Released in January 2021, this book explores sacred building as the continuation of the megalithic: its astronomical knowledge, geometrical and metrological methodology and knowledge of the size of the Earth. The megalithic was our first numerate culture which discovered the main design design parameters for our existence, organised by higher intelligences called angels.
Just after Summer Solstice, Michael Quu and I recorded a conversation for his “Learn Something New” podcast and this is available, as below.
The conversation was balanced between ancient and modern, numbers and metaphysics in a way that seems necessary to make sacred geometry more relevant to the modern situation while revealing what the ancients discovered in the world of astronomical time.
Sacred Geometry is metrical, it is based upon the interactive properties of “natural” (that is, whole) numbers and cosmic constants.
We live in a civilization where everything is thought to be functionally due to forces and laws, these all calculated using numbers and algebra. For this reason, it is hard to see the influence of numbers acting directly in situations to reveal that, geometrical forms are only possible due to numbers. One such form is the equal perimeter circle and square: this figuring heavily in my later books, as an ancient model, and in postings on this website (opens in new tab).
Continue reading “The Modularity of Seven”The foot has twelve inches just as the British shilling had twelve pence. A good case can be made for twelve as a base like 10, since there are 12 months within the year and many ancient monuments can be seen to have employed duodecimal alongside decimal number, to good effect.
Until 1971 the currency in the United Kingdom of Britain was duodecimal, called pounds, shillings and pence.
This old system of currency, known as pounds, shillings and pence or lsd, dated back to Roman times when a pound of silver was divided into 240 pence, or denarius, which is where the ‘d’ in ‘lsd’ comes from. (lsd: librum, solidus, denarius). see historic-uk.com
There were 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound, that is 240 pennies. The change to a decimal (100) pence in a pound caused a lot of inflation during the changeover due to price opportunism, then part lasting recession. In British heads the skill of giving and taking change in a duodecimal arithmetic was soon lost. In the late 70’s my mother, when visiting the US, was amusingly referencing “old money”, alongside the exchange rate between a decimal pound and the decimal dollar, just as Greeks had problems with the Euro.
Napoleon sought to “rationalize” all the ancient weights and measures of France culminating in the decimal units within modern science, firstly CGS (Centimeter-Gram-Seconds) and then MKS (Meters-Kilogram-Seconds).
The Meter exemplifies the situation: it contains 100 centimeters and 1000 millimeters whereas the root foot for the worldwide and only ancient metrology is that called English which has 12 inches (each a “thumb” in French) and each inch halves, quarters, eighths and sixteenths of an inch, but also 10ths etc., that is a duodecimal system and decimal notation as with 12 = 10 +2.
The metrology of the ancient world had no need for decimalization since it had been formed to employ all the integer numbers, using fractions of a foot – fractions being a combined multiplication (numerator) and division (denominator) operation. That is, there was no base-10 decimal notation when metrology was developed and one can suggest that decimalization was created in the wake of treasuries, mints and central banks.
However, decimal notation emerged much earlier with the alphabetic form of writing languages down. Cuneiform had used compound sounds (called syllables such as “no”) but the new Phoenician alphabets notated the consonants and vowels of specific languages, now called phonemes of sound (for exampple, the phonemes “n” and “o”). This reduces the number of symbols needed to notate speech, and in turn these symbols could then have a decimal function and words could also be numbers, in a code called Gematria:
Gematria is the practice of assigning a numerical value to a name, word or phrase by reading it as a number, or sometimes by using an alphanumerical cipher. Wikipedia on Gematria.
As the name implies, Alpha equals 1, Beta =2, D = 4, J = 10, etc.. Words could then encode a number, as in the Bible where Adam equals the three letters A.D.M whose numerical values in Hebrew/ Aramaic (1.4.40): when added up they “mean” 45. The later letters were values in tens and hundreds so that decimalization probably goes back to the 1st millennium BCE.
Figure 1 Numeric equivalence of Hebrew Alphabet
We are therefore needing to go earlier than the decimal base-10 system or indeed the use of any base at all, to see into the world of the megalithic astronomer and different relationships to numbers.
This previous world which gave birth to a type of math that is not arithmetical but instead used the factors within integers and rational fractions, initially through measured geometrical proportionality but then through sets of measures all rational fractions of the common foot.
The earliest number encountered by early astronomers would have been (when they counted) the twelve lunar months within a year. The properties of the number twelve are generally taken to come from its factors (such as 4 x 3), it Platonic solid (the duodecahedron) – see next section. There were no twelve hours in half a day. We will the take a deeper approach, of visualizing the set of numbers within twelve, as {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12}
Twelve does not contain is the prime number 5 nor any higher prime factor. However, in counting to 12, there are two factors containing 5, namely 5 and 10. And there are, of course, the prime numbers and their ennumerated multiples, such as, for 7, {14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49, 56, …}. This means the number field is made up of empty slots into which the number one greater than the preceding number must then be a prime number. And any prime number can then be doubled, tripled, etc., to become enumerated itself. That is, which we call prime numbers are those that happen to have no preceding number of which it is a multiple of any (previously arisen) number.
Twelve does not contain is the prime number 5 nor any higher prime factor. However, in counting to 12, there are two factors containing 5, namely 5 and 10. And there are, of course, the prime numbers and their ennumerated multiples, such as, for 7, {14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49, 56, …}. This means the number field is made up of empty slots into which the number one greater than the preceding number must then be a prime number. And any prime number can then be doubled, tripled, etc., to become enumerated itself. That is, which we call prime numbers are those that happen to have no preceding number of which it is a multiple of any (previously arisen) number.
Figure 2 The inner structure of Twelve
Figure of (top) the first twelve numbers, four of which divide by three, making the even numbers (orange) alternate with the odd numbers in serpentine fashion. Numbers dividing by 5 then alternate down then up, every two threes. (bottom) the color keys used. (One could show primes with italics)
In a following post, the consequences of this inner structure reveal Twelve’s cellular structure within the number field.
The Norton Disney Archaeology Group found an example of a “Gallo Roman Dodecahedron”. One of archaeology’s great enigmas,
there are now about 33 known examples in what was Roman occupied Britain.
The opposed flat pentagons of a regular duodecagon gives us its height, in this case measured to be 70 mm. Dividing 0.070 meters by 0.3048 gives 0.22965 feet and, times 4, gives a possible type of foot as 0.91864 or 11/12 feet**.
** Where possible, one should seek the rational fraction of the foot, here 11/12, over the decimal measurement which assumed base-10 arithmetic and loses the integer factors at work within the system of ancient foot-based metrology.
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.
Continue reading “Design of the Taj Mahal: its Façade”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.
Continue reading “The Moon is Key to our Survival”
