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.

How can an immortal god die? Especially Zeus who was not just a god but head of the Olympians, a new breed of gods that had replaced the Titans and their “despotic” ruler, Chronos. Thus it was that a Rome holding to Zeus, re-badged as Jupiter, and even St Paul, rejected the Cretan tradition of the god’s death with the well-broadcast adage “All Cretans are liars”.

But we all should know that mythology uses contradictory, or at least inconsistent, versions of the same story, to express alternative perspectives and to transmit more knowledge in the process, rather than “a lie”.

The importance of the death of Zeus is that the story emerges exactly from that point in time and cultural transformation in which Zeus is also born and at that time it was familiar for a vegetative god, representing nature blooming in spring and dying in autumn, to die and be re-born within the immortality of the eternal round of the year or yearly daemon.

more on this topic 

Figure 3 The reclining face of Zeus 

This picture is a composite of three things

1. The Chartres eleven level labyrinth discussed in chapter seven.
2. The iconography of Thoth as Pi within the circle (from Temple of Man).
3. The hexagonal number 19 as circles

The 22 units of the 21 unit sector of Thoth's fathom correspond to 19 "cogs" of the circumference of the Chartre labyrinth.

It is fabulous that the cogs are used to define, by their centres, the perimeter as the unit called ped manualis by the builders, according to John James (the foremost investigator of that cathedrals construction order - see his website).

The entire circumference is, like the iconography of Thoth, 6 x 22 = 132 feet long. Using Pi at 22/7, the 22s cancel and the result is a diameter of 6 x 7 or 42 English feet. Like the Scottish brochs, the units directly interpret the ideal value of Pi itself as 22/7, employing as it does the prime numbers 11/7 that also define the ancient model of the Earth.

There is a new Discussion Space for dialogue on Sacred Number, see the navigation.