The Atlantis Blueprint (14 page)

Canterbury may be regarded as a relatively modern site. Its
first cathedral was built soon after St Augustine’s arrival in England in
AD
597. Before Augustine’s arrival, however, it was the capital of Ethelbert, the Saxon king who became a Christian. And a little research into Dean Stanley’s
Memorials of Canterbury
reveals that Ethelbert gave the site of a pagan temple to Augustine, who, following the decree of Gregory the Great to build on pagan sites, built an abbey there, and later began to build the cathedral nearby.

The pagan temple had been built on a 45/45 site – that is to say, by someone with a knowledge of the Hudson Bay Pole. England’s most important religious site, Canterbury, also fits perfectly into Rand’s Atlantis blueprint.

A
CCORDING TO HERODOTUS
, contemporary Egyptians had decided on a crudely simplistic explanation of the purpose of the Great Pyramid; they said it was basically a monument to the vainglory of the pharaoh Cheops (Khufu). The wickedness of Cheops was unsurpassed – he closed down all the temples during his fifty-six-year reign, and when he ran out of money to build the Great Pyramid, sent his daughter out to work as a harlot. She made enough not only to complete its construction, but also to build a pyramid of her own. Herodotus was also told that underneath the Great Pyramid there were a series of vaults ‘for the Pharaoh’s own use’, so that it also served as a luxury apartment. Nile water was introduced by means of a tunnel, forming an underground lake in the midst of which there was an island on which Cheops was laid to rest. The Great Pyramid, apart from being a monument to monstrous egoism, was also a tomb then. The notion of the pyramids as tombs persists down to the present day – in his standard work on the pyramids of Egypt, Professor Ion Edwards states that they were intended as tombs and nothing more.

This assumption has been questioned. In
The Riddle of the Pyramids
,
¹
Kurt Mendelssohn, a physicist who studied under Max Planck then turned his attention to the problem of why the pyramids were built, concluded that there was little evidence that they were tombs. Of the ten major pyramids, only one, the Step Pyramid of King Zoser (or Djoser) at Saqqara, showed unmistakable signs of being a tomb, although mummy fragments found in its granite vault proved – when subjected to radiocarbon-dating – to be dated to several centuries later than Zoser’s reign. Of the other nine pyramids, only three had sarcophagi (which were empty) – it is hard to see why thieves should have gone to the trouble of stealing the other six.

Mendelssohn’s own somewhat unlikely theory is that the pyramids were merely a ‘work project’ designed to unite Egypt’s tribes into a nation state, although it could be asked why the pharaohs did not choose a more practical task, like building harbours or dams. All the same, Mendelssohn’s objections to the tomb theory are certainly convincing, particularly in the case of the Great Pyramid itself. When Herodotus went there, it was covered in gleaming limestone, and was already 2,000 years old.

In
AD
820, the caliph Al-Mamun, son of Haroun Al-Raschid, decided to break into it to see whether, as legend declared, it was full of fabulous treasures, but there seemed to be no way in. The position of a hidden door, high up on the north side, had long been forgotten.

Chisels failed to dent the limestone, so Al-Mamun ordered fires to be lit to crack it, then attacked it with battering rams. After months of exhausting effort, his men had only tunnelled a hundred feet or so. Just as they were about to give up, one of the workmen heard a dull thud nearby. They finally broke into a narrow tunnel, and saw that a large stone had fallen from its ceiling.

By sheer luck they had entered several courses below the original entrance, otherwise they might have tunnelled on until
they came out the other side. Crawling up the sloping tunnel they found the entrance, covered with a hinged stone. Crawling back down the other way, they eventually found themselves in a small subterranean chamber with a vermin-infested pit and a short tunnel running out of the other side until it simply came to a halt. This seemed to be the disappointing reality of Herodotus’s lake, island and luxury apartment.

But at the point where the stone had fallen from the ceiling, they found a passage ascending towards the heart of the pyramid. This proved to be blocked by a massive granite plug. They used their chisels to cut into the limestone around it, only to find another plug, and then yet another. Finally they were able to stand upright, and were faced with another low corridor that ran horizontally. It led to a barn-like chamber with a gabled roof and salt-encrusted walls – but it was empty. They labelled this the Queen’s Chamber, since Arab tombs for women had pointed roofs. They hacked out part of a wall, but found no treasure.

Retracing their steps to the place where they could stand upright, they discovered that the ascending passage continued upward, but that a connecting part of the causeway had been removed, presumably to discourage further exploration. Suddenly the corridor turned into an awesome gallery, whose sloping walls stretched far above their heads. At the top of this smooth slope they found their way blocked by a 3-foot-tall stone. After clambering over this, they found themselves in what came to be called the Antechamber, faced with a kind of giant portcullis made of granite, which seemed designed to be lowered to block the intruders’ further progress – except that the grooves at the sides terminated 4 feet above the floor, so it could never be lowered. Beyond that, the walls contained three more ‘portcullis’ grooves, this time down to the floor, but no portcullises.

They continued down another low passageway, finally arriving at a larger and rectangular chamber, which became known as the King’s Chamber. This was also empty, except for
a huge granite sarcophagus that was lacking its lid. It was so big that it must obviously have been introduced while the King’s Chamber was being built, for it was too large to have been brought up the ascending passage.

So it seemed that the Great Pyramid was not a tomb, as it would have been impossible for there to have been a coffin inside the sarcophagus – there was no way that tomb robbers could have got it out.

It has been generally assumed that the granite plugs must have been slid into place from above, and had been stored in the ‘Grand Gallery’, but once the workmen had allowed them to slide into place, how had they escaped? There were no skeletons to suggest they had been entombed alive. The problem remained unsolved for 800 years until, in 1638, an English astronomer called John Greaves noticed a stone missing from the ramp at the west side of the Grand Gallery, just before it rejoined the narrower passage. It looked like a kind of well, but when Greaves tried to lower himself down it he found that it was blocked with sand and rubble and gave up. Two centuries later, in 1814, an Italian named Giovanni Caviglia made a more determined attempt, and found that the ‘well’ descended to the low passageway that led down to the subterranean chamber with the vermin-infested pit.

This route, then, must have allowed the workmen to escape after sliding the granite plugs into place – unless, of course, the top of the Pyramid was still open at that time (this latter was an obvious possibility, for someone must have blocked the well with sand and rubble, presumably from above).

So the Great Pyramid remained a mystery consisting of many small mysteries. Why, for example, had the Queen’s Chamber been left unfinished, as the rough state of its floor suggested? And why were its walls covered in crystallised salt? And, if the pharaoh had changed his mind and decided that he would prefer a larger chamber built on a higher level, why did he not place the King’s Chamber directly above the Queen’s Chamber? The latter is placed symmetrically in the centre of

Cross-section of the Great Pyramid of Giza

the Pyramid, where you might expect a burial chamber to be; the King’s Chamber is located slightly beyond this meridian.

One theory that seems to fit these facts is based on the speculations of Professor I. E. S. Edwards, one of the British Museum’s foremost authorities on the pyramids. Around 2,500
BC,
the pharaoh Cheops (Khufu) decided to build himself a tomb that should be impregnable to thieves. Having surveyed the subterranean chamber his workmen had hacked out of the rock, he felt it was too stuffy and depressing and decided to build himself a pyramid, like his father and grandfather. The Queen’s Chamber was a deliberate red herring, to persuade any robbers who had penetrated that far that there was nothing for them to steal. Such robbers would only carry torches or candles, and would probably not notice that another passage ran above their heads.

At that point, his obsession about tomb robbers developed into paranoia, and he decided to have the ascending passage
blocked with the granite plugs to make quite sure that no robbers could get that far. But the plugs needed to be slid into place. For that reason, the floor of the Grand Gallery was made smooth, so they could be stored there and slid down. At the top of the Grand Gallery he placed another obstacle in the form of a tall stone, and on its other side was the antechamber and the King’s Chamber, which he had chosen for his tomb. He had his sarcophagus placed ready, but at this point he realised that it would be virtually impossible to carry the coffin up to the chamber – the granite plugs and the tall stone blocked the way.

The only solution was to slide the granite plugs into place there and then and to leave the Great Pyramid unfinished until after his death, when his coffin could be brought into the King’s Chamber from above. But that would entail leaving the Great Pyramid open until he died. In the meantime, any number of thieves could creep in by night and explore its secrets.

At which point, I suggest, Cheops gave up in disgust. The Great Pyramid itself, he decided, should become a gigantic red herring, to divert tomb robbers from his true resting place. And to this day we have no idea of where his body lies…

Why did he order the ‘well’ to be dug, then blocked up with rubble? Perhaps because, just before the Great Pyramid was completed, he had a sudden pang of regret at the thought that he would never again look upon his magnificent handiwork, and left this hidden entrance…

One objection to this theory is the matter of why he ordered his workmen to construct so many puzzling anomalies. Why are there slots cut into the walls of the antechamber, as if to hold three massive ‘portcullis’ stones, when no such stones are to be found? Why is there a niche in the wall of the Queen’s Chamber that is slightly off-centre? Why does a 2-foot step suddenly appear in the passage to the Queen’s Chamber? Why do ‘air vents’ out of the Queen’s Chamber fail to reach the outside and were not even taken through the
walls of the Chamber? There are, of course, ‘air vents’ out of the King’s Chamber – but what is the purpose of air vents in a tomb? And why did the builders decide to build the thirty-sixth course of far larger blocks than the other courses – surely it would have made sense to place the largest at the bottom?

Above all there is the mystery of the Grand Gallery. Why, when most of the passages in the Great Pyramid are so low that it is necessary to stoop (or even crawl), did the pharaoh order his workmen to build a passageway 7 feet wide, 28 feet high and 157 feet long? Why does it narrow to half its width by the time it reaches the ceiling? And why is the ceiling not flat, like most of the ceilings in the Great Pyramid, but made of overlapping blocks, as if designed as steps for a man who could walk upside down? And why is there a raised ramp on either side of the upward slope, making it a sunken channel? And why are there square holes cut on the wall side of the ramp, making it look – from above – like a piece of cinema film?

The answer, clearly, is God only knows. Common sense seems to afford no clues to the answers. And therein lies the merit of J Charles Piazzi Smyth. He at least made the world aware that the Great Pyramid is a giant enigma.

Regrettably, his efforts were in some respects too successful. A Scotsman named Robert Menzies took their theories to a logical extreme. If God was the author of the Great Pyramid as well as of the Bible, then it should obviously be regarded as a book in stone; all that remained was to decipher its message, which must be conveyed in terms of
measurements.
The way from the entrance to the three chambers must be a symbolic journey through time, probably with pyramid inches representing years, including all the great events of the world’s history, among them the flood, the Exodus, the Crucifixion and the Second Coming. The beginning of the Grand Gallery marked the birth of Christ, and, counting back from there, it could easily be verified that the world had been created in 4,004
BC,
just as Archbishop Ussher had declared in 1650.

Smyth had worked out that the Pole Star, which was then Alpha Draconis, had shone straight through the entrance and down the descending passage when the Great Pyramid was build in 2,100
BC
(missing the actual date by about four centuries). Menzies declared that there should be some indication on the walls of the Descending Passage marking the year, and was delighted when Smyth told him of two scored lines on either side of the passage at the spot that marked 2,100
BC
– and so was confirmed in his peculiar form of insanity.

Within a decade or so, the Great Pyramid became the happy hunting ground of religious cranks all over the world. In Boston, a society was formed to alter modern measuring units to those used by the Pyramid’s builders, and was supported by President Garfield. In England, a book called
Miracle in Stone
(1877)2 by Joseph Seiss became a bestseller. A preacher named Charles Taze Russell became a convert, and founded the Jehovah’s Witnesses on the basis of Pyramid prophecies, in 1891 announcing that the Battle of Armageddon would occur in 1914 and that all Jehovah’s Witnesses would thereafter live forever on a ‘paradise earth’. When 1914 failed to bring the end of the world, thousands of Jehovah’s Witnesses left the movement in disillusionment, and Russell had difficulty convincing those that remained that Christ
had
returned, but invisibly. When Russell died in 1916, his successor ‘Judge’ Rutherford decided to discard pyramidology; he explained that Russell had been deluded by Satan, realising the danger of setting a definite date for the end of the world when his own choice, 1925, passed without incident.