the timboucher experience

I’ve been thinking more about this analogy between nets and religions. What got me started on it all was an old medieval picture of God dangling Jesus at the end of a fishing pole for the devil to come snap him up and get caught. From there, I started thinking about how religions themselves are sort of like nets that we construct in order to capture god and to hold him into one specific manageable form.

This seems like a very important image to me, so I’ve been exploring it even farther than that, and came up with a few interesting things. Apparently, the word “net” comes from the Middle English, and ultimately back to the Indo-European root “ned-” which means to bind or tie. Coincidentally, the root of the word “religion” is thought to be the Latin “religare” which also means to bind or tie fast. This is very interesting to me.

I was also just thinking about the shapes themselves. Like a net is this gridwork, essentially, where lines intersect with one another. And then I realized that’s just what a cross is. If you were to put together a bunch of crosses end to end, you would get a grid - a net, essentially. This lead me to the next realization that the image of Jesus pinned to the cross, is actually then very similar to that of a fish caught in a net. I made a little informational graphic to illustrate my point:

[Technical note: that's a .png file. I don't normally use them, but they're supposed to be good. Let me know if you can't see it in your browser.]

Also, while I’m at it, I may as well toss in this quote I found about the self as a net, which I came across today while researching.

Like a net, the conventional self or ego is something we toss into the internal linkinfinite potential of reality in order to “catch” our karmic desires, but it too is composed of emptiness. If the net is too thick and tightly-wound, it will retain everything, for there is no void to escape into, and everything will become very heavy and egocentric. If the net is too loose and weakly bound, it will not function–larger catches will break its threads, and the smaller will escape. We never stop weaving the net or trawling the world of potential. Newly woven patterns catch new fish.

Also, here is a cool picture of a deck of cards with different fish on them. One more thing, there is a Greek mythological figure named Britomartis or Artemis Dictynna who is called “the Lady of the Nets.”

But Britomartis rather died than be in the embrace of a man she loathed [King Minos was trying to fuck her], so she desperately leaped off the cliff. She was saved when the fishermen caught her in their nets. Because of her dedication and desire to protect her chastity, Artemis awarded her with immortality. With her becoming a goddess, she was known by the name Dictynna, which means the “Lady of the Nets”, because she was saved by the fisherman’s nets. Though, according to Diodorus Sicilus, she had already received this name, because Britomartis had invented the nets for hunting, called dictya. It was this invention that she was named Dictynna.

In any event, I don’t know where all this is going, but I rather like exploring the symbol from a variety of directions like this.

• Casting the nets of Religion
• Semantic & Symbolic Codes
• A Heretic’s Guide to Eternity
• The government officially denies that any supernatural entities exist or have any influence on human life.
• Religions as Memeplexes (Part 2)