I continue to wrestle with some of the details involved in exploring my questions about ancient American iconography and planetary/stellar symbolism, such as a considerable amount of rather time-consuming manual data entry and searching for scattered images and drawings of monumental artifacts like stelae and altars.
Ideally, this may help provide the opportunity to better understand many things, but the proof of this remains to be seen and the matter demands much attention – even to the point of being so distracted by it that I let May 4 (as in May the Fourth Be With You) pass by without trying to prepare a blog post.
At present, I wouldn’t mind being back in a more familiar element for a moment, and one of the ancient monuments that has become most familiar is Stonehenge.
Hopefully it has become familiar enough that we can actually give meaningful answers to its purpose, or at very least we can put some focus on some of its functions.
From my perspective, Stonehenge is of course, among other things, a very sizable calendar calculator, whose proportions enter into equations that give considerable insights into numerous matters.
Stonehenge might also be considered a metrological tutorial, and as if just to prove that metrology isn’t always a light subject, it acts as a metrological tutorial that risks confusing us by taking strident steps toward trying to clear our confusion by tackling potentially confusing subjects head-on.
One of its functions in this capacity seems to be that it is a tutorial on the Megalithic Yard – and in the Megalithic Yards’s myriad forms, no less – because that is precisely how its design is effectively able to work.
In this capacity, Stonehenge would share a great deal with the Great Pyramid, because over years of study, that is exactly the picture that has emerged of the Great Pyramid – over and over again, it is implicated as a metrological standard, as a metrological tutorial on a grand scale.
With some of the latest things we have have learned, we can now see that even more clearly than before – the Great Pyramid’s perimeter / height ratio of 2 Pi is according to this research, the glue that holds ancient metrological systems together.
Almighty 2 Pi is also the buffer that keeps the diversity of units required for fluid storage and retrieval of data, from collapsing upon one another.
Using 2 Pi to remarkable advantage, the actual proportions of the Great Pyramid use 2 Pi to practice exactly what they preach.
Almost ironically, the perimeter of the Great Pyramid at the presently attested pavement level, according to this research, is measured exactly as John Michell (corroborated by Hugh Franklin) suggested, in an inverse number of Megalithic Yards – and one of the “true” ones at that.
That is some of the confusing business that ultimate Stonehenge aims to clarify, which is a real Megalithic Yard and which is not.
The most recent metrological discoveries help to corroborate the teachings of Stonehenge, emphasizing that there are probably only three true Megalithic Yard values, primarily the “Alternate e'” and “Incidental” types, but also the “Draconic” Megalithic Yard.
These are the first three Megalithic Yard values I discovered, and in that order.
I have mentioned before how close Sir WMF Petrie seems to have come during his study of Stonehenge, to being the discoverer of the Megalithic Yard before Alexander Thom. Had Petrie only experimented the slightest bit more with some of his data, that might well be the tale that history tells.
In a very similar way, the mean measures of the sarsen circle (mean diameter and circumference) help provide a reference point that illuminates all three of these genuine Megalithic Yards. It’s only one of the aspects of Stonehenge with this property, which has thus far proven to be remarkably rare – the sort of thing that might most likely happen more than once in a design, only by very careful planning and deliberate intent.
Sometimes I wax toward the sentiment that Stonehenge represents an ultimate Megalithic packaging to reflect and ultimate Megalithic design, but this may do poor justice to countless other Megalithic sites whose designs may be every bit as clever.
Having written somewhat extensively on Megalithic sites before, I have demonstrated previously how some of Thom’s Flattened Ring designs inherently contain some key data from Stonehenge – quite an amazing thing to discover, and yet it’s quite plain in Thom’s data (yet to the best of my knowledge, I am the first person to point it out, almost 30 years after the publication of Thom’s first book).
Again, regarding Stonehenge as tutorial on the Megalithic Yard, it features what appear to be some extremely well chosen metrological situations that highlight the true nature of a number of metrological entities that might present a challenging puzzle.
Stonehenge uses an ingenious reciprocation of the inner sarcen circle circumference (one of its parameters that appear in probably all Type A Flattened Megalithic Rings, except that where at Stonehenge it is a measurement value derived from consensus data, in the Type A rings it appears as a ratio) to not only inform us of a useful value for the Indus Foot, but to show it to us in such a way that we understand that it is really an expression of the Megalithic Foot, and most likely indistinguishable from the Harris-Stockdale Megalithic Foot even through field measures.
This affords us understanding that “lesser” (less elaborate) stone circles may be just as ingenious mathematically as Stonehenge, and every bit as worthy of protection and conservation, in spite of Stonehenge’s grandeur.
The sarcen circle’s basic measures also feature a comparison of a genuine Megalithic Yard with a false one.
Professor Thom’s conceptualization of the sarsen circle with outer circumference of 48 Megalithic Rods (Megalithic Rod = 2.5 Megalithic Yards) and inner circumference 45 Megalithic Rods is almost perfect – Thom’s ratio is 48/45 = 1.066666666 whereas 45 false Megalithic Rods constructed from Megalithic Feet, is what provides the eminently more useful ratio of 1.067438159.
It’s in the course of working that out that we are treated to a remarkable example of a real Megalithic Yard and an example of a false one, with the two cued up for comparison, although it’s a puzzle capable of confusing anyone with a preconceived notion that the designers were using only one unit of measure over and over and over.
It’s the apparent fact that Stonehenge utilizes a myriad of different ancient units of measure that nearly won Petrie the honor of being the discoverer of the Megalithic Yard, as I have detailed earlier in this blog.
Petrie discovered a novel unit of measure at Stonehenge of 224.8 inches, although to give a more typical value for an ancient unit we would need to move the decimal point one place to the left and observe that what Petrie thought was one unit was likely 10.
What Petrie’s unit really seems to be is the unit of 1.067438159 ft, itself an expression of the candidate Egyptian Royal Foot, being only one of a number of “Egyptian” units found in the design of Stonehenge, including Petrie’s own observation of the Roman Foot (more properly, the Egyptian-Roman foot, itself in turn being the Egyptian Remen) in use there.
Because I think it has been rarely mentioned, I will devote a few passages to it here: the sarsen circle means works out to mean diameter 100.6036766 ft, mean circumference 100.6036766 x Pi = 316.0557714 ft.
The circumference equates to 150 Palestinian Cubits as 2.107038476 x 150 = 316.0557714, and the diameter equates to 60 “Egyptian Mystery Units” as 1.676727943 x 60 = 100.6036766.
In standard Megalithic Yards of 2.720174976 ft (the “AEMY” Megalithic Yard), that is
316.0557714 / 2.720174976 = 116.1895004
In the course of trying to convert the mean circumference to Megalithic Yards, we find that no less than 3 different true Megalithic Yard values can be used here, and thus we are able to discover all three of them if we pay careful attention to this equation that arises from the extremely obvious question of how many Megalithic Yards there are in the circumference of the sarsen circle (even though it isn’t really measured in Megalithic Yards at all).
Similar accommodations for 3 different Megalithic Yards seem to have been provided by Thom’s “Bluestone Oval With Corners” which has also be discussed here in some detail before.
Thus, like the Great Pyramid, Stonehenge serves as a metrological standard as well as a high-capacity data storage unit for astronomy data, or “astronomical calculator” if one prefers.
That is only a little of what Stonehenge shows us, and why Stonehenge and all stone circles are so important. There are still more ways of looking at them, including as they are seen through the work of author Geoff Bath, who has been a major influence in the great metrological advances of the past year or so, essentially showing me what has been right under my nose the whole time – that 2 Pi isn’t just an interesting number for the Great Pyramid (or a circular monument) to flash at us, it’s the greatest metrological unit unifier of them all.
At long last we know what 2 Pi is capable of when it gets it hands on ANY of a long series of units related to the Megalithic Foot and Egyptian Sacred Cubit, and also when it gets its hand on a whole number, the first thing it does in this later series being to give us the Egyptian Royal Cubit.
–Luke Piwalker
Luke Piwalker 