The image above is Kurma avatara of Vishnu, below Mount Mandara, with Vasuki wrapped around it, during Samudra Manthana, the churning of the ocean of milk. ca 1870. Wikipedia.
It is impossible to talk of a creation outside of the time and space of Existence, though from it, other dimensions can be inferred such as an “Eternity” visible in the invariances of numbers and structures. It is this higher dimensionality that leads to
The recurrence of celestial time periods,
The mental powers to recognise manifested patterns,
The use of spatial geometries of alignment,
The numerate counting of time,
A phenomenology which is neither factual nor imaginary.
The quantification and qualification of Existence, adequately conducted, reveals harmonious structures within time and space, especially in the spacetime of our planetary system, when this system is as seen from our planet. The harmonious nature of our planetary system helped the late stone age to develop a large numerical and geometrical model of the world through counting astronomical recurrences. This model, which shaped ancient texts, implies that solar systems may have an inherent intelligence which makes them harmonious.
Harmony in a planetary system must therefore employ invariances already present in the number field, by exploiting the recurrent orbital interactions between planets and large Moons, this in a connected set of three-body problems. Before our exact sciences and instruments, prehistoric naked-eye astronomers could understand the planetary world by counting the duration of planetary time cycles: the subject my books explore. Through counted lengths of time, the megalithic age came to understand the invariances of the number field and so evolve an early and distinct type of numeracy. This numeracy lived on as the basis for the ancient Mysteries of the early civilizations, embodied in their Temples and in the Pythagorean approach to ordinal numbers and geometries, expressing the “number field” in two or three dimensions, areas and volumes. (see Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels for an introduction to this)
That is, this early human numeracy naturally manifests within the maths governing rotational systems, this involving key transcendental* constants such as π, these regulating what is actually possible, mathematically, within dynamic planetary systems that are gravitational attractors of each other: these constants include pi {π}, √-1 {i}, e, and phi {φ}. The first three { π, √-1, e} are surprisingly well-organized rotational frameworks making the behaviour of vectors relatively simple using geometry. For example, the lunar year of twelve lunar months has become strongly resonant with the two outer gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn. The Golden Mean (or Phi {φ})1 can be approximated by orbital ratios between planets through exploiting the Fibonacci number series2, most visibly in the orbital recurrence of Venus and the Earth, seen in the 8/5 {1.6} relationship of its synod* to the solar year. Phi φ is also expressed in living forms of growth, since growth is often based upon the present size of a living body and what it has previously eaten. Fibonacci ratios are ideally suited to creating the “strange attractors” which can create stable patterns out of otherwise chaotic orbital interactions.
1 My use of curly braces is borrowed from a stricter world of set notation. It offers an ability to place groups of numbers, symbols and other non-grammatical element next to their grammatical context.
2 The series reinvented by Fibonacci uses addition of two previous number to create the next number. His version of that algorithm is {0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 and so on}. These numbers are found within natural form of life, where such numbers can be generated from two previous states or when two counter rotating spirals of seeds will fill the surface of an egg shape with maximum packing. More on this later.
Through universal mathematical laws and constants, rotational and recurrent systems will effectively provide numerical shortcuts* (J.G. Bennett’s null-vectors) expressing Musical or Fibonacci ratios, and without those ratios being available, relationships within existence would be more complex, less synchronous, and truly accidental. Harmonic shortcuts have therefore given the planetary world a simplified mathematics when viewed from the surface of the earth, within the geocentric pattern of time. This synchronicity provided the stone age with a path towards a direct numerical understanding of time through phenomena(that is, a direct visual and countable phenomenology).
In this way, the megalithic cultures of prehistory found that the geocentric planetary system expressed numerical invariances (these already within the number field itself) thus making the time world of the sky unusually harmonious and intelligible. This contrasts with the now-popular modern notion that, while the solar system is a large and impressive structure, its origins come only from the mathematical laws of physics, these forever operating in a mechanical way. That is, the modern way-of-seeing planetary time is heliocentric and causal and this has hidden an ancient view, gained through the megalithic study of the phenomena in the sky using megaliths as large instruments with sightlines to the horizon events of sun and moon, to simply count of time-as-length and, evolve a very basic numeracy based upon numerical lengths (a metrology) and triangular geometries to compare lengths.
Megalithic methods employed the properties of circles, ellipses, squares, rectangles, and right triangles before the analytical geometry of Euclid, Greek math, or ancient near-eastern arithmetic. This was only possible because key parts of the mathematics of complex numbers, for example, are directly visible in the form of the right triangle and unit circle; as the natural form of two vectors: a length at a given angle (or direction) and another length at different angle gives access to ratios. A right triangle can therefore express two vectors of different length and differential angle, and this applies to a pair of average angular rates in the sky, without knowing the math or physics behind it all. If the two vectors are day-counts of time, then the right triangle can study their relationship in a very exact way. Such a triangle may also have been seen as the rectangle that encloses it, making the diagonal (vector), the hypotenuse of the triangular view.
The properties of the imaginary constant i (√-1) represents, through its properties, the rotation of a vector through 90 degrees. It is this that gives the right-angled triangle its trigonometric capacity to represent the relativity of two vector lengths. My early schoolroom discoveries concerning vectors in applied math classes, that right triangles can represent vectors of speed for example, was without any knowledge of the mathematical theory of vectors. This geometry enabled prehistorical astronomy to study the average planetary periods as vectors. That is, rotational vectors enabled the sky to be directly “read”, from the surface of the third planet, through simple day-counting, comparing counts with right triangles, and forming circular geometries of alignment to astronomical events found on the horizon; all without any of our later astronomical instrumentation, maths, or knowledge of physics.
Physics has not yet explained how the time constants between the planets came into a harmonious configuration, because it is unaware that this is the case. The mathematization of Nature, since the Renaissance, has hidden the harmonious view of geocentric planets and all preceding myths, cosmologies and beliefs were swept aside by the heliocentric world view (see Tragic Loss of Geocentric Arts and Sciences, also C.S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image).
The modern approach then emerged, of blind forces, physical laws and dynamic calculations. That is, while the simplifying power of universal constants is fully recognized by modern science (these having made maths simpler) the idea that these simplifications came to be directly reflected in the sky implies some kind of design and hence an intelligence associated with planetary formation.
Furthermore, modern way of seeing things cannot imagine that the megalithic could conducted anastronomy of vectors (using geometrical methods while not understanding why they worked) and that this empowered a simple but effective type of astronomy, without our mathematical or technical knowledge. This is an anachronistic procedural heresy for the history of Science and also for the present model of history, where science for us is the only science possible, evolving out of near-eastern civilization after the stone age ended.
Foundational myths of modern civilization are threatened by the notion that the world is somewhat designed by a higher intelligence. Until these subconscious conflicts of interest are overcome, prehistory will remain the prisoner of modernity where mysteries remain mysteries because we don’t wish to understand.
The geocentric planetary model on the left was displaced by a visually simple heliocentric model, of how the solar system would look from a distance rather than from the Earth.
About 400 years ago, the move to the Heliocentric Model of the “solar system” swept away the worldview upon which human spirituality had been based for at least 5000 years. We can say that all spiritual literature was based upon the previous cosmological norms of the Geocentric Model. It is generally not realized that the Koran, New Testament, Buddhist, Tibetan, Hindu, Pythagorean, Platonic, yogic, shamanistic, and many other primary and secondary texts including Shakespeare, alluded to the details of a geocentric cosmology: a foundational framework often debunked as inaccurate yet, the geocentric was a valid ordering of the planetary cosmos. The religious values within the model were overtaken by the new scientific norm, which was inherently materialistic in its study of physical laws and processes, these universal throughout an ever-expanding vision of the universe, through observations and experiments in physics and chemistry deducing new types of knowledge. And mankind would soon use these new laws and discoveries to exploit the universe itself.
This transition from geocentrism to heliocentrism came against a backdrop of Islamic and Christian suppression of scientific discoveries, which represented a growing desire since Classical times for human reason to escape the shackles of the oral and then bookish traditions, which broadcast their own messages as if final, to be obeyed on pain of death or at least social exclusion. In this war between religious theocracies and an emerging modern science no quarter was given to the geocentric model, even though all previous traditional thought the world over relied on it. A cleric called Copernicus suggested that everything must revolve around the Sun and not the Earth. the geocentric past was soon ditched, like the baby with the bathwater and the whole of spiritual literature lost much of its foundational imagery. Science had displaced the ancient mythologies due to its own struggle to understand the physical world. The “natural philosophers” eliminated any mysterious causes for why things happened by discovering physical causes for all phenomena, these natural and real through physical laws without any gods or spirits being involved.
Pride before a Fall
Modern science might well have reminded monotheistic clerics of Adam, the Bible’s first man eating from the forbidden fruit, plucked by Eve from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which grew at the centre of a geocentric Eden. Like Adam, the scientists would then have the “knowledge of good and evil” and become themselves “as gods”, and this has become true for technology. The improving standards of living for many people in the West is taken to mean the clerics were wrong to suppress science, yet humanity has fulfilled the biblical prophecy concerning Adam: the scientists, industrialists and financiers have exactly become like gods, to “know good and evil”. The spiritual locale was further abstracted from being in the heavens, by removing its foundational geocentric model; simultaneously giving science an over-realised view of a purely physical earth and cosmos.
Science gave humanity powers over the natural world, leading to explosion in the world population based upon an industrial revolution that exploited the planet, its habitats and resources, on an ever-growing rate and scale. In the Iron Age, such a tyranny could only operate on a regional scale, but science-led societies now developed a global reach and an infinite franchise, with business models whose scope was the whole globe, to advertise and consume resources as products and services. In this sense then, the clerics were right: for though the clerics might have themselves behaved like repressive iron age tyrants towards science, they lacked the technologies that could ruin the Biosphere. Science now recognises the exploitation of the Earth, its biosphere, and its people to be a major problem, forecast to grow worse before better, and already more than bad enough. But economic growth is inherently unsustainable and so, what kind of a society will it be that does not depend upon growth to fix its debts? A geocentric society?
The ancient world could and did warn what sort of an archetypal trajectory the scientists would initiate for, like Icarus, the technologists would take humanity too close to the Sun. The wax fixing the wings of wide-bodied multinationals would melt and they would suffer the fate also of Phaethon, son of Helios the Sun, whose chariot he recklessly drove for a day. Losing control, Phaethan caused havoc in the skies and on the earth, his erratic pathway being visible as the deviation of the galaxy from the sun’s path. The Earth goddess Gaia made urgent appeal to Jupiter, who hurled his thunderbolt upon the precocious lad who fell into the eternal river Eridanus.
The Origins of Geocentrism
About twenty years ago, I found simple numbers between planetary periods seen from Earth. This caused me to drop some modern assumptions about which present the ancient view of the cosmos as inferior. For example, modern history is a linear view of the past with a fixed beginning in the earliest middle eastern cities such as Sumer and Babylon (3000 to 2000 BCE). Cities make a happy starting point since we live in cities ourselves and writing arose with the early cities, providing historical records.
In 2002, Matrix of Creation published a different, cyclic view of time, where the complexity of the modern sun-centred system became simple. Looked at without modern bias and, using a scientific calculator, a geocentric astronomy of average periods identified two unexpected baselines: the practical year of 365 days (the Earth) and the lunar year of 354.375 days (the Moon). It was this geocentric simplicity that had made astronomy possible for the late Stone Age (or “neolithic”). On the western seaboard of Europe, the megalith astronomers developed the first geocentric worldview which, I believe, was then inherited by the civilizations of the ancient near eastern cities.
Several astronomical innovations were required to carry out this form of horizon astronomy. For example, without modern numeracy they had to store day counts as lengths, one inch to the day[1]. The primary innovations were,
Long sightlines were established to key celestial events on the horizon, such as the sun or moon, rising or setting.
The number of days were counted between horizon events, to quantify each periodicity as a measured length between points or as a rope.
Different celestial periods could then be compared employing simple geometries like the triangle, circle and square, revealing the ratios between celestial periods.[2]
Musical Ratios and the Giant Planets
The lunar year of 354 ⅝ days manifests the principle of musical harmony between itself and the outer planets. At 398.88 days, the synod of Jupiter is 9/8 of the lunar year, Saturn (at 378.09 days) is 16/15 of the lunar year, while Uranus (at 369.66 days) is 25/24 of the lunar year. In the pure-tone music of the ancient world, these are the three fundamental intervals called the Pythagorean whole tone, the Just semitone, and the chromatic semitone: intervals essential to the formation of musical scales.
In 2018, Harmonic Origins of the World was able to locate these outer planetary ratios within an ancient style of harmonic matrix, implied by some of Plato’s least understood dialogues. Centuries before, Pythagoras would have learnt of such harmonic matrices, from the ancient mystery centres of his day. Harmonic matrices and tables of numbers appear to have been used by initiates of the Ancient Near East[3] to give the stories of ancient texts such as the Bible a deeper subtext beneath. Set within eternity, stories could be entertaining and uplifting while those initiated in the mysteries, could find knowledge relating to harmonic tuning and the planetary world: Tuning theory and its special numbers had come to inhabit ancient texts because the outer planets, surrounding Earth expressed the three most fundamental musical ratios, the tones and semitones found within octave scales.
Geocentric knowledge can be found conserved within ancient narratives because, before writing arose, there was an oral tradition which had to be remembered until eventually written down. The ancient mysteries arose to connect the human world of Existence to the cosmic world of Eternity, visible from the Earth. Myths of gods, heros and mortals were but a natural reflection of the harmonic worlds of the heavens into the cultural life of the people, like the moon reflected in a lake.
Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels illustrates how new types of sacred building and space emerged, still carrying the geocentric model, its numbers and measures into Classical Greece, Rome, Byzantium and elsewhere, including India, China and the Americas. For example, the Parthenon design (figure 1) incorporates the harmony of the outer planets with the lunar year and Athena (the patriarchal moon goddess) had the same root of 45 as Adam did in the Bible’s creation story written about three centuries before.
Figure 1. The Parthenon as a musical instrument model of the Moon (960) and the outer planets (Jupiter is 1080 and Saturn is 1024.) [figure 5.16 of Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels where many further examples are to be found.]
Fibonacci Ratios and the Terrestrial Planets
The inner planets exploit the special properties of Fibonacci numbers as approximations to the Golden Mean. The practical year of 365 days can be divided into 5 parts of 73 days, and the synodic period of Venus is then 8 parts of 73 days or 584 days. The two numbers 5 and 8 are part of the Fibonacci series {0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 etc. } in which the next number is the sum of the two previous numbers. 8/5 is 1.6 in our notation and 73 days x 1.6 equals 116.8 days (584/5 days)[4]. This reveals the inner solar system to be a realm in which, proximity to the Sun leads to numerical relationships informed by the Fibonacci numbers – when seen from the Earth.
The synod of Mars (Ares), the outer terrestrial planet, also relates to the practical year as two semitones of 16/15, a harmonic ratio perhaps because of his proximity to the gas giant Jupiter (Zeus), who is his mythological father.
Figure 2 (left) The geocentric pentacle of 5 successive Venus synods in 8 years of 365 days, within the Zodiac and (right) the ubiquity of the golden mean within the geometry of the pentacle. Such geometrical ratios would become emblematic and sacred to the sky.
The golden mean (1.618034…) is a unique but natural short-circuit within the fractional number field: its reciprocal (equal to 0.618) is equivalent to subtraction by one while its square (equal to 2.618) is equivalent to addition by one. The Fibonacci numbers, in successively approximating the golden mean, enable planetary orbits near the Sun to express the golden mean. For example, the Venus synod is 8/5 (1.6) practical years whilst its orbital period is 8/13 (0.625) practical years, because its orbit divides the practical year as the number 1. The synod of Venus is therefore a function of that orbital period and the practical year in a practical application of discrete mathematics. This sort of resonance is found in moons close to massive planets like Jupiter and so, the inner planets are like moons of the Sun, seen from Earth – exactly as Tacho Brahe’s geoheliocentric model eventually did, after Copernicus just before gravitation was discovered.
Figure 3 The Geocentric Model as (left) a Staff and (right) Nine Concentric Rings or “spheres”
The Geocentric Inheritance of Greece
The medieval geocentric model had its origins in ancient Greece, due to Pythagoras. This was discarded by 1600, when Copernicus showed that many of the difficulties in understanding the form of the planetary orbits were due to the placing of the Earth and Moon at the centre or bottom, and the Sun as third planet out (figure 3). If the Sun, Mercury and Venus are swapped with Earth and Moon, the heliocentric system results – ordered according to its relative gravitational masses and orbital radii.
Figure 4 The Geocentric order (left) can be expanded to show the Harmonic and Fibonacci ordering principles (right)
When accompanied by the set of simple time periods shown in figure 4, the geocentric model may have functioned as a focal aide memoire accompanying explicit oral or written explanations. The synodic planetary periods to either the lunar year or the practical year would be easily learnt by counting time as days between celestial manifestations. This might be the reason the ancient near east did not repeat the astronomy of the megalithic monuments. Instead, temples symbolised time and space, using a canon of sacred numbers in the name of the god or god-king. Astrology became a special form of divination within which long counts could arrive at the general state of the cosmos, correctable using instrumental or naked-eye observations. All such matters were associated with the state, and its specialists, including astrologers and scribes and the geocentric planetary system was a talisman for the ancient mysteries, astronomical and harmonic.
Poetry as the Language of Geocentricity
The primordial light initiating the Bible’s old testament creation story became the Word (in Greek: “Logos”)[5], of the New Testament. The logos was a proposed structure of meaning which held the world together within the human mind, if you could receive it. The second part of the creation story is therefore to understand the original creative process as a human creative process. Language has given human perception of the world a largesse of worldviews in the making. The geocentric world view became a particularly large corpus, through the texts of the religious centres but also through a poetic tradition seeking to locate its voice within a remarkably specific, consistent, and well-mapped-out topography, with geocentrism and its astronomical numbers at its heart. If there has been any major spiritual vision within human history it was geocentric and never heliocentric, even though the Sun is prime suspect for being the creative origin of the solar system and its extra-special geocentric planet, Earth.
By my 6th book, Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels, I realized that the numerical design within which our “living planet” sits is a secondary creation – created after the solar system. Yet the geocentric was discovered before the heliocentric creation of the solar system because the megalithic had observed the planets from the Earth. So, although the solar system was created first in time, this creation continued onwards to produce a more sophisticated planet than the rest, where the other planets had the supporting roles, which the geocentric tradition had mythically alluded to, in a stable topography of places and mythic narratives; of gods, heroes, demons, events, and humans actors, serving as the sacred texts of the ancient world. Later writers both adopted and innovated this tradition:
In its use of images and symbols as in its use of ideas, poetry seeks the typical and enduring. That is one reason why throughout the history of poetry the basis for organising the imagery of the physical world has been the natural cycle. Northrop Frye, 1960.
Using literary criticism, Northrop Frye saw past the habitual assumption that high poets were artfully but merely remarking upon the sensory life and its everyday recurrences. Instead, he realised that living cycles were often employed as “similarities to the already arisen”, as Gurdjieff put it[6], meaning that the planetary world was being expressed by proxy through the natural cycles within poetry. And Life does depend upon the eternal cycles within which it sits: The spin and obliquity of the Earth and the orbit of its large moon. These two bodies are profoundly connected numerically to the rest of the planets according to the vision of the geocentric model, involving both Fibonacci and harmonic cycles. Frye first became aware of link between cosmology and poetry when analysing the works of William Blake, the poet who appeared to “make up” his own original yet geocentric cosmology and language; causing Frye to state “poetry is the language of cosmology”. Long after the heliocentric had suspended any belief in the geocentric, its language and metaphors still formed a stable tradition amongst poets, through the influences of a classical education.
The geocentric topography is quite standardized among its world-wide variation in imagery, over thousands of years, all quite agreeable with that used by Dante in TheDivine Comedy, summarised by Frye in his essay New Directions from Old[7] as follows.
…For poets, the physical world has usually been not only a cyclical world but a “middle earth,” situated between an upper and a lower world. These two worlds reflect in their form the heavens and hells of the religions contemporary with the poet, and are normally thought of as abodes of unchanging being, not as cyclical. The upper world is reached by some form of ascent and is a world of gods or happy souls. The most frequent images of ascent are the mountain, the tower, the winding staircase or ladder, or a tree of cosmological dimensions. The upper world is often symbolized by the heavenly bodies, of which the one nearest to us is the moon. The lower world, reached by descent through a cave or under water, is more oracular and sinister, and as a rule is or includes a place of torment and punishment. It follows that there would be two points of particular significance in poetic symbolism. One is the point, usually at the top of a mountain just below the moon, where the upper world and this one come into alignment, where we look up to the heavenly world and down on the turning cycle of nature.[8]
By the time of the medieval, the image of the geocentric world had sprouted a sublunary gap between the Earth and the Moon with a rudimentary physics of the four elements – which are the four states of matter: solid earth, liquid water, gaseous air and a transformative fire; ideas from the pre-Socratic philosophers. With this palette, the storyteller or poet could allude to an invariant world view based upon megalithic astronomy, but now held as a diagram, made familiar through ever-new expressions or as an oral then written text.
A Simplified Model of Prehistory
The simplest explanation for which there is good evidence finds Atlantis to have probably been an Egyptian myth about the megalith builders on the Atlantic seaboard of Europe, whose astronomical knowledge became enshrined in the ancient mysteries. These mysteries have been made doubly mysterious since the modern age replaced the world view upon which those mysteries were based by the Copernican heliocentric view. This new solar system was soon discovered to be held together, not by the divine world, but by invisible gravitational forces between the large planetary masses and an even more massive Sun, forces elucidated by Sir Isaac Newton. The primacy of heliocentrism caused modern humanity to further lose contact with the geocentric model of the world and its two serpents, of the inner and outer planets (figure 4), a literary tradition that had lasted since at least 3000 BC.
If one but swapped the sun and moon-earth system, the geocentric planetary order became the heliocentric planetary order. The Copernican revolution seemed to be a minor tweak of a less useful model but tragically, the geocentric references to an original form of astronomy, based upon numerical time and forged by the megalithic, were lost and invisible to heliocentric astronomy. Science came to know nothing of the geocentric order surrounding the Earth and blind to the significance of the mythic worlds that animated the geocentric model.
You can find many additional articles at sacred.numbersciences.org
[1] It is remarkable that the inch was one of the first units of length used by the megalithic in Carnac to count days.
[2] These matters are fully explained, most in Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels.
[3] According to the late Ernest G. McClain (https://ernestmcclain.net/), American musicologist and writer, in the 1970s, of The Pythagorean Plato and The Myth of Invariance.
[4] one fifth of the Venus synod is therefore close to the synod of Mercury (115.88 days).
[6] “… the [whole] presence of every kind of three-brained being … is an exact similitude of everything in the Universe.” Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. G.I.Gurdjieff. 345. Similar to the Pythagorean tradition of the human being a microcosm of the macrocosm.
[7] found in Myth and Mythmaking ed: H.A. Murray, Wesleyan University Press.115-131. 1959.
We would know nothing of music were it not that somewhere, between the ear and our perceptions, what we actually hear (the differences between different frequencies of sound, that is, different tones) is heard as equivalent musical intervals (such as fifths, thirds, tones, semitones, etc), of the same size, even when the pitch range of the tones are different. This is not how musical strings work, where intervals of the same size get smaller as the pitch at which tones occur, grows larger. On the frets of a guitar for instance, if one plays the same intervals in a different key, the same musical structure, melodic and harmonic, is perfectly transposed, but the frets are spaced differently.
The key is that human hearing is logarithmic and is based upon the number two {2}, the “first” interval of all, of doubling. This can only mean that the whole of the possibilities for music are integral to human nature. But this miraculous gift of music, in our very being, is rarely seen to be that but, rather, because of the ubiquity of music, especially in the modern world, the perception of music is not appreciated as, effectively, a spiritual gift.
Music is often received as a product like cheese, in that it is to be eaten but, to see how this cheese is made from milk requires us to see, from its appearance as a phenomenon, what music perception is made up of . Where does music come from?
Normally a part of musicology, that subject is full of logical ambiguities, confusing terminology, unresolved opinions, and so on. Those who don’t fully understand the role of number in making music work, concentrate on musical structures without seeing that numbers must be the only origin of music.
The ancient explanation of music was that everything comes out of the number one {1}, so that octaves appear with the number two {2/1}, fifths from three {3/2}, fourths from four {4/3}, thirds from five {5/4} and minor thirds from six {6/5}. Note that, (a) the interval names refer to the order of resulting note within an octave, (b) that intervals are whole number ratios differing by one and that, (c) the musical phenomenon comes out of one {1}, and not out of zero {0}, which is a non-number invented for base ten arithmetic where ten {10} is one ten and no units.
Another miracle appears, in that the ordinal numbers {1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 etc.} naturally create, through their successiveness, all the larger intervals before the seventh number {1 2 3 4 5 6 7} leaving the next three {8 9 10} to create two types of tone {9/8 10/9} and a semitone {16/15} thereafter {11 12 13 14 15 16}: by avoiding all those numbers whose factors are not the first three primes {2 3 5}. Almost the whole potential of western music is therefore built out of the smallest numbers!
This simplicity in numbers has now been obscured, though the structure of music remains in the Equal Temperament form of tuning evolved in the last millennium. By having twelve equal semitones that sum to the number two, we can now transpose melodies between keys (of the keyboard) but we have pretty much lost the idea of scales. Instead, each key is the major diatonic {T T S T T T S} (where T = tone and S = semitone intervals) starting from a different key. The fifth is called dominant and fourth subdominant and the black notes (someway fiendish to learn) required to achieve the major key in all keys but C which is all white keys.
The old church scales are achievable by over ruling the clef with accidental notes, and the reason for different keys sounding different is that they contain aspects of what were the scales. So a pop song, for example, is usually in a scale. “Bus Stop” by the Hollies was in the Locrian scale.
Equal Temperament enabled the Western tradition to create its Classical repertoire but it has made ancient musical theory very distant and has abandoned the exact ratios it used to use since every semitone is identical and irrational. Plato described this kind of solution as the best compromise, where every social class of musical numbers has sacrificed some thing of their former self in order to achieve the riches versatility bestows upon modern musical composition.
Seventeen colossal carved heads are known, each made out of large basalt boulders. The heads shown here, from the city of San Lorenzo [1200-900 BCE], are a distinctive feature of the Olmec civilization of ancient Mesoamerica. In the absence of any evidence, they are thought to be portraits of individual Olmec rulers but here I propose the heads represented musical ratios connected to the ancient Dorian heptachord, natural to tuning by perfect fifths and fourths. In the small Olmec city of Chalcatzingo [900-500BCE] , Olmec knowledge of tuning theory is made clear in Monument 1, of La Reina the Queen (though called El Rey, the King, despite female attire), whose symbolism portrays musical harmony and its relationship to the geocentric planetary world *(see picture at end).
* These mysteries were visible using the ancient tuning theories of Ernest G. McClain, who believed the Maya had received many things from the ancient near east. Chapter Eight of Harmonic Origins of the World was devoted to harmonic culture of the Olmec, the parent culture of later Toltec, Maya, and Aztec civilizations of Mexico.
Monument 5 at Chatcatzinga has the negative shape of two rectangles at right angles to each other, with radiating carved strips framing the shape like waves emanating from the space through which the sky is seen. The rectangles are approximately 3 by 5 square or of a 5 by 5 square with its corner squares removed.
Monument 5 at Chalcatzingo is a framed hollow shape. The multiple squares have been added to show that, if the inner points are a square then the four cardinal cutouts are described by triple squares.
The important to see that the Olmec colossal heads were all formed as a carved down oval shape, that would fit the height to width ratio of a rectangular block. For example, three heads from San Lorenzo appear to have a ratio 4 in height to 3 in width, which in music is the ascending fourth (note) of our modern diatonic (major or Ionian) scale.
Even narrower is the fourth head at San Lorenzo, whose height is three to a width of two. This is the ratio of the perfect fifth, so called as the fifth note of the major scale.
And finally (for this short study), the ratio 6/5 can be seen in Head 9 of San Lorenzo and also at La Venta’s Monument 1 (below).
MUSICAL RATIOS
If the heads were conceived in this way, the different ratios apply when seen face on. The corners of the heads were probably rounded out from a supplied slab with the correct ratio between height and width. The corners would then round-out to form helmets and chins and the face added.
And as a group, the six heads sit within in a hierarchy of whole number ratios, each between two small numbers, different by one. At San Lorenzo, Head 4 looks higher status than Head 9 and this is because of its ratio 3/2 (a musical fifth or cubit), relative to the 6/5 of Head 9. We now call the fifth note dominant while the fourths (Heads 1, 5 and 8) are called subdominant. These two are the foundation stones of Plato’s World Soul {6 8 9 12}, within a low number octave {6 12} then having three main intervals {4/3 9/8 4/3}* where 4/3 times 9/8 equals 3/2, the dominant fifth.
*Harmonic numbers, more or less responsible for musical harmony, divide only by the first three primes {2 3 5} so that the numbers between six and twelve can only support four harmonic numbers {8 9 10}
San Lorenzo existed between 1200 to 900 BCE, and in the ancient Near East there are no clear statements for primacy of the octave {2/1}, nor was it apparent in practical musical instruments before the 1st Millennium BCE, according to Richard Dumbrill: Music was largely five noted (pentatonic) and sometimes nine-noted (enneadic) with two players. However, the eight notes of the octave could instead be arrived at, in practice, by the ear, using only fifths and fourths to fill out the six inner tones of a single octave; starting from the highest and lowest tones (identical sounding notes differing by 2/1). A single musical scale results from a harp tuned in this way: the ancient heptachord: it had two somewhat dissonant semitone (called “leftovers” in Greek), intervals seen between E-F and B-C on our keyboards (with no black note between). Our D would then be “do“, and the symmetrical scale we today call Dorian.
The order of the Dorian scale is tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone, tone {T S T T T S T} and the early intervals of the Dorian {9/8 S 6/5 4/3 3/2} are the ratios also found in these Olmec Heads*. The ancient heptachord** could therefore have inspired the Olmec Heads to follow the natural order tuned by fourths and fifths.
*I did not consciously select these images of Heads but rather, around 2017, they were easily found on the web. Only this week did I root out my work on the heads and put them in order of relative width.
**here updated to the use of all three early prime numbers {2 3 5} and hence part of Just Intonation in which the two semitones are stretched at the expense of two tones of 9/8 to become 10/9, a change of 81/80. (The Babylonians used all three of these tones in their harmonic numbers.)
To understand these intervals as numbers required the difference between two string lengths be divided into the lengths of the two strings, this giving the ratio of the Head in question. The intervals of the heptachord would become known and the same ratios achieved within the Heads, carved out as blocks cut out into the very simple rectangular ratios, made of multiple squares.
The rectangular ratio of Head 4, expressed within multiple squares as 3 by 2.
The early numbers have this power, to define these early musical ratios {2/1 3/2 4/3 5/4 6/5}, which are the large musical tones {octave fifth fourth major-third minor-third}. These ratios are also very simple rectangular geometries which, combined with cosmological ideas based around planetary resonance, would have quite simply allowed Heads to be carved as the intervals they represented. The intervals would then have both a planetary and musical significance in the Olmec religion and state structure.
Frontispiece to Part Three of Harmonic Origins of the World: War in Heaven The seven caves of Chicomoztoc, from which arose the Aztec, Olmec and other Nahuatl-speaking peoples of Mexico. The seven tribes or rivers of the old world are here seven wombs, resembling the octaves of different modal scales, and perhaps including two who make war and sacrifice to overturn/redeem/re-create the world.
A Musical Cosmogenesis
Everything in music comes out of the number one, the vibrating string, which is then modified in length to create an interval. Two strings at right angles, held within a framework such as Monument 5 (if other things like tension, material, etc.were the same) would generate intervals between “pure” tones. However Monument 5 is not probably symbolic but rather, it was probably laid flat like a grand piano (see top illustration). Wooden posts could hold fixings, to make a framework for one (or more) musical strings of different length, at right angles to a reference string. This would be a duo-chord or potentially a cross-strung harp. Within the four inner points of Monument 5 is a square notionally side length. In the image of Monument 1, and variations in height and width from the number ONE were visualized in stone as emanating waves of sound.
The highest numbers lead to the smallest ratio of 6/5 then the 6/5 ratio of Head 9 can be placed with five squares between the inner points and the 3/2 ratio of Head 2 then fills the vertical space left open within Chalcatzingo’s Monument 5.
Monument 5’s horizontal gap can embrace the denominator of a Head’s ratio (as notionally equal to ONE) so that the inner points define a square side ONE, and the full vertical dimension then embraces the 3/2 ratio of the tallest, that of Head 2.
It may well be that this monument was carved for use in tuning experiments and was then erected at Chalcatzingo to celebrate later centuries of progress in tuning theory since the San Lorenzo Heads were made. By the time of Chalcatzingo, musical theory appears to have advanced, to generate the seven different scales of Just intonation (hence the seven caves of origin above), whose smallest limiting number must then be 2880 (or 4 x 720), the number presented (as if in a thought bubble) upon the head of a royal female harmonist (La Reina), see below. She is shown seeing the tones created by that number, now supporting two symmetrical tritones. The lunar eclipse year was also shown above her head (that is, in her mind) as the newly appeared number 1875, at that limit. This latter story probably dates around 600 BCE. This, and much more besides, can be found in my Harmonic Origins of the World, Chapter Eight: Quetzcoatl’s Brave New World.
Figure 5.8 Picture of an ancient female harmonist realizing the matrix for 144 x 20 = 2880. If we tilt our tone circle so that the harmonist is D and her cave is the octave, then the octave is an arc from bottom to top, of the limit. Above and below form two tetrachords to A and D, separated by a middle tritone pain, a-flat and g-sharp. Art by by Michael D Coe, 1965: permission given.
This is a re-posting of an article thought lost, deriving in part from Malcolm Stewart’s Starcut Diagram. The long awaited 2nd edition Sacred Geometry of the Starcut Diagram has now been published by Inner Traditions. Before this, Ernest McClain had been working on tuning via Gothic master Honnecourt’s Diagram of a Man (fig. 2), which is effectively a double square version of the starcut diagram.
The square is the simplest of two dimensional structures to draw, giving access to many fundamental values; for example the unit square has the diagonal length equal to the square root of two which, compared to the unit side length, forms the perfect tritone of 1.414 in our decimal fractional notation (figure 1 left). If the diagonal is brought down to overlay a side then one has the beginning of an ancient series of root derivations usually viewed within the context of a double square, a context often found in Egyptian sacred art where “the stretching of the rope” was used to layout temples and square grids were used to express complex relationships, a technique Schwaller de Lubitz termed Canevas (1998). Harmonically the double square expresses octave doubling (figure 1 right).
Figure 1 left: The doubling of the square side equal 360 units and right: The double square as naturally expressing the ordinal square roots of early integers.
Musical strings have whole number lengths, in ratio to one another, to form intervals between strings and this gives geometry a closer affinity to tuning theory than the use of arithmetic to calculate the ratios within a given octave range. The musicology inferred for the ancient world by Ernest G. McClain in his Myth of Invariance (1976) was calculational rather than geometrical, but in later work McClain (Bibal 2012-13) was very interested in whatever could work (such as folding paper) but was especially interested in the rare surviving notebook of 13th century artist Villard de Honnecourt, whose sketches employed rectilinear frameworks within which cathedrals, their detailing, human and other figures could be drawn.
“I believe we have overlooked Honnecourt as a prime example of what Neugebauer meant in claiming Mesopotamian geometry to approach Renaissance levels illustrated in Descartes. If Honnecourt is 13th c. then he seems more likely to be preserving the ancient picture, not anticipating the new one.”
This draws one into significant earlier traditions of sacred art in Egypt (Canevas) and in Indian temple and statue design, and to Renaissance paintings (see end quote) in which composition was based upon geometrical ideas such as symmetry, divisions into squares and alignments to diagonals. Figure 2 shows one of Honnecourt’s highly stylised sketches of a man, using a technique still in use by a 20th century heraldic artist.
Ernest McClain, Bibal Group: 18/03/2012
Figure 2 The Honnecourt Man employing a geometrical canon.
The six units, to the shoulders of the man, can be divided to form a double square, the lower square for the legs and the upper one for the torso. The upper square is then a region of octave doubling. McClain had apparently seen a rare and more explicit version of this arrangement and, from memory, attempted a reconstruction from first principles (figure 3), which he shared with his Bibal colleagues, including myself.
Figure 3 McClain’s final picture of the Honnecourt Man, its implied Monochord of intervals and their reciprocals.
To achieve a tuning framework, the central crossing point had been moved downwards by half a unit, in a double square of side length three. On the right this is ½ of a string length when the rectangle is taken to define the body of a monochord. McClain was a master of the monochord since his days studying Pythagorean tuning. Perhaps his greatest insight was the fact that the diagonal lines, in crossing, were inadvertently performing calculations and providing the ratios between string lengths forming musical intervals.
Since the active region for octave studies is the region of doubling, the top square is of primary interest. At the time I was also interested in multiple squares and the Egyptian Canevas (de Lubitz. 1998. Chapter 8) since these have special properties and were evidently known as early as the fifth millennium BC (see Heath 2014, chapter two) by the megalith builders of Carnac. In my own redrawing of McClain’s diagram (figure 4) multiple squares are to be seen within the top square. This revealed that projective geometry was to be found as these radiant lines, of the sort seen in the perspective of three dimensions when drawn in two dimensions.
Figure 4 Redrawing McClain to show multiple squares, and how a numerical octave limit of 360 is seen creating lengths similar to those found in his harmonic mountains.
Returning to this matter, a recently developed technique of populating a single square provides a mechanism for studying what happens within such a square when “starcut”.
Figure 5 left:Malcolm Stewart’s 2nd edition book cover introducing right:the Starcut Diagram,applicable to the top square of Honnecourt’s octave model .
Malcolm Stewart’s diagram is a powerful way of using a single square to achieve many geometrical results and, in our case, it is a minimalist version that could have more lines emanating from the corners and more intermediate points dividing the squares sides, to which the radiant lines can then travel. Adding more divisions along the sides of the starcut is like multiplying the limiting number of a musical matrix, for example twice as many raises by an octave.
A computer program was developed within the Processing framework to increase the divisions of the sides and draw the resulting radiants. A limit of 720 was used since this defines Just intonation of scales and 720 has been identified in many ancient texts as having been a significant limiting number in antiquity. Since McClain was finding elements of octave tuning within a two-square geometry, my aim was to see if the crossing points between radiants of a single square (starcut) defined tones in the just scales possible to 360:720. This appears to be the case (figure 6) though most of the required tone numbers appear along the central vertical division and it is only at the locations nearest to D that eb to f and C to c# that only appear “off axis”. The pattern of the tones then forms an interesting invariant pattern.
Figure 6 Computer generated radiants for a starcut diagram with sides divided into six.
Figure 7 http://HarmonicExplorer.org showing the tone circle and harmonic mountain (matrix) for limit 720, the “calendar constant” of 360 days and nights.
Each of the radiant crossing points represents the diagonal of an M by N rectangle and so the rational “calculation” of a given tone, through the crossing of radiants, is a result of the differences from D (equal to either 360 or 720) to the tone number concerned (figure 8).
Figure 8 How the tone numbers are calculated via geometrical coincidence of cartesian radiants which are rational in their shorter side length at the value of a Just tone number
It is therefore no miracle that the tone numbers for Just intonation can be found at some crossing points and, once these are located on this diagram, those locations could have been remembered as a system for working out Just tone numbers.
Bibliography
Heath, Richard.
2014. Sacred Number and the Lords of Time. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions.
2018. Harmonic Origins of the World: Sacred Number at the Source of Creation. Inner Traditions.
2021. Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels. Inner Traditions.
Lubitz, R.A. Schwaller de.
1998. The Temple of Man: Apet of the South at Luxor. Vermont: Inner Traditions.
McClain, Ernest G.
1976. The Myth of Invariance: The Origin of the Gods, Mathematics and Music from the Rg Veda to Plato. York Beach, ME: Nicolas Hays.
Stewart, Malcolm.
2022. Sacred Geometry of the Starcut Diagram: The Genesis of Number, Proportion, and Cosmology. Inner Traditions.
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.
