More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Pandora wasn’t evil, after all. She hadn’t intended to unleash suffering into the world. She’d simply needed to know what was inside the box.
Cracking a code wasn’t about luck, or even about skill, but about having insight into it, a piece of information that threw light on how it was constructed.
Mechanical puzzles were wildly popular and always had been. The first was made in Greece in the third century B.C.,
Labyrinths are often confused with mazes, but they are different in one essential way: Mazes have dead ends. Labyrinths do not. In a labyrinth, a solver can move through a path forever, in constant motion. While a maze will stop you cold if you take the wrong path, a labyrinth will trap you forever.
the sunflower was an important shape in sacred geometry. The seeds created a Fibonacci sequence, the arms of the spirals curving right and left, thirty-four clockwise and twenty-one counterclockwise.
“After the capital moved east to Tokyo, there was a brief period when Kyoto was known as the western capital. Edo, Tokyo’s old name, meant eastern capital.”
A turtle emerged from the water, and it had a strange pattern on its back.” “Circular dots,” Brink said, “that marked the nine sections of the turtle’s shell. Those dots formed a three-by-three grid that created a magic square.” “The Lo Shu Square was widely adopted and served as an important reference for planning cities and temples—informing rituals of geomancy and feng shui. Some people say that the Lo Shu Square is an invention that changed civilization, on par with fire or law or storytelling.”
“It’s an ancient practice to use starlight and moonlight to mark sacred spots,” Rachel said. “The Great Pyramid of Giza. Stonehenge. There is an entire field of research called archaeoastronomy that relates to it.
