Sacred Number

John Neal's metrology, published nearly 20 years after John Michell's under-regarded booklet Ancient Metrology, resolved the two mystery ratios located in the latter work, into a grid defined by just these two ratios, 441/440 and 176/175. This might have seemed an arbitrary step to take except that Neal found the resulting grid then has values corresponding to most of the found variations of historical measures, implying that this grid lay behind the use of metrology in the ancient world, as a globally established, standard practice. The implications of this are well exercised within Sacred Number - here I would like to offer some extra background and resources.

When I was first studying Michell's book, I was led to analyse all the measures using primes. In Matrix of Creation I had developed "matrix diagrams" as the only way to

I began to realise that the special behaviours of measures had to be generated in some way by the properties of number itself. Since any measurement is both a number of units and the units themselves, then the primes within metrology appeared to be spilling out into the monuments they measured.

This hypothesis about the ancient use of primes went a long way towards explaining the likely ideas held by whoever had established the global numerical culture. So whilst metrology and many other fields of the traditional arts give us evidence of such a high culture having existed, the bedrock of number upon which it was constructed has been mistaken for an unexpected skill rather than a deep philosophical speculation about the nature of the world itself!

 I have made a page on Prime Numbers in Metrology to show how this works. Please ask in the Discussion Space if you need more information or assistance.