At about 6" diameter it is only a little larger a DVD, and packed just as tight with content about a lost civilization, but is more technologically advanced in that it has a matching second side full of additional information. All that is needed to gain access to the lost world is the key, but a 1200-year-gap, perhaps more, exists between when the Disk was created and when the ancient Greeks began to document the development of the sciences preserved by the Disk.

Serving as the bridge to the Minoan world, those documents would bring the Gnosis forward to eventually be called Hermeticism, in another 2,000 years after that in the 17th century CE. The artifact preserves the blending of Minoan and Egyptian influences involving the very beginning of this serious scientific thought about the universe and about the approach of gaining spiritual knowledge - Gnosis - from a scientific orientation.

Ultimately, 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 Mediterranean Bronze Age skies at night, they saw more than just stars and planets. They saw the Absolute - that which is unchanging and eternal. Recognizing its ubiquitous nature, they looked for it in other parts of their world and found it 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 general 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, the most famous of the art creations to come from the Minoan Crete world. Imagine you are an ancient Hermeticist looking up into the night sky. There at the center is the fixed North Star, unmoving while the entirety of the cosmos circles around in a spiral. Well, what do you make of that? Note the locations of the etched pictographs, unchanging like the stars, 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 one of these Shields. 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."

Bronze Age shields were elaborate. Is this perhaps a shield design? It is certainly a large, hidden pictograph. It also represents, in an astronomy syncretism, the blue star Sirius, the heliacal rising of which was their method of timekeeping. The star is 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...in the Bronze Age, 3,100 years before they are supposed to.

Nicolas Copernicus (1473 - 1543 CE) is credited with the discovery that 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 suppress the ancient enlightened perspective that Earth is not the center of the universe for, if it is not, 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 suppressed 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 suppression of this enlightened idea, Archimedes of Syracuse (c.287 - c.212 BCE) writes to King Gelon regarding Aristarchus' theory. 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." (Archimedes)

That description, on diagram, would look like this:

It appears that 1,300 years before Archimedes' letter to King Gelon, Minoan astronomers 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. The ancient science of geometry had built the greatest of all structures, at least 1,600 years before the Phaistos Disk was created, the Great Pyramid. For all anyone knew, except perhaps the Hermeticists, it had been there forever.

The geometry force 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.

"In the Egyptian sense, it is SIRIUS the Dog-Star, the Star or Isis-Sothis. Around it are the Stars of the Seven Planets each with its seven-fold counterchanged operation." (Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn)

I found the mysterious Keys in the Enochian Language searching a book of ancient mysteries, a one-off design until I found it on the Phaistos Disk. I used the Keys design as a guide to connect the star image on the disk. The Keys has a fascinating and very mysterious origin, although it seems to me to have some kind of connection with the Phaistos Disk.

When Queen Mary of England, Bloody Mary, imprisoned her half-sister Elizabeth in a nice country estate, Elizabeth was never sure that she would live to adulthood. In 1551, she met the renowned scholar, traveler and astrologer John Dee (left) and asked him for a horoscope. Dee correctly predicted Elizabeth would rise to a high place in the kingdom and live to old age and Queen Mary would die childless. When Elizabeth gained the throne of England, she made Dee court astrologer and a wealthy man.

In 1581, Dee had an experience in which "there suddenly glowed a dazzling light, in the midst of which, in all his glory stood the great angel, Uriel." Uriel told Dee that if he would obtain a "shewstone" (crystal) and gaze into it, he could communicate with otherworldly beings. Dee complied but he never could see anything, so he hired a series of scryers, all unsuccessful until he hired Edward Kelley, an alchemist and Hermeticist who wrote Theater of Terrestrial Alchemy.

Kelly scryed into a black obsidian disk and said he saw an image in the crystal that hung there while he made a wax copy of it. Dee called the scryed image, "The Keys in the Enochian Language." He said it contained the language of angels and of the inhabitants of the Garden of Eden. Dee and Kelley believed it to be a pre-Hebraic language, which they learned to speak. Kelley would look into the crystal and see a "Spiritual Creature, like a pretty girl of seven or nine years of age." She called herself Madimi, and Dee named one of his daughters after her. The spirit Madimi pointed out to Kelley letters and symbols on the Keys design (beneath the scrying ball), and Kelley relayed the information to Dee.

The Keys beneath the crystal ball looks like the Phaistos Disk. I think this artist saw my comparison of the disk to the Keys, which has been online since 1997, and made the Keys in this image look like the Phaistos Disk. Perhaps the artists' idea is that the Keys in the Enochian Language is actually the Phaistos Disk brought forward magically and mysteriously by this angel Madimi for Dee and Kelley. That was something I had wondered about as well. Thanks for the feedback :)

Strange writing is associated with the Phaistos Disk as well. It was found with a Linear A tablet (left, but not the one actually found with the disk) containing an indecipherable script that is considered to be the precursor to the Linear B script, which has been deciphered. These scripts evolved into the Greek language alphabet. That both these pent/hept symbols, the Keys and the disk, would involve indecipherable scripts is another commonality they share. Resemblances are obvious on comparison of the symbols on the Keys in the Enochian Language with the symbols of Linear A (left), although it seems neither advances the other in terms of my understanding of what they mean. Maybe someone else would have better luck.

Did Edward Kelley know about the Phaistos Disk? Not possible. Did he know about Minoan Crete? Not possible. Did he scry back in time and see the Phaistos Disk? Possibly. Did a mysterious etheric presence appear and import the Phaistos Disk image to them? Possibly. As for whether Minoan Crete could be considered the Garden of Eden, maybe so. Many people think it was Atlantis. And Linear A qualifies as a pre-Hebraic language. Will Linear "A" ever be deciphered? Will the Keys in the Enochian Language ever be understood? It is all very mysterious indeed.

"At Phaestus we find a kind of prehistoric printing: the hieroglyphs of a great disk unearthed there from Middle Minoan III strata are impressed upon the clay by stamps, one for each pictograph; but here, to add to our befuddlement, the characters are apparently not Cretan but foreign; perhaps the disk is an importation from the East." (Will Durant referencing two writers, G. Glotz, Aegean Civilization, 1925, and Jas. Baikie, Sea-Kings of Crete, 1926.)

Is the legendary Argothic Language portrayed on the tablet (above) as Linear A? The Argothic Language (Langue Argotique, Language of the Argos) is said to be the Secret Language of Jason and the Argonauts. Perhaps there is a clue here as to the origin of Linear A when wordplaying the name Jason to Jesus. By those correlations, the language may be the "language of the angels."

Argothic Language, which may have been a type of picture writing, might have involved the Constellation Argos and other ships of the sky (constellations) that seem to be revolving around the Pole Star and along the ecliptic. As the stars spin overhead, they create relative positions that were plotted by seafaring Minoans in Crete. Many of these became the constellations we know today. Mariners at Phaistos, Crete, probably dotted the location of each star and connected the dots with lines. The intersecting lines were an invisible matrix in space. From this matrix came the constellations and the mariners' ability to predict the movement of the stars.

Perhaps from this matrix came the secret language, a mariners' language based on the movement of stars, star groups, and constellations, that developed from their special knowledge and that perhaps they wore as skin tattoos. If so, this language, derived from early nautical methods of keeping time and location while on the Aegean, is a dead language in the most literal sense. It perhaps was written as skin tattoos worn by Minoan sailors, and when they died, it died with them. This could explain why no archaeological evidence of it can be found save the Phaistos Disk, on which it was preserved.

"But the perishable nature of the materials on which picture-writing, having for most part only a temporary value, was usually wrought has been fatal to the survival of primitive European pictographs on any large scale. If we had before us the articles of bark and hide and wood of early man in this quarter of the globe or could still see the TATTOO marks on his skin we should have a very different idea of the part once played by picture-writing on European soil. As it is, it is right that the imagination should supply the deficiency of existing evidence." (Sir Arthur Evans, Cretan Pictographs and Prae-Phoenician Script)

Perhaps the Argothic Language was perceived as a gift from the gods who were also perceived to be residents of stars overhead if not the stars themselves. The language of the stars was divinely given to the Argonauts, but only the mariners could understand it - the language of the skin tattoos was the language of the stars - and they could, as a result of this great gift, navigate the ocean. They could also keep track of daytime hours, nighttime hours, and the day and month if they had a version of the Phaistos Disk with them, a clay disk baked so hard that the spray of salt water could not destroy it.

Therefore, the Argothic Language was not a spoken language, not a written language, but was perhaps a picture writing language worn on the skin - as in the stars, so on the skin. It was a language that defined the wearer as an Argonaut, a divine sailor bound to that which is above and that which is below - the ships of the stars on the rolling waves of Oceanus.

The Sunflower pictograph at the center of Side 1 on the Phaistos Disk may indicate influences of Egyptian theology on Minoan ideas. An identical flower pictograph is seen on this fragment of an Egyptian limestone relief. This Flower of Life is protected by the goddess Mut, a vulture-version of the goddess Isis, whose image Egyptians placed in tombs to protect the dead in their embryonic state of re-birth into the afterlife. Above Mut are the stars representing Sirius, the five-pointed star seen on the Phaistos Disk.

The Phaistos Disk star may be Sirius, seen in this Egyptian drawing in which it emanates a power through the connection with Horus that allows the soul of the mummy to fly to the star.

As we look at Sirius, we are looking at the future of our own solar system. And everything that ever happened in and around that star is contained within the light that escapes from it, bringing us the knowledge of the creation of the universe. Contained within its light is that knowledge and those values of creation and destruction. If starlight can inform us, then Sirius is sending us a mountain of data about the universe and the world around us. Thanks to our chakra system, we can receive the enlightening data.

Sirius, a blue-white star 34 times brighter than our sun, with 8 times the mass, is 8.8 light years or 2.7 parsecs away in Canis Major. Sirius is traveling at unbelievable speeds and heading straight for us. If any star in the sky is our destiny, it is Sirius. It has two dwarf stars as companions, Sirius B (Horus) and Sirius C. Sirius is half a million times farther away than our sun.

In 1718, the astronomer Edmund Halley compared the position of Sirius with the position of background stars in the same field of view over time and discovered that it had moved. Beginning in 1834, the mathematician Friedrich Besel measured the exact position of Sirius night after night and discovered that Sirius does not travel in a straight line; it wobbles. He surmised that the wobble was caused by an invisible companion, Sirius B, orbiting around the star once every 50 years. The companion is a white dwarf star, a 'dead' star, as the astronomers say. Our sun will become a 'dead' star 5 billion years from now.

To find Sirius, first find the North Star Polaris which is directly north. Then, turn full around 180 degrees to face the south. Looking up you cannot miss Orion. It is a big constellation made up of bright stars of different colors. Identifying Orion is achieved by looking for three similar stars in a row which are Orion's belt. Follow the line of Orion's belt to the left to find the bright glow of Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. At magnitude -1.5, Sirius is often mistaken for a planet but is rather a blue-white main sequence star (like I know what that means :-). Anyway, my experiments have found (just kidding) that its surface temperature of over 10,000 K, its luminosity 22 times that of the Sun, and its distance of only 8.8 light years from Earth make it the brightest star. (This is just general knowledge found on the net in a million places that I either cut and pasted or paraphrased.)

"The evidence as a whole however clearly pointed to Crete as the principal source of these hieroglyphic forms, and I therefore determined to follow up my investigations on Cretan soil. Landing at Candia early in March 1894, I made my way round the whole centre and East of the island, including the mountainous districts of Ida and Dikta, the extensive central plain of Messara and the sites of over twenty ancient cities. The number of relics illustrative of the prehistoric periods of Cretan culture that I was thus able to collect was surprisingly great, and in particular the evidence daily accumulated itself of the very important part played by the Mycenaean form of civilization in Cretan story. And, in what regarded the more special object of my quest, my researches were well rewarded by the discovery in situ of traces of a prae-Phoenician system of writing in the island, of which two distinct phases were perceptible, one pictorial and hieroglyphic, the other linear and quasi-alphabetic." (Cretan Pictographs and Prae-Phonecian Script Arthur J. Evans, M.A., F.S.A.)

It is possible the Phaistos Disk was used to create a sand mold for a bronze shield. When pressed into the sand it would make a distinct pattern with raised pictographs.

"Bronze sand casting consists of pouring molten bronze into a hollow formed into sand. You can imagine pressing an item (called a pattern) into wet sand and then pouring in the liquid metal and letting it cool and set. That is the most basic method of sand casting. However, there are countless refinements to the process that metal workers have invented throughout history. These refinements allow sand casters to create intricate three-dimensional bronze items of almost any shape desired." (casttechnologies.net)

If the Phaistos Disk was intended as a brilliant shield design, then I might even suggest it was the prototype for the legenday Shield of Achilles, used by Achilles when he fought Hector. Below, left is a concept of the Shield of Achilles derived by Malcolm M. Willcock's reading of Homer's description of the shield in The Iliad, Chapter XVIII, with five spirals. At least the Phaistos Disk, with five spirals, hints at the idea of a legendary shield as early as 1600 BCE, five or six hundred years before Achilles is supposed to have fought Hector at Troy. The bright spots on the Phaistos Disk (below, right) denote locations of the fifteen shields on this side of the disk.

The two shields have much in common. Both have five circles, with the circles drawn in a wave spiral on the Phaistos Disk as befits a Minoan disk. Earth, sea, sun, moon and stars are indicated on the Phaistos Disk, as are cattle (1), ploughing (2), reaping (3), sheep (4), dance (5), vintage (6) and City at Peace (7) and City at War (8).

Homer tells us:

"First he (Vulcan) shaped the shield so great and strong, adorning it all over and binding it round with a gleaming circuit in three layers; and the baldric was made of silver. He made the shield in five thicknesses, [the five spirals] and with many a wonder did his cunning hand enrich it.

He wrought the earth, [the unconnected shield above, click the image to see it] the heavens, [the large image covering the disk, including all the shields] and the sea; [the Oceanus surrounding the design] the moon [the shields along the outside edge] also at her full and the untiring sun, [the star in the center] with all the signs that glorify the face of heaven- the Pleiads,[the man holding the shield, the Pleiades said to hang on Orion's belt] the Hyads, huge Orion, [the man holding the shield] and the Bear, which men also call the Wain and which turns round ever in one place, facing. Orion, and alone never dips into the stream of Oceanus.

He wrought also two cities, fair to see and busy with the hum of men. In the one were weddings and wedding-feasts, and they were going about the city with brides whom they were escorting by torchlight from their chambers. Loud rose the cry of Hymen, and the youths danced to the music of flute and lyre, [the Crane Dance or Dance of the Labyrinth, see the next chapter] while the women stood each at her house door to see them.

He wrought also a fair fallow field, large and thrice ploughed already. Many men were working at the plough (left) within it, turning their oxen to and fro, furrow after furrow. Each time that they turned on reaching the headland a man would come up to them and give them a cup of wine, and they would go back to their furrows looking forward to the time when they should again reach the headland. The part that they had ploughed was dark behind them, so that the field, though it was of gold, still looked as if it were being ploughed- very curious to behold.

He wrought also a field of harvest corn, and the reapers were reaping with sharp sickles in their hands. Swathe after swathe fell to the ground in a straight line behind them, and the binders bound them in bands of twisted straw. There were three binders, and behind them there were boys who gathered the cut corn in armfuls and kept on bringing them to be bound: among them all the owner of the land stood by in silence and was glad. The servants were getting a meal ready under an oak, for they had sacrificed a great ox, and were busy cutting him up, while the women were making a porridge of much white barley for the labourers' dinner.

He wrought also a herd of homed cattle. He made the cows of gold and tin, and they lowed as they came full speed out of the yards to go and feed among the waving reeds that grow by the banks of the river. Along with the cattle there went four shepherds, all of them in gold, and their nine fleet dogs (left) went with them. Two terrible lions had fastened on a bellowing bull that was with the foremost cows, and bellow as he might they haled him, while the dogs and men gave chase: the lions tore through the bull's thick hide (above left) and were gorging on his blood and bowels, but the herdsmen were afraid to do anything, and only hounded on their dogs; the dogs dared not fasten on the lions but stood by barking and keeping out of harm's way.

The god wrought also a pasture in a fair mountain dell, and large flock of sheep, with a homestead and huts, and sheltered sheepfolds.

Furthermore he wrought a green, like that which Daedalus once made in Cnossus for lovely Ariadne. Hereon there danced youths and maidens whom all would woo, with their hands on one another's wrists. (See the next chapter) The maidens wore robes of light linen, and the youths well woven shirts that were slightly oiled. The girls were crowned with garlands, while the young men had daggers of gold that hung by silver baldrics; sometimes they would dance deftly in a ring with merry twinkling feet, as it were a potter sitting at his work and making trial of his wheel to see whether it will run, and sometimes they would go all in line with one another, and much people was gathered joyously about the green. There was a bard also to sing to them and play his lyre, while two tumblers went about performing in the midst of them when the man struck up with his tune.

All round the outermost rim of the shield he set the mighty stream of the river Oceanus. (The outermost ring of the Phaistos Disk is Oceanus.)

Then when he had fashioned the shield so great and strong, he made a breastplate also that shone brighter than fire. He made helmet, (left) close fitting to the brow, and richly worked, with a golden plume overhanging it; and he made greaves also of beaten tin.

Lastly, when the famed lame god had made all the armour, he took it and set it before the mother of Achilles; whereon she darted like a falcon from the snowy summits of Olympus and bore away the gleaming armour (left) from the house of Vulcan." (Homer)

The pictographs on the disk need to seem identical because the artist intended that they produce additional images than are apparent on the faces of the disk. With the matching pictographs placed strategically to produce the images, many more meaningful designs could be contained on the artifact. Those designs reveal a world of information about the Minoan and Egyptian civilizations. Over a period of the last 100 years many people have studied the disk but without ever seeing the additional images contained by the disk, and for a good reason.

In retrospect, the disk is very simple but our presumptions and our distance from this ancient civilization prevent us from immediately recognizing the patterns on the disk. We do not expect to see a nearly 4,000 year-old connect the dots maze, so we do not see it, even after 100 years of collectively looking at it. Had we first seen the disk in the connect the dots section of the Sunday comics of a newspaper, we would have revealed some of the images before breakfast was over.

Plutarch and Plotinus between them give accounts of the ancient world-view involving numerology and the sexagesimal system of counting that is clearly preserved on the Phaistos Disk. These accounts relied heavily on mathematics and involved the emergence of the physical world from the womb of the goddess Rhea, as in Emanationism with the difference being the sex of God/dess.

Formed in Rhea's womb were 5 main divisions of layers or cosmic stuff (cosmoi), and into these layers or firmaments formed 60 soul spaces made of 60 types of soul-stuff, comprising 240 individual souls made of 48 different archetypes (or constellations). The 5 layers are the spirals on both sides of the disk (below, right column), the pictographs removed to see the spirals better. Each outside spiral has 12 line segments; 8 inside spirals have a combined 36 line segments. The spirals are divided into 60 line segments (30 Side 1, 30 Side 2). The 60 soul spaces in Rhea's womb are the total number of line segments on the disk, the 240 individual souls she creates is the total number of pictograph impressions, and the 48 soul types is the number of unique signs on the disk. These numbers in bold also reveal the mathematics of the times that may have involved the sexagesimal system of counting, perhaps with calendar applications.

"And in these sixty spaces dwell the souls, each one according to its nature, for though they are of one and the same substance, they are not of the same dignity." (Plutarch)

The 48 archtypes, or "ark types," probably were the earliest named constellations, which we have inherited from Crete and which remain 48. Since the Minoans' astronomical system included viewing them as "ark types," then we should credit the Minoans with the birth of "modern" astrology, although it was born a very long time ago and became something else before it became itself again. In modern astrology we know our star sign as the constellation under which were born, determined by the month in which we were born. According to modern astrology, our star sign does in fact indicate our "soul stuff" of which we are made and which is supposed to determine our behavior and thought processes.

As example, I am born under the constellation Taurus, a constellation that I believe is "abbreviated," along with the other 47 constellations, on the Phaistos Disk. Taurus is the Bull's Foot pictograph. (left) The Bull's Foot appears twice on the disk, both times on side one and each time with a Heaven-Walker. (left) The Bull's Foot appears upside-down in relation to the Heaven-Walker, so perhaps the indication is the Bull's Foot is above or in the sky. Perhaps this two-pictograph combination also implies Serapis, the sacred Osiris-Apis bull worshipped in Egypt.

Constellation Taurus
Side 1 (top), Side 2 (bottom) Phaistos Disk

Connect these identical Heaven-Walker pictographs with lines to draw the Taurus constellation. The Heaven-Walker was renown...

"...in those days [of ancient Egypt] of initiate kings and rulers and sages who occupied themselves with the Sacred Science, when the clear Aether spake face to face with them without disguise, or holding back aught, in answer to their deep scrutiny of holy things...In those days so great was their love of the holy mysteries, so high their virtue, that they left the earth below them, and in their deathless souls became 'heaven-walkers' and knowers of things divine." (Thrice-Greatest Hermes, G.R.S. Mead)

Constellation Taurus as it is seen on the Phaistos
Disk (left) and the constellation as it is
drawn today (right).

The spirals on the disk are divided into 60 line segments. This would indicate a relationship of the disk to early astronomy, and it would also indicate the Minoans' reverence for astronomy, the science that maps the skies. In the Minoan world-view, as preserved on the Phaistos Disk, the sky is the womb from which humanity is born, each soul based upon a constellation that determines its soul type. The 60 line segments therefore are "sacred," and are emanated by the great goddess Rhea and can be seen flowing out of her in a spiral from the center of the disk.

Later on, in Early Common Era Gnosticism, a more modern mythology grows from this ancient knowledge that involves planetary rulers and the passwords required to negotiate them.

The sacred 60 is significant because long before 1,700 BCE the 60-system of counting was used by the Mesopotamians, who were avid astronomers as were the Egyptians. The application of the sexagesimal (60-system) system in astronomy was continued by Greek and Hindu astronomers until about 500 CE. Since most of the constellation names originated in Crete and Greece, it is safe to say that because of the symbols on the disk and the knowledge of the use of the 60-system by Greek astronomers much later, the 60-system was employed by the Minoans in their astronomical calculations. The three 60's--the 60 soul spaces defined by the Phaistos Disk, the 60 of the 3-4-5 triangle (3x4=12x5=60, right triangle), and the 60-system of counting in astronomy--are inseparable syncretisms, in terms of symbolisms found on the disk.

"And they (crocodiles of the Nile) lay sixty [eggs] and hatch them out in as many days, and the longest-lived of them live as many years-which is the first of the measures for those who treat systematically of celestial [phenomena]." (Timaeus of Plato, in Thrice-Greatest Hermes, G.R.S. Mead, Vol.3, p.198)

"That is (re: the celestial phenomena), presumably, either the 60 of the Chaldaeans, or the 3x4x5 of the 'most perfect' triangle of the Mathematici." (Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn)

"The most perfect triangle, the right triangle, "has its perpendicular [side] of 'three', its base of 'four,' and its hypotenuse of 'five...'" (The Cosmopolite in Les Mystere des Cathedrales, Fulcanelli;)

"And one might conjecture the Egyptians [also revered] the fairest of triangles, likening the nature of the universe especially to this..." (Regardie)

"The Egyptians, millennia before Pythagoras, employed the magic 3-4-5 triangle of the Pythagorean Theorem, c2=a2+b2. The result, 25, was the number of letters in the Egyptian alphabet." (W. Marsham Adams in Mead)

"And five makes a square equal to the number of letters among Egyptians, and a period of as many years as the Apis lives." (Mead)

"Again, by the relative position of its (the ibis') legs to one another, and [of those] to its beak, it forms an equilateral triangle..." (Wallace Budge in Mead )

Not only the number 60 but also the number five was sacred because it symbolized the hypotenuse of the "perfect" 3-4-5 triangle, the right triangle of the Pythagorean Theorem, divinized on the Phaistos Disk 1200 years or so before Pythagoras proved it.

"For the 'three' is the first 'odd' and perfect; while the 'four' is square from side 'even' two; and the 'five' resembles partly its father and partly its mother, being composed of 'three' and 'two.'" (Plutarch in Mead, Vol.1, p.234)

"We must, accordingly, compare its (right triangle) perpendicular to male, its base to female, and its hypotenuse to the offspring of both; and [conjecture] Osiris as its source, Isis as receptacle, and Horus as result." (Plutarch in Mead, Vol.1, p.234)

"And panta [all] is only a slight variant of pente [five]; and they (the Egyptians) call counting pempasasthai [reckoning by fives]." (Plutarch in Mead, Vol.1, p.234)

Seen six times on side two of the disk and five times on side one is the five-branched tree. From "the ancient Chaldaean mystery-tradition of the Fire, 'five-branched' would thus mean man, or rather purified man, and the saying referred to the pruning of this tree." (Wallace Budge in Mead) The tree may also represent the five-branched heather-bush that grew around the coffin of Osiris, which was known as "chen-Osiris" or "Osiris-plant," the ivy consecrated to Osiris. (Wallace Budge in Mead) .

Interesting the geometry that emerges when the five five-branched pictographs on side one are connected with lines. The image seems like a graphical dissertation on triangles.

Did the ancient people in Bronze Age Crete advance knowledge of the phi spiral? Knowing so much about geometry, why would they not? One of the pictographs on the disk is an equilateral triangle. Given the ancient love for syncretisms, it might also be people touring inside the Great Pyramid.

The shields on the disk each have seven dots in the shape of a hexagram. This could reference another Platonic solid, the hexahedron. Other symbols on the disk seem related to geometry. Remembering that the disk comes from a place with "phi" as part of its name--Phai-stos--(which the Greeks pronounce "fes-tos") the implication is that the people there studied the principles of phi and identified Platonic solids 1200 years before the birth of Plato. I believe they actively pursued knowledge of the sciences of geometry and astronomy and, at the same time, expressed their ideas and discoveries within the context of art, fabulous art being the known hallmark of their civilization while, at the same time, they are for some reason denied their massive contribution to astronomy.

I also think that "Phi-stos" Crete was the center for the study of these sciences and may also have been the center for pottery. This vase pictograph, for example, is so similar to this vase excavated at Phaistos. Noticably on the vase is a spiral and a design resembling the symbol for f, the Greek letter Phi.

The magnificent palace at Phaistos was overshadowed by Knossos alone. Phaistos was:

"...a palace only less extensive than that of the Cnossus kings. Phaestus becomes a Cretan Piraeus, in love with commerce rather than with art. And yet the palace of its prince is a majestic edifice, reached by a flight of steps forty-five feet wide; its halls and courts compare with those at Cnossus; its central court is a paved quadrangle of ten thousand square feet; its megaron, or reception room, is three thousand square feet in area, larger even than the great Hall of the Double Ax in the northern capital." (Durant)

"At Phaestus, about 2000, he builds ten tiers of stone seats, running some eighty feet along a wall overlooking a flagged court." (Durant)

"In Middle Minoan I the earliest palaces occur: the princes of Cnossus, Phaestus, and Mallia build for themselves luxurious dwellings with countless rooms, spacious storehouses, specialized workshops, altars and temples, and great drainage conduits that startle the arrogant Occidental eye." (Durant)

This Phaistos Disk pictograph may be the primitive symbol for Pi, 3.1416, to describe the properties of a circle. The short line of the symbol is the radius (r) of a circle and the long line is the diameter (d). The ratio of the circumference of a circle (c) to its diameter (d=2r) is a constant number called Pi, which equals c divided by 2r+3.1416.

The Puzzle | Argo | Sirius | Cheops
Solution | Pictographs | Origins
Previous  |  Home  |  Author  |  Next

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 Author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.