As I recall, although RSI did not appreciate particularly the Cayce involvement, the falling out between RSI and SRI was over fiduciary issues. Why don’t you contact SRI and ask them?
p. 93: ‘Adding to the intrigue ... yet another project financed by the Edgar Cayce Foundation.’
You do want to hang on to that intrigue! No, this was not yet another project. The down-hole immersion acoustical sounding was done in the last days of SRI’s fieldwork at the Sphinx in 1978, not 1982, not another project. I do not have, at present, a copy of this Venture Inward but if it says this is another project in 1982, it is wrong. All that I describe in the quote you excerpted happened the last few days of the 1978 project.
p. 93: ‘a survey, as the reader will recall, ... abrupt halt ... Antiquities Organization.’
You seem inclined to see ‘abrupt halts’. You should not cite me to verify this point because I was not at these events, but my impression is that Schoch, West, and Dobecki were not thwarted in their first season of work at the Sphinx. Permission for such work is granted or denied by a large committee of the Supreme Council for Antiquities (formerly Egyptian Antiquities Organization).
p. 94: ‘Pulling Away. When, exactly, Professor Lehner began to pull away from the influence of the Edgar Cayce Foundation and crossed over into the mainstream of professional Egyptology and its orthodoxy is not especially clear.’
Are you suggesting, based on your own understanding of how belief systems operate, that there are definite lines where ‘now you believe’ and ‘now you don’t’? You seem particularly interested in this question. The way you frame it reminds me of the US Congressional hearings on the Watergate cover-up conspiracy: ‘What did the President know, and when did he know it?’ ‘What did Lehner believe, and when did he not believe it?!’
Let me offer some biography to use if you so choose.
I already had doubts when I went to Egypt in 1973, since Cayce’s ancient history did not agree much with anthropology courses I took at the University of North Dakota. But as I indicated in my last letter, I did indeed have hopes that evidence could be found of past events bearing some agreement with Cayce’s story.
During my two years at the American University in Cairo I majored in anthropology, and took my first courses in Egyptian archaeology and prehistory. I also spent most of my free time at Giza, and I visited other ancient sites and archaeological projects. I did not find ‘footprints of the gods’. By becoming acquainted with a vast amount of previous archaeological research with which the Cayce community and like-minded Egypt-enthusiasts are only minimally familiar, I found the ‘footprints’ of people—their tool marks, names, family relationships, skeletons, and material culture.
In 1974 I read social psychologist Leon Festinger’s work on ‘cognitive dissonance’, in particular his book, When Prophecy Fails. Festinger deals with people reacting to conflict between a revealed belief system and empirically derived information, that is, physical evidence. In his work, I recognized many attributes of the Cayce worldview, my own belief, and my growing doubts.
When I returned to Virginia Beach I would outline in lectures and conversations the real achaeological evidence surrounding the Sphinx and the Pyramids and its conflict with the Cayce picture of Egypt. I spoke to my good friends and supporters, like Hugh Lynn and Joseph Jahoda (are your two unnamed ARE men supposed to remain as mysterious as ‘The Scholar’?), about my doubts, and how the Cayce community and belief system fits many aspects discussed by Festinger and other social scientists.
In these talks I began to suggest to the Cayce community that they look at the Egypt/Atlantis story as a myth in the sense that Joseph Campbell popularized, or that Carl Jung drew upon in his psychology of archetypes. Although the myth is not literally true, it may in some way be literarily true. The Cayce ‘readings’ themselves say, in their own way, that the inner world of symbols and archetypes is more ‘real’ than the particulars of the physical world. I compared Cayce’s Hall of Records to the Wizard of Oz. Yes, we all want the ‘sound and fury’ and powerful wizardry to be real, without having to pay attention to the little man behind the curtain (ourselves). In archaeology, many dilettantes and New Agers want to be on the trail of a lost civilization, aliens, yes, ‘the gods’, without having to pay attention to the real people behind time’s curtain and without having to deal with the difficult subject matter upon which so-called ‘orthodox’ scholars base their views.
(An aside: So a John West can blast Egyptologists for suppressing the sacred science inherent in Egyptian culture without being able to read Egyptian language—a little like saying one knows Shakespeare’s real meaning without reading English. Another pyramid theorist said, in an animated dinner conversation, ‘Where’s the evidence? The pyramid stands out there with no evidence of how the ancient Egyptians could have built it.’ I ticked off four Egyptological titles—all in English—devoted to ancient Egyptian tools, technology, stone building, and materials and industries. Although he had published a widely acclaimed book with a new theory on the pyramids, he admitted to not having read a single one of these basic works. It would be so much more fun and challenging if such theorists did actually read and absorb such primary sources, and then launched the dialogue.)
These ideas were on my mind as I joined my first ‘mainstream’ excavation in 1976. They are reflected in my statement that the Hall of Records is worth looking for, but not in a tangible way. You know, like the Holy Grail.
In 1977-78 I had the opportunity not only to work with the SRI project at Giza, but also to work with Zahi Hawass in excavations of ancient deposits neglected by earlier archaeologists in the northeast corner of the Sphinx floor—just beside the north forepaw, and on the floor of the Sphinx Temple. We recovered pottery, parts of stone tools, and other material directly on the floor, filling deep crevasses and nooks and crannies—material in contexts that only make sense as left by the Old Kingdom Sphinx and pyramid builders.
Such findings, and the negative results of the SRI project, sealed it for me. That is, I knew there was an extremely low probability that Cayce’s story of Egypt and the Giza monuments (and his ancient ‘history’ involving Atlantis, etc.) reflected real events.
My interest in the Cayce-like genre of literature as having anything to do with the archaeological record was gone, although I am still interested in this genre as a social and literary phenomenon. My encounters with bedrock reality were far more fascinating. I was excited by the process of reconstructing the past from empirical evidence. I put aside my interest in the dynamics of beliefs, and in general questions of philosophy and religion, as I spent the next decade doing archaeological fieldwork for projects at various places in Egypt. At Giza, my interest and research was no longer premised on Cayce or any similar point of view. In 1982 I carried out the research and writing for an Egyptological monograph on the tomb of Hetepheres (published in 1985 by the German Archaeological Institute). Cayce ideas had nothing to do with this work.
Meanwhile Hugh Lynn Cayce (until he died), Charles Thomas Cayce and other members of the Cayce community remained very close friends. Some (but not all) were still interested in contributing to research at Giza. Their support of the Pyramids Radiocarbon Dating Project was a way to do something useful for the archaeology of the pyramids, as well as to test their ideas about the origin and date of the Great Pyramid and Sphinx.
I remember a very personal moment in 1983 when I was working for an expedition at Abydos, the cult center of Osiris in Upper Egypt. The tombs of Egypt’s earliest pharaohs were sunk into a spur of low desert far to the west of the cultivation, near the base of the great cleft in the high cliffs, probably seen by the ancients as symbolizing the entrance to the Netherworld. Many centuries later, one of the tombs of a real man who ruled as one of the First Dynasty kings was outfitted as the Tomb of Osiris. Over subsequent centuries hundreds of pilgrims left pottery offerings, resulting in mounds of millions of shards that masked the site, prompting its Arabic name, Umm el-
Qa-ab, ‘Mother of Pots’. One evening near sunset I walked from the dig house to Umm el-Qa-ab. I stood on the mounds above these tombs and wondered if the ancient pilgrims really believed the god Osiris himself was buried here, and if ‘those who sit near the temple’ (as a Zen proverb would say)—the local priests—knew they had simply outfitted one of the First Dynasty tombs of a pharaoh to ‘symbolize’ the burial of Osiris. I thought of my own pilgrimage that brought me to Egypt in the first place, and the myth of the Hall of Records. I realized that this was part of a world view that had moved far away from me, like a chunk of ice that had separated from a continent and was now melting in a distant sea.
Sorry to be so long-winded. But Graham, I agree with your statement in your last letter that readers should be in possession of the facts to evaluate the opinions of academic authorities.
Sincerely,
Mark Lehner
PS Details: It probably does not matter much for a popular readership, but the difference between an Assistant Professor—my title at the Oriental Institute—and Professor is significant in the tenure-track world. I resigned my fulltime post, but I am still a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago and Oriental Institute, I return every other year to teach.
cc: Bruce Ludwig
Douglas Rawls
To: Mark Lehner
From: Graham Hancock
8 December 1995
Dear Mark,
Thank you for your further letter of 16 November 1995 in response to our revised draft of Chapter 5. We greatly appreciate your openness.
If you have no objections, we propose to publish the revised draft of Chapter 5 as you have seen it and to publish your 16 November 1995 letter in full as an appendix to our book. We consider this to be a fair and reasonable way to present the whole matter to the public. If we don’t hear back from you in the next couple of weeks we will assume this is OK with you.
Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!
Warm best wishes,
Graham Hancock
PS We remember one Egyptological title (not four) that you ‘ticked off’ during a certain ‘animated dinner conversation’. The one title was Clarke and Engelbach’s Ancient Egyptian Construction and Architecture. We’ve both read it since and weren’t overly impressed. Robert Bauval, as you know, is a construction engineer by training and spent twenty years actually building enormous buildings in the Middle East. In my opinion—Clarke and Engelbach notwithstanding—this gives him a rather good basis from which to engage in ‘fun and challenging’ dialogue about the construction logistics of the Great Pyramid. There’s no substitute for real experience no matter how many ‘primary sources’ we ‘read and absorb’. (And by the way, in what sense are Clarke and Engelbach a primary source? Were they present when the Pyramid was built? Did they build it?)
Appendix 3
Harnessing Time with the Stars:
The Hermetic Axiom ‘As Above So Below’
and the Horizon of Giza
An observer at Giza, as anywhere else on the globe where the horizontal view is not obstructed, will perceive the landscape as a huge circle whose edge is the horizon with himself at the centre—hence the term ‘Horizon’ used by the ancients when referring to the Giza necropolis. Making apparent contact with the horizon is the celestial landscape, the latter perceived as a huge circular dome or hemisphere.
The ‘below’, earth-landscape, is steadfast. The ‘above’, sky-landscape, however, appears to rotate in perpetual motion around an imaginary axis which passes through the two poles of the earth and extends to the ‘celestial poles’ in the sky. The apparent rotation of the sky makes the celestial orbs—the stars, the sun, the moon and the planets—rise in the east, culminate at the meridian (an imaginary loop running due north-south directly over the observer’s head) and set in the west.
Observations of sunrise through the year will fix four distinct points, sometimes called the colures, on the ecliptic path of the sun around the twelve zodiacal constellations. These are the two equinoxes (spring and autumn), and the two solstices (summer and winter). Today these take place in the following zodiacal signs:
1. Spring equinox (21 March) with the sun in Pisces.
2. Summer solstice (21 June) with the sun in Taurus.
3. Autumn equinox (22 September) with the sun in Virgo.
4. Winter solstice (21 December) with the sun in Sagittarius.
The table below shows in which zodiacal signs the four ‘colures’ fell for a variety of different epochs:
EPOCH
10,000 bc
5000 bc
3000 bc
1000 bc
2500 ad
S. Equinox
Leo
Gemini
Taurus
Aries
Aquarius
S. Solstice
Scorpio
Virgo
Leo
Cancer
Taurus
A. Equinox
Aquarius
Sagittarius
Scorpio
Libra
Leo
W. Solstice
Taurus
Pisces
Aquarius
Capricorn
Scorpio
Strictly speaking, the term ‘colures’ denotes the two great circles of the celestial sphere which are at right angles to each other, pass through the poles and intersect the two equinox points and the two solstice points respectively.
The diurnal or daily apparent motion of the sun is from east to west. The annual or yearly apparent motion is much slower from west to east against the background of the starry landscape through a path known as the ecliptic, or zodiacal circle (containing the twelve zodiacal signs). Also because of the phenomenon of the precession of the equinoxes, the four points on the colures (the two equinoxes and the two solstices) will appear to drift westwards at the very slow rate of 50.3 arc-seconds per year (a full circuit in approximately 25, 920 years).
These apparent cyclical motions of the sky are, of course, caused not by the sky itself moving but by the earth’s own spin on its axis in one day, its orbital revolution around the sun in one year, and its slow wobble-like motion in one Great Year (of 25,920 ‘solar’ years). As we have already said, the most noticeable effect of the latter is that the four points on the colures which mark the two equinoxes and the two solstices on the ecliptic, will drift in clockwise direction along the great ecliptic or ‘zodiacal’ circle.
Every day there is a moment when these four points on the colures find themselves in precise alignment with the four cardinal points of the terrestrial globe defined by the directions due east, due south, due west and due north on the circle of the horizon. This is when it can be said that the sky and earth are a ‘reflection’ of each other. In archaic terminology, this is when the ‘Hermetic’ axiom of ‘as above so below’ can be most faithfully expressed.
At this exact moment the colure containing the two solstice points will be looping above the head of the observer from north to south, and thus becomes the prime meridian of the observer. The colure which contains the two equinox points will loop from east to west and will intersect the horizon at due east to due west, and thus define the parallel of the observer. Again, using archaic terminology, this is when the observer is at the ‘centre of the visible universe’.
A simple yet quite precise way of knowing when this idealistic ‘as above so below’ conjunction takes place is to make use of a bright star that sits on the colure containing the two solstice points. The choice of a bright star on the colure as near to the winter solstice point as possible, will permit the observer to lock the sky in the most favourable condition possible: the precise moment of the rising of the vernal (spring) point in the east. This is simply achieved by waiting for the star in question to transit the south meridian. When this happens, the winter solstice point is due south, and all the other colures lock to the remaining cardinal directions.
The effect of th
e precession of the vernal point, however, will cause the chosen star to change position with time. After a century or so the star can no longer be used.
The Great Pyramid is often said to be perfectly set to the four cardinal points. What seems more likely, as we shall see, is that it is set perfectly to the four colure points when they transit the cardinal directions. The setting-out of the Pyramid, therefore, is not merely directional but also, and perhaps more especially, dependent on ‘time’.
In 1934 the French astronomer E.M. Antoniadi correctly noted that the ‘astronomical character of the pyramids (of Giza) is established by the following facts:
1. They are almost exactly, and intentionally, on the thirtieth parallel of the latitude North.
2. They are marvellously orientated on the cardinal points.
3. Their inclined passageways were, with their closing, colossal meridian instruments, by far the largest ever constructed.’[703]
These confirmed facts, and also the fact that the Great Pyramid is a near-perfect mathematical model of the celestial dome or hemisphere, make this monument a material and earthly representation of the sky-landscape. When linked to a specific star, however, the element of ‘time’ is introduced into the equation.
We recall that the ancient builders fixed the main north-south axis of the Great Pyramid to the south meridian transit of the bright star Alnitak, the lowest of the three stars in Orion’s belt. We also recall that the general layout of the three Pyramids of Giza is at 45 degrees to the meridian axis and that this peculiarity, in turn, is reflected in the sky-image of the three stars in Orion’s belt as they appeared in c. 10,500 bc. This was no arbitrary date, however, because it denoted the lowest point or ‘First Time’ in the precessional cycle of Orion. To the ancients, Orion was ‘Osiris’, and the latter, too, had a ‘First Time’ or genesis.