by Colin Wilson
Ley lines had been ‘discovered’ in 1921 by an English businessman named Alfred Watkins, who was riding his horse across the hills near Bredwardine, in Herefordshire, when he noticed that ancient footpaths ran straight as an arrow for mile after mile, often towards hilltops. It suddenly struck him that England seems to be criss-crossed with hundreds of these ‘old straight tracks’. He called them ‘leys’ or ‘leas’, and concluded that they were ancient trade routes used by the earliest inhabitants of Britain.2
When John Michell approached the problem in the mid-1960s, it was largely because he was fascinated by the mystery of flying saucers, which had been causing excitement ever since a businessman named Kenneth Arnold had seen a formation of them flying at tremendous speed near Mount Rainier in Washington State in 1947. Subsequently there had been thousands of sightings.
Michell noted the curious fact that many flying saucers were seen close to ley lines, which are obviously more easily seen from the air than the ground, and especially at the crossing points of several leys. Learning that the Chinese have similar lines called lung mei, or dragon paths, which are designed to channel the ‘magic energies of heaven and earth’, Michell speculated that ley lines may mark some current of ‘earth-force’. He learned that dowsers, for example, can detect ley lines by the response of their dowsing rods or pendulums, and noted that ley lines often pass through ‘holy’ sites, such as burial mounds, old churches, and ancient monuments like Stonehenge.
Ivar Zapp could see that the stone balls of the Diquis Delta seemed to pose some of the same questions as the megaliths of Stonehenge – or, for that matter, the huge stones of the Great Pyramid. How were they carved so perfectly? How were they moved? Some of them were even found high in the mountains along the coast of Costa Rica, and it was impossible to imagine even a large team of men rolling them uphill – it would be too difficult and dangerous.
Zapp took a party of students to the Diquis Delta to try to fathom the mystery of the spheres. They were baffled, but he began to see a gleam of light. Lothrop had left diagrams of what many of the original stones had looked like before they were moved to museums and front lawns, and Zapp noted that two groups seemed to be arranged on either side of a straight line that pointed directly at the magnetic North Pole. In that case, he wondered, was it possible that the other sides of the triangles were directed towards points on the earth?
When he tried out this theory on a map, extending the lines with a ruler, the result was disappointing. The lines seemed to point at nothing in particular, although that could be explained by the fact that a map is a flat projection of the curved surface of the earth. Zapp tried again, this time with a tape measure and a globe. One line, projected from Palmar Sur, where spheres had been found, went straight through Cocos Island, then through the Galapagos Islands, then to Easter Island. He recalled that similar spheres had been discovered on Easter Island, although they were smaller than the giant balls of Costa Rica.
When he looked more closely at this ‘sight line’ from Palmar Sur to Easter Island, he saw that the line actually missed Easter Island by 42 miles. Then he remembered that Polynesian sailors can detect the presence of an island up to 70 miles away by studying the waves and the clouds, for both are disturbed by the presence of land; sailors also note the presence of land-based birds such as the tern and the noddy. A 7,000-mile-long sight line, passing through two other islands, that missed Easter Island by only 42 miles would be regarded as a hit.
His observations received confirmation as he studied other sight lines. Another side of the same triangle extended across the Atlantic and led to the Straits of Gibraltar. In another group of stones the line led to the Great Pyramid. And in yet another, it not only pointed to southern England, but ran right through Stonehenge. That could hardly be chance.
It seemed that Ivar Zapp had discovered the purpose of the stone balls of Costa Rica: they were navigational aids. That explained why some were in straight lines, and some were in the mountains overlooking the sea, and also why more of the stone balls had been found on the island of Cano, off the south coast of Costa Rica, looking across the Pacific.
Lothrop had also noted that the balls were often found in association with native cemeteries, which led to the speculation that they might be some kind of homage to the dead, although it makes sense for direction markers to be found in such locations, since the sailors would hope for guidance from the spirits of dead navigators.
The question of when the spheres were carved remains a matter for debate. Archaeological finds in the Diquis Delta date from 12,000 BC to AD 500. Some archaeologists date the stone balls to the most recent period, between a few centuries BC and AD 500. Archaeologists tend to be conservative, and extreme caution in dating a new find is a way of showing that you are a sober and respectable member of the academic community, not likely to leap to wild conclusions. This can be a mistake. In the 1920s, when the Meso-American archaeologist Matthew W. Stirling found an immense negroid head at Tres Zapotes in Mexico, he suggested that the Olmec culture that carved it might be dated as early as 600 BC, and was greeted with hoots of derision from his academic colleagues. Stirling was, in fact, too conservative, and the Zapotec culture is now known to date from 1,200 BC. So it is also possible that the giant stone balls are another proof of Hapgood’s ‘worldwide maritime civilisation’ of 7,000 BC.
Zapp knew Hapgood’s Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, and was perfectly aware of his hypothesis. A student named Humberto Carro noted that the story of Sinbad the Sailor in The Arabian Nights had a description of a steering device called a kamal, a long knotted cord with wooden squares at either end, the knots representing the latitudes of various ports. The Arab navigator would hold a certain knot between his teeth and point the string at the Pole Star to determine the ship’s position.
The kamal, a steering device consisting of a long, knotted cord with wooden squares at either end.
Zapp had seen this knotted string before, on a small figure Lothrop had found near a group of stone balls. It was holding the ends of the string in either hand and its centre was in its mouth, creating a V shape. Zapp had seen similar figures from places all over the world, from pottery designs in pre-Inca burial sites in Peru to depictions in the Indus Valley in India.
Costa Rica is, of course, a navigator’s culture, since it is on one of the narrowest parts of Central America, with two vast oceans on either side. Humberto Carro came upon another interesting piece of evidence, an article by Thor Heyerdahl that explained the techniques of sailing balsa rafts against the wind and current. Thousands of years before the keel was invented, Peruvians used removable centre-boards that served as keels and enabled them to tack. In the sixteenth century, Francisco Pizarro had encountered a whole flotilla of such rafts off the coast of Peru. They were of enormous size and moving towards them against the wind and current. Pizarro learned that they made journeys on these rafts along the whole coast of South America. Heyerdahl, we recall, used a similar raft called Kon-Tiki 3 to prove that ancient mariners could have crossed the Pacific; later on, he reinforced the point by crossing the Atlantic from Egypt to America.
When Christopher Columbus landed in Costa Rica in 1502, on his fourth voyage across the Atlantic, the explorers were received with great respect by the natives, and taken on a two-hour trek to the grave of an important person, which was decorated with the prow of a ship. The natives of Costa Rica appeared to be introducing these great navigators from Spain to one of their own famous navigators. The stone lapidas, or funeral slabs, upon which the dead man was laid out looked like the centre-boards of the Peruvian balsa rafts, and other figures – who seemed to be priests and kings – were laid out on identical centre-boards, stone replicas of the boards that played such an important part in their lives.
Could primitive navigators have sailed such enormous distances? Heyerdahl seemed to have proved the point, but he knew Easter Island was there when he set off. Would central American sailors of – let us say – 5,000 BC e
ven have known of its existence? And even if they had, would they have dared to launch a balsa raft into the vast and empty Pacific Ocean?
Zapp came upon a book that answered his question: We, The Navigators by David Lewis, published in 1972,4 in which Lewis described sailing with native islanders on native craft all over the Pacific, over 13,000 nautical miles. The islanders used the ocean lore they had learned from their forefathers. Lewis also described ‘sighting stones’ throughout the Pacific – he personally saw the sighting stones of Tonga and the Gilbert Islands. Unlike the stone balls of Costa Rica, these were flat slabs of coral (which you might expect from islands with plenty of coral), and they were also set in groups of three, which Lewis said were intended to ‘indicate the bearings of islands’. The stones had another use. The eldest child of each family was taught to use them to learn star patterns. They learned by heart the various stars that aligned themselves with the ‘stones’ at various times of the year, and continued to do this over a lifetime, passing the knowledge on to their own children. Navigation came as naturally to these seafaring peoples as reading a road atlas does to a modern motorist.
Zapp noted the similarities between Meso-American, Polynesian and Greek astronomy. Zapp knew that ‘atl’ is not a Greek syllable, but that it comes from the Mayan and Nahuatl languages of Central America and means ‘water’. Atlahuac was the patron god of Tenochtitlan, the city the Aztecs built on a lake – now called Mexico City. Plato’s sunken civilisation was called Atlantis, and its major city was circular and ringed with canals, like some of the ancient cities of Central America. Was it possible that Atlantis was actually America? This is the startling argument that Ivar Zapp and his co-author George Erikson present in their book Atlantis in America (1998).5
They point out that there have been many theories about the location of Atlantis: in the Mediterranean, in the North Sea, in the Atlantic near the Canaries, and in Antarctica. The latter, they argue, is the likeliest among these candidates, for the others are too small to fit Plato’s description. But it cannot be Antarctica, they insist, because Plato described Atlantis as ‘favoured by the sun’ – semi-tropical – and this hardly fits Antarctica. (They had not taken into account Hapgood’s hypothesis that Antarctica was once much further north.)
Zapp and Erikson also believe that the Atlantis catastrophe was caused by a comet or asteroid, about 5 miles across, which landed in the Caribbean in 10,513 BC and sent a great tidal wave thundering across Central America – the heart of their Atlantis’ – from ocean to ocean, leaving behind folk memories of catastrophe. (In Uriel’s Machine, Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight point out that the vast salt plains of Utah are made of sea salt, as is the lake after which Salt Lake City is named, which suggests that an immense tidal wave from the Pacific, perhaps 3 miles high, was responsible.)6
At the beginning of the twentieth century, American archaeologists would have dismissed the idea of folk memories on the grounds that there were no human beings in America at that time. The most influential anthropologist, Ales Hrdlicka of the National Museum, was totally convinced that man had arrived in America about 3,000 BC. The general idea that hunters came across the land bridge that once existed between Russia and Alaska across the Bering Strait is still the main theory of modern anthropology, but modern geological studies, Zapp points out, have revealed that ‘Beringia’ was a desert, devoid of vegetation. Since it was also 600 miles wide, there is no possible reason to assume that Asian hunters decided to cross it to reach an equally barren Alaska.
In 1927, the skeleton of a long-haired bison with a spear point lodged between its ribs was found in New Mexico. Since these bison became extinct more than 10,000 years ago, Hrdlicka’s theory was placed under question. In 1932, archaeologists found more spear tips lodged in mammoth bones near Clovis, New Mexico, after which ‘Clovis man’ was regarded as the first human being in America, dated to around 10,000 BC.7
There is an immense amount of evidence for contact between America and civilisations of the Far East. Joseph Needham, the author of the monumental Science and Civilisation in China,8 describing a visit to Mexico City in 1947, noted the ‘palpable similarities between many features of the high Central American civilisations and those of East and South-east Asia’. He then offered two dozen or so particular points of resemblance, including pyramids, double-headed serpents, dresses made of feathers and jade beads placed in the mouths of the dead. Needham claims that a mountain of evidence has accumulated of visits by Asian people to America from the seventh century BC, although Grant Keddie, a curator of the Royal British Columbia Museum in Canada, believes that Asians established trading posts around the North Pacific rim 5,000 years ago.9
In the early 1960s, Emilio Estrada, an Ecuadorian businessman who was also an amateur archaeologist, read a book on Japanese archaeology and was impressed by similarities between Japanese pottery from the Jomon period (about 3,000 BC) and ancient potsherds he had dug up near Valdivia, on the coast of Ecuador. He passed on his observation to Betty Meggars, of the Smithsonian Institution, but she was unimpressed — until she went to Japan in 1963 and saw 5,000-year-old Japanese pottery found on the island of Kyushu. She became convinced that the similarities of design could not be coincidence.
Her own explanation was that a fishing boat from Kyushu had been blown across to Ecuador by a typhoon, and that the Japanese had taught the native Indians to make ceramics. She was upset that most archaeologists rejected her theory on the grounds that the fishermen would have starved to death on a voyage of more than 8,000 miles. The archaeologists were right, of course — the voyagers would have needed supplies on board, probably more than Columbus needed to cross the Atlantic. It is unlikely that such a journey was made by chance. Ivar Zapp’s Costa Rican mariners could have managed it, though.
One of the most remarkable of the advocates of the spread of Asian culture to America is David Kelley, an archaeologist who, before his retirement, was on the faculty of the University of Calgary. Kelley is an expert on the Maya, who — as we have seen — are still revered for the incredible precision of their calendar.
The first calendar in general use was the moon itself. In 1962, a scholar from the Peabody Museum named Alexander Marshack studied under a magnifying glass a bone about 35,000 years old. It had a curious series of markings made by our ancestor — small holes engraved in the bone with a point. It looked like a decorative pattern, except the holes had been made at different times. Marshack realised that he was looking at the earliest known calendar, and that it showed the phases of the moon.10
The Greeks had based their calendar on the moon, which takes approximately 29.5 days to revolve around the earth.
They had soon encountered a major problem: 12 times 19.5 only equals 354 days, which is 11.25 days short of the year. With a calendar running as fast as this, it only took sixteen years for Midsummer Day to arrive in the middle of winter. Any Greek farmer who tried to regulate his planting by the famous Works and Days of the farmer-poet Hesiod, who lived around 800 BC, would soon have found himself hopelessly confused.
Even the Sumerians had been unable to solve the problem. Although they divided the day into 24 hours, and the hours into 60 minutes, they were still unable to get the year right. They added half a day to each lunar month, making it 30 days, bringing the year to 360 days.
For the average person, living in a small town or village, the number of days in a year didn’t really matter. The seasons came and went, whether you counted them or not, so a calendar that was a few days out made no real difference.
It was the ancient Egyptians who finally came close to measuring the actual length of the year by adding five days that were supposed to be the birthdays of Osiris, Isis, Horus, Nephtys and Set. Some scholars believe that the Nile acted as a calendar, flooding at the same time every year, but Egypt was – as we have seen – green until a few thousand years ago. According to Egyptologist Henry Lhote, the Sahara region was green between 7,000 and 2,000 BC11 – when the Great Pyr
amid was built, the surrounding landscape was probably a savannah. The Neolithic Egyptians had no reason to pay close attention to the flooding of the Nile. They were not dependent on it, as they are now. Why should these farmers have wanted a calendar of such accuracy? Schwaller de Lubicz would have said that it was a legacy from a far older civilisation – Atlantis.
The people who developed a more precise calendar than anyone else – even more exact than the Romans, whose Julian calendar was 365.25 days long – were the Maya, whose year was 365.242 days long. Why did the early Maya – the so-called
‘classic Maya’ who built cities in the jungle before they mysteriously abandoned them around AD 890 – want a calendar as accurate as that? Our own modern measurement, based on the caesium clock, is 365.2422, only 0.0002 seconds longer.
Moreover, the Maya had invented a symbol for zero, which is now regarded as a basic essential in mathematics (neither the Greeks nor Romans had a zero).
Mayan astronomy is also awe-inspiring in its complexity and precision. We calculate the year by the sun; so did the Maya, but they also calculated it by the planet Venus, and by Jupiter–Saturn cycles. As to the length of our earthly year, they solved the problem that the Egyptians, the Greeks and even the Romans had failed to solve by having no fewer than three distinct calendars based on different years: a solar year of 360 days, to which they added 5 supernumary days (although, as already noted, they knew its exact length); a lunar year of 354 days; and a tzolkin, a special ‘sacred’ calendar of 260 days divided into 13 months of 20 days each, which was used for magical and ritual purposes.
These three cycles ran concurrently. Since the tzolkin was well into its second year when the ordinary year had only just come to an end, their ‘century’ was a total cycle in which the three lesser cycles had finally caught up with one another, which was every 52 years. The ‘Venus year’ (584 days long) caught up with the other cycle every two Mayan centuries (104 years).