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.
Category: Books
Books and other occasional writings
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.
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.
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.
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.
Introduction to my book Harmonic Origins of the World
Over the last seven thousand years, hunter-gathering humans have been transformed into the “modern” norms of citizens (city dwellers) through a series of metamorphoses during which the intellect developed ever-larger descriptions of the world. Past civilizations and even some tribal groups have left wonders in their wake, a result of uncanny skills – mental and physical – which, being hard to repeat today, cannot be considered primitive. Buildings such as Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza are felt anomalous, because of the mathematics implied by their construction. Our notational mathematics only arose much later and so, a different maths must have preceded ours.
We have also inherited texts from ancient times. Spoken language evolved before there was any writing with which to create texts. Writing developed in three main ways: (1) Pictographic writing evolved into hieroglyphs, like those of Egyptian texts, carved on stone or inked onto papyrus, (2) the Sumerians used cross-hatched lines on clay tablets, to make symbols representing the syllables within speech. Cuneiform allowed the many languages of the ancient Near East to be recorded, since all spoken language is made of syllables, (3) the Phoenicians developed the alphabet, which was perfected in Iron Age Greece through identifying more phonemes, including the vowels. The Greek language enabled individual writers to think new thoughts through writing down their ideas; a new habit that competed with information passed down through the oral tradition. Ironically though, writing down oral stories allowed their survival, as the oral tradition became more-or-less extinct. And surviving oral texts give otherwise missing insights into the intellectual life behind prehistoric monuments.
Continue reading “Introduction to my book Harmonic Origins of the World”Introduction to my book Sacred Number and the Lords of Time
Modern mathematical science deals in precise measurements accurate to many decimal places. Simple integers rarely appear. the trend has recently been toward reforming our units of measure to get away from specific objects of reference and base them on universal physical properties. in ancient times people tried much the same thing, but, not having an arithmetical system, they used whole numbers of the same length (the inch) to measure astronomical time (the day). then, using geometry, they created their first objective measure, a megalithic yard, which expressed the difference between the solar and lunar year.
Their idea of sticking to whole numbers remains part of our number theory and, as Leopold Kronecker famously said, “God created the natural numbers, all else is the work of man.” The natural numbers or integers carry with them a sense of unity and design as to how they interact with one another. As symbols these number relationships affect the physical world and this suggests they provided a fundamental creative fabric for the universe. the constructions made by megalithic people present such a view. The monuments could only reflect a “heavenly pattern” (“as above, so below”) because the fabric of abstract whole number relationships appears to have been employed in a later weaving of planetary time cycles, which were then seen as the work of some god or gods (the demiurge) who surrounded the earth with numerical time ratios.
Continue reading “Introduction to my book Sacred Number and the Lords of Time”Introduction to my first book, Matrix of Creation
My first book interprets the planetary system through pure number. The numbers involved in this interpretation are surprisingly simple and will be accessible to anyone holding a basic arithmetic education. From this approach we have gained substantial new insights into the realm of mythology, religious thought and what have become known as the Traditional Arts. We show that the solar system evolved from pure number and can no longer be thought of as an accident of nature.
It is also no coincidence that this work lies poised between the realm of mathematics and the world before numeracy. In the ancient world, numbers assumed god-like powers that were continually creating the world through stable numerical relationships. The core of this ancient science developed such a view naturally through simple astronomical observations, by counting events and regular movements in the night sky. This science was then articulated as mythological stories, calendars, sacred geometry, musical theory and monumental architecture, such as the Great Pyramid and Stonehenge.
These artefacts, found in all ancient cultures, have remained obscure to the modern world because modern science has become too sophisticated to see the simple celestial relationships which demonstrate that the planetary system, including the Sun and Moon, hold to a particular design.
Continue reading “Introduction to my first book, Matrix of Creation”Legominism and the Three Worlds
Above: Altaic shaman’s drum depicting the cosmos
The general ordering of the cosmos throughout history was phenomenological, following the very apparent division between the sky and the earth, with the living principle between called a “middle earth”. A summation of its symbolism was placed within Dante’s trilogy The Divine Comedy; of an inferno, purgatory and paradise which were the three worlds of the geocentric experience. But how does it come about that the phenomenological was translated into ancient literature, buildings or, as Gurdjieff names these, legominisms in the literal sense of being made of meaning-making and the naming of things – a power given to Adam but not the angels.
Continue reading “Legominism and the Three Worlds”