As was pointed out in the BWForum, some pages were removed from the original MT and replaced by what I termed some 30 years ago the “Toys” page because Bessler refers to the drawing as Toys. In addition he added the numbers 138, 139, 140 and 141 to the bottom of the drawing. There are numerous examples in his drawings in DT of his predilection for numbering all the parts to achieve a significant total. He restricted the numbers used to no more than 24, and when the subsequent total was divided by 24 it produced another significant total, 55.
I won’t go into the significance of the number 55, because my reasons are speculative, and to me, meaningful, but generally they don’t seem to be accepted. I shall be posting details of the extraordinary trouble Bessler took to make it clear that the number 55 was of the utmost importance.
MT 137 was deliberately inserted before the Toys page to make 138 a logical progression from 136, but also because the drawing, a dodecagram or “Circle of Fifths”, contains some interesting features not directly associated with Bessler’s wheel. The design is used in musical theory, but from Bessler’s perspective the MT number served a dual purpose - 138, 139, 140 and 141 total 558, and that total 18. 18 being the number that every angle in the pentagram is based on, I.e. 18,36,54, 72, 90 and 108.
MT 137
Bessler pointed 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 Timaeusand 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 was a useful hint at the circle of fifths, as well as filling the gap between 136 and 138.
The total of 141 is interesting. It seems as though he wanted to get to that number and not beyond, but numbering the ‘Toys’ page 138 would seem to have been good enough. 141 is not a prime number and it’s only factors are 3 times 47. If we turn to MT 47 we discover that inserted within the drawing which is numbered 47, another number 47, twice in fact because one is the mirror image of the other so there are three number 47s present on the page. Is this a pointer to the number 141 or the reverse or is it just a coincidence?
Of course there 141 Bible quotations In Bessler’s Declaration of Faith in Apologia Poetica. They are included within 220 lines or 55 stanzas.
I’ll publish my own interpretation of the Toys page next.
JC
PS. Click Bessler Wheel Pics at the top of right panel. Click Home to come back to blog.
©️ John Collins 2026
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