Sacred Number

Charles Piazzi Smyth was the largely self-taught Astronomer son of a British admiral who, by the age of 27 had become Professor at Edinburgh and Astronomer Royal for Scotland. He was an extremely accurate and innovative practical astronomer and a pioneer in photography. Visitors to Edinburgh will experience his work every time they hear the One O'Clock Gun, fired from the castle using an electrical connection from Carlton Hill, the original Royal Observatory. He also advised, after visiting the volanic peaks of the Canary Islands, the building of mountain observatories (an idea of Isaac Newton) and though Britain failed to heed this advice until 1967, the French at Pic du Midi, and Russians successfully took it. [see The Story of Astronomy at Edinburgh by Hermann A Bruck]

 

However in the 1860s, Piazzi Smyth's career entered a mystical period which has ever since caused his remarkable scientific achievements to be ignored - as he wanted to take up the speculation that the Great Pyramid at Giza was a metrological and astronomical puzzle.  He and his wife, who was his assistant and constant travelling companion are buried beneath a small pyramid in Sharow near Ripon, N Yorkshire (above) which I visited again when passing yesterday and also over 20 years ago.

 From the perspective of Sacred Number, many of the initial assertions that the Great Pyramid was metrological were correct but these then led to a range of wild theories influenced by religious ideas of the day. It was not until Flinders Petrie increased the accuracy of measurements at Giza that many of the starting points for these theories were completely undermined. At this point, metrology itself was tarnished: before this it had been a living subject of study for antiquarians and scholars. Then it became largely banished from science including archaeological work as a medium of interpretation.

Perhaps the most influential of all the metrological starting points, for what became a farce, was the observation by Sir John Herschel that the pole of the Earth was "500,500,000 British inches long or exactly 500 million inches if the inch were to be lengthened by a thousandth part, the thickness of a human hair" [Bruck, p33], the so called (by Robert Menzies) Pyramid Inch that was used to decode the Great Pyramid as a Chronology of world or at least Biblical history.

The Pyramid Inch is (weirdly) a metrological reality even though, in the Ancient Model, it does not divide perfectly into the pole. John Neal reveals that this Inch is best seen as a numerical effect within metrology in his Freaks section (p218) of All Done With Mirrors.  The best descriptions of the ancient system do not require it, the polar radius being commensurate with all measures having 11/7 in their formulae in feet as is the case with the Jewish sacred cubit, the astronomical megalithic yard (AMY) and the royal mile, to name but a few.

The ancient figure for the pole to pole DIAMETER would be 500 million British inches plus 500,000 plus 7794.26 - and this latter figure is extra to that required by the pyramid inch polar theory. Thus there are three "things" here:

John Michell as written over thirty books, many on key subjects for understanding Sacred Number such as sacred geometry, landscape geomancy, Jerusalem, metrology, the number Twelve and so on. I came across a small biopic at this page: 

JOHN MICHELL has been involved with Glastonbury since the Sixties, and his major works have attracted many people to this ancient centre of British mysticism. His numerous books and pamphlets cover a diverse range of subjects, but they have a common theme: the re-emergence of the traditional worldview and the ancient science and philosophy associated with it, as a natural reaction to the uncertainties of modern life. John Michell lives in Notting Hill, London, and his present activities include research into ancient number symbolism and colour.

Some call him (as you might from the picture) the original Dr Who but most of all he is an original thinker who recognises a subject that is worthy of further investigation and this has left this trail of unique and valuable books.

His most famous early work was probably the 70's bestseller, A View over Atlantis [Sago, 1969] in which he attempted to put a few "different" subjects into a synthesis to define Earth Mysteries as a subject involving at least numbers geomancy and folklore. He first identified the Michael Line in Britain within this work, the longest line in southern England that runs at approximately 30 degree north of east.

In Sacred Number, it was in fact metrology that initiated the project because I felt that John Michell and John Neal's system of Ancient Metrology had components that needed exposition, such as the role of prime numbers, and could benefit by being described "from the outside", i.e. not by the pioneers themselves.  Thus whilst doing some new work, I was also a "bottom feeder", interpreting their work to a wider audience.

I sent John a copy of Sacred Number and he just wrote back to me. The result is the best I could ever have imagined for the four years of research with the above goals in mind:

Dear Richard, 

Many thanks for signing and sending me 'Sacred Number'.  I've been reading it and am very impressed by the way you approach this new and therefore rather difficult subject to write about. Your grasp of it is quite admirable and as is your expression of it. I've talked about it to Nosher [John Neal] and we're both delighted with what you've done.

Only one gripe (nothing's perfect) is with your extension of the Icknield Way [Michael Line] into the Baltic! Otherwise your book is a treasure and deserves the further second reading that I shall give it.

All success to you, from yours ever

John

Of course it is how readers, new to part or all of this area, find the book that is important, but it is very encouraging that John sees it as a valid and attractive extension of the subject.

“…Whatsoever is under the whole heaven is mine. I shall not conceal his parts, nor his power, nor his comely proportion” Job 41:11-12, K J Bible

The world of number found in the Sky becomes something quite different in the world of manifestation, the Earth; where the stage is set for the drama of Life.

Given that the higher worlds are just that, then there is a practical issue of how numerosity in the Sky is to commune with numerosity on the Earth, as represented in myth and iconography as in the tableau of Nut and Shen (Egypt) and less directly, Shiva and Shakti (India). The drama is portrayed as sexual since polarity and interpenetration are involved.

It may not be, as modern science would have it, that “people were superstitious” in their beliefs in celestial influence. Rather, they may have believed in ideas that had once been worked out from first principles, during an age when the numerical world was being explored as a spiritual influence - rather than being used to organise the material world for man.

We really cannot tell, just by living in it, if our world is a projection of active higher powers (the spiritual view), or just a random sampling of valueless experience (the scientific view). There has to be a re-education of the senses and mind to test such possibilities, and this tradition has to be regenerated within human cultures that have lost the traditional ways of seeing the world.

In a sphere like the Earth or a circle such as its equator, the constant Pi that relates radius to circumference is present. In a sense, Pi is the god of all circular forms and there is evidence that this was an “early” form of perception that led to different understandings than those of the modern scientific-mathematical perception. It allowed, for instance, the Egyptians to investigate the size of the Earth (See Sacred Number, Chapters 3 and 4). We know this because the Great Pyramid records in its form the process used to measure the radius of curvature at any point on the Earth.

Where moderns take the formula Perimeter = 2 x Pi x Radius to work out either radius or perimeter, I believe the Egyptians saw the radius growing at the same time as the perimeter so that part of a radius generates part of the perimeter as 2 x Pi. When they, or their predecessors, started measuring the Earth it became clear that, as one travelled north and measuring the latitude from the stars, that the length of a degree increased and therefore the Earth was not perfectly spherical, each degree having a different radius (of curvature).

That is, one degree of latitude can be assumed to be the perimeter of a perfect circle rather than an ellipse, and that portion of perimeter must equate to the same proportion of the radius. From this, latitudes could be numerically related to each other as spheres.

We are suggesting that in rational numbers lie actual control in the sense of autocratic power, without which nothing can really happen. At the core of rational numbers lie the special class of prime numbers, that cannot be divided by any other number (Chapter 2). Prime numbers interact, and through the measures revealed in ancient metrology, the ancient yet accurate model of the Earth involves only the primes 2,3,5,7, and 11. Eleven is generated only within the excellent approximation to Pi of 22/7, a primary ratio within the Great Pyramid and the numerical model developed for the Earth as its creative template.

This is the bridge I was looking for between my first book, Matrix of Creation: Sacred Geometry in the Realm of the Planets, and my Second, Sacred Number and the Origins of Civilization. Metrology and prime numbers were the key but then, the integration with disparate streams of ancient and earth mysteries revealed a journey through the traditional arts including the mythology of earth energies.

(based on a preliminary essay, April 2003)