All of the above leads us to suspect that there is probably far more to the linear length we call the Megalithic Yard than at first seemed to be the case. So neatly does this unit fit into the matrix of the turning Earth, and into patterns we have evolved to utilize and appreciate it, its importance may prove to be pivotal to our very survival.
It is almost certain that the Megalithic Yard is a physical manifestation of patterns that are inextricably linked to our life on this planet. Despite this fact, its length cannot be ascertained instinctively but has to be produced through a mechanical means (i.e. a pendulum). That any supposedly primitive culture was able to draw it forth from the complex interactions of nature in the way that the Megalithic people did is little short of staggering.
Postscript
After we had finished writing this book we decided that it would be fascinating to lay out the detailed rules of Megalithic music that we had just reconstructed. We then asked a young London-based band called De Lorean to respond to a brief to create modern music that carefully followed the ancient principles of sound that are associated with the Megalithic Yard.
Jim Evans, Adam Falkus, Paul Newton and Will Skidmore, who are all highly talented musicians, took the brief and went very quiet for many weeks. Then they came back with their first track ‘Heliotropic’. It was electrifying!
Over the following months they went on to write and perform many other pieces that interpreted the Megalithic rules in a variety of ways, creating music that seemed to us to synchronize with the soul. As we listened we felt in tune with the power of the turning Earth.
Those readers who would like to hear samples of De Lorean’s music, or buy the full CD entitled Civilization One – The Album should visit our website at www.civilizationone.com.
CONCLUSIONS
We found that the Megalithic numbers produced circles that combined the mathematical ratios known pi and phi. Both are irrational numbers yet they produced results that are so close to being perfect to be negligible. In our investigation we found that an American PhD student had discovered the existence of phi in Thom’s data back in the early 1970s – a fact confirmed by the great man himself when he described the finding as ‘magical’.
The all-important numbers 366 and 360 are curiously linked by a combination of pi and phi because 360 divided by 5 gives a result of 72 and 366 divided by pi x phi also gives the result of 72. This suggests that the relationship between the two Megalithic numbers has a fundamental resonance with these two very special ratios.
When we turned to the subject of music we found that Megalithic mathematics produces its own structure. Sound is normally measured in cycles per modern second, known as hertz (Hz), but we considered using cycles per Megalithic Second, which we called Thoms (Th). A frequency of 366 Th is the same as 560 Hz, which places our Megalithic note just slightly above C sharp in modern concert tuning. This is effectively the ‘sound of the Earth turning’ because the planet rotates at a rate of one Megalithic Yard per beat at the equator.
We found that indigenous Australians consider a didgeridoo with a note equal to 366 Th capable of creating sacred Earth music. Further investigation of other indigenous music also revealed Megalithic rhythm and pitch correspondences. It appears that there is an instinctive relationship between the rotating mass of the planet and human music. It may indeed have been this ‘involuntary’ sense that the mystic and mathematician Pythagoras came to call ‘the harmony of the spheres’.
When we looked at human sight we found that the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum forms an octave rather like music. What is more, if we move exactly 40 octaves up the frequency scale from a note of 366 Th we get to blue light. While nearly all scientists believe that light and sound are not connected, we tentatively feel that there might be a resonance between the two that is picked up by human perception.
1 http://twm.co.nz/Benv_bio.htm
CHAPTER 12
Sun, Moon and Megalithic Measure
It was clearly time to sit and take stock again. We had a series of face-to-face meetings in order to review our data and some of the remarkable findings that had resulted from our investigation. We were agreed that we found ourselves faced by certain irreconcilable facts. The association of the numbers 366 and 360 had proved to be far more puzzling than we could have possibly expected. What is more, we were now aware that we were not the first investigators to associate knowledge of both pi and phi with the data Alexander Thom had collected in his long investigations of the Megalithic sites.
The challenge we now faced was to try and understand how Neolithic Man could have devised a unit that was obviously central to a gloriously holistic system of measurement that seems to emanate from the Earth itself. Did they invent it? Was it given to them by some unknown previous but more advanced culture, or does everything come from the human condition, in which simple observation of our environment will intuitively link us to a natural rhythm of 366?
We had constantly tried to stand back to try and understand what sort of ‘magic’ was driving a system that was in some ways far in advance of the best we have today – yet existing more than 5,000 years ago. We had the feeling that there was far more here than simply good astronomical observation or the fruits of the efforts of a group of early sky watchers who just got outrageously lucky. At each stage we had found that the Great Underlying Principle had astonishing powers of cohesion to make all aspects of life work as one. Its existence had been made clear to us while others had not found it, probably because we did not impose the limitations of our expectations or preferences on the possibilities.
We had uncovered an integration of ancient units that had no right to exist according to standard opinions of the past. The reality of the Minoan foot and its correspondence to the Megalithic Yard indicated a science that was deliberately and intentionally amended to meet new requirements. The Minoan foot is nowhere near the same linear measurement as the Megalithic Yard, yet it was clearly intended that 1,000 Minoan feet should represent the same linear distance as 366 Megalithic Yards, which itself is exactly one Megalithic Second of arc of the polar circumference of the Earth.
Where to start?
But where, we mused, was the start of this puzzle? Where exactly was the entry point for this impossibly brilliant system that made all modern approaches to working with nature look awkward and entirely compromised. Having more or less exhausted our ideas as to where we could turn next, we looked outwards – towards the heavens themselves.
The first object we considered was Earth’s companion in space, that rocky body we simply call the Moon. As inhabitants of planet Earth we should all be eternally grateful to the Moon for orbiting our beautiful blue planet in the way it does. Atypically for the solar system at large, Earth’s Moon has large dimensions for a planetary satellite but it has a very low mass because it contains almost no iron or other heavy metals. There is no theory of the Moon’s origin that fits all the available facts but it is generally accepted that it is composed of the same materials as the Earth though without the heavy elements. This gives it a density that is around 60 per cent of our own world.
The Moon is a great deal more than a shining disc that conveniently lights up the night sky. Several leading biologists working with astrophysicists who study our nearest neighbour in space have come to the conclusion that life on Earth may never have established itself at anything more than a primordial aquatic level if the Moon had not been in place.
The Earth has a very active and unstable core and therefore wobbles in several different ways as it spins. It is has been suggested by some scientists that the Moon acts rather like the stabilizer on a child’s bicycle, in that its gravitational presence prevents the Earth from regularly toppling over in relation to its solar orbit. If it did so, any complex life form would be wiped out in the resulting turmoil. In addition, the strong gravitational pull of so massive an object creates by far the largest proportion of the tides we experience.
Biologists hav
e argued that it was the regular cycles of the tides that allowed aquatic life to eventually take up residence on land. For example, some species may have occupied an evolutionary niche provided by tidal pools. If such pools are created during a particularly high tide, it may be some days or even weeks before the sea would replenish them. Natural evaporation would eventually remove the water in the pools, leaving their inhabitants either to die – or to adapt. Creatures exploiting this niche would have been subject to evolutionary forces, which eventually led to the formation of primitive organs for breathing in a part-air/part-water environment. Ultimately, these organs would have become lungs, while fins for swimming evolved into proto-limbs. This is a persuasive theory of how life left the oceans and ultimately evolved into humankind.
By some absolutely incomprehensible quirk of nature, the Moon also manages to precisely imitate the movements of the Sun when both are viewed from Earth. Practically every phenomenon of the Moon replicates, in a month, what the Sun appears to do in a full year. In addition, the magic of the Moon causes it to move in a mirror image of the Sun, in that the midsummer full Moon will set at the same angle and in the same place on the horizon as the midwinter sunset. Then the midwinter Moon sets where the midsummer Sun sets, and at the equinoxes the Moon takes the same setting line as the Sun. This is very, very odd – but it is observably true.1
The realities of the Moon are highly improbable for many reasons but we accept them because of what is known as the ‘Anthropic Principle’. This states that things have to be as they are or we humans would never have developed to witness them – in other words, our environment exists in its current form because we observe it. To us this seems a rather circular argument that appears to be a handy mechanism to stop us from worrying too much about the extreme improbability of the human species existing at all. When one considers the nature of the Moon, it has to be agreed that no-one could have done a better job if they had sat down and thoughtfully designed the thing!
The orbit of the Moon.
The movements of the Moon
We decided to consider the movements of the Moon more closely. Because it always has the same side facing Earth, one lunar day is exactly the same as a rotation around the Earth. This is because the Moon rotates once on its axis as it makes one orbit of the Earth.
The so-called ‘dark side’ of the Moon is not actually dark, it is simply that one side always faces away from us, like a shot-putter’s weight on the end of a line. The Moon orbits the Earth at an average distance of 384,403 kilometres and at an average speed of 3,700 kilometres per hour, and it completes one revolution in an elliptical orbit about the Earth in 27.3217 days. But this is a very human description of events, seen from an Earth-bound perspective. A better way of describing what is happening is to say that the Earth experiences 27.3217 mean solar days for every one of the Moon’s days, and this leads to a very surprising outcome:
366 lunar days
=
10,000 Earth days
Why should this be? This connection by way of the key Megalithic value of 366 is surely no coincidence?
It must also be borne in mind that the number of seconds in a mean solar day (86,400) multiplied by 27.3217 is extraordinarily close to the difference in seconds between 10,000 mean solar days and 10,000 sidereal days. The Moon had always been considered to be improbable – but now it was looking impossible! We were truly stunned as we tried to take in this amazing matrix that stemmed from what we had called the Great Underlying Principle.
An elegant and precise relationship
Our own questions demanded that we try to find an explanation for why the movement of the Moon corresponds to the Megalithic number of 366 so readily. So we looked more closely at the Moon’s dimensions and found that its circumference is almost exactly 3.66 times smaller than the Earth’s. Then, just for thoroughness, we applied the principles of Megalithic geometry against lunar dimensions.
Earth’s Moon is usually quoted as having an equatorial radius of 1738.1 kilometres,2 giving it a circumference of 10,920,804 metres. This distance seems entirely arbitrary when viewed in metric units but when we converted to Megalithic Yards the principles of the assumed Megalithic geometry are applied and the picture looked staggeringly different.
lunar circumference
=
13,162,900 MY
one lunar Megalithic Degree (366th)
=
35,964 Megalithic Yards
one Lunar Megalithic Minute (60th)
=
599.4 Megalithic Yards
one Lunar Megalithic Second (6th)
=
99.9 Megalithic Yards
That is a staggeringly accurate 100 Megalithic Yards to a second of arc!
Allowing for the impossibility of having an entirely accurate estimation of the its circumference, it appears that on the Moon there are 100 MY to a lunar second of arc. For the Megalithic Yard to have a perfect integer fit would only require a tiny adjustment in the assumed radius of the Moon from 1738.1 kilometres to 1739.83 kilometres – a difference that does not exist as the original figure was only intended to be more or less correct to one decimal place.
What was going on? How could there be precisely a hundred Megalithic Yards to a lunar Megalithic Second of arc? It is an inescapable fact that Megalithic geometry works on the Moon as well as the Earth!
Why is it that the Moon conforms so elegantly and precisely to units devised by the Stone Age inhabitants of the British Isles and Brittany? As we thought about the result we could see that the fact that the Earth is 3.66 times larger than the Moon would produce this relationship – but who could have foreseen the astounding level of accuracy. However, it seemed that someone in the distant past had noticed the relationship. All this had to be part of the amazing importance of the number that the Megalithic builders chose as their key value. But, in the light of the lack of sophistication of these people, is it rational to believe that they could possibly have understood all this, or had they simply hit upon some cosmic constant that is unknown in our present era?
The Moon and the Sun
Another strange fact about the Moon is that when viewed from the Earth it appears to be the same size as the Sun. This is why it fits ‘exactly’ across the disc of the Sun at the time of total solar eclipse. The underlying reason for this is that the Sun is 400 times larger than the Moon but, by yet another amazing quirk of nature it is also 400 times further away from the Earth than the Moon.
The Sun, being 400 times larger than the Moon, means that the following breakdown must apply:
one solar Megalithic Degree
=
14,400,000 Megalithic Yards
one solar Megalithic Minute
=
240,000 Megalithic Yards
one solar Megalithic Second
=
40,000 Megalithic Yards
For thoroughness we decided to check this result against the Sun’s radius, which is normally taken as 696,000 kilometres.3 To find a circumference this has to be doubled and multiplied by pi and then by 1,000 to give a result in metres. This comes out at a very unimpressive 4,373,096,974 metres, but converting it according to the principles of Megalithic geometry does indeed produce a Megalithic Second of arc that is 40,004 Megalithic Yards long. That is one hundredth of one per cent different to the estimate of the Sun’s dimensions – which is certainly inside the range of error of the original estimate. The best figure of 696,000 kilometres for the radius is obviously rounded up, yet the actual figure we arrive at by using Megalithic principles is 696,070 kilometres. So the Sun also conforms precisely to the Great Underlying Principle. Simply amazing!
The grand design
As we pondered these new revelations we agreed that things like this are not generally encountered in real life but here they were – real, hard facts. The Sun, the Moon and the Earth all conform to a ‘grand design’ that is also evident in the Megalithic structures that are scattered across the British Isles and w
estern Europe. Is there something absolutely fundamental about the dimensions of the solar system that modern science has missed but which the Stone Age builders understood either intuitively or intellectually?
There is no theory of how the Moon came into being that fits all of the known facts but these days it is widely accepted that the Moon is made of material scooped from the surface of the Earth. This is known as the ‘big whack theory’ and involves the theoretical catastrophic collision of the Earth with a planet-sized body. This theory also explains why the Moon has virtually no iron because such an impact would have blasted off chunks of the Earth’s outer layers rather than its very dense core. If the big whack theory is correct, one could imagine that the debris created might have coalesced in a manner that somehow reflects the same ‘366-ness’ of the Earth, but it seems very strange. As far as we can discover, there is no such effect known to science. Whatever the origin of this orbiting lump of rock, it now becomes clear that the relationships between the Earth, its Moon and the Sun are far more complex and mathematically integrated than anyone in the modern era has realized.
The next step was to look at the dimensions, mass and movements of the other planets in the solar system. We studied each in turn and in every case we found precisely nothing that came anywhere close to fitting the rules of the Megalithic principle. This was reassuring on one level, because it showed that these sorts of numbers and relationships are special. But the consequences of that ‘specialness’ were worrying. We had to admit that it seems as though humanity’s environment has been exclusively engineered for our benefit using a standard measuring system.
Civilization One: The World is Not as You Thought it Was Page 17
