by Colin Wilson
Hapgood believed that the crust movements that resulted in the shift of the North Pole from Hudson Bay to its present position began about 15,000 BC. He seemed to feel that it had occurred slowly and, as it were, almost unnoticeably, although that is unlikely. The San Andreas Fault in California moves slowly, but the occasional earthquakes it produces can be dramatically noticeable.
Rand’s strong belief that the Atlanteans possessed a considerable knowledge of geology suggests that they must have studied the subject for a long time before the final catastrophe – perhaps for more than 2,000 years. In 9,600 BC, the tilt of the earth’s axis was far greater than it is today, and the end of the Ice Age was marked by a great deal of flooding, so they would have had good reason to pay attention to geology.
Their efforts, as we know, proved to be a waste of time, at least if we accept that the final catastrophe destroyed their civilisation. But, Rand suggests, later generations, who came long after the catastrophe, saw the ‘markers’ laid down by the ‘surveyors’, which they took for sacred sites, and went on to build their own temples on these sites.
It seemed to me that the evidence cited by Hapgood in Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, along with Rand’s own researches, pointed conclusively to some former worldwide geographical knowledge.
Uriel’s Machine, by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas, lends a certain support to Rand’s (and the O’Briens’) ‘survey’ hypothesis, suggesting that Enoch knew all about the danger from the heavens. Uriel is one of the Watchers in the Book of Enoch – not one of the rebels, but one of those sent to earth to punish them. A part of the Book of Enoch called the Book of the Heavenly Luminaries is basically an astronomical treatise. At a certain point, Enoch is transported towards a mountain of ‘hard flint rock’ in the west: And I saw six portals in which the sun rises, and six portals in which the sun sets and the moon rises and sets… also many windows to the right and left of these portals.’13 Lomas and Knight were reminded of Stonehenge, with its ‘portals’ between the stone uprights of the trilithons.
In the early 1960s, the British astronomer Gerald Hawkins had started to investigate the possibility that Stonehenge might be a kind of Stone Age computer, constructed to calculate the moment of sunrise and moonrise over an 18.6-year cycle. His Stonehenge Decoded (1965)14 became an immediate bestseller, although most astronomers were unconvinced. In fact, its ideas are now generally accepted, and in the 1970s the work of Professor Alexander Thom on ancient stone circles lent support to Hawkins’s theory.
The basic notion is that by standing in the centre of the circle you can face the sunrise (or moonrise) and foretell the season according to its position behind the ‘markers’. Lomas and Knight decided to try and construct a ‘Uriel machine’ on a Yorkshire hilltop in what amounted to a simple observatory. They returned repeatedly to take their observations of sunrise or sunset from the centre of the ring to the horizon, and stuck markers in place. Persisting for a year, they ended up with two curved rows of posts facing one another. And they learned – as ancient ‘henge’ builders had learned – that the year is not neatly divided into four by solstices and equinoxes. Because the earth’s orbit around the sun is an ellipse, there are 182 sunrises from the winter to the summer solstice, but 183 from the summer to the winter solstice. The same disparity is found between the spring and autumn equinoxes.
Their observations enabled them to learn why the ancient monument builders – these ‘Stone Age Einsteins’ – had chosen as their unit of length what Thom called the ‘megalithic yard’ – 32.64 inches. (Thom admitted he had doubled the basic unit that he found in all the megalithic sites – 16.32 inches – in order to bring it closer to our modern yard.) Lomas and Knight found that their ‘machine’ registered the length of the year as 366 days (between one winter solstice and another), which led them to fix a ‘megalithic degree’, one-366th portion of the earth’s revolution. They set their posts a megalithic degree apart, and found that a star took 3.93 minutes to move from one upright to the next.
The megalith builders almost certainly used a pendulum as their clock. The time a pendulum takes to complete one swing is determined by its length, and Lomas and Knight discovered that for the pendulum to swing 366 times in 3.93 minutes it had to be exactly 16.32 inches long, which is why the ‘Stone
Age Einsteins’ chose 16.32 inches as their basic unit. Lomas and Knight had solved the problem that baffled Thom.
Uriel’s ‘machine’ (amounting, in effect, to a primitive Woodhenge of posts) could not only be used as a calculator of sunrises and moonrises, but also as an observatory for measuring comets. It could determine, quite simply, whether a comet was on course to hit the earth. In other words, Uriel’s ‘machine’ could have been used by the ancients as a catastrophe predictor.
Rand certainly thought so, although his own view was that, rather than using the earth to measure the sky, Uriel’s machine had been designed to use the position of the stars to monitor the movements of the inner earth, a kind of ancient seismic device that could be used to anticipate crust displacements.
According to Rand’s theory, in Chapter 65 of the Book of Enoch, significant geological events take place before the flood: And in those days Noah saw the earth, that it had sunk down and its destruction was nigh.’ At this point Enoch sends an angel to warn Noah specifically about a coming global catastrophe: ‘Go to Noah and… reveal to him the end that is approaching: that the whole earth will be destroyed, and a deluge is about to come upon the whole earth, and will destroy all that is on it.’
He began to suspect that the position of the sacred sites, scattered across the northern hemisphere at 5- and 10-degree intervals, would be an ideal way of keeping track of any geological changes within the Earth. We know that before the flood, Enoch observed the angels flying north to undertake measurements with cords.
We recall that every year after the Nile flooded the Egyptian plains the priests used knotted ‘cords’ to recalibrate boundaries. They also used cords as geometric survey tools to design their temples. These ‘cords’ were nothing less than practical survey tools.
Rand concluded that the survey was geological and that Uriel’s machine was a tool used to anticipate the geological changes that were already building to a crisis when Noah pleaded for help from Enoch.
If there were dozens of astronomical observatories located at known latitudes, such as the equator, 15 degrees north, 30 degrees north, and so on, then the collated information from these ‘observatories’ would permit the people of Atlantis to make an appraisal of the direction of the displacement. For instance, Giza, which was formerly at 15 degrees north and ended up at 30 degrees north, would first pass through latitude 16 degrees north. Likewise, Easter Island, formerly on the equator, moved south until it reached its present location at 27 degrees south by first passing through 1 degree south. And Lhasa, the spiritual capital of Tibet, passed through 1 degree north as it slid from the equator to its current latitude of 30 degrees north.
Lomas and Knight’s ‘sophisticated horizon declinometer’ would also make an ideal seismic monitor to detect any change in the earth’s crust or mantle. If the earth’s mantle began to move then the stars would appear out of place and Uriel’s machine would spot the discrepancy. Our priest-scientist observers would know that something was terribly amiss.
When I checked with Robert Lomas, he replied that yes, indeed, Uriel’s machine could be used to monitor changes within the earth. Although he noted that only the twelve first-magnitude stars (the brightest stars) would be useful, those would still be enough to accomplish the geological task.
Based upon their studies of Freemasonry, Lomas and Knight had argued that geology was an ancient science like astronomy and geometry, so Rand’s notion of Atlantean astronomers observing the heavens to determine the timing of the next catastrophe was a plausible one.
It should be mentioned that Lomas and Knight also accept the idea of catastrophes resulting from cometary impact. For the impact that pro
duced so much damage in the Mediterranean area, which they believe to be the Biblical flood, they prefer the date of 3,200 BC rather than 2,200 BC.
For the ‘Atlantis flood’, they prefer 7,640 BC rather than the 9,600 BC that Rand and I have been suggesting in this book.
An article on Uriel’s Machine by Damian Thompson15 quotes archaeologist Tim Schadler-Hall as saying that in East Yorkshire there is an unbroken geological record of centuries before and after 7,460 BC but there is no sign of the giant tidal wave that is supposed to have swept Britain clear of all life and produced the great salt lake of Salt Lake City.
Uriel’s Machine leaves little doubt that a cometary impact could be calculated weeks or even months before it happened. For example, Donati’s comet, named after the Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Donati, was visible from June 1858 to April 1859, which seems to support the ‘surveyor’ theory. In any case, if the Atlanteans had studied geology because of earthquakes and floods, then their ‘markers’ could have been in place for decades or centuries.
As we read in the Kharsag tablets of the catastrophe that dispersed the ‘civilisers’, we find ourselves wondering what might have caused it. Could it have been one of these unexpected returns to ice age conditions that we have been discussing? That is possible, but human beings had survived ice age conditions for more than 100,000 years, and there seems no good reason why they should not have simply ‘dug in’ and waited for things to improve.
But what if these conditions were caused by a catastrophe such as a comet impact? In that case, we have to date it to the time of Plato’s Atlantis, for the later catastrophe suggested by astronomer Bill Napier (2,200 BC) would have taken place well after the time of ancient Sumer and would postdate the Kharsag tablets. A 9,500 BC catastrophe would suggest that the whole ‘Garden of Eden’ period occurred a great deal earlier.
In From the Ashes of Angels, Andrew Collins has some interesting and important speculations. Collins was not entirely happy with O’Brien’s assumption that Eden was in ‘the mountain-girt valleys where modern Lebanon, Syria and Israel now adjoin’. O’Brien seems to have reached this conclusion because the Book of Enoch says that the rebel Watchers descended on Mount Hermon, near Damascus, but there is no definite indication of the whereabouts of Enoch’s Garden of Eden. Collins discovered other Mesopotamian texts that spoke of an abode of the gods to the north. One Akkadian text of the third millennium BC said that ‘Karsag Kurra’ was a sacred mountain located immediately outside the northern limits of their country, Mesopotamia, which would seem to place it in Kurdistan. Collins went there to investigate.
One reason that O’Brien chose the vicinity of Mount Hermon was that it had cedar forests (the famous ‘cedars of Lebanon’), with whose wood the civilisers built their settlement. Elsewhere in The Genius of the Few, O’Brien admits that the high mountain country where Kharsag was situated sounds like the Zagros Mountains of Luristan and Kurdistan. But he declares that the Zagros Mountains are covered with oak trees, and have no history of cedars – which seems to leave only Lebanon as the site of Kharsag.
In this, however, he was mistaken. Collins soon established that there had been cedar forests in the Zagros Mountains, and that they may have existed since the end of the Ice Age. Moreover, Collins pointed out that Genesis describes God planting a garden ‘eastward, in Eden’. East of what? Mount Hermon is not east of anything except Lebanon and the Mediterranean. On the other hand, the whole area around Lake Van and Lake Urmia, where Kurdish and Armenian legends place both the Garden of Eden and the landing place of Noah’s Ark, is to the east of Turkey. The earliest version of Gilgamesh, written in Sumerian, places a great cedar forest in the Zagros Mountains of Kurdistan.
Moreover, Collins learned about an ancient Anatolian (Turkish) city named Nevali Cori, whose carved columns at first sight looked like those of the vast courtyard called the Kalasasiya, at Tiahuanaco, in the Andes. They were the remains of a monolithic temple that seemed to be a ritual centre, parts of which were carbon-dated back to 8,400 BC. He would later come to suspect a connection between the Watchers of Enoch and the stories of Viracocha, the god who brought civilisation to Central and South America, and the cult of the plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl (the other name for Viracocha).
Collins went to the Kurdistan plateau in eastern Turkey in search of the Garden of Eden, and soon had no doubt that all the information about it in the Kharsag epic pointed to the Zagros Mountains. Rand disagreed. The blueprint suggests that the O’Briens got it right when they associated Kharsag with the Lebanese village of Ehdin, near Mount Hermon and Baalbek (see Chapter 8).
In his quest, Collins and a friend visited Cappadocia, in eastern Turkey, and discovered a kind of lunar landscape of hardened lava, mostly from the volcano of Erciyas Dag. The landscape is full of towers created by wind erosion. Early Christians tunnelled into them to make hermits’ cells and chapels. This area was also where Catal Huyuk, one of the earliest cities in the world, flourished about 8,000 years ago.
After they looked at many of these early ‘churches’, the guide suggested that they might like to see the ‘underground cities’. ‘What underground cities?’ Collins asked. The guide explained that they were made by Christians who were trying to escape persecution by Muslims in the time of Mohammed. He drove them to a village called Kaymakli, where a subterranean city had been discovered in 1964. It was a kind of underground tenement, with several levels and corridors 10 feet wide and 6.5 feet high. Doorways were closed by huge round stones that could be ‘locked’ from the inside. It seemed that the builders of these high-ceilinged rooms were (for that time) exceptionally tall. Another underground city had been discovered beneath the town of Derinkuyu, it had no fewer than eight ‘storeys’, although, in spite of ventilation shafts, it was completely invisible from the ground above. It was big enough to hold a population of 20,000.
As I read Collins’s account, I recalled that I had seen something about these cities – there are thirty-six of them – in a book by Erich von Däniken called According to the Evidence. Predictably, von Däniken’s theory was that the local inhabitants had been visited by extraterrestrials, who departed after threatening that they would return and punish those who did not continue to obey their orders, so the locals had retreated underground.
Even if the notion of extraterrestrials was accepted, this idea does not seem credible, since the inhabitants would have needed food, which had to be grown above ground, and cultivated fields – with cattle – would have revealed their whereabouts. The same applies to the guide’s explanation that Christians had taken refuge in these cities to hide from Muslims. To ‘hide’ in such places would be simply to be caught like rats in a trap.
In fact, there could only be one purpose in building such a city underground: to escape the temperature of the air above ground. In stiflingly hot summers and freezing winters, the temperature in the underground cities remained around 8 degrees celsius.
Collins says there is geological evidence that Turkey was plunged into a mini-ice age for about 500 years in the middle of the ninth millennium BC. This made more sense. If the landscape was covered with snow and ice and scoured by freezing winds, an underground city would be as comfortable as a Hobbit hole.
The local archaeologist, Omer Demir, told Collins that he believed that the oldest parts of the ‘city’ dated to the late Palaeolithic Era, perhaps 8,500 BC. Older parts were hewn out with stone tools, not metal. Moreover, it had been made by two types of human being, and those who carved the oldest part were much taller than the others – again, they had made their ceilings higher.
We have seen that it is conceivable that the break-up of the Kharsag community through a return of ice age conditions could have occurred earlier than the O’Briens believed – that is, before 10,000 BC. O’Brien had worked out his date for the founding of Kharsag, about 8,200 BC, from the fact that the cedars of Lebanon had existed from about that time. If he was wrong about Kharsag being situated in Lebanon, then that date
was purely arbitrary. If Kharsag was affected by the 9,600 BC catastrophe, and it had flourished for over 2,000 years (as O’Brien believes), that would push its foundation back to perhaps 11,500 BC.
Is it not possible that work began on the subterranean cities at that time? Collins cites a Persian legend in which a shepherd called Yima is told by God to build a ‘var’ – an underground city or fortress – to protect men and animals from freezing conditions brought about by an evil demon. Nearly 2,000 human beings are to be taken into the city for their protection.
Could this legend also be referring to the underground cities of Cappadocia? There was a strong connection between Cappadocia and Kurdistan, and also between Kurdistan and its neighbour Persia, in which case there is an arguable connection between these subterranean cities and the end of the last ice age.
Subsequently, the earth then had to contend with yet another catastrophe in a comet that split into ‘seven burning mountains’ and caused a disastrous flood, accompanied by worldwide volcanic activity. Collins argues that this catastrophe could be reflected in the words of a version of the Book of Enoch found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, which states that the rebel Watchers were finally destroyed by ‘fire, naphtha and brimstone’.
There seems to be an obvious objection to this notion: surely the Kharsag epic would have mentioned the ‘seven mountains’ ? But the Kharsag epic is an unfinished fragment, which ends (on tablets 8 and 9) with the long winter and the great storm. We do not know what might have been described on other tablets. Perhaps tablets 10 and 11 now lie in the basement of some Iraqi museum, or even underground, like the missing tablets of Gilgamesh, waiting for discovery by another George Smith.