Architecture as Allegory |
|---|
We all know that architecture sometimes depends on simile, because we hear critique like, that building looks like a rocket, or a ship, or a dump truck. Sometimes the goal is metaphorical, like in public buildings and fortresses designed to portray the idea of power, or churches that use the play of light and darkness. But very few know that buildings have been used for centuries to depict full blown allegories, parables if you will. And I don't mean a series of stained glass windows either.
 The first among architectural parables is the one about Enoch, being forwarned of the Flood, building a pair of pillars or columns, one of brick and one of stone (ie masonry), on which he inscribes the sum totality of human knowledge. The broad idea being expressed here is that people use architecture to produce monuments that encode their local Canon, like the pyramids in Egypt, and the cathedrals in Europe. And we can presume that this was once "the way that it was done". Temples were encyclopedic, an archive of symbol sets. Enoch stories are about the transmission and preservation of knowledge. A study of comparative architecture shows us that the same geometric design principles were used universally, and that parables often centered around geometric designs which were used to illustrate stories. The cross for instance, or a cross and a circle, or a square and a circle. Masonry is at the juncture of architecture, geometry and philosophy, and uses allegories based on geometric figures, building tools, and building dimensions and descriptions. Words names and number were all important. Masonic figures are not historical characters but symbolic actors. Enoch's connection to the sun is indicated by the "fact" that le "lived 365 years". Also the structures described are not seens as buildings but as models of ratios. The interior of the Temple was the same height, and width, but twice as long, 10 cubits, by 10 cubits, by 20 cubits, you know, 1:1:2. It's just like 3:4:5, which produces a right triangle using whole numbers. It could be 6, 8 , 10 too; it doesn't matter, as long as the ratio is the same. That is, that it produces the same lines and angles. The Holy of Holies as well as the New Jerusalem in Revelations were both equal in width, heigth, and breadth, that is, they were cubes, symbol of the 1:1 ratio. It is generally accepted by scholars that much of what is in the Bible is allegorical, and related to astronomy and other sciences. The four cratures in Ezekiel, Daniel and the Revelation are the bull, lion, eagle and man, the symbols for the four fixed zodiac signs, Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius. The description of the encampment in the desert of the tribes is seens at the 12 signs, like Jesus and 12 disciples. The ark is understood as the same solar boat that the Egyptians new, and Noah and the six others figure the sun and the six planets, just like the candlestands in Revalations. These people apparently knew their astronomy pretty well, and they encoded their knowledge of that too. To do so they used monuments and myths that were centered around some geometric or architectual structure, which could be reduce to simple geometric images- some more complex and harder to grasp than others, but all grounded in a Unity that makes them understandable by any one.
Lately it is fashionable for people writing about architectural design to bemoan the loss of what Jonathan Hale calls "The Old Way of Seeing Things". Others too talk about the lost art and terms like that. My purpose here is to suggest that the old way is alive and well in Washington DC, and that the whole monumental core of downtown DC is geometrically analogous to the figures in the plan of the Milan Cathedral. By extension, I suggest that the Cathedral and Capitol City are based on the same allegorical system, the Cabala, which utilizes the figures of the Tree of Life (of 10 spheres)and Metatron's Cube (13 spheres) as contemplative objects.
 I base my assertions on the visual evidence of the triangle, rectangle, hexagon and pentagon in the Tree of Life, the cathedral plan and the DC map. The same figures can be found in the figure below known as Metatron's Cube, which is in fact a "polygonal projection" of the hexagon in a circle, a fractal if you will.
 These relationships keep repeating themselves over and over at different levels. The tesseract or nested cube is the perfect symbol of this layeredness.
 People who claim that the Gothic Cathedral was based on the Vesica Piscis, only got about 10 percent of it, since the Rhombus, made from the vesica, is merely one third of the star of david, which is itself nested in the tree of life, within metatron's cube. We might just as well say that it was based on the star of david or metatron's cube or the tree of life.
OK, the long and short of it is that these people are freaks for science and geometry, and the game they play is designing things (buildings, books, stories, and even cities) that reflect their level of understanding of the natural laws and rythms. (Moving quickly here). It has been suggested that there were three favorite ratios among temple builders, one based on a triangle and a circle, one on a square, and one on the pentagon and circle. Note that this is the 3,4 5 triumvirate mentioned above. I suggest that the three were different elements in the same system. Geometry means earth measure, and is associated with the "flat" surface of the earth, which is usually figured as a square, or x-y coordinate grid. The square is appropriate, therefore, for the floor. The 2D square is the base matter of the Alchemists, the element of earth, while the cube represented developed materiality, and 3D space, the field of time-space. Note that the cube is figured by a hexagon upon adding the pythagorean Y.
 Note how the cube is composed of rhombus, just like the star of david. The rhombus derives from an equilateral triangle and hexagon, appropriate symbols for elevation plans.
The pentagon supplies the golden ratio, know as phi, and the fibonacci series, etc;
 as well as the dodecahedron composed of 12, 5 sided figures.
 Take a look at how the cube and dodecahedron relate, like the rough and finished ashlars; and recall what Plato said about god embroidering figures on the dodecahedron.
 Look at this stellated dodecahedron and notice the overlapping 5 and six sided figures, and the cube; the same elements we see in the tree and metaton's cube.
 Note how the tree of life maps to the dodecahedron. We see the triangle on top, one fifth of the pentagon there, then a pentagon, then two half pentagons, and another triangle at the bottom. Five trees cover the dodecahedron.
 Note how the three pentagons corner. Now look again at the triangle in Metatron's Cube and the three penatgons contained with in that., and compare the lines in the map to the dodecahedron.
 Looking at the relationship between Metatron's Cube, the Tree, the map and the dodecahedron shows us that metatron's cube maps to the dodecahedron. The dodecahedron is the cube's macrocosm.
Hale suggests that, "There is a demanrcation line, a time when the old way of seeing began to be lost and the turning point for architecture was the decade of 1820's. Before 1830 pattern dominated design". Remember that different patterns carried different symbolic meanings, so what he is saying is that symbolic pattern design was dying out. But he is speaking specifically of design elements in a single structure, and not urban design. The planning elements that I examine in the DC map were not even built until well into the 20th century, so clearly I am contending that it didn't die out there. The fact of the matter is, that if the system that I present is truthful, and DC is built around a Cabalistic design, then we have to look for Cabalists, and that would be the Scottish Rites Masons. The Cabala is centered around the number ten and the Tree of Life figure, with 11 points or spheres on it. In the map, I locate 11 locations that correspond to those points. The first is the House of the Temple located north of the White House, which faces west onto 16th street, and is topped by a 13 step truncated pyramid. This building is the home of the Southern Jourisdiction of the Scottish Rites Masons (SJSR), and was designed by John Russel Pope, who also designed the Jeferson Memorial and the Natioonal Archives Building, two of the other 10 points in the map.
 The Cabala deals with the whole integers from 1 to 10, so the conceptual ratio is 1:10. Remember how mandalas are intended to spiritualized the earth by the conjunction of the circle and the square (compass and square), as heaven and earth (male and female); and how Romulus founded Rome by plowing a circle and adding cross avenues, producing the cross in the circle. Rome was called "urbs quadrata", the square city, and while some have suggested that the meaning was that it was square to the meridian, or that the streets were square to one another, other have interpreted it as meaning a square in a circle, like this.
 The District of Columbia is a 10 x 10 mile square, and the Washington Monument, explicitly Masonic, is 550 feet high and 55 feet wide, a ratio of 1 to 10.
A book entitled The Canon (available on line, pages) published in 1897, promises to give us a clue about the method practiced by the old architects in building the temples and cathedrals, an established canonical law underlying the practice of building, and the other arts, as well as the principles which were the common groundwork of all the arts and sciences. Principles = theory, and method = praxis, technique. The book aims to show us a method of construction, actually a design technique called consrtuction geometry, and then the philosophical notions that underlie that.
Geometric design, depends on what are called "regulating lines" to aid in the placement of features in a designed work. The regulating lines are usually derived from digonals of squares and rectangles, the favorite ratios being 1:1 and 1:2. The 1 ratio is circles and square and 45 degree triangles that are half a square, which symbolize equality. The 1:2 is produce by two different triangles. Using an example of a window, we can say that the 30 degree angle diagonal makes the width half the diagonal, while a 26+ degree angle produces a window whose width is half it's height. All three of these depend on easy to remember and use geometric figures that produces whole number ratios. Beware of people pushing the square root of three, you can't find that on a measuring tape, and multiplying by it is a nightmare. The method itself was simple enough that even the Apprentice could pick it up. What was kept secret was the mystical meanings behind the use of the different ratios.
Vitruvius 1st c BC suggests that beauty in design depends on factors like symmetry, proportion and eurythmy, the latter being defined as harmonious realtionships of the parts to one another, and of the parts to the whole. This progression from part to part, to parts to whole immediatley reminds us of fractals and the Golden Ratio. Fractals are a result of what is called "polygonal propogation", like where the triangle becomes the star of david and eventually the snowflake image. So, the same ratio is used throughout the entire design, guaranteeing harmony among the parts as well as the whole. The Golden Ratio is defined as a line segment that is cut so that the short piece to the long piece is equal to the ratio of the long to the whole. Numbers work here too, and they are .618, 1 and 1.618. This is the number that the Fibonacci Series approaches as a limit. Remember phi is not a number per se, but a ratio, a mixing of two elements. The fibonacci series is 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21, etc where you add the last two numbers to get the next one. This means that a carpenter could use 5 to 8 as a good approximation of this; 8 to 13 would be better. The fibonacci series depicted geometrically proves to mirror structure and growth patterns in nature. The pentagram is cut at phi ratio.
 The fascination with the vesica piscis, formed by two equal circles overlapping so that the center of each is on the circumfernnece of the other, lies in the fact that it produces a figure composed of twin equilateral triangles, both composed of twin 1:2 (30-30) right triangles, judged to be the most beautiful truangle by Plato. This is the figure that supposed led the design of the cathedrals. But when you look, you see that it is nested in the star of david and the tree of life. The tree is about god revealed in the creation, and tells a parable about the fall of the divine spark (souls) from heaven to earth, and of their eventual return, through the planetary spheres.
 The Tree of Life is a graphic depiction of the old tale about the soul's journey to earth (materiality, incarnation) via the planets. The order is always the same, 1 is the throne of God, 2 is the zodiac (nuit = space), 3 is Saturn (Chronos = time), 4 is Jupiter, 6 is the sun, 7 is Venus, 8 is Mercury, 9 is the Moon and 10 the Earth. The points on the DC map and cathedral plan correlate with the 10 spheres on the tree. The lion has always been a sign for the sun, and if you look on the edges of the front door of the Milan cathedral you can see the lion's heads which mark the sun center on the building. The White House marks that spot in the DC map.
As I said, the Pyramid is perhaps the best known monument designed to preserve or display knowledge; and one would think that the best form to display the relationship of triangles to squares would be a monument with a square base and four equilateral triangular faces, but the builders took another route. While the square base represents the 4, and the triangular sides the 3, they made the faces of those sides 58 degrees and 18 minutes, the tangent of which is 1.618, or phi, or the 5 ratio. 3, 4 and 5 again.
 This produces a cross-sectional base angle of 51'51", which makes the perimeter equal to 2 pi times the height, analogous to the sphere whose circumference is 2 pi times it's radius.
 At any rate, when you look at the geometric figures in the DC map, you see that they are short and wide. The reason for this is that the builders reduced the ratio of the map, in order to produce a 52 degree triangle from the 60 degree equilateral. Note that this distorts, rectangles, hexagons and circles too.
 See the ellipse below the white house and at scott circle.
 The Circle is a heaxagon around a point in a circle, that has been shortened and pinched. 
You may have noticed that the star of david produces almost the same regulating points on a circle as the pole and tropics do. Remember that two of Plato's favorite triangles were the 45 degree right triangle, which was half a square, and the other was the 30-60 triangle where the short leg was half the hypotenuse, which is half the equilateral triangle; both of which symbolize duality and unity. The three masonic degrees deal with the sun at the tropics, symbolized by the 1:2 triangle and at the equinoxes by the 1:1 triangle. On the globe these translate to 45 and 30 degrees of latitude, just where the star crosses the circle, and just where we find the great pyramid. But the tropics are not at 30 degrees, and the pyramid was not built 45 or 60 degrees.
 The DC map offers a curious solution to this dilema. If we take the equilateral star, and shorten it until the tropics are at 23.5 degrees, the triangle is 52 degrees. So instead of being literal sighting lines like at Stonehenge, at DC the numbers are symbolic, that is generic.
 BTW, we see the same 47 degree rectangle depicted by the station stones at the stonehenge.
 And if that were not enough, the planners also incorporated a cross-section of the pyramid in the DC map.
|