Grid of the Gods (23 page)

For Michell this social engineering component is further manifest in the ancient conception of kingship being “lowered from heaven,” a divine prerogative, as in the ancient Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations. But for Michell, this divine component is much more than just a claim of the ancient kings being chimerical offspring of the “gods” and of man, but is rather
a reflection of the celestial machine itself:

At the locus of divine law, the cosmic pole is the most powerful symbol of authority and is regarded as the only legitimate source of human laws. Its many images include the scepter, the measuring rod, the king post, and the central pillar. Kings and chiefs are installed upon the local world-center rock, which empowers their rule, and when the rightful lawgiver pronounces from it, his words have the same unchallengeable force as if the rock itself had spoken.
⁷⁹

Thus, it became a consuming compulsion for ancient societies and kingdoms to determine the center of their nation, the first component of this exercise being to find or determine the main north-south axis of a given region or country. It was a symbol, an
image, of the universal axis of the world.
⁸⁰
It was this principle of geomantic power as the basis of political power that lay behind the selection of Hitler’s East Prussia headquarters, outlined in chapter two. The next step was to determine the “regional equator,” the main east-west axis.

The principle is not entirely unknown to modern cartography, for “there are specialists known as centographers, whose business it is to locate centers.”
⁸¹
In the United States, these specialists used what can only be called a “‘center of gravity’ approach. They pasted a map of America on a board, cut out the relevant area, and found its point of balance on a vertical pivot.”
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When this was done, the center of the lower forty-eight states was found to be near Lebanon, Kansas.
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When Alaska and Hawaii were later added to the union, the same method located the new center eleven miles west of Castle Rock in Butte county, South Dakota, a short way north of the small town of Spearfish in the northern Black Hills.
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While such an approach may on the surface sound a trifle silly, it does suggest that the center of gravity approach to a given surface and site location might be hinting at a deeper physics to such locations, a physics having to do with gravity and the very nature of space-time itself, a view also reinforced by the astronomical alignments of many of these sites.

When this approach of finding the major north-south and east-west axes over the most land is taken with respect to the entire world, however, an interesting thing results, as the nineteenth century Scottish Astronomer Royal, Piazzi Smyth observed. Here, a map says it all:

Piazzi Smyth’s Map of the Center of the Surface of the World
⁸⁵

Giza, and more specifically, the Great Pyramid, are positioned as close to the north-south and east-west axes passing over the most land mass on the surface of the Earth, and additionally, over the northwest-southeast and southwest-northeast axes as well.
⁸⁶
It was hardly accidental then that Giza’s Great Pyramid was set as a marker for the prime meridian. The question is, was it something more than that, and if so, then what about the structures on the rest of the Grid, and particularly, the pyramidal ones?

2. The Ancient Catastrophe, the Very High Civilization,
and the Post-Catastrophe Elite

Part of the mystery of the Grid for Michell, as for Hancock, Faiia, Munck and other researchers, is its apparent antiquity. Particularly in northern Europe where such sites are evidently contemporaneous with, or even predate ancient Egypt, this phenomenon for Michell, as for the others, is “the relic of an ancient scientific enterprise, conducted over many centuries and presumably directed by a central college of astronomer-priests whose authority was everywhere accepted.”
⁸⁷
And this poses tremendous problems for the “
ex oriente lux”
standard model of cultural diffusion, in other words, the whole idea that

cultural, scientific and technological innovations were made in the early civilizations of the ancient east, and reached Europe only in a dilute and etiolated form through a slow and gradual process of diffusion. In terms of this model, therefore, it is almost inconceivable that mere barbarians on the remote north-western fringes of the continent should display a knowledge of mathematics and its applications hardly inferior, if at all, to that of Egypt at about the same date, or that of Mesopotamia considerably later.
⁸⁸

The sheer antiquity and scale of the undertaking led Michell to suppose that the Grid was the undertaking of some survivors of a very high civilization lost in the mists of High Antiquity through some catastrophe.
⁸⁹

3. Michell on the Purpose of the Grid System

But what was the purpose of all this activity? Michell’s answers to this question go far beyond the usual “archeo-astronomical” or “archaeo-astrological” measuring markers, and even far beyond the idea of geodetic markers. For him, there is a much deeper
functional
significance to the global grid, a functional purpose perhaps revealed in the fact that, after whatever catastrophe as had overwhelmed the civilization that constructed it, the Grid system appeared to have built to channel whatever energies it represented “to their own magical purposes.”
⁹⁰
Reviewing the work of the early twentieth century German Grid researcher Heinsch, Michell notes that Heinsch’s conclusions were rather breathtaking, for “the laying out of a network of astronomical and geometrical lines across the face of the earth implies a technology which would hardly have been developed to no practical purpose.”
⁹¹

a. Alchemy

But if there
were
energies to be channeled, and if the grid
does
represent a technology of some sort with “a practical purpose”, then what were those energies, and what was the technology designed to do with them? What was its “practical purpose”? The global extent of the Grid itself poses enormous implications for these questions:

Only within recent years, since the development of universal communications allowed us to compare the antiquities of our own countries with those of others, have we been able to see the extent of the vast ruin within which we live. If we ignore all alterations to the landscape arising within the last three thousand years and consider the world as it must have looked in prehistoric times, the pattern that emerges is one so incompatible with our idea of civilization that it is easy entirely to miss its significance.
For what we find is this.

    A great scientific instrument lies sprawled over the entire surface of the globe.
At some period, thousands of years ago, almost every corner of the world was visited by people with a particular task to accomplish
.
With the help of some remarkable power, by which they could cut and raise enormous blocks of stone, these men created vast astronomical instruments, circles of erect pillars, pyramids, underground tunnels, cyclopean stone platforms, all linked together by a network of tracks and alignments, whose
course from horizon to horizon was marked by stones, mounds and earthworks.
⁹²

Note the hidden implication of Michell’s remarks, for if the global Grid was truly only perceived as a
global
network with the rise of modern transportation and communications in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that implies that the elite or elites that constructed the Grid had at least a similar global awareness. Such an awareness would, of course, be natural if that elite or elites were survivors of a prior Very High Civilization.

But notice the real import of Michell’s remarks: modern man is living not only in the midst of a vast ruin of planetary extent, he was also living inside a vast ruined
machine
of planetary extent, a machine to manipulate “something.” What that “something” may be was suggested by the research of William Stukeley once again, who discovered “recurrent forms — the serpent and the winged circle — which he identified as the symboils of the former patriarchal religion, on which Christianity itself was constructed.”
⁹³
We have already encountered a similar “primordial patriarchal” image in the Hindu cosmology examined in the previous chapter in relationship to Angkor Wat, but here it is crucial to note that this winged serpent symbol is also common to Egypt, and as we shall see, to Meso-America as well. The image of “the serpent passing through the circle” is the alchemical symbol of fusion par excellence, and Stukeley observed this symbol at Avebury in England before the image was erased by encroaching civilization.
⁹⁴

As we saw in the previous chapter, this “serpent cosmology” contained a profound clue to Hindu cosmology, which in turn led to a profound and deep “topological metaphor” present in ancient texts, a metaphor of a primordial trinity arising from the transmutative and information-creating nature of the physical medium itself, as the ancients viewed it. It was this characteristic that made the medium the Philosophers’ Stone as such, and thus, Michell is quick to perceive the deeply alchemical nature of the ruined architecture of the global grid, for the “prehistoric alchemists were dealing with the
earth itself, which they regarded as the retort for the alchemical fusion between the ‘sulfur’ of solar or cosmic energies and the ‘mercury’ of the earth spirit.”
⁹⁵

This point cannot be pondered too long, for if the “topological metaphor” of ancient cosmologies and texts has any grain of truth in it, then this means that something
more
is involved in this prehistoric “alchemy” than mere pseudo-science; one is looking not only at a ruined machine, but perhaps at a ruined machine of much more sophistication than popular imagination, whether ancient or modern, would admit.

b. Bloody Sacrifice

Leaving no aspect of this alchemical mystery of the Grid unturned, Michell also notes something else, something sinister connected to some sites on the matrix:

The appearance of an organized spiritual technology, controlled by the priests, was attended in every country by a massive increase in human sacrifice. The Aztec massacres are notorious; the Druids in Ireland are said to have decimated the population. The innumerable sacrificial stones, carved with basins and channels for the flow of blood, and the traditional violent and bloody associations of so many ancient sites confirms what is recorded of the slaughter carried out by priests in the interests of necromancy.

    The practice of human sacrifice
flourished in the ruins of the universal civilization.
The secrets of spiritual invocation, once common property, had become exclusive to those appointed by the community to procure the seasonal renewal of fertility and interpret the will of god through the heavenly portents. The priests, thus established in a position of power, began, as do the members of all professions similarly placed, to extend their influence and activities and to make demands on the population for sacrificial offering.
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Not all sites on the Grid, however, were places where human sacrifice was practiced. This emerges in specific cultures — most famously in Meso-America with the Aztecs, as Michell mentions — and for specific reasons as will be seen in a subsequent chapter. For the moment it is important to note that those reasons may have something to do with the alchemical nature of the Grid itself, and what human sacrifice may have been designed, or at least,
perceived by some,
to do. The clue is provided by Michell’s insight that the purpose of such a practice was
magical
and
necromantic
, that is, it was designed to manipulate, or intensify, whatever forces the Grid itself tapped into.

c. Number, Measurement, and Time: The Grimoire of the Cosmos

Michell, like Munck, sees the key to the Grid system to lie not only in its astronomical alignments, but also in the numbers incorporated into each site’s location, and in the dimensions of the structures built on them. And like Munck and many other Grid researchers, he jettisons the metric system as being of any utility whatsoever for understanding these structures: