Read The Atlantis Blueprint Online
Authors: Colin Wilson
The Atlantis Blueprint (39 page)
But why the castration? Because when the god Horus avenged the murder of his father Osiris in a battle with Set, Horus lost an eye and Set lost his testicles. So to punish a treacherous priest in this way would be oddly appropriate, particularly since Sequenenre had lost his eye.
Sequenenre’s son Kamose avenged his father’s murder by fomenting the rebellion that drove the Hyksos out of Egypt. Kamose became the founder of a new Egyptian dynasty, and the ritual of the murder and resurrection of Osiris, which would be used at his coronation, would be enriched by a new level of meaning – the death and resurrection of Sequenenre.
If Lomas and Knight are correct in believing that the pharaoh who made Joseph the governor of Egypt was Apopi – and the dates seem to support it – then the murder of Sequenenre was of even deeper significance, for Joseph’s father Jacob became Israel, the founder of the Jewish people. If Joseph and his family were among the Hyksos who were driven out of Egypt, then the murder of Sequenenre also led to the creation of the Jewish nation, which would help to explain why it was regarded as so important by the Jews that it was transformed into the murder of Hiram Abif, the architect of Solomon’s Temple.
In researching the history of Freemasonry, Lomas and Knight seem to have made a string of extraordinary discoveries. The claim that Freemasonry originated in Egypt would seem to have a sound factual foundation. With the murder of Hiram Abif six centuries later, Egyptian mythology was metamorphosed into Jewish mythology, implying that some form of Freemasonry had survived from the time of Sequenenre and involved a ritual death and resurrection. Lomas and Knight produce compelling evidence to suggest that the ritual was one of the secrets of the Essenes that was hidden beneath
the Temple after the crucifixion of Jesus, in whose story resurrection also plays a central part. The Essenes, who guarded the secret, were wiped out by Titus, and the Temple was destroyed. Lomas writes of a ritual of Freemasonry that ‘has a retrospect that tells of the fall of the Nasoreans in
AD
70, and how the progenitors of Freemasonry left Jerusalem at that time to spread across Europe’. He also says that these survivors ‘believed they were preserving the bloodlines of the two Messiahs of David and Aaron, who would one day arrive and establish the kingdom of God on earth’. Jesus, whom the Baptist Mandaeans (descendants of the Essenes) regard as an impostor, was raised to the status of a god by St Paul, and when Constantine used Christianity to bind his collapsing empire together, the resurrection became the Church’s most powerful claim to supernatural authority.
As to the Templars, we can make one of two assumptions: either the nine original Templars were among the descendants of the ‘progenitors’ who left Jerusalem after the destruction of the Temple and went back with the specific intention of finding the Essene documents, or they were looking for treasure and found instead the Essene scrolls.
Lomas and Knight have no doubt that the former is the correct version of events. In fact, they believe that the First Crusade was deliberately planned to retake Jerusalem so that the knights could undertake the search for the Essene scrolls. When they were found, the illustration of the ‘Heavenly Jerusalem’, identified by the old scholar, Lambert of St Omer, revealed that the knights had found what they were looking for, and the scrolls became the foundation of the power and wealth of the Knights Templar. Somehow, though, the Church and the King of France learned the Templars’ most carefully guarded secret – they were not Christians, in that they believed Jesus to be a man, not the son of God. This served Philip the Fair as an excuse to arrest the Templars and seize their wealth. But he failed because someone – probably Pope Clement – tipped off his relative at Blanchefort, and the
Templar fleet – of eighteen ships – escaped from La Rochelle with the Templar treasure.
Where did they go? The corncobs and aloes in Rosslyn suggests that some of them sailed for America. Other Templars went to Scotland, where an abbey named Kilwinning had been built in the first great days of Templar power, around 1140.
18
It was just south of Glasgow, and was the Templars’ major centre. This would be a natural refuge, particularly since the St Clair family lived not far away, in Roslin. Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland, had been excommunicated by the Pope, so Templars had nothing to fear in Scotland.
One of the main arguments of
The Hiram Key
is that Rosslyn Chapel was built in deliberate imitation of Herod’s Temple and as the home of the precious scrolls, which were the most important ‘treasure’ of the Templars. They argue that even the unfinished outer wall at Rosslyn, which looks as if the building was simply abandoned at that point, was a replica of an unfinished wall in Herod’s rebuilding of Solomon’s Temple.
In 1447, while Rosslyn Chapel was being built, there was a fire in the keep of Roslin Castle. William St Clair was frantic until he learned that his chaplain had managed to salvage four great trunks full of charters, whereupon, says the record, ‘he became cheerful’. Lomas and Knight point out that it sounds odd to value four trunks of ‘charters’ more than his castle keep – not to mention his wife and daughter, who were also inside. If these trunks contained the secret scrolls from Jerusalem, which would have been buried in Rosslyn Chapel, his curious priorities become understandable.
We should now be able to see the connection between the Templars and the mystery of Rennes-le-Château. If Pierre Plantard de St Clair is a descendent of the man who built Rosslyn, then he is also a Templar. The confession that so shocked the local priest who attended Sauniére’s death bed was certainly that Sauniére did not believe that Jesus was the son of God, but was simply a man. And this would be
consistent with Henry Lincoln’s suggestion that Jesus came to France with Mary Magdalene, and that his descendents were the Merovingian kings.
But this, as Lincoln admits, is pure supposition. The truth may be simpler: that the Merovingian kings were, in fact, also heirs to the secret known to the Templars, the secret contained in the Essene scrolls. If this Merovingian connection is not an invention of Plantard and the Priory of Sion, then it seems to follow that the Merovingians were an important ‘missing link’ between the Essenes and the Templars.
We can see why Nicolas Poussin talked about a great secret that kings would have difficulty drawing from him. He must have felt that this knowledge – that Jesus was a man, and that therefore the power of the Church was based upon completely false claims – was dynamite that could cost him, and others privy to the secret, their lives.
As I read Lomas and Knight on Hiram Abif, I found myself thinking about another interesting connection. Hiram came from Tyre. And having visited Tyre on a trip to the Lebanon, I knew that it was a Phoenician city, and that the Phoenicians were not worshippers of Yahweh. Why should Solomon want a Phoenician architect? Presumably because Hiram of Tyre was the best man for the job. But the chief Phoenician god was Baal or Bel, whom the authors of the Old Testament regard with suspicion and dislike, and their leading female deity was Astarte, also called Ashtoreth and Ishtar.
Rand’s research led him to believe that the Templars were the heirs to ancient geographic knowledge once possessed by the Phoenicians. He writes:
It was their colony in Carthage that indicated that the Phoenicians had once possessed ancient maps that depicted the earlier poles. During the Hudson Bay Pole latitude 30 degrees north crossed Tunisia at Carthage. This city is presumed to have been established in the ninth century
BC
but may be much older. The
Phoenicians, the ancient world’s most advanced sea power, may have had access to ancient maps that revealed an ancient site beneath Carthage. They may have selected this place for reasons that may go back to the time of Atlantis. Its location on the east coast of a tiny peninsula on the Tunisian coast would have presented ancient astronomers with an ideal view of the northern sky from latitude 30 degrees. The Mediterranean Sea would have acted as a perfect reflection of the heavens and the horizon would be undisturbed by mountains.
On the west coast of Africa there is another Phoenician city which the Romans regarded as the oldest city in the world. Little remains of Lixus, but it was once a Phoenician colony on the Atlantic coast of Africa. Certainly the most amazing Phoenician city was Byblos which, like Pyongyang in Korea and Cuzco in the central Andes, was linked by sacred latitudes to both the Hudson Bay and Yukon Poles. Byblos was sacred to both the Phoenicians and the Egyptians. For the Phoenicians it was the oldest city in the world and for the Egyptians it was the place that the god Osiris came to rest after his evil brother Seth locked him in a casket and set him adrift upon the waters of the Mediterranean Sea.
Byblos, along with the megalithic structures at nearby Baalbek, made Rand suspect that there had been an ancient maritime power operating worldwide out of this ancient port in Lebanon. Baalbek, as we have seen, may well have been a site constructed by the Fallen Angels that we met in Chapter 7.
Rand knew that the largest stones used in construction in the New World were in and around Cuzco, which also had been at a 10 phi latitude before the flood. Sitchin in
Lost Realms
had commented upon the similarities between Baalbek and Cuzco.
19
We know now that both sites shared the same sacred latitude (10 phi) before the flood. And it was this
latitude where the city of Tiahuanaco at Lake Titicaca was founded. One of the myths associated with Tiahuanaco and Lake Titicaca concerns the god who came from the south after a flood and gave his children a device that led them to Cuzco. In
When the Sky Fell,
Rand and Rose were fascinated by the myths of the people of the central Andes. They wrote:
The famous Peruvian historian, Garcilasso de la Vega, son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca princess, asked his Inca uncle to tell him the story of his people’s origins. How had Lake Titicaca become the source of their civilisation? The uncle explained: ‘In ancient times all this region which you see was covered with forests and thickets, and the people lived like brute beasts without religion nor government, nor towns, nor horses, without cultivating the land nor covering their bodies… [the sun-god sent a son and daughter to]… give them precepts and laws by which to live as reasonable and civilised men, and to teach them to dwell in houses and towns, to cultivate maize and other crops, to breed flocks, and to use the fruits of the earth as rational beings.’
The ‘gods’ who brought agriculture to the vicinity of Lake Titicaca were said to have come ‘out of the regions of the south’ immediately ‘after the deluge’. In other words, agriculture was introduced to Lake Titicaca by people who already possessed the skills and who had been forced to leave their homeland when a flood destroyed their southern land.
20
In his classic work
History of the Conquest of Peru,
William Hickling Prescott told the legend of how Cuzco evolved into one of the most sacred cities of the Andes. This is a tale that tantalises us with the suggestion that some sort of time or survival capsule was planted at Cuzco before the flood. Prescott relates how Cuzco became a sacred city after the flood had subsided.
The Sun, the great luminary and parent of mankind, taking compassion on their degraded condition, sent two of his children, Manco Capac and Mama Oello Huaco, to gather the natives into communities, and teach them the arts of civilised life. The celestial pair, brother and sister, husband and wife, advanced along the high plains in the neighbourhood of Lake Titicaca, to about the sixteenth degree south. They bore with them a golden wedge, and were directed to take up their residence on the spot where the sacred emblem should without effort sink into the ground. They proceeded accordingly but a short distance, as far as the valley of Cuzco, the spot indicated by the performance of the miracle, since there the wedge speedily sank into the earth and disappeared for ever. Here the children of the Sun established their residence.
21
Lost Realms
also drew attention to an amazing geometric fact: ‘Maria Schulten de D’Ebneth… in her book
La Ruta de Wirakocha…
drew lines showing that a 45-degree line originating at Tiahuanacu, combined with squares and circles of definite measurements, embraced all the key ancient sites between Tiahuanacu, Cuzco, and Quito in Ecuador including the all-important Ollantaytambu.
22
Why would the builders of these ancient sacred sites want to connect these four cities geometrically? What do Tiahuanaco, Cuzco, Ollantaytambo and Quito have in common?
Charles Piazzi Smyth believed that the Great Pyramid should be the site of the prime meridian. As we have seen, Tiahuanaco lies 100 degrees west of the Great Pyramid. And Quito, at the equator, lies 110 degrees west of Giza. This would seem to indicate that Tiahuanaco and Quito were constructed after the Giza Prime Meridian was established.
So it seemed that ancient Egypt and Peru had a powerful geodetic link. Several authors had speculated upon the mythological
connection between the Egyptian god, Osiris, and the god, Viracocha, of the people of the central Andes.
23
Osiris was believed to have travelled around the globe bringing civilisation to many nations.
Viracocha was the ‘god’ who brought agriculture and civilisation to the Andes. He was tall, of pale complexion, bearded and dressed in a long white robe. The myths tell us that this stranger came from the south and settled among the native people of Lake Titicaca some time after the flood. He brought instruction in the arts of agriculture, animal husbandry, medicine, metallurgy and even writing, which the Inca claim was later forgotten. Two groups of men accompanied him on his mission. One group were huaminca, ‘faithful soldiers’, and another hayuaypanti, meaning ‘shining ones’, who spread the word of Viracocha throughout the world.
24
The ‘golden wedge’, which Sitchin calls a ‘golden wand’, seems to be a kind of homing device that led the Children of the Sun directly to Cuzco as if towards a beacon situated beneath the ground. In 1575, Cristobal de Molina offered the following Andean prayer to the sun-god Viracocha:
