All Along the Watchtower: Permanance, Power, Mind, Spirit

[Mark Kohut]

Towers have been used by mankind since prehistoric times. The oldest known may be the circular stone tower in walls of Neolithic Jericho (8000 BC).---wikipedia
 
In Eliade's work, which we KNOW Pynchon learned from and used, the tower was the first essential religious sign in the pre-industrial village....... The Holy Place had the highest point of architecture........See spire....[See The Spire, Wm Golding]
 
The tower was an important symbol, for reasons originating in the above, for those modernist poets whom Pynchon loves....
Ulysses begins in the Martello Tower......
Yeats used it in a major poem and had a special cover designed for the book: Here is what one scholar has written:
 
"The cover combines tower as symbol of permanance, power, mind and spirit with.........."  
"with cottages and foliage around streams........{like Kinneret,
like Vineland---the original America....}
 
 
THEN, I practically jumped up when that scholar continued that this scene is itself " an enactment of the "As Above, So Below" adage that so attracted Yeats from hermetic and Neoplatonic lore.....the path to the ideal is through the actual, that the way up is the way down."  (!!!)......Where did we read all this before? 
 
For Oedipa, the way up is the way down [from that tower]!