Author: Richard Heath

The Fourfold Nature of Sun and Moon

A previous post explained the anatomy of the primary celestial cycles of the Sun and Moon. The “resting” part of these cycles are the winter solstice (opposite the summer solstice which was today) and the dark moon (which is coming in a week, after the waning half moon day before yesterday). In the resting phase, the cosmological origin is traditionally found, containing all that is to manifest but that is not yet expressed. In this respect, the Big Bang is the equivalent for modern thinking, as the origin of the entire visible and invisible universe seen via modern instrumentation and discoveries.

Life is somehow connected with our large Moon, without which there could have been no living planet. The form of life appears influenced by the moon and its conjunctions with different planets. And without (a) the tides, (b) the tectonic plates supporting continents, and (c) the tilt and spin of the earth; the earth would be static rather than actively supporting the necessary rhythms of Life. A primordial collision created these features of our earth and moon, since the cyclic archetypes provide an essential framework for living beings, to which their bodies are synchronized through circadian and behavioral rhythms.

Continue reading “The Fourfold Nature of Sun and Moon”

Time and the Midpoints of the Sun and Moon

Our two luminaries, the sun and moon, share a similar form-in-time, as the seasonal year and the monthly phases of the moon. The form they share is of two extremes of opposite character, and two midpoints between these.

The Solar Extremes: At the solar extremes, the sun rises high in midsummer day and rises to a much lower point in midwinter day, extreme points at which the sun moves very slowly day-by-day these hence called solstices from the Latin, “sun stands still”.

The Lunar Extremes: These are the full moon, meaning its face is completely illuminated by the sun, and the dark moon, when the moon stands by and in front of the sun and so its face is not illuminated but during a rare solar eclipse, the dark disk of the moon can be seen slowly crossing the sun’s face since the moon moves 12.368 times faster than the sun that defines each day.

The Solar Midpoints: These occur when the sun rises exactly east and sets directly west, everywhere on the earth. These moments are called Equinox because the length of the day then equals (in Latin: “equi”) and the length of the night (in Latin, “nox”). In the year these two equinoxes are called Spring, when light and heat from the sun are growing (waxing), and Autumn, when light and heat are diminishing (waning).

The Lunar Midpoints: Like the sun, these are exactly between its extremes, when exactly half the moon’s face is illuminated. In the morning, as the full moon approaches the sun, its gibbous (less-than-circular) face is waning until it reaches the point of half illumination by the sun. In contrast, the dark moon reappears as a crescent moon, pulling away from the sun setting in the evening.

The common factor between the midpoints of both sun and moon is that this is when time begins, in the sense that, at two equinoxes and at the two half-moons, (a) the sun’s daily sunrise on the horizon is moving fastest and (b) The sun’s illumination of the moon is changing most quickly. In both cases, this allowed the megalithic to accurately start and finish their counting of these time cycles of the year and the month. In both cases, midpoints could most accurately define the day on which an event occurred.

The following post takes this further.

The Integration of the Megalithic Yard

Above is a proposed geometric relation between Thom’s megalithic yard (2.72 feet), the royal cubit (1.72 feet) and the remen (1.2 feet). Alexander Thom’s estimate for it based on decades of work was refined from 2.72 to 2.722 feet at Avebury. If the origins of it are astronomical, then its value emerges from the Metonic period of 19 years which is 235 lunar months, making its value 19/7 feet or more accurately 2.715428571 (19008/7000) feet and this makes it 2.7 feet x 176/175 within ancient metrology. Another astronomical derivation is found at Le Manio as the difference between three lunar and three solar years, when counted in day-inches as 32 + 5/8th inches which is 2.71875 (87/32) feet. The megalithic yard of Thom’s first appraisal, of 2.72, probably arose from its megalithic rod (MR) of 6.8 feet since, the Nodal Period of the moon’s nodes take 6800 days which in feet would be 1000 MR. For a fuller explanation see my the appendix of my Language of the Angels book and my discussions of the Cumbrian stone circle, called Seascale by Thom and the only known example of a Type D flattened circle.

One can see that the Megalithic Yard is a tale of many variations, some of which might not consider how or why the megalithic might have come to adopt such a yard. I have come to trust simple integers and ratios to guide me to a possible megalithic pathway. To demonstrate, the above megalithic yard at Le Manio, of 32.625 inches is 29/32 of the English yard, and 32 lunar months (at Le Manio Quadrilateral) is 29 AMY. Such simple rationics is explored here.

My 2012 Post below discusses John Neal’s view of the megalithic yard
drawing on his ancient metrology.

John Neal makes a masterful job of considering the megalithic yard in the context of historical metrology, a metrology that he has managed to forge into a single conceptual scheme in which measures known to history from different lands all inter-relate.

Neal’s book, All Done With Mirrors, is one of the most fundamental and significant contributions to the late megalithic and ancient world understanding of numbers but to read it is no easy matter since he takes no prisoners and fully expects readers to resolve through calculation what he does not explicitly state. This makes his approach different to mine in which I try to present as easily a possible aids to the visualisation and registration of a pattern of facts. However, neither approach can really substitute for what one has to do for oneself in order to understand and John gave his “Secret Academy” idea the catch line “We can’t give it away” because of the often deafening silence with which his work is met.

The aim here is to give some workings based on Neal’s book, to give others a taste of what lies beneath what is written and also to further my own interests in the Megalithic Yard. Thom’s lack of metrological background led to both an original approach but also a disconnect to what is known about historical metrology. One particular mystery is how measures appear to have propagated unchanged across millennia.

Neal says on page 47:

Thom made a comparison of his Megalithic Yard with only one other known unit of measurement. This was the Spanish vara, the pre-metric measurement of Iberia, its value 2.7425 feet. Related measurements to the vara survive all over the Americas wherever the Spanish settled, from Peru to Texas. Although the vara is exactly one of the lengths of the m.y. the fact that it is divided into three feet makes this relationship uncertain. These feet are thought to be Roman but this belief is also unlikely, and they would appear to be related to the earlier Etruscan-Mycenaean units. This is a good example of an intermediate measure being thought to be related because of a similarity in length, and illustrates the importance of considering the sub-divisions when sourcing a measure.

How units of measure are divided and aggregated follows strict rules. If these rules did not exist then the system of metrology would have no inner structure as a system. We don’t expect measures to follow rules because today we simply measure things, and do everything else as a calculation following on from that. Metrology is an “ology” because it is a system of calculation that was used for building ancient structures when only limited calculation was possible.

Thus Neal can talk about the ancestry of the megalithic yard because the forensic tools are available through the system of metrology, in which a yard has three feet but that places the foot at close to the limits for a foot, at just over 0.9 feet, for the vara which would then be a yard of near Assyrian feet (9/10 feet). The Roman foot is far greater at 24/25 or 0.96 feet. A Mycenean foot would be 15/16 of the Roman which is in the region of 0.91 feet but the compounding to two errors, that the vara is a yard and that the Roman is its foot is the sort of confusion that only an exact metrology can ever recover from.

Neal continues:

Why he [Thom] did not analyze the Megalithic Yard in terms of what was already very well known of ancient metrology, must remain a mystery. And why, after the Megalithic Yard becoming the most scrutinized measure in the history of measure, nobody else has succeeded in doing so, is an even greater mystery. The very simple fact of the matter is, that if as Thom claimed from the beginning, the Megalithic Yard has 40 sub-divisions, then it is not a “yard” but a double remen [1.25], or 2 and 1/2 feet, and the “megalithic inch” is a digit! If the Megalithic Yard is taken to be 2.7272 feet, which is within Thom’s parameters for the value, the megalithic inch is .06818 feet, which is well within the range of the digits of all known ancient measurements. 16 of these digits are therefore one megalithic foot of 1.0909 English feet. This is a well-known measurement in ancient metrology, sometimes referred to as the Ptolemaic foot, and mistakenly, as the Drusian foot. His “fathom” of 2 m.y. is the historically well-known intermediate measurement, of a pace of 5 feet. Then, his “megalithic rod” [6.8 feet] is 6.25 Ptolemaic feet, which is also a measure known in antiquity as being 100th part of a furlong of 625ft or 1/8th part of the 5,000ft mile. The megalithic measures are not, therefore, peculiar to what is accepted as the megalithic arena, but are perfectly integrated with measuring systems found throughout the ancient world.

One should realize here that Neal is using the word “ancient” in an unquantified way because he believes metrology and other sciences of the numerical arts were inherited by the megalithic – a position that I question since there is no evidence for it. The megalithic could have generated a science of metrology in its earliest phase which then evolved into the greater system of many types of feet (Neal’s modules) since the older megalithic monuments have not been well studied – the British monuments being from a later phase. The early burial mounds, if found to have employed this fuller system, would prove Neal’s thesis. he continues,

Furthermore, the methods whereby Thom discovered [his megalithic measures], namely by careful surveys and comparisons, are the time honoured methods pioneered by Petrie and in no way are they a mistaken interpretation of the evidence, or invention.

The pattern of metrology comes in the ratios between types of unit. If a different foot is used these patterns remain constant and when metrology is used to analyse monuments then it this grammar of its usage that has remained invariant. This may seem to be geeky nonsense until metrology is resolved as a system within which the apparent babel of metrological signals become a direct communication from the past. Neal does not make this any easier by delivering a masterly analysis that prerequires most of the structural understandings to be in place.

Doth this profit a man? And is it simply a specialist field? For sure, by now, like Neal I am something of a specialist. It is true that no older language than metrology, other than language itself, has come down from such antiquity. If there is a truth behind claims (like mine) that the number sciences were sacred and contain mysteries concerning the spiritual world, metrology could be a philosopher’s stone. But when and how?

It is also true that this system of prehistoric thought is now a very powerful forensic tool for recovering their intended meaning of ancient sites and the types of measure found might reveal lines of metrological transmission in the ancient world. Anyone interested needs to apply it in practice.

This excerpt was first published on matrixofcreation.co.uk in 2012

Postscript

The only problem in adopting Neal’s full structure for ancient metrology is that it bears upon the type of metrological knowledge of the size and shape of the Earth, that lies behind the form of the Great Pyramid and other ancient buildings. But I have since seen, from the point of view of early megalithic astronomy, a much freer use of the ordinal numbers {1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9… etc} was applied to counts of astronomical time, using simple geometries of circles and right triangles within which a simpler metrology arose, as explained in Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels. Another problem with Neal’s metrological grid of “Earth ratios” is that the modular range becomes so filled with versions of each foot that a given measurement can give one a false identification upon which a false interpretation or dead end can defeat the process.

This means that, earlier than the late megalithic, one is studying primitive ratios between astronomical measurements. This is clear at Crucuno Dolmen to Rectangle, where the month was coded as 27 feet but the day was the root Iberian foot of 32/35 feet. From this can be deduced an accurate approximation of the lunar month as 27 feet divided by 32 and multiplied by 35 giving 29.53 125 (27 x 35/ 32) Iberian feet. When one multiplies this month by 32 (the denominator) the result is 945 so that 945 days equals 32 lunar months. It is therefore true that the original three lunar year count (leading to the megalithic yard) is 36 months, two lunar years 24 months and two Jupiter synods are 27 lunar months. This forms a limiting octave of {18 24 27 36} which became Plato’s World Soul in his Timaeus cosmogony 6:8::9:12 only tripled [do1 fa sol do2} (see my Harmonic Origins of the World). From this the megalithic can be seen to naturally lead finding 27 lunar months between three loops of Jupiter, so that one Jupiter synod is 13.5 (27/2) months. Hence my reconstruction of the Pythagorean Music of the Spheres, as a mystery garnered from the megalithic.

Counting Days and Lunar Months

Megalithic astronomy achieved far more than modern studies of their astronomy have thought possible. The role of the megalithic in seeding the later religious ideas, of subsequent civilizations, has therefore caused ancient religions to be seen as having no objective basis, and to be considered works of human imagination alone. To correct for this wrong perception and realize what ancient stories were actually about, a number of hybrid disciplines need to be recreated for the modern day. Astronomy, for example, needs to be related to whole number numeracy by seeing the metrological and geometrical possibilities possible to the (Stone Age) megalithic “monuments” and the heritage of later ancient buildings. When this is done, as I and other have, the conclusion is clear, that the megalithic understood not just the time cycles of the sun and moon but also those of the planets and the longer periods of “great time”, though counting time periods in terms of the smaller time periods such as the day and month. As this work proceeded many surprising results emerge hinging on whole number ratios.

My six books, written over twenty years, demonstrate that the planetary system constitutes a special type of system governed by relatively small numbers, the geocentric planets expressing invariant properties of the number field, especially harmony. And I suggest that modern astronomy may find that extraterrestrial intelligence exists on planetary systems similar to our own, in this numerical form given to time on earth, as a prerequisite for the complexity of the biosphere. The use of numbers for counting time in the megalithic, was therefore a further key process in the acquisition of important frameworks of meaning, attributed to civilization. And this is why my last book came to be called Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels.

This significance of numbers to the cosmic process cannot be found until one tries to form an astronomy of time rather than of space. This appears true because the structuring of the world has more to do with the framework numbers provide in the fitting of “things” in space than the modern notion of cause and effect governed by laws, rather than by dimensionality. This can be illustrated by what types of things a framework enables, that cannot be achieved without that framework being extant.

As the megalithic counting of days and months developed, a whole tradition of geometry and numerical ratios were revealed to the prehistoric astronomers, as built in to the time body of geocentric astronomy. Alignments are found, centred upon megalithic observatories, to the horizon events of solsticial and equinoctal sunrises and setting, or to the lunar maximum and minimum standstills. The counting between successive events gave the length of time cycles. Only when one learns what the events are and their duration in days of their cycles, can a megalithic site can be properly interpreted as having counted time cycles, using a constant unit of length representing a day, or a month, to reveal a number of days or months within each cycle.

For exampe, Alexander Thom, a top engineer of the 20th century, noticed alignments between megaliths to lunar maximum events on the horizon, occurring every 18.618 solar years. He was once asked, what happened if the sky was cloudy and you missed the alignment. His response was the ancient astronomers must wait over eighteen years for another maximum; but Thom had not seen that counting between events, using a growing length of equal units per day allowed observatories to use counts between similar events and that this glued the whole enterprise of megalithic astronomy together.

And what we call the megalithic period, in some areas lasted millennia so that an enormous intellectual tradition based upon the numbers of time remains lost to the modern world unless one recognizes that, in the counting of time, lay a doorway into a large numerical scheme perfectly preserved within the planetary system itself. The heavy planetary bodies, orbiting the Sun and as seen from the Earth, are constant in their orbits and their consequent synods, with each other and the Earth. Whatever they are is frozen in eternity whilst this is experienced within time, as our present moment. The design of Time and the evolution of intelligence are therefore an artifact of a higher intelligence than our own, to which the ancient religions sought to connect, in one way or another.

But if one cannot recognize the significance of ancient time counting, then prehistory will be populated with mysteries and rather primitive ancestors.

Counting Days

A good example of counting days in a long cycle emerges from the fact that the nodal period of 18.618 years is 6800 days. It is obviously easier to have counted the days between a lunar maximum standstill and the next, and this means that, exactly halfway through the counting (3400 days) the lunar minimum will occur. It would be noticed that 17 divides into 6800 days to give seventeen periods of 400 days. And 400 days is very close to 399 days of the Jupiter synod, if one can count that between Jupiter’s loops against the stars as the earth “undertakes” the giant planet. So a 400 day-inch rope could be counted along seventeen times.

One can see how the Maya came to their Long Counting by merging all of their knowledge of cycles and letting them play out from a known starting point, hence creating a single calendar representing the geocentric planetary as a whole. Using that one can also go back in time and forward, to predict sky events.

Before the study of great time day-inch counting was developed by 4000 BCE to quantify the invariance between the sun and the moon , from which an integrated calendar could be created (or reconstructed from previous counting exercises) at Le Manio near Carnac Brittany – and also see geometry lesson 5. This explains how Robin Heath’s Lunation Triangle, implied by Stonehnege’s Standing Stone Rectangle, came into the megalithic vernacular by counting three solar and lunar years and comparing these, geometrically within right angled triangles, which are both trigonometric structures (relating to the circle) and proportional calculators in the metrological sense.

The three year triangle creates an excess of three solar years over the three lunar years, equal to the megalithic yard (MY) of 32.625 (32 and 5/8ths) day-inches which I call the Proto MY (see appendix 2 of Language of the Angels).

I made a film about this about ten years ago. Poor sound and picture quality for nowadays, but it gives interesting details of a possible cosmic “design”.

Counting Months

By counting in inches per day, 32 +5/8 day-inches is the excess, of 2.718 feet, a megalithic yard. This led to the idea of counting months using the new unit of lengths and, counting the twelve lunar months (24 half months) the remains of the solar year became an english foot, somewhat defining the foot of 12 inches as a new standard unit. To recap, using day-inches created an solar excess over 3 years of the megalithic yard and then counting a single year using megalithic yards generated the English foot.

If we allow the megalithic astronomers to have pondered such a sequence then the world of time seems to be giving new unit when counting using a simpler unit: inches per day giving the megalithic yard and megalithic yards per month giving the foot as the excess over a solar year. It was as if counting time was generating significant set of measures, some we still use today: the inch and foot. This continuity between the megalithic period, the ancient world and the modern world of measure implies that measures of length have a very long history of at least 6000 years! It also means that the ancient world somehow got these measures from the megalithic astronomers from whence, classical writings and historical discoveries show that civilized building practices built these measures into often sacred buildings so that religion were specuations based upon the measures and findings of megalithic astronomy.

When counting in months, many longer cycles are seen to recur over an integer number. The eclipse cycle called Saros, 10 days over 18 years long, is 223 lunar months because the sun and moon are conjunct at a solar eclipse at one of the two lunar nodes whilst, at a lunar eclipse, they must be on opposite sides of the earth. This makes the integer number of “moons” in that case.

In 19 solar year, there are 235 lunar months and 254 lunar orbits, because the number of lunar months in a single year is 12 and 7/19 lunar months so that after 19 years, seven extra lunar months is the excess over 19 x 12 (=228) lunar months and 228 + 7 = 235.

There are also 13 plus 7/19 lunar orbits in that period so that 19 x 13 (=247) orbits plus (again) seven more equals 254 orbits in 19 years, a period called the Metonic. And since, after (any) 19 year period, the orbits and the months are all integer, almost identical celestial circumstances repeat (continuously) over 19 years. That is all the permutations, patterns, or behaviors, are continuously expressed within nineteen years, over the Metonic period. In this sense “there is nothing new under the Sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

One can count all sorts of celestial recurrence using measures to arrive at a strong tradition of sacred numbers and geometry pre-existing the historical period and informs its characteristic religious thinking. After my first book on the astronomy, I wrote Sacred Number and the Origins of Civilization for this reason. The megalithic and religious use of numbers was then explored in Sacred Number and the Lords of Time.

I had also found the lunar month was in musical harmonic resonance with the outer planets and even the other planets too in Harmonic Origins of the World – where I also had to explore rudimentary musical realities as these are also numerical. My latest, Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels,

Book: Matrix of Creation

Sacred numbers arose from ancient man’s observation of the heavens, and represent the secrets of cosmic proportion and alignment. The ancients understood that the ripeness of the natural world is the perfection of ratio and that the planetary system–and time itself–is a creation of number. We have forgotten what our ancestors once knew: that numbers and their properties create the forms of the world.

A Mexican Triple Square at Teotihuacan

image: Ricardo David Sánchez for Wikipedia 

This article is from June 2012 on my past Matrix of Creation site where it was read 548 times at the time of last backup. It led to another article and so I repeat it here.

The late Hugh Harleston Jr revealed the famous Mexican pyramids at Teotihuacan as being the manifestation of a very advanced megalithic culture, the Olmec as a root culture for New World Megalithism of Mexico and South America (that led to the Maya nearly a millennium later, the Aztec and the Inca) . The Teoti city-building culture started around 200 BCE but it is not exactly clear when the great city started to be built or what it represented. However, Carnac’s megalithic geometries, its day-inch counting within monuments and evident use of circumpolar astronomy suggests important new clues in the interpretation of this sacred city’s design.

So I will open a new thread here to look at the Teotihuacas and the Maya. What better way to start than by immediately identifying the more formal part of the city as following the outline of a triple square, the geometry that in the old world linked the solar year to the eclipse year. Harleston’s web site had a very detailed site plan encoded in special units, called STUs or Hunabs which themselves appear derived from the metre but are also very close to the an Egyptian double royal cubits in length, in its Standard Geographical form (using John Neal’s classification). Harleston’s actual length for the Hunab is exactly the twelfth root of two metres, but that is another story.

Figure 1 Harleston’s time map view of Teotihuacan using his established unit measure of 1.0594 metres, based upon many distances between designed points in the complex. Note that the diagonal of the triple square passes through the two large pyramids that dominate the site, generally called Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramind of the Moon. The triple square has been offset to the North to run through the end of the northerly viewing platforms of the plaza terminating the “solar highway” before the Pyramid of the Moon. [taken from Mayan Treasure]

The triple square is shown defining North with its diagonal but the sides follow the bearing of the “solar highway” (sometimes also known as The Path of the Dead), which is about fifteen and a half degrees east of north rather than the 18.43 degrees of a triple squares diagonal. However the diagonal runs through the two pyramids west of north by about three degrees minus two minutes even though the diagonal was NOT made to point directly North for reasons that may emerge. Instead, the principle axis of the triple square could be pointing to a circumpolar star at maximum eastern elongation and in fact, the behaviour of circumpolar stars could be responsible for the wide range of alignments found in Mexican pyramids over many centuries.

In the case of Teotihuacan, the triple square eems to point at the ex-pole star Thurban around 168 BCE, which could therefore be the date of foundation for the building of the city, since all else proceeds from this alignment of the road. Thurban, in this epoch, was rapidly moving away from the pole due to the precession of the north pole (and equinoxes), from its “reign” as the pole star when the Great Pyramid was built at Giza, whose northern “air shaft” pointed to Thurban. What could be happening is that when megalithism is practiced between 10-20 degrees latitude, the residual circumpolar region is shrunk but can nonetheless form part of the symbolic astronomy towards which megalithic structures are defined.

The long road structure at Teotihuacan pointed directly towards
the maximum elongation of Thurban to the east, in 170 BCE.

Figure 2 The Google Earth view of Teotihucan’s “ceremonial complex”, showing how its triple square pointed towards the circumpolar star Thurban in the epoch 170 BCE. The most significant astronomical reason for using a triple square is to represent the Metonic and Saros periods as a day count so that the pyramids of the Sun and Moon then lie on the metonic period of nineteen solar years whilst the triple square is both oriented to Thurban whilst signifying the controlling periodicity for Eclipses which is nineteen eclipse years. The day length of 0.365 metres would then point to the division of one day into 365 parts, a division quite natural for circumpolar astronomy with 365 days in a year.

At Lochmariaquer, the triple square pointing north was employed to count time in day-inches and even though the units seem different, the subject of such counts are the relations found between the solar and eclipse year. The epitome of this is found in the completing cycle of the sun and moon over nineteen years, called the Metonic period. The Saros period that dominates eclipse phenomena is nineteen eclipse years long, the difference between 19 eclipse years and 19 solar years exactly one lunar year of twelve lunar months.

Figure 3 The north facing triple square at Locmariaquer used the Tumulus d’Er Grah to mark a day-inch count for the Saros period, leaving an implicit metonic period count to the direct north.

Figure 3 The north facing triple square at Locmariaquer used the Tumulus d’Er Grah to mark a day-inch count for the Saros period, leaving an implicit metonic period count to the direct north.

At Locmariaquer (circa. 4500 BCE), its tumulus ended, in similar fashion, one Saros period from the starting point at Er Grah and this can be equated with the length of the triple square at Teotihuacan, making the diagonal equal to the length of the Metonic period of nineteen years. At this scaling, each day would be 365 millimetres long – showing how large megalithic monuments have to be if each millimeter is to represent just the four minutes that it takes for the earth’s rotation to catch up with the sun’s movement in a day, on the ecliptic.

The parallelism between Lochmariaquer and Teotihucan is striking as a mode of astronomical symbolism that naturally makes monuments of different epochs a unique statement within a continuing tradition that is best called Megalithism. Megalithism has its roots in astronomical symbolism and rituals strongly tied to astronomical periods, many of which have been sublimated or dropped within modern calendars.

Chapter 9: Quetzalcoatl’s Brave New World of Harmonic Origins of the World describes some of the number sciences of the Olmec and their derivative New World civilizations.