A prime example of this questionable theorising concerns the magnificent Cambodian city of Angkor, the centrepiece of which is the vast Hindu temple of Angkor Wat, the largest religious building the world has ever known. Angkor was the capital city of the Khmer Empire that dominated Indo-China between 800 and 1500 CE. The city itself is surrounded by an enormous array of other temples and shrines, all staggeringly beautiful and superbly crafted.
Hancock seized upon Angkor as a perfect example of ‘as above, so below’ — the ancient idea that the heavens were in some way mirrored on Earth. He claims that certain of the temples and shrines were deliberately positioned to represent the northern constellation of Draco (the Dragon), in much the same way as he believes the pyramids at Giza mirror the stars of Orion’s Belt. He says that not only do the buildings reflect the composition of Draco but that the orientation of the groundplan was intended to show the constellation as it would have been at dawn on the spring equinox in - not too surprisingly - 10,500 BCE.
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A pause for thought reveals that Hancock’s Angkor scenario is surely the least credible of all of his examples supporting the 10,500 BCE theory. For a start, Angkor was a brand new city, created by the Khmers after their rise to power in the ninth century CE. Most of its temples date from after the year 1000 CE; Angkor Wat, for example, was built as late as the twelfth century. Hancock has claimed that the pyramids had been laid out according to a grand design that had been created 8000 years before. This stretches credulity to breaking point. Surely even the most robust mystery school tradition, in which secret plans were handed down to initiates from generation to generation, would have had major problems in keeping such an agenda alive over such a huge number of years. Now we are asked to believe that the same master plan was put into effect at Angkor, 3,500 years after the pyramids were built and 11,500 years after the plan was first created.
The so-called alignment between Angkor and Draco does not in fact exist. Hancock has been very selective, taking only certain of the temples to use in his groundplan and leaving all those that fail to fit his scheme out of the picture entirely — but even so the resulting shape only roughly corresponds to Draco. Individual temples and individual stars simply do not match up, yet Hancock is claiming that the builders somehow created precise matches between them.
The ease with which, in our view, Hancock’s theories can be discredited does a great disservice to the very subject that he is ostensibly trying to promote: serious debate about the undoubtedly real mysteries of mankind’s ancient past. In the very act of dismissing them there is a danger of throwing out the baby with the bath water, of rejecting any daring new hypothesis about our past, and of condemning the original evidence - the anomalies that intrigued Hancock in the first place. It would be a terrible shame to let dubious theorising bring the whole field into disrepute: there are real mysteries and challenges to the accepted historical paradigm. Academia does not have all the answers.
The work of both Bauval and Hancock is riddled with subjectivity, with an insistence on the importance of the year 10,500 BCE, although almost all of the arguments in its favour simply cannot be supported. Despite the flaws in their arguments, they appear to be convinced that something of great historic significance happened then, something that has a relevance to us today.
Selling Cayce
A clue may lie in the prophecies of America’s ‘Sleeping Prophet’, the psychic Edgar Cayce (1877-1945). Both Bauval and Hancock make apparently casual allusions to him without actually endorsing his psychic information.
According to the standard story - which, as we will see, only approximates to the whole truth — Cayce was an ordinary, God-fearing Kentucky-born citizen who wanted to be a minister but failed to show the required aptitude for book learning. He became a stationery salesman, but his public reputation grew from his talent for falling into trances - ‘sleeping’ — and while in that altered state, diagnosing illnesses and advising on treatment. This later expanded into him giving ‘life readings’, either for individuals or to a circle of followers, in which he predicted the future and gave information about the past. Interestingly, while in normal consciousness his views were those of a mainstream Christian, but while entranced he frequently told of past lives — reincarnation — and claimed to have once been a high-ranking priest of ancient Egypt himself, one Ra Ta.
According to Cayce, the civilisation of Atlantis flourished for some 200,000 years, and finally came to an end around 10,500 BCE. He claimed that some of the survivors travelled to Egypt, where they built the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid between 10,490 and 10,390 BCE. This was also linked to an exodus from the Caucasian Mountains to Egypt, led by Cayce’s previous incarnation Ra Ta, displacing the original, yellow-skinned natives of that country. The Atlanteans arrived in Egypt shortly afterwards.
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Cayce’s influence on the New Egyptologists extends well beyond sketchy details of a putative past life. He was responsible for the introduction of the single most emotive theme to run through many of the most recent high-profile books about Egypt: the idea of the Hall of Records, a hidden chamber somewhere in Egypt, containing ancient records of mankind, perhaps including the secrets of Atlantis. According to Cayce the refugee Atlanteans arrived in Egypt after the sinking of the island in 10,700 BCE, bringing with them the records of their civilisation. In 10,500 BCE these were deposited in the ‘Hall of Records’, also called the ‘Pyramid of Records’ - an underground pyramid. These contain ‘the records of the people of One God from the beginning of man’s entrance into the earth’.
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The Hall of Records, enclosed in its underground pyramid, lies between the Sphinx and the Nile, connected by a passage running from the right forepaw of the Sphinx - according to Cayce.
In our present
fin de siècle
era, a rising Hall of Records hysteria is carefully being whipped up by books, videos and the instant whispering machine of the Internet. Where is this fabled place located? What does it contain? Who will find it - and what will happen when they do? Already this has become, in every possible sense, the modem quest for the Holy Grail: the ancient, elusive object of the heart’s desire is somewhere waiting to be found by the select few, like the mythical Grail knights, who will suffer and fight in order to find it and unlock its secrets. Some will no doubt die in the attempt, but the Chosen will eventually win through, and when the Grail Hall is uncovered, somehow magically the whole of our civilisation will be transformed. We shall understand our past and even our future. We shall suddenly see humankind for what it is, and know the truth about the gods. Oh how we shall be glad, and be grateful to the Grail Hall knights who bring these secrets to us! And because they are chosen, and we are not, we shall see them in the new light of the gods themselves.
The basis of this comes from Cayce. He linked the finding of the Hall of Records to the triggering of global changes: ‘After the end of the cycle [in 1998], there is to be another change in the earth’s position, with the return of the Great Initiate for the culmination of the prophecies.’
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He also said that 1998 marks the beginning of the ‘time of preparation for the coming of the Master of the World’.
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Many have associated this statement with the Second Coming of Jesus, although perhaps it is strange that Cayce, of all people, did not explicitly do so himself. In fact, he also believed it referred to the emergence of a new race of human beings.
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According to the Sleeping Prophet the end result will be:
With the changes that will be wrought, true Americanism, the universal thought that is expressed and manifested in the brotherhood of man, as in the Masonic order, will be the eventual rule in the settlement of affairs in the world.
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Cayce may have been right, and any person who bravely throws himself behind the prophecies may have the right idea. Certainly, neither of us has any objection in principle to the idea of accurate psychic prediction or the miraculous, nor to the idea that information from our very remote past may impinge in some real and even apocalyptic way on our own times. If Cayce was right then all eyes should be turned to the various expeditions that, overtly and covertly, are now seeking to locate the Hall of Records. But that depends on whether Cayce was right ...
Of all his ‘readings’, collected from 1909 onwards, 14,249 have been preserved for posterity, but despite claims by his followers that his predictions are almost entirely accurate — close to one hundred per cent’
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— it is actually hard to find one that is! Edgar Cayce must have one of the most dismal track records of any alleged prophet.
For example, in February 1932 he was asked to give predictions of the most significant events over the next fifty years. Cayce predicted the ‘breaking up of many powers’ in 1936.
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When asked to be more specific about which powers, he named Russia, the United States, Japan and the United Kingdom. Astonishingly, Cayce’s supporters regard this as a success, claiming that it accurately foretells the beginning of the events that would lead to the Second World War. In
Edgar Cayce on Prophecy,
produced by the Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE), the organisation of Cayce followers, Mary Ellen Carter points out that the following events happened in 1936: the abdication crisis in Britain; the start of the Spanish Civil War; the first of Stalin’s great purges in Russia; and the formation of the German-Italian fascist alliance.
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Only two of these events happened in countries singled out by Cayce, and it is certainly debatable whether the British abdication crisis constitutes ‘the breaking up’ of the nation. The most significant events concerning the imminent global conflict were those in Spain and the German-Italian alliance - but Cayce had mentioned none of these countries. Even then, none of this constitutes a great ‘breaking up of powers’ in 1936. And what happened to the Second World War? Cayce simply did not predict the coming global conflict.
If ‘readings’ highlighted by the followers of Edgar Cayce for their amazing accuracy look doubtful when placed under scrutiny, on other occasions, he could be even vaguer. When asked in 1932 about the outcome of Gandhi’s campaign for Indian independence, he replied that it ‘depends on individuals’.
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And during the Second World War, someone asked him ‘What is Hitler’s destiny?’ to which the great prophet answered ‘Death!’
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At least here he had every chance of being ‘close to one hundred per cent’ accurate. But astonishingly, it was regarded as another of his successes. In 1943, Cayce predicted that within twenty-five years — i.e. by 1968 - China would not only become more democratic, but also Christian. Astoundingly, this was published in an ARE book in 1968, which implicitly argues that what Cayce really meant was that China would be purged by Maoism and civil war so that democracy and Christianity would be able to take root.
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Perhaps it is time to cross that prophecy off the list as well.
Another much-vaunted prediction concerns the re-emergence of the sunken Atlantis. On 28 June 1940, Cayce made one of his most famous pronouncements: ‘Poseidia [one of his terms for Atlantis] to rise again. Expect it in ’68 or ‘69. Not so far away!’
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This prediction, it was claimed, was fulfilled when an enigmatic roadlike stone feature, which could have been manmade, was discovered under the water off the coast of Bimini Island in the Bahamas in 1969. Had the discovery of the ‘Bimini Road’ made Cayce’s prediction come true? Perhaps. But according to Andrew Collins and Simon Cox, several of the key figures who discovered the Bimini Road were hardly disinterested, as they were members of ARE, specifically looking for some form of confirmation of Cayce’s readings about Atlantis and the Bahamas.
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Moreover, the Bimini Islanders had known about the road for years and had actually offered to show it to the ‘discoverers’. In any case, the discovery of some — admittedly tantalising — anomalous features off the Bimini coast hardly constitutes the ‘rising’ of Atlantis.
Cayce also predicted that the secret of how the Great Pyramid was built would be revealed - in 1958.
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If it was disclosed, it must be the best-kept secret of all time. Most of us are still waiting.
Over the centuries many prophecies from people of all beliefs and walks of life have come true. To receive due honour and recognition prophets need evidence of some accuracy. Where Cayce was concerned, apart from some impressive medical ‘readings’, this evidence is sadly lacking. The fact that someone is highly successful with one psychic skill does not automatically mean that they have an equal talent in other psychic areas.
In 1931 Edgar Cayce founded the Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE) to promote his life’s work, with its headquarters at Virginia Beach, Virginia. This remained a fairly small and underfunded organisation until well after his death in 1945. In the early 1970s there seems to have been a sudden influx of wealthy members. ARE is now a rich and powerful body, which has funded archaeological work in Egypt and elsewhere to try to substantiate Cayce’s claims. In fact, ARE has had a major role in shaping modern Egyptology of both mainstream and new varieties. We have seen how Cayce’s insistence on the significance of 10,500 BCE has crept into major works of the New Orthodoxy camp, and their highly flawed evidence for this is now trotted out as fact by most other writers of the genre. But Cayce and ARE also stand behind at least two major figures from the — apparently - opposite camp.
Mark Lehner - who built the mini pyramid for
Secrets of Lost Empires
— is the most prominent American Egyptologist stationed in Egypt today. He is highly respected internationally. His 1997 book
The Complete Pyramids
was hailed as a masterly overview of an only too often thorny subject, and was promoted by many major museums, including the British Museum. It is less well known that in 1974 he wrote a book for ARE entitled
The Egyptian Heritage, based on the Edgar Cayce Readings,
which attempted to reconcile Cayce’s pronouncements with the findings of modern Egyptology. According to Lehner in his early days, the Great Pyramid was built as a repository of knowledge, and a ‘Temple of Initiation for the White Brotherhood’.
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