Lovers of Sophia
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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