Jonas: Could you say more about herself? (are you from? Birth? Education? Profession? And more...)
 Claire: I grew up in the United States, in a small south Georgia town in the middle of a swamp. I spent most of my time fishing and hunting, camping and hiking, and running from spiders and snakes. When I wasn't outside I was inside reading a book or playing Bridge. I continued my education and earned a Master's Degree in English Education with a focus on world mythology and saga. My favorite was Greek mythology. I became an English teacher but soon moved to Atlanta, Georgia where I lived for many years working as a writer, editor, graphic artist and database manager. I became an avid tournament Bridge player.
Jonas: When (first time) did you learn about Phaistos Disk and why did you decide to research it?
Claire: In 1993, I returned home to Atlanta from the North American Bridge Championship, where I played well in the Reisinger Board-A-Match, a national event with a lot of national and world champions and other great Bridge players. In Bridge, one of the things you do is visualize the suit patterns you can't see based on the ones you can see, then you bid and play the hand according to that. So, my mind was working full on in that way when I first saw the Phaistos Disk, and I could perceive the hidden patterns. The disk fascinated me so much that it captured me in its spirals, and I stopped playing Bridge entirely and didn't play again, except for a few times, for nearly 20 years.
I also had a strong interest in ancient and modern mysticism and was fascinated by ancient mysteries. I came home from the tournament and went to the library to research the Great Pyramid, to find something more about its purpose as an archaeoastronomy site. Seems the Egyptians used the Great Pyramid for their religious rituals, so I was really interested in the mysterious Egyptian mystery schools and their religion.
In the library, I found a book about ancient artifacts and mysteries, and in that book was a large image of the Phaistos Disk, ca. 1,600 B.C.E., the most famous undeciphered artifact in archaeology. Written above it were the words, "Who can read the Phaistos Disk?" One of the pictographs on the disk resembled a carpenter's square and seemed familiar. I thought I had seen it on another image entitled the Maze of Daedalus in that same book. That's when it occurred to me, what if I could read the Phaistos Disk? I felt encouraged to try because it hadn't been done yet, even after 100 years when it was excavated in Phaistos, Crete. Also, all the people who try to decipher it believe the same thing, that the pictographs on the disk are like Egyptian hieroglyphs; they just need to be deciphered. They all ignore the spirals as having any significance except to separate the pictographs, and nothing is said about the relationship of one side of the disk to the other. And, they had long debated whether to read the pictographs from the center spiraling out or from the outside spiraling in.
(Phaistos Disk Side 1, top, Phaistos Disk Side 2, bottom)
The artifact is terracotta pottery, about 6-1/4" diameter with 2 inscribed sides and 2 spirals per side, each spiral with 5 rings (10). The spirals are divided into 60 line segments (30 Side 1, 30 Side 2). The outside spirals have 12 line segments (24 outside); inside spirals have 18 (36 inside). Divided among the line segments and covering the disk are 240 pictograph impressions made with 48 unique miniature pictographs. 37 are created to appear identical and are repeated. 11 are unrepeated.
It was found in 1908 at Phaistos, Crete, beneath the palace in a basement corner accessible by a trap door above, where the palace had been burned to the ground by an intense fire. Beside the disk was a tablet of Linear A (undeciphered) writing of ancient Crete, perhaps explaining it.
Each side of the disk is a circle containing a spiral. Early astronomy involved the study of the properties of a circle and the geometry of a sphere, for use in astronomy. This is the antique science of "containment of geometrical arrangements," nearly lost now but building pyramids and civilizations way back then. Imagine living so near the Great Pyramid, and closer to the time of its construction, that you could have known how it was built and what it was used for. What if you had been inside it and underneath it as a member of the mystery school divining early astronomy, and what if you figured out a way to record all that on the Phaistos Disk, and then you fire-hardened the disk to preserve it? I wasn't imagining all that back then when I first saw the disk; I was just wondering if I could read it.
I took the book home to see if I could recognize any other patterns and I spent days trying to read the disk. I turned the spirals around and around trying to read them, as though the pictographs in single file formed one long sentence or told a story in a spiral. (I researched that angle off and on for a couple of years. Turns out it does tell a story in a spiral, using a narrative technique in mosaic and pottery art called Continuous Representation, which is the depiction of successive incidents or scenes within a single composition by artists telling a story with their art. It began in Mesopotamia and was fully developed in Minoan Crete in their mosaics.)
I would study the spirals all day, spinning them and trying to read them, then at night when I closed my eyes to go to sleep, I would seem to fly through a spiraling tunnel. As I fell asleep, I awakened in dreamworld where I was a Greek warrior carrying a sword and shield. And the dreams kept coming, getting more real and more fun. Day after day, night after night, for months and then years, the dreams kept me interested in the disk, and the disk kept me traveling throughout the universe in dreams.
In the beginning of these experiences, I dreamed I was exploring the inside of the Great Pyramid, walking through the tunnels and visiting the chambers. I could touch the great stones and they seemed so real, so cool. I went down into the subterranean chamber beneath the pyramid, and I was not alone down there. Others were with me. I wondered who they were and why we were there.
One morning I woke up and looked at the disk and thought I recognized a pattern made by the six carpenter's squares on one side of the disk. When I connected them with lines, a pyramid emerged, drawn as in geometry to show four sides. Once invisible on the disk, it now stood above it, the spiral behind it making it 3D. I thought it was the Great Pyramid because of my dreams and because of the pyramid's proximity to Crete, where the disk was discovered. I made exact tracings of the both sides of the disk so I could see the effect of the spiral behind the other hidden images.
It seemed incredible to me that I could fly through a spiraling tunnel to enter the Great Pyramid, and there on the disk was the pyramid with the spiral behind it. I can't see how that is coincidence. I theorized the disk was a portal to the pyramid because that's how I was getting there. I wanted to test out this theory so I created the internet lightwork project, Ritual of the Portal for Planetary Ascension, writing rituals for hundreds of people to enact at the same time all over the planet. It was successful and became an ongoing, worldwide internet event.
I wondered what other images might be concealed on the disk, so a quest for lost knowledge and a desire to solve this mystery set me on a course to find the other images and to learn why they were there. I didn't know it would take 18 years. I had the patterns, most of them, within a couple of months, but it was always the thrill of finding something new and the research that I loved so much, the learning about that period of time and that little island civilization. I just fell in love with it and merged with it, tried to get immersed in their world and their art. I was so happy to be working on the disk and learning about it, discovering its secrets, that I was truly happy.
And a little less than half-way through the journey came the last temptation of Claire. Right before I left Atlanta for St. Augustine to get a job waiting tables so I could continue the research, Hewlett-Packard offered me a nice, cushy job and excellent money as manager of their online, human resources database in their Atlanta office, and they made promises to more than double my salary in three years. So, I had to choose between that and going broke to figure out the Phaistos Disk, and it literally made me ill for days when it happened because I was so conflicted about it. The choice to move was life-changing, and that was scary enough, plus it cost me a lot of money. But who wants to work for the corporate beast, anyway? :D
 I moved to St. Augustine, Florida to complete an 18 year quest to reveal those other images and to understand what they meant and why they were there. Finding this image (below) fulfilled my quest because it was the last major image I found. For some reason, it took me a long time to see how to connect the matching pictographs on this one. Maybe it was because I needed to find it last so I would know to stop looking because I had gone full circle. Connect with lines the 10 Golden Fleece pictographs (left) on Side 1 to reveal the hidden image of the interior of the Great Pyramid, with the outline of the entrance leading to the subterranean chamber, where I explored with those people.
  Finding it solved the mystery of how I got there. As I slept, my psyche took me through that little door to somewhere else in consciousness, where dreams are animated events in our lives and we experience them as reality. The power of my dreamtime helped my soul evolve as personas who directed the books I wrote during this time. They are my experiences and opinions about how consciousness works and how it evolves.
I have been compelled, in my investigations into the structure of the unconscious, to make a conceptual distinction between soul and psyche. By psyche, I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. By soul, on the other hand, I understand a clearly demarcated functional complex that can best be described as a "personality." (Carl Jung)
By connecting the fourteen Crested Dancers (left) on Side one, I found the hidden image of the spiraling tunnel I fly through to the dreamworld, although the one on the disk is spinning much faster than the one I fly through. (Click the disk!) But that's because I couldn't slow down the animation. I used a gif animator to spin the disk clockwise 90 degrees four times. I love how the triangle at the center appears to be spinning counterclockwise, a wagon wheel illusion that an Ophthalmologist in Sweden tells me cannot possibly be done on a potter's wheel, although I think there might have been enough wagon wheels to go around in those days that the artist(s) tried to reproduce the effect. So, I guess the artist(s) just imagined how it would work if they could spin it fast enough. Maybe that's the portal at the end of my spiraling tunnel, that illusion of the backwards spinning triangle. Through it, I entered other dimensions of consciousness.
JONAS: What is your conclusion about it?
Claire: I think the Phaistos Disk is a pattern recognition maze puzzle so brilliantly conceived that it was known to Bronze Age Crete and Egypt as the Maze of Daedalus. But one thing it is for sure is a pottery art masterpiece about 3,600 years old. Obviously, to me anyway, it was created by a genius artist of the times, perhaps an artist so remarkable that we know him/her as Daedalus, the legendary inventor. If Daedalus ever really existed, this is what was created. The Phaistos Disk and the Maze of Daedalus come from the exact place at the exact time, they are both seemingly unsolvable mazes, and they have other interesting similarities. Daedalus became synonymous with creative genius of invention, and here is a most fabulous invention, a clay disk that can transport you to the interior of the Great Pyramid or to some place in your mind that can project that reality so convincingly that you really believe you are there :) Either way, you're there.
Was the disk intended as a portal or psycho-activating device or does it just work that way because of its brilliant design combining pictographs, spirals, geometry, astronomy and math? I think Daedalus might have had some similar dreamworld experiences when creating the disk as I had when solving it, and would have known its magic. Dreams and consciousness, stars and constellations, spirals, circles and geometry, these are the immortals, the unchangeables, the things that are the same for everyone no matter when or where you live. And when you focus on the disk, you can activate some kind of mechanism of consciousness that connects you with them, even transports you to them, to a group consciousness.
I think there once were many more copies of the disk than the one we have left, that it was mass produced, and that at least one of those copies was placed in the subterranean chamber of the Great Pyramid. I think many people in that ancient world of Minoan Crete had their own personal copy of the Phaistos Disk, which was easy to carry because it was so small, just a little bigger than a CD, and it was durable and waterproof because it was fire-hardened instead of sun-baked. I think it might have been mass produced in an Egyptian pottery factory.
The disk puzzle worked like this. You would impress both sides of the disk into the sand, creating an imprint of the maze puzzle (see the raised pictographs and spirals), and then you would challenge someone to solve it. It might even have been the Mediterranean Bronze Age equivalent of Rubik's Cube.
Jonas: Connected pictograms of shields form a star inside. Is that an indication to relation of Phaistos disk to Cosmos? What kind of star it could be?
Claire: It is widely believed we get our 48 major constellation names from Crete. Connecting all the shields on Side 1 of the disk produces the star just like connecting stars produces constellations. I think this hidden star is related to the Minoans' great accomplishment in astronomy - the identification and naming of the constellations. Maybe the star on the disk, a pentagram inside a heptagon, is the star Sirius inside the seven known planets, or perhaps it is the path of Venus. In ancient civililzations, when the people had a mythical view of the world, it was the similarities of things and ideas that fascinated their minds. The star on the disk probably represented many similar things: constellations, Sirius, path of Venus and even more.
 In history, there is a ton of information regarding Sirius, acknowledging it's place of importance in the lives and concepts of Egyptians and apparently Minoans. Their Sothic Calendar was based upon its movement.
In the mysticism of the ancient Isis-Osiris religion, the pentagram inside the heptagon is supposed to represent Sirius surrounded by the seven known planets. The members of that ancient religion are generally believed to have been conducting their mysterious rituals inside the Great Pyramid, perhaps in the subterranean chamber and perhaps using that design as a magical talisman. The artist who did this must have been one of them.
Drag me! I think the Phaistos Disk was created by an ancient Minoan astronomer-priest and inventor, Daedalus, which could also have been the name of a group of Minoan and Egyptian visionaries, inventors and artists.
Jonas: Maybe there are more cosmic signs at the disk?
Claire: There are many more cosmic signs on the disk, most notably the picture-perfect constellation Argo. Connect the 15 star/pomegranate pictographs to reveal the constellation.
 Modern map of the constellation Argo
 Constellation Argo with mooring and oars on the Phaistos Disk Minoa's Ark?
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The Argo on the Phaistos Disk is "backwards" (thank you, Vigil, for that observation.) The Phaistos Disk Argo shows how the Minoan's drew the original constellation, so the modern constellation has been drawn backwards for at least 2,300 years. Wonder how that could have happened!? Maybe we owe this reversal to Aratos (310-245 BCE), a Greek court philosopher and astronomer who famously wrote (or rather, infamously as it turns out):
"Sternforward Argo by the Great Dog's tail
Is drawn; for hers is not a usual course,
But backward turned she comes, as vessels do
When sailors have transposed the crooked stern
On entering harbour; all the ship reverse,
And gliding backward on the beach it grounds.
Sternforward thus is Jason's Argo drawn.
In the spirit of syncretism, the spiraling tunnel image appears also to be a reference to a cave, as it seems to spiral into a cave, perhaps the sacred cave on Mt. Ida where the telescope lenses were found (that are now housed in the Iraklion Museum in Crete and which apparently were used by the Minoans at the Great Pyramid to study the stars). The image may also symbolize the disk itself as it portrays a spiral maze (thank you Jonas for that observation) at the heart of which is geometry (the triangle in the center of the spiral). (Click me!)
I think the 48 unique pictographs repeated 240 times on the disk are abbreviated symbols of the 48 major constellations bequeathed us by Crete. The pictographs were individually created, then pressed into the wet clay, and are so convincingly identical, because they are so tiny, that ever since the excavation of the disk it is widely and incorrectly accepted that the pictographs were made with a set of tiny stamps. They were not; they were individually created and pressed into the wet clay according to a complex design that the artist probably had worked on for years to perfect or that perhaps was well known among those astronomers.
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The Phaistos Disk is a stunning, historical record of the antique study of containment of geometrical arrangements, a key part of the geometry theology and number philosophy of the Bronze Age. From this antique science comes the development of "method of exhaustion," which is seen in development on the disk.
Method of exhaustion shows how to 'exhaust' the area of a circle by means of an inscribed polygon; (right, Phaistos Disk) if we successively
double the number of sides in the polygon, we will eventually reduce the difference between the area of the polygon (known) and the area of the
circle (unknown) to the point where it is smaller than any magnitude we choose. This method made it possible to calculate the area of a circle to
any desired degree of accuracy; with a little further development, it could be used to calculate the area within (or under) other curves as well
and to calculate the area bounded by certain spirals, and the surface area and volume of a sphere.
(David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science, pp.88, 89)
BRONZE AGE CONTAINMENT OF GEOMETRICAL ARRANGEMENTS AND METHOD OF EXHAUSTION
The method of exhaustion was probably borrowed by Euclid from his predecessor Eudoxus, (Lindberg)
(400-355 BCE), a Greek astronomer and mathematician credited with this inventive method of calculating proportion. The Phaistos Disk,
containing the geometry of a pentagram inside a heptagon (the big star), seems to show exhaustion in use 1200
years before Eudoxus lived.
When you connect all the matching pictographs to themselves you get every piece of Euclidean geometry, 1,300 years before Euclid lived. You get diameter, right triangle, cone, every kind of triangle, polygons, parallel lines of same length and different length, and significant, large images of the Great Pyramid, inside and out, an image of the constellation Argo, the spiral maze with geometry at the center, and you get a big star inside a heptagon - maybe that's the star Sirius inside the seven planets, maybe it's the path of Venus, maybe it's the ancient symbol for astronomy, or maybe it's all of these!
Below is my exact tracing of the Phaistos Disk. I then created gif transparancies of the disk and I added a drag and drop script to this
web page so that these two images are dragable. The two sides of the Phaistos Disk,
placed side-by-side this way, appear to be a maze. Minoan Crete was all about the labyrinth and all its associated symbolism: the Double Axe, the Figure 8 Shield, the Minoan Wave Spiral. They saw something profound about a maze, and from their civilization came the Maze of Daedalus.
The solution to a maze is the
uninterrupted path through an intricate pattern of line segments from a starting point to a goal.
The disk has a combined 60 line segments and two large spirals, each with five levels.
The starting point of this maze is the center of Side 1 (top disk with flower at the center),
the goal is the center of Side 2 (bottom disk with wave at the center). To solve the maze,
find the uninterrupted path through the line segments of all the spirals, from Side 1 to 2 and back.
These Minoan wave spirals are created by moving from the center of Side 1 and
crossing over to the center of Side 2 and back via the 4th level spirals on both sides. The matching
connecting line segments direct the movement from Side 1 to Side 2 but also prevent travel in the outer
spirals on both sides. To see the Minoan Figure 8 Shield and incorporate the spirals, merge the two
sides of the disk by overlaying the perfectly aligned connecting line segments. To achieve this, drag
the bottom image onto the top image and overlay the connecting line segments. Now all the spirals are
connected, the movement of the Figure 8 Shield is discovered, and the maze can be traversed via all the spirals.
Start at the center of Side 1 and trace the spiral around to the 4th level, cross over
to the outer spiral on Side 2, cross from that outer spiral to the outer spiral on Side 1, cross from the
outer spiral on Side 1 into the 4th spiral on Side 2 and travel to the center. Then make the same journey
in reverse, each time creating the movement of a figure 8.
When you combine the front and the back of the disk by connecting them at the matching connecting line segments, you get a Minoan Figure 8 Shield and a Minoan Wave Spiral, art with a geometric orientation commonly found throughout their civilization.
 I want to share what I have learned about the Phaistos Disk with the world, but I'm not so altruistic that I don't get a lot steamed when I see this poster, and I know there are more like it I haven't seen. This guy teaches my work on cruises and conventions in the Mediterranean, and I think he gives me credit for it but I'm not sure. He certainly doesn't give me money, and he doesn't even acknowledge me on the poster. That's all my art, except for the hand holding the disk, and the background, and the stargate below. The Enochian letters are mine and also the idea that the Phaistos Disk and the Keys in the Enochian Language are related. The idea that the disk is a stargate is also mine (see Ritual of the Portal). I copyrighted it all officially in 1997 so maybe I'll sue ;)
To read more about the Phaistos Disk, the pictographs, the images, and the ancient civilization of Minoan Crete, visit:
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