Chapter 7
Ancient Enigmas

Dinosaurs

It is assumed that man is the product of slow and orderly evolution and his present hope for three-score and ten years is a great advancement, since recorded history indicates to us that during other periods of history, when more hostile conditions prevailed, man had a much reduced life-span. I would like to conjecture, however, that a fundamental reordering of things during several episodes in the earth’s past might have appreciably altered conditions so that an original “Edenic condition” was lost. Must we assume that the ancients did not understand time as we know it when they claimed to live hundreds of years? Or must we assume that Time is always and forever the same thing? Obviously many creatures have lived upon the earth that no longer live here.

When they disappear or are all killed off, we say that they are “extinct”. It occurred to me at some point that, perhaps, “extinction” is a symptom of the fact that the cosmos in which that species was able to flourish has lost its vigor. It doesn’t matter how the species becomes extinct, because, in the end, it is only a symbol. What is more, the fact that a certain species does not reassert itself after such losses suggests that certain conditions have changed, and those changes are lethal.

When we begin to look at the South American cultures, the first thing we are told is how “recent” they are. Polish archaeologist Arthur Posnansky dated the Kalasasaya palace court at Tiahuanaco, near Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, to 15,000 to 10,000 BC. Mainstream experts assure us that this evidence simply cannot be considered because radiometric dating says otherwise.

Well, we already know that radiometric dating is a lost cause, so we can set that aside for the moment and consider other factors.

This brings us back to the subject of Atlantis. According to Plato,

“In those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Hercules”.

We might want to ask what Plato could have meant by this remark since, based on all knowledge of the sea floor of the Atlantic, it has always been navigable. However, there is something about this that was pointed out to me by an individual in the shipping industry who wrote:

I am intrigued by Plato’s remarks that the Atlantic was “navigable” before. As ship equipment suppliers, when we say the water is navigable, it means not only that the water is deep enough (the Atlantic was deep when the Critias story was reconstructed, so how could it have been any more convenient before?), but “navigable” also means, today, that on land there are sufficient radio direction or lit indicators and, that once a ship is out of sight of land, he has gyros, or echo sounders which, together with accurate charts means he can safely increment his way forward avoiding shipwreck. So “Navigable“ on a deep ocean really means instruments are on land and on the ships and that accurate charts exist (with soundings) - all three.¹¹¹

Since Ignatius Donnelly, scholars have produced a veritable shipload of books speculating on the location of Atlantis. I have a couple of shelves full of these books, and the theories range from the destruction of the island of Santorini by the eruption of Thera around 1600 BC¹¹² to Indonesia, to the Black Sea. More recently, Rand and Rose Flem-Ath have proposed that Antarctica was the “island of Atlantis” and that it “shifted” or “moved” South as a function of crustal displacement.

111 Matthew Walker, private correspondence with the author.

112 This approximate date is pretty well confirmed by Sturt Manning’s A Test of Time which is devoted to the dating of the eruption of Thera which has been tree-ring calibrated.

Plato described Atlantis as an “island empire” that, “in a single day… disappeared in the depths of the sea”. But he also tells us that this “island” was bigger than Libya and Asia Minor combined. Right away we perceive that his terms are a bit different from what we would use. We might think that his term “island”, meant simply that this body of land was not connected to Eurasia or Africa - that it was a distinct body of land surrounded by water - except for something else he added: Plato also told us that Atlantis was “the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent”. This suggests to us an unusual land formation - an isthmus.

His expression that it “disappeared into the depths of the sea” may have been meant to suggest that it was swept by vast tsunamis as the result of some cataclysmic event. So, considering these clues - its vast size, the definition of the term “navigable”, and the idea that “disappearing into the depths of the sea” very likely meant swept by terrifying walls of water, let take a peek through the Pillars of Hercules.

What do we see? Well, we see the Americas. We see North and South America connected by an isthmus. We also see a lot of little islands in the Caribbean.

Another clue that Plato gives us is that Atlantis had a lot of elephants. Something catastrophic happened to the large mammals roaming the world during the Pleistocene Epoch. Woolly mammoths, mastodons, toxodons, saber-toothed tigers, woolly rhinos, giant ground sloths, and many other large Pleistocene animals are simply no longer with us. The fact is, more than 200 species of animals completely disappeared at the end of the Pleistocene approximately 12,000 years ago in what is known to Paleontologists as the “Pleistocene Extinction”.

At the same time that the paleontologists are dealing with the unsettling notion of such a recent mass death, geologists are confronted with the evidence of terrifying geological changes which took place: extensive volcanism and earthquakes, tidal waves, glacial melting, rising sea levels, and so on. The Pleistocene Epoch didn’t end with a whimper, for sure. It went out roaring and thundering.

We already know that Geologists and Paleontologists don’t like catastrophism - it keeps them up at night. They fought long and hard against the Catastrophists. But in the present day, scientists in both fields have to face the fact that the Catastrophists were mostly right from the beginning - even if they might have gone overboard and explained everything in terms of catastrophe. It is evident that there are “gradual” changes, but that most of what happens on the Big Blue Marble in terms of significant changes is catastrophic.

One of the major facts that paleontologists and geologists and archaeologists have had to face is the stupendous number of frozen carcasses in Canada and Alaska in the western areas, and in Northern Russian and Siberia in the eastern areas - all dated to about 12000 years ago. This suggests, of course, that something dreadful happened on the planet, and its effect on the Northern hemisphere was more severe than on the Southern hemisphere.

Back in the 1940s Dr. Frank C. Hibben, Prof. of Archeology at the University of New Mexico led an expedition to Alaska to look for human remains. He didn’t find human remains; he found miles and miles of icy muck just packed with mammoths, mastodons, and several kinds of bison, horses, wolves, bears and lions. Just north of Fairbanks, Alaska, the members of the expedition watched in horror as bulldozers pushed the half-melted muck into sluice boxes for the extraction of gold. Animal tusks and bones rolled up in front of the blades “like shavings before a giant plane”.

The carcasses were found in all attitudes of death, most of them “pulled apart by some unexplainable prehistoric catastrophic disturbance”.¹¹³ The evident violence of the deaths of these masses of animals, combined with the stench of rotting flesh, was almost unendurable both in seeing it, and in considering what might have caused it. The killing fields stretched for literally hundreds of miles in every direction.¹¹⁴

113 Hibben, Frank, The Lost Americans (New York: Thomas & Crowell Co. 1946).

114 Ibid.
 

There were trees and animals, layers of peat and moss, twisted and tangled and mangled together as though some Cosmic mixmaster sucked them all in 12000 years ago, and then froze them instantly into a solid mass.¹¹⁵ Just north of Siberia entire islands are formed of the bones of Pleistocene animals swept northward from the continent into the freezing Arctic Ocean. One estimate suggests that some ten million animals may be buried along the rivers of northern Siberia. Thousands upon thousands of tusks created a massive ivory trade for the master carvers of China, all from the frozen mammoths and mastodons of Siberia.

The famous Beresovka mammoth first drew attention to the preserving properties of being quick-frozen when buttercups were found in its mouth. What kind of terrible event overtook these millions of creatures in a single day? Well, the evidence suggests an enormous tsunami raging across the land, tumbling animals and vegetation together, to be finally quick-frozen for the next 12000 years. But the extinction was not limited to the Arctic, even if the freezing at colder locations preserved the evidence of Nature’s rage.

Paleontologist George G. Simpson considers the extinction of the Pleistocene horse in North America to be one of the most mysterious episodes in zoological history, confessing, “no one knows the answer”. He is also honest enough to admit that there is the larger problem of the extinction of many other species in America at the same time.¹¹⁶

The horse, giant tortoises living in the Caribbean, the giant sloth, the saber-toothed tiger, the glyptodont and toxodon. These were all tropical animals. These creatures didn’t die because of the “gradual onset” of an ice age, “unless one is willing to postulate freezing temperatures across the equator, such an explanation clearly begs the question”.¹¹⁷ Massive piles of mastodon and saber-toothed tiger bones were discovered in Florida.¹¹⁸

115 Sanderson, Ivan T., “Riddle of the Frozen Giants”, Saturday Evening Post, No. 39, January 16, 1960.
116 Simpson, George G., Horses, New York: Oxford University Press) 1961.

117 Martin, P. S. & Guilday, J. E., “Bestiary for Pleistocene Biologists”, Pleistocene Extinction, Yale University, 1967.
118 Valentine, quoted by Berlitz, Charles, The Mystery of Atlantis (New York, 1969).

Mastodons, toxodons, giant sloths and other animals were found in Venezuela quick-frozen in mountain glaciers. Woolly rhinoceros, giant armadillos, giant beavers, giant jaguars, ground sloths, antelopes and scores of other entire species were all totally wiped out at the same time, at the end of the Pleistocene, approximately 12000 years ago.

This event was global. The mammoths of Siberia became extinct at the same time as the giant rhinoceros of Europe; the mastodons of Alaska, the bison of Siberia, the Asian elephants and the American camels. It is obvious that the cause of these extinctions must be common to both hemispheres, and that it was not gradual.

A “uniformitarian glaciation” would not have caused extinctions because the various animals would have simply migrated to better pasture. What is seen is a surprising event of uncontrolled violence.¹¹⁹ In other words, 12000 years ago, a time we have met before and will come across again and again, something terrible happened - so terrible that life on earth was nearly wiped out in a single day.

Harold P. Lippman admits that the magnitude of fossils and tusks encased in the Siberian permafrost present an “insuperable difficulty” to the theory of uniformitarianism, since no gradual process can result in the preservation of tens of thousands of tusks and whole individuals, “even if they died in winter”.¹²⁰

Especially when many of these individuals have undigested grasses and leaves in their belly. Pleistocene geologist William R. Farrand of the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, who is opposed to catastrophism in any form, states,

“Sudden death is indicated by the robust condition of the animals and their full stomachs … the animals were robust and healthy when they died”.¹²¹

Unfortunately, in spite of this admission, this poor guy seems to have been incapable of facing the reality of worldwide catastrophe represented by the millions of bones deposited all over this planet right at the end of the Pleistocene.

Hibben sums up the situation in a single statement:

“The Pleistocene period ended in death. This was no ordinary extinction of a vague geological period, which fizzled to an uncertain end. This death was catastrophic and all inclusive.”¹²²

119 Leonard, R. Cedric, Appendix A in “A Geological Study of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge”, Special Paper No. 1 ( Bethany: Cowen Publishing 1979).
120 Lippman, Harold E., “Frozen Mammoths”, Physical Geology, (New York 1969).

121 Farrand, William R., “Frozen Mammoths and Modern Geology”, Science, Vol.133, No. 3455, March 17, 1961.
122 Hibben, op. cit.

The conclusion is, again, that the end of the Ice Age, the Pleistocene extinction, the end of the Upper Paleolithic, Magdalenian, Perigordian, and so on, and the end of the “reign of the Gods”, all came to a global, catastrophic conclusion about 12,000 years ago. And, as it happens, even before this evidence was brought to light, this is the same approximate date that Plato gave for the sinking of Atlantis.

In recent years, a cartographer named J. M. Allen published a book entitled Atlantis: The Andes Solution. Allen focused on South America as Atlantis. He points to the fact that the Indian name for South America - before Columbus arrived - was “Atlanta”. He informs us that this is related to the Quechua word for copper, “antis.” Allen believes he has found the plain of canals on the Altiplano of southern Peru and northern Bolivia.

He suggests that the plain was very smooth and level, was surrounded by mountains on all sides, and was high above ocean level. This is, indeed, a close description of the Altiplano, supposedly the largest level plain in the world, containing the inland seas of Lake Titicaca and Lake Poopo. Allen found the remains of a channel of enormous dimensions in Bolivia, and was certain he had found the ancient city of Atlantis. Unfortunately, like William Farrand above, Allen is unable to let go of certain assumptions - such as reliance upon the chronologies established by uniformitarian believers. He suggests that the Andean/Atlantean civilization ended at the time of the eruption of Thera.

We already noted that Arthur Posnansky dated the Kalasasaya palace court at Tiahuanaco, near Lake Titicaca, in Bolivia to 15,000 to 10,000 BC. And Allen mentions that Lake Poopo is known to have flooded around 12000 years ago. There are ancient terraced cornfields on the sides of the mountains rising above Lake Titicaca where corn no longer grows. Corn only grows at lower altitudes. The lower altitude terraces where corn still grows are still above Lake Titicaca.

What this suggests is that peoples who constructed the terraces, and who were growing corn there, must have been doing so at a time when the land was lower. There is a stone causeway leading “out” of Lake Titicaca to nowhere. This causeway is built like an ancient wharf, which has suggested that it was built when the lake and the city were at sea level.

The remains of Tiahuanaco, the site of a technologically advanced culture considered by many archaeologists (romantic, not orthodox) to be the oldest ruins in the world.

Although some misguided scholars have attributed the buildings of Tiahuanaco to the Incas, it has now been established that the city was already in ruins when the first Incas came upon the scene.

In 1540 the Spanish chronicler, Pedro Cieza de Leon, visited the area and his description of the statues and monoliths compares very closely to what we see today. The site is at an altitude of 13,300 feet, which places it some 800 feet above the present level of Lake Titicaca. Most archaeologists agree that in the distant past Tiahuanaco was a flourishing port at the edge of the lake, which means that the water has receded almost 12 miles and has dropped about 800 feet since then.

All concur that the lake is shrinking, due mainly to evaporation, since no rivers flow from it In November 1980, the well known Bolivian author and scholar of pre-Columbian cultures, Hugo Boero Rojo, announced the finding of archaeological ruins beneath Lake Titicaca about 15 to 20 meters below the surface off the coast of Puerto Acosta, a Bolivian port village near the Peruvian frontier on the northeast edge of the lake.

If, over the past 3 or 4000 years, Lake Titicaca has slowly receded, as appears to be the case - as all scientists agree, then how can we explain the existence of stone temples, stairways, and roads still under water’? The only answer is that they were built before the lake materialized. We must go back, then, to the remnants of Tiahuanaco and reexamine the more than 400 acres of ruins, only 10 percent of which have been excavated. We have pointed out that dirt covers the ancient civilization to a depth of at least 6 feet. The only explanation for this accumulation is water.

A large amount of water had to have inundated the city; when it receded it left the silt covering all evidence of an advanced civilization, leaving only the largest statues and monoliths still exposed. It is logical to conclude, therefore, that Tiahuanaco was built before the lake was created, and not as a port on its shore. As the waters today continue to recede, we should be able to find more evidence of the city’s remote peoples. Scientists theorize that the area at Lake Titicaca was at one time at sea level, because of the profusion of fossilized marine life that can be found in the region.

 

The area then lifted with the Andean upheaval and a basin was created which filled in to form the lake. No one has suggested the marine life might have been brought to the altiplano by seawaters that were at flood stage. The Tiahuanacans could have been victims of worldwide flood, their civilization all but wiped out when their homes and structures were covered with seawater.

Because of the basin-like geography of the area the floodwaters that became Lake Titicaca could not run off and have only gradually evaporated over the centuries.

 

[…]

Professor Schindler-Bellamy as a disciple of Posnansky and Horbiger (who created the world famous Glacial-Cosmogony theory in the 1930’s) has worked dozens of years in the Tiahuanaco area and has written books on the subject. According to him the large monolithic Sun Gate of Tiahuanaco was evidently originally the centerpiece of the most important part of the so-called Kalasasaya, the huge chief temple of Tiahuanaco. Its upper part is covered with a stupendously intricate sculpture in flat bas-relief. This has been described as a “calendar” almost as long as the monolithic gateway has been known to exist; thus the Sun Gate has also been called the Calendar Gate. This calendar sculpture, though it undoubtedly depicts a “solar year”, cannot however be made to fit into the solar year as we divide it at present.

The “solar year” of the calendar’s time had very practically the same length as our own, but, as shown symbolically by the sculpture, the earth revolved more quickly then, making the Tiahuanacan year only 290 days, divided into 12 “twelfths” of 24 days each, plus 2 intercalary days. These groupings (290, 24, 12, 2) are clearly and unmistakably shown in the sculpture.[…]

[According to Schindler-Bellamy], at the time Tiahuanaco flourished the present moon was not yet the companion of our earth but was still an independent exterior planet. There was another satellite moving around our earth then, rather close... Because of its closeness it moved around the earth more quickly than our planet rotated. Therefore it rose in the west and set in the east (like Mars’ satellite Phobos), and so caused a great number of solar eclipses, 37 in one “twelfth,” or 447 in one “solar year.”

 

These groupings (37, 447) are shown in the sculpture, with many Corroborating cross-references. Different symbols show when these solar eclipses, which were of some duration, occurred: at sunrise, at noon, at sunset. These are only a small sample of the exact astronomical information the calendar gives. It also gives the beginning of the year, the days of the equinoxes and solstices, the incidence of the two intercalary days, information on the obliquity of the elliptic (then about 16.5 degrees; now 23.5) and on Tiahuanaco’s latitude (then about 10 degrees; now 16.27), and many other astronomical and geographical references from which interesting and important data may be calculated or inferred by us. […]

 

A few more facts revealed in the calendar are both interesting and surprising. As indicated by an arrangement of “geometrical” elements we can ascertain that the Tiahuanacans divided the circle factually astronomically, (but certainly mathematically) into 264 degrees (rather than 360). Also, they determined (ages before Archimedes and the Egyptians) the ratio of pi, the most important ratio between the circumference of the circle and its diameter, as 22/7, or, in our notation, 3.14+. They could calculate squares (and hence, square roots). They knew trigonometry and the measuring of angles (30, 60, 90 degrees) and their functions.

They could calculate and indicate fractions, but do not seem to have known the decimal system nor did they apparently ever employ the duodecimal system though they were aware of it. (For a still unknown reason, however, the number 11 and its multiples occur often.)

The most tantalizing fact of all is that the Tiahuanaco culture has no roots in that area. It did not grow there from humbler beginnings, nor is any other place of origin known. It seems to have appeared practically full-blown suddenly. Only a few “older” monuments, as can be inferred from the “calendrical inscriptions” they bear, have been found, but the difference in time cannot have been very great. The different, much lower cultures discovered at considerable distances from Tiahuanaco proper, addressed as “Decadent Tiahuacan” or as “Coastal Tiahuanaco”, are only very indirectly related to the culture revealed by the Calendar Gate. […]

When the satellite (the former moon) approached within a few thousand miles gravitational forces broke it up; according to the Roche formula each planetoid or asteroid disintegrates when approaching the critical distance of 50 to 60,000 kms. The fragments shattered down on earth; the oceans, released from the satellite’s gravity, flowed back toward the continents, exposing tropical lands and submerging polar territories. […]

 

Thus the approach of the “moon” caused a world-wide deluge, effecting changes of climate and provoking earthquakes accompanied by volcanic eruptions. The “ring” left by the satellite after breaking into fragments caused a sudden drop in temperature of at least 20 degrees… It is evident, for example, in the discovery of frozen mammoths in the Siberian tundra.

 

Possibly gravity - and therefore physical weight - was also changed on earth, and with it biological growth: this would explain the widespread construction of huge megalithic monuments as well as the presence of giants - man and animal - in fossil strata, tombs, and myths. According to Horbiger four moons fell on earth, producing four Ice Ages; our present moon, the fifth one, will similarly be drawn into the critical configuration of one-fifth of its present distance (380,000 kms.) and will cause the fifth cataclysm.

 

Tiahuanaco apparently remained for only a very short period at its acme of perfection (evidenced by the Calendar Gate) and perished suddenly, perhaps through the cataclysmic happenings connected with the breakdown of the former “moon.”

We have at present no means of determining when Tiahuanaco rose to supreme height, or when its culture was obliterated, as naturally, the calendar itself can tell us nothing about that. It will certainly not have been in the historical past but well back in the prehistoric. It must indeed have occurred before the planet Luna was captured as the earth’s present moon, about 12,000 years ago. ¹²³

123 Zettl, Helmut, Catastrophism and Ancient History, Volume VI, Part 2, A Journal Of Interdisciplinary Study, July 1984, Marvin Arnold Luckerman Executive Editor.

There are several fascinating items in the above material.

One that interests me particularly is the speculation that the year was different prior to the deluge, and that the number 11 was significant in some mysterious way. The ideas about the capture of the moon, and a previous satellite which broke apart and rained destruction on the earth are interesting, but my guess is that this might just be interpretation of a swarm of comets or asteroids.

The theory of a falling moon has been discussed by Dr. John O’Keefe, a scientist at the Goddard Laboratory for Astronomy in Maryland. O’Keefe claims that the fragments of a moon’s collision formed a ring around our planet that blocked the sun’s rays, thus causing world-wide decline of temperatures. After a while the fragments disintegrated even further and showered down on earth, as tectites.

These tectites O’Keefe suggests, were fragments of a fallen moon. What is evident is that this world-wide cataclysm of 12,000 years ago appears in myths from every corner of the globe. The Egyptian Papyrus Ipuwer tells us that “The sun set where it rose” and an Egyptian tomb, (Senmut) shows Orion and Sirius painted in reverse position. The Finnish Kalevala says “the earth turned round like a potter’s wheel” and the Popol Vuh describes a showering of fiery hail from heaven.

On the outskirts of Brno, Moravia, there is a quarry where workers uncovered the bones of a wooly mammoth. There, in the quarry, was discovered a 160 foot deep sequence of multiple soil cycles. Each climate cycle from warm to cold was expressed as a sequence of gradational soil types reflecting the change from a moist, deciduous forest to an arid, frozen tundra, cracked by deeply penetrating permafrost. Midway through each cycle, there are numerous bands of fine windblown dust delivered in what must have been monstrous storms of continental scale.

Expert speculations suggest that this dust must have shrouded the earth for weeks or months at a time and must have produced a refrigerating effect on Europe’s climate. In the colder part of each cycle, the environment had become so dry that even large rivers dried up.

It seems that the ice sheets that repeatedly advanced southward were accompanied by the development of vast, but temporary deserts throughout Russia and Ukraine, even extending into southeast Europe and to the shores of the Black Sea. Every passage back from freezing cold to warm was abrupt in every cycle. Oceanographers from Turkey, Russia, Bulgaria and the United States teamed up to explore the Black Sea. Using sound waves and coring devices, they discovered that the Black Sea was once a vast freshwater lake.

Glenn Jones of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution dated the samples from the bottom of the Black Sea and confirmed that around 7,500 years ago, the seas had burst through the Bosporus valley and the salt water of the Mediterranean poured into the lake with unimaginable force. What was evident was that it had happened suddenly and almost instantaneously. What was also noted was that the massive amounts of salt water pouring into the Black Sea had been deficient in Oxygen.¹²⁴

While searching for the answers to this mysterious event, cores of coral were drilled from the ocean in order to determine the rates of growth on a year by year basis going back 20 thousand years. Apparently, ice melt affects the rate of coral growth. The results of these cores showed that there was a huge spurt of ice-melt around 12,000 years ago. The meltwater from this event was enormous. It filled up dozens of lakes that no longer exist - lakes formed by the sag in the Earth’s crust caused by the weight of the huge ice dome.

Immediately following this melt, the ice age returned for a brief period called the Younger Dryas.

At 8 p.m. on June 5th, 8498 BC, the core parts of Asteroid A punched the first decisive hole in the fracture zone of the Atlantic Ridge. The forces of hell were let loose. Through these two newly formed vents the glowing red-hot magma shot up at terrific speed and mixed with the liquid above it - the waters of the Atlantic. This created all the conditions for a submarine volcanic eruption of the greatest possible violence. The fracture seam was torn apart. The bottom of the sea burst open.

 

All existing volcanoes were activated and new vents formed. Terrestrial fire and ocean water became embroiled in ever-increasing volume. Magma mixed with steam. The chain of fire ran all the way between the two continents from the Beerenberg volcano on Jan Mayen in the north to Tristan de Cunha in the south.¹²⁵

124 Ryan, William, Pitman, Walter, Noah’s Flood (New York: Simon and Schuster 1998).
125 Muck, Otto, The Secret of Atlantis (New York: New York Times Books 1976) back cover blurb.

This rather dramatic description from the back of Otto Muck’s book - The Secret of Atlantis - is based on his ideas about the causal relationship between isotherms and favorable climate in northwestern Europe, and the unobstructed flow of the Gulf Stream across the Atlantic.

Muck attempts to use this flow to make a case for the prior existence of a large body of land in the Atlantic whose subsidence changed the ocean currents and warmed the British Isles about 10,500 years ago, give or take a day or two. Based on a varied and interesting collection of hard data, Muck suggests that the submarine massif of the Azores was once above water and could have blocked and deflected the Gulf Stream, preventing the circulation of the warmer waters, and thus contributing to the freezing temperatures of the British Isles.

Muck writes:

If we then date the transition from the Quaternary to the Quinternary Age at 12,000 years ago, or around 10,000 BC, we are doing so on the authority of contemporary geologists and paleontologists. We are at the same time fixing the date when Barrier Island X, which had hitherto prevented the Gulf Stream from reaching the coasts of Europe, sank beneath the Atlantic … a point in time … when the warm water and rain-bearing winds brought by the Gulf Stream were no longer deflected back to the west by the Atlantic island barrier, but flowed freely eastward because the barrier had sunk beneath the waves.

We have uncovered the traces of the greatest cataclysm on Earth that has been experienced by man. For there can be no doubt that this catastrophe of 12,000 years ago is the most terrible event that has ever taken place in all the dramatic history of mankind.¹²⁶

126 Ibid., p. 84-85.

Essentially, what Muck did was to note that the geologically recorded isotherms moved significantly at this point in time. I still think his book is one of the better ones on the subject because he assembles a lot of interesting hard data, even if I don’t necessarily agree that there was a big island that “sank beneath the Atlantic”.

There are other solutions to the problem of the isotherms, including current day research showing that this can result from global warming. While we don’t deny that it’s possible for such severe lithosphere disruption as Muck suggests to occur, and we aren’t playing soft with the idea of mass destruction of species, it just seems that an event that would produce the sinking of so vast a body of land so completely would be an event from which absolutely nothing on the earth would survive.

Nevertheless, Otto Muck draws our attention to the meteor craters in the Carolinas. The Carolina bays are mysterious land features often filled with bay trees and other wetland vegetation. Because of their oval shape and consistent orientation, they are considered by some authorities to be the result of a vast meteor shower that occurred approximately 12,000 thousand years ago. What is most astonishing is the number of them. There are over 500,000 of these shallow basins dotting the coastal plain from Georgia to Delaware.

That is a frightening figure.

Unlike virtually any other bodies of water or changes in elevation, these topographical features follow a reliable and unmistakable pattern. Carolina Bays are circular, typically stretched, elliptical depressions in the ground, oriented along their long axis from the Northwest to the Southeast. [T]hey are further characterized by an elevated rim of fine sand surrounding the perimeter. […]

The last twenty years have seen an explosion of evidence that earth has often encountered objects that profoundly alter our environment. For instance, it is now commonly accepted that an impact with a large object in the Gulf of Mexico caused the extinction of large dinosaurs - a theory considered bizarre and irresponsible at the time Kacrowski studied the Bays.

Robert Kobres, an independent researcher in Athens, Georgia, has studied Carolina Bays for nearly 20 years in conjunction with his larger interest in impact threats from space. His recent, self-published, investigations have profound consequences for Carolina Bay study and demand research by academia as serious, relevant and previously unexamined new information. The essence of Kobres’ theory is that the search for “debris”, and the comparison of Bays with “traditional” impact craters, falsely and naively assumes that circular craters with extraterrestrial material in them are the only terrestrial evidence of past encounters with objects entering earth’s atmosphere.

Kobres goes a logical step further by assuming that forces associated with incoming bodies, principally intense heat, should also leave visible signatures on the earth. And, finally, that physics does not demand that a “collision” of the bodies need necessarily occur to produce enormous change on earth. To verify that such encounters are possible outside of the physics lab, we need look no further than the so-called “Tunguska event”.

On June 30, 1908, in the vicinity of the Tunguska River deep in Siberia, a tremendous explosion instantly leveled 2000 sq. km. of tundra, felling trees by the millions, all left pointing outward from a central area. News accounts of the day told of Londoners being able to read newspapers from the glow of the night sky for days afterward.

 

Seismographs worldwide recorded an apparent cataclysm in Siberia. Unfortunately (or fortunately as the case may be) the explosion had occurred in an area so remote, and during a time of such political turmoil, that no researcher pinpointed or even managed to travel to the suspected impact site for more than two decades. Not until pioneer Russian meteoritic researcher Leonard Kulik managed to gain entry to the inhospitable area in 1927, did anyone but local tribesmen view the devastation and its peculiar nature.

At the epicenter of the explosion lay not a large crater with a “rock” in it, as might be expected, but nothing more than a number of “neat oval bogs”. The Tunguska literature generally mentions the bogs only in passing, since Kulik failed in digs there to locate any evidence of a meteorite and went on to examine other aspects of the explosion.¹²⁷

What do we have so far? We have an event that seems to have affected Eastern Siberia and Northern North America more severely than other places, though whatever it was certainly amounted to a global event.

We have already talked about the evidence of “nuclear bombardment” in the Great Lakes region provided by Firestone and Topping that tells us:

Radiocarbon dates for Pleistocene remains in northeastern North America are as much as 10,000 years younger than for those in the western part of the country.[…] Materials from the Gainey Paleoindian site in Michigan, radiocarbon dated at 2880 yr BC, are given an age by TL dating of 12,400 BC. It seems that there are so many anomalies reported in the upper US and in Canada of this type, that they cannot be explained by ancient aberrations in the atmosphere or other radiocarbon reservoirs, nor by contamination of data samples. […]

Our research indicates that the entire Great Lakes region (and beyond) was subjected to particle bombardment and a catastrophic nuclear irradiation that produced secondary thermal neutrons from cosmic ray interactions. The neutrons produced unusually large quantities of Pu239 and substantially altered the natural uranium abundance ratios […]

Sharp increases in C14 are apparent in the marine data at 4,000, 32,000-34,000, and 12,500 BC. These increases are coincident with geomagnetic excursions. […] The enormous energy released by the catastrophe at 12,500 BC could have heated the atmosphere to over 1000 C over Michigan, and the neutron flux at more northern locations would have melted considerable glacial ice. Radiation effects on plants and animals exposed to the cosmic rays would have been lethal, comparable to being irradiated in a 5 megawatt reactor more than 100 seconds. The overall pattern of the catastrophe matches the pattern of mass extinction before Holocene times.

 

The Western Hemisphere was more affected than the Eastern, North America more than South America, and eastern North America more than western North America. Extinction in the Great lakes area was more rapid and pronounced than elsewhere. Larger animals were more affected than smaller ones, a pattern that conforms to the expectation that radiation exposure affects large bodies more than smaller ones.¹²⁸

127 Howard, George A., The Carolina Bays: http://www.georgehoward.net/cbays.htm

128 Firestone, Richard B., Topping, William, Terrestrial Evidence of a Nuclear Catastrophe in Paleoindian Times, dissertation research, 1990 - 2001.

Firestone and Topping propose that this evidence of nuclear radiation is a result of “cosmic ray bombardment” from, perhaps, a supernova. D.S. Allan, a biologist at Cambridge, and J. B. Delair, coauthor of Cataclysm!, published in 1995 in the U.K, also like the supernova hypothesis. Evidence of a supernova explosion, in the form of aluminium 22 (along with other scientific and mythological evidence), found in concentration at the edge of our solar system, helped Allan and Delair conclude that a stellar blast probably caused the massive destruction. Iron ore in the earth from about 11,000 years ago shows that its magnetic polarity violently reversed.

This certainly suggests an extraterrestrial encounter with a magnetically powerful agent at that period. The supernova explanation, however, does not account for all the evidence, most particularly the mythic and geological evidence of massive bombardments of comets.

Dr. Paul LaViolette, author of Earth Under Fire, claims that he has discovered evidence of a different sort of cataclysm, a volley of cosmic waves resulting from an explosion in the galactic core. Entering our solar system, this galactic super wave (the most powerful energetic phenomenon in the galaxy) would have interrupted the solar wind’s ability to repel most intruding cosmic dust particles.

LaViolette builds a mythological foundation for his scientific theory, the shakiest part of which is that he suggests that galactic core explosions are a cyclical event, recurring every 26,000-year cycles, a period that relates to the precession of the equinoxes. He claims that this is a great clock, and that the precessional cycle is the duration of one Great Year recognized by the ancient Greeks, Zoroastrians, and Chinese.

La Violette’s theory is weak because galactic core explosions, like other nuclear phenomena, are only statistically probable.

Further, the record shows a frequency greater than every 26,000 years, and his attempts to introduce “mini-explosions” to account for this come across as so much prestidigitation of the data. Also his theory does not account for all of the evidence, most particularly the geological evidence of massive bombardments of cometary bodies. What is more, La Violette’s claim that the precessional cycle is the “great clock”, assumes that the current polar orientation has remained stable for eons, and the very mythic evidence he tries to use as his foundation contradicts this, most especially the decoded information from the Gate of the Sun at Tiahuanaco reported above.

In all of this searching high and low for Atlantis, and comparing the paleontogical records and geological records and archaeological records with the story of Plato, the one major thing that everybody seems to be forgetting is this:

Plato’s tale was about a WAR followed by cataclysm.

According to Plato’s story, Atlantis was the center of a country of extreme economic wealth and military power that sought to enslave all of Europe. The Atlanteans were quite successful in defeating many European countries; however, the great civilization of Athens repelled their attacks and eventually succeeded in driving them back out of Europe.

Unfortunately, almost all records of this great achievement were lost due to a very powerful flood that wiped out most of Athens and the whole continent of Atlantis in one day and one night.

Over and over again, what we see is the fact that something terrible happened on the earth around 12,000 years ago. This time period comes up over and over again in many disciplines having to do with the study of the past. And it just happens to be the period designated by Plato’s characters as the time of the destruction of Atlantis, following a terrible war in which Atlantis was defeated after attempting to conquer the entire world, at the time of what is remembered as the greatest deluge in human history: The Flood of Noah.

In terms of human beings, the Bible tells us that after the Flood of Noah, man was no longer able to live the same lifespan that had originally been allotted to him. Symbolically, this suggests that something significant about the cosmos or the state of matter itself, had changed. Modern science, of course, completely dismisses such ideas with seeming good reason.

But, we should like to ask:

• What if the shortening of man’s lifespan actually happened?

• What if it happened more than once?

• What if such an event represents a loss of vigor or exhaustion of cosmic resources?

• Or, what if it represents the fact that mankind originally evolved in a different environment and the present one is no longer conducive to such long lives?

In this regard, some observations about dinosaurs are pertinent.

There have been found dinosaur remains in “bone-yards” which had shoulder blades eleven feet long! The towering Brachiosaurus, an herbivore, stood up to fifty feet tall and weighed perhaps a hundred tons! How could it have sustained itself? One hundred tons is about fifteen times the weight of an adult African bull elephant - an animal that consumes 300 to 600 pounds of fodder every 24 hours and spends up to eighteen hours a day foraging for food! It seems totally out of the question to imagine this “Supersaurus” feeding itself.

If Brachiosaurus was warm-blooded like an elephant, it might have been unable to eat enough to keep itself alive! But, even as a cold-blooded animal, there is doubt that this gargantuan creature could have eaten enough with its small mouth and teeth. There is just no real solution to this problem if we assume that the earth has always been the same since life evolved on its surface.

We are taught by orthodox science that the dinosaurs were failures - colossal failures. There is a litany of “couldn’ts” recited about them. They couldn’t walk on land because they were too heavy. They couldn’t eat anything but mush because their heads were too small. They couldn’t run fast because their joints were imperfect. They couldn’t be warm-blooded because their brains were too small. They couldn’t compete with smaller, warm-blooded animals.

Yet, when dinosaurs began to emerge as the dominant group, there were many other species which had equal opportunity to dominate, to win the race for king of the mountain. For five million years, the dinosaurs were on equal footing with the other inhabitants of the ecosystem. But then, the dinosaurs showed that they were the fittest and survived into absolute domination of the globe. During their rule, it is claimed that there was no non-dinosaur larger than a turkey! They don’t call it the “age of reptiles” for no reason!

The dinosaurs monopolized the planet for 130 million years. As they spread into every area of dominance, they drove out or destroyed other advanced clans which had also been evolving and adapting for tens of millions of years. During their long reign, there were other clans that could have threatened their survival, and each time the dinosaurs showed they were “firstest with the mostest” in terms of adaptive vigor.

It is posited that the class Mammalia emerged fully defined just as the dinosaurs began their expansion. But, obviously, for some reason, being a mammal wasn’t such an advantage during that time. Dinosaurs evolved quickly, changed repeatedly, and maintained their dominance until some terrible event brought their rule to an abrupt end.

Robert T. Bakker, author of The Dinosaur Heresies, writes:

The sudden extinction of dinosaurs is one of the most popularized topics in paleontology. Why, after all, did the last dynasties finally end in total extinction? In reality, however, the dinosaurs’ history contains the drama of much more than a single death. They suffered three or four major catastrophes during their long predominance, each one thinning the ranks of the entire clan. And after each such fall, they recouped their evolutionary fortunes, rising again to fill the terrestrial system with yet another wave of new species and families of species.

 

The final complete extermination did not come until sixty-five million years ago, at what geologists label the ‘Time of Great Dying,’ the greatest evolutionary disaster of all time... Our view of evolution must take into account the profoundly disorienting blows struck by the environment during these world-wide extinctions.¹²⁹

There are many theories put forth to explain these problems but, as is the usual case with Darwinian thought, they are highly unsatisfactory and leave too many questions that require fantastic cerebral gymnastics to answer.

Using Occam’s razor, might it not be more reasonable to assume that the earth was a different place at the time the dinosaurs walked? Just to speculate here, it might be that they obtained a portion of their nourishment from the act of breathing itself. Additionally, a different level of gravity would have greatly reduced the energy needs, and a more salubrious climate would have further eliminated the energy expenditure for heat regulation.

At the same time, a soupier atmosphere would have shielded the inhabitants of the earth from the harmful radiation of the sun and would have been more conducive to extensive life spans, which may have been the means by which the dinosaurs grew to such fantastic sizes.

Bakker also makes an excellent case for the warm-bloodedness of dinosaurs:

No one, either in the nineteenth century or the twentieth, has ever built a persuasive case proving that dinosaurs as a whole were more like reptilian crocodiles than warm-blooded birds. No one has done this because it can’t be done... So hundred year-old dinosaur theories live on without being questioned, and too often they are assumed to be totally correct. Even when such a theory is caught in an error, it’s likely to be excused. […]

 

Any attempt to analyze the events of the extinction of the dinosaurs runs into the fundamental difficulties that hinder the investigation of any of these mass murders of species. Most fossil bones owe their preservation to quick burial by sediment right after the death of their owner. But generally most spots in the terrestrial biosphere suffer erosion, not deposition.¹³⁰

129 Bakker, Robert T., The Dinosaur Heresies (New York: William Morrow and Company 1986).

130 Ibid.

The Mystery of Malta

I have on my desk a slim archaeological guidebook to Malta which proclaims on its first page that the first humans on the island arrived around seven thousand
years ago¹³¹ from Sicily. The last page of the book mentions, in one paragraph, the enigmatic “cart ruts” that are “too obvious in the Maltese rocky landscape to be ignored”.

Well, a brief paragraph at the end of the book is about as close to being ignored as something can get that is declared to be so obvious in the landscape of the area under discussion. The author of the little guidebook informs us he believes they were intended for the transportation of construction blocks from the quarry in ancient times. He then makes a point of saying that he does not mean “prehistoric”.

The temples of Malta are its main attraction.

Anthony Bonanno¹³², the author of the above mentioned booklet, declares in a news article¹³³ that the temples of Malta are,

“very reliably carbon-dated to the period 3,600 to 2,500 BC. In that space of time we have traced a regular evolution in style, from the small and rudimentary to the large and complex”.

131 Curiously, this is the same time that the Black Sea was filled with water from the Mediterranean by overflowing the Bosporus valley. Connection?

132 Museums Department, Department of Classics and Archaeology at the University of Malta.
133 Old Temples Society, Second issue, November 1999.

The first of these “Temples” was discovered in 1902 by a workman digging a trench for the foundations of a house. His digging activities broke through to a huge subterranean temple and cemetery, cut from solid rock. Twelve years later, a farmer kept hitting stones in his field as he ploughed, and this turned out to be a complex of temples. As time went by, more and more structures were revealed, and they have become known as the world’s most impressive prehistoric monuments.

The first thing that I notice about this is that all of these things were buried for a very long time - so long that they were completely unknown to the inhabitants of the region. But uniformitarian science tells us that the surface of the earth is constantly being subjected to the processes of erosion unless, of course, we are talking about a river delta or a landslide or something.

Apparently on Malta, things work backward.

They get covered up by some conditions unknown to uniformitarian science, and then require millennia to be uncovered again. As fascinating as they are, I don’t want to discuss the “temples”. There are numerous layers of them, and many of them are actually built on top of the thing that has my attention, the “cart ruts” which are so evident everywhere that they cannot be ignored. Yet, these “cart ruts” only receive a brief paragraph and most certainly are not being protected by the Maltese government, since they are of so little importance!

It’s difficult to find a good set of photographs of the ruts, but with persistence, a photo here and another there, enough can be assembled to make some observations.

The facts are that, for cart ruts, they follow strange rules. Very often, indeed, there are two parallel furrows; but they differ not only from rut to rut, but a single parallel expanse can vary in width and depth from one end to the other. That’s a strange cart that has an axle that expands and contracts. The ruts run through the valleys, up the hills, down the dales, and sometimes more than one set run side by side for awhile until they suddenly merge into a single set of ruts.

What is more amazing is that they often just keep going - right into the Mediterranean - or right off the edge of a cliff.

Erich von Daniken paid a visit to the island to examine them and thoughtfully took his tape measure. It seems that the distance between a parallel series of ruts can range from 65 to 123 cm. What is more amazing is that some of them are up to 70 cm deep, going around sharp curves. Anyone who has ever played with toy cars and trucks in the sandbox, or driven a sulky, has some idea of the problem here.

A wheel large enough to make a rut that deep could not possibly make such a curve. At one point near San Pawl-Tat-Targa, four pairs of ruts, with four different gauges, join up to make a single pair of ruts. Nearby, one set crosses another, each with different rut depths. Another rut that extends up to 60 cm deep is only 11 cm wide at its deepest point and 20 cm wide at its shallowest point.¹³⁴

134 Von Daniken, Signs of the Gods. pp. 82-135.

The ruts that run into the Mediterranean are most interesting. Divers have discovered that the ruts continue a long way below the sea level. What is more fascinating is that in July of 1999, amateur German archaeologist Hubert Zeitlmair discovered a megalithic temple on the sea-bed in Malta’s territorial waters about 3 kilometers off the eastern coast. The problem with this is, in order for a temple to lie on the bed of the Mediterranean, it would have to date to the last ice age. The implication is that the Maltese temples are at least six thousand years older than Bonnano and his colleagues propose.

Naturally, Bonnano was called upon to pronounce sage words regarding this discovery.

If the underwater temple does prove authentic, it would have to be a contemporary of those built on the mainland. The only possibility that springs to mind is that of a separate island, or even part of the mainland, which sank because of a fault in the rock. It is highly unlikely, but it does remain a possibility. There are after all no written records of any kind dating back to that period.¹³⁵

135 Old Temples Society, Second Issue, November 1999.

It, “sank because of a fault in the rock”. It absolutely could NOT have been covered by rising water levels!

Malta’s temples and tombs are unique in their construction: the massive piling of stone upon stone, and the deep excavations. According to the experts, they are a tremendous engineering feat, and they must have been the sole focus of the society that built them. All the people of Malta worked to build “temples” to the exclusion of all else, except for subsistence.

According to the experts, the people of Malta neither built houses of stone nor learned how to write. They evolved all of their techniques for one reason and one reason only: to build “temples” to house their cult activities. How these people created a society that was ready, willing, and able to spend all their efforts and energy to labor incessantly in the work of tunneling and building, remains a great mystery.

The distribution of the “temples”, plotted on a map, fall into clusters which command a major area of territory. The island seems to be divided into six major areas of this type. The problem arises when we consider the fact that the island, at its best, could never support more than 11,000 people divided up into these six areas, at no more than 2000 people per section.

So, how could a group of about 2000 people at most, mobilize the labor to excavate all those caverns and build all those “temples” in each of the sections, particularly when you consider the fact that the evidence shows that the area could not have supported so many people in terms of food production. That leads to the problem of where they were getting their food and how were they getting their food, if all they were doing was building “temples” and performing cult activities?

Colin Renfrew¹³⁶ has proposed the “Big Chief Theory” whereby the building of “temples” was instigated to awe the howling savages and keep them in line.

136 Read his book Before Civilization for the details. The ideas are too puerile for me to waste any time on recounting them.

Why do I keep putting the word “temples” in quotes? Well, when I looked at the photographs of these structures, the ground plans drawn to scale, and the plaster models made of them, the only thing they reminded me of was simply houses - places where people lived. After all, why would there be so many “temples”? Of course!

Because the natives devoted their energies to building temples while they, themselves, lived in grass or bearskin huts! That’s it.

Megalithic stone structures MUST be temples because what other reason could there be for such Herculean efforts to create them?

That is, of course, assuming that the ability to manage large blocks of stone were unusual when they were built. It certainly would be for us today. So we cannot imagine that the ancient peoples might have done it as easily as we nail gypsum board on cheap two-by-fours to build our houses. As noted, archaeologists explain the cart ruts by saying that they are evidence of the transporting of the blocks used to build the “temples”. But, we see from our descriptions of the cart ruts above, that the idea that these grooves in the ground are really cart ruts runs into serious problems.

Any effort to explain them in this way falls apart if an engineer instead of an archaeologist looks at them. In fact, in my humble opinion, archaeologists ought to be required to have a degree in engineering before they are allowed to say a word about anything. In the end, no one seems to have a single rational explanation for these “cart ruts”. One of the great mysteries on the planet, and nobody seems to care.

What a waste.

Do I have an idea to propose? I would like to suggest that these “ruts” look an awful lot like places where lightning has struck, and the electricity has blasted away the dirt and rock as it shoots along some sort of natural earth power grid conductor.

The only difference is that the cart ruts are not random.

• Were the cart ruts some sort of networked energy conduction system?

• Could some sort of element have been placed in the ground by an ancient civilization; something that conducted power to their homes the way our vulgar power poles and lines crisscross the landscape?

• And then, at some point in time, was the earth hit by such a surge of energy from some unknown source that these power “lines” melted the rock in which they were “strung”?

• Perhaps a surge of some kind of cosmic energy source?

• Maybe even the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear explosion?

• Maybe it was neither of these, but merely a massive overheating of the surface of the earth so that the conduction element and its insulating covering melted and was swept away?

Among the artifacts discovered at Malta are a number of truly extraordinary “Goddess” images. They are, without exception, extremely corpulent by today’s standards. There are many representations of spirals and other “Goddess” motifs, including waves of water. According to the experts, the very oldest form of religion that can be archaeologically identified anywhere was the worship of the Mother Goddess by wandering “hunter gatherers”.

It was thought, for a very long time, that such cultures were very primitive and narrow, but it has now been discovered that this is not the case. New archaeological sites are being excavated at the present time that show very advanced levels of art and culture among these “husbandmen” of the Earth.

An example is the Japanese Jomon culture.

The Jomon Puzzle

The incipient Jomon culture is said to date between 11,000 and 7,500 BC. It is described as “one of the most affluent forager cultures to ever exist”. Although the Japanese did not settle Japan until the third century BC, it seems that human beings have occupied the area from about 30,000 BC. During the Ice Ages, Japan was connected to the Korean peninsula by means of a land bridge. Additionally, all four main Japanese islands were connected, and the southern island of Kyushu was connected to the Korean peninsula while the northern island of Hokkaido was connected to Siberia.

As with all preliterate people, the only things we know about the Jomon is based on fragments of artifacts and the imaginative guessing of anthropologists and archaeologists. “Jomon” means “cord pattern”, for these people put cord patterns on their pottery.

Pottery is a characteristic of Neolithic peoples; the Jomon, however, were Mesolithic peoples (Middle Stone Age).

The standard anthropological line on the development of human arts asserts that pottery-making developed after agriculture and is characteristic of a more sedentary culture. The Incipient Jomon, however, were hunter-gatherers who made pottery long before agriculture was introduced into Japan. In fact, the Incipient Jomon pottery-making dated to long before any human was introduced to agriculture. So, who were they? As in Malta, we have to go underwater again to find out.

In 1987, Kihachiro Arataka, a scuba instructor and diving guide, was exploring the southeast coast of Yonaguni Island, the last island of the Ryukyu chain. This string of islands in the East China Sea curves from Japan south and west toward China.

Aratake was looking for interesting dive sites for tourist expeditions when he came across a submarine cliff that appeared to be cut in a series of immense geometric terraces.

Masaaki Kimura, a marine seismologist at the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa, heard about the ruins in 1990 and went to check it out. For the next seven years, Kimura dived on the site repeatedly, taking his students with him on many occasions, and assembling a portfolio of drawings, maps and models. He became convinced that the Yonaguni formation was fashioned by human hands. Based on well-established studies of rises in the East China Sea during and after the last ice age, the Yonaguni Monument was last above sea level at around 6,000 to 8,000 BC. This means that it could represent an early, unknown civilization.

 

Geologist Dr. Robert Schoch went to investigate, made six dives, and noted several interesting things about the site. Superficially the monument has the appearance of a platform or part of a step pyramid, something like the ancient Temple of the Sun near Trujillo in northern Peru. The top of the monument lies sixteen feet under the surface, the bottom at an approximate depth of eighty feet. Extending over 160 feet north to south, the asymmetrical monument has uneven stone steps ranging in height from a foot and a half to several feet, on its southern face. It looks like a great staircase up which only a giant could stride. The surfaces have a regular smooth surface, like dressed stone.[…]

Much of the regularity of the surface was due not to a tooled smoothness of the rock but to a thick even coating of algae, corals, sponges, and similar organisms. […] In a number of spots I scraped the coating away, both to determine what kind of stone lay beneath and to look for tool scars or quarry marks. I found none. Even more telling, I couldn’t find any evidence that Yonaguni consisted of separate pieces of stone. Stone blocks carved, set in place, and arranged in an order would clearly indicate a human-made structure. Rather, the monument is essentially a single piece of solid, “living” bedrock that is less precise than it appears at first. […]

 

Still, Yonaguni posed a problem. If the monument was the result of a natural process, this natural process was unlike any I had seen before. What could it be?¹³⁷

137 Schoch, Robert, Ph.D., The Voices of the Rocks, (New York: Harmony Books 1999).

Dr. Schoch was faced with an interesting problem in his examination of the Japanese underwater “city”. Since the sea level sequences were so well established, to state unequivocally that the structure was man-made would have been a terrible blow to the currently accepted chronology of human history. It would have been far worse than his claims that the Sphinx is older than Egyptologist claim because that issue can be debated from now until the cows come home with no absolute resolution. Here, a declaration of human origin for these structures would be undeniable proof of an ancient civilization which built the monuments before the sea level rose.

I have a great deal of sympathy for Dr. Schoch’s position. What did Dr. Schoch determine about the Underwater city?

Well, after having noted that he had never before, as a trained geologist, seen anything like this in “natural structures”, he went looking and found a “tentative answer”.

He noted that:

The monument is composed predominantly of very fine sandstones and mudstones of the type we geologists call the Lower Miocene Yaeyama Group. Rocks of this type contain numerous, well-defined, parallel bedding planes that allow easy separation of the layers, and they are crisscrossed by many joints and fractures running parallel to one another and vertical to the bedding planes. Yaeyama Group sandstones lie exposed along the southeast and northeast coasts of Yonaguni Island, and I went there to see how the weather under current conditions above water. […] I became convinced that the steplike and terrace like features of the underwater monument resulted from natural processes working on the stone, not from the activity of humans long ago.

 

Possibly the choice between natural and human-made isn’t simply either/or. Yonaguni Island contains a number of old tombs whose exact age is uncertain, but that are clearly very old. Curiously, the architecture of the tombs is much like that of the monument. It is possible that humans were imitating the monument in designing the tombs, and it is equally possible that the monument was itself somehow modified by human hands. […] It is also possible that the monument served as a quarry from which blocks were cut, following the natural bedding, joint, and fracture planes of the rock, then removed to construct buildings that are now long gone. […]¹³⁸

138 Ibid.

Thus Dr. Schoch determined that, even if the underwater structure can be explained by natural forces, he leaves the door open to an ancient civilization that existed on Yonaguni Island 12,000 years ago.

Coming at the problem from another direction, we discover that about ten thousand years ago, a group of people lived in the northern part of Japan who were ethnically distinct from the rest of the Japanese population. They were named “Ainu”, meaning human being or male in their own language. This word is remarkably similar to the words “Manu” and “Anu”, which we will encounter more than once.

The Ainu were generally assumed to be descendants of an ancient people referred to as Emishi in the famous Japanese chronicles called “Kojiki” and “Nihon-syoki”. Today, the term Ainu is used to denote the indigenous people of Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, as a single, integrated population who are the descendants of the Ainu of ten thousand years ago.

The traditional Ainu lifestyle was hunting, fishing and gathering. Ainu religious beliefs center around the existence of another world of spirit essences subject to the same forces that control the visible world. The people worship animal Gods, especially the bear, with ritual, song and dance. Even the Ainu language is unusual in its Asian environment. Although they possessed no system of writing, they created a rich oral tradition of stories and poems expressed in formal prose and verse. We, of course, immediately think of the Bear cults of Europe, and the bear skulls found in the caves of France dating back in the tens of thousands of years.

The Ainu are a morphological problem.

The characteristics that differentiate them from Asians are their hairiness and their hair “form”. The explanation is that there is a strong admixture of Caucasoid genetics in the Ainu. Some experts consider them to be related to the Australian aborigines, and others think that they represent an independent grouping altogether. More recent studies have connected them genetically to Turkic populations of Central Asia, a combination of caucasoid and mongoloid genes.

So how are we to relate this “archaeology” of a “preliterate” culture to the fact that there is evidence of nearby remains of a former civilization far more advanced than the Jomon? I think that noting the dates might be important.

It is as though the Jomon were survivors of a cataclysm.

The infrastructure of their society may have been destroyed, along with many of the artifacts that might have been discovered by archaeologists of our day, and they began anew on a planet that had been swept clean - except for stone structures that survived the maelstrom.

Global Evidence of Ancient, Pre-Historic High Civilizations

Over and over again we find these odd clues that point to an ancient civilization that existed something over 12,000 years ago. There has been a raging controversy for generations between pro-Atlanteans and anti-Atlanteans about this. There seem to be sufficient archaeological remains to justify a serious scientific study based on such a hypothesis but so far, there are no “takers” in the mainstream scientific community.

Archaeology and ethnology, being observational sciences, and not experimental sciences, have built their entire framework upon the study of those remains. And when we look closely at the array of discoveries in those fields, we note bits and pieces of cultures of almost unspeakable age. The fact that uniformitarian science barely allows the idea of cataclysmic destruction to be part of the hypothesis cripples archaeologists and, in the end, may make fools of them all.

Without the algorithm of cyclic cataclysm, archaeologists cannot fully understand what they observe, nor can they explain the anomalies here and there, and the lack of other evidence that ought to be here and there (if one assumes great antiquity of civilization with no cataclysms). The fact seems to be that, what does continue to exist in terms of archaeological remains from times before 7,000 or more years ago, have been subjected to geological and cosmic cataclysms of almost incomprehensible violence and few major relics remain for perusal. Those few, however, are cast aside as the anomalies of archaeology and ethnology, and their very existence is buried or denied in efforts to avoid toppling the house of cards so laboriously established by those sciences.

Nevertheless, we find that all over the globe, with few exceptions, these studies break down almost completely right around 7,000 to 10,000 BC, at which point they meet with what mathematicians call a “discontinuity”.

Immediately after this discontinuity, all of the hot-spots of ancient civilization that archaeologists accept as valid suddenly appear with no indication of gradual, uniformitarian development. What is more, there seems to be considerable indication that these developments were degenerate remnants of something already lost in the mists of antiquity.

Entire libraries of books have been written demonstrating this antiquity of man and his civilizations, but it has not yet been accepted, even in principle, by any branch of modern science. The scientific thought police oppose any type of cataclysmic change in the structure of the earth and will go to any extremes to avoid coming to grips with its evidence.

And yet, as we will see, science breaks down again when it is forced to contemplate the origin of man’s intellectual development.

Ancient Flight?

Is there any “hard” evidence for this ancient, worldwide, high civilization?

I don’t want to spend too much time going over all of it and attempting to reproduce the fine efforts of other writers. But, just to cover the subject briefly, one of the most telling pieces of hard evidence is included in Charles Hapgood’s book, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings.

Hapgood, a Professor of Anthropology, included in his book a most interesting letter from a group of cartographers in the United States Air Force. The statements in this letter, to my knowledge, have never been challenged. In fact, the letter itself doesn’t receive much attention, though Hapgood is certainly referred to as a crank often enough. The letter refers to a series of highly technical analyses of several maps that Dr. Hapgood presented to the cartographers.

After their study, they wrote:

It is not very often that we have the opportunity to evaluate maps of ancient origin. The Piri Reis (AD 1513) and the Oronteus Fineaus [sic] (AD 1531) maps sent to us by you, presented a delightful challenge for it was not readily conceivable that they could be so accurate without being forged. With added enthusiasm we accepted this challenge and have expended many off duty hours evaluating your manuscript and the above maps. I am sure you will be pleased to know that we have concluded that both of these maps were compiled from accurate original source maps, irrespective of dates.

 

The following is a brief summary of our findings:

The solution of the portolano projection used by Admiral Piri Reis, developed by your class in Anthropology must be very nearly correct; for when known geographical locations are checked in relationship to the grid computed by Mr. Richard W. Strachan (MIT), there, is remarkably close agreement. Piri Reis’ use of the Portolano projection (centered on Syene, Egypt) is an excellent choice, for it is a developable surface that would permit the relative size and shape of the earth at that (latitude) to be retained. It is our opinion that those who compiled the original map had an excellent knowledge of the continents covered by this map.

As stated by Colonel Harold Z. Ohlmeyer in his letter (July 6, 1960) to you, the Princess Martha Coast of Queen Maud Land, Antarctica, appears to be truly represented on the southern sector of the Piri Reis Map. The agreement of the Piri Reis map with the seismic profile of this area made by the Norwegian-British - Swedish Expedition of 1949, supported by your solution of the grid, places beyond a reasonable doubt the conclusion that the original source maps must have been made before the present Antarctic ice cap covered Queen Maud Land coasts. It is our opinion that the accuracy of the cartographic features shown in the Oronteus Fineaus [sic] Map (AD 1530) suggests, beyond a doubt, that it also was compiled from accurate source maps of Antarctica, but in this case of the entire continent.

 

Close examination has proved the original source maps must have been compiled at a time when the land mass and inland waterways of the continent were relatively free of ice. This conclusion is further supported by a comparison of the Oronteus Finneaus [sic] Map with the results obtained by International Geophysical Year teams in their measurements of the subglacial topography. The comparison also suggests that the original source maps (compiled in remote antiquity) were prepared when Antarctica was presumably free of ice. The Cordiform projection used by Oronteus Fineaus [sic] suggests the use of advanced mathematics.

 

Further, the shape given to the Antarctic continent suggests the possibility, if not the probability, that the original source maps were compiled on a stereographic or gnomonic type of projection (involving the use of spherical trigonometry). We are convinced that the findings made by you and your associates are valid, and that they raise extremely important questions affecting geology and ancient history, questions which certainly require further investigation.

We thank you for extending us the opportunity to have participated in the study of these maps. The following officers and airmen volunteered their time to assist Captain Lorenzo W. Burroughs in this evaluation:

 

Captain Richard E. Covault,

CWO Howard D. Minor,

MSgt Clifton M. Dover,

MSgt David C. Carter,

TSgt James H. Hood,

SSgt James L. Carroll,

AIC Don R. Vance.

Lorenzo W. Burroughs, Captain,
USAF Chief, Cartographic Section
8th Reconnaissance Technical Sqdn
(SAC) Westover, Mass.¹³⁹

139 Hapgood, Charles, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (London: Turnstone Press 1979).

The Antarctic ice cover is supposed to be millions of years old. Who could have made a map of Antarctica when it was not covered by ice, and when? Why is it that we believe this ice cover to be so old? And if it is not, how old is it really and why does it present the appearance of being millions of years old, assuming it does so to the trained scientist?

Charles Hapgood heard about these maps at a particular point in his life when he was studying the ice ages. A copy of an ancient map had been found in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul in 1929, and a Turkish naval officer had presented a copy of it to the US Navy Hydrographic Office. It was examined by scholars who noted that the map represented Antarctica before it was covered with ice. Yet, the map was painted on parchment and was dated to 1513, over 300 years before Antarctica was officially “discovered”.

Core samples taken by the Byrd Antarctic Expedition showed that the last warm period in the Antarctic ended around 4,000 BC. It began about 9,000 years before that. The only conclusion that could be drawn was that someone had mapped Antarctica at least 6,000 years ago. Hapgood discovered that there were more of these ancient maps - portolans, as they are called - and that some of them strongly indicate that the mapmaker had an aerial view of what he was mapping!

Hapgood himself writes:

The evidence presented by the ancient maps appears to suggest the existence in remote times, before the rise of any known cultures, of a true civilization, of an advanced kind, which either was localized in one area but had worldwide commerce, or was, in a real sense, a worldwide culture. This culture, at least in some respects, was more advanced than the civilizations of Greece and Rome. In geodesy, nautical science, and mapmaking it was more advanced than any known culture before the 18th century of the Christian Era.

 

It was only in the 18th century that we developed a practical means of finding longitude. It was in the 18th century that we first accurately measured the circumference of the earth. Not until the 19th century did we begin to send out ships for exploration into the Arctic or Antarctic Seas and only then did we begin the exploration of the bottom of the Atlantic. The maps indicate that some ancient people did all these things.[…]

When I was a youth I had a plain simple faith in progress. It seemed to me impossible that once man had passed a milestone of progress in one way that he could ever pass the same milestone again the other way. Once the telephone was invented, it would stay invented. If past civilizations had faded away it was just because they had not learned the secret of progress.

 

But Science meant permanent progress, with no going back.[…]

S.R.K. Glanville writes in The Legacy of Egypt:

“It may be, as some indeed suspect, that the science we see as the dawn of recorded history was not science at its dawn, but represents the remnants of the science of some great and as yet untraced civilization.”¹⁴⁰

By a series of analyses, Hapgood and others came to the conclusion that there was an ancient civilization whose center or “home base” was Antarctica itself.¹⁴¹ The fact that it was a global society, just as our own is, was also evident to these researchers from other clues. This was, to put it mildly, not an acceptable idea to the uniformitarian view of evolution.

140 Ibid.
141 Flem-Ath, Rand and Rose, When the Sky Fell (Canada: St. Martins 1995).

Dr. Hapgood never used the word “Atlantis” in his book. He knew the value of his academic reputation and that he just couldn’t go there. But that was not a problem for Erich von Daniken.

Von Daniken’s book Chariots of the Gods? came out in 1967 and proposed that the ancient portolans, side by side with other anomalies, suggested the presence and influence of extraterrestrial “Gods” in ancient times. I find this to be a curious sort of “damage control” that attempts - in a left handed way - to support the uniformitarian hypothesis since it suggests strongly that mankind himself was incapable of creating an advanced civilization on his own.
 

The portolans studied by Charles Hapgood demonstrate that there have been very ancient cultures, or civilizations, which may have and could have developed methods of flight. The existence of the great megalithic structures further suggest that the energy sources of that time may have been much simpler and more effective than ours, and more directly associated with forces which we do not yet comprehend.

Yes, we are dealing with indirect evidence, not always of the greatest clarity.

Yet in support of such antiquity, we note that there is stonework carved out of the solid mountain of rock in South America, which certainly antedate the Andean glaciers, and almost as certainly predate the formation of the mountains themselves. This work is superior in technique to anything that can currently be produced by our mechanized civilization. It seems almost patently evident that the construction, sculpting and tunneling of our ancestors could only have been accomplished by forces different from those in use by us today. The problem can be solved by admitting to a levitating force developed and used by the same common denominator - space flight - which simplifies so many other puzzles for us.

And it seems that these very things are what the myths of antiquity, including that most captivating story of all, the legend of the Holy Grail, are telling us. On the basis of the evidence of an antiquity, we postulate the ancient development of some kind of science. In either case, it is of great importance to consider these matters in terms of the how’s and why’s and who’s. Most books on these subjects approach the matter from one of these assumptions or the other, with little regard to what might be behind it all when considered in light of present day observations.

For us, the most telling thing about this is that either angle is abhorrent to science and to most religions.

In the end, nothing but the existence of an extremely ancient high civilization answers all of the problems presented by observed and recorded facts. And that is what led us to ask the questions about what is the wellspring of our beliefs, what is the source of our denial and rejection of what is observable in favor of an imposed belief system?

We will come to that issue soon enough.

The Neanderthal Enigma

Let’s come back now to the idea that the earth may have been an entirely different place in terms of cosmic environment, thus enabling the dinosaurs to live and thrive, we can ask if other “different” environments might have existed at other times, specifically in relation to man himself? One example that might relate to such an idea is the extraordinarily strange disappearance of Neanderthal man.

Actually, the disappearance of a whole, distinct group of human type beings at such a relatively recent point in history, is scary as all get-out. Just think about it:
Neanderthals were everywhere in the icy lands of Europe and Western Asia for over 150,000 years. They were enormously strong and manifestly intelligent. What went wrong?

It is also proposed that, at the same moment in time that Neanderthal man just went “poof!” homo sapiens sapiens (that’s us), just dropped in for dinner, so to speak. Is there a connection between what went wrong for Neanderthal and what was “right” for modern man? That question is driving a lot of paleontologists batty.

Allan Wilson and Vincent Sarich of Berkeley undertook to determine the date of human origins via DNA analysis. They were looking at proteins because they knew that proteins evolve by accumulating mutations. They also knew that the proteins in related species are slightly different from one another because of the mutations that occur after a species splits off from the “common ancestor”. Differences in proteins can be quantified.

Well, this wasn’t so controversial a thing to be doing until Wilson and Sarich suggested that mutations occur across the millennia at a steady rate, like the ticks of a molecular clock. If this was true, it meant that the difference in a given protein in any two species would indicate not only how related they were, but also how much time had elapsed since they shared a common ancestor. In other words, Wilson and Sarich were going to analyze some proteins and tell us when we last were apes. Everyone was holding their breath for the answer to this one. Wilson and Sarich’s protein analysis suggested that the common ancestor of apes and humans had lived only five million years ago.

Stretching it to accommodate errors, they could only give it eight million years.

“To put it as bluntly as possible,” Sarich wrote, “one no longer has the option of considering a fossil specimen older than about eight million years as a hominid no matter what it looks like”.

The idea that there was or was not any genetic connection between Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal led to many hot debates. A team of U.S. and German researchers extracted mitochondrial DNA from Neanderthal bone showing that the Neanderthal DNA sequence falls outside the normal variation of modern humans. The researchers compared the Neanderthal sequence with 2,051 human sequences and 59 common chimpanzee sequences. They found that the differences in Neanderthal DNA occurred at sites where differences usually occur in both humans and chimps.

In other words, Neanderthal was simply a different species.

When the researchers looked at the Neanderthal sequence with respect to 994 human mitochondrial DNA lineages including Africans, Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, Australians and Pacific Islanders, they found the number of base pair differences between the Neanderthal sequence and these groups was 27 or 28 for all groups.

There is a long and interesting case of some Neanderthal remains in a cave in Israel that some scientists were attempting to utilize as evidence that this was the region in which Neanderthal morphed into anatomically modern man. The interested reader may want to have a look at The Neanderthal Enigma by James Shreeve for a blow-by-blow account of this idea and how it was shot down.

The end result is, just to save some time, the conclusion that it was another example of Darwinist wishful thinking.¹⁴²

142 New data may change this. If it can be shown that Neanderthal did evolve into modern man, or was at least one of the sources for modern man, this opens intriguing possibilities for their relationship to what we have named the organic portal.

Naturally, since the idea that Neanderthal was not the precursor to modern man was now pretty well squashed, that meant that modern man evolved along another line. This opened the door to the acknowledgement of certain facts that had been rejected in earlier debates, while the Neanderthal hypothesis was still viable, but now looked like a reasonable way out of the dilemma. Suddenly, fossils of very old, modern humans, were acceptable, even if they existed long before the disappearance of Neanderthal.

The problem is, this little clue that a controversy exists is merely the end of a thread hanging out there in public view. When you take hold of this one, oh my! It does get deep and you do need hip-waders!

An interesting book was published a few years back entitled Forbidden Archeology. The authors, Michael Cremo and Richard L. Thompson, were savaged by the mainstream science critics for their “absurd ideas and ridiculous assertions”. Most of all, it was suggested that, since they were not “experts”, they simply could not understand the material they were assembling and, therefore, it had no validity.

Sad to say, I delayed reading this book for a rather long time because of the negative reviews. However, as I pulled on this particular thread, one disturbing element leading to another, I finally gave in and ordered the volume and sat down to read it in a skeptical frame of mind. Just because it was well written did not resolve my skepticism. Just because there were hundreds of references to scientific papers did not persuade me that the authors had actually come to the correct conclusions about those papers.

So, I undertook to go to the papers they cited myself.

As it turned out, I ended up reversing my opinion of Cremo and Thompson. A great many of these scientific papers that they have cited were written in rather plain terms that anyone could understand - even another non-expert like myself. What is more, the fact that they have been “buried”, or marginalized, ignored, flamed and forgotten, suggests more about the experts who have done this, and who then adopt the jargon they use as a means of concealing that they really don’t understand what they are doing, than it says about the authors who can clearly see that we have serious problems reconciling the observable and empirical facts with the “accepted theories”.

By the time the reader is finished with this book, they will be completely disgusted with the utter and absolute lies and fabrications of some of the most influential members of the mainstream scientific community, what I have come to call the Scientific Thought Police. When the masses of people come to the realization that the power structure of any given period creates the educational institutions that promulgate the lies and distortions that support the political structure, and that the majority of the scientific community only “follow the money” of the military-industrial complex, I tremble for those who have chosen the cozy lies over the truth.

Again, that raises the question as to who or what ideology “controls” our world in such a way that science can - and is - manipulated to support a political agenda? What is that agenda?

We will come to that.

Evidence of the Ica Stones

Recently, some objects called the Ica Stones have become a subject of much discussion. These stones were brought to the attention of the scientific community in 1966 when a Dr. Javier Cabrera, a Peruvian physician, received a small, carved rock for his birthday from a poor native. The carving on the rock looked ancient to Dr. Cabrera, but intrigued him because it seemed to depict a primitive fish.

It wasn’t long before the locals were bringing the doctor scads more of these rocks gathered from a riverbank. He soon had a collection of more than 15,000 stones, many etched with impossible scenes that clearly depict such dinosaurs as triceratops, stegosaurus, apatosaurus, and human figures riding on the backs of flying pterodactyls! What’s more, some of the scenes are of men hunting and killing dinosaurs!

Others show men watching the heavens through what look like telescopes, performing open-heart surgery, and cesarean section births, and even some serious pornography.

Oh dear! How can this be? We have already been told that modern man is only about 2 million years old and dinosaurs are thought to have become extinct 65 million years ago.

Sophia Melewska, a geomorphologist, was commissioned to investigate the rocks, summarize their content, and comment on their authenticity. After studying the collection of Ica stones, Melewska said that she was in a state of “intellectual shock”. Melewska is one of the scientists now trying to direct the attention of professional research toward this mystery with little success.

Part of the problem for mainstream science is the nature of artifacts themselves. Unlike clay figurines that have organic material (i.e., straw) in their composition, there are no organic materials that can be dated in plain old rock. The surface of these rocks has a varnish that is produced by bacteria and minute organisms over millennia. Such a varnish or patina will take thousands of years to discolor and coat each stone. The etching of the stones removed the existing varnish, revealing the lighter rock underneath. Since these rocks have developed additional varnish in the etched grooves, the evidence is that they were carved a very, very long time ago.

The BBC sent a team to investigate these stones, sending Neil Steede to examine them. Steede examined the varnish on the stones but was not able to guess at the date. Without recourse to radiometric dating, the strata in which an object is found can often give a clue to their age. However, these stones were revealed by accidental erosion, and their original resting place is not known.

Acting on a rumor, Steede traveled to a nearby village where he met a local farmer who, reportedly, was in the process of carving similar stones for tourists. The rumors of Dr. Cabrera’s collection had brought tourists to the area, seeking what they are assured are the “real stones”. Steede discovered that the artist was imitating the style on the Ica stones, but his technique was not as good. What was more telling, the varnish was absent from his grooves.

It is at this point that the Scientific Thought Police went into action, or so it seems. They pointed to these reproductions as proof of a hoax, and dismiss any serious study of the original collection which is still maintained by Dr. Cabrera. Just to drive home the point and put an end to the controversy, after the broadcast of the BBC TV documentary, the farmer who had sold many of the stones to Dr. Cabrera, and who had been caught carving others, was arrested and interrogated.

He was forced to admit that he had carved ALL of the stones himself to sell to tourists! So, the “hoax” was over.

However, we soon discover that under Peruvian law, if the stones were genuine, they belonged to the government, and if the farmer had been selling government property to anyone, he would have gone to prison. By claiming that he had created a hoax, the farmer was let off the hook and stayed out of jail. And rather than determine scientifically if the stones were authentic, the authorities were satisfied that they had dealt effectively with this troubling matter, and the farmer was released. German journalist Andreas Fischer visited the farmer later, at which time the poor traumatized guy revealed that he had admitted to perpetrating a hoax only to avoid going to prison.

Regarding the Ica stones, we have three possibilities:

• a human civilization existed during the age of the dinosaurs

• dinosaurs survived to coexist with man

• the stones are an elaborate hoax

Considering all the other evidence of the Scientific Thought Police on the prowl, I vote against number three, but I can’t claim any certainty about either of the other two solutions.

I rather think that Time Loops could be added to the list.

Other Artifacts

Now and again an anomalous artifact “pops up”. One particular little item always fascinated me. It seems that, during mining operations in 1851, at Dorchester, Massachusetts, blasting threw out a bell shaped vessel from its bed in formerly solid rock. It was made of an unknown metal and was decorated with floral inlays of silver.¹⁴³

143 Scientific American, 7:298, June 5, 1852.

When we consider ancient archaeological evidence, most of which consists of fragmentary bits and pieces of skeletons or stone tools, we do not get the idea of

an ancient worldwide, advanced civilization. However, there is something about this that we need to consider before we discard such an idea.

The first thing to think about is the fact that our own “history” is a mere 5 thousand years old. When we talk about the possible existence of man on the earth for literally millions of years, many, many civilizations could have come and gone, leaving little more than fragmentary remains. If the reader will have a look at some books that show pictures of the ancient structures whose history we know, and think, for a moment, about what might remain of our own civilization after a period of ten thousand years, it becomes evident that even under the best of conditions, little would remain that would be recognizable as the works of man.

I have tried to imagine what the structures of our civilization would look like after thousands of years of abandonment. I had to admit that we have not created a very substantial environment. The prospects of providing future archaeologists with such elegant ruins are indeed remote! And, to assume that societies which did leave sophisticated metropolitan centers were primitive in their technologies, and backward, compared to our own, seems to be the ultimate in absurd conceit. In fact, in these terms, metal is the least substantial element of all.

Many gravesites have been dug up after only a few hundred years, and metal objects, aside from precious metals, have tended to simply disintegrate into powder. So, as a matter of fact, the things that would be preserved the longest are objects of stone. So, just because the only remains we find are stone does not prove that technology of metals was not known. In fact, there is considerable evidence of metals mining all over the earth far into dim antiquity. Further, during those inter-civilizational periods when we might conjecture that man was forced to use whatever implements he could to survive, stone is always there, always handy, and always works.

Thus it is that repeated periods wherein primitive stone tools are evidence, in no way contradicts the idea of other periods of high civilization. There is another thing we need to consider about the possible survival of artifacts: cataclysm. The evidence that repeated worldwide cataclysms have occurred tells us that it is very likely that, during such events, the forces of the earth itself would grind up, pulverize, and bury the works of man so completely that the fact that we find any traces at all is practically a miracle. You could say that such artifacts have a very short “shelf life”!

It is generally agreed that agriculture first developed in the “Fertile Crescent” of the Middle East. In fact, the archaeological record supports this idea. It is also generally agreed that Pastoral Nomadism developed in the Central Asian Steppes. Archaeology also supports this idea. However, the archaeology of these two developments only go back to a certain relatively recent date which poses a problem when one considers the Nostratic language hypothesis. In other words, if an advanced civilization existed in the distant past, it was from the survivors of this civilization that the Shepherds and agriculturalists of our present world paradigm evolved.

About 35,000 years ago, at the same time that homo sapiens sapiens (Cro-Magnon) was supposed to have appeared on the stage of history, simultaneously with the mysterious disappearance of Neanderthal man, there also appeared an explosion of representational art. It is as if the birth of culture occurred from the primal continuum of the Paleolithic mind. Prominent among these first and most artistic creations are diverse representations of the creatrix Goddess of fertility, complemented by sculptures and wall paintings of animals and the hunt of a more shamanic content. The consistency and the careful beauty of these figurines is consistent with the worship of the female as generator of the continued line of living existence.

The mainstream explanation for this event is that while primitive men were wandering hunters who had to remain silent in the shamanic meditation of the hunt, the women were collecting and recognizing a wide variety of plants, talking more and socializing and forming the foundation skills that underpinned the birth of civilization. The myths of diverse tribal cultures hint at a previous era when women were the founding influence in this way.

The “Venuses” of Dolni Vestonice, Willendorff, Lespugue, and Laussel date from inter-Gravitean Solutrean 20,000-18,000 BC.

The Sudden Appearance of Cro-Magnon

As we have noted, it was formerly thought by paleontologists that Neanderthal morphed into Cro-Magnon, and that Cro-Magnon was the progenitor of human beings as we know them today. However, aside from the problems of the Eve Hypothesis, there are serious problems with the assumptions about when modern human types actually appeared on Earth.

Even if we take the evolving scientific view of the present day, we find that Cro-Magnon man was something altogether different from other anatomically modern humans.

Over and over again we read in scientific studies that Cro-Magnon man was just an “anatomically modern human”.

The experts will say:

“The Cro-Magnons lived in Europe between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago. They are virtually identical to modern man, being tall and muscular and slightly more robust than most modern humans.”

Notice how they slip in that “slightly more robust” bit.

The fact is, the Cro-Magnon man was, compared to the other “anatomically modern humans” around him, practically a superman. They were skilled hunters, toolmakers and artists famous for the cave art at places such as Lascaux, Chauvet, and Altamira. They had a high cranium, a broad and upright face, and cranial capacity “about the same as modern humans” (can we say larger?), but less than that of Neanderthals. The males were as tall as 6 feet.

They appeared in Europe in the upper Pleistocene, about 40,000 years ago and “their geographic origin is still unknown”. Their skeletal remains show a “few small differences from modern humans”. Of course, the “out of Africa” theory advocates suggest that Cro-Magnon came from Sub Saharan Africa and a temperate climate and that, “they would eventually adapt to all extremes of heat and cold”. In this way, the “slight differences” between Cro-Magnon and other forms of anatomically modern humans can be explained away as an adaptation to cold.

But, as we will see, this idea doesn’t hold water.

Cro-Magnon’s tools are described as the Aurignacian technology, characterized by bone and antler tools, such as spear tips (the first) and harpoons. They also used animal traps, and bow and arrow. They invented shafts and handles for their knives, securing their blades with bitumen, a kind of tar, as long as 40 thousand years ago. Other improvements included the invention of the atlatl, a large bone or piece of wood with a hooked groove used for adding distance and speed to spears.

They also invented more sophisticated spear points, such as those that detach after striking and cause greater damage to prey.¹⁴⁴ The Cro-Magnon type man was also the “originator” of such abstract concepts as “time”. They marked time by lunar phases, recording them with marks on a piece of bone, antler or stone. Some of these “calendars” contained a record of as many as 24 lunations.¹⁴⁵

In the relatively recent past, tool industries diversified. The Gravettian industry (25 to 15 thousand years ago), characterized by ivory tools such as backed blades, is associated with mammoth hunters. One type of brief industry was Solutrean, occurring from 18 to 15 thousand years ago and limited to Southwest France and Spain. It is characterized by unique and finely crafted “laurel leaf” blades, made with a pressure technique requiring a great skill. The industry is associated with horse hunters. The tool industry of the Clovis Culture in North America (11 to 8 thousand years ago) is notable for its remarkable similarity to Solutrean. Some suggest that the Solutrean culture migrated to North America around 12,000 thousand years ago.¹⁴⁶

Cro-Magnon people lived in tents and other man-made shelters in groups of several families. They were nomadic hunter-gatherers and had elaborate rituals for hunting, birth and death. Multiple burials are common in the areas where they were found. What is most interesting is that from 35 to 10 thousand years ago, there was no differentiation by sex or age in burials. They included special grave goods, as opposed to everyday, utilitarian objects, suggesting a very increased ritualization of death and burial..¹⁴⁷

144 Eric Whitaker, Steve Stewart; Article Reviews; Late Ice Age Hunting Technology (Heidi Knecht) Scientific American, July 1994.
145 Marshack, Alexander, The Roots Of Civilization - Moyer (Mt. Kisco, New York: Bell Limited 1991).
146 Preston, Douglas, “The Lost Man”, New Yorker Magazine, June 16, 1997.

147 Schirtzinger, Erin, The Evidence for Pleistocene Burials, Neanderthals versus Modern Humans, December 6, 1994.

They were the first confirmed to have domesticated animals, starting by about 15 thousand years ago (though ancient sapiens may have domesticated the dog as much as 200 thousand years ago).

They were the first to leave extensive works of art, such as cave paintings and carved figures of animals and pregnant women. Huge caves lavishly decorated with murals depicting animals of the time were at first rejected as fake for being too sophisticated. Then they were dismissed as being primitive, categorized as hunting, fertility or other types of sympathetic magic.

Re-evaluations have put these great works of art in a more prominent place in art history.

They show evidence of motifs, of following their own stylistic tradition, of “impressionist” like style, perspective, and innovative use of the natural relief in the caves. Also possible, considering the new concepts of time reckoning practiced by Cro-Magnon, are abstract representations of the passage of time, such as spring plants in bloom, or pregnant bison that might represent summer.¹⁴⁸

Aside from pregnant women and other Goddess worship iconography,¹⁴⁹ representations of people, “anthropomorphs,” are very few, and never show the accuracy or detail of the other animals. Humans are represented in simple outlines without features, sometimes with “masks”, often without regard to proportion, being distorted and isolated. At the Grottes des Enfants in France are found four burials with red ocher, and associated with Aurignacian tools. At Lascaux, France, are the famous caves of upper Paleolithic cave art, dated to 17 thousand years ago, and even older, in some cases, by many thousands of years!

148 Reeser, Ken, “Earliest Art: Representative Art In The Upper Paleolithic Era”, 1994 (after: Marshack, 1991; Grand, 1967; Ucko, Peter J., and Rosenfeld, Andre, 1967; Brown, G. Baldwin, 1932; Breuil, Abbe H., date unknown) (unpublished).
149 Stone, Merlin, When God Was A Woman (San Diego, New York, London: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1976).

The modern human types that appeared in the Levant were, however, somewhat different from Cro-Magnon. They were the sub-Saharan type, less “robust” individuals than the Cro-Magnon “superman” of Europe.

What seems to be the truth of the matter is simply that the modern humans of the Levant were “different” from the Cro-Magnon types that “appeared” in Europe. Try as they would, there is simply was no way to prove that Cro-Magnon evolved in Africa or the Levant and then moved to Europe.

But then, how to explain what happened in any reasonable terms?

What the archaeological record seems to show is that in Europe, after millennia of almost no progress at all, even in the few areas where modern man has been found, suddenly human culture seems to take off like an explosion with the appearance of Cro-Magnon man.

Not only does culture explode, but also new ways of doing things, new styles and innovations that were utterly unknown in the period immediately preceding them, suddenly appear, only to disappear again like an outdated fad. From Spain to the Urals, sites list the developments of sewing needles, barbed projectiles, fishhooks, ropes, meat drying racks, temperature controlled hearths, and complex dwellings.

The most amazing part of all of it is the art. Art suddenly springs onto the landscape, fully formed, with no period of gradual development; no signs of childish attempts preceding it. A piece of ivory carved 32,000 years ago is as realistic as anything turned out by the most accomplished carver of the present day.

The Upper Paleolithic signals the most fundamental change in human behavior that the archaeological record may ever reveal.¹⁵⁰ The only explanation for this tremendous change is that a new kind of human appeared on the earth stage.

150 Richard Klein, Stanford, quoted by Shreeve.

When we consider the difficulties of such an event, in terms of “evolution”, we find that this presents a huge difficulty in our understanding. First of all, we still have the problem of a 60,000-year time lag between the appearance of the sub-Saharan modern type man who was on the scene with no “improvements” in his technology for that length of time.

If Cro-Magnon evolved in Africa, why isn’t there a continuous record of incremental developments? By the same reasoning, if he evolved only after crossing the Mediterranean to Europe, why isn’t there a continuous record of incremental developments?

The most effective and popular way that science deals with this crisis is to ignore it, to deny it, or to seek to twist the facts to fit the theory. Many archaeologists continue to account for the cultural events of the Upper Paleolithic by tying them to the emergence of a more modern, intellectually superior form of human being from Africa. They propose a “second biological event” to explain this, never mind that it left no tracks in any skeletal shape.

Nowadays, the idea is to suggest that the other “modern men” of sub-Saharan Africa were not really fully modern. They were “near-modern”. Thus, Africa is preserved as the origin of all mankind, and the only thing necessary was a breakthrough in the African lineage, a “neurological event” that allowed this “new man” to develop all these new cultural behaviors overnight, so to say. What this amounts to is saying that the explosion of culture in the Upper Paleolithic times did not happen earlier because other modern men didn’t have the brains to make it happen.

Unfortunately, the support for this idea amounts only to circular logic. What’s more, it seems that if it were a “neurological event”, it would start in a small place and spread outward.

But what seems to have happened is that it sort of exploded in a lot of places at once: from Spain to the Ural mountains in Russia! And in fact, the Middle East is the LAST place where art appears.

The earliest known Aurignacian sites are in the Balkans, and they are dated to around 43,000 years ago. Three thousand years later, the Aurignacian craze is all over Europe.

We ought to note that the Neanderthals did not have art. What’s more, there was essentially no change in their stone tools for 100,000 years.

Some people suggest that the impetus for culture was the sudden development of speech. But that idea doesn’t hold much water either. If we were to look at some of the aboriginal societies of Australia and New Guinea, they are certainly Neanderthal like in their stone tools. But they think and communicate in languages that are as rich as ours, and they construct myths, stories and cosmologies with these languages. They just don’t seem to be much interested in technology.

There is another very strange thing about this explosion of homo intellectualis technologicus: it seems to have sort of “lost its steam” around 12,000 years ago.

We have already noted the pottery making of the Jomon. Even more startling is the fact that twenty-six thousand years ago the residents of Dolni Vestonice were firing ceramics in kilns. But you don’t read that in archaeology textbooks. In the standard teachings, the emergence of ceramics is linked to the functional use of pottery which supposedly did not appear until the agricultural revolution in the Neolithic period some 12,000 years after the kilns at Dolni were last used. Oh dear!

Did we just stumble on something interesting? Didn’t we just note that something happened to “cool” the steam of the cultural explosion of the Upper Paleolithic and that it happened about 12,000 years ago? And we noted that the Jomon culture “began” at about the same time. And here we note that the agricultural revolution occurred at about the same time as that “loss of creative vigor”.

Could the two have some connection?

In Bulgaria, a thousand miles to the east of Dolni Vestonice, there is a cave called Bacho Kiro. It is famous for containing the earliest known Aurignacian tool assemblages. They are 43,000 years old.

This brings us to another curious thing about Neanderthal man: he never seemed to go anywhere. He always made his tools out of what was locally available, and he never seemed to travel at all. What was made where it was made, stayed there. Nobody traded or shared among the Neanderthal groups.

But it seems that right from the beginning, Cro-Magnon man was traveling and sharing and exchanging not only goods, but technology.

If there was a better form of stone somewhere else, the word seemed to get around, and everybody had some of it. Distinctive flints from southern Poland are found at Dolni Vestonice, a hundred miles to the south. Slovakian radiolarite of red, yellow and olive is found a hundred miles to the east. Later in the Upper Paleolithic period, the famous “chocolate flint” of southern Poland is found over a radius of two hundred and fifty miles.¹⁵¹

151 Shreeve, op. cit.

Naturally, these rocks didn’t walk around on their own. Human legs carried them. And that leads us to our next little problem with Cro-Magnon man: You see, his legs were too long.

One of the sacred laws of evolutionary biology is called “Allen’s Rule”.

This rule posits that legs, arms, ears, and other body extremities should be shorter in mammals that live in cold climates, and longer in mammals of the same period who live where it is hot. This is because having short arms and legs conserves heat. This is supposed to explain why Eskimos and Laplanders have short legs. It also is supposed to explain why Bantu people are leaner, and the Maasai are extremely long and lean in their tropical open country.

The only people who seem to be mocking Allen’s rule are Cro-Magnon.

They just refused to adapt. They all have much longer legs than they ought to. Of course, this is pounced upon as proof that they came from Africa. The only problem with this is that it is hard to imagine people from a warm climate migrating to a cold one by choice. Then, on top of that, to remain long-limbed for over a thousand generations? Keep in mind that, during that time, the thermometer kept going down and, at the glacial maximum, 18,000 years ago, it was like the North Pole in northern Europe!

So how come they didn’t adapt?

By whatever means they arrived in Europe, we ought to take note of the fact that their presence there may be related to the fact that Europe and other nearby locations are literally blanketed with megaliths. Indeed, it may be so that the megaliths came long after the appearance of Cro-Magnon man, but the connection ought not to be discarded without some consideration.

We have still another problem here, and it has to do with dating. Analyzing mitochondrial DNA data to reconstruct the demographic prehistory of Homo Sapiens reveals statistical evidence of explosive growth around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. Is there a connection between this DNA evidence and the appearance of Cro-Magnon man? If so, it would mean that the DNA is dated to twice the age that archaeology confirms.

Instead of assuming that the archaeological dates are correct, perhaps we ought to ask the question: could something be wrong with the dating? From a morphological point of view as well as judging by their industry and art, these highly evolved humans who coexisted with Neanderthal man represent a mutation so enormous and sudden as to be absurd in the context of evolutionary theory.

What in the world are we going to do with this problem?

I could exhaustively describe the endless books and papers that seek to explain it away; to account for it, to marginalize it, and even ignore it. But at the end of it all, the fundamental problem still remains: a new kind of man appeared on the planet, seemingly from nowhere, and he was smart, artistic, and however he got here, he landed in a lot of places simultaneously.

Did I say “landed”? Yes, I did.

Am I suggesting that Cro-Magnon man was an alien? Not exactly.

We still have to consider the mitochondrial DNA of Eve. I also haven’t forgotten that annoying problem of the Asian vs. African origins of the “first mother” that has been so deftly dealt with by avoidance and non-answers.

What do all of these factors, taken together, suggest?

Well, any farmer can figure that one out: it suggests hybridization. But that would imply somebody doing the hybridizing. Further, we might wish to make note of the range of this culture that suddenly dropped in on Europe: from Spain (and a small region of North Africa) to the Ural Mountains that are at the border of Central Asia.

The steppes of Central Asia, just north of Turkmenia, are a difficult environment for agriculture. Goats and sheep and cattle bones are found there that date to about 4000 BC. Later, the camel and horse came into use. These cultures spoke Indo-European languages and their members are believed to have been Caucasoid. There have been many theories that the Caucasoid nomads of the Central Asian steppes migrated to Europe.

But, as we have seen, the initial migration may have been from West to East. The archaeological record is uncertain, and therefore the migrations of the Indo-Europeans (for so we may most assuredly call them) from the Asian steppes are no longer as clear in the minds of scholars as they once were.¹⁵² The migrations into India and Pakistan, however, do seem to have some firmer foundation.

152 Renfrew, 1973, 1987.
 

These incursions were most likely from the Andronovo and Srubnaya cultures as the culture described in the oldest Aryan texts is very similar to that of the steppe nomads.

The Role of the Shaman

With that idea, we come to some very interesting relationships that will go very far in providing clues to us in terms of asking some of the most interesting questions of all relating to our idea of the rites and myths of ancient man being the disjecta membra of a vanished civilization.

Mircea Eliade writes:

Recent researches have clearly brought out the “shamanic” elements in the religion of the Paleolithic hunters. Horst Kierchner has interpreted the celebrated relief at Lascaux as a representation of a shamanic trance.[…]

Finally, Karl J. Narr has reconsidered the problem of the “origin” and chronology of shamanism in his important study.¹⁵³ He brings out the influence of notions of fertility (Venus statuettes) on the religious beliefs of the prehistoric North Asian hunters; but this influence did not disrupt the Paleolithic tradition.[…] it is in this “Vorstellungswelt” that the roots of the bear ceremonialism of Asia and North America lie. Soon afterward, probably about 25,000 BC, Europe offers evidence for the earliest forms of shamanism (Lascaux) with the plastic representations of the bird, the tutelary spirit, and ecstasy. […]

 

153 Barenzeremoniell und Schauanismus in der Altern Steinzeit Europas.

What appears to be certain is the antiquity of “shamanic” rituals and symbols. It remains to be determined whether these documents brought to light by prehistoric discoveries represent the first expressions of a shamanism in statu nascendi or are merely the earliest documents today available for an earlier religious complex, which, however, did not find “plastic” manifestations (drawings, ritual objects, etc) before the period of Lascaux.

In accounting for the formation of the shamanic complex in Central and North Asia, we must keep in mind the two essential elements of the problem: on the one hand, the ecstatic experience as such, as a primary phenomenon; on the other, the historic-religious milieu into which this ecstatic experience was destined to be incorporated and the ideology that, in the last analysis, was to validate it. […]

 

Everywhere in those lands, and from the earliest times, we find documents for the existence of a Supreme Being of celestial structure, who also corresponds morphologically to all the other Supreme Beings of the archaic religions. The symbolism of ascent, with all the rites and myths dependent on it, must be connected with celestial Supreme Beings; […]

 

This symbolism of ascent and “height” retains its value even after the “withdrawal” of the celestial Supreme Being - for, as is well known, Supreme Beings gradually lose their active place in the cult, giving way to religious forms that are more “dynamic” and “familiar” (the Gods of storm¹⁵⁴ and fertility, demiurges, the souls of the dead, the Great Goddesses, etc.) […]

The reduction or even the total loss in religious currency of Uranian Supreme Beings is sometimes indicated in myths concerning a primordial and paradisal time when communications between heaven and earth were easy and accessible to everyone; as the result of some happening, these communications were broken off and the Supreme Beings withdrew to the highest sky.[…]

The disappearance of the cult of the celestial Supreme Being did not nullify the symbolism of ascent with all its implication. […]

The shamanic ecstasy could be considered a reactualization of the mythical illud tempus when men could communicate in concreto with the sky.
It is indubitable that the celestial ascent of the shaman is a survival, profoundly modified and sometimes degenerate, of this archaic religious ideology centered on faith in a celestial Supreme Being and belief in concrete communications between heaven and earth. […]

The myths refer to more intimate relations between the Supreme Beings and shamans; in particular, they tell of a First Shaman, sent to earth by the Supreme Being or his surrogate to defend human beings against diseases and evil spirits.¹⁵⁵

 

154 Such as Yahweh.
155 Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism, Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, pp. 503-506.

It was in the context of the “withdrawal” of the “Celestial Being” that the meaning of the shaman’s ecstatic experience changed.

Formerly, the activity was focused on communing with the God and obtaining benefits for the tribe. The shift of the function of the shaman associated with the withdrawal of the benevolent God/Goddess was to “battling with evil spirits and disease”. This is a sharp reminder of the work of Jesus, healing the sick and casting out demons - the shamanic exemplar “after the Fall”.

There was, it seems, another consequence of this “shift”. Increasingly, the descents into the “underworld” and the relations with “spirits” led to their “embodiment” or in the shaman’s being “possessed” by “spirits”. What is clear is that these were innovations, most of them recent. What is particularly striking in the research of the historiographers of myth, legend, shamanism, etc, is the discovery of the “influences from the south, which appeared quite early and which altered both cosmology and the mythology and techniques of ecstasy”.

Among these southern influences were the contribution of Buddhism and Lamaism, added to the Iranian and, in the last analysis, Mesopotamian influences that preceded them.¹⁵⁶

Eliade writes:

The initiatory schema of the shaman’s ritual death and resurrection is likewise an innovation, but one that goes back to much earlier times; in any case, it cannot be ascribed to influences from the ancient Near East. But the innovations introduced by the ancestor cult particularly affected the structure of this initiatory schema. The very concept of mystical death was altered by the many and various religious changes effected by lunar mythologies, the cult of the dead, and the elaboration of magical ideologies.

Hence we must conceive of Asiatic shamanism as an archaic technique of ecstasy whose original underlying ideology - belief in a celestial Supreme Being with whom it was possible to have direct relations by ascending into the sky - was constantly being transformed by an ongoing series of exotic contributions culminating in the invasion of Buddhism. […]

 

The phenomenology of the trance underwent many changes and corruptions, due in large part to confusion as to the precise nature of ecstasy. Yet all these innovations and corruptions did not succeed in eliminating the possibility of the true shamanic ecstasy.

More than once we have discerned in the shamanic experience a “nostalgia for paradise” that suggests one of the oldest types of Christian mystical experience. As for the “inner light”, which plays a part of the first importance in Indian mysticism and metaphysics as well as in Christian mystical theology, it is already documented in shamanism..¹⁵⁷

156 For example, the co-opting and corruption of the Tree of Life symbolism by Judaism with complete loss of its true function.
157 Ibid., pp. 506-508.

What seems to be most important about Central Asian shamanism in the history of mysticism is the role the shaman plays in the defense of the psychic integrity of the community. Shamans are pre-eminently the anti-demonic champions; they combat not only demons and disease, but also the black magicians. The shaman is the tireless slayer of demons and dragons. And here we find explication of the “military” elements of the Grail Ensemble.

The Sword in the Stone that can only be withdrawn by the “Heir”, or the “Desired Knight”, was represented in the Steppe shamanic regalia as lance, cuirass, bow, sword, etc. These are accounted for in our study by virtue of the requirements of war against the demons, the true enemies of humanity.

As Eliade points out, the shaman defends life, health, fertility, the world of “light”, against death, diseases, sterility, disaster, and the world of “darkness”. In short, the Shaman is a very early “type” of the Knight on the Quest for the Holy Grail - the Shamanic ascent to the Celestial Spheres. We see that what is fundamental and universal to the shaman, to the heroes of myth, to the Quest for the Holy Grail, is the shaman’s struggle against what we could call “the powers of evil”.

The knight/shaman’s essential role in the defense of the psychic integrity of the community depends above all on this: men are sure that one of them is able to help them in the critical circumstances produced by the inhabitants of the invisible world. Here we come to a crucial characteristic of the knight/shaman: he must be able to SEE what is hidden and invisible to the rest and to bring back direct and reliable information from the supernatural worlds. In short, in the accounts of shamanic ecstasies, we find correspondence to the themes of the great epics in oral literature.

The knight/shaman’s adventures in the other world, the ordeals and tests that he undergoes in his ecstatic descents below and ascents to the sky, describe in every detail the adventures of the figures in popular tales and the heroes of epic myths.

This suggests that many epic “subjects” or motifs, as well as many characters, images, and clichés of these tales, are of ecstatic, or even other-worldly origin in the sense of interactions with hyperdimensional realities.

Tying it All Together

Here we may have found the essential key to the mystery of the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant and Noah’s Ark. We may even have, in a sense, found Arthur and Perceval of the Grail stories: the “Desired Knight” raised in obscurity, to discover that he is the “rightful heir” who can unlock DNA potential and achieve the shamanic ascent, or the Alchemical Transformation, and can remove the sword from the stone and defend the community against “sickness and demons” of an “otherworldly” nature.

Thus it is that we may find that our religious myths and rites are remnants of narratives – a message in a bottle - designed to explain these phenomena, and that the monotheistic versions, declaring a Final End, or a Judgment Day of a final end, are merely distortions of the myth designed to establish a Control System on our planet.

These distortions are beneficial to those who seek power and wealth, who are under the control of archetypal forces of another realm of which our own reality is but a shadow or a reflection.

Let me reiterate: I do not mean, here, to suggest that this other realm is “astral” or ephemeral or non-material. I am suggesting that it is an intermediate realm of para-physical, hyper-dimensional beings whose existence and nature has been carefully concealed from us for millennia – for a reason that is not to our benefit.

And this leads us to another exemplar of the “primordial myth”, Orion.

Orion, the Ark and the Holy Grail

The first question the reader might ask: What does Orion have to do with Noah’s Ark and the Grail Quest?

A great deal, I think. The similarities between the stories are many, the most evident being the theme of the prior “Golden Age” that was lost - as well as HOW it was lost.

According to Edith Hamilton, the story of Orion goes like this:

He was a young man of gigantic stature and great beauty, and a mighty hunter. He fell in love with the daughter of the King of Chios, and for love of her he cleared the island of wild beasts. The spoils of the chase he brought always home to his beloved, whose name is sometimes said to be Aero, sometimes Merope (one of the Pleiades).

 

Her father, Oenopion, agreed to give her to Orion, but he kept putting the marriage off. One day when Orion was drunk he insulted the maiden, and Oenopion appealed to Dionysus to punish him. The God threw him into a deep sleep and Oenopion blinded him. An oracle told him, however, that he would be able to see again if he went to the east and let the rays of the rising sun fall on his eyes. He went as far east as Lemnos and there he recovered his sight.¹⁵⁸

158 Hamilton, Edith, Mythology (New York: New American Library 1942).

Other ancient sources suggest that the real reason for the attack upon Orion was due to the fact that his beloved’s father, King Oenopion, a son of Ariadne and Dionysus, plotted against him. He was tricked into getting drunk, the same way Osiris (another variation on the story) was tricked into getting into a coffin, and as he slept, men fell upon him, put out his eyes, and then carried him to a beach and cast him there.

Hephaestus - the Fire God - gave him his servant Cedalion to serve him as a guide. Orion set him on his shoulders and asked him to give directions to the sunrise, and when they arrived Orion was healed by the sun’s rays. The similarity to the story of Samson is evident. He, too, was deprived of his strength while sleeping, his eyes were put out, and he was put to work turning a millstone. In an encounter with the Pharisees, Jesus mentions the “strong man” who had been “bound” in an obvious allusion to the legend of Orion.

What is interesting about it is the context in which this story was told:

Then a blind and dumb man, under the power of a demon, was brought to Jesus, and He cured him, so that the blind and dumb man both spoke and saw. ... But the Pharisees hearing it said, This Man drives out demons only by and with the help of Beelzebub, the prince of demons. And knowing their thoughts, He said to them, Any kingdom that is divided against itself is being brought to desolation and laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will last or continue to stand.

 

And if Satan drives out Satan, he has become divided against himself and disunited; how then will his kingdom last or continue to stand? And if I drive out the demons by Beelzebub by whose help do your sons drive them out? ... Or how can a person go into a strong man’s house and carry off his goods without first binding the strong man? Then indeed he may plunder his house. ... Either make the tree sound, and its fruit sound, or make the tree rotten and its fruit rotten; for the tree is known and recognized and judged by its fruit.¹⁵⁹

In the above story, being “blind and dumb” was compared to being a strong man who was bound, and who then was subjected to having all his goods stolen.

As in the story of Orion (where he was tricked into becoming drunk), and in the story of Samson, (in which the sleeping man was deprived of his vigor represented by his hair), the condition of being “bound” or blind and dumb is attributed by Jesus to “demons”.¹⁶⁰

159 The Bible, Matthew 12:22-33.
160 The main point that Jesus was trying to make, of course, was that “If Satan drives out Satan, he has become divided against himself and disunited: how then will his kingdom last or continue to stand?” Jesus was pointing out to the Pharisees that it was completely illogical to accuse him of working in concert with darkness since the effect of his work was to free the man of his demonic attack which enabled him to both see and speak.

Another interesting side reference in the New Testament is a remark Jesus made about the “blind leading the blind” and both of them falling into the ditch. This seems to be another reference to the story of Orion with Cedalion on his shoulders giving instructions.

This event can also be related to the story of the Prodigal son who, when a famine came upon the land, asked a “resident of the far country” for help, who then sent him to live and eat with the pigs.

The Relevance of Orion to Our Situation

The astute reader may note that it’s a little bit curious that deafness was omitted from the condition of being bound. Being healed of deafness as a condition of becoming free is conspicuous by its absence in this story. The fact is, as we will discover in the course of our investigations, most of the distortions of our reality come to us by listening rather than observing.

Deception and errors of perception would have far less influence on us, and we would have fewer illusions, if we would look at the face value of objects and see things for what they really are instead of allowing ourselves to be hypnotized by “experts” who have a vested interest in concealing the truth - the blind leading the blind. Most of mankind’s illusions are the “children of the ear” and hearsay. My beloved grandmother always told me to, “believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see”.

This is very good advice.

If we open our eyes and look at a problem as objectively as we can, forgetting all our beliefs and assumptions, and all the things we have been “told”, we might be able to see what is, and if we then apply our minds to what we see, we might be able to draw some accurate conclusions. It’s easy to look back on history and see where this or that group was “misled” in their beliefs and this distorted their thinking, which then led them to perpetrate unspeakable horrors.

We can point to the genocide advocated by the God of the Hebrews, whether it was actually committed or not, or the religious-zeal-run-amok of the Catholic church when it instituted the Inquisition and the Crusades. We can see the twisted version of the desire to create a “genetic superman” that led to the holocaust. It’s easy to discern these errors of the past, because we “know more now”.

We know more now.

• How much more can we learn?

• Can we be certain that the current beliefs of our reality are not similar manipulations?

• How much more will we know in the future about our own present situation?

• Do we have any clues around us pointing out that something is dreadfully amiss as were present in the years preceding the Holocaust?

• How many people at that time ignored all the warning signs until it was too late?

• How many people didn’t “get it” until they were bombed back to the Stone Age?

• Can we compare any of our present reality to such a scenario?

After all, a smart man learns from his mistakes; a genius learns from the mistakes of others.

At the present time, there are, indeed, indicators that we are being maneuvered into a certain mind-set, a certain belief system. The “reality game” has just gotten more and more complex, but the same essential errors keep getting repeated. What is at the root? Will our descendants look back on our own time and shake their heads in dismay at how ignorant we were, how manipulated our thinking was, and how great an error we made because of our beliefs?

As the reader will discover, it seems that we are presently facing just such a grand illusion; one that may be the grandest of them all, and if we do not find our way to the light whereby our eyes can be healed, we shall be, indeed, the householder who lost all he possessed because he was bound and blinded by “demons”. And if we are blind, and follow the blind, we will most certainly all fall into a pit; one that we may not be able to get out of for a very long time.

We know that this question, “why is life the way it is?” is one that we don’t like to face.

But, when we awaken late at night, alone in our thoughts, with no distractions of daily life to fill the void, we are face to face with our existential dilemma. And it is a terrible silence. In those moments of cold clarity, the bleakness and futility of our existence in cosmic terms rises up to confront us as it has confronted all of humanity throughout millennia.

Looking back at history, we see that, to escape this monstrous “dark night of the soul”, human beings will accept any answer - any religious belief or philosophy - that may be offered, because the cold, abyssal silence that follows the question must be filled at any cost. The sad fact is, there are plenty of people willing to try to convince us that they have “the answer to all our questions”.

These blind leading the blind can be found in the pulpits of nearly every church across the land, and in the seminars and lecture circuit of the New Age. But, these answers generally consist of confusing the discernment of reality with personal opinion which results in a judgment upon reality by refusing to acknowledge it as it really is.

Those parts of reality that are not acknowledged have a way of biting us.

“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

At the present moment in history, it seems that everybody and his brother are either looking for King Arthur and the Holy Grail, or are waiting for aliens to land on the White House lawn so they can kick the tires of the UFO Cadillac.

I have hundreds of books on these subjects, and over two dozen recent books, all of which claim to have discovered that the two subjects overlap and that the Holy Grail is really a bloodline, and that this bloodline of “special people” are offspring of alien beings, alternatively good guys or bad guys, depending on the orientation of the writer.

Most of the conclusions of the current raft of alternative researchers point to aliens from Mars having come to earth in the distant past, and that they are the real “Gods”. The current fad of focus on the pyramids and the sphinx have led them all to conclude that the root of all of this is the great mysteries of Egypt - that the Egyptian Gods are the original and true “Gods”. They declared to be advanced and superior beings from the “stars”, i.e. Mars, and they originally had a great civilization there that was destroyed, and they came to earth and gave impetus to the formation of our own early civilizations.

The stories then sort of bifurcate between these Gods being truly physical as humans are, or being “Neters” or principles, as in purely ethereal beings who occasionally deign to manifest on earth.

Meanwhile, the opposing parties often declare the “Serpent race” to be representative of a benevolent scaly gang of civilizers who have humanity’s best interests at heart, as in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. This group promotes a reptilian bloodline of Christ, and proposes that a descendant of this line is going to come along, a New Christ, who will lead us all to true enlightenment if we prepare ourselves according to any number of bizarre proposals.

This group tends to see the alleged hyperdimensional Reptilian race as physical like us and not, as we suggest, hyperdimensional creatures of variable physicality. Still other groups tell us that these reptilians are purely demonic, ethereal beings, who can “descend” into a person, or a human being can “host” a reptilian and “shape-shift” into this form (only if they have the genetics, mind you), and become temporarily reptilian themselves.

The Queen of England and many of the leaders of the world have been listed as being of this latter type, with tales spun around them that pass the bounds of bizarre into lunacy.

There are any numbers of variations on these themes, with just about every preferred belief system from A to Z represented.

In all cases, they have the chief feature of designation of this or that group of physical human beings as conspirators or guardians, (Masons, Rosicrucians, Templars, Illuminati, take your pick), or a strict ethereal conception of the conspirators or guardians. In the first case, humanity is divided into “good guys” and “bad guys”. In the second case, people are encouraged to place their faith in the “ethereal good guys”, in order to be saved from the “ethereal bad guys”.

At the end of it all, as noted above, there is the strangest thing I have ever observed: they all seem to be focused, in one way or another, on “finding the Holy Grail”. Just as Hitler was obsessed with discovery of some material object that would give him total and complete power over all the world, so do these different groups have a similar objective in mind: discover the Grail!

I thought about this for a long time. Why in the world is there this obsessive concentration on Reptilian beings and the Holy Grail? Is it a distraction, or is it an agenda? If it is either, what is driving it? I realized that the only way to come to any ideas about it would be to investigate the matter carefully.

The first thing we notice in undertaking such a study is that, in the minds of these individuals, identifying Arthur seems to be the prerequisite for discovering the grail itself. The theory seems to be that if you can figure out who Arthur really was, then you might be able to track his movements in history and discover the hiding place of this great object of power. In the numerous books I have on King Arthur, each one claims to have the one and only answer as to who he was and when he lived and where. Most of them are quite convincing with careful research and scholarship. And they all have a slightly different answer.

Does this mean that no actual object - such as the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant, which, by the way, seem to often be confused as one and the same “item” - does not exist? My personal opinion is that, yes, it is possible that there is an “object of power”. But based on the frantic searching going on, either it was lost, or it was hidden, and it seems that even the hyperdimensional beings are helpless to find it.

Assuming, for the sake of the hypothesis we are playing with, that this is true, my theory is that they cannot SEE it because it is “occluded” by a frequency that is impenetrable to them for some reason. In fact, this idea seems to be another key element of the Grail Stories - the theme of the Sword in the Stone. Only the Heir can withdraw it and wield it.

And so, the current craze for “finding the grail” seems to be promoted by those who are anxious to find this object in hopes that the “right person” will discover it and lead them to it.
 

From Scythia to Camelot

The important point at the moment regarding “Who is Arthur” is that it seems that the Arthur of the Grail Quest is not, in a certain sense, a real flesh and blood man, but is rather an archetypal complex of images. Arthur is other and more than the sum of his appearances in literature, and he is present in myths, stories and images that have NO direct mention of him. Arthur is present in the myths of all the sacrificial kings, dying saviors, and heroic slayers of dragons from time immemorial. His story grows with every episode we study, and after a time, we realize that Arthur, himself, is only a clue.

Orion, Arthur, Arca, Arcadia (Ark of God), Ark are all clues to the mythology of Fall and Redemption: The Once and Future King. He is the symbol of the Lost Eden and the New Jerusalem, the antediluvian world and the passage to the postflood reality. His story has branches that reach out to embrace all the ideas of cyclical changes and all attempts to exert power over the environment as opposed to interacting with Nature.

There are two books out of this entire morass that I consider to be outstanding in terms of combining scholarship with thinking “out of the box”. The first one is From Scythia to Camelot: A Radical Reassessment of the Legends of King Arthur, etc., by C. Scott Littleton and Linda A. Malcor, and The Keys to Avalon: The True Location of Arthur’s Kingdom Revealed, by Steve Blake and Scott Lloyd.

Scott Littleton and Linda Malcor made the serendipitous discovery of the parallels between the stories of King Arthur and the Ossetian saga of Batraz which has enabled a major leap in understanding the origins of the themes, and we hope to develop it further here. According to Littleton and Malcor, a fellow scholar, J. P. Mallory, told them that at the end of the Marcomannian War in the year 175 AD, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius sent a contingent of 5,500 Sarmatian cataphracti ¹⁶¹ from Pannonia to Britain. Their descendants survived as an identifiable ethnic group into the fourth century and possibly longer. It was, as Littleton and Malcor put it, just an “interesting bit of trivia” gleaned from Tadeusz Sulimirski’s book The Sarmatians.

161 Cavalry, mounted soldiers.

Sarmatians are a sub-group of Scythians, and the term “Scythian” can mean either the ancient Scythian tribes described by Herodotus, or, in the larger sense, it can apply to all of the Northeast Iranian steppe peoples. The Scythians of antiquity, and their cousins, the Sarmatians and Alans, were nomads of the Central Asian steppes. At the time of their greatest manifestation on the stage of history, the tribes extended from Hungary to China. These Scythians were big, blond and blue-eyed, and based on the accounts that have come down to us, and archaeological findings, their nomadic culture has sharp parallels with the most ancient occupants of Europe.

At the end of the classical period, these steppe dwellers had been driven to the edges of their homeland by the Altaic speakers, the Huns and Turks. Some migrated to Afghanistan, eastern Iran, western India, and others invaded the Roman Empire as either conquerors or supporting mercenaries. Many of them migrated into Britain, Italy, France, Spain and North Africa. Others retreated into Poland, European Russia and the Caucasus. The assumption has been that the Scythians, the sub-tribes of Iazyge ¹⁶² Sarmatians, Alans, etc, vanished without a trace.

162 The name “Jadczyk” is a “Polish-ized” variation of Iazyge.

But that is not, apparently, the case. It seems clear, upon reviewing the evidence, that the steppe dwellers became the aristocracy of Europe. According to Littleton and Malcor, another group of the Alani retreated into the Caucasus and survived as an ethnic group called the Ossetes, or Ossetians, in what is now known as the Republic of Georgia.

The Holy Grail was the chief concern of the Alans who settled in Gaul and Spain in the fifth century. They were tall, blonde and good looking, and lived a nomadic life in wagons. Their main claim to fame was their skill as horsemen. The Scythians (including the Alans) were referred to as Goths, and the one thing they all had in common was their extraordinary art. They assimilated into the territories they finally settled in, intermarrying with the Romans and other indigenous people.

The name “Alan” and “Goar” are common among these groups, being passed down from generation to generation.

In addition to becoming the rootstock of most of the nobility of Europe, the Alans introduced the steppe pony and the Alan hunting dog. They introduced chain mail and the customs that were later to become Norman and Breton chivalry, and above all, let it be repeated, their natural home was on the back of a horse. Alienor of Aquitaine was undoubtedly a descendant of the Alani and the Nart sagas were a natural part of her heritage, becoming the foundation for the Grail stories written and promulgated through her “courts of love” after Geoffrey of Monmouth created the “history of Arthur”.

In the Latin chronicle Draco Normannicus, by Etienne de Rouen (1169), Arthur is still alive in the twelfth century. He exchanges letters with Henry II in which the monarchs discuss the sovereignty of Brittany, but he allows Henry to claim the feudal rights to the land as his vassal.

This seems to reflect the Alanic attitude toward other rulers on the Continent from Gallo-Roman times on: allowing Roman, Merovingian, Carolingian, French and even British kings to rule over them while seeing themselves as having ultimate control over the land.¹⁶³

163 Littleton & Malcor, From Scythia to Camelot (New York: Garland 1994) p. 37. 250

In the Nart Sagas, the prototype of the grail cup is a large, magical vessel that appears at the banquets of the Narts, never runs dry, and magically rises to the lips of the hero who is without blemish. In other words, it chose its own guardian. The Grail legends tell of a special family that is intimately connected to the fertility of the land, from which is born a preeminent hero who becomes the sovereign of the Grail Castle and the guardian of the Grail. This grail cup of the Narts is also a “lie detector”. It would magically float to the lips of the man who was telling the truth. We see, of course, that there does not seem to be any particular “Christian” connection here, such as the Holy Grail being the cup of the Last Supper or whatnot.

The Nartamongae, as it is called, is a purely pagan symbol. In the archaeological sites associated with the Sarmatians in southern Russia, cauldrons are found almost exclusively in the graves of women. In the Arthurian legends, the cup is almost always borne by a woman. In the Scythian origin myth, a cup falls from the sky and is recovered by Kolaxais, the youngest son of the primeval being Targitaos. The cup is the prime symbol of sovereignty, and he who possesses it is established in his royal lineage.

Following the connection between the saga of Batraz and the Narts and Arthur and the knights of the round table, Littleton remembered a passage in Dio Cassius’s Roman History, written in 225 AD, where it is revealed that at the end of the Marcomannian war, 8,000 cataphracti from a Sarmatian tribe known as the Iazyges, were impressed into the Roman legions. Of these, 5,500 of them were sent to Britain. The Iazygian auxiliaries were posted in groups of five hundred to the garrisons along Hadrian’s Wall.

When their period of service was up, they were settled into a veteran’s colony at Bremetennacum Veteranorum near the modern village of Ribchester. What is most fascinating is that their first commander was a Roman officer named Lucius Artorius Castus, prefect of the VI legion Victrix. It seems that the Iazyges were conscripted into the Roman army, and riding under their own banner of the flying dragon, the Sarmatians must have been an impressive sight.

Imagine 5,500 men with their thousands of horses and long baggage trains, making their way across Europe from the Hungarian plain to the shores of the Channel. Caesar himself had invaded with only 400 cavalry and word of the coming of the tall, fair horse warriors must have spread like wildfire across Britain.

As Littleton and Malcor demonstrate in their well-reasoned work, it seems that the 12 victories attributed to “Arthur” by Nennius and others, including the famous one at Badon Hill, which are conventionally dated to the early sixth century AD, may actually have belonged to Lucius Artorius Castus, won between 183-185 AD in Northern Britain.

There does not seem to be any evidence that the Iazyge women accompanied their men to Britain. There have been no traces found of Sarmatian jewelry, makeup, mirrors or anything of what could be considered evidence of Sarmatian femininity in the remains of Roman forts, settlements or graveyards in Britain. This means that it is very likely that they married local women and remained in Britain when their term of service was over.

By the beginning of the third century, with 5,500 Sarmatians having been stationed in northern England, it is certain that the skills, talents, ideas, beliefs and legends of the steppe peoples were being told and re-told, including their belief in the divine sword as war-God, worshiped by being thrust into and withdrawn from the ground. The divine sword was another potent and central symbol to the Sarmatians, so it is no surprise that it has come down to us as a central theme of the Arthurian saga - the “sword in the stone” motif.

As the Sarmatians settled down and learned to speak the local Celtic dialect with their new womenfolk and children, it seems only natural that the great magical deeds of their own heroes, ancestors and deities would spread among this new hybrid population. In 460 AD, Cunedda of the Votadini tribe was invited into North Wales to help expel the Irish. The Votadini came from the northeast of England; their capital was probably near Bamburgh, curiously close to the seat of the great Percy family, Alnwick, and in the region of the Parisi Celts - both interesting homonymic clues to the name Percival of Grail fame.

During the time Britain had been under Roman rule, the Votadini had acted as a police force for the Romans protecting their northern frontier. But they had suffered since the Roman withdrawal. From the north they were under threat from the Picts, from the west, the Irish, and from the east, the Angles. It is believed that they colonized northwest Wales. This theory is strengthened by the finding of distinctive Votadini pottery in Gwynedd dating from this period. It was at this point that the “dragon banner” became part of the Welsh culture, which suggests a blending of the Celtic Welsh and a Votadini-Sarmatian culture.

Thus we see a possible chain of evidence for the bringing of the stories to Wales at this point, along with heroic figures that were then assimilated to the mythical archetype, no matter what their actual deeds were. This must have been the moment in which the Welsh prototype, a blending of Celtic and Sarmatian imagery took place, during a period of turmoil and crisis.

Blake and Lloyd establish, with great clarity, that the written historical material drawn on by Geoffrey was, in fact, a body of Welsh stories - which were probably Sarmatian stories before they were Welsh - based upon real people whose histories and geography match the particulars so completely that there is little doubt left that Geoffrey was “reinventing Arthur” to suit contemporary agendas. In point of fact, as Blake and Lloyd show, Geoffrey’s account was merely the first step in hijacking the Welsh prototype that has been followed ever since.

The primary question asked by Blake and Lloyd is: where did Geoffrey get his materials? And they carefully and thoroughly demonstrate that they came from Wales, known originally as “Brittania”.

In the 12th century “Britannia” did not denote the whole of Great Britain, as we know it today but referred specifically to Wales. This raised a crucial question: if Britannia was the Latin name for Wales, what had been the original Latin name for England? …

We found the answer to this in the 12th century book of Llandaff, where the name of the land that bordered Britannia was given on more than one occasion:

“The borders of Britannia and Anglia towards Hereford… From both parts of Anglia and Britannia… Anglia.”¹⁶⁴

164 Blake and Lloyd, The Keys to Avalon, (Shaftesbury, Dorset: Element Books 2000) p. 14.
 

Because of Geoffrey’s spin on the stories, many researchers have come to the idea that a mysterious and shadowy “Riothamus” is the “Historical Arthur”. Indeed, letters from Sidonius to Riothamus still survive and, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Arthur’s antagonist during a continental invasion was “Leo, emperor of Rome”.

As it happens, the eastern Roman emperor at the time of Riothamus was Leo I, supported by the Alanic general Aspar. Leo appointed a Byzantine noble, Anthemius, to negotiate a British alliance in 467, which brought Riothamus, “king of the Britons”, to Gaul in 468. Riothamus and his 12,000 troops fought a series of battles on the Continent, moving right into the region where the Lancelot legends are set. Sidonius’ letter was an appeal to Riothamus to stop enticing away the slaves of a local landowner. Gaul’s Imperial prefect called on Euric, King of the Visigoths, to crush Riothamus.

The Chronicles of Anjou say that Arthur’s betrayer was Morvandus, which is very likely a combination of the name of the traditional betrayer of Arthur, Mordred, and the real name of the prefect, Arvandus. There is no record of Riothamus’s death, but the last mention of him has him moving toward a town called Avallon. Thus, Geoffrey Ashe proposes Riothamus as the “real” Arthur.

However, as Littleton and Malcor, Blake and Lloyd demonstrate, this Riothamus was a Johnny-come-lately to the archetypal assimilation process!

Descendants of the Iazyges in Britain may have been among the troops of this Riothamus, and very likely, many of them never returned to Britain, and their legends of Arthur, assimilating their lost leader Riothamus, mixed with the variations on the Nart sagas brought to Gaul by the Alans, combined to form the corpus of the Arthurian tradition born in France.

What is of particular interest is the identity of the original Celtic Welsh, or Britons, who had earlier retreated defensively into Wales. As the Anglo-Saxons invaded and moved further west, many of the Britons fled the country to settle in Normandy.

Gildas, writing in the sixth century AD, is the first native British writer whose works have come down to us. Nennius, writing about 200 years later, refers to “the traditions of our elders”. And Geoffrey of Monmouth praises the works of Gildas and Bede and wonders at the lack of other works about the early kings of Britain saying:

“Yet the deeds of these men were such that they deserve to be praised for all time. What is more, these deeds were handed joyfully down in oral tradition, just as if they had been committed to writing, by many peoples who had only their memory to rely on.”¹⁶⁵

165 Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, translated by Lewis Thorpe, 1966, p. 1.
 

In describing the fifty or so years preceding his account of Arthur, Geoffrey of Monmouth tells us about Vortigern and the arrival of the Saxons under the leadership of Hengest and Horsa, an obvious assimilation of the earlier arrival of the Votadini and Sarmatians to Wales to drive out the Irish. Present throughout these events is the presence of Merlin - the British equivalent of Hiram Abiff - and Daedalus combined: the great architect of the temple.

What we are interested in is the fact that Merlin was credited with building Stonehenge. For some reason, based on the “oral tradition”, Geoffrey of Monmouth connected the mysterious and legendary figure of Merlin to the prehistoric monument on the Salisbury plain. The question then is not about the accuracy of Geoffrey’s history, but why he made this connection? Was it based on stories in the traditions that he had mentioned and considered to be reliable? Traditions that predated the arrival of the Sarmatians?

The Stonehenge story told by Geoffrey of Monmouth begins with a treacherous massacre of the Britons by Hengest and his Saxons, which took place at a peace conference. The Saxons hid their daggers in their shoes and, at a signal from their leader, drew them and killed all the assembled British nobles except the king. Geoffrey tells us that the meeting took place at the “Cloister of Ambrius, not far from Kaercaradduc, which is now called Salisbury”. He later describes this as a monastery of three hundred brethren founded by Ambrius many years before.

As it happens, there is a place called Amesbury about two and a half miles east of Stonehenge, which was originally called Ambresbyrig. This site in no way matches the description of the Cloister of Ambrius. The cloister is described as situated on Mount Ambrius, whereas Amesbury is in the valley of the river Avon. Geoffrey tells us that the victims of the massacre were buried in the cemetery beside the monastery, not two and a half miles away. What is more, since it seems that Geoffrey was acting under the pressure of the mythical norm of assimilating current events to the archetype, we then are left free to consider the possibility that this was the site of an ancient and famous massacre and that Stonehenge and the Cloister of Ambrius are one and the same.

The fact that Geoffrey called it a “cloister” is a curious choice of words since a cloister is “a covered arcade forming part of a religious or collegiate establishment”. That certainly seems to describe Stonehenge very well. Geoffrey was obviously trying to “Christianize” Stonehenge in his references to monastery and monks. The Saxons gave Stonehenge the name by which we know it today.

The Britons called it the Giant’s Dance, and Geoffrey certainly had a tradition to draw on there if he had wanted to since he begins his history with the adventures of Brutus, a descendant of Aeneas, who, after much traveling and fighting, landed on Britain, which was uninhabited except for a few giants. Geoffrey had a reasonable context here in which to place Stonehenge, but he ignored it and instead attributed the building of Stonehenge to Merlin after the dreadful massacre by the Saxons.

This enabled him to connect his Arthur to the great architect of the monument and all its glories. This suggests to us that there was a solid tradition behind this idea: that Stonehenge was the focal point of a people who had suffered a terrible, terminal disaster; after the disaster they had built Stonehenge, and the stones themselves had magical properties that could heal. In short, this tradition may reach back into the mists of antiquity.

In Geoffrey’s story, Merlin suggests to Aurelius that he ought to send an expedition to Ireland to fetch the Giant’s Ring from Mount Killaraus.

The King begins to laugh and asks:

“How can such large stones be moved from so far-distant a country?” he asked. “It is hardly as if Britain itself is lacking in stones big enough for the job!”

 

“Try not to laugh in a foolish way, your Majesty,” answered Merlin.

 

“What I am suggesting has nothing ludicrous about it. These stones are connected with certain secret religious rites and they have various properties that are medicinally important. Many years ago the Giants transported them from the remotest confines of Africa and set them up in Ireland at a time when they inhabited that country. Their plan was that, whenever they felt ill, baths should be prepared at the foot of the stones; for they used to pour water over them and to run this water into baths in which their sick were cured. What is more, they mixed the water with herbal concoctions and so healed their wounds. There is not a single stone among them which hasn’t some medicinal value.”¹⁶⁶

As W. A. Cummins, geologist and archaeologist remarks, all of this sounds like a pre-medieval tradition about Stonehenge, possibly even prehistoric. However, instead of coming from Africa, or even Ireland, the bluestones used in the construction of Stonehenge come from the Prescelly Mountains, or Mynydd Preselau. The so-called “altar stone”, however, most likely came from somewhere in the Milford Haven area in Pembrokeshire.

Cummins asks:

1. Why did the builders of Stonehenge go all the way to Mynydd Preselau for the bluestones, when there were perfectly satisfactory stones to be had much nearer home?

2. Why if their main source of bluestones was Mynydd Preselau, did they also bring a single huge block for micaceous sandstone (the Altar Stone), which quite certainly did not come from that area?¹⁶⁷

166 Ibid., p. 139.
167 Cummins, W. A., King Arthur‘s Place in Pre-history, (Surrey: Bramley Books 1992) p. 64.

Cummins remarks astutely that Geoffrey was eight and a half centuries closer to the event than we are, so maybe his account is correspondingly closer? In these few remarks by Geoffrey of Monmouth, referring to the Cloisters of Ambrius, and “baths” at the “foot of the stones”, we find a possible hidden connection between the Cauldron of rebirth, the Holy Grail, and Stonehenge.

Merlin’s explanation of the importance of the stones as reported in Geoffrey’s history, is that they were connected to “secret religious rites” that he further explains have to do with “magical healing properties”, an interesting juxtaposition of “stones” and a sort of “elixir of life”.

There is a very ancient Celtic tradition about cauldrons of rebirth, into which wounded, dead or dying soldiers were plunged, and came out healed, whole and reborn. The Holy Grail also bestowed health, healing of battle wounds, and curing of disease upon its bearers. The Celtic cauldrons were also sources of abundance, prophecy, inspiration, and knowledge.

Cerridwen, the Welsh Moon Goddess, had a magic cauldron of inspiration.

Welsh Bards called themselves Cerddorion (sons of Cerridwen). The Bard Taliesin, founder of their craft, was said to be born of Cerridwen and to have tasted her potion known as “greal”, made from six plants for inspiration and knowledge. Branwen, the sister of Bran the Blessed, was the “Lady of the Cauldron”, as well as the Lady of the Lake.

In short, the “Lake” from which the famous Sword emerged, and to which it was returned, was a Cauldron, or the Holy Grail.

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