The Venus Blueprint

by Richard Merrick

  But it was not enough to seek the gods only in the sky. They sought to find them in the world around them and even in themselves. As the people sang and danced around tribal fires, chanting sacred words over dusty drumheads, they found the patterns in the sky on the surface of their drum. And as they cut open the sacrifice to the sky gods, here too were the patterns of music. Everything was music—as above, so below.

  They could see the divine proportion in the shapes of life. Their wings, their bones, their shoulders, and hips—all were Meru. They saw the ripples of the ocean in their eyes and the spirals of the wind in their ears. They found a universal order in everything from the flowers and fruit, to the jewels in the ground, to the beautiful ice crystals falling from the winter sky. The gods of Meru were all around, in everything and inside themselves.

  From this came an understanding of the body as an inner Meru. Beginning as the naga wind or kundalini (or coil) at the base of the spine, a serpentine energy was believed to resonate upward through the body and along the spinal axis. Around this formed the nadis (or energy channels), chakras (psychic centers), prana (subtle energy), and bindu (drops of essence). This was the harmonic energy body behind the physical form.

  Their model of consciousness was one of prana flow and spiritual liberation. Through the practice of laya-yoga or kriya-yoga, the kundalini could be awakened, coiling three and one-half times as it encircles the seven chakras into the head. Exiting the cranium through the crown or forehead, the kundalini serpent or energy body could take leave of its physical body for a time, achieving nirvana and oneness with creation.

  The Meru pyramid was the harmonic model behind it all. The seven chakras were the seven outer angles of the Sri Yantra mandala, and the five-way branching of the body was its inner five angles and tiers. Seven-tone musical scales and the seven-color rainbow ran through the body as waves of prana, comprising an ancient music-color theory of the body known as musica humana.

  In this way, the outer cosmos and inner-body structures were all the same—a Fibonacci serpent wrapped around a resonating axis inside an egg. You might call it the harmonic lattice model for universal resonant patterning (Fig. 25).

  FIGURE 25. The human body in a harmonic lattice

  Based on Vedic models such as these, the ancient Egyptians used a standard grid framework to draw the human form. To them the body must have been understood as a tunable instrument resonating inside a harmonic lattice. As I came to understand it, the body resonates like a crystal while growing according to a field of interlocking standing waves.

  Within the lattice, a standing wave centered on the navel marks key locations in the body. The second harmonic wave partial resonates more nodes to stabilize the body, and a third harmonic partial forms seven locations corresponding to the ancient Hindu chakra system. These are spaced like a musical scale along the length of the spine. Higher frequencies bring out greater and greater detail, weaving muscles and organs from intersecting harmonic waves of subtle energy.

  In the vertical direction, a linear harmonic interference pattern demarks the region of maximum resonance and damping along the spine centered on the heart. Horizontally the polar reflective interference pattern describes the cardioid shape of the chest and pelvis as two ends of a dipole magnet. In the most general sense, the geometry of the human body grows according to the squaring of the circle and the Venus Blueprint, just as we find it in the floor plan of Rosslyn chapel.

  The same interference patterns can be found in other life forms, including plant life. More than just a prosaic description of life as music, an open-minded look at the harmonic patterns and organization of the human body proves that resonant processes really are a guiding factor behind evolution.

  While they may not have described it in exactly this way, ancient Vedic priests clearly understood the harmonic organization of the body and other life forms. They knew resonant patterning was the universal principle behind it and that energy currents in the body were linked to an underlying harmonic lattice in space. Mount Meru was the physical model—an axis around which the Fibonacci series coiled along a harmonic spine to hatch as pure spirit from the cranial egg.

  Harmonic Numbers

  Another important aspect to Vedic harmonic science is the patterning properties of numbers. Early mathematicians discovered that the patterns produced by musical intervals could be represented using numbers. We saw this earlier with the Rosslyn Magic Ratio and dimensions of Rosslyn chapel.

  Since everything in the universe was believed to be harmonic in some way, numbers could be used together with detailed observation over time to measure and predict how certain cycles would align and if they would do so constructively or destructively. From this, numeric divining systems were developed to help predict events in the future.

  The Chinese I-Ching and tarot cards are examples of divination systems based on number harmony. The special arithmetic of gematria described in the Hebrew Qabala is also a study of harmonic relationships across scales and orders of magnitude. Known today as numerology, Pythagoras is credited with this study of harmony in numbers, though we know he must have learned it during his years of study in the mystery schools. The harmonic qualities of numbers played a huge role in legend and mythology long before the Pythagoreans made it popular.

  For instance, take the resonant number seven. Seven corresponds to the seven angles of the Sri Yantra Meru and seven seas surrounding it. It describes the Seven Wonders of the World, the seven cities, the seven colors of the rainbow, seven days of the week, and the seven notes in a diatonic scale. In mythology they spoke of seven heavens, seven hells, and the seven doors to hell behind which the dreaded seven-headed hydra lies in wait. From the Seven Hills of Rome to the seven days of Passover, the faithful light the seven candles of the menorah to celebrate the seven heavenly virtues. It is said that only through the seven muses and seven sisters of the Pleiades can divine inspiration be found. For under the seven seals are the seven signs that bring the Seven Horses of the Apocalypse to destroy a world created in only seven days. Seven was the symbol of divine completion.

  But seven finds its complement in the damping number five. It begins with the five tiers of Meru. From there it became law in the Five Books of Moses expressed in the Five Wounds of Jesus. Muslims pray to Allah five times a day in worship of the five pillars of Islam and the Five Holy Purified Ones, the name for Muhammad’s family. The Sikhs have five sacred symbols identical to the five classical Greek elements of water, earth, air, fire, and ether. These correspond to the five perfect or Platonic solids, built upon the golden ratio taken from the square root of five. And of course, there is beautiful Rosabelle, the pentagonal rose of Venus.

  The complementary opposites five and seven were then combined to yield the heavenly number twelve. This is where the balance between resonance and damping becomes the expression of harmony in a circle.

  There were Twelve Olympians in the Greek pantheon, and the Norse god Odin had twelve sons. Biblical Jacob had twelve sons who became the progenitors of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, repeated in the twelve apostles of Jesus and the twelve Imams of Shi’a Islam. There are twelve days of Christmas ending on January 5th, observed in Eastern Orthodoxy with twelve Great Feasts. In Hinduism the sun god Surya has twelve names reflected in the twelve petals of the Heart Chakra or Anahata. Twelve is a prime symbol of musical harmony and the standard division of an octave.

  But twelve is more than just a theosophical ideal—it is used to mark time. Most calendar systems have twelve months in a year matched by twelve zodiac constellations. There are twenty-four hours in a day and twelve hours in a half-day. Hours are numbered from one to twelve with noon and midnight marking the twelfth hour. While such things are usually considered just a matter of convention, the number twelve earns its place of importance from serious mathematics.

  Twelve is a composite number representing the smallest number with exactly six divisors. It is also a highly composite number, the next one being twenty-fo
ur, which is the first to form a square prime. The square of any prime number larger than three is then always twelve. It is the first “abundant number,” in fact a “superabundant number,” and is a sublime number having a perfect number of divisors in which the sum of its divisors also forms a perfect number. In addition to being highly composite and superabundant, twelve is superfactorial, since it is the product of the first three factorials, and is uniquely characterized by having the first four positive integers appearing in the equation 12 = 3 x 4.

  In short, twelve is the most balanced and harmonious number possible. When plugged into the interference function presented earlier, its square of 144 is the only number (other than 1) that is shared between the Fibonacci series and the square of the harmonic series. In fact, the musical tritone intervals of 7:5 and 10:7 balance either side of the logarithmic middle of a twelve-step octave. Twelve is the simplest division of a periodic octave, providing optimal contrast between tension and resolution for music harmony.30

  Armed with just a few of these facts, the ancients would have concluded that twelve also represents the cyclic octave of Mount Meru, while its factors of seven and five symbolize the opposing forces of circular wave resonance and spiraling damping. With this as their Theory of Everything, it seems unavoidable that Vedic priests would model the inner structure as a seven-chakra diatonic wave with an outer form described by a pentatonic five-point star. As a theory of musical perception that integrated the outer environment with inner physiology, it was ultimately encoded in the piano keyboard as seven diatonic white keys and five pentatonic black keys comprising the twelve-step octave.

  Rosslyn chapel embraces each of these numbers and harmonic symbolisms along its twelve-step octave length. On either side of the chapel are seven buttressing steeples and five additional steeples that run parallel to the choir chamber. The inner length and width of the chapel are then multiples of twelve, and the length of the choir area (including the eastern window inset) is seven squared. With the height of the choir loft a golden mean to its length, their corresponding factors 51/2 and 72 imply a number harmony of twelve.

  But Meru was not only the harmonic archetype for temple building and the human body—it was also the archetype for the human mind. Just as the Fibonacci swastika of Meru once served to mark good temples on Hindu maps, so was it used to indicate the good temple of the mind.31

  This is the inner temple or tikal of the third eye through which the kundalini resonates. This is where the celestial fertility of the Sun and Venus is transformed into a fertile mind. This is where we find the most wonderful Meru of all—a temple once believed to be more resonant and more sacred than any building could ever be.

  The Harmonic Center

  One of the first things Tommy Mitchell introduced me to during our initial meeting and correspondence was a theosophical system based on an ancient geometric symbol known as the Enneagram. After reading several descriptions he had sent to me by email, I knew this was a piece of the ancient harmonic science puzzle I needed to understand.

  The Enneagram, or nonagram, is a nine-point star polygon representing certain esoteric and mystical qualities (Fig. 26). First introduced to the West by George Gurdjieff, a Greek-Armenian mystic and spiritual teacher, he considered it his most important symbol of universal harmony. In fact based largely on this symbol, he founded his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, becoming known later as the Fourth Way School. As it happened, Tommy was an early follower of the Fourth Way School in Edinburgh during the 1950s and 1960s, so was something of an expert on this subject.

  FIGURE 26. The Enneagram

  As the story goes, Gurdjieff learned of the Enneagram from a secret brotherhood of Sufis called the Naqshbandi. While some say the Enneagram is no older than the fourteenth century, its origin likely extends much further back in time, perhaps to the mythology of King Ninus (and Queen Semiramis), who founded the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh. Nine has a long history of symbolisms in both Western and Eastern religions.

  Number nine is the number of heaven and the number of Brahma the Creator. Egyptian mythology has nine prime deities known as the Ennead, and the ninth day of the Chinese New Year is the birthday of the Jade Emperor, the supreme god of Taoists. There were nine muses born from Zeus and Mnemosyne whose love affair lasted nine nights.

  The chief Norse god Odin hung nine days and nights on the Tree of Yggdrasil (the Tree of Life), and Norse gods Aegir and Ran bore nine daughters. For the Hebrews, nine was a symbol of truth because when multiplied it will always reproduce itself in the product, and Christians count Nine Fruits of the Spirit. Nine is the number of completion and fulfillment.

  Gurdjieff believed the nine-point Enneagram represented a lost knowledge that could reconnect people with the natural world. He argued that many of the religious and spiritual traditions of human history had forgotten their original meaning, so no longer served humanity as originally intended. As a result he felt that humans were failing to understand the truth of ancient teachings and becoming more and more like automatons, susceptible to social control and mass psychosis. He saw the Enneagram as a model that could be used in many ways to help counteract this disturbing trend.

  Some of his followers used the Enneagram to develop a model for analyzing human personality and enhancing consciousness. Bolivian Oscar Ichazo is recognized as the creator of the “Enneagram of Personality,” which assigns a characteristic role, virtue, and other personality qualities to each of the nine points. The goal of the system is to progress around the Enneagram circle, overcoming critical points of change to achieve enlightenment and spiritual self-awareness.

  One interesting feature of the Enneagram is it is usually drawn as an equilateral triangle superimposed on an irregular hexagram to form an irregular nonagram. By separating the triangular group from the remaining six, the points of change, called “Aware Intervention” and “Aware Transformation,” are emphasized. Gurdjieff saw this as a seven-step musical Do-Re-Me scale with the tonic fundamental Do located at the top between the two points of change.

  As a researcher and writer on the subject of harmonic science, the thing that really caught my attention was how the musical tones were positioned on the Enneagram. Specifically I wondered why the tonic Do was positioned symmetrically at the top of the Enneagram when the actual point of scalar symmetry in a major scale is not Do but Re—the so-called supertonic. This is especially odd considering the supertonic is actually the ninth step in a diatonic scale, which also corresponds to the ninth wave partial in the harmonic series of Do. In point of fact, only the ninth is synchronized perfectly with all points of maximum resonance and damping in the tonic Do, thus making Re a kind of central axis around which all the other harmonics balance.32 Why wasn’t the Enneagram centered on the ninth and Re? I wondered.

  After further research and much deliberation, I came to the conclusion that the wrong musical mapping had been applied to the Enneagram (perhaps by Gurdjieff himself) and that it should be corrected to make it compatible with harmonic physics. This new mapping shows the Enneagram now centered on the supertonic or ninth (Fig. 27).

  With this small shift, we can now see a few other interesting features of the Enneagram. For one we find that the irregular Enneagram used by Gurdjieff actually approximates two golden means when measured from the relocated tonic Do, a feature I’ve not seen mentioned elsewhere. It also shows how the tense diatonic tritone interval (e.g., B-F in a C major scale) now balances symmetrically on the Golden Enneagram, resolving symmetrically inward to the restful tonic major third (C-E).

  FIGURE 27. The Golden Enneagram as a harmonic model

  Overlaying Newton’s Color Wheel on this, several more interesting correspondences appear. The ninth or Harmonic Center aligns with indigo, and the two golden sections align (not surprisingly) with the colors gold and purple. With this color-tone mapping added, the Enneagram can now simultaneously represent harmony in geometry, music, and color.

  While this may
seem to invalidate the original Enneagram for practitioners of the Fourth Way, I believe it actually strengthens it as a model of harmony. The teachings associated with the Enneagram can now be supported by the actual physics intrinsic to all harmonic vibration. The new symmetry of the Enneagram even corresponds to the scalar symmetry of the C major scale as it appears on a piano keyboard.

  More than this, the Enneagram now corresponds to Egyptian symbolism. As a tribute to its ancient origin of Ra or Re as the Egyptian sun god, the ninth scale step and Harmonic Center Re now sits at the top of the pyramid inside the Enneagram. Plugging the new Enneagram into the Rosslyn floor plan, Re is revealed to be none other than the Shekinah Pillar at the heart of the star (Fig. 28).

  Can it be a mere coincidence that the top Re location on the circle corresponds to the Shekinah and Holy of Holies in the Rosslyn floor plan? Is it a fluke that the Egyptian Eye of Re is at the top of the pyramid? And is it just an accident this ancient eye symbol for the Venus transit corresponds to the Enneagram and Harmonic Center of the Venus Blueprint? What is it about the Enneagram that makes all this possible?

  From this it seems the Enneagram represents the Harmonic Center of the Blueprint and may well have been extracted from it long ago. Since it looks like the resonant yolk of an egg, it is only natural that someone would consider it a good model for living a harmonious life. As the perfectly synchronous and harmonious ninth, the Enneagram and its teachings may well be the key to the spiritual meaning of Rosslyn. Perhaps there are a few Gurdjieff students out there with something to say about this.