by Colin Wilson
He checked Rosslyn’s latitude; it was 55 degrees, 52 minutes north, only 15 minutes out – not bad, but still 17 miles too many. Then he checked its location with regard to the Hudson Bay Pole. It was precisely 50 degrees north. In an email telling me of this discovery, Rand wrote:
What made Rosslyn so special was its position relative to today’s North Pole and the North Pole during the Hudson Bay Pole. Stand outside Rosslyn Chapel facing north-west and raise your right arm so the tip of your index finger is pointing to the North Pole. Now raise your left arm and point at the Hudson Bay Pole. An angle is formed by the tips of your fingers and your nose This angle is precisely 50 degrees. Rosslyn was formerly at 50 degrees north and the angle difference between it, the North Pole and the Hudson Bay Pole is exactly 50 degrees. This made it a 50/50 site, and indicates that accurate geodetic and geological information was used in its location.
If the Templars deliberately sited Rosslyn on a phi latitude that was also a ‘50/50 site’, then it looked as if they must also have had knowledge of this worldwide grid of sacred sites.
For me, this was further confirmed by Lomas and Knight’s reference to the prophet Enoch. In The Hiram Key there are merely three brief references to him. Towards the end of The Second Messiah, there is a passage about the thirteenth degree of Scottish Freemasonry, which
tells how, in times long before Moses and Abraham, the ancient figure of Enoch foresaw that the world would be overwhelmed by an apocalyptic disaster through flood or fire, and he determined to preserve at least some of the knowledge then available to man, that it might be passed on to future civilisations of survivors. He therefore engraves in hieroglyphics the great secrets of science and building on to two pillars: one made of brick and the other of stone.
The Masonic legend then goes on to tell how these pillars were almost destroyed, but sections survived the Flood and were subsequently discovered – one by the Jews, the other by the Egyptians…
So, according to the Masons, the origins of Freemasonry – the two pillars that play a central part in its rituals – can be traced back to Enoch.
When I first read The Hiram Key I assumed that this was simply another more or less fictional attempt to establish the ancient origins of Freemasonry, but by the time I finished The Second Messiah, it seemed to me that Lomas and Knight had made an extremely plausible case for the Egyptian origin of Freemasonry and for secret knowledge that could be traced through Solomon’s Temple, the Essenes and the Templars. The notion that the Book of Enoch might be involved came as no surprise. Rand’s When the Sky Fell had already left me in no doubt that ancient memories of the Great Flood have survived down the millennia.
Lomas and Knight emphasise that the tradition of Enoch and the flood is of central importance to Freemasonry, and in their third volume, Uriel’s Machine, Enoch is virtually the central figure. As already noted, Lomas and Knight believe that the flood was caused by the impact of a comet in 7,640 BC, and that the ancients were able to anticipate this impact by using ‘Uriel’s machine’. There are also no fewer than thirty-two references to the planet Venus, which, they explain, ‘symbolises rebirth in Judaism, Freemasonry and many other ancient traditions’.
There is, then, a convergence of Masonic tradition and other arguments about ancient civilisation. It was Rand who pointed out one of the most fascinating implications of the Templar tradition of an important discovery in the remains of Solomon’s Temple: the evidence that part of the Templar fleet that left La Rochelle in 1307 made its way to America. (Of course it is believed that the Vikings had found their way to America centuries before Columbus, but they did not cross the Atlantic, but stuck to the coast of Greenland.) Before Columbus ‘discovered’ America, did one of the Templar ships that had sailed to America later return to Scotland?
The corncobs in Rosslyn suggest that some of the Templars sailed for America. Lomas and Knight mention that Westford, Massachusetts, has an image of a Templar knight carved on a slab of rock, while at Newport, Rhode Island, there is a curious tower constructed in the manner of Templar round churches.
But it is unlikely that Templars fleeing from imminent arrest and torture would set sail across the Atlantic unless they knew where they were going. How could they have known about America? The only answer can be that they had a map or maps. Could they have obtained such maps from the ‘treasure’ that Hugh de Payens and the knights discovered in 1126 in the basement of the Temple in Jerusalem?
In The Hiram Key, Lomas and Knight comment: ‘Josephus… observed that the Essenes believed that good souls have their habitation beyond the ocean… across the seas to the west.’ This land is marked by the star that the Mandaeans of Iraq called ‘Merica’, and which Lomas and Knight suggest is Venus. They believe that it was from this star that America took its name – not from the explorer Amerigo Vespucci.
In short, what the Templars discovered in Jerusalem included the knowledge contained in Hapgood’s ‘maps of the ancient sea kings’.
10
The Legacy
AS YOU FLY east from La Paz in the Bolivian Andes, the dense green of the jungle suddenly gives way to open grasslands that extend as far as the eye can see. This is the swampy flood plain of the Mamoré River, a tributary of the Amazon, which is underwater one half of the year and bone dry the other half. The few inhabitants simply have to move to higher land during the flood season.
In 1962, an American student at the University of California, Berkeley, Bill Denevan, who realised that many areas of this immense land are virtually unknown, persuaded the pilot of a Bolivian airliner to divert north over the Moxos Plain, an area called Beni. Suddenly he was goggling with excitement, rushing from side to side of the plane with his camera. What he saw below him was a landscape in two shades of green, the lighter green lying on the surrounding darker green in short, broad strokes, as if an abstract painter had taken a whitewash brush and slapped a green-tinted wash over the flat landscape in V-shaped patterns. The lighter green, he realised later, was raised fields, in effect platforms of earth that had once been surrounded by flood-filled ditches. Looking ahead, a distance of perhaps 50 miles, he could see another light green patch of landscape about the size of a fairly large village. It was all around him – a landscape with circular fields and raised mounds of tree-covered earth, and straight lines that ran towards the horizon for hundreds of miles. There were also square lakes, obviously man-made.
What excited Denevan was its sheer scale. Whoever had civilised this vast landscape had spread their raised fields, ditches and reservoirs over thousands of acres. Yet no one had ever heard of a great civilisation in the Amazon. Columbus, of course, had not penetrated this far, and when the Spanish Conquistadores arrived in the late 1600s they had found nothing to indicate the presence of an ancient people – just a few thousand Indians who were forcibly converted to Christianity.
When Denevan returned to the United States, he tried to interest archaeologists in this vanished people but failed completely. No one believed him. Eventually, an archaeologist named Oscar Saavedra, from the region’s largest town, Trinidad, began to explore the ancient landscape. He soon realised that the fields ran to hundreds of thousands, that there were thousands of forest-covered mounds to which the inhabitants retreated during floods, and that there were over a thousand miles of causeways. As Saavedra penetrated the waterways with their overhanging trees in a motor-driven boat, he was actually travelling through a man-made waterscape that extended for hundred of thousands of square miles, as far as the borders of Bolivia and Brazil. These canals often connected rivers on the great swampy plain, so that the whole area might be compared to Venice, but thousands of times larger.
There are also earthworks that depict people and animals that have been compared to the Nazca lines, one anthropomorphic figure being 2 kilometres from head to toe. It is believed that these various structures were built by the Paititi tribe 5,500 years ago,1 but Denevan dismisses this estimate as grossly exaggerated.
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p; Then how old is it? Ceramic heads and utensils that farmers found in their fields could not be dated, but other artifacts could be carbon-dated to 5,000 BC. Denevan’s own feeling is that an age of a couple of thousand years is closer to the truth. Even so, it would be as old as anything then known in South America. (No one believed that Tiahuanaco, that other great Bolivian civilisation, could be dated any further back than a few centuries BC.)
What had happened to the builders? Some pieces of evidence suggested that their descendants had still been around in large numbers when Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492, but by the time the Spaniards arrived two centuries later they had all but vanished. It was easy to see why no one had noticed them. Their lives appeared to be a continuous battle against nature, although their agriculture must have been capable of supporting a population that could easily have run to millions. (Historians have calculated that North and South America before 1492 might have contained 100 million people.)2 When they vanished, the land quickly returned to nature.
Denevan’s theory is that they may have been killed off by diseases brought by the white man, such as smallpox, measles and influenza, which swept across the continent like the Black Death, wiping out 90 per cent of the population.
What particularly interested me about the agricultural and forest-covered mounds in the Amazon was that this settlement answered a question that Rand and I had been asked repeatedly: if there are vanished civilisations, then where are the traces of their existence?
Rand always made the same reply. They might be lost under the sea, or the ice of Antarctica. Or they might by lying unnoticed under our noses, as the Moxos civilisation of the Amazon went unnoticed before Denevan persuaded the pilot to fly over it. Even around Tiahuanaco, which has been known since the time of the Conquistadores, no one suspected the sheer size of the civilisation that surrounded the present ruins, though the immense stone blocks of its port area – some weighing over 400 tons – which once looked out across Lake Titicaca, ought to have alerted scholars to the possibility that this was once a city on the scale of ancient Rome or the sacred Mexican city of Teotihuacan rather than an isolated town in the middle of a plain.
Not only were such sites found all over the world, but Rand’s theory offered him a means of locating them. His method had led him to pinpoint Lubaantum, the Maya sacred centre in Belize, by looking for a specific spot 120 degrees west of the Great Pyramid and at a 10 phi longitude north of the equator. He had also discovered three immensely important sites at polar Golden Section latitudes (i.e., the Golden Section measured from the poles rather than from the equator). They were Baalbek, Ehdin (the O’Briens’ Garden of Eden), and the Chinese pyramids. Tracing this line on to the east of China, he found that it passed through another sacred site of immense importance: Isé, in Japan (to which I had dedicated a page in my Atlas of Sacred Sites). He continued along the line and found a group of islands located on his ‘sacred latitude’: the Canary Islands, 700 miles off the coast of Spain, at 45 degrees west of the Great Pyramid – that is, one-eighth of the distance around the world. And they were, of course, ‘phi sites’.
The Canaries are most commonly regarded as a holiday destination, but not as the location of any sacred temples or pyramids. Rand, though, recollected reading something about them in a book by the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl.
In 1969, twenty years after The Kon-Tiki Expedition3 had become an international bestseller, Heyerdahl again set out to prove that ancient seamen could have crossed vast oceans – this time, from Egypt to America. He succeeded – at the second attempt – in a boat built of papyrus reeds. In his book The Ra Expeditions,4 describing these ocean voyages, he pauses to speak about the mystery of the natives of the Canary Islands, the Guanches.
The Guanches were discovered by the Spaniards who sailed in the wake of Columbus, and who, in the typical manner of the Conquistadores, virtually exterminated them. They were tall, blue-eyed and blond, and are described by Encyclopaedia Britannica as of the Cro-Magnon type. One authority compares them to the natives of Muges, in Portugal, whose origins can be traced to about 8,000 BC.5
How did they get there? They must have come by sea, yet they were farmers and sheep breeders and possessed no boats. In fact, they detested the sea. Heyerdahl’s suggestion is that the Guanches arrived on boats of papyrus reeds, like the Ra, and never mastered the technique of making wooden craft with joined planks. Another oddity was that they practised mummification and cranial trepanning, as in ancient Egypt and Peru. Were they, as Heyerdahl suggests, sailing across the Atlantic, on their way to America, when they discovered the Canaries, and decided to settle there?
Another authority on the Guanches, the Brazilian Dr Arysio Nunes dos Santos, has pointed out that their language is related to the ‘Dravidian’ family of languages from India,6 but what would Aryan types from India be doing in the Canaries? Santos advances the theory that they were natives of Atlantis, escaping after the great catastrophe, and that Atlantis was somewhere in the region of Indonesia. Santos may, of course, be mistaken in calling the homeland of the Guanches Atlantis’, but he could still be correct about where they came from, and when. At all events, Heyerdahl bore in mind the mystery of the Guanches. And when, in 1998, a native of the Canaries told him about black stone pyramids, he hastened to go and see for himself.
The pyramids — eight of them — were discovered near the town of Guimar, on Tenerife. They had six steps, and bore a distinct resemblance to the step pyramids of South America. One was even in the centre of the town, but no one had paid it much attention because it looked like a series of terraces with a flat top. Heyerdahl recognised it for what it was, persuading a Norwegian businessman to buy the pyramids and set up a museum.
If Rand is correct, some of the Guanches preferred to remain on the Canaries because they are at a sacred latitude and longitude, a suitable spot for settling and for building temples to the sun.
The Moxos Plain of Bolivia and the Guimar pyramids on Tenerife are two examples of civilisations that vanished — or at least, retreated into unrecognisability Heyerdahl had found yet another in northern Peru, when he was looking for evidence of ancient seafaring that might prove his theory that natives of South America sailed across the Pacific.7
One day in March 1987 Heyerdahl was driving north from the ruins of Chan Chan, the former capital of the Chimu Indians, which is near the coastal city of Trujillo. Driving along the Pan-American Highway, he was looking for a solitary pyramid that he had once seen in the middle of the desert. He was unsuccessful, but he bumped into an old friend, the museum director Christopher Donnan, who was excavating a pre-Inca city called Pacatnamu, and told him a curious tale about robbery and violence.
A month earlier, on 6 February 1987, a group of tomb robbers dug their way into a small pyramid near a village called Sipan, near Chiclayo. To call it a pyramid would strike the visitor to Sipan as an exaggeration, for the three pyramids of Sipan look more like weathered hills scored with hundreds of water channels. The people of the area, however, know they are ancient tombs, and that small artifacts they find there, such as beads, can be sold to foreign tourists for a few pesos. Some of these amateur tomb robbers had sunk a shaft from the top of one of the pyramids, called Huaca Rajada, then dug outwards from it.
The looters often spent all night searching the tunnels made of adobe bricks and found nothing, but on this occasion they were in luck. In a groove between two bricks, their leader— an unemployed lorry driver named Ernil — found eight hammered gold beads. On the black market they were worth around $17 each. Eagerly, Ernil drove a tyre-iron into the ceiling – and was knocked to the floor by a landslide of rubble and sand. When ten fellow thieves rushed up to see what had happened, they found that the prone Ernil was covered with golden artifacts, obviously worth a fortune. Ernil had punctured the floor of a burial chamber, and it proved to be full of gold and silver knives, gold masks, chains of beads and statuettes of jaguars and horned monsters.
The loote
rs carried off eleven rice sacks filled with treasure. There was enough gold to make them all rich. Unfortunately, they quarrelled during the division of the spoils. One man was killed with three gunshots to the chest. Another of the looters took to his heels and called the police. Not long afterwards, Ernil was killed when the police came to try and arrest him.
The local museum curator, Walter Alva, was called in to examine the captured loot. He realised immediately that the robbers had found the Peruvian equivalent of Tutankhamen’s tomb, although these magnificent artifacts were not as old as those of the boy pharaoh. They had been created by a civilisation of Indians called the Moche, who flourished from about AD 100 to AD 700. Then they abruptly vanished. The reason for their disappearance was a mystery until the late 1990s, when it was realised that there had been a forty-year drought in Peru in the sixth century AD. The heavy rains caused by El Niño ceased, and the Moche starved. This was the same drought that, archaeologists speculate, led the Indians of the Nazca Plains of Peru to create their vast menagerie of animals – monkeys, whales, spiders, birds – visible only from the air, in a vain attempt to persuade the gods to send back the rain.
Regrettably most of the treasure of the Huaca Rajada had already been sold by the time the police went to arrest Ernil. Walter Alva told the story to Thor Heyerdahl as the two stood at the bottom of the robbers’ shaft, and he permitted
Heyerdahl to examine a superb gold mask, with eyes made of blue lapis lazuli. As Heyerdahl looked at it, he thought again about the legends of the gods who came to South America, bringing civilisation with them.