The Nasca Monkey
Americas' Golden Mean Champion

Introduction

Secrets of the Pentagon & Nasca

Every picture tells a story. The figure of a nine-fingered monkey from the desert near Nasca, Peru tells its story in a symbolic language, and contains much more than meets the eye.

How much of the figure on the left can be found in the Nasca figure on the right? (Hint - a lot). This report shows prehistoric artists engaged in a game of logic and encryption, utilizing a scientific code derived from geometry. The design of the Nasca Monkey is as deceptively simple, as it is sophisticated. Its clearest objective seems to be self-affirmation, as logically coded art. Naturally, such coded art turns prehistory upside down.
The monkey was designed over a pentagonal structure. /see note In this, the monkey takes over the second oldest spot in a fascinating category - Golden Section in art and architecture. In this world,  many old, as well as modern masterpieces also have hermetic structures basing on Golden Section. There is a belief that the presence of Golden Section (Φ) enhances perfection and beauty in human perception. The Golden Section compasses surviving in museums, which had once been popular with Renaissance artists, serve as indisputable physical evidence of this trend.
Hermetic art structures can be exposed by a variety of rational methods. However, prior to my experiments, no one had kept an open eye for mathematical sophistication in Stone Age materials.

• Therefore, I sure am glad that my analysis is easily verifiable.
  
  One Discovery Leads to Another
  
  The hard, but brittle dark-red crust of pebbles sunbaked with mud on the desert surrounding the town of Nasca, Peru (Nazca in English) is thousands of years old. The crust crumbles easily under  feet of bigger creatures, not to speak of terrain vehicles. When exposed, the fresh soil below the crust is of a bright ochre color, which contrasts vividly with the dark-red patina on the aged surface. Before history began to be recorded in this area, someone had exploited this contrast to decorate vast tracts of this desert with a majestic and puzzling collection of straight lines from horizon to horizon, and beyond, spirals, large trapezoidal clearings, and various giant animal and plant figures. Modern ad-industry got into the act around Nazca, as well. Using the same ancient method, it vies for the attention of air-travelers by giant signs marring the natural museum in the worst taste of invasive in your-face commercialism, while simultaneously providing a perfect example of how such giant figures are meant to be seen from high above by be it airline passengers, astronauts, flying saucerites, or gods, deities, and spirits. The largest clearings at Nasca can be espied by unaided eye from low planetary orbits, while at the vision-limits on the other side of the Andes, there lurks the archeological super-site of Machu Picchu. Numerous speculative theories have been advanced on Nasca, all of them wrong. Most information on Nasca comes the prolific fieldwork of Maria Reiche, a math teacher in her native Germany, before becoming Nazca's guardian angel. Reiche had devoted her life-time to surveying and protecting of the Nasca markings. This intrepid vegetarian lady had lived like a bedouin while patiently dusting off the desert with a broom to revive the faded figures, measuring, sketching, etc. If not for Reiche - the figures wouldn't have had survived irrigation plans for ranches in the area! Luckily, Reiche managed to win Peruvians over to the conservationist side. Ave Maria ...
  The consensus has it that the line makers had to be good at land surveying techniques to implement the designs, which the eye cannot span from the ground level. Yet, the consensus stops well short of
  wanting to imply that the line makers had advanced science - a notion, which would require rewriting of history. The consensus presumes that the Nazcans had a relatively advanced method of scaling designs onto the pampa. The designs themselves are not suspected of mathematical sophistication. In  contrast, Reiche became convinced that the lines hold ingeniously encoded information. Promptly, she spent a lot of time trying to break the code. As one possibility, Reiche had considered the "sacred path" idea, which likens the lines to the still unsolved "knotted cords", once used by the Incan civilization as a way of keeping records. The Nazca lines were perenially short of a good theory. For instance, searching for connections between the markings and astronomy never turned up anything worthwhile. True, most such searches had concentrated on skies of the early first millennium A.D., to which researchers credit the markings' genesis. No one had checked dates like 10,500 BC, etc. Critics complain that Reiche failed to document any of her ideas (on the geometrical skills of the Ancients) in a sufficiently convincing< manner, having published just too little material. Yet, the critics did nothing for the advancement of Nazca's research, unlike Reiche. While her documentation may not be convincing, it certainly is enticing. Regarding the credibility of my own report, at least some of my observations must merit automatic attention. Let me just mention the matter of the Monkey's positioning to the world compass. Surely, such a matter can and should be considered in all objectivity. But, when shall this pass?
  
  

The Phi-ratio, or the "Section", as the Pythagoreans called it, occurs on only one regular figure - the five-pointed star. Pythagoreans guarded their knowledge of the star's secrets, having sworn to seek and destroy all those who would betray them. This must have been the traditional approach to the matter by high priests of the Egyptian Temple. Pythagoras was once one of the highest priests in Egypt.There was no gain in protecting these secrets, so, perhaps, these were considered dangerous somehow. But, how could  Mathematics be considered dangerous? The idea might not be so strange, if Science has been misused before. There is no shortage of myth on Wars between Gods. But ancient authors also speak of the Secret of Life. In my interpretation of his passage on the solids, Plato claims that the Dodecahedron - the 3-D solid with twelve faces of either a five pointed star, or a pentagon - holds  the Secret of Life, as this was the Divine Design with which God had animated the Heavens, i.e., the Universe. Translators have two options for the word Plato had  used:

a) to draw figures of beings
b) to animate with soul

They opt for version 'a)' without hesitation and then muse at the impenetrable meaning of their own words "Dodecahedron, with which God had decorated the Heavens". Why not choose veersion b  'Dodecahedron, which God had used in the Creation of Life.' We do see all around countless simpler forms of Life like flowers, or  sea-stars, proving Life's pragmatical use of the Golden Mean and other secrets of the 5-pointed star. Does this not make the star magical?