Inside Time

There are two things we can count in this world, one is the number of objects on the Earth and the other is the number of time periods between events in the Sky.

photo: The Moon, with Jupiter and Mars, on 11th January 2018. (see end for interpretation)

Objects are counted in an extensive way, from one to an almost infinite number, the count extending with each addition (or multiplication) of a population.

Time periods appear similar but in fact they emanate from measurable recurrences, such as phases of the moon, and these derive from the behaviour of celestial objects as they divide into each other.

For instance, the unit called the day is created by the rotation of the earth relative to the Sun and the lunar month by its orbit around the Earth relative to the Sun, and so on.

Thus, time originally came from the sky. Furthermore, it largely came from the zodiacal band of stars surrounding the Earth within which the planets, Sun and Moon progress eastwards. The Earth’s own orbital motion is superimposed upon those of the other planets and the inner planets (Mercury and Venus) also appear to orbit a Sun that appears to orbit the Earth once a year.

The zodiacal band is naturally divided up into a number of constellations or stars and about three thousand years ago it became popular to follow the Sun throughout the year into 12 constellations whilst the Moon tends to create 27 or 28 stars (nakshatras) where the Moon might sit on a given evening. When the moon is illuminated by the sun, the primordial month has 29 1/2 days and twelve such in less than a year hence perhaps first defining the 12-ness of our months within the year.

All celestial cycles recur and this has formed our notion of eternity, that the sky world is made up of cyclic time rather than extensive time – every year being the same cycle seen again but then numbered so that they can be referred to as to when something happened in the past. The intensive reality above our heads is the polar opposite of extensive counting of time we see in History where numbered years and days within named months provide an unbroken continuum of time and famous people are said to have made history through their actions at a given date.

Whilst on Earth we might measure feet or meters between objects, above we effectively measure angles and angular rates to arrive at a synthesis between intensive and extensive time we call a calendar, an inevitable necessity for an organised civilization. And the moon and then the sun gave rise to the early calendars that naturally led to the arising of history as a human phenomenon. The oldest myths were connected to the sky, and were less than historical because the language of the sky had not been formalized in a way we would recognize.

Myths speak of eternal patterns that repeat rather than of existential events, on earth. The sun, moon and planets were seen as gods whose generative functions were hailed as emerging from their interactions with each other.

It has been widely assumed that “primitive” thought was premature, fantasizing planetary gods out of thin air with an as yet unripened grasp on logic and reason. But a simpler explanation, for the equation of planets with super beings, was their finding of special numbers linking the planetary cycles when these were counted and compared. This quantification of celestial time evolved from knowing the days in a year and a month, into a running calendar – of various sorts. The Maya Long Count is an example where numbers could interact through week lengths of 13 and 20 days to give a sacred calendar of 260 days whilst in historical times the 7 day week emerged, tied to Saturnian time. In this way, a calendar could add weeks adapted to societal events such as having a market every Tuesday.

This is a big subject where we have all the sky data but do not spend time understanding it. In the past, the sky was our constant companion between few man-made spaces. The sky sits within the horizon and so was like a primordial cave for humans and, the sky became an early teacher through its phenomena.

Jupiter and the Lunar Year

The lunar month is like the common denominator of what happens inside time. The sun illuminates the phases of the moon during its month so that, the month combines the movements of the moon and the sun to form a synthetic (combined) period of 29 1/2 days and twelve of these months fit inside the solar year as the lunar year of 12 1/3rd months (354.367 days). Jupiter has its own relationship to the sun in that, when the sun is opposite the moon, Jupiter describes a loop amongst the stars, and strangely there are 13 1/2 lunar months between loops (Jupiter’s synodic period of 398.88 days). 13 1/2 months divided by 12 months is the ratio 9/8, a musical whole tone.

But in the image above, of Jupiter and the Moon, the moon would be full if Jupiter was going to loop (as earth “overtakes” Jupiter on the “inside lane” – the planets inspiring ancient racetracks). Mars is another “outer planet” which loops in the same way and so Mars is also not looping.

But without understanding these matters, the picture cannot be understood. The phase of moon shows where the sun is. The planets have been in conjunction. If Venus had been present, then it has a 4/3 ratio to Mars but has to remain close to the sun to appear first as an evening star, then a morning star, in a cycle 8/5 years (584 days) long compared to Mars synod (between loops) of 780 days. Less accurate than Jupiter to the Lunar year, by a day. This is what I mean by being inside time, where all the celestial bodies have relationships to one another, when these are seen by us from earth.

This is how I started, with my first book Matrix of Creation. The musical ratios and their entrance into ancient stories was explored in Harmonic Origins of the Earth. How ancient humans counted time was discussed in Lords of Time and a unified treatment made in Language of the Angels. Used alongside archaeology, more can be understood about the prehistoric and early civilizations since astronomy was the first real subject for the human race.

Sacred Geometry in Ancient Goddess Cultures (March 26th, 2024)

My new book can be pre-ordered from the publisher and other retailers.

In March next year my new book will be released (see publisher website). The book has been typeset and is out for printing, having been favorably reviewed by a peer group. (The original date was February, but printing schedules have had to be adjusted.)

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.

Some new material was added during production, including chapters on the design of Angkor Wat (chapter 9) and St Peter’s basilica in Rome (chapter 10), and some early articles on these can be accessed on this site, most easily through the search function.

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.

Continue reading “Sacred Geometry in Ancient Goddess Cultures (March 26th, 2024)”

The Stonehenge Crop Circle of 2002

One sees most clearly how a single concrete measure such as 58 feet can take the meaning of the design into the numbers required to create it. However, metrology of feet and types of feet can hide the elegance of a design.

photo by Steve Alexander of TemporaryTemples.co.uk

I received Michael Glickman’s Crop Circles: The Bones of God at the weekend and each chapter is a nicely written and paced introduction to a given years worth of crop circles generally in the noughties. The above is the second in proximity to Stonehenge reminding keen croppers of an earlier one. This cicle preceeded the late-season (August) circle at Crooked Soley that I have an analysis of soon to be posted, drawing on Allan Brown’s small book on it.

Glickman’s chapter 10 : Stonehenge Ribbons and Crooked Soley provided a tentative analysis of the Ribbons as having the ends of the ribbons measuring 58 feet. The design was observed as making use of a single half circle building block for most of the emergent six arms emerging from the center. Michael suggested that there were 13 equal units of 58 feet across the structure.

Figure 10.4 Showing thirteen divisions of one of the three diameters of ribbons. photo: Steve Alexander.

From this I was able to observe that clearly the divisions were not equal in size and the white ones were clearly smaller as was the central circle’s diameter. Scanning the picture and placing it in my Visio program, so that a rectangle of 58mm was equal to the diameter of the right hand ribbon end, it was possible to determine that the ratio between these lengths was 5 to 4, or 5/4, from which the shorter white length must be 46.4 feet and that the diameter can be seen as 9 units across, that is 104.4 feet. The unit is 104.4 feet divided by 9 which equals 11.6 feet, which is 10 feet of 1.16 feet, the root reciprocal of the Russian foot of 7/6 feet, that is 7/6 feet divided by 175/176 (= 1.16). Going down the “Russian” root led to the diagram below.

My analysis of Michael Glickman’s figure reveals a span of 580 Russian Feet.

There are parallax errors so I have had to show the ideal designed shortened across the left-hand of the design, but the design has many numerical aspects where each arm is 27 units so that two arms are 54 which, plus the center, gives 58 times 10 equaling 580 Russian feet. But then I noted that 58 feet, divided by 5, gave the unit as 11.6 English feet while 58 feet divides into the 58 unit diameter across the crop circle.

Now we see a set of multiples of 29 are there as numbers {29 58 87 116 145 174 203 232 261 … }. The reciprocal Russian at 1.16 feet and the unit of 11.6 feet are decimal echoes of the number 29. The formula of the Proto Megalithic yard is 87/32 feet and 261/8 inches.

To be continued

One sees most clearly how a single concrete measure such as 58 feet can take the meaning of the design into the numbers required to create it.

Pauli’s Cosmic Dream

above: Wolfgang Pauli, ca. 1924. Wikipedia CC BY 4.0

Renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung had an intellectual friend in Wolfgang Pauli, a leading theoretical scientist in the development of quantum mechanics who had offered (with others) a third perspective to the deterministic physics of Newton and relativistic physics of Einstein. For example, Pauli’s Exclusion Principle explained how sub atomic particles of the same type could be connected to each other (entangled) on the level of the very small.

Dream analysis with Carl Jung opened Pauli up to the inner worlds of alchemy, archetypes, and dreams. Pauli recounted his dreams to Jung who would analyze their symbolism. One dream is of special interest here since it concerned a cosmic clock with two discs with a common center: one vertical and the other horizontal. The vertical disc was blue with a silver lining upon which were 32 divisions and the hand of a clock pointing to a division. The horizontal disc was divided into four differently colored quadrants, surrounded by a golden ring.

above: A visualization of Pauli’s report of his dream of the Cosmic Clock. The black bird would traditionally be a member of the Corvus or Crow family. In the original one sees 32 rings punctuating the outer ring. below: Jane Roberts colored it, noting it resembled Ezekiel’s vision. 

This reminded me of the 32 lunar months which take 945 days to complete so that each lunar month could be known in ancient times as 945/32 or 29.53125 days, only 57 seconds too long! The clock had three “pulses”, the first moving the hand on the scale of 32, the second pulse occurring after the hand had completed one revolution, after which, something golden and presumably the Sun, moving something on the golden ring, by 1/32 of its circumference. Pauli said the golden ring was black before the clock’s hand started moving, and it seems that Pauli experienced this goldenness as a principle of geometrical harmony. If the golden disc is the sun and, since the lunar month is the completed illumination of the moon by the sun, here the sun is lit up by the moon to become golden rather than black.

Such an apparatus would complete itself in 32 times 32 (1024) pulses, these taking 945 times 32 or 30,240 days. This long cycle is three times 10,080 which number is the diameter of the sublunary sphere (14) then 10,080 in the factorial Equal Perimeter model, a model which presents the size of the earth and moon whose diameters are in the ratio 11 to 3, the mean earth diameter of 7920 miles and moon diameter of 2160 miles. This model has been found present within many ancient monuments up to the modern era, hence expressing past cosmological knowledge. Though the vertical “face” of the clock is blue, the colors of the four horizontal quadrants were red, green, orange, and blue, each quadrant having an outward facing “monk” holding a pendulum that, by Pauli’s day, represented the counting of time as seconds, rather than as days.

The whole apparatus is held aloft by a black bird, and this can explain the 30,240 days as eighty synods of Saturn (378 days), the planet that moves (between its synodic loops each year) a similar distance on the Zodiac as the Moon moves in a single day, which is one reason why Saturn was called a god of Time. In the Greek Myths, the crow family were not black but white until the separation of the “world parents”, namely the ecliptic and equatorial planes, this separation of the parents being the cause of the long Precession of the Equinoxes in 25,920 years. More significantly, it is this separation that divides the solar year into four quadrants of the clock. The quadrants are separated by the four gates of the year: the spring and autumn equinoxes where the parents cross one another; and the summer and winter solstices where, outside of the Tropics, the sun is higher or lower in the sky, creating the four seasons.

Equating the 32 divisions in the dream with 32 lunar months has allowed what is a dream to be quantified and connected to the ancient model, in a new and factual way, where the golden ring is the Sun on the ecliptic and the bird is Saturn. Distance and Time become twin dimensions since the size of the earth and moon, in miles, are then related to the lunar month within this harmonious clock. Another boundary has also been crossed, between our conscious daytime experience, as factual, and our subconscious nighttime experience of dreaming, as imaginative. A model of time on Earth was communicated through Pauli’s dream life. Jung called it the Collective Unconscious and it is either (or both) a door to the higher intelligence responsible for the creation of time on earth or (and) to the ancient works of astronomy that had understood the world of time to be a numerical creation. For this reason, Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels got its name.

Jung later discovered a similar dream emanating from the Christian mystic Guillaume (whose works inspired John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress). Guillaume’s “vision” was presented as a dialogue with an angel. The details are different but significantly, a small blue ball (said to represent ecclesiastical time) was floating in an golden sea of Eternity and manifesting the Trinity within the Zodiac of twelve signs (3 times 4), as 12 fishermen who together manifest the Trinity. Guillaume did not understand so the angel then talked about the three principal colors as being green, red, and gold, but abruptly stops, terminating further questioning. Jung had already found, in the number three within the Trinity a culturally dominant form of masculine thinking which came out in the dream as the color not mentioned, namely blue – the color of the “small” sphere in Guillaume’s and of the fourth blue quadrant in Pauli’s version. Blue is associated with the Goddess, portrayed in the cloak of Mary, the mother of Jesus.

The missing goddess figure is also found in Vishnu’s awakening to his creation of a new world through Prajapati, the first man. Prajapati emerges out of a lotus, a flower growing from Vishnu’s navel, a flower that had Brahma (the creator god) in its many petals. So long as Vishnu sleeps between creations, the goddess attended to him but when He awakens, she has disappeared (because she is considered the supreme reality of the creation). It was Pauli’s feminine side who had, thought Jung, like Eve revealed the cosmic clock to him.

In my forthcoming book: Sacred Geometry in Ancient Goddess Cultures (chapter 11), the harmonic model can be seen emerging from this cosmic clock of lunar month and year and the planetary synods resonating with these musically. The biblical Adam then emerges within a lunar octave of doubling from 45 (through 90, 180, 360, 720, 1440). The coordination of such stories of “first men” within scripture might not have happened through the diffusion of traditions but instead, it may subsist in something like Jung’s collective unconscious, that men dream through their feminine side (and women through their masculine side), as seen in these dreams. This makes sacred geometry in ancient matriarchal cultures significant today when masculine thinking has become so dominant. It is also interesting that the early Indian myth of Vishnu had the god sleeping at night and, as humans do , re-inventing the world during the day.

Chartres 3: Design of West Façade

The design of the twin towers of Chartres point to an extraordinary understanding of its designers, quite unlike pre or modern understandings of the outer planets and their harmonic ratios. We have already seen a propensity for using the ordinary English foot to indicate days-as-feet within the structure. The Façade hosts what is perhaps the most famous “rose window”, though it was only in later centuries that it would be termed thus, as the cult of the Virgin Mary became more widespread. But this cathedral was strongly dedicated to the Virgin, when built.

The two towers are separated by the same distance as the rose window is above the footings, namely 100 feet, while the façade is 150 feet wide. This has led me to rationalize the façade as being six units across of 25 feet, while the façade appears to end (and the towers begin) 200 feet above the footings.

Interpretation of the western Facade as composed as towers 4 apart, width 6 apart and height 8 units, all of 25 feet. The Rose Window is held within two 3,4,5 triangles within a wall of 2 units square.

That is the façade was therefore designed as a three by four rectangle, the rose window centrally located within a square of side length 50 feet.

In simplest units of 50 feet, 8 by 6 becomes the proportion 4 by 3, with diagonals that are 10 units (that is, 250 feet) where the rose is at the crossings of those diagonals, held between two 3,4,5 triangles.

This first Pythagorean triangle holds all of the ratios of regular musical harmony, having 4/3 (fourth), 5/4 (major third), 6/5 (minor third) between its sides, which multiplied together equal 60 and summed equal 12.

NEXT: to come

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 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.