Mysteries and Secrets of Numerology. Patricia Fanthorpe

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      The Parthenon

      The goddess Athena, also known as Pallas Athena, is the goddess of courage, wisdom, and skill. Also known as Minerva to the Romans, she was their goddess of justice, strength, and strategy, and was an inspirer of heroes. Wisdom, which is one of her greatest attributes, includes the mysteries of mathematics and the strange secrets of numerology. She is traditionally associated with the owl, the bird of wisdom, and some numerologists would associate the owl with the number “7” as indicative of wisdom and thoughtfulness.

      The Golden Section ratio ф was very important to early Greek mathematicians and numerologists because it featured prominently in pentagrams and pentagons. Pythagoras and his followers most certainly gave it a great deal of attention. The pentagram with a pentagon inside it was their Pythagorean symbol. Euclid’s book, The Elements, contains what may well be the earliest description of the golden ratio in words. In describing it, he said that the golden ratio was found when the whole of a line to its greater segment was the same as the relationship of the greater segment to the lesser segment. Some of the proofs that Euclid used in The Elements reveal that the golden mean ф is an irrational number — a number that cannot be expressed as a fraction with 1 integer above another.

      Michael Maestlin (1550–1631) worked out a decimalized approximation for the reciprocal of ф in 1597 and came up with 0.618034. This was incredibly close. Maestlin worked at the University of Tübingen and his calculations appeared in a letter to Kepler, who had been one of his students.

      Le Corbusier, the Swiss-born French architect, whose real name was Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (1887–1965), produced magnificent buildings, often based on the harmonies and proportions of the golden mean and the Fibonacci numbers. He is quoted as saying that the rhythms of the golden mean and the Fibonacci series were at the “very root of human activities.” He felt that there was a great inherent mystery in them which placed them somehow in the minds of “children, old men, savages and the learned” — a point of view that many numerologists would share.

      The outstandingly brilliant Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was well aware of the golden mean and the Fibonacci series. His amazing picture of the so-called Vitruvian Man testifies to this. Named after the old Roman architect Vitruvius (80 BC–15 BC), the 2 superimposed human figures in the drawing are in perfect artistic proportion. Le Corbusier was a great admirer of da Vinci’s work and seems to have modelled some of his finest architecture on da Vinci’s principles.

      Prince Matila Ghyka (1881–1965) influenced Salvador Dali, who undoubtedly used the golden ratio in his superb work The Sacrament of the Last Supper. There is a vast dodecahedron behind the central figures and its edges are in golden ratio to one another.

      Over and above the works of these artists and architects, the psychology of the golden mean attracted the attention of Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887), the pioneering German experimental psychologist. Fechner wanted to find out whether the Golden Section was correlated with the human ideas of what constituted beauty. His research concluded that there was a distinct preference for rectangles that were built on the golden mean.

      Musicians and advanced music theorists like James Tenney (1934–2006) applied the numerical theories of the golden mean and the Fibonacci series to their musical compositions with striking results. Musicologist Roy Howat, who is also an excellent pianist, has found musical pieces that correspond to the golden mean.

      The golden mean and the Fibonacci series are among the most intriguing mysteries of mathematics and numerology. They even overflow into the flora and fauna of the Earth’s biosphere, which are the subject of the next chapter. Nature, it seems, is the product of special numbers and special numerical sequences.

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       Numbers in Flora and Fauna

      One of the strangest things about the power of numbers, as disclosed by both scientific mathematics and the mysteries of numerology, is their persistence throughout the biosphere. Animals, plants, fungi, and insects — in fact, all life forms — are surprisingly and persistently numerical. Why is there this persistent correlation between numbers and the multitude of organisms, from whales to bacteria, that fill the biosphere along with us? The component parts of most of these living things have inexplicable numerical sequences. They often line up with the Fibonacci series and with ф. What have life and mathematics and numerology to do with one another? It all seems to make numerology far more viable and significant. It raises the major question, yet again: is the mind of the Creator the mind of a mathematician?

      Adolf Zeising (1810–1876) was a remarkable German psychologist, mathematician, and philosopher, who was convinced that he could trace the mathematical principles of ф and the golden ratio in plant stems and the arrangements of veins in their leaves. He pursued his research into animal skeleton formations and other zoological details such as the cardiovascular system, arteries, veins, neurones, and the lymph system. He also looked into the shapes and relative sizes of crystals, and he applied his favourite mathematical theories to chemical compounds. Wherever Zeising looked, he found indications of ф. For him, the golden ratio was a kind of universal law that he claimed he could detect in every phenomenon in the universe. Zeising didn’t just find significant number series in living organisms — he found them everywhere. In his view, the Fibonacci mystery permeated everything: organic and inorganic, СКАЧАТЬ