My own part in this quest began in July 1979, when I received a review copy of a book called
Serpent in the Sky
, by John Anthony West. It was basically a study of the work of a maverick Egyptologist called Rene Schwaller de Lubicz, and its central argument was that Egyptian civilisation—and the Sphinx in particular—was thousands of years older than historians believe. Schwaller had devoted the latter part of his life to demonstrating that the ancient Egyptians possessed ‘a grand, interrelated and complete system of knowledge’. The passage that excited me so much was on page 198:
Schwaller de Lubicz observed that the severe erosion of the body of the Great Sphinx at Giza is due to the action of water, not wind and sand.
If the single fact of water erosion of the Sphinx could be confirmed, it would in itself overthrow all accepted chronologies of the history of civilisation; it would force a drastic re-evaluation of the assumption of ‘progress’—the assumption upon which the whole of modern education is based. It would be difficult to find a single, simple question with graver implications. The water erosion of the Sphinx is to history what the convertibility of matter into energy is to physics.
The problem is that although this final chapter of the book is called ‘Egypt: Heir to Atlantis’, it actually says very little about such a possible link. The most important comment about this occurs in the Introduction:
Following an observation made by Schwaller de Lubicz, it is now possible virtually to prove the existence of another, and perhaps greater civilisation ante-dating dynastic Egypt—and all other known civilisations—by millennia. In other words, it is now possible to prove ‘Atlantis’, and simultaneously, the historical reality of the Biblical Flood, (I use inverted commas around ‘Atlantis’ since it is not the physical location that is at issue here, but rather the existence of a civilisation sufficiently sophisticated and sufficiently ancient to give rise to the legend.)
So West was not, in fact, necessarily talking about Plato’s mythical Atlantis, but simply about this possibility that civilisation may be millennia older than historians accept. In which case, there is a sense in which what has been called ‘the dreaded A word’ (which entails the instant assumption that its user is a member of the lunatic fringe) may not be necessary at all. We are not talking about the fictional Atlantis of Verne’s
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
or Conan Doyle’s
Maracot Deep
, but simply about the possibility that human culture may be far older than we believe.
Now, at the same time as I received
Serpent in the Sky
, another publisher sent me the reissue of a book called
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings
, subtitled
Advanced Civilisation in the Ice Age
, by Charles Hapgood, a professor of the history of science in New England. Like West and Schwaller, Hapgood had also come to accept the notion of an ancient civilisation that pre-dated dynastic Egypt. Hapgood had arrived at his conclusion by a completely different route. He had studied medieval navigation maps called portolans, and concluded from certain of them that they had to be based on far, far older maps, and that the South Pole had been mapped in the days
before
it was covered with ice, possibly as long ago as 7000 BC—three and a half thousand years before the Great Pyramid. But Hapgood takes great care not to suggest that his ancient maritime civilisation might be Atlantis, or even to breathe the word.
Hapgood’s quest began with the so-called Piri Re’is map, dating back to 1513, which shows the coast of South America
and
the South Pole—many centuries before the latter was discovered. I had heard of the Piri Re’is map via a popular bestseller called
The Morning of the Magicians
, by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier—the book that had started the 'occult boom’ in 1960—as well as in the work of Erich von Daniken: both had tried to use the map to prove that earth must have been visited by spacemen in the remote past. I was perfectly willing to be open-minded about the possibility—as I still am—but it seemed to me that their arguments were simply untenable, and in Daniken’s case, often absurd and dishonest. Now I was interested to learn that the argument for an Ice-Age civilisation did not depend on ancient astronauts, and that Hapgood’s reasoning was cautious, sound and logically irrefutable. As far as I could see, he had proved, once and for all, that there had been a maritime civilisation in the days before the South Pole was covered with ice.
But I had other work to do—for example, writing an enormous
Criminal History of Mankind
—and pushed aside the whole question of ‘Atlantis’.
In the autumn of 1991, I was approached by the Hollywood producer Dino de Laurentiis, who was thinking of making a film about Atlantis, and who wanted to try to give it a realistic historical approach. He and his associate Stephen Schwartz commissioned me to write an outline. Naturally, I decided immediately that I would base it on John West’s theory.
In November 1991 I found myself in Tokyo, taking part in a symposium on communication in the twenty-first century. In the Press Club, I spoke about my Atlantis project to some friends, and mentioned Schwaller’s theory that the civilisation of ancient Egypt was the heir to Atlantis, and that the Sphinx could date thousands of years earlier than 2400 BC, which is when the pharaoh Chefren is supposed to have built it. At which point my host, Murray Sayle, remarked that he had recently read a paragraph in the
Mainichi News
that claimed there was new evidence to support this view. Naturally, I was excited, and asked him if he could find me the item. He promised to try, but was unsuccessful.
A week later, in the Savage Club in Melbourne, I mentioned the elusive paragraph to Creighton Burns, the ex-editor of the
Melbourne Age
, who said that he had also seen the story about the Sphinx. He tracked it down in a recent issue of the
Age
, and was able to give me a photostat.
It was from the
Los Angeles Times
of 26 October 1991, and read:
EGYPT SERVES UP NEW TWIST TO MYSTERY OF THE SPHINX
San Diego, Wednesday
New evidence that Egypt’s Great Sphinx may be twice as old as had been thought has triggered a fierce argument between geologists who say that it must be older and archaeologists who say that such a conclusion contradicts everything we know about ancient Egypt.
Geologists who presented their results at the Geological Society of America Convention yesterday found that weathering patterns on the monument were characteristic of a period far older than had been believed. But archaeologists and Egyptologists insist that the Sphinx could not be much older because people who lived there earlier could not have built it.
Most Egyptologists believe that the Sphinx was built during the reign of the ‘Pharaoh’ Kafre [Chefren] in approximately 2500 BC. But scientists who conducted a series of unprecedented studies at the Giza site said their evidence shows that the Sphinx was already there long before Kafre came to power.
The evidence suggests that Kafre simply refurbished the Sphinx.
Boston geologist Robert Schoch said his research suggests that the Sphinx dates back to between 5000 BC and 7000 BC. That would make it double the age of the Great Pyramid and make it the oldest monument in Egypt, he said.
But California archaeologist Carol Redmount, who specialises in Egyptian artefacts, said, There’s just no way that could be true.’
The people of that region would not have had the technology or the will to have built such a structure thousands of years earlier, she said.
Other Egyptologists said that they cannot explain the geological evidence, but they insist that the theory simply does not match up with the mountains of archaelogical research they have carried out in that region. If the geologists are right, much of what the Egyptologists think they know would have to be wrong.
So it seemed that there
was
evidence, after all, that the Sphinx might be far older than anyone thought.
Back in England I wrote my outline based on Schwaller’s idea in the form of a kind of novel, and sent if off to Hollywood. What happened to it then I am uncertain—probably it was handed to half a dozen other script writers to improve. But it seemed to me that I had succeeded in writing a basically realistic film instead of the usual scenario with Greek temples, white bearded priests, and beautiful blondes wearing togas like linen bathrobes. And once again, I shelved the problem of ‘Atlantis’ in favour of other projects.
It was almost two years later, in the autumn of 1993, that I was approached by an old friend, Geoffrey Chessler, who had commissioned one of my earlier books,
Starseekers.
He was now working for a publisher who specialised in illustrated books on ‘occult’ subjects—like Nostradamus—and who wanted to know if I might have some suitable suggestion. My mind was a blank, but since I expected to be passing through London a few days later, I agreed to meet him for dinner at a mutually convenient spot, which happened to be a hotel at Gatwick airport. There we exchanged various ideas and possibilities, and I casually mentioned my interest in the Sphinx. Geoffrey was immediately interested, and as I expanded my ideas—how it seemed to me that Hapgood’s ‘lost civilisation’ would probably have a totally different
mode
of thinking from that of modern man—suggested that I should write him an outline of a book about it.
Now I should explain that, in the late 1960s, I had been asked by an American publisher to write a book about ‘the occult’. The subject had always interested me, but I was inclined to take it with a pinch of salt. When I asked the advice of the poet Robert Graves about it, his answer was ‘Don’t’. Yet it was in Graves’s own
White Goddess
that I found a basic distinction that served as a foundation for the book—between what he called ‘solar knowledge’ and ‘lunar knowledge’. Our modern type of knowledge—rational knowledge—is solar; it operates with words and concepts, and it fragments the object of knowledge with dissection and analysis. Graves argues that the knowledge system of ancient civilisations is based upon intuition, which grasps things as a whole.
In a story called ‘The Abominable Mr Gunn’, Graves offers a practical example. When he was at school, a fellow pupil named Smilley was able to solve complex mathematical problems merely by looking at them. Asked by the master—Mr Gunn—how he did this, he replied: ‘It just came to me.’ Mr Gunn disbelieved him; he thought he had simply looked up the answers in the back of the book. When Smilley replied that the answer got two of the figures wrong, Mr Gunn sent him to be caned. And he forced him to do his sums ‘the normal way’ until Smilley lost his strange ability.
Now it could be objected that Smilley was merely a freak, a prodigy with a mind like a computer. But this explanation will not suffice. There are certain numbers called primes, which cannot be divided exactly by any other number—7, 13 and 17 are examples. But there is no simple mathematical method of finding out whether a large number is a prime, except by painfully dividing every smaller number into it. Even the most powerful computer has to do it this way. Yet in the nineteenth century, a calculating prodigy was asked whether some vast ten-digit number was a prime, and replied after a moment's thought: ‘No, it can be divided by 241.’
Oliver Sacks has described two mentally subnormal twins in a New York asylum who can sit swapping
twenty-figure
primes.
Scientifically speaking
—that is, according to our system of rational ‘solar knowledge’—it cannot be done. Yet calculating prodigies do it. It is as if their minds hover like a bird above the whole number field, and
see
the answer.
This can mean only one thing: that although our solar knowledge system seems to us comprehensive and all-sufficient, there must be
some other
means of obtaining knowledge that achieves its results in a completely different way. The idea is baffling—like trying to imagine another dimension apart from length, breadth and height. We know that modern physics posits other dimensions, yet our minds are incapable of conceiving them. Yet we can imagine some tiny, blind, wormlike creature who is convinced that the world consists of surfaces, and who cannot even begin to imagine what we mean by height. As offensive as it is to human dignity, we have to recognise that, where knowledge is concerned,
we
are blind, wormlike creatures.
So I had no problem with the notion that Hapgood’s pre-ice Age civilisation might differ from our own in some absolutely basic manner. I recalled an observation by the archaeologist Clarent Weiant, to the effect that when the Montagnais Indians of eastern Canada wish to make contact with a distant relative, they go into a hut in the forest and build up the necessary psychic energy through meditation: then the relative would
hear his voice
. And Jean Cocteau records that when his friend Professor Pobers went to study the same phenomenon in the West Indies, and asked a woman ‘Why do you address a tree?’, she replied: ‘Because I am poor. If I were rich I would use the telephone.’
The implication would seem to be that by using telephones—and the rest of the paraphernalia of ‘solar knowledge’—we have lost some abilities that our remote ancestors took for granted.
When I met Geoffrey Chessler at Gatwick airport, I was en route to Melbourne again, for the annual Literary Festival, after which I intended to meet John West in New York. By total coincidence, West had written to me out of the blue a few weeks earlier, enclosing a magazine with an article he had written about the latest developments in his investigation—including the facial ‘reconstruction’ by Detective Frank Domingo which demonstrated that the face of the Sphinx was nothing like Chefren’s. We had never had any contact—although I had recently reviewed his book
The Case for Astrology
—and he had no idea I was interested in the Sphinx. I wrote back immediately, mentioning that I would be in New York in a few weeks’ time, and we arranged to meet.