The Stargate Conspiracy (12 page)

 

Randall-Stevens gives a diagram of the chambers and tunnels under the Sphinx and the Giza plateau, and also adds this telling paragraph:

But did Randall-Stevens - like Edgar Cayce — really find his ideas in the spirit world, or did they have a more terrestrial source? Investigation reveals a very interesting tradition of which both men may have been aware — the Ancient and Mystic Order Rosae Crucis, the prominent American Rosicrucian society commonly known as AMORC.

AMORC, which has become well known for its extensive advertising and well-organised correspondence courses, was founded in the early 1920s by Harvey Spencer Lewis, who died in 1939. He had been initiated into the Rosicrucian Order in the great occult centre of Toulouse, in southern France, and founded AMORC in order to study (according to one of its brochures) ‘the mysteries of time and space; the human consciousness; the nature of matter; perfecting the physical body ... development of will; important discoveries in Rosicrucian chemistry and physics’. More significantly, the order claimed a pedigree that went directly back to the Mystery Schools of ancient Egypt.

Spencer Lewis claimed to have inside knowledge of the Giza Plateau: indeed, the idea of a complex of tunnels and chambers beneath Giza — linking the Sphinx to the three pyramids - is a major part of AMORC’s beliefs. Lewis said this information was taken from the ‘Rosicrucian archives’, although he offered no evidence to support this claim.
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Interestingly, the diagrams of these tunnels and chambers in AMORC documents are virtually identical to those of Randall-Stevens, and are too similar to be merely coincidental. And the latter’s account of the arrival of the Atlanteans in Egypt also resembles Cayce’s (although Cayce’s description of the Hall of Records is different from those of Randall-Stevens and Lewis).

Bauval and Hancock’s diagram showing the secret ‘Genesis Chamber’ locates it in more or less the same place as in the AMORC documents. On the face of it, this appears to be exciting confirmation that Bauval and Hancock have proved independently, using astronomical data, the claims of psychics and occult brotherhoods over the last eighty years. But have those two authors really presented a much wider public with great esoteric secrets for the first time, enabling us all to participate in the ancient mysteries? Unfortunately the answer must be probably not. In our opinion Bauval and Hancock want to give the impression of providing independent corroboration: after all, we have seen that their argument about the location of the Genesis Chamber was highly contrived.

Is the New Orthodoxy not so new after all, but merely older, occult ideas repackaged? Obviously there is nothing wrong with presenting an eager public with old, mystical concepts, be they from AMORC or Freemasonry. But if this is the case, why do they seem to be unwilling to acknowledge it?

Hancock and Bauval’s driven attempts to forge a link between the ancient Egyptian First Time -
tep zepi
— and the Age of Aquarius creates a sense of expectancy in their readers. Everything they have written so far appears to us to be geared to making that connection, with the distinct impression that soon a great secret will be revealed, and that they are its guardians. In other words, Hancock and Bauval seem to be a part, wittingly or unwittingly, of a programme designed to climax at the time of the Millennium and the first years of the twenty-first century.

Hints about the nature of that agenda may be gleaned from the increasingly messianic tone of their recent postings on the Internet, as in that from Robert Bauval on 29 July 1998:

And from Hancock on 14 August 1998:

In our view, this messianic fervour is no accident: Hancock and Bauval, like other individuals and groups, appear to be working to a private programme fuelled by a very real missionary zeal.

In October 1998, Bauval announced the creation of his ‘Project Equinox 2000’, based around a group of twelve authors (plus himself) whom he refers to as the ‘Magic 12’. The membership of this group was not fixed at the time of writing, but it originally included Graham Hancock, John Anthony West, Andrew Collins and, of course, Robert Temple. Other names mentioned by Bauval in this context are Colin Wilson, Michael Baigent, Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas.

The idea is that the Magic 12 are to hold a series of conferences in different locations around the world on the key astronomical days of the year 1999 — the equinoxes and solstices. The locations have been selected as the major Hermetic sites of the world, including Giza, Alexandria, Stonehenge and San Jose (headquarters of AMORC). Bauval states that the ‘principal objective is to perform a global ritual’ symbolising the return of the magical Hermetic tradition to Egypt.
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The year’s events will culminate at midnight on 31 December 1999, when, from a specially erected platform in front of the Sphinx, Bauval and his 12 companions will deliver a ‘message to the planet’. He also says that this event will mark the ‘return of the gods’ to Egypt.
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Whether or not the Great Ennead comply with Bauval’s stage directions and time their return to coincide with the climax of his announcement, one can only reel in amazement that Dr Zahi Hawass has actually granted permission for this event to take place in front of the Sphinx. The likes of Coca-Cola or IBM would have been happy to pay millions to have secured what must essentially be the prime advertising spot of the big Millennium party. So why has Bauval been given it?

An intrinsic part of the planned spectacular is a twelve-hour concert, complete with state-of-the-art laser displays, designed and presented by Jean-Michel Jarre. It is scheduled to begin at sunset on 31 December 1999 and end at sunrise on 1 January 2000, encompassing Bauval’s midnight ‘Message to the Planet’. Industry rumour has it that Jarre’s current recording, ready for release in late 1999, is a follow-up to his 1980s album
Equinox,
and, like Bauval’s project, it will be called
Equinox 2000.
The common name suggests some degree of co-ordination between the two.

Bauval’s Project Equinox 2000 is funded by Concordium, a non-profit foundation based in New York that sponsors research into alternative technology and philosophies that may, in Bauval’s words, ‘bring enlightenment and spirituality to the world’.
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He has also established the ‘Phoenix Experiment Base’ in the Sphinx village, Nazlet-al-Samman, in order to monitor all activity at Giza until the Millennium.

There is no harm in providing the best Millennium show of all against such a stupendous backdrop, nor in wishing the planet love and peace. But let us not forget that an intrinsic part of the Millennium show is the announcement of the return of the ancient Egyptian gods. This may be merely some poetic turn of phrase or a kind of metaphor, but — as we shall see - part of the plan we have uncovered demands that the gods are real, and that they are returning.

The belief that the second coming of certain ancient gods — and the accompanying global transformation — is imminent is by no means confined to Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock. In the new edition of
The Sirius Mystery
Robert Temple suggests that the ancient amphibious gods, the Nommo, who are now in suspended animation somewhere in orbit around Saturn, are about to return to Earth. He says darkly that ‘these matters ... may affect us all sooner than we think.’
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In the minds of this new breed of Aquarian missionaries, the imminent momentous events will either take place at, or focus on, the Giza plateau.

 

 

Everything about Giza today is a mass of contradictions. At any given moment there are dozens of rumours and counterrumours about clandestine excavations, all manner of cover-ups and — by far the most exciting — secret discoveries that will somehow transform the world. Activity and rumour have escalated according to some kind of programme designed to culminate at the Millennium. But who lies behind this campaign? And can we successfully sort out the truth from the rumours about Giza?

Officially, nothing much is happening on the Giza plateau except that the Great Pyramid was closed on 1 April 1998 for ‘cleaning’, which seems reasonable, because the many thousands of tourists leave an incredible amount of grime and condensation on the venerable stone of the interior. A build-up of breath and sweat could cause a dangerous deterioration of the pyramid; besides, some renovation work was clearly needed — to improve the temperamental lighting system, for example. But in addition to cleaning and electrical work it was suggested, from many sources — some considerably more reliable than others - that other activities were going on at Giza: secret tunnelling, inside the Great Pyramid and elsewhere on the plateau; clandestine searches by shadowy groups for fabled hidden chambers and ancient secrets; conspiracies galore. With some cynicism, we turned our attention towards Giza, although we were in for something of a shock.

There is a certain hypocrisy in the official Egyptian attitudes to visitors to the Great Pyramid. Many tourists are frequently derided - with good reason, for American and European New Agers seem to regard the pyramids as their own and show a marked reluctance to allow the Egyptian authorities, or anyone else, to try to limit their enthusiasm for meditating inside, outside or even on top of the pyramids at any time of the day or night. They arrive in Egypt with the firm intention of planting their flag and seizing the country as their own, the jewel in the crown of New Age colonialism. They clamber and chant everywhere regardless of local feeling: a decade ago a party of 350 trooped into the Great Pyramid for a group meditation for the so-called ‘Harmonic Convergence’ - a huge number, considering the small and cramped King’s Chamber, and the oppressively ‘close’ atmosphere within that massive stone bulk, particularly when it hosts such a massive influx of people.

It is freely acknowledged that ‘metaphysical’ groups are in fact allowed into the Great Pyramid after the Giza plateau has been closed to the public each night — for a fee. In fact, in December 1997, when Dr Zahi Hawass announced the forthcoming closure of the pyramid, he specifically said that this arrangement would continue.
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But not all visitors to the Great Pyramid keep their eyes either shut in meditation or glued to a guidebook. Several seasoned and knowledgeable travellers have reported evidence of ongoing work in the ‘relieving chambers’, a series of low vaulted chambers, about 3 feet high, above the King’s Chamber. (They are generally taken to have been built specifically to relieve the pressure of the thousands of tons of rock that would otherwise have pressed down far too dangerously on the roof of the King’s Chamber, although recently some doubts have been expressed about this being the purpose of these chambers.
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) Such rumours of this and other clandestine work in the pyramid proved too tantalising, so we, together with writer-researcher Simon Cox, hastened off to Egypt, arriving there the day before the Great Pyramid was closed for what was then described as an eight-month ‘cleaning and restoration’ programme. However, the Great Pyramid did not re-open on 1 January 1999, and the Egyptian Cultural Centre in London have since told us that it may never be reopened to the public.

One unexplored chamber in Giza is known: assuming Gantenbrink’s door really is an entrance, then it must open on to something. But what? As with everything else at Giza these days, there is a political background to the story.

The German robotics engineer made the discovery on 22 March 1993, the day after Zahi Hawass had been dismissed because of a scandal over a stolen Fourth Dynasty statue (although Graham Hancock has suggested that his dismissal was in fact somehow connected with Gantenbrink’s work).
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The man who dismissed Hawass, Dr Muhammed Bakr, President of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, was himself sacked three months later. He claimed that a ‘mafia’ — which had controlled everything at the pyramids for the last twenty years - was responsible
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Hawass himself was only out of office for about a month, and was reinstated in April 1994. He had spent that time in California, which may be significant, for — as British writer-researcher Chris Ogilvie-Herald wrote in
Quest for Knowledge
magazine, of which he was then editor - Hawass’s reinstatement ‘was said to have been brought about by American intervention’.
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After Robert Bauval had released the news of Gantenbrink’s discovery to the media on 16 April 1993, the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo officially reacted to Gantenbrink’s discovery by dismissing it as unimportant (perhaps a case of sour grapes?). Dr Bakr went considerably further; at first he even dismissed it as a hoax.
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Gantenbrink was refused permission to continue with his work, because of the breach of protocol in the way the news of his discovery was released to the press. As described in the previous chapter, Gantenbrink places the blame for this fairly and squarely on Robert Bauval, but this has not prevented Graham Hancock from portraying Gantenbrink as a martyr to the cause and a victim of the Egyptological establishment — nor from hinting that this was part of some conspiracy. He wrote in
Nexus
magazine in late 1996: ‘The official reason given by the Egyptian Antiquities Organization ... was that Gantenbrink leaked the news of the discovery to the British press and thus, apparently, broke a “rule” of archaeology.’
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