Grid of the Gods (18 page)

3) the “surface” Nothing that the two regions share, or
,

Hermes’ “Space” and the
Padama Purana’s
Brahma.

The implications of this sort of analysis are profound and far- reaching, for they suggest that behind certain types of metaphysical texts, particularly those suggesting triadic structures, there is a much deeper topological metaphor that such texts are designed to encode and transmit. It suggests that all such texts are capable of a deep topological analysis, and that they have nothing, really, to do with
metaphysics in the conventional philosophical or theological senses at all. They also suggest, as more and more differentiations are added to this process that account for the rise of physical creation, that there is a
physics
reason for the phenomenon of the world grid. They suggest that, as the physical medium is the information-creating and transmuting Philosophers’ Stone itself, that the purpose of the world grid and its constructions is one of an “alchemical architecture,” of the monumental manipulation and engineering of the medium itself, for after all, on the ancient view, once again, everything derives from that nothing and is a multi-differentiated nothing, directly tied in with everything else.

In these metaphysical and religious texts, in other words, we are looking at a profound topological and physics metaphor. We are looking at declined legacies of a very ancient, and very sophisticated, science.

5. Cosmology and History: A Hidden Elite, and a Hidden Physics?

With the “topological metaphor” in hand, let us return to Angkor Wat, and look more closely at other aspects of the Hindu cosmology memorialized in the grand and intricate stone edifice. One of the many stone reliefs at Angkor Wat portrays a Hindu cosmological conception called “the Churning of the Milky Ocean” by the five-headed Naga serpent, Vasuki.
²⁷
On one of the panels depicting Vasuki, his long body is coiled around a mountain, Mount Mandera. Mount Mandera is, in turn, one of the four mountains butressing Mount Meru in Hindu cosmology.
²⁸
These mountains are, like the “primordial mound” of Egypt’s “Zep Tepi” or “first time,” the primordial mountains of Hindu cosmology.

Vishnu himself is above this mountain, clutching Vasuki’s body with two of his four hands “and seeming to control or direct its movement.”
²⁹
Vasuki is gripped on one side of his long body by an
asura
or a “high-ranking demon,”
³⁰
and on the other by three gods
and 85
devas
“of lesser stature.”
³¹
Between them, Vishnu is suspended, gripping Vasuki in the center of his body coiled around Mount Mandera, as if superintending this cosmic tug-of-war, as Mount Mandera “is being rotated, first one way then the other, by the opposing forces of the
devas
and
asuras
.”
³²

As this back-and-forth churning and counter-rotation continues, eventually there arises a foaming mass, a “Sea of Milk” or “the Milky Ocean”, from which the Moon and other celestial bodies appear, followed by the goddess Lakshmi, Vishnu’s wife.
³³
Mount Meru and its four buttressing mountains, including Mount Mandera, are the mountains at “the center of the world”
³⁴
and thus, from their “churning,” give rise to the physical world
from the action of rotation, from a vortex.

This is a profound metaphor, and again, a distinctively
physics
- related metaphor, for what is being suggested is that one of the key methods by which things arise from that primordial nothing, and the means by which they are distinguished, is by complex systems of rotation and counter-rotation. Even “the Milky Sea” has a profound physics analogue in the “sea of quantum flux” or “vacuum energy,” the sea of the void of space-time, which in quantum theory is literally teaming with vast energy potential, and which, in some versions of the theory, is
accessed by the rise of rotating systems
. In some versions of the theory, particles themselves are but systems of rotations with this otherwise inchoate sea of energy, and anyone familiar with the vast quantum mechanical particle zoo will know at once that particle families are distinguished by, among other things, their spin or rotation.

Once again, behind the seemingly irrational religious and mythological imagery lurks a profound metaphor of very contemporary and sophisticated physics.

These observations are worth comparing with those of Hancock and Faiia, who, looking at the stone reliefs of the Churning of the Milky Ocean at Angkor Wat, see yet another physical process:

There
is
a cosmological process that fits the bill: precession — the slow, cyclical wobble of the axis of the earth that inexorably changes the positions of all the stars in the sky and shifts the ‘ruling’ constellation that lies behind the sun at dawn on the spring equinox. It is this process, according to Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend in their landmark study
Hamlet’s Mill
, that is the subject of a whole family of myths coming down to us from remotest antiquity. The Churching of the Milky Ocean, they say, is one of these myths.

The great contribution to scholarship made by
Hamlet’s Mill
is the evidence it presents — compelling and overwhelming — that, long
before
the supposed beginnings of civilized human history in Sumer, Egypt, China, India and the Americas, precession was understood and spoken of in a precise technical language by people who could only have been highly civilized. The prime image used by these as yet unidentified archaic astronomers ‘transforms the luminous done of the celestial sphere into a vast and intricate piece of machinery. And like a millwheel, like a churn, like a whirlpool, like a quern, this machine turns and turns endlessly.’
³⁵

But given all we’ve seen thus far, the answer of de Santillana and von Dechend, and of Hancock and Faiia, is not deep or complete enough. What we’ve observed thus far is that these mythological cosmologies are metaphors operating on
three
distinctive levels:

1) at the deepest level, of a topological metaphor of the physical medium itself, and of its “analogical” information-creating properties;

2) at a less deep level, of a
physics
metaphor of the emergence of creation, of particles, from the vast ocean or sea of quantum flux, whose emergence is described in terms of
rotation
;

3) similarly, at a less deep level, of a
physics
metaphor of the
astronomical
machine of precession.

With this in hand, we may propose a corollary thesis regarding the alchemical architecture of the world grid: any theory of the world grid
which takes into account only one of these aspects is an incomplete theory.

But there is one final aspect of the cosmology enshrined at Angkor War that must be examined, and it is the most controversial of them all.

6. The Machine-Like Medium and Immortality

Hancock and Faiia ask a significant question: why, at Giza, and Angkor Wat — and as we shall see, in other structures of the world grid — is there such a focus and fascination with the astronomical phenomenon of precession? Precession was both for the Egyptians and the builders of Angkor a virtual immortal, eternal celestial machine. Accordingly, both in the Hindi cosmologies depicted at Angkor Wat and in the religious cosmology of distant Egypt, precession was the means to “seize the sky” and its immortal processes. Understanding it, the initiate could gain immortality.
³⁶
This machine-like character of the celestial medium was, in other words, conceived also as a gate to immortality. While this may seem to the modern reader to be the flights of purest mythological fantasy and imagination, the Hindu cosmology so beautifully depicted in the stone carvings of Angkor Wat also contains a key, for in the “churning of the Milky Sea” the nectar of immortality is created.
³⁷

This, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter, is a profound clue to the deeper physics behind the world grid.

However, it is worth mentioning at this juncture that such a “deeper physics” is implied by the Hindu cosmology, for it views this world — the world of our three dimensions, our senses and perceptions — as

not
real at all but rather a sinister sort of virtual reality game in which we are all players, a complex and cunning illusion capable of confusing even the most thorough empirical tests — a mass hallucination capable of extraordinary depth and power designed to distract souls from the straight and narrow path of awakening which leads to immortal life.
³⁸

This is the view implied by the “topological metaphor” we examined earlier in connection with the
Hermetica
, and it has yet another incarnation in the world grid, for “with a synchronicity that seems strange to anyone who has studied the mysteries of Central America,” the Hindus named this hallucination “Maya.”
³⁹
Indeed, as we shall eventually discover, the connections go much deeper than just a name.

B. The Master Plan of a Hidden Elite

In addition to a “deep physics” implied by all this, there is also a “deep history” laying underneath the ground of Angkor Wat, a deep history testifying to the antiquity not only of the cosmological views of the Vedas but of the placement of the site itself. Hancock and Faiia note that Hindu tradition ascribes great antiquity to the actual
contents
of the Vedas, which were initially passed down for thousands of years as an oral tradition by Brahman priests before their codification into the books we know today. Even here, this oral transmission is not understood by the Hindu tradition to be the
original
transmission, but a “repromulgation” after the previous age of calamity and catastrophe. This work of repromulgating an earlier tradition was the work of the seven Rishis, or seven sages, who survived the previous cataclysm and “whose desire it was ‘at the beginning of the new age… to safeguard ‘the knowledge inherited by them as a sacred trust from there forefathers in the preceeding (sic) age.’”
⁴⁰
Viewed another way, what the Rishis represent is a
surviving elite from a catastrophe
, doing what all such elites do in such circumstances: trying to preserve the knowledge that made a previous high state of civilization possible, in order to attain a similar development in the future.

Not surprisingly then, “all the major temples of Angkor also show similar traces of having been built directly on top of earlier structures which may in turn have been built on the sites of earlier
structures still,”
⁴¹
dating back to the period when the constellation Draco, itself representing the great cosmic serpent, rose over the spring equinox in 10,500 BC. Once again, we shall discover in later chapters that the same can be said of many other sites on the world grid: while the structures themselves may be comparatively new, they are often built according to a preconceived plan dating back to remotest antiquity.

This activity of a surviving elite is encoded within Hindu tradition in yet another intriguing way, for many of Vishnu’s incarnations follow a
pralaya
, a cataclysm that, interestingly enough, is most often a world-destroying flood. Hindu codices state unreservedly that Vishnu’s objective on each of these occasions was precisely to save some of the knowledge “accumulated by antediluvian civilizations” and to secure its transmission to future generations.
⁴²
In other words, Vishnu’s activities on such occasions represent the activity of a surviving elite, decorated and disguised in the pious language of religion and mythology.

At Angkor Wat — as at Stonehenge, Giza, Teotihuacan and so many other places on the world grid — we are confronted with vast structures, temples, pyramids, monuments, all seemingly laid out in correlation with some astronomical alignment, and all seemingly related to each other, as Angkor Wat’s placement at a certain longitude east of the Giza Prime Meridian testifies. This, as Hancock and Faiia state, is clearly suggestive of the activity of hidden players, of a hidden elite or elites:

…(We) have had the eerie sense of stumbling across the fragments of a strange and shadowy archaic master game — a game on a planetary scale that ran for thousands of years and that appears to have been played out in four principal dimensions: