The Atlantis Blueprint (34 page)

The fact that Rennes-le-Château and Nanking are both located at a Golden Section division of the pole-to-pole distance is further support that either the Celts and Chinese shared knowledge, or, more likely, that their separate traditions are derived from a common source.

My own favourite story about Rand’s researches concerns a pyramid, not in Egypt or Mexico, but in China.

In the summer of 1997, Rand was thinking about the Hudson Bay Pole and the orientation of Mexican religious sites to it. At this time, he heard from Laura Lee, friend and radio interviewer whose Seattle-based show is broadcast internationally, that the German writer Hartwig Hausdorf was going to appear on her programme to talk about ancient pyramids in China. Rand had no idea that there were pyramids in China.

Hausdorf, the author of
The Chinese Roswell,
had been influenced by Erich von Däniken’s ‘ancient astronaut’ theory, and had travelled in China, Tibet and Mongolia searching for
evidence of aliens visiting earth in the remote past. Hausdorf explained on the radio programme how, in the spring of 1945, an American air force pilot named James Gaussman was returning from Chungking when engine trouble forced him to a low altitude near Xian, in Shansi province. Directly below him he saw a white pyramid of ‘colossal size’. He took some photographs, although these would not be published for another forty-five years. Two years later, in 1947, a pilot named Maurice Sheahan caught a glimpse of another enormous pyramid when he was flying over Shansi province, and again took pictures. Although these were published in the
New York Times
and other newspapers in March 1947, Chinese archaeologists denied that China had any pyramids.
¹⁷

In 1962, a New Zealand airline pilot named Bruce Cathie was also informed by the Chinese that there were no pyramids in China. He was nevertheless able to confirm the existence of several of them, and in a book called
The Bridge of Infinity18
suggested that there are a network of pyramids over the surface of the earth whose purpose is connected with ley lines and earth energies. (His views have something in common with those of Christopher Dunn.)

In March 1994, Hausdorf succeeded in getting permission to visit Xian, a former imperial capital that is regarded as the cradle of Chinese civilisation. (Emperor Qin Shihuang, who built the Great Wall, has a tomb there, surrounded by 10,000 life-size terracotta soldiers.) He saw a number of pyramids on the plain, but they were not 1,000 feet high, as Gaussman had reported, only about 200 feet high, less than half the height of the Great Pyramid. They were flat-topped, and made of clay baked to the consistency of stone. Trees and other vegetation had been planted on them. Hausdorf realised that he was standing in a kind of crater at the top, suggesting that a chamber had collapsed.

On two subsequent visits, Hausdorf examined sixteen pyramids, and he claims to have counted a hundred. Professor Wang Zhijun, director of the Banpo Museum, who discussed

The so-called ‘White Pyramid’ of China is located at a Golden Section division of the North Pole and equator distance.

them with him, seemed to feel that they might be part of a sacred system of feng shui lines, a Chinese variation of leys. The professor estimated that they dated from about 2,500
BC
– the time of the pyramids of Giza. Hausdorf was unable to visit the White Pyramid of Xian himself, and admitted that he was not sure of its existence.

Rand was investigating phi sites when he heard about the White Pyramid. He found the city of Xian, in Shansi province, in his
Times Atlas,
but had no idea how far away the White Pyramid might be. As a speculation, he wondered if it might be a phi distance from the pole, and worked out that this should be 3,337.2 nautical miles, which would be 34 degrees, 23 minutes north.

A few days later, he rang Shawn Montgomery in Toronto to talk about his latest investigations. He mentioned the White Pyramid, and his difficulty finding its precise coordinates.

‘Oh, I have that,’ said Shawn. ‘It’s in Bruce Cathie’s book. I’ll get it for you.’ And moments later, he was back with the location: 34 degrees, 26 minutes north – only 3 minutes (or 3 nautical miles) from Rand’s location.

It seemed that Cathie had succeeded in getting his hands on some satellite photographs of the pyramids. What was even more exciting was that there was, in fact, another pyramid on the exact spot that Rand had calculated – 34 degrees, 23 minutes north. He points out that the Lebanese village of Ehdin, where the O’Briens located Kharsag, is also at this latitude and is 5 degrees east of Giza.

So again Rand’s blueprint method pinpointed a sacred site.

But what was its location with regard to the old North Pole in Hudson Bay? Rand plugged the numbers into the ‘How Far Is It?’ site on the Web, and waited with his fingers crossed. When the answer appeared on the screen, he gave a chortle of delight. During the Hudson Bay Pole, the White Pyramid was at 5 degrees north, precisely the same latitude as Byblos, a city sacred to both the Egyptians and the Phoenicians.

Rand’s email describing his find ended: ‘It seems to me that the very position of the Chinese pyramids suggests an advanced knowledge of the earth’s dimensions, coupled with an ability to determine these distances within very small margins of error.’

What is even more significant is that people in China had possessed this knowledge of the surface of the globe at a time when, according to historians, it was completely isolated from the rest of the world.

Rand told me his reason for searching for Golden Section sites:

The geometry of Rennes-le-Château is, as we have seen, pentagonal, and pentagonal geometry is, as Lincoln points out, linked with phi, the Golden Section. Did this mean that the Rennes-le-Château site was 100,000 years old? Almost certainly not, since its pentagonal geometry is natural, not man-made. But Rand’s blueprint theory suggests that Enoch’s ‘angels’ (i.e., geologists), making their survey at the time of the Hudson Bay Pole, recognised that Rennes-le-Château was one of the most unusual sites in the world, not only because its geometry was pentagonal, reflecting the Golden Section, but also because it had been at a Golden Section site at the time of the Yukon Pole. It would certainly have deserved one of their ‘markers’, upon which later generations would build their sacred sites.

Other sacred sites match this pattern. Abydos, the ‘birthplace of Osiris’, Cuzco, in the Andes, and Nippur, the holiest Sumerian city, were all located at the equator during the Yukon Pole but must have been constructed only a few thousand years ago. Rennes-le-Château is in good company, but differs in one critical respect: being centred on a natural pen-tacle, it would inevitably be regarded as sacred.

This, then, was Rand’s reason for including Rennes-le-Château in the blueprint; Lincoln’s
Key to the Sacred Pattern
confirmed that it is one of the most remarkable sites in our book, a natural ‘magic landscape’.

Oddly enough, M. Plantard refused to confirm Lincoln’s insight. Although it was obvious that he and Cherisey were startled that Lincoln had discovered the pentagonal geometry
in the Saunière parchments, Plantard would simply not enlarge. On the contrary, when Lincoln asked him about the hidden codes, Plantard made the incredible remark that the parchments were ‘confections’ concocted by his friend Cherisey for a ten-minute television film made some years previously19 Quite rightly, Lincoln refused to swallow this. The incredible complexity of the code left no doubt that it had taken a very long time and a great deal of skill to prepare.

There seems little doubt that it was the original aim of Plantard – and the ‘Priory’ – to bring this mystery to public attention. De Sède originally told Lincoln: ‘We hoped it might interest someone like you.’20 Yet now Lincoln had got his teeth into the subject, and had discovered the pentagonal geometry, Plantard seemed to feel he had been
too
successful and wanted to backtrack.

If so, he must have been delighted with the reaction to Andrews and Schellenberger’s book
The Tomb of God.
The thesis of that book was that the real secret of Rennes-le-Château was the location of the tomb of Jesus, at the foot of a mountain called Pech Cardou, 3 miles east of Rennes-le-Château. The BBC programme about the book was, to put it mildly, somewhat sceptical, and took the view that Plantard was an impostor, and that the whole Rennes-le-Château mystery was a hoax – a major change of viewpoint since Lincoln’s original programmes.

After I had watched the merciless debunking on television, I commented to my wife: ‘Well, that looks like the end of the Rennes-le-Château mystery’ But on reflection, I saw that this is not so. The programme might have shown – or set out to show – that the Priory of Sion was a recent invention, that the parchments were probably forgeries of de Cherisey, and that Plantard was probably an impostor, but that still left the mystery untouched. How had Saunière become rich overnight? What had he discovered in the Visigothic pillar? The more I thought of it, the more I saw that the essence of the mystery remained, whether M. Plantard was an impostor or not.

But was he an impostor? Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince
laid out the case against him in
The Templar Revelation.
He came to prominence in occupied Paris in 1942, as the Grand Master of a quasi-Masonic order called the Order Alpha-Galates, which was ‘markedly uncritical’ of the Nazis – in fact, the Nazis seemed to approve of it. But then, they would have; part of Himmler’s job was to establish that the Germans had a noble origin in the remote days of the Norse sagas and to create a modern mystical order with its roots in the Aryan past. Pierre Plantard, whom Picknett and Prince describe as ‘a one-time draughtsman for a stove-fitting firm, who allegedly had difficulty paying the rent from time to time’, then changed his name to Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair. He played an important part in bringing about the return to power of General de Gaulle in 1958. In 1956, the Priory of Sion had begun depositing ‘enigmatic documents’ in the Bibliothèque Nationale. The implication was that these documents had been concocted as part of the ‘hoax’.

In writing this chapter, I have reread Lincoln’s four books –
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, The Messianic Legacy
(both with Leigh and Baigent),
The Holy Place
and
Key to the Sacred Pattern –
have studied again his television programmes on Saunière and the Priory, and reread such books as Picknett and Prince’s
The Templar Relevation,
David Wood’s
Genisis21
and Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe’s
The Holy Grail Revealed.22
And I can see no reason whatever for believing that the Priory of Sion is some kind of hoax, or that Pierre Plantard is not exactly who he says he is.

Lincoln himself certainly felt doubts; he describes, in
The Messianic Legacy,23,
how he and his co-authors went along to see Plantard in Paris with the specific intention of confronting him with some major contradictions, including two apparently discrepant birth certificates, one of which named him as ‘Plantard’ and the other as ‘Plantard de Saint-Clair’. Plantard, far from being embarrassed, answered each point with precise explanations: the birth certificate that gave his name simply as Plantard and also the profession of his father as a
‘valet de
chambre’
was explained as the substitution of falsified information to deceive the Gestapo, which was common during the war. When Lincoln and his friends went to the Mairie to confront officials with this explanation, they readily agreed with Plantard.

Lincoln
—
and I in turn
—
concluded that Plantard really was Plantard de Saint-Clair, and that there is every probability that the story of the Priory of Sion is true, from its inception in 1090 to Jean Cocteau and Plantard. (In
The Shadow of the Templars,
Lincoln filmed inside the church of Nôtre Dame de France, near Leicester Square in London, which has a mural of the crucifixion by Cocteau, pointing out the irrelevant rose at the foot of the cross
—
symbol of the Templars
—
and other evidence that Cocteau was indeed a member of the Priory of Sion.)

Lincoln himself writes an introduction to one of the oddest, but most interesting, books about Rennes-le-Château,
Genisis,
by David Wood, who had made another curious discovery in the area: five churches (including Rennes-le-Château) fell on an exact circle. Wood found that these were connected by a pentacle geometry. Lincoln writes (in
Key to the Sacred Pattern):
‘It was now clear that my discovery of the Pentacle of Mountains was but the first glimpse of something much more complex. Here was proof that there had been a conscious and highly skilled geometric plan…’ Oddly enough, Wood ignored the pentacle of mountains discovered by Lincoln.