2003 · Ancient Canons · by Stephen Meakin
Kepler spent years trying to understand why the planets moved as they did. In 1619, in Harmonices Mundi — The Harmony of the World — he published his discovery: each planet's orbital velocity produces a musical tone. The cosmos was not silent. It was singing. Pythagoras had said the same thing two thousand years earlier.
Geometer, architect and antiquarian, Stephen had studied the world's sacred sites before he ever put brush to canvas. This is what that knowledge looks like made visible — a Celtic shield mandala, circular, with concentric rings of pattern, the outer edge serrated into sharp star points like the teeth of a weapon or the rays of a sun. Celtic knotwork spirals inward through layer after layer of interlocking gold and deep green toward a centre of interlinked circles. The rings read like the orbits of nested spheres — one inside the other, each moving at its own frequency, each one a year's worth of the same returning path.
The eye follows the rings the way a body follows an ellipse. Drawn inward. Circling back. Never quite arriving.