Sacred geometry or playschool games?

Not long ago I came across this extraordinary web site:

http://www.geoffss.plus.com/movingmenhirs.htm

and I have had some interesting Email exchanges with Geoff, the originator.  I was interested to discover the amount of effort which is put in by some mathematicians and "astroarchaeology" or "archaeoastronomy" researchers into understanding alignments, orientations, lunar and solar observations and predictions etc, with respect to Stonehenge and other sites.  I don't have a problem with Neolithic man lining up stones with horizon positions for summer solstice sunrises or midwinter sunsets, or even for lunar positions -- or even for the Pole Star in the heavens.  And I quite like the idea of Stonehenge and other monuments being astronomical observatories, calendars or maybe even calculators related to seasonal rhythms -- so long as these ideas are not stretched ad absurdam.  But I do have major problems with this strange thing called "sacred geometry" -- as preached by Gerald Hawkins, Alexander Thom, John Michell and Robin Heath, among others.  Richard Atkinson was VERY sceptical about all this sort of stuff, as was Aubrey Burl, and this scepticism is shared by many modern archaeologists like Clive Ruggles who have studied STONEHENGE.

Let's quote Matt Parker and refer to my previous post about Woolworths stores.  ".........in any sufficiently large set of random data it is possible to find meaningless patterns of any required accuracy.”

In any set of points plotted on a map (such as a map of Neolithic or megalithic sites in the UK) you can simply skip over the vast majority of the sites that happen to be inconvenient, and home in on the few that happen to coincide with the lines or corners of whatever triangle or other shape that you choose to demonstrate as "meaningful."  The more data or plotted points you have, the greater is your ability to pull meaningless patterns from them.

http://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2011/04/navigating-to-stonehenge-lessons-from.html


Matt Parker had the locations of 800 Woolworth stores to work with.  He was still able to find close "fits" with his chosen lines, distances, and geometric shapes, just as Robin Heath and others have done with their maps.  The more random or precisely positioned points you have on the map, the greater the chance of finding "meaningful" patterns.  If you just plot standing stones, or Neolithic henges, on a map, some geometric patterns will be found; but if you then add long barrows, round barrows, causeways, etc, your data set is greatly enlarged, and more and more "patterns" can be "discovered." If you want to increase your prospects of finding patterns even further, you can add in ALL prehistoric features, or "meaningful points in the landscape", such as Carn Meini, Glastonbury Tor, Lundy Island, Bardsey island, Caldey Island, or the tips of peninsulas or river mouths.  You end up with hundreds if not thousands of points in the landscape, enabling you to find patterns everywhere, with close matches for triangles of various shapes and sizes, circles, straight lines, and curves.

You can play little games, just as they do in Playgroups and primary schools with very small children, by creating predetermined shapes (such as triangles of circles) and moving them around on your map with thousands of random points in it, and finding "fits."  If the points of your triangle do not EXACTLY coincide with the "meaningful places" on your map, you can explain this away by using some pseudo-scientific phrase relating to degrees of confidence, or by saying "the fit is accurate to within 0.5%" or "the fit is almost perfect" -- or even by saying that the map itself is inaccurate, or that coastal erosion since the Neolithic has moved your crucial point from A to B.  This is quite wonderful!  You can do almost anything, and find "meaning" and "ancient wisdom" or "sacred geometry" in almost anything, as Matt Parker has pointed out.

This is not science.  It is pseudo-science, pure and simple. Put another way, it is a little game that one might play with one's grandchildren.  What is amazing is that some people actually write books about this sort of stuff, and that people buy them and read them, and are apparently swept away into a state of wonderment.  What does it tell us about the human condition?  Well, it tells us, I suppose, that the yearning for a rediscovery of "ancient wisdom" is still as strong as ever, that people have a strong sense of spatial awareness, and want to find patterns or "sacred geometry" in landscapes, or order where there is chaos.  It also tells us that people are remarkably poorly educated and that they are just as gullible as our ancestors were in the Middle Ages.

Thinking of which, I have been dipping into Robin Heath's book called "Bluestone Magic" -- I am amazed, and I will shortly post a review.

In the meantime, and returning to the "Lunation Triangle" illustrated above, I discovered this in the field of "Geomantics":
http://cura.free.fr/decem/06heath

Robin Heath -- "The Marriage of the Sun and Moon"

Quote:

"The large Lunation Triangle, shown incorporated into a huge cardinally aligned 5:12 rectangle, includes the location of the bluestone site, and the exact north-south and east-west lines complete a right angled triangle via Lundy and Caldey Island. In Old Welsh, Lundy is called Ynys Elen, the 'island of the elbow, or right-angle'. I suggest that this may be the reason why Stonehenge is located where it is - as the only man-made construction in this geomantic message about calendar wisdom? (Figure 5.2, Sun, Moon & Stonehenge, page 76)"

Now what is all that about?  What on earth is this "Lunation Triangle" with sides 5:12:13?  We can remind ourselves that exactly this same triangle can be located in an almost infinite number of positions, with Stonehenge at one of its points.  It can be flipped and swivelled all over the map of Southern Britain, and fitted to an almost infinite number of other points on the map. Some of those points will be north, west, south or east of Stonehenge.  Amazing!

Robin is actually suggesting that Stonehenge was built where it is because it was the only point which exactly fitted this triangle, in exactly the position where he chooses to place it.  So he assumes that the builders knew what they were doing, or did something unconsciously, driven by some irresistible urge or geomantic guidance.  From whom or what?  All very strange.  Let's look at the triangle. I tried the same exercise, and the "Lundy point" is not on the island at all, but in the sea to the north-west.  And what about Carn Meini?  You can play silly games in the eastern Preseli, and put your point wherever you want it.  We know that the stones did not all come from Carn Meini anyway, but from at least 30 different places, including Pont Saeson.  If there was sacred guidance here, how come the source of all this esoteric guidance and wisdom got the geology all wrong? 

To quote Geoff:  "But how did they (the builders of Stonehenge) do it, if they actually did?  When was it possible to know you were on a Lat. as specific as 51 53 00?  The problem here is that the ability to have that kind of exactitude seems to postdate some apparent model activity - if there ever actually was any such model.  Things, names and people turn up at precise model points before the precision to do it existed.  And that's a puzzle.  It's almost worth conjecturing a pre-OS survey/mapping here, perhaps?  OS only really gets going after 1800 AD, but our model will find accurate activity from the 1750s and earlier - but then, as the investigation developed, I found some things that looked old were actually fairly recent in situ - and the more recent the placement, of course, the easier the explaining any accuracy - were such, of course, intentional."

Elsewhere in his writings, Geoff (in spite of being predisposed to accept much of this "sacred geometry" system of belief) finds things that don't quite fit -- with points not quite where they are supposed to be, angles just slightly awry from those cited with certainty, and other associations which sound very learned until you explore them in detail and find that they are just plain wrong...........

So what's going on here with all this geomantic / sacred geometry literature?  It is certainly packed with pseudo-science and mumbo-jumbo.  Are those who write it all down and flog it to a gullible readership just deluded themselves, or are they charlatans?  I couldn't possibly comment......