by Freddy Silva
Part of the lower course of red granite is still attached to the pyramid attributed to Menkaure. is hardest of rocks is eroded by water, in a region that hasn’t seen signi cant rainfall in over 6000 years. Note the same protruding knobs common to Andean temples. Giza.
Mica is generally used as an electrical insulator and capacitor, a clue to the ultimate purpose of the buildings.
Inside Menkaure’s pyramid, ancient architects made it even harder for themselves by allowing little room in which to maneuver the huge blocks of stone — from as little as two feet down to a few inches. There is no headroom in which to place lifting equipment, nor is the inner chamber large enough for more than a handful of people, who would be physically incapable of lifting the stones anyway. The only possible explanation is that the granite blocks were hydraulically raised into place. Which begs a further question: why line the interior of these passages and chambers which are carved out of solid bedrock, the ceiling is not likely to collapse?
Rumours of technology from a bygone era and protected from damage by the great flood are rife throughout Egypt. When Setnau, one of the sons of Ramses II, came across the story that Twt had hidden one of his books in a repository somewhere near the Giza Plateau, he set out with his brother to find it: “On the third day they found it... went down into the place where the tomb was. When the two brothers came into the tomb they found it to be brilliantly lit by light which came forth from the book.”42 It can be argued that the story is metaphorical, the Mysteries of the ancients were always veiled in this manner, and since we are talking about a book of wisdom it is not inconceivable that what shone from the book was something akin to light — enlightenment. Conversely, it is worth remembering the earlier story of the antediluvian Yim who was provided inside his ark with a 'window, self-shining from within'.43 "There are uncreated lights and created lights,"44 explains the god Ahura Mazda, who gave Yim other goodies such as a jeweled glass throne or chariot capable of flight, and a miraculous cup in which one could see everything that was happening anywhere in the world.45 Over in Central America, Quetzalcoatl’s nemesis, the Tula leader Tezcatilpoca, is said to have had at his disposal a kind of smoking mirror which enabled him to see the activities of men and gods from afar, much like a cross between close-circuit television and radar. It was made from a stone called Tezcat, and from it, other mirrors were manufactured to be used by magicians trained in the art of divination.46
Statues of Viracocha depict him holding two unusual objects, although they are so worn they cannot be properly identified. In central Mexico, a better-preserved group of nine-foot tall statues of Tula warriors are depicted in the same upright pose. Legends state how these gods — referred to as Atlantes — armed themselves with xiuhcoatl (fire serpents) which emitted burning rays capable of piercing and dismembering a human body. I wonder whether this may have been the device with which many of those megaliths were cut and carved like butter, after all, in Cuzco and Saqsayhuaman the stones show clear signs of having been subjected to intense heat.
Atlantes with their fire serpents. Tula, Mexico.
The central argument in many texts and myths maintains that the events which shook the Earth 11,000 years ago resulted from the abuse of power and the careless sharing of inappropriate technology with comparatively immature humans. The culprits are said to have been a group of renegade Watchers. Before this abuse took place we are informed that the knowledge was willingly passed along to responsible individuals who would preserve it and share with survivors after the Earth was wiped clean. On this matter, the Estonian scholar Amar Annus elegantly points out, "One way to preserve the knowledge was to inscribe pre-flood wisdom in its entirety on different tablets or stones and either bury them or to install the knowledge carriers on high places to escape the perdition."47
In Mesopotamian tradition, such a divine source of restricted information was the Tablet of Destinies, originally in the possession of seven Apkallu,48 which corresponds to the divine secrets in the Pargod in 3 Enoch. Enoch was probably describing this momentous occasion when he wrote in his own words: "Then the Lord [Anu] called one of his Archangels named Uriel, who was the most learned of them all, and said: 'Bring out the books from my library and give Enoch a pen for speedy writing, and tell him what the books are about'. And Uriel hurried and brought me the books, smelling of myrrh, and handed me a pen."49
Another panel of Lookers/Watchers with the snaking emblem, identifying them as People of the Serpent. Horseshoe Canyon, Arizona.
17. THE TERRIBLE TAURIDS
Peruvians need little excuse to take to the streets to celebrate, be it a festival, a notable figure or religious occasion, in fact, one would be forgiven for believing an underground movement exists solely for the invention of obscure saints. One day I was walking through old Cuzco looking for misplaced megaliths among its residential buildings — I found an entire wall inside a gift shop — when it became progressively more difficult to get from one side of the street to the other. The population had tripled, a sea of people flowed towards the central plaza. Of course! The beginning of November, everyone must be out celebrating the fertility festival popularly known as May Day. Peru lies in the southern hemisphere, so the calendars are reversed.
In Europe, May Day is a Christian feast day, cunningly usurped from the Celts who’d been practicing it thousands of years earlier as Beltane. Its mirrored opposite is Samhain, the cross-quarter in the solar calendar marking the fallow days when nature has yielded its bounty and retreats into a period of gestation from which life is born anew on the winter solstice. This too was usurped and renamed All Souls Day, that annoying November ritual when peer pressure forces intelligent people on the evening prior to participate in a gruesome desecration of children’s otherwise healthy teeth.
But this was not the case in Peru. Everyone was out commemorating Aya Marcay Killa, literally ‘the month of carrying corpses’. They were honoring the dead. To make it more confusing, it’s been traditionally regarded as a water or rain ceremony, yet November is already the wet season in the Andes, so why the need for a rain festival when it is already pouring? Besides, right up to the time of the Inka, a second festival took place in May to honor the spirit world, exactly as it is done in the northern hemisphere every November.
Two feasts commemorating the dead? What is going on here?
DAYS OF THE DEAD
This calendrical mix-up is not an anomaly restricted to the Andes. Before colonization by Catholics, the people of Tonga and other Pacific Islands south of the equator also held a remembrance for deceased ancestors early in November, as did Australian aborigines, in ceremonies culminating around the seventeenth of the month; Hindu, Persians and Japanese did likewise in the northern hemisphere. In Yucatan and Guatemala, and specifically the Lake Petén region associated with the Itzà, it is tradition to bake cakes from the very best corn and hang them from branches of sacred trees or at crossroads and isolated nooks, typically around the 17th of November.
All this is most odd because places in opposite hemispheres shouldn’t be holding common observances in the same month. And it gets stranger. The ancient remembrance of the dead doesn’t just occur in every corner of the world, it does so when the Pleiades occupy a conspicuous position in the sky that has nothing to do with their folkloric role as heralds of spring and the planting season.1 At one time in India — north of the equator — November was regarded as the Month of the Pleiades, despite the Pleiades not being prominent in the sky until April. This makes even less sense when one considers that every two thousand years this seven-star cluster rises in a different month,2 and yet the November festival remains constant. Since the timing is of no practical use to people such as farmers, who rely on the exalted position of the stars to mark the return of Spring, is it possible the Indians might have been commemorating an event in which the Pleiades played an important role?
In Arizona on the first day of the New Moon in November — also called the Initiates or Hawk Moon — members
of the Hopi kiva prepare, fast and cleanse before undertaking a private ceremony called Wúwutcim. On a symbolic level it marks the time when the Earth lies cold and barren, and by extension the individual. But there’s more to it. Wúwutcim marks the beginning of the new ceremonial year and recalls the first phase of Creation — rituals typically reserved for the winter solstice. During the restricted ceremony, an elder representing Masau’u shares with young initiates the teachings of this antediluvian Watcher, while the kachinam appear for a brief time on Earth. In many ways it is similar to the feast of Samhain, when the barrier between worlds is thinner and honor is given to ancestors and protective spirits. The Hopi ceremony begins with a New Fire ritual the moment the belt of Orion appears above the kiva,3 and closes sixteen days later with the Pleiades appearing in the same position at midnight. On the seventeenth day, the entire village celebrates.
The Pleiades are generally regarded by ancient cultures as a group of heavenly luminaries dispensing knowledge and wisdom. Temples were raised throughout the world in honor of this cluster of faint stars and their positive influence upon human affairs, so it is both odd and contradictory to find the Pleiades also looked upon as the seven Stars of Death — as they were throughout Persia and Mesopotamia where November was called Mordad (Angel of Death), the month when the festival of the dead culminated with the ascendency of the Pleiades at midnight on the seventeenth of the month. In Egypt it was performed as a three-day festival dedicated to At-Hyr (Hathor) in commemoration of a world-destroying deluge and the souls who perished in it,4 a stance also adopted in the Hebrew account of the flood: “Now the deluge was caused by the male waters from the sky meeting the female waters which issued forth from the ground. The holes in the sky by which the upper waters escaped were made by God when he removed stars out of the constellation of the Pleiades; and in order to stop this torrent of rain, God had afterwards to bung up the two holes with a couple of stars borrowed from the constellation of the Bear. That is why the Bear runs after the Pleiades to this day; she wants her children back, but she will never get them till after the Last Day.”5 Strange how the same story appears in the Aboriginal tribal lore Water Girls of the Pleiades, who emerge from a hole in the sky in Orion prior to a major catastrophe.6 The Talmud also contains a legend associating the Pleiades with the world flood: “When the Holy One wished to bring the deluge upon the world, he took two stars out of the Pleiades and thus let the deluge loose”7 a passage eerily reminiscent of the Andean flood account of the farmer looking up at the sky and watching “angry stars gathering close to the Sun.”
Later, misinformed Aztecs took the association to its extreme. They regarded the rising of the Pleiades at midnight every fifty-two years as a cosmic sign that the sky was falling and the world was about to end, and sacrificed up to 50,000 people a day to forestall the event.
In the south Pacific the cluster is at its most prominent towards April and May, and yet in the Society Islands and other cultures, where the Pleiades were known as Matari’I, the Festival of the Dead began at the end of October to welcome the god of paradise in commemorating those who had departed and to share in the joy of the living. At the end of the occasion, the Breath of God was instilled once more across the Earth.8 That was prior to Christian missionaries arriving on Tahiti to change the calendar and put an end to all the fun.9
The question now is, what took place so long ago in the region of the Pleiades during November that made this star cluster synonymous with death in so many parts of the planet?
UNWANTED VISITORS FROM SPACE
The forty-two books written by the antediluvian god Twt were said to cover every facet of knowledge.10 Naturally the tomes were zealously guarded and handed down from one remote generation to another, from the Followers of Horus to the pharaohs, and maintained by the priesthood at Iwnw. Twt’s particular focus appears to have been astronomy and geography, in essence corroborating Plato’s remark about the Egyptians having carefully observed stars for ten thousand years. Why would anyone be so obsessed with marking the motions of the heavens to a level far in excess of what is required for agriculture or navigation? Likewise the Itzà, the Olmec and the Maya assiduously marked time spans covering over 140,000 years, too long to be of practical use for a species with an average life span of seventy years. This fixation is a common trait of all the gods we’ve encountered so far.
The following statistic might clarify things. It is estimated that an average of 200,000 tons of debris falls onto the Earth from interplanetary space every year.11 Hardly surprising, then, that even as late as the 7th century the Chinese astronomer Li Ch’un Feng was compelled to describe comets as “vile stars. Every time they appear… something happens to wipe out the old and establish the new.” Maori peoples didn’t care much for such space junk either, they looked upon a Tunui-a-te-ika (comet) as a tormenting demon whose appearance was a precursor to certain death,12 while the Sumerians put such incoming projectiles into perspective with the word agh-hu-bua — great celestial inundation.
The Native American Ojibwa, like the aboriginal cultures of Australia, have a long memory of events that took place deep in prehistory, such as the recurring orbit of a large comet whose tail sows unimaginable destruction across the Earth: “The star with the long, wide tail is going to destroy the world some day when it comes low again. That’s the comet called Long-Tailed Heavenly Climbing Star. It came down here once, thousands of years ago. Just like the Sun, it had radiation and burning heat in its tail. The comet burned everything to the ground. There wasn’t a thing left. Indian people were here before that happened, living on the earth. But things were wrong; a lot of people had abandoned the spiritual path. The holy spirit warned them a long time before the comet came. Medicine men told everyone to prepare. Things were wrong with nature on earth... Then that comet went through here... It flew so low the tail scorched the earth... The comet made a different world. After, the survival was hard work. The weather was colder than before.”13
Comet over Mount Taranaki, New Zealand. Indigenous people the world over are wary of passing space rocks.
The Navajo have an even older recollection. One of their sky gods streaked down from heaven as a flaming serpent and left a calling card in the shape of Meteor Crater in Arizona. The impact is estimated to be 50,000 years old.
The word comet is used as a general term, but it is useful to distinguish between the types of rocks flying around in space. The general agreement among astronomers is that a comet consists of a nucleus of ice and dust, and develops a tail of gas and dust when approaching the Sun. By comparison, an asteroid is a small rocky body orbiting the Sun, although ‘small’ is a relative term, some asteroids are 600 miles in diameter. A meteor, on the other hand, is a body of matter that enters the Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrates, while a meteorite is the type that makes full body contact.
The latter is the type that concerns us.
Mounting evidence suggests the Earth crossed a stream of cosmic debris around 10,800 BC containing fragments of a once massive planetary object, now disintegrated, portions of which crashed to the ground and triggered the Younger Dryas,14 the irony being that Earth crossed the same path 1100 years later and closed said glacial period,15 when “seven burning mountains hurtled towards the Earth,” to put it in the words of Enoch the scribe.16
A scientific paper from the University of California provides a visual dimension to events leading up to the Younger Dryas. The scientists involved were examining the sudden mass extinction of camels, mastodons, horses and sabre-toothed cats in North America, along with a major decimation of human population around 11,000 BC. The paper posits that meteorite impacts in the northern hemisphere, many smashing directly into the great ice sheets, were responsible for the abundance of nanodiamonds distributed over 20 million square miles across the face of the Earth. This material is produced by the kind of temperature variations, pressure and oxygen levels associated with an extraterrestrial collision which leaves a thin, black, carbon-ric
h layer in subsurface soil. Additional glassy materials such as cosmic impact spherules, high-temperature melt-glass, grapelike soot clusters, carbon spherules and platinum were also formed at temperatures in excess of 2200 degrees Celsius, all consistent with a meteorite impact. Altogether the field of debris covers 10% of the planet.17 Thirty-two sites on three continents were analysed, revealing a large concentration in North America and Western Europe. As one of the scientists summed up, “Our hypothesis challenges some existing paradigms within several disciplines, including impact dynamics, archaeology, palaeontology and palaeoceanography/palaeoclimatology, all affected by this relatively recent cosmic impact.”18 To give a sense of perspective, one impact crater discovered beneath the Hiawatha Glacier in Greenland measures nineteen miles in diameter and was produced by a mile-wide object.19
This is what triggered the Younger Dryas. For evidence of the closing event one can look to the large meteorite craters dating from 10,000 - 8,000 BC found along the eastern and south-eastern seaboard of North America. They are hard to miss, there are over one hundred thousand of them, concentrated along the coastline between Florida and Virginia. The field of impact is called the Carolina Bays and its discovery dates back to 1931 when a new survey of the eastern seaboard called for a photogrammetric experiment, for which a company specializing in aerial photography was commissioned. When the films were enlarged and examined in stereo they revealed vivid images of an impact site composed of gigantic mud-filled craters, so much so that pilots looking at them drew comparisons to the bomb craters of battlefields from the First World War.