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.
Volume as cubes reveal the wholeness of number as deriving from the unit cube as corner stone defining side length and “volume” of the whole.
The first cube (above left) is a single cube of side length one. One is its own cornerstone. The first cubic number is two to the power of three, with side length two and volume equal to eight cubes that define the unit corner stone.
In modern thinking, and functional arithmetic, volume increases with side length but the cube itself, as archetype of space, is merely divided by the side length of the unit cornerstone, which is 1/8th the volume and therefore reciprocal to the volume of 8 leaving the cube singular.
This may not seem important but, by dividing a whole cube, one is releasing more and more of the very real behavior that exists between numbers, within the cube. For example the number 8 gives relations between numbers 1 to 8, such as the powers of two {1,2,4,8} and the harmonic ratios {2/1, 3/2, 4/3,5/4,6/5}. These can give an important spine of {4/3, 5/4,6/5} which equals 6/3 = 2 of the yet to (numerically) be octave of eight note classes. Moving to side length 3, the cube of three is twenty seven (27), as seen in figure above, top right. To obtain it, the corner stone must be side length 1/3, and volume 1/27 so that, in these units, the volume of the cube is 27.
If one were to reciprocally double the 1/3 side length, each cornerstone unit would have 8 subunits, so that the volume of 27 would be times 8 which equals Plato’s number of 216. Another view is then that the cornerstone side length has divided the bottom right cube into six units which number, 6, cubed, is 216 a perfect number for Plato.
By accepting the cube of one as the whole, this form of thinking reciprocally divides that whole side length to generate an inner structure within the whole cube of one, equal to the denominator of the reciprocation. The role of the whole is then to be the arithmetic mean between a number and its reciprocal. This procedure maintains balance between what is smaller than the whole (the reciprocal) and what is larger than the whole (in this case the volume).
In ancient tuning theory this was expressed by the two hexchords descending and ascending from the tonic (we might call do), expressed by the two hands. The octave of eight and the cube are both wholes to be broken into by numbers greater than one by means of reciprocation.
Ernest G. McClain revealed the scale of such thinking was massive, whilst also but secretly reciprocal, so that a limiting number could express how different wholes will behave due to their inner diversity of numbers at work within them.
In this example, a musical code for planetary resonance is revealed within the metrology of the Parthenon (above), implied tone set (right) and octave mountain of numbers below 1440 (left bottom). In this case the number 24 has been multiplied by 60 to give a limiting number of 1440. The cornerstone in this case is bottom left of the mountain = 1024, a pure power of 210.
By simply quoting a limiting number, in passing, ancient texts could, in the hands of an initiate, create an enormous world of tonal and impied religious meaning – through a kind of harmonic allusion.
It is only by using the conceptual approach of the ancients, that their intellectual life can be recovered – just by adding the waters of number and some powers of imagination.
This extract from The Harmonic Origins of the World (p58-62) shows how what are taken to be arbitrary numbers, in the narrative of the Patriarchs, expressed knowledge of planetary resonances.
above: Diagram of the Bible code of “holy mountains”: Products of the powers of five upwards and of the powers of three across, each mountain within a limiting number if note D is {60, 120, 45, 180, 720} .
Female archetype Eve, “mother of all living,” becomes Abram’s wife Sarai. Childless, Abram was encouraged (by Sarai) to have first son Ishmael by concubine Hagar, but the Lord God (the mountain god whose number sums to 345) renames Sarai as Sarah and Abram as Abraham. At a miraculous 90 years of age she gives birth to Isaac (“he laughs”), then reportedly dies at 180 years old. It is harmonically relevant that (a) the giving of heh = 5 to both Sarah and Abraham elevates them from their former selves onto the second row, “stepping up” like the god Ea in Sumeria, and that (b) Adam’s number 45 has now been doubled to 90 and can form an octaval womb in which Isaac can be born, his life to then end at the doubling of Sarah’s 90 years to 180 years.
above: The human essence class related to four other classes in J.G. Bennett’s Gurdjieff: Making a New World. Appendix II. page 290. This systematics presents the human essence class which eats the germinal essence of Life, but is “eaten” by cosmic individuality, the purpose of the universe. The range of human potential is from living like an animal to living like an angel or demiurge, then helping the cosmic process.
The human essence class is a new type of participation within the universe where the creation can form its own creative Will, in harmony with the will that creates the universe. The higher intelligences have a different relationship to the creation than human intelligence. It is based upon this Universal Will (to create the universe) which has manifested a world we can only experience from outside of it. And the creative tip of creation* is the universal life principle that led to the human world where it is possible to participate in the intelligence behind the world, through a transformation into an Individuality, creative according their own pattern while harmonious with the universal will.
*creative tip: The evolving part of organic life is humanity. Humanity also has its evolving part but we will speak of this later; in the meantime we will take humanity as a whole. If humanity does not evolve it means that the evolution of organic life will stop and this in its turn will cause the growth of the ray of creation to stop. At the same time if humanity ceases to evolve it becomes useless from the point of view of the aims for which it was created and as such it may be destroyed. In this way the cessation of evolution may mean the destruction of humanity.
In the previous post, the difference in height of the two towers was seen to have an exoteric and an esoteric meaning. Exoterically, the taller tower is sometimes called the sun tower, probably because the globe at its top (below its cross) is about 365 feet-as-days (hence representing the sun and its year). From this fact, the lower tower was considered lunar , since the lunar year is “not as long” and so less high. However, one must go to the top of the cross on the lower tower to achieve the height of 354.367 feet-as-days (hence representing the moon and its year).
This article presents a deeper meaning, that the difference in the full heights of the two towers represents the musical intervals of the synods of Saturn and Jupiter, relative to the lunar year: cunningly encoded within the full height of the solar tower as the Saturn synod of 378 feet-as-days, which is 16/15 of the lunar year. To have made the taller tower higher, to achieve the Jupiter synod, was impractical so that, instead, Jupiter was symbolized by the lunar year of 12 lunar months while Saturn was 12 “months” of 28 days, the 336-foot high globe of the moon tower, as shown below.
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).
