At Shugborough Hall in England there is a carved copy of the tomb from Poussin’s painting of the shepherds, and this bears a short but mystifying inscription. Shugborough was, at one time, the property of the immensely wealthy Anson family. The letters on the Shugborough memorial are:
O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.
D. M.
Despite numerous interesting possibilities, this code has never been satisfactorily or definitively deciphered. However, this mysterious Shugborough code may be accessible to a numerological approach. To the best of our knowledge this has not yet been attempted.
Exploring the English alphabet with its numerological values, we get:
A=1
B=2
C=3
D=4
E=5
F=6
G=7
H=8
I=9
J=10=1+0=1
K=11=1+1=2
L=12=1+2=3
And so on up to Z=26=2+6=8
If we apply the numerical values to each number in this inscription, starting with the “D” on the lower line, we get:
O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.
D. M.
4+6+3+6+1+4+1+4+4+4=37=3+7=10=1+0=1
The “1” is particularly significant as it suggests that the entire code indicates a strong, independent, and energetic leader, a pioneer, and an outstanding achiever.
Could this coded reference then indicate Admiral Anson of Shugborough? Is the code saying that Anson possessed some great secret — perhaps hidden treasure — and the code, when analyzed in depth, could indicate where that treasure is concealed?
George Anson (1697–1762) went to sea at the age of 14 and became a naval lieutenant in 1716. He later commanded his own warships and circumnavigated the world. After many hardships and desperate battles, he eventually sailed home with treasure that was almost too valuable to count accurately! Although after coming home from the sea, he lived mainly in Hertfordshire, he was also a frequent visitor to Shugborough. He could easily have been the “1” of the secret code on the Shepherd Memorial there.
Poussin was certainly a party to some deep and sinister secrets, which he shared with Nicolas Fouquet, Superintendent of Finance in France from 1653 until 1661, and Nicolas’s younger brother, Louis. A letter written by Louis to Nicolas is still in existence. Part of it reads:
I have given to Monsieur Poussin the letter that you were kind enough to write to him; he displayed overwhelming joy on receiving it. You wouldn’t believe, sir, the trouble that he takes to be of service to you, or the affection with which he goes about this, or the talent and integrity that he displays at all times. He and I have planned certain things of which in a little while I shall be able to inform you fully; things which will give you, through M. Poussin, advantages which kings would have great difficulty in obtaining from him and which, according to what he says, no-one in the world will ever retrieve in the centuries to come; and furthermore, it would be achieved without much expense and could even turn to profit, and they are matters so difficult to enquire into that nothing on Earth at the present time could bring a greater fortune nor perhaps ever its equal.
Was this mysterious secret that Poussin controlled a numerological secret like the geometrical secret that he hid in The Shepherds of Arcadia?
There is a further layer to this mystery involving the Fouquet brothers and Nicolas Poussin. When Fouquet senior fell from power as a result of Colbert’s plotting against him, there is a possibility that Fouquet became the Man in the Iron Mask. Suppose that there was a standoff between Fouquet and King Louis XIV? If Fouquet had some secret that the king desperately wanted, Louis XIV could hardly kill him. If he did, the all-important secret would die with him. If it was Fouquet who was imprisoned in an iron mask in the custody of King Louis’s trusted jailer, Bénigne Dauvergne de Saint-Mars, it was essential from the king’s point of view that Fouquet could not communicate the vital secret to anyone. Regulations surrounding the masked prisoner were particularly strict. Fouquet also knew perfectly well that if he gave in and revealed his secret to the king, he would be executed to silence him. Poussin, Fouquet, Louis XIV: what did they all know that was so valuable and so secret? Could that strange numerological secret have gone all the way back to ancient Greece?
One of the earliest and most famous examples of the use of the golden mean expressed in the ratio of ф — the Parthenon in Athens — is renowned throughout the world. Built during the fifth century BC as a temple to the goddess Athena, it comprises a series of Golden Rectangles based on ф. The particular use of golden mean rectangles in this sacred building suggests a numerological significance as well as an architectural one. What does “5” signify numerologically? Activity, energy, freedom, adventure, and constant movement and change.
The Parthenon
The goddess Athena, also known as Pallas Athena, is the goddess of courage, wisdom, and skill. Also known as Minerva to the Romans, she was their goddess of justice, strength, and strategy, and was an inspirer of heroes. Wisdom, which is one of her greatest attributes, includes the mysteries of mathematics and the strange secrets of numerology. She is traditionally associated with the owl, the bird of wisdom, and some numerologists would associate the owl with the number “7” as indicative of wisdom and thoughtfulness.
The Golden Section ratio ф was very important to early Greek mathematicians and numerologists because it featured prominently in pentagrams and pentagons. Pythagoras and his followers most certainly gave it a great deal of attention. The pentagram with a pentagon inside it was their Pythagorean symbol. Euclid’s book, The Elements, contains what may well be the earliest description of the golden ratio in words. In describing it, he said that the golden ratio was found when the whole of a line to its greater segment was the same as the relationship of the greater segment to the lesser segment. Some of the proofs that Euclid used in The Elements reveal that the golden mean ф is an irrational number — a number that cannot be expressed as a fraction with 1 integer above another.
Michael Maestlin (1550–1631) worked out a decimalized approximation for the reciprocal of ф in 1597 and came up with 0.618034. This was incredibly close. Maestlin worked at the University of Tübingen and his calculations appeared in a letter to Kepler, who had been one of his students.
Le Corbusier, the Swiss-born French architect, whose real name was Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (1887–1965), produced magnificent buildings, often based on the harmonies and proportions of the golden mean and the Fibonacci numbers. He is quoted as saying that the rhythms of the golden mean and the Fibonacci series were at the “very root of human activities.” He felt that there was a great inherent mystery in them which placed them somehow in the minds of “children, old men, savages and the learned” — a point of view that many numerologists would share.
The outstandingly brilliant Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was well aware of the golden mean and the Fibonacci series. His amazing picture of the so-called Vitruvian Man testifies to this. Named after the old Roman architect Vitruvius (80 BC–15 BC), the 2 superimposed human figures in the drawing are in perfect artistic proportion. Le Corbusier was a great admirer of da Vinci’s work and seems to have modelled some of his finest architecture on da Vinci’s principles.
Prince Matila Ghyka (1881–1965) influenced Salvador Dali,