Great Serpent Mound, Ohio
Latitude: 39.2° N
Longitude: 83.4° W
Seafarers who traveled up the Mississippi River also sailed up the Ohio River. They designed significant star mounds. The Great Serpent Mound, the largest serpent effigy in the world, illustrates the navigation symbols built into these mounds. Figure 11-12a shows the Great Serpent Mound having a spiral, zigzag body, a head like the horns of Venus, and the oval egg outside the mouth.
Observing the Great Serpent Mound was awesome. The precision of the curves was outstanding. There was an air of disbelief as to why such a creation was built in the middle of Ohio. I had observed the Great Serpent Mound before I had come to an understanding of the meaning behind the Irish symbols. Now, it is clear.
Figure 11-12a: Great Serpent Mound, Ohio, with a spiral tail, curved zigzag body, and the horns of Venus (Reference61)
Figure 11-12b: Great Serpent Mound, the constellation Drago with the North Star, Thuban (Reference 23, author’s annotations)
Figure 11-12c: Great Serpent Mound map connecting the Ohio to Cahokia
Connecting the star dots results in Figure 11-12b, showing the Great Serpent Mound overlaid on the constellation Draconis. What is above is below. Russ Hamilton in Reference 23 presents an outstanding book on star mounds. Figure 11-12b translates the Great Serpent Mound into a celestial navigator’s delight.
A Seafarer’s Interpretation
The serpent spins around Thuban, the North Star until 1700 BCE. Polaris became the North Star at this time because of the precession of the earth. The serpent’s mouth resembles the Horn of Venus, which represents either latitude or longitude. Connecting the center of the spiral tail to the point of the triangle symbolizing the serpent’s mouth is exactly the north-south axis, the dotted line in Figure 11-12a.
The angle of the arrow through the egg is thirty degrees, relative to the east-west axis (line in Figure 11-12b). The angle of the triangle in the head through the neck is thirty-five degrees, relative to the east-west axis (dotted line in Figure 11-12b). There are seven curved zigzags on the body, indicating seven counts on water. A spiral tail is a symbol for a harbor. The spiral, the wavy zigzags, and the Horn of Venus are connected.
A thirty-five-sun-shadow-degree latitude would predict an actual latitude of 39.7 degrees north, close to the latitude of the Great Serpent Mound. The thirty-sun-shadow-degree latitude would predict an actual latitude of thirty-two degrees north, the latitude for Poverty Point. Most historians do not see that there are two angles of interest in the serpent’s head.
The key harbor going down the Ohio River, the winding river, is Cahokia, longitude 90.2 degrees west, seven degrees west from the Great Serpent Mound, longitude 83.4 degrees west.
From a seafarer’s perspective, the egg and the serpent’s head represent two latitudes. The wavy zigzags represent seven degrees of longitude between the location of the head and the spiral tail, a harbor on the Mississippi River. The spiral entrance comes west with the center having the land on the east.
The Great Serpent Mound represents a map, as seen in Figure 11-12c, from the Great Serpent Mound, east of Cincinnati, to the Mississippi River harbor of Cahokia. Two latitudes are built into the Serpent Mound, the latitude for the starting location at thirty-five sun-shadow degrees north and the latitude for a destination harbor at thirty sun-shadow degrees north. There are seven wavy zigzags representing seven degrees of longitude between The Great Serpent and Cahokia or a seven-day trip down the Ohio River to Cahokia. The Great Serpent spins around the North Star, Thuban, and becomes a map connecting Southern Ohio to Cahokia.
It is interesting to note that there is a Serpent Mound at Keene, Ontario, Lake Rice, which was on the northern river route to the St. Lawrence Bay.
The Bear Claw and Stone Mound
There are many mounds from the Cahokia Mounds on the Mississippi River up the Ohio River. Ohio is one of the great areas for the star mounds and other structures that have celestial interpretations, particularly, Venus. Figure 11-13a is an example, the Bear Claw (Reference 50).
Figure 11-13a: Ohio, Bear Claw structure with fifty-foot opening and a set of five rows
Figure 11-13b: Stone mound in Moundsville, West Virginia, near the Ohio River, (Reference 61).
Look for counts and angles.
Within the Bear Claw stone work is a stone wall with a diameter of 250 feet and an opening of fifty feet. From a seafarer’s perspective, the shape of the Bear Claw is a petal of Venus having a fifty-day disappearance between the Morning and Evening Star and then a 250-day cycle of observation. The shape is an open crescent symbolizing Venus.
The five rows above the stone work represent the five Venus years, each of 584 days, which terminates at the end of the eight-year solar cycle. Five crescents, one for each Venus year, then, form a star pentagram. The pentagram is another symbol for Venus. If one connects the five rows to a point, the extensions to the crescent form an angle of fifty degrees (dotted lines in Figure 11-13a).
The Irish connection is that this stone work represents the same configuration as many of the Irish mounds and is the base shape of the Necklace of Venus; in Ireland this is called the torc.
In Moundsville, West Virginia, near the Ohio River, there is a stone mound with a rho passageway and chamber very similar to those found in Ireland. See figure 11-13b.
Close to the mounds in Ohio is the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, the site where selenite crystals are found. Selenite crystals have also been found at Aztalan. The selenite crystals can be used to refract sunlight, similar to the Iceland spar crystals. The seafaring connection is obvious.
Harbors on North America’s East Coast
To return to the Eastern Mediterranean customers from the Mississippi Delta, the seafarer would follow the Gulf Stream up the eastern coast of North America. The Gulf Stream would flow to Ireland or to the Azores. This was the trade route back to Europe. The seafarers knew about currents and winds and used them to navigate and return to their originating harbors.
Newport Tower, Rhode Island
Latitude: 41.5° N, a sun-shadow latitude of thirty six degrees north
Longitude: 71.3° W
The basic seafarer’s need for determining time and location has never changed. Astronomy was developed for calendars and clocks and then for navigation. The architecture for astronomical observations, or stone circles, became stone towers. The Newport Tower is one of the best representations of stone circles built as a tower designed for the same purposes: calendars and navigation. Newport was a key harbor for all trade routes on the East Coast. It surely gained significance in the last one thousand years. It is included in this book because it has some design features that are similar to the seafarers’ decoding of the Irish symbols. The tower also shows how recently the same celestial navigation concepts existed among serious seafarers.
Figure 11-14a shows the Newport Tower, Newport, Rhode Island.
Figure 11-14b: An alignment of three windows in the Newport Tower
Figure 11-14c: Newport Tower in Touro Park (Ref. 42)
Figure 11-14d: Newport Tower showing the sun, moon and Venus orientations.
Stone circles were used for calendars and for monitoring the cycles of the sun, moon, and Venus. The angles determined latitude and longitude. Initially, separate circles were constructed for the sun, the moon, and Venus. The three separate circles became concentric circles, as is seen at Stonehenge. We have seen, for example, in the Boyne Valley and Aztalan, that the circles became mound or pyramids with angles related to Libra, le Balance, or the Summer (navigation) Triangle. The passageways were the windows for the celestial lights and shadows.
The local position and also the position of a key reference location, the customer or storage, was also built into the stone circles. In other words, where am I, and where am I going? The beginning or returning key location positions are built into the local observatory or stone circle. This also exists at the Newport Tower, as seen in Fig
ure 11-14d. On the ground level, there are eight pillars, spaced at forty-five-degree intervals. There is also the unexplained counterclockwise rotation of the tower by three degrees west from north. On the second level, the windows become the openings for the winter and summer solstices. The windows are also the entry points for Venus alignments, as Scott Wolter has shown in Reference 62. Mr. Wolter presents extremely important information on how the sun shadows generate diamond shapes, which determine latitude. He further indicates that there is a relationship between Venus and the lunar eclipses, which helps determine longitude. His inspiration, The Hooked X (Reference 62), is key to understanding the relationship between the sun-shadow latitudes and the winter solstice angles.
The reference location for the Newport Tower is Rosslyn Chapel, Scotland. The latitude (55.8 degrees north), when corrected by the golden ratio, is a sun-shadow latitude of forty-five degrees north, and the longitude is three degrees east.
The ground-level orientation of the eight pillars splits the Newport Tower into forty-five-degree increments around the base. The X is formed with forty-five-degree angles from the east-west axis. The counterclockwise rotation of three degrees may correspond to the longitude at Rosslyn Chapel of two degrees east. So the base orientation of the Newport Tower is the latitude and longitude for the Rosslyn Chapel. The builder of the Newport Tower was someone familiar with Rosslyn Chapel and confirms the comment by Ian Sinclair in The Hooked X (Reference 62) that the Sinclairs built the Newport Tower.
The Newport Tower has two main locations built into the structure: one for Newport and one for the customer, Rosslyn Chapel. Rosslyn is on the Rose Line, and Venus, from the earth’s viewing, rotates based on the line which connects Venus’s representation as a Morning Star and Evening Star. Every seventy two degrees of longitude from the Rose Line, Venus is aligned with a meridian that passes through the apex of the Venus pentagram. Venus is built into the Newport Tower. Connecting the two Venus-related entrance windows in Figure 11-14d, the angle relative to the east/west axis is eighteen degrees. The meridian line then is the complement of eighteen, or seventy-two degrees. This is the longitude for Adquidnick Island, the site of the Newport Tower.
The winter solstice shadows are built into the window openings, passageways, on the Newport Tower and they determine the latitude of the Newport Tower. In Figure 11-14c, the Newport’s winter solstice line at a sun-shadow latitude of thirty six degrees is shown based on the excellent work of Penhallow, Reference 42. In Figure 11-14b, there are three windows at three levels of the Newport Tower that have an angle of twenty degrees counterclockwise from the east/west axis. This corresponds to the sun-shadow latitude of twenty degrees for the Isle Meroe, Nubia. Thus, there are three sun-shadow latitudes built into the Newport Tower, twenty, thirty-six, and forty-five degrees, corresponding to the locations of the Isle Meroe, Newport and Rosslyn, respectively.
Further of interest is the name of Rhode Island. From the Greek, rhode is the result of the base rose. So Rhode Island is Rose Island. There is a Rose Island lighthouse in the Newport Harbor. The rose is a symbol for Venus and longitude. One would then expect to find Venus shadows built into the windows of the Newport Tower.
What is important is the line that connects Venus as a morning star and evening star, which occurs with a fifty-day disappearence of Venus in each Venus-year cycle. This line’s angle relative to the east-west axis is the tangent to the actual migration of Venus as it appears to someone on Earth. This tangent is why there is a “mysterious” offset, either clockwise or counterclockwise, from the east-west axis. This offset is built into many structures, like the Newport Tower and many European cathedrals.
An alternate name for the Newport Tower was the Touro Tower on Touro Hill. It is interesting to note that beside the tower is a side street named Gold Lane. There is a St. Clair House on the next street toward the harbor. Is it a coincidence that the Newport Tower is located on Touro Hill, close to Gold Lane, having the St. Clair House with the symbol of chi rho with a bird with a twig in its mouth within a block of the tower? Was this Newport’s Garden of Eden? The elite surely built their mansions here. I have sailed extensively from the Newport Harbor and can say that the greatest sailing on the coasts of North America exists here.
Figure 11-15 shows various Venus and diamond-related symbols, which may relate to the Newport Tower.
Figure 11-15: Symbolic representations of celestial bodies and stacked diamonds, representing latitudes (Reference 62)
Figure 11-15a shows the stacked Xs in the Rosslyn Chapel (Reference 62, photo by Scott F. Wolter with permission of the Rosslyn Chapel Trust, 2008)
The stacked Xs in the Rosslyn Chapel represents four latitudes on the western side of Europe (Reference 58). If the Sinclairs built the Newport Tower, one should expect similar navigation concepts to be built into the tower, and they were.
Figure 11-15b shows a schematic drawing of Figure 11-15a, the Horn of Venus with the stacked diamonds. Figure 11-15c shows Venus as the Morning and Evening Star (Reference 13).
Figure 11-15d is the Monas schematic linking the sun, moon, and Venus (Reference 15). The Monas has a base of two arcs, which represent the sun’s yearly pattern from one winter solstice to the next. The center symbol is the symbol for the ankh, Venus, and copper. The circle part of the ankh is then intertwined with the crescent symbol of the moon. The architecture of the Newport Tower can be represented by the Monas. The Newport Tower may be designed after many of the round towers in Europe, particularly the round churches on Bornholm Island in Denmark (References 22 and 42). Figure 11-14d shows the actual angles for the sun‘s winter solstice, the moon’s lunar major, and the rotations of Venus at the Newport (Rose) Tower.
It is interesting to note John Dee’s picture of the Perfect Art of Navigation, Figure 11-16. John Dee was the chief advisor to Queen Elizabeth I around 1550 CE and was instrumental in directing the expansion interests of England into the world. It is also interesting to note that John Dee’s navigation teacher was Mercator, the great cartographer who developed the Mercator charts still in use today. The charts became the standard map projection for nautical purposes because of their ability to represent lines of constant course.
John Dee uses symbols from the Nile River dynasties (Hieroglyphikon) to Brittany (Britanikon) and then from Plymouth, England, to the St. Lawrence Gulf and to Newport Rhode, Island.
Figure 11-16: John Dee’s picture of the Perfect Art of Navigation (Reference 17)
In Latin, surrounding the title, is a statement: “More is hidden than meets the eye.”
In Figure 11-16, the four corners show the seafarer’s symbols for the sun, the alpha part of the double spiral, indicating the trip’s calendar; the navigation triangle with the Northern Cross; and an “aleph” trip on the waters. The “aleph” symbol is further developed in Appendix A.
Based on the concept that east is up, this picture needs to be rotated ninety degrees clockwise. The dotted lines are the N/S/E/W grid. It is now easy to see the St. Lawrence Gulf and the eastern coasts of North America as dotted contour lines.
By connecting the four corners of Figure 11-16, an X is formed, having a forty-two-degree angle relative to the east-west axis. The actual latitude for Newport is 41.5° N. By using the Nile River Dynasty counting method, the ten stars in the upper corner each relate to ten degrees, which results in a longitude of one hundred degrees relative to the Nile River prime meridian. The one hundred degrees becomes seventy degrees by changing the longitude to the Rose Line meridian, the Paris prime meridian. There is a two-degree difference between the Rose Line meridian and the current Greenwich prime meridian. The Newport Tower is at 71.3° W longitude.
The latitudes and longitudes are also encoded into Figure 11-16, for Plymouth, England, 50.4° N and 4.1° W, the starting point of the John Dee trip. Remember Figure 11-16 represents a trip from a starting harbor to eventually the harbor at Newport, Rhode Island, but this discussion is for another book.
Different pr
ime meridians have been used throughout the ages. It is interesting that the ten stars are set in columns of three stars each. To John Dee, these stars probably represent the meridians of the Nile River, the Rose Line for Britannia, the Azores, St. John, and Newport: zero, thirty, sixty, ninety, and then one hundred degrees. The Nile River dynasties calculated longitude based on a metric system, and the longitude calculation would appear in the upper-left corner of the picture, as will be seen in Chapter 12.
Newport Tower was built by those who understood the Irish symbols and built them into the appropriate per ankhs at Newport, Rosslyn Chapel, and the mounds of Ireland. The seafarers were present then, and now, at Newport, with its protected harbor. Newport is still the sailing center of North America. The Newport 3-D Tower contains all of the sun, moon, and Venus angles that were built into the Irish mounds.
The Newport Tower should be called Newport’s Rose Tower.
Mystery Hill, North Salem, New Hampshire, 2200 BCE
Latitude: 42.8° N
Longitude: 71.2° W
Mystery Hill, currently called America’s Stonehenge, is an important megalithic site located near the Merrimac River, about thirty miles from the Atlantic Ocean coast. The complex has many chambers, having stones weighing up to fifty tons.
Figure 11-17a: Sacrificial stone (Reference 61)
Figure 11-17b: Mystery Hill, New Hampshire, with an ankh passageway (Reference 55, author’s annotations)
Figure 11-17c: Mystery Hill: Sun-shadow projections from stones in a circle (Reference 19)
The main site has a diameter of fifty meters, and the center of the large area has a diameter of 250 meters. The numbers relate to the Venus yearly cycle.
A sacrificial table, shown in Figure 11-17a, has a carved outside shape like a keystone and is tapered at the bottom. Figure 11-17b shows the sacrificial table as part of the design structure of Mystery Hill. The trough surrounding the outside of the table with no outlet is quite interesting. There are round areas on the table where crushing looks like it occurred. Could this trough be a variation of a quartz crushing mill where the heavy metals would sink, similar to the nubs on a crushing basin?
A Seafarer's Decoding of the Irish Symbols Page 18