The Atlantis Blueprint

by Colin Wilson

  Templar fleet – of eighteen ships – escaped from La Rochelle with the Templar treasure.

  Where did they go? The corncobs and aloes in Rosslyn suggests that some of them sailed for America. Other Templars went to Scotland, where an abbey named Kilwinning had been built in the first great days of Templar power, around 1140.18 It was just south of Glasgow, and was the Templars’ major centre. This would be a natural refuge, particularly since the St Clair family lived not far away, in Roslin. Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland, had been excommunicated by the Pope, so Templars had nothing to fear in Scotland.

  One of the main arguments of The Hiram Key is that Rosslyn Chapel was built in deliberate imitation of Herod’s Temple and as the home of the precious scrolls, which were the most important ‘treasure’ of the Templars. They argue that even the unfinished outer wall at Rosslyn, which looks as if the building was simply abandoned at that point, was a replica of an unfinished wall in Herod’s rebuilding of Solomon’s Temple.

  In 1447, while Rosslyn Chapel was being built, there was a fire in the keep of Roslin Castle. William St Clair was frantic until he learned that his chaplain had managed to salvage four great trunks full of charters, whereupon, says the record, ‘he became cheerful’. Lomas and Knight point out that it sounds odd to value four trunks of ‘charters’ more than his castle keep – not to mention his wife and daughter, who were also inside. If these trunks contained the secret scrolls from Jerusalem, which would have been buried in Rosslyn Chapel, his curious priorities become understandable.

  We should now be able to see the connection between the Templars and the mystery of Rennes-le-Château. If Pierre Plantard de St Clair is a descendent of the man who built Rosslyn, then he is also a Templar. The confession that so shocked the local priest who attended Sauniére’s death bed was certainly that Sauniére did not believe that Jesus was the son of God, but was simply a man. And this would be consistent with Henry Lincoln’s suggestion that Jesus came to France with Mary Magdalene, and that his descendents were the Merovingian kings.

  But this, as Lincoln admits, is pure supposition. The truth may be simpler: that the Merovingian kings were, in fact, also heirs to the secret known to the Templars, the secret contained in the Essene scrolls. If this Merovingian connection is not an invention of Plantard and the Priory of Sion, then it seems to follow that the Merovingians were an important ‘missing link’ between the Essenes and the Templars.

  We can see why Nicolas Poussin talked about a great secret that kings would have difficulty drawing from him. He must have felt that this knowledge – that Jesus was a man, and that therefore the power of the Church was based upon completely false claims – was dynamite that could cost him, and others privy to the secret, their lives.

  As I read Lomas and Knight on Hiram Abif, I found myself thinking about another interesting connection. Hiram came from Tyre. And having visited Tyre on a trip to the Lebanon, I knew that it was a Phoenician city, and that the Phoenicians were not worshippers of Yahweh. Why should Solomon want a Phoenician architect? Presumably because Hiram of Tyre was the best man for the job. But the chief Phoenician god was Baal or Bel, whom the authors of the Old Testament regard with suspicion and dislike, and their leading female deity was Astarte, also called Ashtoreth and Ishtar.

  Rand’s research led him to believe that the Templars were the heirs to ancient geographic knowledge once possessed by the Phoenicians. He writes:

  It was their colony in Carthage that indicated that the Phoenicians had once possessed ancient maps that depicted the earlier poles. During the Hudson Bay Pole latitude 30 degrees north crossed Tunisia at Carthage. This city is presumed to have been established in the ninth century BC but may be much older. The Phoenicians, the ancient world’s most advanced sea power, may have had access to ancient maps that revealed an ancient site beneath Carthage. They may have selected this place for reasons that may go back to the time of Atlantis. Its location on the east coast of a tiny peninsula on the Tunisian coast would have presented ancient astronomers with an ideal view of the northern sky from latitude 30 degrees. The Mediterranean Sea would have acted as a perfect reflection of the heavens and the horizon would be undisturbed by mountains.

  On the west coast of Africa there is another Phoenician city which the Romans regarded as the oldest city in the world. Little remains of Lixus, but it was once a Phoenician colony on the Atlantic coast of Africa. Certainly the most amazing Phoenician city was Byblos which, like Pyongyang in Korea and Cuzco in the central Andes, was linked by sacred latitudes to both the Hudson Bay and Yukon Poles. Byblos was sacred to both the Phoenicians and the Egyptians. For the Phoenicians it was the oldest city in the world and for the Egyptians it was the place that the god Osiris came to rest after his evil brother Seth locked him in a casket and set him adrift upon the waters of the Mediterranean Sea.

  Byblos, along with the megalithic structures at nearby Baalbek, made Rand suspect that there had been an ancient maritime power operating worldwide out of this ancient port in Lebanon. Baalbek, as we have seen, may well have been a site constructed by the Fallen Angels that we met in Chapter 7.

  Rand 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 in Lost Realms had commented upon the similarities between Baalbek and Cuzco.19 We know now that both sites shared the same sacred latitude (10 phi) before the flood. And it was this latitude where the city of Tiahuanaco at Lake Titicaca was founded. One of the myths associated with Tiahuanaco and Lake Titicaca concerns the god who came from the south after a flood and gave his children a device that led them to Cuzco. In When the Sky Fell, Rand and Rose were fascinated by the myths of the people of the central Andes. They wrote:

  The famous Peruvian historian, Garcilasso de la Vega, son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca princess, asked his Inca uncle to tell him the story of his people’s origins. How had Lake Titicaca become the source of their civilisation? The uncle explained: ‘In ancient times all this region which you see was covered with forests and thickets, and the people lived like brute beasts without religion nor government, nor towns, nor horses, without cultivating the land nor covering their bodies… [the sun-god sent a son and daughter to]… give them precepts and laws by which to live as reasonable and civilised men, and to teach them to dwell in houses and towns, to cultivate maize and other crops, to breed flocks, and to use the fruits of the earth as rational beings.’

  The ‘gods’ who brought agriculture to the vicinity of Lake Titicaca were said to have come ‘out of the regions of the south’ immediately ‘after the deluge’. In other words, agriculture was introduced to Lake Titicaca by people who already possessed the skills and who had been forced to leave their homeland when a flood destroyed their southern land.20

  In his classic work History of the Conquest of Peru, William Hickling Prescott told the legend of how Cuzco evolved into one of the most sacred cities of the Andes. This is a tale that tantalises us with the suggestion that some sort of time or survival capsule was planted at Cuzco before the flood. Prescott relates how Cuzco became a sacred city after the flood had subsided.

  The Sun, the great luminary and parent of mankind, taking compassion on their degraded condition, sent two of his children, Manco Capac and Mama Oello Huaco, to gather the natives into communities, and teach them the arts of civilised life. The celestial pair, brother and sister, husband and wife, advanced along the high plains in the neighbourhood of Lake Titicaca, to about the sixteenth degree south. They bore with them a golden wedge, and were directed to take up their residence on the spot where the sacred emblem should without effort sink into the ground. They proceeded accordingly but a short distance, as far as the valley of Cuzco, the spot indicated by the performance of the miracle, since there the wedge speedily sank into the earth and disappeared for ever. Here the children of the Sun established their residence.21

  Lost Realms also drew attention to an amazing geom
etric fact: ‘Maria Schulten de D’Ebneth… in her book La Ruta de Wirakocha… drew lines showing that a 45-degree line originating at Tiahuanacu, combined with squares and circles of definite measurements, embraced all the key ancient sites between Tiahuanacu, Cuzco, and Quito in Ecuador including the all-important Ollantaytambu.22

  Why would the builders of these ancient sacred sites want to connect these four cities geometrically? What do Tiahuanaco, Cuzco, Ollantaytambo and Quito have in common?

  Charles Piazzi Smyth believed that the Great Pyramid should be the site of the prime meridian. As we have seen, Tiahuanaco lies 100 degrees west of the Great Pyramid. And Quito, at the equator, lies 110 degrees west of Giza. This would seem to indicate that Tiahuanaco and Quito were constructed after the Giza Prime Meridian was established.

  So it seemed that ancient Egypt and Peru had a powerful geodetic link. Several authors had speculated upon the mythological connection between the Egyptian god, Osiris, and the god, Viracocha, of the people of the central Andes.23 Osiris was believed to have travelled around the globe bringing civilisation to many nations.

  Viracocha was the ‘god’ who brought agriculture and civilisation to the Andes. He was tall, of pale complexion, bearded and dressed in a long white robe. The myths tell us that this stranger came from the south and settled among the native people of Lake Titicaca some time after the flood. He brought instruction in the arts of agriculture, animal husbandry, medicine, metallurgy and even writing, which the Inca claim was later forgotten. Two groups of men accompanied him on his mission. One group were huaminca, ‘faithful soldiers’, and another hayuaypanti, meaning ‘shining ones’, who spread the word of Viracocha throughout the world.24

  The ‘golden wedge’, which Sitchin calls a ‘golden wand’, seems to be a kind of homing device that led the Children of the Sun directly to Cuzco as if towards a beacon situated beneath the ground. In 1575, Cristobal de Molina offered the following Andean prayer to the sun-god Viracocha:

  Oh! Day-King, Sun, my Father!

  May there be a Cuzco:

  may the Capable One be he who measures.25

  Shining ones appeared in the Andes and in the mountains of the Middle East after the flood. And in both cases, their great concern was with measurement. Did ancient Andean mythology point to Cuzco as a sacred site? Is there a rational explanation beneath the mythological record? Was there some sort of technological or scientific reason for the ‘golden wedge’? And what does it all have to do with ‘measures’? The ‘golden wedge’ of Cuzco, the ‘omphalos’ of Delphi and the ‘cording of the Temple’ in ancient Egypt are all part of a mysterious web which spans the globe, a pattern that tempts us to believe that the sacred sites that haunt our landscape are not scattered across the earth at random but are rather part of a deliberate design.

  The significant line discovered by Maria D’Ebneth that connected Tiahuanaco and Cuzco extended all the way to the equator where it intercepted Quito, the northern capital of the Inca empire. Before the Earth’s mantle/crust shifted position, Quito was located at 30 degrees north. The Inca Trail, which is one of the great wonders of the ancient world, ran from Cuzco in the south to Quito in the north. This link between Cuzco and Quito is quite literal. One can still walk the Inca Trail from Cuzco to Quito today.

  Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru records that the Inca were desperate to maintain the Cuzco—Quito connection. Huayana Capac, the father of the last Inca, Atahuallpa, died around 1525, some seven years before Pizarro’s arrival brought an end to that great empire. When Huayana Capac died ‘his heart was retained in Quito, and his body, embalmed after the fashion of the country, was transported to Cuzco, to take its place in the great temple of the Sun, by the side of the remains of his royal ancestors’.26

  Atahuallpa was eventually murdered by Pizarro, but before he died he ‘expressed a desire that his remains might be transported to Quito, the place of his birth, to be preserved with those of his maternal ancestors’.27 Pizarro refused this request and instead buried the remains of the last Inca in a Christian cemetery. ‘But from thence, as is reported, after the Spaniards left Caxamalca, they were secretly removed, and carried, as he had desired, to Quito.’28

  Prescott tells us that

  the royal edifices of Quito, we are assured by the Spanish conquerors, were constructed of huge masses of stone, many of which were carried all the way along the mountain roads from Cuzco, a distance of several hundred leagues.

  And while the capitals of Christendom, but a few hundred miles apart, remained as far asunder as if seas had rolled between them, the great capitals of Cuzco and Quito were placed by the high roads of the Incas in immediate correspondence.

  Quito, which lay immediately under the equator, where the vertical rays of the sun threw no shadow at noon, was held in especial veneration as the favoured abode of the great deity29

  It would seem that information buried at Cuzco before the displacement may have provided the people of ancient America with a blueprint for laying out their post-flood sacred sites. This blueprint linked Cuzco to Tiahuanaco and Cuzco to Quito and so the 45-degree ‘ley line’ that connects these ancient sacred sites begins to make geodetic sense. Ollantaytambo and Machu Picchu are so close to Cuzco that they should be considered a group, with Cuzco at the centre being the ‘navel of the world’. The monuments at Ollantaytambo were constructed with the largest stones used in the New World. Sitchin links Ollantaytambo with ancient Baalbek in Lebanon:

  The many similarities we find between Ollantaytambu and Baalbek include the origin of the megaliths. The colossal stone blocks of Baalbek were quarried miles away in a valley, then incredibly lifted, transported, and put in place to fit with other stones of the platform. At Ollantaytambu too the giant stone blocks were quarried on the mountainside on the opposite side of the valley. The heavy blocks of red granite, after they had been quarried, hewed, and shaped, were then transported from the mountainside, across two streams, and up the Ollantaytambu site; then carefully raised, put precisely in place, and finally fused together.30

  Little could Sitchin suspect that Ollantaytambo and Baalbek are the same distance from the Hudson Bay Pole and share the 10 phi latitude. The fact is that the largest stones used in construction in both the Old and New World are found at the same distance to the Hudson Bay Pole. This worldwide geodesic pattern repeatedly emphasises the importance of the geometric notion of the Golden Section married to the number 10.

  When the people of ancient Israel conquered ‘Canaan’ they were occupying the homeland of the Phoenicians, who regarded themselves as the heirs of the much earlier maritime Byblos culture. The Phoenicians had drawn upon the Byblos for their art, culture and architecture. The Israelites respected the achievements of the Phoenicians and drew upon their architecture in the building of King Solomon’s Temple.

  In The Temple and the Lodge31 Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh assert that ‘modern archaeological research confirms that Solomon’s Temple… bears an unmistakable resemblance to the actual temples built by the Phoenicians… It is even possible to go a step further. Tyrian temples were erected to the Phoenician mother goddess Astarte… hilltops and mountains – Mount Hermon for example – abounded with her shrines.’ And they point out that King Solomon is also described (I Kings 3) as offering ‘sacrifice and incense on the high places’.

  They draw attention to the fact that Solomon’s religion was not strictly orthodox. When he grew old ‘his wives swayed his heart to other gods… Solomon became a follower of Astarte’ (I Kings 11). They even state that the famous Song of Songs is a hymn to Astarte. They then ask the question: ‘Was [the Temple] dedicated to the God of Israel, or was it dedicated to Astarte?’

  This may seem academic until we recall that Astarte was known to the Greeks as Aphrodite, the goddess of love (from which we get the term aphrodisiac), and to the Romans as Venus. And Henry Lincoln, for one, believes that the planet Venus was the reason that the pentacle is perhaps the most important of magi
c symbols.

  So the man who built Solomon’s Temple was a worshipper of Venus, and his employer also had leanings in that direction.

  When we recall that the geometry of Rennes-le-Château is pentacular, we can suddenly see another connection with Solomon’s Temple and the Templars. The whole area has connections with Merovingians and Templars and the religion of gnosticism. The kind of gnosticism that led to the extermination of the Cathars was a belief that matter is created by the Devil and spirit by God, so ‘this world’ is evil. But according to Lomas and Knight the Essenes had a different version of gnosticism. ‘Gnosis’ means knowledge, and the Essenes held that when a man awakens to ‘gnosis’, he is ‘resurrected’. Priests and saviours become unnecessary, because he now possesses the ‘knowledge’ himself. Such a position is, of course, anathema to all forms of established religion that depend on priestly authority, for it makes them unnecessary. It could be compared to Quakerism, with its belief in the ‘inner light’, and also to Buddhism, with its concept of enlightenment.

  In reading Lomas and Knight, I had been particularly interested in Kilwinning, the original Templar abbey built in Scotland, for Rand had included it among his sacred sites. Recognising the importance of the Golden Section in their positioning, he had tried measuring the Golden Section from the North Pole (34 degrees, 23 minutes north), and had discovered two other important sacred sites at this latitude, the Chinese pyramids and Ehdin (the O’Briens’ Eden). Measuring the Golden Section from the equator (55 degrees, 37 minutes north), he could find nothing in North America or Asia, but he found Kilwinning only 3 minutes of a degree away, at 55 degrees, 40 minutes north. And when he learned (from The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail) about Kilwinning, he checked its position compared to the Great Pyramid, and found that it was 36 degrees – one-tenth of 360 degrees, the total distance around the earth. When he learned that Kilwinning was reputed to be built on an ancient pagan site, he was further encouraged.