pricked to the universe, ever rushing to the outside of itself.
The form to submit imaginal entities.
I’ll be writing two of these essays a month. Subscribe to this Substack (as a free subscriber!) to receive them as they come out.
Submit your imaginal entities through the Google form linked here, and also here.
The current imaginal entities, as of a week ago (another forty have come in since then!):
How is the Blake reading going?
I'm in awe of your creativity!