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We stand today at an unprecedented turning point in human history. In recent years two versions of ancient history have formed. One, we shall call ‘alternative’ history, the other we shall refer to as ‘official’ history. The former ponders over a variety of anomalies and tries to make sense out of the corpus of evidence, i.e., the pyramids and timelines, why they were built, by whom and when. The latter conducts digs, catalogues pottery shards, and tries to defend its proposal there are no enigmas, and virtually everything is explained.

At one point perhaps as late as fifteen years ago these two camps seem to be engaged in an informal dialogue. That all changed after, 1) the Great Sphinx redating controversy caught Egyptologists off guard and, 2) the impact of Chris Dunn’s book The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt at the end of the last decade.

There is no more dialogue and no more polite, gloves on debate. The proponents of ‘official’ history have taken an increasingly political and ideological approach to the issue. They now do little more than offer pronouncements of the historical ‘truth’ on the one hand, and denounce of all those who dare challenge officialdom on the other.In this context we offer evidence that our ‘scholars’, the gatekeepers who control our institutions of ‘higher learning’, refuse to consider.

The Great Pyramid – Precision Engineering

This colossal structure, the last of the seven ancient wonders and the largest stone building in the world, still provokes awe, controversy and a plethora of theories that inspire bitter debate to this day. Instead of going over the well-established mysteries, we would like to shine new light on this important enigma that appears out of place in ‘Stone Age’ Egypt.

The real challenge the Great Pyramid still poses to us in the opening decade of the Third Millennium is the physical plant itself. Theorists have gone on endlessly speculating about how it was built and the metaphysical, cultural and religious significance and/or symbolism behind its construction. Though several authors have offered tantalising possibilities, none have been conclusively proven.

The mystery remains unsolved.

To begin with, the massive size – the staggering volume and weight of the building blocks – remain problematic. With an estimated 2.3 million blocks with a weight of about 4 million tons, the pyramid is two-thirds the mass of the Hoover Dam. The sheer size and the numbers of blocks that had to be quarried and moved into place, presents numerous architectural, construction and engineering headaches.

These issues have been raised time and again, yet are still unsettled. It is time to move on and define the even more difficult issues. We consider the core ‘hard’ problems to be those that reflect precision engineering and assembly line manufacturing accomplished on a massive scale. The primitive tools scenario concocted by Egyptologists does not explain the following tasks:

1. Creating precision-cut casing blocks weighing 16 tons, fitted together and held by a super-glue mortar that maintained a tight seal forming a nearly seamless shell.

2. Leveling the 13-acre limestone bedrock base to a degree of accuracy only recently achieved with laser technology.

3. Squaring the base to True North with minimal deviation.

4. Excavating the ‘Descending Passage’ 350 feet into solid bedrock at a 26-degree angle while keeping the tunnel arrow-straight for its length.

5. Bringing the massive 48-story pyramid together around complex internal structures, retaining the true shape to enable the builders to form the apex. (These internal structures include four enigmatic ventilation shafts and a coffer in the King’s Chamber that is too large to have been moved through the opening. It shows evidence of having been cut with a jewel-tip saw.)

6. Extensive usage of different types of machined granite inside the Great Pyramid chambers.

The father of modern Egyptology, Sir Flinders Petrie, marvelled at the precision and size of the casing blocks. He carefully measure the blocks and found that “the mean thickness of the joints are .020 and therefore, the mean variation of the cutting of the stone from a straight line and from a true square, is but .01 on length of 75 inches up the face, an amount of accuracy equal to most modern opticians’ straight-edges of such a length.”

The modern international engineering firm of Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Menendhall conducted a forensic analysis of the Great Pyramid. Their findings are evaluated in an article published in Civil Engineering.

The pyramid was oriented with its major sides either north-south or east-west. This in itself was a remarkable undertaking, given the accuracy to which it was done, because the Egyptians had to perform the work using astronomical or solar observations – the compass had not yet been invented. The dimensions of the pyramid are extremely accurate and the site was levelled within a fraction of an inch over the entire base. This is comparable to the accuracy possible with modern construction methods and laser levelling.1

The summary speaks volumes between the lines. The problems with the Descending Passage are numerous. For starters the tunnel is less than 4 x 4 feet, enough for no more than one excavator wielding a hammer-stone at any given moment. How would our proposed digging crew negotiate the space in the suffocating darkness once they had dug down 50 feet and more? In addition how would the 26-degree angle be set and maintained without lights or levels? The lack of carbon deposits on walls and ceiling indicate that torches were not used.

Once again, Petrie measured the passage and found an amazing accuracy of .020 of an inch over 150 feet and a mere .250 inch over 350 feet of its constructed and excavated length. We submit that this passage with its smooth surfaces, squared shape, and accurate angle could not have been tunnelled with primitive tools and methods.

The Great Pyramid remains the world’s greatest wonder and ancient enigma. We suggest researchers should pay more attention to these details and ask about the materials used inside the Great Pyramid, especially near the ventilation shafts. We now have two doors blocking a very important shaft, the one that pointed to the star Sirius in 2450 BCE.

The Origin Of Dogs – Biogenetic engineering

Now we turn to a mystery that nearly equals the pyramid, though it is a little known conundrum hidden in the mists of remote antiquity. Let us start with a simple question that appears to have an obvious answer: what is a dog? It turns out geneticists in the past decade have shown the answer is not so obvious. In fact, generations of anthropologists, archaeologists and wildlife biologists turned out to be dead wrong when it came to the origins of “man’s best friend”.

Prior to DNA studies conducted in the 1990s, the generally accepted theory posited that dogs branched off from a variety of wild canids, i.e., coyotes, hyenas, jackals, wolves and so on, about 15,000 years ago. The results of the first comprehensive DNA study shocked the scholarly community. The study found that all dog breeds can be traced back to wolves and not other canids. The second part of the finding was even more unexpected – the branching off occurred from 40-150,000 years ago.

Why do these findings pose a problem? We have to answer that question with another question: how were dogs bred from wolves? This is not just difficult to explain, it is impossible. Do not be fooled by the pseudo-explanations put forth by science writers that state our Stone Age ancestors befriended wolves and somehow (the procedure is never articulated) managed to breed the first mutant wolf, the mother of all dogs. Sorry, we like dogs too, but that is what a dog is.

The problems come at the crucial stage of taking a male and female wolf and getting them to produce a subspecies (assuming you could tame and interact with them at all). Let us take this one step further by returning to our original question, what is a dog? A dog is a mutated wolf that only has those characteristics of the wild parent, which humans find companionable and useful. That is an amazing fact.

Think about those statements for a moment. If you are thinking that dogs evolved naturally from wolves, that is not an option. No scientist believes that because the stringent wolf pecking order and breeding rituals would never allow a mutant to survive, at least that is one strong argument against natural evolution.

Now, if our Paleolithic ancestors could have pulled off this feat, and the actual challenges posed by the process are far more taxing, then wolf/dog breeders today certainly should have no problem duplicating it. But like the Great Pyramid, that does not seem to be the case. No breeders have stepped up to the plate claiming they can take two pure wolves and produce a dog sans biogenetic engineering techniques.

The evolution of the domesticated dog from a wild pack animal appears to be a miracle! It should not have happened. This is another unexplained enigma.

Mohenjo Daro – Civil Engineering

Since indoor plumbing did not arrive in modern societies to any extent until the 20th century, and urban planning has still not been adopted much to this date in history, what we find in the ancient city of Mohenjo Daro is anomalous indeed.

This city in the Indus Valley was built on a grid system about 4,500 years ago, obviously planned out and drawn up before the first brick was laid. It had houses, some with indoor plumbing, a granary, baths, an assembly hall and towers all made out of standard size bricks. The streets were about eight to ten feet wide on average, and were built with well-engineered drainage channels.

Mohenjo Daro was divided into two parts; the Citadel was on the upper level and included an elaborate tank called the Great Bath that was made of fine quality brickwork and drains. The Great Bath was 40 feet long and 8 feet deep, a huge public facility by any standards. A giant granary, a large residential building, and several assembly halls were also on this upper level.

The Great Bath was made watertight by the use of two layers of brick, lime-cement and then finally sealed with bitumen (tar). The bath included a shallow section for children.

We should wonder how an ancient culture of which nothing is known, not even their language, created this sophisticated city at a point in time many thousands of years ahead of the curve? Civil engineers do not crawl out of thatched-roof huts able to draw up plans for a complex urban environment. We need to address the following question to archaeologists and historians:

1. Where are the cities that demonstrate the path of urban development, social and technical organisation, leading to Mohenjo Daro?

2. How do you explain the sudden emergence of a complex society when 99.99% of the rest of humanity were living primitively?

These issues cannot be brushed aside with some arrogant pretence that the questions have already been addressed and answered by digging up and labelling pottery shards and other artefacts. We have been and are being overly indulgent with our “soft sciences” regarding their cavalier assertions about having all the answers. In fact, they have very few, so why are they throwing stones at independent researchers from behind glass towers?

Extraordinarily little is known about the Indus Valley civilisation that once spanned nearly a thousand miles with other cities matching the description of Mohenjo Daro.

We file this under our list of great enigmas and challenge orthodox scholars to prove differently as with the first two of our mysteries.

We note that the Indus Valley civilisation was contemporary with the Great Pyramid. It is often said this was one of the first three civilisations, having a written script that has never been deciphered. Now we turn next to the mother of all civilisations, Sumer.

Sumeria – The Source Of Civilisation

Are we missing something or are our historians looking at our earliest civilisations through a strange and distorted lens? Like Egypt and the Indus Valley, the biblical ‘Land of Shinar’ – the birthplace of Abraham – was a brutally hot, largely barren, empty desert with a mighty river cutting a swath through it. Does this sound like the magnet that would attract late Stone Age tribes to hunker down and pull wonders out of a hat?

In fact, historians thought Shinar was a piece of biblical fiction until the mid-19th century, but now they know everything about it with complete certitude that we, the unwashed masses, dare not question. Nonetheless, we encourage readers to maintain an attitude of healthy skepticism and dare to question ‘official history’.

As is the case with the culture that built the cities of the Indus Valley, no one knows who the ancient Sumerians were or where they came from. They called themselves ‘the black-headed ones’ and spoke a strange language that was unrelated to the languages of the Semitic tribes in the region. Some linguists note a similarity between the Sumerian language and that of the Basques, another anomalous culture.

We find it curious that any primitive peoples would choose the rigours of a hostile desert environment to settle in and build a civilisation. Why not a gentle river in a forested mountain valley? Especially in light of the fact that Sumeria contained very few resources, no forests, no minerals, not even the rocks that were plentiful in Egypt.

How are we to explain the fact this mysterious culture managed to invent all of the core components of civilisation under such restrictive conditions? It occurs to us that a culture would need minerals like copper, gold, silver and tin immediately available to experiment with over the course of generations in order to create process metallurgy. There is nothing simple or accidental about making the connection between raw ores, the metals they contain, and how to reduce them out of their native state using high heat.

Nevertheless, the Sumerians not only figured out geology, how to obtained the ore, knew the levels of heat needed and how to build kilns to achieve it, they also took very different metals and created the first alloy, bronze. As metal-smiths were performing these feats, other citizens were apparently creating the wheel, building cities, ziggurats, inventing writing, movable type, the ox-drawn plow, cereal crop agriculture, and advanced mathematics, to mention the most notable of their innovations.

Something is wrong with this picture. Most human beings were counting using their fingers, if at all, hunting animals and gathering plants for their meals. Yet, we find the Sumerians in classrooms learning the principles of the sexigesimal math system. Yes, the very same 60-base system we use today to keep track of hours, minutes and seconds. This advanced system was the first to reveal that a circle has 360 degrees and can be subdivided using 60, 30, 15, 12, etc., all fractions of the root number.

Teotihuacán – Anomalous Technical Evidence

Teotihuacán, in Mexico, is an immense, even overwhelming archaeological site, oriented along a twin axis. In the 1960s a team of archaeologists and surveyors mapped out the entire complex in great detail. The resultant map revealed an urban grid centred around two principal, almost perpendicular, alignments.

From the Pyramid of the Moon at the north end, the complex extends south along the Avenue of the Dead beyond the Ciudadela and Great Compound complexes for about 3.2 kilometres. To this north-south axis we must add an east-west alignment that led from a point near the Pyramid of the Sun to a spot of prime astronomical significance on the western horizon.

Anthony Aveni, an astronomer-anthropologist, discovered that on the day the Sun passes directly overhead in the spring of the Northern Hemisphere (May 18), the Pleiades star cluster makes its first annual predawn appearance. It was at this point on the western horizon that the Pleiades set, and the builders aimed the east-west axis.

Additionally, the Sun also sets at this point on the horizon on August 12 – the anniversary of the beginning of the current Mesoamerican calendar cycle (5th Sun) – determined by a consensus of academic and independent scholars to have begun on August 12, 3114 BCE.

It is very clear Teotihuacán was laid out according to a set of alignments that reflected celestial, geographic, as well as geodetic relationships. Walking along the avenue from one pyramid to another, up the steps to the top, and surveying the site from a multitude of angles, one is struck by the sense of being in the middle of some vast geometric matrix.

Teotihuacán was the first true urban centre in the Americas. At its peak around 500 CE, it boasted a population of an estimated 200,000. George E. Stuart, archaeologist and the editor of National Geographic magazine sums up our ignorance:

We speak of it with awe, as we do the pyramids of Egypt, but we still know next to nothing about the origins of the Teotihuacános, what language they spoke, how their society was organised, and what caused their decline.2

As for one the most anomalous of artefacts on the planet, in the 1900s archaeologists discovered a sheet of mica in the upper tiers of the Pyramid of the Sun. This was no ho-hum pottery shard to catalogue and file away in a dusty box, yet that is about how archaeologists treated the find. To anyone with even a smattering of technical knowledge, discovering a large sheet of mica in an ancient pyramid site comes as a shock. In fact, it is one of the great ‘smoking guns’ that turn archaeologists mum.

Mica is an inflammable and non-conductive mineral that grows in fairly weak plate-like structures. It is not at all useful as a structural building material. NASA uses it as a radiation shield in space vehicles. Mica is also utilised in electronic components and microwave ovens, and it is a good shield for electromagnetic radiation, like radio waves. Like the Great Pyramid, the Pyramid of the Sun has a subterranean cavity under the middle of the pyramid. A large pyramid with layers of thick mica would be an excellent EMI shield.

Its placement in the complex raises questions that we could only answer today after the development of electronic, atomic and space age technologies.

Thick sheets of mica were also found by archaeologists about 400 meters down the avenue from the Sun Pyramid, these precision-cut sheets were of considerable size: 27.5 meters square. They were located under a rock-slab floor of a complex now called “the Mica Temple”.

What possible reason could the builders have had for including a layer of mica in any structure? It was obviously not decorative. To add greatly to the growing mystery, the particular mica used was traced to Brazil. Now we are getting in deep. How would a supposedly indigenous “Stone Age” culture know that mica existed 3200 kilometres away in the jungles of Brazil? Not only that, how did they transport these large sheets over that long distance intact without wheeled vehicles? Surely not via relay teams on foot travelling overland! No large seagoing boats or ports have ever been found in ancient Mexico.

High Technology In Stone Age Peru

Lake Titicaca borders Bolivia and Peru in the Andes. The highest large lake in the world, there are many signs it was once exposed to the ocean. Megalithic structures like the Gateway of the Sun in Tiahuanacu, Bolivia, also indicate a long lost past. The gateway was carved out of one solid block, the hard way to make a gate.

Moving northward near Cuzco, Peru, we find even more large, impressive and mysterious structures. Here we find walls built with complex jigsaw type megalithic blocks similar to the more familiar walls found at nearby Machu Picchu. Some of the megalithic structures contain complex cut-rocks weighing over 100 tons; a few were joined together by bronze clamps. Some of the bronze had obviously been poured in place, a skill not available in pre-Columbian Peru.

Like Sumer, the high Andes is an unlikely location for Stone Age cities, evidence of advanced technologies, and seminal agricultural discoveries. It is well established that the region around Tiahuanco, at 12,500 feet elevation, had been turned into a highly productive agricultural zone. That was achieved by the building of dikes, dams, canals and raised beds that created microclimates which protected the plants from frost.

We have attempted to show our planet is full of ancient wonders and mysteries that have yet to be solved. You can find more information as well as our theories on who and what created these enigmas in our books, The Genesis Race (by Will Hart) and Ancient Gods and Their Mysteries: Will They Return in 2012 AD? (by Robert Berringer).

.

Footnotes:

1. ‘Program Management BC’, Civil Engineering, June 1999, Craig Smith, P.E., www.pubs.asce.org/ceonline/0699feat.html

2. ‘The Timeless Vision of Teotihuacán’, National Geographic magazine, December 1995

.

Will Hart is a journalist, photographer, and filmmaker who has investigated ancient mysteries and evidence of extraterrestrial intervention on Earth since 1969. His first book The Genesis Race: Our Extraterrestrial DNA and the True Origins of the Species is the outcome of three decades of research. Robert Berringer is the author of Ancient Gods and Their Mysteries: Will They Return in 2012 AD? which is distributed by Book Clearing House www.bookch.com and available from www.CloudriderBooks.com. He can be contacted at rtberringer@netzero.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 90 (May-June 2005).

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© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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Lemuria and Mu are interchangeable names given to a lost land believed to have been located somewhere in either the southern Pacific or Indian Oceans. This ancient continent was apparently the home of an advanced and highly spiritual culture, perhaps the mother race of all mankind, but it sank beneath the waves many thousands of years ago as the result of a geological cataclysm of some kind.

The thousands of rocky islands scattered throughout the Pacific, including Easter Island, Tahiti, Hawaii and Samoa, have been claimed by some to be the only surviving remains of this once great continent. The theory of a lost continent in this area has been put forward by many different people, most notably in the mid 19th century by scientists in order to explain the unusual distribution of various animals and plants around the Indian and Pacific Oceans.In the late 19th century occultist Madame Blavatsky reincarnated the idea of Lemuria as a lost continent / spiritual homeland and influenced a host of subsequent occultists and mystics including well known American psychic healer and Prophet Edgar Cayce. The popularisation of Lemuria / Mu as a purely physical place began in the 20th century with ex-British army officer Colonel James Churchward, and the idea still has many adherents today.

But is there any physical evidence to back up these claims of an ancient continent beneath the Pacific or Indian Ocean? Or should these ‘lost homeland’ stories be interpreted in another way entirely, perhaps as the symbol of a mythical vanished ‘Golden Age’ of man?

The Land of Mu

The idea of a lost continent known as ‘Mu’ in the Pacific Ocean does not actually have a particularly long history, neither is it mentioned specifically in any ancient mythologies as some writers have suggested. The title ‘Mu’ originated with eccentric amateur archaeologist Augustus le Plongeon (1826-1908), who was the first to make photographical records of the ruins of the archaeological site of Chichen Itza in Yucatán, Mexico. Plongeon’s credibility was badly damaged by his attempted translation of a Mayan book known as the ‘Troana Codex’ (also known as the ‘Madrid Codex’).

In his books Sacred Mysteries Among the Mayans and Quiches (1886) and Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx (1896) Plongeon interpreted part of the text of the Troana Codex as revealing that the Maya of Yucatán were the ancestors of the Egyptians and many other civilisations. He also believed that an ancient continent, which he called Mu, had been destroyed by a volcanic eruption, the survivors of this cataclysm founding the Mayan civilisation. Plongeon equates Mu with Atlantis and states that a ‘Queen Moo’ originally from Atlantis, travelled to Egypt where she became known as Isis, and founded the Egyptian civilisation. However, Plongeon’s interpretation of the Mayan book is considered by experts in Mayan archaeology and history as completely erroneous, indeed much of what he interpreted as hieroglyphics turned out to be ornamental design.

Lemuria

‘Lemuria’, the alternative name for the lost continent, also originated in the nineteenth century. Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834-1919), a German naturalist and supporter of Darwin, proposed that a land bridge spanning the Indian Ocean separating Madagascar from India could explain the widespread distribution of lemurs, small, primitive tree-dwelling mammals found in Africa, Madagascar, India and the East Indian archipelago. More bizarrely, Haeckel also suggested that lemurs were the ancestors of the human race and that this land bridge was the “probable cradle of the human race.”

Other well-known scientists, such as the evolutionist T.H. Huxley and the naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, had no doubt about the existence of a huge continent in the Pacific millions of years previously, which had been destroyed in a disastrous earthquake that submerged it beneath the waves, much as Atlantis was thought to have been drowned.

Before the discovery of continental drift it was not unusual in the mid to late 19th century for scientists to propose submerged land masses and land bridges to explain the distribution of the world’s flora and fauna. In 1864, the English zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater (1829-1913) gave the hypothetical continent the name ‘Lemuria’ in an article ‘The Mammals of Madagascar’ in The Quarterly Journal of Science, and since then it has stuck.

The Geologists’ View

Zoologists and geologists now explain the distribution of lemurs and other plants and animals in the area of the Pacific and Indian Oceans to be the result of plate tectonics and continental drift. The theory of plate tectonics, and it is still a theory, affirms that moving plates of the Earth’s crust supported on less rigid mantle rocks causes continental drift, volcanic and seismic activity, and the formation of mountain chains. The concept of continental drift was first proposed by German scientist Alfred Wegener in 1912, but the theory did not gain general acceptance in the scientific community for another 50 years.

With this understanding of plate tectonics geologists now regard the theory of a sunken continent beneath the Pacific as an impossibility. They also point out that theories of lost lands in the Pacific mostly originate in the 19th century, when knowledge of the area was limited and well before the Pacific sea floor had been mapped.

Blavatsky’s Lemuria

The idea of Lemuria as something more than a physical place, or at least somewhere which had been inhabited by non-human entities before the appearance of man, derives from the writings of colourful Russian occultist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891). Blavatsky was the co-founder, together with lawyer Henry Steel Olcott, of the Theosophical Society, in New York in 1875. The Society was an esoteric order designed to study the mystical teachings of both Christianity and Eastern religions.

In her massive tome The Secret Doctrine (1888) Blavatsky describes a history originating millions of years ago with the ‘Lords of Flame’ and goes on to discusses five ‘Root Races’ which have existed on earth, each one dying out in an earth-shattering cataclysm. The third of these Root Races she called the ‘Lemurian’, which lived a million years ago, and who were bizarre telepathic giants who kept dinosaurs as pets.

The Lemurians eventually drowned when their continent was submerged beneath the Pacific Ocean. The progeny of the Lemurians was the fourth Root Race, the human Atlanteans, who were brought down by their use of black magic, their continent of Atlantis sinking beneath the waves 850,000 years ago. Present humanity represents the Fifth Root Race.

Blavatsky envisioned her Lemuria as covering a vast area. In her own words it stretched from

…the foot of the Himalayas, which separated it from the inland sea rolling its waves over what is now Tibet, Mongolia, and the great desert of Schamo (Gobi); from Chittagong, westward to Hardwar, and eastward to Assam. From thence, it stretched South across what is known to us as Southern India, Ceylon, and Sumatra; then embracing on its way, as we go South, Madagascar on its right hand and Australia and Tasmania on its left, it ran down to within a few degrees of the Antarctic Circle; when, from Australia, an inland region on the Mother Continent in those ages, it extended far into the Pacific Ocean…

Blavatsky also describes survivors of the catastrophic destruction of Lemuria escaping to become the ancestors of some of the Aboriginal tribes of Australia. She maintained that she took all of her information regarding Lemuria from ‘The Book of Dzyan’, supposed to have been written in Atlantis and shown to her by the Indian adepts known as ‘Mahatmas’.

Madame Blavatsky never claimed to have discovered Lemuria; in fact she refers to Philip Schlater coining the name Lemuria, in her writings. It has to be said that The Secret Doctrine is an extremely difficult book, a complex mixture of Eastern and Western cosmologies, mystical ramblings and esoteric wisdom, much of it not meant to be taken literally.

Blavatsky’s is the first ‘occult’ interpretation of Lemuria, but on one level it should not be equated with the physical continent later proposed by Churchward. What Blavatsky and other occultists since have suggested concerning Lemuria could be partly interpreted as an ideal spiritual condition of the soul, a kind of spiritual-historical vision.

Nevertheless, there are some psychics and prophets who even today regard the existence of ancient Lemuria / Mu as a physical reality. Indeed, there are a few who when ‘hypnotically regressed’ have recalled former lives as citizens on the doomed continent.

Lemuria and Australia

The writings of Blavatsky and other Theosophists about Lemuria, and the idea of Australia as part of this ancient lost continent and the scene of a lost golden age, had a significant influence on mystics and occultists in the country at the end of the 19th century.

Queensland-born novelist Rosa Campbell Praed represented Australia as the last remnant of ancient Lemuria and believed the myth of the lost continent to be based on fact. In Praed’s case, she used the theosophical idea of Lemuria to present an idealised primeval history of Australia, a land very different to the Queensland frontier country wracked by racial violence she had witnessed first-hand as a child.

Other evidence for this fascination with ancient Lemuria comes in the series of Australian adventure of the 1890s known as “the Lemurian novels.” In The Last Lemurian, written in 1898 by historian of Australian exploration and adventure-romance novelist George Firth Scott, the narrator Dick Halwood discovers the remains of legendary Lemuria out in the Australian desert, in a plot involving reincarnation, pygmies, a bunyip-monster, and an occult Yellow Queen.

John David Hennessey’s An Australian Bush Track (1896) calls Lemuria ‘Zoo-Zoo land’, and locates it somewhere in northern Queensland. Its inhabitants, the Zoo-Zooans, are a “remnant of a great nation which came there from some part of the mainland of Asia,” but had lost all the arts of high civilisation they once possessed. The Lost Explorer (1890) by James Francis Hogan has Lemuria as ‘Malua’, located in the centre of Australia, and ruled by the cannibalistic Queen Mocata, the last survivor of a superior race that once lived in “the interior of the great southern continent.”

The idea that Australia was once part of this lost Eden has also influenced those of a more practical bent, and attempts have been made to locate traces of Lemurian civilisation on both the west and east coasts of Australia.

Aboriginal art, artefacts and mythology have also been used to identify the Aborigines as prehistoric remnants of the Lemurians (following Blavatsky again), who somehow escaped the devastation of 20,000 or so years ago. Indeed, in some Theosophical publications of the first quarter of the 20th century Aborigines were described as the last of the Lemurians. However, the Aborigines of Australia had already been established on the continent for at least 30,000 years at the time of the supposed destruction of Lemuria, in fact they have perhaps the longest continuous cultural history of any people on Earth, so the theory of them having a Lemurian origin does not hold water.

Colonel James Churchward

The lost civilisation of Lemuria / Mu was brought dramatically back to public attention in 1931 with the publication of Colonel James Churchward’s bizarre The Lost Continent of Mu, the first in a series of five books by Churchward about the lost continent.

In the book he claimed that the lost continent of Mu had once extended from an area north of Hawaii southwards as far as Fiji and Easter Island. According to Churchward, Mu was the original Garden of Eden and a technologically advanced civilisation which boasted 64,000,000 inhabitants. Around 12,000 years ago Mu was wiped out by an earthquake and submerged beneath the Pacific. Apparently Atlantis, a colony of Mu, was destroyed in the same way a thousand years later. All the world’s major ancient civilisations, from the Babylonians and the Persians, to the Maya and the Egyptians, were the remains of the colonies of Mu.

Churchward claimed he received this sensational information when, as a young officer in India during a famine in the 1880s, he became friendly with an Indian priest. This priest told Churchward that he and two cousins were the only survivors of a 70,000 year old esoteric order which originated on Mu itself. This order was known as the ‘Naacal Brotherhood’.
The priest showed Churchward a number of ancient tablets written by the Naacal Order in a forgotten ancient language, supposed to be the original language of mankind, which he taught the officer to read. Churchward later asserted that certain stone artefacts recovered in Mexico contained parts of the ‘Sacred Inspired Writings of Mu’, perhaps taking ideas from Augustus le Plongeon and his use of the Troana Codex to provide evidence for the existence of Mu.

Unfortunately, Churchward never produced any evidence to back up his exotic claims, he never published translations of the enigmatic Naacal tablets, and his books, though they still have many followers today, are perhaps better read as entertainment than factual studies of Lemuria / Mu.

Nan Madol

It was James Churchward who first posited the theory that the site of Nan Modal, on Pohnpei Island in the North Pacific Ocean, was one of the seven cities of ancient Mu / Lemuria.

The cyclopean ruins of Nan Modal, at one time a ceremonial centre covering 11 square miles, consist of around 90 small artificial islands built up out of a lagoon, and interlinked by a network of tidal canals. These islands, situated on the tidal flats southeast of Temwen Island, Micronesia, contain house foundations, sea walls – thirty feet tall in places, tunnels and burial vaults, all constructed entirely from prismatic basalt columns stacked crisscross like log cabins. These rocks weigh several tons on average, with the largest weighing 25 tons.

What makes the construction all the more remarkable is that the stone had to be transported some distance to the site, as no quarries have been found nearby, though they do exist elsewhere on the island. A clue to how this feat was achieved are crystal basalt columns discovered at the bottom of the lagoon near Temwen Island and on the shores of other islets in the area, which would suggest that the stones were transported by raft.

Modern Pohnpeians, on the other hand, believe the stones were flown over the island using black magic. Radio carbon dates and analysis of pottery from Nan Madol reveal that construction of the site began around 1200 CE, though the area may have been occupied from as early as 200 BCE. Such dates would certainly preclude any connection with Churchward’s Lemurians or their descendents.

At the beginning of the 13th century CE the island of Pohnpei is thought to have been conquered and unified by the mysterious ‘saudeleur’ dynasty, and it was then that the spectacular complex was constructed as a ceremonial and political seat for the new royal line. The saudeleur line was brought to an end in the 1500s by exiled Pohnpeian warrior, Isokelekel. The new chiefs, known as Nahnmwarki, occupied Nan Madol for a couple of hundred years, but by the 1800’s when the first Europeans arrived, the site was deserted. Why this happened remains one of the many mysteries of this incredible site.

The Kerguelen Continent

In the last twenty or so years submerged civilisations have once again been in the news due in particular to a number of intriguing underwater discoveries. In 1999 the Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling (JOIDES) Resolution research vessel made an amazing discovery drilling in an area of the southern Indian Ocean about 3,000 km to the southwest of Australia.

The researchers discovered that an underwater plateau about a third the size of Australia, known as the Kerguelen Plateau, was actually the remains of a lost continent, which sank beneath the waves around 20 million years ago. The team found fragments of wood, a seed, spores and pollen, in 90 million year old sediment, as well as types of rocks associated with explosive volcanism.

One of the many fascinating points about the Kerguelen Plateau is that it contains sedimentary rocks similar to those found in India and Australia, which indicates that they were at one time connected. Scientists believe that around 50 million years ago, the continent may have had tropical flora and fauna, including small dinosaurs. With further research planned, the fascinating puzzle of the Kerguelen Plateau may yet resurrect the Lemuria debate.

Yonaguni Island and the Gulf of Cambay

In 1985 off the southern coast of Yonaguni Island, the westernmost island of Japan, a Japanese dive tour operator discovered a previously unknown stepped pyramidal edifice. Shortly afterwards, Professor Masaki Kimura, a marine geologist at Ryukyu University in Okinawa, confirmed the existence of the 183m wide, 27m high structure.

This rectangular stone ziggurat, part of a complex of underwater stone structures in the area which resemble ramps, steps and terraces, is thought to date from somewhere between 3,000 to 8,000 years ago. Some researchers have suggested these ruins are the remains of a submerged civilisation – and that the structures represent perhaps the oldest architecture in the world. Connections with Lemuria and Atlantis have also been mentioned.

However, some geologists, such as Robert Schoch of Boston University, and others with knowledge of the area, insist that the underwater ‘buildings’ are natural, mainly the result of ocean erosion and coral reef settlements and similar to other known geological formations in the region. Furthermore, archaeologists also point out that no man-made tools or weapons have been recovered from the site, which would indicate human settlement.

In December 2000 a team from the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) claimed to have discovered the remains of a huge lost city 36 metres underwater in the Gulf of Cambay, off the western coast of India. A year later further acoustic imaging surveys were undertaken and evidence recorded for apparent human settlement at the site, which included the foundations of huge structures, pottery, sections of walls, beads, pieces of sculpture and human bone. One of the wooden finds supposedly from the city has given a radiocarbon date of 7500 BCE, which would make the site 4,000 years earlier than the oldest known civilisation in India.

Research is ongoing at this fascinating site, now known as the Gulf of Khambat Cultural Complex (GKCC), which if the dates are proved correct, may one day radically alter our understanding of the world’s first civilisations. However, it must be added that a number of marine geologists believe that the NIOT scientists have made serious errors in their interpretations of the sonar images obtained from the area. The opinion of these researchers is that the supposedly ancient ‘ruins’, shown as geometric patterns on the images, are natural rock formations and there is no evidence that the artefacts discovered in the area of the site, including the radio-carbon dated block of wood, are associated with it. The debate is still continuing among geologists, archaeologists and historians on this controversial discovery.

Whether any of these underwater finds in the Pacific and Indian Oceans prove to be the remains of forgotten civilisations or not, one thing is certain – man will always be searching for a lost homeland or a more spiritually satisfying ancient past. In this sense Lemuria or Mu will always be more than just a physical place.

Sources and Further Reading

The Lost Continent of Mu by J. Churchward, C.W. Daniel Co. Ltd, 1994 (1931).

The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories by Sumathi Ramaswamy, University of California Press, 2005.

The Secret Doctrine II – Anthropogenesis by H.P. Blavatsky,  Theosophical University Press, Pasadena, California, 1970 (1888).

Other Temples, Other Gods: The Occult in Australia by N. Drury & G. Tillett, Sydney, Hodder & Stoughton, 1982.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/353277.stm – ‘Lost Continent Discovered’. The Kerguelen discovery.

www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1905/19050670.htm – ‘Questionable Claims’. The finds in the Gulf of Khambat.

www.morien-institute.org/yonaguni.html – Morien Institue page about Yonaguni.

www.pohnpeiheaven.com/nanmadol.htm – ‘Pohnpei – Between Time and Tide’.

www.uoregon.edu/~wsayres/NanMadol.html – Dr. William S. Ayres’s site about his work in Nan Madol.

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BRIAN HAUGHTON is a qualified archaeologist and researcher with an interest in the strange and unusual. He is author of Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries and Webmaster of www.mysteriouspeople.com, a site devoted to the lives of enigmatic people. He has written on the subjects of ancient mysteries and unusual people in history for various print and Internet publications including the B.B.C.’s Legacies Website, New Dawn Magazine, Awareness, and Paranormal Magazine in the U.K. His website is www.brian-haughton.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 103 (July-August 2007).

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© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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By JOHN MAJOR JENKINS

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In my own process of studying the Maya and their traditions, I moved progressively into deeper water with time. Twenty-two years in, I can report back to newcomers that the implications of the Mayan calendar are staggering, its connection to other cosmologies around the globe is deep, and its most famous artifact, the cycle ending date of 2012, encodes an understanding of the cosmos that modern science is unprepared to grasp.

That’s where the investigation leads, but we will not venture so far in this article. Many people will be introduced to the existence of the Maya and their calendar through the attention generated by the 2012 date. You may be one of them. In fact, I hope you are, because this article is written for you. How can we even begin to understand the Mayan calendar and its 2012 date? What is it? What was it intended to represent? What did the ancient Maya believe would happen as 2012 draws close? Sit back and read on, for there are answers to these questions.

In my speaking events and workshops, people ask questions and I’ve noticed that many of them are based on misconceptions. I will anticipate and address these, hopefully guiding you away from dead ends.It is no surprise that 2012, the so-called ‘end of the Mayan calendar’, is a topic filled with images of the end of the world, doomsday, and cataclysm. Many writers have and will exploit such a hot topic to play into human fears. They are not necessarily interested in understanding 2012 as the ancient Maya understood it. Here we must state a guiding principle so we can have a healthy approach to 2012: let’s honour the authentic Mayan tradition.

This seems self evident, but is rarely taken to heart by modern writers. As a result of this unfortunate situation, newcomers are likely to encounter a smorgasbord of ideas, information, opinions, and models about 2012. The loudest barkers in Carnival 2012, as my friend Jonathan Zap reminds me, are likely to be the first ones heard. There’s the Pleiadian faction, there’s the crop circle theorists, there’s the alien invasion crowd, there’s the doomsday tribe, there’s the ascension light workers. People like many choices on the menu, right? Sure, but what about the real ding an sich, the thing-in-itself? Are we interested in getting to the heart of the Mayan insight? I propose that we should be, and that such an approach yields interesting, satisfying, revolutionary, and lasting results.

A little research reveals that a large cycle in the Mayan Long Count calendar ends precisely on December 21, 2012. The precision comes from a painstakingly established correlation between the Long Count calendar and our own Gregorian calendar. Scholars figured it out, beginning in the 1890s, testing and retesting the correct correlation. It was settled by 1950.

The Gregorian calendar and the Long Count calendar are simply two different methods of tracking time. Each one tracks one day after another, but designates the days with different symbols and words. The correct correlation between the two means that, for example, 9.16.4.1.1 in the Long Count equals May 7, 755 in the Gregorian calendar. We are simply correlating two different systems. It’s the same challenge of correlating the ancient Egyptian calendar, or the ancient Hindu or Roman system, to a time frame we recognise. With the ‘key’ of the correlation, we can make a precise conversion between the Mayan calendar into our own. It’s not rocket science, and there’s no need to mystify it.

What you need to know is that scholars have isolated the precise correlation for the Mayan calendar, such that the end of the 13-baktun cycle in the Long Count (written 13.0.0.0.0) falls precisely on December 21, 2012. Most importantly, the surviving 260-day calendar (the tzolkin) among the Maya today verifies this correlation, since it confirms that the cycle-ending date falls on 4 Ahau in the tzolkin. Authors that write popular books and broadcast other notions have simply not done their homework.

Next, what is the Long Count and how does it work? The Long Count calendar system was developed about 2,100 years ago in southern Mexico. Archaeologists know this because the first carved monuments with Long Count dates appear in the first-century BCE, mostly in the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico. Theoretical reconstructions of the calendar that trace its origins further back in time are possible, but for now we can rest safely with the carved monuments that date to the first-century BCE. This is a good indicator of when the Long Count was formally inaugurated and carved in stone.

A typical Long Count date contains five place values. A baktun is a period of 144,000 days. A katun is a period of 7,200 days. A tun contains 360 days. A uinal contains 20 days, and a kin is a day. I’m surprised when newcomers begin to wonder how anyone can possibly know this. Some assert that the Maya disappeared long ago, so how do we know this information about their calendar? Well, the truth is that the Maya have not disappeared, as the popular misconception goes. The reason why we can say things with certainty about how the Long Count works is because scholars have reconstructed its operation from a careful examination of the archaeological evidence. It’s not so mysterious or far fetched for scholars to piece together fragments of a forgotten tradition, especially something as tangible as the basic mathematics of a calendar system.

A typical Long Count date is written 8.16.3.12.5. The cycle ending date is written 13.0.0.0.0. After this date, the calendar cycles back to 0.0.0.0.1. Why? Because there are 13 Baktuns in one Creation Cycle, or Age. We know this because there are several carvings that are called ‘Creation Monuments’, and they tell us that 13.0.0.0.0 is the completion of a World Age. The Long Count is thus part of a philosophy of time known as a World Age doctrine. It is a belief that many ancient cultures share, that the world passes through a series of chapters or Ages. For the Maya, an Age lasts 13 Baktuns, which is 5,125 years.

The Maya’s Creation Myth contains information about the World Ages, and therefore we can consult it to gain an understanding of what the ancient Maya believed occurs during a cycle ending. General principles can be identified. For example, at the end of all Ages, humanity goes through a transformation and is reborn. A person chooses from two ways, because free will is honoured. One can go the way of Seven Macaw, the vain ego-driven ruler who appears at the end of the cycle, or one can go the way of One Hunahpu, who sacrifices his false self and is reborn whole.

The point is that the Creation Myth actually provides relevant and meaningful information concerning the ancient Maya belief about what would happen as 2012 approached. Therefore, studying the messages in the Creation Myth is an effective approach for understanding 2012.

Another important question is, why did the Maya believe that the year we call 2012 in our calendar would be so transformative? What is so special about 2012? The answer to this has been the focus of my pioneering research. My 1994 article “The How and Why of the Mayan End Date” really broke the case, as it identified how a rare astronomical alignment (the ‘galactic alignment’) was encoded by the Maya into their Creation Myth. My 1995 book The Center of Mayan Time explored my new findings further, by examining the early Maya site, Izapa, that invented the Long Count cosmology. More discoveries occurred in 1995-1997, and were reported in various articles and in my books Izapa Cosmos (1996) and Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 (1998). The galactic alignment is the key to understanding why the ancient Maya believed 2012 (or, to be more accurate, ‘the years around 2012’) would be so transformational.

What is the Galactic Alignment?

A = the solstice sun’s position 4,000 years ago. B = the solstice sun’s position 2,000 years ago. C = the solstice sun’s position in era-2012 (the galactic alignment). Note the dark rift and the crossroads of the Milky Way and the ecliptic.

The galactic alignment is a rare alignment within the cycle of the precession of the equinoxes, or let’s say ‘precession’ for short. Precession is thought to be caused by the slow wobble of the earth on its axis. The earth spins once every 24 hours, giving us the day cycle. But like a spinning top it also wobbles very slowly, making one complete wobble in just under 26,000 years. This phenomenon changes our angular orientation to the larger field of stars and constellations that surround us. One effect of the precession is that the position of the sun on a solstice or equinox slowly shifts in relation to the background stars. Ancient skywatchers might observe the stars of Capricorn rising ahead of the dawning solstice sun. Eight hundred years later, however, it will be the stars of Sagittarius. The constellations served as markers for this celestial shifting.

For the Maya, the bright band of the Milky Way was a very important feature of the night sky. It was seen to be a river, a road, a cosmic snake, a Great Mother, or even a celestial ballcourt. Compared to the very wide constellations, the Milky Way is a better marker for precessional shifting, because it is thin, like a ‘finish line’ in the sky. If the sun’s position on, say, the December solstice, was tracked, skywatchers would notice it shifting closer and closer to the bright band of the Milky Way. According to my pioneering research, ancient Maya skywatchers noticed this shifting, and calculated forward to the future day when the December solstice sun would line up with the Milky Way. They even used a more precise marker for the alignment, the dark rift in the Milky Way, which lies right along the Milky Way’s mid-plane.

Modern astronomers call the Milky Way’s precise mid-plane the ‘galactic equator’. So, a good definition of the galactic alignment is ‘the alignment of the December solstice sun with the galactic equator’. Modern astronomers have largely ignored this alignment phenomenon, but one named Jean Meeus calculated it after being encouraged to look at it by astrologer Daniel Giamario. With his calculation, and recognising that the sun itself is one-half of a degree wide, we arrive at a reasonable ‘alignment zone’ that stretches from 1980 to 2016. This is the ‘alignment zone’ of the galactic alignment. In the mid-1990s I pioneered a comparative analysis of Mayan traditions, such as the ballgame, king-making rituals, and the Creation Mythology, to show how the Maya were aware of this future galactic alignment (also sometimes called ‘the solstice-galaxy alignment’).

The galactic alignment occurs at an important location along the Milky Way – right at the crossing point formed by the Milky Way and the ecliptic (the path followed by the sun, moon, and planets). This crossroads in the sky is a critical feature of Mayan star lore. It is the Mayan Sacred Tree. Most interestingly, this cross targets the ‘nuclear bulge’ of the Galactic Centre. For this reason, the galactic alignment is often described as an alignment to the galactic centre, which it is, generally speaking.

These astronomical features had profound symbolic meaning for the ancient Maya. And some still do for the modern Maya. The Milky Way was the Great Mother, the galactic centre was her womb, and the dark rift was her birth canal. The December solstice sun was also very important, energetically, because that day signals the turnabout in the year, when increasing night shifts to increasing light. After the December solstice, the light begins to return as days grow longer. When THAT sun, the December solstice sun, shifts into alignment with the dark rift ‘birth canal’ of the Milky Way, the Maya believed the world would be reborn. It constituted a good location to place the end of a World Age, 13.0.0.0.0 in their calendar, and the beginning of the next Age. The cycle ending is ultimately about renewal.

The galactic alignment, so defined, happens only once every 26,000 years. This is the big news, why we should be astounded at what the ancient Maya achieved. If we honour it only as a profound galactic cosmovision, whether or not we believe in its transformational power or correctness, that would be enough to shatter the continuing stereotypes of the ancient Maya as barbaric savages. Progress in understanding the brilliance of the ancient Maya’s achievement is hindered by stereotypes and clichés propagated by an exploitative media, as recent Hollywood movies illustrate. They play into fear and deep-set biases, and newcomers should be on alert for attitudes and books that disrespect the authentic Mayan calendar tradition, the one that makes December 21, 2012 equal to 4 Ahau, 13.0.0.0.0.

But what of it? Does the galactic alignment somehow ‘cause’ change? This is an inevitable question, and one that is currently not easy to answer within the limits of our science. Astrophysicists look at distant galaxies, peer into galactic centres, and theorise about black holes, quasars, and dark matter. That’s all well and good, but they have not looked at the empirical effects of the galactic alignment phenomena. The possibility that our changing angular orientation to the galactic plane might somehow trigger seasonal changes on Earth, over very long periods of time, should be examined. Speaking from personal experience, however, it’s been very difficult to get astronomers and scientists to engage in a rational dialogue about the galactic alignment, although there have been some exceptions.

I’ve suggested scientific research that may answer the question of how the galactic alignment effects life on planet earth. It is, after all, an interesting question. In my 2002 book Galactic Alignment I discussed the Cosmecology theory of Dr. Oliver Reiser. Combining Reiser’s ideas with the galactic alignment concept, which he was not aware of, results in a possible model by which galactic alignments trigger consciousness. In 1995 I noted that our sun is roughly 26,000 light years from the galactic centre. I wondered if this could mean that precession is somehow entrained to this distance. A principle of sub-atomic physics that I located, later confirmed in the work of Reiser, provides the missing clue. The principle of ‘proton precession’ observes that protons have a varying wobble rate or ‘precession’ just like the earth does. The frequency of the wobble is directly related to the strength of the magnetic field that the proton is in, as well as its distance from the source of field. Here we have a principle that connects distance from source to the precession rate.

I am neither a sub-atomic particle physicist nor am I an interstellar astrophysicist, so this is not really my department. I offer this observation to others who are more interested in exploring the empirical models by which precession, and galactic alignments, may effect consciousness on earth.

We may be on the verge of a revolution in how we, in Western countries, understand the cosmos and our relationship to it. We may be going through a paradigm shift, much like the seventeenth century, when the sun became the centre of the cosmos during the Copernican revolution. Now, inspired by Mayan cosmology (just as Copernicus was inspired by Greek precursors), we might begin to see the womb of the Great Mother as the centre of the universe. This shift has important ramifications for our socio-political assumptions, for ‘god the solar father’ cannot be reborn unless it is through ‘goddess the galactic mother’. A higher principle that has been winnowed out of Western thought is reasserting itself, and our embracing it may be the key to transforming our unstable world into a sustainable one.

What Does 2012 Mean for the Modern World?

The pressing question is ‘what does 2012 mean for us?’ Consider this: the Maya offer us the 2012 date and tie it to a rare galactic alignment that our science barely acknowledges. They believed, for reasons we cannot quite grasp, that such an alignment would signal great transformation on the planet. If we look around us today, and recall events of the last twenty, fifty, and a hundred years, great transformation is indeed what is going on. Perhaps we should pay more attention to what the ancient Maya teachings actually say, rather than injecting modern assumptions and distortions into the 2012 discussion. There is no better place for accessing this Mayan wisdom than the Creation Mythology, otherwise known as the Popol Vuh or Hero Twin myth.

And here it is in a nutshell: 2012 bodes a challenge and an opportunity for humanity to rebirth itself. Such a transformational rebirth can only be accomplished through sacrifice, sacrificing the illusions that bind us to states of suffering and limitation. We can reconnect with the higher source, our true selves, the centre and source of the world. This invitation is reflected in the galactic alignment, our sun’s rare alignment with the cosmic heart and source (symbolised by the galactic centre).

This requires a little context and explanation. In the Creation Myth, the vain and false ruler Seven Macaw appears at the end of the cycle. He deceives and controls people, trying to take all the wealth for himself. He represents the archetype of self-serving egoism. That is the Mayan prophecy for 2012. Today, world leaders, megalomaniacal presidents, and even corporations all exhibit this trait. The Mayan prophecy for 2012 has come to pass. This is no accident. Ego takes control of the world at the end of the cycle, and this is a fact of the dynamics of cycles. We see this insight in many World Age doctrines, from the Hindus to the Greeks and especially among the indigenous peoples of the New World, such as the Maya. Spiritual light at the beginning gives way to darkness. Day turns to night, and at midnight the darkness has maximised. Year 2012 represents galactic midnight in the great cycle of precession. Everything is inverted; the ego denies any spiritual authority higher than itself. But because the ego’s vision is short-sighted, limited only to its own gain, it corrupts the world.

There is a second part to the Mayan prophecy in the Popol Vuh. Seven Macaw’s nemesis is One Hunahpu, the December solstice solar deity. He is the father of the Hero Twins, and much of the story is about facilitating his rebirth at the end of the Age. First, Seven Macaw, the ego, must be put in his place. In order for the higher consciousness to appear, for the mind and heart of humanity to be reborn, the self-serving squawking of ego must be stopped. The whole story is about the dynamic between the limited ego (Seven Macaw) and the eternal soul (One Hunahpu). Since One Hunahpu represents the December solstice sun, the entire myth is framed upon the galactic alignment. And here’s the key to the transformation, the key to putting Seven Macaw back into right relationship with One Hunahpu: sacrifice.

The challenge and the opportunity of 2012 lies within the province of our free will choice to sacrifice our illusions, the illusions that entangle our consciousness with the ego limitation of Seven Macaw. 2012 is not about something that ‘will happen’ in a predetermined sense while we sit around waiting. It is about our free will choice to open up and reconnect with the eternal wisdom, or hunker down in defeatism, closing our minds in fear.

These ideas, found in the Maya Creation Myth, are really perennial teachings. It is very significant that hidden within the depths of the Mayan calendar we find the same spiritual wisdom that resides at the root of all great spiritual traditions. Called the primordial tradition or the perennial philosophy, Mayan genius has linked up this global human heritage to galactic seasons of change timed by the galactic alignment of era-2012.

The ramifications of the 2012 opportunity are critical for creating a sustainable future. The key is embodying the higher wisdom, the higher vantage point, to resolve problems that are impossible to solve when consciousness retains an allegiance to lower consciousness, to the self-serving agenda of egoism.

Caption for photo at top of article: The author at Izapa (located in the Mexican state of Chiapas), the origin place of the 2012 cosmology. December 2006.

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JOHN MAJOR JENKINS is a leading independent investigator of Mayan sacred sciences and the origins and meaning of the 2012 calendar. John has authored dozens of articles and many books, including Journey to the Mayan Underworld, Mirror in the Sky, Tzolkin: Visionary Perspectives and Calendar Studies, Mayan Sacred Science, Maya Cosmogenesis 2012, Galactic Alignment: The Transformation of Consciousness According to Mayan, Egyptian, and Vedic Traditions and Pyramid of Fire. His latest work is a 3-CD program Unlocking the Secrets of 2012. John’s website is an extensive resource for studying the lost Galactic Cosmology of the Maya: www.Alignment2012.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 4.

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn Special Issue 4 (PDF version) for only US$5

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For our reproduction notice, click here.

—

“All was mystery, dark, impenetrable mystery, and every circumstance increased it.” So wrote 19th century explorer John Lloyd Stephens after journeying through the rainforests of Mesoamerica in search of cities long shrouded under a dense canopy of vegetation. Today, some of the mystery has been dispelled. Their great cities, their architecture and their art challenged the splendour of the ancient capitals of Asia and Africa.While Europe languished in the Dark Ages, the Maya devised sophisticated mathematical and astronomical concepts, wrote books and developed trade routes that spanned much of Mesoamerica. They derived many cultural forms from the north, but also devised many cultural innovations that profoundly influenced all subsequent cultures in the area. Much of Maya culture, particularly the religious reckoning of time, is still a vital aspect of Native American life in Guatemala and Honduras.

All that the ancient Maya accomplished is truly awe-inspiring! With a difficult life in the Tropics, with heat and humidity that would melt the hardiest person, and with a very sparse population, the Maya built incredibly sophisticated ceremonial centres, an astronomical science and mathematics among the most sophisticated in the pre-modern world, and the most developed and complex system of writing in the Americas. In recent years, new archaeological and investigative breakthroughs – including the deciphering of Maya glyphic writing – have revealed a much better idea of how the ancient Maya lived their lives.

A Personal Connection

For me, the Maya are my passion. Somehow, I sense a deep inner connection from my soul to this marvellous culture. And in these times, I am able to experience my life from what some may describe as a unique position and perspective. I have lived in the Mayalands for 8 years; I maintain close contact with researchers and archaeologists who investigate the ancient Maya; and I interact with some of the modern Maya Spiritual Elders. I produce an informative monthly 8-page newsletter covering ongoing archaeology and research of the ancient Maya for the Institute of Maya Studies. I also lead group adventures to the Mayalands. Lately, I’ve emerged as one in only a handful of Maya researchers who share their insights about the current 2012 phenomena.

As you know, there is much to read elsewhere about Maya prophesies, but there is only one real Maya prophesy that I am aware of. According to Yukatek Maya Elder Hunbatz Men, the message says that, “In these times, the people of the ‘north’ will come back and help to revitalise the Maya’s own culture.” Yes, I was born in North America this time around, but I am a reincarnated Maya and I’m back to educate and motivate those who I encounter along the way – to communicate positively and realistically about the ancient Maya.

In the mid-1970s, after I had completed my regular schooling, I was invited by some good friends who had bought some land in Belize, to help them with their dream of creating a yoga retreat.

Located in the western Cayo District, their piece of land was on a hilltop above the small Maya village of Sokutz, right along the Mopan River, across from and in view of the ancient Maya site of Xunantunich. The sun would set each evening behind the silhouette of its massive great acropolis pyramid. I loved living outside of the United States at such a young age, even though it was a challenge in numerous ways. We had a Maya family helping and teaching us. We learned how to build structures of wood poles and thatch, how to plant corn and beans, how to grow a garden in the Tropics, what to eat, what not to eat, how to cook, how to survive. The Godoy family taught us how to live, to slow down and move with the cycles of nature around us, day and night.

Some of my best memories are of when my Maya friends and I would cross the river in their dugout canoe and make our own trail (with machetes) up to the top of the pyramid to spend the night on full moons. With the ancient stone and earth below me and the crisp, clear starry nights above me, I was immersed in a new world. I was between worlds. I believe it was here that I first felt the rhythm of the mysterious Maya.

We could only stay in this paradise for a year and a half, but it was a very memorable experience. When funds ran out before the government of Belize could bulldoze an access road to the centre we had created, we had to abandon the project and return to the US. They drove back and I decided to hitchhike and ride buses into Guatemala, then up though Mexico, to California and back to Florida. A three-month wild adventure of a lifetime.

When I arrived in the highlands of Guatemala, I sensed a very intense dejavú… I felt that this was my territory, this was my home. My most memorable experience was the night a Guatemalan friend took me to the top of the active Pacaya volcano. At that time you could struggle to make your way to the uppermost peak and then witness ecstatic eruptions in front and below. The ground would shake with intense tremors. This would lead to eruptions that created multi-coloured clouds and its own lightning. I had never felt so much natural energy.

It was the night of the full moon in Gemini (and I’m a Gemini), a time when in India, they celebrate the Wesak Festival, their most spiritual celebration of the year. On top of that, we witnessed a full eclipse of the moon! It was then that I made a pact with myself to return to Guatemala to live. A few years later, I did return to the land of eternal springtime and was able to stay for six years. It was the best time of my life. The ancient and the modern Maya had touched my heart and soul. It is a feeling of an intense connection that I enjoy sharing.

The Ancient Maya in Space and Time

Ancient Mesoamerica was one of the great independent hearths of civilisation. Out of varied landscapes grew some of the richest cultures of the early historic world of the Americas – Olmec, Zapotec, Izapan, Maya, Toltec and Aztec.

The beginning of civilisation in Mesoamerica dates to about 2000 BCE with the rise of the Olmecs in the Gulf Coast Lowlands of Mexico. Although the Olmecs have traditionally been viewed as the first of a series of civilisations that culminated in the Aztecs just prior to the Spanish Conquest nearly three millennia later, some researchers have argued that it is preferable to consider the cultural developments from 1500 BCE to the sixteenth century CE as one complex system with various flowerings through time and space. Such a view is more than mere semantic fiddling: it indicates how impressed scholars are with the interconnectedness of ancient Mesoamerican cultures, a process that was present from the very beginning, especially in respects to the magnificent culture we have come to know as the Maya.

The Maya lived in the area of Central America that now consists of Guatemala, Belize, the northern parts of Honduras and El Salvador, all of the Yucatán Peninsula and southern Mexico (the Chiapas and Tabasco states). This whole area lies south of the tropic of Cancer and north of the equator, and is about 900 kilometres from north to south and 550 kilometres in the east-west direction.

It is believed the first humans reached Central America about 15,000 years ago. The first identifiable culture, Clovis, existed around 10,000 BCE. Some stone tools dating back to 9,000 BCE have been found in Guatemala. Around this time, the Fourth Ice Age was drawing to a close and the climate was gradually warming up enabling humans to begin eating more plants and less meat. This change was underway around 8,000 BCE.

From 8,000 BCE to 2,000 BCE the inhabitants of Central America gradually became more agrarian and they domesticated beans, corn, peppers, squash and other plants. During this time there was still no jungle, just savannah and grassland and some trees. Evidence indicates that a tropical jungle climate appeared in Central America only quite recently, after the Maya civilisation was well underway. Towards the end of this period, some recognisably Maya villages appeared and pottery and ceramics appeared. Some villages would construct simple ceremonial platforms and temples.

The period from 1500 BCE to 300 CE is called the “Pre-Classic” period of Maya culture. During this period the diversity of Mayan languages developed. The Maya experienced population growth and larger towns were constructed. This was the period when more intense agriculture began (especially corn cultivation). Monochrome ceramics, stone carving and the construction of the first buildings in places like Kaminal Juyú, Izapa, El Baúl, Tikal, Uaxactún and Dzibilchaltún are part of this period as well. Archaeological evidence suggests the construction of ceremonial architecture in the Maya area by approximately 1000 BCE.

The earliest configurations of such architecture consist of simple burial mounds, which would be the precursors to the stepped pyramids subsequently erected in the Late Pre-Classic. Prominent Middle and Late Pre-Classic settlement zones are located in the southern Maya lowlands, specifically in the Mirador and Petén Basins. Important sites in the southern Maya lowlands include Nakbe, El Mirador, Cival, and San Bartolo. In the Guatemalan Highlands, Kaminal Juyú emerges around 800 BCE. For many centuries it controlled the jade and obsidian sources for the Petén and Pacific Lowlands.

The important early sites of Izapa, Tak’alik Ab’aj and Chocolá that appeared around 600 BCE were the main producers of cacao (chocolate). Mid-sized Maya communities also began to develop in the northern Maya lowlands during the Middle and Late Pre-Classic, though these lacked the size, scale and influence of the large centres of the southern lowlands. Two important Pre-Classic northern sites include Komchen and Dzibilchaltún.

Meanwhile, the Olmec culture was developing in southern Mexico. They developed a system of writing and a complex religion. The Olmecs had a considerable influence on the fledgling Maya culture. The Maya adopted many of the Olmec skills and practices and developed them further. It seems that the mixture of the Olmec and Maya cultures touched off an explosion of cultural development. The Izapan culture, in the area of the present-day border between Mexico and Guatemala also flourished during this time. Archaeologists are not sure of the cause, but from 300 BCE to 300 CE, tremendous development occurred in architecture, writing and calendrics throughout the Mayalands and the population increased.

The Classic Period of Maya development is the 650 years from 250 CE to 900 CE. The Maya refined the Long Count calendar and developed a more advanced written language that they apparently inherited from the Izpapans and Olmecs. (The 5,125-year, 13-Baktun cycle of the Long Count ends and restarts on 21/12/2012). The Maya had a tendency to tear down buildings and temples and rebuild new ones over the rubble of the old. Some buildings are built on several layers of previous buildings. Most of the great Maya cities as they appear today were built during the Classic Period, over the remains of previous construction. Architecture and culture blossomed during the Classic Period. The Maya began to accurately record important events on carved stelae. Excellent examples of Maya carved stelae and dramatic stucco art can be seen at Quirigua, Palenque and Copán.

Early in the Classic Period, around 400 CE, the Maya became heavily influenced by the civilisation of Teotihuacan to the north. Teotihuacan was the most powerful culture in Central Mexico. Much about this relationship is unclear, but it appears to have been beneficial to both civilisations because both prospered and developed at this time.

Around the year 650 CE the civilisation of Teotihuacan collapsed. This collapse triggered an upset in the Maya civilisation. Apparently there was a struggle to fill the power-vacuum left by the collapse of Teotihuacan. Now free of its relationship to Teotihuacan, the Maya reached their highest levels of sophistication. Art, astronomy and religion reached new heights. The population grew and cities expanded in this era of greatest Maya prosperity. Astronomy and arithmetic advanced and the Maya were able to measure the orbits of celestial bodies with unprecedented accuracy. The Maya predicted the motions of Venus to a degree of precision only equalled in recent times. Maya cities were much larger and more populous than any city in Europe. The Maya’s greatest artistic works in pottery and jade were made during this pinnacle of Maya development.

However, this peak of Maya development was to be short lived. By 750 CE problems arose and the “collapse” was underway. By this time, the climate was certainly changing from grassland and savannah into the tropical climate we now associate with Guatemala. In any event, the population dropped and the cities were gradually abandoned. By 830 CE construction and development had come to a halt. Some cities in Belize and the Yucatán survived longer, but in Guatemala the population abandoned the cities and redistributed itself into the farming villages of the highlands that we see today.

For reasons that are still debated, the Maya centres of the southern lowlands went into decline during the 8th and 9th centuries and were abandoned shortly thereafter. This decline was coupled with a cessation of monumental inscriptions and large-scale architectural construction. Although there is no universally accepted theory to explain this collapse, current theories fall into two categories: non-ecological and ecological.

Non-ecological theories of the Maya decline are divided into several subcategories, such as overpopulation, foreign invasion, peasant revolt, and the collapse of key trade routes. Ecological hypotheses include environmental disaster, epidemic disease, and climate change. There is evidence that the Maya population exceeded the carrying capacity of the environment including exhaustion of agricultural potential and over-hunting of megafauna. Some scholars have recently theorised that an intense 200-year drought led to the collapse of Maya civilisation. The drought theory originated from research performed by physical scientists studying lake beds, ancient pollen and other data, not from the archaeological community.

The cities the Maya built were ceremonial centres. A priestly class lived in the cities, but for the most part the Maya population lived in small farming villages. The priestly class would carry out daily religious duties, that sometimes included sacrifices, and the commoners would periodically gather for religious ceremonies and festivals.

Around the time of the collapse, there is evidence of invasion from the outside and it’s possible that economic difficulties led them to abandon the cities, but the greatest change seems to be the disappearance of the priestly class; with this disappearance, the Maya stopped working on their cities. The power of the king’s blood no longer was able to overcome the difficulties they encountered and the people quit believing in and supporting the idea of divine kingship. Some people seem to have continued to use their cities for a time, but that eventually came to a halt as well.

Life for the Maya did not really change drastically after the decline of their cities, for the cities were central only in their ceremonial life. Their “Classic” experience came to a halt, but the Maya did not disappear, they returned to their villages and plots of corn, or perhaps relocated far away, but they still survived. Today, there are over 8 million Maya living in Mesoamerica and more than 23 Maya dialects are still spoken.

Understanding 2012

I have long recognised the significance of the up-and-coming December 21, 2012 Maya Long Count Calendar end date and the increasing public interest surrounding the possible effects of the impending alignment involving the earth, the sun and the area looking towards the Galactic Centre of our galaxy.

I enjoy a great friendship with independent Maya researcher John Major Jenkins, who has penned various articles in New Dawn magazine over the past few years. I consider him the Godfather of 2012. John is one of the original investigators who figured out the alignment that the ancient Maya were anticipating, but it was he who put 2012 on the map with the release of Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 in 1994. Since then, a scholarly debate has slowly gained momentum, but it is only recently that a small number of established Maya scholars have begun to voice their opinions. It demands that we all investigate the realities behind the 2012 alignment concept a little more closely.

The Long Count end date that we are concerned with culminates one of the Maya’s 5,200 tun (5,125 year) 13-Baktun Great Cycle calendar “ages” and is the “seating” of the next Great Cycle. As much as it is significant as the ending of one Great Cycle, at the same time, it is the creation of a new sun, a new world age. It is not the end of the world.

Scholars disagree over some of the specific aspects of this alignment as it relates to the ancient Maya stargazers and calendar formulators. Were the ancient Maya really aware of the exact location of the centre of our galaxy? Were the ancient Maya astronomer priests aware of the +/-26,000 year cycle of the precession of the equinoxes? Why did the Maya choose this time, the time that we live in, as the “end” of their Long Count calendar, when their Classic culture played out more than a thousand years ago (around 950 CE)? And why did they “initiate” this calendar cycle in 3114 BCE, more than five thousand years ago, two thousand years or so before their culture ever really began to flourish?

Scholars are now beginning to agree that it is apparent that the ancient Izapan skywatchers and the early Maya did consciously choose the 21/12/2012 date, significant because it is a winter solstice, first as the end date of this Great Cycle and then back-calculated to determine the start date. And very significantly, they started the calendar on a day when the sun was at zenith at Izapa. And even if they weren’t aware of the cycle of the precession of the equinoxes nor even aware of where the “centre” of our galaxy is located, amazingly they did “anchor” this cycle’s end date to a day when viewed from earth, our sun will rise on a winter solstice directly in front of the area of the bright band (bulge) of the Milky Way galaxy where the Galactic Centre is located.

What cycle are we in, which cycle number is ending?

All Mesoamerican cultures and some North American indigenous cultures believe that the evolutional history of mankind here on earth is tied into cycles of creation and transformation. Is it the end of the fourth Great Cycle and the beginning of the fifth or is it the end of the fifth Great Cycle and the beginning of the sixth? And if the latter, would it be referred to as the beginning of the sixth Long Count, or the beginning of a new first cycle in the Grand Cycle of five ages divisible within the +/-26,000 year cycle of the precession?

In my research, I have uncovered the fact that there is a difference among the beliefs of various surviving indigenous cultures, but only recently are researchers uncovering and collecting these beliefs from numerous and varied sources to get a glimpse of the whole situation.

Through a reading of the Popul Vuh, the surviving Quiché Maya Creation Myth, we find that they record four previous ages of creation and destruction (transformation) and we, like the ancient Maya, are living in the fifth cycle. The five separate creation attempts were the mountains and rivers, the animals and birds, the mud persons, the wooden persons, and now humankind (made of maize [corn]). They record that mankind first faced starvation and were eaten by jaguars and other animals. Then we faced cycle endings with transformations by wind, by a rain of fire, and more recently as most ancient cultural traditions around the world record, by floods. The end of this fifth cycle is in the calendar sign of Olin in the Nahuatl language, Caban in Yucatek Maya, and Noj in Quiché Maya, and it involves movement, vibration and earthquake. Plus, not so quite incidentally, my birthday in the sacred Tzolk’in calendar is 7 Caban – another major connection for me.

The Tz’utujil Maya creation myth confirms that we are in the fifth of a series of five eras, and also suggests an evolution through the eras, culminating in the “fruiting.” In addition, it also suggests the need for a conscious evolution during this fifth era lifetime to become the ripe fruits we are designed to be, and that there is a Creation beyond the fifth if only we continue to honour the gods. Aztec, Zuni and Navajo peoples also say we are living in the fifth era, and approaching the sixth.

Do modern Maya use the Long Count calendar?

The Maya discontinued their use of the Long Count calendar long before the Spanish arrived. The Maya living today do not use it. They now only utilise the 260-day sacred Tzolk’in calendar. The use of the Long Count calendar was glyphically carved in stone on ancient Maya stelae to indicate precise days when important rituals or activities occurred, especially period endings. This practice died out around 980 CE. There are no modern Maya predictions or prophecies for this Great Cycle ending, as much as a few confused book writers would have you believe.

And be aware, if any living Maya comes out with some prophesies nowadays, it seems they are just repeating some of the same “new-agey”-type comments that they think we want to hear. They are apparently not voyaging into the cosmic centre to retrieve wisdom and learning from the gods as their ancient royal Maya counterparts were capable of. As carved in stone with images and hieroglyphic writings, ancient Maya kings were required to undertake powerful shamanic rituals culminating in journeys to “the centre of the sky” to commune, invoke and channel the power resident in the cosmic centre. It was the basis behind the ancient Maya belief system that celebrated the power of the king’s blood, evolving into kingship by “divine rule.” It served the Maya well, for more than two thousand years, as the cohesive force that governed their cultural evolution.

The ancient Maya were not coerced into working on building their king’s massive construction projects… they willingly participated. The architecture built into all central ceremonial areas of Maya sites reflects their desire to create sacred space for the king. Their great central temples represented “symbolic sacred mountains” and were built directly on perceived earthly energy centres. The upper rooms were “symbolic sacred caves,” portals for accessing the Maya Underworld, which at night was the Upperworld above them. The king’s throne represented the inner nucleus of power, the hot seat and hotline of communion with the cosmic centre and source. In so many ways, the Maya manifested the saying: As above, so below. From what I can gather from some of the Maya spiritual elders whom I am aware of, the modern Maya are not voyaging into the cosmic centre this time around.

How might 2012 affect us?

There is an “alignment zone” for our sun’s alignment over the Galactic Centre that is 20 or so years (1 Katun) on either side of 2012, due to the perceived “width” of our sun passing over the area of the creation place. The scheduled “movement” transition isn’t going to happen all at once exactly on December 21, 2012. That particular day is only a “marker” for another age of transition, and taken by itself, it certainly isn’t the cause of anything.

Take a good look around… you can’t deny that we are experiencing worldwide transformation and change in many respects and this action will continue to accelerate. Not only is there an increase of powerful earthquakes and changes in climate around the world, but mankind is also being shaken down to the core of our most treasured beliefs. It isn’t just the physical world, but also our mental, emotional and spiritual worlds that will get a big “shaking up.” Current worldwide religious and political system divisiveness needs to transform into a global plan of mutual cohesiveness and sustenance.

Plus, scientists now know that 2012 will be the peak of a great solar cycle and we can expect to experience some major repercussions from increased solar activity. In its most drastic form, solar radiation in the short term could knock out the sensitive communication satellites that monitor and control our ever-increasing technology-dependent existence and also seriously affect our genetics in the long term.

I think you will agree that we are currently living in an age of a quickening transformation. Almost all cultures around the world record and warn in myths or legends and written texts of impending change during these times. With their multiple calendars, the Maya have only provided us with a point of reference in “time,” a guiding “lighthouse” to show us that we’re getting close. We are the ones living now who will experience this transition. It is a wonderful time to have reincarnated! We’re ready to witness the birth of the Maya’s sixth sun on Friday, December 21, 2012. And if one can gleam anything prophetic from the Popul Vuh, one finds that mankind is intrinsically intertwined with the cosmic and astronomical cycles that surround this planet we call home. We need to keep consciously evolving to have all of planet Earth support all of humankind equally. Either by cause and effect or by conscious transmutation, mankind will eventually transform into something completely different in order to survive. And through it all, remember to honour the gods!

The alignment in 2012 is very important astronomically. It involves our sun aligning with the arc of the Milky Way at a crossroads (a Maya creation place) where it hasn’t been for +/-26,000 years. It is a marker of a period of transition and change that is worthy of recognition, understanding and celebration. It is not the end of the world… it is a planetary-wide opportunity to help re-create it. There will be an international push towards aligning human intent towards manifesting a better world for ourselves with a focus towards raising our collective consciousness.

We are all co-creators with the gods. Honour the divine within you; create your own cosmic connection. But be forewarned, no matter if you celebrate the Maya Long Count calendar end date at a Maya site or not, wherever you are on 21/12/2012, take along some strong UV sunglasses and use some strong sun-block. Future generations are depending on you! Have a great 2012!

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Above photo montage of Maya Elder Don Rigoberto, one of Jim Reed’s connections. The printed version of this article includes extensive colour photos, montages and graphics that help explain concepts. Photo © and courtesy the author. Find out about tours to Maya sites by contacting Jim Reed at mayaman@bellsouth.net.

John Major Jenkins’ latest book is The 2012 Story. In a very matter-of-fact manner, John confronts his critics and lays it all on the line. Order your copy at www.the2012story.com.

No where can you get a DVD that tells the 2012 story with all colour images, including NASA photography. Understanding 2012 has its focus on Maya creation centres, the Popol Vuh, the amazing accomplishments of the ancient Izapan skywatchers, and the modern Maya Spiritual Elders. The meaning behind 2012 is told in a manner that you can grasp, then share it with your friends. Order your copy today by contacting Jim Reed at mayaman@bellsouth.net.

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JIM REED is a Maya aficionado who has been involved with Maya studies for 40 years. He is currently editor of the IMS Explorer, an informative monthly newsletter by the Institute of Maya Studies (based in Miami, Florida). He was past President of the Institute in the year 2000. The IMS offers traditional postal mail subscriptions (printed in black and white) and a colourful online version. The IMS thanks our subscribers in Australia and New Zealand and we welcome more! Jim also leads group adventures to the Mayalands. Perhaps you will need to ground yourself soon in the land where time was born. Imagine the possibilities! Contact Jim Reed for more information at mayaman@bellsouth.net. You can also contact him by searching for him using his email address on FaceBook and MySpace.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 118 (Jan-Feb 2010).

Read this article with its extensive full colour illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 118 (PDF version) for only US$5

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

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Atlantis: everyone knows the name and almost everyone knows that the name refers to a mythical, sunken island continent in the Atlantic Ocean, according to a story told by the Greek philosopher Plato sometime during the 4th century BCE. Whether or not Atlantis existed has been a matter of conjecture for nearly four hundred years, ever since Francis Bacon published his novel The New Atlantis in 1626. Atlantis is a controversy that continues to this day.

For some folks, Atlantis existed just as Plato explained, but for others the idea alone runs across the grain of prevailing scholarship and archaeological investigation. For those who are sure Atlantis did exist, it is a belief. But for the skeptic, a prehistoric civilisation with technical sophistication is pure fiction. Unfortunately, for those who believe there is no proof, Atlantis has been ‘discovered’ by researchers in almost every part of the world, from South America to the Eastern Mediterranean to the British Isles.

Although scholarly consensus is convinced that Plato’s fictitious tale of Atlantis was based on the Island of Thera’s destruction in 1628 BCE, Atlantis remains as the Holy Grail of archaeology, even if archaeologists won’t admit it. Discovering evidence – even the smallest artefact – that the lost continent of Atlantis really existed would be the greatest find in the annals of all historical disciplines. History would not only be made, but have to be rewritten. However, until that evidence is discovered and confirmed, the controversy will rage on between believers and skeptics, with the skeptics having a distinct advantage. It’s all about evidence.

Solid evidence is important and there is no direct evidence that Atlantis existed. No ancient stone or sign has ever been found stating ‘Atlantis this Way’ or ‘Welcome to Atlantis.’ No artefact has been discovered proving that sophisticated Atlantean equipment was used by any culture or civilisation during prehistoric times. This being the case, why do some people insist that the story of Atlantis is fact?

The answer to this question lies in the Valley of the Nile, ancient Egypt, and the enigmatic Old Kingdom period. It’s where my hunt for Atlantis began.

STANDARD EXPLANATION MISINTERPRETS THE EVIDENCE

The ruins of ancient Egypt are unique. Nowhere else in the world are there such magnificent megalithic structures as well as fields of granite. It’s obvious that the builders of ancient Egypt’s temples and pyramids used granite, as well as limestone and basalt, as primary materials in their architectural designs. The importance of this fact cannot be overlooked.

Working with stone is not easy and working with granite – the hardest rock known to man – and achieving any scale of economy in order to build big and build everywhere, like the ancient Egyptians did, is impossible without diamond studded tools. Today, such large and numerous projects on a big scale require specialised tools and equipment. Case in point: Giza’s Great Pyramid was the tallest structure in the world until France erected the Eiffel Tower in 1889.

So, how could the ancient Egyptians build an entire civilisation out of limestone, basalt and granite using little more than copper chisels, stone hammers, dolerite pounding rocks, and brute strength? How could a large number of granite statues, some in excess of forty feet tall, be carved with such detail and perfection and then erected?

The traditional explanation is that they did it with copper chisels, stone hammers, dolerite pounding rocks, and brute strength. However, for me, since no culture or civilisation was able to duplicate in complexity, scale, and quantity, the Old Kingdom construction efforts during the next 4,000 years, then the traditional understanding must be an incorrect interpretation of the evidence – the most erroneous being the Great Pyramid. Skepticism is a two-way street.

The idea that the Great Pyramid was a tomb defies logical and cogent reasoning. First, funeral items were never found within any of the pyramid’s chambers. Nor are there any inscriptions describing it as a tomb. Second, its internal design is strange and does not accommodate human beings. Passageways that lead to its three chambers are a little more than three feet in height and width. Nor are there any steps; so, to move about you have to crawl on your hands and knees. This makes moving about inside the pyramid next to impossible for anyone, let alone a ritual funerary party. Third, the walls and ceiling of the uppermost chamber, the alleged burial chamber, was built from seventy-ton slabs of granite with another five layers of granite in the area directly above its ceiling. Finally, as any good detective would consider important, a colossal structure such as the Great Pyramid requires enormous resources to build which, consequently, requires a valid and reasoned motive. A tomb is not one of them.

At a cost of thirty-five billion in adjusted (US) dollars, according to engineer Markus Schulte, there had to be a very good reason to build the Great Pyramid; a reason or a cause that united a nation in mind and in spirit. To be sure, the currently accepted idea that the Great Pyramid’s construction was a national project is an accurate interpretation of what likely happened. However, any large scale operation that consumes billions of dollars in resources must return some type of social benefit. In the case of the Great Pyramid, the benefit somehow involved water.

A trough links the pyramid/temple site to the valley below at Abu Sir. Image courtesy of the author.

Basin at Abu Gorab (1 mile north of Abu Sir). Image courtesy of the author.

On the Giza Plateau just south of the middle pyramid, a granite trough emerges from the sand (see illustration). At Abu Sir, south of Sakkara, a limestone trough runs the course of the hill on which a pyramid was built, and at both Abu Sir and its neighbour pyramid, Abu Gorab, there are numerous stone basins. Although denied by most Egyptologists, there is also evidence that a system of tunnels exists under the Giza Plateau. The so-called ‘Tomb of Osiris’ runs deep into the ground as does ‘the pit’ in the Great Pyramid’s subterranean chamber. Near the granite trough there is also two square tunnels drilled into the bedrock, although now filled with sand. Furthermore, the Great Pyramid’s original design included a perimeter wall, which might have functioned as a retaining wall for a reservoir for fresh water that flowed through a canal from the ancient Lake Moeris.

A DEVICE, NOT A TOMB

In his 1967 book The Pharaoh’s Pump, Edward Kunkel put forth the idea that the Great Pyramid was a hydraulic device. According to Kunkel, the Great Pyramid served as a ‘ram’ style water pump in order to facilitate moving large quantities of stone. Through a series of locks, stone blocks arriving from Upper Egypt were moved onto the Giza Plateau by barge, through a system of canals that linked the Nile River to the Great Pyramid. In Kunkel’s theory, the Great Pyramid housed two pumps. One was built underground and a second pump was built above ground. The underground pump consisted of the subterranean chamber and its associated passageways, and the above ground pump, the middle and upper chambers.

The underground ‘ram’ style water pump used energy created by compressing water to maintain water flow, as did the middle chamber for the upper pump. In the lower pump, the subterranean chamber functioned as a compression chamber, and in the upper pump, the middle chamber functioned as a compression chamber. The odd niche in the middle chamber, according to Kunkel, was a safety value, and the upper (King’s) chamber, a secondary compression chamber.

Kunkel’s theory is not as wild as it first seems. In his book he discusses the archaeological evidence that supports his idea. However, the notion that the middle and upper chambers functioned as compression chambers is a stretch of engineering imagination. For the upper pump to function, water would have to enter the Grand Gallery from the lower pump and then flow into the middle and upper chambers. Once in the upper chamber, the continuous flow of water from below would create two streams exiting the pyramid through the shafts built into the north and south sides.

Unfortunately, Kunkel’s upper pump theory requires the creation of a vacuum, a number of valves, and some type of combustible fuel and combustion chamber to drive the pump, which according to Kunkel was located above the uppermost chamber. None of which appear plausible, although the theory that the subterranean chamber functioned as a ‘ram’ style water pump makes sense.

According to marine engineer John Cadman, Kunkel made the mistake of theorising that the entire pyramid was a water pump. Cadman realised that only the subterranean chamber and associated passageways would have functioned as a pump. So, Cadman set out to solve it the engineering way.

With as many photos of the subterranean chamber as he could find, Cadman built a model to test his theory, the first of which didn’t work. Accordingly, he went over the model’s design looking for weak points, and built a second model. This one worked the first time. He then built two more models, one which was made with a glass top and ink injectors in order to study the flow of the water inside the chamber. After studying this model he concluded that the chamber was designed to efficiently circulate and move water through the output and waste line.

Cadman experimented further by adding a vertical pipe connected to the input pipe, called a ‘stand pipe’. In a ram pump, water enters the compression chamber from an elevated source. Inside the compression chamber an opened valve allows water to flow out until the velocity forces the valve shut; when the valve closes high pressure forces water past the check valve and through the output line. When the valve reopens, water once again flows down the input pipe into the compression chamber. A vertical pipe connected to the input line facilitates the pressure wave exiting the system and thereby allows greater cycling, i.e. water is moved through the pump at a faster rate. He also discovered that the stand pipe increases the intensity of the compression wave inside the chamber.

Cadman’s conclusion: whoever carved the subterranean chamber out of bedrock knew exactly what they were doing. The chamber’s design was deliberate and engineered to quickly move water through the system. Furthermore, the compression wave resulting from the pump’s action was apparently more important to the builders of the pyramid than the water being pumped. This leads to another question: why would the pyramid builders design a device that intentionally sent a compression wave up through the body of the pyramid?

Although the answer to that question still lies in the future, the significance of Cadman’s modelling of the Great Pyramid’s subterranean area is obvious. The builders of the Great Pyramid understood engineering physics, at least in the area of hydraulics which requires scientific inquiry and the application of science; in other words, technology.

Herein is the answer to how the pyramid builders built an entire civilisation out of limestone, basalt and granite. If they had achieved an understanding of hydraulics sufficient to build a large ram pump, certainly they also achieved an understanding of physics sufficient to develop some type of machine technology.

Of course, skeptics would argue if they used machines to build, then where are the machines now?

I, too, would like to know what happened to the machines, but the reality is the machines they used, or what is left of them, probably disintegrated and returned to the elements from which they were made long ago. Exposed to weathering, only rock can withstand the corrosiveness of the environment for extremely long periods of time, although the possibility exists that beneath the Saharan sands lies the machining treasure of Civilisation X. Even so, there is another way to demonstrate that powered machines were used in the process of building the Old Kingdom’s magnificent structures.

Whether a hand tool or power tool, every tool leaves its mark, and marks from hand tools are very different than those made by machines. Anyone who has taken metals or wood shop in high school knows this to be true. A cut made from a table saw is flat and straight where as a cut made by a person using a hand saw is less precise, not quite as flat or straight.

The telltale signs of a power tool or machine are the minute marks the blade’s teeth make as they remove material. Although difficult to see, close up the marks from the blade are visible and make a regular pattern across the surface of the cut material. These marks are called ‘feed lines’ and are left by the machine as the operator feeds the material into the cutting blade. Finding evidence of feed marks on stone at one of Egypt’s ancient sites would be the equivalent of finding the machine that made those marks.

THE STONE AT ABU RAWASH

With the Great Sphinx and three pyramids, the Giza Plateau is the jewel of Egypt’s modern day tourist economy, and rightfully so. Without question there is no other place with such magnificence. However, there’s little-known ancient ruins five miles to the north, just off the road to Alexandria, called Abu Rawash. It’s not on the tourist map, but is as spectacular as Giza, although in a very different way.

According to Egyptology, Abu Rawash’s pyramid was built 4,570 years ago during the fourth dynasty by Djedefre, that dynasty’s third ruler. What’s fascinating about this pyramid is that it was never finished. Only fifteen or so courses of the pyramid were laid and the descending passage is exposed to the sky. It’s a fantastic site to visit and provides insight into pyramid construction and design.

Machined granite slab at Abu Rawash. Image courtesy of the author.

The most intriguing aspect of Abu Rawash, though, lies on its south side, a hundred feet or so from the base of the pyramid. There is a pink granite slab approximately four feet in length, three feet wide, and a foot in thickness. It’s propped up on a dozen or so stones the size of a softball. The granite stone is pristine, as if it was hidden away for thousands of years and only recently uncovered. The surface of the stone is smooth to the touch and at its top is an arc, precise in its edge, which separates the stone’s smooth surface from its rough. On the smooth surface there are two slice marks, one near the top and another toward the bottom. And as you look close at the stone’s surface, minute horizontal striations are clearly visible in the same pattern of the separating arc.

Unmistakably, this pink granite slab was cut using a machine; irrefutable evidence that whatever construction crew was responsible for the pyramid at Abu Rawash, they were using some type of power saw. Abu Rawash isn’t the only place, either.

There is evidence elsewhere that powered equipment was used by the pyramid builders – on the Giza Plateau, on the east side of the Great Pyramid at the north end of the basalt patio. Originally, the machine marks on these stones were not visible, hidden by adjoining blocks of a finished patio. But sometime over the course of the last four thousand years or more scavengers removed a number of blocks from the patio’s periphery, particularly the north end, exposing what the pyramid builders did not want anyone to see. Mistakes made by the men who operated the saws. At Giza, the evidence is just as compelling as what exists as Abu Rawash.

WAS THERE A CIVILISATION X?

Since the ancient Egyptians that lived from the third through the first millennium BCE were not known to have developed machine technology, and no other civilisation since has until modern times, the builders responsible for the stone at Abu Rawash and the Great Pyramid’s basalt patio must have existed at a remote time in prehistory. The evidence speaks for itself.

There was Civilisation before Civilisation. I like to refer to it as Civilisation X.

Who were they? Was Egypt a colony of Atlantis as some theorists have put forth? Or were they an unknown culture never described by ancient peoples?

Although everyone knows that the story of Atlantis is attributed to the Greek philosopher Plato, most people don’t realise the story of Atlantis is Egyptian in origin. According to Plato’s dialogues Timaeus and Critias, he heard the story second hand from his uncle Solon who originally heard it from the temple priests at Sais where the Atlantis tale was said to be inscribed upon the temple’s pillars. Unfortunately, such an inscription has never been found. So no one knows whether or not Plato’s story of Atlantis is fact or fiction.

There’s no question that Plato’s tale of Atlantis was a social moral. The pertinent question is, in my opinion, was there a kernel of truth to the story? In other words, was Plato inspired to write Timaeus and Critias from known history of the time?

I think that is likely the case. There are a number of ancient cataclysm myths such as the Greek’s Deucalion’s Flood, the Hopi’s ‘Blue Star’, Sumer’s ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’, and Egypt’s story of ‘Hathor as the Eye of Ra’, just to name a few. There are also two tales of catastrophe in the biblical Genesis, Noah’s Flood and the Tower of Babel.

In modern times these ancient stories of death and destruction have been attributed to fantasy or a way of explaining life’s mysteries. I think such an interpretation is not only superficial but an insult to our ancestors. Who are we to say they were primitive and ignorant in their understanding of the world around them?

Indeed, we should understand these ‘myths’ for what they are, ancient history told as a story in oral tradition that was designed to be understood as metaphor to be interpreted, and not a literal account. With that in mind, a fresh look at the biblical Tower of Babel story allows unique insight into our remote past. On its surface, the Tower of Babel story is just another fable where God’s wrath befalls an unsuspecting world:

The whole world had one language and a common speech. Mankind was capable of planning and completing just about anything. Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar [Babylon] and settled there.

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel – because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

– Genesis 11:1-9

Taken literally the story makes little sense. However, as metaphor the imagery is easy to understand. First, the word Babel in Hebrew sounds like the Hebrew word for confused. In my opinion what they were building was not a literal tower. In fact, the tower they were building was not a tower at all. The tower represents the technical state humanity had achieved at that time and that they were building a great civilisation. The text is clear on this point: “mankind was united through a single language and could accomplish just about anything.”

It’s ludicrous to think that some magic event occurred that picked people up and moved them across the world while at the same time mysteriously altering their language. This, too, is metaphor.

In the insurance industry customers are protected from floods, fires, tornados, and other unfortunate events. They are referred to as ‘Acts of God’ and are nothing more than natural disasters. Today, although we know that the disaster is a result of nature, we still perceive these events as acts of God. And a number of people, particularly those who hold spiritual views, assign their responsibility to God. Why would it be any different five thousand years ago?

I don’t think it would. We still blame God today for all sorts of personal disasters.

What the Tower of Babel story is expressing in metaphor is that a natural disaster of immense proportions occurred that decimated civilisation. Over many generations, isolated pockets of survivors struggled back onto the road of civilisation, and because of their isolation unique languages developed in diverse regions.

HISTORY UNLEASHED

According to history pundits, civilisation emerged around the world at about the same time, around 3000 BCE; in the Nile Valley, the Indus Valley, Mesopotamia, as well as South America at Caral, Peru and Japan from within the Jomon culture. Scholars interpret the sudden rise in societal organisation as an evolutionary phenomenon, a natural progression of humankind. But how do we know that as a fact?

We don’t. It’s an assumption based solely on archaeological evidence, and given the evidence for the use of powered equipment at Abu Rawash and Giza, and the scientific modelling of the subterranean section of the Great Pyramid, it appears to be a false assumption.

Maybe we should pay more attention to ancient myth such as the story of Hathor as the Eye of Ra and ancient records such as the Palermo Stone or the Turin Papyrus.

According to the Turin Papyrus, before Egypt’s first dynasty – preceding 3000 BCE – the ‘Followers of Horus’ ruled for 13,000 years and before them ‘the gods’ ruled for 20,000 years. Thus, according to the ancient Egyptians their civilisation’s history dates back 36,000 years.

What happened to obscure this history?

Between 14,000 BCE and 9,000 BCE catastrophe occurred on our planet, a cataclysm we simply refer to as ‘the end of the Ice Age’; science refers to it as the Terminal Pleistocene Extinction. We know for a fact that during that time many large mammalian species became extinct. If civilisation existed at that time, and the evidence is convincing that it did, the women and men living at that time would also have suffered the consequences of global calamity. For the survivors it would have been a long and difficult journey on the road to re-establishing civilisation.

Edward Malkowski‘s next book – Ancient Egypt 39,000 BCE: The History, Technology & Philosophy of Civilization X (released in 2010) – takes a fresh look at the physical and textual evidence for a technical, prehistoric civilisation.

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EDWARD F. MALKOWSKI has a lifelong interest in history, particularly ancient history with a special interest in philosophy and the development of religious beliefs from ancient to modern times. With the opinion that the ancient biblical stories in Genesis were based on historical fact, during the late 1990’s he began investigating such a possibility which led to his first book Sons of God – Daughters of Men. This led to a deep interest in the origin of civilisation, the curiously large monuments of Egypt’s Old Kingdom, particularly the Sphinx, and the influence Egyptian philosophy and culture exerted in the ancient world. Two more books were the result: Before the Pharaohs and The Spiritual Technology of Ancient Egypt. Edward will take a fresh look at the physical and textual evidence for a technical, prehistoric civilisation in his next book, Ancient Egypt 39,000 BCE: The History, Technology & Philosophy of Civilization X. He is also a contributing author to The Search for Lost Knowledge: A Graham Hancock Alternative Science and History Reader edited by Glenn Kreisberg. For further information, please visit his websites www.sonsofgod-daughtersofmen.com and www.civilizationx.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 8.

Read this article with ALL its illustrations by downloading
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© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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—

There has never been a satisfactory answer to what the Sphinx actually is or was. Anyone who goes to Giza can see for himself or herself that there is something ‘wrong’ with the Sphinx. It only takes an instant. The body is gigantic and the head is just a pimple. The Egyptians never did anything like that, they were always meticulous about proportions in their art. So how is it that we have this monster with a tiny head sitting there in the sand, then?

There are several other things wrong with the Sphinx. They are:

• The back is flat. Who ever saw a lion with a flat back, no big chest, and no mane?
• The Sphinx is sitting in a deep hole in the ground. Why is that? Why is it not sitting somewhere high up so that it can show off?
• There is a ruined temple right in front of the Sphinx, with a wall practically up against its nose, and no door in that wall. Why obstruct the view of the Sphinx from the front like that? And if the temple was for worshipping the Sphinx, why is there no access from the temple to the Sphinx, so that you can’t even get to it?
• The pit in which the Sphinx sits seems to be deeply eroded, as if by flows of water. What caused all that? It looks as if water has poured down the sides. On the other hand, there are no such vertical erosion patterns on the Sphinx itself, which instead has clear horizontal erosion patterns. How can these two different patterns at right angles to each other be reconciled? And what could possibly have caused either of them?

None of this makes any sense if you think about it. Of course, many people don’t think. They just gawp and move on, their brains in neutral.

But when my wife Olivia and I first saw the Sphinx many years ago, we just stood there in astonishment and both agreed that the whole thing was wrong, wrong, wrong.

So now after many years of work, we think we have found some answers. Naturally, any new idea about anything that ‘everybody knows’ makes (1) conventionally thinking people enraged, and (2) makes anti-establishment people delighted. No prizes for guessing which side I’m on.

Let me first declare my position on what has become something of an entrenched notion amongst my fellow anti-Establishmentarians. I do not believe that the Sphinx is 12,500 years old. Nor do I believe in ‘ancient rain’.

I do believe that the Sphinx is older than conventionally believed. But I do not believe it is thousands of years older, or anything of that kind.

I do believe there is water erosion at the Sphinx site, but I do not believe it had anything to do with ‘ancient rain’, nor do I believe there was anything there to be eroded at the time any ‘ancient rain’ fell.

So what is the answer, then?

Sphinx Island & Moat

The water of the Nile in those days, at the time of inundation once a year (which no longer happens because of the Aswan dam), came right up to the edge of the Sphinx Temple, where there are even quays in front. So what I believe happened was that the water of the Nile was let into the Sphinx Pit, which I now call the Sphinx Moat, by some simple water-raising devices, led along the narrow channel between the Sphinx Temple and the Valley Temple (the two structures in front of the Sphinx), and its flow was controlled by a series of sluices and water gates. The signs of these sluices and gates, with their many bolt holes and so forth, no longer exist, because new stones and cement have been laid over them. But not to worry! I took plenty of photographs of them before they disappeared, and those are all reproduced in our book. Everyone can then see it all very clearly. The reason why the temple wall is in front of the Sphinx is to act as the fourth barrier to the water. The reason why there is no door in the wall is that it would have let the water out.

The horizontal erosion on the side of the Sphinx (where it is not covered by ‘restoration stones’) is because the Sphinx was sitting in the middle of a moat filled with water. The vertical erosion on the sides of the pit, especially the south side, is because of the continual dredging of the Moat due to the windblown sand accumulating there. Every time the Moat was dredged, water poured down in torrents onto the sides, leading to vertical erosion, accentuated by the natural cavities in the limestone bedrock.

So I think the Sphinx was, amongst other things, an island!

This immediately solves the puzzle of the evidence recorded by the fifth century BCE Greek historian Herodotus, who said that King Cheops let water in from the Nile to surround an island at Giza. Here it is!

Whose Head is on the Sphinx?

So we have got an island. Now what do we do with it? And why is King Cheops’s head the size of a pimple on the front of this large flat-backed lion, surrounded by water? What’s going on?

But wait! Who says that is King Cheops’s head? Some say it is King Chephren’s head, but if you have ever seen Chephren’s head on that huge statue in the Cairo Museum, you know they look nothing alike at all, since Chephren has a long face and the Sphinx has a round face, just for starters, and there’s plenty else that’s not the same too.

At this point of my wonderings, I began to feel really uncomfortable. I generally know when something doesn’t fit. I may not know what does fit, but I more often know what does not.

And that face is neither Cheops (not that we know what he really looked like anyway, as the only likeness of him that survives is a three inch-high ivory statuette, which could be your Uncle Tony or even your Auntie Madge for that matter) nor old Chephren Long-Face. So who is it?

It was at this point that I discovered one of those forgotten sources which keep falling into my lap, and in this case it was an article written by a German archaeologist named Ludwig Borchardt long before the Sphinx was excavated, when only its head and neck were sticking above the sand. Borchardt used to go and stand there and look at it. In those days, you could look the Sphinx in the eye and he wouldn’t even flinch, in fact he smiled back. Nowadays, he’s very stuck up, with his head high above us if we stand at his feet, so you can’t make out the details of his head all that well.

Borchardt got to thinking. He noticed that the Sphinx was wearing eye-paint stripes (no comment, pharaohs have the right to do what they like as consenting adults in the privacy of their own Sphinx Pits), and he knew that those were not worn in the period known as the Old Kingdom, when Cheops and Chephren lived. He noticed the details of the stripe patterns in the strange headdress worn by the Sphinx. The face had to be that of a pharaoh, since this headdress was the sacred religious headdress of the pharaoh known as a nemes. But Borchardt, who was head of the German Institute at Cairo and therefore knew a thing or two, realised that those stripe patterns were also not used in the Old Kingdom.

He started to do some research on nemes headdresses, and he discovered that those particular stripe patterns were only used in the Middle Kingdom period, hundreds of years later than Cheops and Chephren. He wrote this all up in technical form and published it in a distinguished scholarly periodical (in German of course, but I have translated it and it appears as an appendix to our book), and concluded that the Sphinx had been carved in the Middle Kingdom Period, not in the Old Kingdom period.

But everybody laughed at poor old Borchardt. Who ever heard of such a thing? The Middle Kingdom! Borchardt must have gone crazy! And then the Sphinx was excavated in 1926, and finally completely excavated in 1936, and it was perfectly clear to everyone that the Sphinx was much older than the Middle Kingdom. But everybody forgot that Borchardt had never seen the Sphinx’s body at the time he wrote the article, he was only talking about the head.

So I have reopened the case and concluded that the head was recarved in the Middle Kingdom, just as Borchardt said, and what is more, I believe I can even identify precisely which pharaoh’s face that is. Of course, to find that out, you really need to see the book.

However, it is all very well identifying the face on the Sphinx. Some people might be satisfied just doing that. But no, it’s like watching a film noir without knowing the ending. Even if you know whodunnit, you still want to know the motive.

“Everybody knows” Herd Mentality

So what was the Sphinx before it had that guy’s face carved on it? Well, to figure that one out you have to try to figure out what the Sphinx was before that pharaoh got his chisels on it. This draws one’s attention to the flat back. “Everybody knows” that the Sphinx has the body of a lion. As soon as I hear that “everybody knows” something, I know that it must be wrong. I have a pathologically anti-herd mentality. All you have to do is tell me “everybody knows” something, and I will instantly disbelieve it. That is because crowds are always wrong. Crowds have about as much sense as a mollusc.

I started from the premise that the Sphinx was not a lion at all. Millions of people see it every year, from all over the world, and they all “know” that it is a lion. So that means that it cannot possibly be one. They “know” it is a lion because they have been told that it is a lion. The Germans were told that Hitler was their saviour and so they “knew” it, the Russians all “knew” that Stalin was like a gentle father, who would look after them. Yes, everybody, or at least everybody they knew, “knew” these things. And people also all once “knew” that the Earth was flat, and that the Sun went round the Earth. Those things were all “known.” But were they true?

If it wasn’t a lion, what was it? Well, it had to be an animal with a straight back, with no huge chest, and no mane. It also had to be an animal that crouched like that with its legs stuck out in front of it. (There is no use looking too closely at the paws, as they are completely covered in restoration stones, and have been shaped to look like “what everybody knows,” in order to re-confirm the consensus falsehood which everybody has agreed to believe in.)

Anubis – Guardian of the Necropolis

The Sphinx is crouching there at the entrance to the Necropolis like a guardian. Well, there it is! It is a guard dog! The ancient Egyptians had a god called Anubis, who was a crouching wild dog, generally referred to as a jackal (although strictly speaking there were no jackals in Egypt, and Anubis was really a wild dog species which is now extinct). Anubis was the guardian of the Necropolis, the guardian of the dead, and he was often depicted in the precise position of the Sphinx – and famously in a statue found in the Tomb of Tutankhamun as well – so that his image is familiar to almost anyone who has ever had an interest in ancient Egypt.

In Figure 1 I show the drawing I commissioned which shows how the recarved head of the Sphinx was carved out of the neck stump which remained on the Sphinx after the original statue was mutilated by the rampaging mobs who smashed up everything they could on the Giza Plateau during the period of chaos known as the First Intermediate Period, between 2200 and 2000 BCE.

It was the easiest thing in the world to knock the ears and nose off the Sphinx when the Sphinx was Anubis. You couldn’t put them back because the Sphinx was carved out of the solid bedrock, and the pieces must have been smashed to bits anyway. So the later exhibitionist pharaoh could even tell himself he was doing a pious act and ‘restoring’ the statue by flaunting himself, just as, say, Madonna helps the world, doesn’t she? Tom Cruise is also saving the world, remember? Yes, we all know that all celebrities are getting their pictures in the papers only for noble causes, and it has nothing to do with wanting people to look at them, or with such a low thing as vanity.

Speaking of movie stars, the Sphinx is now so botoxed and has had so much plastic surgery from crazy ‘restoration’ (which is all shown in great detail in our book) that he could easily get a lead part in a blockbuster. But his ‘nose job’ didn’t go so well, as it is still missing. It was hacked off in the 13th century by a fanatical imam named Sheikh Mohammed, who wished to purge Egypt of non-Islamic influences. He got as far as the nose, at least. (The story that the nose was shot off by Napoleon’s soldiers is false.)

So now we have a crouching Anubis as an island, surrounded by a little lake. And at last we have something which students of the ancient texts can suddenly recognise. For the most ancient surviving Egyptian texts, known as the Pyramid Texts, often speak of a sacred place associated with the Giza Necropolis called Jackal Lake. And here it is!

Now we are getting somewhere. It is all beginning to make sense. In our book we gather together the many ancient texts which refer to Anubis guarding the Necropolis, situated at Giza, being beside a causeway, and being very large. We also reproduce Fourth Dynasty Giza tomb reliefs showing a giant Anubis, which may be intended as actual depictions of the Sphinx.

Secret Chamber Beneath the Sphinx

Most people who are intrigued by Egyptian mysteries have been wondering for a long time whether there might be any secret chamber beneath the Sphinx. I have crawled around inside the Sphinx, and I describe the tunnel which exists in the rear portion of the Sphinx’s body, as well as the vertical tunnel carved out of the bedrock beneath the Sphinx’s rump, and reproduce photos of these. In Figure 2 you see a photo which Olivia took of me with my head sticking out of the Sphinx’s ass, which perhaps proves how well I know him.

Then an amazing thing happened. I came across a passage in one of the old books which I collect, in this case one published in 1715, which described a chamber beneath the Sphinx and gave an eyewitness account of it! I was astounded. The book referred to earlier accounts of this chamber, but neglected to say who had written them or when they had been published. Slight problem! How was I to find these books?

If you went into the British Library and told a librarian you needed a book published before 1715 which described a chamber beneath the Sphinx, you would be told to come back when you had the author’s name or the title of the book. All I had to go on was ‘a book mentioning the Sphinx before 1715’, so how did I do it?

That is where my special abilities come in, which enable me to obtain information which others seem not able to obtain. I am what you might call an information retrieval expert, and I do not need to know anything about the field in order to obtain its ‘concealed’ information. There is no such thing as concealed or destroyed information: it is all there in Information Space if you have access. Everyone knows about the emails which people think they have deleted from our computers, but which can be recovered by computer data recovery experts (as part of a criminal investigation, for instance). Well, there is a higher version of that, which enables all information which has ever existed in any material form to be accessed from the wholly non-material realm of Information Space.

Unfortunately, I have never met anyone who seems to be able to access this material methodically and systematically. Most human beings can access it in a feeble and flickering fashion, by means of what is called ‘intuition’ or ‘hunches’. Perhaps it is just as well that proper access to all this information is limited. After all, the purpose of our being here in the material world is to see how we cope without information. That is why people like myself find it so difficult to communicate what we know when we somehow, in a way we do not understand, acquire information from Information Space. It is mostly not intended for circulation, and maybe I should not even be doing it. When I reveal such information to people, they never believe me anyway, so I generally do not bother.

I cannot explain how I access it. I seem to ‘see through matter’ in some way which is difficult to describe, and I see the Information behind it on the other side. Matter becomes increasingly transparent to me every day anyway, and I no longer believe in it. On only one occasion was I so desperate that I ‘raped’ Information Space. That was when our beloved dog Kim was mistakenly locked in a room with a digital security code. Because she was old and ill and needed water, and might otherwise die before I could get someone with the code to come, I ‘accessed’ the numerical code, punched it in, the door opened, and I released her. I didn’t do it instantly. I first made two or three hysterical wrong attempts and wasted precious minutes through being over-stressed. I made myself try to remain calm and then got it right. This meant that I actually had to access the whole number of several digits, none of which was known to me. Really, we are not supposed to do this sort of thing, but my dog was more important to me than protocol.

Also important to me is a Larger Dog, the Sphinx! I feel almost as affectionate towards him as I did… well, no, that would not be fair to Kim. But I also like the Dog Star. In fact, I am a sucker for dogs, I really am. I am not a cat person, even though I am a great fan of the original version of the film ‘Cat People’ (1942). Watch it sometime! See my review of it on my website.

I was eventually able to find 281 years’ worth of published eyewitness accounts of the chamber beneath the Sphinx, including detailed information about exactly where it was, its size, and the fact that it contained the remains of a wooden coffin. Because the chamber was described as having hieroglyphics on the walls, I am certain that it was what archaeologists call ‘an intruded burial’, but it must have been a royal one, as a shaft was carefully constructed and a chamber cut in one of the most important monuments in Egypt, within the sacred precincts of the royal Necropolis. The shaft was sealed with cement by Émile Baraize in 1926. A century earlier, Henry Salt also sealed some openings and passages elsewhere at the Sphinx, and was sharply criticised for it by the French Count de Forbin. All of this is described in full detail in our book. So, yes, there is a ‘secret chamber’ beneath the Sphinx. And the information in our book proves this beyond all possibility of doubt. But no, it is not original and does not date from the time of the Sphinx’s carving. Also, it is empty, so there is no gold or treasure. But if we could just read what it says on the walls!

Another thing I was able to demonstrate is that the Sphinx and the three Giza pyramids were part of a single unified design concept of the Giza Plateau. The position and size of the Sphinx is determined precisely in relation to the three pyramids, in a manner never before noticed. This is shown and explained at great length in the book, and it is not really possible to summarise that material, as it is too lengthy and detailed for a brief description. I can say, however, that it was part of a resurrection cult. In the process of explaining this in detail, I even have occasion to explain the true nature of those bizarre reliefs in a crypt at Denderah which have excited a great deal of speculation, the ones with the ‘lightbulbs’, although they are 2,500 years more recent, and their only connection is through the symbolism.

I hope everybody will get a lot out of looking through our book, and, who knows, maybe even reading it. Stranger things have happened.

Oh yes, I almost forgot: ‘Woof! Woof!’

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ROBERT TEMPLE is visiting professor of the history and philosophy of science at Tsinghua University in Beijing; fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society; member of the Egypt Exploration Society, Royal Historical Society, Institute of Classical Studies, and the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies; and visiting research fellow of the University of the Aegean in Greece. He is the author of 10 books, including The Sirius Mystery and The Genius of China. He wrote, produced, and presented the documentary film ‘Descent into Hell’, based upon his book, Oracles of the Dead, for National Geographic Channel. His translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh was staged at the Royal National Theatre in London in 1993. He resides in England with his wife, Olivia. They are joint translators of Aesop: The Complete Fables. Robert’s website is www.robert-temple.com and the website for his new book is www.sphinxmystery.info.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 112 (January-February 2009).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 112 (PDF version) for only US$5

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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—

Vast shadowy forces are moving in Central Asia – or rather in the greater region we call Eurasia – which may change the face of our global society and civilisation forever.

Even as the balance of geopolitical forces is shifting inexorably in favour of the Eurasian superpowers – principally Russia, China, the Central Asian states and India – a new spiritual wind is blowing out of Inner Asia and its many hidden mystical schools, promising to sweep the new entente into unprecedented heights of international power, politically and culturally. The immensity of the coming turbulence occasioned by this shift from West to East is incalculable, the outer symptom of a global revolution of consciousness.

Already the transformation of consciousness accompanying this hemispheric shift is creating both exaltation and unease in all people sensitive to evolutionary change. As the West moves through increasing economic and geopolitical tumult towards what many regard as a birthing into a new World Age, pressing questions are being asked. What are we mutating into and what kind of social realities will replace those we know? The mystery and the terror is not so much the speed of change as its unknown destination. Where are we heading? To what precipice sheer and awful, or to what blessed landfall?

Striving to answer such questions, many leading esotericists today have turned to certain very ancient traditions to throw light on the crisis of our times. Increasingly heeding the overwhelming evidence for their thesis, they suggest that the key to humanity’s future lies in its distant past, in the heritage of an unknown antediluvian race that lived in a time so remote that its existence has been erased from racial memory.1

A Forgotten Race

Perhaps 100,000 years ago or more, so the hypothesis runs, a great star-gazing Ice Age people lived in the Arctic region, at that time a temperate zone, before migrating south to Inner Asia as conditions changed and the great ice sheets melted. There, in a fertile, paradisaical land, these unknown sages became the core of a Ural-Altaic race that continued to evolve over the millennia, improving the stock of primitive humanity by intermarriage, developing cosmological sciences and political structures that sowed the seeds of our present civilised state, migrating across the earth and then disappearing, leaving immortal legends about itself behind.

The British author John Michell cites the massive evidence for such a civilisation, which he regards as essentially magical, and still faintly visible across the earth for those who care to look:

The entire surface of the earth is marked with the traces of a gigantic work of prehistoric engineering, the remains of a once universal system of natural magic, involving the use of polar magnetism together with another positive force related to solar energy. Of the various human and superhuman races that have occupied the earth in the past, we have only the dreamlike accounts of the earliest myths. All we can suppose is that some overwhelming disaster… destroyed a system whose maintenance depended upon its control of certain natural forces across the entire earth.2

Michell is one voice among many claiming that in the archives of prehistoric peoples a forgotten race has left traces of an advanced body of knowledge, seemingly both spiritual and technological, which can guide us, if we will, into a viable future.

Despite being ignored by mainstream historians and anthropologists, this theory is being ever more insistently put forward by highly accredited researchers as evidence for the enormous age of our species continues to be found not only in the legends of races in every part of the planet but also in the thousands of technological anomalies being unearthed in unlikely geological strata.

The ancient Greek historians had much to say on this subject, especially concerning the legends of Asia Minor which told of the descent thereto, in the depths of the Ice Ages, of the Hyperboreans, a mysterious race of superior beings from polar regions whose Pillar works on earth sought to mirror the starry heavens above. Yet it is Central and Inner Asia further to the east, a vast land of steppes, mountains and sandy deserts, whose people preserve the most significant memories of a time beyond telling when cities populated the deserts and an Elder race walked tall on the earth. And it is these Ural-Altaic regions that are now taking centre stage as the search continues for the roots of homo sapiens and the path into a viable future.

Arkaim: A Bronze Age Town in the Southern Urals

In 1987, in the middle of the Russian steppe, a team of Russian archaeologists unearthed the ruins of a fortified town called Arkaim, causing great excitement in scientific ranks and a surge of neo-pagan and nationalist enthusiasm among Russian intellectuals. The region was known to have preserved landmarks of the most diverse cultures, ranging from every epoch and every direction of the compass, but Arkaim was the first clear evidence of an ancient advanced culture flourishing on Russian soil.

Constructed on a circular principle around a central square, with about sixty semi-dugout houses built within its ramparts, the settlement was situated in the southern Urals, near the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. It was defended by two concentric ramparts of clay and adobe blocks on a wooden frame, and could only be entered via four intricately constructed passageways that would have made the entrance of enemies extremely difficult. The inhabitants and the common central square were thus well protected by Arkaim’s defensive, inward-turned ground plan. The town was found to be closely aligned to several celestial reference points, and is therefore believed to have been an observatory as well as a fortress, an administrative and a religious centre.

Dubbed “the Russian Stonehenge,” this Bronze age settlement was about 3,600 years old and was contemporaneous with the Cretan-Mycenaean civilisation, with the Egyptian Middle Kingdom and with the Mesopotamian and Indus valley civilisations, and older by several centuries than Homer’s fabled Troy, whose circular layout it so closely resembled. Arkaim was inhabited for 200 years and was then mysteriously burned down and deserted.

The Russian team’s explorations showed that Arkaim enjoyed an advanced technology for its time. It was equipped with a drainage gutter and storm sewage system and had actually been protected from fire: the timbered flooring of the houses and the houses themselves were imbued with a fireproof substance – a strong compound the remnants of which can still be found in the ruins. Each house gave onto an inner ring road paved with wooden blocks; and in each house there was a hearth, a well, cellars, an oven and provision for a cooled food storage system. The oven was such that it may have been possible to smelt bronze in it, as well as to fire pottery.

Subsequent to this exciting excavation, more than another twenty fortified settlements and necropolises were unearthed in the Arkaim Valley, some stone-built, larger and more impressive than Arkaim. With Arkaim possibly its capital, the complex came to be called the Land of Cities and presented scientists with many mysteries. It was the first concrete evidence of a lost neolithic civilisation in southern Russia, confirming what had long been believed, that the southern Urals and northern Kazakhstan, situated at the junction of Asia and Europe, was an important region in the formation of a complex Aryan society.

A possible light was thrown for the first time on the development, nature and wide migratory pattern of early Indo-European culture, and stimulated all sorts of theories in Russian circles about the Aryan roots of the Slavic people.3

This, however, has been only the beginning of the quest for a new ethnic, cultural and religious identity in a small but influential Russian minority since the demise of the Soviet Union. Increasingly rejecting the American and European vision of a global hegemony rooted in Western Christianity, Russians, besides their interest in their Indo-European roots, are turning eastwards to find a connection with the Turkic/Mongol ethnic strain. Many, especially among the young, are already embracing the mystique of a united Eurasian people and community cemented by spiritual bonds far older than those of Christianity or Islam. Arkaim has become a ready focus for these ideals, a symbol of the future basis for world peace.

Ar-ka means sky, and Im means earth, says Alex Sparkey, a Russian writer. He explains that this means Arkaim is a place where the Sky touches the Earth. Here the material and the spiritual are inseparable.

The East and the West are fused here. Today, in Russia, we feel that Mankind is faced by the necessity to choose Oneness. Western culture must come into unity with Eastern wisdom. If this can happen, the harmony that once reigned supreme in the Land of Cities will be restored.4

In fact, it is doubtful whether peace and harmony existed in the period of Arkaim, since it and the surrounding fortified settlements were obviously geared to warfare or at least to heavy defensive measures in a hostile environment. It is noteworthy that the cult of Tengri, the Mongol/Turkic Sky God who plays a prominent part in Central Asian religion, fosters a fierce competitive nationalism rather than peaceful relations with neighbours. However, Sparkey is right to emphasise the principle of harmonious accord implicit in the Arkaim ideology, pointing as it does to the settlement’s inheritance of a once more peaceful culture.

The head of the archaeological team observed:

A flight above Arkaim on board a helicopter gives you an incredible impression. The huge concentric circles on the valley are clearly visible. The town and its outskirts are all enclosed in the circles. We still do not know what point the gigantic circles have, whether they were made for defensive, scientific, educational or ritual purposes. Some researchers say that the circles were actually used as the runway for an ancient spaceport.5

The truth is that Arkaim was a troy town, so-called after the city in Asia Minor that the Greek king Agammenon destroyed during the Trojan Wars. Built on the same circular principle as Troy, as described in Homer’s Iliad, but at least six hundred years older, Arkaim finds its prototype in Plato’s Atlantis with its three concentric circles of canals; in legendary Electris, the Hyperborean city some said was built under the Pole Star by the sea-god Poseidon; and in Asgard, the sacred city dedicated to the Norse god Odin that is described in the Icelandic saga, the Edda. All these legendary troy towns have the same circular ground plan. They have gone down in history as neolithic Wisdom centres and the seats of ancient god-kings, and this undoubtedly throws light on the cultic function of Arkaim in its day, as we shall see.

In Russia’s more mystical quarters there is intense interest in the ancient town, seeing it as the city temple built by the legendary King Yama, ruler of the Aryans in the Golden Age, which will once again become the centre of the world.6 However, the discovery of the settlement has opened a historical aperture onto far more than the battles and conquests of an aggressive Indo-European people waged across Eurasia and south into the Mediterranean lands, where their war chariots shattered the peace of Old Europe. What the Land of Cities has revealed in its very structure and history is above all the still earlier past of the Ural-Altaic peoples – a past of such enormous antiquity that it presents more mysteries than it solves.

Built in the unique architectural mould of nordic Asgard, the most sacred shrine of the Aesir of which the Prose Edda relates that “men call it Troy,” Arkaim may have been a shrine dedicated to the Aryan Sun religion, yet the roots of its dedication would have lain ultimately in the far older cult of the Pole star. Essentially, this was the religion of the shaman, the wizard, the medicine-man and other wonder-workers in touch with the spirits of nature.

Thus the swastika, thought to be the exclusively Aryan symbol of sun-worship misappropriated by the Nazis,7 and found depicted on many of the clay pots unearthed in Arkaim, is an older religious and metaphysical symbol than that attached to the Aryan Sun God, its roots lying in totemic shamanism. René Guénon, the eminent French esotericist, points out that the swastika, symbolising eternal motion around a motionless centre, is a polar rather than a solar symbol, and as such was a symbol central to the Pole star cult, originally dedicated to a planetary deity connected to Ursa Major, the Great Bear. This centre, Guénon stresses, “constitutes the fixed point known symbolically to all traditions as the ‘pole’ or axis around which the world rotates…” The swastika is therefore known world-wide as the ‘sign of the pole.’8

In short, it would be a mistake for Russian ethnic pride to train too narrow a focus on Arkaim’s Aryan background, for the town was heir to a great civilising force that existed in the Eurasian corridor long before there were Indo-Europeans. One universal feature of troy towns is missing in Arkaim – presumably because it has been destroyed over the centuries – and that is the altar pillar in the central square. Undoubtedly, in Arkaim we see a late expression of a megalithic Pillar religion that once reigned universally in every corner of the globe, among nearly all peoples, whatever their ethnic type, and which became associated with troy towns. It is the oldest religion known to us and goes back to the most remote antiquity when men saw the heavens as revolving around the axis of the Pole Star.

Only later did the Sun, as the centre of the revolving stellar system, replace the Pole Star as the supreme deity of the Pillar cult and lead to the elevation of the Sun God of the Indo-European peoples. It led to their greater intellectual development, to complex civilisations, to advanced arts and sciences and the transcendence of nature.

Troy towns like Electris – and Arkaim – were built as stellar observatories. Their function was to unite earth to the starry cosmos above according to the principle of “as above so below” by means of a central axis symbolised by a stone pillar. Thus Diodorus Siculus of the first century BCE, quoting the historian Hecataeus, described the sanctuary of Electris as a troy town after the pattern of the spheres,

by which he meant an astronomical design similar to that of Stonehenge and other ancient sun temples, in which the scheme of the heavenly spheres or astral shells surrounding the earth was represented diagrammatically by a series of concentric circles marked by walls, ditches or moats around a central pillar-stone.9

These enclosed and heavily guarded sanctuaries sacred to the gods of the greater cosmos were inhabited only by initiated priests and their families, and were forbidden to the wandering nomads beyond the ramparts. The mystery to archaeologists is how such an advanced astronomical science can have been pursued at a time when hunter-gatherers still roamed the land. Colin Wilson, a highly accredited investigator, in answer takes us back to the Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia, a people who almost certainly had their origin in Central Asia, as the Bible states: “As men migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar [Sumer] and settled there.” Sumer is regarded as the site of one of the first true civilisations in human history.

Wilson points out that the Sumerians were accomplished astronomers who had compiled tables of the motions of all the planets, including Uranus and Neptune, as early as five thousand years ago, long before the existence of Arkaim. He adds that according to the library of clay tablets compiled by the Assyrian King Assurbanipal (669 – 626 BCE) and unearthed during the nineteenth century, the Sumerians had also understood the precession of the equinoxes, and therefore knew about the zodiac.10

Further revelations of the Sumerians’ sophisticated astronomical science convinced Wilson that the Chaldaean astronomers understood our solar system as well as Isaac Newton did.11 Indeed Wilson came to believe that a scientific knowledge of the universe existed on earth as far back as 64,000 years ago, if not far longer.

Evidently Arkaim was a Wisdom Centre in a network of such Centres that once related all the prehistoric peoples of the earth to each other under the spiritual aegis of the Pillar religion and its priestly elites. The remains of countless similar stone circles, menhirs and troy towns are scattered throughout Europe, the Americas, Eurasia and the Pacific lands, memorials to great crisscrossing migrations of peoples, all loyal to the same axial principle that relates earth to the heavens.

As to the cradle of this great diaspora, the mystical Russian painter and explorer Nicholas Roerich saw thousands of such megalithic pillar-works in the highlands of Tibet and believed them to be older than any found elsewhere. He suggested they had strong links to the works of the Celts and the Scythian tribes, as also to the megaliths of Carnac in Brittany, and that they represented a Pillar cult that had its beginnings long ago in the Trans-Himalayas of Inner Asia.12

This proposed Eurasian cradle of the troy town phenomenon is reinforced by the researches of one Jacob Bryant in 1776. Bryant, a noted expert in Homeric Troy, published an encyclopaedia of ancient mythology in which he claimed the Trojans were descended from a very old “Atlantean” race that had long ago settled across the whole of Eurasia.13 If the first troy towns were built in Central Asia, could the universal Pillar religion also have had its beginning there?

As I have said, various versions of the cult of the World Pillar as it spread around the world were once known from the Americas to northern Africa, where the blond Tamahu worshipped the Magna Mater and her spouse the Heaven-Bearer, as did their cousins in Brittany and Spain. In Hindu India the World Axis, Mt. Meru, ascended into the revolving heavens above through the centre of the three worlds, and in the Canary Islands the Cro-Magnon Guanches, now extinct, worshipped with sacrifices the god of the World Pillar whom they called “the God who Holds the Heavens,” and who thus prevented the collapse of the foundations of the world.”14 A remnant of this belief-system survives in the legend of Jacob’s Ladder in the Hebrew Book of Exodus, in which we learn that on this Ladder angels ascend and descend between heaven and earth.

Each race has considered a certain tree as symbolic of the World Pillar and therefore sacred. In the Voluspa, the song of the Old Norse prophetess, the tree on which the god Odin hung in order to receive the sacred runes was called Yggdrasil, the heaven-pole or world axis. The World Ash Yggdrasil was declared to be the greatest of all trees and the best; its limbs spread over the world and above the heavens, its shaft the pivot of the ever-revolving sky. At the foot of that tree the laws were first brought into being by the Aesir, the Norse gods, and Yggdrasil was worshipped as the source of all higher knowledge.15

To the inhabitants of Sumer, whose language is unknown – being neither Indo-European nor Semitic – the Pillar was a dominant religious feature: thus Nippur, one of Sumer’s chief cities, as long ago as 3800 BCE had the meaning of “Bond of Heaven-Earth.” A prominent researcher on this subject says that in the text of the Sumerian ‘Enuma Elish’, “clues to the purpose of Nippur were found in references to a heavenward tall pillar reaching to the sky.”16 In ancient Egypt, the land of the Hamitic peoples, the city of An or Anu, which was renamed Heliopolis by the Greeks, originally meant Pillar City.17 As a commentator has pointed out, this fact may shed light on the mysterious djed pillar, the “backbone of Osiris,” often associated with Heliopolis.18

Like others of the Pillar fraternities, the totemic shaman too dedicated his life and calling to the vision of the marriage of heaven and earth achieved by means of a heaven-bearing Tree of Life. In ancient Crete he was a familiar adjunct to the temple rituals of the Great Mother Demeter; in Siberia, Mongolia and the Americas, he was the magician and wise man of his tribe. Beating his drum and climbing the central pole of his yurt, the symbolic pillar by which he communed with the sky spirits above, the shaman thus brought down healings, prophecies and advice from the ancestors to the people of his community. The Mongol-Turkic shamanic tradition with its Sky God Tengri and its World Tree still survives over a vast area of the planet, although its roots are lost far back in the mists of the palaeolithic age.

The mystery of Arkaim is indeed the mystery of the Pillar religion. Who brought to all the primitive peoples of earth this knowledge of the Polar Axis, uniting them for many thousands of years in a common planetary culture? Who taught them the astronomical secrets of the solar system, the zodiac and precession of the equinoxes at a time in prehistory when human intelligence was not supposed to be evolved enough to have developed that knowledge alone? And what part did Arkaim play in that dissemination?

Tracing the Arctic Origins of Civilisation

The Babylonians believed in a mysterious paradise in “the far north” where a race of great sages lived; and the ancient Greeks too extolled a northern Elysium in which they believed the Hyperboreans, a wise, peaceful and long-lived race, lived in great splendour and prosperity. Even though Delphi was regarded as the centre of the Greek world, its god Apollo and his sister, the goddess Artemis, were acknowledged to be originally deities of this secret land far to the north, where stood the cosmic axle that the Greeks called Helice, “That Which Turns.” Many Greek historians as well as later scholars located this northern paradise in Scythia or the Altai, and as having its source in the shamanism that grew up around the semi-mythical magicians and pole-lords of Altai. But research and sacred tradition both suggest its origins go further back still to northeastern Asia within the Arctic Circle, to a society that flourished on the shores of the Siberian Sea.

How long ago, or for how long, this circumpolar culture may have existed no-one knows: possibly 200,000 years or more. In The Interpretation of Radium, the acclaimed physicist Frederick Soddy stated that some of the beliefs and legends which have come down to us from antiquity may be “evidence of a wholly unknown and unsuspected ancient civilisation of which all other relic has disappeared.”19 There may have been, he suggested, previous cycles in the unrecorded history of the world when civilised men lived “in a past possibly so remote that even the very atoms of civilisation literally have had time to disintegrate.”20

On the basis of years of investigation, Charles Hapgood, a New England professor of history, in 1982 declared that possibly as long ago as 100,000 years BCE the hub of a worldwide maritime civilisation with a highly developed level of scientific knowledge must have been in existence in the Arctic Circle.21 Until lately Hapgood’s finds, presented in Earth’s Shifting Crust (1958) and Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (1966), have been largely ignored in scientific circles, even though they elicited support from the great physicist Albert Einstein; but today interest in them is mushrooming among a growing number of highly accredited investigators.

René Guénon appeals to the oldest and most authentic esoteric traditions in claiming that long before the Indo-European races arose, at a time when a hunter-gatherer humanity was still at a primitive stage of development, the tropics were differently distributed and a great Hyperborean culture flourished around the Arctic Circle, “in the Islands of the Blest on the shores of the Ocean where the great maelstrom whirls.”22

Only later, after a catastrophic change in geological conditions, did this senior race migrate southward, some to Central Asia, others, possibly crossing the Bering Strait, to Atlantis to the west. The latter has been located by some researchers in the Antilles, two large islands beyond the Gulf of Mexico widely regarded as the remains of what was once a great sunken landmass.23 (In support of this theory, the Caribs and the tribes of Hispaniola have long had a tradition that many of the islands of the Antilles, a well-known earthquake zone, were once connected by a single landmass, before a great cataclysm about 15,000 years ago submerged the connection and left only the known island fragments.)24

Leaving aside Guénon’s oblique reference to the two southern refuges of the Hyperboreans being in Russia and Central America, he suggests that in both cases the two groups brought with them advanced mathematical and astronomical knowledge and the seeds of arts and sciences that would eventually be passed on to our brute ancestors to become the basis, about eight thousand years ago, for our own civilisations.

Both Sumer in the Middle East and Central America have flood stories written down long before the biblical account of Noah’s flood, and in all these stories the salvific activity of the Elder race is pivotal. There is the Sumerian story of Utnapishtim and his wife, who, helped by the gods, survived a flood and were made immortal; and likewise early American accounts tell how the god Viracocha, who “came from the east,” destroyed the earth in a great flood. Later, after a man and a woman survived by taking refuge in a floating box, “Virachocha recreated the peoples of the earth, and gave each one his own language and songs.”25 Wilson cites many such instances in which flood stories about the Hyperboreans and their salvation of our race are to be found in both the Old World and the New.

Guénon is emphatic, however, that of the two primary locations, both of which have at times borne the name of Tula (known to the Greeks as Thule), that of Central Asia was the elder. The Atlantean Tula, says Guénon, must be distinguished from the Hyperborean Tula, the supreme Holy Land, which latter represents the first and supreme centre for the entire current Manvantara, and is the archetypal “sacred isle.”

All the other “sacred isles,” although everywhere bearing names of equivalent meaning, are still only images of the original. This even applies to the spiritual centre of Atlantean tradition, which only governed a secondary historical cycle, subordinate to the Manvantara.26

Plato himself notes this hierarchical distribution: the Atlantean empire, he said, was only one nexus established by the gods in a greater network of Centres whose capital was elsewhere “at the centre of the Universe.”27 Thus the Eurasian heartland, Guénon says in his brief but ground-breaking work, The Lord of the World, has indeed become that “centre of the Universe,” the authentic “supreme country” which,

According to certain Vedic and Avestan texts, was originally situated towards the North Pole, even in the literal sense of the word. Although it may change its localisation according to the different phases of human history, it still remains polar in a symbolic sense because essentially it represents the fixed axis around which everything revolves.28

However, this still does not tell us why the location in Central Asia was chosen as the Hyperboreans’ primary destination? Guénon’s response to this question is cryptic in the extreme. He admits he is dealing with proscripted material he is not permitted to divulge, but goes so far as to reveal that Mt. Meru, the “polar mountain” stands in the centre of the “supreme country” – and Mt. Meru, as is now generally understood, symbolises the mysterious World Axis or World Tree of esoteric tradition. In other words, Central Asia was chosen because the World Axis was there; that was the real goal of the migration. The World Axis was, and is, the “centre of the Universe”; it is the World Axis that renders its geographical location a Holy Land – a fact which is only now being elucidated in para-scientific circles.

As we shall see in the second part of this article, the earth’s esoteric structure is a subject that has been veiled in secrecy for thousands of years, and this applies especially to the mystic’s Mt. Meru or World Axis. John Major Jenkins, in his book Galactic Alignment, is one of the first modern researchers to throw light on the meaning of this and much other Hyperborean lore that Guénon was unwilling or unable to discuss. Beyond referring to the senior race as “the guardians of Earth’s sacred mysteries,” Guénon’s initiatory vows kept him silent.

Who, then, were these mysterious Hyperboreans – or as we might perhaps better call them, these Elders, these early Masters of Wisdom who understood the importance of the World Axis? The records of most of the Bronze age nations have a legend that an unknown race of Elders gave us kingship and civilisation and that they came from the gods and understood the most powerful secrets of our planet – secrets that have since been lost.

The Elders have been known as the Nephilim, the Sons of God, the Anunnaki, the Watchers and many other appellations; G.I. Gurdjieff spoke of them as agents of the divine Demiurge from a previous cycle of humanity. But beyond being credited with great wisdom and magical powers as well as having giant stature and extremely high craniums, little more is known about them. Did they really exist? All that can be said with certainty is that they remain a benign shadowy presence moving inscrutably in the background of virtually all the prehistoric traditions of our race.

These souls from Sirius, say the ancient texts, descended down the World Axis and incarnated on earth long ago in order to aid our fledgling species. When a great catastrophe towards the end of the Ice Age, around the twelfth millennium BCE, threatened us with extinction, these sons and daughters of the gods instituted the hieros gamos, a genetic science that mingled their genes with ours and so bred a superior human stock with a greater survival potential that spread gradually from the heart of Asia on one hand, and Atlantis on the other, to the rest of the world.29

The climate changed again around the ninth millennium BCE, which is widely regarded as the date of the demise of Atlantis and the enforced dispersal of its people both westward to Central America and eastwards to Europe. Bringing catastrophic earthquakes and coastal flooding to vast areas of the globe30 and a severe threat to the survival of our species, it was a racial crisis that brought another response from the senior race.

Although the Elders had gone, their dynastic descendants, a long line of neolithic priest-kings, began a new evolutionary programme. In their migrations from Central Asia, the Ural-Altaic race is credited with establishing in every corner of the earth its Pillar religion, which Plato’s Critias vividly describes as also the religion of the Atlanteans. Stone pillar altars have survived in Malta from c. 5000 BCE, also from Catal Huyuk, in Anatolia, c. 5800 BCE.31 The Pillar religion is the earliest known vehicle of a comprehensive body of wisdom originally centred on the Pole Star, in which the moon is the primary image of the mysteries of birth, generation and death. It is the fundamental root of all the religions and esoteric traditions we know today, as well as all our higher learning. Its spread heralded the dawn of peaceful, egalitarian, Goddess-loving societies clustered in neolithic towns and villages around the world wherein the feminine principle was dominant and strife little known.32

Arkaim and the Sun Gods

Modern historians have found that three great floods seem to have occurred in the known span of human history. According to Stephen Oppenheimer in Eden in the East, the third of these, around the fifth millennium BCE, corresponded to Noah’s Flood and was the greatest of the three, peaking during the fourth millennium.33 It caused catastrophic coastal flooding, tsunamis and severe earthquakes, and also desertification of the interior of the land masses, and civilisation disappeared. Once again the species was threatened with a reversion to savagery, and once again salvation appeared from Inner Asia.

In the third millennium BCE, so the Chinese Celestial records tell us, the Sons of the Sun – also known as the Sons of Heaven – fanned out across the world from their homeland in the Karakorum Range at the western end of the Trans-Himalayas, bearing with them the higher revelation of the Sun religion.34 It was a patriarchal and hierarchical belief-system that disclosed new depths of metaphysical and technological knowledge inducive to civilisation. Everywhere the stone circles whose central axis was dedicated to the Pole Star, like Stonehenge in ancient Britain, evolved over a further thousand years into more sophisticated observatories focused instead on the Sun and its circling planets, and human culture once more blossomed.

This innovation, however, was not without inter-faith warfare, since many ethnic groups, such as the Mongol/Turkic peoples of the eastern steppes, remained loyal to the Pole Star cult. At the same time, pyramids as well as defensive troy towns like Arkaim sprang up in dedication to the Sun Gods, whose mystique became more and more occulted as enmity grew for the powerful new faith. Indeed Arkaim may have been the seat of one of the Solar mystery religions of that period, and the fiery holocaust that destroyed the settlement after two hundred years of operation may well have been caused by that same internecine conflict between the old order and the new.

The pictorial evidence contained in the ‘Enuma Elish’ shows that the Sumerians understood full well that the Elders they revered so much were “from the gods” – not gods themselves but human beings, though far more advanced in consciousness. According to the murals they have left us, the early Egyptians too knew in some sense that their deities were really high shaman masters, each masked in the official headdress of his animal totem. But that understanding was to be occluded with the increasingly aggressive dominance of the Solar religion, when a kind of darkness of amnesia fell over the collective consciousness of our race. The Solar priesthoods withdrew behind barricades, and a spiritual division opened up in society that had never before existed.

As the historian Giorgio de Santillana has pointed out in Hamlet’s Mill, from then on the enlightened understanding of our forbears began to descend into mythology and superstition as small pockets of secret wisdom called temples shone out in a sea of darkness, and a mystique of gods replaced the cosmological knowledge of an earlier age.35 While bands of initiate culture-bearers spread out across the globe to sow the seeds of civilisation once more, a nucleus of the senior race withdrew deep into the mountain ranges of High Asia that surround the Takla Makan desert and severed all direct contact with the outside world.

Ever since, the whole Eurasian heartland, from the Urals to the Gobi and including southern Siberia, has borne the stamp of a special sanctity. High Asia in particular has been called by a succession of peoples and religions Paradesha, the Forbidden Land, the Land of the Living Gods, Thule, Djong, Uttarakuru, Olmolungring, Shambhala, the Holy Land and the Land of White Waters. Whatever its current name, almost all esoteric traditions in the Old World have related this vast, mysterious Inner Eurasian region, so rich in higher knowledge, to the legendary Elder race and revered it as the home of the Ancient Wisdom for the present World Age.

The legend of the Sons and Daughters of God has thus never died, though it has gone underground. Inner Asia, thought to be the immemorial cradle of shamanism as well as of all yogic and religious systems, is believed by many to be still spiritually efficacious, still a holy land which, under a single governing Hierarchy, nurtures without fear or favour arcane schools and brotherhoods persecuted elsewhere. Sufis, Buddhists, Nestorian Christians, Taoists, Zoroastrians, Jews, Neo-Platonists and others who have been hidden from the profane world by long chains of initiatic transmission have never failed to find sanctuary in that specially blessed protectorate, where everything began.

From being hidden in shadows for thousands of years, today the region is being illuminated by an intense spotlight from every possible angle. The discovery of Arkaim is only one such angle. The highly publicised row between China and Tibet is another; the ever-worsening struggle between the US and Russia for military dominance over the oil- and gas-rich provinces of Central Asia; the increasing commitment of Russia, China, Iran and India to a Eurasian geopolitical bloc, in tacit opposition to the Western powers; and at the same time the awakening of interest in the West to the mysterious spiritual wealth that can be glimpsed in the place, are yet other factors bringing the heart of Asia to the very centre of world attention. Yet the questions they pose remain unanswered.

What is the secret of the Holy Land? Who really were the Elders who gave us civilisation? Are they still guiding our evolution in discarnate form? What is the secret of the World Axis? Do we as yet understand the archetypal principles that shape our planet? And why are we only now beginning to ask such questions?

Footnotes:

1. Colin Wilson, Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals, Bear & Co., Vermont, 2006.

2. John Michell, The View Over Atlantis, Sphere Books, London, 1975, 117.

3. V.A. Shnirelman, Archaeology and Ethnic Politics: the Discovery of Arkaim, Unesco, 1998.

4. Alex Sparkey, The Ancient Land of Arkaim, from Spirit of Ma’at: Russia: Land of Living Mysticism, Vol. 3, No. 9, 3.

5. Pravda.Ru, An Ancient Aryan Civilisation, 16/07/2005.

6. Shnirelman, op. cit., 38.

7. Louis Pauwels & Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians, Souvenir Press, London, 1960, 188.

8. René Guénon, The Lord of the World, Octagon Press, U.K., 1983, 9.

9. Victoria LePage, Shambhala, Quest Books, Illinois, USA, 1996, 197, citing Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History, Loeb Classical Library, London, 1936 – 67.

10. Colin Wilson, op. cit., 32.

11. Ibid., 32.

12. Nicholas Roerich, Shambhala: In Search of the New Era, Inner Traditions International, 1930, 221.

13. Jacob Bryant, A New System or An Analysis of Ancient Mythology, T. Payne, P. Elmsly, B. White and J. Walter, publishers, London, 1776.

14. Jurgen Spanuth, Atlantis of the North, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1979, 123 – 24.

15. Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. 1, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1984, 121.

16. Alan F. Alford, Gods of the New Millennium, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1996, 261.

17. Ibid., 261

18. Ibid., 261

19. Frederick Soddy, The Interpretation of Radium and the Structure of the Atom, Putnam, New York, 1922, quoted by Colin Wilson, op. cit., 292.

20. Ibid., 292.

21. Colin Wilson, op. cit., 2.

22. Hesiod [Works], R. Lattimore, trans., University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1959, 172 – 3.

23. Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis, Rider, London, 1926; cited by Geoffrey Ashe, Atlantis, Thames & Hudson, London, 1992, 21.

24. Eberhard Zangger, The Flood from Heaven, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1992, 66.

25. Colin Wilson, op. cit., 91.

26. René Guénon, op. cit., 56.

27. Plato, Timaeus and Critius, Desmond Lee, trans., Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1983, 145.

28. René Guénon, op. cit., 50.

29. Ibid, 56.

30. Stephen Oppenheimer, Eden in the East, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1998, 30 – 41.

31. Anne Baring & Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess, Penguin, 1993.

32. Ibid., 50 –56.

33. Oppenheimer, op. cit., 35.

34. Andrew Tomas, Shambhala: Oasis of Light, Sphere Books, London, 1976, 26.

35. G. Santillana & H. Von Deschend, Hamlet’s Mill, Gambit International, Boston, 1969.

.

VICTORIA LEPAGE has published numerous articles on the new spiritual paradigm emerging in cultures worldwide and is the author of Shambhala: The Fascinating Truth Behind the Myth of Shangri-la, published in ten foreign languages. Her latest book is Mysteries of the Bridechamber: The Initiation of Jesus and the Temple of Solomon. She lives in New South Wales, Australia, and can be contacted through her website at www.victoria-lepage.org.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 111 (November-December 2008).

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If you asked them what life was like in prehistoric times, most people would conjure up an image like the famous opening scenes of 2001: Space Odyssey – groups of hairy savages grunting and jumping around, foaming at the mouth with aggression as they bash each over the heads with sticks. We take it for granted that life was much harder then, a battle to survive, with everyone competing to find food, struggling against the elements, men fighting over women, and everyone dying young from disease or malnutrition.

A whole branch of “science” has grown up around this view of the human race’s early history. This is a relatively new discipline of evolutionary psychology, which tries to explain all of the negative sides of human nature as “adaptations” which early people developed because they had some survival value. Evolutionary psychologists explain traits like selfishness and aggression in these terms. Life was such a struggle that only the most selfish and aggressive people survived and passed on their genes. The people with gentle and peaceful genes would have died out, simply because they would have lost out in the survival battle.

Evolutionary psychologists see racism and war as “natural” too. It’s inevitable that different human groups should be hostile to one another, because once upon a time we were all living on the edge of starvation and fighting over limited resources. Any tendency to show sympathy for other groups would have reduced our own group’s survival chances.

But fortunately we don’t have to believe any of this crude nonsense. There is now a massive amount of archaeological and anthropological evidence which suggests this view of the human race’s past is completely false. Life for prehistoric human beings was far less bleak than we might imagine.

Take the view that life was a “struggle to survive.” The evidence suggests that the lives of prehistoric human beings were a lot easier than those of the agricultural peoples who came after them. Until around 8000 BCE, all human beings lived as hunter-gatherers. They survived by hunting wild animals (the man’s job) and foraging for wild plants, nuts, fruit and vegetables (the woman’s job). When anthropologists began to look at how contemporary hunter-gatherers use their time, they were surprised to find that they only spent 12 to 20 hours per week searching for food – between a third and a half of the average modern working week! Because of this, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins called hunter-gatherers “the original affluent society.” As he noted in his famous paper of that name, for hunter-gatherers, “The food quest is so successful that half the time the people do not seem to know what to do with themselves.”1

Strange though it may sound – the diet of hunter-gatherers was better than many modern peoples’. Apart from the small amount of meat they ate (10-20% of their diet), their diet was practically identical to that of a modern day vegan – no dairy products and a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, roots and nuts, all eaten raw (which nutrition experts tell us is the healthiest way to eat.) This partly explains why skeletons of ancient hunter-gatherers are surprisingly large and robust, and show few signs of degenerative diseases and tooth decay. As the anthropologist Richard Rudgley writes, “We know from what they ate and the condition of their skeletons that the hunting people were, on the whole, in pretty good shape.”2

The hunter-gatherers of Greece and Turkey had an average height of five feet ten inches for men and five feet six for women. But after the advent of agriculture, these had declined to five feet three and five feet one. An archaeological site in the lower Illinois Valley in central USA shows that when people started cultivating maize and switched to a settled lifestyle, there was an increase in infant mortality, stunted growth in adults, and a massive increase in diseases related to malnutrition.

Hunter-gatherers were much less vulnerable to disease than later peoples. In fact, until the advances of modern medicine and hygiene of the 19th and 20th centuries, they may well have suffered less from disease than any other human beings in history. Many of the diseases which we’re now susceptible to only actually arrived when we domesticated animals and started living close to them. Animals transmitted a whole host of diseases to us which we’d never been exposed to before. Pigs and ducks passed the flu on, horses gave us colds, cows gave us the pox and dogs gave us the measles. And later, when dairy products became a part of our diet, we increased our exposure to disease even more through drinking milk, which transmits at least 30 different diseases. In view of this, it’s not surprising that with the coming of agriculture, people’s life spans became shorter.

The transition from a nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life to a settled agricultural one began in the Middle East at around 8000 BCE, spreading into Europe and Asia over the following millennia (and developing independently in some places). Many of the world’s cultures have myths that refer to an earlier time when life was much easier, and human beings were less materialistic and lived in harmony with nature and each other. In ancient Greece and Rome this was known as the Golden Age; in China it was the Age of Perfect Virtue, in India it was the Krita Yuga (Perfect Age); while the Judeo-Christian tradition has the story of the garden of Eden. These myths tell us that, either as a result of a long degeneration or a sudden and dramatic “Fall,” something “went wrong.” Life became much more difficult and full of suffering, and human nature became more corrupt. In Taoist terms, whereas the earliest human beings followed the Way of Heaven and were a part of the natural harmony of the Universe, later human beings became separated from the Tao, and became selfish and calculating.

Many of these myths make clear references to the hunter-gatherer way of life – for example, the Greek historian Hesiod states that during the Golden Age “the fruitful earth bore [human beings] abundant fruit without stint,” while the early Indian text the Vaya Purana states that early human beings “frequented the mountains and seas, and did not dwell in houses” (i.e. they lived a non-sedentary way of life). The garden of Eden story suggests this too. Originally Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge, until they were forced to leave the garden and forced to “work hard and sweat to make the soil produce anything.” It appears that, at least in part, these myths are a kind of “folk memory” of the pre-agricultural way of life. The agricultural peoples who worked harder and longer, had shorter life spans and suffered from a lot more health problems must have looked at the old hunter-gatherer way of life as a kind of paradise.

Warfare and Social Oppression

There are other significant reasons why these peoples would have seen earlier times as a Golden Age. There is a great deal of evidence suggesting that prehistoric human beings were much less war-like than later peoples. Archaeological studies throughout the world have found hardly any evidence of warfare during the whole of the hunter-gatherer phase of history. There are, in fact, just two indisputable cases of group violence during all of these tens of thousands of years.

A cluster of sites around the Nile Valley show some signs of violence from around 12,000 BCE. The site of Jebel Sahaba, for instance, has a grave containing the bodies of over 50 people who apparently died a violent death. And in south-east Australia, there are some signs of inter-tribal fighting – as well as of other kinds of social violence such as the cranial deformation of children – at several different sites dating from 11,000 and 7000 BCE. Lawrence Keeley’s book War Before Civilisation suggests several other examples of prehistoric violence and warfare, but all of these are dubious, and have been dismissed by other scholars. For example, Keeley sees cut marks on human bones as evidence of cannibalism, when these are more likely to be the result of prehistoric funeral rituals of cleaning bones of their flesh. He also interprets highly abstract and stylised drawings in caves in Australia as depicting battles, when they are open to wide variety of other interpretations. In this way, as the anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson remarks, Keeley’s “rhetoric exceeds his evidence in implying war is old as humanity.”3

The lack of evidence for warfare is striking. There are no signs of violent death, no signs of damage or disruption by warfare, and although many other artefacts have been found, including massive numbers of tools and pots, there is a complete absence of weapons. As Ferguson points out, “it is difficult to understand how war could have been common earlier in each area and remain so invisible.” Archaeologists have discovered over 300 cave prehistoric “art galleries,” not one of which contains depictions of warfare, weapons or warriors. In the words of the anthropologist Richard Gabriel, “For the first ninety-five thousand years after the Homo sapiens Stone age began [until 4000 BCE], there is no evidence that man engaged in war on any level, let alone on a level requiring organised group violence. There is little evidence of any killing at all.”4

There seems to have been equality between the sexes in prehistoric times too. The fact that women provided so much of the tribe’s food strongly suggests they had equal status, since it’s difficult to see how they could have low status while performing such an important economic role. The healthy, open attitude ancient hunter-gatherers had to the human body and to sex – shown by the massive numbers of sexually explicit images and objects archaeologists have discovered – suggests this too, since the oppression of women appears to be closely linked to a sense of alienation from the human body, and a negative attitude to instincts and bodily processes.

Contemporary indigenous peoples are sexually egalitarian too. Before European conquest and colonisation, many of them traced descent and ownership of property through the mother’s rather than the father’s side of the family. And as the anthropologist Tim Ingold notes, in “immediate return” hunter-gatherer societies (that is, societies which live by immediately using any food or other resources they collect, rather than storing them for later use), men have no authority over women. Women usually choose their own marriage partners, decide what work they want to do and work whenever they choose to, and if a marriage breaks down they have custody rights over their children.5

In prehistoric societies there were no status differences between individuals either. There were no different classes or castes, with people who had more power and possessions than others. For archaeologists, the most obvious signs of social inequality are differences in graves, in terms of size, position and the goods which are placed inside them. Later agricultural societies have larger, more central graves for more “important” people, which also have a lot more possessions inside them. Men generally have more “important” graves than women. But the graves of the ancient hunter-gatherers are strikingly uniform, with little or no size differences and little or no grave wealth.

Almost all contemporary hunter-gatherers show a striking absence of any of the characteristics that we associate with social inequality. The anthropologist James Woodburn speaks of the “profound egalitarianism” of immediate-return foraging peoples and emphasises that no other way of human life “permits so great an emphasis on equality.”6 Foraging peoples are also strikingly democratic. Most societies do operate with a leader of some kind, but their power is usually very limited, and they can easily be deposed if the rest of the group aren’t happy with their leadership. People don’t seek to be leaders – in fact if anybody does show signs of a desire for power and wealth they are usually barred from consideration as leaders. And even when a person becomes a leader, they don’t have the right to make decisions on their own. Decisions are made in co-operation with other respected members of the group.

The Ego Explosion

All of this strongly argues against the idea that prehistoric human beings were brutes whose only concern was survival, and whose lives were full of cruelty and conflict, as men competed against each other for status and food and sex. Warfare, social oppression and male domination – and an existence that was “nasty, brutish and short” – belong to a later phase of human history. Evidence from artwork, cemeteries and battle sites suggests there was an “eruption” of these social pathologies during the fourth millennium BCE, starting in the Middle East and central Asia. The root cause of this change seems to have been environmental. Around this time massive areas of land which had been fertile for thousands of years started to turn into desert. This happened all over the Middle East and central Asia, creating the massive belt of arid or desert land which runs across from the Steppes of southern Russia to the Arabian and Iranian deserts. The groups who lived in the area – including the original Indo-Europeans and Semites – were forced to flee and look for new fertile lands, causing massive waves of migrations.

This environmental disaster seems to have changed the psyche of these peoples. Whereas before they had been peaceful and egalitarian, now they became aggressive, hierarchical and patriarchal. Over the following centuries they spread over Europe, the Middle East and Asia, killing and conquering the peaceful “Old World” peoples they came across, including the civilisation of Old Europe (which was reconstructed by the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas). By 500 BCE, these peoples had more or less completely conquered the whole of Eurasia, leaving only a few indigenous peoples such as the Laplanders of Scandinavia, the tribal peoples of Siberia, and the indigenous peoples of the forests and hills of India. In mainland Europe the only surviving non-Indo-European indigenous peoples were the Basque people of northern Spain (who amazingly still survive today) and the Etruscans of Italy, who were soon to be wiped out by the Romans.

In my book The Fall, I try to explain how these people were (and are) different from the peaceful peoples who came before them. My theory is that the environmental catastrophe (the drying up of their fertile lands) caused an “Ego Explosion.” These peoples developed a stronger and sharper sense of identity, or of individuality, which made them feel more separate to nature and to other people, and more liable to be aggressive and to lust after power and status. We – modern day Eurasians – are the descendents of these peoples, and we have inherited their strong sense of ego. This is still the main difference between us and indigenous “unfallen” peoples such as the Native Americans, Australian Aborigines and the peoples of Oceania, and the reason why they have a much more respectful attitude to nature than us, and a more spiritual vision of the Universe. Our strong sense of ego “walls us off” from other people and nature, makes us unable to sense the alive-ness of the world around us, and may ultimately be responsible for our extinction as a species.

However, there are some signs that, as a culture, we are slowly transcending the “fallen” psyche, and going beyond our ego-separateness. Over the last 300 years or so, there has been a new spirit of empathy growing, which has led to less cruel treatment of children and animals, less severe punishments for criminals, the women’s movement, the abolition of slavery, the socialist movement, a new respect for nature, a more open and healthy attitude to sex and the human body and so on. And there has been a new sense of the sacred and of the possibility of self-transcendence, which has led to a massive upsurge of interest in esoteric/spiritual philosophies and practices like paganism, shamanism, Buddhism, meditation and so on.

There are signs that we are reconnecting with nature, regaining our sense of the aliveness of the world and of the hidden mysteries of the cosmos. The characteristics of the prehistoric golden age may be slowly re-emerging. The only question is whether there is enough time left for these characteristics to emerge fully, before the old “fallen” psyche leads us to self-destruction.

The idea that human history is a gradual but continual progression – starting from a state of savagery, with generations slowly making technological and social advances and passing these down, and leading to the pinnacle of western European civilisation – is a leftover from the Victorian era, part of the same colonial mentality which saw “primitive” indigenous peoples as subhumans who could be justifiably conquered and killed. Rather than a progression, the last 6000 years of war, oppression, misery and hardship are the result of a painful degeneration from an earlier, healthier state. We may finally be moving forward now – but only in the sense of turning a full circle, and rekindling glimmers of ancient harmony.

Footnotes:

1. Sahlins, M. (1972). Stone Age Economics. New York: Aldine de Gruyter,. p.36.

2. Rudgley, R. (2000). Secrets of the Stone Age. London: Random House, p. 36.

3. Ferguson, R.B. (2000). ‘The Causes and Origins of Primitive Warfare.’ Anthropological Quarterly, 73.3, 159-164, p.159.

4. Gabriel, R. (1990). The Culture of War: Invention and Early Development. New York: Greenwood Press, p. 21.

5. Ingold, T., Riches, D. & Woodburn, J. (Eds.). (1988). Hunters and Gatherers, Volume 2: Property, Power and Ideology. Oxford: Berg.

6. Woodburn, J. (1982). ‘Egalitarian Societies.’ Man, 17, 431-51, p.432.

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STEVE TAYLOR is an author and lecturer who lives in Manchester, England. This article is based on his new book Making Time: Why Time Seems to Pass at Different Speeds and How to Control It, published in Australia by Allen & Unwin. The book has been described by Dr. Stanley Krippner as “a major landmark in our understanding of how human beings experience time.” Steve is also the author of The Fall: The Evidence for a Golden Age and the Dawning of a New Era, described as “astonishing work” by Colin Wilson. Steve can be contacted at essytaylor@yahoo.com. His website is www.stevenmtaylor.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 95 (March-April 2006).

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By Robert Feather MIMMM., C.Eng.

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This article is a brief examination of the nature and historical roots of the Qumran community that lived and worked on the western shore of the Dead Sea around 150 BCE to 68 CE and the connections that may be discerned between it and the preaching of John the Baptist, the ministry of Jesus, and the origins of Christianity. It looks through the eyes of scholars like Jozef Milik, one of the first to discover the nature of the Dead Sea Scrolls and to analyse them in depth, back in the 1950s, and the author’s analysis of the latest research now that translations of most of the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered near Qumran, have been officially published.My previous book The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran,1 dealt with aspects of the Dead Sea Scrolls and, more particularly, one of the scrolls that had been engraved on copper by the strange community of Essenes that inhabited Qumran. As a trained metallurgist, the use of copper by a devout Jewish sect, living by the Dead Sea around the first century BCE, had aroused my curiosity – especially as the Hebrew text seemed to be a list of buried treasures that apparently had never been found (see New Dawn No. 80, September-October 2003).

Identifying the location of some of the treasures described in the Copper Scroll was only one of the claims substantiated in that book; treasures I identified as being in various museums around the world. Furthermore, a detailed analysis arose from my reading of the name of an Egyptian pharaoh encrypted in the text of the scroll – an interpretation confirmed as “not unreasonable” by both Professor John Tait of University College London and Professor Rosalie David of Manchester University.

The profound conclusion was that the Hebrews must have been present at the court of Pharaoh Akhenaten and the origins of monotheism date back to his time.For my next book I had planned to take a closer look at the Qumran community’s beliefs and way of life, examining how these may have influenced the beginnings of Christianity and its emergence as a daughter religion of Judaism. However, while discussing the project with Jozef Milik, one of the scholars who originally worked on deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls back in the early 1950s, my research took a strange and totally unexpected twist. Jozef Milik had been the leader of the team of translators based at the École Biblique in East Jerusalem; he had also been, at that time, an ordained Catholic priest.What Monsieur Milik revealed to me, in the course of many intriguing conversations he and I shared about the Essene community, inspired me to write a new book and informs a substantial part of it.

During my researches I have come across many further pieces of evidence that confirm a connection between a uniquely monotheistic pharaonic period in Egyptian history and the Essenes of Qumran, who lived a thousand years later and a thousand miles distant. As remarkable as this connection may appear to be, to date the relationship has been criticised but not refuted, and a number of eminent scholars have indicated that it begins to explain some anomalies in their own research. As I progressed further along the “Jozef Milik trail,” many more examples came to light that supported my conjectures regarding this link and these have a considerable bearing on early Judaism and the story of Jesus and his epoch.

The main thrust of the current search, however, was the nature of the people who lived at Qumran between, perhaps, 150 BCE and 68 CE, when their settlement was destroyed by the Romans, the secrets they kept, their relationship to the earliest followers of Jesus, and the incredible revelations of Monsieur Milik. It was not until my third visit, in October 1999, when I returned to present him with a copy of my book on one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that Jozef Milik started to talk more freely about his early life and work, volunteered his date of birth as March 24, 1922, and told me why he had left the Catholic Church. Ostensibly it was to marry his rather delightful wife, Yolanta, née Zaluska, but there were other reasons, reasons connected with what he had found and interpreted in the scrolls of the Dead Sea. Two hours into our conversation he quietly and almost casually spoke of certain events near Qumran. It was one of those nerve tingling moments; my mind reeled with the impact of what he was saying.

Those dramatic words of Jozef Milik started me on a journey of discovery to determine how the circumstances at the time of Jesus might confirm or disprove his revelation. It was a quest that was to take me from the cold dampness of a Parisian autumn day to the remote dryness of Egypt, to the holy places of Jerusalem, to an offshore haven on the Isle of Man, to catacombs in Rome, to Washington and New York, to a Gothic building in Germany, and back to the barren shores of the Dead Sea in Israel. As my journeys and investigations progressed, it became increasingly clear that something extraordinary, as yet not revealed, may have occurred at or near to Qumran, and there were others who were party to this knowledge but were not keen for the evidence to become public.

Qumran

The Qumran Essenes, a mysterious Jewish sect that suddenly vanished from its habitat by the Dead Sea in Judaea around 68 CE, was a unique community in Jewish history, and in many ways practiced a form of Judaism very different from that being pursued elsewhere in the Second Temple period. No one is certain of the origins of the strange, reclusive sect that wrote and possessed what are now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Nor is there agreement as to the degree of influence the sect had on early Christianity, or its relationship to John the Baptist and Jesus. Such is the intensity of feelings about who exactly these Essenes were that it is not uncommon to see professors shouting across conference rooms at each other as they defend their respective pet theories. Whilst there is consensus on many issues, there are also large areas where there are just no accepted answers. Perhaps part of the reason is there are basic misunderstandings with regard to the origins of the community. As archaeologist Magen Broshi, of the Israel Museum, likes to put it: “There are at least ten different theories about the origins and function of Qumran. By definition, nine of them are wrong.” As our story unfolds, it will become increasingly evident that the activities of the Essenes are central to the plot, and of profound significance to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as many other religions. It is useful to set the scene with a Timeline of Events in the period in question. After the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it soon became apparent that the type of Judaism practiced by the authors/possessors of the scrolls – a minority Essene group that numbered perhaps less than four thousand, or 2 percent of the Jewish population – was far more similar to early Christian practices and beliefs than that of any previous group. Previously it had been assumed Christianity emerged out of Pharisaic Judaism. The worry for modern Christian authorities was not so much that they had got their suppositions wrong, regarding which strand of Judaism had given birth to Christianity, but that it was becoming increasingly difficult to distance Christianity from this previously little-known new slant on Judaism, namely Essenism. The first sensational claim relating the Dead Sea Scrolls to Christianity came from a respected Sorbonne University professor, André Dupont-Sommer who wrote in 1950 that he saw Jesus in the “pierced messiah” mentioned in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls: “The Galilean Master… appears in many respects as an astonishing reincarnation of the Teacher of Righteousness.” When who this Teacher of Righteousness really was becomes apparent, it is clear that Dupont-Sommer was quite wrong in his assumptions about the Teacher as “the exact prototype of Jesus.” As an outsider from the predominantly Catholic translation team (he had once been an abbé), Dupont-Sommer was immediately criticised by his peers for jumping to preposterous conclusions. Nevertheless, Edmund Wilson, a respected American literary journalist and columnist for The New Yorker, picked up the theme and subsequently published a book entitled The Scrolls from the Dead Sea, in which he claimed that Qumran, “with its ovens and its inkwells, its mill and its cesspool, its constellation of sacred fonts and the unadorned graves of its dead, is perhaps, more than Bethlehem or Nazareth, the cradle of Christianity.” A few years later John Marco Allegro, the only Methodist among the predominantly Catholic original Dead Sea Scrolls translation team in Jerusalem, broke ranks and claimed that one of the Dead Sea Scrolls included mention of messianic crucifixion and resurrection. He was undoubtedly a brilliant scholar, but his claims became more extreme with the publication of his book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross in 1970, which claimed Christianity was born out of Jesus’ followers imbibing hallucinatory drugs. In 1979 he went even farther down this hypothetical trail, claiming Jesus was no more than a fanciful legend developed by the Essenes to extemporise on their own Teacher of Righteousness. Allegro conceived of this Teacher figure as an Exodus period Joshua/Jesus incarnate who was killed, or perhaps crucified, by the Israelite Wicked Priest, Alexander Jannaeus, around 88 BCE. Allegro was pilloried by his peers in an open letter to The Times, of London, in 1956, and never really recovered from the personal attacks on his character that followed. Perhaps the record is put right in his daughter’s recent biography of her father published this year.2 In the mid-1980s Robert Eisenman, a professor of Middle Eastern religions at California State University, published a number of works attempting to relate the Qumran Essenes to characters in the Christian Scriptures. One of Eisenman’s ongoing themes has been the idea that James the Just, the brother of Jesus, was the leader of the Qumran-Essene community. When more of the Cave 4 Dead Sea Scrolls material became available in 1991, Eisenman, together with Michael Wise, associate professor of Aramaic at the University of Chicago, continued the theme in their book The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered. In this work, they also discuss what they believe is a reference in the Dead Sea War Scroll to a suffering, wounded, and ultimately slain messianic figure. Two journalist protégés of Robert Eisenman, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, expanded on Eisenman’s theories in their book The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, published in 1991. In addition, they accused Catholic authorities and the Vatican of a cover-up conspiracy designed to distance the teachings and beliefs of the Qumran Essenes from early Christianity. The controversies were added to dramatically by an Australian academic from Sydney University, Barbara Thiering. She claimed there had been a complete misunderstanding of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Thiering maintains that the Teacher of Righteousness and his rival the Wicked Priest corresponded to John the Baptist and Jesus. For her, Jesus did not die on the cross but lived on at Qumran after his experience of near death. Some other commentators could not even find a real Jesus in historical terms and suggest he was a fictitious figure culled from Greek myths and pagan legends. The overall conclusion, nevertheless, from sources external to the Christian Scriptures, both literary and archaeological, is that someone who fulfilled many of the biblical claims relating to Jesus really did exist. Furthermore, whatever attributes he possessed, divine or otherwise, they inspired a devoted religious following that eventually grew into a movement whose influence swept the entire world.

The Messiahs of Qumran

Two central concepts need to be kept in mind when attempting to understand the motivations behind the beliefs and behaviour of the Essenes, and, more particularly, the Qumran Essenes and their messianic hopes. First, although they put immense store in traditional Hebrew teachings, they followed an apparently aberrational form of Judaism that yearned for and echoed the early days of Mosaic Sinai and which, I maintain, dates back even further to the ancient monotheism of Akhenaten and Jacob. Second, if the early Jesus movement owed a powerful debt to the beliefs practiced at Qumran, which I suggest will become even more apparent from the evidence presented in my new book, then it would not be surprising to find that some of Akhenaten’s teachings and imagery would be transferred across and reflected in the early Jesus movement and later Christianity. It is evident from the Dead Sea Scrolls that the Essenes of Qumran considered themselves an elite messianic group; they had retreated from the fray of the Temple and the priesthood and sought refuge in the wilderness to protect their piety. The opening verses of Isaiah, chapter 40, aptly describe their role:

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

For some of the Essenes, the need to retreat was part of their search for a reaffirmation of the divine covenant given to Moses on Mount Sinai, a quest for the purity and essence of Torah and Hebrew teachings. They looked upon themselves as the ancestral custodians of the “light of truth.” Their fundamental beliefs and manner of practicing their special religion were essentially at odds with the rest of the Jewish community, and they followed an extreme form of ritualistic behaviour and strict adherence to their interpretation of the Law. So who were the Qumran Essenes waiting for? The answer is contained in a number of the Dead Sea Scrolls texts that indicate they were waiting for two, and some scholars read three, messiahs. These messiahs, one priestly and one royal, are given various titles in different scrolls:

Priestly: Interpreter of the Law, the Star; the Messiah of Aaron, who was of princely descent

Royal: Prince of the Congregation, the Scepter; the Messiah of Israel; the King Messiah

In addition, they expected the return of a prophet similar to Moses. Fortunately, there are quite detailed descriptions of these messiahs in a number of the scrolls, so one would assume it should be relatively easy to identify who they were talking about. Unhappily, that is not the case, and conventional scholarship makes little attempt to utilise this information. As Joseph Fitzmyer, professor emeritus at Catholic University in Washington, notes: “It is a surprise to see a priestly figure become part of the Qumran community’s messianic expectations, because there is little in the Hebrew Scriptures itself about a future ‘priest’.” He finds no reasonable explanation for this phenomenon. In fact, I believe both the name of Akhenaten, preserved in the text of the Copper Scroll, and a variation on the name Meryra, his High Priest, as a title for a leader of the Qumran community, reflect this priestly connection, among many other indicators. Another clear example comes from the community’s War Scroll: “And on the banner of Merari they shall write… God’s offerings [and the name of the Prince of Merari]” (4QM).

A Line of Priests

The Book of Jubilees, which emanated from the Essenes, makes it quite clear the patriarch Jacob passed his teachings on down through the line of Levi, one of his sons, giving rise to the so-called Levitical priests. Yet these hereditary priests were not, according to the Hebrew Scriptures, appointed as priests until the time of Aaron several hundred years later. At the time of Jacob, there was no Israelite sanctuary or temple of worship, and yet the Dead Sea Scrolls repeatedly insist that priests were appointed at the time of Jacob. The only explanation that makes sense is that there were hereditary priests in Jacob’s time, that there was a place of worship, and that it was almost certainly the Great Temple at Akhetaten, modern day Amarna.

The Messiah(s) Awaited by the Rest of the Jewish Population

The generalised Jewish view of the awaited messiah can be understood in terms of the messianic age that the messiah would bring about. The End Days eschatology has essentially two elements: one of material restoration and one of a spiritual utopia. The Jewish concepts differ from Christian ideas of redemption in that they involve the visible world, whereas Christianity envisages a spiritual and personal redemption reflected in the soul. Tracing the quotations in the Christian Scriptures to their assumed original Qumran-Essene and Hebrew Scriptures sources is the flavour of the decade and preoccupies hundreds if not thousands of scholars around the world. Texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls; the Genizah Collection – found in Cairo, Egypt, in the late 19^th century; and the John Rylands fragment – the earliest example of text from the New Testament dated to c 125 CE, have stimulated endless debate on the origins of Christianity. Despite the fact that large chunks of the Hebrew Scriptures have been shown to have been based on much earlier Egyptian texts, little attempt has been made to investigate these texts in the light of these blazing neon signs. Although early Christian writers could in theory have obtained some of their information from versions of text in general circulation, it seems likely that much of the Qumran Essenes’ literature from which they were quoting was available only to the Qumran Essene membership. The significance of these correlations is that the early Christians must have had access to sectarian texts with limited circulation and had a much closer relationship with the Qumran Essenes than has previously been acknowledged. Ideas and theology exclusively promoted by the Qumran Essenes, that appear in the Christian Scriptures or Christian practice and are not apparent in other Jewish sources, include: • Belial as a personalised incarnation of the powers of evil • The temple as a metaphor for community • Dualism in terms of light (good) and darkness (evil) • Equating righteousness with the Sun • The demand to keep separate from the way of darkness and to walk in the light • Courts of justice at Qumran and Corinth following the same novel judicial system • A conviction of humankind’s hopeless sinfulness • A humble teacher of justification through grace (recognised by Paul as Christ) • Knowledge of mysteries (creational and eschatological) of God is revealed only to the absolutely righteous • The terms wisdom, knowledge, and understanding used in the same sense • Three cardinal sins of fornication, impurity, greed (which leads to idolatry) • Foolishness and silliness as punishable offenses • An imperative for mutual fraternal correction – that is, the urgent need to make people aware they are sinning and bring them back to the light of goodness • The Qumran community and the Christian Church as the “chosen ones” • Liturgical times of prayer, vigils, quarter-tense (days of fasting and abstinence) coming to the church from Qumran • Tendencies toward monasticism and male chauvinism The possibility that John the Baptist had an association with the Qumran Essenes is for most modern and many early scholars much stronger than they would allow for Jesus. The enigmatic last verse of Luke regarding John living in the desert, as pointed out by l’Abbé René Laurentin, a French authority of the Church Council, makes little sense unless it is saying that John the Baptist was, from his childhood, a member of the Qumran community. The verse becomes clear, asserts l’Abbé, when the testimony of Flavius Josephus, the 1^st century CE Jewish/Roman historian, is considered, when he says of the Qumran community it was their custom to adopt “children from others, at an age when their spirit is still malleable enough to easily accept instruction.” (Jewish Wars) John Allegro has also pointed out that the Baptist’s parents were elderly, and when his father died he may have been adopted by the community as it is difficult to envisage what he was doing as a child wandering around in the wilderness of Judaea. The only logical deduction, from all the evidence, is that he spent at least part of his early life at Qumran. John the Baptist’s prime activity was baptism, and this too can be linked to the practices at Qumran where initiates were accepted into the Community with a final ‘graduation’ baptism that confirmed their obedience and spiritual commitment to God. The obvious question to ask is: “What were the origins of baptism?” How did it commence as a religious ritual? The required presence of water in the Tabernacle of Moses indicates the importance of water from a very early time in Hebrew history. That it was also used in religious rites across the Middle East prior to this time is also apparent from various pictorial sources. Its use for baptism as an initiation rite, however, appears to have originated in Egypt. The explanation for John the Baptist’s extension of this ritual, I believe, lies in the same thread that connects religious practices of Akhenaten to those of the Qumran Essenes, as can be seen in the above illustration. Here, in a relief discovered at Amarna dating to circa 1350 BCE, one of Akhenaten’s princesses is seen being blessed as purifying water is poured over her head from a jar held in the hand of a projecting ray from the Aten – the name the Pharaoh gave to his God. Only further external proof can confirm this probability of John’s, and/or other members of the early Jesus movement’s connection to Qumran, and that some kind of extraordinary evidence might be forthcoming would seem unlikely on the face of it two thousand years after the events. That evidence is, however, presented in The Secret Initiation of Jesus at Qumran, published by Inner Traditions, in July 2005.

Footnotes:

1. Published by Inner Traditions International, June 2003. An earlier version, The Copper Scroll Decoded, was published by HarperCollins in June 1999, and under other titles in Italy, Holland, and Japan. 2. Judith Brown, John Marco Allegro: The Maverick of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005.

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ROBERT FEATHER is a metallurgist, engineer, journalist, and scholar of world religions. He is the founding editor of The Metallurgist, editor of Weighing and Measuring, and the author of The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran and The Secret Initiation of Jesus at Qumran. He lives in London.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 93 (Nov-Dec 2005).

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