Richard Heath - The Harmonic Origins of the World: Sacred Number at the Source of Creation

To Ernest G. McClain Cryptographer to the Gods (19182014)

THE
HARMONIC ORIGINS
OF THE
WORLD

In this book the author reveals himself as the natural successor to Ernest McClain. As McClain before him, Heath has realized the extent to which the natural harmony of music binds into one the within and without of mans world. He introduces us first to the observable recurrence of numbers underlying ancient astronomical sightings and then skilfully reveals the connection with the harmonic numbers of the sexagesimal system discovered by the Sumerians and Babylonians. Underpinning ideas with superb graphics and skilful numerical tables, he shows the ancient scribes, priests and gentlemen of leisure in the Aristotelian sense, to be most subtlein many cases far more so than we who work so hard to understand them. The progression by which he reveals his thesis is impressive.

PETE DELLO, SINGER-SONGWRITER, COMPOSER, AND MUSICOLOGIST

Preface

My own findings regarding planetary harmony lacked a proper context until I came to understand the work of Ernest G. McClain and collaborate with him under the auspices of Duane Christensens Bibal group, many of whose members were Ernests highly various friends and long-term collaborators. Ernest sought to write his version of this book, then called Brave New World. Instead, there was a period of acclimatization and analysis as to the deeper implications within his diagrams and his methods of working. Out of the blue I wrote him a program through which anyone can survey his views of the harmonic domain, while that domain and his friendship started to change how I perceived it.

Previous books of mine have also drawn on bodies of work not generally accepted by academics and hence were published to a more general audience, those interested in Earth mysteries and sacred numbers. A prominent influence was a leading author, John Michell, with whom I corresponded largely about ancient metrology. Michell and his friend John Neal provided me with the content for a self-propelled education in the now suppressed science of measures, which has been crucial here in analyzing sites such as the Parthenon, Marduks ziggurat, and the Mexican city of Teotihuacan, as to harmonic codes built using ancient measures.

I wrote my first book (Matrix of Creation) after a decade of calculation. This work was initiated by my brother Robin, and it focused on how the megalithic probably studied astronomy through their monuments and geometrical methods, then stumbling on the harmonic ratios crucial to this book. My purpose became the work of writing and researching a number of mystery areas with an eye to the story of their human development, a story not sought by historians who ignore fringe subjects. My writing resonated with the interests of long-term friend and occasional mentor Anthony G. E. Blake, on how media journeys enable an implicit order toemerge.

Richard Dumbrills ICONEA musicology conferences for 2013 and 2014 led to the work found here on harmonic buildings, the Olmec, and orality, while Dumbrill and Carrs new Music and Deep Memory: In Memoriam to McClain will have an extensive paper on harmonic allusion in the earliest chapters of the Bible, from which chapter 3 developed. The Bible material is a concrete example of what was possible for this book, and since then other topics, undocumented by McClain, have been completed including the location of musical scales on harmonic mountains with help from my Bibal friend Pete Dello.

Having published five books with Inner Traditions I recognize, from a media perspective, how contact with technical specialists and their general ethos has influenced my published work for the better. The copy editor for this book, Cannon Labrie, and project editor, Jennie Marx, cannot have found it easy handling new semitechnical material, yet their work triggered a significantand, I think, beneficial for the readerrestructuring of the book.

Researching illustrations has become easier online with Creative Commons and Wikipedia, while rights to use have become harder if not impossible to progress in some cases. Michael D. Coe very kindly agreed to my use of his content, as did Carly Rustebakke on behalf of the Linda Schele collection and David Schele.

Before he died, Ernest McClain gave his permission to use any of his work, helping me to create sections of chapter 4 on Greece. But I could not rest on McClains laurels and, where possible, I have instead expanded on his own body of examples for harmonic coding employed in the ancient world. One should not assume McClain would have approved of my work but, in the service of my own findings regarding planetary harmony, his own case for harmonic allusion in ancient literature is further validatedfor a widespread religious harmonism having existed before the current era.

INTRODUCTION

The Significance of Planetary Harmony

Over the last seven thousand years, hunter-gathering humans have been transformed into the modern norms of city dwellers through a series of metamorphoses during which the intellect developed ever-larger descriptions of the world. Past civilizations and even some tribal groups have left wonders in their wake, a result of uncanny skillsmental and physicalthat, being hard to repeat today, cannot be considered primitive. Buildings such as Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza are felt to be anomalous because of the mathematics implied by their construction. Our notational mathematics only arose much later, and so, a different mathematics must have preceded ours.

We have also inherited texts from ancient times. Spoken language evolved before there was any writing with which to create texts. Writing developed in three main ways: (1) pictographic writing evolved into hieroglyphs, like those of Egyptian texts, carved on stone or inked onto papyrus; (2) the Sumerians used cross-hatched lines on clay tablets to make symbols representing the syllables within speech; cuneiform allowed the many languages of the ancient Near East to be recorded, since all spoken language is made of syllables; (3) the Phoenicians developed the alphabet, which was perfected in Iron Age Greece through identifying more phonemes, including the vowels. The Greek language enabled individual writers to think new thoughts through writing down their ideas, which was a new habit that competed with information passed down through the oral tradition. Ironically though, writing down oral stories allowed their survival, as the oral tradition became more or less extinct. And surviving oral texts give otherwise missing insights into the intellectual life behind prehistoric monuments.

The texts and iconography of the ancient world once encrypted the special numbers used to create ancient and prehistoric monuments, using a numeracy that modeled the earth and sky using the invariant numbers found in celestial time, and in the world of number itself. Oral stories spoke from a unified construct, connecting the people to their gods. Buildings were echoes of an original Building, whose dimensions came to form a canon within metrology, the ancient science of measure. But the language of the gods within this Building was seen to be that of musical tuning theory, the number science that concerns us here. The gods in question are primarily the planetary and calendric periods seen from Earth, and it was only through the astronomy associated with the earliest megalithic buildings that the ancient mathematics could have naturally evolved.