SPIRALS, everywhere in the ancient world why ?

Gotta love the "Golden Spiral" good info

reply to post by Harte


Thanks for the kind words.

A section from website www.spirasolaris.ca... almost half way down the page shows this:
Charles Ross discovered a possible origin of the double spirals:

• He performed an experiment where he arranged a lens in front of a wooden plank, so that it focused the sun's rays onto the plank and burned a track on the wood.
  
• Each day he put a new piece of wood on the plank holder and after 366 days he plotted out the pattern the sun's rays had burned on the planks.
  
• He found that the resulting shape was a perfect double spiral.
  
• During the summer the track forms a tight clockwise spiral and during the winter it forms a wide anticlockwise spiral.
  
• At the equinox the track began to straighten out as the loose winter spiral stopped and was transformed into a tight spiral moving the opposite direction.
  

I think spiral markings started with observation, then moved into a functional stage after the observations were made over time, then moved into a symbolic stage from there (explains why they may be carved in areas where there is no sunlight). I am sure single spirals can be found to be just as functional as the double spiral in regards to sun movement - I am not sure about triple spirals though.

I do find ancient spirals very interesting and hopefully they will be 100% decoded at some point.

reply to post by ratboy




That is an outstanding link.

In ancient times, "science" amounted to observing and then trying to make sense out of what they were seeing.

This is what drove some of the greatest breakthroughs in mans history. Pythagoras, Aristotle, Scharbauer....even The Mysteries are based on ancient mans observations of nature.

This guy did not do a good experiment. In fact, it is well known that this is wrong. The shape that would be produced is an analemma.

Analemma - wikipedia

For instance, knowing that Earth's average solar day is almost exactly 24 hours, an analemma can be traced by plotting the position of the Sun as viewed from a fixed position on Earth at the same time every day for an entire year. The resulting curve resembles a figure of eight. This curve is commonly printed on globes.

No spirals. No reversing spirals. Someone faked their data.

reply to post by stereologist


you see you are just picking one moment in time each day. the experiment recorded this



with the lense i assume at the centre. depending on when in the year you start recording, you can get some odd shapes.

reply to post by Parta


That's not forming a spiral. The spiral can't reverse direction. What is observed is that the sun is higher in the sky during the summer and lower in the winter. That is due to the earth's tilt. Roughly parallel arcs would be seen across the wood. Part of the year the next line is one side of the previous line and other times of the year the arcs are on the other.

Is this the same artist?

The Alchemist of Light

Star Axis is just one of Ross's explorations of the physical relationship between light and form. In another set of projects, he makes solar burns – marks made by sunlight burned through glass onto wood. The goal is to chart the movement of the sun in a particular location, at a particular time of day.

reply to post by stereologist


it doesn't make a spiral on wood... but then gestalt is not a new thing. you feel you have the right to continue the tracks because the sun does keep moving but the earth in in the way some of the day. if you don't know when you should fairly start then your imagination can do whatever you are trying to achieve.

i have seen the patterns that result minus the assumption about the sun too. can't remember if they were neolithic or paleolithic. i'll see if i can find them.

i heard a tale about an anthro class in japan where the student were asked to suggest what the mal'ta spirals were all about. one said that the inner spiral what the distance they'd walked and the outside double spirals were the number of days. very practicle thing to keep on a belt buckle if it was ever your intention to go home again.

peace
p

The claim ratboy posted is simply not true. In fact, when we look at what the artist is doing it sounds to me like he is making an analemma. That's pretty cool don't you think?

What made me highly suspicious of the claim was that the wood was burned along a curve, and we all know that the wood burns at the focal point of the lens and no where else. To burn an arc means that the lens or the wood has to move. The claim from the website referred to by ratboy is obviously and patently false. It does not fit with wood burning. It does not fit with the path of the sun. It's a a pretty fake story every which way.

reply to post by stereologist


here i go again but... mythologically yima was supposed to have dug his three ringed structure based on a pole stuck in the ground and the circuit of the sun.... obviously there was a little gestalt to complete a whole circle.

its a funny thought i guess but the answers MUST get less complex the farther back in time we go.



[edit on 29-4-2010 by Parta]

reply to post by Parta


What does this have to do with the claim of the spiral burned in wood by a lens?

The lens story is a fake. It does not match what the artist did or is doing.

As far as knowing the path of the sun across the skies of course the ancients knew it was a circle. That's how you figure out the horoscope sign.

I think the word you want is inference, not gestalt.

reply to post by stereologist


admittedly i was in marketing forever so maybe my understanding of gestalt is somewhat different than yours. inference can get you in trouble. gestalt cannot.

you chose to make the whole thing fake based on a point in the sky at the exact same time every day and only that one time every day. how exactly were they related? path of the sun on the ground vs its point in the sky once a day?

is it fair to join the two segements of a circle burned in wood when that circle actually tracks the movement of a single body. sure.. its a day by day thing. can you conclude that the other segment you'd like to join with would be there even when it doesn't show up? sure. over a year do you end up with a spiral. yes you do if you start at the right time.

put the lens at the centre on the north south axis. the beam won't always be strong enough to burn but you can track it.

i'm not saying this is the answer to the spiral question but lets be fair to the folks trying to find an answer. people who do nothing but complain certainly deserve less consideration.




[edit on 29-4-2010 by Parta]

Big fan of Terence Mckenna! Thanks for posting this one, looks interesting.

reply to post by Parta


First off the artist did not do what the post claimed. In fact, the artist made an analemma.

Second, a lens also won't burn a curve across a board. As the sun moves the focal point moves off of the board and stops burning the board.

Third, the path of the sun does not draw a spiral.

Fourth, the roughly elliptical path does not reverse direction.

I'm certainly not complaining. I'm just pointing out that the statement made is false. Let's take the time to separate the real evidence from the screwy made up glop that permeates much of the web.

reply to post by stereologist


on the pic i posted, if you stick pole in the ground [to be really accurate if you have lots of time to do nothing else] when the sun rises farthest north and track its shadow for a whole year you will get what easily could be called a spiral because you get to fill in the missing segments that join it all up. obviously he didn't have the time so i imagine the bits of a circle he might have gotten would be pretty small and weak but he says it happened so unless you do the experiment and prove you dont get any no matter what then maybe we should say that a pole in the ground could prove it one way or the other..







[edit on 29-4-2010 by Parta]

reply to post by Parta


So you have no spiral to show. You're defending the spiral claim and have nothing to show.

When you say "what easily could be called a spiral" you really mean a self intersecting curve that goes round and round and looks more like a Lissajous figure or a spirograph drawing than anything else.

Spirograph

Spiral

edit: I need to correct this post by adding that I am not saying that the shape is one of the above. Instead I am asking if people think the shape is more like one of the above figures.

[edit on 29-4-2010 by stereologist]

Out of curiosity that chart you posted many posts back, what is it? It can't be the trace of a shadow from a pole.

reply to post by stereologist


what is it that you have to show? can you show that the shadow i talk about doesn't happen? are you saying the shadow doesn't change everyday? are you saying it travels in a straight line east to west everyday? are you saying there is no relationship between what happened yesterday and what happens today? and then tomorrow?

i still don't understand the connection you weren't making very well. seems like maybe you were confused about the time in a year when the shadow changes from getting bigger to smaller and then smaller to bigger? how does an ancient indicate that i wonder. maybe a double spiral for a whole yearly cycle?




[edit on 29-4-2010 by Parta]

Originally posted by stereologist
Out of curiosity that chart you posted many posts back, what is it? It can't be the trace of a shadow from a pole.

that is the suns path across the sky for a half a year [or a full year i suppose] if you were standing in timisoara romania. timisoara has no meaning just had it at hand.



[edit on 29-4-2010 by Parta]