The Royal Road to Harmony, Post 5

His Royal Highness, Charles, Prince of Wales

Charles, Prince of Wales, has written a wonderful book, Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World, about which this continuing series of posts revolves.

The book gives us insight into the 'sacred geometry' which is responsible for the basic order we find in the natural world, as well as for the forms we see in much of our religious art and architecture. For example, as I showed in my last post, the shape formed when two circles overlap such that the perimeter of each touches the center of the other has a height-to-width ratio that governs the floor plan of Chartres cathedral:

The overlapped portion has a shape that is called a vesica or vesica piscis. Vesica piscis means 'the bladder of the fish', i.e., the almond shape of the overlap resembles the shape of a fish and accordingly of the large internal organ that allows the fish to float at any depth.

The early church used a modified vesica as its symbol:

As Pythagoras and other pre-Christian Greek philosophers knew, the symbolism of the vesica and the two circles from which it derives represents the sequence from unity (one circle) to duality (two circles) to harmonia or harmony (overlapping the two circles so that each touches the other's center or 'heart'). The overlapping of the circles in this way produces a 'third number' which Pythagoras called the first 'real number'.

These ideas are important to the budding Catholic environmentalist because, per Prince Charles, 'Pythagoras’s teaching was based upon the essential kinship of all living things'. In the Pythagorean view and that of the early/medieval church, the harmony symbolized by the vesica was all-inclusive.

As the folk song 'A Place in the Choir' puts the same idea:

All God's creatures got a place in the choir
Some sing low, some sing higher,
Some sing out loud on the telephone wire,
And some just clap their hands, or paws, or anything they got now ...

Combining the Circles

When six circles surround the first (symbolizing the 'six days of creation') you get the 'seed of life':

The central part or 'seed' can be 'tiled' to produce the 'flower of life':

With reference to this illustration from the book ...

... Charles writes:

From ‘the flower of life’ comes the pentagon and the five-pointed star, far left. As we shall see, Venus describes these shapes in the skies above us every eight years (or thirteen Venusian years). I wonder how much of a coincidence it is that the self-same five-pointed star and the relationships we will soon discover between Earth’s orbit and size and that of her nearest neighbours are to be found in so many plants and flowers on the ground around us?

I have to admit that I don't quite see how you get a pentagon or five-pointed star from four circles appropriately selected from the flower of life. Nor do I quite see how the resulting pentagon/five-pointed star, when superimposed on the flower in the second image, tells us much, since to my eye the flower has six, not five, groups of petals.

Maybe an image like this one would have been better:

But never mind. The overarching point is that one can derive various basic geometric figures such as the pentagon from a simple master figure such as circles overlapping to produce vesicas, and those figures govern and give order to nature.

In sacred geometry, then, the master figure consists of vesica-generating overlapping circles. That's significant for two reasons:

1. The vesica, as I've tried to show, is a simple symbol that intrinsically represents an all-inclusive natural harmonia or harmony.
2. The fact that nature adheres to a set of basic geometric figures tells us of a hidden governance within the natural order that offers us a powerful lens into the mind of its Creator.