Read The Atlantis Blueprint Online
Authors: Colin Wilson
The Atlantis Blueprint (30 page)
Is it not possible that work began on the subterranean cities at that time? Collins cites a Persian legend in which a shepherd called Yima is told by God to build a ‘var’ – an underground city or fortress – to protect men and animals from freezing conditions brought about by an evil demon. Nearly 2,000 human beings are to be taken into the city for their protection.
Could this legend also be referring to the underground cities of Cappadocia? There was a strong connection between Cappadocia and Kurdistan, and also between Kurdistan and its neighbour Persia, in which case there is an arguable connection between these subterranean cities and the end of the last ice age.
Subsequently, the earth then had to contend with yet another catastrophe in a comet that split into ‘seven burning mountains’ and caused a disastrous flood, accompanied by worldwide volcanic activity. Collins argues that this catastrophe could be reflected in the words of a version of the Book of Enoch found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, which states that the rebel Watchers were finally destroyed by ‘fire, naphtha and brimstone’.
There seems to be an obvious objection to this notion: surely the Kharsag epic would have mentioned the ‘seven mountains’ ? But the Kharsag epic is an unfinished fragment, which ends (on tablets 8 and 9) with the long winter and the great storm. We do not know what might have been described on other tablets. Perhaps tablets 10 and 11 now lie in the basement of some Iraqi museum, or even underground, like the
missing tablets of
Gilgamesh,
waiting for discovery by another George Smith.
I have already noted that Andrew Collins is inclined to suspect a connection between the ‘civilisers’ of Eden and the ‘god’ Viracocha, who brought knowledge to Central and South America. He also links them with ancient Egypt. Collins accepts – as I do myself – that Egyptian civilisation probably dates back thousands of years before the pharaohs.
Collins notes that among the Anannage who built Kharsag there is a council of seven, and that in the Edfu ‘building texts’ the Seven Sages are divine beings who organise the building of the temples and sacred places. Graham Hancock writes of them:
This context [describing the sages] is marked by a preponderance of ‘Flood’ imagery in which the ‘primeval waters’ (out of which the Great Primeval Mound emerged) are depicted as gradually receding. We are reminded of Noah’s mountaintop on which the Ark settled after the Biblical Deluge, and of the ‘Seven Sages’ (Apkallu) of ancient Babylonian tradition who were said to have ‘lived before the Flood’ and to have built the walls of the sacred city of Uruk. Likewise is it an accident that in Indian tradition ‘Seven Sages’ (rishis) are remembered to have survived the Flood, their purpose being to pass down to future generations the wisdom of the antediluvian world? In all cases the sages appear as the enlightened survivors of a cataclysm that wiped the earth clean…
17
Hancock says that the Seven Sages come from an island that was destroyed by a flood, and that the majority of its divine inhabitants were drowned. The Seven Sages then moved on to Egypt. We might bear in mind that the island called Dilmun, which appears in Sumerian and Akkadian mythology, is a paradise that sounds remarkably like a variant of the Garden of Eden.
The Edfu texts and Pyramid texts tell us that these Seven Sages were also known as the ‘followers of Horus’
(Shemsu Hor)
and that they rebuilt the world after the great catastrophe. Since we are dealing with the relatively small area of the Middle East, it seems, to say the least, not unlikely that the Seven Sages of Egypt are the seven councillors of Kharsag.
These speculations are related to Rand’s observations on the geography of sacred sites (see Appendix 5). He notes that the O’Briens and Andrew Collins are in agreement that several sites in the Middle East were linked with the Shining Ones – Baalbek, Byblos and Ehdin in Lebanon, Jericho near Jerusalem, Catal Huyuk in Turkey, Edfu in Egypt and finally Nippur, the religious capital of ancient Sumer. He commented in an email to me:
If the Shining Ones were undertaking geological surveys at these sites before the Flood then they should fit into the Atlantis Blueprint.
Baalbek is perhaps the most impressive site in the Middle East because of the gigantic blocks of stone used in the construction of a platform that was later to become a temple dedicated to the Roman god, Jupiter. In John Anthony West’s award-winning documentary
The Mystery of the Sphinx,
he showed just how difficult it was even for modern engineers using the largest cranes in the world to move objects weighing 200 tons. The blocks used in construction at Baalbek are much larger than those found in Egypt.
Andrew Collins comments on their sheer weight: An outer podium wall, popularly known as the Great Platform, is seen by scholars as contemporary to the Roman temples. Yet incorporated into one of its courses are the three largest building blocks ever used in a man-made structure. Each one weighs an estimated 1,000 tonnes apiece. They sit side-by-side on the fifth level of a truly cyclopean wall located beyond the western limits
of the Temple of Jupiter. These three stones are called the Trilithon. Even if they did not exist and we were left with the six blocks of stone that lie beneath them, we would still be looking at blocks weighing in excess of 450 tonnes. The course beneath the Trilithon is almost as bewildering. It consists of six mammoth stones thirty to thirty-three feet in length, fourteen feet in height and ten feet in depth, each an estimated 450 tonnes in weight.’
Collins is highly sceptical of the claim by some scholars that the Romans were responsible for the Great Platform and remarks: ‘Nowhere in extant Roman records does it mention anything at all about the architects and engineers involved in the construction of the Great Platform. No contemporary Roman historian or scholar comments on how it was constructed, and there are no tales that preserve the means by which the Roman builders achieved such marvellous feats of engineering.’
Instead, Andrew Collins looks to the mythology of the people who live in the Bequa’a Valley. Theirs is a very different tale: ‘They say that Baalbek’s first city was built before the Great Flood by Cain, the son of Adam, whom God banished to the “land of Nod” that lay “east of Eden,” for murdering his brother Abel, and he called it after his son Enoch. The citadel, they say, fell into ruins at the time of the deluge and was much later re-built by a race of giants.’
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So, says Rand, according to local traditions there have been at least two ancient periods of construction at Baalbek: one well before the flood (since it was undertaken by Cain who flourished before Enoch who was in turn the greatgrandfather of Noah), the second long after the flood, when a race of giants occupied the site. Rand, like Collins, believes that, like so many sacred places around the world, Baalbek was simply appropriated by later generations, in this case Roman.
Rand’s next thought was to compare Baalbek’s location to the Hudson Bay Pole:
I discovered that it was situated at 10 phi distance from the equator. I knew that the largest stones used in construction in the New World were in and around Cuzco, which also had been at a 10 phi latitude before the flood. Sitchin had commented upon the similarities between Baalbek and Cuzco and now we knew that both sites shared the same sacred latitude.
I was intrigued by this development and it occurred to me that the geological survey of Enoch’s ‘angels’ might have marked off the distance to earlier positions of the earth’s crust/mantle. I decided to see how Baalbek related to the Greenland Sea Pole (before 50,600
BC)
and the Yukon Pole (before 91,600
BC)
(see Appendix 4).
Rand’s theory of sacred sites is based on the notion that, as Hapgood himself implies, the Atlanteans were a central part – perhaps the central part – of a worldwide maritime civilisation that extended as far as China, so it is highly probable that they had conducted a worldwide survey decades or centuries before the catastrophe of 9,600
BC.
Rand suggests they were trying to understand the periodic earthquakes and volcanic activity that had been devastating their country for a long time (there is a persistent tradition that Atlantis suffered three catastrophes, and was destroyed by the third).
We have to suppose that the Atlanteans knew the earth’s crust had been moving for a considerable time – Hapgood thinks 15,000
BC
– and were aware of its rate of movement and direction. (O’Brien’s suggestion that the ‘civilisers’ had carried their knowledge to Atlantis would certainly lend plausibility to this notion.) They also, if this theory is correct, knew the position of the North Pole before it began to move, and we have to suppose that they had built certain ‘markers’ – perhaps stone circles, Uriel’s machines – to measure this movement.
What Rand discovered, when he measured the position of Baalbek against previous poles, was unequivocal. The position of the Yukon Pole and the Greenland Sea Pole also gave significant figures.
This was when the mystical number seven showed up. During the Greenland Sea Pole Baalbek was located at 49 degrees north (7x7). But the real surprise came when Rand compared Baalbek to the Yukon Pole. When the North Pole was situated in the Yukon, a time that reached back almost 100,000 years, Baalbek was located at exactly 7 degrees north.
Golden Section Sites
W
HEN I FIRST
read Rand’s original outline of his theory, only one part caused me twinges of doubt: the section on Rennes-le-Château, the tiny French village in Languedoc where a poor village priest had discovered coded documents in a hollow pillar in his church and had suddenly become wealthy.
A year earlier, my friend Lynn Picknett had sent me the typescript of her book
The Templar Revelation
(1997) (co-authored with Clive Prince).
1
She seemed to feel that part of the modern ‘evidence’ was little more than a hoax.
The previous autumn, I had been sent for review a book called
The Tomb of God
(1996),
2
whose authors, Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger, had no doubts about the truth of the Rennes-le-Château saga and believed that their researches had revealed the burial site of Jesus Christ in the Pyrenees. A BBC programme on the book exploded their theory so savagely that the authors (who had taken part in it apparently under the belief that their book was being taken seriously) must have felt as if they had stood on a landmine.
About this time I also read a book called
The Key to the Sacred Pattern
(1997)3 by Henry Lincoln – the man who had started the avalanche of interest in Rennes-le-Château nearly thirty years before – and I realised that I was wrong: the mystery had not been exploded. Not only was the story of Rennes-le-Château as baffling as ever, but the geometry of the area provided some of the most convincing proof so far of Rand’s ‘geodetic’ theory of sacred sites and his view that ancient people possessed sophisticated surveying skills.
In 1969, the name of Rennes-le-Château was unknown, even to most of the tourists who love Languedoc and its ancient historical sites. Most of those who went there made for the walled town of Carcassonne, the breeding ground of a medieval heresy called Catharism, which preached that ‘this world’ was created by the Devil and that everything to do with matter is evil (a creed also known as Manicheeism). The Cathars were bloodily suppressed when a huge army invaded the region in 1209, murdering them by the thousand. In 1244, they made their last stand in the citadel of Montségur, situated on a mountain top, and 200 of them were finally burned alive on a huge pyre.
In the last days of the siege, four men had escaped from the citadel by night, carrying the ‘treasure’ of the Cathars – two months earlier, another two Cathars had escaped with even more treasure. I had visited the citadel years ago, and can still recall that precipitous and exhausting climb. Was it possible that the parchment discovered in the church pillar had led the priest to the treasure of the Cathars, and that this had made him a wealthy man?
Henry Lincoln was a writer of television drama scripts when he first stumbled on the mystery in 1969. On holiday with his wife and children in a French farmhouse in the Cevennes, he picked up a paperback called
Le Trésor Maudit4 – The Cursed Treasure
– by a man called Gérard de Sède. It told the story of the simple village priest called Bérenger Saunière, who was thirty-three years old when he
came to Rennes-le-Château in 1885. He was very poor – the income on which he supported himself and a housekeeper was about six pounds sterling a year.
Some time thereafter, a wealthy female parishioner, the Countess de Chambord, gave Saunière 3,000 francs to repair the church – the date may have been 1886 or 1891, according to different accounts. It was during the repairs that a workman found four wooden cylinders containing rolls of paper inside a square Visigothic pillar that held up the altar stone. Two of the papers proved to be genealogies of local families, allegedly linking them with the Merovingians, a dynasty of kings that had ruled France – less than successfully – from the fifth to the eighth centuries
AD.
The other two were Latin texts from the New Testament, but written without spaces between the words.
They were fairly obviously in code – in fact, the code of the shorter text was so straightforward that Henry Lincoln worked it out at a glance as he looked at the reproduction in de Sède’s book. Some letters were raised above the others, and when these were written down consecutively they read:
?
Dagobert II roi et à Sion est ce tresor et il est là mort’ –
‘This treasure belongs to King Dagobert II and to Sion, and he is there dead’. Sion was Jerusalem, and the last phrase could also mean ‘and it is death’. Dagobert was a seventh-century French king of the Merovingian dynasty who had lived at Rennes-le-Château in the far-off days when it was a flourishing town. The author of these parchments was probably a predecessor of Saunière named Antoine Bigou, who had been curé of Rennes-le-Château at the time of the French Revolution.