It's our collective malaise: Post-Traumatic Math Disorder.
Yet despite how we personally feel about mathematics, our distant ancestors willingly used numbers as pathways into the great patterns of Nature, avenues to understanding the Universe and their own place in it. Many ancient cultures had specific gods and goddesses they credited with inventing mathematical skills. With the aid of divine inspiration and assistance, humans nourished this numerical invention, continually pushing their skills and seeking greater clarity of expression.
Often, their motivation was metaphysical: A large portion of math history traces back directly to the earliest astrologers, who needed to be able to describe and record what they saw in the night sky…
What you'll find in this book are some of the many things our distant ancestors knew and used, based on long generations of seeing and absorbing, based on sky-watching, on folk knowledge, on myths and on ever-more-complex calculations…
Our starting point may seem like a Zero. But for now, before looking at numbers and math, let's simply see it as a circle. No matter what our spiritual practice, we each live within the circle of creation, each within the circle - the cohesiveness - of our own form...(excerpted from Math for Mystics)
If publishing happened like the fantasy version of Old Hollywood - director discovers girl in soda shop, turns her into movie star - an editor might walk into an indie bookstore. A small book catches her eye as she browses the aisles.
The visiting editor asks the store's book buyer: "Are there any local writers we should know about?"
"Yes, and you're already holding one of her books."
The preceding isn't a suggested manuscript-submission technique likely to be found in a how-to-get-published book, but it is how Weiser editor Brenda Knight found Renna Shesso's self-published Ancient Numerology: Math for Mystics on the shelves of Isis Metaphysical Bookstore in Denver.
Adding another twist to the tale, Fran Carey, the book buyer, ran into Shesso the following day at the International New Age Trade Show. "Hey, Renna, you might want to go over to the Weiser booth - pronto! - and introduce yourself to Brenda Knight."
The editor and the author met a few minutes later, and the result is the greatly expanded and retitled Math for Mystics (Weiser, 2007, 1578633834).
Math for Mystics was something of a surprise for the author herself. Shesso was happily writing, publishing and teaching metaphysical classes in 1999 when a cognitive-injury sustained in a minor auto accident brought her to a halt. Reading was suddenly difficult; Her ability to manipulate letters and numbers came and went unpredictably from day to day. With basic language and math skills threatened, her small publishing business was suddenly at risk. Intensely frustrated, she found hope through research with birds.
"Shortly before the accident," Shesso says, "I'd read that black-capped chickadees create new brain cells annually to accommodate how they find and stockpile their winter food in a changing landscape. I decided to believe I could create new brain cells, too, and that I could build new versions of whatever dendritic pathways had shifted." Amid her medically mandated cognitive therapies, Shesso shifted her reading to children's books and started working crossword puzzles. She was especially drawn to playing with numbers, so did what she'd always done when a topic catches her imagination: She began studying. The numbers-play triggered an era of intensely creative recovery work. Some of the new mental branches led into the history of mathematics, both magical and mundane, a research project that came as a surprising twist to a woman rooted in the visual arts. "We all have survival issues of some kind. Mine seem to repeatedly play out in terms of balancing between intellect and intuition, or more like intellect versus intuition. Making peace with math has been profoundly healing."
Did you know:
that the Square of the Moon contains the pattern for a labyrinth?
that Venus is perpetually drawing a pentagram as she travels the cosmos?
that the root of our word "ritual" means "to count, number"?
Many numerology books are strong on numbers - one at a time - while avoiding math, the functional stuff we do WITH the numbers. But that feels like owning a tool without bothering to learn how to use it. As a result, Shesso set out to write the math book she'd longed for back in school, a book short on tedium and long on curiosity.
This book sprang from a sense of joy and discovery, sparked by number-use in astrology, spell-work and Tarot. Shesso's background is in the arts (allegedly a math-phobic path) and her approach to numbers is highly visual -Math for Mystics is copiously illustrated. The magic/planetary squares, Tarot, the Golden Ratio, geometric solids and the Fibonacci sequence are some of the topics treated in a very accessible manner. The book is heavily illustrated with both drawings and graphics. According to the author, "Illustrations are the only way I can make sense out of math for myself. Surely I'm not the only one who feels this way?!
"I wrote this book because I wanted more than I was finding in many other numerology books: More information, more details, more non-mathematician explanations, many more ILLUSTRATIONS and a h*** of a lot more fun!"
With a background that includes childhood studies with her astrologer-grandmother and a lengthy career in the arts, including a decade as art critic for Westword, Shesso is a longtime resident of Colorado. Perpetual curiosity, clarity and quirky humor fuel her popularity as a year-round teacher of shamanism, Tarot and the Craft. Meanwhile, she worships out loud under the stars and anticipates an active and ornery crone-hood.
On Shesso's website you'll find links to worksheets created for some of the chapters, playful ways of getting a more personal connection with the ideas in that chapter. Many of the activities are suitable for use with children, as a way to create interest in number-concepts without making a big scary math-deal out of it.
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