Tag: nodal cycle

The Geocentric Orbit of Venus

It is helpful to visually complete the movement of Venus over her synodic period (of 1.6 years) seen by an observer on the Earth.

figure 3.13 (left) of Sacred Goddess in Ancient Goddess Cultures
version 3 (c) 2024 Richard Heath

In the heliocentric world view all planets orbit the sun, yet we view them from the Earth and so, until the 16th century astronomy had a different world view where the planets either orbited the sun (in the inner solar system) which like the outer planets orbited the earth, this view called geocentric. The discovery of gravity confirmed the heliocentric view but the geocentric view is still that seen from the Earth.

The geocentric was then assumed to be wholly superseded, but there are many aspects of it that appear to have given our ancestors their various religious views and, I believe, the megalithic monuments express most clearly a form of astronomy based upon numbers rather than on laws, numbers embedded in the structure of Time seen from the Earth, and hence showing the geocentric view had more to it than the medieval view discarded by modern science.

Venus was once considered one part of the triple goddess and the picture above shows her complete circuit both in the heavens and in front of and behind the sun. The shape of this forms two horns, firstly in the West at evening after sunset. Then she rushes in front of the sun to reemerge in the East to form a symmetrical other horn after which she travels behind the sun to eventually re-emerge in the West in a circuit lasting 1.6 years of 365 days, more precisely in 583.92 days – her synodic period.

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Utility of the Ushtogai Square to count the Nodal Period

Using Google Earth, a large landform was found in Kazakhstan (Dmitriy Dey, 2007); a square 940 feet across with diagonals, made of evenly spaced mounds. We will demonstrate how the square could have counted the lunar nodal period of 6800 days (18.617 solar years)

 images courtesy of Wild Ticket

Counting the Lunar Nodal Period

One can see the side length of the square contains seventeen (17) mounds, with 16 even distances between the mounds. Were one to count each side as 17 mounds, then four times 17 gives 68 which reminds us of the 6800 days in the moon’s nodal period of 18.617 years. If 17 can be multiplied by 100, then one could count the nodal period in days, and to do this one notices that the diagonals have one central space, around which each of four arms are 10 mounds long.

The Ushtogai Square from above, north to the top.

Each side length of 17 mounds forms a triangle to the central space, perhaps for central control, with two sides (left and right) of 10 mounds each. As with our own decimal counting of units and tens (as in 12) there could have been a day marker placed in the center.  On day 1, it was moved to the first mound on the left. Every day, the left marker moves towards the left corner mound. Upon reaching the corner, two things happen.

  1. The day marker returns to the center and,
  2. A ten-day marker then starts its own journey to the right hand corner.

The left-hand day counting would continue on the next day, for ten more days, whereupon the same action, incrementing the ten counter, would mark another ten days in a further step between mounds, towards the right hand corner.

After 100 days, the marker of ten-day periods has reached the right hand corner and a new hundred day marker is deployed, to record hundreds of days per mound. Only after the first 100 days is the hundred marker placed upon the left-hand corner mound (that might have represented 100 days after the maximum standstill of the moon.)

The counting scheme for one quarter of the nodal period, repeated in each quadrant to count 6800 days

All of the above is repeated, slowly moving the hundred-day counter from the left corner to the right, at which time the moon no longer exceeds the solar extremes of summer and winter solstice in its range of rising and setting every orbit of, on average, 27.32166 days.

In conclusion …

There is a very beautiful correspondence between the geometry of Ushtogai and the nodal period of the moon. But in a following article we will explore the parallel meaning of this monument as a counter of lunar months: to use the outer perimeter to study the Metonic and Saros eclipse periods.

There is a second article on Ustogai here.

For more information on this sort of astronomical counting in the prehistoric period, and of the details of the major time periods of the moon and sun,
these can be found in my books,
Sacred Number and the Lords of Time and
Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels.

Mangroves and the Moon’s Maximum

photo: Ariefrahman for Wikipedia /_

Tides on earth are due to the sun and moon. During the year, the Sun reaches extreme solstice points and during the lunar month, the phases indicate where the sun is relative to the sun: their configuration relative to one another, leading to stronger or weaker tides.

The tides therefore vary but when the lunar orbit is in phase with the solar ecliptic path, the moon rises above and below that path and the moon becomes more extremely north and south than the solstice sun ever can be. Within a single year, the sun is at winter solstice in midwinter, and summer solstice in midsummer. But the moon takes 18.618 years to reach its maximum standstill, further south and north than the solstice sun.

Ancient cultures were aware of this cycle and sometimes thought to place monuments or burial places on an alignment with maximum moonrise or moonset, occurring north and south of east on the eastern or western horizon.

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The Strange Design of Eclipses

We all know about solar eclipses but they are rarely seen, since the shadow of the moon (at one of its two orbital nodes) creates a cone of darkness which only covers a small part of the earth’s surface which travels from west to east, taking hours. For the megalithic to have pinned their knowledge of eclipses to solar eclipses, they would have instead studied the more commonly seen eclipse (again at a node), the lunar eclipse which occurs when the earth stands between the sun and the moon and the large shadow of the earth envelopes a large portion of the moon’s surface, as the moon passes through our planet’s shadow.

This phenomenon of eclipses is the result of many co-incidences:

Firstly, if the orbit of the moon ran along the ecliptic: there would be a solar eclipse and a lunar eclipse in each of its orbits, which are 27 and 1/3 days long.

Secondly, if the moon’s orbit was longer or shorter, the angular size of the sun would not be very similar. The moon’s orbit is not circular but elliptical so that, at different points in the lunar orbit the moon is larger, at other points smaller in angular size than the sun. This is most visible with solar eclipses where some are full or total eclipses, and others eclipse less than the whole solar disc, called annular eclipses.

Thirdly, the ecliptic shape of the moon’s orbit is deformed by gravitational forces such as the bulge of the earth, the sun and planets so that its major axis rotates. When the moon is furthest away (at apogee), its disc exceeds that of the sun. And when the moon is nearest to the earth (at perigee), its disc is smaller than that of the sun. This type of progression is called the precession of the lunar orbit where the major axis travels in the same direction as the sun and moon. This contrasts with the precession of the lunar nodes which also rotate (see later).

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An Angelic Geometrical Design

The above diagram contains information with can generally only be grasped by using a geometrical diagram. Its focus is the properties of a right triangle that is 4 times larger than its third and shortest side. The left hand view illustrates what we call Pythagoras’ theorum, namely that

“The squares of the shorter sides add up to the square of the longest side.”

Here this is shown as 144 + 9 = 153 because, if the third side is three lunar months long, then the 4-long base is 12 lunar months, hence the square of 12 is 144″. The longest side is then 153, the diagonal of the four squares rectangle, and the square root of 153 is 12.369 lunar months, the solar year when measured in lunar months.

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pdf: Synchronicity of Day and Year with the Lunar Orbit

This document was prepared by Richard Heath as a letter for Nature magazine and submitted on 14th April 1994 but remained unpublished. For readers of the Matrix of Creation (2nd ed, Inner Traditions Press, 2004) it marks the discovery of a unit of time proposed and named the Chronon, as being 1/10000th of the Moon’s orbit and also the difference between the sidereal and tropical day of the Earth. The paper also documents a discovery made, with Robin Heath, later to be documented in his books: that one can divide up the solar year by its excess over the eclipse year to reveal an 18.618:19.618 ratio between these years, and many other interesting numerical facts not mentioned in this place. The puzzle here is a connection between the rotation of the Earth, the solar year and the precession of the Moon’s orbit which (a) may be explainable by science (b) appears to have puzzled Megalithic astronomers and (c) should puzzle us today.