RandomMonkeyWorks Interactive

It has been a while since I last posted—much longer than I thought it would be! But that hasn’t been due to laziness; instead, just the opposite has been the case.

Over the past two months I’ve been busy finishing my videos, and I’m happy to say that you can finally view them for yourself! In The Magnificent Seven, I illuminate the reasoning behind how the days of our week came into existence, and in The Power of Sixty series, we finally see the astronomy that is responsible for making that number so prominent on our watches and in our angular measurement systems.

If you are one who enjoys reading, this series is available in written format in the links on this page.

Enjoy!

p.s. — The Power of Sixty is a three-part video. There are links at the end of each part to take you the the next installment.

For the past few months I have been incredibly busy with yet more learning, and mastery of other processes. It has kept me away from posting anything to this blog (and many other things!), but I’m back, and should put more up soon. Until then, here is the first of my YouTube videos! Enjoy!

Two weeks ago, while working to get this blog up and running, the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics was on in the background. Like others, I was mesmerized by much of it, particularly the whales on the floor. But the item that struck me the deepest was the failure of the post of the cauldron to rise (starting at approximately 1:22:00 in that video).

From an engineering perspective I wanted to know what the root of the problem was – hydraulics? computers? other? But from a mythical perspective I was grinning from ear-to-ear, as I couldn’t get some associations out of my mind.

In the earliest times the Games were dedicated to the gods in heaven – Zeus, Cronus, Hercules, etc. (These three correspond to the planets Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars, respectively.) There is a very good chance that the original impetus behind the physical events was to commemorate the passing of an ‘age’ of these celestial beings. (The mechanics of ‘ages’ is discussed in The Power of ‘Sixty’, although I recommend reading the two installments before that page first. It should be noted that in the earliest times, an ‘age’ may have been an eight-hundred year period rather than the twenty-one hundred year period I outline – more research is needed on this issue.)

The reasons for believing that the games were originally celestially oriented include Pausanias’s statement in ~160 AD: “Now some say that …[Zeus (Jupiter)] held the games in honor of his victory over Cronus…” [5.7.10]. There is also the fact that Hercules is said to have constructed a ’seven-walled’ enclosure for the initial games – ’seven’ was an important number to many cultures, specifically because there are seven visible wanderers in the sky.

With these heavenly issues in mind, the cauldron failure shook me because it highlights another celestial number that has been forgotten: ‘three.’ The three functional posts reminded me that our ancestors once divided the night sky up into three portions because of the ‘triangular’ nature of Jupiter and Saturn’s conjunctions (see The Power of ‘Sixty’ if you haven’t already done so).

This ‘triplicate’ nature is best seen in the following quotation taken from the Enuma Elish – a Babylonian creation that is probably close to five-thousand years old, if not older:

The only explanation that makes sense of this ‘three’ is that it refers to the three conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn every sixty years, that occur approximately 120° from each other. They come close to forming an equilateral triangle in the sky, making the constellations behind those conjunctions especially significant to our ancestors.

That isn’t to say that the successful operation of the fourth pillar would not have been symbolically powerful to the ancient priests and sky-watchers that were behind the Enuma Elish quotation: remember, they were the ones who first determined how to locate the four cardinal points: North, South, East, and West!

Maybe this will be the year that we start collectively remembering some of the great work of those ancestors, and seeing the deep astronomical roots that they sewed into the innermost seams of our society so long ago as they attempted to understand their universe. That would be a pretty cool result of an Olympic malfunction!