Month: August 2023

Christian pastry

The Guardian reported recently on a dispute between Ryanair and the cultural authorities of the Balearic Islands over a traditional pastry called ensaïmada. This spiral-formed pastry is apparently rather bulky, and the Irish surcharge-generating firm has been charging passengers £45 to take their ensaïmadas onboard as carry-on luggage.

Ensaïmada

According to the article, the pastry is

made from flour, sugar, eggs, water and pork fat. It takes its name from saïm, the Mallorcan word for pig fat.

Pig fat? Seems like a weird thing to put into pastry. And indeed, the article goes on to say that an identical pastry called a bulema was made by Mallorcan Arabs and Jews before the Spanish conquered the islands in 1229. Needless to say — but the Guardian does need to say it — neither the Arabs nor the Jews put pig fat in their pastry. But the weird thing was that apparently the pig fat was added explicitly to “Christianise” the pastry.

The Catalan poet and painter Santiago Rusiñol wrote in 1922 that with the addition of pig fat, “the Moorish ensaïmada became Christian, then it became Mallorcan and then was transformed into a food for all of humanity”.

I’ve long found it bizarre the extent to which, just as much as many Jews and Muslims see not eating pork as a crucial determinant of their identity, so many gentiles see themselves as a mirror image, with positively eating pork as decisive for their Christian identity. For example, there was this article about how some French schools were refusing to serve any alternative to pork for school lunches.

Bacon and sausage school dinners are being used by rightwing politicians to hammer home what it means to be French. Court battles and vicious political spats have erupted as protesters warn that controversial menu changes are sending a message to Muslim or Jewish children that to be truly French, they must eat roast pork.

And then there were the repeated attacks by the British press on the Jewish Labour leader Ed Milliband for “failing to look normal eating a bacon sandwich”.

Mathematics and Meditation

Womb Realm Mandala

Sure, they’re both four-syllable words starting with M*, but do they have anything else in common?

Actually, quite a lot. They’re both ancient mental technologies for refining the mind’s ability to focus and grasp what is fundamentally ineffable: for mathematics this is space, motion, and quantity (or number); for meditation (I’m thinking here of Buddhist jhana meditation) it is the nature of mind and thought itself. Both require many years of intensive training and apprenticeship, often focusing on learning to solve a set of standard problems and carry out fixed exercises and incantations (QED, induction on n, proof by contradiction; buddham saranam gacchami). The practitioners of both are generally viewed as weird and otherworldly, and advanced practitioners demonstrate their mastery with bizarrely abstruse feats such as proving that all integers can be represented as a sum of a finite number of primes, or spending long periods of time in trance states, or levitating.

There is some direct overlap as well. Meditative practices often draw on geometric motifs — as in the mandala above — and arithmetic relations. Many chants are built on combinatorial principles. More specifically, the last of the five jhana factors is ekagatta, often translated as ‘one-pointedness’. This is typically interpretted as identification of mind and object, but the Pali word is purely geometric: eka (one) agga (point) ta (state). Viewed from a mathematical perspective you can see that the focusing of consciousness to a point can happen continuously, through contraction, or discretely, through reduction of dimension. It is possible to experience the mind as a geometric space, whose dimension can be reduced through concentration.

Presumably it’s just a coincidence, but I find it fascinating that the modern systematic approach to numbers is often attributed to the work of Euclid, in the early 3rd century BCE, shortly after Indian influences started to filter into Greek philosophy, particularly through the thought of skeptics such as Pyrrho of Ellis.

* Reminding me obliquely of the report I heard on the radio in Germany about 20 years ago about the efforts in Germany to establish mediation as an alternative path for dispute resolution. The expert bemoaned the lack of understanding that the general public had of mediation, claiming that many people thought it was some sort of esoteric process, because they confused the word with meditation. (The German words are the same as the corresponding English words.) That is, at least, a problem I’ve never had with the word mathematics.