‘Vitruvian Man’

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Many, if not all, geometric forms can be used as templum, and the diagrammatic glyphs of most spiritual systems can be mapped on to the form of the human body after a three-fold pattern.

Despite exoteric claims to the contrary, amongst other things, Vitruvian Man illustrates the correspondence between human physiology and the pentagram, along with the three-fold nature of the human soul.

Movement in the lower torso and legs.

Emotion in the upper torso and arms.

Intellect in the head.

The Christian Trinity was originally a Gnostic Concept based on the ‘Theosophical Reduction’ of the first ten numbers, or Decad. In this system, the number five, which, as we have seen above, is reputedly the number of mankind, also ‘reduces’ to three but after a different fashion, and can thus be seen to explain the biblical mystery of, ‘man made in the image of god’.

The Old Irish Brehon laws were expressed in a triadic form and the Welsh Bards also told the history of Britain in this three-fold way. This was partly to aid memory which, it seems, must also operate via a linked system of three.

In a number of spiritual-traditions holding the central line of three marks the ‘golden mean’ or ‘true path’ giving rise to notions of being centred and/or balanced.

In the east we have the chakras, and in the west the middle pillar of the kabbalistic tree-of-life.

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The tree itself appears to have been earlier than the dying/living god associated with, or affixed to, it and would originally have represented a tree-spirit. The ‘Green Man’ effigies are for this reason always bodiless.

The Gnostic, Sophia, who is a goddess of wisdom initially inhabited the earth sphere as a tree-spirit.

In Scandinavian Mythology which may be very old indeed, the cosmos is a tree, and its form represents, the branching Macrocosm, the trunk of the Mesocosm, or middle-earth, and the roots of the Microcosm below ground. Psychologically this equates with the super-conscious, conscious and subconscious states.

The ancient stone monument builders regarded wood a symbol for life, and stone a symbol of death, even though they used stone to focus, transmit and, in some cases, re-direct the natural earth energies or telluric forces, of the planet. They constantly played with these polarities in the construction of their monuments some of which utilise petrified wood to good effect. Such life/death pillars of wood-turned-stone were sometimes placed over ‘blind springs’ whose energy emanates from the ‘stones’ in a spiral form.

Between the temples-of-the-forehead lie the eyes…

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