first published 2016
now part of chapter 8 of Sacred Number: Language of the Angels (2021)
The prophet Mohammad declared he was the last prophet of Allah, a name resembling the El Shaddai (trans. Lord God, KJV), the god of Abraham in the Bible. Mohammad galvanised the Arabs and nearby nations with an original religion, branching off from the start of the Patriarchs found in the Bible’s first book, Genesis. His story follows Ishmael, the first son of Abraham, from whom the Arabs believe themselves descended.
Mohammad’s religion of Islam (“salvation”) started in Mecca where he received visions of angels and spontaneously recited suras (verses) which became the Quran and associated texts. An unknown history of Abraham and Ishmael emerged, intimate with Mecca, long a spiritual center for the Arabic world. Mecca’s principle monument, the Kaaba or “cube”, has taken a number of forms. Adam located it as a dolmenA chamber made of vertical megaliths upon which a roof or ceiling slab was balanced. created by God when Adam was formed; Ishmael built the next design for his father, “open to the sky”, using surface stones from nearby mountains; and Mohammad’s dispensation adds ancient stories about cubic arks and located these as a renewed Kaaba, the prime center, or Pole of redemption for the world.
The three keys here will be the Kaaba as an Ark, the Pole (Qutub) and model of Great Time.
The Kaaba as Ark
Within both myth and the historical period, the Kaaba has been restored or rebuilt many times. Mohammad himself was involved in one restoration effort after flood damage, and that version was probably not much different from the present form; which is not cubic. I believe the original Kaaba was referenced to a cubic relationship in time, which was then adapted into the harmonic number most favoured for arks, the cube of twelve or 1,728. These two references to a cube are anciently megalithic and (more recently) harmonically symbolic. Mohammad and his fellow rebuilders of the Kaaba appear to have demonstrated a contact with the harmonism of YHWH and hence with the Abrahamic tradition found in the Bible.
(Please note that further re-working of the Kaaba and the plan used might both both be used to cast doubt on my conclusions)
Figure 1 The symbolic use of numbers for Adam and Ark
in the interior and exterior perimeter of the present Kaaba, in inches.
The Prophet’s Kaaba, if it involved 1440 inches as its interior circumference, placed Adam* at the heart of the monument whilst the outer perimeter appears to be 1728 inches in length**, referencing the Kaaba as an Ark. Such a simple integration is achievable in a rectilinear building by having a wall depth of 36 inches. The notion of using perimeters in a focal monument (as a simulacrum of the centre of the world***) is then enacted by perambulations of the faithful and the calling to prayer facing Mecca from around the world. Islam is a distinctly oral religion with its own sounds and of course the recitation of the Quran and other originally oral works, after Mohammad’s initial recitation.
*this basis for Adam’s name code was discovered by Ernest G. McClain (1975.) whose work I use extensively in my latest book, Harmonic Origins of the World.
** the author has here used the plan, with thanks, provided by Bjank through Wikipedia. No official site plan was available.
*** in Sacred Numbers and the Lords of Time, p178-180, I demonstrated how the wall of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount was a scale model of the Earth’s Meridian referencing precession of the Equinoxes according to an ancient model of the celestial earth, in the sky.
The Kaaba as Pole
The older signification of the Kaaba as cube can be seen in its (continuing) orientation to the maximum moonrise in its northerly moonset in the east. The monument was (always) located with Mount Hira in the east (frequented by Mohammad during key visions and recitations) whose northern limit is a valley enabling visibility of the maximum moonrise in the northeast. A further circumstance for Mohammad’s time was that Canopus rose to the south-east, at right angles to the maximum moonrise. At that moment, the semi-circular Hatim would have pointed towards the axis of the moon’s orbit within the circumpolar stars.
Figure 2 The alignment of Canopus to the axis of the lunar orbit in Mohammad’s time
Canopus, a giant golden star, second brightest star in the sky, is emblematic of the Golden Age within the precessional cycle of 25,920 years since it is the bright southern pole of that Age, whilst the Babylonian ark of 1,728,000* is (numerically) the Hindu Krita Yuga or duration of the golden age in years. As such, Canopus was shining into Mohammad’s Kali Yuga Age and the star Canopus figures in the illuminist literature of Islamic Sufi orders, especially Persian, as Kutb (Pole), the teacher of the Age. These orientations of the Moon evidently go back to the Arab monument which, by Mohammad’s time, had 360 stone monuments to worship, and we know the harmonic root of Adam, according to his Hebrew letter-numbers, is A.D.M. = 1 + 4 + 40 = 45, when summed, which times two cubed or 8 equals 360, a number rooted in Adam’s 45.
* The thousands are not arbitary: being the cube of 10 x 10 x 10 but also the decimal base of 1440 = 360 x 4.
The Kaaba as Great Time
The original monument was described (see figure 3) as trapezoidal, involving four lengths of 20, 22, 32 and 37 ells, and from this one can make a trapezoidal shape which does not simply use these lengths as sides. One finds that the draconic period of 18.618 years, in which the moon’s nodes travel around the eclipticThe path of the Sun through the sky along which eclipses of sun and moon can occur, traditionally divided into the 365¼ parts of the solar year, each part then a DAY in angle rather than time., can numerically appear when a base length of 32 ells and hypotenuse of 37 ells, are used to form a right triangle.
Figure 3 An interpretation of Ishmael’s Kaaba as Code for the 32:37 right triangle
whose third side is closely 18.618, the years in the moon’s nodal periodUsually referring to the backwards motion of the lunar orbit's nodes over 6800 days (18.618 years), leading to eclipse cycles like the Saros..
At this point one needs to know that the cube of 18.618 years is one quarter of 25,814 years, so that the 18.618 side of the triangle is the side length of a cube of time related to one quarter of a Great Year (to the extent that precession of the equinoxes could be established then or now.) The revision of the Kaaba in Mohammad’s time appears to have placed the cube of Twelve in the outer perimeter of the monuments wall and then subtly located Adam’s 1440* by having walls of suitable thickness.
* 4 x 360 = 1,440 and Adam’s name using position notation of 1.4.40 (again after Ernest McClainAmerican Cryptologist and Pythagorean Musicologist who decoded Plato's cryptic numerical ciphers in The Pythagorean Plato. The Myth of Invariance showed limiting numbers had been an ancient way of defining the onset of key musical tuning realities, then coded into many religious texts. Wikipedia. 1975. 126-7: “now 8 is a cube number in both decimal and sexagesimal systems, and the cube plays a sacred role in many religions, including that of Mecca and Delphi.”)
It remains to be seen whether the uniqueness of Islam as an Abrahamic religion comes from a fresh perspective on the Great Year connecting Abram, Adam and the Moon. It is certainly true that the rotation of the Earth, the length of its orbit and the motion of the moon’s nodes are normalised with respect to each other, and that the tilt of the earth’s axis would have been changed by the primordial collision with the moon, and thus the creation of the Moon is the reason for the separation of earth and heaven, then subject to The Precession of the Equinoxes.
Principle References
McClain, Ernest G. (see http://ernestmcclain.net/ for pdfs)
- The Myth of Invariance. New York : Nicolas Hays, 1976.
- Meditations on the Quran. New York: Nicolas Hays, 1981
Esin, Emel. MECCA the Blessed MADINAH the Radiant. London: Paul Elek, 1963.