by Freddy Silva
Could the enigmatic structure be a remnant of an antediluvian age? With its raised platform surrounded by a water channel, the Osirion can be regarded as a recreation of the primeval island of the gods in stone, an artificial representation of the original home from which the gods emerged. To determine exactly when it was built we must turn to astro-archaeology.
No resemblance to the temple above it. Osirion, Abydos.
Time and again I have stood dumbstruck in the Osirion. Its orientation has puzzled me for years, for it does not face the solstices or equinox, nor does it relate to the pole star, nor any obvious object in the sky. Myth states this to be a resting place of Osiris, even if the association, as in so many cases in the ancient world, is metaphoric. Osiris is the classic depiction of the hero who is dismembered before ascending the Milky Way to reach the origin of souls — typically the Pole Star or the belt of Orion — and whilst in the Otherworld he is reconstituted by his consort Isis.
A look at the night sky at the time of Seti I produces absolutely no relationship to any stellar object, it seems the pharaoh broke yet another convention by ignoring the sky-ground dualism essential to the foundation of the temple and its function as a mirror image of the sky, as expressed in the maxim As Above So Below. Seti was an astute student of temple protocol, he wouldn’t have made such an obvious mistake. Since his temple is aligned to the same axis at the Osirion, it follows that he may have may have attempted to revive the importance of its predecessor.
I turned my focus to Orion, the constellation with which Osiris is intimately associated. Perhaps this obvious clue would yield a sky-ground relationship, but no such relationship exists, not unless the Earth was upside down 14,000 years ago and even so it would be hard to prove.
Only in the epoch of 10,000 BC do connections finally begin emerge, when the constellation Cygnus appears in full upright ascent over the horizon in conjunction with the axis of the temple, the entrance framing its brightest star Deneb. As does the Milky Way, forming a vertical river for Cygnus to ride towards the vault of heaven. The correlation took place on the spring equinox c.10,500 BC, and again on the winter solstice.
Cygnus rides the Milky Way, as viewed from the Osirion 10,500 BC. (Rear of site shown.)
By way of validation the sky goddess Nut, who is identified with the Milky Way, is painted as a naked female spread across the sky on the ceiling of the Osirion's north-eastern chamber, her legs formed by the bifurcation at Deneb in Cygnus.11 The symbol couldn’t be more apt. Cygnus itself was regarded as both a swan and a kite hawk, and it is likely that Egyptian text references to the "kite of Osiris" may have had this constellation in mind. His bride Isis, who took on the form of a kite hawk when resurrecting souls, is depicted with outspread wings as a symbol of protection and to demonstrate her ability to fan the breath of immortality into those whom she oversaw, specifically her consort Osiris.
The canal around the platform was drained in 1918, revealing the protruding knobs common to Andean temples.
For this to occur, the soul of the hero must reside in the pole star, regarded by ancient cultures as the region of regeneration, a place in the sky protected by seven great akus (souls), each represented by the seven circumpolar stars, Deneb being one.12 Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson explains this in context of Egyptian ideology: "Circumpolar stars are a very good metaphor for the afterlife because when viewed, they never seem to set: they simply rotate around the pole star. They are the undying stars, or in Egyptian terminology, the Indestructibles, a perfect destination for the soul."13 The Indestructibles or ikhemu-sek (the ones not knowing destruction) was a name created by Egyptian astronomers, although the idea of these stars protecting a portal of regeneration is shared among indigenous cultures.14 Interestingly Cygnus appears to occupy a region in space where such regeneration might occur. Research by NASA reveals this constellation to be a source of the most energetic and penetrating form of light — gamma rays. More to the point, it is one of our galaxy's richest-known stellar construction zones. In essence Cygnus is a star-forming region.15 Perhaps it is for this reason that temples of the magnitude of the Osirion are referred to as places where an individual goes to be transformed into a god or into a bright star.
Indestructible? Portal of regeneration? What apt epiteths for a temple named for the god of rebirth and designed to outlast time! Incidentally the derivative of aku is akh — a person filled with inner spiritual radiance, a Shining One — from which is derived the term ahu, the name given to ceremonial stone platforms of Easter Island. We have already come across groups of seven Shining Ones in the form of the Urukehu, Viracocha and the Hayhuaypanti, and the Anunaki sages. Could any of these seafaring gods have been responsible for the Osirion? Probably, based on a direct correlation between the Osirion and the position of Deneb c.10,500 BC, when this brightest of stars not only rose along the axis of the temple but, due to the effects of precession, it had by then also taken up its position as one of the Indestructibles.
Isis in her role as kite hawk.
The effective pole star during the course of the Younger Dryas was Vega.16 In Arabic tradition Vega is An-nasz-al-waki, the falling eagle, named after its apparent swooping motion in the sky. Perhaps it is more than ironic that a number of world traditions describe wise men being forewarned of the impending deluge by an eagle or a hawk. According to the Kamilaroi of Australia, for example, when the deluge was caused by the eagle-hawk Pundjel, two people survived by climbing a tree. The metaphor describes how the couple saved themselves through attachment to the World Tree representing the cosmic pole linking the three levels of creation, the knowledge of which guarantees their survival as seeds of a regenerated humanity. That’s quite the symbol of rebirth.17
IWNW. ANTEDILUVIAN ABODE OF GODS
Surviving the suicidal tendencies of Cairo’s drivers is one of life’s great adventures, although it hardly compensates for the disappointment I felt when arriving unharmed at perhaps the most overlooked temple city in Egypt, Iwnw, because nowadays it is nothing more than an unremarkable, rubbish-strewn park hemmed in by an ever-encroaching suburb, its monuments long since scavenged for the building of medieval Cairo. Only a colossal carved head of Thutmosis II, recently dug out of the Nile silt, and a sixty-seven foot tall obelisk of Senusret I reveal a sliver of its former glory, for Iwnw was once the epicenter of Egypt’s gods, the root of temple and priestly culture. It housed a fabulous library, thousands of years before Alexandria, and its grounds resembled a forest of obelisks. During the Ptolemaic era the Greeks renamed it Heliopolis.
I couldn’t help but see the irony here. Senusret’s father was the pessimistic pharaoh Amenemhet I. And well he should have been because when Amenemhet took control of Egypt in 1990 BC he inherited a wasteland decayed by civil war. Writing to an emergency council meeting, Ipuwer, a sage at Iwnw, laments the chaos and confusion spreading through the land: "Temples are defiled, texts are defaced, the districts of Egypt devastated and the treasury bankrupt." Ipuwer makes an impassioned plea for a leader of courage to step forward, someone with the kind of spiritual integrity as those from the Golden Era of the gods, to which he adds the astonishing remark, “that which the pyramid concealed has become empty.”18 Clearly there once existed something of supreme importance inside the Great Pyramid which by his time had been lost, looted or hidden. Still, part of Ipuwer’s prayer was answered in the form of Senusret I, who rebuilt the by-then ruined temple academy.
How did Iwnw become the foundation of Egyptian history and when might this moment have occurred?
The Egyptian Building Texts describe the abode of the original primeval gods as iw swht (Island of the Egg), and every artificial focal point constructed thereafter was regarded as its equivalent, a mirror of the original domain. When an environmental catastrophe initiated the start of the Younger Dryas, it partly sank the Island of the Egg, forcing the gods to search for a suitable location where they could rebuild their civilization. They sailed to Egypt, found a mound surrounded by the Nile
and called it iw nw (Island of Primordial Waters).19
As the effigy of the pregnant belly of creation, Iwnw — also transcribed as Annu and Awnu — was enclosed within a rectangular temple dedicated to the creator god Atum. Inside was placed an obelisk and the Temple of the Bennu, a phoenix-like heron who impregnates the mound with a life-giving essence called hikê or heka, the closest interpretation being ‘magical power’; the final addition was a pyramidal stone, benben, whose root means ‘seeding of a womb’. Taken together these symbols tell the story of how an antediluvian group of gods settled here and instigated a rebirth based on magic, which in ancient times was equated with the control and application of the laws of nature. It marked a moment in prehistory when civilization was reborn from the waters of chaos and divine order was reestablished following the devastation that marked the start of the Younger Dryas. Iwnw became the womb from which the whole Egyptian religious cult heralded, it was the central hub for initiates, for the study of the stars, symbolic architecture, and the sacred hieroglyphic writing unique to this region.
This navel of the earth was said to have been established at Zep Tepi (First Occasion). When might this moment have occurred?
Like their counterparts in the Pacific, the Urukehu, the architects of Iwnw were expert astronomers and voyagers, and proof of their work appears in the manner in which subsequent temples were designed as terrestrial mirror images of stars and constellations.20 In this respect, looking at the night sky above Iwnw it is possible to establish a founding date for this temple.
As already mentioned, Egyptian architects took a specific interest in Orion, specifically its belt stars which were considered the hearth of the universe. From Iwnw it was possible to see the ridge across the Nile where the pyramids might be. In the epoch c.10,400 BC the pattern of Orion’s Belt seen on the ‘west’ of the Milky Way matches the pattern and alignments of the three Giza pyramids, and when this pattern is observed in the east when Sirius makes its heliacal ascent, a perfect match of this star occurs on the ground with Iwnw, thus matching the time of its construction to that of the pyramids on the spring equinox.21
The implication is that a group of gods settled in Egypt within a few hundred years of the onset of the Younger Dryas to initiate the recreation of their vanishing world, a substitute, with Iwnw as its nucleus.22 This may explain why the region experienced an unexplainable Palaeolithic agricultural revolution around the same period, particularly the cultivation of barley, while ferocious floods and other natural disasters regularly swept down the Nile Valley, recurring periodically for a further thousand years.23
However, this is hardly the end of the story. The Building Texts refer to another island of the gods, iw titi (Island of Trampling), a region occupied by some divine beings since primeval times.24 Taking this at face value we can extrapolate that this island of titi lent its name to Lake Titicaca, amid which lies the Island of the Sun. According to the Andean creation myth this island represents the original mound emerging from the waters of chaos at the very beginning of time — much like the description of Iwnw. In one account this is the place from where Viracocha and his Shining Ones later emerged, at one stroke fusing Egyptian and Andean narratives. The name given to Titicaca, along with its attendant temple city Tiwanaku, was a way to symbolically link these places with the original island of creation, thereby maintaining a tradition to the beginning of creation itself. That iw titi, this island abode of the gods, was protected by a falcon deity may also be the reason why, in the Togarevan tradition, titi-caca is a compound name of two totem birds.
THE GIZA BLUEPRINT
An eight-mile ride southwest of Iwnw brings you to mosque Ibn Tulum, one of the oldest in Cairo, an unusual place insofar as it does not face Mecca, as mosques are generally designed to do, but misses said holy site by a full ten degrees. Ninth century Arab architects, mathematicians and astronomers were light years ahead of the competition, they would not have allowed such an error, unless the site on which the mosque stands is of older provenance. Orthodox Muslim historians are touchy when it comes to acknowledging archaeological places preceding Mohammed so, predictably, no information has been forthcoming on what might have previously stood on the site, although I predict that, in time, the location might come to be of enormous significance, because exactly eight miles to the east marks the middle of the three pyramids at Giza. Given ancient architects’ disposition to arrange sacred sites in perfect triangles, the third point, Iwnw, creates a perfect isosceles triangle. We could be looking at the original geodetic blueprint mapped in this region by the gods 12,000 years ago.
Earlier I outlined the conclusion of the research by Bauval and Gilbert dating the Giza pyramids to 10,400 BC when their pattern matched Orion’s Belt on that spring equinox. How might people of earlier times have interpreted such a proposition?
The general view that pharaohs Sneferu, Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure were responsible for the buildings erected between Giza and Dashur is based entirely on circumstantial evidence, even graffiti, but most likely from taking the opinion of the Roman philosopher Pliny too literally — that pyramids were “the idle and vain ostentation of the wealth of kings” — and accepting his opinion as fact. The truth is, by the time early Greek travelers visited Egypt during the first millennium BC and wrote down whatever accounts they could gather, it is clear from the confusing and contradictory stories that no one by then had any reliable idea of when the monuments were built or by whom or for what purpose. From this mass amnesia one can deduce that the pyramids were erected not in historical times but during a prehistoric age, without discounting the possibility that the original structures were expanded upon at a later date.
Much to the consternation of Egyptologists, the closest anyone has come to dating the pyramids is Amenhotep II, who ruled around 1427 BC. If the star shaft theory proposed by Bauval and Gilbert is correct — that the internal shafts of the Great Pyramid align to Sirius, Ursa Minor, Thuban and Orion c.2450 BC, and thus provide an additional reference date for the building 25— then it is extraordinary how within a relatively short span of 1100 years even this pharaoh did not attribute the pyramids to Khufu, Khafre or Menkaure. When Amenhotep built a small temple on the north side of the sphynx enclosure he placed in it a limestone stela bearing the inscription, “the Pyramids of Hor-em-akhet” (Horus of the Horizon) yet ignores their alleged architects; instead Amenhotep’s poetic epithet refers only to the earliest name by which the sphynx and its environs were known,26 implying that, by his time, the sphynx and the pyramids were accepted as an essential whole and shared the same time frame. Since the sphynx is dated to c.10,400 BC, by implication so too are the pyramids.
Giza-Orion correlation 10,400 BC (after Bauval and Gilbert).
Support for this idea comes from the Inventory Stela rediscovered in the nineteenth century by archaeologist Auguste Mariette among the rubble of the Wadi Maghara. It was an explosive find, least of all because it strongly suggests the Great Pyramid, the sphynx and other structures in their orbit were already present long before pharaoh Khufu’s reign c.2500 BC, with one pyramid being the abode of Isis. It states: “Khufu... found the house of Isis, Mistress of the Pyramid, beside the house of the Sphynx... on the northwest of the house of Osiris, Lord of Rostau. He built his pyramid beside the temple of this goddess, and he built a pyramid for the king’s daughter.”27 The Inventory Stela appears to be a copy of an earlier original. It goes on to declare how Khufu found the temple of Isis in a ruinous state and “he built her temple again.”28 The same stela also states that the Valley Temple, attributed to Khafre, was built before his reign, in fact, it was considered extremely ancient even in the time of his predecessor, believed instead to have been the work of the gods during the First Occasion, when they arrived from afar to settle in this region. It was called the House of Osiris, Lord of Rostau, the ancient name given to the Giza Plateau.29
The Westcar Papyrus of c.1650 BC is likewise a replica of a far older document. It references an Inventory
Building located in Iwnw where the wisdom of ages was maintained and promulgated. The papyrus mentions a chest of flint stored in a room containing “the number of secret chambers of the sanctuary of Thoth.”30 These documents were obviously of considerable importance because pharaoh Khufu spent considerable effort in the third millennium BC searching for them, possibly to assist him completing or restoring the pyramid to which his name has been attached and incorrectly so, because many remote sources claim the Giza building project was begun by someone else in prehistoric times. Ancient Egyptians and Arab historians such as Ibn Wasuff Shah and Ibn Abd Alhokm believed the pyramids were built by an antediluvian pharaoh by the name of Saurid ibn Salhouk following a prophetic vision in which the whole Earth was turned over, its inhabitants lying upon their faces as stars fell down, striking one another with a terrible din. He saw six massive chunks of rock falling to Earth, snatching up people and crushing them between two great mountains whose debris blotted out the sky. Awaked with great fear, Saurid assembled one hundred and thirty high priests from the provinces and related his vision. The priests took the altitude of the stars and made their prognostication: a deluge would be overwhelming the Earth. “Will it come to our country?” asked the pharaoh. "Yes," they answered, "and Egypt will be destroyed." Since the cataclysm was still three hundred years in the future, Saurid commanded that pyramids ought to be built.31 Coincidentally, the same time frame for the impending catastrophe was given by seven beings to Enoch the scribe.