From Atlantis to the Sphinx

by Colin Wilson

  This is clearly very close to the views of the Hopi and Navajo Indians as described by Hall—the feeling that our mental attitudes influence nature and the material world, so that, for example, a house cannot be built until the builders have created ‘right thoughts’. The Indians feel that their minds can influence the future of the house, just as, according to Jung, our minds influence the fall of the coins in consulting the I-Ching.

  Mike Hayes would express it slightly differently. He would say that the basic energies of which the universe is made are constructed of vibrations that obey the laws of music; therefore events follow these ‘hidden laws’.

  A simple example may clarify the point. Try asking someone to write down his telephone number, then to write down the same number with its digits jumbled up. Now tell him to subtract the smaller number from the larger one, and to add together the digits of the answer until they become one single number (i.e. 783 will become 18, then 9). You can tell him that the answer is nine. This is because the answer is always nine. It works with the biggest or smallest numbers.

  I am not enough of a mathematician to know why it is so, but I know that it is not ‘magic’—merely the laws of arithmetic. Jung would say that synchronicities are the operation of similar laws of reality. Mike Hayes would add that those laws are basically musical in nature.

  So what may appear to be primitive ‘magic’ may be merely a recognition of these laws of ‘chance’.

  An example was witnessed by television reporter Ross Salmon in the late 1970s. He was visiting the Calawaya Indians of Lake Titicaca, and learned that, while the medicine man had gone to the city to earn money, his wife Wakchu was suspected of being unfaithful to him. A council of local women and a council of elders was undecided about her guilt, so the priests announced that they would ‘call the condor’ to decide the matter. The Calawayas believe that human beings are reincarnated as condors, and that the ‘Great Condor’ is a reincarnation of a great Inca leader.

  Salmon was allowed to film the ceremony at the top of a sheer cliff, as the priests performed their ritual to summon the condor, throwing coco leaves into the air and chanting. The next day, Wakchu was taken to the site, and tied to a post, stripped to her loincloth. Salmon was quite convinced that nothing would happen. But after half an hour, a condor appeared, flew around overhead, then landed on a rock facing Wakchu. It sat there for a time, then stepped right up in front of the girl and pointed its beak up at her. The elders cried: ‘Guilty—she must take her own life.’ If Salmon had any doubts about the genuineness of the ceremony, they vanished ten days later when the girl flung herself from a high cliff.

  All this was shown on Westward Television, with Salmon's commentary. When he wrote a book about his travels, In Search of Eldorado, I hastened to buy it, so that I could quote his description. To my surprise, he only told half the story, making it altogether more ambiguous. When I saw him subsequently, I asked him why this was, and he explained that scientists had advised him to ‘water it down’, because he had obviously been tricked. Yet the film left no doubt whatsoever that he had not been tricked.

  Here, it seems, the condor was ‘called’ in much the same way as the porpoises in Sir Arthur Grimble’s account, and then played the part of the oracle, indicating the girl’s guilt. No ‘rational’ explanation can cover the facts (short of cheating on the part of the priests); but Hopi Indians or the natives of the Gilbert Islands would certainly find nothing unbelievable about the events.

  Ross Salmon also mentions that he spoke to two tribes of Indians in the Bolivia-Colombia area, both illiterate, but with endless events stored in their memory, and that they both told him that man had been on earth far longer than anyone suspects.

  Sir Wallis Budge begins his book Egyptian Magic (1899) by explaining that Egyptian religion has two sides. ‘On the one it closely resembles in many respects the Christian religion of today, and on the other the religion of many of the sects which flourished in the first three or four centuries of our era...’ This latter aspect, he explains, ‘represents a collection of ideas and superstitions which belong to a savage or semisavage state of existence ... We may think that such ideas and beliefs are both childish and foolish, but there is no possible reason for doubting that they were very real things to those who held them.’

  Budge was, of course, a late Victorian—which explains the patronising tone, and the strange suggestion (no doubt meant to reassure his readers) that Egyptian religion is not unlike Christianity. He sees the Egyptians from a thoroughly western standpoint, and often speaks about their belief in ‘God’. The magical stories he tells are all preposterous—about magicians who can cut off heads and then restore them, so the subject of the experiment remains unharmed. (He even tells a story from Apuleius’s Golden Ass—which of course has nothing to do with Egypt—about a man whose nose and ears are eaten off by witches.)

  Half a century after Budge, a work called Before Philosophy (1949) shows an altogether closer understanding of the Egyptians. Professor Henri Frankfort observes in the introduction: ‘Mythopoeic thought does not know time as uniform duration or as a succession of qualitatively indifferent moments. The concept of time as it is used in our mathematics and physics is as unknown to early man as that which forms the framework of our history.’ What Frankfort means by mythopoeic time is what Edward T. Hall means by the ‘polychronic time’ of American Indians—the sense of an eternal present.

  And how did a people who lived in an eternal present create monuments like the pyramids?

  To understand this, we first need to understand the Nile, and the land it supports. Professor John A. Wilson says:

  The essential part of Egypt is a green gash of teeming life cutting across brown desert wastes. The line of demarcation between life and non-life is startlingly clear: one may stand at the edge of the cultivation with one foot on the irrigated black soil and one foot on the desert sands. The country is essentially rainless; only the waters of the Nile make life possible...

  The Egyptians were a lucky people. Their country was a kind of tube, with the sea at one end and the mountains of Africa at the other, and hills on either side of the Nile to protect them from enemies and scorching winds. By August the harvest is in and the fields are dry and cracked. Then the Nile rises and floods the land, leaving behind rich mud, in which farmers hasten to plant new crops. Mesopotamia, by contrast, had the untrustworthy Tigris and Euphrates, which might flood at any time, drowning the crops, and the fierce desert winds that often blew up sandstorms. It is not surprising that the Egyptians were known to the writers of antiquity as a serene and contented people.

  What does seem to surprise John A. Wilson—writing in Before Philosophy—is the short period it took for Egyptian civilisation to reach such a high point. He explains this by saying: ‘For centuries the Egyptians had been gathering slow strength within the Nile Valley until their day arrived, and they sprang upward with a suddenness which is miraculous to us.’

  Wilson goes on: ‘We shall see two major periods of Egyptian thought, the aggressive and optimistic earlier times and the submissive and hopeful later times.’ And he quotes Breasted, who remarks: ‘Conceive... the dauntless courage of the man who told his surveyors to lay out the square base 755 feet on each side! [He knew it would] take nearly two and a half million blocks each weighing two and one half tons to cover this square of thirteen acres with a mountain of masonry 481 feet high... The Great Pyramid of Gizeh is thus a document in the history of the human mind.’

  West, Hancock and Bauval would agree; but they would argue that the ‘suddenness’ is an illusion, and that the Egyptians were heirs to an older civilisation. Bauval and Hancock would suggest, moreover, that it was not a ‘gathering of slow strength’ that caused the Egyptians to explode into the achievements of the pyramid age, but a long-term religious purpose. The Great Pyramid was the culmination of centuries of preparation, and it marked the beginning of a new age, the Age of Osiris, which could only bring prosperity to everyone
in the land of Egypt. With their god-king, in their well-protected land, under the benevolent eye of the gods who looked down from the heavens, they could afford to be cheerful and optimistic.

  Moreover, they were almost certainly the first civilisation in human history who were in that happy position. There is a sense in which we can regard the Egyptians as the culmination of man’s evolution up to that point. Wilson says: ‘We want to emphasise just as strongly as we can that the Egyptians of these times were a gay and lusty people. They relished life to the full, and they loved life too fully to surrender its hearty flavour.’ For thousands of years, man had been ‘up against it’—against ice ages and droughts and earthquakes and floods. Now suddenly, one single people—who believed firmly that they were protected by the gods—had found their golden age.

  But what we are in a position to understand—as Professor Wilson was not—is that the strength of dynastic Egypt sprang from unity of mind. Like the Hopi or the Navajo, they were living very close to the earth, to the black mud that brought them life. And we could say of them what Hall says of the Hopi—that religion is the central core of their life (see p. 239).

  All the evidence shows that his every word can be applied to ancient Egypt. It was basically a religious civilisation, bound together in total unity.

  To understand this fully, we have to see it against the background of human social evolution up to that point.

  I have argued that the evidence—presented, for example, by Alexander Marshack—suggests that Cro-Magnon man represented an astonishing step forward in evolution. It had been happening, by then, for nearly half a million years, for reasons that are not fully understood.

  As we have seen, Gurdjieff borrowed from Sankhya philosophy the idea of the ‘Law of Three’—the third force. Two forces—such as man struggling against his environment—may remain forever in equilibrium if nothing alters the balance. Whether human beings existed as long ago as the Miocene (as Forbidden Archaeology suggests) is in a sense irrelevant—although the evidence is certainly worth studying—because if they did, they marked time for millions of years. Then, about half a million years ago, some ‘third force’ altered the balance, and gave man a reason—or a cluster of reasons—for becoming more intelligent. Language and the development of human sexuality almost certainly played their part. A creature who is learning to express himself verbally is becoming more intelligent by definition. And a creature whose interest in sex has ceased to be brutish and seasonal, and who finds the opposite sex permanently interesting and exciting—perhaps even sacred—has also taken an important step towards being truly human.

  Neanderthal man was undoubtedly a ‘religious animal’, and Stan Gooch has argued strongly (in The Neanderthal Question and Cities of Dreams) that he achieved a higher level of civilisation than we give him credit for. But since he vanished from the scene of history, this is largely irrelevant to the present argument. And since he has left us no art, we possess no evidence to suggest that he achieved the supremely important development of hunting magic.

  But we know that Cro-Magnon man achieved it. And we are also in a position to understand the importance of that step forward. A man who believes that he can influence nature and capture his prey by means of magical ritual has a new sense of control. He feels that, in some sense, he has found the key to becoming the master of nature rather than its slave. Life ceases to be a non-stop struggle for survival, which he often wins only by the skin of his teeth. He has undergone a psychological revolution that might be labelled the purpose-revolution.

  If Marshack is correct, then a close study of the heavens also played its part in the revolution. To begin with, it was probably merely a matter of creating some kind of calendar, which enabled him to anticipate the changes of the seasons. But since this study played a central part in his more active and involved attitude towards his own existence, it must have become something in which he indulged more and more for its own sake.

  But we are speaking of Cro-Magnon man as if he was an individual, who enjoyed indulging his hobby of star-gazing. What must be understood is that ancient man was never an ‘individual’ in our modern sense. He was a member of a group—of both males and females—who shared the consciousness of that group. Animals operate on a collective instinct, like a herd of reindeer or a flock of birds or a school of fishes, and this is how we need to think of our remote human ancestors.

  But hunting magic made another basic difference, as we can see from his cave paintings. Those who performed it were shamans, ‘magicians’, and it was inevitable that the shaman would also become the leader. In primitive societies, the priest quickly becomes the priest-king, the priestess the priestess-queen. And this has the effect of creating a new kind of unity, a new level of purpose.

  This must have have been one of the most important factors in the evolution of Cro-Magnon man towards modern Homo sapiens. He had a leader whom he regarded with unqualified admiration. From now on, he could face the world with total singleness of purpose. And with this unity of purpose, he was ready to create civilisation.

  How long did it take? We have no idea. Conventional history suggests about 25,000 years between the time when Marshack’s Cro-Magnon star-gazers turned into farmers and then city-builders. The evidence we have examined in this book suggests that it was far less than that, and that by perhaps as long ago as 20,000 BC, the ‘collective unity’ with its shaman-king or priestess-queen had evolved into some early form of civilisation.

  According to Hapgood, a worldwide maritime civilisation existed at a time when Antarctica was free of ice, perhaps 7000 BC. But if Schwaller de Lubicz is correct in believing that the Sphinz is water-weathered, then some fairly sophisticated civilisation antedated it by three or four thousand years. In Earth’s Shifting Crusty Hapgood argues that Antarctica was 2500 miles closer to the equator in 15,000 BC. If so, then it is easy to imagine that its movement was a major catastrophe for those who lived there, and probably involved massive flooding.

  We have looked closely at the evidence that survivors from this drifting continent took refuge in South America and in Egypt, and that the native peoples of Central and South America called them the Viracochas.

  If Schwaller is correct, then a group of these Viracochas moved to Egypt found that this sheltered country, with its great river and its yearly inundation, was the ideal home, and began to create a new civilisation. Aware of the precession of the equinoxes, which played a central part in their religious belief, they laid the foundations of their temple on the Giza plateau, where a great mass of granite became identified with the ‘primeval mound’. They built the Sphinx, gazing towards the constellation of Leo, and laid out the ground-plan of the pyramids, whose conformation was precisely that of the three stars of Orion’s Belt in 10,500 BC. They planned to complete their Temple of the Stars when Orion came close to the heavenly counterpart of the Giza plateau. Then the pharaoh-god would perform the ceremony that would send Osiris back to his home in the skies, and inaugurate a new Golden Age.

  Egyptologists are agreed that this Golden Age actually arrived, around 2600 BC. There was an explosion of creative energy, an upsurge of optimism. With religious conviction acting as a ‘third force’, the ancient Egyptians became the highest manifestation of the human evolutionary drive so far achieved.

  For the ancient Egyptians, magic was accepted in the same way that modern man accepts technology—not magic in the sense of a contradiction of the laws of causality, but, as Schwaller explained, in the sense of being ‘bathed in a psychic atmosphere which establishes a bond between the individuals, a bond which is as explicit as the air which is breathed by all living beings.’ In other words, Egyptian magic was undoubtedly closer to the magic of the porpoise caller of the Gilbert Islands, or the Amahuaca chieftain performing a hunting ritual, than to the absurdities described by Budge. Such magic is based upon an understanding of forgotten laws of nature.

  In attempting to gain some insight into how the Egyptians lifted giant b
locks of stone, I asked Christopher Dunn, the manufacturing engineer who had studied the sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid, whether he had any practical—or even impractical—suggestions. By way of reply he sent me a strange little pamphlet called A Book in Every Home, written by a man called Edward Leedskalnin, and published by the author in Homestead, Florida. Leedskalnin, apparently, was an eccentric who lived in a place called Coral Castle, near Miami, Florida, which he built himself from giant blocks of coral, some weighing as much as 30 tons. Leedskalnin, a thin little man who was only five feet tall, died in 1952 without divulging the secret of how he constructed the ‘castle’, and moved these enormous weights. In 28 years, he quarried and erected a total of 1,100 tons.

  A Book in Every Home tells us the reason that Ed Leedskalnin became a recluse. ‘I always have wanted a girl, but I never had one.’ As a young man, he fell in love with a sixteen-year-old girl, but his courtship was apparently unsuccessful. This may have been because she turned him down, although the pamphlet hints strongly that the real reason was that he learned that she was not a virgin, and decided that it would be humiliating to accept ‘damaged goods’. He seems to have become obsessed by the idea that most girls of ‘sweet sixteen’ (one of his favourite phrases) were ‘damaged’ (although he obviously regarded even a kiss as evidence of depravity), and ‘that is why I was so successful in resisting the natural urge for love making’. The pamphlet advises all mothers not to allow their daughters to associate with ‘fresh boys’, and even suggests that they should offer themselves instead.

  Leedskalnin’s disappointment in love led him to retire to Homestead, Florida, where he worked out some secret process of moving and lifting giant blocks, weighing an average of 6½ tons—more than the average weight of blocks in the Great Pyramid.