From Atlantis to the Sphinx

by Colin Wilson

  When did this take place? The authors argue that the astronomical evidence gives the date as 2500 BC.

  And where? According to Hancock, there is a pyramid painting of the land of Sokar, with corridors and passageways that remind us strongly of those of the Great Pyramid. And of course, Bauval argues in The Orion Mystery that the pharaoh—identified with Osiris—took his departure from the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid when the ‘ventilation shaft’ was pointing at Orion.

  Now consider. The cycle began—according to Bauval and Hancock—in 10,500 BC, when Orion (Osiris) was at the nadir of its precessional cycle. And if Hancock is correct, these survivors of some great flood felt that the catastrophe marked the end of an age—and, of course, the beginning of another. This next cycle would last for 25,920 years, the half-cycle (when Orion begins to descend again) occurring in AD 2460.

  Let us make the admittedly far-fetched assumption that the astronomer-priests who built the Sphinx in 10,500 BC also planned to build the pyramids in such a way that their arrangement would reflect exactly the Belt of Orion, and so convey an important message to some future age. The obvious question is: when would this building be done?

  Let us assume—what is now virtually a certainty—that these priests knew all about precession of the equinoxes: that is, they knew that the equinoxes do not keep occurring against the same constellation: that, like the hand of a clock, they slowly move around the constellations, taking 2200 years to move from figure to figure. (To complicate things, of course, the hand of this clock moves backwards—which is why the phenomenon is called precession.) The most important equinox is traditionally that which takes place in spring, at the beginning of the year—the vernal equinox. And the ‘vernal point’ is the precise spot in the zodiac the ‘hand’ is pointing to at the time. In 10,500 BC, that point was in Leo.

  Being skilled astronomers, these priests knew what would happen over the next thousand or so years. First of all, the vernal point would move backwards, from Leo to Cancer, then to Gemini, then to Taurus, until in our own age it would be in Pisces, about to enter Aquarius.

  As this happened, the body of Osiris—the constellation of Orion—would rise in the sky, appearing to drift north up the right ‘bank’ of the Milky Way.

  Now obviously, a point would come when Osiris would reach ‘the land of Sokar’ in the sky—the land where, down on the ground, the Sphinx had been built. And then, with the correct ceremonies, he could finally take up his proper place as the lord of the sky.

  So now, at last, was the time to build the great Temple of the Stars where this ceremony would reach its climax. And where was the vernal point at this time? Exactly where was the hand of the precessional clock pointing?

  Between 3000 and 2500 BC, the vernal point was on the ‘west’ bank of the Milky Way, moving slowly past the head of the bull Taurus. This ‘head’ is formed by a group of stars known as the Hyades, in which two stars stand out as the brightest.

  If we now look down from the sky to its reflection in the land of Egypt, we see the Nile and the ‘land of Sokar’, which includes Memphis, Heliopolis and Rostau (Giza). And if we look down today, at the place where those two bright stars of the Hyades are ‘reflected’, we also see two pyramids—the so-called ‘Bent Pyramid’ and the ‘Red Pyramid’ at Dahshur, built by the pharaoh Snofru, the father of Cheops.

  Bauval and Hancock suggest, very reasonably, that Snofru built them in that place for a purpose—to signal the beginning of the great design.

  And where is Osiris (Orion) at this time? He has also arrived virtually in ‘Sokar’. The vernal point and the constellation of Orion—and the star Sirius (Isis)—are now in the same area of the sky.

  It was not so in 10,500 BC. As you faced due east towards Leo—which is where the vernal point was situated—you had to turn through a full 90 degrees to look at Orion. Now, eight thousand years later, they have come together.

  This, say Bauval and Hancock, is why the Great Pyramid was built eight thousand years after the Sphinx. The ‘heavens’ were finally ready for it. And their logic seems virtually irrefutable. Provided you agree that the ancient Egyptians knew all about precession—and no one now seriously doubts this—and that Orion was their most important constellation, then it is impossible to disagree that the moment when the vernal point moved into the same area as Orion was perhaps the most important moment in Egyptian history.

  What followed was the building of the pyramids at Rostau, with their arrangement pointing back clearly to the ‘first time’ in 10,500 BC.

  Then came the ceremony that the pharaoh now undertook to send Osiris back to his proper home, which would also gain immortality for himself and for his people.

  This ceremony took place at the time of the dawn-rising of Sirius. But it began ten weeks earlier. Sirius was absent for seventy days below the horizon (due, of course, to the fact that the earth is tilted on its axis). So, of course, was its near neighbour Orion—Osiris.

  It seems highly probable that a ceremony to ‘rescue’ Osiris took place every year. But the ceremony that took place at the time of the summer solstice—the event that announced the flooding of the Nile—in the year after the completion of the Great Pyramid, would have been climactic.

  The Horus-pharaoh—presumably Cheops—had to undertake a journey to bring his father Osiris back to life. In his form as the sun, he had to cross the great river—the Milky Way—in his solar boat, and journey to the eastern horizon, where Osiris was held captive. In his form as the king, he had to cross the Nile in a boat, then journey to Giza, to stand before the breast of the Sphinx.

  Bauval and Hancock write:

  As the ‘son of Osiris’ he emerged from the womb of Isis, i.e. the star Sirius, at dawn on the summer solstice... It was then—and there—both at the sky-horizon and the earth ‘horizon’ that the Horus-King was meant to find himself in front of the Gateway to Rostau. Guarding that Gateway on the earth-horizon he would encounter the giant figure of a lion—the Great Sphinx. And guarding that Gateway in the sky-horizon his celestial counterpart would find—what?

  The answer, of course, is the constellation of Leo.

  The Pyramid texts explain that the beginning of the journey of Horus into the Underworld occurred 70 days before the great ceremony. Twenty-five days later, the sun has crossed the ‘river’—the Milky Way—and is now moving east towards the constellation of Leo. And 45 days later—the end of the 70 days—the sun is between the paws of Leo.

  On the ground, the pharaoh stands on the east bank of the Nile, crosses it in the solar boat—perhaps the boat found buried near the Pyramid in 1954—then makes his way, via the two pyramids at Dahshur, to the breast of the Sphinx.

  At this point, according to the texts, he has to face a ritual ordeal, rather like those of the Freemasons described in Mozart’s Magic Flute. He is given a choice of two ways, either by land or by water, by which he can journey to the Underworld to rescue his father. The land route, the authors believe, was an immense causeway (of which there are still remains) linking the Valley Temple with the Great Pyramid. It was once roofed with limestone slabs and had stars painted on its ceiling.

  The ‘water route’ is still undiscovered—but the authors believe that it was an underground corridor that was kept half filled (or perhaps more than half) with water drawn by capillary action from the Nile. (They cite a French engineer, Dr Jean Kerisel, who suggests that the Sphinx may stand over a 700-metre-long tunnel leading to the Great Pyramid.)

  What happened next is pure conjecture—except that it must have ended with the reappearance of Orion and Sirius over the eastern horizon. Bauval and Hancock believe that this ceremony was the symbolic uniting of Upper and Lower Egypt—that is, of heaven and earth. Clearly, the priests who planned it saw it as the central event of Egyptian history after ‘the first time’.

  And who were these priests? Bauval and Hancock write:

  We shall argue that ‘serious and intelligent men’—and women too—were ind
eed at work behind the stage of prehistory in Egypt, and propose that one of the many names by which they were known was the ‘Followers of Horus’. We propose, too, that their purpose, to which their generations adhered for thousands of years with the rigour of a messianic cult, may have been to bring to fruition a great cosmic blueprint.

  They go on to speak of the Temple of Edfu, parts of which date back to the Pyramid Age, although its present form was built from 237 BC to 57 BC. Its ‘Building Texts’ speak of earlier ages going back to the ‘First Time’, when the words of the Sages were copied by the god Thoth into a book with the oddly modern title Specifications of the Mounds of the Early Primeval Age, including the Great Primeval Mound itself, where the world was created. This mound is believed by Professor Iodden Edwards to be the huge rock on which the Great Pyramid was erected.

  According to the Building Texts, the various temples and mounds were designed by Seven Sages, including the ‘mansion of the god’ (presumably the Great Pyramid)—which would seem to support Bauval’s belief that the pyramids were planned (and perhaps partly constructed) at the same time as the Sphinx. The Seven Sages were survivors of a catastrophic flood, and came from an island. These Seven Sages seem to be identical with ‘Builder gods’, ‘Senior ones’ and ‘Followers of Horus’ (Shemsu Hor) referred to in other writings such as the Pyramid Texts. The Followers of Horus were not gods, but humans who rebuilt the world after the great catastrophe—which was predated by the Age of the Gods.

  This, then, is the basic thesis of Keeper of Genesis: that a group of priests, survivors of some catastrophe, virtually created ancient Egypt as we know it. It could be regarded as a sequel to Hamlet’s Mill, and Jane B. Sellers’ Death of the Gods in Ancient Egypt, which also argues powerfully that the ancient Egyptians knew all about precession. But it goes further than these books in its mathematical and astronomical arguments (of which I have only had space to present a crude outline). Its arguments about the astronomical alignments of the Sphinx and the pyramids are a tour de force. Jane Sellers had already discussed a ‘precessional code’ of numbers, and Graham Hancock summarises her results in Fingerprints of the Gods. But Bauval’s use of computer simulations raises all this to a new level of precision, with the result that even those who feel dubious about the idea of a priestly succession lasting for thousands of years will have to admit that the mathematics seems uncontradictable.

  The authors reach one more interesting conclusion. Where precisely, they asked the computer, was the vernal point situated in 10,500 BC? The answer was ‘that it lay exactly 111.111 degrees east of the station that it had occupied at 2500 BC. Then it had been at the head of the Hyades-Taurus, close to the right bank of the Milky Way; 8000 years earlier it lay directly under the rear paws of the constellation of Leo.’

  And if this point has an ‘earthly double’, then it would seem to hint at some undiscovered secret below the rear paws of the Sphinx. The Coffin Texts speak about ‘a sealed thing, which is in darkness, with fire about it, which contains the efflux of Osiris, and is put in Rostau’. Could it be that ‘something hidden’—in a chamber under the rear paws of the Sphinx—is a ‘treasure’ that will transform our knowledge of ancient Egypt? Edgar Cayce predicted the discovery of a ‘Hall of Records’ beneath the Sphinx towards the end of the twentieth century, and Hancock and Bauval speculate whether this is not even now being investigated by the team of ‘official Egyptologists’ who are the only ones permitted near the Sphinx.

  So Keeper of Genesis—as is perhaps inevitable—ends on a question mark. For the real question that lies behind this search into the remote past is: what does it all mean? We have to recognise that even the most precise knowledge of the Egyptian precessional code and their religion of resurrection still brings us no closer to answering some of the most obvious questions about their achievement—even one as straightforward as how they raised 200-ton blocks...

  10 The Third Force

  In Chapter 1, we saw that both Schwaller and Gurdjieff believed that the men of today have degenerated from their former level. Schwaller, obviously, was talking about ancient Egypt, and the earlier civilisation from which it derived its knowledge. But what was it that—according to Schwaller—made these men of former times ‘giants’?

  What emerges clearly from his books is the idea that modern man has forgotten something of central importance.

  Some notion of what he had in mind can be derived from the researches of American anthropologist Edward T. Hall, who spent much of his life working with or studying Native American Indians—Hopi, Navajo, Pueblo and Quiché (the descendants of the Maya). His book The Dance of Life (1983) is about time, and about the fact that the time system of the Indians is so totally different from that of American-Europeans (which he shortens to AE) that it is virtually a different kind of time. He notes that the Hopi do not even have a word for time, and that Hopi verbs have no tenses. They live in an ‘eternal present’, indifferent to western science, technology and philosophy. Hall coins the term ‘polychronic time’ to distinguish this Native American ‘eternal present’ from the ‘monochronic’ time of western civilisation, with its ever-ticking clock.

  Religion is the central core of Hopi life. Religious ceremonies perform many functions which in AE cultures are treated as separate and distinct entities, quite apart from the sacred: disciplining children, for example; encouraging rain and fertility; staying in sync with nature; helping the life-giving crops to be fertile and to grow; relating to each other; and initiating the young into adulthood. In fact, religion is at the center not only of social organisation, but also of government, which is part and parcel of Hopi ceremonial life.

  And the centre of this ceremonial is, of course, the dance. When a Hopi dance is successful, ‘all consciousness of external reality, all awareness of the universe outside, is obliterated. The world collapses, and is contained in this one event...’

  Of course, the dance is not always successful; if some element of discord enters, it may be a failure. This underlines the fact that a Hopi dance is not simply a formality, like hymns in a Christian church; it requires total commitment, and success can be felt, like the success of a work of art. Elsewhere in the book Hall emphasises that ‘for the Quiché, living a life is somewhat analogous to composing music, painting, or writing a poem. Each day properly approached can be either a work of art of a disaster... The Quiché really do have to think deeply and seriously about the process of how each day is to be lived.’ So the ‘law of productivity’ that drives western man, and which is the measure of his achievement, seems alien to Native Americans, who feel that a day properly lived is an achievement, even if it has not involved a stroke of ‘productive work’.

  This, I would suggest, begins to explain to us what Schwaller and Gurdjieff meant in stating that modern civilised man had ‘degenerated’. It is as if he has stuck ear-plugs into his ears to protect him from city noise, and then forgotten to take them out.

  We could express this, of course, by saying that the civilised city dweller is a left brainer, and that the Hopi and Quiché are right brainers. It is true, of course. But it gets us no closer to our objective—defining the mental world of the ancient Egyptians.

  As a first step, consider Hall’s description of a long ride he took with a companion to bring his horses from New Mexico to Arizona.

  Our daily average was twelve to fifteen miles, otherwise the mustangs we were riding would tire and ultimately give out. Dropping down from the fir-covered slopes of the Jemez Mountains onto the parched plains of the west, I watched the same mountain from different angles during three days, as it seemed to slowly rotate while we passed by. Experiences of this sort give one a very different feeling than speeding by on a paved highway in one or two hours. The horse, the country, and the weather set the pace; we were in the grip of nature, with little control over the rate of progress.

  Later, riding horseback on a trek of three or four hundred miles, I discovered it took a minimum of three days to ad
just to the tempo and the more leisurely rhythm of the horse’s walking gait...

  He is not speaking merely about relaxation, but about a different kind of perception.

  Oddly enough, the ‘magician’ Aleister Crowley, who was in some ways a most unadmirable character, knew about this. In 1920, an actress called Jane Wolff came to visit Crowley in his rented villa at Cefalu. She proved to be highly combative, and Crowley determined to teach her that he knew best. He told her that she should begin her training in magic with a month’s meditation in a tent at the top of the cliff. When she flatly refused, he told her she was free to leave on the next boat. Finally, with anger and reluctance, she agreed to go and meditate.

  During the next month she lived in the tent, wearing only a woollen robe, and living on bread, grapes and water. During the first few days she was tense, resentful and uncomfortable. Then she became bored. But after the nineteenth day she suddenly plunged into a mood of ‘perfect calm, deep joy, and renewal of strength and courage’. Suddenly she understood what Crowley meant when he told her that she had the sun, moon, stars, sky, sea and the universe to read and play with. When the month was up, she left her tent reluctantly.

  Like Hall, she had switched from one mode of time to another. This is not simply a matter of relaxation—after all, when we are relaxed, the world may look more or less the same as when we are tense. But what Hall—and Jane Wolff—experienced was a perception, a certainty, that the world is a richer and stranger place than we realise.

  This also emerges in a story Hall tells about the Pueblo Indians (of whom D. H. Lawrence wrote in Mornings in Mexico). A new agricultural agent had spent a summer and winter working with the Indians, and seemed to be well-liked. Then, one day, he called on the superintendent of the agency, and admitted that the Indians seemed to have taken a dislike to him—he had no idea why. The superintendent called on a religious leader of the Pueblos and asked him what had gone wrong. All the Indian would say was: ‘He just doesn’t know certain things.’