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.
Figure 1 The five Trilithons of Stonehenge 3, highlighted in yellow within the Sarsen ring to express the five evening and morning star couplets which occur in eight practical years of 365 days. Plan from Megalithic Remains in Britain and Brittany, Oxford U.P. Central portion is fig.3, upside down to match the horseshoe of trilithons..
Inside the Sarsen ring of Stonehenge, there once stood a group of five trilithons, each made up of two uprights and a lintel stone, repeating the unique style of building found in the Sarsen ring. However the Trilithons were higher than the sarsens, punctuating an elliptical cup shape towards the midsummer sunrise, the axis of Stonehenge and its solstice-marking “heel” stone.
The Horns of Venus
The symbolism therefore involved (a) the Sun, (b) the number five of the trilithons while (c) expressed something involving close pairs. The dominant astronomical significance of the number 5 comes through the brightest planetary phenomenon of all, in which the planet Venus approaches the Earth, as Venus approaches from the east, preceding the Sun in the evening sky. It is often therefore called the Evening Star. Venus then shoots past the sun and reappears in the morning sky, again growing in brightness as the Morning Star.
Figure 2 The Horns of Venus when the evening and morning “stars” are visualised over an extended present moment of the Venus synodic period of 1.6 (⅝) practical years of 365 days. Fig. 2.2 of my Matrix of Creation, Inner Traditions, 2004 . (Drawn by Robin Heath.)
The original astronomers of the megalithic only saw the planetary system from the Earth and not (conceptually) from the Sun, as we do today. That is, they were naturally geocentric whilst the present worldview is heliocentric.
The astronomers could study cosmic time periods without arithmetic, through counting days, using a constant unit length to mark each single day adding up to a fixed length of days. Through such counting they would see 365 whole days between the solstices and (more reliably) between the equinoxes (when the Sun moves most rapidly on the horizon). It was also quite obvious that the horns of Venus were bracketing the Sun, just as the elliptical cup of the trilithons they erected at Stonehenge bracketed the solstitial sun, a sun which travels every day from east to west.
Five-ness in the Zodiac
If the earth was their viewpoint then the Zodiac of the sun’s path over the year could, like the Sarsen Circle, be seen as a circle of 365 days, and when the time between evening or morning stars was counted, the result was 584 days between the horn-like and brilliant manifestations of Venus. 584 days is 219 days more than 365 days. The sun has therefore moved 3/5th of a year forward and hence it became noticeable, as stated above, that 1/5th of the practical year is 73 days, the practical year 5 units of 73 days long whilst the Venus synod is 8 units of 73 days long. The Venus synod therefore has exactly 1.6 (8/5) practical years between its phenomena.
Figure 3 The Horns of evening (E) and morning (M) stars shown upon the circle of the Zodiac, each successive pair 3/5ths advanced within the solar year. [from Joachim Schultz, Movement and Rhythms of the Stars, Floris, 1986, fig 88]
The form of Venus upon the Zodiac therefore describes a 5-fold pentacle star. This would later make the number 5 and all of its properties, sacred by association to the planet Venus who became the leading goddess of the Ancient Near East. The Golden Proportion or Mean (1.618034…), often seen in Classical and Neoclassical architecture, has the number 5 as its root. Also, many living bodies share forms derived from the number 5, or of the Fibonacci approximations to the Golden Mean.
The Fibonacci series (of 1, 1, 2, 3 ,5 ,8 ,13 ,21, …) has successive numbers that sum to give the next number, and each new ratio, between successive numbers in the series, yields an ever-better approximation to the Golden Mean: (2, 1.5, 1.6, 1.6, 1.617, …).
I talked to the Dr Pat Show 9th Feb and the programmme can be linked to using this link. The live show will be up and the podcast will be up 24 hours later on the same link.
The producer emailed: Great show! Here is a link to your video from earlier today, please feel free to share it ?
My camera was working but I could see no-one due to mystery side monitor outage. It works this morning.
Whitley invited me to be a guest on Dreamland Radio to discuss Sacred Geometry and The Harmonic Origins of the World. The interview was pre-recorded and lasts an hour in the public version.
After a couple of weeks, there was a Zoom meeting with Dreamland subscribers:
Harmonic Origins of the World inserted the astronomical observations of my previous books into an ancient harmonic matrix, alluded to through the harmonic numbers found in many religious stories, and also through the cryptic works of Plato. Around 355 BC, Plato’s dialogues probably preserved what Pythagoras had learnt from ancient mystery centers of his day, circa. 600 BC.
According to the late Ernest G. McClain*, Plato’s harmonic matrices had been widely practiced by initiates of the Ancient Near East so that, to the general population, they were entertaining and uplifting stories set within eternity while, to the initiated, the stories were a textbook in harmonic tuning. The reason harmonic tuning theory should have infiltrated cosmological or theological ideas was the fact that, the planets surrounding Earth express the most fundamental musical ratios, the tones and semitones found within octave scales.
* American musicologist and writer, in the 1970s, of The Pythagorean Plato and The Myth of Invariance.
Ancient prose narratives and poetic allusions were often conserving ancient knowledge of this planetary harmony; significant because these ratios connect human existence to the world of Eternity. In this sense the myths of gods, heros and mortals had been a natural reflection of harmonic worlds in heaven, into the life of the people.
In the Greece before the invention of phonetic writing, oral or spoken stories such as those attributed to Homer and Hesiod were performed in public venues giving rise to the amphitheaters and stepped agoras of Greek towns. Special performers or rhapsodes animated epic stories of all sorts and some have survived through their being written down.
At the same time, alongside this journey towards genuine literacy, new types of sacred buildings and spaces emerged, these also carrying the sacred numbers and measures of the megalithic to Classical Greece, Rome, Byzantium and elsewhere, including India and China.
Work towards a fuller harmonic matrix for the planets
In my first book, called Matrix of Creation, I had not yet assimilated McClain’s books, but had identified the musical intervals between the lunar year and the geocentric periodicities of the outer planets. To understand what was behind the multiple numerical relationships within the geocentric world of time, I started drawing out networks of those periods and, as I looked at all the relationships (or interval ratios) between them, I could see common denominators and multiples linking the celestial time periods through small intermediary and whole numbers: numbers which became sacred for later civilizations. For example, the 9/8 relationship between the Jupiter synod and the lunar year could be more easily grasped in a diagram revealing a larger structural network, visualized as a “matrix diagram” (see figure 1).
Figure 1 Matrix Diagram of Jupiter and the Moon. figure 9.5 of Matrix of Creation, p117.
One can see the common unit of 1.5 lunar months, at the base of the diagram, and a symmetrical period at the apex lasting 108 lunar months or 9 lunar years (referencing the Maya supplemental glyphs). In due course, I re-discovered the use of the Lambda diagram of Plato (figure 8.7), and even stumbled upon the higher register of five tones (figure 2) belonging to the Mexican flying serpent, Quetzalcoatl (as figure 8.1), made up of [Mercury, the eclipse year, the Tzolkin, Mars and Venus], Venus also being called Quetzalcoatl.
Figure 2 My near discovery of Quetzalcoatl, in fig. 8.1 of Matrix of Creation
These periodicities are of adjacent musical fifths (ratio 3/2), which would eventually be shown as connected to the corresponding register of the outer planets, using McClain’s harmonic technology in my 5th book Harmonic Origins of the World (see figure 3).
Probably called the flying serpent by dynastic Egypt, Quetzalcoatl’s set of musical fifths was part of the Mexican mysteries of the Olmec and Maya civilizations (1500 BC to 800 AD). This serpent flies 125/128 above the inner planets – for example, the eclipse season is 125/128 above the lunar year: 354.367 days × 125/128 = 346 days, requiring I integrate the two serpents within McClain’s harmonic matrices in Harmonic Origins of the World (as figure 9.3).
Uranus is above Saturn
The eclipse year is above the lunar year
the Tzolkin of 260 days is above the 9 lunar months of Adam
Figure 3 The two harmonic serpents of “Heaven” and “Earth”
By my 6th book, Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels, I had realized that the numerical design within which our “living planet” sits is a secondary creation – created after the solar system, yet it was discovered before the heliocentric creation of the solar system, exactly because the megalithic observed the planets from the Earth. Instead of proposing the existence of a progenitor civilization with high knowledge** I instead proposed, as more likely, that the megalithic was the source of the ancient mysteries. Such mysteries then only seem mysterious because; a kind of geocentric science before our own heliocentric one seems anachronistic.
**such as Atlantis as per Plato’s Timaeus: an island destroyed by vulcanism, Atlantis and similar solutions have simply “kicked the can down the road” into an as-yet-poorly-charted prehistory before 5000 BC, for which less evidence exists because there never was any. In contrast, the sky astronomy and earth measures of the megalithic are to be found referenced in later monuments and ancient textual references. That is, megalithic monuments recorded an understanding of the cosmos then found in the ancient mysteries. A geocentric world view was a naturally result of the megalithic, achieved using the numbers they found through geocentric observations, counting lengths of time, using horizon events and the mathematical properties of simple geometries.
Geo-centrism was the current world view until superseded by the Copernican heliocentric view. This new solar system was soon found by 1680 to be held together by natural gravitational forces between large planetary masses, forces discovered by Sir Isaac Newton. The subsequent primacy of heliocentrism, which started 500 years ago, caused humanity to lose contact with the geocentric model of the world: though figure 4 has the planets in the correct order for the the two serpents, of inner and outer planets, this is also (largely) the heliocentric order, if one but swaps the sun and the moon-earth system.
All references to an older and original form of astronomy, based upon numerical time and forged by the megalithic, was thus dislocated and obscured by our heliocentric physical science and astronomy of the modern day – which still knows nothing of the geocentric order that surrounds us.
Figure 4 The Geocentric Model by 1660
The geocentric model entered Greek astronomy and philosophy at an early point; it can be found in pre-Socratic philosophy … In the 4th century BC, two influential Greek philosophers, Plato and his student Aristotle, wrote works based on the geocentric model. According to Plato, the Earth was a sphere, stationary at the center of the universe.
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.
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.
The Trigon Period of Jupiter and Saturn
Being a dark, planetary body, the episodic pull of Jupiter follows a different pattern to each of the inner, terrestrial planets; Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, since each has a different orbital period which, combined with Jupiter’s orbit, brings each under Jupiter’s influence or absence. The combined episodic pull of Jupiter and Saturn, is visually seen in their conjuction every 20 years, which occurs just over a third of the Zodiac onwards, thus giving a cosmic significance to the equilateral triangle as a sacred geometry.
Figure 1 The series of Trigon conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn, as will be the case on 21st December 2020
Only Earth’s large moon stops the axial tilt of the Earth from varying significantly, then causing large changes in climate which would have restricted the development of the relatively stable habitats and biomes we enjoy.
361 days: Jupiter and the Zodiac
The combination of Jupiter’s orbital period (of 4332 days) and Earth’s (of 365.2422 days) generates an interesting set of numerical facts since Jupiter passes through each of the twelve signs of the Zodiac in 361 days. This number is 19 times 19 days so that 12 times 361 days equals 4332 days. But these numbers are a product of the solar year of 365.2422 days, since the day length on Earth is 1 year divided by the 365.2422 days due to its rotation. If the day length were less or more then Jupiter’s complete orbit would still be as long but the numbers from Earth would not.
This is a major aspect of what the megalithic astronomy had to learn, that the relative time lengths of the many cosmic periods, counted in days, could be numerically interrelated when quantified. The situation of the earth orbit and its rotation would present Jupiter as a bright moving star which completed its journey through the stars in 12 times 361 days. Jupiter and the Zodiac of 12 constellations would inevitably become fused as seen in the story of Zeus, the Greek god name for Jupiter whose symbol is the twelve-fold circle. The pre-Classical Greeks were matriarchal, following the lunar month of twelve whole lunar months within the solar year and, the solar year only arose as the patriarchal northern tribes occupied Greece after the Bronze Age collapse. The name Zeus is therefore not matriarchal since the Greeks had no “Z”. Zeus arrived in ancient Greece with the tribes displaced from the North escaping the worsening climate at higher latitudes. And, whilst 12-foldness is associated with the Sun being in one of the 12 zodiacal constellations, Jupiter defines these through passing through each sign (on average) in 361 days.
399 days: Jupiter’s synodic period
Twelve-ness is a massively widespread tradition (see John Michell – Twelve-fold Tribes for instance) and the brightest celestial body next to the Sun is the Moon which expresses twelve whole lunar months a year (plus 7/19 of a lunar month). The common lunar year was therefore twelve months long, taking 354.367 days to complete, this countable between thirteen full moons. It is no accident that the 12-ness of the lunar year is connected with Jupiter’s 12-ness of its 361 day years, since the Jupiter synod has a strong grip on our moon: the synod is 9/8 lunar years long – a musical whole tone. And Saturn also has a similar grip, its synod of 378 days being 16/15 lunar years long.
When the Earth passes by Jupiter, the latter goes retrograde or backwards relative to the stars, meaning it appears to travel east night-by-night, rather than the norm for all planets (and the sun and moon) of slowly travelling west in our skies, as they orbit. During this retrograde period, the planet describes a loop in the sky relative to the stellar background, before returning to where it should be in the stars. Between the loops of Jupiter’s synodic period the 398.88 days could be counted in days. This can only mean that over millennia, the Moon became synchronised by the regular proximity of Jupiter to our moon.
Our months today have divided the solar year into twelve months of 30 or 31 days, to resemble Jupiter’s 12-fold zodiac and 12-month lunar year, the Roman emperors vying to lengthen a month and name it after themselves (examples being October after Octavius, September after Septimius and August after Augustus). And since a zodiacal sign is traversed after 361 days by its definer, it is inevitable that there are not 12 solar years in a Jupiter orbit but just less (11.86 years). However, the fact that 4332 days is not 12 times 365.2422 days accesses, through its deficit, more subtle possibilities hidden in a numerical world of differences.
Differences between periodicities, especially involving the moon that rotates the Earth, define those periods through the fact that they endlessly repeat so that differences accumulate over longer periods and when these differences are divided into the periods, a new set of numbers are generated. One could call orbital systems differential calculators and modern math would describe them as potentially discrete systems, which form due to gravitational recurrence. This idea that the planetary and lunar systems generate numbers is somewhat hidden by our modern description of such systems as subject to gravitational dynamics. The numbers allowed the ancient astronomers to discover a static numerical view of planetary astronomy through counting days. In contrast, modern astronomy calculates the location of celestial bodies from first principles; especially when trying to visit planetary bodies in spacecraft.
