The sun of the mind at dawn rises from the grip of not knowing.
The sun of the mind at dusk drops into exhausted non-attachment.
This “metaphor” was all too real in the India that gave birth to Yoga, since the light of the sun illuminates the objects conceptualized by the mind. Through the illumination of objects, the mind attaches the desire to participate, own, use and identify with objects and scenarios concerning them and other persons.
Ways of Purchasing: This large-format book, richly illustrated in color throughout, can be seen in the sidebar (on mobiles, below the tag cloud) or visit Inner Traditions.
The Light and Dark, as Value and Fact, could be viewed as reconciled by an evolved mind, within the biosphere. They could indeed be the cause of the arising of proto-minds, since existential situations in the Biosphere are of value for its beings whilst being factual. As Bennett points out, sex and death are innovations of the biospheric world, and we can now date their arrival during the Cambrian “explosion” (around 542 million years ago) when plants and animals (multicellular life forms) innovated sex to reproduce their organisms as a whole as well as regenerating their cells through cell division. Animals, unlike single-celled algae, are able to express action but must die to benefit from generational improvement by natural selection. Only by such means could the three brains of humans, motive, emotive and cognitive, be selected through their effectiveness in adaptation to living conditions within a variety of different biomes.
But there have been problems for humans in their maintaining a shared cultural harmony towards nature and the biosphere, due to the success of their cognitive brain capacity to solve environmental problems based upon facts. Technologies can arise whose consequences may conflict with social values that are somewhat weakly held to. Arguments can break out over values and the impact of technologies and those that wield them, but the factual benefits generally dominate other human views. The environmental argument is being lost whilst technology becomes an ever stronger threat to the biosphere as we know it. The modern world is simply the latest and greatest in which actions often clearly go against valuing the environment over the wealth it can create, and better-off populations have become used, inured and psychically hardened to human and biospheric tragedy.
This post begins a Theme relating to the Trigon event occurring on 21st December 2020, when Jupiter and Saturn are conjunct at dusk in the sky. This touches upon what such synchronicities mean for other long term periods seen from Earth, such as the Moon’s nodal period of 6800 days and even the Precession of the Equinoxes over 25,800 ± 120 years.
Jupiter is the second largest body in the solar system next to the sun itself. In fact, Jupiter is not far short of being a sun itself and, being the closest giant planet to the Earth, our planet is strongly influenced by Jupiter’s gravity which, unlike the Sun’s continuous pull to maintain Earth’s orbit around it, Jupiter pulls upon the Earth and the Moon on an episodic basis when the Earth is passing between the Sun and Jupiter.
The Trigon Period of Jupiter and Saturn
Being a dark, planetary body, the episodic pull of Jupiter follows a different pattern to each of the inner, terrestrial planets; Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, since each has a different orbital period which, combined with Jupiter’s orbit, brings each under Jupiter’s influence or absence. The combined episodic pull of Jupiter and Saturn, is visually seen in their conjuction every 20 years, which occurs just over a third of the Zodiac onwards, thus giving a cosmic significance to the equilateral triangle as a sacred geometry.
Figure 1 The series of Trigon conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn, as will be the case on 21st December 2020
Only Earth’s large moon stops the axial tilt of the Earth from varying significantly, then causing large changes in climate which would have restricted the development of the relatively stable habitats and biomes we enjoy.
361 days: Jupiter and the Zodiac
The combination of Jupiter’s orbital period (of 4332 days) and Earth’s (of 365.2422 days) generates an interesting set of numerical facts since Jupiter passes through each of the twelve signs of the Zodiac in 361 days. This number is 19 times 19 days so that 12 times 361 days equals 4332 days. But these numbers are a product of the solar year of 365.2422 days, since the day length on Earth is 1 year divided by the 365.2422 days due to its rotation. If the day length were less or more then Jupiter’s complete orbit would still be as long but the numbers from Earth would not.
This is a major aspect of what the megalithic astronomy had to learn, that the relative time lengths of the many cosmic periods, counted in days, could be numerically interrelated when quantified. The situation of the earth orbit and its rotation would present Jupiter as a bright moving star which completed its journey through the stars in 12 times 361 days. Jupiter and the Zodiac of 12 constellations would inevitably become fused as seen in the story of Zeus, the Greek god name for Jupiter whose symbol is the twelve-fold circle. The pre-Classical Greeks were matriarchal, following the lunar month of twelve whole lunar months within the solar year and, the solar year only arose as the patriarchal northern tribes occupied Greece after the Bronze Age collapse. The name Zeus is therefore not matriarchal since the Greeks had no “Z”. Zeus arrived in ancient Greece with the tribes displaced from the North escaping the worsening climate at higher latitudes. And, whilst 12-foldness is associated with the Sun being in one of the 12 zodiacal constellations, Jupiter defines these through passing through each sign (on average) in 361 days.
399 days: Jupiter’s synodic period
Twelve-ness is a massively widespread tradition (see John Michell – Twelve-fold Tribes for instance) and the brightest celestial body next to the Sun is the Moon which expresses twelve whole lunar months a year (plus 7/19 of a lunar month). The common lunar year was therefore twelve months long, taking 354.367 days to complete, this countable between thirteen full moons. It is no accident that the 12-ness of the lunar year is connected with Jupiter’s 12-ness of its 361 day years, since the Jupiter synod has a strong grip on our moon: the synod is 9/8 lunar years long – a musical whole tone. And Saturn also has a similar grip, its synod of 378 days being 16/15 lunar years long.
When the Earth passes by Jupiter, the latter goes retrograde or backwards relative to the stars, meaning it appears to travel east night-by-night, rather than the norm for all planets (and the sun and moon) of slowly travelling west in our skies, as they orbit. During this retrograde period, the planet describes a loop in the sky relative to the stellar background, before returning to where it should be in the stars. Between the loops of Jupiter’s synodic period the 398.88 days could be counted in days. This can only mean that over millennia, the Moon became synchronised by the regular proximity of Jupiter to our moon.
Our months today have divided the solar year into twelve months of 30 or 31 days, to resemble Jupiter’s 12-fold zodiac and 12-month lunar year, the Roman emperors vying to lengthen a month and name it after themselves (examples being October after Octavius, September after Septimius and August after Augustus). And since a zodiacal sign is traversed after 361 days by its definer, it is inevitable that there are not 12 solar years in a Jupiter orbit but just less (11.86 years). However, the fact that 4332 days is not 12 times 365.2422 days accesses, through its deficit, more subtle possibilities hidden in a numerical world of differences.
Differences between periodicities, especially involving the moon that rotates the Earth, define those periods through the fact that they endlessly repeat so that differences accumulate over longer periods and when these differences are divided into the periods, a new set of numbers are generated. One could call orbital systems differential calculators and modern math would describe them as potentially discrete systems, which form due to gravitational recurrence. This idea that the planetary and lunar systems generate numbers is somewhat hidden by our modern description of such systems as subject to gravitational dynamics. The numbers allowed the ancient astronomers to discover a static numerical view of planetary astronomy through counting days. In contrast, modern astronomy calculates the location of celestial bodies from first principles; especially when trying to visit planetary bodies in spacecraft.
above: Carreg Coetan Arthur portal dolmen in Newport, Pembrokeshire.
The prehistory of sacred geometry was the late stone age, when the stone circles, dolmens, and long alignments to astronomical events on the horizon, used megaliths (large stones) in geometrical ways. Their geometries served their quest to understand the heavens, without telescopes or arithmetic, by using counted time periods as geometrical lines, squares and circles. Geometry, supplemented by the days counted between alignment events, was therefore a prelude to sacred and then secular geometry.
By developing early geometrical methods, they forged an enduring cultural norm lasting millennia, as part (or not) of the more-familiar aspect of the neolithic, innovating an agricultural pastoralism, that could support settlements, cities and, only then, the great civilizations of the middle and far east. It was civilization that generated our earliest written histories; these still powering our historical context and leading the basic notion of economic progress and territorial expansion, as superior to all that went before.
Our surviving megaliths are hence deeply enigmatic, a mysterious and mute presence in a world far less mysterious. The megaliths may have something we have forgotten in a collective way, something pushed out by millennia of later ideas and now relatively recent ones too.
There seems little trace of the megalithic astronomers themselves, their geometricized landscape overlaid by our notions of a primitive Stone Age. And, as the prelude to world history, their geometry gave birth to sacred geometry and sacred buildings; pyramids, ziggurats, temples and religious complexes. In some way, therefore, geometry obtained its sacredness from the skies or the earth itself, as if these had been built from the harmonious organization of the solar system seen from Earth and given to it by one or more gods or angels.
Sacred geometry the became a secular and analytical geometry, which would become an encyclopedic exploration of all that geometry could do, rather than a set of techniques dreamt up by a band of roaming astronomers. In our schools, many lose interest in having to learn geometry in the abstract and so, in this, the megalithic had an advantage. They could learn geometry as and when they needed it, as their astronomy brought up new questions to solve, learning by finding methods to answer questions.
If one truly travels backwards in time, to discover what the megalithic astronomers had understood, I believe one has to decide which bits of your own skills have to be applied to solve the riddles of the megalithic mind. Each modern researcher must not assume the megalithic could calculate using numbers, use trigonometry, knew Pythagoras’ theorum, and so on. And yet, one can employ modern equipment to help investigate the megalithic. Google Earth, for example, can allow megalithic alignments to be studied, their azimuth, length and interrelation, whilst the context of sites can be seen that may provide clues not available in site plans, written descriptions and so on, which are sometimes difficult to obtain or require a personal expedition. The most basic tool for me has been the Casio scientific calculators, since the megalithic interaction with space (geometry) was blended with the interaction of numerical time counting, numbers which exist in the geocentric world of time.
Finally, one must realise the past is only in the present through our attention to it and, in the absence of much official interest in applied geometry, dimensionality and astronomical intent of the sites, it is left to non-specialists to become new specialists in the sense of recovering and conserving the true achievements of the megalithic, for our present age, while the monuments still exist as living mysteries. In this I advocate the path leading to what this website is about.
The harmony of the spheres can only be found in our world of time, where it is a strong and compelling phenomenon. Such a harmony was no prescientific fantasy. Pythagoras, who coined the term, probably did so based on the geocentric time world, a view lost to history apart from cryptic references that can no longer be interpreted.
In our age of system science, musical harmony is not thought relevant to the design of dynamic systems such as the planets, yet they appear adapted to just intonation seen from the exclusive perspective of our planet. Why should our planet have a harmonious view of time, and what difference does time’s harmoniousness make to life on Earth? Is there some other purpose to this harmony or none at all? To answer such questions one has to recognize just intonation as being a holistic system that demands human insight into the nature of whole phenomena (a so-called gestalt). Such gestalts flow from the need to see higher-level relationships rather than the raw complexity of their parts. All higher structures of meaning subsume lower levels of meaning. For example, microclimates are a structuring of meaning higher than trees, water, weather, and topography, usefully integrating these parts within a newly perceived whole. Such insights reveal a higher idea that indicates new potentials within a system. The new level of conceptual order has not changed in the phenomenon but how we relate to it. This profound faculty is the basis of what we call understanding rather than knowing, and it enlarges our “world.” The world is already structured, and a sensory insight re-creates that structure as a simplifying aspect, already present, to expand the intelligibility of the sensory world and with it, our present moment. Insight and the world’s creation were considered similar acts within ancient cosmologies, in that an insight about the world resembles the structure of the world as it would be conceived by any god in the act of creating it. Such a vision involves a special effort but provides a creative view of the world, in which simplicity and relatedness replace functional complexity with a new appreciation of the sensory world. The celestial behavior in Earth’s skies is a prime example of such an action: the rotation of Earth, its orbit around the sun, the moon’s orbit, and its illumination by the sun complicate the observed orbital periods of the other planets and yet, that added complexity has produced harmonic simplicity between synodic periods!
Chapter 1 showed how Late Stone Age astronomers used geometrical counts of synodic periods to discover this harmony of the spheres, which modern astronomers have not seen because scientific calculation methods deal instead with planetary dynamics modeled by equations. Simplicity has somehow adapted our solar system without breaking physical laws. At the level of gravitational dynamics, many complexities were required to achieve just intonation seen only from Earth, especially the lengthening of the lunar month as an intermediary to the planetary synods seen from Earth. Any demiurgic preference for harmony (seen from Earth) resembles the human gestalt that revealed the harmony of the spheres to human sensory intelligence in the Late Stone Age, and it must be noted, humanity has become demiurgic since the Stone Age, creating man-made worlds.
Demiurgic intelligences are probably part of each star system and, if our star has a demiurgic intelligence, this action seems to have used the moon to establish a justly intoned time world for the third planet. It adapted the unchanging orbital pitches of an n-body planetary system to present harmonic synodic systems that planetary orbital periods alone could never express. Our geocentric system is harmonically founded between 1, the zeroth power of 2 (the Saturn synod) and the fifth power of 60 (YHWH, as 365-day year), which is the smallest numerical resolution to contain just intonation of both inner and outer planets, as in the implied holy mountains of our ancient texts.
Harmonic Origins of the World Contents (272 pages, 100 b&w illustrations) Preface Introduction: The Significance of Planetary Harmony (5) PART 1: RECOVERING LOST KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORLD SOUL 1 Climbing the Harmonic Mountain (20) 2 Heroic Gods of the Tritone (19) 3 YHWH Rejects the Gods (15) 4 Plato’s Dilemma (22) PART 2: A COSMICALLY CREATIVE HARMONY 5 The Quest for Apollo’s Lyre (25) 6 Life on the Mountain (23) PART 3 THE WAR IN HEAVEN 7 Gilgamesh Kills the Stone Men (16) 8 Quetzalcoatl’s Brave New World (31) 9 YHWH’s Matrix of Creation (19) 10 The Abrahamic Incarnation (15) Postscript: Intelligent Star Systems APPENDIX 1: Astronomical Periods and Their Matrix Equivalents APPENDIX 2: Ancient Use of Tone Circles (11) Notes Bibliography Index
