Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Eye of Horus: A comment on the title image

Regular readers of this blog might have noticed that I had the following image of an eye on this template earlier:

This was cropped out of the following:

A well-wisher writes to me that the latter image is an Egyptian glyph called 'the eye of Horus'. More from the comment:

    The 'eye of Horus' is a talismanic image and incorporates some mystic mathematics and (seemingly grisly) mythology as well: different portions of the eye glyph represent fractions (powers of 1/2) which add up to 63/64. Each fraction apparently corresponds to a portion of the body of the god Osiris which was cut to pieces and scattered by his vengeful brother Seth - and found and reassembled by his widow Isis. The remaining 1/64 corresponds to the phallus which was probably never retrieved.
The comment further suggested that "the full glyph be adopted for 'locana' rather than the present trimmed one", since "mystic symbols have certain attributes which militate against unrestricted editorial freedom."

So I decided to have the full glyph as the background image of the title field. Further comments are welcome.