By RIXON STEWART—

It’s almost a cliché. Working alone, an inventive genius pioneers new devices that ultimately change the world but his genius is barely recognised and he goes on to die in relative poverty; and whilst he dies, virtually alone and unrecognised, his inventions eventually transform life across the planet.

Unfortunately it’s pretty much the story of Nikola Tesla, the scientific visionary whose inventions shaped much of the 20th century, whilst the man himself has been all but forgotten. And it is no exaggeration to call Tesla a visionary.

In contrast to many scientific pioneers who spent years developing their projects, Tesla’s ideas were often conceived and perfected in his mind’s eye in an instant.

“Birth, growth and development are phases normal and natural,” said Tesla, but, “It was different with my invention(s). In the very moment I became conscious of it, I ‘saw’ it fully developed and perfected…”

In fact these extraordinary powers of memory and visualisation were to characterise much of his life and work. One day while walking with a friend in Budapest, Tesla was reciting lines from Goethe’s Faust when the idea of a rotating magnetic field suddenly appeared before him, literally. In an instant Tesla knew how to produce the alternating current.

“Can’t you see it right here in front of me, running almost silently?” He asked his companion: “It is the rotating magnetic field that does it… Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it simple? My motor will set man free, it will do the work for the world.”

He was in every sense of the word a scientific visionary; he initially developed the fluorescent bulb and neon lights; he pioneered the speedometer and the car ignition system, and helped reveal the basic scientific principles behind electron microscopes, and the microwave oven. Yet apart from a small but enthusiastic following that has grown around him, most people have hardly even heard of Nikola Tesla.

Born at the stroke of midnight, July 9-10, 1856 in Similjan, Croatia, the son of a priest of the local Serbian Orthodox Church, the young Tesla quickly distinguished himself as intelligent and went on to study physics and mathematics in Gospic and electrical engineering at the Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria.

A turning point came in 1884 when Tesla first arrived in America but initially he wasn’t too impressed: “What I had left was beautiful, artistic and fascinating in every way.” He wrote to a friend: “What I saw here was machined, rough and unattractive.”

The young immigrant arrived with four cents in his pocket, some mathematical computations and a letter of introduction from Charles Batchelor, one of Thomas Edison’s business associates in Europe.

After a short spell working for Thomas Edison, Tesla went out on his own and by December 1887 he had filed for seven US patents. These comprised a complete system of generators, transformers, transmission lines, motors and lighting. So original were the patents that they were issued without a challenge, as would normally happen. They turned out to be the most valuable patents since the telephone.

Pittsburgh industrialist George Westinghouse heard about Tesla’s inventions and decided to investigate for himself. Acting on his sharp business instincts, Westinghouse arrived at Tesla’s lab, inspected the inventions and promptly bought the patents, which ironically were to lay the foundations for the Westinghouse Corporation, one of the pillars of the Military/Industrial complex (otherwise known as the ‘New World Order’).

The Westinghouse Corporation went on to win the bid for illuminating the World’s Fair. Held in Chicago in 1893, the fair was also the world’s first ever all-electric fair. It opened on the evening of May 1 when President Grover Cleveland pushed a button and a hundred thousand incandescent lamps illuminated the fairground’s neoclassical buildings.

Tesla inventions had arrived and they were about to illuminate not only the World Fair but also the world itself.

Unlike Westinghouse though, Tesla didn’t have any business sense, nor was he driven by any overwhelming desire to make money; instead he had vision, genius, a God given creative gift that has led some observers to liken him to a Da Vinci of the modern day sciences.

In fact it’s no exaggeration to say that Westinghouse Corporation was built on Tesla’s lack of business sense. Years of fierce competition with Edison’s Corporation had left Westinghouse financially drained and by 1896 his company’s position was looking extremely precarious.

J.P. Morgan, the Stock Market’s ‘robber baron’, saw his chance. In an effort to bring the US power industry firmly under his control he began to manipulate the Stock Market, with the intention of ruining Westinghouse and buying Tesla’s valuable patents.

In desperation, Westinghouse pleaded with Tesla to revise his contract and release him from a bond to pay the inventor generous royalties. In a gesture that was typical of his true spirit, Tesla is said to have torn up the contract.

Rocky Mountain High

Around the turn of the century Tesla concluded that it would be possible to transmit electrical power without wires. To optimise results, he chose to experiment at high altitude, where the air was thinner and therefore more conductive.

As a result he ended up building a research laboratory in Colorado Springs where he conducted some of his most extraordinary experiments, tests that even to this day are shrouded in mystery.

Tesla theorised that unlimited amounts of power could be transmitted anywhere on Earth, without wires and with virtually no loss of energy. It is not clear exactly how he intended to do this, but right up until the end of his life he maintained it was quite possible and that he only needed sufficient funds to make it a reality.

The funds, however, were not forthcoming, and Tesla was eventually forced to abandon his Colorado experiments in what was to become a recurrent feature in his life: no money or insufficient finance to pursue an idea… but a constant stream of new ideas.

At the beginning of the First World War, Tesla described a means for detecting ships at sea. His idea was to transmit high-frequency radio waves that would reflect off the hulls of vessels and appear on a fluorescent screen. The idea was way ahead of its day, and at the time few quite understood it, but it was a forerunner of what we now call radar.

Tesla was also the first to see a time when flying vehicles could be remotely controlled to land with an explosive charge on an unsuspecting enemy. In effect he was describing what we know today as a cruise missile.

By 1922 Tesla was working as a consulting engineer. He was making just enough money to live on, but often the plans he drew up were rejected as impractical.

Interestingly, around this time Tesla spoke out against the new theories of Albert Einstein. In contrast to the Nobel Laureate, Tesla maintained that energy was not contained in matter, but in the space between the particles of an atom.

Toward the end of his life Tesla became even more eccentric and reclusive. He began visiting parks to rescue pigeons that he then took home to nurse.

In his final years, at the Hotel New Yorker, he had the chef prepare a special mix of seeds for the birds. He also became obsessive about cleanliness, eating only boiled foods.

Nonetheless the ideas continued to flow and in the years prior to the Second World War he announced that he had discovered a new energy source, and a technology that could end war entirely.

The New York Times of 11 July 1934 announced that: “TESLA, AT 78, BARES NEW DEATH BEAM.”

“The Death Beam,” the Times continued, “will send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy warplanes at a distance of 250 miles…”

The weapon, said Tesla, would make war impossible by surrounding every country with an “invisible Chinese Wall.” It was, in effect, what we know today as a charged particle beam accelerator.

Once again though, Tesla was unable to summon sufficient finance to back his proposal and as the prospect of war became more likely so Tesla became ever more desperate.

In despair he finally sent detailed plans for his ‘peace weapon’ to the governments of the US, Britain, France, Canada, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. But to Tesla’s dismay, none of the Western governments took his proposal seriously, not at the time anyway.

However, in the aftermath of Tesla’s death in 1943, it became apparent that some of these governments had grown more than a little interested.

Tesla’s nephew, Sava Kosanovic went to his uncle’s rooms on the morning of his death. On arrival, according to Kosanovic, the rooms looked as if they had been searched; notebooks and crucial technical papers were missing, and two days later the Office of Alien Property seized all of Tesla’s remaining belongings.

One result of this is H.A.A.R.P.¹ Situated in Alaska, exactly where Tesla first proposed it should be sited, H.A.A.R.P. is seen by some observers as a working example of a device first proposed by Tesla in 1915. Long before anyone had heard of H.A.A.R.P., before it had even been built, Tesla was talking to the press about it.

“It is perfectly practicable to transmit electrical energy without wires and produce destructive effects at a distance,” he told the New York Times in an interview published on December 8, 1915.

“I have already constructed a wireless transmitter which makes this possible, and have described it in my technical publications. . . With a transmitter of this kind we are enabled to project electrical energy in any amount to any distance [HAARP’s output is a full gigawatt] and apply it for innumerable purposes, both in war and peace.”

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Footnote

1. See ‘Weapons of the New World Order’, www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=115

Sources

www.pbs.org/tesla/

UFO Magazine (American edition), Vol. 15, No. 7, devoted to Tesla and his work.

www.teslasociety.com

.

RIXON STEWART is a long time ‘underground’ researcher based in Britain. He is the webmaster of the widely respected alternative news web site The Truth Seeker, www.thetruthseeker.co.uk.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 97 (July-August 2006).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 97 (PDF version) for only US$2.95

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

By EDWARD MALKOWSKI—

There is no other place on Earth like Egypt’s Giza Plateau. Anyone with even a slight interest in history and civilisation is aware of this fact. For on this plateau there stands the Great Pyramids and their sculpted guardian, the Great Sphinx.

Although there are plenty of theories, no one really knows who built the Giza Pyramids or carved the Sphinx, or when they were constructed. Any statement as to who built them, or when they were built, is pure theory. In light of all the various theories concerning these mysterious structures, I don’t think the theoretical nature of the pyramid builders can be emphasised enough.

What stands out at Giza more than anything else is not only the magnitude of the construction of the pyramids, but the internal design of the Great Pyramid; three chambers, of which one is subterranean, and their connecting passageways. The passageway that leads to the so-called King’s Chamber rises to a height of thirty-six feet! On the other hand, all other passageways were not built tall enough to accommodate the average man or woman.

There is also the unique configuration of the King’s Chamber as well as the Queen’s Chamber. Both of these contain two shafts, one on each side of the chamber. The Queen’s Chamber contains a corbelled niche built into its east wall, and the King’s Chamber’s ceiling is composed of five granite slabs stacked one atop the other. Why these chambers were constructed in this manner is unknown.

The official theory is that the pyramids were tombs, and that King Khufu kept changing his mind where his burial chamber was to be placed; thus, the reason for three chambers in the Great Pyramid. However, in comparison to typical Egyptian burial methods (the mastaba and the tombs in the Valley of the Kings), the Giza pyramids, and particularly the Great Pyramid, do not fair well within the Egyptian concept of a tomb.

The Ancient Egyptian View of the Afterlife

The Egyptians believed in an afterlife, and the tomb was an important part of that belief. As the tomb of King Tutankhamun testifies, the deceased’s chamber of internment was to be decorated with art and filled with that person’s possessions. Why they practiced this ritual was not for superstitious reasons, as one might suspect. It was practical, according to their beliefs, and aimed at preventing that person’s energy (spirit) from being re-absorbed into Nature’s spiritual force.

For the ancient Egyptians, Ba animated a living person, whereas Ka was the energy emanating from that person. Although not an exact analogy, the Ka and the Ba are what traditional Western thought might refer as spirit and soul. Another important aspect of Egyptian belief represented immortality, the ankh, depicted as the crested ibis.

The Ka, represented in art by up-stretched arms, was believed to be the part of man’s consciousness and energy (man’s spirit or inner quality) that related to the immediate world. It is the part of us connected to the physical body; where it lived, its possessions, as well as the people he or she was acquainted with. The Ka can be likened to one’s personality, which upon death is separated from the body, and naturally seeks a way to once again take form. The Ba, represented by a winged human head, or sometimes a human-faced bird, represented the part of consciousness that is immortal.

When someone passed away, it was their goal as well as the hope of the family, that the deceased’s Ka would seek a way to remain united with their Ba. To help accomplish this eternal union, the possessions of the deceased were gathered together by the family and placed in the tomb with the mummified body. Mummification prevented the body from decomposing and returning to the soil of the Earth, whereas the tomb, with the deceased’s possessions, served as a ‘home’ for the Ka. As a result, the Ka maintained its identity in the spiritual world and could seek out its Ba in order to achieve ankh, which resulted in the resurrected and glorified form of the deceased beyond the limits of an earthly realm.

Pyramids and the Concept of the Egyptian Tomb

Like the pharaonic tombs carved into the Valley of the Kings, royal mastabas built during the early dynasties – some as early as 3000 BCE – were also designed with ‘home’ in mind, as that home relates to a person’s Ka. Case in point: from the sixth dynasty, Mereruka’s mastaba was crafted in mansion-like proportion with thirty-two rooms and adorned with statues and art depicting, for example, scenes of wildlife along the Nile River.

The traits of Egyptian domestic life, so beautifully incorporated into the design of their tombs, are not found in the Giza pyramids. The Giza pyramids contain no art or hieroglyphics of any kind, very uncharacteristic of Egyptian tombs. So why is it the case that the Giza pyramids are generally considered to be tombs of fourth dynasty Pharaohs? The reason is because of an association of the Giza complex with another development ten miles south at Sakkara where the Egyptians really did build tombs as pyramids.

At Sakkara in 1881, the French Egyptologist, Gaston Maspero (1846–1916) discovered that the subterranean chamber of the Pepi I Pyramid (second ruler of the sixth dynasty) was engraved with hieroglyphics. Over the course of subsequent explorations, it was discovered that a total of five pyramids at Sakkara also contained inscriptions, from the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth dynasties of the Old Kingdom. In 1952, Dr. Samuel A.B. Mercer (1879–1969), Professor of Semitic Languages and Egyptology at the University of Toronto, published a complete English translation of “The Pyramid Texts” in a volume of the same name. According to Mercer, The Pyramid Texts contained ‘words to be spoken’ concerning funerary ritual, magical formulae, and religious hymns, as well as prayers and petitions on behalf of the deceased king.¹

With the pyramids at Sakkara being confirmed as tombs the associative logic came to be that all pyramids must be tombs. Furthermore, since there are two cemeteries (mastaba fields) to the east and west of the northernmost Giza pyramid, assuming that all pyramids are tombs was a likely conclusion. However, the condition of the Sakkara pyramids – most of which are believed constructed after the Giza pyramids – poses serious problems in this logical association. Of the pyramids at Sakkara only Djoser’s ‘Step Pyramid’ is in good condition, although not really a true pyramid. (The Step Pyramid was originally a mastaba that was modified into a pyramid.) All other pyramids at Sakkara, most of which belong to the fifth and sixth dynasties are in ruins today and resemble mounds of rubble.

According to a consensus of Egyptologists, Djoser’s Step Pyramid at Sakkara was constructed during the third dynasty and was the forerunner to the fourth dynasty pyramids on the Giza Plateau. After pyramid development at Giza, for whatever reason, the focus of pyramid building shifted back to Sakkara.

The Great Pyramid – A Device

The easily observable and obvious differences in the Giza pyramids and the Sakkara pyramids, which were all supposed to have been built during the same era, are a problem. Clearly, the construction techniques, as well as materials, for the Giza pyramids were different than those at Sakkara, or else we would expect pyramids at both sites to have stood the test of time in a similar manner. They did not. The important point is why. Did the engineers and construction workers of the Old Kingdom not pass along their methods from the fourth to the fifth dynasty? It seems they did not, which is a very curious occurrence given the stability of Egyptian civilisation. It may also be the case that the fourth dynasty Egyptians did not build the Giza pyramids.

No other pyramid in Egypt (the world for that matter) is like the Giza pyramids, and in particular the Great Pyramid. Additionally, there is no direct evidence to support the claim that the Great Pyramid, or the other Giza pyramids were tombs. Nor is there any record left by its builders as to what it was for or when it was built. This creates a problem of explanation. If the Great Pyramid was not a tomb, then what was it? A mystical temple for initiation ritual, or a public works project designed to unify the country? Or, was it something else entirely? Theories are abundant, but the only theory I am aware of that covers all aspects of the Great Pyramid’s interior design, is Christopher Dunn’s theory that it was a device. According to Dunn, the Great Pyramid was a machine for producing power by converting tectonic vibration into electricity.

There are a number of reasons to accept Dunn analysis. First, he explains the interior design and all other evidence within the Great Pyramid in a cohesive manner. Second, he demonstrates the technical skills required to accomplish precision construction. Third, Dunn’s expertise and career is in the precision fabrication and manufacturing industry, which makes him uniquely qualified to express a professional opinion on the techniques and tools of the Giza pyramid builders.

The fact is, modern construction companies could not build the Great Pyramid today without first inventing specialised tools and techniques in order to deal with blocks of stone that vary in weight from ten to fifty tons. Such an endeavour would be on a magnitude equivalent to building a hydroelectric dam or a nuclear power station requiring tens of billions of dollars in resources. Although our modern economy is different than that of the ancient world, the resource required now as compared to then is the same! The stone must be quarried and moved and the workers must be paid. The fact that an extremely large amount of resources were dedicated to Giza pyramid development over a long period of time demands, in my opinion, that pyramid building was utilitarian, and not for any fourth dynasty pharaonic vanity of having the largest headstone in the world.

Prehistory – Evidence and Perspective

For me, the evidence clearly tells a very different story of early dynastic Egypt. Sometime around 3000 BCE, the establishment and growth of permanent settlements in the Lower Nile Valley led to the development of civilisation. Why Giza and the surrounding area were chosen as the focal point for early Dynastic Egypt was because ‘civilisation’ had been there before, as the three pyramids and the Great Sphinx testify. Without knowing what the pyramids were designed for, the early Egyptians also assumed they must have been tombs. As a result, they rejuvenated the Giza Plateau and turned it into a Necropolis, then expanded to Sakkara where they built tombs in pyramid form, albeit of lesser quality and not brandishing the skills the original builders of the Giza pyramids demonstrated. Pyramid building, even the smaller ones at Sakkara, was resource intense, so the Egyptians reverted to burying their nobility in the traditional mastaba.

This scenario, which calls for an earlier civilisation with advanced technical skills, poses another problem. It does fit the standard model of history. However, the notion that an earlier civilisation existed does not rest on the Giza pyramids alone. There is also the Sphinx, which in 1991 was geologically dated to between 7,000 and 9,000 years old by the team of John Anthony West and geologist Dr. Robert Schoch. Add to that the megaliths of Nabta Playa in southwestern Egypt, which is believed to have been a star viewing diagram, according to astrophysicist Dr. Thomas Brophy, that relates not only the distance from Earth to the belt stars of Orion, but their radial velocities as well. Another ‘head scratching’ discovery is the 1260-ton foundation stones of the Baalbek temple, west of Beirut in Lebanon, one of which was left in its quarry.

Clearly history has its secrets, but there is enough evidence to validate, as theory, that civilisation is much older than we have previously believed. History, according to the ancient Egyptians themselves, confirms this. According to the Papyrus of Turin, which is a complete list of kings up to the New Kingdom, before Menes (before 3000 BCE) the:

…venerables Shemsu-Hor, [reigned] 13,420 years

Reigns up to Shemsu-Hor, 23,200 years²

These two lines in the king’s list are explicit. According to their documents, the total years of Egyptian history goes back 36,620 years. The argument that the years in the king’s list do not represent actual years, but some other, shorter, measurement of time seems more of an attempt to explain away than to explain. The ancient Egyptians employed a sophisticated calendar system that involved a 365-day year, which was periodically corrected through the predictable and cyclical nature of the star Sirius. Every 1,461 years, the heliacal rising of Sirius marked the beginning of the new year. A single Sirius cycle corresponds to 1,461 years, where each year is equivalent to 365.25 days. In essence, the marking of the New Year at the heliacal rising of Sirius was the ancient Egyptian’s ‘leap year.’ Of course, determining the length of Sirius’ cyclical nature requires stellar observation over thousands of years which means the origins of pharaonic Egypt, or its source of knowledge, must originate in the remote past.

Late twentieth century Egyptologist Walter Emery seems to have agreed in principle that the origins of ancient Egypt date well into prehistory. Emery believed that ancient Egypt’s written language was beyond the use of pictorial symbols, even during the earliest dynasties, and that signs were also used to represent sounds, along with a numerical system. When hieroglyphics had been stylised and used in architecture, a cursive script was already in common use. His conclusion was that:

All this shows that the written language must have had a considerable period of development behind it, of which no trace has as yet been found in Egypt.³

Ancient Egyptian religion also testifies to a considerable period of development. Their religion, which is more of a philosophy of nature and life than it is a ‘religion,’ is based on a level of sophistication that, in all respects, appears more scientific than it does mythical.

Symbolism and Nature: The Method of Egyptian Thought

From a modern Western perspective their religion has been billed as primitive and polytheistic, and appears as a mythological menagerie of gods. Nothing could be further from the truth. The source of this misunderstanding stems from the Egyptian word neter being translated into Greek as ‘god,’ which later took on the Westernised meaning of deity. The true meaning of neter was to describe an aspect of deity, not a deity to be worshipped. In essence, neters referred to principles of nature in a practical scientific way.

Yet, the meaning of a specific neter was communicated in a visually symbolic manner. When a human was depicted with an animal head, this signified the principle as it occurs in man. If the whole animal was depicted it was a reference to a principle in general. Alternatively, a human head depicted on an animal represented that principle as it relates to the divine essence within mankind, not any person in particular, but the archetypal; as the immortal Ba is represented by a human-faced bird.

Another example is Anubis (the jackal), who presided over the process of mummification. He did so as a representation of the decomposition or fermentation process. In nature, the jackal keeps its prey and allows it to decompose before consumption. Therefore, he who presided over the mummification ritual was depicted in art as a man with the head of the jackal, thereby representing man’s death as the digestive principle found in nature. From a universal perspective, the decomposition of a body is, to Nature, digestion. Hence, those organs associated with digestion, after being removed from the deceased, were placed in a Canopic jar with a lid shaped in the image of the jackal’s head.

Before the Pharaohs

The sudden emergence of Dynastic Egypt, at the beginning of the third millennium BCE, is one of civilisation’s greatest mysteries. How did this supposedly primitive North African culture organise itself into a civilisation of such magnificence? One aspect that I believe has been overlooked is that mankind – anatomically modern humans – has been around for a very long time. According to recent genetic studies, all people today are the descendents of a single African woman who walked the Earth 150,000 years ago. According to geneticists, her mitochondrial DNA exists in all of us.

This is a long time, 147,000 years, for our ancestors to have remained in a relatively primitive state. In my opinion, the evidence, some of which is incredibly anomalous (in particular the Great Pyramid) suggests they did not remain primitive. Given the evidence of ancient Egypt’s technical abilities (their monument, temples, and other crafted artifacts still exist), as well as their sophisticated symbolism in describing Nature, it appears that in establishing a dynastic society, the Egyptians of the third millennium BCE benefited from a legacy of knowledge.

Skeptics of this approach to history, of course, would want to know where the evidence of this technical and prehistoric civilisation is. If such a civilisation existed, surely there would be overwhelming evidence to support its existence. If an exclusively uniformitarian approach to geologic formation were generally accepted as fact, I would agree with the skeptic.

However, mass extinctions, as a result of environmental catastrophism because of volcanism, asteroid or comet impact, or stellar (gamma) radiation, now seems to be a reality.

According to geologists there have been five large mass extinctions in Earth’s history: the Ordovician (440–450 mya), Devonian (408–360 mya), Permian (286–248), Triassic (251–252 mya), and Cretaceous (144–65 mya). Although all of these cataclysms occurred well before the modern human form, there are two global disasters that occurred relatively recently.

Approximately 71,000 years ago Mount Toba, in Sumatra, erupted spewing an enormous amount of ash into the atmosphere. It was the largest volcanic eruption in the last two million years, nearly 10,000 times larger than the Mount St. Helen’s explosion in 1980. The resultant caldera formed a lake 100 kilometres long by 60 kilometres wide, with devastating and lasting climatic consequences. A six-year long volcanic winter followed, and in its wake an ice age that lasted for a thousand years. With its sulfuric haze, the volcanic winter lowered global temperatures, creating drought and famine decimating the human population.

According to geneticist’s estimates, the population was reduced to somewhere between 15,000 and 40,000 individuals. Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Utah, Lynn Jorde, believes it may have been as low as 5,000.⁴

Even closer to our time is the mysterious cataclysm at the end of the Ice Age, only 10,000 years ago. No one really knows if it was the result of natural phenomenon or an asteroid impact. What is known is that the climate drastically altered life for those who lived at that time. It is a known geologic fact that at the end of the Ice Age many North American species became extinct, including the mammoth, camel, horse, ground sloth, peccaries (pig-like hoofed mammals), antelope, American elephant, rhinoceros, giant armadillo, tapirs, saber-toothed tigers and giant bison. It also affected the climates of lower latitudes in Central and South America, as well as Europe in a similar way. Those lands have also revealed evidence of mass extinction. Yet, the mechanism that brought on this Ice Age ending cataclysm remains a mystery.

If an ancient technical civilisation existed during the remote past, what would be the likelihood of that civilisation surviving a global catastrophe intact? Estimates from the Toba eruption are not encouraging. Neither are the scenarios that astronomers and climatologists build today for a theoretical asteroid impact.

According to the archeological evidence, anatomically modern man (Cro-Magnon) appeared in Western Europe 40,000 years ago. Where they came from has been a long-standing mystery. The logical deduction is that they migrated from Africa. However, such a migration requires a host culture, of which there is no evidence.

Nevertheless, a likely location for this host culture would have been along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, which were likely a series of fresh water lakes during the remote past.

If ancient civilisation existed in the region of the Mediterranean, it would not have survived the conflagration that turned those lakes into a salt-water sea.

If that were indeed the case, the remnants of those who lived on the perimeter of that civilisation would appear to us, today, as anomalies such as the Giza pyramids and the giant stones of Baalbek.

Cro-Magnon cultures of Western Europe, although once a part of a great Mediterranean civilisation, would also appear as an anomaly. For us, it would be as if they appeared from nowhere.

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Footnotes

1. Samuel A. B. Mercer, The Pyramid Texts, Longmans, Green and Co., 1952, p.2.

2. René Schwaller de Lubicz, Sacred Science: The King of Pharaonic Theocracy, Inner Traditions, 1982, p.86.

3. Walter B. Emery, Archaic Egypt, Penguin Books, 1961, p.192.

4. ‘Supervolcanoes’, BBC2, 3 February 2000, also see www.bbc.co.uk/ science/horizon/1999/supervolcanoes_script.shtml.

.

EDWARD MALKOWSKI is the author of Ancient Egypt 39,000 BCE, Sons of God–Daughters of Men, Before the Pharaohs, and The Spiritual Technology of Ancient Egypt. He is a historical researcher in Lincoln, Illinois.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 97 (July-August 2006).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 97 (PDF version) for only US$2.95

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

By JOHN ANTHONY WEST—

Academics abhor a mystery the way nature abhors a vacuum, yet in nature there are no vacu­ums, while in academia there are many mysteries. In no field of science or scholarship are there more (or more glaring) mysteries than in Egyptology. Yet, at the same time, there is no field in which mysteries are more systematically denied.

Pick up a book, any book, written by a creden­tialed Egyptologist and you will find nothing but agreement – about everything but the most insignificant details. In his gloriously mis-titled volume The Complete Pyramids, Egyptologist Mark Lehner does not bother to even mention the controversies that have swirled (and continue to swirl) about these extraordinary structures for two centuries. Nothing; not a word. It’s all been solved by the experts: The pyramids were built as tombs by powerful but deluded pharaohs desperately trying to ensure their own immortality (wink, wink, nod, nod).

No matter that there is no evidence, not a shred, that these pyramids – of Giza and Dahshur – were ever used as tombs – and much cogent argument strongly suggesting they were not. The huge stones were hauled up ramps by gangs of laborers and just wafted into place with lapidary precision. No matter that engineers, quarrymen and masons, people accustomed to moving large blocks of stone around, insist it could not be done in this fashion, while toolmakers and machinists study the precision and cannot fathom how it could possibly have been achieved with hand tools. The acknowledged mathematical properties exhibited by the Great Pyramid are mere accidents of design, etc. etc.

No doubts ruffle the calm, smooth surface of Lake Consensus, that bottomless pool where the Church of Progress’ (un)faithful go for solace, baptism and to pledge undying allegiance to the Great God Status Quo. (This act of ritual intellec­tual servitude is called, in the quaint terminology peculiar to their Church, “critical thinking” and sometimes even “reason.”)

Nevertheless, despite the near-total control exercised by the Church of Progress over the educational systems of the world (especially the West), heresy abounds. A vast public simply refuses to acknowledge the infallibility of “experts” and, indeed, exults in their discomfiture when unwelcome facts breach the walls of their fortified ivory towers.

The Churchmen fume about “ignorance and superstition,” they try to get laws passed outlawing what they don’t approve of (e.g. astrology, home­opathy), organised debunkers pressure the media to display to the public only that which carries a Church imprimatur upon it. To no avail. While the mainstream press remains largely obedient to Church of Progress directives, television and Hollywood are less docile. They are interested in dollars, not dogma, and in their corporate amorality they will not hesitate to present heretical material. They don’t even care if it is both good and true. In other words, as long as it brings in dollars and ratings, academic disapproval goes unheeded. The merely intellectual inquisition mounted by this Church lacks the effective dissuasive powers of the Church that preceded it – since it is no longer considered politically correct to subject heretics to physical torture. Churches are not what they used to be. And torture is now illegal – sort of.

The moral: People are less stupid than our arro­gant academics assume. However, people are also undiscriminating. Wildly speculative, even loony work gets accepted as readily, indeed, much more readily, than anything based upon rigorous scholarship. Erich von Daniken is far more popular than R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz (which is probably unavoidable except in some ideal world going through its Golden Age) and, of course, given the goals of Hollywood and TV, it is always the ratings-­and-dollar producing mysteries/heresies/alterna­tives that get the bulk of screen and air time.

Regarding Egypt, most of the heretical attention is focused on the Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx – which is legitimate enough since the establishment answers to virtually every question raised about these structures are so manifestly inadequate that the fires of controversy never run short of fuel. But the Giza Plateau has no monop­oly on Egyptian mysteries and some of these, unrecognised for what they are, have serious impli­cations, not only for a better understanding of the ancient world, but also for contemplating and understanding the huge, slow processes of history and our own present position within that process.

The founding, establishment and breathtaking rise of dynastic Egypt (beginning around 3200 BCE) is one such mystery. In the space of just a few cen­turies, Egypt (apparently) went from primitive Neolithic beginnings to a complex, utterly assured command of a spectrum of disciplines. In little more than a blink of the historical eye Egypt somehow developed a sophisticated hieroglyphic system, a complex theology and cosmology, astronomy and mathematics, advanced medicine and a total mas­tery of architectural construction and artistic form.

Egyptologists sometimes find this mildly remark­able, but by insisting that despite appearances to the contrary (and the careful work of a dozen scholars categorically proving the contrary) Egypt was “really” still a “primitive” society, devoid of “real” science and “real” philosophy (and therefore “real” civilisation). The world would have to wait for Greece for “real” civilisation to begin. And therefore, however remarkable, the flowering of Egypt presents them with no mysteries and few problems. Though this is an evasion of great mag­nitude, it will not be my focus here.

If Egypt attained such unacknowledged heights so early, what then accounts for the long decline? Egyptologists have no problem responding to this question, and the conventional explanation, while not illogical, is unsatisfactory once you stop to question it.

Plotted on a graph, Egypt’s history does not show a long, steady, gradual descent (from the glories of the Pyramid Age to Ptolemaic moral and artistic decadence and ultimately to the dissolution of Egypt as a coherent entity under Roman domina­tion). Rather the graph shows a series of waves, with troughs more or less equal, and each peak generally lower than the preceding peak – like waves on a beach after a storm. But it is unar­guably at its height very nearly at its beginning (a bit like starting off automobile technology with the first horseless carriage, proceeding in a couple of years to the 2005 Ferrari and then gradually working backward to the Model T Ford).

The descent is ascribed to a combination of fac­tors: years of famine and failed Nile floods may have brought on the end of the Old Kingdom c. 2300 BCE. (An interesting alternative theory: it was an asteroid or comet strike, some sort of major but localised event that destroyed not just Egypt but much of the Middle East along with it). Then, Egypt’s early military superiority was eventually challenged and then defeated by the more warlike (read “progressive and advanced”) civilisations of Anatolia (modern Turkey) then later Mesopotamia to the east and still later Greece to the north. Concurrently, her internal centralised political, artis­tic, moral and religious authority was eroding from within. One complementary (and attractive) theory claims that the use and abuse of black magic played a significant role. There can be no doubt that magic was rife in Egypt (and actually still is).

Civilisations come and go; we know that Roman, Holy Roman (about as holy as Lehner’s Complete Pyramids is complete), Mongol, Mogul, Dutch, French, British – all have established themselves, invariably by force, held sway briefly (by ancient Egyptian standards), weakened and ultimately fallen. So where is the alleged mystery?

It lies in recognising the fallacy of the standard scholarly assessment of Egyptian sophistication ­which is actually a deliberate exercise in academic malpractice. As long as Egypt is seen as a kind of magnificent (but primitive) dry run for Greece, lead­ing eventually (by discrete but identifiable stages) to our current state of technological expertise, there is no problem and no mystery. But as soon as that assessment corresponds to reality then the problems arise and the mystery surfaces.

Through the work of Schwaller de Lubicz, Giorgio de Santillana and Herta van Dechend (Hamlet’s Mill) and many other careful scholars over the past 50 years or so, it is now clear that not just ancient Egypt, but ancient civilisations worldwide, were far more sophisticated than the societies that followed them. In other words, for a few thousand years at least, what is called progress is actually regress. Indeed, it is only the major advances in our current cosmological and scientific understanding that allowed these scholars to recognise the ancients had this knowledge as well; and that it is written into their mythology and symbol­ism, their understanding of mathematics, their astronomy/astrology and their religion.

Since Egypt’s Old Kingdom, up until very recently civ­ilisation has been going down, not up; simple as that.

We can follow that degenerative process physi­cally in Egypt; it is written into the stones and it is unmistakable. The same tale is told in the mythologies and legends of virtually all other societies and civilisations the world over.

This is the ultimate heresy to our Church of Progress. Progress does not go in a straight line from primitive ancestors to smart old Us with our bobble head dolls and weapons of mass destruc­tion, our traffic jams and our polluted seas, skies and lands. There is another, and far more realistic way to view history. Plato talked about a cycle of Ages: the Golden, Silver, Bronze and Iron (or Dark) Ages; a cycle, a wave form – not a straight line. A similar understanding is reflected by virtually all other ancient accounts.

The best-known and by far the most elaborately developed of these systems is the Hindu, with its Yuga Cycle, which corresponds to the Platonic idea of four definable Ages (the Hindu Kali Yuga – our cur­rent Age – corresponds to Plato’s Iron, or Dark Age). The problem with the Hindu version, however, is the time frame traditionally applied to the separate ages: hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of years.

No matter how wrong archaeologists may be in their chronologies or their interpretations of the ancients, it is hard to imagine they can be that wrong! Yet not long ago, a little-known work on the Yuga Cycle came my way that fits the four stage cycle within the more manageable 20-odd thousand year cycle of the precession of the equinoxes. There can be no doubt the ancients were fully aware of the phenomenon of precession, and they regarded it as a matter of commanding impor­tance, but it is difficult to see why. I now believe that integrating the Yuga cycle with precession may hold the key to understanding just why the ancients considered it so important, and also, just possibly, to figuring out with some accuracy just where we stand within that cycle.

Of Myth And Meaning

Microsoft Word’s in-PC thesaurus lists two meanings or synonyms for “myth”: legend and falsehood. Interestingly, the synonyms for “legend” do not include “falsehood,” while the synonyms for “false­hood” do not include “legend.” Nevertheless, in common usage, both definitions are used, often indiscriminately, and in some cases both actually apply. Utterances made by George W. Bush, for example, achieve legendary status instantly, and in most cases they are also falsehoods. But in dealing with the myths of the ancients, it is wise to exercise caution before summarily equating a legend with a falsehood, no matter that it generally does not cor­respond to our modern manner of communicating fact. The ancients, obviously, did not think of their legends as falsehoods. That negative meaning is a contemporary judgment, promulgated by Victorian proto-anthropologists of the nineteenth century and turned into dogma by Church of Progress devotees in the twentieth. (James Frazier’s exhaustive Golden Bough was probably the most influential single work of the genre.)

Though still prevalent, especially in academia, that Victorian assessment has been under attack almost since its beginning. It is now becoming clear that these strange, seemingly haphazard and irrational ancient tales contain within them forgotten history and profound psychology, but also, amazingly, astronomy, cosmology, physics, genetics and an understanding of the workings of the Universe so advanced and comprehensive that it is only the most recent advances in our own sciences that allow us to begin to understand what knowledge was available in the very distant past – at a time when, according to our “experts,” there was no civilisation to speak of at all.

In short, it is time for a total re-evaluation of the knowledge of the ancients. Not only did they know more than we thought they knew; it is also very possible they had knowledge we do not yet have, and that might be extremely useful, even crucial for us to acquire.

An Egyptian myth may be one place to start looking.

Introducing Sekhmet

In ancient Egyptian mythology, Sekhmet, the goddess portrayed as a woman with the head of a lioness, is associated with vengeance, warfare and also, curiously enough, with healing; but healing by fire, or purgation. Esoterically, she represents the female aspect of the fire (initiat­ing) principle. Ptah (architect of heaven and Earth) creates the Universe with “words” fur­nished by Djehuti (cosmic wisdom) but it is Sekhmet, Ptah’s female consort, who actually gets the work done. Her name “Sekhem” means “power”; the addition of the feminine suffix, “t” makes it “feminine power.”

In one well-known myth, Re, the Sun (creative principle) is old and tired; fractious, disobedient mankind no longer pays him homage. So Sekhmet is dispatched by the gods to punish humanity and bring it back into line. She proceeds to carry out this task with the gleeful fury proper to her lioness nature. By day she massacres; by night she returns to gorge herself on the blood-covered fields – until a point is reached when it becomes clear that unless checked, she will soon destroy mankind altogether, and she is not distinguishing between those few still obedient to the gods and the scornful and skeptical majority. (This attitude will show up peri­odically throughout subsequent history, most memorably perhaps at the Siege of Bezier, during the Albigensian Crusades, when the general in charge of the siege, and about to storm the walls, asked the Papal Legate, Arnald-Amalric, Abbot of Citeaux, how he was to distinguish between the true believers in the town so that they might be spared, and the targeted heretics who, needless to say, deserved to die. The Abbot is reputed to have said: “Kill them all. God will recognise his own.”)

In any event, in the Egyptian myth, the gods prove more merciful. For reasons difficult to ascertain, they decide mankind has been punished enough and something has to be done to stop Sekhmet before she annihilates the race entirely. A trick is played upon Sekhmet, instigated by the wise Djehuti. While Sekhmet sleeps, the blood cov­ering the fields is replaced by wine. And when Sekhmet wakes and visits the fields to gorge her­self as is her wont, the wine has its intended effect. Sekhmet falls into a drunken stupor, goes to sleep, and wakes up transformed into the benefi­cent Hathor, provider of cosmic nourishment and associated with sexuality, song, dance and the cycles of time. There the Egyptian story stops, but extrapolating, it is probably safe to suppose the mythmakers assume that at this point, with Sekhmet pacified, mankind regroups and pro­ceeds along its not-so-merry way.

Consider the Kali Yuga

In the first part of this article, I left off with a brief discussion of the Vedic/Hindu doctrine of the Yugas, the idea that history follows a cycle, corresponding to the Platonic doctrine of Aeons or ages (Golden, Silver, Bronze and Iron, or “Dark” Ages). Most Hindu accounts assign improbably long time periods to each of these ages, but one relatively modern thinker, Sri Yukteswar, the guru of the influential twentieth century yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda, wrote that originally, the Yuga cycle was supposed to correspond to a precessional cycle (Yukteswar allots approximately 24,000 years to this cycle, modern astronomy puts it close to 26,000 years but variable within narrow limits. Plato gives a precise numero­logically interesting canonical number of 25,920 years – six times six times six times 12). Moreover, in the standard accounts, the Kali Yuga (or Dark Age) is followed immediately by a new Golden Age. This does not make sense; the end of winter is not followed immediately by summer.

Now in Hindu mythology, Kali the Destroyer is equivalent to the Egyptian Sekhmet, and it may be that the Sekhmet myth has legitimate astronomi­cal/astrological significance.

An aging or dying god is a feature of many ancient myths and legends and it is the mythic way of signaling the end of an astronomical cycle of some sort (cf. Hamlet’s Mill). Unfortunately, our standard view of history is not only very wrong, it is also very short. We have a good idea of the Piscean Age of the last 2,000 years, a much less comprehensive picture of the Arian Age preceding it (c. 2000-0 BCE), but in the Taurean Age (4000-­2000 BCE), except for Egypt, we enter a realm of myth and legend with relatively little factual material to base sound interpretations upon. The further back we go, the mistier it gets.

The English writer Samuel Butler once remarked that, “Analogy may be misleading but it is the least misleading thing we have.”

So, to appreciate our own position within the grand Yuga cycle, analogy may help.

We are familiar with the cycle of night and day. But imagine a sentient creature that lives for just a minute. If that minute falls at midnight, then our Minute Man can have absolutely no idea of what that minute of life might be like at high noon, espe­cially if it’s raining.

Now move up a step in the cyclical hierarchy to the seasons, and imagine a sentient creature that lives for just a day. If that day falls in February and it’s still raining (both Minute Man and Day Man live in Wales) then he can have no idea of what a day would be like in mid-June – unless, of course, leg­ends and myths have somehow survived the course of the year, in which case they would be so inconsis­tent with their own life experience that they might well dismiss them as falsehoods, i.e. myths.

Now move up to ourselves, within the preces­sional cycle. Allowing an ideal 100 year life span, if that 100 years corresponds to a rainy midnight minute or equally rainy February day in Wales then we can have no experiential possibility of under­standing what a sunny 100 years in June in Cosmic California might be like, much less that life might actually be much prolonged under such circumstances – as so many myths and legends assert. There can be no doubt the ancients under­stood precession, and equally no doubt they considered it of paramount importance. And maybe that is why – because it enabled them (at least in principle) to live in harmony with the dic­tates of their era, or so the legends say.

So if there is validity to the concept of the Yuga cycle, just where would we stand? Not in June in Cosmic California, that is for sure! Scan the front page of any daily newspaper in the world and it looks like mid-January: war, terrorism, murder, rape, robbery, scams, famine and disease – chaos everywhere. The greatest military and economic power in recorded history has as its leader an inarticulate, illiterate dunce, himself under the control of a tribe of corporate cannibals. The entire planet is threatened by a gamut of poten­tially terminal environmental, ecological, medical and military disasters. The institutionalised reli­gions of both East and West (at their best but stunted, pale offshoots of much more robust and earlier root stocks) are degraded and degenerate. Education everywhere is controlled by the priest­hood of the Church of Progress, forcibly proselytising its psychotic and spurious doctrine of meaning­lessness, accident and despair.

A good case could be made that it’s mid-Kali Yuga, and Sekhmet has again been summoned and is already exercising her bloody trade. But this could be a misperception. Certainly a cosmic bliz­zard is blowing, of that there can be no doubt, yet maybe it’s March in the cycle – and even though it doesn’t look that way, spring is on the way. Under the snow, the seeds of spring are germinating. The substantial minority of us who aren’t trapped in hopeless third world conditions know that at the very least we’re not back in the post-Roman Dark Ages – which were pretty dark everywhere around the planet as far as we can determine.

Opposition to the Church of Progress Mounts: A Positive Sign

There is one potentially major positive sign that goes generally unrecognised. The past three centuries have seen a prodigious flowering of creative energy, most of it undeniably dedicated to destruc­tion and frivolity (even the most nauseating TV commercial is the result of an extraordinary expen­diture of creative and technical expertise).

While imbeciles insist upon calling this progress, in its standard manifestation it is little more than shiny barbarism.

Even so, that standard is not necessarily a fait accompli, an unalterable condition. The outpouring of creative energy is a fact. In itself it is neutral in principle. Directed consciously and constructively, things could change, everywhere – and in a hurry. When ideas change, everything changes. Of course, getting the ideas to change is another mat­ter altogether. Nevertheless, it could happen. Even before it’s too late. If only…

Maybe, just maybe, Sekhmet is just growling and flexing her claws, and despite all appearances to contrary, there is still some wiggle room.

It’s a thought.

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JOHN ANTHONY WEST is a writer and independent Egyptologist who has been studying and writing about ancient Egypt for nearly three decades. He is the foremost exponent of the “Symbolist” school of Egyptology, which sees (and demonstrates) an ancient sacred science where modern academics see mainly superstition. West’s work redating the Great Sphinx of Giza via geology (proving that it must be at least 10,000 years old or older) was the subject of a 1993 NBC special, The Mystery of the Sphinx, hosted by Charlton Heston. West won an Emmy in 1993 for Best Research for his work on the video, and the show itself was one of four nominated for Best Documentary Program. West’s non-fiction books include Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt, The Traveler’s Key to Ancient Egypt and The Case for Astrology. He has also written a book of short stories, a novel, plays and film scripts. John organises study tours of ancient Egypt’s sacred sites. Further information can be found at his web site www.jawest.net.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 97 (July-August 2006).

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