Before the Pyramids: Cracking Archaeology's Greatest Mystery (24 page)

The ritual describes how Enoch took his secrets and eventually stopped in the land of Canaan where he excavated down into the ground, creating nine apartments, one above the other with each roof arched – with the bottom one cut out of solid rock. In the crown of each arch he left an aperture closed with a square stone, and over the very top he built a small temple. All of this was before the biblical Flood, and designed to withstand the pressures of the crashing waters and protect the ancient secrets therein. The ritual states:

None knew of the deposits of the precious treasure: and, that it might remain undiscovered, and survive the Flood, which was known to Enoch would soon overwhelm the world in one vast sea of mire, he covered the aperture, and the stone that closed it, and the great ring of iron used to raise the stone, with the granite pavement of his primitive temple.
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According to Masonic legend, the Flood came and did its worst, and Enoch’s Delta remained safely preserved beneath the ruins of his temple for thousands of years.

The ritual eventually moves forward to the time of King Solomon, around 3,000 years ago. After David (Solomon’s father) has taken the city state of Jerusalem, he decides to build a temple, but this task is finally undertaken by his son, Solomon. The new king orders his workmen to clear the ground above the city and they hear a hollow sound as they strike a rock. Upon examination they discover an underground chamber. Investigation eventually leads to the recovery of Enoch’s lost secrets.

The Temple of Solomon is then built on top of the super-ancient site.

As the story told by the rituals moves on, it tells how the Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians and rebuilt, destroyed again by the Romans in
AD
70 and left for 1,000 years. Then it recounts how the Knights Templar, as the descendants of the Jerusalem priesthood, arrived in 1118, after the first Crusade, and dug down in search of their lost secrets. They found them in 1128 and instantly became the richest and most influential religious order the world has ever known.

The Templars rediscovered the ancient secrets and immediately began immense changes to society. Socially, architecturally, politically, commercially and spiritually – these people radically altered the world. To understand the complexity of their task and the enormity of their success, see our book –
Solomon’s Power Brokers
.

The bottom line is that Freemasonry consistently claims to be the guardian of ancient scientific knowledge – and every aspect of the ritual is based in observational astronomy. Could there be an awareness of Neolithic science?

So, the question stands – was John Wood in possession of ancient knowledge when he designed the modern city of Bath? It seemed strange to imagine, yet if the oldest rituals of Freemasonry were not complete invention, someone understood the ancient secrets of science.

We had less than a year to wait for an unexpected piece of luck that transformed the possibility of Wood’s megalithic intentions from long-shot to odds-on. Quite by accident we were to discover that another, far greater city, was designed using a pure form of megalithic thinking.

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The team from the TV production company in LA had travelled to London for the making of a two-part documentary for the History Channel on the Founding Fathers of the United States, and Chris had agreed to be interviewed concerning the Masonic connections of this august group. The evening before, Chris consulted some of his previous books to remind himself of some points of detail – and his mind went back to a pleasant visit to Washington a few years previously when he had stayed at a small hotel in Georgetown.

Georgetown is a historic settlement that became a town in 1751 but is now absorbed into the city of Washington DC. It still has an old-world feel to it and, being on higher ground to the northwest of the city, it provides a splendid view across to the Washington Monument and beyond. Chris had walked from his hotel down to the Potomac River to look across at Rosslyn – a name that held a lot of interest for him. As he was at his computer, he opened up Google Earth to see if he could use the aerial views to spot the hotel and the route he had taken that day.

As he was about to close the program down, something caught his eye and he moved the object to centre screen. Oddly, there was a very large circle that looked extremely henge-like. Of course it could not be a henge here in the New World, but if it had been in England Chris would have been surprised if it were not. It was ridiculous really, but he opened the measuring device within the program and converted its diameter from metres to Megalithic Yards just to see what would happen. His eyes widened as he realized that it was extremely close to being 2 Megalithic Degrees across.

A little investigation proved that it was indeed a henge and within its huge circumference sits the home of the Vice President of the United States of America. It is, however, a very recent henge. Known as the ‘Observatory Circle’ it was constructed by the navy in 1893 and, according to the official White House website, it was created so that scientists could ‘observe the sun, moon, planets and selected stars, determine and precisely measure the time, and establish astronomical data needed for accurate navigation’.
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What finer definition of a henge could there be?

Nothing really changes even after 5,500 years. Instead of hand-swung pendulums the US Navy astronomers will have used pendulum clocks – which are exactly the same thing except the more modern version has a labour-saving wind-up mechanism attached to it and a dial to read out the passage of time, so the users no longer have to count the beats themselves. But it is an identical process requiring identical skills and delivering identical benefits to the civilization concerned.

This discovery made us more bemused than ever. Given that a relatively modern circular earthwork is known to be used to measure time, accumulate astronomical data and aid navigation, why is the similarity displayed by Neolithic henges rejected as a valid theory? It is fully accepted that these ancient people must have been sailors, so they would have wanted this information. If the academic researchers dug up a Stone Age coffee cup and saucer, would they make a connection with hot drinks or would they assume it was some kind of religious talisman for collecting the spirits of the dead?

The Observatory Circle in Washington DC is a fine piece of evidence for an archaeological theory. Human beings have not changed physiologically or intellectually for over 100,000 years. Their curiosity, their need to know, must surely be much the same, and the techniques to achieve the required results will not, indeed cannot, change in principle.

Our next question was to try and establish whether the Naval Observatory had an apparently megalithic dimension by accident or whether it was a deliberate construction.

We began by looking at key landmarks such as the White House, the Capitol Building, the Washington Monument and the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials. And immediately we began to see a web beneath the street design – all mapped out in Megalithic Seconds of arc.

We were completely lost for words.

What we were starting to uncover was extraordinary in the extreme – is it conceivable that Washington was designed using megalithic proportions?

We had to be cautious in jumping to any undue conclusions because 366 MY is very close to being 1,000 ft (996.25 ft) following from the ancient Minoan foot used 4,000 years ago. The Observatory Circle
could
have a deliberately engineered megalithic diameter, but measuring the Circle absolutely accurately is difficult and it may be that those designing it had intended it to have a diameter of 2,000 ft. After all, the statute foot was in common use in the United States when the Observatory Circle was completed, as it still is to this day. This was the most likely answer, although all British large-scale historical measurements in the United States tended to be measured in yards, rods, poles or furlongs rather than feet. Using yards would mean the Circle was an ungainly 666.6 units, and using rods produced 121.21 units.

We are not aware of anyone in history using 1,000 ft as a major unit but we knew that the Neolithic British peoples, and the later Minoans, used a second of arc that was 366 MY or 1,000 Minoan Feet. This was of course a 1/360th subdivision of a Megalithic Second of arc of the polar circumference of the Earth.

We needed to be highly circumspect about what we were starting to find, because chance results do crop up.

Because our books have gained a lot of interest we receive a lot of correspondence from people who have their own ideas that they wish to share. This is a wonderful thing – indeed we met because Alan contacted Chris after
The Hiram Key
appeared. A number of people who have contacted us over the years have had some really interesting ideas, whilst others appear to be fanciful in the extreme. There is a category of people whom we call ‘dot-joiners’. They take a map and draw lines between selected points to produce symbols or other supposedly meaningful shapes – but the points chosen always seem to be selected to fit the required pattern. They ignore similar points that do not fit, and they often take unrelated objects to complete the pattern. It is like a visual form of numerology where patterns are found for little or no reason.

There are people who are certain that the government of the United States represents a Masonic, and/or sometimes Jewish, plot to instigate a ‘New World Order’. These people and are convinced that all manner of secret patterns are to be found when one connects particular Washington structures together. There are many books that concentrate on this preoccupation, not to mention a number of odd-ball websites. People claim to have found all manner of shapes and symbols when connecting Washington DC’s various landmarks, including, most famously, a rather obvious huge pentacle.
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Given the frequent use of symmetry, building geometric shapes within Washington DC’s ground plan is not difficult. The city plan was first laid out by the French engineer and architect Charles L’Enfant and, although his original plan was somewhat modified by Andrew Ellicot, the essence of L’Enfant’s original design remains. L’Enfant allowed for wide avenues, circles and squares at major intersections, and lots of parks. Together with the gridiron pattern of the streets of Washington DC it is therefore quite easy to create a host of different geometric shapes, using only a map, a pencil and plenty of imagination.

One shape that was nearly as important as the circle to the Neolithic builders of Western Europe was the ellipse, which has a natural centre but is constructed around two foci. This is a shape that can easily be constructed on a beach, for instance. Place two sticks in the ground and create a loop of rope that is slightly longer than the gap between the sticks. Then place the loop over the sticks and, with another stick in your hand, draw in the sand with the stick inside the loop at full extension. The shape in the sand after one circuit will be an ellipse.

In the case of the Washington Ellipse, the two foci (the sticks) were 276 ft either side of the centre. However, it was the major axis (east–west) that grabbed our attention. We took the path that runs right around the edge of the Ellipse to represent its intended original extent. From the centre of this path on the west side of the Ellipse to the centre of the path on the east side of the Ellipse is exactly 366 MY, and quite definitely not 1,000 feet.

Then we turned our attention just to the southeast of the Ellipse – to the Washington Monument. This huge, white stela was designed in 1836 by Robert Mills, an architect and a Freemason. Excavation for the foundation of the Monument began in the spring of 1848 and the cornerstone was laid as part of an elaborate Fourth of July ceremony conducted by the Freemasons.

Around the base of this major monument are two intersecting circles defined by another ellipse. This ellipse, too, is 366 MY in length at its widest part.

Remembering what we had discovered in Bath, we thought it worth measuring some of the distances between specific important buildings in Washington DC, as well as to and from geometric focal points such as the meridian marker at the centre of the Ellipse. We struck gold immediately. The direct distance between the Ellipse centre and a position right under the centre of the dome of the Capitol building is 2,429 m. In Megalithic Yards this is 2927.7 MY. Working in blocks of 366 MY (1 Megalithic Second of arc of the polar circumference of the Earth), the distance between these two points is 8 × 366 MY, or 8 Megalithic Seconds of geographic arc.
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When we first started to use Google Earth for measuring henges and megalithic structures, we conducted a series of checks of known distances on the ground and found that the program is highly accurate. However, henges are all at ground level and there are no perspective and parallax problems. But tall buildings introduce distortion, especially when the photograph was not taken directly overhead. Looking at the Capitol Building as shown on Google Earth, we identified exterior features that were at interior ground level and projected them inwards to find the true centre under the dome. We believe that this gave us a suitably accurate point of reference. Had we simply used the top of the dome as it appears in the aerial shot, we would have been well over 100 ft out.

In this instance we were unlikely to be dealing in units of 1,000 ft. Eight units of 1,000 ft would of course have measured 8,000 ft, whereas the measurement we obtained was 7,970 ft, a full 30 ft short of 8,000 ft. But it was extremely accurate in terms of Megalithic Yards – in fact completely within the possible accuracy levels we were working with.

Was this yet another random result? This certainly did not seem to be the case because the meridian marker at the centre of the Ellipse turned out to be a very important hub for megalithic measurements across much of Washington DC.