The Mediterranean coast, the birthplace of the rest of the world that no one in the enclosed four walls of the Fertile Crescent had ever seen.

 

Was there an entrapment of the mind, an abdication of vessel searching for the planetary rod elongated?  Yes, the belief was that it circled around to fingertip touch the edges of the Iberian boundaries.  In accordance with the fragile longitudinal measurement of Ptolemy, who was right about so much else, this was a truncated vessel in which we lived.

 

The center of it was Jerusalem.  That was the lionized core of the material plane imaged by the Sanhedrin foreheads of the god that ruled everything below the heavens, some corporeal manifestation of a reflection of the earth where choir angels sang forever embolden by some Mithric discolonization of time.  The lord was above, we were below.  And the Fertile Crescent, the Levant, abrogated integration into slender tendrils to expand out 90% of the plundering girth of this corporeal plane.

 

The oceans were mere puddles within the breadth of the continental mass.  The Indian Ocean was a lake on the other side of the Fertile Crescent.  There was a recognition of land mass north of Viking lands, north of the British Isles.  So there must be a elliptical of granular wasteland below the teardrop envelopment of whatever continenta reach below the cusp of Northern Africa.

 

It was a circular spiraling pathway that devolved into a flat encrusted mass, locked stagnant into space, without movement, but encircled by the moon, the sun and the stars.

 

A cylindrical flat block with some density that sat aimlessly tethered to some vacuous place in space.  Hovered over by some incarnate representation of an infinite eternal heaven — was it also just a flat plane in space?   Presided over by a menacing god evolved from the fingertips of Jupiter and Zeus.

 

And it was from this regal place in space and time, wrapped up in the imagined plethora reach of the Fertile Crescent, that Henry the Navigator set forth vessels to explore the outer reaches of this imagined dense continental shelf.  It was Henry the Navigator, seated at the desk overlooking the Mediterranean Sea as it coalesced with the Atlantic Ocean at the southern tip of the Iberian peninsula, at the pointed toes of Portugal, in Sagres, who unleashed the fertile furrows of the imagination to fertilize and germinate the Fertile Crescent plains that reached outside the circumference of Jerusalem, jettisoned forth from the broad reach of the Levant.

 

It was Henry the Navigator, seated at the Atlantic threshold of Portugal, in Sagres, the cultural designation of finite awareness, who would open up the confines of the mind.  Metaphorically.  All of the Christian dogmatic evolved western culture conglomeration of some un-mystified mind would be cast despotically to the shores of the coast of Africa, as the Portuguese fishermen slowly moved across the edges of the dark continent to eventually encircle the coastal edge of the swirling waters of the Cape of Good Hope and discover that the Indian Ocean had no boundaries.

 

And it was from the perch of Henry the Navigator, even though he had unleashed the slave trade, even if he had passed away, that Vasco de Gama, Bartolomeu, Magellan, Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci would all jettison forth and open up the closed parameters of the clumping conglomeration of the mass of Jerusalem.  Sagres.  The emanation of discovery, casting down the walls of the sequestered mind to open up to all and everything beyond the caged unreality of the dogmatic Christian western mind.

 

By dissolving these parameters it was not only the earth that was opened up, but also the dogmatic Christian western mind.  Adding continents, oceans, native inhabitants, stars, planets, universal expansion, would lead away from the strictures of St. Augustine to the expansive prodding spider tendril mind of Nietzsche and all those who processed our fallow minds with the fertilization that released us all from the encaptured prison box of consciousness.  When the western planes were opened up, so was the western mind.

 

And was it Henry the Navigator?  In many ways it was.  Without his orders and directions, Portuguese fishermen may never have meandered beyond the upper shoulders of Africa, and we may still be sheltered in no knowledge of anything beyond candle lit tenement hovels of captured religious rigidity.

 

Open the vision. Open the mind. Open the soul.