The Atlantis Blueprint (10 page)

Graham Hancock was immensely helpful to me when I began my own book, which was eventually published as
From Atlantis to the Sphinx.20
Graham sent me two complete versions of the typescript of
Fingerprints of the Gods,
and the next year the typescript of the sequel on which he and Robert Bauval collaborated,
Keeper of Genesis,21
with an invitation to use anything I wanted.

Rand had also played his part in the success of
Fingerprints of the Gods.
Graham has described how, when he was finishing
Fingerprints of the Gods,
he was at a low ebb physically and mentally – physically because of months of travel, mentally because he was beginning to doubt his own findings
about a lost civilisation that preceded ancient Egypt and Sumeria. His researcher added to his problems by resigning, explaining that there was simply no place on earth where the remains of such a lost civilisation could be concealed. It was certainly not at the bottom of the Atlantic, where there was no evidence whatever of a sunken land mass.

At that moment Graham received a letter from Rand, who had been given his address by Paul Roberts. The enclosed outline of
When the Sky Fell
solved his problem, while the various maps he had studied – those of Piri Reis, Philip Buache, Oronteus Finnaeus – now all fell into place, like the missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Atlantis
had
to be situated in Antarctica. With that single recognition, Graham tied up all his loose ends.

Also in
When the Sky Fell
Rand suggested that the language of the Aymara, who live around Lake Titicaca, has a structure that is so logical that it can be written in an algebraic shorthand that computers can understand; it can therefore be used as an intermediate language in enabling computers to translate other languages. Its structure is so simple that a Bolivian mathematician, Rojas de Guzman, suggests that it did not just evolve, but was constructed from scratch.
²²

That sounds like another argument for Erich von Däniken’s visitors from the stars, but neither the Flem-Aths nor Graham Hancock use it as such. They simply point out that legends of ‘gods’ exist all over Central and South America, and that the gods come from the east. Their chief has a beard (Native Americans do not have beards) and looks like a European; he had many names in different parts of South America – Viracocha, Quetzalcoatl, Kon Tiki, Votan, Kukulcan – and he is known as the ‘god’ who brought civilisation and a moral code forbidding slaughter. When he finally sailed away, he promised to return. In fact, the Aztecs of Mexico mistook the invasion of the Spaniards for the return of the gods, which is why their empire was conquered so easily. Professor Arthur

Posnansky concluded, from Aymara legends,
²³
that they believe that their language was that of the gods. Neither Graham Hancock nor the Flem-Aths assume the existence of visitors from space to explain many of these ancient mysteries – the white gods from the east may have been fleeing from their own disintegrating continent when they came to Mexico and South America.

So in 1993, after years of disappointment in trying to find a publisher for
When the Sky Fell,
the Flem-Aths suddenly began to sense that things were improving. I offered to write an introduction to the book, and it appeared in 1995, a year before my own
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
and Bauval and Hancock’s
Keeper of Genesis.

Keeper of Genesis
aimed to explain why, if the ancient Egyptians (or Atlanteans) had made plans for the Giza pyramids in 10,500
BC,
they waited another 8,000 years to build them. The reason, according to Bauval and Hancock, was ceremonial. By 2,500
BC,
the precession of the equinoxes had finally brought the constellation of Orion (which represented Osiris) to a point in the heavens that reflected the Giza plateau – the place of the ‘First Time’ – on the ground. The Egyptians built the Great Pyramid and enacted an elaborate ceremony in which Osiris arrived home in the pyramid, and then left for his home in the sky. It is a thesis that is bound to arouse a certain scepticism, rather like suggesting that disciples who were present at Jesus’s crucifixion later planned to build the Vatican in
AD
8,000 in order to perform a ceremony symbolic of the Resurrection, but it is certainly argued on the basis of immense astronomical knowledge.

When the Sky Fell
was translated into nine languages. Rand soon found himself embarking on a new project, linked to his previous work.

In November 1993, shortly before
When the Sky Fell
had been accepted, John West sent Rand an article by Robert Bauval that summarised the arguments that would appear in
The Orion Mystery
and
Keeper of Genesis.
Bauval had
explained his view that the pyramids of Giza exactly mirrored the stars of Orion’s Belt most recently in 10,500
BC,
at the beginning of the present ‘precessional cycle’, and he argued that the Sphinx had been built at that date. Rand had dated the last great crust shift at 9,600
BC.
John West wanted to know how could Rand account for this discrepancy of 900 years?

Rand replied that all the archaeological and geological evidence pointed to 9,600
BC
as the correct date. But Bauval’s argument did not imply that the Sphinx
had to
have been built in 10,500
BC,
simply that it memorialised that date. There is a memorial in Plymouth to the Pilgrim Fathers who sailed on the
Mayflower,
but it was not built in 1620.

The question nevertheless continued to nag at Rand, just as the Atlantis problem had nagged at him twenty years earlier, until a serendipitous event brought it into sharper focus. Rose often brought home library books that she thought might interest Rand; one was
Archaeoastronomy in Pre-Columbian America
(1975) by Dr Anthony Aveni.
²⁴
It provided a vital clue.

The most important prehistoric monument in Mexico is undoubtedly the vast religious complex of Teotihuacan, 20 miles north-east of Mexico City. At the height of its prosperity, around
AD
600, it had extended for 12 square miles, a city larger than imperial Rome. Then, around
AD
750, there was a sudden and total collapse. Its cause is still unknown, although an earthquake seems probable, since large areas of the city were found to have burned to the ground.

A 2-mile avenue, known as the Way of the Dead, runs through Teotihuacan from north to south. At its northern end stands the pyramid of the moon, while the immense pyramid of the sun lies off the avenue to the west.

But, oddly enough, the Way of the Dead does not run exactly north–south – it was 15.5 degrees off true north, pointing north-east. No one knows why. One suggestion was that the avenue was aligned on the setting of the Pleiades (or Seven Sisters), a constellation that was important in Meso-American mythology.

Rand was excited to learn that there are no fewer than forty-nine other sacred sites in Mexico that are also misaligned to the north-east. As he studied the Way of the Dead, he was struck by an interesting suspicion. Was it conceivable that when the holy site of Teotihuacan was first laid out, it
did
point to true north –
at the old North Pole in Hudson Bay?

At first sight, that seemed unlikely. The Hudson Bay Pole dated back before 9,600
BC,
and even outside estimates for Teotihuacan claim that it was founded no earlier than about 4,000
BC
(the most widely accepted estimate among archaeologists is a mere 150
BC).

Rand was also aware that most major religious sites are built on older religious sites, as if the ground itself is regarded as sacred. From Australia to Northern Europe, from China and Japan to Canada, a sacred place remains sacred over the millennia. Many temples are built on the site of older temples. In the early seventh century
AD,
Pope Gregory the Great told Augustine, who Christianised England, to build Christian churches on pagan sites. The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest places, is built on a Jewish holy site. Archaeology has uncovered the remains of five different cities at Tiahuanaco in the Andes. If civilisation existed before 10,000
BC,
as both Hapgood and the Flem-Aths believed, then it was likely that Teotihuacan had been a holy place for thousands of years before 4,000 BC.

Hapgood had stated that the longitude of the old North Pole in Hudson Bay was about 83 degrees west of our present Greenwich meridian (its latitude was 60 degrees north). Teotihuacan is 98 degrees, 53 minutes west. On a map of the Americas, it looked very much as if the Way of the Dead pointed straight at the Hudson Bay Pole, but as a map is a projection of the globe on a flat surface, it might therefore give the wrong impression. At all events, it
looked
as if the Way of the Dead was aligned on the old North Pole, and that was a vital first step.

What about the other forty-nine ‘misaligned’ Mexican sites?

Rand examined four – Tula, Tenayucan, Xochicalco and Copan – and the results were always the same. The layout of all of the sites seemed to point within a degree of the old North Pole, as if they pointed at the old North Pole like signposts.

Aveni made one extremely interesting comment: ‘Many persist in believing that what we’re really looking at are the remains of a mega-land survey undertaken by a vanished civilisation of Atlanteans.’ He obviously had in mind writers such as Peter Tompkins (author of
Secrets of the Great Pyramid25
and
Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids)26
and the British writer John Michell,
²⁷
who popularised the concept of ‘ley lines’ – lines of earth-force – in the 1970s, but he had only mentioned this idea to dismiss it. Like all academics Aveni would have regarded Atlantis as purely mythical, a happy hunting ground for cranks. Since both Hapgood and Rand were fairly certain that Atlantis – or some civilisation like it – had actually existed, Aveni’s comment was certainly thought-provoking.

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that there had been some kind of sacred temple at Teotihuacan before 10,000
BC,
and that it was aligned on the old North Pole. And let us also assume that the forty-nine other ‘misaligned’ sites in Mexico were also aligned on the Hudson Bay Pole. If Hapgood is correct, Antarctica would have been perhaps 2,000 miles further north than it is today, and would have had a pleasant, temperate climate.

The different locations under scrutiny suggest a civilisation that is spread over a fairly wide area. Professor Posnansky thought that Tiahuanaco, in the Andes, had been a flourishing city around 10,000
BC
and that it had been so since 15,000
BC.
We also seem to be looking at something like Hapgood’s notion of a worldwide maritime civilisation (he dated this around 7,000
BC,
but we also know that he believed that Atlantis was destroyed in 9,600
BC).
If such a civilisation existed, then the idea of a ‘mega-land survey’ ceases to look absurd. Hapgood’s ‘maps of the ancient sea kings’ implied
something of the sort – maps that showed the present Antarctica when it was free of ice.

At this point, a website called ‘How Far Is It?’ enabled Rand to calculate the exact distance from any place on earth to any other spot. More importantly, it also showed the exact bearings from one to the other. Sadly the first result of this new tool was a major disappointment. When Rand used it to calculate the position of Teotihuacan relative to the Hudson Bay Pole, he discovered that it did not, after all, point at it like a signpost – it was at an angle of 11.6 degrees rather than the 15.5 degrees he had been assuming. Rand pressed on with his studies. The idea that the Mexican sites pointed to the old North Pole like different signposts had not been proved, even though so many
were
aligned east of north, but the website had given him another, and equally useful, tool – distance.

All over the earth, 1 degree of latitude is equal to roughly 70 miles. (Degrees of longitude, by contrast, vary from 66 miles at the equator to inches at the poles. Indeed, at the North or South Pole you can walk around all the earth’s longitudes in seconds.)

Rand knew that the Great Pyramid revealed an extraordinary knowledge of mathematics and geography. Its four sides are aligned exactly to the four points of the compass, and its site is exactly 30 degrees north of the equator – precisely one-third of the distance from the equator to the pole. Evidence that the Egyptians knew the length of the equator and its distance from the poles and that the Pyramid itself is intended to represent half of the earth, from the equator to the North pole, indicates that the Egyptians of 2,500
BC
had knowledge of
worldwide
geography.

Would the Great Pyramid, probably the most famous sacred site in the world, yield any evidence to support the theory that sacred sites were aligned on the old North Pole?

Rand fed the Giza co-ordinates into the website, and discovered that, at the time of the Hudson Bay Pole, Giza would
have been 15 degrees further south (naturally, because the pole itself was further south). Rand now imagined drawing a line from the Great Pyramid to the old North Pole, and another from the Great Pyramid to the present pole. He discovered that the angle between the two lines was 28 degrees – the number 28 seems to play a basic part in the Giza site: there are 28 steps in the Grand Gallery that leads up to the King’s Chamber, and the Sphinx Temple had 28 pillars. Moreover, in
Keeper of Genesis,
Bauval and Hancock had pointed out that, as seen from Giza, the solstice points (the positions where the sun comes up over the horizon during the longest day of the year and the shortest day of the year) are 56 degrees apart – that is, 28 degrees between each solstice
*
and the equinox point.

Rand’s most exciting discovery was that the Sphinx Temple had a 28-degree bearing from the mortuary temple of the Great Pyramid,
and that if this bearing is extended it points literally like a signpost to the Hudson Bay Pole.