Chapter 8
The Culture of Stones

Magic and Megaliths

We want to turn back now to the many sculptures of female Goddesses found in the most ancient archaeological levels. According to the experts, the discernible idea of the religion of the Goddess is that of an infinite bounty of the Great Mother. It is proposed that such peoples didn’t engage in agriculture because the idea of “owning land” may have been abhorrent to them. The idea of “forcing” the earth to yield, rather than accepting the natural abundance the Goddess provided was simply not a part of their philosophy.

Their Goddess was a Star Being, and she was worshipped in outdoor Temples that were laid out along Celestial Archetypes. But it may be that “worshipping the Goddess” in the terms we understand worship was not precisely what was going on in these temples. Why do I say this? Well, because there was something else VERY mysterious about these ancient peoples - they seem to have had “super powers”. In a previous chapter, we looked at Dr. Robert Schoch’s work on the underwater pyramids off Japan known as the Yonaguni Monuments.

Schoch noted the odd fact that there were no “quarry marks” on the stones of the underwater structure. From this, he concluded that they couldn’t be manmade. But he ought to have considered other great stone cities where there is often a similar lack of evidence of our present quarrying technology.

Morris Jessup wrote extensively about the megalithic structures in his book The Case for the UFO, concluding that, based on his own knowledge and experience, many of them seemed to have been fitted by a process of “grinding in situ”. This, of course, would necessitate a means of handling stone that is completely outside the range of our present understanding.

He then makes a remarkable observation:

It may be that this tremendous power was limited in its application to articles of stone texture only, but this is a little doubtful. Or, perhaps it was limited to nonmagnetic materials in general. Such a limitation would have sidetracked the development of a mechanized culture such as ours of this day, and would partly account for the strange fact that almost all relics of the profound past are nonmetallic. ¹⁶⁸

It is a fact that the Earth is literally blanketed with megaliths from some ancient civilization. Tens of thousands of them!

There are variations in placement and style, but the thing they all have in common is their incredible size and their undeniable antiquity. Many scholars attempt to place them within recorded history by digging around them and shouting “aha!”, when they find something that can be dated within the current scheme of human history. It is now understood by the experts that the megalithic structures demanded complex architectural planning, and they propose that it was the labor of tens of thousands of men working for centuries.

No one has ever made a systematic count of the megaliths, but the estimate goes beyond 50,000. It is also admitted that this figure represents only a fraction, since many have been destroyed not only by the forces of nature, but also by the wanton destruction of man.

Even though there are megalithic monuments in locations around the world, there is nothing anywhere else like there is in Europe. The megaliths of Europe form an “enormous blanket of stone”. Great mounds of green turf or gleaming white quartz pebbles formerly covered many of them. The quartz is, of course, electrically active.

The megalithic mania of ancient Europe is:

Unparalleled indeed in human history. For there has never been anything like this rage, almost mania, for megalith building, except perhaps during the centuries after AD 1000 when much the same part of Europe was covered with what a monk of the time called a ‘white mantle of churches.’ […]

 

The megaliths, then, were raised by some of the earliest Europeans. The reason that this simple fact took so long to be accepted was the peculiar inferiority complex which western Europeans had about their past. Their religion, their laws, their cultural heritage, their very numerals, all come from the East.

 

The inhabitants, before civilization came flooding in from the Mediterranean, were illiterate; they kept no records, they built no cities. It was easy to assume that they were simply bands of howling half-naked savages who painted their bodies, put bear-grease on their hair and ate their cousins.¹⁶⁹

168 Jessup, Morris K., The Case For The UFO (New York: Bantam Books 1955) p. 148.

169 Reader’s Digest, The World’s Last Mysteries, 1977.

The whys and wherefores of this “megalith mania” are still under debate. The fact is: you can’t date stones. Yes, you can date things found around them, or near them, or under them, but you can’t date the stones.

The interesting thing about the megalith builders is that the peoples who were able to perform these utterly amazing feats of engineering are still, in most circles, considered to be barbarians because they did not build cities, engage in agriculture, develop the wheel, or writing. Yet, they did something that clearly cannot be, and was not, done by “civilized” peoples who did all of those “civilized” things. They had some sort of “power” that we cannot replicate and do not understand.

I would like to speculate here for a moment. The first thing that comes to my mind when I consider the problem of the megaliths is that of what I call “payoff”. That is to say, nobody who is human ever does anything without a “payoff”, or to put it more generally, for a reason, Colin Renfrew and his “Big Chief Theory” notwithstanding.¹⁷⁰ What could be the reason for the stones?

170 We discussed briefly Renfrew’s theory in the last chapter.

There were clearly a great deal more of them than would be necessary for simple “monumental” or “worship” purposes, or even time keeping, as recent researchers have suggested. They appear to be arranged like the inner workings of some vast global machine whose purpose is an enigma to us. For example, at Carnac in Brittany, 3,000 menhirs formed thirteen parallel lines, sprawled across four miles of the French countryside.

At the same time, could the overabundant presence of these megaliths, their “machine-like” arrangement, have anything to do with the things that are observed to be “lacking” in these peoples, i.e. the signs of civilization: the wheel, agriculture, writing and cities? Might we suppose the reason for the stones and the reason for the absence of evidence of what we, today, call civilization, are identical?

And since they are found in all the same areas as megaliths exist, might we also suppose that very corpulent women represented in the thousands of carvings had some relationship to these mystical powers as well? I am just observing what is evident based on long periods of contemplating these structures and artifacts. If we sit down before them without any preconceived notions and try to imagine ourselves participating in the life of the people for whom they were a natural and necessary part of the landscape, and put that together with what we know about our own civilization, we come to some very startling ideas.

It is a matter of observation that cities developed in agricultural societies as a central place to manufacture and exchange goods. Agriculture is required to feed stable and static populations. Wheels are needed to both transport people and goods in cities and from agricultural zones to cities and back. Writing is needed to keep records of transactions, as is demonstrated by the clear evidence of the earliest forms of writing: endless lists and tallies of grain and cattle. And, writing was used for another reason: to record and promulgate the exploits of certain Gods and Goddesses as well as keeping track of all the goods tithed to the temple and priesthood.

So, suppose none of this was needed? Suppose a civilization existed that did not need cities, agriculture, wheels or writing? That is not to say that they did not produce goods en masse, nor that they did not produce food for large groups, or that they did not travel over vast distances or record their exploits.

But, suppose they did not do it in the way we would expect? Suppose the STONES DID IT ALL?

What do I mean?

It may very well be that the “worship” of the ancients was not worship in the terms we understand it; it was a technology based on cosmic energy, having something to do with the stars as markers of periods of time in which cosmic rays could be collected, and utilizing stones in interaction with the human body, possibly very large women, to produce whatever the tribe needed.

For those of you who are science fiction fans, simply think of a modified function of The Navigator in the book and movie Dune. It ought not to be lost on the reader that one of the titles of the Goddess Isis, as well as other divine beings, is “The Navigator”. Another point about the Goddess image of Isis is the odd construction on her head that is called the “throne”. The term “seated” is regularly used in conjunction with Goddess images, and in archaic times, kingship was bestowed by marriage to the representative of the Goddess.

Worship of the moon is recorded in the oldest literatures of Egypt, Babylonia, India, and China - and is still practiced today in various parts of the world, particularly among certain African and Native American groups. The experts will tell us that Moon worship is founded on the belief that the phases of the moon and the growth and decline of plant, animal, and human life are related. In some societies food was laid out at night to absorb the rays of the moon, which were thought to have power to cure disease and prolong life.

Among the Baganda of central Africa it was customary for a mother to bathe her newborn child by the light of the first full moon. The moon has also been associated with wisdom and justice, as in the worship of the Egyptian God Thoth and the Mesopotamian God Sin. The moon has also been the basis for many amorous legends and some superstitions (madmen were once considered to be moonstruck, hence the term lunatic). This is just the short version because entire libraries could be filled with books on the mythology of the Moon and related subjects.

The interesting points are that the rays of the moon were anciently thought to have the power to cure disease and prolong life and confer wisdom. These are motifs of both the Holy Grail and the Philosopher’s Stone.

And this brings us to another most interesting idea of Morris Jessup.

Morris Jessup and Gravitational Nodes

The reader familiar with Jessup’s work will know that he died under very mysterious circumstances, and his death was the platform upon which the “legend” of the “Philadelphia Experiment“ was founded. This story is about Secret Government experiments in radar invisibility that resulted in Time Travel/manipulation. It is too much to go into here and now, and not totally relevant to our subject, but we will say that, after much research and tracking of clues, we have concluded that Jessup was most likely murdered - but that it wasn’t for the reasons that most people think.

We believe that he was killed to give “substance” to the diversionary story of the Philadelphia Experiment, which is, in our opinion, designed to promulgate disinformation AND distract attention away from certain observations that he made in his book, cited above.

Jessup points out that UFOs have been sighted and recorded by human beings for thousands of years, and he cites these reports in detail. He informs us that some of the oldest and richest sources of such reports are records of Indian and Tibetan monasteries. He notes that records suggesting sightings 15,000 to 70,000 years ago are to be found there, and these, as well as a report from the court records of Thutmose III that has been, dated to approximately 1500 BC, are quite similar to the reports of the present day.

Jessup then moves to the many sightings made by skeptical astronomers, of which I have a collection myself. Their observations are quantitative and documented as to time and conditions of observation.

The astronomers, though unable to explain what they were seeing, nevertheless faithfully recorded all details utilizing whatever equipment was available to them at the various periods when the observations were made. Simultaneous observations by two or more observers have at times established the approximate distances of the UFOs through the study of parallax calculations.¹⁷¹ It was these observations, with certain specific data included, that provided the details upon which Jessup formulated his idea.

171 “Parallax” is the displacement, often measurable, caused by looking at an object from two different points; e.g. hold up a finger and view it with first one eye and then the other. The displacement against a distinct background is parallax.

He called it the “habitat of the UFOs”.

Refinements of Bode’s law indicate nodes in the gravitational field, at which planets, asteroids, and possibly comets and meteors tend to locate themselves. An extension of the theory to the satellite systems of the major planets indicates a similar system of nodes on smaller scales, where planets, rather than the sun, are gravitational centers. …it might well be that these gravitational nodes are occupied to some degree by navigable constructions.[…]

 

We can, therefore, take it as highly probable that there are many zones of convenience around the planets, as well as around the sun, which are presently unoccupied by planets or satellites of any considerable size and which may well be used by enlightened space dwellers. Such zones, if they exist, are in addition to the demonstrable earth-sun-moon neutral.

Since this system of nodes appears to be some function of the radius of the attracting body, it may be that there is a complete series of them in concentric circles starting at the surface of a parent body such as the earth, but their existence or true nature can hardly be known to us until we can in some way determine the nature of gravity itself. There may even be hints available to us regarding gravity.

For instance, no final settlement has ever been made of the argument over the opposed wave and corpuscular theories of the propagation of light. An assumption that the ether, a necessary adjunct to the wave theory, is identical with the gravitational field, whatever that may be, would reconcile the opposing theories and a quantum of light would then be merely a pulsation or fluctuation in the gravitational field. Intense studies of the movements of space-navigable UFOs might furnish vital clues to such problems.[…]

There is increasingly strong evidence that gravity is neither so continuous, so immaterial nor so obscure as to be completely unamenable to use, manipulation and control. […] The lifting of the ancient megalithic structures, too, must surely have come through levitation.[…]

 

It is my belief that something of the sort was done in the antediluvian past, through either research or through some fortuitous discovery of physical forces and laws, which have not as yet been revealed to scientists of this second wave of civilization.¹⁷²

172 Jessup, Morris K., The Case for the UFO, (New York: Bantum Books 1955) pp. 38-42.

Jessup next goes on to discuss the periodicity of events of celestial and spatial origin. As he stated, it is not particularly astonishing that such phenomena should be cyclic, for nearly everything astronomical IS periodic.

There are several important things in the comments of Jessup that are pertinent to our discussion here. Not only is he drawing very close to describing a paraphysical, hyperdimensional state of existence which utilizes gravitational technology, he is also pointing out a certain “periodicity” to the activities of same in relationship to what might be considered points in time when “dimensional doorways” open and close naturally. This is the fundamental concept behind his idea of gravitational nodes in a three-body system, the Earth, Moon and Sun.

Jessup came to these ideas by researching UFOs and other anomalous phenomena, and it is very interesting to speculate as to how this might connect to the ideas of Gurdjieff when he says we are “food for the Moon”. In the latter case, Gurdjieff was repeating an ancient idea that may have been related to the concept of hyperdimensional beings using gravitational nodes as “portals” between dimensions.

Another important point about Jessup’s comments is his connection between scientific observations and clues in ancient myths to the fact that the megalith builders had extraordinary abilities. In short, what could it mean to be “enthroned” in terms of the Goddess? How could this be a source of health, extended life, knowledge and other benefits?

Where on earth did such ideas come from?

The Dance of the Hours

The Book of Hours of Jean de France, Duc de Berry, is considered to be one of the most magnificent of late medieval manuscripts that have survived into our time. A “Book of Hours” is a prayer book based on the religious calendar of saints and festivals throughout the year. The book commissioned by the Duke, undertaken by the brothers Limbourg, consists of twelve folios; one for each month. According to a lengthy analysis of these folios by Prof. Otto Neugebauer, this calendar encodes the traditions of ancient astronomy and mathematics from deepest antiquity.

At the conclusion of a fascinating analysis, demonstrating the method of decoding the Book of Hours, Otto Neugebauer writes:

The scheme ends where it began, with January 19, if we make the two last lunations 29 days long. This final exception to the rule of alternation was called sallus lunae, the “mump of the moon.” In order to know which date is supposed to be a new moon, one need only know which number the present year has in the 19-year cycle. This number is called the “golden number” because, as a scholar of the 13th century expressed it, “this number excels all other lunar rations as gold excels all other metals.”¹⁷³

173 Neugebauer, Otto, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, (New York: Dover 1969).

The 19-year cycle is called a “Metonic Cycle”. It refers to the observational fact that 19 years (6939.689 days) is almost exactly the same length as 235 lunar months (6939.602 days) and that a 19-year cycle consisting of 12 years that were 12-lunar-months-long and 7 years that were 13-lunar-months-long would keep the lunar months in step with the seasons. In other words, the phases of the Moon start to reoccur, within about 2 hours, on the same days of the same months of the year.

Meton tried to sell the scheme to the Athenians, who weren’t interested, it seems, and nevertheless they named the idea the “Metonic Cycle”. This 19-year cycle is closely related to the 18.6 year precession of the moon’s orbit about the earth which causes a corresponding wobble (nutation) on the earth’s motion. This suggests that the megalith builders KNEW about the planetary wobble! In fact, the 18.6 year cycle seems to be a key concern of the megalith builders: it is also an observational fact that every 18.6 years, the moon reaches a major standstill point, which means that every 18.6 years, the rising or setting Moon reaches a northern extreme in rising and setting azimuth at summer solstice, and a southern extreme at winter solstice.

In 1897 at Coligny in Burgundy, fragments of a bronze tablet were discovered.

Reassembled, this tablet is the longest known document in the Gallic language. Dating to around the 1st century BC, it contains forty different words written in Latin script, and it was a calendar. After it was deciphered, it became clear that the Celts worked in units of sixty-two lunar months, from one new moon to the next.

One of these months would contain thirty days, the next twenty-nine, which gave half-months of fifteen days, or one fifteen-day period followed by a fourteen-day period. The days were counted from moon-rise to moon-rise. The year that emerged from all this was eleven days shorter than the 365-day solar year. They corrected this problem, however, by the simple expedient of alternating 12-month years with 13-month years, - 3 of the former and 2 of the latter in a complete cycle of 62 months.

Obviously, this was a rather ingenious solution to the problem but it begs the question: it’s obvious that they had the mathematical skills to calculate the solar year rather accurately, so why didn’t they use it as their calendar? Why were they not linking the passage of time to the Sun, the agricultural cycles? Why were they so obviously concerned with what the Moon was doing and having a precise way of keeping track of it? Why did they count their days from moon-rise to moonrise? We note that this is a custom still reflected in the practices of the Jews and Moslems, who count a day as beginning when the Sun sets as a consequence of their interactions with the Indo-Europeans.

Well, of course the experts tell us it was because they “worshipped” the Moon. It was close and big and awesome to behold, so they naturally just created a whole slew of ignorant beliefs about it, and it became their “Goddess”, or God, as the case may be. As I have already noted, by observing children, we may come to a better idea of how it would be unlikely for the ancients (assuming they were howling savages) to have come up with such ideas without some basis, without some “story” having been told to them. Children accept the natural world around them as it is until someone tells them a story. And even then, you have to work hard to convince them that the story is true because if you say that the moon is made of green cheese, the child will think you have gone nuts.

However, if we connect Jessup’s idea of a gravitational node that lies somewhere between the earth and the moon, in a specific and cyclic relationship, to the strange marking of time by the ancients according to where the moon was, as well as the later “moon worship” as the transmission of an archaic knowledge of some secret source of power, then we come to the idea that the ancient technology was something quite extraordinary.

What seems to be evident is that the megalith builders were concerned enough with the “three body system” - that relates to the nutation of the Earth to the relative positions of the earth-moon-sun - that they based their calendrical system on this factor! This very well may suggest that they USED gravity.

We want to emphasize that curious comment of a thirteenth century scholar quoted by Neugebauer who said, regarding the 19 year cycle:

“this number excels all other lunar rations as gold excels all other metals.”

If we then connect that remark to the quests of the alchemist to “transmute base metals into gold” via the “philosopher’s stone”, and the alchemical adage, “the right person, in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing, can accomplish the work”, we begin to realize that we are moving in the correct direction.

Most particularly when we recall that curious story about Fulcanelli and Jacques Bergier:

Certain geometrical arrangements of highly purified materials are enough to release atomic forces without having recourse to either electricity or vacuum techniques.¹⁷⁴

174 Pauwels, L, and Bergier, J., The Morning of the Magicians, (New York: Stein and Day. 1964) p. 77.

This will become even more significant further on.

Are there any clues about stones themselves being part of an ancient technology? At present, there are many people who claim that the megaliths are arranged around the world on a grid, the structure of which is, according to them, 36 degrees of longitude apart.

The assumption is that all of the megaliths belong to a single, pre-flood civilization. The assumption being made from this hypothesis is that the strange locations of these complexes implies that the purpose of the megaliths was not to derive power from a grid for local use, but rather, to do something to the earth grid by coordinating local actions on a global basis. In other words, the claim is that the megaliths appear to have been used to put energy into a global grid rather than to extract energy from it.

There are problems with this blanket assumption. First of all, while we do not think that the present scientific dating is reliable, we do think that some ball-park figures can be established if enough care is taken in observing individual situations and taking all the evidence into account. The undersea structures off Japan, Bimini, and Malta, as well as Tiahuanaco in South America, all suggest a civilization that belonged to a pre-cataclysmic environment.

But many other megalithic structures clearly belong to an “eruption” of civilization in a postcataclysmic environment, including the pyramids in Egypt, Central America, Stonehenge, and so on. What is striking is the difference between the pyramidal groups and the “circle making” groups, though many current researchers are trying to connect them to the same basic philosophical context. I think that may be a mistake.

It has been proposed by the advocates of so-called Sacred Geometry that the placing of the megaliths was a function of “Grid Engineering”, and that this is mankind’s oldest science. Such people further claim that precise geometrical spherical versions of the cube, such as the tetrahedron, octahedron, icosahedron, dodecahedron, and other compound and semi-regular solids, such as the cuboctahedron, are now recognized as evidence of Neolithic man’s familiarity with the concepts of this putative sacred geometry.

These folks then go on to propose that this was a “mystical” sort of practice that includes visualizing the earth’s energy grid in certain ritualistic ways that will bring the individual in “tune” with the superior intelligence of the Earth by producing “resonance”.

I have to wonder about this interpretation. If, as we suspect, we have been under an “Hyperdimensional Raj”¹⁷⁵ for these many thousands of years, we might think that much of this material is designed to do one of two things:

1) to inform us about the “control system”

2) to perpetuate it

What would be more natural than for the Matrix Control system to manipulate people to think that “visualizing” these grids will bring them into “harmony” with the earth and that this is a “good thing”?

175 Thanks to C. Scott Littleton for this handy term.

It may be, in fact, that it is designed to strengthen the prison and to make human beings into the “batteries” that keep it in place! However, that does not mean that discovering these things and knowing where these points are is not a useful exercise. But, to take this very scientific knowledge, ignore its possible correct applications, and fall into the trap of doing what amounts to “rituals” of visualization so as to bring oneself into “harmony” with the earth may be exactly what “they” want us to do.

The very fact that it is being so widely promulgated in this way suggests to me that this is the case.

Possible Antagonistic Polarities in Ancient Civilizations

When one tracks back through all of the ancient “matters” and studies the different groups, trying to follow them as they moved from place to place, studying the genetic morphology in order to keep track of who is who, and comparing linguistics and myth and archaeology, one comes to the startling realization that there were significant polarities throughout space and time.

I have tentatively identified these polarities as the Circle People and the Triangle - or Pyramid - People. In a general sense, one can see the broad brush of the triangle people in the Southern hemisphere, in the pyramids and related cultures and artifacts.

For the most part, their art is primitive and stylistically rigid. In the northern hemisphere, one sees the circle makers, the spirals, the rough megaliths, the art of Lascaux and Chauvet and the many other caves. One can note a clear difference between the perceptions and the response to the environment between the two trends and groups. Of course, there are areas where there was obvious mixture of both cultures and styles, and ideological constructions, but overall, there is a very distinct difference.

There are many books on “alternative science” being published in the present time about the purported ancient civilizations. One assumption that they all seem to hold in common is that everything was all hunky dory, sweetness and light among all the people, and the only thing that happened was that a nasty cataclysm came along and brought it all to an end.

They keep forgetting the issue of the Vedas and Plato’s Timaeus where an ancient war was described, and it was at that point in time, or immediately after, that the cosmic catastrophe occurred. It would then be only reasonable to suspect that the same differences between the warring parties would be carried over into the post cataclysmic world.

And it seems to be a reasonable assumption that the “southern influence”, including Egypt, was that of the “Atlanteans” of Plato, and that the “northern influence”, including the builders of Stonehenge, were the “Athenians” of Plato, the “Sons of Boreas”, or the North Wind, keeping in mind that these “Athenians” were obviously not from Athens as we know it today, though we are beginning to suspect that we know who they were.

We should also like to note that the so-called “civilizing influence” of the South, of the creators of agricultural civilizations, the instigation of writing and the wheel and so forth, is always connected in some way to “scaly” critters like Fish Gods or Serpents.

It isn’t until fairly late that the Serpent makes his appearance among the archaeological finds of Europe and central Asia. Before the serpent appeared there, there were only Goddesses, birds, and wavy lines representing water and cosmic energy. I think that it is dangerous to confuse the issues.

Again and again we see currents of two completely different processes, two factions, two ways of perceiving and interacting with the cosmos: one that wishes to conceal and one that wishes to reveal, one that wishes to dominate, one that wishes to share.

We notice that many megalithic sites are located a certain points that correspond with a certain geometry. But, if we look even closer, if we discard the current so-called “Sacred Geometry” and just look at the sites themselves and let them speak - all of them - instead of leaving this one or that one out because it doesn’t quite fit, or only is “very close” to fitting, we may discover another relationship that is suggested by the sites, rather than working to fit the sites into an assumption.

So many bizarre ideas are being propagated at the present time, including the preposterous one about the megaliths being set up to absorb the energy of human sacrifices, and that the stones “drink blood...” that it is quite discouraging to realize how easily people are misled by nonsense. If such writers cannot figure out that the megaliths were demonized by the church because they were revered by the nature religions, which we theorize are carriers of ancient scientific knowledge, and the nature religions themselves were also demonized, then there isn’t much chance that they will figure anything else out either.

Such people also tend to be convinced that the Holy Grail is the cup from the Last Supper, too, and I won’t even comment on that.

Stone Technology and T.C. Lethbridge

Getting back to our stones, and whether or not we can find even a hint that they were involved in some kind of technology, we note first of all that archaeologist T.C. Lethbridge once placed his hand on one of the stones and received a strong tingling sensation like an electric shock, and the huge, heavy stone felt as if it were rocking wildly. Many other people have received sensations of shock when placing their hands on certain stones, and photographs have occasionally shown inexplicable light radiations emanating from them.

Upon examination, we find that many of the megaliths were engraved with “cup and ring” marks - concentric rings and channels. The first impression these designs give is that of a circuit board of a computer.

In Greek myth, the walls of Thebes were said to have been constructed by the skill of a musician called Amphion and his lyre. He played the lyre in such a way that stones were made to move. Phoenician myth speaks of the God Ouranus moving stones as if they had life of their own. This is one of numerous traditions from around the world that sound in various forms was used to levitate and move large stones.

Stones may have another interesting property that deserves serious research. In 1982, Tafter, the landlord at the Prince of Wales Inn at Kenfig in Mid-Glamorgan, Wales, complained of the sound of organ music and voices keeping him awake at night. To investigate, John Marke, an electrical engineer, and Allan Jenkins, an industrial chemist, connected electrodes to the wall of the pub after closing time one night. They fed 20,000 volts across the electrodes and locked tape recorders in the room for four hours.

When the tapes were analyzed, they had succeeded in taping voices speaking in old Welsh, organ music, and a ticking clock. Interestingly, there was no clock in the room at the time. It has been suggested that the stones in the wall contained substances similar to those found in modern recording tape.

This last remark about “recordings” in stone brings us to another interesting item. Tom C. Lethbridge, the above mentioned archeologist (who became Director of Excavations for the Cambridge Antiquarian Society and Director of the University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology), wrote a number of excellent books that form a collection that has been called one of the most fascinating records of paranormal research ever compiled. In recent years, Lethbridge is finally beginning to be fully appreciated.

Combining the skills of a scientist with a completely open mind, he conducted a series of experiments that convinced him of the existence of hyperdimensional realms that interact dynamically with our own.

Colin Wilson called him a man whose gifts were far ahead of his time and credited him with one of the most remarkable and original minds in parapsychology. We agree most heartily and highly recommend his work to the reader. Over the past ten years or more, Lethbridge’s work has served us as a platform for many fruitful speculations and experiments about hyperdimensional realities.

Tom Lethbridge, the Cambridge don, took no interest in psychical research until after he had retired. But dowsing fascinated him.

In the early 1930’s, he and another archaeologist were looking for Viking graves on the Isle of Lundy in the Bristol Channel. After finding what they came for, they were just killing time while waiting for a ferry and decided to try some experiments with dowsing, which had been an interest of Lethbridge for some time. Lundy Island is crisscrossed with seams of volcanic rock that extrude through the slate, and Lethbridge wanted to see if dowsing would locate them. So, he had his friend blindfold him and lead him about with a forked hazel stick. Every time he passed over a volcanic seam, the hazel fork twisted violently in his hands. The friend was carrying a very sensitive magnetometer and was able to immediately verify that Lethbridge had accurately located the volcanic seams of rock.

Lethbridge realized that, like running water, volcanic rock has a faint magnetic field. He had written about dowsing earlier,

“Most people can dowse, if they know how to do it. If they cannot do it, there is probably some fault in the electrical system of their bodies”.

This remark makes us wonder if there are not people who have extremely powerful and well-developed electrical systems in their bodies, and if such conditions might not be a genetic inheritance? This question will come up again further on, so keep it in mind.

Lethbridge’s success with finding volcanic rock started him off on his investigations into other realms. Hidden objects could not stay hidden when Lethbridge was wandering around with his rods, twigs or pendulum. There didn’t seem to be any limits to what could be detected this way. He had proved to his complete satisfaction not only that dowsing worked, but that it was “mind stuff” - the rod or pendulum was connected to the mind of the person holding it in some way.

Tom Lethbridge’s results proved to be not only accurate but also repeatable, and he found the responses appeared to be governed by vibrations of various wavelengths. The wavelength of water, for instance, was different to that of metal. His principal instrument became the pendulum, and he found a lot depended on the length of the pendulum’s cord.

He was able to test not only for minerals but abstract things and qualities like anger, death, deceit, sleep, colors, male, and female. In a lengthy series of trial and error experiments, he created a table of very precise measurements showing, for example, that a 22-inch length would reveal the existence of silver or lead, while iron demanded a 32-inch stretch, but sulphur a mere 7 inches.

Stranger still, though, the pendulum would react to different emotions and attributes, with a different length for feminine (29”) and masculine (24”) objects, including human or animal remains. The details of his experiments are utterly fascinating. This open-minded and extremely literate man was aware that many people would regard his methods and findings with suspicion.

He once wrote:

“It is impossible for it to be imaginary. If you can use a pendulum to work out within an inch or two exactly where something lies hidden beneath undisturbed turf, and do this in front of witnesses, and then go to the spot which the pendulum has indicated and take off the turf, dig up the soil beneath and find the object. If you can do this same operation again and again and almost always succeed, this cannot be imagination, delusion, or any of those things. It is scientific experiment, however crude it may be.”

Perhaps the reason why some still cannot accept dowsing is because it is so incredibly simple. At no cost at all you can produce an instrument no piece of expensive machinery can equal. But again, Lethbridge points out that everything depends on the operator.

Lethbridge found himself confronted with a very strange world - “far stranger I feel than anything produced by physics, botany or biology” - and he wrote of millions of cones of force surrounding each of us in our homes and backyards which can be contacted instantly by something in our own “energy field”. It was much more difficult to comprehend than molecules, atoms and electrons, he said, because we had been brought up to take these for granted.

As we have already noted, if the infrastructure of our civilization were to be destroyed, then if a person a hundred years later tried to explain the theory of radio and television, people would find it impossible to comprehend. It would sound like magic.

Where does the power to work a pendulum come from? Lethbridge thought that it might be something invisible and intangible, a part of us, which knows far more than we do. Is it mind or soul? Some sort of electromagnetic or psyche field? Something linked to a higher dimension? He agonized over this and admitted he wasn’t wise enough to come to any definite conclusion, apart from the thought that ancient man knew far more about it than we do today.

Although, Lethbridge did a huge amount of experimental work in the field of dowsing, and his results deserve attention from any serious student of the deeper realities of our world, what we are interested in here is his work in another, though related, direction.

In 1957, Lethbridge left Cambridge in disgust at the narrow-minded attitudes of the scholars there. He moved into Hole House, an old Tudor mansion on the south coast of Devon. Next door to him lived a little old white-haired lady who assured Lethbridge that she could put spells on people who annoyed her and that she was able to travel out of her body at night and wander around the district. She explained that if she wanted to discourage unwanted visitors, she had only to visualize a five-pointed star in the path of the individual and they would stay away. Lethbridge, of course, was skeptical.

But, being an experimenter, Lethbridge was trying the visualization one evening while lying in bed. That night, his wife awakened with the feeling that somebody else was in the room. She could see a faint glow of light at the foot of the bed, which slowly faded. The next day the old lady came to see them and told them that she had come to “visit” them the previous night and had found the bed surrounded by triangles of fire.

Leaving aside whether or not we can prove this story to be anything more than a subjective experience, there are two important points we would like to make. The first one is that somehow, this practice of “visualizing pentagrams” seems to have a causal relationship to the appearance of the old woman in Lethbridge’s bedroom. It was almost as though the practice “attracted” the visitor, possibly even inspiring the wish or compulsion to visit. The second is that the visualized pentagrams appeared as triangles of fire.

Theories of how hyperdimensional objects might appear in fourth dimensional space-time, or how four dimensional objects might appear in three dimensional space time, in mathematical terms, lends a modicum of credibility to this story. If the old woman had seen fiery pentagrams, we would not take such notice of the event.

That a pentagon in our world might appear as a triangle in another realm suggests something very mysterious here. I am also intrigued by the possible relationship to the differences of these hyperdimensional solids and the difference between the perspectives of the “triangle people” and the “circle people”. This is also a very important point related to the dangers of visualizing geometric shapes when we consider the subsequent events that Lethbridge recounted.

Several years later, the old lady told Lethbridge that she was going to put a spell on the cattle of a farmer with whom she was quarreling. At this point, Lethbridge took her seriously and warned her about the dangers of practicing magic. She ignored him, and one day not long after declaring her intentions, she was found dead in her bed under mysterious circumstances. As it happened, the cattle of two other nearby farmers did get hoof and mouth disease, but the cattle of the farmer with whom the old lady was quarreling were unaffected. Lethbridge was convinced that the “spell” had rebounded on the old lady in some way. But, it was this event that led to an important insight for us here, which is why we have recounted the story.

Sometime after the old woman’s death, Lethbridge was passing her cottage and suddenly experienced a “nasty feeling”, a “suffocating sense of depression”. His curiosity aroused, Lethbridge walked around the cottage and discovered a most interesting thing: he could step into and out of the “depression” just as if it were some kind of invisibly defined “locus”.

This reminded Lethbridge of a similar experience he had had when walking with his mother as a teenager. It was in the Great Wood near Wokingham, on a nice morning, when suddenly the two of them experienced a,

“horrible feeling of gloom and depression, which crept upon us like a blanket of fog over the surface of the sea”.

They left in a hurry and only later discovered that the corpse of a suicide had been discovered lying just a few yards from where they had been standing. Some years later, Lethbridge and his wife went to the seashore to collect seaweed for their garden. As he walked on the beach, he again experienced the sense of depression, gloom and fear descending on him. Resisting this influence, Lethbridge and his wife began to fill their sacks with seaweed.

After a very short period of this activity, Lethbridge’s wife, Mina, came running up to him demanding that they leave saying,

“I can’t stand this place a minute longer. There’s something frightful here”.

In a discussion about the phenomenon with Mina’s brother the following day, the brother mentioned that he had experienced something very similar in a field near Avebury, in Wiltshire.

When he said the word “field”, it clicked in Lethbridge’s mind and he remembered that field telephones often short circuit in warm, muggy weather.

 “What was the weather like?”, he asked.
“Warm and damp”, replied the brother.

Right there, the idea began to shape itself in Lethbridge’s mind. Water.

On the day he had been in the Great Wood, it had been warm and damp. When they had been at the beach gathering seaweed, it had likewise been warm and damp. Experiment was obviously in order!

The next weekend, Lethbridge and his wife again visited the bay. Again, as they stepped onto the beach, the same bank of depression and gloom enveloped them. Mina led him to the spot where she had experienced such an overwhelming sensation that she had insisted on leaving the place. At that spot, the sensation was so powerful that they actually felt dizzy. Lethbridge described it as being similar to having a high fever and full of drugs. As it happened, on either side of this spot were two streams of water.

Mina went off to the cliff to look at the scenery and suddenly walked into the “depression” again. She actually had the sensation that something or someone was urging her to jump off the cliff! When she had brought it to the attention of Lethbridge, he agreed that this spot was as “sinister” as the spot on the beach between the streams.

As it turned out, nine years later, a man did commit suicide from that exact spot. Lethbridge wondered if there was some sort of “timeless” sensation that had been “imprinted” on the area via some sort of “recording” principle. It seemed that, whether from the past or the future, feelings of despair were somehow recorded on the surroundings, in the very atmosphere, it seemed.

The only question was, how? Lethbridge believed that the key was water.

A hint of what may be happening here is provided by the work of Y. Rocard of the Sorbonne, who had discovered that underground water produces changes in the earth’s magnetic field, and this was proposed as the solution as to why dowsing works. The water does this because it has a field of its own which interacts with the earth’s field.

And most significantly to us here is that magnetic fields are the means by which sound is recorded on tape covered with iron oxide. This suggested to Lethbridge that the magnetic field produced by running water could record strong emotions that, as Lethbridge also noted, produce electrical activity in the human physiology. Such fields could be “played back” continuously, and amplified in damp and muggy weather.

This would explain why these “areas of depression” seem to form invisible walls. If you bring a magnet closer and closer to an iron object, you notice that at a certain point, the object is “seized” by the magnet as it enters the force field. Lethbridge’s experiments took a new turn at this point, and led to evidence that many things that are perceived as “hauntings” or “ghosts” are really just “recordings”.

At some point he thought about the fact that ghosts are often reported to reappear on certain “anniversaries” which suggests that there are other cyclical currents that turn such recordings on or off or simply amplify them. To answer the question that is growing in the reader’s mind, yes, it seems that some hauntings are the result of happy emotions, and strong happiness can also be recorded in the same way. It also seems that the type of material substance that the human “field” interacts with has an important role. For example, in the 1840s, a certain Bishop Polk told a Joseph Rhodes Buchanan that he could detect brass in the dark. He said that when he touched it, a distinctly unpleasant taste was produced in his mouth.

Buchanan tested him and discovered that it was true, even if the metal was carefully and thickly wrapped in paper. Buchanan experimented with his students and found that some of them had a similar ability. In fact, it seemed that there were quite a number of substances that could be detected this way, and the only explanation that seemed reasonable was that the nerves of the human being produce some sort of field - he called it the nerve aura - which interacts with a similar “field” of the object. Buchanan and others called the ability to “read” these fields “psychometry”, and it is popularly practiced today.

What many people do not realize is that the principle of psychometry, that many take for granted - they can “feel the vibrations” - led Tom Lethbridge to some startling revelations.

As noted, Tom Lethbridge had concluded after a lot of experiments that a dowsing pendulum could somehow respond to different substances, and that lengthening or shortening the string was like tuning the pendulum to a particular wavelength. Lethbridge spent days testing all kinds of different substances. He discovered that the wavelength for silver is the same as lead: 22 inches. Truffles and beech wood both respond at 17 inches. This meant that there must be something further about such “paired” items to distinguish them. After some testing, Lethbridge discovered that it was not just the length of the string, but the number and direction of revolutions.

For lead, the pendulum would gyrate 16 times and for silver it would gyrate 22 times. It was beginning to look like nature had a truly marvelous and foolproof code for identifying anything. It is also beginning to appear to us that the ancients knew this and that they may have attempted to transmit this knowledge to us via myth and legend and the “Green Language”. (That magical mumbo jumbo might not be the solution to the mysteries is also becoming more and more apparent, but, let us continue into even more remarkable speculations of Tom Lethbridge.)

Through a variety of experiments, Lethbridge established the “frequency” for both death and violent anger: 40 inches. This also proved to be the frequency for cold and black. Indeed, colors have frequency. Grey is 22 inches - not a surprise since it is the color of both lead and silver. Yellow is 29 and green is 30. After months of experiments, Lethbridge had constructed his table of frequencies, and he had discovered that 40 inches was some kind of limit.

Every single substance that he tested fell between zero and 40 inches. It was at this point that he discovered something curious: Sulphur reacts to a 7 inch pendulum; if he extended the pendulum to 47 inches, it would still react to sulphur, but not directly over it. It would only react a little to one side. He then discovered that this was true of everything else he tried beyond the number 40 - it would react, but only to one side. He noticed another odd thing: beyond 40 inches, there was no rate for the concept of time. The pendulum simply would not respond.

Lethbridge realized that he was measuring a different dimension.

However, when he lengthened the pendulum to 80 inches, there was a response to the idea of time. Lethbridge pondered this and finally theorized that in the realm beyond 40, the pendulum is in time itself, and that is why there is no reaction to the idea. But, beyond that, there are other “realms” where the idea of time exists in another world “beyond death”. Lethbridge discovered that if he lengthened the string again beyond 80 inches, he got the same result, as if there were still another dimension. Lethbridge realized that he had discovered worlds in other dimensions, outside the limits of space and time, and theorized that we cannot see it because our physical bodies are limited detectors.

Tom Lethbridge continued with his experiments and determined that the world of the “next” level beyond our own is one in which the energy vibrations are four times as fast as those of our world. The effect of encountering this reality is like a fast train passing a slow one. Even though they are both moving forward, the slow train seems to be moving backward. This hyperdimensional world is all around us, yet we are unable to see it because it is beyond the range of our senses. All the objects of our world are very likely just our limited perceptions of what is happening in this total reality.

His experiments with megaliths indicated that they were placed to mark places where the earth forces were most powerful, and to harness energy in some way now forgotten.

Unfortunately, Lethbridge died of a heart attack before he could complete his researches.

At this point we would like to note that Tom Lethbridge was not a spiritualist. He believed that magic, spiritualism, occultism and other forms of mumbo jumbo are merely crude attempts to understand the vast realm of hidden energies in which we live. We would like to add that expositions along the lines of most esoterica generally serve only to obscure, not to reveal; to disinform, rather than to produce real knowledge.

Tom Lethbridge used logic and experiment and observation to come to the conclusion that there are other realms of reality beyond our world and that there are forms of energy that we do not even begin to understand.

Stones and “Sacred Geometry” ¹⁷⁶

Coming back now to our stones, and the questions about their placement, we realize that this matter is not as simple as the many “Sacred Geometry” specialists would have us believe. We need to do more investigating before we come to any solid conclusions about earth grids and what they may or may not do.

176 Lethbridge, T.C., The Power of the Pendulum (Viking, Penguin, 1991); also see Wilson, Colin, Mysteries (Putnam Publishing Group, 1980).

The temple at Baalbek, Lebanon, is probably one of the most astonishing structures on earth due to the sheer size of the stones used in its construction. In a quarry about a mile away from the actual temple is an abandoned stone that was never used. It is the biggest stone block ever cut by man and its measurements are 68 ft by 14 feet wide and 14 feet tall. In other words, it is a single building block that is as large as two complete modest homes put together. The block is estimated to weigh 1200 tons.

From this single block, if cut into manageable pieces, stonemasons could build 15 houses, each 20 by 40 feet, with walls a foot thick. The Egyptian obelisks were large; each being a single block, but the largest one standing today is less than half the size of this stone. The marble for the columns of Baalbek was obtained from a quarry far up the Nile, and then overland for 400 miles. The column drums themselves were cut in sections 20 feet long. The platform upon which Baalbek is built is composed of granite blocks and measures 900 feet by 600 feet.

In this platform are positioned three stones that are each 63 feet long, 13 feet high, and 10 feet thick. The doorway of the “smaller” temple of Bacchus at Baalbek is fifty feet high and is said to be the most marvelous doorway in all of ancient architecture. Even as a ruin, having been damaged by wars and earthquakes, Baalbek is still one of the most awesome sights in the world.

Curiously, most of those who write about ancient monuments seldom mention Baalbek except in passing.

One has to wonder if it is because they simply prefer to not have to think about the cutting and moving of those stones?

The Coral Castle and Spinning Airplane Seats

In October of 1994, I asked the Cassiopaeans - myself in the future - how the stones of Baalbek were cut and moved. They replied that it was done by “sound wave focusing”. Well, sure!

But then they added that I was going to discover something about this myself, and they cryptically mentioned the “Coral Castle”.

Edward Leedskalnin was a 100-pound, unschooled wizard who single-handedly built an edifice known as the Coral Castle down in South Florida.

Some of the stones Edward used in the construction of the Coral Castle weigh 28 tons. That is not in the same ballpark as the stones of Baalbek, but for the work of a single, little guy, it suggests to us that he certainly discovered something!

Leedskalnin also produced several pamphlets for sale during the mid-1940’s dealing with magnetic currents. These pamphlets describe various experiments he undertook with home made magnets that he created using such things as welding rods, steel fishing line, and automobile batteries. It is thought that he was explicating the ideas that would lead the insightful reader to the same discovery he had made himself. So far, no one has figured it out except to propose that it had something to do with the so-called “earth grid”, which, as we will see, is more nonsense.

As it happens, even though I lived my entire life in Florida, I had never been to see this purported marvel, and the only things I knew about it were what I had learned by watching a television program about it on Unsolved Mysteries, I believe.

The February following the Cassiopaean’s remark about the Coral Castle, I was invited to give a talk to a study group in Orlando.

After my little talk, a funny old man came up to me with a big grin on his face, grabbed my hand and shook it vigorously and said to me with a faint accent,

“Ya know, I’ve been studying this UFO business for over 40 years - I talked with Hynek and Major Keyhoe and all that - and you are the first person I have ever heard who has gotten up in public and described it as it really is! I have some material you might be interested in. You should come and see me some time”!

Well, I thought he was just an old guy with a lot of time on his hands that needed company and might be using this as an excuse to get it. I thanked him, chatted a bit, and when he went off to get a snack, I “mingled” in the direction of the host of the event who was chatting with several other people, intending to make my adieus.

He was apparently describing the Florida tourist attractions to a group of out-of-towners when he said,

“And you might want to go down and have a look at this Coral Castle, too”!

“What is that?”, one of them asked.

The host proceeded to recap the Unsolved Mysteries presentation.

Then he said: “You can ask Henry over there”, pointing at my little old man who knew Hynek, “he was a close friend of the guy who built the Coral Castle”.

Well, needless to say, after hearing this, I remembered the Cassiopaeans had said that I would “discover” something about this “sound-wave focusing”.

I decided that I wouldn’t leave just yet, and went back to chat with the old man and said,

“I hear you knew the guy who built the Coral Castle?”
“Ayup! Sure did! Knew him for years! I was stationed over there in Homestead area after the war and got to know him pretty well.”

I asked, “Did he ever tell you how he did it?”

“Nope. He never would tell anybody. He would always say that he knew the secret of how the pyramids were built, but nobody ever saw him do it. I have some ideas about it, though, and I wrote a little book about him and my experiences and observations. You know, it’s a shame that the television program didn’t give the real story! All that nonsense about ‘Sweet Sixteen’ and a ‘broken heart’ and so on! What a lot of crap! Sure! If you come to visit, I can show you what I do know! Do ‘ya know something? I am the only person ole Edward ever invited inside his private living quarters! Ayup! He was a real loner!”

I was already making plans for a visit!

I made the trip back over to the Orlando area within a couple of weeks. I was truly amazed at what I found. Henry hadn’t been exaggerating when he said he had been interested in studying UFOs for forty years. His home was a veritable museum of UFOs! There were paintings, enlarged photographs on the walls, knick-knacks and memorabilia on the tables; and books! He had a HUGE collection of books in bookcases and papers in boxes all over his house.

Out of one of these boxes he pulled a loose-leaf notebook containing a typewritten manuscript. It had black and white photographs stuck in the appropriate places with corner tabs, and he said it was the only copy. I was appalled at that and offered to transcribe it onto the computer and give him a copy on diskette. He said he would like that very much, but he was not yet ready to let the only existing copy leave his possession. I certainly understood.

The manuscript was about his long friendship with Edward Leedskalnin and all their conversations. Henry wasn’t one to pry, and that may be why he was accepted as a friend. The photographs were of Henry and Edward - Henry in his military uniform - and many others of his children playing among the great blocks of the Coral Castle.

I regret that I did not read the book carefully - because Henry died in 1996 - but there was no time with all the other fascinating things to do and see. Henry took me on a tour of his memorabilia, his photographs, and his books. It was just too much to absorb at once! Finally, we sat down and I was able to ask about that most interesting of clues that Henry had let drop - that he had been inside the living quarters of Edward Leedskalnin while Edward was still living. I wanted to know what he had observed.

Henry described how Edward had done a lot of experiments and knew all kinds of secrets, but that he was very paranoid. That is why he told the crazy story about “Sweet Sixteen” and the phony broken heart. It was to put people off the trail, or so he thought. Edward had the idea that if he let it be known exactly what he knew, he would be picked up by some government officials and never seen again.

Well, maybe he wasn’t crazy!

Henry told me that, after much, or all, of the Coral Castle had been built, Edward had moved it from one location to another. Apparently there was some question of zoning and Edward was told he had to tear it down or move it. He moved it.

Certain “researchers” have claimed that it was moved because of some theory of earth grids relating to Sacred Geometry, but that does not seem to be true based on what Henry told me. It was simply a question of zoning and county regulations. And, since it was built in a different original location, that pretty much discounts the idea that the location was important to the act of building. It simply wasn’t, and the evidence does not support the idea.

The mode of the moving of this pile of rocks was what was so interesting to me. Apparently, Edward hired a truck and driver; only he would have the driver park the truck overnight and send him home. The next morning, the truck would be loaded with the huge blocks of stone and would be driven to the new site.

There was a block and tackle on tall poles prominently displayed and, apparently, Edward confided to Henry that this was his ruse to give the impression that this was what he was using to unload the blocks. He would send the driver off on an errand, leaving the truck there with the blocks on it, and when the driver would return, the truck would be unloaded. This was repeated over and over again until all the stones were moved to the new site. There are reports that say he placed his hands on the stones and “sang” to them.

Another peculiar thing was that Henry told me he had visited the quarry where the stones were cut and there were no tailings! Tailings are the stone equivalent of sawdust. When you saw wood, you have sawdust. When you cut stone or metal, you have tailings.¹⁷⁷ So, however Leedskalnin cut these stones, it was not a usual method!

177 Remember Schoch’s findings about the stones of the underwater monuments. They didn’t appear to have been cut.

The final and most interesting part of Henry’s story was the description of the living quarters of Edward Leedskalnin.

According to Henry, there were three pieces of ordinary furniture in the room: a cot type bed, a hand-made wooden table with a framed screen that fit over the top to keep insects off the food which was stored there since Edward had no refrigerator, and a hand-made wooden chair. What was not ordinary was an airplane seat suspended by chain from the ceiling - complete with seatbelt.

Now, for an extremely ascetic man, one who slept on a simple cot, and ate the simplest of diets, and who had absolutely no use for any kind of luxuries or comforts at all, what was he doing with an airplane seat suspended from the ceiling?

I thought about this for a while. I thought about swinging in such a seat. But if swinging was all that wanted, why not just build a wooden swing that would be in keeping with the other hand-made wooden items in the room.

But Edward did not do that. He had an airplane seat with a seatbelt. Why?

Well, let’s consider some of the things he has written in his little pamphlets. Edward writes about sphere or ball magnets, which can change the poles to any location on the sphere. He discusses lengths of magnetization (North vs. South) in a rod as varying by Earth’s latitude. North and South are separate magnetic currents, running “against the other” in whirling, right-hand screw like fashion, i.e. dextrorotatory helices.

He then says:

Magnets they are the cosmic force, they hold together this earth and everything on it. […] I have a generator that generates currents on a small scale from the air without using any magnets around it. […] The natural path to the North Pole magnets in the Northern Hemisphere is to go down, and the South Pole magnets to go up. When the magnets are running out of the middle of the earth, as soon as they meet an object they attract it, on account of the fact that in any object there has both kinds of magnets in it.¹⁷⁸

Now, one just has to wonder about his “generator” that generates currents “from the air”, and whether or not it has anything to do with spinning in a right-hand, screw-like fashion? And then one gets the little light bulb lighting up over one’s head that suggests that Edward Leedskalnin was using his airplane seat with the seatbelt to sit in and spin, and that he, himself, was the “generator”. One also thinks immediately about the length of the chain in reference to Lethbridge’s experiments.

Edward also mentioned another curious thing:

“I have several lily pools where I keep water. I have watched the lily pools for sixteen years.”

This quote is interesting because of the connection in legend between the presence of water and “moving stones”, as well as Lethbridge’s connection of water to certain fields. Some ancient megaliths were said to go down to the nearest stream for a drink at certain astronomically propitious times of the year. And “astronomically propitious” may be another clue because, Edward also suggests that the experimenter “face the east”.

But, we still wonder about the mode of manifestation of this strange power that we seem to be approaching from several different directions.

We may find a clue in the following:

When a time-varying magnetic field is applied to a ferromagnetic, a rearrangement of local lattice strain fields due to the motion of non-magnetic domain walls occurs and emits elastic energy. The interaction between domain walls and lattice defects creates a discontinuity in the domain wall motion causing a burst of energy called Magneto-Acoustic Emission (MAE).

 

The envelope of the time-averaged MAE bursts has a unique shape, which has been shown to be dependent upon the frequency and magnitude of the applied field and factors affecting lattice defects such as embrittlement. Although domain wall movement is a random process it does exhibit features of regularity which have been identified by studying phenomena such as 1/f flicker noise and self-organized criticality (the “domino effect“). Nevertheless, certain fundamental elements of the MAE characteristics remain unexplained.¹⁷⁹

178 Leedskalnin, Edward, Magnetic Current (Pomeroy, WA: Health Research 1998) p. 4. Other citations are from photocopies of a monograph published by Leedskalnin.

179 J. P. Fulton, B. Wincheski and M. Namkung, A Probabilistic Model for Simulating Magneto-Acoustic Emission Responses in Ferromagnets M. Namkung, B. Wincheski, J. P. Fulton and R. G.

What the above is saying to us is that the application of a magnetic field causes motion of non-magnetic domain walls in the material and emits elastic energy. In other words, it makes a sound in response to the magnetic field.

Was Edward Todhunter, Leedskalnin spinning a precise number of times, at a precise frequency length, in order to produce an energy within him that connected him to another realm, which resulted in a “Magneto Acoustic Emission”? That is, did he produce a sound of a very special sort that enabled him to move massive blocks of stone, not because he was strengthened by what he did, but because this sound, emitted from a timeless dimension that he had tapped, directed at the stones, had an effect on gravity?

That’s all fine and good for a single person to be able to utilize such a handy technique to manhandle some big chunks of rock like they were marshmallows. But now we want to inquire into how an entire civilization would utilize such a technology? What can it mean to suggest that in those areas where the megaliths march along the landscape, and where the megalithic temples are situated, that the peoples did not produce a civilization as we know it because they didn’t need to?

How does it all connect to Morris Jessup’s remark that,

“It may be that this tremendous power was limited in its application to articles of stone texture only…[This would] account for the strange fact that almost all relics of the profound past are non-metallic”?

Egyptian Stone Vases

Both Graham Hancock and Colin Wilson devote considerable time to describing the marvels of Egypt and the construction of the pyramid in terms of the possible techniques of cutting the stones with such amazing accuracy. They describe in some detail the event that led to the fraudulent dating of the pyramid, which date was taken up by mainstream archaeologists who cannot now repudiate it because they have too many other theories and dates hinged on this original error. What is interesting to us here about Egypt is a discovery made by Flinders Petrie in the village of Naqada in 1893.

Naqada is 300 miles south of Cairo, and pottery and stone vases were discovered there that were produced by some technique that has created considerable controversy.

It seems that the pottery of Naqada had none of the striations that would indicate that it had been thrown on a wheel. But, without a pottery wheel, it is almost impossible to get pots to be “perfectly round”. But this pottery was so perfectly rounded that it was absurd to think that it had been made by hand without a wheel!

Petrie, of course, dated the pottery to the 11th dynasty, around 2000 BC, based on his observations of workmanship, rather than on any other criteria. The pottery was, however, so “un-Egyptian” that he called the creators “the New Race”. Petrie faced a certain difficulty when he later found some of these same types of stone vases in tombs of the First Dynasty dating from, according to Egyptologists, around 3000 BC. At this point, he dropped the Naqada vase from his chronology, preferring to ignore what he could not explain.

Did the Naqadans produce these artifacts?

The Naqada peoples were descended from Paleolithic farmers who began raising crops in North Africa around 5000 BC. They buried their dead facing West, and seemed to be your standard primitive culture. The only problem was: the vases. The most astonishing of them were,

“tall vases with long, thin, elegant necks and finely flared interiors, often incorporating fully hollowed-out shoulders”.¹⁸⁰

Even more amazing, it seems that more that 30,000 of these vases were found beneath the Step Pyramid of Zoser at Saqqara.

Christopher Dunn, a toolmaker, wrote an article entitled Advanced Machining in Ancient Egypt, where he notes:

The millions of tons of rock that the Egyptians had quarried for their pyramids and temples - and cut with such superb accuracy - reveal glimpses of a civilization that was technically more advanced than is generally believed. Even though it is thought that millions of tons of rock were cut with simple primitive hand tools, such as copper chisels, adzes and wooden mallets, substantial evidence shows that this is simply not the case.

 

Even discounting the argument that work-hardened copper would not be suitable for cutting igneous rock, the evidence forces us to look a little harder, and more objectively, when explaining the manufacturing marks scoured on ancient granite by ancient stone craftsmen.[…]

Although the Egyptians are not given credit for the simple wheel, the machine marks they left on the granite found at Giza suggests a much higher degree of technical accomplishment. Petrie’s conclusion regarding their mechanical abilities shows a proficiency with the straight saw, circular saw, tube-drill, and surprisingly, even the lathe.¹⁸¹ Naturally, Egyptologists do nothing but disparage and attack such views, but they are unable to produce any evidence to support their claims, while there is an ever-growing mountain of evidence to support the ancient technology.

Again, I suggest that Egyptologists ought to be required to have engineering degrees, as well as broader educations in other terms. It is Egyptologists who seem to be the fundamental arbiters of our history, and over and over again, we will find that they are the blind leading the blind.

Getting back to Dunn, he examined blocks that had been hollowed out with some kind of drill in the Valley Temple at Giza. He noted that the drill marks left in the hole show that it was cutting into the rock at the rate of a tenth of an inch for every revolution of the drill!¹⁸²

180 Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods, op cit.
181 See: Technologies of Ancient Egypt by Christopher P. Dunn (Bear and Co. 1998).
182 Wilson, op. cit.

What is so amazing about that?

As it happens, such a rate cannot be achieved by hand without the application of over a ton of pressure. And that is patently absurd to consider in terms of hand drilling! Dunn inquired of specialists in drilling machinery and was informed that the best drills we have today, spinning at the rate of 900 revolutions per minute, can only cut into similar stone at the rate of one ten thousandth of an inch per revolution.

Conclusion? The builders of the pyramids and the creators of the stone vases had drills that either worked 500 times as fast as those we have today, or they had a “secret”.

Colin Wilson tells us:

Another aspect of the problem began to provide Dunn with a glimmer of a solution. A hole drilled into a rock that was a mixture of quartz and feldspar showed that the “drill” had cut faster through the quartz than the feldspar, although quartz is harder than feldspar. The solution that he suggests sounds almost beyond belief. He points out that modern ultrasonic machining uses a tool that depends on vibration.[…]

 

Quartz crystals are used in the production of ultrasonic sound, and conversely, respond to ultrasonic vibrations. This would explain why the “bit” cut faster through the quartz than the feldspar. What is being suggested sounds, admittedly, absurd: that the Egyptians had some force as powerful as our modern electricity, and that this force was based on sound.¹⁸³

183 Wilson, op. cit.

As Wilson and Hancock point out, this explanation goes a long way toward explaining the vases with swan necks that are hollowed out of such hard and brittle materials. He also notes how embarrassed Petrie would have been to know that similar vases have been removed from strata dated to 4000 BC when Egypt was supposed to have been occupied by nomads in tents.

But, we do still have the fact that there were nomads in tents at that point, and the only solution I can see is that these peoples were survivors of a cataclysmic event, and that they continued to use whatever they could find from their lost civilization. In this way, vases and other artifacts, scavenged from ruins, would be found in any number of “strata” laid down after such an event. It seems that these vases could be evidence that Petrie’s “New Race” pre-dated pharonic Egypt by thousands of years.

We come back to Edward Leedskalnin who claimed to have discovered the secret of how the pyramids were built.

And the theorists are having a field day!

Pythagoras and the Barbarians

We have touched briefly in earlier sections on the issue of sacred geometry, which is often related to the secret significance of numbers. Most of the current craze for these ideas is usually traced back to Pythagoras. We believe Pythagoras has been maligned by these new age purveyors of sacred geometry and sacred numbers. Naturally, when one is considering the “secret significance” of numbers, Pythagorean Mathematics will be among the earliest considerations.

Manly Hall wrote that:

The true key to philosophic mathematics is the famous Forty-seventh Proposition of Pythagoras, erroneously attributed to Euclid. The Forty-seventh Theorem is stated thus: In a right-angled triangle the square described on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares described on the other two sides.¹⁸⁴

 

184 Hall, Manly P., The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Los Angeles: The Philosophical Research Society 1988) p. LXIX (facing page).

Everyone who has attended public school and paid the slightest attention in math class knows that one. The problem is: what does it really mean that it is the “true key to philosophic mathematics”? What does C2=A2+B2 have to tell us? Accounts of the travels and studies of Pythagoras differ, but most historians agree that he visited many countries and studied at the feet of many masters.

Supposedly, after having been initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries, he went to Egypt and was initiated into the Mysteries of Isis. He then traveled to Phoenicia and Syria and was initiated into the Mysteries of Adonis. After that, he traveled to the valley of the Euphrates and learned all the secrets of the Chaldeans still living in the area of Babylon. Finally, he traveled to Media and Persia, then to India where he was a pupil and initiate of the Brahmins there. Sounds like he had all the bases covered.

Pythagoras was said to have invented the term “philosopher” in preference to the word “sage” since the former meant one who is attempting to find the truth, and the latter means one who knows the truth. Apparently Pythagoras didn’t think he had the whole banana.

Pythagoras started a school at Crotona in Southern Italy and gathered students and disciples there whom he supposedly instructed in the principles of the secrets that had been revealed to him. He considered mathematics, music and astronomy to be the foundation of all the arts and sciences. When he was about sixty years old, he married one of his disciples and had seven children. I guess he was a pretty lively senior citizen! His wife was, apparently, quite a woman in her own right, and she carried on his work after he was assassinated by a band of murderers incited to violence by a student whom he refused to initiate.

The accounts of Pythagoras’ murder vary.

Some say he and all his disciples were killed, others say that he may have escaped because some of his students protected him by sacrificing themselves and that he later died of a broken heart when he realized the apparent fruitlessness of his efforts to illuminate humanity.

The experts say that very little remains of the teachings of Pythagoras in the present time unless it has been handed down in secret schools or societies. Naturally, every secret society on the planet claims to have this “initiated” knowledge to one extent or another. It is possible that there exists some of the

original secret numerical formulas of Pythagoras, but the sad fact is that there is no real evidence of it in the writings that have issued from these groups for the past millennium.

Though everyone discusses Pythagoras, no one seems to know any more than the post-Pythagorean Greek speculators who, as Manley Hall put it,

“talked much, wrote little, knew less, and concealed their ignorance under a series of mysterious hints and promises”.

There seems to be a lot of that going around these days! Even Plutarch did not pretend to be able to explain the significance of the geometrical diagrams of Pythagoras. However, he did make the most interesting suggestion that the relationship which Pythagoras established between the geometrical solids and the Gods was the result of images seen in the Egyptian temples. The question we would ask is: what do geometrical solids have to do with “Gods”?

Albert Pike, the great Masonic symbolist, also admitted that there were many things that he couldn’t figure out.

In his Symbolism for the 32nd and 33rd degrees he wrote:

I do not understand why the 7 should be called Minerva, or the cube, Neptune. ...Undoubtedly the names given by the Pythagoreans to the different numbers were themselves enigmatical and symbolic - and there is little doubt that in the time of Plutarch the meanings these names concealed were lost. Pythagoras had succeeded too well in concealing his symbols with a veil that was from the first impenetrable, without his oral explanation.¹⁸⁵

Manly Hall writes:

This uncertainty shared by all true students of the subject proves conclusively that it is unwise to make definite statements founded on the indefinite and fragmentary information available concerning the Pythagorean system of mathematical philosophy.¹⁸⁶

185 Cited by Hall, ibid., p. LXIX.
186 Ibid.

With what little we have examined thus far, we are beginning to realize how true this latter remark is. Of course, in the present time, there is a whole raft of folks who don’t let such remarks stop them. Any number of modern gurus claim to have discovered the secrets of “Sacred Geometry”! Not only that, they don’t seem to have even studied the matter deeply at all, missing many of the salient points that are evident in the fragments of Pythagorean teachings.

Regarding this, there is a passage in Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco, that explicates the problem:

Amid all the nonsense there are some unimpeachable truths... I invite you to go and measure [an arbitrarily selected] kiosk. You will see that the length of the counter is one hundred and forty-nine centimeters - in other words, one hundred-billionth of the distance between the earth and the sun. The height at the rear, one hundred and seventy-six centimeters, divided by the width of the window, fifty-six centimeters, is 3.14. The height at the front is nineteen decimeters, equal, in other words, to the number of years of the Greek lunar cycle.

 

The sum of the heights of the two front corners is one hundred and ninety times two plus one hundred and seventy-six times two, which equals seven hundred and thirty-two, the date of the victory at Poitiers. The thickness of the counter is 3.10 centimeters, and the width of the cornice of the window is 8.8 centimeters. Replacing the numbers before the decimals by the corresponding letters of the alphabet, we obtain C for ten and H for eight, or C10H8, which is the formula for naphthalene.

...With numbers you can do anything you like. Suppose I have the sacred number 9 and I want to get the number 1314, date of the execution of Jacques de Molay - a date dear to anyone who professes devotion to the Templar tradition of knighthood. ...Multiply nine by one hundred and forty-six, the fateful day of the destruction of Carthage. How did I arrive at this? I divided thirteen hundred and fourteen by two, by three, et cetera, until I found a satisfying date. I could also have divided thirteen hundred and fourteen by 6.28, the double of 3.14, and I would have got two hundred and nine. That is the year Attalus I, king of Pergamon, ascended the throne.

You see? ...The universe is a great symphony of numerical correspondences... numbers and their symbolisms provide a path to special knowledge. But if the world, below and above, is a system of correspondences where tout se tient, it’s natural for the [lottery] kiosk and the pyramid, both works of man, to reproduce in their structure, unconsciously, the harmonies of the cosmos.¹⁸⁷

187 Eco, Umberto, Foucault’s Pendulum, (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1988) pp. 288-289.

The idea has been promoted with great vigor for over a thousand years that so-called Kabbalists and “interpreters of mysteries” can discover with their incredibly tortuous methods The Truth. This arrogance completely misses the point of a truth that is far more ancient: Mathematics is the language of Nature. The Pythagoreans declared arithmetic to be the mother of the mathematical sciences.

This idea was based on the fact that geometry, music, and astronomy are dependent upon arithmetic, but arithmetic is not dependent upon them. In this sense, geometry may be removed but arithmetic will remain; but if arithmetic were removed, geometry will be eliminated. In the same way, music depends on arithmetic. Eliminating music affects arithmetic only by limiting one of its expressions.

The size, form, and motion of the celestial bodies are determined by the use of geometry and their harmony and rhythm by the use of music. If astronomy is taken away, neither geometry nor music is harmed; but if geometry and music are done away with, astronomy is destroyed. The priority of both geometry and music to astronomy is established and arithmetic is prior to all of them, being primary and fundamental. Playing endless games with numbers demonstrates only that which cannot be otherwise.

The real secret seems to be much more profound and most, if not nearly all, “seekers” of truths never penetrate beyond the surface of the matter. Nevertheless, we have now reached the point where we have some idea that there was an ancient technology that utilized simple arithmetic, and geometry, or spatial relationships, in conjunction with sound, to accomplish something of great import. We have also come to the idea that this ancient technology was the science of the mastery of space and time and gravity. This is the great secret of the Golden Age.

This is why their civilization was based on different elements than our own. Aside from the fact that cataclysms may have washed away most of the evidence of this civilization, we have here an additional reason for the lack of metal and other such artifacts of the type we would consider to be evidence of “civilization”.

The Dancing God

Getting back to our spinning Edward Leedskalnin in his airplane seat, we realize that he must have stumbled onto this secret and was able to utilize it to some extent. But Leedskalnin didn’t have a landscape covered with megaliths to collect and store energy. Edward had an airplane seat suspended from the ceiling by a chain. How can this possibly give us a hint about what the ancients were doing?

Searching for clues as to how the ancients utilized this technology, we find the following most interesting item. Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BC, gives us a description of Britain based, in part, on the voyage of Pytheas of Massilia, who sailed around Britain in 300 BC.

As for the inhabitants, they are simple and far removed from the shrewdness and vice which characterize our day. Their way of living is modest, since they are well clear of the luxury that is begotten of wealth. The island is also thickly populated and its climate is extremely cold, as one would expect, since it actually lies under the Great Bear. It is held by many kings and potentates, who for the most part live at peace among themselves.¹⁸⁸

188 Diodorus of Sicily, English translation by C. H. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library, Volumes II and III. London, William Heinemann, and Cambridge, Mass., USA, Harvard University Press, 1935 and 1939.

Diodorus then tells a fascinating story about the Hyperboreans that was obviously of legendary character already when he was writing:

Of those who have written about the ancient myths, Hecateus and certain others say that in the regions beyond the land of the Celts (Gaul) there lies in the ocean an island no smaller than Sicily. This island, the account continues, is situated in the north, and is inhabited by the Hyperboreans, who are called by that name because their home is beyond the point whence the north wind blows; and the land is both fertile and productive of every crop, and since it has an unusually temperate climate it produces two harvests each year.¹⁸⁹

Now, it seems that there is little doubt that Diodorus is describing the same location, but we notice that the climate is so vastly different in the two descriptions that we can hardly make the connection. However, let us just suppose that his description of Britain was based on the climate that prevailed at the time he was writing, and the legendary description of the Hyperboreans was based on a previous climatic condition that was preserved in the story.

Diodorus stresses that he is recounting something very ancient as he goes on to say:

The Hyperboreans also have a language, we are informed, which is peculiar to them, and are most friendly disposed towards the Greeks, and especially towards the Athenians and the Delians, who have inherited this goodwill from most ancient times. The myth also relates that certain Greeks visited the Hyperboreans and left behind them costly votive offerings bearing inscriptions in Greek letters. And in the same way Abaris, a Hyperborean, came to Greece in ancient times and renewed the goodwill and kinship of his people to the Delians.¹⁹⁰

Diodorus remark about the relations between the Hyperboreans and the Athenians triggers in our minds the memory of the statement of Plato that the Atlanteans were at war with the Athenians, and we wonder if the Hyperboreans are the real “early Athenians”. After all, the Greeks are said to be “Sons of the North Wind”, Boreas.

Herodotus expounds upon the relationship of the Hyperboreans to the Delians:

Certain sacred offerings wrapped up in wheat straw come from the Hyperboreans into Scythia, whence they are taken over by the neighbouring peoples in succession until they get as far west as the Adriatic: from there they are sent south, and the first Greeks to receive them are the Dodonaeans.

 

Then, continuing southward, they reach the Malian gulf, cross to Euboea, and are passed on from town to town as far as Carystus. Then they skip Andros, the Carystians take them to Tenos, and the Tenians to Delos. That is how these things are said to reach Delos at the present time.¹⁹¹

189 Ibid.
190 Ibid.
191 Herodotus, The Histories, Book IV, trans. Aubrey De Selincourt, revised John Marincola (London: Penguin 1972) p. 226

The legendary connection between the Hyperboreans and the Delians leads us to another interesting remark of Herodotus who tells us that Leto, the mother of Apollo, was born on the island of the Hyperboreans. That there was regular contact between the Greeks and the Hyperboreans over many centuries does not seem to be in doubt. The Hyperboreans were said to have introduced the Greeks to the worship of Apollo, but it is just as likely that the relationship goes much further back. Yes, this is contrary to the idea that culture flowed from south to north, but we are writing a contrary book; so don’t let that bother you!

Herodotus has another interesting thing to say about the Hyperboreans and their sending of sacred offerings to Delos:

On the first occasion they were sent in charge of two girls, whose names the Delians say were Hyperoche and Laodice. To protect the girls on the journey, the Hyperboreans sent five men to accompany them … the two Hyperborean girls died in Delos, and the boys and girls of the island still cut their hair as a sign of mourning for them… There is also a Delphic story that before the time of Hyperoche and Laodice, two other Hyperborean girls, Arge and Opis, came to Delos by the same route. …Arge and Opis came to the island at the same time as Apollo and Artemis…¹⁹²

Herodotus mentions at another point, when discussing the lands of the “barbarians”,

“All these except the Hyperboreans, were continually encroaching upon one another’s territory”.

Without putting words in Herodotus’ mouth, it seems to suggest that the Hyperboreans were not warlike at all.

A further clue about the religion of the Hyperboreans comes from the myths of Orpheus. It is said that when Dionysus invaded Thrace, Orpheus did not see fit to honor him but instead preached the evils of sacrificial murder to the men of Thrace. He taught “other sacred mysteries” having to do with Apollo, whom he believed to be the greatest of all Gods. Dionysus became so enraged; he set the Maenads on Orpheus at Apollo’s temple where Orpheus was a priest.

They burst in, murdered their husbands who were assembled to hear Orpheus speak, tore Orpheus limb from limb, and threw his head into the river Hebrus where it floated downstream still singing. It was carried on the sea to the island of Lesbos. Another version of the story is that Zeus killed Orpheus with a thunderbolt for divulging divine secrets. He was responsible for instituting the Mysteries of Apollo in Thrace, Hecate in Aegina, and Subterrene Demeter at Sparta.¹⁹³

192 Herodotus, The Histories, pp. 226-227.
193 See: Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths (London: Penguin, London) 1992

And this brings us to a further revelation of Diodorus regarding the Hyperboreans:

And there is also on the island both a magnificent sacred precinct of Apollo and a notable temple, which is adorned with many votive offerings and is spherical in shape. Furthermore, a city is there which is sacred to this God, and the majority of its inhabitants are players on the cithara; and these continually play on this instrument in the temple and sing hymns of praise to the God, glorifying his deeds… They say also that the moon, as viewed from this island, appears to be but a little distance from the earth and to have upon it prominences, like those of the earth, which are visible to the eye.

 

The account is also given that the God visits the island every nineteen years, the period in which the return of the stars to the same place in the heavens is accomplished, and for this reason the Greeks call the nineteen-year period the “year of Meton”. At the time of this appearance of the God he both plays on the cithara and dances continuously the night through from the vernal equinox until the rising of the Pleiades, expressing in this manner his delight in his successes. And the kings of this city and the supervisors of the sacred precinct are called Boreades, since they are descendants of Boreas, and the succession to these positions is always kept in their family.¹⁹⁴

194 Diodorus, op. cit..

I would like to note immediately how similar the above story of the Maenads murdering their husbands is to the story of the daughters of Danaus murdering their husbands on the wedding night connected to the story of the massacre at the Cloisters of Ambrius attributed much later to Hengist and Horsa.

Keeping in mind that the Danaans were the family of the hero Perseus who cut off the head of Medusa, while comparing this to the beheading of Orpheus and his “singing” head floating down the river. The two themes, wives murdering husbands and a significant beheading are startling enough to give us pause. Was an original legend then later adapted to a different usage, assimilated to a different group or tribe? More than once?

In any event, we have discovered a most interesting little collection of things all in one place. First a “round temple” on an island that can only be Britain, may be describing Stonehenge and the way in which it was utilized by a group of people. Next we see that Diodorus is suggesting that the 19-year lunar calendar is a product of the Hyperboreans and that it relates to a period in which the “return of the stars” is accomplished.

We realize immediately that these “stars” must refer to a geometric relationship between the Sun, Moon and Earth, rather than the “stars” in terms of real stars and the planets because they certainly do not “return” to any particular position every nineteen years. And we now suspect that this may have something to do with a gravitational node of a three-body system. We begin to think that these ancient people really knew something! In the Temple of Apollo, we also find that there are musicians whose job it is to continually play in the temple and sing, and the most famous of ancient singers and musicians is associated with the worship of Apollo. This suggests to us the possible use of sound for something; the utilization of gravitational nodes, perhaps?

There is an additional puzzle here. What did it mean that every nineteen years a God “dances” from the vernal equinox until the rising of the Pleiades?

This suggests to us a very specific date is being recorded in this myth. The heliacal rising of the Pleiades does not happen every 19 years. So, aside from telling us about a regular event that occurred every nineteen years, the myth has recorded something else very significant, the date of which is internal to the myth. When did the Pleiades rise just before the sun on the vernal equinox?

There are many who assume that a “heliacal rising” means that a star or constellation is in conjunction with the sun. But this is probably not correct. The ancients were practicing observational astronomy.

Otto Neugebauer, in his many studies regarding what the ancients did or did not know about science and mathematics, noted the following:

When we watch the stars rise over the eastern horizon, we see them appear night after night at the same spot on the horizon. But when we extend our observation into the period of twilight, fewer and fewer stars will be recognizable when they cross the horizon, and near sunrise all stars will have faded out altogether.

 

Let us suppose that a certain star S was seen just rising at the beginning of dawn but vanished from sight within a very short time because of the rapid approach of daylight. We call this phenomenon the “heliacal rising” of S, using a term of Greek astronomy. Let us assume that we use this phenomenon as the indication of the end of “night” and consider S as the star of the “last hour of night”. […]

 

We may continue in the same way for several days, but during this time a definite change takes place. […]

 

Obviously, after some lapse of time, it no longer makes sense to take S as the indicator of the last hour of night. But there are new stars that can take the place of S. Thus year after year S may serve for some days as the star of the last hour, to be replaced in regular order by other stars.¹⁹⁵

195 Neugebauer, op. cit.

In order to observe a heliacal rising of a star or group of stars, they must rise long enough before the sun to be “observed”, because as soon as the sun rises, the stars can no longer be seen. The heliacal rising of the Pleiades would have to occur at least 36 minutes before the sun comes up, in order to be seen.

So, the real question seems to be:

• When did the Pleiades rise around half an hour before the sun, at the time of the equinox?

• When were the Pleiades the stars of the “last hour of the night”, and what might have been the significance of this event?

Certain “standard” texts, written by individuals who have not taken into account the observational nature of a heliacal rising, have given 2300 BC as the date, because this was when the Pleiades were conjunct the Sun on the Vernal equinox. However, after careful calculations of our own, as well as assistance by expert astronomers, the date of the actual heliacal rising of the Pleiades, in the terms that Neugebauer has given us, occurred on April 16, 3100 BC. This date is most certainly correct as we will see further on.

There is an even greater mystery here regarding the Pleiades.

In the cave of Lascaux, there is a prehistoric image of an Auroch, which is the largest picture in the whole assembly of images, and is painted almost entirely on the ceiling of the cave. Above the back of the Auroch, a strange figure of a cluster of six floating points can be seen. The distribution of the dots does not seem to be haphazard, but rather shows a clear structural element.

It looks, in fact, like an exact portrayal of the constellation Taurus with the star cluster of the Pleiades placed precisely as they actually relate to the constellation. The Navajo in America have also portrayed the Pleiades in exactly this same six-star arrangement in modern times, as handed down to them by their ancestors.¹⁹⁶ The constellation Taurus was originally a complete image of a bull in the sky. The Babylonians called it the heavenly bull, and the Pleiades were recognized as the “bristle on the neck of the bull”. At some point, the bull was cut in half to create Aries and Cetus, the whale.

196 Chamberlain, Von Del, “Navajo Constellations in Literature, Art, Artifact and a New Mexico Rock Art Site”, Archaeoastronomy 6 (1-4):48-58, 1983.

So here we have a very interesting confluence of seemingly unrelated elements:

We will pass from that subject for the moment to return to our matter of the dancing God who came every 19 years to Stonehenge, and how it may relate to spinning in airplane seats, producing sounds, and overcoming gravity - and perhaps even space and time and matter.

 

What we find is that these elements are all connected in such a way that we suspect that they were elements of a technology that enabled an entire group of people to live in harmony, and to produce all they needed so that the artifacts of civilization, as we know them, were not required by these peoples.

 

What is more, they seem to have been related to their ability to perform feats of which we are incapable with all our technology. These “wonders” that are the stuff of myth to us now, were, apparently, part of their daily reality.

In searching for additional clues in the nature religions associated with the symbols of the Holy Grail, we find that dancing was part of the archaic grail ensemble. The Sword Dances, Morris Dances, and Mumming Plays, for example, seem to be an inherited tradition of solemn ceremonial dances performed at stated seasons.

And that is exactly what Diodorus has told us: The God danced all night every 19 years at the time of the Equinox.

Jessie Weston, among others, was moved to think of these dances and the entire Grail cycle ensemble as a ritual designed to “preserve and promote the regular and ordered sequence of the processes of Nature”. In other words, the disjecta membra of the advanced technology of a vanished civilization.

It seems to us, from looking at the evidence of the absolute reality of what these people were capable of doing, that the dances, the myths, and the rites, all point to an archaic technology that is preserved idealistically as “promoting the processes of Nature”, but it was actually a direct interaction with Nature that resulted in the manifest production of all that was needed by the peoples in a literal and immediate sense.

The earliest recorded Sword Dancers are the Maruts, the attendants of the God Indra.

They are a group of youths of equal age and identical parentage and are always dressed alike, and they are always dancers. Throughout the Rg-Veda the Maruts are referred to as,

“Gold bedecked dancers… with songs of praise they danced round the spring… When ye Maruts spear-armed dance, [the Heavens] stream together like waves of water”.¹⁹⁷

The image of the “spear armed” dancing of course has led people to think that they are dancing with spears, but what if it means something altogether different?

Anyone who has watched traditional Celtic dances is immediately struck by the stiff armed posture of the dancers who only move the lower parts of their bodies. Dancing in perfect synchrony on a wooden platform produces a hypnotic and thrilling effect, and we find here a possible system of elevation of consciousness that might produce vibratory effects not only in stone, but also in the very cells of both the dancers and the audience.

More than this, when we consider the immobility of the upper part of the body, and the stylized motion of the lower part of the body, we think of the “length of string” attached to a pendulum that accesses other realities. We may also consider the addition of a real “lance” as a “lengthener” of the “string”, or something that was incorporated to connect the dancer to a specific frequency. Add to it very specific music, utilized to amplify the energetic effects, or sound that was a result of the dance, and we begin to see a very different picture of the dance of Apollo at Stonehenge every 19 years.

In fact, we are reminded of that curious story where an alchemist supposedly told Jacques Bergier:

Certain geometrical arrangements of highly purified materials are enough to release atomic forces without having recourse to either electricity or vacuum techniques.¹⁹⁸

Most especially when we recall this:

For it is by fire and in fire that our hemisphere will soon be tried. And just as by means of fire, gold is separated from impure metals, so, Scripture says, the good will be separated from the wicked, on the great Day of Judgment. […]¹⁹⁹

The Maruts were the companions of Indra, his helpers in the fight against his adversaries, the evil Gods who afflict mankind. But more than this, these dancers, (Dan-cers) were bringers of all necessities to the people in some magical, mysterious, and astonishing way:

The adorable Maruts, armed with bright lances and cuirassed with golden breastplates, enjoy vigorous existence; may the cars of the quick-moving Maruts arrive for our good. …Bringers of rain and fertility, shedding water, augmenting food. …Givers of abundant food. …Your milchkine are never dry. …We invoke the food-laden chariots of the Maruts.²⁰⁰

197 Von Schroeder, Mysterium und Mimus, quoted by Jessie Weston in From Ritual to Romance, p. 78.

198 Pauwels and Bergier, op. cit.
199 Fulcanelli, Mystery, op. cit. p. 149.
200 Rg-Veda, Vol III.

We now begin to see the wild orgies of the New Year festivals, the Dionysian frenzies, and the Nature cults with parades of ecstatic men and women bordering on being in a state of madness, as corruptions of what was obviously an original, formalized series of dance type activities.

And this makes us think of the Maze. The Labyrinth. Troy. Crete. Egypt?

The Labyrinth

Hundreds of mazes and labyrinths are found scattered across Europe, parts of Africa, Asia and the Americas. They are composed of turf, hedges, stone, brick, or tile work on floors. There are paintings and carvings of mazes on rocks that are incredibly ancient. One of the oldest representations that I have found is a 20,000-year-old bracelet carved from a single piece of mammoth ivory, found at Mezin, Ukraine.

This piece has a magnificent “Greek Meander” or “maze” design which predates any other maze we are going to discuss here, but most definitely offers a clue since this area of the world is that hot-spot of Grail legends identified by Littleton and Malcor.

What most people know about the maze, or labyrinth, is due to the myth of Theseus and Ariadne. Briefly, the tale tells of King Minos of Crete, who demanded tribute from Athens, after defeating them in a war. The tribute was an annual shipment of seven youths and seven maidens who were sacrificed to the Minotaur by sending them into the maze, the specially constructed home of the beast, built by the great architect, Daedalus.

The labyrinth was so cleverly constructed that even Daedalus had difficulty navigating in it. The Athenian young people would wander around in the maze, lost, until the Minotaur, half bull (top half) and half man (bottom half) caught up with them and devoured them. This, of course, reminds us of Herodotus’ story of the Hyperborean girls sent to Delos bearing gifts, who died while there under what seem to be mysterious circumstances.

As a side note, we would like to draw attention to the fact that Daedalus, the “great architect”, was connected to a king named Minos. Another king named Menes was the great unifier of Egypt, builder of the great city of Memphis, and a famous temple of Hephaestus there. This is dated to around 3100 BC, and we wonder if the image of the half bull, half man might not be a clue to a date such as the point at which the constellation Taurus was “cut in half” to make room for Aries, the ram, who represents Agni, God of fire.

Hephaestus is, after all, the Greek version of the Smith God. Discovering a great architect connected, even indirectly, to a great unifier of two kingdoms and builder of a great Temple on the one side, and connected to another king with a similar name, and builder of a great labyrinth which is connected to a “power in the center”, - the Minotaur, keeping in mind the legends of the building of Stonehenge, the “cloisters of Ambrius” where the God danced all night in the center around 3100 BC, makes us wonder if this is not all a clue to the manifestation of a certain power that has to do with sound and gravity and stones and so forth.

We are naturally drawn to make connections between these matters and the myth of Solomon and Hiram Abiff and the Ark of the Covenant. When we think of the Temple of Solomon (about which we will learn a great deal further on), which was built to house the Ark, and we then think of the labyrinth which was built to house a monster, we naturally wonder just what is going on here? We also note that the victims of King Minos of Crete were “Athenians”, and we remember what Plato said about the war between Atlantis and “Athens”, even if we don’t put any stock in it actually being the Athens we know today.

According to the myth, the labyrinth was built for one reason only: to hide the Minotaur, which was a source of horror and shame to Minos, whose wife had given birth to the monster after mating with a bull. This really doesn’t follow logic since the victims were rounded up in public, and everyone apparently knew about the Minotaur.

In South Africa, a popular Zulu game is played where a maze is drawn on the ground, and the players take turns “finding the way to the king’s hut” which is at the center. The game is played with toys carved in the shape of bulls. It seems that, thousands of miles from Crete, the same elements of the legend are played out from time immemorial: kingship, bulls, and conflict at the center of a labyrinth. Excavations at Knossos have indeed uncovered evidence of a bull cult practiced in a maze like “palace” of hundreds of chambers and corridors.

There were innumerable images of bulls in bas-reliefs, small sculptures, bull-shaped vessels, seals and imprints of seals, as well as stylized bulls’ horns. All of these things linking the dynasty of Minos with bulls suggested that the vitality of the Minoan kings, like that of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, was identified with the bull-God. What is more, ancient Greek writers came right out and said that the labyrinth of Minos was modeled on an original in northern Egypt. Very little survives of this Egyptian marvel except for a few brick courses.

What Herodotus had to say about it is rather fascinating:

Being set free after the reign of the priest of Hephaistos, the Egyptians, since they could not live any time without a king, set up over them twelve kings, having divided all Egypt into twelve parts.

 

These made intermarriages with one another and reigned, making agreement that they would not put down one another by force, nor seek to get an advantage over one another, but would live in perfect friendship: and the reason why they made these agreements, guarding them very strongly from violation, was this, namely that an oracle had been given to them at first when they began to exercise their rule, that he of them who should pour a libation with a bronze cup in the temple of Hephaistos, should be king of all Egypt (for they used to assemble together in all the temples).

 

Moreover they resolved to join all together and leave a memorial of themselves; and having so resolved they caused to be made a labyrinth situated a little above the lake of Moeris and nearly opposite to that which is called the City of Crocodiles. This I saw myself, and I found it greater than words can say. For if one should put together and reckon up all the buildings and all the great works produced by the Hellenes, they would prove to be inferior in labour and expense to this labyrinth, though it is true that both the temple at Ephesos and that at Samos are works worthy of note.

The pyramids also were greater than words can say, and each one of them is equal to many works of the Hellenes, great as they may be; but the labyrinth surpasses even the pyramids. It has twelve courts covered in, with gates facing one another, six upon the North side and six upon the South, joining on one to another, and the same wall surrounds them all outside; and there are in it two kinds of chambers, the one kind below the ground and the other above upon these, three thousand in number, of each kind fifteen hundred.

 

The upper set of chambers we ourselves saw, going through them, and we tell of them having looked upon them with our own eyes; but the chambers under ground we heard about only; for the Egyptians who had charge of them were not willing on any account to show them, saying that here were the sepulchres of the kings who had first built this labyrinth and of the sacred crocodiles.

Accordingly we speak of the chambers below by what we received from hearsay, while those above we saw ourselves and found them to be works of more than human greatness. For the passages through the chambers, and the goings this way and that way through the courts, which were admirably adorned, afforded endless matter for marvel, as we went through from a court to the chambers beyond it, and from the chambers to colonnades, and from the colonnades to other rooms, and then from the chambers again to other courts.

 

Over the whole of these is a roof made of stone like the walls; and the walls are covered with figures carved upon them, each court being surrounded with pillars of white stone fitted together most perfectly; and at the end of the labyrinth, by the corner of it, there is a pyramid of forty fathoms, upon which large figures are carved, and to this there is a way made under ground.²⁰¹

201 Herodutus, op. cit. Bk II:147.

What was Herodotus describing?

He declared all the great architectural works of the Greeks and Egyptians, including the pyramids, to be “inferior in labour and expense to this labyrinth”. We would also like to note that there were no references to bulls hidden in the Egyptian labyrinth; rather, in the hidden underground chambers were the “sepulchres of the kings who had first built this labyrinth and of the sacred crocodiles”.

Diodorus has a slightly different story about who built this famous labyrinth:

When the king died the government was recovered by Egyptians and they appointed a native king Mendes, whom some call Mares. Although he was responsible for no military achievements whatsoever, he did build himself what is called the Labyrinth as a tomb, an edifice which is wonderful not so much for its size as for the inimitable skill with which it was built; for once in, it is impossible to find one’s way out again without difficulty, unless one lights upon a guide who is perfectly acquainted with it.

 

It is even said by some that Daedalus crossed over to Egypt and, in wonder at the skill shown in the building, built for Minos, King of Crete, a labyrinth like that in Egypt, in which, so the tales goes, the creature called the Minotaur was kept. Be that as it may, the Cretan Labyrinth has completely disappeared, either through the destruction wrought by some ruler or through the ravages of time; but the Egyptian Labyrinth remains absolutely perfect in its entire construction down to my time. […]

For they chose a site beside the channel leading into Lake Moeris in Libya and there constructed their tomb of the finest stone, laying down an oblong as the shape and a stade as the size of each side, while in respect of carving and other works of craftsmanship they left no room for their successors to surpass them.

 

For, when one had entered the sacred enclosure, one found a temple surrounded by columns, 40 to each side, and this building had a roof made of a single stone, carved with panels and richly adorned with excellent paintings. It contained memorials of the homeland of each of the kings as well as of the temples and sacrifices carried out in it, all skillfully worked in paintings of the greatest beauty. Generally it is said that the king conceived their tomb on such an expensive and prodigious scale that if they had not been deposed before its completion, they would not have been able to give their successors any opportunity to surpass them in architectural feats.²⁰²

Next there is the report of Strabo:

In addition to these things there is the edifice of the Labyrinth which is a building quite equal to the Pyramids and nearby the tomb of the king who built the Labyrinth. There is at the point where one first enters the channel, about 30 or 40 stades along the way, a flat trapezium-shaped site which contains both a village and a great palace made up of many palaces equal in number to that of the nomes in former times; for such is the number of peristyle courts which lie contiguous with one another, all in one row and backing on one wall, as though one had a long wall with the courts lying before it, and the passages into the courts lie opposite the wall.

 

Before the entrances there lie what might be called hidden chambers which are long and many in number and have paths running through one another which twist and turn, so that no one can enter or leave any court without a guide. And the wonder of it is the roofs of each chambers are made of single stones and the width of the hidden chambers is spanned in the same way by monolithic beams of outstanding size; for nowhere is wood or any other material included. And if one mounts onto the roof, at no great height because the building has only one story, it is possible to get a view of a plain of masonry made of such stones, and, if one drops back down from there into the courts, it is possible to see them lying there in row each supported by 27 monolithic pillars; the walls too are made up in stones of no less a size.

At the end of this building, which occupies an area of more than a stade, stands the tomb, a pyramid on a oblong base, each side about 4 “plethora” in length and the height about the same; the name of the man buried there was Imandes. The reason for making the courts so many is said to be the fact that it was customary for all nomes to gather there according to rank with their own priests and priestesses, for the purpose of sacrifice, divine-offering, and judgment on the most important matters.

 

And each of the nomes was lodged in the court appointed to it. And above this city stands Abydos, in which there is the Memnonium, a palace wonderfully constructed of massive stonework in the same way as we have said the Labyrinth was built, though the Memnonium differs in being simple in structure.²⁰³

202 Diodorus Siculus, op. cit., two passages in his history, Book I, 61 and 66.

203 Strabo (ca. 64 BC - AD 19): Three passages in his geography, Book 17, I, 3 and 37 and 42.

Pliny tells us still another version of the stories about this amazing structure:

Let us speak also of labyrinths, quite the most extraordinary works on which men have spent their money, but not, as may be thought, figments of the imagination. There still exists even now in Egypt in the Heracleopolite Nome the one which was built first, according to tradition 3,600 years ago by king Petesuchis or Tithois, though Herodotus ascribes the whole work to Twelve Kings and Psammetichus, the latest of them. Various reasons are given for building it. Demoteles claims that it was the palace of Moteris, Lyceas the tomb of Moeris, but the majority of writers take the view that it was built as a temple to the Sun, and this is generally accepted.

 

At any rate, that Daedalus used this as the model for the Labyrinth which he built in Crete is beyond doubt, but it is equally clear that he imitated only 100th part of it which contains twisting paths and passages which advance and retreat-all impossible to negotiate. The reason for this is not that within a small compass it involves one in mile upon mile of walking, as we see in tessellated floors or the displays given by boys on the Campus, but that frequently doors are buried in it to beguile the visitor into going forward and then force him to return into the same winding paths.

 

This was the second to be built after the Egyptian Labyrinth, the third being in Lemnos and the fourth in Italy, all roofed with vaults of polished stone, though the Egyptian specimen, to my considerable astonishment, has its entrance and columns made of Parian marble, while the rest is of Aswan granite, such masses being put together as time itself cannot dissolve even with the help of the Heracleopolitans; for they have regarded the building with extraordinary hatred.

It would be impossible to describe in detail the layout of that building and its individual parts, since it is divided into regions and administrative districts which are called nomes, each of the 21 nomes giving its names to one of the houses. A further reason is the fact that it also contains temples of all the Gods of Egypt while, in addition, Nemesis placed in the building’s 40 chapels many pyramids of 40 ells each covering an area of 6 arourae with their base.

 

Men are already weary with traveling when they reach that bewildering maze of paths; indeed, there are also lofty upper rooms reached by ramps and porticoes from which one descends on stairways which have 90 steps each; inside are columns of imperial porphyry, images of the Gods, statues of kings and representations of monsters. Certain of the halls are arranged in such way that as one throws open the door there arises within a fearful noise of thunder; moreover one passes through most of them in darkness. There are again other massive buildings outside the wall of the Labyrinth; they call them “the Wing”.

 

Then there are other subterranean chambers made by excavating galleries in the soil. One person only has done any repairs there-and they were few in number. He was Chaermon, the eunuch of king Necthebis, 500 years before Alexander the Great. A tradition is also current that he supported the roofs with beams of acacia wood boiled in oil, until squared stones could be raised up into the vaults.²⁰⁴

204 Pliny (AD 23-79): One passage in his natural history, Book 36, 13.

We seem to have a bit of a problem here. Notice that Pliny assures us that Herodotus was wrong not only about who built the labyrinth, but also about when it was built. Pliny dates it to almost four thousand years before his own time. He also makes the most interesting remark that the building was regarded with extraordinary hatred. That would certainly be true of a structure that was utilized for dreadful sacrifices.

Pliny mentions the mythical labyrinth of Crete, though it is a certainty that the temple at Knossos that was identified as the labyrinth by Arthur Evans was no longer available for view in the time of Pliny. It seems that Pliny, along with everyone else just took it for granted that the legends of the labyrinth on Crete were the truth.

So it is that we have found that the earliest known written account of the existence of labyrinths appears in the writings of the Greek historian Herodotus in approximately 450 BC. He describes a great labyrinth located in Egypt at the ancient site of Arsinoe on the eastern bank of a large body of water, Lake Moeris. The labyrinth was constructed in the style of a great compartmental palace with 3000 different chambers, 1500 of which were above ground and 1500 were below ground.

The foundation was approximately 1000 feet long x 800 feet long. He claimed that it was built by Ammenemes III in the twelfth dynasty of the Old Kingdom in approximately 2300 BC. He further said that its primary purpose was for burial, and many kings were buried there. Pliny verified Herodotus’ account in his writings on the four famous labyrinths of antiquity in approximately 50 AD. The remains of the city of Arsinoe have been excavated, but a great labyrinth to the extent of Herodotus’ description has never been found.

Flinders Petrie did extensive excavation of the city of Arsinoe in 1888, but he never discovered the fantastic site that Herodotus described. Petrie found only a great bed of fragments which he believed was the labyrinth. The body of Ammenemes III was supposedly unearthed corroborating Herodotus. A sufficient quantity of the original foundation was unearthed which handily allowed it to be measured at 1000 feet X 800 feet which is exactly the dimension quoted by Herodotus!

That it was definitely a labyrinth could not be determined.

More recently, Egyptologists have decided that the so-called “pyramid of Hawara” is the famous Egyptian labyrinth, but that makes no sense at all. Herodotus, Diodorus, Strabo and Pliny all describe so marvelous a structure that we are hard put to not think that there is truth behind what they were describing. The various propositions for what must be the “remains” of the structure simply do not fit the descriptions. And, while we can have some doubts about the accuracy of the history ascribed to the monument by the various ancient authors, depending on who gave them their information, it’s difficult to doubt that they either saw it themselves, or had direct information.

Modern experts suggest that “Lake Moeris” is really Lake Qarun, the third largest lake in Egypt, which is located in Faiyyum. If so, we wonder why there are no remains of this labyrinth which Pliny tells us was constructed of,

“Parian marble, while the rest is of Aswan granite, such masses being put together as time itself cannot dissolve even with the help of the Heracleopolitans; for they have regarded the building with extraordinary hatred”.

Of course, this last may provide a clue: if the building was so hated, it is altogether possible that it was deliberately destroyed, cut to pieces, and carried away block by block.

The bottom line seems to be that the legend of the labyrinth containing a horrible creature is based on the Egyptian labyrinth. The fact that the Cretans became “experts” in some sort of funerary cult, only created a fertile ground for transferring this legend to Crete. In fact, the Cretans may be closely related to the original Egyptians, the ones who were responsible for the building of the pyramids, the Sphinx, and other techno marvels.

We notice a most peculiar series of events in regard to Egyptian “history”, that may offer some clues:

The generally accepted sequence of Egyptian historical events tells us that a king from “upper Egypt” - that is, the arid highlands - named Narmer, Menes, or Aha, (who may have been separate individuals), defeated the King of Northern, or Lower Egypt, and thereby unified the two lands. This unification is commemorated in the famous Narmer Palette, which shows the ubiquitous “head smiting” scene, a euphemism for conquest.

According to Manetho, Menes/Narmer came from the Thinite province in Upper Egypt and, whether unification was achieved by military of peaceful means is uncertain, though head smiting seems to indicate the former.

According to tradition, Menes founded Memphis on an island in the Nile, conducted raids against the Nubians, and extended his power as far as the first cataract. He sent ambassadors to Canaan and Byblos in Phoenicia; he founded the city of Crocodilopolis and built the first temple to the God Ptah, who Herodotus and others say was Hephaestus, the volcano/fire God.

As a sidebar, skipping over the list and details of what is known via archaeology and conjectured via ignorance, we come to the reign of Peribsen in the so-called second dynasty. Peribsen was the fourth king of that line and some experts opine that he was actually not the legitimate heir of Nintejer, the king before him, but that he was an outsider who instigated a coup against Pharaoh Nintejer. Peribsen used the nomen “Seth” in his titles. Apparently, this signified sweeping political changes since the serekhs bearing the royal names are not surmounted by Horus anymore, but by his religious rival, Set, who became the primary royal patron deity of Peribsen.

Here we discover a most interesting point in history. Peribsen was claiming the title of the rival of Horus. Egyptologists admit that the events of the second dynasty are extremely uncertain, if not the most uncertain in Egyptian history. It just so happens that, right around the time of the Peribsen “rebellion”, the Cretan civilization suddenly appeared in the Mediterranean.

We also note the most curious fact that, based on the years assigned to the kings by Manetho, though we cannot be certain of the year in our own calendar system on which to affix these dates, the period between the unification by Narmer and the Peribsen rebellion happens to be right at 430 years - the period of slavery in Egypt claimed by the Jews. It is curious to find this “unification” of Egypt, the building of a great city and temple in Egypt, and a rebellion 430 years later.

As it happens, it was precisely at this moment in time that a new group of people appeared on the island of Crete.

Tacitus tells us:

Some say that the Jews were fugitives from the island of Crete, who settled on the nearest coast of Africa about the time when Saturn was driven from his throne by the power of Jupiter. Evidence of this is sought in the name. There is a famous mountain in Crete called Ida; the neighboring tribe, the Idaei, came to be called Judaei by a barbarous lengthening of the national name.²⁰⁵

205 Herodotus, The Histories, Book V, c. 110 CE

Is this an ancient tradition that was carried to Crete by refugees from Egypt, and then, at the time of the eruption of the volcano Santorini, was carried again to Palestine along with the terrifying images of death and destruction? In the myths of the labyrinth, the most famous of Daedalus’ architectural feats, it is said that King Minos imprisoned him in the labyrinth for helping Theseus escape.

Daedalus and his son escaped by fashioning wings made of feathers and wax, though his son is killed by falling into the sea when the wax melts and the feathers begin to fall out. It was said that Daedalus fled to Sicily. Again we make note of the curious similarity of the story of Minos and his great architect, Daedalus, and Solomon and his great architect Hiram Abiff. We see in the story of Menes/Narmer not merely a strong resemblance, but we see certain historical developments that, even though not specified, point us in the direction of thinking that the myth of Theseus, Ariadne, and Daedalus and the Minotaur in the labyrinth, actually relate to Menes and his labyrinth, and a rebellion 430 years after a “unification” and the building of a labyrinth.

It is most curious to find this ancient link between Crete and Egypt and the Jews, the purported possessors of the famous Ark of the Covenant, most especially when we consider the issue of the labyrinth and the Minotaur. Was the Labyrinth the real “Temple of Solomon”? We find another clue in the writings of our old gadabout recorder of all gossip, legends, and discombobulated history, Herodotus. Keep in mind that Herodotus was writing down what he was told and what he could get from inquiry.

Indeed, the history had already been “mythicized”, and different kings had been assimilated to the myth according to the pattern discovered by Eliade and friends, so keep that in mind as you read this passage:

Apries having thus been overthrown, Amasis became king, being of the district of Saïs, and the name of the city whence he was is Siuph. Now at the first the Egyptians despised Amasis and held him in no great regard, because he had been a man of the people and was of no distinguished family; but afterwards Amasis won them over to himself by wisdom and not willfulness.

First in Saïs he built and completed for Athene a temple-gateway which is a great marvel, and he far surpassed herein all who had done the like before, both in regard to height and greatness, so large are the stones and of such quality. Then secondly he dedicated great colossal statues and man-headed sphinxes very large, and for restoration he brought other stones of monstrous size. Some of these he caused to be brought from the stone-quarries which are opposite Memphis, others of very great size from the city of Elephantine, distant a voyage of not less than twenty days from Saïs: and of them all I marvel most at this, namely a monolith chamber which he brought from the city of Elephantine; and they were three years engaged in bringing this, and two thousand men were appointed to convey it, who all were of the class of boatmen.

Moreover Amasis became a lover of the Hellenes; and besides other proofs of friendship which he gave to several among them, he also granted the city of Naucratis for those of them who came to Egypt to dwell in; and to those who did not desire to stay, but who made voyages thither, he granted portions of land to set up altars and make sacred enclosures for their Gods.

Also with the people of Kyrene Amasis made an agreement for friendship and alliance; and he resolved too to marry a wife from thence, whether because he desired to have a wife of Hellenic race, or apart from that, on account of friendship for the people of Kyrene: however that may be, he married, some say the daughter of Battos, others of Arkesilaos, and others of Critobulos, a man of repute among the citizens; and her name was Ladike.²⁰⁶

206 Herodotus, The Histories, Book II, 181.

We are suddenly reminded of the Hyperborean girls who brought offerings to Delos, one of whom was named Laodike.

What is more, it brings to mind the journey of the great Queen of Sheba who heard of the fame of Solomon and came, bearing gifts, to see for herself.

The Secret of Crete

For centuries, bards in the marketplaces of the Mediterranean recited the stories of the Minotaur. Scholars of later centuries considered them to be fable and fantasy. The ideas of human sacrifice and grotesque creatures were reinterpreted as symbolic accounts of how higher Greek culture overcame the bloody bull cult of the ancient Cretans. And so the matter was interpreted until Arthur Evans discovered and excavated the “palace” at Knossos, a few miles south of the capital of Crete, Herakleion. (We note that Pliny mentions residents of an Egyptian city Heracleopolis.)

Nevertheless, Arthur Evans banished the myth of the Minotaur with his discovery. From the remains of twelve hundred deviously interconnected rooms, stairways, corridors, warehouses, colonnaded halls and cellars grouped around an interior court, and from the arrangements of wall paintings showing bull games, animal scenes, processions and portraits, Evans reconstructed the Minoan culture for the breathless world. Based upon Evan’s analyses, the Greek bards who said such nasty things about the Cretans were all a bunch of frauds!

The innumerable battles between Theseus and the Minotaur portrayed on classical vases, murals, mosaics, reliefs, gems, and coins, were obviously based on pure imagination. There were, of course, some criticisms of Evans’ reconstruction, but by and large, no one really doubted that the excavated labyrinth at Knossos was, indeed, the home of the Cretan royal family - a palace. Not only that, but the world of Arthur Evans’ time was amazed at the high culture of the Minoans. They had drainage systems, bathrooms, frescoes of women in striking toilettes that were actually similar to the styles at the time of the discovery - bared breasts and long skirts.

The women of Knossos wore make-up and lived in country estates that were undefended - a sign of gracious living - as opposed to the gloomy citadels of the later Greeks. Clearly the Minoans lived in a land flowing with milk and honey and lived a carefree life devoted to sports, art, and love in the sunny kingdom of Minos, a veritable Solomon with his genius architect, Daedalus.

There was only one serious dissenter to the universal acceptance of the gay lifestyle of those amazing Minoans: Oswald Spengler.

In his book World History of the Second Millennium BC, published in 1935, Spengler speculated on the archaeological finds of Crete. He noted the absence of any protecting walls around ancient Cretan palaces and country estates; he noted the pictures of bulls so reminiscent of the ancient Minotaur legend; he noted a very peculiar “king’s throne” in the Palace of Knossos, which in his view, would have been more suitable “for a votive image of a priest’s mummy”.

And then he asked,

“were the ‘palaces’ of Knossos and Phaistos temples of the dead, sanctuaries of a powerful cult of the hereafter? I do not wish to make such an assertion, for I cannot prove it, but the question seems to me worthy of serious consideration”.

But such a suggestion was ignored.

According to the experts, the position of Crete was particularly favorable for the purported Minoan domination of the sea, and for growth and development of their wonderful civilization. It was claimed to be the “crossroads”, linking three continents, and all the racial and cultural elements of Europe, Asia and Africa met and mingled in the melting pot of Crete. It was this mingling that produced such a marvelous new way of life, a new philosophy, new art, and the “freshness, charm and variety” that enchanted the world.

The Minoan Kingdom was destroyed by the eruption of the terrible volcano of Santorini, which we will discuss further on in some detail, and after that, none of the Minoan “palaces” was ever re-inhabited. It seems that the original Minoans fled, never to return, and afterward, the purely Greek period of Crete began with the arrival of waves of Dorians.

According to Homer, Idomensus, grandson of the ruler of Knossos, fought side by side with the Achaeans against the Trojans. In the famous catalogue of ships in The Iliad, the Cretans are listed along with the rest of the Achaeans and not as foreign auxiliaries. There is absolutely no indication that the Cretans are anything other than Danaans, which means Achaeans or Greeks.

Before the discoveries of Arthur Evans, there was no indication that the Minoans had not been Greeks. But after his excavations, such an idea could no longer hold sway. They were clearly not Greeks.

The question in the minds of everyone is: who were these Minoans, really, and where did they go?

From the very beginning of his excavations, the finds at Knossos differed so fundamentally from the art and artifacts of classical Greece that there was simply no comparison. The russet skin color of the Minoan men on the frescoes in the Palace of Knossos was a distinct sign of their alien nature to the Greeks. They were not fair-haired Achaeans, but brown skinned, dark-haired tribes. Evans found no temples, no large sculpture, no amphitheaters with seats, and no inscriptions telling the deeds of the Gods and great men, not even any familiar characters of the Greek pantheons.

Instead, Evans found strange columns that tapered toward the bottom, and architecture like no other in its shapes and arrangement of space. He found magazines full of gigantic jars - pithoi - deposits of clay tablets of endless statistical notations devoid of any historical character or mythological references. He found curious clay idols of women with bared breasts holding serpents. The resemblances to finds at Mycenae and Tiryns in the Peloponnesus have prompted some experts to think that the lords of the citadels of Mycenae and Tiryns had visited Crete. The frescoes of women in Tiryns, with long black hair, exposed bosoms and slender waists; the dolphins, lotus blossoms and spiral motifs; and especially the characteristic Cretan double shields plainly showed the hand of a Cretan artist.

Knossos presented no clear parallel to other known cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. The Minoans were something quite “other”. The only possible comparison in terms of elegance of lifestyle was either Greece or Egypt. But the people who lived at Knossos were quite different from either of them. Knossos had no mummies, no pyramids, no sphinxes or obelisks, no monumental statues of Gods or pharaohs, no walls filled with hieroglyphs glorifying their rulers and their deeds.

Arthur Evans thought that something must have prevented a complete cultural and civilizational exchange. He came to believe that the inhabitants of Knossos had attained a height of civilization unique for the Middle to Late Bronze Age, with technical devices at their disposal that seemed strikingly modern. Again the question was asked: who were they and where did they go? What happened to the Minoans?

In 1974, Hans Georg Wunderlich, Professor of Geology and Paleontology at Stuttgart University, published The Secret of Crete. This book was the result of many observations he had made from a “geologists” point of view while visiting Crete. There were many puzzling facts about the strange 1200 room “palace”.

One thing his geologist’s eye noticed immediately was that the steps of the “palace” were made of soft alabaster, but were not worn! There were many doorways, but stone slabs sealed them off. There were “bathtubs” equipped with drain holes, but no drainpipes! He found row after row of storage vessels, but no kitchen. The list goes on, and the reader is encouraged to read his book for the lengthy analysis.

Wunderlich quotes the account of traveller Thomas Munster in Crete:

What about the palace’s access to light, air and sun? Where, for example, are the big windows without which we can scarcely imagine elegant living? When you look closer you see, to be sure, that the royal palace has open loggias, colonnaded halls, roofed over courts, but that there are scarcely any windows.

 

A good many rooms are so completely boxed in within the complex structure that they do not even border on an outside wall. There is something very odd about the idea of constructing a luxurious building in whose interior people would necessarily feel as if they were inside a cave. Yet they had the means to build in totally modern windows, perhaps even glazed windows.

In a state of devastation the place must have looked like a tangle of artificial caves in which nobody could find his way about… and the impression of mystery, vastness and confusion must have been complete.

No materials were carried away from Knossos to be used for peasant villages… The place was avoided with superstitious fear. What exactly happened, why Knossos was avoided like the site of a gallows or a witches’ dancing floor, remains to be clarified.²⁰⁷

207 Munster, quoted by Wunderlich, The Secret of Crete, (New York: Macmillan 1974) p. 85.

In the end, Wunderlich came to the realization, based on the objective evidence, that the “palace” of King Minos, so identified by Evans, was nothing but a necropolis. It had never been intended for the living, but was a place where a powerful cult of the dead practiced elaborate sacrifices, burial rites, and ritual games of death.

He realized that the legend of Crete was essentially accurate, and that legend said that it was not a “home to a wise sovereign who fostered arts and sports”, but that it was a sinister place belonging entirely to the underworld and a devouring God. In other words, it had the equivalent reputation among the civilizations of the Mediterranean that a graveyard and mausoleum have in our own society. Just as our society has a tendency to tell “ghost stories around the campfire”, about terrifying apparitions of the dead in our own cemeteries, or “cities of the dead”, so were similar tales told about Crete, where the only living inhabitants were the “resident undertakers”, the “embalmers”, and experts on death and the afterlife.

Crete didn’t need defensive walls because it was the place that the other cities and countries brought their dead for “cult care”. It may also have been the site of human sacrifice for cult reasons as well.

Wunderlich wrote his own observations:

I had visited the Minoan sites to explore the traces of early geological catastrophes, but what I found were curious contradictions. Were the excavated labyrinthine complexes really the palatial residences of glorious kings, of the legendary Minos and his brothers Sarpedon and Rhadamanthys? In fact, could these places be regarded as residences at all?

 

My geological observations argued against any such assumption. Places of worship, shrines, sanctified earth, yes, but not places of human settlement. Comparison with other Mediterranean cultures suggested a cult of the dead […] that would mean, however, that Minoan culture, to the extent that we now know it, was almost entirely a funerary cult.²⁰⁸

208 Ibid.

In dealing with the issue of what happened to the Minoans, Wunderlich points out that it is a mistake to think that just because an institution comes to an end, and the buildings of a civilization are destroyed, that it means an end to the peoples themselves. Institutions end when they no longer have a “living function”. In light of the major destruction of the area by the cataclysmic eruption of Santorini, it is far more likely, as Wunderlich points out, that there was a “change in function”, and an “abandonment of traditional ideas and modes of behavior”.

In other words, if a funerary cult is destroyed cataclysmically, it is entirely likely that the practitioners came to the conclusion that they needed a change of philosophy and were “born again” into a new and different cult that was considered to be less likely to evoke such disastrous responses from the “Gods”. And, in point of fact, that seems to be what happened.

Given all the evidence presented by Wunderlich, we can no longer think of Crete as an anomaly, an isolated civilization in the Mediterranean. Rather, we come to the rather startling realization that Crete did have an enormous role in the context of those times. Many connections are drawn between the Minoans and Etruria, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece.

More than this, Wunderlich marshals a great body of evidence to show that the Cretan civilization was born from Egypt and interacted with Egypt in a long relationship.

The Minoans were a dark, elegant people of mysterious origin. Even their ancient name is unknown; they were given the name Minoans by a modern-day British archaeologist, Arthur Evans, who derived it from Greek mythology. [...]²⁰⁹ About 3200 BC, a large number of newcomers reached southern Crete. Their religious symbols - the trident, the double axe, and the shield shaped like the numeral 8 - were those of the Delta tribes of Lower Egypt.

 

The Libyan Goddess, with her spear, snake, spindle, and goatskin bib, came with them, and she remained one of their chief deities. Other evidence of the newcomers’ Egyptian or Libyan origin was the soldiers’ custom of training their hair in a long lock curled over one shoulder and their use of a peculiarly shaped loincloth instead of a kilt. It seems likely that these people may have been fleeing from Menes‘ conquest of Lower Egypt. They mixed with the Neolithic Cretans of the mountains to form the Cretan civilization.²¹⁰

209 Colon, Thuborn, The Ancient Mariners, (Alexandria, Virginia: Time-Life Books 1981) p. 12.

210 Hayes, pp. 73-74.

Returning to our tracking of the story of the labyrinth, the hero of the story, Prince Theseus of Athens, volunteered to become one of the intended victims.

However, the priestess Ariadne fell in love with him and helped him by giving him a ball of golden thread. He unraveled this as he penetrated to the heart of the maze, where he slew the Minotaur and was able to find his way out and escape.

Afterwards, Theseus sailed away from Crete with Ariadne and the other Athenian youths and maidens who had been held captive in the labyrinth, and arrived at Delos. There he set up a shrine to Aphrodite, and he and his companions executed a dance which imitated the winding twists and turns of the labyrinth, which included weaving, turning movements to complex rhythms. It is known that locals performed a version of this dance until fairly recent times.

This connection of the myth of Theseus and Ariadne to the island of Delos brings us again back to the mysterious offerings that were sent from the Hyperboreans to the Delians, and the story of the four Hyperborean girls who never returned to their country, Hyperoche and Laodike, Opis and Arge, accompanied by five men who Herodotus tells us were later called “Perphereës”. We see here a connection to the myth of the Athenian youths and maidens sent as tribute to Minos. We also see a connection to several other myths that all seem to be different versions of the same story that has received various treatments according to the “mythicization” principle. We are interested in the common elements so as to be able to determine the core event.

The majority of experts who write about the labyrinth, tell us that the plan and meaning of the maze clearly originated in Egypt, where it was the scene of the religious dramas involving killing the God-king in the form of a bull. They further tell us that the sacrifice was only token, and that a divine bull was substituted for the king in the culmination of several days of ritual dance, drama and combat performed in a labyrinth. A similar cult is said to be at the root of the Cretan labyrinth myth. The “bull of Minos” would be the representative of the kingship and power of Minos; and Theseus, by killing the bull and taking the king’s daughter, was claiming the throne symbolically.

Indeed, such a solution would explain why bull, king and labyrinth occur together in both Crete and Egypt, but what it does not explain is the labyrinth itself and why the same design is found all over the world. Most scholars of ancient history and archaeology are powerfully influenced by the theories of Egyptology which posit that all civilizations diffused from ancient Egypt, or from Mesopotamia, at least. However, the sheer volume of physical evidence suggests that this is not the case.

The Egyptian labyrinths were always composed of straight lines, and the abstract mazes on seals were usually made up of square fret patterns. While Cretan coins from classical times often show labyrinths, some of which are of the Egyptian fretwork kind, most of them show a maze of a very different construction - the square or rounded spiral design - the Greek meander - of European tradition, which is never found in Egypt.

The spiraling maze consists of a series of interlocking concentric bands, usually seven in number, with a straight line of exit running from the center to the base. This is the form of nearly all the ancient mazes of Europe, including those known to have been focal points of nature religions and folk activity such as festivals, dancing, dramas and games.

These designs are known as Troy towns. Spiral mazes with names that are obviously derived from the word “Troy” are found in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, England, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Norway and Russia. In short, there is absolutely nothing Egyptian about the Troy mazes, and there is every reason to believe that they are indigenous to the megalithic cultures, which were independent developments from the civilizations of the Near East.

But in the stories of the Hyperborean girls, the myths of Theseus, as well as several other myths we are going to examine, we find two independent aspects of the maze puzzle meeting and interacting, and what they have in common is, in our opinion, ancient technology - a device that may have been at the center of the dance of the God at Stonehenge, utilized to manipulate gravity, space and time.

That similar powers were available to the Egyptians seems to be evident, but it is also clear that their perception of the world, their reaction to it, and their utilization of this technology was quite different.

In the stories of the Egyptian labyrinth, the object at the center was a terrible, devouring power. In the story of the Hyperboreans, the dance of the God was a celebration of life, of bounty, of victory over the serpent. The “spear-armed Maruts” danced and brought forth baskets of bountiful blessings, materializing from the waves of the great Star Goddess, the Enthroned Queen.

Something happened. Something terrible, and whether or not we discover that any sort of “object” was at the center of the labyrinth, we believe that our investigations will lead us to the knowledge of the Ark.

And so far, even if it left Egypt, it does not seem to have made it to Crete.

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