The method Randall describes is elegant in its simplicity and profound in its implications. Drive a pole with a sharpened point into the ground. Draw a circle of any sacred length around it. As the sun rises in the east, a long shadow is cast to the west -... and as it shortens toward noon, the moment the shadow's tip touches the circle, a stake is driven into the ground. That point is due south. As the afternoon progresses and the shadow swings back and lengthens toward the west, a second stake is driven when the tip touches the circle again. String a line between the two stakes and the result is a precise east-west line. The north-south axis follows immediately from there. With those four cardinal directions established, the entire geometric program of a sacred site can be laid out - squares, rectangles, circles, ellipses, all derived from a single pole, a drawn circle, and the movement of the sun across the sky. No instruments beyond what any culture in any era could produce. No calculations beyond what sustained observation of shadow movement provides. Randall's point is that this method was available to every ancient builder who ever oriented a monument to the cardinal directions - and the precision of the sacred sites that resulted was not the product of sophisticated technology but of a simple, reproducible technique that anyone willing to watch the sun carefully enough could master.show more

Randall Carlson

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