The subject of this blog might seem a bit unusual but perhaps it might spark some new ideas?
Some of you may be aware of the work I've published on www.theorffyreuscode.com Three of the pages refer to the dodecagram on MT 137, which precedes the 'Toys' page, MT 138. 139. 140 and 141. I wrote that Johann David Heinichen, 1683-1729, a German musician, introduced the concept known as the ‘circles of fifths’ in 1711 (he called it Quintenzirkel). I suggested that MT 137 being similar to his quintenzirkel was designed to point to the circle of fifths, thus being another pointer to the number 5.
Some of you may be aware of the work I've published on www.theorffyreuscode.com Three of the pages refer to the dodecagram on MT 137, which precedes the 'Toys' page, MT 138. 139. 140 and 141. I wrote that Johann David Heinichen, 1683-1729, a German musician, introduced the concept known as the ‘circles of fifths’ in 1711 (he called it Quintenzirkel). I suggested that MT 137 being similar to his quintenzirkel was designed to point to the circle of fifths, thus being another pointer to the number 5.
That has all been discussed before, here. This time my interest was directed to the MT number itself, written clearly on the bottom of the page - 137. I know Bessler was fascinated by the history and the relationship between numbers and letters and their hidden meanings and of course all the popular codes of the era, and it seemed to me that he had included the number quite deliberately, even if it was somewhat roughly executed. We know he had to add the Toys page in a hurry due to a possible impending arrest, and replaced the existing pages which gave the secret of the wheel. My guess is that he also added the MT 137 at the same time. As it had no mechanical resonance I think it was a deliberate inclusion along with in the Toys page.
MT 137, is the only illustration in the MT which doesn’t appear to show any mechanisms. One reason for this was, as I suggested above, to provide a hint towards the circle of fifths, but as Bessler usually included two or even three pieces of information in each of his clues I felt there could be something additional, that was invisible to me. A Google search of the number 137 for anything connected to his work produced the following information, but I’m still not sure if it’s relevant. Hopefully you will find it interesting, and in particular my final piece. Most of what follows is way over my head, but I include it because of the perceived importance of this number, both now and historically.
So, in the world of physics, it has been suggested that the number 137 could lie at the heart of a grand unified theory, relating theories of electromagnetism, quantum mechanics and gravity.
There is something called the ‘fine structure constant’, a physical constant with no dimension is approximately 1/137, and it’s reciprocal was said to be the integer 137, although later work suggested it was closer to 137.036.
Richard Feynman wrote the following about the number 137.
‘It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and Pauli famously quipped, “When I die my first question to the Devil will be: What is the meaning of the fine structure constant?” Unfortunately Pauli died without accomplishing his goal in the Red Cross Hospital of Zurich in Room 137—and he was aware of that synchronistic irony before he died. Theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it. It’s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the ‘hand of God’ wrote that number, and ‘we don’t know how He pushed his pencil.’
In the Hebrew Kabbalah, the word has a Gematria value of 137, symbolically, this word indicates the threshold between the physical dimension and the utterly spiritual dimension. In other words, at the boundary line of the physical world, the number 137 emerges. The wisdom of Kabbalah is to find correspondences between the mundane and spiritual levels of reality.
Here are some quotes from some web sites.
“In his Nobel lecture delivered in Stockholm on 13 December 1946, Pauli expressed his goal was to establish a theory “which will determine the value of the fine-structure constant and will thus explain the atomistic structure of electricity, which is such an essential quality of all atomic sources of electric fields actually occurring in nature."
Cosmologist Robert L. Oldershaw argues that “137 is the relationship of the strength of the unit electromagnetic interaction compared with the strength of the unit gravitational interaction. That sounds pretty fundamental to me.”’
‘In the Bohr atomic model, the innermost electron of a hypothetical atom with atomic number 137 would be orbiting just below the speed of light, and the next heaviest element would be impossible because its electron would have to exceed c. Atoms close to the theoretical limit of 137 are unstable and not found in the universe’.
https://www.secretsinplainsight.com/why
The following is skimmed and abbreviated from my forthcoming book, which will be published later this year.
I was intrigued by the possibility that the number 137 was recognised to have special properties in Bessler’s time. There are websites devoted to such things as the properties of the three main pyramids which allude to the number 137, plus the Kabbalah, numerology, Freemasons, etc.
But I discovered that Bessler was hinting at the relationship between 137 and the golden angle or the golden mean, well known to the ancient Egyptians and the Greeks who called it phi, after the Greek sculptor Phideas. Phi, the golden ratio, is equal to 1.618, plus an unending succession of numbers. Plato discussed the subject at length in his Timaeus and of course there are the Leonardo Fibonacci series of numbers, and the laws of nature also dependant on the gold mean!
In geometry, the golden angle is the smaller of the two angles created by dividing the circumference of a circle according to the golden ratio, thus creating two arcs so that the ratio of the length of the smaller arc to the length of the larger is the same as the ration of the larger arc to the full circumference of the circle.
This provides two radii with angles of two particular degrees. The golden angle is 137.508. I suspect that using the number 137 for his dodecagram seemed like a good idea to the inventor, but he couldn’t name it MT 137.5, that would be too obvious. Bessler used the golden ratio routinely in his drawings and it was more commonly integrated in works of art than it is today. A search for the subject on the BW forum throws up many links.
Why did he add this page? Much of the work I have done on finding and interpreting his coded work was useful, but not a first sight and it was hard to explain when out of context.
Bessler’s clues, if solved in isolation, get the confirmation of their validity from solving other related clues. This clue of the number MT 137 is an example of this. I have found, subsequent to the investigation of this clue, confirmatory examples of at least two precisely executed angles of 137.5 within his drawings. The connections I pointed out in my orffyreuscode.com web site also a showed a heptagram within the dodecagram, which, as well as the pentagram, includes numerous examples of the golden mean or ratio.
But there is a further mystery - or am I becoming even more paranoid than before?
The Toys page is numbered at the bottom as 138, 139, 140, and 141, but why? The page is labelled with A, B, C, D and E, and these five letters were obviously on the page before he added his four handwritten numbers. So four page numbers for five labelled itemss? It has been suggested that the Toys page replaces four pages which were burnt or buried, but why did he need to remind himself by numbering the page in this way? He could just dig up the ink blocks he buried when he needed them. Maybe he decide to add MT 137 at the last minute so he could use the number 137 with the do-decagram and add a pointer to the golden angle, there rather than on the Toys page? But if he then added the other four numbers to the Toys page why not end with 142 to cover the five items on the page, instead of number 141? Perhaps he needed to end with 141 and he had already used 137. He had a record of including more numbers than necessary to reach a significant total.
141 is the product of two prime numbers 3 and 47. Coincidentally (maybe) there are 141 bible references in chapter 55, within the 55 verses of his Apologia Poetica. The number 47 brings to mind Eulclid's 47th proposition but which can exhibit the properties of the golden ratio with some additional extras. It describes the 345 right triangle with its accompanying squares. That particular figure was adopted by the Freemasons a while ago, so perhaps he is demonstrating his knowledge of the craft. Apparently the Euclid’s 47th proposition is discussed in the Freemason 33rd degree, and a Masonic publication, Anderson’s “constitutions”, was published in 1723, it mentions that “ the greater Pythagoras provided the author of the 47th proposition of Euclid’s first book“
In 1723 Bessler was well established at Kassel, a centre of Freemasonry, and I’m sure he was familiar with the “Constitutions”. The history and use of the 345 right angle is described in detail and a number of its additional features described which I was unaware of. One of the angles produced in the additional features is 108 degrees which looks uninteresting but 360 divided by 108 equals 3.3333, the 33rd degree? 108 is the largest angle in the pentagram, all the angles in pentagram are multiples of 18, the smallest angle in the pentagram 18, 36, 54, 72, 90 and 108, so I’m sure that there is a golden ratio in there. The Kepler triangle also exhibits the golden ratio.
I prefer to think that although Bessler was using the language of Alchemy he was actually disguising mechanical processes. It makes more sense than him going off at a tangent and talking about things of a magical nature.
In 1723 Bessler was well established at Kassel, a centre of Freemasonry, and I’m sure he was familiar with the “Constitutions”. The history and use of the 345 right angle is described in detail and a number of its additional features described which I was unaware of. One of the angles produced in the additional features is 108 degrees which looks uninteresting but 360 divided by 108 equals 3.3333, the 33rd degree? 108 is the largest angle in the pentagram, all the angles in pentagram are multiples of 18, the smallest angle in the pentagram 18, 36, 54, 72, 90 and 108, so I’m sure that there is a golden ratio in there. The Kepler triangle also exhibits the golden ratio.
I prefer to think that although Bessler was using the language of Alchemy he was actually disguising mechanical processes. It makes more sense than him going off at a tangent and talking about things of a magical nature.
All comments welcome.
JC
