Books Read 2015: Miranda Lundy’s Sacred Geometry

A couple of weeks ago, I came down with one helluva fever, and was desperate for something short and sweet to distract me.  As Sacred Geometry by Miranda Lundy was the thinnest volume on my “To Read” shelf, I grabbed it and settled into a lavender and eucalyptus bath to try to steam out some of the sickness.

This may be a short work, but it packs quite a bit of information into its 64 pages.  It is beautifully produced with lush illustrations that really inspire one to grab a compass and straight edge and begin doodling away. You read a passage and constantly refer back and forth to the picture on the opposite page until the concept takes root and one can truly grasp it.

The book is well organized, and the presentation proceeds logically from a single point to a line, to a circle, triangle, and square, and from there to the first three basic Platonic solids: the sphere, the tetrahedron, and the cube.  Most importantly, Lundy encourages a sense of play in the reader, at every turn challenging you to try with compass and ruler of your own to re-create her shapes. Her excellent sense of humor also peeks out now and again, my favorite quote by far being, “There is indeed something very sixy about circles” (Lundy 2011, 8).

By the end of the book, the reader is exposed to a number of quite sophisticated geometrical procedures. It may have been the results of the fever, but the last few pages kept me gazing at them for long stretches of time, watching how the lines and points built upon each other to produce sinuous and complicated designs. It should be noted, however, that some reviewers on Amazon (who would seem to have a stronger background in math than I) find there is erroneous information in several places. Checking out this review in particular may be of use to people wanting to dive deeper into the subject.

Sacred Geometry is one of those introductory works that initially presents as being simple and straightforward, but that doesn’t mean the information is necessarily easy to understand fully. I’m very much looking forward to reading some of the other titles in the Wooden Books series, which promise to hold more in-depth discussions of some of the topics covered in Lundy’s book, such as the Golden Section and Platonic and Archimedean Solids.

*Lundy, M. 2011. Sacred Geometry. New York: Walker Publishing Company.