Figure 1 The five Trilithons of Stonehenge 3, highlighted in yellow within the Sarsen ring to express the five evening and morning star couplets which occur in eight practical years of 365 days. Plan from Megalithic Remains in Britain and Brittany, Oxford U.P. Central portion is fig.3, upside down to match the horseshoe of trilithons..
Inside the Sarsen ring of Stonehenge, there once stood a group of five trilithons, each made up of two uprights and a lintel stone, repeating the unique style of building found in the Sarsen ring. However the Trilithons were higher than the sarsens, punctuating an elliptical cup shape towards the midsummer sunrise, the axis of Stonehenge and its solstice-marking “heel” stone.
The Horns of Venus
The symbolism therefore involved (a) the Sun, (b) the number five of the trilithons while (c) expressed something involving close pairs. The dominant astronomical significance of the number 5 comes through the brightest planetary phenomenon of all, in which the planet Venus approaches the Earth, as Venus approaches from the east, preceding the Sun in the evening sky. It is often therefore called the Evening Star. Venus then shoots past the sun and reappears in the morning sky, again growing in brightness as the Morning Star.
Figure 2 The Horns of Venus when the evening and morning “stars” are visualised over an extended present moment of the Venus synodic period of 1.6 (⅝) practical years of 365 days. Fig. 2.2 of my Matrix of Creation, Inner Traditions, 2004 . (Drawn by Robin Heath.)
The original astronomers of the megalithic only saw the planetary system from the Earth and not (conceptually) from the Sun, as we do today. That is, they were naturally geocentric whilst the present worldview is heliocentric.
The astronomers could study cosmic time periods without arithmetic, through counting days, using a constant unit length to mark each single day adding up to a fixed length of days. Through such counting they would see 365 whole days between the solstices and (more reliably) between the equinoxes (when the Sun moves most rapidly on the horizon). It was also quite obvious that the horns of Venus were bracketing the Sun, just as the elliptical cup of the trilithons they erected at Stonehenge bracketed the solstitial sun, a sun which travels every day from east to west.
Five-ness in the Zodiac
If the earth was their viewpoint then the Zodiac of the sun’s path over the year could, like the Sarsen Circle, be seen as a circle of 365 days, and when the time between evening or morning stars was counted, the result was 584 days between the horn-like and brilliant manifestations of Venus. 584 days is 219 days more than 365 days. The sun has therefore moved 3/5th of a year forward and hence it became noticeable, as stated above, that 1/5th of the practical year is 73 days, the practical year 5 units of 73 days long whilst the Venus synod is 8 units of 73 days long. The Venus synod therefore has exactly 1.6 (8/5) practical years between its phenomena.
Figure 3 The Horns of evening (E) and morning (M) stars shown upon the circle of the Zodiac, each successive pair 3/5ths advanced within the solar year. [from Joachim Schultz, Movement and Rhythms of the Stars, Floris, 1986, fig 88]
The form of Venus upon the Zodiac therefore describes a 5-fold pentacle star. This would later make the number 5 and all of its properties, sacred by association to the planet Venus who became the leading goddess of the Ancient Near East. The Golden Proportion or Mean (1.618034…), often seen in Classical and Neoclassical architecture, has the number 5 as its root. Also, many living bodies share forms derived from the number 5, or of the Fibonacci approximations to the Golden Mean.
The Fibonacci series (of 1, 1, 2, 3 ,5 ,8 ,13 ,21, …) has successive numbers that sum to give the next number, and each new ratio, between successive numbers in the series, yields an ever-better approximation to the Golden Mean: (2, 1.5, 1.6, 1.6, 1.617, …).
Harmonic Origins of the World inserted the astronomical observations of my previous books into an ancient harmonic matrix, alluded to through the harmonic numbers found in many religious stories, and also through the cryptic works of Plato. Around 355 BC, Plato’s dialogues probably preserved what Pythagoras had learnt from ancient mystery centers of his day, circa. 600 BC.
According to the late Ernest G. McClain*, Plato’s harmonic matrices had been widely practiced by initiates of the Ancient Near East so that, to the general population, they were entertaining and uplifting stories set within eternity while, to the initiated, the stories were a textbook in harmonic tuning. The reason harmonic tuning theory should have infiltrated cosmological or theological ideas was the fact that, the planets surrounding Earth express the most fundamental musical ratios, the tones and semitones found within octave scales.
* American musicologist and writer, in the 1970s, of The Pythagorean Plato and The Myth of Invariance.
Ancient prose narratives and poetic allusions were often conserving ancient knowledge of this planetary harmony; significant because these ratios connect human existence to the world of Eternity. In this sense the myths of gods, heros and mortals had been a natural reflection of harmonic worlds in heaven, into the life of the people.
In the Greece before the invention of phonetic writing, oral or spoken stories such as those attributed to Homer and Hesiod were performed in public venues giving rise to the amphitheaters and stepped agoras of Greek towns. Special performers or rhapsodes animated epic stories of all sorts and some have survived through their being written down.
At the same time, alongside this journey towards genuine literacy, new types of sacred buildings and spaces emerged, these also carrying the sacred numbers and measures of the megalithic to Classical Greece, Rome, Byzantium and elsewhere, including India and China.
Work towards a fuller harmonic matrix for the planets
In my first book, called Matrix of Creation, I had not yet assimilated McClain’s books, but had identified the musical intervals between the lunar year and the geocentric periodicities of the outer planets. To understand what was behind the multiple numerical relationships within the geocentric world of time, I started drawing out networks of those periods and, as I looked at all the relationships (or interval ratios) between them, I could see common denominators and multiples linking the celestial time periods through small intermediary and whole numbers: numbers which became sacred for later civilizations. For example, the 9/8 relationship between the Jupiter synod and the lunar year could be more easily grasped in a diagram revealing a larger structural network, visualized as a “matrix diagram” (see figure 1).
Figure 1 Matrix Diagram of Jupiter and the Moon. figure 9.5 of Matrix of Creation, p117.
One can see the common unit of 1.5 lunar months, at the base of the diagram, and a symmetrical period at the apex lasting 108 lunar months or 9 lunar years (referencing the Maya supplemental glyphs). In due course, I re-discovered the use of the Lambda diagram of Plato (figure 8.7), and even stumbled upon the higher register of five tones (figure 2) belonging to the Mexican flying serpent, Quetzalcoatl (as figure 8.1), made up of [Mercury, the eclipse year, the Tzolkin, Mars and Venus], Venus also being called Quetzalcoatl.
Figure 2 My near discovery of Quetzalcoatl, in fig. 8.1 of Matrix of Creation
These periodicities are of adjacent musical fifths (ratio 3/2), which would eventually be shown as connected to the corresponding register of the outer planets, using McClain’s harmonic technology in my 5th book Harmonic Origins of the World (see figure 3).
Probably called the flying serpent by dynastic Egypt, Quetzalcoatl’s set of musical fifths was part of the Mexican mysteries of the Olmec and Maya civilizations (1500 BC to 800 AD). This serpent flies 125/128 above the inner planets – for example, the eclipse season is 125/128 above the lunar year: 354.367 days × 125/128 = 346 days, requiring I integrate the two serpents within McClain’s harmonic matrices in Harmonic Origins of the World (as figure 9.3).
Uranus is above Saturn
The eclipse year is above the lunar year
the Tzolkin of 260 days is above the 9 lunar months of Adam
Figure 3 The two harmonic serpents of “Heaven” and “Earth”
By my 6th book, Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels, I had realized that the numerical design within which our “living planet” sits is a secondary creation – created after the solar system, yet it was discovered before the heliocentric creation of the solar system, exactly because the megalithic observed the planets from the Earth. Instead of proposing the existence of a progenitor civilization with high knowledge** I instead proposed, as more likely, that the megalithic was the source of the ancient mysteries. Such mysteries then only seem mysterious because; a kind of geocentric science before our own heliocentric one seems anachronistic.
**such as Atlantis as per Plato’s Timaeus: an island destroyed by vulcanism, Atlantis and similar solutions have simply “kicked the can down the road” into an as-yet-poorly-charted prehistory before 5000 BC, for which less evidence exists because there never was any. In contrast, the sky astronomy and earth measures of the megalithic are to be found referenced in later monuments and ancient textual references. That is, megalithic monuments recorded an understanding of the cosmos then found in the ancient mysteries. A geocentric world view was a naturally result of the megalithic, achieved using the numbers they found through geocentric observations, counting lengths of time, using horizon events and the mathematical properties of simple geometries.
Geo-centrism was the current world view until superseded by the Copernican heliocentric view. This new solar system was soon found by 1680 to be held together by natural gravitational forces between large planetary masses, forces discovered by Sir Isaac Newton. The subsequent primacy of heliocentrism, which started 500 years ago, caused humanity to lose contact with the geocentric model of the world: though figure 4 has the planets in the correct order for the the two serpents, of inner and outer planets, this is also (largely) the heliocentric order, if one but swaps the sun and the moon-earth system.
All references to an older and original form of astronomy, based upon numerical time and forged by the megalithic, was thus dislocated and obscured by our heliocentric physical science and astronomy of the modern day – which still knows nothing of the geocentric order that surrounds us.
Figure 4 The Geocentric Model by 1660
The geocentric model entered Greek astronomy and philosophy at an early point; it can be found in pre-Socratic philosophy … In the 4th century BC, two influential Greek philosophers, Plato and his student Aristotle, wrote works based on the geocentric model. According to Plato, the Earth was a sphere, stationary at the center of the universe.
above: a 21-petal object in the Heraklion Museum which could represent the 21 seven-day weeks in the 399 days of the Jupiter synod. [2004, Richard Heath]
One of the unfortunate aspects of adopting the number 360 for calibrating the Ecliptic in degrees is that the megalithic counted time in days and instead saw the ecliptic as divided by the 365¼ days. In transferring to the number 360, with all of its easy factors, 8 x 9 x 5, moderns cannot exploit a key advantage of 365¼ days.
If the lunar orbit takes 27.32166 days then each day the moon moves by 1/27.32166 of the ecliptic every day. For this reason, after 27.32166 days the orbit completes because the Moon’s “year” then equals one as the angular motion has been 27.32166/ 27.32166 = 1.
The same is true of the lunar nodes, which retrograde to the east along the ecliptic in 18.618 years. For this reason one can say, the lunar nodes move by 1/18.618 DAYS (in angle) every day and to travel one DAY in angle, the nodes take 18.618 DAYS per day (needing the new term “node day” equal the 18.618 days.*** A solar year takes 19.618 node days (since 365¼ equals 18.618 x 19.618) and an eclipse year takes 18.618 x 18.618 – 346.62 days
*** These are average figures since the moon comes under variable gravitational influences that are episodic.
A general rule emerges in which the larger, whole cycles, lead to reciprocals which can be numerically characterized by knowing the number of the days in the larger period.
For instance, Jupiter has a synodic excess over the solar year of 398.88 days and this means its angular motion is 1/ 398.88 DAYS per day while Saturn’s synod is 378.09 days and its angular motion is 1/ 378.09 DAYS per day. These synods are, by definition, differential to the Sun at 1/ 365.2422 DAYS per day.
Without seeing astronomy as calibrated to day and year cycles, one is robbed of much chance to appreciate the megalithic view of time and the time-factored buildings that came to be built in pursuit of quite advanced knowledge.
Looking from the relatively large cycles to the extremely small, daily angular changes of celestial bodies seen from Earth, reveals a further obscuration created, in this case, by the heliocentric view of the solar system, rather than the geocentric view which is obviously founded on days and years seen from the surface of the planet.
The largest cycle the megalithic could see using their techniques, reverses the direction from large-to-small to small-to-large since the precessional cycle (of the equinoctal nodes of the earth’s obliquity) is around 25,800 ± 100 years long. A star or constellation on the ecliptic appears to move east, like the lunar nodes, and using the angular measure of DAYS, it is possible to estimate that the equinoctal points move by a single DAY, in a given epoch, something like 71 years. The precessional cycle is therefore 71 years multiplied by the 365.2422 DAYS of the whole ecliptic.
The most important benefit of using DAY angles is that knowledge of a few celestial periods opens up a realm in which different scales of time can be derived from first principles. And added to that, the celestial periods appear related to one another so that so-called sacred numbers emerge such as the seven day week which divides into both the Saturn synod (54 weeks), Jupiter synod (57 weeks), the 364 day saturnian year (52 weeks) and others.
To understand the full scope of megalithic astronomy requires a geocentric calibration of the ecliptic as having 365¼ angular DAYS.
What really happens when Earth turns? The rotation of Earth describes periods that are measured in days. The solar year is 365.242 days long, the lunation period 29.53 days long, and so forth.
Extracted from Matrix of Creation, page 42.
Earth orbits the Sun and, from Earth, the Sun appears to move through the stars. But the stars are lost in the brightness of the daytime skies and this obscures the Sun’s progress from human view. However, through observation of the inexorable seasonal changes in the positions of the constellations, the Sun’s motion can be determined.
The sidereal day is defined by the rotation of Earth relative to the stars. But this is different from what we commonly call a day, the full title of which is a tropical day. Our day includes extra time for Earth to catch up with the Sun before another sunrise. Our clocks are synchronized to this tropical day of twenty-four hours (1,440 minutes).
The Sun circumnavigates the zodiac in 365 tropical days, within which 366 sidereal days have occurred. There is one full Earth rotation more than there are sunrises within a year. This hidden oneness within the year is recapitulated in the one-unit difference between the number of sidereal days and the number of tropical days in a practical year.
The small catch-up time in every day is about three minutes and fifty-six seconds long. This unit defines not only a sidereal day with 365 such units but also the practical year of 365 tropical days. The catchup unit is the difference between the duration of a sidereal day and that of a tropical day. It relates the Sun’s daily motion to the rotation of Earth and is a fundamental unit of Earth time (figure 3.6).
Figure 3.6. A polar view of Earth’s equator showing sunrises for two consecutive days. Compared with clock time, the stars rise three minutes and fifty-six seconds earlier each evening. (Drawn by Robin Heath)
THE MOON GATHERS THE TEN THOUSAND WATERS
The sidereal day (the duration of one rotation of Earth) is a very significant cosmic unit. The Jupiter synodic period of 398.88 tropical days is within 99.993% of four hundred sidereal days long. Therefore, twenty-five Jupiter synods (365 lunar orbital periods) equal 10,000 sidereal days since four hundred times twenty-five is 10,000.
A sidereal day differs from a tropical day due to the motion of the Sun during one tropical day. The three-minute-and-fifty-six-second time difference between these two days, the aforementioned catch-up unit, is quite useful when applied as the unit to measure the length of these days. A tropical day has 366 of these units while the sidereal day has 365 of the same units. The difference between the two is one unit.
Since 365 lunar orbits equal 10,000 sidereal days, it follows that a single lunar orbit has a duration of 10000/365 sidereal days. There are 365 units in a sidereal day, and therefore 10,000 units in a lunar orbit, so this new unit of time is 1/10000 of a lunar orbit. One ten-thousandth of a lunar orbit coincidentally is three minutes and fifty-six seconds in duration. The proportions in the Jupiter cycle combine with the lunar orbit, solar year, and Earth’s rotation to generate a parallel number system involving the numbers 25, 40, 365, 366, 400, and 10,000.
This daily catch-up unit I shall a chronon. Its existence means that the rotation of Earth is synchronized with both the lunar orbit and the Jupiter synodic period using a time unit of about three minutes and fifty-six seconds.
The sidereal day of 365 chronons is the equivalent of the 365-day practical year, the chronon itself is equivalent to the sidereal day, and so on. The creation of equivalents through exact scaling enables a larger structure to be modeled within itself on a smaller scale. This is a recipe for the integration of sympathetic vibratory rhythms between the greater and the lesser structures, a planetary law of subsumption.
The exemplar of the chronon was found at Le Menec: It’s egg-shaped western cromlech has a circumference of 10,000 inches and, if inches were chronons (1/365th of the earth’s rotation), then the egg’s circumference would be the number of chronons in the lunar orbit of 10,000. Dividing 10,000 by 366 (the chronons in the tropical day) gives a lunar orbit of 27.3224 – accurate to one part in 36704! The forming circle of Le Menec’s egg geometry provided a circumpolar observatory of circumference 365 x 24 inches, which is two feet per chronon versus the chronon per inch of the egg as lunar orbit.
The quantified form of the Le Menec cromlech was therefore chosen by the builders to be a unified lunar orbital egg, with a forming circle represented the rotation of the Earth at a scaling of 1:24 between orbital and rotational time.
The form of Le Mence’s cromlech unified the 10,000 chronon orbit of the Moon and 365 chronon circle of the Earth rotation because Thom’s Type 1 geometry naturally achieved the desired ratio. When the circle’s circumference (light blue) was 24 x 365 inches there were 10,000 inches on the egg’s. Underlying site plan by Thom, MRBB.
This design is further considered in Sacred Number and the Lords of Time, chapter 4: The Framework of Change on Earth, from the point of view of the cromlech’s purpose of providing a working model of the lunar orbit relative to the rotation of the circumpolar sky, leading to the placement of stones in rows according to the moon’s late or early rising to the East.
Capturing Sidereal Time
We can now complete our treatment of Carnac’s astronomical monuments by returning to Le Menec where the challenge was to measure time accurately in units less than a single day. This is done today at every astronomical observatory using a clock that keeps pace with the stars rather than the sun.
The 24 hours of a sidereal clock, roughly four minutes short of a normal day, are actually tracking the rotation of the Earth since Earth rotation is what makes all the stars move. Even the sun during the day moves through the sky because the Earth moves. Therefore, in all sidereal astronomy, the Earth is actually the prime mover. The geometry of a circumpolar observatory can reveal not only which particular circumpolar star was used to build the observatory but also the relatively short period of time in which the observatory was designed. Each bright circumpolar star is recognizable by its unique elongation on the horizon in azimuth and its correspondingly unique and representative circumpolar orbital radius in azimuth. …
The knowledge that was discovered due to the Le Menec observatory is awe inspiring when the perimeter of the egg shape is taken into account. It is close to 10,000 inches, the number of units of sidereal time the moon takes to orbit the Earth. The egg was enlarged in order to quantify the orbit of the moon as follows: every 82 days (three lunar orbits) the moon appears over the same part of the ecliptic. Dividing the ecliptic into sidereal days we arrive at 366 units of time per solar day.*
*These units are each the time required for an observer on the surface of the Earth to catch up with a sun that has moved within the last 24 hours, on the ecliptic, a time difference of just less than four minutes.
82 days times 366 divided by the three lunar orbits gives the moon’s sidereal orbit as 122 times 82 day-inches. Instead of dividing 82 by three as we might today to find the moon’s orbit, the pre-arithmetic of metrology enabled the solar day (of 366 units) to be divided into three lengths of 122. If a rope 122 inches long is then used 82 times (a whole number), to lay out a longer length, a length of 10,004 inches results. If 10,004 is divided by 366 units per day then the moon’s orbit emerges as 82/3 or 27⅓ days.
If a moon marker is placed upon the Le Menec perimeter and moved 122 inches per day, the perimeter becomes a simulator of the moon. … Knowing the moon’s position on the western cromlech’s model of ecliptic and knowing which parts of the ecliptic are currently rising from the circumpolar stars enabled the astronomers to measure the moon’s ecliptic latitude.
Hence the phenomena related to the retrograde motion of the lunar orbit’s nodal period could be studied and its 6800 day length.
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.
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.
Jupiter taken by the Wide Field Hubble Telescope by NASA, ESA, and A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center)
