Category: Astronomy

Important time cycles and coincidences

The Strange Design of Eclipses

We all know about solar eclipses but they are rarely seen, since the shadow of the moon (at one of its two orbital nodes) creates a cone of darkness which only covers a small part of the earth’s surface which travels from west to east, taking hours. For the megalithic to have pinned their knowledge of eclipses to solar eclipses, they would have instead studied the more commonly seen eclipse (again at a node), the lunar eclipse which occurs when the earth stands between the sun and the moon and the large shadow of the earth envelopes a large portion of the moon’s surface, as the moon passes through our planet’s shadow.

This phenomenon of eclipses is the result of many co-incidences:

Firstly, if the orbit of the moon ran along the ecliptic: there would be a solar eclipse and a lunar eclipse in each of its orbits, which are 27 and 1/3 days long.

Secondly, if the moon’s orbit was longer or shorter, the angular size of the sun would not be very similar. The moon’s orbit is not circular but elliptical so that, at different points in the lunar orbit the moon is larger, at other points smaller in angular size than the sun. This is most visible with solar eclipses where some are full or total eclipses, and others eclipse less than the whole solar disc, called annular eclipses.

Thirdly, the ecliptic shape of the moon’s orbit is deformed by gravitational forces such as the bulge of the earth, the sun and planets so that its major axis rotates. When the moon is furthest away (at apogee), its disc exceeds that of the sun. And when the moon is nearest to the earth (at perigee), its disc is smaller than that of the sun. This type of progression is called the precession of the lunar orbit where the major axis travels in the same direction as the sun and moon. This contrasts with the precession of the lunar nodes which also rotate (see later).

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The Fourfold Nature of Sun and Moon

A previous post explained the anatomy of the primary celestial cycles of the Sun and Moon. The “resting” part of these cycles are the winter solstice (opposite the summer solstice which was today) and the dark moon (which is coming in a week, after the waning half moon day before yesterday). In the resting phase, the cosmological origin is traditionally found, containing all that is to manifest but that is not yet expressed. In this respect, the Big Bang is the equivalent for modern thinking, as the origin of the entire visible and invisible universe seen via modern instrumentation and discoveries.

Life is somehow connected with our large Moon, without which there could have been no living planet. The form of life appears influenced by the moon and its conjunctions with different planets. And without (a) the tides, (b) the tectonic plates supporting continents, and (c) the tilt and spin of the earth; the earth would be static rather than actively supporting the necessary rhythms of Life. A primordial collision created these features of our earth and moon, since the cyclic archetypes provide an essential framework for living beings, to which their bodies are synchronized through circadian and behavioral rhythms.

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Time and the Midpoints of the Sun and Moon

Our two luminaries, the sun and moon, share a similar form-in-time, as the seasonal year and the monthly phases of the moon. The form they share is of two extremes of opposite character, and two midpoints between these.

The Solar Extremes: At the solar extremes, the sun rises high in midsummer day and rises to a much lower point in midwinter day, extreme points at which the sun moves very slowly day-by-day these hence called solstices from the Latin, “sun stands still”.

The Lunar Extremes: These are the full moon, meaning its face is completely illuminated by the sun, and the dark moon, when the moon stands by and in front of the sun and so its face is not illuminated but during a rare solar eclipse, the dark disk of the moon can be seen slowly crossing the sun’s face since the moon moves 12.368 times faster than the sun that defines each day.

The Solar Midpoints: These occur when the sun rises exactly east and sets directly west, everywhere on the earth. These moments are called Equinox because the length of the day then equals (in Latin: “equi”) and the length of the night (in Latin, “nox”). In the year these two equinoxes are called Spring, when light and heat from the sun are growing (waxing), and Autumn, when light and heat are diminishing (waning).

The Lunar Midpoints: Like the sun, these are exactly between its extremes, when exactly half the moon’s face is illuminated. In the morning, as the full moon approaches the sun, its gibbous (less-than-circular) face is waning until it reaches the point of half illumination by the sun. In contrast, the dark moon reappears as a crescent moon, pulling away from the sun setting in the evening.

The common factor between the midpoints of both sun and moon is that this is when time begins, in the sense that, at two equinoxes and at the two half-moons, (a) the sun’s daily sunrise on the horizon is moving fastest and (b) The sun’s illumination of the moon is changing most quickly. In both cases, this allowed the megalithic to accurately start and finish their counting of these time cycles of the year and the month. In both cases, midpoints could most accurately define the day on which an event occurred.

The following post takes this further.

The Integration of the Megalithic Yard

Above is a proposed geometric relation between Thom’s megalithic yard (2.72 feet), the royal cubit (1.72 feet) and the remen (1.2 feet). Alexander Thom’s estimate for it based on decades of work was refined from 2.72 to 2.722 feet at Avebury. If the origins of it are astronomical, then its value emerges from the Metonic period of 19 years which is 235 lunar months, making its value 19/7 feet or more accurately 2.715428571 (19008/7000) feet and this makes it 2.7 feet x 176/175 within ancient metrology. Another astronomical derivation is found at Le Manio as the difference between three lunar and three solar years, when counted in day-inches as 32 + 5/8th inches which is 2.71875 (87/32) feet. The megalithic yard of Thom’s first appraisal, of 2.72, probably arose from its megalithic rod (MR) of 6.8 feet since, the Nodal Period of the moon’s nodes take 6800 days which in feet would be 1000 MR. For a fuller explanation see my the appendix of my Language of the Angels book and my discussions of the Cumbrian stone circle, called Seascale by Thom and the only known example of a Type D flattened circle.

One can see that the Megalithic Yard is a tale of many variations, some of which might not consider how or why the megalithic might have come to adopt such a yard. I have come to trust simple integers and ratios to guide me to a possible megalithic pathway. To demonstrate, the above megalithic yard at Le Manio, of 32.625 inches is 29/32 of the English yard, and 32 lunar months (at Le Manio Quadrilateral) is 29 AMY. Such simple rationics is explored here.

My 2012 Post below discusses John Neal’s view of the megalithic yard
drawing on his ancient metrology.

John Neal makes a masterful job of considering the megalithic yard in the context of historical metrology, a metrology that he has managed to forge into a single conceptual scheme in which measures known to history from different lands all inter-relate.

Neal’s book, All Done With Mirrors, is one of the most fundamental and significant contributions to the late megalithic and ancient world understanding of numbers but to read it is no easy matter since he takes no prisoners and fully expects readers to resolve through calculation what he does not explicitly state. This makes his approach different to mine in which I try to present as easily a possible aids to the visualisation and registration of a pattern of facts. However, neither approach can really substitute for what one has to do for oneself in order to understand and John gave his “Secret Academy” idea the catch line “We can’t give it away” because of the often deafening silence with which his work is met.

The aim here is to give some workings based on Neal’s book, to give others a taste of what lies beneath what is written and also to further my own interests in the Megalithic Yard. Thom’s lack of metrological background led to both an original approach but also a disconnect to what is known about historical metrology. One particular mystery is how measures appear to have propagated unchanged across millennia.

Neal says on page 47:

Thom made a comparison of his Megalithic Yard with only one other known unit of measurement. This was the Spanish vara, the pre-metric measurement of Iberia, its value 2.7425 feet. Related measurements to the vara survive all over the Americas wherever the Spanish settled, from Peru to Texas. Although the vara is exactly one of the lengths of the m.y. the fact that it is divided into three feet makes this relationship uncertain. These feet are thought to be Roman but this belief is also unlikely, and they would appear to be related to the earlier Etruscan-Mycenaean units. This is a good example of an intermediate measure being thought to be related because of a similarity in length, and illustrates the importance of considering the sub-divisions when sourcing a measure.

How units of measure are divided and aggregated follows strict rules. If these rules did not exist then the system of metrology would have no inner structure as a system. We don’t expect measures to follow rules because today we simply measure things, and do everything else as a calculation following on from that. Metrology is an “ology” because it is a system of calculation that was used for building ancient structures when only limited calculation was possible.

Thus Neal can talk about the ancestry of the megalithic yard because the forensic tools are available through the system of metrology, in which a yard has three feet but that places the foot at close to the limits for a foot, at just over 0.9 feet, for the vara which would then be a yard of near Assyrian feet (9/10 feet). The Roman foot is far greater at 24/25 or 0.96 feet. A Mycenean foot would be 15/16 of the Roman which is in the region of 0.91 feet but the compounding to two errors, that the vara is a yard and that the Roman is its foot is the sort of confusion that only an exact metrology can ever recover from.

Neal continues:

Why he [Thom] did not analyze the Megalithic Yard in terms of what was already very well known of ancient metrology, must remain a mystery. And why, after the Megalithic Yard becoming the most scrutinized measure in the history of measure, nobody else has succeeded in doing so, is an even greater mystery. The very simple fact of the matter is, that if as Thom claimed from the beginning, the Megalithic Yard has 40 sub-divisions, then it is not a “yard” but a double remen [1.25], or 2 and 1/2 feet, and the “megalithic inch” is a digit! If the Megalithic Yard is taken to be 2.7272 feet, which is within Thom’s parameters for the value, the megalithic inch is .06818 feet, which is well within the range of the digits of all known ancient measurements. 16 of these digits are therefore one megalithic foot of 1.0909 English feet. This is a well-known measurement in ancient metrology, sometimes referred to as the Ptolemaic foot, and mistakenly, as the Drusian foot. His “fathom” of 2 m.y. is the historically well-known intermediate measurement, of a pace of 5 feet. Then, his “megalithic rod” [6.8 feet] is 6.25 Ptolemaic feet, which is also a measure known in antiquity as being 100th part of a furlong of 625ft or 1/8th part of the 5,000ft mile. The megalithic measures are not, therefore, peculiar to what is accepted as the megalithic arena, but are perfectly integrated with measuring systems found throughout the ancient world.

One should realize here that Neal is using the word “ancient” in an unquantified way because he believes metrology and other sciences of the numerical arts were inherited by the megalithic – a position that I question since there is no evidence for it. The megalithic could have generated a science of metrology in its earliest phase which then evolved into the greater system of many types of feet (Neal’s modules) since the older megalithic monuments have not been well studied – the British monuments being from a later phase. The early burial mounds, if found to have employed this fuller system, would prove Neal’s thesis. he continues,

Furthermore, the methods whereby Thom discovered [his megalithic measures], namely by careful surveys and comparisons, are the time honoured methods pioneered by Petrie and in no way are they a mistaken interpretation of the evidence, or invention.

The pattern of metrology comes in the ratios between types of unit. If a different foot is used these patterns remain constant and when metrology is used to analyse monuments then it this grammar of its usage that has remained invariant. This may seem to be geeky nonsense until metrology is resolved as a system within which the apparent babel of metrological signals become a direct communication from the past. Neal does not make this any easier by delivering a masterly analysis that prerequires most of the structural understandings to be in place.

Doth this profit a man? And is it simply a specialist field? For sure, by now, like Neal I am something of a specialist. It is true that no older language than metrology, other than language itself, has come down from such antiquity. If there is a truth behind claims (like mine) that the number sciences were sacred and contain mysteries concerning the spiritual world, metrology could be a philosopher’s stone. But when and how?

It is also true that this system of prehistoric thought is now a very powerful forensic tool for recovering their intended meaning of ancient sites and the types of measure found might reveal lines of metrological transmission in the ancient world. Anyone interested needs to apply it in practice.

This excerpt was first published on matrixofcreation.co.uk in 2012

Postscript

The only problem in adopting Neal’s full structure for ancient metrology is that it bears upon the type of metrological knowledge of the size and shape of the Earth, that lies behind the form of the Great Pyramid and other ancient buildings. But I have since seen, from the point of view of early megalithic astronomy, a much freer use of the ordinal numbers {1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9… etc} was applied to counts of astronomical time, using simple geometries of circles and right triangles within which a simpler metrology arose, as explained in Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels. Another problem with Neal’s metrological grid of “Earth ratios” is that the modular range becomes so filled with versions of each foot that a given measurement can give one a false identification upon which a false interpretation or dead end can defeat the process.

This means that, earlier than the late megalithic, one is studying primitive ratios between astronomical measurements. This is clear at Crucuno Dolmen to Rectangle, where the month was coded as 27 feet but the day was the root Iberian foot of 32/35 feet. From this can be deduced an accurate approximation of the lunar month as 27 feet divided by 32 and multiplied by 35 giving 29.53 125 (27 x 35/ 32) Iberian feet. When one multiplies this month by 32 (the denominator) the result is 945 so that 945 days equals 32 lunar months. It is therefore true that the original three lunar year count (leading to the megalithic yard) is 36 months, two lunar years 24 months and two Jupiter synods are 27 lunar months. This forms a limiting octave of {18 24 27 36} which became Plato’s World Soul in his Timaeus cosmogony 6:8::9:12 only tripled [do1 fa sol do2} (see my Harmonic Origins of the World). From this the megalithic can be seen to naturally lead finding 27 lunar months between three loops of Jupiter, so that one Jupiter synod is 13.5 (27/2) months. Hence my reconstruction of the Pythagorean Music of the Spheres, as a mystery garnered from the megalithic.

An Angelic Geometrical Design

The above diagram contains information with can generally only be grasped by using a geometrical diagram. Its focus is the properties of a right triangle that is 4 times larger than its third and shortest side. The left hand view illustrates what we call Pythagoras’ theorum, namely that

“The squares of the shorter sides add up to the square of the longest side.”

Here this is shown as 144 + 9 = 153 because, if the third side is three lunar months long, then the 4-long base is 12 lunar months, hence the square of 12 is 144″. The longest side is then 153, the diagonal of the four squares rectangle, and the square root of 153 is 12.369 lunar months, the solar year when measured in lunar months.

Before Pythagoras, the Egyptians had a long tradition of geometrical mathematics which fed into their art in which designs can be seen to obey a grid of squares. Their view of Pythagoras’ theorum can therefore be put within a greater world of geometrical transforms using grids.

In the above, one can see this view (called Canevas by Schwaller de Lubicz, The Temple of Man) in which the larger square is seen to fit when angled into a 5-by-5 grid (see right). The extra width and height of the grid enables the smallest square to be seen in this common framework of 25 squares.

The largest square of area 153 is distinguished as an integer, rather than its square root. Thus this is not a Pythagorean triangle with all sides integral, but rather the two smaller sides being integer allows them to be placed within a grid. Somewhat rare though is the arising of an integer on the square, so that Jesus disciples in the gospel of John could comment, in being asked to throw their net on the right side, they then caught 153 fish!

If the diagram was in its least numbers, the 153 would be 9 times smaller as 17 and so the 12.369 would be √9 × √17 instead. And in sacred number science, the interaction of numbers can be seen to be determined by the prime numbers which then make larger numbers such as 153 = 9 × 17. This 17 is known to be a factor of the node cycle of 18.618 solar years, which is 6800 days long and 6800 = 400 × 17.

When two lengths of astronomical time share a larger prime such as 17, it indicates numerical compatibility between two periods, and so the solar year of √153 lunar months (in which the sun moves once around the Ecliptic) has some affinity with the 6800-day period during which its orbital nodes also move once through the Zodiac.

If the larger, yellow square has 6800 days within it, the square root is 20 × √17, whilst the square of the solar year had 153, the square root being 3 × √17.

The new imagined diagram would be 20/3 relative to the above one. Without explaining how this could be, the point is that this cannot be known by the human mind without using sacred geometry which can notate how a higher intelligence might have organised the time environment of Earth according to definite criteria. Further examples can be found in my Book, Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels. The book is not about sacred geometry as a compendium of traditional knowledge but rather shows how it was that sacred geometry came into the human mind (and architecture) through the initial study of time periods as counted lengths, revealing angelic coincidences.

There is much else to know about the lunation triangle linking the lunar and solar years, discovered about 3 decades ago by my brother Robin Heath.

Jupiter’s gravitational and numerical influence

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.