Dodecahedron
Twelve regular pentagons on thirty edges, three meeting at each vertex. Plato does not give it an element: he says the fifth construction was used for the whole, to embroider the universe with figures. The tradition afterwards filled the gap with aether, or with the zodiac, since the faces are twelve and five-sided.
The aether attribution is not Plato's. Timaeus gives the fifth solid to the whole, and the aether reading is later, arriving with the Neoplatonic and Hermetic five-element scheme; the corpus records the Aether link as that later overlay. The chakra link follows the corpus's element mapping. In Kepler's nesting the dodecahedron separates the spheres of Earth and Mars.
Correspondences
- Element
- Aether
- Chakra
- Throat Chakra
Practice
- Magical Uses
- CosmosWholenessProtectionThe year
Nature and meaning
- Meaning
Twelve regular pentagons on thirty edges, three meeting at each vertex. Plato does not give it an element: he says the fifth construction was used for the whole, to embroider the universe with figures. The tradition afterwards filled the gap with aether, or with the zodiac, since the faces are twelve and five-sided. It is the solid of the whole rather than of a part.
Details
- Dimensions
- 3D
- Keywords
- AetherCosmosTwelve facesPentagonPlatonic solid
- Sacred Ratio
- phi (its faces are regular pentagons, and a face diagonal is phi times its side)
- Construction
Twelve regular pentagons folded three to a corner. Euclid constructs it inscribed in a sphere at Elements XIII.17, the last construction of the Elements, and the pentagon brings the extreme and mean ratio in with it. It is the dual of the icosahedron.
- Appears in
- The zodiacSacred artDiceKeplers nesting
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