—

On the 13^th of September 2010, in a Swansea, South Wales hospital, an embittered and reclusive man, hailed as a genius by some, yet marginalised by many mainstream scientists and academics, passed away at the age of seventy-eight.¹

In his later years Stan Gooch lived “virtually destitute” in “a rented caravan in a nearly abandoned Welsh trailer park – with neither telephone nor computer, his correspondence inked on the backs of galley proofs, and scarce personal contact – wholly lacking family, right at life’s raw edge.”²

This was the sad end for a man who made incredibly original contributions to our understanding of the origins and nature of our own humanity. Colin Wilson once wrote of Gooch, “It has seemed to me for many years that Stan Gooch is one of the most underrated writers of our time.”³ We agree with this assessment.

Born in 1932 among the slums of southern London to working-class parents, Gooch raised himself from his dreary surroundings, ultimately earning a degree in Modern Languages at King’s College, London, and a degree in Psychology at Birkbeck College, London.⁴ After spending time, between earning his degrees, variously working in the scrap metal business, teaching in Coventry (English Midlands), and serving as “Head of Department” in a London grammar school, in 1964 Gooch was appointed a senior research psychologist at the National Children’s Bureau. He wrote scholarly articles and coauthored books on psychology.

On the surface it seemed that Gooch was off to a respectable and potentially prosperous career.⁵ However, Gooch’s life would take a different turn, driven by his overwhelming interest in two subjects that on the surface might seem quite distinct, but for Gooch were intimately related: 1) psychical research (the paranormal, or what is now often referred to as parapsychology) and 2) understanding and reconstructing the mental and cultural world of Neanderthals and their bearing on modern humanity.

Ultimately Gooch gave up his secure position, turning down both the directorship of the National Children’s Bureau, and a professorship of Psychology at Brunel University, London, to pursue his research and writing full-time.

Unfortunately for Gooch, his books never had the mass appeal, with the concomitant income, he hoped for. Furthermore, psychical research is a subject that is viewed as fairly marginal at best by most academics, and Gooch’s conclusions concerning Neanderthal mentality and culture diverged so radically from the common conceptions of the time that mainstream scholars systematically ignored his work.

At the time of his death Gooch was depressed, bitter, and even angry that his ideas had not garnered the recognition that he felt they rightfully deserved. Perhaps he was ahead of his time, as many of his ideas about Neanderthals in particular are now being independently confirmed (although still generally without citing or crediting Gooch).

From the Paranormal to Neanderthals

While teaching in Coventry in the late 1950s, Gooch began attending weekly séances, his introduction to the paranormal. This sparked a deep lifelong interest in psychic phenomena. Moreover, Gooch found that he personally had telepathic and mediumistic talents. At one séance Gooch and the other members of the circle became aware of “a crouching, ape-like shape” in the corner of the room that “approximated to most people’s idea of what an ancient cave-man would look like.”⁶ After a while the figure faded away and the séance continued.

Nearly two decades later Gooch would write,

As regards the figure of the cave-man, which so very much impressed and haunted me both then and afterwards (in a wholly agreeable way, I must add) – I had [not] and could not have had any inkling that one day I would write books about Neanderthal man.⁷

Gooch summarised his own work during this period as

Looking always for further knowledge about the human condition, I was at the same time prospecting for a framework which could accommodate all the information that was accumulating.⁸

Ultimately Gooch developed a framework and theory of human personality in terms of dualities, such as unconscious versus consciousness, religion versus science, magic versus logic, dreaming versus waking. In his list are two key comparisons: psychic phenomena versus materialism, and Neanderthal man versus modern man.⁹

Gooch’s great insight was that while modern humans might manifest occasional psychic phenomena,¹⁰ Neanderthals “certainly possessed abilities in respect of the purely paranormal that far exceeded our own.”¹¹ According to Gooch, we modern humans are literally the result of the dualities coming together, the biological interbreeding of Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons (that is so-called “modern humans,” Homo sapiens) and the melding of Neanderthal religious beliefs and cultural practices with Cro-Magnon societal elements even as Cro-Magnons may have come to physically dominate, and even apparently exterminate, the earlier Neanderthals.

The Neanderthal Question

Who, or what, the Neanderthals were has been a much discussed issue ever since their remains were first recognised in the middle nineteenth century.¹² The popular conception of Neanderthals is that of big-browed, short, stocky, stooping, grunting, ape-like cave men (and women) eking out a meagre existence during the harsh conditions of ice age Europe, the Near East, and Southwest Asia.

Classic Neanderthals in Europe date from around 130,000 years ago to perhaps as recently as 24,000 years ago in Gibraltar, but Neanderthal characteristics and antecedents are seen in fossil forms going back to perhaps half a million years ago or earlier.

In many people’s minds Neanderthals are a primitive side branch of the human tree at best, a totally separate species from us, that was driven to extinction by the more intelligent and better armed “Cro-Magnon Man” group (archaic Homo sapiens, essentially the direct ancestors of living humans) who progressively migrated from East Africa into Eurasia during the period of about 60,000 to 30,000 years ago.¹³

Stan Gooch had a very different view of the place and importance of Neanderthals – in Gooch’s view modern humanity is a result of the intermixing, both biologically and culturally, of Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal elements. In his words,

A biological supernova occurred when Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal man met. We can, if we will listen, still clearly hear the echoes of that explosion and observe its after-effects… [B]ehind these echoes and tendrils we can also then detect the still fainter traces of Neanderthal civilisation itself, and hear the still fainter echoes of falling cities of dreams.¹⁴

According to Gooch, Neanderthals possessed an intricate, psychically-charged, magical culture.¹⁵ Neanderthals built a long-lasting “high civilisation of dreams.”¹⁶ Neanderthal culture, more sophisticated than that of the Cro-Magnons when they first arrived in Europe, served as a primary source for much so-called ancient wisdom.

Gooch argued that Neanderthals were the original creators, the innovators, of high culture, of symbolic values and religious sensibilities, which early modern humans (Cro-Magnons) copied and adopted without genuine understanding. Neanderthal culture was not a civilisation of high technologies, but one of the mind and spirit that survives today in our beliefs, myths, folklore, and religious practices.

Neanderthal Culture

Neanderthals developed in time a culture of the mind of a very high order, but also of a strangeness that is extremely difficult for us to imagine.

Neanderthals, according to Gooch, worshipped the cave bear, the spider, and the serpent – animals with whom they shared their caves. Neanderthals were the first humans to fully develop religious cults, and cave bear worship was their most significant cult. Neanderthals worshipped the number 13, associated with the moon and the lunar calendar, a number that is still considered magical today. Neanderthals developed a profound knowledge of crystals and minerals. According to Gooch, Neanderthals developed their own unique symbols, signs, and sophisticated language systems.¹⁷

Neanderthals weaved and sewed embroidery, wore jewellery, painted their faces and bodies, danced, had an elaborate mythology and cosmology, built stone circles, utilised sacred fires, and made ceremonial sacrifices. They had their own grand celebrations and feasts, which were spectacularly colourful and creative performances.

They worshipped the moon and other celestial bodies including constellations still worshipped today worldwide such as The Big Bear, Little Bear, and Draco (the dragon or serpent in the sky). Gooch asserted that Neanderthals had a strong religious life, based on an earth-magic religion, and they believed in the afterlife, practicing complex burial rituals.¹⁸

Neanderthals, as Gooch emphasised, were capable of great cultural innovations that included wearing jewellery and decorating their bodies and faces with colourful paints for special ceremonies. There is evidence that the sophisticated Chatelperronian culture of France belonged to the Neanderthals and not, as was formerly believed, to modern humans.¹⁹ This culture included symbolic artefacts, such as jewellery. The Uluzzian culture in Italy, also now attributed to Neanderthals, is another example – an innovative culture that included a variety of very sophisticated tools that were similar to modern humans’ tools.²⁰ Neanderthals in Spain were painting perforated shells for decoration, using pigments, and engaged in other ritual behaviour.²¹ As archaeologist João Zilhão, has stated,

The one thing these finds make clear is that Neanderthals were behaviourally modern. They were not like early modern humans anatomically, but they were cognitively as advanced or more so.²²

In many ways Neanderthal culture and Cro-Magnon culture were diametrically opposed. Gooch wrote,

I believe the actuality of Neanderthal man – of whom archaeologists find only a handful of skeletons, a few altars, traces of ritualised burial, a range of flint tools, and an apparent knowledge of herbal remedies – was this: his was a moon-goddess-worshipping, matriarchal, food-gathering society, where women governed all matters. The only tasks delegated specifically to men were those where muscle power was directly and literally required, as in fighting, for example. The structure and nature of Cro-Magnon life was diametrically opposite. This was a patriarchal, hunter-warrior society, of which men governed all aspects, including religious life. Women were mere adjuncts in all things, whose main purpose was to bear sons and to comfort and care for the male. The supreme deity worshipped was the sun god.²³

Gooch believed that Neanderthals were a mostly nocturnal species, and came out at night. Observing the skies and the moon for thousands of generations, they had become experts in all phenomena of the stars, having a great understanding of cycles and time, equinoxes and solstices, the phases of the moon.

Cro-Magnons would have come to know Neanderthal religion and knowledge initially through secret observation during 10,000 years (or more) of co-existence. When Cro-Magnons arrived in Europe they were shocked by the knowledgeable Neanderthals, and wanted the Neanderthal magic for themselves; so, they slowly and carefully spied on Neanderthals, copied them, and in the process stole all of their knowledge and wisdom, including writing systems and rituals.

The meeting of Classic Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons in Europe some 35,000 years ago was an immense culture shock for both parties… The two species were culturally opposite to each other in every way.²⁴ At the purely psychological/cultural level,… Neanderthal dealt Cro-Magnon a culture-shock of such magnitude that its consequences are still with us today. Though it left little physical trace, there is in fact… not one aspect of our present lives, our attitudes and our institutions which does not today bear that ancient [Neanderthal] culture’s stamp.²⁵

According to Gooch, Cro-Magnon was dazzled by the religious rituals, symbolism, cosmology, and deep intimate knowledge of the natural world the Neanderthals possessed.

Cro-Magnon took over all the ‘magic’ and ritual of Neanderthal for his own. But he took it over without any real understanding of most of it, and also with certain appropriate changes to suit his own world view, his own existing social structure, his own biological imperatives. He took over essentially empty forms, while losing the priceless content.²⁶

The Cerebrum and Cerebellum

The vertebrate brain includes the cerebrum and the cerebellum. In modern humans the cerebrum consists of the cerebral hemispheres that fill most of the skull. In humans the cerebellum is smaller than the cerebrum and situated at the back of the head tucked behind and under the cerebrum. Gooch points out that essentially the cerebrum and the cerebellum are two different brains (“we are each of us ‘in two minds’”²⁷) that correspond to two different ways of approaching the world (“Two Brains – and Two Universes”²⁸). The cerebrum is associated with “logical” and “rational” thinking, versus the cerebellum is associated with “dreaming” and “magic.”

[T]he cerebellum… is responsible for trance states, for dreams, for telepathy, for psychic healing, for spontaneous wounds, for poltergeist phenomena, and all other such matters. It is also the source of and the impetus for religious belief.²⁹

Here we have the anatomical/physiological explanation for the duality of human personality. The Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal brains both consisted of larger cerebrums and smaller cerebellums, but the Neanderthal brain had a much larger and more powerful cerebellum than that found in Cro-Magnons. The more developed Neanderthal cerebellum gave rise to their “high civilisation of dreams.”³⁰

Neanderthals developed a deep understanding of the natural world, but they did not necessarily do so in the rational, logical, “scientific” manner that modern humans have come to expect and accept. “I think that they [the ancients, Neanderthals]” Gooch stated, “obtained their knowledge not logically and scientifically but intuitively.”³¹

Hybridisation Between Neanderthals & Cro-Magnons

The taxonomic status of Neanderthals has long been debated. Were they a species distinct from modern humans? Even if they were a distinct species, could they have interbred with our species, at least to a limited extent?³² Or were Neanderthals simply a subspecies or variety of our own species? Is the grouping of fossil forms currently labelled “Neanderthals” actually a collection of different types of humans, perhaps different species or varieties or races? Gooch believed there were several different varieties of Neanderthals, separated geographically and temporally, in Europe, Africa,³³ the Middle East, and Asia. Furthermore, a key point of his thesis is that Neanderthals, at least some Neanderthals, could and did interbreed with our direct ancestors, the Cro-Magnons.

In recent decades it has become apparent that human diversity tens of thousands of years ago was much more complex than previously believed. Some 50,000 to 30,000 years ago, for instance, there may have been half a dozen or more distinct species of humans inhabiting Earth. Besides Cro-Magnons (archaic Homo sapiens) and Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) in Eurasia, in what is now modern Indonesia there was the diminutive “hobbit” form Homo floresiensis³⁴ as well as apparently the last remnant populations of Homo erectus.³⁵ In southern Africa were found the Boskop people, Homo capensis, reputedly with brains 25 to 35 percent larger than those of modern humans.³⁶ In Siberia about the same time there was another population of humans, who may have been a species distinct from those listed above (though perhaps most closely related to Neanderthals), at present simply referred to as the “Denisovans.”³⁷ To add to the list, the indigenous aboriginal Homo sapiens populations of Australia and New Guinea may have been relatively isolated for the last 50,000 years or more.³⁸

Leaving aside at this time the issue of the numerous other human species (how they interacted with one another, and what contributions they made to the modern human lineage, remain open questions), Gooch believed that aggressive and battle-skilled Cro-Magnons both massively exterminated some populations of Neanderthals and also interbred with them. He wrote,

The genetic crossing of Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal produced not just (a) highly gifted individuals (‘the mighty men of old, the men of renown’) but (b) an entirely new species of human – ourselves…. [T]his new product was… either entirely or very largely due to Cro-Magnon men fertilising Neanderthal women – not the other way around. These offspring would have been accepted into Cro-Magnon groups…. And so Neanderthal genes were introduced into the Cro-Magnon gene pool…³⁹

This was a radical, unconventional view – to believe that Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals interbred and therefore Neanderthal genes should still be found among us. However, recent studies of the Neanderthal genome reveal that today an estimated 1% to 4% of the modern Eurasian genome appears to come from Neanderthals.⁴⁰ That is, Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons must have interbred. Gooch’s ideas appear to be corroborated! (As an aside, we can also point out Gooch suggested that at least some Neanderthals may have been redheaded, another prediction since corroborated by modern science.⁴¹)

Gooch also asserted that Neanderthals never fully went extinct, writing,

[A]ctual Neanderthals at this very moment in time – that is, now, today – still survive and live at the edges of our civilisation…⁴²

Gooch cites, for instance, the research of anthropologist Myra Shackley, who tantalisingly suggests that the legendary Almas (“wildmen”) of the Caucasus and Outer Mongolia may in fact represent relict Neanderthals.⁴³ In one famous account a female Almas was captured in the nineteenth century. She was described as having skin of “a grayish-black colour, covered with reddish hair, longer on her head than elsewhere… She had a large face with big cheek bones, muzzle-like prognathous jaw and large eyebrows, big white teeth and a ‘fierce expression’.”⁴⁴ She sounds very much like a Neanderthal! First kept for some years in a stone enclosure, she later was kept in a cage, and finally in a house. She learned to obey simple orders and used branches and stones as tools. She became pregnant by her captors and while her first several infants died, she subsequently gave birth to two sons and two daughters who in turn produced children of their own via mating with other humans. This is all in line with Gooch’s hypotheses concerning Neanderthals. Note that the “primitive” state of the Almas may be because they are relict populations who have degenerated from the Neanderthal prime of 50,000 or so years ago.

The Neanderthal Legacy

The Neanderthals left us a lasting legacy, one that remains an undercurrent of modern human psychology, society, and culture. It is important, even critical, to understand this Neanderthal legacy – and the work of Stan Gooch may provide the fundamental key to unlocking the secrets of the Neanderthals.

We are personally further exploring, testing, and developing Gooch’s ideas concerning Neanderthal culture, including through first-hand study of the evidence, such as sites visited and used by Neanderthals. Thus during the summer of 2010 we mounted a small expedition to Neanderthal territory, including caves where Neanderthal remains have been found, in the Bucegi Mountains region of Romania. Rather than hypothetically reconstruct Neanderthal lifestyles and modes of thinking purely intellectually, our aim is to actually experience (as much as possible) what it was like to have been a Neanderthal. Future potential research includes attempting to reconstruct Neanderthal rituals and cave usage, for instance. This may be a tall order, but we are sanguine about the prospects.

We will close with a final tantalising note on the life and death of Stan Gooch. At the end of his last book, Gooch writes

The number thirteen figures centrally in my work because it is the most important number of the moon religion [according to Gooch, the religion of the Neanderthals]. And it just so happens that I was born on June 13 [1932]. And the day, it just so happens, was a Monday. And Monday is, of course, Moon Day.⁴⁵

Gooch died on 13 September 2010, which also just happened to be a Moon Day. “Well, well, well…” (as Gooch himself might have written⁴⁶).

Books by Stan Gooch:

Total Man, Allen Lane, 1972.

Personality and Evolution, Wildwood House, 1973.

The Neanderthal Question, Wildwood House, 1977.

The Paranormal, Harper and Row, 1978.

Cities of Dreams (subtitle on the cover of the 2001 paperback edition: When Women Ruled the Earth), Aulis Books, 1995, reprinted 2001.

The Dream Culture of the Neanderthals: Guardians of the Ancient Wisdom, Inner Traditions, 2006.

The Origins of Psychic Phenomena: Poltergeists, Incubi, Succubi, and the Unconscious Mind, Inner Traditions, 2007.

The Neanderthal Legacy: Reawakening Our Genetic and Cultural Origins, Inner Traditions, 2008.

Footnotes

1. Anonymous, “Stan Gooch 1932-2010”, posted at www.aulis.com/index.html (Accessed 23 October 2010); Geoff Ward, “A Sad End for Reclusive Writer Stan Gooch”, posted 26 October 2010, www.suite101.com/content/a-sad-end-for-reclusive-writer-a301122 (Accessed 20 November 2010).

2. Brent Logan, “An Urgent Appeal to Help the Acclaimed Author, Stan Gooch”, posted at www.brentlogan.net/sg/stan_gooch.htm (Accessed 8 June 2009).

3. Colin Wilson, posted 11 September 2007 under the title “Colin Wilson writes about me”, posted on a Stan Gooch blog at www.myspace.com/stangooch/blog/308876837 (Accessed 9 June 2009); for other comments by Wilson on Gooch, see for instance: Colin Wilson, Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals: 100,000 Years of Lost History, Rochester, Vermont: Bear and Company, 2006 (pp. 272-277, 281), and various remarks in Colin Wilson, Mysteries, New York: A Wideview/Perigee Book, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978/1980.

4. For biographical details, see: Brent Logan, “Stan Gooch, Biography”, posted at www.brentlogan.net/sg/bio.htm (Accessed 8 June 2009); “Colin Wilson writes about me” (note 3, above); and autobiographical comments in Stan Gooch, The Paranormal, New York: Harper and Row, 1978.

5. Of the time around during which he was at the National Children’s Bureau, Gooch comments dryly, “I was also married and divorced. So there were events enough to take up my days.” (The Paranormal [note 4], 17)

6. Gooch, The Paranormal, 7.

7. Gooch, The Paranormal, 8.

8. Gooch, The Paranormal, 17.

9. Gooch, The Paranormal, 18; Gooch outlined his theory of human personality in the following trilogy: Stan Gooch, Total Man, London: Allen Lane, 1972; Stan Gooch, Personality and Evolution, London: Wildwood House, 1973; and Stan Gooch, The Neanderthal Question, London: Wildwood House, 1977.

10. For a review of Gooch’s ideas on the paranormal, see Louis Proud, “Forces of the Unconscious Mind: Exploring the Work of Stan Gooch”, New Dawn 105 (November-December 2007), posted at www.newdawnmagazine.com/Article/Forces_of_the_Unconscious_Mind.html (Accessed 15 December 2008); see also Stan Gooch, The Origins of Psychic Phenomena: Poltergeists, Incubi, Succubi, and the Unconscious Mind, Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2007 (Originally published under the title Creatures from Inner Space, London: Rider, 1984).

11. Stan Gooch, The Dream Culture of the Neanderthals: Guardians of the Ancient Wisdom, Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2006, 105 (Originally published under the title Guardians of the Ancient Wisdom, London: Wildwood House, 1979).

12. Neanderthal is alternatively spelled Neandertal. The species Homo neanderthalensis was named in 1864 (see William King, “The Reputed Fossil Man of Neanderthal”, The Quarterly Journal of Science, 1, 88-97 with two lithographic plates [January 1864]) based on a skullcap found in the Neander Valley, Germany, in 1856 and first described in 1857, although remains subsequently recognized as Neanderthal had been found earlier in Belgium and Gibraltar. For general information on Neanderthals, see the following (and references cited therein): Clive Finlayson, The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009; C. David Kreger, “Homo neanderthalensis”, posted at www.archaeologyinfo.com/homoneaderthalensis.htm (Accessed 5 January 2011); Dennis O’Neil, “Evolution of Modern Humans: Neandertals”, posted at anthro.palomar.edu/homo2/mod_homo_2.htm (Accessed 5 January 2011); James Shreeve, The Neanderthal Enigma: Solving the Mystery of Modern Human Origins, New York: Harper Perennial, 1996; Robert Munro, “The Rise and Progress of Anthropology” (Address delivered 7 May 1894), Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 20, 215-244 with a plate (1895).

13. For background information, see discussion in Erik Trinkaus, “European early modern humans and the fate of the Neandertals”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104 (18), 7367-7372 (1 May 2007).

14. Stan Gooch, Cities of Dreams (subtitle on the cover of the 2001 paperback edition: When Women Ruled the Earth), London: Aulis Books, 1995, reprinted 2001, 7 (first published as Cities of Dreams [subtitle on the dust jacket of the hardback edition: The rich legacy of Neanderthal Man which shaped our civilisation], London: Rider [An imprint of Century Hutchinson], 1989).

15. Our summary of Gooch’s ideas concerning Neanderthals is based primarily on his books The Neanderthal Question (note 9), The Dream Culture of the Neanderthals (note 11), Cities of Dreams (note 14), and Stan Gooch, The Neanderthal Legacy: Reawakening Our Genetic and Cultural Origins, Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2008.

16. Gooch, Cities of Dreams, 242 (Chapter 16 title).

17. Paleogeneticist Carles Lalueza-Fox discovered that modern humans and Neanderthals share a version of a gene called FOXP2, associated with language abilities. Most likely Neanderthals were able to speak their own languages, exactly as Gooch predicted. See Zach Zorich, “Should We Clone Neanderthals? The Scientific, Legal, and Ethical Obstacles”, Archaeology 63 (2) (March/ April 2010), available from www.archaeology.org/1003/etc/neanderthals.html (Accessed 6 January 2011).

18. For instance, Neanderthal burials with flowers were discovered at Shanidar Cave in Northern Iraq, indicating complex mortuary rituals. See Ralph Solecki, Shanidar: The First Flower People, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971; Owen Edwards, “Beyond Bones: A Rare Cache of Hominid Fossils Offers a Window on Neanderthal Culture”, Smithsonian (March 2010).

19. See discussion in Paul Mellars,Brad Gravina,and Christopher Bronk Ramsey, “Confirmation of Neanderthal/modern human interstratification at the Chatelperronian type-site”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104 (9): 3657–3662 (27 February 2007), available from www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1805566/ (Accessed 7 January 2011).

20. Ann Wuyts, “Rehabilitating the Neanderthals – Accusations Uluzzian Man Took H. Sapiens Tools Prove False”, 22 September 2010, posted at heritage-key.com/blogs/ann/rehabilitating-neanderthals-accusations-uluzzian-man-took-h-sapiens-tools-prove-false (Accessed 7 January 2011); Julien Riel-Salvatore, “A Niche Construction Perspective on the Middle–Upper Paleolithic Transition in Italy”, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 17 (4), 323-355 (2010), available from www.springerlink.com/content/t6g625nx3744766x/ (Accessed 7 January 2011); Anonymous, “Neanderthals More Advanced Than Previously Thought: They Innovated, Adapted Like Modern Humans, Research Shows”, ScienceDaily (22 September 2010), posted at www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100921171412.htm (Accessed 6 January 2011).

21. João Zilhão, Diego E. Angelucci, Ernestina Badal-García, Francesco d’Errico,Floréal Daniel, Laure Dayet, Katerina Douka, Thomas F. G. Higham, María José Martínez-Sánchez, Ricardo Montes-Bernárdez, Sonia Murcia-Mascarós, Carmen Pérez-Sirvent, Clodoaldo Roldán-García, Marian Vanhaeren, Valentín Villaverde, Rachel Wood, and Josefina Zapata, “Symbolic use of marine shells and mineral pigments by Iberian Neandertals”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Published online before print January 11, 2010, www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/01/06/0914088107 (Accessed 7 January 2011); see also supporting material posted at www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2010/01/07/0914088107.DCSupplemental/pnas.200914088SI.pdf (Accessed 7 January 2011).

22. João Zilhão [interview with], “Did Neandertals Think Like Us?”, Scientific American, June 2010, pp. 72-75 (quotation from p. 75); for online version see www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=did-neandertals-think-like-us (Accessed 6 January 2011); PDF of the article available from www.bris.ac.uk/archanth/staff/zilhao/scientificamericanjune2010.pdf (Accessed 10 January 2011).

23. Gooch, The Dream Culture of the Neanderthals, 56.

24. Gooch, The Neanderthal Legacy, 59, italics in the original.

25. Gooch, Cities of Dreams, 5, italics in the original.

26. Gooch, Cities of Dreams, 37.

27. Gooch, The Neanderthal Legacy, 118.

28. Gooch, The Neanderthal Legacy, 118 (Chapter 11 title).

29. Gooch, The Neanderthal Legacy, 131, italics in the original.

30. Gooch, Cities of Dreams, 242 (Chapter 16 title).

31. Gooch, The Dream Culture of the Neanderthals, 92.

32. Note that in some cases well-established species can on occasion interbreed and produce fertile offspring, such as lions and tigers producing hybrids.

33. Gooch considered “Rhodesian Man”, for instance, to be a Neanderthal representative (The Neanderthal Legacy, 11).

34. P. Brown, T. Sutikna, M. J. Morwood, R. P. Soejono, Jatmiko, E. Wayhu Saptomo, and Rokus Awe Due, “A new small-bodied hominin from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia,” Nature 431, 1055-1061 (28 October 2004); available from www-personal.une.edu.au/~pbrown3/nature02999.pdf (Accessed 11 January 2011); see http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v431/n7012/full/nature02999.html (Accessed 29 July 2010).

35. Mark Rose, “Homo erectus Survival”, Archaeology 50 (2) (March/April 1997), available from www.archaeology.org/9703/newsbriefs/h.erectus.html (Accessed 2 January 2011); Hillary Mayell, “Java Skull Raises Questions on Human Family Tree” (27 February 2003), posted at news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0227_030227_javaskull.html (Accessed 6 January 2011); note that, as often used, Homo erectus may be a taxon that includes a collection of closely related species and subspecies.

36. R. Broom, “The Evidence Afforded by the Boskop Skull of a New Species of Primitive Man (Homo capensis)”, Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 23 (2): 63–79 (1918), available from digitallibrary.amnh.org/dspace/bitstream/2246/287/1/A023a02.pdf (Accessed 10 January 2011);  Gary Lynch and Richard Granger, Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; note that there is disagreement as to whether or not Homo capensis represents a distinct species or variety.

37. Anonymous, “Denisovans? Fossil Discovery Is Neither Modern Human Nor Neanderthal”, 22 December 2010, posted at www.science20.com/news_articles/denisovans_fossil_discovery_neither_modern_human_nor_neanderthal (Accessed 28 December 2010); Carl Zimmer, “Siberian Fossils Were Neanderthals’ Eastern Cousins, DNA Reveals”, New York Times, 22 December 2010, available from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/science/23ancestor.html (Accessed 28 December 2010).

38. Hamish Clarke, “DNA confirms Aboriginal Australian origins”, Cosmos Magazine (8 May 2007), available from www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/1286/dna-confirms-aboriginal-australian-origins (Accessed 6 January 2011).

39. Gooch, The Neanderthal Legacy, 72, italics in the original.

40. Richard E. Green, Johannes Krause, Adrian W. Briggs, Tomislav Maricic, Udo Stenzel, Martin Kircher, Nick Patterson, Heng Li, Weiwei Zhai, Markus Hsi-Yang Fritz, Nancy F. Hansen, Eric Y. Durand, Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas, Jeffrey D. Jensen, Tomas Marques-Bonet, Can Alkan, Kay Prüfer, Matthias Meyer, Hernán A. Burbano, Jeffrey M. Good, Rigo Schultz, Ayinuer Aximu-Petri, Anne Butthof, Barbara Höber, Barbara Höffner, Madlen Siegemund, Antje Weihmann, Chad Nusbaum, Eric S. Lander, Carsten Russ, Nathaniel Novod, Jason Affourtit, Michael Egholm, Christine Verna, Pavao Rudan, Dejana Brajkovic, Zeljko Kucan, Ivan Gušic, Vladimir B. Doronichev, Liubov V. Golovanova, Carles Lalueza-Fox, Marco de la Rasilla, Javier Fortea, Antonio Rosas, Ralf W. Schmitz, Philip L. F. Johnson, Evan E. Eichler, Daniel Falush, Ewan Birney, James C. Mullikin, Montgomery Slatkin, Rasmus Nielsen, Janet Kelso, Michael Lachmann, David Reich, and Svante Pääbo, “A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome,” Science 328 (5979), 710-722 (7 May 2010), available from www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/328/5979/710.pdf (Accessed 7 January 2011); Paul Rincon, “Neanderthal genes ‘survive in us’ ”, BBC News (6 May 2010), posted at news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8660940.stm (Accessed 6 January 2011).

41. Paul Rincon, “Neanderthals ‘were flame-haired’ ”, BBC News (25 October 2007), posted at news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7062415.stm (Accessed 7 January 2011); Anonymous, “Ancient DNA Reveals That Some Neanderthals Were Redheads”, ScienceDaily (26 October 2010), posted at www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071025143311.htm (Accessed 7 January 2011).

42. Gooch, The Neanderthal Legacy, 33, italics in the original.

43. Myra Shackley, Still Living? Yeti, Sasquatch and the Neanderthal Enigma, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1983 [Paperback edition, 1986], 161-164.

44. Shackley, Still Living?, 112; this particular Almas, also referred to as an abnauayu, was named Zana and she is further described in: Igor Bourtsev, “A Skeleton Still Buried and a Skull Unearthed: The Story of Zana” (From: In the Footsteps of the Russian Snowman by Dmitri Bayanov, 1996, Moscow, Russia: Crypto-Logos, pp. 46-52), available from www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/zana.htm (Accessed 10 January 2011).

45. Gooch, The Neanderthal Legacy, 132.

46. Gooch’s last three closing words (before the appendices) of The Neanderthal Legacy (page 132). Besides his work on Neanderthals, Gooch made other contributions to the study of ancient history, such as his quite rational suggestion that the ancients could have figured out, based on its approximately 50-year “wobble” (and possibly using simple lenses), that Sirius has a small, dark, heavy companion star (The Dream Culture of the Neanderthals, 227-240). This information was passed down, for instance to the Dogon tribe of Africa, and despite various sensational claims (see Robert Temple, The Sirius Mystery: New Scientific Evidence of Alien Contact 5,000 Years Ago, Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 1998; see also Blair MacKenzie Blake, “Dark Seed: The ABCs of the Sirius Mystery”, Darklore 5, 117-133 [2010]) no alien contact was required.

OANA R. GHIOCEL received an M.A. in Documentary and Audio Production from Emerson College and she holds previous degrees in screenwriting and filmmaking. Born in Bucharest, Romania, she is an award-winning media producer, consultant, and screenwriter, and currently the Vice-President of Hyperion Media Inc. She has done extensive research on Neanderthals and currently is producing a feature-length documentary on the Neanderthal legacy in the Bucegi Mountains of Romania. The documentary includes a presentation and discussion of Stan Gooch’s work on Neanderthals and features on-site research by Dr. Robert M. Schoch in the Bucegi Mountains. The film is expected to be completed in spring/summer 2011, and will be featured in festivals and on television after that.

ROBERT M. SCHOCH received a Ph.D. in Geology and Geophysics from Yale University, and since 1984 has been a full-time faculty member at the College of General Studies of Boston University. His books include the trilogy with R. A. McNally: Voices of the Rocks, Voyages of the Pyramid Builders, and Pyramid Quest. His most recent book is The Parapsychology Revolution: A Concise Anthology of Paranormal and Psychical Research (Compilation and Commentary by Robert M. Schoch and Logan Yonavjak, Tarcher/Penguin, 2008). Dr. Schoch’s personal website is located at: www.robertschoch.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 125 (Mar-Apr 2011).

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Of all the chambers in the Great Pyramid, the subterranean chamber is the largest, as well as the most mysterious. It is 46 feet long, 27 feet wide, hewn into the limestone bedrock, and difficult to describe. The descending passageway’s entrance to the subterranean chamber is near the floor at the northeast corner. A six-foot-wide square pit shaped like a funnel has been tunnelled in the middle of the floor, near the east wall. This square-shaped pit is actually the mouth of a shaft that is eleven feet deep, although in 1816 the Italian explorer Count Caviglia drilled into the pit another thirty feet.

The western half of the chamber has been carved nearly six feet higher than the eastern half and sculpted into several large finlike protrusions. All these finlike protrusions are situated east to west and are nearly as tall as the ceiling. Between the large protrusions, a stepped channel starts at the floor and flows toward the back of the chamber. In its centre there is a channel leading to the western wall. In the southeastern corner, a tunnel known as the “dead end shaft,” thirty inches in height and width, runs south fifty-seven feet, then ends at a wall. There are two other features in the design of the Great Pyramid that appear to be part of the work performed in the bedrock, the well shaft and the “grotto” (see figures 1 & 2)

Figure 1. © Edward Malkowski

Figure 2. © Edward Malkowski

If the subterranean chamber was nothing more than a mistake, and was originally designed to be a burial vault, an enormous amount of resources was wasted. On the other hand, if the chamber was an integral part of the overall design of the Great Pyramid and performed a function, then what could that function possibly be?

Everything from a tomb to temple of initiation to a device of some kind, there’s never been a lack of theories over the years describing what the Great Pyramid of Giza and the other pyramids was originally designed for. What has been lacking, though, is a theory describing why all the ancient Egypt pyramids were built. More importantly, what’s been lacking in any theory is scientific experimentation.

To the best of my knowledge no one has built a scale model of the Great Pyramid. However, without any idea of what the Great Pyramid was, assuming it was a device, there would be no theory to test. Marine engineer, John Cadman, saw something that had been passed over for decades. In 1962, in a book entitled The Pharaoh’s Pump, a man named Edward Kunkel put forth the theory that the Great Pyramid was in its entirety a water pump. Cadman ran across the book one day browsing titles in a used bookstore. Intrigued, he purchased Kunkel’s book and after reading it realised that Kunkel was not far off the mark with his water pump theory. Being familiar with hydraulics and machines that rely on hydraulics, Cadman noticed that the design of the Great Pyramid’s subterranean chamber and its associated tunnels looked familiar.

Cadman’s Experiment

Figure 3. © Edward Malkowski

Before the invention of the electric water pump the ram pump was used to move water from a reservoir to another location through a simple system that had only two moving parts, a weight loaded waste valve and check valve. Under the force of gravity, water in a reservoir flows down the input pipe and forces the waste value closed (see figure 3). With the waste valve closed, water continues to flow down the input pipe increasing the pressure inside the pump. The increased pressure opens the delivery valve forcing water into the output pipe. Since the water is being forced to a higher elevation faster than the water flowing down the input pipe the flow of water reverses which closes the check valve and the process begins again.

Inspired by Kunkel’s work, Cadman learned as much as he could about the Great Pyramid’s subterranean chamber and associated tunnels, and in June of 1999 he made his first model. It leaked then cracked, neither would it function. Several months later he began work on a second model and connected a new line to the bottom of the pit shaft, believing this new line had to be the pressurised output. But the pump still didn’t operate the way he thought it should so he began building a third model which he completed on April 3, 2000, and it worked flawlessly.

What Cadman discovered was that the subterranean chamber absorbed much of the reverse pulse. He also observed that without the subterranean chamber, the reverse pulse was large and the output flow was more erratic, confirming for him that the output in the Great Pyramid’s subterranean chamber travelled through what is called the dead end shaft. It also confirmed his suspicion that the ancient oral tradition that a tunnel exists connecting the subterranean chamber’s pit to the Nile River.

A few weeks later Cadman moved the model to a seasonal creek with a pond serving as a reservoir, and experimented further. To simulate the effect of being underground he encased the pump assembly in concrete (see figures 4 and 5). Interestingly, the action of the pump, which was now embedded in concrete, created a vertical compression wave. This, according to Cadman, meant that the Great Pyramid’s subterranean ram pump also had an acoustical element. So, he built two more models to study the acoustics and fluid dynamics.

The acoustic model, which was made of fibreglass and epoxy and encased in concrete, weighed five hundred pounds. When operating, the characteristic heartbeat-like thump of the pump could be felt through the ground twenty feet away and heard nearly a hundred feet away. Because of the powerful pulses it generated, Cadman named it the “pulse generator.”

Figure 4. © Edward Malkowski

Figure 5. © Edward Malkowski

Cadman constructed a fourth model to study how water moved through the subterranean chamber and could operate in two different modes. This model was fitted with twenty-five individual ink injection locations and a glass top (see figure 6). It had a glass wall on its east side to view water flow, although Cadman discovered that the glass top quickly shattered when the model was operating in pump/pulse mode. Nevertheless, when not in pump/pulse mode, it was clear by studying the movement of water within the modelled subterranean chamber that the flow was complex and precise.

What he discovered was that the sound wave striking the perpendicular surface reflects the majority of the pulse back toward the source. He also discovered that when the fluid jet strikes a perpendicular surface, it spreads in a 360° pattern perpendicular to the jet. Thus, he concluded that the design of the subterranean chamber incorporated fluid dynamics as well as acoustical dynamics. In his own words, “The dynamics are on par with that of computerised storm analysis: somewhere between hurricane dynamics and tornado dynamics.”

Cadman’s model also revealed some performance issues that were built into the Great Pyramid’s subterranean pump. An additional “assist” line, from the compression chamber to a secondary location, speeds the movement of water through the output pipe. It also focuses the shock wave in the line leading to the compression chamber. The result is that a pulse is transmitted through the ceiling of the compression chamber. Thus, the line that connects the waste valve to the compression chamber acts as a waveguide, forcing the shock wave into a pulse. Therefore, the pulse is transmitted vertically (through the ceiling) as well as down the waste-valve line.

Figure 6. © Edward Malkowski

Cadman’s modelling of the subterranean chamber and its tunnels provides a better understanding of the Great Pyramid, as well as the Giza Plateau. In its completed state the Great Pyramid required a moat, which was fed by a system of aqueducts from the Western Nile (the Ur Nile); an ideal source for a gravity-fed water system, since the Western Nile was at a higher elevation than the plateau. It also explains the remains of a retaining wall that once surrounded the pyramid. The wall served as an embankment for an onsite reservoir, which in appearance was a moat. Tunnels, such as the “well” at the pyramid’s entrance, connected the Great Pyramid complex to an ancient lake, Lake Moeris, and the Western Nile.

Lake Moeris (Egyptian Mer-Wer, meaning “Great Lake”) was an ancient lake fifty miles southwest of Cairo. At one time it was very large and occupied the entire Faiyum depression. It was also called the Pure Lake and the Lake of Osiris by the ancient Egyptians. During prehistoric times the waters of Lake Moeris stood nearly 120 feet above sea level, but by 10,000 BCE they had dropped to nearly twenty-five feet below sea level, possibly as a result of the Nile channel being naturally diverted. With increases from rain, between 9000 BCE and 4000 BCE the lake rose again, but gradually subsided. And as the climate became increasingly more arid, a canal connected Lake Moeris to the Nile; over the years it slowly silted. During the Middle Kingdom, 2000 BCE to 1600 BCE, dynastic Egyptians widened and deepened the channel, thereby restoring its flow. At that time the lake was believed to be fifty-five feet above sea level.

There is little doubt that the lake served as a means of flood control as well as a reservoir for irrigation. Egypt’s Ptolemaic kings of the third century BCE partially drained Lake Moeris to make available 450 square miles of rich alluvial soil, which was irrigated by canals and extensive cultivation. Since then the water level of Lake Moeris has continually declined, and it is now the small, shallow saltwater Lake Qārūn.

When the Great Pyramid pulse pump was functioning, the descending passage, subterranean chamber, dead end shaft, pit, well shaft, and grotto made up the components (see figure 7). According to Cadman, it could be operational today if all the tunnels associated with the pyramid could be cleared. Besides the well shaft that connects the descending passage to the middle chamber of the pyramid, there are two other tunnels that would need to be cleared. Clearing the pit associated with the dead end shaft (where the check-valve exists) would expose the horizontal shaft. If these shafts were cleared, the moat reservoir was in place, and the well in front of the pyramid connected to a Lake Moeris substitute, the pump could be operational.

Figure 7. © Edward Malkowski

One of the most important results from Cadman’s experiments was discovering the significance of the well shaft and its effect on the pump’s pulse rate. This specific design issue leads to the intent of the Great Pyramid’s designer. The well shaft begins near the bottom of the descending passageway and extends upward 170 feet. In the water-pump assembly, the well shaft functions as a standpipe, providing a shortcut for the reverse shock wave to reach air. In essence, it maximises the pulse rate of the pump.

Although standpipes are typically twice the diameter of the input (drive) pipe, in the Giza assembly the standpipe (well shaft) is actually 25 percent smaller than the input pipe (descending passageway), which has a peculiar effect on the system. It lowers the elevation of the pulsing water below the water level of the moat reservoir. Interestingly, this specific elevation correlates to the height of the grotto, which serves as a reservoir, allowing for stabilisation and regulation of the reverse pulse. A block of granite, existing within the grotto that fits within the pipe, is believed to function as some type of choke or regulator.

According to Cadman, the well shaft was part of the original design of the pyramid, and as a standpipe in the pump assembly, it served to maximise the pulse rate of the pump. The standpipe also reduced the reverse surge out of the descending passage, as well as reduced pumping efficiency and pulse intensity.

The Importance of Pump Efficiency

Cadman tested four different pump configurations, two circulating and two elevating, to gauge the well shaft’s affect efficiency. When in a circulating-pump mode, the well shaft reduced the efficiency by 29 percent. And, in an elevating-pump mode, the well shaft reduced the efficiency by 68 percent. The increase in efficiency of the well shaft provided an extra twenty pulses per minute, from sixty to eighty. Since the Giza configuration of the subterranean chamber included a well shaft, for the builders of the pyramid, pumping efficiency did not appear to be of primary importance. So if pumping efficiency was not of primary importance then what was?

One way to approach this question is to review the general layout of the subterranean chamber. The subterranean chamber pit is offset by 45° in relation to the general configuration of the chamber and is aligned northwest to southeast. According to Cadman, this is so because a plane placed at a 45° angle will maintain the unidirectionality and consistency of the compression wave. In other words, this reflective elbow ensures the consistency of the compression wave. Any other type of elbow at the pit’s bottom would diffract (scatter) the compression wave. So the pit’s alignment is strictly for acoustical dynamics and for creating a standing wave in the waste line and subterranean chamber.

Figure 8. © Edward Malkowski

To create the standing wave in the waste gate line and subterranean chamber, it would be imperative to have the reflective elbow. The pit’s offset is exactly aligned with the tunnel (see figure 8, right; the red arrow is aligned with the exit tunnel). Not only does the reflective elbow completely explain the pit’s diagonal offset, but it also confirms that the compression wave is a major design consideration. The designers thoroughly understood complex fluid dynamics as well as complex acoustics (see figure 8, right; the red arrow shows the direction of the tunnel at the bottom of the pit; the ink injection photo shows some of the flows in the step area).

Another way to approach the question is to review the engineering significance of the dead end shaft. It allows for a pressure change, which in turn changes the frequency of the compression wave. A gate valve at the end of the dead end shaft provides a means for accomplishing this. Adjusting the back pressure by adjusting the gate valve allows for changes in timing. In essence, this is a simple method to compensate for different water temperatures and atmospheric pressure, which are factors that affect the velocity of the compression wave.

Cadman’s testing demonstrated that the pulse rate can be altered by at least 30 percent, between sixty and eighty pulses per minute. He also discovered that adjusting the back pressure changed the water’s density and, as a consequence, altered the compression wave’s velocity and frequency. In essence, such an assembly allows for easy fine tuning of the lower portion of the Great Pyramid to create the standing wave in the subterranean chamber and waste gate shaft.

These experimental results confirm that the compression wave was a major design consideration. Also, according to Cadman, the square pit carved into the subterranean chamber created a whirlpool as water moved through the system of tunnels – apparently another design feature to efficiently move water to the chamber and out the waste line.

If pump efficiency – in other words, pumping water – was not of prime importance to the ancient Egyptians, then what was? According to the experimental evidence, the answer is a compression wave, which, of course, creates another question. Why was a compression wave of primary interest to the Great Pyramid’s builders?

A New Theory

The question I have always had in the back of my mind concerning the pyramids is one of economics. Resources are resources whether a construction project occurs today or thousands of years ago. Man-hours and tools are required, so is pay for the management team, supervisors, and workers. If it cost 35 billion dollars to build a large structure today it would also cost that much in resources to build the same structure many thousands of years ago, the only difference being the nominal value of money used. In the case of the Great Pyramid that’s 380 billion dollars, according to engineer Markus Schulte of the global design and business consulting firm Arup.1 The limestone blocks for the Great Pyramid, alone, would cost today 18 billion dollars. With such a high dollar amount for a single pyramid, and more than ten were built comparable in size, then there had to be a very good reason why the Great Pyramid and the other pyramids were built, a reason that would benefit the whole of society.

If the Great Pyramid was exclusively a water pump as John Cadman demonstrated in his experiments, then there wouldn’t be a need for another chamber located in the middle of the pyramid and a third chamber located in its upper regions. These chambers as well as the shafts in these two chambers need to be explained.

Assuming Cadman is correct that the compression wave was what the pump was designed for, then the middle and upper chamber would likely have been designed to somehow react with the vibrations emanating from the pump. The upper chamber, known as the King’s Chamber, in its entirety was built from slabs of granite – the floor, walls, and ceiling – and located just above the chamber the builders of the Great Pyramid placed five rows of granite beams. So, it is obvious that granite was of primary importance in the uppermost chamber. The question is why.

The high-fidelity stereo industry uses granite not only to provide a stable base for equipment but also because of its resonance qualities. All materials have a natural resonance frequency meaning that all materials will vibrate at certain frequencies. In the world of high-fidelity, the resonance of other materials in a room distorts the stereo’s sound, including the rack where the components of the sound system are housed. However, with granite as a base for stereo components not only are extraneous sounds dampened, but full sound is produced through the granite’s resonance. And by further isolating the granite base from the stereo rack with rubber washers or other polymer fixtures, the granite’s resonance properties can be further controlled. With this in mind, it might be the case that the purpose of building a granite chamber in the Great Pyramid was to create resonance.

According to Tom Danley, the sound engineer featured in the documentary film The Mystery of the Sphinx, the Great Pyramid makes strange sounds because the granite chamber resonates from the rigidity of the stone. What he also discovered was that a number of low-frequency components existed even without a test signal present in the pyramid implying that the chamber was constructed for its resonance, and that it naturally creates a frequency. Most likely, he added, the low frequencies were a result of “Helmholtz resonances caused by the wind blowing across the entry tunnel.”2

However, a compression wave emanating from the subterranean chamber would likely have a marginal effect on the granite in the upper chamber. What would be needed to localise the granite is a way to transform the compression wave into sound. This would create enough vibration to activate the granite beams and create a standing wave of resonance. With devices such as Helmholtz resonators built into the Grand Gallery those vibrations would become sound and cause the granite to resonate or ‘sing’. The question is ‘why’, to what effect? With shafts leading to the Great Pyramid’s exterior, the ‘singing’ granite would project its sound into the atmosphere. This, in turn, would create an electrical field in the atmosphere according to physics research.

Again, we are left with the question ‘why’? The subtle electrical field created by the Great Pyramid would be of little use for means of powering equipment. However, such a field would deflect very low frequencies (VLF) and extremely low frequencies (ELF), frequencies that exist at all times in the atmosphere as a result of thunderstorms around the world. In agricultural experiments, VLF and ELF have been shown to promote plant growth. With the Great Pyramid operating as the engine, all of the pyramids could be connected by a subtle electrical field to create a canopy of sorts thereby deflecting VLF and ELF into the surrounding fields.

In might sound mundane that the pyramids were agricultural devices, but it provides the best of reasoning for a civilisation to spend an immense amount of resources on any given project. Without food society would gradually fall into anarchy and civilisation would cease to exist.

Illustrations courtesy of © Edward Malkowski.

Footnotes

1. ‘Where Did It Come From? Ancient Egypt: Iconic Structures’, Popular Arts Entertainment, The History Channel, September 21, 2006.

2. “ProSoundWeb Live Chat with Tom Danley,” March 12, 2002, transcript, at www.prosoundweb.com/chat_psw/transcripts/danley3.shtml (Accessed September 29, 2009).

Further information on the above theory and a whole lot more can be found in Edward Malkowski’s new book Ancient Egypt 39,000 BCE: The History, Technology, and Philosophy of Civilization X (Bear & Company, 2010), available from all good bookstores and via www.newdawnbooks.info.

.

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. His interest in the origin of civilisation, particularly the Sphinx and the large monuments of Egypt’s Old Kingdom, as well as the influence Egyptian philosophy and culture exerted in the ancient world, led to his two books Before the Pharaohs and The Spiritual Technology of Ancient Egypt. Edward takes a fresh look at the physical and textual evidence for a technical, prehistoric civilisation in his new 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 13.

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By JOHN MAJOR JENKINS

—

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.

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“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$2.95

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

—

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.

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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!’

.

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).

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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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—

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.

.

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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2012 Creation Date on Tortuguero Monument 6

BY JOHN MAJOR JENKINS

—

Twentytwelvology. You won’t find it in Webster’s dictionary. Not yet. But believe me, before this decade is out, we’ll have that as well as plenty of 2012 -isms and -ographies.

“The 2012 Phenomenon” was recently the subject of a paper written by anthropologist Robert K. Sitler.1 The sub-title of his paper brings focus to his approach: “New Age Appropriation of an Ancient Mayan Calendar.” In his assessment of the writings and statements of popular writers, New Age teachers, and independent researchers (including myself), he sorts the wheat from the chaff and exposes “merely tangential connections to the realities of the Mayan world.” To his credit, he distinguishes the serious work done by myself and Geoff Stray2 from the wild and unfounded speculations of other writers.

Sitler’s area of focus is the Long Count calendar and its 2012 end-date, which is the subject of growing interest and controversy – not so much among academicians, who dismiss it as irrelevant, but among spiritual seekers and people interested in the wisdom attained by ancient civilisations. So, what’s all the clamour and confusion about? What is the Long Count calendar?

The Long Count Calendar

An archeological site that’s been known about for decades preserves an open secret about the culture that invented the Long Count calendar. Izapa, in southern Mexico a few miles from the Guatemala border, was the chief ceremonial observatory of “the Izapan civilisation.”3 It was the transitional culture between the older Olmec civilisation and the emerging Maya, and enjoyed its heyday between 400 BCE and 50 CE. My investigation of Izapa’s carved monuments and the site’s astronomical orientations have revealed a great deal about how they understood the Long Count calendar.4

The earliest monuments carved with Long Count dates were found in the region of Izapa and have been dated to the 1st century BCE. The Long Count notation uses bars to represent 5 and dots to represent 1. Five place values are almost always used, representing the following periods of days:

Kin = 1 day
Uinal = 20 days
Tun = 360 days
Katun = 7,200 days
Baktun = 144,000 days

Thirteen Baktuns equal 5,125 years, which is one World Age in the Maya Creation mythology. The Long Count calendar was recorded on monuments and ceramic vessels for almost a thousand years. Most of the dates refer to local mundane events, like king crowning ceremonies. Some of the Long Count monuments, however, refer to mythological events that occurred at the beginning of the current World Age. Scholars have figured out how the Long Count calendar correlates with our own, so we know that the fabled dawn time – when all the place values were set to zero – occurred on August 11, 3114 BCE. This should be written 0.0.0.0.0 in the Long Count, but the monuments that speak of this date call it 13.0.0.0.0. This is less confusing than it appears, because the two accountings are equivalent. In the same way that 1300 hours (military time) equals 1:00 p.m. (civil time), the Long Count resets to 0 when 13 Baktuns are completed.

This tells us something important about the structure of the Long Count calendar and its chronology of World Ages. Every 13 Baktuns (5,125 years), the Long Count resets to zero. Thus, we should expect that when the Long Count again reaches 13.0.0.0.0, it will reset to zero, the cycle of time will begin anew, and a new World Age will commence. As mentioned, several so-called Creation monuments describe events that occurred in 3114 BCE, during the end-beginning nexus of the previous World Age turnover. The texts associated with these Creation monuments state that “Creation happens at the Black Hole,” at “the Crossroads,” and “the image” will appear in the sky. At that time, a new Solar Age begins and the Sun Lord gets reborn. Creation Lord deities are often portrayed attending the rebirth of the world, including one called Bolon Yokte K’u who is closely associated with God L of the Mayan pantheon.

He is portrayed on the ceramic Vessel of the Seven Lords which contains the date 3114 BCE.5 This doesn’t mean the vessel is 5,120 years old; it simply means that the Classic Period Maya were documenting, around 700 CE, their thoughts about the fabled dawn time.

Mayan Time Philosophy and 2012

Although the philosophy of cycle endings that we find on these Creation monuments refers to past events in 3114 BCE, it can also be applied to the next 13-Baktun cycle ending, which falls on December 21, 2012. Some scholars have been unwilling to accept this analogy, asserting there are no Long Count monuments that refer explicitly to 2012. As we will see, this position can no longer be maintained. Moreover, one scholar understands quite clearly the analogical relationship between the period ending of the previous World Age (in 3114 BCE) and other period endings, great and small, throughout Mayan history: “Zoomorph P and Altar P’ [at Quirigua] were commissioned by Sky Xul as the primary commemorative monuments for his third period ending festival on 9.18.5.0.0 [September 13, 795 CE]. As a celebration of cosmic renewal, the period-ending was considered to be a replay of the events of cosmogenesis, which occurred on 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk’u [13.0.0.0.0 in 3114 BCE].”6 This means that we can identify a generalised principle of the Mayan concept of period endings: each period ending in the Long Count, including all the various place value levels, were seen to be like-in-kind replays of the great period-ending event that occurs at the end of the 13-Baktun period. As such, the next 13-Baktun period-ending (in 2012) should be a big replay of the events described for 3114 BCE. That scenario involves the rebirth of the Sun Lord from the sky-earth cleft.

The belief that we don’t have “direct statements” about 2012 in the archaeological record ignores the plethora of pictographic images at Izapa that portray a rare celestial alignment that appears in the skies in the years around 2012.7 This galactic alignment is the key to understanding 2012, and it involves the rebirth of the December solstice Sun Lord through the Dark Rift “cleft” in the Milky Way, located between Sagittarius and Scorpio.

It is “the image” that appears in the sky during cosmogenesis. My interpretation of the Mayan 2012 date comes from an interdisciplinary examination of the carvings of Izapa, laid out in my book Maya Cosmogenesis 2012. The theory has withstood eight years of debating with scholars, and the ideas are starting to seep into general acceptance. I say “seep” because the unaffiliated source of the breakthroughs will probably go unacknowledged.

The process will most likely follow the sequence mentioned by Thomas Kuhn, in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. First, a radical new theory (often proposed by an independent thinker or outsider) will be ignored by the mainstream scholars. Then, as it starts to make inroads, status quo scholars will vehemently criticise and attack it. Finally, after the truth of the new breakthrough is recognised, they will embrace it as if they knew it all along. The three-stage process often takes decades, but may get turbocharged in respect to 2012, since that date looms so close in our future.

Understanding the New Discoveries

My theory about the 2012 end-date finds contextual support in two recent discoveries. One is a Pre-Classic mural depicting the Creation myth and the other is a hieroglyphic text pointing explicitly to the 13-Baktun cycle end date, December 21, 2012.

The Mayan civilisation rose to prominence some 2,000 years ago, in the jungle forests and mountains of Mesoamerica. The Classic Period stretched from 200 CE to 900 CE. However, archaeologists are finding older sites with all the hallmarks of the Classic Period, so the origins of Mayan civilisation are slowly getting pushed further back in time. One of these sites, San Bartolo in Guatemala’s Peten rainforest, preserves stunning murals of the Maya Creation Myth in what has been called “the New World’s Sistine Chapel.”8 They have now been given the early date of 250 BCE.

Realising that the murals were threatened by looters in the area, archaeologist Bill Saturno recorded the paintings by holding a flatbed scanner sideways against the walls and taking over 350 digital scans. They were digitally pieced together to reveal a very early rendition of the Maya Creation Myth, involving five trees of paradise.

The mural is incomplete in sections, having crumbled over the centuries, but two of the Sacred Trees preserve an interesting feature. Toward the base of the trees we can see a paw sticking out. This feature has been noticed on other portrayals of Mayan Sacred Trees, and has been identified as a jaguar paw, perhaps representing one of the Hero Twins, Xbalanque.

“Balan” means jaguar, similar to “Bolon” (“nine”) and the two terms are often used in word puns. In fact, they are sometimes interchangeable in hieroglyphic passages. The two meanings likewise reinforce each other, as jaguars were night creatures ruled by the nine Lords of the Night. We’ll come back to this in a moment.

Another important fact of the San Bartolo Creation Trees is how closely they resemble trees portrayed at Izapa, the origin place of the Long Count calendar. Upon close examination, we can see that the trees combine caiman and tree symbolism, and the caiman’s head is at the bottom, in the roots of the tree. Izapa Stela 25, 10, and 27 all contain this inverted caiman tree, and are widely acknowledged to represent the Milky Way. The caiman’s mouth represents the “Dark Rift” in the Milky Way – the “Black Hole” of Mayan Creation mythology. Likewise, the Bird Deity in the branches of the San Bartolo trees are often found in the Izapan trees, and represents the Big Dipper constellation.9 He must fall from his tree before the Sun Lord can be reborn at the end of the Age.

This simple comparison means the “Creation Myth” at San Bartolo utilises the same astronomical features the Izapan Creation Myth does. Those features are central to how the 2012 alignment of the solstice Sun and the Milky Way was encoded into Mayan myth.

Another new discovery involves the recent translation of a text from Tortuguero, a Classic Maya site north of Palenque, which explicitly points to December 21, 2012. Drawn by Sven Gronemeyer and translated by Mayan epigrapher David Stuart, the legible part of the text reads: “At the end of 13 Baktuns, on 4 Ahau 3 Kankin, 13.0.0.0.0; something occurs when Bolon Yokte descends.”10

Since the verb glyph describing what happens is effaced, scholars have stated that the text doesn’t really tell us much, but in fact it does.

First off, scholars now have to acknowledge we do have a hieroglyphic text which refers explicitly to the ending of the current 13-Baktun cycle, in 2012. Secondly, a usual suspect in Mayan creation narratives is present, Bolon Yokte. This means that 2012 was thought of as a cosmogenesis, a creation or recreation of the world.

I’ve been arguing this for years, debating doomsayers as well as scholars who would like to think that 2012 is irrelevant within Mayan time philosophy.11 But, as expected, we can now see that 2012 is to be thought of as a world renewal.

We can also determine something very intriguing about the name of the Creation Deity who is present in both 3114 BCE and in 2012 CE. Bolon Yokte means bolon (nine), y- (plural), ok (foot), -te (tree). Although bolon means “nine,” the word is a homophonous pun for balan (jaguar). Mayan folklore and hieroglyphic texts often combine the two designations, for dramatic effect or for emphasising how the Jaguar God is one of the nine Lords of the Night (the Underworld).12 Thus, we have an alternate identification for the Creation Lord Bolon Yokte which means something like “jaguar at the foot/feet of the tree.”

Perhaps the plural “feet” refers to two feet: the foot of the jaguar and the foot of the tree. Thus, the jaguar foot or paw at the foot of the Creation tree likely represents the Creation Lord Bolon Yokte. He was present at the last World Age creation in 3114 BCE and he will be present at the next one, in 2012.

But why is he there? Probably because the spotted jaguar pelt symbolises the stars of night, and the mouth of the jaguar represents the Underworld Portal, which is seen in the sky as the Dark Rift in the Milky Way. This “Black Hole” in which Creation happens also represents the birth cleft of the Great Mother, the Milky Way.

In 2012 the December solstice Sun Lord will have shifted into alignment with the Dark Rift, after making a centuries-long precessional journey though the stars of the night sky. The Sun Lord, and the Age, will be reborn.

Twentytwelvologists, Unite!

We now have a Mayan inscription, from the Classic Period site of Tortuguero, that refers directly to the end of the current World Age of the Long Count calendar. The text indicates the event is to be thought of as a world renewal.

The deity attending the world renewal, Bolon Yokte, was present during the previous World Age shift, in 3114 BCE, and he is a guardian of the portal of rebirth at the Dark Rift “Black Hole” in the Milky Way’s “nuclear bulge” – the Galactic Centre. He waves to us, as the jaguar paw, from behind the base of the Creation Tree on the recently discovered Creation murals from San Bartolo.

These are exciting times as we recover the lost knowledge of the ancient Maya skywatchers. Especially so, since the world-transforming renewal date in the Maya Long Count calendar is right around the corner. That ancient wisdom speaks for a grand precessional paradigm, of how we on Earth experience galactic seasons of change, of how our Sun moves into rebirth at the celestial Black Hole at the base of the Creation Tree.

December 21, 2012 signals the commencement of a new World Age, one that has successfully transformed, purified, and renewed the previous cycle of time. An essential component of this is conscious human participation, a willing openness to the process.

As we pay attention to the changes going on around us and tune into our own evolving journey through the 2012 experience of renewal, we all become twentytwelvologists. Not only by having studied it in the primary sources of Maya Creation texts, but by living it.

Let’s convene in 2013 and share what we’ve learned.

Footnotes:

1. Robert Sitler, “The 2012 Phenomenon: New Age Appropriation of an Ancient Mayan Calendar” in Nova Religio, Vol. 9, Issue 3 (www.ucpress.edu/journals/nr/).
2. Geoff Stray, Beyond 2012: Catastrophe or Ecstasy? A Complete Guide to End-of-Time Predictions, Vital Signs Publishing, 2005. See also his extensive Diagnosis 2012 website www.diagnosis2012.co.uk
3. Michael Coe, Mexico, Thames & Hudson, 1962, pp. 99-101.
4. John Major Jenkins, Maya Cosmogenesis 2012, Bear & Company, 1998.
5. Michael Coe, “The Hero Twins: Myth and Image” in The Maya Vase Book, ed. Justin Kerr, Kerr Associates, 1989.
6. Matthew G. Looper, “Quirigua Zoomorph P: A Water Throne and Mountain of Creation” in Heart of Creation: The Mesoamerican World and the Legacy of Linda Schele, ed. Andrea Stone, University of Alabama Press, 2002, p. 199.
7. See http://alignment2012.com/mayan2012statements.html.
8. William Saturno, “The Dawn of Maya Gods and Kings” in National Geographic, January 2006.
9. Freidel David, Linda Schele, and Joy Parker, Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path, William Morrow and Company, 1993; David Kelley, “Mesoamerican Astronomy and the Maya Calendar Correlation Problem” in Memorias del Segundo Coloquio Internacional de Mayistas 1:65-95, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1989; Barbara Tedlock, Time and the Highland Maya, University of New Mexico Press, 1982.
10. See the “Tortuguero” thread at http://groups.google.com/group/utmesoamerica; Sven Gronemeyer’s website www.sven-gronemeyer.de/
11. The argument that a 20-Baktun period has precedence over a 13-Baktun period is faulty. See http://alignment2012.com/app5.htm
12. In fact, Bolon Yokte is associated with one of the three primary gods of the Mayan pantheon, called the Triad Gods. At Izapa, the three primary monument groups are associated with three cosmic centres (zenith, polar, and galactic) presided over by three avatars or deities. For more on the triad cosmology pioneered at Izapa, see chapter 21 in Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 and http://Alignment2012.com/bolon-yokte.html.

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 (co-authored with Marty Matz). 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 97 (July-August 2006).

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

Many New Dawn readers will know of British writer Christopher Knight from his first book The Hiram Key, which he co-authored with Robert Lomas and published in 1996.

Quickly becoming a best seller, The Hiram Key was acclaimed a classic in the field of alternative history, going on to influence a generation of researchers among them The Da Vinci Code’s Dan Brown.

In the last ten years Knight has written six books, four with Robert Lomas and two, including his latest Who Built the Moon?, with Alan Butler. In Who Built the Moon?, Knight and Butler raise some fascinating and challenging questions, foremost: Could it be that the Moon is artificial? Could it even be hollow? And does the Moon really exist through some happy accident, or is a blueprint apparent – and if so, who was the architect? New Dawn recently spoke with Christopher Knight about his controversial new book and his astonishing conclusions.
– New Dawn

NEW DAWN: All of mankind’s visits to the Moon have not answered some of the most basic questions about its origin and importance. Your new book Who Built the Moon? (co-authored with Alan Butler) brings to light some extraordinary facts about the Moon, and comes to a mind-blowing conclusion about its origin. Could you briefly outline some of these little known and ignored facts?

CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: The Moon sits very close to the Earth yet it is widely regarded as the strangest object in the known universe. It is a bit like knowing that every person in the world is completely normal except the person you live next door to, who has three heads and lives on a diet of broken razor blades.

The book lists the strangeness of the Moon, which includes the fact that it does not have a solid core like every other planetary object. It is either hollow or has a very low-density interior. Bizarrely, its concentration of mass are located at a series of points just under its surface – which caused havoc with early lunar spacecraft. The material the Moon is made from came from the outer surface of the Earth and left a shallow hole that filled with water and we now call the Pacific. This rock left the Earth to produce the Moon very quickly after our planet had formed around 4,6 billion years ago.

The Moon is not only extremely odd in its construction; it also behaves in a way that is nothing less than miraculous. It is exactly four hundred times smaller than the Sun but four hundred times closer to the Earth so that both the Sun and the Moon appear to be precisely the same size in the sky – which gives us the phenomenon we call a total eclipse. Whilst we take this for granted it has been called the biggest coincidence in the universe.

Furthermore, the Moon mirrors the movement of the Sun in the sky by rising and setting at the same point on the horizon as the Sun does at opposite solstices. For example, this means the Moon rises at midwinter at the same place the Sun does at midsummer. There is no logical reason why the Moon mimics the Sun in this way and it is only meaningful to a human standing on the Earth.

ND: What led you to write Who Built the Moon? And does this latest book relate to your earlier research when writing Civilization One and Uriel’s Machine?

CK: All of the six books I have had published over the last ten years are part of a continued single piece of research. I came to write Who Built the Moon?with Alan Butler after we had finished Civilization One, because our research led us to study the Moon very closely.

We had found that the superbly advanced measuring system in use over 5,000 years ago was based on the mass, dimensions and movements of the Earth.

However, for thoroughness we checked every planet and moon in the solar system to see if there was any pattern. Amazingly, it worked perfectly for every aspect of the Moon but did not apply at all to any other known body – except the Sun.

It was as though we had found a blueprint where the Moon had been ‘manufactured’ using very specific units taken from Earth’s relationship with the Sun. The more we looked, everything fitted – and fitted perfectly in every conceivable way.

ND: Most astoundingly, you found that an ancient system of geometry and measurement used in the Stone Age works perfectly on the Moon. What exactly is this system and how could the ancients have attained this knowledge?

CK: It is not possible to describe the greatness of this ancient system of geometry and measurement without repeating the content of Civilization One.

The work of Alexander Thom, a brilliant professor of engineering from Oxford University, was our starting point. He identified the existence of what he called the Megalithic Yard. This was a precise unit of measurement that was the basis of late Stone Age structures across Western Europe – such as Stonehenge. Most archaeologists have written his work off as a mistake but when one looks coldly at their objections they are baseless.

Alan and I were able to show how they made these highly precise linear units based on the rotation of the Earth and how they were also the basis of all time, capacity and weight units in use today. Once again these are exact – not approximations or close fits.

Where the ancients got such knowledge is quite baffling. All we can be certain of is that they were way ahead of us today! It’s easy to check out by anyone with a calculator.

ND: Your conclusion is there are more than enough anomalies about the Moon to suggest it is not a naturally occurring body and was quite possibly engineered to sustain life on Earth. How did you reach this conclusion?

CK: Not only is the Moon an apparently impossible object, it has some unique benefits for us humans. It has been nothing less than an incubator for life. If the Moon was not exactly the size, mass and distance that it has been at each stage of the Earth’s evolution – there would be no intelligent life here. Scientists are agreed that we owe everything to the Moon.

It acts as a stabiliser that holds our planet at just the right angle to produce the seasons and keep water liquid across most of the planet. Without our Moon the Earth would be as dead and solid as Venus.

ND: If the Moon is an artificial construct, what are your theories on who or what built it, and why?

CK: In Who Built the Moon? we explain that we could not come to any other conclusion than the Moon is artificial. Because it is certain that it is 4.6 billion years old that raises some interesting points. Another factor was the obvious message that has been built into the Moon to tell us it’s artificial. The language of the message is base ten arithmetic so it looks as though it is directed to a ten digit species that is living on Earth right now – which seems to mean humans.

The question of why the Moon had to be built is easy to answer: To produce all life, especially humans. As to who did it – well that’s a lot tougher! We give the three possibilities we can think of, namely: God, aliens or humans. The only one of these that is 100% scientifically possible is the last one. Time travel is universally accepted as being physically possible and a number of scientists are close to sending matter back in time. We can envisage that machines could be built in the future that could be sent back to remove matter from the young Earth to construct the Moon – probably using mini black hole technology.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 96 (May-June 2006).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
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