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The geocentric was then assumed to be wholly superseded, but there are many aspects of it that appear to have given our ancestors their various religious views and, I believe, the megalithic monuments express most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.

Continue reading “The Geocentric Orbit of Venus”

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

Tragic Loss of the Geocentric Arts and Sciences

This was an article for New Dawn.

The geocentric planetary model on the left was displaced by a visually simple heliocentric model, of how the solar system would look from a distance rather than from the Earth.

About 400 years ago, the move to the Heliocentric Model of the “solar system” swept away the worldview upon which human spirituality had been based for at least 5000 years. We can say that all spiritual literature was based upon the previous cosmological norms of the Geocentric Model. It is generally not realized that the Koran, New Testament, Buddhist, Tibetan, Hindu, Pythagorean, Platonic, yogic, shamanistic, and many other primary and secondary texts including Shakespeare, alluded to the details of a geocentric cosmology: a foundational framework often debunked as inaccurate yet, the geocentric was a valid ordering of the planetary cosmos. The religious values within the model were overtaken by the new scientific norm, which was inherently materialistic in its study of physical laws and processes, these universal throughout an ever-expanding vision of the universe, through observations and experiments in physics and chemistry deducing new types of knowledge. And mankind would soon use these new laws and discoveries to exploit the universe itself.

This transition from geocentrism to heliocentrism came against a backdrop of Islamic and Christian suppression of scientific discoveries, which represented a growing desire since Classical times for human reason to escape the shackles of the oral and then bookish traditions, which broadcast their own messages as if final, to be obeyed on pain of death or at least social exclusion. In this war between religious theocracies and an emerging modern science no quarter was given to the geocentric model, even though all previous traditional thought the world over relied on it. A cleric called Copernicus suggested that everything must revolve around the Sun and not the Earth. the geocentric past was soon ditched, like the baby with the bathwater and the whole of spiritual literature lost much of its foundational imagery. Science had displaced the ancient mythologies due to its own struggle to understand the physical world. The “natural philosophers” eliminated any mysterious causes for why things happened by discovering physical causes for all phenomena, these natural and real through physical laws without any gods or spirits being involved.

Pride before a Fall

Modern science might well have reminded monotheistic clerics of Adam, the Bible’s first man eating from the forbidden fruit, plucked by Eve from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which grew at the centre of a geocentric Eden. Like Adam, the scientists would then have the “knowledge of good and evil” and become themselves “as gods”, and this has become true for technology. The improving standards of living for many people in the West is taken to mean the clerics were wrong to suppress science, yet humanity has fulfilled the biblical prophecy concerning Adam: the scientists, industrialists and financiers have exactly become like gods, to “know good and evil”. The spiritual locale was further abstracted from being in the heavens, by removing its foundational geocentric model; simultaneously giving science an over-realised view of a purely physical earth and cosmos.

Science gave humanity powers over the natural world, leading to explosion in the world population based upon an industrial revolution that exploited the planet, its habitats and resources, on an ever-growing rate and scale. In the Iron Age, such a tyranny could only operate on a regional scale, but science-led societies now developed a global reach and an infinite franchise, with business models whose scope was the whole globe, to advertise and consume resources as products and services. In this sense then, the clerics were right: for though the clerics might have themselves behaved like repressive iron age tyrants towards science, they lacked the technologies that could ruin the Biosphere. Science now recognises the exploitation of the Earth, its biosphere, and its people to be a major problem, forecast to grow worse before better, and already more than bad enough. But economic growth is inherently unsustainable and so, what kind of a society will it be that does not depend upon growth to fix its debts? A geocentric society?

The ancient world could and did warn what sort of an archetypal trajectory the scientists would initiate for, like Icarus, the technologists would take humanity too close to the Sun. The wax fixing the wings of wide-bodied multinationals would melt and they would suffer the fate also of Phaethon, son of Helios the Sun, whose chariot he recklessly drove for a day. Losing control, Phaethan caused havoc in the skies and on the earth, his erratic pathway being visible as the deviation of the galaxy from the sun’s path. The Earth goddess Gaia made urgent appeal to Jupiter, who hurled his thunderbolt upon the precocious lad who fell into the eternal river Eridanus.

The Origins of Geocentrism

About twenty years ago, I found simple numbers between planetary periods seen from Earth. This caused me to drop some modern assumptions about which present the ancient view of the cosmos as inferior. For example, modern history is a linear view of the past with a fixed beginning in the earliest middle eastern cities such as Sumer and Babylon (3000 to 2000 BCE). Cities make a happy starting point since we live in cities ourselves and writing arose with the early cities, providing historical records.

In 2002, Matrix of Creation published a different, cyclic view of time, where the complexity of the modern sun-centred system became simple. Looked at without modern bias and, using a scientific calculator, a geocentric astronomy of average periods identified two unexpected baselines: the practical year of 365 days (the Earth) and the lunar year of 354.375 days (the Moon). It was this geocentric simplicity that had made astronomy possible for the late Stone Age (or “neolithic”). On the western seaboard of Europe, the megalith astronomers developed the first geocentric worldview which, I believe, was then inherited by the civilizations of the ancient near eastern cities.

Several astronomical innovations were required to carry out this form of horizon astronomy. For example, without modern numeracy they had to store day counts as lengths, one inch to the day[1]. The primary innovations were,

  1. Long sightlines were established to key celestial events on the horizon, such as the sun or moon, rising or setting.
  2. The number of days were counted between horizon events, to quantify each periodicity as a measured length between points or as a rope.
  3. Different celestial periods could then be compared employing simple geometries like the triangle, circle and square, revealing the ratios between celestial periods.[2]

Musical Ratios and the Giant Planets

The lunar year of 354 ⅝ days manifests the principle of musical harmony between itself and the outer planets. At 398.88 days, the synod of Jupiter is 9/8 of the lunar year, Saturn (at 378.09 days) is 16/15 of the lunar year, while Uranus (at 369.66 days) is 25/24 of the lunar year. In the pure-tone music of the ancient world, these are the three fundamental intervals called the Pythagorean whole tone, the Just semitone, and the chromatic semitone: intervals essential to the formation of musical scales.

In 2018, Harmonic Origins of the World was able to locate these outer planetary ratios within an ancient style of harmonic matrix, implied by some of Plato’s least understood dialogues. Centuries before, Pythagoras would have learnt of such harmonic matrices, from the ancient mystery centres of his day. Harmonic matrices and tables of numbers appear to have been used by initiates of the Ancient Near East[3] to give the stories of ancient texts such as the Bible a deeper subtext beneath. Set within eternity, stories could be entertaining and uplifting while those initiated in the mysteries, could find knowledge relating to harmonic tuning and the planetary world: Tuning theory and its special numbers had come to inhabit ancient texts because the outer planets, surrounding Earth expressed the three most fundamental musical ratios, the tones and semitones found within octave scales.

Geocentric knowledge can be found conserved within ancient narratives because, before writing arose, there was an oral tradition which had to be remembered until eventually written down. The ancient mysteries arose to connect the human world of Existence to the cosmic world of Eternity, visible from the Earth. Myths of gods, heros and mortals were but a natural reflection of the harmonic worlds of the heavens into the cultural life of the people, like the moon reflected in a lake.

Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels illustrates how new types of sacred building and space emerged, still carrying the geocentric model, its numbers and measures into Classical Greece, Rome, Byzantium and elsewhere, including India, China and the Americas. For example, the Parthenon design (figure 1) incorporates the harmony of the outer planets with the lunar year and Athena (the patriarchal moon goddess) had the same root of 45 as Adam did in the Bible’s creation story written about three centuries before.

Figure 1. The Parthenon as a musical instrument model of the Moon (960) and the outer planets (Jupiter is 1080 and Saturn is 1024.) [figure 5.16 of Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels where many further examples are to be found.]

Fibonacci Ratios and the Terrestrial Planets

The inner planets exploit the special properties of Fibonacci numbers as approximations to the Golden Mean. The practical year of 365 days can be divided into 5 parts of 73 days, and the synodic period of Venus is then 8 parts of 73 days or 584 days. The two numbers 5 and 8 are part of the Fibonacci series {0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 etc. } in which the next number is the sum of the two previous numbers. 8/5 is 1.6 in our notation and 73 days x 1.6 equals 116.8 days (584/5 days)[4]. This reveals the inner solar system to be a realm in which, proximity to the Sun leads to numerical relationships informed by the Fibonacci numbers – when seen from the Earth.

The synod of Mars (Ares), the outer terrestrial planet, also relates to the practical year as two semitones of 16/15, a harmonic ratio perhaps because of his proximity to the gas giant Jupiter (Zeus), who is his mythological father.

Figure 2 (left) The geocentric pentacle of 5 successive Venus synods in 8 years of 365 days, within the Zodiac and (right) the ubiquity of the golden mean within the geometry of the pentacle. Such geometrical ratios would become emblematic and sacred to the sky.

The golden mean (1.618034…) is a unique but natural short-circuit within the fractional number field: its reciprocal (equal to 0.618) is equivalent to subtraction by one while its square (equal to 2.618) is equivalent to addition by one. The Fibonacci numbers, in successively approximating the golden mean, enable planetary orbits near the Sun to express the golden mean. For example, the Venus synod is 8/5 (1.6) practical years whilst its orbital period is 8/13 (0.625) practical years, because its orbit divides the practical year as the number 1. The synod of Venus is therefore a function of that orbital period and the practical year in a practical application of discrete mathematics. This sort of resonance is found in moons close to massive planets like Jupiter and so, the inner planets are like moons of the Sun, seen from Earth – exactly as Tacho Brahe’s geoheliocentric model eventually did, after Copernicus just before gravitation was discovered.

Figure 3 The Geocentric Model as (left) a Staff and
(right) Nine Concentric Rings or “spheres”

The Geocentric Inheritance of Greece

The medieval geocentric model had its origins in ancient Greece, due to Pythagoras. This was discarded by 1600, when Copernicus showed that many of the difficulties in understanding the form of the planetary orbits were due to the placing of the Earth and Moon at the centre or bottom, and the Sun as third planet out (figure 3). If the Sun, Mercury and Venus are swapped with Earth and Moon, the heliocentric system results – ordered according to its relative gravitational masses and orbital radii.

Figure 4 The Geocentric order (left) can be expanded to show
the Harmonic and Fibonacci ordering principles (right)

When accompanied by the set of simple time periods shown in figure 4, the geocentric model may have functioned as a focal aide memoire accompanying explicit oral or written explanations. The synodic planetary periods to either the lunar year or the practical year would be easily learnt by counting time as days between celestial manifestations. This might be the reason the ancient near east did not repeat the astronomy of the megalithic monuments. Instead, temples symbolised time and space, using a canon of sacred numbers in the name of the god or god-king. Astrology became a special form of divination within which long counts could arrive at the general state of the cosmos, correctable using instrumental or naked-eye observations. All such matters were associated with the state, and its specialists, including astrologers and scribes and the geocentric planetary system was a talisman for the ancient mysteries, astronomical and harmonic.

Poetry as the Language of Geocentricity

The primordial light initiating the Bible’s old testament creation story became the Word (in Greek: “Logos”)[5], of the New Testament. The logos was a proposed structure of meaning which held the world together within the human mind, if you could receive it. The second part of the creation story is therefore to understand the original creative process as a human creative process. Language has given human perception of the world a largesse of worldviews in the making. The geocentric world view became a particularly large corpus, through the texts of the religious centres but also through a poetic tradition seeking to locate its voice within a remarkably specific, consistent, and well-mapped-out topography, with geocentrism and its astronomical numbers at its heart. If there has been any major spiritual vision within human history it was geocentric and never heliocentric, even though the Sun is prime suspect for being the creative origin of the solar system and its extra-special geocentric planet, Earth.

By my 6th book, Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels, I realized that the numerical design within which our “living planet” sits is a secondary creation – created after the solar system. Yet the geocentric was discovered before the heliocentric creation of the solar system because the megalithic had observed the planets from the Earth. So, although the solar system was created first in time, this creation continued onwards to produce a more sophisticated planet than the rest, where the other planets had the supporting roles, which the geocentric tradition had mythically alluded to, in a stable topography of places and mythic narratives; of gods, heroes, demons, events, and humans actors, serving as the sacred texts of the ancient world. Later writers both adopted and innovated this tradition:

In its use of images and symbols as in its use of ideas, poetry seeks the typical and enduring. That is one reason why throughout the history of poetry the basis for organising the imagery of the physical world has been the natural cycle. Northrop Frye, 1960.

Using literary criticism, Northrop Frye saw past the habitual assumption that high poets were artfully but merely remarking upon the sensory life and its everyday recurrences. Instead, he realised that living cycles were often employed as “similarities to the already arisen”, as Gurdjieff put it[6], meaning that the planetary world was being expressed by proxy through the natural cycles within poetry. And Life does depend upon the eternal cycles within which it sits: The spin and obliquity of the Earth and the orbit of its large moon. These two bodies are profoundly connected numerically to the rest of the planets according to the vision of the geocentric model, involving both Fibonacci and harmonic cycles. Frye first became aware of link between cosmology and poetry when analysing the works of William Blake, the poet who appeared to “make up” his own original yet geocentric cosmology and language; causing Frye to state “poetry is the language of cosmology”. Long after the heliocentric had suspended any belief in the geocentric, its language and metaphors still formed a stable tradition amongst poets, through the influences of a classical education.

The geocentric topography is quite standardized among its world-wide variation in imagery, over thousands of years, all quite agreeable with that used by Dante in The Divine Comedy, summarised by Frye in his essay New Directions from Old[7] as follows.

…For poets, the physical world has usually been not only a cyclical world but a “middle earth,” situated between an upper and a lower world. These two worlds reflect in their form the heavens and hells of the religions contemporary with the poet, and are normally thought of as abodes of unchanging being, not as cyclical. The upper world is reached by some form of ascent and is a world of gods or happy souls. The most frequent images of ascent are the mountain, the tower, the winding staircase or ladder, or a tree of cosmological dimensions. The upper world is often symbolized by the heavenly bodies, of which the one nearest to us is the moon. The lower world, reached by descent through a cave or under water, is more oracular and sinister, and as a rule is or includes a place of torment and punishment. It follows that there would be two points of particular significance in poetic symbolism. One is the point, usually at the top of a mountain just below the moon, where the upper world and this one come into alignment, where we look up to the heavenly world and down on the turning cycle of nature.[8]

By the time of the medieval, the image of the geocentric world had sprouted a sublunary gap between the Earth and the Moon with a rudimentary physics of the four elements – which are the four states of matter: solid earth, liquid water, gaseous air and a transformative fire; ideas from the pre-Socratic philosophers. With this palette, the storyteller or poet could allude to an invariant world view based upon megalithic astronomy, but now held as a diagram, made familiar through ever-new expressions or as an oral then written text.

A Simplified Model of Prehistory

The simplest explanation for which there is good evidence finds Atlantis to have probably been an Egyptian myth about the megalith builders on the Atlantic seaboard of Europe, whose astronomical knowledge became enshrined in the ancient mysteries. These mysteries have been made doubly mysterious since the modern age replaced the world view upon which those mysteries were based by the Copernican heliocentric view. This new solar system was soon discovered to be held together, not by the divine world, but by invisible gravitational forces between the large planetary masses and an even more massive Sun, forces elucidated by Sir Isaac Newton. The primacy of heliocentrism caused modern humanity to further lose contact with the geocentric model of the world and its two serpents, of the inner and outer planets (figure 4), a literary tradition that had lasted since at least 3000 BC.

If one but swapped the sun and moon-earth system, the geocentric planetary order became the heliocentric planetary order. The Copernican revolution seemed to be a minor tweak of a less useful model but tragically, the geocentric references to an original form of astronomy, based upon numerical time and forged by the megalithic, were lost and invisible to heliocentric astronomy. Science came to know nothing of the geocentric order surrounding the Earth and blind to the significance of the mythic worlds that animated the geocentric model.

You can find many additional articles at sacred.numbersciences.org


[1] It is remarkable that the inch was one of the first units of length used by the megalithic in Carnac to count days.

[2] These matters are fully explained, most in Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels.

[3] According to the late Ernest G. McClain (https://ernestmcclain.net/), American musicologist and writer, in the 1970s, of The Pythagorean Plato and The Myth of Invariance.

[4] one fifth of the Venus synod is therefore close to the synod of Mercury (115.88 days).

[5] John X:Y

[6] “… the [whole] presence of every kind of three-brained being … is an exact similitude of everything in the Universe.” Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. G.I.Gurdjieff. 345. Similar to the Pythagorean tradition of the human being a microcosm of the macrocosm.

[7] found in Myth and Mythmaking ed: H.A. Murray, Wesleyan University Press.115-131. 1959.

[8] ibid. 123.

Double squares: Venus and the Golden Mean

The humble square, with side length equal to one unit, is like the number one. It’s area is one square unit and, when we add another identical square to one side, the double square appears. Above right the Egyptian Djed column is shown within a double square. The Djed is the rotating earth which the gods and demons have a tug of war over. This is also a key story in the Indian tradition, called The Churning of the Oceans, where the churning creates both the food of the gods (soma) and every wonderful thing that emerges upon the Earth. In this, the double square symbolized the northern and southern hemispheres of the Earth. The anthropomorphic form Djed shown above has elbows indicative of the Double square.

Figure 1 The churning of the ocean (Samudra Manthan in Sanskrit)

The Djed appears to be the general principle of rotation of, and apparent motion around, the earth.

The god Isis is (as a planet) Venus and is shown (fig.2) offering up the sun disk: another Djed is below, with her Ankh symbol of Life atop the Djed, now having female arms . This sun most probably points to the practical year as 365 days which is 5/8 of the Venus synod of 584 days. (This ratio of 1.6 is the sixth note of the octave 1 to 2.)

In figure 2, two female attendants provide the duality which one might take to be her two famous manifestations of (firstly) the brightest Evening Star, as the sun goes down, and then (after that) the brightest Morning Star before the sun rises. Above there is duality again with three baboons either side of the sun, perhaps representing the six visible planets: Moon, Venus and Mercury: Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and their “tug of war”.

Figure 2 The creation of Horus-Ra from out of an ankh with female arms atop a djed. from Budge 1899, also fig. 7.8 of Richard Heath, The Harmonic Origins of the World.

The numbers 5 and 8 are Fibonacci approximations {1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 …} to the golden mean, a transcendent number {1.618034…} which rational numbers can only approximate. Venus and the Earth have clearly settled into orbits around the sun resonant with Fibonacci ratios since the Venus orbital period (224.701 days) is 8/13 of the solar year. And it is this fact that eventuates in what we see on Earth, namely the manifestations of Venus every 8/5 of a practical year. of 365 days.

Figure 3 The double square, its in-circle and out-circle manifesting golden rectangles around itself.

In this post, I developed a result sent to me, that a square drawn within the upper hemisphere of a circle must define a golden mean rectangle either side from its height of 1 and the remaining radius of 0.618034… and so it can be seen that the divine principle of the Golden Mean emanates from the double square, either side of each square, when the double square is embraced by a circle drawn from its center. Obviously, on Earth and between orbits (of Venus and Earth), the Golden Mean (also called Phi) has to be approximated by whole number ratios but the principle is present within the geometry and its out-circle. Schwaller de Lubicz thought the dynastic Egyptians held the Golden Mean to be “the fundamental scisson” (literally “scissor cut”) in the range one to two and, its reciprocal can be seen to share the portion over 1 (figure 3).

One can see that geometry and the early numbers would have been seen as two aspects of what we call space and time, in which “things” are separate from each other in Existence but somehow conjoined within Eternity. What we call order is in fact an achievement of harmony made possible by the arranging and fitting of parts to form a coherent whole. It is this insight which gave meaning to their study of geometry and numbers from the prehistoric onwards, into the recorded history of early civilizations. The meaning for Life on Earth became encoded within ancient and prehistoric symbols, whose geometrical and numerical language of expression went to the heart of phenomena.

Hounds & Jackals as Venus Counter

The Petrie Museum has a game called Hounds & Jackals or 58 holes, from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom and widely found elsewhere, in the ancient world. Two players had a set of sharp ended sticks with animal heads, which sat in each of the 29 + 29 = 58 holes. The top hole is larger (as with the Cretan 34-hole circular kernos, at Malia in Crete).

Cretan 34-hole Kernos

One can see the possibilities in such artifacts stored objective numerical information while being kept, within the cultural life of the people, through having a valuable everyday purpose (rather like the 52 playing cards do). This was exactly how Gurdjieff saw it that, he proposed a meeting of wise men in Babylon, it was seen that ancient knowledge would be forgotten were it not that art, games, buildings, dances, music and so on were designed to incorporate the knowledge until such time that human would be able, once again, to understand what they meant. In his book Beelzebub’s Tales he termed such artifacts as being logominisms, loosely translating to “meaning objects”.

Continue reading “Hounds & Jackals as Venus Counter”

The Stonehenge Trilithons (Part 2): Day-Inch Counting

In the previous article, it was shown that the form of the trilithons, of five taller double sarsens approximating to a five-pointed star, matches the astronomical phenomena of the successive morning and evening stars, as Venus approaches Earth from the east and then recedes to the west as the morning pass. On approach, the planet rises in the evening sky and then dives into the evening sun and if one traces this motion it have the appearance of a horn. Venus shoots past the sun and reappears in the morning sky as the sun rises, creating another traced horn shape, symmetrical to the evening.

Figure 1

In support of the form of the trilithons resembling five successive double horns of Venus over 8 years, the width of the inner faces can also be interpreted as to their length being one megalithic rod, that is 2.5 megalithic yards. The distance between each pillar is ¼ of a megalithic rod so that, each inner face is divided by 4 of these units which units are 5/8ths of a megalithic yard, the ratio of the practical year of 365 days relative to the Venus synod of 584 days (365 / 584 = 5/8), the common factor between the two periods being 73 days.

The combined inner width of each pair of supports would therefore symbolize 8 x 73 days, or 584 days. Five of these pairs would then be 5 x 584 days, which equals 2920 days, this time period also being 8 x 365 days or eight practical years.

The inner surfaces lie on an ellipse which can be framed by a 5 by 8 rectangle whose sides are exactly the diameters required to form a day-counting circle for 365 day-inches (116.136 inches) and 584 day-inches (185.818 inches). The 365 day-inch circle (shown red and dashed in figure 4) has its centre in the center of the ellipse and so would have touched the two trilithons at A and B, at a tangent to their faces.

Figure 2 The Venus count of 584 day-inches (shown blue and dashed) was concentric to both the bluestone and sarsen circles, sitting inside of the bluestone circle.

The high degree of correlation between,

  1. the five-fold form of the Venus synod and the five couplets of trilithons,
  2. the summed inner widths of the trilithons as being 5 x 8 = 40 units of 73 days = 2920 days.
  3. the out-rectangle of the inner ellipse being 8 by 5 and
  4. the rectangle’s sides being the diameters of two circles of 584 inches and 365 inches, suitable for day-inch counting,

……. points to the 5-fold horseshoe of trilithons as a “temple” to the unique astronomical behavior of Venus in its synodic relationship to the solar year of 365 whole days.

No other compelling explanation exists, though many interpretions have been proposed such as