"God, in both Judaism and Islam, was One. God was a unity. God was everything. The forms of the phenomenal world, on the other hand, were numerous, manifold, multifarious and diverse. Such forms bore witness not to the divine unity, but to the fragmentation of the temporal world. If God was to be discerned in the creation at all, it was not in the multiplicity of forms, but in the unifying principles running through those forms and underlying them. In other words, God was to be discerned in the principles of shape-determined ultimately be the degrees in a angle-and be number. It was through shape and number, not by representation of diverse forms, that God's glory was held to be manifest. And it was in edifices based on shape and number, rather than on representational embellishment, that the divine presence was to be housed.

The synthesis of shape and number is, of course, geometry. Through geometry, and the regular recurrence of geometric patterns, the synthesis of shape and number is actualised. Through the study of goemetry, therefore, certain absolute laws appeared to become legible-laws which attested to an underlying order, an underlying design, an underlying coherence. This master plan was apparently infallible, immutable, omnipresent; and by virtue ot those very qualities, it could be construed, easily enough, as something of divine origin-a visible manifestation of the divine power, the divine will, the divine craftsmanship."

-The Temple and the Lodge, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh.