Having seen, in the last post, that three eclipse years fitted into the three-year count at Le Manio, another eclipse fact has come to light, recorded within the nearby site of Crucuno, between its dolmen and rectangle. The coding of time at Crucuno was an evolution of a new metrology based upon the English foot in which, the right triangle of longest integer side lengths was replaced by fractions of a foot using the same two numbers as the sides would have had. This allowed the measurement of a time period to be simultaneously seen in both days and months. That this was possible can be seen at Le Manio, where it could be noticed that 32 lunar months equaled exactly 945 day-inches.
Continue reading “The Octon of 4 Eclipse Years”Category: Sacred Geometries and Texts
3000 BC onwards: Numerical and geometrical designs within buildings and texts often considered sacred.
Introduction to my book Harmonic Origins of the World
Over the last seven thousand years, hunter-gathering humans have been transformed into the “modern” norms of citizens (city dwellers) through a series of metamorphoses during which the intellect developed ever-larger descriptions of the world. Past civilizations and even some tribal groups have left wonders in their wake, a result of uncanny skills – mental and physical – which, being hard to repeat today, cannot be considered primitive. Buildings such as Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza are felt anomalous, because of the mathematics implied by their construction. Our notational mathematics only arose much later and so, a different maths must have preceded ours.
We have also inherited texts from ancient times. Spoken language evolved before there was any writing with which to create texts. Writing developed in three main ways: (1) Pictographic writing evolved into hieroglyphs, like those of Egyptian texts, carved on stone or inked onto papyrus, (2) the Sumerians used cross-hatched lines on clay tablets, to make symbols representing the syllables within speech. Cuneiform allowed the many languages of the ancient Near East to be recorded, since all spoken language is made of syllables, (3) the Phoenicians developed the alphabet, which was perfected in Iron Age Greece through identifying more phonemes, including the vowels. The Greek language enabled individual writers to think new thoughts through writing down their ideas; a new habit that competed with information passed down through the oral tradition. Ironically though, writing down oral stories allowed their survival, as the oral tradition became more-or-less extinct. And surviving oral texts give otherwise missing insights into the intellectual life behind prehistoric monuments.
Continue reading “Introduction to my book Harmonic Origins of the World”The Stonehenge trilithons as synods of Venus
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.
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.
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, …).
Continue reading “The Stonehenge trilithons as synods of Venus”The Richard Syrett Interviews on Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels
I recently recorded a podcast with Richard Syrett and will be talking with him again today (January 2nd) on Coast to Coast, starting 10pm Pacific time. In the UK, this is tomorrow (Sunday the 3rd) at 6am GMT. Both these interviews are in response to my new book Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels, which goes on release Monday 4th of January 2021.
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.
pdf: Astronomical Musicality within Mythic Narratives
Ancient musical knowledge came to Just tuning long before Greek music, in Babylonia. It now seems likely that two sources of musical information, were involved in an early tradition of musical tuning by number: firstly, the early number field is the original template upon which musical harmony is based; and secondly, the prehistoric geocentric astronomy which preceded the ancient world had been comparing counted astronomical time-periods, and had discovered the rational tone and semitone intervals between the lunar year, Jupiter and Saturn . Ernest G. McClain identified a harmonic parallelism within ancient texts in which the anomalous numbers found within mythic narratives inferred a unique array (a matrix) of whole numbers, shaped like a mountain, which could explain plot elements, events and characters of the narrative, as intended parallels to such harmonic mountains. McClain’s matrices allowed the author to locate the harmonic intervals found between planetary synods as a reason why religious texts should have employed harmonic numbers, these relating to planetary time as gods alongside ancient systems of tuning. Based on a talk delivered at ICONEA2013, 5th December at Senate House, University College London.
Sacred Number and the Lords of Time
Back Cover
ANCIENT MYSTERIES
“Heath has done a superb job of collating his own work on the subject of megaliths with the objective views of many other researchers in the field. I therefore do not merely recommend reading this book but can state unequivocally it is a must read.”
–John Neal, British metrologist and researcher and author of Measuring the Megaliths and The Structure of Metrology
“In Sacred Number and the Lords of Time we have an important explanation of how megalithic science was developed. This book is a long-overdue wakeup call to a modern culture that has abandoned this fully developed and astonishingly rich prehistoric model of the physical world. The truth is now out.”
–Robin Heath, coauthor of The Lost Science of Measuring the Earth and author of Sun, Moon and Earth