For further details of the book look at the growing Publisher pages for it at Inner Traditions.
Author: Richard Heath
St Pierre 1: Jupiter and the Moon
The egg-shaped stone circles of the megalithic, in Brittany by c. 4000 BC and in Britain by 2500 BC, seem to express two different astronomical time lengths, beside each other as (a) a circumference and then (b) a longer, egg-shaped extension of that circle. It was Alexander Thom who analysed stone circles in the 20th century as a hobby, surveying most of the surviving stone circles in Britain and finding geometrical patterns within irregular circles. He speculated the egg-shaped and flattened circles were manipulating pi so as to equal three (not 3.1416) between an initial radius and subsequent perimeter, so making them commensurate in integer units. For example, the irregular circle would have perimeter 12 and a radius of 4 (a flattened circle).
However, when the forming circle and perimeter are compared, these can compare the two lengths of a right-triangle while adding a recurring nature: where the end is a new beginning. Each cycle is a new beginning because the whole geocentric sky is rotational and the planetary system orbital. The counting of time periods was more than symbolic since the two astronomical time periods became, by artifice, related to one another as two integer perimeters that is, commensurate to one another, as is seen at St Pierre (fig.3).
Continue reading “St Pierre 1: Jupiter and the Moon”Durrington Walls and its massive circle of Pits
Recent analysis of animal bones within Durrington Walls indicated, to the archaeologists involved, that people had travelled there from all over the British mainland, along with animals then eaten inside the henge[1]. But what would these people be doing there? It had earlier been suggested that an elite responsible for building Stonehenge lived in a wooden roundhouse within the henge ([2] see figure 1). So, people may have come from elsewhere to help the building works now found between Stonehenge and Avebury.
More recently, pits have been found [3] within a circular strip that I notice lies between 3168 feet and 4038 feet from Durrington Walls, a boundary 864 feet wide. The pits may contain the material remains of the building elite and perhaps of those workers who died, functioning like nearby barrows but vertically.
This post aims to explain why this might have been done according to a significant geometrical pattern. In the megalithic, numbers played an active role and this perhaps inspired the myth of Atlantis recorded by Plato – the classical Greek writer who transmitted the ancient notion that numbers had a causative role in forming the “world soul”, rather than our usage for number: a means to quantify things within civilized societies or laws of nature.
Continue reading “Durrington Walls and its massive circle of Pits”Fields, Racetracks and Temples in Ancient Greece
The fields of ancient Greece were organised in a familiar way: strips of land in which a plough could prepare land for arable planting. Known in various languages as furlong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furlong, runrig, journel, machen etc, in Greece there was a nominal length for arable strips which came to be associated with the metrological unit of 600 feet called a stadia. The length of foot used was systematically varied from the foot we use today, using highly disciplined variations (called modules); each module a numeric ratio of the Greek module, whose root foot was the English foot [Neal, 2000]. These modules are found employed throughout the ancient world, lengthening or reducing lengths such as the stadia, to suit geometrical problems; such as the division of land into fields (figure 1).
Continue reading “Fields, Racetracks and Temples in Ancient Greece”Further Ratios of the Outer Planets to the Lunar Year
The traditional way to express the Harmony of the Spheres is geometrically, despite the fact that geometrical knowledge of the heliocentric planetary system was not available to Pythagoras who, for the West, first established this whole idea – that the planets were part of a system expressing harmony.
The opening picture is from Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi :
from a scan made of the Smithsonian’s copy,
made available on Wikipedia as in the public domain.
In my own work, on the type of ancient astronomy based upon time and not space, I find it to be the outer planets in particular which express harmony in their geocentric synods relative to the lunar year. This applies to Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus but Neptune expresses a rational fraction of 28/27 involving prime numbers {2 3 7} whilst the other three planets only involve ratios involving primes {2 3 5}. The harmony of the outer planets has been a strong source for the sacred numbers found in ancient texts, as with Jupiter 1080 – considered a lunar number perhaps because the Moon is resonant to Jupiter – who is shown by figure 1 to be geocentrically resonant to the other planets and the Moon.
Continue reading “Further Ratios of the Outer Planets to the Lunar Year”Fibonacci in Jupiter’s 12-fold Heaven
The Fibonacci series is an ideal pattern, widely found within living systems, in which the present magnitude or location of something is the product of two previous magnitudes or locations of it. The next magnitude will again be the sum of the last two magnitudes in what is, an algorithmic pattern producing approximation to the Golden Mean (designated by the Greek letter φ,’phi’). As the series gets larger, the ratio (or proportion) between successive magnitudes will better approximate the irrational value of φ = 1.618033 … – which has an unlimited fractional part whilst the virtue of the Fibonacci numbers within the Series is that they are integers forming rational fractions.
Continue reading “Fibonacci in Jupiter’s 12-fold Heaven”