p. 27.
12 Ibid.
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The occasion of this was because he saw in his sleep that the whole earth was
turned over, with the inhabitants of it lying upon their faces and the stars falling
down and striking one another with a terrible noise ... And he awaked with great
feare, and assembled the chief priests of all the provinces of Egypt ... He related
the whole matter to them and they took the altitude of the stars, and made their
prognostication, and they foretold of a deluge. The king said, will it come to our
country? They answered yes, and will destroy it. And there remained a certain
number of years to come, and he commanded in the mean space to build the
Pyramids ... And he engraved in these Pyramids all things that were told by wise
men, as also all profound sciences—the science of Astrology, and of Arithmeticke,
and of Geometry, and of Physicke. All this may be interpreted by him that knowes
their characters and language ...13
Taken at face value, the message of both of these myths seems crystal
clear: certain mysterious structures scattered around the world were built
to preserve and transmit the knowledge of an advanced civilization of
remote antiquity which was destroyed by a terrifying upheaval.
Could this be so? And what are we to make of other strange traditions
that have come to us from the dark vault of prehistory?
What are we to make, for example, of the Popol Vuh, which speaks in
veiled language about a great secret of the human past: a long-forgotten
golden age when everything was possible—a magical time of scientific
progress and enlightenment when the ‘First Men’ (who were ‘endowed
with intelligence’) not only ‘measured the round face of the earth’ but
‘examined the four points of the arch of the sky’.
As the reader will recall, the gods became jealous at the rapid progress
made by these upstart humans who had ‘succeeded in seeing, succeeded
in knowing, all that there is in the world.’14 Divine retribution quickly
followed: ‘The Heart of Heaven blew mist into their eyes ... In this way all
the wisdom and all the knowledge of the First Men [together with their
memory of their] origin and their beginning, were destroyed.’15
The secret of what happened was never entirely forgotten because a
record of those distant First Times was preserved, until the coming of the
Spaniards, in the sacred texts of the original Popol Vuh. The abuses of
the conquest made it necessary for that primordial document to be
concealed from all but the most highly-initiated sages and replaced with a
watered-down substitute written ‘under the law of Christianity’:16 ‘No
longer can be seen the book of Popol Vuh which the kings had in olden
times ... The original book, written long ago, existed—but now its sight is
hidden to the searcher and to the thinker ...’17
On the other side of the world, among the myths and traditions of the
Indian subcontinent, there are further tantalizing suggestions of hidden
secrets. In the Puranic version of the universal flood story, shortly before
13 John Greaves, Pyramidographia, cited in Serpent in the Sky, p. 230.
14 Popol Vuh, p. 168.
15 Ibid., p. 169.
16 Ibid., p. 79.
17 Ibid., p. 79-80.
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the deluge was unleashed, the fish god Vishnu warned his human
protégé that he ‘should conceal the Sacred Scriptures in a safe place’ to
preserve the knowledge of the antediluvian races from destruction.18
Likewise, in Mesopotamia, the Noah figure Utnapishtim was instructed by
the god Ea ‘to take the beginning, the middle and the end of whatever
was consigned to writing and then to bury it in the City of the Sun at
Sippara’.19 After the waters of the flood had gone, survivors were
instructed to make their way to the site of the City of the Sun ‘to search
for the writings’, which would be found to contain knowledge of benefit
to future generations of mankind.20
Strangely enough, it was the City of the Sun in Egypt, Innu, known by
the Greeks as Heliopolis—which was regarded throughout the dynastic
period as the source and centre of the high wisdom handed down to
mortal men from the fabled First Time of the gods. It was at Heliopolis
that the Pyramid Texts were collated, and it was the Heliopolitan
priesthood—or rather the Heliopolitan cult—that had custody of the
monuments of the Giza necropolis.
More than just Kilroy was here
Let us return to our scenario:
1 we know that our late twentieth-century, post-industrial civilization is
about to be destroyed by an inescapable cosmic or geological
cataclysm;
2 we know—because our science is pretty good—that the destruction is
going to be near-total;
3 mobilizing massive technological resources, we put our best minds to
work to ensure that at least a remnant of our species will survive the
catastrophe, and that the core of our scientific, medical, astronomical,
geographical, architectural and mathematical knowledge will be
preserved;
4 we are of course aware how slim are our chances of succeeding on
both counts; nevertheless, galvanized by the prospect of extinction,
we make an almighty effort to build the Arks or Vars or strong
enclosures in which the chosen survivors can be protected, and we
focus our considerable ingenuity on ways to transmit the essence of
the knowledge we have accumulated during the 5000 years of our
recorded history.
18 The Bhagavata Purana, cited in Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, p. 88.
19 Berossus Fragments cited in The Sirius Mystery, p. 249.
20 Ibid.
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We start by preparing for the worst. We assume that there will be
survivors but that they will be blasted back into the Stone Age by the
cataclysm. Realizing that it may take ten or twelve thousand years for a
civilization as advanced as our own to rise again like a phoenix from the
ashes, one of our top priorities is to find a way to communicate with that
postulated future civilization. At the least we would want to say to them:
KILROY WAS HERE! and to be sure they got the message no matter what
language they spoke or what ethical, religious, ideological, metaphysical
or philosophical leanings their society might exhibit.
I’m sure we’d want to say more than just ‘Kilroy was here’. We’d want,
for example, to tell them—those distant grandchildren of ours— when we
had lived in relation to their time.
How would we do that? How would we express, say, AD 2012 of the
Christian era in a language universal enough to be worked out and
understood twelve thousand years hence by a civilization that would
know nothing of the Christian or of any of the other eras by which we
express chronology?
One obvious solution would be to make use of the beautiful
predictability of the earth’s axial precession, which
has the effect of
slowly and regularly altering the declination of the entire star-field in
relation to a viewer at a fixed point, and which equally slowly and
regularly revolves the equinoctial point in relation to the twelve zodiacal
constellations. From the predictability of this motion it follows that if we
could find a way to declare: WE LIVED WHEN THE VERNAL EQUINOX WAS IN THE
CONSTELLATION OF PISCES we would provide a means of specifying our epoch
to within a single 2160-year period in every grand precessional cycle of
25,920 years.
The only drawback to this scheme would become evident if a
civilization equivalent to our own failed to arise within 12,000 or even
20,000 years of the cataclysm, but took much longer—perhaps as much
as 30,000 years. In that case, a monument or calendrical device declaring
‘we lived when the vernal equinox was in the constellation of Pisces’
would no longer be unambiguous. If discovered by a high culture
flourishing at the very beginning of a future Age of Sagittarius for
example it could be read as meaning ‘we lived 4320 years before your
time’—that is, two full precessional ‘months’ prior to the Sagittarian Age
(the 2160-year ‘months’ of Aquarius and Capricorn). But it could also
mean ‘We lived 30,240 years before your time’, that is those two
‘months’ plus the full previous precessional cycle of 25,920 years. The
Sagittarian archaeologists would not only have to use their wits to work
out the meaning of the message (i.e. WE LIVED WHEN THE VERNAL EQUINOX WAS IN
PISCES), but would need to decide from other clues which Age of Pisces we
had lived in: the most recent, or the one in the previous precessional
cycle, or perhaps even the cycle before that.
Geology would naturally be of assistance in making such broad
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judgements ...
The civilizers
If we could find a way of saying WE LIVED IN THE AGE OF PISCES, and could
specify the altitude above the horizon of certain identifiable stars in our
own epoch (say, the prominent belt stars of the Orion constellation), we
would be able to signal our dates to future generations with greater
precision. Alternatively we could do as the builders of the Giza pyramids
appear to have done and lay out our monuments in a pattern on the
ground reflecting exactly the pattern of the stars in the sky in our time.
There would be several other options and combinations of options open
to us, depending on our circumstances, on the level of technology
available to us, on the extent of the early warning we were given, and on
which chronological facts we wanted to transmit.
Suppose, for example, that there was not time to make proper
preparations prior to the catastrophe. Suppose that the disaster, like ‘the
Day of the Lord’ in 2 Peter 3, crept up on us unseen ‘as a thief in the
night?’21 What prospects might humanity be faced with?
Whether as the result of an asteroid strike or an earth-crust
displacement or some other cosmic or geological cause, let us assume:
1 massive devastation all around the world;
2 the survival of only relatively small numbers of people, the majority of
whom rapidly revert to barbarism;
3 the presence, among this remnant, of a minority of well-organized
visionaries—including master-builders, scientists, engineers,
cartographers, mathematicians, medical doctors and the like—who
dedicate themselves to salvaging what they can and finding ways to
transmit the knowledge to the future for the benefit of those who
might eventually understand it.
Let us call these hypothetical visionaries ‘the civilisers’. As they banded
together—at first to survive, later to teach and to share ideas—they might
take on something of the manner and belief systems of a religious cult,
developing a clear sense of mission and of shared identity. No doubt they
would make use of powerful and easily recognizable symbols to
strengthen and express this sense of common purpose: the men might
wear distinctive beards, for example, or shave their heads, and certain
archetypal imagery like the cross and the serpent and the dog might be
used to link the members of the cult together as they set out on their
civilizing missions to relight the lamps of knowledge around the world.
21 2 Peter 3:10.
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I suspect, if the situation were bad enough after the cataclysm, that
many of the civilizers would fail, or meet with only limited success. But let
us suppose that one small group had the skill and dedication sufficient to
create a lasting and stable beach-head, perhaps in a region which had
suffered relatively little damage in the disaster. Then let us suppose that
some other unexpected disaster were to occur—an aftershock or series of
aftershocks from the original catastrophe perhaps—and the beach-head
was almost totally annihilated.
What might happen next? What might be salvaged from this wreckage
of a wisdom cult which had itself been salvaged from a greater wreck?
Transmitting the essence
If the circumstances were right it seems possible that the essence of the
cult might survive, carried forward by a nucleus of determined men and
women. I suspect, too, with the proper motivation and indoctrination
techniques, plus a means of recruiting new members from among the
half-savage local inhabitants, that such a cult might perpetuate itself
almost indefinitely. This could happen, however, only if its members (like
the Jews awaiting the Messiah) were prepared to bide their time, for
thousands and thousands of years, until they felt confident that the
moment had come to declare themselves.
If they did that, and if their sacred objective were indeed to preserve
and transmit knowledge to some evolved future civilization, it is easy to
imagine how the cult members might be described in terms similar to
those used for the Egyptian wisdom god Thoth who was said to have
succeeded in understanding the mysteries of the heavens [and to have] revealed
them by inscribing them in sacred books which he then hid here on earth,
intending that they should be searched for by future generations but found only
by the fully worthy ...22
What might the mysterious ‘books of Thoth’ have been? Is it necessary to
suppose that all the information they were purported to contain should
have been transmitted in book form?
Is it not worth wondering, for example, whether Professors de
Santillana and von Dechend might have earned their place among the
‘fully worthy’ when they decoded the advanced scientific language
embedded in the great universal myths of precession? In so doing, is it
not possible that they might have stumbled upon one of the metaphorical
‘books’ of Thoth and read the ancient science inscribed upon its pages?
Likewise, what about Posnansky’s discoveries at Tiahuanaco, and
Hapgood’s maps? What about the new understanding that is dawning
/> concerning the geological antiquity of the Sphinx at Giza? What about the
questions raised by the gigantic blocks used in the construction of the
22 The Egyptian Hermes, p. 33.
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Valley and Mortuary Temples? What about the secrets now being teased,
one by one, from the astronomical alignments and dimensions and
concealed chambers of the pyramids?
If these, too, are readings from the metaphorical books of Thoth, it
would seem that the numbers of the ‘fully worthy’ are increasing, and
that new and even more startling revelations may soon be at hand ...
To return briefly and for the last time to our evolving scenario:
1 at the beginning of the twenty-first century of the Christian era, near
the cusp of the Age of Pisces and the Age of Aquarius, civilization as
we know it is destroyed;
2 among the devastated survivors a few hundred or a few thousand
individuals band together to preserve and transmit the fruits of their
culture’s scientific knowledge into a distant and uncertain future;
3 these civilizers split into small groups and spread across the globe;
4 by and large they fail, and perish; nevertheless, in certain areas, some
do succeed in making a lasting cultural impression;
5 after thousands of years—and perhaps several false starts—a branch
of the original wisdom cult influences the emergence of a fully fledged
civilization ...
Of course the parallel for this last category is once again to be found in
Egypt. I would seriously propose as a hypothesis for further testing that a
scientific wisdom cult, made up of the survivors of a great, lost, maritime
civilization, could perhaps have established itself in the Nile Valley as
early as the fourteenth millennium BC. The cult would have been based at
Heliopolis, Giza and Abydos, and perhaps at other centres as well, and
would have initiated Egypt’s early agricultural revolution. Later, however,
beaten down by the huge floods and other disturbances of the earth
which took place in the eleventh millennium BC, the cult would have been
obliged to cut its losses and withdraw until the turmoil of the Ice Age was
over—never knowing whether its message would survive the subsequent
dark epochs.
Under such circumstances, the hypothesis suggests that a huge and