Read Before the Pyramids: Cracking Archaeology's Greatest Mystery Online
Authors: Christopher Knight,Alan Butler
Tags: #Before the Pyramids
We cannot know for sure if there is a chamber beneath the stone set in the middle of the Ellipse, let alone a tunnel to the White House. But we would wager a large bet that both are present and that an object or objects of considerable historic and cultural value are now residing in that chamber. It is even possible that Enoch’s triangle of gold is there but, if so, it is likely to be a copy made in Jerusalem during the early centuries
BC
.
We truly believe that Washington was destined to be the New Jerusalem, the hub of the world that would herald in a new age – a new world order. The evidence, both direct and circumstantial, also points to an amazing treasure lying at the absolute centre of the city and the District of Columbia.
The White House was built on the ‘White Lot’, a piece of land deliberately left alone despite all the building going on around it. This area was thought to be the very heart, not just of Washington DC but also of the District of Columbia. Its ultimate signature as a place of megalithic proportions and importance did not become evident until the Ellipse was finished and the Meridian Stone was placed at its very centre in 1890. Things would probably have moved quicker had it not been for the exhausting Civil War.
The placing of the Meridian Stone brought to life an incredible series of deliberately planned measurements that had actually existed since Washington DC had first come into existence. The Meridian Stone became the centre of this fantastic web, though of course it isn’t really a web. When seen isolated from the megalithic measurements to the south and east, the true state of affairs regarding the Ellipse becomes quite obvious. What the megalithic lines represent is nothing more or less than a huge and elaborate arrow, pointing directly at the Meridian Stone and whatever lies beneath. (
See
colour plate 13).
The arrow is a double delta, reminiscent of the delta stone of Enoch that was, and is, so important to Scottish Rite Freemasonry.
The centre of the Ellipse is a marvellous place for whatever once slept away the centuries below the Temple Mound in Jerusalem, and then in the more northerly climes of Scotland. It is part of the Presidential Park and will never be given over to development. If we are right, thousands of people walk over it every year and it is the scene of pageantry and enjoyment as the main outdoor meeting place in Washington DC.
Washington DC is the latest legatee of a continuing and constantly re-emerging way not only of viewing the world but also systematically measuring it that self-evidently began long before the pyramids.
We have traced ancient knowledge back over the last 6,000 years – back deep into the Stone Age. But if Thomas Brophy turns out to be correct about his dating of astronomic observatories in the Sahara, and they are 18,000 years old, the account retold in Freemasonic ritual – of great knowledge carried forward from before Noah’s Flood – is true. It seems very possible that Washington DC is a continuation of knowledge held by an advanced culture from the extreme past. And there is still an elite group of people who fully understand this.
Let us hope they are using our heritage well.
This has been the most incredible passage for us. It has taken us on a whole series of journeys and has introduced us to some amazing people, all of whom are dedicated to uncovering the truth of our common past.
It would have been impossible to imagine on that sunny day – which now seems so long ago – when we stood at the centre of the largest and most impressive structure from Britain’s prehistory, how far our research would bring us. Our introduction to the giant henges brought us to an almost immediate realization that everything we had suggested about the incredible megalithic measuring system was not only real, but unequivocally demonstrated to be real by the very dimensions of these massive structures so carefully placed on the landscape. Even more important was the fact that specific comments we had previously made about what we might ‘expect’ our ancient ancestors to have done with the megalithic system were also born out at both Thornborough and at Dorchester-on-Thames.
These quite remarkable people knew the size and shape of the Earth. They carried out detailed experiments to qualify and to prove what they knew, and they managed to create a system of measurements based entirely on an intimate knowledge of the Earth, its dimensions and its orbit around the Sun. And Jim Russell has made a great contribution to our understanding of just how this could have been achieved.
And this was no cul-de-sac of history, as archaeology currently believes. We now know that a full 1,000 years after the great henges of Britain were constructed, the culture that planned and built them was being prevailed upon to take its knowledge far from the shores of the British Isles. The knowledge that designed and built the astronomical observatories of Britain would be used to lay down the footprint of the Great Pyramid and its companions. The same ideas and protocols were present. But the fact that the plan for the pyramids was almost certainly laid down at Thornborough bears testimony to the fact that the henge array was known, respected and perhaps even revered across a great area of our planet.
Our journeys during our research for this book, together with some of the experts we met on the way, had led us to realize that even the amazing achievements of the henge builders was not the start of the story. The existence of standing stones in Egypt, together with the evidence regarding the Sphinx and its true age, prove beyond doubt that the emergence of civilizations and almost certainly super-civilizations, took place long, long before orthodox history has ever considered. What happened to these lost people, with their amazing knowledge of the Earth and even the universe, remains a puzzle, though the vulnerability of the Earth to comet and meteorite strikes probably offers the best clue we have.
We had been led to our recognition of the importance of the British henges by the most incredible coincidence – the discovery of an 18th century building with megalithic proportions in a pretty English city. Our research into the King’s Circus in Bath, though we had never sought it, brought us face to face once again with Freemasonry, a subject we have dealt with in the past. And when it became obvious that there were other megalithic connections in Bath apart from the King’s Circus, we felt duty-bound to see if these ancient measurements had been used in other 18th-century structures. It was at this point that things began to become truly incredible.
The custom-built city of Washington DC, far to the west of Britain across the Atlantic Ocean, turned out to be a veritable repository of megalithic knowledge. Not merely specific buildings but the entire plan of the city had been based upon the Megalithic Yard and megalithic geometry. Once again we came head to head with Freemasonry, and with an ancient story that began in prehistoric Jerusalem.
Nor was Washington DC’s reliance on megalithic measurement and geometry restricted to the city’s foundation. It was self-evidently understood and used as recently as our own century. But the most intriguing spot in Washington DC lay at the very centre of the District of Columbia, in the middle of an elliptical park with megalithic proportions. This obviously sacred spot had been planned well over 200 years ago because its creators had left a huge and unmistakable arrow on the landscape, specifically pointing to this very place.
Washington DC is an ‘astronomically planned’ city. It is an intended repository for ‘something’ that almost certainly slept for centuries beneath the equally astronomically planned chapel of Rosslyn in Scotland. Whatever this treasure may be it originally came from the Temple of Jerusalem, yet another structure that was planned according to the stars. Are we looking at something so old it was once held by the patriarch Enoch? This possibility seems unlikely but it may well have originated in the early centuries
BC
– or even to the time of King Solomon.
What a story, what an adventure. For the remainder of our lives when we look up at the star-spangled sky and see the three stars of Orion’s Belt pointing relentlessly down to Sirius, we will know that from the lonely uplands of Stone Age Britain to the first steps of a much more recent people desperate for freedom and self-determination, we are in good company. And whoever you are, you people in Washington DC and probably elsewhere on our planet who already know these secrets and hold them sacred to this day, we can only admire a conviction, a resilience and a firm commitment that has endured for such an incredibly long period of time.
But one thought is inescapable. It is now time to fully re-examine the history of mankind and look again at old ideas of the past that are so obviously and lamentably inadequate. Archaeology must find a way to put aside its 19th- and 20th-century assumptions and move forward to a new paradigm of social and scientific evolution that respects the gargantuan achievements of our forebears.
We all have so much to relearn.
•
In order to establish how, when and where the Thornborough Henge complex had been planned we ran many simulations predominantly using Cyber Sky 4, an astronomical computer programme that, experience had taught us, gave reliable and stable results, even when working back in time several thousand years.
We suspected that there was a common factor involved between the length of a pendulum used to establish the correct footprint for the henge complex and the finished size of the structure as it would appear on the ground. In our estimation, getting a really accurate match between the stars of Orion’s Belt and the henges on the ground would have been impossible using only naked-eye estimation. Meanwhile, we knew that the match was almost absolutely perfect. No magnification or instrumentation was available to these early astronomers and the only weapon at their disposal, in order to get the accuracy they required, was their ability to measure the passage of time by using a pendulum set against rising stars.
We tried to recreate the right circumstances from the area of Thornborough itself. We knew that included in the central henge was a cursus. A cursus is a long often straight track that was originally defined by henges and banks on both sides, that predated the henges. Although we did not have a date for this cursus it was a fair bet that the location was of interest to our ancestors for some time before the henges were completed.
No model we could run would give us the necessary pendulum/footprint relationship we were seeking, though the results were very close. In the end we discovered that the experiments necessary to plan the footprint of the Thornborough complex must have been carried out not at Thornborough itself but at its sister henge further south at Dorchester-on-Thames in Cambridgeshire, England.
This is how we believe it was undertaken:
The height of the bank tops of the Dorchester-on-Thames henge, when seen from the centre of the henge, must have given a minimum view of the sky beyond at a height of around 3° above the natural horizon. Dorchester-on-Thames occupies a latitude of 51° 38' 50" N and a longitude of 001° 09' 21" W. We estimated our experiment to have been carried out on, or close to, the winter solstice in 3500
BC
(December 18). In this model the first star of Orion’s Belt would have appeared above the eastern bank top at 18 21 02 hours. This star is Mintaka. The third star to appear, which is Alnitak, appeared at 18 36 56 hours. The elapsed time between the two was 15 minutes and 54 seconds of time (954 seconds).
A Megalithic half-yard pendulum, when used at this latitude, completes one beat in 0.655 seconds. During a period of 954 seconds the pendulum could have completed 1,454 beats. Each pendulum length is ? MY so to make the linear length up to 1 MY the number of beats is halved, giving a total of 727 MY. The position of the centre star, when translated to the ground, had to be calculated in a different way (
see
Appendix 2), but once this had been ascertained it would have been discovered that the ratio of the gap between the northernmost henge (Mintaka) and the middle henge (Alnilam) to the gap between the middle henge (Alnilam) and the southern henge (Alnitak) would have been 366:360.
366 + 360 = 726, which is stunningly close to the 727 pendulum beats we established for the difference in rising time between Mintaka and Alnilam. Thus we can see that, following the rule of pendulum beats to linear measurements, the full range of henges should have been Mintaka to Alnitak 366 MY and Alnitak to Alnilam 360 MY. To follow this procedure strictly would have meant that smaller henges would have been necessary so, in our opinion, a decision was made to increase each proposed Megalithic Yard to a Megalithic Rod – making the whole structure 2.5 times bigger than it would have been using the Megalithic Yard.
However, the ratios remain exactly the same, which is why the stars in the sky are such a good fit when superimposed onto the Thornborough Henge group.
The true distance between the northernmost henge and the central henge centres is 366 MR, whilst the distance between the central henge and the southernmost henge is 360 MR.
We therefore suggest that what we have described above is by far and away the most likely explanation for the size of the Thornborough Henge array and explains its almost perfect match to the stars of Orion’s Belt.
•
In Appendix 1 we showed how the overall footprint of the Thornborough henges was planned using a half Megalithic Yard pendulum at Dorchester-on-Thames henge in around 3500
BC
. However, we soon became aware that this experiment would not have worked for accurately placing the middle henge so that the finished configuration accurately matched the stars of Orion’s Belt. This is because of the angle at which the three stars rise. Trying to place the centre henge in this way would have put it too close to the southern henge, and the fit between the henges and the stars would not have been correct.
However, there was an ingenious way in which the position of the middle henge (though not the dogleg in the system) could have been established, this time using the metre pendulum with which we know these ancient astronomers were also familiar.