An Oratio on Ratio

So, here's an idea that I ran across several years ago and it's been percolating in my cranium long enough. It's time to give this the light of day. Once again, it has helped me enormously on how to grasp what some of the ancient mystics and weird highly spiritual thinking and writing ancient authors were trying to say without giving the game away. Most especially in Iamblichus' book On The Mysteries, which I shall extensively demonstrate after I lay some ground work here.

Back then it was their life on the line so they had to be secret and yet find a way to get the ideas out to the initiates. Today we have no need nor reasons for secrecy. Rome is not going to kill us over dead for sharing some very interesting views.

Years ago I asked one of my favorite authors, David Fideler if he still agreed more or less with what he wrote in his book Jesus Christ: Sun of God. He told me yes, and in fact, later research of his confirmed and has expanded even what he wrote then. I hope he comes out with more books as his ideas are galvanizing to get us to understand what the ancient authors meant, whether we are reading Plato, Proclus, Aristotle, or several of the early Christian Church Fathers, Origen, Eusebius, Augustine, or Clement of Alexandria. He also has some electrifying insights into the Bible that are quite enlightening that I really enjoy knowing.

I confess, for this article I am more or less summarizing some ideas of his, and I used his figures, though I added my own artistic flourishes and colors to his black and white figures. They really help in understanding, so I add some pazzazz to them here.

Usually when we get talking about math our eyes glaze over, but Fideler as well as the Sacred Geometrician Robert Lawlor, has made it honestly easy because they show what the ratios we need to understand are, and how they operate. It is important because these are the eternal things the ancients were talking about as being responsible for the Creation of the universe. So, here is a figure that is important in getting to the ratio of the gods as the ancients taught them to be. Here in this first figure we see two intertwined circles on the right of the triangle, with a middle area overlapping both circles. That area is called the Vesica Piscis. This one has the triangles with their bases touching. The single triangle split down the middle on the left has a half base measure of 1, which means the height of the triangle is the square root of 3. The triangle in the Vesica Pisces is pictured to show you how the relationships work, where the ratios are, etc. Every Vesica has the measure of square root of 3.

Now, using gematria, which is one of the more extensive systems of intellect the ancient Greeks as well as Jews used, we find something utterly fascinating! Gematria is where each letter of the Greek alphabet (this is also used with the Hebrew alphabet, among others) also is a number and so words with the same number are supposed to be related in meaning somehow. Or numbers can also be words, it goes both ways. I shall give more details in another paper with explicit examples. There is a lot of material to use on this subject.

As it turns out, the Greek name Apollo has a gematria value of 1061. The Greek name Zeus has a gematric value of 612. And the Greek name Hermes has a gematric value of 353. And there you go! I know, I hear you asking, "yeah... and....so?" Well, nothing major here except when we put them into ratios and relationships with each other, then we see something quite interesting. Scholars have discovered that the ancients had a "canon" of knowledge, based on music, number, geometry, and astronomy. They encoded this canon of proportion, measure, and harmony into the names of their gods, the structures of their buildings, and into the landscape they lived in also. It was a measure of the heavens which they knew they were part of, a combining of heaven and earth, gods and men, etc. This use of the canon of knowledge they acquired from the heavens and input it into earth. Their very gods were harmonized in geometric relationships of ratio and proportion. It is what made the gods eternal! They used geometry as a basis for meditation as they learned "the truth" about reality, because geometry showed them the proportions and ratios of the incommensurable numbers they saw, such as the square root of two, the square root of three, the square root of 5, etc.

When two circles are whirled using the compass, the overlapping area comes into play, the Vesica Piscis. The short axis within the Vesica, the yellow one, if it is measured out as 353, the same number as Hermes name in the Greek calculates to, then the longer red axis within the Vesica measures in proportion to the Hermes measure, as 612, the number of adding up the Greek letters in his name as we did with Hermes. And, the measure of the line from A to B, then continuing from B to the other A on the other end of the second circle, measures 1061, the number of the Greek name counting up the value of the Greek letters in the name of Apollo! The interrelationship of the gematria gives us a profound and beautifully integrated, fully measured, and in direct proportion figure of geometry! Notice that Zeus is the geometric mean between Apollo and Hermes through the ratio of the Vesica Piscis. There is yet another way to see this geometrically which piques our interest even more.

As Fideler shows, the ancient Greek philosopher Thales proved in his famous theorem that a perpendicular raised in a semi-circle is the Geometric Mean between the base line segments on either side. What this figure shows is the upright line here is the mediating line between Hermes and Apollo. And its measure is the gematric value of the Greek gematria for Zeus, namely 612! The remarkable thing is with this perpendicular line measuring Zeus's number of 612, the total measure of the baseline would equal 1415. This number is arrived at through the Greek words calculated using gematria. The words are "The God Apollo"![1] They designed their gods names to coincide with the eternal ratios one can find by doing geometry, numerics, working with musical harmony and studying astronomy, the ancient Quadrivium of education in antiquity. It all formed an entire symphony of harmony, which they then incorporated into their myths, sacred literatures, and buildings, especially their temples.

As Fideler has shown extensively "certain gematria numbers represent quantified values of the root ratios which exist as the timeless heart of creation." He also elaborated saying "Certain gematria numbers are based upon the archetypal logoi, ratios, or 'Aeons' which underlie the structure of the manifest universe[2] They called these ratios Zeus, Hermes, Apollo, among other names because their Greek names gave the accurate number of the relatedness of the numerical ratios and geometric shapes! The idea is to harmonize the gods through the power of logos or proportion. The initiates would perform the mathematical geometric drawing while being taught and then calculating the gematria of the names of the various gods in order to see how the cosmos was ordered, and in turn, learned how to proportion their buildings to reflect the powers of the gods on earth.

The gematric values of their names tied in with the geometry as well as proportions of the square roots demonstrated their eternal natures, that they are "brothers of one another in Greek mythology." It isn't the numbers that the ancients concentrated on so much as the functions or the powers, which is how the gods were identified and understood to be by the ancient priesthoods. Notice the God Apollo and the God Hermes are 1.415 and .707 respectively, which shows they together equal "1"! Now with the various aspects of the divine logos as the ideal showing through the geometry and gematria we see many other relationships and ratios that show this was a well thought out ancient canon of law and reality of based on the heavenly knowledge of eternal ratios. This is not a coincidental accident, but a conforming of their earthly reality to what they saw in the astronomical heavens and the order there being pulled down to earth.

As Fideler notes "Because the central values of the Greek number canon were derived from the most archetypal ratios, they possess many remarkable properties in relation to one another. Whether they were codified as whole numbers, none of these values symbolize regular numbers per se, rather, they represent functions or logoi, the ideal principles of universal relation. These values also symbolize a process of emanation whereby the Primal Unity passes through the 'First Logos' and subsequent stages of harmonic differentiation."[3]

And the geometry keeps on working. Consider how the names of the gods fit so perfectly with the length, surface area and volume combined. The volume of the tetrahedron in cubic units = 612, ZEUS. With this volume as the basis, the insphere radius = 3.53, HERMES. The insphere diameter = 7.07, THE GOD HERMES. Now the volume of the cube surrounding the insphere = 353, HERMES. With the insphere radius = 6.12, ZEUS, this makes the insphere diamater 12.24, FISHES, THE NET. The Circumsphere radius = 10.61, APOLLO, that makes the Circumsphere surface area = 1414/1415, THE GOD APOLLO.

What this is doing is bringing out the key canonical numbers in terms of cubic volume, surface area, and length simultaneously. "In Greek cosmology, it was appropriately associated with the element of fire or light and, as a natural design type, defined the structure of Apollo's mystical tripod at Delphi."[4] What most people appear unaware of is the gematria of the various names is not arbitrary. "It is based on the archetypal laws of geometry which underlie the genesis of form and harmonic manifestation."[5]

What is amazing is that we find this exact same kind of correspondence of ratio to geometric figure to heavenly harmony and music in both the Jewish Old Testament and the Christian New Testament, only more extensively...

Endnotes

1. David Fideler, Jesus Christ, Sun of God, Quest Books, 1993: 84.

2. Fideler, Jesus Christ, Sun of God, p. 79.

3.Fideler, Jesus Christ, Sun of God, p. 83.

4.Fideler, Jesus Christ, Sun of God, p. 86-87.

5.Fideler, Jesus Christ, Sun of God, p. 86-87.