Category: Books

Books and other occasional writings

Agni, the Indian God of Fire

Those new to Ernest McClain and his The Myth of Invariance, should know this book was a seminal work for anyone in my generation, that opened up a Pythagorean vision; of how number operates in the domain of harmony. This world of harmony can be numerically defined in a quite extraordinary and specific way and we, as human beings, can receive it through our mind whilst also through the senses. This relates to the unusual fact that, whilst all notes can be doubled in frequency through the number two, with a perfect consonance, a new population of notes is then opened up, within an octave, of intervals that are also harmonious, through the use the two next prime numbers: three and five. Thus music, so effective upon the human heart, can build a world of meaning, sometimes referenced in myths as sacred numbers, written through understanding harmony as fundamentally generated through numeric transitions within music.

In 2008 I prepared a summary of Ernest McClain’s statements about Agni because, in the midst of the perfect symmetry of musical harmony lies something new, born to the world opposite its beginnings and endings. I originally made the pdf below for my friend Anthony Blake, part of our attempt to study the origin of creativity within the existing world. It appears that something important comes into being at the centre of this issue of octaval harmony, just as we ourselves come into existence in the middle of the universe, as conscious beings, conscious then of our incompletion.

It occured to me to include this in an email to Ernest and, all in, he said in reply “I can’t imagine anyone improving on your few pages” and “Put it out now on your own website stamped with my approval”. Please enjoy this transmission from the centre of the octave:

What Ernest McClain says about Agni in The Myth of Invariance:

Visit Ernest McClain website: Musical Adventures in Ancient Mythology. In the section of online documents, his books are available for your to study as links to pdf downloads.

The Richard Syrett Interviews on Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels

I recently recorded a podcast with Richard Syrett and will be talking with him again today (January 2nd) on Coast to Coast, starting 10pm Pacific time. In the UK, this is tomorrow (Sunday the 3rd) at 6am GMT. Both these interviews are in response to my new book Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels, which goes on release Monday 4th of January 2021.

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.

Jupiter’s gravitational and numerical influence

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.

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Before, during and after Sacred Geometry

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.

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from Book 5: Harmonic Origins of the World

Intelligent Star Systems

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

Gavrinis R8: Diagram of the Saros-Metonic Cycle

The Saros cycle is made up of 19 eclipse years of 364.62 days whilst the Metonic cycle is made up of 19 solar years of 365.2422 days. This unusually small number of years, NINETEEN, arises because of a close coupling of most of the major parameters of the Earth-Sun-Moon system which acts as a discrete system, a system also commensurate with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Venus. It is this type of coherent cyclicity which lies at the centre of what the megalithic were able to achieve through day-inch or similar counting of visible time periods and comparing of counts using geometric means. [see my books, especially Sacred Number and the Lords of Time, for a fuller discussion].

It would have been relatively easy for megaithic astronomy to notice that eclipses occur in slots separated by eclipse seasons of 173.3 days and also to see that the difference between lunar and solar years resolves over the 19 year of the Metonic so that lunar orbits, lunar months, the starry sky and the rotation of the earth provide a close repetition of alignments over 19 solar years which equal 235 lunar months and 254 lunar orbits. The Saros period is 223 lunar months long and is therefore one lunar year of 12 months short of the Metonic of 235 lunar months.

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