About this archive

Everything else on this site is John's own voice — his articles, his tools, his footnotes. This page is ours.

John P. Pratt (1947–2024) was an astronomer with a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona, a software engineer whose patents helped teach computers to search text, and — to those who knew him — a dear friend with a singular conviction: that the heavens keep time. For five decades he mapped how the sacred calendars — Hebrew, Enoch, Venus, Mercury, the Sacred Round — align across history like gears of one great celestial clock, and he published every step of it freely at johnpratt.com.

John always said the real meat of his research was in the footnotes. And he built his website deliberately plain, so the whole of it could be saved to a disk and read anywhere, with no internet at all. He wanted his life's work to be able to survive anything.

This archive is that wish, kept. Every year John would create a calendar and sell it along with his entire website burned on a DVD. This revision of his website continues that legacy by making all of his knowledge available to all. Every page, every image exactly where he placed it, every footnote is preserved here word for word. Even the search that finds his articles runs on the kind of full-text indexing his own patents described, twenty years early.

The heavens keep time. John taught us to read the clock.

John's own biography page →  ·  His original home page →  ·  His patents →