The Atlantis Blueprint (40 page)

Shining ones appeared in the Andes and in the mountains of the Middle East after the flood. And in both cases, their great concern was with measurement. Did ancient Andean mythology point to Cuzco as a sacred site? Is there a rational explanation beneath the mythological record? Was there some sort of technological or scientific reason for the ‘golden wedge’? And what does it all have to do with ‘measures’? The ‘golden wedge’ of Cuzco, the ‘omphalos’ of Delphi and the ‘cording of the Temple’ in ancient Egypt are all part of a mysterious web which spans the globe, a pattern that tempts us to believe that the sacred sites that haunt our landscape are not
scattered across the earth at random but are rather part of a deliberate design.

The significant line discovered by Maria D’Ebneth that connected Tiahuanaco and Cuzco extended all the way to the equator where it intercepted Quito, the northern capital of the Inca empire. Before the Earth’s mantle/crust shifted position, Quito was located at 30 degrees north. The Inca Trail, which is one of the great wonders of the ancient world, ran from Cuzco in the south to Quito in the north. This link between Cuzco and Quito is quite literal. One can still walk the Inca Trail from Cuzco to Quito today.

Prescott’s
History of the Conquest of Peru
records that the Inca were desperate to maintain the Cuzco—Quito connection. Huayana Capac, the father of the last Inca, Atahuallpa, died around 1525, some seven years before Pizarro’s arrival brought an end to that great empire. When Huayana Capac died ‘his heart was retained in Quito, and his body, embalmed after the fashion of the country, was transported to Cuzco, to take its place in the great temple of the Sun, by the side of the remains of his royal ancestors’.
²⁶

Atahuallpa was eventually murdered by Pizarro, but before he died he ‘expressed a desire that his remains might be transported to Quito, the place of his birth, to be preserved with those of his maternal ancestors’.
²⁷
Pizarro refused this request and instead buried the remains of the last Inca in a Christian cemetery. ‘But from thence, as is reported, after the Spaniards left Caxamalca, they were secretly removed, and carried, as he had desired, to Quito.’
²⁸

Prescott tells us that

It would seem that information buried at Cuzco before the displacement may have provided the people of ancient America with a blueprint for laying out their post-flood sacred sites. This blueprint linked Cuzco to Tiahuanaco and Cuzco to Quito and so the 45-degree ‘ley line’ that connects these ancient sacred sites begins to make geodetic sense. Ollantaytambo and Machu Picchu are so close to Cuzco that they should be considered a group, with Cuzco at the centre being the ‘navel of the world’. The monuments at Ollantaytambo were constructed with the largest stones used in the New World. Sitchin links Ollantaytambo with ancient Baalbek in Lebanon:

Little could Sitchin suspect that Ollantaytambo and Baalbek are the same distance from the Hudson Bay Pole and share the
10 phi latitude. The fact is that the largest stones used in construction in both the Old and New World are found at the same distance to the Hudson Bay Pole. This worldwide geodesic pattern repeatedly emphasises the importance of the geometric notion of the Golden Section married to the number 10.

When the people of ancient Israel conquered ‘Canaan’ they were occupying the homeland of the Phoenicians, who regarded themselves as the heirs of the much earlier maritime Byblos culture. The Phoenicians had drawn upon the Byblos for their art, culture and architecture. The Israelites respected the achievements of the Phoenicians and drew upon their architecture in the building of King Solomon’s Temple.

In
The Temple and the Lodge31
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh assert that ‘modern archaeological research confirms that Solomon’s Temple… bears an unmistakable resemblance to the actual temples built by the Phoenicians… It is even possible to go a step further. Tyrian temples were erected to the Phoenician mother goddess Astarte… hilltops and mountains – Mount Hermon for example – abounded with her shrines.’ And they point out that King Solomon is also described (I Kings 3) as offering ‘sacrifice and incense on the high places’.

They draw attention to the fact that Solomon’s religion was not strictly orthodox. When he grew old ‘his wives swayed his heart to other gods… Solomon became a follower of Astarte’ (I Kings 11). They even state that the famous Song of Songs is a hymn to Astarte. They then ask the question: ‘Was [the Temple] dedicated to the God of Israel, or was it dedicated to Astarte?’

This may seem academic until we recall that Astarte was known to the Greeks as Aphrodite, the goddess of love (from which we get the term aphrodisiac), and to the Romans as Venus. And Henry Lincoln, for one, believes that the planet Venus was the reason that the pentacle is perhaps the most important of magic symbols.

So the man who built Solomon’s Temple was a worshipper of Venus, and his employer also had leanings in that direction.

When we recall that the geometry of Rennes-le-Château is pentacular, we can suddenly see another connection with Solomon’s Temple and the Templars. The whole area has connections with Merovingians and Templars and the religion of gnosticism. The kind of gnosticism that led to the extermination of the Cathars was a belief that matter is created by the Devil and spirit by God, so ‘this world’ is evil. But according to Lomas and Knight the Essenes had a different version of gnosticism. ‘Gnosis’ means knowledge, and the Essenes held that when a man awakens to ‘gnosis’, he is ‘resurrected’. Priests and saviours become unnecessary, because he now possesses the ‘knowledge’ himself. Such a position is, of course, anathema to all forms of established religion that depend on priestly authority, for it makes them unnecessary. It could be compared to Quakerism, with its belief in the ‘inner light’, and also to Buddhism, with its concept of enlightenment.

In reading Lomas and Knight, I had been particularly interested in Kilwinning, the original Templar abbey built in Scotland, for Rand had included it among his sacred sites. Recognising the importance of the Golden Section in their positioning, he had tried measuring the Golden Section from the North Pole (34 degrees, 23 minutes north), and had discovered two other important sacred sites at this latitude, the Chinese pyramids and Ehdin (the O’Briens’ Eden). Measuring the Golden Section from the equator (55 degrees, 37 minutes north), he could find nothing in North America or Asia, but he found Kilwinning only 3 minutes of a degree away, at 55 degrees, 40 minutes north. And when he learned (from
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail)
about Kilwinning, he checked its position compared to the Great Pyramid, and found that it was 36 degrees – one-tenth of 360 degrees, the total distance around the earth. When he learned that Kilwinning was reputed to be built on an ancient pagan site, he was further encouraged.

He checked Rosslyn’s latitude; it was 55 degrees, 52 minutes
north, only 15 minutes out – not bad, but still 17 miles too many. Then he checked its location with regard to the Hudson Bay Pole. It was precisely 50 degrees north. In an email telling me of this discovery, Rand wrote:

If the Templars deliberately sited Rosslyn on a phi latitude that was also a ‘50/50 site’, then it looked as if they must also have had knowledge of this worldwide grid of sacred sites.

For me, this was further confirmed by Lomas and Knight’s reference to the prophet Enoch. In
The Hiram Key
there are merely three brief references to him. Towards the end of
The Second Messiah,
there is a passage about the thirteenth degree of Scottish Freemasonry, which

So, according to the Masons, the origins of Freemasonry – the two pillars that play a central part in its rituals – can be traced back to Enoch.

When I first read
The Hiram Key
I assumed that this was simply another more or less fictional attempt to establish the ancient origins of Freemasonry, but by the time I finished
The Second Messiah,
it seemed to me that Lomas and Knight had made an extremely plausible case for the Egyptian origin of Freemasonry and for secret knowledge that could be traced through Solomon’s Temple, the Essenes and the Templars. The notion that the Book of Enoch might be involved came as no surprise. Rand’s
When the Sky Fell
had already left me in no doubt that ancient memories of the Great Flood have survived down the millennia.

Lomas and Knight emphasise that the tradition of Enoch and the flood is of central importance to Freemasonry, and in their third volume,
Uriel’s Machine,
Enoch is virtually the central figure. As already noted, Lomas and Knight believe that the flood was caused by the impact of a comet in 7,640
BC,
and that the ancients were able to anticipate this impact by using ‘Uriel’s machine’. There are also no fewer than thirty-two references to the planet Venus, which, they explain, ‘symbolises rebirth in Judaism, Freemasonry and many other ancient traditions’.

There is, then, a convergence of Masonic tradition and other arguments about ancient civilisation. It was Rand who pointed out one of the most fascinating implications of the Templar tradition of an important discovery in the remains of Solomon’s Temple: the evidence that part of the Templar fleet that left La Rochelle in 1307 made its way to America. (Of course it is believed that the Vikings had found their way
to America centuries before Columbus, but they did not cross the Atlantic, but stuck to the coast of Greenland.) Before Columbus ‘discovered’ America, did one of the Templar ships that had sailed to America later return to Scotland?

The corncobs in Rosslyn suggest that some of the Templars sailed for America. Lomas and Knight mention that Westford, Massachusetts, has an image of a Templar knight carved on a slab of rock, while at Newport, Rhode Island, there is a curious tower constructed in the manner of Templar round churches.

But it is unlikely that Templars fleeing from imminent arrest and torture would set sail across the Atlantic unless they knew where they were going. How could they have known about America? The only answer can be that they had a map or maps. Could they have obtained such maps from the ‘treasure’ that Hugh de Payens and the knights discovered in 1126 in the basement of the Temple in Jerusalem?

In
The Hiram Key,
Lomas and Knight comment: ‘Josephus… observed that the Essenes believed that good souls have their habitation beyond the ocean… across the seas to the west.’ This land is marked by the star that the Mandaeans of Iraq called ‘Merica’, and which Lomas and Knight suggest is Venus. They believe that it was from this star that America took its name – not from the explorer Amerigo Vespucci.

In short, what the Templars discovered in Jerusalem included the knowledge contained in Hapgood’s ‘maps of the ancient sea kings’.

A
S YOU FLY
east from La Paz in the Bolivian Andes, the dense green of the jungle suddenly gives way to open grasslands that extend as far as the eye can see. This is the swampy flood plain of the Mamoré River, a tributary of the Amazon, which is underwater one half of the year and bone dry the other half. The few inhabitants simply have to move to higher land during the flood season.

In 1962, an American student at the University of California, Berkeley, Bill Denevan, who realised that many areas of this immense land are virtually unknown, persuaded the pilot of a Bolivian airliner to divert north over the Moxos Plain, an area called Beni. Suddenly he was goggling with excitement, rushing from side to side of the plane with his camera. What he saw below him was a landscape in two shades of green, the lighter green lying on the surrounding darker green in short, broad strokes, as if an abstract painter had taken a whitewash brush and slapped a green-tinted wash over the flat landscape in V-shaped patterns. The lighter green, he realised later, was raised fields, in effect platforms of earth
that had once been surrounded by flood-filled ditches. Looking ahead, a distance of perhaps 50 miles, he could see another light green patch of landscape about the size of a fairly large village. It was all around him – a landscape with circular fields and raised mounds of tree-covered earth, and straight lines that ran towards the horizon for hundreds of miles. There were also square lakes, obviously man-made.

What excited Denevan was its sheer scale. Whoever had civilised this vast landscape had spread their raised fields, ditches and reservoirs over thousands of acres. Yet no one had ever heard of a great civilisation in the Amazon. Columbus, of course, had not penetrated this far, and when the Spanish Conquistadores arrived in the late 1600s they had found nothing to indicate the presence of an ancient people – just a few thousand Indians who were forcibly converted to Christianity.

When Denevan returned to the United States, he tried to interest archaeologists in this vanished people but failed completely. No one believed him. Eventually, an archaeologist named Oscar Saavedra, from the region’s largest town, Trinidad, began to explore the ancient landscape. He soon realised that the fields ran to hundreds of thousands, that there were thousands of forest-covered mounds to which the inhabitants retreated during floods, and that there were over a thousand miles of causeways. As Saavedra penetrated the waterways with their overhanging trees in a motor-driven boat, he was actually travelling through a man-made waterscape that extended for hundred of thousands of square miles, as far as the borders of Bolivia and Brazil. These canals often connected rivers on the great swampy plain, so that the whole area might be compared to Venice, but thousands of times larger.

There are also earthworks that depict people and animals that have been compared to the Nazca lines, one anthropomorphic figure being 2 kilometres from head to toe. It is believed that these various structures were built by the Paititi
tribe 5,500 years ago,
¹
but Denevan dismisses this estimate as grossly exaggerated.

Then how old is it? Ceramic heads and utensils that farmers found in their fields could not be dated, but other artifacts could be carbon-dated to 5,000
BC.
Denevan’s own feeling is that an age of a couple of thousand years is closer to the truth. Even so, it would be as old as anything then known in South America. (No one believed that Tiahuanaco, that other great Bolivian civilisation, could be dated any further back than a few centuries
BC.)

What had happened to the builders? Some pieces of evidence suggested that their descendants had still been around in large numbers when Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492, but by the time the Spaniards arrived two centuries later they had all but vanished. It was easy to see why no one had noticed them. Their lives appeared to be a continuous battle against nature, although their agriculture must have been capable of supporting a population that could easily have run to millions. (Historians have calculated that North and South America before 1492 might have contained 100 million people.)2 When they vanished, the land quickly returned to nature.

Denevan’s theory is that they may have been killed off by diseases brought by the white man, such as smallpox, measles and influenza, which swept across the continent like the Black Death, wiping out 90 per cent of the population.

What particularly interested me about the agricultural and forest-covered mounds in the Amazon was that this settlement answered a question that Rand and I had been asked repeatedly: if there
are
vanished civilisations, then where are the traces of their existence?

Rand always made the same reply. They might be lost under the sea, or the ice of Antarctica. Or they might by lying unnoticed under our noses, as the Moxos civilisation of the Amazon went unnoticed before Denevan persuaded the pilot to fly over it. Even around Tiahuanaco, which has been known since the time of the Conquistadores, no one suspected the sheer size of
the civilisation that surrounded the present ruins, though the immense stone blocks of its port area – some weighing over 400 tons – which once looked out across Lake Titicaca, ought to have alerted scholars to the possibility that this was once a city on the scale of ancient Rome or the sacred Mexican city of Teotihuacan rather than an isolated town in the middle of a plain.

Not only were such sites found all over the world, but Rand’s theory offered him a means of locating them. His method had led him to pinpoint Lubaantum, the Maya sacred centre in Belize, by looking for a specific spot 120 degrees west of the Great Pyramid and at a 10 phi longitude north of the equator. He had also discovered three immensely important sites at polar Golden Section latitudes (i.e., the Golden Section measured from the poles rather than from the equator). They were Baalbek, Ehdin (the O’Briens’ Garden of Eden), and the Chinese pyramids. Tracing this line on to the east of China, he found that it passed through another sacred site of immense importance: Isé, in Japan (to which I had dedicated a page in my
Atlas of Sacred Sites).
He continued along the line and found a group of islands located on his ‘sacred latitude’: the Canary Islands, 700 miles off the coast of Spain, at 45 degrees west of the Great Pyramid – that is, one-eighth of the distance around the world. And they were, of course, ‘phi sites’.

The Canaries are most commonly regarded as a holiday destination, but not as the location of any sacred temples or pyramids. Rand, though, recollected reading something about them in a book by the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl.

In 1969, twenty years after
The Kon-Tiki Expedition3
had become an international bestseller, Heyerdahl again set out to prove that ancient seamen could have crossed vast oceans – this time, from Egypt to America. He succeeded – at the second attempt – in a boat built of papyrus reeds. In his book
The Ra Expeditions
,
⁴
describing these ocean voyages, he pauses to speak about the mystery of the natives of the Canary Islands, the Guanches.

The Guanches were discovered by the Spaniards who sailed in the wake of Columbus, and who, in the typical manner of the Conquistadores, virtually exterminated them. They were tall, blue-eyed and blond, and are described by
Encyclopaedia Britannica
as of the Cro-Magnon type. One authority compares them to the natives of Muges, in Portugal, whose origins can be traced to about 8,000
BC.5

How did they get there? They must have come by sea, yet they were farmers and sheep breeders and possessed no boats. In fact, they detested the sea. Heyerdahl’s suggestion is that the Guanches arrived on boats of papyrus reeds, like the
Ra,
and never mastered the technique of making wooden craft with joined planks. Another oddity was that they practised mummification and cranial trepanning, as in ancient Egypt and Peru. Were they, as Heyerdahl suggests, sailing across the Atlantic, on their way to America, when they discovered the Canaries, and decided to settle there?

Another authority on the Guanches, the Brazilian Dr Arysio Nunes dos Santos, has pointed out that their language is related to the ‘Dravidian’ family of languages from India,
⁶
but what would Aryan types from India be doing in the Canaries? Santos advances the theory that they were natives of Atlantis, escaping after the great catastrophe, and that Atlantis was somewhere in the region of Indonesia. Santos may, of course, be mistaken in calling the homeland of the Guanches Atlantis’, but he could still be correct about where they came from, and when. At all events, Heyerdahl bore in mind the mystery of the Guanches. And when, in 1998, a native of the Canaries told him about black stone pyramids, he hastened to go and see for himself.

The pyramids
—
eight of them
—
were discovered near the town of Guimar, on Tenerife. They had six steps, and bore a distinct resemblance to the step pyramids of South America. One was even in the centre of the town, but no one had paid it much attention because it looked like a series of terraces with a flat top. Heyerdahl recognised it for what it was, persuading
a Norwegian businessman to buy the pyramids and set up a museum.

If Rand is correct, some of the Guanches preferred to remain on the Canaries because they are at a sacred latitude and longitude, a suitable spot for settling and for building temples to the sun.

The Moxos Plain of Bolivia and the Guimar pyramids on Tenerife are two examples of civilisations that vanished
—
or at least, retreated into unrecognisability Heyerdahl had found yet another in northern Peru, when he was looking for evidence of ancient seafaring that might prove his theory that natives of South America sailed across the Pacific.
⁷

One day in March 1987 Heyerdahl was driving north from the ruins of Chan Chan, the former capital of the Chimu Indians, which is near the coastal city of Trujillo. Driving along the Pan-American Highway, he was looking for a solitary pyramid that he had once seen in the middle of the desert. He was unsuccessful, but he bumped into an old friend, the museum director Christopher Donnan, who was excavating a pre-Inca city called Pacatnamu, and told him a curious tale about robbery and violence.

A month earlier, on 6 February 1987, a group of tomb robbers dug their way into a small pyramid near a village called Sipan, near Chiclayo. To call it a pyramid would strike the visitor to Sipan as an exaggeration, for the three pyramids of Sipan look more like weathered hills scored with hundreds of water channels. The people of the area, however, know they are ancient tombs, and that small artifacts they find there, such as beads, can be sold to foreign tourists for a few pesos. Some of these amateur tomb robbers had sunk a shaft from the top of one of the pyramids, called Huaca Rajada, then dug outwards from it.

The looters often spent all night searching the tunnels made of adobe bricks and found nothing, but on this occasion they were in luck. In a groove between two bricks, their leader— an unemployed lorry driver named Ernil
—
found eight
hammered gold beads. On the black market they were worth around $17 each. Eagerly, Ernil drove a tyre-iron into the ceiling – and was knocked to the floor by a landslide of rubble and sand. When ten fellow thieves rushed up to see what had happened, they found that the prone Ernil was covered with golden artifacts, obviously worth a fortune. Ernil had punctured the floor of a burial chamber, and it proved to be full of gold and silver knives, gold masks, chains of beads and statuettes of jaguars and horned monsters.

The looters carried off eleven rice sacks filled with treasure. There was enough gold to make them all rich. Unfortunately, they quarrelled during the division of the spoils. One man was killed with three gunshots to the chest. Another of the looters took to his heels and called the police. Not long afterwards, Ernil was killed when the police came to try and arrest him.

The local museum curator, Walter Alva, was called in to examine the captured loot. He realised immediately that the robbers had found the Peruvian equivalent of Tutankhamen’s tomb, although these magnificent artifacts were not as old as those of the boy pharaoh. They had been created by a civilisation of Indians called the Moche, who flourished from about
AD
100 to
AD
700. Then they abruptly vanished. The reason for their disappearance was a mystery until the late 1990s, when it was realised that there had been a forty-year drought in Peru in the sixth century
AD.
The heavy rains caused by El Niño ceased, and the Moche starved. This was the same drought that, archaeologists speculate, led the Indians of the Nazca Plains of Peru to create their vast menagerie of animals – monkeys, whales, spiders, birds – visible only from the air, in a vain attempt to persuade the gods to send back the rain.

Regrettably most of the treasure of the Huaca Rajada had already been sold by the time the police went to arrest Ernil. Walter Alva told the story to Thor Heyerdahl as the two stood at the bottom of the robbers’ shaft, and he permitted

Heyerdahl to examine a superb gold mask, with eyes made of blue lapis lazuli. As Heyerdahl looked at it, he thought again about the legends of the gods who came to South America, bringing civilisation with them.

While the Mexicans believe that the god Quetzalcoatl came from the east, the Peruvians in the Lambayeque Valley, where the pyramids are situated, have a legend of a king called Naymlap, who arrived from the west on a balsa wood raft and led his followers inland for a mile, where he built palaces at a place called Chot. Like Quetzalcoatl and Kon Tiki, he was worshipped as a god, and when he died his followers buried him in a pyramid and announced that he had flown away. A Jesuit priest named Cabello, who recorded the ancient tradition, declared that Naymlap was succeeded by eleven generations of kings, who were also buried in pyramids.

This all came to an end when the last of the kings, Fempellec, was seduced by a demon in the guise of a beautiful woman. After that, the gods sent storms, followed by the Great Drought. To propitiate them, Fempellec was tied up and thrown into the sea, but it was too late to avert catastrophe.