Read The Atlantis Blueprint Online
Authors: Colin Wilson
The Atlantis Blueprint (26 page)
But the Flores discovery throws doubt on my assumption. It suggests that man had enough language 800,000 years ago to co-operate in raft-building and sailing. That in turn led me to wonder whether language may not be as natural to man as the upright posture, and that men may have been talking to one another for perhaps a million years. In which case, it seems inconceivable that he developed civilisation only in the past 10,000 years. The Mayan knowledge of mathematics and astronomy alone makes the idea seem absurd. Even if we have
our doubts about Chatelain’s evidence on the Nineveh constant and the two gigantic numbers discovered at Quiriga, we are still left with an achievement that seems utterly beyond what we regard as the normal human capabilities.
I would suggest that there is only one logical solution: civilisation is thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of years older than we think. But in that case, where is the proof? Where are the ruins of this older civilisation?
This was the challenge thrown down by the Giza plateau authority when John West and Robert Schoch suggested that the Sphinx may be at least twice as old as Egyptologists believe. ‘Show us the intervening civilisation.’ But any evidence of such a civilisation may be buried beneath the desert sand, as that strange, monolithic structure called the Oseirion was buried under the sand below the temple of Seti I – a structure whose bleak, massive blocks and lack of ornamentation suggest some older stage of Egyptian civilisation.
32
Other evidence may lie beneath the sea, or beneath the ice of Antarctica. When we consider such evidence as Hapgood’s ‘ancient sea kings’, or the Nineveh constant and the Quiriga numbers, it becomes hard not to acknowledge that there is something oddly wrong with our present limited view of human history.
Equally convincing, I would suggest, is the evidence that Rand Flem-Ath has amassed in his study of ancient religious sites and their curiously precise placing on the face of the earth.
Fallen Angels
A
ND THEIR FACES
shone like the sun, and their eyes were ‘A-like burning lamps; and fire came forth from their lips. Their dress had the appearance of feathers: their feet were purple, their wings were brighter than gold; their hands whiter than snow.’
1
This was the sight that greeted Enoch, Noah’s greatgrandfather, when he was awakened one night by two tall, shining creatures. The strangers flew Enoch to the sky, from where, he tells us, ‘they showed me a very great sea, much bigger than the inland sea where I lived’.
2
Since Enoch lived somewhere in the Middle East, this inland sea is probably the Mediterranean and the ‘much bigger sea’ may have been the Atlantic Ocean, or ‘real ocean’ referred to in Plato’s account of Atlantis.
Before leaving with these two strange visitors, Enoch had instructed his sons not to try to find him, which suggests that his destination was on earth, not in heaven. He was transported to a place full of ‘light without any darkness’ which was covered in ‘snow and ice’ that was ‘at the ends of the earth’.
Enoch lived centuries before the flood, so this is a rare description of the home of the gods before it was destroyed. He was told that he’d reached ‘heaven’. Christian and Barbara O’Brien, who have studied this material in detail, are inclined to translate ‘heaven’ as ‘highlands’.
We don’t have to travel far to recognise a very real place here on our planet that fits this description; a high place of endless days and polar conditions which lies at the end of the earth. Antarctica is the highest continent on the planet, having an average altitude more than twice that of the second-highest (Asia). Was the ‘heaven’ that the two strangers showed Enoch another name for Atlantis? Another name for Antarctica?
All of these fascinating details are found within the Book of Enoch. Revealed within its colourful pages are the methods of ancient scientists determined to measure and survey their planet. In doing so they left a record of their findings for us in the location of sacred sites around the globe.
This important book would have been lost for ever had it not been for the wanderings of one of the most eccentric characters of the eighteenth century, a Scotsman named James Bruce, who was born in 1730 and spent twelve years of his life in a mysterious quest in the unknown heart of Africa. One of the most interesting things he brought back was a forgotten book called the Book of Enoch, regarded as so sinister and blasphemous that a Christian could endanger his soul just by reading it.
Bruce was a Scottish aristocrat, descended from a line of kings that included Robert the Bruce, who defeated the English at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. James Bruce would have made a formidable opponent in battle, being 6 feet, 4 inches tall and powerfully built, with red hair and a loud voice. He was also an egoist of monstrous proportions, so it becomes possible to see why he inspired more than his due share of dislike and died a thoroughly embittered man.
As a schoolboy at Harrow, Bruce wanted to be a clergyman;
his father wanted him to become a lawyer. Both were disappointed. Bruce’s attempt to study law so bored him that he had a nervous breakdown, and his father let him go his own way. His ambition was to travel to distant places and explore the unknown. He applied for permission to become a trader in India, then his attention was diverted by falling in love. Unfortunately, the girl
—
the orphaned daughter of a wealthy wine merchant, with vineyards in Spain and Portugal
—
was consumptive. Bruce and his new wife were on their way to Provence when she suddenly fell ill in Paris and died within days. Sick with grief, Bruce had her buried at midnight then rode through a storm to Boulogne, where he collapsed.
Back in Scotland he flung himself into the study of languages and history
—
he was particularly fascinated by the Freemasons and the Knights Templar
—
and went off on a trip to visit Templar sites in Europe. He had to return when his father died. At twenty-eight, Bruce had become the heir to the estates.
The Age of Steam was about to arrive, and the Industrial Revolution had already started. Bruce, of course, had no interest in such matters
—
his mind was in the Middle Ages, dreaming of knights and crusaders
—
but fortunately for him coal was discovered on his land at Kinnaird, and he leased it to a mining company, who paid him a generous royalty. Now he was able to indulge his passion for faraway places. He went to Spain and studied Arabic manuscripts in the Escurial, travelled down the Rhine by boat and studied antiquities in Italy.
Bruce was a Freemason, of the Canongate Lodge of Kilwinning. Through the offices of another Freemason, Lord Halifax, he was offered the post of consul at Algiers, which appealed strongly to his romanticism and promised spare time for archaeology. It proved harder work than he expected. The Bey of Algiers was capricious, difficult and occasionally violent, and on one occasion had a court official strangled in the consul’s presence. Bruce needed all his stubbornness and determination to avoid being tied up in a sack and thrown
into the Mediterranean. After two years it was a relief to resign his post.
Then, at the age of thirty-five, he prepared to embark on the adventure of a lifetime. His precise goal is still not entirely known. In
The Blue Nile
(1962),3 Alan Moorehead has no doubt that he was obsessed by finding the source of the Nile, which would certainly have brought him worldwide celebrity, since it was at that time still undiscovered. But he is also known to have been fascinated by the black Jews of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), the Falashas, perhaps because their presence suggested that the Ark of the Covenant might have been brought there by them from Jerusalem. As a man with a deep interest in scripture, James Bruce certainly wanted to find out more about the peculiar mystery of the Book of Enoch. The apocryphal book of the Old Testament had been held in veneration by early Christian theologians such as Origen and Clement of Alexandria, then it had disappeared. Rumour suggested that it contained scandalous information about angels and their sexual behaviour, perhaps explaining why the early Church decided to suppress it (if indeed that was the case).
Encountering many perils and adventures – such as shipwreck and brigands – Bruce made his way to Cairo, and from there travelled up the Nile. His aim was to go to Abyssinia, a country virtually unknown to Europeans – only two Catholic missionaries were known to have visited there, although Bruce had a low regard for Catholics, being fiercely Protestant.
The first part of his journey was pleasant enough – up the Nile by boat as far as Aswan. It was not the first cataract that deterred him there, but a local war. He decided to continue by the Red Sea. In a few weeks, he was facing unknown territory. Eventually, Bruce and his party found their way to the town of Gondar, which was then the capital of Abyssinia and consisted of about 10,000 clay huts with conical roofs, overlooked by the king’s palace, with its view down across the vast inland sea, Lake Tana.
The name Abyssinia means ‘confusion’, and Bruce found the country in turmoil – apparently its usual state – with the king and his vizier away on a punitive expedition. It was soon clear that an exceptionally high level of violence was regarded as quite normal. Soldiers rode around with the testicles of their enemies dangling on their lances. Their favourite meal was steak, which they ate raw, simply slicing it off the buttock of a living cow, after which the raw patch was covered in clay and the animal turned loose again. When Bruce first met the king, Tecla Haimanout, and his vizier, Ras Michael, on their return they were amusing themselves by putting out the eyes of a dozen captives.
Bruce was lucky; he might well have been castrated or beheaded. But Ras Michael took a liking to him, and gave him command of a troop of the King’s Horse. Bruce, never averse to showing off, dressed up in chainmail, stuck pistols in his wide cummerbund and impressed his hosts with his ability to shoot mountain kites while galloping on a black charger.
In due course, Bruce managed to do a little exploring. He was taken to a mountain top that was the source of a river called the Little Abbai, which his guide assured him was the source of the Nile. Bruce was suitably impressed, but his guide was quite wrong – the source of the White Nile is 1,000 miles further south in Lake Victoria, while the source of the tributary Blue Nile is actually in Lake Tana, several miles to the north of the mountain where they stood. Bruce was an enthusiast rather than a conscientious geographer. But in the Gondar monastery, on the shores of Lake Tana, he came upon a discovery that made up for his misidentification of the source of the Nile.
Abyssinia had been a Christian country since
AD
320, but since it was so far from the great northern centres of Christianity it had maintained its own tradition. One of the most interesting parts of that tradition is contained in an epic called the
Kebra Nagast,
or the Book of the Glory of Kings. When Bruce went to Gondar, no one in Europe had ever heard
of the epic. Its narrative tells how the Ark of the Covenant was brought to Ethiopia from Jerusalem in the ninth century
BC.
It seemed that the Queen of Sheba had her capital in Abyssinia. She was a beautiful young virgin, who had been on the throne for six years when she heard about Solomon and his wisdom and made the trip to Jerusalem to meet him. Both were impressed, and on the night before she left Jerusalem, he begged her to spend the night with him. She agreed on condition that she should retain her virginity. Solomon gave his word, with the unusual condition that it depended upon her taking nothing from him. Since she had no intention of taking anything, she agreed.
In the middle of the night, the queen got out of bed to drink from a bowl of water. Solomon woke up and pointed out that she had broken her promise. ‘But it’s only water,’ she protested. ‘What is more precious than water?’ asked Solomon. And since the queen had to agree with him, she yielded her virginity.
Nine months later, back in Abyssinia, she bore a son. After twenty years, the young man returned to Jerusalem to see his father. Solomon became so fond of him that he anointed him king, and when the youth departed for Abyssinia the eldest sons of all Solomon’s courtiers went as his escort. They were dismayed and depressed at the thought of leaving behind the Ark of the Covenant, the most sacred symbol of the Hebrews, which contained the Tables of the Law brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses, so the son of the high priest suggested that they take the Ark with them. This was accomplished, with the aid of the Angel of the Lord, who declared that the Ark itself had decided it was time to leave Jerusalem.
And that, according to the
Kebra Nagast,
was how the Ark came to Abyssinia.
When Bruce read this account he must have been immensely excited. It seemed to show that not only was the Abyssinian Church the oldest in the world, but that it could trace its roots back to King Solomon. And perhaps – who
knows? – this might also have been true of the Freemasons. As to the Falashas, the black Jews of Abyssinia, perhaps they traced their descent from the courtiers who had accompanied the young king to Abyssinia. Had Bruce, in fact, heard of the
Kebra Nagast
in his Arabic researches – perhaps in the Escurial – and is it possible that his motive in coming to Abyssinia was not to find the source of the Nile, but to find the Ark of the Covenant?
Bruce’s next discovery was, if anything, even more exciting. In this same monastery, he was also allowed to read a copy of the long-lost Book of Enoch. It had aroused so much curiosity that Queen Elizabeth’s astrologer Dr John Dee had tried to obtain a copy by supernatural means. He and his magician assistant Edward Kelley had taken part in seances in which ‘angels’ (or spirits) had dictated the Book of Enoch – or at least,
a
Book of Enoch – to Kelley. (Whether the text was the same one discovered by Bruce will never be known, since it has vanished.)
