The Taj Mahal is one of the most recognizable buildings on earth. It was built by a Moghul king as a memorial for his dead queen and for love itself. The Mughals became famous for their architecture and the Persian notion of the sacred garden though their roots were in Central Asia just north of Persia.
I had been working on Angkor Wat, for my soon to be released book: Sacred Geometry in Ancient Goddess Cultures, where the dominant form of its three inner boundary walls (surrounding the inner sanctum) were in the rectangular ratio of outer walls of six to five. A little later I came across a BBC program about the Mughals and construction of the Taj by a late Moghul ruler, indicating how this style almost certainly arose due the Central Asian influences and amongst these the Samanids and the Kwajaghan (meaning “Masters of Wisdom”). I had also been working on the facades of two major Gothic Cathedrals (see post), and when the dimensions of the façade of the Taj Mahal was established, it too had dimensions six to five. An online pdf document decoding the Taj Mahal, established the likely unit of measure as the Gaz of 8/3 feet (a step of 2.5 feet of 16/15 English feet; the Persepolitan root foot *(see below: John Neal. 2017. 81-82 ). Here, the façade is 84 by 70 gaz.
With the advent of many orbital missions, the Moon is threatened with orbital and other changes due to space travel.
The modern theory of relativity has joined the worlds of space and time, now called spacetime. As beings we live in space while moving through time, and both these are assumed to be neutral dimensions having mere extension. However, spacetime is distorted by the massive gravitational objects found in solar systems, these exerting an attractive force on all objects including ourselves. As humans, we are therefore locked onto the surface of the earth by gravity, viewing a solar system of eight orbiting planets seen in the sky from the surface of the third planet from the sun. The earth has an unusually large moon which has fallen into resonance with the planets, a resonance then belonging to time.
The Moon was formed 4 to 5 billion years ago and this affected the Earth’s geology, stabilized its tilt (giving stability to the seasons) and providing tidal reaches on coasts. But apart from such direct physical changes to the earth, the moon has now developed resonances with the solar system, especially its outer giant planets, and this has given time on earth a highly specific resonant environment, based upon the lunar month and year of 12 lunar months. This resonant network appears to be numerical when counting days, months and years, in between significant events in the sky.
The structure of time is numerical because of these resonances between the moon, the sun and the planets. This resonance came to be known by previous civilizations and was thought meaningful in explaining how the world was created. Time was deemed spiritual because its organisation allowed human beings to understand the purpose of life and of the earth through the structure of time. In particular, the moon was a key to unlocking the time world as a link to a higher or spiritual world, a literal sky heaven organised according to numbers.
This extract from The Harmonic Origins of the World (p58-62) shows how what are taken to be arbitrary numbers, in the narrative of the Patriarchs, expressed knowledge of planetary resonances.
above: Diagram of the Bible code of “holy mountains”: Products of the powers of five upwards and of the powers of three across, each mountain within a limiting number if note D is {60, 120, 45, 180, 720} .
Female archetype Eve, “mother of all living,” becomes Abram’s wife Sarai. Childless, Abram was encouraged (by Sarai) to have first son Ishmael by concubine Hagar, but the Lord God (the mountain god whose number sums to 345) renames Sarai as Sarah and Abram as Abraham. At a miraculous 90 years of age she gives birth to Isaac (“he laughs”), then reportedly dies at 180 years old. It is harmonically relevant that (a) the giving of heh = 5 to both Sarah and Abraham elevates them from their former selves onto the second row, “stepping up” like the god Ea in Sumeria, and that (b) Adam’s number 45 has now been doubled to 90 and can form an octaval womb in which Isaac can be born, his life to then end at the doubling of Sarah’s 90 years to 180 years.
It is helpful to visually complete the movement of Venus over her synodic period (of 1.6 years) seen by an observer on the Earth.
figure 3.13 (left) of Sacred Goddess in Ancient Goddess Cultures version 3 (c) 2024 Richard Heath
In the heliocentric world view all planets orbit the sun, yet we view them from the Earth and so, until the 16th century astronomy had a different world view where the planets either orbited the sun (in the inner solar system) which like the outer planets orbited the earth, this view called geocentric. The discovery of gravity confirmed the heliocentric view but the geocentric view is still that seen from the Earth.
The geocentric was then assumed to be wholly superseded, but there are many aspects of it that appear to have given our ancestors their various religious views and, I believe, the megalithic monuments express most clearly a form of astronomy based upon numbers rather than on laws, numbers embedded in the structure of Time seen from the Earth, and hence showing the geocentric view had more to it than the medieval view discarded by modern science.
Venus was once considered one part of the triple goddess and the picture above shows her complete circuit both in the heavens and in front of and behind the sun. The shape of this forms two horns, firstly in the West at evening after sunset. Then she rushes in front of the sun to reemerge in the East to form a symmetrical other horn after which she travels behind the sun to eventually re-emerge in the West in a circuit lasting 1.6 years of 365 days, more precisely in 583.92 days – her synodic period.
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.
If one takes the figure of 940 feet (that is, 286.512 meters) as the side length factorizing 940 gives 20 x 47 and 47 (a prime number) times 5 gives 235 which is the number of lunar months in 19 solar years: the Metonic period. image by Google Earth
This is the larger of three bounding periods for the sun, moon, and earth. The lower boundary is exactly 19 eclipse years, called the Saros eclipse period of 18.03 solar years. . Within that range of 18-19 years lies the moon’s nodal period of 18.618 years, this being the time taken for the two lunar nodes, of the lunar orbit, to travel once backwards around the ecliptic. It is only at these nodal points that eclipses of sun and moon can occur, when both bodies are sitting on the nodes.
The first article on Ushtogai showed how, by daily counting all the tumuli in a special way, the 6800 days of the nodal period would keep a tally in days, to quantify where the nodes were on the ecliptic as well as predicting the lunar maximum and minimum standstills.
It now seems that, if the absolute size of the monument’s perimeter was able to count the 19-year Metonic, not by counting days but rather, counting the 235 lunar months of the Metonic period. The lunar month would then be 16 feet long. And, within that counting, one could also have counted the 223 lunar months between eclipses having the same appearance. The diameter of a circle drawn within the square would then have a diameter of 235 (lunar months) divided by 4 = 58.75 lunar months which, times the 16 feet per month, is the 940 feet of the square’s side length.
Figure 1. The size of Ushtogai Square, side length 940 feet, is 235 x 4 feet, making its perimeter able to count 235 lunar months of 16 feet.
In Cappadocia, present-day Turkey, this type of geometrical usage can be seen within a rock-cut church called Ayvali Kelise, only then in miniature to form a circular apse, just over 100 times smaller! The church was built in the early Christian period (see figure 2).
The Ushtagai Square has the basic form for the equal perimeter geometry. If so, that would form a tradition at least 10,000 years old. As a counting framework for the 18-19 solar year recurrences of aspects between the the Sun, Moon, Earth, eclipses and nodes the Square appears to be both a tour-de-force in a form of astronomy now largely forgotten.
Figure 3 Showing the circle equal in perimeter to the Ushtagai Square, the size of the Earth (in-circle of diameter 11) and Moon (four circles of diameter 3.)
As an earthwork where tumuli punctuate geometrical lines, it is a highly portable symbol of great time and a highly specific astronomical construction. It was an observatory and also a snapshot within celestial time, built just after the Ice Age had ended.
