How geometry became Tool’s sacred creative force: “This basic philosophy”
What do geometry and the music of the American rock group Tool have in common?
You may remark, as soon as anyone starts talking about either one of them, your brain switches off, and you’d be right to say it, but believe it or not, they have even more in common than that. And to that, if your response is that they’re both incredibly boring and inaccessible to anybody who doesn’t get into them early enough, you’d still be right, but that’s not really what I had in mind either.
No, what the music of the American rock group Tool and the “branch of mathematics concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures” that is geometry have in common is more intangible than that. In fact, the group’s love of ‘sacred geometry’ informs almost everything they do, from the way they write their songs to the way Danny Carey sets up and positions his drum kit, but what actually is sacred geometry?
“It’s this basic philosophy and idea of how things are put together, and what’s harmonic and what vibrates in your soul, I guess”, Carey explains, “It gets kind of metaphysical and weird at some point, and it’s subjective, too, but any kind of esoteric subject like that is so subjective”.
Tool guitarist Adam Jones elaborated on the band’s use of the idea to explore things like “what’s different about everyone, what’s different about everyone? What’re the spiritualities? To me, that’s what sacred geometry is. Which of those things in nature are harmonious? And, why are they harmonious, and what do we have in common?”
That allusion to nature is a key question and something that is explored in sacred geometry time and again. The symbolic study of repeating patterns in nature and natural forces is not considered a true science like its more stuffy sibling, but rather a spiritual searching for metaphysical meaning in the world; think of it as looking at the world through the lens of a kaleidoscope.
It is a study of the universal geometric patterns and shapes that keep repeating in nature, from molecular structures to the make-up of each and every falling snowflake, from the conical swirls on a shell to the way a cat curls up to sleep, right up to the swirl of our galaxy: it can all be found in the cells of our flowers and in the stars of the night sky. It suggests that there is some link between these foundational and fundamental patterns and the more intangible, mystical and spiritual side of life, and searches for the symbolism of wholeness.
Sacred geometry has inspired some of the most breath-taking designs in architecture from all of human history through use of the Fibonacci sequence, present in temples, mosques and in the pyramids, and it has also inspired the music of American rock group Tool, especially in the 2001 song ‘Lateralus’, which integrated the sequence into the syllabic structure of the verses in the song.
Apologies if that last sentence made your brain switch off.
