Book Of Abraham: Greco-Roman Era Constrained Writing Experiment With Sensen

[DragonLancer]

[The Nehor]

are you comparing me to two of the greatest heroes of my childhood? If so, thank you.

Also, I get to be Statler. Cinepro can be Waldorf.

[cinepro]

Glad to see that the other peanut from past threads has joined the gallery too.

 

You actually missed my best post.  The first response to your OP was a SPAM post for Cialis that somehow got through.  I gave it a rep point and said it was the most helpful and informative post so far in the entire thread (my post being the third post).  Sadly, both were deleted by the mods

[Brian 2.0]

Creatively like anybody that idles away their time writing poetry or wasting time with crossword puzzles or playing board games or Banana-grams or whatever.

 

And they either had copies of the actual book of Abraham text we have now and knew the story, or they had the story orally passed down.  Either way is fine by me, but I do not believe Joseph Smith had the text of the Book of Abraham in his possession, but that he got it through revelation.  And since this papyrus was representative of this story through associations over time with the various characters in it, it was serviceable for Joseph Smith to use for the Book of Abraham.  The important thing is ancient context here of the usage of the papyrus, not the literal meaning of the papyrus.

 

 

This is where I don't see the evidence.  What evidence in there that the characters on the papyri were used as a connection to Abraham's story?

 

I'll grant you the existence of constrained writing but what evidence is there that this papyri is that?

 

Sorry if I missed that evidence in your link.  And I will say that the resemblance of a game table with the lion couch does not count as evidence that the papyri is constrained writing in my book.

[DragonLancer]

 

This is where I don't see the evidence.  What evidence in there that the characters on the papyri were used as a connection to Abraham's story?

 

I'll grant you the existence of constrained writing but what evidence is there that this papyri is that?

 

Sorry if I missed that evidence in your link.  And I will say that the resemblance of a game table with the lion couch does not count as evidence that the papyri is constrained writing in my book.

 

 

You have to look at the evidence I have accumulated as a whole and see the overall pattern that I have documented in the blog, from the reverse engineering of what Joseph Smith is doing in the KEP and Book of Abraham Manuscripts

The evidence for the constrained writing is in the Kirtland Egyptian Papers and BOA manuscripts, coupled with the reverse-engineering of that.  I show example after example of what Joseph Smith said, and then how that relates to how the Egyptians understood the symbol.

 

I can't show you some ancient example of this, because all we have that is ancient in this case directly is the Sensen Papyrus.

The Sensen papyrus itself only contains the characters used in the constrained writing, not the constrained writing itself.  We don't have an additional papyrus.  This is based on the internal evidence from Joseph Smith's dealings with these characters.

 

I can show you ancient examples of constrained writing such as in the Psalms that show the general ancient precedent for what I'm talking about.

 

The link I provided in the OP is the general theory.  The evidence is scattered throughout all the rest of the posts in the blog.  You are welcome to read every post in the blog if you wish.  But I won't reproduce it all here.  I've given a couple of examples with the reed symbol and the rope coil symbol.

 

People have to meet me half-way here.  I can't show you everything on a message board.  Individuals will need to read the documentation on the blog for the entirety of the evidence.

 

I could post links to article after article from my blog here, but there is no point in that.  There are over 110 articles on my blog dealing with different aspects of this.

Edited August 11, 2015 by DragonLancer

[The Nehor]

The link I provided in the OP is the general theory.  The evidence is scattered throughout all the rest of the posts in the blog.  You are welcome to read every post in the blog if you wish.  But I won't reproduce it all here.  I've given a couple of examples with the reed symbol and the rope coil symbol.

 

People have to meet me half-way here.  I can't show you everything on a message board.  Individuals will need to read the documentation on the blog for the entirety of the evidence.

 

I could post links to article after article from my blog here, but there is no point in that.  There are over 110 articles on my blog dealing with different aspects of this.

I read over a dozen of your articles and putting the evidence together came up with this:

Nonsense does not start making sense because there is a lot of it. If it did then we would be surrounded by UFOs and the reptilian Illuminati would control our lives.

[DragonLancer]

I read over a dozen of your articles and putting the evidence together came up with this:

Nonsense does not start making sense because there is a lot of it. If it did then we would be surrounded by UFOs and the reptilian Illuminati would control our lives.

 

Sometimes Nehor is a genuinely funny guy.

[bjw]

I think we need to remember that some who followed Nibley's works believe the scrolls were temple ritual scrolls of some kind of initiation experience of the soul going from creation to judgment, and that traces of the Abraham account can be found in the papyri. We do have a creation story, near death experience, and judgment scene in the BoA that makes these ideas interesting. We may never understand these things fully, but this speculation is still fun to read.

[DragonLancer]

I think we need to remember that some who followed Nibley's works believe the scrolls were temple ritual scrolls of some kind of initiation experience of the soul going from creation to judgment, and that traces of the Abraham account can be found in the papyri. We do have a creation story, near death experience, and judgment scene in the BoA that makes these ideas interesting. We may never understand these things fully, but this speculation is still fun to read.

 

My research is much more than speculation.  I have data.  Nehor will disagree.  But I truly have data to back up my points.  That is why, I differ with everyone that wants to just pass of what I have to say as just having fun with speculation.  I have detailed analysis with detailed data.  But it doesn't much matter what I say if people choose to ignore it and make fun of it.

 

Furthermore, you need to separate out the use of symbols with the context of what Nibley found for what this papyrus says.  This is not about what the papyrus says about an initiation rite.  This is about the usage of the characters in the papyrus as a list of symbols, where it doesn't matter what they "say."  it only matters how they were used in this other way.

Edited August 11, 2015 by DragonLancer

[bjw]

My research is much more than speculation.  I have data.  Nehor will disagree.  But I truly have data to back up my points.  That is why, I differ with everyone that wants to just pass of what I have to say as just having fun with speculation.  I have detailed analysis with detailed data.

 

Furthermore, you need to separate out the use of symbols with the context of what Nibley found for what this papyrus says.  This is not about what the papyrus says about an initiation rite.  This is about the usage of the characters in the papyrus as a list of symbols, where it doesn't matter what they "say."  it only matters how they were used in this other way.

I agree with you and am basically in the same camp, so it was not my intent to sound condescending, I was trying to clarify the topic for those who may be new to it, since some are posting silly pictures.

I too take this topic seriously, to the point that I travel once per month to the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum to do research and used to have my own website and am hoping to write a book one day. I also have spent time on your site and have been impressed with what you have written so far. I am not quite as far in my research on the BoA specifically, but I have been doing research on hermeticism, masonry, kabbalah, ancient and middle age Christianity, esoteric Christianity, as well as Egyptology. Hugh Nibley's books sparked an interest that got me researching this, as well as the LDS temple ceremonies, and I have brought my research in this direction every since.

I also like the direction your site goes examining the alphabet and grammar, which Nibley dismissed.

[DragonLancer]

I agree with you and am basically in the same camp, so it was not my intent to sound condescending, I was trying to clarify the topic for those who may be new to it, since some are posting silly pictures.

I too take this topic seriously, to the point that I travel once per month to the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum to do research and used to have my own website and am hoping to write a book one day. I also have spent time on your site and have been impressed with what you have written so far. I am not quite as far in my research on the BoA specifically, but I have been doing research on hermeticism, masonry, kabbalah, ancient and middle age Christianity, esoteric Christianity, as well as Egyptology. Hugh Nibley's books sparked an interest that got me researching this, as well as the LDS temple ceremonies, and I have brought my research in this direction every since.

I also like the direction your site goes examining the alphabet and grammar, which Nibley dismissed. 

 

Thank you bjw.  Please contact me if you would like.  It sounds like we have a lot in common.  I have also studied a lot on various hermetic things like that.  There is a contact form on my blog if you want to contact me that way, and from there, we could email each other directly if you wish.  Now, just to make it as clear as possible, I have tried, yet again, to put my theory in other words (let's see if anybody can understand what I'm trying to say using these terms):

 

http://egyptianalphabetandgrammar.blogspot.com/p/httpsbooks.html

 

(1) Abraham wrote his book in something like 2500 to 1500 BC (we don't know for sure when he lived).

(2) A copy of this book made its way into the hands of Egyptians in the Greco-Roman era (sometime around a few centuries before or after Christ).

(3) Or, an altered version of the story made its way into the hands of Egyptians in that era.

(4) The Egyptians loved artistic, creative experiments with words and letters in books, just like the Jews would do in the Bible.

(5) Sometimes, the Egyptians used the letters and symbols from books as decorations in other books.

(6) One of these books that they used symbols from to decorate other books with was called the Sensen.

(7) The Egyptians decorated the sections of text or sections of the story of Book of Abraham with letters and symbols from this book.

(8 ) These decorations, used in this way, have meaningful ties to the text or story of the Book of Abraham.  These meaningful ties were like letter puzzles that we are familiar with in our poetry.  In other words, they didn't just arbitrarily pick these symbols for what they would decorate, but they wanted there to be some kind of conceptual tie and reason, tying the symbol decoration to what it decorates.

(9) In modern times, Joseph Smith got the Sensen book that had these symbols in it that were used to decorate the Book of Abraham.  He never got a copy of the Book of Abraham.  Through revelation, he re-constituted the Book of Abraham text using the Sensen letters and symbols as clues.  But they don't represent the text of the Book of Abraham.  They only represent these decorations that were used to mark or outline sections or themes from the Book of Abraham story.

Edited August 14, 2015 by DragonLancer

[DragonLancer]

For those that still don't see the difference between what I am doing and the Mnemonic Device theory, here is the difference:

 

http://egyptianalphabetandgrammar.blogspot.com/2015/08/constrained-writing-of-sort-without.html