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Sacred Number and the Lords of Time
The Stone Age Invention of Science and Religion
Published by Inner Traditions
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
Table of Contents
About The Book
Our Stone Age ancestors discovered that the geometry of the Earth provided a sacred connection between human experience and the spiritual worlds. Exploring the numerical patterns of time and then the size and shape of the Earth, they created an exact science of measures and preserved their discoveries within sacred structures, spiritualized landscapes, and mythologies, which interpreted the religious ideas associated with their science. In this way, the ancient measures of space and time reached our present age and still embody the direct but forgotten truths of our sacred planet.
By recovering the megalithic secrets of space and time, carefully preserved in megalithic stone structures, Richard Heath tells an untold story of four megalithic ages. He identifies a first age of astronomical discovery in the French sites around Carnac, where, using only counted lengths and simple geometries, the ancients created a sophisticated cosmic clockwork. A second age centered in Britain, and including Stonehenge, successfully measured the Earth and revealed a simple pattern held within the Earth's shape, using metrological ratios. A third age, centered in Egypt and Greece, saw a perfecting of the monumental arts, associated metrology, and religious ideas, revealing the Earth and the heavens as the work of a numerical genius. The fourth age saw pyramids and other metrological buildings spread to the New World, at Teotihuacan in Mexico, and also to the Far East.
Examining Earth's harmonic relevance to the Universe as a whole, Heath shows how we can recognize the long-forgotten foundations of our own civilization and revive the sacred teaching preserved by the four great megalithic ages.
By recovering the megalithic secrets of space and time, carefully preserved in megalithic stone structures, Richard Heath tells an untold story of four megalithic ages. He identifies a first age of astronomical discovery in the French sites around Carnac, where, using only counted lengths and simple geometries, the ancients created a sophisticated cosmic clockwork. A second age centered in Britain, and including Stonehenge, successfully measured the Earth and revealed a simple pattern held within the Earth's shape, using metrological ratios. A third age, centered in Egypt and Greece, saw a perfecting of the monumental arts, associated metrology, and religious ideas, revealing the Earth and the heavens as the work of a numerical genius. The fourth age saw pyramids and other metrological buildings spread to the New World, at Teotihuacan in Mexico, and also to the Far East.
Examining Earth's harmonic relevance to the Universe as a whole, Heath shows how we can recognize the long-forgotten foundations of our own civilization and revive the sacred teaching preserved by the four great megalithic ages.
Excerpt
Chapter 8
DESIGNER PLANET
The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.
Sir James Jeans, 1930
THE MONUMENTS OF THE MEGALITHIC have so far been interpreted as necessary technical designs, suitable for understanding astronomical time periods, establishing the dimensions of the Earth and distances upon the Earth according to relative longitude or latitudinal degrees. As we saw in the last chapter, developments emerging from the geodetic phase made it possible for the length of perimeter walls surrounding the Temple Mount at Jerusalem to present an exact symbolic meaning (i.e., the Precession of the Equinoxes). Detailed within Sumerian, Jewish, and Christian texts are designs for arks, ships built using metrological codes defining cubes, and buildings or shapes whose areas and volumes generate large numbers, significant to planetary dimensions and astronomical time periods, thus providing a link between heaven, earth, and humanity’s sacred spaces. Such sacred structures remained significant to those initiated in megalithic metrology, but when presented as religious symbols they were increasingly detached from any factual relevance.
Humanity’s cultural development was therefore established upon a numeric and symbolic foundation provided by the megalithic, however soon forgotten and lost sight of. The combination of number and symbol was projected into future cultural settings as a canon of sacred geometrical art. This symbolic work turned megalithic understandings into simple and powerful patterns, such as the Ark, which the ancient world reset into traditional information (texts) for transmission across unknown future times and circumstances or within temple-building practices. This is probably how Ark stories came to be part of our world of stories and texts, versed so to speak in the evolving number sciences of the East, incorporating all that was known about geometry, art, temple-building, and compositional and harmonic codification.
These new number scientists of the ancient Near East inherited megalithic codes indicating that the world was wholly founded on numerical relationships. Carnac’s astronomical relationships involving multiple squares had indicated how numbers might participate in cosmic structures and rhythms. The shape of the Earth and the role of the moon and planets had then become known through the use of ideal units of length, within a pattern surely not dreamed up by human agency. This pattern inscribed the Earth within a design, revealing the Earth’s unique relationship to the number field. It was this that rightly turned megalithic science into the ideals and ratios we find embodied in sacred religious structures, these being perpetuated in the design of temples throughout the historical period, each numerically coded using a metrological system to establish numeric connections between the Earth and the heavens.
THE GEOMETER’S GIFT
At Carnac, the first four numbers were seen to generate multiple squares. In modern math we sometimes multiply numbers together so as to form factorial numbers such as factorial FOUR, shown as 4!, which is 1 × 2 × 3 × 4 = 24.
The presence of factorial numbers in late Stone Age thinking should not come as a shock since, throughout the megalithic period, the art of factorization was seeing whole numbers as the product of their smaller factors, including the prime numbers. The lesser factorials such as 4! = 24 would be present as aggregate metrological lengths.
Through his lifetime studying Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid, John Michell intuited the geometry involved in the mean Earth discovered by the ancients, which made heavy use of factorials. By now we know that SEVEN is useful within PI as 22/7, noting then that 22 is two times ELEVEN. If 5040 were declared as the length of a radius, then it would have a circumference equal to 6! times 44, or 720 times 4 times ELEVEN, which equals 31,680. One-quarter of this would be the length of a single quadrant equaling 7920, the idealized diameter of the mean Earth in English miles. This length happens to be 11! divided by 7! since 8 × 9 × 10 happens also to equal 720, which is 6!. This can be presented as two circles with a common center as in the figure below.
The resulting geometry is quite unique. No other geometry could embody a quadrant to equal a diameter and engage in such fundamental play of factorials while also numerically expressing the Earth’s size in miles. Built in the same century, Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid can be seen to display this relationship of two circles, albeit in completely different ways. This implies the existence of this ancient mean-Earth geometry as informing the design of these monuments.
DESIGNER PLANET
The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.
Sir James Jeans, 1930
THE MONUMENTS OF THE MEGALITHIC have so far been interpreted as necessary technical designs, suitable for understanding astronomical time periods, establishing the dimensions of the Earth and distances upon the Earth according to relative longitude or latitudinal degrees. As we saw in the last chapter, developments emerging from the geodetic phase made it possible for the length of perimeter walls surrounding the Temple Mount at Jerusalem to present an exact symbolic meaning (i.e., the Precession of the Equinoxes). Detailed within Sumerian, Jewish, and Christian texts are designs for arks, ships built using metrological codes defining cubes, and buildings or shapes whose areas and volumes generate large numbers, significant to planetary dimensions and astronomical time periods, thus providing a link between heaven, earth, and humanity’s sacred spaces. Such sacred structures remained significant to those initiated in megalithic metrology, but when presented as religious symbols they were increasingly detached from any factual relevance.
Humanity’s cultural development was therefore established upon a numeric and symbolic foundation provided by the megalithic, however soon forgotten and lost sight of. The combination of number and symbol was projected into future cultural settings as a canon of sacred geometrical art. This symbolic work turned megalithic understandings into simple and powerful patterns, such as the Ark, which the ancient world reset into traditional information (texts) for transmission across unknown future times and circumstances or within temple-building practices. This is probably how Ark stories came to be part of our world of stories and texts, versed so to speak in the evolving number sciences of the East, incorporating all that was known about geometry, art, temple-building, and compositional and harmonic codification.
These new number scientists of the ancient Near East inherited megalithic codes indicating that the world was wholly founded on numerical relationships. Carnac’s astronomical relationships involving multiple squares had indicated how numbers might participate in cosmic structures and rhythms. The shape of the Earth and the role of the moon and planets had then become known through the use of ideal units of length, within a pattern surely not dreamed up by human agency. This pattern inscribed the Earth within a design, revealing the Earth’s unique relationship to the number field. It was this that rightly turned megalithic science into the ideals and ratios we find embodied in sacred religious structures, these being perpetuated in the design of temples throughout the historical period, each numerically coded using a metrological system to establish numeric connections between the Earth and the heavens.
THE GEOMETER’S GIFT
At Carnac, the first four numbers were seen to generate multiple squares. In modern math we sometimes multiply numbers together so as to form factorial numbers such as factorial FOUR, shown as 4!, which is 1 × 2 × 3 × 4 = 24.
The presence of factorial numbers in late Stone Age thinking should not come as a shock since, throughout the megalithic period, the art of factorization was seeing whole numbers as the product of their smaller factors, including the prime numbers. The lesser factorials such as 4! = 24 would be present as aggregate metrological lengths.
Through his lifetime studying Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid, John Michell intuited the geometry involved in the mean Earth discovered by the ancients, which made heavy use of factorials. By now we know that SEVEN is useful within PI as 22/7, noting then that 22 is two times ELEVEN. If 5040 were declared as the length of a radius, then it would have a circumference equal to 6! times 44, or 720 times 4 times ELEVEN, which equals 31,680. One-quarter of this would be the length of a single quadrant equaling 7920, the idealized diameter of the mean Earth in English miles. This length happens to be 11! divided by 7! since 8 × 9 × 10 happens also to equal 720, which is 6!. This can be presented as two circles with a common center as in the figure below.
The resulting geometry is quite unique. No other geometry could embody a quadrant to equal a diameter and engage in such fundamental play of factorials while also numerically expressing the Earth’s size in miles. Built in the same century, Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid can be seen to display this relationship of two circles, albeit in completely different ways. This implies the existence of this ancient mean-Earth geometry as informing the design of these monuments.
Product Details
- Publisher: Inner Traditions (June 5, 2014)
- Length: 288 pages
- ISBN13: 9781620552445
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Raves and Reviews
“Heath has done a superb job of collating his own work on the subject of megaliths with the objective views of many other researchers in the field. I therefore do not merely recommend reading this book but can state unequivocally it is a must read.”
– John Neal, British metrologist and researcher and author of Measuring the Megaliths and The Structur
“In Sacred Number and the Lords of Time we have an important explanation of how megalithic science was developed. This book is a long-overdue wakeup call to a modern culture that has abandoned this fully developed and astonishingly rich prehistoric model of the physical world. The truth is now out.”
– Robin Heath, coauthor of The Lost Science of Measuring the Earth and author of Sun, Moon and Earth
“...Heath reveals the underpinnings of our civilization and seeks to revive the sacred teachings preserved in stone.”
– Ruth Parnell, Nexus Magazine, October 2014
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