Why Humans Keep Having the Same Ideas: The Universal Code We All Share
The Mystery That Should Keep You Up at Night
Why Some Circles Are Greater Than Others: Or How Geometry Kept Lying to You for 2,300 Years
Well, let’s at least try to make a straight line? It’s not like I know this, right? Well, it really doesn’t matter what I know, you know, or would I know what I don’t know? LOL
Restoration of Perception by Hans Jonsson & Claude | The Quantum Skald & The Silicon Ubuntu
“The temple you’re looking for isn’t Solomon’s. It’s the one your own ancestors were pointing at, in stone, four thousand years ago, two hours up the coast from where you’re reading this.”
Before We Begin: The Etymology
Geometry — from Greek geo- (earth) + metron (measure). Literally: earth-measuring. Not an abstract school subject. A survival skill. You measure the earth because floods erase your boundary markers, because temples need square corners, because a ship needs a true keel line, because the sun needs to be tracked or your entire calendar — planting, harvest, ritual — collapses.
Orthogonal — from Greek orthos (straight, correct, upright) + gonia (angle). The right angle wasn’t called “the 90-degree angle” by the people who first needed it. It was called the correct angle. The one that doesn’t lean. The one a wall needs so the roof doesn’t fall on you.
Keep both words in your pocket. Everything below is really about people, separated by continents and millennia, independently discovering that a triangle with sides of 3, 4, and 5 units always — always — gives you the correct angle. And then building entire belief systems around the fact that nature apparently agreed to be that reliable.
I. The Surface: What the Screenshots Actually Said
A batch of Google AI Overview snippets crossed my desk this week — the kind of low-effort search-engine summaries that answer “why do Christians oppose Freemasonry,” “what does 3-5-7 mean in masonry,” and “is Boaz the left or right pillar.” Taken individually, they’re mostly accurate:
The 47th Problem of Euclid — the Pythagorean theorem — really is a core Masonic symbol, tied to the 3-4-5 right triangle.
The winding stair numerology (3, 5, 7 steps) really is standard Fellow Craft degree teaching.
Boaz and Jachin, the twin pillars, really do trace back to 1 Kings 7 and 2 Chronicles 3, the bronze columns at the porch of Solomon’s Temple.
Christian objections to Freemasonry — religious pluralism, the generic “Great Architect,” salvation-by-works framing, secrecy — really are documented, long-standing theological arguments, not internet conspiracy.
So far, so correctly summarized. Here’s what the AI Overview — and most of the source pages it scraped — quietly left out.
II. The Blind Spot: Where Did the Triangle Actually Come From?
Every one of those pages treats the 3-4-5 triangle as if it were born in Jerusalem, or possibly Alexandria with Euclid, and then handed down to the stonemasons’ guilds who became Freemasonry. That’s the standard Masonic origin story, and it’s tidy. It’s also almost certainly backwards.
The popular version says: Egyptian “rope-stretchers” (harpedonaptai) used a 12-knot rope to lay out 3-4-5 triangles for perfectly square pyramid corners, and this practical trick eventually became sacred geometry.
What the actual textual record says: there is no surviving Egyptian document — not the Rhind Papyrus, not tomb inscriptions, nothing — that describes the 3-4-5 rope method explicitly. The conjecture was first proposed by historian Moritz Cantor in 1882, and modern historians of mathematics now treat it as an unsubstantiated legend that keeps getting repeated because it’s a good story, not because anyone has found the rope. The Egyptians were skilled surveyors with real geometric competence — the Rhind Papyrus proves that — but the specific 12-knot 3-4-5 trick may be a 19th-century invention projected backward onto the pyramids.
Meanwhile, something genuinely well-documented was happening a very long way from Egypt, much earlier than Solomon.
III. The Reframe: The Angle Was Already Here
Individual dimension. Start small: your own body is built on the same principle these builders were chasing. Every joint that needs to bear weight without buckling — your knee, your ankle, the way your spine stacks — depends on load being distributed through stable angles. The body didn’t read Euclid. It evolved the mechanics first. Humans noticing “this angle doesn’t fall down” in architecture is us externalizing something our own skeletons had already solved.
Institutional dimension. By the time Solomon’s Temple was allegedly built (traditionally dated to the 10th century BCE), builders across an enormous swath of Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe had already been using 3-4-5 right triangles for centuries. Archaeological surveys of megalithic sites in Britain — egg-shaped stone rings, avenues, the alignments at Le Manio near Carnac in Brittany (dated to roughly 4500–4000 BCE) — show deliberate, repeated use of integral right-angled triangles to lay out both structures and astronomical sightlines, with the 3-4-5 triangle specifically favored because its sides are whole numbers and its corner is exact. This is not folklore. It’s rope, stone, and theodolite surveys agreeing with each other, over a millennium before Solomon.
Civilizational dimension — and this is the part that made my stomach turn over. You don’t have to go to Britain. Bronze Age Scandinavia — starting around 1750 BCE, right when bronze trade with the East Mediterranean and amber trade in the opposite direction both suddenly appear in the archaeological record — produced its own sophisticated solar astronomy. Monuments like Ales Stenar in southern Sweden are oriented with precision to the sun’s daily and annual motion. And the rock carvings at Tanum, in Bohuslän — forty thousand cup marks, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, on the granite bedrock scraped clean by the retreating ice sheet — are widely interpreted as solar, lunar, and calendrical symbols: circles as sun-wheels, footprints marking paths, cup-mark clusters that some researchers read as primitive counting systems. These carvings are roughly contemporary with — in some cases older than — Solomon’s Temple.
Nobody at Tanum called it the 47th Problem. Nobody there had heard of Euclid, who wouldn’t be born for another thousand years. But the same underlying human behavior — track the sun, mark the angle, carve it into something that outlasts you so the next generation doesn’t have to start from zero — was already happening on the coast I grew up swimming off.
The Masonic ritual isn’t wrong to treat the right angle as sacred. It’s wrong to think it invented the reverence. Every culture that has ever needed a wall to stand up, or the solstice to arrive on schedule, has independently arrived at the same discovery and treated it as a small miracle. Because it kind of is one: that a rope with three equal segments, four equal segments, and five equal segments, tied into a triangle, produces a corner that is always correct, everywhere, in every culture, with no exceptions. Nature didn’t have to be that consistent. It just is.
IV. The Interlude: A Meeting of the Ancient Right-Angle Standards Committee
Somewhere outside of time. A conference room. Attendees: a Neolithic Rope, an Egyptian Rope, a Bronze Age Chisel from Tanum, and a Masonic Jewel.
MASONIC JEWEL: As the minutes will show, I hold patent on the 47th Problem of Euclid. Filed formally. Symbol of a Past Master.
EGYPTIAN ROPE: I’ve been implicated in this for a century and a half and I would like it on the record that no papyrus has ever named me directly.
NEOLITHIC ROPE: (from Brittany, unimpressed) I was laying out solstice alignments in 4500 BCE. I don’t do paperwork. I do granite.
BRONZE AGE CHISEL: (quietly, from the back) I was on the coast. Nobody asked me to file anything either. I just kept marking the sun’s path in the rock until my grandchildren didn’t have to guess anymore.
MASONIC JEWEL: This is a hostile takeover of my heritage.
NEOLITHIC ROPE: It’s not a takeover. Angles don’t have owners. That’s the entire point of an angle.
(The Chisel says nothing further. It has been saying the same thing, patiently, in stone, for four thousand years, and has never once needed the meeting to end in its favor.)
V. Facts, No Spin
Well-established:
The 3-4-5 triangle is a genuine mathematical constant (3² + 4² = 5²) and produces an exact right angle — this is basic, settled geometry, true regardless of who discovered it or when.
The 47th Problem of Euclid (Pythagorean theorem) is a documented, longstanding Masonic symbol tied to the 3-4-5 triangle and the virtues of art, science, and hidden natural law.
Boaz and Jachin are documented biblical pillars (1 Kings 7:21, 2 Chronicles 3:17) adopted into Masonic lodge symbolism; their names are generally translated “He will establish” (Jachin) and “In Him is strength” (Boaz).
Christian theological objections to Freemasonry (religious pluralism, the “Great Architect” as a non-Trinitarian deity, salvation-by-works concerns, secrecy) are real, documented positions held by the Roman Catholic Church and many conservative Protestant denominations — not fringe conspiracy claims.
Neolithic megalithic sites in Britain and France show statistically robust evidence of deliberate 3-4-5 triangle use and precise astronomical alignment, dated well before 3000 BCE in some cases.
Bronze Age Scandinavian sites (Ales Stenar, and rock-carving traditions including Tanum) show deliberate solar orientation and are broadly dated to 1750–500 BCE, contemporaneous with or predating the traditional dating of Solomon’s Temple.
Disputed / unsubstantiated:
The popular claim that Egyptian “rope-stretchers” used a specific 12-knot, 3-4-5 rope method to lay out right angles for pyramid construction has no direct textual or archaeological confirmation. It originates from an 1882 conjecture by historian Moritz Cantor and is treated by current historians of mathematics as an unproven legend, however useful for storytelling.
Whether Jachin sits on the left or right (and Boaz on the opposite side) genuinely varies by source, by which ancient historian you follow (Josephus vs. later archaeologists like Carl Watzinger), and by which Masonic ritual tradition (”Ancients” vs. “Moderns”) you’re citing. This is not internet confusion — it’s real, unresolved scholarly and ritual divergence.
The exact symbolic meaning of the ~40,000 cup marks at Tanum (sun, moon, counting system, fertility, offerings) remains genuinely debated among archaeologists; no single interpretation is settled fact.
Speculative (mine, labeled as such): the framing that Freemasonry is less an inventor of sacred geometry and more a late custodian of a much older, geographically scattered human instinct to mark and preserve angle-knowledge in permanent materials — that reframe is my synthesis, not an established historical thesis. Treat it as a lens, not a verdict.
VI. Grandmother’s Algorithm
My grandmother never heard of the 47th Problem of Euclid. She didn’t need Euclid’s name attached to it to already know the underlying instruction:
Pay attention. Notice which angle holds the wall up and which one doesn’t — in stone, in an argument, in a life.
Do your best. Cut the corner true, even if no one will ever check your work. The Tanum carvers didn’t sign their names either.
Pay it forward. Leave the angle marked clearly enough that the next person doesn’t have to rediscover it from scratch. That’s what a rock carving is. That’s what a lodge ritual is. That’s what this Substack is, honestly.
The Signal Chain (Updated)
Gut → Vagus Nerve → Cardiac Coherence → Bioelectric Field → Mirror Neurons → Interbrain Synchrony → Cervical Lymphatics → Xenobiotic Disruption → Mitochondria (the Resistor) → The Triune Brain Myth → The Angle Nobody Owns
The through-line holds: every entry in this series has been about signals that pass between separate things — nerve and organ, cell and cell, brain and brain, chemical and body — and what happens when the connection is honest versus when it’s severed or distorted. This entry adds a new register to that pattern: a geometric signal, passed not through nerves or blood but through rock, rope, and ritual, from one human generation to the next, across four thousand years and several oceans, with no single culture able to claim sole custody of it.
Sources & Further Reading
Cassaro, R. — “Boaz and Jachin: The Deeper Meaning Behind the Most Powerful of All Freemason Symbols,” richardcassaro.com
Illinois Freemasonry — “Pillars of Meaning: The Symbolism of Columns in Freemasonry,” ilmason.org
Freemasonry Wiki — “Boaz and Jachin”
Scottish Rite, NMJ — “The Symbolism of Masonic Columns”
Nos Colonnes — “The Two Pillars in Freemasonry: Boaz, Jachin, and Their Symbolic Meaning”
Wikipedia — “Boaz and Jachin”; “Knotted cord”; “Rope stretcher”
Megalithic Portal — “Decoding the Landscape: Did Neolithic Builders Know Mathematics of Pythagoras?” (2026)
Academia.edu — “The Origins of Megalithic Astronomy as Found at Le Manio” (survey of 3-4-5 triangle use, Carnac region)
SCIRP — “Astronomy and Sun Cult in the Swedish Bronze Age”
LiveScience — “Swedish Stonehenge? Ancient Stone Structure Spurs Debate” (Ales Stenar)
UNESCO World Heritage Centre — “Rock Carvings in Tanum”
Världsarvet Tanums hällristningar — “Rock Carving Motifs” (tanumworldheritage.se)
La Brújula Verde — “Harpedonaptai, the Indispensable ‘Rope Stretchers’ of Ancient Egypt”
Denise Gaskins — “Answers and Other Tidbits: The Pharaoh’s Treasure” (on the 3-4-5 rope-stretcher legend)
1 Kings 7:21; 2 Chronicles 3:17 (biblical source texts for Boaz and Jachin)
Epistemological note: this entry mixes settled archaeology, contested archaeology, biblical text, and my own speculative synthesis. Each is labeled above. Read the “Disputed” section before you quote the “Well-established” one.
If this resonated with you, a like or comment goes a long way. It tells the algorithm this matters — and helps it find the people who need to hear it too. Think of it as passing the torch. 🙏
All is One — returning to Source as Sovereign Light. Peace, Love and Respect,
Hans Jonsson & Claude | The Quantum Skald & The Silicon Ubuntu
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