From Atlantis to the Sphinx

by Colin Wilson

  Only the treasure of Tutankhamen surpassed Thompson’s discoveries at Chichen Itzá. The treasures of the sacred well, and the incredibly dramatic story of their recovery, made Thompson famous. When he died in 1935, at the age of 75, he had—as he admitted—squandered most of his fortune on his Maya excavations; but it had been the kind of rich and exciting life of which every schoolboy dreams. His article on Atlantis had led him to a lifetime of adventure, a real-life version of Indiana Jones, who had originally inspired Graham Hancock’s first excursion into historical detection.

  Chichen Itzá holds an important lesson for those who want to make sense of Meso-America’s bloody past. When I was sixteen, I read Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico, and was shocked by his account of the Aztec sacrifices. Yet the maidens of Chichen Itzá were not thrown into the pool by sadistic priests to pacify cruel gods; they were thrown in as messengers whose purpose was to speak to the gods, to beg the gods to avert some catastrophe. Then they were pulled out. Admittedly, a sacrificial victim whose ribs have been sliced open with a flint knife so that his heart can be torn out cannot expect to survive. But the Mayas, like the ancient Egyptians and Tibetans, seem to have believed that the passage to the underworld is long and perilous—these sacrificial victims were being offered a swift and safe passage. The priests thought that they were doing them a favour, and no doubt most of them prepared themselves for death in a perfectly calm frame of mind, instructed in precisely what to say to the gods by a grave and friendly priest.

  Whether or not we can accept the notion of a geological cataclysm that destroyed Atlantis and Mu (there seems a general agreement that their destruction occurred contemporaneously), there can be little doubt about the evidence for great catastrophes in the remote past. In fact, ‘catastrophism’ was a respectable scientific theory in the mid-eighteenth century. Its chief exponent was the celebrated naturalist Count Georges Buffon, an early evolutionist. Buffon’s explanation of how so many species had become extinct was that they had been destroyed in great catastrophes, such as floods and earthquakes. Fifty years later, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Scottish geologist James Hutton suggested that, geological changes occur slowly over immense epochs, but since at this time most scientists accepted Archbishop James Ussher’s view that the earth was created in 4004 BC (a view arrived at by adding together all the dates in the Bible), his view made little headway—until another geologist, Sir Charles Lyell, produced convincing proofs of the immense age of the earth in his Principles of Geology (1830-33). Science, as usual, lost no time in rushing to the opposite extreme, and declaring that catastrophism was a primitive superstition.

  In the twentieth century, as Hapgood pointed out in his ‘Great Extinctions’ chapter of Earth’s Shifting Crust, this view was modified by discoveries like that of the Beresovka mammoth in 1901, with fresh flowers still in its stomach. Ignatius Donnelly had devoted many chapters to deluge legends—and evidence—in Atlantis, and even more in its successor, Ragnarok, The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), which argued that the Pleistocene Ice Age (which started 1.8 million years ago) was brought about by a collision of the earth with a comet. In Atlantis he cites Brasseur to show that the Mayas preserved legends of the destruction of Atlantis.

  Around the year 1870, a ten-year-old German named Hans Hoerbiger arrived at the curious conclusion that the moon and planets are covered with a thick layer of ice—in the case of the moon, 125 miles deep. Later, as an engineer, he saw the effect of molten iron on waterlogged soil, and concluded that some similar explosion had caused the Big Bang that created the universe. He came to believe that the earth has experienced a series of violent catastrophes, which have been caused by the capture of a series of ‘moons’. According to Hoerbiger, all the planetary bodies in the solar system are slowly spiralling in towards the sun. As the smaller bodies move faster than the larger ones, they inevitably pass close to the planets, and are ‘captured’. This, he said, has happened to our earth at least six times, and our present moon is only the latest in the series. Once captured, the moons spiral in on the earth until they crash on it, causing cataclysms. The last one was captured about a quarter of a million years ago, and as it came closer, its gravity caused all the water of the earth to bunch around its equator. Because of the lighter gravity, men became giants—hence the biblical quotation about ‘giants in the earth’. Finally it crashed, releasing the waters and causing great floods, such as those described in the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh.

  Hoerbiger’s book Glacial Cosmology (1912, with Phillipp Fauth) caused a sensation, although astronomers derided it. In due course it was enthusiastically taken up by the Nazis, and Hitler designated Hoerbiger one of the world's three greatest astronomers, together with Ptolemy and Copernicus, and proposed to build an observatory in his honour. But in spite of all this approval, Hoerbiger remained distinctly paranoid, and told astronomer Willy Ley, ‘Either you believe in me and learn, or you must be treated as an enemy.’ His disciple Hans Schindler Bellamy, an Austrian, continued to propagate his theories after Hoerbiger’s death in 1931, and made even more of the evidence for earth cataclysms. It was not until the flight of Apollo 11 in 1969, and the moon landing, that millions of Hoerbiger disciples finally conceded that the Master had somehow been mistaken.

  In the 1930s, a Russian-Jewish psychiatrist named Immanuel Velikovsky became interested in ancient history through reading Freud’s Moses and Monotheism—which had proposed that Moses and the pharaoh Akhnaton were contemporaries, not separated by a century, as historians believe. Velikovsky’s research led him to conclude that a great deal of the dating of ancient history is hopelessly wrong.

  His research convinced him that some great catastrophe had befallen the earth in the distant past. For a while he believed that Hoerbiger’s ‘captive moon’ theory might be correct, but finally rejected it. Then he came upon texts that seemed to indicate that the planet Venus was not mentioned by ancient astronomers before 2000 BC. Could it be that Venus had not been in its present position before the second millennium BC? But if Venus was ‘born’, as many ancient texts seemed to indicate, where was it born from? According to Velikovsky, Greek myth gives us the answer: Venus was born from the forehead of Zeus—that is, of Jupiter. According to Velikovsky, around 1500 BC, some great internal convulsion caused Jupiter to spew forth a fiery comet, which fell towards the sun. It came close to Mars, dragging it out of its orbit, then passed Earth, causing the catastrophes described in the Bible (and many other ancient texts, all meticulously cited). It went around the sun, and returned 52 years later, causing more catastrophes; then it settled down as the planet Venus.

  How did Velikovsky arrive at what sounds like a farrago of pure nonsense? By reading hundreds of ancient texts, including many from Mayan history (he cites Brasseur repeatedly). The bloody sacrifices of the Aztecs, which so appalled the Spaniards (and which they cited as an excuse for their own massacres) were, according to Velikovsky, aimed at preventing a repeat of the 52-year-interval catastrophe.

  Velikovsky’s success—Worlds in Collision became an instant bestseller in spring 1950—was understandable; his scholarship is awesome. For example, in speaking of the rain of blood mentioned in Exodus (‘there was blood throughout the land of Egypt’), he argues that this was actually a red meteoric dust or pigment, and cites a dozen myths and ancient texts, including the Egyptian sage Ipuwer, the Mayan Quiché Manuscript (as quoted by Brasseur), the Finnish Kalevala, Pliny, Apollodorus, and several modern historians—all in the course of less than three pages.

  Although scientists derided Velikovsky’s ideas—and forced the publisher to hand over the book to a publisher with no academic list to worry about—Velikovsky has scored some triumphs. He predicted that Jupiter would emit radio waves, and he proved correct. He predicted that the sun would have a powerful magnetic field and proved correct; one critic declared that such a field would have to be 10 to the power of 19 volts; in fact, this is the figure that has now been calculated. He also sugge
sted that the close approach of celestial bodies causes Earth to reverse its magnetic poles; the cause of such reversals (nine in the past 3.6 million years) is still unknown, but scientists now admit that Velikovsky’s explanation could be the right one.

  Yet no sooner has the reader conceded that Velikovsky appears to know far more than his critics than he also has to admit that the notion that the fall of the walls of Jericho and the parting of the Red Sea were caused by a passing comet is too absurd to be taken seriously. Velikovsky’s thought is bold and exhilarating, but in the last analysis fails to add up to common sense.

  Where Velikovsky cannot be faulted is in his premise that, at some time in the past, there were great catastrophes that convulsed the surface of the earth and killed millions of people and animals. In this sense, perhaps his most impressive book is the third in the series, Earth in Upheaval, which is simply a 300-page account of evidence for great catastrophes and extinctions. Rather like that maverick opponent of scientific orthodoxy, Charles Fort, Velikovsky simply collected hundreds of strange facts—for example, the Columbia Plateau, the puzzling sheet of lava—200,000 square miles in extent, and often a mile deep—that covers the northern states of America between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific coast. Then he mentions that in 1889, during the drilling of an artesian well at Nampa, Idaho, a figurine of baked clay was found at a depth of 320 feet in this lava. His intention is to prove that the lava flood occurred in the past few thousand years (the implication being about 1500 BC). But his evidence could also be construed to mean that the human race—and ‘civilisation’—could be far, far older than we assume. In fact, a remarkable book called Forbidden Archaeology by Michael A. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson (which will be more fully examined later) does precisely that, arguing that the Nampa figurine was found in a layer where the Pliocene age gives way to the Pleistocene—about two million years ago.

  Like Brasseur and Le Plongeon (and Bellamy), Velikovsky speaks of the mystery of Tiahuanaco and Lake Titicaca, in the Andes. Titicaca is the world’s largest freshwater lake, 138 miles long and in places 70 miles wide. Bellamy writes in Moon, Myths and Man:

  It is a pity that the Peruvians have not preserved any myths of the time when the waters of the girdle-tide (caused by the moon) ebbed off. Near Lake Titicaca we find a very interesting phenomenon: an ancient strand line which is almost 12,000 feet above sea level. It is easily verifiable as an ancient littoral (coast line) because calcareous deposits of algae have painted a conspicuous white band upon the rocks, and because shells and shingle are littered about there. What is even more remarkable is that on this strand line are situated the cyclopean ruins of the town of Tiahuanaco, enigmatic remains which show five distinct landing-places, harbours with moles, and so on, while a canal leads far inland. The only plausible explanation is that the town was once situated on the shores of a girdle-tide, for no one can easily believe that the Andes have risen some 12,000 feet since the town was founded.

  But if we reject Hoerbiger’s belief that the moon came so close to Earth that it caused a permanent ‘girdle-tide’ round the equator, then we are left with the only other explanation: that the Andes have risen more than two miles above sea level. The presence of various sea creatures—including sea horses—in Lake Titicaca leaves no doubt it was once part of the sea.

  It was the problem of Lake Titicaca—and the city of Tiahuanaco—that drew Graham Hancock to South America at the start of his search for evidence of an ancient civilisation that predated dynastic Egypt by thousands of years.

  The city of Tiahuanaco was once a port, as is revealed by its vast docks—one wharf big enough to take hundreds of ships. The port area is now twelve miles south of the lake and more than a hundred feet higher. The old port is located at a place called Puma Punku (Puma Gate), and dozens of huge blocks lying around in chaos indicate that it had been subject to some earthquake or other disturbance. This, as the great authority on Tiahuanaco, Professor Arthur Posnansky, observed, caused a flood that drowned part of Tiahuanaco, leaving behind human skeletons and those of fish.

  In Tiahuanaco, Graham Hancock came upon the Viracocha legend—the white god from the sea—except that here he was known as Thunupa. Hancock was also intrigued to see that the reed boats of Lake Titicaca looked exactly like those he had seen in Egypt; local Indians declared that the design had been given to them by the Viracocha people. A seven-foot statue, carved out of red sandstone, is generally supposed to be of Viracocha (or Thunupa), a man with round eyes, a straight nose, and a moustache and beard—clearly not an Indian, since the South American Indians have little facial hair. Curious animals, unlike any known to zoology, were carved on the side of his head.

  Here, as in Egypt, Hancock was baffled by the sheer size of the building blocks, many 30 feet long and 15 feet wide. One of the construction blocks weighed 440 tons—more than twice as much as the vast blocks of the Sphinx Temple at Giza—again raising the question of how these primitive people handled such blocks, and why they chose to work with them rather than with ordinary-size blocks. Hancock found a quotation in a Spanish chronicler, Pedro Cieza de Leone, in which local Indians told him that the city had been built in a single night. Another Spanish visitor was told that the stones had been transported miraculously ‘to the sound of a trumpet’. This recalls not only the biblical story of the walls of Jericho being demolished by the sound of trumpets, but may also remind us of Christopher Dunn’s strange speculation that the Egyptians may have used ultrasonic sound in drilling the granite sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid.

  One of the main ritual areas of ancient Tiahuanaco was a large enclosure known as the Kalasasaya, Place of the Standing Stones—roughly 150 by 130 yards—whose name came from the stockade of dagger-like stones, more than twelve feet high, that surround it. Posnansky argued that the purpose of the enclosure was astronomical—that, in other words, it was an observatory.

  It was while studying its astronomical alignment that Posnansky noticed there was something odd about it. Two observation points in the enclosure marked the winter and summer solstices, the points at which the sun is directly overhead at the Tropic of Cancer or Capricorn. In our day, the two tropics are exactly 23½ degrees (23 degrees and 30 minutes) north and south of the equator. In fact, our earth rolls slightly, like a ship, and over a cycle of 41,000 years, the position of the tropics changes from 22.1 degrees to 24.5. (This change is known as ‘the obliquity of the ecliptic’, and should not be confused with the precession of the equinoxes.) And Posnansky realised that the two ‘solstice points’ in the Kalasasaya revealed that when they were made, the two tropics were positioned at 23 degrees, 8 minutes and 48 seconds from the equator. Working this out with a table of astronomical positions, he concluded that the Kalasasaya must have been built in 15,000 BC, at a time when, according to historians, man was still a primitive hunter pursuing mammoths and woolly rhinos with spears, and immortalising this activity in the cave paintings of Lascaux. Clearly, Posnansky’s dating challenged some of the most fundamental assumptions of historians.

  That estimate had stunned his academic colleagues, who preferred a more conservative estimate of AD 500—roughly the time King Arthur was driving the Saxons out of England. And although Posnansky’s estimate was based on nearly half a century of study of Tiahuanaco, he was dismissed by his colleagues as a crank. Fortunately, his calculations drew the attention of a four-man German Astronomical Commission whose purpose was to study archaeological sites in the Andes. This, team, led by Dr Hans Ludendorff of the Potsdam Astronomical Observatory, studied the Kalasasaya between 1927 and 1930, and not only confirmed that it was an ‘observatory’, but also decided that it had been constructed in accordance with an astronomical plan that, at the very least, predated the time of King Arthur by many thousands of years—they suggested 9300 BC.

  Even this struck the scientific community as outrageous. One of the commission, Dr Rolf Müller, reworked the calculations, deciding that if Posnansky was wrong about t
he solstice points in the enclosure, and other possible variants were taken into account, the date could be reduced to 4000 BC. Posnansky finally made his peace with the establishment by conceding that the correct date could be either 4500 BC or 10,500. The latter, of course, might suggest that the catastrophe that destroyed the port of Tiahuanaco and cracked the Gate of the Sun in two was the legendary cataclysm that destroyed Atlantis...

  For Hancock, the Kalasasaya was fascinating for another reason: two massive pieces of statuary—again carved in red sandstone—whose lower half was covered with fish scales, bringing to mind again the fish gods who, according to the Babylonian historian Berossus, brought civilisation to Babylonia. The stories of the fish-god Oannes sound curiously like those of Viracocha and Kon-Tiki.

  Finally, the Hancocks stood before the most famous of the Tiahuanaco ruins, the ‘Gateway of the Sun’, a smaller version of the Arc de Triomphe, 10 feet high and 12½ feet wide, covered with mysterious carvings. Above the gate is a menacing figure with a weapon in one hand and a thunderbolt in the other—almost certainly Viracocha.

  Below this, Hancock was intrigued to see the form of an elephant in the complex frieze—for elephants are unknown on the American continent, and there have been no such beasts since about 10,000 BC, when a creature with tusks and trunk, called the Cuvieronius, became extinct. Looking more closely, he saw that the elephant was actually formed of crested condors—the design was a kind of visual pun, of the same kind that appeared elsewhere on the frieze, where a human ear might turn out to be a bird’s wing. Among other animals portrayed on the gateway was a toxodon, a hippopotamus-like creature that vanished from the Andes at about the same time as the elephant-like Cuvieronius—in fact, there were no less than 46 toxodons. There are also toxodons on Tiahuanaco pottery, and even in sculptures. All this certainly suggested that Posnansky was probably right in his chronology of Tiahuanaco.