From Atlantis to the Sphinx (3 page)

John West proved to be a thin, bespectacled man of immense enthusiasm, and information poured out of him in great spurts, like water from a village pump. I found that, like all genuine enthusiasts, he was generous with his ideas and his time; there was none of the mistrustfulness that I have occasionally encountered in people who seem to believe that all other writers are waiting for an opportunity to steal their ideas. He had with him a first ‘rough cut’ of the videotape of his programme about the Sphinx, and we were able to watch it in the home of playwright Richard Foreman, who found it as exciting as I did. Later, John came out to dinner with my family—my children had met us in America and with the writer on ancient megaliths Paul Devereux. We discussed my projected book on the Sphinx, and John mentioned that I ought to contact another writer, Graham Hancock, who was also writing a book to prove that civilisation is far older than we assume. He also threw off another name—Rand Flem-ath—who was writing a book arguing that Atlantis was situated at the South Pole. This made sense—Hapgood had argued that his ancient maritime civilisation was probably situated in Antarctica, and, now I thought about it, the idea seemed almost self-evident.

And so when I returned to England, I wrote to both Graham Hancock and to Rand Flem-ath. I had heard of Graham, because I had seen a television programme about his search for the Ark of the Covenant. Now he sent me the vast typescript of his book
Fingerprints of the Gods
, and as soon as I began to read it, I wondered whether it would be worth going ahead with my own book on the Sphinx. Graham had already gone into the whole question that John West had dealt with in his television programme, screened in America soon after I returned.

Moreover, Graham also knew all about Rand Flem-ath and his Antarctica theory, and made it virtually the climax of his own book. I had by this time received the typescript of
When the Sky Fell
by Rand and Rose Flem-ath, and learned that they had been inspired by Hapgood’s
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings
, as well as by his earlier book
Earth’s Shifting Crust
, which I lost no time in borrowing from the London Library. I was able to play a small part in persuading a Canadian publisher to accept
When the Sky Fell
by offering to write an introduction.

I was still in two minds about whether it was worth writing my own book. But it seemed to me that there had been such a chain of coincidence and synchronicity since I first came across Schwaller’s water-weathering theory that it would be absurd not to persist.

During the next few weeks—in January 1994—two more pieces of the jigsaw fell into place. I received for review a copy of
The Orion Mystery
by Robert Bauval, and learned of his belief that the pyramid complex at Giza was
planned
as early as 10,450 BC. I was, at this time, still reading Graham Hancock’s vast typescript, and had not yet reached the section on Bauval. But Bauval’s brief mention of Atlantis led me to comment in my review that his own conclusions seemed to support the theories of Schwaller and John West. I wrote Bauval a letter telling him that he ought to contact John West, and I sent West a copy of
The Orion Mystery
.

Second, I had also succeeded in obtaining my own copy of a book called
Al-Kemi
by André VandenBroeck, an American artist who had become a student and close friend of Schwaller de Lubicz in his last years. A couple of years earlier, when I had been researching Schwaller, my old friend Eddie Campbell (whom I had known since he was literary editor of the London
Evening News
) had lent me the book, but I had found it very hard going. Now I had my own copy, I settled down to reading it slowly and carefully, sometimes reading difficult pages two or three times. And as I read on, I became absolutely certain that my own book had to be written. For what emerged from
Al-Kemi
was the certainty that Schwaller believed that the ancient Egyptians had a completely different
knowledge system
from modern man—not simply something like the odd ability to communicate with far-off relatives by telepathy, but a different way of seeing the universe. And what caused me particular excitement was VandenBroeck’s statement that Schwaller believed that this different ‘way of seeing’ could somehow make possible a greatly accelerated rate of human evolution.

I succeeded in contacting André VandenBroeck, and we launched into correspondence by fax. With immense patience, he did his best to explain to me many of the things I had failed to understand. And I contacted Schwaller’s American publisher, Ehud Spurling, who was kind enough to send me the seven books currently in print. These proved to be even more of a headache than
Al-Kemi
, yet equally rewarding—particularly the last book,
Sacred Science
. (Schwaller’s major work, the three-volume
Temple of Man
, has been translated into English but not yet published.) Little by little, I felt I was beginning to understand—although at times it was like walking through a pitch-black night lit only by the occasional lightning flash.

When it appeared in April 1995, Graham Hancock’s
Fingerprints of the Gods
climbed immediately to the top of the British bestseller charts, leaving no doubt that an enormous number of people are fascinated by this question of a pre-ice Age civilisation. But for me this only underlined the question: what
difference
does it make? Whether civilisation is 5000 or 15,000 or 100,000 years old can surely make no practical difference to our lives?

On the other hand, if we are talking about a different knowledge system, a system that is as valid as our own and yet unthinkably different in approach, then it could be of unimaginable importance.

The kind of knowledge possessed by modern man is essentially
fragmented
. If some future visitors from outer space landed on earth, and found vast empty cities full of libraries and museums and planetariums, they would conclude that men of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries must have been intellectual giants. But as their scholars studied our encyclopaedias of science and philosophy and technology and every other conceivable subject, they would quickly recognise that no single mind could even begin to grasp what it was all about. We have no essential knowledge
system
—no way of seeing the universe as a whole and making sense of it.

But if Schwaller is right, and the ancient Egyptians and their predecessors possessed some comprehensive knowledge system that offered them a unified view of the universe and human existence, then the insights of Hapgood and Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock would only be a halfway house. The really important question would lie beyond their conviction that civilisation may be thousands of years older than we suppose. It would lie in the question:
What does it all mean?

One implication, according to Schwaller, is that there must be some method of accelerating the pace of human evolution. The reason this statement excited me so much was because it has been the underlying theme of all my own work. I had noticed, as a child, that at Christmas the whole world seems to be a far richer and more wonderful place than we normally recognise. But of course, what I meant was that
consciousness
itself can be far more intense than the everyday consciousness we accept as ‘normal’. This ‘intenser’ form of consciousness often appears accidentally, in moments of relaxation or relief when a crisis disappears, yet when we experience it, we recognise that it is somehow ‘normal’, merely a different way of seeing things and responding to them. One of the basic characteristics of this state of ‘heightened consciousness’ is that it seems to involve the proper use of our mental energy, instead of wasting it. Normal consciousness is like a leaky bucket, or a tyre with a slow puncture. In certain moods we seem to get the ‘trick’ of closing the leaks, and when that happens, living ceases to be hard work, and turns into a continual glow of satisfaction and anticipation, like the feeling we get when setting out on holiday. I sometimes call this ‘duo-consciousness’, because it depends on being conscious of two realities at once, like a child sitting in front of a warm fire and listening to the patter of rain on the windows, or the feeling we get lying in bed on a freezing winter morning, when we have to get up in five minutes, and the bed has never seemed so warm and comfortable.

Our personal development depends upon what might be called ‘intensity experiences’. Such experiences may be pleasant or unpleasant, like the experiences of Paris in Helen’s arms, or the experience of a soldier under fire; but they certainly have the effect of causing some kind of minor yet permanent transformation of awareness. Yet it seems a pity that our development depends upon the chance of having such experiences, when consciousness is a
state
, not a mere product of what happens to us. A cook can make jellies and cakes; a carpenter can make tables and cupboards; a pharmacist can make sleeping draughts or pick-me-ups. Why should we not be able to make our states of consciousness by understanding how they come about?

Did the ancients understand this process? I doubt it—at least in the I sense I am discussing. What I am fairly certain they understood is some I secret of cosmic harmony and its precise vibrations, which enabled them to feel an integral part of the world and nature, instead of experiencing the ‘alienation’ that Karl Marx declares to be the lot of modern man. Deeper insight into the process of conscious evolution depends, to some extent, on having experienced the process of alienation and learned how to transform it.

What
can
emerge will emerge as a result of passing beyond alienation, and grasping once again this ‘ancient knowledge’—which, according to Schwaller, has been long forgotten, although it has been transmitted down the ages in some symbolic form in the great religions.

The aim of this book is to try to grasp once again the nature of this forgotten knowledge.

At 4.30 in the morning of 16 March 1993, Graham Hancock and his wife Santha prepared to scramble up the side of the Great Pyramid. It had to be this early because climbing the Pyramid had been strictly forbidden since 1983, when an incautious tourist broke his neck. Hancock had bribed the guards with $150, but they refused to stay corrupt, and before he was allowed to climb the Pyramid, he had to bribe them all over again.

The first thing the Hancocks discovered was that climbing the Pyramid was not like walking up a flight of steps. The sides of the Pyramid
are
shaped like steps—and have been since its limestone ‘facing’ vanished centuries ago—but some of them are chest-high. On the other hand, the flat of the step is often only six inches deep, which explains why a tourist who overbalances is unlikely to stop until he reaches the bottom. The Pyramid is 203 ‘steps’ high and slopes at 52 degrees, so by the time the Hancocks were less than a quarter of the way up, they were winded and exhausted, and ready for a long rest; but this was out of the question, since it would be dawn in about an hour, and they would become visible to cruising police cars.

At the 35th course, they noted that the blocks were particularly huge—each weighing between 10 and 15 tons—and found themselves wondering why the builders had decided to put such immense stones so high up the Pyramid, instead of putting them in the obvious place, near the ground—and saving the smaller blocks (around 6 tons each) for higher up.

In fact, now they were actually climbing the Pyramid, they became aware of many mysteries that fail to strike you or me when we look at a postcard of these picturesque objects against a blue sky. To begin with, at over six million tons, the Pyramid is the largest edifice ever built by man. It contains more masonry than
all
the medieval cathedrals, churches and chapels built in Europe added together. Which raises the question:
how
did the builders get these massive blocks up the side of the Pyramid and into place?

Imagine that you are a building contractor, and that the Pharaoh has approached you to build the Great Pyramid. He hands you the measurements, and explains that the four sides of the Pyramid must face north, east, south and west, and that each side must be 755 feet long, and the height must be 481 feet. (You find out later that this gives the same ratio as the circumference of a circle to its radius.) He will provide you with as many blocks as it takes, and with an unlimited number of workmen.

This doesn’t sound too difficult. You work out that, in order to meet his requirements, the sides will have to slope at an angle of 52 degrees. So you will start off by laying the first course, consisting of a 755-foot solid square, constructed of roughly cubical blocks, with weights varying between 6 and 30 tons. The size of the second course must obviously be slightly smaller, with an angle of 52 degrees between the edge of the first course and the edge of the second.

The stones for the second course have to be manhandled on to the top of the first course, but that is easy enough—you build a gently sloping ramp of earth and stone, with wooden planks on top, and each block is heaved up the ramp by twenty of so workmen hauling on ropes. And when you have finished the second course, you repeat the procedure with the third ...

But now you begin to see a problem. As the ramp gets higher, you either have to increase its slope—which would defeat its purpose—or extend it much further back. You quickly calculate that, by the time you have reached the top of the Pyramid, the ramp is going to have to be about a mile long, and to contain around three times as much material as the Pyramid itself. Moreover, if the ramp is not to collapse under its own weight, it will have to be built of massive blocks like those used in the Pyramid.

The alternative is some kind of lifting gear, rather like a modern crane, but built, of course, of wood. But here the same problem applies. To raise blocks weighing several tons to a height of nearly five hundred feet would require a crane built of several of those gigantic trees found in American forests. Such trees do not exist in Egypt, or even in Europe.