The Mars Mystery

by Graham Hancock

  Many religious cults that venerated sacred meteorites existed in the ancient world. The cult at Delphi certainly had a meteoritic origin.14 Pliny (A.D. 23–79) reported that a “stone which fell from heaven” was worshiped at Potidae.15 The cult of meteorites was particularly rife in Phoenicia and Syria.16 The sacred black stone of the Kaaba in Mecca is believed to be a meteorite.17 And in ancient Phrygia (central Turkey) the great Mother of the Gods, Cybele, was represented at the temple of Pessinus by a black stone fallen from the sky.18

  Sir E. A. Wallis Budge was the first scholar to suggest that the Benben stone of the ancient Egyptians must have belonged to this class of objects.19 Subsequently another Egyptologist, J. P. Lauer, independently concluded that the Benben could only have been a meteorite.20 Our own research has also convinced us of the very high probability that a large, oriented iron meteorite may have fallen near Giza some time in the first half of the third millennium B.C. From depictions of the Benben stone, it would seem that this meteorite was from 6 to 15 tons in mass, and the frightful spectacle of its fiery fall would have been impressive. The fall would have been presaged by loud detonations caused by shock waves, and even in daylight a fireball with a long plumed tail would have been visible from far away. Rushing to the spot where it landed, people would have seen that the “fire-bird” had disappeared, leaving only a black, pyramid-shaped bja object, or cosmic egg—the oriented iron meteorite.

  FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX

  Intimately linked to the Benben in terms of symbolism and religious significance, and stemming from the common root word ben, was the bennu bird, the ancient Egyptian phoenix—the cult of which was also centered at Heliopolis. At widely separated cyclic intervals of many thousands of years, this creature was said to have

  fashioned a nest of aromatic boughs and spices, set it on fire and was consumed in the flames. From the pyre miraculously sprang a new Phoenix, which, after embalming its father’s ashes in an egg of myrrh, flew with the ashes to Heliopolis where it deposited them in the altar of the sun-god Ra. A variant story made the dying Phoenix fly to Heliopolis and immolate itself in the altar fire, from which the young Phoenix then rose…. The Egyptians associated the Phoenix with immortality.21

  Comparable in many ways to Quetzalcoatl, the fiery-winged (bird-like) serpent,22 the defining qualities of the bennu/phoenix are therefore as follows:

  It is a thing that flies.

  It is a thing that returns, after long intervals.

  It is a thing that is “consumed in flames.”

  It is in some way reborn, or renewed, on each return.

  It is closely associated with the Benben meteorite—an iron “egg” fallen from heaven, which the ancient Egyptians are known to have kept in Het Benbennet, the “Mansion of the Phoenix” in Heliopolis.

  CODE FOR A COMET?

  It is often a mistake to give literal interpretations to the symbols of ancient religions. And we accept that the bennu and the Benben must be ranked among the most complex, subtle, and sophisticated symbols to be found anywhere in the ancient world. We have explored the spiritual implications of this symbolism elsewhere in our work.23 But it is a characteristic of such powerful images as the phoenix and the stone that they can be employed at many different levels of meaning.

  If we take the images literally and start looking around in the natural world for something that flies, which returns at cyclical intervals, which has the appearance of being “consumed in flames,” which is mysteriously “renewed” on each occasion, and which is associated with meteorites, then there is really only one class of objects known to scientists today that could possibly fit the bill.

  These objects, once again, are comets—the same objects symbolized in Mexican myths as fiery feathered or winged serpents, which we shall have the opportunity to investigate in part 4. Comets are responsible for several spectacular meteor showers that the earth encounters every year—showers consisting of relatively small scattered chunks of fragmenting parent comets, which continue to circulate in the same orbits as the showers. The family resemblance is obvious:

  Comets can truly be said to be associated with meteorites in much the same relationship as the “parent” bennu-phoenix to the “offspring” Benben stone that falls to earth.

  Comets, of course, “fly.”

  Since comets are in orbit they also return to our skies at cyclical intervals—some as short as 3.3 years, in the case of Encke’s comet, some longer than 4,000 years, in the case of comet Hale-Bopp, some even running into tens of thousands of years.

  Comets do literally undergo a process of renewal—indeed, rebirth—on each appearance in our skies. This is because comet nuclei are usually inert and utterly dark while traveling through deep space, producing no characteristic glowing coma and sparkling tail. However, as a comet approaches the Sun (and Earth), the solar rays cause volatile materials buried in its interior to burst into boiling, seething activity, producing jets of gas—scientists call the process “outgassing”—and shedding millions of tons of exceptionally fine dust and debris to form the coma and the tail.

  Last but not least, outgassing comets do have the appearance of being consumed in flames—and the collision of any cometary fragment with Earth itself could lead to a gigantic, even worldwide, conflagration, followed by a global flood, as we shall see in part 4.

  CLUES IN THE STARRY LANDSCAPE

  The religion of the phoenix and the Benben, practiced at Heliopolis in the Pyramid Age—and for which the pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Giza were undoubtedly the central spiritual monuments—conveyed a distinctive system of teachings, which we have explored in several previous books.24

  According to this religious system the afterlife journey of the soul is undertaken in a region of the sky known as the Duat—which has specific coordinates, demarcated on one side by the constellation Leo and on the other by the constellations Orion and Taurus. Through the middle of this skyscape, at the bottom of a wide, dark “valley,” flows the celestial counterpart of the sacred river Nile—the stunning feature that we now call the Milky Way and that the ancient Egyptians knew as the “Winding Waterway.”25

  The gist of our previous work has been to show that it is not only the Milky Way that has a terrestrial twin in Egypt. The constellation Orion, represented by its three belt stars, is mirrored by the three pyramids of Giza.26 The constellation Taurus, represented by two bright stars in the characteristic V of its horns is twinned with the two pyramids of Dashur.27 And the constellation Leo has as its terrestrial counterpart the lion-bodied Sphinx of Giza.28

  We saw in chapter 16 that precession alters the positions of all the stars in the sky according to a great cycle of 25,920 years—a cycle that proceeds at the rate of one degree every 72 years and that is most easily observable (although not within the short span of one human lifetime) as the precession of the equinoxes.

  In The Orion Mystery, Fingerprints of the Gods, and The Message of the Sphinx, we have demonstrated with a substantial body of evidence that the pattern of stars that is duplicated on the ground at Giza in the form of the three pyramids and the Sphinx represents the disposition of the constellations Orion and Leo as they looked at the moment of sunrise on the spring equinox during the astronomical Age of Leo (the epoch in which the Sun was “housed” by Leo on the spring equinox).

  Like all precessional ages, this was a 2,160-year period. It is generally calculated to have fallen between the Gregorian calendar dates of 10,970 B.C. and 8810 B.C.29 In this epoch, and in no other, computer simulations of the effects of precession show that the three stars of Orion’s belt—when viewed at dawn on the spring equinox—would have stood due south at the meridian in the pattern of the three pyramids on the ground, and that the Sun rose due east, in line with the gaze of the Sphinx, with the constellation Leo—the Sphinx’s celestial counterpart—poised directly above it.30

  There is geological evidence, which we will not repeat here, that the Sphinx may in fact date back as far as the eleventh mil
lennium B.C.31 But we do not dispute that the pyramids were built, or mostly built, during the third millennium B.C.—the date attributed to them by Egyptologists. Moreover, although we are satisfied that the ground plan of the Giza necropolis was conceived as an image of the equinoctial sky in the Age of Leo—10,970 B.C. to 8810 B.C.—we also note that the Great Pyramid has pronounced astronomical connections to the much later epoch of 2500 B.C. (the date at which Egyptologists believe it was built). These connections, which could not be more explicit, are the carefully angled shafts that emanate from the so-called Kings Chamber and Queens Chamber.32 There are two shafts in each chamber, one of which points due north and the other due south. In the epoch of 2500 B.C.—and only in that epoch—precessional calculations show that all four of the shafts would have lined up like gunsights on the meridian transits of four stars that are known to have been of great significance to the ancient Egyptians:

  From the Queens Chamber, the northern shaft is angled at 39 degrees and was aimed at the star Kochab (Beta Ursa Minor) in the constellation of the Little Bear—a star associated by the ancients with “cosmic regeneration” and the immortality of the soul. The southern shaft, which is angled at 39 degrees 30’, was aimed at the bright star Sirius (Alpha Canis Major) in the constellation of the Great Dog. This star the ancients associated with the goddess Isis, cosmic mother of the kings of Egypt.33

  From the King’s Chamber, the northern shaft is angled at 32 degrees 28’ and was aimed at the ancient Pole star, Thuban (Alpha Draconis) in the constellation of the Dragon—associated by the pharaohs with notions of “cosmic pregnancy and gestation.” The southern shaft, which is angled at 45 degrees 14’, was aimed at Al Nitak (Zeta Ononis), the brightest (and also the lowest) of the three stars of Orion’s belt—which the ancient Egyptians identified with Osiris, their high god of resurrection and rebirth and the legendary bringer of civilization to the Nile Valley in a remote epoch referred to as Zep Tepi, the “First Time.”34

  A VAST AND EXTRAORDINARY STATEMENT

  Because we can reconstruct the ancient skies over Giza with modern computers we can demonstrate the perfect alignments of the four shafts to the four stars circa 2500 B.C. What the same computers also show us is that these alignments were rare and fleeting, only valid for a century or so. After that the continuous gradual change effected in stellar declinations by the passage of time altered the positions at which the stars transited the meridian. It therefore seems inescapable—whatever their connections to the date of 10,500 B.C.—that the pyramids are also signaling an extremely close connection to the date of 2500 B.C.

  Indeed, we are prepared to go further. It is our hypothesis that one of the multiple and complex functions of the monuments of the Giza necropolis may have been to make some sort of statement about two widely separated astrological ages—the Age of Leo, 10,970 B.C. to 8810 B.C. (in which falls the earlier date spelled out by the ground plan), and the Age of Taurus—that is, when Taurus housed the Sun on the spring equinox, generally put at 4490 B.C. to 2330 B.C. (in which falls the later date spelled out by the star shafts).

  Only a statement of vast and extraordinary significance could have justified such a vast and extraordinary undertaking—for any rational analysis of the pyramids shows that they must have been built with enormous, almost unlimited resources, and the focused attention of the very best minds of the age over a sustained period of time. Indeed, their standards of precision are so high, and coupled with the use of such gigantic megaliths, that it is not certain they could be built today even with the best modern technology. Then, and now, they stand at the very edge of what is possible.

  What were the ancients trying to say that they felt was worth such a superhuman effort?

  GODS AND THEIR STARRY COUNTERPARTS

  The pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Giza are uninscribed monuments that have never been proven to be just “tombs and tombs only,” as Egyptologists like to tell us. Indeed, all that the monuments tell us about themselves—from their alignments, their shafts, and the presence within them of empty sarcophagi—is that their builders connected them to the stars, to the cyclical flow of time as measured by precession, and to ideas about death. The Heliopolitan religion that was practiced around them, however, has left us a gigantic legacy of texts, some inscribed on the walls of later pyramids (the so-called Pyramid Texts), which help to fill in the picture.

  We have already encountered the Heliopolitan symbolism of the Benben stone and the bennu-phoenix. It is as well to remind ourselves also of some of the principal Heliopolitan gods and of their astronomical counterparts:

  Atum-Ra, the creator, the father of the Gods, identified with the Sun.35

  Osiris, the first divine pharaoh of Egypt, later transformed into the god of death and rebirth, associated with the constellation of Orion.36

  Isis, goddess of magic, sister and consort of Osiris, associated with the star Sirius.37

  Set, god of storms and chaos, violence and darkness, fire and brimstone, the murderer of Osiris and usurper of his kingdom, associated with the constellation of Taurus.38

  Horus, the revenging son of Osiris and Isis who defeats Set and restores his fathers kingdom, associated with the constellation of Leo, with the Sun when it is “in” the constellation of Leo, and also with a planet that sometimes passes between the paws of the constellation of Leo—the planet Mars, as we shall see.39

  MESSAGE OF THE CATACLYSM

  The Egyptian golden age over which Osiris was said to have presided is referred to in the Pyramid Texts as Zep Tepi—literally the “First Time.” This word tepi, as we have shown in The Message of the Sphinx, refers to a new cycle of time ushered in symbolically by the appearance of the phoenix flying from the east, alighting in Heliopolis, and starting time with its cry. We are now beginning to wonder, however, if it is only a symbolic ushering in that was intended here. Or is it possible that the “phoenix” with its fiery, meteoritic associations could in fact be a comet, as we suggested above. Perhaps a comet that was seen to return to the skies over Egypt at cyclical intervals, on each occasion capsizing the old order of the world and ushering in the new?

  We suspect, and have argued at length in our works,40 that the story of the golden age of Osiris may have historical foundations in a lost prehistoric civilization—highly advanced both scientifically and spiritually—that was obliterated more than 12,000 years ago in the huge global cataclysm that shook the earth at the end of the last Ice Age.

  No scholar today doubts that such a cataclysm occurred—more than 70 percent of all animal species were rendered extinct—but the more interesting and still unresolved issue is, what caused it?

  As we will show in part 4, evidence has been steadily accumulating during the past decade that does indeed link the whole mystery to a fragmenting giant comet, trapped in a cyclical Earth-approaching orbit, that was responsible for massive impacts in the eleventh millennium B.C. and in the ninth millennium B.C.—the exact span of the Age of Leo—and for a later episode of bombardment in the third millennium B.C., toward the end of the Age of Taurus, at around the time that the Giza pyramids were built.

  Is it simply some sort of bizarre coincidence that one level of the enormously sophisticated multi-layered message that ancient Egypt has passed down to us could, with perfect legitimacy, be read as follows:

  Bennu/Phoenix = Large, Earth-approaching comet

  Benben/Stone = Meteoritic debris of the same comet

  Ground plan of the pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Giza = Signpost written in the universal language of precessional astronomy stating that the comet (phoenix) visited Earth in the Age of Leo, the mythical golden age called Zep Tepi in the Egyptian calendar, 10,970–8810 B.C.

  Star shafts of Great Pyramid = Signpost written in the universal language of precessional astronomy remarking on the return of the phoenix to the close vicinity of Earth during the Age of Taurus, 4490–2330 B.C.

  DANGER FROM TAURUS?

  A curious matrix of mythology surrou
nds the essential symbolism and architecture in which the phoenix story unfolds.

  As we have seen:

  Osiris = Orion

  Isis = Sirius

  Set = Taurus

  Horus = Leo

  We also know that in the Heliopolitan myths Set killed Osiris and usurped his kingdom (interestingly enough, with the help of 72 coconspirators,41 and 72 is the key number in the precessional code, outlined in chapter 16). The myths further state that Isis/Sirius used her magic to restore Osiris briefly to physical life so that she could copulate with him and receive his “seed.” He was then translated to the heavens where he became judge of the dead and god of rebirth. Meanwhile, as we noted earlier, the fruit of his union with Isis was Horus, who in due course was destined to grow to manhood, overthrow Set, and restore his father’s kingdom.

  New life, the myth seems to be saying, comes from the death of the old—literally the dead body of the old god. In a sense, the image of Osiris-Horus is the same as that of the phoenix. Just as the immolation of the phoenix ends the previous world age, so the death of Osiris ends Zep Tepi and leads, ultimately, to the reign of the pharaohs.