Cosmokrator's Purpose and Origins

‘He’s got the whole world in His hands’ – so the song goes, and so say the scriptures of most religions (metaphorical of course, since God can’t possibly have human hands). It would be intriguing to be able in some way to see the universe from the outside, in order to understand it.

Cosmokrator is such a model of the universe that can be held in our hands. It is a self-assembly card model printed in 28 colours with the sigils of the Signs and Planets reversed out.

There are other ways of achieving cosmos miniaturisation that are well-known - such as listening to a great symphony, sitting round a Persian carpet, or visiting a great cathedral – indeed the human body in ancient times was also seen as the summation of the universe and its parts (see Book 6 in our list of Forthcoming Books).

Cosmokrator, a beautiful coloured model expressing cosmic harmonies, helps us to see aspects of the universe that we both contain and are contained within. It embodies some well-known sequences of life, notably the colour spectrum and the sections of the sky above us that form the zodiac, along with their ruling planets.

Even as absolute beginners children and adults alike are attracted to it, and can use it richly, according to their capacity.

In a nutshell, Cosmokrator uses simple number combinations, shapes, and the colour spectrum to help you understand the order and beauty of life. As a starter exercise, by using colour opposites alone, Cosmokrator can be used to explain plain numbers and music, and thereby the nature of the signs and planets of astrology (see under Getting Started). Using Cosmokrator enables even the beginner to:

• Interpret key personal characteristics of yourself, your friends and your enemies
• pinpoint who actually your ‘other half’ could be
• Use it as a calendar and understand World Ages - and find out when the Age of Aquarius is meant to begin (in fact it has already started to creep up on us)
• Have fun with it in the office, and as a game for parties and family gatherings
• Use it as a colour guide for interior decoration, choice of dress and jewellery, or any other kind of design
• Use it at a deeper level as a means of regulating your life more harmoniously,
• as a support for meditation, prayer, contemplation – and your own transformation
• and, finally, you can download a series of small books that will be published annually, starting with a full introductory booklet, Book 0: Atum to Atom – Introduction to Cosmokrator.

Cosmokrator could be described as a multivalent ‘Spanner’ that helps you unlock the Universe in different ways (Uni-verse literally means All [Things] Turning Together as One). At the same time in a sense Cosmokrator clothes the true workings of that Cosmos in a many-layered ‘Veil’ of matter. Whether we use its attributes in terms of a spanner, or of a veil, both approaches will help you deal with the turning world through an enhanced Inner Eye.

The model can also be used generally to mark the passing time on a small or vast scale (7 facets for the days of the week, and 7 for the nights). Long ago the ancient Greeks saw that the main notes of the musical scale correspond to the numbers 1-7 (though the octave can be split into smaller intervals, increasing the number of subdivisions), and that the spacing of the planets corresponds to the intervals between the main notes of the Octave.

To give one example of natural correspondences explored in Book 1, the Sun equates to the middle note of the Octave, F/Fa and its nature is expressed by the colour Gold.

In other words, if a musical note expresses a number and a colour on different wavelengths, so on a much larger scale, as the Greeks observed, notes and colours directly radiate the nature of a Zodiac Sign and its ruling Planet (not many people would be unable to see the connection between Mars and bright Red, for instance!).

What we have tried to give you in your New, yet Ancient, Model of the Universe is a tangible object that sums up all such musical correspondences, that enables a developed human to travel back and forth between planes all the time – something we take for granted. How else could your voice change into electrical impulses down a phone line and come out at the other end as a voice again? In the same way, text goes down a phone line and comes out as a fax! Translation between sets of wavelengths is going on all the time, and we live with this phenomenon daily in countless ways (food becomes flesh, to take another example).

Not everyone will want to seriously look in such detail at the separate parts of the wavelengths we explore in the booklets we are producing in association with Cosmokrator, rewarding though it may be. It can be better to start off by simply using it as a novel plaything and looking at the pictures in the books. The potential for using Cosmokrator in a light-hearted way at family tea, or a party with friends and guests is huge.

It gives a rough guide to people’s Sun Signs, through a particular colour, and can provide clues about what they are really like, by referring to the standard books on Astrology! In the shark-infested waters of office politics, it can defuse situations to find out the boss’s Sun Sign and look up some inside information about him (or other work colleagues, for that matter!).

You can use the colours and signs on Cosmokrator to tune the many dimensions of your own life. Do you sometimes find you are repeating the same behaviour or getting into the same mood or situation again and again? You need to balance yourself, and the first way to do this is to find your opposite – in colour terms first, and then use it an indicator to other pursuits you could take up in order to achieve this.

Not a crystal ball, but certainly a coloured ball, by starting to see its seven pairs of contrasts at work in life around us, Cosmokrator can even be used as a focus for meditation, whether in the abstract, or in connection with related divinities. Its properties lie at the heart of religion, ancient and modern.

Cosmokrator can be used at a rudimentary level straight away by following the menu given on the Home Page - whether in strict order or hopping about as the fancy takes you is up to you. Indeed, by printing them off you can staple them together into a Getting Started Booklet which you can refer to in preparation for the much larger booklets we aim to bring out annually.

Once you are more familiar with using Cosmokrator, to grow in knowledge and unlock its hidden benefits you may want to read some or all of the fascinating series of small books about the seven separate Spanners, or Veils, that are embedded within Cosmokrator (see under Forthcoming Books) though actually the books can be read independently in their own right. Through them we gradually fill in the background that shows why Cosmokrator works.

Ancient forms of the Cosmokrator

In the ancient Near East at Sidon in Phoenicia (in present-day Lebanon), every year at the festival of the Urania, Goddess of the Night Sky, a great sphere representing the Cosmos as the Great Mother was placed in an open carriage and pulled through the streets amidst great celebration. Under Roman occupation this event was commemorated on coins showing what the float looked like – a precursor of those we see today in the Lord Mayor’s Show - a modern echo of a ‘pagan’ tradition.

That Roman festival marked the ending of an era stretching back six or seven thousand years before, at the start of which the first farmers had gradually been working out the cycles of the planets as they moved against the stars at night in order to tell the time more accurately so they could manage their crops and herds better. We guess this must be so, not only because of the observatories (stone circles) built by Neolithic man in Europe, throughout the ancient Near East and as far east as India, but also because in recent decades small granite stone balls of unknown function, stored in the cellars of museums in Britain and Scotland that date back to the Neolithic period, have now been recognised for what they are –precursors of Cosmokrator!

Cosmokrator has fourteen flat sides and is directly comparable in size to the granite stone ball illustrated above whose fourteen facets, astonishingly for their age, are spheroid. Our model is not so durable, but has the advantage of colour! The picture can be misleading as to size, for it is no bigger than a tennis ball, and nestles neatly in the cupped palm of the hand. Its geometrical partitions are accurate, with unadorned, curved surfaces that may originally have been polished. Literally hundreds of these, with differing numbers of facets, have been found in northern Scotland – Abderdeenshire in particular. Just a few of them have spiral or hatched markings carved on them.

We cannot precisely know what these stone balls were used for, but they are astonishing in their mathematical accuracy, and for people to bother to carve them in such a hard stone they must have been important instruments of calculation. We don’t know if they were used to understand sections of the sky, or as spherical abaci – what is certain is that these pure geometric forms precede by at least
two millennia Plato’s description of the five regular solids in The Timaeus written c. 500BC (available today in English in the Penguin Classics). I like to think that the Cosmokrator is a twenty-first century successor to these Neolithic instruments, and that by using it you are reattaching yourself to a very ancient practice. Their discovery is described in more detail in the book on architecture (Book 11).

Filling in the gap in between the Neolithic and Roman periods for the history behind Cosmokrator, we already have ready a supplementary booket to Book 7, Book 7A, about the interrelationships between astronomy, astrology, colour, materials and many other things. This is an academic paper which describes this tradition as it was built up in ancient Mesopotamia from c. 4000BC by diviners, astrologers, astronomers, doctors and priestesses. If you are really keen to understand the factual roots of Cosmokrator in history, then as a special offer we are enabling you to download it from this site, independently of the learned journal it is destined to appear in.