Letters - 18 February 2022
From Special numbers to Carpets and rugs
Special numbers
At several recent Quaker Meetings, Friends have shared their thoughts and offered suggestions about how to prevent the current intense frustrations, and very unQuakerly feelings of anger, circulating in their minds and hearts, over recent government activities.
One idea which I was already enjoying telling folk about, was the activity of focusing on palindromes of several kinds, including, especially, palindromic numbers. I think I may qualify for being called an elihphile or ‘lover of palindromes’.
As I’m sure you already know, 2.2.22 passed by recently, but on the twenty-second of this month, an even better one arrives. 22.02.2022 will be a near-perfect palindromic number and is well worth celebrating for fun, enjoyment, distraction, relaxation, sharing and would be a great number to feature in the Friend.
Numbers were my misery at school, but my father said he found them ‘beautiful’ and I have come to love seeking them as palindromes. I would love to think that others, maybe also suffering from stress of many kinds, might find brief, but welcome respite in the symmetry, if nothing else.
Should you feel able to use the date, I would need to apologise in advance, to any suffering from aibohphobia, or people with a fear of palindromes.
I will close with a few Quakerly palindromic words that I have enjoyed sharing with other Friends before. These are as follows:
Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?
Do geese see God?
We panic in a pew.
Madam, in Eden, I’m Adam.
Rise to vote sir.
Jill Blackadder
Mystical roots of Quakerism
In her article investigating the mystical roots of Quakerism, Moira Fitt (14 January) reminds us that George Fox’s mysticism formed part of a much longer European tradition. Whether Fox was aware of the writings of Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen Mechthild of Magdeburg is, as far as I am aware, unknown, but what does seem clear is that he was greatly influenced by the German mystic Jacob Boehme (1575-1624).
In his magisterial work Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries published in 1914, Rufus Jones was the first to draw attention to the extraordinary similarities to be found in Boehme’s and Fox’s writings.
Boehme writes ‘show us the Gate and how we must enter again into Paradise through the sharpness of the sword’, ‘the flaming sword which God set to keep the Tree of Life’ and ‘when Paradise brings up, the paradisiacal joy puts itself forth with a lovely smell’. Fox: ‘Now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter.’
Boehme refers to Sofia and ‘the hidden Unity in the Eternal Being, or the Eternal Essence’. Fox asks that we ‘may receive the Word of Wisdom that opens all things, and, come to know the hidden Unity in the Eternal Being’. Both speak of the Seed of God. Rufus Jones concludes: ‘There are ideas expressed and experiences described in the Journal which look strangely like memories, conscious or subconscious, of ideas and experiences to be found in the Boehme writings’.
There are also many common themes in the writings of Boehme and James Nayler, such as the doctrine of the inward light and the necessity of silent waiting. Most of Boehme’s writings and letters were translated from German and printed in English between 1645 and 1662. Robert Rich, a close friend and ally of James Nayler, had an extensive library of mystical texts and especially admired Boehme. This may well help explain Fox’s evident familiarity with Boehme and probably also the continental mystical tradition.
Jan Arriens
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