1
The Sacred Constant
The “Jewel in the Crown”
Although all ancient civilizations were special in their own way, Egypt was in a class entirely of its own. To begin with, it was the first truly unified nation in history. It was also the longest-lived, spanning three thousand years from unification to final dissolution. Its architecture is truly exceptional: in magnitude, sophistication and precision, nowhere since has it been surpassed or even equaled. Most importantly, it was in Egypt, at the very beginning of the era of the historical pharaohs, that the Hermetic Code first came to light. This is demonstrated not only through the pi relationship, which appears to have been incorporated both in the architecture and in the administrative procedures of this culture, but also in its protracted and detailed mythology. The octave format inherent in the natural processes of creation was first expressed in stories surrounding the miraculous appearance of the eight principal gods of the Egyptian pantheon.
It was once pointed out to me that one of the earliest and most influential of the Egyptian creation myths portrayed a pantheon not of eight but of nine gods, known in the Old Kingdom as the Great Ennead. Clearly this rather awkward detail was disconcertingly inconsistent with “my” musical theory. The obvious anomaly puzzled me at first, but on closer examination of the myth in question, I came to realize that there was, in fact, no inconsistency whatever. More than that, I found that this imagery of a mythical group of nine not only embodied within it the symbol of the octave, the primary ingredient of the Hermetic Code, but also an extremely subtle connection with another key component of this universal formula.
The principal god of the Great Ennead, Atum, was said to have fertilized himself to produce eight offspring. So we are already back on safe ground. Eight is good. So is seven, of course, as expressed in the formula pi, the symbol of the triple octave, the “trinity.” In general, the numbers 7 and 8, as they appear in myth and religious tradition, each refer to the same concept, namely, the octave and the musical symmetry inherent in all processes in nature. And the number 9? This also has definite musical connotations. If we substitute the “gods” of the Great Ennead with the word octaves, the result is a musical composition of nine octaves, comprising sixty-four fundamental notes. The Great Ennead, therefore, is simply a mythical expression of the formula pi, the triple octave, which is quite naturally subdivisible into nine inner octaves, sixty-four notes.
Sixty-four is, of course, the square of eight. And the number 8, as I have said, is a constant number, one that consistently recurs in nature, in the genetic code, in the spectrum composing white light, and in the natural harmonies of the major musical scale. The Egyptians evidently recognized this musical symmetry, which is why they held the number 8 to be sacred—hence its association with the gods. Eight was thus regarded as a “sacred constant,” a yardstick by which everything could be measured or compared. Sixty-four, being the square of this number, was therefore of supreme significance to the guardians of the Egyptian mysteries, representing the ultimate goal of the individual—the squaring of one’s possibilities, the acquisition of godlike attributes. In “bioharmonic” terms we might call this the attainment within oneself of an optimum degree of physical and psychological “resonance,” an individual condition of absolute metaphysical harmony. This is simply a higher state of consciousness, a level of perception that empowers the individual to strike metaphysical or conceptual “notes” up in a greater “scale” above, which we call, for want of a better word, heaven.
ORIGINS
I have often speculated on the true age of this ancient wisdom. As far as my own research has revealed, it seems initially to have appeared in its full-blown form in Egypt in the first half of the third millennium BCE. This by no means proves, however, that the concept of the sacred constant actually originated in Old Kingdom Egypt.
Even when starting to write The Infinite Harmony, I suspected that the canon of wisdom to which I had tuned in could be much older than the existing records show. Orthodox historians are reluctant to push back the beginning of Egyptian civilization much further than the establishment of what is known as the Archaic Period, which began around 3100 BCE, when Upper and Lower Egypt were first unified under the rule of King Narmer and his successor, Hor-aha, or Menes. However, the Egyptian chronicler Manetho, a priest of the city of Heliopolis from the third century BCE, recorded a long, continuous succession of divine and semidivine rulers of prehistoric Egypt stretching back 24,925 years beyond the beginning of the Archaic Period.1 An earlier, fragmented document known as the Royal Canon of Turin and dated to around 1300 BCE contains a king list that begins with an unspecified period when Egypt was ruled by a succession of ten gods, the Netjeru, followed by a second period of 13,420 years of divine rulers known as the “Followers of Horus.”2 Obviously these reigns are given no credence by academics: the timescales involved are simply too great to fit into any accepted historical format. But in my view these records, though they might have become distorted with the passage of time, are highly significant, primarily because they reflect the views and traditions of the Egyptians themselves. Clearly these people firmly believed that their culture had its origins in a past reaching back many thousands of years before the Archaic Period.
So which view is correct? Is it that of today’s archaeologists and historians, who rely principally on the evidence of datable artifacts to ascertain the age of a culture? Or is it the account that has come down to us from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, from the Egyptian priesthood of Manetho’s day and from the compilers of the Royal Canon of Turin?
It seems to me very unlikely that a culture as advanced and sophisticated as Egypt’s should have mushroomed “overnight” from a primitive intellectual environment. As we have noted, the Old Kingdom priests and astronomers were already in possession of a fully developed, extraordinarily imaginative belief system—a true science, no less—the main tenets of which they described symbolically and with superlative clarity in the form of the Hermetic Code. What is, perhaps, even more incredible is the obvious intent behind this essentially harmonious mode of spiritual evolution, which was to forge for mankind a direct means of access to the stars, to the mythical realm of the gods that came to be known as heaven. The important point to note here is that heaven— that place I vainly looked for as a boy—is, in fact, a scientific concept employed by ancient metaphysicians to describe a higher dimension of existence. We can define this netherworld in musical terms as a greater “scale” of being. This unique mode of evolution is based, as I have said, on systematic scientific principles—those of harmonics—but later we shall see that this theory of “transcendental evolution” is also scientific in other significant ways—specifically in relation to some of the benchmark discoveries of modern physics and genetics. But even if we presently consider only the musical aspect of this theory, this is a surprisingly sophisticated concept to have originated with the relatively close descendants of simple hunter-gatherers.
In addition to this highly evolved “religion” of the Fourth Dynasty Egyptians, the stonemasons and architects of that unique era—particularly the builders of the Pyramids of Giza and Dashur—displayed incomparable expertise in precision and enormity of scale.
So history here belies logic: the finest, the most sophisticated, appeared very early on, and the standard of pyramid building degenerated as time went by. This is not, of course, what we observe in the ongoing development of our own culture, particularly in technology and the sciences, which are generally considered as having progressively evolved— primarily out of the supposedly superstitious ideas of medieval alchemy.
Of course, if the Egyptians themselves are to be believed, quite the opposite appears to have happened. According to them, their culture was not the product of a gradual development, but began in full bloom, with a first, golden era, a distant age when the “gods” suddenly appeared (presumably from somewhere), bringing with them all the trappings of civilized existence. This period in their history the Egyptians called Zep Tepi, the “First Time.”
From this golden age onward, there apparently proceeded a gradual process of involution, through a long period of high civilization under the rule of lesser demigods—the “Followers of Horus” earlier mentioned— ultimately ending with the “normal” era of the historical pharaohs. I use the term normal guardedly here, because the Great Pyramid was constructed at this time, and it is difficult to imagine that those responsible for the creation of this amazing structure were just ordinary souls.
On the face of things, it seems as if this ancient Egyptian scenario of a distant, perfect beginning is, by conventional standards, fantastic, totally at odds with the established academic view of events. Egyptologists tell us that the datable, factual evidence, painstakingly collated by scholars over the last couple of hundred years, proves conclusively that a mere one thousand years before Egypt’s Dynastic Period, the tribes in the Nile region were living in simple, mud-brick dwellings and thought about little other than survival.
And then, one thousand years later—around 2550 BCE—historians present us with the fully developed civilization we know as Old Kingdom Egypt, the most advanced of the ancient world, whose architects built like giants, and whose influence upon the human race is felt even to this day. This crucial development, from the hunter-gatherer tending a few goats in the middle of the fourth millennium BCE, to the Egyptian priest-astronomer of the Old Kingdom, with their gigantic pyramid markers and lofty thoughts of the firmament, is perhaps the most dramatic leap forward ever encountered in human history.
This sudden appearance of the high civilization exemplified by the architecture and the extant texts of Old Kingdom Egypt has prompted many alternative investigators to challenge seriously the orthodox view of the sources of Egyptian culture, positing a direct legacy from an earlier, greatly more advanced race of people.
The evidence in support of this revolutionary proposition has in recent years come to us from all quarters, and doubtless most readers hooked on the mysteries will already be familiar with most of it. Modern writers, such as Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval, Colin Wilson, Andrew Collins, and many more have done much to increase public interest in “alternative” explanations of the origin of civilization. Many of the ideas discussed by these authors are of necessity highly contentious and so are continually under attack from academics. However, even if we accept that some of these theories are, to coin an apt phrase, not “hermetically sealed”—not entirely watertight—there is now a whole swath of significant new data that simply does not fit in with the orthodox picture of events. In short, it is now time for us to rewrite the standard, but apparently garbled, story of the development of civilization, for the period that historians have consistently referred to as “prehistory,” circa 10,500–4000 BCE, is that no more.
Most of the new evidence to support this view of a highly advanced, proto-Egyptian culture has been variously dealt with by dozens of alternative theorists, so we need not dwell too long on the details. A quick review of the main features will suffice to impress upon the reader how remarkably advanced these denizens of “prehistory” really were. No doubt academic arguments over the true age of civilization will rage for years to come, but this is not my primary concern. The intention of this book is to proffer an alternative perspective that is not so much focused on the antiquity of our culture, but more on the nature and future ramifications of the unique belief system bequeathed to us by our most distant ancestors. But first let us examine certain key, well-established facts and see for ourselves exactly what these mysterious people were capable of.
“IMPOSSIBLE” MAPS
In 1966, the late Charles H. Hapgood, Professor of the History of Science at Keene College, New Hampshire, published a seminal work called Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings. The title refers to certain medieval maritime maps currently filed away in the American Library of Congress, which depict the exact contours of the land mass buried deep beneath the mile-thick ice packs of Antarctica. Possibly the best known of these is the now famous Piri Re’is map of 1513, owned by a Turkish pirate executed in 1554. This shows the southern Atlantic Ocean, a part of the coast of Africa to the right, the coast of South America to the left, and, farther to the south, Antarctica, with the bays of Queen Maud Land shown in astonishingly clear relief. Note that these bays were not officially “discovered” until surveys using sonar soundings were conducted by a joint team of British, Swedish, and Norwegian scientists in 1949. There are, in fact, many more of these maps—called portolans—some of which show that Antarctica actually consists of two separate land masses, a fact not known to modern geographers until further surveys were conducted in 1958.
Hapgood’s explanation for the existence of these portolans remains controversial even today. He surmised that they were probably copies of earlier maps, which in turn might have been copies of even older ones— and so on, effectively reaching back to a time when Antarctica was relatively free of ice. Controversial this proposition may be, but Hapgood’s observations were based on solid factual evidence that has never been refuted or otherwise explained by the academic establishment.
The obvious implication of all this is that there may have been highly proficient mariners alive then—when Antarctica was a more temperate land—with the wherewithal to chart it. But of course mapmaking of the accuracy found in many portolans is a highly exacting science and implies a detailed knowledge of trigonometry and geometry—hardly the skills we would normally ascribe to “primitive” peoples.
Geologists and climatologists tell us that the latest possible date that Antarctica could have been a temperate region—and therefore topographically surveyed by ancient seafarers—was around 4000 BCE. If we assume, then, that this prehistoric civilization of accomplished mapmakers and mathematicians progressively evolved, as we have, through long periods of trial and error and spasmodic bouts of inspirational genius, then the conservative date of 4000 BCE would merely mark a turning point in the development of a culture that had already reached a marked stage of maturity. How long it took to attain such a level of sophistication is anybody’s guess, but if historians are ever to make sense of the evidence provided by portolans, this is certainly a question that needs to be addressed. Where these ancient seafarers went after Antarctica finally became covered with ice is also crying out for an answer. After all, they must have gone somewhere, because they had boats and were obviously inclined to use them. It is perhaps significant that the time frame under discussion comfortably encompasses the beginning of the Archaic Period of ancient Egypt. And the early Egyptians, in fact, also had boats. Khufu’s father, Snefru, had a fleet of them, and they were identical in design to reed boats still being built today by the South American Indians living on the shores of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. Local Indians informed Graham Hancock that the design had been given to them by the legendary Viracocha, the white god from the sea who, like Osiris in Egypt, brought with him civilization and a new way of being.
In 1954 a rectangular pit was discovered on the south side of the Great Pyramid that contained a dismantled boat made of cedar. It took fourteen years to reassemble this craft, which measures 43 meters from prow to stern.
According to the sailor and explorer Thor Heyerdahl, the streamlined hull of this boat could never have withstood the conditions of the high seas. It was built, in his opinion, as a symbolic craft for the use of the pharaoh in his afterlife. This acknowledged expert in the field of ancient shipbuilding believes that the boat was essentially a riverboat. Curiously, however, he also asserts that its high-prowed design was a highly sophisticated and technically accurate model, not of a riverboat, but of an ocean-going vessel. Heyerdahl is suggesting that Khufu’s ceremonial boat could have been derived from the plans of very experienced shipbuilders, people with a long tradition of sailing on the open seas.3
It is tempting to think that this is the answer, that the Egyptian and, perhaps, the early American civilizations, whose descendants are still making boats of an identical design today, might have been spawned by descendants of this long-forgotten race of mariners of ancient Antarctica—say, around the middle of the fourth millennium BCE.
The emerging historical picture, however, is not quite that simple.
THE GEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE
Let us now look briefly at the latest controversy surrounding the dating of the Great Sphinx and its two neighboring constructions on the Giza plateau, the extraordinary buildings known today as the Sphinx Temple and the Valley Temple.
In 1979, the American writer John Anthony West published a book, Serpent in the Sky, in which he discusses the ideas of the maverick Alsatian Egyptologist, René Schwaller de Lubicz. Schwaller, who spent almost fifteen years between the wars investigating numerous archaeological sites in Egypt, noted marked differences between the erosion of the Sphinx enclosure and that of the nearby tombs and pyramids on the Giza plateau. The weathering pattern on the exterior surfaces of the tombs and pyramids is angular and irregular, with rock layers higher up in the masonry showing less weathering than the layers below. This angular erosion is attributed to the effects of wind-blown sands blasting away the softer layers of limestone and leaving exposed the harder levels. The weathering of the Sphinx and on the outer walls of the two neighboring temples, however, is rounded, undulating, sloping slightly outward toward the ground, with deep, intermittent, vertical fissures or gullies. Schwaller’s explanation for this is that the erosion of the Sphinx and its surrounding structures has been caused not by sandblasts, but by water. This clearly suggests that they must have originated in a different and quite distinct era—when water other than that of the River Nile abounded.
West’s book subsequently achieved only a moderate success. One can perhaps understand why: it certainly had no chance of being officially endorsed, and the present “Egyptian renaissance” had not yet begun to flower. Undeterred, West, convinced that the weathering pattern of the Sphinx provided a vital clue to our understanding of “prehistory,” has spent the last twenty years steadily chipping away at another crumbling edifice—the orthodox opposition to Schwaller’s theory. The turning point in this modern David and Goliath story came when West invited an expert to examine the Sphinx erosion and try to ascertain what had caused it. Significantly, this expert was not an Egyptologist, but a scientist, a leading authority on the structure and nature of rocks.
This was the eminent Boston geologist Dr. Robert Schoch, whose studied opinion, based on exhaustive investigations at the site, is that the erosion is indeed the result of water—rainwater, to be precise. Schoch presented his findings at the annual convention of the Geological Society of America in 1992, and his evidence and conclusions were received with marked approval. The assumption is, therefore, that the weathering of the Sphinx enclosure has most likely been produced by precipitation. As with the case of the portolans mentioned previously, orthodox historians may have another serious question to address here, because it has now been fairly well established that Egypt ceased to be a temperate zone nine thousand years ago—around 7000 BCE—over three and a half thousand years before the beginning of the Dynastic Period. Significantly, this ties in rather well with Schoch’s estimate for the age of the Sphinx, which he puts conservatively at nine thousand years. If he is off by only a thousand years or so, and the Sphinx was indeed drenched by rain in a temperate climate for a thousand years or more, this could arguably account for the erosion observed by geologists.
Historians and archaeologists of the old school, however, have reacted negatively to this radical view, insisting that the Sphinx is contemporary with the Dynastic Period. They claim that it was commissioned by, and is an image of, the pharaoh Khafre (Greek, Chephren), builder of the second of the three Pyramids at Giza. An undamaged statue of Khafre was found in the Valley Temple, and the American archaeologist Mark Lehner, leading the academic opposition to West’s and Schoch’s theories, declared that the similarities between it and the face of the Sphinx proved conclusively that the Sphinx was an image of Khafre. West totally disagreed; in fact, he could see no similarity whatsoever. And neither could leading New York forensic artist Detective Frank Domingo when, at West’s behest, he went to Egypt to check out the validity of Lehner’s claims. After a close, professional examination of all the available evidence, Domingo’s verdict was emphatic: the Great Sphinx is definitely not an image of the Fourth Dynasty pharaoh Khafre. Indeed, if the geologists have it right, how could it possibly be?
If the orthodox view of an evolving culture is correct, we might reasonably assume that the people responsible for such marvelous feats of construction would have had a good deal of practice before they mastered their formidable skills. Therefore if we are considering here a civilization dating back to a time when the Sahara was green, there may be a great deal more evidence of it yet to uncover—a hidden empire under the sand.
MEGALITHIC LEGO
There is also another anomaly intrinsic to the Sphinx enclosure, which again throws the orthodox view into question: the incredible size of the stone blocks used in its construction. Weighing at least 200 tons apiece, with some of them tipping the scale at a staggering 450 tons, these enormous blocks—hundreds of them—have been superimposed with a degree of precision that makes the mind boggle. The point is that these massive, austere, and predominantly rectangular constructions—the so-called Valley Temple of Khafre and the Sphinx Temple—are entirely uncharacteristic of the architecture of the Old Kingdom Pyramids and tombs—the latter incorporating elaborate carvings, inscriptions, cylindrical fluted columns, and numerous other architectural features typical of that era. One possible reason for this anomaly, as a number of investigators have of course already suggested, is that the Sphinx enclosure and the nearby pyramids and tombs of Giza originated in two quite distinct and widely separated time frames.
Take the Great Pyramid, for example, possibly the finest and most complete example of stonemasonry in existence, constructed mainly out of standard blocks of limestone averaging around two to three tons in weight. Even the most massive of its granite blocks, incorporated in what is now commonly known as the King’s Chamber, would probably weigh in at “only” around seventy tons.
Now consider this: the average weight of the carved stones used in the building of the Sphinx and Valley Temples at Giza is two hundred tons. Of course, these blocks have been carved from much softer limestone bedrock but, by Old Kingdom standards, they are truly cyclopean. What is more, their joints are so fine that it is impossible to slide a razor-thin blade between them. Even by modern standards, they are nigh on perfect.
In Abydos, in Upper, or Southern, Egypt, there is another ancient structure, a temple known as the Osireion, which has the same stark, megalithic form of architecture as the buildings of the Sphinx enclosure. Professor Edouard Naville, sponsored by the Egypt Exploration Fund, excavated much of the site between 1912 and 1914, and when he observed the unique style of architecture of the structure, he straightaway compared it with the Valley Temple at Giza. Both were made with gigantic blocks without any ornament but, as Naville noted, the Osireion, though of a similar style, was made with even larger blocks, a fact that, rather curiously, prompted him to suggest that it was “of a still more archaic character.”4 Is it not strange that he should have associated antiquity with size in this way? He was saying, in effect, that the larger the blocks—and, consequently, the more advanced the engineering techniques required to carve, transport, and position them—the greater the antiquity of the building. Naville suggested, in fact, that the Osireion might be the most ancient building in Egypt. This is, of course, a decidedly unorthodox view, but one that accords with that of the Egyptians themselves, with their belief that their civilization began with a godlike race of beings who possessed supernatural powers, in other words extraordinary skills.
Later excavations by Henry Frankfurt at the site in Abydos, between 1925 and 1930, unearthed a cartouche of the Nineteenth Dynasty pharaoh Seti I carved in granite above the entrance into the main hall of the temple. Not surprisingly, this and other minor finds linking Seti with the site prompted the archaeological community to disregard Naville’s earlier conclusions, opting for the much more palatable idea that the building dated back to an established period in known history. There is now, however, a growing number of investigators in the field who are inclining more and more toward Naville’s view. The writer Andrew Collins, in his book Gods of Eden, has suggested that Seti, having recognized the unquestionable sanctity of this important edifice, may have constructed his own temple at Abydos “to comply with the existing orientation and ground-plan of the Osireion, which was already of immense antiquity even in his own age.”5 This makes perfect sense. And, after all, why should Seti, of all of the pharaohs to have ruled in any dynasty since the Fourth (the supposed era of construction of the Valley Temple), be the only one to have built with blocks of such size?
In respect of megalithic architecture, it is worth noting here that the Valley Temple and the Osireion, while unique in Egypt, do, in fact, have counterparts elsewhere in important archaeological sites worldwide, notably in the Lebanon, Bolivia, Peru, and Mexico. In his book Fingerprints of the Gods (1995), Graham Hancock describes the aweinspiring remains of buildings all over the ancient world that have been constructed from massive stone blocks weighing several hundred tons apiece—again, as with the blocks incorporated in the Sphinx Temple and the Osireion, featuring joints of near-perfect precision.
Furthermore, in Mexico, as in Egypt, the pyramid structure is a central feature. Most significantly, in the case of the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán in Mexico, we even find the crucial pi relationship incorporated within its dimensions. This and other “hermetic” buildings will be revisited in due course.
THE ASTRO-ARCHAEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
The fact that the Sphinx has the body of a lion has prompted certain investigative authors to suggest that it was very likely carved in the Age of Leo, some time between 11,380 and 9220 BCE.
To understand the basis of this new argument, we first have to consider the phenomenon of precession, which is the apparent backward motion of the twelve constellations of the zodiac in relation to the horizon. Precession occurs because the earth is spinning like a giant top that is losing momentum and has begun to turn and wobble very slowly—almost imperceptibly so—in the direction opposite to its spin. This alternative motion gives observers on earth the illusory impression that the “fixed” stars of the firmament are revolving slowly around us like a giant stellar wheel. The rate of precession is measured by observing the gradually changing zodiacal backdrop against which the sun rises on the spring equinox. Proceeding at the rate of one degree every seventy-two years, this means that each of the twelve ages of the zodiac occupies 30 degrees of this great astronomical circle, taking 2,160 years to complete. A whole precessional cycle therefore lasts 25,920 years.
In our present astrological age, the equinoctial rising of the sun still occurs in Pisces, the symbol of Christianity. As Andrew Collins points out in Gods of Eden, just before this age the equinoctial sunrise occurred against the backdrop of Aries, the sign of the ram, which is historically associated with the reign of the Hebrew Scriptures patriarch, Abraham, and also with the ram cult of Amun in ancient Egypt, both of which appeared shortly after this age began, around 2200 BCE. The latter stages of the age before this, the Age of Taurus, the time of the bull cult of the Mediterranean and the Apis cult of Egypt, is the epoch in which Egyptologists say the leonine Sphinx was carved. To Collins, and indeed to many other current investigators, placing the lion squarely in the bull’s domain makes no sense at all. The “alternative” view, of course, offers a much more logical explanation: the Sphinx has the body of a lion because it was carved and orientated in the Age of Leo.
The new evidence in favor of this hypothesis is concerned primarily with certain stellar alignments that appear to have been intentionally built into the Giza necropolis. As we might expect, the authors engaged in this new field of enquiry are consistently under attack from traditional Egyptologists, recognized experts in their own field, of course, but scholars who generally know little or nothing about astronomy. Consequently the Leo hypothesis is seen as simply another crank theory being purveyed by ill-informed amateurs.
Possibly one of the best-known names in this new area of “astroarchaeology” is the Belgian construction engineer Robert Bauval. His first book, The Orion Mystery, co-authored with the writer and publisher Adrian Gilbert, is based around his discovery of an evident alignment of the Giza necropolis with certain key stars in the Egyptian sky, stars that, significantly, were of very special interest to the priest-astronomers of the Old Kingdom.
Bauval noted the curious misalignment and marked difference in size of the much smaller third Pyramid of Menkaura (Mycerinus), and wondered why this should be. He subsequently realized that this peculiar anomaly corresponded accurately with a similar “misalignment” evident in the positions of the three stars of Orion’s Belt, called by astronomers Zeta Orionis, Epsilon, and Delta. The smallest of this triad—Delta—is slightly offset from the line described by the first two. Significantly, it is also noticeably dimmer, apparently smaller.
As Bauval already knew from his exhaustive examinations of many of the so-called Pyramid Texts, the constellation of Orion was extremely important in the mythology and religion of the ancient Egyptians. It was associated with their principal god, the great civilizer, Osiris, Lord of Zep Tepi, the “First Time,” the golden epoch when Thoth/Hermes is said to have imparted to mankind the fruits of his infinite wisdom. Orion, therefore, is clearly a key to the enigma of the Pyramids.
Bauval realized further that the Great Pyramid itself has certain internal features that link it directly not only with Orion, the star of Osiris, but also to another equally important star—Sirius—that associated with Osiris’s consort, the goddess Isis. Sirius’s heliacal rising (i.e., the same time as the sun) was in fact the basis of the Egyptian “sothic” calendar. The link between Orion, Sirius, and the Great Pyramid is to be found in two of the four mysterious shafts projecting from the so-called King’s and Queen’s Chambers. Using computer-simulated star charts to reproduce the position of the stars above the Nile Delta around 2500 BCE, the time when the Pyramids were built, Bauval established that each of the shafts would then have targeted particular stars as they culminated at the meridian, that is, as they reached their highest point above the horizon. The crucial ones turned out to be the southern shafts. That of the King’s Chamber, angled at 45 degrees 14 minutes, would have targeted the star known to the Egyptians as Al Nitak, Zeta Orionis, the lowest of the three stars of Orion’s Belt. Similarly the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber, angled at 39 degrees 30 minutes, would have aligned with the high point of Sirius, or Alpha Canis Major, in the constellation of the Great Dog.
During the course of the precession of the equinoxes, Orion’s Belt moves through the heavens in a specific and unchanging way. It rises upward for almost thirteen thousand years, tilting slightly in a clockwise motion, and then back again, drifting slowly down and turning anticlockwise as it returns to its starting point. To Bauval, this starting point was highly significant, for his computer star charts told him that the last time Orion was at its lowest point in the sky was circa 10,450 BCE, in the Age of Leo.
Bauval further noted that at this point in the precessional cycle the three stars of Orion’s Belt would not have been tilted sideways, and so would then have perfectly reflected the position and orientation of the three Pyramids of Giza. He surmised that the Giza site in fact acted like a giant star-clock marking the epoch of the First Time, the golden age of Osiris/Orion.
In a later book, Keeper of Genesis (1997), jointly written by Bauval and Graham Hancock, the astro-archaeological theory is explored further. They suggest that the designers of the Giza complex saw the River Nile itself as a reflection of the diffused band of light of the Milky Way—our own galaxy. The leonine Sphinx faces due east. Had it been there, as Bauval and Hancock imply, at dawn on the all-important spring equinox in the year 10,450 BCE—the beginning of the present precessional cycle—the constellation of Leo would have appeared above the horizon directly in front of it. Understandably, they see this as compelling evidence that the Sphinx enclosure—which the geologist Robert Schoch believes is much older than the nearby tombs—was built to align with the constellation of the precessional age in which it was carved and constructed. At that time, Orion’s Belt itself would have been positioned in the southern sky, at right angles to Leo, and at its lowest point of declination. What is intriguing is the idea that the builders of Old Kingdom Egypt, working in the later Age of Taurus, may have built and aligned their three mighty pyramids to reflect perfectly the position of the three stars of Orion’s Belt as they would have appeared in the skies in the Age of Leo. It’s as if the designers may have been focusing back on this age for a specific purpose, possibly to mark it as an important era in their history, when Orion was closest to home and when Leo appeared in the sky exactly in line with the Sphinx’s present gaze. Orion has been rising in the sky ever since, and will continue to do so until around the year 2550 CE, thus marking the first half of the full precessional cycle, thirteen thousand years after the First Time.
Clearly the earth–stellar configuration being described here, although not yet accepted by academics, has much merit. It is, after all, based on verifiable facts, data that Egyptologists, if they are sincere, simply cannot afford to ignore. The point is that these ancient, highly accomplished construction engineers of Old Kingdom Egypt were also experienced astronomers, people deeply concerned with the movement of the heavens, and they apparently knew about precession. This obviously begs the question, How did they obtain this knowledge? If we assume through a vigilant observation of the heavens, then it must also be accepted that these observations must have continued uninterrupted for a considerable period of time. It takes seventy-two years—a good lifetime—for the zodiacal wheel to move just one degree of arc. So let’s say that, somewhere and at some time in the remote past, one rather shrewd individual happened to notice a very slight change in the position of a particular favored star. Fortuitously, he or she then passes this information on to a son or a daughter, or to a group of followers, who subsequently continue to observe the same star. For how long would this observation have to continue before it was realized by someone in the chain that their favorite star had a high point and a low point in its movement through the heavens? More importantly, how long would it be before someone could work out the last time the given star was at its lowest point of declination in a great astronomical cycle spanning almost twenty-six thousand years?
So, how old is “civilization”?
In fact, evidence of knowledge of precession in ancient times comes from many quarters, and is not exclusive to the Egyptians. It was mysteriously encoded in the different mythologies of peoples from all over the world. This was first noted by the scientific historian Giorgio de Santillana and the anthropologist Hertha von Dechend, in their complex and challenging book Hamlet’s Mill (1960).
Put simply, what de Santillana and von Dechend discovered was that certain numbers—derivatives of the great precessional cycle of 25,920 years—cropped up again and again in myths and legends from cultures all around the world. As with the numbers associated with the laws of harmony and the structure of the octave, they appear to be deeply rooted in mankind’s race-memory. The numbers are all based on the 360-degree precessional wheel (“Hamlet’s Mill”) and the numbers of years occupied by the twelve zodiacal ages. As we noted, one degree occupies seventy-two years, which is one of the key numbers in the series. Further, one “age,” one-twelfth part, or a 30-degree segment of the wheel, occupies a period of 2,160 years—two more key numbers. If we double these we get two more: 60 degrees and 4,320 years—and so on.
The fact that these same numbers occur in so many diverse myths and legends not only indicates that ancient peoples were aware of precession, but also that the myths themselves very probably have a common origin. Such beginnings, however, reach back to a time too remote for us to identify precisely. Perhaps the myths originated with the legendary Egyptian harbingers of wisdom, Osiris and his grand vizier, Thoth. Certainly precessional numbers appear in many of the myths surrounding these “gods” of the First Time. Then again, possibly this knowledge had its source with the race of ancient mariners responsible for mapping Antarctica way back when the continent was free of ice. As experienced navigators, these people would presumably have developed an acute awareness of the gradually changing star patterns of the night sky. Perhaps Osiris and his companions were actually connected with, or were either descendants or ancestors of, this prehistoric brotherhood of mapmaking mathematicians and geometers. Alternatively it may be that the true origin of the knowledge of precession dates back to a time more remote than anyone has hitherto imagined.
Certainly observation of the sun, moon, and stars is one of man’s oldest pastimes. We see evidence of this in the alignments of many ancient sites, not just in Egypt, but all over the world, in Western Europe’s ancient stone circles, the citadels and plains of South America and in the temples and pyramids of present-day Mexico and Guatemala. Furthermore, as Colin Wilson and Rand Flem-Ath have noted in their book The Atlantis Blueprint, it is evident that very many of these sites were not simply selected at random, but were chosen to conform to an overall global pattern of longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates. That is, from sacred centers in Egypt and the Americas, to remote Pacific Islands, through ancient Greece and the Middle East and Tibet, there has emerged a clear pattern of whole-number coordinates linking many of them.6 Obviously these sites are not all contemporary with one another, ranging in age, according to orthodox chronology, from one to five thousand years. However, given that some of these important centers of culture are extremely ancient, it is possible that the original geophysical or metrological plan was mapped out in the very early days, when civilization was supposedly in its infancy.
What I believe is unfolding here, in the light of all the recent research into “prehistory,” is a picture of an ancient people who, whatever the precise age they might have lived in, were almost totally preoccupied with the idea of harmony and order. As we have noted, this way of seeing the world reached its peak in the civilization of the ancient Egyptians, who were so evidently concerned with the order and movement of the cosmos. They were also, according to the metrologist Livio Stechini, highly skilled in the measurement of the earth and were able to define the extent of their country in relationship to the latitude and longitude of the planet.7 (According to Charles Piazzi Smyth, the noted nineteenth-century Astronomer Royal of Scotland, the Great Pyramid stands at the exact center of the largest landmass on earth.) Moreover, Stechini has calculated that the base perimeter of the Great Pyramid—921.453 meters—is exactly equal to half a minute of latitude at the equator, so the perimeter is equal to 1/43,200 of the circumference of the earth. This fact has a twofold significance: first, it demonstrates how remarkably knowledgeable these people were about their planet, and second, given that 4,320 is a precessional number, they may have realized also that there exists an intimate, symmetrical connection between the earth and the zodiacal wheel.
But the rise of the Egyptian civilization of the Old Kingdom, as we have noted, marked a time when people probably already knew about the immensely long cycle of precession. They knew about longitude and latitude, shipbuilding and navigating, and techniques of building with giant blocks of hewn stone that even to the present day have not been adequately explained. Most importantly, they were also familiar with pi and, of course, the Hermetic Code, which we now know is a virtual blueprint of the genetic code, the code of life itself.
So once again, if we allow a reasonable period for the natural accumulation of all this sophisticated knowledge, we have a clear indication of an extraordinarily advanced civilization existing in the period historians call prehistory, say, between 10,000 and 4000 BCE, or possibly long before.
How long exactly?
As I said previously, it is not my intention here to try to prove that civilized hominid culture is ten or even one hundred thousand years old. In trying to ascertain where the Hermetic Code originated, however, we must delve very deeply into our past: there is, in fact, datable archaeological evidence to suggest that the most fundamental component of the Hermetic Code—the sacred constant, or the unit of the octave—was “sacred” even in the time of Neanderthal man seventy-five thousand years ago.
In his book Cities of Dreams (1989), a highly original study of Neanderthal culture, the psychologist and philosopher Stan Gooch describes a remarkable find at Drachenloch in the Swiss Alps, a known Neanderthal bear-hunter site: inside a cave an altar was discovered. It consisted of a rectangular stone-built chest capped with a great stone slab in which had been placed seven bear skulls with their muzzles pointing toward the entrance of the cave. Six more skulls were discovered set in niches in the cave wall behind the altar.
Gooch sees this as a clear indication that the numbers 7 and 13 (7 plus 6) were sacred to the Neanderthal. He notes also that the constellation of the Great Bear contains seven stars, a fact that prompts him to make this rather bold and startling statement: “We can hardly doubt that Neanderthal had already given it this name that almost unimaginable time ago. And so, in our own times, it is still called the Great Bear by ourselves, by the ancient Greeks, by the Romans, the Hindus, the Ainu, the North American Indians, tribes in Africa, and many others besides.”8
If Gooch is correct in assuming that this 75,000-year-old altar was intentionally associated with a particular constellation in the sky—that of the Great Bear—then we already have here the beginnings of the science of astronomy. Scholars may argue that there is no real proof that these seven bear skulls, carefully placed in this ceremonial stone chest at a time when the last great ice age was literally raging full-blast outside, were associated in any way with the seven stars of the Great Bear. Surely the cavemen responsible for this irritating anomaly were just adorning their lair and toying unwittingly with a random number—in this case 7. However, as Gooch convincingly demonstrates in chapter 10 of his book, these people were already extremely interested in the heavens and were, in fact, capable of calculating the periodicity of the planets and the long-term cycles of the moon.9 Remember also that astronomy is in fact one of the most ancient sciences known, and that a detailed knowledge of the 26,000-year cycle of precession is hinted at in mankind’s oldest myths. It may be, therefore, that the practice of observation and identification of prominent stars in the ever-changing firmament reaches back in a continuous line to Neanderthal times. After all, only two precessional cycles ago it was the Neanderthal, not the Cro-Magnon race (modern man), who was the dominant hominid species on earth.
And the number 7? According to Gooch, the Neanderthals actually identified three sacred numbers: 3, 7, and 13. Significantly, two of these—3 and 7—are fundamental components of the Hermetic Code; that is, taken together, they are an elementary expression of the pi relationship. With regard to the number 13 it is, perhaps, worth noting that all of the world’s traditional musical scales are founded on the pentatonic scale and the so-called circle of fifths. A fifth is an “overtone” and is produced by touching a vibrating string lightly at one-fifth its length. The ancient Chinese found that a series of “perfect fifths” will produce twelve separate notes before the notes begin repeating. Set down in pitch series, these twelve separate notes include all the semitones of our westernized octave. The thirteenth note, seven octaves higher, is the same as the first.
Is this merely coincidence? Of course, it could be. But I am offering an alternative hypothesis, based wholly on hermetic/genetic principles, which is that the emergence of these specific numbers in the cultural practices of our hominid predecessors, numbers that so closely reflect the musical symmetry of DNA and the genetic code, may have been a perfectly natural adaptation acted out almost instinctively by perfectly natural people.
It should now be clear, from the evidence discussed so far, that the story of our origins is by no means clear-cut. There are simply too many anomalies in the prevailing picture of events, awkward “facts” that consistently fly in the face of the orthodox view of the evolution of civilization.
We have, for example, the “impossible” medieval maps—portolans— copies of copies which were arguably made many thousands of years ago, possibly before 4000 BCE, by people with a workable knowledge of geometry and trigonometry.
Then there is the weathering of the Sphinx and its related structures, quite different from the exterior erosion patterns of the Fourth Dynasty pyramids and tombs, which suggests a greater age for the Sphinx than historians will currently permit. Robert Schoch’s proposal, supported by other geologists, is that the erosion has been caused by heavy rainfall. But very little rain has fallen on Egypt in the last nine thousand years—hence the desert we see today. This obviously raises serious questions in respect of the present dating of the Sphinx and its enclosure, which, archaeologists tell us, was created in the Fourth Dynasty, at a time when Egypt had for many thousands of years been engulfed by desert sands.
The incomparable size of the stone blocks used in some of Egypt’s most ancient structures is also hard to explain. There are no intermediaries in terms of size, no other earlier structures of any significance whose form might indicate some kind of gradual, evolutionary development leading to the use of such incredibly huge stone blocks. Another puzzle is the remarkably accurate metrological data encoded in the dimensions of the Great Pyramid, data that indicates that its designers possessed an intimate knowledge of the dimensions of the earth. The fact that Giza, along with dozens of other sacred sites scattered worldwide, is positioned on a giant grid of whole-number latitudinal coordinates, suggests that this knowledge was not exclusive to the designers of the Great Pyramid.
Further, the very detailed and extremely plausible astro-archaeological evidence highlighted by Bauval and Hancock, among others, points to an era in time for the carving of the Sphinx that is too remote for historians even to consider. And yet the evidence speaks for itself. Giza displays so many astroarchaeological features that it is hard to believe they might all be purely coincidental. Further, the inclusion of precessional numbers in ancient myths and legends from all over the world is a clear indication that the science of studying and mapping the heavens was fully developed at a time when the inhabitants of pre-dynastic Egypt supposedly hadn’t even begun to domesticate plants and animals.
Finally, and in my view most importantly, we have the evidence of the Hermetic Code, an encoded expression of the two fundamental laws of creation that, sometime around 2500 BCE, appears to have suddenly flowered into a complete, highly articulated belief system. On the other hand, if we accept that the numbers 3, 7 and 13, sacred to the star-gazing Neanderthal, taken together constitute an elementary expression of the pi symmetry, we can envisage a long and winding trail of intuitive and scientific discovery stretching back at least seventy-five thousand years.
By now the reader might appreciate how remarkably talented were these early ancestors of ours. Of course, strictly speaking, this is the “alternative” view. Egyptologists, by and large, officially accept none of the theories I have mentioned here. Indeed, many of them still maintain that the Great Pyramid was built solely as a tomb for the megalomaniac King Khufu.
In spite of this intransigent orthodox opposition, however, the alternative concept of an extremely ancient lost civilization is fast gaining ground. This has resulted, not surprisingly, perhaps, in a renewed interest in the writings of the Greek philosopher Plato, and in particular his story of the great catastrophe that destroyed a high civilization known as Atlantis in 9600 BCE. As I write, I know of three forthcoming books by investigative authors that will be dealing with this enduring historical enigma in some detail. Doubtless they will be met with the usual scholarly objections, but these detailed investigations, which have been briefly outlined by the authors concerned in recent lectures in the UK, will certainly pose more challenges to the standard view of history.
Just on the basis of the current evidence, there is a scenario suggesting that the advanced knowledge we usually see as marking the beginning of recorded history by no means represents the dawning of scientific activity, but rather the last vestiges of the science of a prior great and hitherto unidentified culture.
Plato’s dialogue on Atlantis, though, is officially just a story, a “fairy tale” concocted by this overworked Greek sage as a form of relaxation, a means of escaping the rigors of disciplined academic life. That may be the case, and the existence or otherwise of Atlantis is not here my primary concern. It is enough to know that the ancient Egyptians of the Fourth Dynasty were scientists of the first order. After all it was here, on the banks of the ancient Nile, that the numerous branches of the knowledge acquired in “prehistory” were subsequently drawn together in a vast intellectual exercise. And what a truly awe-inspiring enterprise this was, combining precessional astronomy, geodetics and metrology, surveying and architecture, a complete understanding of the scientific laws of creation and, incredibly, a method of applying these laws as a way of being, a “religion.” It is difficult to imagine how much more in tune with the world and with nature anyone could possibly be. These people were in tune with virtually everything, with the patterns in the skies, the symmetries on the earth, and, most importantly, the rhythm of life itself.
It seems to me, therefore, that one of the most rewarding lines of inquiry is to try to find out what made these great megalithic builders tick.
Let’s investigate.