by Colin Wilson
The sanctuary looked rather like an immense stone box turned on its side. I decided to walk all the way around it but found the narrow passage at the back blocked by someone who was obviously meditating, with his forehead and palms pressed against the stone. I realised that it was Michael Baigent, the co-author (with Henry Lincoln and Richard Leigh) of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.9 I backed away so as not to disturb him, and instead followed John West to look at the famous ‘Building Texts’ inscribed on the walls – texts that refer back to the remote age called the ‘First Time’, when seven sages designed the temples and pyramids.
An hour later, back on the boat, Robert Bauval told me that Michael Baigent had not returned with the rest of us on the bus, and asked me if I could give a lecture in his place that afternoon. Everyone was concerned, since Baigent could only rejoin us further down the Nile by taking a taxi, and we were in ‘bandit country’ – not long ago, tourists had been machine-gunned to death at the Temple of Hatshepsut. When Michael later turned up unharmed, after I had given his lecture, I asked him what had happened.
‘I don’t know. I was meditating for a few minutes, then I found you’d all gone.’
I told him that I had seen him behind the sanctuary. ‘That wasn’t a few minutes before we left – it was at least twenty minutes.’
He was incredulous. ‘It only seemed a few minutes.’
He may have simply lost track of time, but I am inclined to believe that he had ‘tuned in’ to the vibrations of that hallowed ground, vibrations that are still powerful after more than 2,000 years.
In Bauval and Hancock’s Keeper of Genesis I find a quotation from the scholar E. A. E. Reymond, which refers to the ‘founding, building and bringing to life [my italics] of the historical temple of Edfu’. This ‘bringing to life’, this activation, is brought about by a ritual that involves sound.
The earth also has its own frequency, known as the Schumann Resonance, which results from electromagnetic activity between the earth and the upper atmosphere. It is far too low in frequency to be heard, but Christopher Dunn found himself speculating whether, if the Great Pyramid was constructed with some ‘sonic’ purpose, as Tom Danley suspected, and if it was deliberately built to correspond to the size of the earth, its purpose might be connected with the earth’s vibrations.
Dunn had already conducted some of his own experiments. In February 1995, when visiting Egypt with Bauval and Hancock, he bribed an inspector to leave him in the King’s Chamber alone for half an hour after it closed to visitors. The inspector assumed he wanted to meditate, and agreed to turn off the lights. In fact, Dunn wanted the lights turned off so that no background hum would spoil his tape recording. He was also carrying a digital frequency counter to measure the radio frequencies he thought might be generated by the King’s Chamber.
When the sound of tourists had receded into the distance, he thumped the side of the sarcophagus with his fist and listened to the humming sound it made. He hummed this note to test the resonance, then hummed his way up the scale until noted that the resonance became even more powerful when he reached the note an octave higher.
Concerned that he was running out of time, he went through to the Antechamber to yell down at the guard to turn off the lights, whose humming was spoiling his recording. Then, still humming the note of the sarcophagus, he went back to the King’s Chamber, where he realised that the humming of the fans in the ‘air shafts’ was still spoiling his recording. After a few more recordings, he left the Great Pyramid and walked back to his hotel.
Back in his room he played back his recording and realised that his time had not been wasted after all. The note he had been humming had caused overtones – sympathetic vibrations – in the Chamber. When he listened to his own voice calling for the lights to be turned off, he was astonished that it sounded as if he was still in the Chamber and not on the far side of the Antechamber, despite the fact that walls and leaves of granite and limestone stood between himself and the recorder. His humming was also clearly recorded. He also noted that the sound of his footsteps as he walked back from the Grand Gallery resonated clearly at the Chamber’s natural resonance – the note of the sarcophagus.
Dunn had proved two things: that, as Howard-Vyse had said, the Great Pyramid seemed to have perfect acoustics, and that the King’s Chamber was a kind of sounding box, producing the same note as the sarcophagus. In fact, it was more than a matter of perfect acoustics. The Great Pyramid was designed like the Whispering Gallery in St Paul’s Cathedral in London, where a whisper at one side of the gallery is reflected around the walls.
Dunn’s own observations were confirmed by the scientist Stephen Mehler, who had also made recordings in the King’s Chamber. These had been analysed by a sound engineer named Robert Vawter, who agreed that the King’s Chamber was designed as a resonance chamber.
Even if we agree that the Pyramid was intended to be a sounding box, this still leaves the question of why. Christopher Dunn’s own conviction was that the important clue was the fact that the Great Pyramid’s proportions are the same as those of the earth, suggesting that the ‘sounding box’ was intended to vibrate to the earth. Or, as he puts it in his book The Giza Power Plant,10 ‘the pyramid acts as a receiver of energy from within the earth itself.
Inevitably, most readers will feel that the notion of the Great Pyramid as a giant resonator is far fetched, but sceptics will also have to admit that Dunn succeeds in making sense of its anomalies and apparent absurdities, producing plausible explanations for all kinds of features, from the subterranean gallery to the iron plate with traces of gold found at the top of the southern air shaft. One of Dunn’s illustrations is based upon Charles Piazzi Smyth’s drawings (see page 64).
The Great Pyramid is not only located on the meridian that covers more land than any other; it is also at the centre of the earth’s land masses. In addition, it is situated so accurately in the centre of the Nile Delta that a compass point placed on the Great Pyramid can neatly enclose the whole Delta in an arc. That is why Piazzi Smyth thought the Giza meridian ought to be our modern prime meridian. He also believed that, for the ancient Egyptians, it probably was their prime meridian.
In The Giza Power Plant, Christopher Dunn has produced a fascinating book about the possible technological purpose of the Great Pyramid. Rand has another, equally interesting theory of the location of what has become known as ‘Thoth’s Holy Chamber’.
One of Rand’s major aims, in trying to understand the hidden geometry of the Giza site, was to try to locate this ‘secret chamber’. The notion seems to have originated in a document called the Westcar Papyrus,11 now in the Berlin Museum, which seems to be a New Kingdom copy of a Fifth Dynasty original (soon after the time of Cheops, or Khufu). It tells how Cheops asked a magician named Djedi the number (or precise location) of Thoth’s secret chamber, and was told that it could be found in a flint chest in a building called the Inventory. But no one, Djedi added, would be able to obtain the number until the coming of three kings as yet unborn… The papyrus breaks off at this point.
In their book Keeper of Genesis, Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock make an interesting suggestion. Bauval regards the Giza pyramids as a ‘reflection’ on the ground of the three stars of Orion’s Belt, and he and Hancock explain their belief that the secret chamber can be found reflected on the ground where the ‘vernal point’ – the location in the heavens of the spring equinox – was located in 10,500 BC. This was under the rear paws of the constellation of Leo, and Bauval and Hancock go on to suggest that the chamber is therefore located under the rear paws of the Sphinx.
More recently, Nigel Appleby12 has proposed that the secret chamber will be found at a spot on the ground that is a ‘reflection’ of the star Sirius, which embodies the goddess Isis. This location has proved to be on someone’s allotment on the outskirts of Cairo, and at the time of writing the theory has not yet been tested.
Rand, naturally, was inclined to approach this problem of Thoth’s
holy chamber from the angle of his own Atlantis blueprint. All our researches have led us to believe that ancient Egypt preserved the legacy of an earlier civilisation, perhaps of more than one, and that contemporary science is inclined to greatly underestimate the intelligence of the people of the remote past. It was, at least, plausible that there was a hidden cache of knowledge inside or around the Great Pyramid. The
Byzantine historian George Syncellus in the ninth century AD wrote a commentary that included a reference to a lost Egyptian text called The Book of Sothis,13, which was circulating in the third century BC. This lost book, according to Syncellus, contained important ‘records’ brought to Egypt immediately ‘after the flood’.
Robert Bauval, in Secret Chamber,14 unearths another clue in a tract called the Kore Kosmou, from the famous ‘Hermetic Writings’ attributed to Hermes Trismegistos (or Thoth), of which the most famous sentence is: ‘As above, so below.’ Scholars had been inclined to dismiss these writings as Neoplatonist texts written by Greeks in the third century AD, but more recently it has been widely accepted that they date back to early Ptolemaic times in Egypt (i.e., from 323 BC onwards). In the Kore Kosmou,15 Isis tells her son Horus that the secret knowledge of Hermes was engraved on stone and hidden away ‘near the secrets of Osiris’. She also declares that a spell has been cast on these books, to ensure that they remain unseen. The fourth-century Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus also writes of ‘subterranean passages and winding retreats’ built by men before the flood to house documents, ‘lest the memory of all their sacred ceremonies should be lost’.16
Rand had read a children’s book on magic called The Secrets of Alkazar, and had never forgotten its advice to aspiring young magicians: pay attention to the techniques of misdirection. ‘The audience will always look where the magician looks. The magician must never look at what he wants to conceal. The audience will treat as important what the magician treats as important, and as unimportant what the magician treats as unimportant.’17 Rand reflected that a hidden chamber might well be concealed according to the methods of Alkazar.
The most obvious things at Giza are the pyramids and the Sphinx, so someone who wished to conceal something would expect future generations to devote their attention to these. But supposing this is just ‘misdirection’?
In Keys to the Temple, David Furlong discovered that there is a phi relationship between the pyramids at Giza.
Rand also recalled that one of the sacred names of the Sphinx is neb, which means ‘the spiralling force of the universe’.18 Why should a spiral be associated with the Sphinx? Is it possible that the spiral was a Fibonacci spiral?
In The Keys to the Temple, David Furlong19 had also pointed out that the golden section has been used in the layout of the three Giza pyramids:
Rand recalled that, in a book called The Giza Necropolis Decoded, (1975),20 Rocky McCollum had noted that he could draw a Fibonacci spiral that would touch the apex of all three Giza pyramids. It folds in on itself, as can be seen, at a spot south-east of the pyramids, between the Sphinx and the Nile. It is Rand’s conviction that Thoth’s Holy Chamber lies at the centre of this spiral.*
In September 1980, engineers from the Egyptian Ministry of Irrigation had been measuring the depth of the water table under the Sphinx and set up their drilling equipment half a football field to the east of the Sphinx. They expected to have to penetrate about 20 feet and were puzzled when their drills went on through the sand until, at more then 50 feet, they hit something solid.
It proved to be red granite, of the same kind that can be
In The Giza Necropolis Decoded, Rocky McCollum created a phi spiral which passed through the tips of the pyramids at Giza.
found in the antechamber to the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid. Such granite is not to be found in the area of Giza; like the black granite that lines the King’s Chamber, it has to be brought from Aswan, 500 miles south. The implication would seem to be that there is some kind of underground chamber. The irrigation engineers also thought that the layout of the red granite suggested an ancient harbour.
In 1990, the geologist Thomas Dobecki, who accompanied John Anthony West and Robert Schoch to Giza to check the notion that the Sphinx might have been weathered by water, sent vibrations down into the rock under the Sphinx’s front paws and found evidence of a rectangular underground chamber. In October 1992 a French engineer named Jean Kerisel was in the ‘descending passage’ that goes down to the underground chamber of the Great Pyramid, using ground-penetrating radar. Beneath the horizontal passageway that connects the end of the descending passage to the underground chamber, Kerisel’s equipment detected a ‘structure’ that could be a corridor crossing the horizontal passageway at an angle of about 45 degrees. It seemed to lead directly to the Sphinx.
The historian Herodotus, as we have seen, had been told of underground chambers intended to be the tomb of Cheops, but this has generally been discounted as misinformation. That may be so. What does seem certain is that the Giza plateau is honeycombed with underground tunnels.
This was again demonstrated in 1977, when a team from Stanford Research Institute22 used a new technique called ‘resistivity’ (which involves the passing of an electric current into rods driven into the rock) to investigate the Sphinx, and concluded that behind the north-west rear paws there was an ‘anomaly’ that looked like a tunnel running north-west (the direction of the Great Pyramid) to south-east.
If the centre of Rocky McCollum’s Fibonacci spiral is, in fact, Thoth’s Holy Chamber, then presumably there is some connection with the Great Pyramid. Rand drew a line from
At that point, he discovered something that intrigued him. This line, continued in a straight direction, through the foundation stone in the north-east corner of the Pyramid, pointed directly at the Hudson Bay Pole. Moreover, if a line was drawn from the foundation stone to the North Pole, and another from the Sphinx to the foundation stone, they form an angle of 28 degrees. We have noted in earlier chapters the importance of this angle on the Giza plateau. Rand comments:
This solution to the location of the Holy Chamber breaks Thoth’s magic spell by revealing that the pyramids and Sphinx are the most amazing case of misdirection ever conceived. It solves the mystery of the south-east to northwest directions that show up at Giza. This direction points at the former position of the North Pole when it was in Hudson Bay. The red granite in front of the Sphinx may prove to be a part of a roof covering a secret subterranean structure designed to house treasures from a lost world. Only a civilisation equipped with the tools of astronomy, geometry, geodesics and a knowledge of the former location of the earth’s crust would be able to find the treasure so carefully hidden in the ‘desert sands’. Thoth hid his treasure well.
Part of that message, he thinks, is a deliberate indication of the direction of the Hudson Bay Pole, intended as a warning of what can happen to our earth. We are not invulnerable. Echoing Hapgood, Rand writes: ‘Our notion of progress is an illusion. We are deceiving ourselves if we think we are immune to the forces of nature. Civilisation, as the ancients have repeatedly told us, unfolds in cycles.’
T = Thoth’s Holy Chamber
R = Red granite in front of Sphinx
H = Hudson Bay Pole @ 28 degrees NW
A phi-controlled spiral running through the tips of the Giza pyramids folds in upon itself at a point in the desert. A line extending from the centre of the spiral to the Great Pyramid’s foundation stone points directly towards the Hudson Bay Pole.
*Rand notes that the south-east corner of the Great Pyramid is highlighted in Robert Temple’s The Crystal Sun. He has discovered that once a year, at sunset, during the winter solstice, the Middle Pyramid casts a Golden Triangle shadow upon the south-east corner of the Great Pyramid. Once again we find the geometric appearance of the Golden Section linked with the geographic direction of the south-east. Is the shadow another way of pointing towards Thoth’s Holy Chamber.21 this centre point to the foundation stone of the Grea
t Pyramid, and noted that it passed through the rear paws of the Sphinx, in the same direction as the Stanford researchers’ hypothetical ‘tunnel’.
5
6,000 DEGREES Celsius
THE LIBYAN DESERT is one of the most godforsaken wildernesses on earth. Its white sand dunes tower like cliffs, often 600 feet high, and there is no sign of a living thing. Its desolate nature was underlined on 3 June 1971, when three scientists discovered an Egyptian plane in the desert near the Gilf Kebir Plateau. The plane had vanished three years earlier and aerial searches had failed to locate it. It had crash-landed for some unknown reason, and all that remained inside were the nine skeletons of the crew. The airmen had obviously died of thirst.1
The area in which they were found was a broad sand-free corridor of hard rock between the giant dunes. The three explorers, Virgil E . Barnes, James Underwood and Ali Sbeta, were investigating a mystery that had intrigued scientists for almost forty years: the enigma of the Libyan Desert ‘glass’.
Pieces of this ‘glass’, found on the surface of the Libyan Desert — which, in spite of its name, is in Egypt, 500 miles south-west of Cairo — were originally identified as ‘tektites’. Often very beautiful, their colour varies from pale yellow to
The Libyan Desert glass deposits are located in the desert near latitude 25 degrees north and the border between Egypt and Libya.
dark yellow and yellow-green, and can be worked by a jeweller into semi-precious stones. No one really knows where they come from. Most scientists are inclined to believe that they have originated in space and have melted as they came hurtling down through the atmosphere.
For Barnes and his companions, the finding of the crashed plane was a stroke of luck, for within a hundred yards or so they also found more than two dozen tektites lying on the sandstone. They lost no time in returning to their Land Rover and setting out on the long drive back to civilisation.