Category: Sacred Geometry in Ancient Goddess Cultures

Chartres 2: the harmony in its towers

In the previous post, the difference in height of the two towers was seen to have an exoteric and an esoteric meaning. Exoterically, the taller tower is sometimes called the sun tower, probably because the globe at its top (below its cross) is about 365 feet-as-days (hence representing the sun and its year). From this fact, the lower tower was considered lunar , since the lunar year is “not as long” and so less high. However, one must go to the top of the cross on the lower tower to achieve the height of 354.367 feet-as-days (hence representing the moon and its year).

This article presents a deeper meaning, that the difference in the full heights of the two towers represents the musical intervals of the synods of Saturn and Jupiter, relative to the lunar year: cunningly encoded within the full height of the solar tower as the Saturn synod of 378 feet-as-days, which is 16/15 of the lunar year. To have made the taller tower higher, to achieve the Jupiter synod, was impractical so that, instead, Jupiter was symbolized by the lunar year of 12 lunar months while Saturn was 12 “months” of 28 days, the 336-foot high globe of the moon tower, as shown below.

The two towers have a deeper meaning regarding the two gas planets Jupiter and Saturn, representing their synods to the lunar year. These musical intervals of 9/8 (tone = Jupiter) and 16/15 (semitone = Saturn), are different by 132/128, the ratio of the cross relative to the lunar tower.

To achieve this, the lunar tower had to be built shorter by 135/128 so that the top of its cross could ride 354.367 feet-as-days (of the lunar year), from the base, and the cross could then represent the ratio, 135/128 in height, between the two intervals the synods make with the lunar year.

The globe is at 336 feet-as-days, which is 12 times 28 days, a month belonging to the Saturnian year of the Goddess culture recorded in Greek Myth, whilst we know the Cathedral was a major shrine to the Goddess and Child found in the Crypt beneath this rebuilt upper form of the Cathedral. In Hesiod’s cosmogony, from the Archaic period, Saturn was the previous ruler over the sky, a culture which kept patriarchal cultural norms at bay*. Zeus-Jupiter was suppressed by the Goddess culture’s view of time and its year of 364 days, of exactly 52 (7-day) weeks.

That the archaic month of 28 days, times 135/128, is accurately the lunar month of 29.53 days, suggests a combined influence of the outer planets on the Moon’s synodic period with the Sun of 29.53 days.

NEXT: design of the west façade

*see my forthcoming Sacred Geometry in Ancient Goddess Cultures.

Interpreting Chartres
  1. the cosmic coding of its towers in height
  2. the harmony in its towers
  3. design of the west façade

Yet to come: the design of the Rose Window.

Chartres 1: the cosmic coding of its towers in height

The lunar crescent atop the “moon” tower’s cross.

Chartres, in north-west France, is a very special version of the Gothic transcept cathedral design. Having burnt down more than once, due to wooden ceilings, its reconstruction over many building seasons and different masonic teams, as funds permitted, would have needed strong organizing ideas to inform the work (as per Master Masons of Chartres by John James).

As shown below, Chartres main towers are unequal in height and the “western” facade itself does not align to east-west, as normal Christian churches do. The left tower is also higher than the right tower and, it has been said, the left represents the Sun and the right the Moon. The height of the left tower, to its globe below its cross, is indeed the solar year of 365 days in feet. But the height of the shorter right tower, to its own globe, is not the 354.367 days of the lunar year (of 12 months); rather, it is the top of its cross, sporting a crescent moon suggesting it is a moon tower, that is 354 and a third feet high.

The cosmic time coding of the two towers as solar year->lunar year between the globe’s height (on left in red) and the top of the cross (on right in blue). But the left tower also indicates the Saturn synod of 378 days to the top of its cross. The for-square rectangle, geometrically relating the solar (diagonal) and lunar years, is shown.

That is, the height of the lunar year in feet, from the same starting point as the solar tower’s height as the solar year, the lunar year would be to the top of the lunar cross, where the crescent is attached, and not to its globe. There is then a reasonable connection between the solar and lunar years and the two towers. However, it is also interesting to see the number of days, as feet, of the left tower to its own cross. It is exactly 378 feet, the synodic period of Saturn in days. Readers of my books and this site will remember that the ratio between the lunar year and Saturn synod is exactly 16/15: a musical semitone within the ancient tuning system called Just intonation.

This arrangement suggests Chartres was built to be a time-factored monument, which may be why the cathedral was aligned to midsummer sunrise (which was a megalithic norm) rather than being aligned east-west. Built on top of a solitary promontory, horizon events would have been clear across the flat fertile plains.

NEXT: the harmony in its towers

Interpreting Chartres
  1. the cosmic coding of its towers in height
  2. the harmony in its towers
  3. design of the west façade

Yet to come: the design of the Rose Window.

Saturn’s “Measuring” of the Lunar Month

Video

How the Moon was seen to be like Saturn in expressing the Sacred Number 28.

illustrated SCRIPT

To measure the length of a lunar orbit, one needs to see any prominent stars that the moon is passing by in her orbit.

This sort of procedure is implied in Indian astronomy, and other traditions, where the sky was first divided into 28 or 27 equal parts, called lunar mansions (nakshatras).

The lunar mansion on a given day was identified by the name of the lunar mansion seen behind it.  In B.C. 2350, the system started with the spring equinox which stood on the seven sisters or Krittikas.

This was in the Zodiac constellation Taurus the Bull, but the mansion, one of 28, was called Ashwini – the Horse’s Head. In this way Indians still speak of “the moon in Ashwini”.

The division into 28 probably came from the observation of Saturn’s loops which resembled the twenty seven and a third days for a lunar orbit, though the first is a frequency of synods while the latter is a frequency of earth rotations, both relative to the ecliptic / Signs / Mansions.