I’ve got an even better one: the circle! Yes, it predates even the enigmatic hexagram! Want your mind blown? Even the Universe follows its laws! Look into the sky and behold the moon! In the holy shape of the circle…
Aww, shit. I can’t keep this crap going for long before I lose interest in mocking these asshats.
Oh man, wait until I tell you about lines. They can be straight, or curved. Curved enough, they make a circle. Three straight ones, and you get a triangle. And they’refucking everywhere.
They can even have varying length and girth!
I know something else that has varying length and girth
Glad it’s not just me who gets irrationally annoyed when it turns out being dangerously stupid is hard, if you’re not incredibly stupid.
Thank you for calling the moon a circle and not a sphere.
Note: there are no triangular celestial bodies.
There’s the Triganic Pu…
The Triganic Pu has its own very special problems. Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change.
– Douglas Adams
Note: there are no triangular celestial bodies.
yet
Are you suggesting the circles might be cones? Eg, triangles from the side?
Of course it’s a circle; it’s a flat disk, just like the Earth.
What is this mysterious symbol? What did it mean? Why did it suddenly arise across civilizations in the late 1900s, then just as mysteriously vanish? Find out on: Lost Mysteries of The Schoolyard on the History Channel.
The Lemmino documentary about it is actually kind of cool snd interesting.
Shhh don’t tell anyone.
There’s no way that more than one culture would figure out that 2 triangles inside each other looks cool
I drew those as a child with no context whatsoever.
The number 6 is quite nice. It has a lot of factors and is also the smallest perfect number. Unsurprisingly, it shows up everywhere in a number of religions. People might easily have started with the number 6 and designed the star to go along with it. While it was harder to travel thousands of years ago, people did and it only takes one to bring back a design like this.
We can trace every script in Europe, Africa and Asia back to just three, one from Mesopotamia (3400 BC), another from Egypt (3250 BC) and the third from China (1200 BC). If writing was able to make it’s way to almost every single culture on three continents, a 6 pointed star certainly can.
I always thought it would be a fun short story, probably just a dialogue between two people, where someone convinces the dean of a European art school that this young kid who’s applying isn’t great yet, but he shows promise and could be molded into a great artist and at the end, it turns out it’s a time traveler and the kid is Hitler.
It’s not like these societies were completely disconnected from each other (except Japan). Remember even people in the past borrowed things from their history for their beliefs. The entirety of Hermeticism is the fusion of Greek and Egyptian beliefs for example (Hermes and Thoth specifically).
Japan wasn’t even disconnected. They traded with China, sent missions there, etc.
They were more disconnected during the sakoku policy, but they still had traders coming in (Chinese, Korean, and I think Dutch) even if they all had to trade from Dejima. Rangaku (the Ran here coming from hoRANda (holland) and gaku (study)) was quite popular even during this time and before the opening leading up to the Meji era.
Traded heavily with China for obvious reasons. And the Silk Road began in China and ended on the Eastern Mediterranean coast. Every single one of these areas was directly connected by the most famous trade route in history.
I’ve been going down a rabbit hole trying to get to the source of the Japanese one. It’s a marker at a shrine with the old name of the shrine, apparently, and no longer has the hexagram. That’s all the further I could get before work, but it shows up in weird conspiracy-like blogs with arbitrarily-drawn hexagrams on maps (using the location of things today despite, y’know, the shrine variously having been purported to move, and some saying the thing was sealed away for over 2000 years which has a whole host of other issues). I’ll report back if I get sufficiently bored. I have a feeling that, short of contacting the actual shrine, I’m not going to get very far. Even the various shrine and tourism websites are mostly dead links that I have to find by searching again on the base tourism site.
edit: This seems like a more sensible site explaining what a hexagram meant previously in Japan (basket weave pattern) https://cultural-experience.blogspot.com/2015/01/blog-post_8.html and addresses the “Japanese people came from the lost tribes” myth that was apparently dreamed up by a Scottsman in the past.
