6. SEVEN SAGES.

 

 

“And the Elders sat on rough hewn stones within a sacred circle, and held in their hands the sceptral rods of the loud proclaiming heralds, on receiving which they then rose from their seats, and in alternate order gave good judgement.”

~ Homer, Illiad, book 18.I.585

 

 

 

The enigmatic moai, staring longingly toward the heavens. Easter Island.

 

 

The Earth and its organisms flow endlessly in a pentagonal cycle of birth, growth, assimilation, gestation and rebirth. As do ancient monuments, even after the ground upon which they have long stood overwhelms them; as do their founders’ renascent ideas, despite the very best intentions of organized religion.

Clearly there were adepts who survived the flood and lived to sow the seeds of new civilizations. The Egyptian temple culture, for one, is proof enough. That it appeared without precedent, as if pre-packaged and re-assembled suggests that its founders already possessed skills, laws and knowledge capable of executing a pre-conceived plan.

The magnificent seven.

Just like Jerusalem’s Ail-na-Mirenn — today’s Temple Mount — the omphalos of Ireland was also a place where the great flood first subsided, as was Arunachala and so many other primeval mounds of the world. The Puranas mention how seven sages visited Arunachala after the flood to collect and dissipate the knowledge; north Indian tradition asserts that Manu and seven sages took refuge in the Himalayas, and after the flood, embarked on reconstructing the area between the Indus and the Ganges while teaching the Vedas ; in Sumeria the seven sages assisting in the rebuilding of that region go by the name Apkallu.

One of the seven Apkallu.

 

 

Andean traditions describe the megalithic monument builders as the Huari, a race of white-skinned, bearded giants, the most celebrated being a bearded, white-skinned, red-haired god named Viracocha, who emanated from a boat on Lake Titicaca. Together with seven 'shining ones' he set about building the temple complex of Tiwanaku, which then was used as a ‘navel’ from whence they set out to promulgate the knowledge throughout the Andes. ¹

Just as the Popul Vuh represents the oral history of the Quiché Maya, so the Codex Vaticanus records faithfully the very ancient oral traditions of Central America. In one curious passage it states that, “in the First Age, giants existed in that country [Mexico]. They relate to one of the seven whom they mention as “having escaped from the deluge…he went to Cholula and there began to build a tower…in order that should a deluge come again he might escape to it.” ² This pyramid of Cholula still stands, partly because a newer, Spanish church now resides on top of it, and mostly because it is the largest pyramid ever constructed in the world — its volume alone is greater than that of the great pyramid at Giza. ³ In Nahuatl language it’s named Tlachihualtepetl , also known as the 'artificial mountain'. Originally it was named Acholollan , meaning 'water that falls in the place of flight'.

Certainly these builders were physically and intellectually endowed, as one account after another credits these unusual individuals with achieving the seemingly impossible, using techniques that bend the presently-known laws of physics. At the temple complex of Uxmal, the Pyramid of the Magician is said to have been raised in just one night by a man of magical disposition who “whistled and heavy rocks would move into place.” ⁴ Compare this with the traditions of Tiwanaku, in which “the great stones were moved from their quarries of their own accord at the sound of a trumpet… taking up their positions on the site.” ⁵ Similar attributes are common to the creators of Teotihuacan and Stonehenge, as well as the original Egyptian temples, which are described as “speedy at construction.” ⁶

Pyramid of the Magician. Uxmal, Mexico.

 

 

All this sounds reminiscent of the practice of Egyptian magic hekau (the possible origin of the often-misinterpreted hex) with which magicians moved stones with “words of their mouths,” just as the Ethiopian Hor magicians are said to have carried great stones through the air.

Identical stories involving survivors of the deluge emerging from the oceans and capable of supernatural feats appear throughout Micronesia. On the island of Pohnpei stand 100 artificial islands that comprise the pentagonal citadel of Nan Madol. Within it sits the basalt temple of Nan Dowas and its central pyramid, wherein megalithic foundation stones are said to have been erected by two antediluvian gods who came by boat from a sinking land to the west, and “by their magic spells, one by one, the great masses of stone flew through the air like birds, settling down into their appointed place.” ⁷ Traditionally called Sounhleng ('reef of heaven'), it was built as a mirror image of its sunken counterpart, Kahnimweiso Namkhet (‘city of the Horizon’). Indeed, undersea ruins of two cities have been discovered here, lying at great depths and complete with standing columns on pedestals rising to 24 feet. ⁸

Pentagonal citadel of Nan Madol.

 

 

Polynesian idol depicting a very tall and slender physique, uncharacteristic for the region.

 

 

The concept of gods or sages re-emerging from sea-going vessels and other safe havens after a global catastrophe is a recurring theme in myths and traditions maintained by supposedly unconnected cultures. But there are connections, and they’re interwoven like the finest Persian carpet.

From the primordial mound at Innu, groups of builder gods referred to as seven sages, set about locating other mounds at "carefully chosen locations" that would act as foundations for future temples, the development of which was intended to bring about “the resurrection of the former world of the gods” following its destruction by a worldwide flood. ⁹ These Egyptian Ahau were survivors from an island overwhelmed by a catastrophe that “inundated the former mansions of the gods.” ¹⁰ What’s more, these Ahau were described as 15 feet tall. ¹¹

Meanwhile in the Pacific Ocean, the first European explorer to reach the island of Te Pito o Te Henua ('Navel of the World') was Jacob Roggeveen, who did so on Easter Sunday, 1722, hence its recent, anglicized name of Easter Island. He faithfully recorded the experience along with some of the islanders’ traditions, one of which states that the population consisted of two types of races — the Short Ears and the Long Ears.

The Short Ears referred to the typical Homo sapiens . As for the Long Ears, Roggeveen and his crew had direct experience with them: “In truth, I might say that these savages are as tall and broad in proportion, averaging 12 feet in height. Surprising as it may appear, the tallest men on board our ship could pass between the legs of these children of Goliath without bending their head.” ¹²

Are we dealing here with the same Ahau associated with ancient Egypt?

Apparently, the Long Ears’ ancestors were responsible for raising the carved stone effigies that punctuate Easter Island, the enigmatic moai ('image'), whose monolithic faces stare longingly at the sky. These magician builder gods were called Ma’ori (‘scholar/master’), the full title being Ma’ori-Ko-Hau-Rongorongo ('master of special knowledge'). ¹³ According to oral tradition they moved the stone colossi with the use of mana , a kind of psychic force where matter yields to the focused intent of a person skilled in the subtle arts. ¹⁴ At times they would combine their mana by standing in a circle around a collection of rounded boulders called Ahu Te Pito Kura ('the navel of light'), ¹⁵ which still exist today on this island. Identical round stones, larger in size, are found near sacred sites in central America, as well as New Zealand. Legend states that the statues were commanded to walk through the air by “words of their mouths.” ¹⁶

Like so many other lands and their flood myths, Easter Island is said to have been part of a larger landmass before a giant cataclysm and a subsequent rise in sea level claimed much of it; ocean charts validate this to be the case. Island legend states that the natives received survivors from the drowned land of Hiva, and that seven sages, “all illuminated men,” carefully surveyed the island before setting up sacred mounds at specific locations. A stepped mound called ahu was constructed at their original landing place, upon which seven moai were subsequently erected in commemoration of these builder gods; incidentally, similar types of moai are also present in Teotihuacan, Tiwanaku and the Marquesas Islands. The masonry style of the ahu is identical to that of Andean temples such as Tiwanaku, and just like said temples, it’s built atop much earlier megalithic foundations. ¹⁷ Ahu are also found under the older marae ('sacred place') of other Polynesian islands.

Beside the first ahu and its seven moai , the builder gods dug a large, rectangular boat grave. Here we see mirror images of Egyptian ritual concerning the sanctification of the sacred mound, for beside the Great Pyramid of Giza, also erected on a primordial mound, lies a deep enclosure that once housed a massive, ocean-going vessel.

Linguistically both cultures even share the same words when referring to the same processes — Ra , the Egyptian Sun, is Raa to Easter Islanders; ahu, the Egyptian term describing a supernatural spirit, and its linguistic permutations akh and akhu , meaning 'being of light, shining one' or 'transfigured spirit, reappers on Easter Island as Aku-Aku .

The tall magnificent seven.

The Babylonian creator god Uanna is said to have emerged from the Persian Gulf and founded an advanced civilization. He’s depicted as either a giant or a man inhabiting the skin of a fish (an analogy to his sea-faring origin), and that he gave to 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… he instructed them on everything which could tend to soften manners and humanize mankind. From that time, so universal were his instructions, nothing has been added materially by way of improvement.” ¹⁸

That such builder gods were described as giants may be an apt indication of their intellectual, and possibly psychic, stature. That would seem the rational way for the modern mind to interpret the legends of unreasonably tall people doing mighty deeds. But could the seven sages have been physical giants too? Even the Old Testament recalls how around the time of the flood “there were giants in the earth… and after that sons of God came unto the daughters of men, and bore children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.” The Qumran scrolls also qualify these mighty men as “giants who were descended from the pre-diluvial gods." ¹⁹ Likewise the Koran refers to the Gibborim ('giants') who inhabited the Near East, and often describe them in the context of remote antiquity and magic, even locating their home in the city of Jericho, 'City of Giants'.

Two hundred years of archaeology helps us further. In Bolivia, after the giant Viracocha and his 'shining ones' left Tiwanaku, they traveled to the coastal place called Matarani, which was often used by them as a Pacific port. Traditions assert that from here they were never seen again, disappearing across the ocean in their “magical craft,” shortly after bands of humans attacked them, apparently in fear of their size. The legend was finally confirmed when giant skeletons were unearthed from ancient grave mounds near Matarani. Excavations in Mexico and Peru also produced similar 9-foot tall skeletons buried in similar mounds or stone-lined graves.

Matarani is a name steeped in Egyptian overtones — Ma’at , goddess of truth, Ra the Sun. ²⁰ Stranger still, the name reappears in New Zealand in a somewhat backwards form as Marotini, the tutelary goddess of the landscape temple of Kura Tawhiti — set up by its tall, mythical gods, the Waitaha, who once came from across the ocean. ²¹

Giant lore is most prevalent throughout the British Isles, not just as abstract legends, but in physical proof across the land. Today anyone from central London to Sligo in western Ireland can visit hundreds of Giants Graves — mounds called long barrows made from alternating layers of earth and stone, with stone passageways at the front, and a profile resembling a Pythagorean triangle. On many occasions during the Victorian Era these mounds were dug up and skeletons measuring between 9- and 12 feet tall exhumed. Most of the descriptions of the digs are accompanied by eyewitness accounts of sudden inclement weather, particularly violent thunderstorms, every time the workmen disinterred the bodies. ²²

Clearly some sacred things are meant to be left undisturbed.

One exhumed corpse from a Giant’s Grave in County Antrim, Ireland, was found fossilized to the point where the skin can still be seen on a photograph in the December 1895 edition of Strand magazine. Alongside the remains of such corpses there has been found rusting armor, axes, and a 7-foot long bow, which was uncovered from another Giant’s Grave near Glastonbury and excellently preserved in the peat soil. It now rests in nearby Taunton Museum. There are hundreds of such documented cases throughout the British Isles alone, each accompanied by the persistent habit of the bones being sent to high seats of learning, such as the British Museum, and for the evidence to conveniently disappear from public view. ²³

Inside a giant’s grave or long barrow. West Kennett, England.

 

Fossilized giant dug from a Giant’s Grave in Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland.

Native tribes of North America have identical tales of races of giants, particularly the Creek, who describe encountering the remnants of unusually tall people who’d originally escaped a sinking land in the Atlantic. The Cherokee go so far as to claim much of their traditions are a legacy from a dying race of giants they encountered during their migrations across the Plains and into the Allegheny Mountains. They attribute these people with building many of the great earthworks throughout the Ohio valleys, including the sinuous Serpent Mound. In fact the name Allegheny is a derivation of their name, Allegewi . The Cherokee say that during their own early history, the Allegewi had already become brutish, the remaining strands of a far older and highly civilized race. This is confirmed in Sioux legends, which recount attacks in the central plains by isolated tribes of giants moving out of the mountains of the east. ²⁴ It appears that the incoming nomadic tribes were witnessing the end of a dying race, too few to breed among themselves, and physically too large to breed with human women, leading to hopelessness and the abandonment of civilized behavior. That the last of them did reach California is evidenced by an account in 1833, when soldiers digging a foundation for a powder magazine at Lompock Rancho encountered a stone sarcophagus containing a 12-foot tall human skeleton, covered by thin tablets of porphyry upon which were engraved a series of symbols resembling a long lost language. In an unusual turn of events, the soldiers actually consulted the shaman of a local native tribe to seek information on the origin of the skeleton. During a trance he stated that the body belonged to an Allegewi , whom his own ancestors had fought during the tribes’ earliest wanderings into California. ²⁵

As was the case in Europe well into the 1960s, the recent disinterring of these anomalous skeletons regularly followed the predictable pattern of being shipped off for analysis at the Smithsonian, never to be heard of again. ²⁶ Still, enough published evidence supports the stories.

Whether these unusual humanoids are the Sumerian Apkallu , the Indian Seven Rishis, or the Egyptian Seven Sages, clearly a fraternity of enlightened people, often of giant stature, survived an unimaginable cataclysm and, fueled by high ideals, ventured to all corners of the world to rebuild the former world of the gods.

The Followers of Horus.

No discussion on rebuilding a system of archaic knowledge could take place without reference to the Egyptian culture. So, that’s where we shall go for additional signs of the seven sages.

“The Egyptians believed that in the beginning their land was ruled by a dynasty of great gods, of whom Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris, was the last. He was succeeded by a dynasty of semi-divine beings known as the Followers of Horus, who, in turn gave place to the historical kings of Egypt.” ²⁷ Chronologically speaking then, the land the Egyptians once called Ta-Mery is first presided by the Neters ('creator gods'). In the aftermath of a devastating global flood, their lineage and ideals were continued by the melodiously named Akhu Shemsu Hor , ('Shining Ones, the followers of Horus'). ²⁸ It is they who take on the responsibilities of kingship until the first fully-human pharaoh, Menes, takes up the mantle of divinely-guided leadership. The Dynastic kings then follow, not all of whom adhered to the spiritual path, and by 1300 BC , following the era of Akhenaten and his son Tutankhamun, a corrupted priesthood effectively wrestled control of the temple from the pharaohs and dominated the religious psyche of the people. But of interest to our inquiry are the aforementioned Akhu Shemsu Hor because, after the floodwaters subsided, like the seven adepts who emerged from Arunachala, it was their charge as high initiates of Innu to re-establish the academy of knowledge founded during the Golden Age of the Neters.

We are dealing here with an elite civilization of enlightened, philosophical and influential individuals to whom the rest of Egypt owes its post-diluvial civilization. As Followers of Horus, one aspect of their responsibility was to teach the passage of the heavens, the precession of the Earth’s cycle — the ‘wobble’ of its axis — and the marking of solar and lunar events. Much of the understanding of stars and numbers would later form the blueprint for the specific alignment of thousands of temples across the Earth. But on a secondary, metaphorical level — and ancient traditions always speak in multiple levels — their instruction was to motivate others towards enlightenment. Horus was, after all, the god of the sky, and to walk in the footsteps of Horus was to ‘reach for the sky’, to be bright, like the sun.

An important figure charged with the disbursement of gnosis was the ibis-headed god of wisdom Djehuti, along with his female counterpart Seshat, who was similarly the goddess of wisdom, the arts, writing, astronomy and architecture. Possibly the best surviving proof that promulgation of knowledge was the focus behind this ‘brotherhood’ and the temples they built lies in the well-preserved temple of Edfu, itself the continuation and reflection of a far older, mythical temple. Carved upon its walls are the Building Texts . Although but a fragment of a more ancient and complete cosmology, they are nevertheless a “faithful copy of the writings which Thoth made according to the words of the Sages.” ²⁹

The Edfu Building Texts make repeated references to Seven Sages and how they were the only divine beings who knew how temples and sacred places are to be created. Sometimes referred to as Lords of Light, they initiated construction of the first edifice at the Primeval Mound, a mansion of god described as “speedy of construction” — an attribute also conferred on other temples from Uxmal to Easter Island. ³⁰

Various traditions state that the knowledge and other important records of such “men of high learning” not only survived the flood, but were also stored in special protective rooms on the building constructed atop the Primordial Mound, namely the Great Pyramid of Giza. Deposited there by the ever-diligent Djehuti, the information would remain protected by a type of Hermetic magic until such time as humans could be entrusted with it. ³¹ Or at the very least conveyed to people of the highest integrity.

Djehuti’s own opus, a book titled Specifications of the Mounds of the Early Primeval Age , is said to outline the magical formula for temple building and list all the pre-diluvial cult centers, which Djehuti wrote according to the words of the Sages of Mehweret. As far as we know, no lucky turn of the archaeologist’s spade has uncovered this tome. It is lost to time. ³² When it does reappear, from the title alone, it will prove a most enlightening read.

A seat fit for a giant. The Hag’s Chair at Loughcrew’s 5500-year old passage mound stands over 6 ft. tall, ideal for a person twice the height. Ireland.

 

 

Certainly such statements etched on the walls of temples have provided ample inspiration for adventurers over the course of 2,400 years to seek these treasures; even in 400 A.D. the Romans sought underground galleries in the Pyramids they knew had been intended to “prevent the ancient wisdom from being lost in the flood.” ³³ Much later, a team of Arabs blasted their way into the Great Pyramid out of the same conviction that it held “a profound science” and “knowledge of history and astronomy.” Maybe some part of it was discovered, for by the 15 ^th century the Arabs — and through them the Portuguese — did possess sea maps showing the contours of the South American coastline along with an ice-free continent of Antarctica, a situation which previously occurred between 13,000-9000 BC . ³⁴

Whether wisdom/treasure seekers were digging in the right place remains to be seen. Human nature being what it is, people tend to be blinded by the size of things. Personally, I would look where the eye is not so easily fooled, such as the smallest of the three Giza pyramids, the one attributed to Menkaure. It is also the one most dear to Zahi Hawass, former Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Egyptian Antiquities, whose composure, contrary to his bombastic media personality, takes on a quiet, almost transcendental quality whenever he speaks of this less prominent edifice.

Another auspicious location may lie near the Sphinx. In 1980 an irrigation company drilling 250ft to the east of this stone lion inadvertently struck a hard object 50ft below the surface, which turned out to be particularly hard Aswan granite. ³⁵ This type of stone does not occur naturally anywhere near the Nile Delta. Suddenly, visions of Edgar Cayce’s trance readings indicating a lost Hall of Records beneath the paws of the Sphinx come to mind. Given that in a separate reading Cayce dated the flood to c.10,000 BC which, as we saw earlier, is a pretty accurate estimate, this seer’s body of work should be better appreciated. It would be another half a century before individuals such as Bauval, Hancock and Steffensen honed-in on the precise date. ³⁶

But in some form or another, the old knowledge did survive, and probably due to the emphasis placed on committing information to memory. Whether we are talking about Vedas , the texts of Djehuti or the oral tradition of the Quechua Maya, it was established practice to learn the knowledge by heart. In fact, that much of the archaic rituals and literature of India survive today is due to the supernatural feats of memory practiced by Sadhus and other wise people. Such skills may seem worthless to our computer culture, but back then recital and memory were both admired and celebrated. In his writings concerning the Druids, Julius Caesar remarked that up to 20 years of oral instruction was considered necessary before those who attended the Mysteries Schools of the Druids were ready for their final initiation. ³⁷ The logic seems reasonable: should the knowledge placed in the temple be destroyed, it will remain invested with the adepts. All they have to do is survive. And all flood myths describe the gods forewarning a few wise men to run to the safety of high ground or take safe passage in arks.

As for writing down information, this has its own drawbacks. As time passes, words change, meanings are skewed, and symbols misappropriated (case in point, the re-working of the noble Hindu swastika by Nazis). By the time the already ancient Pyramid Texts were being copied onto the walls of the pyramids of Unas and Pepi I around 3300 BC , few of the scribes understood the writings in front of their eyes. ³⁸

Djehuti himself was made aware of the shortcomings of the written form. Shortly after he discovered the art of letters, he sought the counsel of Amun concerning this ‘magic’ he feels will improve the memorizing of knowledge. Amun’s reply is the essence of eloquence: “…now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory, because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others; instead of trying to remember from the inside completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding. You provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things, without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing.” ³⁹

With the aim of re-promulgating the sacred knowledge inherited from their forefathers, the Seven Sages — whether directly or via their variants or successors, the Followers of Horus — maintained an unbroken lineage from age to age. According to the Matsya Purana , “what the Seven Sages heard from the Sages of the preceding age, they narrated in the next age.” ⁴⁰ As the population grew, so too did the order. We see this in India where groups of Seven Sages were assigned to different regions, much in the way the later order of the Knights Templar grew from nine original knights into a European Order, later to evolve into multi-national movements such as the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians.

Still, the association with the sky remained. Groups of wise men in southern India became associated with the seven stars that comprise Ursa Major, the constellation of the Great Bear — a parallel to Osiris who is associated with the seven primary stars of Orion. ⁴¹ As such, these ‘separate’ traditions can be linked with the northern European spiritual brotherhoods centered on the Arthurian legends — Arthur in Welsh is arth-wr , meaning 'great bear', and he was likewise associated with Ursa Major. And although the numbers change from period to period, the basic principle remains unchanged: twelve knights in shining armor accorded equal status at a round table and entrusted with restoring the Holy Grail to a kingdom gone to ruin is a new metaphor describing the Shining Ones, and likewise, they embark on a quest to restore the land to right. Echoes of this tale abound in Jesus and the twelve apostles, Jason and the Argonauts (a quest for a golden fleece), and to some degree Robin Hood and his twelve merry men — with Robin taking on the role of the Green Man, exactly like Osiris or Siva, symbol of the perennial resurrection of nature and life. ⁴²

The mission of these astronomer-philosophers survived well beyond the fall of Egyptian culture. The Greeks, who were handed the gnostic baton via the Egyptian academy at Alexandria, after Innu/Heliopolis ceased to be, rekindled the concept of the Seven Sages around 620 BC in the shape of the Hoi Sophoí . According to an account by Socrates, these seven wise men were associated with both Sparta and Delphi: “They all emulated and admired, and were students of Spartan education, and one could tell their wisdom was of this sort by the brief, but memorable remarks they each uttered when they met, and jointly dedicated the first fruits of their wisdom to Apollo in his shrine at Delphi, writing what is on every man’s lips: Know thyself.” ⁴³

The oracle of Delphi has been considered a navel of the earth since at least 4000 BC , and long before a shrine dedicated to Apollo was erected there, it was a landscape temple consecrated by the god Zeus. According to the playwright Aeschylus, Delphi's origins are prehistoric and involved the honoring of Gaia. During historic times the wisdom and guidance expounded by the Delphic oracle exerted great influence on Greek life, from governmental actions to daily affairs. It’s worth mentioning that this sacred site of great antiquity always came under the protection of kings, but when allowed to fall into ruin, whether at the hands of barbarian hordes or lunatic rulers such as Nero, the surrounding area became impoverished in tandem with the oracle's fall into decay. Tellingly, the power of the site was reinvigorated whenever rulers contributed significantly towards its restoration, such as during the Flavian dynasty of Rome.

A strong tradition of sages and wise men exists between Delphi and the Egyptian temple complex at Karnak ('The Most Perfect of Places'). Both were dedicated to solar gods (Zeus/Apollo in Greece, Amun/Ra in Egypt); both contained notable examples of omphaloi ; both were used as places of 'distance seeing' or clairvoyance.

Legend states that Karnak is the mother of all oracles, from where all other oracles emanate, and that two doves once flew between Karnak and Delphi, wherein the two temples were used as a means of telepathic communication between each other; ⁴⁴ the same was practiced between ‘hill forts’ throughout the British Isles. It seems that in using the oracles, the adepts were tapping into the power of a connected grid so as to amplify their personal ability. Of course, it also saved time when communicating over lengthy distances. We will touch on this later.

But why did two doves fly between Karnak and Delphi, a distance of 1,070 miles (a number tantalizingly close to the radius of the Moon)? The dove also makes an appearance as a symbol of communication in the story of Utnapishtim who, as Ziusudra, is also the central figure of the Sumerian flood myth, just as in Hebrew texts he is Noah, and in Vedic texts, Manu, preserver, father of mankind, and institutor of religious ceremonies; his progeny called themselves Aryas, meaning 'noble, pure or enlightened'. ⁴⁵ In all cases, Utnapishtim/Manu/Ziusudra/Noah are directly instructed by the gods to build a boat prior to a flood, and are accompanied in the endeavor by Seven Sages (with the notable exception of the Biblical account which refers to them as members of his family) who, after the deluge, go on to teach wisdom to mankind. In other words, they sow the seeds of civilization. ⁴⁶

Since the ancients are so fond of incorporating multiple layers of meaning into one symbol, let’s take these connections to another level: Karnak, Delphi and Mt. Ararat (as the reputed location of the ark) ⁴⁷ all share the same dove symbolism, and all three are connected by a triple step of Vishnu in the shape of a perfect isosceles triangle.

Triple step of Vishnu centered on Kolossi, the Templar castle in Cyprus.

 

 

This revelation happened unexpectedly while I was thinking about the dove symbolism. I was astonished by this connection, to say the least, and believed it to be the end of the matter. However, looking at the map and the overlaid ‘triple step’, I was curious as to what lay at the center of this triangle, which brought me another riddle. The heart of the triangle rests conveniently on the only piece of dry land in that part of the Mediterranean, the island of Cyprus. In fact, the center point rests exactly on the castle of Kolossi, a cube-shaped tower reminiscent of both the Ka’ba — the Islamic navel stone — and the symbol for Mount Meru.

In the 13 ^th century, this tower would become the seat of a new group of sages, the Knights Templar, who learned their craft by consulting groups of mystics all over the Near East.

Colossal, to say the least. But it also begs the question: did the Templars rebuild this tower over an existing ancient site, as they did elsewhere in Europe, in accordance with Egyptian temple-building rules?

The brotherhood of light goes on to reveal itself in Roman times, this time as members of an elite priesthood responsible for locating the sacred center of cities, the siting of temples, and assessing their preferred time of construction. These adepts belonged to the College of Augurs; their counterparts in Greece were the Oiônistai . Their work — and name — is still commemorated in the nun describing the opening of an important place or event, the in-augur-ation.

Further to the north, from Julius Caesar’s accounts we are given a tantalizing insight into the Druids as a continuation of an invisible academy: “Those who would study the subject [the Druidic arts] most thoroughly still travel to Britain to learn it… They discuss and teach youths about the heavenly bodies and their motions, the dimensions of the world and of countries, natural science and the powers of the immortal gods.” Although by Julius Caesar’s time the Druids were already a mere shadow of their origin — much like the priests of the Aztecs but nowhere as barbaric — they still met once a year at the sacred center of Gaul, where today stands the Gothic cathedral of Chartres. Their counterparts in eastern traditions could be said to be practitioners of feng shui , and once belonged to the Confucian Board of Rites in China, who oversaw social protocol, worship of ancestors and gods, and governed codes of conduct that facilitated civilized behavior; geomancers are descended from identical traditions. Such disciplines were versed in the arts of astronomy, astrology, mathematics, geometry and geodesy, much as were the priests who founded the oracle at Delphi. ⁴⁸

It seems, then, that the Seven Sages and the Akhu Shemsu Hor have been implementing the Great Work while wearing different mantles throughout the ages: the Organization of Nag Hammadi, the Gnostics, Bogomils, Manicheists, even the Merchants of Light in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, always resurrecting over time, keeping to a code dedicated to the preservation of gnosis, from architecture, arts, astronomy and astrology, to sacred geometry, numbers, and above all, the application and manipulation of subtle forces by the power of will. As akhu they were not merely Shining Ones, but also bore the attributes such titles imply: bright, excellent and luminous. ⁴⁹ They acted on the knowledge handed down to them to plan a future network of temples, and by their deeds, so they too reached the status of gods — most notably Imhotep, the architect of Saqqara, and Visvakarma, the re-builder of Angkor.

Inscribed on the walls of the present temple of Dendereh, built c.350 BC upon earlier foundations, is a statement that the architects of the present temple adhered to “the great plan” exactly as “recorded in ancient writings” handed down from the Followers of Horus. ⁵⁰ This temple dedicated to Hathor is indeed just that: Hat-Hor , ‘the House of Horus’, one of the primeval mounds of the gods. ⁵¹

Barely twenty miles from Dendereh, at Nag Hammadi, the subsequent unearthing of papyri containing the Gnostic Gospels reminds us that this ‘Organization’ built temples “as a representation of the spiritual places,” and in doing so, created an antidote against forces of darkness that “…steered the people who followed them into great troubles, by leading them astray with many deceptions. They died not having found the truth and without knowing the God of truth. And thus the whole creation became enslaved forever from the foundations of the world.” ⁵²

The art of creating temples was serious work involving universal laws and the harnessing of natural forces to create spaces where the veil between worlds is thinner. And part of this practical magic involved a framework whose vestiges can still be seen the world over.

Stones chosen to mark giant’s graves seem to depict faces with very high foreheads, possibly in homage to the tall beings buried there. Above: Cumbria; below: Kintraw, Scotland.

 

 

7. BUILDERS OF THE GRID.

 

 

“From the relics of the Stone-Age science practiced by the adepts of the ancient world, it appears: first that they recognized the existence of natural forces... and learnt to manipulate them; second, that they gained thereby certain insights into fundamental questions of philosophy, the nature of the universe and the relationship between life and death.”

~ John Michell, The New View Over Atlantis

 

 

 

Why use a convenient piece of stone when a 1100-ton monolith will do? Temple of Baalbek. Lebanon.

 

Resurrecting the former world of the gods.

The Edfu Building Texts are a source of valuable information regarding the manner in which events unfolded around the time of a catastrophe of nightmare proportions, particularly with regard to the rebuilding of temples. One passage describes the survivor builder gods “entering in that which was in decay” at the opening of this new era, for they found the mansions of the gods reduced to debris. ¹

The Egyptians accepted decay as an inherent part of the natural rhythm of life; they also accepted the first temples that ever existed inhabited an era of limited time. The first generation of gods, the Neters , was also considered finite, and everything that was accomplished during its 6,000-year span perished in a storm, “an aggression against the island of creation.” ²

After the consecration of the sacred sites, both Egyptian and Vedic texts describe how groups of Seven Sages, divinely-connected beings and other adepts embarked on works of construction at carefully chosen locations across the world to rebuild a network of power places. Picking up the story in Egypt, they then sailed away, leaving behind the “crew of the Falcon” — the Followers of Horus — to look after the temples while they wandered into the hinterlands to set up additional sites. ³ Looking around the world today, we have indeed inherited an abundant legacy of post-diluvian temples and other places of power. The oldest unearthed temple to-date, Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, an impressive series of twenty to fifty stone circles replete with astronomical alignments and 18-foot carved standing stones, is estimated to have been carefully, but deliberately buried just 100 years before the great flood. ⁴

As suggested in earlier chapters, the ancient peoples understood the telluric forces of nature. They searched out unique places on the land where electromagnetic energy and gravity behave differently from the norm, and took full advantage of such 'spots on the fawn' to reach across the veil and access what Zoroastrians described as pairi-daeza . The adepts memorialized these special places of transformation, then extended the reach of the gods by sourcing the same invisible currents wherever they manifested across the earth, and upon them raised new temples as mirror images of nature and sky.

A glance at sacred sites far-and-wide, from Stonehenge to Callanish, from Eridu to Sacsayhuamán, shows how substantial cultures evolved around them, demonstrating that despite the incalculable task of rebuilding after the flood, the planning revolved around an energetic ‘navel’ where a cosmic order already prevailed. The complexity of thought behind temple designs shows they did not start as rudimentary meeting places either. Astonishing pyramids such as Cholula and Giza, the standing stone rows of Carnac, even the carved stone circles of Göbekli Tepe, appear suddenly and without antecedent as if part of a pre-conceived, pre-packaged plan, all designed by people who thoroughly understood how the universe works.

Göbekli Tepe, oldest post-diluvial temple. So far.

 

 

Since one aim of the temple was to help transform the individual “into a god, into a bright star,” ⁵ it seems fair to speculate that under the prevailing circumstances, a resurrection of the previous world of the gods would do no end of good for human morale, to say the least. Sacred texts such as the Qumran Scrolls not only offer advice on the purposeful conduct of life, they also remind us how straying from spiritual places leads people to be deceived by darkness. And with more than enough darkness to go around in the times following the flood, not to mention the need for superior moral examples for the sake of social order in the wake of a mass disaster, the incentive to rebuild the cities of knowledge would probably have ranked high on the list of priorities.

Furthermore, sacred power centers serve the same function as the endocrine glands of the human body. ⁶ Just like human power centers such as the heart, liver and lungs, they serve to maintain the whole organism in balance. Thus, a temple built as a mirror of the cosmos and situated at an energy node, if correctly used, will serve the human body in the same way – first by facilitating the connection of its spirit to the stars, followed by its denser organs in relationship to the local environment.

The decision to rebuild a global grid of places of power would also have taken one other important element into account. Worldwide myths clearly point to very large objects falling down from the sky and impacting the Earth with unimaginable force, making the constellations appear out-of-place and the Sun to set in a different location; in fact for several days the Sun did not set at all. ⁷ Geological analysis has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that pieces of a disintegrating comet did collide with the Earth, the magnitude of which may have temporarily destabilized its axis, possibly shifting its thin mantle over layers of lubricating magma.

Remember, we are dealing with a formidable impact. By comparison, the Chilean earthquake of 2010 alone shifted the Earth’s axis by 3 inches, causing the planet’s rotation to slow down. ⁸

Temple legends describe how many of the power places of great importance — the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Oracle of Delphi, the site of Chartres Cathedral and Temple Mount, for instance — were chosen above underground fissures and streams along which a vital spirit terrestrially dispersed and connected with all corners of the land. The chthonic mysteries were performed in galleries and chambers below these temples, into which ran metal rods connected to the tips of the buildings, typically a Benben coated in a conducting material such as electron. ⁹ Just like a lightning rod, it allowed positively-charged electromagnetic energy to be conducted from the atmosphere and into the water veins below the temple and the metals in the rock, making the temple — and the practitioners within — an instrument of fusion between the elements above and below — the sacred marriage in sky-ground dualism. With life turned upside down in 9703 BC , erecting new temples on the crossroads of the Earth’s magnetic and gravitational nodes would serve to re-stabilize the planet, enabling it to regain its balance in the cosmic order of things. Following that, balance would be restored to people, and thus, to society.

As above, so below, as within, so without.

If so, such an endeavor would have involved the careful alignment of temples on a global scale.

A left turn into the universe of number.

 

But first, a small detour.

One of the elements of knowledge taught at ancient academies and Mysteries schools was the concept of sacred number, and how everything in the universe is accorded a numerical value. The process has the capacity to reduce important concepts such as gods, places, events and tendencies in nature into numbers. It has proved a useful vehicle for storing secret information, especially since it can be transmitted within otherwise innocuous stories and narratives while keeping the information safe from greedy schemers, abusers and misusers. This art is called Gematria . Its practice occurs throughout Greek gnostic texts just as it does in Qaballah, and was no doubt taught to scholars in Alexandria, and before that, most likely in Innu/Heliopolis.

In Greek Gematria, the name Jesus has a value of 888; Abraxas — the overarching principle of life — is 365, the same as the number of days in the solar year, as reflected in the number of parts that comprise the human body. The letters of the Hebrew word life add up to the numerical value 18, hence why in Jewish custom it is lucky to offer gifts of $18 or multiples thereof — 36, 54, 72, 108, and so on.

One of the most popular examples of Gematria is the numerical value 666, since it makes people see the devil in everything, even if the ‘number of the beast’ merely represents the numerical values of the Sun and the solar deities who personify it, such as Baal and Teitan, ¹⁰ and not the cloven hoofed creature of the Catholic Church’s fertile machinations. From a scientific point of view, 666 is a reference to the carbon atom, the basis of life on Earth, which comprises 6 neutrons, 6 electrons, 6 protons, thereby reviewing the Bible’s specific interpretation of “the number of a man” into the more general “number of man.” It is quite possible that the misconceptions behind this number date back to the days when Roman emperors were feeding early Christians to the lions. Since emperor Nero represented the polar opposite of the traits of Jesus Christ, and the name Neron Caesar in Hebrew Gematria carries a value of 666, the association stuck. Some Protestant Cabbalists have used this argument against the Church itself, by claiming that the Pope, I am God on Earth , also has the value 666. ¹¹ However, any Gnostic devotee knows that the numerical value 666 is neither good nor bad, nor is it representative of any moral quality, it is merely an element in the cosmic scheme of things.

Just as the solar number is represented by 666, so the lunar number is found in 1080, the gematrian value of both holy spirit and spirit of the earth , what the Chinese refer to as Ch’i or Qi . It’s the composite of the masculine and feminine values represented by Jesus and Mary, or 888 + 192. The numerical value of 1080 also happens to be the radius of the Moon in statute miles, while this satellite’s corresponding mineral, silver, ironically has an atomic weight of 108.

The geometric image of the lunar/feminine principle is conveyed in the pentagram, the sides between its angles being 108º. 1080 x 2 = 2160, the length of one Great Year, the period in takes the Sun to traverse one sign of the zodiac. According to Heraclitus, 10800 is the number of years before the destruction of civilization, which climatologists agree as the interval between successive ice ages. Coincidentally, 10800 stanzas make up the Rig Veda , and 4 x 10800 diameters of the moon equals the distance between the Earth and Sun. ¹²

These are just a few examples in the world of correspondence.

The brilliant and late English antiquarian John Michell looked into number symbolism in parables and discovered a series of revelations. Much of the New Testament was written from older sources and brims with hidden codes. One curious story in the last chapter of St. John’s Gospel, for example, describes the catching of exactly 153 fish by the apostles. An odd thing, catching exactly 153 fish, and why should anyone care?

Michell observed that the words fishes and net each have a gematrian value of 1224, and 1224 is 8 multiplied by 153 (incidentally the value of Mary Magdalene ). By following the rest of the story, something miraculous emerged.

Peter goes fishing on a boat with 6 other apostles; 200 cubits away on the shore, Jesus instructs Peter to cast a net to the right-hand side if he’s to be successful at catching the fish. Peter then puts on his father’s coat, jumps off and goes ashore, followed behind by 6 apostles in the boat. That’s when Peter notices the 153 fish in the net, and despite such plenitude “the net was not broken.” ¹³

Michell broke the story down into numerical values: Simon Peter is 1925; as he’s the center of the story, Michell took this to represent the circumference of a main circle, whose diameter, 612, translates to Good Shepherd , ironically the title Peter inherits upon landing ashore. Next, drawing 6 circles to represent each of the apostles and placing then in the most economical way inside the seventh, an elegant geometric diagram unfolds. A ‘net’ is then ‘cast’ to the right of the diagram by placing the compass point on the circumference of the circular ‘boat’ and drawing an arc of a second, great circle of equal measure containing a vesica piscis , literally ‘vessel of the fish’. The rhombus created within, its width being 612, is divided into 16 squares, each 153 wide — the number of ‘fish in the net’.

Diagram hidden in the parable of Peter and the Fish.

 

 

The story of Peter and the fish illustrates how a simple parable can be intentionally constructed to conceal an important geometric code: ¹⁴ the prime figure of the diagram is called the Flower of Life, ¹⁵ an allegorical visualization of God creating the world in six days and resting on the seventh; it is also a matrix representing the laws and proportions of the unfolding of creation, such as the division of an embryo; it similarly describes the fundamental forms of space and time. ¹⁶

Full versions of the diagram are found in the Osirion temple at Abydos, flash-burned on the cyclopean granite stones by a method that so far has defied explanation. It is also found engraved throughout many temples and churches around the world, and most prominently, on the globes held under the paws of two lions protecting the entrance to the Temple of Tranquil Longevity — the Forbidden City in China — a symbolism identical to the Sphinx guarding the mansion of Osiris at the place of departure for the Otherworld.

Flower of Life. Abydos, Egypt.

 

 

According to Michell, in all the numerical manifestations of nature there occur nodal numbers which provide a link between processes and phenomena, and whose proper application exerts an influence on the spirit of place and the people who interact with it. These form a canon of numbers that feature predominantly in traditional cosmologies and religious systems, the entire list being governed by the number 72 and its multiples. ¹⁷ The concept is reaffirmed in Plato’s Laws : “The most important and first study is of numbers in themselves: not of those which are corporeal, but of the whole origin of the odd and the even, and the greatness of their influence on the nature of reality.” ¹⁸

Since number is an expression of universal concepts, it was considered very carefully when drawing up the blueprints of temples. In this the architects sought a correspondence between benevolent cosmic forces and their work in stone, the intent being the attraction of forces which would enhance the environment for which the structure was built, thereby inviting a numinous state in the people attending the temple. The Chinese Book of Diagrams is very specific about this practice: “By means of the doctrine of numbers, virtuous conduct is brought into contact with invisible things. The diagrams are useful in manifesting the right course of things to men and in bringing the virtuous conduct of men into contact with invisible beings.” ¹⁹

Studies into the dimensions of sacred edifices reveal that the numerical and geometrical proportions of every room, arch, pillar and nave were calculated to amplify the fundamental principles the individual structure was designed to represent. ²⁰ Simply put, temples devoted to masculine principles are based on a different set of numbers and geometries to those intended to facilitate feminine forces.

The two could also be combined. In Stonehenge, the area of the bluestone circle is 666, as measured in megalithic yards, the unit of measure used by ancient architects. ²¹ Based on the distance between surviving stones, the circle may have originally consisted of 59 slender uprights, marking the passage of two 29.5 lunar months. ²² As such the original Stonehenge would have reflected a feminine principle, the Moon, while at the same time resting on a solar foundation, thus creating the sacred marriage. The later addition of the large sarsen stones, which occupy an area of 1080 sq. megalithic yards, brings together this fusion of masculine and feminine. Joining the two ground plans of 1080 + 666 = 1746, the gematrian number of fusion and the gnostic value of the ideal city. ²³

A similar concept is incorporated in the design of Glastonbury Abbey. The original temple dedicated to Mary consisted of a circular temple surrounded by twelve other circular structures. ²⁴ After these burned down, the present structures were constructed over the original site. The numerical value of 1746 is encoded in the measurements of the main axis of the Abbey: 1080 together with that of the adjacent Mary Chapel, 666, again revealing the number of fusion as well as the sacred marriage between masculine and feminine. ²⁵

Glastonbury Abbey, fusion of the masculine and feminine.

 

 

By looking at information relative to the measures of temples, the buildings reveal themselves to be parables in stone. Like Glastonbury, Chartres Cathedral was designed to represent the cosmic marriage between male and female, thus each of the two front towers is built to different elevations, one representing the numerical value of the Sun, the other the Moon.

When the profile of the Great Pyramid of Giza is placed relative to the vesica piscis , magic is unveiled. The vesical shape is formed by the intersection of two equal circles, the circumference of each of which passes through the center of the other. As such it represents the perfect equilibrium between two equal forces, with its interpenetrating center revealing the womb of life, the balance of heaven and earth, spirit and matter. With the height of a vesica made to the same as the height of the Great Pyramid, 481 feet, the circumference of each circle is 1746 feet — the number of fusion, of the ideal city, and coincidentally, the perimeter length of the Great Pyramid itself. ²⁶

The gematrian number 1746 also represents the phrases hidden spirit , chalice of Jesus , spiritual law , and precious pearl of Mary ²⁷ — all apt descriptions of this glorious edifice.

Inside an environment where the essence of fusion is encapsulated, the inclusion of the human being commences an alchemical process that exemplifies the principal reason behind the erection of temples. Taking 1746 and adding 1 — the value of alpha and the upright human — creates the gematrian number 1747, values are: holy spirit and the bride , fruit of the vineyard , knowledge of God , and Mysteries of Jesus . ²⁸

The union between temple and human acknowledges the alchemical process that takes place when the two elements become one and indivisible. As the temple exerts its influence, the initiate becomes a recipient of the chalice of Jesus . Through immersion in the temple, the initiate receives the knowledge of God , and in the resulting transfiguration of the soul the individual becomes the fully realized fruit of the vineyard — he or she becomes the very embodiment of the city of God.

And at such a moment, the ordinary human becomes extraordinary and christed .

Vesical geometry of the Great Pyramid.

 

 

Signs of a global pattern.

The adepts recognized that the fate of the soul while residing in the physical body was tied to a cosmos in which geography and the science of the heavens are inextricably interwoven. As the historian Giorgio de Santillana and scientist Hertha von Dechend comment in Hamlet’s Mill , “Knowledge of cosmic correspondences led up to harmony on an infinite number of levels, and the rigor and absoluteness of number was the instrument with which these correspondences were determined and remembered.” ²⁹

We have already seen how both landscape temples and later constructed temples correspond to the sacred trinity of the triple steps of Vishnu. Given the designers’ predilection for engaging in sacred engineering that echoes universal forces, and how such forces are by their very nature geometric, it is not unreasonable to speculate that the temples constructed since the time of the Seven Sages and the Akhu Shemsu Hor may have adhered to an orderly geometric-numeric scheme. This began to stir my imagination, particularly after reading myths such as the two doves flying between the navel stones of Delphi and Karnak. It made me realize just how the ancients always left clues in all manner of ways, in all manner of places, just like the unknown stone masons who engraved cryptic symbols on pillars of abbeys and cathedrals.

The mother of all oracles. Karnak, Egypt.

 

 

The origin of the Delphi omphalos is in many ways identical to the Sivalingam at Arunachela: “it fell from heaven as a mark of god, after Zeus released two golden eagles from the opposite ends of the earth whereupon they flew in an arc and set down at Delphi.” This association between birds and navel stones features prominently in the ancient world; an Egyptian papyrus depicting the falcon god of orientation Sokar, shows an omphalos topped with a measuring ruler flanked by two birds — the standard symbol for laying out meridians and parallels. ³⁰ Not that these are the only connections between Delphi and Egypt, for there are historical accounts and monuments in Delphi indicating the oracle may have been set up by pharaohs of the Ethiopian Dynasty, since even the Greeks portrayed Delphos, the eponymous hero of the site, as a negro. ³¹ Furthermore, Delphi is strategically situated on a latitude that is 3/7 of the distance from the equator to the north pole, just as Karnak and its omphalos in the Temple of Amun is precisely 2/7 the distance. ³²

While performing his exhaustive investigation of the Great Pyramid of Giza, the science historian Livio Stecchini began wondering if a relationship exists between such navel stones and lines of latitude and longitude. ³³ The surviving omphalos at Delphi is a later Hellenistic reproduction of the original, yet it is still one of the best surviving examples of a navel stone. It is engraved with a net not unlike the geometric ‘net’ extracted from the parable of Simon Peter, or that unfolding geometry of the universe, the Flower of Life, which is found throughout many temples. But a net can also be interpreted as a grid. If so, why is one carved upon a navel stone?

It was an established practice in the ancient world to mark the descent of the power of divinity with an omphalos . Such a 'spot of the fawn' would inevitably identify a place of special electromagnetic interest. Additionally, the geodetic center of ancient cities was often marked by ritual centers, typically a temple or a pillar, as is the case with Persepolis, Susa, Mem-Fer (Memphis), Nimrod, Sardis, even the ancient Chinese capital An-Yang. ³⁴ And as tradition goes, the navels of the earth are interconnected.

Let’s see.

Saturn to the rescue.

In 1988, images beamed back of Saturn from Voyager 1 showed the ringed planet’s polar vortex flowing in the unmistakable shape of a hexagon. ³⁵ Twenty-five years later we would see another geometric shape from the sky, this time on Earth, in the form of a pentagram staring back from the eye of Hurricane Isabel as it sauntered across the Gulf of Mexico. It was a reminder from Gaia that its living organisms obey the geometry of the pentagram.

Hexagonal clouds on Jupiter, pentagonal eye of hurricane Isabel on Earth

 

 

It also had me thinking once again about a possible relationship existing between geometry and the positioning of temples, particularly after I came across the writings of the 5 ^th century Indian astronomer and mathematician Virahamihira who, in quoting Indian texts of remote antiquity, remarked: “the round ball of the earth, composed of the five elements, abides in space in the midst of the starry sphere, like a piece of iron suspended between magnets.” ³⁶ It seemed an unusual departure to ascribe five elements to the Earth when traditionally there have been four: earth, air, fire water. So what was the fifth element? Ether? Perhaps. But I couldn’t get my mind away from pentagrams, the Delphi omphalos , Sokar the god of orientation, and the possibility of a temple world grid.

The net on the omphalos of Delphi.

 

 

The pentagram of course is the five-sided geometric figure. Like every geometric shape, it can be created by dividing a circle of 360º into five equal parts, yielding a base angle of 72º. This angle is unique to the pentagram, just as 60º is unique to the hexagram, and so forth. When fully drawn, the pentagram reveals its other angles: 18, 36, 54, 108 and 144.

With the words of Stecchini ambling across my head, I took a globe, and from the North Pole, divided the circumference and traced the angles common to the pentagram as lines of longitude. But where to begin?

Up until the 19 ^th century a number of countries vied for the location of the Earth’s Prime Meridian, that arbitrary place that marks 0º longitude and, by definition, sets the position of time and distance for the rest of the world. Then in 1884, at a conference in Washington D.C. it was agreed the honor should go to Greenwich, England, on account of Britain’s supremacy in maritime commerce, which at the time was the preferred method of transportation in global trade. Such a commercial basis is too superficial with regard to the geodetic placement of temples and would not do for my investigation, and besides, a stronger case can be found in Giza/Heliopolis.

One of the most famous ancient maps ever discovered is the seafaring chart of Piri Reis from 1513, for it shows Queen Maud Land in Antarctica free of ice, a condition which existed between 13,000-4000 BC ³⁷ How did an admiral in the Mediterranean have known the existence of Antarctica in the 16 ^th century, let alone in a condition over 5,000 years before his time? One reasonable possibility is that the map is based on far more remote sources, and clearly from someone with extensive experience of world travel. The clue as to who that someone may have been lies in the map’s cartographic projection, which appears to have been centered on the Giza plateau. ³⁸ It may seem unusual at first to base the center of the world at this location, yet Giza does lie at the precise geodetic center of the Earth’s antediluvian landmass, ³⁹ and its pyramids occupy a ‘navel of the earth’. Additionally, the angles and dimensions of the Great Pyramid are a perfect representation of the Earth’s size and shape, indicating that its designers took an interest in the dimensions of the planet thousands of years before measurements by NASA satellites would prove their calculations to be exact. So, using Giza as the 0º longitude from which to start looking for a pentagonal relationship with temples seems reasonable.

Just as this idea started to intrigue me, research into my first book Secrets in the Fields had begun to dominate my entire life, and I put this quest on the shelf.

72 degrees of wisdom.

The seemingly innocuous pentagonal number 72 carries formidable weight in the universe. In Gematria it bears the value of the truth . 72 is also the average number of heart beats per minute for an adult while resting; the percentage of water in the human body; the hours of the life duration of the ovule; the number of names of God in Qaballah; the degrees of Jacob’s ladder, which took him to heaven; the numerical system of the Druids; the points that constitute an inch in typography; the dots per inch of computer screen resolution; the mass of the Moon relative to the Earth’s; and the point in sound frequency at which small objects begin to vibrate.

To the antiquarian John Michell (an Aquarian antiquarian, to be exact, since he was born in February), 72 is a kind of keystone, a nodal number from which entire numerical values are deduced, such as the dimensions and distances of the Earth, Sun and Moon, the formula behind the ideal universe, the plan of Stonehenge and other temples, the music scale, the order of planets, and the universal soul. As we saw earlier, it is also the base number from which the canon of traditional cosmologies and religious systems is generated. ⁴⁰

Michell may well have been on to something, since so many other scholars have made identical observations, particularly with regard to myths and temples: ⁴¹ inside the Pyramid of Kukulkan at Chichen Itza there’s a room symbolizing the center of the cosmos in which stands a throne in the shape of a red jaguar covered with 72 spots; the dimensions of Teotihuacan are based on multiples of 72; the seven-layered Indonesian temple of Borobudur is crowned with 72 stupas , just as the temples of Angkor, Arunachaleswar, and the central courtyard of Luxor contain 72 columns; even the angle at which one ascends toward heaven on the staircase of Phnom Bakheng temple at Angkor is estimated at 72º. ⁴²

The numerical value of 72 is the principal number of the pentagram, the others being 108 and 54. These often work in combination throughout temples and sacred literature. It occurs repeatedly throughout the Vedas , the Babylonian and Chinese traditions, even the Norse Valhalla . 108 beads make up the mala prayer beads of the Hindu, while 10,800 Stanzas constitute the Rig Veda , as well as the number of bricks of the Agnicayana, the Indian fire-altar in Angkor, while its central sanctuary, Phnom Bakheng, is surrounded by exactly 108 towers. ⁴³

Angkor has five gates. To each of them leads an avenue, each bordered by a row of 108 huge stone figurines, 54 per side, each pulling on a serpent representing the churning of the heavens. In Lebanon, the layered temples of Baalbek rest upon cyclopean retaining walls featuring rectangular blocks of stone five stories high, supporting a platform with 54 pillars.

Surely it is more than mere coincidence that one specific canon of numbers features so prominently throughout temples, the writings of Plato, even the initiation practices of the Hung League of China, an archaic secret society akin to the Knights Templar and Free Masons. ⁴⁴ We could go on indefinitely on the uses and virtues of numbers relating exclusively to the pentagon, specifically its central number 72. But of central importance in our quest for evidence of a geodetic order in temple-building are the following: first, it takes 72 years for the axis of the Earth to move one degree relative to the background of stars; and second, it took the unfeasibly large number of 72 of Set’s accomplices to put Osiris into a coffin.

Is there a connection?

One grid, two starting points.

Six years after my first book finally allowed me to have my life back, I resumed the search for a relationship between temple geodesy and the pentagram. Back then, all it took was the identifying of pivotal sacred sites, a massive wall map and several boxes of pins. Then something magical manifested: Google Earth, an annoyingly addictive, not to mention highly accurate application. As I inputted temple longitudes relative to the pentagon’s unique angles — 18, 36, 54, 72, 108, 144, and 180 degrees — a slow, uneasy feeling came over me that I’d seen this pattern somewhere before.

In his excellent book Heaven’s Mirror , the investigative researcher Graham Hancock had considered the same intriguing possibility, except he approached the idea from a totally different angle — that the geodetic placement of temples was in some way related to the Earth’s precession cycle, a concept hit upon in 1969 by Santillana and von Dechend in their opus Hamlet’s Mill . What’s astonishing is that Hancock’s numerical system for the relationship of temples on a longitudinal grid are the same as the pentagonal numbers I’d been considering. Like two birds launched from opposite sides of the world and meeting at a navel, we’d approached a similar concept from two different angles and reached similar results. I was actually thankful that Graham got there first because he saved me months of work!

In order to understand Hancock’s, Santillana and von Dechen’s points of view, it’s necessary to take another brief side step and understand how certain factors influence variations in the Earth’s otherwise perfect orbital geometry.

A quick lesson on Precession and other celestial mechanics.

The way the Earth’s axis behaves allows the two equinoxes and solstice points to creep backwards imperceptibly around its orbital path over a period of 25,920 years. And it works like this:

The equator rotates counter-clockwise, just as the Earth moves counter-clockwise around the Sun, at 18.5 miles per second.

But the Earth’s axis of rotation tilts in relation to its plane of orbit, so that over the course of 41,000 years it will tilt between 22.1º and 24.5º, and back again. This axial tilt, also called obliquity, currently stands at 23.5º.

Because the axis is off-center, the natural centrifugal force of the Earth’s rotation makes the axis at the poles behave like a spinning top and move in a clockwise direction that is contra-directional to the counter-clockwise spin of the Earth. Thus, over the course of time, the axis traces an invisible arc backwards relative to the background of stars. In other words the axis is said to precess .

The arc traced by the wobbling axis takes approximately 25,920 years to return to its original point. In so doing, the tip of the axis will aim at a different pole star: today it is Polaris, just as around 3000 BC it was Alpha Draconis in the constellation Draco; in 13,000 BC it would have been Vega in Lyre.

The precessional cycle.

 

 

Now, if you were to take the circle of the equator and extend it into a greater circle around the Earth and into space, as an observer on the ground you’d gaze upward at this circle and it would be called the plane of the ecliptic. Arranged in almost equal measure around this ring are 12 constellations of the zodiac, each occupying a 30º segment of that ring (because a 360º circumference ÷ 12 = 30º). And every month, because of the movement of the Earth around the Sun, the Sun will rise against a new zodiacal constellation approximately every 30 days, 12 times a year.

So far, so good. But there’s a second phenomenon at work. Because of the relationship between the Earth’s axial tilt and its movement backwards along the sky, an observer on the ground will, over the course of a very, very, very long span of time start to see that the Sun, at the moment of the equinox, rises not against the same constellation but a different one approximately every 2,160 years.

This phenomenon is called Precession of the Equinoxes . Its discovery is attributed to the Greek astronomer and mathematician Hipparchus c.120 BC , but it was already known to Timocharis of Alexandria c.250 BC and recorded by the Babylonians before that. And if Tiwanaku serves as example, as we saw earlier, precession was known to adepts even before the great flood. ⁴⁵

This is the point where we rejoin the number 72 and its importance in the grand scheme of temple-building:

It takes 72 years (71.6 to be precise) for the equinoctial Sun to move just 1º along the path of the ecliptic.

72º x 30º for each constellation = 2,160 years.

12 constellations x 2,160 years = 25,920 years, the ecliptic cycle.

Osiris (Slight Return).

Like so many great sagas, the myth of Osiris incorporates specific numbers describing the motion of the heavens into the body of the story by way of allegory. Most prominent of all is 72, the number of Set’s co-conspirators that put Osiris into a coffin. Clearly it does not take 72 people to place a body into a coffin, so the myth is asking the reader to interpret the story from a different point of view.

There are several supporting numbers at play in the myth, namely 360, 30 and 12. From these numbers it is simple arithmetic to work out precessional values: 72 x 30 = 2160, the years required for the Sun to move along one full constellation; 72 x 360 = 25,920, the years of one complete precessional cycle or Great Year. ⁴⁶

According to researchers such as Jane Sellers, Graham Hancock and John Michell the pre-eminent number in this code is 72, and the calculus involved in precessional numbers was deliberately encoded into myths to pass along the knowledge to initiates through the ages. After all, it is no accident that the same numbers and correspondences crop up repeatedly in Chinese, Mayan, Nordic and Sumerian myths, and in the structure of the Rig Veda and the Mayan calendar. ⁴⁷ The symbols used to diffuse these numbers are the millstone and the wheel along which the heavenly cycles rotate in perpetuity. ⁴⁸ And although the spokes of the wheel are occasionally damaged by a periodic catastrophe, the cycle is reset and the mill continues to churn.

The Grid below.

Using Giza/Heliopolis as Latitude 0º, Hancock set about looking for relationships between precessional numbers and geodetic temple placement based on the central number 72 and its divisibles, 36 and 18; combined, they generate the remaining numbers of the canon: 54, 108, 144 and 180. ⁴⁹ As strange coincidences go, these precessional numbers are identical to the angles common to the pentagram, the geometry of organic life. Hancock was thus able to link together some of the oldest temple sites to the east of Giza: Angkor, the Micronesian island of Pohnpei and its pentagonal temple of Nan Madol, Kiribati, Tahiti, Easter Island, and the colossal ‘tree of knowledge’ carved on a hillside at the Bay of Paracas in Peru. ⁵⁰

Since I had been compiling my own list, I was curious to see what other landmarks conform to the grid: east of Giza lies Susa (18º), Mehrghar (36º), the Great Stupa and temple complexes of Pashupatinath and Gorakhnath in Kathmandu (54º); Éméi Shan hilltop temple and sacred mountain, as well as the world’s largest hill-carved Buddha at Leshan, China (72º); the sacred mountain Fuji (108º); and the Temple of the Four Winds, New Zealand (144º).

To the west of Giza we find a couple of surprises: the Basilica of St. Peter in Vatican City (18º, minus .5º), one of the holiest Christian sites and resting place of Simon Peter, one of the 12 apostles whom we met earlier in this chapter. Conspiracy theorists may read into this what they may, however, this site was originally a sacred mound marked by a prominent menhir erected in 204 BC to represent the earth mother Cybele. A temple was subsequently erected in her honor and to the son she bore every year on the 25 ^th December, Attis, a crucified hero-god who rose on the third day, and whom ancient Romans considered a redeemer. ⁵²

The rest, as they say, is distorted history.

Ironically, the menhir has disappeared from sight, but in its place now stands an obelisk removed from its original position in Innu/Heliopolis. As to the Basilica, the word is derived from basilisk , a serpent, symbol of those telluric lines of force, the spirit roads. Funny how nothing changes.

Moving along further west, at 36º we find a long line of sacred sites in Scotland, Wales and England. The stone circles and menhirs of the Scottish Isle of Arran, whose importance as a strategic geodetic marker will be discussed in the next chapter; the Preseli region of Wales — the source of the bluestones of Stonehenge — with Cairn Ingli (‘hill of angels’) and its attendant dolmen Pentre Ifan; the miniscule Isle of Lundy and its prehistoric standing stones and giant’s graves, populated by people described by the Romans as “a specially holy race of men… who had visions of the future;” and Tintagel and Castle Dore, centers of the Arthurian myths.

South of the English Channel: the gargantuan menhirs on the tip of Bretagne around Kergadiou; and Carnac, off by -1.6º, making one wonder how many more megaliths lie submerged off this shallow coast; the Mosque of Cordoba in southern Spain, one of the Islamic world’s most precious gems, apparently resting on ancient foundations.

There follows a large amount of missing landmass below the Atlantic Ocean, its visible remains being the Açores archipelago, where a pyramid, perfectly oriented to the cardinal points, was discovered eighty feet below sea level in 2013. Given that its location between the islands of Terceira and São Miguel is four degrees west from the grid, and the area would have been a formidable landmass when it was above sea level in 10,000 BC , the discovery may yet be part of a larger antediluvian complex. We wait and see.

Completing the grid, 108º west of Giza — and 180º east of Angkor — we arrive at the 650-foot high ‘tree of knowledge’ etched on the hillside of Paracas on the coast of Peru. ⁵²

As we shall see, this was just the start of an inspired, global, sacred, engineering project that spanned several thousand years, which sought to restore enchantment and ritual to land, body and soul, and whose legacy sits all around us today.

Ancient sacred sites and the world grid.

 

 

Pentre Ifan dolmen. Wales.

 

Castle Dore. Its entrance aligns directly with Stonehenge 136 miles away.

 

 

The mosque at Cordoba, Spain.

8. KINGDOMS OF CONSCIENCE.

 

 

“The old stones fossilize a moment in the history of consciousness, when it seems that the intuitive and intellectual properties of the human mind hung in a delicate symbiosis.”

~ Paul Devereux

 

 

 

Borobudur and a few of its 72 stupas. Java.

 

 

The law of correspondence.

The temple as a representation of the universe is well attested throughout the cultural circles of the ancient Near East, Asia, North Africa and Europe. ¹ The sacred places built by the Tamils, Zoroastrians, Khmers, and Egyptians — even during the early Ptolemaic era — bore a likeness to the cosmos in the style in which each culture interpreted it. The measures and proportions were chosen relative to each structure’s meaning and function, even decorative elements, such as the 72 stupas encircling the summit of Borobudur in Java. Courtyards of Islamic mosques were wrapped in thousands of tiny ceramic tiles forming hypnotic, geometric lattices depicting, to Muslims, the image of God at rest, a statement a physicist might agree with while observing the geometric bonding patterns of molecules under a microscope. In fact, Islamic tile art is based on quasicrystalline geometry, a highly-sophisticated math only rediscovered in the late 20 ^th century. ²

X-ray fractal pattern of tungsten, and mosque art depicting the “face of Allah.”

 

 

Courtyards and lakes surround the inner sanctum of Angkor Wat, just as the sea surrounds the land; just as Earth is an island in the solar system, and the solar system an island in a galaxy, ad infinitum . Indeed temples are microcosms of a macrocosm.

Since so much of the foundation of the temple is based on the harnessing of underlying natural forces, maintaining this integrity enables the site to function as a living entity, thus proffering a mediating influence upon the local environment. According to Talmudic studies, after a change in climate c.3000 BC , the Near East was tormented by torrential rains that fell like a monsoon each year, causing widespread damage. Then Solomon built his temple, and the torrents ceased. ³

Maintaining the efficacy of Solomon’s Temple appears to have benefited the spiritual comport of the citizenry as well, since a marked improvement was noticed in the relations between the people of that land: “no conflagration ever broke out in Jerusalem, for the fire of the altar kept guard that no alien fire should break out.” ⁴ This led Rabbi Joshua ben Levi to comment, “Had the nations of the world known how beneficial the Temple is to them, they would have surrounded it by camps in order to guard it. For the Temple was more beneficial to them than to Israel.” ⁵

In so many aspects, the temple represented the embodiment of individual and communal prosperity, and its perpetuation was remembered and reinforced through specific ceremonies. The performance of ritual assured the welfare of the people so long as it adhered to the instructions prescribed by the creator gods, and with an integrity that was true to its origins. Since the temples stood on ‘navels of the earth’, and their designs represented the harmony of the universe in miniature, the welfare of the surrounding land was to some degree influenced by the proper performance of the service, every event having a determinable effect or correspondence on the functions of nature. According to the Torah, so long as the service to the temple existed, the world was full of blessing for its inhabitants. So if destruction befell the temple, the same fate befell the natural order of things. In China, the abandonment of the rigid and ceremonial cult of Shangte, the heaven-god, was said to have lead to “the ruin of states, the destruction of families, and the perishing of individuals.” ⁶

That the spiritual way of life was preserved for long periods of time was due in great part to groups of pious people maintaining the existence of knowledge through whatever means was available. Since this was also dependent on the quality of leadership, so long as a pharaoh, priest, shaman or king was united spiritually, philosophically and politically, the temple was protected from interference. The problems arose when ego or greed entered the process and when the spiritual caretaker looked upon the ethereal power inherent in the temple as a means of physical power for individual aggrandizement.

Because leaders in ancient times were so closely associated with magic — that is, the practical use of secret knowledge for the manipulation of subtle energy — such matters as the spiritual health of the community, favorable weather for crops, good harvest and so on, became their responsibility. Hence the pharaoh was hailed as “lord of the flood, plentiful in grain, in whose footsteps is the goddess of harvest.” ⁷

Whenever problems occurred, blame would fall on the ruler for leading his own life out of balance with the cosmos; in Babylonian tradition, it was not uncommon for the king to be severely punished (a law that would come in useful today). The Chinese Great Law from 1050 BC demonstrates this relationship well: “It is the duty of the government at all times to watch carefully the phenomena of nature, which are the echo in the world of nature of the order, or disorder in the world of government. The government is bound to watch the phenomena of nature in order, to be able immediately to amend what is in need of amendment. When the course of nature goes its proper way, it is a sign that the government is good, but when there is some disturbance in nature, it is a sign that there is some sin in the government. With the help of fixed tables it is possible to learn from the disturbance in nature and what is the sin that caused it. Any disturbance in the Sun accuses the emperor. A disturbance around the Sun – the court, the ministers; a disturbance in the Moon – the queen, the harem. Good weather that lasts too long shows that the emperor is too inactive. Days which continue to be cloudy shows that the emperor lacks understanding. Too much rainfall shows that he is unjust. Lack of rain shows that he is careless. Too great a cold shows that he is inconsiderate of others. Stormy wind—that he is lazy. Good harvest proves that everything is alright; bad harvest – that the government is guilty.” ⁸

Since proper stewardship was by-and-large under the tutelage of a creator god’s earthly representative, the success depended on whoever was enthroned. Whenever leaders did look upon the power of the temple for narrow, materialistic gain, everything in the immediate vicinity of the temple became destabilized, including the very kingdom itself, as the history of Solomon’s Temple illustrates so well. According to Biblical accounts of words exchanged between God and Solomon, it is clear that Solomon himself lost touch with the laws governing the proper upkeep of the mansion of the gods. Solomon also succumbed to some of the poor habits previously acquired by his father, King David, which further eroded the spiritual governance of the site and precipitated its fall. Consequently, after Solomon’s death, the armies of Assyria and Egypt ransacked the temple and the land of Israel was split. A thousand years later, Henry VIII would inflict the same upon Glastonbury while seeking, but failing to find, the ‘treasure’ of the Abbey, for the treasure was the Abbey as well as the layers of consecrated soil on which it stood.

Al-Aqsa mosque above Solomon’s Temple.

 

 

As the Temple of Solomon fell into disuse and misuse, the old imbalances returned: “Ever since the day that the Temple was destroyed there is no day without a curse… and the fatness of the fruits has been taken away… the ritual purity which ceased caused the taste and smell of the fruit to cease.” ⁹ According to the Torah , so long as the service to the temple existed, the world was full of blessing for its inhabitants. The period of governance under Uzziah restored much-needed balance until the day the king illegally entered the temple in 750 BC , at which moment a powerful earthquake destroyed the region. ¹⁰

Things did not improve much. Afterwards, Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Solomon’s Temple in 586 BC ; a foundation for a second temple was laid fifty years later and it was not until Herod rebuilt and enlarged on this in 20 BC that proper balance returned: “In the days of Herod, when the people were occupied with rebuilding of the Temple, rain fell during the night but in the morning the wind blew and the clouds dispersed and the sun shone… and then they knew that they were engaged in sacred work.” ¹¹ That peace was short lived, as simmering tensions between Jews and Romans led Emperor Vespasian to order the burning down of the temple in 70 AD .

Since then, peace at this navel of the earth has remained elusive.

The symbiotic relationship between the conservation and honoring of the temple and the well-being of people and land – physically, philosophically and spiritually – was emphasized in the original Building Texts of the first temples at the time of the builder gods. Naturally, the reverse also applies, and in the Talmudic texts, God clearly states that the lack of correct ritual and improper governance of the temple leads to times of disintegration: “Consider your ways… ye looked for much and, lo, it came to little… Why? Because of mine house that is waste.” ¹² If only people had read the Talmud , for it is explicit in the correspondence between temple and people: “when the service to the Temple does not exist, the world has no blessings for its inhabitants and the rains do not fall in their season.” ¹³

Indeed, the instability of the seasons throughout the Near East around the time of the final destruction of the temple in Jerusalem is evidenced by sudden and severe climate change, as the typical south winds which typically brought rains like clockwork suddenly failed and the region became arid. ¹⁴

If there exists a corresponding relationship between the temple and the balance of the land and the spiritual well-being of the people, then creating a vast network of sacred sites benefits everything. The general evidence regarding temple-building throughout Europe and the regions of the Mediterranean suggests a period of uninterrupted progress, from the time of the great flood until around 2500 BC With the exception of the odd meteorite strike, volcanic blast or periodic burp of the earth, life was on the up.

The raising of great stones.

What is certain in archaeology is that when it comes to digging up the past, old assumptions are seldom certain for long. With every new lucky turn of the spade, together with improved dating methods, the founding dates of sacred sites continue to roll back with every decade. ¹⁵ At 4800 BC the Carnac region of north-western France was once considered the oldest temple metropolis in Europe, until the standing stone complexes in Portugal were dated to at least 5000 BC The pendulum then swung back to Carnac following the discovery of a partially submerged stone circle on the Isle of Er-Lannic, which would have been wholly above sea level in 7000 BC ¹⁶ Not to be outdone, the two hundred-or-so sites that ring the massif of Knocknarea on the northwest coast of Ireland are regularly yielding dates of 7490 BC ¹⁷ In the meantime, the founding of Stonehenge, once established at 1100 BC , was moved to 2600 BC , but is now accepted as having originally occurred in 8000 BC .

Stone circles on Er-Lannic island, now partly submerged.

 

 

Some of the evidence sits under the temple, where the historic foundation is discovered to rest on deeper and deeper origins. Perched on a dramatic pyramid of stone on what would have been dry land 9,000 years ago, the majestic gothic cloister of Mont. St. Michel envelops an older Templar abbey that cradles an earlier Carolingian church, which sits over a Neolithic chamber containing a prehistoric rock altar. To the east, Chartres cathedral, a pearl in a necklace of Gothic creations, stands over a Roman temple that was once a Druid academy that stood beside a dolmen which was once a Mesolithic mound.

Mont St. Michel. And the original foundation ‘navel stone’ upon which the whole structure stands.

 

In northern India a monolithic sandstone pillar named Sankisa is inscribed with Buddha’s teachings. Allegedly created in the 3 ^rd century the site is layered sequentially with the ruins of a Hindu temple, an Islamic mosque, the tomb of an Islamic saint, and finally, another Hindu temple. This sustained re-enforcing of sacred space through the ages bears the legacy of Egyptian temple credo, where no site can be considered truly sacred unless it stands on the foundations of previous temples, and specifically, on a mound sourced by the builder gods at Zep Tepi . In earlier chapters we learned how these gods survived a flood, were exceptionally tall, and following the consecration of their initial works, bearing the mantle of the Followers of Horus, they and their counterparts embarked into the hinterlands to consecrate new sacred mounds — travelers bound to a common cause of rebuilding the former world of the creator gods. ¹⁸

The close resemblance between temple design, construction method, language and local myths around the Pacific Rim, even the Indian Ocean, suggests a common origin, whose protagonists were deft navigators of the oceans. ¹⁹ Likewise, the fertile crescent of sacred sites along the west coasts of Ireland, Cornwall, France, northern Iberia and Portugal, represent the bulk of the oldest temples in Europe, their stones being tallest nearest the sea and becoming progressively smaller — and younger — the further they venture inland, again suggesting a seafaring origin for their creators. The sheer number, scale and concentration of these monuments give the impression of focal points from which other, later sites emerged. And like the pyramids, this architecture just appears overnight and without antecedent, supporting the legends of gods who came from sinking lands, armed with knowledge and considered very advanced by local standards.

This ties-in nicely with the Followers of Horus being equipped with a now-lost brand of esoteric technology. Anyone who has witnessed first-hand the size of the dolmens and menhirs of Roches aux Fées, Kergadiou and Locmariquer in Bretagne, or the uprights and 180-ton capstone of the dolmen at Zambujeiro, Portugal, knows just how ridiculous the assumption is that such sentinels of stone were somehow inched into place by means of wooden rollers. If these adepts did use a form of sound to levitate the stones, as the myths of Tiwanaku, Uxmal and Easter Island declare, then this art survived well into the 1930s, when a Swedish doctor by the name of Jarl was privy to the raising of huge boulders 700-feet up onto a Tibetan mountain by means of a deliberate geometric and mathematical arrangement of musical instruments by a group of monks. Using this method they levitated up to six stone blocks per hour on a parabolic flight path. To be certain he had not been the victim of mass-psychosis, Dr, Jarl made two films of the incident, which were promptly confiscated after screening by the English Society sponsoring him and declared classified. ²⁰ It would be seventy-five years before scientists at Nottingham University, England, finally revealed an anti-gravity machine capable of floating lumps of metal and heavy stones in mid-air, while in China, scientists did the same to small animals using ultrasound. ²¹

Studies into the mathematical and linguistic origins of ancient British temples suggest a heavy Egyptian presence. The Celtic version of the obelisk is the menhir (‘upright stone’), ²² which represents the omphalos, the temple in its simplest form. Some of the largest examples weigh 400 tons, yet their simplicity makes them no less powerful than their appearance might give. In the northern Celtic lands, their local names reveal Egyptian roots: they were called amberics , and one Cornish monolith was known as men amber (‘stone obelisk’ or ‘stone of the Sun’). ²³ The connection reappears at Stonehenge, whose approach is now the town of Amesbury: ames meaning ‘a place of the sun’, and bury , ‘an enclosure’; its earlier name ambres-bury derives from the Egyptian amber , or obelisk. ²⁴ Thus, the site of Stonehenge was known as an ‘enclosure of obelisks, a temple of the sun’.

The Egyptian Karnak and its French namesake Carnac come from Karn Ac , ‘a seat or enclosure of great fire or light’. ²⁵ From this is derived carn and cairn in the Celtic language, the generic names for an earthen or stone enclosure, and Cernunnos, the horned fertility god of nature otherwise known as Pan. Such associations not only suggest a common Egyptian heredity, but also connect the sites with light, wisdom and fecundity.

Menhirs at Kergadiou.

 

The oldest sites in Europe (dark grey) appear around coastal areas.

 

 

In the Iberian Peninsula the names of standing stones similarly give away their function: betilo , from the Semitic beth-el , ‘a house of God’. Yet one is hard-pushed to visualize a menhir as a type of dwelling, unless, like the Sivalingam , it is the spirit of god that resides in the stone. Indeed, in Greece, a betylo is a stone of Zeus that descended from heaven. Their other name anta is a derivative of the Latin annotare , meaning ‘to mark or locate’. This leads us to understand that a standing stone is a repository of the effulgent force of a creator god and mark the place where this telluric energy is found on the land. So in a matter of speaking, it is a ‘mansion’.

The monoliths and the priestly cult that erected them are not ubiquitous to Europe, for they are found far-and-wide throughout the Korean Peninsula, India, Africa and the Middle East. ²⁶ At Al Qaseem (‘great sunlight’), ²⁷ in the harshest part of the Arabian desert, there exists a temple similar to Stonehenge, as a traveler through that land recorded in 1863: “this Arabian monument, erected in the land where the heavenly bodies are known to have once been venerated by the inhabitants… in fact, there is little difference between the stone wonder of Qaseem and that of Wiltshire.” ²⁸

Giant-scale engineering.

While much of the world appears to have been erecting pyramids and citadels, the temple-builders of the British Isles and Bretagne applied their skills on a subtler level with standing stones. But the sheer scale in which they did so is mind-boggling. Sites such as Knowlton and Drewstaignton in southern England, and Callanais in Scotland were in their heyday formidable cities of stone, featuring hundreds of menhirs and stone circles, and avenues stretching over six miles. They were both ceremonial places as well as cities of knowledge in their own right.

In the small county of Wiltshire, England, hundreds of mounds, giant’s graves, long barrows, dolmens, stone circles and conical mounds have somehow managed to dodge all manner of religious, agricultural and commercial bullets. Their primary concentration revolves around the world’s largest stone circle, the temple of Avebury and its cluster of preparatory temples. Together they cover an area of roughly 60 square miles, forming one of the most respected and ritualized landscape temples ever known. Some say it is still so today, and having walked it and breathed it for nine years I would have to agree.

Just as Delphi is strategically situated on a latitude 3/7 of the distance from the equator to the North Pole, and Karnak 2/7, the navel that is Avebury marks the 4/7 spot. In fact, the precise band of latitude runs through the middle of this temple, ²⁹ and specifically where the site’s first feature — a giant menhir — originally stood. The geodetic significance of Avebury is therefore global. A connection to Egypt is hinted by the antiquarian William Stukeley: “all the stones of our whole Temple were called Ambres, even by our Phoenician founders, but this [the center stone] particularly. The Egyptians by that name still called theirs obelisks.” ³⁰ As late as the 17 ^th century it was suggested that before the Romans named it Avenabury, the name may have been Ambresbury.

Avebury and its serpentine avenues in their original splendor, as drawn by Stukeley c.1720.

 

 

To the north and just outside Avebury’s formidable chalk embankment, there stood the original stone circle. At the time, it was considered too energetically unstable, and its stones were taken down and re-used to construct the outer ring of the site as it is marked today. ³¹

The study of Avebury is a whole book in itself, so we shall concern ourselves with its example as a ritual metropolis that sustained the delicate trinity of people-land-spirit for some 3,000 years. Many prehistoric pilgrimage tracks lead to this natural sanctuary; its main thoroughfare, the Harepath, is an ancient Saxon name for a spirit road. Avebury’s tall embankments originally fully concealed any sight of the stones, and despite the hills that flank its eastern edge, the inner sanctum is still completely obscured from view. This was done by design. The ancients saw the temple as the very foundation of life, the physical personification of cosmic forces in perfect equilibrium. If the temple is defiled by any form of impurity, the umbilical connection between earth and heaven is lost, and the tribe it nourishes disintegrates. ³²

The outer stone circle of Avebury — or what religious fanatics have left of it — once comprised a perimeter boundary of 99 stones (as with Tiwanaku), with a diameter of 1,100-feet; its closest comparison is the Ring of Brogar in the Isles of Orkney, which was erected at the same time, suggesting a link between the two locations. Within this ring of stones are two smaller circles of 27 and 29 stones, resembling two eggs in a frying pan, each respectively calibrated to the sidereal and synodic lunar cycles. Thankfully William Stukeley spent many years on-site creating accurate drawings and documenting the last orgy of destruction of these circles, his anger barely masked: “And this stupendous fabric, which for some thousands of years, had brav’d the continual assaults of weather, and by the nature of it, when left to itself, like the pyramids of Egypt, would have lasted as long as the globe, hath fallen a sacrifice to the wretched ignorance and avarice of a little village unluckily plac’d within it.” ³³

Avebury today. The site houses a village. And since this is Britain, a pub.

 

 

Stukeley, a practicing Freemason of his day, went on to describe the destruction of the stones as “an execution,” and given the scale of the rampage, which lasted about 200 years, it’s no wonder: originally connected to the Avebury henge were two processional stone avenues covering a total of three miles, each consisting of some 200 stones, of which only 32 remain.

The southeastern avenue meandered from an ancillary temple on Overton Hill called the Sanctuary, originally a series of six concentric stone circles that served as a preparatory area for those wishing to enter Avebury. If you recall, these sites were originally built to concentrate and amplify the telluric energy of the land. Since the human body — particularly its brainwaves — emit electromagnetic signals, ³⁴ entering a temple with unstable thoughts or incorrect intent would pollute the site, energetically speaking; such infractions over time would corrupt the temple, leading the surrounding land and its people to fall out of synch. Only when totally prepared were initiates allowed to stroll down the stone avenue and enter Avebury. Stukeley was greatly moved by the final destruction of the Sanctuary between 1723-43, when farmers Green and Griffin removed the stones: “This Overton-hill from time immemorial, the country people have a high notion of. It was (alas, it was!) a very few years ago, crown’d with a most beautiful temple…They still call it the Sanctuary…The loss of this work I did not lament alone; but all the neighbors (except the person that gain’d the little dirty profit), were heartily griev’d for it. It had a beauty that touch’d them far beyond those much greater circles in Avebury town.” ³⁵

Inside Avebury, specific stones served as classrooms for the teaching of specific elements of the Mysteries. There once was a holed stone which stood over a particularly energetic spot (of which only the stump remains) where marriages were conducted by having the couple link hands through the hole; one of the two monoliths forming the entrance has an alcove and a seat and is still used today for healing with sound.

In the northeastern quadrant, the center of one of the lunar circles consisted of three colossal stones (two remain), forming a horseshoe named The Cove. ³⁶ As the name implies, it is the receptacle of telluric forces, where the full energy of the rising sun at midsummer collects into a chalice, just like the horseshoe of bluestones inside Stonehenge. The Cove was the place for shamanic dreaming, where adepts downloaded information from the invisible universe and shared it with the tribe. By 1900 BC , when a turn of events brought war to the land, warriors would sharpen the blades of their swords on the back of its lozenge stone to carry its protective energy into battle. The marks are still visible today, as is the outline of a large serpent carved on the front, indicating this as the spot where telluric energy is most concentrated.

Over the past 4,000 years the height of Avebury’s protective chalk embankment has eroded some 20 feet. Back then, one could barely see the incline of the adjacent hill of Waden, a proto-Germanic derivation of the Norse god Odin who, like so many other creator gods, is associated with wisdom, magic, prophecy and the leadership of souls. Scandinavians symbolized him with the cube, thereby linking Odin/Wotan with Mt. Meru. ³⁷

From the spot marking the original menhir inside Avebury one can still see the cleft in the chalk where a sightline lines up with the slope of Waden hill as it meets the summit of the artificial hill rising behind it, the breast-shaped mound of Silbury.

The rising Sun lights Silbury on the winter solstice.

 

 

Sil-bury takes its name from the Phoenician sil meaning ‘light’, thus it is an ‘enclosure of light’. Legend states that around 2650 BC local shamans received information from a group of spirit beings named Watchers, who instructed them to erect a six-stepped conical mound as an insurance policy for future times, when humanity would lose its connection to the divine. ³⁸ As word spread of the sacred construction project about to be undertaken, merchants of Light came from all over Europe and as far as Phoenicia to take part in the building of this temple. Traditional historians scoffed at this idea until a shaft dug to the center of the mound revealed a multitude of soils brought in from as far away as the Middle East, and established the date of construction at c.2600 BC .

Exactly at the same time in Egypt, the temple seers at Saqqara were guided to build a six-stepped pyramid by a group of creator gods named the Shining Ones, the equivalent to the Watchers, and the pyramid was subsequently erected by Imhotep, one of the architects of the gods. ³⁹ So again the association with Egypt persists. Avebury, with its two winding avenues of stones, has even been likened to the Egyptian solar disc bearing two serpents, and from the air the resemblance is striking. In fact, the Celts also shared the Egyptian practice of orienting their temples to enhance the correspondence between site and cosmic forces, which we shall deal with in depth later. Simply put, the direction in which the site was aligned played a crucial part in its purpose.

Ringed by processional temples like spokes on a wheel, the Avebury complex is best appreciated if seen from above, when its ancillary mounds, long barrows, stone circles and dolmens reveal an interconnected whole. In addition to being aligned to each solstice and equinox, the sites are accorded a position on the eight-fold Celtic wheel of life, death and renewal. Occupying the southwestern quadrant lies Silbury, which in the Celtic tradition represents Lammas , a harvest festival that takes place on August 1 ^st . Indeed the shape of the hill resembles that of a pregnant belly or a bosom full of milk, both symbols of the abundance of the land. When archaeologists dug to the center of Silbury and discovered the original mound, they also found in its turf small winged insects. These insects are native to the area and still hatch in this part of Britain in the first week of August. ⁴⁰

Avebury (center) and some of the sites that comprise this ritual landscape.

 

 

The moat on which Silbury stands was engineered to hold the water from the nearby springs when they burst to life every February on the feast of Imbolc , the Christian Candlemas , day of the Purification of the Virgin.

Speaking of Imbolc, the northeastern quadrant is represented by an enclosure locally known as Glory Ann. Now barely recognizable, it once served as a temple of instruction on land owned by the Knights Templar and still called Temple Farm.

Avebury’s kingdom of conscience was constructed and dutifully maintained over the course of some 3,000 years before changes in circumstances led to its slow decline. Clearly the endeavor of engineering a landscape covering sixty square miles required years of forethought and planning, not to mention hard physical labor, and deserves high praise — certainly far more than unenlightened sources at Wikipedia , who state: “The people who built [these large monuments] had to be secure enough to spend time on such non-essential activities.” ⁴¹ Sixty square miles of landscape engineering a non-essential activity!? Just goes to show one cannot trust all that is found on the internet. In counterpoint, the learned earth mysteries author Paul Devereux elucidates: “The old stones fossilize a moment in the history of consciousness, when it seems that the intuitive and intellectual properties of the human mind hung in a delicate symbiosis.” ⁴²

Celtic three-steps.

Avebury and its environs sit on the tip of rolling chalk hills which suddenly give way to steep escarpments and fertile downland. A pilgrim to this sacred land can still imagine these escarpments rising out of some prehistoric sea, which was precisely the case many thousands of years ago, and it is not uncommon to walk these undulating hills and come upon fossils of seashells. On this tip of land there are three artificially-shaped and near-identical escarpments, each standing precisely 11 miles apart like legs of a tripod. In fact, they form an equilateral triangle — a triple step of Vishnu — and Avebury marks its center.

Nearby Silbury Hill was also designed as part of an equilateral array of identical mounds, each precisely 5.2 miles apart. Its twin to the east, Merlin’s Mound, sits in the town of Marlborough; to the south, the third mound is now a cricket pitch in the hamlet of Wilcot, an unfortunate casualty of the building of the nearby canal during the rush to industrialize England. ⁴³

But there’s more. In esoteric circles, Avebury is said to be part of a ‘pyramid of light’ that covers a significant portion of the British Isles, established in remote times by a prehistoric priesthood to protect these lands and its thousands of sacred places. ⁴⁴ This obscure information was received clairvoyantly by an accomplished and highly-respected local trance medium named Isabelle Kingston. Following the instructions given through her, I pinpointed the other two sites to a high degree of accuracy using satellite images. The second site is a complex of six stone circles in the Moor of Machaire on the Isle of Arran, one the most important temple complexes in Scotland. Arran is home to several giant’s graves and numerous eyewitness accounts of highly luminous flying orbs. Folklore states that the main stone circle itself was built by the giant Fin MacCoul; it is also the one stone circle with a natural radiation count 33% above the background, certainly the highest energy spot of the group, and where researchers have seen tubes of light and other light phenomena.

The Moor of Machaire. Arran.

 

 

The third site is on one of the wettest and muddiest plots of land I have ever walked, although the view over Bantry Bay makes up for the ordeal...when the rain finally stops, that is. This is the hill temple complex of Kealkill in southwest Ireland, consisting of a stone circle, a radial stone cairn and two attendant standing stones. In one of those precious moments where science validates psychic phenomena, the form of a flattened pyramid, an equilateral triangle, connects all three sites along a total distance of 960 miles.

The Ways and Leys of the Force.

The temples of the British Isles represent some of the best-studied and well-documented in the world. Firstly, there are thousands of sites set within relatively compact territory, and secondly, there has been a consistent abundance of scholars and eccentrics who have devoted their time to understanding what they are, why they are where they are, and most importantly, what they are doing.

The Avebury temple complex, along with those at Stonehenge, Stanton Drew, Callanish and Tara, served as major hubs where the sacred arts of astronomy, mathematics and geometry were practiced. ⁴⁵ As the original priesthood died off — and they too were described as exceptionally tall, with elongated skulls — the essence of the sites continued as academies of the Druids. Ceremony and ritual were rigorously maintained according to the temple tradition, where the positions of the Moon and Sun reinforced the relationship between people-land-cosmos and the core values of the temple. By this means, cultures were sustained and maintained. More importantly, the relationship between the temple and its underlying telluric forces was carefully reinforced from season to season, which served the two-way relationship of energizing the place of power, and in return, the temple acted as a mediating influence on the energy grid of the Earth.

In 1966, John Michell was wandering through southern England visiting its plethora of ancient shrines. His itinerary allowed for a brief stop at Glastonbury Tor and its crowning tower of St. Michael, all that remains of a church that collapsed after an earthquake in 1275. From the summit he could see its mirror image twelve miles to the southwest, the Barrowbridge Mump, also topped with a ruined church and dedicated to the same archangel. There appeared to be some kind of communication between these two identical hills, with identical churches, sharing the same north-eastern trajectory.

As Michell journeyed back to Avebury, it became apparent that a considerable number of hills, mounds and churches all dedicated to St. Michael or his earthly counterpart St. George were linked by a straight line, what in geodetic studies is called a ley . One of the great surviving traditions states that Avebury itself is a great serpent temple marking the geodetic center of a line of consciousness stretching from the south-western tip of England at Land’s End – and not far from St. Michel’s Mount – to the opposite coast where it meets the North Sea at Hopton.

Michell’s hunch of an accurate alignment of sacred sites sharing common purposes and traditions was later confirmed through geodesic calculations by Robert Forrest. ⁴⁶ It was just the beginning of a major rediscovery of what would turn out to be a deliberately designed archaic system of sacred sites stretching over hundreds of miles. The highly-respected dowser, the late Hamish Miller, together with investigative researcher Paul Broadhurst followed through on Michell’s spontaneous revelation and discovered that entwined around the straight pole of the Michael ley line runs a current of telluric energy, which indeed passes through dozens of sacred locations associated with the famous archangel. ⁴⁷

The Michael and Mary telluric alignment and a few of its nodes.

 

 

Broadhurst and Miller placed their respective reputations on the line with this discovery, yet their efforts would later be consistently validated. Even so, by the time they reached Avebury, they were still unaware that inside the 5,000-year old temple they would find a second telluric current wrapping itself around this invisible axis. It would later become known as the Mary line, on account that, just like the Michael line, it passes through sanctuaries dedicated to St. Mary or her mother St. Anne. And whereas the Michael line carried a positive or masculine charge, the Mary line carried a negative or feminine charge.

Seen from above southern England the two telluric currents wind their way through hundreds of sanctuaries, joining together at nodes, wrapping around the ley like vertebrae on the back of a mighty spine which itself is directly aligned to the path of the rising Sun on the Celtic solar festival of Beltane. ⁴⁸ At the moment the morning light surfaces from the underworld, it sends a shaft of light to every temple along the axis of southern Britain as though lighting a network of wells imbibing the jubilant energy of the Sun and grounding it into the land.

Extending the Michael and Mary ley as a great circle across the globe, 6,000 miles later it reaches the center of Tiwanaku; on its return journey it bisects the Chinese island of Hainan precisely at its most holiest shrine, the sacred mountain of Wuzhi, a landscape temple brimming with mythology and dedicated to the five most powerful Li gods.

Essentially, Michell, Broadhurst and Miller tapped into the living memory of the land — just as Aboriginal people have done for millennia — and rediscovered a forgotten territory of natural energies which our ancestors harnessed and used to connect themselves to the bigger picture. To quote Paul Broadhurst, “it leads into a world where everything is truly interdependent, where the Earth is acknowledged as a part of a greater whole, a philosophy which, while rooted in a spiritual understanding, is also pragmatic and practical. The old temples were built to enhance the environment, not to create disharmony, and so a technology of natural forces was employed, the same forces which create life and vitalize the countryside.” ⁴⁹

Broadhurst and Miller then spent the best part of a decade on a second labor of love: a 2,700-mile linear odyssey across Europe, starting at a lonely hermitage high up on the wind-beaten pyramidal rock of Skellig Michael, off the western coast of Ireland, through the tip of southern Britain and St. Michael’s Mount, across the English Channel to Mont St. Michel, along the shrines, mounds and oracles of France, Italy and Greece, finally reaching Israel and the hilltop temples of Mount Tabor — where Jesus experienced his own transfiguration of the soul — to the 9,000-year old temple site of Megiddo. Again, without foreknowledge of where the journey would take them, they discovered a masculine telluric energy line winding its way through St. Michael places, complemented by an interconnecting feminine line traveling through sacred places dedicated to the divine virgin and the earth goddess. As with their English counterparts, these two lines entwined around a central ‘pole’ stretching diagonally through the axis of Europe. It would be called the Apollo and Athena ley. ⁵⁰

Like Michell’s revelation whilst connecting with the sacred land and its oracles, the discovery of the Apollo/Athena axis followed from an earlier French scholar’s oracular dream during his stay at the sacred hill of Lycabettus, in which it was revealed to him that the sanctuaries dedicated to Apollo lay in a perfect straight line and intersected with those of the earth goddess Athena. ⁵¹

The Apollo-Athena ley and a few of the hundreds of temples along its route.

 

Skellig Michael, one of the loneliest outposts for a sanctuary, and the start of the Apollo-Athena ley.

 

 

 

The grid expands.

Studies into the ley lines of the British Isles, the Carnac region, and to a lesser degree the tracks of the Anasazi in New Mexico (for no reason other than the absence of new information), show how the initial temples were augmented across several thousands of years through the addition of new sites such as menhirs, dolmens, tumuli (earthen mounds), early Celtic places of veneration, and with the advent of Christianity, churches and Gothic cathedrals, the majority of which are built over older sites. The alignments were not just random points on a map. They typically were calculated to mark pivotal motions of the Sun and Moon, even to specific stars such as Sirius, the star associated with Isis, Sophia and ancient wisdom, as evidenced by the deliberately aligned axis of the temple of Luxor in Egypt, ⁵² as well as a prominent mound to the northeast of Avebury. Such extraordinary feats by the ancient surveyors led John Michell to remark, “the surface of Britain is like a palimpsest – an old parchment covered with lines and markings from different periods over thousands of years, linking permanent landmarks and running between opposite ends of the island.” ⁵³

That they also performed an essential service to the well-being of people was hinted at as early as the 7 ^th century BC by the biblical prophet Jeremiah: “ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.” ⁵⁴

The rediscovery of this closely-linked network of temples came during the 1920s in Hereford, England, and as is typical, it occurred as a sudden, mystical revelation when connecting with the land and its temples. The naturalist Alfred Watkins was out horseback riding, and as he stopped to take in the view high up on a hill, the land spoke back and revealed to him a network of lines “standing out like glowing wires all over the surface of the country, intersecting at the sites of churches, old stones, and other spots of traditional sanctity.” ⁵⁵ His years of solitary study and measure revealed a vastly engineered ancient landscape, where prehistoric mounds, spirit roads, old tracks, stone markers, Druid tree groves, beacons, church steeples, and hand-sculpted notches on the summits of hills were purposefully aligned. His findings would later be validated by other pioneers. ⁵⁶

Connecting many of the ancient sacred sites throughout Britain is a network of long, straight tracks and stone roads that criss-cross the island from coast-to-coast, sometimes without deviating an inch over the course of a hundred miles. These supernatural feats of surveying were already considered ancient by the 5 ^th century BC , when King Belinus undertook the task of repairing this old highway system that was falling into ruin. The reason for his work was that the old tracks had wandered off line, and “no one knew just where their boundaries should be.” ⁵⁷ That these paths were considered sacred is evidenced not just by the plethora of ancient places and pilgrimage sites they still bind together to this day, including prominent cathedrals, but very specific laws codified the rights of travelers on these sacred paths between sanctuaries: “the temples of the gods… should be so privileged that anyone who escaped to them… must be pardoned by his accuser when he came out… the roads which led to these temples and cities should be included in the same law and that the ploughs of the peasantry should be inalienable.” ⁵⁸ In essence they are spirit roads, with every wayfarer, even criminals, granted immunity from harassment or arrest, and any child or foreigner with no knowledge of the language could pass from one end of the country to the other, finding hospitality everywhere. Two of these famous tracks can still be walked today, both crossing to the east of Avebury: the Ridgeway track and the Icknield Way, the latter passing through the heart of the stone circle itself.

While researching potential connections between Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland and Templar sites in France for a separate project, I inadvertently steered onto a road less traveled and found myself sharing that exuberant sense of revelation that Watkins himself must have felt. This road was to take me on a 900-mile ley of sacred sites, beginning just to the north of Rosslyn, in Edinburgh and its 900-year old Holyrood Abbey. Originally built by King David I in an act of thanksgiving after a flaming cross descended from the sky and saved him from being gorged by the antlers of a hart, the abbey and its en-suite palace would become the seat of power of Kings, Queens and the Scottish Parliament. Just down the road stands St. Giles Cathedral, the High Kirk of Edinburgh, also built in the 12 ^th century. Between these two seats of power is placed the start of the ley, barely 500 yards from the oldest purpose-built Masonic meeting room in the world, the Chapel of St. John. From there it proceeds to Rosslyn Chapel, site of the Rose Well, symbol of the bloodline of Mary Magdalene and the whole mystery surrounding the location of her final resting place. ⁵⁹ Its links to the Knights Templar and the mysteries of the Temple of Solomon are extensive, as they were given refuge here by William St. Clair following their bloody purge by King Phillip of France and the Catholic pope Clement V.

The ley then makes its southerly trajectory, passing through eight churches, including one dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes, which would turn out to be a hint of things to come. It follows to Cirencester Abbey, founded in 1117 as an Augustinian monastery on the site of the oldest-known Saxon church in England, which itself had been built on a Roman sanctuary. It then ambles into Wiltshire, brushing alongside Windmill Hill, and the exact spot where the original western stone avenue of Avebury would have ended. After crossing several tumuli, it reaches the embankments of the hill fort at Rybury before descending into the sinuous Vale of Pewsey and the church of Stanton St. Bernard, followed by Marden Henge, which once contained a stone circle ten times the size of Stonehenge and a mound half the size of Silbury Hill.

The ley line then passes through the heart of Stonehenge.

Having brushed past the front door of Sting’s Jacobean residence in the hamlet of Lake and its en-suite tumulus, it continues purposefully through Kaer Gradawk, a gigantic, artificial hill, already in use by 3000 BC , its central conical hill and water-bearing ditch making it the epitome of the primordial mound. In 1075 a cathedral was built on its northwestern quadrant, but after several calamities and three visitations from the Virgin Mary, its bishop was ‘instructed’ to move God’s church elsewhere, the new location to be chosen by the shot of an arrow. This arrow allegedly was shot by a very muscular individual, for it landed two miles away in a water meadow and, allegedly, on a Neolithic mound. The new church would become one of gothic architecture’s finest moments, Salisbury Cathedral. And as luck would have it, the Rosslyn ley passes through its original altar.

The location also marks the golden ratio cut along the entire ley line.

We now travel southwards once more, through Clearbury Ring hill fort, whereupon the line rises to meet the tip of St. Catherine’s Hill at Gods Hill. St. Catherine was the patron saint of the Knights Templar and other esoteric orders that fell outside the favor of the medieval Catholic Church. Passing through the grounds of Highcliffe Castle the ley crosses the English Channel and on to France. However, before departing the shores of Britain, it is worth recalling that this particular quest began as a separate and vague exploration of the Knights Templar. The builder of Highcliffe was Charles Stuart, a baron and a Knight of the Portuguese Order of the Tower and of the Sword of Valour, Loyalty and Merit — a pinnacle of the Portuguese Honors system which bears a passing resemblance to the order of the original Knights Templar. Given how the Order was central to the founding of Portugal as a country only makes the story even more salivating, ⁶⁰ as does the fact that Queen Elizabeth II shares the same knighthood, and her summer residence in Scotland is Holyrood.

But we digress. Much of the line’s journey through France is frustrating in its lack of ancient sites. This is heavily agrarian territory where, through necessity, and often ignorance, the old stones have been broken up for building material; destructive attitudes towards pagan temples by the Catholic Church as well as countless wars have not helped. Still, a number of important connections remain: the ley passes through the ancient churches at Amfreville, Raids, Hambye and Monthault before entering the secret world of the Forest de Fougères and the heart of a major Druid temple, as well as various stone alignments much like those at Carnac to the west. The ley then connects with no less than twelve churches, literally down the nave of La Poitevinière, and the altar of St.-Vivien de Pons; it also meets the hill church of Les Châtelliers-Châteaumur, with its resemblance to Glastonbury Tor.

The Rosslyn ley finally comes to rest 900 miles from its point of origin in Scotland, inside a natural grotto famous for its healing waters and, just as the bishop of Kaer Gradawk once experienced, for apparitions of the Virgin Mary.

The end of the ley line is the grotto of Lourdes.

The mystery of the elbow.

Separating England and Wales is the narrow Bristol Channel, whose two distinguishing features are the miniscule island of Caldey, 10,000-feet by 4,000-feet, consisting of a Cistercian Abbey and the time-worn church of Saint Iliud, which is aligned to the northeast and sports a steeple bearing a closer resemblance to a menhir. Then there’s the island of Lundy, one mile by three, home to several giant’s graves and, according to Celtic mythology, one of the entrances into the Otherworld: “[it] is supposed to be Annwn, or rather a place where mysterious realms can be entered… The most important hill is the Tor of Glastonbury, the most important island is Lundy… [its] inhabitants have human form, but are not strictly human… they are immortals, fairy folk… Gods thinly disguised.” ⁶¹

In 1992 this tiny but mysterious island appeared as a revelation to the mathematician and engineer Robin Heath while staying near Carnac. Robin had previously rediscovered that the rectangle formed by the four-station posts at Stonehenge allows the famous monument to resemble the planet Earth in cross-section, while also marking the angles of the midsummer sunrise, the most northerly moonset, and other important events during the year. ⁶² This rectangle has side ratios of 5:12 units, and a corresponding diagonal of 13. The suggested form is therefore a Pythagorean 5:12:13 triangle, though what it’s doing in a monument built nearly 3,000 years before the Greek mathematician is another matter. In essence, this lunation triangle allows for the calibration of both solar and lunar cycles; furthermore, with a cord marked at 3:2 along the short side of the triangle, its internal length markst the number of lunations during a solar year: 12.369. ⁶³

Robin describes the implications of this system of measure inside an ancient monument thus: “[It is] an astonishingly valuable tool for performing a range of astronomically precise tasks, which enable forecasts to be made concerning solar and lunar positions and phases. A Neolithic calendar maker would have given away his entire set of round-bottomed pots for such a technique.” ⁶⁴

Like Michell’s decoding of the aforementioned parable of Peter and the 153 fish, Robin also realized this strange number of fish, together with Jesus being the 13 ^th person among 12 disciples, encodes the numerical value of the lunation triangle at Stonehenge, with the square root of 153 equaling 12.369 — the number of lunations.

It was at this point that Heath had a vision of the lunation triangle as a reflection of a much larger collection of related points on the landscape, specifically the relationship between Stonehenge and the origin of its bluestones at Preseli, and that speck of rock, Lundy Island, whose Welsh name Ynys Elen means 'island of the elbow, angle or corner'. ⁶⁵ As it happens, when seen from the air Lundy actually resembles an elbow or corner. It also lies at the same latitude as Stonehenge. When connecting the three points, Lundy indeed forms the elbow or right angle of a large 5:12:13 triangle, its corner occurring on the island at Knights Templar Rock. And just to the north, Caldey Island forms the 3:2 point along the upright. ⁶⁵

The elbow of Lundy.

 

By drawing a mirror image of this triangle, the north point marked by Preseli now becomes the exact location of Castle Dore in the south, with its entrance pointing back to Stonehenge.

To complete this extraordinary lesson in long-distance surveying, consider that the relationship between Caldey Island and Preseli is also mirrored by Stonehenge, and a marker two miles north of Avebury, ⁶⁶ on Monkton Hill, site of nine barrow mounds (and several others destroyed), and beside it, the old Templar academy at Glory Ann.

Heath’s theory is that Lundy, not Stonehenge, was the original point of construction, and what’s more, as an indication of just how old this ancient metrology is, consider that all three sites have yielded remains dating to 8000 BC . ⁶⁷

Revelation at Kura Tawhiti.

It’s not difficult to find magic at Kura Tawhiti. The landscape temple’s mere presence among the untouched Southern Alps of New Zealand is ample compensation for the long journey required to reach it. During my second visit, art was on my mind, particularly the visual resemblance shared between Maori and Celtic sacred art, which at times appears indistinguishable. The site itself precedes the Maori, it is the abode of the Waitaha, the unnaturally tall, fair-skinned mystical race, probably not dissimilar to the giants once witnessed on Easter Island, Aotearoa’s bijou neighbor four thousand miles to the northeast.

It was while standing beside Kura Tawhiti’s main power center that strange things began to happen: the spirit of place whispered in my right ear, “Look for what lies opposite, find what’s on the other side.” Anyone who has experienced this sensation knows just how unsettling it can be, and yet the unease soon gives way to a sense of being totally surrounded by what I can only describe as unconditional love. It took me a couple of days to process the message and understand what exactly I was being asked to find. Since my thoughts had been on the relationship to an equally mysterious culture on the opposite side of the world, I wondered if there may be a connection to another, possibly Celtic, site opposite to Kura Tawhiti.

Once the site’s grid coordinates were secured all that was required to find the counterpoint in the northern hemisphere was a good map. When I found it, the quest that followed revealed to me just how the development of these kingdoms of conscience had been conducted not just on a global scale, but how the knowledge was sustained over the course of thousands of years, most likely by adepts who transmitted it from person to person, from brotherhood to brotherhood — individuals who’d persevered to keep a bright light burning even through times of great natural or political turbulence.

Having established the start and end points, I endeavored to discover if any important temples lay along this ley that ran halfway around the world.

Moving north-westward and across Australia, the ley homed-in on the only prominent feature of the endless desert and that nation’s most recognizable icon, the sandstone hill of Uluru, which the ley passed to within 9 miles — an acceptable margin given that it is an unmovable mountain and 2,600 miles from the point of origin. The ley continued through the continent, across the Indian Ocean, entering the long island of Java to cross the heart of the temple of Borobudur, a distance of 4,400 miles. Borobudur, with its six-stepped platforms, 2,672 reliefs, 504 statues, and 72 perforated stupas sits on a sacred mound and forms a ley of its own with at least two other temples in Java — Pawon and Mendut — all three sharing a ceremonial route.

Temple of Pawon.

 

 

The ley continued along the spine of Sumatra, returning to the ocean, and making landfall 7,000 miles away in India, at the sacred hill of Padmanabham — a doppelganger for Glastonbury Tor — its ancillary temple complex being one of the holiest abodes of Vishnu. 300 miles later the ley intersects the temples of Ramtek and Mansar, each perched on opposite hills high above the plain like an entrance deliberately created to allow the passage of the ley. In addition to twenty-seven other temples here, there’s a university dedicated to Sanskrit, one of the oldest forms of writing, and a monument dedicated to the primal sound OM.

Four-hundred miles further along the ley meets another freestanding hill and the ancient site of Meera Mandir, now bearing a temple to Siva and rebuilt in the 14 ^th century. After crossing into Pakistan it passes by the remains of Mehrgarh. It then follows a trajectory through vast desolate plains, arid hills and deserts, the keepers of secrets still waiting to be uncovered. In the mountainous region of Armenia it passes by the north slope of Mt. Ararat and Noah’s Ark before reaching the monastery of Cokesina in Serbia. Curiously, the ley’s passage from Bulgaria to northern Italy closely matches the geographical origin and spread of Bogomilism (‘god loving’), an esoteric order from around the 10 ^th century, whose doctrine was closely tied to the Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, Albigensians and Cathars.

In northern Italy the ley reaches the town of Alba, with its deep Celt and Ligurian roots. Having traveled 10,000 miles I decided to pause briefly and take a look around. The ley passes by the cathedral, but it’s the town’s name and its heavy Templar presence that are of interest. The name Alba is actually a Latin acronym for the four elements: Aquarii (water), Leone (Leo, fire), Bue (Ox, earth), Aquila (eagle, air); these form the sign of a cross. Curious, then, that on the outskirts of town this ley from Kura Tawhiti should cross the Apollo and Athena ley between Ireland and Israel. Did some olden order know of this and memorialized it in the town’s name?

In France the line passes through the 9 ^th century basilica of Vayats, which stands on earlier foundations. Finally, 12,400 miles later, the journey ends in northern Spain. With just a margin of error of 0.27º of latitude and 0.3º of longitude, we reach one of the oldest sites of pilgrimage in the world, Santiago de Compostela (‘field of stars’), an appropriate name in honor of the Celtic stargazers who originally venerated this part of Galicia.

So this is “what lies opposite, what is on the other side.” An extraordinary journey of discovery, to say the least.

Esoteric studies always emphasize the balance of opposites, so, not wishing to deny my studies, I was curious as to what might lay on the return leg of the journey. The trip from New Zealand to Galicia is predominantly over land, and true to the principle of opposites, the return journey is overwhelmingly over water. The only land between Europe and South America is the archipelago of the Açores, a scattering of nine volcanic peaks and rocky fragments insinuating the remains of a larger, but now drowned land. The ley passes through the tip of the island named and dedicated to our old friend São Miguel. Specifically, it crosses the island’s most active caldera and the little town nestled inside it named Sete Cidades (‘Seven Cities’), although there are no seven cities here, nor have there ever been. However, because of its position in the mid-Atlantic Ridge, the Açores have been central to the legend of Atlantis and its fabled seven cities, and historical records suggest that the name of the town was a deliberate tribute to the location of the ill-fated land given in the accounts by Plato, Pliny, Diodorus and Theopompue.

The ley moves on, passing briefly through Columbia, Venezuela and Ecuador before returning to water and the Pacific Ocean, gliding within fifty-seven miles of the only grain of land between Ecuador and New Zealand: Easter Island and its star-gazing moai, before returning home to Kura Tawhiti, 25,000-miles later.

Akhenaten, DNA and that mystical 33.

In our time, the bulldozer of commerce far outruns the spade of archaeology. Whether we shall discover the kingdoms of conscience still buried beneath jungle vines and desert sands remains to be seen. Certainly we have lost tens of thousands of temples to war and ignorance over the last thousand years alone, and yet once in a while the earth discloses its ancient secrets. In the dense jungle of Guatemala, forty-seven citadels have recently been discovered and an estimated thirty more await classification. The largest complex, El Mirador, features some of the biggest temples ever built, each internally connected by causeways, and externally to other temples eight miles away. ⁶⁸ This is but a small glimpse into what a global network must have once resembled, a true world-wide web of sacred power places acting as permanent reference points of an archaic library safeguarding knowledge for the long-term benefit of the human race, where ordinary people were able to plug into the consciousness of a grid whose reach lies far and beyond the confines of this terrestrial sphere.

We saw at the beginning of this chapter how temples were designed as a series of correspondences between the natural world below and the cosmos above. Just how far the builders went in extending this influence to the human body is evidenced by the sourcing of telluric forces, above which the structures were sited, and in turn generated a corresponding effect on the electromagnetic field of the human body. But the ancient architects may have gone a step further in linking together the human body and the temple with the host planet.

Pour out a container of salt or sand, let it pile slowly on a level surface, and watch it form a conical mound. Its slope angle, or angle of repose, will be 32.72º. Why this should be so is a mystery. That enigmatic force called gravity influences the grains to fall just so, and looking around the Earth there are any number of mountains — specifically volcanoes — whose slopes correspond to the very same angle: Mount Fuji, Japan; Chiginagak, Alaska; and Mount Taranaki, New Zealand, are but three examples. All three are also sacred mountains.

Oddly, the measurement of the acceleration of gravity, 32.17 feet per second, bears a close numerical relationship. ⁶⁹

The mystery of 32.72 is so tantalizingly close to that mystical number 33 that it’s worth taking a minute to consider both.

The Zoroastrian creator god Ahura Mazda is said to have made the universe with the power of 33 steps. This secret process is reputedly buried within myths and fables and the underlying philosophies of the Tree of Life, typically known as the Qabalah. Through the thorough understanding of its 32 principles one reaches the 33 ^rd degree or enlightenment. This knowledge would have been a component of the Mystery Schools in Heliopolis, later to become a closely guarded secret within the 33 degrees of Freemasonry, whose roots herald from said academy.

Could 33 be a convenient rounding-off of 32.72? After all, one cannot go around claiming to be a 32.72-degree Mason! Maybe, but why then is the original Scottish Rite Masonry building in Charleston, South Carolina — the ‘Mother Supreme Council of the World’ — situated at latitude 32.78º ? And why did the United States of America, a country founded by Freemasons, establish its border with Mexico at Yuma, where, in the middle of a river, it forms the tip of a pyramid — a Benben — precisely at latitude 32.72º? And why did the Knights Templar, the precursors of the Freemasons, build a castle at Vadum Iacob in Israel, exactly at latitude 33º, followed by another on the coast at Atlit at 32.71º?

The bizarre behavior of the U.S. border at Yuma.

 

 

Stranger still, nearby Mount Carmel, ‘the vineyard of God’ lies at 32.72º; the transfiguration of Jesus on Mount Tabor occurred at 32.69º, while his home in Nazareth is at 32.70º. Like many historical and mythological solar heroes — Alexander the Great, et al — Jesus reaches heaven at the age of 33, which also happens to be the gematrian value of amen , the finale of prayer.

The true fraternity of Freemasonry is an echo of the Followers of Horus, the falcon god of the sky, whose mission was to bring the Light to humanity. The light of the sky is embodied by the Sun. 365 days (the solar year) divided by 11.060606 years (the Sun’s cycle) equals 33. Conversely, the Sun defined as a circumference of 360º divided by 11 (the convenient number of the solar cycle) equals 32.72. This numerical value was not lost on the makers of that mansion of transformation, the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza, whose volume is 327.2 cubic meters; ⁷⁰ nor on the creator of the Earth when It invented water and chose 32.72º F as the boundary at which this essential ingredient of life transmutates into ice.

Which ultimately brings us to a connection between Stonehenge, Heliopolis, and the referencing of that greatest of temples, the human body. The Edfu Building Texts state that after the Followers of Horus set up shop in Innu/Heliopolis they wandered far into the hinterland to found other ‘mansions of the gods’. They did this after a flood, now precisely dated to 9703 BC . Could they have reached the shores of Britain by 8000 BC to survey the original location for what would become the grand enclosure of Stonehenge? Earlier in this chapter we saw how temples on these islands share similar linguistic roots, construction techniques and a knowledge of temple practises common with Egyptian culture; we also know that archaeologists now support a date of 8000 BC as a probable founding of Stonehenge, and that this temple’s connecting points at Lundy Island and Preseli also share a similar date.

There’s one further point to consider. The 12 ^th century chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth stated that this “Giant’s Ring” originated from Africa and was brought to the Celtic lands by a race of giants. ⁷¹ It’s been widely debated that Geoffrey was recounting far older sources when he compiled his work, and undoubtedly the meanings may have been misinterpreted or mistranslated, as they tend to be over long spans of time. It’s unlikely the building material for Stonehenge was transported all the way from Africa — the stones are known to have been sourced in Preseli and the Wiltshire Downs. But what would have traveled from Africa was the knowledge of surveying and temple-building, and enough giant’s graves exist throughout Britain to validate the existence of an older race of people who were physically different to us. Egypt certainly qualifies as a land in Africa, and if you recall, the Akhu Shemsu Hor were described as standing over 12-feet tall.

So, let us now stretch some very long cords and connect these dots.

Measured from the North Pole, the angle subtending Stonehenge and Innu/Heliopolis is 33º.

Where does the human temple fit in to the equation?

The human body and its spine of 33 bones is kept alive by water, which is composed of 33 different substances. ⁷² The other element that keeps us alive is DNA, and modern research shows how DNA “is a remarkably flexible molecule… and thermal fluctuations can produce bending, stretching and un-pairing in the structure.” ⁷³ In its normal state, the angle of rotation of the bDNA helix is 34.61º, but in a dehydrated state it changes into aDNA, as does its angle of rotation, to 32.72º. ⁷⁴

Now it gets interesting. In 1346 BC the pharaoh Akhenaten broke with tradition and moved the capital of Egypt from Thebes to a site at Til el-Amarna, and named it Akhet-aten ('Horizon of the Aten'). ⁷⁵ The prime motivation for Akhenaten dispensing with Thebes was to wrestle the temple away from the power of an increasingly corrupt priesthood, who had by this time usurped control of the rituals and symbols and come to see the temple as a method of crowd control; the second motivation was to return the focus of worship to a monotheistic cult of the Aten, the Sun, which his father Amenhotep III had commenced in Thebes. In essence Akhenaten appears to have revitalized the concept upon which Innu/Heliopolis was founded, for that temple city was the epitome of the veneration of the Sun, created at Zep Tepi as the perfect mound of the gods. There is evidence of a deliberate connection between the two locations, for “in the first boundary stele, it is decreed that the sacred bull of Heliopolis was to be buried in the mountain to the east of Akhet-aten… Bringing the bull to Akhet-aten could show the Heliopolis cult’s central importance in Egyptian religion. It could even have been a way of making the new landscape of Akhet-aten sacred, by providing it with a suitable religious monument in the form of the divine bull.” ⁷⁶

At first glance Akhet-aten seems a ludicrous place to build a temple-city, let alone a capital. It was remote, 120 miles from the nearest complex at Abydos, encircled by desert, and nothing other than the Nile providing an umbilical cord to the rest of the world. Yet two clues suggest a well-conceived plan was at play: first, Akhet-aten is placed precisely at the geodetic center of Egypt; second, although some historians state the area of the city to have been a virgin site, Akhenaten, in his oblation to the Aten, praises the new capital as “the seat of the First Occasion, which he had made for [Aten] that he might rest in it.” ⁷⁷ As we read earlier, to be a seat of the First Occasion the site must be an original primordial mound, in other words, it must stand on ground previously consecrated by the Seven Sages and the builder gods at Zep Tepi . That’s 8,000 years earlier. ⁷⁸ Thus, when the bull from Innu/Heliopolis was interred at Akhet-aten, it was to imbue the energy from one primordial mound upon another, perhaps because during that great span of time the site had been left to lie fallow. In any event, it established a symbolic link between the two sites, bestowing upon the new city the beliefs of that older academy to the north. ⁷⁹ Certainly there were high-ranking people within the court of Akhet-aten who honored the Heliopolitan tradition, one of whom was Hesuefemiunu, “He-gives-praise-in-Innu.” ⁸⁰ There are also suggestions that in preparation for kingship, Akhenaten would have undoubtedly been initiated into the mysteries at Heliopolis, in accordance with the custom. ⁸¹

So, if we act as Akhenaten did: take the 33º location marking the relationship between the Earth, Stonehenge and Heliopolis, and move it south to create a new relationship between Earth, Akhet-aten and Stonehenge, the exact angle between the sites changes, just like our DNA, to 32.72º.

The correspondence between the temple and the land, and ultimately, its influence on people is a grand design that evolved over many thousands of years. It certainly makes one appreciate the ambitious scale of engineering that took place in ancient times, not to mention the role it played in the elevation of the human spirit.

Still, to fully appreciate the interaction between temple and body, the best evidence comes from direct experience.

 

 

ACT II

 

 

9. A VERY PERSONAL ODYSSEY.

 

 

And felt the hillside thronged by souls unseen,

Who knew the interest in me, and were keen

That man alive should understand man dead.

— John Masefield

 

 

 

Mu’adhdhin, or muezzin, at Mosque d’El Azhar.

 

 

 

Once upon a time in the Great Pyramid.

The call to prayer by the mu’adhdhin , his sonorous voice drifting like an ibis across sun-baked mud brick roofs, is the romantic ideal of Egypt. Except when it occurs at six in the morning and you are not genetically equipped to awaken before Ra has risen at least thirty degrees above the horizon. I admit it, I’m one of those people. But once the bedroom curtains were drawn to reveal the towering peaks of the Giza pyramids, I knew this dawn would require a break from my habitual sleeping pattern. Besides, the small group I was with had to reach the plateau by 7 a.m. or risk missing out on the daily allotment of passes into the Great Pyramid.

It was my privilege to be part of this group, under the stewardship of Isabelle Kingston, a former bank liaison officer who took a leap of faith to develop her natural gift as a trance medium under the wing of another psychic luminary, Roger St. John Webster. Since then, her work as an intuitive and healer has earned the respect of even the English police. Over the years Isabelle and I have become great friends, and by studying alongside her for a decade I can confidently call her one of my mentors. The sign of a great teacher is that they don’t teach, but rather refine you through subtle guidance while you experience the world of the invisible for yourself. And that, I believe, is Isabelle’s great gift.

Once in a while we visit sacred places and quietly go about the business of cleansing subtle energy where it may have been polluted from centuries of neglect or wrong action. Sometimes we are asked to be conduits of light and re-energize the effulgent spirit of place; along with similar groups around the world, we tend the grid.

Through these experiences you quickly discover just how powerful we humans really are, and by slowly developing your own sensory perception it’s remarkable how simple it is to sense and see the invisible universe. Like driving a car, the more you do it the more adept you become. Everyone is born with this ability, but somewhere along the path to adulthood or among the towers of statistics or halls of analysis we lose sight of this gift and become skeptical of the existence of other realities. But as our predecessors knew all to well, they do, and they lie but a whisper away.

On any given day the inner passages of the Great Pyramid are a-howling with the refracted echoes of over-excited children and wide-eyed tourists; my first reaction was disappointment, to have traveled this far (and to have risen at the crack of dawn) to stand in a musty, humid tunnel filled with a decibel level I last experienced at a Black Sabbath concert. Nevertheless, along with five members of the group I was probably happier than the rest of our party, who had been unable to secure tickets and would be experiencing this monument from the outside. For anyone who has never been inside a pyramid, the notion that millions of tons of stone are carefully balanced all around you is disconcerting, to say the least. Claustrophobes need not apply. Breathing can be problematic, the air is laden, the smell of musty stone is everywhere. For someone like me who is 6” 5’ tall, some passages are torturous and humiliatingly short. Yet none of this bothered me as we ascended the Grand Gallery in the barren light. I felt very much part of the structure, as though the building and I were one and indivisible.

The six of us reached the voluminous vault of the King’s Chamber, it’s perfectly bonded, monolithic red granite blocks showcasing the ancient’s world’s fluent ability to work the hardest stone on earth like pastry. The two women in the group immediately felt uncomfortable in the chamber and exited, along with the hordes of tourists. Within minutes, the three men and I had the whole temple to ourselves, an incredible stroke of luck considering that only a suitcase of bakshish can buy you private, quiet time in this wondrous temple. And yet, there we were, alone and silent as gold.

Unusual things began to happen: the pump from the contraption that passed for an air conditioner stopped churning; then the lights turned off. We were immersed in total darkness, in the core of the Great Pyramid. Out of the four, Aaron and I had had more experience in the ways of sacred space, and he suggested we do what we were taught to do, which is honor the spirit of place; one of the others then suggested I lead a toning of the chamber, to which I acquiesced, since I’m generally not comfortable in the limelight. But since there was no light, there was no problem. I tried to find a sweet spot in the coal black chamber, about a third of the way back from the ‘sarcophagus’. Again, that sinuous feeling between building and body overcame me, and sounds the likes of which I had never made before, or since, came out from my throat.

As the others joined in, the natural acoustics brewed our voices into an intoxicating melody. It was at this point that my life and my perception of temples changed forever. Emanating out of the granite walls came a group of tall people, all dressed in a type of white silk, and circled the chamber. I still remember turning my head to look at them all (remember, this is in total darkness), there must have been thirty or so. They bowed their heads and I bowed mine. It felt like a reunion with a long lost family, I did not want them to go, my head was filled with many questions to ask. I don’t know how many minutes this lasted, it didn’t matter. We were in a conclave with magic.

No sooner had we stopped toning when the two dim light bulbs slowly glowed back to life. I looked across at the others, and although no words were exchanged I knew each of these people had also experienced something profound. We took turns lying inside the ‘sarcophagus’, maybe five minutes at a time. When my turn came I was concerned that, being so tall, I would be a bad fit. But no; the granite, softened by centuries of visitors, embraced my body like a pillow, the flat of my head and the soles of my feet being exactly the length of the receptacle, my shoulders being the precise width. I remember making a mental note that I ought to get a bed made to these specifications on my return home. Further chamber activity was curtailed by the sound of an excited Arab voice hailing from somewhere deep below. We’d probably overstayed our welcome and decided to make haste. In perfect silence.

The bright desert light blinded our exit into the fresh air. Aaron and I exchanged dazed glances, it was obvious we both wanted to say something, so I initiated: “Did you see what I saw up there?”

“You mean the priests, in a circle, all in white!?”

You can’t fake moments like this. As the other two came into earshot I remarked on how the ‘sarcophagus’ had been such a perfect fit for a tall guy like me. To which each of them replied in turn, “It was the same for me.” Now, here are four men with different heights — and girths — ranging from 5”5’ to 6”5’: a variation of one foot. How could a solid stone box be one-size-fits-all? We walked back to meet the rest of the group, probably looking shell-shocked.

“So, how was it?” Isabelle asked. Seeing that I was struggling for words, she told of the rest of the group’s morning — how they ‘tuned-in’ to the origins of the pyramids, among other things, then decided to ‘look-in’ on us to see if we were behaving ourselves inside the pyramid. “Well, that was a fun experience, wasn’t it?” she said, “how you went there with right intent, honoured the site, and the priests came out of the stones.”

By now it was obvious Aaron and I had not been hallucinating.

“But what about the thing with the sarcophagus?” I mumbled.

“It’s living stone. If you use it for the right reasons, and the site understands this, the stone moulds itself to you. Did you go somewhere nice?”

Indeed I traveled far, visiting several interesting people whose names I do not recall, or for that matter what they told me, except for snippets of information which no doubt would be important in my future work; I also traveled to a number of extraordinary environments I’d never seen before, yet which felt all too familiar. In a matter of a few minutes I had been transported to faraway universes, the Otherworld. Makes one marvel at the quality of initiatory experience that could be possible under more favorable conditions.

Needless to say, the experience in the Great Pyramid altered my perception of the world as well as my understanding of why temples were created, and what they can do for you, and to you.

Throughout ancient cultures the temple was looked upon as a divine being, and as such, its foundation and construction gave material shape to a divine force who originally had been conceived as a god. In Egypt, the temple was awakened by the Morning Hymns, later adopted by the Cistercians as chants, during which all the parts of the site were addressed as an animate being who is awoken from slumber during the hours of darkness. ¹ But it’s one thing to be book-smart about these matters and another to have direct validation of the process. For me, the experience in Giza was that more valid because I had not searched for it, I hadn’t gone seeking an otherworldly encounter so I could talk (and write) about it later. Such a position serves little purpose other than to validate what you so desperately want, and in the end, it will not be constructive. But walking into a sacred place and allowing yourself to be open to possibility, that’s the place where fascinating things occur. It is the thin line between rational and mystical, the abode that painters, musicians and other creatives seek. It is the assembly room of inspiration, of gods. The skeptic will never understand this, for by staking a concrete and antagonistic position the spirit of place will respect that and will never find him. The spirit of place is not there to work for you, it exists to meet you halfway along the bridge, should you make the effort to cross it.

It would be eight years after my experience when I came across a book by Paul Brunton, an early 20 ^th century journalist who became dissatisfied with the credo of the modern world, and walked the globe meeting philosophers, visiting sacred places and writing about his encounters and experiences along the way, in layman’s terms. His philosophical writings alone cover over 20,000 pages. While reading of his travels in Egypt I discovered he also had had a personal experience in the Great Pyramid.

Learning of Brunton’s intention to stay the night inside the temple, a local Arab friend warned him, that “every inch of ground is haunted. There is an army of ghosts and Genni in that territory.” ² Traditions of the Bedouin going back centuries do tell of lights regularly swirling around the pyramids — specifically the third, smaller pyramid — that they claim are guardian spirits. These lights spiral around the pyramid several times before ascending to the apex, where they discharge like a flame. ³ Unperturbed, Brunton proceeded to stay the night, just as Napoleon had done a century earlier. His experience seems to have been less than favorable at first, but as he relaxed, the energy of the chamber changed in rhythm to his feelings. The following passage from his account took my breath away: “I became conscious of a new presence in the chamber, of someone friendly and benevolent who stood at the entrance and looked down upon me with kind eyes. With his arrival the atmosphere changed completely… He approached my stony seat, and I saw that he was followed by another figure. Both halted at my side and regarded me with grave looks, pregnant with prophetic meaning. I felt that some momentous hour of my life was at hand.

“In my vision the apparition of these two beings presented an unforgettable picture. Their white robes, their sandaled feet, their wise aspect, their tall figures — all these return to the mind’s eye… There was a light a-glimmer all around them, which in a most uncanny manner lit up the part of the room. Indeed, they looked more than men, bearing the light mien of demi-gods.” ⁴

Brunton wrote about his experience in the 1930s, over seventy years before mine, yet the descriptions are identical. With more time and quiet to work with, Brunton was even able to converse with these spirits, who inquired of him, “why dost thou come into this place, seeking to evoke the secret powers? Are not mortal ways enough for thee?” ⁵ Brunton makes it very clear that the voice was heard inside his head, much like a deaf person might. And he’s absolutely correct: anyone who works with subtle forces — clairvoyants, for example —state that the communication is heard within, and different in tone to one’s mental thoughts; also, the pattern of language is consistent with the recipient’s so the conversation can be understood, hence why in many valid trance channelings the syntax is often awkward, just as communication between two vastly different cultures would be. This happens to me the more I work in sacred sites — at Castle Hill, for example, as shared in the previous chapter.

But let’s return to the riveting dialogue that ensued: “They are not!” Paul answered. The priest continued: “The stir of many crowds in the cities comforts the trembling heart of man. Go back, mingle with thy fellows, and thou wilt soon forget the light fancy that brings thee here…The way of Dream will draw thee far from the fold of reason. Some have gone upon it — and come back mad. Turn now, whilst there is yet time, and follow the path appointed for mortal feet.”

Brunton didn’t miss a breath in replying, so sure was he of his chosen path: “I must follow this way. There is none other for me now.”

One of the priests bent down and uttered in his ear. “He who gains touch with us loses kin with the world. Art thou able to walk alone?”

“I don’t know.”

“So be it. Thou hast chosen. Abide by thy choice for there is now no recall. Farewell.” Brunton was then left alone with the second priest: “…the mighty lords of the secret powers have taken thee into their hands. Thou art to be led into the Hall of Learning tonight.”

Brunton was instructed to stretch himself in the sarcophagus, which in the old days, he was told, would be lined with papyrus reeds. Brunton wrote that his experience in the sarcophagus was hard to explain — as indeed was mine. He describes being overcome with a sensation like an anesthetic that rendered his muscles taut, like a paralyzing lethargy. Ironically, I experienced an identical sensation not just in the pyramid but several years earlier inside a genuine crop circle, during which I was levitated and taken out of body. ⁶ After Brunton had gotten past the shock of what was happening — and the experience can be a little discomforting at first — his consciousness went walkabout on a very personal journey. ⁷

I was glad not to have read Brunton’s notes before my own personal excursion, for no doubt they would have influenced me in some way. The warning made to him — how he would have problems fitting-in with modern life once he had made contact with the invisible — is all too true a statement for people who choose this path into the knowledge, one that super-rational people cannot accept because their minds are closed to the remarkable and the unseen. It is a lonely journey, at best, but one that I, for one, would not exchange for anything, even in spite of the obstacles it has brought. What makes the path tolerable are the experiences, which I sarcastically refer to as ‘fringe benefits’. And besides, it’s an excuse to indulge in 16-year old Lagavulin, otherwise known in the trade as ‘research’.

I was interested in what the second priest-spirit went on to tell Brunton, because there was a ring of truth about it: “In this ancient fane lies the lost record of the early races of man and of the Covenant which they made with their Creator… Know too that chosen men were brought here of old to be shown this Covenant that they might return to their fellows and keep the great secret alive. Take back with thee the warning that when men forsake their Creator and look on their fellows with hate, as with the princes of Atlantis in whose time this Pyramid was built, they are destroyed by the weight of their own iniquity, even as the people of Atlantis were destroyed.

”It was not the Creator who sank Atlantis, but the selfishness, the cruelty, the spiritual blindness of people who dwelt on those doomed lands. The Creator loves all; but the lives of men are governed by invisible laws which He has set over them.”

Paul is then told why he has been allowed to experience this crossing of the veil: “because thou art a man versed in these things, and has come among us bearing goodwill and understanding in thy heart, some satisfaction thou shalt have.” ⁸ Still inside the sarcophagus, he is led through passageways and becomes disoriented when looking for the door into a chamber holding the secret records, whereupon the priest offers sagely advice, whose relevance is as important now as it was then: “It matters not whether thou discovered the door or not. Find but the secret passage within the mind that will lead thee to the hidden chamber within thine own soul, and thou shalt have found something worthy indeed. The mystery of the Great Pyramid is the mystery of thine own self. The secret chambers and ancient records are all contained in thine own nature. The lesson of the Pyramid is that man must turn inward, must venture to the unknown centre of his being to find his soul, even as he must venture to the unknown depths of this fane to find its profoundest secret.” ⁹

A sword of light at Stonehenge.

One person who knew all too well about the importance of connecting with ancient temples was the architect and psychic researcher Frederick Bligh Bond who, in 1908, was appointed by the Church of England as director of excavations at Glastonbury Abbey. Over the course of thirteen years Bond developed a deep connection to the spirit of place, which led him to discover buildings and obelisks buried by layers of silt and time. He did so through a process called automatic writing, in which the spirit of monks who once resided at the abbey instructed, through Bond’s writing, where to dig so that the former plan of the abbey may yet see the light of day. What is illuminating about Bond’s written notes is how the vernacular of the language is closer to 13 ^th century English than to Bond’s own period. Unorthodox his method may have been, but Bond certainly succeeded in unearthing much of the foundations seen today in the abbey grounds. Sadly, for all his gifts, he was fired because the methods were unacceptable to the Church. Which, when you think about it, is strange coming from an institution that supposedly believes in a holy spirit. ¹⁰

Bond’s experience is another example of how, in his own words, “connecting with the energy of place often brings about great revelations.” Such interactions come in all kinds of ways, and when least expected. In the previous chapter I discussed how an innocent wonder concerning the possible connection between Celtic and Maori art took me to Kura Tawhiti in New Zealand, only to be ‘told’ at the site to look ”for what lies opposite” and discovered a previously unknown global ley line. Or a ley circle, as the case may be. And yet, I had not gone to the temple with the intention of soliciting a response, I merely went with a question in my mind. As my colleagues John Michell, Paul Broadhurst and Hamish Miller have experienced, the assistance comes when one adopts a certain grace, an acceptance and surrender to the temple and to its presiding force. Like a library, these are repositories of very old knowledge, accumulated from millennia of experiences, and as Paul Brunton discovered that night inside the pyramid, when one’s heart is true it sets off an energetic chain-reaction. If one is not prepared for the consequences, the interaction can be alarming at first. It’s as if your body and its multitude of frequencies ¹¹ carries a PIN number that the temple reads, recognizes, and unlocks the doors to many secret chambers.

In 1987 while living in London with my then wife, I suddenly felt compelled to travel to Stonehenge for the first time. There was absolutely no underlying rationality to this: it was a Friday rush-hour, August, hot, in central London: only a person who is certifiable will drive during such a confluence of unfavorable circumstances. But some unyielding magnetic force pulled me. When we finally did arrive at Stonehenge I was amazed to find the place overrun with rock bands, huge crowds of people wearing painted faces and odd costumes, and an untypical carnival atmosphere. I asked a policeman directing traffic what the commotion was all about, to which he replied, “Harmonic Convergence, mate.” Later I would discover just what a momentous occasion this was in the world of esoterica.

On my second visit, many years later, the rigors of professional life had eased somewhat to allow me the luxury of spending quality time researching what really moved my heart: the world of very old and upright stones. I had entered into the spirit of the quest. That evening, another of my mentors and friend, Jane Ross, secured private access into Stonehenge at night, a very rare opportunity, and one in a long string of coincidences which I would later come to understand as the way the invisible world prefers to communicate.

Like Isabelle Kingston, Jane is a gifted sensitive as well as an accountant. Since I was still an initiate, I didn’t want to intrude on her work at the site. She suggested I find a stone that ‘spoke to me’ and we’d reconnect in an hour, which is the time allotted for extra-curricular activity at Stonehenge. I found my stone – or rather, it made its presence known to me – sat down, closed my eyes.

I heard the guard whisper somewhere in my vicinity to “come back to the gate when you’re ready, sir.” Two hours had elapsed.

Jane and I made our way out humbly, past the monolithic sarsen trilithons, and back to the waiting guard. There was little going on that night and so the three of us sat and exchanged pleasantries while gazing at the rings of stones outlined in the dim twilight. Some of the caretakers at Stonehenge are people who’ve served in special combat units of the British Military, and although they have seen hard action their demeanor takes on the most peaceful, zen-like quality when talking about the enigmatic stones, particularly about the things they’ve witnessed: “First it’s the large balls of light, incandescent like, which fly through here at incredible speed. Sometimes our boys are following them in helicopters. Then there are the figures dressed in strange, period costume, and we think, ‘hallo, some joker’s jumped the fence again’, and we chase them characters into the stones. We know all the hiding places but we never see them again. They just evaporate. Then there’s the fog, real pea-soupers, can’t see a blessed thing in front of you. I go check on them stones, it’s so dense you can’t see them until your nose is right up to them, and you go inside and look up and there’s clear sky. Stars. Outside there’s fog, inside the weather’s perfect.

“The best are the cadets. They come here to get away from the missus, thinking this is an easy job, a few extra quid in the pocket. After their first apparition they run across the field, jump that high fence, get into their cars, they don’t even come back for the pay. Did you want sugar with your tea?”

Jane and I retired to a nearby research facility — otherwise known as the pub — to recap the day’s events. “So, did anything interesting happen to you?” she asked.

“Not sure, all I remember is closing my eyes for five minutes to take-in the feel of the place, and two hours later I landed back in my body with a thud when I heard this voice whispering our time was up. I had the strangest dream, though. The stone felt like it wrapped me. There was this tall figure of a man, looked as if he had wings, it was hard to see, and he handed me this blazing sword, as though made of light.”

Jane stopped drinking. “That happened to you !? Oh, boy.” I suddenly had the uneasy feeling that life as I knew it was about to change.

Next day we met Isabelle for a long tea and what would be the start of an even longer friendship. The subject of my ‘experience’ came up in conversation. “You know what,” Jane said to Isabelle, “this guy goes into Stonehenge for the first time and he’s given a sword of light by Michael.”

“Who’s Michael?” I wondered.

“That’s archangel Michael, to you, young man,” replied Isabelle. “Well, you certainly have your work cut out for you!”

They laughed. I knew it would be hard work from that point.

It has, and it’s been illuminating.

Michael (slight return).

In a perfect world, hindsight would be foresight. As I would discover later, people on the path of the Mysteries are often recipients of the sword of light as a symbol of protection and guidance by the spirit world, as they try to make sense of ‘the Knowledge’ so it can be learned, taught, and promulgated from age to age. It is one of the highest privileges because in this cynical world it is one of the hardest jobs. It comes with heavy responsibility, and as others have similarly found, life as you know it falls apart. It is not for the weak willed, and had I known any of this, chances are I’d not abandoned my comfortable existence in the modern world. But as I said before, the fringe benefits are amazing.

In the very early days of my desire to understand the reason behind ancient places of power (although I ought to point out that by the age of four I was already drawing pyramids), I learned by helping others who already knew better, and followed their example. Fortunately, I bumped into people who really knew what they were doing, and over the years I’ve witnessed wondrous events manifest around them.

One sunny, summer afternoon in Wiltshire, Isabelle’s group was called out to clear the energy of a mound which had become tainted through hundreds of years of abuse. Depending on the time of the week and people’s disposition, there is never any idea as to how many will show up. Sometimes three; if tea and cake are involved afterwards, fifteen. At Chisenbury mound, all twenty-eight people showed up and without any promise of culinary delights. That’s when you know very serious work is at hand.

Circling the large ring barrow, the group gathered their concentration under a shining sun and calm, azure sky. Following the customary ceremonies, after the third evoking of the words “Archangel Michael” the heavens darkened, the wind whipped up, clouds closed up the sky like a velvet purse and hail and sleet descended upon the group. What I ‘saw’ floating out of the mound were grotesque and distorted entities doing their utmost to break our concentration and with it the power of the united circle. We persevered for twenty minutes until the site seemed infused with a blinding brightness. Calm returned, the sun shone once more, not a cloud in the blue sky. We were soaked. Two hundred yards away not even the cars were wet.

“Whatever just came out of there, it was pretty ugly,” I remarked to Isabelle.

“Yes, and if half the group had seen it, they would’ve bolted for their lives!”

Oh, the fun we have.

I’d often read accounts of shamans working with the skills taught through the Mysteries Schools to bring rain to parched farmland, but until you experience it, the stories are just abstract experiences that happen to someone else. It taught me much about the power of place, how it becomes corrupted through misuse, and how it can be restored to its correct function by the power of individuals sharing a common and unshakable belief. At some distant point in time, the Akhu Shemsu Hor must have engaged in similar work while setting up the primordial mounds of the gods.

Michael. Again.

After years of walking and feeling the energy of place at hundreds of temples around the world, you realize the invisible universe has a very puckish sense of humor. It provides much needed respite on a road that often requires your full concentration, regularly involves heavy reading, and without question, arduous quests to unpronounceable places to look under the strangest of stones. Humor is the key, and the key lies in the word itself: hu , an ancient name for god, and amour , love. When you engage in hu-amour you participate in the act of god-loving, in a non-religious sense.

The late and great dowser Hamish Miller once told me of his adventure to Skellig Michael and the Celtic monastery propped atop this vertiginous, pyramidal island of basalt, nine miles off the coast of Ireland. The madness of a group of monks living there is only eclipsed by the insanity of getting there. Visitors need not be discouraged: eleven months of howling wind, pounding surf, and a thriving colony of gannets, razorbills, guillemots and storm petrels and their descending effluence will do that. But for the sake of research it is worth it, after all, Hamish would discover it to be the starting place of the Apollo and Athena ley.

Nine miles from the Irish coast it may be, but this loneliest of mansions of the archangel Michael, barely 300 acres in size, is impossible to locate in thick fog in the middle of the Atlantic, despite assurances from the fishing captain steering the tiny boat: “Tis over here, sum’where. Or so it was yest’day. ‘Tis a wonderful sight, if only you could see it.” Miller had no intention of becoming the first Scotsman to reach America on an oversize skiff, so he took out his iron dowsing rod, connected with the spirit of the island, and sure enough the rods began to point in a specific direction, which the boat captain followed bemusedly. In no time at all, lo and behold, the party arrived at their intended destination, rendering the skipper speechless, a rarity for an Irishman.

Meanwhile in the warm and tame environment of Salisbury cathedral — another of Michael’s many homes — I was focusing on locating energy nodes, and unusual deviations from architectural norm that might reveal tidbits of concealed information; the architects of the Gothic were very cunning when it came to hiding knowledge from less benevolent eyes. Having scouted the length of the cathedral I worked out that, like Luxor, Salisbury’s floor plan is designed according to the chakras of the human body. By standing at specific places along the nave, the pilgrim stops and feels the gradual upwelling of telluric energy rise from the base of the spine, following through to the heart (the cross of the nave and transept), the throat (choir), third-eye (altar) and finally, the crown (Trinity Chapel).

I returned to the edge of the choir to take stock of the notes, pausing to connect with the inspired mind that created such timeless art. Midway into my reverie I noticed something ambling towards me just above the flagstone floor: an orb of incandescent purple light, about the size of a large fist, hovered past my ankle, with a vapor trail wandering from side to side like the tail of a fish. In my head I could hear it: “Hi, how’s the work going?”

“Fine thanks, how about you?” I replied out loud.

“Great. Follow me. Too dee doo…”

Flustered, I looked around at the visitors walking down the choir. “Did you see that? Did anyone see that?” All to no avail. As far as everyone around me was concerned, I was certifiable, with horns growing out of my forehead. I paused and turned to look up at the priest setting down his bible in the pulpit, who gave me the widest grin and several nods of the head. Obviously I was not the first person to experience a conscious being dressed as a ball of light.

I followed the path of the orb and arrived at the rear of the church, and below its outstanding stained glass window, built by a glazier from that other great Gothic mansion, Chartres. There are very few opportune times when the back-light from the sun shines through this window, but when it does, as it did at that moment, it revealed a second design — a large purple pyramid bisected by a serpent, with each node of the chakras rising upwards to the tip of its Benben, where a burst of light radiated in a tribute to revelation.

How all these incidences remind me of the incantation etched on the outer wall of the Pronaos of Edfu: “When you have reached the land of the First Generation… you have awakened the gods on their resting place.” ¹²