Megalithic sites are subject to strict evidence criteria regarding solar and lunar alignments. Studies show that stone configurations often indicate astronomical events, with specific shapes reflecting lunar cycles. Notably, the alignment of stones at sites like Le Manio and Carnasserie highlight ancient observation techniques, suggesting intentional design to mark celestial occurrences.
where the sun or moon rose or set at a site can allow a dating due to the tilt of the earth having varied over a very long term cyclicity. One can also see that alignment to such events was a major feature of megalithic monuments, of pointing to sun and moon events. This approach gets even more powerful when day or month counting between alignment events can be measured within the dimensions of a site, using units of length seen belonging to a megalithic culture, like the megalithic yard.
However, another feature of stones at megalithic sites is their shape. When tracking the tracking the moon in time, its phase is changing so that shapes could indicating lunar phase, according to some sort of code. Le Manio Quadrilateral near Carnac shows a great shape variation in the 36 stones of its southern curb of 36, marking the 36 lunar months in three lunar years alongside a day-inch count of 1063 days-inches. This count starts from the Sun Gate from which the summer (and winter) sunrise can be viewed (so that the curb is 14 degrees south of the summer sun line.)
The summer solstice sunrise alignment runs from the sun gate through to the the eastern curb, where the vertical dressed edge of stone K marks the sunrise. Beyond stone K, stone G has a groove where the midsummer sun would sit as a full disk in about 4000 BC. This was clear in our Spring Equinox survey in 2010 and the further interest here is in David Fisher’s work on a similarly grooved stone, on the summer solstice sunrise alignment where the mountain over which the sun rises is also similarly grooved.
Northern notched Stone at Carnasserie in Argyll
Two years later (in 2012-3), David Fisher presented a paper about the shapes of stones, and this included this self-same device of notches, but then between the sun, a notch in a mountain and a notch in a stone.
Figure 2 The northern stone at Carnasserie faced a mountain with a notch so that its right hand edge is below the notch.
It then appears, as reported by David Fisher in a 2012 anthropological supplement (see reference below and link for download of pdf), that the stone had its top shaped to match the mountains notch, because the mountain notch is where the midsummer sun rose in 3500 BC.
Figure 2 The notched northern stone of Carnasserie, showing a mirroring of the notch in the mountain by the top of the stone, a phenomenon called self-indication in this case of from where to observe (the stone notch) the rising of the sun (the mountain’s notch).
In figure 2, having defined (or self-indicated) the observation notch, the observer would see the sun rise in the mountain notch.
Only by being open to this sort of meaning-making within stone settings could one first note the similar notches in the backsight and in the foresight and discover a calibrated piece of stone age equipment.
More from Alexander Thom
from reference 2: CARNASSERIE, Argyll. (1) A. & A.S. Thom. A2/6.
The plan shows two slabs 8.5 and 9 ft high and 12.5 feet apart, azimuth about 170 degrees, There is a fallen stone on the ridge. This site needs investigation. NM 834 008 Latitude 560.15
figure 3 Alexander Thom’s sketch of Carnasserie
My Interpretation
It is possible that the northern stone, facing the summer solstice in the mountain, was in the proportion of a four square geometry (half a lunation triangle) whose diagonal is the solar year relatve to the base being the lunar year of 12 lunar months. The southern stone has the same proportion in cross section (see figure below , blacked in stones at about 14 degrees to the 170 degree line sketched by Thom). The symbolism would suit the summer solstice as it would the other stone if it pointed towards the Equinoctial sun if the equinoxes occur half way through the solar year if reckoned summer solstice to summer solstice.
Figure 4 Thom’s sketch with my interpretation so far.
The azimuth of 170 degrees plus 14 degrees would place the equinox sunrise as close to east. In figure below, one can see what Google Earth sees from the location of the stones with the notched hill left of centre and the East presumably to the far right with some elevation. To quote Thom: “This site needs investigation.”
Figure 5 Google Earth view from Carnasserie stones to summer solstice
References
ANCIENT COSMOLOGIES AND MODERN PROPHETS: Proceedings of the 20th Conference of the European Society for Astronomy in Culture. Edited by Ivan Šprajc and Peter Pehani. Slovene Anthropological Society, Ljubljana, 2013. see Pages 143-145. Employing 3-Dimensional Computer Simulation to Examine the Celestial Dating of Scottish Megalithic Site by David Fisher.
Stone Rows and Standing Stones: Britain, Ireland and Brittany. Two parts:part 1 page 105. Alexander and Archie Thom with notes from Audrey Burl. Oxford: B.A.R.. 1990.
I use the downloadable database of Google Earth megaliths at megalithic.co.uk.
The Mayan 260-day sacred year, structured on 13 and 20-day periods, aligns with solar and Venus calendars. Robert D. Peden emphasizes its accuracy in syncing with tropical years over cycles, suggesting a profound astronomical foundation for Mesoamerican calendars. This reveals ancestral knowledge of cosmic time systems integral to their culture.
diagram: the interaction of two types of week creating a sacred calendar of 260 days. text: from Sacred Number blog, Saturday, November 8, 2008
In 2008, William Sullivan sent me an explanation for why the Mayan time system used 260 days as a sacred or ritual year, counting 13 and 20 day periods (that divide into this), to characterize days of one’s birth.
Robert D. Peden pointed out that: “The Mayan Ritual year of 260 days was successful for one major reason – after a cycle lasting 59 Ritual years, the tropical year and the Ritual year lock together in step. A period of 59 by 260 days equals a period of 42 tropical years, of 365.242 days.”. He therefore thought that (a) the Maya Long count was a lunar calendar. (b) The Accounting year of 364 days might be considered a Venus calendar. (c) 104 years is the natural and optimum intercalation time to correct the solar and Venus calendars – and is the basis of the Mesoamerican Calendar Round. The first and other observations can be accessed for accuracy:
42 Solar years [of 365.242] = 59 x 260 (accurate to 4 minutes)
405 Lunar Months [of 29.53059] = 46 x 260 (accurate to 3.5 minutes)
61 Venus Synods [of 583.92] = 137 x 260 (accurate to 9.25 minutes)
1 Mars Synod [of 779.94] = 3 x 260 (accurate to 28.8 minutes)
88 Jupiter Synods [of 398.88] = 135 x 260 (accurate to 15.36 minutes)
“It is proposed that these factual astronomical derivations [and some others] are ipso facto sufficient to prove the astronomical base for the Mesoamerican calendrical system.”
This extended my own work in Matrix of Creation, the book. It should give a whole new impetus to the Mayan “calendar”, for those interested and academics alike. The main inference here is the uncanny way in which time is organised on Earth and how the uncanny ancestors tuned into it through their sacred structures including their calendars. The 260-day calendar is an original cultural work and some say (e.g. Jose Arguelles), it is a form of time that comes from higher levels of order within the galaxy.
References: The standard archaeological work, obviously conservative but reliable, is The Ancient Maya by Robert Sharer. Georges Ifrah wrote an excellent collection called Numbers which covers the Maya well and other books abound from all manner of viewpoints.
I will be adding to this entry as I re-engage with this unlikely system of time, technically called an Almanac of 260 days and somewhat different from the MayaCalendarwith base-20 days in a 360 day year and the Haabof 365 days.
It is often possible to find a formula for a cosmic constant using a favourite number or two, in this case 13 and 20. It is worthwhile working through what this was for the Maya and their calendrical counting expertise in which time periods needed to be reconciled using such formulas, if those cycles were going to remain accurately synchronised with observations. So,
The solar year = 365.2422 days is equated here with 59 x 260 / 42. Cancelling the prime numbers leads to the minimal formula of,
The solar year = 2 x 5 x 13 x 59 / 3 x 7 which would make it, 365.238 days long. This is accurate to one part in 89,000 or about six minutes per year so that this “equation” would slip by one day after 240 years. After ten years, it would be 1/24 of a day out or one hour so that every 240 years, one could set back the almanac of 260 days by one day, since it is based upon whole days.
Explores the concept of sacred centers in relation to ancient civilizations and their geographical patterns. It discusses how these centers, influenced by Earth’s nature, manifest through numerically significant shapes and polygons. The movement from the poles affects mapping and measurements, revealing harmonious relations in spatial designs reflective of cosmic principles.
18th-century illustration of Mount Kailash, depicting the holy family: Shiva and Parvati, cradling Skanda with Ganesha by Shiva’s side
A culture often creates centers, While someone may gets powerful, and everything gets built around them and the rest is history, the concept of sacred center came from the nature of the Earth itself. In Egypt the meridian was both explicit and dominant in the south to north flow of the Nile, after the desertification of the Sahara. In Britain and elsewhere however, large landscape geometries were created of an approximately circular nature and this is a natural result of the near-spherical Earth.
The Lord of the World is a very ancient concept, often referred to as a Axis and therefore congruent with the pole of the Earth. Yet, even Superman does not live actually at the pole – that is not the point. The point is that in a cosmos with the Sun at the centre of the planetary system and with the Earth spinning about its poles, the central organising power is seen at the centre and in the case of a civilisation, that centre causes manifestations out into a sacred pattern, having numeric and geometric properties. For example a polygon such as a square manifests the “holy city of Jerusalem”, twelve sides the autocracy of the Zodiac, ten sides the rule of law, and multiple projections out from a centre give alternative views of the same whole – the people in the landscape.
Sacred civilisations have been characterised as being an enchantment of the landscape by John Michell, and in this we can reject our fears of magic to see that all civilisations enchant their populations, but that a sacred foundation will aim to provide an organising idea that is harmonious with the creation itself according to its highest principles of the purpose and potentials of life. The numerical view of creation explains why regular polygons and similar structures are employed: they uniquely achieve harmony and, from our perspective, this uniqueness of approach allows us to see into their numerical knowledge and avoid projecting our own culture “into their shoes” as archaeology often does to make the subject more interesting.
The movement of the Pole to a given latitude results is a situation that would be conceptually obvious to polar explorers – if you set off from the pole in any direction, called an Azimuth or Bearing, you are travelling down a north-south meridian. The poles are often mapped with a type of cartography called Azimuthal because unlike most maps, these maps allow your bearing from the centre to be a straight line on the map.
When moving to a latitude other than the pole, the same applies, and the mapping would be called Azimuthal Oblique. In reality, we can set off from anywhere in a straight line and within a degree of latitude the difference of a flat and a spherical Earth will hardly matter. Having measured such a degree as a length, the geographical foot can be determined – meaning that if the degree is longer than another by a fraction, the foot used for your sacred measures in a new centre can be that much longer. This means the same number will, by this technique, divide into a longer degree.
This system of geographical feet was well established in ancient times and recent work has shown a systematic grid of measures that, most fortunately, have revealed further monumental facts about the Earth.
For now it is sufficient to say that a latitude, given a sacred pole or centre, naturally manifests a symmetrical radiating pattern that is measured out using geographical and other symbolically significant feet. The most direct pattern is a circle since it echoes the three-dimensional circularity of the Earth itself, but in two dimensions.
This text was created in July 2003 and only recently found. Its neighbouring texts will be edited to show how some ideas go back but some change.
Influences from John Michell regarding centres were very important, based upon his books; he once advising me that finding the geographical center was a very interesting activity, illustrated in The Sacred Center.
Easter Aquhorthies (i.e. apocathery) has eleven stones in a circle and in between the two south-to-south-west stones is a large (bridging) recumbent stone, more commonly found in Scottish circles and associated (by Alexander Thom) to lunar observatories because, in Scotland at lunar maximum standstill, the moon can rest upon or be hidden by a raised horizon.
Picture by krautrock, a member of megalithic.co.uk in June 2010.
Figure 1 Alexander Thom’s site plan, with cardinal directions and highlighting the diameter .
It is tempting to assume geometry within stone circles and this one invites that by having eleven regularly placed stones,. However, 11 is rarely found in regular geometries or stone circles. But,
Eleven is associated (geometrically) with the simplest approximate ratio for pi, of 22/7 and, being on a circle perimeter 22 units on the perimeter means 7 as the diameter. However, the diameter here is 7 x 9 = 63 so that 7 units of 9 feet in diameter translates into 22 x 9 = 198 feet on the circumference.
The second symbolism of eleven is found in the solar time cycles of 33 years which traditionally references as the Solar Hero cycle as the age when heroes die. 33 years was signified in this way because of an exact alignment, at which Equinox sunrise should repeat on the distant horizon every 33 years. While the solar year is 365 whole days long it takes an extra 32/132 of a day for the Earth’s orbit to complete, and this fraction (of 32/132) depends upon 4 x 33 = 132 losing its 33, 33 years after an earlier Equinox on the horizon. (Note that one did not need to know the data and then calculate, as we do today: instead, observation of in-exact solar risings or settings could notice near exact repetitions occurring after 8 years, but more perfectly after 33 years.
Returning to the circle, the circumference of this stone circle is 198 feet which is 6 x 33 = 198 so that the 11 stones may be referencing 33 solar years.
The 33-year period is strangely linked to the movement of the moon’s nodes, which take 18.618 years (of the nodal period) to progress once around the path of the sun (ecliptic). The area under this precession of the lunar nodes (pi x 18.618^2 = 1,088.970022752789) relative to the earth it orbits, which closely equals the area of a square of side 33 x 33 = 1,089.
The megalithic and ancient world both made monuments conforming to the equal area and equal perimeter geometries and even though the equal area situation is proven unsolvable, one sees that (before the notion of an analytic solution) a perfect example was found of a workable pair of numbers (33 years and 18.618 years) was available as these two very significant astronomical time periods.
If the circle is 63 feet in diameter, then one divided by 14 and multiplied by 11 to obtains the square of equal perimeter: 63 x 11/14 = 49.5, which is 99/2 feet on the side. This can then establish the radius of the circle as 18.618 of the same units: When divided by 33, 99/2 becomes 3/2 which is the unit for the radius of the circle of equal namely 18.618 x 3/2 = 27.927 or nearly 28 feet. Below is a picture showing the square and the circle, equal in area in red while the perimeter of the stone circle is equal in perimeter to the red square.
Author’s notes.
I have been looking at ways in which 18.618 years could have been generated geometrically so as to avoid the need to resolve it as a numerical measurement, and this has led to some really interesting ideas.
I came upon Anne Macauley’s book Megalithic Rhythms and Measures (2006) and was interested whether the apparently unique eleven equally-spaced stones were indicative of the Equal Area having been seen as relating the 33-year Solar Hero cycle and 18.618-year Nodal cycle where the latter is a radius and the former is a square’s side-length of 33 years, which the solar year divided into. These numbers have special properties.
My books on Sacred Geometry: a. Language of the Angelsand b. in Ancient Goddess Culturesboth have a lot on the equal perimeter model, which describes the relative and absolute sizes of the Earth and the Moon, and the equal area model which fits the 33/18.618- cycles which ratio equal a near-pi ratio of SQRT (3.144).
Phenomenal Visualization
One sees above that the equal area circle touches the recumbent stone and the southern stones tip, and that the maximum moon, in Scotland, can touch the horizon being more extreme to the south than the sun at winter solstice, see below where I have drawn the Moon as a white disc between the two smaller recumbents (off the main one) as if showing the moon between the actual vertical monoliths either side.
One can see that the red circle embraces the recumbent stone and its altar-like appendages.
This jest of showing “on plan” a vertical structure was seen at Gavrinis L6 where the “sun gate” Manio Quadrilateral feature, 4 Km to the west, is shown in what appears to be a technical information stone originally accompanying the Quadrilateral (as were the other stones lining in the Cairn’s corridor walls.
Explores the relationship between ancient astronomical practices and megalithic cultures, highlighting how early societies understood time through celestial cycles. It contrasts matrilineal hunter-gatherer societies with later patriarchal agricultural ones, suggesting that megalithic structures reflect deep, sacred knowledge of the cosmos and have influenced subsequent architectural designs across civilizations.
Above: (center) The form of the Minoan “horns of consecration”, on the island of Crete, followed (outside) the form of the manifestations of Venus in her synodic period.
Time appears to march on at what seems a constant rate. In this way time has two opposite directions, the somewhat known past and the largely unknown future. However, events in the sky repeat and so they can be predicted as seasons within a year or lunar phases within a month. Even before modern calendars, stone age humans counted the days in a month to understand recurrence of the menstrual period and know when moonlight would be strong again at night.
Figure 1 (above) L’Abri Blanchard Tally Bone 30,000 BP with (below) Alexander Marshack’s interpretation, showing marks as days shaped to express the moon’s phase, over 59 whole days or two lunar months.
Two months happen to equal 59 whole days: a lunar month is 29.53 days long, just over twenty-nine and a half, which is half of 59. In the artifact shown on the top of figure 1, each day was carved upon a flat bone, each mark appearing varied in shape and depth to show the moon’s changed phase on a given day. The flat bone enabled a cyclic shape to be used, of 59 marks, which “ate its own tail”: showing there were always the same number of days in two “moons”. This sameness emerges from dividing the recurring time of the solar day into the time of the month’s phases over two months, to give the recurring whole number of 59, then forever useful as a knowledge object.
The solar day is clearly the same duration every day and two lunar months clearly repeat twice after 59 days. But our modern life is the extended straight line of day numbers belonging to unequal months of the sun so that the loops that recur are lost in the framework of man-made time. The stone age “lesson from nature” was, that events in the sky largely run according to a definite schedule along cyclic paths, most of these being along the path of the sun, along which the sun, moon, and planets follow their own cyclicities, seen from the earth. This reliable cyclicity shaped our notion of an unchanging realm of Eternity, different to Life upon the Earth as our ever-developing present moments within Existence. In this way, knowledge from the sky came to be considered sacred, and interconnected through numbers when counted as days and months, especially through counting the often identically sized discs of the Sun and Moon and their respective years.
While astronomy started as a stone age hobby it later became a tribal science quite unlike our own astrophysics. Only latterly could farmers support city specialists that would assimilate this prehistoric science, by forming religious sciences and cosmologies in the East, of Egypt, Babylonia, India, China and so on. But millennia later, the 16th century altogether discarded this geocentric view-from-the-Earth and adopted a new heliocentric view of a solar system: this enabled the planetary orbits of the sun to be clearly seen as mathematical ellipses by Kepler, a system soon seen to be held together by Newton’s newly intuited force called gravity, of the central sun’s large mass.
If counting the moon had synchronised both female fertility and male hunting then this shaped the format we call the hunter-gatherer, who foraged for food before there was farming. Their women formed a naturally less-mobile core for the tribe and its children, the men hunting over extensive ranges. All adults were used to working together for the greater good and, since they were in-common descended from the women, so a matrilineal society was an effective format for problems requiring larger groups.
Stone age art of the goddess seems to have been very varied and geometrical (see Language of the Goddess by Marija Gimbutas). In Sacred Geometry in Ancient Goddess Cultures, myexperience in analysing megalithic sites had caused me to question whether the megalithic monuments were the work of Neolithic or New Stone Age farming revolution moving west from the Middle East where it started. Because the farming revolution was only slowly advancing through central Europe towards the Atlantic coast (see figure 2) it was pretty much avoiding the Mediterranean. For a start, the megalithic revolution was largely taking place within the islands and hinterlands of the Mediterranean and Atlantic Coast of Europe, between 5000BC and 2500BC. It was therefore much more likely to have have been carried out by the late middle stone age (Mesolithic) people, before the farming way-of-life arrived. And the indigenous culture of old Europe was mesolithic, well established and centred around women, foraging, and matrilineage (using your mother’s name) rather than the neolithic norm, led by men, farming and patrilineage (using your father’s name).
Figure 2 The journey of the Neolithic from the Middle East (see colored circles), via central Europe, was in stark contrast to the dating (dark circles) of megalithic sites on the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts: And the neolithic were patriarchal farmers using the seasonal year while the late middle stone age were matriarchal foragers, truly interested in the sacred time world of the celestial objects, and hence building and using the megalithic observatories. [Globe by Google Earth, data from Barry Cunliffe and Bettina Schulz Paulsson]. Figure 1.1 in Sacred Geometry in Ancient Goddess Cultures.
The Clash of the Titans
Being indigenous, the matrilineal tribes were far more likely and able to innovate the megalithic astronomy which effectively inherited from the long tradition of day counting seen on the stone age tallies like the Blanchard plaque. But this continuity of interest in the sky conflicts with the today’s model of history and our foundation myth for modern science, as grandchild of ancient Near Eastern civilizations and exact sciences, fuelled by farming on fertile soils using irrigation.
Through comparing day counts, sky time could be given geometrical forms such as the circle, square and rectangle/triangle, these rightfully considered sacred by the coherent megalithic culture on Europe’s shores. The civilization was numerate, intelligent, but not stone age in the vernacular sense, of having no ability to reason. Having an extended family of adults and no urgent need to seasonally grow crops, conserve seeds or tend their animals, nature already provided food through foraging There was a natural collaborative workforce and this perhaps explains the dearth of neolithic settlement noted alongside the earliest megalithic monuments.
Having overcome this misnomer that megaliths were automatically neolithic, a further work is required to see why our own science cannot understand the sky phenomena in the way the stone age must have. We do not today study the synodic periods of the planets because they are seen as a merely incidental composite of the planetary orbits and our solar year. But, and quite unexpectedly, the view from the Earth is supremely important since the structure of time on earth is a phenomenon reflecting the form and structure of the numerical world. This would suggest that the earth was, in some way, influenced by the abstract world of numbers to have formed this type of time environment. This might also suggest that the evolution of Life was an intended outcome for the third planet.
Having discarded the earth-centred model of the universe and having rid ourselves of the religions and gods proposed to explain this phenomenon, modern humans are free to live in an accidental universe where one is just alive on an existential line-of-time with no end except for death, and without any appreciation of the deeper structural recurrences, implicate within the sky. Instead there is a hotch potch Roman calendar whose roots were literally man-made.
Figure 3 Fibonacci Golden Mean. 1.618 is found in the Fibonacci approximation of 8/5 = 1.6 of the practical year of 365 days to the Venus Synod 584 days. Venus was seen as the youthful goddess, Earth as the mother of all that lives and the Moon as the wise older goddess, these together forming the ancient Triple Goddess. [photo by C. Messier for Wikipedia] see section Statues representing Knowledge in Sacred Geometry in Ancient Goddess Cultures, pages 106 to 111.
The Greek myths referred to women, but in ways designed to put matrilineage norms in a bad light. The patriarchal farmers of Jupiter-Zeus had defeated the religion of the Goddess, whose representatives had snakes (perhaps the dreadlocks of the Medusa or knowledge of the snake shaped ecliptic, see figure 3) or had kept men sexually enslaved on an island (as in the Odyssey) or sacrificed a sacred king after “a year …” (of 364 days) “… and a day” (making 365 in all). Our 7-day week derived from this Saturnian year of 364 days (52 weeks), named because the synod of Saturn is exactly 378 days (54 weeks) while the synod of Jupiter is 57 weeks. In this one is seeing through a series of invisible filters, that the ancient Greeks were against the tribal age that had preceded farming and cities, when women rather than men were most important to that way-of-life. And the western Enlightenment adopted the heliocentric planets as a binary removing the foundations of a vast past cultural corpus of religious and pre-scientific thought that had quite reasonably shown something special about the world that modern science would never choose to see. If we can fathom megalithic astronomy, its uniquely powerful discoveries will reveal what the religious texts were about: that the environment of the earth is no accident within in the universe, but that it is that of a planet for the evolution of Life.
Megalithic discoveries had been transmitted, only subconsciously, into the cultural subconscious of the later civilizations, and it was and is still informing and infecting our arts and the classical form of numeracy called mathematics. This diffusion had benefited from the clash of the Titans, namely between the matriarchal and patriarchal ways-of-life in the Eastern Mediterranean and Levant. It would be recorded in the intellectual life of the Greeks and Hebrews, thus informing Islamic then Christian world view, as a code of numbers and stories often agreeing with those of the East.
Continuity in Sacred Building
If you know how to look, one finds the units of measure and geometries of the megalithic repeated in later sacred buildings, built under disparate religions as if the design of sacred buildings had some sort of megalithic origin. The Chinese, Indian, Buddhist, Minoan, Classical Greek, Romanesque, Islamic, South Asian, Amerindian, Gothic, Sufi, and Renaissance buildings draw upon common geometric and metrological blueprints relating, for example, to the relative size of the Earth and Moon, and the sophisticated celestial time cycles such as the eclipse phenomena, as if to celebrate the cosmic environment even though many religions had conceptualized the heavens as if not found in the sky.
For this reason, my books can explore buildings of the historical period in the same way as megalithic buildings, to demonstrate this continuity of an invisible language, as if there were people with megalithic knowledge behind the construction of buildings without the outer religion officially acknowledging this fact. And in some strange way, I and others are recapitulating ancient works as to their meaning, by employing skills belonging to the past. For example,
In Cappadocia, Turkey, stone cut churches inexplicably contain high levels of meaning in their dimensions and definition of circular apse and rectangular naos occupied by hermit monks.
Angkor Wat is shown to be a massive statement of astronomical cyclicities alongside an outer meaning of Vedic mythological carving and Indian temple design.
St Peter’s Basilica was a renaissance rebuilding involving many great architects, including Michaelangelo who displayed sacred geometrical skill in translating a Greek square-cross basilica design into a Latin cross cathedral design, through the golden mean relationship of a square to such a rectangle (see figure 4). St Peter’s tomb is then in the centre of a model of the Earth and Moon.
Figure 4: St Peter’s Basilica: Sacred buildings followed geometrical and numerical rules that reflect both the cycles of the sky and the geometrical methods and numerical results of the megalithic. [plan courtesy The New York Metropolitan Museum]
Chapter 11 demonstrates that the equal perimeter model of the earth and moon had been related to the now-abandoned geocentric model. The Earth is at the centre (of course) and a system of growing square areas, for each planet’s synod, grows to embrace the whole figure to show it was the archetypal form taken as the norm for Buddhist Mandalas. And mandalas have recently been used by Jungian therapists and others to enable interaction with the subconscious mind. This suggests that our very being, as micro-cosmos, is part of the Earth and its planetary Sky environment of time. Celestial time appears to be a carrier wave for reality and not just a straight line.
Figure 4 The geometry of Equal Perimeter circle and square, with moon circles, showing the influence of the time world of the earth and moon, as the true basis for far-eastern designs called mandalas. [photo: Cesar Ojeda 17th century Tibetan -Five Deity Mandala from Sacred Number: Language of the Angels. Fig 7.20]
References
Cunliffe, Barry. Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC to AD 1000. Yale 2008.
Gimbutas,Marija. The Language of the Goddess. Thames & Hudson 1989.
Heath, Richard.
______Sacred Geometry in Ancient Goddess Cultures. Inner Traditions 2024.
______Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels. Inner Traditions 2021.
Sacred Geometry is metrical, it is based upon the interactive properties of “natural” (that is, whole) numbers and cosmic constants.
We live in a civilization where everything is thought to be functionally due to forces and laws, these all calculated using numbers and algebra. For this reason, it is hard to see the influence of numbers acting directly in situations to reveal that, geometrical forms are only possible due to numbers. One such form is the equal perimeter circle and square: this figuring heavily in my later books, as an ancient model, and in postings on this website (opens in new tab).
