The 3,600-year-old Phaistos Disk is an artifact of Hermeticism that was created more than 3,200 years before that field of study finally broke through its social oppression to acquire that name.
At least an 1100-year-gap exists between when the Disk was created and when the ancient Greeks began to document the development of the sciences preserved by the Disk that would be called Hermeticism in the 17th century CE. The artifact preserves the blending of Minoan and Egyptian influences involving the very beginning of serious scientific thought about the universe and the approach of gaining spiritual knowledge - Gnosis - from a scientific orientation.
Essentially, the Disk is a preservation of a Mediterranean Bronze Age math argument that the universe is a math structure, in fact a math maze, comprehensible through the integrated sciences of mathematics, geometry, and astronomy.
When the ancient Hermeticists, or whatever they called themselves, of the Minoan Crete and the late Pharaonic Egypt world looked into the skies at night, they saw more than just stars and planets. They saw the Absolute - that which is unchanging and eternal - and they saw it also in math, geometry, astronomy, and the Great Pyramid.
Only the Hermeticists, of which there were many and likely a cult, pursued this intellectual inquiry, as the wider population was focused differently, their beliefs forming the basis of Greek mythology in a parallel development. The Hermeticist and their studies informed the technology of that age, as they also were scholars, artisans, architects, inventors, merchants and, in this particular instance, pottery artists.
Observe the Phaistos Disk, a terra cotta pottery masterpiece and the most famous of the art creations to come from the Minoan Crete world. At about 6" diameter and 1" thick, this etched terra cotta pottery is a little larger than a DVD. Imagine it is the night sky and you are looking up into it. There at the center is the fixed North Star, unmoving while the entirety of the cosmos circles around in a spiral. Note the locations of the etched pictographs. Like the stars, they too are unchanging, their positions absolute.
Locate the 15 matching pictographs of a circle containing the points of a hexagram. Beside most of them is a Warrior pictograph, encouraging the idea that the hexagram circle pictograph is a Shield. In one instance, a Warrior is holding a Shield. The instruction seems to be to consider the Shields as points and connect them with lines, as in plane geometry and as in the Minoan way of creating our 48 original constellations.
On following that instruction, suddenly revealed is that North Star with the cosmos moving around it. Surrounded by 7 Shields on the outside spiral, the configuration, in terms of plane geometry, is a pentagram surrounded by a heptagram, or in math is, 5 (pentagram), 6 (hexagram), and 7 (heptagram), and in terms of the sacred geometers of the modern age it is the revered "pent-hept."
This large, hidden pictograph also represents, in an astronomical syncretism, the blue star Sirius, the heliacal rising of which was their method of timekeeping, surrounded by 7 known "planets" of their world, historically recorded to be Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. But here (below), the Sun appears in the center, where Sirius rises with it (heliacal rising) at the beginning of each new year, and on the outside spiral, with its 12 line segments, are the planets: Earth, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, all revolving around the Sun.
Nicolas Copernicus (1473 - 1543 CE) is credited with discovering planets revolve around the sun. For maintaining the heretical Corpernican heliocentrism, Galileo (1564 - 1642 CE) was condemned, threatened with torture, and placed under house arrest by the Catholic Church in its failed attempt to oppress the enlightened perspective that the Earth is not the center of the universe for, if it is not, then their power as God's representatives on Earth is in jeopardy, as well as their tithes.
But 1000 years before that, heliocentrism was regarded as a radical theory and apparently repressed by astronomers through the ages who could see no value in supporting it, if they had ever heard of it. The Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos (c.310 - c.230 BCE) proposed such a theory, believed to be based upon a theory by Philolaus of Croton (c. 470 - 385 BCE), Greek Pythagorean, regarding a fire at the center of the universe which Aristarchus believed to be the sun.
In a temporary breakthrough in the continuous social oppression of this enlightened idea, Archimedes of Syracuse (c.287 - c.212 BCE) writes to King Gelon, regarding Aristarchus' theory, but though King Gelon is made aware it, the theory of heliocentrism becomes occulted again for 1000 years:
"You are now aware that the "universe" is the name given by most astronomers to the sphere the centre of which is the centre of the earth, while its radius is equal to the straight line between the centre of the sun and the centre of the earth. This is the common account as you have heard from astronomers. But Aristarchus has brought out a book consisting of certain hypotheses, wherein it appears, as a consequence of the assumptions made, that the universe is many times greater than the "universe" just mentioned. His hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the sun remain unmoved, that the earth revolves about the sun on the circumference of a circle, the sun lying in the middle of the orbit, and that the sphere of the fixed stars, situated about the same centre as the sun, is so great that the circle in which he supposes the earth to revolve bears such a proportion to the distance of the fixed stars as the centre of the sphere bears to its surface."
1,300 years before Archimedes' letter to King Gelon, Minoan astronomers appear to have speculated that Earth is a planet and that the planets revolve around the sun "on the circumference of a circle," and remain in their orbit because they are connected to each other. Theorized on the Phaistos Disk is that the connection is not the force of gravity, of which they knew nothing, but is the force of geometry, of which they were masters and with which had been built the greatest of all structures, the Great Pyramid. The geometric form connecting the planets to each other is a heptagon because the math involved is 7. Further, the geometric configurations above allow for the possibility Minoan astronomers theorized that the stars, different from the planets in that they are fixed, are the same type of heavenly body as the sun.
Preserved on the Phaistos Disk is more than just geometry, mathematics, and astronomy - the integrated sciences of the Minoan world and the sacred sciences of the first Hermeticists - but likely the first recorded heliocentric theory of the solar system/universe and the first recorded theory that the sun is a star.
The revelations of the Phaistos Disk continue...
Copyright Notice - Disk of the World - Text and images copyrighted March 21, 1993-2025,
Claire Grace Watson, B.A., M.S.T., U.S. Copyright and under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, All rights reserved. No part of this web page may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.