by Colin Wilson
What can emerge will emerge as a result of passing beyond alienation, and grasping once again this ‘ancient knowledge’—which, according to Schwaller, has been long forgotten, although it has been transmitted down the ages in some symbolic form in the great religions.
The aim of this book is to try to grasp once again the nature of this forgotten knowledge.
1 Egyptian Mysteries
At 4.30 in the morning of 16 March 1993, Graham Hancock and his wife Santha prepared to scramble up the side of the Great Pyramid. It had to be this early because climbing the Pyramid had been strictly forbidden since 1983, when an incautious tourist broke his neck. Hancock had bribed the guards with $150, but they refused to stay corrupt, and before he was allowed to climb the Pyramid, he had to bribe them all over again.
The first thing the Hancocks discovered was that climbing the Pyramid was not like walking up a flight of steps. The sides of the Pyramid are shaped like steps—and have been since its limestone ‘facing’ vanished centuries ago—but some of them are chest-high. On the other hand, the flat of the step is often only six inches deep, which explains why a tourist who overbalances is unlikely to stop until he reaches the bottom. The Pyramid is 203 ‘steps’ high and slopes at 52 degrees, so by the time the Hancocks were less than a quarter of the way up, they were winded and exhausted, and ready for a long rest; but this was out of the question, since it would be dawn in about an hour, and they would become visible to cruising police cars.
At the 35th course, they noted that the blocks were particularly huge—each weighing between 10 and 15 tons—and found themselves wondering why the builders had decided to put such immense stones so high up the Pyramid, instead of putting them in the obvious place, near the ground—and saving the smaller blocks (around 6 tons each) for higher up.
In fact, now they were actually climbing the Pyramid, they became aware of many mysteries that fail to strike you or me when we look at a postcard of these picturesque objects against a blue sky. To begin with, at over six million tons, the Pyramid is the largest edifice ever built by man. It contains more masonry than all the medieval cathedrals, churches and chapels built in Europe added together. Which raises the question: how did the builders get these massive blocks up the side of the Pyramid and into place?
Imagine that you are a building contractor, and that the Pharaoh has approached you to build the Great Pyramid. He hands you the measurements, and explains that the four sides of the Pyramid must face north, east, south and west, and that each side must be 755 feet long, and the height must be 481 feet. (You find out later that this gives the same ratio as the circumference of a circle to its radius.) He will provide you with as many blocks as it takes, and with an unlimited number of workmen.
This doesn’t sound too difficult. You work out that, in order to meet his requirements, the sides will have to slope at an angle of 52 degrees. So you will start off by laying the first course, consisting of a 755-foot solid square, constructed of roughly cubical blocks, with weights varying between 6 and 30 tons. The size of the second course must obviously be slightly smaller, with an angle of 52 degrees between the edge of the first course and the edge of the second.
The stones for the second course have to be manhandled on to the top of the first course, but that is easy enough—you build a gently sloping ramp of earth and stone, with wooden planks on top, and each block is heaved up the ramp by twenty of so workmen hauling on ropes. And when you have finished the second course, you repeat the procedure with the third ...
But now you begin to see a problem. As the ramp gets higher, you either have to increase its slope—which would defeat its purpose—or extend it much further back. You quickly calculate that, by the time you have reached the top of the Pyramid, the ramp is going to have to be about a mile long, and to contain around three times as much material as the Pyramid itself. Moreover, if the ramp is not to collapse under its own weight, it will have to be built of massive blocks like those used in the Pyramid.
The alternative is some kind of lifting gear, rather like a modern crane, but built, of course, of wood. But here the same problem applies. To raise blocks weighing several tons to a height of nearly five hundred feet would require a crane built of several of those gigantic trees found in American forests. Such trees do not exist in Egypt, or even in Europe.
There is another possibility. Assuming you have plenty of time, you might use smaller lifting gear, and move it from step to step of the Pyramid, raising each block a step at a time. In fact, according to Herodotus, this was the method used:
The pyramid was built in steps, battlement-wise, as it is called, or, according to others, altar-wise. After laying the stones for the base, they raised the remaining stones to their places by machines formed of short wooden planks. The first machines raised them from the ground to the top of the first step. On this there was another machine, which received the stone upon its arrival, and conveyed it to the second step, whence a third machine advanced it still higher.
The notion of raising six-ton blocks with planks sounds difficult enough, but the idea of manoeuvring such blocks on ledges sometimes only six inches wide sounds impossible. Moreover, to move more than two and a half million blocks in this way, at the rate of 25 a day, would take about 150 years. And if the workmen were only working part-time, during the season when they did not have to tend their farms, it could be twice that period.
In fact, in the 1980s, the Japanese had tried to build a smaller replica of the Great Pyramid as a showpiece. Even with modern equipment, the problem defeated them, and it was abandoned.
Reluctantly, I suggest, you would tell the Pharaoh to find another construction engineer, and would go off to seek some simpler project, like building the Empire State Building or Brooklyn Bridge.
And what had led the Hancocks to embark on this risky project? The answer dates back eleven years, when Graham Hancock was an economics journalist in Ethiopia, and went to see the film Raiders of the Lost Ark. It aroused his curiosity about the Ark of the Covenant, the sacred wooden chest lined with gold that the Hebrews carried into battle, and which had vanished from history many centuries before Christ. He was intrigued to learn that Ethiopian Christians believed that the Ark of the Covenant was preserved in a chapel in the centre of the town of Axum, near the Red Sea. Scholars and archaeologists—inevitably—dismissed the claim as absurd. Hancock felt that this attitude was based on arrogance and stupidity, and set out to prove them wrong.
What he had to establish was how the Ark of Axum had got from Jerusalem—twelve hundred miles to the north—down to Ethiopia, and what it was doing there.
Study of biblical sources convinced him that the Ark had vanished from Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem in the reign of the bloody and brutal king Manasseh, who occupied the throne from 687 BC to 642 BC; he had rejected Judaism, and defiled the Temple by installing a ‘graven image’ of Baal. There seemed every reason to believe that the priests had been ordered to remove the Ark by Manasseh. But why had it been taken as far as Ethiopia?
A vital clue was handed to him by a Jewish scholar, who mentioned that there had once been a Jewish temple on the island of Elephantine, in the upper Nile. This was unusual; the Jews had believed that foreign soil was unclean. A visit to Elephantine, and the discovery that its temple—now destroyed—had been of exactly the same dimensions as Solomon’s Temple, convinced Hancock that this had been the first major staging post on the journey of the Ark. The Jews had been forced to move on because of a clash with their Egyptian neighbours, who worshipped a ram-headed deity in a nearby temple, and objected to the Hebrew sacrifice of rams. Slowly, Hancock established that the Ark had been moved to Meroe, in Sudan, then to the island of Tana Kirkos, on Lake Tana, and finally to Axum.
The Sign and the Seal (1992) tells the fascinating story of how Hancock tracked down the route of the Ark from Jerusalem to Axum. The quest took him to many countries, including Egypt, and it was there in April 1990 that he succeeded in spending so
me time alone in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid. The experience deeply impressed him, and his subsequent study of the Pyramid’s history brought to a head his increasing conviction that the ancient engineers possessed far more knowledge than has been attributed to them. Far from being—as one authority expressed it—‘technically accomplished primitives’, they seemed to possess a level of scientific accomplishment that we have still not reached.
This second visit to the Pyramid in 1993 deepened that conviction. Studying the baffling yet incredibly precise mathematics of its corridors and chambers, he concluded that the science that had been responsible for this construction must have been far, far older than professional Egyptologists will admit. The history books tell us that Egyptian civilisation came into existence about 2925 BC, and that a mere four centuries later, it was building monuments like the Sphinx and the Giza pyramids. To Hancock this seemed absurd. There had to be some ancient, ‘lost’ civilisation that dated back thousands of years earlier.
This was a view supported by a guide book he had been using since his first visit to Egypt: The Traveller’s Guide to Egypt, by John Anthony West. This differed from the standard guide books in that it discussed the mysteries associated with the pyramids; and temples, a subject more orthodox travel writers shy away from. And in this book, West had mentioned the view of a highly unorthodox Egyptologist named R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, to the effect that the Sphinx had not been eroded by wind-driven sand, but by water. Schwaller de Lubicz had argued that since the Sphinx is protected from the west by its ‘enclosure’ wall, and that in any case, it has spent most of its life buried up to its neck in sand, wind erosion is unlikely. But there has obviously been no significant rainfall in Egypt for thousands of years—otherwise the Sahara desert would not exist.
Now, according to modern historians, the Sphinx was built at about the same time as the second Giza pyramid, around 2500 BC, probably by the Pharaoh Chefren, the son (or brother) of Cheops, who is supposed to the builder of the Great Pyramid. This assumption is based on the fact that Chefren’s cartouche—the ‘box’ bearing the name of the pharaoh—was found on the stela between the paws of the Sphinx. But this view is comparatively recent. In 1900, Sir Gaston Maspero, director of the Department of Antiquities in the Cairo Museum, suggested that Chefren simply excavated or repaired the Sphinx, which was already old.
If, in fact, it is eroded by water, not by sand, it must obviously be a great deal older—perhaps thousands of years.
What is more, if the Sphinx is older than modern historians believe, the same could well apply to the Great Pyramid—a thought that had occurred to Graham Hancock after his first visit. He found the idea at once exciting and disturbing. His academic training inclined him to caution and scepticism. But in studying the Ark of the Covenant, he came upon reference after reference to its ‘miraculous’ powers—to strike people dead, to destroy cities, to level mountains, to cause burns and cancerous tumours. The old monk who claimed to be the Ark’s present guardian explained that it was wrapped in thick cloths when it was carried in religious processions—not to protect the Ark, but to protect other people from its powers. It sounded rather like atomic radiation, or perhaps Wilhelm Reich’s ‘orgone energy’. And as he read through every available primary source on the Ark, all of which referred to the same powers, Hancock found himself speculating that it sounded like some kind of ‘device’ or machine. The idea seemed altogether too much like the wilder assertions of that high priest of the improbable, Erich von Daniken. And it was von Daniken who, in explaining how the pyramids were built by visitors from outer space, managed to multiply the weight of the Great Pyramid by five. Hancock had no desire to get himself classified as a member of the lunatic fringe. Yet everything about the Giza complex deepened his certainty that it had not been built by ‘technically accomplished primitives’.
The search for a lost civilisation was to take him on a journey to see the Nazca lines of Peru, the ‘lost’ Inca city of Machu Picchu, Lake Titicaca and Tiahuanaco, and the great Aztec temples of Central America. Here again, the evidence—which we shall review later—seemed to point to far greater antiquity than the guide books assert. He was also intrigued by legends of a white god—or gods—who brought civilisation to South America: he was sometimes called Viracocha, sometimes Quetzalcoatl, sometimes Kukulkan, and he was represented as having fair skin and blue eyes—as Osiris was represented in ancient Egyptian statues. By the time he returned to Egypt, to make that early morning climb of the Great Pyramid, the sophistication required to construct these monuments had convinced Graham Hancock beyond all doubt either that the civilisation of the Incas and the Aztecs extended back thousands of years earlier than the history books claim, or that there had once been an unknown civilisation that has been lost to history.
It was in Canada, while publicising his book The Sign and the Seal—which had become a bestseller—that Graham Hancock met a friend of John Anthony West, and mentioned his admiration for the Traveller’s Guide to Ancient Egypt. The friend—writer Paul Roberts—asked: ‘Ah, but have you read his Serpent in the Sky?’ Hancock admitted his ignorance. ‘Then take it and read it,’ said Roberts, offering a copy.
Serpent in the Sky proved to be as fascinating and as startling as West’s Traveller’s Guide. It was basically a study of the ideas of Schwaller de Lubicz, and the argument was simple. Schwaller had spent fifteen years studying ancient Egyptian monuments, particularly the temple at Luxor, and had concluded that—in West’s words:
Egyptian science, medicine, mathematics and astronomy were all of an exponentially higher order of refinement and sophistication than modern scholars will acknowledge. The whole of Egyptian civilisation was based upon a complete and precise understanding of universal laws... Moreover, every aspect of Egyptian knowledge seems to have been complete at the very beginning. The sciences, artistic and architectural techniques and the hieroglyphic system show virtually no sign of a period of ‘development’; indeed, many of the achievements of the earliest dynasties were never surpassed or even equalled later on. This astonishing fact is readily admitted by orthodox Egyptologists, but the magnitude of the mystery it poses is skilfully understated, while its many implications go unmentioned.
West goes on to ask: ‘How does a complex civilisation spring fullblown into being? Look at a 1905 automobile and compare it to a modern one. There is no mistaking the process of “development”. But in Egypt there are no parallels. Everything is there right at the start.’ It is rather as if the first motor car was a modern Rolls-Royce.
Then West goes on to drop his bombshell. According to Schwaller, Egyptian civilisation did not begin—as the history books say—around 3000 BC with the legendary King Menes. Thousands of years earlier, Egypt was populated by survivors of Atlantis, who had crossed a (then fertile) Sahara and settled in the valley of the Nile. The great temples and pyramids of Egypt are a legacy of these survivors.
Atlantis ... the very word is enough to make an academic historian bury his head in his hands and groan, ‘Oh no!’ And even though West tries to disinfect it by placing it in quotation marks, suggesting that he is referring simply to some great lost civilisation of the past—but not necessarily in the Atlantic—the name itself is enough to place anyone who uses it beyond the pale of intellectual respectability.
The fact remains that Schwaller de Lubicz believed that the answer to the mystery of Egyptian civilisation lies in the fact that it was founded by survivors from the great lost continent which, according to Plato (our sole source), perished about 9500 BC in a volcanic cataclysm. It was these survivors who built the Sphinx, and who designed—and perhaps even built—the Giza pyramids. And it was Schwaller who led John West to begin his quest for the age of the Sphinx by trying to establish whether it was eroded by wind-blown sand or by rainfall.
Who precisely was Schwaller de Lubicz, and what right had he to pronounce on such matters?
René Schwaller was born in Alsace in 1887, into a wealthy bourgeoi
s family. His father was a pharmaceutical chemist, and René spent his childhood dreaming in the forests, and painting and conducting chemical experiments. From the beginning, he was equally fascinated by art and science, a combination whose significance for his life-work can hardly be underestimated. At the age of seven, his wife tells us, he received a ‘revelation regarding the nature of the divine, and seven years later, another illumination regarding the nature of matter.’
As a teenager he went to Paris to study painting under Matisse. Matisse himself was at this time under the influence of the philosopher Henri Bergson, who emphasised the inadequacy of the intellect to grasp reality—which slips through it like water through the holes in a fishnet—and again, his own tendency to mistrust ‘mere science’ was reinforced. Yet, typically, he also plunged into the study of modern physics, which at the time was undergoing the great revolutions of Einstein and Planck.
He joined the Theosophical Society—its founder, Madame Blavatsky, had died when he was four—and was soon delivering lectures and writing articles for its journal. In the first of these he paid homage to science, which ‘leads to all progress, fecundates every activity, nourishes all humanity’, while at the same time attacking it for its conservatism and nihilism. Yet by nature, Schwaller was far more hard-headed and pragmatic than the Theosophists. He was setting himself a difficult task: to undermine rationalism with rational thought.1
The next step seems to have been an interest in alchemy, the ‘science’ of the transmutation of matter, and the pursuit of the ‘philosophers’ stone’. But Schwaller was not interested in trying to turn lead into gold; he believed—as Jung later came to believe—that alchemy is basically a mystical quest whose aim is ‘illumination’, and of which the transmutation of metals is a mere by-product. He soon extended his alchemical studies to stained glass and the geometry of Gothic cathedrals, convinced that their geometry and measurements concealed some secret knowledge of the ancients.