Homage to Pythagoras: Rediscovering Sacred Science
edited by Christopher Bamford
(302 pages, pb, $18.95)
Lindisfarne Press, 1994
ISBN 0-940262-63-0
This book presents a collection of brilliant essays by Robert Lawlor, Keith
Critchlow, and others. They are all good. Lawlor's are the best with Critchlow
running a close second.
Chapter Titles
1. Introduction: Homage to Pythagoras
Christopher Bamford
2. Ancient Temple Architecture
Robert Lawlor
3. The Platonic Tradition on the Nature of Proportion
Keith Critchlow
4. What is sacred Architecture?
Keith Critchlow
5. Twelve Criteria for Sacred Architecture
Keith Critchlow
6. Pythagorean Number as Form, Color, and Light
Robert Lawlor
7. The Two Lights
Arthur Zajonc
8. Apollo: The Pythagorean Definition of God
Anne Macaulay
9. Blake, Yeats and Pythagoras
Kathleen Raine
Selected Quotes
pp. 74, 75 (Ancient Temple Architecture, Robert Lawlor)
"We believe that time is passing only because our ordinary consciousness,
absorbed in the transiency of material forms, is capable of "illuminating"
only one particular moving cross section of space-time at each instant.
In other words, form and substance, including the brain and body through
which we perceive, are continually changing, and we experience time as passing
because each instant of consciousness is different. This is because we are
always thinking new thoughts, experiencing and noticing new things, metabolizing
new substances; and it is this constant sequential difference of one instant
from the last or the next that gives the experience of time passing -- the
mind-body relationship drives time into its appearing and disappearing movement.
But through meditation techniques, in which perceptions and thoughts are
trained to subside, or through Mantra, by which each instant is made, through
repetition, to appear the same as every other instant, the sense of the
irrevocable movement of time can be arrested, and a "timeless"
status of consciousness experienced.
This is, of course, only a very external view of the mechanics of meditation,
such as is proposed by the physicist R. B. Rucker in his book Geometry,
Relativity and the Fourth Dimension, but it does lead us to several exciting
implications concerning the experience of time. Clearly, variations in temporal
perception are a factor separating one individual consciousness from another
within a species and, to an even greater degree, separating the conscious
awareness of different species. It may be said, indeed, that each distinct
variation in the pattern of temporal recognition constitutes an entirely
different universe of perception. For example, birds have a capacity for
temporal recognition eight to ten times more rapid than we do. For them,
pictures flashing at twenty-four frames per second, which appear to us as
a continuous, moving picture, remain still photos until the velocity of
240 frames per second is reached. Likewise, sounds which are to us a continuous
whistle are to birds separate and distinct peeps. In other words, birds
are able to record ten times as many granulated perceptions as we can in
any given temporal interval, which accounts for the acute rapidity of their
reflex responses. It is even possible to say this perceptual rapidity was
not developed in birds to enhance flight ability, but rather that birds
fly only because it is a movement which suitably embodies and expresses
the perceptual rapidity.
The sense of time, then, is related to the rate of change in phenomenal
experience."
pp. 122, 123
"It has long been recognized that bird navigation is accomplished both
by the bird's photo-sensitivity and its sensitivity to magnetic fields,
but only recently have the mechanics of this magnetic sensitivity been revealed.
It appears to lie in the most characteristic attribute of the bird, its
feathers. Bird feathers seem to function as electromagnetic transducers,
changing the dielectric pulsation received from the atmosphere into piezoelectric
signals, which can be carried by the bird's nervous system. Thus bird feathers
appear to be not only selective receptors and filters of the electromagnetic
information contained in the surrounding environment, but also energy transducers
and lines of transmission. In other words, birds use the underside of their
wings for magnetic sensing: which may remind us of Maat or other winged
deities, holding their feathered arms around the body of the initiate King,
or protecting the four corners of the coffin or canopic chest, or, as Nut,
the sky, standing with extended wings, welcoming the deceased to heaven.
From this we may speculate that the King or deceased is believed to receive
from the deity the initiatic training which heightens sensitivity to magnetic
fields and so leads towards a centering of the energetic body in universal
rhythms.
The feather symbol of Maat supports the oscillating plumb-bob and, because
vibration is nothing more than rapid oscillation, this ideogram reminds
us that every living body vibrates physically, and that all elementary or
inanimate matter vibrates molecularly or anatomically and that, since every
vibrating body emits a sound, all such vibrating bodies are thus musical
in the widest sense of the word.
The weight of the plumb-line's end, Egyptologist Lucy Lamy points our,
is often shaped like a heart, and is given the name ib , meaning
dancer. Now, the plumb-line which oscillates in the rhythm of the human
heart has a length of 0. 69 meters, while the human heartbeat itself, which
is normally seventy-two beats per minute, is in effect the plumb-bob of
the vibratory universe--for as physicist Lewis Balamuth has pointed out
the rate of seventy-two oscillations per minute falls exactly on the midpoint
of a chart which scales all observed periodicities, from ultrasonic, subatomic
vibrations up through the vast, galactical, rhythmic frequencies. The human
heartbeat, in other words, is literally the center of the vibrating cosmos.
