by Colin Wilson
Schwaller believed that this tradition predated ancient Egypt because during his first visit to the Sphinx he had no doubt whatever that it had not been eroded by wind-blown sand, but by water. This suggested that it dated back long before 2,500 BC,the usual date assigned to the pyramids of Giza. Schwaller was familiar with an occult tradition that the Sphinx was not built by ancient Egyptians, but by survivors from the civilisation of Atlantis, who had fled some time before the final catastrophe. In his last book, Sacred Science,14 he spoke of an Atlantean race, ‘ancient vestiges of which have now been determined in western Africa; a wave of these people, having crossed Saharan Africa, finally settled in the valley of the Nile’. The true date of the construction of the Sphinx must be some time around 10,000 BC.
Schwaller died at Grasse in 1961, at the age of seventy-four. Although his books soon went out of print, a copy of Sacred Science fell into the hands of a student of Egyptology called John Anthony West. West was convinced that it was absurd to believe that ancient Egypt had come into being about 3,100 BC– the date accepted by most Egyptologists – and that a mere five centuries later it was already building the pyramids. That, he felt, would be like asking us to believe that Europeans had no civilisation until five centuries before Chartres Cathedral. The more West learned of Egyptian science, medicine, mathematics and astronomy, the more it seemed to him obvious that Egyptian civilisation was far, far older than Egyptologists usually believe.
As he read Sacred Science, he realised there might be a simple way to prove this. If the Sphinx and its enclosure had been eroded by rain, not by wind-blown sand, a good geologist ought to be able to tell at a glance. He discussed the problem in a strange book called Serpent in the Sky15 – strange because it spends most of its time discussing Schwaller de Lubicz, Egyptian geometry and the Golden Section. The book was sent to me for review in July 1979, and I was naturally most impressed by its final chapter, ‘Egypt: Heir to Atlantis’, with its photographs comparing the Sphinx enclosure with the cliff face behind the temple of Queen Hatshepsut, with erosion in both places that geologists agree to be water weathering. To me they certainly looked remarkably similar.
It took West many years to find an open-minded geologist who could command the respect of his colleagues. Eventually, accompanied by Boston University geologist Robert Schoch, West made the trip to Cairo. As they stood before the Sphinx enclosure, he was understandably nervous, half expecting
Schoch to point out that he had made some elementary error and that the erosion was caused by sand. To his relief, Schoch took one look and agreed that this was water weathering.
The difference is easy to explain. When a rock face is blasted by wind-blown sand, its soft layers are worn away while its hard layers continue to jut out, so the profile of the rock looks like a layer cake or a club sandwich. When a rock face is eroded by rainfall, the soft layers are still worn away horizontally, but the rain also cuts vertical channels, so the profile of the rock is a little like a series of babies’ bottoms, with rounded curves. Such weathering could be seen on the Sphinx and the Sphinx enclosure.
In Schoch’s opinion the Sphinx might well have been built around 7,000 BCwhich would make it 9,000 years old instead of 4,500. When he announced this result to fellow geologists at a conference of the Geological Society of America in October 1991, it aroused intense controversy, although – strangely enough – many of the geologists were inclined to agree. It was the Egyptologists among them who denounced Schoch’s views as pure fantasy.
West also persuaded a senior forensic artist, Frank Domingo of the New York Police Department, to examine the battered face of the Sphinx, and assess whether it might be that of the pharaoh Chefren, whose bust had been found buried in the Valley Temple facing the Sphinx. Domingo went to Cairo and applied to the Sphinx the same methods he would employ in trying to identify the damaged face of a corpse from a photograph. His conclusion was that the Sphinx was emphatically not Chefren – the chin was more prominent, the mouth a different shape, and the cheeks sloped at a different angle.
West published an article about the findings in a glossy magazine and sent me a copy. It so happened that I had been asked to write a film outline about Atlantis for a Hollywood producer, and had used West’s theory that the Sphinx had been built by survivors from Atlantis. We met in New York in
September 1993, and he showed me the rough cut of a television documentary he had made about the Sphinx. When I told him that I was thinking of writing a book about the whole question of the Sphinx and the age of civilisation, he recommended that I contact two other writers who were working along the same lines. One was an economics journalist named Graham Hancock, who had written a book called The Sign and the Seal,16 about the Ark of the Covenant, and was now writing a book arguing that civilisation may be many thousands of years older than historians believe. The other was a Canadian librarian called Rand Flem-Ath, who had written a book about Atlantis that was still in typescript. I made a note of both their addresses.
How had John West come to hear about Rand and When the Sky Fell? By another coincidence. In March 1993, Rand read a copy of a magazine called Saturday Night, which contained an article about the Sphinx by Paul Roberts,17 a writer on Eastern philosophy, telling the story of John West and Robert Schoch and describing West’s suspicion that the Sphinx may have been built by survivors of Atlantis. Rand wrote to Paul Roberts, enclosing an outline of When the Sky Fell. To his delight, Roberts replied a few days later by fax, expressing his willingness to read the entire book. Paul Roberts sent the outline on to his old friend John West, and also suggested a Canadian publisher.
When I returned to England in late September 1993, I lost no time in writing to Rand and to Graham Hancock. Within little more than a week, I had received typescripts of When the Sky Fell, and of a book called Fingerprints of the Gods.18
Hancock’s typescript was vast. He was not, like Däniken, arguing that space visitors were responsible for civilisation but simply proposing that our human ancestors – who built Tiahuanaco in the Andes and the pyramids of Mexico and Egypt – were far more technically accomplished than had ever been acknowledged. He cited astronomical evidence by the Bolivian scholar Arthur Posnansky, who had spent a lifetime studying the ruins of Tiahuanaco, that the ‘temple’ (or Kalasasiya) had been built about 15,000 BC,some 9,000 years before the latest estimates of the beginning of civilisation in the Middle East.
Hancock also drew on the work of a Belgian engineer, Robert Bauval, presented in a book called The Orion Mystery.19 Bauval had seen a photograph of the three pyramids at Giza taken from the air, and had been struck by their rather odd arrangement. The first two pyramids – the Great Pyramid of Cheops (Khufu), and the pyramid of his son Chefren – were neatly arranged so that a diagonal could be drawn from the upper left-hand corner of the Great Pyramid, straight through the opposite corner, and then on through the same two corners of the Chefren pyramid. You would expect that line to continue on through the two corners of the smallest of the three pyramids, that of Menkaura. So why was the third pyramid completely out of alignment? And why was it so small, compared to the other two? Menkaura was as powerful a pharaoh as his father and grandfather.
The answer came to Bauval when he was in the desert one night, and saw the three stars of Orion’s Belt – Orion looks like two triangles placed point to point, and the Belt runs across its middle. The three stars were arranged exactly like the three pyramids. Moreover, the Milky Way, stretching across the sky beside them, looked very much like the Nile running north past the pyramids. Bauval knew that the Egyptians regarded their land as a reflection of heaven. Did they mean that quite literally, building the pyramids to reflect the Belt of their sacred constellation of Orion, which represented the god Osiris?
However if the pyramids were meant as a representation of the stars of Orion’s Belt, Bauval noticed that they were not quite an exact reflection. Because of a phenomenon called the precession of the equinoxes, the constellation moves up an
d down the sky over a period of about 26,000 years. As it does so, it twists slightly – imagine that the double-triangle is impaled on the end of the minute hand of a clock, and you can see that as it moves from twelve o’clock to half past twelve, it will turn completely upside down. Actually, precession causes the constellation to move only to about ten past twelve, but it still changes its angle. Bauval calculated that the last time Orion actually ‘reflected’ the pyramids of Giza, as if reflected in a vast mirror, was about 10,500 BC.
Bauval felt that this date must have had some deep significance for the ancient Egyptians – in fact, it was what their holy scriptures referred to as the ‘First Time’, zep tepi, the beginning of Egyptian history. Was the Sphinx built to commemorate that ‘First Time’ around 10,500 BC?If Bauval was correct, the Sphinx’s construction predated Schoch’s estimate of 7,000 BC.
Bauval did not think that the pyramids were also built in 10,500 BC– he thought that certain astronomical evidence concerning the ‘air shaft’ out of the Queen’s Chamber indicated that the Great Pyramid had actually been built around 2,500 BC,just as Egyptologists believe, but he felt the whole Giza complex was almost certainly planned in 10,500 BC.In Fingerprints of the Gods, Graham Hancock suggests that perhaps the lower part of the Chefren pyramid had been built in 10,500 BC,since its massive blocks are quite unlike the much smaller blocks of the other two pyramids.
Graham Hancock was immensely helpful to me when I began my own book, which was eventually published as From Atlantis to the Sphinx.20 Graham sent me two complete versions of the typescript of Fingerprints of the Gods, and the next year the typescript of the sequel on which he and Robert Bauval collaborated, Keeper of Genesis,21 with an invitation to use anything I wanted.
Rand had also played his part in the success of Fingerprints of the Gods. Graham has described how, when he was finishing Fingerprints of the Gods, he was at a low ebb physically and mentally – physically because of months of travel, mentally because he was beginning to doubt his own findings about a lost civilisation that preceded ancient Egypt and Sumeria. His researcher added to his problems by resigning, explaining that there was simply no place on earth where the remains of such a lost civilisation could be concealed. It was certainly not at the bottom of the Atlantic, where there was no evidence whatever of a sunken land mass.
At that moment Graham received a letter from Rand, who had been given his address by Paul Roberts. The enclosed outline of When the Sky Fell solved his problem, while the various maps he had studied – those of Piri Reis, Philip Buache, Oronteus Finnaeus – now all fell into place, like the missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Atlantis had to be situated in Antarctica. With that single recognition, Graham tied up all his loose ends.
Also in When the Sky Fell Rand suggested that the language of the Aymara, who live around Lake Titicaca, has a structure that is so logical that it can be written in an algebraic shorthand that computers can understand; it can therefore be used as an intermediate language in enabling computers to translate other languages. Its structure is so simple that a Bolivian mathematician, Rojas de Guzman, suggests that it did not just evolve, but was constructed from scratch.22
That sounds like another argument for Erich von Däniken’s visitors from the stars, but neither the Flem-Aths nor Graham Hancock use it as such. They simply point out that legends of ‘gods’ exist all over Central and South America, and that the gods come from the east. Their chief has a beard (Native Americans do not have beards) and looks like a European; he had many names in different parts of South America – Viracocha, Quetzalcoatl, Kon Tiki, Votan, Kukulcan – and he is known as the ‘god’ who brought civilisation and a moral code forbidding slaughter. When he finally sailed away, he promised to return. In fact, the Aztecs of Mexico mistook the invasion of the Spaniards for the return of the gods, which is why their empire was conquered so easily. Professor Arthur
Posnansky concluded, from Aymara legends,23 that they believe that their language was that of the gods. Neither Graham Hancock nor the Flem-Aths assume the existence of visitors from space to explain many of these ancient mysteries – the white gods from the east may have been fleeing from their own disintegrating continent when they came to Mexico and South America.
So in 1993, after years of disappointment in trying to find a publisher for When the Sky Fell, the Flem-Aths suddenly began to sense that things were improving. I offered to write an introduction to the book, and it appeared in 1995, a year before my own From Atlantis to the Sphinx and Bauval and Hancock’s Keeper of Genesis.
Keeper of Genesis aimed to explain why, if the ancient Egyptians (or Atlanteans) had made plans for the Giza pyramids in 10,500 BC,they waited another 8,000 years to build them. The reason, according to Bauval and Hancock, was ceremonial. By 2,500 BC,the precession of the equinoxes had finally brought the constellation of Orion (which represented Osiris) to a point in the heavens that reflected the Giza plateau – the place of the ‘First Time’ – on the ground. The Egyptians built the Great Pyramid and enacted an elaborate ceremony in which Osiris arrived home in the pyramid, and then left for his home in the sky. It is a thesis that is bound to arouse a certain scepticism, rather like suggesting that disciples who were present at Jesus’s crucifixion later planned to build the Vatican in AD8,000 in order to perform a ceremony symbolic of the Resurrection, but it is certainly argued on the basis of immense astronomical knowledge.
When the Sky Fell was translated into nine languages. Rand soon found himself embarking on a new project, linked to his previous work.
In November 1993, shortly before When the Sky Fell had been accepted, John West sent Rand an article by Robert Bauval that summarised the arguments that would appear in The Orion Mystery and Keeper of Genesis. Bauval had explained his view that the pyramids of Giza exactly mirrored the stars of Orion’s Belt most recently in 10,500 BC,at the beginning of the present ‘precessional cycle’, and he argued that the Sphinx had been built at that date. Rand had dated the last great crust shift at 9,600 BC.John West wanted to know how could Rand account for this discrepancy of 900 years?
Rand replied that all the archaeological and geological evidence pointed to 9,600 BCas the correct date. But Bauval’s argument did not imply that the Sphinx had to have been built in 10,500 BC,simply that it memorialised that date. There is a memorial in Plymouth to the Pilgrim Fathers who sailed on the Mayflower, but it was not built in 1620.
The question nevertheless continued to nag at Rand, just as the Atlantis problem had nagged at him twenty years earlier, until a serendipitous event brought it into sharper focus. Rose often brought home library books that she thought might interest Rand; one was Archaeoastronomy in Pre-Columbian America (1975) by Dr Anthony Aveni.24 It provided a vital clue.
The most important prehistoric monument in Mexico is undoubtedly the vast religious complex of Teotihuacan, 20 miles north-east of Mexico City. At the height of its prosperity, around AD600, it had extended for 12 square miles, a city larger than imperial Rome. Then, around AD750, there was a sudden and total collapse. Its cause is still unknown, although an earthquake seems probable, since large areas of the city were found to have burned to the ground.
A 2-mile avenue, known as the Way of the Dead, runs through Teotihuacan from north to south. At its northern end stands the pyramid of the moon, while the immense pyramid of the sun lies off the avenue to the west.
But, oddly enough, the Way of the Dead does not run exactly north–south – it was 15.5 degrees off true north, pointing north-east. No one knows why. One suggestion was that the avenue was aligned on the setting of the Pleiades (or Seven Sisters), a constellation that was important in Meso-American mythology.
Rand was excited to learn that there are no fewer than forty-nine other sacred sites in Mexico that are also misaligned to the north-east. As he studied the Way of the Dead, he was struck by an interesting suspicion. Was it conceivable that when the holy site of Teotihuacan was first laid out, it did point to true north – at the old Nort
h Pole in Hudson Bay?
At first sight, that seemed unlikely. The Hudson Bay Pole dated back before 9,600 BC,and even outside estimates for Teotihuacan claim that it was founded no earlier than about 4,000 BC(the most widely accepted estimate among archaeologists is a mere 150 BC).
Rand was also aware that most major religious sites are built on older religious sites, as if the ground itself is regarded as sacred. From Australia to Northern Europe, from China and Japan to Canada, a sacred place remains sacred over the millennia. Many temples are built on the site of older temples. In the early seventh century AD,Pope Gregory the Great told Augustine, who Christianised England, to build Christian churches on pagan sites. The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest places, is built on a Jewish holy site. Archaeology has uncovered the remains of five different cities at Tiahuanaco in the Andes. If civilisation existed before 10,000 BC,as both Hapgood and the Flem-Aths believed, then it was likely that Teotihuacan had been a holy place for thousands of years before 4,000 BC.
Hapgood had stated that the longitude of the old North Pole in Hudson Bay was about 83 degrees west of our present Greenwich meridian (its latitude was 60 degrees north). Teotihuacan is 98 degrees, 53 minutes west. On a map of the Americas, it looked very much as if the Way of the Dead pointed straight at the Hudson Bay Pole, but as a map is a projection of the globe on a flat surface, it might therefore give the wrong impression. At all events, it looked as if the Way of the Dead was aligned on the old North Pole, and that was a vital first step.