Read The Atlantis Blueprint Online
Authors: Colin Wilson
The Atlantis Blueprint (36 page)
If it was to be exactly 6 miles long, it would end on the slope below the Magdala Tower, but since it is on a slope below the Tower it would have to be higher than the Tower if the landmarks – Blanchefort and Arques church – were to be seen from its summit. Is this where Saunière meant to build his new tower? If so, it underlines the fact that the whole area has been deliberately laid out with a geometrical logic that reminds one of the streets of New York.
Soon after Saunière had discovered the parchments, he spent a great deal of time rambling around surrounding hillsides, claiming he was collecting stones to built a grotto. Most commentators suspect that he was looking for treasure, but there is now a more likely possibility: that on his trip to Paris he had learned the secret of the geometry of the ‘Temple’, and he was now familiarising himself with it. Then he built the Magdala Tower, completing the ‘sunrise’ alignment, going as far west as he could – the slope of the landscape frustrated him. It seems highly probable that, twenty-five years later, he prepared to build a second tower, 60 metres high, which would complete the ‘sunrise line’. It sounds as if Saunière’s discovery of the parchments led to his being appointed custodian of the ‘Temple’, with the money that went with that role.
What Lincoln has done, with his thirty-year investigation of Rennes-le-Château, is to demonstrate the existence of some ancient science of earth measurement. Since medieval times, this science seems to have been in the custody of the Church (and we must naturally suspect the involvement of the Templars), but Lincoln is inclined to believe that it may be far older – dating back to the age of the megaliths. This immediately reminds us of Alexander Thom and his ‘Stone Age Einsteins’, while Rand’s evidence suggests that we may be looking at dates thousands of years before Stonehenge or Carnac.
Berriman seems to be making the same point in
Historical Metrology.
His argument that prehistoric measurement was
geodetic in origin – that is, was derived from the size of the earth – is powerfully expanded at the very beginning of Chapter 1.
He points out that although the Greeks did not know the size of the earth, the earth’s circumference happens to be precisely 216,000 Greek stade (the Greek stade is 600 Greek feet, and the Greek foot is 1.0125 times as long as the English foot).
If we want to find out how many Greek stades there are to one degree of the earth’s circumference, we divide 216,000 stade by the 360 degrees in a circle, and the answer, significantly, turns out to be 600 – the same as the number of feet in a stade.
If we then divide by 60 – to get the number of stade in 1 minute of the circumference – we get 10 stade. Change this to Greek feet – 6,000 – and divide again by 60, to find the number of Greek feet in 1 second, and we see that it is precisely 100.
This simply cannot be chance. Distances do not normally work out in neat round figures. It is obvious that (a) the Greeks took their stade from someone else, and (b) that someone else knew the exact size of the earth. Berriman is full of these puzzling facts – for example, the area of the great bath of Mohenjo Daro, in the Indus Valley, is 100 square yards.
Here is another curiosity: the Romans had a land measure called a jugerum, which is five-eighths of an English acre (as the French metre is five-eighths of an English mile) and exactly 100 square English ‘poles’. Again, we are faced with the idea that ancient measures are not dependent on the whim of some ancient king’s land surveyor, but on a tradition stretching back into the dim past,
and based on an exact knowledge of the size of the earth.
Lincoln has an amusing but fascinating speculation about this ‘English connection’. Early in his investigation into Rennes-le-Château, he went to the Bibliothèque Nationale with Gérard de Sède, who suggested he should request a book called
Le Vraie Langue Celtique (The True Celtic Tongue)27
by the Abbé Henri Boudet, priest of nearby Rennes-le-Bains and a close friend of Saunière.
In fact, there is strong evidence that Boudet was Saunière’s paymaster. Plantard’s grandfather visited Boudet in 1892, and Boudet not only passed on more than 3.5 million gold francs to Saunière (or rather, to Saunière’s housekeeper, Marie Denardaud), but more than 7.5 million gold francs to Bishop Billard, the man who appointed Saunière and who was obviously in on the secret. Since a gold franc was worth thirty-five modern francs and there are about nine francs to the pound sterling, Saunière received more than the equivalent of £13 million (over $20 million) and his bishop more than twice that amount.
Lincoln was able to obtain Boudet’s book, and found it baffling as well as funny. Boudet seemed to think that the original language of mankind before the Tower of Babel was English – or rather, Celtic. This part of Boudet’s book Lincoln describes as ‘linguistic tomfoolery’, and since Boudet was known to be an intelligent man Lincoln suspects he had his tongue in his cheek. But the volume developed into something far more interesting as he went on to discuss the complex megalithic structures of the area. The subtitle of the book is
The Cromlech of Reines-les-Bains
– a cromlech is a megalith made up of a large flat stone resting on two upright stones, rather like a huge dining table.
It looks as if Boudet’s job was simply to hint at the mystery of the whole area, and imply that it dated back to megalithic times, but Lincoln is also inclined to suspect that his intention was also to tell his reader that one major key to the secret of the area lies in English – perhaps in English measures, such as the English mile. Was Boudet hinting that the original measures of mankind are English – such as the mile?
In summary, the Rennes-le-Château area certainly qualifies as one of Rand’s sacred sites. It differs from all the others in being centred on a natural pentacle. Lincoln is certain that it has been sacred for at least 1,000 years, for the ‘temple’ – consisting of churches, castles and villages – must have been designed at least 1,000 years ago. (Rand, of course,
believes it was recognised as a sacred site during the Hudson Bay Pole.)
That raises an obvious question. The pentacular structure of the mountains of the area can only be seen from the air or on a good map, but we know that there were no good maps 1,000 years ago, except portolans, which covered the sea. Land maps were crude in the extreme. We have also seen Hapgood’s evidence that there were maps
—
even of Antarctica before the ice
—
that dated from thousands of years before Christianity.
*
It has been stated that this is the reason that Friday the 13th is an unlucky day, but there is no evidence for this - Friday was considered an unlucky day by Christians because Jesus was said to have been crucified on a Friday, while the unlucky number 13 was the number present at the Last Supper.
but that wealth seems to have mysteriously disappeared. For example, the knights of Bezu (near Rennes-le-Château) avoided the trap and escaped with vast amounts of treasure. Could it be coincidence that the commander of these knights was called the Signeur de Gotte, and that he was related to the Pope, the former Bertrand de Gotte? Or, moreover, that the Pope’s mother was a member of the Blanchefort family, who owned a château on the next hilltop to Bezu?
What the Templars Found
I
N MAY
1996, I was in Edinburgh with my wife; we had been invited to lunch by Graham Hancock’s uncle, Jim Macaulay. In the bar of his golf club, he said, ‘I’d like to take you to a special place this afternoon.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s called Rosslyn Chapel. It was built by a Templar in the mid-fifteenth century.’ He reminded me that this date was more than a century after the Templars had been arrested by Philip the Fair. ‘The French Templars were arrested in 1307. Many escaped to Scotland.’
My wife Joy is the historian in our family, and she asked Jim what was special about the place.
‘Well, there’s a sculpture of a corncob – about half a century before Columbus discovered America.’
By the time we arrived at the chapel we were expecting something quite unusual. We were not disappointed. To begin with, the style of Rosslyn was impressively Gothic. The ticket office was also a bookshop, and I bought a couple of pamphlets about Rosslyn, including Robert Brydon’s
The
Guilds, the Masons and the Rosy Cross.
1
I noticed that they also had for sale a book called
The Hiram Key,
by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas. I had heard about it already – in fact, had been warned about it. My own book
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
was due to be published that weekend, but
Keeper of Genesis
by Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock had already appeared, and I had been told that
The Hiram Key,
on a related theme, was due out about the same time. Literary editors of newspapers might decide to review all three in the same article, and so cut down the amount of space available to each, so I considered
The Hiram Key
as a potential rival. But that didn’t prevent me from buying a copy for Joy to read on the train.
Rosslyn turned out to be a very strange place, and Jim Macaulay was an excellent guide. This Christian chapel seemed to be half pagan. To begin with, its decoration seemed to be devoted to various kinds of vegetation, a riot of carved flowers and fruits, and, as Jim pointed out, the pagan figure known as the Green Man seemed to be everywhere. In mythology he represents the rebirth of vegetation every spring, and pagan festivals revolved around him. What was he doing in a Christian church?
In my book
Mysteries
,
2
written twenty years earlier, I had discussed the ancient religion of the moon goddess Diana, which had been driven out by Christianity yet had refused to die. An eccentric scholar named Margaret Murray had even suggested that witchcraft was really a religion based on this ancient worship of Diana, and that witch trials in which the Devil is described as having presided over a Witches’ Sabbat were really pagan fertility rituals, presided over by a high priest dressed as the god Pan, with a goat’s feet and horns.
I found myself wondering if William St Clair (or Sinclair, as it was spelled later), the man who had built Rosslyn, was as pious a Christian as he was supposed to be. There was obviously some mystery attached to the place. There could be no possible doubt about the representation of sweetcorn, or of
the plant called aloes cactus, also a native of America, which looks rather like a lily and has a bitter flavour.
We left Rosslyn after a couple of hours, feeling oddly disturbed; there was definitely something peculiar about the place. Jim dropped us off at the train back to Glasgow, where I was lecturing that evening. On the journey, I began to read a book that Jim had lent me called
Time Stands Still,
by Keith Critchlow,
3
while Joy read
The Hiram Key.
I could see immediately why Jim had lent me the book. In
From Atlantis to the Sphinx,
I speculated about a civilisation that predated the ‘Atlantis catastrophe’, and at the beginning of
Time Stands Still
Critchlow speaks about Alexander Thom’s investigations into ancient megaliths then goes on to talk about certain Babylonian clay tablets that had been consigned to a dusty shelf in the Plimpton Library in New York. Labelled ‘Commercial Tablets’, they had recently proved to contain some extremely interesting numbers: pairs of Pythagorean triplets, that is, numbers referring to Pythagorean triangles.
The simplest Pythagorean triangle, where the square on the hypotenuse equals the sum of the square on the other two sides, has sides of 3, 4 and 5 units. When squared, these numbers turn into 9, 16 and 25 – and, of course, 9 plus 16 equals 25. On these Babylonian tablets, only two of the three numbers were given. But these were enormous numbers, such as 12,709, 13,500 and 18,541. How did the Babylonians – or the Sumerians, who probably originated the numbers – manage to square numbers such as 18,541? Their number system was particularly crude, as complicated as Roman numerals. Critchlow concludes that ‘actual numbers conveyed some sort of immediate perception of the general relationships existing between these numbers’.
4
Some people – known as calculating prodigies – have this odd ability to do enormous sums in their heads. A five-year-old child named Benjamin Blyth, out walking with his father one morning, asked him what time it was and his father told him, ‘Ten minutes to eight.’ A hundred yards later, Benjamin
said, ‘In that case I have been alive…’ and named the number of seconds, about 158 million. Back at home, his father did the calculation on paper, and said, ‘No, you were wrong by 172,800 seconds.’ ‘No I wasn’t,’ said the child, ‘you’ve forgotten two leap years.’
5
Many of these calculating prodigies are very young, and their powers disappear as they grow up (Benjamin Blyth became a perfectly normal
—
that is, non-prodigious
—
adult). We cannot imagine such odd powers, but they obviously come naturally. Is it possible that our Sumerian
—
or even remoter
—
ancestors could somehow see these immense numbers in their heads as if they were in front of their noses? The psychiatrist Oliver Sacks mentions two mentally subnormal calculating twins in a New York psychiatric hospital, who saw a box of matches fall off a table,
and had counted them before they hit the floor.
Could the ancient people who created the Nineveh constant have been like that?
The Hiram Key
is equally fascinating, and nothing if not controversial. It reinforced the suspicion in my mind that William St Clair may have been the guardian of some curious
—
and non-Christian
—
mystery.
Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight are both Freemasons, and I knew little about Freemasonry. I knew that Masons are believed to have started in the guilds of the Middle Ages, such as the stonemasons who built Chartres. With so much cathedral building going on, there was plenty of work for everybody, and stonemasons travelled from place to place, having a secret handshake by which they recognised one another.
Masonry began to reach the general consciousness in the mid-seventeenth century, when it seems to have been involved with the strange affair of the Rosicrucians. This began in 1614 with the publication of a pamphlet called
Fama Fraternitas
(or ‘Fraternal Declaration’)
of the Meritorious Order of the Rosy Cross.
This purported to describe the life of a fifteenth-century mystic-magician called Christian Rosenkreuz, who lived
to be 106 and whose body was preserved – undecayed – in a mysterious tomb for the next 120 years. The pamphlet went on to invite all interested parties to join the Brotherhood, and told them that they only had to make their interest known (by word of mouth or in writing) and they would be ‘contacted’. Hundreds of people published their willingness to join, but, as far as is known, no one ever received a reply.
The
Fama
was followed by two more ‘Rosicrucian’ works, the
Confessio
(1615), and a larger work called
The Chemical Wedding
(1616), which both increased the Rosicrucian fever. The author is believed to have been a Protestant theologian named Johann Valentin Andrae, who is most certainly the author of
The Chemical Wedding
although he denied writing the other two. He seems to have started as an idealistic young man who hoped to launch a new spiritual movement, since – like so many other people at that period – he felt that it was time for a new beginning.
It seems that in Scotland and in England an organisation that called itself the Freemasons came into being around 1640. The Catholic Church came to detest it, but in the early days – particularly in Scotland – there seemed to have been as many Catholics as Protestants in the organisation. Freemasonry was basically about the brotherhood of man. In
War and Peace
the hero, Peter Bezukhov, feels spiritually and emotionally drained, until he meets a Freemason who renews his faith in life. The Mason tells him: ‘No one can attain to truth by himself. Only by laying stone on stone, with the cooperation of all, by the millions of generations from our forefather Adam to our own times, is that temple reared which will be a worthy dwelling place of the Great God.’ He goes on to explain that the chief object of the order is the ‘handing down of a great mystery, which has come down from the remotest ages’. Peter becomes a Mason by going through incredibly strange and complicated rituals that involve a symbolic death and rebirth, and he ends up feeling completely refreshed, ‘as if he had come back from a long
journey’. Mozart, of course, underwent the same rituals, and put them into
The Magic Flute.
The implication of all this is that Freemasonry was a secret society whose purpose was to produce in its members the sense of a great religious conversion. It can be seen that it involves a certain paradox. Andrae wrote the Rosicrucian pamphlets as a kind of ‘hoax’ (as he himself later put it), yet he also intended to cause a spiritual revolution. Nietzsche said, ‘The great man is the play actor of his own ideals.’ Andrae hoped to create greatness by creating high ideals. Nevertheless, a cynic might say that Freemasonry was the unintended outcome of a hoax.
Knight and Lomas had a far more interesting and exciting view of Freemasonry. Modern Freemasons are inclined to believe that the curious ceremony of initiation – with a noose round the neck, a slipper on one foot and the other trouser-leg rolled up to the knee – and the incomprehensible questions and answers are pure invention. As Lomas and Knight studied the ceremonies involved in the thirty-three degrees of Masonry, they increasingly began to feel that its roots lie in the remote past – and not merely two or three centuries ago, but a thousand years or more. As their research project progressed, they quickly concluded that Freemasonry can trace its origins at least to the Knights Templar, and that the most interesting mystery is precisely what those original nine knights discovered below the Temple in Jerusalem.
Although the Templars were on the surface an organisation created by a few Crusaders in the hope of achieving power and influence, behind them lies a strong sense of particular knowledge, of possession of some secret tradition. Did Philip the Fair really destroy them simply because he wanted their wealth? Or did this motive happen to fit in with some other motive shared by the Church?
Again, if the Church persecuted the Templars simply because Philip persuaded Pope Clement V to help him seize their wealth, why did its hostility persist for so long? After all,
Philip had been regarded as an enemy of the Church (which excommunicated him) and that feeling must have been strengthened by his later demand that its centre of power should be moved from Rome to Avignon. The Templars, in fact, had been servants of the Pope. After Philip’s death, you might expect a back-swing of sympathy for them, so why did the Church genuinely seem to detest them and to want to stamp them out like plague rats?
Lomas and Knight set out to try and uncover the origin of Freemasonry and began by rejecting the stonemason theory, on the grounds that there were no stonemasons’ guilds in England. They mention the interesting fact that Solomon’s Temple was not, as most of us naturally assume, some huge building covering many acres, but smaller than Solomon’s harem, about the size of an ordinary church, say the size of Rosslyn Chapel. Turning their attention to the Templars, they conclude – as we did in the last chapter – that Hugh de Payens and his knights spent years excavating beneath the remains of the Temple, searching for something specific, something whose presence they suspected in advance.
For what? Lomas and Knight believe the knights found a treasury of ancient scrolls that had been deposited there before the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in
AD
70. The scrolls were the scriptures and secret rituals of a Jewish religious community called the Essenes. When the Jewish revolt against the Romans broke out in
AD
66, their books were hidden away in the Temple and in caves by the Dead Sea. The latter were discovered by an Arab shepherd in 1947, who took them home with him, and fortunately decided against using them as fire-lighters. They became famous worldwide as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Lomas and Knight believe that the scrolls hidden in the Temple were even more important. Lomas speculates: ‘They knew that they had found something of immense significance that was probably very holy, so they decided to get them translated… The man with the solution was Geoffrey
de St Omer, the second in charge to Huges de Payen…’ Geoffrey took some of the scrolls back to an old priest called Lambert, now known as Lambert of St Omer. ‘Today, one of the most famous of all Lambert of St Omer’s works is his hasty copy of a drawing that depicts the Heavenly Jerusalem.’
This drawing, made around 1120, shows the basic symbols of Freemasonry five centuries before Freemasonry is supposed to have been founded. Moreover, the symbolism also leaves Lomas and Knight in no doubt that the drawing originated in the Temple, and that it was one of the things found by the Templars.
The notion of a Heavenly Jerusalem (or New Jerusalem), they point out, was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, based on Ezekiel’s vision. They conclude: ‘With the discovery of the Heavenly Jerusalem Scroll… we were now certain that the Templars did find the secrets of their Order inscribed upon the scrolls buried by the Nasoreans (or Essenes of Qumran…)’
