The Holy Place by Henry Lincoln

Author:Henry Lincoln [Lincoln, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781611454642
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2016-02-14T11:25:55.998051+00:00

The ‘fixing of a lawful rood’ from a woodcut in Jakob Kobel’s Géométrie (1531).

In 1791, the French National Assembly decided to adopt the metric system in an attempt to fix, once and for all, a verifiable measure which could be independently checked against a natural and unchanging ‘standard’. The expertise then existed to make this possible, and so the metre was defined as one ten-millionth of a quadrant of the earth’s surface; that is, the distance from the pole to the equator. This measure, verifiable and checkable on the earth’s surface, was apparently the first system to be fixed in this way. Other measures, such as the English mile or furlong, pole or yard, were not so fixed. We believe they were defined in a purely arbitrary fashion.

My work on the Temple of Rennes-le-Château, however, seems to leave no doubt that the apparently arbitrary English measure (as Boudet has hinted) stems from a standard unit fixed in the remote past. Moreover, that unit seems to relate directly to the earth’s surface, PRECISELY as does the metre. This, of course, implies that, at some early date, the devisers of the standard unit were able to measure the earth with accuracy. Maybe it is not surprising that no hint of such a contention has ever been heard by the public from any expert in the field, yet this very idea has been lurking in the scholarly literature for decades.

In his book Historical Metrology, published in 1953, A. E. Berriman ends his Preface by saying: ‘… the earliest mathematical texts … should be studied … to sharpen opinion on the right answer to a particular question: Was the Earth measured in remote antiquity?’ Berriman goes on to quote many examples of ancient measures which seem to relate to precise divisions of the earth’s surface. ‘The English acre’, he tells us, ‘is the most intriguing of ancient measures because it is virtually equal to a hypothetical geodetic acre defined as one-myriad-millionth of the square on the terrestrial radius: if both acres are expressed as squares the difference between the lengths of their sides is less than 1 part in 1,200. The geodetic acre can also be defined as measuring one myriad square cubits in terms of a hypothetical cubit equal to one-ten-millionth of the terrestrial radius, and … its former existence is as plausible (or as incredible) as a cubit derived from the sexagesimal division of the Earth’s circumference.’

When Berriman says that such a suggestion is either ‘plausible’ or ‘incredible’, he seems to be saying with admirable caution: ‘Please don’t expect me to make the decision. Here are the facts. Let somebody else risk having the egg slapped into his face!’ As a layman and non-expert, I have no need to share his timidity. His evidence seems to me to be quite convincing. But Rennes-le-Château had led me to the conclusion long before I knew of Berriman’s work.

When I became convinced that the mile measure was certainly being used in the layout of the churches in the Rennes-le-Château area, I was faced with an apparent anomaly.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.