by Colin Wilson
I have already noted that Andrew Collins is inclined to suspect a connection between the ‘civilisers’ of Eden and the ‘god’ Viracocha, who brought knowledge to Central and South America. He also links them with ancient Egypt. Collins accepts – as I do myself – that Egyptian civilisation probably dates back thousands of years before the pharaohs.
Collins notes that among the Anannage who built Kharsag there is a council of seven, and that in the Edfu ‘building texts’ the Seven Sages are divine beings who organise the building of the temples and sacred places. Graham Hancock writes of them:
This context [describing the sages] is marked by a preponderance of ‘Flood’ imagery in which the ‘primeval waters’ (out of which the Great Primeval Mound emerged) are depicted as gradually receding. We are reminded of Noah’s mountaintop on which the Ark settled after the Biblical Deluge, and of the ‘Seven Sages’ (Apkallu) of ancient Babylonian tradition who were said to have ‘lived before the Flood’ and to have built the walls of the sacred city of Uruk. Likewise is it an accident that in Indian tradition ‘Seven Sages’ (rishis) are remembered to have survived the Flood, their purpose being to pass down to future generations the wisdom of the antediluvian world? In all cases the sages appear as the enlightened survivors of a cataclysm that wiped the earth clean…17
Hancock says that the Seven Sages come from an island that was destroyed by a flood, and that the majority of its divine inhabitants were drowned. The Seven Sages then moved on to Egypt. We might bear in mind that the island called Dilmun, which appears in Sumerian and Akkadian mythology, is a paradise that sounds remarkably like a variant of the Garden of Eden.
The Edfu texts and Pyramid texts tell us that these Seven Sages were also known as the ‘followers of Horus’ (Shemsu Hor) and that they rebuilt the world after the great catastrophe. Since we are dealing with the relatively small area of the Middle East, it seems, to say the least, not unlikely that the Seven Sages of Egypt are the seven councillors of Kharsag.
These speculations are related to Rand’s observations on the geography of sacred sites (see Appendix 5). He notes that the O’Briens and Andrew Collins are in agreement that several sites in the Middle East were linked with the Shining Ones – Baalbek, Byblos and Ehdin in Lebanon, Jericho near Jerusalem, Catal Huyuk in Turkey, Edfu in Egypt and finally Nippur, the religious capital of ancient Sumer. He commented in an email to me:
If the Shining Ones were undertaking geological surveys at these sites before the Flood then they should fit into the Atlantis Blueprint.
Baalbek is perhaps the most impressive site in the Middle East because of the gigantic blocks of stone used in the construction of a platform that was later to become a temple dedicated to the Roman god, Jupiter. In John Anthony West’s award-winning documentary The Mystery of the Sphinx, he showed just how difficult it was even for modern engineers using the largest cranes in the world to move objects weighing 200 tons. The blocks used in construction at Baalbek are much larger than those found in Egypt.
Andrew Collins comments on their sheer weight: An outer podium wall, popularly known as the Great Platform, is seen by scholars as contemporary to the Roman temples. Yet incorporated into one of its courses are the three largest building blocks ever used in a man-made structure. Each one weighs an estimated 1,000 tonnes apiece. They sit side-by-side on the fifth level of a truly cyclopean wall located beyond the western limits of the Temple of Jupiter. These three stones are called the Trilithon. Even if they did not exist and we were left with the six blocks of stone that lie beneath them, we would still be looking at blocks weighing in excess of 450 tonnes. The course beneath the Trilithon is almost as bewildering. It consists of six mammoth stones thirty to thirty-three feet in length, fourteen feet in height and ten feet in depth, each an estimated 450 tonnes in weight.’
Collins is highly sceptical of the claim by some scholars that the Romans were responsible for the Great Platform and remarks: ‘Nowhere in extant Roman records does it mention anything at all about the architects and engineers involved in the construction of the Great Platform. No contemporary Roman historian or scholar comments on how it was constructed, and there are no tales that preserve the means by which the Roman builders achieved such marvellous feats of engineering.’
Instead, Andrew Collins looks to the mythology of the people who live in the Bequa’a Valley. Theirs is a very different tale: ‘They say that Baalbek’s first city was built before the Great Flood by Cain, the son of Adam, whom God banished to the “land of Nod” that lay “east of Eden,” for murdering his brother Abel, and he called it after his son Enoch. The citadel, they say, fell into ruins at the time of the deluge and was much later re-built by a race of giants.’18
So, says Rand, according to local traditions there have been at least two ancient periods of construction at Baalbek: one well before the flood (since it was undertaken by Cain who flourished before Enoch who was in turn the greatgrandfather of Noah), the second long after the flood, when a race of giants occupied the site. Rand, like Collins, believes that, like so many sacred places around the world, Baalbek was simply appropriated by later generations, in this case Roman.
Rand’s next thought was to compare Baalbek’s location to the Hudson Bay Pole:
I discovered that it was situated at 10 phi distance from the equator. I knew that the largest stones used in construction in the New World were in and around Cuzco, which also had been at a 10 phi latitude before the flood. Sitchin had commented upon the similarities between Baalbek and Cuzco and now we knew that both sites shared the same sacred latitude.
I was intrigued by this development and it occurred to me that the geological survey of Enoch’s ‘angels’ might have marked off the distance to earlier positions of the earth’s crust/mantle. I decided to see how Baalbek related to the Greenland Sea Pole (before 50,600 BC) and the Yukon Pole (before 91,600 BC) (see Appendix 4).
Rand’s theory of sacred sites is based on the notion that, as Hapgood himself implies, the Atlanteans were a central part – perhaps the central part – of a worldwide maritime civilisation that extended as far as China, so it is highly probable that they had conducted a worldwide survey decades or centuries before the catastrophe of 9,600 BC. Rand suggests they were trying to understand the periodic earthquakes and volcanic activity that had been devastating their country for a long time (there is a persistent tradition that Atlantis suffered three catastrophes, and was destroyed by the third).
We have to suppose that the Atlanteans knew the earth’s crust had been moving for a considerable time – Hapgood thinks 15,000 BC – and were aware of its rate of movement and direction. (O’Brien’s suggestion that the ‘civilisers’ had carried their knowledge to Atlantis would certainly lend plausibility to this notion.) They also, if this theory is correct, knew the position of the North Pole before it began to move, and we have to suppose that they had built certain ‘markers’ – perhaps stone circles, Uriel’s machines – to measure this movement.
What Rand discovered, when he measured the position of Baalbek against previous poles, was unequivocal. The position of the Yukon Pole and the Greenland Sea Pole also gave significant figures.
This was when the mystical number seven showed up. During the Greenland Sea Pole Baalbek was located at 49 degrees north (7x7). But the real surprise came when Rand compared Baalbek to the Yukon Pole. When the North Pole was situated in the Yukon, a time that reached back almost 100,000 years, Baalbek was located at exactly 7 degrees north.
8
Golden Section Sites
WHEN I FIRST read Rand’s original outline of his theory, only one part caused me twinges of doubt: the section on Rennes-le-Château, the tiny French village in Languedoc where a poor village priest had discovered coded documents in a hollow pillar in his church and had suddenly become wealthy.
A year earlier, my friend Lynn Picknett had sent me the typescript of her book The Templar Revelation (1997) (co-authored with Clive Prince).1 She seemed to feel that part
of the modern ‘evidence’ was little more than a hoax.
The previous autumn, I had been sent for review a book called The Tomb of God (1996),2 whose authors, Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger, had no doubts about the truth of the Rennes-le-Château saga and believed that their researches had revealed the burial site of Jesus Christ in the Pyrenees. A BBC programme on the book exploded their theory so savagely that the authors (who had taken part in it apparently under the belief that their book was being taken seriously) must have felt as if they had stood on a landmine.
About this time I also read a book called The Key to the Sacred Pattern (1997)3 by Henry Lincoln – the man who had started the avalanche of interest in Rennes-le-Château nearly thirty years before – and I realised that I was wrong: the mystery had not been exploded. Not only was the story of Rennes-le-Château as baffling as ever, but the geometry of the area provided some of the most convincing proof so far of Rand’s ‘geodetic’ theory of sacred sites and his view that ancient people possessed sophisticated surveying skills.
In 1969, the name of Rennes-le-Château was unknown, even to most of the tourists who love Languedoc and its ancient historical sites. Most of those who went there made for the walled town of Carcassonne, the breeding ground of a medieval heresy called Catharism, which preached that ‘this world’ was created by the Devil and that everything to do with matter is evil (a creed also known as Manicheeism). The Cathars were bloodily suppressed when a huge army invaded the region in 1209, murdering them by the thousand. In 1244, they made their last stand in the citadel of Montségur, situated on a mountain top, and 200 of them were finally burned alive on a huge pyre.
In the last days of the siege, four men had escaped from the citadel by night, carrying the ‘treasure’ of the Cathars – two months earlier, another two Cathars had escaped with even more treasure. I had visited the citadel years ago, and can still recall that precipitous and exhausting climb. Was it possible that the parchment discovered in the church pillar had led the priest to the treasure of the Cathars, and that this had made him a wealthy man?
Henry Lincoln was a writer of television drama scripts when he first stumbled on the mystery in 1969. On holiday with his wife and children in a French farmhouse in the Cevennes, he picked up a paperback called Le Trésor Maudit4 – The Cursed Treasure – by a man called Gérard de Sède. It told the story of the simple village priest called Bérenger Saunière, who was thirty-three years old when he came to Rennes-le-Château in 1885. He was very poor – the income on which he supported himself and a housekeeper was about six pounds sterling a year.
Some time thereafter, a wealthy female parishioner, the Countess de Chambord, gave Saunière 3,000 francs to repair the church – the date may have been 1886 or 1891, according to different accounts. It was during the repairs that a workman found four wooden cylinders containing rolls of paper inside a square Visigothic pillar that held up the altar stone. Two of the papers proved to be genealogies of local families, allegedly linking them with the Merovingians, a dynasty of kings that had ruled France – less than successfully – from the fifth to the eighth centuries AD. The other two were Latin texts from the New Testament, but written without spaces between the words.
They were fairly obviously in code – in fact, the code of the shorter text was so straightforward that Henry Lincoln worked it out at a glance as he looked at the reproduction in de Sède’s book. Some letters were raised above the others, and when these were written down consecutively they read: ? Dagobert II roi et à Sion est ce tresor et il est là mort’ – ‘This treasure belongs to King Dagobert II and to Sion, and he is there dead’. Sion was Jerusalem, and the last phrase could also mean ‘and it is death’. Dagobert was a seventh-century French king of the Merovingian dynasty who had lived at Rennes-le-Château in the far-off days when it was a flourishing town. The author of these parchments was probably a predecessor of Saunière named Antoine Bigou, who had been curé of Rennes-le-Château at the time of the French Revolution.
Saunière took the parchments to his bishop, who was intrigued enough to send him to Paris to consult with various scholars. There he went along to the church of St Sulpice, and talked with its director, Abbé Bieil. He also met Bieil’s nephew, a young trainee priest named Emile Hoffet, who was involved in a circle of ‘occultists’ who flourished in Paris in the 1890s (some of whom Huysmans portrayed in his ‘Satanist’ novel Là Bas). Hoffet introduced Saunière to a circle of writers and artists that included the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, the dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck, and the composer Claude Debussy. Saunière also – probably through Debussy – met the famous soprano Emma Calvé, and probably became her lover (he was far from ascetic).
Before leaving Paris, Saunière visited the Louvre and bought reproductions of three paintings, one of which was Nicholas Poussin’s Les Bergers d’Arcadie – ‘The Shepherds of Arcadia’ – which shows three shepherds and a shepherdess standing in front of a tomb on which are carved the words ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, usually translated ‘I (death) am also in Arcadia’.
Back in Rennes-le-Château, three weeks later, he hired workmen to raise a stone slab set in the floor in front of the altar – it dated from around the time of Dagobert II. They discovered two skeletons and ‘a pot of worthless medallions’. Saunière sent his helpers away, and spent the evening in the church alone. He then committed an odd piece of vandalism on a grave in the churchyard – that of a distinguished lady named Marie de Blanchefort – and obliterated its two inscriptions.
He was unaware that the inscriptions had already been published in a little book by a local antiquary. One contains the words ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ (in a mixture of Greek and Latin letters) on either side. The other is curious in that it contains four unexplained lower-case letters, three e’s, two p’s and four capitals, TMRO. From the small letters only one word can be formed – épée, ‘sword’ – while from the capitals the only word that emerges is MORT, ‘death’. Epée proved to be the ‘key word’ to decipher the second parchment Saunière had found in the column.
And suddenly Saunière was rich. He constructed a public road to replace the dirt road to the village, as well as a water tower. And he built himself a villa with a garden, and a Gothic
The ‘obliterated’ tombstone.
tower to house his library. Distinguished visitors came regularly, including Emma Calvé and the Austrian Archduke Johann von Habsburg, the cousin of Emperor Franz-Josef. His many guests were superbly fed and wined by his young peasant housekeeper, Marie Denarnaud.
A new – and less friendly – bishop became curious about the source of Saunière’s wealth. When Saunière refused to divulge its source – saying merely that it was from a wealthy penitent who insisted on anonymity – the bishop ordered Saunière’s transfer to another parish. Saunière refused to be transferred, and another priest was appointed in his place. (Oddly enough, when the bishop took his complaint to Rome, the Pope found in Saunière’s favour…) In 1905 the French government – which was anticlerical – began to make his life uncomfortable by accusing him of being an Austrian spy. It seems that part of his regular income came from Austria.
In 1917, Saunière died of cirrhosis of the liver; he was sixty-five. The priest who attended his deathbed is said to have been so shocked at his final confession that he refused to administer extreme unction.
His housekeeper lived on in the villa, and died in 1953. She had sold the villa in 1946; she told its purchaser that one day she would tell him a secret that would make him rich and powerful, but a stroke left her speechless.
This was the remarkable story that Henry Lincoln had read in Gérard de Sède’s book. There were obviously many questions. Had Saunière found some of the treasure of the Cathars who died at Montségur? Or had he learned some secret that led certain wealthy patrons to wish to silence him with large sums of money? Was he a blackmailer, or simply a member of a small group who shared some closely guarded secret? There was yet another possibility – that the tr
easure might have been that of the Templars, the medieval order of knights who possessed immense wealth and influence during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and was destroyed virtually overnight.
The Templars are so called because their original headquarters was in the basement of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem (or rather, the remains of the Temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70, only four years after Herod had rebuilt it). Jerusalem fell to Christian knights in 1099, as a result of the First Crusade. Twenty years later, nine French knights from the area of Troyes approached King Baldwin II of Jerusalem, and told him they had sworn to protect the roads and make them safe for Christian pilgrims; they asked if they could establish a home on the Temple Mount, and Baldwin gave them a plot of land that included the Temple’s ‘basement’, which they turned into a stable.
Oddly enough, the nine knights showed no sign of organising themselves to protect pilgrims (and in any case nine men would hardly have formed an effective patrol). Instead they spent the next seven years excavating their ‘stable’, and scarcely ever ventured outside. They were obviously looking for something. One of their tunnels was found by Israeli archaeologists in the 1970s.
But searching for what? When the Romans destroyed the Temple in AD 70, they had carried off its treasures. Could the remains of that treasure have been concealed under the Temple? Or were they looking for something else?
In The Sign and the Seal (1992),5 Graham Hancock has an interesting speculation. As we saw in the last chapter, the Ethiopians claimed that the Ark of the Covenant had been taken to their country in the time of King Solomon, in the tenth century BC, but the truth is probably that it vanished from the Temple in the reign of a king named Manasseh (687–642 BC), who, according to the Bible, ‘did evil in the sight of the Lord’ and introduced a graven image into the Temple.