Go out one clear starlit night to some open space and look up at the sky, at those millions of worlds over your head. Remember that perhaps on each of them swarm billions of beings, similar to you or perhaps superior to you in their organization. Look at the Milky Way. The earth cannot even be called a grain of sand in this infinity. It dissolves and vanishes, and with it, you. Where are you? And is what you want simply madness?

Before all these worlds ask yourself what are your aims and hopes, your intentions and means of fulfilling them, the demands that may be made upon you and your preparedness to meet them.

-- G.I. Gurdjieff, Views from the Real World, p.5

There is much about astronomy which resembles religion, and observatories are surely the finest temples built by Western hands in the last two centuries. But if it is a cult it is one which teaches us to observe and question, and in that it is superior to most religions.

-- Axel Harvey

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.

-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.

The Elizabethan polymath John Dee had an obsidian scrying mirror. This mirror was a polished black disk crafted of natural volcanic glass, the magical tool of a New World civilization. It was a thing of Tezcatlipoca, "Smoking Mirror", the Aztec Lord of Darkness. Some Spanish bureaucrat sent it back to Europe as a heathen curio after exterminating followers of Tezcatlipoca and burning their books.

It fell into the hands of a person excellently-placed to wreak Tezcatlipoca's vengeance on the Spanish empire. Whether this was done via Dee's experiments with calling spirits into the Devil's Looking-Glass, or through the quickening of inspiration it afforded Dee's work in optics and geometry, is naturally hard to say. Whatever the case, England outpaced Spain's imperial ambitions and thus this message is written in English.

You who read this are using the magical tool of a New World civilization right now. This tool is crafted of a non-natural glass -- layer upon layer of doped semiconductor -- set in bits of copper and gold. It is fed, moment by moment, by millions of years of ancient sunlight. You're using it to project thoughts, feelings and intuitions to the minds of other people around the world, including some not yet born, and to take into your own mind the thoughts, feelings and intuitions of others alive and dead.

Who made this thing?

How did it come to you?

Why?

It was on the eve of 1987 when I saw the statue.

My mate and I had flown into San Francisco for winter holiday and a New Year's Eve concert. The previous day we had watched the newly released Star Trek IV. I was still pondering when & how Starfleet Academy ended up in the Bay Area.

We were walking past the fountains in the yet-unrestored Music Concourse, just outside the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. The central fountain featured a big cat. I thought it was our native mountain lion, though I later read it was supposed to be a tiger. This alone would not have been noteworthy. However, this figure was in combat with a serpent or python.

In the New World the eagle and the jaguar represented two kinds of power. The eagle's aerial vision coupled with the ferocity and speed of death from above made it a favorite in the iconography of political power. The jaguar, on the other hand, was the sign of shamanic power and magical transformations. According to legend Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec Empire, was founded on a lake island where the Nahuatl saw an eagle perched on a cactus with a snake in its talons. Today this is Mexico City. What I saw, twenty-five years ago, I read as a transposition of symbols, and the founding of a different kind of empire.

I learned the sculptor was Melvin Earl Cummings, a Berkeley professor of architecture, but never did find any sensible explanation for the Rideout Fountain. It apparently replaced Bonet's Electric Tower, the illuminated centerpiece of the 1894 Mid-Winter Fair's Grand Court, scrapped immediately thereafter.