Myths are like the megaliths of their time, monuments to a type of creative investigation. They were probably current as oral traditions before being absorbed by the mythic exact sciences, such as astronomy and musical harmony, and only eventually written down. The Traditional Arts of the Medieval represented this idea in three arts of language (the Trivium) and four of exact sciences (the Quadrivium), making seven in all. In the theme: How Stories Create the World, myths have the potential to identify [our] consciousness within a developed world of symbols that are then psycho-active, in a bestiary of meaning. Or so they say....
Politics of Number 2: Cosmic Structures and Systematics
Written by Richard Heath
The second chapter of The Politics of Number is focussed on the structure of cosmic time, as did my first book Matrix of Creation. It begins with a reproduction I made in the Heraklion Museum in Crete:
Item 2646: A “Perforated Utensil” possibly for use with incense,
New Palace Period: "Advanced and Final Phase of the Palace of Knossos" Gallery V, The Heraklion Museum
My model reproduces the pattern on the top of the disk, which I decoded in the hours following a visit to the museum. It appears to form a simulator that can count days and track the lunar nodes in a similar way to the megalithic simulation of celestial bodies likely to have taken place at Carnac in Brittany, the subject of the second report on Le Manio by the Heath Brothers.
We know that by the Bronze Age, gears had been invented for this purpose, as found in the Antikythera Clock recovered from the sea just north of Crete. Simulators based around a circle of holes are just a few steps away from being gear wheels whose cogs can interact to distribute a day count to wheels representing longer cycles of time.
This Saturnian time system will be the subject of a further article which will be linked in here. More on the Disk of Chronos, as I called it, can be found here.
In lieu of going to the 12th Systematics Gathering, Anthony Blake and I had the idea of making a film that would relate Systematics to my recently published book, Precessional Time. I was just able to keep up with providing subjects, toys and scripts, as the shooting proceeded over one and a half days. Tony was then able to take the resulting DVD, called The Politics of Number, to add another voice to that meeting.
This is the first DVD chapter in which a formerly neglected aspect of the ancient numerical sciences came naturally to the fore, namely their political relevance in shaping human understanding. The remaining chapters will be appearing shortly. Each are about 10 minutes long and sit reasonably well on their own, each having their own monadic nature and (as ever these days) written with an eye to their structural form.
Myths
- Politics of Number 2: Cosmic Structures and Systematics Read 66 times
- Politics of Number 1: Introduction Read 62 times
- The Death of Pan: the Instinctive Power of Numbers Read 148 times