by Colin Wilson
Like the dragons of ancient China, Python was thought to be dangerously unpredictable, but after a valiant struggle Apollo triumphed in taming the creature by driving a lance through its head. In celebration, a sacred rock, the omphalos, was placed over the spot of Apollo’s victory.
In ancient Japan, a similar story was told in Hitachi Province, where a sea monster by the name of Hishin-Uwo was thought to be responsible for earthquakes. A god pinned down this creature with a river-rock called the Kaus-mi-ishi so that he could temper the fearful shaking of the earth.
And at Deli, in India, there is an iron pillar driven so deep into the ground that it was believed that it had impaled the head of the serpent king, Vasuki, thus keeping the world safe as long as this pillar remained in place.
Widespread myths testify to the ancient belief that certain places on earth are sacred and demand respect. Often, as in the case of Delphi, these sites were perceived to hold the extraordinary power of also being the centre or the navel of the earth. Cuzco in the central Andes, Nippur in ancient Sumeria, Jerusalem, Mecca, Easter Island and Deli have all at one time been held in such esteem.
Many ancient people regarded the world as a giant disc floating upon the world’s ocean. The holy city lay at what its citizens believed to be the exact centre of the earth-disc. When constructing temples and monuments, the ancients aligned their buildings with great precision so as not to dishonour any gods. This was considered a practical duty, since if a sacred site was marred by improper placement then the uncontrollable forces of nature could be released, followed by disaster.
Feng shui is the Chinese art of divining the most fortuitous arrangement of space. The foundation stone of each new building was always selected with great care since it was considered the anchor of the whole edifice and its position would prevent the violent actions of underground spirits from destroying the structure. The entire surrounding environment was also carefully considered. Mountains were thought to harbour dragons that, if not appeased, might arise from their slumber and destroy the works of humans. If a peak was not perfectly balanced, it must be modified. The Chinese were terraformers, reshaping the elevations of the earth around them to ensure perfect harmony.
Numerous tactics were adopted to allow the free flow of ‘chi’, the positive energy believed to stream throughout the universe. Mirrors and fountains, if properly arranged, could enhance the positive flow of chi and, by avoiding a design that included straight lines, evil forces might be diverted from homes and places of work.
Around AD1700 the Jesuits arrived in China. During their tenure they systematically destroyed any books about feng shui while hypocritically copying the writings. So it was only a matter of time before the ancient Chinese practice was finding its way into the design of such sites as Versailles. The original plans of the famous French palace built for Louis XIV were rectangular in shape, but the secret application of feng shui forced a change. Winding paths and kiosks were introduced to please the eye, and if they also warded off evil spirits, so much the better. This notion that a place holds intrinsic meaning is called geomancy
Just as astrology evolved into astronomy, and alchemy became chemistry, so has the ancient science of geomancy found its modern equivalent in geology, the forgotten science of antiquity. Unlike astrology/astronomy, which conjures up images of a priest gazing at the stars, or alchemy/chemistry, which brings to mind Frankenstein-like laboratories filled with test tubes and foaming gases, geomancy/geology is devoid of a popular image, but it was once an esteemed science.
At the heart of geology lies another ancient science, geometry. Geometry, which means ‘the measuring of the earth’, is a science that was practised, as we shall see, throughout the globe, but most purposefully in ancient Egypt, where the annual flooding of the Nile drowned the boundaries between farming plots. In Sacred Geometry: Symbolism and Purpose in Religious Structures, Nigel Pennick explains the process undertaken by the priests to restore order each year:
Of necessity, the method of surveying had to be practical and simple. It required but two men and a knotted rope, and the knowledge of the so-called ‘Pythagorean’ triangle, centuries before Pythagoras walked this earth.
The laying out of areas required a foolproof method for the production of the right angle. This was achieved by marking off the rope with thirteen equal divisions. Four units then formed one side of the triangle, three another and five the hypotenuse opposite the right angle. This simple method has persisted to this day, and was used when tomb and temple building began. It was the origin of the historic ‘cording of the temple’, and from this technique it was a relatively simple task to lay out rectangles and other more complex geometrical figures.1
The ‘cording of the temple’, using a simple rope with thirteen knots, turns out to be an important clue about the origins of the people who brought sacred geometry to Egypt.
Underlying the idea of geomancy is the assumption that there is something unique about sacred sites that prompted people to construct marvellous monuments at specific locations. Some authors have speculated that the ancients knew of forces within the earth that emitted energy at particular points on its surface. This energy might be psychic, as in the case of Delphi, where the spirit of the earth goddess’s serpent, Typhon, released powers that the priests and priestesses drew upon to devise oracles. Other authors, such as Bruce Cathie, believe that there are sacred sites at critical points on the earth’s surface where the ancients could tap a universal energy flowing through the planet.2
But perhaps there is another explanation for the placement of the sanctified monuments? John Michell, in City of Revelation, comments that ‘the traditions relating to these monuments are unanimous in claiming that they are relics of a former elemental science, founded upon principles of which we are now ignorant’.3 Among Masons the search for these lost principles has become an essential feature of their secret society. In November 1752, when George Washington became a Mason in Fredericksonburg, he heard the following words:
The proper business of a Mason is astronomical, chemical, geological and moral science, and more particularly that of the ancients, with all the mysteries and fables founded upon it.
Let us endeavor to turn the stream; to go from priestcraft to science, from mystery to knowledge, from allegory to real history.[italics added].4
Whatever we may think of the Masons in modern times, we can perhaps agree that the priest-craft of geomancy needs to be reborn.
Just as astrology may well be a form of degenerated astronomy and alchemy may have had its origins in the science of chemistry, so might not geomancy be a debased form of ancient geology? That was the question that ultimately sent me on the quest that would become The Atlantis Blueprint.
Today we assume that sacred sites such as the Egyptian, Chinese and South American pyramids were built by local people for local reasons, but The Atlantis Blueprint will reveal that there is a single global pattern that ties these monuments together. This in turn implies the existence of an advanced civilisation that existed before the flood and managed to communicate important geodesic, geological and geometric information to people who became ancient mariners and recharted the globe.
This knowledge was periodically lost and rediscovered: first by an unknown people who may have been centred in Lebanon, and then by the Phoenicians, and most recently by the Knights Templar. This lost civilisation preserved some of its great knowledge as a gift to future generations.
Joining me in the quest is Colin Wilson, author of scores of books, including From Atlantis to the Sphinx.
Our collaboration had an unexpected beginning. Colin had written an introduction to When the Sky Fell: In Search of Atlantis, the book that my wife, Rose, and I published in 1995. In the winter of 1997–8 he sent me a fax asking if I could verify Charles Hapgood’s signature on a copy of his first important book, Earth’s Shifting Crust. Colin knew that I was familiar with Hapgood’s signature because of my correspondence with him from 1977 to 19
82. I was happy to be able to tell him that the book had indeed been signed by Charles.
Colin and I stayed in touch and he sent me a copy of a documentary called The Flood that he’d introduced and in which I had appeared. It was around that time that I had decided to gather together the previous four years of research into a new book. Rose was occupied with working on her first novel5 and so I was temporarily without a co-author. I wondered if Colin would be interested in joining me in this adventure? To give him an idea about where the latest work had taken me, I sent him an article called ‘Blueprints from Atlantis’ that was about to be published in the American magazine Atlantis Rising (see Appendix 1). After reading the article Colin phoned to say he was keen to join me in the quest.
We began with the death of a professor in New England.
Author’s note: The text of The Atlantis Blueprint has been jointly written by Rand Flem-Ath and Colin Wilson. However, to enable the reader to distinguish between their individual voices, Colin Wilson takes the role of first-person narrator and Rand Flem-Ath contributes in the third person.
1
Hapgood's Secret Quest for Atlantis
ON A RAINY night in December 1982, a retired New England professor of anthropology named Charles Hapgood stepped off the pavement without looking left and was hit by an oncoming car. He died in hospital three days later.1
Two months earlier he had sorted out his books and papers, and invited his sons to come and take what they wanted. He had been retired for sixteen years, and, at the age of seventy-eight, had the satisfaction of knowing that the last thirty years of his life had produced work of amazing originality. Earth’s Shifting Crust (1958),2 written with the active encouragement and co-operation of Albert Einstein, had proposed a revolutionary new theory of the great ice ages: namely, that the crust of the earth can slide,3 like the skin on cold gravy, under the weight of polar ice caps, and move whole continents around. But perhaps his most revolutionary book was Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (1966),4 which proved beyond reasonable doubt that civilisation is far older than historians had suspected; it should have brought him worldwide celebrity, since his arguments were irrefutable. He also produced a second edition of Earth’s Shifting Crust (called The Path of the Pole, 1970)5 with still more evidence for his theory of crust slippage.
Born in 1904, Hapgood had graduated from Harvard in philosophy of science, then studied at Freiburg during the 1930s, when he witnessed the rise of the Nazis. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was inducted into the Office of Strategic Studies – the forerunner of the CIA – as an expert on Germany. When the war was over, Hapgood became a professor of anthropology at Springfield College in Massachusetts.
He was a good teacher, who believed in involving his students as much as possible. When, in 1949, a student named Henry Warrington asked him about the lost continent of Mu, the legendary civilisation that is supposed to have been engulfed by the Pacific Ocean, Hapgood told him to go away to research it, then report back to the class. As an afterthought, he told Warrington to examine the evidence for Atlantis too.6
Warrington had only to consult any good encyclopaedia to learn that in the 1850s an English zoologist named P. L. Sclater had observed a strange similarity between animals and plants as far apart as India and Australia, and suggested that there must have been a land bridge between the Malay archipelago and the south coast of Asia during the Eocene Age, around 55 million years ago. He called this Lemuria, because his missing continent connected places where lemurs – a primate species – were common.
The existence of Lemuria became incorporated into the teachings of the eccentric genius Madame Blavatsky, who said it was the home of what she called the ‘third root race’, predecessors of human beings who looked like giant apes and communicated by telepathy, who were followed by Atlantis, then our current civilisation, the fifth root race. But, since only members of the Theosophical Society took Madame Blavatsky seriously, this view of Lemuria failed to gain wide currency.
In the 1880s a brilliant but erratic French scholar called Augustus Le Plongeon claimed to be able to read texts of the ancient Maya of Mexico, where he said he had found references to a continent called Mu that had vanished beneath the waves after tremendous earthquakes. Few took him seriously. Then in 1926 a British ex-intelligence officer named James Churchward, who had been a colonel in the Bengal Lancers, wrote a book called The Lost Continent of Mu,7 following it up with four sequels. Churchward had a friend called William Niven, a Scottish engineer and amateur archaeologist, who had been excavating near a village called Amantia, north of Mexico City, when he found hundreds of tablets apparently written in the Mayan script. From their depth, Niven judged them to be more than 12,000 years old. Contemporary Mayan scholars were unable to decipher the script, but when Niven showed some of the tablets to Churchward, the ex-lancer claimed to be able to read it. During his time in India, he explained, he had formed a friendship with a Hindu priest who, when he learned that the young British officer was interested in archaeology, spent two years teaching him to read inscriptions that, he claimed, were written in Naacal, which was the original tongue of mankind and also the language of the lost continent of Mu. And now Niven had demonstrated the truth of another assertion of Churchward’s mentor: that the priesthood of Mu had sent emissaries to Central America to teach their secret knowledge and to prepare a place of refuge in the event of the destruction of their own civilisation. This had finally come about, according to Churchward, about 50,000 years ago.
Because Churchward made no attempt at a scholarly presentation, his books were generally dismissed as fantasy. When Henry Warrington presented his report to Charles Hapgood’s class at Springfield College, everyone agreed that there was no real evidence for Mu.
Atlantis was a different matter. It had first been described by Plato in two of his dialogues, the Timaeus and Critias, and the Greek Neoplatonist philosopher Proclus had stated that Plato’s student Crantor (c.340–275 BC)had visited Egypt, where he saw pillars inscribed with the legend of Atlantis.
In the Timaeus, Plato’s uncle, Critias, describes how his ancestor Solon (639–559 BC),the great statesman, had visited Egypt about two centuries earlier. Realising that the Egyptians knew far more about history than the Greeks, he lured a group of priests to talk about the past by telling them what he knew of Greek history. The bait was successful; an old priest told him, ‘Oh Solon, Solon, you Greeks are all children.’ He went on to say that the earth had experienced many catastrophes that had almost destroyed mankind, some by fire, some by water, and some by other means. But 9,000 years before (i.e. about 9,600 BC),one of the greatest of these catastrophes had occurred – a destruction by water. At this time, Solon was told, Athens already existed, and out in the ocean, beyond the Pillars of Hercules (which we now know as the Straits of Gibraltar), there was an island-continent called Atlantis, ‘as large as Libya and Asia combined’. (By Libya he meant all of North Africa and by Asia he meant an area equivalent to the Middle East.)
The priest then made a baffling statement. From Atlantis, he explained, it was possible to reach other islands that formed part of Atlantis, ‘and from them, the whole opposite continent that surrounds what can be truly called the ocean’.
It is conceivable that, by the ‘opposite continent’, the priest was referring to America – for there is evidence that Europeans visited America thousands of years before Columbus – but to say that the opposite continent surrounds the ocean sounds odd. Sea can surround a continent, but surely a continent does not surround the sea?
On Atlantis, said the priest, a powerful dynasty of kings had succeeded in extending their empire as far as the borders of Egypt. Their next ambition was to conquer Egypt and Greece. But Greece had resisted; an alliance led by Athens succeeded in defeating the Atlanteans. After this, a tremendous catastrophe, involving earthquakes and floods, destroyed most of the Greeks, and engulfed Atlantis under the waves.
This is not the usual version of history. Ac
cording to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, Athens probably dates from about 900 BC,possibly a few centuries earlier. Even though it admits that ‘the more substantial remains of later periods have largely effaced prehistoric settlement evidence’, there is still a huge gap between 900 BCand 9,000 BC.On the other hand, we know that archaeology is continually pushing back the age of civilisation. In the 1960s, Jericho – the first walled city – was believed to date from about 6,500 BC,but it is now believed to date from at least 2,000 years earlier. ‘The great stone wall, some twenty feet high and nine feet thick, was joined by at least one apsidal tower which… would not have disgraced one of the more impressive mediaeval castles,’ says one expert.8 But early settlers do not build walls and towers like that; they build one-room huts. It took European man about 1,000 years to move from fortified wooden barricades to medieval castles. So Jericho might well be as old as 8,000 BC.And in that case, why not Athens?
In the Critias, Plato continues the story. Atlantis was founded by the sea god Poseidon (Neptune), who fathered five pairs of twins on a mortal woman. The god built her a home on a hill, and surrounded it with concentric rings of sea and land. The twins were each allotted a portion of the island, and over the generations extended their conquests to other islands and to the mainland of Europe.
Great engineers, the Atlanteans built a circular city, 11 miles in diameter, with a metal wall and a huge canal connecting it to the sea. Behind the city there was a plain 229 by 343 miles wide, on which farmers grew the city’s food supply. Behind this were mountains with fertile meadows and every kind of livestock, including elephants. Plato spends many pages describing the magnificent buildings, with hot and cold fountains, communal dining halls and palaces of many-coloured stone, then goes on to describe the Atlantean social structure at equal length.