It has been a mystery since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number60 up on their wall and worry about it. Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from; is it related to π or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It’s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the “hand of God” wrote that number, and “we don’t know how He pushed his pencil.” We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don’t know what kind of dance to do with the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!61
In other words, unlike most of the constants of physics, mathematics, and geometry, the Fine Structure Constant’s relationship to geometrical functions was obscure. It explained a lot, but its own basis remained obscure, unless one remembers the musical context in which it occurs in Plato.
The presence of this decimal basis of the coefficient of a constant of physics only discovered in the early twentieth century in writings that antedate it by over two thousand years suggests that its presence in those writings might be a legacy from High Antiquity, and a very sophisticated civilization.
One lone coefficient squatting otherwise anachronistically in an ancient text does not, however, constitute a case. If one were to encounter similar coefficients of quantum mechanics in decidedly ancient contexts, the case would become more solid, and the indicators that at least some of the structures of the world grid constituted parts or “gears” in a vast global hyper-dimensional machine, would become stronger.
Not surprisingly, one can find precisely such things at the center of the machine, at Giza, and in even older structures buried and only recently rediscovered in the deserts of Egypt.
Notes
1 Ernest G. McClain, The Myth of Invariance: The Origin of the Gods, Mathematics and Music from the Rg Veda to Plato (York Beach, Maine: Nicholas Hays, Inc., 1984), p. 14.
2 See for example David Frawley, Gods, Sages and Kings: Vedic Secrets of Ancient Civilization (Salt Lake City: Passage Press, 1991), and L. Austin Waddell, Makers of Civilization in Race and History (Kessinger Publishing. No date). Waddell is a good overview of the links between Sumer and the Vedic civilization but should be approached with some caution.
3 See my The Giza Death Star Destroyed (Adventures Unlimited Press, 2005), pp. 49–52; The Cosmic War (Adventures Unlimited Press, 2007), pp. 75–81.
4 Ernest G. McClain, The Myth of Invariance, p. 2.
5 Ernest G. McClain, The Myth of Invariance, p. xi
6 Ibid., p. 1.
7 Ibid., p. 3.
8 Ibid., p. 4, boldface emphasis original, italicized emphasis added.
9 Farrell, The Giza Death Star Destroyed, pp. 33–37.
10 For a discussion of this formula, see my The Cosmic War, pp. 74–75, 83, 233
11 McClain, The Myth of Invariance, p. 4, emphasis original.
12 McClain, The Myth of Invariance, p. 11.
13 McClain, The Myth of Invariance, p. 7.
14 Farrell, The Cosmic War, pp. 170–181.
15 McClain, The Myth of Invariance, p. 14.
16 Rig Veda, 1.164.11and 48, cited in McClain, op. cit., p. 9.
17 McClain, op. cit, p. 15.
18 Rig Veda, 10.129.6, cited in McClain, op. cit., p. 9.
19 McClain, The Myth of Invariance, pp. 10–11, references are to the Rig Veda.
20 It should be noted that organ stops use the imperial and not the metric system of measurement!
21 McClain, The Myth of Invariance, pp. 19–20.
22 Ibid., p. 21.
23 McClain, The Myth of Invariance, p. 21.
24 Ibid., p. 24.
25 Ibid., p. 25.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., pp. 25, 13.
28 McClain, The Myth of Invariance, p. 24.
29 McClain, The Myth of Invariance, p. 22.
30 Ibid., p. 49.
31 Ibid., p. 53,
32 Ibid., p. 129.
33 McClain, The Myth of Invariance, p. 130, citing Otto Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1969), p. 48, and Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sumerians, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 291, and Neugebauer, op. cit., p. 36, respectively.
34 Ibid., p. 130.
35 Ibid., p. 131.
36 Farrell, Genes, Giants, Monsters, and Men (Feral House, 2011), ch. 2, pp. 55–89.
37 McClain, The Myth of Invariance, p. 131. It should be pointed out that we are, of course, massively compressing a great deal of numerical argumentation, and that, strictly speaking, the use of our modern chromatic scale is made for the ease of illustration, and that it is not, strictly speaking, an accurate representation of the subtlety of McClain’s analysis of the ancient musical system, especially in the case of Mesopotamia. It nonetheless follows from McClain’s argument that Mesopotamia was at least familiar in theory with our modern system of equal tempering of musical instruments.
38 Ibid., p. 132.
39 Ibid., p. 133.
40 McClain, The Myth of Invariance, p. 138.
41 Ibid., p. 143.
42 Ibid.
43 McClain, The Myth of Invariance, p. 51.
44 McClain, The Myth of Invariance, p. 141.
45 McClain, The Myth of Invariance, p. 144.
46 McClain, The Myth of Invariance, p. 143.
47 Ibid., p. 142.
48 McClain, The Myth of Invariance, p. 145.
49 Ernest G. McClain, The Myth of Invariance, p. 163
50 Ibid., p. 150, emphasis in the original.
51 McClain, The Myth of Invariance, p. 147.
52 Ibid.
53 The modern name for such notations is Schläfli numbers, and their appearance in notation is identical, with each number representing a particular type of geometric function. This will be explored further in chapter 13.
54 McClain also observes that the Egyptian god of wisdom, Thoth, is also a sigil for various musical-numerical scales and harmonics; q.v. McClain, The Myth of Invariance, pp. 184–185.
55 Ibid., p. 158.
56 Ibid., p. 161.
57 McClain, The Myth of Invariance, p. 171.
58 Ibid.
59 For further speculations involving the fine structure constant, see The Giza Death Star Deployed, pp. 259–262.
60 “This number,” i.e., 137.
61 Richard Feynmann, cited Peter Varlacki, Laszlo Nadai, Jozsef Bokor, “Number Archetypes and ‘Background’ Control Theory Concerning the Fine Structure Constant,” Acta Polytechnica Hungarica, Vol. 5, No 2, 2008, 71–104, pp. 74–75.
PART FOUR:
THE PREMIER “PYRAMID PEOPLES”: THE
EGYPTIANS
“How does a complex civilization spring full-blown 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. The answer to the mystery is of course obvious, but because it is repellent to the prevailing cast of modern thinking, it is seldom seriously considered. Egyptian civilization was not a ‘ development ’ , it was a legacy . ”
“The implications of this alternative are obvious. If the coherent, complete and interrelated system of science, religion, art and philosophy of Egypt was not developed by the Egyptians but inherited (and perhaps reformulated and redesigned to suit their needs), that system came from a prior civilisation possessing a high order of knowledge. In other words, this alternative brings up the old question of ‘Atlantis’.” John Anthony West,
The Serpent in the Sky, pp. 13, 197, emphasis added.
10
ALCHEMICAL COSMOLOGY AND QUANTUM
MECHANICS IN STONE:
THE MYSTERIOUS MEGALITH OF NABTA PLAYA
“…the history of science, like all other forms of history, is written by the winners. Thus, very few know
that in the 17th century, an intellectual battle between supporters of the Hermetic Tradition and those of the school that would eventually produce our rationalistic, materialistic philosophy very nearly fell to the Hermeticists. Had they prevailed, we would most certainly still have an advanced science today, but it would look and ‘feel’ very different.”
John Anthony West1
Approximately one hundred miles to the west of the great Nile River dam at Aswan, in the middle of nowhere in the Egyptian desert, one finds an “Egyptian Stonehenge” at a remote location called Nabta Playa. Discovered in 1973 by Fred Wendorf and his archaeological team, the site was soon excavated,2 and with it, an almost inconceivable mystery was unearthed, for according to the astronomer Thomas G. Brophy, who undertook the most extensive examination of the structure’s encoded physics, “a people living over seven thousand years ago may have possessed technical knowledge in astronomy and physics more advanced than our current understandings of the same subjects.”3
As of this juncture, though it is difficult to say whether or not this site lies on a significant “grid” point, the site nonetheless commands our attention precisely because of the knowledge it demonstrates concerning advanced physics and astronomical knowledge it displays. There are, according to Brophy, at least three levels of sophistication involved in this ancient megalithic structure, the last two of which comprise the most serious difficulties for the standard academic models of history:
1) Maps and markers denoting objects, alignments, and events that can be observed in the sky with the unaided (naked) eye.
2) Markers indicating celestial phenomena and events that cannot be observed (apparently) with the unaided eye.
3) Detailed astronomical and cosmological information, such as distances to stars, speeds at which stars are moving away from us, the structure of our galaxy (The Milky Way), and information on the origin of the universe, which we have either only just discovered in modern times, or possibly information (for example, concerning planetary systems around stars) that we do not even have available to us at the moment.4
Even worse for the standard academic models of history, all of this is positioned within a site whose astronomical alignments last occurred ca. 16,500 BC!5
This is a significant point, for it corroborates ancient Egypt’s own legends and historical records — Manetho among them — that its civilization is of much greater antiquity than standard academic historiography will allow, and it also corroborates the ancient Egyptians’ view that theirs was a legacy civilization.
But this is not the only problem posed by the Nabta Playa megaliths, for they are intimately tied to that most famous site associated with Egypt: Giza, for both Nabta Playa, and Giza, have alignments pointing to the Galactic center, and in Giza’s case, this alignment to the Galactic center occurred in 10,909 BC.6 In Nabta Playa’s case, argues Brophy, we are looking at a literal, and very sophisticated, “cosmology in stone.”7
A. Celestial Alignments at Nabta Playa
One need only look at the celestial alignments Brophy detected at Nabta Playa to see how intricate and complex the megaliths there really are.
In its basic form, the Nabta Playa site is a circle of stone slabs — a “calendar” circle — similar to many other such sites in Europe and South America, and is of obvious antiquity. This “calendar circle”
consists of an outer rim of sandstone slabs with four sets of larger gate stones that form two (lines) of sight “windows” in the calendar circle. Inside the circle are six larger stones. The largest of the slabs are almost three feet long, and the smallest are slight less than a foot. The circle is ten to eleven feet across.8
However, in addition to this, it was eventually discovered that the site possesses two further subterranean levels buried beneath the earth,9 thus making the entire site a complex three-dimensional object that, as will be shown, exhibits an extraordinary degree of knowledge and deliberation in the way it was constructed.
1. The Celestial Alignments
The complex sophistication of the knowledge and deliberation that went into the construction of Nabta Playa is evident in the first level of the site, the surface “circle” itself, for there are a host of astronomical alignments and other celestial features encoded in the structure. The first, and most obvious, of these alignments also immediately confronts one with an anomaly:
Three of those central six stones are a diagram of the constellation of Orion’s Belt as it appeared on the meridian around summer solstice from 6,400 BC to 4,900 BC. The “meridian” is simply the line in the sky that passes north to south, and is thus the midway line or “meridian” across which stars pass in their nightly travels from rising in the east to setting in the west. Thus the inside of the calendar circle had a clear use as a star-viewing diagram.10
Therein lies the anomaly, and it is a somewhat anachronistic one, for as most people are aware, the Egyptian religion was fixated upon the constellation Orion and evolved a complex mythology of death and resurrection fastened around the gods Osiris, Set, Isis, and Horus. The constellation became, for them, a veritable seal of the concept of Osiris’ resurrection. The six megaliths in the center of the Nabta Playa circle were, when compared with reliable modern astronomical star charts, clearly meant to represent the six stars of Orion: Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka, Betelgeuse, Bellatrix, and Meissa.11
So what is a structure doing in the Egyptian desert that antedates the oldest Egyptian structures, and the Egyptian religion, itself? Or to put it differently: why the fixation on Orion?
To make the chronological anachronism and anomaly very much worse, Brophy soon discovered that there were earlier alignments encoded within the calendar circle. Three of the stones, as was noted, pointed to alignments ca. 4,900 to 6,400 BC. But there was a problem with the other three:
The apparent significance of the other three central stones in the calendar circle is more difficult to reconcile with prevalent assumptions about prehistory. These other three stones are a diagram of the configuration of Orion’s head and shoulders as they appeared on the meridian on summer solstice sunset in the centuries around 16,500 BC. That date is symmetrically opposite the 5,000 BC congruence of the Orion’s Belt stars, in terms of the precession of the equinoxes, and both dates are at the extremes (maximum and minimum) of the tilt angle of the Orion constellation. Thus the stone diagram illustrates the time, location, and tilting behavior of the constellation of Orion through the 25,900 year equinox precession cycle, and how to understand the pattern visually.12
Lest one be tempted to use this earlier alignment as a means to date the structure, Nabta Playa has surprises in store, for it is a clear example of a younger site clearly encoding alignments that antedate its construction by several thousands of years:
The case for the southern three stones in the diagram is also strong, but it is troubling to some investigators because there is no evidence yet of activity circa 16,000 BC at Nabta Playa, and the calendar circle couldn’t be that old because it sets on younger sediments, and there is bias against the idea that ancient people could have known that the constellations change tilt long term due to the precession of the equinoxes.13
In other words, someone in pre-dynastic times in Egypt had accurate knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes and had encoded the entire cycle within the calendar circle.
Brophy’s Chart of the 16,500BC Summer Solsticial Alignment14
None of this, however, was beyond the ability of primitive peoples either to observe or to enshrine in structures with their primitive technology:
…(It) should not be assumed that ancient sky watchers could not determine geometrical heliacal risings, even without the use of technology or mathematics, if they wanted to. An astute observer would simply watch the rising of the star for several days during the year while the star’s rise was clearly visible. If the ancient sky watcher knew when vernal equinox was, he would simply extrapolate the star rise time of day to vernal equinox and determine if it would
be a geometrical heliacal rising. That is a very achievable feat for an accomplished ancient megalithic astronomer even without technology or mathematics.
Thus so far in this analysis of the Nabta megalithic astronomy these alignments could possibly have been designed by ancient peoples with the usually assumed low level of Stone Age technology. The designers displayed astonishing elegance and clarity, but plausibly they could have done it with primitive technology.15
But this easy explanation collapsed when Brophy then turned to deeper and closer analyses of the calendar circle.
One of the first clues that suggested to him that he was dealing with a structure requiring far more knowledge and sophistication than merely Stone Age technology was when he compared the analogues of distances between the stones in the circle that represented stars, and their modern astronomical measures, incorporating standard errors. The result? The measures of the Nabta Playa circle, when compared with modern astronomical measures, were astonishingly accurate.
This is the first very important result of this analysis of the Nabta Playa megalith map. Star distances are difficult to measure. Modern science’s best estimates of star distances, based on astrophysical models of star evolution, were very erroneous until recently. Only with the launcing of the Hipparcos satellite observatory, above the atmosphere, have we been able to directly measure parallaxes (parallaxes are the different angles measured to a star as the Earth travels around the Sun) and achieve somewhat accurate star distances. If these star distances are the intended meaning of the Nabta Playa map, and are not coincidence, then much of what we think we know about prehistoric human civilizations must be revised. Further study of the Nabta Playa megalith map proves that this is in fact not coincidence.16
Grid of the Gods Page 27