Colin Wilson - From Atlantis To The Sphinx
Colin Wilson - From Atlantis To The Sphinx
Colin Wilson - From Atlantis To The Sphinx
to the Sphinx
Colin Wilson
To
John West,
Graham Hancock
and
Robert Bauval-
friends without whose
help this book could
not have been written.
First published in Great Britain in 1996 by
Virgin Books
an imprint of Virgin Publishing Ltd
332 Ladbroke Grove
LONDON W10 5 AH
Reprinted 1996
Copyright Colin Wilson 1996
The right of Colin Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him
in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or
otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's
prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is
published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed
upon the subsequent purchaser.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 1 85227 526 X
Phototypeset by Intype London Ltd
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Mackays of Chatham plc, Chatham, Kent
Analytical Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
viii
Acknowledgements
ix
Introduction
1
Schwaller de Lubicz and the age of the Sphinx - was it
built by 'Atlanteans'? Hapgood's ancient maps. The
Atlantis film script. Schoch's conference at San Diego.
Scepticism of 'the experts'. Robert Graves and Mr Gunn.
Mathematical prodigies. I meet John West. Graham
Hancock and Rand Flem-ath. Bauval's Orion Mystery.
Andr VandenBroeck' s Al-Kemi. Publication of
Fingerprints of the Gods. What does it all mean? The
search for 'the intensity experience'. What can 'the
ancients' teach us?
1 Egyptian Mysteries
11
The Hancocks scale the Great Pyramid at dawn. How was
it built? The Sign and the Seal. Was the Sphinx eroded by
water? Serpent in the Sky. Schwaller de Lubicz and
alchemy. Death of Fulcanelli. Schwaller in Luxor. Andr
and Goldian Vanden-Breck visit Schwaller. A different
kind of knowledge. Gurdjieff on the Sphinx. Pythagoras
and music. Schwaller on ancient Egypt
2 The New Race
31
Robert Schoch agrees to look at the Sphinx. Who carved
the Sphinx? Schoch agrees the Sphinx is weathered by
water. How did the Egyptians move 200-ton blocks?
Flinders Ptrie discovers
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
'the New Race' then changes his mind. Unknown
techniques of carving. Christopher Dunn on the granite
sarcophagus. A drill that works 500 times faster than a
modern drill. Schoch announces his results at San Diego.
The BBC proves Schoch correct about rock layers at Giza.
The Sphinx Temple and the Oseirion. The 'Cyclopeans'.
The Inventory Stela. Frank Domingo declares the Sphinx
is not Chefren
3 Inside the Pyramid
49
Al-Mamun breaks into the Great Pyramid. The missing
mummy. The 'other entrance'. Davison's Chamber.
Howard-Vyse 'proves' that Cheops built the Great
Pyramid. Sitchin throws doubt on Howard-Vyse. Did the
Egyptians know the size of the earth? Was the Great
Pyramid an observatory? Robert Bauval reads The Sirius
Mystery. How did the Dogon know Sirius was a double
star? The Pyramid Texts. The pyramids and the belt of
Orion. Edgar Cayce on Atlantis. Were there pyramids
planned in 10,500 bc? Mendelssohn on the pyramids.
Boats. Thor Heyerdahl on Egyptian shipbuilding
4 The Forbidden Word
81
Hapgood's Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings. The great Ice
Ages. The Piri Re'is map. The significance of Syene. How
Eratosthenes worked out the size of the earth. Earth's
Shifting Crust. A worldwide maritime civilisation in 7000
BC? Plato and Atlantis. Ignatius Donnelly. The Bimini
Road. Randy Flemming begins a novel on Atlantis. When
the Sky Fell. Is Atlantis in Antarctica?
{
5 The Realm of the White Gods
99
Cortes and the conquest of Mexico. Careri and the Aztecs.
Stephens discovers a jungle city. Why did the Mayas
disappear?. Brasseur de Bourbourg on the 'great
cataclysm'. Charnay in Mexico. Palenque, 'City of the
Serpents'. Augustus le Plongeon learns the Mayan
language. Evidence for Atlantis. Queen Moo. James
Churchward and Mu. Thompson and Chichen Itza. He
dives in the sacrificial well. Hoerbiger and the World-Ice
theory. Velikovsky and catastrophes. The mystery of
Tiahuanaco. The
Analytical Table of Contents
Hancocks in Tiahuanaco. Posnansky on the place of the
Standing Stones. Was Tiahuanaco built in 15,000 bc? The
fish gods. Teotihuacan. Corts fights his way out of
Tenochtitlan. Batres excavates the Pyramid of the Sun.
Gerald Hawkins on Teotihuacan. The Nazca lines. Did
they expect Viracocha to return by air? The move towards
caution. Why did the Egyptians and the Mayans both
regard Sirius as sacred?
6 The Antiquity of Man
135
Scheuchzer' s ' Ol d Si nner' . The begi nni ng of
palaeontology. Maillet's theory of evolution. Cuvier on
catastrophes. Lyell's Principles of Geology. A brief
history of the earth. How man developed from a tree
shrew. Darwin sails on the Beagle. The survival of the
fittest. The Missing Link. Piltdown Man. The discovery
of Neanderthal Man. Cro-Magnon Man. Don Marcelino
and the Altamira cave. Did man exist five million years
ago? Dubois and Java Man. The Olduvai Gorge and
Reek's skeleton. Peking Man. Leakey and the Kanjera
skulls. Dart and the Taung baby. The killer ape. Leakey
and Homo habilis. Johanson and Lucy
7 Forbidden Archaeology
163
How old is man? Michael Cremo studies palaeontology.
Von Ducker and the Pikermi bones. Pliocene sharks' teeth
with holes bored in them. Ribeiro and the River Tagus
beds. Bourgeois's flints - artefacts or naturefacts?
Ragazzoni and Pliocene man. 'Conventional history' - a
summary. The wheel. The implications of 'alternative
history'. What caused the brain explosion? Language?
Maerth's cannibalism theory. The Romantic theory of
evolution
8 More Forbidden Archaeology
183
Why is man a religious animal? Cave art and ritual
magic. Shamans and 'miracles'. The Wizard of the Upper
Amazon. Manuel Cordova is kidnapped. The 'collective
mind' of the Amahuaca Indians. Grimble and the 'calling
of the porpoises'. 'Mental radio'. Mavromatis and
hypnagogia. Why has man evolved so quickly?
Neanderthal man. Julian Jaynes and the
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
'bicameral mind'. The right and left brain. Did man
become a 'left brainer' in 1250 bc? Schwaller on
hieroglyphics. The Egyptian mentality. Harvalik and
dowsing. Alternative history of man. Pygmy hunting ritual
9 Of Stars and Gods
211
Alexander Thorn and the Callanish stone circle. Megaliths
as observatories. Anne Macaulay on the ancient 'code' of
Apollo. Cro-Magnon man as a star-gazer. Marshack's
Roots of Civilisation, Robert Graves and The White
Goddess. Maurice Cotterell and The Mayan Prophecies. Is
the Mayan calendar based on sunspot activity? Santillana
and Hamlet's Mill. The precession of the equinoxes. The
mill of the sky. Ancient civilisation in India. The date of
the Rig-Veda. A new theory of human evolution. Hunting
magic. Bauval and Hancock reconstruct the sky in 10,500
bc. Why did the Sphinx builders wait eight thousand years
to build the pyramids of Giza? Osiris's voyage up the
Milky Way. The journey to Rostau. Osiris returns to
Orion. The 'Followers of Horus'. Does the secret lie below
the rear paws of the Sphinx?
10 The Third Force
239
Edward T. Hall and the Hopi Indians. Monochronic time
and polychronic time. 'A different kind of perception'. The
Hopi and Mother Earth. Quiche time. Zen and archery.
Children in a school playground - the dance of life. Basic
rhythms. Mike Hayes and DNA. The mysterious 64. The
I-Ching and its 64 hexagrams. Pythagorianism. The third
force. The number it. The tetrad. The Luxor temple.
Synchronicity. The Chinese rain maker. Jacques Valle and
Melchizedek. Ross Salmon and the condor. Egyptian
magic. Ancient Egypt and the Nile. How man evolved.
How did Egyptians move 200-ton blocks? Ed Leedskal-
nin and Coral Castle. The sheet of iron found in the Great
Pyramid. How did Egyptian artists light the tombs? Egypt
as a 'collective' civilisation. Electronic ping pong in Las
Vegas. Boris Yermolayev suspends a cigarette packet in
the air. Lifting a man with four index fingers. The
drawbacks of group consciousness. The Chalice and the
Blade - a matriarchal civilisation? Wells's Experiment in
Autobiography. Are we human? The need for a 'third force'
to achieve the next step in evolution. Maslow and
Analytical Table of Contents
peak experiences. The importance of insights into past
civilisations. The 'next step' has already happened
Notes
283
Bibliography
285
Index
287
Illustrations
All pictures from The Art and Architecture Collection
except where credited otherwise
Map of Atlantis from Mundus Subterraneus by Athansius
Kircher (The
Charles Walker Collection)
Neanderthal Man (Hulton Deutsch Collection)
Java Man (Hulton Deutsch Collection)
The Great Pyramid at Giza, Egypt
The pyramids at Giza
The sarcophagus of Cheops in the King's Chamber, the
Great Pyramid
The Grand Gallery in the Great Pyramid
The Sphinx and the Pyramid of Chefren at Giza
,
The Sphinx
The Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, Mexico
View of the ruins at Teotihuacan
Cave painting, Lascaux, France
Cave painting of urus, Lascaux
viii
Acknowledgements
Many friends have helped in the writing of this book -
primarily the three to whom it is dedicated: John Anthony
West, Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval. The latter was
particularly helpful with astronomical information, while
Graham Hancock patiently printed up spare copies of the
typescripts of Fingerprints of the Gods and Keeper of
Genesis for me. It was Graham's uncle Jim Macaulay who
lent me the important book Time Stands Still by Keith
Critchlow, and also introduced me to the ideas of Anne
Macaulay (no relative), who was kind enough to allow me
to read her unpublished typescript Science and Gods in
Megalithic Britain. Rand and Rose Flem-ath allowed me
to see their (then) unpublished typescript of When the Sky
Fell which, in my opinion, solves the problem of the
present whereabouts of 'Atlantis'.
My old friend Eddie Campbell, for whom I used to
write reviews when he was literary editor of the London
Evening News, lent me Andr VandenBroeck's Al-Kemi
several years ago, and in due course, Schwaller de
Lubicz's American publisher, Ehud Spurling, was able to
give me Andre's address. He also sent me copies of all
Schwaller's books in English. (The Temple of Man is
unfortunately still awaiting publication.) Christopher
Bamford has also been extremely helpful in providing me
with information on Schwaller - of which, as it turned out,
I-was able to use only a fraction in this book. The same is
true of the vast amount of material with which Andr
VandenBroeck provided me, and which I am still hoping
to use in some future book. Christopher Dunn has also
been unstintingly helpful in trying to help me find possible
answers to Egyptian scientific mysteries. Detective Frank
Domingo, of the New York Police Department, also
provided me with valuable information on his facial
reconstruction techniques.
Paul Roberts was responsible for introducing me to the
work of David Frawley on ancient India, and my friend
Georg Feuerstein sent
ix
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
me the book he co-authored with Frawley and Subhash
Kak, The Roots of Civilisation.
An old acquaintance, Carole Ann Gill, introduced me to
the work of Zechariah Sitchin. Graham Hancock was able
to provide me with Sitchin's address, and Sitchin was kind
enough to answer my innumerable questions with kindly
patience. I must also thank my old friend Martin Burgess,
who proved to be a Sitchin devotee, and who was able to
answer my many questions about him.
It was Alexander Imich who recommended me to read
Forbidden Archaeology, and its author, Michael Cremo,
was also kind enough to enter into correspondence.
Readers who know Herbert Wendt's books on
palaeontology will note my indebtedness to them in
Chapter 6.
Other friends who have read parts of the book in
typescript form and made valuable suggestions are
Howard Dossor, Maurice Bassett, Ted Brown, Gary
Lachman and Donald Hotson.
I am grateful to Mike Hayes for sending me his book
The Infinite Harmony, which had been lying around my
untidy house for six months before I happened to read it,
and realised that it provided some of the answers I had
been looking for.
A casual visit from Frank and Carina Cooper led to my
reading of Kevin Kelly's Out of Control, which arrived
with a perfect timeliness which looked remarkably like
synchronicity. But then, the whole writing of this book
has involved a series of synchronicities that left me
slightly incredulous.
x
Introduction
M
y own part in this quest began in July 1979, when I received a
review copy of a book called Serpent in the Sky, by John
Anthony West. It was basically a study of the work of a
maverick Egyptologist called Ren Schwaller de Lubicz, and its
central argument was that Egyptian civilisation - and the Sphinx
in particular - was thousands of years older than historians
believe. Sch-waller had devoted the latter part of his life to
demonstrating that the ancient Egyptians possessed 'a grand,
interrelated and complete system of knowledge'. The passage
that excited me so much was on page 198:
Schwaller de Lubicz observed that the severe erosion of
the body of the Great Sphinx at Giza is due to the action
of water, not wind and sand.
If the single fact of water erosion of the Sphinx could be
confirmed, it would in itself overthrow all accepted
chronologies of the history of civilisation; it would force a
drastic re-evaluatibn of the assumption of 'progress' - the
assumption upon which the whole of modern education is
based. It would be difficult to find a single, simple
question with graver implications. The water erosion of the
Sphinx is to history what the convertibility of matter into
energy is to physics.
The problem is that although this final chapter of the book is
called 'Egypt: Heir to Atlantis', it actually says very little about
such a possible link. The most important comment about this
occurs in the Introduction:
Following an observation made by Schwaller de Lubicz, it
is now possible virtually to prove the existence of another,
and perhaps
1
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
greater civilisation ante-dating dynastic Egypt - and
all other known civilisations - by millennia. In other
words, it is now possible to prove 'Atlantis', and
simultaneously, the historical reality of the Biblical
Flood. (I use inverted commas around 'Atlantis' since
it is not the physical location that is at issue here, but
rather the existence of a civilisation sufficiently
sophisticated and sufficiently ancient to give rise to
the legend.)
So West was not, in fact, necessarily talking about
Plato's mythical Atlantis, but simply about this possibility
that civilisation may be millennia older than historians
accept. In which case, there is a sense in which what has
been called
c
the dreaded A word' (which entails the instant
assumption that its user is a member of the lunatic fringe)
may not be necessary at all. We are not talking about the
fictional Atlantis of Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues
Under the Sea or Conan Doyle's Maracot Deep, but
simply about the possibility that human culture may be far
older than we believe.
Now, at the same time as I received Serpent in the Sky,
another publisher sent me the reissue of a book called
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, subtitled Advanced
Civilisation in the Ice Age, by Charles Hapgood, a
professor of the history of science in New England. Like
West and Schwaller, Hapgood had also come to accept the
notion of an ancient civilisation that pre-dated dynastic
Egypt. Hapgood had arrived at his conclusion by a
completely different route. He had studied medieval
navigation maps called portolans, and concluded from
certain of them that they had to be based on far, far older
maps, and that the South Pole had been mapped in the
days before it was covered with ice, possibly as long ago
as 7000 bc - three and a half thousand years before the
Great Pyramid. But Hapgood takes great care not to
suggest that his ancient maritime civilisation might be
Atlantis, or even to breathe the word.
Hapgood's quest began with the so-called Piri Re'is
map, dating back to 1513, which shows the coast of South
America and the South Pole - many centuries before the
latter was discovered. I had heard of the Piri Re'is map via
a popular bestseller called The Morning of the Magicians,
by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier - the book that had
started the 'occult boom' in 1960 - as well as in the work
of Erich von Daniken: both had tried to use the map to
prove that earth must have been visited by spacemen in
the remote past. I was perfectly willing to be open-minded
about the possibility - as I still am - but it seemed
2
Introduction
to me that their arguments were simply untenable, and in
Daniken's case, often absurd and dishonest. Now I was
interested to learn that the argument for an Ice-Age
civilisation did not depend on ancient astronauts, and that
Hapgood's reasoning was cautious, sound and logically
irrefutable. As far as I could see, he had proved, once and
for all, that there had been a maritime civilisation in the
days before the South Pole was covered with ice.
But I had other work to do - for example, writing an
enormous Criminal History of Mankind - and pushed aside
the whole question of 'Atlantis'.
In the autumn of 1991,1 was approached by the
Hollywood producer Dino de Laurentiis, who was
thinking of making a film about Atlantis, and who wanted
to try to give it a realistic historical approach. He and his
associate Stephen Schwartz commissioned me to write an
outline. Naturally, I decided immediately that I would base
it on John West's theory.
In November 1991 I found myself in Tokyo, taking part
in a symposium on communication in the twenty-first
century. In the Press Club, I spoke about my Atlantis
project to some friends, and mentioned Schwaller's theory
that the civilisation of ancient Egypt was the heir to
Atlantis, and that the Sphinx could date thousands of years
earlier than 2400 bc, which is when the pharaoh Chefren is
supposed to have built it. At which point my host, Murray
Sayle, remarked that he had recently read a paragraph in
the Mainichi News that claimed there was new evidence to
support this view. Naturally, I was excited, and asked him
if he could find me the item. He promised to try, but was
unsuccessful.
A week later, in the Savage Club in Melbourne, I
mentioned the elusive paragraph to Creighton Burns, the
ex-editor of the Melbourne Age, who said that he had also
seen the story about the Sphinx. He tracked it down in a
recent issue of the Age, and was able to give me a
photostat.
It was from the Los Angeles Times of 26 October 1991,
and read:
EGYPT SERVES UP NEW TWIST TO MYSTERY OF THE SPHINX
San Diego, Wednesday
New evidence that Egypt's Great Sphinx may be
twice as old as had been thought has triggered a fierce
argument between geologists who say that it must be
older and archaeologists who say that such a
conclusion contradicts everything we know about
ancient Egypt.
3
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
Geologists who presented their results at the
Geological Society of America Convention yesterday
found that weathering patterns on the monument were
characteristic of a period far older than had been
believed. But archaeologists and Egyptologists insist
that the Sphinx could not be much older because
people who lived there earlier could not have built it.
Most Egyptologists believe that the Sphinx was
built during the reign of the 'Pharaoh* Kafre
[Chefren] in approximately 2500 bc. But scientists
who conducted a series of unprecedented studies at
the Giza site said their evidence shows that the
Sphinx was already there long before Kafre came to
power.
The evidence suggests that Kafre simply refurbished
the Sphinx.
Boston geologist Robert Schoch said his research
suggests that the Sphinx dates back to between 5000
bc and 7000 bc. That would make it double the age of
the Great Pyramid and make it the oldest monument
in Egypt, he said.
But California archaeologist Carol Redmount, who
specialises in Egyptian artefacts, said, 'There's just no
way that could be true.
5
The people of that region would not have had the
technology or the will to have built such a structure
thousands of years earlier, she said.
Other Egyptologists said that they cannot explain
the geological evidence, but they insist that the theory
simply does not match up with the mountains of
archaelogical research they have carried out in that
region. If the geologists are right, much of what the
Egyptologists think they know would have to be
wrong.
So it seemed that there was evidence, after all, that the
Sphinx might be far older than anyone thought.
Back in England I wrote my outline based on
Schwaller's idea in the form of a kind of novel, and sent if
off to Hollywood. What happened to it then I am uncertain
- probably it was handed to half a dozen other script
writers to improve. But it seemed to me that I had
succeeded in writing a basically realistic film instead of
the usual scenario with Greek temples, white bearded
priests, and beautiful blondes wearing togas like linen
bathrobes. And once again, I shelved the problem of
'Atlantis' in favour of other projects.
It was almost two years later, in the autumn of 1993,
that I was approached by an old friend, Geoffrey Chessler,
who had commissioned one of my earlier books,
Starseekers. He was now working for a publisher who
specialised in illustrated books on 'occult' subjects - like
4
Introduction
Nostradamus - and who wanted to know if I might have
some suitable suggestion. My mind was a blank, but since
I expected to be passing through London a few days later,
I agreed to meet him for dinner at a mutually convenient
spot, which happened to be a hotel at Gatwick airport.
There we exchanged various ideas and possibilities, and I
casually mentioned my interest in the Sphinx. Geoffrey
was immediately interested, and as I expanded my ideas -
how it seemed to me that Hapgood's 'lost civilisation'
would probably have a totally different mode of thinking
from that of modern man - suggested that I should write
him an outline of a book about it.
Now I should explain that, in the late 1960s, I had been
asked by an American publisher to write a book about 'the
occult'. The subject had always interested me, but I was
inclined to take it with a pinch of salt. When I asked the
advice of the poet Robert Graves about it, his answer was
'Don't'. Yet it was in Graves's own White Goddess that I
found a basic distinction that served as a foundation for
the book - between what he called 'solar knowledge' and
'lunar knowledge'. Our modern type of knowledge -
rational knowledge - is solar; it operates with words and
concepts, and it fragments the object of knowledge with
dissection and analysis. Graves argues that the knowledge
system of ancient civilisations is based upon intuition,
which grasps things as a whole.
In a story called 'The Abominable Mr Gunn', Graves
offers a practical example. When he was at school, a
fellow pupil named Smilley was able to solve complex
mathematical problems merely by looking at them. Asked
by the master - Mr Gunn - how he did this, he replied: 'It
just came to me.' Mr Gunn disbelieved him; he thought he
had simply looked up the answers in the back of the book.
When Smilley replied that the answer got two of the
figures wrong, Mr Gunn sent him to be caned. And he
forced him to do his sums 'the normal way' until Smilley
lost his strange ability.
Now it could be objected that Smilley was merely a
freak, a prodigy with a mind like a computer. But this
explanation will not suffice. There are certain numbers
called primes, which cannot be divided exactly by any
other number - 7, 13 and 17 are examples. But there is no
simple mathematical method of finding out whether a
large number is a prime, except by painfully dividing
every smaller number into it. Even the most powerful
computer has to do it this way. Yet in the nineteenth
century, a calculating prodigy was asked whether some
vast ten-digit number was a prime, and replied after a
moment's thought: 'No, it can be divided by 241.'
5
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
Oliver Sacks has described two mentally subnormal
twins in a New York asylum who can sit swapping
twenty-figure primes. Scientifically speaking - that is,
according to our system of rational 'solar knowledge' - it
cannot be done. Yet calculating prodigies do it. It is as if
their minds hover like a bird above the whole number
field, and see the answer.
This can mean only one thing: that although our solar
knowledge system seems to us comprehensive and all-
sufficient, there must be some other means of obtaining
knowledge that achieves its results in a 1 completely
different way. The idea is baffling - like trying to imagine f
another dimension apart from length, breadth and height.
We know that f modern physics posits other dimensions,
yet our minds are incapable of conceiving them. Yet we
can imagine some tiny, blind, wormlike creature who is
convinced that the world consists of surfaces, and who
cannot even begin to imagine what we mean by height. As
offensive as it is to human dignity, we have to recognise
that, where knowledge is concerned, we are blind,
wormlike creatures.
So I had no problem with the notion that Hapgood's
pre-Ice Age civilisation might differ from our own in
some absolutely basic manner. I recalled an observation
by the archaeologist Clarent Weiant, to the effect that
when the Montagnais Indians of eastern Canada wish to
make contact with a distant relative, they go into a hut
in the forest and build up the necessary psychic energy
through meditation: then the relative would hear his
voice. And Jean Cocteau records that when his friend
Professor Pobers went to study the same phenomenon in
the West Indies, and asked a woman 'Why do you
address a tree?', she replied: 'Because I am poor. If I
were rich I would use the telephone.'
The implication would seem to be that by using
telephones - and the rest of the paraphernalia of 'solar
knowledge' - we have lost some abilities that our remote
ancestors took for granted.
When I met Geoffrey Chessler at Gatwick airport, I was
en route to Melbourne again, for the annual Literary
Festival, after which I intended to meet John West in New
York. By total coincidence, West had written to me out of
the blue a few weeks earlier, enclosing a magazine with
an article he had written about the latest developments in
his \ investigation - including the facial 'reconstruction' by
Detective Frank Domingo which demonstrated that the
face of the Sphinx was nothing i like Chefren's. We had
never had any contact - although I had recently reviewed
his book The Case for Astrology - and he had no idea I
was
6
Introduction
interested in the Sphinx. I wrote back immediately,
mentioning that I would be in New York in a few weeks'
time, and we arranged to meet.
John West proved to be a thin, bespectacled man of
immense enthusiasm, and information poured out of him
in great spurts, like water from a village pump. I found
that, like all genuine enthusiasts, he was generous with his
ideas and his time; there was none of the mistrustfulness
that I have occasionally encountered in people who seem
to believe that all other writers are waiting for an
opportunity to steal their ideas. He had with him a first
'rough cut' of the videotape of his programme about the
Sphinx, and we were able to watch it in the home of
playwright Richard Foreman, who found it as exciting as I
did. Later, John came out to dinner with my family - my
children had met us in America ^ and with the writer on
ancient megaliths Paul Devereux. We discussed my
projected book on the Sphinx, and John mentioned that I
ought to contact another writer, Graham Hancock, who
was also writing a book to prove that civilisation is far
older than we assume. He also threw off another name -
Rand Flem-ath - who was writing a book arguing that
Atlantis was situated at the South Pole. This made sense -
Hapgood had argued that his ancient maritime civilisation
was probably situated in Antarctica, and, now I thought
about it, the idea seemed almost self-evident.
And so when I returned to England, I wrote to both
Graham Hancock and to Rand Flem-ath. I had heard of
Graham, because I had seen a television programme about
his search for the Ark of the Covenant. Now he sent me
the vast typescript of his book Fingerprints of the Gods,
and as soon as I began to read it, I wondered whether it
would be worth going ahead with my own book on the
Sphinx. Graham had already gone into the whole question
that John West had dealt with in his television programme,
screened in America soon after I returned.
Moreover, Graham also knew all about Rand Flem-ath
and his Antarctica theory, and made it virtually the climax
of his own book. I had by this time received the typescript
of When the Sky Fell by Rand and Rose Flem-ath, and
learned that they had been inspired by Hapgood's Maps of
the Ancient Sea Kings, as well as by his earlier book
Earth's Shifting Crusty which I lost no time in borrowing
from the London Library. I was able to play a small part in
persuading a Canadian publisher to accept When the Sky
Fell by offering to write an introduction.
I was still in two minds about whether it was worth
writing my own book. But it seertied to me that there had
been such a chain of coin-
7
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
cidence and synchronicity since I first came across
Schwaller's water-weathering theory that it would be
absurd not to persist.
During the next few weeks - in January 1994 - two
more pieces of the jigsaw fell into place. I received for
review a copy of The Orion Mystery by Robert Bauval,
and learned of his belief that the pyramid complex at
Giza was planned as early as 10,450 bc. I was, at this
time, still reading Graham Hancock's vast typescript,
and had not yet reached the section on Bauval. But
Bauval's brief mention of Atlantis led me to comment in
my review that his own conclusions seemed to support
the theories of Schwaller and John West. I wrote Bauval
a letter telling him that he ought to contact John West,
and I sent West a copy of The Orion Mystery.
Second, I had also succeeded in obtaining my own copy
of a book called Al-Kemi by Andr VandenBroeck, an
American artist who had become a student and close
friend of Schwaller de Lubicz in his last years. A couple of
years earlier, when I had been researching Schwaller, my
old friend Eddie Campbell (whom I had known since he
was literary editor of the London Evening News) had lent
me the book, but I had found it very hard going. Now I
had my own copy, I settled down to reading it slowly and
carefully, sometimes reading difficult pages two or three
times. And as I read on, I became absolutely certain that
my own book had to be written. For what emerged from
Al-Kemi was
%
the certainty that Schwaller believed that
the ancient Egyptians had a J completely different
knowledge system from modern man - not simply '
something like the odd ability to communicate with far-off
relatives by telepathy, but a different way of seeing the
universe. And what caused me particular excitement was
VandenBroeck's statement that Schwaller believed that this
different 'way of seeing' could somehow make possible a
greatly accelerated rate of human evolution.
I succeeded in contacting Andr VandenBroeck, and
we launched into correspondence by fax. With immense
patience, he did his best to explain to me many of the
things I had failed to understand. And I contacted
Schwaller's American publisher, Ehud Spurling, who
was kind enough to send me the seven books currently
in print. These proved to be even more of a headache
than Al-Kemi, yet equally rewarding -particularly the
last book, Sacred Science. (Schwaller's major work, the
three-volume Temple of Man, has been translated into
English but not yet published.) Little by little, I felt I
was beginning to understand -although at times it was
like walking through a pitch-black night lit only by the
occasional lightning flash.
8
I
n
t
r
o
d
u
c
t
i
o
n
When it appeared in April 1995, Graham Hancock's
Fingerprints of i
the Gods climbed immediately to the top of the British
bestseller charts, f
leaving no doubt that an enormous number of people are
fascinated by \
this question of a pre-Ice Age civilisation. But for me this
only under
lined the question: what difference does it make? Whether
civilisation
is 5000 or 15,000 or 100,000 years old can surely make no
practical
difference to our lives?
Is
On the other hand, if we are talking about a different
knowledge system, a system that is as valid as our own
and yet unthinkably different in approach, then it could
be of unimaginable importance. The kind of knowledge
possessed by modern man is essentially fragmented. If
some future visitors from outer space landed on earth,
and found vast empty cities full of libraries and
museums and plantariums, they would conclude that
men of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries must
have been intellectual giants. But as their scholars
studied our encyclopaedias of science and philosophy
and technology and every other conceivable subject,
they would quickly recognise that no single mind could
even begin to grasp what it was all about. We have no
essential knowledge system - no way of seeing the
universe as a whole and making sense of it.
But if Schwaller is right, and the ancient Egyptians
and their predecessors possessed some comprehensive
knowledge system that offered them a unified view of
the universe and human existence, then the insights of
Hapgood and Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock
would only be a halfway house. The really important
question would lie beyond their conviction that
civilisation may be thousands of years older than we
suppose. It would lie in the question: What does it all
mean?
One implication, according to Schwaller, is that there
must be some method of accelerating the pace of human
evolution. The reason this statement excited me so
much was because it has been the underlying theme of
all my own work. I had noticed, as a child, that at
Christmas the whole world seems to be a far richer and
more wonderful place than we normally recognise. But
of course, what I meant was that consciousness itself
can be far more intense than the everyday consciousness
we accept as 'normal'. This 'intenser' form of
consciousness often appears accidentally, in moments of
relaxation or relief when a crisis disappears, yet when
we experience it, we recognise that it is somehow
'normal', merely a different way of seeing things and
responding to them. $Pne of the basic characteristics of
this state of 'heightened
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
consciousness' is that it seems to involve the proper use
of our mental energy, instead of wasting it. Normal
consciousness is like a leaky bucket, or a tyre with a
slow puncture. In certain moods we seem to get the
'trick' of closing the leaks, and when that happens,
living ceases to be hard work, and turns into a continual
glow of satisfaction and anticipation, like the feeling we
get when setting out on holiday. I sometimes call this
'duo-consciousness', because it depends on being
conscious of two realities at once, like a child sitting in
front of a warm fire and listening to the patter of rain on
the windows, or the feeling we get lying in bed on a
freezing winter morning, when we have to get up in five
minutes, and the bed has never seemed so warm and
comfortable.
Our personal development depends upon what might be
called 'intensity experiences'. Such experiences may be
pleasant or unpleasant, like the experiences of Paris in
Helen's arms, or the experience of a soldier under fire; but
they certainly have the effect of causing some kind of
minor yet permanent transformation of awareness. Yet it
seems a pity that our development depends upon the
chance of having such experiences, when consciousness is
a state, not a mere product of what happens to us. A cook
can make jellies and cakes; a carpenter can make tables
and cupboards; a pharmacist can make sleeping draughts
or pick-me-ups. Why should we not be able to make our
states of consciousness by understanding how they come
about? ! Did the ancients understand this process? I
doubt it - at least in the I sense I am discussing. What I am
fairly certain they understood is some I secret of cosmic
harmony and its precise vibrations, which enabled j them
to feel an integral part of the world and nature, instead of I
experiencing the 'alienation' that Karl Marx declares to be
the lot I of modern man. Deeper insight into the process
of conscious evolution I depends, to some extent, on
having experienced the process of alienation * and
leained how to transform it.
What can emerge will emerge as a result of passing
beyond alienation, and grasping once again this 'ancient
knowledge' - which, according to Schwaller, has been
long forgotten, although it has been transmitted down
the ages in some symbolic form in the great religions.
The aim of this book is to try to grasp once again the
nature of this forgotten knowledge.
10
1 Egyptian Mysteries
A
t 4.30 in the morning of 16 March 1993, Graham
Hancock and his wife Santha prepared to scramble up
the side of the Great Pyramid. It had to be this early
because climbing the Pyramid had been strictly
forbidden since 1983, when an incautious tourist broke
his neck. Hancock had bribed the guards with $150, but
they refused to stay corrupt, and before he was allowed
to climb the Pyramid, he had to bribe them all over
again.
The first thing the Hancocks discovered was that
climbing the Pyramid was not like walking up a flight of
steps. The sides of the Pyramid are shaped like steps -
and have been since its limestone 'facing' vanished
centuries ago - but some of them are chest-high. On the
other hand, the flat jSfet of the step is often only six
inches deep, which explains why a tourist who
overbalances is unlikely to stop until he reaches the
bottom. The Pyramid is 203 'steps' high and slopes at 52
degrees, so by the time the Hancocks were less than a
quarter of the way up, they were winded and exhausted,
and ready for a long rest;
7
but this was out of the
question, since it would be dawn in about an hour, and
they would become visible to cruising police cars.
At the 35th course, they noted that the blocks were
particularly huge
{ - each weighing between 10 and 15 tons - and found
themselves
\ wondering why the builders had decided to put such
immense stones
so high up the Pyramid, instead of putting them in the
obvious place,
| near the ground - and saving the smaller blocks (around
6 tons each)
i for higher up.
In fact, now they were actually climbing the
Pyramid, they became aware of many mysteries that
fail to strike you or me when we look at a postcard of
these picturesque objects against a blue sky. To begin
with, at over six million tons, the Pyramid is the largest
edifice ever built by man. It contains more masonry
than all the medieval cathedrals,
11
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
I churches and chapels built in Europe added together.
Which raises the question: how did the builders get these
massive blocks up the side of the Pyramid and into place?
Imagine that you are a building contractor, and that the
Pharaoh has approached you to build the Great Pyramid.
He hands you the measurements, and explains that the
four sides of the Pyramid must face north, east, south and
west, and that each side must be 755 feet long, and the
height must be 481 feet. (You find out later that this gives
the same ratio as the circumference of a circle to its
radius.) He will provide you with as many blocks as it
takes, and with an unlimited number of workmen.
This doesn't sound too difficult. You work out that, in
order to meet his requirements, the sides will have to
slope at an angle of 52 degrees. So you will start off by
laying the first course, consisting of a 755-foot solid
square, constructed of roughly cubical blocks, with
weights varying between 6 and 30 tons. The size of the
second course must obviously be slightly smaller, with an
angle of 52 degrees between the edge of the first course
and the edge of the second.
The stones for the second course have to be
manhandled on to the top of the first course, but that is
easy enough - you build a gently sloping ramp of earth
and stone, with wooden planks on top, and each block is
heaved up the ramp by twenty of so workmen hauling on
ropes. And when you have finished the second course,
you repeat the procedure with the third . . .
But now you begin to see a problem. As the ramp gets
higher, you either have to increase its slope - which would
defeat its purpose - or extend it much further back. You
quickly calculate that, by the time you have reached the
top of the Pyramid, the ramp is going to have to be about
a mile long, and to contain around three times as much
material as the Pyramid itself. Moreover, if the ramp is
not to collapse under its own weight, it will have to be
built of massive blocks like those used in the Pyramid.
The alternative is some kind of lifting gear, rather like a
modern crane, but built, of course, of wood. But here the
same problem applies. To raise blocks weighing several
tons to a height of nearly five hundred feet would require
a crane built of several of those gigantic trees found in
American forests. Such trees do not exist in Egypt, or
even in Europe.
There is another possibility. Assuming you have plenty
of time, you might use smaller lifting gear, and move it
from step to step of the
12
1 Egyptian Mysteries
Pyramid, raising each block a step at a time. In fact,
according to Herodotus, this was the method used:
The pyramid was built in steps, battlement-wise, as
it is called, or, according to others, altar-wise. After
laying the stones for the base, they raised the
remaining stones to their places by machines
formed of short wooden planks. The first machines
raised them from the ground to the top of the first
step. On this there was another machine, which
received the stone upon its arrival, and conveyed it
to the second step, whence a third machine
advanced it still higher.
The notion of raising six-ton blocks with planks
sounds difficult enough, but the idea of manoeuvring
such blocks on ledges sometimes only six inches wide
sounds impossible. Moreover, to move more than two
and a half million blocks in this way, at the rate of 25 a
day, would take about 150 years. And if the workmen
were only working part-time, during the season when
they did not have to tend their farms, it
^ could be twice that period.
! In fact, in the 1980s, the Japanese had tried to build a
smaller replica
I of the Great Pyramid as a showpiece. Even with modern
equipment,
/ the problem defeated them, and it was abandoned. -
Reluctantly, I suggest, you would tell the Pharaoh to find
another construction engineer, and would go off to seek
some simpler project, like building the Empire State
Building or Brooklyn Bridge.
And what had led the Hancocks to embark on this risky
project? The answer dates back eleven years, when
Graham Hancock was an economics journalist in
Ethiopia, and went to see the film Raiders of the Lost
Ark. It aroused his curiosity about the Ark of the
Covenant, the sacred wooden chest lined with gold that
the Hebrews carried into battle, and which had vanished
from history many centuries before Christ. He was
intrigued to learn that Ethiopian Christians believed that
the Ark of the Covenant was preserved in a chapel in the
centre of the town of Axum, near the Red Sea. Scholars
and archaeologists - inevitably - dismissed the claim as
absurd. Hancock felt that this attitude was based on
arrogance and stupidity, and set out to prove them
wrong. What he had to establish was how the Ark of
Axum had got from Jerusalem - twelve hundred miles to
the north - down to Ethiopia, and what it was doing
there.
Study of biblical sources convinced him that the Ark
had vanished
13
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
from Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem in the reign of the
bloody and brutal king Manasseh, who occupied the
throne from 687 bc to 642 bc; he had rejected Judaism,
and defiled the Temple by installing a 'graven image' of
Baal. There seemed every reason to believe that the
priests had been ordered to remove the Ark by
Manasseh. But why had it been taken as far as Ethiopia?
A vital clue was handed to him by a Jewish scholar,
who mentioned that there had once been a Jewish temple
on the island of Elephantine, in the upper Nile. This was
unusual; the Jews had believed that foreign soil was
unclean. A visit to Elephantine, and the discovery that its
temple - now destroyed - had been of exactly the same
dimensions as Solomon's Temple, convinced Hancock
that this had been the first major staging post on the
journey of the Ark. The Jews had been forced to move
on because of a clash with their Egyptian neighbours,
who worshipped a ram-headed deity in a nearby temple,
and objected to the Hebrew sacrifice of rams. Slowly,
Hancock established that the Ark had been moved to
Meroe, in Sudan, then to the island of Tana Kirkos, on
Lake Tana, and finally to Axum.
1 The Sign and the Seal (1992) tells the fascinating story
of how Hancock tracked down the route of the Ark from
Jerusalem to Axum. The quest took him to many
countries, including Egypt, and it was there in April 1990
that he succeeded in spending some time alone in the
King's . Chamber of the Great Pyramid. The experience
deeply impressed him, and his subsequent study of the
Pyramid's history brought to a head his increasing
conviction that the ancient engineers possessed far more
knowledge than has been attributed to them. Far from
being - as one authority expressed it - 'technically
accomplished primitives', they seemed to possess a level
of scientific accomplishment that we have still not
reached. / This second visit to the Pyramid in 1993
deepened that conviction. I Studying the baffling yet
incredibly precise mathematics of its corridors | and
chambers, he concluded that the science that had been
responsible I for this construction must have been far, far
older than professional \> Egyptologists will admit. The
history books tell us that Egyptian civilis-| ation came into
existence about 2925 bc, and that a mere four centuries -
later, it was building monuments like the Sphinx and the
Giza pyramids. To Hancock this seemed absurd. There had
to be some ancient, 'lost' ! civilisation that dated back
thousands of years earlier.
This was a view supported by a guide book he had
been using since his first visit to Egypt: The Traveller's
Guide to Egypt, by John Anthony
14
1 Egyptian Mysteries
West. This differed from the standard guide books in that it
discussed the mysteries associated with the pyramids; and
temples, a subject more orthodox travel writers shy away
from. And in this book, West had mentioned the view of a
highly unorthodox Egyptologist named R. A. Schwaller de
Lubicz, to the effect that the Sphinx had not been eroded
by wind-driven sand, but by water. Schwaller de Lubicz
had argued that since the Sphinx is protected from the
west by its 'enclosure' wall, and that in any case, it has
spent most of its life buried up to its neck in sand, wind
erosion is unlikely. But there has obviously been no
significant rainfall in Egypt for thousands of years -
otherwise the Sahara desert would not exist.
Now, according to modern historians, the Sphinx was
built at about the same time as the second Giza pyramid,
around 2500 bc, probably by the Pharaoh Chefren, the son
(or brother) of Cheops, who is supposed to the builder of
the Great Pyramid. This assumption is based on the fact
that Chefren's cartouche - the 'box' bearing the name of the
pharaoh - was found on the stela between the paws of the
Sphinx. But this view is comparatively recent. In 1900, Sir
Gaston Maspero, director of the Department of Antiquities
in the Cairo Museum, suggested that Chefren simply
excavated or repaired the Sphinx, which was already old.
If, in fact, it is eroded by water, not by sand, it must
obviously be a great deal older - perhaps thousands of
years.
What is more, if the Sphinx is older than modern
historians believe, the same could well apply to the Great
Pyramid - a thought that had occurred to Graham Hancock
after his first visit. He found the idea at once exciting and
disturbing. His academic training inclined him to caution
and scepticism. But in studying the Ark of the Covenant,
he came upon reference after reference to its 'miraculous'
powers - to strike people dead, to destroy cities, to level
mountains, to cause burns and cancerous tumours. The old
monk who claimed to be the Ark's present guardian
explained that it was wrapped in thick cloths when it was
carried in religious processions - not to protect the Ark, but
to protect other people from its powers. It sounded rather
like atomic radiation, or perhaps Wilhelm Reich's 'orgone
energy'. And as he read through every available primary
source on the Ark, all of which referred to the same
powers, Hancock found himself speculating that it
sounded like some kind of 'device' or machine. The idea
seemed altogether too much like the wilder assertions of
that high priest of the improbable, Erich von Daniken. And
it was von Daniken who, in explaining how
15
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
the pyramids were built by visitors from outer space,
managed to multiply the weight of the Great Pyramid by
five. Hancock had no desire to get himself classified as a
member of the lunatic fringe. Yet everything about the
Giza complex deepened his certainty that it had not been
built by 'technically accomplished primitives'.
The search for a lost civilisation was to take him on a
journey to see the Nazca lines of Peru, the 'lost' Inca city
of Machu Picchu, Lake Titicaca and Tiahuanaco, and the
great Aztec temples of Central America. Here again, the
evidence - which we shall review later -seemed to point to
far greater antiquity than the guide books assert. He was
also intrigued by legends of a white god - or gods - who
brought civilisation to South America: he was sometimes
called Viraco-cha, sometimes Quetzalcoatl, sometimes
Kukulkan, and he was represented as having fair skin and
blue eyes - as Osiris was represented in ancient Egyptian
statues. By the time he returned to Egypt, to make that
early morning climb of the Great Pyramid, the
sophistication required to construct these monuments had
convinced Graham Hancock beyond all doubt either that
the civilisation of the Incas and the Aztecs extended back
thousands of years earlier than the history books claim, or
that there had once been an unknown civilisation that has
been lost to history.
It was in Canada, while publicising his book The Sign and
the Seal -which had become a bestseller - that Graham
Hancock met a friend of John Anthony West, and
mentioned his admiration for the Traveller's Guide to
Ancient Egypt. The friend - writer Paul Roberts - asked:
'Ah, but have you read his Serpent in the Sky?
9
Hancock
admitted his ignorance. 'Then take it and read it,' said
Roberts, offering a copy.
Serpent in the Sky proved to be as fascinating and as
startling as West's Traveller's Guide. It was basically a
study of the ideas of Schwal-ler de Lubicz, and the
argument was simple. Schwaller had spent fifteen years
studying ancient Egyptian monuments, particularly the
temple at Luxor, and had concluded that - in West's words:
Egyptian science, medicine, mathematics and
astronomy were all of an exponentially higher order
of refinement and sophistication than modern
scholars will acknowledge. The whole of Egyptian
civilisation was based upon a complete and precise
understanding of universal laws ... Moreover, every
aspect of Egyptian knowl-
16
1 Egyptian Mysteries
edge seems to have been complete at the very
beginning. The sciences, artistic and architectural
techniques and the hieroglyphic * system show virtually
no sign of a period of 'development'; indeed, many of
the achievements of the earliest dynasties were never
surpassed or even equalled later on. This astonishing
fact is readily admitted by orthodox Egyptologists, but
the magnitude of the mystery it poses is skilfully
understated, while its many implications go
unmentioned.
West goes on to ask: 'How does a complex civilisation
spring fullblown into being? Look at a 1905 automobile
and compare it to a modern one. There is no mistaking the
process of "development". But in Egypt there are no
parallels. Everything is there right at the start.' It is rather
as if the first motor car was a modern Rolls-Royce.
Then West goes on to drop his bombshell. According to
Schwaller, Egyptian civilisation did not begin - as the
history books say - around 3000 bc with the legendary
King Mens. Thousands of years earlier, Egypt was
populated by survivors of Atlantis, who had crossed a
(then fertile) Sahara and settled in the valley of the Nile.
The great temples and pyramids of Egypt are a legacy of
these survivors.
Atlantis . . . the very word is enough to make an
academic historian bury his head in his hands and groan,
'Oh no!' And even though West tries to disinfect it by
placing it in quotation marks, suggesting that he is
referring simply to some great lost civilisation of the past -
but not necessarily in the Atlantic - the name itself is
enough to place anyone who uses it beyond the pale of
intellectual respectability.
The fact remains that Schwaller de Lubicz believed that
the answer to the mystery of Egyptian civilisation lies in
the fact that it was founded by survivors from the great
lost continent which, according to Plato (our sole source),
perished about 9500 bc in a volcanic cataclysm. It was
these survivors who built the Sphinx, and who designed -
and perhaps even built - the Giza pyramids. And it was
Schwaller who led John West to begin his quest for the age
of the Sphinx by trying to establish whether it was eroded
by wind-blown sand or by rainfall.
Who precisely was Schwaller de Lubicz, and what right
had he to pronounce on such matters?
Ren Schwaller was born in Alsace in 1887, into a
wealthy bourgeois family. His father was a pharmaceutical
chemist, and Ren spent his
17
&
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
childhood dreaming in the forests, and painting and
conducting chemical experiments. From the beginning, he
was equally fascinated by art and science, a combination
whose significance for his life-work can hardly be
underestimated. At the age of seven, his wife tells us, he
received a 'revelation regarding the nature of the divine,
and seven years later, another illumination regarding the
nature of matter.'
As a teenager he went to Paris to study painting under
Matisse. Matisse himself was at this time under the
influence of the philosopher Henri Bergson, who
emphasised the inadequacy of the intellect to grasp reality
- which slips through it like water through the holes in a
fishnet - and again, his own tendency to mistrust 'mere
science' was reinforced. Yet, typically, he also plunged
into the study of modern physics, which at the time was
undergoing the great revolutions of Einstein and Planck.
He joined the Theosophical Society - its founder,
Madame Blavatsky, had died when he was four - and was
soon delivering lectures and writing articles for its
journal. In the first of these he paid homage to science,
which 'leads to all progress, fecundates every activity,
nourishes all humanity', while at the same time attacking
it for its conservatism and nihilism. Yet by nature,
Schwaller was far more hard-headed and pragmatic than
the Theosophists. He was setting himself a difficult task:
to undermine rationalism with rational thought.
1
The next step seems to have been an interest in
alchemy, the 'science' of the transmutation of matter, and
the pursuit of the 'philosophers' stone'. But Schwaller was
not interested in trying to turn lead into gold; he believed -
as Jung later came to believe - that alchemy is basically a
mystical quest whose aim is 'illumination', and of which
the transmutation of metals is a mere by-product. He soon
extended his alchemical studies to stained glass and the
geometry of Gothic cathedrals, convinced that their
geometry and measurements concealed some secret
knowledge of the ancients.
The 'occult' tradition is based upon the notion that there
existed in the past a science that embraced religion and
the arts - including architecture - and that this knowledge
was restricted to a small caste of priests and initiates, and
was 'encoded' by medieval stonemasons in the great
Gothic cathedrals. One of the classic expositions of this
idea, The Canon by William Stirling (published in 1897)
states:
From the times of ancient Egypt this law [the Canon]
has been a sacred arcanum, only communicated by
symbols and parables, the making of which, in the
ancient world, constituted the most
18
1 Egyptian Mysteries
important form of literary art; it therefore required for
its exposition a priestly caste, trained in its use, and
the guilds of initiated artists, which existed
throughout the world till comparatively recent times,
were instructed in it. Nowadays, all this has
changed...
The essence of this art, says Stirling, is 'working
symbolically'.
Schwaller was in his early twenties when he met, in the
Closerie des Lilas, in Montparnasse, an alchemist who
called himself Fulcanelli (and whose real name seems to
have been Champagne) and they discussed the 'Oeuvre',
the Great Work of transmutation. Fulcanelli was
surrounded by a circle of disciples, who called themselves
The Brothers of Heliopolis; all were dedicated students of
the works of Nicolas Flamel and Basil Valentinus. They
combed the second-hand bookshops of Paris looking for
old alchemical texts. In an ancient volume he was
cataloguing for a Paris bookshop, Fulcanelli had come
across a six-page manuscript written in faded ink, and stole
it. It indicated that colour played an important part in the
secret of the alchemists. But Fulcanelli, whose approach to
alchemy was materialistic, failed to understand it. Schwal-
ler was able to help him in his interpretations. He also
showed Fulcanelli his own manuscript on medieval
cathedrals, at which Fulcanelli became excited, and offered
to help find a publisher. In fact, Fulcanelli borrowed the
manuscript for a long time, and eventually stole most of its
central insights for his own Mystery of Cathedrals,
published in 1925, which has achieved the status of a
modern classic.
Schwaller had meanwhile become friendly with a
French poet - who was also a Lithuanian prince - called
Luzace de Lubicz Milosz. During the First World War,
Schwaller worked as a chemist in the army, and after the
war Milosz bestowed on him a knighthood for services to
the Lithuanian people, and the right to add 'de Lubicz' to
his name. (It is not clear what right Milosz had to go
around bestowing knighthoods.) At this point Schwaller
also received the 'mystic name' AOR. He and Milosz
founded a political organisation called Les Veilleurs
('watchmen' or 'vigilant ones') based upon Schwaller's
notions of elitism, of which Rudolf Hess was at one time a
member (as well as of a German magical order called the
Thule Society). But Schwaller seems to have grown tired
of involvement in politics - recognising, like most mystics,
that it is a form of entrapment - and moved to Suhalia, in
Switzerland, to pursue his esoteric studies with a group of
like-minded friends, particularly studies relating to stained
glass. This lasted until 1934,
19
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
when financial problems led to the dissolution of the
Suhalia community.
By this time, Fulcanelli was dead. According to
Schwaller, he had invited Fulcanelli to his home in Grasse,
in the south of France, to attempt the magnum opus, and
they were wholly successful. Convinced that he now knew
how to bring about the alchemical transformation,
Fulcanelli returned to Paris and repeated the experiment
several times - failing each time. The reason, said
Schwaller later, was that he had chosen the right moment
and the right conditions for the experiment, and Fulcanelli
was ignorant about such matters. Fulcanelli now decided
to break the vow of silence he had taken, and to
communicate what he had learned to his disciples. He
ignored Schwaller's pleas and turned down his offer of
renewed financial support in exchange for silence. But he
became ill, and died of gangrene the day before he was
going to divulge the 'secret
5
to his disciples. Schwaller
declared that this was an inevitable consequence of
breaking the alchemical vow of secrecy.
Schwaller spent the next two years on his yacht,
apparently at something of a loose end. His wife Isha -
who had come to him as a disciple in the early days
(drawn to him, she claims, by some telepathic link) -had
always been fascinated by ancient Egypt, but Schwaller
had failed to share her interest. Now, in 1936, he allowed
himself to be persuaded to go ashore in Alexandria to look
at the tomb of Rameses IX. There he was struck by a
revelation as he looked at a picture of the pharaoh
represented in the form of the hypotenuse of a right-
angled triangle whose proportions were 3:4:5, while the
upraised arm represented an additional unit. Clearly, the
Egyptians knew about Pythagor-as's theorem centuries
before Pythagoras was born. Suddenly, Schwaller realised
that the wisdom of the medieval craftsmen stretched back
to ancient Egypt. For the next fifteen years, until 1951, he
remained in Egypt, studying its temples - particularly the
temple at Luxor. The result was his massive geometrical
opus The Temple of Man, in three volumes, and his last
book The King of Pharaonic Theocracy, translated into
English as Sacred Science.
All this will undoubtedly strengthen in the reader's mind
the suspicion that John Anthony West must have been
slightly insane - or perhaps only appallingly misguided -
to take Schwaller's judgement on the erosion of the
Sphinx seriously, although in his defence it might be
argued that a devotion to mystical ideas does not
necessarily imply that
20
1 Egyptian Mysteries
there was anything wrong with Schwaller's eyesight. In
fact, Schwaller's observation was based upon his
conviction - already noted - that Egyptian civilisation had
to be thousands of years older than 3000 bc, because the
knowledge encoded in the temples could not have
developed in a mere six hundred years. The comment
about water erosion was thrown off rather casually in
Sacred Science, and his friend and disciple Andr
VandenBroeck, the author of the remarkable memoir Al-
Ketni, gathered the impression that Schwaller thought the
erosion had occurred when the Sphinx was submerged
under the sea. Whatever the misunderstanding, it
awakened in West the conviction that water erosion was a
notion that could provide the scientific confirmation or
refutation of Schwaller' s theory about Egyptian
civilisation.
But Schwaller's significance goes far beyond his
theories about the age of the Sphinx. After all, there is a
sense in which it hardly matters whether the Sphinx is five
or ten thousand years old. It would certainly be interesting
to know that there was a great civilisation that pre-dated
ancient Egypt, but surely it would make no practical
difference to our lives - the kind of difference that was
made by splitting the atom or the invention of the
microchip?
If Schwaller is correct, such a view represents a total
failure to grasp what lies behind the Egyptian temples and
the medieval cathedrals. Hermetic tradition claims that
this knowledge was kept hidden for thousands of years -
and why should it be kept hidden if it has no practical
value?
The sceptic will reply: because the ancient priests
deceived themselves about the practical value of their
religious nonsense - or wished to deceive other people.
To which Schwaller would reply: you are wrong. This
knowledge is practical. You wish me to give you an
example? Then consider the stained red and blue glass of
Chartres cathedral. Scientific analysis has been unable to
identify the pigments used. This is because there is no
pigment. The staining involved an alchemical process
which involved liberating the colour from the metals that
contained it...
(In fact, there is reason to believe that this was the
'oeuvre' completed by Schwaller and Fulcanelli at Grasse.)
Schwaller was careful to make no such statement in his
books. This information was passed on verbally to Andr
VandenBroeck in 1960 -the year before Sehwaller died, in
December 1961. During the final decade of his life,
Sehwaller lived in retirement in Grasse, not far from
Cannes, his name totally unknown to the general public.
Andr
21
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
VandenBroeck, an American artist living in Bruges, came
upon one of Schwaller's early books, Symbol and the
Symbolic, published in Cairo in 1951, and was instantly
fascinated. It seemed to VandenBroeck that Schwaller was
talking about a question that had absorbed him for years:
that of precisely what art represents.
It might simplify the matter it we translate this into
musical terms. No one has any doubt that the music of
Beethoven is 'saying' more than the music of Lehar. But
how would we answer a Martian who asked us: 'What is it
saying?' Beethoven remarked to Elizabeth Brentano:
'Those who understand my music must be freed from all
miseries that others drag around with them. Tell Goethe to
listen to my symphonies, and he will see that I am saying
that music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher
worlds of knowledge .. .' Beethoven had no doubt that his
music represented knowledge, yet quite clearly it would
be impossible to take a single bar of his music and
declare: 'What this is saying is .. .'
Now, VandenBroeck had been influenced by a friend,
Andrew Da Passano, who tried to 'prove' the existence of
higher states of consciousness by referring to the work of
Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg. VandenBroeck had been
reading Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica,
and it seemed to him that his own idea about knowledge
might be expressed in mathematical terms. Most
knowledge is a function of the method you use to achieve
it; for example, if you want to know how many people
there are in a room, you count them, and the knowledge
you arrive at is a function of counting. But, reasoned
VandenBroeck, you simply cannot say that the 'higher
knowledge' Beethoven was talking about was arrived at
by some ' method' like counting or reasoning.
VandenBroeck felt that this insight was an important
breakthrough, and he wrote a short paper in which he tried
to express this notion of a knowledge that precedes
method in terms of symbolic logic, i
Schwaller had begun his book on symbols and
symbolism by remarking that there are two ways of
reading ancient religious texts: the 'exoteric' and the
'esoteric'. The 'exoteric' consists of meanings, which you
could look up in a dictionary or work of history; but this
only serves as a foundation for the esoteric meaning,
which Schwaller calls the 'symbolique' - that is to say, a
system of symbols.
Clearly, Schwaller's 'symbolic system' was what
VandenBroeck meant by higher knowledge, the
knowledge that comes from the depths of the soul, and is
not achieved by 'method'. Yet Schwaller appeared to be
22
1 Egyptian Mysteries
saying that this knowledge was not some religious insight
- the equivalent of 'Love your neighbour' - but is practical
and scientific. Vanden-Broeck was so excited that he lost
no time driving from Bruges to the south of France, and
presenting himself on Schwaller's doorstep.
He found Schwaller living on an impressive country
estate that left no doubt that he had a considerable private
income. It was a curious household, made up of the tall,
grey-haired, 72-year-old sage, his 'psychic' wife Isha, who
made VandenBroeck think of a gypsy fortune teller, and
Isha's two children from a former marriage, Dr Jean Lamy
and his sister Lucie, who had devoted her life to being
Schwaller's amanuensis. Isha assumed that VandenBroeck
had come there to speak to her about her 'occult' ideas - an
understandable mistake, since her husband was virtually
unknown, whereas she - by reason of a skilful novel about
ancient Egypt called Chick Pea - had a considerable
reputation.
VandenBroeck and his wife were invited to lunch,
where Isha continued to assume that VandenBroeck was
there to sit at her feet, and to monopolise the conversation.
Yet the few words he managed to exchange with
Schwaller convinced VandenBroeck that they were on the
same wavelength, and that Schwaller had a great deal to
teach him. He decided to leave Bruges and move to
Grasse.
On his way back to Bruges, VandenBroeck stopped at
Lyon and bought a copy of The Temple of Man. Although
slightly taken aback by the geometrical diagrams,
VandenBroeck was soon absorbed in the first volume,
which brought him a continual sense of 'vistas on to a
well-known but forgotten landscape'... 'We spoke the same
language.'
Back in Grasse, the VandenBroecks were soon regular
visitors in the Schwaller household. It took some weeks as
Isha's student - reading the Chick Pea novels, and listening
to her reading from her latest opus, a work of 'esoteric
fiction' - before his sense of her 'gentle imposure', and his
inborn distaste for 'spiritual' mumbo-jumbo led him to
detach himself tactfully and spend more time with
Schwaller (whom everyone addressed as 'Aor'.)
There was also in Schwaller 'a grey zone of speculation
where true and false did not apply' - for example, in his
conviction that mankind has not evolved, but 'devolved',
from 'giants who once walked the earth to a near-animal
state... vowed to cataclysmic annihilation, while an
evolving lite gathers all of human experience for a
resurrection in spirituality.' Schwaller was also convinced
that the Nile is a man-made river, deliberately directed
into the Nile valley, to form the basis of Egyptian
civilisation. But VandenBroeck felt that he could take or
leave
23
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
such beliefs. Far more important was Schwaller's insight
into the nature of the knowledge system of the ancient
Egyptians. This was also elitist in conception: 'at its head,
the enlightened priesthood, the perfect identity of science
and theology, its main duties cognition of the present
moment' This Schwaller saw as the 'Absolute from which
we constantly draw our power'.
This notion is central to Schwaller's ideas, perhaps their
most significant feature. One way of explaining it would
be to say that human beings imagine they live in the
present, yet their basic mental state might be described as
'elsewhereness', like a schoolboy looking out of a window
instead of paying attention to the lesson. It is, in fact,
incredibly difficult to be 'present', since we live in an
interpreted world. We cannot even 'see' without
preconception - 'that is so and so'. Our most basic frame of
mind is that of spectators; we look out at the world like
someone in a cinema. When a man awakens to present
reality - as Dostoevsky did when stood in front of a firing
squad - the whole world changes. Everything suddenly
becomes reaL But his vision of himself also changes: he
becomes aware of himself as a dynamic force rather than
as a passive entity.
This, VandenBroeck discovered, is also the essence of
Schwaller's notion of alchemy. Alchemy, according to
Schwaller, is derived from Kemi, the Greek word for
Egypt, with the Arabic 'aP appended. In ancient Egypt, the
pharaoh, the god-king, was the symbol of this 'absolute
from which we draw our power'. And alchemy, or the
transmutation of matter into spirit - of which the
transmutation of base metals into gold is a mere by-
product - depends upon this 'moment of power', of being
wholly present in the present moment. He seems to be
speaking of what Shaw once called 'the seventh degree of
concentration'.
Schwaller dismisses Jung's notion of alchemy as a
modern intellectual fashion. Jung thought that the true aim
of alchemy was the state he called 'individuation', unity of
being, but that in trying to achieve this, the alchemist
'projects' his own visions into external reality - in other
words, sees hallucinations. One text describes how, when
seven pieces of metal are heated in a crucible with a
fragment of the philosophers' stone, fire will fill the room
and the starry firmament will appear overhead. Jung
believed that the alchemist 'projects' such visions as if,
without knowing it, he is a cinema projectionist.
Schwaller rejected this with scorn. Alchemy, he told
VandenBroeck, depends on laboratory results. These
results, he seems to imply, are
24
1 Egyptian Mysteries
achieved ultimately by a kind of mind-over-matter. As
VandenBroeck expresses it:
There could be no other than this unique act of total
apprehension beyond words which is knowledge
itself, where the particular disappears and only the
greatest generality remains, stark and devoid of
content. In this utter silence words would form
meanings in the most natural fashion, without our
interference. Here the universe would speak, not the
cerebral cortex. This is the act, the state of
knowledge. There is no referent for knowledge.
Knowledge is knowledge in itself, it is primitive, and
cannot refer to a previous self.
In other words, it is total objectivity, an escape from the
shadow-house of personality.
What Schwaller is talking about, in short, is a different
kind of knowledge. In The White Goddess, Robert Graves
speaks about 'lunar' and 'solar' knowledge. Our modern
type of knowledge - rational knowledge - is 'solar'; it
operates with words and concepts, and it fragments the
object of knowledge with dissection and analysis. But
ancient civilisations had iunar' knowledge, an intuitive
knowledge that grasped things as a whole.
What is at issue might be made clearer by a reference to
another 'esoteric' thinker of the twentieth century, George
Ivanovich Gurdjieff. In 1914, Gurdjieff told his disciple
Ouspensky that there is a fundamental difference between
'real art' and 'subjective art'. Real art is not just an
expression of the artist's feelings; it is as objective as
mathematics, and will always produce the same
impression on everyone who sees it.
The great Sphinx in Egypt is such a work of art, as
well as some historically known works of
architecture, certain statues of gods, and many other
things. There are figures of gods and of various
mythological beings that can be read like books, only
not with the mind but with the emotions, providing
they are sufficiently developed. In the course of our
travels in Central Asia we found, in the desert at the
foot of the Hindu Kush, a strange figure which we
thought at first was some ancient god or devil. At first
it produced upon us simply the impression of being a
curiosity. But
25
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
after a while we began to feel that this figure
contained many things, a big, complete and complex
system of cosmology. And slowly, step by step, we
began to decipher this system. It was in the body of
the figure, in its legs, in its arms, in its head, in its
eyes, in its ears; everywhere. In the whole statue there
was nothing accidental, nothing without meaning.
And gradually we understood the aim of the people
who built this statue. We began to feel their thoughts,
their feelings. Some of us thought that we saw their
faces, heard their voices. At all events, we grasped the
meaning of what they wanted to convey to us across
thousands of years, and not only the meaning, but all
the feelings and the emotions connected with it as
well. That indeed was art!
2
According to Schwaller, this is precisely what the
Egyptians were aiming at in their temples, monuments and
statues.
In A New Model of the Universe, a book written after he
had become Gurdjieff's disciple, Ouspensky had written of
the Sphinx: 'As a matter of fact the Sphinx is older than
historical Egypt, older than her gods, older than the
pyramids, which, in their turn, are much older than is
thought.' This sounds like a piece of information acquired
direct from Gurdjieff.
But how could a work of art make the same impact on
everybody -even if their emotions are 'sufficiently
developed'? Surely art appeals to what is 'personal' in us?
To understand why this is not so, it is necessary to speak
of the founder of Greek mathematics, Pythagoras, who
lived between 582 and 507 bc. According to a typical entry
in a modern encyclopaedia, Pythagoras believed in
reincarnation, and Tythagoreans believed that the essence
of all things was number and that all relationships could be
expressed numerically. This view led them to discover the
numerical relationship of tones in music and to some
knowledge of later Euclidean geometry.'
3
Pythagoreanism
is sometimes described as 'number mysticism', and the
mathematician Lancelot Hogben dismissed all such
notions as the 'dark superstitions and fanciful puerilities
which entranced people who were living through the
childhood of civilisation'.
4
But that is to miss the point. The Pythagoreans were
entranced by such things as the shape of crystals and the
patterns made by frost. They suspected, rightly, that there
is a mathematical reason for this. Again, consider the fact
that women have two breasts, and that in
26
1 Egyptian Mysteries
female animals, the number of teats is always a multiple
of two, never an odd number. Again, the Pythagoreans
suspected that the processes of living nature are governed
by mathematical laws, and they were right.
Let us return to an earlier question: what is music
'saying'? Why do certain musical phrases fill us with a
curious delight? Around 1910, a Viennese composer
named Arnold Schoenberg decided that, since he could see
no obvious answer to the problem of why music touches
our feelings, the answer must lie in the word 'habit' - or
conditioning. Schoenberg decided that he would create a
different tone scale, and write music that was based on a
number of notes arranged in arbitrarily chosen order -
rather than one that 'appeals' to the ear. But he proved
mistaken in his assumption that music is 'arbitrary'. Almost
a century later, his works and those of his disciples still
sound strange and dissonant - although their dissonance is
undeniably successful in expressing neurosis and tension -
and their inclusion in a modern concert programme is
enough to guarantee a decline in ticket sales. Any
Pythagorean could have told him that his theory was based
on a fallacy - a failure to grasp that there is a hidden
mathematical reason why a certain order of notes strikes
us as harmonious, and why arbitrary notes fail to convey a
sense of musical meaning.
It is when the same insights are applied to the realm of
living things that we begin to grasp the essence of
Egyptian thought. Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 popularised the
idea that a computer might develop human feelings; and,
in fact, many computer scientists argue that a sufficiently
complex computer would be alive - that if it was complex
enough to behave like a living thing, then by any sensible
definition it would be a living thing. In The Emperor's
New Mind, Oxford scientist Roger Penrose expended a
great deal of ingenuity in demonstrating that this is a
fallacy - that even if a computer was more complex than a
human being, it would still not be 'alive'.
Most biologists now accept the view that life evolved
accidentally with the action of sunlight on carbon
compounds: that these compounds 'accidentally' built up
into cells that could reproduce themselves, and that these
cells were the first sign of 'life' on earth. Penrose's
arguments about computers apply equally to this theory.
No matter how complex an arrangement of carbon
molecules, it would still not be alive.
The Egyptians would have found these ideas about
'living' computers and carbon molecules unutterably
perverse. For them there were two distinct realities: matter
and spirit. In living beings the two interact,
27
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
and the laws that govern the interaction are mathematical.
It is not meaningless to ask why carrots are long and
pointed, and melons are round, and marrows are long and
round. Life obeys unknown mathematical laws.
Gurdjieff also attached great importance to the concept of
alchemy. In his major work, Beelzebub's Tales to his
Grandson, he explains that what is generally called
alchemy is a pseudo-science, but that there was - and is - a
genuine alchemy, a 'great science', that was known to the
ancients before man began to degenerate.
It may also be noted that, in Beelzebub's Tales,
Gurdjieff makes Beelzebub - a higher being from a solar
system in the Milky Way -explain that Egypt was
originally populated by survivors from Atlantis, which
was destroyed in two cataclysms, and that the Sphinx and
the Giza pyramids were built by the Atlanteans.
(Beelzebub, it should be noted, was written before
Schwaller discovered ancient Egypt, so there was no
mutual influence.) Some time later, around the time of
dynastic Egypt, there occurred a spiritual 'cataclysm' that
caused mankind to degenerate to a lower level. Man began
to believe that the material world is the only reality, and
that the spiritual is a mere reflection of the material. This
would seem to echo Schwaller's conviction that mankind
has degenerated from 'giants ... to a near-animal state'.
It seems ironic that Schwaller's interest in the age of the
Sphinx -and the other great Egyptian monuments - was
virtually a by-product of his interest in 'alchemy', and its
bearing on human evolution. What he believed he had
found in ancient Egypt was a completely new mode of
thought - a mode that cannot be expressed in the
analytical concepts of language, but only shown in myth
and symbolism.
This knowledge also involved a highly sophisticated
technology, capable of such incredible feats as moving
200-ton blocks (used in building the Sphinx temples) and
placing them on top of one another.
In short, Schwaller believed that ancient Egypt
possessed a knowledge system that had been inherited
from a far older civilisation, whose modes of thought
were fundamentally different from those of modern man.
The secret of this knowledge system he believed lay in
ancient Egypt.
It was probably because Schwaller was anxious not to
undermine the reputation of his mathematical studies on
the temple of Luxor that he took care not to be too
specific about his view of the age of the Sphinx.
28
1 Egyptian Mysteries
But in Sacred Science, in the chapter in which he discusses
the legends of Egyptian prehistory, he speaks about
ancient traditions that refer to the days before the Nile
delta existed - before, that is, the Nile had brought down
the billions of tons of mud that now form the delta. He
continues:
A great civilisation must have preceded the vast
movements of water that passed over Egypt, which
leads us to assume that the Sphinx already existed,
sculptured in the rock of the west cliff at Gizeh, that
Sphinx whose leonine body, except for the head,
shows indisputable signs of aquatic erosion.
He goes on to say: 'We have no idea how the submersion
of the Sphinx took place ...', which seems to make it plain
that he is thinking in terms of a Sphinx submerged beneath
the sea. But when he read these sentences, John Anthony
West was struck by the obvious fact that this notion - of
erosion by water - ought to be scientifically testable. He
expressed this conviction in 1978, in Serpent in the Sky, his
study of Schwaller and ancient Egypt. During the next
decade, he tried to interest scholars in the problem. For
example, he asked an Oxford geologist if he would mind if
he played a trick on him, then showed him a photograph of
the Sphinx in which the head and other identifying features
had been hidden by masking tape, so that it looked like a
fragment off cliff. 'Would you say this is wind-erosion or
water erosion?' The geologist said without hesitation:
'Water erosion.
5
Then West stripped off the tape, revealing
the head and the paws. The geologist stared at it and said:
'Oh.' And after more reflection he added: 'I don't want to
say any more. You see, I'm not a desert specialist.' Other
scientists to whom West wrote did not even reply.
It was several years more before he found a geologist
who was sufficiently open-minded to go and look at the
Sphinx. It was the beginning of an important new phase in
the search for Atlantis.
29
2 The New Race
T
he problem of finding an open-minded scientist, West has
remarked (with understandable bitterness), is about as easy
as finding a fundamentalist Christian who loves Madonna.
But in 1985, a friend at Boston University remarked: 'I
think I might know someone.'
The 'someone' was Robert Schoch, a geologist at Boston
University, and his entry in Who's Who made it clear that
he would be the ideal supporter. Although still in his
twenties, he had published four books, and was a highly
respected stratigrapher - a geologist who studies layers of
sedimentary rock - and palaeontologist. But to begin with,
it looked as if he was going to be as evasive as the Oxford
geologist. West was advised not to try approaching him
directly in case he scared him off. Periodically, reports
came back: Schoch had been approached, Schoch was
willing to look at the material, Schoch's first reaction had
been scepticism... Eventually, after studying all the
material West could muster, Schoch began to express a
cautious interest. But he was up for tenure, and it would
have been insane to jeopardise this by espousing an
opinion that would be sure to enrage his academic
colleagues. Yeats went by with these occasional reports,
until, at last, West travelled to Boston to meet him.
He had taken a boxful of slides, and when they had
looked at them, and they had discussed the whole
question, Schoch admitted what was worrying him. 'From
the photograph, it looks like water weathering. It looks so
obvious. If you're right, I can't believe that no one would
have noticed it before.'
Clearly, he would have to go to Egypt to see for
himself. But that would have to wait until he had tenure.
That finally came in April 1990. Two months later they
were in Cairo. West was in a state of tension as they
approached the Giza site,
31
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
half-expecting Schoch to point out some geological gaffe
that would destroy his whole theory. But Schoch seemed
quietly impressed. At first sight, he could see nothing that
undermined West's belief in water-weathering. The Sphinx
enclosure - the walls of limestone that surrounded the
Sphinx on two sides - certainly showed the typical
undulating pattern of rain weathering. But he felt that he
needed a more detailed study, together with the aid of a
geophysicist, as well as up-to-date seismographic
equipment.
It seems probable that the original rock that formed the
head of the Sphinx was an outcrop that once rose above
the ground beside the Nile. Schoch theorised that it may
have been carved into some kind of face - either human or
animal (such as a lion) at some remote date when the
surrounding countryside was still green. Then, at some
later date, it was decided to add a body. For this purpose,
its makers sliced into the softer limestone below and
around the head - creating a two-sided wall or enclosure ~
thus giving themselves elbow room to work. The great
blocks they removed - 200 tons each - were used to
construct two temples in front of the Sphinx. These
ancient architects worked in a style that might be called
'Cyclopean', using absurdly large blocks -which could far
more conveniently have been carved into a dozen smaller
ones - and erecting them into structures as simple and
underrated as Stonehenge.
The next step was to hack out roughly the chunk of rock
that would form the body of the Sphinx - which would
eventually be 240 feet long, and 66 feet high, as tall as a
six-storey building. From the point of view of posterity, it
is a pity that the whole Sphinx was not carved out of the
same type of rock, for the limestone body has eroded far
more than the harder head and shoulders. The present
damage to the Sphinx's head was done in 1380, by a
fanatical Arab sheikh, and later by the Mamelukes, who
used it for target practice.
And what evidence have we about the age of the
Sphinx? Oddly enough, it is not mentioned by Herodotus,
and so we must assume either that it was covered with
sand when Herodotus visited Egypt around 450 bc, or that
the outcrop of badly eroded rock sticking up above the
surface bore so little resemblance to a face that he did not
even notice it.
When the sand - which buried it up to its neck - was
cleared away in 1817, a small temple was revealed
between the paws. This contained the statue of a lion and
three stelae; the one against the Sphinx's breast bore the
date of King Thutmose IV, who came to the throne in
1425
32
2 The New Race
BC. The main stela told how King Thutmose IV had fallen
asleep near the Sphinx when out hunting, and how the
Sphinx - who was inhabited by the god Khepera (a form of
the sun god Ra), creator of the universe - spoke to him in a
dream and asked him to clear away the sand that buried
him. Thutmose not only cleared away the sand, but made
extensive repairs to the body. Apparently this was not the
first time; the same stela bore the name of the Pharaoh
Chefren - although its surrounding writing was flaked
away, so that its significance was not clear. Sir Gaston
Maspero assumed that Chefren had also performed the
same service of clearing the sand, and possibly repaired
the Sphinx - the rear of the Sphinx contains repairs that
have been dated to the Old Kingdom, which lasted about
450 years (2575-2130 bc).
But this obviously raises a basic question. If the Sphinx
was built by Chefren around 2500 bc, then why should it
need repairs in the course of the next three and a half
centuries? It was well protected, and was no doubt buried
in sand most of the time since it was built. Dr Zahi
Hawass, the keeper of the Cairo Museum and a bitter
opponent of West's theory, was to argue that the limestone
of which the Sphinx was built was so poor that it began to
erode as soon as the monument was completed. West's
reply was that this would involve erosion at the rate of a
foot every hundred years, and that if that was the case, the
Sphinx would have vanished completely about five
centuries ago.
On the other hand, if Maspero was correct, then Chefren
had merely repaired the Sphinx and cleared away the sand;
Maspero actually stated that this was proof that 'the Sphinx
was already covered with sand during the time of Khufu
[Cheops] and his predecessors'. In fact, it was a
commonplace among nineteenth-centry Egyptologists to
state that the Sphinx was far, far older than the pyramids.
It has only been during the twentieth century, on the
evidence of the name of Chefren on the stela of Thutmose
IV, that Egyptologists have decided that the Sphinx was
built by Chefren, and that its head is supposed to be a
portrait of Chefren. They have reached that conclusion on
precisely the same evidence that made Maspero decide the
Sphinx was far older than the pyramids.
Another obvious question arises. Most of the Sphinx -
as already stated - is below ground level, so it would have
been clear to its builder that it would soon be buried in
sand. (It seems to take about twenty years.) Does this not
suggest that, when the Sphinx was built, the Sahara was
still green, which would explain how the Sphinx came to
be eroded by rainfall? We know that the Sahara was once
green and
33
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
fertile, and that it has been slowly eroded over the
millennia. No one is certain when it was last green, but a
conservative guess is 3500 bc. It is
9
of course, even
possible that it was still green in the time of Chefren;
1
but
then, even if it was built by Chefren in a green Sahara in
2500 bc, this still fails to explain why it needed repairs so
soon.
Now West had the task of trying to prove that Maspero
and the other nineteenth-century scholars had been right,
and that the Sphinx was already old in the time of
Chefren. If he could prove that the body of the Sphinx,
and the Sphinx enclosure, had been eroded by water, not
by wind-blown sand, then he would certainly have taken a
major step in that direction. His first task would be to set
about finding the necessary finance to take a team of
experts to look at it. Boris Said, a maker of videos,
coordinated the project, and Thomas L. Dobecki, a
geophysicist, also signed on, with two geologists, an
architect and an oceanographer. After an interminable
struggle to persuade the authorities to grant permission,
they were finally ready to start.
Now that Schoch could study it all at close quarters, his
doubts vanished. If the Sphinx was the same age as the
rest of the Giza site, why was it so weathered, when
nearby Old Kingdom tombs were so much less weathered
- and, what is more, so obviously weathered by wind-
blown sand? Surely the Sphinx had to be older?
The wind-weathering on these other tombs provided a
convenient comparison. Limestone is a sedimentary rock,
made of particles glued together; and, as everyone knows,
such rocks come in strata, like layer cake. When wind-
blown sand hits the side of the layer cake, the softer layers
are worn away, while the harder layers stick out above and
below them. The result is a series of parallel layers, with a
profile of humps and hollows like the profile of a club
sandwich.
When a rock face is eroded by rain water, the effect is
totally different. The rain runs down in streams, and cuts
vertical channels into the rock. The softer rock is still
eroded more deeply than the harder, but the effect is quite
distinct from wind-weathering - it can look like a series of
bumps, not unlike a row of naked buttocks. The team
agreed that both the body of the Sphinx and the Sphinx
enclosure showed this type of weathering, not the
smoother effect of wind-weathering.
The two temples in front of the Sphinx - known as the
Valley and the Sphinx Temples - provided additional
evidence for this thesis. If, of course, they had been left
untouched, they should have exhibited pre-
34
2 The New Race
cisely the same weathering as the Sphinx and its
enclosure. But there is clear evidence that they were
repaired by the ancient Egyptians, who set out to prevent
further damage by facing them with granite slabs. Many of
these granite slabs were removed by later generations,
who used them in their own building. And the outer walls
left exposed by this removal are so irregular that any self-
respecting architect would blush with shame.
What happened seems clear. These walls were deeply
weathered, like the Sphinx, but so that they could be
repaired, they were cut back to provide convenient flat
surfaces. Since they were going to be covered up with
granite, it was unimportant if they looked a mess.
In fact, where the granite facing has been removed,
these limestone blocks show the same undulatory
weathering as the Sphinx and its enclosure. The rear sides
of some of the granite facing-slabs have even been carved
into an undulatory pattern to fit the eroded limestone.
Again, it looks as if the people who repaired the temples
found them deeply water-eroded - a relic of the earlier
'Cyclopean' age, standing alone, except for the Sphinx, on
an empty plateau.
These temples in front of the Sphinx raised another
problem that has been ignored by orthodox Egyptologists.
As already noted, their architecture is quite unlike that of
most Egyptian temples, with their cylindrical columns and
wealth of carvings. Here there are simply bleak
rectangular pillars surmounted by similar blocks, bare and
uncarved, as if they belonged to a completely different
epoch from the great Egyptian temples.
Again, why had the ancient builders chosen to build the
Sphinx temples of blocks weighing 200 tons each? The
explanation that suggests itself is that, like the Sphinx, the
temples were regarded as so sacred that anything smaller
would have been an insult to the god for whom they were
raised. King Thutmose dreamed that the 'god' who
inhabited the Sphinx was Khepera, creator of the universe
and father of all the other gods. If this was true, then it was
certainly appropriate that the Valley and Sphinx temples
should be plain and bare.
Finally, there was the most baffling question of all: how
had the builders succeeded in moving and raising 200-ton
blocks? West consulted various modern engineers with
experience in building huge structures; they admitted to
being baffled. Graham Hancock's research assistant
learned that there are only three cranes in the world big
enough to move such blocks.
What does that suggest? This, at least, is undeniable: that
whoever
35
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
carved the Sphinx and built the two temples possessed
some highly / sophisticated technology. Even the Great
Pyramid contains no such blocks. The conclusion would
seem to be that if the Sphinx and its I temples were built
centuries - or perhaps thousands of years - earlier than
Cheops and Chefren, the builders were more, and not less,
technically accomplished.
I This brings us to another question about the 'know-
how' of these f ancient people.
j In 1893, Flinders Ptrie had excavated the village of
Naqada, 300
; miles south of Cairo, and found pottery and vases that
revealed a high
| level of skill. The pottery showed none of the striated
marks that would
j indicate a potter's wheel, yet were so perfectly rounded
that it was hard
| to believe they were made by hand. The level of
workmanship led
j him to assume that they must date from the 11th Dynasty,
around 2000
bc. They seemed so un-Egyptian that he called their
creators 'the New
j Race'. When some of these 'New Race' vases were found
in tombs of
j the 1st Dynasty, dating from about a thousand years
earlier, he was so
| bewildered that he dropped the Naqada vase from his
chronology, on
/ the principle that what you cannot explain you had
better ignore.
j In fact, the Naqadans were descendants of Palaeolithic
peoples from
/ North Africa who began raising crops (in small areas)
some time after
I 5000 bc. They buried their dead in shallow pits facing
towards the
[ west, and seem to have been a typical primitive culture
of around
the fourth millennium. But the vases that puzzled Ptrie
seemed too
, j sophisticated to have been
made by primitives.
/ When he examined the great red granite sarcophagus
that was found
/ in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid (of which
there will be
more in the next chapter), Ptrie found himself once again
puzzling
about ancient craftsmen. It seemed to present insuperable
technical
problems. Measurement revealed that its external volume
- 2,332.8
litres - is precisely twice that of its internal volume. That
meant cutting
! with incredible precision. But with what tools?
Flinders Ptrie thought
that it must have been sawn out of a larger block with
saws 'eight feet
or more in length'. Such saws, he thought, would have to
be made of
1 bronze set with diamonds. No one has ever seen such a
saw, and no
ancient text describes it, but Ptrie could see no
other solution.
But what tools were used to hollow out its inside?
Ptrie makes the extraordinary suggestion that the
ancient Egyptians had created some
36
2 The New Race
kind of circular - or rather tubular - saw which 'drilled
out a circular
groove by its rotation'. This notion of tubular saws with
diamonds
somehow inserted into the points sounds like science
fiction. And even
if such saws could have been made - and the diamonds
set so firmly
that they did not shoot out when the saw was used, or
get driven back
into the bronze that held them - how did the Egyptians
make them
'spin'? We assume that, at this early stage of technology,
drills had to
be 'spun' by hand - or perhaps with a bowstring wound
around thei
shaf t . I t sounds, qui t e si mpl y, i mpossi bl e.
(
Ptrie also speaks about granite slabs and diorite
bowls incised with quite precise inscriptions. The
characters, says Ptrie, are not 'scraped or ground out,
but are ploughed through the diorite, with rough edges
to the line'. Diorite, like granite, is incredibly hard.
Graham Hancock had also seen various kinds of
vessels of diorite,
\ basalt and quartz, some dating from centuries before the
time of
I Cheops, neatly hollowed out by some unknown
technique. The most baffling of all were 'tall vases with
long, thin, elegant necks and finely
I flared interiors, often incorporating fully hollowed-out
shoulders'. (More than 30,000 were found beneath the
Step Pyramid of Zoser at Saqqara.) The necks are far
too thin to admit a human hand - even a child's - some
too narrow even to admit a little finger, Hancock points
out that even a modern stone carver, working with
tungsten-carbide drills, would be unable to match them,
and concludes that the Egyptians must have possessed
some tool that is totally unknown to, and unsuspected
by, Egyptologists. It sounds, admittedly, too
preposterous to suggest that they had some kind of
electric drill. Yet when we consider Petrie's comment
about grooves 'ploughed through the diorite', it seems
\ obvious that they must have had some means of making
the bit spin at
j a tremendous speed. A potter's wheel, with suitable
'gears', might just do it.
In fact, a modern toolmaker, Christopher P. Dunn,
studied Petrie's book in an attempt to make sense of his
descriptions, and in an article
1 called 'Advanced Machining in Ancient Egypt', reached
some astonish-
I ing conclusions. He comments:
1 The millions of tons of rock that the Egyptians had
quarried for
\ their pyramids and temples - and cut with such
superb accuracy -
\ reveal glimpses of a civilisation that was technically
more advanced
\ than is generally believed. Even though it is thought
that millions
of tons of rock were cut with simple primitive hand
tools, such as
37
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
copper chisels, adzes and wooden mallets, substantial
evidence shows that this is simply not the case. Even
discounting the argument that work-hardened copper
would not be suitable for cutting igneous rock, other
evidence forces us to look a little harder, and more
objectively, when explaining the manufacturing
marks scoured on ancient granite by ancient stone
craftsmen.
He discusses the puzzle of how these craftsmen cut the
43 giant granite beams, weighing between 45 and 70 tons
each, and used in the King's Chamber.
Although the Egyptians are not given credit for the
simple wheel,
2
the machine marks they left on the
granite found at Giza suggests a much higher degree
of technical accomplishment. Petrie's conclusion
regarding their mechanical abilities shows a
proficiency with the straight saw, circular saw, tube-
drill and, surprisingly, even the lathe.
He goes on to mention the two diorite bowls in Petrie's
collection which Ptrie believed must have been turned on
a lathe, because they could 'not be produced by any
grinding or rubbing process'. Ptrie had detected a
roughness in one of the bowls, and found that it was
where two radii intersected, as if a machinist had failed to
'centre' the bowl correctly on the lathe, and had re-centred
it more precisely.
Examining blocks that had been hollowed out - with
some kind of drill - in the Valley Temple, Dunn states that
the drill marks left in the hole show that it was cutting into
the rock at a rate of a tenth of an inch for every revolution
of the drill, and points out that such a phenomenal rate
could not be achieved by hand. (Ptrie thought it could,
but only by applying a pressure of more than a ton on the
drill - it is not clear how this tould be achieved.) An
Illinois firm that specialises in drilling granite told Dunn
that their drills - spinning at the rate of 900 revs per
minute - only cut into it at one ten thousandth of an inch
per revolution, so in theory the ancient Egyptians must
have been using a drill that worked 500 times faster than a
modern drill.
Another aspect of the problem began to provide Dunn
with a glimmer of a solution. A hole drilled into a rock
that was a mixture of quartz and feldspar showed that the
'drill' had cut faster through the quartz than the feldspar,
although quartz is harder than feldspar. The solution that
he suggests sounds almost beyond belief. He points out
that modern
38
2
The
New
Race
ultrasonic machining uses a tool that depends on
vibration. A jackham-mer used by navvies employs the
same principle - a hammer that goes up and down at a
tremendous speed, raining hundreds of blows per
minute on the surface that has to be broken. So does a
pneumatic drill. An ultrasonic tool bit vibrates
thousands of times faster.
Quartz crystals are used in the production of
ultrasonic sound, and conversely, respond to ultrasonic
vibration. This would explain why the 'bit' cut faster
through the quartz than the feldspar.
What is being suggested sounds, admittedly, absurd: that
the Egyptians had some force as powerful as our modern
electricity, and that this force was based on sound. We all
know the story of Caruso breaking a glass by singing a
certain note at high volume. We can also see that-^ if a
pointed drill was attached to one of the prongs of a giant
tuning fork, it could, in theory, cut into a piece of granite
as easily as a modern rotating drill. Dunn is suggesting, in
effect, a technology based on high-frequency sound. But I
must admit that precisely how this force could have been
used to drive the 9-foot bronze saw blade that cut the
sarcophagus in the King' s Chamber eludes my
comprehension. Possibly some reader with a more
technically-oriented imagination can think up a solution.
Unfortunately, the vibration theory fails to explain
Dunn's observation about the drill rotating five hundred
times as fast as a modern drill. We must assume that, if
he is correct, the Egyptians knew how to use both
principles.
In the course of making a television programme,
Christoper Dunn demonstrated the incredible technical
achievement of the Egyptian engineers to another
engineer, Robert Bauval, by producing a metal
instrument used by engineers to determine that a metal
surface has been machined to an accuracy of a
thousandth of an inch, and holding it against the side of
the benben stone in the Cairo Museum. He then applied
the usual test - shining an electric torch against one side
of the metal, and looking on the other side to see if any
gleam of light could be seen. There was none whatever.
Fascinated by the test, Bauval took him to the Serapeum
at Saqqara, where the sacred bulls were entombed in
giant sarcophagi made of basalt. These proved to have
the same incredible accuracy. Why, Bauval asked me
when telling me about all this, should the ancient
Egyptians have needed accuracy to the thousandth of an
inch for a sarcophagus? Moreover, how did they achieve
it without modern engineering techniques?
The notion of ultrasonic drills at least provides a
possible answer to
3
9
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
the otherwise insoluble riddle of Hancock's swan-necked
vases into which it was impossible to insert a little finger.
Dunn says that the technique is used 'for the machining of
odd-shaped holes in hard, brittle materials'. The technique
for hollowing out such vases, even with a long drill, down
a long and narrow neck still defies the imagination. But
with Dunn's suggestions, it begins to seem slightly less
absurd.
Ptrie would have been even more embarrassed about
his Naqada vases if he had known that vessels of the same
type had been discovered in strata dating from 4000 bc -
at a time when Egypt was supposed to be full of nomads
in tents, and that these include the swan-neck vases.
It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that, even if the
Naqada people were not the technically accomplished
super-race of our speculations, Petrie's 'New Race'
nevertheless really existed, and that it predated pharaonic
Egypt by at least a thousand, possibly several thousand
years. These vases seem to be the strongest evidence so far
for Schwaller de Lubicz's 'Atlanteans'.
Dobecki, West's geophysicist, was also making some
interesting discoveries. One of the basic methods of
studying deeper layers of rock is through vibration. A
metal plate is struck with a sledgehammer, and the
vibrations go down through the rock, and are reflected
back by various strata. These echoes are then picked up by
'geophones' placed at intervals along the ground, and their
data interpreted by a computer. One of the first discoveries
Dobecki made was that a few metres under the front paws
of the Sphinx there seems to be some kind of underground
chamber - possibly more than one. Legend has always
asserted the existence of such chambers, containing
'ancient secrets', but they are usually cited by writers who
might be dismissed as cranks - for example,*'a book called
Dramatic Prophecies of the Great Pyramid, by Rodolfo
Benvenides, published in 1969, contains a drawing of the
Sphinx with a kind of temple underneath it. (The
'prophecies' - based on the measurements inside the Great
Pyramid - include little green spacemen landing in 1970,
and a world war between 1972 and 1977.) Dobecki's
discovery at least seemed to confirm that some of the
stranger legends about the Sphinx are not pure fantasy.
Then, in October 1994, Associated Press reported that
workers repairing the Sphinx had discovered an unknown
passageway leading down below its body. The Giza
plateau authorities immediately announced that further
exca-
40
2 The New Race
varions by international teams would be delayed until
1996, because repairs to the Sphinx were their primary
concern ...
One of Dobecki's other discoveries had momentous
implications concerning the age of the Sphinx. Vibration
technology can also be used to investigate 'subsurface
weathering', the weathering that penetrates below the
surface when porous rocks are exposed to the elements.
Dobecki discovered a strange anomaly. At the front of the
Sphinx, the subsurface weathering penetrated about eight
feet. Yet at the rear, it was only four feet deep. The
implication seemed to be that the front of the Sphinx had
been carved out first, and the rear end thousands of years
later. So even if we assume that the rear end was carved in
the time of Chefren, 4,500 years ago, it would seem that
the front part of the Sphinx is twice that age. And if the
rear part of the Sphinx was carved long before Chefren,
then the front part could be far, far older.
As far as Schoch could see, West was basically correct.
The weathering of the Sphinx - compared to that of the
Old Kingdom tombs only 200 yards away - meant that it
had to be thousands of years older than the tombs, and
therefore than the pyramids. The two Sphinx temples
pointed clearly to the same conclusion; their weathering
was also far more severe than that of the Old Kingdom
tombs, as well as being of a different kind - rain as
opposed to wind weathering.
At this point Schoch decided that the time for academic
caution was at an end; it was time to go public. He
submitted an abstract of his findings to the Geological
Society of America, and he was invited to present his case
at the annual convention of the Society in October 1992; it
was being held that year in San Diego, California.
Geologists are not slow to express disagreement, and he
anticipated being given a hard time. To his pleasant
surprise, far from raising objections, the audience listened
with obvious interest, and afterwards no less than 275
enthusiastic geologists came up to him and offered to help
on the project; many expressed astonishment that no one
had noticed earlier what now struck them as obvious - that
the Sphinx was weathered by water.
But then, they were geologists, not Egyptologists; they
had no vested interest in denying that the Sphinx could be
older than Chefren. Egyptologists, when the news leaked
out, were indignant or dismissive. 'Ridiculous!' declared
Peter Lacovara, assistant curator of the Egyptian
Department of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, in the
Boston Globe.
41
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
There's just no way that could be true,' said archaeologist
Carol / Redmount in the Los Angeles Times. Others asked
what had happened to the evidence for this earlier
Egyptian civilisation - its other monuments and remains.
For West and Schoch, the answer to that was obvious: it
was underneath the sand.
One of the sceptics was Mark Lehner, an American
who had been investigating the Sphinx since 1980. Yet it
was Lehner who had inadvertently encouraged West's
belief that the Sphinx predated Chefren. In the careful
survey he had conducted with L. Lai Gauri, a stone
conservation expert, Lehner had reached the odd
conclusion that although the earliest repairs to the flanks
of the Sphinx looked typical of the Old Kingdom (i.e. the
time of Chefren), they were actually from the New
Kingdom period, about a thousand years later. Why, West
wondered, should New Kingdom repairers make their
work look like Old Kingdom? What is more, if the early
repairs - the first of three lots - were as recent as 1500 bc,
the Sphinx must have sustained two or three feet of
erosion (the depth of the repairs) in a thousand years,
during most of which it had been covered in sand.
On the other hand, if those early repairs were - as they
looked - Old Kingdom, this completely ruled out the
notion that Chefren built the Sphinx; for even if the
repairs had been at the very end of the Old Kingdom, this
would still only allow a century or so for two or three feet
of erosion.
And if, of course, the repairs were Old Kingdom, this
meant that Chefren could not possibly be its builder. He
was simply its repairer, as the stela between its paws
seemed to suggest. And the Sphinx must have been built
several thousand years earlier than Chefren's reign to
have eroded three feet - Schoch's conservative estimate
was 7000 bc.
This was the estimate Schoch had put forward at San
Diego, and which caught the attention of the world press:
it made the Sphinx exactly twice the usual estimate:
about nine thousand years old.
West also pointed out that the mud-brick tombs around
the Step Pyramid of Saqqara, dating back about a century
before the Great Pyramid, show none of the weathering
features of the Sphinx - yet are a mere ten miles away
(and so subject to the same climate) as well as being
softer. Why have they not weathered like the Sphinx?
When Schoch presented his case at the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, Mark
Lehner was chosen as the champion of
42
2 The New Race
the academic opposition. He raised the now familiar
objection - that if the Sphinx had been built by a far older
civilisation than the Egyptians, around 7000 bc, what had
happened to the remains of this civilisation? 'Show me a
single potsherd.' West was not allowed to take part in the
debate; since he was not an accredited academic, he had to
listen from the audience. But he was not slow to point out
afterwards that Lehner's objection was illogical. He and
Schoch had demonstrated by evidence that the Sphinx was
older than the surrounding tombs; it was Lehner's job to
refute that evidence, not to ask for more evidence which
has not yet been found. It was, West pointed out, like
objecting to Magellan's plan of sailing round the world by
saying: 'Show me someone who has done it before.'
Lehner also implied that Schoch was incompetent as a
geologist. 'I don't think he's done his geological work yet...
One of the primary pillars of his case is that if you
compare the Sphinx to Old Kingdom tombs, they don't
show the same rain weathering, therefore the Sphinx must
be older. But he's comparing layers in the Sphinx to other
layers.' According to Lehner, the 'Sphinx layers' run under
the tombs, so the tombs are made of a different limestone -
Lehner implied afar harder limestone - and weather more
slowly.
If this was true, then it struck a deadly blow at Schoch's
case. When the BBC decided to present the programme
made by West and Boris Said, they hired an independent
expert to decide whether Lehner was correct. Their expert
looked closely at a tomb only a hundred yards from the
Sphinx, and known to date from the same time as the
pyramids. He found that the tombs were made of the very
same flaky limestone as the Sphinx, and contained exactly
the same types of fossil. The tomb layer was the same
layer that the Sphinx was carved from. And Schoch and
West had scored a major victory for their cause. It was
now up to Lehner - and Dr Hawass of the Cairo Museum -
to explain why the tombs had weathered so little in
comparison to the Sphinx and its enclosure and temples.
West had another argument for his 'New Race' civilisation.
The Sphinx Temple is - as we have already noted - built in
a far more simple and bleak form of architecture than later
Egyptian temples. There is in upper Egypt one other
temple that has the same bare style - the Oseirion, near
Abydos. During the nineteenth century, the only famous
temple in this area was the Temple of Osiris, built by the
Pharaoh Seti I (1306-1290
43
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
bc), father of Rameses II, who figures as the oppressor of
the Israelites in the Bible. But the Greek geographer
Strabo (c. 63 bc-c. ad 23) had mentioned another temple
nearby, and in the early twentieth century, Flinders Ptrie
and Margaret Murray began clearing away the sand -to
reveal a temple that stood below the temple of Seti I. It
was not until 1912 that Professor E. Naville cleared away
enough sand to make it clear that this temple was built of
megalithic blocks in a style like that of the Sphinx
Temple, virtually bare of decoration. One block was 25
feet long. Naville was immediately convinced that it dated
from the same time as the Sphinx Temple, and that it
could well be 'the most ancient stone building in Egypt'.
Like the Sphinx, it had been excavated out of the solid
rock, and had no floor, so that it soon turned into a kind of
swimming pool when the excavation was finished in the
early 1930s. Naville even thought that it might be some
primitive waterworks. But seventeen small 'cells', about
the height of a man, also hinted at a monastery.
Because of delay due to the First World War, the
Oseirion was not excavated by Naville, but by a younger
man named Henri Frankfort. Frankfort soon concluded
that it must have been built by Seti I because Seti had
written his name twice on the stone, and because a broken
potsherd was found with the words: 'Seti I is of service to
Osiris'. There were also some astronomical decorations on
the ceilings of two 'transverse chambers' which were
outside the temple itself; these were undoubtedly carved
by Seti or his son.
Yet Frankfort's assumptions were highly questionable.
A more straightforward scenario might be as follows.
When Seti I came to build his temple around 1300 bc, he
found the Oseirion temple buried under the sand, a simple
and massive structure dating from the same time as the
Sphinx, built of massive blocks. Its presence certainly
added dignity to his own temple, so he built two
'transverse chambers' at either end - and outside the
temple itself - carving them with his own astronomical
designs. He also had his own name carved in two places
in the granite of the inner temple. The potsherd with its
inscription about being 'of service to Osiris' simply meant
what it said: he assumed that this ancient temple was built
for Osiris, and he was being 'of service' by adding to it
and repairing it.
Margaret Murray doubted whether Frankfort was
correct in dating it to 1300 bc, pointing out that pharaohs
were fond of adding their own names to monuments of
the past. But by that time, she was also regarded with
some doubt by scholars, for she had created controversy
44
2 The New Race
with her Witch Cult in Western Europe, which argued that
witches were actually worshippers of the pagan 'horned
God' (Pan) who preceded Christianity, and her objections
were ignored.
The Oseirion raises an interesting question. If it was
totally buried in the sand - as the Sphinx was at one point -
is it not conceivable that other monuments built of
'Cyclopean blocks' by some ancient people lie buried
beneath the sand? It was almost certainly not built in
honour of Osiris.
The way that Frankfort had decided that the Oseirion
was more recent than anyone thought is reminiscent of
how Egyptologists came to decide that the Sphinx was
built by Chefren because his name was mentioned - in
some unknown context - in the inscription placed between
its paws by Thutmose IV. It might also remind us of how
the 'Valley Temple' - next to the Sphinx Temple - came to
be attributed to Chefren. Throughout most of the
nineteenth century it was assumed to date from far earlier
than Chefren, because of the bareness of its architecture,
and the fact that it is built with giant stone blocks removed
from the Sphinx enclosure. But when a number of statues
of Chefren were discovered buried in the temple precincts,
Egyptologists revised their views; if statues of Chefren
were found in the temple precincts, surely this proved that
Chefren built it?
The reasoning of course is flawed. The fact that Chefren
set up statues of himself in the temple only proves that he
wanted his name to be associated with it. If Chefren had
built it, would he not have filled it with inscriptions to
himself?
Meanwhile, there is one more interesting piece of
evidence that needs to be mentioned. One of the major
discoveries of Auguste Mariette -the first great
'conservationist' among nineteenth-century archaeologists
- was a limestone stela he uncovered in the ruins of the
Temple of Isis, near the Great Pyramid, in the mid-1850s.
The inscription declares that it is erected by the Pharaoh
Cheops, to commemorate his repairs to the Temple of Isis.
It became known as the Inventory Stela, and would
certainly be regarded as one of the most important of all
Egyptian records - for reasons I shall explain in a moment
- if it were not for one drawback: its hieroglyphics clearly
dated it from around 1000 BC, about 1500 years after
Cheops.
Now scholars would not normally question the
authenticity of a record merely because of its late date, for,
after all, the stela was
45
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
obviously copied from something dating much earlier.
Another valuable record of early kings is contained on a
block of basalt known as the Palermo Stone (because it
has been kept in Palermo since 1877). This contains a list
of kings from the 1st to the 5th Dynasties (i.e. about 3000
bc to 2300 bc), and is known to date from about 700 bc,
when it was copied from some original list. But the fact
that this is 1500 years later than the last king it mentions
causes Egyptologists no embarrassment, for they take it
for granted that it is an accurate copy of the original.
Indeed, why should it not be accurate? Scribes copying in
stone are likely to be more accurate than scribes writing
with a pen.
Then why are they suspicious about Cheops's Inventory
Stela - to the extent of denouncing it as an invention, a
piece of fiction? Because its 'facts' sound too preposterous
to be true. Referring to Cheops, it says 'he found the house
(temple) of Isis, mistress of the pyramid, beside the house
of the Sphinx, north-west of the house of Osiris.'
The implications are staggering. Cheops found the
Temple of Isis, 'mistress of the pyramid', beside the
Temple of the Sphinx. In other words, both the Sphinx
and a pyramid were already there on the Giza plateau at
least a century or so before Cheops.
This is all very puzzling. If Isis is the 'mistress of the
pyramid', then presumably one of the Giza group must be
her pyramid. Which? Cheops also mentions that he built
his pyramid beside the Temple of Isis, and that he also
built a pyramid for the Princess Henutsen. Now we know
that Henutsen's pyramid is one of the three small
pyramids that stand close to the Great Pyramid. It is
therefore just conceivable that one of its sister pyramids is
the pyramid of Cheops.
In any case, what it amounts to is that we do not know
for certain that the Great Pyramid was built by Cheops. It
may have been, but on the other hand it may not have
been. In the next chapter we shall look at the one rather
slender piece of evidence that connects it with Cheops.
Meanwhile, one thing seems clear: that according to the
Inventory Stela, the Sphinx was already there in the time
of Cheops, and so was a 'Pyramid of Isis'. It is hardly
surprising that Egyptologists are anxious to consider the
stela an 'invention'.
It was after the discovery of an undamaged statue of
Chefren that Egyptologists decided that there was a strong
resemblance between its face and that of the Sphinx - in
fact, another statue was even in the form of a sphinx.
46
2 The New Race
At the height of the controversy that followed the San
Diego geological conference, Mark Lehner launched an
attack on West in the National Geographic magazine,
which included a computer image of the face of the
Sphinx merged with a photograph of the face of an
undamaged statue of Chefren from the Valley Temple.
This, Lehner claimed, proved that the face of the Sphinx
was Chefren. To West's eyes, this was absurd - the Sphinx
looked nothing like Chefren. But, for better or worse,
computer models make impressive arguments. West
decided to counterattack. And the producer of the video,
Boris Said, came up with an inspired idea: get a trained
police artist to work on it.
Enquiries about who was the best in New York pointed
them towards Detective Frank Domingo, senior forensic
artist with the New York City Police Department.
Since he joined the Department in 1966, Domingo had
been right up through the ranks, and ended as a major
consultant in any kind of case that involved facial
reconstruction. Sometimes they were straightforward
criminal cases - like that of the nun who was raped,
sodomised and tattooed with dozens of cross-shaped cuts
by two intruders. Domingo went to see her in hospital,
drew the faces of the burglars from her descriptions, and
was able to provide the lead that led to the arrest and
conviction of both suspects.
As his reputation spread, he was at various times called
in by archaeologists and historians. A fragment of broken
potsherd showed the mouth and chin of a man
archaeologists thought might be Alexander the Great, but
there is no accredited portrait of Alexander - only many
idealised portraits. Domingo looked at every one
available, and made a kind of composite - which was
found to match closely the mouth and chin of the
potsherd. He was even asked to undertake the
reconstruction of the face of the crystal 'Skull of Doom',
on the supposition that it was an exact copy of the skull of
some ancient princess. In another case - that of an old
daguerreotype photograph whose proud owner thought it
might be the young Abraham Lincoln - Domingo had to
disappoint: he took one look at the photograph and said:
'Definitely not.'
There are times when a police artist can achieve such an
astonishing likeness to the suspect - based purely on the
description of witnesses -that it raises the suspicion that he
must be telepathic. But in cases like the identification of
Chefren, the technique requires only scientific precision.
When West asked Domingo if he was willing to go to
Giza and decide
47
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
whether the Sphinx and Chefren were one and the same,
Domingo asked: 'What if I decide it is Chefren?'
'If that's what you come up with, that's what I'll publish.'
On this promise, Domingo went to Cairo, and took many
photographs of the Sphinx and of the statue of Chefren in
the Cairo Museum. His conclusion was that the chin of the
Sphinx is far more prominent than that of Chefren.
Moreover, a line drawn from the ear to the corner of the
Sphinx's mouth sloped at an angle of 32 degrees. A similar
line drawn on Chefren was only 14 degrees. This, and
other dissimilarities, led Domingo to conclude that the
Sphinx is definitely not a portrait of Chefren.
48
3 Inside the Pyramid
W
hen Herodotus visited the Great Pyramid in 440 bc, it was
a white, gleaming structure that dazzled the eyes. At that
time, its limestone casing was still intact; the blocks were
so precisely cut that the joints were virtually invisible. Just
over four centuries later, in 24 bc, the Greek geographer
Strabo also visited Giza, and reported that on the north
face of the Pyramid, there was a hinged stone that could be
raised, and which revealed a passage a mere four feet
square, which led downward to a vermin-infested pit 150
feet directly below the Pyramid. Herodotus had said that
there were several underground chambers, intended as
'vaults', built on a sort of island surrounded by water that
flowed from the Nile. The reality, it seemed, was a small,
damp chamber, and no sign of an island or a canal.
Eight centuries passed, and in Baghdad there reigned the
great Haroun Al-Rashid, the caliph of the Arabian Nights.
In fact, Haroun was not particularly great; he received his
honorific title Al-Rashid ('one who follows the right path')
as a teenager for winning a war against Constantinople
under the direction of more experienced generals. His
elder brother, who became caliph before him, died under
mysterious circumstances suggesting murder. Haroun
succeeded to a vast empire stretching from the
Mediterranean to India, and he increased his wealth by
permitting regional governors and princes to pay him
yearly payments in exchange for semi-independence. It
was his vast wealth arid conspicuous consumption that
impressed his contemporaries. Tales of him roaming the
streets in disguise, with his Grand Vizier Jafar and
executioner Mazrur may well be true; so are tales of his
uncertain temper: he had Jafar and his whole family
executed for reasons still unclear. He died in his mid-
forties from a disease picked up while on his way to
repress a revolt in Persia.
49
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
Haroun divided his empire between his two sons, Al-
Amin and Al-Mamun, further contributing to the
dissolution of his empire. It is Abdullah Al-Mamun who
concerns us here, for when he became caliph in ad 813, at
the age of 27, he set out to turn Baghdad into a centre of
learning like ancient Alexandria. Haroun had been a
connoisseur of art and poetry, but Al-Mamun was also
interested in science, and founded a library, called the
House of Wisdom, intended to rival the great library of
ancient Alexandria. He also had an observatory built, and
commissioned the first atlas of the stars. This amazing
man was curious about the circumference of the earth, and
doubted Ptolemy's estimate of 18,000 miles. So he had his
astronomers marching north and south over the flat sandy
plain of Palmyra until their astronomical observations told
them that the latitude had changed by one degree, which
had occurred in just over 64 miles. Multiplied by 360, this
gave 23,180 miles, a far more accurate figure than
Ptolemy's. (The actual circumference at the equator is
roughly 24,900 miles.)
When Al-Mamun heard that the Great Pyramid was
supposed to contain star maps and terrestrial globes of
amazing accuracy - not to mention fabulous treasures - he
resolved to add them to his collection. In ad 820, the
seventh year of his reign, he landed in Egypt -which was
part of his empire - with an army of scholars and
engineers. Mamun has left us no account of the
expedition, but it has been described by a number of later
Arab historians.
Unfortunately, the location of the 'hinged trapdoor' had
been forgotten in the past few centuries and the gleaming
limestone of the Pyramid offered no clue to its
whereabouts. So he decided to break his way in by sheer
force. The limestone casing proved impervious to chisels -
days of work only produced shallow depressions. Al-
Mamun decided on a cruder method - to build huge fires
against the limestone, and then cool the red-hot surface
with buckets of cold vinegar. The cracked limestone wa
then levered and battered out.
After tunnelling through eight feet of hard limestone,
the workmen found themselves confronting the inner
blocks of the Pyramid, which proved just as hard. It took
months to tunnel a hundred feet into it, and by that time,
Al-Mamun concluded that it was solid throughout and was
about to give up when one of his workmen heard a dull
thud coming from somewhere to the left. They changed
direction, and finally broke into a narrow and low passage
that seemed to have been made for dwarfs. On its floor lay
a prism-shaped stone from the ceiling, which had made
the thud.
50
3 Inside the Pyramid
They crawled up the slope, and finally discovered the
original entrance to the Pyramid, ten courses above the
entrance Al-Mamun had forced. It had cunningly been
placed 24 feet left of centre, and was invisible behind
huge limestone gables. Arab historians claim that the
hinged stone - which required two men to move it - was
still there -it vanished centuries later, when the limestone
casing was purloined by builders.
Now they retraced their steps and crawled down the
passage. This simply led them to Strabo's Vermin-infested
pit', with an irregular (and obviously unfinished) floor. On
the further side of this there was a low passage that ended
in a blank wall. Clearly, this had been abandoned.
Again, luck favoured Mamun. The stone that had fallen
from the ceiling revealed the end of a granite plug which
looked as if it blocked a passage that sloped upward. This
again proved too hard for their chisels, so Mamun told his
men to cut into the softer limestone to the right of it. But
when they came to the end of it, there was another plug,
and at the end of that, yet another - each of the plugs about
six feet long. Beyond this there was a passage blocked
with a limestone plug, which they cut their way through
with grim persistence. Beyond that there was another, then
still another. The workmen were now eager, for they felt
that whoever had taken so much trouble to block the
passageway must certainly have concealed some
marvellous treasure ...
A long crawl up another low passageway finally led to a
space where they could stand upright. Facing them was
another low corridor - less than four feet high - that ran
horizontally due south. They scrambled along this for
more than a hundred feet, then found that the floor
suddenly dropped in a two-foot step, enabling them at last
to stand upright. But why a two-foot step at that point?
The Pyramid would prove to be full of such absurd and
arbitrary mysteries - so many that it is hardly surprising
that, in later centuries, cranks would read profound
significance into its strange measurements, such as
detailed prophecies of the events of the next 5000 years.
Now Al-Mamun - who took care to go first - found
himself standing in a rectangular room with plastered
walls and a gabled roof, like a barn. It was completely
bare and empty. In the east wall there was a tall niche that
looked as if it had been carved for a large statue, but it was
also empty. The floor was rough, and looked unfinished.
Because the Arabs buried their women in tombs with
gabled ceilings (and men in tombs with flat ceilings), Al-
Mamun arbitrarily labelled this the Queen's Chamber. But
it contained no artefact - or anything else - to associate
5
1
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
it with a woman; Bafflingly, the walls were encrusted
with a half-inch layer of salt.
The measurements of the room were puzzling -
although Al-Mamun was probably too chagrined at the
lack of treasure to pay much attention to them. It was not
quite square, which was odd, since the pyramid builders
showed themselves obsessed with precision and accuracy,
and the wall niche was slightly off-centre. In the
nineteenth century another puzzle would become apparent
when an explorer named Dixon, tapping the walls, noticed
a hollow sound, and got a workman to cut into the wall
with a chisel. This revealed an 'air vent' sloping upwards.
Yet the air vent - and an identical one in the opposite wall
- failed to reach the outside of the Pyramid. Why should
the architect of the Pyramid build two 'air vents' that
failed to reach the outside air, and then seal them off at the
lower end so they were not visible? It sounds like Alice's
White Knight:
But I was thinking
of a plan To dye
one's whiskers
green, Then always
use so large a fan
That they could not
be seen.
Did these ancient builders have a sense of humour like
Lewis Carroll?
There is another puzzle. The 'Queen's Chamber' looks
as if it was left unfinished. If so, then why did the
workmen continue to construct the 'air vents' as they went
on building upwards? Is the chamber part of some curious
bluff?
Al-Mamun ordered his workmen to hack into the wall
behind the niche, in case it was a secret doorway into
another chamber, but after a few feet, gave up. Instead,
they retraced their steps to the end of the horizontal
passage, where they could stand upright, and raised their
torches above their heads. They could now see that the
level 'step' they were standing on had not always been
there. The low ascending passage they had climbed had
once continued upward in a straight line; this was proved
by joist holes in the walls which had once supported it.
Standing on one another's shoulders, they heaved
themselves up the side of the 'step', and into the
continuation of the ascending passage. As they held their
torches aloft and saw what lay ahead, they must have
gasped with astonishment. There was no longer a lack of
headroom - the ceiling of this long ascending tunnel was
far above them. And ahead of them, rising at the same
angle as the ascending passage
52
3 Inside the Pyramid
behind them (26 degrees), the tunnel ran up into the heart
of the Pyramid. This marvellous structure would be
christened the Grand Gallery.
This gallery, about seven feet wide at floor level,
narrowed to about half this width at the ceiling, about 28
feet above. Against the wall on either side is a two-foot
high step or ramp, so that the actual floor is a sunken
channel or slot, just less than three and a half feet wide.
Why there has to be a sunken channel between two low
walls, instead of a flat floor, is another of those unsolved
mysteries of the Pyramid.
A long scramble of 153 feet up the slippery limestone
floor brought them to a huge stone higher than a man; the
top of a doorway was visible behind it. When they had
clambered over this, and down another short passageway,
they found themselves in the room that was obviously the
heart of the Pyramid. It was far larger than the 'Queen's
Chamber' below, and beautifully constructed of red
polished granite; the ceiling above them was more than
three times the height of a man. This, obviously, was the
King's Chamber. Yet, except for an object like a red granite
bathtub, it was completely empty.
Al-Mamun was baffled; his workmen were enraged. It
was like some absurd joke - all this effort, to no purpose
whatsoever. The 'bathtub' - presumably a sarcophagus -
was also empty, and had no lid. The walls were
undecorated. Surely this had to be the antechamber to
some other treasure chamber? They attacked the floor, and
even hacked into the granite in one corner of the room. It
was all to no avail. If the Pyramid was a tomb, it had been
looted long ago.
Yet how was this possible? No one could have been in
here before them. And the sheer bareness of the room, the
lack of any debris or rubbish on the floor, suggested that
there had never been any treasure, for robbers would have
left something behind, if only useless fragments of their
loot.
Oral tradition describes how Al-Mamun pacified the
angry workmen by having treasure carried into the
Pyramid at night, and then 'discovered' the next day and
distributed among them. After that, Al-Mamun, puzzled
and disappointed, returned to Baghdad, where he devoted
the remaining twelve years of his reign to trying - entirely
without success - to reconcile the Sunni and Shi'ite
Muslims. Like his father, he died when on campaign.
In 1220, the historian and physician Abdul Latif was one
of the last to see the Pyramid still encased in limestone.
Two years later much of Cairo was destroyed by a great
earthquake, and the limestone - 22
53
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
acres of it - was removed to rebuild the city's public
buildings. The 'Grand Mosque' is built almost entirely
from the casing of the Pyramid. But it is a pity that the
builders did not retain its inscriptions. Abdul Latif said
that the hieroglyphics on its surface were so numerous
that they would have occupied thousands of pages. In that
case, we would presumably know the answer to the riddle
of the Pyramid.
As it happened, Al-Mamun was wrong in believing that
there was no other entrance to the Pyramid. It was almost
rediscovered in 1638 by an English mathematician called
John Greaves, who went out to Egypt armed with various
measuring instruments. After struggling through a cloud of
huge bats, and staggering out of the Queen's Chamber
because the stench of vermin made him retch, he made his
way up the smooth ramp of the Grand Gallery, and
surveyed the King's Chamber with the same bafflement as
Al-Mamun; it seemed incomprehensible that this vast
structure should be built merely to house this red-granite
room with its granite bathtub. On his way back down the
Grand Gallery, just before it rejoined the narrow ascending
passage, he noticed that a stone was missing from the
ramp on one side. Peering down into the hole, he
concluded that there was a kind of well that descended
into the heart of the Pyramid. He even had the courage to
lower himself into this well, and to descend about 60 feet -
at which point it had been enlarged into a small grotto. He
dropped a lighted torch into the continuation of the well,
and realised that it came to an end when the torch lay
flickering somewhere in the depths. But the fetid air and
the presence of bats drove him out again. Back in England,
his book Pyramidographia brought him celebrity, and an
appointment as Professor of Astronomy at Oxford.
Two centuries later, an intrepid Italian sea captain - and
student of the hermetic arts - named Giovanni Battista
Caviglia gave up the sea to devote himself to the mystery
of the Great Pyramid. Like Al-Mamun, he believed that
there must be a secret room that would reveal why the
Pyramid had been built.
In fact, a kind of 'secret chamber' had been discovered
in 1765 by an explorer named Nathaniel Davison, who
had observed a curious echo at the top of the Grand
Gallery, and raised a candle on two joined canes to look at
the wall above him. At ceiling-level he had seen a hole in
the wall, and investigated it with the aid of a shaky ladder.
He crawled down a tunnel almost blocked with bat dung,
and found himself
54
3 Inside the Pyramid
in a 'chamber' that was only about three feet high, whose
irregular floor was formed of the blocks that made the
ceiling of the King's Chamber, directly below it. But it
proved to be quite empty.
In his search for a secret chamber, Caviglia paid a gang
of workmen to dig a tunnel out of 'Davison's Chamber',
while he used the Chamber itself as a bedroom. It seems to
have occurred to him that there might well be more hidden
chambers above this one, but he lacked the resources to
search for them. Instead, he decided to explore the mystery
of the 'well'. He went twice as far as John Greaves, but
found the bottom blocked with rubble, and the air so fetid
that his candle went out.
He tried removing the rubble by having his workmen
pull it up in baskets; but they soon refused to work in such
appalling conditions, choked with foul air and powdered
bat dung. He tried clearing the air with burning sulphur,
but since sulphur dioxide is a deadly poison, this only
made it worse.
Caviglia returned to the descending passage that ran
down to the 'vermin-infested pit' under the Pyramid. It was
still full of limestone debris from the entrance cut by Al-
Mamun's workmen. Caviglia had this removed, and
crawled on down the passage. The air was so foul and hot
that he began to spit blood; but he pressed on. A hundred
and fifty feet further down, he found a low doorway in the
right-hand wall. When he smelt sulphur, he guessed that he
had found the lower end of the well. His workmen began
to try to clear the debris, and suddenly had to retreat as it
fell down on them - bringing the basket they had left at the
bottom of the well. This was the secret entrance to the
heart of the Pyramid.
In a sense, this raised more problems than it solved. The
obvious explanation was that the builders of the Pyramid
had used it to escape after they had blocked the ascending
passageway with granite plugs and so sealed the Pyramid.
But that theory demanded that they should slide the granite
plugs down the ascending passageway like pushing corks
down the neck of a bottle; the sheer size and weight of the
plugs would have made this impossible. It was far more
sensible to assume that the plugs were inserted as the
Pyramid was being built - in which case, the builders
would not need an escape passage, because they could
walk out via the still unfinished top.
The truth is that, where the pyramids are concerned, there
are no
55
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
absolute certainties: only certain established ideas that the
'experts' have agreed to accept because it is convenient to
do so.
One of these established ideas is the 'certainty' that the
Great Pyramid was built by a pharaoh called Cheops or
Khufu. As a cautionary tale, it is worth telling how this
particular 'certainty' came about.
In 1835, a British officer, Colonel Richard Howard-
Vyse - according to one writer, 'a trial to his family', who
were anxious to get rid of him
1
- came to Egypt and was
bitten by the 'discovery' bug. He approached Caviglia,
who was still exploring the Pyramid, and offered to fund
his researches if Caviglia would give him credit as the co-
discoverer of any major find; Caviglia rejected this.
In 1836 Howard-Vyse returned to Egypt and managed
to obtain a firman - permission to excavate - from the
Egyptian government. But, to Howard-Vyse's disgust, this
named the British Consul, Colonel Campbell, as a co-
excavator, and Caviglia as supervisor. Howard-Vyse paid
over a sum of money to finance the investigation, and
went off on a sightseeing tour. When he returned, he was
infuriated to find that Caviglia was looking for mummies
in tombs instead of investigating the Great Pyramid for
secret chambers, which is what Howard-Vyse wanted,
Caviglia had told him that he suspected that there might
be more hidden rooms above Davison's Chamber.
On the night of 12 February 1837, Howard-Vyse
entered the Pyramid at night, accompanied by an engineer
named John Perring, and went to examine a crack that had
developed in a granite block above and to one side of
Davison's Chamber; a three-foot reed could be pushed
straight through it, which suggested there might be
another chamber above. The very next morning, Howard-
Vyse dismissed Caviglia, and appointed Perring to his
team.
Howard-Vyse's workmen now began to try to cut their
way through the granite at the side of Davison's Chamber.
It proved more difficult than he had expected, and a
month later he had still made little headway. Royal
visitors came, and Howard-Vyse had little to show them
except 'Campbell's Tomb', which Caviglia had discovered
near one of the other Giza pyramids. (He also tried boring
into the shoulder of the Sphinx, looking for masons'
markings, but was unsuccessful.) Finally, in desperation,
he employed small charges of gunpowder - which made
granite fly around like shrapnel - and managed to open a
small passage up from out of Davison's Chamber.
Oddly enough, Howard-Vyse then dismissed the
foreman of the
56
3 Inside the Pyramid
workmen. The next day, a candle on the end of a stick
revealed that Caviglia had been right; there was another
hidden chamber above.
The hole was further enlarged with gunpowder. The first
to enter it was Howard-Vyse, accompanied by a local
copper mill employee and well-known 'fixer' named J. R.
Hill. What they found was another low chamber - only
three feet high - whose irregular floor was covered with
thick black dust, made of the cast-off shells of insects. To
Howard-Vyse's disappointment, it was completely empty.
Howard-Vyse decided to call it Wellington's Chamber.
The hole was enlarged yet again, and the next time
Howard-Vyse entered it, with John Perring, and another
engineer named Mash, they discovered a number of marks
painted in a kind of red pigment, daubed on the walls.
These were 'quarry marks', marks painted on the stones
when they were still in the quarry, to show where they had
to go in the Pyramid. Conveniently enough, none of these
marks appeared on the end wall, through which Howard-
Vyse had smashed his way. But there was something more
exciting than mere quarry marks - a series of hieroglyphs
in an oblong-shaped box (or cartouche) - which meant the
name of a pharaoh. Oddly enough, Howard-Vyse had
failed to notice these when he first entered the chamber.
From the fact that Wellington's Chamber was almost
identical with Davison's underneath it, Howard-Vyse
reasoned that there must be more above. It took four and a
half months of blasting to discover these - three more
chambers on top of one another. The topmost chamber,
which Howard-Vyse called 'Campbell's Chamber', had a
roof that sloped to a point, like the roof of a house. All the
chambers had more quarry markings, and two of them -
including Campbell's Chamber - had more names in
cartouches. As in Wellington's Chamber, these marks were
never on the wall through which Howard-Vyse had
broken...
The purpose of these chambers was now apparent: to
relieve the pressure of masonry on the King's Chamber
below. If there was an earthquake that shook the Pyramid,
the vibration would not be transmitted through solid
masonry to the King's Chamber. In fact, there had been an
earthquake, as the cracks in the granite revealed, and the
secret chambers had served their purpose and prevented
the King's Chamber from collapsing.
When copies of the quarry marks and inscriptions were
sent to the British Museum, the hieroglyphics expert
Samuel Birch testified that one of the names written in a
cartouche, and found in Campbell's
57
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
Chamber, was that of the Pharaoh Khufu. So, at last,
someone had proved that Cheops built the Great Pyramid,
and Howard-Vyse had earned himself immortality among
Egyptologists.
But Samuel Birch admitted that there were certain
things about the inscriptions that puzzled him. To begin
with, many were upside-down. Moreover, although the
script was - obviously - supposed to be from the time of
Cheops, around 2500 bc, it looked as if many of the
symbols came from a much later period, when
hieroglyphics had ceased to be 'pictures', and become
something more like cursive writing. Many of the
hieroglyphs were unknown - or written by someone so
illiterate that they could hardly be deciphered. This in
itself was baffling. Early hieroglyphic writing was a fine
art, and only highly trained scribes had mastered it. These
hieroglyphs looked as if they had been scrawled by the
ancient Egyptian equivalent of Just William.
Most puzzling of all, two pharaohs seemed to be named
in the cartouches - Khufu and someone called Khnem-
khuf. Who was this Khnem-khuf ? Later Egyptologists
were agreed that he was supposed to be another pharaoh -
and not just some variant on Khufu - yet the puzzling
thing was that his name appeared in chambers lower than
Campbell's Chamber, implying that Khnem-Khuf had
started the Pyramid and Khufu had completed it (since a
pyramid is built from the bottom up). It was an
embarrassing puzzle for archaeologists.
The answer to this puzzle has been suggested by the
writer Zechariah Sitchin. Unfortunately, his solution will
never be taken seriously by scholars or archaeologists,
because Mr Sitchin, like Erich von Daniken, belongs to
the fraternity who believe that the pyramids were built by
visitors from outer space, 'ancient astronauts'. Sitchin's
own highly individual version of this theory is expounded
in a series of books called The Earth Chronicles. These
have failed to achieve the same widespread impact as
Daniken's because Sitchin is almost obsessively scholarly;
he can read Egyptian hieroglyphics, and he overloads his
chapters with archaeological details that sometimes make
them hard going. But no matter how one feels about his
theory that 'gods' came to earth from a '12th planet' nearly
half a million years ago, there can be no doubt that he has
an extremely acute mind, and that his erudition is
enormous. And what he has to say about Howard-Vyse
goes straight to the point.
Sitchin points out that no marks of any kind were found
in Davison's Chamber, discovered in 1765 - only in those
discovered by Howard-Vyse. And, noting that Howard-
Vyse dismissed Caviglia the day after his secret visit to
Davison's Chamber, and his foreman on the day
58
3 Inside the Pyramid
the workmen broke through into Wellington's Chamber, he
concludes reasonably that Howard-Vyse preferred not to
be observed by anyone who had his wits about him. He
notes that Hill was allowed to wander in and out of the
newly discovered chambers freely, and that it was he who
first copied the quarry marks and other inscriptions.
The atmosphere that surrounded Vyse's operations in
those hectic days is well described by the Colonel
himself. Major discoveries were being made all
around the pyramids, but not within them. Campbell's
Tomb, discovered by the detested Caviglia, was
yielding not only artefacts but also masons' markings
and hieroglyphics in red paint. Vyse was becoming
desperate to achieve his own discovery. Finally he
broke through to hitherto unknown chambers; but
they only duplicated one after the other a previously
discovered chamber (Davison's) and were bare and
empty. What could he show for all the effort and
expenditure? For what would he be honoured, by
what would he be remembered?
We know from Vyse's chronicles that, by day, he
had sent in Mr Hill to inscribe the chambers with the
names of the Duke of Wellington and Admiral
Nelson, heroes of the victories over Napoleon. By
night, we suspect, Mr Hill also entered the chambers,
to 'christen' the pyramid with the cartouches of its
presumed ancient builder.
2
The problem was that in the 1830s, knowledge of
hieroglyphics was still minimal (the Rosetta Stone, with
its parallel inscriptions in Greek and ancient Egyptian, had
only been discovered in 1799). One of the few books that
Hill might have consulted would be Sir John Wilkinson's
Materia Hieroglyphic^, and even Wilkinson was uncertain
about the reading of royal names.
Sitchin suggests that what happened is that Hill
inscribed the name that Wilkinson thought was Khufu, and
then Howard-Vyse heard that a new work by Wilkinson,
the three-volume Manners and Customs of the Ancient
Egyptians, published earlier that year, had just reached
Cairo. Howard-Vyse and Hill did some frantic - and
unexplained -commuting between Giza and Cairo soon
after the discovery of the chamber named after Lady
Arbuthnot. They must have been dismayed to find that
Wilkinson had changed his mind about how Khufu was
spelt, and that Hill had inscribed the wrong name in the
lower chambers. They hastened to put right this appalling
blunder in the newly
59
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
discovered Campbell's Chamber, and at last the correct
spelling of Khufu appeared.
But what they did not know was that Wilkinson was
still incorrect. The 'Kh' of Khufu should be rendered by a
symbol like a small circle with lines hatched across it - a
sieve. Wilkinson, and a Frenchman named Laborde (who
had also written about hieroglyphs in a travel book) made
the mistake of rendering this as a sun-disc - a circle with a
dot in the middle. In fact, this was the name for the sun
god Ra. So instead of writing 'Khufu', the forger wrote
'Raufu'. No ancient Egyptian would have made such an
appalling and blasphemous error.
But what about the red paint? Would it not be obvious
that the inscriptions were modern, and not more than four
thousand years old? No. The same red ochre paint was
still used by the Arabs, and Perring noted that it was hard
to distinguish ancient quarry marks from new ones. (In
the same way, many Cro-Magnon cave paintings look as
fresh as if they were made yesterday.)
Sitchin notes that Mr Hill, who had been a mere copper
mill employee when Howard-Vyse met him, became the
owner of the Cairo Hotel when Howard-Vyse left Egypt,
and that Howard-Vyse thanks him effusively in his book.
Howard-Vyse himself had spent ten thousand pounds
- an incredible sum - on his excavations. But the black
sheep was able
to return to his family as a famous scholar and discoverer.
It is Sitchin's intention to try to prove that the Great
Pyramid was built in some remote age, at the time of the
Sphinx. This would seem to be a reasonable assumption -
except that carbon-dating tests on organic material found
in the mortar of the Great Pyramid seem to indicate that
its date was - give or take a century or so - the middle of
the third millennium bc. (We shall see later that there is
another reason
the astronomical alignment of the 'air vents' in the King's
Chamber
for accepting the conventional dating.) It is nevertheless
worth bearing in mind the curious tale of how
Egyptologists came to accept that the Great Pyramid was
built by Khufu, and to draw from it the moral that, where
ancient civilisations are concerned, nothing should be
taken for granted unless it is based on hard scientific
evidence.
Mr Hill, at least, had one genuine discovery to his credit.
John Greaves had noted two nine-inch openings in the
walls of the King's Chamber, and speculated that they
were air vents. It was Hill who, two centuries
60
3 Inside the Pyramid
later, clambered up the outside of the Pyramid and found
the outlets that proved that they were air vents. When they
were cleared of debris, a cool breeze rushed down them,
keeping the King's Chamber at a constant 68 degrees
Fahrenheit, no matter what the temperature outside. Again,
this only seemed to increase the mystery. Why should the
ancient Egyptians want a chamber kept at exactly 68
degrees? One of the scholars Napoleon had taken with him
to Egypt in 1798, Edm-Franois Jomard, speculated that
the Chamber might be a storage place for measuring
instruments, which would need to be kept at a constant
temperature. But this theory failed to explain why, in that
case, the King's Chamber had to be virtually inaccessible.
Or why it had to be approached by a long, slippery gallery
of smooth limestone rather than a sensible staircase.
It is difficult for a reader, who has to rely on facts and
figures printed in a book, to realise how much more
baffling the Great Pyramid is when confronted in its
overwhelming reality. In Fingerprints of the Gods,
Graham Hancock conveys something of his own
bewilderment as he repeats: 'All was confusion. All was
paradox. All was mystery.' For the inner architecture of the
Pyramid simply fails to make sense. Everything has an air
of precision, of some exact purpose; yet it is impossible to
begin to guess the nature of this purpose. For example, the
'walls' or ramps on either side of the 'slot' at the centre of
the Grand Gallery have a series of slots cut into them.
These could be to help the climber. But why are the holes
of two different lengths, alternately long and short, and
why do the short ones slope, while the long ones are
horizontal? And why does the sloping length of the short
holes equal the horizontal length of the long holes? It is as
if the place had been designed by an insane
mathematician.
To see these vast blocks - some weighing as much as 70
tons - all laid in place as neatly as if they were ordinary-
sized builder's bricks, brings an overwhelming sense of
the incredible skill involved. Medieval cathedrals were
built by masons who devoted their lives to the study of
their craft, and who apparently incorporated as many
mysterious measurements as the Great Pyramid. But
cathedral building lasted for centuries, and there were so
many that the masons had plenty of time to practise their
craft. The pyramids of Giza were preceded - according to
the history books - by a few cruder examples like the Step
Pyramid at Saqqara and the Bent Pyramid at Dahshur.
Where did the Great Pyramid's craftsmen learn their skill?
Again, why was the Great Pyramid so bleak and bare,
like a
6
1
? opninx
geometrical demonstration? Why were there none of the
wall decorations that we associate with Egyptian temples?
As we saw in the last chapter, even an object as simple
as the sarcophagus in the King's Chamber presented
impossible technical problems, so that Flinders Ptrie
speculated that it had been cut out of the granite by bronze
saws studded with diamonds, and hollowed out by some
totally unknown 'drill' made of a tube with a saw edge
tipped with diamonds. Moreover (as we saw in the last
chapter), swan-necked vases, cut out of basalt, quartz and
diorite with some unknown tool, seem to prove
conclusively that there was a highly sophisticated
civilisation in Egypt long before the First Dynasty. This is
not some Daniken-like crankery, but hard evidence that
Egyptologists refuse to face squarely.
The first scientific theory of the purpose of the Great
Pyramid was put forward by a London publisher named
John Taylor in 1864. He wondered why the builders of the
Pyramid had chosen to make it slope at an angle of almost
52 - 51 51'. When he compared the height of the
Pyramid with the length of its base he saw the only
possible answer: it had to slope at that exact angle if the
relation of its height to the length of its base should be
exactly the relation of the radius of a circle to its
circumference. In other words, the builders were revealing
a knowledge of what the Greeks would later call tt (pi).
Why should they want to encode tt in the Pyramid? Could
it possibly be that they were really speaking about the
earth itself, so the Pyramid was supposed to represent the
hemisphere from the North Pole to the equator?
In fact, towards the end of the second century bc, the
Greek grammarian Agatharchides of Cnidus, the tutor of
the pharaoh's children, was told that the base of the Great
Pyramid was precisely one eighth of a minute of a degree
in length - that is, it was an eighth of a minute of a degree
of the earth's circumference. (A minute is a sixtieth of a
degree.) Intact, if the length of the Pyramid's base is
multiplied by eight, then sixty, then 360, the result is just
under 25,000 miles, a remarkable approximation of the
circumference of the earth.
Taylor concluded that, being unable to build a huge
dome, the Egyptians had done the next best thing and
incorporated the earth's measurements into a pyramid.
So it was possible - indeed, highly likely - that the
ancient Egyptians possessed knowledge that was
thousands of years ahead of their time.
62
3 Inside the Pyramid
Unfortunately, this was Taylor's sticking point. Rather than
give the ancient Egyptians credit for knowing far more
than anyone thought, he concluded that the only way these
ignoramuses could have known such things was from
Divine Revelation - God had directly inspired them. That
was too much even for the Victorians, and his work was
received with derision.
When the Scottish Astronomer Royal, Charles Piazzi
Smyth - who was also a friend of Taylor's - visited the
Pyramid in 1865 and made his own measurements, he
concluded that Taylor was fundamentally correct about ir.
But being, like Taylor, a Christian zealot, he was also
unable to resist the temptation to drag in Jehovah and the
Bible. Not long before, a religious crank named Robert
Menzies had advanced the theory that the Great Pyramid
contained detailed prophecies of world history in its
measurements. Piazzi Smyth swallowed this whole, and
concluded that the Pyramid revealed that the earth was
created in 4004 bc, and that it contains all the major dates
in earth history, such as the Flood in 2400 bc. He also
came up with a staggeringly simple explanation of why the
Grand Gallery is so different from the narrow ascending
passage that leads to it: its beginning symbolises the birth
of Christ. The Second Coming, he concluded, will happen
in 1911. All this was again received by his scientific
contemporaries with scepticism, although his book had
considerable popular success.
Later, the founder of the Jehovah's Witnesses, Charles
Taze Russell, would embrace the prophecy theory of the
Great Pyramid, and a group called the British Israelites,
who believed that the British are the ten lost tribes of
Israel, elaborated it even further.
3
More sober theories of the Pyramid's purpose included
the suggestion that it was intended as a landmark for
Egyptian land surveyors, and that it was a giant sundial.
This latter led to the most interesting and plausible theory
so far: that it was intended as an astronomical observatory.
This had been stated as fact by the fifth-century Byzantine
philosopher Proclus, who mentioned that the Pyramid was
used as an observatory while it was under construction. In
1883 it was again advanced by an astronomer, Richard
Anthony Proctor.
Proctor realised that one of the prime necessities for an
agricultural civilisation is an accurate calendar, which
involves precise observation of the moon and stars. What
they would need, to begin with, is a long narrow slot
pointing due north (or south), through which the passage
of stars and planets could be observed and noted down in
star tables.
The first necessity, said Proctor, was to determine true
north, then
63
prom Atlantis to the Sphinx
align a tube on it. Nowadays we point a telescope at the
Pole star; but in ancient Egypt, this was not in the same
place, due to a phenomenon called 'procession of the
equinoxes' (a term to note, since it will play a major part
in later arguments). Imagine a pencil stuck through the
earth from the North to the South Pole; this is its axis. But
due to the gravity of the sun and moon, this axis has a
slight wobble, and its ends describe small circles in the
heavens, causing the north end of the pencil to point at
different stars. In ancient Egypt, the Pole star was Alpha
Draconis.
Now the stars appear to describe a semicircle above our
heads, from horizon to horizon. Those directly overhead
(at the meridian) describe the longest circle, those nearest
the Pole the smallest. If the ancient Egyptians had wanted
to point a telescope at Alpha Draconis, they would have
had to point it at an angle of 26 17' - which, Proctor
noted, happens to be precisely the angle of the descending
passage.
He also noted that if the 'vermin-infested pit'
underneath the Pyramid had been filled with water, the
light of the then Pole star, Alpha Draconis, would shine
down it on to the 'pool', as into the mirror of a modern
astronomer's telescope. The flat top of the Great Pyramid
was, according to Proctor, an observatory platform.
Proctor's theory had the advantage of suggesting the
purpose of the Grand Gallery, and the peculiar oblong
holes in its 'ramp'. If, said Proctor, an ancient astronomer
wanted an ideal 'telescope' to study the heavens, he would
probably ask an architect to devise a building with an
enormous slot in one of its walls, through which he could
study the transit of the stars. Proctor thought that the top
end of the Grand Gallery was originally such a slot.
Astronomers stationed on scaffolding above the Grand
Gallery - with the scaffolding based in the oblong holes -
would be able to observe the transits of stars with great
accuracy. The bricks in the apex of the Grand Gallery are
removable, and this would also enable them to study the
stars overhead.
The obvious objection is that the Grand Gallery at
present ends halfway across the Pyramid, and that the
King's Chamber with its 'secret chambers' lies beyond it.
The present King's Chamber would have completely
blocked the 'slot'. But is it not conceivable, said Proctor,
that the Pyramid remained in its half-finished state for a
long time before it was finished? In fact, once the heavens
had been minutely mapped, the unfinished pyramid would
have served its purpose, and could be completed. Proctor
envisaged that it would take about ten years before the
builders were ready to move beyond the Grand Gallery,
64
3 Inside the Pyramid
and by that time the priests would have completed their
work of making star maps and calendars.
In retrospect, it seems clear that Proctor had come the
closest so far to suggesting a reasonable theory of the
Great Pyramid. Since The Great Pyramid, Observatory,
Tomb and Temple, we have become increasingly aware of
the astronomical alignments of great monuments like the
Egyptian temples and Stonehenge. In fact, it was only ten
years after Proctor's book, in 1893, that the British
astronomer Norman Lockyer (later Sir Norman), who
identified helium in the sun, went on to demonstrate
precisely how Egyptian temples could have been used. On
holiday in Greece, the young Lockyer found himself
wondering if the Parthenon was aligned astronomically -
recalling, as he said later, that the east windows of many
English churches face the sunrise on the day of their
patron saint. Since Egyptian temples had been measured
and documented so carefully, he turned to them to seek
evidence for his thesis. He was able to show that temples
were astronomically aligned, so that the light of a star or
other heavenly body would penetrate their depths as it
might have penetrated a telescope. He noted, for example,
how the light of the sun at the summer solstice entered the
temple of Amen-Ra at Karnak and penetrated along its
axis to the sanctuary. Lockyer was also the first to suggest
that Stonehenge had been constructed as a sort of
observatory - a view now generally accepted.
The significance of Lockyer's method was that it
enabled him to date Stonehenge to 1680 bc, and the
Karnak temple - or at least its original plan - to about 3700
bc. He noted that sun temples were designed to catch the
sun at the solstice (when the sun is furthest from the
equator) or the equinox (when the sun is above it), and star
temples to catch the star's heliacal rising (just before
dawn), again at a solstice. But he also noted that a sun
temple could serve as a 'calendar' for much longer than a
star temple. This is because a star temple is subject to the
precession of the equinoxes already mentioned. Although
it amounts to a tiny fraction -
l
/
71
of a degree per annum
(causing the stars to rise twenty minutes later each year) it
obviously adds up over the centuries, coming a full circle
every 25,920 years. The result was that star temples had to
be realigned every century or so - Lockyer pointed out
evidence that the Luxor temple had been realigned four
times, explaining its curious and irregular shape, to which
Schwaller de Lubicz was to devote so many years of
study.
According to Lockyer, the earliest Egyptian temples, at
Heliopolis and Annu, were oriented to northern stars at the
summer solstice, while
65
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
the Giza pyramids were built by 'a new invading race'
who were far more astronomically sophisticated, and used
both northern and eastern stars.
But why should the Egyptians take such a deep interest
in the heavens? One reason, as we have already observed,
is that farmers need a calendar - in 3200 bc, the 'dog star'
Sirius became the most important star in the heavens
because it rose at dawn at the beginning of the Egyptian
New Year, when the Nile began to rise. But for the
Egyptians, the stars were not merely seasonal indicators.
They were also the home of the gods who presided over
life and death.
And it was this recognition that would form the basis of
one of the most interesting insights into the Great Pyramid
since the days of Proctor.
In 1979, a Belgian construction engineer named Robert
Bauval was on his way to Egypt, and bought at London's
Heathrow Airport a book called The Sirius Mystery by
Robert Temple.
The book had caused some sceptical reviewers to
classify Temple with Erich von Daniken; but this is hardly
fair. Temple's starting point was a genuine scientific
mystery: that an African tribe called the Dogon (in Mali)
have known for a long time that the dog star Sirius is
actually a double star, with an 'invisible' companion.
Astronomers had suspected this companion, Sirius B,
since the 1830s, when Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel noted the
perturbations in the orbit of Sirius, and reasoned that there
must be an incredibly dense but invisible star - what we
now call a white dwarf, in which atoms have collapsed in
on themselves, so that a piece the size of a pinhead weighs
many tons. According to the Dogon, their knowledge of
Sirius B - which they called the Digitaria star - was
brought to them by fishlike creatures called the Nommo,
who came from Sirius thousands of years ago. It was not
until 1928, when Sir Arthur
(
Eddington postulated the
existence of 'white dwarfs', that knowledge of Sirius B
ceased to be the province of a few astronomers. It seems
inconceivable that some European traveller could have
brought such knowledge to the Dogon long before that. In
any case, the Dogon possessed cult masks relating to
Sirius, stored in caves, some of them centuries old.
As Temple discovered when he went to Paris to study
with anthropologist Germaine Dieterlen - who, with
Marcel Griaule, had spent years among the Dogon - the
Dogon seemed to have a surprisingly detailed
66
3 Inside the Pyramid
knowledge of the solar system. They knew the planets
revolved around the sun, that the moon was 'dry and dead',
and that Saturn had rings and Jupiter had moons. Dieterlen
noted that the Babylonians also believed that their
civilisation was founded by fish gods.
Since the dog star (so called because it is in the
constellation Canis Major) was the sacred star of the
Egyptians after 3200 bc (called Sothis and identified with
the goddess Isis), Temple speculated that the Dogon
gained their knowledge from the Egyptians, and that the
fact that the goddess Isis is so often to be found in boat
paintings with two fellow goddesses, Anukis and Satis,
could indicate that the ancient Egyptians also knew that
Sirius is actually a treble system, consisting of Sirius,
Sirius B, and the home of the Nommo.
But, surely, such knowledge would be contained in
hieroglyphic inscriptions from ancient Egypt? Temple
disagreed, pointing out that Griaule had had to be initiated
into the religious secrets of the Dogon after ritual
preparation. If the Egyptians knew about Sirius B, such
knowledge would be reserved for initiates.
'Ancient astronaut' enthusiasts would suggest - and have
suggested - that this 'proves' that the ancient Egyptian
civilisation was also founded by 'gods from space', but
Temple is far more cautious, merely remarking on the
mystery of a primitive African tribe having such a
sophisticated knowledge of astronomy.
Reading Temple's book reawakened Bauval's interest in
astronomy, and he pursued it during his time in the Sudan,
and subsequently in Saudi Arabia. Back in Egypt, in his
home town Alexandria, in 1982, he drove at dawn to Giza,
where he was startled to see a desert jackal near the third
pyramid, that of Menkaura (or Mycerinos). These animals
are seldom seen, and this reminded him of the curious
story of how one of the most amazing discoveries in
Egyptology came about. In 1879, the head of a gang of
workmen at Saqqara had noticed a jackal near the pyramid
of Unas, last pharaoh of the 5th Dynasty (c. 2300 bc), and
when the jackal vanished into a low passage of the
pyramid, the workman followed, probably hoping to find
treasure. His light showed him that he was in a chamber
whose walls and ceiling were covered with beautiful
hieroglyphics. This was astonishing, as the pyramids of the
Giza complex were devoid of inscriptions.
These became known as the Pyramid Texts and - like
the later Book of the Dead - contained rituals concerning
the king's journey to the afterlife. Five pyramids proved to
contain such texts. They are probably the oldest religious
writings in the world.
67
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
Now Bauval drove on to Saqqara, to renew his
acquaintance with the pyramid texts of Unas, and found
himself reflecting on passages in which the king declares
that his soul is a star. Did he mean simply that his soul
was immortal? Or did he mean - as J. H. Breasted had
once suggested - that his soul would literally become a
star in heaven? One of the texts says: 'Oh king, you are
this great star, the companion of Orion, who traverses the
sky with Orion ...' The constellation of Orion was sacred
to the Egyptians, since it was regarded as the home of the
god Osiris. In the sky slightly below Orion - and to the left
- stands Sirius, the star of Osiris's consort Isis. Bauval
found himself reflecting on the mystery of the Pyramid
Texts, and why they appear only in five pyramids dating
from the 5th and 6th Dynasties - that is, over a period of
about a century. The Egyptologist Wallis-Budge, noting
the sheer confusion of some of the texts, remarked that the
scribes themselves probably did not understand what they
were writing, and that therefore the texts were probably
copies of far older documents ...
The visit to Saqqara was still fresh in Bauval's mind the
next day when he visited Cairo Museum. There he noticed
a large poster with an aerial photograph of the Giza
pyramids. Now he was suddenly struck by the fact that the
third pyramid is oddly out-of-line with the other two. The
four sides of each pyramid point precisely to the four
points of the compass, and it would be possible to take a
gigantic ruler and draw a straight line from the north-
eastern corner of the Great Pyramid to the south-western
corner of the Chefren pyramid. You would expect this line
to extend on to the corners of the Menkaura pyramid; in
fact, it would miss it by about two hundred feet. Why this
dissatisfying lack of symmetry?
Bauval was struck by another question. Why is the
third pyramid so much smaller than its two companions,
when the Pharaoh Menkaura was just as powerful as his
two predecessors?
More than a yar later, in November 1983, Bauval was
in the desert of Saudi Arabia on a camping expedition. At
3 a.m., he woke up and stared overhead at the Milky Way,
which looked like a river flowing across space. And to its
right there was a tiara of bright stars which he recognised
as Orion, which the ancient Egyptians identified with
Osiris. He went to the top of a dune, and was joined by a
friend who was also interested in astronomy, and who
proceeded to explain to him how mariners find the rising
point of Sirius above the horizon by looking at the three
stars in Orion's 'belt'. (Orion, the Hunter, is shaped
roughly like an hour-glass, and the belt goes around its
'waist'.) 'Actually,'
68
3 Inside the Pyramid
added the friend, 'the three stars of Orion's belt are not
perfectly aligned - the smallest is slightly offset to the
east.' At this point Bauval interrupted him with a shout of:
'Je tiens l'affaire' - Tve got it!' These were the words
uttered by the Egyptologist Champollion when he realised
that the Rosetta Stone had handed him the key to
hieroglyphics.
What Bauval had 'got' was an answer to his question
about why Menkaura's pyramid was smaller than the other
two, and offset to the east. They were intended to
represent the stars of Orion's belt. And the Milky Way was
the River Nile.
What Bauval did not know at this time was that a
connection between the Great Pyramid and Orion's Belt
had been the subject of a paper in an academic journal of
Oriental studies as long ago as 1964. The author was an
American astronomer named Virginia Trimble, and she
had been asked by an Egyptologist named Alexander
Badawy to help him verify his theory that the southern 'air
shaft' in the King's Chamber pointed straight at Orion at
the time the Great Pyramid was built, round about 2550
bc. Virginia Trimble had done the necessary calculations,
and was able to tell Badawy that he was correct: the air
shaft had pointed straight at Orion's Belt around 2550 bc.
In other words, if you had been thin enough to lie in the
air shaft, you would have seen Orion's belt pass directly
overhead every night. Of course, hundreds of other stars
would also pass - but none of this magnitude.
If the pyramids of Giza were supposed to be the three
stars of Orion's Belt - Zta, Epsilon and Delta - was it not
possible that other pyramids might represent other stars in
Orion? In fact, Bauval realised that the pyramid of Nebka
at Abu Ruwash corresponded to the star at the Hunter's left
foot, and the pyramid at Zawyat al-Aryan to the star at his
right shoulder. It would, of course, have been utterly
conclusive if the 'hour-glass' shape had been completed by
two other pyramids, but unfortunately these had either
never been built, or had long since vanished under the
sand.
But what did it all mean} Badawy had surmised that the
southern shaft of the King's Chamber was not an air vent,
but a channel to direct the dead pharaoh's soul to Orion,
where he would become a god. In other words, the ritual
ceremony to release the pharaoh's soul from his body
would take place when the shaft was targeted, like a gun
barrel, on Orion, and the pharaoh's soul would fly there
like a missile.
One thing bothered Bauval. Virginia Trimble's
calculations seemed to show that the gun barrel was
targeted on the middle star of Orion's Belt - the one that
corresponded to Chefren's pyramid - when it should
69
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
have been targeted on the southern star, Zeta Orionis,
which corresponded to the Great Pyramid. This problem
was finally solved by a German engineer named Rudolf
Gantenbrink, who had been hired to de-humidify the
Pyramid, and who had made a tiny tractor-like robot that
could crawl up the shafts. His robot had revealed that the
shafts were slightly steeper than Flinders Ptrie had
thought. Ptrie had estimated the southern shaft at 44 30',
when it was actually 45. This new measurement meant
that the gun barrel was directly targeted on Zeta Orionis -
although a century later than is generally believed. If
Bauval was correct, the Pyramid was built between 2475
bc and 2400 bc.
Bauval's curiosity now centred on the 'air shafts' in the
Queen's Chamber - shafts, in fact, that could not have
been intended as air vents because they were closed at
both ends. With the aid of a computer Bauval worked out
where the southern shaft of the Queen's Chamber had
been pointing when the Pyramid was built. It confirmed
his speculations: the shaft was targeted on Sirius, the star
of Isis.
What was emerging was a highly convincing picture of
the purpose of the Great Pyramid: not a tomb, but a ritual
building - a kind of temple - whose purpose was to send
the soul of the Pharaoh Cheops flying to Zeta Orionis -
called by the Egyptians al-Nitak - where it would reign for
ever as Osiris.
And what was the purpose of the Queen's Chamber?
From the alignment of its shaft on Sirius, Bauval believed
that it was a ritual chamber for an earlier part of the
ceremony: that in which the son of the dead pharaoh
performed a ritual called 'the opening of the mouth',
designed to restore life to the pharaoh. He had to open the
mouth using an instrument called the sacred adze, which
was made of meteoric iron. (Iron in ancient Egypt was an
extremely rare metal, found only in meteorites; since it
came from the skies, the Egyptians believed that the bones
of the gods were made of iron.) In illustrations of this
ceremony, the king is shown with an erect phallus, for a
part of the ceremony concerned him copulating with the
goddess Isis - hence the alignment of the shaft on Sirius,
the star of Isis.
Now all this had one extremely interesting implication.
According to the usual view, the three pyramids of Giza
were built by three separate pharaohs as their tombs. But
if they represented the stars of Orion's Belt, then the
whole lay-out must have been planned long before the
Great Pyramid was started. When?
To understand how Bauval approached this problem,
we must return to the precession of the equinoxes - the
wobble on the earth's axis that
70
3 Inside the Pyramid
causes its position in relation to the stars to change -
one degree over 72 years, and a complete circle every
26,000 years. Where Orion was concerned, this
wobble causes the constellation to travel upwards in
the sky for 13,000 years, then downwards again. But
as it does this, the constellation also tilts slightly - in
other words, the hour-glass turns clockwise, then back.
Bauval noted that the only time the pattern of the pyramids
on the
ground is a perfect reflection of the stars in Orion's Belt -
and not tilted
sideways - was in 10,450 bc. This is also its lowest point
in the sky.
After this, it began to rise again, and will reach its highest
point about
{ ad 2550. In the year 10,450 bc, it was as if the sky was
an enormous
I mirror, in which the course of the Nile was 'reflected' as
the Milky
I Way, and the Giza pyramids as the
Belt of Orion.
And it is at this point in his book The Orion Mystery
that Bauval raises a question whose boldness - after so
many chapters of precise scientific and mathematical
argument - makes the hair prickle. 'Was the Giza
Necropolis and, specifically, the Great Pyramid and its
shafts, a great marker of time, a sort of star-clock to
mark the epochs of Osiris and, more especially, his
First Time?'
This 'First Time' of Osiris was called by the
Egyptians Zep Tepi, and it was the time when the gods
fraternised with humans - the equivalent of the Greek
myth of the Golden Age.
The date 10,450 bc has no meaning for historians, for it is
'prehistoric', about the time when the first farmers
appeared in the Middle , East. But Bauval reminds us
that there is one date in mythology that is i reasonably
close. According to Plato's Timaeus, when the Greek
statesman Solon visited Egypt around 600 bc, Egyptian
priests told him the story of the destruction of Atlantis,
about nine thousand years earlier, / and how it had sunk
beneath the waves. The story was generally I discounted
because it also told how the Atlanteans had fought against
I the Athenians, and Athens was certainly not founded
as long ago as 9600 bc. Yet - as we know - the Atlantis
story has haunted the European imagination ever since.
Bauval points out that, in the Timaeus, Plato not only
reports Solon's account of Atlantis, but adds that Plato
also says that God made 'souls in equal number with
the stars, and distributed them, each soul to a different
star... and he who should live well for his due span of
time should journey back to the habitation of his
consort star.' This certainly sounds a typically
Egyptian conception. Having risked offending the
Egyptologists by raising the subject of
7
1
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
Atlantis, Bauval now goes further,
and mentions that the clairvoyant
Edgar Cayce stated that the Great
Pyramid was planned around 10,400
bc. Amusingly enough, the authority
he quotes on this matter is none other
than the arch-enemy of West's Sphinx
thesis, Mark Lehner. It seems that
Lehner was (and possibly still is)
financed by the Cayce Foundation,
and began his career as a follower of
Cayce; in The Egyptian Heritage,
Lehner argued that the 'Atlantis
events' in ancient Egypt (i.e. the
arrival of the Atlanteans) probably
occurred in 10,400 bc. (It should be
added that Lehner has now spurned
these early divagations, and reverted
to orthodoxy - he is now regarded as
the leading expert on the pyramids.)
a Edgar Cayce (pronounced Casey) is a
strange and puzzling figure. Born
on a farm in Kentucky in 1877, he
seems to have been a fairly normal
I child except for one odd ability - he
could sleep with his head on a
I book, and wake up knowing
everything in it. When he left the farm
he
i married and embarked on life as a
salesman - although it had always
j been his ambition to become a
preacher. When he was 21, his voice
j suddenly disappeared, and the fact
that it came back under hypnosis,
j but vanished again when he woke up,
suggested that the problem was
\ mental rather than physical - in fact,
that Cayce was unconsciously
! longing to give up his job as a
salesman. Placed under hypnosis again
\ by a man named Al Layne, Cayce
accurately diagnosed his own problem
:and prescribed its cure. Layne then
decided to consult Cayce - again
under hypnosis - about his own
medical problems, and Cayce
explained
plow they should be treated. When he
woke up and looked at the notes
(Layne had made, he insisted that he
had never heard of most of the
{medical terms.
After that, Cayce discovered that
he had the ability to diagnose -and
prescribe for - illness when he was in
a hypnotic trance, and his celebrity
spread.
In 1923, when he was in his mid-
forties, he was shocked to learn lone
day that he had been preaching the
doctrine of reincarnation while \in his
trance state. A devout and orthodox
Christian, he nevertheless icame to
accept the idea that human beings are
reborn again and again. \ It was when
he was describing the past life of a
fourteen-year-old boy that Cayce
declared that the boy had lived in
Atlantis about 10,000 Ac. From then
until the end of his life, Cayce
continued to add fragments arjbout
Atlantis. Some of these comments
seemed designed to cause
72
1
3 Inside
the
Pyramid
sceptics to erupt into fury, and to arouse doubts even in the
most open-minded student of the past. According to
Cayce, Atlantis occupied a place in the Atlantic Ocean
from the Sargasso Sea to the Azores, and had a flourishing
civilisation dating back to 200,000 bc. The Atlanteans'
civilisation was highly developed, and they possessed
some kind of 'crystal stone' for trapping the rays of the
sun; they also possessed steam power, gas and electricity.
Unfortunately, their prosperity finally ; made them greedy
and corrupt, so they were ripe for the destruction ! that
finally came upon them. This occurred in periods, one
about 15,600 f bc, and the last about 10,000 bc. By then,
Atlanteans had dispersed to \ Europe and South America.
Their archives, Cayce says, will be found \ in three parts of
the world, including Giza. He forecast that Atlantis j
would begin to rise again, in the area of Bimini, in 1968
and 1969. He } also forecast that documents proving the
existence of Atlantis would ; be found in a chamber below
the Sphinx.
Cayce's biographer Jess Starn has stated that his
'batting average on predictions was incredibly high,
close to one hundred per cent', but this is hardly borne
out by the facts. It is true that a few of his trance
statements have proved weirdly accurate - such as that
the Nile once flowed west (geological studies have
showed it once flowed into Lake Chad, halfway between
the present Nile and the Atlantic ocean), that a
community known as the Essenes lived near the Dead
Sea (verified by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls
two years after his death), and that two American
presidents would die in office (as Roosevelt and
Kennedy did). But critics point out the sheer vagueness
of many of his prophecies, and the fact that so many of
them quite simply miss the mark. Asked in 1938 if there
would be a war that would involve the United States
between 1942 and 1944, he missed a golden opportunity
to prove his prophetic credentials by answering that this
depended on whether there was a desire for peace. Asked
what might cause such a war he replied: 'Selfishness' -
which, in view of Hitler's anti-Semitism, and his desire
to see the Aryan race conquering the world, seems to be
oversimplification. Asked about China and Japan, he
explained that 'the principle of the Christian faith will be
carried forward through the turmoils that are a part of
events...', which is again so wide of the mark as to count
as a definite miss. Asked about Spain, then nearing the
end of its murderous civil war, he declared that its
troubles were only just beginning; in fact, Franco's rule
would bring many decades of peace, followed by a
peaceful transition to democracy. Asked about Russia he
was exceptionally vague, merely declaring that
7
3
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
'turmoils' would continue until freedom of speech and the
right to religious worship was allowed. Asked about the
role of Great Britain, Cayce replied with Delphic
obscurity: 'When its activities are set in such a way as to
bring consideration of every phase, Britain will be able to
control the world for peace ...', which must be again
counted a fairly wide miss.
Some of Cayce's more alarming prophecies were that
the earth would be subject to a period of cataclysm
between 1958 and the end of the century, that Los
Angeles, San Francisco and New York would all be
destroyed, while Japan would vanish beneath the Pacific;
in fact, although there is still time (writing in 1995) for
Cayce to prove correct, there have so far been no more
cataclysms than in any other similar period of history.
Anyone who is familiar with the history of the
paranormal will recognise Edgar Cayce as a typical
example of a highly gifted psychic - with all the
disadvantages that seems to entail. Psychical research
seems to be subject to a curious limitation which might be
labelled 'James's Law', after the philosopher William
James, who declared that there always seems to be just
enough evidence to convince the believers, and never quite
enough to convince the sceptics. All the great psychics
and clairvoyants have had enough successes to prove their
genuineness, and enough failures to prove that they are
highly fallible. Cayce is clearly no exception.
It must be admitted that, at this point in this book, Cayce
is something of a digression - Bauval makes only a brief
and passing reference to him - and to 'The Atlantis events'
- in The Orion Mystery. Yet the curious coincidence of the
date - 10,400 bc - raises an important question: why
should the pyramid builders arrange the Giza pyramids to
reflect the position of Orion's Belt in 10,450 bc? It is hard
to disagree with Bauval that they wished to indicate this
date as an important time in their history - probably as the
beginning of their epoch, their 'Genesis'.
The Giza pyramids took at least three generations to
build: Cheops, Chefren and Menkaura, extending over
about a century. It seems, then, that Chefren and
Menkaura were building according to a plan. It is possible
that this plan was drawn up by Cheops and his priests.
But, as Bauval has shown, it is arguable that the plan was
there from the beginning - 10,450 bc. There is
evidence that the great Gothic
74
3 Inside the Pyramid
cathedrals were planned centuries before they were built;
Bauval is suggesting that this is also true of the pyramids
of Giza.
And if we accept the arguments of West and Schoch
about the water-weathering of the Sphinx, then it seems
likely that West is correct in assigning the Sphinx to
10,450 bc.
Let us, then, merely for the sake of argument, assume
that both West and Bauval are correct. Let us suppose that
the survivors of some catastrophe came to Egypt in the
middle of the 11th millennium bc, and began trying to
reconstruct a fragment of their lost culture in exile. They
begin by carving the front part of the Sphinx from an
outcrop of hard limestone on the banks of the Nile. It
faced sunrise on the spring (vernal) equinox. At some
subsequent period they go on to excavate the limestone
below it, and carve the lion's body.
Why a lion? Because, suggests Graham Hancock, the
age in which the Sphinx was built was the Age of Leo. We
have seen that the wobble of the earth's axis - which
causes the precession of the equinoxes -means that it
moves like the hour hand of a clock, pointing to a different
constellation every 2,160 years. The Age of Leo lasted
from 10,970 to 8810 bc. Hancock clinches his argument
by asking if it is coincidence that in the Age of Pisces (our
present age) the symbol of Christianity is the fish, that in
the preceding Age of Aries, we find rams sacrificed in the
Old Testament, and an upsurge of the ram god Amon in
Egypt, while in the previous Age of Taurus the Egyptians
worshipped Apis, the bull, and the bull-cult flourished in
Minoan Crete.
So these proto-Egyptians began to plan their great sky
temple in the 11th millennium bc, and continued for the
next thousand years or so, probably building the Sphinx
Temple and the Valley Temple with the giant blocks
removed from around the Sphinx. They may also have
built the Oseirion near Abydos, and many other
monuments that have now vanished beneath the sand.
In that case, it seems incredible that they failed to make
a start on the pyramid complex. Hancock points out that
the lower half of the Chefren pyramid is built of
'Cyclopean blocks', while halfway up it changes to smaller
blocks, which may suggest that it was started at a much
earlier stage. West also remarks: 'On the eastern side of
Chefren's pyramid the blocks are particularly huge, as
much as 20 feet (6.4 m) long and one foot (.3 m) thick ...'
But if part of Chefren's pyramid was built, it seems
unlikely that the Great Pyramid remained in blueprint. The
heart of the Great Pyramid, according to Iodden Edwards
in The Pyramids of Egypt, consists of 'a
75
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
nucleus of rock, the size of which cannot be precisely
determined'. This could have been a mound of
considerable size, possibly a 'sacred mound'. Possibly the
lower chamber was also cut out of the rock at this time,
forming a kind of crypt. And if the pyramids were
intended to mirror the stars in Orion's Belt, then it seems
more likely that a start was also made on the third
pyramid, of Menkaura. It is even possible that was
another sacred mound on this site.
Why should these proto-Egyptians not have gone on to
complete all three pyramids?
The obvious suggestion is that if only a small group of
them arrived in Egypt - perhaps a hundred or so - then
they simply lacked the manpower. What they needed, to
begin with, was simply a religious centre - the equivalent
of St Peter's in Rome or St Paul's in London. The Sphinx
and the sacred mound - or mounds - would have provided
this.
But, as we shall see in a later chapter, Robert Bauval
and Graham Hancock have produced a far more
interesting and plausible suggestion - a suggestion based
on computer-created simulations of the skies over Egypt
between 10,500 and 2500 bc.
We have no way of guessing what might have happened
between these two dates. Few civilisations flourish for
more than a few thousand years, and so it seems unlikely
that this proto-Egyptian civilisation lasted until pharaonic
times. As a civilisation, it may not even have lasted until
the sixth or fifth millennium bc, when (according to
Encyclopaedia Britannica) Stone Age people began to
migrate into the Nile valley and grow crops. The notion
that Stone Age cultures (the Tasian, Badarian and
Naqadan) could exist side by side with the remains of
proto-Egyptian culture suggests that the proto-Egyptians
were nothing more than a priestly remnant - perhaps
living, like the Essenes of a later age, in some equivalent
of the Dead Sea caves, and preserving their knowledge as
the monasteries of the Dark Ages preserved European
learning.
As we shall see later, there is a certain amount of
evidence for the existence of this priestly cast - sometimes
referred to as 'the Companions of Osiris' - in the millennia
between 10,500 and 2500 bc.
What we do know is that - perhaps as early as 4000 bc -
Egypt began to unite into a nation. A work called the Turin
Papyrus - unfortunately badly damaged when it was sent
to the Turin Museum without proper packing - mentions
nine dynasties of kings of Egypt before Mens. Before
that, it says, Egypt was ruled by gods and demigods -
76
3 Inside the Pyramid
the latter may mean some priestly caste. The Palermo
Stone mentions 120 kings before Mens. The third-
century bc Egyptian priest Manetho also produced a list
which reaches back to a distant age of gods, and covers
nearly 25,000 years.
What seems clear, if Schwaller de Lubicz is correct, is
that there came a point when the 'demigods' or priests
became the mentors of early pharaonic civilisation, and
taught them geometry, science and medicine.
But were they mentors in any practical sense? If they
were, then we have to answer some difficult historical
puzzles.
About a century before Cheops, the pharaoh Zoser built
an impressive funeral complex at Saqqara, including the
famous Step Pyramid. This was supervised by the
legendary architect Imhotep, who was also Zoser's Grand
Vizier, and probably High Priest. The Greeks called him
Aesclepius, and made him the god of medicine. He sounds
as if he might well be a descendant of the 'New Race'. The
Step Pyramid was started as a mastaba - a mud-brick tomb
covered with stucco - and then enlarged literally step by
step, until it was six 'storeys' high. It seems to have
provided the Old Kingdom Egyptians with the idea of
creating pyramids.
Two generations after Zoser came the Pharaoh Snofru
(or Snefru), the father of Cheops, whom the ancient
Egyptians believed ordered the construction of a pyramid
at Meidum (in fact, it is now believed to have been built
by Huni, the last of the 3rd Dynasty pharaohs), which
looks unfinished. All that stands now is a huge square
tower (in two stages) on the top of what looks like a hill. It
was not until 1974 that a German physicist named Kurt
Mendelssohn pointed out why the pyramid is unfinished: it
collapsed before it was completed - probably with
immense loss of life. The 'hill' on which it appears to be
standing is a pile of rubble. The pharaoh started by
building a seven-storey pyramid, then added an eighth. At
this point, it was decided to convert it into what is almost
certainly the first smooth pyramid by adding packing
blocks, and a layer of heavy casing stone. Bad
workmanship was probably responsible for one of the
casing stones being squeezed out of place by the
accumulated sideways thrust of the pyramid, and the
remainder must have collapsed like an avalanche within
seconds.
This, Mendelssohn argues,
4
is why another pyramid,
the so-called Bent Pyramid at Dahshur, changes to a less
steep angle halfway up. In all probability, it too was built
by Snofru, and the fact that its angle becomes less steep
suggests that its architect had profited from the earlier
disaster.
77
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
Mendelssohn's central argument is that the pyramids
were not built as tombs, but in order to unite many tribes
into a nation-state by giving them a common task. It is an
interesting argument, but it sounds like the theory of a
modern liberal who was a pupil of Einstein (as
Mendelssohn was), rather than that of an Egyptologist.
Why did Snofru not get them to do something more
practical, like construct a Nile dam, or vast granaries? We
feel intuitively that, whatever the purpose of the pyramids,
it had something to do with Egyptian religion.
The fiasco at Meidum seems to contradict Schwaller's
theory that the swift emergence of pharaonic civilisation
was due to its Atlantean legacy. Admitting that the skill
shown in the building of the Great Pyramid suggests an
ancient and highly sophisticated civilisation, we are still
entitled to ask: where were the Atlanteans when Snofru's
architect was revealing his incompetence?
The answer could nevertheless be simple. If the Sphinx-
builders had lived for thousands of years in the same
isolation as monks in the Dark Ages, nothing is more
likely than that they had lost their constructive skills, and
had to learn them all over again.
Then why assume they played any part in pharaonic
Egypt? Is it not conceivable that they had vanished from
the face of the earth, leaving behind only a library of
mouldering papyri that few people could decipher? Why
should we assume that they emerged from their isolation
and began to play a practical part in the religion of the
pharaohs?
Well, there is, to begin with, one intriguing piece of
evidence. Boats.
In May 1954, an archaeologist named Kamal el-
Mallakh discovered a rectangular pit on the south side of
the Great Pyramid - 103 feet long and 17V
2
feet deep. Six
feet down there was a ceiling of huge limestone roofing
blocks, some weighing 15 tons. Under this roof lay a
dismantled boat made of cedar wood. When reconstructed
- it took fourteen years - the result was a ship 143 feet
long, as large as those that carried the Vikings across the
Atlantic. John West describes it as 'a far more seaworthy
craft than anything available to Columbus'. Thor
Heyerdahl disagrees; speaking of this same craft in The Ra
Expeditions, he says that 'the streamlined hull would have
collapsed on its first encounter with ocean waves'. It was
built, he says, for 'pomp and ceremony', and was intended
for use of the pharaoh in the afterlife. Yet he also
acknowledges that 'he had built it on architectonic lines
which the world's leading seafaring nations never
surpassed. He had built his frail river boat to a pattern
created by shipbuilders from a people with a long, solid
tradition of sailing on the open sea' (My italics.)
78
3 Inside the Pyramid
Now Heyerdahl, if anyone, should recognise the design
of a seagoing craft when he sees it. In fact, it is his
contention that these early Egyptians could have sailed
across the Atlantic on a ship made of papyrus reeds. But
he can scarcely be said to have proved it, for his papyrus
ship was virtually under water by the time it reached
Barbados.
Obviously, this raises a central question. If Khufu's ship
was designed 'to a pattern created by shipbuilders from a
people with a long, solid tradition of sailing on the open
sea', who were these shipbuilders? There was very little
timber in Egypt, until large quantities began to be
imported towards the end of the 3rd Dynasty - Khufu's
father Snofru built a fleet of 60 ships.
5
But during the
early dynasties, they could hardly be described as a people
with a long tradition of sailing the open sea; after all, they
had been - according to orthodox history - wandering
nomads only a few centuries earlier.
When Graham Hancock was at Abydos, he was
reminded of another facet of this mystery when he went to
see a whole graveyard of boats buried in the desert eight
miles from the Nile - no less than a dozen ships, some of
them 72 feet long. This is only about half the length of the
Khufu ship - but then, they date from five centuries earlier
-Hancock quotes a Guardian report (21 December 1991)
which states that they are 5000 years old. Again, the
design was of seagoing ships, not Nile boats.
Agreeing that these ships - and another found in a
second pit near the Great Pyramid - were purely ritual
objects, intended for the use of the dead pharaoh, where
did the ancient Egyptians get the design from}
According to Schwaller de Lubicz - and West - the
answer is: from survivors from Atlantis, who arrived in
ships. But is there any evidence of the use of seagoing
ships before the age of the pharaohs?
As it happens, there is.
79
4 The Forbidden Word
I
n 1966, an American professor of the history of science
named Charles H. Hapgood caused widespread
controversy with a book called Maps of the Ancient Sea
Kings. The reason becomes clear from the title of his final
chapter: A Civilisation that Vanished', which begins:
The evidence presented by the ancient maps appears
to suggest the existence in remote times, before the
rise of any known cultures, of a true civilisation, of an
advanced kind, which either was localised in one area
but had worldwide commerce, or was, in a real sense,
a worldwide culture. This culture, at least in some
respects, was more advanced than the civilisations of
Greece and Rome. In geodesy, nautical science, and
mapmaking it was more advanced than any known
culture before the 18th century of the Christian Era. It
was only in the 18th century that we developed a
practical means of finding longitude. It was in the
18th century that we first accurately measured the
circumference of the earth. Not until the 19th century
did we begin to send out ships for exploration into the
Arctic or Antarctic Seas and only then did we begin
the exploration of the bottom of the Atlantic. The
maps indicate that some ancient people did all these
things.
It was unfortunate for Hapgood that in the following
year, 1967, these same ancient maps figured prominently
in a book called Chariots of the Gods} by Erich von
Daniken, whose purpose was to demonstrate that they
proved the earth had been visited in remote ages by
visitors from outer space. How otherwise, Daniken asked,
could ancient man have accurately plotted the coast of
South America, and the North and South Poles, unless
they had seen them from the air? Von Daniken's
81
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
many inaccuracies, and the sensational nature of his
theories, caused a violent reaction among serious
scholars, who decided that the whole thing was a bubble
of absurdity. And as Daniken's inaccuracies were exposed
(for example, multiplying the weight of the Great
Pyramid by five), the idea gradually got around that the
whole question of the 'maps of the ancient sea kings' was
an exploded myth.
This was totally untrue. More than a quarter of a
century after its publication, the evidence of Hapgood's
book remains as solid and as unshaken as ever.
In September 1956, Hapgood had been deeply involved
in the study of another mystery, that of the great Ice Ages,
when he heard of an intriguing puzzle that sounded as if it
might have some bearing on his enquiries. On 26 August
1956, there had been a radio discussion of an ancient map
known as the Piri Re'is map, which had been the property
of a Turkish pirate who had been beheaded in 1554. A
panel of respectable academics and scientists had
supported the view that this map appeared to show the
South Pole as it had been before it was covered with ice.
The controversy had arisen because earlier that year, a
Turkish naval officer had presented the US Navy
Hydrographie Office with a copy of the Piri Re'is map,
whose original had been found in the Topkapi Palace in
Istanbul in 1929. It was painted on parchment and dated
1513, and showed the Atlantic Ocean, with a small part of
the coast of Africa on the right, and the whole coast of
South America on the left. And, at the bottom of the map,
what looked like Antarctica.
The map was passed on to the Hydrographie Office's
cartographic expert, W. I. Walters, who in turn had shown
it to a friend named Captain Arlington H. Mallery, who
studied old Viking maps. It was after he had studied the
map at home that Mallery made the astonishing statement
that he believed it showed the coast of Antarctica as it had
been before it was covered by thick ice. It appeared to
show certain bays in Queen 'Maud Land as they had been
before they were frozen over. In 1949 an expedition
mounted by Norway, Sweden and Britain had taken sonar
soundings through the ice - which in places was a mile
thick - and discovered these long-vanished bays.
It was amazing enough that a sixteenth-century map
should show Antarctica, which had not been discovered
until 1818, but that it should show Antarctica as it had
been in prehistoric times seemed preposterous. Indignant
scholars had said as much, which is why the panel of
experts had gathered at Georgetown University, in
Washington DC, to defend
82
4 The
Forbidden
Word
Mallery. All this excited Hapgood, for he had been arguing
that the /
polar ice caps had built up fairly quickly - over thousands
rather than 1
millions of years - and that they caused the earth to
wobble and the f
continents to move around. He had gone on to suggest that
great masses \
of dislodged ice caused major catastrophes, and that the
last of these \
catastrophes had occurred about fifteen thousand years
ago, when Ant- /
arctica was 2,500 miles closer to the equator.
/
Hapgood contacted Captain Mallery, who impressed
him as sincere and honest. He learned from him that the
Library of Congress had already possessed facsimiles of
the Piri Re'is map even before the officer brought a copy
to the Hydrographie Office, and that it possessed many
more such maps. They were called portolans - meaning
'from port to port' - and were used by mariners in the
Middle Ages. And Hapgood was startled to learn that
these maps had been known to scholars for centuries,
but that no one had paid much attention to them. He
thereupon decided to involve his students at Keene
State College, New Hampshire, in a full-scale study of
the maps.
Why had no one paid much attention to them? To
begin with, because they had been made by medieval
mariners, and were assumed to be full of errors and
inaccuracies. Why take the trouble to compare them
with more modern maps?
But at least one scholar - E. E. Nordenskiold, who
compiled an atlas of portolans in 1889 - was convinced
that they were based on charts that were far more
ancient than the Middle Ages. They were too accurate
to have been drawn by medieval sailors. Moreover,
charts dating from the sixteenth century showed no sign
of development from those of the fourteenth century,
which sounded as if both were based on older maps.
Moreover, Nordenskiold also noted that the portolans
were more accurate than the maps of the great
geographer and astronomer Ptolemy, who was active in
Alexandria around ad 150. Was it likely that ordinary
seamen could surpass Ptolemy, unless they had ancient
maps to guide them?
Hapgood's students decided that the simplest way of
attacking the problem would be to put themselves in the
position of the original mapmakers (or, in some cases,
mapmaker - for it often looked as if many later maps
had been based on the same original chart). As everyone
knows, the first problem in creating a map is that the
world is a globe, and a flat piece of paper is bound to
distort its proportions. In 1569, Gerald Mercator solved
the problem by 'projecting' the globe on to a flat
surface, and dividing it up into latitude and longitude,
the
8
3
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
method we still use. But this is because we know the
whole globe. How would an ancient mapmaker, who
knew perhaps only his own country, go about it?
The sensible way, the students decided, would be to
choose some centre for the map, draw a circle around it,
then subdivide this circle into various segments, like a
cake - sixteen seemed to make sense. Then if they had to
extend beyond the circle, they would probably stick
squares on the edge of every 'slice'.
Piri Re'is had admitted that he had combined twenty
maps together, and he had often allowed them to overlap -
or fail to overlap. So he had shown the Amazon river
twice, but left out a 900-mile stretch of the coastline of
South America. Hapgood and his students had - so to
speak - to reason their way back to the original twenty
maps.
The first question was: where was the original 'centre'?
Long study left them to
c
conclude that it was off the map,
but that it was probably in Egypt. Alexandria seemed the
obvious choice. Hapgood involved a friend who was a
mathematician, to try to find the answer by trigonometry
(fortunately, he had not been told that experts thought the
charts were not based on trigonometry). It took three years
to find the solution. When it finally became clear that the
place they were looking for had to be situated on the
Tropic of Cancer, they realised that only one ancient city
seemed to fit the requirements - Syene, now known as
Aswan, the site of the modern dam.
Syene, in upper Egypt, has one interesting distinction; it
was the place from which the Greek scholar Eratosthenes,
head of the Library of Alexandria, had worked out the size
of the earth around 200 bc.
Eratosthenes happened to hear that on 21 June every
year, the sun was reflected at the bottom of a certain deep
well in Syene - that is, it was directly overhead, so towers
did not cast a shadow. But in Alexandria they did. All he
had to do was to measure the length of a shadow in
Alexandria at midday on 21 June, and work out from that
the angle at which the sun's rays were striking the tower.
This proved to be l
x
fi degrees. And since the earth is a
globe, then the distance from Syene to Alexandria must be
7V
2
degrees of the earth's circumference. Since he knew
the distance from Syene to Alexandria was 5000 stadia (or
500 miles), the rest was easy: 7% goes into 360 forty-
eight times, so the circumference of the earth must be 500
times 48 - 24,000 miles. (As we have seen, it is actually
closer to 25,000, but Eratosthenes was amazingly close.)
Now, Eratosthenes had made a small error, and increased
the circum-
84
4 The Forbidden Word
ference of the earth by 4V
2
degrees. Hapgood discovered
that if he allowed for this error, Piri Re'is's map became
even more accurate. This made it virtually certain that the
map was based on ancient Greek models after
Eratosthenes.
But, reasoned Hapgood, when the geographers of
Alexandria made their maps, it is unlikely that they sailed
off to look at the various places they were mapping. They
almost certainly used older maps -and then introduced the
error. So the older maps must have been even more
accurate than those of Alexandria.
As we saw in the last chapter, a tutor of one of the late
Ptolemies, Agatharchides of Cnidus, was told that the base
of the Great Pyramid was an eighth of a minute of a
degree in length. And from this it is possible to work out
that the pyramid builders knew that the circumference of
the earth was just under 25,000 miles, which is even more
accurate than the estimate of Eratosthenes. This evidence
leaves us in no doubt that the ancient Egyptians not only
knew that the earth was a globe, but knew its size to
within a few miles.
Clearly, this would seem to indicate one of two things:
ei t her t he Egypt i ans had a navy capabl e of
circumnavigating the globe, or they had access to
information from someone who did possess such a navy.
(The third possibility - astronauts from the stars - seems,
on the whole, rather lower on the scale of probability than
the other two.) But we have already seen that one of the
first pharaohs to possess a navy was Snofru, father of
Cheops, and there would hardly have been time for his
ships to sail around the earth and map it in detail before
the Pyramid (with its boat pits) was built. Margaret
Murray points out that some of the pre-dynastic people of
Egypt, the Gerzeans (around 3500 bc) represented ships in
their pottery decorations; but these ships have banks of
oarsmen, and it seems unlikely that the Gerzeans (possibly
Cretans) rowed around the world. So we are left with the
possibility that there were seafarers who crossed the
oceans long before dynastic Egypt.
How long before? The Piri Re'is map of Queen Maud
Land, at the South Pole, shows bays before they were
covered with ice, and Hapgood estimated that the last time
Antarctica was free of ice was some time before 4000 bc.
(Core samples taken by the Byrd Antarctic Expedition of
1949 showed that the last warm period in the Antarctic
ended then; the indications are that it began about 13,000
bc.) Someone had mapped Antarctica at least six thousand
years ago, and possibly long before that. But a map is no
use without some kind of writing on it,
85
---.* w ne opninx
and the official date for the invention of writing is about
3500 bc (in Sumeria). Moreover, mapmaking is a
sophisticated art, requiring some knowledge of
trigonometry and geometry. Again, we seem to be
positing a highly developed civilisation existing before
4000 bc. And since civilisations take a long time to
develop, it seems possible that we are speaking of
thousands of years before this date.
In November 1959, Hapgood made an appointment to
look at other portolans at the Library of Congress. When
he got into the conference room, he was embarrassed to
find literally hundreds of maps. He passed days looking
over them, and discovered that many of them showed a
southern continent. (In fact, Mercator had shown it - but
that was only because he believed it was there, not
because he knew of it.) When he saw a map drawn by a
man called Oronteus Finaeus in 1531, he was suddenly
transfixed. This not only showed the complete South Pole,
as if seen from the air, but looked startlingly like the South
Polar continent on modern maps. It showed the same bays
without the ice, rivers flowing to the sea, and even
mountains that are now buried under the ice.
There was only one problem. Oronteus Finaeus had
made Antarctica far too large. Then Hapgood discovered
what seemed to be the explanation. For some odd reason,
Oronteus Finaeus had drawn a small circle in the middle
of his Antarctica and labelled it 'Antarctic Circle'. The real
Antarctic Circle goes around Antarctica, in the sea. Then
Hapgood realised that the circle he had drawn on his own
map to represent the 80th parallel was in the centre of his
normal-sized version of the Antarctic, just about where
Oronteus had drawn his own Antarctic Circle. Obviously,
some earlier copyist of the original map had mistaken the
80th parallel for the Antarctic Circle and mis-labelled it;
the result of such a mistake would be to make Antarctica
about four times its proper size - just as Oronteus Finaeus
had done. Hapgood also concluded that the errors in the
map showed that Oronteus Finaeus had constructed it out
of many smaller overlapping maps. Again, his reasoning
pointed to far earlier - and more accurate - maps.
The conclusion seemed to be inescapable. Some
mapmaker had drawn Antarctica in the days when it was
free of ice. Moreover, the thoroughness of the map
showed that the mapmaker had spent some time there.
The logical conclusion seemed to be that he was, in fact,
an inhabitant
86
4 The Forbidden Word
of Antarctica in the days when it was warm and habitable -
and possibly had a navy capable of sailing round the
world.
Now this fitted in comfortably with a theory Hapgood
had been developing since the early 1950s, and had put
forward in a book called Earth's Shifting Crust (1959),
whose evidence so impressed Einstein that he wrote a
preface to it. The purpose of the book had been to explain
abrupt changes in the earth's climate - what one
palaeontologist called 'sudden and inexplicable climatic
revolutions', often involving great extinctions of creatures
like mammoths. The Beresovka mammoth, found in
Siberia in 1901, had frozen in an upright position with
food in its mouth, and spring plants - including buttercups
- in its stomach. Hapgood devotes a whole chapter to such
'great extinctions'.
Hapgood's theory was that the crust of the earth is rather
like the skin that forms on cold gravy, and can be literally
pulled around by great masses of ice at the poles. It was
not until the 1960s that scientists became aware of the
earth's tectonic plates, and Hapgood took these into
account in a later edition of his book called The Path of
the Pole. His argument was still that ice could cause the
whole crust - tectonic plates and all - to move as one. He
cites scientific evidence that Hudson Bay was once at the
North Pole, and quotes a study of magnetism in British
rocks made in 1954 that shows that the British Isles were
once more than two thousand miles further south. Soviet
scientists have stated that the North Pole was as far south
as 55 degrees latitude sixty million years ago, and that it
was in the Pacific, to the south-west of southern
California, three hundred million years ago. Moreover,
India and Africa were once covered with a sheet of ice,
while - incomprehensibly - Siberia escaped. Is it not
possible, Hapgood suggested, that an Ice Age does not
cover the whole earth simultaneously, but only those parts
that move into polar regions? He goes on to argue that,
before the last 'catastrophic event' of 15,000 years ago, the
Antarctic continent was 2,500 miles further north.
So it did not surprise Hapgood to find in the Oronteus
Finaeus map evidence that the South Pole was once free
of ice, and probably contained cities and ports.
A Turkish map of 1559, five years before the birth of
Shakespeare, shows the world from a northern 'projection',
as if hovering over the North Pole. Again, the accuracy is
incredible. But what may be its most interesting feature is
that Alaska and Siberia seem to be joined. Since this
projection shows a heart-shaped globe, with Alaska on one
side of the 'dimple' and Siberia on the other, this could
merely indicate that the
87
... *-*iaiiti to me sphinx
mapmaker did not have space to show the Bering Strait
which divides the continents. If this is not so, the
consequences are staggering; a land-bridge did exist in
the remote past - but it may have been as long as 12,000
years ago.
Other early 'portolans' were equally remarkable for
their accuracy -the Dulcert Portolano of 1339 shows that
the cartographer had precise knowledge of an area from
Galway to the Don basin in Russia. Others showed the
Aegean dotted with islands that do not now exist -
presumably drowned by melting ice - an accurately drawn
map of southern Great Britain, but without Scotland, and
with indications of glaciers, and a Sweden still partially
glaciated.
A map of Antarctica published by the eighteenth-
century French cartographer Philippe Buache in 1737
shows it as divided into two islands, one large, one small,
with a considerable area of water between them. The 1958
survey showed that this is correct. On modern maps,
Antarctica is shown as one solid mass. Even Oronteus
Finaeus showed it as a solid mass. The implication is that
Buache used maps that were far older than those used by
Oronteus Finaeus - possibly thousands of years older.
Perhaps the most interesting piece of evidence
uncovered by Hapgood is a map of China which he found
in Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, dating
from 1137, and carved on stone. Hapgood's studies of Piri
Re'is and other European portolans had made him familiar
with the 'longitude error' mentioned above; now he was
astonished to find it on this map of China. If he was
correct, then the Chinese had also known the 'original'
maps on which Piri Re'is was based.
All this explains why Hapgood reached the startling
conclusion that there was a flourishing worldwide
maritime civilisation on earth before 4000 bc, and that its
centre was probably the Antarctic continent, then free of
ice. He says in the final chapter of Maps of the Ancient
Sea Kings: 'When I was a youth I had a plain simple faith
in progress. It seemed to me impossible that once man had
passed a milestone of progress in *one way that he could
ever pass the same milestone again the other way. Once
the telephone was invented, it would stay invented. If past
civilisations had faded away it was just because they had
not learned the secret of progress. But Science meant
permanent progress, with no going back ...' And now the
evidence of his Vanished civilisation' seemed to contradict
that conclusion. He quotes the historian S. R. K. Glanville
as saying (in The Legacy of Egypt): 'It may be, as some
indeed suspect, that the science we see as the dawn of
recorded
88
4 The Forbidden Word
history was not science at its dawn, but represents the
remnants of the science of some great and as yet untraced
civilisation.'
Hapgood, of course, does not mention Atlantis - it would
have been more than his academic reputation was worth.
Yet the story of Atlantis can hardly fail to occur to the
minds of his readers - after all, his great catastrophe of
fifteen thousand years ago sounds as if it might have been
the beginning of the disaster that, according to Plato,
engulfed the continent.
The problem, as we have seen, is that Plato's account of
Atlantis is - to put it mildly - hard to accept. In the
Timaeus he tells us that Atlanteans were warring
aggressively against Europe in 9600 bc, and conquered
Europe as far as Italy and North Africa as far as Libya. It
was the Athenians who, according to Plato, fought on
alone, and finally conquered the Atlanteans - after which
both Atlantis and Athens were engulfed by floods. But
since archaeological investigation shows no sign of
occupation of the site of Athens before 3000 bc (when
there seems to have been a fairly sophisticated Neolithic
settlement on the site of the Acropolis), this must be
regarded as myth rather than history (although some of the
surprises we have encountered in ancient Egyptian history
suggest we should keep an open mind).
In his fragmentary dialogue Critias, of which only a
few pages exist, Plato tells us that the Atlanteans were
great engineers and architects; their capital city was built
on a hill, surrounded by concentric bands of land and
water, joined by tunnels large enough for a ship to sail
through. The city, eleven miles in diameter, contained
temples (to the sea god Poseidon - or Neptune) and
palaces, and there were extensive harbours and docks. A
canal, a hundred yards wide and a hundred feet deep,
connected the outermost ring of water to the sea. Behind
the city was an oblong plain, three hundred by two
hundred miles, on which farmers grew the city's food
supply; this was surrounded by mountains that came down
to the sea, and which were full of villages, lakes and
rivers. Plato goes into considerable detail about the
architecture - even to the colour of the stones of the
buildings - and the communal dining halls with hot and
cold fountains make it sound like some Utopian fantasy of
H. G. Wells.
But as a result of interbreeding - presumably with
immigrants - the Atlanteans gradually began to fall away
from their god-like origins, and to behave badly. At this
point Zeus decided they needed a lesson
89
.--!- v nts opninx
to 'bring them back into tune', and called a meeting of the
gods ... At which point, the fragment breaks off, and the
rest of the history of Atlantis - which once continued in a
third dialogue ~ is lost.
The editors of the Bllingen edition of Plato explain
that Plato was 'resting his mind ... making up a fairy tale,
the most wonderful island that could be imagined.' But if
it was intended as a fable or fairy tale, the motive is
obscure; it seems far more likely that it is an old story that
was told to Plato by Socrates. And if it was fiction, why
did Plato insert his first brief account of Atlantis in the
Timaeus, his account of the creation of the universe,
which Benjamin Jowett called 'the greatest effort of the
human mind to conceive the world as a whole...' if it was
merely a fairy tale?
In the second half of the nineteenth century, ships of the
British, French, German and American navies began
soundings of the floor of the Atlantic, and discovered the
'Mid-Atlantic Ridge', a mountain range running from
Iceland almost to the Antarctic Circle, which is at one
point 600 miles wide. This has proved to be an area of
great volcanic activity. Understandably, the discovery
caused considerable excitement, and drew the attention of
an American congressman named Ignatius Donnelly,
whom L. Sprague de Camp has described as 'perhaps the
most erudite man ever to sit in the House of
Representatives'. On losing his seat in 1870, when he was
39, Donnelly retired to write Atlantis: The Antediluvian
World, based upon extensive studies in the Library of
Congress; it appeared twelve years later, and became an
instant bestseller. The success was deserved; the book
shows considerable learning, and even today is as readable
as when it was written. Donnelly shows a wide knowledge
of mythology and anthropology, and quotes in Greek and
Hebrew. He studies flood legends from Egypt to Mexico,
pointing out their similarities, and argues that ancient
South American civilisations like the Incas and the Maya
bear interesting resemblance to early European
civilisations. His suggestion that the Azores may be the
mountain tops of the sunken continent so impressed the
British Prime Minister Gladstone that he tried -
unsuccessfully - to persuade the British Cabinet to allot
funds to send a ship to search for Atlantis.
Like Schwaller de Lubicz, Donnelly was struck by how
quickly Egyptian civilisation seems to have attained a
high degree of sophistication; like Schwaller, he
suggested that this was because its civilisation originated
in Atlantis. In his book Lost Continents (1954), L.
Sprague de Camp asserts that 'most of Donnelly's
statements of fact... either were wrong when he made
them, or have been disproved by subsequent
90
4 The Forbidden Word
discoveries.' Yet his list of Donnelly's mistakes - such as
his views on Egyptian civilisation - only emphasises that
Donnelly had a remarkably acute nose for interesting
evidence from the past.
It was unfortunate for the budding science of
'Atlantology' that it ran into the same problem that
Hapgood would encounter when he published Maps of the
Ancient Sea Kings and found himself classified with Erich
von Daniken and other advocates of the 'ancient astronaut'
theory. Five years before Donnelly's Atlantis appeared, a
Russian 'occultist' named Helena Blavatsky had published
an enormous work of ancient mythology called Isis
Unveiled, which became an unexpected bestseller; one of
its fifteen hundred pages deals briefly with Atlantis,
declaring that its inhabitants were 'natural mediums',
whose childlike innocence had made them an easy prey
for some malevolent entity who turned them into a nation
of black magicians; they started a war that led to the
destruction of Atlantis.
Madame Blavatsky died in London in 1891, having
became the founder of the Theosophical Society; her final
enormous work, The Secret Doctrine, claimed to be a
commentary on a religious work called The Book of
Dzyan, written in Atlantis. According to Madame
Blavatsky, the present human race is the fifth race of
intelligent beings on earth; its immediate predecessor, the
fourth 'root race', was the Atlanteans.
A leading Theosophist named W. Scott-Elliot followed
this up with a work called The Story of Atlantis (1896),
which achieved widespread popularity. Scott-Elliot
claimed that he gained his knowledge directly from his
ability to read 'the Akasic records', the records of earth
history that are imprinted on a kind of 'psychic ether', and
which are accessible to those possessing psychic
sensitivity. He later went on to write a similar book about
Lemuria, another 'lost continent' that is supposed to have
been located in the Pacific. (Donnelly had pointed out
there there is evidence that Australia is the only visible
part of a continent that stretched from Africa to the
Pacific, and the zoologist L. P. Sclater christened it
Lemuria, noting that the existence of lemurs from Africa
to Madagascar seemed to suggest a continuous land mass.)
One of the most influential theosophists around the turn
of the century was the Austrian Rudolf Steiner, and in
1904 he produced a work called From the Akasic Records,
which described the evolution of the human race. Like
Madame Blavatsky, he taught that man began as a
completely etherialised being, who has become more solid
with each step in his evolution. The Lemurians were the
third 'root race',
9
1
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
the Atlanteans the fourth. Like Plato, Steiner declares that
the Atlante-ans became increasingly corrupt and
materialistic, and that their use of destructive forces led to
the catastrophe (which Steiner places around 8000 bc)
that caused the disappearance of Atlantis beneath the
waves.
The annexation of Atlantis by occultists caused the
whole subject to fall into disrepute. In the 1920s, a
Scottish newspaper editor named Lewis Spence tried to
reverse this trend by returning to Donnelly's purely
historical approach in The Problem of Atlantis (1924). He
argued for the existence of a great Atlantic continent in
Miocene times (25 to 5 million years ago), which
disintegrated into islands, the two largest of which were
close to the coast of Spain. Another island called Antillia
existed in the region of the West Indies. The eastern
continent began to disintegrate about 25,000 years ago
and disappeared about 10,000 years ago. Antillia survived
until more recent times. Cro-Magnon man came from
Atlantis, and wiped out the European stock of
Neanderthal man about 25,000 years ago. Later
Atlanteans, known as Azilian man, founded the
civilisations of Egypt and Crete, while other Atlanteans
fled westward and became the Mayans.
Like so many Atlantis theorists, Spence became
obsessed by his subject, and later works like Will Europe
Follow Atlantis} and The Occult Sciences in Atlantis show
a decline in standards of intellectual rigour.
In the late 1960s, a Greek archaeologist, Professor
Angelos Galano-poulos, proposed the startling theory that
Atlantis was the island of Santorini, north of Crete. This
was blown apart around 1500 bc by a tremendous
volcanic explosion, which probably also destroyed most
of the Greek islands and the coastal plains of Greece and
Crete. But how could the small island of Santorini have
been Plato's enormous continent of Atlantis, with its 300-
mile inland plain? Galanopoulos suggests that the scribe
simply multiplied the figures by ten - and that this also
applies to the date - Plato's 9000 years earlier should
actually be 900 (i.e. about 1300 bc). Surely, says
Galanopoulos, a canal 300 feet wide and 100 feet deep is
absurd; 30 feet wide and 10 feet deep sounds more
reasonable.
The chief objection to this theory is that Plato states
clearly that Atlantis was beyond the Pillars of Hercules -
Gibraltar. Galanopoulos argues that since Hercules
performed most of his labours in Greece, the Pillars of
Hercules could refer to the two southernmost
promontories of Greece. But Plato also says that the
Atlanteans held sway over the country as far as Egypt and
the Tyrrhenian sea, and these are certainly not within the
Greek promontories. In spite of these objections, the
92
4 The Forbidden Word
tourist board of Santorini has taken full advantage of the
theory to
display notices declaring itself to be the
original Atlantis.
j^ In 1968, it looked as if Edgar Cayce's prophecy that
Atlantis would
*** rise again in 1968 and 1969 was about to be fulfilled.
A fishing guide
^ /called Bonefish Sam took the archaeologist and
underwater explorer
>%> JA- Dr J. Manson Valentine to a place where there
was a regular pattern
j i| JL of enormous underwater stones that looked man-
made. Valentine con-
/ ^|f eluded that this was part of a ceremonial road leading
to a sacred site,
^1 built by 'the people who made the big spheres of
Central America, the
V| huge platforms of Baalbek in Lebanon, Malta in the
Mediterranean,
//fj Stonehenge in England, the walls of OUantaytambo
in Peru, the standing
%- I stone avenues of Brittany, the colossal ruins of
Tiahuanaco in Bolivia,
4 J and the statues of Easter Island - this was a
prehistoric race that could
(
"
v
* transport and position cyclopean stones in a way
that remains a mystery #. to us.' When Valentine
leaned of Edgar Cayce's prophecy that Atlantis would
begin to reappear near Bimini, he was startled and
impressed. For a while, the 'Bimini road' was the
subject of much speculation, and an expedition led
by Dr David Zink spent months studying the stones.
Yet the result was inconclusive. Although a grooved
building block and a stylised head weighing over 200
pounds seemed to contradict the sceptics who
declared that the blocks were natural formations, no
positive evidence was ever discovered to link the
road with a vanished civilisation; the stones may be
merely remains dating from the past thousand years.
No wonder, then, that Hapgood had no intention of
exposing himself to ridicule by mentioning
Atlantis. In later life, he showed remarkable
courage in publishing a book called Voices of
Spirit, a series of interviews - or rather 'sittings' -
with the trance medium Elwood Babbitt, in which
Hapgood was appar ent l y abl e t o hol d
conversations with -among others - Nostradamus,
Queen Elizabeth I, William Wordsworth, Abraham
Lincoln, Gandhi, John R Kennedy, Albert Einstein
and Adlai Stevenson. But by then Hapgood was
retired and didn't care what the academic world
thought about him. The book is a vehicle for
expressing his conviction that the next step in
man's evolution will be in the realm of the psychic
and paranormal.
However, Hapgood's notion that the earth's
crust might be capable of 'slipping' came to
intrigue a young Canadian named Randy Flem-
ming, who lived in British Columbia. In the
1970s, waiting to hear
93
.mis lo ine 5pnnx
whether he had secured a librarian's job at the University
of Victoria, Hemming decided to distract himself by
writing a science fiction novel about Atlantis, set in
10,000 bc. He decided that the present site of Antarctica
would make a good location for Atlantis.
Having obtained the job, he came upon Hapgood's
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, and saw the ice-free map
of Antarctica (p. 93), which immediately reminded him of
the map of Atlantis drawn by the seventeenth-century
Jesuit archaeologist Athanasius Kircher. Now he launched
into serious research on Atlantis, with the help of the
university library. A major step forward occurred when his
wife Rose - also a librarian - gave him a National Atlas of
Canada that revealed that the northern Yukon and some
Arctic islands were free of ice during the last Ice Age. It
was while puzzling on this curious anomaly that he heard
of Hapgood's theory of the earth's shifting crust. When he
saw that Hapgood's theory would place the Antarctic
continent 2,500 miles closer to the equator around 15,000
bc, he left the library 'jumping for joy'. Suddenly, it began
to look as if his science fiction novel might be based on
fact.
Fl emmi ng began wor k on a paper f or t he
Anthropological Journal of Canada on the problem of
why agriculture seems to have begun all over the world
around 9000 bc. His own suggestion was that Hapgood's
'Earth Crustal Displacement' occurred some time before
9000 bc, and made large areas of the globe uninhabitable,
trapping people who would normally have been mobile in
small areas. Since wild food would soon become scarce
under these conditions, they were forced to learn to grow
their own food ...
He also wrote to Hapgood to discuss Earth's Shifting
Crust, and Hapgood, unaware that the Flemmings already
knew his Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, sent them a
copy.
Some time around now - 1977 - the Flemmings had the
romantic idea of hyphenating a combination of their
surnames - Flemming and De'Ath - to make Flem-Ath;
Randy Flemming was later to admit ruefully that 'it
Seems mainly to have resulted in getting us lost in the file
of every bureaucracy in Canada'.
With considerable rashness, the Flem-Aths decided
they had to move to London, so that they could continue
their researches in the British Museum. It was a highly
fruitful period, which ended with their return to Canada in
the 1980s, and continuation of researches into 'earth's
shifting crust' which led to the writing of When the Sky
Fell (1995).
I heard of the Flem-Aths from John West during a
meeting in New
94
4 The Forbidden Word
York in 1994. I wrote to them, and as a consequence,
received a copy of the typescript of When the Sky Fell.
Their starting point was Plato - not just the accounts of
Atlantis, but
I the remark in Laws (Book 3) that world agriculture
originated in high-
| land regions after some great flood catastrophe that
destroyed all low-
\ land cities. Plato, of course, had already given the date
of the destruction
\ of Atlantis as 9600 bc. The Flem-Aths note that the
Soviet botanist
f Nikolai Ivanovitch Vavilov collected over fifty thousand
wild plants
{ from around the globe, and concluded that they came
from eight centres
I of origin, all in mountain ranges. They also note that
the modern
I scientific account of the origin of agriculture dates it
roughly from this
j period. One of the major sites of origin was Lake
Titicaca in Peru, the
I highest freshwater lake in the world. (We shall have
more to say of
| Lake Titicaca in the next chapter.) Oddly enough,
another mountain
| area known as a site where agriculture originated at
about the same
S time lies in the highlands of Thailand, exactly on the
opposite side of
the earth from Lake Titicaca. Hapgood's theory had, in
fact, pinpointed
these two places as areas of stability after the great
upheaval that he
posited.
'After hundreds of thousands of years of living by
hunting and gathering, humankind turned to
experimenting with agriculture on opposite sides of the
earth at the same time. Is this likely without the
intervention of some outside force?'
Egypt had been tropical before the crust
displacement; now it became temperate. So, according
to Hapgood, did Crete, Sumeria, India and China. All
became places where civilisation flourished.
In the pages that follow, the Flem-Aths discuss the
catastrophe myths of many tribes of American Indians -
the Utes, the Kutenai, the Okana-gan, the A'a'tam, the
Cahto, the Cherokee, and the Araucanians of Peru. All
have legends of violent earthquakes followed by floods
which caused widespread disaster. The Utes tell a story
of how the hare god fired a magic arrow at the sun,
causing it to shatter into pieces and earthquakes and
floods to engulf the earth. Many similar legends suggest
that some great catastrophe was preceded by some
change in the face of the sun that made it look as if it
was shattered; a Spanish chronicler remarks on the
terror of the Incas at an eclipse of the sun - while
another comments that the Araucanians rush to the
highlands whenever there is an earth tremor.
There are also many legends of survival that bear a
family resemblance to Noah's Ark. The Haida of north-
west Canada have a flood
95
Miiantis to the Sphinx
myth which is virtually identical with the flood myth of
Sumeria in the Middle East.
From all corners of the earth the same story is told.
The sun deviates from its regular path. The sky falls.
The earth is wrenched and torn by earthquakes. And
finally a great wave of water engulfs the globe.
Survivors of such a calamity would go to any lengths
to prevent it from happening again. They lived in an
age of magic. It was natural and necessary to
construct elaborate devices to pacify the sun-god (or
goddess) and control, or monitor its path.
Hence, according to the Flem-Aths, the many strange
magical customs connected with the sun which
anthropologists have observed all over the world.
The Flem-Aths go on to review the evidence that many
areas of the earth were believed to be buried deep under
ice during the last Ice Age. Wolf bones found in Norway
north of the Arctic Circle revealed that this area must have
had a temperate climate 42 thousand years ago, when it
was supposed to be in the grip of an Ice Age. 'Of the
thirty-four species known to have lived in Siberia before
9600 bc, including mammoths, giant deer, cave hyena and
cave lions, twenty-eight were adapted to temperate
conditions', indicating that Siberia's climate was then
much warmer than today. At this time, two vast ice sheets
lay across Canada. Yet the evidence shows that there was
an ice-free corridor between them. Why? Hapgood's
answer is that, at this time, the Gulf of Mexico was in the
east and the Yukon in the west, so the sun melted the snow
along this corridor as fast as it fell.
The Flem-Aths cite evidence that an earth crust
displacement around 91,600 bc moved Europe within the
Arctic Circle, while another around 50,600 bc moved
North America into the polar zone.
All this evidence, the Flem-Aths submit, points to the
present Antarctica as the site of the legendary Atlantis.
(They also cite Hapgood's map evidence to reinforce the
point.) Some shift in the earth's crust, beginning about
15,000 bc, ended in violent upheaval in 9600 bc, the time
when, according to Plato, Atlantis and Athens suffered
catastrophic upheavals.
And how did the seventeenth-century Jesuit Athanasius
Kircher come upon the map of Atlantis that first struck
Randy Flemming as being so similar to Antarctica? In the
first volume of his encyclopaedic work Mundus
SubterraneuSy published in 1665, Kircher claimed that
the map
96
4 The Forbidden Word
he had discovered in his researches was stolen from Egypt
by the Roman invaders. The original of the map has not
been discovered, but it seems unlikely that a Jesuit scholar
would have concocted it, particularly in a scientific work.
As the Flem-Aths point out, both the shape and the size of
the map correspond remarkably to Antarctica as we now
know it from seismic soundings - or even to Antarctica as
it is now shown on most globes.
For Graham Hancock, the Antarctica theory of the Flem-
Aths came as a kind of deliverance. A few months into
work on his book about the problem of a lost civilisation,
he received a letter of resignation from his researcher. It
explained that, as far as he could see, the search was quite
pointless, since such a civilisation would have to be
enormous -at least two thousand miles across, with rivers
and mountains, and a considerable history of long-term
development. There was no known land mass in the world
that could have accommodated such a civilisation. As to
the notion that it could lie at the bottom of the Atlantic, the
floor of the Atlantic Ocean, now so thoroughly mapped,
showed no sign of a lost continent. The same was true of
the floor of the Pacific and the Indian Oceans. So in spite
of all the evidence for some earlier civilisation - such as
that contained in Hapgood's maps - it looked as if there
was nowhere its remains might be lurking.
In fact, the answer was in Hapgood, and in the belief
that he states in Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings - that the
maps of Antarctica show that someone living in the
continent, at a time when it was free of ice, must have
been responsible for mapping it.
Yet I can hardly blame Graham Hancock for failing to
draw the obvious conclusion. I was also thoroughly
familiar with Hapgood's book, and had discussed it at
length in an 'encyclopaedia' of unsolved mysteries, and I
had also failed to see what was staring me in the face. It
took Randy Flemming's chance decision to write a science
fiction novel in which - purely as a fictional hypothesis -
he assumed that Antarctica was Atlantis, to start the chain
of reasoning that led him to the 'Eureka' experience.
As to why Hapgood himself failed to label his iost
civilisation' Atlantis, the answer is that - quite apart from
his wish not to expose himself to the ridicule of academic
colleagues - he felt that it hardly mattered what the lost
civilisation was called; he told the Flemmings in a letter of
August 1977: 'It may well be that after examining this
book
97
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
(Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings) you may decide to
reduce somewhat your emphasis on Atlantis, that is on
the myths, for the book contains enough hard evidence to
stand on its own.' Which is, of course, true. But then,
Hapgood had not studied the rich evidence of catastrophe
myths all over the world, or the physical evidence of sites
like Tiahuan-aco. If he had, he might have decided that it
was worth a little academic ridicule to be able to claim
precedence in associating his ancient maps with the
forbidden word ..,
98
5 The Realm of the White Gods
I
N March 1519, the conquistador Hernando Corts landed
in Mexico with 508 soldiers. The Aztecs, under their king
Montezuma, had tens of thousands of warriors. Yet in just
over two years the Spaniards had defeated them and
destroyed the Aztec empire. The Indians were enslaved,
Christian churches were built on the site of Aztec temples,
the name of the capital was changed from Tenochtitlan to
Mexico City, and that of the country to New Spain.
Why did the Spanish succeed with such relative ease?
Because the Aztecs mistook them for descendants of the
god Quetzalcoatl, a cross between a snake and a bird
known as 'the plumed serpent'. (Elsewhere in South
America he is known as Viracocha, Votan, Kukulkan and
Kon-Tiki.) The legend states that Quetzalcoatl, a tall,
bearded, white man, came from somewhere in the south,
soon after some catastrophe that had obscured the sun for a
long time; Quetzalcoatl brought back the sun, and he also
brought the arts of civilisation. (We are naturally inclined
to wonder: was the arrival of Quetzalcoatl connected with
the obscuring of the sun? Could he have been fleeing from
the catastrophe that caused it?) After an attempt to kill him
by treachery, the 'god' returned to the sea, promising one
day to return. By coincidence, Corts had landed close to
the spot where Quetzalcoatl was expected, which is why
the superstitious Montezuma allowed Corts to take him
prisoner. One reason why the Spaniards felt no
compunction at slaughtering the Aztecs was that they were
appalled at their tradition of human sacrifice. The Aztec
priest would carefully slice an incision in the ribs with a
flint knife, while several men held the victim down on the
altar by his (or her) arms and legs, and then plunged in his
hand and tore out the beating heart. When - as in many
cases - the victim was a baby, it was unnecessary to hold it
down. Such victims were often despatched by the dozen,
and even - when prisoners were taken - by the hundreds
99
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
or thousands. The Spaniards saw this, rightly, as a custom
of appalling barbarity. What they did not know is that it
dated back thousands of years, and that it was designed to
prevent the gods from bringing about the end of the world
in some violent catastrophe, as they had done in the
remote past.
In 1697, when an Italian traveller named Giovanni
Careri visited Mexico, he found a country exploited by
greedy Spanish merchants and fanatical and ignorant
priests who were busily destroying signs of the old
civilisation. 'We found a great number of books,' says one
chronicler, 'but as they contained nothing but superstitions
and falsehoods of the Devil, we burned them.' But in
Mexico City Careri met a priest who was an exception:
Don Carlos de Siguenza, scientist and historian, who
could speak the language of the Indians and read their
hieroglyphs. From ancient manuscripts, Siguenza had
concluded that the Aztecs had founded the city of
Tenochtitlan - and the Aztec empire
- in 1325. Before them there was a race called the Toltecs,
and before
them, the Olmecs, who lived in the tropical lowlands, and
who, accord
ing to legend, had come over the sea from the east -
Siguenza believed
from Atlantis.
Form Siguenza, Careri learned that the Indian
civilisation also had its great pyramids, including one at
Cholula that was three times as massive as the Great
Pyramid at Giza (which Careri had visited on his way to
South America). On Siguenza's recommendation, Careri
went to the town of San Juan Teotihuacan, and was
impressed by the magnificent Pyramid of the Moon and
the Pyramid of the Sun, even though both were partly
buried in earth. What puzzled him was how the Indians
had succeeded in transporting enormous blocks from
distant quarries; no one was able to tell him. Neither could
anyone suggest how the Aztecs had carved great stone
idols without metal chisels, or how they had raised them
to the summit of pyramids.
When, in 1719, Careri published the story of his round-
the-world voyage in nine Volumes, he was greeted with
incredulity and hostility; his critics spread the story that
he had never left Naples. One of the main reasons for this
hostility was Careri's descriptions of the civilisation of the
Aztecs; Europeans simply refused to believe that savages
could have created a culture that ranked with those of
ancient Egypt and Greece.
Many distinguished travellers visited Mexico and
described its ruins
- including the great Alexander von Humboldt - but
somehow their
descriptions failed to make an impact outside academic
circles. It would
not be until the mid-nineteenth century that a wider
audience would
100
5 The Realm of the White Gods
become aware of the legacy of South America. In 1841, a
three-volume work called Incidents of Travel in Central
America became an unexpected bestseller, and brought its
author - a young New York lawyer named John Lloyd
Stephens overnight celebrity in Europe as well as
America. Stephens had already explored the archaeology
of the Old World, in Egypt, Greece and Turkey. And when
he came across a report by a Mexican colonel of huge
pyramids buried in the jungles of Yucatan - on the Gulf of
Mexico - he succeeded in using his political connections
to get himself appointed to the post of charg d'affaires in
Central America. He took with him an artist named
Frederick Catherwood.
Landing at Belize, Stephens and Catherwood made their
way inland along the Honduras-Guatemala border. It
proved to be more dangerous and uncomfortable than
travelling in the Middle East. The country was in the grip
of a civil war, and they spent one night under arrest while
drunken soldiers fired off rifles into the air. After that they
plunged into deep forest where the trees met overhead, and
the stifling air was full of mosquitoes. They breathed in
the stench of vegetable decay, and the horses often sank up
to their bellies in the swamp. Stephens had almost lost
faith when one day they came upon a wall of stone blocks,
with a flight of steps leading up to a terrace. Their Indian
guide attacked the lianas with his machete, and tore them
away to reveal a kind of statue like an immense totem
pole, standing more than twice the height of a man. A
blank face with closed eyes looked down on them; the
decorations were so rich and finely carved that it might
have been some statue of the Buddha from India. There
could be no doubt whatsoever that this was the product of
a highly sophisticated civilisation. Within the next few
days, Stephens realised that he was on the edge of a
magnificent city, almost totally buried in the jungle. It was
called Copan, and it contained the remains of huge step
pyramids - not unlike the one at Saqqara - that were part of
a temple complex.
The owner of the site, an Indian called Don Jos Maria,
at first showed signs of irritation at the intruding
foreigners, but quickly became amenable when they
offered to buy the jungle city for a vast sum that exceeded
all his expectations. In fact, their offer - $50 -convinced
him that they were fools, but he accepted without
revealing his bafflement that they should want to purchase
such a worthless piece of property. Stephens threw a party
and offered everyone - including the women - cigars.
Stephens's Travels in Central America was the first that
the civilised world had heard of an ancient people called
the Maya, who preceded
101
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
(and overlapped with) the Toltecs, and who had built
Copan around ad 500; their cities had once spread from
Chichen Itz - in Yucatan -to Copan, from. Tikal in
Guatemala to Palanque in Chiapas. Their temples were as
magnificent as those of Babylon, their cities as
sophisticated as eighteenth-century Paris or Vienna, their
calendar as complex and precise as that of ancient Egypt.
Yet the Mayas also represented a great mystery. There
is evidence that, around ad 600, they decided to abandon
their cities; their method, apparently, was to move to a
new location in the jungle, where they would build
another city. The first attempt at an explanation was that
they were driven out by enemies. But as knowledge of
their society increased, it became clear that they had no
enemies; in their own territory they were supreme. Some
natural catastrophe - like earthquake or floods - also had
to be ruled out, since there was no sign of any kind of
destruction. And if the explanation was some kind of
plague, the graveyards would have been full, and this was
not true either.
The likeliest theory is the one put forward by the
American archaeologist Sylvanus Griswold Morley, who
believed that Maya origins went back as far as 2500 bc.
Morley noted that the Mayan cities suggested a rigid
hierarchical structure, with the temples and the palaces of
the nobility in the centre, and the huts of the peasants
scattered around the edges. The Mayas had no 'middle
class', only peasants and aristocrats - the latter including
the priests. The task of the peasants was to support the
upper classes with their labour - particularly the growing
of maize. But their agricultural methods were primitive -
dropping seed into a hole made with a stick. They seemed
to know nothing about allowing certain fields to 'rest' and
grow fallow. So the soil surrounding the cities gradually
became infertile, requiring a move to another site.
Moreover, because the social structure was so rigid, the
ruling class received no new blood. So as the farming land
lost its strength, and the peasant population increased, and
the rulers became increasingly decadent, the society went
into a slow collapse - and a once-great people drifted into
primitivism, confirming Hapgood's suspicion that history
can go backwards.
Stephens's book inspired a French abb named Charles
Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg to follow in his footsteps
across Mexico. In Guatemala he found the sacred book of
the Quiche Indians, the Popol Vuh, which he translated
into French and published in 1864. In the same
102
5 The Realm of the White Gods
year he brought out a translation of the Account of Yucatan
by Bishop Diego de Landa, a work of immense value by
one of the original Spanish 'conquistadors', which had been
languishing in the Madrid archives. His four-volume
History of the Civilisation of Mexico and Central America
was immediately recognised as the most important work
so far on the subject. But one of his most interesting
discoveries was a Mayan religious book known as the
Troano Codex (which later, when a second part was found,
became the Codex Tro-Cortesianus), owned by a
descendant of Cortes, for it was in this book that Brasseur
found mentions of some great catastrophe that had
convulsed Central America in the remote past - Brasseur
declared that the year could be identified as 9937 bc - and
destroyed much of its civilisation. Brasseur had met
natives who still had an oral tradition about the destruction
of a great continent in the Atlantic ocean, and had no
doubt, like the Codex, they were referring to the
destruction of Atlantis. He went on to speculate that it was
from Atlantis that the civilisations of Egypt and of South
America originated. This seemed to be confirmed by an
account of a great cataclysm described in the writings of
the Nahuatl tribe, whose language Brasseur had learned
directly from a descendant of Monte-zuma. He suggested
that Quetzalcoatl, the white god who came from the sea,
was an inhabitant of the lost Atlantis.
In the College of San Gregorio, in Mexico City,
Brasseur discovered a manuscript in Nahuatl (which he
called the Chimalpopoca Codex), in which he learned that
the immense upheaval had occurred around 10,500 bc, but
that it was not one catastrophe, as described by Plato, but
a series of at least four, each of which was caused by a
temporary shifting of the earth's axis.
Such unscholarly notions could hardly be excused, even
in one whose knowledge of the culture of Central America
was greater than that of most of the professors, and in his
later years Brasseur came in for more than his share of
derision. Yet many of his theories would later be supported
by Hapgood's 'maps of the ancient sea kings' (while
Graham Hancock cites Nature to the effect that the last
reversal of the earth's magnetic poles occurred 12,400
years ago - in other words, about 10,400 bc). Brasseur
believed that there was an ancient seafaring civilisation
long before the first cities appeared in the Middle East,
and that its sailors carried its culture throughout the world.
He also believed that their religion involved a cult of the
dog star Sirius - thus anticipating the discoveries made by
Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen among the Dogon
in the 1930s.
103
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
Between 1864 and 1867, the history of Mexico took a
turn in the direction of comic opera when the French
government, under Napoleon III, sent a military
expedition led by Archduke Maximilian of Hapsburg,
brother of Emperor Franz Joseph, to bring an end to the
civil war by claiming the throne. A gentle liberal,
Maximilian encouraged the arts, subsidised investigation
of the pyramids of Teotihuacan, and did his best to cope
with the total corruption that was part of the Mexican way
of life. Betrayed by Napoleon III, who decided to
withdraw his army, Maximilian was captured by the rebel
General Porfirio Diaz and shot by a firing squad. His
empress Carlota went insane and remained so for the
remainder of her long life (she died in 1927). But
Maximilian left a rich legacy for historians when he
purchased from a collector named Jos Maria Andrade a
library of five thousand books on Mayan culture, which
were sent to Europe.
Among Europeans to flee Mexico when Maximilian
was executed was a young Frenchman named Desire
Charnay, who had been the first to photograph the ruins
with a camera obscura. It was while his assistants were
setting up the camera that Charnay prodded idly in the soil
with his dagger, and unearthed pottery and bones, a find
that was to inspire a lifelong passion for excavation. He
would return to Mexico in 1880, searching for Tollan, the
legendary capital of the Toltecs. Convinced that it lay
beneath the Indian village of Tula, fifty miles north of
Mexico City, Charnay began to dig there, and soon came
upon six-foot-long blocks of basalt, which he took to be
the feet of huge statues intended to support a large
building. He called these statues 'Atlanteans' - from which
it may be deduced that, like so many Central American
archaeologists, he had come to believe that the
civilisations of South America originated in Atlantis. This
was enough to make the academic world regard him with
deep suspicion.
Charnay went on to study the ruins of another Maya
city, Palenque in Chiapas, discovered in 1773 by Friar
Ramn de Ordonez, who had then gone on to write a book
in which he declared that the 'Great City of the Serpents'
had been founded by a white man called Vptan who had
come from somewhere over the Atlantic in the remote
past. Ordonez claimed to have seen a book written (in
Quiche) by Votan -and burned by the Bishop of Chiapas in
1691 - in which Votan identified himself as a citizen of
'Valim Chivim', which Ordonez believed to be Tripoli in
ancient Phoenicia.
In the steaming heat of the 'City of the Serpents',
Charnay had to content himself with taking papier-mache
casts of the friezes, which
104
5 The Realm of the White Gods
were already being destroyed by the vegetation. In the
Yucatan city of Chichen Itz, built by the Mayas as they
abandoned cities they had built in Guatemala - and here
Charnay was confirmed in his belief that Mayan
civilisation had the same roots as that of Egypt, India and
even China and Thailand - the step pyramids reminded
him of Angkor Wat. But Charnay was inclined to believe
that the Toltecs originated in Asia. Later, in one of the
least-explored of Mayan ruins at Yaxchilan (which
Charnay renamed after his patron Lorillard), he was
deeply impressed by a relief showing a man kneeling
before a god, and apparently passing a long rope through a
hole in his tongue - reminding Charnay that the
worshippers of the Hindu goddess Shiva also pay homage
by drawing a rope through their pierced tongues.
Back in France, Charnay published a book called
Anciennes Villes du Nouveau Monde, but it failed to
improve his reputation among academics, and he retired to
Algiers to write novels, dying in 1915 at the age of 87.
Charnay's contemporary Augustus Le Plongeon was even
less concerned about his academic reputation, with the
result that his name is seldom found in books on Central
America (although one modern authority pauses long
enough to describe him as an 'argumentative crackpot').
By the time he was in his mid-forties, Le Plongeon had
been a gold prospector in California, a lawyer in San
Francisco and the director of a hospital in Peru, where he
became interested in ancient ruins. He was 48 when he
sailed, with his young English wife Alice, from New York
for Yucatan in 1873.
By this time, Mexico was firmly in the grip of Porfirio
Diaz, who had encouraged the corruption that so dismayed
his predecessor Maximilian; in fact, Mexico had reverted
to the days of the Mayas, with an all-powerful ruling class
and a browbeaten class of peasants, whose land was
confiscated and given to the rich. The result was that the
Indians in remoter parts - like Yucatan - frequently
rebelled, and when the Le Plongeons first went to Chichen
Itz, they had to be protected by soldiers. But Le Plongeon
learned the Mayan language, and soon began exploring
the forest alone. He found the Indians to be friendly and
polite, and he was soon known as the Great Black Beard.
From oyster shells in the region of Lake Titicaca, on the
border of Bolivia and Peru, Le Plongeon had concluded
that at some point in the remote past, the lake must once
have been at sea level, and that therefore
105
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
some great upheaval must have raised it two and a half
miles to its present location. Now, among the Indians of
Yucatan, he again heard tales of this great catastrophe.
He learned from these forest Indians that they still
preserved an occult tradition. Peter Tompkins states (in
Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids):
Like Carlos Castaneda in our day, Le Plongeon
learned that the native Indians in his day still
practised magic and divination, that their wise men
were able to surround themselves with clouds and
even appear to make themselves invisible,
materialising strange and amazing objects.
Sometimes, says Le Plongeon, the place where they
were operating would seem to shake as if an
earthquake were occurring, or whirl around and
around as if being carried off by a tornado ... Beneath
the prosaic life of the Indians ... Le Plongeon
concluded that there flowed a rich living current of
occult wisdom and practice, with its sources in an
extremely ancient past, far beyond the purview of
ordinary historical research.
Le Plongeon felt that occasionally the mask was lowered
sufficiently for him to glimpse 'a world of spiritual reality,
sometimes of indescribable beauty, again of inexpressible
horror'.
Le Plongeon learned to decipher Mayan hieroglyphs
from a 150-year-old Indian. Scholars were to cast doubt
on Le Plongeon's readings of these glyphs, yet his ability
is attested by his discovery of a statue buried 24 feet under
the earth of Chichen Itza, whose location he found
described in a Mayan inscription on a wall. The
inscription referred to the buried object as a chacmool
(meaning 'jaguar paw'); it proved to be the huge figure of a
man reclining on his elbows, his head turned at 90
degrees. With the aid of his team of diggers, Le Plongeon
raised it to the surface. But his hopes of sending it for
exhibition in Philadelphia were frustrated by the Mexican
authorities, who seized it before it had got beyond tHe
local capital. Chacmools are now recognised as ritual
figures - probably representing fallen warriors who act as
messengers to the gods - and the receptacle often found on
the chest is intended for the heart of a sacrificial victim.
The result of Le Plongeon's studies of ancient Mayan
texts were convictions that in many ways echoed those of
Brasseur and Charnay, but went even further. Charnay had
been inclined to believe that civilisation had reached
South America from Asia or Europe, Brasseur that it
originated in Atlantis. Le Plongeon thought that it had
begun in South
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5 The Realm of the White Gods
America and moved east. He cited the Ramayana, the
Hindu epic written by the poet Valmiki in the third century
bc, declaring that India had been peopled by seagoing
conquerors in remote antiquity. Valmiki called these
conquerors the Nagas, and Le Plongeon pointed out the
similarity to the word Naacal, Mayan priests or 'adepts'
who, according to Mayan mythology, travelled the world
as teachers of wisdom. Like Brasseur, Le Plongeon cited
the Mesopotamian myth that civilisation was brought to
the world by creatures from the sea called 'oannes', and
pointed out that the Mayan word oaana means
c
he who
lives in water'. In fact, Le Plongeon spent a great deal of
space on the similarities between Mayan and the ancient
languages of the Middle East. (In both Akkadian and
Mayan, kul is the word for the behind, and kun for the
female genitalia, suggesting a common origin for words
we still use.)
But Le Plongeon's most controversial contribution was
his translations from the Troano Codex, first studied by
Brasseur. Like Brasseur, he agreed that this contained
references to the catastrophe that destroyed Atlantis -
although, as far as Le Plongeon could determine, the
Mayas had apparently referred to Atlantis as Mu. The text
spoke of terrible earthquakes that continued for thirteen
chuen ('days'?), causing the land to rise and sink several
times before it was torn asunder. The date given by the
codex - 'the year six Kan, and the eleventh Mulac' - means
(according to both Brasseur and Le Plongeon) 9500 BC.
Le Plongeon later claimed that he had discovered in the
ruins of Kabah, south of Uxmal, a mural that confirmed
this date, and at Xochicalco yet another inscription about
the cataclysm.
Le Plongeon's reputation for romantic flights of fancy
seemed to be confirmed by his book Queen Moo and the
Egyptian Sphinx (1896) in which he argued that the
Mayas' legendary Queen Moo and Prince Aac are the
origin of the Egyptian Isis and Osiris, and that the
evidence of the Troana Codex indicates that Queen Moo
originated in Egypt and later returned there. He also
speculates that the fact that Atlantis sank in the thirteenth
chuen may be the origin of the modern superstition about
the number thirteen; he suggests, more plausibly, that this
may explain why the Mayan calendar is based on the
number thirteen.
Such speculations obscured some of Le Plongeon's
more important observations, such as that the relation of
the height to the base of Mayan pyramids represented the
earth - as in the case of the Great Pyramid of Giza. He also
argued that the Mayan unit of measurement was one forty-
millionth of the earth's circumference - a suggestion that
107
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
might be regarded as absurd if it were not for the fact that
the Egyptians also seemed to be aware of the length of the
equator.
The Le Plongeons spent twelve years in Central
America, returning to New York in 1885. He was hoping
for a triumphant homecoming; in fact, the remaining 23
years of his life were to be a continuous disappointment.
To the academic establishment he was a crank who
believed in magic and in a chronology that struck them as
absurd (for everyone knew that the very first towns were
built around 4000 bc -it would be another seventy years
before that estimate was pushed back to 8000 bc, and even
that was fifteen hundred years later than Le Plongeon's
dating of Atlantis). Museums were not interested in
Mayan artefacts, or even Mayan manuscripts; the
Metropolitan Museum accepted Le Plongeon's casts of
Mayan friezes but relegated them to the storage basement.
So Le Plongeon lived on to 1908, and died at the age of
82, still regarded as an argumentative crackpot.
One of the few friends he made in these last years was a
young Englishman named James Churchward, who had
been (according to his own account) a Bengal Lancer in
India. (Peter Tompkins states that he was a civil servant
with connections with British Intelligence.) According to
Churchward, writing more than forty years later, he had
already stumbled on the trail of ancient Mayan ('Naacal')
inscriptions in India, when a Brahmin priest had showed
him - and allowed him to copy -tablets covered with
Mayan inscriptions. These, according to the priest, were
accounts of the lost continent called Mu, which was not
situated in the Atlantic, as Le Plongeon had assumed, but
in the Pacific, just as the zoologist P. L. Sciater had
suggested in the 1850s when he noticed the similarity
between flora and fauna of so many lands between India
and Australia. But Churchward's Lost Continent of Mu
would not be published until 1926, and then it would be
dismissed by historians as a kind of hoax. After all, Sciater
had christened his lost continent Lemuria, and it was after
this that Le Plongeon had discovered 'Mu' in the Troano
Codex.
Churchward seems to have been inspired to write his
Mu books (five in all) by contact with a friend named
William Niven, to whom he dedicated the first of them.
Niven was, like Le Plongeon, a maverick archaeologist - a
Scots mining engineer who worked in Mexico as early as
1889. At Guerrero, near Acapulco, he explored a region
that contained hundreds of pits, from which the building
material of Mexico
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5 The Realm of the White Gods
City had been mined. Digging in these pits, Niven claimed
to have come across ancient ruins, some of which were
full of volcanic ash, suggesting that, like Pompeii, they
had been suddenly overwhelmed. From their depth - some
were 30 feet below the surface - Niven estimated that
some of them dated from 50,000 years ago. One
goldsmith's shop contained around 200 clay figures that
had been baked into stone. He also found murals that
rivalled those of Greece or the Middle East.
In 1921, in a village called Santiago Ahuizoctla, he
found hundreds of stone tablets engraved with curious
symbols and figures, not unlike those of the Maya,
although Maya scholars failed to recognise them. Niven
showed some of these tablets to Churchward, who said
they confirmed what he had learned from the Hindu priest.
These tablets, said Churchward, had been inscribed by
Naacal priests who had been sent out from Mu to Central
America, to disseminate their secret knowledge.
Churchward was to claim that these tablets revealed that
the civilisation of Mu was 200,000 years old.
Understandably, then, Churchward's Mu books have
been dismissed as a fraud. It must be confessed that this
was largely his own fault; he is so vague about the temple
where he claims to have seen the Naacal tablets, and offers
so little proof of his various assertions, that it is hard to
take him seriously. On the other hand, if Brasseur, Le
Plongeon and Niven can be taken seriously when they
speak of Mayan inscriptions referring to 9500 bc, then it is
possible that we may eventually discover that Churchward
was more truthful than we suspect.
Le Plongeon was a severe disappointment to the American
Antiquarian Society, which for a time published his
reports from Mexico in its journal. But his speculations
about Atlantis, and his habit of sniping at the Church for
its unsavoury record of torture and bloodshed, became
finally too much for the New Englanders, and they
dropped him.
Amusingly enough, the young man they chose to be
their representative in Mexico had started his career by
publishing an article in Popular Science Monthly called
'Atlantis Not a Myth', which argued that although there is
no scientific evidence for Atlantis, a tradition so
widespread must surely have some basis in fact, and that
this lost civilisation seems to have made its mark on the
land of the Mayas. He then went on to cite the legend of
light-skinned, blue-eyed people, with serpent emblems on
their heads, who had come from the east in remote
antiquity. His article came out in 1879, three years before
Donnelly's
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From Atlantis to the Sphinx
book on Atlantis. He pointed out that the leaders of the
Olmecs were known as Chanes, Serpent Wise Men, and
among the Mayas as Canob, People of the Rattlesnake.
Edward Herbert Thompson's article attracted some
scholarly attention, as a result of which he found himself,
in his mid-twenties, in Mexico as American consul. It was
1885, the year Le Plongeon left.
As a student, Thompson had read a book by Diego de
Landa, the Spanish bishop who began his career by
destroying thousands of Mayan books and artefacts, and
ended by carefully collecting and preserving the remains
of Mayan culture. Landa had described a sacred well at
Chichen Itza, where sacrificial victims were hurled during
times of drought or pestilence. The story fascinated him,
just as, four decades earlier, a picture book showing the
vast walls of Troy had fascinated a seven-year-old named
Heinrich Schliemann, who thereupon decided that he
would one day discover Troy. Forty-four years later, in
1873, he did precisely that.
Diego de Landa's descriptions of the sacrificial
ceremonies would have been regarded by most scholars in
the 1880s as fiction; like Schliemann, Thompson was
determined to establish how much truth lay behind it.
Another account, by Don Diego de Figueroa, described
how women were hurled into the well at dawn, with
instructions to ask the gods who dwelt in its depths
questions about when their master was to undertake
important projects. The masters themselves fasted for 60
days before the ceremony. At midday, the women who had
not drowned were heaved out by means of ropes, and were
dried out in front of fires in which incense was burned.
They would then describe how they had seen many people
at the bottom of the well - people of their own race - and
how they were not allowed to look at them direct in the
face -they were given blows on the head if they tried. But
the well-people answered their questions and told them
when their masters' projects should be undertaken ...
Thompson lost no time in visiting Chichen Itza to look at
the sinister well; he found it as morbidly fascinating as he
had expected. The sacrificial well, or cenote, was an oval
water hole, 165 by 200 feet, surrounded by vertical
limestone cliffs that soared 70 feet above the surface. It
certainly looked grim enough. The water was green and
slimy, almost black, and no one was sure of its depth, for
there was undoubtedly a thick layer of mud at its bottom.
Finally, more than a decade after his first visit, Thompson
succeeded
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5 The Realm of the White Gods
in purchasing Chichen Itz as Stephens had purchased
Copan. Now, in effect, he owned the well. But how could
he explore it?
He decided on an extremely dangerous expedient: to go
down in a diving suit. Realising that everyone would try to
talk him out of it, he started by going to Boston and taking
lessons in deep-sea diving. Then he was ready to approach
the American Antiquarian Society, and his patron Stephen
Salisbury. As he expected, Salisbury reacted with horror,
and told Thompson he would be committing suicide. But
Thompson persisted, and finally raised the funds he
needed.
Next he dangled a plumb line into the well until it
seemed to touch bottom; from this he determined that the
water was about 35 feet deep. But how to know where to
look for human skeletons in about 3000 square feet of
water? He solved this by throwing logs weighing as much
as a human body from the top, and noting the spot where
they fell.
Next, he positioned a dredge, with a long steel cable, at
the edge of the cliff, and watched the gaping steel jaws
plunge under the dark surface. The men at the winch
lowered the dredge into the dark water and turned the
handle until the cable became slack. Then they closed the
steel jaws, and heaved the dredge back up. As it came out
above the surface, the water boiled, and great bubbles of
gas surged up. On a wooden platform, the jaws deposited a
load of black leaf mould and dead branches. Then it
plunged back again into the water.
For days this continued, and the pile of black sludge
grew larger -one day it even brought up a complete tree,
'as sound as if toppled into the pit by a storm of yesterday'.
But Thompson began to worry. Supposing this was all he
was going to find? Suppose Landa had been allowing his
imagination to run wild? He would be subjected to
merciless ridicule. Even fragments of pottery did nothing
to raise his spirits. After all, boys might have used flat bits
of broken pots to skim across the surface of the well.
Then, one early morning, he staggered down to the
cenote, his eyes heavy with lack of sleep, and looked
down into the 'bucket' formed by the closed jaws as it rose
out of the water. In it he noticed two large blobs of some
yellow substance, not unlike butter. They reminded him of
the balls of 'bog butter' found by archaeologists in ancient
settlements in Switzerland and Austria. But the ancient
Maya had no cows or goats - or any other domestic
animals - so this could not be butter. He sniffed it, then
tasted it. It was resin. And suddenly, Thompson's heart
became light. He threw some of the resin on to a fire, and
the air was permeated
i
l
l
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
by a fragrant smell. It was some kind of sacred incense,
and it meant that the well had been used for religious
purposes.
From then on, the well began to yield up its treasures -
pottery, sacred vessels, axe and arrow heads, copper
chisels and discs of beaten copper, Maya deities, bells,
beads, pendants and pieces of jade.
Thompson had moored a large, flat boat below the
overhang of the cliff, alongside a narrow 'beach' with
lizards and giant toads. One day he was sitting in the boat,
working at his notes, when he paused to stare meditatively
down into the water. What he saw startled him. He seemed
to be looking down a vertical wall with 'many deeps and
hollows', as described by the women who had been hauled
up. It was, he quickly realised, the reflection of the cliff
above him. And the workmen looking over the cliff were
also reflected in the water, giving the impression that
people were walking about below.
He had also read that the water in the cenote sometimes
turned green, and sometimes became clotted blood.
Observation over a period revealed that these comments
were also based on fact. Algae sometimes turned the water
bright green, and red seed capsules made it look like
blood.
Finally, it was obvious that the dredge had reached the
bottom of the mud and slime - about 40 feet below the
original 'bottom' - and that no more artefacts would be
found. Now it was time to begin diving.
Thompson and two Greek divers descended to the flat-
bottomed scow in the dredge bucket, and changed into
diving gear, with huge copper helmets. Finally, Thompson
climbed over the edge of the boat - the boys who would
work the air pump solemnly shaking hands with him, in
case he failed to reappear - and clambered down the wire
ladder. At the bottom he let himself go, and his iron-soled
shoes and lead necklace carried him downward. Yellow
water changed to green, then purple, then black, and pains
shot through his ears. When he opened the air valves,
letting out the pressure, these disappeared. Finally, he
stood on the rock bottom. Here he was surrounded by
vertical mud walls left by the dredge, eighteen feet high,
with rocks sticking out of them.
Another diver joined him and they shook hands.
Thompson discovered that, by placing his helmet against
that of his companion, they could hold intelligible
conversations, although their voices sounded like ghosts
echoing in the darkness. They soon decided to abandon
their flashlights and submarine telephone - these were
useless in water as thick as pea soup. It was not hard to
move around, since they were
5 The Realm off the White Gods
almost weightless, like astronauts; Thompson soon
discovered that if he wanted to move to a spot a few feet
away, he had to jump cautiously, or he would shoot
straight past it.
Another danger came from the huge rocks jutting out of
the mud walls that the dredge had excavated. Sometimes
these would break loose and fall down. But they sent a
wave of water-pressure ahead of them, which gave the
divers time to move. So long as they kept their air-lines
and speaking tubes away from the walls, they were
relatively safe. 'Had we incautiously been standing with
our backs to the walls, we would have been sheared in two
as cleanly as if by a pair of gigantic shears.'
The natives were convinced that giant snakes and
lizards swam in the pool. There were snakes and lizards -
but they had fallen into the pool and were desperate to get
out.
Thompson did have one bad experience. Digging in a
narrow crevice in the floor, a Greek diver beside him, he
suddenly felt the movement of something gliding down on
him. A moment later, he was being pushed flat against the
bottom. For a moment he remembered the legends of
strange monsters. Then the Greek diver began to push at
the object, and as Thompson helped him, he realised that it
was a tree that had been dislodged from above.
On another occasion, gloating over a bell that he had
found in a crevice, he forgot to open his air valves to let
the air out. Suddenly, as he rose to change his position, he
began to float upwards like a balloon. This was highly
dangerous, for a diver's blood is charged with air bubbles,
like champagne, and unless these are released with a slow
ascent, they cause a disorder known as decompression
sickness or the 'bends', in which a man can die in agony.
Thompson had the presence of mind to open the valves
quickly; but the accident permanently damaged his
eardrums.
The bottom of the cenote yielded the treasure he had
hoped for: human bones and skulls, proof that Landa had
been telling the truth, and hundreds of ritual objects of
gold, copper and jade. They even found the skull of an old
man - probably a priest dragged down by a struggling girl
as she was hurled into the pool.
Only the treasure of Tutankhamen surpassed
Thompson's discoveries at Chichen Itza. The treasures of
the sacred well, and the incredibly dramatic story of their
recovery, made Thompson famous. When he died in 1935,
at the age of 75, he had - as he admitted - squandered most
of his fortune on his Maya excavations; but it had been the
kind
113
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
of rich and exciting life of which every schoolboy dreams.
His article on Atlantis had led him to a lifetime of
adventure, a real-life version of Indiana Jones, who had
originally inspired Graham Hancock's first excursion into
historical detection.
Chichen Itz holds an important lesson for those who
want to make sense of Meso-America's bloody past. When
I was sixteen, I read Prs-cott's Conquest of Mexico, and
was shocked by his account of the Aztec sacrifices. Yet the
maidens of Chichen Itz were not thrown into the pool by
sadistic priests to pacify cruel gods; they were thrown in
as messengers whose purpose was to speak to the gods, to
beg the gods to avert some catastrophe. Then they were
pulled out. Admittedly, a sacrificial victim whose ribs
have been sliced open with a flint knife so that his heart
can be torn out cannot expect to survive. But the Mayas,
like the ancient Egyptians and Tibetans, seem to have
believed that the passage to the underworld is long and
perilous - these sacrificial victims were being offered a
swift and safe passage. The priests thought that they were
doing them a favour, and no doubt most of them prepared
themselves for death in a perfectly calm frame of mind,
instructed in precisely what to say to the gods by a grave
and friendly priest.
Whether or not we can accept the notion of a geological
cataclysm that destroyed Atlantis and Mu (there seems a
general agreement that their destruction occurred
contemporaneously), there can be little doubt about the
evidence for great catastrophes in the remote past. In fact,
'catastrophism' was a respectable scientific theory in the
mid-eighteenth century. Its chief exponent was the
celebrated naturalist Count Georges Buffon, an early
evolutionist. Buffon's explanation of how so many species
had become extinct was that they had been destroyed in
great catastrophes, such as floods and earthquakes. Fifty
years later, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the
Scottish geologist James Hutton suggested that geological
changes occur slowly over immense epochs, but since at
this time most scientists accepted Archbishop James
Ussher's view that the earth was created in 4004 bc (a
view arrived at by adding together all the dates in the
Bible), his view made little headway - until another
geologist, Sir Charles Lyell, produced convincing proofs
of the immense age of the earth in his Principles of
Geology (1830-33). Science, as usual, lost no time in
rushing to the opposite extreme, and declaring that
catastrophism was a primitive superstition.
In the twentieth century, as Hapgood pointed out in his
'Great Extinc-
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5 The Realm of the White Gods
tions' chapter of Earth's Shifting Crust, this view was
modified by discoveries like that of the Beresovka
mammoth in 1901, with fresh flowers still in its stomach.
Ignatius Donnelly had devoted many chapters to deluge
legends - and evidence - in Atlantis, and even more in its
successor, Ragnarok, The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883),
which argued that the Pleistocene Ice Age (which started
1.8 million years ago) was brought about by a collision of
the earth with a comet. In Atlantis he cites Brasseur to
show that the Mayas preserved legends of the destruction
of Atlantis.
Around the year 1870, a ten-year-old German named
Hans Hoerbiger arrived at the curious conclusion that the
moon and planets are covered with a thick layer of ice - in
the case of the moon, 125 miles deep. Later, as an
engineer, he saw the effect of molten iron on waterlogged
soil, and concluded that some similar explosion had
caused the Big Bang that created the universe. He came to
believe that the earth has experienced a series of violent
catastrophes, which have been caused by the capture of a
series of 'moons'. According to Hoerbiger, all the planetary
bodies in the solar system are slowly spiralling in towards
the sun. As the smaller bodies move faster than the larger
ones, they inevitably pass close to the planets, and are
'captured'. This, he said, has happened to our earth at least
six times, and our present moon is only the latest in the
series. Once captured, the moons spiral in on the earth
until they crash on it, causing cataclysms. The last one was
captured about a quarter of a million years ago, and as it
came closer, its gravity caused all the water of the earth to
bunch around its equator. Because of the lighter gravity,
men became giants - hence the biblical quotation about
'giants in the earth'. Finally it crashed, releasing the waters
and causing great floods, such as those described in the
Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Hoerbiger's book Glacial Cosmology (1912, with
Phillipp Fauth) caused a sensation, although astronomers
derided it. In due course it was enthusiastically taken up
by the Nazis, and Hitler designated Hoerbiger one of the
world's three greatest astronomers, together with Ptolemy
and Copernicus, and proposed to build an observatory in
his honour. But in spite of all this approval, Hoerbiger
remained distinctly paranoid, and told astronomer Willy
Ley, 'Either you believe in me and learn, or you must be
treated as an enemy.' His disciple Hans Schindler Bellamy,
an Austrian, continued to propagate his theories after
Hoerbiger's death in 1931, and made even more of the
evidence for earth cataclysms. It was not until the flight of
Apollo 11 in 1969, and the
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From Atlantis to the Sphinx
moon landing, that millions of Hoerbiger disciples finally
conceded that the Master had somehow been mistaken.
In the 1930s, a Russian-Jewish psychiatrist named
Immanuel Velikovsky became interested in ancient history
through reading Freud's Moses and Monotheism - which
had proposed that Moses and the pharaoh Akhnaton were
contemporaries, not separated by a century, as historians
believe. Velikovsky's research led him to conclude that a
great deal of the dating of ancient history is hopelessly
wrong.
His research convinced him that some great catastrophe
had befallen the earth in the distant past. For a while he
believed that Hoerbiger's 'captive moon' theory might be
correct, but finally rejected it. Then he came upon texts
that seemed to indicate that the planet Venus was not
mentioned by ancient astronomers before 2000 bc. Could
it be that Venus had not been in its present position before
the second millennium bc? But if Venus was 'born', as
many ancient texts seemed to indicate, where was it born
from? According to Velikovsky, Greek myth gives us the
answer: Venus was born from the forehead of Zeus - that
is, of Jupiter. According to Velikovsky, around 1500 bc,
some great internal convulsion caused Jupiter to spew
forth a fiery comet, which fell towards the sun. It came
close to Mars, dragging it out of its orbit, then passed
Earth, causing the catastrophes described in the Bible (and
many other ancient texts, all meticulously cited). It went
around the sun, and returned 52 years later, causing more
catastrophes; then it settled down as the planet Venus.
How did Velikovsky arrive at what sounds like a
farrago of pure nonsense? By reading hundreds of ancient
texts, including many from Mayan history (he cites
Brasseur repeatedly). The bloody sacrifices of the Aztecs,
which so appalled the Spaniards (and which they cited as
an excuse for their own massacres) were, according to
Velikovsky, aimed at preventing a repeat of the 52-year-
interval catastrophe.
Velikovsky's success - Worlds in Collision became an
instant bestseller in spring 1950 - was understandable; his
scholarship is awesome. For example, in speaking of the
rain of blood mentioned in Exodus ('there was blood
throughout the land of Egypt'), he argues that this was
actually a red meteoric dust or pigment, and cites a dozen
myths and ancient texts, including the Egyptian sage
Ipuwer, the Mayan Quiche Manuscript (as quoted by
Brasseur), the Finnish Kalevala, Pliny, Apollo-
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5 The Realm of the
White Gods
dorus, and several modern historians - all in the course of
less than three pages.
Although scientists derided Velikovsky's ideas - and
forced the publisher to hand over the book to a
publisher with no academic list to worry about -
Velikovsky has scored some triumphs. He predicted
that Jupiter would emit radio waves, and he proved
correct. He predicted that the sun would have a
powerful magnetic field and proved correct; one critic
declared that such a field would have to be 10 to the
power of 19 volts; in fact, this is the figure that has now
been calculated. He also suggested that the close
approach of celestial bodies causes Earth to reverse its
magnetic poles; the cause of such reversals (nine in the
past 3.6 million years) is still unknown, but scientists
now admit that Velikovsky's explanation could be the
right one.
Yet no sooner has the reader conceded that
Velikovsky appears to know far more than his critics
than he also has to admit that the notion that the fall of
the walls of Jericho and the parting of the Red Sea
were caused by a passing comet is too absurd to be
taken seriously. Velikovsky's thought is bold and
exhilarating, but in the last analysis fails to add up to
common sense.
Where Velikovsky cannot be faulted is in his premise
that, at some
time in the past, there were great catastrophes that
convulsed the surface
of the earth and killed millions of people and animals. In
this sense,
perhaps his most impressive book is the third in the series,
Earth in
Upheaval, which is simply a 300-page account of evidence
for great
catastrophes and extinctions. Rather like that maverick
opponent of
scientific orthodoxy, Charles Fort, Velikovsky simply
collected hundreds