THE MAGIC OF PRIMITIVE MAN
In his book Man, God and Magic, the ethnologist Ivar Lissner proposes an absorbing thesis: that our primitive ancestors believed in one God, and that they gradually degenerated, through the evil influence of tribal magicians or witches into worshippers of many gods. He argues this from primitive cave paintings, which seem to show the sacrifice of bears and reindeer. Certainly, primitive man’s interest in bears is still one of the great unsolved mysteries of anthropology. They were huge and very dangerous, with enormous strength, claws like razors and despite their bulk, incredible speed. To primitive peoples, from the North American Indians to the modern Ainu of Japan and Orochon of northern Siberia, the bear is believed to possess supernatural powers, and may be ritually sacrificed as a messenger to the gods. The bear was one of the most dangerous creatures of the ancient world, yet Neanderthal man went out of his way to hunt it when there was plenty of other prey. The suspicion that there was some magical or religious significance in bear hunts seems to be confirmed by the discovery of a cave in Drachenloch, Switzerland, stacked with the skulls of bears that seem to have been ritually sacrificed. Similar finds have been made in other remote caves; bear skulls placed on altars, or even on a rough-hewn representation of a headless bear. This is indubitable evidence that Neanderthal man – between seventy and eighty thousand years ago – possessed a religion. It is a startling thought. These creatures lived in caves, and were nomadic. They knew about fire, and could make spears by burning sticks to a point; otherwise they had no arts and no culture. Cave art and primitive sculpture belong to the epoch of his Magdalenian successor, Cro-Magnon man. The Neanderthalers lived hard, violent lives, and to judge by their remains, most of them died young. Yet they worshipped a god and made sacrifices to him.
Lissner argues that primitive people were monotheistic on the evidence of their sacrifices. For example, the skeleton of a deer was found in an Arctic lake, held down by a lump of rock, with evidence pointing to ritual sacrifice. But, argues Lissner, the modern Tungus of this area would not sacrifice in this way because each lake and hill has its spirit, and a carcass would offend the lord of the lake. Man probably abandoned this form of sacrifice by submersion when he began to believe that there was a lord of the forest, a lord of the mountains, a lord of the water. How did the change come about? Through the increasing influence of magic and magicians.
We know that Cro-Magnon art, as found in the caves at Lascaux or Montespan or Altamira, was not ‘art’ in our modern sense, but part of a magic ritual, still practised today by primitive peoples. The Pygmies of the Congo draw in the sand a picture of the animal they intend to hunt, then fire an arrow into its throat; Tungus carve an animal they intend to hunt; Yeniseis make a wooden fish before going fishing, and so on. The Pygmies leave the picture of their quarry, with the arrow in its throat, until they have caught the animal; then they rub some of the animal’s blood on the picture and withdraw the arrow. They believe that this ritual establishes some kind of mysterious contact between the hunter and the hunted; now the animal cannot escape. No matter how fast it runs, or where it hides, the hunter moves towards it inexorably, guided by fate. It is the animal’s destiny to become his prey.
The ‘scientific’ attitude to these activities is that they are primitive superstitions, merely a sign of ignorance of cause and effect. If they happen to be successful, this is only because they create a feeling of success in the hunter; it is self-hypnosis. I would argue that this view may completely miss the point. The hunter’s mind becomes totally concentrated on his prey by the ritual, activating the same powers that led Rhine’s subjects to such high scores when they first tried influencing the fall of dice.
What I am suggesting here, and throughout this book, is that whenever man has a strong sense of the value of something, he activates his ‘powers’, the powers that lie beyond the violet end of his mental spectrum. Man has developed to his present stage by learning to do many things mechanically; he learns some difficult skill with a conscious effort, and then passes it on to his subconscious ‘robot’, which learns to do it efficiently and automatically – riding a bicycle, speaking a foreign language. But to do a thing automatically means that you do not need to concentrate on it, and man’s increasing use of his ‘robot’ has meant that he makes less and less use of his faculty of intense concentration. This explains why modern man is inclined to disbelieve in ‘powers’ beyond the violet end of the spectrum; he hardly ever uses them.
However, these powers operate whenever his sense of values is deeply touched – that is, when he really feels concern about something. After all, the purpose of these faculties is the same as the purpose of all our other powers: to make life run smoothly, to avert catastrophe. The Journal for the Society of Psychical Research records a typical case (March 1897) in which a clergyman’s wife sent her little daughter to play in the ‘railway garden’, a walled garden near the railway embankment. ‘A few minutes after her departure I distinctly heard a voice, as it were, within me, say, “Send for her back, or something dreadful will happen to her.” At the same time I was seized with violent trembling, and great terror took possession of me.’ The child was brought back, safe and well. and later that afternoon, an engine and tender jumped the rails and killed three people in the railway garden. The phenomenon can work the other way, as can be seen in a case quoted in Phantasms of the Living by Gurney, Myers and Podmore; a Mrs. Bettany described how, as a child of ten, she saw a vision of her mother lying, apparently dead, on the floor of her bedroom. She was on a country walk at the time, and fetched a doctor. They hurried to the bedroom, and found her mother lying on the floor in the position she had seen in the vision; she had had a heart attack, but was saved by the intervention of the doctor. Corroboration of her experience by her father is also published: ‘I distinctly remember being surprised by seeing my daughter in company with the family doctor ... and I asked “Who is ill?” She replied “Mamma.” She led the way to the White Room, where we found my wife lying in a swoon on the floor. It was when I asked when she had been taken ill that I found it must have been after my daughter had left the house.’
The account does not add whether there was a strong bond between mother and daughter, but there undoubtedly was.
Primitive magic was no more than the use of these powers; it was, in the most basic sense, ‘sympathetic magic’. Lissner emphasises that the shamans of Siberia (where the word originates) were not ‘witch doctors’ or magicians, but something closer to mediums. The Manchurian word samarambi means ‘to excite oneself’, while samdambi means to dance. The shaman excites himself into a divine frenzy or ecstasy through drum beating and dancing, until he passes into a trance, when his spirit is supposed to have left his body. In his trance he makes the sounds of various birds and animals – he is supposed to be able to understand their language. The anthropologist Mirca Eliade describes shamans as ‘specialists in ecstasy’, and cites an impressive list of attestations to their powers, including thought-reading, clairvoyance, firewalking and discovering thieves with the aid of a mirror. Lissner describes the tribal ceremony:
A fire burns on the ground. Framed against the night by the red glow of the flickering flames, the shaman begins to move rhythmically, drumming, dancing, leaping and singing. The little bells on his robe tinkle, his iron ornaments clatter, and the Tungus sit there in the dim light, their attention riveted on his every move. The shaman’s excitement communicates itself to the circle of spectators, and the larger the audience, the stronger the empathy between them and him. They all know each other, being interrelated and members of the same clan. Drawn together by the combination of night and firelight, they allow the monotonous rhythm of the drums to waft them irresistibly away from the everyday world. The excitement mounts, leaping like a spark from one man to the next, until all are near ecstasy and each is at once performer and spectator, doctor and patient, hammer and anvil.*
Lissner adds: ‘I can only confirm Shirokogorov’s assertion that those assembled around a shaman experience a satisfaction infinitely deeper than we ourselves do after a musical or dramatic performance.’ This is an interesting comment. For after all, what is the purpose of music, of all art? It is an attempt to counteract the effect of the ‘robot’, what we might call ‘the diffusion effect’, since it is the opposite of concentration. Human beings have this strong tendency to drift into a state of ‘indifference’, and so waste consciousness that might be valuably employed. And indifference is like falling asleep; in fact, my sense of values has gone to sleep. Any crisis or challenge serves as an alarm clock, to jerk me out of my boredom. But if I listen with total concentration to a Mozart piano sonata, the same effect is achieved. It channels my emotions and mental energies and prevents the ‘diffusion effect’.
If the human mind has this innate tendency to ‘devalue’ reality, then we can immediately grasp the importance of (a) a set of intensely held beliefs (i.e. values), and (b) the kind of concentration and concern demanded by primitive magical ceremonies. A Catholic may be transported by the mass, but he still knows that it is a symbolic ceremony, that if a pathologist was called in he would quickly verify that the bread and wine have not become flesh and blood. Even so, he is transported, because the mass concentrates the mind upon a ‘reality’ more important than the here and now, and this mental act – of putting the present firmly in its place – raises the spirit. The savage believes completely that the shaman’s soul has taken leave of his body and is now journeying in heaven or hell. (The shaman of the Altaians has a young birch tree, with notches cut in it, placed in front of him; these represent the various heavens, and as his spirit ascends from one to the other, he describes them in detail from his trance state.) He believes implicitly everything the shaman tells him from his trance. The result must be far more deeply moving and emotionally exhausting than any Wagner opera.
The shaman himself has achieved his priesthood through the most terrifying ordeals, an initiation through pain. Fierce rubbing of his face with an abrasive substance is intended to remove the old skin, and even the second skin is rubbed away, symbolising total rebirth. An Eskimo shaman may have to spend five days in freezing water. Sometimes, the spirit of a dead shaman takes up its abode in the body of his successor; then the new shaman undergoes intense agony and the belief that he has been totally hacked to pieces and devoured by spirits. He ‘sees’ all this in a trance state, and Lissner states that ‘blood-shot patches appear on his body, his clothes sometimes become stained with blood, and gouts of blood discolour his couch of freshly stripped birchbark’. An older shaman has undergone this ‘dismemberment’ three times. The aim of this initiation is to ‘shake the mind awake’, to crystallise the will. For the chief problem of human beings is passivity, ‘the triviality of everydayness’. If you watch television all evening, or read too long, you feel a ‘freezing’ of your mind; it congeals; your eyes become capable only of a blank, dull stare. The same is true, to a lesser degree, of all routine existence. The problem is to stir the mind out of its lethargy, to make it reach out further. This is why all asceticism begins with stern self-restraint, sometimes self-torment. The thirteenth-century German mystic Suso wore a leather shirt studded with tacks whose points were turned inwards, and for eight years he carried on his back a wooden cross studded with pointed nails; mystical enlightenment came to him suddenly at the end of sixteen years of suffering.
In parenthesis, it is interesting to note that the legend of the northern Siberians declares that the spirits of shamans are born in a larch tree, in nests of varying sizes, and a large bird like an eagle lays iron eggs which turn into shamans. The legend bears a curious resemblance to the Tree of Life, which Yeats describes as a universal symbol (see p. 132).
Lissner argues convincingly that cave drawings of Palaeolithic man – some of them twenty thousand years old – represent shamans performing magical operations, men wearing the masks of birds or skins of bison or deer antlers. Wands or batons found in the caves resemble the drumsticks of the modern shaman. No drums have been found, but this is understandable.
This, then, is Lissner’s picture of the life of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon men, based upon seventeen years of research. In certain ways, they were more primitive than any primitive tribes in the world today. They lived in caves or, later, tents of skin, and they wore animal skins. They worshipped God, and the shamans were their priests; like the Hebrews of the Old Testament, they sacrificed animals to their God. Like any modern priest, the shaman’s functions were wholly benevolent: he diagnosed and treated illness, and performed spells to aid the hunters of the tribe.
And then, roughly sixty thousand years ago, changes began to occur. As man became more civilised, it became inevitable that magic should become more important; for man is a creature who craves knowledge and belief, and magic represented his chief form of both. New cults began to spread. At Willendorf in Austria, at Vestonice in Moravia, at Savignano in Italy, at Lespugue in France, tiny female statuettes have been unearthed by archaeologists. The name ‘Venus’ has been applied to them. They certainly seem to represent some goddess cult – perhaps the White Goddess herself. Many of them are fat, with enormous breasts, which has led to the suggestion that they might be magical aids to pregnancy; but others are slim. At Brno, a male figure has been found. The artist has concentrated on the body; the face is hardly ever suggested.
And then, just as surprisingly, primitive man stopped making figures of human beings. Why? Because they were magical. If you could kill a bison or a reindeer by making its image and performing magical operations, the same applied to human beings. It had become dangerous to represent the human form. The age of magic had begun. If you could kill animals by magic, why not your enemy?
And as man became increasingly obsessed with magic, the number of his gods, and demons, increased. And in the dawn of recorded history – about 3000 B.C. – the civilisations of the Nile valley, the Indus valley and Mesopotamia are riddled with ideas of gods, demons and sorcerers. Some time in this fourth milennium B.C., the human race took its most tremendous leap forward so far – a leap so remarkable that one is tempted to credit the imaginative speculation of Arthur C. Clarke in his 2001 that more intelligent beings from outer space have periodically taken a hand in mankind’s development. The Stone Age lasted until sometime between 4000 and 3000 B.C., and man used stone knives, flint spearheads, stone or wooden ploughs. And then man discovered the use of metals. We do not know how it happened. Perhaps someone threw a piece of copper ore into a fire and discovered that a bright, hard metal had flowed out of it. The edges of the metal could be made far sharper than the edges of flint, and were better for skinning animals. At about the same time, some unknown genius – perhaps the legendary Tubal Cain – discovered the many uses of the wheel, both for transport and for making pots. Building bricks were invented. Sailing ships were built. Oxen were harnessed to the plough and the cart. Civilisation as we now know it – technical civilisation – came into being. The invention of writing came a few hundred years later, at least, that is the period from which the written records date. Mankind has never known such a comparable advance, unless we count the scientific advance of our own epoch. What caused this sudden surge of achievement was the emergence of large communities. Man was now the most successful creature on earth, and his numbers had increased. He had known the use of agriculture since about 10,000 B.C. But the earth was still covered with forests and deserts. The best places to live were river valleys, or beside the sea. Man crowded together on the banks of the Nile, the Indus, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Yellow River, in conglomerations of tents, mud huts and shacks made of woven reeds. City life brought the advantages and disadvantages with which we are so familiar – disease and crime, and also trade and art. It brought division of labour and time to think. It destroyed once and for all the primeval innocence of the hunters. It emphasised the basic hostility of man to man. In nature there is a law of ‘letting alone’; there are few animals that kill for the pleasure of it. A woman collecting sweet berries might hear a bear snuffling around, but she knew it would not attack her unless it was afraid for its cubs. And at nightfall the antelope and the lion drink together, side by side. Hunters from different tribes, meeting one another in the forest, might salute one another and pass on, unless one group had invaded the territory of the other. In the city, a new law of hostility prevailed, and to call it the law of the jungle is unfair to the jungle.
One does not have to believe in Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’ to believe that man’s fall from grace came with city dwelling; it is common sense. Some cities might be prosperous and secure, with good land and a strong ruler; but they would be the exceptions. Most cities would be little more than large groups of human beings living together for convenience, like rats in a sewer.
The consequence is obvious, Man ceases to be an instinctive, simple creature. Whether he likes it or not, he has to become more calculating to survive. He also has to become, in a very special sense, more aggressive – not simply towards other men but towards the world. Before this time, there had only been small Neolithic communities, whose size was limited by their ability to produce food. If the population increased too fast, the weaker ones starved. It encouraged a passive, peaceful attitude towards life and nature. Big cities were more prosperous because men had pooled their resources, and because certain men could afford to become ‘specialists’ – in metalwork, weaving, writing and so on. And there were many ways to keep yourself alive: labouring, trading or preying on other men. Unlike the Neolithic community, this was a world where enterprise counted for everything. It would be no exaggeration to say that the ‘rat race’ began in 4000 B.C.
The more man expanded his activities, the more gods he needed. When he began to sail the seas, he needed to make sacrifices to the sea god; when he set out on a journey, he needed to feel himself under the protection of the god of travellers, and so on. Every new enterprise needed a new god. Man was out to gain control of his environment. And his chief means of achieving this control was still – magic.
In all this ferment and uproar there would be little opportunity for that intense concentration of mind that distinguished the earlier shamans. All religion and occultism that spring from this intense concentration tend to be simple and mystical. They are a recognition of vistas of meaning ‘out there’, of powers that man can ‘plug into’ if he directs his mind towards them with strong conviction. All the great religions – Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Mohammedanism – are simple in this sense. In the hands of the common people – the nonreligious 99 per cent – they soon lose this simplicity, this clarity of vision, and develop hordes of angels, gods and demons.
This raises another point of central importance to ‘magic’ – how central was not understood until the emergence of Freud. Primitive people are characterised by a kind of puritanism. The shaman of the Huichol Indians, Ramon Medina, told Norman Lewis that any Huichol who had sexual relations more than ten or fifteen times a year was regarded as a debauchee. Their attitude towards sex, he explained, was based upon the tribe’s divine ancestor, the deer, which limited its sexual activity to a brief yearly season. Besides, sexual indulgence wastes vital powers.
This statement may be more accurate than it sounds. Sexual intercourse in itself may not waste vitality, but there is an association between self-discipline and survival-qualities. A Huichol boy who was bathing in the freezing river at dawn was reproved by Medina for self-indulgence; three in the morning was the correct time for bathing. ‘Such dousings fostered the natural sexual coldness that the Huichols appreciated in their womenfolk,’ adds Lewis. Tribal women reflect the virtues demanded by their menfolk; placidity, fidelity, good housekeeping.
In contrast, the city dweller tends to be ‘sexier’. The natural outlets of male dominance are hunting and fighting. If these are reduced, an interest in sex naturally replaces them, for the penetration of the female is an act of supreme dominance. The act of making love to a placid, domesticated girl would be less satisfying to this urge than making love to a girl who is more glamorous, independent, challenging. Where a type of human being is demanded by circumstances, it soon appears. Urban culture produced the glamorous courtesan, the ‘siren’, the woman for whose attention dominant men compete. It becomes a virtue to present men with a challenge. Leonard Cottrell repeats from a Chinese chronicle the story of Emperor Wu’s concubine, who was noted for being sullen and difficult to please. She liked the sound of tearing silk, so bales of it were torn in front of her. To gratify her whim, the Emperor lit the beacon fires which summoned his war lords to defend the country against barbarians. Armies arrived at the palace of the Emperor, only to be told that it was all a joke. When she saw the expression on the faces of the lords, the girl laughed – for the first time in her life, according to the story.
Like most ancient stories, this one carries a moral. When the barbarians did invade, the beacons were lit, but no one came, and the Emperor was killed and his city destroyed.*
The counterpart of the ‘siren’ was the Don Juan. The Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, a thousand years older than Homer, begins by describing how the insatiable sexual appetite of the warrior – and king – Gilgamesh ‘leaves no virgin to her lover, neither the warrior’s daughter nor the wife of the noble’. His fellow citizens recognise – with Freudian penetration – that he is ‘sublimating’ a powerful urge to conquer, and beg the gods to create a man strong enough to be his downfall. They create the man-god Enkidu, who first has to be ‘humanised’ by a courtesan who attends to his sexual education. ‘She was not ashamed to take him, and she made herself naked and welcomed his eagerness His eagerness is so great that he makes love to her for a whole week, at the end of which time he is much enfeebled, and his former companions, the beasts of the forest, fail to recognise him. He is also shrunken in stature. (Again we have the notion of primitive peoples that sex is a depressant.) Later, when Enkidu and Gilgamesh have fought, and then sworn friendship, Enkidu finds the gay, debauched life of the city degrading, a drain on his powers, and he and Gilgamesh set out in search of adventure. And when they return, and the goddess Ishtar (the Babylonian Venus) tries to seduce Gilgamesh, he rejects her; his heroic energies have been diverted into their proper channels, and he no longer cares for this unmanly business of seduction. The whole poem is a protest of the old tribal morality against the sexuality of the town. And its analysis of Gilgamesh’s satyriasis has a penetration that suggests that the original Sumerian author was a shaman. (The shamans were also poets and story-tellers; Eliade points out that a shaman has a vocabulary of twelve thousand words, three times that of the rest of the tribe.)
I have argued in this book that man was not really made for civilisation. As an aggressive, highly energetic creature, he finds it difficult to adjust himself to its restraints. He responds to lack of challenge with boredom and a tendency to become slack and demoralised. The sexual instinct remains as powerful as ever, and has to bear an increased weight of frustrated dominance. The result: hypersexuality and sexual perversion. Gilgamesh, one of the earliest of written records, sounds almost as decadent as Petronius or Martial where it deals with sex. Except in one respect: homosexuality has not yet appeared. But it is remarkable that homosexuality – rare or nonexistent among primitive tribes – seems to have figured in the history of Western civilisation ever since men began to live in cities. (Experiments conducted by the psychologist John B. Calhoun in which rats were made to live and breed in overcrowded conditions showed that rats developed homosexuality when crowded into ‘slums’.)
The same, interestingly enough, may be said of incest. Primitives have strong incest taboos; the Huichols believe that a man who has intercourse with a relative or with someone outside the tribe will become sterile. The taboo on extra-tribal relations is understandable enough: the desire for racial purity. But why a taboo on incest? The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss made his reputation with a book called The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), in which he advances the interesting theory that incest is tabooed among primitives not because they are afraid of racial enfeeblement, but because savages are obsessed with the notion of gifts. Giving, he says, is an essential social lubricant, a way of fostering community spirit and avoiding war. The natural, selfish response of the male would be to keep pretty daughters and sisters in the family, a private harem: women were property, to be kept or disposed of as the male thought fit. But this would be a source of social tension, says Lévi-Strauss, for the rest of the tribe would feel it unfair that the most attractive girls should be the property of their fathers and brothers. And so the women became the most valuable objects of tribal barter; they were given as ‘gifts’ to men of other families, who in turn gave their own women. And so women ensured harmony within the tribe, and incest gradually became a taboo. Lévi-Strauss’s view is that the incest taboo reveals a kind of ‘natural Christianity’ in savages: ‘It is better to give than to receive …’
I mention this view because it is now generally accepted, and it seems to me demonstrably false. There is no evidence that primitive man was naturally incestuous and reformed out of a desire to keep his neighbours friendly. But if he was, what happened about the ugly daughters, who were not, so to speak, social currency? Were they kept in the family harem? And why should giving away a pretty daughter lessen the tribe’s envy? She still had only one husband. If this was the motive for getting rid of her, it would be more sensible to make her the general property of the males of the tribe.
But the real objection, if our line of argument is correct, is that it is far simpler to assume that primitive man knew instinctively that incest would weaken the tribe’s genetic purity even more than marriage with strangers. Every child takes half its genes from its father and half from its mother. It may receive a ‘recessive gene’ from one parent – short-sightedness or some other defect – but the chances are that this will be counteracted by a healthy gene from the other. If blood relatives mate, the chances are higher that the child will get two recessive genes, so that in the long run, incest will breed feebler specimens than normal ‘mixed’ marriages. If we are right to accept that the genes are somehow influenced by a ‘group mind’, then the group mind has an excellent reason for creating an instinctive aversion to incest in tribes whose existence depends upon their racial vitality.
When man began to live in cities, the incest taboo was weakened. The brother–sister marriages of the ancient Egyptian rulers have no relevance to this argument, because they were the result of a belief that the kings and queens were gods and therefore not able to mate with ordinary mortals; but according to Suetonius and Tacitus, some of the Caesars indulged in incest purely for pleasure, a piquant variation to stir appetites that had become jaded through too much sexual indulgence.
Now, primitive magic was basically the use of man’s hidden powers to influence the hunt, or perhaps the battle. Grimble’s description of ‘the calling of the porpoises’ is a perfect example of primitive shamanism. Under the new, urban conditions, it inevitably became more closely connected with sex. Sexual frustration became increasingly common in the cities. The lords could enjoy their harems; the young nobles could pursue famous courtesans; the poor man still had his overworked wife and large family, and he only had to turn his head to see bare-breasted girls passing in the street. Men were inclined to die younger than women, so there were many sexually frustrated widows. (This is reflected in the story of Ishtar’s pursuit of Gilgamesh, as in the story of Venus and Adonis, or even of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife.) Bronislaw Malinowsky spent years observing the Trobriand Islanders, and noted the magic rites connected with the launching of a canoe; their purpose was to protect the crew from flying witches who would wreck the boat and eat the bodies of the sailors. Here one can see plainly the sexual origin of the fear of witches. It was believed that if a girl wanted to prevent her lover from becoming unfaithful, she should bake a cake containing her menstrual blood; having eaten it, he would become impotent with other women. The young man who wanted to ‘bewitch’ a girl had to induce her to drink a potion in which his semen had been mixed. (These magical beliefs persist today as far apart as Sicily and America’s Deep South.)
What happened to magic, as it became ‘urbanised’, was that it became infused with a strong element of nonsense. Cornelius Agrippa, the sixteenth-century mage, declared that women should drink the urine of mules as a contraceptive, because mules are sterile. This would obviously be as effective as most love potions. On the other hand, it would be incorrect to assume that sexual magic was fundamentally no more than crude superstition. Sex is one of the few human functions that has not been successfully ‘automatised’ by the robot. If I am tired, a beautiful view or a Mozart symphony may fail to stir my interest; but a glimpse of a strange girl taking off her clothes will. That is to say, sex has a certain inbuilt defence against the loss of ‘value perception’ caused by fatigue or close-upness. This means that it has, so to speak, a ‘hot line’ to my subconscious mind. Civilisation robbed man of many of his deeper powers; but sex remained unaffected – if anything, it became stronger. The subconscious powers can still be unleashed by sex. It now seems fairly certain that poltergeist phenomena (poltergeist means ‘rattling ghost’) are caused by unconscious sexual disturbances in pubescent girls and boys – particularly girls. Rayner C. Johnson writes:
One of the most striking features of the poltergeist phenomena is that in an overwhelming majority of cases a young person seems to be the unconscious agent of the effects. In 95% of cases it is a young girl; in 5% a boy or youth, says Price. Moreover, sexual change or shock seems to be frequently associated either with the beginning or the cessation of the phenomena. Puberty and adolescence are thus the periods favourable to the effects. Price informs us that Eleonora Zugun’s power vanished overnight with the first appearance of the menses; that the Schneider brothers were brilliant about puberty, but the effects waned as adolescence advanced; conversely, that Stella C.’s power became marked with sexual maturity; that in the case of Esther Cox, the phenomena which lasted a year were initiated by nervous shock following attempted sexual assault, and that moreover they attained their greatest strength every twenty-eight days ... Price also tells of an interview with the husband of Frieda W., a young Austrian medium, who informed him that at the height of his wife’s sexual excitement in their early married life, ornaments would sometimes fall off the mantelpiece in their bedroom; also that during menstruation ... mediumship did not occur.*
Johnson also cites a case of a similar nature that was analysed by Dr. C. A. Meier, Jung’s assistant. At the height of the analysis, the patient, in a trance, imagined herself to be penetrating deeper and deeper into a city, which symbolised her problem (presumably sexual, although Johnson does not say so). At the moment she reached its centre, there was a loud report, and a Gothic wooden bench split from end to end.
Robert Graves commented to me that many young men use a form of unconscious sorcery in seducing girls; this is also consistent with the view I am advancing: that since man has become a city dweller, there is a strong connection between his latent ‘psychic’ powers and his sexuality. Sex can arouse a degree of will-power and intensity that can seldom be found in other departments of civilised life. One only has to see dogs, sleeping out in the worst weather around the house of a bitch in heat, to grasp something of the force of the instinct. Bartok also catches something of it in his ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, in which a prostitute lures a mandarin to her room, where he is attacked by two roughs; they smother him, stab him and finally hang him, but he refuses to die until his sexual desire has been satisfied. The mandarin is portrayed as a silent, impassive man, whose desire is expressed only by his burning eyes: a man driven by an enormous will, the archetypal image of the mage.
It is this association of magic with sex that really created the concept of ‘black magic’. And this was the second stage in the degeneration of the magical art.
Let us summarise the history of magic, as it emerges from all this.
Primitive man still possessed the supersensory instincts of the lower animals: telepathy, intuition of danger, a ‘sixth sense’ to guide him to green pastures where the hunting was good. After more than a million years of evolution he had lost most of these powers; for he had, compared with other creatures, become a highly rational being. But the tribal shamans knew how to nurture their powers, and used them for the good of the tribe.
Some sixty thousand years ago, Cro-Magnon man appeared, the highest type of man so far. Magic played a larger part in his life than in that of earlier man. Magic was Stone Age science, and he was the most intelligent creature yet to appear on earth.
The inevitable occurred; the ‘white’, sympathetic magic of the shamans turned into something more personal. Sorcery came into existence. Sorcery must be clearly distinguished from ordinary magic or witchcraft, which is simply the use of extrasensory powers – that is, telepathy and water-divining are simple forms of witchcraft. Sorcery is the attempt at the systematic use of such powers by means of ‘spells’, potions, rituals and so on. A simple distinction would be to say that witchcraft is fundamentally passive, sorcery fundamentally active.
But perhaps the most important distinction is this. Witchcraft and magic depend upon higher levels of consciousness, a wider grasp of reality than man normally possesses. In this they are closely related to mysticism. Sorcery may depend upon supernormal powers, but it sets out from everyday consciousness, the everyday personality. The characteristic of the everyday personality is its will-to-power: the desire for money, possessions, sexual conquest, position. The mystical urge, on the other hand, transcends all these. A poet enchanted by the freshness of an April shower experiences strange longings, something bursting and struggling inside him, a feeling of the richness and mysteriousness of the universe that makes the ambitions of ordinary men seem stupid and mistaken. It might be argued that all men are driven by these urges to self-transcendence: even the politician telling lies to win an election; even the Don Juan telling lies to persuade a girl into bed. That is true. The essential difference is that the poet somehow ‘rejects himself’; he is not interested in his personality and its aggrandisement. He would like to become as innocent as clear water. The distinction is important, for it will be raised repeatedly in the course of this book. The difference between a magician and a sorcerer is that the magician is disinterested, like a poet or scientist; the sorcerer wants personal power.
Sorcery came into being sixty thousand years ago, but while men lived simple lives in small villages, it remained an unimportant offshoot of shamanism. With the coming of cities, and the growth of mankind’s sexual obsession, it outstripped shamanism and took on an independent existence. From now on, magic and sex remained in close association; it explains the violence of the persecution of witches in the Christian era.
But there is reason to suspect that another important event played a part in changing the history of mankind in the fourth millennium B.C.: the flood.
In the early 1920s, a joint British and American expedition, under the leadership of Leonard Woolley, went to investigate the mound of Tell al Muqayyar, which lies midway between Baghdad and the Persian Gulf; it was the site of the ancient city of Ur, of the Chaldees. The Chaldeans were traditionally the founders of astronomy and astrology; Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar were Chaldean kings.
The whole decade of the twenties was rich in archaeological discoveries, dating back to the period of the discovery of writings – 3000 B.C. The treasures discovered were as beautiful and exotic as those discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922. But in the summer of 1929, as the digging was coming to an end, Woolley decided to penetrate below a hill that contained the graves of Sumerian nobles (which Woolley called ‘the graves of the Kings of Ur’). They discovered clay tablets older than those in the tombs: tablets dating from the discovery of writing. As they continued to dig down, they found more Sumerian pottery, resembling that already found; plainly, Sumerian civilisation had been stable and unchanging over a long period.
And then, to everyone’s surprise, they reached a layer of pure white clay. It was over eight feet thick. And on the other side of it, they found more pots and fragments of buildings. The pots were now hand-made, not shaped on a potter’s wheel; they were back in the culture of the Stone Age.
The Stone Age was divided from the Bronze and Iron Age by evidence of a flood. Calculations indicated that the flood took place about 4000 B.C., the date of mankind’s great change to city dwelling.
In the 1870s a scholar named George Smith was working in the British Museum, examining some of the clay tablets with cuneiform writing that had been found at Nineveh by Rassam, Austen Layard’s assistant. These tablets were part of the library of the bloody King Sennacherib of Biblical fame. It was Smith who realised that some of the tablets were part of an ancient poem about a hero named Gilgamesh. I have already mentioned the early part of this epic – one of the greatest works in world literature: how the gods were persuaded to create Enkidu to chasten Gilgamesh, and how the two became friends. Gilgamesh and Enkidu journey to the Cedar Mountain (now known to be between Syria and Asia Minor) and fight with its guardian, the giant Humbaba, whom they kill. On their return, there occurs the episode of Ishtar’s attempted seduction of Gilgamesh; when he rejects her, she persuades the gods to send a celestial bull to destroy the city of Uruk. Gilgamesh and Enkidu manage to slay the bull. Ishtar then sends a mysterious disease that kills Enkidu. Gilgamesh is desolated – and suddenly aware of his mortality. He decides to go and consult a man who has been given immortality by the gods – Uta-Napishtim. He journeys to a strange mountain guarded by scorpion men, and penetrates to its heart, a sort of Arabian Nights garden. The goddess Siduri tells him that all men are born to die, but finally consents to help him meet Uta-Napishtim. And it is Uta-Napishtim who narrates to Gilgamesh the story of the flood: how he had been warned by the god Ea that the world was to be destroyed by water, and how he escaped the destruction by building an ark. The gods decided to make him immortal as a consequence.
There is little more of the epic of Gilgamesh – the remainder has not been discovered. On Uta-Napishtim’s advice, Gilgamesh finds a plant of Eternal Life at the bottom of the sea; but a snake steals it while he is asleep, and he returns to Uruk sad and empty-handed.
Victorian England was astonished when Smith published his translation of the Flood story from Gilgamesh. Certain tablets were missing, and the London Daily Telegraph provided Smith with £1,000 to go and look for the missing fragments. It was a million-to-one chance that he would find them. Amazingly enough, he did, after a mere five days. (Some of the incredible ‘coincidences’ that have occurred in archaeology are enough to make the most sceptical person believe in the Fates.) Smith unearthed most of the Gilgamesh poem as we know it today; unfortunately, little more has been found, although there have been fragments in the older language of the Sumerians, indicating that the poem records traditions of the previous millennium.
Legends of a flood are widespread throughout world mythology – a flood accompanied by volcanic eruptions, hurricanes and waterspouts. In Greek legend, Deucalion, son of Prometheus, was the sole survivor (together with his wife Pyrrha) of a flood through which Zeus destroyed the world. (The reason given is the same as in the Bible: that the race of mankind had grown utterly corrupt.) Ovid tells the story. So does the Hindu Rig Veda, which has Manu building his ark, and alighting on a mountain-top when the flood is over – like Deucalion and Uta-Napishtim. Flood legends are found in the Popol Vuh, the ‘sacred book’ of the Quiche Indians of South America, and among North American Indians. Any reader who doubts the universality of flood legends should look under ‘deluge’ in the index of Ballou’s Bible of the World, where he can choose among six different versions, including Persian, Chinese and Hindu.
It is possible, of course, that each of these legends refers to a different flood; it seems unlikely that both China and North America were flooded at the same time. But it is interesting to speculate: Could there have been any event in the earth’s history catastrophic enough to cause flooding of large areas of the whole globe?
A strange German engineer named Hans Hoerbiger* was convinced that he had the answer, and he numbered Hitler among his followers; even today, the Hoerbiger ‘world-ice theory’ has thousands of adherents. (In Morning of the Magicians, published in 1960, Louis Pauwels declares that he still has a million followers.) Hoerbiger said that it was due to the moon – to the capture of the present moon by our earth. Our moon, according to Hoerbiger, is the fourth that the earth has captured. It was once a small planet that came too close to the earth – in its inevitable spiral closer to the sun – and became its satellite, creating havoc on the surface of the planet earth in the process.
The ‘world-ice theory’ (Welteislehre) takes its name from Hoerbiger’s belief that the universe began when a huge block of cosmic ice somehow encountered a sun. There was a tremendous explosion, which is still continuing. That is why astronomers observe that our universe is expanding, says Hoerbiger. Inevitably, there is no such thing as ‘empty space’, because an explosion would diffuse its matter all over the universe; what we call empty space is actually filled with rarefied hydrogen and fine ice crystals. (His great idea originated in the days when he was an engineer, and saw molten iron falling accidentally on snow, causing an explosion; he had a sudden powerful conviction that this was how the universe began.)
It will be interesting to see how the Hoerbiger cult will survive the moon landings, for he declared that the moon is covered with a thick layer of ice to a depth of many miles. According to Hoerbiger, the earth’s three previous moons have been comets covered with ice that came too close to the earth; a day came when they fell on the earth – for they spiral closer to the earth as the needle on a gramophone record approaches the centre. These giant catastrophes explain the epochs in the earth’s evolution – the great Ice Ages, and so on.
Before we dismiss Hoerbiger completely as a madman, it is as well to bear in mind that scientists still have no explanation of some of these changes in the earth’s climate. In the past twenty million years, an age of heavy rainfall (the Miocene) was succeeded by twelve million years of droughts and deserts (the Pliocene); then came the Pleistocene, a strange, explosive period with tremendous variations of climate, including four great Ice Ages, which lasted for a million years. In African Genesis, Ardrey has an amusing chapter describing the various theories that attempt to account for the four Ice Ages of the Pleistocene, the last of which, Würm, extended from the time of Neanderthal man to a mere eleven thousand years ago. They include comets, the tilting poles of the earth, sudden bursts of solar radiation and Ardrey’s own theory that the solar system revolves through a gas cloud every two hundred million years. All the theories can be disproved. And so we still have no definite idea of what has caused the great Ice Ages of the Pre-Cambrian, the Permian and the Pleistocene. Hoerbiger’s moon hypothesis is as likely as any. Particularly since it now seems likely that our moon is a foreign body captured from outer space.
It is true that Hoerbiger dates the capture of our present moon (which he calls the planet Luna) at about 12,000 B.c. But then, he is quite certain that the capture of Luna caused the Flood. The point is argued in one of the most delightful of crank books, Atlantis and the Giants, by the late Professor Denis Saurat (1957). Saurat, a follower of Hoerbiger, seizes on that strange phrase in the story of Noah, ‘There were giants in the earth in those days.’ There is plenty of geological evidence that giants did once exist. In the mid-1930s, the anthropologist G. R. H. Von Koenigswald was shown a tooth from the Kwangsi cave deposits of China (late Tertiary) that seemed to be that of a giant ape, twice the size of the present gorilla; more teeth were later discovered, proving that this was no freak. Then, in the late thirties, near the Javanese village of Sangiran, skull and jaw fragments of human giants were discovered – men twice the size of present-day man. Von Koenigswald described it all in a remarkable book, Apes, Giants and Man. It was only the intervention of the war, when Von Koenigswald was interned by the Japanese, that prevented the discoveries from being a worldwide sensation. Von Koenigswald’s Meganthropus is about half a million years old.
According to Saurat, a moon gradually approaching the earth would produce giants, for it would counteract the earth’s gravitational force. Men – and all living creatures – would become bigger and live longer. (They would live longer because there would be less gravitational wear and tear, heart failure due to overweight, etc.) Hence the legends of Methuselah and other long-lived patriarchs in the Bible. He even uses this hypothesis of longevity to explain Fabre’s puzzle of the Ammonophilas wasp (mentioned on page 160). If creatures were much more long-lived in those days, the wasp had time to learn to sting the caterpillar in the right places. (I have pointed out that the telepathic theory of evolution provides a better explanation.) The approaching moon would also cause the tides to be sucked into a band around the equator, for they would not have time to retreat. A strange line of maritime deposits running from Lake Umayo, in the Peruvian Andes, and extending for nearly 400 miles southward in a curve to Lake Coipasa, are cited as evidence of this equatorial ‘tidal bulge’ of thousands of years ago. A great civilisation of giants came into being at Tiahuanaco, near Lake Titicaca, 12,000 feet high in the Andes; their ships encircled the globe – on the ‘tidal bulge’. This, says Saurat, explains the resemblances in human culture all over the earth: the cromlechs of Malekula, the megaliths of Brittany and Stonehenge, the resemblances between legends of Greece and Mexico.
There is one slight inconsistency in this theory, which may be overlooked in view of its exciting nature. If the flood of 4000 B.C. was caused by the capture of our present moon, not by the explosion of the previous moon as it fell on our earth, then why should there have been giants on the earth in those days? If the earth had no moon to lighten its gravitational pull, there would more likely have been dwarfs on the earth. Or were the giants, perhaps, survivors of the earlier giant races? Saurat declares that the Ruanda tribe of Africa, who sometimes grow to a height of eight feet, are survivors of the giants.
Saurat makes at least one point with which we can agree wholeheartedly. Citing the anthropologist John Layard, who wrote a classic book on the great stone megaliths of Malekula, he suggests that the ‘weather magic’ of the Malekulan primitives may not have been pure imagination, as Frazer and Durkheim believe, but that the power of the human psyche over nature may have been far more developed in these ‘savages’. And in the important essential he agrees with Lissner. Saurat writes:
For some time it has been fashionable to believe that civilised society has evolved from primitive savagery ... This fashion is now on the wane. We are more disposed to believe that man, as man, emerged very quickly and reached almost at once a state of high intellectual and spiritual development. Then a series of calamities, both moral and physical, overwhelmed him ... and those calamities caused a rapid degeneration in different parts of the earth.
And this underlines the problem in dealing with ‘crank’ books like those by Saurat, Hoerbiger and Hoerbiger’s English disciple H. S. Bellamy. They are crank books, because in spite of the impressive weight of evidence they offer – much of it irrefutable – they begin by taking a long leap into pure assumptions. Hoerbiger’s obsession with ‘cosmic ice’ has not, so far, been borne out by space probes, and seems unlikely to be. He does not base his theory on some unexplainable ‘fact’ that sets him guessing – as Einstein based the theory of relativity on the negative result of the Michelson-Morley experiment to test the presence of the ether – but seems to start from a kind of poetic inspiration, not unlike Graves’s ‘flashes’ about the tree alphabet. On the other hand, his belief that our present moon is an alien from outer space seems to be an inspired guess. And the work of his disciple Bellamy in Moon, Myths and Man, showing the remarkable similarities between various moon-catastrophe myths in world mythology, is valuable in its own right. The attitude taken by Martin Gardner, in his delightful classic Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science – that all this is totally absurd – is hardly justified. The ‘science’ that Gardner uses as his yardstick is the dogmatic nineteenth-century science that we have already discussed in connection with H. G. Wells. Saurat may leap from ‘fact’ to ‘fact’ in the most unorthodox manner: he points out that the ancient Egyptians said that man was taught the art of writing by the gods, then asserts that these gods were actually the highly cultured ‘giants’ of the pre-Luna phase. But this kind of imaginative guesswork, supported by odd pieces of evidence like the Kwangsi giant and the Meganthropus of Java, may be eventually more fruitful than the cautious scepticism of scientists. This is why Ouspensky had his desk drawer full of books on magic and Atlantis, and why he found a ‘strange flavour of truth’ in them. Man achieves his power over reality by withdrawing from it and recharging his vital batteries by flights of imagination. Otherwise he becomes stale and dehydrated; his attitude towards reality becomes shortsighted and violent. There is a flavour of reality in the study of magic and the occult, for it stimulates Faculty X, which is man’s direct sense of reality.
I would suggest, then, as a fruitful hypothesis which might well be true, that round about the year 4000 B.C., the earth captured its present moon. It may or may not have had earlier moons – we have no way of knowing, since writing was not invented. The capture of the satellite caused an immense upheaval, volcanic eruptions and tidal waves. A large part of mankind was destroyed. And the tremendous catastrophe had far-reaching psychological effects on the survivors. For thousands of years, man had been a farmer rather than a hunter. He lived in small, secure village communities where there were few changes from century to century. For, as Gerald Hawkins remarks in Stonehenge Decoded: ‘Primitive tribes do not necessarily welcome radical ideas; they are quite capable of resisting an innovation even if it is demonstrably beneficial, and of putting to death the would-be innovator as a sorcerer. Significant change sometimes depends on force’ (p. 35). The flood was an immense shock, stimulating the deepest springs of the will to survive. The security of centuries was at an end. The survivors moved together into river valleys. As in all times of devastation, human hyenas roamed the country, making travel unsafe, raiding what small communities had survived. The city was mankind’s instinctive response to the disaster: a huddling together for comfort and protection. And, if we are correct in regarding the moon as the cause of the disaster, then they stared at the new planet in the sky – which glowed red through the disturbed atmosphere – and saw it as an object of terrible significance, a god. Man is a creature with an apocalyptic view who responds best to violent challenge. He had become accustomed to the green, peaceful world that succeeded the last Ice Age (which began 55,000 years ago), a world in which he was becoming the most dominant creature, now that the mammoths and sabre-tooth tigers were extinct. Without the catastrophe he might have continued to live as a nomad or farmer for another five thousand years like his descendants, the aborigines of Australia and New Guinea. The flood shook him out of his sloth.
It is Hoerbiger’s belief that it was the flood that destroyed the continent of Atlantis, and this is therefore a convenient place to speak of these legends. The Atlantis myth is derived solely from Plato, who tells the story in two dialogues, the Timaeus and Critias. Plato’s Critias, a real person, explains that his family are in possession of documents written by the statesman Solon, who obtained his information from the priests of Egypt. It certainly looks as if Plato inserted the substance of these documents into the two dialogues in order that it should be preserved; otherwise, the ‘myth’ seems to serve no particular purpose in the dialogues – it is not intended as a parable or illustrative fable. An Egyptian priest tells Solon that the Greeks are like children as far as historical knowledge goes; they remember only one flood, when there have been many. One of the greatest of these was the one that destroyed the vast continent of Atlantis, which lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) and was as large as Libya and Asia together. The destruction was timely, for the Atlanteans had decided to attack Egypt and Athens. All this happened about nine thousand years before Plato. Plato adds that Atlantis held sway over many islands, which makes it sound as though it were a group of islands instead of – or as well as – a continent.
The modern interest in Atlantis began in 1882, when an American called Ignatius Donnelly brought out Atlantis, The Antediluvian World, a remarkable work that can still provide hours of fascination. Donnelly asserts that Atlantis was a huge continent lying in the Atlantic ocean, and that its kings and queens became the gods and goddesses of all later mythologies. It was the origin of the Garden of Eden legend. And it was destroyed about thirteen thousand years ago – a date that agrees roughly with Plato and Hoerbiger. Donnelly’s book examines the flood legends of the world, and the coincidences of a ‘universal culture’ that Saurat later drew upon.
Donnelly was followed by a serious and learned student of anthropology, Lewis Spence, who wrote half a dozen books on Atlantis. He enters many strange fields to prove the existence of the submerged continent: for example, he declares that the lemmings of Norway – tiny rodents – sometimes migrate en masse, swimming into the Atlantic; they reach a certain point, swim around in circles and then drown. The same is true of flocks of birds, says Spence.
Madame Blavatsky, of whom we shall speak later, took full advantage of the Atlantis legend and incorporated it into her mythology – all dictated by hidden ‘masters’ living in Tibet. She declared that the Atlanteans were the ‘fourth root race’ of our planet, which is destined to have seven such races. (We are the fifth, and the third were called Lemurians, who lived on another lost continent, Lemuria or Mu.)
Over two thousand books and articles have now been published on the subject of Atlantis. A theme common to many of them is the notion that the inhabitants of Atlantis destroyed themselves through their use of black magic. This is inconsistent with Plato’s view, but is sufficiently widespread to be worth mentioning.
The most recent, and most sane, attempt to solve the problem of Atlantis is that of Professor A. G. Galanopoulos. His theory is based upon a simple fact that was overlooked by earlier writers: that all the figures given in connection with Atlantis are too great. Plato himself expresses doubts whether the Atlanteans could have dug a trench 10,000 stades (1,135 miles) long around the Royal City. The ancients were admittedly capable of enormous works – the Great Wall of China is 1,500 miles long – but on the other hand, a trench of that length would stretch around modern London – Greater London – twenty times! The Royal City of Atlantis would be three hundred times the size of Greater London. This is obviously absurd. But if these figures are reduced by ten, they become altogether more reasonable. The plain on which the Royal City is built becomes 300 by 200 stades – that is, about 34 by 22 miles, an altogether more reasonable size for a city. Similarly, the date given by the Egyptian priest – nine thousand years before Plato (and therefore about 11,500 years ago) – may have been acceptable to Donnelly, Spence and Hoerbiger, but archaeological evidence indicates that the culture of that period was still Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age). Modern man has not yet appeared, and the occasional mammoth, hairy rhinoceros and sabre-tooth tiger were still to be found. The earliest civilisation, that of Egypt, lay six thousand years in the future. But if one knocks off a nought, making it nine hundred years before Plato, the date becomes altogether more reasonable. Athens existed as a fortified town in the Bronze Age (about 2000 B.C.), and there was a high Ievel of civilisation in nearby Crete in 1600 B.C., which at that period was peopled by Minoans.
The sea between Greece and Crete is full of islands, which were once part of Greece itself. The most southerly of these islands is Santorin, which was once circular in shape and some five or six miles in diameter. Around 1500 B.C., there was a tremendous volcanic explosion that ripped apart the island and turned it into little more than the remains of a gigantic crater. Modern Santorin consists of three islands: the largest, Thera, is shaped like a crescent moon; all three islands are covered to a considerable depth with pumice and volcanic rock. The tremendous explosion must have produced a tidal wave like that following the eruption of Krakatoa in August 1883. Greater, in fact, because the Santorin explosion was about three times as large. The eruption of Krakatoa is estimated to be the greatest explosion that has taken place on earth; Rupert Furneaux’s book on it states that it was equivalent to a million H-bombs (although one cannot help wondering where on earth he got the figure). Hundred-foot waves swept over islands, killing thirty-six thousand people and washing away whole towns. If the explosion of Santorin was three times this size, then one can begin to understand the Atlantic legend. Crete must have been almost depopulated and its navy destroyed; the explosion seems to account for the mysterious destruction of the palaces at Cnossos and Phaestus at about this time. Greece must have been equally hard hit – and here, possibly, we have the origins of the Deucalion flood legend (although I am inclined to date it 2,500 years earlier, at the same time as the deluge that destroyed Ur). Professor Galanopoulos argues convincingly that Crete was actually the Royal City, while Santorin is the metropolis described by Plato. The empire of Atlantis extended over the many islands of the Aegean. Plato describes the island of the metropolis as having circular canals and one deep channel connecting them. The present-day remains of Santorin show traces of this channel.
But why did Plato multiply all his figures by ten? Professor Galanopoulos has an equally ingenious hypothesis to explain this: a copyist-priest simply mistook the Egyptian symbol for 100 – a coiled rope – for that signifying 1,000 – a lotus flower. He points out that today it would be easy to mix up the English and American billion – one meaning a million million, the other only a thousand million.
No doubt Donnelly and Hoerbiger would reject this solution of the puzzle with disgust;* it is more romantic to believe in a vast Atlantean continent whose people were highly civilised when the rest of Europe was inhabited by Cro-Magnon hunters. But the evidence accumulated by Professors Galanopoulos and Marinatos seems conclusive. Plato has described a Bronze Age civilisation, and Crete was exactly that. When the figures have been reduced by ten, Plato’s description of the Royal City and its plain corresponds exactly to Crete. So unless conclusive evidence of a mid-Atlantic continent is unearthed, it would seem that the Atlantis problem is now closed.
In this connection, it is worth mentioning Immanuel Velikovsky, the strange author of Worlds in Collision and Earth in Upheaval. Martin Gardner dismisses Velikovsky as a crank; but after careful consideration of the evidence, I do not see that one can be as outright as this. Velikovsky believes that an enormous comet swept close to the earth on several occasions, causing great cataclysms, and that it finally became the planet Venus. Gardner rightly points out that Velikovsky leaps from fact to fact without regard to the kind of reasoning that would satisfy a scientist. But the array of facts is impressive and immensely stimulating. One need not take too seriously his contention that it was the action of this comet (which erupted from Jupiter) that coincidentally caused the parting of the Red Sea that saved the Israelites from the pursuing Egyptians, and that, on a later occasion, made the walls of Jericho collapse (again coincidentally). It is as easy to believe that Moses could perform miracles as that coincidences of this magnitude occurred. On the other hand, when he asks what destroyed herds of mammoths in Siberia, or how giant slabs of stone were torn from the Alps to litter the Jura mountains, we are reminded that immense, unexplainable catastrophes have taken place in the history of the earth. Velikovsky devotes a section in Worlds in Collision to Atlantis, which, like Donnelly, he believes to have been beyond Gibraltar. (Galanopoulos argues convincingly that the Pillars of Hercules refers to the twin capes of Maleas and Taenarum, now Matapan, in southern Greece.) Unlike Donnelly, Velikovsky also believes that Plato made a mistake and multiplied the date by ten; it should have been nine hundred years earlier, not nine thousand. This is the date he sets for the parting of the Red Sea and the first visitation of his comet.
It sounds as if Velikovsky has merely set up a comet against Hoerbiger’s moons as a source of catastrophe, and that the reader might well take his choice; but this is not quite true. We do not know what caused the eruption of Santorin; it was not our present moon. It may therefore well have been Velikovsky’s comet. In matters of this sort, where science knows almost as little as anybody else, it is as well to keep the mind open.
Edgar Cayce, a remarkable American clairvoyant and healer, also vouched for the existence of Atlantis. Cayce’s Atlantis, like Plato’s, was a vast island in the Atlantic Ocean, bigger than Europe, extending from the Sargasso Sea to the Azores. According to Cayce, there were three periods of destruction, from 15,600 B.C. to 10,000 B.C., the first two splitting a single island into three smaller islands; the third destroying everything. According to Cayce, their civilisation was highly developed, and they possessed some ‘crystal stone’ for trapping and utilising the rays of the sun. (Cayce died in 1945, long before the laser was invented.) The inhabitants of Atlantis spread to Europe and the Americas after the first two catastrophes – which, says Cayce, explains similarities of features in distant civilisations. The Atlanteans had become totally destructive before the end.
Before this is dismissed as another crank theory, it is worthwhile considering Cayce’s success in other spheres. Born in 1877 in Kentucky, the son of a farmer, Cayce wanted to be a preacher, but had to drop this ambition when he lost his voice at the age of twenty-one. A travelling hypnotist put Cayce to sleep and told him to speak in a normal voice. Cayce did; but when he woke up, the laryngitis was back. A local hypnotist now asked Cayce to describe what was wrong with his vocal cords; under hypnosis, Cayce did exactly this, and also prescribed the remedy: hypnotic suggestion to increase circulation in the throat. It was tried, and worked. Layne, the hypnotist, asked Cayce if he could give him a reading on a stomach ailment. Cayce allowed himself to be put to sleep, and tried it. His prescribed treatment again worked. Cayce’s reputation spread around the town, and he devoted all the time he could spare from his photography business to giving ‘readings’ to the sick. There were occasional misses, but on the whole the diagnoses were weirdly accurate, and the treatments prescribed effective. He always refused to take money, except occasionally for rail fares to distant towns. Cayce’s powers seemed to consist of some kind of ‘travelling clairvoyance’, the ability to somehow leave his body when under hypnosis, and examine people in other places – the patient did not have to be present, so long as Cayce knew where to find him. When he woke up, he could not remember anything he had said in the trance. A highly religious man, he was at first afraid that these powers were diabolic; but the help and comfort he was able to give eventually reassured him.
In 1923, Cayce awoke from a trance in Dayton, Ohio, to be told that he had asserted the reality of reincarnation: that man is born in many different bodies. At that time Cayce did not himself believe in reincarnation; but when his sleeping self had repeatedly affirmed its reality, he came to terms with it, and incorporated it into his orthodox Christian doctrine.
Inevitably, Cayce was asked to give ‘readings’ of the future. His biographers – and there have been many of them – all assert that these prophecies have been proved accurate again and again. Joseph Millard, for example, cites a whole list of prophecies that have come true: the Wall Street crash, predicted by Cayce in April 1929, six months before it happened, two presidents who would die in office (Roosevelt and Kennedy – Cayce did not mention names, of course), the end of the Second World War in 1945, the decisive tank battle of the war and many others. Cayce also predicted world cataclysms in the period 1958–1998, including the destruction of Los Angeles, San Francisco and America’s eastern coastline. (Nostradamus – as will be seen in a subsequent chapter – predicted that 1997 would be the year of some world cataclysm.)
The references to Atlantis began shortly after Cayce first spoke about reincarnation, in 1923. Giving a ‘life reading’ on someone called David Greenwood, he described a whole series of previous incarnations: in the reign of Louis XIII of France, as a French tradesman who lived in Greece; under Alexander the Great; in Egypt in prehistoric times; and finally, in Atlantis, where he was heir to the throne.
According to Noel Langley (in Edgar Cayce on Reincarnation), the Atlanteans, who date back as far as 200,000 B.C. were immensely headstrong, commanded powers of extrasensory perception and telepathy, and had electricity and had invented the aeroplane. Their energy source, the ‘Tuaoi stone’ or terrible crystal, was eventually so misused by this iron-willed race that it brought about the final catastrophe.
Cayce’s descriptions of these later Atlanteans, who were worshippers of Belial, the god of power, make one suspect that his unconscious mind was using them as parables to illustrate a Christian text, Their ‘karmic debts’ will take many thousands of lifetimes to pay off, he declares. And he seemed to imply that Hitler and Stalin were reincarnated Atlanteans.
Whether Cayce’s undoubted powers as a trance-diagnostician also qualify him as a prophet and historian of Atlantis must be left to the judgement of the individual reader. Perhaps it would be safer to wait until the year 1998 has passed without incident before we dismiss him.
Before we pass out of the dim realm of prehistory into the known and recorded history of occultism, in which there is a regrettable amount of charlatanism and pure nonsense, we should bear in mind that magic relates to the hidden part of the psyche. It might be called the science of exploring man’s hidden powers. It is based upon a strong intuition that there is more, infinitely more, in life than meets the eye or the everyday senses. And when this idea is clearly grasped as an intuition, it produces an enormous and pleasurable excitement, of the sort that a child feels when wondering what he will find in his Christmas stocking, or when he is going to be taken to the fair. Superstition and charlatanism should not be allowed to affect this state of wonder, for it relates to a reality, no matter how absurd its manifestations may become.
It is the recognition of this reality that is the basis of the psychology of Jung. Like Sir Alister Hardy, Jung is convinced of the existence of the collective unconscious. And this leads to what is perhaps his most interesting contribution to psychology: the theory of archetypes. There are certain symbols, he believes, whose meaning can never be pinned down, because, like an electrical cloud, it hangs around them in a fine haze, As the dream reflects my personal life, so the myth represents the life of the race. And the archetypes are symbolic motifs that occur in myths. The hero with a thousand faces, whose history Mr. Joseph Campbell traces in the book of that title, is an archetype. ‘A collective image of woman exists in a man’s unconscious,’ says Jung in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. This image is projected onto the various women he meets, and since it ‘corresponds to the deepest reality in a man’, it may lead to completely unsuitable relations, for he may be trying to fit the woman into a kind of straitjacket. Frieda Fordham says of the female archetype in her study of Jung: ‘[she] has a timeless quality – she often looks young, though there is always the suggestion of years of experience behind her. She is wise, but not formidably so; it is rather that “something strangely meaningful clings to her, a secret knowledge or hidden wisdom”. She is often connected with the earth, or with water, and she may be endowed with great power. She is also two-sided or has two aspects, a light and a dark …’ We have again Graves’s White Goddess, or the two aspects of the goddess in Tantric philosophy.
The revolutionary aspect of this theory is Jung’s notion that the archetypes float around in the collective unconscious and may turn up in dreams that seem to have little connection with the dreamer’s personal problems. (In Man and His Symbols, Jung describes the dreams of an eight-year-old girl that are full of such mythological symbols.) Here we have an explanation of Yeats’s symbolic Tree of Life with its souls, and the Siberian ‘tree of the shamans’.
Describing Jung’s theory of the savage mind, Philip Freund says: ‘[it] is far less developed in extent and intensity than our own. Functions such as willing and thinking are not yet divided in him; they are pre-conscious, which means that he does not think consciously, but that thoughts appear for him, The savage cannot claim that he thinks; rather, “something thinks in him”. [One is reminded of Mahler’s remark that it is not the music that is composed, but the composer himself.] The spontaneity of the act of thinking does not lie, causally, in his awareness, but is still in his unconscious. Moreover, he is incapable of any conscious act of will; he must put himself beforehand into the “mood for willing”, or let himself be put into it by the shaman’s hypnotic suggestion …’* This sounds amazingly like Rudolf Steiner’s description of the people of Lemuria (the third ‘root race’ of mankind), who were unable to reason and lived purely on an instinctive level. (His Atlantis and Lemuria will be considered later.) But in another way, it sounds very much like any of us. Anybody ‘wills’ better if he puts himself into the mood for willing. Moreover, some external event or suggestion can galvanise my will in a way that seems beyond my conscious power. And this emphasises again that the conscious ‘me’ suffers from a kind of permanent power-cut. This is because what triggers my will-power are rational calculations and needs, and I seldom put all my heart into them. When some urgency appeals to my deepest reality, the result is a flood of power that amazes me. It may happen in the sexual orgasm. It happened to Nietzsche in a thunderstorm – the sudden overwhelming feeling of well-being. All this emphasises that rational consciousness is a kind of valve that cuts us off from the full power of the life current inside us. Magic is a recognition of this power, an attempt to devise means of tapping it. Ordinary consciousness could be compared to a picture gallery full of magnificent paintings but lit by dim electric bulbs. The moments of intensity are like a sudden burst of bright sunlight that makes a spectator realise just how dazzling the colours are. Lower states of consciousness do not understand the higher – just as, according to Dr. David Foster, blue light may be regarded as a cybernetic coding for red light, but not vice versa. Jung’s psychology goes deeper than that of Freud or his disciples because he emphasises the superiority of blue light to the red light of rational consciousness.
I mention the Jungian concepts at this point because they should be borne in mind continually in considering the subsequent history of magic. It would be pleasant to be able to say that the ancient Egyptians, Chaldeans, Babylonians and others possessed an understanding of the occult that has been totally lost since that time. It is not true. The basic traditions of ‘magic’ were no doubt preserved by natural shamans. But from the point of view of man’s inner evolution, the civilisations of the three millennia before Christ are a disappointment. Man was in between two stools. He had lost touch with the old simplicity that made the magic of the shamans effective, but his science was of the crudest kind. As far as organised knowledge went, these three millennia were a Tower of Babel. The Egyptians – the oldest civilisation on earth, as far as we know – had more than two thousand gods. Plato speaks of the tradition of the wisdom of their priests, but what we know of their beliefs – described, for example, in Sir Wallis Budge’s Egyptian Religion and Egyptian Magic – hardly bears this out. Egyptian magic was based on ‘words of power’. They believed that a word or sentence, uttered correctly, had magical effect, and that this magic power could be transferred to amulets or scarabs. Budge relates some typical stories of Egyptian magic. The priest Tchatcha-em-ankh was summoned by King Snefru (who reigned between 2650 and 2500 B.C.) and asked to relieve his boredom; he recommended that the king take a row on the lake in the company of dancing girls dressed in nets. One of the dancing girls lost her turquoise hair-slide in the water. The priest was summoned, and by certain words of power (hekau) made a slab of water rise up and lie on top of another; the ornament was found on the bottom of the lake; then the priest ordered the water back into its place.* The magician Teta, who lived in the reign of Snefru and his son Cheops, knew how to fasten a head on a body after it had been cut off – according to an ancient manuscript. ‘Then some one brought to him a goose, and having cut off its head, he laid the body on the west side of the colonnade, and the head on the east side. Teta then stood up and spake certain words of magical power, whereupon the body began to move and the head likewise, and each time they moved the one came nearer to the other, until at length the head moved to its right place on the bird, which straightway cackled.’ Teta went on to perform the same miracle on an ox. And the historian Mas’ûdi describes a Jewish sorcerer, a pupil of Egyptian priests, who cut off a man’s head and joined it on again, and who also transformed himself into a camel and walked on a tightrope.
There would be no point in speculating whether this was all done by hypnotism. Quite obviously, these people were absurdly credulous; their state of mind was the kind that can still be found in many country villages today. (In a recent British television programme, The Family of Man, a woman who specialised in prenatal care described some of the extraordinary beliefs still held by middle-class people in Esher, Surrey: that if a cat jumped up at a pregnant woman’s stomach, the baby would be born with some deformity, and that if she found a spider on her, the baby would be born with a ‘spider mark’ on the same spot.)
People love stories of horrors and wonders. W. B. Yeats tells of a widely believed Dublin story to the effect that Sir William Wilde (Oscar Wilde’s father) took out the eyes of a patient and left them on a chair while he went to get a surgical instrument; in the meantime, the cat ate them. In 1969 there was a story about two young thugs who castrated a boy in a public lavatory in central London while the child’s mother waited outside; this caused such widespread indignation that a Surrey newspaper printed a denial by a responsible police official. Such a story is invented by someone with a morbid turn of mind, and then circulated purely for its shock value. One can see the same psychology at work in the anecdotes of Egyptian magic recounted by Sir Wallis Budge.
The most interesting thing about Egyptian magic – perhaps the only interesting thing – is its confirmation of Lissner’s guess that the reason Cro-Magnon man stopped manufacturing images of human beings is that they were believed to have magical properties. One of Budge’s anecdotes concerns a wronged husband who destroyed his wife’s lover by making a wax crocodile, which the husband’s steward was ordered to throw into the river when the lover went to bathe himself; it turned into a real crocodile and carried off the lover. The wife was burnt to death. Another story concerns King Nectanebus who overcame the navy of his enemies by holding a mock battle with model ships on a large bowl of water. The Book of the Dead, a work containing the rituals to be recited over the body of a dead man to ensure his progress in the afterworld, describes how the serpent Apep can be overcome – by making a wax figure of Apep with his name written on it (in green), and drawing the serpent on a sheet of papyrus; these must be burned on a fire of khesau grass four times a day, and then the ashes mixed with excrement and burned again; it was also necessary to keep spitting on the wax image of Apep as he burned. Budge asserts that Aristotle gave Alexander the Great a boxful of wax figures representing his enemies; tradition says that Aristotle taught Alexander ‘words of power’ to keep these enemies subdued. (Arrian does not mention this in his life of Alexander.) Wax images could be used for less negative purposes: cure of ailments, and for obtaining the love of a woman. Images called shabti figures were placed in the tomb with the deceased, and were supposed to work for him and to serve as his scapegoat in the underworld. The Book of the Dead gives perhaps the fullest insight into the incredible complexity of Egyptian religious beliefs, for its 190 ‘chapters’ deal with all the perils which the soul of the deceased might encounter in its night-long journey to the underworld (amentet). They include spells to ward off various serpents, monsters in human form with tails, crocodiles, giant beetles and jackals – all of these really demons in animal form – and spells to prevent the heart being stolen and the advent of a second death. Compared to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, whose purpose is identical but which recognises that all the perils are products of man’s own mind, it is a crude farrago.
Budge remarks accurately: ‘From Egypt, by way of Greece and Rome, the use of wax figures passed into Western Europe and England, and in the Middle Ages it found great favour with those who interested themselves in the working of the “black art”, or who wished to do their neighbour or enemy an injury.’ What he fails to point out is that there is a difference between the shamanic use of an ‘image’ to direct the mind clearly to its objective, whether to work black or white magic, and the belief that the image itself, inscribed with words of power, possesses magical properties.
The truth is that in spite of their reputation as wise men and magicians, the Egyptians did not possess the single-minded qualities of northern shamans. They had the easy-going Mediterranean temperament. Their fertile land made them prosperous. The rich were very rich; they took pride in personal cleanliness and lived in houses that would still be considered luxurious in modern California. They had a rigid caste system: royalty, nobility, priests, scribes, artisans and so on. Like their riches, their culture was almost accidental, for it depended upon a convenient writing material called papyrus which grew in wide leaves in the river. If they had been restricted to clay and stone, like the Babylonians, the art of reading and writing might have been less widespread.
Papyrus was to Egypt of the second millennium what the paperback book is to the twentieth century. Because of extreme class differences, it suited the rulers to have an elaborate religion (which was based upon the worship of the sun god, Ra). When it suited the upper classes, the religion could be modified, as when the first great queen, Hatshepsut (who ruled at about the time Santorin exploded), gave the god Osiris a partly feminine nature for her own benefit; it was like the Russian rewriting of history. In spite of their military victories and large empire, the Egyptians were lazy, and averse to serious thinking. It took conquest by a barbaric army of ‘shepherds’ (the ‘Hyksos kings’ – 1680–1580 B.C.) to stir the Egyptians out of their sloth and turn them into a fighting nation. The battle of Armageddon (or Megiddo) was the first great victory of Thutmose the Third, the husband of the late Queen Hatshepsut, who went on to build an empire like that of Alexander the Great. But the new militarism did nothing to improve the quality of Egyptian intellectual life, unless the monotheistic sun-religion created by the Pharaoh Akhnaton (about 1375 B.C.) is counted as an intellectual achievement. Their science was almost nonexistent, their mathematics remained crude. Like the Chinese, they tended to respect antiquity for its own sake, and so their medicine was a mixture of up-to-date observation and old wives’ remedies out of ancient books. Their religion suffered from the same confusion, due to an aversion to discarding any link with the past. They were highly sexed, and the sexual exploits of their gods were nearly as disgraceful as those of the Greeks. Horus loses his temper with his mother, Isis, and chops off her head. His elder brother Set pursues him, and they end by sleeping in the same bed. Set sodomises Horus in the night, but Horus masturbates on a lettuce that Set eats for his dinner, and his sperm makes Set pregnant. (In spite of their embalming skill, the Egyptian knowledge of anatomy was extremely limited.) And so the absurd and Rabelaisian story goes on.
After a few centuries of military victory the old Egyptian laziness reasserted itself, and the nation drooped slowly into luxurious decadence.
I have spoken at some length about the Egyptians because I do not propose to devote more space to the magic of the ancient world. The Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Hittites, the Persians, the Greeks and Romans all embraced a farrago of absurdities not unlike the Egyptian system. The Greeks, having the liveliest intellects of the Near East, also had the least belief in magic, although they believed (like the Egyptians) in dreams and divinations. Their oracles, of which the one at Delphi was the most famous, were virtually shamans; and, like the shaman, she went into terrifying convulsions when inspired. The Persian mages (from whom the word ‘magic’ derives) will be discussed later in connection with Zoroaster; they were a priest cult like the Egyptian priesthood. The Romans were as superstitious as the Egyptians; Robert Graves’s two Claudius novels give a fair picture of their endless preoccupation with auguries, oracles and omens, and their attempts to foretell the future by the flight of birds or the intestines of animals. Apuleius’s Golden Ass touches on the lighter side of these beliefs – for example, the story of the student Telephron, who agreed to spend the night watching over a dead body to protect it from witches who want to tear off the nose and ears with their teeth. The witches cast a spell over Telephron and eat his nose and ears, replacing them with pink wax; he only discovers this much later when he touches them. There is nothing in the magic of the Golden Ass or the Claudius novels that rises above absurdity and superstition. In this respect – belief in omens – the Greeks were little better; the sailing of the whole Attic fleet was delayed in the fourth century B.C. because a soldier sneezed, but their general, Timotheus, laughed them out of it by pointing out that if the gods had really wanted to communicate a warning, they would have made the whole fleet sneeze.
The belief in astrology comes under a different heading. Astrology was generally accepted – and no doubt most of its practitioners were as fraudulent as most ancient ‘magicians’ – but this should be regarded as a descendant of shamanism rather than as a stepchild of sorcery. There are certain people who are naturally gifted in ‘divination’, whether by the I Ching, Tarot cards or the reading of palms; if such people become astrologers, no doubt their readings can possess frightening accuracy. Ellic Howe points out in The Strange World of the Astrologers that some astrologers can produce astounding results, while others, working from the same material (details of the subject’s hour of birth) are completely inaccurate. It is a matter of natural talent, and of how carefully these natural intuitive powers have been nurtured.
I have tried to outline the development of ‘man’s hidden powers’ from the dawn of history to its ‘Tower of Babel’ period, the period of degeneration. When a man’s head is full of superstitions and beliefs, he is insulating himself from his natural magical powers. When he melts the wax figure of an enemy, he is putting himself into a trivial and vengeful state of mind that is the reverse of true shamanism, and certainly of any sort of mysticism. There is a negative and stupid side to magic that should be acknowledged and condemned. Ivar Lissner describes how the Ainus of northern Japan carefully rear a bear cub, the women of the tribes suckling it at their breasts. One day it is tied to a stake, and blunt arrows are fired at it to enrage it; it is also beaten with rods. When it has been tormented into a state of exhaustion, it is despatched with a sharp arrow, and ceremonially eaten; the idea is that its soul will intercede for the tribe in heaven. This kind of thing should be classified with a case cited by Budge, in which an Irish labourer, with the help of several cronies, burnt his twenty-seven-year-old wife because he thought she was a witch. Boiling liquid was poured down her throat, after which she was stripped and set on fire with paraffin; she was then forced to sit on the fire to ‘drive out the witch’ that possessed her. While she died of burns he recited incantations over her, and then sent for the priest to exorcise the house of evil spirits. The husband was sentenced to twenty years in jail, and the cronies to shorter periods. This took place in 1895 in Tipperary.
More than a hundred years earlier, Gibbon, writing about the superstitions of the Romans and their witchhunts with his usual magnificent invective, remarked: ‘Let us not hesitate to indulge a liberal pride that, in the present age, the enlightened part of Europe has abolished a cruel and odious prejudice, which reigned in every climate of the globe and adhered to every system of religious opinions.’ The self-congratulation was premature.
* Man, God and Magic, translated from the German by J. Maxwell Brownjohn (London, Jonathan Cape, 1961), p. 274.
* Leonard Cottrell, The Tiger of Ch’in, Chapter 4.
* The Imprisoned Splendour (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1953), pp. 255–256.
* 1860–1931.
* Robert Graves also rejects it in his essay ‘The Lost Atlantis’ (included in The Crane Bag, 1969). His own suggestion, which, he says, is suppored by Greek historical tradition, is that Atlantis was to be found in Libya, in the low-lying coastal plain that stretches inland behind the shallow Gulf of Sirte. ‘Four thousand years ago, a great part of this region was flooded by salt water from the Mediterranean, but by Solon’s day the main surviving evidence of the catastrophe was a group of salt lakes, the largest of them called Lake Tritonis, lying near the foothills of the Atlas. These lakes have since shrunk to salt marshes …’
* Philip Freund, Myths of Creation, 1964, p. 69.
* Anyone consulting Sir E. A. Wallis Budge’s works on Egypt should be warned that his dating is completely unreliable, being usually about 1,200 years out. He attributes the reign of Cheops (Khufu) to 3800 B.C. instead of about 2600 B.C.