Homage to Pythagoras: Rediscovering Sacred Science
edited by Christopher Bamford
Lindisfarne Press, Rochester, Vt.; paper.
The title, subtitle, and a summary of subjects addressed (form, number, geometry, architecture, light, color, music, poetry) effectively describe the contents. Sacred art and architecture put us in touch with the divine. Genuine sacred art can only be produced through sacred science. This was the science of the ancients, a science no less sophisticated and advanced than our own, but directed toward very different values.
Unless our emotional faculties have been utterly destroyed by modern education, it is impossible not to respond to sacred art. But knowing why we respond is a first step toward reacquiring that great, lost wisdom. Homage to Pythagoras is hardly bedtime reading, but anyone interested in understanding that "why" will find the effort expended amply repaid.
-JOHN ANTHONY WEST
Summer 1995