What does the Great Pyramid of Giza have in common with the United Nations Secretariat? Need a clue? It’s the same thing that Leonardo da Vinci has in common with Claude Debussy and your head. I hope that helps.
There is a lot of talk in the spiritual community about ‘sacred’ numbers and geometry. Numerology is an especially popular belief. We turn the letters of our name into numbers and add them together until we get one digit, which supposedly defines our entire character and life purpose.
This doesn’t work so well for Chaldeans, who don’t recognise the number nine, or for those with a different alphabet. And what about people who change their names or are known by family and friends by different names? A certain German typographer had twenty-eight names, and his surname had five hundred and ninety-six letters. I’m guessing Hubert Blaine, for short, wasn’t a big fan of numerology.
Then we have the so-called angel numbers… Do you keep seeing 11:11 or 555? Well, you’re embarking on a new path or going through some changes in your life. But you probably knew that anyway, didn’t you?
These beliefs about numbers may be an interesting way to pass the time, but at the end of the day they’re not really helpful on our spiritual journey, are they? They’re not going to affect the way we live or guide how we respond to significant events. And let’s remember that numbers are, after all, basically just a human invention to help us count things.
Still, there may be something a bit mysterious about mandalas, mostly circular geometric designs intended to symbolize the universe or paradise or the spiritual journey, from the outer edge towards the centre. Mandalas have been used for millennia in Hinduism, Buddhism and Shinto as an aid to meditation. They embody deep meanings in the symbols used.
On the other hand, they are essentially just pictures painted by humans to support their own religions. Surely the word ‘sacred’ should be reserved for something beyond human invention, beyond our thinking minds, something numinous and ineffable?
This leads us to the connection between the Great Pyramid and your head. Some of the most interesting and important numbers in mathematics don’t even have a fixed value. It’s weird, literally irrational. The most well-known of these numbers is pi ( Π ), the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. It’s about 3.14… continuing to infinity with no pattern.
Now, it turns out that pizza and ice cream are not the only good things to come out of Italy. In 1202, Leonardo Bonacci, also known as Fibonacci, introduced the world to the Golden Ratio, named by the Greek letter phi ( Φ ). True, he wasn’t the first to discover this; the Babylonians, ancient Greeks and Egyptians were aware of it and realised that it had something to do with the geometry of nature. It is built into the design of the Great Pyramid of Giza, for the structure to be in harmony with the Earth.
Fibonacci, though, showed us how fundamental it is for understanding how the world grows.
The Fibonacci Sequence is 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34…, a mathematical model of natural growth, because each number is the sum of the two before it. And dividing one number by the one before it gets us closer to the value of phi, approximately 1.62… But of course, the sequence is infinite, making phi an irrational number.
Fibonacci numbers are seen throughout nature, for example flowers having three, five or eight petals, and the head of a sunflower having twenty-one and thirty-four intertwining spirals of seeds. And rotating lengths of Fibonacci numbers around a point creates a special spiral, which is found on snails, pinecones and nautilus shells, the nerves of our eyes’ corneas and the spiral arms of galaxies in the Milky Way.
But nature includes us. Grab a ruler and a calculator! Measure the length of your head, excluding hair, and divide this by its width, excluding ears. Well, you may not be perfect – which of us is? – but on average the result will be close to 1.62. The same proportions are found throughout the rest of our bodies because it’s the geometry of natural growth.
(If you’re still not impressed, the digits of irrational numbers are used to encrypt our financial transactions online as well as to create codes for national security, whilst the Fibonacci Sequence is used to create Internet search algorithms.)
Phi has come to be regarded as representing natural beauty and the spirit of life itself. And it was those Italians again who made us realise it. In the fifteenth century, the mathematician and monk, Luca Pacioli, told his friends about it. Among these friends were Pietro Perugino, Piero della Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci.
The Renaissance was born. These artists began to use phi in the design of their work; canvases being divided into rectangles with Fibonacci lengths (such as eight units by thirteen). The result was that paintings no longer looked flat but had natural proportions, enhancing their beauty. The most famous examples, of course, are the Mona Lisa and the Baptism of Christ.
The same principle has often been used in architecture, with Fibonacci rectangles seen from the Parthenon in Greece to the United Nations Secretariat building in New York. In music, the structure of the formal boundaries in Debussy’s haunting symphony, La Mer, also follows the Fibonacci Sequence. Even commerce has used the Golden Ratio, with the packaging of many foodstuffs having the same proportions. The idea is that, because our bodies are built the same way, we will instinctively recognise the product’s goodness!
The likes of Fibonacci and da Vinci have shown us that Maths is not only useful, but it can also be genuinely sacred.
© Nigel Peace, 2026
Nigel Peace is the author of several spiritual books, both fiction and non-fiction. His new novel, The Unbroken, is a story of deep human love and an adventure in mysterious worlds of the mind.
Published by Roundfire Books.
Nigel’s website is https://www.spiritrevelations.com
