A Mexican Triple Square at Teotihuacan

image: Ricardo David Sánchez for Wikipedia 

This article is from June 2012 on my past Matrix of Creation site where it was read 548 times at the time of last backup. It led to another article and so I repeat it here.

The late Hugh Harleston Jr revealed the famous Mexican pyramids at Teotihuacan as being the manifestation of a very advanced megalithic culture, the Olmec as a root culture for New World Megalithism of Mexico and South America (that led to the Maya nearly a millennium later, the Aztec and the Inca) . The Teoti city-building culture started around 200 BCE but it is not exactly clear when the great city started to be built or what it represented. However, Carnac’s megalithic geometries, its day-inch counting within monuments and evident use of circumpolar astronomy suggests important new clues in the interpretation of this sacred city’s design.

So I will open a new thread here to look at the Teotihuacas and the Maya. What better way to start than by immediately identifying the more formal part of the city as following the outline of a triple square, the geometry that in the old world linked the solar year to the eclipse year. Harleston’s web site had a very detailed site plan encoded in special units, called STUs or Hunabs which themselves appear derived from the metre but are also very close to the an Egyptian double royal cubits in length, in its Standard Geographical form (using John Neal’s classification). Harleston’s actual length for the Hunab is exactly the twelfth root of two metres, but that is another story.

Figure 1 Harleston’s time map view of Teotihuacan using his established unit measure of 1.0594 metres, based upon many distances between designed points in the complex. Note that the diagonal of the triple square passes through the two large pyramids that dominate the site, generally called Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramind of the Moon. The triple square has been offset to the North to run through the end of the northerly viewing platforms of the plaza terminating the “solar highway” before the Pyramid of the Moon. [taken from Mayan Treasure]

The triple square is shown defining North with its diagonal but the sides follow the bearing of the “solar highway” (sometimes also known as The Path of the Dead), which is about fifteen and a half degrees east of north rather than the 18.43 degrees of a triple squares diagonal. However the diagonal runs through the two pyramids west of north by about three degrees minus two minutes even though the diagonal was NOT made to point directly North for reasons that may emerge. Instead, the principle axis of the triple square could be pointing to a circumpolar star at maximum eastern elongation and in fact, the behaviour of circumpolar stars could be responsible for the wide range of alignments found in Mexican pyramids over many centuries.

In the case of Teotihuacan, the triple square eems to point at the ex-pole star Thurban around 168 BCE, which could therefore be the date of foundation for the building of the city, since all else proceeds from this alignment of the road. Thurban, in this epoch, was rapidly moving away from the pole due to the precession of the north pole (and equinoxes), from its “reign” as the pole star when the Great Pyramid was built at Giza, whose northern “air shaft” pointed to Thurban. What could be happening is that when megalithism is practiced between 10-20 degrees latitude, the residual circumpolar region is shrunk but can nonetheless form part of the symbolic astronomy towards which megalithic structures are defined.

The long road structure at Teotihuacan pointed directly towards
the maximum elongation of Thurban to the east, in 170 BCE.

Figure 2 The Google Earth view of Teotihucan’s “ceremonial complex”, showing how its triple square pointed towards the circumpolar star Thurban in the epoch 170 BCE. The most significant astronomical reason for using a triple square is to represent the Metonic and Saros periods as a day count so that the pyramids of the Sun and Moon then lie on the metonic period of nineteen solar years whilst the triple square is both oriented to Thurban whilst signifying the controlling periodicity for Eclipses which is nineteen eclipse years. The day length of 0.365 metres would then point to the division of one day into 365 parts, a division quite natural for circumpolar astronomy with 365 days in a year.

At Lochmariaquer, the triple square pointing north was employed to count time in day-inches and even though the units seem different, the subject of such counts are the relations found between the solar and eclipse year. The epitome of this is found in the completing cycle of the sun and moon over nineteen years, called the Metonic period. The Saros period that dominates eclipse phenomena is nineteen eclipse years long, the difference between 19 eclipse years and 19 solar years exactly one lunar year of twelve lunar months.

Figure 3 The north facing triple square at Locmariaquer used the Tumulus d’Er Grah to mark a day-inch count for the Saros period, leaving an implicit metonic period count to the direct north.

Figure 3 The north facing triple square at Locmariaquer used the Tumulus d’Er Grah to mark a day-inch count for the Saros period, leaving an implicit metonic period count to the direct north.

At Locmariaquer (circa. 4500 BCE), its tumulus ended, in similar fashion, one Saros period from the starting point at Er Grah and this can be equated with the length of the triple square at Teotihuacan, making the diagonal equal to the length of the Metonic period of nineteen years. At this scaling, each day would be 365 millimetres long – showing how large megalithic monuments have to be if each millimeter is to represent just the four minutes that it takes for the earth’s rotation to catch up with the sun’s movement in a day, on the ecliptic.

The parallelism between Lochmariaquer and Teotihucan is striking as a mode of astronomical symbolism that naturally makes monuments of different epochs a unique statement within a continuing tradition that is best called Megalithism. Megalithism has its roots in astronomical symbolism and rituals strongly tied to astronomical periods, many of which have been sublimated or dropped within modern calendars.

Chapter 9: Quetzalcoatl’s Brave New World of Harmonic Origins of the World describes some of the number sciences of the Olmec and their derivative New World civilizations.

Locmariaquer 1: Carnac’s Menhirs and Circumpolar Stars

Read 1458 times when last published on MatrixOfCreation.co.uk, Wednesday, 16 May 2012 14:22

At megalithic sites, the only alignment of note on the northern horizon has usually been the direction of the north pole or “true” North on the site plan. “Megalithic” cultures worldwide, both the later manifestations in the Americas or the old world cultures of Northwest Europe or Egypt, built structures oriented in a very accurate way to North. The builders of the Great Pyramid for example or of the geo-glyphs of the Amazon rainforest, seemed to have had an unexpectedly good method for determining North, no easy task when a pole star is never exactly north and, in many epochs, there is no star near to the pole.

Continue reading “Locmariaquer 1: Carnac’s Menhirs and Circumpolar Stars”

Erdeven Alignment’s counting of Metonic and Saros Periods

first published in March 2018

The word Alignment is used in France to describe its stone rows. Their interpretation has been various, from being an army turned to stone (a local myth) to their use, like graph paper, for extrapolation of values (Thom). That stone rows were alignments to horizon events gives a partial but useful explanation, since menhirs (or standing stones) do form a web of horizon alignments to solstice sun and to the moon’s extreme rising and setting event, at maximum and minimum standstill. At Carnac the solstice sun was aligned to the diagonal of the 4 by 3 rectangle and maximum and minimum standstill moon aligned to the diagonal of a single or double square, respectively.

It seems quite clear today that stone rows at least represented the counting of important astronomical time periods. We have seen at Crocuno that eclipse periods, exceeding the solar year, are accompanied by some rectalinear structures (Le Manio, Crucuno, Kerzerho) which embody counting in miniature, as if to record it, and it has been observed that cromlechs (or large stone kerb monuments) were built at the ends of the long stone rows of Carnac and Erdeven. Sometimes, a cromlech initiated a longer count,with or without stone rows, that ended with a rectangle (Crucuno). The focus on counting time naturally reveals a vernacular quite unique to this region and epoch. We have seen that the Kerzerho alignments were at least a 4 by 3 rectangle which recorded the 235 lunar months in feet along its diagonal to midsummer solstice sunset. After that rectangle there follows a massive Alignment of stone rows to the east,ending after 2.3 km having gradually changed their bearing to 15 degrees south of east. Just above the alignments lies a hillock with multiple dolmens and a north-south stone row (Mané Braz) whilst below its eastern extremity lies the tumulus and dolmen,”T-shaped passage-grave” (Burl. Megalithic Brittany. 196) called Mané Groh.


Figure 1 The intermittent extent of the Erdevan Alignments, and associated dolmens
Continue reading “Erdeven Alignment’s counting of Metonic and Saros Periods”