A great many papers in the collection of the Society deal with a specific ratio known as the Golden Section. Associated is a series known by the name of its credited discoverer, Fibonacci. The ratio is a result of growing by integers so is commonly found in nature, being most obvious in spirals.
For some reason, many have seized on this ratio as fundamental, a key to how nearly everything in the world is organized. The Society encourages a broad interpretation of symmetry and one candidate is the original meaning of the word as proportion. We therefore have a lot of papers on the Golden Section (or Mean) and how it can be found in this and that.
Some papers claim ancient architects used the ratio. Others decompose the works of more contempoary musicians artists and architects, finding the hidden framework of harmony. It is surely the case that some of these consciously used the ratio in their work.
But we know some things now from good scholarship. We know that the claim that humans prefer the proportion is not true. Some startling papers by Dénes Nagy — the earliest cited here is 1997 — show that the ratio was completely unknown to the ancients, Greeks and Leonardo.
Dirk Huylebrouck later showed that an arbitrarily selected ratio is as good a fit when applied to architectural analysis in the way the Golden Mean is.
In other words, the idea that the ratio is somehow fundamental is bogus. That shouldn’t matter much to us. One of our metaphor strategies is the leveraging geometric cosmologies, like Kabbalah. They need not be true in order to be useful to us; they only have to have permeated the culture enough to seem true.
The Relationship to Kutachi
The Kutachi Project does leverage at least one such cosmology, the one associated with Kabbalah. But this has more historical heft and geometric depth than anything from the the Golden Mean. On the other hand, there is something here to be learned. What is it about the Golden Mean that attracts religious intensity? Is it simply the mix of being intuitive and wholly comprehensible?
Links
The Kutachi essay on Geometric Cosmologies. (not online yet)