Tag: Le Manio Quadrilateral

Astronomical Time within Clava Cairns

In North East Scotland, near Inverness, lies Balnuaran of Clava, a group of three cairns with a unique and distinctive style, called Clava cairns; of which evidence of 80 examples have been found in that region. They are round, having an inner and outer kerb of upright stones between which are an infill of stones. They may or may not have a passageway from the outer to the inner kerb, into the round chamber within. At Balnuaran, two have passages on a shared alignment to the midwinter solstice. In contrast, the central ring cairn has no passage and it is staggered west of that shared axis.

This off-axis ring cairn could have been located to be illuminated by the midsummer sunrise from the NE Cairn, complementing the midwinter sunset to the south of the two passageways of the other cairns. Yet the primary and obvious focus for the Balnuaran complex is the midwinter sunset down the aligned passages. In fact, the ring cairn is more credibly aligned to the lunar minimum standstill of the moon to the south – an alignment which dominates the complex since, in that direction the horizon is nearly flat whilst the topography of the site otherwise suffers from raised horizons.

Cairns at Balnuaran of Clava. plan by A. Thom and pictures by Ian B. Wright
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Three Lunar Orbits as 82 day-inches

Sacred Number and the Lords of Time interpreted Thom’s megalithic fathom of 6.8 feet (as 2.72 feet times 2.5) found at Carnac’s Alignments as a useful number of 82 day-inches between stones in the stone rows of Le Menec. After 82 days, the moon is in almost exactly the same place, amongst the stars, because its orbit of 27.32166 days is nearly 27 and one third days. Three orbits sums to nearly 82 days. But the phase of the moon at that repeated place in the sky will be different.

The stone rows of Le Menec are not straight and in places resemble the deviations of the lunar nodes seen in late or early moon rise or setting phenomenon.
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Harmonic Astronomy within Seascale Flattened Circle

first published in July 2018

Only two type-D stone circles (see figure 3) are known to exist, called Roughtor (in Cornwall) and Seascale (in Cumbria). Seascale is assessed below, for the potential this type of flattened circle had to provide megalithic astronomers with a calendrical observatory. Seascale could also have modelled the harmonic ratios of the visible outer planets relative to the lunar year. Flattened to the north, Seascale now faces Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant (figure 1).


Figure 1 Seascale type-D flattened circle and neighbouring nuclear facility.
photo: Barry Teague

Stone Age astronomical monuments went through a series of evolutionary phases: in Britain c. 3000 BC, stone circles became widespread until the Late Bronze Age c. 1500 BC. These stone circles manifest aspects of Late Stone Age art (10,000 – 4500 BC) seen in some of its geometrical and symbolic forms, in particular as calendrical day tallies scored on bones. In pre-literate societies, visual art takes on an objective technical function, especially when focussed upon time and the cyclic phenomena observed within time. The precedent for Britain’s stone circle culture is that of Brittany, around Carnac in the south, from where Megalithic Ireland, England and Wales probably got their own megalithic culture.

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Megalithic application of numeric time differences

Natural time periods between celestial phenomena hold powerful insights into the numerical structure of time, insights which enabled the megalith builders to access an explanation of the world unlike our own. When looking at two similarly-long time-periods, the megalithic focussed on the difference between them, these causing the two periods to slide in and out of phase, generating a longer period in which the two celestial bodies exhibit a complete ensemble of variation, in their relationship to each other. This slippage of phase between celestial periods holds a pattern purely based upon number, hidden from the casual observer who does not study them in this way. Such numerical patterns are only fully revealed through counting time and analysing the difference between periods numerically.

For example, the solar year is longer than the lunar year by 10 and 7/8 days (10.875 days) and three solar years are longer than three lunar years by three times 10.875 days, that is by 32 and 5/8th days (32.625 days), which is 32/29 of a single lunar month of 29.53 days.

The earliest and only explicit evidence for such a three year count has been found at Le Manio’s Quadrilateral near Carnac (circa 4,000 BCE in Brittany, France) used the inches we still use to count days, a “day-inch” unit then widespread throughout later megalithic monuments and still our inch, 1/12 of the foot [Heath & Heath. 2011]. The solar-lunar difference found there over three years was 32.625 day-inches, is probably the origin of the unit we call the megalithic yard and the megalith builders appear to have adopted this differential length, between a day-inch count over three lunar and solar years, in building many later monuments.


Figure 1 (in plan above) The monumentalising of a three-year day inch count at Le Manio as a right triangle based upon its southern kerb (in profile below), automatically generating the megalithic yard.
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Musical Tones of the Outer Planets

My crucial entré to planetary harmony came when I noticed musical ratios in the synodic time periods of Jupiter and Saturn relative to the lunar year. This approach differs from the norms for “harmonies of the spheres” (a.k.a. Musica Universalis) which are geometrical and spatial, rather than temporally harmonic.

The planetary harmony I found within synodic periods became the subject of my new book The Harmonic Origins of the World (pub. 2018). These synodic ratios have been parts of my work from c. 2000, then expressed as “matrix diagrams” (Matrix of Creation, figure 2 below). In my new book, I show how ancient tuning theory seems to have presented the same information, in a different type of matrix (see figure 4).

Below I connect the outer planets using two additional (and useful) kinds of diagram, the right-angled triangle (figure 1) and the Pentad (figure 5), the latter developed in the 20th century within a discipline called Systematics. 


Figure 1 The harmonic ratios between the nearest two outer planets and the lunar year. The four square rectangle with side length of four, when equal to the lunar year gives, geometrically, the solar year as its diagonal length. The outer planetary synods are longer than the solar year as the planets have moved ahead of their last opposition to the sun. Such oppositions are marked by an outer planet appearing to travel in a loop, amongst the stars
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