Hayes Michael - The hermetic code in DNA : the sacred principles in the ordering of the universe

The

Hermetic Code

in DNA

The Sacred Principles

in the Ordering of the Universe

Michael Hayes

Inner Traditions

Rochester, Vermont

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Colin Wilson for all the help and encouragement he has given me in the writing of this book, and for always finding time in his busy schedule to answer my calls. A kinder, wiser man I have yet to meet. I am duty bound also to thank posthumously three other wise men who have helped shape my world: George Gurdjieff, Pyotr Ouspensky, and Rodney Collin. Without their input, I should never have dreamt of such wonderful things.

A special thanks to Kay Hyman, whose invaluable editorial contribution has been generously provided simply for the love of it.

And lastly, but most of all, thanks to my wife, Ali, for reasons too numerous to mention.

Foreword

I suspect that the name of Michael Hayes is going to be remembered together with those of Stephen Hawking and Watson and Crick as a thinker who has made a revolutionary contribution to our vision of modern science.

Some time in 1995 I received a copy of a book called The Infinite Harmony, and subtitled Musical Structures in Science and Theology, published by the respectable firm of Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Since I was overworked, trying to complete a book to a deadline, it took some time before I got around to reading it. My book was about ancient Egypt and was called From Atlantis to the Sphinx; its starting point was the theory of John Anthony West that the Sphinx may be thousands of years older than anyone had supposed. And the amount of reading required was enormous.

One evening I was relaxing with a glass of wine when I noticed The Infinite Harmony in a pile of books beside my chair. I picked it up idly, glanced down the table of contents, and saw that the second chapter is devoted to ancient Egypt. Naturally, I turned to it immediately, and was soon reading with excitement and absorption. I quickly learned something I had not come across before: that in the antechamber to the Kings Chamber in the Great Pyramid, there is a square granite relief whose area is exactly equal to the area of a circle whose diameter happens to be precisely the same length as the antechamber floor. What is more, when this length is multiplied by pi, the result is precisely the length of the solar year: 365.2412 pyramid inches.

I was fascinated. It had long been clear to me that the ancients attached some mystical significance to numbers and that the sophistication of their knowledge was often greater than ours. Hayes reinforced my feeling that we are dealing with a very ancient knowledge system whose secret has been lost.

I was so excited that I looked around to see if I could locate the letter that had accompanied the book. It had vanished. The inscription in the book showed that it had been lying around my sitting room for months. And my wife had made a note of the senders address, which was in Moseley, Birmingham. I rang Directory Enquiries and asked them if they had a telephone number for Michael Hayes; they had. And although it was now after ten in the evening, I rang him. A girl answered the phone, and went off to get her father. A few moments later, I was speaking to Michael Hayes, apologizing for keeping him waiting so long for a reply, and telling him that I found his book enormously exciting.

I asked him some questions about himself, and about how he had become interested in the subject. He told me that it had started in his hippie days, when he was living in Mashad, in Iran, and was in the great mosque of the Imam Reza, impressed by the sheer number of worshippers, and by their devoutness. It was obvious that to them, religion was a living reality, just as it had been to the thousands of worshippers who had brought stones for the building of Chartres cathedral in the twelfth century. And during his travels in Iran, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, Michael Hayes had felt exactly the same thingthat their religions had a living source. He experienced an overpowering sense of being on the brink of learning some enormous secret.

Back in England, he had decided that it was time he learned something about the genetic code, and the mysterious letters DNA. He enrolled at a course at Leicester University. And there he took an important step closer to the secret. It proved to be numerical.

The spiral-shaped DNA molecule involves four chemical bases called adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. And these four can combine together in sixty-four different ways to form triplet units called RNA codons.

The number 64 struck a chord. Then he remembered what it was: that the Chinese Book of Changes, the I Ching, has sixty-four hexagrams, each made up of two different lines. Any reader who has ever tried throwing down three coins to consult the I Ching will recall that a preponderance of tails result in a broken line,

while three heads form an unbroken line:

The first symbolizes the Chinese concept of yin, the feminine, the yielding, while the second is yang, the forceful and masculine. The coins are thrown six times, and the six lines are laid on one another in a kind of six-decker sandwich.

Those who use Richard Wilhelms translation, with the introduction by Jung, will recall that the next step is to turn to the chart at the back of the book, which contains sixty-four numbers in a grid of squares, whose sides are eight units long. You then look up your top trigram along the horizontal edge, and your lower trigram along the vertical edge, and the square where the two trigrams meet is the number of the hexagram you are looking for.

In the early stage of his quest, Mike Hayes (as he prefers to be known) had studied the I Ching, and wondered idly why the number of hexagrams is eight times eight, not seven times seven or nine times nine. And now, with the coincidence of the DNA code and the hexagrams of the I Ching, he found himself wondering if this number 64 is some basic code of life.

When he learned that there were eight trigrams hidden in DNA, he began to feel that this was more than an odd coincidence....

All this Mike sketched out for me during that phone conversation. And when it was over, I had decided that reading the whole book was a major priority.

What I learned in The Infinite Harmony was that this coincidence was just the beginning of a whole series of related discoveries. For example, the number 22 plays a basic part in the DNA code. Proteins are formed by twenty amino acids, but with two codons forming start and stop signals, making twenty-two in all. And 22 also plays an important part in music, being the number of notes in three octaves on the piano. The followers of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras regarded 22 as a sacred number, and also 3.

Previously, studying the Russian mage Gurdjieff, Mike had also been introduced to something called the law of three. Positive and negative, good and evil, light and darkness, merely counterbalance one another, but a third force is necessary to combine themjust as the two sides of a zipper are made to interlock with the fastener in the middle, or two gases will only combine in the presence of a catalyst that is itself unaffected.

Studying the worlds major religions, Mike was struck by how often the numbers 22, 3, and 7 occur. The number pi, the relation of a diameter of a circle to its circumference, is 22 divided by 7. So now he began to look in detail at the worlds major religionsancient Egyptian, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, Jainism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Christianity. With increasing excitement, he realized that his numerical discoveries constituted a code that connected them all. The same code turned up in alchemy, which led him to label it the Hermetic Code, after Hermes Trismegistus, the Greek god who is the patron of alchemists, and whose best-known dictum is As above, so below. And so