From the magazine Parabola, fall 1999. Numbers in [ ] indicate references at the bottom of the page.

FIVE IN THE CENTRE
By Rebecca Robison

The mourning dove is calling from high in the cottonwood; its chant is always five notes repeated and repeated, "ooah-oo-oo-oo". I have listened to those same five notes for so many years and from so many doves that it is a sudden revelation when at last I realised that they are the very notes of the Dakota prayer song to the Great Spirit, "Wakan Tanka ka" - after all these years, to finally connect "Wakan Tanka ka" with the five notes of the mourning dove's call! It is a moment of epiphany for me, coming at this particular time when I find myself involved in the study of the mystically centering number five and since I regard such synchronicities as affirmation signals, I am encouraged to continue.

Native Americans

The number five is the centre of the Native American medicine wheel, the fifth direction, the place of transformational possibilities. It is the central point of balance which unifies East, South, West, and North and leads beyond them. Within a traditional medicine wheel ceremony, a person acknowledges the four directions and this acknowledgment becomes the fifth direction [1]. Likewise, in the sacred pipe ceremony, as the pipe is passed around the circle beginning at the centre, in the heart, its bowl is held as the stationary fifth point while its stem is rotated, acknowledging the four directions. This same static point itself takes part in a greater movement later as the pipe passes from person to person and so the fifth point is a rotation returning to its starting point. The centre is the process of completion that leads beyond the four: the fifth direction, the connection to the Great Spirit.

Mayans

Throughout the 3700 years of Mayan religion, the number five has symbolised the connecting centre allowing access to the spiritual world. It is the basic ordering principle of the Mayan cosmos represented by Pauahtan, the Lord of the Shell and all beginnings and endings; whose primary role is to open a portal of space and time [2]. A ceremony performed on February 8th of each year is the setting up of an altar in the ancient five-point sign called the Quincunx - five stones laid out according to solstice locations, one at each corner and one in the centre. When the central fifth stone which represents the centre of the cosmos is set up, a portal is opened to the Otherworld. According to Mayan religion, the universe was created by the gods who support it at the four corners and designate its center "the navel of the world". The first act of Mayan creation was to centre the world by placing the five stones of the cosmic hearth [3]. Houses and fields even today are small scale models of this five point cosmology, having cross shrines at their corners and centres.

Navajo

Five is an important unifying element in both the Navajo and Tibetan ritual creation of Mandalas. These circles of the spirit are used in healing, initiation and transformation rites as interfaces between the real world and the sacred world, which temporarily resides in the inner sanctum of the Mandalas. In both traditions, the east-west vector is the axis of mind, while south-north is the axis of action, of involvement in the real world. Where the two axes intersect arises the quintessence, the 'fifth essence' of universal mind and energy. The Navajo speak of a universal mind with full knowledge of beauty and empowered by Holy Wind, a pulsating, breathing fusion of all the animating and enlivening energies of the living cosmos. They understand all phenomenal, material reality to have its origin in the partnership of Holy Wind and Universal Mind, which permeate the cosmos and are expressions of its beauty. At the basis of the Universal Mind are four elemental colored winds merging in and out of a multicolored or 'glittering' wind, the fifth wind [4].

Tibetans

Tibetans call this same crossing point of the two axes the five-fold heart. At its centre is the transcendent wisdom of the clear-light mind powered by the fundamental life-wind. In the mandala of the five Dhyani Buddhas, the centre is the fifth Wisdom, Vairocana the Illuminator, radiating blue light from its heart and symbolising the pure state of cosmic consciousness. Vairocana can be placed at the beginning as well as at the end of the sequence of meditation: as unfoldment of universal knowledge from the centre outward into active existence or as enfoldment. This fifth Wisdom as the realisation of universal law is the sum total as well as the origin of the four Wisdoms surrounding it [5].

Greeks

To early Greeks, the four elements - fire, earth, air, and water-were brought into synergy by the fifth, the quinta essentia, ether. It was a fluid, invisible connector allowing the four to communicate through its essential fifth quality, which embraced them all [6]. In Fundamental Symbols, Rene Guenon discusses ether as the 'central' part, recognised in everything that is a principle in any order whatsoever and that its state of perfect equilibrium can be represented by the neutral and primordial point prior to all the distinctions and oppositions that emanate from and finally return to it - in the double movement of expansion and contraction, expiration and inhalation, diastole and systole, of which the two complementary phases of every process of manifestation essentially consist. More precisely, this can be found in the ancient cosmological conceptions of the West, where the four elements were represented at the extremities of the four branches of a cross, and in certain of these figurations the fifth element appears at the centre of the cross in the form of a five-petaled rose [7].

Paracelsus, an alchemical philosopher of the fifteenth century, considered the quinta essentia to be the light of nature, extracted by God from the four elements, enkindled by the Holy Spirit, and dwelling "in our hearts" [8]. This fifth and highest element became the alchemical bird to W. B. Yeats - the veil hiding another four, a bird born out of the fire. Yeats' golden bird, quintessential and prophetic, relinquished eternity to remain a messenger to mankind [9].

The term 'quintessence', first coined by Aristotle to describe the Ether permeating all of space, has been resurrected by contemporary astrophysicists to apply to the dark matter that seems to form the bulk of the universe. Its composition might be the ethereal energy of empty space, something Einstein used to stabilise his universe as a "cosmological constant". Even though he abandoned the theory within five years, "new astronomical observations - of the age of the universe, the density of matter and the nature of cosmic structure - all independently suggest that it may be here to stay" [11]. The possibility of this force, this energy in empty space, being termed 'quintessence' brings the fifth force back to centre, connecting philosophy of the past with the new science of the present.

Greek philosophers called the number five Pentad and to them it represented a new level of cosmic design beyond the Monad's point, Dyad's line, Triad's surface and Tetrad's volume; the introduction of life itself. The Pentad becomes the geometry of the pentagon and five-pointed star, the structure of living forms as well as the fifth Platonic dodecahedron, the quintessence, encompassing and infusing the four elements with the life they cannot create separately [12]. Nature has a tendency to build on a system of five-fold construction - five-petaled flowers, five-edged leaves, five-pointed star patterns of seeds in fruit, bodies with five senses and five extensions with each limb ending in five fingers or toes. The source of the power of five and its appearance in nature has to do with the principle of regeneration and the pulsing rhythms of natural growth and dissolution; it has to do with the life-patterning energy of the golden mean, Phi, the first and archetypal form for all divisions of a unity into extreme and mean. Phi results from a proportional division and creates the geometric proportion A is to B as B is to A plus B, the lesser is to the greater as the greater is to the whole, which can then generate geometric progressions [13]. For the ancient Greeks, it was the symbolic principle of returning to the source. Entire books have been written about the wonder and beauty of the Golden Mean. It creates Harmony by uniting the different parts of a whole so that each preserves its own identity while blending into the greater pattern, allowing growth to maintain a stable centre of gravity. The golden mean's ratio is an irrational, infinite number only approximated as 0.618... and is reached through the equation (1 + ??? 5)/2, placing five once more in the centre.

The unifying principle of the golden mean and the bonding ring of five unfurl biologically at the deepest molecular level of life, through the very core centre of the genetic code, the DNA.

Deoxyribo-Nucleic Acid

The DNA helix, created by the union of male and female germ cells, is a precisely arranged polar pattern, the purine bases Adenine-Thymine and Cytosine-Guanine (A-T/C-G) combined with the corresponding purine bases of the other half of the oppositely turning double helix, like yin and yang [14]. Relationships within DNA include the external width of the double helix, the length of each turn configuration, and the vertical offset of one helix from the other. X-ray studies show that these relationships fit the golden mean [15]. Five hydrogen atoms form the central ring of atoms bonding the four molecules of DNA's base of A-T and C-G, creating a central hub from which the rest of the atoms branch. This central ring of five acts as the essential fifth condition, the quinta essentia, allowing communication with the four groups of atoms it bonds together [16].

Chinese

Five in the centre can be traced back at least 4000 years to the ancient Chinese Yellow River Map, Ho Tu, a diagram showing the laws of world order said to have been inspired by the patterned lines on the back of a turtle (or dragon horse, depending on the source). The map formed the basis of probably one of the oldest books in the world, the I Ching, 'Book of Changes', which delineates the relationship of the behavior of humans and the constantly changing structure of the universe. The Ho Tu Map shows the development out of odd and even numbers of the five stages of change. In the center of the Ho Tu is a quincunx of five dots, a central 'heaven' from which the four emanations go forth like celestial forces extending through space. The five dots not only express the balancing force and unifying field of the Ho Tu but form the very centre of the creation of the I Ching. Marie-Louise von Franz describes the Ho Tu as "the underlying numerical order of eternity..., a Mandala and also a cross" in which one counts 1, 2, 3, 4, moves to the middle 5, then 6, 7, 8, 9 and back to the middle as 10, always crossing and returning; the movement emanates into four and contracts into the middle five [17].

One

The cross-cultural use of five as a centring element might be explained by Joseph Campbell's suggestion that "the high cultures of Middle America were not merely similar to those of ancient Greece and the Orient, but actually one piece with them - a remote provincial extension of the one historic heritage and universal history of mankind" and that there is evidence of early (3000 B.C.E.) trans-Atlantic contributions from Europe and the Near East to North America [18]. However, the biological fact of five regenerating and uniting, balancing growth from the centre of life as the golden mean and amazingly appearing as the bonding ring of five hydrogen atoms in DNA remains wonderfully and infinitely magical.

Japanese

Five moves through the fifth direction, centres the world in altars and Mandalas, rises as the quinta essentia from the centre of the crossing point, becomes the alchemical bird, regenerates through Phi, forms the central ring in DNA and the central creation of I Ching and, in the beginning and in the ending, five is the number of the letters which compose Alpha and Omega. In addition, five syllables frame the verse form known as Haiku, a three-line, seventeen-syllable verse pattern of five-seven-five popular in Japan since the eleventh century. Originally it was "the hook," an opening verse of a longer chain poem, Haikai, but progressively was written to stand alone and superseded the Haikai to become the ordinary form of poetic expression. The Haiku, in essence, catches a glimpse of the natural order that implies a continuity of events before and after the moment of the poem. It focuses on a part of the whole which tells all and constitutes a true record of a vivid moment in time, a record of 'now'. In its pure form, Haiku is usually limited to nature or religious matters, often beginning with an observation or musing and then concluding sharply with a contrasting realisation [19].

Rebecca Robinson paints, writes poetry and teaches drawing in Oklahoma City. Her work has been published by The Poet and Quantum Tao and she is the librettist for Gaia Sophia, an opera/pageant by William Ludtke.

References

1. David F. Peat, Lighting the Seventh Fire (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1994), p. 169.
2. Martin Brennan, The Hidden Maya (Santa Fe, N.M.: Bear and Company, 1998).
3. David Friedel, Linda Schele, and Joy Parker, Maya Cosmos (New York: Quill/William Morrow, 1993).
4. Peter Gold, Navaho and Tibetan Sacred Wisdom (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1994), p. 156.
5. Lama Aanagarika Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1969).
6. Katya Walter, Tao of Chaos (Austin, Tex.: Kairos Center, 1994).
7. Rene Guenon, Fundamental Symbols (Cambridge, England: Quinta Essentia, 1995), p. 306.
8. C. G. Jung, Alchemical Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 115.
9. William Gorski, Yeats and Alchemy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), p. 182.
10. Ibid.
11. Lawrence Krauss, "Cosmological Antigravity" Scientific American, January 1999, p. 55.
12. Michael Schneider, A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994).
13. Homage to Pythagoras, edited by Christopher Bamford (Hudson, N.Y.: Lindisfarne Press, 1994), p. 87.
14. Martin Schonberger, The I Ching and the Genetic Code (Santa Fe, N.M: Aurora Press, 1992), p. 83.
15. Marilyn Ferguson, Pragmagic (New York: Pocket Books, 1990), p. 171.
16. Walters, p. 241.
17. Marie-Louise von Franz, On Divination and Synchronicity (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1980), p. 14.
18. Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974).
19. Kenneth Verity, Breathing with the Mind (Rockport, Mass: Element Books, 1993).