Bernard I. Pietsch, archaeo-metrologist and independent researcher, has spent over six decades exploring the geometry and dimensions of the world’s greatest stone monuments. Before his foray into ancient art, Pietsch was investigating how changes in the Earth’s magnetic field affected the behavior of living organisms. He observed pendulums and gyroscopes and studied earthquakes, tornadoes, and astronomy. In the living sciences, he surveyed everything from the vagaries of mass migrations to microscopic changes in blood sedimentation rates. From this wide perspective, his focus turned to how data from various scientific domains were cataloged and graphed.
“After surveying many fields,” he recalls, “I could see that events occurring in Nature defied prediction. I wanted to know what gave rise to so many anomalies. Clearly, an unaccounted factor was at work. I began to ask if perhaps there were another kind of framework or time sense that would more clearly resonate with Nature’s time—a single, reconciling dynamic to which all was responding.
“By the spring of 1971, I had drafted some promising explanations for these questions and was able to formulate an innovative, general statement about frequency expressing a natural law. About that time, and quite accidentally, my attention was captured by a book on the Great Pyramid—a diversion that would last for decades. By the fall of that year, l was deep into the geometry and measurements of the Pyramid. I realized that it confirmed, supported, and upgraded my derived concepts. It seemed as if all my research into astronomical cycles and biological rhythms had prepared me to read what I came to call the “book” of the Pyramid. I discovered in its architecture a geometric idiom that expressed insights I had gleaned from mathematics, psychology, epistemology, and Nature—the Pyramid was a cosmological model.”
Nearing the century mark at the time of this writing, Bernard Pietsch is no stranger to the boundaries of convention. His willingness to challenge, if not violate the rules of practical mathematics has enabled him to use the functions of number as an artist would—in complete freedom. As a result, the novel insights and “coincident correspondences” documented in his work are not random or serendipitous. They are evidence of an order implicitly revealed through the plasticity of number.
Pietsch doesn’t claim to have discovered anything, only that he has recovered the language of ancient artists who expressed in their work, a level of harmony we moderns do not yet enjoy. “I just read well,” he says. “If a work is allowed to penetrate and inform our sensibilities, we may be fortunate enough to contact within ourselves, an experience of understanding modeled by the work.”
Pietsch has tapped into those models and left guideposts for the rest of us to follow.