Okay - I confess, I visited the Daily Grail a few days ago, much sooner than my scheduled bi-monthly visit. I found this beauty of a crop circle - I took it as a sign from the Chess Goddess that She approved my action:) Here is the article from Harold Sun (Australia):
July 03, 2007 12:00am
CROP circles have achieved a new level of sophistication – they've gone 3-D.
CROP circles have achieved a new level of sophistication – they've gone 3-D.
The latest one, created in a wheat field at Silbury Hill, Wiltshire, southern England, shows a floor of checkered tiles stretching down a long, high-ceilinged corridor with doors leading off each side.
The three-dimensional design, 60m in diameter, is just metres from the 5000-year-old West Kennet Long Barrow burial grounds, one of the largest and most impressive Neolithic graves in Britain.
The latest design was photographed by Steve Alexander who, with his wife Karen, has been researching crop circles for more than 15 years.
"It's one of the most architectural designs we have seen, rather than purely geometric," Karen said.
"In traditional geometry a square represents material reality and a circle the divine or heavenly realm."
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In Chinese symbolism, the turtle/tortoise is one of the four sacred animals marking out the heavens (along with the dragon (or serpent), phoenix and chimera (or tiger)). The carpace (shell) of the turtle came to symbolize the "round" heavens (the top of the shell) and the "flat" plain of the earth created by the four cardinal directions, which was the bottom, flat part of the shell.
Chinese legend says that it was on the back of a turtle that the "mythical" Emperor Yu discovered the 3x3 Lo Shu magic square, perhaps the oldest magic square, in approximately 2100 BCE. From the markings on the back of the turtle the square was made consisting of the numbers 1 through 9 that totalled on the verticals, horizontals, and both diagonals to 15:
4 9 2
3 5 7
8 1 6
It was that perfect magic square that gave rise to the complicated system of divination called the I Ching, whose ba gua (eight trigrams) was based on the numbers of the Lo Shu magic square. The I Ching is based on a square of 64 (8x8).
Numerical relationships that were either independently discovered by Pythagoras many many centuries later or filtered down to him through much cross-cultural contact of learned Buddhist missionaries travelling along the Silk Road from China into India, etc. are 1, 4, 9, and 16 (see the graphic here under "page 117") - The Pythagorean "square numbers."
It's no accident that one gets an eight point star (the ancient symbol for the goddesses Inanna and Ishtar, among others, and the basis of a much later Islamic tile pattern) by rotating a square 45 degrees once upon itself. And it's no accident that the "palace" marked out on the xiang qi board is made up of 9 points - or four-four sided squares, two each stacked on top of each other. And it's no accident that in ancient Egypt, there were two sets of primieval gods and goddesses - the "Ogdoad," eight gods and goddesses led by Thoth in Hermopolis, and the "Ennead," eight gods and goddesses plus the creator god Atum originally centered in Heliopolis.
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