Author: Richard Heath

Counting the Moon: 99 equals 8 years

Plan of Avebury showing the stone arrangement of the henge. 
Source: The Avebury Cycle Michael Dames (1977).

The principle of finding anniversaries appears promising when three solar years contain just over 37 (37.1) lunar months while three lunar years contain 36 lunar months and, if one then looks for a better anniversary, then one can move to the 8 year period which has two key features.

  1. The sun will appear on the horizon where it did 8 solar years ago because of the quarter day every solar year.
  2. The moon will be in the same phase (relative to the sun) after 99 lunar months.

This appears useful: by dividing the days in eight years (~ 2922 days) by 99 (having counted to 99 months by eight years) the resulting estimate for the lunar month is 29.514 days, out by just 23 minutes of our time.

Eight solar years was therefore an early calendar in which the solar year could be somewhat integrated by the lunar year. However, the lunar year was entrenched as a sacred calendar, for example in Archaic Greece. And it may be that when the Neolithic reached England in the Bronze Age that 99 stones were placed around the massive henge of Avebury so that eight solar years could be tracked in a seasonal calendar alongside 99 lunar months, 96 months constituting eight lunar years.

The three lunar months left over must then, divided by 8, give the solar excess over the lunar year as 3/8 = 0.375, whereas the actual excess is 0.368 lunar months or 5 hours less. In the previous post, two months the stone age could have been counted as 59 days, here 8 solar years could have been counted as 99 lunar months at Avebury. Through this, one would be homing in on knowing the solar excess per year (10.875 days) and the length of the lunar month, to more accuracy.

It is obvious that counting using whole months has not got enough resolution to catch an accurate result and so in the next post we must revert to counting days in inches, as was done at Le Manio around 4000 BC, over the 36/37 month anniversary at three solar years. It is important to grasp that while we have great functional mathematics, we are here using it to find out what the numeracy 3000-4000 BC could have intended or achieved within counts monumentalized geometrically as a stone monument that can store information.

Counting the Moon: Two equals 59 days

Above: Title Slide of my 2015 Lecture

Counting the lunar month has a deep history, reaching right into prehistory. Firstly, how does one find a phenomenon that gives a whole number of days. Its actual length is now known to be 29.53059 days, and to give a whole number just two lunar months gives 59 days, leaving just 1.8 days too little. But never mind, for the stone age this looks promising but how can one observe the moon at a fixed point and which phase is best to count.

Within a day, before or after the full moon, the Moon looks pretty full, changing little and offering no decisive moment between to count between two full moons. For this reason, a few prehistoric bones give clues to their method which involved counting days with some mark representing the Moon’s phase. This led to the sickle/cresent marks to left “(” or right “)” and between these a round mark “O” and dashes of dark or invisible moon “-“. These are what Alexander Marshack saw in the Albard Plaque, carved on a flat bone from a midden:

Figure 1 (left) Alexander Marshack investigating marked bones in Europe and a crucial interpretation of a 30,000 year old bone as a double lunar month of counting. From my 2015 lecture in Glastonbury about my work prior to Sacred Number and the Lords of Time in 2014.

Marshack demonstrated plausible evidence that consecutive day marks were used in the stone age, stylised to indicate lunar phase within a pattern recognizing that two lunar months formed a recurrent structure in time in a whole number of days, namely 58 days. The utility of the calendric device was that the cycle could be visualized as a whole, making the plaque an icon of both knowledge and meaning. This could be shared but also gave the possessor of this small bone, a power to predict when hunting is possible in lighter nights the light cycle of the moon. In addition, the moon’s phase locates the location of the sun and how many hours were left before the dawn. The bone was an overview of a daily process during most of which the moon is visible by night and day.

In following posts I look at many other ways to count the month, based on longer counts and also look at where in the lunar phases one can best start and stop counting.

You may like to watch my lecture at Megalithomania
(which starts with an ad you may skip).

A House that is your Home

This graphic demonstrates how the inner geometry within numbers can point to significant aspects of Celestial Time or here Space regarding the relative sizes of the Earth and the Moon, namely 11 to 3 according to pi as 22/7.

In some ways one cannot understand numbers without giving them some kind of concrete form as with seeing them as a number of identical units. Sixteen units can make a square of side 4 since the square root of 16 is 4 and 6 is factorial 3 (3! = 1 x 2 x 3 and 1 + 2 + 3) which is triangular, so together they make 22, and if the triangle to placed on top of the square, like a house and its roof, then the house is 7 tall. If you want an accurate approximation to pi of 3.14159 … (pi is transcendental), the 22/7 is good and the house defines it.

This adds another mystery to this form of pi often used in the ancient world where numbers were best handled as whole numbers and ratios of these. This pi allows a circle of diameter 11 to be set within a square of side 11, whose perimeter is then 44. This can be seen in the diagram as made up of 16 yellow squares and 6 blue ones, centered on the circle and making 22 squares in all.

Continue reading “A House that is your Home”

Inside Time

There are two things we can count in this world, one is the number of objects on the Earth and the other is the number of time periods between events in the Sky.

photo: The Moon, with Jupiter and Mars, on 11th January 2018. (see end for interpretation)

Objects are counted in an extensive way, from one to an almost infinite number, the count extending with each addition (or multiplication) of a population.

Time periods appear similar but in fact they emanate from measurable recurrences, such as phases of the moon, and these derive from the behaviour of celestial objects as they divide into each other.

For instance, the unit called the day is created by the rotation of the earth relative to the Sun and the lunar month by its orbit around the Earth relative to the Sun, and so on.

Thus, time originally came from the sky. Furthermore, it largely came from the zodiacal band of stars surrounding the Earth within which the planets, Sun and Moon progress eastwards. The Earth’s own orbital motion is superimposed upon those of the other planets and the inner planets (Mercury and Venus) also appear to orbit a Sun that appears to orbit the Earth once a year.

The zodiacal band is naturally divided up into a number of constellations or stars and about three thousand years ago it became popular to follow the Sun throughout the year into 12 constellations whilst the Moon tends to create 27 or 28 stars (nakshatras) where the Moon might sit on a given evening. When the moon is illuminated by the sun, the primordial month has 29 1/2 days and twelve such in less than a year hence perhaps first defining the 12-ness of our months within the year.

Continue reading “Inside Time”

Angkor Wat and St Peter’s Basilica

Unexpectedly, three more chapter were written to conclude Sacred Geometry in Ancient Goddess Cultures, on Cambodian temple Angkor Wat and Rome’s St Peter’s Basilica.

Here is a taster of the later chapters.

figure: the punctuation of towers and western outlook. Possibly a funerial building for the king, it could be used as a living observatory and complex counting platform for studying the time periods of the sun, the moon, and even the planetary synods.

Chapter 9 is on the design of Angkor Wat and chapter 10 is on St Peter’s basilica in Rome (see below). Some early articles on these can be accessed on this site, most easily through the search function, tag cloud and tags on this post..

As you can see, my books partly emerge through work presented on this website. This has been an important way of working. And whilst I am providing some ways of working that could be duplicated by others, at its heart, my purpose is to show that the celestial environment of our living planet appears to have been perfectly organized according to a numerical scheme.

My results do not rely on modern techniques yet I have had to avail myself of modern techniques and gadgets to work out what the ancient techniques arrived at over hundreds if not thousands of years.

My basic proposal is that ancient astronomers learned of the pattern of time in the sky by counting days and months between events on the horizon or amongst the fixed stars. Triangles enabled the planetary motions to be compared as ratios between synodic periods.

Continue reading “Angkor Wat and St Peter’s Basilica”

Medieval Solfeggio within the Heptagonal Church of Rieux Minervois

This paper responds to Reichart and Ramalingam’s study of three heptagonal churches[1], particularly the 12th century church at Rieux Minervois in the Languedoc region of France (figure 1a).

image: The Church in situ

Reichart and Ramalingam discuss the close medieval association of the prime number seven[2] with the Virgin Mary, to whom this church was dedicated. The outer wall of the original building still has fourteen vertical ribs on the inside, each marking vertices of a tetraheptagon, and an inner ring of three round and four vertex-like pillars (figure 1b) forming a heptagon that supports an internal domed ceiling within an outer heptagonal tower. The outer walls, dividable by seven, could have represented an octave and in the 12th century world of hexachordal solmization (ut-re-mi-fa-sol-la [sans si & do])[3]. The singing of plainchant in churches provided a melodic context undominated by but still tied to the octave’s note classes. Needing only do-re-mi-fa-sol-la, for the three hexachordal dos of G, C and F, the note letters of the octave were prefixed in the solmization to form unique mnemonic words such as “Elami”.It is therefore possible that a heptagonal church with vertices for the octave of note letters would have been of practical use to singers or their teachers.

The official plan of Rieux Minervois

12th Century Musical Theory

In the 10th Century, the Muslim Al-Kindi was first to add two tones to the Greek diatonic tetrachord of two tones and single semitone (T-T-S) and extend four notes to the six notes of our ascending major scale, to make TTSTT. This system appeared in the Christian world (c. 1033) in the work of Guido of Arezzo, a Benedictine monk who presumably had access to Arabic translations of al-Kindi and others [Farmer. 1930]. Guido’s aim was to make Christian plainsong learnable in a much shorter period, employing a dual note and solfege notation around seven overlapping hexachords called solmization. Plainsongs extending over one, two or even three different hexachords could then be notated.

Continue reading “Medieval Solfeggio within the Heptagonal Church of Rieux Minervois”