Category: Sacred Number and the Lords of Time

Astronomy 1: Knowing North and the Circumpolar Sky

about how the cardinal directions of north, south, east and west were determined, from Sacred Number and the Lords of Time, chapter 4, pages 84-86.

Away from the tropics there is always a circle of the sky whose circumpolar stars never set and that can be used for observational astronomy. As latitude increases the pole gets higher in the north and the disk of the circumpolar region, set at the angular height of the pole, ascends so as to dominate the northern sky at night.

Northern circumpolar stars appearing to revolve around the north celestial pole. Note that Polaris, the bright star near the center, remains almost stationary in the sky. The north pole star is constantly above the horizon throughout the year, viewed from the Northern Hemisphere. (The graphic shows how the apparent positions of the stars move over a 24-hour period, but in practice, they are invisible in daylight, in which sunlight outshines them.)
[courtesy Wikipedia on “circumpolar star”, animation by user:Mjchael CC-ASA2.5]

Therefore, the angular height of the pole at any latitude is the same angle we use to define that latitude, and this equals the half angle between the outer circumpolar stars and the pole itself. For example, Carnac has a latitude of 47.5 degrees north so that the pole will be raised by 47.5 degrees above a flat horizon, while the circumpolar region will then be 95 degrees in angular extent.

It is perhaps no accident that the pole is called a pole since to visualize the polar axis one can imagine a physical pole with a star on top, like a toy angel’s wand. The circumpolar region is “suspended” around the pole like a plate “held up” by the pole. Therefore, a physical pole, set into the ground, can be used to view the north pole from a suitable distance south (i.e., with the pole’s top as a foresight for the observer’s backsight). Such an observing pole would probably have been set at the center of a circle drawn on the ground, representing the circumpolar region around the north pole. This arrangement, a gnomon,* existed throughout history but usually presented as part of a sun dial.

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The Discovery of a Soli-Lunar Calendar Device at Le Manio

by Robin Heath

In 2009 I returned to Plouharnel, again for the Solstice Festival, and undertook my own research both before and after the four day event. Howard Crowhurst had undertaken a great deal of theodolite and tape work at a well known site called Le Manio. This collection of surviving monuments forms an exceptionally rich group of astronomical alignments which together carry enormous ritual significance in that these sites hold information about human conception, the gestation period and ritual use of geometry and metrology. Howard understands the site to the point where his three hour workshop covered much of this material, and the implications of it were clearly understood by non-specialists. Those readers who have the chance to attend the Festival, and who speak either English or French, should regard this experience as a megalithic ‘must’. Howard is an exceptionally good communicator of what are often seen as difficult areas of megalithic research, and he is astonishingly good at passing these ideas on to his audience with a great deal of clarity, enthusiasm and humour.
It was during Howard’s seminar/workshop that he invited me to set up his theodolite within the Le Manio Quadrilateral, a curious site near the 6.5 metre high ‘Giant of Le Manio’. This done, I noticed something I had been searching for for twenty years. Read on…!

Le Site Mégalithique du Manio à Carnac

by Howard Crowhurst

Perched on a hill in the forest north of the Carnac alignments, a megalithic site has escaped the fences that have littered the landscapes of the region for several years. These are the menhir and the quadrilateral of Manio. From the outset, the large menhir impresses with its dimensions. Nearly 5m50 high, it is the highest standing stone in the town.

More discreet, the quadrilateral caps the top. 90 upright and contiguous stones, varying in height between 10 cm and 1m60, make up an enclosure approximately 36 meters long and 8 meters wide on average, because the long sides converge. The stones at the ends draw a curve. Four stones to the northeast form the remains of a circle. Two menhirs, much larger than all the other stones in the quadrilateral, open a kind of door in the south file. This particular form questions us. What could she be used for? Was it a meeting place, maybe an enclosure for sheep? In fact, what we see today is probably only the outer skeleton of a larger monument, a mound of stone and earth that contained a chamber inside. Other remains complicate the whole, unless they help us solve our puzzle. Hidden in the brambles and brush, we can discover a stone on the ground of rounded shape. These curves are reminiscent of the belly of a pregnant woman. She is nicknamed the “Lady” of the Manio.

Day-inch counting at the Manio Quadrilateral

It is 10 years since my brother and I surveyed this remarkable monument which demonstrates what megalithic astronomy was capable of around 4000 BC, near Carnac. The Quadrilateral is the earliest clear demonstration of day-inch counting of the solar year, and lunar year of 12 lunar months, both over three years. The lunar count was 1063.125 day-inches long and the solar 1095.75 day-inches, leaving a difference of 32.625 day-inches. This length was probably the origin of a number of later megalithic yards, which had different uses.

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pdf: Synchronicity of Day and Year with the Lunar Orbit

This document was prepared by Richard Heath as a letter for Nature magazine and submitted on 14th April 1994 but remained unpublished. For readers of the Matrix of Creation (2nd ed, Inner Traditions Press, 2004) it marks the discovery of a unit of time proposed and named the Chronon, as being 1/10000th of the Moon’s orbit and also the difference between the sidereal and tropical day of the Earth. The paper also documents a discovery made, with Robin Heath, later to be documented in his books: that one can divide up the solar year by its excess over the eclipse year to reveal an 18.618:19.618 ratio between these years, and many other interesting numerical facts not mentioned in this place. The puzzle here is a connection between the rotation of the Earth, the solar year and the precession of the Moon’s orbit which (a) may be explainable by science (b) appears to have puzzled Megalithic astronomers and (c) should puzzle us today.

pdf: Counting lunar eclipses using the Phaistos Disk

This paper* concerns itself with a unique fired-clay disk, found by Luigi Pernier in 1908 within the Minoan “palace” of Phaistos (aka Faistos), on the Greek island of Crete. Called the Phaistos Disk, its purpose or meaning has been interpreted many times, largely seen as either (a) a double-sided text in the repeated form of a spiral and outer circle written using an unknown pictographic language stamped in the clay or (b) as an astronomical device, record or handy reference. We provide a calendric interpretation based on the simplest lunar calendars known to apply in Minoan times, finding the Disk to be (a) an elegant solution to predicting repeated eclipses within the Saros period and (b) an observation that the Metonic is just one lunar year longer, and true to the context of the Minoan culture of that period.

*First Published on 26 May 2017
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