The cultural experience of the sacred through geometry (from the dawn of humanity up to pythagoras’ arithmosophy)

Abstract

The so-called «Holy Geometry» is a metaphor about the universe’s Order, the digital sign of Creation. This article is an interdisciplinary study that offers information about diverse themes ranging from aesthetics theory and history of art, to quantum mechanics, through symbolism, anthropology of religions, microbiology, and cosmology. The interest of this study is the heuristic and trans-disciplinary vision projected to a perennial and holistic knowledge concerning the meaning of geometry as a semiotics of the sacred in life. We begin our journey from the dawn of humanity, when geometry was linked with the possibility of communication in such a way that its semiotics was not the sole source of social and economic management. Above all, there was a strong motivation to communicate with the tremendous, the magnificent, the ineffable, and the sacred (Mircea Eliade), or «the holy» (Rudolf Otto). We will see how said semiotic-symbolic link acquires greater complexity, although its degree of abstraction was already subtle beginning from the neolithic period. The complexity came from the application  of mathematical geometry to architecture (starting from megalithic monuments, temples, pyramids,  and ziggurats) and its magical, mystical, and theurgic operations. We will concentrate on some characte- ristics of the constructions until we reach Pythagoras of Samos, in whose school of geometry was lived the Golden Age in the pleromatic sense of the sapiential knowledge of mathematics: the harmony of number and rhyme.