Ptolemy Biography

Ptolemy or Claudius Ptolemaeus was born in Egypt in 85. He died in 165 AD.

Ptolemy was among numerous early philosophers of the ancient world that contemplated the harmony of the movement and music of the planets and put forth the idea that the earth was at the center of the universe, a theory which stood for over 1400 years until Copernicus proposed a heliocentric view in 1543.

In Ptolemy's unfinished work, "Harmonics," he proposed the earliest known linkage between the 12 signs of the zodiac to the 12 musical intervals. This idea appears to have been explored by other astro-musical theorists, most notably Rudolph Steiner.

It is said that the theories made it to early Europe where they were made manifest in the proportions of architecture in the great abbeys and cathedrals of the time. Robert Fludd, an English hermeticist, even designed and created a number of engravings which illustrate celestial creations, albeit in the pre-Copernican modality.

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