By RUPERT SHELDRAKE, Ph.D.

We have been brought up to believe that our minds are inside our heads, that mental activity is nothing but brain activity. Instead, I suggest that our minds extend far beyond our brains; they stretch out through fields that link us to our environment and to each other.

Mental fields are rooted in brains, just as magnetic fields around magnets are rooted in the magnets themselves, or just as the fields of transmission around mobile phones are rooted in the phones and their internal electrical activities. As magnetic fields extend around magnets, and electromagnetic fields around mobile phones, so mental fields extend around brains.

Mental fields help to explain telepathy, the sense of being stared at and other widespread but unexplained abilities. Above all, mental fields underlie normal perception. They are an essential part of vision.

Images Outside Our Heads

Look around you now. Are the images of what you see inside your brain? Or are they outside you – just where they seem to be? According to the conventional theory, there is a one-way process: light moves in, but nothing is projected out.

The inward movement of light is familiar enough. As you look at this page, reflected light moves from the page through the electromagnetic field into your eyes. The lenses of your eyes focus the light to form upside-down images on your retinas. This light falling on your retinal rod and cone cells causes electrical changes within them, which trigger off patterned changes in the nerves of the retina. Nerve impulses move up your optic nerves and into the brain, where they give rise to complex patterns of electrical and chemical activity. So far, so good. All these processes can be, and have been, studied in great detail by neurophysiologists and other experts on vision and brain activity.

But then something very mysterious happens. You consciously experience what you are seeing, the page in front of you. You also become conscious of the printed words and their meanings. From the point of view of the standard theory, there is no reason why you should be conscious at all. Brain mechanisms ought to go on just as well without consciousness.

The standard theory of vision applies to all species of animals with image-forming eyes. It does not explain why there should be conscious vision in any animal species, or in people. There is just unconscious, computer-like data-processing by the nervous system.

Then comes a further problem. When you see this page, you do not experience your image of it as being inside your brain, where it is supposed to be. Instead, you experience its image as being located about two feet in front of you. The image is outside your body.

For all its physiological sophistication, the standard theory has no explanation for your most immediate and direct experience. All your experience is supposed to be inside your brain, not where it seems to be.

The basic idea I am proposing is so simple that it is hard to grasp. Your image of this page is just where it seems to be, in front of your eyes, not behind your eyes. It is not inside your brain, but outside your brain.

Thus vision involves both an inward movement of light, and an outward projection of images. Through mental fields our minds reach out to touch what we are looking at. If we look at a mountain ten miles away, our minds stretch out ten miles. If we gaze at distant stars our minds reach out into the heavens, over literally astronomical distances.

The Sense of Being Stared At

Sometimes when I look at someone from behind, he or she turns and looks straight at me. And sometimes I suddenly turn around and find someone staring at me. Surveys show that more than 90% of people have had experiences such as these. The sense of being stared at should not occur if attention is all inside the head. But if it stretches out and links us to what we are looking at, then our looking could affect what we look at. Is just an illusion, or does the sense of being stared at really exist?

This question can be explored through simple, inexpensive experiments. People work in pairs. One person, the subject, sits with his or her back to the other, wearing a blind-fold. The other person, the looker, sits behind the subject, and in a random series of trials either looks at the subject’s neck, or looks away and think of something else. The beginning of each trial is signalled by a mechanical clicker or bleeper. Each trial lasts about ten seconds and the subject guesses out loud “looking” or “not looking.” Detailed instructions are given on my website, www.sheldrake.org.

More than 100,000 trials have now been carried out, and the results are overwhelmingly positive and hugely significant statistically, with odds against chance of quadrillions to one. The sense of being stared at even works when people are looked at through closed-circuit TV. Animals are also sensitive to being looked at by people, and people by animals. This sensitivity to looks seems widespread in the animal kingdom and may well have evolved in the context of predator-prey relationships: an animal that sensed when an unseen predator was staring would stand a better chance of surviving than an animal without this sense.

Telepathy

Educated people have been brought up to believe that telepathy does not exist. Like other so-called psychic phenomena, it is dismissed as an illusion.

Most people who espouse these opinions, which I used to myself, do not do so on the basis of a close examination of the evidence. They do so because there is a taboo against taking telepathy seriously. This taboo is related to the prevailing paradigm or model of reality within institutional science, namely the mind-inside-the-brain theory, according to which telepathy and other psychic phenomena, which seem to imply mysterious kinds of ‘action at a distance’, cannot possibly exist.

This taboo dates back at least as far as the Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century. But this is not the place to examine its history (which I discuss in The Sense of Being Stared At). Rather I want to summarise some recent experiments, which suggest that telepathy not only exists, but that it is a normal part of animal communication.

Psychic Pets

I first became interested in the subject of telepathy some 25 years ago, and started looking at evidence for telepathy in the animals we know best, namely pets. I soon came across numerous stories from owners of dogs, cats, parrots, horses and other animals that suggested these animals seemed able to read their minds and intentions.

Through public appeals I have built up a large database of such stories, currently containing more than 4,700 case histories. These stories fall into several categories. For example, many cat owners say that their animal seem to sense when they are planning to take them to the vet, even before they have taken out the carrying basket or given any apparent clue as to their intention. Some people say their dogs know when they are going to be taken for a walk, even when they are in a different room, out of sight or hearing, and when the person is merely thinking about taking them for a walk. Of course, no one finds this behaviour surprising if it happens at a routine time, or if the dogs see the person getting ready to go out, or hear the word “walk.” They think it is telepathic because it seems to happen in the absence of such clues.

One of the commonest and most testable claims about dogs and cats is that they know when their owners are coming home, in some cases anticipating their arrival by ten minutes or more. In random household surveys in Britain and America, my colleagues and I have found that approximately 50% of dog owners and 30% of cat owners believe that their animals anticipate the arrival of a member of the household. Through hundreds of videotaped experiments, my colleagues and I have shown that dogs react to their owners’ intentions to come home even if they are many miles away, even when they return at randomly-chosen times, and even when they travel in unfamiliar vehicles such as taxis. Telepathy seems the only hypothesis that can account for the facts. (For more details, see my book Dogs that Know When their Owners Are Coming Home, And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals.)

Telephone Telepathy

In the course of my research on unexplained powers of animals, I heard of dozens of dogs and cats that seemed to anticipate telephone calls from their owners. For example, when the telephone rings in the household of a noted professor at the University of California at Berkeley, his wife knows when her husband is on the other end of the line because Whiskins, their silver tabby cat, rushes to the telephone and paws at the receiver. “Many times he succeeds in taking it off the hook and makes appreciative miaws that are clearly audible to my husband at the other end,” she says. “If someone else telephones, Whiskins takes no notice.” The cat responds even when he telephones home from field trips in Africa or South America.

This lead me to reflect that I myself had had this kind of experience, in that I had thought of people for no apparent reason who shortly there afterwards called. I asked my family and friends if they had ever had this experience, and I soon found the majority were very familiar with it. Some said they knew when their mother or boyfriend or other significant person was calling because the phone sounded different!

Through extensive surveys, my colleagues and I have found that most people have had seemingly telepathic experiences with telephone calls. Indeed this is the commonest kind of apparent telepathy in the modern world.

Is this all a matter of coincidence, and selective memory, whereby people only remember when someone they were thinking about rang, and forget all the times they were wrong? Most sceptics assume that this is the case, but until recently there had never been any scientific research on the subject at all.

I have developed a simple experiment to test for telephone telepathy. Participants receive a call from one of four different callers at a prearranged time, and they themselves choose the callers, usually close friends or family members. For each test, the caller is picked at random by the experimenter by throwing a dice, or by using a computerised random-number generator. The participant has to say who the caller is before the caller says anything. If people were just guessing, they would be right about one time in four, or 25% of the time.

We conducted more than 800 such trials, and the average success rate is 42%, very significantly above the chance level of 25%, with astronomical odds against chance.

We also carried out a series of trials in which two of the four callers were familiar, while the other two were strangers, whose names the participants knew, but whom they had not met. With familiar callers, the success rate was 56%, highly significant statistically. With strangers it was at the chance level, in agreement with the observation that telepathy typically takes place between people who share emotional or social bonds.

In addition, we have found that these effects do not fall off with distance. Some of our participants were from Australia or New Zealand, and they could identify who was calling just as well as with people down under as with people only a few miles away.

Telepathic emails and text messages are the latest version of this phenomenon, and an extensive series of experiments with emails has given very similar results to the telephone experiments. Positive and highly significant statistically. (The details of all this research on telepathy in people and in pets are published in a series of papers in peer-reviewed journals, and the full texts are available on my web site).

An automated version of the telephone telepathy test that works on mobile telephones is now up and running and can be accessed from the Online Experiments Portal on my web site, www.sheldrake.org.

Extended Minds

Laboratory studies by parapsychologists have already provided significant statistical evidence for telepathy (well reviewed by Dean Radin in his book The Conscious Universe, Harper 1997). But most laboratory research has given rather weak effects, probably because most participants and “senders” were strangers to each other, and telepathy normally depends on social bonds.

The results of telephone telepathy experiments give much stronger and more repeatable effects because they involve people who know each other well. I have also found that there are striking telepathic links between nursing mothers and their babies. Likewise, the telepathic reactions of pets to their owners depend on strong social bonds.

I suggest that these bonds are aspects of the fields that link together members of social groups (which I call morphic fields) and which act as channels for the transfer of information between separated members of the group. Telepathy literally means “distant feeling,” and typically involves the communication of needs, intentions and distress. Sometimes the telepathic reactions are experienced as feelings, sometimes as visions or the hearing of voices, and sometimes in dreams. Many people and pets have reacted when people they are bonded to have had an accident, or are dying, even if this is happening many miles away.

There is an analogy for this process in quantum physics: if two particles have been part of the same quantum system and are separated in space, they retain a mysterious connectedness. When Einstein first realised this implication of quantum theory, he thought quantum theory must be wrong because it implied what he called “spooky action at a distance.” Experiments have shown that quantum theory is right and Einstein wrong. A change in one separated part of a system can affect another instantaneously. This phenomenon is known as quantum non-locality or non-separability.

Telepathy, like the sense of being stared at, is only paranormal if we define as “normal” the theory that the mind is confined to the brain. But if our minds reach out beyond our brains, just as they seem to, and connect with other minds, just as they seem to, then phenomena like telepathy and the sense of being stared at seem normal. They are not spooky and weird, on the margins of abnormal human psychology, but are part of our biological nature.

Of course, I am not saying that the brain is irrelevant to our understanding of the mind. It is very relevant, and recent advances in brain research have much to tell us. Our minds are centred in our bodies, and in our brains in particular. However, they are not confined to our brains, but extend beyond them. This extension occurs through the fields of the mind, or mental fields, which exist both within and beyond our brains.

The idea of the extended mind makes better sense of our experience than the mind-in-the-brain theory. Above all, it liberates us. We are no longer imprisoned within the narrow compass of our skulls, our minds separated and isolated from each other. We are no longer alienated from our bodies, from our environment and from other people. We are interconnected.

The new edition of Dr. Sheldrake’s classic book The Sense of Being Stared At, And Other Unexplained Powers of Human Minds, is available from all good bookstores and online retailers.

If you appreciated this article, please consider a digital subscription to New Dawn.

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DR. RUPERT SHELDRAKE is a biologist and author of more than 80 papers in scientific journals and ten books. His book The Sense of Being Stared At, And Other Unexplained Powers of Human Minds, has just been released in a new edition by Park Street Press. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and a Research Fellow of the Royal Society. From 2005-2010 he was the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project, funded from Trinity College, Cambridge University. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, near San Francisco, and a visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut. He lives in London with his wife, Jill Purce, and their two sons. His web site is www.sheldrake.org.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 140 (September-October 2013)

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By PATRICK HENNINGSEN

Among the long list of items bundled by consensus reality merchants under the banner of ‘conspiracy theory’, is a world without cash – where technocrats rule over the populace, and everything and anything is exchanged via plastic and RFID chips.

In this sterile and controlled Orwellian hi-tech society, the idea of cash being passed from hand to hand would be as archaic as the thought of carrying around a rucksack of tally sticks today.

Still, despite the incredible penetration of credit and debit card transactions into economic aggregate, and the boom in internet shopping, few will comfortably admit that a cashless society is nearly upon us. In part, it’s a natural denial by many fuelled by the idea our society is indeed on a collision course with the sort of dystopic impersonal future like that depicted in the 1970s sci-fi film classic, Logan’s Run. Cashless money is here, and growing rapidly.

Over the years, futurists and commentators alike seemed to agree that a cashless society will be a slow creep, and would automatically phase itself in simply by virtue of the sheer volume of electronic transactions that gradually make cash less available and more costly to redeem, or exchange. This is still true for the most part. What few counted on, however, was how the final push would take place, and why. Some will be surprised by these new emerging mechanisms, and the political and sinister implications they ultimately lead to.

Introduction of Parallel Currencies

There has been a lot made about the ‘cashless society’ in media, but this cannot fully happen until there is a cashless currency.

Every revolution needs a good crisis in order to germinate its seed. The cashless revolution is no different. It should be abundantly clear by now that the global financial meltdown has been engineered at every juncture of its unfolding by the very private central banks who expand and contract the money supply. A Dollar or Euro collapse will trigger a global economic crisis, which is a prime opportunity to introduce the next phase.

In the summer of 2012, at the height of the European Central Bank (ECB) ritualistic raping of the Greek economy, financial expert Max Keiser, alongside Mexican billionaire Hugo Salinas Price, travelled to Athens to promote the idea of a silver Drachma as a parallel currency to the ever-failing Euro. In theory and in practice, this parallel currency was ‘sound money’ for individual Greeks and would allow them to retain some say in their financial destiny, and also allow them to accumulate real wealth. It should have caught on. But this great idea did not go down well with media moguls and technocratic elites loyal to their overlords in the ECB, Wall Street and the City of London. Still, too many people remain unaware of how money is created, enters into circulation, and how their private central banks control inflation, and Greece is no different.

The US Dollar is pure fiat [fiat money is money that derives its value from government regulation or law], but it does have a theoretical backer. It is an oil-backed currency – and for better or for worse, is on its way to losing its long-lived status as the world’s reserve currency. China is moving towards a gold-backed currency and has already agreed to buy the majority of its oil supply from Russia off of the US Dollar peg. This could mean two things: the US could be forced to fight a war to maintain Dollar supremacy, or the Dollar will begin to drop as the top dog. This shift will open up a window of opportunity for money masters to insert not only a brand new global currency, but also its universal cashless attributes as well.

Common sense and free market wisdom would expect to see a sound money option replace the current fiat disaster, but as we saw in Greece, a great solution was not taken up and straddled with the dysfunctional Euro, and that society will continue to pay the cost of that reality.

The Euro crisis was a great opportunity to throw out the Euro in favour of something that could create wealth, rather than debt. As the fiat currencies continue to slide downhill, globalists are preparing their solution behind closed doors.

Enter the Cashless Currency…

Right now we are now on the cusp of that US Dollar collapse, and perhaps a Euro implosion on the back end of it. Risks of hyper inflation are very real here, but if you control the money supply and have a ready-made solution waiting in the wings, you will not be worried about the rift, only wait for the chaos to ensue so as to maximise your own booty from the crisis.

Many believed that the global currency would be the SDR unit, aka Special Drawing Rights, implemented in 2001 as a supplementary foreign exchange reserve asset maintained by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). SDRs were not considered a full-fledged currency, but rather a claim to currency held by IMF member countries for which they may be exchanged for Dollars, Euros, Yen or other central bankers’ fiat notes.

With the SDR confined to the upper tier of the international money launderette, a new product is still needed to dovetail with designs of a global cashless society. Two new parallel currencies are currently being used exclusively within the electronic, or cashless domain – Bitcoin and Ven. Among the many worries US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke listed was the emergence of Bitcoin. But don’t believe for a second these digital parallel currencies are not being watched over and even steered by the money masters. Couple this latest trend with done deals by most of the world’s largest mobile networks to allow people to pay via a mobile ‘wallet’, and you now have the initial enabler for a new global electronic currency.

These new parallel cashless currencies could very quickly end up in pole position for supremacy when the old fiat notes fade away as a result of the next planned economic Dollar and Euro crisis.

Both Bitcoin and Ven appear on their surface to be independent parallel digital money systems, but the reality is much different. In April 2011, Ven announced the first commodity trade priced in Ven for gold production between Europe and South America. Both of these so-called ‘digital alternatives’ are being backed and promoted through some of the world’s biggest and most long-standing corporate dynasties, including Rothschild owned Reuters as an example, which should be of interest to any activist who believes that a digitally controlled global currency is a dangerous road.

The Electronic Deutsche Mark

Much is made of Germany’s prominent financial position within the EU, with a popular talking point being that, “Germany is carrying the majority of the load in ‘bailing out’ countries such as Greece in the south.” If the Euro is ‘heading south’ as many a financial commentator are claiming, then how would a country like Germany – or even the Federal Reserve for that matter – hedge their bets with an impending currency collapse looming just over the horizon?

Economics professor Miles Kimball from the University of Michigan thinks he knows the answer:

In short, for a smooth transition, a reintroduced mark needs to be an electronic mark. I recently made the case for the electronic dollar in a previous Quartz column, “E-Money: How paper currency is holding the US recovery back.” The trouble with paper money is that the rate of interest people earn on holding paper money puts a floor on the interest rate they are willing to accept in doing any other lending. For the US, I proposed making the electronic dollar the “unit of account” or economic yardstick for prices and other economic values, and having the Federal Reserve control the exchange rate between electronic dollars and paper dollars to make paper dollars gradually fall in value relative to electronic dollars during periods of time when the Fed wants room to make the interest rate negative.

In the case of Germany, there would be no need to reintroduce a paper mark along with the electronic mark, since the euro itself could continue in its current role as a “medium of exchange” for making purchases in Germany, alongside the electronic mark. A “crawling peg” exchange rate could be used to let the electronic mark gradually go up in value relative to the euro, without causing a huge rush into the mark, since with no paper mark other than the euro itself, interest rates in Germany could be close to zero when measured in euros, which would make them strongly negative in terms of marks.

A Dollar or Euro crash could be the perfect storm for the introduction of major global digital currencies, and this will do nothing but fast-track our entry into the new cashless society.

Contactless Payments

This past year’s London Olympics was a beta testing exercise for a number of new programs. We witnessed troops deployed en mass for the first time to marshal the international sporting event and new facial recognition technology tested to monitor its attendees. One of the chief sponsors of the 2012 London Olympics was VISA, which used the event as a springboard to launch its new ‘contactless payment’ technology, acclimatising the international public to making routine payments via smartphones. VISA now predicts that this new method will carry 50 per cent of its transaction volume by the year 2020.

Mastercard has also rolled out its own version called Paypass, and Barclaycard has already implemented its own mobile phone payment chip in 2011. It’s conceivable here that a bank like Barclays could one day takeover a major mobile service provider in order to streamline the endless profits it could accrue from monopolising cashless payment facilities for its customers. A recent edition of Marketing Week further explains how this program is being rolled out:

Barclays launched Pingit this year, a mobile payment service that allows customers to send and receive money with a mobile phone number, which has sparked The Payments Council to work on a similar project. And the three leading mobile operators in the UK – EE, Vodafone and O2 – are working on a joint project under the name Weve, one of the aims of which is to develop standardised technology for ‘digital wallets’ on mobile.

These industry innovations reflect the changing attitude and behaviour by consumers to cashless payments. Barry Clark, account director at Future Foundation, which identified the trend towards a cashless society in its recent report into the changing face of payments, explains that this move towards digital is a “banking nirvana” for brands, since replacing cash with electronic payments takes high costs out of the system.

These mobile enablers will effectively cover the small services and contractor’s market for the cashless society. In addition, digital payment terminals like iZettle and Square (created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey), have brought in most small traders, including taxi drivers, plumbers etc, and street side retailers – meaning that the barrier for entry into the new cashless society has been effectively dissolved.

The Socialist Oyster

The darker aspect of a cashless society is one which few are debating or discussing, but is actually the most pivotal in terms of social engineering and transforming communities and societies. In London, the electronic touch payment Oyster Card was introduced in 2003, initially for public transport, and since that time the card has been co-opted to be used for other functions, as the UK beta tests the idea of an all-in-one cashless lifestyle solution.

Ironically, it’s the United States, supposedly the birthplace of modern capitalism, which is beta testing its own socialist technocracy. As the ranks of the poor and unemployed grow and inflation rises in America, more and more people are dependent on traditional ‘Food Stamp’ entitlements in order to feed their families. The US has now introduced its own socialist ‘Oyster’ to replace the old Food Stamp program. It’s called the ‘EBT’, which stands for “Electronic Benefit Transfer,” as a means of transferring money from the central government to people living below the poverty line. Advocate Mike Adams for Natural News describes it another way:

EBT benefits have more than doubled during the Obama administration’s last four years, creating tens of millions of new dependents who now vote based almost entirely on who gives them the most handouts. The purchase of vitamins is specifically prohibited by the EBT program. This is done as a way to keep EBT recipients sick and diseased while suffering from nutritional deficiencies, which is precisely what the federal government wants.

EBT cards create high-profit handouts to corporations, too: Pharmaceutical companies and the sick-care industry; Big Government which gets re-elected based on entitlement handouts; global banks which earn a percentage off every swipe; and even the processed junk food industry which preys upon nutritional ignorance of the poor.

In fact, for every dollar’s worth of food handed out to EBT recipients under the program, at least 50 cents is driven right into the profit coffers of wealthy corporations.

Adams points out the endgame here. Where collectivist technocrats are concerned, a global digital currency is not only a means for a centrally controlled economy, but also a centrally controlled society. And as Adams also pointed out, they can even control what you eat.

Bottom line: the State can, and will cut-off your electronic financial lifeline should you fall foul of the system. No negotiations, no gray areas – and definitely no place for a free individual in this type of globalist system.

Social Networks Could Supplant Nations

In 2011 Facebook launched its own virtual currency, which was taken up immediately by the games developer industry. Facebook created its own internal digital market overnight. If customers didn’t like it, they had two choices – jump ship, or stay in the biggest market place. That’s a lot of power to wield, and you can wield it if you have the big numbers.

A severe lack of choice in the world of online communities has unwittingly (or not) positioned Facebook to play the roles of not only data collector, but also as banker, retailer, archivist and governor.

Many people have certainly become, in one way or another, sans border citizens of the ‘Facebook Nation’. In the future, one corporation or cartel’s success in capturing a near global monopoly of membership to a particular online platform might give it the ability to dictate a digital economic mandate to both producers and consumer.

The digital data industry now claims in a recent study by fast.MAP that consumer confidence in sharing personal information has risen. But the reality is that most people do not know which data is being used and to who it is being shared or sold to. Most users are unknowingly trading “access” to networks, as well convenient speed of registration – for data privacy. We do this on a daily basis now.

It’s a question of speculation at this point how deeply the new digital currencies will be integrated into social networking giants like Facebook, or Second Life – where users are already buying virtual property with virtual currency, but few can deny that the potential for consolidation in the early 21st century is already there.

History Will Repeat Itself

Whenever the status quo is seen as a failure, the architects of society will rarely allow the whole show to come to a grinding halt, for fear that new and non-centrally controlled organic systems of organisation will emerge. The ruling establishment will spare no opportunity to tell society this, over and over, making people truly believe that it is in their best interest to adopt whatever alternative is handed down to them. This is why, when faced with a crisis, society will almost always seek to implement a parallel alternative, rather than rethink the whole system.

In 2008, the public had an opportunity to collapse the predatory banking system that has been trading insolvent and gambling on thin air. But the very same ruling establishment who engineered the crisis to begin with, masterfully presented their own solution as the remedy by establishing the precedent of the State bailing out any gambling losses incurred by the banking community.

In the end society relented, and with the help of pro-banking political leadership on both sides of the Atlantic, they adopted the pre-packaged belief that a cluster of bloated and corrupt financial institutions were simply too big to fail. Aside from being a massive redistribution of wealth upwards into the hands of the speculative elite classes, this was merely a test by the establishment to see how far they could go in robbing the public, pushing up inflation, hoovering up real assets, robbing pension funds and enslaving taxpayers to generations of debt the bankers created – all in one swoop.

It has long been the dream of collectivists and technocratic elites to eliminate the semi-unregulated cash economy and black markets in order to maximise taxation and to fully control markets. If the cashless society is ushered in, they will have near complete control over the lives of individual people.

The financial collapse which began in 2007-2008 was merely the opening gambit of the elite criminal class, a mere warm-up for things to come. With the next collapse we may see a centrally controlled global digital currency gaining its final foothold. The cashless society is already here. The question now is how far will society allow it to penetrate and completely control each and every aspect of their day to day lives.

If you appreciated this article, please consider a digital subscription to New Dawn.

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PATRICK HENNINGSEN is an independent investigative reporter, editor, and journalist. A native of Omaha, Nebraska and a graduate of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in California, he is currently based in London, England and is the managing editor of 21st Century Wire – News for the Waking Generation (http://www.21stCenturyWire.com) which covers exposés on intelligence, geopolitics, foreign policy, the war on terror, technology and Wall Street. Patrick is a regular commentator on Russia Today.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 137 (March-April 2013)

Read this article with its illustrations and much more by downloading
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By RICHARD SMOLEY

I was in search of the unknown…
– Madame H.P. Blavatsky (1831-1890)

Gary Lachman is one of today’s most intelligent and prolific authors on the world of the occult. He started out in the 1970s in the New York rock scene as one of the original members of the groundbreaking New Wave band Blondie. In 1996 he moved to London, where he established himself as a full-time writer, contributing to publications such as Fortean Times, The Guardian, and The Times Literary Supplement.

Since 2001 he has produced a steady stream of books, including Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius; The Secret History of Consciousness; A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult; and Politics and the Occult: The Right, the Left, and the Radically Unseen. In recent years he has published biographies of major esoteric figures including P.D. Ouspensky, Emanuel Swedenborg, Rudolf Steiner, and Carl Jung.

I first came to know Gary in the ’90s, when he was a frequent contributor to the now-defunct Gnosis magazine, for which I was editor. Although we’ve been in constant touch over the years, the last time I saw him in person was in 2006, when he was in New York to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of Blondie. We had a long conversation over lunch that led to his book Politics and the Occult. In 2012 Gary published Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality, a biography of the pioneering nineteenth-century spiritual figure H.P. Blavatsky (also known as HPB). In January 2013 I conducted an e-mail interview with him about the book and about Blavatsky.

RICHARD SMOLEY (RS): To begin with, could you say a little bit about who H.P. Blavatsky was for those who aren’t familiar with her?

GARY LACHMAN (GL): Helena Petrovna von Hahn was born in 1831 into a family of the lower Russian nobility. Around her eighteenth year, she fled a brief and unconsummated marriage to an older man, Nikifor Blavatsky, and embarked on what by all accounts was a twenty-odd-year-long global quest for secret knowledge, triggered by her reading of her great-grandfather’s occult library and her own mystical experiences. During this time, she said, she met her Master Morya in London, who charged her with a mission: to reach Tibet, where she would be tutored in the control of her psychic abilities. She surfaced in New York City in 1873, where she lived in a woman’s cooperative on the Lower East Side. A meeting with Colonel Henry Steel Olcott led to a lifelong Platonic relationship, and in 1875, she, Olcott, and William Quan Judge founded the Theosophical Society. The rest is history.

RS: What made you choose her as the subject of a biography?

GL: I had already written studies of Ouspensky, Jung, Swedenborg, and Rudolf Steiner. As I argue in the book, HPB was a seminal influence on practically the whole of modern spirituality and esotericism. All of my work is centred on the idea of an evolution of consciousness, both in the individual and in culture at large. It seemed to make sense to take a new, fresh look at someone who kick-started a whole movement dedicated to this idea. Also, it struck me that much of what we think we know about HPB was really a myth, made up of hearsay and misperception, repeated for more than a century. I can’t say I’ve told the truth about Blavatsky, but I’ve tried to point out what others haven’t.

RS: What influence does Blavatsky continue to have on the current spiritual scene?

GL: Well, the Theosophical Society, in its many different forms, continues today. Much of what we think of as New Age really has its roots in Blavatsky’s early work. Tibetan and Mahayana Buddhism, as we understand it in the West, for example, emerged from her and her early followers. W.Y. Evans-Wentz, who collected the funerary texts we know as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, was a Theosophist, and much of his work is informed by Theosophical ideas. Also, our contemporary interfaith and multifaith sensibilities, our striving toward a broad religious tolerance, has its roots in Blavatsky’s belief that all the major religions have their source in an ancient, ‘secret’ doctrine. She was very much ahead of her time.

RS: There is a broad spectrum of opinion about Blavatsky. On one end there are those who regard her as a fraud pure and simple. On the other end are those who see her as a much-maligned saint. Where would you place yourself on this continuum?

GL: Well, I don’t see her as a fraud or as a saint, so I guess I am in the middle, or rather, perhaps ‘above’ this either/or opposition. In the book I refer to a concept I borrow from the novelist Hermann Hesse. In an essay on Dostoyevsky, Hesse speaks of what he calls ‘Russian Man’, who is an antinomian character, “an hysteric, drunkard, criminal, poet and saint, all wrapped up in one.” Think of Rasputin, the ‘holy devil’. HPB was what we call a ‘trickster’, although that is something of a cliché. She wasn’t above mystical high jinks when she felt it was necessary – or when she got exasperated with the sanctimonious devotees who often wasted her time. But she was also a deeply spiritual, I would even say religious, moral character; I liken her to the Russian startzi – deeply spiritual individuals who gave off a kind of spiritual electricity. But she didn’t wear this on her sleeve.

RS: After having done so much research on Blavatsky, do you personally believe that her alleged occult powers were genuine?

GL: I keep an open mind about her powers. For one thing, I’ve had enough anomalous experiences to accept that the standard ‘scientific’ view of reality simply doesn’t cover all the bases, things like precognitive dreams, telepathy, and very convincing synchronicities. Of course, some of the things claimed about HPB – materialising teacups and other items – do seem impossible. But I point out in the book other examples of similar abilities. I look at a few of the most well known examples, and, given what we know about them – and we can only go by the accounts that have come down to us – I try to see how she could have faked them – if she did. Of course, because I can’t see how she could have faked the teacup or some other ‘materialisation’, doesn’t mean she couldn’t have. But I did rack my brain quite a bit about it, and I think I covered every possible angle. So my take is that, yes, they are incredible, but perhaps not impossible. I mean, look at what science tells us about dark matter, dark force, super strings, and n-dimensions. That seems pretty incredible too. Were her ‘phenomena’ important? That’s a different question.

RS: Blavatsky made much of her connection with the hidden Masters Morya and Koot Hoomi, as well as other Masters. Some take these to be actual men endowed with superhuman capacities who guided her in her path and in the creation of the Theosophical Society. Others say they are figments of her imagination. What’s your own position on this issue?

GL: Blavatsky’s Masters seem to me to be composed of several different things. There was the ‘mysterious Hindu of my dreams’ that came to her in her earlier life, and more than once saved her life – at least that was the story she told in her later years. Then there was the idea of ‘unknown superiors’, high-ranking individuals in the Rosicrucian Freemasonry her great-grandfather practised. Reading of these mysterious powerful but ‘hidden’ men, Blavatsky became committed to finding them and to realising the vision of a progressive, united Europe they championed. The Theosophical Society was her way of trying to make their goal of a universal fraternity come true. Then there were the actual men and women she encountered in her quest for knowledge; people like herself who were pursuing a similar quest. She considered many of these ‘Masters’ – a title of respect and gratitude. But of course the most significant Masters were Morya and Koot Hoomi, flesh-and-blood men who had mastered their own psychic powers and who taught her how to master her own. Whether they had the powers she claimed is still up for debate, but I believe they did exist. HPB lived out a myth and she saw these people as embodiments of the inner guides she believed were helping her on her path. So the Master she knew from her childhood dreams and the Master she met in London in 1851 may not have been the same actual person, but for her we can say that they fulfilled the same role.

RS: In your book you allude to unseen hands that work behind the scenes of history. Do you think there are such forces, and if so, how did they use Blavatsky?

GL: I’m not sure about the ‘hidden hand’ version of history – and the phrase ‘hidden hand’ comes from the esoteric scholar Joscelyn Godwin. That idea is a kind of staple of occult history, and also of our contemporary conspiracy consciousness. In one sense I’m not partial to it – I think we need to solve our problems ourselves, rather than expect a saviour, either some ‘inner circle’ of humanity or benevolent aliens or extradimensional beings or Mayan calendars, to do it for us. But on the other hand, given the dominance of the ‘rational’ view that history is meaningless, or, at best, the result of purely material forces, I think the idea of something at work ‘behind the scenes’ can be positive. At least it posits some meaning or intelligence at work. But the notion of some cabal of advanced individuals, holed up in the Himalayan fastness – or at the centre of the earth, or in the Arctic – does seem a bit de trop. I tend to see the idea as a metaphor for the evolutionary urge. But then perhaps there are angelic beings who drop us hints from time to time.

RS: Could you tell us a bit about Blavatsky’s major works, Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine?

GL: In the book I say that I am more partial to Isis Unveiled than to The Secret Doctrine. One reason is that Isis Unveiled is often overlooked compared to her other major work. I think it is a remarkable achievement. It is one of the first occult compendiums, a fascinating, if often exhausting, collection of what esoteric and occult literature and philosophy was available at the time. It is the source of so much of what we see as ‘alternative’ literature today. In a way it is like Charles Fort’s books, only much better-written and containing more cogent argument. Basically, with Isis Unveiled Blavatsky tried to resurrect the Hermetic wisdom, which had been in eclipse since the 1600s. If nothing else she deserves credit for formulating the first philosophical – not religious – criticism of Darwinian evolution in it; credit for this is usually given to Samuel Butler (author of Erewhon), who wrote a remarkable series of books attacking Darwin in the 1870s and ’80s. Unfortunately these are forgotten today, but their arguments are still quite pertinent. (Someone should send copies to Richard Dawkins.) But Blavatsky got there ahead of Butler by a few months. She should be recognised in the history of ideas for this.

The Secret Doctrine is a kind of bible of esoteric and occult thought. It presents a full scale esoteric history of humanity and the universe, and presents the occult wisdom that Blavatsky says she learned during her tutelage in Tibet. It has more of a ‘carved in stone’ character than Isis Unveiled and has given rise to numerous offshoots, some good, some not so good.

RS: The Secret Doctrine presents an elaborate alternative history of human evolution, with references to things like Atlantis and Lemuria. What do you personally make of this history?

GL: I found it most profitable to read HPB’s occult history as a gigantic sci-fi or fantasy epic, a modern mythology, something along the lines of, say, Olaf Stapledon’s ‘future histories’ Last and First Men and Starmaker. I felt the same about Rudolf Steiner’s similar readings of the akashic record. I also think, though, that while the details in both Steiner’s and Blavatsky’s readings of Atlantis and Lemuria and so on can seem frankly unbelievable, the general sense of an earlier form of consciousness they present has much of value. With most such spiritual visions – William Blake’s can fit in here, as can Jung’s as depicted in The Red Book – we have to sift through what is personal, what is simply the unconscious being creative, and what may be a symbolic presentation of our actual spiritual reality. At the same time, there is much cogent argument for the idea that civilisations existed well before what we considered the beginning of history. In fact, the ‘official’ accounts are regularly pushed further and further back. Will archaeology eventually prove HPB was absolutely right? I doubt it. But it may and probably will show that she was right in saying that we aren’t the first ones to spend time on our planet.

RS: One criticism that is frequently levelled at Blavatsky was that she was a racist, and that her views on what she called the ‘Aryan root race’ inspired Nazism and similar ideologies. Where does the truth lie on this issue?

GL: Basically, although some of HPB’s remarks about race break the cringe barrier and are unacceptable to us, she was no more racist than what the prevailing sensibilities of the time accepted. Sadly, her remarks about root and subraces in The Secret Doctrine inspired some proto-Nazi characters in Austria and Germany – if you can call what they did with her brief remarks ‘inspired’. We can’t hold her responsible for that, or for any other appropriation of her ideas by less tolerant characters. In a sense, HPB is in the same position Nietzsche was in when the Nazis appropriated some of his work – he was in no way racist, nor was he a war monger, but Nazi hacks presented him in this way. It wasn’t until serious scholars repaired his reputation that he was cleared of any Nazi taint. The same needs to be done for HPB, and if I’ve helped in this effort, I am glad. I saw no evidence of Blavatsky being personally racist, and indeed, she abandoned her white, European privilege to live with Hindus and Sinhalese during her time in India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). She was more anti-European, even anti-white, we can say, given her remarks about the British Raj and the Christian missionary movement. Some have called her anti-Semitic, but what this really means is that she had little fondness for the Judeo-Christian religion. One forgets that her central mission was the founding of a universal fraternity, regardless of race, creed, sex, or colour. One also forgets that she had much more influence on Gandhi than she did on Hitler. Gandhi found his life’s work through his contact with Theosophy.

RS: Could you say a little bit about the Theosophical Society and its place in twentieth- and twenty-first-century spiritual currents? What influence does it continue to have?

GL: Well, I’m not a Theosophist and am not associated with any Theosophical group, so I can only speak of what I’m aware of peripherally, as it were. But the Theosophical Society in its different forms – there are quite a few different incarnations of it – is still alive and kicking. I know here in London the Theosophical Society is a centre for a wide-ranging series of talks, lectures, and other activities, all linked to the themes of spirituality, consciousness, and ‘lost knowledge’. There is quite a lively Theosophical presence on the Internet, with several different sites devoted to different aspects of Theosophy in general and Blavatsky in particular. My book itself seems to have stimulated some discussions. So I think it will continue to maintain an important place in the ‘alternative’ world. What I have found with practically all of the movements or groups associated with the people I’ve written about – Steiner, Swedenborg, Ouspensky, etc. – is that they are all looking for ways to reboot themselves, to attract a wider, younger audience, to make themselves more inclusive. I think this is also paralleled in the broader, outer world. I’ve been involved with some art events in Europe and England at major museums and galleries that have had spirituality at their centre, and Theosophy is a frequent element in these. In fact, I am supposed to be involved in a major retrospective of the work of the Swedish Theosophical painter Hilma af Klint in Stockholm later this year. I think in general the official world is starting to see what many of us have been aware of for years: that esotericism has had a much bigger influence on the modern world that we realise.

RS: What are your own views of human evolution, particularly as it relates to the current era? What do you think is happening with the human race as a whole at this stage of the game?

GL: As I say, pretty much all my work is focused on the idea of an evolution of consciousness. My view is informed by the work of people like Colin Wilson, Owen Barfield, Jean Gebser, and others; I write about it at length in my book A Secret History of Consciousness. In a general sense, I think we are seeing the beginning of the breakdown of the kind of scientific reductionism that has been the dominant mode of consciousness for the last four centuries. This doesn’t mean that a neon sign will rise up over the horizon announcing the start of a new age. It doesn’t work like that, and we shouldn’t look for signs of this change in the news. Changes in consciousness don’t necessarily mean immediate changes in society or the world. All work begins with the individual. But I do think that in the last century or so, more and more people have realised that science, or rather, scientism, is simply no help when it comes to the big questions, such as ‘What is this all about?’ Science is very good on know-how but useless on ‘know why’. The Higgs boson can’t tell me why I exist and what I am supposed to do now that I’m here. For a long time we went along with the notion that if science can’t answer these questions, then they are nonsense. But that doesn’t work any more. The main challenge is for us to understand how our own consciousness works, not try to explain it away, as much contemporary neuroscience and philosophy of mind have tried to do. Science can’t tell me the meaning of my life, and the established religions – which once were able to satisfy this need for meaning – seem no longer capable of it. I think the answer lies in ourselves, in our own minds. I think HPB would have agreed.

Gary Lachman’s biography of the pioneering nineteenth-century spiritual figure H.P. Blavatsky is titled Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality (352 pages, Tarcher 2012). It’s available from all good bookstores or www.amazon.com. Gary Lachman’s website is www.garylachman.co.uk.

If you appreciated this article, please consider a digital subscription to New Dawn.

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RICHARD SMOLEY has over thirty-five years of experience of studying and practicing esoteric spirituality. He is the author of Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition; The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe; Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity; The Essential Nostradamus; Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism; and Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (coauthored with Jay Kinney). Smoley is editor of Quest: Journal of the Theosophical Society in America and of Quest Books. His latest book, Supernatural: Writings on an Unknown History, contains many articles that originally appeared in New Dawn.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 137 (March-April 2013)

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In Hindu mythology, Kalki is the final incarnation of Vishnu, foretold to appear at the end of Kali Yuga, our current epoch. The Puranas foretell that he will be atop a white horse with a drawn blazing sword. He is the harbinger of the end time in Hindu eschatology, after which he will usher in the Satya (Krita) Yuga.

By JOSCELYN GODWIN

The widespread belief that an age is ending and a new one dawning is part of a cyclical concept of time common to most philosophical cultures. The best known versions are the Four Ages of Greek mythology and the Hindu myth of the Four Yugas. The purpose of this article is to clarify some of the confusion that exists around them, to set out the actual figures as given by Eastern and Western authorities, and to discourage unthinking acceptance of a currently popular theory.¹

The earliest European source of the myth is Hesiod, a Greek poet of the eighth century BCE. In his Works and Days (lines 109-21) he describes the ages as a cycle of decline, from Golden to Silver, Bronze, and Iron. He adds the interesting idea that these ages do not only change the quality of life, but the after-death state of humans. The people of the Golden and Silver Ages, when they died, became spirits who watch over and benefit the human race. The people of the Bronze Age were not immortal in that sense, but went down to a twilight existence in Hades. Perhaps influenced by the Trojan War, Hesiod here inserts an “Age of Heroes” of whom a few crossed the ocean to enjoy a private Golden Age under its ruler Cronos (Saturn). But this did not stem the degeneration for the rest of mankind, which hurtled down to the nadir of the Iron Age. For Hesiod it was too soon to tell their after-death fate, but things were not looking good for them.

Post-classical culture learned of the Four Ages mainly through Virgil and Ovid. In the first book of his Metamorphoses (I, 89-261) Ovid describes them and their races as declining in happiness and virtue until the universal Deluge. After that a new order of humans, animals, and plants was raised up from the earth. Christians saw a similarity with the biblical story of Noah’s Flood, but even more so in Virgil’s prophecy of a new Golden Age in his own time. It may have been intended to flatter the Emperor Augustus, who had brought peace after Rome’s civil war, but the mention of the Virgin made it applicable to Christ:

Now comes the last age, sung by the Cumaean Sibyl:
The great order of ages starts anew.
The Virgin returns and Saturn’s reign resumes:
A new race of men is sent from heaven.
(Eclogue IV, 5-8)

The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) do not share the pagan concept of multiple cycles of creation and destruction. Monotheisms have room only for one cycle, with the Garden of Eden before the Fall as equivalent to the Golden Age. To continue the parallel, the Silver Age might be that of the biblical patriarchs who were still intimate with God; the Bronze Age that of the prophets and sacred kings; the Iron Age, from the Babylonian exile up to the present day. The cycle will end with Judgment, after which the Christian elect enter the New Jerusalem and Muslims the Garden of Paradise. Jews have their corresponding Messianic expectation. All three religions promise that in the end God will set things right, or in pagan language, that the reign of Cronos will return.

Incidentally, one of the recurrent themes of the Golden Age is that during it, the earth’s axis was perpendicular to the ecliptic (a topic treated in my book Arktos²). If this were so there would be no seasons, but equal day and night throughout the year. Plants and trees would fruit continuously, and the years would pass uncounted. Eternity could well describe the human experience of time under such conditions, which ceased when the axis was knocked off kilter. It will be restored at the next Golden Age, when the earth resumes its proper axial position. Whether or not there is any scientific basis to this myth makes no difference to its power and the “thought experiment” that goes along with it.

The Four Ages (Yugas) of Hinduism

Hindu tradition has its own version of the Four Ages, and it was probably from there that it reached the Greeks and other Indo-European peoples. The Puranas and Laws of Manu agree that the four Yugas are in the proportion 4:3:2:1. Their names are Krita Yuga (fortunate age; also called Satya Yuga), Treta Yuga (age of three parts), Dwapara Yuga (age of two parts), and Kali Yuga (age of conflict), the four together constituting a Maha Yuga or Great Age.

Each Yuga has a dawn and a twilight period, each a tenth of its length, called respectively Sandhyá and Sandyásana. The Vishnu Purana gives their durations in divine years, each counting for 360 human years, as follows:³

To relate these durations to history we need an actual date, and this is supplied by the Hindu astronomers. They agree that the Kali Yuga began at midnight between February 17 and 18, 3102 BCE. From that we can calculate that the transition to the Golden Age will occur around 427,000 CE. It hardly seems worth bothering about something so far outside the time-scale of human experience. But before we dismiss these figures as pure fantasy, we should know that they are not peculiar to Hinduism. Some of them appear in very different contexts, with such precision that there is no question of chance coincidence.

Berossus, who records the Babylonian chronology, was a priest of Bel and had a school of astronomy on the island of Kos in the third century BCE. He gives the figures for the reigns of the ten Assyrian kings who preceded the Flood: they total 420,000 years.⁴

In China, according to the early missionary researcher Père Prémare, the early dynasties were respectively of 13 and 11 kings, each of whom ruled or lived 18,000 years. Prémare understandably doubted this, but if we do the arithmetic, (13 + 11) x 18,000 comes to 432,000 years.⁵

The Icelandic saga called the Poetic Edda describes the preparations for the apocalyptic battle at the end of time, when Valhalla’s warriors issue forth against the Fenris Wolf:

Five hundred doors | and forty there are,
I ween, in Valhall’s walls;
Eight hundred fighters | through one door fare
When to war with the wolf they go.⁶

800 fighters going through each of 540 doors totals 432,000. So the number of warriors gathered in Valhalla on the last day is again the number of years in the Kali Yuga, the last age of the Maha Yuga cycle.

The authors of Hamlet’s Mill, Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, called this a “remarkable and disturbing coincidence.”⁷ This is because the theory of an archaic worldwide culture with cosmological knowledge is anathema to official prehistory. One breach in the conventional view is due to Ernest McClain, one of the most original and ingenious researchers of our time. He has uncovered evidence of a kind of multidisciplinary game played with these self-same numbers which hinges on musical tuning systems. Those in the know included the Babylonians, the Vedic poets, Plato, the compilers of the Hebrew scriptures, the earliest Christians and Gnostics, and whoever gave the Quran its present form. For example, McClain interprets the Arks of Babylonian and Hebrew legend as multi-story diagrams that enclose, or “save” from the flood all possible numbers, the ones needed for calculating the calendar and the musical scale. In the case of Noah’s Ark, the significant number is none other than 432,000.⁸

McClain is a radical with regard to the history of ideas, but even more so are the Traditionalists, who take the numbers not as a philosophical game but as encoding precise knowledge of cosmic and historical time-cycles. René Guénon (1886-1951), one of the few great thinkers to have worked from this assumption, accepted that the four Yugas are in the proportion of 4:3:2:1, but questioned the Puranic figures. The zeros were put there simply to mislead, he says,⁹ and for good reason. If people knew the real dates, they would try to predict the future, which is unwise “because in practice, such knowledge brings many more problems than advantages.”¹⁰ The essential thing is the number 4320, which Guénon takes as representing the Maha Yuga: the set of four Yugas that embraces the entire history of present humanity. But 4320 years is obviously too short a period, just as the 4,320,000 years of the Puranas is too long. There were two basic problems: first, to find the correct multiplier of 4320 in order to arrive at the true length of the Maha Yuga, and second, to find the anchor in known chronology. Guénon seems to have worked backwards from knowledge of another cycle, that of the precession of the equinoxes which is traditionally given as 25,920 years (4320 x 6). Assuming that the Krita Yuga or the “timeless” Golden Age lasted for a whole precessional cycle, this gives the following durations for the four Yugas in human years, with a total of 64,800 years or 4320 x 15:

Krita, 25,920
Treta, 19,440
Dwapara, 12,960
Kali, 6480

For all his warnings about attempts to predict the future, Guénon planted straightforward clues, mostly in footnotes, to show how he connected these durations to known chronology. Writing about Atlantis, he says:

We think that the duration of the Atlantean civilisation must be equal to a “Great Year,” understood as half the period of the Precession of the Equinoxes. As for the cataclysm that brought it to an end, certain concordant data seem to indicate that it took place 7200 years before the year 720 of the Kali Yuga: a year which is itself the departure point of a familiar era, but one whose origin and significance are no longer known to those who currently use it.¹¹

Guénon typically does not reveal the “concordant data,” but his commentator Jean Robin explains:

If one knows that the era in question is none other than the Jewish one, whose beginning is traditionally placed 3761 years before the Christian era, it is easy to deduce… the “theoretical” end-date of the cycle. The beginning of the Kali Yuga would thus be in the year 4481 BCE (3761 + 720), and its end would have to come 6480 years later, i.e. in the year 1999 (6480 – 4481).¹²

We can now reconstruct Guénon’s chronology as follows:

Robin was writing in the early 1980s. He reminds us that 1999 is the one date specifically mentioned by Nostradamus as when “a great King of Terror will come from the sky.” But like every other world-ending date, it has come and gone.

The orientalist and musicologist Alain Daniélou (1907-1994) knew the Hindu tradition from the inside and was a correspondent of Guénon’s. He too could not accept the extremely large figures given in the Puranas, and reduced them in a different way. There are some problems with his method (explained in my book Atlantis and the Cycles of Time), but it is enough here to give his figures for comparison. Daniélou’s historical peg is the traditional date for the beginning of the Kali Yuga, 3102 BCE, which he says “represents a cosmological reality linked with an alternation in influx from the planetary spheres; it is not an arbitrary date.”¹³

By these calculations, the Kali Yuga’s final phase began with World War II. Daniélou, although a much more cheerful type than the saturnine Guénon, was a complete cultural pessimist. He writes that, “the final catastrophe will take place during this twilight. The last traces of this present humanity will have disappeared in 2442.”¹⁴ I can imagine him adding, with a smile, “et bon débarras!” [and good riddance!].

Guénon also corresponded with Gaston Georgel (1899-?), an independent scholar of whom almost nothing is known. He had found that historical events tend to replicate each other at certain rhythmical intervals. Some of his parallels are impressive, such as that of the medieval kings of France with Louis XIV-XVI, at an interval of 539 years (77 × 7), or that of the English and French revolutions, 144 years apart. Georgel first published his cyclical theories in 1937 as Les rythmes dans l’histoire (Rhythms in history).¹⁵ He was as yet unaware of Hindu traditions, and his large-scale cycle was one of 2160 years. This is the traditional duration of an astrological age, twelve of which make up the precessional cycle of 25,920 years. Georgel renames the Age of Aries the “Cycle of Abraham,” and the Age of Pisces the “Cycle of Caesar,” which he dates from 130 BCE. He arrived at that date, he says, from “a deep study of the Christic cycle” and the fact that “according to Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, the sun at autumn equinox then entered the sign of Virgo.”¹⁶ That sounds authoritative, but as anyone who has studied the astrological ages should know, the borders of the constellations are not fixed (unlike the regular, fictive constellations counting from the spring point as 0° Aries). Consequently the time when the equinoctial sun moves from one to the next is debatable. For instance, the dates given by various authorities for the beginning of the Aquarian Age range from 1760 (Godfrey Higgins) to 2160 (Paul Le Cour).¹⁷

Guénon agreed that many of Georgel’s coincidences were extraordinary. The next year he wrote his own contribution to the subject, “Some Remarks on the Doctrine of Cosmic Cycles” (1938), in which he interpreted the Puranic numbers as given above. After World War II their correspondence resumed. Georgel returned the compliment by adopting Guénon’s Yuga chronology but stuck to his own dating, saying that “to facilitate our research, we will here adopt the date of AD 2030 that was proposed as a working hypothesis in our first book, for the end of the Manvantara” (i.e. the Maha Yuga of 64,800 years).¹⁸

Georgel found corroboration of the 2030 end-date in a book to which Guénon himself lent much credence: Beasts, Men and Gods by Ferdinand Ossendowski. This best-selling book published in 1922 plays a large role in the myth of Agarttha, which I have treated elsewhere.¹⁹ It culminated with a prophecy that the King of the World is supposed to have made in Mongolia in 1891:

In the fiftieth year only three great kingdoms will appear, which will exist happily seventy-one years. Afterwards there will be eighteen years of war and destruction. Then the peoples of Agharti will come up from their subterranean caverns to the surface of the earth.²⁰

The fiftieth year from 1891 is 1941. The happy period of 71 years under three great kingdoms lasts from 1941 till 2012. Then 18 more years bring us exactly to 2030.²¹

We now have four suggested dates for the end of the Kali Yuga, and with it the end of the present set of four ages. The Puranic figures, taken literally, place it about 427,000 years in the future. Jean Robin, following Guénon, reckoned that it would end in 1999. Daniélou calculated that the Kali Yuga entered twilight phase in 1939 and will end completely in 2442. Georgel’s multiple cycles converge on the year 2030. After that a new Krita/Satya Yuga initiates the next cycle.

Sri Yukteswar’s Hindu Yuga system

Many readers will be familiar with the system proposed by Sri Yukteswar Giri (1855-1936). It has had such favourable publicity in recent years that it is widely believed to be the authoritative Hindu Yuga system.²² Sri Yukteswar adopts as his Maha Yuga a 24,000 year period, supposedly that of the precession of the equinoxes. He assigns half these years to a set of descending Yugas in the traditional proportion 4:3:2:1. By taking the “divine years” of the Puranas (see the first table, page 64) as human ones, they total 12,000 years. Then comes his real innovation: the cycle does not repeat, but starts a new set of four Yugas in reverse order. The link to historical chronology seems to be the traditional Kali Yuga starting-date of 3102 BCE, but moved to 3101 and to a different place in the Yuga sequence. From this it is easy to construct a table of Yuketeswar’s system:

As in the Puranic system, each age is framed by sandhis or periods of mutation at its beginning and end, each worth 1/10 of the Yuga. Thus a Kali Yuga proper lasts 1000 years, with periods of 200 years preceding and following it. In 1894 Yukteswar wrote:

In 1899, on completion of the period of 200 years of Dwapara Sandhi, the time of mutation, the True Dwapara Yuga of 2000 years will commence and will give to mankind in general a thorough understanding of the electricities and their attributes.²³

The essence of Yukteswar’s system is that it places present-day humanity in an ascending, rather than a descending curve. This is so contrary to all traditions that we must look for its source elsewhere. Upper-caste Indians like Yukteswar may have resented being colonised by the British, but they had bought into the European myth of progress through science. Yukteswar believed that around 1700 the world had entered an “electrical” age. The discovery of electricity and its uses signified to him that man was attaining a finer perception than in the purely materialistic age that had preceded it. Before that, in the dual Kali Yuga, “the intellectual part of man was so much diminished that it could no longer comprehend anything beyond the gross material of creation.”²⁴

Only historical ignorance can excuse such a statement. The period in question, from 701 BCE to 1699 CE, saw the birth of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Taoism, Jainism, and Vedanta; of the Orphic and Pythagorean movements, the mysteries of Isis, Serapis, and Mithras, the birth of post-exilic Judaism, Druidry, Christianity, Manicheanism, Gnosticism, Catharism, and Islam. On the esoteric side it witnessed Zen and Vajrayana Buddhism, Sankhya philosophy, Kabbalah, Sufism, theosophy both Neoplatonic and Christian, Rosicrucianism, and the arts of magic, alchemy, and astrology. Reports of miracles were commonplace, and belief in non-material realities such as oracles, curses, the Will of God, the Devil, transubstantiation, or witchcraft was so intense as to cause major wars and persecutions. Finally around 1700, with the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, came a rising tide of disbelief in anything spiritual, leading to the atheism and scientific materialism of today’s elites.

The Jains and some Buddhist sects also had an up-and down cyclical system, which may have been one of Sri Yukteswar’s inspirations, though their time-scale far exceeds his. His other ingredient was a rough approximation of the precessional cycle to 24,000 years instead of the astronomers’ 25,770 or the traditional 25,920. He anchored it in historical chronology with a clearly political motive, for, along with another future guru, Sri Aurobindo Ghose, he belonged to a secret anti-colonial movement called precisely Yugantar, meaning “New Age” or “Transition of an Epoch.”²⁵ There was a strategic purpose behind the announcement in 1894 that the Kali Yuga was over and the Dwapara Yuga, a better age, already in progress; also behind the emphasis on 1899, only five years away, as the year that the new epoch would come into its own. In the early years of the twentieth century, the movement’s propaganda announced that the “sinful Iron Age was over” and urged insurrection. This is not an attack on Sri Yukteswar and those who respect him and his disciple Yogananda, but simply a reminder that even sages have their agendas. Guénon said as much about the authors of the Puranas!

What is at stake here is more than allegiance to one authority or another. It is whether one’s world-view allows (1) that humanity as a whole passes through predetermined cycles, and (2) that these are fixed chronologically, hence predictable if one can find the key. For what it is worth, I lean towards the first but not the second, because I trust the microcosm as a guide to understanding the macrocosm, and vice versa. Every one of us is passing through a predetermined cycle whose dates are unpredictable. Barring accidents, we are making our way from the Golden Age of childhood, through the bitter-sweet Silver Age of adolescence and the combative Bronze Age of maturity, to the Iron Age of decline and death. Then we may start afresh, but we certainly don’t repeat the process in reverse! Just as one can estimate someone’s life expectancy by their age, state of health, habits, etc., so one can make a guess at that of civilisations and maybe the entire human race.

The traditional descriptions of the Kali Yuga, and especially of what Guénon in 1944 called the “Reign of Quantity,” fit the modern world perfectly, and that may give us an idea of our position in the cycle. But like an old person recovering from one close call after another, we seem to be holding on and must be grateful for each new day.

More information and extensive research on this subject matter can be found in Joselyn Godwin’s book Atlantis and the Cycles of Time (Inner Traditions, 2011).

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Footnotes

1. This article quotes and adapts material explained more fully in my book Atlantis and the Cycles of Time (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2011).

2. J. Godwin, Arktos, The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival (Kempton: Adventures Unlimited, 1996), 13-18.

3. Compiled from Vishnu Purana, 1:3; see also Linga Purana, 4:24-35; Laws of Manu, 1:68-82.

4. Eusebius, Chaldaean Chronicle, 1:8.

5. Joseph Henri Marie de Prémare, Discours préliminaire, in Joseph de Guignes, ed., Le Chou-King, un des livres sacrés des Chinois (Paris: Tilliard, 1770), li.

6. The Poetic Edda, Grimnismol, 23, trans. Henry Adams Bellows.

7. Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time (Boston: Gambit, 1969), 162.

8. Ernest G. McClain, The Myth of Invariance: The Origin of the Gods, Mathematics and Music from the Rig Veda to Plato (New York: Nicolas Hays, 1976), 149.

9. What follows is summarised from René Guénon, “Quelques remarques sur la doctrine des cycles cosmiques,” in Formes traditionnelles et cycles cosmiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 22-24.

10. Ibid., 21.

11. Ibid., 48n.

12. Jean Robin, Les sociétés secrètes au rendez-vous de l’apocalypse (Paris: Guy Trédaniel, 1985), 67.

13. Alain Daniélou, While the Gods Play: Shaiva Oracles and Predictions on the Cycles of History and the Destiny of Mankind, trans. Barbara Bailey et al. (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1987), 193.

14. Daniélou, While the Gods Play, 197.

15. Gaston Georgel, Les rythmes dans l’histoire, 3^rd ed. (Milan: Archè, 1981; 1^st ed. 1937).

16. Ibid., 164.

17. See Atlantis and the Cycles of Time, 346-48.

18. Gaston Georgel, Les quatre âges de l’humanité (Exposé de la doctrine traditionnelle des cycles cosmiques) (Milan: Archè, 1976; 1^st ed. 1949), 87.

19. See J. Godwin, “Agarttha: Taking the Lid Off the Underground Kingdom,” New Dawn 109 (2008), 59-62; also the investigations by Marco Baistrocchi, “Agarttha: A Guénonian Manipulation?” trans. J. Godwin (Fullerton, Ca.: Theosophical History, 2011) and Louis de Maistre, Dans les coulisses de l’Agartha l’extraordinaire mission de Ferdinand Anton Ossendowski en Mongolie. (Paris: Arché, 2010).

20. Ferdinand Ossendowski, Beasts, Men and Gods (New York: Dutton, 1922), 314.

21. Gaston Georgel, Le cycle Judéo-Chrétien, sceau et couronnement de l’histoire humaine (Milan: Archè, 1983), 34.

22. This system is explained in Jnanavatar Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri, The Holy Science (Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship, 1990; 1^st ed. 1949), 7-18.

23. Ibid., 15.

24. Ibid., 13.

25. See Terrorism in Bengal: A Collection of Documents on Terrorist Activities from 1905 to 1939, ed. Amiya K. Samanta (Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1995), 1:155. Accessed through Wikipedia article “Mokshadacharan Samadhyayi.”

.

JOSCELYN GODWIN is Professor of Music at Colgate University, New York State, and a writer, editor, and translator of many books on esoteric traditions. His latest titles are The Golden Thread (Quest Books), Athanasius Kircher’s Theatre of the World (Thames & Hudson/Inner Traditions), Atlantis and the Cycles of Time (Inner Traditions), and an occult mystery novel co-authored with Guido Mina di Sospiro, The Forbidden Book, published by RedWheel/Weiser under their Disinformation imprint. He is currently finishing a book called Upstate Cauldron: Eccentric Spiritual Movements of Early New York State (SUNY Press).

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 138 (May-June 2013)

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By PATRICK HENNINGSEN

Books have been written about [US] President Eisenhower’s famous farewell warning in 1961 about the “military-industrial complex,” and what he described as its “unwarranted influence.” But an even greater leviathan today, one that the public knows little about, is the “intelligence-industrial complex.”
– Michael Hirsh, National Journal¹

In our interconnected global digital society, there appears to be no escape from the issue of digital surveillance. Regardless of nationality, political affiliation, profession or income bracket, it touches nearly everyone in some fashion.

Over the last three decades, a parallel state has been constructed right under our noses. It’s nothing less than a digital dynasty, whose sole concern thus far has been mass surveillance and covert operations – across the whole world. With the full support of an unflinching judicial structure that approves the spying, it also goes to bat for the transnational corporations who wish to target certain individuals that oppose them.

For some Democrat voters in the United States, the Obama government’s stance on the National Security Agency’s (NSA) global spying network has come as a shock. Their government not only approves such a program, but also battles against reform legislation designed to stop it.

Americans were quick to realise this is no mere partisan issue – it’s been fostered by successive governments and with virtually no public oversight. Under the shadow of 9/11, USA Patriot Acts I and II were hurried through by President George W. Bush. On this point, George W. is often credited as being the source of the problem, along with the self referential Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) state wiretapping edicts – where anything goes so long as it’s deemed to be within the bounds of national security.

But the foundation of this modern international digital surveillance state goes back much further though – to the Echelon program – in operation since the 1980s (see ‘ECHELON: The System that Foreshadowed PRISM’ on page 12 of this issue of New Dawn). The US government built this state of the art total information collection centre off shore at Menwith Hill in the north of England, and then routed its data back to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland and Arlington Hall, Virginia. By offshoring various aspects of their communications spy network, the US avoided any sticky legal issues surrounding the existence of such an operation within the borders of the US.

Besides their joint project with General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the United Kingdom, other US offshore bases for this global operation include joint operating facilities with Defense Signals Directorate (DSD) in Australia, Communications Security Establishment (CSE) in Canada, Government Security Communications Bureau (GSCB) in New Zealand, and National SIGINT Organisation (NSO) in The Netherlands.

Americans cite the Fourth Amendment of their Bill of Rights as their legal protection to privacy against government intrusions, which states clearly, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

What has become clear, however, is that neither the Fourth Amendment, the Supreme Court, nor citizen petitioning, has the power to stop this new international state and corporate digital spy network.

The Snowden Affair

The NSA whistleblowing exploits of former CIA analyst and NSA consultant Edward Snowden has ripped open the privacy debate on both domestic and international levels (see ‘What Snowden Revealed’ in this issue of New Dawn).

Despite the size and scope of Snowden’s NSA whistleblowing, there’s little sign of Washington DC changing its imperial practices, and even less indication that any of its European allies will display the political backbone necessary to hold it to account.

European leaders appear to have stumbled and fallen into their own gray abyss of legalese and culpability. The lack of leadership on such a major issue may damage public confidence in the political classes who appear to be unable to properly address what can only be described as a multi-billion dollar state within a state, existing completely outside democratic and judicial processes.

Europe’s Appeasement

During the early days of the Third Reich in Germany, much European policy towards Nazi aggression was indifferent because so many regarded Germany as a dominant power and were therefore keen to curry favour. Many leaders, including those in Britain and France, adopted a policy of appeasement. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was even hailed as the “saviour of Europe” after he struck the Munich agreement with Hitler’s government.

Europe’s general lack of foresight and ethical vacuum saw them defer to Germany on the basis of money and power. Now we see history repeating itself again, although somewhat in reverse, with Germany running cover for Washington’s NSA digital empire.

Germany’s change of direction on this issue reveals a lot about the scale of the problem. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s initial public response seemed to be that of outrage.

“We are no longer in the Cold War,” said Angela Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert. Seibert added, “If it is confirmed that diplomatic representations of the European Union and individual European countries have been spied upon, we will clearly say that bugging friends is unacceptable.”²

Merkel’s public façade didn’t hold up for long after Snowden revealed in Der Spiegel magazine only days later that the US and Germany were in fact partners in the global spy network. “They are in bed with the Germans, just like with most other Western states,” the German magazine quoted Snowden as saying, adding the NSA has a Foreign Affairs Directorate which is responsible for cooperation with other countries.³

The same Der Spiegel report also detailed exactly how German Federal Intelligence Service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), and NSA work together.

The embarrassment of this particular Snowden bombshell seemed to force Germany down a notch, with Merkel opting for a new policy of appeasement instead, proving that the initial rift between the US and Germany was mere political theatre.

Merkel told Die Zeit that there was “a need to discuss the balance between privacy and security, but protection against terrorism was not possible without the option of electronic surveillance.” She added, “(I want) the necessary discussions with the United States to be conducted in the spirit which, despite the many justified questions, never forgets that America has been our most loyal ally over the decades and still is.”⁴

Merkel’s last statement indicates she is just as out of touch with public opinion as the culture of denial that still dominates Washington DC.

“For me, there is no comparison at all between the state security (STASI) of the GDR and the work of intelligence services in democratic states,” said Merkel.⁵

It seems incredible but not so shocking when you consider the reality: all the major Western powers are in total coordination when it comes to international data mining and spying on their domestic populations. They have laid down the embryonic framework necessary for an intelligence gathering network that will be the keystone for a global government in the near future.

STASI Comparisons

When former lieutenant colonel in East Germany’s secret STASI police, Wolfgang Schmidt, heard about Snowden’s NSA leaks, he remarked that in his day the wiretapping department was limited to tapping only 40 phones every day. If a decision was made to tap a new phone, one of the others had to be disconnected. “For us, this would have been a dream come true… so much information on so many people!,” said Schmidt.⁶

With the data packets being collected and stored reaching into the trillions, many are claiming it is physically impossible for the US, UK, Germany and others to sift through and make sense of all of it – but this is missing the point. Aside from the fact that much of the data processing and filing is computer automated already, the real function of the giant digital harvester is not to spy on everyone and watch everyone in real time. Rather, the function of this system is to collect data and archive it. Once a citizen, activist, or dissenter (essentially, any enemy of the state or major corporation) has been profiled and targeted, then the system can pull up that person’s complete digital thread and then analysts can begin digging through that person’s life online and conceivably paint any picture imaginable based on travel movements, relationships, search history, phone activity and social network commenting.

The Accountability Myth

It’s long been assumed throughout the 20^th century – regarded as ‘the century of progress’ – that an essential quality of any modern civilised society is the presence of accountability between government and its citizens. This concept is struggling for survival in the early 21^st century.

At the height of the NSA exposure, a tiny country in Europe has somehow managed to deliver a rare example of what should happen in an advanced civilised democracy. Luxembourg’s long-serving Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker announced his resignation on 11 June over a spying scandal involving illegal phone-taps, alongside a number other highly corrupt activities.

In normal times, what happened in Luxembourg should also happen in other countries like the US, or Great Britain – but these are far from normal times. What passes for normal in this bizarre epoch is anyone’s guess, and you could say the same for what passes for ‘legal’ these days, especially in the United States.

The net result is that expectation of accountability has dissolved into a larger pool of moral relativism – where any extremist government program can be justified on a basis of Hegelian narrative or such.

The NSA crisis is a perfect example of the death of accountability. Snowden’s revelations should have been a watershed moment for 21^st century society in 2013, but instead it’s languished in a political environment devoid of any real democratic or parliamentary controls which should be regulating the practice of the state’s warrantless digital surveillance and mass data theft.

What’s worse, there’s even less chance of justice in the courts, where adjudicators have been rendered impotent to enforce the law – they are buried under an avalanche of national security directives, emergency war-time edicts and administrative executive orders.

The Star Chamber Courts

The rise of new administrative and statutory courts in the West has been a great enabler for the modern security state. These courts are designed to work outside of their countries constitutional controls and common law rights. What has emerged out of this new trend is a type of corporate state where the corporations themselves can exert their own ‘rights’ to life, liberty and the pursuit of profits, and where the corporation’s interest ultimately usurps that of the individual citizen.

Well before the Snowden affair broke in June 2013, Germany had already cleared the legal path for at least one of the transnational corporations within the NSA global collective.

Through the use of administrative courts and the EU, the Administrative Court of Schleswig, Germany upheld two decisions on 14 February 2013 which ruled that German data protection laws do not apply to data processing by Facebook (file numbers 8 B 60/12 and 8 B 61/1). These controversial judicial procedures, initiated by Facebook Inc. (USA) and by Facebook Ltd. (Ireland, EU), reversed a previous order by the Independent State Center for Data Protection of Schleswig-Holstein (ULD) which had ruled to allow users to sign in on Facebook using a pseudonym and to unblock those user-accounts that had been blocked due to the users not using their real name and personal data. At the time this was seen as a victory for Facebook the corporation – when in fact, this was really a victory for the NSA – who harvests its data from Facebook.

NSA in Partnership with GCHQ

Based on Snowden leaks, we’ve learned more about the true nature of America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ partnership in this international spy network, sharing data and communications.

Through the UK Government’s Communications Headquarters known as TEMPORA, the British agency is able to tap over 200 fibre optic cables landing in the UK, saving everything – up to 27 petabytes a day – which are then parsed out to 300 GCHQ analysts and 250 NSA colleagues who then sift through it.

A decade of Patriot Acts, FISA laws and Wikileaks cables has left Americans and Europeans alike in a precarious state akin to Stockholm Syndrome, where their love of digital communications almost trumps their concerns for privacy. This same ambiguity has been echoed by Obama and Merkel, who both claim that protection against terrorism is not possible without the option of electronic surveillance.

The narrative which was originally framed around Washington’s invasion of its citizens’ privacy has since gone international, as governments partner with each other – and with corporations – to establish the largest global digital dragnet imaginable.

According to Snowden’s revelations in Der Spiegel, the NSA snoops through approximately 20-60 million German phone connections, and 10 million internet data sets a day. All in all, the NSA combs through around half a billion German phone calls, emails and text messages on a monthly basis.

To add insult to injury, it’s been said US intelligence regards Germany as a “third class partner,” on par with the likes of China and Iraq, making them fair game for NSA targeting. It’s not just Berlin, as the NSA are also said to have bugged EU diplomatic offices and gained access to EU internal computer networks.

Digital Fascism Without Borders

The corporate aspect should not be underrated in terms of its central role in the international digital data trade.

Edward Snowden’s PRISM revelations of government controlled NSA wiretapping and data theft are nothing new, as former CIA analyst Russell Tice proved almost a decade ago in 2005 by showing the NSA were engaged in unlawful and unconstitutional wiretaps on American citizens.

The NSA cannot operate without the partnership of telecommunications companies – all of whom have offices and operational hubs in most foreign markets. Herein resides the key aspect in all of this – that in order for agencies like the NSA and GCHQ to get easy access to all of our digital communications and data, they still need the cooperation of corporations to do it.

In the US, it’s still not known to what extent major internet service providers and mobile carriers like Verizon and AT&T are in bed with the NSA within US borders. NSA-controlled “SG3” collection rooms embedded within various companies’ facilities have been revealed. Shocking enough, but not nearly as shocking if you consider the role of transnational corporations in enabling NSA access to your digital threads and mobile phone activity.

Internationally, citizens have already signed over most of their privacy simply by using the digital services of US multinationals like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Skype, Yahoo and others. It seems that all of these corporations operate within a kind of ‘profit-first’ ethical vacuum where in many cases there is a client relationship with the NSA who is allowed the privilege of consuming their customers’ communications and data.

According to the Snowden leaks, the level of collusion between Microsoft Corp and the NSA is astonishing. Microsoft allows the NSA to skirt encryption protocols on Outlook, Skype video and cloud services, and data captured by the NSA is routinely passed on to both the FBI and the CIA.⁷

What happened to businesses looking out for their customers?

The horrible irony here is too obvious to ignore: the US government, through its National Security Agency, is handing taxpayer dollars to mega corporations in exchange for all of our personal communications and data. In other words, it’s big business.

Corporations Using the NSA to Target Activists

Harvesting data and communications from the digital corporate monopolies is one thing, but the collusion between big government and big business reached new lows when it was revealed that major international oil producer Chevron Corporation had pressured the US federal government to hand over nine years of NSA metadata – metadata including names, time stamps, user location data and their login information, but not the email contents. The metadata Chevron was after belonged to activists, lawyers, and journalists who criticised Chevron for its drilling in Ecuador – an operation that left an environmentally devastating trail of toxic sludge and leaky pipelines.

“Since 1993, when the litigation began, Chevron has lost multiple appeals and has been ordered to pay plaintiffs from native communities about $19 billion to cover the cost of environmental damage. Chevron alleges that it is the victim of a mass extortion conspiracy, which is why the company is asking Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, which owns Hotmail, to cough up the email data. When Lewis Kaplan, a federal judge in New York, granted the Microsoft subpoena last month, he ruled it didn’t violate the First Amendment because Americans weren’t among the people targeted.”⁸

The court ruled that the First Amendment rights of the activists did not apply when weighed against the interests of the transnational oil corporation Chevron. This was an unprecedented move by US courts, and is perhaps one of the most worrying examples of where the digital power grab is heading in future.

When omnipotent security organisations like the NSA can skirt around privacy laws by reaching over borders, and then act on the behest of powerful corporations who seek to hunt down their detractors across borders, then the potential for a complete breakdown of local law protected by national sovereignty exists.

Taking the Hegelian dialectic of problem, reaction, solution into account here, we can see how the US federal courts and Chevron initiated the problem, and triggered the reaction which is public outrage. All that is needed now is the solution, likely to be offered by the very bodies who initiated the outrage in the first instance. Their solution to the over-influence of global corporate bodies may be a global corporate government to regulate such affairs in future.

Such an unholy alliance between partnering governments and transnational corporations could be defined as fascism, but the global nature of this operation might require a new term to define what it means as a global phenomenon.

Watch the Bouncing Ball

It’s important the public realise the lesson in the media circus surrounding the Snowden affair: that despite all the damning discoveries and illegalities, neither the US nor anyone else in its sphere has any plans to roll back this intrusive network.

As the world’s media focused on the Snowden leaks and recoiled in horror over the implications, behind the scenes the NSA steamed ahead by embarking on its biggest expansion phase since Echelon. We are told there must be austerity for just about every public service and expenditure, but when it comes to spying and data mining on citizens, they’re writing nothing but blank cheques. The bill is already in the trillions of dollars and it’s far from over.

As a facility that is already much bigger than the Pentagon, the NSA headquarters is set to grow by an additional 50 percent when construction is complete in 2022 – and that’s just for its HQ in Fort Meade. Expansion is also taking place across all its major domestic sites including bases in Hawaii, Colorado, Georgia, Utah and Texas, as well as Australia and Britain.

Chilling Effect

These revelations of the size and scope – and total legal impunity of state and corporate spying networks – have already initiated a chilling effect on how people use the internet. Self policing behaviour on internet surfing, searches, email and social network engagement is already happening.

“In Louisiana, the wife of a former soldier is scaling back on Facebook posts and considering unfriending old acquaintances, worried an innocuous joke or long-lost associate might one day land her in a government probe. In California, a college student encrypts chats and emails, saying he’s not planning anything sinister but shouldn’t have to sweat snoopers. And in Canada, a lawyer is rethinking the data products he uses to ensure his clients’ privacy.”⁹

Perhaps this was one of the intended social engineering byproducts of the whole NSA media campaign. Either way, one thing is certain, and that’s no one likes being watched.

Beyond the obvious disturbing narrative in Edward Snowden’s dark revelations, it’s important to focus on what has enabled agencies like the NSA and GCHQ to act with impunity from behind their digital fortress. Big governments excelled in capitalising on a post-September 11 paranoia that hijacked the national consciousness in the US, the UK and Australia. The entire basis upon which their relentless war-time cry has been erected can be described in three words: “War on Terror.”

As public pressure mounts on the US government over the NSA scandal, so has the pressure for the government to justify such operations as part of the global war on terror. Early efforts in this area have already met with failure, including this past June, when NSA Director General Keith Alexander claimed that more than 50 terror plots had been prevented because of the agency’s highly classified data gathering.

“In the 12 years since the attacks on Sept. 11, we have lived in relative safety and security as a nation. That security is a direct result of the intelligence community’s quiet efforts to better connect the dots and learn from the mistakes that permitted those attacks to occur on 9/11.”¹⁰

Unfortunately for General Alexander, the facts don’t square with such lofty claims. At least one of the terror plots he cited has already been shown to have never occurred, along with two other cases shown not to have been solved by the NSA spy grid.

Most reasonable folk are in agreement that government agencies like the NSA have been allowed to drift far beyond the boundaries of domestic and international law and are out of control. They should be reined in as soon as possible in order to preserve any remaining moral standing for a country that has exhausted nearly all of its goodwill internationally – as well as domestically.

Judging by Washington’s stoic and unapologetic stance thus far, goodwill doesn’t seem to be a high priority. Until the problem is properly addressed, there will remain a gaping hole of moral leadership in the international community.

Throughout history, political leaders have always been notoriously slow to realise when the goodwill of the public is exhausted, which completely erodes public trust. That seems to be where things stand right now over the surveillance issue – and we’re on that very slippery slope indeed.

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Footnotes

1. ‘How America’s Top Tech Companies Created the Surveillance State’, by Michael Hirsh, www.nationaljournal.com, 25 July

2. ‘NSA spying row: bugging friends is unacceptable, warn Germans’ by Ian Traynor, The Guardian, 1 July

3. ‘Snowden: NSA is “in bed with the Germans”’, RT.com, 8 July

4. Reuters, 10 July

5. Ibid.

6, ‘Memories of Stasi color Germans’ view of U.S. surveillance programs’ by Matthew Schofield, McClatchyDC, 26 June, www.mcclatchydc.com

7. ‘How Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages’ by Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, Laura Poitras, Spencer Ackerman and Dominic Rushe, The Guardian, 12 July

8. ‘Court: Chevron Can Seize Americans’ Email Data’ by Dana Liebelson, Mother Jones, 22 July

9. ‘NSA spying revelations prompt some ordinary citizens to rethink computing habits’ by Associated Press, 22 July

10. ‘N.S.A. Chief Says Surveillance Has Stopped Dozens of Plots’ by Charlie Savage, NY Times, 18 June

.

PATRICK HENNINGSEN is an independent investigative reporter, editor, and journalist. A native of Omaha, Nebraska and a graduate of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in California, he is currently based in London, England and is the managing editor of 21st Century Wire – News for the Waking Generation (http://www.21stCentryWire.com) which covers exposés on intelligence, geopolitics, foreign policy, the war on terror, technology and Wall Street. Patrick is a regular commentator on Russia Today.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 140 (September-October 2013)

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Philip K Dick with his wife Leslie (Tessa) Busby (married between 1973-1977). Photo courtesy of Tessa Dick.

By ANTHONY PEAKE

This year saw the 30^th anniversary of the death of one of the most influential writers of all time, the iconic Philip K. Dick. Although virtually unknown outside of science fiction circles, during his lifetime Dick’s intriguing philosophy on the nature of reality has become a staple of the modern Hollywood movie. Huge blockbusters such as Total Recall, Minority Report, The Adjustment Bureau, Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly and Paycheck were loosely based directly on his novels or short stories, and movies such as The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Memento, The Matrix, The Truman Show and Inception all owe a huge debt to his vision.

One of the most intriguing themes of Dick’s writing was the concept of the “precog,” a person who could “see” the future before it happened. In 1954 Phil introduced the concept of precognition in his novel The World Jones Made. In this novel the eponymous anti-hero Floyd Jones can see exactly one year into the future. From then on “precogs” occur regularly in his novels and short stories, most notably in his 1956 short story The Minority Report, his 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and many others.

What was it that made Philip K. Dick interested in precognition? It had not been a particular theme within classical science fiction nor had it been part of the books that the young Philip read during his childhood years and early teens. The answer may lie in one simple fact: Philip K. Dick himself was a “precog.” He was not writing fiction but heavily disguised autobiography. Let us review the evidence.

Like many of his schoolmates, Phil was expected to attend the University of California in his hometown of Berkeley. But in order to do so he needed to reach the entrance grades required. This possibility started to fade rapidly when, during a crucial physics test, Phil couldn’t remember the key principle behind the displacement of water. As eight of the ten questions involved this principle, he was clearly in trouble. And then it happened: a voice clearly and precisely explained to the surprised young man the scientific principles he so desperately needed to understand. All Phil had to do was write down the words in his head. Phil received an ‘A’ grade.

Although this “voice” effectively disappeared for many years, Phil continued to sense there was a part of him that was alien in some way. Throughout the 1950s the voice remained silent and then, under somewhat prosaic circumstances, it re-appeared. In an interview with his friend Greg Rickman, recorded in October 1981, Phil described how he had been watching a TV programme about the Galapagos turtles. The fight for survival of one particular female turtle had really upset him. After laying her eggs she had turned in the wrong direction and instead of going towards the sea she crawled inland. Soon the heat had brought about extreme dehydration. She was dying. As she began to fade her legs were still seen to be moving. The film had been edited to give the impression that the dying turtle was imagining she was back in the ocean. He went to bed with this tragic image in his mind. He woke up in the night to hear a voice. In careful and deliberate terms the entity explained to Phil that the turtle actually believed she was in the water:

I was just terribly amazed and dumbfounded to hear that voice again. It wasn’t my own voice because one of the sentences the voice said was “And she shall see the sea” and I would not use the two words “see” and “sea” in the same sentence. It tends to do that, use word choices I don’t use. One time it used the expression “a very poisonous poison” which I would not use.¹

It is clear Phil recognised the voice as being the same entity that had helped him in his physics exam all those years before. It was back. He was to continue hearing this entity for many years, but only as a faint background whisper. In another 1981 interview he stated:

I only hear the voice of the spirit when I am falling asleep or waking up. I have to be very receptive to hear it. It’s extremely faint. It sounds as though it is coming from a million miles away.²

The “Voice” Returns

In February and March 1974 the voice was to reappear and stay with him. It all started quite innocently. Phil had been in considerable pain after having a wisdom tooth pulled out. His wife, Tessa, called the dentist who prescribed painkillers. As Tessa did not want to leave her husband alone in such a state of agitation she asked if somebody could deliver the prescription to their house in Fullerton. Half an hour later the doorbell rang and Phil dashed to the door. On opening it he saw a young woman clutching the much-needed painkillers. Phil stood back stunned. Around the young woman’s neck was a necklace with a fish pendant. Phil recognised this as a symbol of something deep within himself. He asked her what it was and she explained it was a sign used by the early Christians as a code to show their secret beliefs to fellow Christians.

Dick later reported this was the first time he experienced the pink light, the same light so central to the Beatles incident (described below). He said a beam of this light shot out of the pendant and entered his brain. This light opened up a part of his brain that had long been asleep. He described it in this way:

I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis – a Greek word meaning, literally, “loss of forgetfulness.” I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me.³

As we have already mentioned, up until March 1974 what Dick had called “the voice” manifested itself on rare occasions such as the incident during the school exam. But after Phil’s “anamnesis” his hidden partner was to become very active in his life. It decided that Phil had become far too slovenly in his personal appearance. He was made to go out and buy a pair of nasal hair-clippers and it suggested he trim his beard. The entity even had Phil go shopping for new trendy clothes.

It was also concerned about the health of the shared body. It had Phil go through his drugs cabinet and forced him to throw out those medications that were proving problematical to his health. It discovered that wine was too acidic for his sensitive stomach and suggested he change to drinking beer. This being had many skills that Phil sadly lacked, such as business acumen. It realised he had made quite a mess of his tax matters and within weeks the entity sorted this out. It also had Phil sack his agent after it read over his royalty statements and discovered massive irregularities.

All of these were minor interventions compared to its apogee, the saving of Phil’s son’s life. Phil describes how one morning he was lying in a semi-sleep state when he heard the voice announce that his recently born son, Christopher, had a potentially fatal birth defect and that urgent medical attention was needed. Indeed the voice was quite precise when it stated: “Your son has an undiagnosed right inguinal hernia. The hydrocele has burst, and it has descended into the scrotal sac. He requires immediate attention, or will soon die.” Phil told various versions of this story, including one involving him listening to the Beatles and the lyrics of “Strawberry Fields” were changed to give the instruction. Tessa, acting on her husband’s frantic instructions, took Christopher to the family doctor and it was, indeed, confirmed that Christopher had exactly the problem the “voice” had described and surgery was needed.

Dick’s “Homoplasmate”

What was the source of this “voice” and how did it have information unknown to Phil? Phil was to conclude that it was an immortal part of himself, something he called a “plasmate.” He argued this entity had bonded with him and in doing so had taken human form, something Phil termed a “homoplasmate.” He was later to describe how his mind had been invaded by a “transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and had suddenly become sane.” He explained that:

…mental anguish was simply removed from me as if by divine fiat… some transcendental divine power which was not evil, but benign intervened to restore my mind and heal my body and give me a sense of the beauty, the joy, the sanity of the world.

This being, set free from its shackles by Phil’s “anamneses,” was able to use its powers to help Phil precognise the future. Indeed, Phil realised this being had been the source of a series of peculiar precognitive incidents that had taken place throughout his life.

For example, in his 1974 novel Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, Phil has a sequence in which one of his characters, Felix Buckman, is distraught at the death of his twin sister, Alys. He finds himself in an all-night gas station and there he meets up with a black stranger. Buckman and the black man start up a conversation. In the summer of 1978 Phil, uncharacteristically, decided to go out late at night to post a letter. In the darkness he noticed a man loitering by a parked car. Phil posted his letter and on the way back the man was still there. In a second uncharacteristic impulse Phil walked over to the man and asked if anything was the matter. The man replied that he was out of gas and he had no money with him. Much to his surprise Phil found himself digging into his pocket and giving the man some cash. The man asked for Phil’s address and said that he would return later and pay him back. As Phil entered his apartment he realised that the money would be of no use to his new friend. There were no gas stations within walking distance. Phil went back out, found the man, and offered to drive him to the nearest all-night gas station. As he stood watching the man fill up his metal gas can he had an alarming sensation of a déjà vu-like recognition:

Suddenly I realised that this was the scene in my novel – the novel written eight years before. The all-night gas station was exactly as I had envisioned it in my inner eye when I wrote the scene – the glaring white light, the pump jockey – and now I saw something which I had not seen before. The stranger who I was helping was black.⁴

Phil drove the black man back to his car, they shook hands and Phil never saw him again. He finishes off his description of this event with a slightly chilling comment:

I was terribly shaken up by this experience. I had literally lived out a scene completely as it had appeared in my novel…. What could explain all this?⁵

Uncanny Precognition

In early 1974 Phil started a long-term correspondence with a graduate student called Gloria Bush. As time went on Phil described to Gloria some of his deepest thoughts, including his fascination regarding his own precognitive abilities. In a letter dated 9 May of that year he described to Gloria a particularly strange recurring dream he experienced in November 1971. In the dreams he always saw what looked like a Mexican city with “square arrangements of streets and yellow cabs.” The yellow cabs suggested to Phil a location in the USA rather than Mexico or Latin America. At the time of these dreams he was living in Marin County, north of San Francisco. In 1974 he was living in Fullerton, a southern suburb of Los Angeles. Right next to Fullerton is a place called Placentia which is a strongly Hispanic area. Phil explains to Claudia that he was convinced this was the place he saw in these dreams.⁶

But Phil’s dreams in 1975 took a turn to the macabre. On 25 February he wrote a letter to Bush that was very different from those he had sent before. In a fascinating postscript to an otherwise standard letter, he mentions “the entity” again. It had clearly been manifesting itself within his life at that time. How regularly and to what intensity we cannot say as we have no other source other than this letter. However, it is clear Phil wanted to bring things to a head. He told Claudia:

I was up to 5 a.m. on this last night. I did something I never did before; I commanded the entity to show itself to me – the entity which has been guiding me internally since March. A sort of dream-like period passed, then, of hypnogogic images of underwater cities, very nice, and then a stark single horrifying scene, inert but not still; a man lay dead, on his face, in a living room between the coffee table and the couch.⁷

On 9 May 1974 he wrote another typewritten letter to Claudia stating that he felt “scared.” He didn’t elaborate on this comment but at the bottom of the letter is a handwritten note that states the following: “p.s. What scares me most, Claudia, is that I can often recall the future.”

Almost exactly seven years later Phil had failed to answer a series of phone calls to his condominium. A group of neighbours then found his front door open. One witness, Mary Wilson, entered the condo and described how she initially thought nobody was home, but then she spotted Phil’s feet sticking out from behind a coffee table. She immediately asked her mother to phone Phil’s close friend, science-fiction writer Tim Powers. Powers jumped on his motorcycle to see what he could do to help. In his introduction to The Selected Letters of Philip K Dick Volume Four Powers describes what happened next:

As I was putting the key in the ignition of my motorcycle I heard the sirens of the paramedics howl past me down Main Street. When I got to Phil’s place the paramedics and Mary Wilson were already there and the paramedic had lifted him from between the coffee table and the couch and carried him to his bed, and Mary and I answered a few hasty medical questions about him before they got him into a stretcher and carried him downstairs to the ambulance.⁸

Phil’s February 1975 dream had come true in stunning detail. He had seen the circumstances of his own death.

Who, or what, was the “entity” that seemed to share Phil’s life and know his future? Surprisingly enough Phil believed this being to be a version of himself that existed outside of time; a being that could observe the whole of Phil’s life from a position of timelessness. Phil believed that during his dreams, in his semi-waking states and during certain times of heightened awareness, this timeless part of himself could communicate and use its foreknowledge to assist him.

In October 1977 Phil made a very curious statement during a radio interview at the Berkeley radio station KPFA FM. He described an incident that took place in 1951:

Back at the time I was starting to write science fiction, I was asleep one night and I woke up and there was a figure standing at the edge of the bed, looking down at me. I grunted in amazement and all of a sudden my wife woke up and started screaming because she could see it too. She started screaming, but I recognised it and I started reassuring her, saying that it was me that was there and not to be afraid. Within the last two years – let’s say that was in 1951 – I’ve dreamed almost every night that I was back in that house, and I have a strong feeling that back then in 1951 or ’52 that I saw my future self, who had somehow, in some way we don’t understand – I wouldn’t call it occult – passed backward during one of my dreams now of that house, going back there and seeing myself again. So there really are some strange things…⁹

If the figure at the end of the bed was a future version of Phil then that version would have foreknowledge of all Phil’s life-experiences between 1951 and 1977. Indeed, if Phil’s interpretation can be taken at face value, we have here evidence that in some way his mind from the mid-1970s was manifesting itself back within its own past.

Vertical Vs. “Orthogonal Time”

But Phil was not simply happy with accepting this may be the case, he wanted to create a model to explain such a belief. Immediately after the strange events of February and March 1974, or simply 2-3-74 as he termed them, Phil started to keep a journal. Initially in hand-written form and later as page after page of typewritten sheets with diagrams and side notes, this became known as his Exegesis. In effect this was Phil’s attempt to understand the source and meaning of the visions and revelations that he continued to receive until his death in March 1983.

We are fortunate that in November 2011 a single volume containing all the main sections of this huge work was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Running to 976 pages this is a fascinating read and in it one can discover Phil’s own understanding of how a part of him could see the future. His solution was a radical re-interpretation of time itself – something Phil called “orthogonal time.”

He proposes there are two variations of time, both of which exist at right angles to each other. We are usually only aware of “Vertical Time,” but there is another which runs at right angles to our space-time. He calls this “Orthogonal Time.” If we could perceive both times simultaneously it would look cubical, hence his term cubic time. He proposed that events are actually located within this cubic time. As such the idea of cause and effect cannot be applied within this model. Causality can run in reverse or act simultaneously with an event in the past or the future. In other words within orthogonal time all past and future states exist at this moment. In the whole of the Exegesis Phil makes one passing reference to a physicist by the name of Herman Minkowski, the teacher of the much more famous Albert Einstein. With reference to his own precognitions, Phil wrote:

This is a disturbing new view but oddly enough it coincides with my dream experiences, my precognition of events moving this way from the future; I feel them inexorably approaching, not generated from the present, but somehow already there but not yet visible. If they are somehow “there” already, and we encounter them successively (the Minkowski block universe; events are all already there but we have to encounter them successively), then this view might be a correct view of time and causality.¹⁰

Phil suggested that the basic premise of his short story Adjustment Team – that there exists a way in which the past can be “adjusted” to change the present – may be another of his fictionalised accounts of something that really takes place.¹¹

Phil believed that part of us exists within orthogonal time and this alternate-consciousness can, under certain circumstances, communicate with the every-day self that perceives only linear time. This was the source of “the voice” and VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System, Dick’s gnostic vision of one aspect of God). This is how, in dreams, Phil found himself back in his own past observing an earlier version of himself. In this way “the voice” was his own voice speaking from his own future. This entity created his plot-lines using material from his own future. Was this how the meeting with the black man at the gas station ended up in A Scanner Darkly? All information from all parts of our life is readily available to a mind open to receive it. Phil suggested in a letter to his friend Patricia Warrick, written in September 1981, that:

The universe is an information retrieval system; which is to say, everything that has ever happened, ever been, each arrangement and detail – all are stored in the present moment as information; what we lack is the access or entry mechanism to this stored information… where the past of each object – all its prior manifestations along the Form axis – this is all stored in the present object and can be retrieved.¹²

This is again astounding evidence that Phil seemed to be accessing information from some form of infinite data-field. It is very much in keeping with the work of modern-day researchers such as Ervin Laszlo and Bernard Haisch, both of whom suggest this “library” is, in fact, something known as the Zero-Point Field.¹³

Is this the answer to the mystery of Phil’s precognitions? It certainly makes sense. The future and the past are simply illusions. Phillip K. Dick and every being that reads this article consist of two independent consciousnesses. One lives in linear time and the other in orthogonal time. And in this way we may all be immortal. After all, the transition between life and death takes place in linear, not orthogonal, time.

In his novel Ubik Phil created a concept known as “Half Life.” This is a timeless place, hovering between life and death. Tibetan Buddhists call this the “Bardo State.” Is this from where Phil’s eternal mind communicated with him? To paraphrase the title of one of his most intriguing books, could it be we all exist in a place where “Time is Out of Joint”?

For more on the above, read Anthony Peake’s book The Man Who Remembered the Future: A Life of Philip K. Dick.

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Footnotes

1. Gregg Rickman, Philip K. Dick: The Last Testament, Fragments West, 1985, 23

2. John Boonstra, Horselover Fat and The New Messiah, Hartford Advocate, 22 April 1981, reproduced in PKD Otako #06, 22

3. ‘How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later’, published as an introduction to I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon, Doubleday, New York, 1985

4. Lawrence Sutin (editor), The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, Vintage, 1995, 268

5. Ibid., 269

6. The Selected Letters of Philip K Dick, 1974, Underwood-Miller, 1991, 101

7. Philip K. Dick, Letter to Claudia Krenz, 25 February 1975

8. The Selected Letters of Philip K Dick, 1975-76, Underwood-Miller, 1992, ix

9. Richard A Lupoff, A Conversation With Philip K Dick, Vol. 1, no. 2, August 1987, 45-54

10. Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K Dick, Hachette Littlehampton, Kindle Edition.

11. Ibid.

12. The Selected Letters of Philip K Dick, 1980-1982, Vol. 6, Underwood Books, 2009, 262

13. Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything, Inner Traditions, 2007

.

ANTHONY PEAKE is the author of a series of highly acclaimed books, all of which develop a hypothesis that he terms “Cheating the Ferryman.” In these books he presents an explanation for all of Philip K. Dick’s extraordinary experiences. His book on Dick is The Man Who Remembered the Future: A Life of Philip K. Dick. This expands on the issues discussed in this article. Anthony’s website is www.anthonypeake.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 139 (July-August 2013)

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By WALTER MASON—

Angkor Wat is a vast stone temple at the heart of an ancient stone city. But at the ends of its corridors and the centres of its hidden rooms lie surprising Buddhist shrines still active in a place abandoned for hundreds of years. These Buddhist statues are imposters, hasty late additions to a religious building constructed to accommodate the myths and rituals of Hinduism.

They are splendid still, some draped incongruously in new and garish orange robes, the polyester glowing harsh against the cool, old stone. They are alive, thriving on the centuries of mystical memory that make Angkor Wat one of the most fascinating and mysterious places on Earth. Among these ancient religious ruins there still exists a living, beating heart of spirituality that has survived almost 1,000 years. Imagine the incredible spiritual power that exists in such a place.

These days the revered King of Cambodia, for whose ancestors the ancient temples at Angkor were built, lives in his official residence right in the centre of Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia. I often wonder if he thinks about what it would be like to live at that other place. Angkor Wat would be uninhabitable, of course, for any modern head of state. But its presence must play in the king’s heart and mind, reminding him that his was one of the greatest of the lost civilisations, and now still the largest standing stone religious structure in the world.

Angkor Wat was built over a 30 year period beginning in 1113. It was a royal palace, temple and eventually tomb for a god-king and the hundreds of women who attended him. The five famous lotus-bud towers still rise above the flattened landscape so characteristic of Cambodia, the central one containing the holiest of shrines once attended only by the King himself.

Though it was lost to the world for centuries, rumours of this great complex would pop up occasionally in Europe, principally in the accounts of Spanish and particularly Portuguese Catholic missionaries who would periodically stumble upon the place. Of course, when you go to Angkor Wat now you are more likely to see hundreds of Chinese and Korean tourists on package holidays. It is more than compensating for its centuries of obscurity.

It has tantalised the popular imagination, periodically slipping from the collective memory, only to be discovered and celebrated over again. Angkor Wat was once again “rediscovered” by the West in 1860 by French Protestant naturalist Henri Mouhot, who became its great publicist and created a vogue for Cambodia and for Angkor in particular. This rediscovery very nearly destroyed it by creating a market for the exquisite sculpture that was littered all through the jungle which covered the complex.

Writers and aristocratic travellers like Somerset Maugham and the eccentric Sitwells travelled to Angkor in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Maugham thought that everyone should see Angkor once before they die. They were charmed by Angkor Wat and its surrounding reservoirs and canals. It reminded them of an oriental version of the Palace at Versailles, though it far surpassed Versailles in scale.

The temple has been plundered over the centuries, and much of its best statuary is now in collections all over the world, as well as in places like the National Museum of Cambodia – an astounding institution – probably one of the best in the world – in an exquisitely designed building. The grounds of the museum also house a University of Fine Arts and a College of Traditional Performing Arts. It is in this museum that you will see the best sculpture of the Angkor period. Cambodian religious art is simply the best in the world, the refined and beautiful Buddha heads becoming such iconic items that they are reproduced now in cement and resin and found in gardens and on coffee tables across the world. To come face to face with them in their original stone glory is really quite exceptional.

Angkor Wat was not constructed as a Buddhist temple. It represents an extraordinary moment in religious history where an ancient civilisation shifted from Hinduism to Mahayana Buddhism and later to the more deliberately primitive form of Theravada Buddhism, which it continues to practise today.

The King & His Wives

The stone temples at Angkor are covered with intricate carvings of women. The dancing, flying and singing angels called apsaras and the more substantial and sensuous goddesses or devadattas. They look out at you from every wall and from every column. Kent Davis, writing in the recent book To Cambodia With Love (Andy Brouwer ed.), claims that there are 1,850 women carved into the stone at Angkor Wat alone, making them the real subject of the temple, crowding out the image and idea of Vishnu, to whom the place is meant to be dedicated. For Angkor was a city of women. The temples were allowed to house only women, apart from the god-king himself.

He had hundreds of wives, plus attendants and staff and the sacred court musicians and dancers. He was also attended by an all-female bodyguard, a picturesque police force that made quite an impression when he paraded amongst his people outside the temple walls, standing on the back of an elephant. It is said that these carvings are in fact portraits of the very women who lived here, and certainly each is different and quite unique. They are imbued with clothing and jewellery and attitudes that are quite individual. And the faces are still quite recognisably those of the women you meet outside on the streets of 21^st century Siem Reap. It’s the most extraordinary communication across the centuries.

The King and his women walked through these galleries and cloisters, attending to a particular religious cult that was said to be the very purpose of the Khmer people. During the Angkorian empire – when this place was the centre of a vast city of over a million people – the Kingdom extended its rule over huge areas of south-east Asia, over the whole of the Mekong Delta, Laos, Burma, Thailand and Malaysia. What’s so eerie about Angkor Wat now is that it stands alone, with none of the immense wooden city which once surrounded it. All we have left are the stone cloisters, galleries and temples that served the empire’s religious purpose. There is no record anymore of the places where people actually lived and pursued their everyday lives. Just constant, monolithic stone structures dedicated to a purely religious purpose.

And into these structures are carved religious iconography, and out of it are carved the most sensuous and alive statues – Garudas, Bodhisattvas, the Naga. This Naga, the snake king, was the special protector of the Angkorian empire, and his hooded, cobra-like image, bearing seven, nine or eleven heads, is still there in the antique stone, emerging at the end of stairways on balustrades, looming up at the visitor in an attitude both threatening and majestic. Each evening the King of Angkor had to ascend to the temple at the summit of the complex and spend the night with his only true wife, the Queen of Serpents. This is the central tower of Angkor Wat, with a well 120 feet deep, its bottom scattered with sacred golden objects. He was locked into the holiest of shrines each night of his life to consummate this supernatural relationship. If the Queen of Serpents were not to appear, the King was doomed to die the next day. And if the King didn’t appear then the Khmer kingdom would be destroyed and the world would end.

This was the mythology of the Khmer people, and the reason behind their great stone city. They saw themselves as the creators of humanity, and the keepers of humanity’s secrets. The continued existence of the whole world, they believed, relied on the religious duties of the Khmer King. This mythology continues even into the present day, with a real conviction amongst the Khmer people that whoever could build Angkor Wat must still be possessed of extraordinary talents. This conviction has fed into some of the more unfortunate moments of recent Cambodian history, with the genocidal butcher Pol Pot employing this imagery to justify his savagery and his lunatic ambitions.

The holy ground surrounding the ancient and mysterious (and fundamentally Hindu) Angkor Wat has been colonised by the more modern Buddhists, recognising the special significance of this amazing place. Indeed, almost from the day it was deserted as the centre of royal power, the city of Angkor became a place of pilgrimage for the Buddhists of Cambodia, though century by century it fell into further disrepair.

These days in the surrounding areas you can have your palm read, make offerings to Buddhist monks and have the special blessed red thread tied around your wrists, and all of these activities have an especial significance on the hallowed ground of Angkor. Wizened old women performed the thread-tying ceremony on me and my partner, and these threads stayed around our wrists for almost a year, something we took as an auspicious and remarkable sign – they normally only last for a month or two. Attesting as well to Angkor Wat’s Hindu heritage is the presence of shrines to the sacred cow at various points around the city. These shrines are still recognised as holy by the local people, though they have no real understanding of why this is so, and Cambodian Buddhist culture has no taboos surrounding the eating of cows.

The Amazing Construction of the Temple

So who built the place? The king Suryavarman the 2^nd built Angkor Wat as a Hindu temple dedicated to Vishnu, in a recreation of the mythical Holy Mountain of Meru. He was said to be the descendant of an intrepid Hindu family that had managed to conquer vast swathes of Asia. This included the island of Java, where a relative built the extraordinary temple of Borobudur, another evocation of Mount Meru, though on far less grand a scale than Angkor. The glory of the Angkor Wat period was short lived. Having been completed in 1150, it was sacked by the sister Hindu Kingdom of Cham – in modern-day Central Vietnam – in 1177. In the nineteenth century, when Henri Mouhot asked the locals how it was built they were as mystified about its origins as he was. They suggested that it was self-created, somehow emerging entirely perfect from the jungle floor. At this point in history the Cambodian people had forgotten the greatness of their empire. Some others thought that it had been created through magical intervention – that such a feat of construction was impossible given the technology of the time.

Maverick historian Graham Hancock believes the temples mirror the constellation Draco as it would have been seen some 12,000 years ago, so that they in fact map out an even more ancient – and perhaps even extraterrestrial – set of astronomical records. Many have hinted that Angkor contains wisdom that is Atlantean in its origins. The lost civilisation archetype is at its most powerful in this place because it provides such solid and inexplicable evidence of technology, sophistication and architectural complexity seemingly out of its time. It is no accident that it calls to so many people from across the world. Angkor is a point of power, and to be amongst it is to feel a connection that cannot be described or defined.

Others still wondered if it was constructed by a prehistoric race of giants who embodied the perfection of the Khmer nation. This last theory still has some currency today, with one of my smart young university-educated friends in Phnom Penh confessing to me that he was sure the Khmer had once been giants. Giants and demons make up the balustrades of the stone bridges in Angkor, representing the act of the churning of the ocean of milk, the fundamental creation myth of Hinduism, and a central idea behind the architecture of Angkor Wat.

The temples are surrounded by still-functioning reservoirs, artificial lakes and ornamental pools. These served, not a practical purpose as the earliest French archaeologists supposed, but a religious and symbolic purpose. Australian Cambodia expert Milton Osborne explains it best in his book The Mekong: “Symbolically, the water that surrounded the temples represented the ‘seas’ of the Hindu universe, just as the towers of the temples were evocations of Mount Meru, the sacred mountain at the centre of the universe.” Such incredible complexity exists in this antique cityscape. The average tourist is almost entirely unaware of the sacred intent of the ground on which they wander.

As might be expected in such an ancient, mysterious and palpably spiritual place, there is much talk of prophecies found etched in the stones of Angkor. Monks and magicians are all privy to these tales, all of which hinge on the destruction of Cambodia and the eventual return to power of the Khmer on the global stage. The prophecies are quite spooky in their prescience, though perhaps they speak more to the agony of a powerless and impoverished nation destroyed by war and internal conflict. Certainly they are shared at drunken gatherings of men all over Cambodia. It is written in Angkor, they say – one day we shall be great again.

The man who restored the Angkorian empire to greatness was Jayavarman the 7^th, descendent of the man who constructed Angkor Wat. He led Cambodia during its very brief period in the sun and remains a great hero to the Cambodian people, the epitome of the God-King. He is so much still revered that they are making a new movie about him featuring Khmer martial arts and a muscular movie star playing the king. The real truth is probably Jayavarman the 7^th was a recluse who rarely left his Temple at Bayon and was said to have leprosy. Nonetheless he seems to have been a strong and capable leader and he got rid of the invading Chams in 1181.

That’s when he built the enigmatic Bayon Temple, which has his own face carved into dozens of towers scattered at random around the temple. The King rendered himself, not just as the supreme ruler and representative of the Godhead, but also as the Bodhisattva Lokesvara, thereby combining in his person the multiple religious currents of the Khmer. There is something, as well, supremely human in these heads, so perfectly recreated throughout the complex. The full lips and plump cheeks are beautiful, and speak of gentleness rather than fear, of contemplation rather than exertion. I am always delighted to be in the presence of this enormous cosmic friend, no matter how many hundred elderly Korean ladies might be pushing past me in the hot sun. That is the connection between the ruler and his people – perhaps all people. We respond to majesty, and recognise its presence and its guiding hand, even across the division of ages.

After he died in 1218 the Khmer Empire began its slow and sad decline, from which it is only now beginning to rescue itself. From the 17^th century the Khmer empire began to spiral downward, ceding vast amounts of territory to Thailand and Vietnam – including the whole of what we now know as Southern Vietnam, including the city of Saigon, which the Khmer called Prey Nakor (and still do, if you ask them). In 1865 Cambodia became a French protectorate.

The Legacy of the Khmer Empire

The Khmer empire is responsible for so much of what we recognise as south-east Asian culture – including many of the things we normally attribute to Thailand, such as Thai boxing, Thai dancing, even the Thai script is derived from Khmer, which was itself derived from Sanskrit. The traditional story of the Ramayana – though considerably changed in its Cambodian version – is carved on kilometres of stone panels in Angkor Wat, said to contain eighteen to twenty thousand carved figures. The women of the temple spent much of their time re-creating the stories in sacred dance. This dance has survived, quite miraculously, through its continuous royal patronage, and these days is performed once again on the terraces of the temples of Angkor.

Cambodia is still a very poor place. It has suffered the effects of war and the disastrous Khmer Rouge years. Angkor Wat is its jewel, glorious and majestic still, and the Khmer people are justly proud of it. In our enthusiasm for this ancient site it’s important that we not glamorise the poverty that still blights the nation or, more subtle still, spiritualise it. The Cambodian people struggle to exist, and it’s a country of immense poverty and injustice. But there exists as well a great continued interest in the traditional arts, the arts that you can see being practiced on the 900 year-old carved stones of Angkor.

And Angkor Wat is no longer the centre of political power in modern Cambodia. The capital city is Phnom Penh, 315 kilometres to the south-east. Interestingly enough, Phnom Penh has its own spiritual and mystical roots in Angkor. The city was said to have been founded by an elderly woman who, scavenging for firewood in the debris washed up by a recent flood, split a log and found in its hollow five religious statues – four stone Buddhas and one bronze Vishnu. They had come from Angkor, magically transported in the floodwaters. The woman, called Penh, decided to have them enshrined on a hill (Phnom in Khmer) on her property around 1372. Around this grew the city of Phnom Penh, eventually the new heart of the Khmer kingdom. But at its very centre remains the spiritual energy of Angkor.

The temples of the Angkor area are still alive as points of worship and pilgrimage. They have seen such a strange shift over the centuries – as Hindu temples, then Mahayana Buddhist temples, then Theravada Buddhist temples, and finally as shrines to the tourist dollar. They will survive this, too, and their stones will continue to speak to people a thousand years after we have gone.

Check out Walter Mason’s new article in the latest issue of New Dawn (Jan-Feb 2014).

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WALTER MASON is an academic and writer with a long-standing interest in meditation, prayer and other contemplative practices. Walter has travelled extensively throughout Asia, and has spent long periods studying Buddhism and meditation in Vietnam, Thailand, Taiwan and Cambodia. His first book Destination Saigon was named one of the ten best travel books of 2010 by the Sydney Morning Herald. His latest book is Destination Cambodia. His website is www.waltermason.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 6 No 1.

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By MITCH HOROWITZ

—

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw an explosion of spiritual teachers and impresarios dealing in “secret wisdom.” Their ranks included hacks and frauds – as well as more than a few genuine scholars of esoteric traditions. Most have vanished from memory, their writings a historical footnote.

There exists one distinct figure, though, whose movement and teachings not only survived his passing but are even experiencing a revival in our day. His name is Manly P. Hall. While few academicians will ever know of him, Hall was among the twentieth century’s – and perhaps any century’s – most commanding and unusual scholars of esoteric and mythological lore. Yet the source of his knowledge and the extent of his virtuosity can justly be called a mystery.

While working as a clerk at a Wall Street banking firm – the “outstanding event” of which involved “witnessing a man depressed over investment losses take his life” – the 28-year-old Hall self-published one of the most complex and thoroughgoing works ever to catalogue the esoteric wisdom of antiquity, The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Hall’s Secret Teachings is almost impossible to classify. Written and compiled on an Alexandrian scale, its hundreds of entries shine a rare light on some of the most fascinating and little-understood aspects of myth, religion, and philosophy.

Today, more than seventy-five years after its initial publication, the book’s range of material astonishes: Pythagorean mathematics; alchemical formulae; Hermetic doctrine; the workings of Kabala; the geometry of Ancient Egypt; the Native American myths; the uses of cryptograms; an analysis of the Tarot; the symbols of Rosicrucianism; the esotericism of the Shakespearean dramas – these are just a few of Hall’s topics. Yet his background betrays little clue to his virtuosity.

A Man Unknown

Hall was born in Peterborough, Ontario, in 1901 to parents who would shortly divorce, leaving the young Manly in the care of a grandmother who raised him in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He had little formal schooling. But there was a spark of some indefinable brilliance in the young man, which his grandmother tried to nurture in trips to museums in Chicago and New York.

Tragedy struck early, when his grandmother died when he was 16. Afterward, a self-styled Rosicrucian community in California took him in. At age 19, suspicious of the community’s claims to ancient wisdom, Manly moved on his own to Los Angeles where he began a precocious career in public speaking – first giving an address on reincarnation in a small room above a bank in Santa Monica, and soon rising to the rank of minister at a liberal evangelical congregation called The Church of the People.

Word spread of the boy wonder’s mastery of arcane and metaphysical subject matter. He attracted benefactors and eventually began travelling the world in search of hidden wisdom. Yet Hall’s early letters from Japan, Egypt, China, and India are, in many respects, fairly ordinary: They contain little of the eye-opening detail or wonder of discovery that one finds in the writings of other early twentieth-century seekers encountering the East for the first time. More often they read like prosaic, if somewhat sensitive, linear travelogues of their day.

Like a bolt from the blue, however, one is astounded to discover a short work of immense power from the young Hall – a book that seems to prefigure that which would come. In 1922, at the age of 21, Hall wrote a luminescent gem on the mystery schools of antiquity, Initiates of the Flame. Though brief, one sees in it the outline of what would become The Secret Teachings of All Ages. On its frontispiece, Initiates of the Flame boldly announces: “He who lives the Life shall know the Doctrine.”

The short book goes on to expound passionately and in detail on Egyptian rites, Arthurian myths, and the secrets of alchemy, among other subjects. Feeling the power and ease in its pages, the reader can almost sense the seeds of greatness that were beginning to take hold in Hall’s grasp of esoteric subjects.

The Secret Teachings Born

Hall soon returned to America, where he tried his hand at banking – though he found his true path in the beaux arts Reading Room of the New York Public Library. Entering this cavernous space today, it is not difficult to picture the large-framed, young Manly P. Hall surrounded by books of myth and symbol at one of the room’s huge oaken tables. Like a monk of the Middle Ages, Hall copiously, almost superhumanly, pored over hundreds of the great works of antiquity, distilling their esoteric lore into his volume.

By the age of 28, having pre-sold subscriptions for nearly 1,000 copies (and printing 1,200 more), Hall published what would become known as “The Great Book” – and it has never gone out of print since.

Indeed, Hall is an exception to most of his contemporaries as someone whose work is actually building in influence today. In its day, the Secret Teachings was expensive, hefty, and cumbersome. As a result, the book spent much of its existence as an underground classic. In late 2003, however, the Secret Teachings found new life in a reset and redesigned “reader’s edition,” which has sold a remarkable 40,000 copies in less than three years.(For further details, see “Bringing the Secret Teachings Into the 21st Century” by Mitch Horowitz at www.lapismagazine.org). A little-known 1929 companion volume by Hall, called Lectures on Ancient Philosophy, has also been recently reissued.

After publishing his magnum opus, Hall opened a campus in 1934 in the Griffith Park neighbourhood of Los Angeles called The Philosophical Research Society (PRS), where he spent the rest of his life teaching, writing, and amassing a remarkable library of esoterica. A self-contained property designed in a pastiche of Mayan, Egyptian, and art deco styles, PRS remains a popular destination for LA’s spiritually curious.

Following Hall’s death in 1990, PRS barely survived simultaneous legal battles – one with Hall’s widow, who claimed the group owed her money, and another with a bizarre father-son team of con artists who, in the estimation of a civil court judge, had befriended an ailing, octogenarian Hall to pilfer his assets. The Los Angeles Police Department considered Hall’s death sufficiently suspicious to keep it under investigation for several years.

Secret Wisdom, Practical Wisdom

For all his literary output, Hall revealed little about his private life. His most lasting record is a frequently trite, unrevealing childhood memoir called Growing Up with Grandmother (in which he refers to his guardian as “Mrs. Arthur Whitney Palmer”). As an adult, Hall’s close relations were few. He did not marry until well into middle age, in a union some surmise was never consummated.

Hence, when Hall disclosed something about his background, it was purposeful. He wrote this in a PRS newsletter in 1959: “As a result of a confused and insecure childhood, it was necessary for me to formulate a personal philosophy with which to handle immediate situations.”

Here was someone with a tremendous interest in the arcane philosophies of the world, in the occult and metaphysical philosophies, but he wasn’t fixated on immortality, or a will to power, or on discovering keys that unlock the universe. Rather, he was focused on harnessing inner truths in a very practical way. How, he wondered, could such ideas lend clarity to daily life?

We’ll take a byroad that steers us in another direction before returning to this point. Our byroad involves one of the most famous novels in history, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The work has many facets, among them a portrait – not sympathetic, but not as unsympathetic as one might suppose – of the European occult in the Enlightenment era. The portrait comes in the character of a young Victor von Frankenstein, a budding scientist torn between the occult teachings that drew him to science as a child and the prevailing rationalism of his teachers. Victor confides his interest in the great alchemists and occult philosophers, such as the Renaissance-era magus Cornelius Agrippa, but his professors dismiss him with complete condescension.

One day in his room, Victor ponders the unbridgeable gap between his magical visions and the scholasticism of his peers:

I had a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very different when the masters of science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand; but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.

In a sense, Victor spoke for generations of occultists when describing his ideal of boundless grandeur, immortality, power, and visions. (And who wouldn’t sympathise with the rebellious young Victor – whose dreams and ambitions, while hopeless, exist on a grand scale – versus the certainties of his crusty professors?)

An occult scholar born at the cusp of the twentieth century, Manly P. Hall signalled a different kind of ideal. Hall told of “a personal philosophy with which to handle immediate situations.” After Hall’s death, a reporter in the Los Angeles Times noted, “Followers say he believed in reincarnation and in a mixture of the Golden Rule and living in moderation.”

For Hall, the very act of writing The Secret Teachings of All Ages was an attempt at formulating an ethical response to the age he lived in. While the book is at times speculative and some of its sources are limited by the constraints of their era, it is the only codex to esoteric ideas that treats its subject with total seriousness. Contemporaneous works, such as The Golden Bough, regarded indigenous religious traditions as superstition – interesting museum pieces worthy of anthropological study but of no direct relevance to our current lives. Hall, on the other hand, felt himself on a mission to re-establish a connection to the mystery traditions at a time when America, as he saw it, had given itself over to the Jazz-Age materialism he witnessed at his banking job.

“After I thought the matter over,” he wrote a few years before his death, “it seemed necessary to establish some kind of firm ground upon which personal idealism could mingle its hopes and aspirations with the wisdom of the ages.”

In this sense, the prodigious scholar achieved more than a cataloguing of esoteric truths. He turned the study of occult ideas into an ethical cause.

Check out Richard Smoley’s interview with Mitch Horowitz in the latest issue of New Dawn (Jan-Feb 2014).

If you appreciated this article, please consider a digital subscription to New Dawn.

MITCH HOROWITZ is the editor in chief of Tarcher/Penguin. A well-known voice for occult and esoteric ideas, Horowitz lives in New York City with his wife and two children. The above article is adapted from his book Occult America: White House Séances, Ouija Circles, Masons, and the Secret Mystic History of Our Nation. You can visit his website at www.mitchhorowitz.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 96 (May-June 2006).

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BY ROBERT JAMES BURATTI

—

He who wishes to live in an oriental martial art, rather than to just practice it on a physical level, must so train his consciousness to attain a self-discipline that at last his conscious mind will merge into an identity with the very principle of life itself.
– Maurice Zalle

Amongst the usual loud and predictable offerings at the Australian cinema box office last summer, the Hollywood movie The Last Samurai emerged as an interesting alternative for many curious movie-goers. We were presented with a unique perspective on the cultural interaction between East and West. The film deals almost exclusively with the philosophical, spiritual and martial differences between Japan and America, and presents in grand form the figure of the Samurai, and the way his martial practice has a powerful spiritual dimension to which the West cannot relate.

The traditional practice of Martial Arts is now experiencing a renaissance of sorts, and this is largely due to the fact many people are realising the existence of the esoteric spiritual components behind widely known styles. The Arts are no longer considered remnants of old cultures, but valid and effective methods of achieving spiritual growth. The Martial Arts were actually formulated for this purpose all along.

A Spiritual Heritage

In 475, the Indian monk Bodhidharma arrived in Southern China. On his arrival he moved to the Huan province where he spent nine years in meditation, facing the rock wall of a cave. When the monk emerged from his retreat, he stumbled across a small mountain temple approximately one mile away called Shaolin. Bodhidharma was shocked to see the terrible physical condition of the monks of the Shaolin Temple who practiced long-term meditation exercises which, while making them spiritually strong, totally destroyed their physical health.

Bodhidharma created an exercise regime for the monks involving physical techniques that were efficient in strengthening the body, and eventually, could be used to defend oneself from the inevitable travelling thieves and gangs prominent in the area at the time. The latter benefit was a simple side benefit of the practice. The former was the main objective. The primary concern was always maintaining the physical strength of the monks for the purpose of meditation. These physical exercises developed into what we now know as Martial Arts.

Amongst the myriad of contemporary options for developing the spirit, the Martial Arts remains one of the oldest and most universally effective systems for teaching internal ideas which awaken the spiritual dimension in all parts of life.

The Physical Path To Enlightenment

The true value in studying the Martial Arts lies not in the learning of the technique or system itself, but in the acquisition of particular internal qualities that are developed through the learning process. The physical exercises are the concrete examples of abstract philosophical principles. Footwork systems teach the student about the qualities of energy, ebb and flow, and both creative and destructive potential. Handwork patterns teach the student about balance, dynamics and the intuition of natural spirit.

The actions of blocking, deflecting, striking, breaking and throwing all contain concepts that can be applied to the human spirit. Then in combat, we unite these concepts and in the process discover our own nature which is forced to emerge under extreme stress and pressure.

One is never rattled as much as when under attack. In this act, one’s metal is tested and they emerge with a new view of themselves and in many cases, a view of their true self. This is a first step to self realisation.

The legendary Japanese swordsman, Myamoto Musashi, found that the more he looked for proficiency and efficiency in his training, the more he looked for proficiency and efficiency in all things. He began to look for the deeper purpose in everything that he did.

When farming, he took land made useless by yearly floods and turned it into productive land by building his dikes and fields in the shape of the natural water flow. The farmers built a shrine in his honour for his concepts and prayed at that shrine daily. He found that every part of his life effected every other part of his life and he began to look for the spirituality in every part of his life.

Combat places great demands on the capacities of the warrior. Such demands act as powerful learning situations for self-discovery and self-confrontation.

Confronting Death

To defeat a thousand enemies is good, but the Samurai who defeats himself is the greatest of warriors.
– The Dhammapada

Perhaps the first and most important of these is the confrontation with death. Throughout life we are sporadically confronted with death, be it through family, television or literature. In the modern world we are very familiar with death, but rarely if ever are we confronted with the prospect of our personal demise. But when it does arrive it most likely will be a sudden, irrevocable and inconvenient event from which we learn nothing. The martial artist does not ignore or wait for death, but walks right up to it.

In the Martial Arts, death is a constant presence. The whole activity revolves around it. Attack, defense and counter-attack are all performed as if a true life-or-death situation were involved. With proficiency, the vigour of the actions increases and, if one is using weapons, one may employ, for instance, a ‘live’ (naked) sword instead of a bamboo or wooden sword – all of which make the situation genuinely dangerous. The practitioner confronts death and makes peace with it in the knowledge it is inevitable. With this understanding, there exists no more fear, and the martial artist is now truly free.

All spiritual systems set up a confrontation with death, for confronting death is perhaps the most important element of spirituality. The basic preparatory practices of Buddhism involve the recognition one’s life is short and one may die tomorrow. In the Chod rite of Tibet, practitioners visit a graveyard at night (where the corpses are left exposed to the elements and scavengers) and invite the demons to come and take them. Christians and Muslims invite the Almighty to take their souls at any time.

The fear of death is the greatest obstacle for the martial artist. This fear has a quality of rigidity, or paralysis, or of loss of control; one may freeze with terror, or one may panic and react blindly and irrationally. Such reactions, intruding at the crucial moment in combat, will spell death, even for the technically accomplished fighter.

But freedom from this incapacitating fear releases great powers. There is a story of a Master of the Japanese Tea Ceremony from the province of Tasa – a man of no martial skill yet of great meditative and spiritual accomplishment. He accidentally gave offence to a high-ranking Samurai and was challenged to a duel.

He went to the local Zen Master to seek advice. The Zen Master told him frankly that he had little chance of surviving the encounter, but that he could ensure an honourable death by treating the combat as he would the formal ritual of the Tea Ceremony. He should compose his mind, paying no attention to the petty chatterings of thoughts of life and death. He should grasp the sword straightforwardly, as he would the ladle in the Tea Ceremony; and with the same precision and concentration of mind with which he would pour the boiling water onto the tea, he should step forward, with no thought of the consequence, and strike his opponent down in one blow.

The Tea Master prepared himself accordingly, abandoning all fear of death. When the morning of the duel arrived, the Samurai, encountering the total poise and fearlessness of his opponent, was so shaken that he promptly begged forgiveness and called off the fight.

The recognition and mental triumph over death is the martial artist’s greatest power, in that he will focus on the fact he has little time and hence lets his acts flow accordingly. Each act is your last battle on Earth, and only with this philosophy will your acts have their rightful power. Otherwise they will be, for as long as you live, the acts of a timid man.

In the words of a Samurai legend, “being timid is fine if you are to be immortal, but if you are going to die, there is no time for timidity, simply because timidity makes you cling to something that exists only in your thoughts.” It soothes you while everything is at a lull, but then the awesome, mysterious world will open its mouth for you, as it will open for every one of us, and then you will realise your sure ways were not sure at all. Being timid prevents us from examining and exploiting our lot as men.

Mastery of Energy

To the martial artist, Energy manifests within each individual as spirit, spirit manifests in each individual as mind. This Energy or “Chi” as it is known in China, or “Ki” in Japan, permeates everything, and hence is both the martial artist’s strongest connection to his enemy as well as his strongest weapon against his enemy.

The mastery of this energy is a central element of all traditional forms of Martial Arts practice. Two widely recognised expressions of this ideal are the Chinese art of Tai Chi Chuan, and the Japanese art of Aikido.

Tai Chi Chuan integrates many elements of Chinese culture such as philosophy and religion, medicine, and military practice. It draws its inspiration for movement heavily from the philosophy of yin and yang. It incorporates the theory of the Five Elements of cosmology and the principles of the Bagua (“Eight Trigrams”) together with motion, creating a continuous flow of movement that reflect the ideas behind these ideologies.

The Yin-Yang symbol, which is often linked with Tai Chi Chuan, represents the interaction of Yin and Yang. Yin and Yang are shown in equal amounts, yet the Yin portion of the Yin-Yang contains a small amount of Yang and the Yang portion an equally small amount of Yin.

The ancient Chinese saw the universe as a vast unity with every part of it being related to and dependent on every other part. Within this unity, there is continual change in an endless cycle between two partners, the Yin (feminine, dark, soft, yielding) and the Yang (masculine, hard, aggressive).

The universe is entirely made from these two forms of energy and in order for all things to progress harmoniously, the forces of Yin and yang must constantly interact with each other. While doing so, each must evolve, over a period of time, into its opposite, just as day gradually turns to night. For this reason, everything that seems to be Yin contains some Yang and all that is Yang also contains some Yin, without which change would not be possible. (Chen Lei)

From this view of existence and energy, the style of Tai Chi Chuan was constructed. It is a perfect physical expression of the Yin-Yang philosophy and operates within the same parameters and limitations.

While other martial styles are violently fast and rigid, Tai Chi is slow and controlled, with techniques that flow endlessly into one another. Just as Yin-Yang energy maintains a continual flow, so does the Tai Chi form. There is no rigid stop-start, only a controlled natural mimic of energy. This is why Tai Chi is often seen as one of the most graceful and peaceful Martial Arts. Just as energy is circular in flow, all Tai Chi footwork is circular in direction, and just as energy is a natural phenomenon, the Tai Chi defence postures are always in a natural form, not rigid, boxing-like military stances.

The effective practice of Tai Chi relies on a pure and deep understanding of the Yin-Yang/ Tai Chi view of Chi and the universe. Without this spiritual dimension to the art, the student is not practicing Tai Chi, they are simply performing empty movements of little significance to themselves or the world around them.

Another art dealing with the dynamics of energy was founded by Ueshiba Morihei in 1942. The Japanese art of Aikido was considered a continuation of the Samurai Arts, and borrows much of its spiritual dimension and expression from Bushido (The Way of the Samurai), particularly its use of traditional sword practices. It is a relatively contemporary system and much a continuation of Japanese values and culture as it is a cultivation of philosophy and spirit.

The meaning of Aikido is literally the “artful path of discovery of gathering Ki”. Ki is the Japanese translation of Chi, and shares an identical definition. It is suggested that Ki was “born” at the same instant as the rest of the universe, and that we are all born from the Ki of the universe. All living organisms have equal access to Ki, and it will course through our system if we allow it. Daily Aikido practice is primarily directed at maintaining a balanced state physically and emotionally, and practicing ways to cultivate this energy.

Like Tai Chi, Aikido is a physical expression of this way of seeing the world. As a result, it has no attack form, because attacking an opponent would be like attacking a family member or damaging the flow of Universal Ki energy sustaining the world. Once again, because Ki moves constantly, so does the martial artist, with all of Aikido’s footwork occurring in circular patterns. Aikido also places great attention on the balance aspect of energy, and hence has created an awareness of balance essential to its maneuvers. The main techniques of the style involve particular throwing and wrestling patterns that are precisely dependent on the perfect balance of its practitioner.

In Aikido like all Martial Arts, physical and emotional balance is codependent. Physical balance helps to engender emotional balance. An understanding of the nature of our spirit will help the practitioner create an effective alignment of thought and action. When every aspect of the individual is aligned the individual is better able to adapt and change.

Spirituality and the Samurai

The Way of Zen perpetuates the earliest Buddhist traditions. It signifies the perfect natural state of enlightenment. Zen cannot be rationalised, only experienced, lived and realised. Unattainable through concrete thought and analysis, the Way of Zen is found through meditational practice engaging both mind and body. Zen may be considered a unique expression of the Mahayana Buddhism. It originated in the northern regions of India and later moved to China and then Japan where it became a strong influence from around 1190 CE onwards. It exerted such an influence that up until a few years ago, it would have been difficult to find a person of noble Japanese origins who had not been exposed to Zen philosophy.

Zen offers an interesting perspective in the world of Martial Arts and spirituality, because it becomes hard to see where the spiritual philosophy ends and the martial practice begins. While most Martial Art philosophies are a building process supplying us with tools and understanding, the experience of Zen is a destructive process, in the strict sense that it removes things from our lives that keep us from enlightenment. Zen’s liberation comes in absolute autonomy. There are no gods, no denominations, and no higher authority. It is necessary to abandon all crutches and proceed forward with no assistance.

The role of Zen in the Samurai society is amazingly complex. It sustained the warrior spirit in two ways: Morally, because Zen is a system which teaches the individual not to look back once the course is decided; and philosophically, because Zen treats life and death indifferently.

The classic text, Hagakure or “Hidden by Leaves” attributed to the Samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo, states that, “The Way of the Samurai is found in death” and goes on to say that the Samurai is powerful because his mind is no longer attached to life and death. The Samurai will “conquer immortality by dying without hesitations.” Great deeds are accomplished when one attains the Zen state of “no-mind-ness.”

It is through this Zen state of “no-mind” that swordplay becomes not an act of killing but an instrument of spiritual self-discipline. The individual, the sword and the target become one. The blade moves by itself under the influence of the target without any individual decision, always finding a perfect blow. The acknowledgement of mastery in the sword is also the acknowledgement of a higher degree of Zen spirituality. The “no-mind” is one of the most influential Zen concepts to mix with the Samurai psyche.

A mind unconscious of itself is a mind that is not at all disturbed by affects of any kind. It is the original mind and not the delusive one that is chock-full of affects. It is always flowing; it never halts; nor does it turn solid. It fills the whole body, pervading every part of the body. It is never like a stone or a piece of wood. If it should find a resting place anywhere, it is not a mind-of-no-mind. A no-mind will keep nothing in it. It is thus called mushin. (G.R. Parulski)

This “empty-minded-ness” applies to all creative activities, such as dancing and swordplay. The mind flows freely from one object to another stopping at no single concern. In this process the mind is free and fulfills every function required of it. When the mind stops at a single thought, it loses its freedom. It cannot hear, it cannot see, even when sound enters the ears or light flashes before the eyes. Every mind has the nature of Buddha and every person is already liberated beyond birth and death. They must only realise this fact. Zen seeks to promote this realisation, the gradual process of which is referred to as Satori. The consequence of Satori is a completely new way of seeing the world and one’s place within it. According to Zen, liberation should not be looked for in the next world, for this is the next world and is already liberated. We are already at our goal, yet we cannot realise it.

Zen does not require involvement in speculation, sacred texts or writings, and every theory is valid only as an indication toward the Way. Originally a secret doctrine, passed on by the Buddha to his disciple Mahakassapa, Zen itself arose as a reaction against the fantastic and shallow rituals of traditional Hinduism, and while seeming quite loose in form, it actually operates on a base of severe self-discipline which appealed to the Samurai. Far removed from the harsh ascetic practices of its contemporary systems, the discipline of Zen involves a more subtle and inward form operating on four levels.

The first is the mastery of external objects, in particular the reactions which emanate from them. The student must understand that every time a yearning leads him toward something, he is not in control of the external object, but rather the object is in control of him. “He who loves a liquor, deceived himself in thinking that he is drinking the liquor; the truth is, the liquor is drinking him.” (Hagakure)

The second stage sees the student master the physical body. Often at this level, martial training accompanies spiritual growth as an initiatory counterpart. It is here that legends grew of superhuman Samurai and masters who could withstand the extremes of heat and cold, and break trees and stone with their bare hands. The Samurai exerts dominion over his body and mastery of his own mental functioning.

Imagine your own body as something other than yourselves. If it cries, quiet it right away, as a strict mother does with her own child. If it is capricious, control it as a rider does his own horse, through the bridle. If it is sick, administer medicines to it, just as a doctor does with a patient. If it disobeys you, punish it, as a teacher does with a pupil. (Hagakure)

The third stage involves controlling personal emotion, and establishing an inner equilibrium. Through meditational practices the student confronts every fear and excitement in an effort to “bring the heart under control.”

The fourth stage is the rejection of the Ego, and the most difficult. The heart of the philosophy promotes a higher form of spontaneity, freedom and calmness in action. Traditional arts have originated in the East as a response and execution of this mental state. Many of these arts were developed as a means of achieving Zen awareness. While the majority are martial in nature, the Zen element extends to the art of drama, the tea ceremony, flower arranging, and painting. Mastery in any of these arts cannot be achieved without the inner enlightenment and transformative power of Zen.

Generally Zen does not promote the hermit like existence found in legend, but rather asks that the practitioner lives in the world with a Zen state of consciousness which should be permanent and permeate every experience and activity. The student will labour with his mind and body until they have reached the extreme limit of all natural faculties, and eventually achieve Satori. The student is only supposed to spend the training period in Zen monasteries, and once they have achieved Satori, the student returns to the world, choosing a way of life that fits their needs.

Martial Arts systems are all united in the fact they demand the practitioner to readjust their lifestyle. Aside from being an intellectual and physical pursuit, true practice arises in the expression of the Art throughout one’s daily life and thought. Attending a Martial Arts class once a week will not release the enormous transformative potential of this avenue, but it will start you on an ancient path that has affected lives for centuries. Like all spiritual endeavours it requires commitment and patience.

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Bibliography

Evola, J., The Zen Tradition, Holmes Publishing Group

Tsunetomo, Y., trans. W. Wilson (1979), Hagakure, Kodansha Int. Company: Tokyo

Parulski, G., (1976), An Introduction to Oriental Philosophy, Ohara Publications, Inc: California

Suzuki, D.T., (1959), Zen and Japanese Culture, Pantheon Books, Inc: New York

Chen Lei, Exploding the Myths of Martial Arts

Geis, K.E., (1987), Christmas Clinic Newsletter, The Fugakukai International Association

Geis, K.E., (1990) The Spiritual Aspect of the Martial Arts, The Fugakukai International Association

Parulski, G., Zen and the Samurai: Why Zen Became Associated with a Warrior Class

ROBERT BURATTI is an Australian curator, artist and researcher. He is a Past President of the Friends of the Art Gallery of WA, a member of The Blake Society, founding President of Collective777. He contributed this article to New Dawn in 2004. Robert Buratti is the owner and director of Buratti Fine Art. Website: www.buratti.com.au.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 85 (July-August 2004).

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.

For our reproduction notice, click here.

BY RICHARD HEINBERG

—

Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, as well as over parts of the continent, and besides these they subjected parts of Libya within the Straits as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia.
- PLATO, Timaeus

For as long as there have been historians, two versions of early human history have competed for acceptance. One, which is now the official version, says that civilization has evolved along a more or less smooth incline from barbarism to modernity. The second, which never really disappeared even when it fell out of fashion, flows from an idea found in nearly every culture’s early mythology – that there has been a series of high civilizations reaching back many millennia into the forgotten past, and that each, in turn, was destroyed by some horrific terrestrial cataclysm.

The latter idea is to be found, for example, in the doctrine of the Yugas – or world ages – in the Mahabharata of India, wherein it is said that the first Yuga, the Krita, was the best, and that human society has been in decline ever since. The Maya and the Hopi told of a series of elapsed World Ages which ended, in turn, in flood, fire, and earthquake. In Western classical literature, Hesiod’s doctrine of the original Golden Race and the succeeding races of Silver, Brass, Heroes, and Iron relates essentially the same story. But of all the tales of lost or fallen worlds, perhaps none has exerted a greater influence on the popular imagination than Plato’s account of the island of Atlantis.

Writing in about 355 BC at about age seventy, Plato told of a great maritime civilization that had existed nine thousand years earlier, and located its center “beyond the Pillars of Heracles” (that is, the Strait of Gibraltar). He claimed that the story originated with the priests of Isis, who had imparted it to the Athenian statesman Solon during the latter’s trip to Egypt around 590 BC. The Atlanteans, unsatisfied with ruling their own land, had conquered parts of the outer “true” continent and much of the Mediterranean region, including Egypt. But they were defeated in their attempts at conquest by the brave Athenians, ancestors of Solon. Soon afterward, a great earthquake and flood caused Atlantis to sink beneath the waters of the ocean “in a single day and night.” Plato describes the lost city and island of Atlantis in detail and mentions Socrates’ enthusiasm about the story, which the elder sage termed “no invented fable but genuine history.”

Plato’s narrative, contained in the dialogues Timaeus and Critias, would eventually inspire over five thousand books seeking to explain away or to identify the sunken land. Nearly every place from Palestine to Brazil, from the West Indies to the North Pole has been suggested by one author or another as the “real” site of Atlantis.

Historians of the steady-progress school have argued either that Plato was exaggerating (perhaps, they say, Atlantis was merely the Greek island of Thera and did not sink 11,500 years ago but was destroyed in a volcanic eruption in 1500 BC), or that he made the story up in order to illustrate his political ideas or to convey through allegory some item of arcane mathematical or astronomical knowledge. After all, Plato’s narrative is not supported by any other early Greek or Egyptian document describing a lost island named Atlantis; moreover, we know that it was common for authors in his era to put invented speeches in the mouths of famous historical characters in order to illustrate competing philosophies. Of the thousands of dialogues surviving from ancient times, few if any are believed to be accurate transcripts of real discussions.

Plato’s story would likely never have stirred so much controversy had it not been for certain intriguing bits of evidence that have nagged at explorers and historians for centuries – evidence suggesting the existence of an unknown early civilization with highly developed scientific and engineering capabilities. Since conventional history supplies no likely candidate as source for such evidence, theorists have turned again and again to Atlantis.

Secrets of the Stones

The single most frequently cited item of evidence for a lost high culture is the Great Pyramid of Giza. Of the seven wonders of the ancient world, it is the only survivor. It consists of over two million blocks of stone, most weighing from two to six tons, though some are far heavier. Since the Great Pyramid is as tall as a forty story building, its builders faced the immense problem of lifting or dragging these blocks ever higher as construction proceeded. We still do not know quite how they did it, though theories abound. The largest construction cranes in existence today can barely lift 200-ton blocks, such as the ones in the core of the neighboring pyramid attributed to the pharaoh Khafre, and there is no construction company in the world that would undertake the job of duplicating either of these immense structures. The designers and builders of the Great Pyramid are conventionally credited with having only a rudimentary knowledge of mathematics and the most primitive of tools, yet the precision of their work is truly astounding, judged by any standards: many of the blocks are fitted to opticians’ tolerances, and the structure as a whole is square and aligned to true north to an accuracy that would be difficult to improve upon with even the most up-to-date surveying and construction equipment.

But the mysteries of the Great Pyramid go far beyond the engineering virtuosity it so magnificently flaunts. There is also the matter of its design. Historians of science maintain that the number pi – the ratio of the radius to the circumference of a circle – was discovered by the Greeks and worked out to the fourth decimal place by the Hindu sage Arya-Bhata in the fourth century. Nevertheless, pi is embodied in the ratio of the Pyramid’s height to the circumference of its base, and to a precision of five decimal places. The perimeter of the sockets at the base of the structure equals a half minute of equatorial longitude, or 1/43,200 of the Earth’s circumference; and the Pyramid’s height, including the stone platform on which it rests, equals 1/43,200 of the Earth’s polar radius. This suggests that the Pyramid’s builders had a good idea of the shape and size of our planet and intended the monument to embody this geodetic information.

Discussions about the Great Pyramid are inevitably littered with question marks. How? Why? When? Was the Pyramid built as a royal tomb, as nearly all the textbooks tell us? If so, why would anyone have gone to such immense lengths to build a permanent, conspicuous mausoleum, and then leave no epitaph? The tombs of most pharaohs are covered with hieroglyphs and cartouches; in the Great Pyramid there are no inscriptions whatever, save for a few workmen’s rough quarry marks on the inner blocks, from which Egyptologists have inferred that the builder was a Fourth-Dynasty pharaoh named Khufu. No body was found in the Pyramid, nor any unequivocal sign that a burial ever occurred in it. Not surprisingly, crypto-historians have always asserted that the Great Pyramid served purposes other than that of grave – including initiatory temple, geodetic marker, and signpost of the survivors from Atlantis.

The Pyramid is conventionally dated at about 2500 BC, which places its construction in the early phase of Egyptian history. Egyptologists acknowledge that the artistic and engineering achievements of the civilization peaked near its beginning; but given that there is so little evidence of gradual cultural development prior to the Pyramid Age, one has to wonder how these people so quickly acquired their skill and knowledge, and why they gradually frittered it away during the remaining two thousand years of their history. The Egyptians themselves apparently believed that their civilization had a much greater antiquity than present experts acknowledge, one that reached thirty millennia or more into the dim past.

While the Great Pyramid is perhaps the most spectacular item of evidence suggesting the existence of a lost high civilization, there are many others. Consider, for example, the great fortress at Sacsayhuaman, Peru, whose wall contains stones weighing up to 400 tons, cut with as many as twelve butting faces fitted precisely with their neighbors; or the 228-foot-high Black Pagoda in India, capped with a single slab estimated to weigh over 1000 tons; or the platform of the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek in Lebanon, containing three blocks weighing 750 tons each. In each case we see an instance of a global pattern: the earliest stone monuments often seem to be the largest and most perfectly executed.

As if this were not problem enough for the steady-progress version of history, consider the really bizarre anomalies that conventional historians disregard altogether: an iron cup found embedded in an Oklahoma coal mine, a metal tube recovered from a 65-million-year-old chalk bed, a gold chain encased in a lump of Illinois coal, a grooved metal sphere taken from a Precambrian mineral deposit, a nail embedded in sandstone in Scotland. The deeper one digs, the more reasons one finds to think that the standard view of history omits some vitally important chapter in the human past.

Could the giant quarried and carved stones of the ancients be a legacy of Plato’s Atlantis? Unfortunately, while the evidence is suggestive, it is far from being conclusive. In the case of well-documented lost civilizations – such as those of the Mayas, the Mycenaean Greeks, or the Babylonians – archaeologists can point to a geographical homeland, reconstruct a common language and trace specific contacts with contemporaneous cultures. But with regard to “Atlantis”, none of this is possible. Connecting the Great Pyramid with Stonehenge or Macchu Picchu requires a tremendous leap of conjecture. But of conjecture, among Atlantis theorists, there has been no lack.

Floods of Speculation

While we do not know for certain where Plato got the idea of Atlantis, its later evolution in literature is a matter of record. Plato’s famous pupil Aristotle apparently did not take the Atlantean passages in Critias and Timaeus seriously, though Poseidonius, Strabo, and Pliny the Elder seem to have done so. By the time of the Church Fathers, the story was accepted at face value, though rarely mentioned. During the Middle Ages, rumors circulated widely about lands in or beyond the Atlantic Ocean, populated by “the Cannibals that each other eat, The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.” Medieval maps featured legendary lands with names like Antilla, St. Brendan’s Isles, and Avalon; and, following Columbus’s fateful voyage, rumors of unexplored lands ran riot. Throughout the Age of Discovery (or the Age of Invasion and Genocide, depending on your point of view), maps were festooned with newly named islands, many the result of poor navigation, clouds, or eyestrain: Isle of the Demons, Drogio, Estotiland, Grocland, Frisland, the Island of Brazil, and so on.

More than a few people, from Francis Bacon in the sixteenth century to Alexander von Humboldt in the nineteenth, thought that the Atlantis narrative was an early reference to America. Eventually, however, it became clear that none of the Native American civilizations had visited Egypt or Athens, and Atlantis theorists began to view the Americas merely as yet more colonies of the lost continent.

One of the most knowledgeable of these theorists was Augustus Le Plongeon (1826-1908), the first explorer to excavate the Mayan ruins in Yucatan. Le Plongeon pieced together what he believed was a history of the mother culture in the Atlantic, the founding of its colonies in Central America, Egypt, and Greece, and its destruction by earthquake. He based his Sacred Mysteries Among the Mayas and the Quiches 11,500 Years Ago on his own translation of the Troano Codex, one of the few Mayan books to survive the Inquisition. But Le Plongeon was derided by the Americanist establishment for his flights of historical fancy, despite his demonstrated ability to trace the surviving Mayan Indian culture to its roots by learning the language of the people and participating in their shamanic rituals.

At around the time Le Plongeon was completing his explorations in Yucatan, American lawyer, newspaper publisher, and politician Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901) published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, a book that would eventually go through over 50 printings and provide fodder for generations of Atlantis researchers. Donnelly was a man of extraordinary energy and curiosity: before commencing his writing career he had been Lieutenant-Governor of Minnesota and member of the U.S. House of Representatives. After his electoral defeat in 1870, he returned to Minnesota, wrote books, went on lecture tours, served in the Minnesota state senate, helped found the Populist Party, and twice ran for Vice President of the United States on the Populist ticket. In Atlantis, Donnelly argued that the source of all civilization was an island in the Atlantic that “perished in a terrible convulsion of nature, in which the whole island sank into the ocean, with nearly all its inhabitants,” though not before establishing colonies in Egypt and Central America. Unfortunately, though his scholarship was wide-ranging, it was exceedingly careless, and the academic community never took Donnelly seriously.

Establishment historians were even more dismissive of James Churchward, author of The Lost Continent of Mu (1931). Churchward set out to prove that the ultimate source of civilization lay not in the Atlantic, but the Pacific Ocean, where a great continent called Mu had disappeared 13,000 years ago when “gas belts” supposedly underlying the continents collapsed, causing both Mu and (somewhat later) Atlantis to sink beneath the waves. Churchward said he had based his conclusions on the study of two sets of inscriptions, one in India and the other in Mexico. The Indic tablets were never seen by other researchers, and the Mexican ones – a collection of 2,600 carved stones found in 1921 by explorer William Niven, a friend of Churchward – have been virtually ignored by the authorities. A reconsideration of the significance of the Mexican tablets is long overdue, but Churchward is partly to blame for their neglect: The Lost Continent of Mu bristles with so many demonstrable errors in archaeology, history, and linguistics (for example, the frontispiece shows a “12,500-year-old Muvian jar” bearing an inscription which Sanskrit scholars recognize as dating from no earlier than the eleventh century) that the potentially useful material it contains has suffered from guilt by association.

The Psychic/Occult Connection

By far the most colorful writing about Atlantis has come not from explorers or historians, but from clairvoyants and occultists – of whom the most influential was Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), the founder of Theosophy. Blavatsky claimed to receive telepathically the teachings of a group of Masters or Mahatmas, who for millennia have maintained a benign oversight of the world from their headquarters in Tibet and who purportedly showed her the manuscript of the Book of Dzyan (originally composed in Atlantis in the forgotten Senzar language). It was on the Book of Dzyan that Blavatsky would base her magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine, a vast synthesis of Eastern and Western myth and magic. According to The Secret Doctrine, humankind is destined to unfold through seven Root Races, of which we (humanity in the present era) are the Fifth. The Fourth Root Race was that of the Atlanteans, and the Third the Lemurians – who were hermaphroditic giants, some with four arms or an eye in the back of their heads. The people of the First and Second Root Races, it seems, were not entirely physical. According to Blavatsky, both Lemuria and Atlantis were destroyed when their populations resorted to sorcery.

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), the founder of Anthroposophy – an offshoot of Theosophy – expanded on Madame Blavatsky’s account of the Atlanteans and Lemurians in his own voluminous writings. The Lemurians, he said, operated on instinct and will power, by means of which they could control nature in extraordinary ways. The Atlanteans had better memories than the Lemurians, but did not develop rational thought (the contribution of our own Root Race); still, they were masters of the life force, by means of which they operated aircraft and built cities. They also used the occult power of words to heal and to tame wild beasts.

Edgar Cayce (1877-1945), “the sleeping prophet,” was famous for his ability, while in trance, to diagnose illnesses, often without benefit of any direct contact with the patient. During his “life readings,” in which he described his subjects’ past incarnations, he often referred to Atlantis and the events surrounding its destruction. The Atlanteans, according to Cayce, had air travel, electricity, advanced metallurgy and chemistry, detailed knowledge of geography, and standard units of measure. When it became apparent to Atlantean priests that their homeland was doomed, they sent colonists to carefully chosen sites around the globe. A priest named Ra Ta decided upon Egypt and began construction of the Great Pyramid in 10,490 BC, several centuries before the cataclysmic end of the Third World Age. Cayce described Atlantis as a group of large islands in the western part of the Atlantic Ocean, and prophesied that it would reemerge from the depths in the late twentieth century.

If most scientists were skeptical about the ideas of Le Plongeon, Donnelly and Churchward, they were even less inclined to seriously consider those of Blavatsky, Steiner and Cayce. By the early part of this century, geologists had determined that sea beds and continents are composed of fundamentally different kinds of rocks, and that there simply are no large areas of continent-type rock (known as sial for its silicon-aluminium content) present on the ocean bottom. Why, then, give credence either to ancient myths or to clairvoyant visions of ancient advanced civilizations of which there is no conclusive evidence, and that supposedly lived and perished on lost continents that could not have existed?

Promising Leads, Sensational Claims

Still, there was the riddle of the stones. How and why did people in Europe, the Near East, and South America build astronomically aligned structures many millennia ago using giant monoliths? Where did they get the necessary engineering know-how? Throughout the present century, the depth of the mystery has steadily increased, while the skepticism of the scientific establishment has hardly abated.

Alsatian philosopher and mathematician R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz spent the years 1936 to 1951 in Egypt making painstaking measurements of the Temple of Luxor – which he characterized in his book, Le Temple de l’Homme as an architectural image of the human body, incorporating knowledge of the location of the ductless glands, the Hindu chakras, and the Chinese acupuncture points. These, together with astronomical alignments incorporated in the structure, showed symbolically the incarnation of the universe in human form. De Lubiscz contended that the science of the Egyptians (their mathematics, medicine, astronomy, and engineering) was far in advance of what can be explained by a slow, indigenous acquisition of knowledge, and must have been the legacy of some previous high culture.

In Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age (1966), Charles Hapgood presented the fruits of his careful study of medieval and Renaissance maps showing coastlines that had not yet been “discovered.” These well-authenticated maps, some of which show an ice-free Antarctica as it would have looked many thousands of years ago, were purported by their creators to be copies of still older maps – which, Hapgood theorized, may once have been housed in the great libraries of Alexandria and Constantinople. Hapgood, a professor of anthropology and the history of science, deduced that the ancient geographical knowledge embodied in the maps could only have been accumulated by a maritime civilization prior to the change of sea levels that occurred roughly 11,500 years ago at the end of the last ice age.

In their brilliant and difficult book Hamlet’s Mill (1969), Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend argued convincingly that the ancient, worldwide language of myth preserves archaic knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes – an astronomical phenomenon commonly believed to have been discovered by Hipparchus in 127 BC. The fact that the full cycle of the precession completes itself only once every 26,000 years suggests that humans may have been observing the sky systematically for a very long time indeed.

The work of de Lubiscz, Hapgood, and de Santillana, though stunning in its implications, raised only limited interest among scholars. Meanwhile, several popular writers of the 1960s and ’70s ignited a firestorm debate about crypto-history among the general public. In The View Over Atlantis (1969), which is still probably the best-written example of the Earth-mysteries genre, author John Michell suggested that traditional sacred sites in Britain (including Stonehenge, Woodhenge, Avebury, Glastonbury, and the “ley lines” connecting them) were planned according to principles similar to those encoded in the Great Pyramid, using a universal archaic system of measure. This, according to Michell, implies “a gigantic work of prehistoric engineering” laid out across the surface of the planet. In his book, Michell cited the research carried out by engineering professor Alexander Thom, who spent decades meticulously surveying the 500 or so stone circles of Britain, and concluded that their groundplans were based on a precise geometry and incorporated astronomical alignments related to the extreme positions of the Sun and Moon and the rising points of stars.

Books like Peter Tompkins’s Secrets of the Great Pyramid (1971) and Secrets of the Mexican Pyramids (1976), Brad Steiger’s Mysteries of Time and Space(1973), Otto Muck’s The Secret of Atlantis (1978) and William R. Fix’s Pyramid Odyssey (1978) combed over similar data and drew similar conclusions. But it was the wildly successful Chariots of the Gods (1970) of Erich von Daniken that led the way in book sales and controversy. By blending flying saucer reports with ancient stories about the exploits of various local deities, and adding more than a judicious dash of Earth-mystery lore, von Daniken arrived at the startling conclusion that God was an astronaut. Perhaps, he posited, Earth was visited in ancient times by explorers from other star systems, and humankind was put here as part of a cosmic science experiment. There is no way to completely disprove such an assertion; indeed, in competent hands it could be argued rather convincingly. Unfortunately, however, von Daniken heavyhandedly conflated genuine mysteries – like the Nazca lines of Peru – with phenomena that are well explained in quite mundane terms – such as the statues of Easter Island, whose creation has been reconstructed in detail by archaeologists – monotonously insisting on the same explanation in every case. Critics easily discredited him.

Zechariah Sitchen, author of The Twelfth Planet (1976), took up where von Daniken left off, contributing his impressive ability to translate Mesopotamian texts. According to Sitchen’s readings, the Sumerian gods Enlil, Enki, and Inanna were members of a race of ancient astronauts who came to Earth to mine gold. After genetically engineering human beings as servants, they interbred with their creations and taught them the arts of civilization. Eventually, the gods fell to fighting among themselves, brought on a catastrophe remembered as the biblical Deluge, and left humanity to cope with the aftermath. Sitchin doggedly ignored all contrary interpretations of the Sumerian literature, such as those of the late Joseph Campbell; Sitchin was as relentlessly technological as Campbell was metaphysical in his approach to the texts – whose “real” meaning is about as clear as that of a Rorschach ink blot.

Open Questions

By the late 1970s, the crypto-historical literature, though uneven, was extremely extensive. Evidence suggesting the existence of a lost high culture had been prodded and dissected by scores of authors with a wide range of prejudices and abilities. None – neither the sober scholars like de Santillana and Hapgood nor the careless sensationalists like von Daniken – had been able to persuade the scientific establishment to undertake a fundamental reassessment of the steady-progress version of history.

For New Age devotees, no further proof was necessary: Atlantis and Lemuria were already unquestioned realities, routinely discussed as the backdrop for this or that prior incarnation. But for those with a more skeptical bent – including the vast majority of scholars and scientists – it seemed that one last bit of unequivocal evidence was needed in order to turn the tide. If only someone could point to a piece of carbon-dated hardware stamped “Made in Atlantis”!

Attempts were made to uncover the crucial proof. During the mid-’70s, Cayce-inspired explorer Dr. David Zink investigated an underwater stone “road” near the island of Bimini, finding a tongue-and-groove pavement slab and other curiosities. But it was impossible to determine the date of construction, and further research was postponed for lack of funds. Even with this added, tantalizing piece of information, the contest between the crypto-historians and the defenders of the steady-progress version of the human past remained at an uneven and uneasy stalemate.

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This article continues in Part Two

RICHARD HEINBERG is the author of Memories and Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age (Quest Books: 1995), Celebrate the Solstice: Honoring the Earth’s Seasonal Rhythms Through Festival and Ceremony (Quest Books: 1994), and A New Covenant With Nature. The above article originally appeared in his Museletter.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 37 (July-August 1996).

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.

For our reproduction notice, click here.

BY RICHARD HEINBERG

—

A great scientific instrument lies sprawled over the entire surface of the globe. At some period, thousands of years ago, almost every corner of the world was visited by people with a particular task to accomplish. With the help of some remarkable power, by which they could cut and raise enormous blocks of stone, these people created vast astronomical instruments, circles of erect pillars, pyramids, underground tunnels, cyclopean stone platforms, all linked together by a network of tracks and alignments, whose course from horizon to horizon was marked by stones, mounds and earthworks.
- John Michell, The New View Over Atlantis

In Part I of this article [see New Dawn No. 37] we explored literature and evidence relating to the question of whether the ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Indic, and Central American civilizations were seeded by an advanced antediluvian maritime culture which perished in some immense convulsion of nature. In this second, concluding part of the article we pick up the story of the unfolding investigation where we left off – at the beginning of the 1980s.

New Evidence

In 1979, amateur Egyptologist John Anthony West published Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt, later updated in 1987 and 1993. In it he summarized the ideas and research of mathematician-Egyptologist R. Schwaller de Lubicz. One chapter in the book, concerning the Sphinx, would eventually spawn a heated debate in the scientific community and open a promising new line of inquiry into the origins of Egyptian civilization.

In the 1950s, de Lubicz had written that the Sphinx’s body “shows indisputable signs of water erosion.” Moreover, he suggested that it was built far earlier than the conventionally ascribed date of 2600 B.C. West decided to investigate. He showed respected geologist Robert Schoch a detailed photo of the Sphinx and asked, “What caused this weathering?” Schoch studied the photo carefully and replied, “Water erosion.” Schoch immediately grasped the implications of what he had said. Water erosion in the Egyptian desert? Given the climatic history of the region, the weathering suggested a construction date of at least 5000 B.C. (West himself is convinced that the Sphinx was built some time between 10,000 and 15,000 B.C.)

Most Egyptologists consider the Sphinx a likeness of the pharaoh Khafre (Chephren); Mark Lehner, Field Director for the American Research Center in Egypt, went so far as to “prove” on national television, by way of computer imaging, that the face of the Sphinx and the face of Khafre are identical. West was skeptical of Lehner’s methodology and enlisted New York Police forensic artist Frank Domingo to compare the Sphinx with a statue of Khafre. Domingo concluded that “If the ancient Egyptians were skilled technicians and capable of duplicating images then these two works cannot represent the same individual.” He noted, for example, that the Sphinx face has a distinctive “African,” “Nubian” or “Negroid” aspect lacking in that of Khafre.

Members of the Egyptological establishment were furious with West and dismissive of Schoch. One prominent Egyptologist, Dr. K. Lal Gauri, said that “Neither the subsurface evidence nor the weathering evidence indicates anything as far as the age is concerned. It’s just not relevant.” The Egyptologists’ minds were made up, and no amount of hard scientific data could change them. The entire incident served to publicize how the methods of Egyptology differ fundamentally from those used in the natural sciences, and drove a wedge between the Egyptologists on one hand and physical scientists on the other. At the 1992 Convention of the Geological Society of America, and again at the 1992 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Schoch stated his case that the Sphinx presents “a classic, textbook example of what happens to a limestone structure when you have rain beating down on it for thousands of years,” and on both occasions geologists by the score expressed their support for his conclusions. The majority of Egyptologists refused to budge an inch.

Meanwhile, seismic analyses of the Sphinx complex carried out by Schoch and architect Thomas L. Dobecki showed signs of several unexplored cavities under and around the statue. Cayce-inspired researchers found this significant because in several of his “life readings” Cayce noted that an Atlantean Hall of Records lies buried under or near the Sphinx.

There were signs, also, of at least one unexplored chamber in the Great Pyramid. In 1993, the Egyptian Antiquities Organization hired robotics engineer Rudolf Gantenbrink to improve the ventilation in the structure. He first used a miniature robot (named Upuaut, after the Egyptian god of the “opening of the ways”) to clear debris from the “air shafts” of the King’s Chamber, then designed another, more sophisticated robot (Upuaut II) to do the same with the unexplored “air shafts” of the Queen’s Chamber. Two hundred feet up the southern shaft, he found a sliding stone door with copper fittings. There was a gap at the base of the door, and when Gantenbrink directed Upuaut II’s laser spot into the gap, the beam disappeared into a void, indicating a sizable open space.

New data challenging the conventional version of the human past have come not just from Egypt, but from far and wide. In the Americas, the standard view of prehistory has humans first crossing a land bridge from Asia about 12,000 years ago. Numerous finds of human remains and artifacts apparently dating from much earlier than 10,000 B.C. (recent examples include a spear point lodged in a horse’s hoof, radiocarbon dated at 34,400 B.C., found in Pendejo Cave near Oro Grande, New Mexico) have routinely been ignored. However, during the past fifteen years the evidence has grown to such an extent that the anthropological establishment is beginning to hedge. The latest data weighing in on the side of an early arrival consists of genetic reconstructions of evolutionary patterns among Amerind populations. These studies, carried out by a research team led by Dr. Antonio Torroni of Emory University, suggest a first settlement date of at least 30,000 years ago.

According to the orthodox view, once early humans migrated to their present homelands they tended to stay put. We should expect to find evidence of the ancient Chinese only in China, of the Polynesians only in Polynesia, of the Africans only in Africa, and so on. Yet recent finds suggest that migratory or exploratory patterns in the distant past were complicated. Well preserved 4000-year-old bodies of Caucasians have recently been uncovered in China, and coins, petroglyphs, and other artifacts suggest that Celts, Basques, Libyans, Arabs, Romans, Egyptians, Hebrews, and Chinese all visited North America at one time or another.

Meanwhile, the search for Atlantis near the island of Bimini has continued into the 1990s, producing a few significant discoveries – underwater zoomorphic effigy mounds and hexagonal “paving” stones – as well as neutron-activation analysis evidence that “roads” discovered in the 1970s are indeed artificial and not (as some critics argued) natural features of the ocean floor. That these artifacts are now below sea level suggests either that the area around Bimini has sunk over the past few centuries, or that the artifacts date from a time prior to the rise of ocean levels that accompanied the end of the last ice age roughly 12,000 years ago. If the latter turns out to be the case, then we will be faced with one more bit of hard evidence for the existence of an antediluvian high culture.

The Bimini stones raise an important question: How much more evidence of lost civilizations may rest on the ocean bottom? After all, people in all historical eras have tended to live along rivers or on seacoasts. Given that ocean levels rose by up to 300 feet at the end of the last ice age, and that many rivers were then flooded with the water of melting glaciers, wouldn’t the continental shelves be the logical places to look for signs of antediluvian settlements? Maybe the fact that few unequivocal relics of these have been found so far is merely a result of archeologists looking in the wrong places.

Theoretical Developments

The past fifteen years have brought not only new evidence, but new ways of looking at facts already known.

Engineer Robert Bauval, author of The Orion Mystery (Crown, 1994), claims to have found the purpose of the Giza pyramid complex – as a monument to an archaic star – religion. For the ancients, Egypt was equivalent to the sky, the Nile to the Milky Way. The three main pyramids at Giza were the three bright stars on Orion’s belt. Bauval has shown that the presumed “air shafts” in the King’s and Queen’s chambers of the Great Pyramid were sighting holes trained on Orion, and that they establish a construction date of 2450 B.C. But, says Bauval, the overall layout of the Giza pyramids, and their correlation with the night sky, suggests that the site as a whole was planned much earlier, around 10,500 B.C. – the Egyptians’ legendary “Time of the Gods.” Since that was one of those periods that comes along once every 26,000 years when Orion appears lowest in the night sky, the ancients may have regarded it as the start of the great precessional cycle (which de Santillana and von Dechend described inHamlet’s Mill as the focus of archaic myth).

In their book When the Sky Fell: In Search of Atlantis (Stoddart, 1995), Canadian librarians Rand and Rose Flem-Ath update the work of Charles Hapgood, who brought to light medieval maps showing an ice-free Antarctica. How is it, Hapgood asked, that during much of the last ice age a large part of North America was under mile-thick glaciers, but a third of Antarctica was not? Hapgood suggested that perhaps the continents were then in different places relative to the poles – that the Earth’s crust had shifted over the molten layers beneath it. But if Antarctica was once further north and partly ice-free, was it also inhabitable? The Flem-Aths add up the clues and come to a startling conclusion: Antarctica was Atlantis! They retrace Plato’s description of the lost island and show that Antarctica fits it at least as well as any other place ever suggested. According to their reconstruction, Lesser Antarctica was once the homeland of a great maritime civilization that sent colonists worldwide. But 13,500 years ago, as certain astronomical cycles meshed to create a warmer global climate, the asymmetrically distributed weight of the polar ice packs caused the Earth’s crust to shift. Massive earthquakes and tidal waves followed, Siberia moved closer to the pole (quick-freezing the mammoths), the ice sheets covering much of North America melted, ocean levels rose, many large land animals became extinct, and Atlantis became a polar wasteland. Refugees from the catastrophe sailed to the most stable and hospitable areas available – the highlands of South America, the Near East, Egypt, Southeast Asia, and the Indus Valley – and there tried to preserve as much of their culture as they could. It was in these places that we find the earliest known experiments with agriculture and the apparent beginnings of civilization. According to the Flem-Aths, the disaster of 11,500 B.C. was the great turning point of history, an event whose memory would persist in the myths of cultures around the globe.

Graham Hancock, former East Africa correspondent for The Economist, is the author of Fingerprints of the Gods (Crown, 1995) – a summary and popularization of the work of the Flem-Aths, Bauval, West, and Gantenbrink. In Britain, Hancock’s book is something of a publishing phenomenon (the 10,000 copy initial printing was sold out within a week). Fingerprints of the Gods is written for a popular audience, and in it Hancock leads us on a globe-circling journey from Macchu Picchu to the Great Pyramid, describing his first-hand observations with the breathless excitement of a detective about to crack the biggest case in history. While it contains little in the way of original theory or research, it is a big, engaging book packed with up-to-date information.

The date and site of the earliest archeologically identifiable (i.e., non-“Atlantean”) civilization are also up for review. In the nineteenth century, historians believed that Egypt was the earliest civilization; then came the discovery of Sumer, then Catal Huyuk in Turkey, then Harappa in the Indus Valley. Gradually, the date of the first civilization has been pushed back from 3000 B.C. to at least 7000 B.C. In their book In Search of the Cradle of Civilization (Quest, 1995), David Frawley, Subhash Kak, and Georg Feuerstein explore the implications of the new evidence. They argue convincingly that civilization began not in the Near East but in the Indus Valley, and call into question the now-established idea that Hindu culture came to India by way of an Indo-European invasion; they suggest instead that the authors of the Rig-Veda were the indigenous heirs of an already ancient tradition. Frawley, Kak, and Feuerstein also note signs of a tremendous natural catastrophe that brought what they call the Indus-Sarasvati civilization to an end, and they propose that we begin to take seriously the mythic idea of history as a series of World Ages.

Perhaps the most shockingly unorthodox new book having to do with the human past is Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson’s The Hidden History of the Human Race (Govardhan Hill, 1994), a condensation of their daunting 952-pageForbidden Archaeology (1993). In both books, the authors collect the evidence that mainstream archeologists have rejected-bones of anatomically modern humans in geological formations tens or even hundreds of millions of years old; artifacts recovered from mines and coal beds; signs of human presence in the Americas up to 750,000 years ago. They also re-evaluate the accepted evidence of the human evolutionary past – the bones of Australopithecus, Homo erectus, and Neanderthal, and show convincingly that this evidence has passed through a “knowledge filter” whose purpose is to perpetuate a reigning paradigm. Whatever evidence fits the paradigm (no matter how flimsy) is accepted; whatever doesn’t (no matter how solid and unequivocal) is suppressed. Along the way, Cremo and Thompson compare the Australopithecine/Homo erectus data with modern reports of living ape-men (the Yeti of the Himalayas, the Sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest, and the Yeren of southern China). Perhaps, they suggest, the ape-men who lived a couple of million years ago were not our ancestors; they were merely other primate species who coexisted with Homo sapiens then, just as the Yeti and Sasquatch do to this day. The authors do far more than push the temporal borders of civilization back a few thousand years; they question the basic premises on which we have based all our ideas about the prehistoric human past. They don’t offer an alternative theory; they merely show that the one that is dominant today is based on an extreme form of intellectual tunnel vision.

The Cataclysm

Some sort of consensus seems to be emerging from the work both of the older generation of theorists such as Tompkins, Michell, de Lubicz, de Santillana and von Dechend, and Hapgood, and from that of the current generation of writers such as West, Hancock, Zink, Bauval, and the Flem-Aths. According to this hybrid scenario, a complex, technologically and scientifically advanced maritime culture existed during the last ice age. How long it existed we do not know; nor do we know if it was unique or merely one of a series of such civilizations. At any rate, it was destroyed by cataclysm about 13,500 years ago. Migrations that preceded and followed the cataclysm resulted in the establishment of outposts from which the historical civilizations of the Americas, the Near East and the Far East would eventually arise. If this scenario is even partly correct, it would mean that humankind has a vastly richer, more ancient and more interesting past than conventional historians have dreamed possible.

Unfortunately, when we get down to the details of the scenario, disagreements arise. One point of contention has to do with the nature and cause of the catastrophe. As Hapgood, Hancock, and the Flem-Aths have it, ice ages result from astronomical factors-changes in the obliquity of the terrestrial axis, the precession of the equinoxes, and variations in the shape of the Earth’s orbit. Taken together, these variables produce what geophysicists call the Croll-Milankovitch effect, which (according to theory) should produce periodic global climate fluctuations. According to Hapgood and his followers, the asymmetrical buildup of ice at the poles occasionally leads to a crust displacement. While the Hapgood model of a shifting crust has not been given much consideration by orthodox scientists, the Croll-Milankovitch effect (on which it is partly based) is widely accepted as real.

But in his 1981 book Ice: The Ultimate Human Catastrophe, astronomer Fred Hoyle skewered the idea that the Croll-Milankovitch effect could explain ice ages. True, combined axial and orbital effects unbalance the hemispheres climatically – with a gain or loss of solar radiation to each hemisphere alternating every 11,500 years or so – and also make for a cyclical one percent change in the distribution of solar energy between polar and equatorial regions. But, Hoyle pointed out, since about half the energy that heats the polar regions comes from water vapor that evaporated from tropical areas, the effect at the poles of the Croll-Milankovitch variation would be moderate. The ice pack would increase or decrease slightly and gradually, not significantly or suddenly. What is needed to explain the beginnings and endings of ice ages is some more dramatic event with global repercussions. For this, Hoyle proposed occasional comet or meteor impacts powerful enough to send millions of tons of dust into the upper atmosphere, reflecting a significant percentage of incoming solar radiation and creating a years-long winter over Earth’s entire surface.

In the fifteen years since Hoyle published his critique of the Croll-Milankovitch theory of the ice ages, the idea that Earth experienced severe cometary bombardment episodes in the relatively recent past has been taken up by others. Victor Clube, currently Dean of Astrophysics at Oxford University, has published two books in collaboration with fellow astronomer Bill Napier (The Cosmic Serpent, 1982, and The Cosmic Winter, 1990), in which he discusses evidence for periodic bombardment episodes over the past 2.5 million years. On the basis of computations of Earth-crossing comet and asteroid orbits and observed cratering rates, Clube estimates a strong likelihood of a collision of several megatons energy somewhere on Earth every 200 years or so, and one of 50,000 megatons energy every 100,000 years on average. Such an impact would certainly have severe short-term climatic effects, perhaps triggering the onset of an ice age. Clube also notes that “Within the past 500 million years…there have been about fifty collisions of energy more than seven million megatons, ten of more than 100 million megatons, and one or two of energy in excess of three or four billion megatons.” It was these latter immense impacts, he believes, that resulted in the mass extinctions revealed in the fossil record.

There is plenty of mythological evidence as well, for bombardment episodes: ancient humans around the globe feared capricious sky-gods who, they believed, occasionally rained destruction on hapless humanity; and the Chinese, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Native Americans all represented deities by way of comet symbols.

Both Clube and the followers of Hapgood say that Earth is accident-prone; they merely disagree about the agent or process of destruction. Perhaps the two scenarios – one based on cometary and asteroid impacts and the other on crust displacement – are not mutually exclusive; it is possible that the first phenomenon is capable of triggering the second. At present, there seems to be more hard evidence for impact events than for crustal shifts (which would be quite different in character from the well-attested phenomenon of gradual continental drift), and no geologist is now working publicly to prove or disprove Hapgood’s theory. In any case, there are good reasons for assuming that humanity was deeply traumatized by events that occurred just prior to the appearance of agriculture.

If Victor Clube is right and sizable comet or asteroid impacts have occurred every few thousand years on average, then we have yet another reason for taking a closer look at the mythic idea of World Ages. Have there been several “Atlantises”? Cremo and Thompson open the door to extraordinary possibilities: if anatomically modern human beings have been on Earth for hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of years, what were they doing all that time? The downside to catastrophes (aside from the inconvenience caused to their direct victims) is that they tend to erase signs of whatever preceded them. Thus it may forever be impossible for us to accurately reconstruct the antediluvian past. We have the myths, of course, but they paint a garbled picture. Perhaps the best we can hope for would be the discovery of some bit of evidence of the immediate survivors of the Deluge-ideally, a manuscript from 13,500 years ago written by witnesses to the events!

On the Verge of a Breakthrough?

Such a find is at least remotely possible.

The discoveries of West, Schoch, and Gantenbrink, and the theories of Bauval, are illuminating, and more revelations appear to be in store. What lies in that unexplored chamber in the Great Pyramid, or the cavities under and around the Sphinx? Cayce predicted that an Atlantean Hall of Records would be found under the Sphinx. Yet if the “Atlanteans” were literate, why have we so far failed to find examples of their writing?

It is also possible that the Bimini researchers (now organized under “The Atlantis Project,” which includes a few archeologists and geologists among its ranks) may come across definitive proof a Pleistocene civilization. A recent aerial survey indicated the presence of thirty possible megalithic sites around Bimini. And other areas in the Bahamas may also yield important finds.

Then there is the Flem-Aths’ theory that Atlantis was Antarctica. If it holds true, then sonar explorations of Lesser Antarctica should turn up something interesting-perhaps a street plan of downtown Atlantis. While no detailed, large-scale sonar surveys are now under way there, in a recent issue of Omnimagazine (August 1994), in an article devoted to the “face” and “pyramids” many people claim to see in photographs of the surface of Mars, NASA aerial photographer Michael Malin was quoted as saying: “I’ve done a lot of work in Antarctica, and there are lots of pyramidal shapes cut by ice. …there are far stranger things in Antarctica than I have seen on Mars.”

Since the implications of finding such a significant forgotten chapter in the human past would be immense, one might expect that archeologists would be champing at the bit to do field work in Antarctica, Bimini, or Giza. This, however, is hardly the case. Most are sitting on the sidelines and throwing stones. After all, there are careers and established doctrines to be protected. Mainstream Egyptologists appear to be the least imaginative and most vitriolic of the lot. Ironically, two of the leaders of the establishment opposition to West, Schoch, and Bauval – Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass (Director of Antiquities of the Giza Plateau and Sakkara) – are both former Cayce-ites. Lehner once published a book titled The Egyptian Heritage, based on the Edgar Cayce Readings, in which he wrote: “If the readings’ story of 10,500 B.C. approaches truth (it is the author’s premise that it does on several levels of significance) then we should consider seriously the implications of this epoch being the motivating center of the Egyptian mandala – the real legacy of ancient Egypt.” These days he makes statements like the following: “When you say something as complex as the Sphinx dates to 9000 or 10,000 B.C., it implies, of course, that there was a very high civilization that was capable of producing the Sphinx at that period. The question an archeologist has to ask, therefore, is this: If the Sphinx was made at that time, then where is the rest of this civilization, where is the rest of this culture?” That, of course, is exactly what West, Bauval, et al., want to find out. But the Egyptological establishment is putting up road blocks at every step. One suspects that Lehner and Hawass may be exhibiting the psychological reactions of “reformed” cult members, and may therefore be acting on the basis of motives that however understandable, nevertheless compromise their objectivity and obstruct new discoveries.

Meanwhile, Schoch is seeking to open a department for the search for lost civilizations at Boston University, and Gantenbrink has distanced himself from West in an effort to gain permission from the authorities to investigate the chamber he discovered in the Great Pyramid. One way or another, it seems that important news may be in store within the next few years.

Discoveries about vanished civilizations have a certain poignancy these days, as our own civilization goes about destroying itself through environmental ruin, overpopulation, and economic predation. Perhaps at this unique moment in time we have some important lesson to learn from our distant ancestors. Were their civilizations as power-driven, politically unstable, and ecologically unsustainable as ours? How sad and ironic it would be if we were to attain the sophistication finally to open long-dormant time capsules from our counterparts in past millennia, and to decode their final warnings – or merely their note-in-a-bottle messages that “We were here!” – just as our own civilization succumbs to a catastrophe of its own making. Or is it possible that their legacy will consist of the realization of the inevitability of terrestrial cataclysms beyond human control? These lines of thought may be somewhat depressing, but they help us see the problems and achievements of our era from a larger perspective. One wonders: What will we leave behind for archeologists ten thousand years from now?

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RICHARD HEINBERG is the author of Memories and Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age (Quest Books: 1995), Celebrate the Solstice: Honoring the Earth’s Seasonal Rhythms Through Festival and Ceremony (Quest Books: 1994), and A New Covenant With Nature. The above article originally appeared in his Museletter.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 38 (Sept-Oct 1996).

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.

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In Search of Lost Cities

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Sundaland Rising
Gunung Padang: Indonesia’s Mysterious Lost Civilisation?

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Megalithic Origins
Clues Carved in Stone by an Ancient Global Elite

By Hugh Newman

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The Enduring Enigma of Tiwanaku & Puma Punku

By Brien Foerster

Lost City of the Ancients Located in Ecuadorian Jungle?

By Bruce Fenton

Gene Savoy & His Search for the Secrets of Vanished Civilisations

An Interview with Sean Savoy

In Search of the Lost City of ‘Z’
The Amazing Real Life Story of Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett

By Larry Orcutt

Decoding the Secrets of the Nebra Sky Disc
Man’s Oldest Portrayal of the Cosmos?

By Howard Crowhurst

Imhotep the African
Architect of the Cosmos

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The Real Atlantis

By Peter Daughtrey

Viral Mythology
How Information was Encoded & Passed Down Through Legend, Art & Architecture

An Interview with Marie Jones & Larry Flaxman

Remnants of the Gods
Impossible Buildings

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The Concept of Civilisation

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By ROBERT M. SCHOCH, PH.D.

—

When and where did civilisation begin? How far back in time does high culture go? Indeed, what do we mean by such terms as civilisation, or sophisticated and high culture?

When I was in college, more years ago than I perhaps care to remember, I learned the standard story which still holds sway in many circles: Civilisation and high culture date back to, at most, perhaps five or six thousand years ago. A handy marker for recognising a true civilisation was written language, and it was generally agreed that the earliest true writing could be dated to the late fourth millennium BCE (that is, circa 3500 to 3000 BCE).

The Sumerians are generally credited with developing writing about 3300 to 3200 BCE, although the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphics may date back to the same period, or even a century or so earlier, and there is also evidence of writing possibly from as far back as 3500 BCE found at Harappa, the Indus Civilisation, in what is now modern Pakistan.¹

But then there are reports of much earlier possible writing from Henan Province, China, dated to 6600 to 6200 BCE, inscribed on tortoise shells.² I recollect a book I read while still an undergraduate, The Roots of Civilization by Alexander Marshack, which argued that various lines, notches, and “scratchings” on ancient bone artefacts dating to 10,000 BCE and earlier, before the end of the last Ice Age, were in fact symbolic systems, including lunar calendar notations. Maybe our ancestors were not so primitive and stupid after all.

Maybe defining civilisation and high culture in terms of a written language (or more accurately our knowledge of a recorded language; we can easily miss things in the archaeological record) simply is not a fruitful approach. This is the conclusion I have come to while pursuing my own research.

Re-Dating the Great Sphinx of Egypt

I first came to the problem of the origin of civilisation through my studies of the Great Sphinx of Giza, Egypt. Combining a Ph.D. in geology and geophysics from Yale University (1983) with a lifelong enthusiasm for ancient cultures, on my first trip to Egypt in 1990 I was primed to take a careful look at the Sphinx.

As I have recounted elsewhere,³ my colleague and friend John Anthony West had suggested to me various silly notions that the Great Sphinx might be older than the standard Egyptological attribution of circa 2500 BCE. I figured that through a careful analysis of the geology, I could show the error in such thinking. Surely all those professional Egyptologists could not be wrong. It turns out they were.

Based on my geological and seismic analyses, utilising the weathering and erosion patterns correlated with the palaeoclimatology and subsurface features,⁴ I concluded that the oldest portions of the Great Sphinx date back to at least the period of 7000 BCE to 5000 BCE, and perhaps back to 9000 BCE or earlier. To oversimplify a bit, the core body of the Great Sphinx shows features that place it well back before the onset of the current arid regime (the Giza Plateau is on the edge of the Sahara Desert) some 5,000 years ago.

Such a conclusion has deep implications, suggesting that high culture and civilisation dates back much earlier than previously believed. I have been told on more than one occasion that my conclusions cannot be true because if they are, then “history must be rewritten.” Certainly, we cannot have that, can we? Vested interests run high, and I have been attacked from many sides, both by orthodox Egyptologists and historians, and by various people not as closely associated with mainstream academia.

Through it all over the last two decades, I have looked at the alternative theories suggested to explain the data, and I continue to maintain that the evidence clearly points to the origins of the Great Sphinx being much older than 2500 BCE. Indeed, the attacks and criticisms, forcing me to carefully scrutinise and enlarge my dataset, have served only to reaffirm my conclusions.

The Sphinx Under Water, or Under Fire?

Recently my work on the Great Sphinx has come under fire from a self-described anti-Establishmentarian. Given the number of people who have been asking me about this latest “Sphinx theory,” I feel it is imperative that I briefly address it here.

Robert Temple⁵ has proposed a moat theory (that is, the Sphinx Enclosure was purposefully filled with water such that the body of the Sphinx was submerged and sat as a statue in a small artificial lake) to explain the clear signs of water weathering and erosion on the body of the Great Sphinx and on the walls of the Sphinx Enclosure.

Temple contends that the moat theory explains the data adequately without hypothesising that the Great Sphinx dates back to a much earlier period during which there was more rainfall than at present. (Here I will not address his hypotheses, which I do not find persuasive, that the Sphinx was the jackal [wild dog] Anubis and the face seen on the Sphinx is that of the Middle Kingdom pharaoh Amenemhet II, though I would point out that the original Sphinx has been reworked and the head has been re-carved, perhaps more than once.)

The body of the Sphinx, carved from the bedrock, sits largely below ground level, and various moat, pool, or artificial fountain hypotheses have been suggested for the Sphinx from time to time. I considered such notions carefully as far back as my early analyses of the geology of the Sphinx, starting in 1990. In summary, such moat and related theories do not hold water (to use a bad pun) and are not compatible with the features of the actual Great Sphinx, the Sphinx Enclosure, and the general geology and palaeohydrology of the Giza Plateau.

Scrutinising the Sphinx

While in Egypt recently (March 2009) I made it a point to look at the Great Sphinx and Sphinx Enclosure with fresh eyes to see if there could be anything to the moat class of theories. I will summarise briefly a half dozen points.⁶

1) Based on my observations and analyses, the Sphinx Temple (built out of blocks removed from the Sphinx Enclosure when the body of the Sphinx was initially carved) and the so-called Valley Temple to the south of the Sphinx Temple show clear signs of heavy precipitation-induced weathering on the limestone core blocks. These limestone temples were subsequently refurbished with Aswan granite ashlars during the Old Kingdom (as evidenced by an Old Kingdom inscription still found on a block located at the Valley Temple). The moat theory cannot explain the nature of the very ancient weathering seen under the Old Kingdom granite veneer.

2) There is much heavier surface erosion on the western end of the Sphinx Enclosure, and the surface erosion tapers off dramatically toward the eastern end of the enclosure. This is exactly what is to be expected based on the palaeohydrology of the Giza Plateau and is incompatible with a moat theory where it is hypothesised that water was brought in from the Nile to the east. Furthermore, the nature of the surface erosion throughout the enclosure and on the body of the Sphinx is as expected if there were water running over or raining down on the rock layers. The erosion actually observed is not compatible with pooled water in the enclosure.

3) The highest levels of the middle member strata, as seen in the Sphinx Enclosure on the western end, are most severely eroded, which is compatible with the agency of precipitation. If the moat theory were true, then the lower strata on the eastern end of the Sphinx Enclosure would be most heavily eroded (caused by water being brought in via canals from the Nile), but the opposite is seen in reality.

4) The subsurface seismic data demonstrating the depth of weathering below the floor of the Sphinx Enclosure, based on my analyses (using areas excavated during the Old Kingdom for comparison), even when calibrated very conservatively, gives an age of initial carving for the core body of the Great Sphinx of at least 5000 BCE. More than one geological colleague has suggested to me that a more realistic calibration gives a date thousands of years earlier. And no, standing water in the Sphinx Enclosure would not accelerate the depth of weathering below the floor of the enclosure.

5) The vertical fissures observed in the walls of the Sphinx Enclosure show diagnostic signs of having been formed by precipitation and water runoff. In my opinion, they do not show any characteristics that are diagnostic or even suggestive of having been formed by artificial dredging of the Sphinx Enclosure, as some have suggested.

6) If the Great Sphinx actually had sat in an artificial pool or lake, either the water level around the Sphinx would have had to have been the same as that of the surrounding water table, or the walls and floor of the pool in which the Sphinx sat would have had to have been sealed up and watertight (and any artificial walls, such as on the eastern end, would have had to have been strong enough to withstand the pressure of the water). Clearly, the ancient water table was well below the level of the floor of the Sphinx Enclosure (or else the Sphinx Temple, for instance, would have been flooded). The Sphinx Enclosure, if simply carved from the bedrock (as all the evidence suggests) would not have held a deep pool of standing water. The bedrock in the enclosure is highly faulted, and characterised by a karst morphology that would leak like a sieve (another bad pun, perhaps). The enclosure would have had to have been fully sealed up (with some kind of mortar or cement, perhaps), and there is no evidence of such sealing. Furthermore, if the enclosure had been sealed in such a manner, this would not be compatible with the dredging theory for the vertical fissures mentioned in the previous point. I would also note that the chambers and tunnels under the Great Sphinx would have been flooded from above if the Great Sphinx had been sitting in a pool of water, unless the Sphinx Enclosure had been watertight; yet the evidence suggests the enclosure was not watertight.

Could the Sphinx be Hundreds of Thousands of Years Old?

Even as my re-dating of the Great Sphinx has been attacked as impossible by some authorities, other serious researchers have suggested that I have underestimated the true age of the oldest portions of the Great Sphinx by a factor of ten or more!

For instance, two members of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Vjacheslav I. Manichev and Alexander G. Parkhomenko,⁷ citing my work, have reinterpreted the geology and erosional features on the Great Sphinx to mean that the core body of the statue could date back as far as 800,000 years ago. And they are not referring to simply a natural outcropping that may have existed 800,000 years ago that was later shaped into a statue. (Remember, too, that to carve the core body of the Sphinx huge multi-ton blocks were removed from the Sphinx Enclosure and assembled as the Sphinx Temple, so the original Sphinx Temple is as old as the core body of the Great Sphinx).

The dating of Manichev and Parkhomenko could push the age of the Great Sphinx into a very remote time period, one that has been suggested for possible, but ambiguous, ancient structures, sculptures, or simulacra that are found in many parts of the world, such as Markawasi in Peru,⁸ the Romanian Sphinx,⁹ or a possible stone circle dubbed Adam’s Calendar by researchers Johan Heine and Michael Tellinger with a claimed date of 75,000 years ago.¹⁰ Personally, I am not convinced that the Great Sphinx is anywhere close to the age postulated by Manichev and Parkhomenko, or that various claimed very ancient, very eroded statues are anything more than natural formations, but the prospects are intriguing. Without going off on such limbs, there is clear evidence for early high culture at a remote period beyond just that of the Great Sphinx.

Nabta Playa

In the Sahara Desert of southern Egypt, west of Aswan, is an area known as Nabta Playa. Here an ancient stone calendar circle, as well as many other megalithic erections and structures, was identified by archaeologist Fred Wendorf (Southern Methodist University) and his team and dated to circa 4000 BCE and earlier.¹¹

Thomas Brophy¹² has carried out extensive analyses of Nabta. According to Brophy, three stones inside the Nabta calendar circle represent the belt of Orion (just as the three pyramids of Giza represent the belt of Orion according the research of Robert Bauval¹³). The stones on the Playa and the corresponding stars in the sky aligned on summer solstice nights between about 6400 BCE and 4900 BCE. Brophy found even more correlations, however. Three other stones in the Nabta calendar circle correspond to the configuration of Orion’s head and shoulders as they appeared in circa 16,500 BCE, about half a precessional cycle earlier than the previously mentioned alignment. Based on these and other analyses of monoliths in the area, Brophy concludes that the early inhabitants of Nabta Playa possessed incredibly sophisticated knowledge, the type of knowledge we associate with high culture and civilisation. Furthermore, the dates of the Nabta structures are in line with my dating of the oldest portions of the Great Sphinx, and at both Giza and Nabta the constellation of Orion (which represented the god Osiris during dynastic times) was of prime importance.

Göbekli Tepe

If the dating of the Great Sphinx remains controversial (after all, old ideas die hard), and the analyses of Nabta Playa are questionable in the eyes of some researchers, there is one site that even the most ensconced conventional archaeologists cannot ignore.

In modern Turkey, just north of the border with Syria, is a site known as Göbekli Tepe that has yielded dozens of carved limestone megaliths, many of which date back to the extraordinarily early period of 9000 BCE to 10,000 BCE.¹⁴ Klaus Schmidt, of the German Archaeological Institute, has been heading an excavation team there since 1994, and there is no doubt as to the importance, authenticity, and dating (based in part on radiocarbon) of Göbekli Tepe. This is a discovery made by mainstream academics.

Göbekli Tepe boggles the imagination on many accounts. The date is incredibly early, even earlier than my “conservative” estimate for the date of the Great Sphinx. Göbekli Tepe dates back to the end of the last Ice Age. The monolithic megaliths are in the range of two to seven metres high (the latter is the height of an unfinished megalith left where it was being quarried). Sculpted onto the surfaces of the monoliths are a variety of animals, including snakes, boars, foxes, vultures, spiders, scorpions, a centipede, and a three-dimensional figure that has been interpreted as a lion. The megaliths excavated thus far had been erected into four distinct stone circles, ranging from ten to thirty metres in diameter. Based on geophysical surveys, the entire site may cover three dozen hectares (about 90 acres) and contains another twenty or so stone circles.

Although very different from the Great Sphinx and the Sphinx Temple, in my estimation, taking the entire Göbekli Tepe site as a whole into account, just as much effort, social organisation, and sophisticated or high culture must have been required to construct the Göbekli Tepe complex as the Sphinx complex. When I first presented my findings on the age of the Great Sphinx, I was told over and over again by mainstream archaeologists and historians that my dating was simply impossible because it was well known that nothing so elaborate and sophisticated, requiring an advanced level of social organisation, could occur so early. Göbekli Tepe proves these assertions false and helps place the Great Sphinx in a larger context.

The work at Göbekli Tepe has literally just begun. Most of the site has yet to be excavated and who can predict what surprises might be in store for us? Who were the people that built the site, and why did they build it? So far there is no evidence that the site was inhabited; no living areas have been excavated, though the thousands of animal bones found (the most common animal represented is the aurochs, a type of extinct ox) are evidence of feasting at the site. Was it a holy, sacred site? An area for religious pilgrimages? Or perhaps an ancient centre of knowledge? My instinct is that the positions of the monoliths, and the specific carvings on their surfaces, probably encode information… but what? And what happened to the people who built and used Göbekli Tepe? Curiously, the site did not simply fall into disuse and gradually decay. It was intentionally buried somewhere around 8000 BCE. Why? The mystery only deepens.

The Origin and Demise of Early High Culture

There has been space here to mention only a few examples of archaeological sites that challenge the conventional view of when high culture, advanced knowledge, and civilisation arose. Admittedly, I have dwelt on those that most interest me, including the Great Sphinx with which I have become entwined. Put all the evidence together and there is no doubt in my mind that what we can term high culture existed at least 11,000 years ago (and possibly much earlier).

Where did early civilisation originate? And what happened to it? Is there a lost primordial ancient civilisation, one that was destroyed in some cataclysmic natural catastrophe? Could the legend of Atlantis have some truth to it? These are questions I have pondered long and hard for many years.

Being a geologist, I view Earth and our environment as unstable, full of unexpected surprises, at least over the long term. Climates change, sea levels rise and fall, volcanoes erupt, earthquakes rock the land and sea, and objects fall from the sky. I have discussed how such natural cataclysms may have influenced the history of ancient civilisations,¹⁵ and in particular I have pointed out that Earth has experienced a series of encounters with comets during historical and prehistoric times.¹⁶

Depending on the severity of the encounter (size of the comet, whether it actually touched the surface of Earth or perhaps resulted in a mid-atmosphere explosion, and so forth), dramatic climatic changes could be affected on Earth, which in turn could affect sea levels, and weather extremes can wreck havoc on animal and human populations, causing famines.¹⁷

In 2003 I suggested that the end of the last Ice Age may have been brought about in part by comets bombarding Earth,¹⁸ and this hypothesis has received dramatic support with physical evidence for an impact around 10,900 BCE.¹⁹ There is also evidence for impacts around 7600 BCE, 4400 BCE, 3150 BCE, 2345 BCE, 1628 BCE, 1159 BCE, 207 BCE, 536 CE, and 1178 CE.²⁰

Bottom line, based on all the evidence, there is no doubt in my mind that these incidents, these cosmic catastrophes, had a profound influence on ancient civilisations. In some cases migrations were sparked, in other cases entire cultures may have been wiped out.

At the end of the last Ice Age, from before around 18,000 BCE to perhaps 11,000 BCE or later (dates at such a far remove are approximate), when sea levels were significantly lower (by seventy-five to a hundred and twenty metres), a sub-continental expanse of land was exposed in Southeast Asia where there is now only water in the area bounded by Indochina, the Malay Archipelago, the islands of Indonesia, and Borneo. To geologists this drowned region is known as Sundaland, and there is a variety of evidence that here an early civilisation was located; they fled as the waters rose and the comets came down.²¹ Could this be the primordial lost civilisation that so many of us suspect once existed?

And what about that intentional burial of the structures at Göbekli Tepe? Did they see their fate in the skies? As the comets rained down did those ancient builders do their best to cover and preserve that which they had so carefully created, perhaps hoping to return one day to uncover their monuments? Or did they leave them for us to recover?

If you enjoyed this article be sure to check out the latest Special Issue Vol 8 No 1 which includes a report by Dr. Robert Schoch plus all the latest discoveries in the world of archaeology.

FOOTNOTES

1. David Whitehouse, “‘Earliest Writing’ Found”, BBC News Online, 4 May 1999; John Nobel Wilford, “Who Began Writing? Many Theories, Few Answers”, The New York Times on the Web, Science, 6 April 1999.

2. Paul Rincon, “‘Earliest Writing’ found in China”, BBC Science.

3. Robert M. Schoch with Robert Aquinas McNally, Voices of the Rocks: A Scientist Looks at Catastrophes and Ancient Civilizations, New York: Harmony Books, 1999.

4. Robert M. Schoch, “Redating the Great Sphinx of Giza”, KMT, A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 52-59, 66-70 (Summer 1992); Robert M. Schoch with Robert Aquinas McNally, Voyages of the Pyramid Builders: The True Origins of the Pyramids from Lost Egypt to Ancient America, New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2003; Robert M. Schoch & Robert Aquinas McNally, Pyramid Quest: Secrets of the Great Pyramid and the Dawn of Civilization, New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2005; T.L. Dobecki & R.M. Schoch, “Seismic Investigations in the Vicinity of the Great Sphinx of Giza, Egypt”, Geoarchaeology, vol. 7, no. 6, pp. 527-544 (1992); Robert M. Schoch, “Life with the Great Sphinx: Some Personal Reflections”, Darklore, vol. 1, pp. 38-55, 291 (2007).

5. Robert Temple, “What was the Sphinx?”, New Dawn, no. 112, pp. 47-52 (January-February 2009); Robert Temple with Olivia Temple, The Sphinx Mystery: The Forgotten Origins of the Sanctuary of Anubis, Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2009.

6. For more details pertaining to some of these points, as well as various comments on the criticisms of K. Lal Gauri and his colleagues as cited by Temple with Temple [2009], see Robert M. Schoch, “Geological Evidence Pertaining to the Age of the Great Sphinx”, in New Scenarios on the Evolution of the Solar System and Consequences on History of Earth and Man (Eds. Emilio Spedicato and Adalberto Notarpietro), 2002. Proceedings of the Conference, Milano and Bergamo, June 7-9th, 1999, Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Quaderni del Dipartmento di Matematica, Statistica, Informatica ed Applicazion, Serie Miscellanea, Anno 2002, N. 3, pp. 171-203.

7. Vjacheslav I. Manichev & Alexander G. Parkhomenko, “Geological Aspect of the Problem of Dating the Great Egyptian Sphinx Construction”, in Geoarchaeology and Archaeomineralogy (Eds. R. I. Kostov, B. Gaydarska, and M. Gurova) 2008. Proceedings of the International Conference, 29-30 October 2008, Sofia, Publishing House, “St. Ivan Rilski”, Sofia, pp.308-311.

8. Robert M. Schoch, “Introduction”, in Markawasi: Peru’s Inexplicable Stone Forest (Ed. and Author, Kathy Doore, with a foreword by Peter E. Schneider), Surprise, Arizona: Kathy Doore, 2006, pp. 14-20.

9. Anonymous, “THE BUCEGI – Sphinx,” article dated 10 October 2002 and posted at: www.ici.ro/romania/en/turism/c_sfinx.html. Accessed 4 April 2009.

10. Angelique Serrao, “‘Oldest Man-Made Structure’ Unearthed”, Article dated 14 July 2008 and posted at: www.iol.co.za/index.php?from=rss_South%20Africa&set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=vn20080714062546858C113827. Accessed 4 April 2009.

11. J. McKim Malville, “Oldest Astronomical Megalith Alignment Discovered in Southern Egypt by Science Team”, Press release dated 31 March 1998 and posted at: www.colorado.edu/news/releases/1998/101.html. Accessed 5 April 2009.

12. Thomas G. Brophy, The Origin Map: Discovery of a Prehistoric, Megalithic, Astrophysical Map and Sculpture of the Universe (Foreword by Robert M. Schoch and Afterword by John Anthony West), New York: Writers Club Press (iUniverse), 2002; Mark H. Gaffney, “The Astronomers of Nabta Playa: New Discoveries Reveal Astonishing Pre-Historic Knowledge”, Atlantis Rising, no. 56, pp. 42-43, 68-70 (March/April 2006).

13. Robert Bauval & Adrian Gilbert, The Orion Mystery: Unlocking the Secrets of the Pyramids, New York: Crown Trade Paperbacks, 1994.

14. Graham Chandler (photographs by Ergun Çağatay), “The Beginning of the End for Hunter-Gatherers”, Saudi ARAMCO World, vol. 60, no. 2, pp. 2-9 (March/April 2009); Andrew Curry (photographs by Berthold Steinhilber), “The World’s First Temple? Predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, Turkey’s Stunning Gobekli Tepe Upends the Conventional View of the Rise of Civilization”, Smithsonian, vol. 39, no. 8, pp. 54-58, 60 (November 2008).

15. Schoch with McNally, 1999.

16. Schoch with McNally, 2003.

17. For a discussion of the effects of a sixth century CE cometary event, see Ker Than, “Comet smashes triggered ancient famine”, New Scientist, issue 2689, p.9 (7 January 2009).

18. Schoch with McNally, 2003.

19. R.B. Firestone, A. West, J.P. Kennett, L. Becker, T.E. Bunch, Z.S. Revay, P.H. Schultz, T. Belgya, D.J. Kennett, J.M. Erlandson, O.J. Dickenson, A.C. Goodyear, R.S. Harris, G.A. Howard, J.B. Kloosterman, P. Lechler, P.A. Mayewski, J. Montgomery, R. Poreda, T. Darrah, S.S. Que Hee, A.R. Smith, A. Stich, W. Topping, J.H. Wittke, and W.S. Wolbach, “Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 104, no. 41, pp. 16016-16021 (9 October 2007).

20. Schoch with McNally, 2003; Undoubtedly this list is incomplete, especially for the period between 10,900 BCE and 3150 BCE.

21. Schoch with McNally, 2003.

.

ROBERT M. SCHOCH, Ph.D., is renowned for his work on re-dating the Great Sphinx. Based on his geological studies, he determined that the Sphinx’s origins date prior to dynastic times. He has also focused his attention on the Great Pyramid and various other temples and tombs in Egypt, as well as studying similar structures around the world. Dr. Schoch is an author and coauthor of both technical and popular books, including the trilogy with R. A. McNally: Voices of the Rocks: A Scientist looks at Catastrophes and Ancient Civilizations (1999), Voyages of the Pyramid Builders: The True Origins of the Pyramids from Lost Egypt to Ancient America (2003), and Pyramid Quest: Secrets of the Great Pyramid and the Dawn of Civilization (2005). Dr. Schoch’s most recent book is The Parapsychology Revolution: A Concise Anthology of Paranormal and Psychical Research (2008, compilation and commentary by Robert M. Schoch and Logan Yonavjak). Website: www.robertschoch.com

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 8.

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By MICHAEL HOWARD

—

Every visible thing in the world is put under the charge of an angel.
– St Augustine

In 2002 the British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph reported that the Vatican had banned the veneration of those angels who do not appear in the authorised texts of the Bible. This was an attempt to counter the influence of unnamed New Age groups who were allegedly recruiting new members within the Roman Catholic Church. In future, prayers were only to be directed to the three archangels Michael, Gabriel and Raphael who are mentioned in the Bible. According to the apocryphal and banned Book of Enoch these were the angelic beings responsible for binding the wicked fallen angels or Watchers who had transgressed God’s law. The news report said that the early Church had excluded the book, attributed to the Old Testament prophet and patriarch Enoch, from the authorised version of the Bible because it described these fallen angels and their activities.

Who are the Watchers or fallen angels and why was the early Church and the modern Vatican so concerned about them?

Genesis 6:1-4 says: “When men began to multiply on the face of the Earth, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and took them wives of all which they chose.” Traditionally the Ben Eloha or ‘sons of God’ numbered several hundred and they descended to Earth on Mount Harmon. Significantly this was a sacred place to both the Canaanites and the Hebrews who invaded their land. In later times shrines to the gods Baal, Zeus, Helios and Pan and the goddess Astarte were built on its slopes.

These Ben Elohim or ‘fallen angels’ were also known as the Watchers, the Grigori and the Irin. In Jewish mythology the Grigori were originally a superior order of angels who dwelt in the highest heaven with God and resembled human beings in their appearance.¹ The title ‘Watcher’ simply means ‘one who watches’, ‘those who watch’, ‘those who are awake’ or ‘those who do not sleep’. These titles reflect the unique relationship between the Watchers and the human race since ancient times.

In the esoteric Luciferian tradition they were a special elite order of angelic beings created by God to be earthly shepherds of the first primitive humans. It was their task to observe and watch over the emerging human species and report back on their progress. However they were confined by the divine prime directive not to interfere in human evolution. Unfortunately they decided to ignore God’s command and defy his orders and become teachers to the human race, with unfortunate repercussions for both themselves and humanity.

Most of the information we have about the Watchers and their activities comes from the apocryphal Book of Enoch. In the orthodox Bible the prophet Enoch, from the Hebrew ‘hanokh’ or instructor, is a mysterious figure. In Genesis 4:16-23 he is described as the son of Cain, the “first murderer,” and the first city built by his father is named after him. Further on in Genesis 5:18-19, and several generations later, Enoch is named as the son of Jared, and it is during his lifetime that the Watchers either arrive or incarnate in human bodies.

In the apocryphal Book of Jubilee, allegedly dictated by “an angel of the Lord” to Moses on Mount Sinai when he also received the Ten Commandments, it says that Enoch was “the first among men that are born on Earth [sic] who learn writing, knowledge and wisdom.” It says that Enoch wrote down “the signs of Heaven” (the zodiac signs) according to their months in a book. This was so human beings would know the seasons of the years in relation to the order of the months and their respective stellar and planetary influences. The indication is that Enoch received this information from extraterrestrial angelic sources, i.e. the Watchers, and therefore he was a cultural exemplar.

The Fallen Angels Instruct Humanity

Two hundred of the ‘fallen angels’ descended from the heavenly realm on to the summit of Mount Hermon and they were so smitten by the beauty of human women that, using their new material bodies, they had sex with them. This further incurred Yahweh’s wrath and, according to the Bible, the consequence of this miscegenation between the Fallen Ones and mortals led to the creation of half-angelic, half-human offspring (Genesis 6:4).

These children were called the Nefelim or Nephilim and they were the giant race that once inhabited Old Earth. The fallen angels taught their wives and children a variety of new technological skills, magical knowledge and occult wisdom. This suggests that psychic abilities and magical powers were originally an ancient inheritance from the angelic realm given to early humans. In the Luciferian tradition this is known in spiritual and metaphorical terms as the ‘witch blood’, ‘elven blood’ or ‘faery blood’ that is possessed by witches and wizards.

In the Book of Enoch it says that the leader of the fallen angels was called Azazel, and he is often identified with Lucifer (the Lightbringer) or Lumiel (‘the light of God’). He taught men to forge swords and make shields and breastplates (body armour). Azazel also taught them metallurgy and how to mine from the earth and use different metals. To the women he taught the art of making bracelets, ornaments, rings and necklaces from precious metals and stones. He also showed them how to ‘beautify their eyelids’ with kohl and the use of cosmetic tricks to attract and seduce the opposite sex. From these practices Enoch says there came much ‘godlessness’ and men and women committed fornication, were led astray and became corrupt in their ways.

This was the basis for the early Church condemning the fallen angels for teaching women to make necklaces from pieces of gold and bracelets for their arms. St Paul said that women should cover their head in the synagogue (Corinthians: 11:5-6). This was because the fallen angels were supposed to be attracted to human females with long flowing hair. The custom of women covering their hair in churches is still found in Roman Catholicism and also in the customs of Islam.

The fallen angel Shemyaza, another form of Azazel, is said by Enoch to have taught humans the use of root cuttings and the magical art of enchantment; the fallen angel Armaros taught the resolving (banishing) of enchantments; Baraqijal taught astrology; Kokabiel, the knowledge of the constellations (astronomy); Chazaqiel, the knowledge of the clouds and the sky (weather lore and divination); Shamsiel, the signs of the sun (the solar mysteries); Sariel the courses of the moon (the lunar cycles used in horticulture and agriculture and the esoteric lunar mysteries); Penemuel instructed humans in the art of writing and reading; and Kashdejan taught the diagnosis and healing of diseases and the science of medicine.

It is obvious from these descriptions of the teaching abilities of the Watchers that they were cultural exemplars and the bringers of civilisation to the early human race. It is therefore strange that in orthodox Judeo-Christian religious texts they are misrepresented as evil corrupters of humanity.

Some idea of the original exalted status and real nature of the ‘sons of God’ and ‘the angels of the Lord’ can be found hidden in the ancient annals of angelic lore. For instance, Kokabiel is described as “a great angelic prince who rules over the stars.”² In the Sibylline Oracles, Araqiel is one of the fallen angels who guides the souls of the dead to judgement in the underworld.

Shamsiel, possible originally a Babylonian sun god, was called “the prince of Paradise” because he was one of the guardian angels who watched over the gates to Eden. In this role he took Moses to see the heavenly garden and he also watched over the treasures of King David and his son Solomon the Wise. This reference may be to spiritual treasures rather than physical gold and jewels. In the Jewish Zohar he is named as the chief aide-de-camp to the mighty Archangel Uriel and bore his standard into battle.

Sariel was an angel associated with fertility of the earth and the spring equinox (northern hemisphere) in March. He governed the martial zodiac sign of Aries the Ram and was invoked for protection against the malefic power of the Evil Eye.

Azazel – Lucifer – Lumiel

Azazel, the leader of the Watchers, as mentioned before, was identified with Lucifer or Lumiel. In the Quran it is said that Lucifer-Lumiel (Iblis) rebelled against Allah because he was told to bow down and worship the clay-born “man of earth” Adam and refused. He was forced to fight a battle in Heaven with the Archangel Mikael or Michael and his Army of the Lord. As a result Lumiel and his rebel angels were cast out of Heaven and fell down to Earth. Here Lumiel became the “Lord of the World” and in Christian mythology he was falsely identified with the bogeyman Satan. However, esoterically in the Luciferian tradition, Lumiel or Lumial is not an evil satanic figure luring humankind into temptation and acts of evil as the Church represents him. He is “the angel of God [who] rebelled against the static, established cosmic order and set in motion the forces of change and evolution…”³

It is possible that Lumiel may have originated in Canaan as Shahar, the god of the morning star (Venus). He had a twin called Shalem, who was also symbolised by the planet Venus, but as the evening star. These divine bright and dark twins represented the solar light emerging from the darkness of night at dawn and descending into it at dusk. They were the children of the goddess Asherah, and there is archaeological evidence from the Middle East that the Hebrews adopted her worship when they settled in Canaan and practised it alongside reverence of the tribal storm god Yahweh. The Old Testament has several references to the continued worship of Asherah as “Queen of Heaven” by the allegedly monotheistic Hebrews. This took place at shrines in sacred groves on hills where they made offerings of cakes and incense to the goddess. In Canaanite mythology, Shahar, as the Lord of the Morning Star, was cast down from heaven for defying the high god El in the form of a lightning bolt. In that form he fertilised Mother Earth with his divine phallic force.

Azazel is represented as a metal-smith and a fire-working sorcerer or magician. He has also been compared to the biblical first smith Tubal-Cain, a descendant of the half-human, half-angelic “first murderer” Cain. The actual name Azazel has variously been translated as ‘god of victory’, ‘the strength of God’, ‘the strong god’ and even ‘the goat god’. In the apocryphal Apocalypse of Abraham, he is called “the lord of heathens” suggesting he was originally a pagan god. He has also been identified with the serpent in the Edenic myth that seduced the first woman and “Mother of All Living,” Eve. In a Persian text known as the Urm al-Khibab or The Primordial Book, dating from the 8^th century CE, the angel Azazil or Azazel is said to have refused to acknowledge the superiority of Adam over the angels. As a result Allah expelled him and his rebel angels from the heavenly realm to live on Earth. More generally in Islamic lore Azazel or Azrael is the angel of death and he acts as a guide for the souls of the dead.

In Leviticus 16:8-10 and in the Dead Sea Scrolls a curious Hebrew ritual is recorded that features Azazel as the name for the ‘scapegoat’ that takes on the communal sins of Israel. It says that the high priest Aaron took two goats from the flock and cast lots (practised divination) to choose which one would be the scapegoat and sacrificed as a “sin offering.” The Scrolls say that the high priest confessed all the “impurities of the children of Israel” over the head of the Azazel goat. By this ritually symbolic act he transferred to the unfortunate animal all their guilt and sins so they could be absolved of them. The goat was then either cast out into the wilderness to die or thrown over a cliff to be dashed to pieces on the rocks below.

This ancient and archetypal concept of the scapegoat sacrificed for the sins of the human race and abandoned in the wilderness is a powerful and potent motif that appears several times in biblical myths. It can be seen in the story of Cain who becomes an exiled wanderer on the Earth after being marked by God and banished “east of Eden” after killing his brother Abel. In one Jewish legend the wise King Solomon, a powerful magician who could summon and control demons, fell from grace because he “whored after foreign gods.” He was forced by God to leave Jerusalem and wander in the desert disguised as a beggar.

Also after their exodus from slavery in Egypt, Moses and the Israelites were forced to spend forty years wandering in the desert before they were allowed to enter the Promised Land (Canaan). In Ancient Egyptian mythology, the dark god Set is represented as a divine outcast who dwells in the desert and, after she left Adam, his first wife Lilith or Liliya fled to the wilderness away from human habitation. In the New Testament Jesus wandered in the wilderness for forty days and nights. He was not accepted as a teacher in his own town of Nazareth and was rejected as the promised messiah by his people. When Jesus was crucified he symbolically took on the role of the sacrificial scapegoat who dies to cleanse the sins of the human race.

It is possible that the account of the ritual of the goat-god Azazel may have been an autumn equinox or harvest rite of Syrian, Hittite or Canaanite origin adopted by the Hebrews. Originally a goat would have been selected by means of a divination ritual and then offered to a desert god or demon that had to be placated by the shedding of blood. Eventually the sacrifice was made to Yahweh as a petition to forgive the sins of his followers. Azazel was popularly believed to have a retinue of hairy he-goat demons known as the se’irim who, like the Watchers, lusted after human women. It cannot be a total coincidence that the Church imagined the Devil or Satan in the form of a hairy half-human he-goat with a massive erect phallus who had sexual intercourse with his female worshippers at the Witches Sabbath.

Shemyaza is seen by some modern Luciferians as either the emissary of Lumiel or one of his avatars (an incarnated divine being in human form). He not only fell in love with human women, but also with the Babylonian deity Ishtar, the goddess of love and war. She promised to have sex with him if he would in return reveal to her the secret name of God. When Shemyaza told her, Ishtar used this forbidden knowledge to ascend to the stars and she reigned over the constellation of Pleiades or the Seven Sisters. While the other Watchers were rounded up by the archangels and punished by God, Shemyaza voluntarily repented his error and sentenced himself to hang upside down in the constellation of Orion the Hunter, with whom he is sometimes identified in the Luciferian tradition. In the Qabalistic tradition, Naamah, the sister of the biblical first smith Tubal-Cain, seduced Azazel and she has been associated with Ishtar.⁴

“A race between Gods and men”

As we have seen, the end result of the illicit relationships between the Watchers and “the daughters of men” was, according to Judeo-Christian propaganda, the spawning of a monstrous race of warlike, blood-drinking cannibalistic giants called the Nephilim. Genesis 6:4 less dramatically describes them as “the mighty men of old, men of renown.” At first they were fed manna (ambrosia or the food of the Gods?) by Yahweh to stop them consuming human flesh, but they rejected it. They slaughtered animals for food instead and then began to hunt down and eat human prey.

It has been speculated that this legend is based on the culinary habits of the nomadic desert herdsmen in the Middle East, who were voracious meat-eaters. In the biblical myth of Cain and Abel the dispute between the two brothers that led to the first murder is over the nature of the offerings made to Yahweh. Abel, a “keeper of sheep” or nomadic herdsman offered the “firstlings of the flock…” and Cain, who was “a tiller of the ground” or farmer-gardener offered “the fruit of the ground” (Genesis 4:2-4). Abel’s burnt offerings of animal flesh and blood were pleasing to Yahweh, but he rejected the vegetables, cereal and fruit offered by his brother. On a purely material level, as opposed to a mythic and spiritual metaphor, this story may reflect the struggle for dominance between nomadic herdsmen and the early farmers of the Neolithic Age in the Middle East.

The idea of semi-divine heroes was born from the ancient myths of unions between the Gods and mortals. The poet and writer Pindor (518-438 BCE) described the heroes of the past as “a race between Gods and men.” In the Dead Sea Scrolls the terrible human-eating Nephilim are in fact described as the guardians of arcane knowledge who “knew all the mysteries of nature and science.” There are also oblique references to the breeding techniques they taught that suggest they instructed early humans in the domestication and rearing of animals.

Additional references also hint at experiments that led to the creation of ‘monsters’ by the interbreeding of animals with different and unrelated species. In modern theosophical occultism there are legends about the lost continent of Atlantis that claim its scientists bred half-human, half-animal hybrids as a slave race. In our own time scientists are experimenting with genetic research and animal cloning experiments. It is widely rumoured that in China there have recently been abortive attempts to create a new half-human, half-animal hybrid species. These unnatural experiments led to the cataclysmic disaster that destroyed Atlantis. This also relates to the destruction of the Nephilim and the early human race in the biblical Flood. Records of such an event can also be found in the mythology of ancient peoples worldwide and especially among the Babylonians in the Middle East. In fact, it is claimed that the story of Noah and the Flood in the Old Testament originated in Babylonian and Sumerian myths.

10,000 BCE and the End of the Ice Age

It is known that around 10,000 BCE there seems to have been a cultural explosion that transformed early humankind. At the end of the last Ice Age the first signs of agriculture appeared in the Middle East with a shift from a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle to that of settled farming. This marked the beginning of civilisation in this area. As early as 9500 BCE barley, wheat and rye were being cultivated and oats, peas and lentils were being grown by our Neolithic ancestors in what is now modern Kurdistan, between Turkey and Iraq. At the same time dogs, goats and sheep were also domesticated. Within a thousand years copper and lead smelting was being practised in Anatolia (modern Turkey) and archaeologists believe this process was first discovered in Kurdistan, along with weaving and pottery making. The ancient Kurdish culture was also the first to develop a script and was one of the earliest literate societies in the Middle East.

The Kurds claim to be the descendants of the ‘Children of the Djinn’ (spirits), the offspring of a mating between the djinns and mortal women. In some parts of Kurdistan, especially among the sect of Yezedis, who worship the Peacock Angel (Azazel, the leader of the fallen angels), can be found tall, fair-haired people with blue eyes. Although anthropologists believe they may be of ancient European ancestry, popular folk belief among the Kurds says they are descendants of the ‘Children of the Djinn’, who in ancient times brought civilisation to early humankind.

In general the ancient Middle East was known as ‘the cradle of civilisation’ with the earliest city-states being founded in the Mesopotamian area (modern Iraq and Iran). The early indigenous people of the region, the Sumerians and Akkadians, developed the first written language, studied astronomy and created libraries. The Babylonians and Assyrians followed them and in the mythology of all these races are stories of how the Gods descended to Earth and taught them the arts of civilisation.

In the Book of Enoch it says that when Yahweh saw the lawlessness, chaos, corruption and sexual immorality that had been caused by the interaction of the Watchers and humans he decided to intervene through the agency of the archangels Michael, Raphael, Gabriel and Uriel. He commanded Raphael to bind Azazel hand and foot like a sacrificial goat and cast him into a deep ravine in the desert. Gabriel was sent on a divine mission to destroy “the bastards and reprobates” and “the children of the Watchers amongst men.”⁵ The Archangel Michael, the commander of the Army of God, was sent to arrest Shemyaza and bind him “under the earth” until Judgement Day. As we have seen, the fallen angel repented his sins and sentenced himself to cosmic exile among the stars.

The Book of Jubilee says that the archangels bound the Watchers “in the depths of the earth” and in Judaic lore they are imprisoned in a mysterious “second Heaven.” However, it is also said that some of these “mighty warriors” have a special place reserved for them in Sheol, the Jewish underworld. There they are said to lie in state “with shield and spear intact.”

Christian O’Brien has suggested⁶ there is a connection between the biblical Watchers and the semi-divine, semi-mythical Tuatha De Danann (Children of the goddess Dana). This race of ancient magicians descended to Earth on the sacred hill of Tara in prehistoric Ireland. With the coming of Christianity, the Tuatha De Danann was banished into the ‘hollow hills’ and became the Sidhe (Shee) or ‘Shining Ones’, the elves and faeries of Irish folklore. There has always been a strong belief among the peasantry in Ireland that the Good People or faeries were originally the fallen angels who sided with Lucifer in the Battle of Heaven.

In this article we have constantly referred to the Watchers as angelic beings with a spiritual form who incarnated in physical bodies to have sexual relations with mortal women. In recent years a considerable amount of speculative literature has been published suggesting that instead they were of earthly origin. Popular best-selling authors such as Andrew Collins,⁷ Graham Hancock and Ian Lawson have claimed that the biblical myth of the Watchers represents memories of a primeval ‘elder race’ of super-humans belonging to a lost civilisation who taught their technology to more primitive people. Lawson has claimed that this (unknown) ancient race may have been spiritually advanced souls who incarnated to help early humankind and were corrupted by them in the process. Collins has also recently launched a new project to investigate the magical aspects of the legend.

Symbolism of the Myth of the Fallen Angels

What is the esoteric significance behind the myth of the fallen angels, the expulsion of Lucifer from Heaven and the Fall of Man as represented by the Garden of Eden saga? In the Bible Lucifer is often depicted in the reptilian form of a dragon or serpent and in the West this creature is symbolic of evil and the powers of chaos. Babylonian, Hittite, Canaanite, Iranian, Egyptian, Greek and Norse myths all describe in various forms a struggle between a supreme father-god, representing cosmic order and harmony, and a younger rebellious god who challenges and tries to overthrow divine authority. Although these conflicts usually take place in a pre-human epoch, they are also sometimes depicted as occurring in world history and are often connected with the creation and early development of the human species and the rise of ancient civilisations.

Symbolically, Lucifer or Lumiel is known as the Lord of Light as he is the first-born of creation. He represents the active cosmic energy of the universe and has been identified with fire, light, phallic power, independent thought, consciousness, progress, liberty and independence. The founder of the modern Theosophical Society, Madame Helena Blavatsky, described the Lightbringer as “the spirit of intellectual enlightenment and the freedom of thought” without whose influence humanity would be “no better than animals.”⁸

In the Bible Lucifer (or Satan as he is mistakenly called) is often depicted in reptilian form as either a dragon or a serpent. In Western mythologies this creature is commonly misrepresented as a symbol of the powers of darkness, chaos and evil. In contrast, in Eastern mythology the dragon is a good omen representing fertility and good fortune. Lumiel-Lucifer is often identified with the serpent in the Edenic myth described in Genesis. In the Luciferian tradition, the biblical serpent is regarded as the personification of knowledge, wisdom and enlightenment who liberated the first humans from the spiritual ignorance imposed on them by Yahweh. The serpent is seen as the symbol of an outside liberating force that quite literally opened the eyes of Adam and Eve to the reality of the created universe and the wonders of the material world.

The snake, serpent or dragon is an ancient mythical and archetypal image of the solar phallic power or life force that is associated with Lucifer and the explosion of light following the divine celestial event that created the universe (known by modern scientists as the Big Bang). When the first man and woman ate the forbidden fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the astral or heavenly garden, they became consciously aware. Their first realisation was that their physical ‘cloaks of flesh’ were naked. They rushed to cover their genitals as they had become aware of the so-called ‘serpent power’ or kundalini that can be raised by sexual intercourse and non-reproductive sex acts. They also ate from the Tree of Life which initiated the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth and of human souls incarnating in physical form.

Interestingly, the anthropologist and shamanic teacher Dr. Michael Harner has described an experience he had in the jungle of the Peruvian Amazon after partaking of the hallucinogenic vine ayahuasca. He had a vision of a dragon-prowed ship with a crew of bird-headed humans. He then encountered an ancient race of reptilian entities that he believes exist within each human being in the brain stem at the base of the skull and the top of the spinal column. These reptilian life forms told Dr. Harner they had arrived on Earth aeons ago from the stars. Allegedly, they created life here so they had somewhere to hide and were the true masters of the planet. The anthropologist mentioned this to an old Indian shaman and he said he knew about these entities and called them the “Masters of the Outer Darkness.”⁹

The myth of the Watchers, the Fall of Lucifer and the Fall of Man all represent the primeval Dreamtime or ‘Golden Age’ of cosmic and earthy harmony and primal innocence that may have existed on the material plane or on some kind of astral or pre-material plane. It is the symbolic or actual physical destruction of this heavenly or earthly paradise, where humans and animals lived together and communicated by a universal language, which is reflected in such myths and legends. In shamanic terms it is known as the Great Separation when humans no longer knew or understood the language of the animals. It was also a time when humans began to communicate together in different languages and this is represented by the biblical story of the Tower of Babel.

The myth of the Golden Age or Paradise on Earth is closely linked with the fall of Lucifer from Heaven and the diminishing of his former status as the first-born of creation to become the Lord of the World. On a symbolic and metaphorical level, as well as a physical one, it is also connected to the separation of humans from nature and their natural environment that is manifesting in our modern times. It was the deliberate intervention of Lucifer and the fallen angels in human evolution, rather than any defiance of cosmic authority, which ultimately lead to their fall from heavenly grace. The Watchers’ only ‘crime’ was that they wanted to help the progress of their human flock. However, the refusal of Lucifer-Iblis to recognise the creation of human beings means that the Fall from heavenly grace was inevitable.

In the Luciferian tradition Lumiel is promised redemption and the restoration of his former status in the cosmic plan. This can only come to pass when the human race spiritually evolves. So it is to the benefit of Lumiel and his teaching angels to help us achieve that end. The relationship between humanity and the leader of the Fallen Ones is therefore very much a symbiotic one, as they need each other.

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Footnotes:

1. G.A. Davidson, Dictionary of Angels, The Free Press, USA, 1971, p. 127.

2. Ibid, p.164.

3. Dr. Stephen Flowers, Fire and Ice, Llewellyn, USA, 1990, pp.43-44.

4. Michael Howard and Nigel Jackson, The Pillars of Tubal Cain, Capall Bann, UK, 2000 and 2003, p.65; Michael Howard, The Book of Fallen Angels, Capall Bann, UK, 2004.

5. R.H. Charles, The Book of Enoch, Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, UK, 1912, p.37.

6. Christian O’Brien, The Genius of the Few, Daintus, UK, 1985.

7. Andrew Collins, From the Ashes of Angels, Michael Joseph, UK, 1996; Andrew Collins, The Gods of Eden, Headline, UK, 1998.

8. Helena Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine Vol: II, Theosophical Society, India, 1921, p. 171, 255, 539.

9. Dr. Michael Harner, The Way of the Shaman, Harper & Row, USA, 1980

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MICHAEL HOWARD is an author, researcher and magazine publisher. He lives in England and has been studying esoteric and occult subjects for over forty years. He can be contacted by e-mail at mike@the-cauldron.fsnet.co.uk or by writing to BM Cauldron, London WC1N 3XX, England. Website: www.the-cauldron.org.uk

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 8.

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By WAYNE PURDON

—

From 1209-1249 one of the worst genocides in history was conducted against the Cathars, a heretical sect in southern France. Pope Innocent III, promising gold and indulgences (the remission of punishment due for sins) in exchange for the blood of the Cathars, sent 30,000 crusaders into France to massacre the Cathars and their supporters.

The Cathars were hunted, tortured, burned at the stake and savagely murdered by the Church’s hired killers. Estimates place the total number of Cathars and sympathisers murdered between 300,000 and 1,000,000 men, women and children. Throughout this bloodbath, an amazing phenomenon was witnessed. The Cathars did not express fear, anger or pain, but only bliss, despite the most horrendous atrocities committed against them. What were they on?

According to William Henry in Mary Magdalene: The Illuminator, it was a psychoactive substance produced by the brain – the Cathars had learned the techniques necessary to produce it from the secret teachings of Jesus. It was called Christos (anointing oil) by the Essenes, who passed on their secrets to Jesus from Moses, who had obtained them in Egypt from descendants of the banished Atonite priests of Akhenaton.

These teachings involve the power of the sun and the power of the spoken word and constitute what I call “the mysteries of the sun.” They were part of the Egyptian, Babylonian and Greek mysteries, and the Gnostic teachings of the early Christians and secret societies. They have been given to every culture by great adepts as means of enlightening the minds of the people and freeing them from the darkness of ignorance and superstition.

In this article, I will briefly examine the life and teachings of the founders of various mystery schools in the Middle East and Mediterranean area from the Pharaoh Thutmose III to Omraam Mikhail Aivanhov. There were other mystery schools in India, China, Peru and elsewhere, but the ones I have chosen represent a continuity that spanned millennia and formed the spiritual roots of the Judeo-Christian heritage.

The story of the mysteries of the sun is as old as mankind and as new as the latest scientific breakthrough. In 1882, Ignatius Donnelly published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. In this book, he argued convincingly that Atlantis had established colonies in Peru, Egypt and elsewhere and that the mythologies and mysteries of these peoples represented the original religion of the Atlanteans, which was a form of sun worship.

He wrote, “The religion of the Atlanteans, as Plato tells us, was pure and simple; they made no regular sacrifices but fruits and flowers; they worshipped the sun. In Peru a single deity was worshipped, and the sun, his most glorious work, was honoured as his representative. Quetzalcoatl, the founder of the Aztecs, condemned all sacrifice but that of fruits and flowers. [We can see how far the Aztec religion degenerated over the centuries to the low point of human sacrifice by the time of the Conquest.] The first religion of Egypt also was pure and simple; its sacrifices were fruits and flowers; temples were erected to the sun, Ra, throughout Egypt. In Peru the great festival of the sun was called Ra-mi.”

Between pre-dynastic Egypt and the eighteenth dynasty, the “pure and simple” solar religion of Egypt became very corrupt and complicated. There were several sun gods and a whole host of minor gods. The priesthood was rich and powerful and the people depended on them for magic amulets, praying to the gods on their behalf and giving them a proper elaborate send-off into the afterlife. Fruits and flowers were no longer fitting sacrifices; animals took their place.

Enter Pharaoh Thutmose III. A younger son of Amenhotep I, he owed his rule to the intervention of the priesthood of Amen-Ra who, in a religious ritual invoking the will of Amen-Ra, appointed him pharaoh, even though he was not in line for the succession. Thutmose realised that the priesthood was becoming too powerful and sought to curb their power by outwardly paying obeisance to Amen-Ra, but secretly worshipping Aton and supporting a separate priesthood of Aton at Heliopolis who were loyal to the throne.

Under his rule, Thutmose III permitted the common people to indulge in all their fanciful beliefs and superstition such as magic amulets. He believed that a gradual change in the existing religious beliefs could be more easily and permanently accomplished by establishing a secret mystery school, the students of which would put into practice higher standards. He wanted to gradually infuse into Egyptian religion from the top down those mysteries, myths and rites that would raise the people to a higher understanding and morality.

Thus, in 1489 BCE he founded a secret mystery school, the Order of the Rose Cross, which the Rosicrucians claim descent from and which still exists today. Members of this mystery school were called the Therapeutea, meaning “physicians of the soul.” The sungazing Essene sect of Alexandria later adopted this name and the rosy-cross symbol.

William Henry, in The Healing Sun Code, linked the rosy-cross and the Rosicrucian secrets with the “rising of the Healing Sun, the source of life and wisdom.” I recently talked to a woman who studied Egyptology for 25 years and knew about Thutmose III and the Rosicrucians. She told me that she once knew a Rosicrucian lady, who every time she felt ill would face the sun and do a special breathing exercise in which she would breath in the fire of the sun to burn impurities in her body. She lived to be very old. This technique was part of the secret teachings of the Rosicrucians, which they were very careful not to reveal to the uninitiated.

Another technique used by Thutmose III and members of his order was the use of healing rods while sungazing (see Figure 1). These were copper and zinc tubes that contained hardened coal and magnetite respectively. They were reintroduced to the world by the Russian mystic Count Stefan Colonn Walewski, who was a member of a sungazing mystery school in the Caucasian Mountains. They amplify the current that passes through the body between the sun and earth while sungazing, enhancing meditation and quickening healing and the development of psychic powers.

Thutmose III’s son and grandson continued with the mystery school and the cult of Aton, but it wasn’t until his great grandson, Akhenaton, took the throne that things came to a head.

The Revolution of Akhenaton

In 1369 BCE, Amenhotep IV took over the reigns of Egypt from his ailing father Amenhotep III. During his upbringing, he was educated at the Temple of the Sun at On (Heliopolis) where the priests instilled in him a devotion to Aton. When he became pharaoh, he was given the secret mysteries of the sun handed down from his great grandfather. He learned that Aton was the one true, self-created, unmanifest God and that most of the other gods, including Amen-Ra, were man-made. Early in his reign, he changed his name to Akhenaton, meaning “the servant of Aton.” Unlike his great grandfather, he had no tolerance for spiritual ignorance.

Akhenaton initiated a change in the religious climate from a fear-based polytheism with its death cult, magic amulets, numerous idols, animal sacrifice, and secretive rituals of a powerful priesthood to a more devotional religion, which was free of graven images, obsession with the afterlife, and magic; which emphasised reverence for sunlight and cleanliness, and simple burial; and which allowed ordinary citizens to freely worship in open-air temples with offerings of fruits, flowers and incense, as was done in the original solar religion of Egypt. Aton’s temples had no idols or graven images other than the one Akhenaton devised – a sun disk from which proceeded rays, the ends of which terminated in graceful hands. Some of these hands held the ankh, the symbol of life, to the nostrils of his sungazing worshippers.

This symbolism shows that Akhenaton understood the relationship between sunlight, prana and breath. He knew that sunlight is the source of all life upon earth. This was not worship of the physical sun but worship of one God, a supreme deity, whose spirit was in heaven and whose physical manifestation was the sun – the symbol of life. It changed the worship of the sun as a god to the worship of God symbolised by the sun. Paintings and carvings of Aton were always accompanied with a sort of hieroglyphic footnote (seen at the top of Figure 4, page 56), stating that it was just a representation of the All-encompassing Creator.

Thus, Akhenaton established the first monotheistic religion by elevating Aton over Amen-Ra and other gods. His mother, Tiya, did much to mediate and stem the tide of controversy caused by his bold opposition to the powerful priesthood of Amen-Ra. However, after she died, he took the offensive and ordered his army to disband the priesthood and deface their false gods.

Akhenaton loved to officiate at ceremonies as the high priest of Aton. The following quote from a decree made by Akhenaton upon the founding of his capital city, Akhetaton, shows that morning sungazing was a daily ritual of Atonism:

“Every eye beholds him without hindrance while he fills the land with his rays and makes everyone to live. With seeing whom my eyes are satisfied daily when he rises in this temple and fills it with his own self by means of his rays, beauteous with love, and embraces me with them in life and power forever and ever.”

During these ceremonies, Akhenaton and his congregation would sing his Hymn to Aton. Although the vast majority of Egyptians did not give much credence to Atonism, and Akhenaton’s court followed the rituals of the outer religion out of a sense of duty, there existed an inner circle of about 300 initiates who learned from Akhenaton the mysteries of the sun. Among these were Joseph the son of Jacob, who Robert Feather, in The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran, claims was Akhenaton’s vizier Nakhte.

The Bible records that Joseph married Asenath the daughter of Potiphera, a priest of Aton in Heliopolis, and archaeologists discovered a private chapel to Aton in the ruins of Nakhte’s home in Akhetaton. Robert Feather thinks that after Akhenaton’s death, some of these initiates went to the sun temple of Heliopolis and others, including Joseph and his family, went to Elephantine Island in the land of Cush (Ethiopia), where they built another sun temple and established a branch of Judaism that exists to this day.

The Mysteries Formed the Basis of the Judeo-Christian Tradition

After the death of Akhenaton, the teachings of Atonism, its rituals and precepts, were almost completely destroyed by fanatics of the established religion. This has been the fate of every mystery teaching involving the sun in the past. Most historians and religious writers think that Akhenaton’s monotheism was a brief aberration in a long tradition of Egyptian polytheism and that it died with him.

But, buried in the pages of historical and scriptural texts are hints that his ideas survived in the Jewish faith. For example, Psalm 104 is almost identical to the Hymn to Aton. They also survived in the secret teachings of the Essene and Therapeut Brotherhoods, which were associated with early Christianity.

In the History of Egypt, the Egyptian priest Manetho wrote, “Moses, a son of the tribe of Levi, educated in Egypt and initiated at Heliopolis, became a High Priest of the Brotherhood… He was elected by the Hebrews as their chief and he adapted to the ideas of his people the science and philosophy which he had obtained in the Egyptian mysteries when he established a branch of the Egyptian Brotherhood in his country, from which descended the Essenes. The dogma of an ‘only God’, which he taught, was the Egyptian Brotherhood interpretation and teaching of the Pharaoh who established the first monotheistic religion known to man [Akhenaton]. The traditions he established in this manner were known completely to only a few of them, and were preserved in the mysteries of the secret societies, the Therapeutea of Egypt and the Essenes.”

After returning from Heliopolis, Moses became an annoyance to the priests of Amen-Ra and the court of Ramses II because of his Atonistic ideas. The historian Josephus records that Moses was sent on a military expedition to Cush in an effort by Pharaoh’s courtiers to get rid of the “dissident.” There he not only found a wife but another outpost of Atonism on Elephantine Island. Robert Feather thinks that it was in the wilderness of Cush that Moses saw the burning bush and received his mission.

Flavia Anderson, in The Ancient Secret: Fire from the Sun claimed that the burning bush was actually a small golden tree with a crystal that reflected sunlight so brightly that it appeared to be on fire. A similar talisman, called a punchao, was used by the Incas to put worshippers in a trance so that they could see and communicate with beings of light.

Anderson also relates this golden tree to the Urim and Thummin (perfect light) of the Jews, which was a crystal set in a golden stand, and by which the high priest communicated with God. Anderson thinks that Moses encountered this golden tree during an initiation in the sun temple of Heliopolis. But it’s more likely that he saw it in the sun temple of Elephantine Island right before he returned to Egypt. It’s also likely that some of the Atonite priests who were descendants of Joseph and his family joined Moses in his mission. The Bible records that there were two rival factions of priests during the Exodus. One faction had Egyptian names such as Korah, Dathan, Abiram and On.

In The Secret Initiation of Jesus at Qumran, Robert Feather shows how the descendants of these Egyptian priests, originally appointed at the time of Akhenaton, could have maintained their cohesion down to the beginning of the Qumran Essenes (610 BCE). When they entered Canaan, they settled around Shiloh and so became known as Shilonite priests. They became prominent around the time of Ezekial (589 BCE), Onias IV (160 BCE) and Jesus (4 BCE). These were also times when the Essenes were active. The Qumran Essenes, based on the Shilonite priests, came to have a much purer Judaism that rejected animal sacrifice, idols, amulets and burial with worldly goods which crept into the Judaism of the rest of the Israelites. During the Exodus, these priests were pro-Moses and against the priests of Aaron. It is likely that the priests of Aaron, who backslid into idolatry of the golden calf (the Egyptian goddess Hathor) while Moses was on the mountain, may have been responsible for reintroducing another Egyptian practice of holocaust sacrifice, prohibited by Atonism. On Mount Sinai, God gave Moses the first set of tablets to present to the Hebrews. Figure 2 (page 55) is a detail from a painting by Beccafumi. It shows Moses receiving the tablets from the sun, which is depicted as an opening in the sky.

However, when he came down the mountain and saw how the people had lapsed into idolatry, he realised they weren’t ready for what was on the tablets. So he smashed the tablets and went back up the mountain where God engraved ten simple commandments on a second set of tablets.

What could have been on the first set? Perhaps the solar mysteries! In any case, the mysteries were handed down by word of mouth from Moses to the Shilonite priests to the Essenes.

Archeologists found in the catacombs of Rome a drawing of Jesus holding a rod of power when raising Lazarus from the dead (Figure 3, page 55), showing that early Christians understood that the source of Jesus’ power came from the sun. The Bible records that just before Jesus raised Lazarus, he “lifted up his eyes” to the sun and prayed. The rod is a symbol of the life force, which every Egyptian sun god and sun gods from Babylonia, India and Peru are shown wielding in paintings and wall carvings, such as in Figure 5.

Many scholars are now coming around to the realisation that Jesus was a member of the Qumran Essene movement and that many of his teachings are similar to the Essene teachings. The Essenes and Therapeuts considered themselves to be the children of light and so did the early Christians.

According to Gene Savoy in his book The Essaei Document: Secret Teachings of an Eternal Race, Jesus received the Essenes’ secret teachings, which he calls the paradosis, meaning a divinisation process by which one became immortal. Savoy hints at sungazing being a key factor in this secret teaching.

He writes: “That the Essaei [Essenes] faced the sun at these times [sunrise and sunset] suggests that the sun was used as an intermediary by which men of the earth were linked by ‘cords of light’ with heaven… and were nurtured on a divine food upon which the angels fed…”

The Therapeuts believed that pure souls returned to the sun and that sunlight indeed is the heavenly, incorruptible food of the soul.

Savoy’s “cords of light” linking everyone can be thought of as an energy grid. The sun is one part of this energy grid; the earth is the other. Savoy wrote elsewhere: “The followers of Mithra gathered on the summits or stood in the waters, lifting their hands in prayer before the rising sun…” Savoy also mentioned in Project X that sun worshippers in Peru would stand on the summits of mountains or sun temples. This made me think of the vortices and ley lines of the earth grid, which are focal points and lines of electromagnetic energy usually found on high points on the earth’s surface and in stream beds.

Richard Leviton and Robert Coons, in “Ley Lines and the Meaning of Adam,” a chapter from Anti-Gravity and the World Grid, claimed that the electromagnetic system of our bodies, the entire biosphere and the earth grid are part of a much larger solar system grid and it’s all connected. And the energy that powers this grid is the Light of God. They wrote, “The landscape temple made of stones and crystal… linked Heaven and Earth through Man. The terrestrial temple also functioned as a Grid Door by which human consciousness… could actually exit this plane and enter ‘the realm of the Gods’ [what William Henry called ‘the dimension of the blessed’]. Through this Grid Door, the Gods could also channel their spiritual vibrations and messages.”

Perhaps that’s how God channelled the mysteries of the sun and then the Ten Commandments to Moses on the terrestrial temple of Mt. Sinai, as depicted in Figure 2. It’s significant that key events in Jesus’ ministry occurred on the peaks of mountains and in streams (his baptism, his last temptation, the sermon on the mount, his transfiguration, his death, and his ascension).

Jesus passed on the Essene secret teachings on the mysteries of the sun to his disciples, including Mary Magdalene. The early Christians, who were not privy to these teachings, at first worshipped the spirit of Christ in the sun, but around the third century they lapsed into a personality cult of Jesus worship, which has continued to this day.

Fragments of these secret teachings can be found in the Dead Sea scrolls, in the apocryphal text known as the Pistis Sophia, and in the Essene Gospel of Peace, which was hidden in the Vatican library for centuries before Edmond Bordeux Szekely discovered it in 1928. In the Pistis Sophia, an ancient gospel suppressed for over a thousand years and ignored by the orthodox churches even after its publication in the last century, Jesus, after his resurrection, elaborates on the solar mysteries and how necessary they are for entering the kingdom of heaven:

“Ye are to seek after the mysteries of the Light, which purify the body of matter and make it into refined light exceedingly purified. Amen I say unto you… I have torn myself asunder and brought unto them all the mysteries of the Light, that I may purify them… else would no soul of the total race of men have been saved, and they would not be able to inherit the Kingdom of the Light…”

How this purification occurs is hinted at in this further passage: “Now, therefore, he who shall receive the mysteries of the baptisms, then they becometh a great, exceedingly violent, wise fire and it burneth up the sins and entereth into the soul secretly and consumeth all the sins which the counterfeiting spirit hath made fast on to it.”

In the Essene Gospel of Peace, Jesus gives a teaching on the purifying role of sunlight in this baptism of fire. He tells the sick after instructing them on fasting, “And if afterward there remain within you aught of your past sins and uncleanness, seek the angel of sunlight… For I tell you truly, holy is the angel of sunlight who cleans out all impurities and makes all evil-smelling things of a sweet odour. None may come before the face of God, whom the angel of sunlight lets not pass. Truly, all must be born again of the sun and of truth, for your body basks in the sunlight of the Earthly Mother, and your spirit basks in the sunlight of the truth of the Heavenly Father.”

The receiving of this fire through sungazing with arms upraised in a Y formation or bent at the elbow and hands spread out and facing the sun was called by the Greeks “fire blooming” because the radiance or essence of the sun thus channelled burned away impurities in the solar plexus, which, by the way, is associated with the sun and with fire. One can find wall carvings, paintings, statues, woodcuts and photographs of sun worshippers from all over the world – Hindus, Muslims, American Indians, ancient Egyptians, Medieval monks, Russians, Incas, and even aborigines in prehistoric petroglyphs – all with upraised arms. William Henry wrote in Mary Magdalene: The Illuminator that when Jesus taught his disciples the Lord’s Prayer, he also taught them this prayer position, which he learned from the Egyptians, who called it the Ka position (Figure 6, page 57). Moses also learned it from the Egyptians and used it to invoke the Light of God during the Israelites’ battle with the Amalekites. Significantly, the battle was won at sunset.

This leads us to consider another part of the mysteries revealed by the Pistis Sophia, which is a certain power of the spoken word. The soul, in order to be cut free from the counterfeit spirit, must utter “the mystery of the undoing of the seals and of all the bonds.” This is the science of the spoken word, the uttering of sacred mantras, prayers and songs that remove or restrain the evil self, the “karmic records” of the individual.

These spiritual sciences and techniques were not revealed to all the faithful. According to the Pistis Sophia, the mysteries were to be given only to those initiates who proved themselves worthy through years of testing. They were also kept secret because of the threat of persecution.

The Mysteries Survive Persecution During the Dark Ages

In Lost Light, Alvin Boyd Kuhn wrote that sun worship “was the heart’s core of all religion and philosophy everywhere before the Dark Ages obscured the vision of truth… The dreadful shadows of the Dark Age will not end until the bright glow of the solar wisdom is released once more to enlighten benighted modernity.”

During the Dark Ages, the mysteries of the sun survived and were passed down through the Knights Templar, Cathars, Paulicians, Bogomils and other Gnostics. Many of these saints were brutally murdered by the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches in an attempt to suppress their teachings, which threatened the Churches’ established authority.

One of the most inspired Gnostics was Saul of Tarsus. Saul experienced a sudden conversion and gnosis on the way to Damascus. Paintings of this experience usually show Saul being blinded by the noonday sun shining through a break in the clouds directly upon him.

Gene Savoy, in The Essaei Document, claimed that Saul had learned that the Essenes sungazed in order to communicate with God. When Saul tried it, he received a powerful, life-transforming message, which left him blind and temporarily insane so that he could not eat or drink for three days. In 1840, Dr. Gustav Fechner, the father of psychophysics, experimented with gazing at the sun through coloured filters and liquids. He did it at noon and, as a result, became blind and insane. However, after much prayer and meditation in a dark room, he recovered his sight and sanity and more. He began seeing auras and angels, whom he called “beings from the sun.”

Socrates taught in his academy that personal transformation was only possible through understanding the word of God, the Light, and that it was attained only through inner illumination absorbed from the sun. Apparently, Saul the persecutor was transformed by the sun into Paul the proselytiser.

Clement of Alexandria recorded that Paul, before going to Rome, said that he would bring to the brethren the Gnosis, or tradition of the hidden mysteries, as the fulfilment of the blessings of Christ, who, Clement says, reveals the secret knowledge and trains the Gnostic by mysteries, that is, revelations made in the state of higher consciousness. Such a state can be attained through deep meditation, chanting and sungazing. Unfortunately, Paul was arrested in Rome and a few years later executed. His true teachings on the mysteries of the sun were lost for several centuries until they were resurrected in Armenia and Syria during the late seventh century by the Paulicians. This group was so named because their teachings were the Gnostic mysteries handed down from St. Paul when he brought them to the Balkans and Syria during his ministry.

The Paulicians were persecuted and diminished in the ninth century, although until relatively recently there existed an Armenian sun cult whose adherents were known as Arevorti, “children of the sun.” In the tenth century, a new Gnostic movement, the Bogomils, arose in Bulgaria, which carried many of the same beliefs and practices of the Paulicians, including sun worship. However, their teachings were based on the Gospel of John.

At the beginning of the 12th century, Byzantium started to persecute the Bogomils. Many were killed, but some fled to Italy, southern France and elsewhere. By the middle of the 12th century, Gnostic schools like the Knights Templars and Cathars had sprung up and spread throughout Western Europe. These were the Western European counterparts of the Eastern European Bogomils.

The Cathars “pure ones” and the Knights Templars were concentrated in the Languedoc and Midi regions of Southern France. The Cathars claimed to possess the Book of Love (AMOK) the original initiatory version of the Book of John (the only gospel the Cathars, Knights Templars and Bogomils read) which likely contained the solar mysteries. It taught that a spark or tiny sun of the Christ Light dwelt in man’s heart and it revealed how to nurture it like a seed of divinity so that it blossomed into the rose of the original rosy-cross mystery school. This teaching, which reputedly could transform a human into a divine being, once belonged to Thutmose III, Akhenaton, Moses, Solomon, Jesus, and John the Beloved. It was reputed to be able to dissolve all hatred, anger and jealousy from the hearts of men.

The Cathars believed that the key to this divine transformation was the correct understanding of the symbolism of the Eucharist, that is, the bread and wine and the Holy Grail. The light of the sun is the bread; its warmth is the wine. The Holy Grail is the brain’s third ventricle or cavity containing the pineal and pituitary glands (Figure 7, page 58).

This secret, known to the Cathars as the consolamentum (“with the sun in the mind”), was kept hidden from the uninitiated. The Cathars believed man entered the kingdom of God through his soul, the seat of which was considered by Descartes to be the pineal gland. The Cathars believed that the solar elements of the Eucharist transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ within themselves. The world transubstantiation comes from the Latin trans, across, and substantia, substance. This substance or glandular secretion, caught by the Holy Grail (the third ventricle), is what the Hindus call Amrita, “the elixir of immortality” and the Greeks called Ambrosia, “the nectar of the gods.”

William Henry, in Mary Magdalene: The Illuminator, wrote, “All the occult mysteries speak of a key that is required to unlock mystical secrets of enlightenment. Specifically, the lost secret of the Templars… is about building a better human through the release of secretions from the astounding manufacturing plant of spiritual oils, the human brain. This oil or essence was the key secret of Mary Magdalene and the Essenes, recovered by the Templars from between the temples. The skull [specifically the third ventricle] is… the Cup of Life, the Grail, that catches these secretions from the brain… The Templars’ ultimate objective was to restore true Gnostic monotheism to the world, uniting Christianity, Judaism and Islam in a New Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. The ‘new’ humans that inhabited this New Jerusalem (or New Atlantis) would know and embody the secret of the Kingdom of Heaven within the brain and its capability of producing… the elixir of life, the Sacred Soma, the tonic of immortality, for these terms all refer to the cosmic essence or brain substance.” It was also called Christos (anointing oil) by the Essenes.

Like their forerunners, the Bogomils, the Cathars engaged in chanting. This along with sungazing was the key to activating the pineal gland and producing the oil of Christos. The use of mantras and chanting can awaken the pineal because it sits above the mouth suspended in the third ventricle, a chamber filled with cerebrospinal fluid. Its location above the mouth in a fluid chamber makes the pineal gland quite uniquely positioned to respond to sonic vibrations. Manly P. Hall, in The Opening of the Third Eye, stated that the pineal gland “vibrating at a very high rate of speed, is the actual cause of true spiritual illumination.”

The bliss that is experienced during sungazing and chanting is not just a natural high. According to William Henry, bliss is created by Christos and is a state of extreme happiness and freedom from attachment, conditioned responses and fear. It is the key required to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov said that only those who are happy and carefree like children can enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

The teachings of the Cathars posed quite a threat to the fledgling Catholic Church. Unlike the Cathars, the Church of Rome clearly did not produce a substance that gave people an experience of divine bliss. And if it did, it would keep it from the people. That’s why the Church had to exterminate them.

Fortunately, today we live in an age of spiritual freedom and anyone can teach and learn the science of the spoken word and techniques of sungazing presented by sun yogi Hira Ratan Manek and others. Although the light of the Cathars was snuffed out in the 13th century, at the beginning of the 20th century, the teachings of the Bogomils were revived by the master Peter Deunov and his chief disciple, Omraam Mikhail Aivanhov.

The Mysteries of the Sun Revealed

On January 31, 1900, Mikhael Aivanhov was born into a poor family in Serbtzi, a small village of Macedonia. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, he was inspired by reading the Gospel of John, lives of the saints and books on yoga, which led him, at the age of fifteen, to an experience of illumination or samadhi.

He went to the seashore to gaze at the sunrise. After meditating and sungazing for a little while, he sensed the presence of a heavenly being. Suddenly bathed in a cloud of brilliant light, he was plunged into a state of ecstasy. Later, he commented: “It was so beautiful that I was beside myself. To see such a being, with all those colours, all that light! He was almost invisible in the extraordinary luminosity that surrounded him. I found myself flooded with light. I was in a state of bliss, of ecstasy so immense, so powerful, that I no longer knew where I was. It was a delirious joy; it was heaven; it was the universe! Ever since then I have felt that if God were not all beauty I could not believe in him. It is beauty that remains in my mind as the one essential: neither power, nor knowledge, nor wealth, nor glory. Only beauty!”

On the basis of his own spiritual experiences and of his reading of what he called the “Book of Nature,” he discovered the mysteries of the sun before being taught them by Peter Deunov. Mikhael and his master would go together to meditate in the pre-dawn stillness and watch the sun rise. Deunov also gave him the basic methods and exercises in mantra, prayer and sacred song: the mysteries of the spoken word.

In 1959, he travelled to India, where he visited numerous ashrams and met several spiritual leaders. He was welcomed by several renowned Hindu sages as an accomplished master in his own right. One adept hailed him as a “solar rishi.” Another gave him his spiritual name, Omraam. One of the masters he met was the immortal bodhisattva, Babaji, who in 1992 and 1998 gave his blessings to another teacher of sungazing, sun yogi Hira Ratan Manek.

Central to Omraam’s teaching is the concept of light. He saw in light the first emanation of the Divine, retaining the Divine’s qualities more than any other manifestation. As he insisted: “Light is a living spirit which comes from the sun and which establishes a direct relationship with our own spirit.” He explains how we can use light to transform ourselves and become radiant as the sun. In The Splendour of Tiphareth, he wrote, “Only the sun’s rays are capable of replacing all that is impure, worn out or obscure within you, and they can only do so if you learn to receive them. If you welcome them with your whole heart, they will begin their work of replacing the ‘old man’ in you, so that you will be wholly regenerated, renewed and resuscitated; your thoughts, feelings and acts will all be different. Only the sun’s rays are capable of working this transformation within you.”

Omraam loved to talk about the Spirit of the sun. In this respect his philosophy coincided with the age-old mysteries of the sun, which taught that the true sun is not the star that is visible in the sky, but the invisible spiritual sun, the source of all life, light and love.

He pointed out that, “On the physical, material level, the sun is the door, the link and the medium thanks to which we can make contact with the Lord… Through the sun, we work with God Himself. I can say that certain things that no human can teach me have been revealed to me by the sun. No book can give you what the sun gives you if you learn to have the proper relationship with him… If you want to create a bond between you [and the sun], you have to look at him in all consciousness. If you do that there will be a communication of vibrations between the sun and you in which forms and colours, a whole new world, will be born… The sun is an intelligence, a life, a living light. And when you understand that, all of a sudden he begins to speak to you… Try asking him a question and you will see that he will answer you.”

Omraam died in 1986, but his teachings on the mysteries of the sun live on in numerous books. Over 90 books have been published in English, and there are enough notes from his hundreds of lectures to fill another 400 books. Of these books, the ones that are primarily concerned with the mysteries of the sun are The Splendour of Tiphareth: The Yoga of the Sun, Toward a Solar Civilization and Light is a Living Spirit. Louise-Marie Frenette’s newly-released biography of Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov, The Life of a Master in the West, has just been published in New Zealand by First Edition Press (to order call +64 (04) 586-1973). Today, his teachings and sungazing rituals are practiced by the I.D.E.A.L. Society, The Hearts Center and other spiritual communities around the world.

The above article first appeared in World Explorer 37 Vol. 5 No. 1.

Interested readers can obtain the author’s new audio book The SOLution: Laying the Foundation for a Solar Civilization, both the e-version or on 4 CDs (4½ hours of fascinating revelations), by going to www.suncenterofphoenix.com.

If you appreciated this article, please consider a digital subscription to New Dawn.

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WAYNE H. PURDIN is past president of the International Sun Imbiber’s Society (ISIS), editor of The Sun Gazette, and director of the Phoenix Hearts Center. He has recently written The SOLution: Laying the Foundation for a Solar Civilization. Wayne is also an instructor at New Wisdom University, www.newwisdomuniversity.com. His website is www.suncenterofphoenix.com and he can be reached at wpurdin@gmail.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 113 (March-April 2009).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 113 (PDF version) for only US$2.95

Nefertiti, reportedly ‘a princess from a foreign country’ became married to Akhenaton.

By VICTORIA LEPAGE

—

René Guénon’s assertion, culled from ancient esoteric sources, that in the remote past humanity’s first civilisation arose in the ice-free Arctic zone is not without geological support. According to the well-known researcher J.S. Gordon, “there is no scientific doubt that the polar ice caps have melted and reformed many, many times over and that this has always affected human society (plus animal and plant species), often catastrophically.”¹

He points out that the great Ice Age that lasted about two million years, ending about twelve thousand years ago, was made up of thirty or so minor Ice Ages, with warm intervals of polar deglaciation in between them, each creating periods of thousands of years of temperate conditions at the poles. Any one of these warm intervals would have been hospitable to a circumpolar civilisation.

Charles Hapgood, who in the mid-sixties was the Professor of the History of Science at Keene University in New Hampshire, USA, became convinced that humanity did indeed enjoy a sophisticated civilisation a hundred thousand years or more ago, and that it must have been at least partly in a polar location. He derived his theory from cartographic research conducted on ancient portolans or seafaring maps, one of which had been in the possession of a l6th-century Turkish admiral, Piri Re’is.²

“This map (and others also researched),” Gordon comments, summarising Hapgood’s conclusions, “clearly showed… that the polar regions had been cartographically surveyed when no ice cap existed,”³ and that in the case of the Antarctic Circle, rivers and mountains had been mapped in such detail that the land must have been inhabited – and by a people who understood spherical trigonometry.

Other researchers, sifting and re-examining existing archaeological data from the past 150 years, have concluded from the evidence of human artefacts and fossil bones found under deep geological layers that anatomically modern humans with a modern intellectual capacity have existed from the beginning of the Quaternary period, some 1.65 million years ago – and that they were taller than modern man and with a brain capacity 15 – 20 per cent larger. Such findings reinforce the growing opinion of many people today that Hapgood’s theory, initially rejected by scientists of the day, has serious merit.

In The Secret Doctrine, Helena Blavatsky said that in primeval times the earth had still not densified fully and was therefore larger than at present. All body forms would have been considerably lighter in weight and of a more plastic nature, the skeleton still not having hardened by then; and accordingly human beings could have been less affected by gravity and as much as sixty feet or more taller than they are today. She believed that over vast ages there have been several violent changes in earth’s climatic conditions, with corresponding diminutions of human stature, accompanied by many variations in human civilisation and culture.⁴

Mainstream science has no real conception of how long modern homo sapiens has been in existence, or under what physical conditions, but certainly archaeologists are aware that homo sapiens skulls of an entirely modern type have been found that are over a hundred thousand years old. Swanscombe man from England is a quarter of a million years old, while Vertesszollos man from Hungary, equally modern in type, dates to an amazing four hundred thousand to seven hundred thousand years old.⁵ Such dates leave ample room in our human record for many modifications of climate and variations in the physical stature, cultural development and living conditions of human beings.

The Hebrew Bible tells us:

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the Sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. (Genesis 6:4)

The information given in the Book of Genesis regarding the Sons of God, the giant-sized Elders who once lived on earth – “mighty men of old, men of renown” – was derived by Hebrew scribes from the scriptures of older surrounding races, such as the Indian Vedic texts, the Vedas and Puranas, and the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh.

In the Sumerian illustrations of the doings of the gods it can readily be seen that the relative height of the Elders and ordinary humans was that of adult and child: in one such instance, a god is holding a human on his lap as though nursing an infant. The Egyptians also created statues of god-kings of enormous height juxtaposed to little figures of normal human stature; and while these statements in stone may have been intended symbolically, the alternative possibility exists that an entirely realistic rendition was intended, as more than one researcher has suggested.

Helena Blavatsky, for example, contended that not only were the polar regions the cradle of humanity millions of years ago, but that due to a decrease of velocity in the Earth’s rotation conditions at the poles changed, and the size and weight of all the organisms living there was accordingly modified.

The axle of the Wheel tilted… People [for the first time] knew snow, ice and frost, and men, plants and animals were dwarfed in their growth. Those that did not perish remained as half-grown babes in size and intellect. ⁶

The other outstanding characteristic imputed to the Elders, whom Blavatsky called the Kumaras, was their huge skulls. Although there is less evidence in the ancient texts to support this legend, it is an astonishing fact that several such enormous skulls, relative to the size of the face, have been unearthed in Peru: one is on display in the museum in Lima.⁷ According to reports, others of similar immensity have been found in and around Egypt and Tibet, suggesting a correspondingly massive intelligence.⁸

Furthermore, carved busts of the family members belonging to the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaton of the eighteenth dynasty demonstrate the same anomalous feature, including equally huge ears. Found in the underground desert ruins of Tel el Amarna in Egypt, little known statues of this strange family, which included Nefertiti, Akhenaton’s wife, and their daughters, exhibit other unusual features, including great body height. The body of a statue of Nefertiti is described below:

She’s not wearing clothes because they didn’t believe in that at the time. She has a huge head, large ears, a long, skinny neck and a high waist. She also has a kind of bulging tummy. And… she has skinny legs and wide thighs.⁹

This in fact is an equally good description of her husband’s famously strange appearance. The carved or painted likenesses of Nefertiti’s daughters, down to the youngest, a mere toddler, show exactly the same peculiar characteristics of enormous hairless skulls, high waists, skinny calves and huge ears.

Could this Egyptian royal family, then, have been a throwback to the ancestral offspring of the Elders? And more pertinently, could its anomalous physical features support the idea of an intellectually advanced race alien to ours, either from another stellar system or a previous racial cycle?

These Elders, also known as the beni ha-elohim, the Sons of God or Sons of the Fire Mist whom the Sumerians claimed had brought civilisation to humanity, are a perennial mystery. G.I. Gurdjieff regarded them as palaeolithic shaman adepts, men and women who in the remote past practised their mysteries in the underground caves along the Syr Darya, in Central Asia, and whose evolution due to their superior spiritual practices put them far in advance of their fellows.¹⁰

But occult tradition goes a great deal further, contending the Elders were a wise and powerful race that came from the stars – possibly, say some, from the giant star Sirius. In the ancient Egyptian tradition they are called the “Watchers of Pe,” divine Intelligences who watch over and guide humanity, their progeny, from celestial heights. Alternatively, could they have been, as the noted Theosophist G. de Purucker suggests, the left-over remnant of an earlier human race that had incarnated on Earth but had originally come from the Pleiades system, and which had ended its racial cycle perhaps millions of years ago?

Until recently such questions about the Elders could not profitably be asked except in the context of a closed initiatory society. Even stranger, until recently the rest of the world was not even aware that such questions entailed proscribed temple material that had been forbidden to the outside world for thousands of years. As already mentioned in the first part of this article (see New Dawn No. 112, January-February 2009), René Guénon, one of the foremost esotericists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, struggled as far as he dared against this occult embargo, believing that the time was fast approaching when humanity would be in need of a higher level of anthropological, cosmological and metaphysical understanding than was possible in his day.

“This study,” he wrote, concerning the advanced Elder race that, according to Theosophical lore, had migrated from the Arctic zone to Central Asia many hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of years ago, “has gone deeper than any preceding it, inviting reproach, perhaps, from some. We do, however, believe we have not said too much, nor anything that should not be disclosed…”¹¹ Yet much knowledge regarded as too arcane or too dangerous for the profane populace would, Guénon was convinced, soon have to be released into the public domain. And it would seem he was right.

A new order is dawning in this post-millennial era in which a great deal of the once proscribed sacred knowledge is being made available to all. Among many of yesterday’s underground secrets now freely emerging into the light of day are the secrets of human evolution and its tandem relationship to the evolution of earth and cosmos. These secrets have a direct relevance to the mysterious Elders, gods whom they suggest are actually human beings and members of a fifth kingdom in Nature.

Thus the removal of the occult embargo, allied to an explosion of new scientific discoveries and hypotheses, is making it possible to approach the subject in an entirely new way.

The Fifth Kingdom

The medieval classification of Nature into four universal kingdoms, mineral, vegetable, animal and human, has been rendered obsolete by modern science, which has inductively evolved its own hierarchical system of subatomic particles, atoms and molecules before the mineral, and combined the animal and human in one category. Nevertheless, the old system of four kingdoms, based on an intuitive deductive vision of the truth and seen as an example of the Perennial Philosophy, is still entrenched in most of the Western esoteric schools that have emerged since medieval times: Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Rosicrucianism, modern Sufism, various New Age channellings, the Sri Aurobindo school and others.

Four-kingdom proponents from these schools see the progression in Nature as a succession from inert mineral to the plant, that is alive but not apparently conscious, to the animal that has a limited reasoning power but is not self-aware, and to the human being who alone has self-awareness and conscious free will. To these four definitive classifications a fifth is occasionally added by medieval philosophers under variously named, rather obscure and even misleading headings; but whatever the designation, in esoteric circles any natural classification beyond the fourth is either nonexistent or only vaguely delineated, lacking the emphasis or clarity it requires.

The ancient Egyptians made the matter a great deal clearer. They understood the goal of human evolution to be a transition or resurrection into a higher state, a higher natural kingdom, and illustrated the transition with admirable precision on the ceilings of certain very old tombs.¹² In their depiction of the neters or gods undergoing spiritual resurrection, they show a row of animal-headed human figures marching along a horizontal base line, a red oval – the “egg of metamorphosis” – above each head, until suddenly the base line turns by 90 degrees to the vertical and one figure swings into ascension along it. Achieving what may be a rapid biological change into a new life form, he transforms into the royal fifth kingdom. Armed with what appears to be the staff of spiritual authority and lacking the oval over his head, which has presumably been absorbed into his being, he has metamorphosed into a king.¹³ In other words, from being a collective being of a lower order, he has become a royal singularity, a ruler of all kingdoms lower than the fifth.

Ancient petroglyphs of sun-headed men found in various parts of the world, but especially in Central Asia, tell the same story.

Because of the occult secrecy that has enshrouded the subject of the fifth kingdom over the past 2,000 years at least, we have failed to understand its crucial significance as our true evolutionary goal and our key to all those questions we have never been able to answer. The inclusion of a fifth kingdom in the natural order turns the fourth kingdom that we humans presently inhabit into a mere corridor of becoming, a transitional episode in which we are driven forward in a process of transformation from the animal state behind us to that of the true human ahead, as indeed Gautama Buddha recognised. Life, human life, he said, is never-ending change and the suffering of change – and indeed it is viewed as a journey of relentless development of intelligence and consciousness into the truly human kingdom, the fifth, wherein alone lies repose well earned.

The idea of a potential fifth kingdom, a state of spiritual felicity and repose we may hope to enjoy some time in the future, is not new to us. But what the ancient mystery temples through to modern esoteric teachers like Guénon have been reluctant to disclose is that the fifth kingdom is not a future potential but a presently existing reality, a supremely enlightened human state coexisting with our own. Like the other four kingdoms of nature, it has extended and always will extend back into the illimitable past and forward into an equally illimitable future, with its own archetypal place in the cosmos.

Indeed, it is esoterically acknowledged that beyond the fifth kingdom others also exist. Gordon speaks of the fourth, fifth, sixth and even the seventh kingdom of our planetary Nature. “All of these kingdoms exist together (even if we are unaware of the fact),” he says, “and all of them together comprise the evolving nature of Man. Hence humankind is but one partial expression of Man in general.”¹⁴ Given such a perspective, many possibilities open up that were not previously viable in our worldview.

According to this perspective, the Elders of Akkadian-Sumerian legend and the gods of the Babylonians and the Assyrians were the higher-level final flowering of a previous human cycle many millions of years old, their privilege being to guide the evolution of the next cycle – our own. Freed by their advanced development from the limiting conditions of transitional fourth-level humanity, the universe was open to them, for fifth-kingdom space-time is said to possess multiple dimensions incomprehensible and inaccessible to the lower kingdoms. These so-called gods could travel between the stars on supramundane energy currents unknown to us, incarnating on other stellar bodies or on planet Earth as the need arose, and withdrawing as they chose into dimensions invisible to their charges on Earth.

In the above scenario, not only is our past implicated in this new perspective; our future is equally involved. As we ascend with increasing rapidity into higher states of consciousness and hence into proximity with the fifth kingdom, we are finding the Elders in their various otherworld guises descending to meet us. As a part of the great human order, they are our future as well as our past. We shall find in fact that humanity is at home everywhere in the universe and its life has no beginning and no ending; it is co-eternal with the cosmos.

Therefore, perhaps, it is time we gathered together all our ideas of aliens, extraterrestrials, Sirian cosmonauts and angelic visitors and categorise them all as members of our own human species who, along with their advanced technologies, have arrived in the fifth kingdom before us – our own kin already established in majesty and power; already, like the Egyptian priest-kings of old, free to traverse the cosmic pathways at will as the Sons of God – the lords of the universe.

According to the Solar teachings of the ancient Pillar religion, the royal road to the fifth kingdom lies in an ascension up the World Tree, through its successive gateways, to the starry heavens. Kingly authority and the power to rule wisely rests on the royal initiate’s ability to ascend the axis mundi or World Tree to the divine centre of creation at the zenith of the heavens. There, and only there, he will find deification; there he will be able to access the heavenly powers from which all impulses of rulership, creativity and wisdom emanate; there he will find the freedom of the spiritual world.

This idea of returning home to the stars is implicit in all the tribal totem systems found in early shamanic societies around the world, but was more fully realised in its religious form when the idea of kingship – of hierarchical rule from above – seized neolithic societies at the end of the last Ice Age. John Major Jenkins, a leading researcher of ancient cosmology, says:

Sacred knowledge is won or achieved by undertaking visionary journeys up the World Axis to the cosmic centre. A ruler, having thus become fused with the divine source and emanating power of life and wisdom, constellates the beings and objects of lesser degrees.¹⁵

Such a monarch stands as far more than an exemplary figurehead or an administrative symbol at the heart of his kingdom; he has become, by virtue of his conquest of the World Tree, a way-shower into a new order of being for the whole of his society. In the same way, so Jenkins believes, at certain critical junctures of the Earth’s history, this odyssey of transformation up the cosmic Pillar to the divine Centre at the zenith is possible for the race as a whole, which thereby advances further towards its next evolutionary goal – the supernal kingdom, the fifth.

Revisiting the Pillar Religion

The secret teachings of the very earliest sages of which we have cognisance claimed that all life, all wisdom and creative power is transmitted to the earth plane via a spiritual energy flowing down from the highest Source, and that it is by reascending the sacred current, symbolised as a Pillar or a World Tree connecting earth to heaven, that humanity comes to its most sublime perfection.

A traditional symbol of this occult energy stream has been retained in the Qabalistic Tree of Life defined astrologically.The well-known British author Trevor Ravenscroft likens the Tree of Life to “the Yggdrasil tree of Norse mythology, the world-Ash which binds together heaven, earth and hell.” The crown of the tree, he says, “comprises the twelve constellations of the Zodiac, the spiralling branches symbolise the planets and the roots of the trunk dig deeply into the elements of the earth.”¹⁶ The Tree is thus a metaphor for the archetypal processes of the cosmos that are believed to underlie all evolutionary activity.

From the earliest times, the World Tree was central to the shamanism of the nomadic tribes of the Central Asian steppes, as it was to the later Solar religion of the settled Aryan communities of that region. Indeed, if we are to believe Plato, in the days before the Great Flood and the sinking of Atlantis, the World Tree featured also in the primeval Atlantean religion with its monarchic system, its warlike bull cult and its concentric city planning; and according to Blavatsky, it was this Solar system that was eventually transplanted by great migrations into Central Asia.

From west to east and from north to south, then, the Pillar religion in its various guises appears to have reigned universally as the earth’s primordial belief-system, the destiny of man being seen as the ultimate return of his soul via the World Tree to the power-realms of the stars.

Where then on the planet is this World Tree that the Hebrews called Jacob’s Ladder? Although it would be natural to assume it is synonymous with the earth’s north-south axis of rotation, such is not the case. According to Guénon, there have been several successive locations of the World Axis on the surface of the globe that distinguish it from either the north-south axis of rotation or the magnetic axis. Opening up the secret metaphysical tradition, he asserts that basically nothing less than a new model of the world is needed if we are to understand the true nature of the World Axis.

The esoteric reality, expressed long ago in the Pillar teachings, is that the earth incorporates a principle that connects it at all times to a greater spiritual world in the same way that a mirrored reflection is intrinsically connected to the reality. By virtue of this fact, the earth is multi-dimensional in structure – as indeed the physicist David Bohm has proposed in his theory of an implicate universal order lying behind the explicate physical order as its energetic template – and this radically modifies everything we can say about the planet, in the way we measure and describe it.

The Pillar religion projected a worldview very different from our own. The planet was regarded as a living organism with its own hierarchy of elemental intelligences, plus a hierarchy of solar intelligences or devas, at work in the manifold organisation and running of the whole, and which we call today the work of Nature. The World Tree, in India known as Mt. Meru, was believed to be at the very heart of this great dynamic complex, a channel of evolutionary energy running through the centre of the planet, a path of psychospiritual transformation of the same order as the seven-fold spinal path of consciousness running through the human body.

In fact, the name Meru is connected to the Sanskrit word merudanda, meaning a backbone, and hence the World Tree can be further qualified as the backbone of the planet, a chakric system analogous to that of the human spinal system, with seven or nine nodes of increasing psychospiritual awareness culminating in the Cosmic Centre at the summit. These nodes were clairvoyantly perceived as a succession of gateways up the trunk of the Tree leading into higher planes of existence, and the final entrance to the Cosmic Centre was therefore called the North Gate.

Guénon’s Neoplatonic thesis contains the concept of a universal ether, renamed “the quantum fluid” by modern science, and states that behind the physical body of the earth lies its spiritual template, a permanent prephysical or etheric web of forces delineating the planetary structure in its essential form. In this inner light body – or, as Vedic cosmology calls it, the vajra body – is located the World Axis, the etheric source and intelligent regulator of all the energies of the planet. At the beginning of each great temporal cycle – and by that Guénon means at the very least one round of the Zodiac, one Sidereal Year of 25,920 years – the two bodies are in virtually perfect alignment, but as the cycle proceeds a separation occurs and the physical body falls increasingly out of alignment with its spiritual template.

This non-alignment or tilting away of the planetary body from its inner template is the result of their differentiation from each other, which has the effect of creating all the earthly stresses and vicissitudes of time and change that we know so well, yet is the necessary precondition for evolutionary growth. From this circumstance comes all the suffering of becoming, all the so-called evils of our earthly existence.

In such a spiritual cosmology the universe is the expression of a great Intelligence within which are the unchanging ideas or templates of form, the whole being in a state of ideal harmony and order. But although the spiritual world of pure Being is changeless, the natural state of its reflection, holographically projected onto a lower plane and thus an object of differentiation, is to become off-centre in relation to it and therefore in perpetual compensatory motion. This is the biblical “fall” of mankind without which there would be no evolutionary process. With the separating out of the physical plane, motion is created and the suffering of change begins; for the process of increasing differentiation of the physical body from its spiritual background inflicts on the planet and all its life-forms a local disturbance, the angst of movement, of disequilibrium, of continual adjustment to new conditions and new evolutionary demands – but also to the possibility of attaining a greater state of being.

We can sum up this occult cosmology thus: At the beginning of the great precessional cycles, the north-south axis and the magnetic axis are in virtually perfect alignment with the World Axis and with each other. All three stand at that time apparently united at true North, so that the supreme spiritual centre is in a literally polar location; but as the cycles proceed, the poles fall progressively out of alignment with the World Axis and terrestrial changes develop. Today this mysterious noumenon known variously as the Sampo, the axis mundi and the Tree of Life has apparently shifted southward. Clairvoyantly visible, it has its locale in the Inner Asian region delineated by the Tarim Basin and its surrounding ring of great mountain ranges.

Within the boundaries of this vast mountain encirclement, the World Axis is believed to have varied its location from time to time. But wherever it is found, it always remains functionally polar; it is always the central origin point – or as ancient peoples called it, the omphalos of the planet, the place of the first creation – from whence grand waves of acculturation have periodically issued.

In Galactic Alignment Jenkins presents a similar cosmological picture. He calls the World Axis the evolutionary axis, by implication a third terrestrial axis presently unknown to science. Psychically accessible, this great current of psychospiritual conscious energy that runs through the centre of the earth is thought today to emerge somewhere north of Kashmir, soaring high into interstellar space above the Pamirs.¹⁷ It is in that vicinity, at the foot of the World Tree, that the peoples of Central Asia have traditionally located the hidden kingdom of the Elders known as Shambhala, an initiatory centre accessible on both a physical, an etheric and an astral plane.

The North Gate, Jenkins contends, can be viewed as analogous at a cosmic level to the pineal gland in the human system, which is the most interior and creative centre in man and “the point from which spiritual gifts are given.”¹⁸ He sees the Cosmic Centre at the head of the World Axis as fulfilling the same function in a planetary context. However, while René Guénon has postulated a major polar-to-solar shift of the Cosmic Centre in man’s worship at some remote time in antiquity, Jenkins has argued that this shift would be better understood as a polar-to-galactic one.

Thousands of years ago, he says, priest-astronomers realised that approximately every 6,450 years the North Gate was aligned with the galactic centre, and that such times offered a priceless evolutionary opportunity for the whole race. It is an astronomical fact, says Jenkins,

that alignments of the solstices and equinoxes with the plane of our Milky Way galaxy occur periodically over the 26,000-year precession cycle. Such alignments, in fact, occur every 6,450 years. Joseph Campbell pointed out that knowledge of the precessional cycle is implied by the importance given the number 25,920 in Hindu, Nordic and Babylonian doctrines.¹⁹

Jenkins equates the spiritual evolution of humanity with this periodic alignment of the Earth with the galactic plane and the Galactic Centre. The idea that the latter stimulates consciousness on this planet is, he says, “an intriguing and profound concept” that finds echoes in Mayan, Vedic and Egyptian cosmology. Gordon too observes that the earth is subject to celestial seasons of about 6,480 years, “which have a dramatic effect upon both the climate… and also upon the many and varied cultures and civilisations which exist at the time.”²⁰

The Tree is thus regarded as a planetary chakric system analogous to that of the individual tantrica in the practice of kundalini yoga. Even as the yogic consciousness ascends the spinal system, so activating a sequence of seven hierarchically ordered chakras or psychospiritual energy vortices which alter in subtle ways the entire spectrum of consciousness, so the ascension of the racial soul up the World Tree at certain precessional intervals of c.6,450 (or c.6,480) years corresponds with the opening up of a succession of celestial gateways for humanity as a whole.

At each open gateway the flooding down of divine creative energies precipitates certain psychological and cultural modifications in society; the human body typology changes; new deities, new mores appear; the material technology advances or changes its base, a new world-civilisation is launched founded on newly imperative truths. It is a moment of supreme evolutionary importance, a collective initiation perhaps best conveyed by the teachings of the Mithraic mystery religion.

This important Greco-Roman cult flourished until the fourth century CE, when it was extinguished by Christianity. Seven planetary spheres were opened up to the seeker through the seven grades of Mithraic initiation, allowing him ultimately to ascend to the highest, the Father (Saturn). However, beyond the seventh level was a secret teaching revealing an eighth and ninth level or “house” where the Hypercosmic Sun was located. This hypercosmic luminary, this “Star of Stars” as the first century philosopher Philo Judaeus of Alexandria called it, was identified with the Galactic Centre, to which access was gained only through the eighth and ninth celestial “doorway” above that of Saturn.²¹ This secret means of escape from Earth’s gravity into the freedom of the Universe has been closely guarded by occult tradition and is still not fully unveiled.

The doctrine of the Hypercosmic Sun, according to Jenkins, is “fundamentally about the soul’s passage through the galactic gateways that open during eras of galactic alignment,” when the divine light of the Milky Way Centre pours down through the opened valves of the World Axis and irradiates the earth and all its inhabitants for a certain interval of time. It is in that critical interval that the great evolutionary mutations take place, civilisations are overthrown and reinstated in radically new forms and the potential exists for the fifth kingdom to be realised by at least some members of fourth-kingdom humanity.

Jenkins is only one of countless observers who believe such a historic time has once again come around. Indeed, by now millions of people are watching and waiting for the end-of-the-world Mayan date of 2012 CE, believing it to be the beginning of a new World Age… a further stage in the journey towards the fifth kingdom.

Eurasia Awakes

In February of 1962 astrological pundits announced a major planetary conjunction that occurs only once in every c.6,500 (or 6,480) years – the previous one therefore having taken place in c.4500 BCE, and the one before that in c.11000 BCE, both of which occasions were prophetic of great earth changes.²² I remember well the report in the media, because immediately a cry of distress and foreboding went up right across India; for it was known by most Hindu astrologers that this rare stellar event, occurring only four times in the precessional cycle of 26,000 years, does indeed foreshadow great floods and catastrophic climatic changes.

In response, the dawning New Age movement of the time predicted the return of the Elder race, the possibility of a pole shift, the birth of a new race of clairvoyants. To esotericists generally the conjunction signified a new World Age and an impending psychospiritual initiation of collective humanity, with all the social and ideological turmoil such an event implied. And confirming John Major Jenkins’ later theory to the hilt, the conjunction was seen by some star-gazers as the first sign of a coming revolution in geopolitical world affairs, with the rise of Asia and the decline of the western Anglo-American hegemony.

At the time all these predictions were regarded as amazing and pretty farfetched. But nearly fifty years on, the events presaged in 1962 are now crystallising as post-millennial realities. Ominously, the ice caps and glaciers are melting, the seas rising, earth’s resources shrinking; the Anglo-American world order, built on predatory economic corporations, is unravelling, Asiatic power inexorably rising. A transformation in human consciousness is well underway; and there is increasing evidence that the vast natural, socio-political and consciousness changes we are seeing are now irreversible, for good or ill.

Perhaps the most significant sign of the times is to be found in the growing vision of a unified Eurasia among the major Asian nations such as China, Mongolia, India, Iran (and also Brazil), as well as Kazakhstan and many other of the Central Asian Muslim states. Included in this growing Eastern bloc is Russia which, since the collapse of the Soviet regime, is increasingly turning away from Western Europe and towards Asia in its quest for identity. Geographically the largest nation on the earth, it extends right across northern Asia from Eastern Europe to the Bering Sea.

Russia is rediscovering its Slavic roots; and especially since the discovery of Arkaim and the Land of Cities in the southern Urals, it is also exploring its Aryan past and its more recent connections to the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan, who subjugated the whole of the Eurasian corridor as far as eastern Europe in the thirteenth century. Indeed, for many of Russia’s intellectuals the universal tolerance and freedom from dogma of the ancient Pillar religion of the Mongol/Turkic peoples has great valence and is displacing Christianity and Islam in the popular esteem. “Out of Russia,” says Alice Bailey, channelling the prophecies of her Tibetan guru, DK, “will emerge the new and magical religion about which I have so often told you.”²³

There have been a number of famous prophecies regarding Russia’s future pivotal role in world affairs generally, notably those of Rudolf Steiner and Edgar Cayce, as well as those of Gerard Encausse, the highly respected French occult master who went under the pseudonym of Papus (1865 – 1916). The author Mehmet Sabeheddin notes that “Papus knew of the key role to be played by Russia in unifying Eurasia and her occult destiny as the Empire of the End, the outward manifestation of the enigmatic power of ‘Northern Shambhala’.”²⁴ Many others have seen Russia as destined to continue the work of Genghis Khan, who transformed the nomad tribal conglomerates of the Eurasian steppes into a unified and superbly organised political system that revolutionised international life for centuries to come.

Across the steppes, where for countless centuries a melting pot of peoples, religions and empires from every quarter have traded and warred and sunk with their cities beneath the desert sands, a spirit of renaissance, of ecumenical reform, is undoubtedly taking hold. From the Far East to Moscow and from the Altai to Iran, a countervailing force, identifiable with the invisible spiritual powerhouse of Shambhala, is stirring throughout the region. Muslim, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Christian, Jew, Taoist and shaman are finding common ground in a unitive vision of the future. Responding to the militaristic Anglo-American colonisation that has long dominated the Asian hemisphere, this new regional climate bodes well for the rebalancing of the globe’s spiritual, cultural and economic forces.

The move to turn the tenuous Eurasian concept into a geopolitical reality composed of numerous independent but strongly affiliated nations committed to East-West amity must be regarded as a force for renewal, for the healing of the Atlantean/Hyperborean rupture that long ago shattered the primal unity of the life of the planet. The present thrust seeks instead to recapture the unity of the ancient Arctic accord and to set forth new terms for a viable future for humankind.

What is truly remarkable is that we are witnessing all this happening in Central Asia at the very time of great astrological significance, when the stars again portend extreme danger and extreme opportunity for the life of Earth. Are we then seeing once again a mysterious intervention from the East, a salvific influence arising in the heart of Asia that seeks to sow the seeds of a new global order and a new type of civilisation in the face of apocalyptic geophysical change? Can the Elder race be coming to our aid yet again?

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Footnotes:

1. J.S. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of Atlantis, and the Mysterious Origins of Human Civilization, Watkins Publishing, London, 2008, 131.

2. Charles Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, Turnstone Press, London, 1979.

3. Gordon, op. cit., 131.

4. Ibid., 159.

5. William Fix, Lake of Memory Rising, Council Oaks Books, LLC, San Francisco, 2000, 203.

6. H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2., Theosophical Publishing House, Los Angeles, 1947, 324.

7. Drunvalo Melchizedek, The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life, Light Technology Publishing House, Flagstaff, AZ, 1990 – 8, 143.

8. Ibid., 143.

9. Ibid., 139.

10. J.G. Bennett, Gurdjieff: Making a New World, Turnstone Books, London, 1976.

11. René Guénon, The Lord of the World, Coombe Springs Press, U.K., 1983, 66.

12. Melchizedek, op. cit., 43.

13. Ibid., 43.

14. J.S. Gordon, op. cit., 85.

15. John Major Jenkins, Galactic Alignment, Bear & Co., Rochester, Vermont, 2002, 150.

16. Trevor Ravenscroft & T. Wallace-Murphy, The Mark of the Beast, Vol. 3, Sphere Books, U.K., 1990, 67.

17. Victoria LePage, Shambhala, Quest Books, Illinois, 1996, 180.

18. Jenkins, op. cit., 140, citing Valentinia Straiton, The Celestial Ship of the North, 1927.

19. Ibid., 42.

20. J.S. Gordon, op. cit., 130.

21. Jenkins, op. cit., 107.

22. Sky and Telescope Magazine, December 1961, 320. On February 5, 1962, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were all within 13 degrees of the eclipsed Sun.

23. Cited by Mehmet Sabeheddin, The Secret of Eurasia: The Key to Hidden History and World Events, New Dawn No. 68 (September-October 2001).

24. Ibid.

.

VICTORIA LEPAGE has published numerous articles on the new spiritual paradigm emerging in cultures worldwide and is the author of Shambhala: The Fascinating Truth Behind the Myth of Shangri-la, published in ten foreign languages. She lives in New South Wales, Australia, and can be contacted through her website at www.victoria-lepage.org.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 113 (March-April 2009).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 113 (PDF version) for only US$2.95

By ANDREW GOUGH—

Few, if any, have contributed more to the alternative history and esoteric genres than Graham Hancock. At the peak of his career, and on the eve of his first speaking tour of Australia [in 2012], Andrew Gough met up with Graham to discuss his legacy and what the future may hold for the greatest voice of his generation.

[Graham Hancock will tour Australia in 2014 - go to www.grahamhancocktour.com.au for dates].

ANDREW GOUGH (AG): Graham, hi. Welcome to New Dawn magazine.

GRAHAM HANCOCK (GH): It’s a pleasure.

AG: Can you believe that your seminal book, Fingerprints of the Gods, was published over 17 years ago?

GH: Yes, it’s really bizarre, actually, the feeling that 17 years have passed. I had a feeling back then that there was another story to tell about the past – something missing in the record – and I set out to look for that.

AG: Were you prepared for the responsibility that came with the success of Fingerprints of the Gods?

GH: Well, I think first of all I need to make it very clear that Fingerprints of the Gods could never have been written if there were not a whole group of people working in this area. And, to name a few, I would say: Rand and Rose Flem-Ath, with their work on earth-crust displacement, following up the work of Professor Hapgood; Robert Bauval, with his extraordinary work on the Orion correlation, which radically changed our understanding of the pyramids and what they’re all about, and the deep antiquity that they’re connected to; John Anthony West, and Professor Robert Schoch from Boston University; John West, radical Egyptologist, thinking things through in a different way, realising that there is something wrong with the story of the Sphinx, and Robert Schoch backing that up with geological observations; all of these people were working away, doing incredibly important original work of discovery and part of my function was to write a book that put all of that work together into a bigger picture.

AG: Your success was not without consequence, and I remember watching the 1999 BBC Horizon documentary in horror, as they attacked your theories, in what was clearly a premeditated manner. Although you were vindicated, what do you think led to the BBC’s aggression?

GH: Well, again, I think, first of all, when you get into the field of exploring radical new ideas, challenging the status quo, and perhaps I didn’t realise this fully at the time, because the whole success of Fingerprints of the Gods and the speed with which things developed took me quite by surprise, you absolutely have to expect to be attacked, and academics also attack each other in exactly the same way.

I also think, by 1999 perhaps I myself had become over-confident. I’d had a lot of success. When I look back on the story of my life, and those particular years, I think I was arrogant. I think I was cocky. I think I felt invulnerable. I actually think I needed to be taken down a peg, which is what the BBC did to me.

AG: That’s a very impressive perspective.

GH: Thank you.

AG: So much attention has been paid to the end of the Mayan Calendar, but in your estimation what is significant about the start date?

GH: Well, you know, this is curious. I actually can’t answer that question. All I can tell you is that when we look at what we understand of history we can say that date, of around 3100 BCE, does mark quite closely the beginning of the emergence of the city state.

AG: And now the big question: what’s your view about what may or may not happen on 21 December 2012?

GH: To be honest, I don’t think anything is going to happen on 21 December 2012. People often ask me where I will be on that date. Where I want to be is in the loving embrace of my family, surrounded by my children and my wife, having a good time.

Perhaps now that I am coming on 62, as the years go by you begin to focus perhaps a little bit more on that. Life doesn’t go on for ever. We don’t know what happens afterwards. I happen to believe we come back. I can’t prove that, but I can’t see the point of a universe that provides just one life. So, my feeling about 2012 is a reminder that we’re here to love and that’s what we should be doing and living, as far as possible, positive lives, which means positive lives in relation to others as well. And that remains true, whether or not some great cataclysm is coming.

AG: What is your view on reincarnation?

GH: Well, first of all, reincarnation makes perfect sense to me. I think it was Voltaire who said that it is no more extraordinary to be born twice than to be born once. My own religious point of view is that it seems highly likely that consciousness survives death, and I have tried to make this point in recent lectures, that materialist science works with a model of the brain that says the brain generates consciousness, rather in the way that a factory makes cars, and therefore when the brain is dead consciousness is dead. That’s a view. But again, that is not a fact. It is equally possible, and all the measurements would remain the same, that the brain is a receiver, or a transceiver, of consciousness; that the brain is the junction point between the material and immaterial realms; that is the point through which consciousness manifests into the material plane, rather in the way that a television signal manifests as pictures through a television set. When you destroy the television set the signal is still there. Consciousness could equally well be that way.

AG: Do you think we choose our circumstances in our next life?

GH: Again, it kind of makes sense to me that we set a particular objective for this life – that there’s stuff we need to ‘get’ here. As I’ve gone through the process of life and I’ve made my mistakes, I’ve become more and more certain that there are transcendental consequences to all of our actions and I’m much more aware of this today than I was 20 years ago. We should not act lightly or thoughtlessly in ways that impact others and impact ourselves. We should consider that this may have huge implications over millions of years, not just over this one lifetime.

AG: Tell me about the impetus for The Master Game?

GH: In The Master Game, co-authored with Robert Bauval, I focused on the Gnostic tradition and how the mainstream religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – all worship the same entity, who is referred to as Jehovah or Yahweh in the Christian and Judaic tradition and Allah in the Islamic tradition, and that from the Gnostic point of view this entity called Jehovah is not a god. He is an imposter. He is a demon, who presents himself as a god.

There was a saying in the film, The Usual Suspects, that the smartest trick the devil ever played was to convince the world that he did not exist. Gnostics would take that a step further – they would say, the smartest trick the devil ever played was to convince the world that he is god – that you actually insert the demonic into the mainstream religions and that would explain why these religions talk the talk of peace and love, but actually walk the walk of hatred and cruelty and violence.

AG: Has the fact that history has been written by the victors ever made you wonder if the wrong god won?

GH: Well, yes, I think the wrong god won – absolutely. The alternate point of view was driven underground, and that alternate point of view said that spiritual experience is fundamental and that we don’t need these intermediaries that call themselves priests or mullahs or rabbis to tell us how to relate to the spirit. How dare they stand there and tell us how we may relate to the divine?

AG: Take Lucifer, who we are conditioned to believe was evil, but his name means ‘bringer of light’. That doesn’t sound evil to me.

GH: Not to me, either – and again, of course, the knee-jerk Christian faction will immediately say, ‘Oh, you’re a devil worshipper’, but what actually are we worshipping in this creature called Yahweh, called Jehovah? Look at the stories in the Old Testament. Look at the things that this entity did. This is not a loving, beautiful, divine light. This is a dark creature, which tells a man to kill his own son; which says that if somebody behaves in a certain way – if somebody is a homosexual, for example – they should be killed. This is written in the Old Testament. Don’t listen to what they say. Look at what they do. What they do is pure, unmitigated, divisive hatred, wickedness, suspicion and evil.

AG: Why do you feel there has not been a significant discovery in Egypt or other ancient lands in some time?

GH: Well, actually I do feel there have been significant discoveries. I feel that, for example, Robert Bauval’s Orion Correlation is a significant discovery. I think that the gigantic, 12,000-year-old megalithic temple in Turkey, called Göbekli Tepe, that’s been excavated in the last six or seven years by a mainstream archaeologist, is a hugely significant discovery. First of all, it’s firmly dated to 12,000 years old, which makes it 7,000 years older than other known megalithic sites. Secondly, it’s highly sophisticated, which means there’s a background to it, which is much older than 12,000 years, that we don’t, at present, have any evidence for, but the very fact that Göbekli Tepe stands there tells us there is a background, because those people were not moving around 20 or 30 ton megaliths without some previous experience. Thirdly, that the oldest stuff at Göbekli Tepe is the best and that the younger stuff is less good.

AG: What do you think is the lost civilisation destroyed in the last ice age?

GH: I do think there was something worthy of the name ‘civilisation’ back in what geologists and archaeologists call the upper Paleolithic – the end of the last ice age – and that it thrived, I think, on coastlines. I think it was primarily a maritime civilisation. I don’t think it was a civilisation very much like ours.

For me, maps from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, based on ancient maps, are evidence there was a global, maritime civilisation, which mapped the world and I think that it drew a meridian through the earth. The ancient prime meridian ran through Giza, that’s the zero point, and I think there were sites all around the world that were marked off at significant longitudes in relation to that zero point.

AG: In what epoch do you believe the ancient meridian was constructed?

GH: I think there was an attempt to re-map the world after the cataclysm. I think there were survivors and I think that, again somewhere between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago and perhaps soon after a radical cataclysm shook the earth, there was an attempt to re-establish things, to re-map things, and that attempt ultimately failed, but traces of it are left. I think that’s what happened.

AG: Which underwater site do you think is going to create acceptance that civilisation goes back further than historians believe it does?

GH: Luckily, with Göbekli Tepe, we’ve already got one above water. What I was arguing in Fingerprints of the Gods was evidence for a sophisticated civilisation 12,000 or more years ago and Göbekli Tepe already provides us with really incontrovertible evidence of the existence of such a culture, which had developed its stone-working techniques to such a degree that it could create a site on that scale.

As you’ve said, Fingerprints of the Gods was published 17 years ago. I took the work a lot further with Underworld and the underwater stone circle of Kerama in Japan, off the island of Okinawa, I think is a greatly underestimated site. It’s 110 feet underwater and has been so for 12,500 to 13,000 years. I think the cities that have been detected with sidescan sonar in the Gulf of Cambay, off the north-west coast of India, are very, very interesting. And off southern India, as well, where we have a huge Atlantis tradition.

AG: Where do you place Atlantis, and when?

GH: I place it everywhere. I think it’s important to not isolate the Atlantis story – it doesn’t stand alone. There are many such stories from many different cultures around the world.

And I don’t think we should forget America itself, if we’re looking for the one that’s Plato’s Atlantis. America is very interesting and it does appear to have been over North America that this gigantic comet of 12,900 years ago exploded. So, I think there’s a whole lot of missing story to be recovered from the Americas and offshore of the Americas.

AG: The Sign and The Seal chronicled the history of the Ark of the Covenant and traced its possible resting place to Axum, Ethiopia. What do you think would happen if the Ark was rediscovered today?

GH: It’s a fact, and a rather spooky one, that the three mainstream monotheistic faiths, Islam (particularly in its Shia manifestation) Judaism and Christianity, all have fundamentalist elements which make reference to the Ark of the Covenant, and for the character that the Shias call the ‘Hidden Imam’ to return. He, by the way, is the person whose return Iran is actively preparing for now: the Mahdi, whose name lies behind the Madhi Army in Iraq. The Hidden Imam (the Mahdi) must recover the Ark of the Covenant and return it to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem before he can engage in what is seen, in Shia tradition, as the final battle of good against evil, which is interpreted in Iran as the battle of Shia Islam against the forces of the West and Judaism. The recovery and retrieval of the Ark of the Covenant, and its return to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, is the key that turns that process on – the process of Judgement Day, or of the end of the world.

It’s the same for fundamentalist Judaism. There are groups, such as, for example, the Temple Mount Faithful in Israel, who are intent on building the Third Temple on the Temple Mount and who would like to sweep away the monuments of Islam, the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, and make it a site of fundamentalist Zionism. They, too, require the Ark of the Covenant in order to realise that apocalyptic dream, which they, too, see as the precursor to the end of the world.

And fundamentalist Christians make reference to the Book of Revelation, where one of the signs of the Day of Judgement is the reappearance and return of the Ark of the Covenant. For these institutions, access and control of that object would, undoubtedly, be used as a catalyst for a cataclysmic struggle. So, I think it’s a really good thing if the Ark stays away from history for a while.

AG: What role do you feel psychedelics and hallucinogens have played in the evolution of human consciousness, imagination and religion, and is there a place for them in our world today?

GH: Just as it’s impossible to understand ancient civilisations without getting into astronomy, I think it’s impossible to understand ancient civilisations without getting into altered states of consciousness, which can be brought about by a variety of different means, of which the most widely used and most reliably effective are the visionary plants. But there are other techniques and methods for getting into deeply altered states of consciousness. So, I would put the emphasis first on altered states of consciousness, rather than on psychedelics. Psychedelics are simply a vehicle for bringing about the requisite altered state of consciousness.

AG: Like drumming?

GH: Drumming, rhythmic dancing, certain forms of music, fasting has a long and honourable tradition for bringing on altered states of consciousness and contact with the divine – there really is a huge range of techniques. People get really holier than thou about this and say, ‘we achieve altered states of consciousness though meditation – this is the only pure way to do it – anybody who uses psychedelics is not authentic.’ I think that’s absolute bullshit.

Of course, mainstream society does tolerate certain drugs. It does allow people to use alcohol – in fact, it encourages people to use alcohol. There are other agents that induce radically altered states of consciousness, which not only allow you to step out of the alert, problem-solving state of consciousness, but also almost inevitably lead you to question the fundamentals of life in the material realm and, indeed, the nature of reality itself; those agents include power visionary plants, such as the Ayahuasca in the Amazon, which consists of two things. It consists of the vine, Banisteriopsis caapi, and it consists of the leaf of a bush, Psychotria viridis; it’s called Chacruna in the Amazon and the vine is called Ayahuasca. The leaves contain pharmacologically pure dimethyltryptamine (DMT), which is, of course, a highly illegal drug throughout the West and, indeed, throughout the world. It’s a Schedule I drug in the United States, it’s a Class A hallucinogen in the UK, and you can go to prison for a very long time for using DMT.

DMT is probably the most powerful hallucinogen known to man. I have personally had eleven journeys with pure, smoked DMT and what happens with DMT is that it hits you within about one tenth of a second of the first inhalation and, within two to three seconds, it plunges you mercilessly into a completely alien realm, which is as much disconnected with this realm as it is possible to imagine and which, as a result, can be utterly terrifying – or not.

Most people that have worked with DMT will agree with this: there is something oddly almost mechanistic and technological about DMT realms. And the sense of alien contact is very powerful – that there is so much in common between the realms that are encountered on a DMT journey and the realms that are reported by UFO abductees, that you have to ask yourself what is going on here?

I think it is likely that UFO abductees are people who spontaneously overproduce DMT, because DMT is a natural brain hormone. We’re not sure which part of the brain it’s produced in, although it has been suggested that it might be the pineal gland. But it’s really important to emphasise – and I have to make this absolutely clear – this does not mean that those experiences are not real. This does not mean that those experiences are artefacts of the brain. What this does mean is that reality may be much more complicated than we imagine. If I were a betting man I would say that what we are dealing with here is inter-dimensional contacts, rather than just contacts in this dimension, between high-tech and lower-tech beings. I think the flying saucer may be a vehicle to cross dimensions and that it may, at times, manifest into this physical dimension and may, at times, leave a physical trace, but that the primary way of accessing this is through consciousness.

AG: Dr. Michael A. Persinger’s invention, the ‘God Helmet’, applies pressure to the frontal lobes prompting individuals to experience the alien abduction phenomenon. Are you saying that this does not negate the fact that the individual is accessing another dimension or reality that is equally as real as ours?

GH: Exactly. Even Persinger himself, who is pretty committed to the materialist paradigm, admitted this on record; that he can’t absolutely prove that the brain is making these things. He may be altering the receiver wavelength of the brain and allowing a glimpse of another level of reality.

AG: Tell me more about Ayahuasca.

GH: Ayahuasca is a brew – it’s a drink – and there is a mystery in this in itself, because the DMT is being delivered orally and it’s working and the reason that it’s working is because of the Ayahuasca vine, which contains a monoamine oxidaze inhibitor that switches off the monoamine oxidaze in the stomach and allows the DMT in the Pyschotria viridis leaves to be absorbed and to cross the blood-brain barrier and enter the brain. Now, when you bear in mind that there are 155,000 different species of plants and trees in the Amazon, it’s a pretty amazing piece of chemistry that the shamans in the Amazon found these two plants, which, when put together and cooked with water, produce this amazing brew.

Now, here’s the curious thing with Ayahuasca, which, again, is universally reported: the sense of connection and contact with an intelligence, which we also find with pure DMT, but in pure DMT those intelligences are a bit impersonal and quite mechanistic. It’s like they’re machines that have got a job to do on you. With Ayahuasca there’s a very personal sense of a connection with a being, who, in a way, is a being a bit like us, but vastly superior in her powers and abilities.

AG: Her? Is this ‘being’ demonstrably a female?

GH: Many people encounter this being as a woman, or as a female entity – very often as a serpent – usually as a serpent – but always understood to be female. Serpents play a huge role in it. This is very well documented. As any shaman will tell you, when the 300ft-long serpent opens its jaws right in front of you, then what you have to do is just dive right in and go into that process and see what comes. For me she has always been female and I have come to the feeling that many others have come to, that she is the mother goddess of this planet, and that her business is the planet, and that she does not operate in the material realm. Her only way to access the material realm is through human consciousness and that’s why right now, at this time of crisis, Ayahuasca is spreading all over the world and it is being drunk in every major city in the world, and it’s being encountered by tens of thousands of people all around the world, and every one of them is receiving very curiously similar messages from Ayahuasca. And those messages concern the nature of the environment; they concern terrible things that are being done to our jungles, and to our oceans, and to this beautiful gift that we’ve been given by the universe, that we’re destroying, and the desperate need for a change of consciousness to stop that monstrosity happening. And they concern our personal lives.

Ayahuasca is regarded as a teacher in the Amazon and she will usually begin with obliging you to ruthlessly review your own life, and will show you the impact that you have had on other people. In a visionary sense you see this – the impact that you have had on other people over the whole course of your life, and the pain and the damage and the hurt that you have caused, that you may have totally justified to yourself at the time; but Ayahuasca strips all of that away and obliges you to see yourself as you have been to others in reality, not as you imagined it to be. As a result, many people find themselves in floods of tears during Ayahuasca ceremonies, because they have realised that, far from being the nice, decent, loving person that they thought themselves to be, they’ve actually been rather toxic and selfish and greedy and cruel and unkind to others.

It is probably the most effective and most powerful anti-addiction agent in the world and the control of addiction comes through revelation – through the realisation of the individual that they are making a mistake in their lives and I speak from direct experience in this matter. I am not simply reporting something that’s in the literature, because I had, until October 2011, a 24-year, non-stop marijuana habit. It was a very central part of my life and there was a time in my life when smoking marijuana was, I believe, helpful to me – extremely helpful – and helped to open me up to other possibilities. I first started smoking marijuana in 1987 and that was round about the time that I started to open up to the Sign and the Seal and the ideas that led me into the whole enquiry into ancient civilisations. I actually don’t believe I would ever have done that if I hadn’t encountered marijuana at that time.

I was told by many people that something had changed in my behaviour and that it wasn’t good, but I wouldn’t listen. I was just sure that this major, major, major use of marijuana was a very important, fundamental part of my life and I felt, actually, that I couldn’t write without it. But when I went to Brazil in October 2011 and had five Ayahuasca sessions, they dealt directly and specifically with my marijuana habit.

AG: That’s amazing. And how did your upcoming tour of Australia with Dennis McKenna and Mitch Schultz, ‘The Origins of Consciousness: An Exploration into Psychedelics, Spirituality & Ancient Civilisations’, come about [see advertisement on page 17]?

GH: I know Mitch Schultz personally and I have talked many times with Dennis over Skype and the three of us have many mutual interests; the idea came up of putting together our similar and diverse interests into a series of talks and events that will be given across Australia. I’m enormously looking forward to it.

AG: Your most recent work, Entangled, has seen you delve into fiction. After such an illustrious catalogue of historical non-fiction, what promoted this shift in approach?

GH: I have always wanted to stretch myself and not to get locked in a particular rut, just because it works. In the time that I have I would like to explore this gift that I’ve been given, just as somebody who is a sculptor might like to explore their abilities as a sculptor.

But then there was the question, what would I write about and how would I approach it creatively? And, again, this is an area where some people, no doubt, think that I’m nuts, but I went to Brazil and asked Ayahuasca what to do with that – this was back in 2007/8 – and I was given the story, pretty much, that I wrote in Entangled in a series of Ayahuasca sessions in Brazil.

AG: You present a unique and fascinating view of Neanderthals in Entangled. How did this come about?

GH: In Supernatural I didn’t give the Neanderthals much respect. I regarded creativity and symbolism as the province entirely of anatomically modern humans, but Ayahuasca showed me a different picture of Neanderthals altogether and that I expressed in Entangled.

AG: Time travel is an important theme of Entangled. Do you believe it’s possible?

GH: I really do, yes. I believe time travel is possible and that time itself is much more complicated than we think. This is a point that I make strongly in Entangled: that we have this linear notion of time – time’s arrow – that past, present and future all run in a straight line and that therefore, while the past might impact on the future, it’s impossible for the future to impact on the past. I take a totally opposite view in Entangled – that time spirals like a cat’s cradle of lines that inter-wrap and interweave and that different epochs can be closely connected to one another, and that, actually, the future can have an effect on the past; that the past can be changed; that any unobserved element of the past can be changed by things that happen in the future.

AG: So, 2012 notwithstanding, what does the future hold for Graham Hancock?

GH: I’m embracing fiction very strongly at the moment. I am going to go back and write the second volume of Entangled. I have actually written a hundred pages of the second volume, but for certain complicated reasons to do with my publishers, as much as anything else, but also because I think there was stuff I needed to learn, I’m writing a whole series of other novels first; three novels, of which I’ve already written two, and this is a fantasy adventure series, based very strongly, historically, on the events of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico. Then I’ll go back and finish the second volume of Entangled. Then I may, just possibly, do a follow-up to Fingerprints of the Gods.

AG: That would be brilliant. What words of wisdom can you leave us with?

GH: Just to reiterate that 2012 is a reminder that we’re here to love. And that remains true, whether or not some great cataclysm is coming. It remains true, whether or not the world economy is going to collapse. It remains true, whether or not the madness of the state-driven system and the madness of mainstream religions is going to plunge us into a cataclysmic, man-made, global war. All any of us can do is make choices, as individuals, to live positive and nurturing lives that are filled with love and light, rather than with darkness and with hate and, if we make that decision at the individual level, every one of us, then the light is going to grow in the world.

AG: Let me second that, and thank you for all that you have done. Best of luck in the future.

GH: Thank you. My pleasure. It’s been fun.

Graham Hancock’s interview was transcribed from audio by Beth Johnson.

If you appreciated this article, please consider a digital subscription to New Dawn.

ANDREW GOUGH is a writer of historical conundrums, which he features on his Arcadia website, www.andrewgough.com. He is currently working on a new book, The Hidden Hive of History. His follow-up and yet to be titled documentary to National Geographic’s The Truth Behind King Arthur will air on Channel 5 in the UK and feature many of the subjects in this article. Andrew is also editor of the online magazine The Heretic at www.thehereticmagazine.com

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 134 (Sept-Oct 2012).

Read this article with its illustrations and much more by downloading
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INSIDE THIS MAGAZINE:

From Indonesia to Turkey

New Archaeological Discoveries Uncover the Mysteries of a Lost Civilisation. Graham Hancock looks at extraordinary new evidence showing human civilisation extends much further back in time than what we’ve been told.

Return of the Golden Age?

Drawing on myth and ancient wisdom, Edward Malkowski explains why the time is ripe to initiate a new Golden Age of unity, abundance and equality.

Building the New in the Shadow of the Old

It’s Time for the Localisation Movement to Get Down to Business! Richard K. Moore explores successful models for the reinvigoration of communities.

.

The Secret Influence of the Moon

Alien Origins & Occult Powers. Jeffery Pritchett interviews Louis Proud about Moon mysteries and various scientific & metaphysical theories.

Remembering The Outsider

The Life & Work of Colin Wilson (1931-2013). A short overview and tribute by Colin Stanley to the highly influential self-educated author & philosopher.

Doctor From Lhasa

The Mystery of Tuesday Lobsang Rampa. Walter Mason investigates how the son of a plumber rose to literary fame to become a world renown Tibetan Lama.

The Rebirth of Gnosticism

Richard Smoley speaks to Hollywood’s Gnostic Bishop Dr. Stephan A. Hoeller on key aspects of gnosis and the untold story of the modern Gnostic revival.

Helping Stuck Souls Crossover

Speaking from personal experience, Rev. Gary W. Duncan reveals how he assisted recently departed friends & family members transit into the light.

MIND BODY SPIRIT SUPPLEMENT

Discovering the Fourth Dimension of Ourselves
By Katrina Cavanough

Do You Have a Sixth Sense?
By Dr. David Hamilton

The Word of ONE: Tarot Wisdom of the Ages
By W. Crow

Deadly Medicines & Organised Crime
By Peter Gotzsche, MD

12 Lessons Along the Path to Enlightenment
By David R. Hawkins, Ph.D.

Health Briefs

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Colin Wilson, British author, Goran Haven, Cornwall, 1984. Photo credit: Tom Ordelman

By LYNN PICKNETT & CLIVE PRINCE

—

Colin Wilson passed away on 5 December 2013. A tribute to this life and examination of his work written by Colin Stanley appears in New Dawn 143 (March-April 2014). New Dawn Special Issue Vol 8 No 2 to be published in April 2014 contains an interview with Colin conducted by Australian writer Louis Proud. The following article was published in New Dawn on the occasion of Colin Wilson’s 80th birthday in 2011.

You know individuals have become icons when they are referred to simply by their first names: Marilyn and Diana being perhaps the two most obvious. But in New Age, occult and esoteric circles there is only one Colin (while Wilsons may be thick on the ground). And as the last of the Angry Young Men has reached the age of 80, if ever there was a time to celebrate Colin (Wilson’s) contribution to the world of the mind and spirit, this is it.

This is something of a personal paean, as he has touched both of our own lives in his typically exhilarating way. Back in the 1980s, when Lynn was Deputy Editor of the landmark weekly publication The Unexplained, he was one of its consultants. Thank the gods for Colin! Always polite and affable, he was also the consummate professional, being particularly noted for delivering an article on any subject at a moment’s notice that was word-perfect and guaranteed to be a hot topic for discussion, not only among the readership but even among the cynical editorial team. He was never grand, although with his fame, he could well have been. And of course he has added to the list of his remarkable achievements in the quarter century after the last edition of The Unexplained saw the light of day.

His main achievement has always been to shake his readers up. Through his books on philosophy, psychology, criminology, parapsychology and the weirder aspects of the paranormal – even his novels – he has challenged consensus reality head on. Few authors have done this so consistently, bravely and anarchically, although many have tried. And in our view, no author has done so quite so successfully, if success is measured in kick-starting a mass awakening from spiritual and mental zombie-hood.

This intellectual dynamism – more akin to actual dynamite – has been there right from Colin’s first work on existential philosophy, The Outsider (1956), through to more recent books dealing with weird phenomena such as his study of alleged ET encounters and alien abductions, Alien Dawn (1998).

It all stemmed from a profound dissatisfaction with the way most people experience the world – the feeling that we’re all missing something important. Or “the vague, brainless, cow-like drifting of the people around me” Colin was aware of from adolescence.¹

The occasional individual – usually an artist, poet or mystic – may experience “certain moments when he feels curiously immortal, god-like, as if hovering above the world, untouched by its dullness.”² But is this just an illusion? Which is the ‘real’ world: the mundane everyday reality or the mystics’ and artists’ glimpse of something bigger, brighter and considerably more joyful?

Pursuing such questions led the young Colin to existential philosophy, resulting in his first book, The Outsider, published in 1956 when he was 24. It was an immediate sensation. The term ‘angry young men’ was originally coined by The Times to describe both himself and John Osborne (whose Look Back in Anger premiered the same week as The Outsider was published).

Over the next decade Colin pursued his search for meaning through a mainly philosophical and literary approach. His ‘Outsider cycle’ of six books, plus a final summary volume in 1966 – covering religious experience, human sexuality and discoveries in psychology – developed his ‘new existentialism’, basically existentialism minus the customary pessimism. While Colin regards the flashes of meaning experienced by poets/mystics – or by many ordinary folk as a ‘peak experience’ – as evidence of a state of consciousness towards which humans are evolving, existentialists see them as the mind’s trick to convince us that life’s worth living. Colin has no truck with turgid pessimism – one of his most endearing and encouraging traits, which also, incidentally, makes his talks so life-enhancing.

All his work has continued to develop the original themes of The Outsider, right through to his 2009 Super Consciousness: essentially an update of The Outsider but incorporating all the other major fields of interest he has accrued throughout his long career.

But back in the early 1970s it was The Occult, his great landmark book that set the world alight. Ironically, as a sceptic, he only accepted the commission for the money, intending to write a noncommittal survey of the subject, but it was to turn his worldview upside down. His research not only persuaded him that psychic abilities are real, but it also transformed and enhanced his vision of human beings. (And the vision of many of its readers too, such as Clive, whose own life changed dramatically because of The Occult and its sequel, laying the foundations for his career as a writer of books on the esoteric and alternative history.)

It is hard not to gush about The Occult. In retrospect, it is probably not much of an exaggeration to say that this mammoth work, published in October 1971, worked the same blinding epiphany on many of its readers as did say, Darwin’s Origin of Species in its day. And it had a happy spin-off: not only was The Occult a seminal book for a popular audience but it also revived Colin’s career, which had languished since the heady days of angry young manhood.

Discovering that “the mind possesses hidden powers that can influence the external world”³ finally answered his question about whether the mystics’ and poets’ insights of a purposeful universe were real or illusory – and about whether or not the pessimist-philosophers are right. To Colin not only are they wrong, but their state of mind is actively dangerous, since it inhibits the human ability to tune in to and even order the world: “…there is something in our minds that can alter our lives – the ‘something’ that causes synchronicities, for example.”⁴

Perhaps with all the gloom and doom centred on 2012 hysteria, the New Age community in particular needs to receive an injection of Colin’s inspired optimism. Like the Hermeticists of old, he actively celebrates what it means to be human. O what a miracle is Man!

Mysteries (August 1978), his sequel to The Occult, explored in greater depth the relationship between the hidden powers of the mind and the outside world, covering subjects such as dowsing and Earth mysteries.

Another major development in Colin’s thinking came in 1980. Until then he had understood paranormal phenomena purely in terms of the interaction between the hidden depths of human consciousness and the physical world. But through his research into poltergeists (which he originally thought were projections of the subconscious) he came to accept the reality of spirits, the afterlife and also the existence of non-human entities. As he wrote in 1992:

More than twenty years of psychical research have led me to the conclusion that there is a ‘psychic reality’ which runs parallel to our physical reality. Ghosts, demons, poltergeists, fairies, even ‘vampires’, are incursions from this ‘other reality’ into our own.⁵

These, too, found a place in his all-encompassing philosophy:

…their effect is to remind human beings that their material world is not the only reality. We are surrounded by mystery that cannot be understood in terms of scientific materialism. If psychic phenomena have a purpose, it is to wake us up from our ‘dogmatic slumber’, and galvanise us to evolve a higher form of consciousness.⁶

In Alien Dawn (1998) Colin came to agree with researchers such as Jacques Vallée and John A. Keel that encounters with apparent extraterrestrial entities, including alien abductions, belonged to that parallel, psychic reality – essentially as an updating of the ancient fairies and demons tradition. Discussing the work of abduction researcher John Mack he noted:

Since The Outsider was about people who feel that there is something deeply wrong with ‘consensus reality’, and that we need to broaden our views about what is real or possible, I experienced an instant rapport with his conclusions. I ended by coming to believe that although UFO phenomena seem to contradict consensus reality, they do not contradict the reality described by quantum physicists. Or, for that matter, mystics.⁷

Colin has, over an astonishing six decades, built a grand, all-encompassing and consistent vision of the universe and humanity’s place in it. He started out with the basic question: why are we here? This is his bold and heartening answer (from his 2004 autobiography Dreaming to Some Purpose): “The purpose is to colonise this difficult and inhospitable realm of matter and to imbue it with the force of life.”⁸

This gels astonishingly with the latest (if weirdest) scientific thinking, such as physicist John Archibald Wheeler’s idea that we live in a ‘participatory universe’ that is being created by human observation.

That’s perhaps the most enviable of Colin’s talents as an author – he is always relevant. From the days of the angry youth to the spiritually bereft and scared 21^st century he has always understood the underlying mood. But instead of feeding off our angst like other authors he always has taken us by the scruff of the neck, shaken us and made us glad to be alive. With Colin’s words in our heads we face the future with confidence and courage.

It also helps that he writes and speaks like a dream – always with utter sincerity and deep knowledge – and that he’s a really, really nice guy.

Happy birthday, Colin!

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Footnotes

1. The Outsider (Picador, London, 1978 edition), 296.

2. Ibid., 300.

3. Super Consciousness: The Quest for the Peak Experience (Watkins, London, 2009), 141.

4. Dreaming To Some Purpose (Century, London, 2004), 386.

5. Alien Dawn: An Investigation Into the Contact Experience (Virgin, London, 1998), 295, quoting from a 1992 article.

6. Ibid.

7. Dreaming To Some Purpose, 372.

8. Ibid., 386.

LYNN PICKNETT & CLIVE PRINCE’s joint career began with Turin Shroud: How Leonardo Da Vinci Fooled History and – eight books later – they published The Forbidden Universe. They are best known for their 1997 The Templar Revelation, which Dan Brown acknowledged as the primary inspiration for The Da Vinci Code. As a reward for their contribution they were given cameos in the movie (on the London bus). They also give talks to an international audience. Lynn & Clive both live in South London. Their website is www.picknettprince.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 126 (May-June 2011).

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By RUPERT SHELDRAKE, Ph.D.

Images Outside Our Heads

The Sense of Being Stared At

Telepathy

Psychic Pets

Telephone Telepathy

Extended Minds

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By PATRICK HENNINGSEN

Introduction of Parallel Currencies

Enter the Cashless Currency…

The Electronic Deutsche Mark

Contactless Payments

The Socialist Oyster

Social Networks Could Supplant Nations

History Will Repeat Itself

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By RICHARD SMOLEY

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By JOSCELYN GODWIN

The Four Ages (Yugas) of Hinduism

Sri Yukteswar’s Hindu Yuga system

Footnotes

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By PATRICK HENNINGSEN

The Snowden Affair

Europe’s Appeasement

STASI Comparisons

The Accountability Myth

The Star Chamber Courts

NSA in Partnership with GCHQ

Digital Fascism Without Borders

Corporations Using the NSA to Target Activists

Watch the Bouncing Ball

Chilling Effect

Footnotes

.

By ANTHONY PEAKE

The “Voice” Returns

Dick’s “Homoplasmate”

Uncanny Precognition

Vertical Vs. “Orthogonal Time”

Footnotes

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INSIDE THIS MAGAZINE:

War or Peace? World Entering Epochal Period of Geopolitical Change

2014 The Year Ahead

The War on Consciousness

Pope Francis & the Prophecies of St Malachy

Will Thinking Make it So?

Beginning the New Year With New Thought

William Walker Atkinson: Man of Mystery & New Thought Pioneer

Rising Angels: The Redemption of the Fallen Angels

Twin Souls Merging

The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs

The Gods Are Dead! Long Live the Gods!

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By WALTER MASON—

The King & His Wives

The Amazing Construction of the Temple

The Legacy of the Khmer Empire

By MITCH HOROWITZ

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A Man Unknown

The Secret Teachings Born

Secret Wisdom, Practical Wisdom

BY ROBERT JAMES BURATTI

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A Spiritual Heritage

The Physical Path To Enlightenment

Confronting Death

Mastery of Energy

Spirituality and the Samurai

Bibliography

BY RICHARD HEINBERG

—

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Sundaland Rising
Gunung Padang: Indonesia’s Mysterious Lost Civilisation?

Megalithic Origins
Clues Carved in Stone by an Ancient Global Elite

In Search of the Lost City of ‘Z’
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Decoding the Secrets of the Nebra Sky Disc
Man’s Oldest Portrayal of the Cosmos?

Imhotep the African
Architect of the Cosmos

Viral Mythology
How Information was Encoded & Passed Down Through Legend, Art & Architecture

Remnants of the Gods
Impossible Buildings

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