SACRED GEOMETRY

You're never too old to have your mind blown...

I recently received a copy of ‘Le Pater’ by (and from) the wonderful Thomas Negovan. It is a book about Alphonse Mucha’s symbolist masterpiece, and is an astonishing eye-opener, aside from it just being an absolutely beautiful book.

Confession time - I long shied away from trying anything as beautiful and elaborate as Mucha routinely composed. My math has never been great, in terms of just numbers, and that work seemed steeped in angles, and precise geometry the likes of which I couldn’t even dream of attempting!

But, and here’s the caveat, I was always good at grasping concepts. In ‘Le Pater’ there is an eye-popping two page spread that Thomas put together to explain some sacred geometry, and just looking at the examples made my mind explode. For the FIRST TIME EVER I saw the interconnectedness. It was startling, and clear as day. Here was a natural geometry, that didn’t need precisely measured angles. In fact you didn’t need angles at all, because the shapes themselves GIVE you all the angles you need!

From never doing anything like this before, I produced the below image right out of the gate (literally, this is the first thing I tried!) The vertical line had five circles on top of each other. The size of the circle doesn’t matter. A horizontal line through the middle of the centre circle meant I could then draw circles left and right of the vertical stack the same size, working from the edge of the central circle and matching it to the top on the horizontal line. No math, no angles. Just eyeballing it.

You start to see how the circles stack perfectly, and they give you lots of points to draw lines through - either from the centre point of each circle, or by cutting between two other circles. And very quickly other shapes reveal themselves… stars, triangles, cuboids… it become mesmerizing!

From that I quickly saw that I could treat it like Celtic knot-work, and weave those shapes around each other. Stunning precision, with no measuring at all! All I needed was a pencil, a compass and a ruler. I inked it freehand, to give it an ancient vibe, but the precision shines through. You still have that magical, sacred geometry.

I had not ever seen the relationship between stars, circles, triangles and squares, and so on, before. Not in the way I am seeing it now. The possibilities for design feel fresh and endless, and I can’t wait to explore it even more in the future, to see what else it might reveal.

‘Le Pater’ has changed my understanding of how that work was done. It’s so wonderful to feel the excitement of a genuine epiphany in my late 50s. I’m just sorry I did not grasp this sooner, and so I’m sharing it with you now.

Have fun!