The
DIVINE
BLUEPRINT
Temples, power places, and the global plan to shape the human soul.
Freddy Silva
originally released under the title Common Wealth.
Also by this Author...
First Templar Nation: How the Knights Templar created Europe’s first nation-state.
The Lost Art of Resurrection: Initiation, secret chambers and the quest for the Otherworld.
Secrets In The Fields: The science and mysticism of crop circles.
Chartres Cathedral: The missing or heretic guide.
Copyright © 2010, 2016 Freddy Silva
Book design and cover by Freddy Silva.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work in any form whatsoever, including electronic forms and transmissions, without permission in writing from the author, except for brief passages in connection with a review.
Whilst every effort has been made to ensure the use of quoted text and images have been credited correctly, sometimes errors can occur. If any authors or photographers feel this to be the case, please contact the author and the necessary corrections will be made.
In memory of
JOHN MICHELL
and
HAMISH MILLER.
TWO GIANTS
who
WALKED
AHEAD OF MEN.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Some people need to be thanked, some want to be thanked, some need to be spanked.
Marilee Marrinan, for the little morsels of inspired insights which opened big halls of research.
Martin Page, a big thank you for donating much-needed photos for this self-financed project. It improved the words-to- pictures ratio.
To the various friends and colleagues who allowed me to use their work: Paul Broadhurst, Robin Heath, Dr. Masaaki Kimura, John Martineau, Kevin Ruane, Ba Russell. IOU a pint of ‘research’.
Santha Faiia for permission to use her photo of Yonaguni.
The various individuals who provided images to Creative Commons and allowed them to be shared.
Wendy, your friendship has kept me sane. You have been a great gift.
John Michell, wherever you are I hope this work does you proud.
Habib Koite, Marcio Faraco and Roine Stolt. Your music keeps me illuminated well beyond bedtime.
And to the tens of thousands of fans out there who’ve supported me through thick and thin, particularly thin, for despite my earlier book, which was a best-seller published in four languages, I still ended up driving an eighteen-year old car. I look forward to an improvement this time!
This one is for you.
Table of Contents
0. OUR LEGACY BEQUEATHED BY GODS.
ACT I
1. A LONG MEMORY OF PLACES OF POWER.
Sourcing the earth force; original landscape temples; spirit roads and other invisible paths; sacred mountains as doorways; the location of paradise.
2. THE MYSTERY OF THE THREE STEPS OF VISHNU.
The three faces of the gods; what really happened in Eden; the geometric alignment of sacred mountains and oracles; the geometry of Siva.
3. NAVELS OF THE EARTH, PLACES OF THE GODS.
Where kingship descends from the sky; sacred centers; Heliopolis and the primordial mounds; the inherent power of navel stones; the legitimate source of divinity.
What happened at Tiwanaku; temples with older roots; the Golden Age; places of the First Occasion; temples as mirrors of the heavens; Giza at 10,500 BC; appearing and disappearing craftsmen; where humans are transformed into bright stars.
Tales of lost lands and submerged temples; dating the great flood; recurring flood myths; more than one Noah.
Giants bearing great wisdom; traditions of levitating stones; the Followers of Horus; networks of adepts; seeding the knowledge for the future.
Resurrecting the former world of the gods; strategic positioning of sacred sites; a universe in number; codes inside myths; the precessional cycle and other stellar mechanics; the global alignment of temples.
The law of correspondences; the raising of great stones; sacred engineering at Avebury; telluric lines across Europe; expansion of the grid; the mystery of Stonehenge’s elbow; global ley lines; Akhenaten returns the temple to the people.
ACT II
Interacting with the invisible at places of power.
THE SEVEN PRINCIPLES OF SACRED SPACE:
THE SEVEN PRINCIPLES OF SACRED SPACE:
THE SEVEN PRINCIPLES OF SACRED SPACE:
THE SEVEN PRINCIPLES OF SACRED SPACE:
THE SEVEN PRINCIPLES OF SACRED SPACE:
THE SEVEN PRINCIPLES OF SACRED SPACE:
THE SEVEN PRINCIPLES OF SACRED SPACE:
ACT III
17. THE RISE AND FALL OF THE TEMPLE.
The on-going cycles of humanity; falling asteroids and changing climates; temple-building in overdrive; collapse of culture; Akhenaten strikes against corruption; the cult of blood; abuse of energy and the power of tyrants; Alexander the Great and the resurgence of Light; the decapitation of the divine feminine.
From knowledge to liberty; the great Catholic impostor; the big Templar secret; what was inside the Ark; the Great Work; emergence of the Gothic; a college of invisibles; the return of the gods; the deliberate debunking of crop circles.
The renewal of the soul; empowerment as a threat; emergence of the brotherhood in modern times; the Knowledge as a capital city.
The Library of Alexandria. Yesterday.
0. OUR LEGACY BEQUEATHED BY GODS.
Sunrise pilgrim at Stonehenge, England
Written traditions such as the Edfu Building Texts inform us how groups of sages and creator gods embarked on temple-building programs at carefully chosen locations in the aftermath of a global flood. 1 These temples represent some of the most awe-inspiring structures on Earth, and many have survived at least 11,000 years of abject politics, weather and warfare. Clearly, whoever created such durable structures meant to do so for posterity, perhaps so that the principles upon which they were founded would serve future generations.
Or perhaps they would remind future generations of the principles they’d abandoned.
These gods’ are often described as people of enormous stature, or having unusual physical characteristics, literally and metaphorically. But physical beings nevertheless.
Super-men perhaps.
In the land of Sumer, a god of giant stature once gave men “an insight into letters and sciences, and every kind of art. He taught them to construct houses, to found temples, to compile laws, and explained to them the principles of geometrical knowledge... so universal were his instructions, nothing has been added materially by way of improvements.” 2
Tales of traveling gods escaping a global deluge underscore the myths in practically every culture, and they regularly appear in groups of seven. In the Indian Vedas seven sages are said to have come from an island, “the home of the primeval ones” destroyed in a great flood. The few survivors became builder gods, the lords of light.” With them came the principle of maintaining indefinitely a society in perfect balance with itself and with the universe through earthly and cosmic balance. 3 The same tradition appears in Egyptian texts, which refer to seven sages arriving from an island swallowed up by the waters of an earth-destroying flood to establish sacred mounds along the Nile that served as foundations for future temples. An identical situation exists in the myths of Easter Island, the Andes, Guatemala and the Yucatan.
This priesthood, for lack of a better noun, was dedicated to the preservation and transmission to the future of a body of spiritual knowledge from the remote past. The cities and temples from which the gods emerged and then recreated were no ordinary places; as with Siva, the god of wisdom, they ruled jnana puri , literally 'cities of knowledge'.
Evidence of this intent is imprinted in the very fabric of the structures they left behind, as a hundred years of analysis of sacred sites now reveals knowledge of advanced geometry, the mathematics of the Earth’s precessional cycles, solar, lunar and stellar alignments, and so forth.
And yet their true function is far and beyond that of Universal encyclopedias. Though we may live in a modern and largely cynical society, there is hardly a person who will dispute the fact that we are immersed in times of turbulence, where change is the only constant. There is the uneasy realization that we have lost our faith in the world around us and lost sight of fundamental principles. We are disconnected from some primal source with whom we once felt comfortable, and which served to restore our umbilical resonance with worlds that cannot be seen or touched. While we come to terms with the ills of disconnection, lying all around us in plain view are the means through which ancient cultures once maintained themselves in balance for thousands of years.
They are called temples.
Pyramids, stone circles, menhirs, dolmens, sanctuaries and mounds. Regardless of their shape and size, they all were built by faceless experts from forgotten ages to the same end: to act as mirrors of the heavens so that ordinary men and women may be transformed into gods. 4 As the Egyptian builder gods once stated, “Whosoever shall make a copy thereof, and shall know it upon earth, it shall act as a magical protector for him in heaven and in earth, unfailingly and regularly and eternally.” 5
Texts discovered at Nag Hammadi stipulate how leading away from such spiritual places caused people to die not knowing the truth, never understanding the Source or why they are here, deceived by darkness and ignorance. 6 And darkness and ignorance aren’t just the prisons of modern society, they are lead curtains that threaten to obscure the light which groups of enlightened individuals have championed to re-establish for the past 4000 years. All we need do is rediscover the special places marked for us on the face of the Earth by beings of great stature whose aim was to maintain an unbroken chain of self-help centers in the face of potential chaos. To do this it is necessary to understand the motivation behind the temple-builders, the principles behind their temples and how they work.
This book is not a general saunter through famous temples and sacred sites around the world. There are many books that already delve into such territory and they do it admirably. This is a unique insight, a behind-the-scenes look into the mind and soul of temple-building: why these “special chosen locations” are so; how ordinary landscapes were transformed into places of power; and the seven principles that master craftsmen combined to transform mere stones and subtle forces into sacred environments. Theirs was an art of manipulating natural laws, and inside their creations the veil between worlds isn’t just perceptibly thin, your senses of awareness are acutely enhanced so as to be capable of perceiving them.
This knowledge has appeared sporadically and haphazardly but, to the best of my knowledge, has never been published in whole. Once upon a time, however, it formed the cornerstone of subtle energy teachings in ancient Mysteries Schools.
Few lay people have been privy to this information, and there is a very good reason for this. Because temples are living organisms that amplify the human potential, the laws that govern them have been used and misused throughout history. Enlightened rulers, sages and pharaohs once were entrusted with the keys to the temple, and used these sacred places for the improvement of humanity — to ‘transform base metal into gold’, to coin the alchemical metaphor. In time they were usurped by a false priesthood, who in turn were supplanted by corrupted Caesars and Catholic Popes.
Tyrants, despots, dark Freemasons, Nazis and other irresponsible people driven by ego have sought to apply this knowledge to bring about the subjugation of entire nations. Because just like stone, human intent, properly channeled, can become a very powerful weapon.
The secrets of the temple have been quietly handed down among esoteric societies such as the Cathars, Bogomils and Manicheists, later to be rediscovered by the Knights Templar during their excavations of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. The majority of these sects died horrifically at the hands of despots and brutal clergymen. Rather than give up timeless secrets, initiates took them to the grave.
It is now time for the lost knowledge of temple-building to resurface. Like any sacred space, the idea behind this book is to let you enter as an initiate and re-emerge an adept.
Far from being dead and forgotten, ancient temples are as alive as the day they were built, and anyone who has visited Stonehenge or Saqqara, not as a tourist but as a pilgrim, understands this. Temples are first seen, and then felt. And it is through that feeling that the soul of the Universe extends its pen and inscribes the clay tablet that is Man.
The gods did not build temples for the benefit of one culture or creed. They designed these heirlooms to last as a legacy for all races unborn, an insurance policy for times which they foresaw as dangerous to the proper conduct of human life.
They built temples for our common wealth.
Uragh stone circle, Ireland. The vision of a very tall woman is often seen here.
ACT I
1. A LONG MEMORY OF PLACES OF POWER.
The ground near it is not at all touched by the four oceans that become agitated at the close of the Yuga, and that have the extremities of the worlds submerged in them…All the lores, arts, wealth of scriptures, and the Vedas are truthfully well-arranged there.
~ Skanda Purana, 12; Chapter 2; Verse 52
The Giant of Manio, Carnac. And a potential future giant.
Touching the untouchable.
One of the rare good things that came out of the Spanish genocide otherwise known as La Conquista was a written account of the creation myth of the Quiché Maya. Like other distinguished cultures before them, great emphasis was placed on committing to memory the laws, history, astronomy, sacred knowledge, events, and other vital information pertaining to their collective wisdom. As with the ancient Egyptians or the Hopi, valuable knowledge was transmitted orally from generation to generation. It was an art held in great esteem, and a privilege entrusted to a few, responsible individuals. But in 1701 it was the Dominican Friar Francisco Ximénez’s turn to hear the oral history of the Quiché Maya and immortalize it in paper. The timing couldn’t have been better, for the tribe had been practically eradicated from this mortal coil either by Spanish swords or the diseases of the savages wielding them.
Of all the interesting things about this corpus named Popul Vuh , two items in particular stand out. First, its depiction of life during a Golden Age before a catastrophic global flood swept the Earth sounds remarkably like most gnostic texts compiled by other civilizations with whom the Quiché Maya supposedly had never interacted. Second, it describes how the 'First Men' possessed clairvoyant ability: “Endowed with intelligence, they saw and instantly they could see far; they succeeded in seeing, they succeeded in knowing all that there is in the world. The things hidden in the distance they saw without first having to move… they were formidable men.” 1
It seems that our remote ancestors were highly attuned to nature and applied their ability accordingly. Indeed many cultures who share close contact with the land have always been attributed with the power of natural divination. Celtic cultures –— and later the Druids — as well as the Bushmen of the Kalahari, were not just highly intuitive, but also telepathic. 2 This natural-born ability enabled them to see the unseen and touch the untouchable.
Besides being more attuned to their surroundings they also understood the origin of what they felt, and why it was there. The Hopi creation myth describes how life on Earth came into being, and although the symbology is unique to that culture, its metaphors bear an uncanny similarity to other religious texts. In their legend, one of the first people created by the Source is sent to the South Pole with a drum, whereupon he hears the heartbeat of the Earth. As he beats a rhythm in sympathetic harmony, a surge of life energy is directed into the center of Gaia, sending streams of life force up to the surface and Earth becomes abundant with life. However, some places became significantly more abundant with this energy. The Hopi called them 'the spots of the fawn', 3 and over time they would become sacred places.
Indeed there has always been a sense among shamanist traditions that certain locations — particularly mountains — are repositories of a vital life force that is more concentrated than in surrounding geographical locations. They are thresholds into a non-ordinary reality, places where the worlds of the material and the spirit convergence and the ancestors offer advice.
The ancients appreciated that human beings are, first and foremost, individuals, and that their journey towards spiritual enlightenment is an individual act where success is based on persistence, patience and perseverance. The hazards along this road are plenty and the distractions immense. Therefore, a little help on the journey has always been sought. And as far back as even the Aborigines can remember, we have sought places on the land where the veil between worlds is thinnest. Ancient traditions describe these as resident places of the spirits — what western scholars interpreted to be ‘gods’. They are power places that help enlighten the individual and where the greater good of the community is served. And contrary to our modern perception of power as a monetary or political tool, they are repositories of energy, insofar as they provide a more direct connection with an astral reference library and with the Great Spirit that flows through life.
The ways and roads of the spirit.
Like the force that drives mammals to migrate along invisible roads century after century, the peoples of the land were drawn to specific hotspots, and if they lived far from these special places they utilized a network of hidden highways that led them there. Native tribes of Bolivia and the American southwest refer to them as spirit roads ; in Ireland they are the fairy paths , in China the lung mei . The compacting of the soil by millions of pilgrim feet walking them over the course of thousands of years has even transformed some of these once occult roads into visible footpaths. In the area around Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, these old straight tracks are described in Navajo lores as tunnels along which the Anasazi could invisibly travel; in Britain you can still walk hundreds of such paths called dod lanes , a term handed down from the early Saxon deada waeg , the 'path of the dead'. This is also one of the names of the Via Sacra ('sacred way') connecting the pyramid complex at Teotihuacan, which goes by a second name, the 'Way of the Stars'.
The spirit road at Teotihuacan.
Other celebrated spirit roads are those of the Australian Aboriginal tribes, whose oral tradition, altjurunga ('dreamtime'), recalls events that took place over a million years ago. 4 Thankfully, Aboriginal tribes are still with us, and it is from them that we get a sense of what it feels like to tune-in to the land. And why.
To say these people live among featureless terrain is an understatement, and yet the hardy inhabitants of the Outback are able to find their way around by sensing invisible lines of force. They call them djalkiri , 'footprints of the ancestors'. 5 When a tribesman walks across a spirit road, if he or she is attentive, they will hear the resonance imprinted by those who walked before. In a way, the djalkiri behave like strips of magnetic cassette tape, recording the song of every individual. This led them to be described by westerners as songlines , but more accurately the Aborigines describe the spirit roads as dreaming tracks . 7 They are imprinted with lore and ritual beyond living memory, a permanent record of events, enabling the Aborigines to walk great distances while listening to a data-stream. And just like modern-day cloud computing, the information can be accessed on-demand.
These spirit roads lead to spiritually important places despite the latter being physically separated by hundreds of miles. That makes them all the more important, especially when so many energy hotspots tend to be unobtrusive and possess no redeeming features, at least to the ignorant eye. But there is no doubt that the spirit roads guide the Aborigines to an intended destination. The thing is, when they are used to figure out directions to non-sacred places, the margin of error is as high as 67%, but when using sacred sites as destinations the error is less than 3%. 7 Talk about magnetic attraction.
This implies that the primary use of these pathways is shamanic rather than orientational. Magician-shamans called Karadji – sometimes referred to as 'Men of High Degree' – have long used such pathways to locate energy nodes, to transmit information telepathically and receive it in the form of visions. 8 The same folklore surrounds pre-Bronze Age hill forts in Britain, the flat-topped earthen enclosures erroneously labeled as fortifications, where telepathy and communication with other levels of reality was conducted right up into the era of the Druids. 9 In fact, telepathy is enhanced thousands of times at sacred sites dating to the Neolithic era. 10 And just like the Aboriginal places of power, all such sacred sites are connected by a network of spirit roads.
The energy nodes and their effect on the individual are not restricted to ancient people or modern shaman. Anyone attuned to the environment is able to open a doorway of communication at these focal spots, and that can lead to an intimate experience with the spirit of place. Mountaineers are just such a type. Although the concentration demanded of them requires intense mental clarity and total left-brain engagement, at certain moments a climber’s bond with the rock becomes a religious experience. One such occasion occurred to Maurice Herzog while climbing the Annapurna in Nepal, a holy mountain named for the Goddess of Fertility: “I had the strangest and most vivid impressions such as I had never before known in the mountains… all sense of exertion was gone, as though there was no longer any gravity… I had never seen such complete transparency, and I was living in a world of crystal. Sounds were indistinct. The atmosphere like cotton wool. An astonishing happiness welled up in me, but I could not define it. An enormous gulf was between me and the world. This was a different universe… we were overstepping a boundary.” 11
That Hertzog experienced this transcendental moment on a mountain deemed sacred by local people is not unusual to those who understand such places and their effects; the fact that such a right-brain revelation occurred in a place with a 40% fatality rate for climbers – making this the most dangerous mountain in the world — is what gives credence to his shamanic experience.
In some cultures, natural power places are marked with petroglyphs, notably in the American southwest, the Sahara and Australia, and particularly where landscape temples have been in continuous use for millennia as hotspots for vision quests, as well as healing. They are often some of the most serene places on Earth, where the sky and the earth seem limitless and in balanced proportion to one another.
Petroglyphs mark a magnetic hotspot and temple. Arizona.
They are also unique in that they are located at unusual electromagnetic or gravitational hotspots. Every dawn, the Earth is subjected to a rise in the solar wind, which intensifies the planet’s geomagnetic field; at night this field weakens, then picks up at dawn and the cycle repeats ad infinitum . But there are places on the land where the geomagnetic field interacts with another force, and the effect intensifies. In physics it is called a telluric current ; ancient people call it a spirit road.
These subtle lines of force tend to travel better along soil with a high content of metal and water, and possibly quartz. Drier, less metallic ground conducts telluric currents minimally. Where a boundary between these two types of land occurs, the telluric current crossing it either reinforces or weakens the daily fluctuations of the geomagnetic field. 12 This generates a hotspot called a conductivity discontinuity , and even though ancient people did not own magnetometers, they were able to locate them long before science built machines to prove them right.
The Sioux call this energy skan , and when concentrated at power places it is claimed to influence the mind, creativity, as well as elevate personal power in the form of spiritual attuning. In essence, the energy raises one’s resonance, and contact with multiple power places builds up a kind of numinous state of mind. Chinese Taoist beliefs agree on this experience, and state that the proper relationship with China’s five sacred mountains awakens the “Great Man within'. It is a belief that is culturally shared throughout the world and forms the basis of pilgrimage.
Though the people who originally discovered, used, honored and reinforced the power places are long gone, their tradition lives in the rituals of native cultures such as the Aborigines and the tribes of North America, and to some extent the latter-day practitioners of Druidism and Hinduism. Regardless of whether they visit sacred caves, mounds or mountains, devotees continue this practice to acquire the numinous energy of place, and in correctly harnessing this power they are able to receive visions. Or they serve others by re-directing the energy into a distant place or person, as a Karuk shaman explains: “A medicine man must go to the mountain or some other power center to pray for his people. I connect with the power and shoot it straight down from the mountaintop into the sacred dance. It is like a beam of light or electricity. It will make the healing more powerful… and I ask the spirits from the mountain to come down and dance with us in the ceremony as our ancestors originally did in the beginning.” 13
Jesus did precisely the same as a way of strengthening his power to heal people. 14
Invisible roads leading somewhere.
What spirit roads share in common, from Britain to Bolivia, is they all connect hundreds of energy hotspots, a good number of which are sacred mountains.
One has to wonder how and why some mountains ever became sacred. Did some force or entity present itself in a way that was vastly different to the surrounding land? James Swan, a professor of anthropology, explains that “a place becomes sacred ultimately to us when it is perceived as somehow able to energize within us those feelings and concepts we associate with the spiritual dimensions of life.” 15 Thus, a perceptual reality commonly experienced and reinforced by people of similar purpose over long spans of time serves to mark the location as sacred.
There is no doubt that some places on Earth are more powerful than others. A large body of scientific evidence shows that energy concentrates and behaves differently at certain geographic locales. And ancient places of veneration, without exception, always reference areas of geomagnetic anomalies, even gravity anomalies. 16 So, if such places strike us as powerful, it is probably because they are. Humans, after all, are sensitive to their surroundings and were undoubtedly more so thousands of years ago when they did not have to contend with a morass of electronic devices, and the signal-to-noise ratio was far stronger. A difference in the local magnetic field of just a few gammas is enough to be sensed by people, and anomalies at sacred sites register far stronger.
Atomically speaking, a mountain is nothing more than a vast accumulation of energy. In all nature, form follows function. And form, or matter, is simply energy made concrete: atoms, molecules and electrons spinning, resonating and bonding together. If we expand this logic, landforms can be regarded as manifestations of an inherent energy; a mountain range may be the result of a physical collision between tectonic plates, but those plates are the result of the movement of energy within the Earth, which itself is a ball of solidified atoms and molecules. Thus, in a manner of speaking, a mountain is a repository of considerable life force, it is one of the bigger 'spots of the fawn'.
Sacred mountains, then, can be seen as landscape temples made by nature and later identified as such by human beings.
And if they are a kind of temple, then they may be doorways to an ineffable threshold of awareness, as a shaman of the Tewa people hints: “Whatever life’s challenges you may face, remember always to look to the mountaintop; in so doing you look to greatness.” 17 Such sage advice is probably an echo of the legendary actions of gods and gurus who in remote times sought out specific locations on specific mountains, often following arduous journeys. There is the legend of a Tibetan tutelary deity named Padmasambhava who is said to have flown some 300 miles from Tibet to Bhutan, on the back of a tiger, to consecrate a cave on the side of a mountain. His motivation for the stupendous journey was to “tame a local tiger,” an old euphemism for securing or anchoring telluric forces so as to create an energy hotspot or node. Padmasambhava’s flight obviously succeeded, for a prominent monastery named Taktsang Dzong (Tiger’s Nest), was later built on the edge of the mountain.
Taktsang Dzong, Tibet.
Certainly when one looks at some of these monasteries one has to ask, what kind of revelation prompted these endeavors that look like architectural experiments in anti-gravity? Delicate structures built on vertiginous cliffs and meandering ridges are found from China to Greece, one of the most wonderous examples being the wooden temple of Hsuan-k’ung Ssu, the 'Temple Hanging in Air', built on the side of one of China’s most sacred mountains, Heng Shan, where indeed it has defied gravity since 491 AD. From a distance it actually looks as though it is floating in mid-air, overlooking the curiously-named stream, the Brook of the Gods.
Clearly these sites were not located and then built upon on a whim, and the numerous legends of gods chasing some type of force offers a window into the underlying motivation.
Hsuan-k’ung Ssu, seemingly defying gravity.
Windows into paradise.
The mountain, both as a symbol and metaphor, occupies a central position in the human psyche. Perhaps the best known example throughout eastern religious lore is Sumeru, or Mt. Meru, for it represents at the same time an allegorical structure of the universe as well as the highest spiritual achievement sought by adepts in the physical, spiritual and metaphysical cosmology of Hindus, Buddhists and Jains; the roots of Jainism, in particular, are as old as mountains themselves, and its influence is noted in many other religions. Interestingly, these faiths share similar spiritual philosophies: the practice of self-effort in progressing the soul towards divine consciousness through non-violence, and the conquering of inner struggles (commonly known as the seven deadly sins). To overcome such conditions, devotees have traditionally sourced the energy of places of power, including pilgrimage to sacred mountains, where meditation and integration with the spirit of place helps a person disentangle themselves from such negative limitations as fear, anger, envy, and so forth. And once enlightenment is reached, one attains a state of bliss. Or as many prefer to call it, paradise.
Mt. Meru in Bhutanese art.
The word 'paradise’ originates from pairidaeza in Avestan – the sacred language of Zoroastrianism – and literally means 'a walled enclosure'.
Likewise, a Jain who has mastered discipline over the physical world and achieved a state of godliness is called a Jina . As this word traveled west it became the Arabic Djinn , along with its derivative Allah-Djinn, and finally, the Latin genius — a kind of tutelary spirit, like one’s personal guardian angel. By the 17 th century it appears as genie , later to be known in the West as Aladdin .
Back in the days when Asia Minor was Assyria, this Djinn was a supernatural being. And rightly so, since the root j-n-n means 'hidden'; it is also the root of jannah , the Islamic concept of paradise. Its derivative in Portuguese — a language brimming with Arabic — is janela , 'a window, an opening in a wall'.
In other words, paradise is a demarcated space, hidden and separate from the ordinary and troublesome world. And if we follow this dizzying etymological trail, it seems we can get into this ‘walled enclosure’ through ‘an opening in the wall’.
Paradise is, admittedly, what every living human being strives for, be it in the now or in the afterlife. Could a sacred mountain be a window into such a place?
It might just be. We already know that such places are energetically active, and electromagnetic energy, properly guided, does influence the human body to a degree that it alters brainwaves, causing heightened states of consciousness. 18 The allegorical Mount Meru’s earthly counterpart is Mount Kailas, a 22,000-foot high granite cube that tapers into a pyramid-shaped summit, which is approached by pilgrims walking a path resembling an ever-decreasing spiral. Pilgrims to Mecca perform the same ritual around the cubic Ka’ba ('spirit-body') as do pilgrims to Ireland’s holiest sacred mountain, the pyramidal Cruach Phádraig. Like perambulating a labyrinth, the need to walk in slowly decreasing orbits induces oneness between mind, body, spirit, and God — it creates a shamanic experience that leads to a blissful state of oneness with all levels of creation.
That is paradise.
Mt. Kailas. Abode of Siva and sacred to over a billion people.
Meru/Kailas’ position both as an explanatory model of cosmology and path of spiritual revelation finds its way into later Christian beliefs. If we examine one of the New Testament’s most important characters, Mary, it is stated that the mother of Jesus came out of Egypt. That may well be, but her origins and association with the sacred landscape are far older than the official Gospel traditions. Like Meru, she may be an archetype through which one may find salvation — paradise.
Mary was ‘Beloved of God’, wore a veil, and traditional icons pose her seated with the infant Jesus on her lap. The same applies to the Egyptian goddess of creation, Isis, who was ‘Beloved of God’, wore a veil and is identically posed with the infant Horus. To all intents and purposes, the two entities are one and the same.
The Divine Mother and child. Clockwise from top left: Mary and Jesus; from Babylon; Isis and Horus; Indrani, Hindu goddess.
Ancient Egyptians called their land Ta Mery , 'the land of Mery'. Mery is also written Mr , and the hieroglyph for Mr is a pyramid. 19 Etymologically and symbolically then, Mr , Mary, Mery and Meru are interchangeable.
Isis’ husband Osiris is the god of the afterlife, a kind of gatekeeper into paradise. He is often depicted sitting on a throne shaped like a cube — just as Christ is compared to a cube-shaped mountain upon which a tower is erected. Egypt’s most enigmatic structures are the pyramids, which emerge from a square base — a flattened cube. Even so, they are but representations of an unusual hill across the river from Thebes called Dehenet, an imposing limestone cube of a mountain with a pyramid-shaped top, which was the hotspot chosen by pharaohs as the gateway into the Otherworld, for it stands over what is known today as the Valley of the Kings and Queens. From this serenest of places their souls entered paradise.
Osiris on his cube throne.
So far, the thread of the sacred mountain as both a power place and a doorway of communication with the Otherworld seem quite tenable. Consider also that the Buddhist monuments of veneration, the stupas , are said to represent the primordial sacred mound – the original manifestation of the essence of a creator god – atop which rests a variation of the pyramidal shape. In their venerations, the Sinhalese people of Sri Lanka, in particular, place a stone cube inside the stupas to represent Mount Meru, the center of the world. 20
All this symbolism ties the cube and the pyramid with Meru/Mery/Mary. In other words, Mary/Meru represents the spirit of place, the center of the world, the ‘Beloved of God’. The geometric representation of this principle is the cube and the pyramid, with Osiris, the god of the afterlife presiding over the entrance to paradise.
Thus the sacred mountain — together with the spirit roads leading to it — is ‘a way of the spirit’.
Classic stupa. Thailand.
The mountain as landscape temple.
Such cultural cross-associations reveal how the concept of the sacred mountain is entwined with divinity and the threshold of the human spirit. It is the window into that walled garden called paradise, a portal into a state of bliss.
For all intents and purposes, the sacred mountain is the ultimate landscape temple, the first sacred site. Even today there is no shortage of them in virtually every country in the world, and the traditions associated with each one, handed down from prehistory, affirm their status in world mythology. India, in particular, has long maintained a relationship with such holy places. By looking at some of the traditions associated with sacred mountains we get a sense of why people would later embark on a worldwide construction boom of temples placed on top of these points of power, or as close as their religious outlook would permit.
In the southern Indian province of Tamil Nadu, the god Siva once descended from the sky as an effulgent column of light. Siva’s appearance may have seemed rather brash, but there was a good reason for this behavior. He came with news of an impending catastrophe, and wished to nominate a special location where the sum knowledge of everything would be placed for safe keeping: “When the annihilation of all living beings takes place [by an impending global flood]…all future seeds are certainly deposited there…All the lores, arts, wealth of scriptures, and the Vedas are truthfully well-arranged there.” 21
This was cordially received by the second and third creator gods Vishnu and Brahma, despite the bittersweet news. However, so bright was Siva’s light that Brahma and Vishnu beseeched him to turn it down a notch so that mortal men could approach it in comfort, otherwise there would be little use in creating a repository of knowledge that could not be accessed by mortals. Siva mulled this, agreed, and lowered his radiance, which would forever remain in the form of a mountain of fire. The spot is today marked by a pyramidal hill of red stone called Arunachela, also called the Sacred Red Hill. There is no doubt as to its numinous quality today, for at its base lies the 24-acre temple of Arunachaleswara, one of the five most important temples dedicated to Siva in India. The constructed temple is itself directly associated with deity, for Siva also manifested a column of stone on the hill’s eastern side, after which Visvakarma, the architect of the Gods, erected the first temple with the phallic symbol of Siva, the Sivalinga , housed inside its Holy of Holies (the present-day structure rests on these extremely ancient foundations). 22
Arunachalaleswara temple, as seen from the sacred hill Arunachela. India.
Arunachela embodies the presence of Siva, or divinity, on Earth. Had this occurred in Egypt, the sacred mound would have embodied the presence of Atum. In North America, such a place of connection between divinity and humanity is Tse´Bit’ai ('rock with wings'), otherwise known as Shiprock. Anyone who has traveled to the Four Corners region of New Mexico and approached this 1800-foot vertical wall of breccia cannot be but moved to tears. It happens to me on every occasion. Although this eroded throat of a 27 million year-old volcano can be seen from over 60 miles across the desert, its enchanting effect is also due to the accumulation of millennia of veneration and prayer at the site, which in turn has concentrated the natural power already present. Not surprisingly, Tse´Bit’ai is located at the heart of land that once was the domain of the Mesolithic native people, the Anasazi. As this legendary tribe died out, the site would play a significant role in Navajo religion, mythology and tradition, and it is still recognized today as ‘the place of beginning’ for these cultures. One ancestral myth describes how a metal bird flew the people from Venus, and when they alighted and were safe, the bird descended into the earth and emerged as a protective angel.
Tse’ Bit’ai, sacred center to the Anasazi and Navajo.
Tse´Bit’ai is one of several sacred mountains in the American southwest serving distinct functions above and beyond mere places of power. While this mountain acts as the navel, one hundred and twenty miles due southeast, the pyramidal Tsoodzil (Mt. Taylor), is regarded as the doorway to the spirit world – an exact mirror of the relationship between Giza and Thebes in Egypt.
No matter how the legends describe them, sacred mountains are either homes of gods, portals into paradise or places for illumination: Mt. Olympus in Greece ('the dwelling place of the gods'); Serra de Estrela in Portugal ('place of the bright star'); Nanda Devi in India ('the Goddess of Bliss'). The collection is endless.
In addition to sacred mountains being landscape temples, ambulatories of the gods, and windows into other realities, many traditions also mark them as collection-points for universal scriptures handed down by divine beings to be used at a later date, and often as an insurance policy in the wake of impending upheaval. Like so many creator gods, Siva’s primary attribute is gnosis –— knowledge — which he stores at the hill of Arunachela in the form of the oldest Vedic scriptures, the Vedas ('the knowledge').
Over in China the five sacred mountains of Buddhism have always been places one attends in the pursuit of knowledge; the same applies to Japan’s Mt. Miwa. At Mount Sinai, knowledge in the form of laws was exchanged between God and Moses. And following such interchanges, this knowledge was shared with the people by a priesthood of adepts, shaman or sages.
New Zealand has a sacred mountain that once served as a fully integrated ancient academy. And if you know how such power places function, it still does. Situated on the backbone of the Southern Alps of the South Island, Kura Tawhiti is a curve of limestone megaliths oriented along the saddle of a mountain named Castle Hill. Some of the stones are 50 feet tall. Despite several trips to this magnificent part of the world I still cannot muster the right superlatives to bestow on this landscape temple — undiminished clarity is probably what best describes the sensation. The Dalai Lama himself was moved enough to name this power place A Spiritual Center of the Universe.
Marotini, tutelary goddess of Kura Tawhiti. New Zealand.
Kura Tawhiti is described as both 'the highest place of learning' and 'the meeting place of the gods'. Its tradition far precedes that of the Maori, who were relative latecomers to New Zealand around 1300 AD. The creators of this astonishing outdoor classroom were the Waitaha, a race of mythical beings who are described as very tall and fair skinned, sometimes with reddish hair. 23 A small number still exist today.
Each of the stones at this academy served as an initiation into a specific aspect of gnosis. As the initiate understood and embodied the facets taught, he or she would move along to the next stone, ambling progressively uphill and ever closer to the apex of the mountain, where stands an enigmatic monolith, the embodiment of Marotini, goddess and protective entity of the site. In essence, it is a carbon copy of the story of Siva at Arunachela. This magnetically-charged stone 24 actually resembles the face of a lioness, and it is not unusual for people working with earth energies to afterwards capture on camera the face of a woman emerging from the monolith.
The face of Marotini on a photo.
While Kura Tawhiti serves as a seeding place and repository of the knowledge of the gods amid the enchanting land of Aotearoa, as in New Mexico and Egypt, the actual doorway to paradise is attributed to a secondary site, on the North Island, the perfect cone volcano Taranaki, which from space looks identical to Japan’s Mount Fuji, with whom it shares the attribute, 'place of abundant immortality'.
To quote the mythologist Joseph Campbell, “The idea of a sacred [place] where the walls and laws of the temporal world dissolve to reveal wonder is apparently as old as the human race.” 25 There is little doubt that the recurring theme of the sacred mountain as a navel, seeding place, repository of knowledge, and gateway to the gods — to paradise itself — is a culturally shared idea that is beyond mere conjecture, and dates back into prehistory.
These landscape temples, from small mounds to high hills, are intermediary locations between the temporal and the eternal, they represent the temple in its purest form. Their importance in the balanced conduct of human affairs was understood and later acted upon by groups of 'wise men'. Perhaps it is not by coincidence, then, that the builders of Stonehenge took the trouble to seek and quarry its bluestones 140 miles away, at the foot of a mountain in Wales named Cairn Ingli, 'the Hill of the Angels'.
As we are about to see, landscape temples are indeed receptacles of revelation.
Storm over Kura Tawhiti. Even from four miles away it looks impressive.
2. THE MYSTERY OF THE THREE STEPS OF VISHNU.
“Establish the triangle and the problem is two-thirds solved.”
~ Pythagoras
Vishnu and Siva.
The concept of triadic deity is found throughout world mythology, in which three inter-related creative forces are represented by a central figure or god with two supporting entities – such as the Christian God, whose aspect comprises Father-Son-Holy Spirit. This idea of wholeness is personified on an earthly level in the Egyptian ibis-headed god Djehuti (Thoth, to the Greeks), who is honored as thrice great after he becomes the embodiment of perfection.
Just as with the sacred mountain, the holy trinity is also culturally shared.
In Hindu cosmology the god Siva often appears intertwined with the gods Vishnu and Brahma, all three representing the concept of Trimurti, the three-fold nature of the One divine creative aspect regulating creation, maintenance and destruction. 1 In the Rig Veda there is a recurring theme which involves the unusual behavior of the aforementioned Vishnu — whose role it is to protect humans and restore order to the world – and his often-celebrated act of taking three steps: “I will declare the mighty deeds of Vishnu, of him who measured out the earthly regions… thrice setting down his footstep, widely striding…He within whose three wide-extended paces all living creatures have their habitation…Him who alone with triple step hath measured this common dwelling place, long far extended…” 2
And further along, Vishnu “strode, widely pacing, with three steppings forth over the realms of the earth for freedom and for life.” 3
Strange behavior indeed for a god.
Vishnu is eventually given the attribute Trivikrama, meaning “of the three steps.” Is it possible that Vishnu, the bringer of order to the world, paced out landscape temples in threes? Was he being geometrical, perhaps, positioning them in triangles, symbol of universal order? But mountains are immovable objects, you can’t just put them where you like. And why should he be doing this “for freedom and for life?”
We know that landscape temples were designated repositories of the knowledge of the gods, and that ‘imbibing’ such knowledge empowered the individual to be free — that is, free from the illusions of the world of matter. Under such conditions any person is able to live life fully aware, precisely as the Rig Veda states. One can’t help but envision the parable of Adam and Eve, their sojourn in paradise, and the apple they ate from the Tree of Knowledge. In the account of Genesis given in the Gnostic gospels of Nag Hammadi — which precede the four canonical gospels selected by the Church 4 — the serpent appears as the benevolent hero of mankind, and the god portrayed in the story is a shadow of the god of Light: “What did God say to you?” the serpent asked Eve. “Was it, do not eat from the tree of knowledge?”
Eve replied, “He said, not only do not eat from it, but do not touch it lest you die.” The serpent reassured her, saying, “Do not be afraid. With death you shall not die; for it was out of jealousy that he said this to you. Rather your eyes shall open and you shall come to be like gods, recognizing evil and good.” 5
The Gnostic writings then describe that once Adam and Eve had eaten of the Tree of Knowledge they experienced enlightenment, precisely as one does, and the knowledge empowered them to discover spiritual transfiguration. All of this is in stark contrast to what many have been traditionally taught. Thanks to the machinations of the Church, the attainment of knowledge gets Adam and Eve booted out of paradise, the apple is labeled forbidden fruit, and worse, the whole episode is presided by a serpent who was doing fine as a symbol of telluric forces until the Church turned it into the devil. And just like that, knowledge becomes evil, and coming into contact with it removes you from that state of bliss.
But ‘drinking’ of this knowledge and applying it was precisely the reason why we sought out places of power on the land, and why gods with benevolent intentions, like Siva, imprinted it at special spots for us to find.
As a component of that Trimurti, Vishnu is responsible for the protection of humanity, therefore, whatever is at play here is certainly of great benefit to humanity. So, where do the ‘three steps’ fit into this picture?
A few phrases later in the Rig Veda we are given another cunning piece of information: “He, like a rounded wheel, hath set in swift motion his 90 racing steeds together with the four….”
We are here presented with an instruction concealed in an allegorical tale, which was a time-honored method of preserving ancient — and vital — universal knowledge. Since 90 racing steeds x 4 = 360, it implies the number of degrees in a circumference of a “rounded wheel”. 6 Since Vishnu is measuring a sphere called the Earth, and the sphere is a circle in 3-D, would the siting of landscape temples along the surface of the sphere have something to do with Vishnu’s three steps? After all, he was also in charge of restoring order to the world.
Very orderly sacred mountains.
When looking at traditions behind sacred mountains, it is striking how so many share common stories and plot lines within certain regions. India, for example, is a vast country, enough to be awarded the status of sub-continent, and yet of all its mountains only a small number are sacred, and out of those, fewer still are associated with legends involving the god of wisdom Siva, who in the Bhagavad Gita and Vishnu Purana is viewed as an inherent part of Vishnu.
My curiosity for Vishnu’s three steps made me wonder whether these were connected in some way to a geodetic-geometric placement of sacred mountains and other nodes of energy associated with the manifestation of divinity. Since mountains are natural and immovable objects, such a probability would be astronomical. Then again, all form follows function, and in the Vedic story of Siva, as with so many others, the essence of a creator god descends as a column of light and is anchored into a mountain or a primordial mound. Or the light becomes the mountain itself. With so many myths declaring sacred mountains to be manifestations of the power of a ‘creative god’, one has to wonder if there is substance to these tales, and that the causative power behind what we perceive as matter is far more sentient than we can comfortably admit.
I decided to put the theory to the test.
My point of focus was Mount Kailas, for obvious reasons: it is the earthly depiction of Mount Meru; it is the abode of Siva; it is a place of ‘eternal bliss’, and it is sacred to five religions. The second choice was the holy hill of Gabbar. Like Kailas it is said to be the origin of the Supreme Cosmic Power of the Universe and of India; it is near the source of the famous Vedic virgin river Sarasvati, and the place where Siva left the heart of his first wife, Sati. The third is Maa Sharda, a conical hill used as a sacred mountain since the Paleolithic era, when Siva, mourning over his deceased wife, dropped her necklace. Linking all three sites creates a perfect right-angle triangle, to within 1º of error. Considering the longest span of this triangle covers 650 miles, that is an incredible degree of accuracy — especially as we are dealing with three distinct natural features. But I soon discovered this was by no means a one-off coincidence. A pattern of triangular alignments between landscape temples exists around the world.
In China, three Buddhist sacred mountains are associated with Bodhisattvas — bodhi meaning ‘enlightenment’ and sattva meaning ‘being’. It is also translated as ‘wisdom-being’, a clear reference to the mountain as a repository of the god of knowledge. The three are Wutái Shan, Éméi Shan and Putuó Shan, and together they create an isosceles triangle (in which two sides are of equal length); it is also 4º shy of being a perfect right-angle triangle, with its longest span covering an incredible 1,140 miles!
Still in China, I looked at Taoist sacred mountains. Tài Shan is the holiest, having been in use since Paleolithic times, that is before 10,000 BC . Huà Shan and Héng Shan have also been in constant use since before records began, and both are claimed to be places of contact with God. These three create a right-angle triangle to within 3º of error, with the longest span stretching 410 miles.
Vishnu’s three steps applied to sacred mountains featuring similar lores.
Japan has a similar tradition. Mount Miwa is this island’s oldest place of worship, pre-dating history, and is home to the earliest Shinto shrines. Mount Haku is the primary shrine of 2,000 Hakusan shrines; and Mount Fuji is regarded as the supreme incarnation of creation, its sacredness hard-wired into Japanese culture. 7
These three sacred mountains form a perfect right-angle triangle, with the longest span stretching 175 miles.
By now it was becoming clear that the triple steps of Vishnu in “widely stepped paces” measuring out the earthly regions referred to a geometric-geodetic blueprint of power points. 8 True to his attribute, Vishnu brings order to the world. And this arrangement doesn’t just apply to the placement of sites, it is also the order that comes from a balanced mind when interacting with them, which it was hoped would lead to a balanced society. I was curious to see if Vishnu’s three steps were simply an eastern revelation or a global pattern, so I applied the process to the Egyptian culture.
No study of Egyptian sacred mounds is complete without reference to the Giza plateau, and there we shall begin. To the ancient Egyptians the hill of Giza was known as Rostau , literally ‘Gateway to the Otherworld’. The alignment of the three main pyramids sitting on this hill reflect the belt of Orion as it appeared on the horizon in 10,500 BC , 9 and each structure sits on a primordial mound said to be one of the first manifestations of the wisdom of the gods at the dawn of Zep Tepi , ‘the First Occasion’. Later the site would be called Giza, ‘the embodiment of the place of Isis’. As we saw in the previous chapter with Mary, Giza itself has gone through many linguistic permutations, particularly as Gesa and Gesu , which are linked etymologically and phonetically with Jesu , and inevitably Jesus . 10 To say this sacred place is important is an understatement!
The pyramid hill of Dehenet overlooking the Valley of the Kings. And its mirror at Saqqara.
This plateau of pyramids is linked to an important mountain across the Nile from Luxor which is shaped like a natural pyramid. Called Dehenet, it oversees the Valley of the Kings and Queens. Or, I should say, it was the reason why so many pharaohs chose to be buried around or inside this imposing limestone mountain. Its location on a power point and the spirit roads leading to it makes this the Egyptian ‘Meru’, and the pharaohs’ portal into paradise; it is also one of the many reasons why the pyramid was chosen as the shape of power in their land. 11 Which brings us to the third point of this triangle, Sinai — Mount Katherine, to be specific. Like Siva at Arunachala, this is where God spoke with Moses as a pillar of light. Although traditionally regarded as both a Bedouin and early Christian tale, its central character, Moses, was an Egyptian priest, just to re-affirm the cultural link between the three sites. 12
The three form an isosceles triangle, 310 miles along the longest stretch.
As with Egypt, Celtic Ireland has its own kingly necropolis called Knocknarea, an arresting and freestanding ‘hill of Destiny’ surrounded by no less than 200 burial mounds, some dating to 7,400 BC , 13 including that of Daghdha, father god of the Celts and chief of the mythological magic beings Tuatha Dé Danaan, ‘the people of the goddess Ana’. It is considered a navel of the Earth. As is the hill of Uisneach — the mystical navel of Eire as well as its geodetic center — where Beltane fires are lit annually on May 3 rd . The third point, Cruach Phadraig, is the holiest hill in Ireland and dwelling place of Lugh, son of Cian of the Tuatha Dé Danaan, who is often described as a Shining One — a creator god. The word lugh is also synonymous with light.
These three sites form a perfect right-angle triangle, with the longest span covering 90 miles.
The Navajo and Anasazi cultures of the American southwest have three sacred mountains associated with creation myths: Tse’ Bit’ai and Tsoodzil, both in New Mexico, and Bell Rock in Arizona (sacred to the Sinagua, once part of the Anasazi). All are considered ‘navels of the earth’. Tsoodzil resembles a pyramid, Bell Rock a Tibetan bell, a stupa, and when backlit, the classic shape of a UFO.
The three are connected as a perfect right-angle triangle, with the longest span at 240 miles.
Finally (and I could go on for several pages), in Portugal there exist three near-identical power points, all settled and honored since prehistoric times, all later to become important Templar sites of veneration. They are linked by a right-angle triangle with a 4º margin of error, with the longest span stretching 170 miles.
To the power of three.
It seems that the three steps of Vishnu served a strategic function in establishing the location of natural power places — the umbilical cords between divine knowledge and human enlightenment. But why three steps? Why not four or five?
The predominant occupation of the ancients was the observation of nature. By noting the inherent perfection of the universe and then mirroring it, they hoped to bring harmony to mundane life through the creation of forms that were consonant with nature, be it in architecture, art or civil law. The vehicle for transcribing the macrocosm into the microcosm was number, and every number in ancient cosmology has meaning, since it both represents and explains the functions, principles, processes and cycles of nature. One student who graduated from the Egyptian Mysteries Schools of Alexandria expressed this concept well when he declared, “All is number.” His name was Pythagoras.
When Vishnu’s three steps are expressed two-dimensionally they take on the first form of geometry, the triangle. In innumerable mythologies it is the most important of geometrical shapes because it expresses the relationship of the three-in-one, the divine trinity. The triangle is a reconciling relationship between opposing forces, symbolized by the number two, dark and light, good and evil. But a third element brings balance through relationship. Egyptologist John Anthony West expresses it succinctly: “Male/female is not a relationship. For there to be a relationship there must be ‘love’ or at least ‘desire’. A sculptor and a block of wood will not produce a statue. The sculptor must have ‘inspiration’.” 14 The same can be said for the triangular movements of a creator god as he deposited information at energetically-sensitive locations in our physical domain through a beam of light: one, the creative force; two, manifests knowledge; three, for the love of humanity. In this respect Vishnu and Siva (together with Brahma) are all working for and towards the same indivisible whole.
This relationship is depicted in Egyptian art, where the earthly embodiment of the creator gods — the pharaoh, the builder of human-created temples — is regularly depicted in murals wearing what can only be described as an unfeasibly starched apron in the shape of an isosceles triangle.
The pharaoh’s apron.
This triangular understanding between human/earthly/divine was subsequently incorporated into shamanic/religious practice and its search for enlightenment. The most common pose in eastern meditation is the devotee sitting cross-legged with arms touching the knees, making the form of an equilateral triangle. The black robe worn by a Zen Buddhist priest engaged in Zazen meditation emphasizes the isosceles triangle form of the priest’s body. It is interesting that in their search for inner bliss, such meditational poses mimic the geodetic arrangement of landscape temples — the places of eternal bliss, of paradise –— which favor isosceles or right-angle triangles. Like Plato and Pythagoras, the practitioners of Zen equate the triangle with the transformation of the soul, since it symbolizes a method of organization through the joining or mediating of differences. To them the isosceles triangle, above all, embodies the stability of the Absolute Ground of Being of Buddha consciousness. 15 And yet, all of this is but a mirror of natural forces at play: as Aristotle concluded in his study of organic forms, the isosceles triangle is inherent in the gnomic pattern of growth in nature. 16
Expressed three-dimensionally, geometry becomes polyhedral or solid geometry. Thus, a triangle in three-dimensional space becomes a tetrahedron, otherwise known as a triangular pyramid. It is one of the principal Platonic solids as well as the glue of God, because in nature it is the geometry that bonds all molecules. In other words, the tetrahedron is the prime bonding pattern of matter.
What the gods were up to in sacred mountains and other ‘navels of the earth’ was the imprinting of knowledge, typically via a beam of light, which in the language of science is electromagnetic energy made visible. Enlightened physicists looking at subatomic particle dynamics in a particle chamber have remarked how particles behave as if they are dancing, leading to parallels with the dance of Siva, the god of creation, as depicted by early artists. 17 Indeed the comparison may be apt: statues of the dancing Siva visualize him standing within a flaming circle, two hands and one foot resting on its circumference, the other foot raised in front, giving the pose a distinct three-dimensional persona. By graphically linking the three limbs touching the circumference, an invisible equilateral triangle is revealed, but extending the lines of construction to meet at Siva’s dancing foot reveals nature’s pyramid, the tetrahedron.
Siva stands as a triangle and reveals the 3-D tetrahedron.
The importance attached to the holy trinity — as a symbol and as the process of creation in equilibrium — is very clear, for it effortlessly describes the framework behind the molecular bond of nature. Its application in the geodetic positioning of the nodes of power by creator gods demonstrates their intent to mirror such fundamental creative processes across the face of the Earth.
The core belief of ancient esoteric practices states that human life should strive to reflect the inherent perfection of natural forces around it, such as the orderly motions of the heavens. This was the sky-ground dualism so beloved of the Egyptians, as reflected in their maxim As Above, So Below , as well as the Gnostic As Without, So Within . It was then up to the initiate to acquire the knowledge through direct contact and immersion in the processes imprinted at sacred places.
As repositories of energy, landscape temples are finely-tuned instruments, they are embodiments of a trinity whose creative aspect regulates creation, maintenance and destruction. They must be respected if they are to sustain their original function. As every physicist knows, for every action there’s a reaction, and the invisible power at sacred places also works on the visible plane. Native elder Grandpa David Monongye explains: “Anytime human beings interfere with or violate or alter the power center, they are causing a serious imbalance, hence a negative and detrimental reaction can occur.” 18
In essence, the power centers of the land serve the same function as the power centers of the human body in maintaining the whole organism in perfect balance. 19 As such, the act of honoring both establishes and reinforces the circular relationship between the spirit of place, the human body and the Earth. Perhaps this was the prime reason why we felt motivated to emulate the landscape temples by constructing our very own places of power.
3. NAVELS OF THE EARTH, PLACES OF THE GODS.
Whosoever shall make a copy thereof, and shall know it upon earth, it shall act as a magical protector for him in heaven and in earth, unfailingly, and regularly, and eternally.
~ Book of What is in the Duat
Pilgrims ascending Huà Shan, sacred mountain and navel of the earth. China.
The Tamil tradition of Arunachala as a repository of a creator god’s power and knowledge is ancient, prehistoric even. Arunachala lies in the land of the Dravidian culture, which is at least 10,000 years old, and the origin of today’s Tamil culture. The hill is mentioned in the oldest Tamil sacred literature, the Tolkappiyam , which itself refers to an even older work that was based on a library of archaic texts said to have been compiled more than 10,000 years earlier. 1 We are therefore talking about an extremely old scripture spanning unimaginable eons of time, much like the oral traditions of the Aborigines, which have been kept alive through their interactions with the spirit roads. This was a time when “kingship was lowered from heaven,” 2 a ‘golden age’ whose echoes ripple through Quechua Maya myths as well as the Building Texts of ancient Egypt.
The hill of Arunachala is the embodiment of Siva and his knowledge, forever a “repository of everything auspicious” and which “exists for the welfare of all.” 3 Siva, as we also know, is the god of wisdom and presides over the “city of knowledge.” Later he is beseeched to take on the more accessible form of a phallic stone, the lingam (a ‘mark’ or ‘sign’), on the eastern side of this mountain.
In Vedic traditions Siva is also known as Rudra, who is symbolized by a pillar, representing all at once a column of light descending to earth, an umbilical cord rising toward heaven, and a phallic post marking a special spot of fecundity on the land -— what the Hopi refer to as a ‘spot of the fawn’. And upon such spots, temples would later be erected to serve as “cities of knowledge” from which sprang entire civilizations.
When the primeval architect of the Vedic gods, Visvakarma, erected a temple around the Siva lingam stone, he sparked off a tradition that would still be at play in 1200 BC and 3,000 miles away at Petra, Jordan, when the El Deir monastery was sculpted on the side of the hill of Hor. Inside this breathtaking monument stands a cube of stone that is the essence of Dushara, the ‘lord of the mountain’.
The sacred hill that cradles El Deir is named after the Ethiopian magician-god Hor — otherwise known as the Egyptian Horus, and in a similar vein to Vishnu, protective god of humanity and sacred places.
El Deir, Petra. Carved entirely out of the sandstone hill of Hor.
Legend speaks of another navel of the earth that once existed in the kingdom of Kalakh. It was marked by a series of temples dedicated to the triple solar deity Enlil/Ninlil/Ninurta, the focal point of which was a temple assigned to Nabu, the god of knowledge. In time, a new structure was superimposed on the site: a tall, spiral staircase leading to a temple at the summit that the Greeks would refer to as The Gate of God, and which we would come to know as the Tower of Babel. In the later Mesopotamian cultures of Sumer, which were sited on relatively flat terrain, the omphalos marking the power places took on the form of artificial mountains called ziggurats , each built on the foundations of up to sixteen earlier temples. In later times, the same purpose would be realized in structures such as the imposing stepped pyramids of Central America.
In every respect the cube, the omphalos , the Sivalingam and the step pyramid are one and the same markers of a subtle force, the site where divinity is said to descend and touch the earth.
The idea of power places as navels of the earth is as old as sacred mountains. In fact, quite a number of sacred mountains are accorded this dual designation, their sanctity so unimpeachable that no building is allowed to be erected on them: Mount Kailas in Tibet and Mount Fuji in Japan; the Black Hills of the Sioux of South Dakota; and Uluru of the Pitjantjatjara of Australia. Then there are those conical hills or phallic-shaped mountains upon which rest harmoniously designed temples protecting the very energy hotspot, the omphalos or the Sivalingam: Amarnath, Tirupati, Vaishno Devi, Heng Shān, Tài Shān, to name a few.
The quest for the navels of the earth — those ‘spots of the fawn’ — sometimes requires a lot of sleuthing because so many have been integrated into the fabric of modern development, and their roots and importance are often lost upon this new distracted Culture of Twitter. So, unless the answer is placed in front of you in 140 characters or less, many members of today’s generation can’t be bothered to look. And there’s the rub, for these hotspots of self-empowerment once harmonized the pulse of people with the greater world around them. With so many of today’s western adolescents not even aware that milk comes from a cow, we are raising a generation that’s already become dangerously isolated from the organism upon which it lives.
The Sacred Center.
Iceland is home to Europe’s only true high desert, a forbidding and unforgiving place of desolate lava fields and icy crags. And yet there have always been persistent memories as far back as the Viking Sagas that amid this inhospitable terrain lies paradise. Only an eternal optimist could visualize this. And yet by applying an ancient and established method of locating a country’s geodetic center it is possible to find the Thingvellir (‘Field of the Thing’), the Icelandic version of the omphalos .
Despite the grim terrain and climate that circumscribe it, this fissured heart of Iceland (actually the great rift between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates) was once the site of a meeting mound or doom ring , marked by a large rock called the Law Rock — a place of pilgrimage typically undertaken during the summer solstice, the time of year when homage is given to the highest position of the sun in the northern sky. It is the symbolic praising of the ultimate source of Light or God. On such occasions it was the duty of an appointed head of the country — which in Iceland meant an eminent scholar with no executive power – to recite the spiritual laws of the land entirely from memory and remind people of their divine contract with the sacred center. A godly act indeed. Especially as it became the ideal framework for social husbandry for many generations. 4
The tradition of locating a mound or pillar on the geodetic center of land is found throughout the many islands of the north Atlantic, such as Shetland, Orkney, Islay, and the Faroes. These mounds are still in evidence, many surrounded by lakes, as though portraying the first primordial mounds so regularly mentioned in creation myths. In the case of the Faroe Islands, the navel of the earth is the rock of Tinganes, which not only marks the geodetic center of the island but also divides its main harbor and capital in two. In fact, there has been a running argument for decades as to the wisdom behind locating the island-nation’s main harbor on a site that is unprotected and wide open to storms, and only through extensive engineering can it function as a viable port. The answer is that despite its practical defects, the power of the omphalos of Tinganes was felt by its inhabitants as providing balance to the land and to its people, and for no other reason has this spot not only become the capital of the Faroes, but for these Nordic people it is also the navel of the earth. 5
Sometimes an island becomes the navel of several nations, as is the case with a small piece of real estate in the Irish Sea, midway between Ireland and England, called the Isle of Man. The center of the axis that runs from the northernmost tip of Scotland to the southernmost tip of England passes through this island, making it the omphalos of the British Isles.
The national symbol of the Isle of Man is the Triskele, which shares a similar design and ideology with the tri-fold motif of Celtic, Mycenaean and Tibetan Dzogchen traditions, all of which reflect the tri-fold nature of a creator god. Like the attainment of paradise associated with other navel places, the center of the Isle of Man has similarly been known as a place of enchantment. Manx history is ancient, and right up to the Roman occupation the island was a renowned center of Druidic Mysteries Schools, its college based at Kirk Michael (‘church of Michael’) where the sons of Celtic and Scottish nobles were sent to learn ancient knowledge. The center of the geodetic axis of the British Isles is located here on a lone hill, on whose slope stands a mound with a pole, the omphalos of Man, and it too served as the traditional assembly and ritual point of the island. 6
That a small island should lie at the geodetic center of a cluster of nations is an incredible achievement in itself. But what is truly astonishing is that the calculation appears to have been made by including the land off the south-western tip of Britain which now lies submerged beneath the swirling waters of the Atlantic Ocean. This territory, together with Brittany, was once connected to mainland Britain and formed the mythical kingdom of Lyonesse until it succumbed to the waters of a swiftly rising sea around 9500 BC . All that remains of this kingdom are the tiny Isles of Scilly, which today lie 24 miles off the chiseled coast of Cornwall. 7
Based on John Michell’s work, the center of the Isle of Man is also the omphalos of Britain, especially when the original landmass prior to the rise in sea level is taken into account.
Taking this into consideration, if my calculation is correct, it implies that the original sitting of the navel mound on the Isle of Man took place over 11,000 years ago. Although the mound and its pole are no longer used for their intended purpose, this site is nevertheless presided by a church dedicated to St. Luke, a name derived from the Celtic Lugh, the ancient god of light. And the best way to approach the mound is via an ancient track named the Royal Way, what in other cultures could be called a spirit road.
The mound beside the church of St. Luke plays a second role as a geodetic marker. A perfect right-angle triangle connects the stone circles of Castlerigg and Arbor Low in England to the circles and mounds comprising the Hill of Tara in Ireland, all three sites being contemporaries of each other. When divided by the Golden Ratio — nature’s mathematical harmonic — the sacred mound on the Isle of Man marks the golden cut along the northern line of this triangle.
Triangular relationship between stone circles. St. Luke’s church marks the Golden Cut along the path.
In the previous chapter we encountered the navel of Ireland, the hill of Uisneach, and how it forms part of a sacred triangle with two other of Eire’s landscape temples. The land of Eire is perhaps the richest in Europe in terms of legends and mythology, oral and written, especially as its first character, Cessair, is said to have been a daughter of the biblical Noah, thereby anchoring Celtic cosmology to around the time of the great flood. This seems to fit the bill, since it is claimed that she populated Ireland with fifty other women and three men (talk about having your work cut out for you) at the time of a great deluge. 8 Afterwards, the magical beings Tuatha Dé Danaan arrive on the scene by ‘traveling through the air’, while their queen-goddess Ériu subsequently lent the country its traditional name.
Whoever measured and marked the hill of Uisneach, both as geodetic center and navel of Ireland, is not known, but the myths and traditions do state that the gods once walked certain paths and created specific landmarks — echoes of Aboriginal spirit roads connecting places of power. If one chooses to find the physical omphalos of Ireland, like the Sivalingam in India, it is marked by a volcanic, free-standing pillar of rock on the side of the hill. This legendary location is reputably a place of ancient revelation and pilgrimage, in the same manner Arunachala served as a focal point. Protected by terrain that is hard to access, the weathered and cracked sixteen-foot tall outcrop of stone is called Ail na Mírenn (‘Stone of Divisions’); it is located in the ancient county of Midhe, meaning ‘middle’, and it was considered the pillar by which a perfect social order was maintained. Beneath it lies the tomb of the proprietary spirit of Ireland, the queen-goddess Ériu; Eire’s most popular female saint. Brighid, a Triple Goddess of the Tuatha dé Danaan, also took her vows here. 9
There is little doubt that a relationship exists between navels of the earth as power places, the dispensing of wisdom, the maintenance of balance among people, and the dispensation of laws, both spiritual and mundane. These sacred centers set the example, and from them, cultures flourished all around. It worked like spokes on a well-balanced wheel for countless generations. And one place that encapsulates all these qualities is Innu (also spelled Annu), later renamed by the Greeks as Heliopolis.
The triple spiral, symbol of the three faces of God and the flow of energy in nature, is found from Ireland to Korea. Center: The symbol of the Isle of Man.
Innu, the navel of the earth.
The influence of Innu as an ancient wisdom academy cannot be stated enough: the foundations of Egyptian temple ritual rests upon it, 10 as did the original Templar and Freemasonic movements (I am referring here to those orders who used the knowledge for right action, not the power-hungry lunatics who distorted it later).
The history of Innu/Heliopolis emerges like layers peeling off a proverbial onion. By the time Pharaoh Senusret I built a temple there to Amun-Ra c.1920 BC the site was already considered ancient beyond recollection. 11 Ironically, one of the two red granite obelisks he erected at the site is all that remains to mark Innu as a sacred place, for now it is just a tiny spec of a park cut off from the rest of the Giza complex by a bustling Cairo suburb like a prison wall. The modern pilgrim will be forgiven for disbelieving that in its early days Innu was the foremost academy-city replete with obelisks as far as the eye could see.
Innu actually means ‘place of pillars’ and is considered to be the oldest site in Egypt, one estimate placing its founding long before 4000 BC . 12 Even this date feels conservative in light of the description given in the Building Texts — that long before a physical temple was established, Innu was the site of the original Primeval Mound.
A lone obelisk marks the site of once formidable temple city of Innu.
According to the Building Texts , the essence of the god Atum first impregnates the site: “…before Heliopolis had been founded that I might be therein.” 13 Once established, his energy physically manifests as a primeval mound. The Egyptians believed in the divinization of the physical form of the original creators, and that their embodiment became divine in the sacred mounds of the Earth. 14 Since the mound of Atum at Innu is also his dwelling place, the mound was considered a divine being, from which the four elements of the physical world poured forth. 15
On top of the mound there stood a special stone: “O Atum…when you came into being you rose as a High Hill, you shone as the Benben stone...” 16 As with the Sivalingam, it was a stone that “descended from heaven” reputedly shaped like a cone or pyramid. 17 This pillar was subsequently protected within a temple inside an open courtyard: “…you shone as the Benben stone in the Het Benben, the Temple of the Phoenix.” 18 The temple was then sanctified by an earthly creator god, typically Ptah, and the site fell under his tutelage. The Primeval Mound, the central stone, and its encompassing temple subsequently become a source of initiation, but only to those who have the patience and integrity to undertake the journey into gnosis : “These are they who are outside Het Benben… They see Ra with their eyes and they enter into his secret teachings… I protect my hidden things in Het Benben.” 19
Benben.
As for the earthly god Ptah, he subsequently becomes the personification of the mound and its omphalos , the rock of the temple. The name Ptah, of course, is the root of petra ('rock'), and in later times another temple would be carved out of the rock at Petra in Jordan, which itself housed an omphalos .
The sacred mound is re-enacted physically and metaphorically throughout history. In the Bible, Jesus entrusts the building of his church to Peter (meaning 'rock'): “…you are Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever you shall bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever you shall loose upon earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven.” 20
In this illuminating quote we see blatant references to the worldwide foundations of the temple and how it stands as a force against corruption (the 'gates of hell'), that it offers the potential to take the initiate into a state of paradise (the 'kingdom of heaven'), and its mediating role in sky-ground dualism ('on earth as in heaven').
Asterisks and obelisks.
As symbolic images go, the mound of Atum and the pyramid-shaped Benben are interchangeable. And in the design of the Benben is reflected the threefold nature of divinity and its two-dimensional geometry, the triangle. Thus, the Benben becomes a metaphor of the essence of the creator god on a place of power. As more primordial mounds and navels were consecrated across the face of the Earth, each site was marked by a standing stone. In Egypt these took on the shape of obelisks, atop of which a Benben would be fitted as a capstone and plated with electrum, a highly conductive alloy composed of two-thirds gold and one-third silver.
Although Heliopolis’ light is now much diminished, a mirror of its former glory can still be seen in the field of obelisks at Aksum in Ethiopia, one of which stands 108-feet tall and weighs 520 tons.
A field of obelisks at Aksum, Ethiopia.
The obelisk as an omphalos marking a primordial navel of the earth is enshrined in the Celtic men-hir (‘upright stone’). These phallic stones are particularly memorable in the region of Carnac, what today is the province of Brittany, France. Chief among these are the 30-foot tall Dol-de-Bretagne, weighting-in at a deft 140 tons, and the now recumbent 65-foot, 300-ton cyclopean menhir of Er Grah (‘Fairy Stone’), which once could be seen by ships seven miles out at sea. 21
Carnac is the most prolific place in the world for mounds, dolmens, menhirs, and standing stones and is often described as a navel of the world. One of its alignments of stones, at Menec, consists of eleven rows of megaliths stretching 3,822 feet. Indeed the original expanse of over 3,000 prehistoric structures can only be properly appreciated from the air. With each of its enclosures designed for communal ceremony, it was a true ‘city of knowledge’ during Neolithic, and possibly Mesolithic times, just as Innu was the center of the ancient Mysteries Schools of Egypt — just as Aksum is claimed to be the resting place of a curious box of cedar containing the knowledge of God and called the Ark of the Covenant. 22
On a less conspicuous, but equally important scale is a tiny Pacific island whose most famous inhabitants are gigantic statues made of volcanic tuff bearing proud faces and eyes staring at the sky, hence their name Mata-Ki-Te- Rani, ‘eyes looking at heaven’. We are of course in Easter Island, whose ancient name Te-Pito-O-Te-Henua means ‘navel of the world’. 23 And there is indeed an actual navel place, located near the town of Anakena and called Ahu-Te-Pito-Kura, the ‘golden navel’. 24 It is a circular stone enclosure inside which rest a set of what look like geometrically-arranged supersize cannonballs: four aligned to the cardinal directions with the fifth, and largest, in the center. They are said to have been brought to Easter Island by a creator god named Atu Motua (‘Father Lord’), who brought civilization and laws and knowledge from a land called Hiva, which legend states was submerged during a violent upheaval of the earth in prehistoric times. 25
As for the navel stones themselves, they have magnetic properties, and traditions state how they were used by magician-priests for mana , ‘magic’ (similar to the Egyptian hekau ), which helped concentrate their mental powers while they made the giant statues move silently through the air and land them according to some geodetic plan. 26
The golden navel, Easter Island.
Once again there is this recurring suggestion of a form of energy inherent at the navels of the earth capable of empowering ordinary people and magnifying their god-given potential, what medieval alchemists described as ‘turning base metal into gold’: the transmutation of ordinary being into extraordinary human.
This transfiguration into a mirror image of God required training, discipline, and indoctrination into the Mysteries, and if successful, adepts became an example to others, raising the level of consciousness and in turn maintaining societies in balance for long spans of time. That was the intent from the moment the sacred mounds were created.
The abundance of worldwide sacred sites associated with an omphalos or a lingam , a mound or navel is striking. When we take into account their accelerated destruction over the past 800 years and look at what remains, it is still an impressive endeavor. At these locales the phallic masculine inseminates the earth and the umbilical feminine receives this nourishment in the form of knowledge. It is as primal a symbol of the Sacred Marriage as you can get. These places of the gods are of uncountable age, often accompanied by rich traditions associated with creation, knowledge, spiritual truth and power. It is stated in ancient texts from Teotihuacan to Giza to southern India that by traversing these axis mundi one can bring back knowledge from the otherworld, and a person or place subtended by this meeting between spirit and matter in turn becomes a repository of that knowledge. The symbolism repeats cross-culturally, from the Sagas of Odin and the Yggdrasil Tree, to the Tree of Knowledge in the garden of Eden, to the story of Jacob’s ladder –—even Jack and the Beanstalk. They also tend to be nodes from which entire civilizations emerged, bound by a set of cosmic laws directing them to live a harmonious life which, if adhered to, could be maintained indefinitely. 27 As the late antiquarian pioneer John Michell summarized: “Traditional cosmologies describe a centered universe in which the principle of order is ultimately paramount. Their social product is a cosmologically ordered form of civilization whose central symbol is the world-pole penetrating the earth.” 28
The omphalos at Delos and a Roman coin. Standing stones are always associated with serpents, symbol of earth’s procreative energy.
Here it is possible to draw parallels between the navels of the earth and the navel of the body – not a huge leap considering we emanate from the soil. The navel marks the geodetic center of the human body, but it is also the point of entry of information, disguised as subtle energy, into its electromagnetic circuitry. 29 The phrase ‘a gut feeling’ that so describes the moment one receives information from the surrounding landscape probably derives from this interaction. And just as our navels were initially connected to a source of physical nourishment via the umbilical cord, so the terrestrial omphalos connects us to an invisible source for spiritual sustenance.
The pharaoh Akhenaten understood this concept very well. During his period of kingship he moved the traditional capital from Thebes — which by his time had fallen under control of a corrupted priesthood — to found the new sacred center at Akhetaten, marking the geodetic center of Egypt. As an adept of the Mysteries Schools, Akhenaten allowed himself to be a channel of maat , meaning the balanced order of the cosmos. Free from the misguided idolatry that had come to prevail at Thebes, he sought to do what previous enlightened rulers had done since the days of the primordial mound at Innu: to bring the law and order of heaven to bear on human affairs, to facilitate enlightenment and bring the potential of paradise ever closer to the individual and communal body.
As scientists armed with expensive magnetometers have found, beyond any doubt, there is a numinous telluric power present at these places of the gods; 30 and as centuries of dowsing similarly shows, sacred sites also tend to display a balance of positive and negatively-charged electromagnetic energies. Part of the effect is reflected in the form of the stone pillar itself, as John Michell explains: “Authority at the navel of the earth is upheld by the omphalos rock, which retains the heat of the sun; while the lunar principle is active in the waters that rise beneath the rock, drawn by the moon and corresponding to the dimension of the mind below consciousness.” 31 If this assumption is correct then the stone’s intended purpose as a mediating agent between earth and sky is true to its function.
The lingam/omphalos stone is a physical marker of the only legitimate source of divine law on earth. It is such a primordial image that it survives into our era. When newly-appointed kings or lawgivers proclaimed their divine right in front of an audience, they would stand on a geodetic navel of the earth, or sat on a stone with associations to divinity which served to empower their rule or bestow the same unchallengeable force to the monarch’s words that were traditionally associated with the rock. The image was then reinforced by the sceptre the ruler held in his hand. 32
Whole cultures were based on the simple truth that the navel of the world is a central pillar of interaction with the divine, its laws and knowledge, and they granted these sacred centers the appropriate reverence. Even Chinese emperors made it a practice to attend places of power, such as the sacred mountain Tài Shan, to restore well-being to their empire. 33
Conversely, it was also realized that misuse or loss of connection with the omphalos would precipitate a fall of the tribe, and a cursory look at ancient pharaohs and Caesars who used these temples to claim power purely for narrow ends shows just how quickly the plot was lost. One of the oldest inhabited cities on Earth is Susa. Dating to 7000 BC , this proto-Pythagorean city of mathematics and philosophy was once the capital of the Elamite Empire, described as “the great holy city, abode of the gods, seat of their mysteries.” 34 It was the seat of Nin-Ana, the ‘lady of the sky’, and home to a tomb surmounted with a conical stone said to be the resting place of the biblical King David.
Its fame and sanctity grew accordingly. Yet by 330 BC the true function of its temple had been lost. As the divine power of this navel of the earth was aggrandized by the priesthood, it began attracting the appetite of despots who, after waves of plundering and mistakenly seeking a material face in the power of the temple, allowed Susa to fall and become but a whisper of its former glory.
Such a turn of events in the lifespan of a sacred place is common to so many other navels of the earth, such as the city of Solymna, today’s Jerusalem. 35 Its stunning Al-Aqsa Mosque sits on a temple that Herod rebuilt; it was a renovation of the initiatory Temple of Solomon (sol-amun , the solar deity), which was founded on ancient Egyptian principles yet rested on cyclopean foundation stones, indicating a place of remote, possibly Mesolithic age. All these rest atop the Eben Shetiyah (the Benben), literally ‘foundation stone of the Earth’, said to be the first object created by God. 36 Layers upon layers of sanctity and age. And yet despite such lofty origins, Jerusalem too has become perennially subjected to the baser qualities of men.
Philosophers such as Plato warned of the consequences of stepping away from the sacred center and the imbalance it brings upon society and the individual. In both Laws and Timaeus , Plato illustrates the ideal city-state as one anchored by a central, sacred omphalos , out of which radiate twelve lines, with the land and its people defined by specific numerical and geometric codes. There are multiple layers of cosmology encoded in Plato’s writings, 37 and in this respect his work and intent are no different to that of the creator gods and their landscape temples and lingams, or the architects who implemented their plans. Plato even notes that the locating of the omphalos was always attended to by specialists within a special priesthood.
One Australian tribe, the Arunta, are a dramatic example of what occurs when contact with the divine is lost. They carried around with them their interpretation of the lingam in the shape of a trunk of the gum tree. For them it acted like a dowsing rod, offering divination and direction. One day the limb broke, the tribe became disorientated, lost their focus, and after wandering aimlessly through the featureless Outback, they lay down on the ground as a tribe and died. While undoubtedly a true story, the central illustration of this tale is metaphoric, in that once contact with the divine is broken, people become detached from the landscape and life loses its direction and purpose. As Mircea Eliade wrote, “Once contact with the transcendent is lost, existence in the world ceases to be possible.” 38
First, a navel of the earth, then a hermitage dedicated to archangel Michael. Roche, Cornwall.
Moving towards monumentalism.
As we have already learned, we are rich in myths and traditions of landscape temples as places touched by a concentrated telluric force and frequented by gods. It therefore stands to reason that synthesizing the processes at work in these portals and creating carbon copies at other locations would serve humanity in the same manner.
We do not know exactly when human-constructed temples began, yet at some point they did, and as close to the original navels of power as was permitted. These temples became microcosms of a macrocosm, 39 protectors of the navel of power and a reminder of the sacrality of the site. When the essence of Siva manifested as a phallic pillar on the eastern side of Arunachala, the architect Visvakarma erected a temple around it and “became like a god.” The deeds of this man of geometry and number would subsequently be re-enacted throughout the ages, most notably by the architect and High Priest of Innu, Imhotep, who brought the pyramid form to Egypt and added the step pyramid to the temple complex at Saqqara. He then becomes a god. These and many other acts originated from a Golden Age, when men of great stature were moved by an unshakable duty to the divine to create temples as cities of knowledge, what the Hindu call Jnana Puri .
4. CITIES OF KNOWLEDGE.
“There are a number of texts and traditions which hint that the monuments may have been used directly as instruments of the knowledge. They are spoken of as places in which the initiate might be ‘transformed into a god’ or into a bright star.”
~ Graham Hancock, in Heaven’s Mirror
Tiwanaku, c.1923. Bolivia.
“I asked the natives whether these edifices were built in the time of the Inca. They laughed at the question, affirming that they were made long before the Inca… that they had heard from their forebears that everything to be seen there appeared suddenly in the course of a single night.” 1
Thus reads the eyewitness account by Pedro Cieza de León when he came across a temple two miles above sea level, on the Altiplano of Bolivia. In reading his diary it is clear he struggled for adjectives while attempting to describe what lay in front of him. The year was 1549.
Nearly 500 years later and the problem of finding adjectives persists at the megalithic temple complex of Tiwanaku, or to be more precise, what looters and treasure hunters have left of it. And yet what remains still leaves an indelible mark on even the most obstinate of minds.
Tiwanaku is the oldest sacred site found to date. Its survival after 17,000 years is a powerful testament to the skill and knowledge of its creators, and proof that it was built with longevity in mind: an immortal temple that would survive well into our age. Perhaps they possessed the foresight to teach future generations how to maintain a culture in balance indefinitely, simply by observing, studying distilling and applying universal laws.
Everything about this temple complex is incongruous with its surroundings. Let’s begin at the beginning: the site is composed of various ceremonial structures; a stepped pyramid, semi-subterranean courtyards, an underground chamber, and docks capable of handling a hundred large vessels. One particular block of stone from which the pier was fashioned weighs an estimated 440 tons. 2 All of this sits on a lake 170 miles from the ocean, 12,500 feet above sea level and is as inaccessible from civilization as one can be.
Its most imposing part is the Temple of Kalasasaya, meaning ‘Place of the Upright Standing Stones’, 3 which indeed it is. There are approximately 99 upright megaliths, some as much as 15 feet high, arranged in a rectangle 421 feet by 389 feet, the size of a small stadium; 4 two massive and intricately carved doorways stand within (one since relocated to another section). The menhirs of this freestanding rectangle became connected to each other by a wall of rough masonry in 1960, for obscure reasons, yet the quality and precision of 20 th century craftsmanship is visibly disgraced by the original work. Still we are led to believe the original metropolis was the work of primitive people. Which brings us to the main point: exactly how old is this temple city?
Orthodox archaeologists have rested on Carbon-14 dating of virgin soil to shoe-horn the complex into the acceptable, orthodox historical time-frame of 300 A.D.. Excavated pottery shards show signs of local human activity around 1500 BC . While there is no doubt that these tests are correct, the dating of the top layer of soil only proves the time of a final habitation, not the date of original construction.
To confound things, it’s a well-established fact that virtually all ancient temples rest upon the foundations of far older sites. The temple of the Sumerian god of wisdom Enki at Eridu was once considered to be no older than 2600 BC . This conveniently placed it within established biblical parameters, until further digging exposed seventeen more layers of previous temples, at a stroke clawing back the date of original construction to 5000 BC . 5 The same applies to Stonehenge: four decades ago anyone disagreeing with the established date of 1800 BC was considered mad, and yet further digging and improved technology has moved the origin of this most famous of sites to 8000 BC . 6 (ironically it was the date originally revealed by a number of respected psychics!).
Nothing is as certain as a closed mind, and as far as institutional academics are concerned, no culture could have possibly existed in the Americas that could be in any way superior to that of Europeans. But the evidence indeed proves otherwise.
The Gate of Pachacamac. Tiwanaku.
In the case of Tiwanaku, the different construction methods alone demonstrate that it was built upon over the course of many ages, just like Egyptian temples. The more recent the masonry, the worse and structurally weaker the construction, showing how knowledge has not improved but diminished . Then there is the case of the metal clamps that held the monoliths together, which bear an uncanny resemblance to those used for identical building purposes around 2600 BC and found at Stonehenge and Egyptian sites. These same clamps show signs of having had the metal poured directly into the slots in the stone, implying that a portable smelter was used, and considering the type of alloy employed, would have needed to generate temperatures of thousands of degrees Celsius. Such technology was, allegedly, not available at the time. 7
Honing-in further on the true date of Tiwanaku, around the site are several statues of unusual-looking humanoids surrounded with puzzling, carved images of animals bearing a resemblance to Toxodons, a Pilocene/Pleistocene mammal that became extinct over 16,000 years ago. 8
Then there is the question of astral alignments. In the ancient world, temples such as Stonehenge, Carnac, the Giza Pyramids, Angkor, Luxor, etc. have been proven beyond reasonable doubt that all were aligned to the extreme rising and setting points of the Sun and/or Moon, to specific stars and even entire constellations. 9 It would be unusual if Tiwanaku proved to be the exception. One clue that proves it isn’t is carved on the Gateway of the Sun, one of the temple’s most impressive structures. It's a series of iconographs artistically etched into the hard, greenish-grey andesite. The central figure represents the solar deity holding a rod in each hand and a head crowned with 19 rays. In the ancient world, universal laws were carefully reduced to number The numerical value 19 has no direct association with the Sun alone, it represents the period of years when the motions of the Sun and Moon synchronize. Called the Metonic Cycle, it occurs every 18.7 years and allows for precise predictions of eclipses and the design of very accurate solar-lunar calendars. The same calculation device is employed in stone circles such as Avebury and Stonehenge, and even by 3100 BC this information was already considered old hat. 10
One of the most exhaustive investigations into the calendrical functions shown in the reliefs on the Gateway of the Sun concludes that not only was there “nothing like it in the world…this Calendar is also the oldest in the world — nay, that it has actually come down to us from ‘another’ world.” 11
To understand the relationship between monuments and stars, one needs to be knowledgeable in archeoastronomy, which one Professor Arthur Posnansky was. And during his forty-eight years of on-site fieldwork at Tiwanaku, Posnansky reached the conclusion that this site was no exception to other temples of great antiquity. In fact, its own antiquity was far older than any other temple on Earth.
One of three carved pillars inside the semi-subterranean temple.
Posnansky presumed that an essential component to the layout of the Kalasasaya rectangle was the alignment of its corner standing stones to the rising and setting of the Sun, particularly at the solstices, throughout its yearly cycle. 12 He took the necessary measurements, correlated them to present conditions, and found the markers to be out-of-true with recent positions of the Sun by as much as 18 minutes. Like any studied astronomer, Posnansky was well aware that the angle of the Earth’s axial tilt changes over the course of 41,000 years. Essentially the plane of the Earth’s orbit changes relative to the celestial equator, meaning that over time, the Sun sets at different points along the horizon. One consequence of this barely-perceptible movement is that it alters the degree of latitude assigned to the tropics, from 22.1º to 24.5º, over this long period of time. When Posnansky recalibrated the alignments of monoliths in the ‘Place of the Standing Stones’ to coincide with the sunrise and sunset of the solstices, they did so when the axial tilt of the Earth would have been 23º 8’ 48”.
Ancient megaliths now connected by a modern wall. Kalasasaya.
His work was peer reviewed for three years by a multi-disciplinary group of scientists, who were not so much concerned about fitting temples into convenient historical time-frames as they were on the accuracy of measurement. Posnansky’s observations were proved to be correct, and the date of construction for the Kalasasaya was pegged at 15,000 BC , 13 proving that Tiwanaku could indeed have been built during the mythical Golden Age, when men were as gods and achieved the seemingly impossible.
In ancient times, the area of Tiwanaku was known as Taypikhala, 'the stone in the center'. 14 Its founder was Kon-Tiki Viracocha, who, like so many other mythical entities around the world, was a regenerative creator god who brought knowledge to the land. 303 miles to the northwest of Tiwanaku lies another site known as Cuzco Cara Urumi ('uncovered navel stone'), dedicated to Viracocha, and replete with megalithic sites, citadels and purposeful alignments. Its omphalos is virtually all that remains of the sacred temple, which today sits under and within the Spanish church of Santo Domingo.
The Tree of Knowledge geodetic marker at Paracas, Peru.
To the west, on a sandy peninsula in the bay of Paracas, lies a third ancient mystery: a 650-foot tall geoglyph representing a stylized ‘Tree of Knowledge’ carved on a hill; it is placed precisely 108º west of the Giza Plateau, and 180º east of the vast temple complex at Angkor in Cambodia. 15 As we shall see later, such alignments are deliberate. The geoglyph also bears a striking resemblance to the constellation Crux , the Southern Cross, 16 as it does to three pillars perched on a mound – much like the ones standing inside the semi-subterranean temple adjacent to the Kalasasaya, where the ancestors once observed the skies.
These three sites, sharing common sources, triangulate well across 540 miles to form an isosceles triangle of precisely 130º.
A triple step of Vishnu on the Altiplano of South America.
It’s ironic that legends speak of these ‘cities of knowledge’ having been built under the guidance of great men fluent in the arts, astronomy, geometry, laws and letters, and that in modern times it took enquiring academics with similar backgrounds to uncover their secrets. What Posnansky accomplished at Tiwanaku, so too did another man of astronomy, geometry, mathematics and the arts, Professor Gerald Hawkins, accomplish at Stonehenge. 17
In prehistoric times, ‘cities of knowledge’ were erected in accordance with the directions of creator gods such as Siva, Atum and Kon-Tiki Viracocha to protect and promote universal laws. Not only do we have a city of knowledge in Tiwanaku, we also have a sacred landscape planned by ancient surveyors with a passion for creating things on a grand scale that would last many lifetimes. Slowly, these places are coming to the surface of our awareness; others such as Dwarka and Mahabalipuram in India, and Kahnimweiso in Micronesia, now lie well beneath the waves following a catastrophic rise in sea levels around 9600 BC (which we’ll examine in the next chapter).
While no other record exists of Tiwanaku’s full purpose, what remains reveals a complex of great learning: a calendrical site, an astronomical marker, and given the iconography harmonizing solar/masculine and lunar/feminine forces, as well as specific alignments to the Equinox, it is also a temple for the reconciliation of opposites, which was the ultimate purpose behind every place of the gods. There is no doubt that a high degree of science and technology was used to create it, just as there is no doubt this knowledge was also taught to others by the sages who once lived in this place of wonder. A sixteenth century account by local Aymara on the origin of Tiwanaku’s colossal stone slabs states “they were carried through the air to the sound of a trumpet.” 18
Places of the First Occasion.
Investigative journalist Graham Hancock has produced a remarkable volume of work proving purposeful relationships between ancient sacred sites and how they were built by people with an expert grasp of universal systems of knowledge. One of his observations concerns the multi-level relationship between Tiwanaku and its attendant Lake Titicaca, and Heliopolis and the Giza plateau 100º to the east. 19
Tiwanaku's central mound, the Akapana pyramid, finds its natural counterpart to the northwest, on a cliff in the Isla del Sol, which from the air resembles the silhouette of an animal emerging from the dark blue water of Lake Titicaca. As it happens, Titicaca means ‘Cliff of the Lion’, 20 also the name traditionally given to the island. Like Giza, it’s said to be the place of the ‘First Time’, the primordial mound first created by Kon-Tiki Viracocha through the utterance of a sound. Like Atum and Siva, he represents the threefold nature of a creator god; he was also a solar deity who, as legend has it, also existed in human form. 21
As we discovered in the previous chapter, Heliopolis was a primordial mound, created by Atum “as a high hill that shone as the Benben stone in the Temple of the Phoenix.” 22 And just as Titicaca has its Cliff of the Lion gazing at the Equinox sunrise, so another lion sits on a cliff above the river Nile and across from Heliopolis, staring at the same rising sun. In the ancient texts its name is Shesep Ankh (‘living image of Atum’), or as westerners prefer, the Sphinx. 23 And like Titicaca, it too marks the “Splendid Place of the First Time.” 24 Or as the Egyptians called it, Zep Tepi .
As with the navels of the earth, it appears that all major temple complexes are built on or beside primordial mounds — the ‘spots on the fawn’. The sites of the historical temples of Edfu, Kom Ombo, Philae, Dendereh, Karnak and Luxor are each identified as a Great Seat of the First Occasion. This was an epoch when the primordial mounds were established along the course of the Nile to serve as foundations of future temples. 25
These temples are presided by the falcon god Horus. Is it a coincidence, then, that 7,500 miles away in Peru, on a hill overlooking Cuzco, sits a massive temple complex erected with cyclopean megaliths, resembling a pair of wings, called Sacsayhuamán — 'place of the satisfied falcon'?”
Obviously this concept of a 'first occasion' echoes across the world and is associated with places of remote antiquity. But when exactly did Zep Tepi occur?
If we recall, temples were designed with the purpose of mirroring images of the essence of a creator god and, by implication, the order of the universe. 26 Acting as ‘cities of knowledge’, they provided guidance in daily ritual and instruction in the proper conduct of human affairs. Or at least that was the intention: that the adepts should teach the laws bound in the temple, thereby extending the education and spiritual experience of lay people and creating a trickle-down effect throughout the population. An early concept of keeping up with the Joneses, so to speak. So far as Egyptian temple life was concerned, this involved the observation of the cyclical and orderly motions of the heavens, as seen in their predilection for sky-ground symbolism. They honored this celestial-terrestrial drama by perpetuating it through myth, allegory and ritual. In a way, they treated the interaction between what was above and below, between mortal life and the spirit world, as a play. Hence, notable humans took on the qualities associated with gods like Isis, Osiris, and Horus, while the gods themselves reflected the essence of specific stellar forces: Ra was the Sun, Djehuti the Moon, Isis was Sirius, Osiris the constellation Orion.
Nile delta as a triangle, Giza its Benben
The Egyptians firmly believed the gods of Zep Tepi established their earthly kingdom in the triangular region of the Nile Delta, encompassing Giza, Heliopolis, and much later, the site of that great seat of learning, Alexandria. The Building Texts make frequent references to the historical temples as ‘Seats of the First Occasion’ at the time of Zep Tepi , but stress that the physical temples developed much later on from the abstract: first there was the primordial mound, then the consecrated ground, and finally the god’s domain. 27 The second text at Edfu, The Coming of Re to his Mansion , states the spirit of the Sun (god) finally inhabits a physical structure. This occurred at the start of the sunrise of a new world during antediluvian times, long before kingship, long before Pharaonic rule. 28 All future plans of temples, ritual, royal insignia, magical and medical formulae could only be done in accordance with the laws and principles set down at this time. 29 In other words, the laws and guidance set down in primordial times at the navels of the earth by the gods were meant to be observed and imitated if a blissful state of affairs was to be maintained. In a way it was their definition of a Garden of Eden.
The principal god in this drama is Osiris, god of the Otherworld, of resurrection. According to the Shakaba Texts , he was interred “In the House of Sokar… Osiris came into the Earth, at the royal Fortress, to the north of the land to which he had come.” 30 Another text, this time inscribed on the stelae standing between the paws of the Sphinx, informs us that the area around Giza is the ‘Splendid Place of the First Time’, and that it rests at the apex of a triangle that is the Nile Delta. In ancient iconography the triangle is often used to represent the primordial mound. Symbolically, then, Giza could be said to stand on the apex of a figurative mound.
The same stelae then informs us that that a large building beside the Sphinx is “the House of Sokar,” inside which Osiris will return to the sky. Since Osiris and Orion reflect each other in sky-ground dualism, this can be interpreted to mean that the spirit of Osiris rejoins the spirit world in the sky at the moment Orion appears as its mirror image. 31 So, when should that occasion have been?
Consistent with sky-ground dualism, the Giza pyramids and the primordial mounds upon which they stand are the mirror image of the belt of the constellation of Orion. 32 All things being equal, there is no reason why the Sphinx should not line up with its own cosmic twin. This enigmatic limestone lion, posing majestically on a cliff, seems to gaze at some feature on the horizon just as we stare at ourselves in the mirror every morning.
Due to the way the Earth ‘wobbles’ at the poles, constellations are seen to move, rise and set in different places over a 25,920-year period, an effect known as the Precessional Cycle.
By calculating this rate of movement of the poles it is possible to watch the constellations dance across the night sky until they find their mirror images frozen on the ground in the shape of temples. At the moment of sunrise on the spring equinox — when night and day are in perfect balance — the monuments of the ‘Splendid Place of the First Time’ are mirrored in the sky: the Sphinx in the constellation of Leo rising above the horizon, and in the south sky, the three pyramids in the belt of Orion. 33 The moment this unique double alignment took place, this moment of the ‘first occasion’, Zep Tepi , occurred in 10,500 BC . 34
Foundations that go much deeper.
The primary purpose behind the temple was to go on promulgating the knowledge over an enormous span of ages, by which I mean 4,000 years at a stretch. This is an incalculable reach of time by modern standards, particularly as we in this computer age can barely cope with planning a quarter of the year at a time; even a week in the world of e-mail seems like a century. Physical evidence of the multiple layers of structures beneath present temple buildings suggests the original sites were maintained, improved and expanded over the course of thousands of years. Ancient Egyptian traditions assert beyond their 3,000-year recorded history that no site was considered sacred unless it had been built upon the foundations of earlier temples, particularly those connected with Zep Tepi .
A temple built during the historic period and superimposed on the foundation of another was determined by a pre-existing entity set in the time of myth, so that this new structure was a concretization of its ancestral predecessor, or as the Building Texts inform us, “...made like unto that which was made in its plans of the beginning.” 35 Thus, the foundation mound of the Great Pyramid at Giza dates to 10,500 B.C, but the additional final courses of outer casing stones over the inner core of the building features shafts that reference specific stars in 2,500 BC . 36
The well-preserved Nile temple at Edfu features central structures dating to 237 BC , yet the inner and outer walls date to 2575 BC , and it is very likely even they rest on older foundations, for Edfu is also one of the places specifically identified as the creator god’s ‘genuine Great Seat of the First Occasion’. 37
Temple of Edfu.
The mysterious underground temple that is the Osirion at Abydos has two ancillary chambers constructed of smaller blocks that are at odds with the cyclopean granite stones used to build the central structure. Even to the casual observer it is clear that the temple was enlarged at a later date, in compliance with the rules set by the creator gods. The inscriptions on the walls of the newer enclosures attribute them to Seti I, a pharaoh of the 13 th century BC , yet they lie outside the original enclosure. Furthermore, there is an engraving bearing the legend “Seti is serviceable to Osiris,” 38 an indication that the pharaoh was in employ to the god — in other words the restorer of the original temple dedicated to Osiris rather than its original builder. Architecturally the Osirion has more in common with the megalithic building style of the Sphinx temple enclosure, and new geological data reveals that it too was once a free-standing structure, gradually becoming an underground chamber due to the sedimentary build-up of silt from the regular Nile floods, over 8000 years of them.
The northeast-aligned Osirion at Abydos, today battling a rising water table. The architecture is practically identical to the Sphinx temple, as is the use of 200-ton monoliths.
Likewise, Karnak is an important example of a temple that’s been enlarged over the course of different eras. Karnak is at first a confusing mish-mash of directions, angles, passages, avenues and chambers with no apparent cohesion. Yet every element has its intended purpose. Such cities of knowledge were typically aligned with astronomical considerations, and since the constellations moved according to the Precessional Cycle, so too did the purpose of the work carried out at the temples in proceeding times, the emphasis shifting with each coming age. This helps de-mystify the wild chronology of Karnak, which ranges from its founding date as a primordial mound c.11,700 BC to the historical temple c.3700 BC . Across such a large span of time, because of the tilt of the Earth’s axis, focal stars such as Sirius or the rising equinoctial Sun would have aligned with Karnak’s processional routes on different dates. 39
There exists enough published evidence to uphold the notion that foundation dates of ancient sites are far more remote than is conventionally accepted. 40 Additionally, temples on opposite sides of the world share common purposes, ideologies and knowledge that suggest a single point of origin, or several sources with common intent and information all dating to prehistoric epochs. The specialist knowledge of their craftsmen is inherited like a legacy from one generation to the next, and yet they appear and disappear amid the human drama that flirts between order and chaos, then re-emerge mysteriously through some invisible college.
The case of the disappearing, reappearing falcons.
Earlier I mentioned how the temple/citadel of Sacsayhuamán means 'Place of the Satisfied Falcon', which is an unusual attribute for a temple in Peru since it is a glorification of a site to the Egyptian falcon-god Horus.
The mythological origins of the Egyptian Temple, as enshrined in the Building Texts , describe how once the primeval mound was impregnated by the essence of a creator god, a ‘perch’ was raised on the mound upon which a bird alighted. The site subsequently becomes the Foundation Ground of the Ruler of the Wing , the residence of Horus. 41 The falcon-god makes it quite clear there are two different structures involved at two different periods, each belonging to vastly different ages: “They found my house as the work of antiquity, and my sanctuary as the work of the Ancestors.” 42
Sites dedicated to Horus are typically resurrections of earlier sites destroyed in a catastrophe, typically a deluge. In the myth, Horus comes to ‘avenge the killing’ of his father Osiris, implying the destruction and restoration of a former world of the creator gods. This binds the legend of Horus with that other most famous of birds, the dove, who returns to the ark with an olive branch following the inundation of the Earth, to show new ground has risen out of the floodwaters.
Horus. His wingspan reaches places beyond Egypt.
This would seem to be the case in Cambodia, where a formidable temple complex was built at Angkor by King Suryavarman II in the 12 th century — ironically at the same time Gothic cathedrals were appearing, without precedent, across Europe. Like other numinous architects before him, upon completion of this monumental endeavor, Suryavarman becomes a god. The scale of the Angkor temple complex from the air overwhelms the senses: it consists of over 1,000 temples, sanctuaries, rock carvings and other structures that once formed the hub of an ancient metropolis spreading over an estimated 386 square miles. 43 The entire work is dedicated to Vishnu.
Attempting to describe the main temple of Angkor Wat in a couple of paragraphs is like trying to fit the Pacific into a tea cup. It’s like a necklace of intricately-balanced stones floating on rectangular mirror-pools, with layered turrets and filigree bridges, every inch decked with mythical figures performing and describing the endless cycles of creation. Portuguese monk António da Madalena, one of the first westerners to visit in 1586, wrote: “It is of such extraordinary construction that it is not possible to describe it with a pen, particularly since it is like no other building in the world. It has towers and decoration and all the refinements which the human genius can conceive of.” 44 In the mid-19th century, the French naturalist and explorer Henri Mouhot was equally tongue-tied: “One of these temples — a rival to that of Solomon and erected by some ancient Michelangelo — might take an honourable place beside our most beautiful buildings. It is grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome, and presents a sad contrast to the state of barbarism in which the nation is now plunged.” 45
If you ever wanted to write the story of the universe, had the fortunate opportunity to run out of paper and ink, and were blessed to inscribe it in stone, Angkor would be the result.
In its modern vernacular, Angkor Wat means 'city temple', but when broken into vowels it becomes ankh hor — literally 'Horus lives forever'. Once again we appear to have a misplaced falcon. Could the creator of this Asian masterpiece be telling us he was indoctrinated into the ways of the ancient temple? Was Suryavarman, like Seti I before him at Abydos, a restorer and preserver of a far older city of knowledge?
If you recall, Egyptian mythology conveys that the rebuilding of the temple is allegorical to Horus avenging Set for the murder of Osiris. If ‘Horus lives’ at Ankh-hor, then the name of the site informs us of the intent of its creator to re-build a post-diluvial temple, on a site occupied by a previous mansion of the gods, as was the custom. The Building Texts are very clear on the importance of a name. The ritual of consecration begins with the ceremony of giving name to the temple, and only through such a procedure can the temple acquire its essential functions and assume its final nature as the dwelling-place of a god. By virtue of this ceremony, the temple was believed to have been brought to life. Should any calamity befall the temple, the residual energy contained in the name was the principal means by which the original nature of the site was transferred to a new building. 46
This may be the case with Angkor, for like so many other unique temples it just appears mysteriously as if pre-designed and flat-packed out of a cosmic warehouse. An inscription carved on stelae in the Royal Palace of Angkor provides a clue. It states that the Land of Kambu (the original name for Cambodia) is “similar to the sky,” re-affirming the sky-ground dualism practiced by ancient Egyptians. 47 An exploration of star maps of the era does not reveal any similarities between the stars and the temple complex during the recorded time of its construction in the 12 th century. But if the footprint of Angkor is resting on older foundations, then by the process of precession and rolling back the night sky across millennia, it is possible to find a mirror-image constellation.
The temple of Angkor Thom, one small part of the city of knowledge that is Angkor.
Ta Phrom, one of the many enclosures of Angkor.
Spherical navel stones. Just as in Easter Island.
At the moment in 10,500 BC when Zep Tepi takes place on the Giza plateau — as Orion and Leo find their frozen images reflected on the ground in the pyramids and the Sphinx — the same spring equinox sunrise reveals to the constellation Draco its own frozen image: the ground plan of the temples of Angkor. 48 Because of the sheer scale and number of temples, there are also reflections of the prominent stars Deneb in Cygnus , Kochab in Ursa Minor , and the three stars comprising Corona Borealis, which would not have been visible when their respective temples were built but would, through the effects of precession, have been visible just above the horizon on the spring equinox of 10,500 BC . 49
The five central, conical towers of the main Angkor Wat temple suggest to the pilgrim a series of lingams ; its central sanctuary of Neak Pean ('the entwined serpents') is also shaped like a lingam standing on a mound arising out of a pool of ‘primordial waters’. A pyramidal structure called The Baphuon Temple covets an actual Sivalingam ; and the larger temple of Angkor Thom ('The Great City') anciently translated as 'Horus Lives Eternally and is Great', exactly as defined within the Building Texts , is an entire omphalos perched atop four gigantic heads arranged like a cube and enclosed within a moat.
Eternal echoes of Mount Meru and Heliopolis abound across continents, cultures, and time.
Far beyond bricks and mortar.
Aside from the visual impact of the sight of Tiwanaku on the eyes of Pedro Cieza de Léon in 1549, it’s not unusual that such places should exert a tremendous influence on the pilgrim like a master hypnotist’s pass of the hand. Being mirrors of the universe we stare at these temples and see our own image reflected back in stone. It’s a commonly-shared experience from generation to generation. It’s as though these spaces remain alive, living and breathing, like an organism. This may not seem so far-fetched because the locations chosen by the builder-gods for their ‘cities of knowledge’ are places where planetary electromagnetics behave differently. And being electromagnetic by nature we pick up on these subtleties. The forms of stone and the arrangement thereof serve to amplify the affect.
All across the world, the temples of the gods were designed so that the initiate could be “transformed into a god” or “into a bright star.” 50 Their craftsmen wished to remind us of this someday, lest we forgot. Thus when they built temples, they also created myths and rituals to preserve the knowledge, so as to survive whatever cataclysm the Earth cared to brew.
5. HERE COMES THE FLOOD.
“...[Djehuti deposited in a sacred place] the secret things of Osiris...these holy symbols of the cosmic elements...unseen and undiscovered by all men who shall go to and fro on the plains of this land until the time when Heaven, grown old, shall beget [humans] worthy of you.”
~ Kore Kosmou, XXIII
Submerged citadel off the Japanese island of Yonaguni.
Signs of impending change.
Myths of cities and temples constructed by individuals of great stature exist far and wide, floating around Tiwanaku, Heliopolis, Easter Island, Edfu and Teotihuacan like a magnetic mist.
The surviving texts of Egypt place the era of dynastic kings 3100 BC , beginning with the Pharaoh Menes, who was considered the first human ruler — that is, a descendent of a pure human bloodline. This was preceded by an era governed by the Shemsu Hor (‘Followers of Horus’), whose lineage was of divine descent. Prior to this, Egyptian history mentions the Occasion of the First Time, and we are informed the land was then ruled by the Neteru or ‘gods’. 1 This took place in Paleolithic times before a massive flood devastated the world.
Advice to initiates in the temple of Edfu offers a glimpse as to what these supernatural people may have looked like, for they were instructed to “stand up with the Ahau” (‘Gods Who Stand Up’) who stood 9 cubits tall. That’s approximately 15 feet! 2
By following a trail of clues and the surviving accounts of ancient historians such as Manetho, Heredotus, Solon and Plato, we are offered a picture that prominent temple cities like Innu-Heliopolis are dated to Zep Tepi , which evidently took place in 10,500 BC . 3 All of the above luminaries learned their craft at said academy as far back as the 6 th century BC , and they praised it as a repository of invaluable knowledge. More importantly, they assert that this seat of the knowledge had been maintained for eons: “generations continue to transmit to successive generations these sacred things unchanged: songs, dances, rhythms, rituals, music, painting... all coming from time immemorial when gods governed the earth in the dawn of civilization.” 4
Reading this makes one yearn for this Golden Age, when life was pursued for higher ideals. Even if everyone did not share this common purpose, there is no doubt the bar was set far higher than it is today in supposedly civilized societies.
Had we been given the choice of incarnating in a period such as 16,000 BC , the world would have looked a lot different than it does today, for it was the time of the last glacial maximum, when more of the Earth’s landmass was exposed. During this period Australia and New Guinea formed a massive continent; the British Isles were joined to each other and to Europe; the Black Sea, the North Sea and the Persian Gulf were dry land; the Mediterranean was a lake, and the Indonesian archipelago and Asia were one.
Southern India was also much more vast and incorporated Sri Lanka, which is now an island. Together they comprised the kingdom of Kumari Kandam, ‘the Land of the Virgin’ 5 — an interesting correspondence to both Mary, and the ancient Egyptian land Ta-Mery. As with Heliopolis and Tiwanaku, Kumari Kandam is described in the Tamil texts as a high civilization, part of that Golden Age, where the pursuit of wisdom was held in the highest esteem and cities of knowledge were created by men of great stature, both physically and mentally, who possessed exquisite skills in temple-building and sacred knowledge that compared them to gods.
India and the Maldives c.12,400 BC, before sea level rise.
But the Paleolithic world was soon to change. The Ice Age coming to a close, and ice dams holding back trillions of gallons of meltwater began to collapse. Kumari Kandam, as with many other coastal areas and islands around the globe, fell prey to successive submersions of the land c.16,000 BC , with more geologic changes following in 14,058 BC . 6
Still, there was one more event looming on the distant horizon, and the mere existence of Tamil’s sacred texts is evidence of this. The texts survive thanks to three Sangams (‘academies’) initially set up on the coast of southern India by an enlightened brotherhood to promulgate the knowledge preserved by former academies, all of which are now lost to the sea. The first Sangam, reliably dated to 9600 BC , 7 was the survivor of four older Sangams which had existed prior to the great deluge. 8
Lost lands, submerged temples.
While the work of the Greek philosopher Plato is highly regarded throughout academic circles, the same circles close rank and flee the room at the point where Plato discusses the drowning by a third, and major upheaval of the Earth of the perfect society of Atlantis, which he claims to have taken place around 9600 BC . Had Plato existed today he would have been vindicated by geologists and climatologists who, in the last two decades, have agreed that in the period of glacial melting between 16,000 and 9600 BC the Earth suffered three abrupt periods of catastrophic flooding that raised the sea level by at least 150 feet — enough to drown thousands of miles of coastline and render once sprawling land into tiny atolls. Today’s island nations such as the Açores, Micronesia and the Maldives would have been formidable landmasses back then, complete with valleys and mountain ranges, and certainly large enough to host the high civilizations claimed to have existed there.
Tamil sacred texts such as the Skanda Purana record a similar state of events in and around the Indian sub-continent, and how preparations were made in advance of an inevitable catastrophe, particularly with regard to the preservation of the ‘knowledge of the gods’ at the sacred mountain of Arunachala: “The ground near it is not at all touched by the four oceans that become agitated at the close of the Yuga, and that have the extremities of the worlds submerged in them… all the lores, arts, wealth of scriptures, and the Vedas are truthfully well-arranged there.” 9
With that said, Atlantis, wherever it may now be, was not an isolated event. In fact there are at least twelve identical worldwide legends of great lands swallowed by rapidly encroaching oceans, and with them the folding of an epic era, the Golden Age of the gods. Tamil traditions tell of centers of wisdom and great temples of learning stationed around the coast of present-day India, but lost during a violent swelling of the sea. And there is more than enough physical evidence to validate them. Miles out to sea from the present city of Dwarka lay the stone structures of this original sacred city, once presided by Krishna, an Avatar of Siva/Vishnu, whose foundations rested on the site of a more ancient and sacred city, Kushasthali. 10
In south-eastern India, stone structures belonging to Mahabalipuram ('city of the giant Bali'), presently lie underwater, along with the Temple of the Seven Pagodas whose golden tips are seen by fishermen during still waters. Similar structures have also been located off the Poompuhur coast. 11 And that’s just India.
Several hundred miles to the southwest, in the Maldives, there are staircases submerged 120 feet deep within the ocean, just as there are small pyramids on what little remains of the land’s surface. Prior to the various rising sea levels, this enchanting archipelago of 400 islands was one large landmass which, if still above water today, most definitively would cause commercial shipping routes to be diverted. 12
On the Micronesian island of Pohnpei ('upon a stone altar'), the pentagonal temple of Nan Madol ('reef of heaven') was built as a mirror image of its sunken counterpart, Kahnimweiso ('city of the gods'). It too now lies beneath 100 feet of ocean water. 13
In the Mediterranean island of Malta, structures that once existed on dry land are now two miles out to sea, beneath water that rose abruptly at the close of the Paleolithic age, around 10,000 BC . A substantial prehistoric temple constructed from “rectangular blocks of unbelievable sizes” lies beneath what is today Valletta harbor, and up to the 16th century could be seen stretching far out to sea. Above, on dry land, monoliths in the temple of Tarxien are artistically carved in a style not only consistent with the same era, 14 but bearing the same style of art at Tiwanaku, 6500 miles away in South America.
The Sumerian city of Eridu and its temple dedicated to Enki, the god of wisdom, shows evidence of having been violently overwhelmed by mud and debris due to the overwhelming force of rushing water from the Persian Gulf. 15
Central American traditions describe the origins of the ancestors who constructed the original temple cities as being very tall and pale-skinned and emerging from a land called Atzantiha; a similar word atalanticu means 'the place from where our Good Father rests'. The stupendous pyramids that pepper this land are generally attributed to the Toltec and the Maya, although given how excavations reveal the structures to be superimposed on layers of earlier — and superior — construction, it’s obvious those cultures merely continued the tradition, as is the case in Egypt and Persia.
The Maya book of divination Codex Tro-Cortesianus appears to support the myths that a violent terrestrial disturbance sunk an island in the Atlantic which once extended eastward from the Yucatan peninsula “like a crescent.” 16 The deciphering of the Codex places the disappearance of this landmass in the year 9937 BC . According to Charles-Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, the author of these studies, the Codex pinpoints several catastrophes around 10,500 BC . If correct, it places the events at the same time as Zep Tepi, as well as when the ground plans of the monuments at Giza and Angkor were created. Brasseur de Bourbourg also deduced that the Maya could have been related to the survivors. 17 Indeed their superior knowledge of astronomy, architecture, mathematics and the arts suggests they belonged to the same tradition of ancient adepts.
Temples sharing a common spiral art despite being 11,000 miles apart. Tiwanaku, Malta and New Zealand.
The sea level in 10,500 BC was significantly lower than it is today and would have exposed a land-bridge linking today’s Yucatan with Cuba and the Bahamas. Both the Yucatan and adjoining Guatemala are home to some of the world’s most impressive temple cities, including Uxmal, Chichen Itza, Tulum, Palenque and Tikal. But in 2001 a team of underwater explorers looking for deep sea oil deposits and sunken ships, and particularly gold-laden Spanish galleons, unexpectedly discovered treasure of a different kind. Sonar signals returning from the bottom of the sea at 2,200 feet suddenly revealed images resembling a vast urban center covering eight square miles, complete with three pyramids, roads, symmetrical stone blocks and anomalous structures reminiscent of Yucatan temple cities. The images are unnerving because such structures feasibly should not exist at this depth. The team leader’s reaction almost sums up the experience: “We were shocked, and frankly, a little frightened. It was as though we should not be seeing what we were seeing. Our first thought was maybe we found some kind of secret military installation.” 18
Frustratingly, no further details have emerged since from the expedition, mostly due to predictable hindrances by the orthodox academic world, and partly because of funding problems. However, rock samples from the area under examination produced two tantalizing points for discussion: firstly, the stones recovered were polished granite, suggesting they were worked by hand, and moved from distant lands, because this part of the Earth is composed entirely of limestone; and secondly, fossils embedded in other samples revealed fauna once common to shallow coastal land. 19
Possibly the most direct evidence of monolithic temples now sitting underwater lies off the south-eastern coast of Yonaguni, the westernmost island of the Japanese Ryukyu archipelago. Fifteen anomalous structures have so far come to light, some weighing an estimated 200 tons; one feature alone extends 650 feet. 20 These are precisely-cut and sharply-defined slabs of rock resembling all at once Tiwanaku, Machu Picchu, Sacsayhuamán and Stonehenge. Massive steps lead to angular terraces and regular-cut niches; the bulk of the ‘citadel’ seems to be perfectly aligned to the four cardinal points, just like most pyramids. There is evidence of holes drilled to split the rock, a technique not uncommon in ancient quarries. The anomalous features seem connected by an array of narrow roads, and symmetrical trenches occur in places that cannot be accounted for by natural means.
Yonaguni citadel, ninety feet beneath sea level.
The underwater architecture closely resembles the rock-carved tombs on the island; their age is indeterminable, but by their Neolithic style they are believed to be many thousands of years old. The depth of the underwater temple suggests an age prior to 10,000 BC , when part of this land used to be above water, forming a long and impressive ocean-facing ridge of hills. 21 Professor Masaaki Kimura, who has studied Yonaguni for over twenty years, also strongly suggests that the ‘citadel’ is triangulated to the island’s sacred mountain as well as a third pinnacle along the coast. If so, it would conform to my earlier hypothesis that ancient sites were in some way triangulated in accordance with the triple steps of Vishnu.
Being advanced astronomers and geometers, it’s likely that the builder gods would have foreseen impending astronomical events and their relationship to geological processes taking place on Earth. They definitively were preoccupied with preserving the records and knowledge no matter what presented itself, and built temples to safeguard this precious information. Whether by coincidence or design, the temples at Zep Tepi were in the early stages of completion when the Earth’s magnetic field flipped 180º. 22 Literally! Uncanny timing to say the least.
There is no doubt that preparations were also taking place for a far greater event, since the Skanda Purana comments on them taking place at Arunachala and how in times of change the hill would survive, along with the knowledge deposited there.
3,300 miles away, the same preparations were underway in Innu. In the Hermetic corpus of the Kore Kosmou (‘Virgin of the World’), 23 the goddess Isis describes how the god of wisdom, Djehuti, “…deposited in a sacred place the secret things of Osiris…these holy symbols of the cosmic elements…unseen and undiscovered by all men who shall go to and fro on the plains of this land until the time when Heaven, grown old, shall beget [humans] worthy of you.”
Changing the human race is difficult enough. Preventing the Earth from going about its business is something else.
As it turns out, the flip in the magnetic field was the least of the problems for the guardians of the temples. 700 years later, something far more worrisome would come crashing down.
Crests of many tall waves.
In 1994 the residents of Earth were riveted by a celestial event taking place at a safe distance on Jupiter, as twenty-one fragments from a disintegrating comet hit the surface of the giant planet. One by one they punctured the bands of convulsive clouds which give this orb its peculiar skin. Images of the impact were regularly updated, and for several weeks NASA’s website became a Mecca of fascination. But for many people, the awe and wonder was overshadowed by an irrational fear, as if somewhere deep in our collective consciousness the event summoned a memory of a similar situation that happened to us long, long ago.
Something quite large impacted northern Siberia in an area known as the Laptev Sea, near the Liahknov Islands. Millions of trees were uprooted and thousands of bodies of mammoths lay frozen in situ , their flesh so perfectly preserved during recent excavations that at one time it appeared on restaurant menus in Alaska; over 20,000 pairs of ivory tusks were recovered without any signs of decay. Entire mixed herds of bison, bears, horses, wolves and lions were found twisted together with trees and tossed like straw by an overwhelming common force. 24 Some animals were feasting upon meals and stilled in time at the moment of death. An even stranger discovery pointed to the Arctic having been much warmer before this event took place: a 90-foot tree had its fruit and green leaves still preserved in the permafrost. 25 Whatever the cause of catastrophe, it did so in the blink of an eye, and Carbon-14 tests of this well-studied site place the event around 10,000 BC . 26
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, orderly life at Tiwanaku reached an abrupt dénouement. Tremendous seismic movements forced the waters of Lake Titicaca to overflow. Other lakes to the north broke bulwarks, their waters emptied into Titicaca to form a wall of water that overwhelmed everything and everyone in its rampage. Archaeological digs at the site revealed a jumble of human remains tangled with those of fish, pottery and utensils. Stones were mixed with jewels, tools and shells, and megaliths weighing hundreds of tons lay around Tiwanaku, tossed like matchsticks. The event appears to have also occurred around 10,000 BC . 27
Blocks of andesite weighing as much as 300 tons were tossed around like matchsticks by the sudden emptying of Lake Titicaca. Temple of Puma Punku at Tiwanaku. Bolivia.
There’s also evidence of this event having consisted of many parts besides a sudden temperature drop and earth tremor. Layers of volcanic ash were deposited all around the world, validating ancient myths of a time when there was “black, bituminous rain that fell for months.” 28 The temperature of the waters of the Atlantic rose 6-10 degrees Celsius, followed by wild and rapid fluctuations in climate. Ice sheets which had taken 40,000 years to develop dissolved within 2,000 years, quickly raising sea levels, and allowing hitherto compressed land to rise abruptly and generate titanic earthquakes. 29
Mesopotamian traditions are very clear on the subject of a worldwide conflagration. The story was handed down orally for thousands of years until it was finally recorded on clay tablets as the Epic of Gilgamesh . The account reveals the period in question as a time of gods, with Anu being the supreme god of the firmament — a name that resonates throughout Celtic traditions, both as Anu and Ana, the prevailing god of such tribes as the people of the Danube, the Tuatha de Danaan, and so forth. The story describes how the antediluvian king Utnapishtim is informed by Ea, protector god of humanity, in the same vein as Vishnu, to build a boat in preparation for a massive flood and stock it with animals, seeds and craftsmen of all trades. The sensible fellow takes the advice, and no sooner is construction of the boat complete when “a black cloud came up from the base of the sky” and “smashed the land like a cup.” A flood then overwhelms the land, accompanied by hurricane force winds and rains thick with mud and debris, until the “people could not be distinguished from the sky.” 30 After seven days of cataclysmic hell, it is written that the tempest finally calms down. Gazing upon the complete destruction all around him, Utnapishtim cries, because “all mankind had returned to clay.” He then sends a dove to locate dry ground, if any was still available. Eventually the waters do recede and his massive ship runs aground and onto the side of a mountain. 31
This story involving a forewarning by a god, the detailed descriptions of an impending turmoil, and the final motif involving a bird is identical in other world flood legends featuring the protagonists Yima, Noah, Atra-Hasis, Coxcoxtli, Deucalion, Manu, Xisuthros and Ziusudra, to name a few, for there exist at least 500 comparable flood myths, eighty-six of which are independent of Hebrew accounts. 32
The legend of Enoch featured in the Dead Sea Scrolls quotes events leading up to the cause of this flood, in which seven stars appeared in the sky as “great burning mountains descending towards Earth.” At this time, Enoch is escorted to a mountain by a group of seven beings calling themselves Watchers: “…there came forth beings from heaven who were like white men; and four went forth from that place and three with them.” These seven beings gave Enoch the ability of foresight so that he may realize the impending flood from the impact of a fragmenting comet: “heaven collapsed and was borne off and fell to the earth. And when it fell to earth I saw how the earth was swallowed up in a great abyss, and mountains were suspended on mountains.” 33 Incidentally, the authors of these scrolls found at Qumran called themselves the Sons of Light. We shall reconnect with them and the Watchers later.
The Sibylline Oracles, originally written around the same time as the Book of Enoch — and both part of an oral tradition handed down faithfully through many generations — describe an identical event: “…from heaven a great star shall fall on the dread ocean and burn up the deep sea… there shall be a great conflagration from the sky falling on the earth… and summer shall change to winter in one day.” 34
So, what does science have to say about this event so unanimously shared throughout the world?
Professor of Geology Alexander Tollman compared several flood myths in which the Earth was described as hit by “seven burning suns” before being overwhelmed by floods. He compared these with geological anomalies of molten rock thrown up by impact sites, proving that around 10,000 BC the Earth was indeed hit by seven comet fragments, whose impact generated an increase in radioactive Carbon-14, which has been found in fossilized trees dating to this period. 35
Another impressive study into terrestrial comet impacts concluded that “the environmental data in the flood myths fit remarkably well with the modeling for a large, oceanic comet impact, above the threshold for global catastrophe at or greater than 100 gigatons.” 36 The geologic and atmospheric report of the impacts pretty much synchronizes with the description of conditions in the various myths: six or seven days of intense rain and hurricane-force winds, generated and sustained by the air pressure blast wave and the impact plume, not to mention the thick, muddy rain filled with submicron debris generated by the impact itself. The Maya described it as “heavy resin fell from the sky…a black rain began to fall by day and by night.” 37
There is certainly evidence that both animal and human survivors found shelter on tops of mountains as high as 1,430 feet, only to be overwhelmed by advancing water. On the peaks of mountains in France lie the splintered bones of humans violently mixed with those of mammoth, reindeer, carnivores and birds that became extinct shortly thereafter. Whale skeletons and Ice Age marine life can even be found 600 feet above sea level — inland in Vermont! 38
In short, anyone who chose to incarnate during this period chose poorly.
If a comet or fragments of one collided with the Earth and generated this kind of unparalleled destruction, the soot and particle debris from the event — which according to world legends seems to have blanketed the entire globe — would be sealed in the geologic record as sediment in ice.
In 2008 a team of Danish geologists conducting an extensive examination of ice cores in Greenland secured the precise date of the event to 9703 BC . Startled by the layer of soot in the ice, they remarked that “the climate shift was so sudden that it is as if a button was pressed.” 39
Plato, it seems, had been right all along when he recorded the date of the final sinking of Atlantis to 9600 BC ; Arab chroniclers have similarly placed the event around 10,000 BC , while Coptic traditions place it closer to c10,300 BC . 40 In any event, the dates are remarkably close to that established by science.
Survivors... shaken and stirred.
It’s estimated from the resulting monumental tsunamis, tectonic plate shifts, disruption of the magnetic field, rise in temperatures and melting of ice, that some 5% of the Earth’s surface went underwater as a result of sea levels rising by as much as 150 feet. 41
Thanks to various individuals forewarned by the gods to build ships and take on-board the necessary provisions to safeguard the future seeds of humanity, people survived and civilization evolved, slowly but surely. Recent excavations at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey have unearthed the earliest post-diluvial temple complex, dating prior to 9745 BC , 42 sited a cautious 1,000 feet up a hill and barely 300 miles from the site of Utnapishtim/Noah's own ship.
The beauty of myth is that it embalms a truth in a story that can be disseminated from age to age. What is sometimes baffling to us in the modern era is the language in which the stories are written or visualized, and only by taking a step backwards and observing the myth from a wider perspective does it suddenly make sense. Such is the case with the allegorical Egyptian creation myth: Osiris and his female consort Isis rule the world in perfect balance. Then Osiris is murdered by his dark brother Set, who tears him into little pieces. Isis finds Osiris’ phallus just in time to become inseminated, gives birth to Horus, who avenges his brother Seth for the murder of his father. In the meantime, Osiris resurrects as a beautiful palm tree.
If we now apply this story, albeit highly simplified, to the events surrounding the flood: the sky (Osiris) is in perfect balance with the ground (Isis). Then one day the balance is upset by a global catastrophe, which brings chaos and darkness (Set). Naturally, sky and ground become unbalanced and everything falls to pieces (Osiris is torn up). Yet within the chaos of destruction the seeds survive to re-establish new life (Isis finds his phallus and is impregnated), whereupon a new form is born (Horus) that re-establishes the balance of the previous order (avenges Osiris). And with this new order, so the knowledge survives and takes root once more (Osiris sprouts as a palm tree, an omphalos ).
As we shall see, each of the world’s arks held more than just the seeds of physical survival of the human race. They also contained seeds of another kind – the type that would reconstruct the previous world of the gods and their cities of knowledge, for board each ark sat seven members of an elite brotherhood.
The still visible hulking mass of Utnapishtim/Noah’s ark on Mt. Ararat. Quoting Berosi the Chaldean from 290 BC , the historian Flavius Josephus stated as late as 90 AD that, “Its remains are shown there by the inhabitants to this day.”