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This lecture comes from inside Kosmogonia, Randall Carlson's online university. Randall calls it cosmic architecture: the idea that the great sacred buildings of the world were placed, measured and aligned to the motions of the heavens, and that their numbers match the ancient cycles of time, such as the yugas of the Vedic tradition. He sets out what he sees as the six parameters of sacred architecture: symbol, number and measure, cosmic alignment, sacred geography, sacred geometry, and the alchemy of the raw materials.
Then he looks at two moments in history when building seemed to break out all at once. Around the third millennium BC: the pyramids of Giza, the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, Stonehenge and Avebury, the cities of the Indus Valley, and the first great earthworks in North America. Around 1200 AD: the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, Angkor in Cambodia, the temples of Central America, and the Hopewell and Chaco builders. "It's almost like the whistle blew, the signal went out around the world."
Where did the knowledge and the skilled labour come from? Randall reads from Sigfried Giedion, André Parrot, Christian O'Brien's The Megalithic Odyssey, Louis Charpentier's The Mysteries of Chartres Cathedral, and Manly P. Hall's The Secret Teachings of All Ages, on the worldwide traditions of travelling sages and the guilds of master builders. He is clear that no answer yet satisfies him: "There are still massive holes in our thinking."
0:00 Sacred architecture is cosmic architecture
3:16 Build the house, keep the landmarks
5:53 A technology that looks like magic
7:41 The guilds of master builders
9:33 The six parameters of sacred architecture
18:06 The Great Work: the third millennium BC
26:58 The Great Work: 1200 AD
34:21 Stone, suddenly: Egypt and Sumer
40:25 Christian O'Brien and the travelling sages
46:34 The Nunnehi of Blood Mountain
55:10 The mystery of the Gothic cathedrals
58:06 Manly P. Hall and the Dionysiac Architects
65:47 Part 2