Golden Numbers

The most important piece of information given to Henry Lincoln by Géraude de Sède was that the tomb depicted by Nicholas Poussin in ” Et in Arcadia Ergo” was located close to Rennes Le Château.

The Background Landscape

Lincoln visited the tomb and confirmed that in his opinion the landscape behind the tomb was similar to the landscape in the painting.

There are those who argue against this belief. It is a contentious subject heavily influenced by those who believe that everything associated with Géraude de Sède and Pierre Plantard is a fraud. A very early photograph which looks as though it might have been taken before Lincoln’s involvement is some what discouraging.

The Modern View

The whole issue has become more difficult because the owner of the land on which the tomb was situated demolished the tomb in an attempt to stop people trespassing on his land. Recent photographs, which now have to make assumptions about the location of the tomb nevertheless appear more promising. In reading about the argument as to wether “poussin’s tomb” was important or even relevant I became aware that the Paris Meridien, the North South line which passes through the centre of Paris also passes very close to the tomb. This piece of information was offered more as assistance in finding the tomb than as an independent piece of information but nevertheless it stuck in my mind.

Golden Numbers

Lincoln consulted art experts including, amazingly, Anthony Blunt who was not only art advisor to the Queen of England but also a soviet spy.

Christopher Cornford of the Royal College of Art confirmed that many artists used the so called golden numbers as a basis for their composition.

Artists know that golden number structures, be they squares, spirals, triangles or pentacles are inherently attractive to the human eye. One of the best known examples is Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa where sides of the included squares are all related to each other by The “golden number” 1.618.

Fibonacci

The Golden numbers are an integral part of the Fibonacci Series. In AD 1300, a mathematician called Leonardo Fibonacci succeeded in describing in mathematical terms a relationship of numbers which apparently influence many natural occurrences, including the development of Human Beings. The background to this slide illustrating the sequence is one of the opening scenes from “the Da Vinci Code” where the sequence was prominent in the early part of the mystery.

Applications

The use of the golden numbers to help design and compose structures and works of art was used as early as the construction of the Egyptian Pyramids.

The belief that the golden numbers are important in pleasing the human eye (even if approximate) range from sublime works of art to the most mundane. The universal design of the credit card is an application of the golden numbers.

Pentacles

Its connection with pentacles and therefore the pentacles being investigated by Lincoln is that the perfect pentacle is structured using golden relationships and it can be defined in terms of members of the Fibonnaci series.

One should not get too carried away by this statement. In the later Fibbonaci series the result of dividing the earlier number into the later number is indeed the golden ratio 1.618(0339887). Similarly dividing the later number into the earlier number gives the inverse golden ratio 0.618(0340).

Earlier in the series these calculations clearly do not give the same result. The golden ratio and it’s inverse are yielded as a successive approximation as one progresses to the higher numbers in the Fibonacci series. As the proportions quoted as governing the structure of pentacles are early in the series they are only approximate and given one dimension it cannot be used to calculate other dimensions using only fibonacci relationships. Normal geometric relationships must be used for such calculations.