Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

by Graham Hancock

  ‘You are right. Permanently flooded. It was overwhelmed by the sea.’

  ‘And that city was?’

  ‘It was called Tenmadurai – which means “Southern Madurai”. It was in the southern part of Kumari Kandam. After it was gone, a city called Kapatapuram that lay further to the north was chosen as the headquarters of the Second Sangam. It endured for some thousands of years but ultimately it too was flooded. Our oldest surviving text, the Tolkappiyam, is a work of the Second Sangam.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Finally, when Kumari Kandam had entirely gone beneath the sea, the Third Sangam was established in the city of Madurai. Then it was called Uttara Madurai, “Northern Madurai”.’

  Lingam or omphalos?

  Before we left Tiruvannamalai we visited the Arunachelswar temple in order to see Lord Siva in his lingam form.

  Walking barefoot through the ambulatories and open stone-paved plazas, we passed rows of poor, homeless and hungry people, for the most part dressed in rags – here a mother with sunken breasts trying to suckle her child, there an old blind man, here a cripple, there a leper – waiting patiently for the charity soup kitchen to feed them.

  If we looked up we could see the rugged red peak of Arunachela looming above us, framed by the tall towers of the gopurams that marked the main entrances of each of the temple’s internested rectangular zones. Their steep pyramidal form, and their general arrangement in opposing pairs around a geometrical central plaza, as well as the scale of the whole enterprise, reminded me forcefully of the Mayan city of Tikal in Guatemala, and of Angkor Thorn and Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Indeed, in general, it has for a long while struck me as worthy of note that so many of the world’s ancient places of worship – in Europe, Egypt, Israel, Mesopotamia, India, south-east Asia, China, Japan, Central America and the Andes, for example – have assertively geometrical designs and architecture. What is this recurrent association of geometry with the religious quest? Certainly, it seems that there were many great thinkers in antiquity who, if asked ‘What is God?’, might well have replied, as St Bernard of Clairvaux did to the same question, ‘He is length, width, height and depth.’52

  Because all Hindu temples are part circus, we encountered a painted elephant surveying the world through a jaundiced eye, chained up in a stone pillared pavilion, and when we descended the steps to the sacred pool, known as Siva-ganga Teertham we were followed by a persistent fortune-teller who could only with great difficulty be persuaded to relinquish what he clearly felt was a fair claim on us.

  Soon after we had shaken him off (not until Santha had relented and agreed to have her fortune told for 100 rupees) we were appropriated by a beautiful doe-eyed young man in flowing white robes who floated up to us declaring himself to be a Brahmin and the son of a senior priest of the temple. As though reading our thoughts he then led us towards the sanctuary where the ‘self-generated’ lingam of Siva resides, explaining as he did so that it was normally out of bounds to non-Hindus, but that we had happily chanced, in his person, upon just the man to get us inside. The only thing we would not be allowed to do, he said, was touch the lingam – a privilege that was reserved for initiated Sivachariars.

  I have been offered illegal access to inaccessible areas in many temples around the world, and the young Brahmin’s patter was so familiar that I could already almost count the 100 rupee notes changing hands. Still, we followed him through a maze of crowded rooms and hallways, visited various subsidiary shrines where we were fed puffed rice and sugar, had our foreheads liberally smeared with ash, and jumped a queue of worshippers at the entrance to the principal sanctuary. Then suddenly, for just a few moments, we were in the presence of the natural pillar or cylinder of stone that is venerated by the faithful as the eternal manifestation of Siva himself. The pillar, however, was so decked out with finery, robes, jewellery and an elaborate head-dress in the form of a rearing golden cobra hood that it was impossible to get a clear glimpse of any part of it. All that I can say is that it seemed to be less than half a metre thick and approximately 1.5 metres high and was rounded like a cigar-tube at the tip – very much, in other words, like ‘unclothed’ Sivalinga that can be seen in temples and shrines all around India.

  So what was special about this one?

  As he took my money, the Brahmin could only repeat the old mantras – that it is a wonder of nature wrought by the power of Siva, that it is ancient and nobody knows how old it is, and that the first temple to be built around it was the work of the gods.

  The numbers of time and the world grid

  In previous books I have grappled several times with the hypothesis that the earth and all its oceans may have been explored, mapped and accurately measured with lines of latitude and longitude – a pre-eminently ‘civilized’ and sophisticated activity – thousands of years before what we now think of as history began.53 I want to avoid the tedious repetition of evidence and arguments that I have already presented in Fingerprints of the Gods and Heaven’s Mirror, but, in summary, the problem is this: certain medieval and Renaissance maps seem to express sophisticated geographical and cartographic knowledge far ahead of the science of their age. A number of researchers attribute this knowledge to older source documents that have not come down to us. In his Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, for example, Charles Hapgood draws attention to the accurate longitudes on the so-called ‘portolano’ charts of the fourteenth century (400 years before the invention of Harrison’s Chronometer supposedly made the accurate measurement of longitude at sea feasible for the first time). Hapgood believes that the anachronism may be explained by the survival of ancient cartographical knowledge (either in the form of maps copied and recopied again and again down the generations, or in the form of oral traditions retained and passed on amongst mariners) that originated with a highly advanced, sophisticated and as yet unidentified seafaring civilization of prehistory. He makes the same argument for the appearance of Antarctica on the Oronteus Finnaeus map of 1539 (some 300 years before Antarctica is believed to have been ‘discovered’).54

  Evidence that provides some tangential support for the general thrust of Hapgood’s theory comes from a large sequence of numbers – including 18, 36, 72, 144, 2160, 4320, 25,920, etc. – that appears repeatedly and prominently in ancient myths, scriptures and traditions from all around the world.55 According to the late Professor Giorgio de Santillana of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Professor Hertha von Dechend of Frankfurt University, these ubiquitous numbers derive from an archaic astronomical tradition which used shared, globally diffused conventions to record its observations of the stars. The central symbol of the system depicts a great wheel that rotates in heaven, ‘churning’ or ‘milling’ for thousands of years. The entire axis, spokes and bands that bind this wheel are said to be periodically broken by recurrent cataclysms – often flood and fire – at which point a new wheel is forged and the cycle begins again.

  Santillana and von Dechend’s explanation for this symbolism and for the numbers associated with it is that it is a metaphor for the celestial phenomenon that astronomers today call ‘precession’. This is a slow, cyclical wobble of the earth’s axis in space so that, if the tip of the north (or south) pole were imaginarily extended it would be seen to transcribe a great circle amongst the polar stars over a period of 25,920 years. Though it was not thought to have been detected until the time of the Greeks, it is Santillana and von Dechend’s radical contention that precession was observed, and measured, thousands of years earlier than that by what they describe as ‘some almost unbelievable ancestor civilization’.56 They further claim that it is these same ancient measurements (all time measurements) that generate the mysterious numbers in the myths.

  The most notable effect of precession is that it causes a slow, relentless drift of the background of stars against which the sun is seen to rise on the spring equinox (21 March, when night and day are of equal length). This is called ‘the precession of the equinoxes’. Although it can be detect
ed by relatively simple observations, these must be sustained over several generations before the sequence begins to emerge.

  The ruling number in the sequence, Santillana and von Dechend suggest, is 72 – the round number of years required to observe one degree of the precession of the equinoxes.57 This, they say, is why the tally of significant numbers in the myths includes 72 and multiples of 72 (e.g. 144, 720, 2160, 4320, etc.); 36 (half of 72) and multiples of 36; 24 (one-third of 72) and multiples of 24, etc. The system also uses other ways of combining these numbers – e.g., 72 + 36 = 108, a sacred number in many cultures, while half of 108 is 54, also a sacred number, as is 540 or 540,000, or 5,400,000, etc. and as are 108,000, 1,800,000, and so on.58

  It may be that this powerful number system is not based on the observation of the precession of the equinoxes at all and that some explanation other than a lost civilization will ultimately be found for it. But what cannot be denied is the simple, well-evidenced fact that the system exists – whatever its source – and that it occurs in known texts of all the great archaic mythological and religious systems, amongst them ancient Sumer and Babylon, Vedic India, ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, ancient China, the Maya of Central America, the Old Testament Hebrews and many other cultures.59

  It was only while I was writing Heaven’s Mirror that I began to look into another and much more controversial possibility – that a network of sacred sites might have been established all around the globe according to a longitude grid based on precessional numbers. Thus, the massive sacred complexes on which stand the Great Pyramids of Giza in Egypt and the fabulous temples of Angkor in Cambodia are on meridians 72 degrees of longitude apart; Pohnpei is 54 degrees of longitude east of Angkor; Easter Island is today the closest dry land to 144 degrees of longitude east of Angkor; the Bay of Paracas in Peru, dominated by the massive cliff drawing of unknown origin known as the ‘Candelabra of the Andes’, lies 180 degrees east of Angkor. Frequently these sites are linked to flood myths, spoken of in ancient traditions as ‘Navels of the Earth’ (omphalos in Greek), and are rich in symbolism of obelisks, stone pillars, pyramids and other stone monuments.60

  All this I was already well aware of during my travels in India in February and March 2000. Yet I honestly did not expect when I came to Arunachela, despite its obvious and prevalent omphalos/lingam symbolism, that it too would prove to be located at a meaningful point on the same hypothetical ‘precessional grid’. I only looked it up in the longitude tables as a matter of routine. As soon as I did so, however, it was immediately obvious that a relationship based on significant precessional numbers does in fact exist between Arunachela and other grid sites – for it lies 24 degrees west of Angkor and 48 degrees east of Giza (respectively one-third and two-thirds of the 72 degrees of longitude separating the former from the latter).61

  Apparent longitudinal ‘correlations’ linking sacred sites according to a sequence of numbers thought to have been derived from astronomical observations that occur in ancient myths and scriptures could, of course, arise by chance. I don’t deny that possibility. But I wish to pursue what I believe to be the more interesting explanation – namely that such sites may originally have been established on specific longitudes to act as permanent markers and reference points for an archaic worldwide grid of earth measurements and to safeguard precious geodetic and navigational knowledge for the long-term benefit of mankind.

  This, indeed, is little more than is already claimed in the ancient Indian accounts of the deluge, and the survival of it by a remnant of wise men, and their preservation and repromulgation of antediluvian knowledge in the new age of the earth. Moreover, it can hardly be an accident that the yuga system that lies at the heart of the Dwarka story, of the story of the flood of Manu, and of the Hindu concept of recurrent cycles of cataclysm and rebirth, is also denominated in terms of precessional numbers. According to the Puranas, for example, the duration of the Kali Yuga is set at 1200 ‘divine years’, equivalent to 432,000 mortal years. The durations for the preceding Krita, Treta and Davapara Yugas are set respectively at 4800 divine years, 3600 divine years and 2400 divine years, such that one mahayuga – made up of the total of 12,000 divine years contained in the four lesser yugas – is equivalent to 4,320,000 years of mortals.62

  Whatever the explanation ultimately turns out to be, and whether Santillana and von Dechend are basically right or basically wrong, the worldwide distribution of such an intricate sequence of numbers, not only in myths but also in architecture (e.g., the 72 pillars of the Dwarkadish temple), represents a serious problem that orthodox historians have so far failed to address.

  If it is not ‘coincidence’, then what is it?

  The riddle of Vishnu’s three steps

  Santha and I treated ourselves to a luxury in south India in February 2000, which we would never have dreamed of affording back in 1992. This was a comfortable, crème-white, air-conditioned Ambassador limousine (for what was going to turn out to be a journey of almost 3000 kilometres) with Palani, a small, wiry ex-army driver from Chennai, at the wheel. With his steady nerves and encyclopedic knowledge of the highways and byways of Tamil Nadu, he was the best possible guide and friend we could have had on such a journey. When I needed a beer in a ‘dry’ town he always knew (although never imbibing himself) where to obtain bottles of cold, illicit Kingfisher wrapped up in brown paper sacks. And more to the point he put us through no collisions, no nerve-jangling skids, no horrific misjudgements of the proximity of a pedestrian, no death-defying overtaking manoeuvres, and no falling asleep at the wheel.

  From Tiruvannamalai we drove south all day towards Madurai through a rich, green, predominantly flat dreamscape of paddy fields and palm trees dotted here and there with the weird outcroppings of ancient red granite that are the characteristic feature of this region. There were people everywhere, Tamil peasant farmers at work in the fields in brightly coloured clothes, or strolling along the road, sometimes drying cattle fodder on the road itself, doing hard labour on building sites and eighteen-hour days in wayside shops and stalls – a tremendous mass of individual human lives surviving in many cases on the very edge of absolute penury yet somehow making do and getting by. It was fascinating to realize, and impossible to ignore, that the religion of all these industrious people was a peculiarly Saivite brand of Hinduism:

  Siva ‘the embodiment of knowledge’.63

  Siva, the god of wisdom, who rules in ‘the city of knowledge’ (jnana-puri, literally ‘gnosis city’).64

  Siva who takes the form of Arunachela, ‘the mountain of knowledge’.65

  Siva who, through initiation into gnosis, has the power to inflict or to withhold death and to grant immortality.66

  In some texts, I had been interested to learn, Siva is identified with Vishnu. In the Mahabaratha, for example, there is an episode in which the warrior Arjuna experiences a revelation after being wrestled to the ground by a huge stalwart being:

  Arjuna’s limbs were bruised and he was deprived of his senses. When he recovered he hailed the god, saying: ‘Thou art Siva in the form of Vishnu and Vishnu in the form of Siva … O Hari, O Rudra, I bow to thee.’67

  In the Rig Veda, Vishnu’s principal exploit, recounted and celebrated again and again, is the taking of ‘three steps’.68 Although it is agreed that these steps must symbolize something of profound importance, scholars have as yet reached no consensus as to their underlying meaning.69

  I pulled the Griffith translation of the Rig Veda from the half-open satchel that lay perched between Santha and myself on the middle of the back seat and opened it at Book I, Hymn 104:

  I will declare the mighty deeds of Vishnu, of him who measured out the earthly regions … thrice setting down his footstep, widely striding. For this mighty deed is Vishnu lauded … He within whose three wide-extended paces all living creatures have their habitation … Him who alone with triple step hath measured this common dwelling place, long, far extended …70

  All kinds of symbolism might indeed be intended in
such a passage, but if we take the hymn at face value, then isn’t it rather clearly saying that Vishnu measured out the earth by taking three footsteps? We might speculate on what precisely the footsteps represent, but the involvement of the whole enterprise in earth-measuring – i.e., geography – cannot reasonably be denied.

  Other passages reinforce the same conclusion, describing Vishnu, for example, as ‘He who strode, widely pacing, with three steppings forth over the realms of earth for freedom and for life …’71 Two verses later we read that ‘He, like a rounded wheel, hath set in swift motion his 90 racing steeds together with the four …’72 What could the function of this latter verse possibly be if it is not to invite us to multiply 90 by 4, giving us the 360 degrees of the circle (or ‘rounded wheel’)? Remember, we have been told just beforehand that such an approach to measuring out ‘the realms of earth’ is a contribution to the cause of freedom and life – a clear incentive to its preservation!

  In Book 6, Hymn 49 of the Rig we find Vishnu described as ‘He who for man’s behoof in his affliction thrice measured out the earthly regions.’73 Again, the idea seems to be that Vishnu’s earth-measuring endeavours were of great value and benefit to mankind and were, moreover, delivered in a time of ‘affliction’.

  Last but not least, in Book I, Hymn 164, we encounter the following riddle:

  Formed with 12 spokes, by length of time, unweakened, rolls round the heaven this wheel of during Order. Herein established, joined in pairs together, 720 sons stand …74

  So here, represented by a multiple of its ‘ruling’ number 72, pops up Santillana and von Dechend’s ancient precessional code combined in the same passage with the familiar ‘wheel of heaven’ metaphor of the precession of the equinoxes. The passage also provides further evidence that the convention still in use by modern geographers of dividing the circle into 360 degrees (or 720 half-degrees) was already in existence in Vedic times and is directly alluded to in this hymn. Likewise, the 12 spokes of the wheel are anachronistically suggestive of the 12 ‘houses’ of the (supposedly Graeco-BabyIonian) zodiac in which the sun rests for 30 ‘days’ of each precessional month – each such month being equivalent to 2160 human years with the entire precessional cycle thus amounting to 12 × 2160 = 25,920 human years.75