Spirals: the Pattern of Existence, by Geoff Ward, reveals how spiral energy fields are all around us and within us, patterning our very existence, from microcosm to macrocosm, determining structures from the tiny vortices of sub-atomic particles and the DNA molecule to the awesome “island universes” of galaxies where stars are born and the conditions for life created. The protean spiral is nature’s most favoured pattern of growth and most efficacious deployer of its energy - life-inducing, life-protecting and life-supporting: from the DNA molecule to the very hair on our heads which grows in a spiral about the crown. It is also the age-old intuitive symbol of spiritual development and our identity with the universe found in cultures the world over and reflected in serpent cults, dragon lore, shamanism, geomancy and ritual art and dance throughout history.
INTRODUCTION BY COLIN WILSON
ONE of the sacred names of the Sphinx of Giza is neb, which means “the spiralling force of the universe”. This seems to indicate that the ancient Eygptians knew about the “pattern of existence”, which is the subject of this remarkable book.
When I was thinking about this introduction, I considered starting with the assertion: “This book is about the most important subject in the world”, then rejected it because it would sound as if I was trying to be provocative. Well, provocative or not, the statement was basically accurate, because the spiral – and the mathematical formula that creates it is virtually a glimpse into the mind of God.
This formula was known to the Greeks as the Golden Section, and was symbolised by the letter φ; it is a way of dividing a painting or piece of architecture into two parts, so that it is oddly pleasing to the eye. Why? I don’t know. It is like asking why certain musical phrases give us pleasure. I can only say that when I listen to Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, the introduction of its third subject always gives me a little rush of pleasure, rather like the effect of smelling new-mown hay. It brings about what Proust called a moment bienheureux, such as his character Marcel experiences when he tastes a small cake called a madeleine, which he has just dipped in his herb tea. But then, Marcel discovers the reason for this wellspring of delight when he recalls that the taste brings back his childhood in the small town of Combray. But no psychologist has yet discovered why the Golden Section gives us the same kind of pleasure. If I was inclined to be poetic, I might say that it brings back a glimpse of our origin in paradise.
E M Forster touched upon the problem when he remarked that War and Peace produces an “effect like music”. We know what he means, of course – that the book transports us over great tracts of space and time, and makes us feel oddly detached from the material reality of our everyday lives. But that also fails to explain why a certain phrase of music can produce such an effect.
Let me pause here to get down to some definitions.
When you see bath-water forming into a kind of whirlpool as it goes down the plughole, or observe the pattern of spiral leaf arrangements, or the petals around the edge of a flower, or the shape of a seashell or of a pine cone, or look at a photograph of the Andromeda nebula in a book on astronomy, you are noticing one of the consequences of nature’s curious obsession with the spiral, and with the Golden Section.
What is the Golden Section? Well, in its simplest form, it is a way of dividing a line into two parts, one longer than the other, so that the whole line, compared to the longer part, is the same proportion as the longer part compared to the shorter.
The longer part is almost two-thirds of the line – but not quite. Two-thirds would be .666… going on forever. The longer part of the Golden Section is .618, but if you go on turning the fraction into a decimal, it also goes on forever without repeating itself.
This number is the basis of the Golden spiral. The 12th century mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci, discovered in 1202 a sequence of numbers that can generate this spiral. Each number in the sequence is made by adding the two previous numbers together. We begin with 0, followed by 1. And since 0 plus 1 make 1, the first Fibonacci number is 1; 1 + 1 = 2, so the sequence begins 1, 1, 2, then goes on to 3, then 5, then 8, then 13, and so on.
Now represent 1 by a square whose side is 1 unit long, and place it next to another similar square. Now above these place the second square whose sides are 2 units long. And beside these place a square whose sides are 3 units long. And now if a curved line is drawn that starts in the first square, goes on to touch the far side of the second, then goes up to touch the top of the third square, and so on into the fourth, fifth, etc, the result will be a Fibonacci spiral, which happens to be the spiral you will find in seashells, nebulae, and the rest of the universe.
These Golden proportions can also be found in our bodies, Our navels are placed at .618 of our bodies. If you measure your fingers, you will find that the ratio of the bottom part to the middle, and the middle part to the top joint, is once again the Golden Section proportion.
And why do I find all this so interesting? Because when I began to study these matters, which happened to be in connection with the age of the Sphinx, I quickly became convinced that this piece of knowledge is far, far older than Fibonacci, older than the ancient Greeks, older than the Great Pyramid. The fact that the Sphinx is called by a name that means “the spiralling force of the universe” seems to suggest that this knowledge predates the ancient Egyptians.
The maverick Egyptologist Schwaller de Lubicz thought that the original ur-civilisation that was the source of this knowledge was Atlantis – which, for various reasons, he believed disappeared at about the time Plato said it did (ie, around 9500BC). But when I personally took up the quest for the source of ancient knowledge, in a book about the Sphinx, I began to suspect that it could be even older than that.
However, since this introduction is supposed to be about Geoff Ward and his book, perhaps this is not the place to go into ancient civilisations.
Who is Geoff Ward? I know him as a writer who makes a living by journalism, and who first came to interview me in 2001 to write an article about me. It was excellent and perceptive, and we became friends. Then Geoff started to run a Colin Wilson website, for which I was immensely grateful, since I had always intended to start one of my own, but had always been too busy to get around to it.
When Geoff sent me the typescript of this book, I was amazed to discover that he had embarked on such a complex project. When I wrote to ask him what had led him to launch on such an ambitious design, I received the following reply:
“You may be surprised to learn that it all started with a humble snail! Alfred Watkins’ ‘dodman’ to be precise. I had been very interested in megalithic sites, ‘earth magic’ and astro-archaeology since the late Sixties, and in his The Old Straight Track, Watkins compares the snail with its two horns to the surveyor with his two staves on the ancient trackways, or leys, which Watkins discovered, or perhaps, rediscovered.
“The snail, of course, has a spiral shell and, at the time, I wondered if this had any significance in itself. Then I remembered the spiral tongues of the serpent corbels which I had seen at Kilpeck Church in Herefordshire, not that far from Hereford where Watkins lived (I lived in Herefordshire for a while in the Seventies).
“After I read of dowser Guy Underwood’s discovery of spiral energy patterns in the landscape, I started to become aware of the prevalence of spirals in Stone Age art the world over. Like everyone else I was aware of the double helix of the DNA molecule, and then I was struck by the fact that spiral curves were repeated in galaxies in outer space. After that, I was fascinated to find spirals and helices almost everywhere, in both physical and metaphorical manifestations, and was able to make the intuitive leap to guess that the spiral was indeed the ‘way’ of the universe.
“I suppose I may have been unconsciously seeking a symbol that would at one level connect microcosm and macrocosm, and at another level, science and spirituality. My interests have always been eclectic and this probably helped me to see the connections.
“The next stage was to start seeking out the available literature on the subject, which actually amounted to very few books - those of Cook and Thompson in the early years of the 20th century, and that of Jill Purce in 1974 which seems to have been the first to look at the spiritual aspects of the spiral pattern.
“I rapidly came to see that the spiral was a uniting symbol for all the subjects I was interested in - cosmology, quantum physics, psychology, philosophy, ancient civilisations, megalithic cultures, occult belief systems and even, to a certain extent, literature.
“All this gave me added impetus to investigate further and, as I became aware that there had been no popular study of the subject since Jill Purce (at least in the UK), I thought it would be good idea to produce a new, and wider-ranging, appraisal.”
As can be seen from this letter, Geoff’s range of interests is very wide indeed. This I had already gathered from our meeting and correspondence. What surprised me was the range of this present book, and its originality. There is very little with which it can be compared.
Jill Purce, in the opening paragraph of her book, makes it clear that she also sees the Proustian connection: “In a second, the faintest perfume may send us plummeting to the roots of our being, our whole life verticalised by a fleeting sensation: we have been connected by a mere smell to another place and another time.”
This fascinated me, for I had stumbled upon a very similar concept in the mid-1960s, and subsequently wrote about it in a book called The Occult. This was the power or ability that I labelled Faculty X, that sudden sense of the reality of other times and other places.
It was an experience of this sort that gave the historian Arnold Toynbee the notion of writing his immense Study of History. It happened in May 1912 as he was musing on the summit of the citadel of Mistra, above the plain of Sparta. Mistra had been a ruin since it had been overrun in the Greek war of independence in the 1820s. Gazing down at the ruins, and nibbling a bar of chocolate, Toynbee was suddenly carried back to that day when the invaders had poured into Mistra and massacred most of the inhabitants; from that day onward it had remained a ruin. Suddenly, time stood still and the past became a living reality.
Toynbee experienced several such “time slips”, which he describes in a passage in the tenth volume. One concerned a Cretan villa of one of the last of the Venetian governors. As he stood looking at this deserted house he “had an experience which was the counterpart, on the psychic plane, of an aeroplane’s sudden deep drop when it falls into an air-pocket”. He was “carried down a time-pocket” to a day two hundred and fifty years ago when the house was suddenly evacuated and deserted.
This image of the aeroplane dropping into an air pocket bears an obvious resemblance to Jill Purce’s image. But she obviously feels that what has happened in that Proustian glimpse is a sudden connection to a lower level of the spiral of our own existence.
I say all this to underline that what we are speaking of here is not some abstract arithmetical concept. It is directly connected to one of the most important secrets of human existence. It is that sudden moment of contact with the sense of power and purpose inside us.
What is so interesting is that this nerve is also touched when we are in contact with ancient sites that are connected with this “spiral energy”. Geoff explains in his fourth chapter, “Dragon Magic” how “even as a small child I was attracted to,
and moved by both sites of antiquity…and the patterns the stars made in the sky”. And he goes on to speak of Maiden Castle, and how “the old stones stand…as a reminder…of something important the human race has lost, or at least forgotten”.
I stumbled on the same discovery in the mid-1970s when I came upon the work of T C Lethbridge, to whom I dedicated a large part of my book Mysteries. Lethbridge, a Cambridge archaeologist, was also a highly gifted dowser; and when he left Cambridge (sick of the triviality and backbiting of his fellow dons) in 1957, and moved to an old house at Branscombe in Devon, he embarked on the most interesting stage of his career, as he began to discover the extraordinary power of the long pendulum, and its ability to read the secrets of landscape. He became convinced that the dowser’s pendulum can respond to other levels of reality that somehow co-exist with this one. In recent years, these discoveries have been taken up by the rock musician Julian Cope, and by my friend Terry Welbourn, who has formed a group of like-minded landscape archaeologists who call themselves “the Sons of T C Lethbridge”.
It seems to me that Geoff Ward has stumbled upon this same subject by a kind of inspiration, and that he has written a book that will become a classic of forgotten knowledge. He seems to have the field virtually to himself. I am delighted to play my small part in launching his voyage of intellectual discovery upon the world.