HEART 2 HEART Interview Bethe Hagens with Raphiem

In my early teens when i began researching and reading up on earth-grids, no matter what article or book one read, the names William Becker and Bethe Hagens were synonymous with the Planetary Grid and the likes.

Bethe did not know me from a bar of soap but was still kind enough to give me her time from her busy schedule. Since then (2001) we have become good friends and to this day Bethe conitnues to assist and help further my knowledge in areas such as the planetary grid, anthropology and the art of consciousness.

Here is Part One of the interview. There are more questions to be raised in part 2.

Enjoy
Raphiem

Raphiem: for those perhaps, who have not come across your work, if you would tell us a little about your early background and how you got involved or began in gridwork and most of all why? How'd do go from Anthropology to Planetary Grids? Is there a connection?

Bethe:  It all started in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected and proceeded to totally destroy the environmental agenda that had gotten underway in the mid 70s. I was teaching environmental design at Governors State, an experimental state university in Illinois. My background is cultural anthropology. I have a PhD from the University of Chicago (an extremely traditional graduate school), but this first job gave me the latitude to teach and do research on virtually anything. I was also into the Grateful Dead, so my house and lifestyle were pretty alternative. In fact, I had a copy of the 1975 edition of New Age Journal in which Chris Bird's original article on the grid was published because there was a great interview with Jerry Garcia .

In the summer of 1979, a bunch of us took the southside roof off my house and turned the place into a solar greenhouse. Bill Becker was one of the crew. Later on, he and I got together. He was teaching industrial design at the University of Illinois, and I swear he is one of those people Plato talked about who have the natural gift of geometry. He taught me how to see. We stayed together for 13 years, and during that time I went for the ride of my life into metaphysics, structures, and earth energies. Governors State shut down all its environmental programs in 1981. I was transferred to Political Studies and was told to "teach Hotentot anthropology"--which, of course, I had no intention of doing. I wanted to keep on the grassroots political agenda. And, to be brutally honest, I felt unprepared to talk about "world cultures" when, daily, the names of countries and ethnic groups were changing and the interpretations of their histories were shifting. More to the point, I panicked. Bill came home from work one night with a copy of Moira Timm's original Prophecies and Predictions, and was lying in bed reading it. I'll never forget him saying, "Look, babe, somebody has put one of Bucky's domes on the earth." He was always seeing structures, and I was always seeing meanings. Which led later to huge fights and the breakup of our marriage. But together, we saw implications. Anyway, the grid made immediate, absolute sense to me. I would simply shift my focus from the sun and solar energy. . .to the earth, and earth energy. I had been leaving out half the equation, and here was a chance to catch up. The grid intersections were all numbered, so I could organize my files around numbers and not worry about getting names wrong. I could teach geometry and geography and metaphysics and harmonics and politics all through one exploratory metaphor. What it did was got me--and my students--to take another look, another listen, at just about everything.

Raphiem: Bethe, define what "earth grid" or "planetary grid" means to you? as when mentioning "earth grid" there are many notions thrown around, ranging from geophysicists to newage energy workers.

Bethe:  I've written about this so much, what do I REALLY think it is? Well, I think it is the essence of incarnation in our part of the universe. Some part of me even imagines it as the body of Gaia/Jesus. Let me backtrace. I was very, very influenced by Plato's Timaeus (essential geometry); Buckminster Fuller's Synergetics (the energetic dynamics of spherical bodies); and Olive Whicher's The Plant Between Sun and Earth (she explained the concept of planes in a way I can understand).

Personally, I think "Plato" was either an editor or an encyclopedia. "Plato" means "plane", and if only metaphorically the texts must refer to earth's plane of orbit around the sun--and to all the other bodies and planes that intersect/interact with ours. Bill and I were both convinced that Plato did not draw nor did he understand geometry very well. He seemed to us to be struggling to describe three-dimensional objects that he had heard about but (possibly) had not seen. Still, it is from him that we have the first Western writing on the perfect solids. He also introduces the idea that there is a vibrating Mother essence that is spherical and composed of 120 identical right triangles. The only possible figure that this can be is the hexakis icosahedron.

This figure--which Bill and I used as the planetary grid--can be constructed with 15 great circles. A great circle is an equator. It divides a sphere in half. It is possible to symmetrically place 15 great circles to make all the lines of the planetary grid that Chris Bird first introduced back in the early 70s. (In fact, the Brule Sioux creation myth describes Earth as having been created of 15 hoops!)

Anyway, where those hoops or great circles cross, and they cross 62 times, you have the vertices known as planetary grid intersections. You can create any one of the 5 platonic solids (and their close cousins the rhombic triacontahedron and rhombic dodecahedron) by connecting appropriate vertices. In other words, this 62 point geometry is connective and transformable. It is used to describe the structure of atomic matter, and it appears that it is the mechanism for molecular bonding and transmutation. It applies, theoretically, at all scales of matter. It is a way to understand. A "mnemonic" or memory-aiding device. In Greek mythology, Mnemosyne (Goddess of Memory) is the daughter of Gaia (Goddess of Earth).

I see the great circles as grid lines in a mapping system, but I do not think of them as surface phenomena. I see each circle as marking the cleavage (the plane) between halves of the sphere--and imagine the tension of clinging and pulling apart, like in cell division. 15 infinite planes of cleavage create what I'd call the planetary grid. This is actually all described in Genesis and it's always been easier for me to think about the grid in the realm of myth. Because this geometry can be, and has been, conceptualized as the energetic framework for every "thing", from molecule to virus to planet, it is a sacred scientific myth. We say that matter "clings" to this structure. It makes a close approximation, anyway. At the same time, of course, we know matter is energy, infinite planes of cleavage energy. At this point, I spin off into the technical impossibilities of the whole thing. To be honest, "grid" probably isn't the best word for what's going on.

Even our best instrumentation does not allow us to actually see atoms or viruses; we project what we believe is going there, and geometry is as good a blueprint as we have come up with. It works for us. It's the mnemonic of choice that carbon-based intelligence gravitates toward. It makes sense to me that the nearly spherical earth would approximate Plato's perfect Mother energy structure, and so it doesn't surprise me that the midAtlantic ridge would very closely follow some of the cleavages. If the cleavages/planes have a real energetic existence, it makes sense that we were able to confirm so many of the findings of the original Russian researchers Goncharov, Makarov, and Morozov . The fact that so many archaeological sites line up with ALL of the different theories of earth grids (e.g. Carl Munck's and Peter Champoux's are quite different from ours) suggests to me that humans have used geometry to "see" for, apparently, many thousands of years. The energy of human geometric visualization and thought may even be the "ethics" that have shaped the earth's body for good or bad. As I said, this moves right into the mythological. I have a hard time with Christian theology, but I think Gaia and Christ and Giza and crystal are somewhere buried beneath it all.

Raphiem: From all your research and discoveries, does your grid model have a centre? if so, what is that centre, if not the Giza pyramid?

Bethe:  We began with the Russian model of the planetary grid that Chris Bird brought to the US in l974. This was the so-called "icosa-dodecahedron" model. Bill and I learned from one of our Lithuanian immigrant neighbors in Chicago that the Russians teach geometry as "earth-mapping", that's the rough translation of their term. From earliest grades, kids are taught to put different geometries on the earth. It's a very old tradition, and we later found pieces of the planetary grid in the diCanestris map of 1335-1337. That map has Giza at its center.

Chris was interested in explaining the modern resurrection of icosa-dodec grid geometry. He thought the Russians had aligned two vertices (corners) of the icosahedron with the geographic north and south poles, and then more or less aligned the other ten corners with the "ten vile vortices" (e.g. Bermuda Triangle, Devil's Triangle) that Ivan Sanderson identified. Geometrically, the icosahedron and dodecahedron are "perfect duals". The dodec has 12 faces, 20 corners. The icos has 20 corners, 12 faces. So, if one were etherically merged with the other, the corners of each figure would fall exactly at the centers of the faces of the other. All of the corners of both figures would fall at the surface of a sphere enclosing them. (I feel about as tongue tied as Plato!) The edge crossings of the two figures (30) and corners (12 + 20) create the 62 intersections of Plato's vibrating mother sphere. The Russians claimed that Giza fell at an edge crossing, and they identified all kind of biological and archaeological patterns that seemed to follow the edges of the "crystal" or occured at intersections or vertices.

Bill was the one to say that the model was structurally incomplete. If you think of the Russian grid as a geodesic dome structure, it is missing some struts. Bucky Fuller was one of Bill's friends and mentors, and he showed me old pictures of a huge travelling earth model that Bucky had built using the hexakis icosahedron structure. The missing struts were essentially the hypotenuses of the 120 "basic triangles" of Plato's mother sphere. And those hypotenuses, by themselves, create a 30-faced figure known as the rhombic triacontahedron. We thought we had stumbled onto the secret of the universe when we saw it, for it started to pop up everywhere we looked.

There are ancient, ancient models of this figure from the bronze age, and it is described in a lot of mystic literature (as well as in Kepler). The week we published our first article on it, quasicrystals were announced on the cover of Science News. At the time, five-fold symmetry was a geometry that was not supposed to occur in nature, and yet there it was. This was also about the same time that fullerenes, now known to be ubiquitous, were just being discovered. Along with the rhombic dodecahedron, the triacontahedron creates the heart of transformative geometry. But that is another story.

The missing links of the triacontahedron turned the grid model into a structural geodesic--all of the grid "lines" connected to form the 15 great circles. Fuller claimed he had photographed this pattern on the surface of a balloon, and that planar energetic tensions will manifest at the surface of a sphere as great circles. Bill said that Fuller had believed there must be a geometric pattern to earth, but he was more interested in creating his icosa-based Dymaxion "island earth/one ocean" map--not aligning geometry to topography.

http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/bucky.html

We created the EarthStar map based on the triacontahedron, which was actually an even more accurate projection than the icos, but we kept the familiar equator-based view and sacrified the continental integrity Fuller achieved.

Around 1984, one of the great circles seemed to just shine out above all the others. It connects the north and south poles and runs through Giza (the intersection the Russians labeled #1).

The ozone hole had just been discovered over Antarctica (#62).

The Chernobyl nuclear plant failed so disastrously (#2).

Famine, war, and an epic locust plague hit southern Sudan (#21).

The political situation in South Africa reached a crisis point, and Great Zimbabwe started to reemerge as a cultural political symbol (#41).

The Valdez oil spill poisoned the Alaska coast (#7). I believe a natural whale refuge was discovered just south of the Atlantic Indian Ridge (#51).

All of these intersections were on the same great circle, which we started to call the "orienting ring." The more I looked at the grid, the more things would happen on this circle. It was kind of spooky. I had all my anthropology students carrying globes, taping grid lines on them, andlooking for grid phenomena. (And there were a lot of students--this was a required liberal arts course at Governors State, and I taught it every semester from 1982 until I left in 1992.) We all started seeing things. It was as if our interests, our political consciousness, our fantasies were the material coalescing around the whole grid structure and particularly the orienting ring.

So, at that time, the ring was "the center" you were asking about. I probably would have said, then, that Giza was "the" center. But that would have been because I was so incredibly fascinated by the pyramids and the stars and E*G*Y*P*T. You know? Today, I would probably say it was someplace else, maybe Australia. I really believe the grid is a very personal thing. A spiritual thing.

I do want to say that I had the incredible good fortune to connect up with Valery Makarov's son, Denis , and he invited me to visit Moscow and meet his father. I spend about a week with them in 1994, and though I didn't speak Russian and he didn't speak English, we drank a lot of vodka together and hugged and shared as much as we could with models and what Denis was able to translate. I hadn't realized what a technical language is needed to speak about the grid in Russian, but it just amazed me to see the models Valery had made that looked so much like the ones Bill and I had constructed.

Also, I learned that Makarov met Goncharov (who, he says, was the real theorist) in a very chance encounter on a train trip, one of those fated kind of situations you know you can't walk away from. And also, I learned that we did not have quite the correct understanding of their original model. They believed that it is the dodecahedron--the figure that Plato understood as representing "aether"--that is the primary "center" of the grid. They first aligned the sides of the dodec with the mid-Atlantic ridge, and that's how they set the geometry on the earth. They added the icosahedron (to which Plato attributed the esoteric meaning of "water") later, with the thinking that aether and water create life. Because Valery is an electrical engineer, I believe he thinks in terms of the crystalline properties of the grid rather than the geodesic electromagnetics that so interested Fuller.

Raphiem : To your knowledge, is the Earth/Planetary Grid moving/shifting? If so, this would render alot of maths-grid workers, such as Cathie, Munck/Morton etc (their calculations based on the grid) a lot of headaches, as what may appear to be harmonic or relational is no longer.

Bethe:  I used to have a very pat answer for this. I was over thirty, and it was obvious to me that my own crust was shifting. It was equally obvious that I was still standing on my feet, and my head was on top, and--well--I thought the earth, Gaia, must be pretty much the same as me. Etheric skeleton still vibrant and intact, holding the skin and organs more or less in place, despite surface wrinkles and minor landslides. I've always taken for granted that the chakras and integrity of Gaia were fixed, for as long as Earth is alive.

Then I began to imagine the crust as being like the peel of an orange. It could detach from the core and slide around. This still makes a lot of sense to me, and could explain different grids as surface manifestations reminiscent of different periods in planetary history.

Right now I'm thinking of the core, the etheric mother sphere of 120 identical triangles, as stable. As the crust slides, it eventually locks back on to the core. Some residue of affinity must exist between the triangles of the core and the grid triangles of the crust. Each corner of the "basic triangle" has fairly specific characteristics. The sharp corner, for example, is almost always associated with ocean and with odd electromagnetic effects. The right-angle corner often gives rise to knowledge-rich civilizations. The other corner is usually abundant in minerals and resources. With a crust shift, I'd bet that all three types of corners would realign with similar corners of the core, just different ones. This is the only way that I can explain to myself the remarkable consistency of phenomena over huge periods of time--historic and geologic--that we found in the three types of corners.

In the last few years, a theory of an iron crystalline core for earth has been proposed. And even more recently, imaging of the flows of energy at the core of the planet reveal a figure that looks remarkably like one of the Paleolithic Venus figurines. Maybe the iron core and the pattern of flow are fixed, in the way that our bone skeleton maintains its integrity. But there are so many competing geophysical theories these days. How much water is being brought daily to the planet by comet impacts? Is the earth actually expanding and growing larger in interaction with the sun? Is continental drift a process or a cataclysmic event? Maybe all are correct.

I've never used instrumentation to map earth energies. To be honest, I don't even know that I can feel them--but the summer of 1986, Bill and I decided we had to road test our Fuller-inspired theory. We had gotten to the point where I had put the UVG into a Rand McNally Road Atlas. "UVG" is a name we made up one morning at breakfast, when we couldn't think of anything else that adequately described what we were talking about. It stands for Universal Vector Geometry.

It was an expansion of the original 15 grid rings to 121, following Fuller's icosahedral great set model. We thought we had evidence from Europe, especially the St. Michael's ley, that this expansion might extend the capabilities of the planetary grid as a predictive system. Anyway, we drove and camped along almost 9,000 miles of UVG lines in the United States. One of our big fights started at a grid intersection in Hot Springs, Arkansas, "Home of the World's Largest Trout."

It escalated into a major brawl at the intersection in Pecos, Texas, "Home of the World Famous Pecos Cantaloupe, Eaten for Breakfast Every Day by President Ronald Reagan." Bill said that I absolutely could not publish those things as grid phenomena, and I refused to back down. They were "precisely" what I meant by grid energy. I was actually hoping to be abducted by aliens. So many UFO sitings were made on UVG lines, I figured we would finally make contact. I was wrong. I think.

My point is that we found all kind of incredible things on the US UVG lines to support our not always compatible concepts of the grid. . .archaeological sites, dinosaur bones, biological oddities, natural parks, ancient waterworks, lake monsters. Carl Munck and Michael Morton have taken their vision of grids based on ancient coordinates to a place that is absolutely dazzling to me in its complexity and cohesion. In fact, they synthesize decimals in much the same way that chaos mathematicians have done.

The purpose is to create a clear, understandable image. They are doing art science. Human minds, millions of them, may have thought this way. All the grids feel to me like archetypes from the collective unconscious. Peter Russell , speaking at the recent Science and Consciousness conference in New Mexico, said as much in his keynote address. "The world is in you, not you are in the world. Matter is derived from mind, not the other way around. We are not beings who are conscious, we are consciousness itself, another word for divine essence." (Thanks to Catherine Lowther for telling me about his speech.)

I have no doubts that the cleavages of the great circles of the UVG are intelligent structural energy that manifests in the physical, observable realm. I would say the same for Bruce Cathie's grid which is based on the cubeoctahedron. While not the same as ours, it is compatible within the mother sphere framework. So, it would create still another set of cleavage manifestations. Why wouldn't intelligent civilizations, on or off planet, be drawn to these energies, like ants to electric wires? And why wouldn't they move, if prophecy called for a shift in power and politics?

I constantly wonder at the role of astrology and priesthoods in all of this. Earth's axis of rotation shifts one degree every 72 years, and completes one turn around its gyroscopic path of precession over the course of 25,920 years. Over that time, the north and south poles move alternately toward and then away from the center of the galaxy. This must have had an effect on our planet, pulling and stretching the core and crust. Zodiacs are probably a remnant of ancient knowledge about how precession affected the life of Earth/Gaia. Gaia--Earth--is the root of the word geometry. The Maya, I believe, took the art out of the process and turned it into a tyranny, an obsession with ego and power. For our small group of grid researchers here in New England ( Peter Champoux and Susan Franklin Wilson, Henry Maclean, Kay Whitefield, Marty Cain, Greg Barriere , and myself), this is THE question. How do we get ego out of the way and live this geometry responsibly?

Raphiem : As you've said it's all about patterns and human nature to seek patterns. But what do you think came first, the pattern or the desire to find and see patterns all around us?

Bethe:  It's interesting to me that a question very like this one is raging in creation studies and cosmology in the form of debate about the "anthropic principle". The popular writing on the topic began about 1986 with a highly controversial book by John D Barrow and Frank J Tipler , The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. It's worth typing "anthropic principle" into a search engine and doing some quick reading. Hugh Ross, reasons.org/explore/publications/facts-for-faith/anthropic-principle-a-precise-plan-for-humanity, who takes the creationist side, puts it like this:

I find the conversation absolutely fascinating because it is so inherently mythological. I believe both sides are correct: "coincidence" is the result of recollection, or going back into the past. But I want to stick with your question right now. When I was working strictly with the planetary grid, I totally accepted "carbon-based" geometry as the nature of structure. As Reality.

I always work with models, physical and theoretical. Bill gave me a celestial sphere for my birthday one year, a beautiful turquoisey cobalt blue, and even though I had no idea what it was or how to use it, I liked the color so much that I kept it on a shelf over my desk. It was exactly the same diameter as my gridded earth globe, which I kept right next to it. Now I can't look at the stars without seeing squares, triangles, and pentagons--and thinking that there must be meaning hidden there. Bill, however, takes the zen Buddhist approach: give somebody a stucco wall (or a NASA photograph of Mars) to meditate upon, and they will find every geometric figure and the Mona Lisa as well. Anyway, one night late I was staring into the blue of my celestial sphere, trying to get clear about something I was writing, and a three-dimensional cube popped out at me. It looked as if Orion were inside. That did it. I start following my nose in much the same way I had when I first saw the planetary grid.

You have to understand that I knew nothing about astronomy at the time. In much the same way that the "orienting ring" seemed to activate as we studied it, my celestial sphere became geometric. I found an orienting ring in the sky that ran through the north and south ecliptic poles, and through the three most important stars of ancient mythology: Sirius, Canopus, and Vega. I marked it with graphic-tape. It became immediately obvious that if I added the other 14 great circles, one of them would align exactly with the plane of the Milky Way. The "equator" of this sky grid is the ecliptic--earth's path of orbit around the Sun. As an infinite plane, the ecliptic extends out almost exactly through the galactic center. This is, I think, an example of the kind of observation that might support the anthropic principle. What is so odd, though, is that celestial sphere has no reality. It is what we see from Earth, when we look into the sky. The "heavenly sphere." A celestial sphere is totally a fantasy model, based on the idea that we could somehow get "above" this sphere and look down on it. And yet the sphere "appears" from Earth to be patterned on carbon-based geometry. It felt like a miracle to me to be in our solar system, on our planet, where these "coincidences" could be seen. All my research of the past nine years has been to try to show that this geometric sky model was used as a predictive system by civilizations throughout the world as far back as we can go. I believe it is the basis of the calendric zodiacs.

Raphiem : Bethe, have you found any direct relationships with the grid/nodes and sound/music ?

Bethe : Now you've asked me the question, and it will be the most difficult one for me to answer. I'll start with Hermes, the trickster god in Greek mythology. He's a traveler, a musician, a healer, a hermaphrodite, and a consummate liar. He is the grid. Hermes Trismegistus. Hermes the Thrice Great. Hermes the Triangle. He makes a lyre by stringing the divine guts of one of Apollo's cows across the shell of a tortoise (read: grid lines across the body of Earth) and eventually trades it for Apollo's staff, the caduceus, which symbolizes the light and dark aspects of healing energies. And probably earth energies. There's a great website to check out on this at http://www.consultsos.com/pandora/caduceus.htm . All across ancient Europe, crossroads of minor grid and ley lines were marked for travelers with "herms", wooden or stone pillars topped by a human torso that warned of the seductive, dual energies of boundary crossings. All of this is the music of vibrating strings. Maybe lines of herms will one day be identified as frets on the landscape.

It was actually Bruce Chatwin's book Songlines that put me on to the idea that ley lines, and grid lines, might be "mapped" as melodies. He wrote that the aboriginals in Australia traditionally incorporated travel information in their melodies, and if you knew the appropriate song, you could travel from one place to the next. He didn't explain how, and so of course I ran off on my own particular tangent of how that might be accomplished. If a particular tone represented both a distance and a vector, a melody could tell you where to go. At the time, I had been looking intently at the seven ancient cities in St. John's Revelation. On a map, I did a "connect the dots" by drawing lines between the cities in the order they were mentioned in the text. What appeared was a partial, but very precise perspective rendering of a cube. I converted the distances from one city to another into frequencies, and they turned out to be whole tones of a scale. The conversion process is simple. Tones are frequencies--hertz (hz)--which are measured in cycles per second. Theoretically, a particular frequency (say, 144hz) could represent a distance (144 feet, furlongs, meters, miles. . .whatever measure you wanted to use). And vice versa. I could "play" the pilgrimage path between cities as a song.

When we were first working with the grid's 120 identical triangles, we made the assumption that Earth is a perfect "sphere". It isn't, but it is close. Bill had been trying to help me understand the "flexing" of a triangle's angles and sides as it moves from "planar" to "spherical" form. The angles of the spherical grid triangle (36-60-90), for example, add up to 186 degrees, not 180. Its sides are (proportionally) 1:1.5:1.8. Multiplying and remultiplying these side length proportions by twelve, I discovered that a sphere with the circumference of 24,768 miles would have triangles with side lengths of 1440 miles, 2160 miles, and 2592 miles . Scientists use a slightly larger measurement of 24,901.55 miles at the equator, and 24,859.82 miles through the poles--but this difference is probably negligible, since the grid and its position are etheric. The numbers 144, 216, and 2592 are excellent examples of a baffling worldwide legacy of space/time measurement "coincidences" that fuels speculation about the anthropic principle. For instance, there are 1440 minutes in a day; 2160 years in a zodiacal age; 25,920 years in one complete precession cycle . The length of the mile that we use in the United States (5280 feet, which is a multiple of 12) was set in ancient times, almost certainly by the diameter of the moon--which is 2160 miles, exactly. The moon is very often symbolically associated with water, which in turn is symbolically associated with the icosahedron. The edge of a spherical icosahedron on our planetary grid is 4320 miles, twice 2160.

In terms of the music of the grid triangle, 1440 jumped out at me because 144hz is recognized today as C. Double that figure, 288hz, is middle C on the piano. 216hz could be considered to be G, and 259.2hz could be Bb. Mike Keener in Dayton, Ohio, who is not a grid theorist but a piano tuner, has fooled around with me on this for five years now. There really are no absolute pitches. Everything is context. Pianos settle for average intonation, while for strings and winds constant adjustment to key is required. F# in the key of G will be different from the F# in the key of B major. The A that an orchestra tunes to today is sometimes as high as 445hz. Digital tuners use 440hz. During the Renaissance, A might have been as low or lower than 430hz because some instruments could not bear the tension of strings tuned to 440hz. The A below middle C could have been 216hz. This flexing metaphorically mirrors what must be going on with the grid triangles over time and precessional space. Still, the basic triangle can be "played" as a chord.

Another relationship I discovered quite by accident has to do with the Pythagorean comma, an idea Plato introduces in The Republic. The harmonics of mathematics is a little different from musical harmonics. This is why just, well-tempered, and equal temperament and other tuning systems for pianos, harpischords, and synthesizers have arisen over the years. Say you tune a mathematically perfect 5th from C to G, then from that G to D, D to A, A to E, E to B, B to F#, and on around the "circle of fifths" until you finally tune F to C at the end. The beginning C and the end C will not be the same. They will not be harmonic. The circle "expands", and the final C is higher in pitch by what is known as the Pythagorean comma. The ratio between the actual harmonic and the mathematical harmonic is 531441:524288 . This is virtually identical to the ratio between the solar year (taken as the average of the various ways this can be measured) and the "perfect" year of 360 days. All of this makes me think that music is at the base of our measurements, and that catastrophe did not bring us to a 365.24+ day year. And another reason I think this is the female lineage in Greek mythology: Gaia (of Geometry) gives birth to Mnemosyne (of Memory) who gives birth to the Muses (of Music, arts, and so forth).

Raphiem : Do you use your knowledge gained from your search of the grids, in any way in your life, perhaps musical compositions or other etc ?

You mention, Sirius, Canopus, and Vega and how you found an Orientating Ring that runs through them .... it just happens that these stars are some of the most brightest stars in our sky ... almost too co-incidental .. perhaps we map our world, the way we live, where we live, how we align ourselves, physically and mentally to the alignment of the stars .... what am i trying to ask ...? Did you ever look at or co-relate the grid with astrology ??

The reason i ask is that you touched on it earlier where you mentioned that perhaps Giza was the prime meridian once and now it could be Australia etc ... perhaps the Earth Grid/Map has a different central focal point/meridian during each age i.e. Giza = Pisces, Uluru = Aquarius etc .... any thoughts on this ?

Bethe : I was working with my celestial sphere when I first noticed the sky "orienting ring" through Sirius, Canopus, and Vega. Outside at night, Sirius and Vega were very bright and easy for me to spot, though I was too far north to see Canopus. Eudoxus, an ancient Greek astronomer, gets all excited in one of his texts because he's travelled far enough south to be able to view all three stars at the same time. My point here is that lots and lots of people in the northern and middle latitudes must have noticed this alignment. There are endless stories about these stars. The best book is Richard Hinckley Allen's Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning.

Simply in terms of setting an astronomical/astrological observational framework, the orienting ring is amazing. 90 degrees up the ring from the ecliptic is ecliptic north, the center point of the circular "path" the pole traces over its 25,920-year cycle of precession. Thuban and Polaris lie virtually on this "path" and Vega is just a few degrees below, so it's very easy to "see" the circle. You can "see" the ecliptic by connecting the Pleiades (which are easy to spot, and are just a couple of degrees north of the ecliptic) and Regulus (which is both bright and right on). Curiously, the orienting ring bisects the line between Pleiades and Regulus to create two arc segments of 45 degrees. What I'm trying to say is that these natural markers and measures could be used by anyone to make basic astro/geometric observations without instruments. It's also convenient that both sun and moon appear in the sky to be 1/2 degree in diameter!

Calendars of precession--zodiacs--divide the ecliptic into equal segments and then treat it as a playing field to view and make meaning of astronomical occurences. If Plato's mother sphere is an underlying perceptual and creative framework for zodiacs, which I think it is, then we can really begin to look at the flow of global human consciousness as a Gaia phenomenon as well as (at least partly) the anthropic principle. Independent invention and diffusion, both. These geometric calendars fascinate me because they are science and mythology. They are predictive, subject to experiment, and have deep meaning.

On the night sky/celestial sphere, the plane of the Milky Way (which is one of the 15 rings of the sky grid) crosses the ecliptic exactly 18 degrees west of the orienting ring. This is a natural marker for the Mayan and Aztec zodiacs, which have 20 segments of 18 degrees each. The 8-segment zodiacs are set from the orienting ring using the 45 degree markers of Regulus and the Pleiades. The Greek zodiac of 12 segments is aligned to the crossing point of Milky Way and ecliptic, which is the beginning of the Age of Taurus. Once you know to look for this geometry, you can align the calendars. The Dendera calendar zodiac is, I believe, an attempt to do just that. Aztec and Greek zodiacs align at what we call the beginnings of the four fixed signs. But the fun part is seeing whether the mythologies of overlapping constellations match up.

So far, I've worked primarily with world mythologies of what I call the "constellations of the cube". I talked about this earlier as the cube with Orion inside. The stars which create the illusion of the cube are so bright, astronomers label them the Winter Hexagon. Around the world, this part of the sky is connected to mythologies that link a hunter, turtle, canoe, bullroarer, mountain, birch tree, dradle, crystal river, Father God/Mother Goddess, and End Times. Christians have the story in the Book of Revelation, the "cube" being the New Jerusalem descending from the sky. At the present time, at midnight on the winter solstice and noon on the summer solstice, this cube is directly overhead in the south sky. In 1997, I wrote and co-produced a play about this. (That's what I've been doing, in response to your first question!)

Let me go back to the sky grid, though, just to wrap this up. I'd been working with the earth grid for 12 years before I "saw" the geometry on the celestial sphere. The cube popped out at me, then the orienting ring. Immediately I realized the ecliptic was the equator of the sky grid, and the Milky Way was another of the 15 rings. It was that quick. I had learned how to "see". I'm sure that the ancient esoteric mystery schools taught this geometry, and I believe these teachings are much more intertwined in our planetary history than we currently recognize.

I noticed on my celestial sphere that the ecliptic was graphically marked by a ring of little suns, because the ecliptic is "the sun's path." I've always been interested in the summer solstice, since so many cultures marked its precise timing. On the celestial sphere and in the sky, 66.6 degrees "up" from any summer solstice sun position marks the location of the north axial pole at that time. As this "pole" gradually traces its circular path of precession through the constellations of Cepheus the King, Draco, and other minor constellations, a cosmic mythological drama of the Fall and Redemption is played out. In Plato's Critias, the drama is set in Atlantis. The unfolding drama is magnified with still more characters, and more details, by the zodiacal constellations and planets at the ecliptic. The "pole circle" is the Reader's Digest version of the story, the zodiac the unabridged. The story is live and constantly changing and being updated within the overall script parameters because of chaos and the electromagnetics of being a living universe. This is what the different systems of astrology try to cope with. I think of the summer solstice as a regulator. We can "fix" it. It keeps everybody on the same page.

Anyway, I calculated the dates of the 20 summer solstice positions that were conjunct grid intersections along the ecliptic and discovered that at 1000 AD, the summer solstice sun was conjunct the orienting ring in the cube. And I asked myself, was the birth of Jesus timed at 0 AD or thereabouts to signal the ominous cosmological alignment that would occur 1000 years later and, according to polar mythologies, bring about the beginning of the End? Why were people so afraid of 1000 AD? Why did so many cultures construct observatories and universities around that time? What was the psychological significance of the Crab Nebula, which apparently exploded in 1054 AD conjunct the crossing point of the Milky Way and the ecliptic, at the sky grid intersection at the center of the cube? What should we expect now, at present, with the summer solstice sun virtually conjunct this very same location? And what is the impact, in the larger galactic scheme of things, of Earth's axis of rotation now being oriented as far away from the center of the galaxy as it will ever be in the entire 25,920-year precessional cycle? No wonder so many zodiacs make this time--our time--the end of the calendar.

I have no doubt that we have reached The choice point in terms of global consciousness, but I don't think we're doomed. I guess I keep remembering the tip of Orion's club that also marks the current summer solstice position. We can see that club as a weapon, but could also be a torch to light our way.

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 2 - With respect to Bethe Hagens ... in order to protect the information provided in this article ... This interview is copyrighted (c) 2001 Bethe Hagens any respective authors that maybe be referenced. Feel free to share and distribute this interview far and wide if you wish, but pls respect and reference/credit the author(s)/inteviewee works.