Remnants of the Gods
Page 3
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Incidentally, the village of Alaise, where all the lines intersect, was a druid holy site as late as Roman times. In 47 BC, Julius Caesar defeated the Gallic tribes under Vercingetorix. (The latter even appears in Asterix.) The druids were clearly aware of the sacred nature of this “star point of Alaise.”
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Xavier Guichard traced the root of the word “Alaise” back to the Greek Elysion. Elysion (Greek) or Elysium (Latin) is regarded in Greek mythology as the Island of the Blessed. The heroes beloved of the gods were taken to Elysion—immortal for eternity. And today? Elysium is celebrated in the European anthem. In 1972, the Council of Europe and, in 1986, the European Union decided to adopt the “Ode to Joy” as the European anthem. The text is by the German poet philosopher, historian, and playwright Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) and the music by no less a composer than Ludwig von Beethoven (1770–1827):
Freude, schöner Götterfunke,
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum.
Deine Zauber binden wieder,
Was die Mode strenggeteilt,
Alle Menschen werden Brüder,
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.
Joy, beautiful spark of the gods,
Daughter of Elysium,
In fiery intoxication we enter,
Heavenly one, thy holy sanctuary.
Thy magic power reunites
What custom has strictly parted,
All human beings become brothers
Under thy gentle wing.
The village of Alaise today consists of just 20 houses and an 11th century church, a sleepy farming village in the French Jura. (Image 66) There are the remains of Gaulish fortifications on the hills around Alaise. (Images 67–68) But what was there that needed defending in Alaise? The village historian, Monsieur Louis Courlet, explained to me that there were ancient graves from the Iron and Bronze Ages around Alaise which had often been robbed by earlier inhabitants. The graves contained tools and jewelry—a valuable raw material for the production of weapons. Today’s inhabitants of Alaise and the surrounding villages know about the unique nature of the “star point” Alaise, and they know about the lines that converge on the village from all directions—yet no one has an explanation for the mystery. Courlet, who has written down the history of the village with incredible hard work and meticulousness,6 expressed the view in a personal conversation that the secret of the lines probably had to be seen as one of the riddles of prehistory. Indeed, Monsieur Courlet has a small exhibition in two rooms in Alaise, which he is happy to show to tourists. Yet tourists rarely find their way to Alaise. Invisible lines cannot be looked at.
Human beings have been discovering things from the beginning. Behind every horizon, there is new knowledge; behind every molecule, new combinations of atoms; behind every atom, new sub-atomic particles, new waves. Human beings are learning to marvel again. One of these marveling people is the qualified engineer Peter Hentschel from Dresden, a man with patience, perseverance, and clear, analytical reason. Some years ago he spent some months with a friend in Tuscany in Italy and had no inkling of the mysterious lines in the landscape which would suddenly fascinate him, had no clue that he would be unexpectedly studying the Etruscans and even the Tree of Life of the Jewish Kabbalah. Peter Hentschel is a specialist in surveying. He thinks scientifically. The Etruscans and Kabbalah have about as much to do with his specialist area as an anteater with a crater on the moon. But things did not turn out as expected.
Engineer Hentschel was asked to help with the renovation of an old country house in Tuscany. A 12th-century church is part of the house, and it stands on the remains of an Etruscan cultic site. His friend drew his attention to a curiosity of the region. There was a straight line between the town of Anghiari (famous for the battle of Anghiari), the town of Arezzo, and a Franciscan monastery on Monte Casale. Part of the line is the straight road from Anghiari to San Polcro. What was that about? To begin with, Peter Hentschel shook his head in disbelief but then discovered confirmation in the landscape. A check with his GPS and a computer specially programmed for spherical trigonometry confirmed the information from his friend. But then he began to wonder. The monastery of Laverna lay at right angles to the north of Anghiari. It was the place at which St Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) received the stigmata. Strange. Had the Franciscan monks set up their monasteries in a geometrical pattern? Things were to become even more strange. Once again at right angles and at the same distance there was Petroja, a church of the Templars. Now the engineer’s curiosity was aroused. Were there still other churches, chapels, or holy sites at the same distances?
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Peter Hentschel consulted maps and went to inspect his ever-more-curious discoveries on the ground with GPS and a digital camera. Gradually a system made up of a whole lot of equilateral triangles over the landscape crystalized, in which a distance of 74 kilometers, or exactly half of that, lay between one point and the next. The places were partly ancient Etruscan sites which had belonged to the 12-city Etruscan League, chapels, shrines to the Madonna, or remains of Etruscan walls. The Christian chapels often stood on the remains of Etruscan holy sites. An example: The distance from Cortona to a Bronze Age settlement on Lake Bolsena is 74 kilometers. A straight line can be drawn from both places to Paganaico. Both distances are, in turn, 74 kilometers. There are Marian chapels, Romanesque churches, or the remains of Etruscan walls at these points.
Often the distance from one point to another was 37 kilometers—half the distance of 74 kilometers. Peter Hentschel, the engineer specialising in surveying, transferred his findings to a map, which I reproduced with his permission. The result was a grid of more than 12 equidistant points. The whole system has a strict north–south orientation. (Places such as San Cristoforo, Corton, Citta della Pieve, Perugia, Todi, Orte, and Blera lie at the nodes.) And the middle line of this network lies precisely on the 12th parallel east. The image which was reproduced on the map was very like the Tree of Life in the Kabbalah. What is the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life? (Images 69–70)
The word “Kabbalah” comes from the Hebrew qabal, “receive.” (Hebrew QBLH means “what is received.”) It may be that the content of the Kabbalah even goes back to Moses, as is claimed in Kabbalistic circles, but a fragment of the Kabbalah was written down by Rabbi Simon Bar Jochai (AD 130–170) as late as the second century AD. A thousand years later, the Spanish Jew Moses Ben Schemtob de Leon prepared the version which we have today as the comprehensive text of the Kabbalah.7 It has been translated into several languages. According to these Kabbalistic writings, God revealed himself through emanations throughout the universe. The manifestations of God are called “Sephirot” and presented pictorially in a system which is called the “Kabbalistic Tree.”8 This “Tree” shows all the mystical spheres of the divine forces “and is an allegorical image of the form of the heavenly and perfect human being.”9
Peter Hentschel’s triangles in Tuscany reflect exactly this Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Coincidence? Who in the past would have had the power to
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plant such an over-dimensional image, consisting of sacred corner points, into the landscape? The question remains unanswered. During the eight years he spent studying this astonishing geometry, Peter Hentschel quite separately discovered a highly puzzling geometrical network spread across the whole of central Italy which definitively had to be older than the brothers of the Franciscan order. They did not locate their holy places by accident, in any old place, but kept to the existing sacred points from the time of the Etruscans.
Central Italy was the land of the Etruscans about 3,000 years ago. Where they came from has not been explained to the present day. Herodotus, the Greek “father of history,” reports that the Etruscans were migrants from Lydia in Asia Minor.10 As early as in the eighth century BC, the Etruscans maintained intensive trade with Greece, and their religion was definitely influenced by
the Greek world of the gods. Their priests knew the divine symbols and possessed, in particular, very precise surveying skills. Their urns were accordingly decorated with geometrical motifs. But the knowledge of the Etruscan priests about geometry came from ancient Greece. This claim can be proved easily.
Here are the facts I have reported on several occasions without ever having received a response from the scientific establishment.11, 12, 13
In the autumn of 1974, I gave a lecture to the Rotary Club in Athens. At the end of the discussion, a bald gentleman with graying temples approached me and enquired politely whether I was aware that most of the Greek holy sites were connected in a geometrical relationship. I smiled and said I found that difficult to imagine because the ancient Greeks did not, after all, possess geodetic surveying techniques. Furthermore, I objected, the temples were often many kilometers apart and the Greek mountains meant there was no direct line of sight between one holy site and another. Finally, I considered in a know-it-all manner, the classical sites were also on islands hundreds of kilometers distant from the mainland and cannot be seen with the naked eye in any case. I was thinking of the distance to Crete or Izmir, Turkey, the Smyrna of the Stone Age. So, what was the friendly gentleman going on about?
We met again two days later, this time at the military airport of Athens. Maps and aeronautical charts had been spread out on a large table. The bald gentleman introduced himself: Dr Theophanias Manias, brigadier in the Greek air force. Why was this military big cheese interested in archaeology? He explained it to me over a cup of tea.
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It was normal practice, he said, for the military pilots to undertake surveillance and training flights in the mountains or target practice over the sea. Afterward, they had to prepare a report which also recorded fuel consumption. In the course of the years, a lieutenant who had transferred the data into a table noticed that the same fuel quantities and distances kept being cited, although the pilots had flown in different areas. The lieutenant thought he had discovered a fiddle. The pilots were too lazy to enter the correct information in their log books, and so they copied from one another. Thus the dossier ended up on the desk of Colonel Manias. (He only became brigadier at a later date.)
Mr. Manias took dividers, placed the point on Delphi, and drew a circle over the Acropolis. Curiously, the circle also touched Argos and Olympia. Then the brigadier placed the tip of the dividers on Knossos in Crete. The circle also touched Sparta und Epidaurus—strange. Center of the circle Delos: Thebes and Izmir also lay on it. Center of the circle Paros: Knossos and Chalcis also lay on it. Center of the circle Sparta: Mycenae and the classical oracle of Trofonion also lay on it.
Dr. Manias handed me three documents in English, Spanish, and German, all with the same content.14, 15, 16 They had been prepared with the active support of the military geographic office in Athens and published by the Association for Operational Research. From them I learned and anyone can check (Images 71–76 “Goldener Schnitt” is the golden ratio.):
• The distance between the cultic sites of Delphi and Epidaurus corresponds to the larger section of the golden ratio for the distance from Epidaurus to Delos, specifically 62%.
• The distance between Olympia and Chalkis corresponds to the larger section of the golden ratio for the distance from Olympia to Delos, specifically 62%.
• The distance between Delphi and Thebes corresponds to the larger section of the golden ratio for the distance from Delphi to the Acropolis, specifically 62%.
• The distance between Delphi and Olympia corresponds to the larger section of the golden ratio for the distance from Olympia to Chalcis, specifically 62%.
• The distance between Epidaurus and Sparta corresponds to the larger section of the golden ratio for the distance from Epidaurus to Olympia, specifically 62%.
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• The distance between Delos and Eleusis corresponds to the larger section of the golden ratio for the distance from Delos to Delphi, specifically 62%.
• The distance between Knossos and Delos corresponds to the larger section of the golden ratio for the distance from Knossos to Chalcis, specifically 62%.
• The distance between Delphi and Dodoni corresponds to the larger section of the golden ratio for the distance from Delphi to the Acropolis, specifically 62%.
• The distance between Sparta and Olympia corresponds to the larger section of the golden ratio for the distance from Sparta to the Acropolis, specifically 62%.
Yet there is method in this madness. What is the probability that in mountainous terrain three temples happen to lie on a straight line? It might happen in two or three cases. In Attica and Boeotia (central Greece) alone there are 35 of these “three-temple lines.” Tuscany salutes!
What is the probability that the linear distances between holy sites is the same? It happens 22 times in central Greece. Coincidence? Hardly.
And Delphi, the “navel of the world,” plays the role of the hub airport in this network. Thus Delphi is the same distance from the Acropolis and Olympia. We can construct a perfect equilateral triangle. The holy site of Nemea lies at the half-way point of the cathetus (one of the two shorter legs of a right-angled triangle). The right-angled triangles of Acropolis–Delphi–Nemea and Nemea–Delphi–Olympia have the same hypotenuse, and its ratio to the common Delphi–Nemea line corresponds to the golden ratio.
And now things get even more peculiar: the distance from Delphi to Aphea is the same as from Aphea to Sparta. The distance from Delphi to Sparta is the same as the distance from Sparta to Thebes and—incidentally—also half the distance of the line from Dodoni to Sparta and Dodoni to the Acropolis. The distances are also the same for Delphi–Mycenae and Mycenae–Athens or Delphi–Gortys (a megalithic ruin on Crete) and Delphi–Milet in Asia Minor. In summary, Delphi is geodetically and geometrically related to Olympia, Dodoni, Eleusis, Epidaurus, Aphea, the Acropolis, Sparta, Mycenae, Thebes, Chalcis, Nemea, Kinyra, Gortys, and Milet.
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To complete this madness, we still need to swallow the following: Everyone can imagine an equilateral triangle. But in ancient Greece, there is evidence of several triangles with two proportions relating to the different leg lengths. It works as follows. Take the triangle Dodoni–Delphi–Sparta: the places have the same leg ratio as Dodoni–Sparta to Dodoni–Delphi, Dodoni–Sparta to Sparta–Delphi, and Dodoni–Delphi to Delphi–Sparta.
The triangle Knossos–Delos–Chalcis: the places have the same leg ratio as Knossos–Chalcis to Knossos–Delos, Knossos–Chalkis to Chalkis–Delos, and Knossos–Delos to Delos–Chalkis.
The triangle Nicosia (Cyprus)–Knossos (Crete)–Dodoni: the places have the same leg ratio as Nicosia–Dodoni to Nicosia–Knossos, Nicosia–Dodoni to Dodoni–Knossos, and Nikosia zu Knossos–Dodoni.
All these triangles are the same. With the assistance of the military geographic office, more than 200 geometric equivalent ratios were nailed down. An additional 148 proportions based on the golden ratio can be added to them. To keep talking about coincidence is absurd. After all, we are not just talking about names on a map but cultic sites from antiquity—or to be precise, prehistory. Thus the temple of Apollo in classical Delphi stands on foundations from the Stone Age. (Images 77–79)