FIGURE 18. The Greek Parthenon Blueprint design
Scaling the Blueprint pentacle lengthwise inside the Parthenon floor plan, we find a number of interesting alignments. For one, the most prominent division of the Parthenon aligns with the large horizontal of the Blueprint pentacle, just as it does with the east wall of Rosslyn. For another, the inner width of the temple and other horizontal and vertical columns of pillars also align with prominent Blueprint intersections. Even the central altar falls inside the pentagonal center of the star geometry. Is this only a coincidence, or was it in fact designed using the orbital geometry of Venus?
Perhaps the most telling feature in the Parthenon’s design is the inclusion of three double-square regions as three sets of pillar sizes located in exactly the same region of the Blueprint as the interior of Rosslyn. It seems difficult not to conclude the Greeks were well aware of the Venus Blueprint and used it to design their greatest temple as a symbol of Athena’s (or Vena’s) resonant womb.
Reflecting on this possibility, I wondered how many other ancient temples could have been built with this template. How long had this been going on, and why was it not already known, at least as a contending theory, in archaeological circles?
The Vedic Romans
Most know that the Romans inherited their pantheon of gods from Greek mythology. Among other adoptions, Athena was associated with Etruscan Minerva, while the dawn goddess Aphrodite became the prototypical Vedic fertility goddess named Venus. The Romans clearly knew Athena was really Vena and thus gave her wise protector traits to Minerva, assigning Aphrodite’s fertility, music, and beauty persona instead to Venus. Roman architects and engineers also seemed to understand the origin of temple building in Venus worship, creating their own Venusian temple known as the Pantheon.
Visiting the Pantheon during a vacation to Rome in 2009, I was quite impressed with its perfect spherical design and ocular opening at the apex of the ceiling to let in the light of the Sun, Moon, and stars. It was old news to me that it was an astronomical temple and that the Roman pantheon of gods lived in the sky—however, I was not yet aware that the Pantheon and Parthenon might be related in their design. I had no idea that both structures had their roots in Vedic cosmology and their foundations built upon a star (Fig. 19).
FIGURE 19. The Roman Pantheon Blueprint design
It was really a small leap of faith from the Parthenon to compare the Blueprint fractal to the Pantheon floor plan. Scaling the large Earth circle of the Blueprint egg to fit the circular Pantheon, I was not too surprised to find the top Sun-Moon circle fits right under the portico, aligning neatly with the front row of columns. In this configuration, the horizontal arm of the Blueprint pentacle defined the main entrance, setting up an astounding celestial fertility symbolism.
To enter the Pantheon, one must penetrate the World Egg and fertilize the womb of Venus. To leave the temple, one must be reborn as a Moonchild through the small circle or “cup” at the top of Meru.
It seems undeniable to me that the Pantheon was based on the Venus Blueprint with the entrance simply squared off at two Moon widths to create the portico. Yet there is an octagonal arrangement of niches around the inside that do not seem to originate from the Blueprint fractal. Instead this may be another eight-point symbol of Venus known as the Star of Ishtar. Most scholars believe this refers to the eight-year orbital cycle of Venus with Earth rather than the five-facing conjunctions of the rose pentacle.
Taken together, the 8:5 proportional geometry in the Pantheon could have been intended to symbolize the Venus-Earth resonance rather than the Venus pentacle alone. Since the corresponding Fibonacci ratio of 1.6 is a close approximation for the golden ratio, the Roman Pantheon is another example of an ancient Vedic temple building traced over the Blueprint.
While the Romans could have learned this from the Greeks, they may have already been aware of it from their own history. The Etruscan civilization preceding the Romans was essentially Hindu and worshipped the Hindu god Shiva. Their temple tradition can be characterized as a square floor plan in which the front consisted of a gallery of columns and the rear half was occupied by three chambers or cella. These chambers were houses for the three central deities of the Etruscans named Tinis, Uni, and Menrva, who were of course associated with the Sun, Venus, and Moon. Later becoming the Roman deities Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, these too are descended in one way or another from the Vedic trinity Indra, Vena, and Soma.
During my family’s visit to Rome, we had a private guide take us through Vatican City. Our guide had just completed her master’s degree in ancient studies and archeology, so was able to share some very interesting facts with us about the Vatican.
Rendezvousing at a coffee shop just across from the main entrance, she began by asking what we expected to see when we went in. When we replied that we expected to see a lot of Christian religious artifacts, she said this is what most people expect to see. But then she said what we were actually going to see would be more pagan art and artifacts than Christian. Needless to say, that got my attention.
After making our way through the Vatican museum, she started telling us about the history of the Vatican. She told us that the word Vatican originated from vatica, a Sanskrit word applied to Hindu cultural and religious centers such as the “Ashrama-Vatica,” “Dharma-Vatica,” or “Ananda-Vatica.” I was dumbfounded when she said the land upon which the Vatican was now standing was once a Hindu religious center that existed before the Romans conquered the Etruscans.
Relishing our stunned looks, our guide continued. She said that vatica also referred to a temple wine made from a bitter grape. In fact, this wine is believed to have been a psychedelic brew made from commonly available plants, such as acacia or Syrian rue, and consumed by a cult of women called the Vaticinia who lived in this area.24 Quoting a former Vatican curator:
The Vatican Hill takes its name from the Latin word Vaticanus, a vaticiniis ferendis, in allusion to the oracles, or Vaticinia, which were anciently delivered here.
The Vaticinia would then make their brew in vats and drink it to commune with the Etruscan god Vaticanus, whom they believed guarded the garden and necropolis on the hill.25 Because of these visions, the word vatika eventually became the Latin word for “prophecy” as well as the Italian verb vaticanare, meaning “to prophesize.” Thus the area where St. Peter’s Basilica now stands became known as Ager Vaticanus or Vatican Hill.
Upon my return from Rome, I decided to research the vatica etymology a little further. I discovered there was once a very famous garden in Sri Lanka named Ashok Vatika, described in the Vishnu Purana as the kingdom of the demon king Ravana. In this way, vatica (or vatika) once referred to any garden containing sacred plants that were used to make “entheogenic” temple wine.
Before the Etruscan goddess Turan or Turanna was associated with Greek Aphrodite to become the Roman Venus, she was considered the goddess of vegetables and ripening grapes. For this reason, Turan may have at one time been the feminine aspect of Vaticanus revered by the Vaticinia oracles. If so this would parallel the historical duality of Venus as the Morning and Evening Star with sacred gardens and entheogenic rituals in other cultures.
As for the Sanskrit word vatica, there is a correspondence to the tilaka or tika dot that Hindu women place on their foreheads to acknowledge the third eye and crown chakra. Etruscan statuary often depicts a tika mark on the forehead between the eyes. At the same time, the generic name for a Hindu temple is also vatika. Thus Sanskrit vatica reveals the equivalence between a temple building and the inner temple of the mind. The outer temple is a reproduction of the inner temple.
Historically the inner temple has been associated with the pineal gland at the bottom center of the brain. This gland is so named because it looks like a tiny pinecone. In reality it is an embedded eye with a functioning retina. In primitive animals, the pineal is located at the crown of the skull and equipped with a working cornea to help regulate biological activities by measuring sunli
ght through the thin bone at the top of the skull. Many ancient cultures believed this third eye was the seat of consciousness and source of revelatory prophecy.
Related to the third eye is the Sanskrit word svas-tika or swastika, which also has something to do with the Vatican. In Vedic tradition, the swastika refers to the swirling double-spiral serpent energy Hindus believe emanates from the third eye, just as it does from the Sun. At the same time, swastikas were used on Hindu maps to mark “good temples.” Together, the swastika can be considered a symbol of Mount Meru and its Fibonacci pyramid both in the sky and the body. As the Romans later adopted this symbol it became the Black Sun, representing spiritual light and inspiration.
So we find that Rome and much of what we now call Italy was once a Vedic colony that provided the backdrop for Christianity. For all intents and purposes, Vatican Hill was the Etruscan spiritual center—a place where people could come to worship, hear the latest prophecies, and perhaps even partake of vatica communion themselves to seek enlightenment from the gods. The earliest Vatican was one of many such Vedic temples, not much different from those in India. We can be sure it was marked by a swastika on more than a few Hindu maps.
Today we find vestiges of this ancient Vedic heritage in the seat of the Roman Catholic Church. The Holy See is a clear reference to the Etruscan vatica temple upon which the Church was built, now the Episcopal jurisdiction of the Church on Vatican Hill. With such a long tradition of religious belief based on altered states of consciousness to help divine the future, we might wonder if this practice still continues even into modern times.
Could there be secret rituals held somewhere beneath St. Peter’s Basilica, there in the dark recesses of the underworld necropolis? And might the Pope himself even take a small vatica communion from time to time, perhaps to help him hear the Word of God more clearly? Of this we can only wonder.
Vedic Christianity
As we were being led into the Sistine chapel, our guide stopped us at the center of the room so we could take in the view of the ceiling frescos. Painted by Michelangelo under the patronage of Pope Julius II between 1508 and 1512, the ceiling depicts a series of scenes down its length. Surveying the room, our guide directed us to the scene directly above us in the center of the room.
It was the famous Creation of Adam fresco depicting a god figure reaching down to lightly touch Adam’s outstretched finger. As we craned our necks back and peered skyward, our guide asked us if we saw anything unusual about it. Looking closer we saw nothing unusual or out of the ordinary.
She then urged us to take a closer look at the background behind the god character and tell her what we saw. I replied that all I could see were other figures, perhaps angels representing a heavenly host. That’s when she opened my eyes to the real meaning of the Sistine chapel and Rosslyn chapel with it.
With a faint smile on her face, she told us that it was a depiction of Zeus surrounded by a pantheon of pagan gods inside a cross section of the human brain. Suddenly everything became clear—how could I have missed it? How could anyone miss it?
Looking closer I could see that it was Zeus, who had his left arm around a female figure that looked suspiciously like Botticelli’s Venus. His hand was then on the shoulder of a cherubic figure that looked like their love child Eros or Cupid. Michelangelo was paying homage not only to the Greeks, but also to more ancient concepts of God in Nature. Here he was telling us the Vedic belief that divinity is found within one’s own mind, not some separate Heaven regulated by the Church.
While we stood there mouths agape staring up at the ceiling, our guide explained that the Pope had requested that Michelangelo paint scenes from the Bible, but instead he painted a series of pagan-inspired murals based on the book of Genesis. She pointed out that none of the “angels” had wings and that the scenes gradually became more and more three dimensional from one end of the chapel to the other, as if the stories were materializing from some archetypal realm.
As we continued to make our way through the Vatican, we were shown many other pre-Christian sculptures and symbols. In St. Peter’s Basilica we saw bee and vine carvings interspersed with four wooden sculptures of a woman in different phases of childbirth—all right above the stairs leading down to the necropolis beneath the Basilica. While it did not dawn on me at the time, I came to understand this as a symbolic depiction of the Etruscan Vaticanus (or Vagitanus) and in particular the Birth of Venus, as such fertility rites had been worshipped by the Etruscans on this very spot. It is a direct analog to the Hebrew Shekinah and Green Man symbolism in Rosslyn.
We saw many other pagan artifacts in the Vatican museum, including an Egyptian sphinx and a number of astrological references. One ceiling fresco even depicted Venus and Cupid together, a pentacle star just above her head to identify her. Outside there was a giant pinecone sculpture, suggesting a symbolic connection to the pineal gland and long history of entheogenic communion on this hill.
Out in St. Peter’s Square, which is actually an ellipse, we approached the largest Egyptian obelisk in Rome. Our guide took great pleasure in showing us markers along the shadow line of the obelisk where each astrological sign had been embedded into the pavement. The “square” is a fully functional astrological sundial that tracks the movement and phases of the Sun, Moon, and stars to this day.
At the four compass points of the square we found markers indicating each of the winds. Walking over to the east wind marker, the direction from which Venus and the Sun rise together at dawn, I was not too surprised to find a face blowing five lines, suggesting the five conjunctions or kisses of Venus with the Earth. Inscribed above and below were the words “Est Levante,” Latin for “East Rising.”
I learned later that Rome and Vatican Hill had once been a major center for Mithraism, a derivation of Zoroastrianism and Vedic cosmology that competed with Christianity for some 500 years. In fact, several hundred Mitharic monuments have been identified across Rome.
Mithra was considered the son of the Zoroastrian sun god Ahura-Mazda and linked to the Egyptian sun god Re. As another Son of the Sun, he was often depicted with rays of light or “glory” around his head while wearing a choke collar of a serpent. In addition to representing the Sun, he represented fertility and water as found in Vedic cosmology. Even the name Mithra originates in the Indo-European root “Mihr,” etymologically related to Meru and Mary.
The theology of Mithraism centered on the death and resurrection of Mithra. Appearing before sunrise on the rocky summits of the sacred mountain of Hara Beresaiti, Mithra is described as emerging fully grown from the “virgin dawn” and “rock of the Earth” while holding a fire or torch above his head. This is of course an allegory for the Sun rising out of the mountains at dawn preceded by the Morning Star. Scholars believe that the Sun being born from a rock was the prototype for the Rock of St. Peter, the Christian resurrection symbol upon which the Vatican was built.
Sharing all of this with Stuart, he expressed amazement at how far the Meru legend had once stretched around the world and how every religion, including Christianity, must be descended from the Rig-Veda. This one written work appears to have been the model for what was once a single worldwide religion and spiritual science founded on the physics of music.
More and more we were coming to understand that the true meaning of the chapel at Rosslyn was no different than the Vatican Basilica. Both were Vedic fertility temples founded on the presumption of a musical cosmos. Music and harmonic science were the first religion, and Roman Christianity descended from it, though now heavily veiled.
All of the Vedic scriptures are very explicit in their message that the cosmos is a form of music and made by musical gods. The texts are written as hymns and believed to have been revealed according to sruti or “what is heard.” Mount Meru itself was a kind of musical bridge between Earth and Heaven, a place where gods sang and danced on its golden summit. In the ninth-century Hindu text of the Narpatijayacharya, it says: “Sumeru is heard to be in the middle o
f the Earth, but is not seen there.”
For Buddhists, Jainists, and Sikhs alike, Meru is known as Sumeru, meaning “excellent Meru.” These religions too are descended from the Rig-Veda and the idea of a “sound current vibrating in all creation.” Central to Buddhism is the Om or Aum chant, a sacred incantation used during meditation and prayers. The practice of vocal resonance is believed to purify the mind and help one reconnect with the sound current emanating from the top of Sumeru.
But this mountain of music takes different forms in different cosmologies. The Buddhist Sumeru is described as being shaped like an hourglass, reminiscent of the unfolded pyramid of Rosslyn chapel, and Tibetan and Indian tradition see it as a five-tier, conical pyramid structure with four terraces for the demigods. The base is described as square, surrounded by seven rings of freshwater lakes and saltwater oceans between mountains. In Hindu tradition, Meru is a stepped pyramid modeled on the Hindu mandala known as the Sri Yantra (Fig. 20).
FIGURE 20. Sri Yantra Meru
The Sri Yantra is a harmonious geometric figure composed of a series of carefully balanced triangles inside a circle and square. When the triangles are perfectly balanced, the largest triangles are congruent to Egyptian triangles and the dimension of the Great Pyramid. As this geometry is projected upward and inward, it does indeed form five tiers and four terraces. In the outer circle seven angles then trace an enclosing circle. In this way, the Sri Yantra can be described as a three-dimensional projection of the Venus Blueprint.
According to the Encyclopedia of Tibetan Symbols and Motifs, the Kalachakra cosmological system represents Meru in much the same way:
The Venus Blueprint Page 10