Click here to return to Sacred Geometry

  Click Picture to Return to Home Page

The articles About Sound Possibilities on the Home Page and There are Many Branches on the Tree of Life on the Branches of Possibility main page will explain the name Sound Possibilities. But Robert Fludd’s (1574 - 1637) marvelous depiction of the “Divine Monochord” really says it all much more eloquently. At a glance we can see that the elemental spheres of heaven and earth and the divine proportions of their cosmic harmony can be found in the vibration of a single string. The macrocosm of the universe is represented in the microcosm of the intervals and ratios of the harmonic series.   

   In the two pictures below we see how Fludd arrived at his graphical representation of “as above, so below”.  This was a recurring theme in so much of Fludd’s studies, it figures prominently in his illustrations. The Elemental Spheres represented at the left are the primordial building blocks of alchemy and provide the cosmic media with which the ‘music of the spheres’ is realized. On the right we see the monochord which Pythagoras used 2000 years earlier to carry out his experiments that laid the groundwork for harmonic theory for millennia to come. When the length of a vibrating string is halved, and halved again, and so on, the intervals sound out the Sacred Geometry of the Divine Proportions.

 The four black & white drawings on this page are from Robert Fludd, Hermetic Philosopher and Surveyor of Two Worlds by Joscelyn Godwin, Shambhala Publ., Thames & Hudson, Boulder, CO, 1979

   So naturally conceived were these proportions that for centuries they were believed to be fundamental throughout Nature, from the patterns of seashells and plants to the orbits of the planets and stars. Symbol systems and philosophies emerging during these times found these patterns useful in laying out the scale of attributes that go together to make up “the whole”. These systems have integrity and hold together even today because they ultimately did not rely on the mathematics of the original model.

   Pythagoras did not recognize irrational numbers in his designs and the plantetary motions would not be accurately measured for millenia to come, although Kepler and others in the 16th and 17th centuries contributed remarkably given what they had to work with. The introduction of irrational numbers and ever more exact measurements in physics and astronomy may have bumped the orbits of planets and nuclei off a bit from the whole number ratios used by the ancients, and the tempered scale of the piano keyboard is not true to the enharmonic tuning of medieval instruments, but beauty and truth survive in all these systems nevertheless. 

This colored rendition is from Adam McLean’s fantastic Alchemy Web Site. Go hither and wander; http://www.levity.com/alchemy/

   This is an important point that we will return to again and again in these pages. For the truth and beauty spoken of by poets and composers, artists and mystics, thinkers and seers, seekers and teachers, is more resilient than the exactitude of mathematics. Alchemy, astrology, the symbol systems and occult philosophies of the ancients all begin with the concept of oneness, unity, wholeness, completeness. Then they lay out the aspects and degrees of that oneness, the essential elements, the notes on the scale. Whatever symbolism is invoked, it is towards an understanding of the whole, and of the part in its relationship to the whole. 

   The reductionism of modern science in its attempt to ‘reverse-engineer’ Nature, tries to understand things outside of their relationship to the whole. In nuclear physics, for example, we started out with theoretical particles, figured out how to detect them, then continued with that model to define ever-smaller particles, which led to ‘particle-like things’ that, oh by the way, sometimes act like waves!?! Now we are measuring the probabilities of quantum space-time attempting to ascertain the nature of 12-dimensional cosmic strings! Is this any less esoteric? 

   Furthermore, since the Uncertainty Principle was introduced by Werner Heisenberg in the 20th century, the realization that the observer is intimately involved with and ultimately affects any attempt to measure such particles casts further suspicion on the notion of objective reality.

   The proportions of sacred geometry however, continue to make sense even when the numbers get irrational and the particles behave like waves. Truth and beauty are relative, and even the father of relativity himself, Albert Einstein, will be the first to admit that “...imagination is more important than knowledge” and that “...science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind.”

   For when we study the history of religion and the history of science, as with the history of art and music, we find that all these veritable ‘trees of knowledge’ grew originally in a single forest. All paths to understanding spring from our own consciousness, but in time the trails diverge into various disciplines and wind through a multi-cultural array of ethnocentric notions. If, as some say, we create God in our own image, then the ancient Hebrew idea that there are 72 million names for God makes pretty good sense.

   So Robert Fludd’s Divine Monochord sounds today as vibrantly as ever when we acknowledge the hermetic axiom “as above, so below”, and when we see a similar spiral pattern in a seashell as we find in the Andromeda Galaxy, and when we listen with our hearts to the music of the spheres wherever we find it, or wherever we make it. In the final version of Fludd’s ‘Monochord’ one cannot help but notice the hand reaching down from the cloud at the upper right taking a hold of the tuning peg. In a culture steeped in religion that would be the hand of God, in a more secular time it might be “intelligence asserting its power over the material world”, it could even be the old man himself, Pythagoras, tuning that single string to one tone or another to see how the proportions come out in different keys. But perhaps more importantly we simply need to remember that the instrument can be tuned and should be tuned, and that whatever we choose to tune our life to, we should always seek harmony with those we find ourselves in concert with.                                       - Tim McKamey

 Return to top of page