FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS (THE REAL ANGELS)
PLEIADES:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A55XzotDqE0&feature=related
PLEIADES: [pl ə dz] npl
1. 7 daughters of Atlas: in Greek mythology, the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione who were pursued by Orion and were turned into a constellation to escape him
2. cluster of stars: a cluster of more than 300 STARS in the constellation TAURUS, several of which are blue-white giants visible to the naked eye
[14th century. Via Latin < Greek ]
Encarta ® World English Dictionary © & (P) 1998-2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
1. mythological giant: in Greek mythology, a giant and hunter, the son of the sea god Poseidon, who was killed by the goddess Artemis and transformed into a constellation
2. equatorial constellation: a constellation near the celestial equator containing the Great Nebula and more than 200 STARS visible to the naked eye
Encarta ® World English Dictionary © & (P) 1998-2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheyKNOWandYOUdont
Uploaded by TheyKNOWandYOUdont on May 28, 2011
The descent of light and shadow on the Pyramid of Kukulcán is an annual reminder of the sun-Pleiades-zenith conjunction that occurs during a seasonal window of 72 years, (1976 - 2048) over Chichén Itzá. In the middle of this seasonal window is 2012, when the Great Cycle ends.
The passage of the zenith will combine with two solar eclipses, the first on May 20, 2012.
This day on the Tzolkin is 10 Chicchan, which means "serpent". The second is on November 13. The winter solstice end-point will be 4 Ahau in the Tzolkin calendar, meaning Lord/Sun, and 3 Kankin in the Haab calendar, which means 'snake-day'.
THE DAY WILL BE LIKE NIGHT.........the number 20 is the MOST SACRED number of the Mayan...they say its because they had 10 fingers and 10 toes....but that makes zero sense(all conjecture.) seeing how the divine child himself had 6 fingers and 6 toes..Chilam Balam { The Jaguar Priest }...yes BAAL
THINK about it...these are ASTRONOMICAL GENIUS'S.... yeah? That's what I'm told....
So why are they counting on their toes and fingers like a bunch of pre-k children...gimme a break.
THE DAY WILL BE LIKE NIGHT..............
_____________________________________________________
Amos 5:7 Ye who turn Judgement to Wormwood, and leave off righteousness in the earth.
Amos 5:8
SEEK HIM that maketh the seven stars and Orion(God of Job), and turneth the shadow of death into the morning(star), and make the day dark with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth....The Lord is his name:
The passage of the zenith will combine with two solar eclipses, the first on May 20, 2012.
This day on the Tzolkin is 10 Chicchan, which means "serpent". The second is on November 13. The winter solstice end-point will be 4 Ahau in the Tzolkin calendar, meaning Lord/Sun, and 3 Kankin in the Haab calendar, which means 'snake-day'.
THE DAY WILL BE LIKE NIGHT.........the number 20 is the MOST SACRED number of the Mayan...they say its because they had 10 fingers and 10 toes....but that makes zero sense(all conjecture.) seeing how the divine child himself had 6 fingers and 6 toes..Chilam Balam { The Jaguar Priest }...yes BAAL
THINK about it...these are ASTRONOMICAL GENIUS'S.... yeah? That's what I'm told....
So why are they counting on their toes and fingers like a bunch of pre-k children...gimme a break.
THE DAY WILL BE LIKE NIGHT..............
_____________________________________________________
Amos 5:7 Ye who turn Judgement to Wormwood, and leave off righteousness in the earth.
Amos 5:8
SEEK HIM that maketh the seven stars and Orion(God of Job), and turneth the shadow of death into the morning(star), and make the day dark with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth....The Lord is his name:
It is therefore clear that we are confronted here by the manifestation of a deliberate planning decision: one intended to be recognizable as such by any culture which had acquired,
(b) an accurate knowledge of the rate of precessional motion
Their hallmark seems to have been precession—perhaps because they liked its mathematical regularity and predictability—and they used precession to devise a plan which could be understood properly only by a scientifically advanced culture.
Ours is such a culture, and Robert Bauval is the first to have worked out the basic parameters of the plan—a discovery for which he has received public acclaim and will in due course, get the scientific recognition he deserves.1
1 Robert Bauval’s The Orion Mystery (Heinemann, London; Crown, New York; Doubleday, Canada; List, Germany; Planeta, Spain; Pygmalion, France, etc.) was an international bestseller when it was published in 1994. Egyptologists closed ranks against its implications, which they refused to discuss, but many distinguished astronomers hailed Bauval’s findings as a breakthrough.
The Orion Mystery
The roots of Bauval’s discoveries at Giza go back to the 1960s when the Egyptologist and architect Dr. Alexander Badawy and the American astronomer Virginia Trimble demonstrated that the southern shaft of the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid was targeted like a gun-barrel on the Belt of Orion during the Pyramid Age—around 2600 to 2400 BC.2
Bauval decided to test the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber, which Badawy and Trimble had not investigated, and established that it had been sighted on the star Sirius during the Pyramid Age. The evidence that proved this was provided by the German engineer Rudolf Gantenbrink as a result of measurements taken by his robot Upuaut in March 1993.
As Bauval explains:
He’d measured that at 45 degrees exactly, whereas Badawy and Trimble had worked with Flinders Petrie’s slightly less accurate measurement of 44° 30’. The new data enabled me to refine Badawy’s and Trimble’s date for the alignment. What I found was that the shaft had been precisely targeted on Al Nitak, the lowest of the three belt stars, which crossed the meridian at altitude 45 degrees around the year 2475 BC.
2 Virginia Trimble, cited in The Orion Mystery, p. 241.
4 Personal communications/interviews, 1993-4.
5 Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.
As the reader is aware, however, Bauval had also made another discovery of an altogether more unsettling nature. Once again it involved the stars of Orion’s Belt:
This pattern is mimicked on the ground where we see that the Pyramid of Menkaure is offset by exactly the right amount to the east of the principal diagonal formed by the Pyramid of Khafre (which represents the middle star, Al Nilam) and the Great Pyramid, which represents Al Nitak. It’s really quite obvious that all these monuments were laid out according to a unified site plan that was modelled with extraordinary precision on those three stars. ... What they did at Giza was to build Orion’s Belt on the ground.’
First, and purely by chance, the Milky Way, as visible from Giza in 10,450 BC, exactly duplicated the meridional course of the Nile Valley; secondly, to the west of the Milky Way, the three stars of Orion’s Belt were at the lowest altitude in their precessional cycle, with Al Nitak, the star represented by the Great Pyramid, crossing the meridian at 11° 08’.
Precession and the stars of Orion’s belt.
6 Personal communications/interviews.
7 Skyglobe 3.6.
8 Personal communications/interviews.
Thus from its highest point at meridian transit (58° 11’ above the southern horizon as viewed from Giza) it takes Al Nitak about 13,000 years to descend to the low point, last registered in 10,450 BC, that is immortalized in stone on the Giza plateau—i.e. 11° 08’. As another 13,000 years pass, the belt stars very slowly rise again until Al Nitak is back at 58° 11’; then during the next 13,000 years they gradually fall once more to 11° 08’. This cycle is eternal: 13,000 years up, 13,000 years down, 13,000 years up, 13,000 years down, for ever. 9
It’s the precise configuration for 10,450 BC that we see on the Giza plateau—as though a master-architect came here in that epoch and decided to lay out a huge map on the ground using a mixture of natural and artificial features. He used the meridional course of the Nile Valley to depict the Milky Way, as it looked then. He built the three pyramids to represent the three stars, exactly as they looked then.
10 Personal communications/interviews.
The First Time
I found the implications of the Orion correlation complicated and eerie.
On the one hand, the Great Pyramid’s southern shafts ‘precessionally anchored’ the monument to Al Nitak and Sirius in 2475-2400 BC, dates which coincided comfortably with the epoch when Egyptologists said the monument had been built.
On the other hand the disposition of all three of the pyramids in relation to the Nile Valley eloquently signalled the much earlier date of 10,450 BC. This coincided with the controversial geological findings John West and Robert Schoch had made at Giza, which suggested the presence of a high civilization in Egypt in the eleventh millennium BC.
I knew that Bauval believed this astronomical event to have been linked symbolically to the mythical First Time of Osiris—the time of the gods, when civilization had supposedly been brought into the Nile Valley—and that his reasoning for this derived from the mythology of Ancient Egypt which directly associated Osiris with the Orion constellation (and Isis with Sirius).11
11 See Chapters Forty-two to Forty-four.
Had the historical archetypes for Osiris and Isis actually come here in the First Time, twelve and a half thousand years ago?12 My research into Ice Age mythologies had persuaded me that certain ideas and memories could linger in the human psyche for many millennia, transmitted from generation to generation by oral tradition. I could therefore see no prima facie reasons why the Osirian mythology, with its strange and anomalous characteristics, should not have originated as far back as 10,450 BC.
12 ‘The Egyptians ... believed that they were a divine nation, and that they were ruled by kings who were themselves gods incarnate; their earliest kings, they asserted, were actually gods, who did not disdain to live on earth, and to go about up and down through it, and to mingle with men.’ The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, p. 3.
However, it was the civilization of dynastic Egypt that had elevated Osiris to the status of the high god of resurrection. That civilization was one that had few known antecedents, and none at all recognizable in the remote epoch of the eleventh millennium BC.
And had this culture also been responsible for both the astronomical alignments proven to have been manifested by the pyramids: 10,450 BC and 2450 BC?
Positioned beside the eastern face of the Second Pyramid, the largely ruined Mortuary Temple was a spooky, grey, cold place to be at this hour. And as John West had indicated during our conversation at Luxor, there could be little doubt that it belonged to the same severe, imposing and unadorned style of architecture as the better-known Valley Temple. Here, at any rate, were the same enormous blocks, weighing 200 tons or more each.13
And here too was the same intangible atmosphere of vast antiquity and awakening intelligence, as though some epiphany might be at hand. Even in its present, much despoiled state, this anonymous structure, which Egyptologists had called a Mortuary Temple, was still a place of power that seemed to draw its energy from an epoch far in the past.
I looked up at the huge mass of the Second Pyramid’s eastern face just behind us in the pearl-grey dawn light. Again, as John West had pointed out, there was much to suggest that it might have been built in two different stages. The lower courses, up to a height of perhaps thirty feet, consisted largely of cyclopean limestone megaliths like those in the temples. Above this height, however, the remainder of the pyramid’s gigantic core had been formed out of much smaller blocks weighing around two to three tons each (like the majority of the blocks in the Great Pyramid).
In other words, was it possible that the Second Pyramid’s lower courses might have been built first, before the other pyramids—perhaps long before, in a much earlier age?
The cult
That question was still on my mind when Robert Bauval arrived. After exchanging a few chilly pleasantries about the weather—a cold desert wind was blowing across the plateau—I asked him,
‘Gap?’
‘Yes; shafts that seem to have been aligned in 2450 BC and a site-plan that maps star positions in 10,450 BC.’
‘Actually, I see two explanations that both make some kind of sense,’ said Bauval, ‘and I think the answer has to be one or the other of these ... Either the pyramids were designed as a sort of “star-clock” to mark two particular epochs, 2450 and 10,450 BC, in which case we actually can’t say when they were built. Or they were built up over ...’
‘Hang on with that first point,’ I interrupted. ‘How do you mean “starclock”? How do you mean we can’t say when they were built?’
‘Well, let’s assume for a moment that the pyramid builders knew precession. Let’s assume they were able to calculate the declination of particular star-groups backwards and forwards in time, just as we can today with computers ... Assuming they could do that then, no matter which epoch they lived in, they’d have been able to make a model of what the skies over Giza looked like in 10,450 BC or 2450 BC as required, just as we could. In other words, if they’d built the pyramids in 10,450 BC they would have had no difficulty in calculating the correct angles of inclination for the southern shafts so that they would be sighted on Al Nitak and Sirius around 2450 BC.
Likewise, if they’d lived in 2450 BC they’d have had no difficulty in calculating the correct site-plan to reflect the position of Orion’s Belt in 10,450 BC. Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’
‘OK. That’s one explanation. But the second explanation, which I personally favour—and which I think the geological evidence also supports—is that the whole Giza necropolis was developed and built up over an enormously long period of time. I think it’s more than possible that the site was originally planned and laid out at around 10,450 BC, so that its geometry would reflect the skies as they looked then, but that the work was completed, and the shafts of the Great Pyramid aligned, around 2450 BC.’
‘So you’re saying that the ground-plan of the Pyramids could date back to 10,450 BC?
‘I think it does. And I think that the geometrical centre of that plan was located more or less where we’re standing now, right in front of the Second Pyramid ...’
Bauval shrugged.
‘For example?’
‘Well, obviously the astronomical alignments of the site. I’ve been among the first to start looking into those properly. And the geology: the work that John West and Robert Schoch have been involved in at the Sphinx. Here are two sciences—both hard, empirical, evidence-driven sciences—that have never been applied to these problems before. But now that we have started to apply them, we’re beginning to get a whole new reading on the antiquity of the necropolis.
And I honestly think we’ve just scratched the surface and that much more will emerge from the geology and the astronomy in the future. In addition, nobody’s yet made a really detailed study of the Pyramid Texts from anything other than the so-called “anthropological” perspective, which means a preconceived notion that the priests of Heliopolis were a bunch of half-civilized witch-doctors who wanted to live for ever ...
Actually they did want to live for ever but they certainly weren’t witch-doctors ... They were highly civilized, highly initiated men and they were, in their own fashion, scientists, as we can judge from their works. Therefore I suggest that it’s as scientific or at least quasi-scientific documents that
What’s needed is a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding the Pyramid Texts ... and to understanding the pyramids themselves. Astronomers, mathematicians, geologists, engineers, architects, even philosophers to deal with the symbolism—everybody who can bring a fresh eye and fresh skills to bear on these very important problems should be encouraged to do so.’
‘Why do you feel the problems are so important?’
‘Because they have a colossal bearing on our understanding of the past of our own species. The very careful, very precise site-planning and setting-out that appears to have been done here in 10,450 BC could only have been the work of a highly-evolved, probably technological civilization. ...’
‘Whereas no such civilization is supposed to have existed anywhere on earth in that epoch ...’
‘Exactly. It was the Stone Age. Human society was supposed to have been at a very primitive level, with our ancestors wearing skins, sheltering in caves, following a hunting-gathering way of life and so on and so forth.
So its rather unsettling to discover that civilized people seem to have been present in Giza in 10,450 BC, who understood the obscure science of precession extremely well, who had the technical capacity to work out that they were witnessing the lowest point in Orion’s precessional cycle—and thus the beginning of the constellation’s 13,000 year upwards journey—and who set out to create a permanent memorial of that moment here on the plateau. By putting Orion’s Belt on the ground in the way they did they knew that they were freezing a very specific moment in time.’
‘Which is also a precessional metaphor ...’
‘Yes. Precession again. Most peculiar the way it always keeps cropping up ... At any rate, you’re right, they could have been marking the beginning of the previous precessional cycle ...’
‘But do you think they were?’
‘No. I think 10,450 BC is the more likely date. It’s more within the range of what we know about the evolution of homo sapiens. And although it still leaves a lot of years to account for before the sudden emergence of dynastic Egypt around 3000 BC, it isn’t too long a period ...’
‘Too long a period for what?’
‘It’s the answer to your question about the 8000-year gap between the alignment of the site and the alignment of the shafts. Eight thousand years is a very long time but it isn’t too long for a dedicated highly motivated cult to have preserved and nurtured and faithfully passed on the high-knowledge of the people who invented this place in 10,450 BC.’
Also Sacred Science; pp. 103-4, explains that the construction of temples in the Ptolemaic and late periods of Egyptian history continued to obey very ancient specifications: ‘All the plans always refer to a divine book; thus the temple of Edfu was rebuilt under the Ptolemies according to the book of foundation composed by Imhotep, a book descended from heaven to the north of Memphis. The temple of Dendera followed a plan recorded in ancient writings dating from the Companions of Horus.’
The machine
How high was the knowledge of those prehistoric inventors?
‘Do you think they also knew that they were marking out the site of the Great Pyramid on latitude 30° North?’
Bauval laughed:
I get the feeling that everything was planned, intended, carefully worked out ... Indeed I get the feeling that they were fulfilling a long-term objective—some kind of purpose, if you like, and that they brought this to fruition in the third millennium BC ...
‘In the form of the fully built pyramids which they then precessionally anchored to Al Nitak and to Sirius at the time of completion?’
‘Yes. And also, I think, in the form of the Pyramid Texts. My guess is that the Pyramid Texts are part of the puzzle.’
‘The software to the Pyramids’ hardware?’
‘Quite possibly. Why not? At any rate it’s certain that there’s a connection. I think what it means is that if we’re going to decode the pyramids properly then we’re going to have to use the Texts ...’
‘What’s your guess?’ I asked Bauval. ‘What do you think the purpose of the pyramid builders really might have been?’
‘They didn’t do it because they wanted an eternal tomb,’ he replied firmly. ‘In my view, they had no doubts at all that they would eternally live. They did it—whoever did it—they have transmitted the power of their ideas through something that is to all intents and purposes eternal. They succeeded in creating a force that is functional in itself, provided you understand it, and that force is the questions it challenges you to ask. My guess is that they knew the human mind to perfection. They knew the game of ritual ... Right?
I’m serious. They knew what they were doing. They knew that they could initiate people far ahead in the future into their way of thinking even though they couldn’t be there themselves. They knew that they could do this by creating an eternal machine, the function of which was to generate questions.’
Bauval exclaimed, ‘the whole of the Giza necropolis really. And look at us. What are we doing? We’re asking questions. We’re standing out here, shivering, at an ungodly hour, watching the sun come up, and we’re asking questions, lots and lots of questions just as we’ve been programmed to do.
We’re in the hands of real magicians here, and real magicians know that with symbols—with the right symbols, with the right questions—they can lead you into initiating yourself. Provided, that is, you are a person who asks questions. And, if you are, then the minute you start asking questions about the pyramids you begin to stumble into a whole series of answers which lead you to other questions, and then more answers until finally you initiate yourself ...’
‘Sow the seed ...’
‘Yes. They were sowing the seed. Believe me, they were magicians, and they knew the power of ideas ... They knew how to set ideas growing and developing in people’s minds. And if you start with such ideas, and follow the process of reasoning like I did, you arrive at things like Orion, and 10,450 BC. In short, this is a process that works on its own. When it enters, when it settles into the subconscious, it is a self-willing conversion. Once it’s there you can’t even resist it ...’
‘You’re talking as though this Giza cult, whatever it was—revolving around precession, and geometry, and the pyramids, and the Pyramid Texts—you’re talking as though it still exists.’
‘In a sense it does still exist,’ Robert replied. ‘Even if the driver is no longer at the wheel, the Giza necropolis is still a machine that was designed to provoke questions.’
The minute you ask a question about it you’ve asked a question about engineering, you’ve asked a question about geometry, you’ve asked a question about astronomy. So it forces you to learn about engineering and geometry and astronomy, and gradually you begin to realize how sophisticated it is, how incredibly clever and skilful and knowledgeable its builders must have been, which forces you to ask questions about mankind, about human history, eventually about yourself too. You want to find out. This is the power of the thing.’
The second signature
As Robert, Santha and I sat out on the Giza plateau that cold December morning at the end of 1993, we watched the winter sun, now very close to solstice, rising over the right shoulder of the Sphinx, almost as far south of east as it would travel on its yearly journey before turning north again.
The Sphinx was an equinoctial marker, with its gaze directed precisely at the point of sunrise on the vernal equinox. Was it, too, part of the Giza ‘grand plan’?
I reminded myself that in any epoch, and at any period of history or prehistory, the Sphinx’s due east gaze would always have been sighted on the equinoctial rising of the sun, at both the vernal and the autumnal equinoxes. As the reader will recall from Part V, however, it was the vernal equinox that was considered by ancient man to be the marker of the astronomical age.
In our own lifetimes, the epoch of AD 2000, a more suitable shape for such a marker—should anyone wish to build one—would be a representation of a fish. This is because the sun on the vernal equinox rises against the stellar background of Pisces, as it has done for approximately the last 2000 years.
The astronomical Age of Pisces began around the time of Christ.16 Readers must judge for themselves whether it is a coincidence that the principal symbol used for Christ by the very early Christians was not the cross but the fish.17
During the preceding age, which broadly-speaking encompassed the first and second millennia BC, it was the constellation of Aries—the Ram— which had the honour of carrying the sun on the vernal equinox. Again, readers must judge whether it is a coincidence that the religious iconography of that epoch was predominantly ram-oriented.18 Is it a coincidence, for example, that Yahweh, God of Old Testament Israel, provided a ram as a substitute for Abraham’s offered sacrifice of his son Isaac?19 (Abraham and Isaac are assumed by biblical scholars and archaeologists to have lived during the early second millennium BC20).
The immediate predecessor to the Age of Aries was the Age of Taurus— the Bull—which spanned the period between 4380 and 2200 BC.24 It was during this precessional epoch, when the sun on the vernal equinox rose in the constellation of Taurus, that the Bull-cult of Minoan Crete flourished.25 And during this epoch, too, the civilization of dynastic Egypt burst upon the historical scene, fully formed, apparently without antecedents.
Why should an equinoctial marker have been made in the form of a lion?
I looked down the slope of the Giza plateau towards the great leonine body of the Sphinx.
Khafre, the Fourth Dynasty pharaoh believed by Egyptologists to have carved the monument out of bedrock around 2500 BC, had been a monarch of the Age of Taurus. For almost 1800 years before his reign, and more than 300 years after it, the sun on the vernal equinox rose unfailingly in the constellation of the Bull.
Why, therefore, should an equinoctial marker have been made in the shape of a lion? Because it was made during the Age of Leo when the sun on the vernal equinox rose against the stellar background of the constellation of the Lion, thus marking the coordinates of a precessional epoch that would not experience its ‘Great Return’ for another 26,000 years.
Around 10,450 BC the three stars of Orion’s Belt reached the lowest point in their precessional cycle: west of the Milky Way, 11° 08’ above the southern horizon at meridian transit. On the ground west of the Nile, this event was frozen into architecture in the shape of the three pyramids of Giza. Their layout formed the signature of an unmistakable epoch of precessional time.
Around 10,450 BC, the sun on the vernal equinox rose in the constellation of Leo. On the ground at Giza, this event was frozen into architecture in the shape of the Sphinx, a gigantic, leonine, equinoctial marker which, like the second signature on an official document, could be taken as a confirmation of authenticity.
The eleventh millennium BC, in other words, soon after the ‘Mill of Heaven’ broke, shifting sunrise on the spring equinox from Virgo into the constellation of Leo, was the only epoch in which the due east facing Sphinx would have manifested exactly the right symbolic alignment on exactly the right day—watching the vernal sun rising in the dawn sky against the background of his own celestial counterpart ...
Looking due east at dawn on the vernal equinox in 10,450 BC.
The Sphinx and the constellation of Leo.
‘Obviously because it was an important time for them,’ suggested Santha.
‘It must have been very, very important. You don’t do something like this, create a series of vast precessional markers like these, carve a Sphinx, put up three pyramids weighing almost 15 million tons, unless you have some hugely important reason. So the question is: what was that reason? They’ve forced this question by making such a strong, imperative statement about 10,450 BC. Really, they’ve forced the question. They want to draw our attention to 10,450 BC and it’s up to us to work out why.’
Back to Contents or Back to La Tierra de Kem (El Egipto)
Part VIII
Conclusion
Where’s the Body?
Where’s the Body?
Chapter 50 - Not a Needle in a Haystack
When I was only a few months into this investigation, my research assistant sent me a fifteen-page letter explaining why he had decided to resign. At that stage I hadn’t yet begun to put the pieces of the puzzle together and I was working more on hunches than on hard evidence.
I was captivated by all the mysteries, anomalies, anachronisms and puzzles, and wanted to learn as much about them as I could. My researcher, meanwhile, had been looking into the long, slow processes by which some known civilizations had come into global history.
It transpired that, in his opinion, certain significant economic, climatic, topographical and geographical preconditions had to be met before a civilization could evolve:
This is a landmass as big as the Gulf of Mexico, or twice the size of Madagascar. It would have had major mountain ranges, huge river systems and a Mediterranean to sub-tropical climate which was buffered by its latitude from the adverse effects of short-term climatic cooling.
It would have needed this relatively undisturbed climate to last for around ten thousand years ... Then the population of several hundred thousand sophisticated people, we are to believe, suddenly vanished, together with their homeland, leaving very little physical trace, with only a few surviving individuals who were shrewd enough to see the end coming, wealthy enough and in the right place, with the resources they needed to be able to do something about escaping the cataclysm.
Geophysical impossibilities
The problem was a serious one and it continued to nag at the back of my mind all the way through my own research and travels. It was, indeed, this exact problem, more than any other, which had scuppered Plato’s Atlantis as a serious proposition for scholars. As one critic of the lost continent theory put it:
The adamant and assertive tone, I had long ago learnt, was entirely justified. Modern oceanographers had thoroughly mapped the floor of the Atlantic Ocean and there was definitely no lost continent lurking there.
But if the evidence that I was gathering did represent the fingerprints of a vanished civilization, a continent had to have got lost somewhere,
I had plans to go chasing rumours of ancient pyramids in the Maldive Islands and along the Somali coast of East Africa to see if I could pick up any clues of a lost paradise of antiquity. I thought I might even work in a trip to the Seychelles.
Yet, as my research continued, the evidence kept mounting that precisely such a civilization had once existed. I began to suspect that it must have been a maritime civilization: a nation of navigators. In support of this hypothesis, among other anomalies, were the remarkable ancient maps of the world, the ‘Pyramid Boats’ of Egypt, the traces of advanced astronomical knowledge in the astonishing calendar system of the Maya, and the legends of seafaring gods like Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha.
A nation of navigators, then. And a nation of builders, too: Tiahuanaco builders, Teotihuacan builders, pyramid builders, Sphinx builders, builders who could lift and position 200-ton blocks of limestone with apparent ease, builders who could align vast monuments to the cardinal points with uncanny accuracy. Whoever they were, these builders appeared to have left their characteristic fingerprints all over the world in the form of cyclopean polygonal masonry, site layouts involving astronomical alignments, mathematical and geodetic puzzles, and myths about gods in human form.
But a civilization advanced enough to build like that—rich enough, sufficiently well organized and mature to have explored and mapped the world from pole to pole, a civilization smart enough to have calculated the dimensions of the earth—simply could not have evolved on an insignificant landmass.
Its homeland, as my researcher had rightly pointed out, must have been blessed with major mountain ranges, huge river systems and a congenial climate, and with many other obvious environmental prerequisites for the development of an advanced and prosperous economy: good agricultural lands, mineral resources, forests, and so on.
So where could such a landmass have been located, if not under any of the world’s oceans?
Library angels
Where could it have been located and when might it have disappeared? And if it had disappeared (and no other explanation would do) then how, why, and under what circumstances?
Seriously, how do you lose a continent?
Commonsense suggested that the answer had to lie in a cataclysm of some kind, a planetary disaster capable of wiping out almost all physical traces of a large civilization. But if so, why were there no records of such a cataclysm? Or perhaps there were.
As my research progressed I studied many of the great myths of flood, fire, earthquakes and ice handed down from generation to generation around the world. We saw in Part IV that it was difficult to resist the conclusion that the myths were describing real geological and climatic events, quite possibly the different local effects of the same events in all cases.
During the short history of mankind’s presence on this planet, I found that there was only one known and documented catastrophe that fitted the bill: the dramatic and deadly meltdown of the last Ice Age between 15000 and 8000 BC. Moreover, as was more obviously the case with architectural relics like Teotihuacan and the Egyptian pyramids, many of the relevant myths appeared to have been designed to serve as vehicles for encrypted scientific information, again an indication of what I was coming to think of as ‘the fingerprints of the gods’.
What I had become sensitized to, although I did not properly realize its implications at the time, was the possibility that a strong connection might exist between the collapsing chaos of the Ice Age and the disappearance of an archaic civilization which had been the stuff of legend for millennia.
It was at this moment exactly that the library angels intervened ...
The missing piece of the puzzle
The novelist Arthur Koestler, who had a great interest in synchronicity, coined the term ‘library angel’ to describe the unknown agency responsible for the lucky breaks researchers sometimes get which lead to exactly the right information being placed in their hands at exactly the right moment.2
At exactly the right moment, one of those lucky breaks came my way. The moment was the summer of 1993. I was at a low ebb physically and spiritually after months of hard travel, and the geophysical impossibility of actually losing a continent-sized landmass was beginning to undermine my confidence in the strength of my findings. It was then that I received a letter from the town of Nanaimo in British Columbia, Canada.
Dear Mr. Hancock,
After 17 years of research into the fate of Atlantis, my wife and I have finished a manuscript entitled When the Sky Fell. Our frustration is that despite positive feedback about the book’s approach from the few publishers who have seen it, the mere mention of Atlantis closes minds.
Our work explores sites where some survivors might have relocated. High altitude, fresh-water lakes made ideal post-deluge bases for the survivors of Atlantis. Lake Titicaca and Lake Tana [in Ethiopia, where much of The Sign and the Seal was set] fit the climatic criteria. Their stable environment provided the raw materials for restarting agriculture.
We have taken the liberty of enclosing an outline of When the Sky Fell. If you are interested we will be pleased to send you a copy of the manuscript.
Sincerely,
Rand Flem-Ath
I turned to the enclosure and there, in the first few paragraphs, found the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle I had been looking for. It meshed perfectly with the ancient global maps I had studied—maps which accurately depicted the subglacial topography of the continent of Antarctica (see Part I). It made perfect sense of all the great worldwide myths of cataclysm and planetary disaster, with their differing climatic effects.
It explained the enigma of the huge numbers of apparently ‘flashfrozen’ mammoths in northern Siberia and Alaska, and the 90-foot tall fruit trees locked in the permafrost deep inside the Arctic Circle at a latitude where nothing now grows. It provided a solution to the problem of the extreme suddenness with which the last Ice Age in the northern hemisphere melted down after 15,000 BC. It also solved the mystery of the exceptional worldwide volcanic activity that accompanied the meltdown.
It answered the question, ‘How do you lose a continent?’ And it was solidly based in Charles Hapgood’s theory of ‘earth-crust displacement’—a radical geological hypothesis with which I was already familiar:
What the Canadian researchers were referring to was Hapgood’s suggestion that until the end of the last Ice Age—say the eleventh millennium BC—the landmass of Antarctica had been positioned some 2000 miles further north (at a congenial and temperate latitude) and that it had been moved to its present position inside the Antarctic Circle as a result of a massive displacement of the earth’s crust.
This displacement, the Flem-Aths continued, had also left other evidence of its deadly visit in a ring of death around the globe. All the continents that experienced rapid and massive extinctions of animal species (notably the Americas and Siberia) underwent a massive change in their latitudes ...
The consequences of a displacement are monumental. The earth’s crust ripples over its interior and the world is shaken by incredible quakes and floods. The sky appears to fall as continents groan and shift position. Deep in the ocean, earthquakes generate massive tidal waves which crash against coastlines, flooding them. Some lands shift to warmer climes, while others, propelled into polar zones, suffer the direst of winters. Melting ice caps raise the ocean’s level higher and higher. All living things must adapt, migrate or die ...
If the horror of an earth-crust displacement were to be visited upon today’s interdependent world the progress of thousands of years of civilization would be torn away from our planet like a fine cobweb. Those who live near high mountains might escape the global tidal waves, but they would be forced to leave behind, in the lowlands, the slowly constructed fruits of civilization.
Only among the merchant marine and navies of the world might some evidence of civilization remain. The rusting hulls of ships and submarines would eventually perish but the valuable maps that are housed in them would be saved by survivors, perhaps for hundreds, even thousands of years. Until once again mankind could use them to sail the World Ocean in search of lost lands ...
As I read these words I remembered Charles Hapgood’s account of how the layer of the earth that geologists call the lithosphere—the thin but rigid outer crust of the planet—could at times be displaced, moving in one piece ‘over the soft inner body, much as the skin of an orange, if it were loose, might shift over the inner part of the orange all in one piece.’5
The first of these was the possibility that gravitational influences (as well as the variations in the earth’s orbital geometry discussed in Part V) might, through the mechanism of earth-crust displacement, play a role in the onset and decline of Ice Ages:
When the naturalist and geologist Louis Agassiz presented the idea of ice ages to the scientific community in 1837 he was met with great skepticism. However, as evidence slowly gathered in his favour, the skeptics were forced to accept that the earth had indeed been gripped by deadly winters. But the trigger of these paralyzing ice ages remained a puzzle. It was not until 1976 that solid evidence existed to establish the timing of ice ages.
The explanation was found in various astronomical features of the earth’s orbit and the tilt of the axis. Astronomical factors have clearly played a role in the timing of glacial epochs. But this is only part of the problem. Of equal importance is the geography of glaciation. It is here that the theory of earth-crust displacement plays its role in unravelling the mystery.
Albert Einstein investigated the possibility that the weight of the ice-caps, which are not symmetrically distributed about the pole, might cause such a displacement. Einstein wrote: ‘The earth’s rotation acts on these unsymmetrically deposited masses, and produces centrifugal momentum that is transmitted to the rigid crust of the earth. The constantly increasing centrifugal momentum produced this way will, when it reaches a certain point, produce a movement of the earth’s crust over the earth’s body, and this will displace the polar regions towards the equator.
When Einstein wrote these words [1953] the astronomical causes of ice ages were not fully appreciated. When the shape of the earth’s orbit deviates from a perfect circle by more than one per cent, the gravitational influence of the sun increases, exercising more pull on the planet and its massive ice sheets. Their ponderous weight pushes against the crust and this immense pressure, combined with the greater incline in the earth’s tilt [another changing factor of the orbital geometry] forces the crust to shift ...
The connection with the onset and decline of ice ages? Very straightforward. In a displacement, those parts of the earth’s crust which are situated at the North and South Poles (and which are therefore as completely glaciated as Antarctica is today) shift suddenly into warmer latitudes and begin to melt with extraordinary rapidity. Conversely, land that has hitherto been located at warmer latitudes is shifted equally suddenly into the polar zones, suffers a devastating climate change, and begins to vanish under a rapidly expanding ice-cap. In other words, when huge parts of northern Europe and north America were heavily glaciated in what we think of as the last Ice Age, it was not because of some mysterious slow-acting climatic factor, but rather because those areas of land were then situated much closer to the North Pole than they are today. Similarly, when the Wisconsin and Wurm glaciations described in Part IV began to go into their meltdown at around 15,000 BC the trigger was not global climate change but a shift of the ice-caps into warmer latitudes ...
In other words: there is an Ice Age going on right now—inside the Arctic Circle and in Antarctica. The lost continent
The second connection the Flem-Aths made followed logically from the first: if there was such a recurrent, cyclical geological phenomenon as earth-crust displacement, and if the last displacement had shifted the enormous landmass we call Antarctica out of temperate latitudes and into the Antarctic Circle, it was possible that the substantial remains of a lost civilization of remote antiquity might today be lying under two miles of ice at the South Pole.
It was suddenly clear to me how a continent-sized landmass, which had been the home of a large and prosperous society for thousands of years, could indeed get lost almost without trace.
As the Flem-Aths concluded: ‘It is to icy Antarctica that we look to find answers to the very roots of civilization—answers which may yet be preserved in the frozen depths of the forgotten island continent.’
I hauled out my researcher’s resignation letter from the files and started to check off his preconditions for the emergence of an advanced civilization. He wanted ‘major mountain ranges’. He wanted ‘huge river systems’. He wanted ‘a vast region which occupied a land area at least a couple of thousand miles across’. He also wanted a stable, congenial climate for ten thousand years, to allow time for a developed culture to evolve. Antarctica is by no means a needle in a haystack. It’s a huge landmass, much, much bigger than the Gulf of Mexico, about seven times larger than Madagascar—indeed roughly the size of the continental USA. Moreover, as seismic surveys have demonstrated, there are major mountain ranges in Antarctica. And as several of the ancient maps seem to prove, unknown prehistoric cartographers, who possessed a scientific understanding of latitude and longitude, depicted these mountain ranges before they disappeared beneath the ice-cap that covers them today.
These same ancient maps also show ‘huge river systems’ flowing down from the mountains, watering the extensive valleys and plains below and running into the surrounding ocean. And these rivers, as I already knew from the Ross Sea cores,6 had left physical evidence of their presence in the composition of ocean bottom sediments. 6 Ibid. See Part I and Chapter Fifty-one for details.
Last but not least, I noted that the earth-crust displacement theory did not conflict with the requirement for 10,000 years of stable climate. Prior to the supposed sudden shift of the crust, at around the end of the last Ice Age in the northern hemisphere, the climate of Antarctica would have been stable, perhaps for a great deal longer than 10,000 years.
And if the theory was right in suggesting that Antarctica’s latitude in that epoch had been about 2000 miles (30 degrees of arc) further north than it is today, the northernmost parts of it would have been situated in the vicinity of latitude 30° South and would, indeed, have enjoyed a Mediterranean to sub-tropical climate.
Had the earth’s crust really shifted?
And could the ruins of a lost civilization really lie beneath the ice of the southern continent? As we see in the following chapters, it might have ... and they could.
Chapter 51 - The Hammer and the Pendulum
Although beyond the scope of this book, a detailed exposition of the earth-crust displacement theory is to be found in Rand and Rose Flem-Ath’s When the Sky Fell (published by Stoddart, Canada, 1995).
As noted, this geological theory was formulated by Professor Charles Hapgood and supported by Albert Einstein. In brief, what it suggests is a complete slippage of our planet’s thirty-mile-thick lithosphere over its nearly 8000-mile-thick central core, forcing large parts of the western hemisphere southward towards the equator and thence towards the Antarctic Circle. This movement is not seen as taking place along a due north-south meridian but on a swivelling course—pivoting, as it were, around the central plains of what is now the United States.
The result is that the north-eastern segment of North America (in which the North Pole was formerly located in Hudson’s Bay) is dragged southwards out of the Arctic Circle and into more temperate latitudes while at the same time the north-western segment (Alaska and the Yukon) swivels northwards into the Arctic Circle along with large parts of northern Siberia. In the southern hemisphere, Hapgood’s model shows the landmass that we now call Antarctica, much of which was previously at temperate or even warm latitudes, being shifted in its entirety inside the Antarctic Circle. The overall movement is seen as having been in the region of 30 degrees (approximately 2000 miles) and as having been concentrated, in the main, between the years 14,500 BC and 12,500 BC—but with massive aftershocks on a planetary scale continuing at widely-separated intervals down to about 9500 BC.
Moreover, as the millennia passed, the ruins left behind—the cities, the monuments, the great libraries, and the engineering works of the destroyed civilization—would have been ever more deeply buried beneath the mantle of ice.
Little wonder, if the earth-crust displacement theory is correct, that all that can be found today, scattered around the world, are the tantalizing fingerprints of the gods.
These would be the traces, the echoes of the works and deeds, the much misunderstood teachings and the geometrical edifices left behind by the few survivors of Antarctica’s former civilization who had made it across the turbulent oceans in great ships and settled themselves in faraway lands: in the Nile Valley, for example (or perhaps, first, around Lake Tana at the headwaters of the Blue Nile), and in the Valley of Mexico, and near Lake Titicaca in the Andes—and no doubt in several other places as well ...
Here and there around the globe, in other words, the fingerprints of a lost civilization remain faintly visible. The body is out of sight, buried under two miles of Antarctic ice and almost as inaccessible to archaeologists as if it were located on the dark side of the moon.
Fact?
Or fiction?
Possibility?
Or impossibility?
Is it a geophysical possibility or a geophysical impossibility that Antarctica, the world’s fifth-largest continent (with a surface area of almost six million square miles) could (a) previously have been located in a more temperate zone and (b) have been shifted out of that zone and into the Antarctic Circle within the last 20,000 years?
Is Antarctica movable?
A lifeless polar desert
‘Continental drift’ and/or ‘plate-tectonics’ are key terms used to describe an important geological theory that has become increasingly well understood by the general public since the 1950s. It is unnecessary to go into the basic mechanisms here. But most of us are aware that the continents in some way ‘float around’, relocate and change position on the earth’s surface.
Plate-tectonics and Charles Hapgood’s earth-crust displacement theory are by no means mutually contradictory. Hapgood envisaged that both could occur: that the earth’s crust did indeed exhibit continental drift as the geologists claimed—almost imperceptibly, over hundreds of millions of years—but that it also occasionally experienced very rapid one-piece displacements which had no effect on the relationships between individual landmasses but which thrust entire continents (or parts of them) into and out of the planet’s two fixed polar zones (the perennially cold and icy regions surrounding the North and South Poles of the axis of spin).
Continental drift?
Earth-crust displacement?
Both?
Some other cause?
I honestly don’t know. Nevertheless, the simple facts about Antarctica are really strange and difficult to explain without invoking some notion of sudden, catastrophic and geologically recent change.
Before reviewing a few of these facts, let us remind ourselves that we are referring to a landmass today oriented by the curvature of the earth so that the sun never rises on it during the six winter months and never sets during the six summer months (but rather, as viewed from the Pole, remains low above the horizon, appearing to transcribe a circular path around the sky during each twenty-four hours of daylight).
Antarctica is also by far the world’s coldest continent, where temperatures on the polar plain can fall as low as minus 89.2 degrees centigrade. Although the coastal areas are slightly warmer (minus 60 degrees centigrade) and shelter huge numbers of seabird rookeries, there are no native land mammals and there is only a small community of cold-tolerant plants capable of surviving lengthy winter periods of total or near-total darkness.
In other words, although magnificent to behold in the long-drawn-out antipodean dawn, Antarctica is a freezing, unforgiving, almost lifeless polar desert, as it has been throughout mankind’s entire 5000-year ‘historical’ period.
Was it always so?
Exhibit 1
Discover The World Of Science Magazine, February 1993, page 17:
‘ “The interesting thing about this find is that it’s really the only forest, living or fossil, that’s been found at 80 or 85 degrees latitude,” says Ohio State University palaeobotanist Edith Taylor, who has studied the fossil trees.
“The first thing we palaeobotanists do is look for something in the modern records that is comparable, and there are no forests growing at that latitude today. We can go to the tropics and find trees growing in a warm environment, but we can’t find trees growing in a warm environment with the light regime these trees had: 24 hours of light in the summer and 24 hours of dark in the winter.” ’
Deciduous trees are an indicator of a warm climate, and so is the absence of ‘frost rings’. When Taylor analysed the growth rings in samples from the stumps she found none of the ice-swollen cells and gaps between cells that arise when the growth of a tree is disrupted by frost. That means there wasn’t any frost in the Antarctic at that time.
4 The Path of the Pole, p. 61. 5 Ibid., pp. 62-3.
Exhibit 2
Geologists have found no evidence of any glaciation having been present anywhere on the Antarctic continent prior to the Eocene (about 60 million years ago.)4 And if we go as far back as the Cambrian (c. 550 million years ago) we find irrefutable evidence of a warm sea stretching nearly or right across Antarctica, in the form of thick limestones rich in reef-building Archaeocyathidae:
Thus Sir Ernest Shackleton found coal beds within 200 miles of the South Pole, and later, during
These included leaf and stem impressions and fossilized wood. In 1952 Dr Lyman H. Dougherty, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, completing a study of these fossils, identified two species of a tree fern called Glossopteris, once common to the other southern continents (Africa, South America, Australia) and a giant fern tree of another species ...’5
Admiral Byrd’s own comment on the significance of the Mount Weaver finds:
In 1986 the discovery of fossilized wood and plants showed that parts of Antarctica may have been ice free as little as two and a half a million years ago. Further discoveries showed that some places on the continent were ice-free 100,000 years ago.9
9 Daniel Grotta, ‘Antarctica: Whose Continent Is It Anyway?’, Popular Science, January 1992, p. 64.
Exhibit 7
As we saw in Part I, sedimentary cores collected from the bottom of the Ross Sea by one of the Byrd Antarctic Expeditions provide conclusive evidence that ‘great rivers, carrying down fine well grained sediments’ did flow in this part of Antarctica until perhaps as late as 4000 BC. According to the report of Dr Jack Hough of the University of Illinois:
The Orontaeus Finnaeus World Map reviewed in Part I accurately depicts the Ross Sea as it would look if it were free of ice and, in addition, shows Antarctica’s ranges of lofty coastal mountains with great rivers flowing from them where only mile-deep glaciers are to be found today.11
Charles Hapgood, The Path Of The Pole, 1970, page 111ff:
It has been possible to establish the authenticity of this map. In several years of research the projection of this ancient map was worked out. It was found to have been drawn on a sophisticated map projection, with the use of spherical trigonometry, and to be so scientific that over 50 locations on the Antarctic continent have been found to be located on it with an accuracy that was not attained by modern cartographic science until the 19th century.
And, of course, when this map was first published, in 1531, nothing at all was known of Antarctica. The continent was not discovered in modern times until about 1818 and was not fully mapped until after 1920 ...’
12 Path of the Pole, p. 111ff.
The Buache Map, also reviewed in Part I, accurately depicts the subglacial topography of Antarctica.13 Does it do so by chance or might the continent indeed have been entirely ice-free recently enough for the cartographers of a lost civilization to have mapped it?
Exhibit 10
The reverse side of the coin. If the lands presently inside the Antarctic Circle were once temperate or tropical, what about lands inside the Arctic Circle? Were they affected by the same dramatic climate changes, suggesting that some common factor might have been at work?
Spitzbergen is half way between the northern tip of Norway and the North Pole, at a latitude of 80 degrees N. Today, ships can reach Spitzbergen through the ice only about two or at the most three months during the year.’
Some of the islands in the Arctic Ocean were never covered by ice during the last Ice Age. On Baffin Island, for example, 900 miles from the North Pole, alder and birch remains found in peat suggest a much warmer climate than today less than 30,000 years ago. These conditions prevailed until 17,000 years ago:
Russian scientists have concluded that the Arctic Ocean was warm during most of the last Ice Age. A report by academicians Saks, Belov and Lapina covering many phases of their oceanographic work highlights the period from about 32,000 to about 18,000 years ago as being one during which particularly warm conditions prevailed.17
As we saw in Part IV, huge numbers of warm-blooded, temperate adapted mammal species were instantly frozen, and their bodies preserved in the permafrost, all across a vast zone of death stretching from the Yukon, through Alaska and deep into northern Siberia. The bulk of this destruction appears to have taken place during the eleventh millennium BC, although there was an earlier episode of large-scale extinctions around 13,500 BC.18
We also saw (Chapter Twenty-seven) that the last Ice Age came to an end between 15,000 and 8000 BC, but principally between 14500 and 12,500 BC, with a further outburst of extraordinarily intense activity in the eleventh millennium BC. During this geologically brief period of time, glaciation up to two miles deep covering millions of square miles which had taken more than 40,000 years to build-up suddenly and inexplicably melted:
The icy executioner
Some extraordinary factor was affecting climate ...
Was it a 30° one-piece shift of the lithosphere that abruptly terminated the Ice Age in the northern hemisphere (by pushing the most heavily glaciated areas southwards from the northern pole of the spin axis)? If so, why shouldn’t the same 30° one-piece shift of the lithosphere have swivelled a largely deglaciated six-million-square-mile southern hemisphere continent from temperate latitudes to a position directly over the southern pole of the spin axis?
On the issue of the movability of Antarctica, we now know that it is movable and, more to the point, that it has moved, because trees have grown there and trees simply cannot grow at latitudes which suffer six months of continual darkness.
What we do not know (and may never know for certain) is whether this movement was a consequence of earth-crust displacement, or of continental drift, or of some other unguessed-at factor.
Let us consider Antarctica for a moment.
We have already seen that it is big. It has a land area of 5.5 million square miles, and is presently covered by something in excess of seven million cubic miles of ice weighing an estimated 19 quadrillion tons (19 followed by 15 zeros).20 What worries the theorists of earth-crust displacement is that this vast ice-cap is remorselessly increasing in size and weight: ‘at the rate of 293 cubic miles of ice each year—almost as much as if Lake Ontario were frozen solid annually and added to it.’21
The fear is that when it is coupled with the effects of precession, obliquity, orbital eccentricity, the earth’s own centrifugal motion, and the gravitational tug of the sun, moon and planets, Antarctica’s huge, ever-expanding burden of glaciation could provide the final trigger-factor for a massive displacement of the crust:
Modern geologists are opposed to catastrophes, or rather to catastrophism, preferring to follow the ‘uniformitarian’ doctrine: ‘that existing processes, acting as at present, are sufficient to account for all geological changes’. Catastrophism, on the other hand, holds that,
20 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 1:440; John White, Pole Shift, A.R.E. Press, Virginia Beach, 1994, p. 65.
The great biologist Sir Thomas Huxley remarked in the nineteenth century: To my mind there appears to be no sort of theoretical antagonism between Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism; on the contrary, it is very conceivable that catastrophes may be part and parcel of uniformity. Let me illustrate my case by analogy. The working of a clock is a model of uniform action. Good timekeeping means uniformity of action. But the striking of a clock is essentially a catastrophe.
The hammer might be made to blow up a barrel of gunpowder, or turn on a deluge of water and, by proper arrangement, the clock, instead of marking the hours, might strike at all sorts of irregular intervals, never twice alike in the force or number of its blows. Nevertheless, all these irregular and apparently lawless catastrophes would be the result of an absolutely uniformitarian action, and we might have two schools of clock theorists, one studying the hammer and the other the pendulum.26
Could continental drift be the pendulum? Could earth-crust displacement be the hammer?
Mars and earth
Crustal displacements are thought to have taken place on other planets. In the December 1985 issue of Scientific American, Peter H. Schultz drew attention to meteorite impact craters visible on the Martian surface. Craters in polar areas have a distinctive ‘signature’ because the meteorites land amid the thick deposits of dust and ice that accumulate there.
Judging from the evidence, Shultz put forward the theory that the mechanism appeared to have been,
Charles Hapgood’s solution to this problem is simple, extremely elegant and does not affront commonsense: The only ice age that is adequately explained is the present ice age in Antarctica. This is excellently explained. It exists, quite obviously, because Antarctica is at the pole, and for no other reason. No variation of the sun’s heat, no galactic dust, no volcanism, no subcrustal currents, and no arrangements of land elevations or sea currents account for the fact.
The logic is close to inescapable. Either we accept that the Antarctic ice cap is the first continent-sized ice sheet ever to have been situated at a pole—which seems improbable—or we are obliged to suppose that earth-crust displacement, or a similar mechanism, must have been at work.
Memories of the polar dawn?
Our ancestors may have preserved in their most ancient traditions memories of a displacement. We saw some of these memories in Part IV: cataclysm myths that appear to be eyewitness accounts of the series of geological disasters which accompanied the end of the last Ice-Age in the northern hemisphere.31
The great Indian epic, Mahabaratha, speaks of Mount Meru, the land of the gods:
32 The Mahabaratha, cited in The Arctic Home in the Vedas, pp. 64-5.
34 Cited in Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole, p. 199.
The seventh Mandala of the Rigveda contains a number of ‘Dawn’ hymns. One of these (VII, 76) says that the dawn has raised its banner on the horizon with its usual splendour and reports in Verse 3 that a period of several days elapsed between the first appearance of the dawn and the rising of the sun that followed it.35 Another passage states, ‘many were the days between the first beams of the dawn and actual sunrise’.36
35 Arctic Home in the Vedas, p. 81.
37 Ibid., pp. 414, 417.
38 Ibid., p. 420.
An epoch of turmoil and darkness
As every schoolboy geographer understands, true north (the North Pole) is not quite the same thing as magnetic north (the direction compass needles point). Indeed the magnetic north pole is presently situated in northern Canada, about 11 degrees from the true North Pole.39 Recent advances in the study of palaeomagnetism have proved that the earth’s magnetic polarity has reversed itself more than 170 times during the past 80 million years ...40
What causes these field reversals?
While he was teaching at the University of Cambridge the geologist S. K. Runcorn published an article in Scientific American which made a pertinent point:
41 Ibid., p. 61.
Runcorn appears to be envisaging a complete 180-degree flip of the poles, with the earth literally tumbling—although similar palaeomagnetic readings would result from a slippage of the crust over the geographical poles. Either way, the consequences for civilization, and indeed for all life, would be unimaginably dreadful.
Of course, Runcorn may be wrong; perhaps field reversals can occur in the absence of any other upheavals.
But he may also be right.
According to reports published in Nature and New Scientist, the last geomagnetic reversal was completed just 12,400 years ago—during the eleventh millennium BC.42
This is of course the very millennium in which the ancient Tiahuanacan civilization in the Andes seems to have been destroyed. The same millennium is signalled by the alignments and design of the great astronomical monuments on the Giza plateau, and by the erosion patterns on the Sphinx.
Scientists expect the next reversal of the earth’s magnetic poles to occur around AD 2030.43
Is this an intimation of planetary disaster? After 12,500 years of the pendulum, is the hammer about to strike?
Exhibit 11
Yves Rocard, Professor of the Faculty of Sciences at Paris:
43 J. M. Harwood and S. C. R. Malin writing in Nature, 12 February 1976.
Exhibit 12
If both these observations were accurate when made, as we have every right to expect in view of the eminence of the scientists involved, then we have here evidence that the lithosphere may be in motion at the present time [and that it is experiencing] a geometrical acceleration of the rate of motion ...45
USA Today, Wednesday 23 November 1994, page 9D:
Scientists
‘A live remote broadcast from the South Pole featuring Elizabeth Felton, a 17-year-old graduate of Chicago public schools, will take place Jan 10. Felton will use US Geological Survey data to reposition the copper marker designating the Earth’s geographic South Pole to compensate for the annual slippage of the ice sheet.’
46 USA Today, 23 November 1994, p. 9D.
Is it just the ice sheet that is slipping, or is the entire crust of the earth in motion? And was it just an ‘unusual interactive education project’ that took place on 10 January 1995, or was Elizabeth Felton unknowingly documenting the continued geometrical acceleration of the rate of motion of the crust?
Scientists do not think so. As we shall see in the final chapter, however, the coming century is signalled in a remarkable convergence of ancient prophecies and traditional beliefs as an epoch of unprecedented turmoil and darkness, in which iniquity will be worked in secret, and the Fifth Sun and the Fourth World will come to an end ...
Exhibit 14
Kobe, Japan, Tuesday 17 January 1995:
‘You are in bed, the safest place in the world. Your bed is on the floor, what you used to think of as solid ground. And with no warning the world has turned into a sickening roller-coaster ride, and you want to get off.
‘Possibly the most frightening part is the sound. This is not the dull rumble of thunder. This is a deafening, roaring sound, coming from everywhere and nowhere, and it sounds like the end of the world.’ (Eyewitness report on the Kobe earthquake by Dennis Kessler, Guardian, London, 18 January 1995. The tremor lasted 20 seconds, registering 7.2 on the Richter scale, and killed more than 5000 people.)
Chapter 52 - Like a Thief in the Night
There are certain structures in the world, certain ideas, certain intellectual treasures, that are truly mysterious. I am beginning to suspect that the human race may have placed itself in grave jeopardy by failing to consider [the implications of these mysteries.
We have the ability, unique in the animal kingdom, to learn from the experiences of our predecessors. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example, two generations have grown to adulthood in awareness of the horrific destruction that nuclear weapons unleash. Our children will be aware of this too, without experiencing it directly, and they will pass it on to their children.
Theoretically, therefore, the knowledge of what atom bombs do has become part of the permanent historical legacy of mankind, whether we choose to benefit from that legacy or not is up to us. Nevertheless the knowledge is there, should we wish to use it, because it has been preserved and transmitted in written records, in film archives, in allegorical paintings, in war memorials, and so on.
Not all testimony from the past is accorded the same stature as the records of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the contrary, like the Canonical Bible, the body of knowledge that we call ‘History’ is an edited cultural artifact from which much has been left out. In particular, references to human experiences prior to the invention of writing around 5000 years ago have been omitted in their entirety and myth has become a synonym for delusion.
Suppose it is not delusion?
Suppose that a tremendous cataclysm were to overtake the earth today, obliterating the achievements of our civilization and wiping out almost all of us. Suppose, to paraphrase Plato, that we were forced by this cataclysm ‘to begin again like children, in complete ignorance of what had happened in early times’.1 Under such circumstances, ten or twelve thousand years from now (with all written records and film archives long since destroyed) what testimony might our descendants still preserve concerning the events at the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 of the Christian era?
Not all testimony from the past is accorded the same stature as the records of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the contrary, like the Canonical Bible, the body of knowledge that we call ‘History’ is an edited cultural artifact from which much has been left out. In particular, references to human experiences prior to the invention of writing around 5000 years ago have been omitted in their entirety and myth has become a synonym for delusion.
Suppose it is not delusion?
Suppose that a tremendous cataclysm were to overtake the earth today, obliterating the achievements of our civilization and wiping out almost all of us. Suppose, to paraphrase Plato, that we were forced by this cataclysm ‘to begin again like children, in complete ignorance of what had happened in early times’.1 Under such circumstances, ten or twelve thousand years from now (with all written records and film archives long since destroyed) what testimony might our descendants still preserve concerning the events at the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 of the Christian era?
1 Plato, Timaeus and Critias, Penguin Classics, 1977, p. 36.
2 The Bhagavata Purana, Motilal Banardass, Delhi, 1986, Part I, pp. 59, 95.
It is easy to imagine how they might speak in mystical terms of explosions that gave off a ‘terrible glare of light’ and ‘immense heat’.2
Nor would we be too surprised to find that they might have formulated a ‘mythical’ account something like this:
The flames of the Brahmastra -charged missiles mingled with each other and surrounded by fiery arrows they covered the earth, heaven and space between and increased the conflagration like the fire and the Sun at the end of the world ... All beings who were scorched by the Brahmastras, and saw the terrible fire of their missiles, felt that it was the fire of Pralaya [the cataclysm] that burns down the world.3
And what of the Enola Gay which carried the Hiroshima bomb? How might our descendants remember that strange aircraft and the squadrons of others like it that swarmed through the skies of planet earth during the twentieth century of the Christian era?
Isn’t it possible, probable even, that they might preserve traditions of ‘celestial cars’ and ‘heavenly chariots’ and ‘spacious flying machines’, and even of ‘aerial cities’.4 If they did, would they perhaps speak of such wonders in mythical terms a little like these:
‘Oh you, Uparicara Vasu, the spacious aerial flying machine will come to you—and you alone, of all the mortals, seated on that vehicle will look like a deity.’5
‘Visvakarma, the architect among the Gods, built aerial vehicles for the Gods.’6
‘Oh you descendant of the Kurus, that wicked fellow came on that all-traversing automatic flying vehicle known as Saubhapura and pierced me with weapons.’7
‘He entered into the favourite divine palace of Indra and saw thousands of flying vehicles intended for the Gods lying at rest.’8
‘The Gods came in their respective flying vehicles to witness the battle between Kripacarya and Arjuna. Even Indra, the Lord of Heaven, came with a special type of flying vehicle which could accommodate 33 divine beings.’9
3 Ibid., p. 60.
4 Dileep Kumar Kanjilal, Vimana in Ancient India, Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar, Calcutta, 1985, p. 16.
4 Dileep Kumar Kanjilal, Vimana in Ancient India, Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar, Calcutta, 1985, p. 16.
5 Ibid., p. 17.
6 Ibid., p. 18.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., p. 19.
All these quotations have been taken from the Bhagavata Purana and from the Mahabaratha, two drops in the ocean of the ancient wisdom literature of the Indian subcontinent. And such images are replicated in many other archaic traditions. To give one example (as we saw in Chapter Forty-two), the Pyramid Texts are replete with anachronistic images of flight:
The King is a flame, moving before the wind to the end of the sky and to the end of the earth ... the King travels the air and traverses the earth ... there is brought to him a way of ascent to the sky ...10
Is it possible that the constant references in archaic literatures to something like aviation could be valid historical testimony concerning the achievements of a forgotten and remote technological age?
We will never know unless we try to find out. And so far we haven’t tried because our rational, scientific culture regards myths and traditions as ‘unhistorical’.
No doubt many are unhistorical. but at the end of the investigation that underlies this book, I am certain that many others are not ...
We will never know unless we try to find out. And so far we haven’t tried because our rational, scientific culture regards myths and traditions as ‘unhistorical’.
No doubt many are unhistorical. but at the end of the investigation that underlies this book, I am certain that many others are not ...
For the benefit of future generations of mankind Here is a scenario:
Suppose that we had calculated, on the basis of sound evidence and beyond any shadow of a doubt, that our civilization was soon to be obliterated by a titanic geological cataclysm—a 30° displacement of the earth’s crust, for example, or a head-on collision with a ten-mile-wide nickel-iron asteroid travelling towards us at cosmic speed.
Of course there would at first be much panic and despair. Nevertheless—if there were sufficient advance warning—steps would be taken to ensure that there would be some survivors and that some of what was most valuable in our high scientific knowledge would be preserved for the benefit of future generations.
Strangely enough, the Jewish historian Josephus (who wrote during the first century AD) attributes precisely this behaviour to the clever and prosperous inhabitants of the antediluvian world who lived before the Flood ‘in a happy condition without any misfortunes falling upon them’:11
They also were the inventors of that peculiar sort of wisdom which is concerned with the heavenly bodies, and their order. And that their inventions might not be lost—upon Adam’s prediction that the world was to be destroyed at one time by the force of fire, and at another time by the violence and quantity of water—they made two pillars, one of brick, the other of stone: they inscribed their discoveries upon them both, that in case the pillar of brick should be destroyed by the Flood, the pillar of stone might remain and exhibit these discoveries to mankind; and also inform them that there was another pillar of brick erected by them ...12
10 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. 70, Utt. 261.
11 The Complete Works Of Josephus, Kregel Publications, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1991, p. 27.
12 Ibid.
Likewise, when the Oxford astronomer John Greaves visited Egypt in the seventeenth century he collected ancient local traditions which attributed the construction of the three Giza pyramids to a mythical antediluvian king:
The occasion of this was because he saw in his sleep that the whole earth was turned over, with the inhabitants of it lying upon their faces and the stars falling down and striking one another with a terrible noise ... And he awaked with great fear, and assembled the chief priests of all the provinces of Egypt ... He related the whole matter to them and they took the altitude of the stars, and made their prognostication, and they foretold of a deluge.The king said, will it come to our country? They answered yes, and will destroy it. And there remained a certain number of years to come, and he commanded in the mean space to build the Pyramids ... And he engraved in these Pyramids all things that were told by wise men, as also all profound sciences—the science of Astrology, and of Arithmeticke, and of Geometry, and of Physicke. All this may be interpreted by him that knowes their characters and language ...13
Taken at face value, the message of both of these myths seems crystal clear: certain mysterious structures scattered around the world were built to preserve and transmit the knowledge of an advanced civilization of remote antiquity which was destroyed by a terrifying upheaval.
Could this be so? And what are we to make of other strange traditions that have come to us from the dark vault of prehistory?
What are we to make, for example, of the Popol Vuh, which speaks in veiled language about a great secret of the human past: a long-forgotten golden age when everything was possible—a magical time of scientific progress and enlightenment when the ‘First Men’ (who were ‘endowed with intelligence’) not only ‘measured the round face of the earth’ but ‘examined the four points of the arch of the sky’.
As the reader will recall, the gods became jealous at the rapid progress made by these upstart humans who had ‘succeeded in seeing, succeeded in knowing, all that there is in the world.’14 Divine retribution quickly followed:
Could this be so? And what are we to make of other strange traditions that have come to us from the dark vault of prehistory?
What are we to make, for example, of the Popol Vuh, which speaks in veiled language about a great secret of the human past: a long-forgotten golden age when everything was possible—a magical time of scientific progress and enlightenment when the ‘First Men’ (who were ‘endowed with intelligence’) not only ‘measured the round face of the earth’ but ‘examined the four points of the arch of the sky’.
As the reader will recall, the gods became jealous at the rapid progress made by these upstart humans who had ‘succeeded in seeing, succeeded in knowing, all that there is in the world.’14 Divine retribution quickly followed:
‘The Heart of Heaven blew mist into their eyes ... In this way all the wisdom and all the knowledge of the First Men [together with their memory of their] origin and their beginning, were destroyed.’15
The secret of what happened was never entirely forgotten because a record of those distant First Times was preserved, until the coming of the Spaniards, in the sacred texts of the original Popol Vuh. The abuses of the conquest made it necessary for that primordial document to be concealed from all but the most highly-initiated sages and replaced with a watered-down substitute written ‘under the law of Christianity ’:16
‘No longer can be seen the book of Popol Vuh which the kings had in olden times ... The original book, written long ago, existed—but now its sight is hidden to the searcher and to the thinker ...’17
13 John Greaves, Pyramidographia, cited in Serpent in the Sky, p. 230.
14 Popol Vuh, p. 168.
15 Ibid., p. 169.
16 Ibid., p. 79.
17 Ibid., p. 79-80.
On the other side of the world, among the myths and traditions of the Indian subcontinent, there are further tantalizing suggestions of hidden secrets. In the Puranic version of the universal flood story, shortly before the deluge was unleashed, the fish god Vishnu warned his human protégé that he ‘should conceal the Sacred Scriptures in a safe place’ to preserve the knowledge of the antediluvian races from destruction.18
16 Ibid., p. 79.
17 Ibid., p. 79-80.
On the other side of the world, among the myths and traditions of the Indian subcontinent, there are further tantalizing suggestions of hidden secrets. In the Puranic version of the universal flood story, shortly before the deluge was unleashed, the fish god Vishnu warned his human protégé that he ‘should conceal the Sacred Scriptures in a safe place’ to preserve the knowledge of the antediluvian races from destruction.18
Likewise, in Mesopotamia, the Noah figure Utnapishtim was instructed by the god Ea,
‘to take the beginning, the middle and the end of whatever was consigned to writing and then to bury it in the City of the Sun at Sippara’.19
After the waters of the flood had gone, survivors were instructed to make their way to the site of the City of the Sun ‘to search for the writings’, which would be found to contain knowledge of benefit to future generations of mankind.20
18 The Bhagavata Purana, cited in Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, p. 88.
19 Berossus Fragments cited in The Sirius Mystery, p. 249.
20 Ibid.
Strangely enough, it was the City of the Sun in Egypt, Innu, known by the Greeks as Heliopolis—which was regarded throughout the dynastic period as the source and centre of the high wisdom handed down to mortal men from the fabled First Time of the gods. It was at Heliopolis that the Pyramid Texts were collated, and it was the Heliopolitan priesthood—or rather the Heliopolitan cult—that had custody of the monuments of the Giza necropolis.
Strangely enough, it was the City of the Sun in Egypt, Innu, known by the Greeks as Heliopolis—which was regarded throughout the dynastic period as the source and centre of the high wisdom handed down to mortal men from the fabled First Time of the gods. It was at Heliopolis that the Pyramid Texts were collated, and it was the Heliopolitan priesthood—or rather the Heliopolitan cult—that had custody of the monuments of the Giza necropolis.
More than just Kilroy was here Let us return to our scenario:
1 - we know that our late twentieth-century, post-industrial civilization is about to be destroyed by an inescapable cosmic or geological cataclysm;
2 - we know—because our science is pretty good—that the destruction is going to be near-total;
3 - mobilizing massive technological resources, we put our best minds to work to ensure that at least a remnant of our species will survive the catastrophe, and that the core of our scientific, medical, astronomical, geographical, architectural and mathematical knowledge will be preserved;
4 - we are of course aware how slim are our chances of succeeding on both counts; nevertheless, galvanized by the prospect of extinction, we make an almighty effort to build the Arks or Vars or strong enclosures in which the chosen survivors can be protected, and we focus our considerable ingenuity on ways to transmit the essence of the knowledge we have accumulated during the 5000 years of our recorded history.
We start by preparing for the worst. We assume that there will be survivors but that they will be blasted back into the Stone Age by the cataclysm. Realizing that it may take ten or twelve thousand years for a civilization as advanced as our own to rise again like a phoenix from the ashes, one of our top priorities is to find a way to communicate with that postulated future civilization.
At the least we would want to say to them: KILROY WAS HERE! and to be sure they got the message no matter what language they spoke or what ethical, religious, ideological, metaphysical or philosophical leanings their society might exhibit.
I’m sure we’d want to say more than just ‘Kilroy was here’. We’d want, for example, to tell them—those distant grandchildren of ours—when we had lived in relation to their time.
How would we do that? How would we express, say, AD 2012 of the Christian era in a language universal enough to be worked out and understood twelve thousand years hence by a civilization that would know nothing of the Christian or of any of the other eras by which we express chronology?
One obvious solution would be to make use of the beautiful predictability of the earth’s axial precession, which has the effect of slowly and regularly altering the declination of the entire star-field in relation to a viewer at a fixed point, and which equally slowly and regularly revolves the equinoctial point in relation to the twelve zodiacal constellations.
I’m sure we’d want to say more than just ‘Kilroy was here’. We’d want, for example, to tell them—those distant grandchildren of ours—when we had lived in relation to their time.
How would we do that? How would we express, say, AD 2012 of the Christian era in a language universal enough to be worked out and understood twelve thousand years hence by a civilization that would know nothing of the Christian or of any of the other eras by which we express chronology?
One obvious solution would be to make use of the beautiful predictability of the earth’s axial precession, which has the effect of slowly and regularly altering the declination of the entire star-field in relation to a viewer at a fixed point, and which equally slowly and regularly revolves the equinoctial point in relation to the twelve zodiacal constellations.
From the predictability of this motion it follows that if we could find a way to declare: WE LIVED WHEN THE VERNAL EQUINOX WAS IN THE CONSTELLATION OF PISCES we would provide a means of specifying our epoch to within a single 2160-year period in every grand precessional cycle of 25,920 years.
The only drawback to this scheme would become evident if a civilization equivalent to our own failed to arise within 12,000 or even 20,000 years of the cataclysm, but took much longer—perhaps as much as 30,000 years. In that case, a monument or calendrical device declaring ‘we lived when the vernal equinox was in the constellation of Pisces’ would no longer be unambiguous.
The only drawback to this scheme would become evident if a civilization equivalent to our own failed to arise within 12,000 or even 20,000 years of the cataclysm, but took much longer—perhaps as much as 30,000 years. In that case, a monument or calendrical device declaring ‘we lived when the vernal equinox was in the constellation of Pisces’ would no longer be unambiguous.
If discovered by a high culture flourishing at the very beginning of a future Age of Sagittarius for example it could be read as meaning ‘we lived 4320 years before your time’—that is, two full precessional ‘months’ prior to the Sagittarian Age (the 2160-year ‘months’ of Aquarius and Capricorn).
But it could also mean ‘We lived 30,240 years before your time’, that is those two ‘months’ plus the full previous precessional cycle of 25,920 years. The Sagittarian archaeologists would not only have to use their wits to work out the meaning of the message (i.e. WE LIVED WHEN THE VERNAL EQUINOX WAS IN PISCES), but would need to decide from other clues which Age of Pisces we had lived in: the most recent, or the one in the previous precessional cycle, or perhaps even the cycle before that.
Geology would naturally be of assistance in making such broad judgments ...
Geology would naturally be of assistance in making such broad judgments ...
The civilizers
If we could find a way of saying WE LIVED IN THE AGE OF PISCES, and could specify the altitude above the horizon of certain identifiable stars in our own epoch (say, the prominent belt stars of the Orion constellation), we would be able to signal our dates to future generations with greater precision. Alternatively we could do as the builders of the Giza pyramids appear to have done and lay out our monuments in a pattern on the ground reflecting exactly the pattern of the stars in the sky in our time.
There would be several other options and combinations of options open to us, depending on our circumstances, on the level of technology available to us, on the extent of the early warning we were given, and on which chronological facts we wanted to transmit.
Suppose, for example, that there was not time to make proper preparations prior to the catastrophe. Suppose that the disaster, like ‘the Day of the Lord’ in 2 Peter 3, crept up on us unseen ‘as a thief in the night?’21 What prospects might humanity be faced with?
21 2 Peter 3:10.
Whether as the result of an asteroid strike or an earth-crust displacement or some other cosmic or geological cause, let us assume:
Whether as the result of an asteroid strike or an earth-crust displacement or some other cosmic or geological cause, let us assume:
1 - massive devastation all around the world;
2 - the survival of only relatively small numbers of people, the majority of whom rapidly revert to barbarism;
3 - the presence, among this remnant, of a minority of well-organized visionaries—including master-builders, scientists, engineers, cartographers, mathematicians, medical doctors and the like—who dedicate themselves to salvaging what they can and finding ways to transmit the knowledge to the future for the benefit of those who might eventually understand it.
Let us call these hypothetical visionaries ‘the civilizers’. As they banded together—at first to survive, later to teach and to share ideas—they might take on something of the manner and belief systems of a religious cult, developing a clear sense of mission and of shared identity.
No doubt they would make use of powerful and easily recognizable symbols to strengthen and express this sense of common purpose: the men might wear distinctive beards, for example, or shave their heads, and certain archetypal imagery like the cross and the serpent and the dog might be used to link the members of the cult together as they set out on their civilizing missions to relight the lamps of knowledge around the world.
I suspect, if the situation were bad enough after the cataclysm, that many of the civilizers would fail, or meet with only limited success. But let us suppose that one small group had the skill and dedication sufficient to create a lasting and stable beach-head, perhaps in a region which had suffered relatively little damage in the disaster. Then let us suppose that some other unexpected disaster were to occur—an aftershock or series of aftershocks from the original catastrophe perhaps—and the beach-head was almost totally annihilated.
What might happen next? What might be salvaged from this wreckage of a wisdom cult which had itself been salvaged from a greater wreck?
I suspect, if the situation were bad enough after the cataclysm, that many of the civilizers would fail, or meet with only limited success. But let us suppose that one small group had the skill and dedication sufficient to create a lasting and stable beach-head, perhaps in a region which had suffered relatively little damage in the disaster. Then let us suppose that some other unexpected disaster were to occur—an aftershock or series of aftershocks from the original catastrophe perhaps—and the beach-head was almost totally annihilated.
What might happen next? What might be salvaged from this wreckage of a wisdom cult which had itself been salvaged from a greater wreck?
Transmitting the essence If the circumstances were right it seems possible that the essence of the cult might survive, carried forward by a nucleus of determined men and women. I suspect, too, with the proper motivation and indoctrination techniques, plus a means of recruiting new members from among the half-savage local inhabitants, that such a cult might perpetuate itself almost indefinitely.
This could happen, however, only if its members (like the Jews awaiting the Messiah) were prepared to bide their time, for thousands and thousands of years, until they felt confident that the moment had come to declare themselves.
If they did that, and if their sacred objective were indeed to preserve and transmit knowledge to some evolved future civilization, it is easy to imagine how the cult members might be described in terms similar to those used for the Egyptian wisdom god Thoth who was said to have,
If they did that, and if their sacred objective were indeed to preserve and transmit knowledge to some evolved future civilization, it is easy to imagine how the cult members might be described in terms similar to those used for the Egyptian wisdom god Thoth who was said to have,
succeeded in understanding the mysteries of the heavens [and to have] revealed them by inscribing them in sacred books which he then hid here on earth, intending that they should be searched for by future generations but found only by the fully worthy ...22
22 The Egyptian Hermes, p. 33.
If these, too, are readings from the metaphorical books of Thoth, it would seem that the numbers of the ‘fully worthy’ are increasing, and that new and even more startling revelations may soon be at hand ...
To return briefly and for the last time to our evolving scenario:
To return briefly and for the last time to our evolving scenario:
1 - at the beginning of the twenty-first century of the Christian era, near the cusp of the Age of Pisces and the Age of Aquarius, civilization as we know it is destroyed
2 - among the devastated survivors a few hundred or a few thousand individuals band together to preserve and transmit the fruits of their culture’s scientific knowledge into a distant and uncertain future
3 - these civilizers split into small groups and spread across the globe
4 - by and large they fail, and perish; nevertheless, in certain areas, some do succeed in making a lasting cultural impression
5 - after thousands of years—and perhaps several false starts—a branch of the original wisdom cult influences the emergence of a fully fledged civilization ...
Of course the parallel for this last category is once again to be found in Egypt. I would seriously propose as a hypothesis for further testing that a scientific wisdom cult, made up of the survivors of a great, lost, maritime civilization, could perhaps have established itself in the Nile Valley as early as the fourteenth millennium BC.
The cult would have been based at Heliopolis, Giza and Abydos, and perhaps at other centers as well, and would have initiated Egypt’s early agricultural revolution. Later, however, beaten down by the huge floods and other disturbances of the earth which took place in the eleventh millennium BC, the cult would have been obliged to cut its losses and withdraw until the turmoil of the Ice Age was over—never knowing whether its message would survive the subsequent dark epochs.
Under such circumstances, the hypothesis suggests that a huge and ambitious building project would have been one way cult members could preserve and transmit scientific information into the future independently of their physical survival. In other words, if the buildings were large enough, capable of enduring through immense spans of time and encoded through and through with the cult’s message, there would be hope that the message would be decoded at some future date even if the cult had by then long since ceased to exist.
The hypothesis proposes that this is what the enigmatic structures on the Giza plateau are all about:
Under such circumstances, the hypothesis suggests that a huge and ambitious building project would have been one way cult members could preserve and transmit scientific information into the future independently of their physical survival. In other words, if the buildings were large enough, capable of enduring through immense spans of time and encoded through and through with the cult’s message, there would be hope that the message would be decoded at some future date even if the cult had by then long since ceased to exist.
The hypothesis proposes that this is what the enigmatic structures on the Giza plateau are all about:
1 - that the Great Sphinx is indeed, as we have argued in previous chapters, an equinoctial marker for the Age of Leo, indicating a date in our own chronology of between 10,970 BC and 8810 BC;
2 - that the three principal pyramids are indeed laid out in relation to the Nile Valley to mimic the precise dispositions of the three stars of Orion’s Belt in relation to the course of the Milky Way in 10,450 BC.
This is a pretty effective means of ‘specifying’ the epoch of the eleventh millennium BC by using the phenomenon of precession, which has been rightly described as the ‘only true clock of our planet’.23 Confusingly, however, we also know that the Great Pyramid incorporates star shafts ‘locked in’ to Orion’s Belt and Sirius at around 2450 BC.24
23 By Robert Bauval, personal communication.
24 See Part VII.
The hypothesis resolves the anomaly of the missing years by supposing the star shafts to be merely the later work of the same long-lived cult that originally laid out the Giza ground-plan in 10,450 BC. Naturally, the hypothesis also suggests that it was this same cult, towards the end of those 8000 missing years, that provided the initiating spark for the sudden and ‘fully formed’ emergence of the literate historical civilization of dynastic Egypt.
What remains to be guessed at are the motives of the pyramid builders, who were presumably the same people as the mysterious cartographers who mapped the globe at the end of the last Ice Age in the northern hemisphere. If so, we might also ask,
An urgent mission
The possession of a conscious, articulated history is one of the faculties that distinguishes human beings from animals. Unlike rats, say, or sheep, or cows, or pheasants, we have a past which is separate from ourselves. We therefore have the opportunity, as I have said, to learn from the experiences of our predecessors.
Is it because we are perverse, or misguided, or simply stupid that we refuse to recognize those experiences unless they have come down to us in the form of bona fide ‘historical records’? And is it arrogance or ignorance which leads us to draw an arbitrary line separating ‘history’ from ‘prehistory’ at about 5000 years before the present—defining the records of ‘history’ as valid testimony and the records of ‘prehistory’ as primitive delusions?
At this stage in a continuing investigation, my instinct is that we may have put ourselves in danger by closing our ears for so long to the disturbing ancestral voices which reach us in the form of myths. This is more an intuitive than a rational feeling, but it is by no means unreasonable.
The possession of a conscious, articulated history is one of the faculties that distinguishes human beings from animals. Unlike rats, say, or sheep, or cows, or pheasants, we have a past which is separate from ourselves. We therefore have the opportunity, as I have said, to learn from the experiences of our predecessors.
Is it because we are perverse, or misguided, or simply stupid that we refuse to recognize those experiences unless they have come down to us in the form of bona fide ‘historical records’? And is it arrogance or ignorance which leads us to draw an arbitrary line separating ‘history’ from ‘prehistory’ at about 5000 years before the present—defining the records of ‘history’ as valid testimony and the records of ‘prehistory’ as primitive delusions?
At this stage in a continuing investigation, my instinct is that we may have put ourselves in danger by closing our ears for so long to the disturbing ancestral voices which reach us in the form of myths. This is more an intuitive than a rational feeling, but it is by no means unreasonable.
My research has filled me with respect for the logical thinking, high science, deep psychological insights, and vast cosmographical knowledge of the ancient geniuses who composed those myths, and who, I am now fully persuaded, descended from the same lost civilization that produced the map-makers, pyramid builders, navigators, astronomers and earth-measurers whose fingerprints we have been following across the continents and oceans of the earth.
Since I have learned to respect those long-forgotten and still only hazily identified Newtons and Shakespeares and Einsteins of the last Ice Age, I think it would be foolish to disregard what they seem to be saying. And what they seem to be saying to us is this: that cyclical, recurrent and near-total destructions of mankind are part and parcel of life on this planet, that such destructions have occurred many times before and that they will certainly occur again.
What, after all, is the remarkable calendrical system of the Mayas if it is not a medium for transmitting exactly this message? What, if not vehicles for the same sort of bad news are the traditions of the four previous ‘Suns’ (or sometimes of the three previous ‘Worlds’) passed down in the Americas since time immemorial?
Since I have learned to respect those long-forgotten and still only hazily identified Newtons and Shakespeares and Einsteins of the last Ice Age, I think it would be foolish to disregard what they seem to be saying. And what they seem to be saying to us is this: that cyclical, recurrent and near-total destructions of mankind are part and parcel of life on this planet, that such destructions have occurred many times before and that they will certainly occur again.
What, after all, is the remarkable calendrical system of the Mayas if it is not a medium for transmitting exactly this message? What, if not vehicles for the same sort of bad news are the traditions of the four previous ‘Suns’ (or sometimes of the three previous ‘Worlds’) passed down in the Americas since time immemorial?
By the same token, what might be the function of the great myths of precession which speak not just of previous cataclysms but of cataclysms to come and which (through the metaphor of the cosmic mill) link these earthly disasters to ‘disturbances in the heavens’? Last but by no means least, what burning motive impelled the pyramid builders to erect, with such care, the powerful and mysterious edifices on the Giza plateau?
Yes, they were saying, ‘Kilroy was here’.
And, yes, they found an ingenious way to tell us when they were here.
Of these things I have no doubt.
I am also impressed by the enormous lengths they went to to provide us with convincing proof that theirs was a serious and scientifically advanced civilization. And I am even more impressed by the sense of urgency—of a vitally important mission—that seems to have enlightened all their works and deeds.
I go on intuition again, not on evidence.
It’s my guess that their underlying objective could have been to transmit a warning to the future, and that this warning could be to do with a global cataclysm, perhaps even a recurrence of the same cataclysm that so clearly devastated mankind at the end of the last Ice Age when,
Yes, they were saying, ‘Kilroy was here’.
And, yes, they found an ingenious way to tell us when they were here.
Of these things I have no doubt.
I am also impressed by the enormous lengths they went to to provide us with convincing proof that theirs was a serious and scientifically advanced civilization. And I am even more impressed by the sense of urgency—of a vitally important mission—that seems to have enlightened all their works and deeds.
I go on intuition again, not on evidence.
It’s my guess that their underlying objective could have been to transmit a warning to the future, and that this warning could be to do with a global cataclysm, perhaps even a recurrence of the same cataclysm that so clearly devastated mankind at the end of the last Ice Age when,
‘Noah saw that the earth had tilted, and that its destruction was near, and cried out in a bitter voice: “Tell me what is being done on the earth that the earth is so afflicted and shaken ...” ’25
These words are from the Hebrew Book of Enoch, but similar afflictions and shakings have been foretold in all the Central American traditions that speak of the demise of the present epoch of the world—an epoch, as the reader will recall, in which ‘the elders say [that] there will be a movement of the earth and from this we shall all perish.’26
The reader will also not have forgotten the date calculated by the Ancient Maya calendar for the end of the world:
The reader will also not have forgotten the date calculated by the Ancient Maya calendar for the end of the world:
The day will be 4 Ahau 3 Kankin [corresponding to 23 December AD 2012], and it will be ruled by the Sun God, the ninth Lord of the Night. The moon will be eight days old, and it will be the third lunation in a series of six ...27
In the Mayan scheme of things we are already living in the last days of the earth.
In the Christian scheme of things too, the last days are understood to be upon us. According to the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania:
In the Christian scheme of things too, the last days are understood to be upon us. According to the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania:
‘This world will perish just as surely as did the world before the Flood ... Many things were foretold to occur during the last days, and all of these are being fulfilled. This means that the end of the world is near ...’28
Similarly the Christian psychic Edgar Cayce prophesied in 1934 that around the year 2000:
‘There will be a shifting of the poles. There will be upheavals in the Arctic and the Antarctic that will make for the eruption of volcanoes in the Torrid areas ... The upper portion of Europe will be changed in the twinkling of an eye. The earth will be broken up in the western portion of America. The greater portion of Japan must go into the sea.’29
25 1 Enoch, LXV, in The Apockryphal Old Testament (ed. H.F.D. Sparks), Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989, p. 247.
26 Pre-Hispanic Gods of Mexico, p. 24.
27 Breaking the Maya Code, p. 275.
28 Will The World Survive? Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, 1992.
29 Circulating File, Earth Changes, Extracts from the Edgar Cayce Readings, Edgar Cayce Foundation, Virginia Beach, 1994, p. 36.
Curiously the epoch of the year 2000, which figures in these Christian prophecies, also coincides with the Last Time (or highest point) in the great upwards cycle of the belt stars of the Orion constellation, just as the epoch of the eleventh millennium BC coincided with the First Time (or lowest point) of that cycle.
And curiously, also, as we saw in Chapter Twenty-eight:
29 Circulating File, Earth Changes, Extracts from the Edgar Cayce Readings, Edgar Cayce Foundation, Virginia Beach, 1994, p. 36.
Curiously the epoch of the year 2000, which figures in these Christian prophecies, also coincides with the Last Time (or highest point) in the great upwards cycle of the belt stars of the Orion constellation, just as the epoch of the eleventh millennium BC coincided with the First Time (or lowest point) of that cycle.
And curiously, also, as we saw in Chapter Twenty-eight:
A conjunction of five planets that can be expected to have profound gravitational effects will take place on 5 May in the year 2000, when Neptune, Uranus, Venus, Mercury and Mars will align with the Earth on the other side of the sun, setting up a sort of cosmic tug-of-war ... 30
Could the recondite influences of gravity, when combined with our planet’s precessional wobble, the torsional effects of its axial rotation, and the rapidly growing mass and weight of the Antarctic ice-cap, be enough to spark off a full-scale crustal displacement?
We may never know, one way or another—unless it happens. Meanwhile, I do not think the Egyptian scribe Manetho was being less than literal when he spoke of a harsh and deadly cosmic power at work in the universe:
We may never know, one way or another—unless it happens. Meanwhile, I do not think the Egyptian scribe Manetho was being less than literal when he spoke of a harsh and deadly cosmic power at work in the universe:
Just as iron is likely to be attracted and led after the loadstone, but often turns away and is repelled in the opposite direction, so the salutary, good and rational movement of the world at one time attracts, conciliates and mollifies that harsh power; then again, when the latter has recovered itself, it overthrows the other and reduces it to helplessness ...31
In short, through metaphors and allegories, I suspect the ancients may have tried to find many ways to tell us exactly when—and why—the hammer of global destruction is going to strike again. I therefore think, after 12,500 years of the pendulum, that it would only be wise for us to devote more of our resources to studying the signs and messages that have come down to us from that dark and terrifying period of amnesia which our species calls prehistory.
A speeding up of physical research at the Giza plateau would also be highly desirable—not only by Egyptologists determined to resist any threats to the scholarly status quo but by eclectic teams of investigators who could bring some of the newer sciences to bear on the challenges of this most enigmatic and impenetrable of sites.
A speeding up of physical research at the Giza plateau would also be highly desirable—not only by Egyptologists determined to resist any threats to the scholarly status quo but by eclectic teams of investigators who could bring some of the newer sciences to bear on the challenges of this most enigmatic and impenetrable of sites.
The Chlorine-36 rock-exposure dating technique mentioned in Chapter Six, for example, looks like a particularly promising means of resolving the impasse over the antiquity of the Pyramids and the Sphinx.32
30 See Part V.
30 See Part V.
31 Manetho, pp. 191-3.
32 The Chlorine-36 rock-exposure dating technique has been developed by Professor David Bowen of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Wales. In The Times of London, 1 December 1994, Brown observed:
32 The Chlorine-36 rock-exposure dating technique has been developed by Professor David Bowen of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Wales. In The Times of London, 1 December 1994, Brown observed:
‘One way of resolving the controversy of the ages of the Sphinx and the Pyramids may be through the application of Chlorine-36 rock-exposure dating. This provides an estimate of the time that has elapsed since a rock was first exposed to the atmosphere. In the case of the Sphinx and the Pyramids this would be when the rocks were first exposed by quarrying activity ...’
In 1994 Bowen ran preliminary tests on the famous ‘bluestones’ of Stonehenge in England, hitherto believed to date to 2250 BC. What the tests showed was that these 123 four-ton monoliths could have been quarried during the last Ice Age—perhaps as early as 12000 BC. See The Times, London, 5 December.
Likewise, if the will is there, then a way can be found to get through to whatever lies beyond the little door concealed in the Great Pyramid 200 feet up the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber. At the same time serious efforts should be made to investigate the contents of the large, square-edged and apparently man-made cavity in the bedrock, deep beneath the paws of the Sphinx, that was discovered when a seismic survey was carried out at the site in 1993.33
Last but not least, far away from Giza, I suspect that our efforts might also be repaid if we were to undertake a proper investigation of the subglacial landscapes of Antarctica—much the most likely continent to hide the complete remains of a lost civilization. If we could establish what destroyed that civilization, then we might be in a better position to save ourselves from a similar cataclysmic fate.
In making these latter suggestions I am, of course, fully aware that there are many who will be scornful and will assert the uniformitarian view that ‘all things will continue as they have done since the beginning of creation.’34 But I am also aware that such ‘scoffers in the last days’35 are those who for one reason or another are deaf to the testimony of our forgotten ancestors.
Likewise, if the will is there, then a way can be found to get through to whatever lies beyond the little door concealed in the Great Pyramid 200 feet up the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber. At the same time serious efforts should be made to investigate the contents of the large, square-edged and apparently man-made cavity in the bedrock, deep beneath the paws of the Sphinx, that was discovered when a seismic survey was carried out at the site in 1993.33
Last but not least, far away from Giza, I suspect that our efforts might also be repaid if we were to undertake a proper investigation of the subglacial landscapes of Antarctica—much the most likely continent to hide the complete remains of a lost civilization. If we could establish what destroyed that civilization, then we might be in a better position to save ourselves from a similar cataclysmic fate.
In making these latter suggestions I am, of course, fully aware that there are many who will be scornful and will assert the uniformitarian view that ‘all things will continue as they have done since the beginning of creation.’34 But I am also aware that such ‘scoffers in the last days’35 are those who for one reason or another are deaf to the testimony of our forgotten ancestors.
33 Mystery of the Sphinx, NBC-TV, 1993.
34 2 Peter 3:4.
35 2 Peter 3:3.
As we have seen, this testimony appears to be trying to tell us that a hideous calamity has indeed descended upon mankind from time to time, that on each occasion it has afflicted us suddenly, without warning and without mercy, like a thief in the night, and that it will certainly recur at some point in the future, obliging us—unless we are well prepared—to begin again like orphaned children in complete ignorance of our true heritage.
Walking in the last days
Hopi Indian Reservation, May 1994:Across the high plains of Arizona, for days and days and days, a desolate wind had been blowing. As we drove across those plains towards the tiny village of Shungopovi, I went over in my mind all I had seen and done in the previous five years: my travels, my research, the false starts and dead-ends I had encountered, the lucky breaks, the moments when everything had come together, the moments when everything seemed about to fall apart.
I had travelled a long road to get here, I realized—far longer than the 300-mile freeway that had whisked us up into these austere badlands from Phoenix, the state capital. Nor did I expect to return with any great degree of enlightenment.
Nevertheless, I had made this journey because the science of prophecy is still believed to be alive among the Hopi: Pueblo Indians, distantly related to the Aztecs of Mexico, whose numbers have been reduced by attrition and misery to barely 10,000.36
Like the Ancient Maya whose descendants all across the Yucatan are convinced that the end of the world is coming in the year 2000 y pico (and a little),37 the Hopi believe that we are walking in the last days, with a geological sword of Damocles hanging over us.38
According to their myths, as we saw in Chapter Twenty-four:
The first world was destroyed, as a punishment for human misdemeanours, by an all-consuming fire that came from above and below. The second world ended when the terrestrial globe toppled from its axis and everything was covered with ice. The third world ended in a universal flood. The present world is the fourth. Its fate will depend on whether or not its inhabitants behave in accordance with the Creator’s plans ...’39
36 Community Profile: Hopi Indian Reservation, Arizona Department of Commerce.
37 Breaking the Maya Code, p. 275.
38 Book of the Hopi.
39 World Mythology, p. 26.
I had come to Arizona to see whether the Hopi thought we were behaving in accordance with the Creator’s plans ...
39 World Mythology, p. 26.
I had come to Arizona to see whether the Hopi thought we were behaving in accordance with the Creator’s plans ...
The end of the world The desolate wind, blowing across the high plains, shook and rattled the sides of the trailer-home we sat in. Beside me was Santha, who’d been everywhere with me, sharing the risks and the adventures, sharing the highs and the lows. Sitting across from us was our friend Ed Ponist, a medical-surgical nurse from Lansing, Michigan. A few years previously Ed had worked on the reservation for a while, and it was thanks to his contacts that we were now here.
On my right was Paul Sifki, a ninety-sixyear-old Hopi elder of the Spider clan, and a leading spokesman of the traditions of his people. Beside him was his grand-daughter Melza Sifki, a handsome middle-aged woman who had offered to translate.
‘I have heard,’ I said, ‘that the Hopi believe the end of the world is coming. Is this true?’
Paul Sifki was a small, wizened man, nut-brown in colour, dressed in jeans and a cambric shirt. Throughout our conversation he never once looked at me, but gazed intently ahead, as though he were searching for a familiar face in a distant crowd.
Melza put my question to him and a moment later translated her grandfather’s reply:
Melza put my question to him and a moment later translated her grandfather’s reply:
‘He says, “why do you want to know”?’
I explained that there were many reasons. The most important was that I felt a sense of urgency:
‘My research has convinced me that there was an advanced civilization—long, long ago—that was destroyed in a terrible cataclysm. I fear that our own civilization may be destroyed by a similar cataclysm ...’
There followed a long exchange in Hopi, then this translation:
‘He said that when he was a child, in the 1900s, there was a star that exploded—a star that had been up there in the sky for a long while ... And he went to his grandfather and asked him to explain the meaning of this sign. His grandfather replied:“This is the way our own world will end—engulfed in flames ... If people do not change their ways then the spirit that takes care of the world will become so frustrated with us that he will punish the world with flames and it will end just like that star ended.”That was what his grandfather said to him—that the earth would explode just like that exploding star ...’
‘So the feeling is that this world will end in fire ... And having viewed the world for the past ninety years, does he believe that the behaviour of mankind has improved or worsened?’
‘He says it has not improved. We’re getting worse.’
‘So in his opinion, then, the end is coming?’
‘He said that the signs are already there to be seen ... He said that nowadays nothing but the wind blows and that all we do is have a weapon pointed at one another. That shows how far apart we have drifted and how we feel towards each other now. There are no values any more— none at all—and people live any way they want, without morals or laws. These are the signs that the time has come ...’
Melza paused in her translation, then added on her own account:
‘This terrible wind. It dries things out. It brings no moisture. The way we see it, this kind of climate is a consequence of how we’re living today—not just us, but your people as well.’
I noticed that her eyes had filled with tears while she was talking.
‘I have a cornfield,’ she continued, ‘that’s really dry. And I look up into the sky and try to pray for rain, but there is no rain, no clouds even ... When we’re like this we don’t even know who we are.’
There was a long moment of silence and the wind rocked the trailer, blowing hard and steady across the mesa as evening fell around us.
I said quietly,
I said quietly,
‘Please ask your grandfather if he thinks that anything can now be done for the Hopi and for the rest of mankind?’
‘The only thing he knows,’ Melza replied when she had heard his answer, ‘is that so long as the Hopi do not abandon their traditions they may be able to help themselves and to help others. They have to hold on to what they believed in the past. They have to preserve their memories. These are the most important things ... But my grandfather wants to tell you also, and for you to understand, that this earth is the work of an intelligent being, a spirit—a creative and intelligent spirit that has designed everything to be the way it is. My grandfather says that nothing is here just by chance, that nothing happens by accident—whether good or bad—and that there is a reason for everything that takes place ...’
At the millstone grinding When human beings from around the globe, and from many different cultures, share a powerful and overwhelming intuition that a cataclysm is approaching, we are within our rights to ignore them. And when the voices of our distant ancestors, descending to us through myths and sacred architecture, speak to us of the physical obliteration of a great civilization in remote antiquity (and tell us that our own civilization is in jeopardy), we are entitled, if we wish, to stop our ears ...
So it was, the Bible says, in the antediluvian world:
‘For in those days, before the Flood, people were eating, drinking, taking wives, taking husbands, right up to the moment that Noah went into the Ark, and they suspected nothing till the flood came and swept all away.’40
In the same manner it has been prophesied that the next global destruction will fall upon us suddenly,
‘at an hour we do not suspect, like lightning striking in the east and flashing far into the west ... The sun will be darkened, the moon will lose its brightness, the stars will fall from the sky and the powers of heaven will be shaken ... Then of two men in the fields, one is taken, one left; and of two women at the millstone grinding, one is taken, one left ...’41
40 Matthew, 24: 38-39.
41 Matthew, 24: 27-41.
What has happened before can happen again. What has been done before can be done again.
And perhaps there is, indeed, nothing new under the sun ...
What has happened before can happen again. What has been done before can be done again.
And perhaps there is, indeed, nothing new under the sun ...
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