Return of the Storm God - Appendix X: The Geometry of Eternity
How eternity is woven into our archetypal psychology in the number 8
Part 1
Why the Ancients Saw the Universe as a Woven Loop
Eternity was not an abstraction for ancient peoples but an observable truth. The sun returned each dawn, the river flooded and receded, the seasons repeated, the seed sprouted, died, and was reborn. From this continual return arose a certainty: existence itself was cyclical. What we call religion or myth began as an attempt to describe this pattern of recurrence. Across civilisations, the most enduring image of that law is the woven loop - the figure-8, the knot, the bow, the serpent eating its tail - a geometry that holds duality in unity.
1. The Certainty of Eternity
To early cultures, time was not a straight line but a circle or spiral. Observation showed that every process in nature passed through phases yet returned to origin. The stars revolved; the flood came again; the body of Osiris rose with the grain. The certainty of eternity was the foundation of order itself. The Egyptian concept of Ma’at, the Mesopotamian Me, the Vedic Rta, the Chinese Dao - each describes the same reality: equilibrium through recurrence. The continuity of the cosmos was not a matter of faith but of experience.
2. The Egyptian Foundation – Twisted Flax and the Flame
In Egyptian thought the image of eternity found one of its most elegant forms in the ḥ-glyph, the twisted flax. Archaeology confirms that flax was cultivated in the Nile valley from the fifth millennium BCE and woven into linen for clothing, sails, and ritual wrappings. Its fibres also formed the wick for the oil lamp that burned perpetually in the temple. Dry fibre symbolised the inert body; oil, the anointing essence; flame, the living spirit. The same plant therefore embodied body, soul, and light - the process of rebirth itself.
The twisted-flax sign expresses this visually. Two strands wind about one another, crossing at the centre and re-joining above and below - a lemniscate (∞) in miniature. It is not provably the chronological prototype of later infinity signs, but it performs the same function: a single figure expressing duality held in balance. The glyph condenses in one shape the essential logic of eternity - opposites joined through a central equilibrium. The figure we are more commonly familiar with as the figure 8 - the number 8 itself.
3. Orion and the Geometry of the Sky
The Egyptian understanding of eternity extended to the stars. Orion (Sah), identified with Osiris, displays a geometry of four outer stars surrounding the three of the belt. When lines are drawn between the outer four, they intersect at the belt’s midpoint, creating a natural figure-8 - the bow of heaven. Osiris disappears each year, descending into the Duat, and rises again with the inundation of the Nile; as Horus he returns each dawn as the sun. Annual and daily cycles mirror one another: life and light renewed.
Egyptian figures are repeatedly painted or made as statues to conform to the shape of Orion with a triangular torso to a narrowed waist, flaring out again to a triangular skirt. Often, the triangle will be extended to another unnatural flare of the skirt, which indicates the importance of triangular geometry in Egyptian; moreover, that it relates to the inherent geometry of Orion.
The same geometry is reproduced on earth at Giza, where the three great pyramids echo the belt stars and the plateau defines the wider four. Earth and sky are joined in a single field of recurrence. The king, buried within, participates in that cosmic rhythm, becoming the light reborn.
Linen, flax and fibre were inherently part of the ritual, whether as skirts, mummified wrappings or wicks.
4. Mesopotamian and Indo-European Parallels
Across the Fertile Crescent the same triad of fibre, oil, and flame appeared. In Sumerian ritual, flax and oil were temple offerings; the goddess Nisaba presided over both fibre and writing, threads and lines as one act of creation. The Warka Vase (Uruk, c.3300 BCE) depicts triform plants rising from wavelike water - a vertical version of the same eternal pattern. The image reappears on seals from Susa and in Aegean glyptic art, later mirrored in the flaming trident of India. In the Vedas, Agni, the living fire, is called eternal; Rta, the order of the world, maintains its rhythm. In each culture the perpetual flame is not merely decorative but a pledge that order endures.
The wick that burns with the eternal flame is an enduring motif from ancient Egypt to modern churches. Light and eternity as a union of entwined duality of god and goddess persisted throughout the Drift Culture, but became obscured in the religious form of Christian ritual and ceremony.
5. Greek, Hebrew, and Christian Continuities
Greek philosophy translated recurrence into mathematics. The Pythagoreans called the octave “eight,” a return to the same tone on a higher level. Their Tetractys (1–2–3–4 = 10) mapped manifestation and return, and its reflection forms the double pyramid or figure 8. The ouroboros and the lemniscate curve in later geometry express the same principle of continuity through self-crossing.
In the Hebrew world the eternal flame (ner tamid) burned before the Ark, echoing Egypt’s sanctuary lamps. Some linguistic evidence suggests that words for breath and spirit (Hu, Heh, Ihuh) share the same ancient root of continuity. Christianity preserved the flax-linen continuum: the infant in swaddling cloth, the crucified body in shroud, and the perpetual altar light. The folded cloth motif in early art, the twisted flax glyph, and the typology of the vine as lineage all repeat this surface turning through itself to signify resurrection.
The Heh as value eight emerged in the Greek system through isopsephy in the Eta (Η, η). In Hebrew the parallel Cheth/Heth/Chet/Het (ח) has the gematric value eight and denotes life and the double gate. The Egyptian god Heh already embodied the concept of eternity: his hieroglyph signifies one million, a number high enough to represent the uncountable multitude, or the eternal, much as the Daoist phrase “ten thousand things” denotes the infinite.
It should be noted that we are not implying that the original twisted flax sign, which carries the same phonetic value in ancient Egypt, was conceived as an occult cipher. Its geometry simply implies an eternal loop derived from a duality. The later initiatic cults and secret orders that used that same geometry to encode the concept of eternity into glyphs valued at eight appeared long afterwards. That the same numerical symbolism emerges in Biblical isopsephy and gematria is an important continuity for our study. It is yet more evidence for the Egyptian foundation of the Bible, and the Hebraic system as derived from Egypt.
The hieroglyph for Heh itself confirms the continuity of meaning. In the Egyptian numerical system the god was not only a deity of time but the written sign for the largest countable number, one million. Heh or Huh/IHUH is originally an aspect of Atum, a form of Ptah - which became transformed from IHUH into YHWH in the Biblical texts - signifying the eternal I AM as the self-created formless void, without beginning and end, is identical to the function of Ptah (despite Ptah becoming Pater, it is originally a state of formless mother and father potential - made entirely masculine in the Hebrew version). As the text notes:
“The largest of the Egyptian number symbols, representing 1,000,000, is the seated god Heh. Heh was one of the eight primeval gods, supposed to carry the heaven under the earth. His depiction is often found on temple walls, vases, and jewelry, where he was supposed to grant millions of years of life. Reineke suggests a connection between the usage of Heh for one million and the ‘infinite sky’ linked to this god.”
(Mathematics in Ancient Egypt - A Contextual History, by Annette Imhausen p. 33)
The glyphic form of Heh portrays a seated god with arms raised.
Pictorially he is usually shown holding knotted palm branches. The duality of Atum as IHUH is inherent in his Egyptian imagery. The eternal one in duality.
Note: the imagery includes the Cobras which contain the eternal ratio of Phi as a glyph in the chest. The cobras entwine with the other eternity symbol - the Shen ring - here depicted as the loop of the ankh, but in other depictions the same image has the cobras encircled by the circular shen ring.
That IHUH represents eternity is not in doubt. This is a pectoral image that is described in Exodus 28 as a breastpiece. which is worn by the Kohen along with the ephod. This breastpiece is called a Hoshen - clearly derived from Hu and Shen, the typology and etymology is exact. That YHWH is entirely derived from Ptah/Atum is confirmed in the etymology and typology. That the Bible and Hebraic culture, including the Hebrew language was seeded in Egypt is undeniable.
Heh/IHUH’s name is essentially two twisted flax glyphs HH. The same sign that writes ḥu (utterance) and appears in the glyph for ḥḥt or Hauhet, his feminine counterpart in the Ogdoad. The twin loops are the visual embodiment of eternity: two cords of flax wound into the lemniscate shape and lifted between the falcon and the throne. In this imagery the flax, the falcon, and the throne form one equation - continuity, life, and stability - the eternal balance of Ma’at made visible.
Hauhet, whose name carries the feminine –t ending of ḥḥ, mirrors him exactly. She too holds the paired loops and supports the solar falcon rising from the horizon. Together the divine pair sustain the heavens between them, an image of the double current that flows through all existence. Their union shows that the Egyptian idea of infinity was never abstract arithmetic but living geometry: a dual spiral of being and becoming, endlessly self-renewing.
To the initiate, two H twisted flax signs would symbolise a significant number, as 2X8 which is 16, that reduces to 7, the number associated with Atum as the netjeru or 7 spirit/elementals of Nature - the Ali, which became the name Elohim in Egyptian. The 7 in 1 becomes the 8 - or Ogdoad.
Thus, 16-17, is, in code, the transition from the 7-8. (And we shall see in the Mort D’Arthur that this formula is enacted exactly as Book 16 opens up to Galahad’s tale in book 17.)
6. The Global Typological Constant
Far beyond the Mediterranean, the woven form recurs. Celtic interlace, the Buddhist Endless Knot, Chinese shen rings, Japanese temple flames, and Mesoamerican double serpents all present two currents bound through a single path. Each depicts balance rather than stasis: continuity through crossing. The reason is anthropological as much as historical. Human beings everywhere experience life as oscillation - inhale and exhale, day and night, flood and drought, life and death. The same form arises naturally from observing those reciprocal cycles.
7. The Number Eight and the Law of Balance
Mathematically, eight became the number of eternity. Four defines the stable world - the four corners, elements, and seasons. Doubling it to eight gives order in both worlds, visible and invisible. The number closes upon itself in every cube and every octave; in sacred architecture it marks transition and renewal. Egyptian theology recognised an Ogdoad of primordial powers; Christianity built eight-sided baptisteries for new birth. In geometry the sideways 8, or lemniscate, shows the same principle: two fours joined at a centre - structure mirrored and made eternal.
8. IXOS and the Physics of Eternity
The IXOS model clarifies why the ancients’ symbol is exact. The bow-torus describes a field with two counter-rotating flows joined through a four-dimensional gate. Our 3-D world perceives only one half of the rotation, which appears as the half-spin of electrons. The unseen half returns through the 4-D complement. Phi (ϕ) defines the ratio that allows the torus to recurse indefinitely without destructive interference; Euler’s e describes the continuous curve of that recursion. Eternity, in physical terms, is this self-sustaining exchange across the zero node - a living equilibrium. The same geometry that makes a torch burn evenly, a heart beat rhythmically, or a galaxy maintain shape is encoded in the ancient lemniscate.
9. Eternity as Ma’at – The Woven Universe
Ma’at is the principle that holds the loops together - the still point at the crossing where opposing currents find balance. To act in Ma’at was to live in tune with that universal order; to neglect it was to fall into chaos. Egyptian ethics, ritual, and architecture all expressed this geometry: right weight, true measure, square alignment, pure flame. The same balance became Rta in India, Dao in China, and Dharma in later philosophy. Eternity is therefore not endless time but proportion perfectly maintained.
Conclusion
Across five millennia of evidence - from the twisted flax of Egypt to the endless knots of Asia and the lemniscates of mathematics - a single pattern endures. Every culture that observed nature closely discovered that life sustains itself through rhythmic return. The simplest way to picture that law is the crossing loop: two flows meeting, diverging, and reuniting. Whether carved in stone, traced in myth, sung in octave, or defined through field geometry, the image expresses the same truth. The universe is woven; eternity is its weave. The figure-8 endures because it is not a human invention but a description of the way reality itself holds together.
The Nested Order – From Factorials to Harmonics
Each level of the Tetractys is not isolated but nested within the next, forming a continuous ascent of proportional growth. This nesting is visible in modern mathematics through factorials - 1!, 2!, 3!, 4! - where each term contains the total of all that precedes it. The sequence 1, 2, 6, 24 expresses precisely the same generative law: each stage builds upon, and enfolds, the previous. In exponential form, Euler’s constant e captures this behaviour as a limit of continuous self-multiplication. What the ancients intuited symbolically, modern mathematics renders analytically - a universal constant of growth arising from recursive accumulation.
In geometric and musical form this law appears as harmonic progression. The ratios 1:2, 2:3, and 3:4 produce the fundamental consonances of the octave, fifth, and fourth. Add them together and the sequence 1-2-3-4 yields the octave’s completion - the return to unity at a higher vibration, the natural 8 that mirrors the infinite loop. The ancients heard in harmony what they saw in geometry: the world unfolding by ratio and returning through resonance. Each tone or form is a momentary expression of an unbroken field of relationships.
Thus the Tetractys expands naturally into an eight-fold form, a kind of Pythagorean ennead of cycles: 1 becoming 2, 3, and 4, then doubling across the centre into 8, the eternal figure. In IXOS terms this corresponds to the full bow-torus - the line (1) crossing to become plane (2), surface (3), volume (4), and then returning through its mirror sequence (5–8) as the completed loop of manifestation. Each phase is contained in all the others, like factorials within factorials, a single process expressed through different scales.
The ancients did not need algebra to grasp this. By observing nature - spiral shells, seed heads, waves, and musical strings - they recognised that growth proceeds by proportion, not addition. Everything that lives or moves does so by doubling, folding, or oscillating upon itself. The figure-8, the octave, and the Tetractys are therefore three ways of writing the same truth: existence is woven through self-recursion. It is eternal because it is proportionate.
The Memphite Theology – Ptah, Atum, and the Dual Creation
At Memphis the Egyptians articulated one of the earliest complete cosmologies, known later as the Memphite Theology. It begins not with light or form but with Ptah, the potential itself - the stillness before motion, the void containing all possibility. Ptah is described in both masculine and feminine terms: a self-existent totality, mother-father of the gods, the latent field of becoming. In IXOS language, this corresponds to the unfolded zero-state, the toroidal field before its first differentiation.
From Ptah emerges Atum, the self-manifested being - the first act of polarity. Atum divides into Iusa and Iusaas, two aspects of one consciousness. This pair, the divine son and his feminine complement, already form a bow-torus: a dual loop whose unity is maintained through reciprocal motion. In mythic language they are breath and body, spirit and vessel, the radiant and the receptive. In field language they are the first oscillation of energy across the zero axis - the birth of duality from equilibrium.
Creation unfolds from this dual state. Through Iusa and Iusaas come the gods of substance and ratio, form and life-essence. In every Egyptian cosmogony the same pattern appears: existence becomes living only when form is infused with its complementary principle - breath, moisture, or spirit. The fluidic, often described as the feminine aspect, is not a gender but a state of coherence: the flowing quality that animates the static pattern. Form alone is dry and lifeless; when the current enters, it becomes luminous and self-sustaining.
Khnum, the potter-god, completes this sequence. He shapes the body from clay on the wheel - matter given form - but life begins only when the divine fluid, the breath or moisture, enters it. The spinning of the wheel represents the same motion as the torus: rotation generating structure through flow. The moistening of the clay mirrors the anointing of flax - a lifeless fibre or form brought to animation through infusion. Creation, in Egyptian understanding, is not a single event but a perpetual process of re-wetting - the eternal re-entry of essence into form.
The Memphite theology therefore prefigures the entire cosmological logic of the later world: potential becoming duality, duality generating creation, creation sustained by the continuous exchange between dry form and living fluid. It is the mythic origin of the same structure the Tetractys and the bow-torus describe mathematically - the self-balancing duality through which the universe renews itself.
Ptah and Atum – From Eternal Potential to Manifest Form
In the Memphite scheme, Ptah is not a personified craftsman in the later sense but the state of eternal potential itself - the unmanifest totality from which all possibilities arise. The linguistic root is exact and enduring: the pt of Ptah survives in the modern word pot-ential. What physics calls a field of probability is conceptually identical to Ptah’s primordial condition - a state in which all forms exist implicitly before expression. The Egyptians perceived this not as abstraction but as the real background of being: the silent reservoir of Ma’at awaiting articulation.
From Ptah proceeds Atum, the act of manifestation - potential becoming form. The name itself encodes duality: Atum derives from tem, meaning ‘to complete’ or ‘to be whole,’ and the duplication of the consonant expresses self-reflection. Atum is therefore the dual Tum, a unity containing two aspects within one being. In modern analogy, it is the oscillation by which the potential field collapses into manifestation. Atum is Ptah made visible - energy taking coherent form within the same continuum.
This relationship recurs at every scale. The atom, our fundamental unit of matter, mirrors Atum in structure and in name. Each atom is a dual manifestation of potential: positive and negative charge revolving around a common axis, the nucleus forming the crossing point of the field. What ancient myth depicted as a god of completion, modern science describes as a balanced polarity held in perpetual motion. The typological equivalence is precise: both are single forms of dual reality.
The linguistic echoes deepen the correspondence. The twin names Thomas and Didymus, meaning ‘twin,’ preserve the same tum root. Tammuz, the Mesopotamian dying-and-rising god, carries the identical sense of the revolving whole - the eternal recurrence of manifestation through dual exchange. Across languages and ages, tum signifies the twin nature of reality: the manifest and the unmanifest, the seen and the potential, joined in one process.
In quantum theory, potential is described as probability - the range of possible states inherent in a system before observation or collapse. When an event occurs, potential becomes actual, just as Ptah becomes Atum. The quantum state is therefore the modern expression of the ancient concept of primordial potential, the invisible matrix from which form continually arises. The mechanics of the wave function - potential becoming particle through interaction - are a scientific restatement of the same dynamic the Egyptians intuited in mythic form.
Thus, from Memphis to modern physics, the sequence remains intact:
Eternal potential (Ptah) - the unmanifest totality.
Manifestation (Atum) - duality arising within unity.
Continuity - the eternal return of potential through manifestation.
The ancients perceived this law in the cycles of nature; modern science observes it in the oscillations of field and quantum state. The language has changed, but the structure has not. The universe, whether described as Ptah and Atum or as probability and manifestation, expresses the same principle - eternal potential endlessly realising itself as form.
The Geometry of the Eternal – The Phi-Torus and the Hidden Ratio
The figure of eternity is geometrically exact. Two loops intersect through a single axis, forming a continuous path that turns through itself without beginning or end. Whether drawn as the lemniscate, the bow, the Möbius strip, or the phi-torus, the principle is the same: a single surface carrying two currents whose continuity depends upon their crossing. Around the central axis the path retraces itself eternally, never colliding, never diverging. It is the perfect image of recurrence through harmony.
In IXOS physics this form is known as the phi-torus - a toroidal field whose curvature follows the golden ratio. Because its spiral expansion and contraction occur in self-similar proportion, its paths never interfere destructively. Energy moves through it without loss; every circuit supports the next. This property defines eternity in structural terms: motion without decay, change without disintegration. The phi-torus is therefore the geometric constant of the IXOS system, the diagram of perpetual coherence.
The ancients treated this same ratio as sacred. Phi (ϕ) was never openly stated in their texts but was built into architecture, music, and iconography. It governed the spacing of temples, the intervals of the octave, and the proportions of the body. Because it could be seen only through the forms it sustained, it was described as the veiled principle - the hidden law of beauty and balance. In symbolic language it was expressed through the goddess: Isis, Ma’at, or Sophia, the unseen harmony that unites opposites and makes creation possible.
Over time this veiled principle was re-cast. As patriarchal systems replaced the older balance of masculine and feminine archetypes, the ratio itself - the unseen field of proportion - lost its personified image. The sacred feminine, once the expression of the hidden coherence within matter, was diminished or demonised, and theology became centred upon an isolated male deity. Yet the geometry could not be erased. The ratio remained embedded in architecture, in sacred art, and even in the language of science. Phi continued to shape cathedrals, seed patterns, and atomic lattices alike, silently preserving the same law of eternal proportion.
In this sense, the goddess was not a figure of superstition but a symbol of the unseen constant - the harmonic relationship that holds form together. The phi-torus of IXOS, the lemniscate of eternity, and the veiled goddess of antiquity are three expressions of one truth: that creation endures through proportion, not through dominance. The ancients represented this as a bow of dual currents; modern mathematics describes it as a self-coherent field. Both reveal the same foundation - a universe woven from balance, returning through itself forever.
The Cultural Eclipse – From the Veiled Ratio to the Scriptural Order
As theological systems hardened, the earlier balance of polarities was simplified into hierarchy. The feminine principle that had once symbolised the hidden ratio of coherence became reduced to a set of permitted roles - mother, virgin, or saint. In visual language she survived as water, lake, spring, or well: images of reflection and renewal, still carrying the older hydric symbolism of life and return. Figures such as Brigid or the Lady of the Lake are survivals of that deeper continuum, fragments of the original equation of form and flow. They recall the same geometry in allegory - the circle that nourishes, the vessel that contains, the well that mirrors the heavens - but the living scientific principle once represented by the goddess had by then been relegated to myth.
In mathematical and geometric terms, however, the idea endured. The bow, the figure-8, remained a universal sign for harmony through crossing. It appeared in art, architecture, and illuminated manuscripts as interlace, as Celtic knot, as infinity band. Long after the theology had become rigidly patriarchal, the geometry still testified to balance. The pattern spoke silently of the same law: two forces meeting through one axis, creation maintained by proportion, not by command.
In Britain, the arrival of Christianity confronted an ancient Drift-culture network of archetypes stretching back to pre-Roman times. To persuade a pagan population to accept the new creed, the incoming religion adapted those existing patterns. The native figures of renewal, sovereignty, and eternal return were re-cast as saints and chivalric heroes. The Arthurian cycle became the bridge. Its lake-borne sword, healing chalice, and recurring king are direct continuations of the older language of water, vessel, and resurrection. Over successive retellings, these myths were Christianised until they merged with the Biblical template - every Grail became a Eucharist, every reborn hero a Christ-type. The process was gradual and deliberate: a synthesis of the pagan geometry of eternity with the Roman narrative of salvation.
By the later Middle Ages all roads indeed led to Rome, but the geometry remained untouched beneath the words. The interlaced crosses of Celtic stonework, the halos of saints, the architecture of cathedrals, and the musical octaves of plainchant still encode the same eternal balance that the Egyptians once traced in twisted flax and the Greeks in the Tetractys. Even when doctrine silenced the goddess, the bow of eternity continued to appear in every art that sought harmony.
The Final Transformation – From Natural Science to Christian Allegory
By the end of the Middle Ages, the last vestiges of the old geometric cosmology had been absorbed into Christian narrative. What had once been a living science of nature and proportion became a moral tale of salvation and sin. The Mort le Roi Artu, and its later English synthesis in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, mark the point at which the pagan continuum of Egypt, the Mediterranean, and the Celtic world was re-cast entirely in Biblical terms.
In the Arthurian material the ancient Drift-culture archetypes still survive, but under new names. The Grail is the vessel of eternal renewal, once the womb of Isis or the chalice of the goddess, now the cup of Christ. The perpetual flame becomes the light of faith. The island of Avalon, long associated with apple and afterlife, becomes a Christian paradise. Arthur, the recurring king whose departure and return echo the yearly cycle of Osiris, is presented as a mortal hero redeemed by grace. The goddess who once bestowed kingship through union becomes a consort purified into the Virgin or into a saintly Guinevere. The geometry of eternity remains - the vessel, the circle, the crossing - but its meaning has been domesticated into theology.
This transformation was culturally necessary for the age. To integrate Britain into the Christian world-order, the old mythic science had to be rewritten as Scripture in disguise. The Arthurian corpus achieved precisely that: it bridged the divide between the empirical spirituality of the pagan past and the doctrinal authority of Rome. By the fifteenth century all the ancient symbols of light, renewal, and proportion had been enlisted to serve a single narrative - the history of a Christian knightly people under a Christian God. The eternal bow of nature was reinterpreted as the cross of redemption.
Yet beneath that imposed structure the deeper geometry endured. The figure-8 still appears in knotwork, in heraldry, in the very architecture of the cathedrals that housed the new faith. The loop of flax, the orbit of stars, the cycle of life and death, and the phi-torus of the living field continued to govern the world unseen. The story changed, but the pattern did not. The eternal order that Egypt had first expressed in the language of flax and flame remained intact within the art of the Christian world, waiting to be recognised once more as the true science of harmony.
Epilogue – The Continuity of the Eternal
From the twisted flax of Memphis to the toroidal equations of modern physics, humanity has been describing the same phenomenon: the self-renewing loop through which potential becomes form and form returns to potential. Every myth, number, and geometry examined here is a variation of that law. Eternity was, and remains, the certainty underlying existence - the crossing of opposites through balance, the phi-torus endlessly retracing its path, the woven loop of Ma’at sustaining the universe.
The religions that succeeded the ancient sciences changed the language but not the structure. Behind every tale of resurrection, every saintly spring, every holy cup, the same eternal field endures. The task of modern thought is not to invent new symbols but to recognise that what the ancients saw in the cycles of nature is what physics now measures in the fields of light. Eternity is not beyond the world; it is the geometry by which the world continues.
Part 2 – The Encoded Axis: From Saqqara to Shakespeare
1. Introduction – The Survival of the Eternal Code
From the first monumental axis raised at Saqqara to its literary echoes in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the same pattern of proportion and renewal re-emerges, sometimes in open form, sometimes as cipher. The Egyptian priesthood called it the secret of the chambers; later philosophers would call it harmony or the golden mean; poets and architects embodied it without naming it. The line of descent is not linear but recursive - each era rediscovers and re-veils the same truth.
The Westcar Papyrus already marks the transition. In Khufu’s court the knowledge of eternal form is no longer spoken directly but hidden in narrative. The sage Djedi knows the ‘number of the secret chambers of Thoth’ yet will not reveal it to the uninitiated. Geometry has become mystery. What follows in the millennia after is the story of that mystery’s deliberate preservation - the geometry of eternity encrypted in stone, scripture, and art.
2. Min and the Pre-Djoser Axis – The Living Pillar of Duality
Before the pyramids there was the pillar. In the god Min the Egyptians embodied the principle of generative polarity: a vertical current joining heaven and earth, spirit and matter. His raised arm and flag-staff formed a perfect axial image - the line of energy around which all recurrence turns. Each year at Coptos and at early Saqqara the priests enacted the ‘Raising of Min,’ an explicit ceremony of renewal through vertical ascent. The rite celebrated not fertility alone but the maintenance of balance: the upward flow of life countering the gravitational pull of decay.
The staff of Min is the first human rendering of what physics would later call a field axis. It is the proto-Djed - stability born from dynamic tension. Its geometry prefigures the bow-torus: a single force divided into two movements that rejoin at the summit. In every later pillar, obelisk, and cross, the same vertical logic survives: the world made whole by the meeting of currents through one spine of light.
3. Djoser and Imhotep – Saqqara as the First Axis in Stone
Archaeologically, the monument at Saqqara traditionally called the Step Pyramid is the earliest large-scale stone construction in Egypt. Excavation and restoration by Jean-Philippe Lauer (1926–1976) established that it was built during the reign of King Djoser in the Third Dynasty (c. 2670 BCE). The structure rises about sixty metres and consists of six superimposed mastaba-like tiers diminishing regularly in size. Survey data show that each stage encloses the one beneath it in a measured contraction, forming a consistent geometric progression. The plan evolved through successive enlargements of an original square mastaba until the form became a stepped ascent linking the subterranean chambers with the open sky above. This is the earliest verifiable example of proportioned, vertical architecture in Egypt.
The phrase iu-em-hept (“he who comes in peace”) appears on Djoser’s monument, but is an epithet of Atum and of the divine intelligence through which form is ordered. Rather than naming a historical architect, the title denotes the aspect of Atum’s creative wisdom manifesting through the king. The builder, therefore, is symbolic: Djoser channelled the organising principle of Atum to realise the pyramid as a model of cosmic structure.
The six diminishing tiers embody that principle visually. Each stage represents a refinement of form rising from the square of earth toward the point of unity - a visible enactment of the generative sequence that later thinkers expressed as the 1-2-3-4 harmony. While later Greek writers such as Pythagoras formalised this progression as the Tetractys, the Step Pyramid provides the earliest physical expression of the same logic: unity unfolding through ordered proportion to return at the summit to the One. In this sense Saqqara is both architectural experiment and cosmological statement - a stone translation of Atum’s wisdom rising through Ma’at to the light.
‘Imhotep’s’ design also demonstrates the mathematical consciousness behind the form. The pyramid’s relative heights follow a recursive progression akin to the factorial sequence: each level encloses the sum of those below it. This same nesting behaviour appears later in Euler’s definition of exponential growth. What modern mathematics describes as the constant e - continuous self-multiplication - the Saqqara pyramid expressed through stone courses stacked in harmonic proportion. The Step Pyramid is a visible exponential: life built upon life, ratio within ratio, rising to the point of return.
Thus Saqqara inaugurated the state geometry of eternity. Every later pyramid repeats its law: the Tetractys frozen into monument, each block a unit of Ma’at. From this moment Egypt’s sacred architecture ceases to imitate nature and begins to articulate the field itself.
4. Giza – The Completion of the Axis
Khufu’s pyramid at Giza consummated what Djoser had begun. In it, theology, engineering, and kingship achieved complete synthesis. The fourfold base anchors the structure to the earth; the triadic internal chambers trace the vertical ascent; together they produce the 7 that resolves into 8 - the figure of eternity. The interior shafts point towards the belt of Orion and the circumpolar stars, turning the monument into a breathing machine of light.
The pyramid’s slope encodes the golden ratio; its dimensions form a harmonic with the planet’s circumference. Each proportion is a statement of recurrence: the phi-based curvature that allows infinite self-similar return. The Great Pyramid is thus not simply a tomb but a spatial equation, a standing wave of stone that captures the universe’s own rhythm of expansion and return.
At its foot, the Sphinx faces due east - the horizon of rebirth. Its leonine body and human head conjoin strength and consciousness, the two halves of the eternal field. Every dawn it watches the sun emerge from its own axis, re-enacting the daily resurrection of light. Together, Giza’s monuments turn the natural cycle into enduring geometry.
5. The Cipher of Djedi – The Secret of the Chambers
The Westcar Papyrus, composed centuries after Khufu, preserves the moment when sacred geometry became secrecy. In the tale, Khufu seeks from the sage Djedi the number of hidden chambers in the temple of Thoth - a question ostensibly about architecture, but in truth concerning the structure of eternity. Djedi knows the secret yet refuses to reveal it to the king himself, saying it will be given only to the sons of a priestly woman destined to found the next dynasty.
Behind this narrative lies the transfer of cosmic knowledge from royal monument to initiated priesthood. The ‘hidden chambers’ correspond to harmonic nodes, the compartments of the eternal field where dual currents meet. Their number, the text implies, is fixed by divine ratio. In withholding it, Djedi enacts the principle of recursion: truth can be known only through continuation, never by direct disclosure. The geometry of eternity had become a riddle to preserve itself.
The Westcar tale thus stands as the earliest literary evidence of deliberate encryption pointing as a riddle to the ratios inherent at Giza - the transformation of open science into sacred narrative. The Djedi cipher survives as the clue to sacred pattern itself.
One interesting element to the Djedi tale may be entirely deliberate. His age as 110, is exactly double 55. The Fibonacci number 5 is pivotal to the Tetractys, and becomes locked into Phi at the 55th iteration. If so, then the dating of the knowledge of the Fibonnaci sequence is pushed back to mid 2nd millennium BCE - entirely contrary to consensus academia. However, this remains speculative here.
6. Medjed – The Mobile Axis
The figure of Medjed, appearing in the Book of the Dead and later temple iconography, embodies the living field implied in Djedi’s riddle. Described in the older texts, Medjed is portrayed as a rounded, possibly veiled form with eyes and feet visible beneath a knotted sash. Far from a spirit of punishment or its mistranslation as a ‘smiter’, this is the Djed in motion - the eternal pillar transformed into a dynamic, toroidal being.
The imagery aligns perfectly with the bow-torus model. The knotted sash traces a figure 8; the concealed body represents the unseen field; the eyes at the poles correspond to the points where energy emerges; and the feet signify mobility - the axis walking among men. His name, related to Medjedu, the Horus title of Khufu, links him directly to the builders of Giza and to the maintenance of the cult along the Nile. Medjed’s ‘legs’ indicate that the djed and its ratio moved with the priests from centre to centre, ensuring continuity of Ma’at across changing dynasties. Just as did the eternal flame.
In this sense Medjed marks the internalisation of the axis. After the age of stone, the geometry of eternity became portable, incarnated in ritual processions, in oil and linen, in the consciousness of initiates. The field had learned to walk.
As Medjedu, Khufu was seen as the role of axis in living form, and in co-operation with the goddess forms he would symbolise the centre of Egypt, measure the temple with Sheshat and embody the principle of Ma’at.
7. The Cross on Golgotha – The Recasting of the Axis
With Christianity, the old Egyptian field-geometry reappeared in a new key. The vertical and horizontal of the cross are identical to the bow’s intersecting currents. The Crucifixion site on Golgotha is the axis mundi - heaven and earth joined through a single figure. The linen winding sheet, the oil of anointing, and the flame of the altar lamp continue the flax and fire of earlier ages. The Djed has become the Cross; the eternal flame has become the ‘light of the world.’ The eternal flame typified as the sun or son of God.
But the cyclical principle of Ma’at was redefined. Where Egypt saw eternity as perpetual return, Christianity recast it as a singular redemption and a promised afterlife. The geometry remained but its temporal philosophy inverted: from circle to line. Even the language shows the shift - the Egyptian shen ring of eternity reinterpreted through Hebrew as shin, the linear ‘tooth,’ a move from curved continuity to cutting demarcation. Yet the underlying structure - its perfect proportion and balance - still enacts the same law. The axis of Ma’at persisted inside the new theology, disguised as doctrine but intact as geometry.
8. The Arthurian Continuum – Pagan Geometry Christianised
When Christianity reached the British Isles, it encountered a living network of Drift-Culture archetypes that already understood the eternal axis through symbol and story. To convert a pagan nation, missionaries translated the geometry of balance into the language of chivalric myth. The Grail, the sword, and the recurring king are all residues of Egyptian and Near Eastern symbolism rearticulated for a new world.
The lake or well from which the sword rises recalls the hydric goddess of creation; the sword itself, drawn upward through water, restates the axis of light emerging from the field. The Grail is the vessel of proportion - the containment of infinite life within finite form. Arthur, the ‘once and future king,’ mirrors Osiris: slain, entombed, and destined to return. The Round Table embodies the same geometry of recurrence as the pyramid or torus - a circle of equal points surrounding a still centre.
By the time of Mort le Roi Artu and Malory’s Morte Darthur, these pagan geometries had been fully Christianised. The Grail became the cup of Christ, Avalon the Christian paradise, and Arthur a knightly saviour rather than a cosmic principle. Yet every emblem of the old geometry survived beneath the new names. The pattern of eternity endured, veiled as allegory once more.
The Church also gave Ireland a version of their own indigenous mythology, reworked to loop back into a Biblical origin. Just as the Church gave the Europeans their Eddic lays, as a bridge and mode of expounding the Biblical as the greater truth. It would be wise for historians and laypersons alike not to accept indigenous cultural history at face value when it was agents of the Church that provided it. To trust Rome with historical truth is perhaps the greatest error in academic history.
9. Shakespeare and the Hermetic Transmission
In the Renaissance, the language of eternity found its last esoteric flowering. Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609) display a numerical and structural precision that mirrors the old Egyptian order. The collection’s 154 poems form a 14 × 11 grid, echoing the Tetractys doubled through time: two triangles joined at their base to form a diamond, a textual figure 8. Sonnet 17, at the heart of the sequence, speaks of ‘the truth in beauty’s brow,’ a direct allusion to the eternal ratio - beauty as the visible face of proportion.
Elsewhere, Shakespeare’s imagery of light, stone, and rebirth recalls the vocabulary of Giza. ‘Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes / Shall outlive this powerful rhyme,’ he writes, uniting word and monument as parallel media of immortality. The poet inherits the role of the pyramid-builder; the sonnet becomes the new stone of eternity. Through this structural precision and recurrent ratio, the Hermetic writers of the Renaissance consciously revived the ancient science under cover of art. The geometry of the eternal bow was preserved again, now in language rather than limestone.
10. The Cipher of Eight – The Eternal Measure
Through all these transformations one constant remains: the number 8, the lemniscate of infinity, the measure of dual completion. In Egypt it was the Ogdoad, the eight primordial forces of balance. In Greece it became the octave, the return to unity at higher vibration. In Christianity it was the eighth day, the symbol of resurrection and new creation. Eternity as a cycle of recurrence was written into myth from the earliest times. Derived from nature and encoded in sacred geometry, infinity is inherent.
Not only is 8 the infinity sign in form; it is also the symbolic expression of inherent duality — two interlinked rings revolving around an axis. Its mathematics mirrors this structure: 2 × 2 = 4, 2 + 2 = 4, and 2 × 2 × 2 = 8, or 2 + 2 × 2 = 8. The fundamental duality in the Tetractys revolves also around 5. The sacred Decad has duality embedded within it, as does nature itself. Within 8 there is a natural numerical harmony of infinite relationships, the unfolding of 1–4 returning to the value of 2 - the equilibrium of opposites recurring through the whole.
Other numerical systems express complementary harmonies. The irrational and the odd perform different functions in the natural order. Systems based on 6 and 60 generate the 360° circle and its divisions into 3, 6, 7, 9, 12, and 13 - the basis of our hours, days, weeks, and years, and of the longer zodiacal and precessional cycles. Yet beneath all of them, duality remains the underlying constant - the infinite potential for fractal expression through which the universe sustains itself.
Eight is the silent signature of Ma’at - the numeral of eternity, the cipher that identifies the hidden geometry across epochs. Its shape, the horizontal bow, is the phi-torus viewed edge-on: two loops bound by an axis. Wherever that figure appears - in temple plan, in cross, in knotwork, in musical octave, in mathematical constant - it speaks of the same truth: the universe sustains itself eternally through proportion, not decree. The ancients measured it; later ages worshipped it; physics now describes it as field recursion. The law has never changed.
The Continuum of Ma’at and Evidence of the Cipher
From the staff of Min to the Step Pyramid, from the Great Pyramid to the cipher of Djedi, from Medjed’s walking axis to the Cross on Golgotha, from the Grail to Shakespeare’s geometry of verse, the same eternal pattern persists. What began as a living observation of nature became a hidden language of balance, passed from temple to temple, text to text, culture to culture. The number 8 and the figure of the bow are its unbroken emblem - the geometry of Ma’at enduring beneath millennia of interpretation.
The chain is too precise to dismiss as coincidence. Each transition shows conscious retention: the pillar raised, the pyramid aligned, the cross erected, the circle drawn, the sonnet measured. The structure never alters - only the outer form and language shift. The priest of Saqqara, the monk of Glastonbury, the poet of London all worked from the same archetype. Geometry was their scripture; proportion, their revelation.
Evidence of deliberate continuity abounds. The Westcar Papyrus guards the secret of ratio as riddle; Medjed’s icon conceals the bow-torus in plain sight; the Greek Tetractys formalises it in number; Christian art perpetuates it in the cross and halo; Arthurian legend preserves it in the Round Table’s rotational symmetry; Renaissance Hermeticism encrypts it in literature and measure. Each stage reaffirms that eternity was known, safeguarded, and re-expressed under the new idioms of each age.
The cipher of Ma’at is the constant geometry behind these manifestations. Its form is simple: two currents bound around a single axis, the lemniscate of life. Its number is 8, the octave of completion, the return to unity through doubling. Its substance is ratio, the law that allows infinite recurrence without loss. Where the Egyptians saw divine balance, Pythagoreans saw harmonic series, and modern physics sees field recursion, the principle is one: coherence sustained by proportion.
Ma’at, in its truest sense, is not merely moral order but the equilibrium of existence itself - the law by which energy, matter, and consciousness maintain harmony. The ancients measured it with rope and rod; we measure it now with equations, yet both describe the same relationship. The flax that becomes flame, the stone that becomes star, the thought that becomes light: each is an expression of the eternal axis translating potential into form.
To read history through this lens is to see a single continuity disguised by language. The fall of civilisations did not end the science of eternity; it forced it into new symbols. The torch that burned in the sanctuaries of Egypt was never extinguished - it passed into oil lamp, altar flame, and the metaphoric light of reason. The geometry of Ma’at migrated intact, embedded in every culture that valued balance, truth, and proportion.
Eternity, the first science, remains the last mystery. The ancients called it Ma’at; the mathematician calls it proportion; the physicist, coherence. It is the same law through which the cosmos breathes, folding and unfolding around its own axis. To recognise this is to understand that what we call religion, myth, and science are not opposing paths but parallel expressions of one insight: that all things endure because they are woven. The figure-8 is therefore not a symbol but a statement - the enduring proof that the universe itself is Ma’at made visible.
Summary – The Data Fits the Theory
A central theme of The Return of the Storm God is that Nature itself - and humanity’s earliest, disciplined observation of it - is the true foundation of myth and, by extension, of religion. The heavens supplied the first text, and Orion, with the surrounding nexus of the Pleiades, Taurus, and Sirius and the planet Jupiter moving above them like a pendulum, provided the key imagery. From this celestial arrangement came the principal symbols later woven into the narratives of the Bible.
This knowledge was never lost. It was preserved by initiates and priestly elites who understood that myth was also mathematics: that Pythagorean ratio and Tetractys geometry expressed the same law that temples and scriptures described allegorically. The Step Pyramid at Saqqara shows the first emergence of that awareness; the Great Pyramid at Giza its perfection. Giza is therefore the true axis mundi of the ancient world - the gateway through which the soul ascends the field of Ma’at toward unity with the Source.
The Roman redaction of this science into authorised religion transformed geometry into theology and natural law into doctrine. Yet throughout history, parallel lineages of those ‘in the know’ have kept the older understanding alive, embedding it in architecture, art, and allegory. From the flaxen wick of Memphis to the axis of Giza, from the cross on Golgotha to the sonnet’s measured rhyme, the same pattern endures. The data, linguistic, architectural, and numerical, all point to one conclusion: the ancients understood that the structure of the heavens is the structure of the soul, and the geometry of eternity - the figure of eight - is its enduring cipher.
The Significance of 17
Among the many correspondences that support this theory, none is more compelling than the persistence of a cipher built into number itself. Across monuments and texts, from Egypt to Renaissance England, the same signature recurs: the number 8, the emblem of eternity. Yet the path by which it reaches us is veiled inside another number, 17 - a number that, in Tetractys logic, resolves back to 8. The sum of the Decad (10) and the seven stellar powers of the sky produces the octave of eternity, the 8 that completes and renews the sequence.
The evidence appears to confirm that initiates have used 17 as a device to encode the 8, into texts given the number, as a book or chapter 17. And in these various books or chapter 17s, the Egyptian form of transition to eternity is a central theme.
That the Book of the Dead assigns its pivotal discourse on creation and afterlife to Chapter 17 is therefore not arbitrary. The funerary text is at once ritual and mathematical: an explanation of time as a procession of hours and gates through the night, the measured cycles of earthly and celestial life. Its geometry expresses what later Pythagorean thought would formalise as ratio, proportion, and harmonic return. Long before Pythagoras, Egypt already possessed this knowledge and expressed it in both architecture and myth. The so-called Greek discoveries were rediscoveries of principles that the architects of Saqqara and Giza had rendered in stone millennia earlier. But Book 17 directly relates to the imagery of the soul ascension through god symbolism. It identifies the deceased with the creator god Atum and includes glosses that explain phrases like “Mine is yesterday, I know tomorrow” by connecting them to other gods, such as “yesterday is Osiris, tomorrow is Ra”. This is a journey of ascension to Orion through the duat.
Within the Egyptian cosmos the glyph of the Duat itself encodes the same law. It is a pentad enclosed in a circle, the geometry of φ where every ratio repeats within itself. The pentagram’s orbital equivalent is the eight-year cycle of Venus as observed from Earth-a natural inscription of the octadic form into the heavens. For this reason the planet of morning and evening became the emblem of the goddess: visible proof of eternal recurrence and harmonic proportion. The Duat glyph is therefore an octave written as a pentad, a phi-structure that reveals the hidden 8 of eternity.
When we turn to the Morte D’Arthur, the pattern re-emerges in a medieval Christian idiom. Malory’s sixteenth book ends with the transition to Book 17, where the narrative of Galahad begins-seven announcing eight, the threshold of perfection. The Grail quest unfolds over five chapters of this seventeenth book, reproducing the 1-2-3-4-5 progression of the Tetractys. The common symbolism of the knights’ red cross on a white field (a symbol of the Knights Templar) repeats the ancient Egyptian icon of the crossed axis on the divine torso. The X marks the intersection of four within one-the equilibrium of above and below, the same geometry that underlies the Star of David, the interlaced triangles of heaven and earth. David, or dwd, is typologically Osiris–Orion: the royal axis in human form. In this way both pentagram and hexagram conceal the same value-the eternal 8 that joins duality into unity.
Such numerical and geometric design is not incidental. It indicates initiatory knowledge preserved within Christian literature just as the earlier priesthood encoded it within scripture. The recurrence of 17 as cipher for 8 is a deliberate continuation of the old Tetractys numerology. Galahad-the gala priest, the perfected axis ruled by the principles of proportion and life-represents the same balance embodied in the Egyptian union of form and fluid, Ptah and Atum. As Jesus is incomplete without the anointing of the feminine essence, so the cycle of ascension requires reunion with the goddess, with Ma’at herself. The Sumerian Gala priests were the Priests of Inanna, whose 7th revealing is the disrobing - the removal of the cloth - at the 7th gate. The 7 is what reveals the goddess. This is an early version of the Veil of Isis. The last line of Book 16 (a 7) unveils the tale of Galahad in Book 17 (an 8), and Chapter 17 onwards reveal the Egyptian ritual as the Galahad story. Throughout the Book 17 we see the recurring Egyptian themes of David/Duat and the temple builder son king Solomon/Khufu/Djoser etc.
The chain closes with Shakespeare. The mathematical architecture of the 1609 Sonnets centres on Sonnet 17, the poem that contemplates immortality through art. Its position and its theme are not accidental. As the Book of the Dead placed its cosmology in Chapter 17 and Malory reserved his spiritual consummation for Book 17, so the Bard’s sequence reaches its geometric balance there. Sonnet 17 points, like the Djedi cipher, back to Giza-the origin of the code-and through its dedication to the hidden wisdom of the feminine priesthood that later theology obscured. The geometry of eternity thus reappears in Elizabethan verse exactly as it had in Memphite theology: the same dual flow bound around a single axis.
Through every age the cipher of 17 transmits the truth of 8. It is the numeric bridge between myth and mathematics, the emblem of potential and manifestation, Ptah and Atum, preserved from Saqqara to Shakespeare. In it the continuum of Ma’at is proved once more: eternity rendered as number, geometry, and word-the hidden law that binds the heavens to the human mind.
We may find many more 17 clues that interrelate. For example the Kalevala Rune XVII is a reflection of the Westcar Djedi tale - the revealing of the truth by the magician in code:
‘To procure the magic sayings,
Find the lost-words of the Master,
From the mouth of the magician,’
Which indicates that Elias Lönnrot may have been an initiate of an old cult order, using the 17 cipher in his compilation of Finnish myth. The descent of Väinämöinen into Wipunen’s body is the northern counterpart of Egypt’s Opening of the Mouth. In both, the seeker restores speech to the dead and receives the words of creation in return. Djedi’s miracle of re-attaching the head and the priest’s ritual of opening the lips of the god are the same archetype: the re-activation of the eternal voice—the breath of Hu. That the Finnish tale occupies Rune XVII, the cipher of infinity, shows how the pattern of death, utterance, and renewal endured from the Pyramid Texts to later mythic literatures. Rune XVII repeats the same initiatory pattern found in the Westcar Papyrus and in Malory’s seventeenth book
The Gospel of John reproduces the pattern once more. Chapter 17, the final prayer of the incarnate Word, is an Opening of the Mouth in language - the restoration of divine speech before ascension. ‘I have given them the words thou gavest me … and now I come to thee.’ As Djedi restored the head, as Wipunen gave up the magic sayings, and as Galahad beheld the Grail, so the Johannine Christ reveals the hidden Name and returns the Word to its source. The cipher of seventeen again marks the gate of revelation: the completion of the cycle and the re-entry of the voice into the infinite field.
The Gospel attributed to John functions within the same archetype as the Egyptian Thoth. Thoth, the divine scribe, records the ritual of renewal and guards the creative Word; John, the Evangelist, writes ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ The Logos theology of Alexandria carried Thoth’s doctrine into Greek form, and the Christian text repeats the ritual pattern: the Word descends, speaks, and ascends. Whether by direct inheritance or by the diffusion of shared Hermetic ideas, the Gospel preserves the same structure - the eternal voice written into matter and returned to the source through the act of divine speech.
In Christian scripture the figure of John preserves the twofold office of Thoth: scribe of the gods and revealer of mysteries. The Gospel of John opens with the Word itself; the Book of Revelation closes the canon with the command to ‘write what thou hast seen.’ Both are acts of divine dictation. The numerical cipher recurs - the seventeenth position of Revelation in the New Testament marking the same initiatory gate as before. As in the Westcar tale, in Kalevala XVII, and in Malory’s Book XVII, the seventeenth key introduces the unveiling of hidden truth. The continuity is exact: Thoth becomes John, the ritual of revelation becomes scripture, and the cipher of 17 again signals the opening of the mouth of eternity.
The 17th chapter of Revelation preserves the same initiatic code in explicit number. Here John, the scribe-seer, speaks of seven kings - ‘five fallen, one is, one yet to come’ - and of an eighth who ‘is of the seven.’ The pattern is unmistakable: 5 + 7 → 8, the octave of return, the very cipher of eternity. The beast that ‘was, and is not, and yet is’ mirrors the cycle of death and rebirth, descent and ascension. Revelation 17 therefore completes the sequence begun in the Egyptian texts: the numerical theology of renewal, the eighth arising from the seven, the eternal figure re-expressed in apocalyptic form.
Part 3 – Egypt as the Microcosm of Eternity
1. Introduction – Egypt, the Living Model of the Cosmos
Egypt stood as the first civilisation to build its theology upon observed law rather than conjecture. The land itself mirrored the structure of the heavens: the Nile flowing like a cosmic meridian, the stars of Orion rising along the same axis, the rhythm of flood and fall repeating the pulse of breath and tide. To the Egyptians this was no metaphor but evidence that nature was self-consistent. The kingdom became a working model of the universe – a microcosm of Ma’at. Its theology, architecture, and government all developed as expressions of the same geometry of balance that underlies the figure 8.
As centuries passed, Egyptian religion unfolded in the same manner as the Tetractys: unity dividing into duality, duality flowering into harmonic pairs, and multiplicity returning to unity through a single apex. The nation’s shifting cults record the evolution of this cosmic mathematics written in time.
2. The Age of Duality – Beginnings of the Field
In the earliest records the divine world is twofold. Upper and Lower Egypt, red and white crowns, desert and delta – each pair is a polarity rather than an opposition. The twin falcons of Nekhen and Buto watch from either side of the throne; the twin lions Akeru guard the horizons. Ptah and Atum themselves already express the whole divided into two currents, potential and manifestation. Duality was thus the first visible pattern of the field – a geometry of tension held in equilibrium.
Every ritual act mirrored this principle. The union of the Two Lands symbolised not conquest but balance. The Pharaoh stood as the still axis between north and south, sky and earth, human and divine – the living bow of eternity made flesh.
3. The Heptadic Order – The Seven Spirits of the Axis
With the Old Kingdom a new rhythm appeared. Texts speak of ‘seven who stand behind Ra,’ ‘seven cows of plenty,’ ‘seven scorpions of Isis.’ These sevens correspond to the seven visible planets or to the seven bright stars of the Orion–Pleiades nexus, as well as the older polar constellation of Draco. The single dual field had differentiated into seven functions – seven vibrations of one scale.
This heptadic system ordered ritual and calendar alike. The week of seven days, the seven portals of the underworld, the seven openings of the human head – all repeat the same harmonic segmentation. In music this is the diatonic scale; in cosmology, the unfolding of potential into manifest forces. Egypt’s priests did not invent the number; they recognised it in nature and named it divine.
4. The Ogdoad – The Eight of Eternity
During the Middle Kingdom the city of Hermopolis formalised the geometry of the eternal bow into the doctrine of the Ogdoad: four male–female pairs – Nun–Naunet, Heh–Hehet, Kek–Keket, Amun–Amunet. Each pair represents a polarity: water and air, darkness and light, visible and invisible. Together they form the eightfold field, the 4 × 2 of eternal balance.
The Ogdoad is the cosmos before form, the toroidal field before its axis condenses. Temples reflected this by using paired shrines and symmetrical courtyards; rituals were performed by dual priesthoods acting in mirror. The number 8 had become the sacred measure of stability through movement – the essence of Ma’at in numerical form.
5. The Ennead – Completion of the Decad
At Heliopolis the Ogdoad was refined into the Ennead – the ninefold company of Atum and his emanations. Atum, the self-created one, generated Shu and Tefnut (air and moisture), who produced Geb and Nut (earth and sky), whose children were Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys. The eight thus return to unity through the ninth, the apex that completes the base – exactly the geometry of the pyramid. Atum’s capstone restores wholeness to multiplicity.
This Enneadic system became the theological foundation of kingship. The Pharaoh, as son of Re and heir of Osiris, was the living axis maintaining equilibrium between the nine powers. The pyramid texts are full of this awareness: the king ascends through nine gates to join the gods in light, completing the Decad of being.
6. Rival Theologies – When Geometry Becomes Politics
As Egypt’s numerical cosmos matured, its temples and cities competed to define the primary axis of creation. Memphis exalted Ptah, teaching that all gods were thoughts shaped in his heart and spoken by his tongue - the unity before number. Hermopolis maintained the Ogdoad, the eight primordial powers of potential; Heliopolis upheld the Ennead, the nine visible forms ruled by the solar Atum-Re.
In the fourteenth century BCE the royal reform of Akhenaten attempted to reconcile these rival systems by focusing all divine attributes into a single visible centre: the Aten, the radiant disc of the sun. The king established a new capital at Akhetaten (Amarna) to embody this geometry - a city planned on a single axial line running from the horizon temples to the royal tombs, an architectural projection of the solar path. In doing so, Akhenaten displaced the older priesthoods of Amun, Ptah, and Re, breaking the balance that had maintained Ma’at. After his death the Theban clergy regained control; under the young Tutankhamun the cults of Amun and the traditional gods were reinstated, and the axis of worship returned from Amarna to Thebes.
These theological differences corresponded to political shifts. Under Khufu and Djedefre the solar cult rose to power; under the Thebans the hidden Amun of the Ogdoad regained primacy. The Shabaka Stone later proclaimed Ptah as creator of all through word and mind, reasserting the unity above division. Behind dynastic change lay the same pattern of expansion and contraction – Ma’at seeking equilibrium within history.
7. The Temple – Architecture of the Field
Egyptian architecture rendered these numbers in space. Every temple followed the same plan: twin pylons, central axis, hypostyle forest, and innermost shrine – a walk through the toroidal field from darkness to light. Saqqara’s step pyramid, Giza’s triadic layout, Karnak’s twin processional routes, all are expressions of the same geometry. The sanctuary lamp that burned perpetually at the core symbolised the unmoving node of energy around which the dual currents flowed. Each morning’s rite of opening the temple was an act of cosmic maintenance: Ma’at restored through proportion.
8. The Tetractys in Historical Sequence
Egypt’s own evolution mirrors the Tetractys:
1 = Ptah, the undivided potential.
2 = Atum, self-manifest duality.
3 = Osiris–Isis–Horus, the triad of regeneration.
4 = The paired dualities of the Ogdoad.
10 = The Ennead + Atum, the Decad’s closure.
Each era adds a new layer while containing all that came before, like factorial growth – 1! 2! 3! 4! – a cultural exponential rising to a point of return. The mathematical structure of eternity is thus written across Egyptian time.
9. The Peril of Nine – Recursion and Decline
Yet the number that completed creation also carried danger. Nine is self-returning: every multiple of nine resolves again to nine. In the cosmic rhythm this represents a field turning within itself, energy looping without ascent. When Heliopolitan theology fixed the Ennead as the ultimate order, Egypt’s once-fluid cosmology began to solidify. Dogma replaced discovery; priestly hierarchy replaced living balance. The state, like the number, entered recursion.
Late Old-Kingdom bureaucracy, the rigidity of funerary cults, and the economic grip of temples all reveal a civilisation circling its own perfection. The dynamic 1-to-8 expansion had become a closed system.
Egypt’s political stasis was thus numerical fate made manifest. To pass beyond the archetype of nine is to re-enter unity at ten, and thence to eleven – the renewal of duality at a higher turn of the spiral. Without that crossing, even a civilisation devoted to Ma’at can mistake completion for fulfilment and coherence for life.
10. Conclusion – The Microcosm of Eternity
Egypt’s history is the geometry of the universe written in stone. Its theology grew exactly as the Tetractys unfolds: unity dividing, duality expanding, multiplicity returning to unity. When it reached nine it paused – and in that pause lay both perfection and peril. The same fate later befell religions that inherited its framework yet halted the cycle at dogmatic completion.
To cross from nine to ten is to restore motion; to move from ten to eleven is to begin a new octave of creation. Egypt teaches that Ma’at is not stasis but rhythm, the continual re-balancing of forces around a living axis. The civilisation that most faithfully mirrored eternity also revealed its law: all forms, even divine, must renew or decay. In Egypt the universe studied itself, and through Egypt eternity learned the cost of standing still.
What later philosophers called the Tetractys was already implicit in this understanding. The sacred Decad, ten points arranged in four ascending rows, contains within itself the pattern of totality: unity unfolding, duality dividing, triad mediating, and quaternity completing. The Pythagoreans perceived that this simple triangular array models every order of existence. Its geometry describes number, proportion, and harmonic vibration; its mathematics expresses the relationships of wave and frequency that underlie the harmony of the spheres; and each number functions as an archetype, a quality of being as well as a quantity. In this sense the Tetractys is not merely a diagram of mathematics but a complete cosmological statement, a true theory of everything encoded in number and realised first in the living geometry of Egypt.
Coda – Number as the Architecture of Consciousness
In the Egyptian view, number was not abstraction but existence measured. Each value expressed a stage in the unfolding of Ma’at, and every stage could be seen equally in the cosmos, in the body, and in the mind. The numerical sequence from zero to ten was the universe thinking itself through matter.
This understanding passed into Greek culture, where the philosophical schools developed and refined it within their own academic traditions. The Pythagoreans treated number as the living structure of reality rather than a mere tool of calculation. For them, as for the priests of Egypt, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy were one science, the study of proportion and relationship. Within this system each number held its own archetype: a symbolic and creative principle that defined a quality of existence as well as a quantity. One signified unity, two polarity, three relationship, four structure, and so on, each value unfolding the rhythm of Ma’at through the language of mathematics.
One is totality, the fullness of being. It is also zero, the void that holds all potential. In modern mathematics Euler formalised this same relationship: in his theorem the exponential curve passes smoothly through zero to one, describing the transition from pure potential to manifest unity. Ptah and Atum mirror that process-Ptah the latent field, Atum its emergence. One is therefore both presence and absence, the unseen circle that contains the point.
Two arises as polarity, the first differentiation of consciousness into observer and observed, body and mind. In psychological terms it is the polarity of id and ego, two energies inhabiting one organism. The human brain repeats the pattern: left and right hemispheres, logic and imagination, joined at the corpus callosum-the physical X-axis of thought. What the Egyptians saw in nature, the nervous system repeats in miniature: the dual currents of Ma’at crossing at the centre to create awareness.
Three is the synthesis of that duality, the axis that unites what was divided. It is the creative act itself, the triangle of stability, the dynamic return of the two to the one through relationship. In myth it becomes the divine triad-father, mother, and child-expressing the moment when energy becomes self-aware. In physics it is the equilibrium of force, motion, and counter-force; in psychology, the reconciliation of conscious and unconscious through imagination.
Four completes the plane, the establishment of matter. It is the cube, the cardinal directions, the seasons, the stable world. When the sequence 1–4 is summed, it yields ten, the Decad-the closure of the first cycle. Euler’s factorial progression (1! 2! 3! 4!) mirrors the same law: each stage contains all that precedes it, rising to completion. The Egyptians built this principle into stone; every pyramid is a 1–2–3–4 ascension frozen in limestone.
Five stands at the centre, the bridge between zero and ten. It is the midpoint of the Decad and the hinge of the Fibonacci sequence, where growth and return become reciprocal. The number five generates the golden ratio; at the fifty-fifth iteration of the Fibonacci progression, the ratio locks precisely to Φ. The Lucas sequence-its complementary twin-converges upon the same constant from the opposite direction. Together they form a dual spiral, the two serpents of the caduceus twining around the axis of one. In Daoist and Pythagorean thought alike, this midpoint marks the threshold between unity and multiplicity: ‘From the One came Two, from Two came Three, and from Three the ten-thousand things.’ Meditation on the Tetractys was therefore meditation on creation itself, a contemplation of how potential becomes form.
Six and seven belong to organic life. Six is the number of carbon’s atomic structure-the 6-6-6 pattern of organic chemistry-demonstrating that the same ratios govern matter and mind. Seven introduces rhythm and awareness, the heptadic order of the planets and the octave of sound.
Eight is eternity, the bow fully formed, the toroidal field in perfect proportion. It is balance achieved, motion without loss-the living Ma’at of the cosmos.
But nine marks the boundary where completion can become confinement. In arithmetic it is endlessly self-referential: every multiple returns to itself. Nine lacks true polarity; it cannot be divided back to one. In nature this behaviour appears as systems that turn inward, feeding on their own pattern-recursion without renewal. Historically Egypt’s late priesthoods embodied this number: doctrine looping upon doctrine, energy trapped in repetition. In the psyche, nine is reflection without transformation-the ego circling its own image.
Only ten restores flow. It is the Decad, the full return to unity at a higher scale. Ten divides cleanly by 1, 2, 5-numbers of harmony and duality. Beyond ten lies eleven, the re-emergence of duality on a new octave, the continuation of evolution. The passage from nine to ten, and thence to eleven, is the same crossing described in the Kabbalistic tree: the current moving from Yesod through the heart of Tiphereth to the crown of light. Without that crossing, the system remains a matrix of illusion; with it, the field ascends to the next harmonic.
Each of the ten numbers of the Tetractys is thus an archetype of nature. They define not only mathematics but physics, biology, and psychology. All are one; all are ratio. Ratio is the unseen constant-the veiled Isis, the goddess concealed within form. The god, the manifested aspect, depends entirely upon her; without proportion there is no creation. The ancients knew this, and every temple, myth, and measurement is a testament to that truth: number is the language of Ma’at, the architecture of consciousness itself.
Epilogue – Myth, Math, and Ma’at
Myth and mathematics were once one science. Myth + Math = Ma’at: the unity of story and structure, symbol and proportion. To the first priest-scientists, number and narrative were twin expressions of a single perception. Geometry was theology; the gods were ratios made visible. When myth described the breath of creation or the journey of the sun, it was translating natural law into human language. Their title is retained exactly as the perfect description of both the ancient and the later academic practice - philosophy. These were the true philo-sophia - seekers of wisdom, seekers of Phi. And it was through contemplation of the Tetractys that Phi was found, the golden proportion through which unity reveals its own harmony.
When mathematics was stripped from myth, however, Myth – Math = religion. What had been observation hardened into decree. Religion is the consciousness of nine - complete yet self-enclosed, turning endlessly within its own system. It repeats itself as the number does, unable to cross the axis and rise to a higher octave. The result is dogma: a self-reinforcing pattern in which belief replaces proportion and authority supplants balance.
In this recursion, the One formless potential of Ptah became personified as a distant Father called Elohim. The sevenfold spirits inherent in the One became a plural name - the ali became Elohim. What was originally the heptadic harmony of natural forces was re-cast as a single paternal will presiding over lesser powers. The living duality of Atum became Adam and Eve, and Eve - the emblem of creative intuition - was turned into the source of sin. The feminine polarity, the principle of ratio, breath, and renewal, was suppressed. Knowledge and freedom, once attributes of the goddess, were redefined as transgression. Thus the Tetractys of nature was broken: the toroidal field of balance collapsed into a single pole of patriarchal order.
Even the language of eternity was altered. The fluid name IHUH, a breath signifying eternal being and becoming, was converted into the Tetragrammaton YHWH, fixing what was meant to flow. The infinite torus of Phi became the Torah, a five-part law. It retained the Fibonacci five and its axial pivot yet confined them to one polarity. Five, the number of liberation, became a locked door. The path to Phi - the veiled goddess of proportion - was sealed.
Religion is not Philosophy, therefore. It hides the wisdom in code. It veils Phi, the goddess, within its recursive, unscientific logic. It makes everything polarised. The feminine is stripped out and reduced or demonised in the Bible; the Church used it to control the masses for aeons, while their elites remained fully aware of the original data. It was their power base - the intelligentsia and initiated elites became predators of the dumbed-down flock. The shepherds were the wolves in sheep’s clothing. The Gnostic sects perceived this was the case: that the Biblical god was a trapped, materialist, earthly manifestation - incomplete and not the entirety. The ruling elite were archons, structural gatekeepers preventing the masses from returning to natural unity with the Creator. And the Creator is goddess and god in unity, not the mere polarity of the male principle dominating the entire field.
But it can be reclaimed. Sophia remains observable when we restore our true lens and stop seeing the Bible ‘through a glass darkly’. The Bible can be a gateway to true philosophy rather than its shadow. For every shadow must have a substance to cast it. The shadow is a duality of the form, well known to the ancient Egyptians as a manifestation of the dual self - the ka or ba - always inherent, whether observed or not. Religion must therefore be read as myth and restored to nature.
When myth and number are reunited, the balance returns. Even and odd, positive and negative, masculine and feminine resume their dialogue. The Tetractys stands whole again: unity, duality, trinity, and quaternity revolving in perpetual renewal. Religion, by contrast, is man’s folly - a misreading of his own symbols, not nature’s flaw. The universe remains Ma’at: living proportion, self-renewing balance. To perceive it clearly is to restore the equation the ancients always knew to be true:
Myth + Math = Ma’at.
