Chapter 8 DESIGNER PLANET The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Sir James Jeans, 1930 THE MONUMENTS OF THE MEGALITHIC have so far been interpreted as necessary technical designs, suitable for understanding astronomical time periods, establishing the dimensions of the Earth and distances upon the Earth according to relative longitude or latitudinal degrees. As we saw in the last chapter, developments emerging from the geodetic phase made it possible for the length of perimeter walls surrounding the Temple Mount at Jerusalem to present an exact symbolic meaning (i.e., the Precession of the Equinoxes). Detailed within Sumerian, Jewish, and Christian texts are designs for arks, ships built using metrological codes defining cubes, and buildings or shapes whose areas and volumes generate large numbers, significant to planetary dimensions and astronomical time periods, thus providing a link between heaven, earth, and humanity''s sacred spaces. Such sacred structures remained significant to those initiated in megalithic metrology, but when presented as religious symbols they were increasingly detached from any factual relevance. Humanity''s cultural development was therefore established upon a numeric and symbolic foundation provided by the megalithic, however soon forgotten and lost sight of.

The combination of number and symbol was projected into future cultural settings as a canon of sacred geometrical art. This symbolic work turned megalithic understandings into simple and powerful patterns, such as the Ark, which the ancient world reset into traditional information (texts) for transmission across unknown future times and circumstances or within temple-building practices. This is probably how Ark stories came to be part of our world of stories and texts, versed so to speak in the evolving number sciences of the East, incorporating all that was known about geometry, art, temple-building, and compositional and harmonic codification. These new number scientists of the ancient Near East inherited megalithic codes indicating that the world was wholly founded on numerical relationships. Carnac''s astronomical relationships involving multiple squares had indicated how numbers might participate in cosmic structures and rhythms. The shape of the Earth and the role of the moon and planets had then become known through the use of ideal units of length, within a pattern surely not dreamed up by human agency. This pattern inscribed the Earth within a design, revealing the Earth''s unique relationship to the number field. It was this that rightly turned megalithic science into the ideals and ratios we find embodied in sacred religious structures, these being perpetuated in the design of temples throughout the historical period, each numerically coded using a metrological system to establish numeric connections between the Earth and the heavens.

THE GEOMETER''S GIFT At Carnac, the first four numbers were seen to generate multiple squares. In modern math we sometimes multiply numbers together so as to form factorial numbers such as factorial FOUR, shown as 4!, which is 1 × 2 × 3 × 4 = 24. The presence of factorial numbers in late Stone Age thinking should not come as a shock since, throughout the megalithic period, the art of factorization was seeing whole numbers as the product of their smaller factors, including the prime numbers. The lesser factorials such as 4! = 24 would be present as aggregate metrological lengths. Through his lifetime studying Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid, John Michell intuited the geometry involved in the mean Earth discovered by the ancients, which made heavy use of factorials. By now we know that SEVEN is useful within PI as 22/7, noting then that 22 is two times ELEVEN. If 5040 were declared as the length of a radius, then it would have a circumference equal to 6! times 44, or 720 times 4 times ELEVEN, which equals 31,680. One-quarter of this would be the length of a single quadrant equaling 7920, the idealized diameter of the mean Earth in English miles.

This length happens to be 11! divided by 7! since 8 × 9 × 10 happens also to equal 720, which is 6!. This can be presented as two circles with a common center as in the figure below. The resulting geometry is quite unique. No other geometry could embody a quadrant to equal a diameter and engage in such fundamental play of factorials while also numerically expressing the Earth''s size in miles. Built in the same century, Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid can be seen to display this relationship of two circles, albeit in completely different ways. This implies the existence of this ancient mean-Earth geometry as informing the design of these monuments.