Matryoshka

[Guest fledgling666]

i've been curious of this for a long time:

j edgar hoover says in this episode, while speaking with someone in his office in a flashback scene: "the benzene ring, an ancient symbol for our ancient group."

i have done a lot of occasional checking into what the "benzene ring" is, and as far as i can tell, it is no more important than any other molecule. benzene is a solvent used in a lot of industrial applications. derivatives of it are also used in everything from plastics to soda pop. i don't understand how the oroboros relates to benzene.

at the time the episode aired, there had been a ridiculous conspiracy theory that the benzene contained in some personal lubricants may have been the actual cause of immunodeficiency seen in people who were diagnosed with HIV.

could this have been just a spark for another story line?

[Guest SouthernCelt]

i've been curious of this for a long time:

j edgar hoover says in this episode, while speaking with someone in his office in a flashback scene: "the benzene ring, an ancient symbol for our ancient group."

i have done a lot of occasional checking into what the "benzene ring" is, and as far as i can tell, it is no more important than any other molecule. benzene is a solvent used in a lot of industrial applications. derivatives of it are also used in everything from plastics to soda pop. i don't understand how the oroboros relates to benzene.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I took the connection to be from the story told by the discoverer (name escapes me right now, was German I believe) of the benzene chemical structure many years ago. The man who ultimately "divined" the structure had worked long hours in the lab trying to determine why some of the organic compounds that could be distilled from coal seemed to have drastically different chemical properties than other more common organics that it shared some basic physical properties with. He worked from the presumption that all organic compounds were chains of carbon and hydrogen in various proportions and with variable chemical bonding. I wasn't until he had a dream while dozing in front of his fireplace one night that he realized his mistake wasn't in misjudging the number of atoms or their proportion but in how the atoms bonded in a closed, 6 sided ring and not an open-ended chain. In his dream, the ring took the form of a snake that changed itself from being stretched out to forming a circle by biting its own tail. Ergo -- we have the ouroboros.

Learned that in organic chemistry in college may years back; never forgot it though I didn't know why the idea of a snake biting its own tail would be so interesting to me.

[Libby]

I see that SouthernCelt has replied while I was typing my reply, but I'll post this anyway even if it's mostly repeating what SouthernCelt has already said:

Wikipedia has this:

------------------------------

The formula of benzene (C6H6), caused a mystery for some time after its discovery, as no proposed structure could take account of all the bonds (carbon usually forms four single bonds and hydrogen one).

The chemist Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz was the first to deduce the ring structure of benzene. An often repeated story claims that after years of studying carbon bonding, benzene and related molecules, he dreamt one night of a snake eating its own tail (See Ouroboros): upon waking he was inspired to deduce the ring structure of benzene.

------------------------------

That could explain the link between the ouroborous and the benzene ring. It's the oroborous that's the ancient symbol - benzene wasn't discovered until 1825.

I suspect the use of the Kekule story is just a nice touch - but the idea that Hoover introduced the ouroborous into the MM group rather conflicts with ouroborous tattooed on the back of the man killed in the episode "Hand of St Sebastian" in the year 998 A.D. Or maybe that was meant to show that Hoover didn't know as much about the MM group as he thought.

[Guest zombieromero]

Cool!

[ethsnafu]

Oh Libby! Matroyshka, Hoover and that blessed ring. I can't tell you the headache this episode gave me: it was note books, pause buttons and aspirin all the way through. I won't go into a long and lengthy Hand of Saint Sebastian/Matroyshka analysis but my very first post was on this very subject if anyone is interested it is here. After all this time I still have not solved the Matryoshka riddle......

Thick then and still thick now lol....

Matroyshka

[Guest fledgling666]

wow, didn't know about that story (of the chemist with the dream, etc.). thanks.

as far as the re-emergence theory- sounds good, cuz i would imagine like most "societies" that have been around for that long there would be lulls in the timeline. i would imagine it would be understandable for it to be revived by someone not completely familiar with its past, but somewhat familiar and with his own agenda for its future. as far as hoover just "happening" to use the same symbol the group had already used, that's a little far fetched for him to introduce it as his own idea. one thing i want to say about the Millennium group having been around for 2000 years........... i don't think they were. i think it was a group of people with the same sort of "protective" tendencies, a small, lesser known sect of christian followers with an agenda to protect the heart of the faith and not allow it's power to fall into the hands of those that might use it to do harm, etc. but that they were not the Millennium group. maybe their name was these "knights chroniclers," i don't know, maybe it was similar to the Templars, Masonic Lodge, that sorta thing.

thanks for clearing that part of my confusion up, but that's not necessarily the part of Matryoshka that confused me the most. i was confused about the unrealistic approach to the core of the unrealistic story. a man seperating the dark side from the light side of himself with nuclear fission? i like the episode, a lot, and have only seen it once, the original night it aired, but this storyline makes me think of x-files cheesiness. still a good episode, though.

[Guest zombieromero]

This is starting to bug me now! Lol!

[Walkabout]

I guess I shouldn't have skipped organic chem in college.. this is all very interesting.. maybe after my wanderings and I settle down again I will take some classes at the University of Arkansas