by Colin Wilson
The main piece of data was very simple. Geologists could trace the extent of the previous ice sheet by the marks it left behind, such as valleys carved by glaciers. We can picture the Arctic Circle as a circular piece of adhesive plaster, with the
Prior to 9,600 BC, the Arctic Circle was centred on Hudson Bay (60N 83W) and the Antarctic Circle was in the South Indian Ocean (60S 97E).
North Pole as its centre. Before 10,000 BC,that plaster apparently reached further down, so that its centre was in Hudson Bay and its southernmost edge was as far south as Ohio. As Rand had noticed, the western edge of the plaster did not extend to the west coast of Canada. Hapgood concluded: ‘Thus we are able to say that warm conditions of the Arctic Archipelago of Canada persisted for the entire duration of the Wisconsin glaciation, from 40,000 years ago to the establishment of modern conditions.’
Hapgood presented evidence to demonstrate, in the same way, that the North Pole moved from the Yukon district to the Greenland Sea about 80,000 years ago, then from the Greenland Sea to Hudson Bay about 50,000 years ago, and from Hudson Bay to its present position about 17,000 to 12,000 years ago. In other words, the most recent crustal movement began about 15,000 BC,and ended about 10,000 BC.
These movements of the Pole were not gentle and steady, and as far as human beings were concerned this shift from Hudson Bay to its present position probably involved many shocks, some of them cataclysmic, such as the crustal movement in the La Brea area of California around 11,000 BC,which killed off a dozen species in twenty-five years.
For the next four months, Rand read and reread The Path of the Pole, thrilled at the wealth of corroboration that Antarctica might have been Atlantis. Then he co-wrote with Rose a paper on his discoveries, in which they stated:
We believe that the account given in Plato’s Timaeus is an accurate southern hemispheric ‘global’ view of the earth as it did in fact appear 12,000 years ago.
Further, we believe that the previous Temperate Zone of Antarctica was capable of supporting human settlements prior to the earth crust displacement.
We believe that the lost continent of Atlantis was our generally ignored lost island continent of Antarctica.
In addition, we believe that Atlantis was an advanced civilisation (possibly a World Culture) which possessed an accurate advanced geographic view of the total planet.4
In July 1977, they sent this paper to Hapgood. The response they received was enthusiastic: ‘I am astonished and delighted by your article which arrived here today. Believe it or not, it is the first truly scientific exploration of my work that has ever been done. You have found evidence for crustal displacement that I did not find.’5
They were thrilled, not only by Hapgood’s typical warmth and generosity, but by his acknowledgement that they were doing important work. Rand’s new evidence concerned the fact that in Antarctica the ice was thickest where there was least snowfall, which seemed absurd, since snow turns into ice. Equally odd was the fact that the ice was thinnest in areas with the heaviest snowfall. The most obvious explanation was that the areas with the thickest ice had been within the Antarctic Circle thousands of years longer than the areas with the thinnest ice. In other words, Antarctica had slipped lower, and a part that had once been outside the Antarctic Circle was now located inside it.
Rand had uncovered evidence of a massive floating ice sheet that once extended from the Antarctic to the southern Indian Ocean. If such an ice sheet melted quickly because it suddenly entered a warmer zone, the bottom would be severely disturbed; in fact there was evidence in the scientific literature that that was just what had happened. When the continent of Antarctica, which had once been free of ice, slipped into the Antarctic Circle, it pushed a giant ice sheet – of the type that now covers the North Pole – up towards India on the other side of the globe. Rand found references to this ice sheet in two obscure papers tucked away in the journal Science,6 published since Hapgood’s Path of the Pole.
Rand had made another important discovery that had eluded Hapgood: the work of a forgotten writer named William Fairfield Warren, the founder of Boston University, who had first conjectured that worldwide myths of a falling sky and a lost paradise were memories of a great geological upheaval, although he suggested that this original paradise was at the North Pole. Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole (1885)7 is an immensely erudite work, obviously inspired by Donnelly’s Atlantis, citing evidence from Japanese and Chinese literature and a vast array of ancient cultures: Persian, Egyptian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian and Greek.
Rand also discovered the work of another forgotten scholar, the Indian Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who published studies of the earliest Indian sacred texts, the Vedas. Tilak, inspired by Warren, wrote The Arctic Home in the Vedas (1903).8 He had found evidence for Warren’s arctic paradise in the scriptures of ancient India, as well as in the Persian Zendavesta, especially in the fact that the ancient scriptures contain evidence of knowledge of polar conditions, including the length of the polar day and night. The unknown authors of the Vedic hymns appeared to be familiar with the geography of the polar regions.
Rand pointed out that if Tilak had not been so influenced by Warren’s interpretation of Vedic literature, which placed north at the centre of the earth, he would have seen that the Antarctic was a far likelier home for his island paradise. Hapgood had pointed out, in any case, that the North Pole ice cap dated back at least 50,000 years, which was an unlikely time for the island paradise to have evolved, whereas the Antarctic ice sheet dates back only 10,000 or 15,000 years. (Rand was mildly irritated when Hapgood used his arguments about Warren and Tilak in the second edition of Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings in 1979 without acknowledgement.)9
As delighted as they were with Hapgood’s warm encouragement, the Flem-Aths were puzzled that he failed to react to the suggestion that Atlantis was Antarctica. If someone had taken the trouble to map the interior of Antarctica when it was divided into two islands, the people most likely to be responsible were, surely, its inhabitants? It was not until 1995, when Rand was investigating the Hapgood archives at Yale, that he realised that Hapgood thought he had already discovered Atlantis much further north, in the Rocks of St Peter and St Paul. Rand’s own view, however, was that Hapgood was mistaken. It was true that the mysterious island on the Piri Reis map looked about 250 by 350 miles, and that according to Plato the plain behind the city of Atlantis was about 229 by 343 miles,* but Plato also explained that the continent of Atlantis was as big as Libya and Asia (approximately North Africa and the Middle East) put together, the mountainous part of Atlantis being far greater than the plain. There is no sign of a continent as large as that beneath the Atlantic.
Encouraged by Hapgood as Hapgood had been by Einstein, Rand and Rose began work on a book called Atlantis At Last!, which summarised the results of his research. It was finished in 1980. They began to look for a publisher and Rand continued to develop his own theories about ‘when the sky fell’.
In 1981 Rand and Rose (who had been born in England) moved to London, where Rand was able to use the facilities of the British Museum Reading Room to continue his research on Atlantis. To support themselves, Rose found work as a temp, while he found work at the Conoco oil company.
The job suited Rand; he was in daily contact with geologists and geophysicists, for it was his responsibility to provide them with maps of the North Sea bed, along with available geological evidence, in preparation for a government announcement about North Sea oil exploration. The information Rand was gathering would enable the company to decide which areas to bid for. He led a team of five people, and his skills in map-reading served him well. He also enjoyed discussing Hapgood’s shifting crust theory with professional geologists, and was pleased to find that so many were open-minded about it. All his spare time was spent in the British Museum. They found a publisher for Atlantis at Last!, but unfortunately it went out of business before publication. However, Rand’s days in the Reading Room were provi
ding so much fascinating information that publication undoubtedly would have been premature and would have led to a sense of anticlimax. He worked on with an increasing excitement as new discoveries strengthened his certainty that Hapgood’s theory of earth’s shifting crust was sound.
What continued to puzzle him was why Hapgood continued to be ignored by earth scientists, even though his arguments for ‘the path of the pole’ were backed with such a mass of scientific evidence and scientific acceptance of the theory of plate teton-ics had made his crust displacement theory far less controversial. While following up some remarks by Hapgood on the origins of agriculture, he stumbled upon a possible explanation in a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn. Its arguments had made Kuhn famous – or infamous – in the scientific community when it appeared in 1962: Kuhn had proposed that scientists are mistaken to think of the pursuit of science as a detached and unemotional activity. Once they have become comfortably settled with a certain theory – Kuhn preferred to use the word ‘paradigm’ – they develop an emotional attachment to it, like a mother with a baby, and if anyone challenges it they become defensive, remaining totally convinced that their irritation is the annoyance of a reasonable man in the face of time-wasting absurdities. This is why the great scientific revolutions – of Copernicus, Newton, Einstein and quantum theory – encountered such furious resistance. Even into the 1960s, the eminent British geophysicist Sir Harold Jeffreys maintained that the earth’s crust is immovable in spite of the evidence of plate tetonics. Kuhn pointed out that the proof required to budge such entrenched opinion is enormous – facts stand no chance in the face of a lifetime of believing in the same theory.
Now working for a group called Business International, a consulting firm specialising in providing research for corporate executives, Rand encountered an instructive – and amusing example – of this. He became a friend of one of Kuhn’s graduate students, and on many occasions the two of them discussed Hapgood’s shifting crust theory, with Rand explaining how it could account for the origins of agriculture, extinctions and glaciation patterns. After several months, Kuhn’s student was in total agreement that Hapgood’s crust displacement was a good example of Kuhn’s ‘paradigm shifts’ and the kind of hostility they encounter, until one day, when Rand admitted that his interest in the subject had been triggered by Plato’s account of Atlantis. Suddenly Kuhn’s student refused to discuss earth crust displacement any more.
Concerned that increasing commitments to their careers might prevent them from dedicating their energies to developing their ideas about Atlantis, Rand and Rose decided to return to Victoria to work on the book. The four years in London had been of immense importance to the development of Rand’s theory. After Hapgood’s death in 1982 – which shook Rand badly – Rand felt that he had inherited the problems that Hapgood had left unsolved.
The main one, of course, was what actually caused the crust to shift. In The Path of the Pole Hapgood had come to agree with Einstein that the answer was not the ‘washing machine’ effect, whereby an irregular polar ice cap caused the earth to ‘judder’, but he had accumulated a vast amount of other evidence that the crust does shift. Rand was inclined to believe that Milankovich’s hypothesis about ice ages was right, agreeing that they occur when three factors – tilt, perihelion and eccentricity – coincide. He concluded that the main factor was the earth’s 41,000-year tilt cycle.11
Rand and Rose wrote When the Sky Fell, and began to submit it to publishers. Perhaps he might have been better off retaining the old title Atlantis at Last!. If Rand had suggested that the ancient maps proved that the earth had been visited by extraterrestrials from another galaxy, the book would probably have been accepted by the first publisher who read it, but a sober study on earth crust displacement, with an appendix on the origins of agriculture, seemed to lack bestseller potential, even if it did argue that Atlantis was in Antarctica. Hapgood was forgotten and his works had fallen out of print; why bother to revive them? One publisher found it ‘fascinating but too academic’, and another ‘intriguing but too academic’, while a third said it left him breathless but he couldn’t figure out what audience they had in mind. Finally, the Flem-Aths accepted that the book would never be published.
A decade passed, during which Rand and Rose moved to Vancouver Island. A publisher had not been found for the Atlantis book, but Rand continued to read the scientific literature on archaeology, mammal extinctions and anything else that had a bearing on his quest for Atlantis. Although he was unaware of it, the climate was gradually becoming more favourable for his book. The breakthrough came when John Anthony West read the manuscript and agreed to write an afterword.
West was an Egyptologist, although he would certainly not have been recognised as such by the archaeological establishment. To begin with, he was fascinated by the work of a man who was unmentionable in Egyptological circles: René Schwaller de Lubicz. Schwaller (the ‘de Lubicz’ was bestowed later by a Lithuanian prince of his acquaintance) was the son of a well-to-do Alsatian pharmacist; he went to Paris in his twenties to study painting under Matisse, but soon moved into the study of theosophy and alchemy. He founded an ‘esoteric school’ called Suhalia near St Moritz, in Switzerland; after it broke up in 1929, he and his wife Isha moved to a large country mansion in Grasse, in the south of France, then in 1937 to Egypt, where he became fascinated by the temple of Luxor.
Schwaller came to believe that the Egyptians possessed a mode of thought that the modern world is almost incapable of grasping. In Alexandria he visited the tomb of Rameses IX, where he was fascinated by a painting that showed a right-angled triangle in which the hypotenuse was formed by the body of the pharaoh. The sides of the triangle formed the ratio 3:4:5, in other words, the triangle with which every schoolchild is taught Pythagoras’s theorem that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides. Schwaller was intrigued, since Rameses IX ruled around 1,100 BC,more than 500 years before Pythagoras. Since Schwaller had spent many years studying the architecture of the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, he was familiar with the story that the knowledge of the medieval masons came from ancient Egypt. He began a systematic study of Egyptian temples, and of Luxor in particular.
The first thing that strikes the tourist who looks at his map of Luxor is that the temple is ‘bent’, as if the courtyard that lies inside the entrance has been knocked slightly sideways by a blow from a giant mallet. Since the Egyptians were master builders, who could place blocks together so precisely that a razor blade cannot be inserted between them, there is obviously a reason for this anomaly. The marvellous harmony of the architecture leaves little doubt that it is part of some geometrical plan.
Schwaller set out to solve the riddle. The outcome was his masterwork, The Temple of Man (1957),12 demonstrating that the Luxor temple is of immense geometrical complexity, and that it is a symbolic representation of a man – a kind of gigantic hieroglyph. Because the man is striding forward, like the striding colossus of Rameses II in its south-east corner, the courtyard representing the lower part of the leg has the shape of a square knocked sideways.
One of Schwaller’s main insights was that the temple also contains many examples of the geometrical proportion known as the ‘Golden Section’ (and called by the Greek letter phi). It sounds like an obscure definition from a geometry book, but it is a notion of profound importance, and it also plays a central part in the precise location of sacred sites.
Nature uses the Golden Section all the time. Your body is an example, with your navel acting as the division between the two parts. It can be found in the spirals of leaf arrangements, petals around the edge of a flower, leaves around a stem, pine cones, seeds in a sunflower head, seashells – even in the arms of spiral nebulae. Why is nature so fond of it? Because it is the best way of packing, of minimising wasted space. Artists also discovered it at a fairly early stage, because this way of dividing a picture is oddly pleasing to the eye, in exactly
the same way that musical harmonies are pleasant to the ear.
Obviously, there is something very important about this simple-looking number. It is, in fact, 0.618034…, going on to infinity, non-recurring, as some decimals do.
Another form of phi is 1.618. If you wish to extend a line a phi distance, you simply multiply it by 1.618.
Another piece of mathematics is significant: a sequence of numbers discovered by the mathematician Fibonacci, in which each number is the sum of the preceding two numbers. If you begin with 0 and the next number is 1, 0 + 1 equals 1. And that 1 plus the previous 1 equals 2. And that 2 plus the preceding 1 equals 3. And so on: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55…
If you take any two Fibonacci numbers, and divide each one by the one before it, the answer gets closer and closer to the Golden Number 0.618034… the bigger the numbers concerned. No matter how big the numbers become – even billions or trillions – the number never quite reaches the Golden Number.
These Fibonacci numbers can be found in pine cones, nautilus shells and spiral nebulae.
This is what excited Schwaller so much when he detected it in the Luxor temple. He had spent his years in Switzerland studying the laws of universal harmony, as epitomised in cathedrals such as Chartres. His results had been stolen by an alchemist called Fulcanelli, who had published them as his own in 1925 in a book called The Mystery of Cathedrals,13 which quickly became a classic. Schwaller had no doubt that this law of harmony was a part of a far older tradition that was already well established by the time of ancient Egypt. When his first results were published in 1949 in The Temple in Man, they caused an intellectual furore of the kind that the French enjoy so much, and Schwaller became briefly as famous as contemporaries like Sartre and Camus. (It did not last – the public soon tired of Egyptian geometry.)