Magicians of the Gods

by Graham Hancock

  The most dramatic, and indeed beautiful and aesthetically pleasing effects of precession, however, are those observed at the horizon on the March equinox, when night and day are of equal length and when the sun rises perfectly due east against the background of the twelve constellations of the zodiac. The rate of change is the same as at the pole, i.e. just one degree every 72 years, so it cannot easily be observed—let alone measured—in a single human lifetime. But if yours is a culture that keeps careful records over very long periods, it will be noted that the zodiacal constellation that “houses” the sun on that special day (marking the beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere) does, indeed, very slowly shift along the horizon until eventually, the next constellation takes its place.

  Broadly speaking the sun spends 2,160 years “in” each house of the zodiac (30 degrees x 72 years) and, since there are twelve zodiacal houses, the result is that “the Great Year”—the full precessional cycle—unfolds in 12 x 2,160 years, i.e. 25,920 years, at which point the cycle is back at its starting point and a new Great Year begins. In the sun’s annual path through the zodiac, spending approximately one month in each sign as all of us who check our horoscopes are aware, Aquarius is followed by Pisces, which in turn is followed by Aries, which is followed by Taurus, then Gemini, then Cancer, then Leo, etc, etc, etc. But the slow, majestic precessional course of the sun through the Great Year is a backward motion that unfolds in exactly the opposite direction—thus Leo → Cancer → Gemini → Taurus → Aries → Pisces → Aquarius—with each “month” being 2,160 years in length.

  So, to give some specific examples, it is not an accident that the early Christians used the fish as their symbol, since the constellation of Pisces housed the sun on the spring equinox from the very beginning of the Christian era until today. Nor is the famous song wrong to state that “we live in the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” for the early twenty-first century does indeed stand in the astrological no-man’s land near the end of the “Age of Pisces” and on the threshold of the “New Age” of Aquarius. Going back before the Age of Pisces we come to the age of Aries (2330 BC–170 BC) when, in Ancient Egypt, rams were the dominant symbolic motif (for example, the ram-headed sphinxes at the temple of Karnak in Luxor), and before that to the Age of Taurus (4490 BC–2330 BC) when the cult of the Apis Bull was initiated as early as the First Dynasty, or perhaps before.

  Different astrologers and astronomers might choose to move the constellation boundaries a few degrees (and thus a century or two) in one direction or another, but the general schema is well understood and the dates given above stand as a good approximation to the facts. Moving back in time further, as it is easy to do with modern computer programs that simulate ancient skies, we come eventually to the Age of Leo when the constellation of Leo, the lion, housed the sun on the spring equinox. This astrological age spans the period between 10,970 BC and 8810 BC—although, again, depending on where one sets the constellation boundaries, the dates might be pushed back or forward by a couple of centuries. What is clear, however, even with a little boundary juggling, is that the Age of Leo pretty much perfectly encloses the Younger Dryas (10,800 BC to 9600 BC), something that I was unaware of when I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods. And, of course, it was also the Age of Leo that I signaled in Fingerprints as the most likely candidate for the remote epoch that the Ancient Egyptians called Zep Tepi, the “First Time.”

  Figure 34: The sun has been in Pisces (1) at the spring equinox for the past 2,000 years, defining the astrological “Age of Pisces,” but will in due course shift into Aquarius (2) as a result of precession and the “Age of Aquarius” will begin. At the same time the constellations marking the autumnal equinox will shift from Virgo (4) into Leo (3).

  Again, I refer readers to Fingerprints and to Keeper of Genesis, and to my later book Heaven’s Mirror,6 for more detailed discussions of the astronomical facts, and of the ideas behind them. The essence of the argument, however, is that there was an ancient globally-distributed doctrine—“as above so below”—that set out quite deliberately to create monuments on the ground that copied the patterns of certain significant constellations in the sky. Moreover, since the positions of all stars change slowly but continuously as a result of the precession, it is possible to use particular configurations of astronomically aligned monuments to deduce the dates that they represent—i.e. the dates when the stars were last in the positions depicted by the monuments on the ground.

  The Giza plateau contains the world’s most striking array of astronomically aligned monuments and, for purposes of clarity, let me emphasize that these alignments have nothing to do with compass directions. The “north” indicated by a compass is magnetic north which can vary by 10 degrees or more from true north and wanders constantly because of magnetic changes in the earth’s core. True north is the geographical north pole of the earth, in other words the pivot of our planet’s axis of rotation; from it true south, east and west are derived. It is therefore significant that the gaze of the Great Sphinx is perfectly targeted on true east, while the three great pyramids are aligned with uncanny precision to true north and south—indeed, the error in the case of the Great Pyramid is just 3/60ths of a single degree.

  What this tells us is that all these monuments were set out using astronomy, for it is not possible to achieve such precision by any other means. In other words, even if there were no additional astronomical characteristics present, we would have to say, on grounds of accuracy of alignment alone, that astronomers had been at work here. But in fact there are many other astronomical characteristics—not only in the monuments themselves but also in Ancient Egyptian scriptures such as the Pyramid Texts—and for these, since I wish to avoid unnecessary repetition, I again refer the reader to my earlier books.

  Figure 35: The alignment of the Great Pyramid is only 3/60th of a single degree off true north.

  The heart of the matter, however, involves two constellations—the constellation of Leo, rising due east above the sun at dawn on the spring equinox in the epoch of 10,500 BC, and the constellation of Orion, which the Ancient Egyptians visualized as the celestial figure of the god Osiris, the deceased god-king who ruled over the afterlife kingdom known as the Duat. As we saw in Chapter Nine, Osiris was also believed in some way to be the Ka—the “double,” or spiritual essence—of the Pyramids of Giza.

  Figure 36: The gaze of the Great Sphinx is perfectly targeted on true east.

  I will not vex the reader with lengthy substantiations of the assertions that follow since they are fully backed up, referenced and documented in my earlier books, but an uncanny sky-ground “lock” occurs at Giza in the epoch of 10,500 BC. I had opted for a date fifty years later—10,450 BC—in Fingerprints, but such minor details are not really significant since the stellar changes are so slow, even within a single astrological age, that the same general configuration holds good for many centuries. Indeed, it is true to say that the Giza sky-ground lock stays in place throughout most, if not all, of the Younger Dryas from 10,800 BC down to 9600 BC.

  Effectively, therefore, the epoch of the “First Time,” which I will continue, for ease of reference, to refer to as the epoch of 10,500 BC, is the epoch of the Younger Dryas. And while it was a time of freezing temperatures further north—particularly in North America and northern Europe—indications are that the climate in Egypt would have been much more comfortable and conducive and much wetter and more fertile than it is today. This is not to say that Egypt was entirely spared the cataclysms of the Younger Dryas—there were powerful and destructive Nile floods as we shall see—but by comparison with many other parts of the world it would have stood out as an inviting refuge.

  Figure 37: Looking east in the dawn, about an hour before sunrise on the morning of the spring equinox in the epoch of 10,500 BC, we see the constellation of Leo lying with its belly on the horizon, directly in line with the gaze of the Sphinx.

  As above, so below … To return to the matter of the sky-ground lock at Giza in
the epoch of 10,500 BC, let us consider first the lion-bodied (and very likely once lion-headed) monument, oriented perfectly due east, that we call the Great Sphinx. It looks not only at the rising sun on the spring equinox but also at the constellation that houses the sun on the equinox. Today, therefore, this monument gazes at the cusp between Pisces and Aquarius. At the time of the building of the Temple of Karnak it gazed at the constellation of Aries, and in the Old Kingdom, when the Sphinx was supposedly built, it gazed at the constellation of Taurus, the Bull—clearly not a perfect sky-ground match.

  Indeed, only in one epoch in the last 25,920 years has the lion-bodied Sphinx looked out at its own celestial counterpart, the constellation of Leo, in the pre-dawn on the spring equinox, and that was in the epoch of 10,500 BC.

  Figure 38: On the spring equinox in the epoch of 10,500 BC, at the exact moment that the sun bisected the horizon due east, the three belt stars of the constellation of Orion lay due south on the meridian—in a pattern that very precisely matches the pattern of the three Great Pyramids on the ground.

  But there is more. In that same epoch, at the exact moment that the sun bisected the horizon due east, the three belt stars of the constellation of Orion lay due south on the meridian—and they did so in a pattern that very precisely matches the pattern of the three Great Pyramids on the ground, thus making sublime sense of the image of Osiris/Orion as the Ka, or “double,” of the Pyramids.

  After Robert Bauval presented the Orion correlation to a global readership in his 1994 book The Orion Mystery, and after the further work I did on the subject in Fingerprints of the Gods, and that Robert and I did together in Keeper of Genesis, the hypothesis came in for a great deal of criticism from the mainstream archaeoastronomer Ed Krupp of the Griffiths Observatory of Los Angeles.

  Krupp claimed that the correlation was “upside down,” an argument of some sophistry based on the apparent curvature of the sky which means that the highest of the three stars of Orion’s belt (matched, in the Orion correlation, by the southernmost of the three pyramids), is effectively the northernmost star. Refuting this, we were able to demonstrate that laying the pyramids out on the ground in the way that would satisfy Krupp might be technically “correct” in terms of modern astronomical conventions, but would not produce an immediately recognizable and visually pleasing similitude between what is seen in the sky and what is seen on the ground. If, on the other hand, one steers clear of twenty-first century astronomical conventions (in which north is “up”), and simply models on the ground—rather as an artist or a sculptor would—what would have been seen in the sky at dawn on the spring equinox in the epoch of 10,500 BC, then the result is indeed a very good match, as Robert Bauval always claimed, between the three great pyramids and the three stars of Orion’s Belt (see Appendix, The Orion correlation is not upside down, for further details).

  Moreover, as noted above, the particularly striking feature of this match is its lock with the Sphinx/Leo. The point is worth re-emphasizing. Looking east in the predawn, about an hour before sunrise on the morning of the spring equinox in the epoch of 10,500 BC, we see the constellation of Leo lying with its belly on the horizon, directly in line with the gaze of the Sphinx. There is an unmissable sky/ground correlation here—for the constellation of Leo, in profile as seen at this moment, does very closely resemble the profile of the leonine Sphinx.

  The earth turns, the stars and the sun rise, light floods the sky, and in due course—after about an hour—the solar disc bisects the horizon precisely due east, again exactly in line with the gaze of the Sphinx. At the precise moment it does so, the three stars of Orion’s belt fall into place centered due south over the meridian. This is confirmed absolutely by modern astronomical software and it would have been known absolutely by anyone with sophisticated knowledge of the motions of the heavens, should such a person have been present at Giza in the epoch of 10,500 BC. Indeed, one can almost feel the ponderous gears of the sky at work, like a huge clock: the hour hand is the Sphinx/Leo correlation and the minute hand is the pyramids/Orion’s belt correlation, and both work together to point unmistakably to the epoch of 10,500 BC. This is the epoch that I long ago suggested was the mysterious Ancient Egyptian “First Time,” but that I now understand was significant for the world-changing cataclysm of the Younger Dryas as well.

  Dating with stars

  The use of combinations of stars in the sky and large-scale constructions on the ground to point symbolically to significant moments in history was a practice widely pursued in antiquity, as extensively documented in my 1998 book Heaven’s Mirror.7 Indeed, examples of such sky-ground mirroring, once they are properly understood, frequently shed new light on archaeological inquiries. For example, in 2014 an ancient mound in the Republic of Macedonia was identified as man-made by archaeoacoustic analysis. The mound’s dimensions are 85 meters x 45 meters, it is very precisely oriented north–south and at its summit, placed within an oval ditch, a giant earthwork has been identified by researchers from the University of Trieste as a representation of the constellation of Cassiopeia, as it would have appeared from the site at dawn on July 21, 356 BC, the birthday of the famed Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great. “Cassiopeia, lies directly to the north,” the researchers conclude:

  and stands vertically above the geoglyph in the sky’s zenith, forming a perfect picture of the sky on the earth.8

  Nor are such sky-ground endeavors confined to the ancient world. A relatively recent example is the Hoover Dam in the United States. There at the base of the towering Monument of Dedication with its black diorite pedestals supporting two colossal and imposing winged figures—themselves reminiscent of Mesopotamian and Ancient Egyptian deities—the sculptor Oscar Hansen created a spectacular terrazzo floor with an inbuilt star chart. Here’s how the US Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation describes the artwork, and its purpose:

  The chart preserves for future generations the date on which President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated Hoover Dam, September 30, 1935 …

  In this celestial map, the bodies of the solar system are placed so exactly that those versed in astronomy could calculate the precession (progressively earlier occurrence) of the Pole Star for approximately the next 14,000 years. Conversely, future generations could look upon this monument and determine, if no other means were available, the exact date on which Hoover Dam was dedicated.9

  Hansen, who explicitly compared the dam to the Great Pyramid as “a monument to collective genius exerting itself in community efforts around a common need or ideal,”10 also incorporated the signs of the zodiac into his design.11 Such elements, he said, were all put there as clues and pointers, so that “in remote ages to come, intelligent people” would be able to discern “the astronomical time of the dam’s dedication.”12

  It so happens that the Hoover Dam and its monumental sculptures were completed in the same year, 1935, but it is, of course, possible to use symbolic architecture and astronomical alignments to make a permanent statement about significant moments in the past at any time. A parallel might be the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of our era but referring in every symbolic detail and in the sacred astronomy built into their stones and stained glass,13 to much earlier periods—notably to the time of Christ and the time of the Old Testament patriarchs.

  From a purely astronomical point of view, what can be said about the huge effort and endeavor of the Giza monuments is that the ground-plan of the pyramids and the Sphinx does speak clearly of the epoch of 10,500 BC. But as readers of my previous books will be aware, the monuments also include features, such as the four narrow shafts angled up through the body of the Great Pyramid, that target significant stars in the epoch of 2500 BC when Egyptologists believe the pyramids were built.14

  In other words both epochs are symbolized—2500 BC by the shafts and 10,500 BC by the ground plan.

  Long-lived cult of the Sages

  The hypothesis I derive from this is t
hat Giza was one of several sites around the world—Göbekli Tepe was another—where survivors of a great prehistoric civilization that had been all but destroyed in the global cataclysm at the onset of the Younger Dryas chose to settle, and where their sages set in motion a long-term plan to bring about “the resurrection of the former world of the gods … The re-creation of the destroyed world.”15 Perhaps they felt that their own civilization had made some terrible error, some ghastly mistake, that had brought down the punishment of the universe upon them in the form of the Younger Dryas comet, and that it would therefore be impious or unwise to seek to refashion the destroyed world all at once and straight away. Indeed, perhaps it proved impossible for them to do so. Though its climate would have been attractive, at a time when much of the world was in the midst of a sudden deep freeze, the Nile Valley, like so many other places, did suffer cataclysmic events both at the beginning and at the end of the Younger Dryas. These events included episodes of extreme river floods, the so-called “Wild Nile,” that recurred several times in the epoch of 10,500 BC, with calmer and more predictable conditions not being restored until about 9000 BC.16

  Located on higher ground, well above the valley floor, there is no evidence to suggest that Giza itself was ever scoured by those floods and it would, therefore, have been an obvious choice in Egypt for the survivors to have established a base and begun work on an architectural project, perhaps focused around certain natural features of the plateau itself. Among these I would draw particular attention to the rocky hill more than thirty feet high—an excellent contender for the “Great Primeval Mound” described in the Edfu texts, as we shall see—that would much later be incorporated into the core of the Great Pyramid.