From Atlantis to the Sphinx (45 page)

But we know that Cro-Magnon man achieved it. And we are also in a position to understand the importance of that step forward. A man who believes that he can influence nature and capture his prey by means of magical ritual has a new sense of control. He feels that, in some sense, he has found the key to becoming the master of nature rather than its slave. Life ceases to be a non-stop struggle for survival, which he often wins only by the skin of his teeth. He has undergone a psychological revolution that might be labelled the purpose-revolution.

If Marshack is correct, then a close study of the heavens also played its part in the revolution. To begin with, it was probably merely a matter of creating some kind of calendar, which enabled him to anticipate the changes of the seasons. But since this study played a central part in his more active and involved attitude towards his own existence, it must have become something in which he indulged more and more for its own sake.

But we are speaking of Cro-Magnon man as if he was an individual, who enjoyed indulging his hobby of star-gazing. What must be understood is that ancient man was never an ‘individual’ in our modern sense. He was a member of a group—of both males and females—who shared the consciousness of that group. Animals operate on a collective instinct, like a herd of reindeer or a flock of birds or a school of fishes, and this is how we need to think of our remote human ancestors.

But hunting magic made another basic difference, as we can see from his cave paintings. Those who performed it were shamans, ‘magicians’, and it was inevitable that the shaman would also become the leader. In primitive societies, the priest quickly becomes the priest-king, the priestess the priestess-queen. And this has the effect of creating a new kind of unity, a new level of purpose.

This must have have been one of the most important factors in the evolution of Cro-Magnon man towards modern
Homo sapiens
. He had a leader whom he regarded with unqualified admiration. From now on, he could face the world with total singleness of purpose. And with this unity of purpose, he was ready to create civilisation.

How long did it take? We have no idea. Conventional history suggests about 25,000 years between the time when Marshack’s Cro-Magnon star-gazers turned into farmers and then city-builders. The evidence we have examined in this book suggests that it was far less than that, and that by perhaps as long ago as 20,000 BC, the ‘collective unity’ with its shaman-king or priestess-queen had evolved into some early form of civilisation.

According to Hapgood, a worldwide maritime civilisation existed at a time when Antarctica was free of ice, perhaps 7000 BC. But if Schwaller de Lubicz is correct in believing that the Sphinz is water-weathered, then some fairly sophisticated civilisation antedated it by three or four thousand years. In
Earth’s Shifting Crusty
Hapgood argues that Antarctica was 2500 miles closer to the equator in 15,000 BC. If so, then it is easy to imagine that its movement was a major catastrophe for those who lived there, and probably involved massive flooding.

We have looked closely at the evidence that survivors from this drifting continent took refuge in South America and in Egypt, and that the native peoples of Central and South America called them the Viracochas.

If Schwaller is correct, then a group of these Viracochas moved to Egypt found that this sheltered country, with its great river and its yearly inundation, was the ideal home, and began to create a new civilisation. Aware of the precession of the equinoxes, which played a central part in their religious belief, they laid the foundations of their temple on the Giza plateau, where a great mass of granite became identified with the ‘primeval mound’. They built the Sphinx, gazing towards the constellation of Leo, and laid out the ground-plan of the pyramids, whose conformation was precisely that of the three stars of Orion’s Belt in 10,500 BC. They planned to complete their Temple of the Stars when Orion came close to the heavenly counterpart of the Giza plateau. Then the pharaoh-god would perform the ceremony that would send Osiris back to his home in the skies, and inaugurate a new Golden Age.

Egyptologists are agreed that this Golden Age actually arrived, around 2600 BC. There was an explosion of creative energy, an upsurge of optimism. With religious conviction acting as a ‘third force’, the ancient Egyptians became the highest manifestation of the human evolutionary drive so far achieved.

For the ancient Egyptians, magic was accepted in the same way that modern man accepts technology—not magic in the sense of a contradiction of the laws of causality, but, as Schwaller explained, in the sense of being ‘bathed in a psychic atmosphere which establishes a bond between the individuals, a bond which is as explicit as the air which is breathed by all living beings.’ In other words, Egyptian magic was undoubtedly closer to the magic of the porpoise caller of the Gilbert Islands, or the Amahuaca chieftain performing a hunting ritual, than to the absurdities described by Budge. Such magic is based upon an understanding of forgotten laws of nature.

In attempting to gain some insight into how the Egyptians lifted giant blocks of stone, I asked Christopher Dunn, the manufacturing engineer who had studied the sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid, whether he had any practical—or even impractical—suggestions. By way of reply he sent me a strange little pamphlet called
A Book in Every Home
, written by a man called Edward Leedskalnin, and published by the author in Homestead, Florida. Leedskalnin, apparently, was an eccentric who lived in a place called Coral Castle, near Miami, Florida, which he built himself from giant blocks of coral, some weighing as much as 30 tons. Leedskalnin, a thin little man who was only five feet tall, died in 1952 without divulging the secret of how he constructed the ‘castle’, and moved these enormous weights. In 28 years, he quarried and erected a total of 1,100 tons.

A Book in Every Home
tells us the reason that Ed Leedskalnin became a recluse. ‘I always have wanted a girl, but I never had one.’ As a young man, he fell in love with a sixteen-year-old girl, but his courtship was apparently unsuccessful. This may have been because she turned him down, although the pamphlet hints strongly that the real reason was that he learned that she was not a virgin, and decided that it would be humiliating to accept ‘damaged goods’. He seems to have become obsessed by the idea that most girls of ‘sweet sixteen’ (one of his favourite phrases) were ‘damaged’ (although he obviously regarded even a kiss as evidence of depravity), and ‘that is why I was so successful in resisting the natural urge for love making’. The pamphlet advises all mothers not to allow their daughters to associate with ‘fresh boys’, and even suggests that they should offer themselves instead.

Leedskalnin’s disappointment in love led him to retire to Homestead, Florida, where he worked out some secret process of moving and lifting giant blocks, weighing an average of 6½ tons—more than the average weight of blocks in the Great Pyramid.

Christopher Dunn had visited Coral Castle for the first time in 1982; now, following my letter, he was kind enough to pay a second visit, which convinced him that Leedskalnin was merely telling the truth when he declared: ‘I know the secret of how the pyramids of Egypt were built.’ But he refused to divulge it, even to US Government officials, who paid him a visit and were shown around the castle. The only hint he would drop was to the effect that ‘all matter consists of individual magnets, and it is the movement of those magnets within material through space that produces measurable phenomena, i.e. magnetism and electricity.’

Christopher Dunn’s discussions with a colleague, Steven Defenbaugh, led them to conclude that Leedskalnin had invented some kind of antigravity device. Then it struck him that merely getting out of bed in the morning is an anti-gravity device, and that this concept brings the solution no nearer.

On the other hand, there are even now magnetic levitation trains that are basically anti-gravity devices. If one magnet is suspended over another, there is a natural tendency for their opposite poles to align themselves, so they attract one another. If their poles can be prevented from aligning, they repel one another. Could Leedskalnin have used this principle in raising his vast blocks? One photograph of Ed Leedskalnin’s backyard shows a device like three telephone poles leaning together to form a tripod, with a square box on top. Wires descend from this box and hang between the poles. No such box was found in Leedskalnin’s workshop after his death, so presumably he disassembled it to prevent it from being examined.

What Christopher Dunn
was
able to find in the workshop was a large flywheel, which Leedskalnin is supposed to have used to create electricity. The bar magnets on it were set in concrete. Dunn went off and purchased a bar magnet at a local hardware store. Then he returned to the workshop and spun the flywheel, holding the bar magnet towards it. Sure enough, the magnet pushed and pulled in his grasp like a shunting train. This was enough to suggest that Leedskalnin’s secret involved magnetism.

Dunn points out that the earth itself is a giant magnet—although we still have no idea of what causes the magnetism. And of course, matter itself is electrical in nature. Had Leedskalnin discovered some new principle that utilised earth magnetism? Or, if that sounds too absurd to take seriously, could he have somehow turned his whole block of coral into a giant magnet by wrapping it in steel sheets and using an electric current? And then used his push-pull device to force it to move? Could he even have suspended his iron-clad block like a magnetic levitation train?

The obvious objection to all this—as a solution to how the pyramids were built—is that the Egyptians knew nothing of electricity, and possessed no iron. In fact, there are those who doubt both propositions. When Howard-Vyse was exploring the Great Pyramid in June 1837, he told one of his assistants, J. R. Hill, to use gunpowder to clear the far end of the southern ‘air shaft’ in the King’s Chamber (the one that Bauval discovered to have been pointing at Orion’s Belt in 2500 BC). Hill blasted away at the southern face of the Pyramid, and after clearing away much debris, found a flat iron plate near the mouth of the air shaft. It was a foot long, four inches wide, and an eighth of an inch thick, and did not look like meteoric iron; in fact, since it looked like ordinary wrought iron, the ‘experts’ were inclined to doubt its genuineness. But when Flinders Petrie examined it in 1881, he found fossilised protozoa in the rust, revealing that it had been buried for a long time next to a block of limestone with fossils in it. In 1989, it was re-examined by Dr M. P. Jones of the Mineral Resources Department at Imperial College, London, and he and a fellow metallurgist, Dr Sayed El Gayer, established that it was
not
meteoric iron, since its nickel content was too low. Their tests showed that it had been smelted at a temperature of over 1000 degrees centigrade, and that there were traces of gold on one side of the plate, suggesting that it had once been gold-plated. The conclusion would seem to be that the Egyptians knew how to smelt iron ore—approximately two thousand years before the Iron Age.

The trace of gold raises another possibility—gold plating by electrical means. In June 1936, the German archaeologist Wilhelm König, of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, came upon a clay vase containing a copper cylinder, inside which—held in by asphalt and molten lead—was an iron rod. He recognised it as a primitive battery. Other archaeologists dismissed this conclusion on the grounds that the Parthian grave in which the battery was found dated back to about 250 BC. But another German Egyptologist, Dr Arne Eggebrecht, agreed with König, and constructed a duplicate which, when filled with fruit juice, produced half a volt of electricity for eighteen days. He was able to use this to coat a silver figurine in gold in half an hour. Eggebrecht had noticed gold-covered Egyptian statues in which the gold coating seemed to be too thin and fine to have been applied by gluing or beating, and concluded that it was highly likely that the Egyptians knew about electroplating. It seems certain that the Parthians did—for it is hard to think what else the battery was intended for.

Others have suggested an even more intriguing possibility. One puzzle about painted Egyptian tombs is what the artists used to light the tomb as they worked on the painting—they show no sign of lampblack on the ceilings. But on the walls of the temple at Dendera, there are engravings that might be electric lights and insulators. Admittedly, this would also have involved inventing a light bulb containing a vacuum, which sounds too far-fetched—it seems far more likely that the artists used oil lamps with well-trimmed wicks, or that they carefully cleaned all lampblack off the ceiling. But these suggestions serve to remind us that we still have no idea of how the Egyptians drilled out the sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber, or the inside of vases whose neck is too thin to admit a child’s finger. All that is certain is that they knew far more than we give them credit for.

The basic problem may be the one that these last few chapters have tried to pinpoint: that as products of a technological culture, we find it virtually impossible to place ourselves inside the minds of a far simpler, more primitive culture. Schwaller de Lubicz never tires of emphasising that when the ancient Egyptians expressed themselves in symbols, this was not because their drawing ‘symbolised’ something, in the way that Freud claims an obelisk symbolises a phallus. The symbol was the
only
way to express what they meant. To look for hidden meaning is rather as if someone stood in front of a Constable painting and said: ‘I wonder, what he meant by it?’

We have to try to understand what it means to be a civilisation that is totally
unified
by its religion. As Schwaller says: ‘Ancient Egypt did not have a “religion” as such;
it was religion in its entirety
, in the broadest and purest acceptation of the term.’

We can perhaps begin to grasp this if we think in terms of one of those modern messianic sects who believe that their leader is God, or a reincarnation of Christ, and who would be glad to die for him. Their total belief in their messiah makes life marvellously simple; they feel absolutely secure from the problems and contingencies that torment the rest of us. They have made the discovery that total, unquestioning belief creates a kind of heaven on earth, and even in the face of the most conclusive evidence that their messiah is not what he claims to be, they refuse to be swayed. They are, in fact, refusing to exchange their state of inner peace and certainty for the usual miseries and hazards of human existence.