One night we were talking about random things and somehow or other the talk turned to the 360 degrees of the circle, and we started to wonder WHY there are 360? Why that number?

When you think about it, it doesn’t make much sense because the easy way to divide the circle is by powers of 2; cut it in half, then quarters, eighths, and so on. This is very easy to do accurately because each time you’re splitting all the pieces of the “pie” evenly. And yet 360 doesn’t divide evenly, and it is very difficult to accurately divide a circle into thirds and sixths; so I looked up on Wikipedia to see where this came from. It was a very interesting bit, not particularly useful but cute nonetheless, so here it is.

“The original motivation for choosing the degree as a unit of rotations and angles is unknown… The use of a calendar with 360 days may be related to the use of sexagesimal numbers.” (Wikipedia, “degree (angle)”).

Sexagesimal means “base-sixty” numbers. If that doesn’t help any, look at it this way. You count to 10 in the “ones” column before you move over, and add another digit to the number, right? At which point you have 0 in the “ones” column and 1 in the “tens” column. Right? This is base-ten math. Ten is the base of all our numbers.

Well, Babylonians counted to sixty in the “ones” column before starting over with a 0 in the “ones” column and a 1 in the “tens” column; when they got to sixty in the “tens,” they started again at 0 and put a 1 in the “hundreds” column. And so on. This is base-sixty math. It uses sixty as the base instead of ten.

Well, some historians believe, and I tend to agree, that Babylon is responsible for dividing the circle into 360 degrees. Starting with the equilateral triangle, which was well known to them, it was natural that they should divide the face of the triangle into sixty divisions, because they divided everything into sixty divisions.

Then it was discovered that six equilateral triangles, put together like in the game Tri-Ominoes, make one hexagon; the points of a hexagon make a perfect circle. Six hexagons times sixty degrees for the showing face of each triangle makes 360 – which happens to be ALMOST the exact number of days in a year! (And in fact was the number of days in a year in many ancient calendars, including Hebrew.)

So all these could easily have led to Babylon choosing 360 as the number of degrees in a circle by itself; but so far you’re probably asking, “Who cares? If I wanted to learn math I wouldn’t have slept through this class in school!”

But there is a major fact I didn’t mention that makes this relevant, and that is that ancient India also divided the circle into 360 degrees, apparently independently, and look at their motivation for doing so:

“Twelve spokes, one wheel, navels three.
Who can comprehend this?
On it are placed together
three hundred and sixty like pegs.
They shake not in the least.” (Dirghatamas, Rigveda 1.164.48)

At first, you might not notice the point there; but the universe was viewed as one “wheel,” often depicted in ancient idols; and this one wheel has twelve spokes; and each of these twelve spokes has three “navels”; a nave is the hub in the center of a wheel, so it appears to refer to three sub-hubs at the end of each of the twelve spokes on one wheel.

And finally, this entire wheel was divided into 360 pegs (days). So now to make sense of this, we have only to look to astrology; astrology divides up the heavenly “wheel” into twelve houses – the twelve signs of the zodiac, or the twelve spokes of the Indian wheel. Astrology goes on to divide each of these twelve houses into three rooms – giving a total of 36 rooms for the zodiac; and the sun is in each of these rooms for about 10 days as it goes around the earth!

Some ancient calendars compensate every year for the fact that there are 365.25(ish) days in the year by adding back a few days (about five) every year, bad luck days that aren’t a part of any month, usually around our modern new year’s day.

So what does all that mean? It means that our circle was based directly on the circle the heavens made each night; and that instead of the more logical power of two, a base-sixty division was made, primarily to accommodate the use of astrology and the twelve houses of the zodiac – both in India and in Babylon, both of which trace their origin back to the Tower of Babel and Semiramis and Nimrod… but that’s another long story.

But there is one final thing to mention, one final reason why Satan and his religions have embraced the 360-degree circle. Wikipedia concludes its comments on the history of the degree by saying…

“Another motivation for choosing the number 360 may have been that it is readily divisible: 360 has 24 divisors, including every number from 1 to 10 EXCEPT 7.”

This way, pagans can use every number out there to divide their circle – except the number God loves the most, seven. Now maybe that’s a coincidence… but it’s an awfully strange one if so… and if not, we know now just how many degrees of paganism there are – 360.