Quote from the Author
This book has been praised more by its readers than all of my other
books. Most of my books were written first as a series of notes
for my own use. I tend to lose my notes, so books distributed
to many people are a means of being certain that my notes can be accessed
when needed. In this book are some of my favorite notes.
A large part of it was first published as articles for a magazine.
This is why it has several copyright dates (1989, 1991, 1992, and 1995).
More was added to the original
articles as well as various other chapters to act as transitional material.
I am enjoying your book, which is incredibly fascinating. It looks deeply into the fabric of reality, revealing causation itself. I especially like the exploration of music as a living magic, having power to move and change the world and souls around us. (From Jon Johnson, a modern musical genius who has made two excellent CDs and is working on a third.)
Thank you for writing! I received your books yesterday and wasted no time
delving into The Oldest Magic. I love it. (From Ryan Sullivan,
an avid and serious student of music among other things.)
When I first learned to march in military style, the training officer told us that we all must take a 30 inch stride at a rate of two every second. I didn't even think about asking why. I didn't even think about asking why when I had the opportunity later. By that time I thought I had it figured out. I thought it was because we had short people and tall people, and the pace had to be suited to everyone, which means it was actually suited to no one, but was tolerable for all.
Quite a few years ago, I read Peter Tompkins' book on the great pyramid. The book had a long appendix by Livio Catullo Stecchini on ancient measures, Stecchini told me why the stride and the pace was so in military marching. It was a tradition going back so far that no one knew when it started. But Stecchini knew why it started.
A man marching at a rate of five feet in one second covers a distance of 300 stadia in ten hours of marching (one day's march without excessive tiring). This means that an army could march one degree of latitude (600 stadia) in two days. This was very important for a general to know when it came to positioning his troops.
Here is an example of a tradition that few people understand today. It has stayed with our civilization for thousands of years and is a small clue to how people once thought of their world. Music and flutes (visible examples of wavelength) have their own tradition which are clues as to how people once thought of their world.
In this book, some of this prehistoric thinking is brought to light again, various types of folk flutes from all over the world are described, and their role as "teachers" of humankind explained.
Lew Paxton Price, February, 1992
During the many years of research required for the writing of this book, some themes became apparent that permeated nearly all of the world's ancient cultures. One was the creation myth in which the universe (or universes) was created from nothing. Inpossible? Not according to some of our best modern cosmologists who propose that the universe, and many other as well, were created from nothing. Another is the "name" or symbol for the creator which translates into English as "The Eternal". Another common name for It is "the no-thing" whose symbol is zero, the circle.
Zero is the sum of all positive and negative numbers, which is to say that it is the sum of infinity, and another name for The Eternal is "The Infinite, Indivisible One". And yet, the illusory division of this One is the theme of creation, the Mother of all being merely the "female" portion of the first division of The Eternal into two parts.
Contrary to the teachings of most Christian denominations today, the name "Jehovah" composed of four Hebrew letters, was not intended to be the name for a god. The name for a god was "el" and was considered a lesser being or force of the Creator. The four letters were not to be pronounced, and they were merely a combination of the letters needed for three conjugations of the verb "to be", translating as "The Eternal". These four letters were also four numbers, as every Hebrew letter was also a number and was used in calculations as well as for writing words. And their sum was twenty-six.
These themes, common to most of ancient humanity, are mentioned in various places throughout this book, not in an attempt to proselytize or to ridicule any religion, but to point out that the old world cosmology is very similar to what we are beginning to discover and comprehend today.
There are no words in most of today's languages for many of the concepts of the past. But in this book you will be exposed to these concepts, probably for the first time. By looking at the world through the eyes of these ancient people, you will find that your own view of the world changes, becoming enriched with ideas and concepts that you did not know existed.
This information was inadvertently left out of The Oldest Magic, so it is being presented here.
The people of prehistoric times were guided by learned men who studied the heavens by means of observatories such as Stonehenge. They could make maps of the solar system as seen from a distant point north of the earth's orbit. Upon such maps, the positions of the celestial bodies orbiting the sun could be shown at any given point in time.
They discovered in that Earth and Venus orbited the sun. They also discovered how to tell when all three bodies were aligned (Earth, Venus, and the sun). Today this is called a conjunction of Earth and Venus. They found that a line drawn from one such conjunction to the next was one line of a pentagram. Five such lines made a complete pentagram. If the first conjunction is shown to be on the upper left of the map, the second will be on the upper right. A line drawn from left to right is the same way children are taught to begin to draw a five-pointed star today. The next line (the one from the second conjunction to the third) is from upper right to the lower left. This is followed by a third line from the lower left to the top, a fourth line from the top to the lower right, and a final line from the lower right to the upper left - just like you learned to make a star when you were a child.
The total time for the completed pentagram as described by these conjunctions is, on average, approximately two days short of eight years. The number eight is the number of the verb "to love" (or to attract) in Hebrew. The book describes more of the significance of the number eight and the pentagram.
What are musical scales and modes and how did they evolve?
What was the role of the flute in the evolution of music theory?
What flutes exist in various parts of the world and how are the constructed?
How does music affect the human brain?
What was the connection between the ancient Judean (Jewish) religion, ancient astrology, the pentagram, and music?
What is the secret behind the Fahrenheit scale of temperature?
What major organs of the human body respond to music and why does this affect us?
How do our systems of weights and measures relate to music?
How old is the musical scale?
Why are colors and musical sounds related?
What universal constants were known to the ancients that are not known by modern teachers and are not taught in modern schools?
In what ways did the ancients use math not known by modern teachers and not taught in modern schools?