The Greek word for Ichthus became an acrostic, with each letter standing for another word, which in Greek was "Jesus Christ, God's Son, Saviour". In the gospel of John, there is a curious story where the disciples are unable to find any fish, until Jesus appears and tells them to cast their net on the right side of the ship. They do so, and draw a huge catch of fish. What is odd, is that the gospel of John declares the exact number of fish caught: 153 (John 21:11). Why one hundred and fifty three? Why would someone take the time to count one hundred and fifty three fish? Well there is good reason, and it has to do with sacred geometry.
The ichthus symbol is composed of two intersecting circles, that intersect each other at each other's center (fig. 1):
The intersection between two circles is known as "Vesica Pisces". It was known since ancient times: Euclid used two intersecting circles to divide a line exactly in half using a compass. Thus it has the connotation of growth from division: as soon as the male seed achieves union with the female egg, cells start to divide, each time forming a Vesica Pisces. Jesus himself is the Seed, the Word of God, who became incarnate in human flesh.
As it so happens, the Vesica Pisces contains exactly two equilateral triangles:
The line shared by the two equilateral triangles was the starting point for Euclid: this line can be divided exactly in half by the 2 intersecting circles. If the side of the triangles were assumed to be one, then the length of the Vesica Pisces is the square root of 3. As it so happens, the square root of 3 was closely approximated by the ancients as a fraction: 265 divided by 153!. See fig. 3:
The two triangles form a cross: to approximate the ratio of the square root of three the width of each triangle could be set to 153, while the length across the Vesica Pisces would be 265. The Christian cross is sometimes set in the middle of the Vesica Pisces:
Assume each triangle has a side of a length of 153. Expand the number of triangles to form a perfect hexagon inside one of the circles. What would the circumference be? It could be approximated as 961 or 962 units (see fig. 4):
So, does the number 961 or 962 pop up in the Bible? Yes it does, in a very odd place, which readers of the previous blog entry may recognize:
Jared lived one hundred and sixty-two years, and begot Enoch. After he begot Enoch, Jared lived eight hundred years, and had sons and daughters. So all the days of Jared were nine hundred and sixty-two years; and he died. (Gen. 5:18-20).
So what, a coincidence? I doubt it: Jared was the SIXTH generation from Adam. It takes SIX triangles to form a hexagon, and if each side of the triangle was 153, the circumference would be close to 962! In the previous blog, The Ancient Astronomy of the Bible, I showed how the Patriarch Jared represents the planet Mars (the sixth planet - see the previous blog entry), and his total age represents a multiple of synodic conjunctions between Mars and Venus - a conjunction between the male and female. Jared means "descent" and in ancient Jewish traditions it was during his days that the angels of God descended from heaven to mate with women. Thus the two intersecting circles means the birth of a child from the union of the male with the female. In the case of Jesus, it means in Jesus Christ we have the union of the Divine with the human.
As two triangles are formed with each Vesica Pisces, lets continue by making an intersecting circle for every two triangles, see fig. 5:
Lets clean up the image a bit, and we now have an image which is now known as the "Seed of Life":
All in all, we have 6 intersecting circles with 1 central circle. The Seed of Life is thus a sacred symbol of Christianity, as not only does it contain the Ichthus symbol, but seven circles which represent the seven days of creation. And Jesus Christ represents God's perfect human, God's perfect creation, where humanity was perfected and made Divine.
The Seed of Life pattern can be extended to form a more complicated symbol called the "Flower of Life", which was found engraved in the Temple of Osiris at Abydos, probably during the Christian era:
Some are so intrigued with this symbol that there is an actual organization called "Flower of Life". Its a beautiful symbol, a mandala that allows us to contemplate the Divine interacting within the human. Oddly enough, variants of the Seed of Life has popped up in a couple of crop circles:
Here is the second one:
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