How the notion of a Music of the Spheres came about
- Medieval Solfeggio within the Heptagonal Church of Rieux Minervois
This paper responds to Reichart and Ramalingam’s study of three heptagonal churches[1], particularly the 12th century church at Rieux Minervois in the Languedoc region of France (figure 1a). - Cologne Cathedral Facade as Double Square
image: The Gothic cathedral of Cologne by night, by Robert Breuer CC-SA 3.0 On the matter of facades of Gothic cathedrals, I hark back to previous work (February 2018) on Cologne cathedral. This was published in a past website that was destroyed by its RAID backup system! As we have seen with Chartres, some excellent lithographs with … Continue reading “Cologne Cathedral Facade as Double Square” - Gurdjieff, Octave Worlds & Tuning Theory (2019)This is a paper I suggested for the All and Everything conference in Cumbria, but it was not selected. It developed a number of strands, which I offer here as a snapshot of my thinking and research around 2019. This text was modified to become appendix 3 of my Sacred Number and the Language of … Continue reading “Gurdjieff, Octave Worlds & Tuning Theory (2019)”
- Primacy of low whole numbers
What we call numbers start from one, and from this beginning all that is to follow in larger numbers is prefigured in each larger number. And yet, this prefigurement, in the extensive sense {1 2 3 4 5 6 7 etc.}, is completely invisible to our customary modern usage for numbers, as functional representations of … Continue reading “Primacy of low whole numbers” - Music, part 1: Ancient and Modern
We would know nothing of music were it not that somewhere, between the ear and our perceptions, what we actually hear (the differences between different frequencies of sound, that is, different tones) is heard as equivalent musical intervals (such as fifths, thirds, tones, semitones, etc), of the same size, even when the pitch range of … Continue reading “Music, part 1: Ancient and Modern” - Music of the Olmec Heads
Seventeen colossal carved heads are known, each made out of large basalt boulders. The heads shown here, from the city of San Lorenzo [1200-900 BCE], are a distinctive feature of the Olmec civilization of ancient Mesoamerica. In the absence of any evidence, they are thought to be portraits of individual Olmec rulers but here I propose the heads represented musical … Continue reading “Music of the Olmec Heads” - Starcut Diagram: geometry to define tuning
This is a re-posting of an article thought lost, deriving in part from Malcolm Stewart’s Starcut Diagram. The long awaited 2nd edition Sacred Geometry of the Starcut Diagram has now been published by Inner Traditions. Before this, Ernest McClain had been working on tuning via Gothic master Honnecourt’s Diagram of a Man (fig. 2), which … Continue reading “Starcut Diagram: geometry to define tuning” - 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 … Continue reading “Introduction to my book Harmonic Origins of the World” - The Geocentric Planetary Matrix
Harmonic Origins of the World inserted the astronomical observations of my previous books into an ancient harmonic matrix, alluded to through the harmonic numbers found in many religious stories, and also through the cryptic works of Plato. Around 355 BC, Plato’s dialogues probably preserved what Pythagoras had learnt from ancient mystery centers of his day, … Continue reading “The Geocentric Planetary Matrix” - Agni, the Indian God of Fire
Those new to Ernest McClain and his The Myth of Invariance, should know this book was a seminal work for anyone in my generation, that opened up a Pythagorean vision; of how number operates in the domain of harmony. This world of harmony can be numerically defined in a quite extraordinary and specific way and … Continue reading “Agni, the Indian God of Fire” - pdf: Astronomical Musicality within Mythic Narratives
Ancient musical knowledge came to Just tuning long before Greek music, in Babylonia. It now seems likely that two sources of musical information, were involved in an early tradition of musical tuning by number: firstly, the early number field is the original template upon which musical harmony is based; and secondly, the prehistoric geocentric astronomy … Continue reading “pdf: Astronomical Musicality within Mythic Narratives” - Sacred Number and the Lords of Time
Back Cover ANCIENT MYSTERIES “Heath has done a superb job of collating his own work on the subject of megaliths with the objective views of many other researchers in the field. I therefore do not merely recommend reading this book but can state unequivocally it is a must read.”–John Neal, British metrologist and researcher and … Continue reading “Sacred Number and the Lords of Time” - Harmonic Explorer app
The work of the late Ernest McClain [1918-2014] was based upon a technique in which ever higher numbers appear to have been studied in antiquity as to the harmonic field of intervals possible within that integer limit. Such a single number reference can be mentioned en passant within texts like The Bible, Homer’s Illiad or the Sumerian … Continue reading “Harmonic Explorer app” - pdf: Musicological Narrative Structures in Biblical Genesis
This paper attempts to interpret the first two books of the Bible, according to Ernest McClain’s methods. It is contended that the compositions of ancient texts, as Plato insinuated, were both inspired and used for the science of numerical harmonics. The invariant properties of harmonic numbers, and their evolution through limiting whole numbers, offer a … Continue reading “pdf: Musicological Narrative Structures in Biblical Genesis” - REVIEW of The Harmonic Origins of the Worldby Bryan Carr alias Skholiast During the latter part of the twentieth century, three divergent speculative perspectives opened up on the ancients’ cosmology: astronomical, musical, and metrological. The astronomical perspective found its classic expression in von Dechend and de Santillana’s Hamlet’s Mill. The musical perspective was spelled out, almost single-handedly, by Ernest McClain, beginning with … Continue reading “REVIEW of The Harmonic Origins of the World”
- Harmonic Genesis of the SumeriansThe emergence of 2, 3, 5 from ONE then combining as ANU and leading to the differentiation of the World along various paths. The creation proceeds through three prime number dimensions, Ea (as in Earth) through 2, Enki through 3 , Enlil through 5. Anu remains the fountainhead associated with all three and with the … Continue reading “Harmonic Genesis of the Sumerians”
- Natural Evolution of our Modern Tuning System
The diatonic or natural scale, consisting of five whole tones and two opposed semitones, is most familiar today in the white notes of the piano [Apel. see Diatonic]. On the piano this would be called C-major, which imposes the sequence of tones (T) and semitones (S) as T-T-S-T-T-T-S in which the initial and final tetrachords … Continue reading “Natural Evolution of our Modern Tuning System” - 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 … Continue reading “Distribution of Prime Numbers in the Tone Circle” - Equal Temperament through Geometry and Metrology
The form of musical scale we use today is the (apparently modern) equal tempered scale. Its capabilities express well the new mind’s freedom of movement in that it allows us to change key to play compositions that move between alternative frameworks. This possibility was known to ancient tuning theory, could be approximated within Just intonation’s … Continue reading “Equal Temperament through Geometry and Metrology”