New review

The Hermetic Code in DNA The Sacred Principles in the Ordering of the Universe By: Michael Hayes; 2008; Inner Traditions; 334 pages; $18.95 (pbk); ISBN 978-159477218-4; www.innertraditions.com Groundbreaking science today coincides with ancient philosophies and religions from all over the world in identifying distinct numerical patterns that would seem to hold the secrets of the universe. In The Hermetic Code in DNA , Michael Hayes reveals that these patterns are connected by a precise code, the Hermetic Code, apparently known to ancient cultures but lost over time. Grounded in this code are the harmonic ratios of the octaves underlying what we call music, the overtones of which make a striking appearance in the very basis of biological life: DNA.

So… life is music. Let's tune in…

The opening chapter begins with a discussion of archaeological, geologic and mythological evidence indicating that the origin of scientifically sophisticated human civilization on earth date back far longer than modern conventional wisdom would allow. Prehistoric civilizations, Hayes tells us, seem to have been almost entirely preoccupied with the idea of order and harmony on a universal scale. In his search to ascertain the origin of the Hermetic Code, he finds evidence of its most fundamental component—the octave, the sacred constant—dating back at least 75,000 years.

The book continues with an exploration into a higher octave of consciousness known to the ancients but now obscure, the secrets of the great pyramids, the essence of time and space, reincarnation, mathematics, religious traditions and more… and how all of it relates to the code that determines, for each and every one of us, the essence of who we are.

Clearly written, thoroughly indexed and packed with compelling descriptions of multitudes of phenomena we've all heard about but of which most of us have little understanding, The Hermetic Code in DNA is an exciting and wonderful read.

—Chiwah
The Light Connection Magazine
Vista CA,
Vol. 25, No. 4, 04/09.

Introduction by Colin Wilson to High Priests, Quantum Genes: Science, Religion and the Theory of Everything (American edition re-titled: The Hermetic Code in DNA: The Sacred Principles in the Ordering of the Universe).

I suspect that the name Michael Hayes is going to be remembered with those of Stephen Hawking and Watson and Crick as a thinker who has made a revolutionary contribution to our vision of modern science.

Some time in 1995 I received a copy of a book called The Infinite Harmony, and subtitled Musical Structures in Science and Theology, published by the respectable firm of Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Since I was overworked, trying to complete a book to a deadline, it took some time before I got around to reading it. My book was about ancient Egypt, and was called From Atlantis to the Sphinx; its starting point was the theory of John Anthony West that the Sphinx may be thousands of years older than anyone had supposed. And the amount of reading required was enormous.

One evening I was relaxing with a glass of wine when I noticed The Infinite Harmony in a pile of books beside my chair. I picked it up idly, glanced down the table of contents, and saw that the second chapter is devoted to ancient Egypt. Naturally, I turned to it immediately, and was soon reading with excitement and absorption. I quickly learned something I had not come across before:

“that in the antechamber to the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid, there is a square granite relief whose area is exactly equal to the area of a circle whose diameter happens to be precisely the same length as the antechamber floor. What is more, when this length is multiplied by pi, the result is precisely the length of the solar year: 365.2412 pyramid inches”.

I was fascinated. It had long been clear to me that the ancients attached some mystical significance to numbers and that the sophistication of their knowledge was often greater than ours. Hayes reinforced my feeling that we are dealing with a very ancient knowledge-system whose secret has been lost.

I was so excited that I looked around to see if I could locate the letter that had accompanied the book. It had vanished. The inscription in the book showed that it had been lying around my sitting room for months. And my wife had made a note of the sender’s address, which was in Moseley, Birmingham. I rang Directory Enquiries and asked them if they had a telephone number for Michael Hayes; they had. And although it was now after ten in the evening, I rang him. A girl answered the phone, and went off to get her father. A few moments later, I was speaking to Michael Hayes, apologising for keeping him waiting so long for a reply, and telling him that I found his book enormously exciting.

I asked him some questions about himself, and about how he had become interested in the subject. He told me that it had started in his hippie days, when he was living in Mashad, in Iran, and was in the great mosque of the Imam Reza, impressed by the sheer number of worshippers, and by their devoutness. It was obvious that to them, religion was a living reality, just as it had been to the thousands of worshippers who had brought stones for the building of Chartres cathedral in the twelfth century. And during his travels in Iran, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Michael Hayes had
felt exactly the same thing - that their religions had a living source. He experienced an overpowering sense of being on the brink of learning some enormous secret.

Back in England, he had decided that it was time he learned something about the genetic code, and the mysterious letters DNA. He enrolled at a course at Leicester University. And there he took an important step closer to the secret. It proved to be numerical.

The spiral-shaped DNA molecule involves four chemical bases called adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine. And these four can combine together in sixty-four different ways to form triplet units called RNA codons.

The number sixty-four struck a chord. Then he remembered what it was: that the Chinese “Book of Changes”, the I-Ching, has sixty-four “hexagrams”, each made up of two different lines. Any reader who has ever tried throwing down three coins to consult the I-Ching will recall that a preponderance of tails result in a broken line, while three heads form an unbroken line. The first symbolises the Chinese concept of “yin”, the feminine, the yielding, while the second is “yang”, the forceful and masculine. The coins are thrown six times, and the six lines are laid on one another in a kind of six-decker sandwich.

Those who use Richard Wilhelm’s translation, with the introduction by Jung, will recall that the next step is to turn to the chart at the back of the book, which contains sixty-four numbers in a grid of squares, whose sides are eight units long. You then look up your “top” trigram along the horizontal edge, and your “lower” trigram along the vertical edge, and the square where the two trigrams meet is the number of the hexagram you are looking for.

In the early stage of his quest, Mike Hayes (as he prefers to be known) had studied the I-Ching, and wondered idly why the number of hexagrams is eight times eight, not seven times seven or nine times nine. And now, with the coincidence of the DNA code and the hexagrams of the I-Ching, he found himself wondering if this number sixty-four is some basic code of life.

When he learned that there were eight trigrams hidden in DNA, he began to feel that this was more than an odd coincidence...

All this Mike sketched out for me during that phone conversation. And when it was over, I had decided that reading the whole book was a major priority.

What I learned in The Infinite Harmony was that this coincidence was just the beginning of a whole series of related discoveries. For example, the number twenty-two plays a basic part in the DNA code. Proteins are formed by twenty amino acids, but with two codons forming start and stop signals, making twenty-two in all. And twenty-two also plays an important part in music, being the number of notes in three octaves on the piano. The followers of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras regarded twenty-two as a sacred number, and also three.

Previously, studying the Russian mage Gurdjieff, Mike had also been introduced to something called the “law of three”. Positive and negative, good and evil, light and darkness, merely counterbalance one another, but a third force is necessary to combine them - just as the two sides of a zip are made to interlock with the fastener in the middle, or two gases will only combine in the presence of a catalyst which is itself unaffected.

Studying the world’s major religions, Mike was struck by how often the numbers twenty-two, three and seven occur. The number pi, the relation of a diameter of a circle to its circumference, is twenty-two divided by seven. So now he began to look in detail at the world’s major religions - ancient Egypt, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, Jainism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Christianity. With increasing excitement, he realised that his numerical discoveries constituted a code that connected them all. The same code turned up in alchemy, which led him to label it the Hermetic Code, after Hermes Trismegistus, the Greek god who is the patron of alchemists, and whose best-known dictum is “As above, so below”. And so The Infinite Harmony came to be written.

His chances of publishing such a strange and abstruse book seemed minimal, yet its importance was recognised by an editor at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and it appeared in 1994. But there the marvellous wave of coincidence and synchronicity that had carried him so far seemed to run out of strength. The book was not widely recognised, and opened no further opportunities. And just as Mike was beginning to experience a sense of anticlimax, I rang up, and said I intended to write about it in From Atlantis to the Sphinx.

I did just that, and the book came out in 1996, and went into several editions - partly because the whole subject of ancient civilisations had become popular as a result of Graham Hancock’s remarkable bestseller Fingerprints of the Gods, which argued that civilisation may be thousands of years older than archaeologists believe.

By that time, I had met Mike Hayes. He had spent a part of his childhood in Penzance, in Cornwall, and accepted eagerly when I suggested that he should take a few days off writing his second book, and come and renew his acquaintance with Cornwall. We spent days driving around, talking endlessly, and he told me many things about himself and his development which I shall not repeat here, since they are in the remarkable and absorbing introduction to this book.

Mike proved to be a slightly built, fair-haired man who was in his mid-forties at the time I met him. And during the few days he spent in Cornwall (his wife Ali had to stay behind to look after their three daughters), I got the same odd feeling I had experienced while reading The Infinite Harmony: that here was one of those people that fate seems to throw down into the world to make some important discovery.

This has always seemed to me true of all scientists and inventors. One of my favourite television programmes is Adam Hart Davis’s Local Heroes, in which he cycles from place to place, and comes upon dozens - in fact hundreds - of remarkable men and women who have left something behind them - perhaps something as straightforward but essential as the lawnmower or hovercraft, perhaps some world-changing knowledge like relativity or quantum theory.

Mike Hayes, I soon came to feel, is one of these. And why do I think he is so important? Because if the genetic code and Mike’s “Hermetic Code” - these numbers which recur constantly throughout all world religions - are identical, then there is a fundamental connection between molecular biology and religion. And why is that important? Because ever since Gregor Mendel created genetics in the nineteenth century, it has been regarded as a science of the mechanism of evolution. Darwin suggested that evolution progresses through a mechanical process of the survival of the fittest, but he was not sure about the nature of the mechanism that creates species. Mendel’s discoveries pointed to the genes as the answer.

But Darwinism plus Mendelism was even more mechanical than Darwinism alone. At least Darwin believed that his colleague Lamarck - and his grandfather Erasmus - might be partly correct in believing that the will of the individual influences evolutionary changes. But the neo-Darwinists who accepted Mendel’s discoveries as the mechanism of evolution felt that it explained everything. Evolution was now a totally mechanical process - like the erosion of a landscape by geological forces - for the will of the individual cannot influence his genes. And the most influential of modern geneticists, like Richard Dawkins, are rigid materialists.

I personally have been attacking this view for the past half-century, and have pointed out anomalies that cannot be explained in terms of mechanical evolution - for example, how a colony of little insects called the flattid bug can crawl on to a dead twig and then shape themselves into the likeness of a living flower - a flower that does not even exist in nature. This cannot be explained by “survival of the fittest”. It seems to involve some “group mind” operating at an unconscious level.

Now, in showing the connection between the Hermetic Code and the genetic code, Mike Hayes has pointed to the fact that the essence of evolution can also be found in religion, and therefore in the realm of the evolution of consciousness.

I found his introductory remarks about the insights he obtained through LSD exciting partly because of his comment, “I clearly perceived that (everything solid) is composed, literally, of sparkling, vibrant ‘particles’ of light”, a view that is of central importance to the argument of the book, and which echoes the vision of so many mystics.

Now I had already come upon this notion in a book called Essay on the Origin of Thought (1974) by a remarkable young philosopher named Jurij Moskvitin. Lying one day in the sunlight with his eyes half closed, he became aware of a kind of moving mosaic pattern through his eyelashes. It seemed to be made of tiny light fragments, and as he slowly developed the ability to focus them, he recognised patterns like those in religious art, “art and ornamentation created by civilisations dominated by mystical initiation and experience”. These forms, he finally decided, were made up of “dancing sparks”, a little like the tiny lines in the work of the painter Signac. These sparks, which he decided looked a little like tadpoles, make up our whole, visual field, on which we impose shapes. He compares it to the way that, in a Dutch painting, a wine glass examined closely proves to be merely a few strokes of yellow paint. Moskvitin is suggesting that the external world our eyes reveal to us is simply a limited version of a larger inner world. I was reminded of Moskvitin’s thesis by Mike Hayes’s theory of light - on which he expands greatly in this book.

His insights were also close to those of a remarkable anthropologist called Jeremy Narby, who studied among the Ashaninca Indians of Peru, and became convinced that their extraordinary knowledge of the medicinal properties of forest plants was obtained through a visionary process involving the drug ayahuasca.

For example, the drug curare, used on poison darts, is made from a combination of plants, and the first stage is to boil them for three days, while staying clear of the deadly vapours. The final product kills monkeys without poisoning their meat, and also causes them to relax their grip so they fall from the tree to the ground, instead of clinging to the tree in a death spasm.

But there are about 80,000 species of forest plants. How did the Indians stumble on curare without poisoning themselves first, or wasting their lives in endless experiment?

The same questions arise with regard to ayahuasca. It is made up of two plants, one of which contains a hormone secreted in the human brain, a hallucinogen that is rendered harmless by a stomach enzyme. In order to prevent it being rendered harmless (and useless as a drug), it has to be mixed with a substance from a creeper. Then it induces visions.

How, Narby wondered, did the Indians discover anything so complex? Surely not by trial and error - trying millions of possible combinations? The shaman’s answer was that they learned it from drugs, which “told” them the answer.

Narby learned a great deal from another anthropologist, Michael Harner, who had also experimented with drugs among the Indians. And Harner had declared that his visions emanated from giant reptile creatures “like DNA” that resided at the lowest depth of his brain.

It struck Narby that DNA looks like two intertwined serpents (as Mike Hayes also points out). The molecule also looks like a spiral ladder, and shamans the world over talk about ascending a ladder to higher realms of the spirit.

Narby himself tried ayahuasca, and reached the same conclusions as Harmer. The drug introduced him to Harmer’s “serpents”:

“Suddenly I found myself surrounded by two gigantic boa constrictors that seemed fifty feet long. I was terrified...In the middle of these hazy thoughts, the snakes start talking to me without words. They explain that I am merely a human being. I feel my mind crack, and in the fissures, I see the bottomless arrogance of my presuppositions. It is profoundly true that I am just a human being, and, most of the time, I have the impression of understanding everything, whereas here I find myself in a more powerful reality that I do not understand at all and that, in my arrogance, I did not even suspect existed.”

He began to feel that language itself was inadequate, and that words would no longer stick to images.

But after this alarming beginning, things began to improve as he realised that the Indians know their way around in this bizarre reality, and that the most apparently absurd things they had told him were true. And somehow, the Indians seemed to be obtaining their information direct from DNA, a concept that seems less odd when we remember Mike Hayes’s discovery of the similarity between the genetic code and the I-Ching.

Later in The Cosmic Serpent, Narby writes, “It seemed that no one had noticed the possible links between the ‘myths’ of ‘primitive peoples’ and molecular biology”. And he goes on to make the important comment (in view of Mike Hayes’s emphasis on music), “According to the shamans of the entire world, one establishes communication with the spirits via music”.

Narby dares to ask, “Is there a goal to life? Do we exist for a reason? I believe so, and I think that the combination of shamanism and biology gives undisputed answers to these questions”.

Obviously, Jeremy Narby and Mike Hayes have been pursuing parallel courses, and arrived at very similar conclusions.

A few words about the present book. In many ways, it is easier to absorb than The Infinite Harmony. To begin with, Hayes discusses in his introduction the pertinent biographical facts that enable the reader to watch the discovery and unfolding of his ideas. This introduction says everything that is in The Infinite Harmony, and makes it all beautifully clear. He then plunges into the questions that are directly related to Graham Hancock’s thesis in Fingerprints of the Gods, Robert Bauval’s in The Orion Mystery, and my own in From Atlantis to the Sphinx. Even I, who have now devoted about ten years to these matters, was fascinated by his treatment of them. He also points out that there is evidence that Neanderthal man knew about the Hermetic Code 75,000 years ago.

I shall not try to summarise the rest of the book except to say that it is remarkable for the confidence he shows in handling an immense range of subjects, from modern physics to the paranormal, from evolutionary biology to musical theory, from yoga to superconductivity. I was familiar with some of this material, but much of it was unknown to me, and the use he makes of it is strikingly his own.

The performance is often so dazzling, reminding a reader of a juggler who can keep ten balls in the air at the same time, that the reader might easily be misled into thinking that this is no more than a brilliant piece of eclectic exposition. But make no mistake: what Mike Hayes has discovered could be as important as the original discovery of DNA. Like Jurij Moskvitin and Jeremy Narby, he has created a new paradigm - that is, he is looking at our familiar universe from a new angle, and making us aware of magical possibilities.

Colin Wilson

New Review, October 2008

John Robert Colombo, Reviewer

Posted at www.gurdjieffbooks.com

The Hermetic Code in DNA
By Michael Hayes



I quite enjoyed reading this book, but its title is a mouthful of words, so I have found myself referring to it in conversation with friends as: 'the new book which I am reading that tries to find a relationship between the so-called 'hermetic code' and the code that informs the structure of DNA.' When I say that, people look amiss or agog, and I know why. I repeat that the author is 'trying to find a relationship', and that it is a struggle worthy of the exertions of a Sysiphus (an uphill battle) or the frustrations of a Tantalus (an ever receding reward).

The author who so resembles Sysiphus or Tantalus is Michael Hayes, described on the cover of this quality paperback as 'an administrator at the University of Central England' (formerly Birmingham Polytechnic) and, 'the author of The Infinite Harmony:Musical Structures in Science and Theology' (Weidenfeld & Nicolsen, The Orion Publishing Group, London, 1994). I have yet to see a copy of that publication. After reading the present book, I find myself moderately curious about it.

The present book is a new title, for it was originally published in England in 2004 by Black Spring Press, a quality literary publisher in London, under the title High Priests, Quantum Genes. The edition that I am reviewing is titled: The Hermetic Code in DNA: The Sacred Principles in the Ordering of the Universe, and was published in 2008 by another quality house: Inner Traditions, Rochester, Vermont, which specializes in books of a non-secular and spiritual nature. (Both companies have readily accessible websites).

Here are some bibliographical details for the American edition under review: Trade paperback, 6" x 9", xviii + 334 pages, ISBN 978-1-59477-218-4. $18.95. There are 17 chapters with notes, bibliography and index. Also included is the arresting Introduction, to which I will now turn my attention.

The Introduction is a long personal essay from the fountain pen or personal computer of Colin Wilson. I am second to none in my admiration of Wilson's oeuvre, and I really enjoy reading what he writes for his choice of subjects and his agreeable style. His strength has always been his remarkable ability to present the unconventional ideas of 'outsiders'. He is a great explainer of ancient and advanced thinking, though lately he has become more of an advocate more than an interpreter.
Here, for instance, is the first paragraph of the Introduction to the present book:

'I suspect that the name of Michael Hayes is going to be remembered together with those of Stephen Hawking and Watson and Crick as a thinker who has made a revolutionary contribution to our vision of modern science.'

That is taking a giant step. Indeed, it is equivalent to the step that Wilson took when he completed Alien Dawn: An investigation into the Contact Experience (1999). That book, about the contactee dimension of ufology concludes with the statement that the author believes that not only do aliens exist, but aliens are right here now, walking the streets of our cities, moving among us. The evidence for this claim is lacking, but people will believe what excites them and what they want to believe.

Indeed, when the atomic scientist Leo Szilard was asked if he believed in the existence of alien beings, he replied that he did. Then he was asked, 'If they exist, where are they?' He replied, 'They are here, right now. They live among us. They are called... Hungarians'. Unlike Szilard's aliens, Wilson's critters are creatures or characters from outer space, from other times, or from other dimensions - hybrid humans, perhaps. Maybe.

I doubt that Michael Hayes's name will ever be linked with those of Hawking, Watson or Crick - at least not as long as the names of those scientists are honoured. And Hayes has yet to make a contribution to 'our vision of modern science', but he has modestly contributed to our view of 'the wisdom tradition'. From now on Hayes's name will be linked with a lively and intelligent discussion of a range of subjects of popular speculative interest. This book of his will be shelved alongside works of dozens of writers who have contributed to the 'occult sciences', or what I have called in another context, 'speculative non-fiction'.

Numerology is one such subject and it has been newsworthy for the last decade. For instance, the Fortean movie Magnolia (1999) features the number 8. A Beautiful Mind (2001) drowns in a tsunami of coded numbers, zillions of digits. The comedy, The Number 23 (2007) makes much use of the correspondences of the unlikely number 23. Behind much of this is the Kaballah, and behind that cerebral discipline there are the 613 Hebrew laws (curiously the number of bones in the human body.

In the present book, Hayes devotes chapters to different traditions, so each has its own special number or numbers. Hayes finds special relevance in such digits as 3, 3.1457, 4, 7, 8, 22, 64, 838, etc. The Law of Three and the Octaves of the Ray of Creation are featured. But no special importance is given to the numbers 1.6, 9, 13, or 613, perhaps because these come from traditions that are not surveyed here - in this case, sacred architecture, Baha'i, the superstition of folklore, and the Kaballah.

Excuse me if I am being a little light-headed or flippant, but unlike the scientists named by Wilson, Hayes undertakes no research, contributes findings to no scientific publications, and demonstrates no special scholarly or linguistic abilities or aptitudes. However, what he does display is an omnivorous curiosity and the ability to respond creatively to extensive readings in many popular books and a few serious ones (although it is with the latter that he does express some serious reservations).

By 'popular books', I mean 'eye-openers' like Robert Bauval's The Orion Mystery (1994) and Christopher P Dunn's The Giza Power Plant (1998). By serious books I mean Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker (1998) and Giorgio de Santillana's Hamlet's Mill (1992). I am limiting myself to titles selected at random from the first page of the three-page bibliography. Hayes also accredits reprints of G. I. Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales (1964), as well as P. D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous (1976), and A New Model of the Universe (1977), recalling here and there pertinent passages to good effect.

The Hermetic Code in DNA is hard to beat for a fast moving survey of current thought about the interaction of the wisdom tradition from archaic times to the postmodern period and its possible connection with the recently revealed structures of the human genome, specifically its basis in DNA. It makes use of comparisons and contrasts, similarities and analogies, and above all it uses associative thought processes, what in another context Ouspensky called 'psychological thought', to distinguish it from 'logical thought'.

I am not going to pursue them here, but two general criticisms that I have are that there is no discussion of the tendency of the human mind to find symmetry where none exists, and there is no discussion of the nature of language itself, the appeal of metaphor, or Northrop Frye's 'order of worlds'. Nor is the insight of the poet as distinct from that of the scientist mentioned. At some later point I may tackle those criticisms as subjects worthy of consideration in their own right, for such shortcomings are characteristic of 'occult literature' generally.

Basically what Hayes has done is to offer a discussion of the scientific basis of the existence of the spirit, as well as the spiritual basis for the existence of science. What we have here is a convergence of two disciplines - call one of them 'science', the other, 'occult science'. (Hayes handles this distinction by distinguishing between 'regular science', and what he calls, 'Science with a capital 'S'')

If I can encapsulate Hayes's aim in writing this book, it is to find a convergence and ultimately an identity between hermetic studies and the structure of the gene. In other words, we have in our genes - coded in our genetic structure - the wisdom of the ages. It evolves physically and psychologically through the Law of Three and the Law of Octaves. Hayes encapsulates this theme for the reader in the sole detailed footnote of any length. Here it is:

'One would not expect exact superimpositions to be visible at every level, because the universe is continually evolving, constantly in flux. But as long as the various symmetries link in at these main 'points of entry', the Hermetic Code is valid. If anything, the fact that the code can be directly linked to all of these various symmetries - and many others found in the natural world - is precisely what one would expect of a 'theory of everything'.

Apparently mathematicians and cosmologists are johnny-come-latelys with their own physical 'theory of everything', trailing by centuries if not by millennia metaphysicians associated with obscure schools and monasteries in claiming to have found 'a key to the enigmas of the world'.

But enough of beating around the bush. Hayes in his book focusses on the following subjects and argues in the following fashion:

Introduction. Proponents of all the major belief systems agree that there is an existence after death, the author writes. Matter is composed of particles or vibrations of light. There is a timeless or eternal form of reality. The major religions harness very real forces. Creation is the result of the Law of Three and the Law of Octaves embodied in the nature of the mathematical ratio Pi. The DNA in the cells of human bodies has four chemical bases. There are parallels here with the 64 permutations of the I-Ching. Music and specifically musical harmony offer a scientific key to the tones or wavelengths under discussion.

He writes:

'As the first recorded version of this archaic science first appeared in the Nile Delta about five thousand years ago, I have called this musical symmetry the Hermetic Code, after Hermes Trismegistus, the Greek name for Thoth, the ancient Egyptian god of Wisdom. This is the Hermetic Code, a universal formula that, as we shall find out, encompasses within it practically everything.

This is another form of the axiom, 'As above, so below'.

The author's Introduction takes the reader this far. As a reader of the book, I like the handling of the details that appear in the seventeen chapters. As a reviewer, all I can do is point out a few of the approaches that the author takes. Suffice it to say that the author writes very readably; he is familiar with standard popular books on offbeat topics, and he seems intent on proving that there is a numerical code, if not a Hermetic one, that underpins the genetic code and acts as a cipher for philosophical and theosophical systems.

Here is my simplification of the author's arguments:

There is the four-fold nature of DNA. There are the four traditional elements in the natural world. There is a parallel here between scientific discovery and metaphysical inquiry. Could this be a coincidence? (I am inclined to say that in many cases the 'resemblance' or 'correspondence' is an artifact of the question itself).

Now here is the author's argument, chapter by chapter, with one sentence or two for each of the seventeen chapters.

1. 'The Sacred Constant'. Ancient wisdom first appeared in Egypt some 5,000 years ago B.C., and it holds the 'sacred constant', expressed in the number 8. This is the Law of Octaves, counting the two Do's. Note that 8 x 8 = 64, another type of greater harmony associated with the I-Ching.

2. 'A Different Way of Seeing'. Rhythms and harmonies of the universe are expressed by their Hermetic Code, especially as evolution proceeds by octaves, and this is seen in music and art (Gurdjieff's distinction between subjective and objective art) and architecture (Rene Scwaller de Lubicz's views on architectural forms of man.)

3. 'Music over Matter'. Music (all those octaves) may have managed the construction of the megaliths, evoked by the phrase 'musical magic', and perhaps the phenomenon of the 'group mind' as advanced by Colin Wilson was used by early peoples to great effect: mental building cranes and cranial forklifts.

4. 'The Electron and the Holy Ghost'. Subatomic particles and the theory of 'quantum potential' advanced by David Bohm are considered, as are the views of Sri Aurobindo, leading to the conclusion that matter is alive and composed of vibrations and/or light.

5. 'Further Light'. Christopher Dunn's speculations on 'sonic/ultrasonic stone carving and drilling' and Princeton physicist Robert Jahn are, in a sense, compared. This chapter and indeed much of the book is 'metaphysical' in the sense that literary scholars call John Donne a 'metaphysical poet', for there is a roping together of heterogeneous elements to create a greater whole. A sense of the greater whole may be felt in these two long sentences:
'So the Great Pyramid, the most impressive monument to light ever created on Earth, massive and imposing as it is, is really no more than a foundation stone upon which has been constructed another, infinitely vaster, metaphysical structure, a creation of sorts, whose indeterminate dimensions are even to this day expanding ever outward and upward. I am referring here, of course, to the ongoing evolution of human consciousness, which began its present stage of development at the time the Great Pyramid was designed, and which has ever since been guided subconsciously by the all-embracing hermetic principles embodied within it.'
This is indeed metaphysical prose. In another comparison, it embodies the principle of the hologram, for from a single fragment may be generated or regenerated the multifaceted whole.

6. 'Live Music'. So-called 'scientific creationists' and evolutionary scientists are contrasted and Richard Dawkins is taken to task for his notion that 'stumbling blindly through geological time' led to life as we know it today, not a noble notion of 'transcendental evolution' whereby: 'it is possible for individuals to emulate the living cell and to achieve a similar condition of 'optimum resonance'.'
Here the author expresses his naked thesis: 'I stated above that I believe that the growth and development of consciousness is an organic process. Logically it has to be, because the Hermetic Code and the genetic code are fundamentally one and the same system.'

7. 'Extraterrestrial DNA'. Another extension of 'the theory of transcendental evolution' which leads to the Pyramids ('The Lights' is apparently how these structures were known to the Egyptians of old) which leads to the star systems above them, Sirius and Zeta Orionis, as well as the starry-eyed speculations of Rodney Collin.

8. 'Interstellar Genes and the Galactic Double Helix'. Robert Temple's The Sirius Mystery is discussed along with Gurdjieff's 'missing semitones', to suggest that the universe is a being that is fully conscious.

9. 'The Hermetic Universe of Ancient Times'. The Pythagorean cosmological system is considered with respect to reincarnation, the nature of the universe, modern science, metaphysics, and 'zoon', the Greek term for a 'living thing'.

10. 'The Hierarchy of Dimensions'. So the universe is 'organic', but it exists on a hierarchy of planes or levels or dimensions.
'Confused?' the author questions the reader. 'To be perfectly honest, so am I. Frequently. But then we are trying to come to terms with the imponderable here, and left-brain logic alone can take us only so far in the quest for the ultimate reality'.

11. 'The Fate of the Universe'. Speculation on the fate of the universe gives equal weight to science-fiction writer Wilbur Wright in Time: Gateway to Immortality and writer-scientist Paul Davies in The Last Three Minutes, to build the argument that there is 'music literally everywhere, in the chromodynamic and atomic scales of matter, in DNA and the genetic code', etc.

12. 'Inner Octaves'. Outer octaves were explored, so here the investigation narrows and deepens into the inner octaves, through the symbol or structure of the Ray of Creation.

13 'The Holographic Principle'. Michael Talbot, author of The Holographic Universe, is a big help here to demonstrate that a part is as great as a whole, a whole as great as a part.

14. 'Quantum Psychology'. What the author calls 'quantum psychology' sheds light on the findings of particle physicists (notably Karl Pribram), parapsychologists, and neurophysiologists, permitting the reader to see that there are ways the brain resembles subatomic particles in their 'non-locality'. Here I recall the delicious pun in the movie, The Golden Compass: Lord Asriel is described as a 'particle metaphysicist'.

15. 'QP2: The Universal Paradigm'. Man is composed of 'triple octaves' of resonance, so we are 'walking trinities' composed of our sensations, emotions and perceptions, a point that Hayes argues in his earlier book, The Infinite Harmony.

16. 'The Shapeshifters'. Mayan and Egyptian texts and Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods all lead to an examination of 'extraordinary mental and physical powers' shown by members of 'the Egyptian elite' to permit them to build their monumental structures.

17. 'Al-Chem - the Egyptian Way'. Octaves of resonance are invoked to account for the harnessing or focusing of exceptional powers for exceptional effects. The author writes powerfully:
'We know that in the natural course of Darwinian evolution successful genes can survive all manner of catastrophes: ice ages, rapid meltdowns, deluges, earthquakes, cometary impacts. In the same way, the hermetic ideas we are dealing with here - the metaphysical equivalent of successful genes - have survived all kinds of social upheaval: wars, dark ages, periods of total ignorance and barbarism, inquisitions, revolutions, and so on. Therefore we are not speaking in metaphor: we are talking about organic processes of creation and evolution, both microcosmic and macrocosmic, which are identical in every way, with a difference in scale only'.

So much for this Baedeker-like tour of the countryside. My own view of Michael Hayes's achievement is that The Hermetic Code in DNA is a literary composition written in an underrated literary form, that of the 'anatomy' - think of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy - and that through accumulation of detail and organisation by association, rather than by classification and disinterested pursuit of its thesis, it embraces other subliterary forms in an attempt to reveal common characteristics and congruent conceptions that have to do with the evolution of nature, man, and spirit. It is an ample and in a way an impressive anatomical achievement.

How successful is it? That is for the reader to decide, the reader who is familiar with associative thinking as well as the material that is included and the material that is excluded, or the reader who is flustered by all the material and perhaps over impressed with it. Hayes is committed to his point of view (Hermetic Code = Genetic Code) to the exclusion of criticism of sources and commonsense reservations. Even so, Robert Burton was ultimately unhappy with his classic Anatomy of Melancholy, perhaps because most people read it for its bits and pieces rather than for its 'metaphysical' whole.


John Robert Colombo is an author and anthologist who lives in Toronto. His current publication, 500 pages long, is called The Big Book of Canadian Ghost Stories. He is an Associate, Northrop Frye Centre, Victoria College, University of Toronto.

NEWS

My last book, published in England in 2004: High Priests, Quantum Genes, is being published in the USA by Inner Traditions, July 2008, re-titled: The Hermetic Code in DNA.

Visit the Inner Traditions Website for more information.
www.innertraditions.com

Alternatively, if you live in the UK and would prefer to see the original: High Priests, Quantum Genes, visit:
www.blackspringpress.co.uk

Review by Gary Lachman

Fortean Times Review: July Issue

SOLVING THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX

The Universal man, interstellar genes, galactic double-helices, group consciousness and the magic of the octave make a heady brew. The hot search among physicists and other game scientists is the 'theory of everything'. One physicist quipped that the answer to the question 'Why is everything the way it is?' would be an elegant equation which could then be put on a T-shirt. This 'been there, done that' approach to cosmological riddles is typical of the nerdy sensibility that informs much hubristic science. What will scientists do once everything has been neatly accounted for? A too successful summing up of the Universe will put a lot of other people out of business. This reflection has spawned several 'end of science' books, with gloomy predictions about the boredom that will descend on our intellectual life once our speculative Alexanders have no new worlds to conquer.

As Michael Hayes argues in this intriguing book, the search for a theory of everything has a long and fascinating history, though contemporary thinkers on the subject will probably look askance on Hayes' more mystical approach. He argues that there isn't a 'final equation' to the Universe, but a code, which he calls the Hermetic Code, based on the musical scale of octaves. (The alchemical aphorism, 'as above, so below', associated with the legendary Hermes Trismegistus, is the most concise expression of the Code). With diligence and a little maths, he suggests, the open-minded seeker can find evidence for it in, well, just about everything.

Hayes' central thesis is that the musical symmetry of the octave can be found in phenomena as disparate as the DNA molecule, the major world religions, the holographic character of the brain and the ancient Chinese I-Ching, or Book of Changes. Hayes argues that the code was known to the ancients and was inherited by them from a hitherto unrecognised earlier civilisation. Readers of Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval will be in familiar territory in the opening chapters, but Hayes does more than re-present their arguments. Building on speculations about these early Atlanteans, for want of a better name, Hayes links architectural and engineering marvels like the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid to a host of other fields and thinkers. Stan Gooch's reflections on Neanderthal man, David Bohm's ideas about the 'implicate order', the precession of the equinoxes, elementary physics and the nature of light, non-Darwinian evolution, Sri Aurobindo and Pythagoras and many others, are brought together to form a heady, stimulating alternative to mainstream accounts of what makes the world tick. Following the insights of another philosophical maverick, G.I.Gurdjieff, Hayes argues that at bottom, the key to understanding the fundamental structure of reality lies in vibrations. Hayes suggests that the builders of the Sphinx might have created a 'group mind' to 'tune into' the vibrations of elementary particles in order to move the massive stones needed to construct the Sphinx enclosure and other ancient monuments.

Speculations like these might strike sceptical readers as groundless. Yet when we grasp that the more orthodox methods of transport available then can't account for how blocks weighing 200 tons or more were shifted, the notion of homonoia, Pythagoras's term for group consciousness, doesn't seem too far-fetched. Hayes argues that consciousness then was radically different from our own, and that in some strange way, people were able to intuit the presence of the Hermetic Code and use it to perform what would strike us as miracles.

We may have heard this before, but Hayes does an admirable job of marshalling enough mathematics, historical evidence and persuasive speculation to warrant a fresh look. He suggests that the fundamental insight of the Hermetic Code is, contrary to accepted belief, that the Universe is in some way alive and, perhaps even more odd, growing. Bringing together kabbalistic ideas about Adam Kadmon - the universal man - and DNA, Hayes speaks of 'interstellar genes' and 'galactic double-helices'. Rejecting notions of chance, he instead argues that human evolution is part of a vast 'cosmic octave', which in ourselves is reaching a higher level through increasing consciousness. Richard Dawkins devotees may groan, but anyone looking for a new approach to understanding our world will find much to ponder over in this book. Gary Lachman

Welcome to The Hermetic Code - Blog Site of Michael Hayes

Hello, Welcome to my website. This site is a vehicle for the transmission of ideas that have been pre-programmed to replicate inside the mind of every free-thinking soul on this planet. The ideas are not my property, they belong to all of us, and they have been continuously transmitted down through the ages by other human minds for a very long time - for centuries, millennia, and maybe even tens of millennia.
Let me elaborate:
For the past decade and a half I have been pursuing a singular goal: to try to understand in sensible terms the meaning and purpose of our existence.
This is a tall order, of course, and it is a question that millions of other questing minds have been trying to answer for centuries. But as it turns out, I believe that, in my meandering through time, space and human history, I may have hit upon something. After all, people do hit upon good ideas all the time: inventions, innovations, theories, concepts. And we know that, occasionally, there are marked breakthroughs in the cognitive development of our race, when something sparks in the human consciousness and marvellous discoveries are made. Think of the telescope or the laws of gravitation and motion, penicillin or Relativity, the unravelling of the molecular structure of DNA and the genetic code, or quantum mechanics, chromodynamics, superconductivity and so on. All of these ground-breaking discoveries have ultimately shaped virtually every aspect of life in the twenty-first century.

What I have to offer here is not a discovery in the sense of those just mentioned. Rather, it is an acknowledgement, a celebration even, of the remarkable achievements of the pioneers of human thought, not only those of our own civilisation, but also the accomplishments of the denizens of civilisations long gone. This is their story.

Article One: The Hermetic Code

by Michael Hayes.

The Hermetic Code
A General Theory of just about Everything.

Douglas Adams famously quipped that the number 42 was the key to the secret of life, the universe, everything. Denizens of the hitchhiker's quirky world have long delighted in this revelation, so meaningless as to be almost profound. Ironically, however, Adams was unwittingly touching on an idea that does, in fact, have substance: there is indeed a number that embodies a kind of general theory of everything.

Before I expand on this, a little background information will help the reader understand where I'm coming from.

Ever since I can remember, I have always been confounded by the mystery of human existence. This consciousness of ours, which we blindly take for granted, is to me nothing short of a miracle. What it is witness to is equally profound and perplexing, natural happenings that we seldom think about, but which in reality are truly awesome. For example, millions of sentient beings all over the world, hominid and animal, being born only to starve or be slaughtered wholesale, either through natural disasters, or, more perplexingly, through gross aberrations in human behaviour. On the wider scale of evolution, we see the emergence and subsequent extinction of whole races of people and species of animal.

And existence is no less capricious in the greater cosmos, with the continuous formation and cataclysmic destruction of planets, stars, galaxies. Just normal, 'everyday' occurrences - but these inviolable and often disturbingly violent events have persistently dogged my reason. Why, I wondered, would the cleric's omniscient Benefactor - if he exists - create such a myriad of wonderful forms and then turn round and simply annihilate them? These endless cycles of light and darkness, life and death - what kind of devilish game is being played here?

The ongoing debate over the possible existence and modus operandi of a conscious, all-knowing Creator proceeds unabated, with contributors from all disciplines lining up to have their say. However, owing to a remarkable sequence of events which led me on a solitary quest which was to last nearly fifteen years, I believe I have found a way of understanding what might really be going on in and around us. What is more, in this particular scheme of things, 'God' is tangible, very much alive, and undeniably omnipresent.

And in the end, if I am right, the long-term future of our race, powered by evolutionary forces that are encoded in the very fabric of the universe itself, looks not all bad.

Introducing the Hermetic Code

The Hermetic Code - which I am hereby promoting as 'the General Theory of just about Everything' - centres on a familiar numerical symbol: 22/7. This is 'classical' Pi of course, (as opposed to the ever illusive 'mathematical' version), a unique numerical symmetry whose discovery is generally attributed to the Greeks and which is most commonly known today for its use in maths as an approximate means of squaring the circle. More importantly, however, Pi is, in fact, a symbolic embodiment of the two most fundamental laws of nature, namely: the ubiquitous law of three forces, (active-passive-neutral) and the lesser known but equally all-embracing law of octaves. The law of three forces, as we shall see, is the absolute mainstay of all creative processes; its influence manifests practically everywhere. The second law, the law of octaves, tells us that all phenomena generated by these three primordial forces are essentially musical structures. To sensibly visualise this concept, we need to look at the formula Pi when expressed musically. This may look baffling at first, but in reality, it's as easy as Doh re mi.

This configuration expresses in exact scientific terms everything you need to know to understand the General Theory of just about Everything. But if you are the type who finds this kind of symbolism a little daunting, all you need do is remember these key musical numbers: 3, 4, 7, 8, 22 and 64.

Three, the number of the Trinity, is the number of octaves encoded in Pi. Seven is the number of intervals between the notes of each of these octaves. Four is the number of 'base-notes' (Doh's), in three consecutive octaves. Eight is the number of fundamental notes in a single octave. Twenty-two is the number of notes in three consecutive octaves.

And, according to the law of three forces, the three octaves incorporated in Pi are each sub-divisible into three octaves apiece, giving an inward formula of nine octaves, or 64 'notes'. So eight is the constant and sixty-four...







- is the square of it.

So ends the maths. You really don't need to be an Einstein to venture further. It is worth noting, however, that the most famous scientific equation of all time - e = mc2 - was formulated to verify this great scientist's Special Theory of Relativity, which states that 'e' - the latent nuclear energy contained in any given element, is equal to 'm' - the mass of the thing, multiplied by 'c2' - the square of the constant speed of light. As we shall see, the square of the constant occurs time and again throughout the whole of nature.

I have called this musical pattern of symmetry The Hermetic Code, after the Greek god of wisdom and patron of alchemy, Hermes Trismegistus, known as the god, Thoth, in Old Kingdom Egypt. As I explained in my first book, The Infinite Harmony, it was in ancient Egypt where the Pi symmetry first came to light, both in its most famous piece of architecture - the Great Pyramid of Khufu - and also in extant administrative documents of the Old Kingdom.

The law of three expressed in the Hermetic Code can be discerned by anyone. Nothing in this universe can be created without the combined action of the three forces described by it: active, passive and neutral. The three main constituents of atoms - protons, electrons, neutrons - the triplet-codon templates of the genetic code, the three-pin plug, two opposing teams and a neutral referee, the three primary colours of the rainbow, the tripart social and political arenas, two chemical compounds and an intermediary catalyst - all of these trinities exist and interact as a direct result of the three fundamental forces described by the first law of nature. Whenever and wherever something new is created, these three forces will inevitably be there.

The second law - the law of octaves - also operates throughout the entire universe. For example, the atomic scale of matter described by the periodic table of elements in chemistry conforms to this law precisely. Based on the atomic weight of a given substance, the table begins at its apex with hydrogen, the lightest of all elements, which has just one electron tracing a specific orbit, or 'period', around the nucleus. The heavier the element, the more electrons it houses, and the more periods are needed to accommodate them. The table ends with substances like curium, one of the densest of elements and more radioactive than uranium or even plutonium. The curium atom plays host to ninety-six electrons, which between them trace a total of seven periods around the nucleus - precisely the number of 'periods', or intervals, between the fundamental notes of the major musical scale. The eighth, transcendental 'note' of this atomic scale is of course the whole phenomenon, all atoms combined.

Further, a current method of classification in nuclear physics known as the theory of 'quantum chromodynamics' indicates that, beneath the atomic scale, in the world of sub-atomic particles, there are also distinct musical symmetries. The noted American physicist, Murray Gell-Man, proposed that certain routinely observed 'particle molecules' known as 'baryons', 'mesons' and 'pions', always combine together in families of eight called 'octets' - hence his name for the system: the 'eightfold way'. In addition, each of the eight particles in an octet is itself a triplet made up of three smaller particles, which Gell-Man called 'quarks'. Three quarks to each particle, eight particles to each octet. Sound familiar?

Then we have the hermetic structure of light, with its three primary colours, the seven fundamental colours of the spectrum, and the final, eighth 'note', the product of all seven colours when spun together - white light.

Whilst still on the subject of theoretical physics, it is also interesting to note that the square of the musical constant, the number sixty-four, has surfaced in the somewhat obscure theory of superstrings. This theory describes all particles everywhere in the universe as being the product of the vibrations of infinitesimally small, one dimensional 'strings' of energy which permeate throughout the whole of space. You really can't get more intellectually obscure than superstring theory, involving as it does no less than ten or even eleven different dimensions (three of space, one of time, six of God-knows-what - and maybe one over), and a system of higher mathematics guaranteed to make the layman's eyes glaze over in seconds. But no matter, all we need to know here is that this incredibly complicated system has created a highly resonant 'superstring' of inter-changeable energies that has precisely sixty-four degrees of movement associated with it.

As well as the microcosmic music of the underworld, there is also a 'cosmic' aspect of the Hermetic Code. This is dramatically reflected, not only in the musical vibrations and symmetries of light itself, but also in the movements of the planets in relation to the sun. All of these planetary cycles as I explain in my book, beat out endlessly repeating intervals developing in time which exactly conform to the relative values of the fundamental notes of the major scale. The fabled 'music of the spheres' is not simply legend, but fact.

Perhaps most crucial of all aspects of the Hermetic Code is that this same pattern of symmetry occurs in the digital format of the amino-acid scale of living cells. Amino acids are synthesised from templates, or 'codons', comprising any three of four chemical 'bases'. There are sixty-four possible combinations of these bases, and these in turn code for the synthesis of one or another of exactly twenty-two 'notes' in this fundamental biochemical scale - twenty amino acids and two additional digital signals coding for starting and stopping the process of synthesis.

So we can see that all phenomena - from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic - are, in effect, simply differing 'crystallised' forms of the self-same, universal music, composed by nature from units and sub-units of the constant number eight and its natural multiple, the square of the constant, sixty-four. This same universal harmony is also reflected in the ever present number seven, which again, as we see from the periodic table, is prevalent throughout the whole of nature. There is, of course an eighth note in the scale of the periodic table, the sum of all the previous notes, sounded by all atoms everywhere. Remember, everything, even the apparent cacophony of so-called 'chaos', is music.



So the General Theory of just about Everything is described in its entirety by the Hermetic Code, an exact blueprint, not only of the underlying structure of the physical universe, but also of the genetic code, of the DNA molecule, of life itself. This is that.

By now it should be apparent that the Hermetic Code is not merely some crank or arbitrary invention. It is a remarkably resilient evolutionary concept that has been in existence at least since the time of Old Kingdom Egypt. And, remarkably, the symmetry it describes is currently 'resonating' through the entire spectrum of modern scientific discovery.

How strange is that? Well, not quite so strange, for the seeds of science were sown long ago, as we shall see when we go back in time.

It is my contention, from the proportions evident in the Great Pyramid of Giza, that the formula Pi and its derivative number sixty-four was the original blueprint from which the whole edifice was constructed. Everyone agrees that the Great Pyramid's dimensions incorporate the Pi symmetry, its height standing in relation to the circumference of its base in the same proportion as a radius stands in relation to the circumference of its circle. What is not unanimously agreed is that this relationship was intentionally projected into it by its designers. However, this proposed intent is in fact supported by extant administrative documents of the Old Kingdom in which the key numbers of 'classical Pi' - 22 and 7 - appear in a royal decree. This directive appoints the Vizier and High Priest, Shemaj, director of all twenty-two nomes (districts) of Upper or Southern Egypt. The crucial second part of the document appoints the Vizier's son as deputy director of just seven nomes. This symbolism could not be clearer: father over son, twenty-two over seven - music, in action, in time, in OK Egypt.

The fact that the Hermetic Code has been embodied in architecture and myth since the dawn of civilisation indicates that our remotest ancestors were somehow 'in tune' with a symmetry of composition that existed, not only throughout their physical world, but even in their own DNA. So the question arises: did they consciously know this? Or did they sense it, emote it, intuit it? There is no space here to elaborate on these questions, but as I have attempted to show in my book, I believe the answer may be yes on all counts.

Now consider this:

In the symbolism of every major religion and belief-system in history, the key numbers of the Hermetic Code are absolutely paramount. Without exception, these immensely powerful religious doctrines are all exact copies of the original blueprint.

To briefly illustrate this, we need to focus on the two key numbers of the octave: eight (the notes) and seven (the intervals between them).

The Hermopolitan theology of OK Egypt, for example, which arose at Hermopolis, the seat of Thoth himself, embraces a pantheon of eight gods, four male, four female, who are said to have appeared simultaneously on the primeval hillock known as the Island of Flame. Hermopolis itself was called, in Egyptian, 'the (city) of the eight' (Khmoun).
Exactly the same format appears in another major theological system formulated about the time of the III dynasty by Memphite priests. According to the eponimous Shabaka Stone, a slab of basalt carved at the command of the XXV dynasty pharoah, King Shabaka, the Maker of the universe manifested his creativity through the intermediary of eight forms, which 'existed in him'. This was Ptah, the god of Memphis.
The third and last major myth of the Old Kingdon was the Heliopolitan system, which differs from the two already mentioned in that the gods of its pantheon were nine in number. According to it, the god, Atum, alone and unaided, succeeded in fertilising himself to produce four divine couples.

This rather awkward detail of a pantheon on nine gods was at first disconcertingly inconsistent with 'my' musical theory. The obvious anomaly puzzled me at first, but on closer examination of this myth, I came to realise that there was, in fact, no inconsistency whatever. In fact, it actually provides us with the 'key' to to the secrets encoded in the 'sacred constant' - Pi. If we regard the 'gods' of the Great Ennead as 'octaves', we are left with a musical scale of nine consecutive octaves - precisely sixty-four notes.

In China, sometime in the third millenium BC, the legendary sage, Fu Hsi, introduced a belief system, which was later condensed into a book now known as the I Ching, or the Book of Changes, whose chapters were 'numbered' using a mysterious combination of eight three-lined symbols called trigrams. Confucius himself, who much later added commentaries to the book, taught a system of initiation at his school known as the 'eight steps of learning'. Also in ancient China, entirely reminiscent of the mythology of Egypt, a sign that a country had reached the maximum of plenty and fertility was that one woman should bare four pairs of twins.

In the Book of Genesis of Mosaic tradition we are told that God worked for six days and rested on the seventh. Presumably he started over on the eighth.

In Nepal, in the 6th century BC, the Buddha introduced his eightfold path to enlightenment. In Persia, Zoroaster created his mythic pantheon of eight 'Bounteous Immortals'. And in Greece, on the island of Samos, the original philosopher himself - Pythagoras - re-invented his own version of the oldest science on earth by working out the precise mathematics of the octave. About five hundred years later, in Palestine, Jesus Christ enacted the greatest musical performances of all time: the eight days of the Passion, from Palm Sunday to the Sunday of the Resurrection. Later still, Mohammed appeared and impressed millions in Arabia and beyond with the narrative of his famous night journey, from the sacred site of the Dome of the Rock temple in Jerusalem - called in the Koran the 'Furthest Mosque' - up through the 'seven heavens'.

And the number sixty-four:

We have already seen how the I-Ching is overall a composition of sixty-four separate texts. In the time of the Buddha, in Nepal, it was customary on issues of supreme importance for the nobility to consult a council of sixty-four Brahmins. It was such a council that, according to legend, predicted their Avatar's birth. Contemporary Greek thinkers attached great importance to an Egyptian number system known as the 'magic square of Mercury' defined by the number 2080, which is the sum of all the numbers from one to sixty-four. Mercury, incidentally, is a Romanised version of Hermes/Thoth, the Egyptian 'messenger of the gods'. And again, in the Koran, there is a crucial chapter on the 'sacred light of Allah' - chapter sixty-four.



But what does all this mean? It means many things, whose separate strands all lead back to the same hermetic blueprint, the master plan. It means, for example, that the Hermetic Code, the design plan for everything existing - particles, celestial bodies, living cells - is applicable literally everywhere, not only in the wider universe, but also in the ephemeral realms of the collective human psyche. After all, if everything is music, then everything is hermetic, genetic, alive. There is one singular saying attributed to the Egyptian god, Thoth, which sums up this idea perfectly: 'As above, so below'. This message couldn't be clearer: man below and the greater cosmos above, as stated so emphatically in Genesis, are made in the same image. Everyone, quite literally, is a miniature universe.

Care to expand anyone?

If Hermetic is genetic, this means that the universe itself is alive; it is an organism of infinite size. So if you are looking for a 'god', we have here a candidate that outshines all of the abstract deities vaguely alluded to by theologians - an all-powerful and all-encompassing entity that actually does exist.

Assuming, then, that the universe is a living entity, and that we are all copies of it, this would suggest that the more advanced products of an organic brain - ideas, theories, concepts, - are also in some way alive, they are metaphysical genes, as intrinsically organic as the brain from which they originate. The ancients seem to have understood this, which is why they devised a musical mode of existence in the form of prescribed disciplines and rituals, which enabled them to psychologically conform to the laws and forces controlling evolution. This, I believe, is precisely why 'religion' was first invented and why every seventh day was marked out as a 'sabbath', to instil into the consciousness of humankind the necessity to harmonise ones movements and inner faculties according to the principles of the Hermetic Code. The aim was quite straightforward: it was an attempt to complete the natural course of one's evolutionary and psychological development by living-out a harmonious existence and ultimately transcending on to a higher plane, a greater 'scale' above. This greater scale, a scientific concept describing a higher dimension accessible to the trained mind, is the 'heaven' expressed in all religions.

The great innovators of the past mentioned above have, in a sense, already 'transcended' on to a higher dimension, to the next 'scale' of evolutionary development. They have, as is said in scripture, 'immaculately conceived', they have fortuitously caught a glimpse of the greater picture and subsequently impressed all humanity by lucidly translating their experiences into seminal ideas - enduring theories and concepts, which, quite literally, are still alive today, as vivid and meaningful and powerful as they ever were. Think of the works of Hermes and his builders, of Confucius, Zoroaster, the Buddha, Pythagoras, Christ, Mohammed, or great scientists and artists like Einstein or DaVinci, Newton, Michaelangelo, even Darwin - and others too numerous to mention. These unforgettable individuals are, in a sense, already 'out there', communing with the godlike inhabitants of the real world, waiting patiently for us to join them in the party that never ends, a celestial celebration to which, apparently, we have all been cordially invited. Tickets are free, but it seems that the evolutionary journey of the spirit is long and precipitous, and travelling restrictions are such that absolutely no excess baggage can be accommodated.



High Priests, Quantum Genes. Black Spring Press, 2004

Article Two: Hidden Harmonies

by Colin Wilson.

Hidden Harmonies

After all, harmonies and rhythms can be measured in the physicist's laboratory, and described in terms of amplitude and wavelength. Can we not be more precise about them? This is a question which, almost by accident, came to preoccupy an ex-advertising salesman named Michael Hayes. Ever since late childhood - spent in Penzance, Cornwall, where his mother owned a hotel - Hayes had been preoccupied with the question of why we are alive, and what we are supposed to do now we are here. In 1971, at the age of 22, he went to live in Mashad, Iran, where his brother was in the senior management of an international trading company. These were the years before the Shah was deposed, when Iran was still swarming with hippies. During his seven years in Iran, Mike Hayes - as he prefers to be known - took the opportunity to travel to India, Pakistan, Khatmandu and Afghanistan. It was during this time he was introduce by a hippie friend to the ideas of Gurdjieff - via Ouspenksy's In Search of the Miraculous - and began to think more purposefully about the basic problems of human nature. In Mashad he had been deeply impressed by the great mosque of Imam Reza. It was obvious from the sheer number of worshippers, and their devoutness, that for them religion was a living reality, as it had been for the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages. And travelling in India and Pakistan, where he had a chance to come into contact with Hinduism and Buddhism, he again had this sense of the tremendous vitality of the religious tradition. It took him by surprise for, apart from hymns at school and an occasional visit to church, his childhood had not been particularly religious. The sheer size of these religious territories impressed him, and the effect of the religious founders on their followers... "I decided that there was definitely something supernatural about all this. Whoever they were, these 'saviours' of mankind certainly knew how to make their presence felt."

The Double Helix

Back in England, he felt that it was time to catch up on his situation, which he could now see had been less than thorough. He signed on for a course in extramural studies at Leicester University, and it was there he attended some classes on DNA and the genetic code. DNA is, of course, a thread-like material in living cells which carries genetic information, such as whether a baby is born with brown or blond hair, blue or brown eyes, and so on. It transmits this information by means of a code, which was finally cracked in the early 1950s by James Watson and Francis Crick. They showed that the DNA molecule had a spiral structure, and looks rather like two spiral ladders held together by rungs made of four chemical 'bases' called adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine. These bases are strung together in what looks like a random order - perhaps AGTTCGGAA - but it is the order of these bases that makes the difference between brown and blond hair, etc. When a cell splits into two - which is how it reproduces - the 'ladder' comes apart, and each half attracts itself to various molecules of the bases that are floating free, until there are now two identical ladders. This is how living things reproduce themselves. It was when he learned that sixty-four is the number in which the four bases can form into triplet units called RNA codons that Mike Hayes had a vague sense of deja vu. Sixty-four awoke vague memories. The same things happened when he learned that these codons correspond with the twenty amino acids necessary for the manufacture of protein - but since there are also two coded instructions for 'start' and 'stop', the basic number is twenty-two. This again seemed vaguely familiar.

Significance of Sixty-Four

Then he remembered where he had come across the number sixty-four - in the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, which is used as an oracle. And the basic unit of the I Ching is, of course, a 'triplet' of lines, either broken or unbroken, corresponding to the principles of Yin and Yang, which might be regarded as darkness and light, or the male and female principles, or the moon and the sun. Hayes recalled that when he had studied the I Ching in his hippie days, he had wondered vaguely why the number of its 'hexagrams' (each one made up of two trigrams) should be sixty-four - eight times eight - and not seven times seven or nine times nine. And now he learned that each of the triplet units of RNA links up with another triplet in the DNA molecule. So the 'double helix' of information in the heart of all reproductive cells is made up from sixty-four hexagrams, as in the I Ching. Could this really be just coincidence? Since his extra-mural course left him with time to kill, he began looking more closely into this 'coincidence'. Of course, it seemed unlikely that Fu Hsi, the legendary creator of the I Ching, had stumbled upon some kind of mystical insight into the 'code of life.' But it seemed worth investigating. If this was not coincidence, then there should be eight trigrams hidden in DNA. And when he had learned that this was so, Mike Hayes began to feel that he had stumbled upon something that could be very important indeed.

Mystical Seven

Then he recalled where he had seen the number twenty-two. This was nothing to do with the I Ching, but with Pythagoras, the Greek "father of mathematics". The Pythagoreans regarded the number twenty-two as sacred because it represented three musical octaves, and the Pythagoreans saw music as one of the basic secrets of the universe. Of course, an ordinary musical scale has seven notes - doh, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti - and a final doh of the next octave completes it and begins the next octave. But three octaves - and the Pythagoreans attached a mystical significance to the number three - begins on doh, and ends on another doh twenty-two notes later. Mike Hayes had played the guitar since his early teens, so he knew a certain amount of musical theory. In the quest that followed, it proved to be of central importance. But at this early stage, in the late '70s, a suspicion was beginning to form in his mind: that these numbers involved in the DNA code might express some basic law of the universe. He was in the position of Edward T. Hall's student who realised that the children in the playground were dancing to some basic rhythm of life, a rhythm that is totally unsuspected by the rest of us. Mike Hayes came to believe that rhythm is basically musical in nature. And this, in turn, meant he was a kind of Pythagorean.

The Third Force

Pythagoreanism is sometimes called 'number mysticism', and Pythagoras attached great importance to the numbers three and seven, and to the laws governing musical notes. Gurdjieff had also spoken of the 'Law of Three' and the 'Law of Seven.' The Law of three states that all creation involves a third force. We are inclined to think in terms of dualities: positive and negative, male and female, good and evil. Gurdjieff - who derived the idea from the Sankhya philosophy of India - stated that instead, we should try to think in terms of three. Positive and negative merely counterbalance one another, but if anything is to come of them, they must be given a push by a third force. An obvious example would be the catalyst in a chemical reaction. Oxygen and sulphur dioxide do not naturally combine; but if passed over hot platinised asbestos, they form sulphur trioxide, from which sulphuric acid is made. The platinised asbestos remains unchanged. Another simple example would be a zip. The left and right side of the zip need the fastener in the middle to make them combine. But perhaps Gurdjieff's most interesting illustration is of someone who wishes to change, to achieve great self-knowledge, and in whom the forces of laziness act as a counterbalance. In this case, the breakthrough can occur through knowledge - a perception of how it can be achieved, which brings a new drive and optimism. In other words, the third force is a kind of kick, an outside force that alters the balance of the situation, breaks a deadlock. The Law of Seven is illustrated by the seven notes of the musical scale; here the final doh somehow draws them together so they can move to a higher octave, just as the seven colours of the spectrum are drawn together into white light. When Mike Hayes began to study the major world religions, he was stuck by how often the numbers three, seven and twenty-two recur. The legendary founder of Hermetic philosophy - identified with the Egyptian god Thoth - is known as Thrice Great Hermes. The number pi - the relation of the diameter of a circle to its circumference - which was supposed to have been discovered by Pythagoras, is twenty-two over seven.

Article Three: An Infinity of Harmonies

by Michael Hayes.

An Infinity of Harmonies

Richard Dawkins evokes a river of digital information flowing through time in the form of DNA, branching and forking on its way, and giving rise to new species in the process. When one species mutates off a daughter species, the river of genes forks into two; and if the two branches diverge for long enough - perhaps through the influence of geographical variables - the two species eventually develop quite distinct and different characteristics. At one stage, in one of these branches, 'Mitochondrial Eve' was born. This is the name given to the most recent ancestor of all modern humans, a member of the species Homo Sapiens, who probably lived in Africa between one hundred and two hundred and fifty thousand years ago.

Mitochondria are actually tiny, vital, energy-producing particles which exist in the thousands in all our cells. They help to convert energy from food molecules and store it for distribution later. The interesting point about mitochondria is that they have their own DNA. Unlike the main, nuclear DNA, which becomes almost totally scrambled in every generation every time a sex-cell is made, mitochondrial DNA is passed on down relatively unchanged through the female line only. It is therefore a very useful tool for long-term geneologists, who can use it for dating common ancestors within species. This is how 'Mitochondrial' or 'African Eve' has been identified and dated.

Dawkins is particularly fond of Mitochondrial Eve, and he contrasts her, as a scientific hypothesis, with the Eve of Eden. He believes his scientific truth to be of greater interest and, 'more poetically moving' than the myth. I myself, however, having read them both, am left wondering.
The crucial event in human history occurred, I believe, in the Old Kingdom, Egypt, around the time of construction of the Great Pyramid. The Hermetic Code itself, the mysterious conceptual equivalent of the Rosetta Stone, is actually the original 'immaculate conception', an ingenious esoteric symbol designed to express the all-embracing principle of perfect symmetry and absolute harmony. The code is more familiarly known today by its shorthand version, and this is the classical formula, Pi or 22/7, the numerical symmetry of which describes, in essentially musical terms, the two most fundamental laws of nature, namely the law of triple-creation and the law of octaves. These two laws, and the unseen forces they describe, are discussed in some detail in my book: The Infinite Harmony (ch.1), but, briefly, they can be understood like this:

The law of triple-creation asserts simply that there are three fundamental creative forces in nature (say, active, passive and neutral), and that all phenomena are products of them.

The law of octaves states that all phenomena also consist of varying 'degrees of resonance', which are always inwardly composed, and transmute one to another, in sevenfold patterns of formation and sequence. This also applies to each of the creative forces themselves; each one is composed within as a fundamental octave of resonance - hence the musical construct of the formula: pi or 22/7
So Pi is a symbolic expression of a fully resonant 'triple-octave'. But it is also a remarkably accurate working blueprint for all evolutionary development, and so its distinctive inner-symmetry can be identified in the biomolecular and physical structures of all forms of life; not only, for example, in the overall physiology of human beings, with their three nerve-complexes responsible for sensation, emotion and perception and their eight endocrine transformers, but also in the sixty-four/twenty-two note amino-acid 'scale of resonance' employed by DNA in the biochemical synthesis of proteins. All human beings, in other words - indeed all living creatures - are in reality musically, or 'hermetically' composed; they are evolutionary 'triple-octaves' with the inherent potential to achieve within a condition of 'optimum resonance'.

A GREATER SCALE OF BEING

Incidentally the concept of the trinity of creation - a fundamental component of all major religious doctrines - implies that every phenomenon, without exception, is a composite triple-octave, and each of the individual octaves embodied therein are in themselves trinities. So we have a major twenty-two note scale which can be further subdivided into three minor twenty-two note scales, which gives, in total, nine interpenetrating octaves of potential optimum resonance - exactly sixty-four notes, or the square of the constant number, eight.
The living cell, by following the genetic 'code of conduct' laid down at the microcosmic level of existence (ie., the digital instructions encoded within DNA), actually attains this highly-desirable condition of optimum resonance and so acquires the supernatural power to self-replicate. Through a rapid series of exponential growth patterns it then combines with its fellow creatures to create, in the most 'immaculate' of ways, a whole new world for itself, a massive, intricate, conscious organism. Such an organism constitutes a higher dimension for the cell, a greater 'scale of being', as it were.
Now the theory at the root of the hermetic code, which I have called the theory of transcendental evolution, asserts that, at the human level of existence, this condition of optimum resonance, which can be attained by following certain tried and tested 'religious' codes of conduct, endows any given individual with the supernatural power to penetrate an infinitely greater, or macrocosmic scale of existence, to a higher dimension - to 'heaven' if you like.

Each and every one of us, therefore, is - potentially at least - a kind of cosmic messenger, a programmable metaphysical 'chromosome' with the inherent capacity to self-replicate, to successfully disseminate original, 'immaculate' ideas out into the greater conceptual world inhabited by the minds and hearts of humankind.

THE FATHER OF REVELATION

The unravelling of the digital molecular structure of the DNA double helix by Watson and Crick has been hailed by Dawkins as the most revolutionary scientific discovery in history, an achievement for which, he believes, they should be honoured for as many centuries as Plato or Aristotle. Whether or not this will, in the event, turn out to be the case remains to be seen, but it's a tall order. The Athenian adepts, as I have pointed out in my book, were all fully in tune with hermetic philosophy. In fact, Socrates, the first of the great trio and Plato's mentor, received personal instruction from the Pythagorean school on the island of Samos. In addition, all three were known to have respected and familiarised themselves with the traditions of the legendary Persian Magi. After the execution of Socrates in 399 BC, Plato quit Greece, visiting Egypt and Italy, and on his return to Athens some years later, he founded the famous Academy as a school for philosophical and scientific research, which he presided over for the rest of his life. Plato's writings, as one might expect, are permeated throughout with clearly identifiable hermetic data.

The Greeks believed the source of all this musical wisdom to have been the Ibis-headed Egyptian god, Thoth. Known to the Greeks as Hermes Trismegistus (thrice-great Hermes), he later became associated with the Roman god, Mercury, the messenger of the gods. Most of the literature relating to Hermes belongs to the post-Christian era and scholars in general doubt that he ever existed. But of course, someone, somewhere, revealed the hermetic code to the human race, so by whatever name he was then known, we can be sure that the Father of Revelation did, at some remote period in time, walk upon this earth.

As we have seen from the esoteric content of this individual's remarkable ideas, his knowledge of the evolutionary processes of nature mirrors perfectly the sixty-four/twenty-two note structure of the genetic code. But there is actually another very intriguing fact about the mysterious Hermes Trismegistus worthy of note; one which, to me at least, is so fitting as to be at least as 'poetic' as Mr Dawkins's 'Mitochondrial Eve'. The rod of Hermes was known as the 'caduceus' and he is depicted holding it in Botticelli's La Primavera. The wand itself, said to have magical properties, was surmounted with two wings and entwined by two serpents - a perfect double helix.

Mitochondrial, or African Eve, would have been the first Homo Sapiens to successfully copulate and produce descendants. She may have lived as recently as a hundred and fifty thousand years ago. Before her there were more primitive hominids, such as Homo Erectus and its even more remote ancestors, Homo Habilis and Australopithecus, the earliest having been dated to around four million years ago.

So a great deal happened in the development of the hominid over the last hundred and fifty thousand years, for Eve was little more than a savage, a successful fighter and breeder, an unwitting, cut-throat product of DNA's relentless bid for immortality.

Now contrast his hungry, flint-wielding creature with the kind of hominid that lived in the Fertile Crescent about five thousand years ago. From Egypt to Mesopotamia, there occurred, quite suddenly, an unprecedented bout of civilised activity. Great cities and cultures, the likes of which had never been seen before on earth, grew and blossomed in the space of a couple of centuries. The hominid had learned to build - not just any old how, but with an expertise and precision that even today's architects and engineers, using the same kind of tools, would find impossible to match, let alone surpass.

The Great Pyramid of Cheops is undeniably the oldest, most massive and intricate building ever to have been fashioned in stone. Each of its two and a half million blocks or limestone averages two and a half tons in weight, and some of the larger granite blocks featured in the interior weigh between thirty and seventy tons. On top of that, the whole edifice was originally sheathed in an eight-foot thick exterior limestone casing set with joints only a fractions of a millimetre wide! Archaeologists tell us that this remarkable building, the base area of which covers a staggering thirteen acres, was erected around 2700 BC. And what was the hominid doing for a living in the Fertile Crescent, say, a half a millennium before this, circa 3200 BC? Well, apparently, nothing much (except surviving, of course). At least, there is no archaeological evidence of it.

HOMINID FROM A HAT!

One assumes, therefore, that prior to the appearance of the first civilisations, the hominid had barely learned to tame grass, let alone its restless mind. But then, quite suddenly, the natives not only learned to build on an unprecedented scale, to write, and to administrate vast social enterprises, they also, as it were, conjured-up the amazing hermetic code, pulling it out of nowhere, like a rabbit out of a hat,and...well, hallelujah! the hominid finally came of age.

This, I would suggest, is a massive quantum leap. Now, I have a question, one which I am personally still trying to answer, and it is this: Is the hermetic code the chance product of random mutation in the tribal brain of a rather fortunate member of the species Homo Sapiens, or was it purposefully introduced by some universal force, rather like a cosmic kick in the head? (Force, note, not 'God').

Macromutations seldom occur in nature and usually result in chronic deformity and eventual extinction. Yet here we have a true quantum leap in spiritual and cultural activity, a macromutation of the hominid mind that surely breaks one of the most fundamental rules of natural selective evolution.

Scientists now believe that the first biomolecular self-replicators were free-falling bacterial RNA. Exactly what form their self-replicating predecessors had, no one knows. Dawkins has suggested that the precursors to organic self-replicators might have been something like inorganic crystals, growing, say, in clays, constantly being transported every-which-way by ever-changing waterflows.

CRYSTAL ANCESTORS?

In fact, crystals do 'grow' in a sense, where the first array of geometrically-aligned atoms and molecules acts as a template for the next. As they grow, crystals also produce, on occasions, flaws (mutations) in their molecular structure, which are then 'copied' by the next developing layer and so on. Crystals also possess right and left-handed properties; that is, two varieties, (two or more kinds being a necessary prerequisite for the phenomenon of heredity, where like begets like). However, as Dawkins himself points out, molecules of crystals only act as templates for the formation of molecules in their mirror-image. So, in this instance, like does not beget like. Chemists have been trying for many years to 'trick' inorganic molecules into 'breeding' other molecules of the same handedness, but the natural forces at work in the inorganic molecular world are seemingly indifferent to such a process. If you start cultivation with a left-hander crystal, you end up with an equal number of left and right-handed molecules. Thus, says the author, "although the function of an earlier, non-organic self-replicator didn't involve 'handedness', a version of this trick was pulled off naturally and spontaneously four thousand million years ago."

Once again, as with the inexplicably swift transition from hunting hominid to civilisation-builder, I personally find the Darwinian notion of a gradual, random mutation from inert matter to evolutionary, self-replicating biomolecules a little hard to swallow. There is another quantum leap involved here, another illogically-successful macromutation.

The analogy Dawkins uses in The Blind Watchmaker is that inorganic crystal growth, producing mutational flaws over billions of years, happened, quite accidentally, to act as a kind of crude scaffolding for the building of a beautifully proportioned and sophisticated biochemical 'arch'. Once the final centre-stone of the arch fell into place (perhaps the last of the four chemical bases), the earlier-formed scaffolding, superseded by its biomolecular successor, involved into extinction. Subsequently the now animated 'arch', the biomolecular descendant of this inorganic cousin, eventually evolved, quite randomly, into entities like Jesus or Einstein, Hermes, Dawkins and you.

DYING VITALISM

According to Dawkins, "the digital revolution at the core of life has dealt the final, killing blow to vitalism" - vitalism being the apparently mistaken notion that living material is deeply distinct from non-living material. This is certainly true in respect of the individual electrons and atoms of which living matter is composed, but when considering the overall symmetrical structure of entire biomolecules, and the harmonious distribution of the electrons and atoms within these beautiful dynamic forms, then the fundamental difference between, for example, a molecule of the protein haemoglobin and a molecule of water is surely glaringly obvious. Ergo, vitalism - my kind at least - is very much alive and kicking.

We thus have two unbelievably propitious macromutations in the otherwise uneventful Darwinian story of the evolution of life on earth; one being the quantum transition from, say, salt crystals or whatever, through something or other, to living, writhing, hermetically-composed bacteria, the other being the incredibly rapid metamorphosis, over a period of time which, by Darwinian standards, is infinitesimally small, of African Eve into Madame Curie, Rosalind Franklin or the Virgin Mary.

Now if, as I suspect is the case, the hermetic code was introduced by a powerful external force into the passive mind of the hominid of the Fertile Crescent, then, perhaps, the first, 'hermetically sealed', biomolecular self-replicators also received, so to speak, an external 'leg-up' to get themselves started. I'm not talking about 'God' here. I'm suggesting that there are very real, unseen forces in nature, undetectable by the crude, subluminal instruments of detection of modern science, which dictate that the creation of DNA-based life-forms must inevitably occur everywhere in the universe, as and when physical conditions permit.

Where this conclusion leaves us, the human race, we can but speculate, but the fact that the genetic code of the microcosmic world of the cell, and the hermetic code in the macrocosmic world of the human mind are absolutely identical is surely significant. It in fact brings to mind the principal dictum of Hermes Trismegistus, which was inscribed on the legendary Emerald Tablet: "As above, so below." The implication one immediately draws from this is that the only difference between the DNA helix and a fully-functional human brain is simply one of scale. And if the human brain is a kind of metaphysical 'helix', then presumably it is also an integral component - a cell-nucleus - in the body of an infinitely greater, multidimensional 'organism' - our own galaxy, perhaps. Remember, "As above..."

And if the galaxy is also a chromosome...

There are limits, of course. And many questions still to be answered. Interested readers may care to delve a little deeper into some of these multidimensional meanderings through 'metaphysical time' by consulting my own, previously mentioned work.