by Colin Wilson
A few days later, he rang Shawn Montgomery in Toronto to talk about his latest investigations. He mentioned the White Pyramid, and his difficulty finding its precise coordinates.
‘Oh, I have that,’ said Shawn. ‘It’s in Bruce Cathie’s book. I’ll get it for you.’ And moments later, he was back with the location: 34 degrees, 26 minutes north – only 3 minutes (or 3 nautical miles) from Rand’s location.
It seemed that Cathie had succeeded in getting his hands on some satellite photographs of the pyramids. What was even more exciting was that there was, in fact, another pyramid on the exact spot that Rand had calculated – 34 degrees, 23 minutes north. He points out that the Lebanese village of Ehdin, where the O’Briens located Kharsag, is also at this latitude and is 5 degrees east of Giza.
So again Rand’s blueprint method pinpointed a sacred site.
But what was its location with regard to the old North Pole in Hudson Bay? Rand plugged the numbers into the ‘How Far Is It?’ site on the Web, and waited with his fingers crossed. When the answer appeared on the screen, he gave a chortle of delight. During the Hudson Bay Pole, the White Pyramid was at 5 degrees north, precisely the same latitude as Byblos, a city sacred to both the Egyptians and the Phoenicians.
Rand’s email describing his find ended: ‘It seems to me that the very position of the Chinese pyramids suggests an advanced knowledge of the earth’s dimensions, coupled with an ability to determine these distances within very small margins of error.’
What is even more significant is that people in China had possessed this knowledge of the surface of the globe at a time when, according to historians, it was completely isolated from the rest of the world.
Rand told me his reason for searching for Golden Section sites:
The Golden Section is something that is consistent anywhere in the universe no matter what the number system (base 10, 12, 60 etc.). If an advanced civilisation was trying to make contact with future peoples they could never be sure that their weights and measures would be exactly the same as the ones that evolved long after they had perished.
Two things, however, would never change: the dimensions of the earth and the geometry of the Golden Section. The distance from the equator to the pole will always be the same no matter what number system you use and you will always be able to divide this distance by the Golden Section.
The geometry of Rennes-le-Château is, as we have seen, pentagonal, and pentagonal geometry is, as Lincoln points out, linked with phi, the Golden Section. Did this mean that the Rennes-le-Château site was 100,000 years old? Almost certainly not, since its pentagonal geometry is natural, not man-made. But Rand’s blueprint theory suggests that Enoch’s ‘angels’ (i.e., geologists), making their survey at the time of the Hudson Bay Pole, recognised that Rennes-le-Château was one of the most unusual sites in the world, not only because its geometry was pentagonal, reflecting the Golden Section, but also because it had been at a Golden Section site at the time of the Yukon Pole. It would certainly have deserved one of their ‘markers’, upon which later generations would build their sacred sites.
Other sacred sites match this pattern. Abydos, the ‘birthplace of Osiris’, Cuzco, in the Andes, and Nippur, the holiest Sumerian city, were all located at the equator during the Yukon Pole but must have been constructed only a few thousand years ago. Rennes-le-Château is in good company, but differs in one critical respect: being centred on a natural pen-tacle, it would inevitably be regarded as sacred.
This, then, was Rand’s reason for including Rennes-le-Château in the blueprint; Lincoln’s Key to the Sacred Pattern confirmed that it is one of the most remarkable sites in our book, a natural ‘magic landscape’.
Oddly enough, M. Plantard refused to confirm Lincoln’s insight. Although it was obvious that he and Cherisey were startled that Lincoln had discovered the pentagonal geometry in the Saunière parchments, Plantard would simply not enlarge. On the contrary, when Lincoln asked him about the hidden codes, Plantard made the incredible remark that the parchments were ‘confections’ concocted by his friend Cherisey for a ten-minute television film made some years previously19 Quite rightly, Lincoln refused to swallow this. The incredible complexity of the code left no doubt that it had taken a very long time and a great deal of skill to prepare.
There seems little doubt that it was the original aim of Plantard – and the ‘Priory’ – to bring this mystery to public attention. De Sède originally told Lincoln: ‘We hoped it might interest someone like you.’20 Yet now Lincoln had got his teeth into the subject, and had discovered the pentagonal geometry, Plantard seemed to feel he had been too successful and wanted to backtrack.
If so, he must have been delighted with the reaction to Andrews and Schellenberger’s book The Tomb of God. The thesis of that book was that the real secret of Rennes-le-Château was the location of the tomb of Jesus, at the foot of a mountain called Pech Cardou, 3 miles east of Rennes-le-Château. The BBC programme about the book was, to put it mildly, somewhat sceptical, and took the view that Plantard was an impostor, and that the whole Rennes-le-Château mystery was a hoax – a major change of viewpoint since Lincoln’s original programmes.
After I had watched the merciless debunking on television, I commented to my wife: ‘Well, that looks like the end of the Rennes-le-Château mystery’ But on reflection, I saw that this is not so. The programme might have shown – or set out to show – that the Priory of Sion was a recent invention, that the parchments were probably forgeries of de Cherisey, and that Plantard was probably an impostor, but that still left the mystery untouched. How had Saunière become rich overnight? What had he discovered in the Visigothic pillar? The more I thought of it, the more I saw that the essence of the mystery remained, whether M. Plantard was an impostor or not.
But was he an impostor? Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince laid out the case against him in The Templar Revelation. He came to prominence in occupied Paris in 1942, as the Grand Master of a quasi-Masonic order called the Order Alpha-Galates, which was ‘markedly uncritical’ of the Nazis – in fact, the Nazis seemed to approve of it. But then, they would have; part of Himmler’s job was to establish that the Germans had a noble origin in the remote days of the Norse sagas and to create a modern mystical order with its roots in the Aryan past. Pierre Plantard, whom Picknett and Prince describe as ‘a one-time draughtsman for a stove-fitting firm, who allegedly had difficulty paying the rent from time to time’, then changed his name to Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair. He played an important part in bringing about the return to power of General de Gaulle in 1958. In 1956, the Priory of Sion had begun depositing ‘enigmatic documents’ in the Bibliothèque Nationale. The implication was that these documents had been concocted as part of the ‘hoax’.
In writing this chapter, I have reread Lincoln’s four books – The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, The Messianic Legacy (both with Leigh and Baigent), The Holy Place and Key to the Sacred Pattern – have studied again his television programmes on Saunière and the Priory, and reread such books as Picknett and Prince’s The Templar Relevation, David Wood’s Genisis21 and Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe’s The Holy Grail Revealed.22 And I can see no reason whatever for believing that the Priory of Sion is some kind of hoax, or that Pierre Plantard is not exactly who he says he is.
Lincoln himself certainly felt doubts; he describes, in The Messianic Legacy,23, how he and his co-authors went along to see Plantard in Paris with the specific intention of confronting him with some major contradictions, including two apparently discrepant birth certificates, one of which named him as ‘Plantard’ and the other as ‘Plantard de Saint-Clair’. Plantard, far from being embarrassed, answered each point with precise explanations: the birth certificate that gave his name simply as Plantard and also the profession of his father as a ‘valet de chambre’ was explained as the substitution of falsified information to deceive the Gestapo, which was common during the war. When Lincoln and his friends went to the Mairie to confront officials with this expla
nation, they readily agreed with Plantard.
Lincoln — and I in turn — concluded that Plantard really was Plantard de Saint-Clair, and that there is every probability that the story of the Priory of Sion is true, from its inception in 1090 to Jean Cocteau and Plantard. (In The Shadow of the Templars, Lincoln filmed inside the church of Nôtre Dame de France, near Leicester Square in London, which has a mural of the crucifixion by Cocteau, pointing out the irrelevant rose at the foot of the cross — symbol of the Templars — and other evidence that Cocteau was indeed a member of the Priory of Sion.)
Lincoln himself writes an introduction to one of the oddest, but most interesting, books about Rennes-le-Château, Genisis, by David Wood, who had made another curious discovery in the area: five churches (including Rennes-le-Château) fell on an exact circle. Wood found that these were connected by a pentacle geometry. Lincoln writes (in Key to the Sacred Pattern): ‘It was now clear that my discovery of the Pentacle of Mountains was but the first glimpse of something much more complex. Here was proof that there had been a conscious and highly skilled geometric plan…’ Oddly enough, Wood ignored the pentacle of mountains discovered by Lincoln.
Wood’s book — and its sequel Geneset24 — are certainly impressive and ingenious, but his solution of the ‘mystery’ has more in common with Zechariah Sitchin than with Lincoln’s painfully precise investigations. He finds a number code that points to the gods of ancient Egypt, and in a ‘fairy story’ printed as an epilogue to Genisis outlines his conclusions: 200,000 years ago, a super-race from the Sirius system came to our solar system in three huge space ships and colonised Mars. This super-race was called — the Elohim.
Since water was scarce on Mars, they used earth as their ‘farm’, although its gravity was too high for their comfort. They created humanoid beings called Set, Osiris, Isis and Nephtys and an undersized ‘runt’ called Horus, and also a less intelligent type of creature called ‘Watchers’. The base they made on earth was an island called Atlantis. They also created two subordinate (and even less intelligent) species called the Cains and the Seths, and cloned animals for their food. The supervisors – Osiris, Isis, etc. – were naturally regarded by these subordinates as gods.
Against the specific instructions of the Elohim, Isis created more of these subordinate creatures to reduce the workload of the Seths and Cains, and the experiment soon got out of hand. The Nephilim, who had been chosen to do the work of impregnating the female ‘apes’, found that they so enjoyed it that they began to do it on the sly, producing hideous malformed hybrids. At this point, the Elohim decided to wipe out most of the population of the earth with a comet, which caused havoc and destroyed Atlantis. Finally, with the help of the Egyptian ‘gods’, the survivors created the beginnings of the civilisation we know today…
Understandably, Lincoln wanted nothing to do with this speculative mythology, and decided not to endorse it, yet he had no doubt that some of Wood’s geometrical discoveries were valid. Moreover, he was fascinated by Wood’s discovery that the English mile, not the kilometre (as one would expect), had been used as the unit of measurement by whoever originally designed the gigantic pentagram connecting the French churches. When he checked this against his own geometry, he discovered that Wood seemed to be correct.
In 1991, Lincoln had been contacted by a Danish television producer who had been born on the island of Bornholm. Erling Haagensen had become fascinated by Bornholm’s fifteen churches, which dated from the thirteenth century (the time of the Knights Templar); they often seemed to be associated with ancient megaliths – in fact, some megaliths were actually built into the church walls. Lincoln had been toying with the idea that perhaps some of the Rennes-le-Château pattern had been laid out in megalithic times, and when Haagensen told him that the geometry he had identified on Bornholm was pentacular, Lincoln became convinced that they were each ‘uncovering a different portion of the same mystery’.
Moreover, Haagensen had found the English mile present in the Bornholm geometry. For example, if Haagensen’s geometry was correct, the distance between two of the churches, Ibsker and Povlsker, should be exactly 7 miles. And it was.
Why the mile? In a chapter called ‘The Measure’, Lincoln lays out some curious but highly convincing facts. The French metre, which came into use in 1791, was one-10,000,000th of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. Lincoln shows that an old English measure called the rod, pole or perch (which is one-320th of a mile) is also, in a more primitive version which Lincoln calls the Cromlech Pole (198.41874 inches) a precise measure of the earth’s surface: 1 Cromlech Pole multiplied by itself (i.e., squared) is 1 kilometre (39,370 inches), When this ancient pole (198 inches) is multiplied by 1.618, phi, using the Golden Section, the result is 320, the number of poles in 1 mile. So there is a mathematical connection between the British pole and the kilometre, and between the pole, multiplied by phi, and the mile.
Rand had emphasised again and again that the Golden Section is one of the most important keys to his geometry of sacred sites. He notes: ‘I found that one of the Bornhold churches was 16:18 west of the Great Pyramid. This church (at Vestermarie) is supposed to have been built on top of a megalithic monument. During the Yukon Pole it joined Avebury, Stonehenge, London and others at latitude 30N.’
If the blueprint theory is correct, Rennes-le-Château and the pyramids of China were part of a worldwide web of religious sites. It also seems that whoever arranged the specific positioning of the sites was aware of the earlier crust movements that preceded the Hudson Bay Pole.
Rand was also intrigued by an underwater site off the most westerly point of Japan. He writes:
In 1987, a scuba-diving instructor named Kihachiro Aratake was exploring the southern waters off the island of Yonaguni when he encountered a sight that left him breathless. Beneath the waters of the island lay a structure that seemed man-made. The ramifications of this discovery, if true, would force us to rewrite Asian prehistory. This is precisely what Professor Masaaki Kimura, a marine seismologist from the University of Ryukyus in Okinawa, believes must be done. He took up the case of the Yonaguni ‘pyramid’ in 1990 and has been a champion of its authenticity ever since. Joining him, and enthusiastically endorsing his views, are Graham Hancock and Santha Faiia.25
On the other side of the fence are those researchers such as John Anthony West and Robert Schoch, who believe that the structure beneath the water is a freak of nature, a natural formation. Professor Kimura counters these arguments by pointing to a ‘wall’ at the western edge of the monument which contains limestone blocks that aren’t indigenous to the island.
Although he continues to believe that this is a natural anomaly, Schoch notes: ‘Yonaguni Island contains a number of old tombs whose exact age is uncertain, but that are clearly very old. Curiously, the architecture of those tombs is much like that of the monument.’26
Rand’s blueprint makes him think that Yonaguni is a significant sacred site because it was located at the all important 10 phi latitude during the Yukon Pole, thus joining, Nanking, Rennes-le-Château and Rosslyn Chapel at a golden section division of the Yukon Pole.
But, as we will see, the ‘blueprint’ shows that many sites can be aligned not only to the Hudson Bay Pole but also to the much older Yukon Pole. This might suggest a tradition that extends back at least 100,000 years.
Although Rand believes that, since modern humans have been around for more than 100,000 years, the idea of a 100,000-year-old civilisation is a possibility, he thinks it far more possible that the links to the Yukon Pole were established by scientists using geological evidence before the flood, about 12,000 years ago.
In other words, just as Charles Hapgood had used applied geology in the 1950s to determine the position of earlier poles, so also might the Atlantean ‘surveyors’ have discovered the former latitudes of the Yukon Pole and placed their bases where these intersected with the Hudson Bay Pole (which was ‘their’ pole immediately before the flood).
Henry
Lincoln cites a remarkable book called Historical Metrology (1953)27 by a master engineer named A.E. Berriman, an erudite volume covering ancient Egypt, Babylon, Sumer, China, India, Persia and many other cultures. It begins with the question ‘Was the earth measured in remote antiquity?’ and sets out to demonstrate that indeed it was. It argues that ancient weights and measures were derived from measuring the earth – which, of course, means in turn that ancient people had already measured the earth.
The book must have struck Berriman’s contemporaries as hopelessly eccentric. He says that one measure was a fraction of the earth’s circumference, that a measure of land area (the acre) was based on a decimal fraction of the square of the earth’s radius, and that certain weights were based on the density of water and of gold. It sounds almost as if Berriman is positing the existence of some ancient civilisation that vanished without a trace, except for these ancient measures.
This, of course, is consistent with Hapgood’s comment that history does not necessarily proceed steadily in a forward direction; it might pause, or even backtrack. This might also be the basis of his strange assertion about a science that dates back 100,000 years.
Henry Lincoln had established contact with a Norwegian, Harald Boehlke, who had also made some strange discoveries about Norwegian distances. Norway was pagan until 1,000 years ago. With the coming of Christianity, scattered trading posts disappeared and gave way to larger centres which became cities. Boehlke’s researches seemed to establish that these new cities – Oslo, Trondheim, Bergen, Stavangar, Hamar, Tonsberg – were placed in what looked like quite arbitrarily chosen spots, for example, Oslo is in what was simply a backwater, while no one has the slightest idea why Stavangar was chosen as a cathedral town. But distances seem chosen for some mathematical reason: Oslo to Stavangar, 190 miles; Oslo to Bergen, 190 miles; Tonsberg to Stavangar, 170 miles; Tonsberg to Halsnoy, 170 miles; and so on. Moreover, the position of the old monasteries again shows a pentagonal geometry. It looks as if the Church was using some secret geometrical knowledge in creating the new Christian Norway.