Sacred Number

The “death of Pan” was a phenomenon that occurred before or around the time of Christ in the sense that it was reported that a loud voice was heard (by sailors) that stated “Pan is dead”. As with all mythological information, at one level it is propaganda whilst at another it is history by allusion and at another it is true, especially when the culture absorbs it – in this case a culture with mythological roots right back to prehistory.

As such therefore, Pan’s death is another marker of transition at the beginning of fuller historical record keeping. This keeping of history may indeed have spelt an end to the dominance of mythological thought by the increasing use of rationality to unlock the nature of the physical world whilst banishing the complex mental world of allusion. At the same time though, Pan was manifestly not dead as he had been absorbed into the pantheon of Rome via Greece. He was a goat god that helped the Olympians overwhelm the preceeding Titans (associated with Saturn), to impose Jupiter on the celestial throne. We have encountered this process in the gap between Minoan Crete and classical Greece where Zeus appeared. In fact, Cretans came to be called liars because they retained part of the ancient matriarchal principle of the male king who must die, like the year, after a year and a day.

The illustration on the right is by Bob Jefferson. It first appeared on the cover of Talks on Beelzebub's Tales by J.G. Bennett. These talks sought to make accessible the deliberately challenging master work of G.I. Gurdjieff especially for those coming to these ideas for the first time, and originally delivered in talks to the students of the Sherbourne Academy for Continuous Education.

The Cretans not only said that Zeus was born on Crete (as per Greek myth) but also that he died there. This was infuriating for the new male order which had created immortal male gods to displace the matriarchal practices of the Mediterranean. The Goddess Metis was effectively recycled through Zeus’ head, in a virgin birth and “with a shout, fully formed”, to be reborn as Athena thus disposing of any previous divine female history. In this way her Parthenon was so called because she was born without a second parent and was always a virgin herself with resonances for the Virgin Mary. Thus, the appearance of parts of the previous pantheon into the new Olympians represents the inevitable process of reshaping the past familiar forms.

The new mind of classical times gave birth to now-familiar disciplines such as logic. In logical analysis, the facts are deduced without mechanisms such as allusion, metaphor and simile. In logic there has to be cause and effect that can be proved. It means nothing that a river looks like a snake. However, in the latter, high-level and intuitive, description there is a strong poesis that can integrate water, erosion, headwaters, and flood plains into a holistic overview. It is a powerful communication of a subtle truth not accessible to analytical thought, but communicated these days by schematic diagrams.

Download PDF of the superceded chapter 10 of Sacred Number

To discover this requires a focussed attention on celestial coincidences.

Some of these can now be found in my books, Matrix of Creation and Sacred Number and others in those of Robin Heath (Sun, Moon and Stonehenge, and his subsequent wooden books such as Sun Moon and Earth) and John Martineau (Little Book of Coincidence). Such direct observations of cosmic order patterned by number are complemented by the indirect sources of ancient numerical knowledge, accessible in the many works of John Michell (The Dimensions of Paradise) and the recovery of Ancient Metrology with John Neal (All Done With Mirrors).

The connections between direct cosmic knowing and what we inherited from the ancient world has naturally defined, in the last 50-100 years, a new subject or “protoscience”, which some unfairly call a “pseudoscience”! I have sought to bring these streams together with the third possibility that the natural form of knowledge for human kind was numerically based and not technological. This reveals a drama with respect to history itself, almost to the extent that written history marks a watershed in the loss of the numerical knowledge.

One of the strongest manifestations of direct numerical structure in our planetary environment involves Jupiter, our Moon and the solar year (hence the Sun, the Earth and even its rotation). The main actors are the following time periods and constants:

• Jupiter's, synodic period of 398.88 days [J_syn] and sidereal orbit of (10.858 +1) years [J_sid]

• The Moon's lunation of 29.53059 days [LUN] and Metonic Period of 19 SY [MP], in which the configuration of Sun, Moon and stars are closely repeated.

• The Solar Year, of 365.2422 [SY] days and 12.368 lunations [SY / LUN]

• e, the exponential constant = 2.718, and its square e² = 7.389

The strange relationships implicit in these are:

1. J_syn x 4 x 19 = 83 SY

2. 4 x 19 [Metonic periods] = 76 SY

3. e² is very close to LUN/4 [e would then be 2.717]

4. J_sid = SY/33,638 [10.858] +1 and 10.858 = 4 x e [where e is 2.715]

These numerical relationships are held together as if by numerical artifice, based upon the clustering of certain relationships within the domain of number itself, that is by properties within the number field itself.

Obviously, 1 and 2 above mean that J_syn/SY = 83/76 to a very high accuracy, varying by just one part in 136,000. Since the Metonic repeats four times in 76 years, then J_syn must automatically be resonant with it as 83/76. But the Jupiter synod of 398.88 days would have “reason” to be (a) just and exactly 83/76, (b) an integer (rational) fraction and have (c) 19 within its denominator as a factor.

We can discover the relative motions of Sun and Jupiter from the fact that there are 365.2422 DAYS in angle within the full year circle whilst in a Jupiter synod, the planet has moved 33.637 days. As in 4 above then, the Jupiter sidereal period is the time taken for Jupiter to traverse the year circle, 365.2422/33.638 = 10.858 plus one because Jupiter has gone one extra orbit over those enacted by the Earth's orbit within the sidereal period of Jupiter.

If 10.858 is close to 4 times e, the exponential constant, we can also note that 33.638 = 12.358 times e so that:

4e = SY/(12.368 * e) and since SY/12.368 = LUN, then the relationship LUN/4 = e² results in close approximation.

From this we can deduce that the exponential constant e “rules” the relationship between Jupiter and the Moon through the mediation of the solar year as a common denominator. This was well expressed towards the end of Matrix of Creation as figure 9.5 (left), where Jupiter is shown to have “captured” the Moon within its harmonic behaviour involving a whole tone of 8:9.

Whilst you could argue that the actual numbers don't matter (only the proportions), this soon appears wrong. The 12.368 LUN per SY is closely 12 +7/19 LUN which allows the Metonic period to resolve itself in 19 years, 7/19 being close to e [as it is 2.714].

Of course (?), e is a crucial number within the cosmos which has special powers when raised to powers with the imaginary number, the square root of minus one. This is the base of imaginary numbers which have led to massive utility in understanding the primes within the number field [Riemann Hypothesis], but with e generate a fundamental mathematical model for all energy transforming systems. The fact that e appears at all means that this system of Jupiter, Moon etc, is somehow normalised to both e and 19.

The number 33.618 (close to 33.638) emerges when the intermediate hypotenuse of a Lunation triangle [see Robin Heath's work] that is 12.368 long at the 3:2 point is also 33.618 feet long if the triangle is built using the [astronomical] megalithic yard (19.008/7 or 2.7154 feet) to build the 12:13:5 triangle so as to represent one MY = one LUN.

Finally therefore, the ancient peoples of the Megalithic left us evidence (through the lunation triangle) of the relationship to e within the year and the Moon and that behind this lies Jupiter, later Zeus, the King of the Gods and hence ruler of the Earth and Moon - once Saturn-Chronos' numbers were relegated to the semitone of 15:16 and the vestigial seven day week.

The name of the Ka'aba means "cube" whilst the building itself is evidently not a cube (with identical side lengths). In Sacred Number and the Origins of Civilization much was made of the fact that the square root of three appears between opposite corners of a cube with unit length (the root of two arising between the opposite corners of its square sides).

Root three appears as a very important proportion in the Gothic style of building whilst many sacred cubes are noted in sacred building in general, the Temple of Solomon and Leto [Egypt], Hindu temples, the Delphic altar to Apollo, and the cube of the New Jerusalem.

In his third book, Meditations on the Koran, Earnest McClain suggests that the original prototype of the cube is the cube of 60, which was the base number of the Sumerian and then Babylonian civilisations. From this base, still in use today (within time and angular measure) McClain shows the ability of 60³ to generate a tone map that defines a hexagonal array of musical notes, all within a single octave but held between 216,000 [=60³] and 432,000, a very significant number in, for example, the Vedic tradition as being the length of the Kali Yuga or dark age.

McClain Yantra for 432,000. Only this yantra can yield a hexagonal region where tones and their reciprocals co-incide. The hexagon has 37 tones because 37 is a hexagonal number, viz chapter 10 and the cube of Metatron.
[from p 90 of  Meditations on the Koran by Earnest McClain, Nicolas-Hays, Ney York, 1981]

We need to remember that a hexagon is a cube seen from one corner (and projected upon a flat surface) and that, in McClain's world, all ancient texts were written with numerical tuning theory in mind as a key plot generator. This last point has not been acknowledged yet by the worlds of scholarship or religion because the implications are too profound, subversive to the traditional ideas behind religious texts as communications from God or gods (rather than intimations of the divine world).

Returning to the Ka'aba, McClain gives a splendid account of its possible origins, the background of Mohammed's re-purposing of the shrine and the meaning of its non-cubic design.

Its width, length and height were probably intended to be 10 by 12 by 16 and McClain points to these proportions as being similar to the temple of Poseidon in Plato's myth of Atlantis, namely "6:3 plethora (full)" meaning expressive of 6:5:4:3 in that 5:6 lies between width and length and 3:4 between length and height. These ratios are minor third and perfect fourth.

One should note that the proportion between the width and the height is 6/5 times 4/3 which equals 8/5 the synodic period of Venus [584 days] in terms of the "practical" year of 365 days. The variation of width, length and height can lead to a greater tonal achievement that may be significant.

Why then should the polar radius of the Earth be, according to the ancient model, 3456 royal miles (as I pointed out in Sacred Number)? 3456 is 12 cubed [1728] times 2 and "the doubling of a [cubic] altar" was considered a challenge for the ancients, proved theoretically impossible in modern times. New Jerusalem was declared in Revelations to be a cube of 12,000 per side and as I found, one royal mile [8/7 miles] equals 6000 Greek feet of 176/175 English feet. This makes 1728 royal miles equal to the volume of a cube side length 2 royal miles of 12,000 such feet. [This I found in potentio within the layout of Washington DC].

The volume of a relatively small cube of 12 royal miles, projected to form a hexagon upon the surface of the Earth, generates an allusional volume one half of the polar radius. This relates to both tuning theory and the doubling of the altar. Such a cube has only powers of 3 and 5 plus 2 that figure within 10 = 2 times 5, and 12 = 4 times 3. However, 2 royal miles is 1 over 1728 of the polar radius, that is 1 over 12³ of its length.

Taking up the "doubling of volume" for a 12 side cube, the result is a cube 12 times the cube root of two in side length. The latter is very nearly 1.26 [actually 1.25992105, one part in 16,000 different] and this raises some interesting "ancient metrological" considerations, for John Neal's Standard Canonical transform is 126/125 or 1.008 of a foot. We can then see that 1.25 is 5/4 [the major third] and that this multiplied by 126/125 yields a highly accurate ability to create a cube that has doubled in volume. 5/4 times 126/125 is 1.26 which then times a side length of 12 gives 15.12 for the double volume cube's sides.

It appears then that this metrological ratio happens to be a practical means to the "doubling of the cubic altar" problem.