Staggering Discovery: The Wild Picts of Scotland Who Converted to Christianity Were Advanced, Used the "Divine Proportion"
"It really is absolutely fascinating. It's mind-blowing stuff. This is staggering to hear, but I'm not totally surprised. It shows the importance of symbol and worship in everything done in the service of the Christian God."
(Scotland)—Europe was once a continent inhabited by diverse, warring tribes. One confederation of tribes who lived in the area of Scotland were named "Picts" by the Romans. The name is said to come from the Latin word pingere which means "to paint" and most likely refers to the belief that the Picts painted or tattooed their bodies.
They were one of the more mysterious European tribes, tracing their lineage through their mothers, and they converted to Christianity during the latter part of the first millennium after Christ's death. (Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty)
Now, after studying one of the most important archaeological discoveries in Scotland for 30 years—a Pictish monastery at Portmahomack on the Tarbat peninsula in Easter Ross—the wild, "uncivilized" Picts are believed to have actually built a highly sophisticated culture in northern Scotland.
According to a report in The Independent, in a discovery described as staggering, astonishing, mind-blowing, it appears that the people who built the monastery did so using the proportions of "the Golden Section" or "'Divine Proportion" as it became known during the Renaissance hundreds of years later. "This ratio of dimensions, 1.618 to one, appears in nature, such as in the spiral of seashells, and the faces of people considered beautiful, such as Marilyn Monroe. It can be seen in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the Alhambra palace of Granada in Spain, the Acropolis in Athens and the Egyptian Pyramids, but was thought to have been too advanced for the Picts."
Said Martin Carver, a professor of archaeology at York University. "The Golden Section, together with its inverse, the Golden Number, 1.618, has been valued by artists for millennia ... and it is a true delight to observe it among their architects. It shows the importance of symbol and worship in everything done in the service of the Christian God."
