Chartres, in north-west France, is a very special version of the Gothic transcept cathedral design. Having burnt down more than once, due to wooden ceilings, its reconstruction over many building seasons and different masonic teams, as funds permitted, would have needed strong organizing ideas to inform the work (as per Master Masons of Chartres by John James).
As shown below, Chartres main towers are unequal in height and the “western” facade itself does not align to east-west, as normal Christian churches do. The left tower is also higher than the right tower and, it has been said, the left represents the Sun and the right the Moon. The height of the left tower, to its globe below its cross, is indeed the solar year of 365 days in feet. But the height of the shorter right tower, to its own globe, is not the 354.367 days of the lunar year (of 12 months); rather, it is the top of its cross, sporting a crescent moon suggesting it is a moon tower, that is 354 and a third feet high.
The cosmic time coding of the two towers as solar year->lunar year between the globe’s height (on left in red) and the top of the cross (on right in blue). But the left tower also indicates the Saturn synod of 378 days to the top of its cross. The for-square rectangle, geometrically relating the solar (diagonal) and lunar years, is shown.
That is, the height of the lunar year in feet, from the same starting point as the solar tower’s height as the solar year, the lunar year would be to the top of the lunar cross, where the crescent is attached, and not to its globe. There is then a reasonable connection between the solar and lunar years and the two towers. However, it is also interesting to see the number of days, as feet, of the left tower to its own cross. It is exactly 378 feet, the synodic period of Saturn in days. Readers of my books and this site will remember that the ratio between the lunar year and Saturn synod is exactly 16/15: a musical semitone within the ancient tuning system called Just intonation.
This arrangement suggests Chartres was built to be a time-factored monument, which may be why the cathedral was aligned to midsummer sunrise (which was a megalithic norm) rather than being aligned east-west. Built on top of a solitary promontory, horizon events would have been clear across the flat fertile plains.
The re-discovery of the ancient planetary matrix, seen through three my three books: Matrix of Creation, Harmonic Origins of the World and Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels.
Harmonic Origins of the World inserted the astronomical observations of my previous books into an ancient harmonic matrix, alluded to using the sacred numbers found in many religious stories and the works of Plato, who might have been the savior of what Pythagoras had garnered from ancient mystery centers circa. 600 BC. According to the late Ernest G. McClain*, Plato’s harmonic technology had been widely practiced in the Ancient Near East so that, to the initiated, the stories were technical whilst, to the general population, they were entertaining and uplifting stories, set within eternity. Ancient prose narratives and poetic allusions conserved the ancient knowledge. Before the invention of phonetic writing in Classical Greece, spoken (oral) stories were performed in public venues. Archaic stories such as those attributed to Homer and Hesiod, gave rise to the Greek theatres and stepped agoras of towns. Special people called rhapsodes animated epic stories of all sorts and some have survived through their being written down. At the same time, alongside this transition to genuine literacy, new types of sacred buildings and spaces emerged, these also carrying the sacred numbers and measures of the megalithic to Classical Greece, Rome, Byzantium and elsewhere, including India and China.
* American musicologist and writer, in the 1970s, of The Pythagorean Plato and The Myth of Invariance. website
Work towards a full harmonic matrix for the planets
In my first book (Matrix of Creation,) I had not yet assimilated McClain’s books, but had identified the musical intervals between the lunar year and the geocentric periodicities of the outer planets. To understand what was behind the multiple numerical relationships within the geocentric world, I started to draw out networks of those periods (matrix diagrams) looking at all the relationships (or interval ratios) between them. This revealed common denominators and multiples which linked the time periods through small whole numbers. For example, the 9/8 relationship of Jupiter’s synod to the lunar year could be more easily grasped in a diagram to reveal a structural picture, visualized as a “matrix diagram” (see figure 1).
Figure 1 Matrix Diagram of Jupiter and the Moon. figure 9.5 of Matrix of Creation, p117.
One can see the common unit of 1.5 lunar months, at the base of the diagram, and a symmetrical period at the apex lasting 108 lunar months (9 lunar years referencing the Maya supplemental glyphs). I re-discovered the Lambda diagram of Plato (figure 8.7), and even stumbled upon the higher register (figure 2) of the Mexican Quetzalcoatl (figure 8.1) made up of {Mercury, the eclipse year, Tzolkin, Mars, Venus}, Venus also being called the feathered serpent. These periodicities are of adjacent musical fifths (ratio 3/2), which would eventually be shown as connected to that of the outer planets, using McClain’s harmonic technology, in my 5th book, Harmonic Origins of the World (see figure 3).
Figure 2 Incomplete discovery of the Maya Quetzalcoatl, in fig. 8.1 of Matrix of Creation. I had not noticed that 390 days, times 2, is 780 which is the synod of Mars! This is in fact 41.8949 Node Days, which might be significant.
Also called the flying serpent in Pharaonic Egypt, this set of musical fifths, apparently undocumented in the near east, was part of the Mexican mysteries of the Olmec and Maya civilizations (1500 BC to 800 AD). The serpent is flying harmonically, 125/128 above the inner planets – for example, the eclipse season is 125/128 above the lunar year: 354.367 days × 125/128 = 346 days, requiring McClain’s harmonic matrices to integrate these two serpents, in Harmonic Origins of the World (figure 9.3).
Figure 3 The two harmonic serpents of “Heaven” and “Earth”
By my 6th book, Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels, I had realized that the numerical design surrounding our “living planet” sits, is a secondary creation – created after the solar system, yet it was discovered first, before the heliocentric, exactly because the megalithic observed the planets from the Earth. I therefore propose an alternative timeline for the ancient mysteries. Instead of proposing a progenitor civilization such as Atlantis, as per Plato’s Timaeus: of an island destroyed by vulcanism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timaeus_(dialogue)
My working hypothesis is that Atlantis and similar precursor solutions, simply “kick the can down the road” into an as-yet-poorly-charted prehistory for which there is no strong evidence. In contrast, the sky astronomy and earth measures found in use by the megalithic can only be the product of that singular megalithic culture. There is clear evidence of megalithic monuments recording an understanding of the cosmos then found in the ancient mysteries. Megalithic evidence can show the geocentric world view as being their achievement, based upon the numbers they found using geocentric observations, counting lengths of time, using horizon events and the mathematical properties of simple geometries.
Geocentrism was the current world view until it was superceded, by the Copernican heliocentric view. The new solar system, held soon found to be held together by naturals gravitational forces between the large masses, forces discovered by Isaac Newton. The subsequent primacy of heliocentrism, which started 500 years ago, caused humanity to lose contact with the geocentric model of the world, which had the planets in the same order relating the two serpents of outer and inner planets. All references to an older and original form of astronomy, based upon numerical time and forged by the megalithic, was dislocated and obscured by the heliocentric physical science and astronomy of the modern day – which still knows nothing of the geocentrically order that surrounds us.
Figure 4 The Geocentric Model by 1660
The geocentric model entered Greek astronomy and philosophy at an early point; it can be found in pre-Socratic philosophy … In the 4th century BC, two influential Greek philosophers, Plato and his student Aristotle, wrote works based on the geocentric model. According to Plato, the Earth was a sphere, stationary at the center of the universe.
ABOVE: Stela C from Tres Zapotes roughly rebuilt by Ludovic Celle and based on a drawing by Miguel Covarrubias.
Introduction
The policy of archaeology regarding the Maya and their root progenitor the Olmec (1500 BCE onwards) is that its cultural innovations were made within Mexico alongside an agrarian revolution of the three sisters, namely squash, maize (“corn”), and climbing beans. This relationship of agriculture to civilizing skills then reads like the Neolithic revolution in Mesopotamia after 4000 BCE, where irrigation made the fertile loam able to absorb agricultural innovations from the northern golden triangle leading to writing, trade, city states, religion, arithmetic and so on. However, the idea that the ancient near east or India could have been an influence through ocean conveyors, of currents and trade winds, has never been accepted when proposed. Yet there are good reasons to think this since the astronomy and monumentalism of the pre-Columbian Mexican civilizations has precedents in the ancient near east and other locations.
The timing of the Olmec and the strangeness of immediately building sacred cities with an almost captive population of around 10,000 people, such as La Venta and San Lorenzo, with strong Jaguar imagery and practices, implies a cultic basis was present from the beginning. And it is now looking likely that the ancient near east was similarly prefigured, not just by agriculture but also by know how involving numbers for the building of sacred buildings with astronomical aspects – a tradition that goes back at least to the megalithic of the Atlantic seaboard of Europe.
Since Columbus, the native populations of North and South America have been largely displaced or marginalized. It may be for this reason that the notion that people from an advanced population had initiated the Olmec civilization requires a high, possibly impossible, level of proof. This Isolationism***, perhaps to avoid “adding insult to injury”, is against the Olmec having derived from the Old World, where the historical records are not that much better. The Olmec origin date is around the time of the quite sudden collapse of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean around 1200 BCE. And the Olmec, Maya and Aztec appear to have had a definite myth concerning someone called Quetzelcoatl bringing civilizing skills to found their culture, though their culture was also seen as arising from a group of seven underground caves.
***The opposite of Diffusionism: Diffusionism is an anthropological school of thought, was an attempt to understand the distribution of culture in terms of the origin of culture traits and their spread from one society to another. Versions of diffusionist thought included the conviction that all cultures originated from one culture center (heliocentric diffusion); the more reasonable view that cultures originated from a limited number of culture centers (culture circles); and finally the notion that each society is influenced by others but that the process of diffusion is both [subject to chance] and arbitrary .read more
Long Counts and The LUNAR Calendar
Having sketched this background, this article will explore a strange coincidence between the calendrical origins of the Megalithic in Brittany, of a 36 lunar month, 3 lunar year calendar, and the 18 month calendar found in the some of the later Olmec Great Counts, called after the Supplementary Glyphs appended to record the local time in an 18 lunar month calendar. The correlation between long counts and the supplementary data has been invaluable since the long counts can be ambiguous between one or more possible dates but we can predict the sun and moon that far back can compare the glyphs with the alternative dates. Counts have also been found that were eclipses of the sun or moon, resolving a given long count date. It is therefoe interesting to compare the two calendars using the geometrical fact that 36 lunar months is both 2 x 18, 4 x 9 and 3 x 12 since 36 is 4 x 3 x3.
The implication is that the megalithic calendar over three years, which was based upon noticing that three solar years was the diagonal of a four square triangle whose side length is three lunar years, appears to have resulted in an Olmec/Maya calendar in which each square is 9 lunar months. As was noted in previous books (2004, 2016, 2018), the range 9 to 18 years contains a single lunar month {12}, the Jupiter synod {13.5}, the Saturn synod {12.8} and the Uranus synod {12.5}. This octave range between 9 and 2 x 9 = 18 was therefore possible to manifest as a Mexican city design (Teotihuacan) and as the Parthenon of Athens. A number of other examples can be found as one of the proposed major models used from the megalithic onwards, as discussed in Sacred Number: Language of the Angels (2021).
Does the solar system function as a musical instrument giving rise to intelligent life, civilization and culture on our planet? This 2018 article in New Dawn introduced readers to the lost science of the megalithic – how our ancestors discovered the special ratios and musical harmony in the sky which gave birth to religion and cosmology. The musical harmonies were the subject of my book released that year, called The Harmonic Origins of the World.
After the ice receded, late Stone Age people developed the farming crucial to the development of cities in the Ancient Near East (ANE). On the Atlantic coast of Europe, they also developed a now-unfamiliar science involving horizon astronomy. Megalithic monuments were the tools they used for this, some still seen in the coastal regions of present day Spain, France, Britain and Ireland. Megalithic astronomy was an exact science and this conflicts with our main myth about our science: that ours is the only true science, founded through many historical prerequisites such as arithmetic and writing in the ancient near east (3000- 1200 BC) and theory-based reasoning in Classical Greece (circa 400-250 BC), to name but two. Unbeknownst to us, the first “historical period” in the near east was seeded by the exact sciences of the megalithic, such as the accurate measurement of counted lengths of time, developed by the prehistoric astronomers. With the megalithic methods came knowledge and discoveries, and one discovery was of the harmonic ratios between the planets and the Moon.
The idea that the planets were gods had been born before the ancient world, through the data of megalithic astronomy and this megalithic idea was the basis for the religious ideas of the East. Megalithic astronomy and Near Eastern religious and harmonic ideas have both been written out of our history of civilization, leaving us with enigmatic monuments and ill-defined religious mysteries. How this slighting of our real history happened is perhaps less important than our discovering again the purpose of the megalithic monuments and of those religious ideas that sprang from the discovery that the planets were harmonically related to life on Earth.
Le Menec Alignments indicate a profound astronomical work in the new stone age by 5000-4000 BC. Composite mash up by David Blake using Blender, Google Earth elevation and imagery plus Alexander Thom geometry and digitized stone locations.
