Tag: calendars

Gurdjieff’s Diagram of Everything Living

first created: 28 October 2017

Gurdjieff first presented his ideas to groups in pre-revolutionary Russia. Amongst his carefully chosen students it was the habit to reconstruct talks and diagrams as much as possible, an endeavour that gave us a textbook of Gurdjieff’s ideas called In Search of the Miraculous (P.D. Ouspensky, 1950). This early form of the teaching was radically revised and extended by Gurdjieff, now as an author, during the 1920s, producing All and Everything whose part one was Beelzebub’sTales to his Grandson (G.I. Gurdjieff, 1950). Prior to drawing this diagram just after February 1917, Gurdjieff had been presenting ideas about transformation of energies, human and cosmic, using the musical theory surrounding the octave of eight notes. The Diagram of Everything Living was “still another system of classification… in an altogether different ratio of octaves… [that] leads us beyond the limits of what we call ‘living beings’ both higher [and lower] than living beings. It deals not with individuals but with classes in a very wide sense.”


Figure 1 The Diagram of Everything Living
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Models of Time within Henges and Circles

image: composite, see figure 1 below

Presenting important information clearly often requires the context be shown, within a greater whole. Map makers often provide an inset, showing a larger map at a smaller scaling (as below, of South America) within a detailed map (of Southern Mexico).

This map is shown in the context of South America with a yellow rectangle which is the part blown up in scale. The subject is the Quetzal birds range which corresponds well to the Olmec then Maya heartlands leading to the god named Quetzalcoatl or Feathered Serpent. (see chapter 8 of Heath, 2018.)

Megalithic astronomy generated maps of time periods, using lines, triangles, diameters and perimeters, in which units of measure represented one day to an inch or to a foot. To quantify these periods, alignments on the horizon pointing to sun and moon events were combined with time counting between these events,where days, accumulated as feet or inches per day, form a counted length. When one period was much longer than another, the shorter could be counted in feet per day and the smaller in inches per so that both counts could share the same monumental space. In this article we find the culture leading to megalithic astronomy and stone circles, previously building circular structures called henges, made of concentric banks and ditches.

Thornborough Henge
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Palsson’s Sacred Image in Iceland

Extracted from The Structure of Metrology, its Classification and Application (2006) by John Neal and notes by Richard Heath for Bibal Group, a member of which, Petur Halldorsson, has taken this idea further with more similar patterns on the landscape, in Europe and beyond. Petur thinks Palsson’s enthusiasm for Pythagorean ideas competed with what was probably done to create this landform, as he quotes “Every pioneer has a pet theory that needs to be altered through dialogue.” Specifically, he “disputes the Pythagorean triangle in Einar’s theories. I doubt it appeared in the Icelandic C.I. [Cosmic Image] by design.” Caveat Emptor. So below is an example of what metrology might say about the design of this circular landform.


Figure 1 of Palsson’s (1993) Sacred Geometry in Pagan Iceland
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The Cult of Seven Days

Published in Nexus Magazine in 2004

When understanding the origins of human knowledge, we tend not to look into the everyday aspects of life such as the calendar, our numbering systems and how these could have developed. However, these components of everyday life hold surprising clues to the past.

An example is the seven day week which we all slavishly follow today. It has been said that seven makes a good number of days for a week and this convenience argument often given for the existence of weeks.

Having a week allows one to know what day of the week it is for the purposes of markets and religious observances. It is an informal method of counting based on names rather than numbers. Beyond this however, a useful week length should fit well with the organisation of the year (i.e. the Sun), or the month (i.e. the Moon) or other significant celestial or seasonal cycle. But the seven day week does not fit in with the Sun and the Moon.

The Week and the Year

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