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.