The Atlantis Blueprint (35 page)

Wood’s book
—
and its sequel
Geneset24
—
are certainly impressive and ingenious, but his solution of the ‘mystery’ has more in common with Zechariah Sitchin than with Lincoln’s painfully precise investigations. He finds a number code that points to the gods of ancient Egypt, and in a ‘fairy story’ printed as an epilogue to
Genisis
outlines his conclusions: 200,000 years ago, a super-race from the Sirius system came to our solar system in three huge space ships and colonised Mars. This super-race was called
—
the Elohim.

Since water was scarce on Mars, they used earth as their ‘farm’, although its gravity was too high for their comfort. They created humanoid beings called Set, Osiris, Isis and Nephtys and an undersized ‘runt’ called Horus, and also a less intelligent type of creature called ‘Watchers’. The base they made on earth was an island called Atlantis. They also created two subordinate (and even less intelligent) species called the Cains and the Seths, and cloned animals for their food. The supervisors – Osiris, Isis, etc. – were naturally regarded by these subordinates as gods.

Against the specific instructions of the Elohim, Isis created more of these subordinate creatures to reduce the workload of the Seths and Cains, and the experiment soon got out of hand. The Nephilim, who had been chosen to do the work of impregnating the female ‘apes’, found that they so enjoyed it that they began to do it on the sly, producing hideous malformed hybrids. At this point, the Elohim decided to wipe out most of the population of the earth with a comet, which caused havoc and destroyed Atlantis. Finally, with the help of the Egyptian ‘gods’, the survivors created the beginnings of the civilisation we know today…

Understandably, Lincoln wanted nothing to do with this speculative mythology, and decided not to endorse it, yet he had no doubt that some of Wood’s geometrical discoveries were valid. Moreover, he was fascinated by Wood’s discovery that the English mile, not the kilometre (as one would expect), had been used as the unit of measurement by whoever originally designed the gigantic pentagram connecting the French churches. When he checked this against his own geometry, he discovered that Wood seemed to be correct.

In 1991, Lincoln had been contacted by a Danish television producer who had been born on the island of Bornholm. Erling Haagensen had become fascinated by Bornholm’s fifteen churches, which dated from the thirteenth century (the time of the Knights Templar); they often seemed to be associated with ancient megaliths – in fact, some megaliths were actually built
into the church walls. Lincoln had been toying with the idea that perhaps some of the Rennes-le-Château pattern had been laid out in megalithic times, and when Haagensen told him that the geometry he had identified on Bornholm was pentacular, Lincoln became convinced that they were each ‘uncovering a different portion of the same mystery’.

Moreover, Haagensen had found the English mile present in the Bornholm geometry. For example, if Haagensen’s geometry was correct, the distance between two of the churches, Ibsker and Povlsker, should be exactly 7 miles. And it was.

Why the mile? In a chapter called ‘The Measure’, Lincoln lays out some curious but highly convincing facts. The French metre, which came into use in 1791, was one-10,000,000th of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. Lincoln shows that an old English measure called the rod, pole or perch (which is one-320th of a mile) is also, in a more primitive version which Lincoln calls the Cromlech Pole (198.41874 inches) a precise measure of the earth’s surface: 1 Cromlech Pole multiplied by itself (i.e., squared) is 1 kilometre (39,370 inches), When this ancient pole (198 inches) is multiplied by 1.618, phi, using the Golden Section, the result is 320, the number of poles in 1 mile. So there is a mathematical connection between the British pole and the kilometre, and between the pole, multiplied by phi, and the mile.

Rand had emphasised again and again that the Golden Section is one of the most important keys to his geometry of sacred sites. He notes: ‘I found that one of the Bornhold churches was 16:18 west of the Great Pyramid. This church (at Vestermarie) is supposed to have been built on top of a megalithic monument. During the Yukon Pole it joined Avebury, Stonehenge, London and others at latitude 30N.’

If the blueprint theory is correct, Rennes-le-Château and the pyramids of China were part of a worldwide web of religious sites. It also seems that whoever arranged the specific positioning of the sites was aware of the earlier crust movements that preceded the Hudson Bay Pole.

Rand was also intrigued by an underwater site off the most westerly point of Japan. He writes:

Rand’s blueprint makes him think that Yonaguni is a significant sacred site because it was located at the all important 10 phi latitude during the Yukon Pole, thus joining, Nanking, Rennes-le-Château and Rosslyn Chapel at a golden section division of the Yukon Pole.

But, as we will see, the ‘blueprint’ shows that many sites can be aligned not only to the Hudson Bay Pole but also to the
much older Yukon Pole. This might suggest a tradition that extends back at least 100,000 years.

Although Rand believes that, since modern humans have been around for more than 100,000 years, the idea of a 100,000-year-old civilisation is a possibility, he thinks it far more possible that the links to the Yukon Pole were established by scientists using geological evidence before the flood, about 12,000 years ago.

In other words, just as Charles Hapgood had used applied geology in the 1950s to determine the position of earlier poles, so also might the Atlantean ‘surveyors’ have discovered the former latitudes of the Yukon Pole and placed their bases where these intersected with the Hudson Bay Pole (which was ‘their’ pole immediately before the flood).

Henry Lincoln cites a remarkable book called
Historical Metrology
(1953)27 by a master engineer named A.E. Berriman, an erudite volume covering ancient Egypt, Babylon, Sumer, China, India, Persia and many other cultures. It begins with the question ‘Was the earth measured in remote antiquity?’ and sets out to demonstrate that indeed it was. It argues that ancient weights and measures were derived from measuring the earth – which, of course, means in turn that ancient people had already measured the earth.

The book must have struck Berriman’s contemporaries as hopelessly eccentric. He says that one measure was a fraction of the earth’s circumference, that a measure of land area (the acre) was based on a decimal fraction of the square of the earth’s radius, and that certain weights were based on the density of water and of gold. It sounds almost as if Berriman is positing the existence of some ancient civilisation that vanished without a trace, except for these ancient measures.

This, of course, is consistent with Hapgood’s comment that history does not necessarily proceed steadily in a forward direction; it might pause, or even backtrack. This might also be the basis of his strange assertion about a science that dates back 100,000 years.

Henry Lincoln had established contact with a Norwegian, Harald Boehlke, who had also made some strange discoveries about Norwegian distances. Norway was pagan until 1,000 years ago. With the coming of Christianity, scattered trading posts disappeared and gave way to larger centres which became cities. Boehlke’s researches seemed to establish that these new cities – Oslo, Trondheim, Bergen, Stavangar, Hamar, Tonsberg – were placed in what looked like quite arbitrarily chosen spots, for example, Oslo is in what was simply a backwater, while no one has the slightest idea why Stavangar was chosen as a cathedral town. But distances seem chosen for some mathematical reason: Oslo to Stavangar, 190 miles; Oslo to Bergen, 190 miles; Tonsberg to Stavangar, 170 miles; Tonsberg to Halsnoy, 170 miles; and so on. Moreover, the position of the old monasteries again shows a pentagonal geometry. It looks as if the Church was using some secret geometrical knowledge in creating the new Christian Norway.

Lincoln also identified a ‘church measure’ of 188 metres, and appealed in a French magazine for further examples of it, as well as of pentagonal geodesics. A mathematics teacher named Patricia Hawkins, who lived in France, was able to find no fewer than 162 ‘church measures’ linking churches, hilltops and the roadside crucifixes called calvaries in the Quimper area of Brittany.

Lincoln begins the last chapter of
Key to the Sacred Pattern:

He pleads for historians and archaeologists to turn their attention to the evidence.

By ‘patterns’, Lincoln is not simply talking about the pen-tacle of mountains or the circle of churches. His own study of the Rennes-le-Château area revealed many patterns that could only have been created by deliberate intent. The ‘holy place’ of his title is ‘the natural pentagon of mountains, and the artificial, structured Temple that was built to enclose it.’

I must admit that I only have to see a map covered with lines drawn all over it to groan and close the book, but Lincoln soon had me convinced. For example, he has a diagram centred on the church at Rennes-le-Château, with lines drawn from it to surrounding villages, churches and castles. Straight lines ran from some distant church or château, straight through the church at Rennes-le-Château and out the other side to another château or church.

One of his most convincing discoveries is of a grid pattern. When lines were drawn connecting various sites, they were found to run parallel to one another – not only from left to right, but up and down. The lines were the same distance apart:

Moreover, the unit measure on this grid is the English mile – the point David Wood had also made about the geometry of the area. (Lincoln prints lists of distances that are in miles: for example, Rennes-le-Château to Bezu, precisely 4 miles; Rennes-le-Château to Soulane, precisely 4 miles.)

He also made a discovery that may throw a new light on Saunière’s unexplained fortune. Many of his alignments went through the tower Saunière had built as his library, the Magdala Tower, which was placed as far to the west as Saunière could go – he built it on the edge of a sheer drop.

Furthermore, not long before his death in 1917, Saunière had commissioned another tower, 60 metres high. We do not know where it was to be located, but Lincoln points out that one of the most important alignments of the area is the ‘sunrise line’, which runs from Arques church, through Blanchefort, to Rennes-le-Château. This line was the one that first got Lincoln looking for English miles. It was
almost
6 miles long.