by Colin Wilson
In the autumn of 1991, I was approached by the Hollywood producer Dino de Laurentiis, who was thinking of making a film about Atlantis, and who wanted to try to give it a realistic historical approach. He and his associate Stephen Schwartz commissioned me to write an outline. Naturally, I decided immediately that I would base it on John West’s theory.
In November 1991 I found myself in Tokyo, taking part in a symposium on communication in the twenty-first century. In the Press Club, I spoke about my Atlantis project to some friends, and mentioned Schwaller’s theory that the civilisation of ancient Egypt was the heir to Atlantis, and that the Sphinx could date thousands of years earlier than 2400 BC, which is when the pharaoh Chefren is supposed to have built it. At which point my host, Murray Sayle, remarked that he had recently read a paragraph in the Mainichi News that claimed there was new evidence to support this view. Naturally, I was excited, and asked him if he could find me the item. He promised to try, but was unsuccessful.
A week later, in the Savage Club in Melbourne, I mentioned the elusive paragraph to Creighton Burns, the ex-editor of the Melbourne Age, who said that he had also seen the story about the Sphinx. He tracked it down in a recent issue of the Age, and was able to give me a photostat.
It was from the Los Angeles Times of 26 October 1991, and read:
EGYPT SERVES UP NEW TWIST TO MYSTERY OF THE SPHINX
San Diego, Wednesday
New evidence that Egypt’s Great Sphinx may be twice as old as had been thought has triggered a fierce argument between geologists who say that it must be older and archaeologists who say that such a conclusion contradicts everything we know about ancient Egypt.
Geologists who presented their results at the Geological Society of America Convention yesterday found that weathering patterns on the monument were characteristic of a period far older than had been believed. But archaeologists and Egyptologists insist that the Sphinx could not be much older because people who lived there earlier could not have built it.
Most Egyptologists believe that the Sphinx was built during the reign of the ‘Pharaoh’ Kafre [Chefren] in approximately 2500 BC. But scientists who conducted a series of unprecedented studies at the Giza site said their evidence shows that the Sphinx was already there long before Kafre came to power.
The evidence suggests that Kafre simply refurbished the Sphinx.
Boston geologist Robert Schoch said his research suggests that the Sphinx dates back to between 5000 BC and 7000 BC. That would make it double the age of the Great Pyramid and make it the oldest monument in Egypt, he said.
But California archaeologist Carol Redmount, who specialises in Egyptian artefacts, said, There’s just no way that could be true.’
The people of that region would not have had the technology or the will to have built such a structure thousands of years earlier, she said.
Other Egyptologists said that they cannot explain the geological evidence, but they insist that the theory simply does not match up with the mountains of archaelogical research they have carried out in that region. If the geologists are right, much of what the Egyptologists think they know would have to be wrong.
So it seemed that there was evidence, after all, that the Sphinx might be far older than anyone thought.
Back in England I wrote my outline based on Schwaller’s idea in the form of a kind of novel, and sent if off to Hollywood. What happened to it then I am uncertain—probably it was handed to half a dozen other script writers to improve. But it seemed to me that I had succeeded in writing a basically realistic film instead of the usual scenario with Greek temples, white bearded priests, and beautiful blondes wearing togas like linen bathrobes. And once again, I shelved the problem of ‘Atlantis’ in favour of other projects.
It was almost two years later, in the autumn of 1993, that I was approached by an old friend, Geoffrey Chessler, who had commissioned one of my earlier books, Starseekers. He was now working for a publisher who specialised in illustrated books on ‘occult’ subjects—like Nostradamus—and who wanted to know if I might have some suitable suggestion. My mind was a blank, but since I expected to be passing through London a few days later, I agreed to meet him for dinner at a mutually convenient spot, which happened to be a hotel at Gatwick airport. There we exchanged various ideas and possibilities, and I casually mentioned my interest in the Sphinx. Geoffrey was immediately interested, and as I expanded my ideas—how it seemed to me that Hapgood’s ‘lost civilisation’ would probably have a totally different mode of thinking from that of modern man—suggested that I should write him an outline of a book about it.
Now I should explain that, in the late 1960s, I had been asked by an American publisher to write a book about ‘the occult’. The subject had always interested me, but I was inclined to take it with a pinch of salt. When I asked the advice of the poet Robert Graves about it, his answer was ‘Don’t’. Yet it was in Graves’s own White Goddess that I found a basic distinction that served as a foundation for the book—between what he called ‘solar knowledge’ and ‘lunar knowledge’. Our modern type of knowledge—rational knowledge—is solar; it operates with words and concepts, and it fragments the object of knowledge with dissection and analysis. Graves argues that the knowledge system of ancient civilisations is based upon intuition, which grasps things as a whole.
In a story called ‘The Abominable Mr Gunn’, Graves offers a practical example. When he was at school, a fellow pupil named Smilley was able to solve complex mathematical problems merely by looking at them. Asked by the master—Mr Gunn—how he did this, he replied: ‘It just came to me.’ Mr Gunn disbelieved him; he thought he had simply looked up the answers in the back of the book. When Smilley replied that the answer got two of the figures wrong, Mr Gunn sent him to be caned. And he forced him to do his sums ‘the normal way’ until Smilley lost his strange ability.
Now it could be objected that Smilley was merely a freak, a prodigy with a mind like a computer. But this explanation will not suffice. There are certain numbers called primes, which cannot be divided exactly by any other number—7, 13 and 17 are examples. But there is no simple mathematical method of finding out whether a large number is a prime, except by painfully dividing every smaller number into it. Even the most powerful computer has to do it this way. Yet in the nineteenth century, a calculating prodigy was asked whether some vast ten-digit number was a prime, and replied after a moment's thought: ‘No, it can be divided by 241.’
Oliver Sacks has described two mentally subnormal twins in a New York asylum who can sit swapping twenty-figure primes. Scientifically speaking—that is, according to our system of rational ‘solar knowledge’—it cannot be done. Yet calculating prodigies do it. It is as if their minds hover like a bird above the whole number field, and see the answer.
This can mean only one thing: that although our solar knowledge system seems to us comprehensive and all-sufficient, there must be some other means of obtaining knowledge that achieves its results in a completely different way. The idea is baffling—like trying to imagine another dimension apart from length, breadth and height. We know that modern physics posits other dimensions, yet our minds are incapable of conceiving them. Yet we can imagine some tiny, blind, wormlike creature who is convinced that the world consists of surfaces, and who cannot even begin to imagine what we mean by height. As offensive as it is to human dignity, we have to recognise that, where knowledge is concerned, we are blind, wormlike creatures.
So I had no problem with the notion that Hapgood’s pre-ice Age civilisation might differ from our own in some absolutely basic manner. I recalled an observation by the archaeologist Clarent Weiant, to the effect that when the Montagnais Indians of eastern Canada wish to make contact with a distant relative, they go into a hut in the forest and build up the necessary psychic energy through meditation: then the relative would hear his voice. And Jean Cocteau records that when his friend Professor Pobers went to study the same phenomenon in the West Indies, and asked a woman ‘Why do yo
u address a tree?’, she replied: ‘Because I am poor. If I were rich I would use the telephone.’
The implication would seem to be that by using telephones—and the rest of the paraphernalia of ‘solar knowledge’—we have lost some abilities that our remote ancestors took for granted.
When I met Geoffrey Chessler at Gatwick airport, I was en route to Melbourne again, for the annual Literary Festival, after which I intended to meet John West in New York. By total coincidence, West had written to me out of the blue a few weeks earlier, enclosing a magazine with an article he had written about the latest developments in his investigation—including the facial ‘reconstruction’ by Detective Frank Domingo which demonstrated that the face of the Sphinx was nothing like Chefren’s. We had never had any contact—although I had recently reviewed his book The Case for Astrology—and he had no idea I was interested in the Sphinx. I wrote back immediately, mentioning that I would be in New York in a few weeks’ time, and we arranged to meet.
John West proved to be a thin, bespectacled man of immense enthusiasm, and information poured out of him in great spurts, like water from a village pump. I found that, like all genuine enthusiasts, he was generous with his ideas and his time; there was none of the mistrustfulness that I have occasionally encountered in people who seem to believe that all other writers are waiting for an opportunity to steal their ideas. He had with him a first ‘rough cut’ of the videotape of his programme about the Sphinx, and we were able to watch it in the home of playwright Richard Foreman, who found it as exciting as I did. Later, John came out to dinner with my family—my children had met us in America and with the writer on ancient megaliths Paul Devereux. We discussed my projected book on the Sphinx, and John mentioned that I ought to contact another writer, Graham Hancock, who was also writing a book to prove that civilisation is far older than we assume. He also threw off another name—Rand Flem-ath—who was writing a book arguing that Atlantis was situated at the South Pole. This made sense—Hapgood had argued that his ancient maritime civilisation was probably situated in Antarctica, and, now I thought about it, the idea seemed almost self-evident.
And so when I returned to England, I wrote to both Graham Hancock and to Rand Flem-ath. I had heard of Graham, because I had seen a television programme about his search for the Ark of the Covenant. Now he sent me the vast typescript of his book Fingerprints of the Gods, and as soon as I began to read it, I wondered whether it would be worth going ahead with my own book on the Sphinx. Graham had already gone into the whole question that John West had dealt with in his television programme, screened in America soon after I returned.
Moreover, Graham also knew all about Rand Flem-ath and his Antarctica theory, and made it virtually the climax of his own book. I had by this time received the typescript of When the Sky Fell by Rand and Rose Flem-ath, and learned that they had been inspired by Hapgood’s Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, as well as by his earlier book Earth’s Shifting Crust, which I lost no time in borrowing from the London Library. I was able to play a small part in persuading a Canadian publisher to accept When the Sky Fell by offering to write an introduction.
I was still in two minds about whether it was worth writing my own book. But it seemed to me that there had been such a chain of coincidence and synchronicity since I first came across Schwaller’s water-weathering theory that it would be absurd not to persist.
During the next few weeks—in January 1994—two more pieces of the jigsaw fell into place. I received for review a copy of The Orion Mystery by Robert Bauval, and learned of his belief that the pyramid complex at Giza was planned as early as 10,450 BC. I was, at this time, still reading Graham Hancock’s vast typescript, and had not yet reached the section on Bauval. But Bauval’s brief mention of Atlantis led me to comment in my review that his own conclusions seemed to support the theories of Schwaller and John West. I wrote Bauval a letter telling him that he ought to contact John West, and I sent West a copy of The Orion Mystery.
Second, I had also succeeded in obtaining my own copy of a book called Al-Kemi by André VandenBroeck, an American artist who had become a student and close friend of Schwaller de Lubicz in his last years. A couple of years earlier, when I had been researching Schwaller, my old friend Eddie Campbell (whom I had known since he was literary editor of the London Evening News) had lent me the book, but I had found it very hard going. Now I had my own copy, I settled down to reading it slowly and carefully, sometimes reading difficult pages two or three times. And as I read on, I became absolutely certain that my own book had to be written. For what emerged from Al-Kemi was the certainty that Schwaller believed that the ancient Egyptians had a completely different knowledge system from modern man—not simply something like the odd ability to communicate with far-off relatives by telepathy, but a different way of seeing the universe. And what caused me particular excitement was VandenBroeck’s statement that Schwaller believed that this different ‘way of seeing’ could somehow make possible a greatly accelerated rate of human evolution.
I succeeded in contacting André VandenBroeck, and we launched into correspondence by fax. With immense patience, he did his best to explain to me many of the things I had failed to understand. And I contacted Schwaller’s American publisher, Ehud Spurling, who was kind enough to send me the seven books currently in print. These proved to be even more of a headache than Al-Kemi, yet equally rewarding—particularly the last book, Sacred Science. (Schwaller’s major work, the three-volume Temple of Man, has been translated into English but not yet published.) Little by little, I felt I was beginning to understand—although at times it was like walking through a pitch-black night lit only by the occasional lightning flash.
When it appeared in April 1995, Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods climbed immediately to the top of the British bestseller charts, leaving no doubt that an enormous number of people are fascinated by this question of a pre-ice Age civilisation. But for me this only underlined the question: what difference does it make? Whether civilisation is 5000 or 15,000 or 100,000 years old can surely make no practical difference to our lives?
On the other hand, if we are talking about a different knowledge system, a system that is as valid as our own and yet unthinkably different in approach, then it could be of unimaginable importance.
The kind of knowledge possessed by modern man is essentially fragmented. If some future visitors from outer space landed on earth, and found vast empty cities full of libraries and museums and planetariums, they would conclude that men of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries must have been intellectual giants. But as their scholars studied our encyclopaedias of science and philosophy and technology and every other conceivable subject, they would quickly recognise that no single mind could even begin to grasp what it was all about. We have no essential knowledge system—no way of seeing the universe as a whole and making sense of it.
But if Schwaller is right, and the ancient Egyptians and their predecessors possessed some comprehensive knowledge system that offered them a unified view of the universe and human existence, then the insights of Hapgood and Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock would only be a halfway house. The really important question would lie beyond their conviction that civilisation may be thousands of years older than we suppose. It would lie in the question: What does it all mean?
One implication, according to Schwaller, is that there must be some method of accelerating the pace of human evolution. The reason this statement excited me so much was because it has been the underlying theme of all my own work. I had noticed, as a child, that at Christmas the whole world seems to be a far richer and more wonderful place than we normally recognise. But of course, what I meant was that consciousness itself can be far more intense than the everyday consciousness we accept as ‘normal’. This ‘intenser’ form of consciousness often appears accidentally, in moments of relaxation or relief when a crisis disappears, yet when we experience it, we recognise that it is somehow ‘normal’, merely a different way of seeing th
ings and responding to them. One of the basic characteristics of this state of ‘heightened consciousness’ is that it seems to involve the proper use of our mental energy, instead of wasting it. Normal consciousness is like a leaky bucket, or a tyre with a slow puncture. In certain moods we seem to get the ‘trick’ of closing the leaks, and when that happens, living ceases to be hard work, and turns into a continual glow of satisfaction and anticipation, like the feeling we get when setting out on holiday. I sometimes call this ‘duo-consciousness’, because it depends on being conscious of two realities at once, like a child sitting in front of a warm fire and listening to the patter of rain on the windows, or the feeling we get lying in bed on a freezing winter morning, when we have to get up in five minutes, and the bed has never seemed so warm and comfortable.
Our personal development depends upon what might be called ‘intensity experiences’. Such experiences may be pleasant or unpleasant, like the experiences of Paris in Helen’s arms, or the experience of a soldier under fire; but they certainly have the effect of causing some kind of minor yet permanent transformation of awareness. Yet it seems a pity that our development depends upon the chance of having such experiences, when consciousness is a state, not a mere product of what happens to us. A cook can make jellies and cakes; a carpenter can make tables and cupboards; a pharmacist can make sleeping draughts or pick-me-ups. Why should we not be able to make our states of consciousness by understanding how they come about?
Did the ancients understand this process? I doubt it—at least in the I sense I am discussing. What I am fairly certain they understood is some I secret of cosmic harmony and its precise vibrations, which enabled them to feel an integral part of the world and nature, instead of experiencing the ‘alienation’ that Karl Marx declares to be the lot of modern man. Deeper insight into the process of conscious evolution depends, to some extent, on having experienced the process of alienation and learned how to transform it.