Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 7 -- The Concept of Circulation
"The country bumpkin waits for the river to flow away, but it flows and will flow, rolling on for
ever."
Since the rivers divide into many different courses in the bowels of the earth, it can happen that
they sometimes meet a terrain which is obstructed on all sides by rocky outcrops and forces
them to flow upwards, if the only exit is in that direction. So when they are always ascending,
they always flow out.
Cardinal Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1221-1274) preached on the Holy Spirit’s gift of grace.
Upon this Ecclesiastes: "To the place, whence the rivers go forth, they return." [St. Bernard]
says, that "the origin of springs is the sea, the origin of virtues and sciences is Christ."
For as the spring does not have length, unless it has a continuous conjunction with its origin, so
also light; thus the grace of the Holy Spirit cannot grow in the soul unless through its reversion
to is own original Principle.
The Cardinal likewise is speaking of circulation.
The Renaissance
The term "circulation" derives from the Greek "kirkos" for circle. In generalized mythology, the
circle said to be,
A symbol of the Self. It expresses the totality of the psyche in all its aspects, including the
relationship between man and the whole of nature. It always points to the single most vital
aspect of life, its ultimate wholeness. -- Marie-Louise von Franz in Carl Jung's Man and His
Symbols (1979)
To Jungian psychologists, through “decensus” and “ascensus” we find meaning.
We routinely envision the Renaissance -- "rebirth" in Italian, the cultural movement spanning the
14th to 17th centuries -- in terms of art, but our journey is about intellectual forays, in particular
about waters flowing beneath the earth. We'll look at the Renaissance in terms of how it applied
the circle to that question.
As Marjorie Nicolson observes,
No metaphor was more loved by Renaissance poets than that of the circle, which they had
inherited from Pythagorean and Platonic ancestors, who in turn had borrowed it from Orientals,
to whom the serpent, swallowing its tail, was a Hieroglyphick of eternity. The Breaking of the
Circle (1962)
Core to the Renaissance was the rediscovered Greco-Roman culture. By cleaning and
sharpening the tools of antiquity, observers could refocus their own eyes. We must keep in mind,
however, that no eye, then or now, can peer below the earth. The patterns mapped our
consciousness may be significantly unlike what a drilling rig might puncture. The problem of
perception isn’t, of course, confined to issues of proper illumination. Science is a story of peering
through the muddle of sensibilities.
Turning from the clerics' abstract speculation about the afterlife, the Renaissance was marked by
interest in the visible, in tactile knowledge. Freed inquiry was more important to the future of
thought than immediate specification.
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