from the WEST 7: Egypt Esoteric 3

There is an old saying, “He (or she) who seeks shall find.” So what did Schwaller de Lubicz find from all this measuring? He found Phi. Phi (pronounced to rhyme with “eye”) is a number, but not just any number – it is the number of creation.

If you are anything like me, you may recall your first introduction to the mysteries of circles, where the teacher drew a circle on the board, showed the radius (r) and the circumference (c) and proudly proclaimed, as if you were being initiated into a profound secret that

c = 2πr

π or pi (also pronounced to rhyme with “eye”) turned out to be a very special number. It was equal to 3.14159… with the three dots indicating that you could go on forever and never find an ending. It was supposed to have been discovered by the ancient Greeks, but modern research has shown that much earlier civilisations (like the Egyptians and Babylonians) knew about pi well before the Greeks. If we are going to deal with circles, or circular shapes, then we need pi. This means that if you want to travel into space and orbit the earth, you are going to have to make use of this particular set of digits.

Phi also has a Greek symbol,φ. Like pi, phi is a number: 1.61803… The three dots mean there is no end to the stream of decimals. Ever. The Greeks by the way had a profound hatred for such numbers. They thought they were irrational, and so they christened the whole class of such numbers, ‘the irrationals’. 

So what is so special about phi? It turns out that phi is found everywhere – in the spiralling of sunflower seeds, in the way leaves grow to catch maximum sunlight, in the breeding of rabbits, in the shells of sea creatures – even in the human body.

Actually the idea of phi is very simple. Take a line:

According to Euclid, writing about 300 BC:

A straight line is said to have been cut in extreme and mean ratio when, as the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the greater to the lesser.

We would say simply that if the ratio of the length of AC to that of CB is the same as the ratio of AB to AC, then the line has been cut in “extreme and mean ratio”, or in today’s language, a ‘Golden Ratio.’ This Golden Ratio when we calculate it, comes to 1.618… In other words, phi.

There is more – much more! If we extend the line divided into a golden ratio (phi) into a rectangle, we get – a Golden Rectangle. The ratio of the short side to the long side is 1:1.618 - of course, that’s what makes it “golden”.

What do you think of this rectangle? Do you think it is particularly beautiful? Let’s put it amongst a few other rectangles:

I bet you can pick out the Golden Rectangle almost immediately. There is just something about the proportions of the golden ratio which appeals to our sense of beauty.

For some years I used to teach classes in mathematics. Each year I would present the whole class with a sheet covered with rectangles, and ask them to select the one they thought was most beautiful. Almost all the students chose the golden rectangle.

But, as the ad says, there’s more. If we keep creating golden rectangles by subdividing the original one, we create a spiral:

Golden spirals (and golden rectangles) are found everywhere. Artists and architects love them - and so does the natural world.