From Atlantis to the Sphinx

by Colin Wilson

  Central to this evolution was the authority of the chief. Among animals, the leader is simply the most dominant. But if Cro-Magnon man resembled his descendants in Egypt and Sumeria and Europe (or even the chief of the Amahuaca Indians in Brazil), then his kings were not simply authority figures, but priests and shamans, those with a knowledge of ‘spirits’ and the gods. This was of immense importance for ancient man; we can form some estimate of what it meant if we think of Hitler’s effect on Germany in the early 1930s—the sense of optimism, of idealism, of national purpose. Hitler’s Third Reich was basically religious in conception—the notion of heaven brought down to earth. The same was true of ancient Egypt, under its pharaoh-god.

  So if there was a civilisation in ‘Atlantis’ before 11,000 BC, and in Tiahuanaco in the Andes, and in pre-dynastic Egypt, then we can state beyond doubt that it was a ‘pharaonic theocracy’, ruled by a king who was also believed to be a god.

  The pyramids were built by men who believed totally and without question that their pharaoh was a god, and that in erecting such magnificent structures, they were serving the gods. Such a belief gives a society a sense of purpose and direction that is impossible for any group of mere animals, no matter how dominant and cunning their leader. When primitive man came to believe that his tribal leader was in touch with the gods, he had taken one of the most important steps in his evolution.

  9 Of Stars and Gods

  In the summer of 1933, a 39-year-old Scot named Alexander Thom anchored his sailing yacht in East Loch Roag, north-west of the island of Lewis in the Hebrides. Thom was an aeronautical engineer whose lifelong passion was sailing. As the moon rose, he looked up and saw, silhouetted against it, the standing stones of Callanish, ‘Scotland’s Stonehenge’.

  After dinner, Thom walked up to it, and looking along the avenue of menhirs, realised that its main north-south axis pointed direct at the Pole Star. But Thom knew that when the stones were erected—probably before the Great Pyramid—the Pole Star was not in its present position.

  So how did the men who built it manage to point it with such accuracy to geographical north? To do this, with such incredible precision as is revealed at Callanish, would require something more than guesswork. One way would be to observe the exact position of the rising sun and the setting sun, and then bisect the line between them—but that can only be done accurately in flat country, where both horizons are level. Another would be to observe some star close to the pole in the evening, then again twelve hours later before dawn, and bisect that line. Thom could see that it would be an incredibly complicated business involving plumb lines and upright stakes. Obviously, these ancient engineers were highly sophisticated.

  Thom began to study other stone circles, most of them virtually unknown. They convinced him that he was dealing with men whose intelligence was equal to, or superior to, his own—a television programme about his ideas referred to them as ‘prehistoric Einsteins’.

  The idea staggered—and enraged—most archaeologists. The astronomer Sir Norman Lockyer had observed, around the beginning of the twentieth century, that Stonehenge might be a kind of astronomical calculator, marking the positions of the sun and moon, but no one had taken him very seriously, for most ‘experts’ were convinced that the builders of Stonehenge were superstitious savages, who probably conducted human sacrifices on the altar stone. Thom was asserting that, on the contrary, they were master-geometers.

  Moreover, most of these stone circles were not circles: some were shaped like eggs, some like letter Ds. Yet the geometry—as Thom discovered through years of study and calculation—was always precise. How did they do it? Thom finally worked out that the ‘circles’ were built around ‘Pythagorean triangles’—triangles whose sides were, respectively, 3, 4 and 5 units long (so the square on the hypotenuse was equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides).

  And why did they want these circles? That was more difficult to answer. Presumably to work out such things as the phases of the moon, the movement of the sun between the solstices and equinoxes, and to predict eclipses. But why did they want to predict eclipses? Thom admitted that he did not know, but he mentioned a story of two ancient Chinese astronomers losing their heads because they failed to predict an eclipse—which meant that the ancients attached immense importance to eclipses.

  There was another interesting problem. If these ancient men were so skilled in geometry, how did they remember it all? No stone or clay tablets inscribed with geometrical propositions has come down to us from the megalith builders. But then, we do know that the ancient Greeks knew their Homer—and other poets—by heart. They had trained their memories until they could recite hundreds of thousands of lines. The Iliad and Odyssey we read in books had been passed down for centuries in the memory of bards—this is why bards were so highly respected.

  When Alexander Thom died, at the age of 91, in 1985, he was no longer regarded as a member of the lunatic fringe; many respectable archaeologists and experts on ancient Britain had become his firmest supporters. Moreover, the British astronomer Gerald Hawkins had confirmed Thom’s most important assertions by feeding the data from monuments like Stonehenge through his computer at Harvard, and proving that there were astronomical alignments.

  One of Thom’s most interesting followers, the Scottish academic Anne Macaulay, has followed in Thom’s footsteps with a theory that is just as controversial. In Science and Gods in Megalithic Britain, she starts from Thom’s assumption that the earliest geometry was a tradition which was not written down, and that it was connected with astronomy.1 She then asked herself how ancient astronomers could have stored their knowledge in the absence of phonetic writing (which was developed by the Greeks and Phoenicians after 2000 BC). Obviously, memory has to be the answer. But not memory in the sense we speak of it today. It is a little-known fact that the ancients had developed a complex art of memory, which they regarded as comparable to any of the other arts or sciences. The scholar Frances Yates has written about it in her book The Art of Memory (1966) and shows how we can trace it back to the ancient Greeks, and how it survived down to the time of Shakespeare.

  The art of memory did not simply depend on brain power, but upon a complicated series of mnemonics (devices for helping us remember, like ‘roygbiv’ for the colours of the rainbow). Anne Macaulay’s suggestion is that the phonetic alphabet was created as a series of mnemonics to record positions of the polar stars, and that the word ‘Apollo’—the god of music—was one of these basic mnemonics. The letters, from A to U, were created as mnemonics for certain geometric theorems or figures, with which numbers were associated. (In fact, Anne Macaulay’s starting point was her study of the ancient Greek musical scale.)

  Her theory of ancient history, and the geometry of megalithic circles, is too complicated to detail here. But she reaches one thought-provoking conclusion: that when this ‘code’ is used to encapsulate the extreme southerly rising of the moon, the ideal spot to build an observatory is precisely where Stonehenge is placed. Another is that all this indicates that ancient Greek science—including Pythagoras (who was born about 540 BC)—probably originated in Europe—the exact reverse of a suggestion made in the nineteenth century that Stonehenge was built by Mycenaean Greeks. She suggests that the early Greeks may have been British tin traders from Cornwall.

  Since we know that the construction of Stonehenge began about 3100 BC, her theory also implies that phonetic writing is about fifteen hundred years older than we at present assume.

  From our point of view, the importance of this whole argument is its suggestion that geometry and astronomy existed in a sophisticated form long before there was an accurate method of writing it down. Anne Macaulay believes—as Thom does—that it can be read in the geometry of megalithic circles and monuments, and that their builders are trying to pass a message on to us—just as Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock believe (as we shall see) that the ancient Egyptians were passing on a message in the geometry of Giza.

  When
did our ancestors begin to use mnemonics to record the movements of the sun and moon?

  Incredibly, the answer to that question seems to be at least 35,000 years ago.

  In the 1960s, a research fellow of the Peabody Museum named Alexander Marshack was studying the history of civilisation, and was troubled by what he called ‘a series of “suddenlies”’. Science had begun ‘suddenly’ with the Greeks, mathematics and astronomy had appeared ‘suddenly’ among the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians and the Chinese, civilisation itself had begun ‘suddenly’ in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East.

  In short, Marshack was bothered by the same question that had troubled Schwaller de Lubicz and John Anthony West. And, like Schwaller and West, Marshack decided that these things had not appeared ‘suddenly’, but after thousands of years of preparation.

  He was curious to know whether there was any archaeological evidence that man indulged in seasonal (he calls them ‘time factored’) activities like agriculture in the days ‘before civilisation’.

  At this point, he became fascinated by strange markings on pieces of bone dating from the Stone Age. Under a microscope, he could see that they were made with many different tools, which indicated that they were not made, at the same time. He finally reached the conclusion that one series of marks forming a curved line on a 35,000-year-old bone were notations of the phases of the moon. Which meant that, in a sense, Cro-Magnon man had invented ‘writing’.

  But why? Why should he care about the movements of the sun and moon? To begin with, because he was intelligent—as intelligent as modern man. He probably regarded himself as highly civilised, just as we do. And an intelligent person needs a sense of time, of history. Marshack mentions a ‘calendar stick’ of the Pima Indians of America, which represents their history over 44 years. This means that the Indian ‘story teller’ could take the stick, point out some distant year, and recount its history—represented by dots or spirals or other faint marks. Cro-Magnon man of 35,000 years ago would probably have done much the same thing.

  And then, of course, a calendar would be useful to hunters, telling them when the deer or other prey would be returning. It would be useful to pregnant women who wanted to know when they were due to give birth. In fact, a calendar is one of the basic needs of civilisation, the equivalent of modern man’s digital watch.

  But of course, we are forgetting another vital factor. If Schwaller is correct, Cro-Magnon man was interested in the sun and moon for another reason: because he was sensitive to their rhythms, and experienced them as living forces. Today, even the most sceptical scientist acknowledges the influence of the moon on mental patients; any doctor who has worked in a hospital will verify that certain patients are affected by the full moon. Yet compared to aboriginal peoples, civilised man has lost most of his sensitivity to nature.

  If we want to understand our Cro-Magnon ancestors, then we have to try to imagine human beings who are as sensitive to the sun, moon and other natural forces (like earth magnetism) as a mental patient is to the full moon.

  In The Roots of Civilisation, Marshack comments: ‘Though in the Upper Palaeolithic explanations were by story and via image and symbol, there was a high intelligence, cognition, rationality, knowledge and technical skill involved.’2 In other words, Stone Age man possessed all the abilities needed to create civilisation.

  And yet although he was poised on the brink of civilisation 35,000 years ago, living in a community sufficiently sophisticated to need a knowledge of astronomy, we are asked to believe that it actually took him another 25,000 years before he began to take the first hesitant steps towards building the earliest cities.

  It sounds, on the whole, rather unlikely.

  In his bafflingly obscure book, The White Goddess, the poet Robert Graves puts forward a view that is in total accord with Marshack’s conclusions. He argues that worship of the moon goddess (the ‘white goddess’) was the original universal religion of mankind, which was supplanted at a fairly late stage by worship of the sun god Apollo, whom he regards as a symbol of science and rationality—that is, of left-brain knowledge, as opposed to the right-brain intuition that he associates with the goddess.

  Graves explains that he was reading Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation of the Welsh epic The Mabinogion when he came upon an incomprehensible poem called ‘The Song of Taliesin’. Suddenly he knew (‘don’t ask me how’) that the lines were a series of mediaeval riddles, to which he knew the answers. He also knew (‘by inspiration’) that the riddles were linked with a Welsh tradition about a Battle of the Trees, which was actually about a struggle between two Druid priesthoods for the control of learning.

  The Druid alphabet was a closely guarded secret, but its eighteen letters were the names of trees, whose consonants stood for the months of which the trees were characteristic, and the vowels for the positions of the sun, with its equinoxes and solstices. The ‘tree calendar’ was in use throughout Europe and the Middle East in the Bronze Age, and was associated with the Triple Moon Goddess.

  This cult, says Graves, was slowly repressed by ‘the busy rational cult of the Solar God Apollo, who rejected the Orphic tree-alphabet in favour of the commercial Phoenician alphabet—the familiar ABC—and initiated European literature and science.’

  Graves’s idea supports Anne Macaulay’s notion that the modern alphabet was associated with Apollo. It also supports many of the suggestions made in the last chapter about the ‘magical’ mentality of Cro-Magnon man, which has slowly given way to the ‘bicameral’ mind of today.

  According to Graves, he did not have to ‘research’ The White Goddess in the normal sense; he had it ‘thrust upon him’. And what was ‘thrust upon him’ was a whole knowledge system that is based upon a mentality that is totally different from our own—upon ‘lunar’ rather than ‘solar’ premises.

  And this, clearly, is also what Schwaller is attempting to outline in books like Sacred Science, and helps to explain their obscurity: he is trying to describe a remote and forgotten vision of reality in a language that is totally unsuited to it.

  The mention of ancient calendars inevitably reminds us of the famous Mayan calendar which, as Graham Hancock points out, is far more accurate than the modern Gregorian calendar. Hancock quotes an archaeologist asking why the Maya created such an incredibly accurate calendar, but failed to grasp the principle of the wheel. We know, of course, that the Maya inherited their calendar from the Olmecs of a thousand years earlier, but that only shifts the emphasis of the question to why the Olmecs failed to grasp the principle of the wheel.

  Hancock suggests that the answer may be that the Maya—and the Olmecs—did not invent the calendar: they inherited it—exactly the suggestion that Schwaller de Lubicz made to explain the sophistication of Egyptian science. All the evidence we have considered so far indicates that they are correct.

  Which still leaves us with the question: why should anyone want such an accurate calendar?

  One intriguing possibility has been suggested by a modern researcher named Maurice Cotterell, in a book called The Mayan Prophecies (coauthored with Adrian Gilbert, Robert Bauval’s collaborator on The Orion Mystery).

  Cotterell is an engineer and computer scientist who became interested in scientific aspects of astrology. When in the merchant navy, he noticed that his colleagues on board ship seemed to behave in ways that corresponded with their astrological signs—that ‘fire’ signs are more aggressive than ‘water’ signs, and so on.

  Now in fact, a statistician named Michel Gauquelin had already raised this question, and published a study indicating that there is genuine statistical evidence for certain propositions of astrology, such as that more scientists and doctors are born under the sign of Mars, and that more politicians and actors are born under Jupiter. A sceptical psychologist, Dr Hans Eysenck, was open-minded enough to look at these results, and dismayed his colleagues by publicly admitting that they seemed to be sound. Eysenck then went on to work with an astrologer named Jeff Mayo, and
they studied two huge samples of subjects chosen at random to see whether people born under ‘fire’ signs (Aries, Leo, Sagittarius) and ‘air’ signs (Gemini, Libra, Aquarius) are more extroverted than people born under ‘earth’ (Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn) and ‘water’ (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces) signs. And although the odds against it were 10,000 to 1, the statistics involving around 4,000 people showed that it was indeed so.

  Cotterell wanted to know how this could be. Is there some cosmic factor that changes from month to month to explain this puzzling result? The signs of the zodiac (Aries, Taurus, etc) are called ‘sun’ signs because the sun rises against a background of different constellations each month. But obviously, the constellations cannot influence individuals—they are light-years away; it is a mere figure of speech to say our fate is written in the stars, for they are merely the figures on a clock that enable us to tell the time.

  On the other hand, the sun does something that has considerable influence on the earth; this great roaring furnace sends out a continuous stream of energy, which causes the tails of comets to stream out behind them like flags in the wind. It also has variations known as sunspots, which are huge magnetic flares that can cause radio interference on Earth. They send out a ‘solar wind’ of magnetic particles which cause the Aurora Borealis.

  Cotterell decided to start with the reasonable assumption that it may be the magnetic field of the sun that affects human embryos—particularly sunspot activity.

  Because the sun is made of plasma—superheated gas—it does not rotate uniformly, like the earth; its equator rotates almost a third faster than its poles—26 days to a ‘turn’ as compared to 37. So its lines of magnetism get twisted, and sometimes stick out of the sun like bed-springs out of a broken mattress; these are ‘sunspots’.

  Cotterell was excited to learn that the sun not only changes the type of radiation emitted every month, but that there are four types of solar radiation which follow one another in sequence. So the sun’s activities not only seem to correspond to the monthly astrological changes known as ‘sun signs’, but also to the four types of sign—fire, earth, air, water.