THE MONAD: This is therefore the universal phenomenon of ancient civilisations.
SYSTEMATICS: In the past I used Systematics to develop a single system for structural understanding or a progression of these. Anthony Blake has translated these to their natural heaven or haven, the triangular array, as per his recent essay. I hope to make progress on my need using this lattice arrangement from the whole downwards.
THE DYAD: Astronomy and Music are forming a fine dualism or force field in which the two are not exactly commensurate, a necessary characteristic found by Bennett in true dyads. (see www.systematics.org for background resources).
There is something profound in this dyad, for astronomy belongs to the "objective" world and is from a cultural perspective an indirect language of meaning garnered from our sensory existence in time. It really is phenomenological. Music on the other hand is a direct language of meaning, though how this is is another of the mysteries. The answer lies in accepting that music belongs to the human essence and that is why it is mysteriously close to our hearts and cultural life. The dualism here is seen in science and art but in the less confusing context of ancient civilisations, where science was not a business and art was not entertainment, a culture of what Gurdjieff called "objective art" arises.
Astronomy and music are two of the medieval Traditional Arts, the higher being the Quadrivium and including number "arithmetic" and geometry, which two interestingly give us the metrological geometry that we find in the megalithic structures of the old world and the so called new world's (perhaps best called The Very Late Stone Age?)
THE TRIAD: It was Alexander Marshack who gave us the splendid term of Time Factoring when analysing marks on bones from the Upper Paleolithic that seemed to be counting the month (Roots of Civilisation) and we find evidence of this in Britain, Brittany, Egypt, Babylon, in fact everywhere that ancient civilisations had a grip on astronomy or knew someone who had had. We also know, especially through Ernest McClain, that music was giving birth to more than acoustic experiences and that the concepts within music combined with humanities inherent numeracy, once investigated, appears to speak directly to the human mind like scriptures coming from God. It is no wonder then that ancient civilisation should have been briefly reborn in the Gothic to leave behind the Traditional Arts as a prototype for university education, partly transmitted through Islamic scholarship but one suspects mostly through Centres of Wisdom like the Kwajaghan. It is perhaps reasonable to call cultures experimental and modernity a unique break with the past in the scope of its experiment.
THE TETRAD: The time-factored monuments involve measurements but also lead to highly structured symbols so that the geometrical ideas found in symbols are then implicit versions of the ideas that were being worked out and these generally got around to being proposed as gods. When the gods are planets then astronomy is strongly factored into them and when the gods are harmonic then music is in the ascendant or it is being proposed as an ideal pattern lying behind the pattern of cosmic time, a not unreasonable hypothesis.
NOTE ON PROCESS: As the lattice progresses one can see the ability it places in our hands for keeping many terms in their right place during the emergence process. The number of terms on each level must all have the same character, a character belonging to that number's systemic attribute. The Monad's systemic attribute is universality, the Dyad's is complementarity, the Triad's is dynamism and the Tetrad's is activity. Odd numbers have a central term (a new level of concreteness) and the Pentad brings in something new, an Iseity (or uniqueness) at its centre with a system attribute of significance.
THE PENTAD: The significance of an ancient civilisation lies in its culture. This depends on its skills but feeds these into in myths as an offering, the why. The invariants of the culture derive from its symbols and measurements but its achievements derive from its ideas and its gods. To the left is the material culture that archaeologists specialise in. Different cultures are recognised by their invariants which can be skills, measurements, time-factored monuments, symbols. The outer limits of the culture is between skills on the earth and myths in the sky. The inner limit expresses a lower nature in the cultures invariants (mere stuff) and a higher nature in the cultures achievements (assuming these can still be understood).
So perhaps it is true to say that until one accepts the notion of many ancient cultures all having common origins in their study and integration of astronomy and music and the wish to build large structures to hold their knowledge for posterity, the instances of the essence class Ancient Civilisation will have its proponents arguing as much as the opponents of this evidently real fact. This is and ingrained Diffusionism that can still be passed around within Academia without being challenged. Metrology, astronomy, harmonics are forensic tools with some hope of answering the question "were new world pyramids inspired at all from the old world and if so from where and when?"
If we are at one with this then there is a discipline that has been emerging on an individual level for understanding ancient civilisation, alongside the work of specialists with proper jobs. All that can be done is to approach ancient manifestations as wonderful versions of the essence class. Each site has a different astronomy because of latitude and different ways of reading the sky. But what of their musical ideas and ideals?
