Time Stands Still: New Light on Megalithic Science

by Keith Critchlow

Keith Critchlow, an internationally-renowned scholar, has studied a wide range of Neolithic artefacts. In "Time Stands Still", he adopts a technique of cross-cultural comparison to uncover some previously unknown characteristics of the Neolithic people. He takes ancient temple-building manuals from Indian Vedic sources, for example, and applies them to British sites - with fascinating results. He examines Chinese pictographs for evidence of sighting instruments and scientific tools. Perhaps most significantly, he offers evidence that stone-carved spheres with regular mathematical symmetries, found in Scotland, pre-date Plato's writings on geometric figures by more than a thousand years. The remarkable findings of this groundbreaking book are just as important today as when the book was first published.

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Dr. Keith Critchlow is the cofounder of the journal Temenos, as well as the author of numerous books on sacred geometry, including Order in Space and Time Stands Still. He is Professor Emeritus at The Prince’s School of Traditional Arts in London, and a former professor of Islamic Art at the Royal College of Art. Prof. Critchlow, a leading expert in sacred architecture, also founded Kairos, a society that investigates, studies, and promotes traditional values of art and science.

Prof. Critchlow's contributions to World Wisdom's books on sacred art include such pieces as his forewords to Titus Burckhardt's extraordinary work Chartres and the Birth of the Cathedral and the compilation of Burckhardt's writings on Christian art in general, The Foundations of Christian Art: Illustrated (edited by Michael Fitzgerald), which won a Gold Midwest Book Award and a Silver Benjamin Franklin Award. In addition, Keith Critchlow wrote a foreword to the book of Frithjof Schuon's writings on sacred art, Art from the Sacred to the Profane: East and West (edited by Catherine Schuon).

from worldwisdom.com

Reviews

[Arthur Cowslip]

Critchlow makes a very convincing argument that the patterns of old stone circles indicate in pre-literate culture not only a far more sophisticated awareness of geometry than we may have thought, but also an enviable oneness with the cosmos, from the recurrence of the seasons to the movements of the planets. It's heady stuff, and I was with it most of the way: where I draw the line is when he starts getting mired in astrology in the later chapters, but overall it's hard not to be attracted to a world of co-existence with nature rather than our current void of progress, rationalism and technology.

The reason I give it three stars and not four is because it's a bit heavy with the geometry and calculations. As a more casual reader, I would have preferred a shorter version with more poetry then Pythagoras.

[Phoenix Lain]

Amazing book. So much buried information within these texts. Read this if you’re interested in the subject in the slightest bit. It’s very detailed, very precise.