Patrick Hunt who teaches classical archaeology at Stanford University calls the Pantheon,
"the most impressive Roman monumental building in the world."
I see it as a calendar in stone.
It's rotunda is an engineering marvel employing techniques such as reinforced concrete not
rediscovered until almost 2000 years later.
In this plan view you can see the floor pattern in which stone from all over the empire was
inlaid, a testament to Rome's imperial might.
It's circle and square motif might symbolize the Earth-Moon system in the following way...
Here a circle is inscribed within a square.
The square has 27.3% more area than the circle.
9.6.3.2.1 Comparing a circle and square with equal perimeters, the circle's diameter is
27.3% larger than the edge of the square.
OK so what?
Well the Moon happens to be 27.3% the size of Earth, which is another way of relating
Moon to Earth with the proportion 3 to 11.
In addition, the moon's sidereal orbital period is 27.3 days.
The words moon, month, and menstruation all share the same root because they all have
roughly the same period.
Human gestation lasts on average 273 days.
Another spooky coincidence has to do with temperature.
As you're probably aware, Celsius is defined by a 100 degree scale marking the freezing
and boiling points of water.
Water becomes liquid 273 degrees Celsius above Absolute Zero.
Here are these numbers again.
It seems to me that this fact references Earth as a water planet.
Why are these numbers the same?
Science has no answer for this other than pure coincidence.
In this sectional view you can see that a sphere fits perfectly within the volume the
Pantheon encloses.
I think recognizing this as the celestial sphere is the key to the Pantheon's symbolism.
The original Roman statuary fit into the seven alcoves.
The pantheon of pagan gods was replaced with Christian saints when the building was christened
the Church of Santa Maria Rotunda in the year 609.
Exchanging pagan gods for astrological symbols we see an arrangement matching the Ptolemaic
harmony of the spheres.
To the modern eye this sequence might seem arbitrary but it actually ranks the planets
in order of increasing apparent speed against the background of fixed stars as seen from
Earth.
Ptolemaic cosmology is therefore an Earth-centric approach to astronomy.
"Ptolemy's map of the spheres is conventionally presented as having been superseded by the
ideas of Copernicus, Galileo, and so on, but in fact was and is an accurate map of the
spiritual dimension of the cosmos, a dimension which seemed more real to the ancients than
the material cosmos."
-Mark Booth in The Secret History of the World Are you aware that the days of the week are
named after the planets?
With the exception of Saturn-day, Sun-day and Moon-day, English speakers unfamiliar
with Norse gods might have an easier time spotting this connection in French or Italian.
Connecting the days of the week in order yields
a 7 pointed star, somewhat distorted to accommodate squeezing it into the octagonal symmetry of
the Pantheon.
Looking up in the rotunda you see the oculus or central void in the dome.
The oculus is the sole source of illumination in the interior so it clearly symbolizes the
Sun.
The 5 rising tiers of coffers might represent the 5 planets visible with the naked eye from
Earth.
The 28 divisions around the circumference is where things really get interesting.
It is my contention that the 28 rays represent days.
Consider a month of four 7-day weeks lasting 28 days.
13 such months add up to 364 days.
The extra day needed to round out a 365 day year is where we get the phrase "a year and
a day."
Richard Heath has traced this 13 month plus one day calendar to the matriarchal societies
of the Bronze Age.
The Egyptian Sothic year lasted exactly 365 days, without compensating for leap year as
we do today.
Sothis is the Greek name for Sirius, the star the Egyptians based their new year on.
Any way that father time slices it, the 28 day division fits the Osiris story.
The Temple of Isis on the island of Philae has bas-reliefs which tell the Osiris story.
Here Osiris has 28 stalks of wheat emerging from his dead body.
The 13 pieces that Isis later reassembled symbolize the 13 month calendar of 28 day
months.
And his missing phallus represents the extra day rounding out the Sothic year.
Many religious stories encrypt astronomical information in their core levels.
Returning to Egypt for more wisdom, let's take a look at the Earth-Moon diagram that
came from studying the Great Pyramid.
Recall how the relative sizes of Moon and Earth fit the diagram when the circle was
squared.
John Michell rediscovered the key to much more ancient wisdom still encrypted in this
diagram in his book The Dimensions of Paradise.
Michell expanded the number of spheres in the diagram from 1 to 12 for reasons that
will soon become apparent.
If the mean diameter of the moon is 2160 miles (99.9% accurate), then the 12 moon evolution
in the diagram encodes the Great Year.
2160 times 12 equals 25920, which is Earth's precessional period.
Each month in this so called Great Year is likened to an age in astrology.
We are currently leaving the age of Pisces and it's the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
John Michell calls this the New Jerusalem diagram from his analysis of the Revelation
of St. John.
A seven pointed star resonates within.
Remember the seven rayed diadem of Isis and 7 rays of the Statue of Liberty?
I prefer to call this the Isis diagram in reference to the older stream of knowledge
coming out of Egypt.
The Isis diagram encodes Just Intonation in music.
On the most basic level, consider one octave of a piano keyboard.
A total of 12 notes are divided by sharps leaving 7 white keys.
The term sharp suggests the pointy heptagram doesn't it?
As we'll soon see at Chartres Cathedral, music along with astronomy, geometry, and number
theory are all keys to the ancient mystery.
Expanding the Isis diagram to contain four 7-pointed stars we have what I call the Osiris
diagram which encodes the Sothic year of 365 days in the following way.
The 28 tips of the stars represent days in the ancient month.
12 circles surround a 13th located at the center of the stars.
The circles represent months.
13 months of 28 days each defines the year.
The Earth circle underlying the stars represents the extra day and completion of the Sothic
year.
And the Sothic year was itself calibrated by the heliacal rising of the star of Isis,
consort to Osiris.
It's beautiful the way the geometry matches the cosmology.
The architecture of the universe is embedded in Egyptian cosmology.
To perceive the larger ramifications of the cosmology we are rediscovering, let's break
away from 2D diagrams and explore where we live, the third dimension.
It's a 3D reality that 12 spheres fit perfectly around a central 13th with all of them tangent
to each other, while the 13 fit perfectly within an overarching sphere.
I think this 3D reality is the source of the obsession with the number 13 that we've seen
symbolized in so many places.
Recall all the Lucky 13's on the Great Seal of the United States.
Lucky 13 might be more precisely described as 12 surrounding 1.
In The Last Supper, Da Vinci depicts Jesus in the center, surrounded by 12 apostles.
Geometrically speaking, connecting the centers of the 12 surrounding spheres with straight
lines reveals what is called the Cuboctahedron.
The Cuboctahedron has faces composed of squares and triangles, ad quadratum et ad triangulum
as they would say in the middle ages.
As it turns out cuboctahedral sphere packing has exactly 7 planes of symmetry.
Do these numbers sound familiar?
12 around 1, with 7 planes of symmetry?
The Cuboctahedron is the 3D equivalent of the Isis diagram.
The first ever known depiction of a Cuboctahedron was drawn by Leonardo da Vinci.
He created this illustration for Luca Pacioli's book De Divina Proportione (1509).
Pacioli and da Vinci worked together, became close friends, and later shared a house together
in Florence.
Pacioli was at the center of the Renaissance Hermetic obsession begun by Cosimo de Medici
in 1430 when he obtained the Corpus Hermetica, a body of work compiled in the first few centuries
of the common era recounting words passed down by Thoth through the last of the Egyptian
priesthood in Alexandria.
Here is Pacioli with a mysterious transparent Cuboctahedron half filled with water.
Some believe the younger man standing next to him is Albrecht Durer.
In Divine Proportion (2005), Priya Hemenway writes:
"In the autumn of 1506 Albrecht Durer rode from Venice to Bologna to the home of Luca
Pacioli in order to be initiated in the mysteries of a secret perspective."
Clearly the Cuboctahedron was important to these Renaissance masters immersed in Hermetic
knowledge.
Perhaps they knew something we don't.
In the 20th century Buckminster Fuller was obsessed with the Cuboctahedron.
He called it the Dymaxion and built his philosophy around it because the Cuboctahedron is the
only polyhedron completely in equilibrium.
All 12 vectors emanating from its core have equal angles and all of its internal and external
edges have equal length.
In the 21st century the Cuboctahedron is the "foundation for physicist Nassim Haramein's
unified field theory that offers a new solution to Einstein's field equations..."
Haramein claims that the vacuum, a term used
by physicists to refer to a volume of space that is completely devoid of matter, actually
has a structure, and this structure is based at the core on the Cuboctahedron.
What we perceive as empty space is actually a seething cauldron of energy.
Physicists calculate that the amount of energy in each and every cubic centimeter of space
exceeds the energy output of all stars visible to the Hubble Space Telescope.
The reason space seems empty is because all that energy is perfectly balanced in a state
of equilibrium.
It looks to us like nothing is there.
Haramein has built his entire unified theory of physics on cuboctahedral geometry.
I believe Haramein is really onto something.
His latest paper "The Schwarzschild Proton" received the best paper award in a physics
symposium in 2009.
Modern physics seems to be catching up with ancient knowledge.