Tag: Quadrivium

John Michell’s Perpetual Choirs

15 April 2017 Views: 10450

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


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Tetraktys as plan of planetary harmony and the four Elements

Figure 1 The elimination of 5 as a factor in the harmonic mountain for 36 lunar years, resolved using matrix units of one tenth of a month and the limit 360 units.

In a previous post I explored the astronomical matrix presented in The Harmonic Origins of the World with a view to reducing the harmonic between outer planets and the lunar year to a single harmonic register of Pythagorean fifths. This became possible when the 32 lunar month period was realized to be exactly 945 days but then that this, by the nature of Ernest McClain’s harmonic mountains (figure 1) must be 5/4 of two Saturn synods.

Using the lowest limit of 18 lunar months, the commensurability of the lunar year (12) with Saturn (12.8) and Jupiter (13.5) was “cleared” using tenths of a month, revealing Plato’s World Soul register of 6:8::9:12 but shifted just a fifth to 9:12::13.5:18, perhaps revealing why the Olmec and later Maya employed an 18 month “supplementary” calendar after some of their long counts.

By doubling the limit from 18 to three lunar years (36) the 13.5 is cleared to the 27 lunar months of two Jupiter synods, the lunar year must be doubled (24) and the 32 lunar month period is naturally within the register of figure 1 whilst 5/2 Saturn synods (2.5) must also complete in that period of 32 lunar months.

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Distribution of Prime Numbers in the Tone Circle

first published 13 February 2018

The ancient notion of tuning matrices, intuited by Ernest G. McClain in the 1970s, was based on the cross-multiples of the powers of prime numbers three and five, placed in an table where the two primes define two dimensions, where the powers are ordinal (0,1,2,3,4, etc…) and the dimension for prime number 5, an upward diagonal over a horizontal extent of the powers of prime number 3. Whilst harmonic numbers have been found in the ancient world as cuneiform lists (e.g. the Nippur List circa 2,200 BCE), these “regular” numbers would have been known to only have factors of the first three prime numbers 2, 3 and 5 (amenable to their base-60 arithmetic). Furthermore, the prime number two would have been seen as not instrumental in placing where, on such harmonic matrices, each harmonic number can be seen on a harmonic matrix (in religious terms perhaps a holy mountain), as

  • “right” according to its powers of 3.
  • “above” according to its powers of 5.

The role of odd primes within octaves

An inherent duality of perspective was established, between seeing each regular number as a whole integer number and seeing it as made up of powers of the two odd two prime numbers, their harmonic composition of the powers of 3 and 5 (see figure 1). It was obvious then as now that regular numbers were the product of three different prime numbers, each raised to different powers of itself, and that the primes 3 and 5 had the special power of both (a) creating musical intervals within octaves between numerical tones and (b) uniquely locating each numerical tone upon a mountain of numerical powers of 3 and 5.


Figure 1 Viewing the harmonic primes 3 and 5 as a mountain of their products, seen as integer numers or as to these harmonic primes
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Autonomous Nature of Ancient Numerical Mysteries

The numerical foundations of the “earth mysteries” were nominally present in the medieval doctrine of the four numerical arts, the Quadrivium of sacred numbers, geometry, musical harmony and astronomy. However, these foundations need to be applied to something real which is: the numerical nature of the world seen from being alive upon it. This application gives a completely different set of results to modern science where, instead, numbers are being employed for measurements and calculations (using the physical laws discovered after the medieval period came to an end.)

The ancient mysteries treated numbers as having characteristics
seen to be active within the world.

In applying these numerical arts, one comes into contact with mysteries in the form of ancient monuments, art and literary works, these containing the clues required for developing, in oneself, a kind of skill. This skill can mature into being able to recover information in the most unlikely circumstances because something apparently other to oneself is active within you: a developed sense. This I call the autonomous nature of the mysteries, which is essential when going beyond what is simply data in books, monuments, etc. I believe it is mistaken to call such mystery work historical since it is actually happening in the present moment to create something new, whilst appearing to reference data from the past. Historical data provides the necessary starting points for a new work of reconstructing the mysteries within oneself.

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