Renna Shesso - Math for Mystics

First published in 2007

by Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

With offices at:

500 Third Street, Suite 230

San Francisco, CA 94107

www.redwheelweiser.com

Copyright 2007 by Renna Shesso.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages.

ISBN-10: 1-57863-383-4

ISBN-13: 978-1-57863-383-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shesso, Renna. From the Fibonacci Sequence to Luna's Labyrinth to the Golden Section and other Secrets of Sacred Geometry/Renna Shesso.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-57863-383-4 (alk. paper)

1. GeometryMiscellanea. 2. MathematicsMiscellanea. I. Title.

QA447.S36 2007

516dc22

2006032047

Cover and interior design by Maija Tollefson

Typeset in Trade Gothic and Grajon

Interior illustrations 2007 by Renna Shesso

Cover photo illustration 2007 by Kevin Irby

Printed in Canada

TCP

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

As human beings, we aren't just mildly curious. We're demandingly curious. We want to understand! We want to know! We want to find the underlying order in our universe! We want to matter! We want to count!

Eek! Count?! No! That sounds like math! How ironic that today, in the twenty-first centurydespite technology designed to help us do everything imaginable involving numbersso many of us are profoundly math-phobic. Friends exchange personal horror stories of grade school math experiences, memories similar to my own, sometimes worse. Enjoy arithmetic? Heck, with the sense of mental abuse some of us absorbed with our multiplication tables, it's a wonder we can even count.

It's our collective malaise: Post-Traumatic Math Disorder.

Yet despite how we personally feel about mathematics, our distant ancestors willingly used numbers as pathways into the great patterns of Nature, avenues to understanding the Universe and their own place in it. Many ancient cultures had specific gods and goddesses they credited with inventing mathematical skills. With the aid of divine inspiration and assistance, humans nourished this numerical invention, continually pushing their skills and seeking greater clarity of expression.

Often, their motivation was metaphysical: A large portion of math history traces back directly to the earliest astrologers, who needed to be able to describe and record what they saw in the night sky. Notably, in math history books, those original innovators are usually referred to as astronomers, not astrologers, as if they were either one or the other. Astrology, astronomy initially, the metaphysical and practical worlds overlapped, and it was all the same thing. Whether you were the queen's astrologer or a farmer marking the solstice, timekeeping mattered, and numbers mattered. Mistake a numerical pattern of petals or leaves and you could accidentally poison yourself. Lose the rhythm of a sacred dance, fumble the meter of a ritually told creation story, and the clear patterns of life might be spoiled. Ignore the celestial clock of equinoxes and solstices, and you'd risk being caught short of food as winter arrived. Lose your navigational position at sea well, no good at all.

Striving to understand the order and intelligence they sensed in their surroundingsour surroundings, Mother Earthour ancestors sought an appropriate language to express what they were learning. The tones and tempos in music, the cadences in speech, the harmonious patterns in weaving or in painted decoration, the embodiment of meaning into architecture, the elegant dance of the stars and planets . These studies overlapped into the realm of the spirit while still requiring a grasp of space, form and dimension, all of which could be expressed numerically. The numbers we know are one means of doing this, but there are other infinitely creative methods. The Mayans used complex mask-like glyphs to record their extremely accurate calendars. Pacific Islanders navigated the open sea guided by chants that mimicked the unique rhythm of waves between islands.

What you'll find in this book are some of the many things our distant ancestors knew and used, based on long generations of seeing and absorbing, based on sky watching, on folk knowledge, on myths and on ever-more-complex calculations. Much of this information quietly feeds the rich foundation for modern-day Wiccan practices. Studying it, I feel as if I'm holding a fistful of very fine and very long threads that I can slowly trace back to their sources. Some of the threads unravel in the process. Some change color or texture and become unrecognizable. Others are still hopelessly tangled. But some threadsthose I've included in this bookrun true, stay bright, sing when I pluck them, and can still bear the weight of practical use. This certainly isn't all-inclusive, but makes for a reasonable starting point. There are many more strands still waiting to be discovered, untangled, and utilized.

A surprising number of vintage numerology books start out speaking in spiritual terms but ultimately shift to picking horses at the race track. Let's capriciously assume that gambling is not a major concern here. When I look at numbers in a metaphysical context, I'm usually getting ready to do spellwork, the magical action of graphically sending forth my intentions and requests to the Celestial Powers-That-Be. Do I want to use four different herbs in my talisman? Would five herbs be better? How many knots should I tie to close the pouch? Why? Does the choice of day matter? How come? We'll explore this type of number-question in the following pages.

Despite the dreaded M-word in the title (and I don't mean Mystics), there's very little actual math required here. One concept that is necessary is knowing how to reduce multidigit numbers. Since this generally isn't covered in real math classes, I'll explain it here. For many magical and numerology purposes, we add together the digits of multidigit numbers to produce simpler numbers, those from 1 to 9. Sadly, this has no practical application like calculating sales tax or balancing a checkbook. It's just a simple principle that appears frequently in metaphysical number use.

So, when the text advises you to reduce a number, that's all it means: Add the multiple digits together as if each digit were an independent number. When you need to end up with a single digit, keep going until you get there. For example 15, the number of the Devil card in the Tarot deck, when reduced becomes 6 (from 1 + 5), the same number as the Lovers card, which certainly provides food for thought.

Dates are handled a little differently, as demonstrated in :

Figure I-1 Adding
A. December 31, 1950 is reduced as
12 (month) + 31 (day) + 1950 (year) = 1993
B. Then 1 + 9 + 9 + 3 = 22
C. Followed by 2 + 2 = 4

This is basic pencil-and-paper stuff, so don't bother buying batteries for the calculator.

As a child, Pablo Picasso could draw brilliantly, but was hopeless in mathematics. He supposedly explained that he got distracted by how the numbers looked. To the young Pablo, the number-glyph that meant 2 just looked like a swan. The glyph meaning 5 seemed more like an eyebrow jutting over a large nose. The numbers were distracting him from math: Rather than seeing them as symbols, Picasso saw the numbers as nonquantifiable shapes.