Advanced Grammatology

Introduction

Kent Palmer Ph.D.

kent@palmer.name
http://kdp.me
714-633-9508
Copyright 2015 KD Palmer1
All Rights Reserved. Not for Distribution.
AdvancedGrammatology_01_20160106kdp03a.docx
Started 2015.11.18-25; Edited 2016.01.06; Draft Version 02
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5298-4422
http://schematheory.net
Researcher ID O-4956-2015

Key Words: Grammatology, Hieroglyphs, Kinds of Being, Special Systems,

Continental Philosophy

Rereading Derrida after many years I am struck by how faithful he is to the

exposition of Hyper Being, i.e. Differance to the Exclusion of any traces of Wild Being.
I am not familiar with his later writings but I wonder if he ever got an inkling that
Wild Being as defined by Merleau-Ponty and taken up by Deleuze existed. Derrida
looked deeply into the work of Husserl and saw the contradictions that lurked there
and then used that to unfold the problem of origins which he then applied to
Structuralism contrasting it with Genesis2. The first half of Grammatology is a tour
de force in the definition of the underlying problem of entanglement of opposites
that underlies and undermines the structural analysis of opposites. But when we
take into account all the works published at the same time as of Grammatology
(Writing and Difference3, Speech and Phenomena4) as well as the work on Genesis
in Husserls Phenomenology that was an early work prior to his Introduction to the
Origin of Geometry5 published late in his career, as well as Dissemination6, then
what we see is a bold appropriation of the possibility of Hyper Being discovered by

1 http://independent.academia.edu/KentPalmer See also http://kentpalmer.name

2 Derrida, Jacques. The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
3 Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
4 Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs . Evanston:

Northwestern University Press, 1973.

5 Derrida, Jacques, and Edmund Husserl. Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry, an Introduction. Stony Brook,

N.Y: N. Hays, 1978.

6 Derrida, Jacques, and Barbara Johnson. Dissemination. , 1981.

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Heidegger as Being crossed out. But a complete ignoring of Merleau-Pontys advance
into Wild Being from Hyper Being (The Hyper Dialectic of Being of Heidegger and
the Nothingness of Sartre) seen in The Visible and Invisible. One thing becomes
clear is the way in which Derridas work interacted with that of Foucault (defining
the episteme) and also laid the groundwork for Deleuzes departure into Wild Being
(through the emphasis on repetition and difference) following the lead of Merleau-
Ponty. Also Derrida is actively exploring the implications of the work of Bataille and
Lacan. In order to get to the foundations of Structuralism he goes back and re-
appropriates Husserls work under the auspices of Heidegger new departure into
Process Being from Pure Being. Husserls work is a perfect example of Pure Being
and its limitations. But we discover that many of the innovations of Merleau-Ponty
and Heidegger come from Husserls courses and are in fact appropriations of
Husserls genetic phenomenology. Monads Husserl takes from Leibniz are the
anonymous underpinnings of Subjectivity that Merleau-Ponty takes up and studies
and this becomes in Heidegger Dasein. Existential Time comes from the genetic
analysis of Passive Synthesis in Husserls course. Hyper Being appears in Husserls
course as well in terms of erasure that occurs in time as new things come in to
replace the older impressions. So many themes that appear in Heidegger, Merleau-
Ponty and Derrida appear in Husserls Course on The Analyses of Active and Passive
Synthesis7, as pointed out by Welton8. But Husserl seems to actively repress Genetic
Phenomenology, but it keeps rearing its head for instance in Formal and
Transcendental Logic9, Cartesian Meditations and Krisis10 (Crisis in the European
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology) but without full explication. Derrida
himself in his book on Genesis does not deal with the course 11 and though he is
dealing explicitly with the suppression of genesis in Husserls philosophy and its
development he ignores the one place where Husserl seems to be doing Genetic
Phenomenology rather than just talking about its possibility or attempting to get
around it. So although Derrida takes a lot from the inconsistencies in Husserl and
uses them to get a picture of Hyper Being (Differance) in order to distinguish his
work from Heidegger. There is still a sense in which Derrida is also suppressing
Genetic Phenomenology because he does not deal with the course in which it is
performed in is work and the fact that it had been worked out completely by Husserl
and formed the basis for the work of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida himself.

7 Bernet, Rudolf. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic .

Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2001.

8 Welton, Donn. The Other Husserl: The Horizons of Transcendental Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2000.
9 Husserl, Edmund. Formal and Transcendental Logic. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969. Bachelard, Suzanne. A
Study of Husserl's Formal and Transcendental Logic. Evanston [Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968.
10 Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to
Phenomenological Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Moran, Dermot. Husserl's Crisis
of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction. Cambridge [England:
Cambridge University Press, 2012.
11 Derrida only deals with published works in his study. Although he evidently visited the library where
Husserls works are archived for two weeks.

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So there is still a deeper background that needs to be explored and understood that
leads to Derridas understanding of Grammatology12 and the formulation of Hyper
Being as Differance. Derrida is in some sense ignoring Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and
attempting to go back to Husserl on the basis of Heidegger in order to more deeply
ground his critique of Structuralism that was in vogue at the time. Via Lacan
structuralism and semiotics was leading to a completely different view of Freud and
Derrida had that in the background of all his work, just as Deleuze did after him. And
this of course leads to a reinterpretation of Nietzsche and Heidegger based on the
insights of Bataille into the General Economy. But the ignoring of Merleau-Ponty
leads Derrida to miss the advent of Wild Being which takes us beyond Hyper Being.
But Deleuze was well aware of this transition and used it as the basis for his own
Philosophy attempting to go beyond Differance into Wild Being and thus
appropriate it philosophically. This difference between Deleuze and Derrida is a
good thing in as much as it allows us to get a clear distinction between what it is like
to look at things though the lenses of very different esoteric kinds of Being beyond
Pure and Process Being. The hints that Ultra Being is possible have not appeared as
yet which become the center of attention for Zizek and Badiou. Tracing this
evolution becomes a complex story13. But it would be even more complex if Derrida
himself recognized Wild Being and incorporated it into his philosophy. It would be
interesting if we could see it in his later philosophy. But in these earlier works it
does not seem to be present and thus by contrasting Derrida with Deleuze we can
get a pretty good picture of the difference between Hyper Being and Wild Being.
Hyper Being is deep and esoteric kind of being about the entanglement of opposites
and the fact that the origin is always already lost. Wild Being is about the fact that
there is in spite of this entanglement of opposites still a complementarity that
appears within them the chiasm of touch touching first discussed by Merleau-Ponty.
Hyper Being is about bearing (in-hand) that Levinas talks about while Wild Being is
about encompassing (out-of-hand) both of which go beyond pointing (present-at-
hand) and grasping (ready-to-hand). And because the Western worldview
exemplifies these structures and we can approach them phenomenologically even
though they are rare phenomena means that we can get a picture of the Western
worldview based on understanding these esoteric meta-levels of Being. So we are
indebted to the modern Continental tradition for making these meta-levels of Being
accessible to us despite their esoteric nature. Because though their study we can
understand the upper reaches of the structure of the worldview which we call the
stairway to nowhere just like that which exists in the Winchester House. The
Winchester House is a perfectly embodied exemplification of the structure of the
Western worldview as it is organized around an absent violence14. And one of its
main features is the stairway to nowhere. Likewise the western worldview has its
own stairway to nowhere which is the meta-levels of Being. That nowhere to which
it leads is its existential core successively revealed by the higher and higher meta-

12 Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

13 https://www.academia.edu/13194091/Meta-levels_of_Being
14 Like drones of today but in this case meeted out by the Winchester Rifle which was a repeating rifle that
won the old West.

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levels of Being which were first explored in Continental Philosophy but which
harkens back to an understanding of the worldview and its structure seen in Indo-
European mythology and the epics. In fact we first see it in the Vedas as the
difference between the Gods as discovered by Dumezil. Thus what we are seeing in
Continental Philosophy is the unearthing of an ancient long lost part of our
Worldview which has always been there but has for so long been lost to oblivion 15.
Derridas main insight is that Hyper Being can be seen in the suppression of writing
in the Western worldview, i.e. in traces below the level of signs. And this is what he
develops in of Grammatology, a way of uncovering the traces of the cultural
repression of writing. This prejudice has always been there in the Western
worldview, but no one ever understood its significance before. It has an ontological
significance, and is not just a cultural quirk. Once we understand that there is Hyper
Being (Differance as differing and deferring) we can start looking for it in various
phenomena. We can also do something that Derrida himself does not do, we can
produce a phenomenology of differance, seeing the deferring differences
(supplementation) between essences as a phenomena. Husserl centers on the
essence as the major object of his phenomenology. Husserl slowly realizes that he
has to look at essences in relation to time and develops slowly Genetic
Phenomenology attempting to get out of it but ultimately realizing that there is no
way that it can be avoided. Existentialist thought is basically the break out of
Genetic Phenomenology into Philosophy as a whole via the work of Heidegger and
then Merleau-Ponty. The key to that is the understanding that Time (past, present,
and future) has to be understood as existential time, i.e. as a whole which we get in
Heideggers Being and Time, but that was portended by Husserl in his course. Also
Heidegger realized we needed to escape from the Subject, but that was also
portended by Husserl in the exploration of the anonymous monad that underlies
subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty relates them to reflexes. Genetic Phenomenology makes
us take into account history, and thus we become concerned with origins that are
always already lost origins that never saw the light of presence at all, that were
effectively unconscious16. And this for Derrida opens us up to taking into account
the phenomena of Differance as structural opposites that unfold from the lost origin
always remain entangled. We have come to know that this entanglement is
fundamental from the study in physics of Quantum Mechanics. But there is also
superimposition which is the opposite of entanglement and this is what gives us a
hint of the fact that opposite Hyper Being (expansion of being-in-the-world) is also
Wild Being (contraction of being-in-the-world), the chasm or reversibility of
complementarities 17 within the entanglement. Entanglement undermines the
opposites set up metaphysically by structuralism when we consider the unfolding of
genesis. But despite this undermining there is an inherent chiasmic reversibility
within the entanglement which is Wild Being that juts out beyond Hyper Being.
Deleuze capitalizes upon this to attempt to produce a philosophy that is counter to
that of Derrida that explores Wild Being beyond Hyper Being. And then later we

15 No one knows it is there near the core of the worldview.

16 See also Henry, Michel. The Essence of Manifestation. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973.
17 Plotnitsky, Arkady. Complementarity: Anti-epistemology After Bohr and Derrida. , 1994.

4
realize that there is even a fifth meta-level of Being called Ultra Being that Zizek and
Badiou attempt to explore going deeper into the unconscious as singularity beyond
the level that Deleuze was capable of exploring.

Our thesis here is that Grammatology needs to take into account both Wild Being
and Ultra Being beyond Hyper Being. But of course that will transform
Grammatology into something else. But we must not lose the insight that
Grammatology has brought us. Somehow we must delve deeper into Grammatology.
That ultimately means delving deeper into the history of Writing. The
Grammatology of Derrida was based on the work of Gelb 18 who first coined the term
and wrote a monumental study of the origin of Writing. But it turns out that the
evolutionary model of Gelb, his theory of genesis of writing turns out to be almost
completely wrong19. Somehow we need to develop an even deeper understanding of
the history of writing20. Derrida mentions what is said by Socrates in the Phaedo
that Thoth21 was the god of Writing in Ancient Egypt. Thoth is the origin of the
Hieroglyphs22 which was the way of writing that was developed and held steady for
3000 years in Egypt. They were the way of representing the words of the Gods23. It
was a very different kind of writing than that of the alphabets that were based on
phonemic breakup of the stream of sounds made by the voice alone. Hieroglyphs24
were spatial writing. But due to logocentrism of the Western worldview the
Hieroglyphs25 were not understood by the Greeks or later westerners who looked at
them as a mystery through a logocentric lens. There were other kinds of writing like
this for instance cuneiform26 in Sumeria with an equally long history and more texts
unearthed due to the clay medium they used. There was also the Harrapan writing
system that appears not to have been a straightforward language, but perhaps
something else. It is generally recognized that the Harrapan and Egyptian ways of
writing were developed based on the diffusion of cuneiform. But what is interesting

18 Gelb, Ignace J. A Study of Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.

19 Daniels, Peter T. Fundamentals of Grammatology. Journal of the American Oriental Society 110.4 (1990):

727731.
20 Olson, David R. "How Writing Represents Speech." Language and Communication. 13.1 (1993): 1-17.
21 Boylan, Patrick. Thoth: The Hermes of Egypt : a Study of Some Aspects of Theological Thought in Ancient

Egypt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

22 Collier, Mark, and Bill Manley. How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs: A Step-by-Step Guide to Teach

Yourself. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

23 Velde, Herman . Egyptian Hieroglyphs As Signs, Symbols and Gods . Leiden: Visible religion, 1985. See

also Ray, John D. The Emergence of Writing in Egypt. London: Routlegde and Kegan Paul, 1986.
24 Gardiner, Alan H. The Nature and Development of the Egyptian Hieroglyphic Writing. London: Egyptian

Exploration Fund, 1915.

25 Schenkel, Wolfgang. The Structure of Hieroglyphic Script. RAIN 15 (1976): 47.
26 Glassner, Jean-Jacques, Zainab Bahrani, and de M. M. Van. The Invention of Cuneiform: Writing in Sumer.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. See also Van, de M. M. Philosophy Before the Greeks: The
Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia. Princeton University Press, 2015.

5
about the Egyptian system27 is that it appeared all of a sudden just a few hundred
years after cuneiform full blown and lasted more or less unchanged in essence for
about 3000 years. The other examples, of course, are the Chinese characters and the
Mayan Gliphs recently translated as well as the Sumerian Cuniforms which are other
similar alternative writing systems. All these are spatial and to some extent
representational at least originally. When Derrida frames his theory of Difference he
specifically mentions tombs, and pyramids pointing back to this problem of the
roots of writing in Ancient Egypt as does Socrates in the Phaedrus. Derrida does not
really delve directly into these alternative writing systems but merely makes a
gesture toward them. But because Egyptology operates as an Orientalism projecting
Logocentric assumptions it is difficult to get back to the key elements of the
Hieroglyphs, not to mention the other pre-alphabetical writing systems. In fact it
seems it is only with the Ph.D. dissertation of Leal28 that we get an evenhanded
explication of hieroglyphs which only became available in 2014. If we read the
Grammatology of Leal as the touchstone for an advanced Grammatology then we
can see that Derrida himself did not go far enough into the explication of the
phenomena of writing as seen in Hieroglyphs. Derrida was still bound by the
Orientalizing tendencies of Egyptology. At least he recognized that Ethnocentrisms
of the West was a problem and that he could not disentangle himself from that. But
if we are going to push Grammatology further we need to get beyond this
ethnographic gap in our knowledge and deal as even handedly with the phenomena
of writing as we can which Leal does for the Hieroglyphs. Because of the great
influence of Sumeria and Egypt on the Western worldview it is understanding
Cuneiform and Hieroglyphics that is most significant for us. And we can take the
Chinese and Sumerian writing systems as important counter cases. Here we will
focus just on Hieroglyphics through the lens of Leal as a door way not just toward an
even handed explication of the phenomena of hieroglyphs but also into a deeper
structural understanding of Egyptian mythology and how it underpins some
fundamental aspects of Western culture and the worldview we have inherited.
There are four great reservoirs lying at the source of the Western worldview which
are worlds in themselves which are besides the long lived cultures of Sumeria and
Egypt, also the Semites trapped between them, and the Indo-Europeans that raided
them from the North East. It turns out that the Hittitle language which existed
nearby in the Middle East is close to the root of the Indo-European languages. So the
focus on Egypt is somewhat lopsided. But it is nonetheless a very important source
for our worldview and we need to treat it in depth. Here we are merely outlining our
approach to this deepening of Grammatology by looking more closely at just one of
these pre-alphabetical ways of writing. Leal not only deals with the structure of the
Hieroglyph but also its reception within the Western tradition and how it was
misunderstood within our culture. This is very valuable in helping us deepen our
appreciation of what a Deeper Grammatology might look like, and similar things

27 Loprieno, Antonio. Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
28 Leal, Pedro G. M. C. The Invention of Hieroglyphs: A Theory for the Transmission of Hieroglyphs in Early-

Modern Europe. , 2014. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5167/

6
need to happen with respect to other grammatological sources like Sumeria, the
Harrapan civilization, the Maya in the New World and China. There is a very long
way to go in having a clear and even handed (non-ethnocentric) understanding of all
these sources of grammatological investigation. And the reason we want to do that
is to attempt to break out of our own logocentrism even further than Derrida
managed to have done.

From Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction by Antonio Loprieno

Here we can only sketch a few essentials of this deeper study of Grammatology
unveiled by Leal which we are calling Advanced Grammatology. We want to put that
sketch in a wider context so that its significance can be appreciated. Perhaps that
will spur us on to do that work. Underlying the entire enterprise is the insight that
Plato knows not only abut the Kinds of Being but also the interleaved Special
Systems and he appears to have gotten that knowledge from Egypt. How that came
about is unknown. But there are clear signs that Plato knew about the Special
Systems and also the kinds of Being which separate them from each other. And we
hypothesize that he got that knowledge form Egypt because that is what he alludes
to. Thus our problem is seeing the kinds of Being and the Special Systems in the
materials we have left from Egypt. What we want to do is a structural study that
would unearth these sources within Egyptian Mythology and other cultural forms

7
like the Funerary practices of the Egyptians. But this becomes a formidable task due
to the selection of what was preserved from Ancient Egyptian culture. At first glance
this structural study does not seem very promising due to a lack of materials. But
then we ask whether or not it may be that it is encoded in not just the mythology but
in the system of the Hieroglyphs as well. And at this point a hypothesis that would
need a lot of work to substantiate comes to mind. The Hieroglyphs have a phonetic
element that allows combination of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 consonant roots. In the Pharaonic
Funerary Cult there are five major Gods who participate in the central Egyptian
monomyth surrounding Osiris. There are five intercalary days that are added to 360
to make a full year. There are five parts to the human being including ka, ba, body,
shadow and name. In other words 5 plays an important ordering role in many
aspects of Egyptian civilization and its mythology. What if these five somehow
signified something like the five kinds of Being discovered in the Indo-European
worldview. We know from previous studies that the five kinds of Being interleave
with the Special Systems. And we can clearly see hints of the Special Systems within
the Egyptian mythos. Thoth is the dissipative ordering principle. The creator God of
which he is the voice has autopoietic properties as being self-made. The eight proto-
gods out of which the Atum arises can be seen as a reflection of the Reflexive Special
System. The Special Systems appear interleaved with the Kinds of Being. There is of
course no Being in Egypt as we have shown elsewhere. But it could be that these
same existential limits on the human condition may appear in a different form as
existenitals of some kind that are represented by these various fives already
mentioned that are at the mythic core of Egyptian culture. If we could find that
encoding then we could extrapolate as to how Plato came across these kinds of
Being by translating the Egyptian wisdom into a Western setting. If this could be
done it would help us understand the deeper debt our culture has to the long lived
Egyptian culture as well as the Sumerian culture. This is the deep background of our
worldview which is forged of four very different worlds and this is what makes our
worldview a meta-worldview. Each of the different worldviews of which our
worldview is made up has a vital contribution to the structure of our own
worldview. This deeper background was lost to oblivion until we learned to read the
Egyptian Hieroglyphs and then Cuneiforms. We have storehouses of cuneiform
tablets that are almost completely untouched. With Egypt there has been more
activity but there are less material remains to work with. The Egyptian material is of
more widespread interest to the general public due to its exotic nature. So more
materials are available for Sumerian scholars, but more is known and more work is
done with Egyptian sources despite the fact that there is less original material to
work with for Scholars of Ancient Egypt.

The assumption I made at first was that Plato had received an esoteric knowledge
from Egypt. But as I explored further I realized that hints of it was there I the
mythologies of Egypt. Now this attempt is to see it in a structural way as permeating
Egyptian culture such that it is reflected in many different places under different
themes such that we can cross correlate these structures to get the picture of the
special systems in relation to the five kinds of Being where the kinds of Being are
translated into different types of elements. Joseph Campbell came up with the idea
8
of a Monomyth. In Egypt there really was a Monomyth. For despite having many
gods there are only a few gods with personalities and a historical story and that
story is the heart of the Funeral cult of the Ancient Egyptians related to the name
Osiris. Osiris is buried alive in a casket and sent out to sea then torn to pieces by his
brother Set, and Isis his wife sets about reconstituting him with the help of her
sister, and after piecing him together manages to give birth to his successor Horus
who then vies with Set for the throne. It seems a singularly uninteresting myth and
we find it sad that it is really the only real myth that comes down to us from the
Egyptians because it is the myth that organizes the funerary cult which is about all
that is left to us in the carvings and painting on the tombs which we can only
decipher due to the Hieroglyphs. So there is an intimate relation between the mythic
cult of Osiris, the physical remains we have left of Egyptian Culture that appear on
such a monumental style, and the Hieroglyphs that preserve the indelibility of the
writing on the monuments. And it is the monumentality of memory jutting out from
oblivion that Derrida is pointing to in his article on Differance. There is a
tremendous supplement that the Egyptians appended to life that concerned life
after death. They went to tremendous lengths to institute that supplement. And this
produced a General Economy that organized the restricted economies of life. In a
way this is a perfect subject for the exploration of Batailles ideas about the General
Economy that he talks about in the Accursed Share. There was a huge expenditure
for no gain, a wasting of excess grain in an attempt to buy insurance policy on the
passage to the next life. The Egyptians use their Accursed Share to attempt to elude
Death which ended up organizing much of their lives as they prepared for the
Pharaohs death and then carried out their plans after his death by burying him as a
mummy in a Pyramid or Tomb. Part of the General Economy are the illicit goods of
the dead that come into the hands of living Grave robbers. Much of this preparation
was to save the body so it might transfer to the afterlife and that the Pharaoh might
live in the presence of the Gods or as a God identified with Osiris.

The Gods of the Egyptians were very different from the Gods of the Greeks. Greek
Gods were developed on the basis of Sumerian models as a big family. Egyptian
Gods were more cosmic in origin. And in fact they are called NTR which is related to
Nature. Egyptian gods are not as human-like as Greek/Sumerian Gods. They are
more like forces of nature. But the Human-like gods in Egyptian Mythology is Osiris,
Isis, her sister, Horus and Set. But one aspect of the Gods of Egypt is the fact that
they can be combined and superimposed on each other. But entanglement is really
only found in the Osiris Myth alone which talks about the entanglement of the moral
coil and its relation to death. So the Osiris Monomyth represents a kind of limit in
which the gods approach the human destiny through the myth of Osiris and this is
summed up in the identification of the Pharaoh with Osiris as a means of negotiating
the passage to the next world (Duat). The myth of Osiris is in turn tangled up in the
intercalary days which were considered a dangerous passage from one year to
another. There are five days that are associated with the five major characters in the
Osiris myth. All this is taking place at the level of Myth and ritual ceremonies. But
then studying the Hieroglyphs I suddenly associated this with the thing most
striking about the Egyptian Language which is that it has up to five consonants per
9
word which is more than we get with Arabic which has trilateral roots but may have
either two or four letters to a root in rare cases. Egyptian like Arabic is very well
structured and based on consonant roots, but it is a vaster system because it can go
up to five roots. And those sounds may be represented in hieroglyphs that combine
two and three letters as well as define single letters of which there are 2429.

Loprieno, Antonio. Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction p.13

So what if the five consonant places in the word were related structurally to the five
characters in the monomyth and the five intercalary days giving a basis for
structural interpretation of Ancient Egyptian culture and we could see these places
as existentials that function like the kinds of Being in the Indo-European context.
The key point is that the kinds of Being are the greatest possible essential
differences within the Western worldview. What if these greatest possible
differences were arranged as a structural pattern reflected in the Monomyth, in the
intercalary days, and in the consonantal patterns of the words in Ancient Egyptian.
There is just one narrative which is that of Osiris that survives as the monomyth.
The characters of that monomyth are the closest to humans, while the other Gods
seem more like abstract powers, more like nature (NTR). This one narrative has five
characters who are associated with different intercalary days which are days of
dangerous passage from one year to another. It is a differentiated singularity within
the year repeated each year, which causes the whole calendar to go out of alignment
over time. It is a thread of not perfectly periodic change. The kinds of Being are a
sort of differentiated singularity of ultimate difference within the worldview. We
have associated them with contradiction, paradox, absurdity and impossibility. If
perfection is the cycle of 360 days, then in the differentiation between the extra days
at the end of the year we get the mythology of human like characters breaking free
from the normal inhuman nature of the gods. But these characters in the
interspace between the two years embody the other worldly, what lies outside the
perfection of the periodicity that we project upon the world. Everything is just a
little out of kilter and that is why we get the precession of the equinox. This out of
kilter-ness can invade the world turning it upside down, and the persistent way that
this appears in the world is as death. So the Osiris myth becomes a passion play
about death foreshadowing the retelling of this passion play in terms of Dionysus,
the god who dies young, as opposed to Pan the god who died old, and it would
continue to be told in the Christian era as the passion of Christ that avatar of god

29 Loprieno, Antonio. Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

10
who experiences death as a mortal. The Osiris myth is organized around the biggest
destabilizing event in Egyptian culture which was the passage of Kingship from
Pharaoh to his son, and the struggle with illegitimate successors. Thus the myth
encapsulates the interface between the restricted economy of political control by
the Pharaoh under whose rule things go smoothly and the general economy in
which the rulership can get lost as in the intermediary periods. That interface is
cosmic in as much as it is coded into the transitions of the stars in the precession of
the equinox that shows that the whole cosmos is a little out of kilter. And that
interface is at the human scale in as much as the ruler like everyone else experiences
death which can cause vast social upheaval. Charting and controlling this interface
between them is the work of Egyptian mythology which is fully oriented toward
death. Differentiating the various fundamental differences and turning them into
characters in the passion of Osiris allows us to map the territory of the General
Economy that appears in time as the intercalary days, and appears in space as the
Western desert which is the land of the setting sun, and thus death. The Nile itself is
used as the major metaphor and there is assumed to be a transverse anti-Nile that
goes beneath the earth taking the Sun god Re from West back to East every night.
And thus there is a chance that the one identified with Osiris might re-emerge in the
morning after the night if he can ride with the Sun God in his bark on that cosmic
river through darkness. Thus there is on the analogy with the sum coming up every
day the hope that there is life after death when we make the journey from this world
to the Duat and experience Djet time. Assmann in the Mind of Egypt30 has worked
out this journey and its implications in detail in terms of the Egyptian understanding
of time. And this analysis of the Duat and Djet time is astounding in terms of the
insight it gives us into the mindset of Egyptian culture.

But this mythological treatment even if it is right is not enough to show that there is
a structural aspect to this field of difference in the general economy. What we need
is something really well structured that permeates the society which has the same
structure. And for that we turn to the Hieroglyphs as understood by Leal. What we
see in the treatment of the Hieroglyphs by Leal in his reestablishing of
Grammatology on a more sure footing, is that there is a connection back to
petroglyphs. There were petroglyphs worldwide in the Shamanistic period, and
these also appear in Egypt. The best example of these are the cave paintings in
Europe. These are explained in an interesting way by David Lewis-Williams in The
Mind in the Cave31. If we take the hieroglyphics as having a continuous history
coming down from the Petroglyphs then we can perhaps place them better in our
understanding of the world. Hieroglyphs attempt to add annotations to these reliefs

30 Assmann, Jan. The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs . New York: Metropolitan

Books, 2002. See also J. Assmanns Creation through Hieroglyphs: The Cosmic Grammatology of
Ancient Egypt in La, Porta S, and David D. Shulman. The Poetics of Grammar and the Metaphysics of Sound and
Sign. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
31 Lewis-Williams, J D. The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art . London: Thames & Hudson,

2002.

11
in order to name the participants and to say what is happening in the primal scene.
But exactly how this works is very interesting because Hieroglyphs appear all of a
sudden a few hundred years after the invention of writing in Sumeria as a full blown
system which changed very little for more than 3000 years. And it revolved around
representing 1-2-3-4-5 consonantal words via single, double and trilateral signs.
This is to say it revolved like the myth around five phonetic consonants that appear
in relation to 24 letters, but many more biliterals and a certain number of triliterals.
Here it is the five possible places of the phonic letters that serve as the limits that
distinguish phonetic space within the Ancient Egyptian language. In the petroglyphs
that have turned into stelli, and reliefs of various sorts in temples and on tombs
these additional and notational figures become a linear text within a non-linear field
of the entire picture. But notice that part of what these figures are composed of is
parts of a body, like the parts of the body of Osiris. Among the one letter signs are
arm, legs, mouth, and hand. Among, the three consonant signs are eye, head, arms
upraised arms and phallus. Other partial body signs are face, hair, and breast. Whole
animals as well as animal parts also appear in other signs. But this reminds us of the
fragmentation of Osiris by Seth, and it is interesting that the Hieroglyphs are strewn
with body parts. In a sense when we are looking at the Hieroglyphs we are putting
back together the pieces of the body of Osiris. And if we take Osiris as the signifier
then there is always something missing just like the Phallus of Osiris was missing,
but it is exactly that piece that is missing that makes possible for Isis to become
pregnant and give birth to Horus, i.e. to give rise to something new, and new whole
arising like a phoenix out of the fragmentation of Osiris to grow up and challenge Set
for political power thus restoring order. Order is represented by Thoth who is the
god of writing who plays a key role in these proceedings as advisor to Horus. The
hieroglyphs are like a rebus or picture puzzle where pieces many of which represent
sounds need to be put together to form a whole in order to retrieve the concept
being put across. Interestingly sometimes these hieroglyphs have additional letters
that merely repeat what is within a biliteral (biconsonantal) or triliteral
(triconsonantal) but are not meant to be sounded. And also there are categorical
determinatives that are also mute but which show us what the general idea is that
the word is trying to get across. These are error correcting mechanisms built into
the Hieroglyphs that help us to preserve their meanings. Another aspect of them is
that they are arranged in an aesthetic manner most of the time, and may be
represented in abbreviations rather than in full because a certain patterning of signs
has become canonical. Also another aesthetic characteristic is that they can either be
written left to right or the ordinary right to left order, as well as downward in
blocks. This is so that they can be combined in any way necessary with the
monumental non-linear field of the relief scene that the hieroglyphics are depicting.
Thus the hieroglyphs are fully compatible with their incorporation into depictions of
non-linear pectoral scenes. And the full effect only comes though the combination of
the linear and non-linear 2 or 3d pictorial fields or sculptures. Understanding this
crosstalk between linear and non-linear graphisms as embodied in the

12
Hieroglyphics is the basic work of Leals dissertation so we will not repeat that here
but his analysis is brilliant. However we feel that we want to combine that with
metalepsis32, the violation of the frame. In other words the petroglyph is part of the
rockface, and there are many ways to escape the frame that we mentally put
around the relief on which the hieroglyphs are written.

Once we have a hypothesis as to how Ancient Egyptian society reflected something

like the meta-levels of Being as a framework for separating out the Special Systems,
i.e. in the conjunction between the places in their roots of their language, and in the
intercalary days, and in the myth of Osiris transcending death. Then we can begin to
connect this to the underlying mathematics. And the connection of course is the
relation of the pentachora to these five elements. The pentachora is the minimal
four dimensional simplex hunk (4d hyper-solid). But this is not all. There are six
Platonic solids in four dimensional space while there are just five in three
dimensional space and three in all higher dimensional spaces. And the unique solid
among these 4d solids is the 24 cell polytope with a lattice of 1-24-96-96-24-1
which is made up of nested and interpenetrated octahedrons. Octahedrons are the
only solid that allows laminar flow through its lattice. This 24cell is unique and has
some very special properties being another lattice complementary to the 16cell and
the 8cell that are analogous to the cube and octahedron in three dimensional space.
We will also note that some of the Egyptian mythologies had an eight primordial
gods that were submerged in the water (Nun) before the arising of the mound upon
which Atum appeared, as the creator god that created himself. The eight of the
Ogdad plus the Atum is the first Ennead. The Egyptians were very favorable to
trinities and trinities of trinities, a predilection that Christians may have picked up
from them since an early home of Christianity was Egypt. The point is that there are
some important numbers that appear in the various myths that could be explained
numerologically by appealing to fourth dimensional geometry. Whether when we
actually learn the structures underling these myths this makes sense is another
matter. But on the surface it makes sense that they might appeal to transcendental
geometrical structures given their tendency to use geometry in their building
projects. We dont know if they had a sophisticated geometry and it was lost or
whether that was wholly Greek invention as is presumed by everyone. But there is
evidence that the Chinese had some idea of this higher order geometry as reflected
in Acupuncture theory and other sources. If they knew about it would be an
excellent mathematical substrate to hang their mythological speculations on. In each
place in the set of consonant positions they could place 24 single letter elements
with 7962624 possible combinations. There are 576 biconsonantal possibilities and
13824 triconsonantal possibilities. Of these only a small number are exercised in the
actual language. The words are actually a sparse matrix within the field of possible
word values where there are 24 possibilities at each stage of root formation. There
is another interesting point. Which is that the number 17 is special to the Egyptians
as an important prime. And that number is between 16 and 18.

32 Martin Jimenez, Alfonso A Theory of Impossible Worlds (metalepsis). Universidad de Valladolid, 2015.

13
17. In the treatise "De Iside et Osiride," Plutarch says Osiris was killed on the 17th day of the moon, and hence
when the moon was at the fulland from that reason the Egyptians abominate the number 17, and so did the
Pythagoreansthey called in Antiphraxis (obstruction), because it falls between the square number 16 and the
oblong number 18 http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/nop/nop22.htm

The death of Osiris would have occurred at the 17th day of the month of Athyr according to the Egyptian
mythology. http://www.ridingthebeast.com/numbers/nu17.php

It is a prime number between 16 a square number and 18 an oblong number.

See Taylor, Thomas, and Manly P. Hall. The Theoretic Arithmetic of the Pythagoreans. York Beach, Me: S.
Weiser, 1983.

So what we are saying is that the numbers 5, 16 as related to 17 and 18, 8, and 24
are all numbers that were important to the Egyptians and they are also numbers
with some four dimensional numerological significance. Although it is hard at this
point to see how this could be relevant. However, if we could find some other
evidence for the importance of these numbers among the Egyptians then it might be
useful as a mathematical substrate for the speculations on the structure of Egyptian
mythology putting such emphasis on the pentagram or the pentachora in their
mythology, calendar and the hieroglyphic structure of their writing system.

14
In A Structural Analysis of an Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Deep Structure of
the Western Meta-Worldview I have already analyzed the structural significance of
4+17=21 and 9+12=21 in relation to knots as archetypes of self-organization in
relation to the journey of Re underground to the Duat. We note that in terms of
numerology we can see that on the one hand there is the ogdad (8 primordial gods)
which extends itself with the arising of the Atum to produce the primordial Ennead
(9 fold structure that becomes important as a trinity of trinities). And thus there is a
relation between the eight and singularity on the one hand related to the primordial
origin myth. Atum (Atom) gives rise to creation though a self-erotic self-production
in an self-induced ecstasy causing the existence (a standing outside oneself) giving
rise to the first couple before the birth of Geb and Nut (earth and heaven). But on
the other hand there is the doubling of the 8 to give 16 and the doubling of the 9 to
give 18 (greater and lesser enneads) and between them stands the prime number
17 which is the key to the Osiris mystery being and impediment to the mastery of
Death by Osiris. Thus a singularity appears between the 8 and the 9 when they are
doubled in relation to each other. We associate this 8 and 16 with the 8-cell and 16-
cell polytopes in four dimensional space. The production of the Atun as a ninth is a
singularity out of which all creation unfolds by self-production. On the other hand
the 17 as a prime is a singularity associated with death which stands in the doorway
between 16 and 18. We should also mention that part of this series is the 14 parts of
the body of Osiris, all of which can be found except one giving another prime 13.
When ISIS mounts the phallus of Osiris restored this is the addition of a fifteenth
element. Thus there is a series from 12 to 17 each step with a numerological
significance that is capped by the number 18. We can imagine this series as
extending through 19, 20 to 21 which is the number of knots with eight crossings.
There are seven knots with seven crossings. But it is only at the level of eight
crossings that knots become irrational and this gives rise to the two breaks 9/12
and 4/17 that describe this irrationality in the self-organizing structure of the field
of the knots.
Now our account needs to extend not just to the 24 cell polytope that is related to
the unilateral hieroglyphs but also to the 120-cell and 600-cell polytopes. We can
explain the connection to the 120 cell by looking at the up to five possible letters in
the Egyptian words. We can see that 5*4*3*2*1 = 120. Also we can see that the
uniliteral, biliteral, and triliteral phonemes that give us the 24 letters is 3*2*1 = 6 a
perfect number. The letterforms that are related to the 24 phonemes can take us up
to 27 letters. Arabic is 28 letters which is the next higher perfect number. There are
three vowels, but we can take the Vowels together as the 28th just like it is Alif in
Arabic. Ugrit has 32 letters which are represented by cuneiforms. Hebrew has 22
letters also all consonants. We take the level of 25 as the level of the articulation of
letters which has its limit in 32 forms. This is of course the level at which the
pentachora express itself. This is one level higher in the Pascal Triangle than the 16
where Ilm al-Rama exists. By weak hadith it is said that Idris was the prophet to the
Egyptians and that Ilm al-Raml was the form of the revelation to Idris. In a separate

15
place I have shown that Ilm al-Raml is what Deleuze in the Logic of Sense33 calls an
Ideal Game or what might be called a Meta-game, i.e. an image of the meta-system or
general economy of Bataille as opposed to the restricted economy (system). In
general the relation of the pentachora to the tetrahedron, i.e. the two simplexes of
the third and fourth dimension, is an image of celestial causation. And previously we
have connected Ilm al-Raml with the Meaning of Man34 which gives it philosophical
depth much like the I Ching has in China. Ilm al-Raml is the equivalent of the kind of
oracle that we see in China with the trigrams and the hexagrams in relation to the
oracle bones of turtles. But characterizing them as meta-games makes us realize
that they are techniques for contacting the unconscious but they are also ways of
understanding the relation of opposites in creation in order to situate decisions and
actions in the world. In general we would like to connect Ilm al-Raml to the
fundamental story we are seeing in Egyptian Mythology and the structure of
Hieroglyphs in order to see how the traces of Ilm al-Raml might be seen within this
mythological structure which at this time is far from clear. However a step toward
the resolution of this quandary is relating the mythology to the structure of the four-
dimensional polytopes (platonic solids of 4d). And it is clear that we can get the 120-
cell limit by all the permutation so of the five letters. But we only have uniliterals,
biliterals and triliterals so the permutation of those is the perfect number six. The
next perfect number 28 is the limit of the letter forms that represent the 24
phonemes in Ancient Egyptian. 600 is 5 times 120, while the year of 360 days is 3
times 120. The fundamental structure that is represented by the 120-cell and 600-
cell are the disjointed Tori.
Intertwining rings
Two intertwining rings of the 120-cell.

Two orthogonal rings in a cell-centered projection

33 Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
34 Al-Jamal, Ali, A is a A.-R. Tarjuma na, and al-Munauwara Abd-al-Kabir. The Meaning of Man: The Foundations
of the Science of Knowledge. Norwich, England: Diwan Pr, 1977.

16
 The 120-cell can be partitioned into 12 disjoint 10-cell great circle rings, forming a discrete/quantized
Hopf fibration. Starting with one 10-cell ring, one can place another ring alongside it that spirals around
the original ring one complete revolution in ten cells. Five such 10-cell rings can be placed adjacent to the
original 10-cell ring. Although the outer rings "spiral" around the inner ring (and each other), they
actually have no helical torsion. They are all equivalent. The spiraling is a result of the 3-sphere
curvature. The inner ring and the five outer rings now form a six ring, 60-cell solid torus. One can
continue adding 10-cell rings adjacent to the previous ones, but it's more instructive to construct a
second torus, disjoint from the one above, from the remaining 60 cells, that interlocks with the first. The
120-cell, like the 3-sphere, is the union of these two (Clifford) tori. If the center ring of the first torus is a
meridian great circle as defined above, the center ring of the second torus is the equatorial great circle
that is centered on the meridian circle. Also note that the spiraling shell of 50 cells around a center ring
can be either left handed or right handed. It's just a matter of partitioning the cells in the shell differently,
i.e. picking another set of disjoint great circles. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/120-
cell#/Intertwining_rings

The 120-cell and 600-cell are two ways of looking at the same lattice which is 1-120-
720-1200-600-1. Here the relation is a deeper relation being played out that is also
echoed in the group A5 that is of order 60. It is the same group both for the
octoahedron in 3d and the pentachora in 4d. This group is extremely important
because it allows the coordination between the 3d forms and the 4d forms. But this
group is also that which stops our ability to solve equations higher than the fifth
degree thus it represents a fundamental barrier to transparency of higher
dimensions. Sixty is the fundamental number of the Sumerians whose number
system is in base 60. Egyptian numbers were base 10. Egyptians had a symbol for
zero nfr used in accounting.

So what we are saying is that it appears that several of the numbers that are key in
Egyptian Mythology and Language structure have some at least hypothetical
relation to specific numbers that are important in four dimensional Platonic solids.
And this hypothetical relationship allows us to reinterpret some of the linguistic and
mathematical elements of that mythology and the Egyptian Hieroglyphs. We know
from previous letter studies related to Arabic that there is a fundamental relation
between the Eight of the Trigrams (seven heavens and seven earth) and the perfect
number 28 of the letter forms, in as much as there are 28 relations between the
trigrams that describe the interrelations between heaven and earth. These relations
between the interpenetrating elements of heaven and earth are signified in the
letter forms. Different Semitic languages articulate various extents along the line
from 21 (knots of eight crossings that are irrational) and 32 the full extent of the

17
permutations of the pentachora as seen in Ugrit which is represented by cuneiform.
Hebrew has 22 letters, i.e. one more than the minimum related to the knots, i.e.
adding the Aleph. Ancient Egyptian has 24 single phonemic uniliterals, but up to 27
with alternative forms for the uniliterals. Arabic has 28 which is the perfect number.
When we consider that there are three vowels and one Hamza, zeroth phoneme,
then we get to 32 in the Arabic. If you look at Arabic there are 14 sun and 14 moon
letters. There are also 14 dotted and undotted letters. If you take both of these
relations together we get the distinction between 6 and 8 inscribed within the 14.
Thus Arabics 28 letters are split into 14 which is then doubled. Osiris has 14 body
parts. And Egyptian letters are represented by body parts, whole things, and
abstract symbols. So wholeness and severance into parts are an issue brought to the
fore in Hieroglyphic writing. Re and Thoth are sun and moon. Dotted and undotted
letters represent the pure and the dusty, or internal and external. Osiris goes on a
journey with Re, through the underworld led by Thoth. Organs of the body are
either inside Osiris or outside in the dust of materiality. What appears as a
mythology in Egypt appears abstractly in differences between the letters in Arabic.
But understanding these traces depends on our understanding of the relation
between the trigrams, the quadragrams of Ilm al-Raml and the pentagrams of the
letterforms. There is no equivalent to the level 24 of Ilm al-Raml in China. China
articulates only the level (8) 23 of the trigrams and its doubling in the 64 (26) of the
hexagrams. Ilm al-Raml appears as a separate divinatory system poised at the level
of 24 in relation to the information infrastructure which we are given in Pascals
Triangle. It has figures and places which are 16 elements each and together
approximate the doubling of 32 (25). If we take seriously the idea that Idris is the
prophet to the Egyptians and that Ilm al-Raml was the form of his revelations, then
we can see Ilm al-Raml as an intermediate stage between the trigrams that signify
the interpenetration of heaven and earth and the letter forms that are differentiated
by various Semitic languages. Letters signify the relation between moments of in the
interpenetration, the momens of the trigrams which perfectly realized as in the 28
letters of Arabic. But these are articulated at the level of 32 elements where the
surplus beyond the 28 are the vowels or must vocalizations. In other languages only
parr of the relations are marked rather than all of the relations and thus there is
some opacity in the unarticulated relations within the whole binary system. The
Level of Ilm al-Raml signifies the interrelation of man and cosmos by merging the
two sequences identified by the Chinese called the Ho and Lo river maps, i.e. the
relation between 2n (Quality) and N2 (Quantity). Ilm al-Raml as interpreted through
the Meaning of Man by Sidi Ali al-Jamal is about the rolling over of the opposites in
creation, i.e. the dynamics of creation. At the level of the letter forms (25) asymmetry
enters into this picture in a big way that signifies the interaction between the
receptivity of earth and the celestial causes according to Shaykh al-Akbar in Chapter
11 of the Mekkan Revelation which is about Divine Causality. We can see the
proliferation of the phonemes and written letter forms and the distinction between
them in terms of the how various Semitic languages take on a structural form that
can be seen as part of this process by which the invisible Celestial Cause impacts the
visible Ard or Earth which is simulated in the prophetic process of revelation that is
so important in the historical development of the Mideast which we are heir to as
18
part of the Western worldview. The Primal Scene is the impact of the Celestial Cause
with the Earth that in Egypt is given by the Atum giving rise to creation though self-
erotic action producing a fundamental nondual moment at the origin but which is
rife with paradoxes. Atum gives rise to Shu and Tefnut who in turn gives rise to Geb
and Nut. But it is only with Osiris and Horus whose myths have been stitched
together do we get the beginning of history. And the Osiris myth is the primal myth
of the passing of power from father to son and their standing up against the forces of
Disorder (Set). Notice that Set first puts Osiris in a box and then after Isis finds him
then he dismembers him after which Isis has to put him back together again like
Humpty Dumpty (Hun Tun35 in China). Thus in the myth is the dialectical relation
between the nihilistic opposites of too much (placing him in a box) and too little
(dismemberment where a crucial member [floating signifier] is lost). This nihilistic
situation of being closed in and covered in a box that just fits, and then being
dismembered shows how the nihilistic opposites are infecting the primal scene that
disrupts the transmission of power with continuity from generation to generation.
The fear is not having a son who can be a successor before the King does because
that leads to instability. It was virtual continued possession of power though the son
is a supplement to ones own power during life which would be lost if the son fails to
succeed the father. We see these themes explored in detail based on Derridas
grammatology in ReMembering Osiris by Tom Hare36.

Our point which is purely hypothetical is that much of the structure of the primal
scenes of Egyptian Mythology seems to be structured by four-dimensional geometry
in a complex and interesting way, and that has implications for how we treat the
grammatology of the Hieroglyphs. In other words according to Four-Dimensional
Geometry there are two planes within the fourth dimension that are related to each
other in terms of the Quaternions and it is the interaction of circles on these planes
that produce the Hopf Fibrations. The relation through the quaternion is what
allows the embodiment of the autopoietic special system that we see acted out in
the creation myth. If we think about the nonlinear and linear writing of the
Egyptians we can see their relation as being mediated by this four dimensional
geometry and if that were true it would give a whole different meaning to the
surface reliefs or sculptures and their relation to the Hieroglyphs which Leal
discusses. If we interpret the Duat as the fourth dimension which is so much bigger
than the world37 within which we live then we can understand how perhaps the
Egyptians had the same idea as J. Dunne (Serial Universe38, Experiment in Time39)
thinking that higher dimensionality offered an explanation for and escape from
death. Dunne influenced Tolkien so that each species of humanoid in the Lord of the

35 Girardot, N J. Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism: The Theme of Chaos (hun-Tun). Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1983.
36 Hare, Thomas B. Remembering Osiris: Number, Gender, and the Word in Ancient Egyptian Representational

Systems. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1999.

37 There are four three-dimensional spaces in the fourth dimension.
38 Dunne, J W. The Serial Universe. London: Faber & Faber, Limited, 1934.
39 Dunne, J W. An Experiment with Time. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927 .

19
Rings see time differently. This perspective on time which is multidimensional has
some interesting consequences which may explain some of the oddities of Egyptian
religion especially if you begin to think heterochronically, i.e. outside the closure of
metaphysics which is dependent on linear time. We already noted that the night
journey of Osiris with Re through the underworld (a journey through Nut) is at right
angles (West to East) to the flowing of the Nile. And thus we can think of this
structure of the underworld as being related to the idea of orthogonal time.
Suddenly with the entry of all the oddities of four dimensional geometry some of the
strangeness of the Egyptian religion becomes explicable as the intrusion of four
dimensionality into the three dimensional realm. Atum gives rise to the four
elements (Shu, Tefnut; Ges/Nut) which in turn gives rist to the children of Geb and
Nut (Osiris, Isis, Set, Nepthys) that give rise to Horus40 the son of brother and sister,
and thus also a sibling. Thus a tetrahedron gives rise to a pentachoral structural
configuration. The generations are dissipative between the autopoiesis of atum and
the reflexivity of the Primordial gods. They thought that if they could get past the
three dimensional realm into the fourth dimension called the Duat with Djet time
that they could live on in that realm, much the way that Dunne posits immortality as
being possible in higher dimensional time. What is fascinating however is the fact
that this mythology of the arising of time within the world from the primal scene of
the first incident which is Atun arising on the mound after the flood of the Nile gets
encoded at the beginning of Egyptian history into the Hieroglyphic writing system
as the parts of Osiris body which become some of the uniliterals, biliterals and
triliterals of the language against which are ranged whole bodies, and this happens
not just for humans but also for animals. Between these extremes of wholeness and
separation of parts are various abstract and concrete figures that are of artifacts of
various kinds or abstract figures. The primal scene at the origin of history becomes
fragmented into the writing system itself. Alphabetical letters as such do not exist
until later. These appear with the Phoenicians (the ones who use phonemes) which
ended up migrating to Carthage and become the foe Rome. But all these later letter
forms are based fragmentation of ideogram, logogram and phonogram that made up
the whole of the Egyptian Hieroglyph. It is this wholeness of working seen in the
Hieroglyphs that we need to interpret better. In it voice, figure, concept, word and
inscription are merged into a synthesis and the duality of Phenomena and writing is
submerged not being a duality. Rather the origin is complex from which alphabets
arose in the middle east. We cannot reduce Hieroglyphs to just Ideograph, or
logograph, or pictograph, or phonemic representations of sounds. Thoth was the
god not just of writing but also of the commanding voice that orders carrying out the
will of the Pharaoh (Ra). Thoth did not just invent writing as Socrates claims in the
Phaedrus. But Thoth represents the ur-synthesis of voice and writing, not just
writing.

What we learn when we go beyond Derridas view based on Gibbs is that the
Hieroglyphs and Thoth are more fascinating than Derrida indicates given what we
know now. This leads back into a primal scene that Tom Hare explores in terms of

40 There is a rumor that Horus is related to Hercules which is interesting.

20
its exemplification of grammatology. Leal gives us a fundamental view of the way
Hieroglyphs were brought into the Western tradition during the Renaissance. And
we see in the complexity of the relations between phonogram, logogram, and
ideogram within the Hieroglyphs a far more interesting structure than Derrida
suspects exists which is based on four dimensional geometry.

Other works purporting to be about grammatology:

Bang, Jrgen C, and Jrgen C. Bang. Runes: Genealogy and Grammatology. Odense M, Danmark: Odense
University, Institute of Language and Communication, 1997.
Bang, Jrgen C. Runes - Genealogy and Grammatology: An Augmented Version of the Original Danish Essay ...
Which Was Presented at Aarhus University 10 October 1996. Odense: Odense University, Institute of
Language and Communication, 1997.
Bradley, Arthur. Derrida's of Grammatology: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2008.
Damerow, Peter. The Origins of Writing As a Problem of Historical Epistemology . Berlin: Max-Planck-Institut fur
Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 1999.
Dunand, Francoise, and Christiane Zivie-Coche. Gods and Men in Egypt: 3000 Bce to 395 Ce. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2004.
Gaston, Sean, and Ian Maclachlan. Reading Derrida's of Grammatology. London: Continuum, 2011.
Kadanoff, Leo P. "Reflections on Gibbs: from Statistical Physics to the Amistad V3.0." Journal of Statistical Physics.
156.1 (2014): 1-9.
Kakoliris, Gerasimos. An Impossible Project: Derrida's Deconstructive Reading As 'double' Reading: the Case of
'of Grammatology'. , 2002.
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