This is a film by me of John Michell before his death. It was made on Lundy Island at which time he was working on some of his last published ideas about the British Isles from the perspective of sacred geometry and metrology, both fields in which John made outstanding contributions including The View Over Atlantis, Dimensions of Paradise and Ancient Metrology. It is published here to enable those who did not to experience the unique presence of John Michell, itself conducive to understanding his work.
originally published Monday, 28 May 2012 at 10:58 It was read 478 times
It appears the ancient world had unreasonably accurate knowledge of the size of the earth and its shape: Analysis of ancient monuments reveals an exact estimate for the circumference of the mean Earth, a spherical version of the Earth, un-deformed by it spinning once a day. Half of this circumference, the north-south meridian, was known to be about 12960 miles (5000 geographical Greek feet of 1.01376 ft), a number which (in those Greek units) is then 60^5 = 777,600,000 geographical Greek inches. One has to ask, how such numbers are to be found very accurately within a planet formed accidentally during the early solar system?
Figure 1 The Earth as a circular Equator and a spherical Mean Earth, whose half circumference approximates the non-circular distance between north and south poles
John Michell’s booklet on Jerusalem found (in its Addendum) that the walls of the Temple Mount, extended for the rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon, was a scaled down model of the mean-earth Meridian in its length. These walls are still 5068.8 feet long, which is the length of a Greek geographical mile. This unit of measure divides the meridian into 12960 parts, each a geographical Greek mile.
In 1972 John Michell inferred an enormous ten-sided form nearly sixty three miles across, in which important historical and neolithic sites had been intended as ten vertices around an ancient centre, signified by a Whiteleafed Oak.
Figure 1 The Decagon of Perpetual Choirs, anchored upon Stonehenge, the Solstice sunrise in summer and set in winter
Michell had previously [1991 now The Sacred Center, 2009] developed the idea of the enchantment of the land as an actual practice; land areas were enchanted by using a geometrical pattern integrated with myths and ritual calendars, enacted within that framework. This was long before, around 930, such a pattern was being established of thing-places in Iceland. The idea of thing places is still find-able in English names such as Goring, the centre northeast of Stonehenge, where the summer solstice sun arose.
“Perpetual choirs were a Celtic institution, from pagan into early Christian times. In Iola Morganwg’s Triads of Britain, translated from Welsh, it is stated that ‘in each of these three choirs there were 24,000 saints; that is, there were a hundred for every hour of the day and the night in rotation, perpetuating the praise and service of God without rest or intermission.’ ” – The Measure of Albion
“Three of the choirs were located at Stonehenge, at Glastonbury, and near Llantwit Major in Wales. Others appear to have been at Goring-on- Thames and at Croft Hill in Leicestershire, a traditional site of ritual, legal, and popular assemblies.” The Dimensions of Paradise
Around Carnac in Brittany the land is peppered with uniquely-formed megalithic designs. In contrast, Great Britain’s surviving monuments are largely standing stones and stone circles. One might explain this as early experimentation at Carnac followed by a well-organised set of methods and means in Britain. What these experiments near Carnac were concerned with is contentious, there being no appetite, in many parts of society, for a prehistory of high-achieving geometers and exact scientists. Part of the problem is that pioneers interpreting monuments are themselves hampered by their own preferences. Once Alexander Thom had found the megalithic yard as a likely building unit, he tended to use that measure to the exclusion of other known metrological systems (see A.E. Berriman’s Historical Metrology. Similarly, John Neal’s breakthrough in All Done With Mirrors, having found the foot we still use to be the cornerstone of ancient metrology, led to his ambivalent relationship to the megalithic yard. Neal’s interpretation of the Crucuno rectangle employs a highly variable set of megalithic yards, perhaps missing the simpler point, that his foot-based metrology is supported as present within the dimensions of the Crucuno rectangle; said by Thom to be a “symbolic observatory” of the sun: this monument was an educational device, in which Neal finds the geometry of “squaring the circle” which, as we see later, was probably the Rectangle’s main metrological meaning.
