The Stargate Conspiracy (7 page)

Even more baffling is the fact that Temple found himself the victim of a campaign of harassment by the CIA when
The Sirius Mystery
was published in 1976.
³⁵
For example, they put pressure on a business associate of his to make him break up their partnership. Temple claims that this harassment continued for fifteen years. Why? If, like the theft of his copy
of Le renard pâle,
it was intended to prevent his researches, it was remarkably inept and unsuccessful; after all, it was far too late to harass him when the book was already being sold. Neither did the input of the CIA prevent him from reissuing the book - so what was the point? (This CIA harassment is all the more baffling because, as we will see in Chapter 5, Temple himself is a staunch defender of that organisation.) The plot thickens when it is realised that not only American intelligence agencies were taking an interest in the book. Temple discovered that one of the British security services had actually commissioned a report on it - and that MI5 had carried out security checks on him.
³⁶

Temple also relates how he was approached by a prominent American Freemason, Charles E. Webber - an old friend of his family (who have been high-ranking Freemasons for generations) — who asked him to become a Mason. According to Temple, Webber was not just any rank-and-file Freemason, however, but a 33rd degree Mason, the highest rank in the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, the dominant form in the United States. And he wanted Temple to join specifically so that they could discuss his book as equals and without the risk of his revealing Masonic secrets to an outsider. Webber told him:

Why were the CIA, MI5 and the Freemasons so interested in Temple’s
The Sirius Mystery?
Indeed, their interest by no means stopped there: these shadowy agencies lurked behind every corner as our investigation proceeded, and their role in an insidious but very powerful conspiracy was to become disturbingly clear.

Central to the New Orthodoxy of Egyptology is its redating of the Sphinx of Giza, that enigmatic stone hybrid that lies downhill from the three pyramids, in its own hollowed-out enclosure. It was originally carved out of an outcrop that protruded above the limestone bedrock, after which the builders dug out the enclosure to fashion the body.

Its ancient name was Sheshep-ankh Atum — ‘Living Image of Atum’, the creator god — it is thought that ‘Sphinx’ is a corruption of Sheshep-ankh.
³⁸
Among its other names were Ra-Horakhti, from Horakhti meaning ‘Horus of the Horizon’ (Horus the hawk-headed god in his guise as the sun god Ra) and Hor-em-Akhet, ‘Horus in the Horizon’, rendered in Greek as Harmarchis.
³⁹
There are many similar combinations of the god names of Horus and Atum, representing the ancient Egyptian concept of their gods as fluid, and dynamic, principles.

The standard theory about the Sphinx is that it was built by Khafra, who also constructed the Second Pyramid, and carved in his likeness. This is based on the supposed resemblance between the Sphinx’s mutilated face and a statue of Khafra in the Cairo Museum. However, analysis by forensic experts has confirmed what is obvious to anyone with eyes - namely that the two look nothing like each other.
⁴⁰
In fact, the only evidence linking it to Khafra is the Sphinx Stela, an inscribed stone plaque set up between its paws. This describes how Thutmoses III (1479-1425 BCE), while sleeping beside the Sphinx when out on a hunting trip, had a dream that instructed him to clear the sand away from it. At the bottom of the stela, in hieroglyphs that have since flaked off completely, were the words: ‘Khaf ... the statue made for Atum-Harmakhis’. Egyptologists have read ‘Khaf’ as ‘Khafra’, and extrapolated that the sentence originally told how Khafra made the Sphinx. This is certainly wrong. From copies made of the stela it is known that the word was not enclosed in a cartouche,
⁴¹
the standard oval-shape that - as any student of hieroglyphs learns in their first lesson — always indicates the name of a king.

It has been suggested that the head of the Sphinx was originally that of a lion - which makes perfect sense - but was later recarved in the likeness of a reigning king or pharaoh. This theory is based on the fact that the present head is too small for the body, though it is worth noting that, for much of its history, the Sphinx was buried up to its neck in sand, so later Egyptians could have recarved the head without necessarily knowing that the likeness of a lion’s body lay beneath. Significantly, the head and face of the Sphinx are noticeably less eroded than the body, even though it has been standing up to its neck in sand for a substantial number of years, suggesting that the head has been recarved in more recent times.

The erosion of the Sphinx triggered off a major controversy in recent years, leading to a number of new books that reached a massive international audience. Study of the erosion on the Sphinx’s body and the sides of the Sphinx enclosure was initiated by maverick American researcher John Anthony West, based on observations originally made by R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz in the mid 20th century.

Usually described as a ‘philosopher’, Schwaller de Lubicz (1887-1961) was in fact an occult scholar who lived in Egypt between 1938 and 1952, studying the symbolism of the temples, particularly at Luxor. As a practising alchemist he was already steeped in Hermeticism and other esoteric lore and saw the same principles embodied in the temples of pharaonic Egypt. He was particularly interested in the numerology, mathematics and geometry of the temples, which he believed conformed to certain principles he already understood from his occult studies. He wrote a number of books about his interpretation of the Egyptian culture, the most comprehensive being his three-volume Le
temple de l‘homme (The Temple of Man),
published in 1957. In particular he espoused a Pythagorean system in which the number nine was the most important, and this led to his fascination with the Great Ennead of the Heliopolitan religion. He believed that the Heliopolitan system was an expression in mythological terms of certain fundamental principles, and translated the Egyptian neter, meaning ‘god’, as ‘principle’.
⁴²
Schwaller de Lubicz often spoke of the ‘Nine Principles’, which develops greater significance as our investigation proceeds.

John Anthony West first discovered the works of Schwaller de Lubicz while working on his book
The Case for Astrology
(1970). After studying the works at length, West decided to write a more easily accessible account of Schwaller de Lubicz’s theories, previously only available in rare, weighty French tomes. West’s version was entitled
Serpent in the Sky
(1979).

West had noticed in Schwaller de Lubicz’s book an observation that the heavy erosion on the body of the Sphinx was not caused by wind-blown sand, but by water. As he comments in
Serpent in the Sky:

West realised that not only could this be tested, but also that it may have other, more momentous, implications. He wrote in 1979: ‘In other words, it is now possible to prove “Atlantis”, and simultaneously, the historical reality of the Biblical Flood.’
⁴⁴
(Note that both Schwaller de Lubicz and West believed that a flood — or series of floods — had been responsible for the Sphinx’s erosion.)

After trying for some time to find a geologist to analyse the erosion, West eventually attracted the interest of Dr Robert Schoch of Boston University. After analysing the pattern of erosion, Schoch concluded that it had indeed been created by water — rain water.
⁴⁵
His work has since been confirmed by other geologists. When the BBC made a Timewatch television programme about the Sphinx in 1994, for example, they commissioned their own independent geologist to check Schoch’s results, and he arrived at the same conclusion. In fact geologists generally have been happy to agree with Schoch. Egyptologists, on the other hand, refuse to be convinced, whatever the quality of the evidence. For example, Dr Zahi Hawass, then Director-General of the Giza Plateau, said: ‘If geologists prove what Schoch is saying, still in my opinion, as an Egyptologist, the date of the Sphinx is still clear to us.’
⁴⁶

As climatologists can pinpoint fairly accurately periods of rainfall in the past, this would help to date - even to redate — the Sphinx. Schoch concluded, working back from the level of erosion, that the rock forming the body of the Sphinx and the enclosure wall had been exposed to the elements between 7000 and 5000 BCE. This, of course, makes the Sphinx considerably older than mainstream Egyptologists claim.

Schoch’s work was taken by Graham Hancock and John Anthony West to support an even earlier date for the Sphinx. They say that Schoch, as an academic with a reputation to lose, was simply being conservative by assigning the Sphinx’s erosion to the most recent wet period before the accepted dating of the Sphinx.
⁴⁷
In fact, Schoch had concluded that the erosion was
perfectly consistent
with the rainfall in that period, writing in 1995 that his analysis led him to the conclusion that ‘the earliest portions of the statue date back to between 7,000 and 5,000 BC’.
⁴⁸

West believed that a flood had been responsible for the erosion of the Sphinx. Schoch had, in fact, proved him just as wrong as he had the orthodox Egyptologists. This did nothing to prevent Schoch’s findings being transmuted into ‘evidence’ for the Sphinx’s far greater antiquity. As West says: ‘You really have to go back before 10,000 BC to find a wet enough climate in Egypt to account for the weathering on this type and scale. It therefore follows that the Sphinx must have been built before 10,000 BC.’
⁴⁹

Schoch, however, disagrees, writing: ‘I think that his [West’s] estimation of the age of the Sphinx ... is an exaggeration.’
⁵⁰

Graham Hancock, also picking up on Schoch’s work, writes in
Fingerprints of the Gods:
‘Indeed, for two or three thousand years before and about a thousand years after 10,500 BC it rained and rained and rained.’
⁵¹
This assertion has become as enshrined as fact for the New Egyptology as much as Khafra building the Sphinx is fact for academic Egyptologists, which makes it all the more intriguing to discover that
there was no eleventh-millennium BCE wet period.
Significantly, Hancock gives no source and no evidence for his assertion, while on the other hand there is abundant evidence that there was no such wet period.
⁵²
Dr Sarah O‘Mara of Drylands Research at Sheffield University - the world authority on the climate of deserts, past and present - states that up to 8000 BCE: ’we have no evidence that any humans were living in this area [Egypt]. This was an area that was very dry, very cold. It was the time of the last Ice Age.‘
⁵³
That Ice Age, which had begun around 20,000 BCE, ended in 8000 BCE, ushering in a period that fluctuated between wetter and drier periods. And Michael Rice, in his book
Egypt’s Making,
writes: ‘It is probable that the Valley floor could not really have supported a substantial human civilization until about 10,000 years ago [i.e. around 8000 BCE].’
⁵⁴

The climate at the time of the Old Kingdom, when the pyramids were built, was considerably wetter than it is today. In fact, as late as 2500 BCE, when the Great Pyramid was probably built, the annual rainfall in Egypt was the same as parts of England today.
⁵⁵
Between 7000 and 5000 BCE, the climate of Egypt was very wet. Then, after 5000 BCE, the annual rainfall began to decline steadily until shortly after 2500 BCE, when the climate stabilised into its current pattern. The height of the Nile floods declined dramatically between 3100 and 2700 BCE, and this may have been the very reason for the emergence of Egyptian civilisation, as before that time the floods had been too high to sustain a large population on the Valley floor. As Michael Hoffman, the authority on pre-dynastic Egypt says: ‘For a time between 7000 and 2500 BC the deserts bloomed.’
⁵⁶

It has also been suggested - by Robert Temple among others
⁵⁷
— that the water erosion could have been caused by the Sphinx enclosure being filled with water up to the Sphinx’s neck to make a sacred pool. However, Schoch was perfectly specific: the erosion results from running water — rain, not a static body of water.

Schoch’s work demonstrates convincingly that the Sphinx really is older than mainstream Egyptologists claim, perhaps dating back as far as 7000 BCE. But even that seems to fall short for West and Hancock, who appear to want to push it back further - specifically to 10,500 BCE. This is certainly something of a date with destiny for those researchers, and one that they, and their colleagues, seem to us to be doing their utmost to make us believe in. But why?

Another recent theory to catch the public imagination is that of Robert Bauval, who was born in Alexandria in Egypt of Belgian parents. He has been interested in ancient Egyptian culture — and specifically the pyramids - for most of his life.