Chessboard of Europe

The Chessboard of Europe

"The Mahabhashya (2nd Century AD) defines Ashtapada as a 'board in which each line has eight squares', and the word Ashtapada was used to describe the grid used in land survey. The French writer Bernouf, in La Lotus de la Bonne Loi, an obscure work published in Paris in 1854, cites a passage from a northern Indian Buddhist text where the planet herself is described as 'The Earth on which Ashtapadas were fashioned with cords of gold' ".

- from Nigel Pennick Secret Games of the Gods (Samuel Weiser Inc, 1992)

The map of Europe shown above, a form derived from the research of Professor Livio Stecchini, contains a wealth of symbolic and geometric relations.It is the Mt Meru glyph writ large across the continental body of Europe, and embodies the notion of sacred space as template for the layout of nations, cities, temples, gameboards, and indeed all those sites and spaces designed glyphs of the heavens above mapped onto the earth below.

The grid which makes up the Chessboard of Europe form (above) is made up of geodetic squares of 6° in height and 7.2° in width. The parallels of 12° and 60° latitude form the lower and upper boundaries of the 8 by 8 grid which make up the Chessboard. The lines of longitude are measured east and west of the Prime Meridian of Ancient Egypt, or ToMera, located at 31°14' East.

The zodiac is arranged around the inner squares, as shown, in the arrangement which J. Ralston Skinner, in The Source of Measures, calls the preferred form of the ancients. In this configuration, the 12 zodiac signs are arranged around the outer 12 squares of a 4 x 4 grid. Aries and Taurus are positioned in the upper and lower squares respectively on the right side of the diagram. This corresponds to the position of the eastern equinox, and therefore the diagram may be taken as reflecting the layout of the heavens at the transition of precessional ages from Taurus to Aries in the years approximately 2,000BC.

The combination of chessboard and zodiac with the grid map of Ancient Egypt produces an image of considerable symbolic and metaphoric significance. Most importantly, it served in past ages as an "aide de memoire", a tableau on which a matrix of associations could be deposited for purposes of meditation as much as navigation. Though it appears here publicly for the first time, it may be found hidden in certain early maps. It reveals the Mediterranean Sea as an emblem both of the human and cosmic form, and for those who have eyes to see, points the way to the role of the etheric formative forces in underpinning the creation of form in cosmos, earth and man.