The Atlantis Blueprint (9 page)

Schwaller set out to solve the riddle. The outcome was his masterwork,
The Temple of Man
(1957),
¹²
demonstrating that the Luxor temple is of immense geometrical complexity, and that it is a symbolic representation of a man – a kind of gigantic hieroglyph. Because the man is striding forward, like the striding colossus of Rameses II in its south-east corner, the courtyard representing the lower part of the leg has the shape of a square knocked sideways.

One of Schwaller’s main insights was that the temple also contains many examples of the geometrical proportion known as the ‘Golden Section’ (and called by the Greek letter phi). It sounds like an obscure definition from a geometry book, but it is a notion of profound importance, and it also plays a central part in the precise location of sacred sites.

Nature uses the Golden Section all the time. Your body is an example, with your navel acting as the division between the two parts. It can be found in the spirals of leaf arrangements, petals around the edge of a flower, leaves around a stem, pine cones, seeds in a sunflower head, seashells – even in the arms of spiral nebulae. Why is nature so fond of it? Because it is the best way of packing, of minimising wasted space. Artists also discovered it at a fairly early stage, because this way of dividing a picture is oddly pleasing to the eye, in exactly the same way that musical harmonies are pleasant to the ear.

Obviously, there is something very important about this simple-looking number. It is, in fact, 0.618034…, going on to infinity, non-recurring, as some decimals do.

Another form of phi is 1.618. If you wish to extend a line a phi distance, you simply multiply it by 1.618.

Another piece of mathematics is significant: a sequence of numbers discovered by the mathematician Fibonacci, in
which each number is the sum of the preceding two numbers. If you begin with 0 and the next number is 1, 0 + 1 equals 1. And that 1 plus the previous 1 equals 2. And that 2 plus the preceding 1 equals 3. And so on: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55…

If you take any two Fibonacci numbers, and divide each one by the one before it, the answer gets closer and closer to the Golden Number 0.618034… the bigger the numbers concerned. No matter how big the numbers become – even billions or trillions – the number never quite reaches the Golden Number.

These Fibonacci numbers can be found in pine cones, nautilus shells and spiral nebulae.

This is what excited Schwaller so much when he detected it in the Luxor temple. He had spent his years in Switzerland studying the laws of universal harmony, as epitomised in cathedrals such as Chartres. His results had been stolen by an alchemist called Fulcanelli, who had published them as his own in 1925 in a book called
The Mystery of Cathedrals,
13 which quickly became a classic. Schwaller had no doubt that this law of harmony was a part of a far older tradition that was already well established by the time of ancient Egypt. When his first results were published in 1949 in
The Temple in Man,
they caused an intellectual furore of the kind that the French enjoy so much, and Schwaller became briefly as famous as contemporaries like Sartre and Camus. (It did not last – the public soon tired of Egyptian geometry.)

Schwaller believed that this tradition predated ancient Egypt because during his first visit to the Sphinx he had no doubt whatever that it had not been eroded by wind-blown sand, but by water. This suggested that it dated back long before 2,500
BC,
the usual date assigned to the pyramids of Giza. Schwaller was familiar with an occult tradition that the Sphinx was not built by ancient Egyptians, but by survivors from the civilisation of Atlantis, who had fled some time before the final catastrophe. In his last book,
Sacred Science,
14
he spoke of an Atlantean race, ‘ancient vestiges of which have now been determined in western Africa; a wave of these people, having crossed Saharan Africa, finally settled in the valley of the Nile’. The true date of the construction of the Sphinx must be some time around 10,000
BC.

Schwaller died at Grasse in 1961, at the age of seventy-four. Although his books soon went out of print, a copy of
Sacred Science
fell into the hands of a student of Egyptology called John Anthony West. West was convinced that it was absurd to believe that ancient Egypt had come into being about 3,100
BC
– the date accepted by most Egyptologists – and that a mere five centuries later it was already building the pyramids. That, he felt, would be like asking us to believe that Europeans had no civilisation until five centuries before Chartres Cathedral. The more West learned of Egyptian science, medicine, mathematics and astronomy, the more it seemed to him obvious that Egyptian civilisation was far, far older than Egyptologists usually believe.

As he read
Sacred Science,
he realised there might be a simple way to prove this. If the Sphinx and its enclosure had been eroded by rain, not by wind-blown sand, a good geologist ought to be able to tell at a glance. He discussed the problem in a strange book called
Serpent in the Sky15
– strange because it spends most of its time discussing Schwaller de Lubicz, Egyptian geometry and the Golden Section. The book was sent to me for review in July 1979, and I was naturally most impressed by its final chapter, ‘Egypt: Heir to Atlantis’, with its photographs comparing the Sphinx enclosure with the cliff face behind the temple of Queen Hatshepsut, with erosion in both places that geologists agree to be water weathering. To me they certainly looked remarkably similar.

It took West many years to find an open-minded geologist who could command the respect of his colleagues. Eventually, accompanied by Boston University geologist Robert Schoch, West made the trip to Cairo. As they stood before the Sphinx enclosure, he was understandably nervous, half expecting

Schoch to point out that he had made some elementary error and that the erosion
was
caused by sand. To his relief, Schoch took one look and agreed that this was water weathering.

The difference is easy to explain. When a rock face is blasted by wind-blown sand, its soft layers are worn away while its hard layers continue to jut out, so the profile of the rock looks like a layer cake or a club sandwich. When a rock face is eroded by rainfall, the soft layers are still worn away horizontally, but the rain also cuts vertical channels, so the profile of the rock is a little like a series of babies’ bottoms, with rounded curves. Such weathering could be seen on the Sphinx and the Sphinx enclosure.

In Schoch’s opinion the Sphinx might well have been built around 7,000
BC
which would make it 9,000 years old instead of 4,500. When he announced this result to fellow geologists at a conference of the Geological Society of America in October 1991, it aroused intense controversy, although – strangely enough – many of the geologists were inclined to agree. It was the Egyptologists among them who denounced Schoch’s views as pure fantasy.

West also persuaded a senior forensic artist, Frank Domingo of the New York Police Department, to examine the battered face of the Sphinx, and assess whether it might be that of the pharaoh Chefren, whose bust had been found buried in the Valley Temple facing the Sphinx. Domingo went to Cairo and applied to the Sphinx the same methods he would employ in trying to identify the damaged face of a corpse from a photograph. His conclusion was that the Sphinx was emphatically
not
Chefren – the chin was more prominent, the mouth a different shape, and the cheeks sloped at a different angle.

West published an article about the findings in a glossy magazine and sent me a copy. It so happened that I had been asked to write a film outline about Atlantis for a Hollywood producer, and had used West’s theory that the Sphinx had been built by survivors from Atlantis. We met in New York in

September 1993, and he showed me the rough cut of a television documentary he had made about the Sphinx. When I told him that I was thinking of writing a book about the whole question of the Sphinx and the age of civilisation, he recommended that I contact two other writers who were working along the same lines. One was an economics journalist named Graham Hancock, who had written a book called
The Sign and the Seal,16
about the Ark of the Covenant, and was now writing a book arguing that civilisation may be many thousands of years older than historians believe. The other was a Canadian librarian called Rand Flem-Ath, who had written a book about Atlantis that was still in typescript. I made a note of both their addresses.

How had John West come to hear about Rand and
When the Sky Fell?
By another coincidence. In March 1993, Rand read a copy of a magazine called
Saturday Night,
which contained an article about the Sphinx by Paul Roberts,
¹⁷
a writer on Eastern philosophy, telling the story of John West and Robert Schoch and describing West’s suspicion that the Sphinx may have been built by survivors of Atlantis. Rand wrote to Paul Roberts, enclosing an outline of
When the Sky Fell.
To his delight, Roberts replied a few days later by fax, expressing his willingness to read the entire book. Paul Roberts sent the outline on to his old friend John West, and also suggested a Canadian publisher.

When I returned to England in late September 1993, I lost no time in writing to Rand and to Graham Hancock. Within little more than a week, I had received typescripts of
When the Sky Fell,
and of a book called
Fingerprints of the Gods.18

Hancock’s typescript was vast. He was not, like Däniken, arguing that space visitors were responsible for civilisation but simply proposing that our human ancestors – who built Tiahuanaco in the Andes and the pyramids of Mexico and Egypt – were far more technically accomplished than had ever been acknowledged. He cited astronomical evidence by the Bolivian scholar Arthur Posnansky, who had spent a lifetime
studying the ruins of Tiahuanaco, that the ‘temple’ (or Kalasasiya) had been built about 15,000
BC,
some 9,000 years before the latest estimates of the beginning of civilisation in the Middle East.

Hancock also drew on the work of a Belgian engineer, Robert Bauval, presented in a book called
The Orion Mystery
.1
9
Bauval had seen a photograph of the three pyramids at Giza taken from the air, and had been struck by their rather odd arrangement. The first two pyramids – the Great Pyramid of Cheops (Khufu), and the pyramid of his son Chefren – were neatly arranged so that a diagonal could be drawn from the upper left-hand corner of the Great Pyramid, straight through the opposite corner, and then on through the same two corners of the Chefren pyramid. You would expect that line to continue on through the two corners of the smallest of the three pyramids, that of Menkaura. So why was the third pyramid completely out of alignment? And why was it so small, compared to the other two? Menkaura was as powerful a pharaoh as his father and grandfather.

The answer came to Bauval when he was in the desert one night, and saw the three stars of Orion’s Belt – Orion looks like two triangles placed point to point, and the Belt runs across its middle. The three stars were arranged exactly like the three pyramids. Moreover, the Milky Way, stretching across the sky beside them, looked very much like the Nile running north past the pyramids. Bauval knew that the Egyptians regarded their land as a reflection of heaven. Did they mean that quite literally, building the pyramids to reflect the Belt of their sacred constellation of Orion, which represented the god Osiris?

However if the pyramids were meant as a representation of the stars of Orion’s Belt, Bauval noticed that they were not quite an exact reflection. Because of a phenomenon called the precession of the equinoxes, the constellation moves up and down the sky over a period of about 26,000 years. As it does so, it twists slightly – imagine that the double-triangle is
impaled on the end of the minute hand of a clock, and you can see that as it moves from twelve o’clock to half past twelve, it will turn completely upside down. Actually, precession causes the constellation to move only to about ten past twelve, but it still changes its angle. Bauval calculated that the last time Orion actually ‘reflected’ the pyramids of Giza, as if reflected in a vast mirror, was about 10,500
BC.

Bauval felt that this date must have had some deep significance for the ancient Egyptians – in fact, it was what their holy scriptures referred to as the ‘First Time’,
zep tepi,
the beginning of Egyptian history. Was the Sphinx built to commemorate that ‘First Time’ around 10,500
BC?
If Bauval was correct, the Sphinx’s construction predated Schoch’s estimate of 7,000
BC.

Bauval did not think that the pyramids were also built in 10,500
BC
– he thought that certain astronomical evidence concerning the ‘air shaft’ out of the Queen’s Chamber indicated that the Great Pyramid had actually been built around 2,500
BC,
just as Egyptologists believe, but he felt the whole Giza complex was almost certainly planned in 10,500
BC.
In
Fingerprints of the Gods,
Graham Hancock suggests that perhaps the lower part of the Chefren pyramid had been built in 10,500
BC,
since its massive blocks are quite unlike the much smaller blocks of the other two pyramids.