Sacred Number

The Moon has been a primary influence in the Earth's evolution as a planet since it was created by an unusual collision with the Earth. These influences include:

1. Kneading the crust when the Moon formed orbiting only tens of thousands of miles above its surface.
2. Tilting the Earth to create our familiar phenomena of weather, seasons and large temperate zones.
   
3. Stabilising the tilt which otherwise would have oscillated wildly.
4. Continuing to regulate seismic and volcanic activity.
5. Protecting Earth from many bombardments, as does Jupiter.
6. Producing tidal influences in more recent times that evolve shorelines and large tidal environments.

During its existence the Moon's orbit has receded and the orbital period has therefore lengthened, as the energy from tidal interactions has slowed the rotation of the Earth, transferring energy to the Moon. The current orbit is on average 27.32166 days and the month 29.53059 days, the time it takes the Moon to again catch up with the Sun.

It's orbit is about 5.1 degrees relative to the plane of the solar system, effectively to the Sun's path through the year. The Sun's path, because of the tilt of the earth, is tilted and about 23 degrees to the celestial equator, which is the Equator of the Earth projected up into the sphere of the fixed stars.

This all means that the Moon does not follow the same path as the Sun in the sky. It travels above and below this path and only crosses at two points, an ascending node and a descending node where the Moon moves to the north of the Sun and to the south of the Sun respectively.

The positions of these nodes is moving, in the opposite sense to the movement of the Sun. Also, where these nodes are, the Moon can come in front of the Sun to cause some sort of solar eclipse, or the Moon can be opposite to the Sun in which case a lunar eclipse of the Moon by the Earth's shadow can occur.

Currently, the Moon is in such an orbit that it can just completely cover the Sun in part of its orbit (a total solar eclipse) though in other parts it is further away and smaller (causing an annular eclipse).

Many people think that the phenomenon of totality in solar eclipses represents an unlikely fact, indicative of some possibility that the Moon seems designed to do this. Certainly the likelihood of a technical civilisation co-inciding with this condition is theoretically an unlikely natural event.

However, the deeper one looks into the time periods associated with the Moon, the larger a network of co-incidences emerge and here I am going to take one area and show how ridiculously unlikely it seems. The subject here is the movement of the Moon's nodes relative to the year and the nodal or Draconic year of 18.618 years. (Other information can be found in Matrix of Creation or Sun, Moon and Earth by Robin Heath)

Because the Sun moves along the ecliptic in the opposite direction to the lunar nodes, the Sun will cross a node where the Moon might be in less than half a year. The Sun will recross a node after less than a year, in fact in 346.62 days on average, a time period called the Eclipse Year.

If 346.62 is subtracted from 365.242, the solar year, then the difference is 18.622 days. The square of 18.622 is 346.779 days, very similar to the length of the eclipse year. The square root of 364.62 is in fact 18.618 days and if this is divided into the solar year, then 365.242/18.618 = 19.618. That is, the eclipse year and the solar year appear to have a natural divisor, the period of which is 18.618 days long.

Using the Megalithic technology of right angled triangles, the two years can be represented as an N:N+1 triangle as below. A right angled triangle can always be represented in this form, where the difference between the hypotenuse and the base is divided into each of these to normalise the triangle. Technically this is called a superparticular triangle and it represents the essence of the triangle and the relationship between the two longer sides.

 The logic of this triangle is quite clear once you can read it. The base line of 18.618 must be one less than the hypotenuse of 19.618 (units of 18.618 days) because the sun moves 18.618 DAYS on the ecliptic "year circle" whilst the lunar nodes move away from the Sun just one DAY. In moving away from the Sun, a node is moving towards an earlier reunion with the Sun, around the far side of the year circle.

In the micro world, the creator of the relationship is the relative motions of the Sun and the Nodes. If this was a different ratio than 18.618 to 1, then another N:N+1 triangle would emerge but, because all right angled triangles can be normalised in this way, another interesting numerical relation would be available. However this triangle is special because the unit underlying it of 18.618 days also figures in the N of the N:N+1 triangle, making the eclipse year the unit squared.

Were the unit larger, what would happen? If the nodes moved more quickly then the triangle will get steeper with N reducing in size. This means that the excess of the solar year over the eclipse year is becoming a larger proportion of the solar year, i.e more than 18.618 days. Thus, the units of the triangle and the N implicit within its N:N+1 form diverge at any value other than they are.

Only in the present relative motions of the lunar nodes, and solar motion on the ecliptic, can the triangle be normalised. This is extraordinary enough. However, it is also true that the length of a day further divides up the excess of 18.618 days into the number 18.618 that also belongs to the N:N+1 essence of the triangle. This cannot be possible unless the rotation of the Earth is, by design, perfectly in time with this relationship.

Finally, in the macro world, the 19.618 of the hypotenuse represents also the number of eclipse years in the Draconic period of 18.618 years, the latter being the meaning of the base of 18.618 years. In that time the nodes have completed one complete revolution of the ecliptic, represented here by the number 1, which is how this normalisation of triangles manifests outside the "surface" of the solar year - all beyond the year is the reciprocal of all found within the year. This is a natural consequence of recurrence since each divisor of a period also manifests in longer periodicities that are numerically self-similar but reciprocal.

Every day, we can say, that the Moon's nodes move 1/18.618 of a DAY [on average] on the ecliptic

The above relationship is very hard to explain and since 1994, when it began to become clearer to Robin [Heath] and myself, it has remained a curiosity awaiting and explanation that would reach an audience. Within lies just one of the great co-incidences outside of science that the Moon provides. [In Sacred Number I use a John Michell anomoly relating the Earth, Moon, Great Pyramid and Pi of 22/7.]