Civilization One: The World is Not as You Thought it Was

by Christopher Knight

  When we hear a note played on a musical instrument, both frequency and wavelength are involved in what our ear registers. The note we choose to call ‘A’ on a modern piano keyboard, three notes below middle C, has a frequency of 440 Hz, which means there are 440 peaks and 440 troughs, of the sort shown in the diagram above, for every second of time. The note A also produces a wavelength, which in this case is 78.4 centimetres. The next note up on the piano keyboard, B flat, has a frequency of 466.16 Hz and a wavelength of 74 centimetres. As the frequency increases, the wavelength decreases.

  We had previously discovered that the modern second of time (plus its double counterpart) was first used by the Sumerians, but we could equally well adopt Megalithic units of distance and time to specify musical notes in exactly the same way.

  The Earth turns once every sidereal day of 86,164 seconds and according to Megalithic geometry the equator can be divided into 366 degrees, 60 minutes and 6 seconds of arc. Because the planet bulges a little at the equator its equatorial circumference is larger than the polar circumference and therefore the distance of one second of arc is longer, at just under 366.6 Megalithic Yards. It follows that the Earth will rotate through one Megalithic second of arc every 0.65394657 seconds – which is a period that we might reasonably call a ‘Megalithic Second of time’. Therefore, if we had a musical note with a frequency of 366 cycles for every Megalithic Second of time, it would be ‘in tune’ with the turning Earth because there would be one vibration for every Megalithic Yard of planetary turn at the equator. In reality it is very slightly more than a Megalithic Yard because of the equatorial bulge. The difference between the polar and equatorial circumferences is equivalent to 36.6 Megalithic Minutes of the polar circumference! We decided to call this theoretical unit of Megalithic sound a ‘Thom’ (abbreviated to Th) in honour of Alexander Thom whose work is at the root of our investigation. In standard terms, a frequency of 366 Th would be 560 Hz, which places our Megalithic note slightly above C sharp in modern concert tuning.

  Once we had our primary note, it would then be possible to tune an entire instrument, or even an entire orchestra, to that note. Since all the notes in a scale are harmonious and therefore have a mathematical relationship with the starting or ‘root’ note, and because the Megalithic Yard is geodetic, it would follow that any piece of music played in this Megalithic C sharp would enjoy a mathematical relationship with the turning Earth, both in terms of the planet’s dimensions and its spin.

  The heartbeat of Earth

  Alan, a keen musician, began building a series of musical instruments tuned to this Megalithic root note. In particular he decided to create a Megalithic C sharp didgeridoo, the native Australian instrument which is basically just a long, fairly wide tube varying between three and eight feet in length. The didgeridoo is essentially a low-pitched drone-pipe where the player maintains the drone using circular breathing. Originally they were made from straight eucalyptus branches that had been hollowed out by termites but as Alan did not have access to either eucalyptus branches or termites, he used bamboo instead. The exercise worked very well indeed and the resulting sound had a very authentic feel to it so Alan created a second didgeridoo to give to Chris.

  Chris had been to Australia, where he had noted a number of ancient Aboriginal myths for his research when writing Uriel’s Machine. It is known that some of these myths are 10,000 years old – nearly twice as old as Sumerian stories. Chris suggested that we should try and find out if this particular ‘Megalithic’ didgeridoo really existed amongst the aborigines and was surprised when Alan replied that he had a good friend who was an authority on the subject. Gordon Hookey, an indigenous Australian, had stayed at Alan’s house for a number of weeks when he was visiting Britain to give talks on Aboriginal art and music. Unfortunately, every attempt to contact Hookey for research purposes failed, as he appeared to be permanently on the move. By a quirk of fate, at almost exactly the same time as Alan had given up hope of tracking down his friend the doorbell rang and one of those magical moments of beautiful serendipity occurred. As Alan opened the door a beaming stranger introduced himself saying that he had come to borrow the key to the local Civic Centre, held by Alan and his wife. As the conversation developed Alan was soon open-mouthed.

  ‘I’ll come and open up the Centre for you with pleasure. Are you running some course or other?’ asked Alan.

  ‘Yes. I’m just beginning a music course with a difference – I teach the didgeridoo.’

  ‘What?!’

  Alan stopped in his tracks, staring at the stranger in disbelief.

  ‘I know it sounds pretty weird but it’s actually a fascinating subject,’ replied the stranger in self-defence.

  ‘No, no, I don’t think it’s strange at all. It’s just that I can’t believe that you have turned up on my doorstep at this precise moment in time,’ Alan said, shaking his head from side to side in disbelief.

  The visitor was carrying a long bag, which he then told Alan contained a number of authentic didgeridoos. It transpired that he had spent considerable periods living in the Australian bush with Aborigines. There he had manufactured his own instruments and had ultimately become one of Britain’s few non-Aboriginal experts on the subject. Alan dived right in with the $64,000 question.

  ‘You wouldn’t happen to know if native Australians ever use a didgeridoo that produces a note a little over C sharp, would you?’

  The reply stunned Alan.

  ‘Something a little over C sharp?’

  Hookey paused momentarily as he thought.

  ‘Yes, they certainly do – it’s considered to be the most sacred of all tunings and is reserved for playing music to the Earth.’

  ‘Playing music to the Earth!’ Alan shouted back at the surprised stranger. ‘That’s incredible. When you say ‘Earth’ – do you mean the ground or the entire planet?’

  ‘It’s the same thing to native Australians. The note from that didgeridoo harmonizes them to every aspect of their environment. The sound it makes thanks the world for all it gives them and playing it binds them to all of nature. It’s a kind of prayer of thanks offered up the planet and, at the same time, the music they make merges them into the whole of creation.’

  This was incredible information. It had been a long shot that such an instrument existed at all, but to find out that the Australian Aborigines used an ‘Earth’ note with a frequency of 366 Th was simply wonderful. One again it could be a huge coincidence and it seemed completely impossible that there would be any calculated connection with Megalithic mathematical principles.

  The only reasonable explanation we could come up with was that the note was produced naturally by means of some sort of instinctive harmony between the Australian Aborigines and the revolving planet. Native Australians have a deep spiritual relationship with their environment and their mind-set is completely different to that of the westernized world. This is a race that was cut off from the rest of world more than 40,000 years ago and which has found it hard to come to terms with the materialism of the Europeans that arrived on their remote shores a mere 200 years ago. The Australian government has now realized that it cannot, and maybe should not, necessarily assimilate indigenous Australians into modern lifestyles and so has returned land to the tribes so that they can live in their traditional manner if they so desire.

  If we are right in thinking that Aboriginal Australians instinctively understand that the Earth resonates to a note of 366 Th, it follows that there must be some kind of physical reality to the Megalithic geometric divisions of the planet. This indicated that the utterly brilliant system of the Earth breaking down into 366 degrees, 60 minutes and 6 seconds of arc – each a whisker over 366 Megalithic Yards – was much more ‘authentic’ than we ever imagined. To test this ‘intuition’ theory we began to cast around the world, trying to find recordings of indigenous music that have not been affected by the specific requirements of Western music or what is now known as concert tuning.

  We were try
ing to find out if there was a common usage of musical pieces set in the key that we called ‘Megalithic C’, otherwise known as C sharp in the concert scale. In addition, we were looking for specific rhythm patterns that also fell within expected Megalithic parameters. In particular, we were seeking a rhythm of 91.5 beats per modern minute, because 91.5 beats in a modern minute means that every beat is exactly 1 Megalithic Second apart.

  From the rainforest of the Andes, the windswept mountains of Tibet, and the frozen wastes of Siberia to the rolling plains of North America, we recognized traces of ethnic music that corresponded with the ‘beat of the Earth’ almost everywhere we looked. We found it in traditional Indian music, and among the indigenous peoples of Africa. It seemed that wherever a culture was spontaneously creating music, freed from the constraints of the recording studio and standard concert tuning, Megalithic notes and rhythms were once common (see Appendix 4).

  We began to accept that Megalithic tunings and rhythms were probably part of the ‘heartbeat’ of the planet and that human beings are somehow locked into an instinctive knowledge of the fact. Certainly, we could not find Megalithic notes or rhythms in the animal world, only in music created by our own species. As a passing thought it struck us that it might not be entirely coincidental that a normal human heart beats precisely in a range from once per Sumerian second to once per Megalithic Second (a pulse rate of 60 to 91.5 beats per minute).

  Sound and light

  In its preference for pigeonholing every subject, modern sciences such as medicine and psychology seem to sometimes underestimate the linkage between our species and the Earth. We less live on the planet than we are the planet. Just because we have an intellect that gives us a sense of the individual should not hide the fact that we are made of Earth dust and assembled according to the dynamic qualities that govern our world. With this thought in mind we decided to look at other human senses – especially sight. The light we see is not dissimilar to sound in that it consists of extremely fast oscillations of an electromagnetic field in a particular range of frequencies that can be detected by the human eye. Different colour sensations are produced by light vibrating at different frequencies, ranging from about 4 x 1014 vibrations per second for red light to about 7.5 x 1014 for violet light. The visible spectrum of light is usually defined by its wavelength, ranging from the smallest visible wavelength for violet, at about forty-millionths of a centimetre to seventy-five millionths of a centimetre for red.

  We would upset most scientists if we were to suggest that sound has anything to do with electromagnetic radiation, although some ‘maverick’ academics have made claims that there is a definite relationship. One of these is Dr Jacques Benveniste, former Director at the Institute National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale in France. He is quite convinced that audible sounds have a tangible relationship with biological processes, the molecules of which vibrate at a fantastic rate. Unfortunately, Jacques Benveniste is presently ‘out in the cold’ academically speaking, so his discoveries carry little weight in orthodox circles.

  Generally speaking, stars and other objects in space are the source of electromagnetic radiation which, travelling across space at the speed of light, constantly bombard our planet. Much of the electromagnetic radiation falling upon us could be harmful to life and some of it, such as ultraviolet light, is filtered out by our friendly atmosphere.

  We use non-visible electromagnetic radiation all the time. Devices such as microwaves and cellular phones, electric fires, radar, radio and television signals, all employ electromagnetic radiation and could not function without it. It is within a narrow section of this very broad spectrum that we find visible light. We are able to ‘see’ things in the real world because our eyes have become adapted to accepting a very small section of the electromagnetic spectrum and translating it, via our brain, into the sensation we call sight. Where a particular colour is reflected from an object, for example green from most foliage, it passes into our eyes, where the specific frequency and wavelength are recognized and translated, with the aid of memory, into what we ‘know’ as green.

  Unlike electromagnetic radiation, sound cannot exist in the vacuum of space because it is simply a disturbance in the medium in which it travels. Since it relies on the atmosphere, or some other medium, sound has a very much lower speed than light. But because the electromagnetic spectrum has frequency and wavelength, as does sound, we use the same unit, the hertz, to measure both sound and light.

  Then we discovered, more or less by accident, that the frequency of the basic Megalithic note of 366 Th (560 Hz) has an unusual property. If we double this frequency exactly 40 times, we arrive at 6.15726511 x 1014 Hz, which just happens to bring us to the visible spectrum and to that part of it that we see as the colour blue. Even though, from the standpoint of physics, there is no apparent connection between a sound of 560 Hz and an electromagnetic frequency of 6.15726511 x 1014 Hz, there has to be a ‘sympathetic resonance’ between the two. This fact may, in some so far unknown way, be understood by the Aborigine playing his didgeridoo under the bright blue skies of Australia.

  The visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum more or less neatly coincides, in fact, 40 octaves up, with one full octave or scale on a musical instrument. It is possible to see the note F as the start of the colour sequence of visible light at the lower end of the infrared band; the sequence continues through all the notes, to E, which is resonant with ultraviolet. Traditionally there are seven colours to light; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. In reality, there are as many colours as one wishes to name, as each colour changes imperceptibly into the next throughout the visible spectrum. The relationship between any given musical note and its corresponding resonant colour is described in detail in Appendix 4.

  It appears quite remarkable that human beings can see almost exactly one ‘octave’ of colour. Perhaps, to creatures that see in frequencies below or above our capabilities, the colours repeat, as do musical notes. After all, the last colour in the visible spectrum, violet, is well on the way to becoming red, the starting point of visible light for us.

  There is no doubt that the note we call Megalithic C (just above C sharp in the international musical scale) has a sympathetic frequency resonance with the colour we know as blue. Before any physicists reading these words begin to jump up and down with rage at the liberties we appear to be taking here, let us state again that we are not suggesting a ‘direct’ relationship between sound and light, rather the possibility of a subtle harmony when viewed from a human perspective.

  Nobody fully understands the way the human brain deals with information relating to sound or light once the necessary signals have been created by the auditory and optic nerves. It seems very probable that both types of signal are processed, deep within the brain in more or less the same way. We know this must be the case because of a mysterious and sometimes debilitating medical condition known as synesthesia. This is an involuntary process in which one sensory experience is accompanied by another. It takes many forms, but probably the most common is that in which the sufferer genuinely ‘sees’ a colour upon hearing a particular sound. This condition is well documented and has been studied extensively. The best explanation for its cause is some sort of involuntary crossover within the complex circuitry of the brain, though the latter is an unbelievably complex organ and the process involved is not understood in detail. It was thinking about this bizarre condition that made us consider a real link between the frequency of sound and that of light. It has been a long journey from the simple, single-celled creatures that started life on Earth to the complex structure that is a human being today, and on that long road of evolution we have gradually accumulated the senses we now enjoy. Light sensitivity may have been one of the first of the senses to develop and, ultimately, it did so within a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. If, as many believe, sensitivity to sound came later, it would surely not be too peculiar for a developing nervous system to concentrate
on sounds that had frequencies with a sympathetic resonance to the light frequencies it had already learned to interpret. This might go some way to explaining the occurrence of synesthesia.

  If both of these frequency ranges of sound and light should also be inextricably tied to the natural matrix of cycles present in our little world, we surely could not be too surprised. After all, we are part of it.

  Megalithic C and water

  Interpreting the information in this manner shows that Megalithic C is related, in terms of resonance, with the colour blue. It is interesting to note that the majority of the colour blue visible on our planet is represented by our vast oceans. Many people assume that the seas of the world are blue simply as a result of reflection from the sky which, in a cloudless condition is also blue. This is not the case. The sky is blue because of particles in the atmosphere which react in a rather strange way and which, through a process known as Rayleigh Scattering, give a cloudless sky its colour. But even if the water in our oceans did not reflect the colour of the sky, it would still be blue. We think of water as being colourless, but in reality, it is not. In a laboratory in Kamioka, Japan, there is an indoor pool of absolutely pure water which stands under a silver roof. The water in the pool is a deep and luxuriant shade of blue.

  Water is the absolute basis of all life on Earth and, as far as is known, life cannot exist in an environment in which no water is present. Being composed of two hydrogen atoms to one oxygen atom (H2O), water remains one of the most mysterious and intriguing molecules known.

  We suspect, but at the moment cannot prove, that the sympathetic frequency relationship between the fundamental Megalithic C and that of the colour blue may in some way be related to our utter dependence on water and the way we have evolved to take account of that reliance.