A penetrating exploration of the role of sacred geometry in cosmology and human affairs
In How the World is Made, his final book, John Michell sums up and lays out for anyone to follow, his many astonishing (re)discoveries of the way numbers, geometry and patterns work and how they underlie our whole world and the best of the well-ordered societies and states that have flourished since ancient times.
Step by step from first principles the reader is taken through each of the numbers from 1 to 12, the geometrical figures and regular shapes they generate, their meetings, matings and the ways they breed. En route the reader learns to understand how number and sacred geometry underpin, link and illuminate traditions and cultures ranging from ancient Egypt to Christianity, constructions from the Great Pyramid and Stonehenge through to the crop circles of our new millennium, localities real and envisioned from Plato’s Atlantis to St John the Divine’s Heavenly City of Revelation.
This is the summation of a lifetime’s research on the part of John Michell, wondrously illustrated with his own beautiful watercolour diagrams as well as Allan Brown’s computer-drawn figures that clearly and precisely, yet with sensitivity and ‘heart’, delineate details of construction and much else to help our understanding of ‘that pattern in the heavens’, as Socrates called it, ‘which anyone can find and establish within themselves’.
'A delightful book: clear, witty, beautiful and illuminating'
The Spectator
'Utterly gorgeous … 288 full-colour pages of wisdom and wonder … A thing to be cherished, a work of art, it is also a beautifully illustrated geometry primer with philosophical commentary … the text is Michell’s finest prose - cool, succinct and rational'
Fortean Times
'Instructive and illustrative … John Michell has stamped this book with the freshness and originality that are his hallmark. It is a worthy bequest of an extraordinary mind … a source of inspiration for seekers in the arts, mathematics and the Mysteries'
Temenos Academy Review
Format: Paperback
Size: 25.4 x 20.3 cm
Extent: 288 pp
Illustrations: 341
Publication date: 19 March 2012
ISBN: 9780500290378