Greetings to the Eight Directions

For a number of years, the octagon has fascinated me.

The more I learn about it, the more mysterious it seems.  I continue to discover images and ideas, histories, links, and facts about this most beautiful of shapes.

Finally after so long I have decided to create this site to collect all the things I’ve found online about the shape, the number, and the many roads that lead through it, from it, into it, above and below it.

I have often thought: why not have green GO signs on the Left hand side, across the street from the normal old red Stop signs, perhaps attached to the back of Stop signs?

I’ve always been more likely to stand up and Go than sit down and Stop

I can trace my interest in the shape to when I was living in the mountains of eastern British Columbia with a community of hippies, indians, russians, and elvish faery folk.  As a traveling, wandering, nomadic creative soul (some might say a bum or gypsy) I had found that blessed valley in search of guidance and something spiritually wholesome.  I had originally gone to Canada for the Shambhala music festival, a week-long, electronic rave in the woods with an international host of characters and creatures.  Upon arriving, I couldn’t wait for the music to stop so I could hear the birds again.  Once it did stop, all I could do was gaze at the endless stretches of forested hills, and talking with the locals, I learned that there was plenty of oddjob work for a nice guy like me, so I stayed, and made my way.  Somehow I found myself invited and welcomed with open arms into a closeknit community of families living on the fringes of the rules and the law.  I tried that coat on and it fit me, much better than my urban life back in Portland, Oregon as an artist driving taxi in between live painting gigs and gallery shows.

In that blessed valley, I migrated from tipi to tent to cabin to yurt.  Each spot I landed seemed to blossom with greater lessons, healing my urban scars and blessing me with sight to see how to simplify my life and find some peace and purpose.  It was in the yurt that I discovered the octagonal sky-light window, with all radiating support beams centering upon its eight sides.  Here was the physical manifestation of my own traveling ways.  For after spending so much time with the indians I had learned of the respect for the directions and their significance to family and faith.  The yurt itself beckoned me to explore my own heritage, my grandmother having her ancestral roots in Jewish Russia and perhaps 13 generations back to the Golden Horde’s Mongolian-Tartar occupation of Russia as far as the Don River and Voronezh, the place of my family, Voronoff.

So.  I was a 21st Century nomad traveling in the 8 directions, making my seasonal migrations.  Certainly a far cry from the comfortable, safe life of a teacher, cashier, cook, or something else career-minded and therefore normal.  I knew from the time I was young that I could not fit any template or previously set mould, but was meant to cross the length and breadth of the world and see as much as there was to see, within the confines of my means, which have never been much.  The confines of my culture however, have had little success in holding me down, though at times I have felt overwhelmed by the pressures of America’s timetable for success.  But I am not a roundtrip, 2-week vacation kind of guy.  I lust for the oddysey, the unknown.  And so back to the octagon.

I do consider myself to be a somewhat obsessive researcher, compulsively led to discover symbols and meaning in random occurrences that some would call coincidence.  I do believe in synchronicity, the meaningful connections and threads that unite seemingly random events.  It is therefore no simple fact that one day I decided to do a google search of my grandmother’s uncle, the infamous Serge Voronoff, and began a very strange quest to pull back the veil of the past and sift through the ashes of the Holocaust to learn the truth of my Russian family. 

What I discovered seems stranger than science fiction.  In the 1920s, Dr. Voronoff gained worldwide fame and fabulous wealth for pioneering a rejuvenation procedure that involved the transplanting of chimpanzee testicle glands into the testicles of elderly men.  And chimpanzee ovary glands into women.  His methods were celebrated by thousands of doctors and scientists, and his techniques were taught and elaborated upon by medical professionals in many countries around the world.  If you are actually reading this and care to learn more, click on his name above.  Perhaps the most relevant aspect of my illustrious grand-uncle was that he and his first wife were involved in numerous mystical societies during Le Grande Epoche in Paris at the turn of the century.  This is certainly what holds my keen attention.  Involved in MacGregor Mathers’ Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Max Theon’s Cosmic Movement, Rothschild’s Zionist movement, the Parisian Grande Jewish Freemasons, and Head Surgeon for the Last Khedive of Egypt in Cairo, Dr. Voronoff was a well-respected, intense, flamboyant personality, brushing shoulders with Europe’s ruling elite class as well as occultists, alchemists, and the famed artists who gave birth to the great art movements.

I’m sure they all knew why the octagon was so significant.

That’s what I’m trying to figure out.  Why the octagon haunts me.

I have tried asking the Magic 8 ball,

but the answer is always inconclusive.

Back in Canada I had this idea.  For a new kind of church.  Really it’s not a new idea, but when I thought of it, I thought, I’m sure there are other people out there who feel the way I do.  Maybe not, maybe.  My idea for a church was that it would be in an octagonal shape.  White.  With 8 doors leading into it.  It would be pointed at the top, like a pyramid.  Those eight doors would represent 7 faiths, and 1 for those who have no faith.  I figured these 7 faiths could represent the great faiths of the world: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Aboriginal, Science, and Atheism.  I figure, that just about covers what one can believe.  This sacred place would be there for all people.  Not like the Unitarian Universalists, not like the Theosophists.  Like something for our times.  For these pre-2012 times.

Eventually I discovered that I wasn’t the first one to think of this octagonal church idea.

The Russian Orthodox church figured it out a while ago.

And apparently churches since the beginning of churches have been using octagons in baptisms.  The 8 sides of the octagon may represent the 8th day in which Christ was resurrected, the Day Out of Time.  So symbolizing resurrection, rejuvenation, and a new beginning.

On the blog  Just a Catholic Shane Kaplar discussed this.  Maybe this is because of the First Epistle of Peter: “God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water. And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you” (1 Peter 3:20-21)

Of course, plenty of other kinds of churches have made use of the Octagon.

The Octagon Chapel in Norwich, England was once Presbyterian and is now Universalist.

The Baptistery in Florence is one of Europe’s oldest octagonal structures.

The Octagon figures prominently in Islamic architecture.

The Octagon is very often the foundation for most domes around the world, being the ideal sided support for a circular top.

It is interesting to me that the Dome of the Rock is in an Octagonal shape, considering that this was the original site of the Temple of Solomon where the Knights Templar

lived during the Crusades.  There is an article about the Power of the Octagon in Templar ritual here.  Another link is here detailing Octagonal Geometry as it relates to the circular Templar churches of Rosslyn Chapel, and the Round Churches at Edinburgh, Cambridge, and Northampton.  Apparently their 8-sided cross is based on the Octagon.  As far as the Templar descendants, the Freemasons go, apparently they like Octagons too.

Orson Squire Fowler was the champion of the Octagon House.

Fowler inspired thousands of people during the late 1800s to build octagonally shaped buildings as healthy living spaces across Eastern America.  He is also considered to be one of the proponents of Phrenology, an early ‘pseudoscience’ of personality.

Octal is a number system most often used in computers.  It is also known as an Octal System of counting the spaces between the fingers.  In 1716 Emanuel Swedenborg proposed this idea as a way to teach mathematics to the masses.

The octagon forms the basis for the I-Ching or Book of Changes.

8×8=64.

In Chess, there are 64 squares, 8×8.

There are 64 sexual positions in the Kama Sutra.

Now I am not exactly a raving Synchromystic but. well. maybe I am okay?  ”The art of realizing meaningful coincidence in the seemingly mundane with mystical or esoteric significance” does seem to apply to my own obsession with the Octagon. I am intrigued by the connections that Jake Kotze has made regarding the Octagon and certain Freemasonic, Templarized Egyptian rituals and symbols. There are loads of videos and links that might make you a little paranoid and might just be interesting food for thought.

SeaLion’s theory concerning the StarGate locked within the 8-sided Pyramid of Giza, the Dome of the Rock, and more…

Jack Black educates the youth of America about the ‘glories of the Octagon’ on Sesame Street on this youtube video. haha.

As far as freaky paranoia goes, check out this to learn more about the numbers behind the Octagonal-shaped Freedom Tower scheduled to be completed in 2012.

Good old Washington Mutual Bank broke, so Chase bought them, and has now invaded the west coast.  In Arizona last December employees celebrated by forming the ‘world’s largest human octagon’ around Chase Tower in Phoenix.  J.P. Morgan Chase Corporation, one of the oldest banking entities in the U.S., is now headquartered in an octagonal building in manhattan.  I don’t know why but the picture above really disturbs me, and usually I’m the guy who likes octagons.  I can accept octagons as churches and umbrellas, but a bank?

Yes, umbrellas are Octagons too.