Tagged: six

The following is a transcript of Chapter VI of The Pythagorean Triangle: Or, the Science of Numbers by the Rev. Dr. George Oliver, a noted 19th century English Freemason. I have compiled this from several sources, including the Internet Archive, Google Books, and my own copy of the work. I slightly reworked the layout where necessary, including sort of rejiggering the chapter opening here. I've made several minor typographic modifications as well, such as removing the spaces before semicolons (a form of punctuation the good Doctor seems to have had a particular fondness for).

The rest of the book consists of similar musings on the other natural numbers, up to ten. I do not necessarily agree with Dr. Oliver's views, either on the hexad in particular, or on Christian numerology in general. I certainly don't agree with his cryptodecimalist ontology. But it is nonetheless an interesting treatment of the subject, and I offer it here as a noteworthy historical artifact of antiquarian hexagonal thought.

A PDF version of the full book can be downloaded from our Hexagonal Library.

Note: Writing about dozenalism always presents some semantic complications. When discussing the natural numbers up to twelve, I have opted to spell out the numbers in English, since this is a clear and base-neutral way of representing them. After trying several different systems, I have settled on writing larger numbers in decimal. Unless otherwise specified, "10" means ten, not twelve, et cetera. When I use dozenal notation, and for clarification purposes elsewhere, I have prefixed the radix as an abbreviation before the number. Thus, "dec. 360" means decimal 360, and "doz. 260" means dozenal 260. "360" by itself, unless otherwise specified, refers to the former. Larger numbers spelled out, where it is stylistically appropriate to do so, will always be given in decimal. My first inclination, of course, was to put all numbers here in dozenal, but on further reflection I see no value in confusing people needlessly. (Confusing them for a good reason though is fine.)