ambitious building project would have been one way cult members could
preserve and transmit scientific information into the future independently
of their physical survival. In other words, if the buildings were large
enough, capable of enduring through immense spans of time and
encoded through and through with the cult’s message, there would be
hope that the message would be decoded at some future date even if the
cult had by then long since ceased to exist.
The hypothesis proposes that this is what the enigmatic structures on
the Giza plateau are all about:
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1 that the Great Sphinx is indeed, as we have argued in previous
chapters, an equinoctial marker for the Age of Leo, indicating a date in
our own chronology of between 10,970 BC and 8810 BC;
2 that the three principal pyramids are indeed laid out in relation to the
Nile Valley to mimic the precise dispositions of the three stars of
Orion’s Belt in relation to the course of the Milky Way in 10,450 BC.
This is a pretty effective means of ‘specifying’ the epoch of the eleventh
millennium BC by using the phenomenon of precession, which has been
rightly described as the ‘only true clock of our planet’.23 Confusingly,
however, we also know that the Great Pyramid incorporates star shafts
‘locked in’ to Orion’s Belt and Sirius at around 2450 BC.24 The hypothesis
resolves the anomaly of the missing years by supposing the star shafts to
be merely the later work of the same long-lived cult that originally laid
out the Giza ground-plan in 10,450 BC. Naturally, the hypothesis also
suggests that it was this same cult, towards the end of those 8000
missing years, that provided the initiating spark for the sudden and ‘fully
formed’ emergence of the literate historical civilization of dynastic Egypt.
What remains to be guessed at are the motives of the pyramid builders,
who were presumably the same people as the mysterious cartographers
who mapped the globe at the end of the last Ice Age in the northern
hemisphere. If so, we might also ask why these highly civilized and
technically accomplished architects and navigators were obsessed with
charting the gradual glaciation of the enigmatic southern continent of
Antarctica from the fourteenth millennium BC—when Hapgood calculates
that the source map referred to by Phillipe Buache was drawn up—down
to about the end of the fifth millennium BC?
Could they have been making a permanent cartographical record of the
slow obliteration of their homeland?
And could their overwhelming desire to transmit a message to the
future through a variety of different media—myths, maps, buildings,
calendar systems, mathematical harmonies—have been connected to the
cataclysms and earth changes that caused this loss?
An urgent mission
The possession of a conscious, articulated history is one of the faculties
that distinguishes human beings from animals. Unlike rats, say, or sheep,
or cows, or pheasants, we have a past which is separate from ourselves.
We therefore have the opportunity, as I have said, to learn from the
experiences of our predecessors.
Is it because we are perverse, or misguided, or simply stupid that we
23 By Robert Bauval, personal communication.
24 See Part VII.
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refuse to recognize those experiences unless they have come down to us
in the form of bona fide ‘historical records’? And is it arrogance or
ignorance which leads us to draw an arbitrary line separating ‘history’
from ‘prehistory’ at about 5000 years before the present—defining the
records of ‘history’ as valid testimony and the records of ‘prehistory’ as
primitive delusions?
At this stage in a continuing investigation, my instinct is that we may
have put ourselves in danger by closing our ears for so long to the
disturbing ancestral voices which reach us in the form of myths. This is
more an intuitive than a rational feeling, but it is by no means
unreasonable. My research has filled me with respect for the logical
thinking, high science, deep psychological insights, and vast
cosmographical knowledge of the ancient geniuses who composed those
myths, and who, I am now fully persuaded, descended from the same lost
civilization that produced the map-makers, pyramid builders, navigators,
astronomers and earth-measurers whose fingerprints we have been
following across the continents and oceans of the earth.
Since I have learned to respect those long-forgotten and still only hazily
identified Newtons and Shakespeares and Einsteins of the last Ice Age, I
think it would be foolish to disregard what they seem to be saying. And
what they seem to be saying to us is this: that cyclical, recurrent and
near-total destructions of mankind are part and parcel of life on this
planet, that such destructions have occurred many times before and that
they will certainly occur again.
What, after all, is the remarkable calendrical system of the Mayas if it is
not a medium for transmitting exactly this message? What, if not vehicles
for the same sort of bad news are the traditions of the four previous
‘Suns’ (or sometimes of the three previous ‘Worlds’) passed down in the
Americas since time immemorial? By the same token, what might be the
function of the great myths of precession which speak not just of
previous cataclysms but of cataclysms to come and which (through the
metaphor of the cosmic mill) link these earthly disasters to ‘disturbances
in the heavens’? Last but by no means least, what burning motive
impelled the pyramid builders to erect, with such care, the powerful and
mysterious edifices on the Giza plateau?
Yes, they were saying, ‘Kilroy was here’.
And, yes, they found an ingenious way to tell us when they were here.
Of these things I have no doubt.
I am also impressed by the enormous lengths they went to to provide
us with convincing proof that theirs was a serious and scientifically
advanced civilization. And I am even more impressed by the sense of
urgency—of a vitally important mission—that seems to have enlightened
all their works and deeds.
I go on intuition again, not on evidence.
It’s my guess that their underlying objective could have been to
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transmit a warning to the future, and that this warning could be to do
with a global cataclysm, perhaps even a recurrence of the same cataclysm
that so clearly devastated mankind at the end of the last Ice Age when
‘Noah saw that the earth had tilted, and that its destruction was near, and
cried out in a bitter voice: “Tell me what is being done on the earth that
the earth is so afflicted and shaken ...” ’25 These words are from the
Hebrew Book of Enoch, but similar afflictions and shakings have been
foretold in all the Central American traditions that speak of the demise of
the pres
ent epoch of the world—an epoch, as the reader will recall, in
which ‘the elders say [that] there will be a movement of the earth and
from this we shall all perish.’26
The reader will also not have forgotten the date calculated by the
Ancient Maya calendar for the end of the world:
The day will be 4 Ahau 3 Kankin [corresponding to 23 December AD 2012], and it
will be ruled by the Sun God, the ninth Lord of the Night. The moon will be eight
days old, and it will be the third lunation in a series of six ...27
In the Mayan scheme of things we are already living in the last days of the
earth.
In the Christian scheme of things too, the last days are understood to
be upon us. According to the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of
Pennsylvania: ‘This world will perish just as surely as did the world before
the Flood ... Many things were foretold to occur during the last days, and
all of these are being fulfilled. This means that the end of the world is
near ...’28
Similarly the Christian psychic Edgar Cayce prophesied in 1934 that
around the year 2000: ‘There will be a shifting of the poles. There will be
upheavals in the Arctic and the Antarctic that will make for the eruption
of volcanoes in the Torrid areas ... The upper portion of Europe will be
changed in the twinkling of an eye. The earth will be broken up in the
western portion of America. The greater portion of Japan must go into
the sea.’29
Curiously the epoch of the year 2000, which figures in these Christian
prophecies, also coincides with the Last Time (or highest point) in the
great upwards cycle of the belt stars of the Orion constellation, just as
the epoch of the eleventh millennium BC coincided with the First Time (or
lowest point) of that cycle.
And curiously, also, as we saw in Chapter Twenty-eight:
A conjunction of five planets that can be expected to have profound gravitational
25 1 Enoch, LXV, in The Apockryphal Old Testament (ed. H.F.D. Sparks), Clarendon Press,
Oxford, 1989, p. 247.
26 Pre-Hispanic Gods of Mexico, p. 24.
27 Breaking the Maya Code, p. 275.
28 Will The World Survive? Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, 1992.
29 Circulating File, Earth Changes, Extracts from the Edgar Cayce Readings, Edgar Cayce
Foundation, Virginia Beach, 1994, p. 36.
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effects will take place on 5 May in the year 2000, when Neptune, Uranus, Venus,
Mercury and Mars will align with the Earth on the other side of the sun, setting up
a sort of cosmic tug-of-war ... 30
Could the recondite influences of gravity, when combined with our
planet’s precessional wobble, the torsional effects of its axial rotation,
and the rapidly growing mass and weight of the Antarctic ice-cap, be
enough to spark off a full-scale crustal displacement?
We may never know, one way or another—unless it happens.
Meanwhile, I do not think the Egyptian scribe Manetho was being less
than literal when he spoke of a harsh and deadly cosmic power at work in
the universe:
Just as iron is likely to be attracted and led after the loadstone, but often turns
away and is repelled in the opposite direction, so the salutary, good and rational
movement of the world at one time attracts, conciliates and mollifies that harsh
power; then again, when the latter has recovered itself, it overthrows the other
and reduces it to helplessness ...31
In short, through metaphors and allegories, I suspect the ancients may
have tried to find many ways to tell us exactly when—and why—the
hammer of global destruction is going to strike again. I therefore think,
after 12,500 years of the pendulum, that it would only be wise for us to
devote more of our resources to studying the signs and messages that
have come down to us from that dark and terrifying period of amnesia
which our species calls prehistory.
A speeding up of physical research at the Giza plateau would also be
highly desirable—not only by Egyptologists determined to resist any
threats to the scholarly status quo but by eclectic teams of investigators
who could bring some of the newer sciences to bear on the challenges of
this most enigmatic and impenetrable of sites. The Chlorine-36 rockexposure dating technique mentioned in Chapter Six, for example, looks
like a particularly promising means of resolving the impasse over the
antiquity of the Pyramids and the Sphinx.32 Likewise, if the will is there,
then a way can be found to get through to whatever lies beyond the little
door concealed in the Great Pyramid 200 feet up the southern shaft of
30 See Part V.
31 Manetho, pp. 191-3.
32 The Chlorine-36 rock-exposure dating technique has been developed by Professor
David Bowen of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Wales. In The
Times of London, 1 December 1994, Brown observed:
‘One way of resolving the controversy of the ages of the Sphinx and the Pyramids may
be through the application of Chlorine-36 rock-exposure dating. This provides an
estimate of the time that has elapsed since a rock was first exposed to the atmosphere.
In the case of the Sphinx and the Pyramids this would be when the rocks were first
exposed by quarrying activity ...’
In 1994 Bowen ran preliminary tests on the famous ‘bluestones’ of Stonehenge in
England, hitherto believed to date to 2250 BC. What the tests showed was that these 123
four-ton monoliths could have been quarried during the last Ice Age—perhaps as early
as 12000 BC. See The Times, London, 5 December.
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the Queen’s Chamber. At the same time serious efforts should be made
to investigate the contents of the large, square-edged and apparently
man-made cavity in the bedrock, deep beneath the paws of the Sphinx,
that was discovered when a seismic survey was carried out at the site in
1993.33
Last but not least, far away from Giza, I suspect that our efforts might
also be repaid if we were to undertake a proper investigation of the subglacial landscapes of Antarctica—much the most likely continent to hide
the complete remains of a lost civilization. If we could establish what
destroyed that civilization, then we might be in a better position to save
ourselves from a similar cataclysmic fate.
In making these latter suggestions I am, of course, fully aware that
there are many who will be scornful and will assert the uniformitarian
view that ‘all things will continue as they have done since the beginning
of creation.’34 But I am also aware that such ‘scoffers in the last days’35 are
those who for one reason or another are deaf to the testimony of our
forgotten ancestors. As we have seen, this testimony appears to be trying
to tell us that a hideous calamity has indeed descended upon mankind
from time to time, that on each occasion it has afflicted us suddenly,
without warning and without mercy, like a thief in the night, and that it
will certainly recur at some point in the future, obliging us—unless we are
well
prepared—to begin again like orphaned children in complete
ignorance of our true heritage.
Walking in the last days
Hopi Indian Reservation, May 1994: Across the high plains of Arizona, for
days and days and days, a desolate wind had been blowing. As we drove
across those plains towards the tiny village of Shungopovi, I went over in
my mind all I had seen and done in the previous five years: my travels,
my research, the false starts and dead-ends I had encountered, the lucky
breaks, the moments when everything had come together, the moments
when everything seemed about to fall apart.
I had travelled a long road to get here, I realized—far longer than the
300-mile freeway that had whisked us up into these austere badlands
from Phoenix, the state capital. Nor did I expect to return with any great
degree of enlightenment.
Nevertheless, I had made this journey because the science of prophecy
is still believed to be alive among the Hopi: Pueblo Indians, distantly
related to the Aztecs of Mexico, whose numbers have been reduced by
33 Mystery of the Sphinx, NBC-TV, 1993.
34 2 Peter 3:4.
35 2 Peter 3:3.
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attrition and misery to barely 10,000.36 Like the Ancient Maya whose
descendants all across the Yucatan are convinced that the end of the
world is coming in the year 2000 y pico (and a little),37 the Hopi believe
that we are walking in the last days, with a geological sword of Damocles
hanging over us.38 According to their myths, as we saw in Chapter
Twenty-four:
The first world was destroyed, as a punishment for human misdemeanours, by an
all-consuming fire that came from above and below. The second world ended
when the terrestrial globe toppled from its axis and everything was covered with
ice. The third world ended in a universal flood. The present world is the fourth. Its
fate will depend on whether or not its inhabitants behave in accordance with the
Creator’s plans ...’39
I had come to Arizona to see whether the Hopi thought we were behaving
in accordance with the Creator’s plans ...
The end of the world
The desolate wind, blowing across the high plains, shook and rattled the
sides of the trailer-home we sat in. Beside me was Santha, who’d been
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