Astronomy 4: The Planetary Matrix

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.

Wikipedia: “Geocentric model” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentric_model

Gurdjieff’s Diagram of Everything Living

first created: 28 October 2017

Gurdjieff first presented his ideas to groups in pre-revolutionary Russia. Amongst his carefully chosen students it was the habit to reconstruct talks and diagrams as much as possible, an endeavour that gave us a textbook of Gurdjieff’s ideas called In Search of the Miraculous (P.D. Ouspensky, 1950). This early form of the teaching was radically revised and extended by Gurdjieff, now as an author, during the 1920s, producing All and Everything whose part one was Beelzebub’sTales to his Grandson (G.I. Gurdjieff, 1950). Prior to drawing this diagram just after February 1917, Gurdjieff had been presenting ideas about transformation of energies, human and cosmic, using the musical theory surrounding the octave of eight notes. The Diagram of Everything Living was “still another system of classification… in an altogether different ratio of octaves… [that] leads us beyond the limits of what we call ‘living beings’ both higher [and lower] than living beings. It deals not with individuals but with classes in a very wide sense.”


Figure 1 The Diagram of Everything Living
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On the Harmonic Origins of the World

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.

Is human history lacking something fundamental?

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Introduction to my book Harmonic Origins of the World

Over the last seven thousand years, hunter-gathering humans have been transformed into the “modern” norms of citizens (city dwellers) through a series of metamorphoses during which the intellect developed ever-larger descriptions of the world. Past civilizations and even some tribal groups have left wonders in their wake, a result of uncanny skills – mental and physical – which, being hard to repeat today, cannot be considered primitive. Buildings such as Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza are felt anomalous, because of the mathematics implied by their construction. Our notational mathematics only arose much later and so, a different maths must have preceded ours.

We have also inherited texts from ancient times. Spoken language evolved before there was any writing with which to create texts. Writing developed in three main ways: (1) Pictographic writing evolved into hieroglyphs, like those of Egyptian texts, carved on stone or inked onto papyrus, (2) the Sumerians used cross-hatched lines on clay tablets, to make symbols representing the syllables within speech. Cuneiform allowed the many languages of the ancient Near East to be recorded, since all spoken language is made of syllables, (3) the Phoenicians developed the alphabet, which was perfected in Iron Age Greece through identifying more phonemes, including the vowels. The Greek language enabled individual writers to think new thoughts through writing down their ideas; a new habit that competed with information passed down through the oral tradition. Ironically though, writing down oral stories allowed their survival, as the oral tradition became more-or-less extinct. And surviving oral texts give otherwise missing insights into the intellectual life behind prehistoric monuments.

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Jupiter’s gravitational and numerical influence

This post begins a Theme relating to the Trigon event occurring on 21st December 2020, when Jupiter and Saturn are conjunct at dusk in the sky. This touches upon what such synchronicities mean for other long term periods seen from Earth, such as the Moon’s nodal period of 6800 days and even the Precession of the Equinoxes over 25,800 ± 120 years.

Jupiter is the second largest body in the solar system next to the sun itself. In fact, Jupiter is not far short of being a sun itself and, being the closest giant planet to the Earth, our planet is strongly influenced by Jupiter’s gravity which, unlike the Sun’s continuous pull to maintain Earth’s orbit around it, Jupiter pulls upon the Earth and the Moon on an episodic basis when the Earth is passing between the Sun and Jupiter.

The Trigon Period of Jupiter and Saturn

Being a dark, planetary body, the episodic pull of Jupiter follows a different pattern to each of the inner, terrestrial planets; Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, since each has a different orbital period which, combined with Jupiter’s orbit, brings each under Jupiter’s influence or absence. The combined episodic pull of Jupiter and Saturn, is visually seen in their conjuction every 20 years, which occurs just over a third of the Zodiac onwards, thus giving a cosmic significance to the equilateral triangle as a sacred geometry.

Figure 1 The series of Trigon conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn, as will be the case on 21st December 2020

Only Earth’s large moon stops the axial tilt of the Earth from varying significantly, then causing large changes in climate which would have restricted the development of the relatively stable habitats and biomes we enjoy.

361 days: Jupiter and the Zodiac

The combination of Jupiter’s orbital period (of 4332 days) and Earth’s (of 365.2422 days) generates an interesting set of numerical facts since Jupiter passes through each of the twelve signs of the Zodiac in 361 days. This number is 19 times 19 days so that 12 times 361 days equals 4332 days. But these numbers are a product of the solar year of 365.2422 days, since the day length on Earth is 1 year divided by the 365.2422 days due to its rotation. If the day length were less or more then Jupiter’s complete orbit would still be as long but the numbers from Earth would not.

This is a major aspect of what the megalithic astronomy had to learn, that the relative time lengths of the many cosmic periods, counted in days, could be numerically interrelated when quantified. The situation of the earth orbit and its rotation would present Jupiter as a bright moving star which completed its journey through the stars in 12 times 361 days. Jupiter and the Zodiac of 12 constellations would inevitably become fused as seen in the story of Zeus, the Greek god name for Jupiter whose symbol is the twelve-fold circle. The pre-Classical Greeks were matriarchal, following the lunar month of twelve whole lunar months within the solar year and, the solar year only arose as the patriarchal northern tribes occupied Greece after the Bronze Age collapse. The name Zeus is therefore not matriarchal since the Greeks had no “Z”. Zeus arrived in ancient Greece with the tribes displaced from the North escaping the worsening climate at higher latitudes. And, whilst 12-foldness is associated with the Sun being in one of the 12 zodiacal constellations, Jupiter defines these through passing through each sign (on average) in 361 days.

399 days: Jupiter’s synodic period

Twelve-ness is a massively widespread tradition (see John Michell – Twelve-fold Tribes for instance) and the brightest celestial body next to the Sun is the Moon which expresses twelve whole lunar months a year (plus 7/19 of a lunar month). The common lunar year was therefore twelve months long, taking 354.367 days to complete, this countable between thirteen full moons. It is no accident that the 12-ness of the lunar year is connected with Jupiter’s 12-ness of its 361 day years, since the Jupiter synod has a strong grip on our moon: the synod is 9/8 lunar years long – a musical whole tone. And Saturn also has a similar grip, its synod of 378 days being 16/15 lunar years long.

When the Earth passes by Jupiter, the latter goes retrograde or backwards relative to the stars, meaning it appears to travel east night-by-night, rather than the norm for all planets (and the sun and moon) of slowly travelling west in our skies, as they orbit. During this retrograde period, the planet describes a loop in the sky relative to the stellar background, before returning to where it should be in the stars. Between the loops of Jupiter’s synodic period the 398.88 days could be counted in days. This can only mean that over millennia, the Moon became synchronised by the regular proximity of Jupiter to our moon.

Our months today have divided the solar year into twelve months of 30 or 31 days, to resemble Jupiter’s 12-fold zodiac and 12-month lunar year, the Roman emperors vying to lengthen a month and name it after themselves (examples being October after Octavius, September after Septimius and August after Augustus). And since a zodiacal sign is traversed after 361 days by its definer, it is inevitable that there are not 12 solar years in a Jupiter orbit but just less (11.86 years). However, the fact that 4332 days is not 12 times 365.2422 days accesses, through its deficit, more subtle possibilities hidden in a numerical world of differences.

Differences between periodicities, especially involving the moon that rotates the Earth, define those periods through the fact that they endlessly repeat so that differences accumulate over longer periods and when these differences are divided into the periods, a new set of numbers are generated. One could call orbital systems differential calculators and modern math would describe them as potentially discrete systems, which form due to gravitational recurrence. This idea that the planetary and lunar systems generate numbers is somewhat hidden by our modern description of such systems as subject to gravitational dynamics. The numbers allowed the ancient astronomers to discover a static numerical view of planetary astronomy through counting days. In contrast, modern astronomy calculates the location of celestial bodies from first principles; especially when trying to visit planetary bodies in spacecraft.

pdf: Counting lunar eclipses using the Phaistos Disk

This paper* concerns itself with a unique fired-clay disk, found by Luigi Pernier in 1908 within the Minoan “palace” of Phaistos (aka Faistos), on the Greek island of Crete. Called the Phaistos Disk, its purpose or meaning has been interpreted many times, largely seen as either (a) a double-sided text in the repeated form of a spiral and outer circle written using an unknown pictographic language stamped in the clay or (b) as an astronomical device, record or handy reference. We provide a calendric interpretation based on the simplest lunar calendars known to apply in Minoan times, finding the Disk to be (a) an elegant solution to predicting repeated eclipses within the Saros period and (b) an observation that the Metonic is just one lunar year longer, and true to the context of the Minoan culture of that period.

*First Published on 26 May 2017
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