Cardinal Alignments and the Golden Section: Principles of Ancient Cosmography and Design

Were the dimensions of the Earth known in northern Europe already before 2000 BC? Completely new evidence is disclosed in this book of an accurately laid out meridian along which Late Neolithic gallery-graves were systematically aligned. This enterprise involved what appears to be accurate measurements of the polar circumference and the division of distances in the golden section. Remarkably, this layout is repeated several hundred years later with Iron Age monuments. And in the 12th Century the same meridian is brought into focus again through conspicuous locations of medieval churches, some of them round. Were these round churches connected to the Order of the Temple? And what role did the Cistercian Order play in linking up with an ancient tradition involving King Solomon’s Temple and the Middle East as well as what seems to have been similarly preserved in illiterate Europe? Although breathtaking in many ways, this is not fiction but a serious academic work, researched over many years and written by Leif Sahlqvist with a Ph. D. in Archaeology from Uppsala University, Sweden, and additional degrees in Modern Languages, Geography, Art and Ancient History. The author’s main thesis is the existence of a geometrical and cosmographical tradition in ancient, illiterate Europe, vigorously pursued into the Middle Ages. The book includes significant chapters on Cistercian architecture and cosmography, medieval art and ironwork, the Temple Churches in London and Paris, the Bronze Age Nebra Disk from Germany (below) and landscape geometry around the Devil’s Rock in southern Austria. Cardinal alignments – north/south, east/west – and a fourfold division of space is one of two tracks followed from ancient times into the Middle Ages. The golden section and pentagonal geometry is the other. These fourfold and fivefold perspectives are traced in the dynamic symmetry of Bronze Age ceremonial axes as well as in the ground plan design of King Solomon’s Temple but also – and not least – in newly discovered cosmography displayed in ritual landscapes.