Lovers of Sophia

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by Jason Reza Jorjani


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  into the joints in a liquefied form, which means that the builders

  would have needed something like a portable forge.

  Tiahuanaco features an expansive step pyramid, known as the

  Akapana, whose facing stones have lamentably been stripped over

  time for building material. Despite its vandalized state, excavations

  have discovered that its seven terraces were built in something like

  a modernist style and featured an intricate system of waterworks

  that channeled rain between a pool in the central court on the roof,

  through a drainage system that ran around and down the sides of

  the various terraces and into a moat surrounding the pyramid. The

  heart of Tiahuanaco is the Kalasasaya, an austere rectangular open-

  air temple with megalithic wal s of 100 ton stones perfectly cut and,

  as at Baalbek, so tightly fitted together without mortar that a razor

  blade cannot be slipped between their joints.

  Wilson recounts how Professor Arthur Posnansky spent the

  better part of his life studying these ruins before publishing his

  findings in an encyclopedic multi-volume work entitled, Tiahuanacu: The Cradle of American Man (1915). It has been recognized that, like many ancient temples elsewhere, the Kalasasaya is an astronomical

  observatory. Measurements of the sunrise and sunset from markers

  inside the Kalasasaya are as persistently precise as the stonework

  of its builders. Two observation points in the enclosure mark

  the summer and winter solstices. Posnansky noted that these

  measurements were uncharacteristical y off the mark. Due to a

  slight rolling motion of the earth over very long periods of time (the obliquity of the ecliptic), the two tropics are slightly further from the equator than they once were.

  If one takes this into account, the builders at Tiahuanaco could

  have marked the solstices accurately at the precisely constructed

  Kalasasaya, but long before the date that conventional archeologists

  assign to the structure. Posnansky put this date at 15,000 BC. More

  recently another archaeologist, Professor Neil Steede, replicated

  Posnansky’s methodology with more refined contemporary

  instruments and corrected that to 12,000 years ago – roughly the

  date that Plato gives us for the zenith and catastrophic col apse of

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  Atlantis. When Dr. Oswaldo Rivera, the Director of the Bolivian

  National Institute of Archeology, was initial y presented with these

  refinements of Posnansky’s analysis he was skeptical, but after

  taking his own meticulous measurements, he came to agree with

  the assessment that the megalithic city was built long before the

  rise of the known native historical culture that revitalized the site

  nearly ten thousand years later. The Aymara Indians, who live in the

  environs of Tiahuanaco and around Lake Titicaca, have a language

  that is so logical that, when translated into algebraic shorthand, it is the perfect bridge for computers to translate from one language into

  another.240 The Bolivian mathematician Rojas de Guzman believes

  that it was artificial y constructed; the Aymara Indians claim that it came from the gods.

  The later Mesoamerican culture in Bolivia and Peru as well as

  that of the Mayans in Mexico and the Aztecs after them, all share

  the unambiguous tradition that tall white gods coming from across

  the ocean brought the arts of civilization to the highlands of what is now Latin America after their own island homeland was destroyed

  by a cataclysmic upheaval and a great flood that washed over the

  Earth. The bearded leader of these sagacious gods, symbolized by

  the feathered serpent or dragon, is variously called Quetzalcoatl,

  Kukulkan, Viracocha, and Votan (Wotan?).241 This civilizer and his

  cohorts were eventual y confronted and defeated by Tezcatlipoca,

  the “Lord of the Smoking Mirror” by means of which distant places

  could be seen.

  With his smoke and mirrors, Tezcatlipoca instituted the

  practice of human sacrifice in Mesoamerica. Instead of violently

  resisting him, Quetzalcoatl and his fellow gods fled in boats

  without paddles but promised to return someday. It was because

  the arrival of the bearded European Cortez and his plunderers

  was mistaken for the return of these white civilizer gods that the

  Mesoamericans were so easily overcome by the conquistadors.

  Ironical y, the Catholic friars who came with the conquistadors

  240 Ibid., 53.

  241 Ibid., 131.

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  identified Quetzalcoatl – the Feathered Serpent who was also

  symbolized by the Morning Star (Venus or Lucifer) – with Satan

  or the Dragon of the Apocalypse and on this account, above al

  others, they rounded up and burned the Mayan scriptures. If

  they had been a little keener they might also have recognized in

  Tezcatlipoca the blood lusting egotistical maniac of their own

  Bible, the Lord of Abraham and Moses.

  As Wilson observes, there is something disturbingly

  bizarre about the alleged civilizational accomplishments of the

  Mesoamericans. The ‘Mayan’ solar calendar is more precise than

  any other pre-modern measure of time; their year was 365.242 days

  long, only 0.0002 seconds shorter than our modern measurement

  of 365.2422, which was calculated with a cesium clock.242 They also

  had several other calendars: one that calculated according to Venus

  cycles, another according to Jupiter–Saturn cycles, as well as a Long

  Count calendar. This by now infamous Long Count calendar that

  measures world ages, has units of 20 days, its ‘weeks’ consist of 360

  days or 18 units, called a tun, a katun consists of 20 tuns, and 20

  katuns is a baktun or 144,000 days, with 13 baktuns amounting to a Great Year after which the cycle begins again.

  Why did the Mayans need calendars that were so accurate and

  that calculated such cosmic spans of time? Were the Maya faithful

  preservers of fragmentary knowledge that they inherited but did not

  truly understand? Did a culture that put wheels on children’s toys but failed to grasp what they would accomplish on cars or chariots real y

  build that vast network of roads that crisscrosses Mesoamerica, or

  were they built by the same people who set down vast straight lines

  in the plains of Nazca that can only be seen from the air?

  While these potential traces of Atlantis in the Americas are

  intriguing, Plato tel s us that the legend came to him by way of

  Solon who received it from the priests of ancient Egypt – where the

  best memory of the Atlantean age had been preserved. Indeed, the

  Edfu building texts recount the tale of the Seven Sages who brought

  242 Ibid., 150–151.

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  civilization to Egypt after a worldwide deluge.243 These shemasu

  hor – Followers of Horus, or more literal y “trackers of the Sun” –

  are described in strikingly similar terms as the civilizer gods of the Americas: tal , statuesque, fair skinned people, whose men could

  grow flowing beards, and who wore robes that were emblazoned

  with feathered or winged serpents. As in M
esoamerica, the winged

  serpent became the ubiquitous sacred symbol of ancient Egypt.

  Here it took the form of two serpents framing each side of a winged

  solar disk – the symbol of the secret society of the shemasu hor, the initiatory kingmakers and power behind the throne of the Pharaohs,

  who had it engraved over nearly every doorway in temples and

  palaces. But what is this reference to a “tracking of the Sun”?

  The Belgian engineer Robert Bauval noticed that there is

  something odd about the three pyramids at Giza. A straight line can

  be drawn through the corners of the first two large pyramids, but

  the third much smaller pyramid is not anywhere near aligned with

  them. Menkaura was no less important a Pharaoh than Cheops and

  Chefren, so what accounts for this geometry? It occurred to Bauval

  that the three pyramids of Giza look just like the three stars of Orion’s belt, where the third is offset from the alignment of the first two and is less bright than they are. Furthermore, these three stars are in the same basic orientation to the Milky Way as the three pyramids on

  the ground at Giza are to the Nile River. Bauval was familiar with

  the fact that the Egyptians associated Osiris with Orion and thought

  of Egypt as an earthly mirror of the heavens. Yet, if so much trouble

  was taken to mirror Orion and the Milky Way on the Giza plateau,

  the builders ought to have come very close to a perfect reflection.

  This was not the case, but Bauval recalled that on account of a slight wobble of the Earth’s axis there is, over the course of 25,920 years, a

  “precession of the equinoxes.”244

  The signs of the Zodiac turn backwards so that the Sun rises

  into a different one on the Spring Equinox every 2,160 years. A

  “zodiacal age” is marked by which constel ation the Sun rises into

  243 Ibid., 210–211.

  244 Ibid., 51, 166.

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  around March 21. From the standpoint of the average lifespan of a

  civilization, let alone that of an individual human being, this change in the stars is nearly imperceptible. The position of the three stars of Orion’s belt with respect to the Milky Way in the heavens is mirrored

  exactly by the three pyramids of Giza with respect to the Nile River

  on the Earth at about 10,500 BC.245

  The Egyptians refer to this period as zep tepi or the “first time”, when the builder gods founded their civilization. Not only is this

  the same epoch as Plato’s destruction of Atlantis and the new

  date proposed for the earliest strata at Tiahuanaco, it is also the

  astrological age of Leo, which ties in the other great monument

  on the Giza plateau: the Sphinx. With the possible exception of

  the foundation courses of the Pyramid of Cheops, whose massive

  megalithic stones are reminiscent of those at Baalbek, the pyramid

  complex at Giza seems to have been built around 2,500 BC. If it was

  planned eight thousand years earlier, or at least commemorates that

  time precisely, who in Egypt was following the movements of the

  Sun through the astrological ages for so long?

  Wilson explains how R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz undertook a

  detailed study of esoterical y encoded Egyptian symbolism that

  sheds light on how the Egyptian elite of initiates managed to

  maintain a basical y stable high civilization for three thousand years (six times longer than the classical Greeks, four times longer than

  the Romans, and some ten times the length of modern European

  civilization to date).246 Schwaller noted that the Great Sphinx

  at Giza appeared to be badly eroded by water as well as by wind.

  Thus, he hypothesized that the ancient Egyptians’ account of their

  own prehistory might be more than mythology. Manetho and other

  Egyptian chroniclers before him had claimed that their civilization

  was a legacy handed down by a Pre-Pharaohonic culture established by the gods after the devastation at the end of the last world age.247

  245 Ibid., 52.

  246 R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, Symbol and the Symbolic: Ancient Egypt, Science, and the Evolution of Consciousness (Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1978).

  247 Gerald P. Verbrugghe and John M. Wickersham, Berossos and Manetho, 406

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  A single unbroken lineage traced back to these times through the

  shemasu hor, the Followers of the Sun.

  Boston University geologist Robert Schoch began to study the

  water erosion on the Sphinx in the 1990s. He concluded that it was

  indeed a pattern of erosion quite separate from that produced by

  wind, and that it was due not to flooding but to sustaining centuries

  of torrential rainfal . Based on the history of climate conditions in

  Egypt, where there had not been regular heavy rainfall for many

  centuries before the known Egyptian civilization, Schoch was

  ultimately able to convince geologists to re-date the Sphinx to a

  period at least several thousand years prior to the recognized ‘rise’ of ancient Egyptian civilization.248 Its head, which is dramatical y out

  of proportion with its body and may original y have been a lion’s

  head, that of Leo, could have been re-carved during dynastic times

  – perhaps because the original was so water eroded by then that its

  facial features could not be made out. The megalithic Sphinx and

  Valley temples were built with the same rock hollowed out of the

  Sphinx trench while that statue was being carved, and so they are

  of the same earlier date although the engineering skill involved in

  them surpasses most anything known to be Egyptian.

  The Osireion at Abydos, which is in the same austere style

  as the Sphinx and Valley temples is buried under 8,000 years of

  sedimentation – in other words, that could be the last time it stood

  above ground. The proposal of establishment Egyptologists that it

  may have been built underground boggles the mind even further

  given that the unmarked precision-cut megaliths there are the largest

  in all of Egypt. The Egyptians believed that this structure was the

  dwelling place of Osiris, who was represented by the constel ation of

  Orion.

  The folklore of Atlantis has it that before the destruction of their

  civilization, its mariners had colonized the world and that after the

  Introduced and Translated: Native Traditions in Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).

  248 Robert M. Schoch, Voices of the Rocks: A Scientist Looks at Catastrophes and Ancient Civilizations (New York: Harmony Books, 1999).

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  cataclysm they took refuge in some of these colonies. If Baalbek,

  Tiahuanaco, and Giza were among the colonies of Atlantis, where

  are the remains of Atlantis itself? A plethora of attempts made to

  geographical y locate the homeland of Plato’s advanced antediluvian

  maritime empire, beginning with that of the US Senator Ignatius

  Donnel y, have all been sunk by this question. Certainly, there are

  no such remains in the Atlantic – at least not on a continental scale

  (although recent ocean floor mapping suggests that there might

  have been another colony somewhere around Cuba, one swallowed

  by sea level rise). Establishment archeologists have taken this to

  mean that if Plato’
s “Atlantis” refers to any historical civilization

  at al , it is nothing but a vague and embellished recollection of the

  island culture of Minoan Crete – the cradle of Greek civilization.249

  The palace of Knossos with its labyrinth is supposed to have been

  that of the ringed city of Atlantis, and the volcanic eruption of Thera on nearby Santorini has been taken for the cause of the earthquake

  and tsunami that Plato describes.

  However, as Colin Wilson recognizes, Plato’s account clearly

  refers to an island outside of the “pil ars of Hercules” or Straits of Gibraltar and not inside the Mediterranean. Subsequent interpreters have assumed that he meant that Atlantis was in what we have come

  to know as the Atlantic Ocean, between Europe and the Americas.

  But Plato himself is clear in telling us that “the Ocean” was named

  after Atlantis and not the other way around. Moreover, he uses the

  enigmatic phrase “the true Ocean” when he describes the location of Atlantis at the center of it, and then he adds that “the whole opposite continent” could be reached across this Ocean on the other side of

  Atlantis. Final y, he explicitly states that this so-called “island” is actual y an immense landmass with its own impressive mountain

  chains, rivers, lakes, and so forth. There is only one “true Ocean”

  recognized by oceanographers today – the place on earth where the

  three major ‘oceans’ converge into a single Ocean that surrounds an

  island that is indeed the size of a continent: Antarctica.

  249 Richard Ellis, Imagining Atlantis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.), 102–187.

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  While this continent is just the right size, and in just the right

  place, to be Plato’s Atlantis, it is now buried under an ice cap that

  is in some places two miles thick. The conventional geological view

  is that Antarctica has been within the southern polar region for

  millions of years. That view has been challenged by the Earth crustal

  displacement theory of Professor Charles Hapgood, which was

  endorsed by Albert Einstein.250 Hapgood was a Harvard graduate in

  the Philosophy of Science and later went on to teach anthropology

  at Springfield College in Massachusetts. Hapgood became aware of

  very old maps that accurately depicted the sub-glacial topography

  of Antarctica, a continent that was not even supposed to have been

 

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