And here is where the mystery becomes even more intriguing!
1. Thom’s Megalithic Yard and the Expansions of Knight and Butler
To see just how intriguing the mystery is, we must first know exactly what Thom’s “megalithic measures” were.Thom identified the use of a standard unit he called a ‘Megalithic Yard’ (MY), which he specified as being equal to 2.722 ft +/- 0.002 ft (0.82966 m +/- 0.061 m). He claimed that there were also other related units used repeatedly, including half and double Megalithic Yards and a 2.5 MY length he dubbed a Megalithic Rod (MR). On a smaller scale he found that the megalithic builders had used a fortieth part of a Megalithic Yard, which he called a ‘Megalithic Inch’ (MI) because it was 0.8166 of a modern inch (2.074 cm). The system worked like this:1 MI = 2.074 cm
20 MI = ½ MY
40 MI = 1 MY
100 MI = 1 MR.53
But there was not only system in this ancient structure of measure, there was amazing consistency over a very large area:The lifetime work of Alexander Thom and his rediscovery of the Megalithic Yard resulted in a stunning conclusion that created an immediate paradox — how could an otherwise primitive people build with such fine accuracy? Why did they do it and how did they do it? Thom made no attempt to answer these questions. He reported on his engineering analysis and left the anthropological aspects for others to explain. He did comment that he could not understand how these builders transmitted the Megalithic Yards so perfectly over tens of thousands of square miles and across several millennia and he acknowledged that wooden measuring sticks could not have produced the unerring level of consistency he had found.54
How indeed had they done it? And much more importantly, why?
The problem posed by these questions only deepens when one considers the standard archaeological and anthropological view of where ancient measures came from:According to Thom, the units he discovered were extraordinary because they were scientifically exact. Virtually all known units of measurement from the Sumerians and Ancient Egyptians through to the Middle Ages are believed to have been based on average body parts such as fingers, hands, feet and arms, and were therefore quite approximate.55
In other words, Thom’s measurements, recorded over several thousand square miles in Britain and France, and recording an accuracy of this ancient unit of measure to within the width of a human hair, gave lie to the archaeological assumptions that ancient measures were based upon ever-varying body parts! Something else entirely was in play!
2. The Methods a. Thom’s “Ancient Bureau of Standards” Theory
This fact posed an intriguing problem, namely, could one “reverse engineer” the method by which supposedly primitive Megalithic builders had derived such an accurate and consistent measure?
One theory that attempts to do this is — for want of a better expression — the “ancient Bureau of Measures” theory. Thom himself was at a loss to explain the consistent accuracy of the Megalithic Yard over such a large theory, and at first proposed the “ancient Bureau of Measures” theory:This unit was in use from one end of Britain to the other. It is not possible to detect by statistical examination any differences between the values determined in the English and Scottish circles. There must have been a headquarters from which standard rods (a rod could be of two types, but in this context there are pieces of wood cut to represent the Megalithic Yard) were sent out... The length of rods in Scotland cannot have differed from that in England by more than 0.03 inch (0.762mm) or the difference would have shown up. If each small community had obtained the length by copying the rod from its neighbor to the south the accumulated error would have been much greater than this.56
But there was a major problem with this theory, and Knight and Butler are quick to point it out:At that time Thom’s data could not be explained by any mechanism known to be available to the people of the late Stone Age other than to assume that all rods were made at the same place and delivered by hand to each and every community across Scotland and England. Eventually, he would find the unit in use from the Hebrides to western France, which makes the central ruler factory theory look most unlikely. He also found it impossible to imagine why these early communities wanted to work to an exact standard unit.57
In other words, the unit was spread over too large an area for the “ancient Bureau of Standards” theory to account for it. We will leave the full exposition of the answer to the question of why such primitive Stone Age people would have wanted “to work to an exact standard unit” to a later point in this chapter.
Thus, effectively, we are back to square one: how did these “primitive” Stone Age peoples come up with such a unit of measure, and reproduce it with unerring accuracy over such a wide area? The answer to that, according to Knight and Butler, is rather astounding, and points in turn to a hidden and hardly “primitive” elite acting as a guiding hand, and working behind the scenes.
3. Celestial Geometries and the Pendulum Method
The question of why such a primitive people would have need for such an accurate unit of measure spread over such a wide area is, however, crucial for understanding how they reproduced it. Knight and Butler state this methodological problem in the following fashion: “We saw that the only hope of resolving the issue, once and for all, was to attempt to find a reason why this length of unit would have had meaning for Neolithic builders, and then to identify a methodology for reproducing such a length at different locations.”58 Optimally, this meant that “what our Megalithic mathematicians needed was a method of reproducing the Megalithic Yard that was simple to use, very accurate and available to people dispersed over a large distance and across a huge span of time.”59 It was the classic engineer’s optimalization problem, for whatever this method was, it had to be a method that also “ensured that the unit of length would not change across time or physical distance,”60 and this meant of course that in all likelihood, the unit was founded on something with a fairly constant base “in the natural world”61 that would not change over time or physical location.
That, of course, implied that the answer lay in the stars, and in the Earth, themselves. And if this be the case, then the most obvious unit immediately known to such “primitive” observers would be a “day,” and this is where the ultimate basis of the method of reproducing an accurate unit of measure begins:There are various ways of defining a day and the two principal types are what we now call a ‘solar’ day and a ‘sidereal’ day. A solar day is that measured from the zenith (the highest point) of the Sun on two consecutive days. The average time of the Sun’s daily passage across the year is called a ‘mean solar day’ — it is this type of day that we use for our timekeeping today. A sidereal day is the time it takes for one revolution of the planet, measured by observing a star returning to the same point in the heavens on two consecutive nights. This is a real revolution because it is unaffected by the secondary motion of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. This sidereal day, or rotation period, is 236 seconds shorter than a mean solar day, and over the year these lost seconds add up to exactly one extra day, giving a year of just over 366 sidereal days in terms of the Earth’s rotation about its axis.
In short, anyone who gauged the turning of the Earth by watching the stars would know full well that the planet turns a little over 366 times in a year, so it follows that this number would have great significance for such star watchers. If they considered each complete turn of the Earth to be one degree of the great circle of heaven, within which the Sun, Moon and planets move, then they would also logically accept that there are 366 degrees in a circle.
There really are 366 degrees in the most important circle of them all — the Earth’s yearly orbit of the Sun. Anything else is an arbitrary convention. It seemed to us that this was so logical that the 360-degree circle may have been a later adjustment to make arithmetic easier, as it is divisible by far more numbers than the ‘real’ number of degrees in a year. In other words, the circle of geometry has become somehow detached from the circle of heaven.6
2
Note carefully the implication of these remarks, for the natural system of a celestial and geodetic measure would involve some system of a circle of 366 degrees, while at some later point — largely for the sake of simplified arithmetical calculation — a modified or tempered system was put into place by “someone.” This is a significant point and it will be taken up again later in this chapter.
But how was this “original” 366-degree system derived by such primitive peoples? Seeking to reconstruct the thought processes of the Megalithic builders, Knight and Butler came to some very practical conclusions:[It] is highly likely that they would also realize that sunrises across the year move exactly like a pendulum. At the spring equinox (currently around 21 March) the Sun will rise due east and then rise a little further north each day until the summer solstice (21 June) at which point it stops and reverses its direction back to the autumn equinox and on to the winter solstice, by which time it will rise well into the south. The Sun’s behaviour across a year, as viewed from the Earth, creates exactly the same frequency model as a pendulum. It displays a faster rate of change in the centre and slows gradually to the solstice extremes, where it stops and reverses direction.63
So the first problem was “to puzzle over the issue of how any unit of time could possibly be converted into a linear unit.”64 The answer lay in the motion of the Sun during a year: the pendulum. In a certain way, the same of course could be said of the motion of nearby planets, such as Venus, for by using the very primitive “machine” of a pendulum and choosing a fixed reference point in the heavens, and counting the beats or swings of the pendulum as a chosen star moved between fixed observation points on the horizon.
The pendulum was a ready-made, simple machine, easily within the technological capacities of Megalithic builders, and moreover, so closely tied to the “invariable” properties of the Earth itself that it formed the perfect basis for the accuracy of Megalithic measures over so wide an area. The reason for this is simple, for the pendulum directly links the gravitational field of the Earth, the notion of time as a beat frequency, and the conversion of both to a linear measure: The time it takes a pendulum to swing is governed by just two factors: the mass of the Earth and the length of the pendulum from the fulcrum... to the centre of gravity of the weight. Nothing else is of significant importance. The amount of effort that the person holding the pendulum puts into the swing has no bearing on the time per swing because a more powerful motion will produce a wide arc and a higher speed of travel, whereas a low power swing will cause the weight to travel less distance at a reduced speed. Equally, the heaviness of the weight of the object on the end of the line is immaterial — a heavier or lighter weight will simply change the speed/distance ratio without having any effect on the time of the swing.
The mass of the Earth is a constant factor...
and thusin an area the size of the British Isles anyone swinging a pendulum for a known number of swings in a fixed period of time will have almost exactly the same pendulum length. 65
So the method was simple: if one erected two markers on the circle of the horizon, spaced ⅓66th of a degree apart, and then watching a selected star pass between them and, through trial and error with pendulum lengths, eventually a length would be found that would produce a half Megalithic Yard when swung 366 times as the star passed between the poles. And this would be the case regardless of where one was, and it would produce that length with unerring accuracy.66 There was absolutely no need for an “ancient Bureau of Standards” whatsoever.
4. Beautiful Numbers: The 366-, 365-, and 360-Degree Systems
The 366-degree system also bears a close connection to a geodetic measure, namely, the polar circumference of the Earth. As Knight and Butler put it, “the most common value quoted” for the polar circumference of the Earth is “40,008 kilometers” which easily converts to “48,221,838 Megalithic Yards (MY).”67 By assuming that these ancient Megalithic builders had divided each degree to 60 minutes of arc and each minute in turn to six seconds of arc, they are able to determine that one degree (or ⅓66th) of the polar circumference of the Earth was 131,754 Megalithic Yards, and one minute (⅙0th) of that value was 2,196 Megalithic yards. That, as they admitted, “did not look too exciting.”68 But then when one divided the minute by one second, or ⅙th of a part, the final result “was truly remarkable” for it yielded 366 Megalithic Yards!69
This astonishing result tied into yet another ancient measure, this time the so-called “Minoan Foot” from the island of Crete. Noting that “Professor J. Walter Graham of Princeton University” had made the discovery of “a standard unit of length” that had been used “in the design and construction of palaces on Crete dating from the Minoan period, circa 2000 B.C., Graham dubbed this unit a ‘Minoan foot’ which he stated was equal to 30.36 centimetres.”70 Knight and Butler then made the discovery that tied this measure to the whole 366-degree Megalithic system they had found in Britain:Imagine our surprise when we realized that one second of arc in the assumed Megalithic system (366 MY) is equal to 303.6577 metres — which is exactly 1,000 Minoan feet (given that Graham did not provide a level of accuracy greater than a tenth of a millimetre). This fit could just be a very, very strange coincidence — but it has to be noted that several researchers now believe that the Minoan culture of Crete had ongoing contact with the people who were the Megalithic builders of the British Isles.71
But this was not all.
There was in use in ancient Greece a unit of measure known as the “Olympian” or “geographical” foot, which, “by general consent” measures “what might at first seem like a meaningless 30.861 centimetres.” And this raised even more peculiar relationships for Knight and Butler, for it exposed a hidden relationship between the Megalithic 366-degree system, and our now more familiar 360-degree system:We immediately noticed something special about the relationship between the Minoan foot and the later Greek foot. To an accuracy of an extremely close 99.99 percent, a distance of 366 Minoan feet is the same as 360 Greek feet! This was incredible, and we felt certain that it was not a coincidence. The two units did not need to have any integer relationship at all — yet they relate to each other in a Megalithic to Sumerian manner...72
In other words, Sumeria — which was the origin of our modern 360-degree system — had entered the picture, and in a way that connected the two systems, the 366- and 360-degree systems.
The link is evident from the Sumerian number system itself, which was a sexagesimal system, that is to say, based on units of sixes, tens, and six- ties, and multiples thereof, thus making numbers such as 36, 360, 3600, and 36,000 very “Sumerian” numbers. As we have already noted, it appears that the ancients, in deriving the 366-degree system to begin with, had noticed the transit of the sun through a year was approximately 365.25 days, and simply rounded that number up to the next whole number, 366. The Sumerians, who influenced the Egyptians, modified or tempered the entire system by coming up with the 360-degree system in use to this day, to make calculation easier. In other words, at first glance it would appear that there was, at a certain point in prehistory, “Sumerian reform” to the Megalithic system. This is the position of Knight and Butler, namely, that the Megalithic system is the oldest, and the “Sumerian reform” a later modification of it. But as we shall see later in this chapter, there is evidence — from a very unusual place, that the 360-degree system was in use long before the Sumerians or Megalithic builders of Britain were even on the scene!
But whatever the chronological relationship between the two systems was, there was nonetheless a mathematical one, as was evidenced by the relationship of the Minoan to the Greek foot, the former representing a measure based on the 366 system, and the latter one based on the 360 system. The problem was, what was it?73 Was it simply a case that “the 360-degree circle may have been a later adjustment to make arithmetic easier...”?74 Or was something else at work in addition to this?
Knight and Butler quickly discovered what the mathematical
relationship was, and the relationship was that of two absolutely critical and fundamental constants, those of ƒ, with a value of 1.618, and π, with the value 3.14. Simply put, 360 divided by 5 equaled 72, and 366 divided byπxƒ also equaled 72. While the division by 5 may seem arbitrary, it is not, for the constant ƒ generates the well-known Fibonacci sequence — 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and so on — where the first two numbers sum to the next number, then those two to the next, and so on. So five is in the “harmonic series,” so to speak, of ƒ.
Genes, Giants, Monsters, and Men: The Surviving Elites of the Cosmic War and Their Hidden Agenda Page 5