The lunar crescent atop the “moon” tower’s cross.
Chartres, in north-west France, is a very special version of the Gothic transcept cathedral design. Having burnt down more than once, due to wooden ceilings, its reconstruction over many building seasons and different masonic teams, as funds permitted, would have needed strong organizing ideas to inform the work (as per Master Masons of Chartres by John James).
Continue reading “Chartres 1: the cosmic coding of its towers in height”ABOVE: Stela C from Tres Zapotes roughly rebuilt by Ludovic Celle and based on a drawing by Miguel Covarrubias.
The policy of archaeology regarding the Maya and their root progenitor the Olmec (1500 BCE onwards) is that its cultural innovations were made within Mexico alongside an agrarian revolution of the three sisters, namely squash, maize (“corn”), and climbing beans. This relationship of agriculture to civilizing skills then reads like the Neolithic revolution in Mesopotamia after 4000 BCE, where irrigation made the fertile loam able to absorb agricultural innovations from the northern golden triangle leading to writing, trade, city states, religion, arithmetic and so on. However, the idea that the ancient near east or India could have been an influence through ocean conveyors, of currents and trade winds, has never been accepted when proposed. Yet there are good reasons to think this since the astronomy and monumentalism of the pre-Columbian Mexican civilizations has precedents in the ancient near east and other locations.
The timing of the Olmec and the strangeness of immediately building sacred cities with an almost captive population of around 10,000 people, such as La Venta and San Lorenzo, with strong Jaguar imagery and practices, implies a cultic basis was present from the beginning. And it is now looking likely that the ancient near east was similarly prefigured, not just by agriculture but also by know how involving numbers for the building of sacred buildings with astronomical aspects – a tradition that goes back at least to the megalithic of the Atlantic seaboard of Europe.
Since Columbus, the native populations of North and South America have been largely displaced or marginalized. It may be for this reason that the notion that people from an advanced population had initiated the Olmec civilization requires a high, possibly impossible, level of proof. This Isolationism***, perhaps to avoid “adding insult to injury”, is against the Olmec having derived from the Old World, where the historical records are not that much better. The Olmec origin date is around the time of the quite sudden collapse of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean around 1200 BCE. And the Olmec, Maya and Aztec appear to have had a definite myth concerning someone called Quetzelcoatl bringing civilizing skills to found their culture, though their culture was also seen as arising from a group of seven underground caves.
***The opposite of Diffusionism: Diffusionism is an anthropological school of thought, was an attempt to understand the distribution of culture in terms of the origin of culture traits and their spread from one society to another. Versions of diffusionist thought included the conviction that all cultures originated from one culture center (heliocentric diffusion); the more reasonable view that cultures originated from a limited number of culture centers (culture circles); and finally the notion that each society is influenced by others but that the process of diffusion is both [subject to chance] and arbitrary . read more
Having sketched this background, this article will explore a strange coincidence between the calendrical origins of the Megalithic in Brittany, of a 36 lunar month, 3 lunar year calendar, and the 18 month calendar found in the some of the later Olmec Great Counts, called after the Supplementary Glyphs appended to record the local time in an 18 lunar month calendar. The correlation between long counts and the supplementary data has been invaluable since the long counts can be ambiguous between one or more possible dates but we can predict the sun and moon that far back can compare the glyphs with the alternative dates. Counts have also been found that were eclipses of the sun or moon, resolving a given long count date. It is therefoe interesting to compare the two calendars using the geometrical fact that 36 lunar months is both 2 x 18, 4 x 9 and 3 x 12 since 36 is 4 x 3 x3.
The implication is that the megalithic calendar over three years, which was based upon noticing that three solar years was the diagonal of a four square triangle whose side length is three lunar years, appears to have resulted in an Olmec/Maya calendar in which each square is 9 lunar months. As was noted in previous books (2004, 2016, 2018), the range 9 to 18 years contains a single lunar month {12}, the Jupiter synod {13.5}, the Saturn synod {12.8} and the Uranus synod {12.5}. This octave range between 9 and 2 x 9 = 18 was therefore possible to manifest as a Mexican city design (Teotihuacan) and as the Parthenon of Athens. A number of other examples can be found as one of the proposed major models used from the megalithic onwards, as discussed in Sacred Number: Language of the Angels (2021).
The human viewpoint is from the day being lived through and, as weeks and months pass, the larger phenomenon of the year moves the sun in the sky causing seasons. Time to us is stored as a calendar or year diary, and the human present moment conceives of a whole week, a whole month or a whole year. Initially, the stone age had a very rudimentary calendar, the early megalith builders counting the moon over two months as taking around 59 days, giving them the beginning of an astronomy based upon time events on the horizon, at the rising or setting of the moon or sun. Having counted time, only then could formerly unnoticed facts start to emerge, for example the variation of (a) sun rise and setting in the year on the horizon (b) the similar variations in moon rise and set over many years, (c) the geocentric periods of the planets between oppositions to the sun, and (d) the regularity between the periods when eclipses take place. These were the major types of time measured by megalithic astronomy.
The categories of astronomical time most visible to the megalithic were also four-fold as: 1. the day, 2. the month, 3. the year, and 4. cycles longer than the year (long counts).
Continue reading “Knowing Time in the Megalithic”A previous post explained the anatomy of the primary celestial cycles of the Sun and Moon. The “resting” part of these cycles are the winter solstice (opposite the summer solstice which was today) and the dark moon (which is coming in a week, after the waning half moon day before yesterday). In the resting phase, the cosmological origin is traditionally found, containing all that is to manifest but that is not yet expressed. In this respect, the Big Bang is the equivalent for modern thinking, as the origin of the entire visible and invisible universe seen via modern instrumentation and discoveries.
Life is somehow connected with our large Moon, without which there could have been no living planet. The form of life appears influenced by the moon and its conjunctions with different planets. And without (a) the tides, (b) the tectonic plates supporting continents, and (c) the tilt and spin of the earth; the earth would be static rather than actively supporting the necessary rhythms of Life. A primordial collision created these features of our earth and moon, since the cyclic archetypes provide an essential framework for living beings, to which their bodies are synchronized through circadian and behavioral rhythms.
Continue reading “The Fourfold Nature of Sun and Moon”Our two luminaries, the sun and moon, share a similar form-in-time, as the seasonal year and the monthly phases of the moon. The form they share is of two extremes of opposite character, and two midpoints between these.
The Solar Extremes: At the solar extremes, the sun rises high in midsummer day and rises to a much lower point in midwinter day, extreme points at which the sun moves very slowly day-by-day these hence called solstices from the Latin, “sun stands still”.
The Lunar Extremes: These are the full moon, meaning its face is completely illuminated by the sun, and the dark moon, when the moon stands by and in front of the sun and so its face is not illuminated but during a rare solar eclipse, the dark disk of the moon can be seen slowly crossing the sun’s face since the moon moves 12.368 times faster than the sun that defines each day.
The Solar Midpoints: These occur when the sun rises exactly east and sets directly west, everywhere on the earth. These moments are called Equinox because the length of the day then equals (in Latin: “equi”) and the length of the night (in Latin, “nox”). In the year these two equinoxes are called Spring, when light and heat from the sun are growing (waxing), and Autumn, when light and heat are diminishing (waning).
The Lunar Midpoints: Like the sun, these are exactly between its extremes, when exactly half the moon’s face is illuminated. In the morning, as the full moon approaches the sun, its gibbous (less-than-circular) face is waning until it reaches the point of half illumination by the sun. In contrast, the dark moon reappears as a crescent moon, pulling away from the sun setting in the evening.
The common factor between the midpoints of both sun and moon is that this is when time begins, in the sense that, at two equinoxes and at the two half-moons, (a) the sun’s daily sunrise on the horizon is moving fastest and (b) The sun’s illumination of the moon is changing most quickly. In both cases, this allowed the megalithic to accurately start and finish their counting of these time cycles of the year and the month. In both cases, midpoints could most accurately define the day on which an event occurred.
The following post takes this further.
By 2016 it was already obvious that the lunar month (in days) and the PMY, AMY and yard (in inches) had peculiar relationships involving the ratio 32/29, shown above. This can now be explained as a manifestation of day-inch counting and the unusual numerical properties of the solar and lunar year, when seen using day-inch counting.
It is hard to imagine that the English foot arose from any other process than day-inch counting; to resolve the excess of the solar year over the lunar year, in three years – the near-anniversary of sun and moon. This created the Proto Megalithic Yard (PMY) of 32.625 day-inches as the difference.
A strange property of N:N+1 right triangles can then transform this PMY into the English foot, when counting over a single lunar and solar year using the PMY to count months.
