The Royal Road to Harmony, Post 6

Prince Charles

Charles, Prince of Wales and heir to the Crown of the United Kingdom, is an environmental sage and prophet. He has written Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World as a way of disseminating his wisdom.

As I have reported in the earlier posts in this ongoing series about his book, some of the wisdom gets pretty arcane. He writes of a 'sacred geometry' that was known in ages past, at least from the time of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras (c. 570–c. 495 BC). You can start with a single circle, then replicate it, and then overlap the two circles such that the perimeter of each touches the center of the other. Then the overlapping portion forms a vesica:

This shape is seen everywhere in medieval religious art and architecture, since it symbolizes a sacred harmony which the Greeks called harmonia.

The first circle symbolizes the original unity, which we Christians may think of as God. Then the second circle, symbolic of duality, stands for the multiplicity of beings God creates. Until there is overlap of the circles so they touch at their respective 'heart points', i.e., their geometric centers, there is symbolically no harmony between God and His Creation. That's why the vesica piscis, as it is formally known — form the Latin for the 'air bladder of the fish', owing to the almond-shaped resemblance to a fish — is huge in Christian art.

Carry the geometric derivation of the vesica further, and you get:

The 'Seed of Life'

The 'Flower of Life'

These figures are so named because yet further geometric manipulations of them produces (two-dimensional representations of) each of the so-called 'Platonic solids'. The Platonic solids, says Charles, are ...

... the five essential geometric shapes – the cube, the pyramid (or tetrahedron) through to the twenty-sided icosahedron. These are the foundation shapes of all matter.

There are five Platonic solids:

Tetrahedron or Pyramid
(4 Faces)

Hexahedron or Cube
(6 Faces)

Octahedron
(8 Faces)

Dodecahedron
(12 Faces)

Icosahedron
(20 Faces)

These are the only 'perfect' solids — perfect in that all faces are identical 'regular' polygons, and all sides where faces come together have the same length.

This web page shows how the Platonic solids can be derived from the Flower of Life. First, select 13 non-overlapping circles from the Flower of Life to form the 'Fruit of Life':

Then, draw lines between the centers of every pair of the circles to form 'Metatron's Cube':

Metatron's Cube

(This one should be thought of as three-dimensional.) Now, pick out just the lines/sides/faces that pertain to each Platonic solid in turn:

Notice that the tetrahedron has been doubled to form two interpenetrating tetrahedrons, called a 'star tetrahedron'. It is the three-dimensional equivalent of the Star of David.

Notice also that only a very few of the vertices and lines of the dodecahedron correspond to vertices and lines of Metatron's cube.

That admittedly seems a weakness in the system. However, the point of the Platonic system as understood by Prince Charles is that nature often conforms in surprising ways to the various Platonic solids, however derived on paper. Mother Nature herself holds a mirror up to these forms.

Matter in general, Charles shows, favors the Platonic solids. He illustrates with a photo and caption:

A drop of mercury subjected to a stable soundwave. It is forced to form one of the basic geometric shapes known as the Platonic solids. [Here, the shape is a 6-faced hexahedron or cube, seen from above one of its vertices, with one vertex hidden.] If a different modulation [i.e., a different frequency of the soundwave] is used, so the drop changes its shape but it always conforms to the same grammar of harmony.

Geometry, then, is powerful. Certain of its forms infuse nature in a fundamental way. Traditionally, at the same time, these same geometric forms have been said to possess great symbolic and spiritual significance.