Washington DeCoded: The Lost City
I've been generously invited to introduce my new ebook on Ishtar's Gate. It shows what was found when geometrical principles were applied to the city design of Washington, D.C.
Washington DeCoded: The Lost City
C. Hardaker 2011
http://washingtondecoded.net/
http://www.lulu.com/product/ebook/washi ... y/14679809
The book examines a number of geometrical features embedded in the plan for Washington, D.C, first drawn up in 1792 and faithfully laid out exactly the same on the ground. The features resemble Great Seal symbols, such as the Pyramid-Eye of Providence, the Hexagram (Star of David), and an Eagle. I ended up with and odd but inescapable idea: that the design itself may have been envisioned as a huge Seal in its own right, impressed on the landscape as if it was hot wax. With respect to the narrative voice, a previous subtitle was: Or, a funny thing happened on the way to the Inauguration.
Chapter 5 is available at my website and the Lulu website. It is an intro to the methodology and introduces my Freemason informant, Ray. It focuses on the star north of the White House.
So many films have talked about satan worship among the Founders, that they were Illuminati, and that all Freemasons were Illuminati at the start. Invariably, as in Riddles In Stone, the evil spectre of the upside down star pointing to the White House is telegraphed by the eeevil background music that introduces it. Invariably, again, when I look at the websites that are associating satan with the Founders, it is a fundamentalist Christian outfit, or else Illuminati conspiracy buffs who are a few fries short of a happy meal. This theoretical nonsense is tackled in my Chapter 2: Satan City.
George Washington himself called the Illuminati diabolical, well aware they were trying to infiltrate American lodges. The thing is, they had not taken over yet. The symbols of the Seal are anti-Illuminati, anti-royalist, anti-bankster, anti-Church. It is not their fault if the Illuminati appropriated the symbols. Hitler used the swastika and forever pissed off the Buddhists by ruining what had been a nice symbol. So it goes.
In Chapter 5, I dispose of the idea that the star is an upside-down satan star. Instead, it seems to be part of a larger pattern that incorporates a huge star pointing up, along with the actual geometric identity of the star itself. It is not a perfect pentagram. It is associated with the octagon.
I am including a short chapter about where I was coming from when I was assigned Washington, D.C. for my Master's thesis. I had proposed my Anasazi research. My chairman suggested DC.
If the chapter was reduced to a sentence, it would be:
'It's not my fault; the geometry was already there.'
__________________________________________________ _____
from
Washington DeCoded:The Lost City
Chapter 3. Context of Discovery
The discoveries were the result of an archaeological challenge. The non-history of the 1792 Revision compelled me to investigate the plan from a non-historical, geometric point of view. After all, this is what I was doing in the first place. I was experimenting with classical geometry as an archaeological tool, as a methodology to investigate the architecture of the circular kivas built by the prehistoric Anasazi at Chaco Canyon, N.M. I found fairly good evidence that they knew how to square a circle. My chairman says no dice, 'too fringy.'He suggests, "Why don't you look at the Baroque, it's historically strong."Trying to quell the sudden explosion of tears on the other side of his desk, he blurted out, "What about Washington, DC?" That was December 1988.
I had never seen a map of Washington DC, nor had it occurred to me to do so. I did not know what a Freemason was, but knew it had something to do with funny hats and riding tricycles in parades. I wanted a higher degree in Anthropology. My research was Prehistoric American, but my new bumper sticker was: The Baroque or Bust. So, this is just to affirm that:
a) There was no preconceived agenda; and
b) It's not my fault; the geometry was already in the city.
Any personal foreknowledge of the symbols of the Great Seal came from the PBS project, The Power Of Myth, with Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers. It included a discussion on the mythology of the Great Seal and Reason. It remains the best overall summary of the Great Seal I have seen because it was grounded in the concept, reason.
CAMPBELL: No, no, you have to distinguish between reason and thinking.
MOYERS: Distinguish between reason and thinking? If I think, am I not reasoning things out?
CAMPBELL: Yes, your reason is one kind of thinking. But thinking things out isn't necessarily reason in this sense. Figuring out how you can break through a wall is not reason. The mouse who figures out, after it bumps its nose here, that perhaps he can get around there, is figuring something out the way we figure things out. But that's not reason. Reason has to do with finding the ground of being and the fundamental structuring of order of the universe.
MOYERS: So when these men talked about the eye of God being reason, they were saying that the ground of our being as a society, as a culture, as a people, derives from the fundamental character of the universe?
CAMPBELL: That's what this first pyramid says. This is the pyramid of the world, and this is the pyramid of our society, and they are of the same order. This is God's creation, and this is our society. (Campbell 1988:29-31)
Campbell talks of different types of mythologies. The myths we often think of pertain to the exploits of gods, angels, demons, all with personalities and stories to tell. There is another kind of myth that he refers to as the mythology of being, of self-realization, spiritual enlightenment, satori. Every religion accommodates this experience, usually catalogued under mysticism. It has nothing to do with the gods, but everything to do with clarity, and wider and deeper levels of awareness regarding the human condition. Images of Buddha epitomize self realization.
As a student of comparative religion, my attraction was Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and other oriental philosophies. I liked simple. Western philosophies always seemed long-winded “ never say in a sentence what you can say in a paragraph. Zen seemed to make points in a short breath. The 10 Oxherding Pictures are an elegant illustration. And this is what pulled me into the geometry, its simplicity, and how it played out seamlessly, flawlessly, perfectly, naturally, forever and a day.
Western mystical traditions where geometry plays a role were always too difficult, too complex. The systems that combine geometry with magic, astrology, geomancy, psychic powers and ectoplasmic entities were, and remain, complex and very confusing; and much of it is still celebrated in secret. This world is insightfully and spookily portrayed in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, a novel you could use as a text for Modern Western Mysticism 101.
It is a much different culture than my own pseudoquasi Zen worldview, which in Western culture would be close to the Deism camp. Beyond my attraction to the geometry as an archaeological tool, I was attracted to its being, the idea that it exists at all, not its secrets. For example, from the Tao Te Ching, #42: 'Tao gives birth to one. One gives birth to two. Two gives birth to three. Three gives birth to the 10,000 things'.
Or the commentary from the I Ching's Hexagram 2: Earth (Wilhelm/Baynes translation), where heaven is the circle and earth is the square.
Straight, square, great.
Without purpose,
Yet nothing remains unfurthered.
[Commentary:] The symbol of heaven is the circle, and that of earth is the square. Thus squareness is a primary quality of the earth. On the other hand, movement in a straight line, as well as magnitude, is a primary quality of the Creative. But all square things have their origin in a straight line and in turn form solid bodies. In mathematics, when we discriminate between lines, planes and solids, we find that rectangular planes result from straight lines, and cubic magnitudes from rectangular planes. The Receptive accommodates itself to the qualities of the Creative and makes them its own. Thus a square develops out of a straight line and a cube out of a square. This is compliance with the laws of the Creative; nothing is taken away, nothing added. Therefore the Receptive has no need of a special purpose of its own, nor of any effort, yet everything turns out as it should.
My take on the Pyramid and the Eye accommodates that worldview. I believe, for the Founders, it was about self-realization, the celebration of the individual, the mind set free “ and the formation of a government that accommodates that kind of personal anarchy. Thomas Jefferson's notion of a national church was a university. The Pyramid provides a sound foundation, but it is not finished. The work will be guided by the Eye of God, the Eye of Reason, the 3rd Eye, the Eye of the God of Geometry, the Creator. Or rather, the symbols could be about that. They can also be about Big Brother/Big Sister. They can also be about whatever the Pharaohs said they meant. For some extremists, the Founders who were Masons were pagans, therefore satanists. It is a free country and they can think and say what they want. The Founders made it so.
The Great Seal has a deep history, the result of a complex of intertwining histories of architecture, symbols, philosophies, worldviews. It reveals the history of a turning point, a qualitative step to a higher realm of social order, more egalitarian, one ruled by Law and governed by elected officials. America is an ideal, a culture, a place. It was a government closer to God, to Reason, to both. Of your choosing. Nobody could force you away from your belief. That was the idea. It was a leap, a punctuated equilibrium event for Homo sapiens, the cultural evolution of a governing philosophy let loose upon the world, a new spirit and letter of the law. The American way was an entirely new way of acting out nationhood and self-governance without royalty or the Church. It was a dream come true, and due largely to President Washington, the first advocate for term limits. He could have been a king, but after two terms as president he refused a third.
The discoveries in this book are not historic and they are without precedent. While some of the geometric features have been singled out before, none have been catalogued according to their geometric source. To know what to look for, it is important to grasp what the language is all about. Classical Geometry is a language of shapes and space, and comes with its own syntax. This spatial language saturates most religious and national iconographies around the world. Advertisers took it and ran with it for corporate logos.
Geometry is one of the fundamental structures of the universe. That is why it was regarded as sacred, like the sun, in so many early cultures and civilizations. Buckminster Fuller referred to it as design science -- celebrated every year at the Bridges Conference.
The symbols chosen by the Founders turn up in the initial geometric construction: the vesica pisces.
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