24
ASTRONOMY AND GEOMETRY IN THE AFTERLIFE
I’M NOT SUGGESTING THAT THE religion of ancient Egypt was brought from there to ancient North America and I’m not suggesting that the religion of ancient North America was brought to ancient Egypt. I accept the scientific consensus that the Old World and the New World have been isolated from one another, with no significant genetic or cultural contacts, for more than 12,000 years. Also, the similarities between the religious systems practiced in ancient Egypt and ancient North America are not such as could be explained by direct “missionary” or “conversion” activities at any time, whether relatively early or relatively late. There are too many stark and obvious differences, too deeply adapted to local conditions and local cultural circumstances, for this to be the case.
What, then, are we to make of the striking package of shared beliefs and symbols reviewed in the previous chapter? In both cases we have a journey of the soul to a staging ground in the west, a “leap” to a portal in the constellation Orion, transition through that portal to the Milky Way, a journey along the Milky Way during which challenges and ordeals are faced, and a judgment at which the soul’s destiny is decided.
Just as the differences rule out direct influence so, too, in my view, the similarities are too many and too obvious to be dismissed as mere “coincidences.” A better explanation needs to be sought and in this respect it’s helpful to remember that analogous situations arise in genetics. 355 Sometimes, for example, two seemingly completely different groups of people, separated by huge distances and formidable geographic barriers and with zero opportunity to trade DNA, nevertheless turn out to share certain distinct clusters of genes. In these cases the answer very often lies in an earlier population, perhaps with no living members today—a “ghost” population—that was the remote common ancestor of both otherwise unrelated populations in which the surprising genetic resemblances have been found.
In the realm of archaeology, E. A. Wallis Budge faced a comparable problem with similarities he had identified between the Mesopotamian deity Sin, a moon god, and the ancient Egyptian deity Thoth, also associated with the moon. The resemblances, in Budge’s view, are “too close to be accidental. It would be wrong to say that the Egyptians borrowed from the Sumerians or the Sumerians from the Egyptians, but it may be submitted that the literati of both peoples borrowed their theological systems from some common but exceedingly ancient source.”1
Walter Emery, late Edwards Professor of Egyptology at the University of London, also looked into similarities between ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia. He found it impossible to explain them as the result of the direct influence of one culture upon the other and concluded:
The impression we get is of an indirect connection, and perhaps the existence of a third party, whose influence spread to both the Euphrates and the Nile. … Modern scholars have tended to ignore the possibility of immigration to both regions from some hypothetical and as yet undiscovered area. [However] a third party whose cultural achievements were passed on independently to Egypt and Mesopotamia would best explain the common features and fundamental differences between the two civilizations.2
What I’m suggesting is essentially the same. The hypothesis that best explains the puzzling common features and fundamental differences between the religions of ancient Egypt and ancient North America is that an even more ancient religion, of as yet unidentified provenance, was ancestral to both. The presence of its “DNA” in Egypt and North America also has chronological implications. In view of the evidence that the Old and New Worlds were isolated for more than 12,000 years, from the end of the Ice Age until the time of Columbus, the remote common ancestor of the religions that 356 would later blossom in the Nile and Mississippi River valleys must therefore be more than 12,000 years old. I suggest that this ancestral religion—perhaps system would be a better word—used astronomical and geometrical memes expressed in architectural projects as carriers through which it reproduced itself across cultures and down through the ages, and that it was a characteristic of the system that it could lie dormant for millennia and then mysteriously reappear in full flower.
The ayahuasca-inspired art of the Shipibo, in the Peruvian Amazon, is noted for its complex geometrical imagery.
Though it is not my purpose to argue this case here, the possibility that the system still hibernates in some form or another in the twenty-first century cannot be ruled out, nor the possibility that it might at some point be awakened again in a garb suited to its time.
Indeed, might we not already be seeing the first intimations of this with the explosion of interest all around the world in ayahuasca as a teacher plant, and in the parallel growth in public exposure to the initiating geometries of ayahuasca-inspired art?
The notion that human agents were behind the spread of the system is not contradicted by this suggestion. On the contrary, the system may itself have 357 had its origins in visionary experiences, in which case those responsible for its spread would surely have made use of “plant allies” wherever they could find them.
ANSWERS IN UNEXPECTED PLACES?
BECAUSE OF THE BURNING OF the library of Alexandria and the frenzied despoiling of the temples by fanatical Christian mobs in the fifth and sixth centuries, much of the legacy of wisdom that made ancient Egypt the “light of the world” has been lost. Nevertheless, because they carved so much in stone, and wrote so much down on papyrus and other media, and because they were enormously prolific artists and builders for more than 3,000 years, the ancient Egyptians have left us a vast legacy of knowledge about their spiritual ideas.
The immense destruction, genocide, and near-total obliteration of indigenous cultures unleashed in North America during the European conquest was a matter of an entirely different order—a full-blown, fast moving cultural cataclysm, as a result of which we’re left often with no record at all or with huge gaps in the record. Thus, although we can be sure the great earthworks and mounds of the Mississippi Valley were connected to beliefs about death and the afterlife, no myths or traditions have survived to explain why it was essential to these beliefs that geoglyphs and mounds should be built or why these structures should incorporate complex geometry and astronomical alignments.
After all a vast expenditure of energy, effort, ingenuity, manpower, and organizational skills was required to create a Cahokia or a Moundville or a Newark Earthworks or, for that matter, a Watson Brake, so it makes no sense that such projects would have been undertaken without some enormously important motive that inspired all the participants. In the absence of surviving evidence of what that motive was in North America, could it be possible that the ancient Egyptian funerary texts might provide an answer?
SQUARES, RECTANGLES, ELLIPSES, AND CIRCLES
I REMEMBERED FROM MY EARLIER encounters with the texts that they included references to geometry and sought out those references now.
A few examples.
In chapter 108 of the Book of the Dead we read of the “Mountain of Sunrise … in the eastern heaven. It hath dimensions of 30,000 cubits in length and 15,000 cubits in breadth.”3
That’s a perfect 2-by-1 rectangle, no matter what system of measure you convert it into, equivalent roughly to 15,000 meters by 7,500 meters.
Strange “mountain!”
In chapter 81 there’s an obscure geometrical reference to “four sides of the domain of Ra and the width of the earth four times.”4
Ra is the Sun God and it is the business of “geometry”—literally “earth measuring”—to know the “width of the earth.”
Turning to chapter 110 of the Book of the Dead, we read:
The god Horus maketh himself to be strong like unto the Hawk which is one thousand cubits in length and two thousand cubits in width.5
It seems a scribe copying from an older source document mixed up the concepts of length and width but what is defined here is nonetheless a 2-by-1 rectangle with dimensions of approximately 1,000 meters by 500 meters.
In the Book of What Is in the Duat another rectangular district is mentioned. Named Sekhet-Hetepet, its long and short dimensions are so close that it is almost, and in the vignettes appears visually to be, a square. Its shape is defined by an unbroken water-filled moat. The land within it is intersected by canals.6
359 Sekhet-Hetepet (Papyrus of Nebseni, BRITISH MUSEUM).
A second district of the Duat, named “Tchau,” is “440 cubits in length and 440 cubits in width.”7
That’s a perfect square, no matter what system of measure you convert it into, equivalent to roughly 220 meters by 220 meters.
Later, in the Seventh Division of the Duat, another square enclosure of identical dimensions is encountered.8
In the Land of Sokar, part of the Fifth Division, and the location of the Judgment scene, we meet a “goddess of the apex.”9 In that same division we also encounter “the god of his angle” whose hieroglyph incorporates a right triangle,10 fundamental for surveying and trigonometry. The heart of the Land of Sokar, which rests on the backs of two man-headed lion sphinxes set tail to tail, is formed by an elongated ellipse over the top of which looms a pyramid with its apex in the form of the head of a goddess.11
Turning to the Coffin Texts, we find a gigantic ship or “bark” described with the following dimensions:
A million cubits are half the length of the bark; starboard, bow, stern and larboard are four million cubits.12
That’s around 500 kilometers for “half the length of the bark” and a combined total of 2,000 kilometers for its other listed parts, a geometrical progression with a ratio of 4.
Among the squares, rectangles, and ellipses of ancient Egypt’s starry Netherworld there are also perfect circles everywhere.
Staying with the Coffin Texts, we read of “the circle of the Pillar of Horus which is north of the opening of darkness.”13
In the Book of the Dead we meet “the gods of the Querti”—literally the “Circles”—to whom the soul on its afterlife journey was obliged to sing hymns of praise.14
In the Book of What Is in the Duat, in the Fifth Division and associated with Ra, the Sun God, we are told of a “Circle” that “unites itself with the 361 roads of the Duat.”15 In the Seventh Division a journey is made “in the path of the Circle of Osiris,”16 while in the Eighth Division we learn of “the Circles of the hidden gods who are on their sand.”17 In addition, five “Circles of the Duat,” each entered through a “door,” are described.18
And throughout the texts we hear repeatedly of “the hidden Circle of the Duat,”19 a location of great significance, as we shall see. There are indications that the Duat itself was considered to be circular in form. As Wallis Budge points out, there is a scene in the Book of Gates that depicts “the body of Osiris bent round in a circle and the hieroglyphics enclosed within it declare that it is the Duat.”20
SUN AND MOON
AS WELL AS MULTIPLE REFERENCES to stars and constellations, too numerous and all-pervasive in the funerary texts to require special mention here,21 the moon is frequently encountered on the journey through the Duat. In the Second Division, for example, a vignette shows a boat, the purpose of which, as Budge describes it, is “to support the disk of the full moon. … By the disk kneels a god who is ‘supporting Maat,’ which is symbolized by a feather, and is described by the word MAAT.”22
Central to the ancient Egyptian judgment scene described in the previous chapter, the concept of Maat enshrines notions of cosmic justice, harmony, and balance. Its association with the moon is appropriate since the moon indeed plays a key “balancing” or “stabilising” role for the earth.23
The sun is also often figured as being carried aboard a boat and also features prominently in the Duat, blazing an indomitable path through its terrors each night, a symbol of hope and resurrection in whose company, if they are fortunate, the souls of some of the deceased might be permitted to ride. That much might be expected, but what is interesting are passages in the texts that help us to understand the special attention paid by the ancient Egyptians to the solstices, with several of the greatest temples of the Nile Valley, notably the Temple of Karnak at Luxor, incorporating spectacular solstitial alignments.
A defining characteristic of the solstices, around June 21 and December 21 when the sun reaches its northernmost and southernmost rising and setting points, is that the pendulum swing of the solar disk along the horizon appears to pause or “stand still,” without further northward or southward movement, for an interval of 3 days. In this connection let’s recall the peculiarly geometrical “Mountain of Sunrise.” The passage concerning it in chapter 108 of the Book of the Dead that I cited earlier continues as follows:
There is a serpent on the brow of that Mountain, and he measureth 30 cubits in length; the first 8 cubits of its length are covered with flints and with shining metal plates. … Now after Ra hath stood still he inclineth his eyes towards him and a stoppage of the boat of Ra taketh place, and a mighty sleep cometh upon him that is in the boat.24
It’s difficult to interpret this passage in any other way than a colorful, lyrical, poetic description of a solstice.
Similarly, in the Coffin Texts we read:
I am here from the lifting up of the horizon that I may show Ra at the gates of the sky. … A path is prepared for Ra when he comes to a halt.25
Again, what else but a solstice could possibly bring Ra, the almighty Sun God, to a halt?
EARTHWORKS
THERE ARE CAUSEWAYS IN THE ancient Egyptian Netherworld.
“I will travel on that great causeway,” proclaims the deceased in Spell 629 of the Coffin Texts, “on which those whose shapes are great travel.”26
In Utterance 676 of the Pyramid Texts, in a passage that calls to mind a pilgrimage with relics, we read:
Do for him what you did for his brother Osiris on that day of putting the bones in order, of making good the soles, and of traveling the causeway.27
And in Utterance 718:
The Mourning Woman summons you as Isis, the Mooring-post calls to you as Nepthys, you having appeared upon your causeway.28
Very frequently when causeways are mentioned it’s in specific association with mounds. The above passage continues:
May you travel around your Horite Mounds [i.e., mounds consecrated to the god Horus], may you travel around your Sethite Mounds [i.e., mounds consecrated to the god Seth]. You have your spirit, O my father the King … make yourself into a spirit.29
In Utterance 470 the deceased informs the soul of his mother, the “Lady of the Secret Land:”
“I am going to the sky that I may see my father.”
“To the High Mounds?” she asks, “or to the Mounds of Seth?”
“The High Mounds,” the deceased replies, “will pass me on to the Mounds of Seth.”30
It’s a very curious, obviously coded language, beyond the reach of straightforward translation, that continues throughout the funerary texts.
As well as Horite Mounds and Sethite Mounds there are the Mounds of Osiris,31 and also the Southern Mounds and the Northern Mounds that the soul must travel to and traverse on its journey through the Duat.32 And the structure in the Fifth Division of the Duat that Budge refers to as a pyramid is also sometimes described as a “hollow mound,”33 and as a “mound of earth.”34
In the Coffin Texts we hear of “the gods on their mounds,”35 and later that “mounds will be towns and towns will be mounds.”36
There are also frequent references to “cities of the gods,” as in:
A divine city hath been built for me; I know it and I know the name thereof. Sekhet-Aaru is its name.37
Or:
I come from the city of the god, the primeval region.38
I mention these “city” references because if towns can be mounds and mounds can be towns, then “cities” presumably can also be towns and therefore mounds as well? Moreover, the whole picture immediately becomes much more complicated when we read of a god who “setteth the stars in their places”39 only for the translator to immediately qualify that the word he’s chosen to render as “places” actually means “towns.” What this god is doing, therefore—though it seemed an impossible concept to the translator—is literally setting stars down to earth in “towns.”
And we already know that towns can be mounds and mounds can be towns. That both should also be stars is not at all a contradiction if you just … think like an Egyptian!
HOW TO EQUIP A SPIRIT FOR JOURNEYING
THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS SAW THEIR lives as their opportunity to prepare for the trials of the journey through the Duat that they would have to confront as souls after death. The stakes were high, with both eternal annihilation and immortality being possible outcomes of that journey. There was undoubtedly an ethical aspect to the Judgment, as we’ve seen, but something else was also required, some gnosis, some deep understanding, and very strangely it turns out to be the case that those who truly sought the prize of immortality—“the life of millions of years”—were called upon first to build on the ground perfect copies “of the hidden circle of the Duat in the body of Nut [the sky].”40
Whoever shall make an exact copy of these forms, and shall know it, shall be a spirit well-equipped both in heaven and earth, unfailingly, and regularly and eternally.41
Whosoever shall make a copy thereof, and shall know it upon earth, it shall act as a magical protector for him both in heaven and upon earth.42
If copies of these things be made according to the ordinances of the hidden house, and after the manner of that which is ordered in the hidden house, they shall act as magical protectors to the man who maketh them.43
He who hath no knowledge of the whole or part of the secret representations of the Duat shall be condemned to destruction.44
Whosoever shall know these secret images shall be in the condition of a spirit who is equipped for journeying.45
Wrapped up in the colorful archaic language is a belief—or perhaps the inculcation of a belief—that the immortal destiny of the soul can be influenced by an architectural project to copy on the ground a “hidden” or “secret” part of the Duat sky region, the coordinates of which are set down in archives in the “hidden house.”
Egyptologists already accept that the Milky Way and the constellation Orion on its west bank are key markers in the celestial geography of the Duat, and in 1996 Robert Bauval and I made the case in our book The Message of the Sphinx that the constellation Leo was very much part of the Duat as well. To cut a long story short, our argument, which we stand by today, is that the ideas expressed in the funerary texts were indeed manifested in architecture in Egypt in the form of the Great Pyramid, the leonine Sphinx, and the underground corridors and chambers beneath these monuments.
The complex was constructed, we believe, as a three-dimensional replica, model, or simulation of the intensely geometrical Fifth Division of the Duat, also known as the “Kingdom of Sokar” and always regarded as an especially hidden and secret place.46 Moreover, we suggest that what motivated the population to support this gigantic project was precisely the promise of thus obtaining that “magical protection,” that power to become “a spirit equipped for journeying,” that would ensure a successful afterlife passage through the Duat.
It is not necessary, for the sake of my argument, to enter into any debate about the merits or demerits of such beliefs. It is enough to say that they were clearly held in ancient Egypt over an immensely long span of time and that the proof of this is in the books of the dead and in the Giza architectural complex. Nor is it controversial to add that it was around the belief system expressed in those texts and monuments that the entire extraordinary civilization of the ancient Nile Valley was organized and mobilized from the very beginning—and since that civilization endured and fed its people and nourished their spirituality for more than 3,000 years, it’s also obvious that at some fundamental level something about the system worked.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
SO WE RETURN TO THE question of why, over a period of many thousands of years, sometimes punctuated by long, culturally barren intervals, huge numbers of architectural projects were undertaken up and down North America’s Mississippi Valley linked to a very distinctive set of beliefs about the afterlife journey of the soul that shared many core elements with the spiritual cosmology of ancient Egypt.
If the resemblances are coincidental, we would not expect the ancient Egyptian funerary texts to provide immediate, sensible answers to some outstanding questions about the monuments of the Mississippi Valley. The fact that they do, in my view, increases the likelihood that we’re looking at a real connection.
Why are the Mississippi Valley sites built on such a gigantic scale and why are celestial alignments of such importance within them?
For the same reasons given in the ancient Egyptian funerary texts for the construction of the sky-ground architecture of the Nile Valley—that the sky is gigantic and the purpose of the architecture is to honor, connect with, and above all “resemble the sky.”
Why are the Orion constellation and the Milky Way so important in the funerary symbolism of the Mississippian culture? And why is the Milky Way the “Path of Souls”?
For the same reason given in the ancient Egyptian funerary texts—that within the general frame of the starry sky it is specifically Orion that hosts the portal through which the soul must pass to reach the “Winding Waterway” that in turn leads the soul onward on its journey through the Land of the Dead.
Why is geometry, and its particular manifestation in the form of rectangular, square, circular, and elliptical enclosures, such a significant element of the Mississippi Valley sites?
For the same reasons given in the ancient Egyptian funerary texts for the distinct geometrical character of the sky-ground architecture of the Nile Valley—geometry is a foundational characteristic of the Land of the Dead and the rectangular, square, circular, and elliptical enclosures are the typical forms of celestial “districts” through which the soul must pass on its afterlife journey.
Why do the Mississippi Valley sites feature causeways and mounds?
For the same reasons given in the ancient Egyptian funerary texts for the incorporation of causeways and mounds in the sky-ground architecture of the Nile Valley—namely, that causeways and mounds are prominent features of the celestial Land of the Dead that it is the purpose of the architecture to replicate on earth.
Why were the peoples of the Mississippi Valley willing to expend such great quantities of treasure and energy on the creation of spectacular sites such as Moundville, Cahokia, and the Newark Earthworks, and why did they take such care to imbue every one of them with intense geometrical characteristics and to ensure that each in its own way “resembled” and formed intimate connections with the sky?
For the same reason given in the ancient Egyptian funerary texts—the belief that if the sky, or some “hidden” or “secret” aspect of it, were NOT copied on the ground (and in some way explored, navigated, and known prior to death), then those souls who had failed to do this necessary work, and thus were not equipped with the knowledge of “the secret representations,” would be “condemned to destruction.”
SKY AND GROUND
WHEN IT COMES TO MOTIVATIONAL techniques, as the Roman Catholic Church demonstrated throughout the Middle Ages, the prospect of eternal damnation can be very effective. I suggest that in ancient Egypt it was the equivalent prospect of “destruction” or “annihilation” of the soul, and the possibility of avoiding such a fate—as spelled out in the funerary texts—that motivated the construction of the sky-ground temples and pyramids of the Nile Valley. They were all, in a sense, gigantic books of the dead in stone and some–the Giza complex in particular—were undoubtedly seen as “actual gateways, or doorways, to the otherworld.”
That phrase, “actual gateways, or doorways, to the otherworld,” is William Romain’s, cited at the end of the previous chapter with reference to the Hopewell earthworks. I quote it again here to emphasize the peculiar interchangeability of spiritual beliefs in the Nile Valley and the Mississippi Valley. Although widely separated in time and space, the ancient inhabitants of these two regions seem to have shared a core set of ideas about the afterlife destiny of the soul and seem, moreover, to have been largely in agreement not only that those ideas should be manifested in architecture, but also on many of the specific characteristics of that architecture, and on the purpose that the architecture was intended to serve.
Thus, while one reproduced Orion’s belt and the constellation of Leo and the other orchestrated complex architectural dances aligned to lunar and solar standstills, the fundamental objective of both was to open portals between sky and ground through which the souls of the dead could pass.
I’m not ruling out the possibility that some of the monuments of the Mississippi Valley are “constellation diagrams”—or constituent parts of “constellation diagrams”—much like the Giza monuments. Indeed Ross Hamilton, as we saw in part 1, has long been of the opinion that Serpent Mound is a terrestrial figure of the constellation Draco. George Lankford, on the other hand, makes a strong case that it represents the constellation Scorpius.47 The point is not whether one is right or wrong, but that both see the possibility that the mounds and earthworks could have been used to represent constellations.
Perhaps we’ll never know for sure, since so much of North America’s pre-Columbian heritage has been destroyed. Nevertheless, efforts are already being made.
Stepping back in time from the Mississippian civilization, for example, William Romain’s detailed studies of the Hopewell lead him to conclude that, in the minds of those who made them:
the Newark Earthworks were a portal to the Otherworld that allowed for interdimensional movement of the soul during certain solar, lunar and stellar configurations.48
He also argues that the “Great Hopewell Road,” an ancient causeway that once ran straight for more than 60 miles between Newark and High Bank (see chapter 20), “was the terrestrial equivalent of, or metaphor for the Milky Way Path of Souls providing a directional component for soul travel to the Realm of the Dead.”49
Further, Romain joins George Lankford in linking Serpent Mound to Scorpius and in concluding that “Serpent Mound was a cognate for the Great Lowerworld Serpent which guarded the Realm of the Dead.”50
What confronts us with the Hopewell, then, as with ancient Egypt and as with the Mississippian civilization, is a Realm of the Dead in the sky and its representation by architectural structures on the ground. It is part of the brilliance of such structures that they can play multiple roles in the cosmic drama. Thus, while the Great Sphinx may be the terrestrial counterpart of the constellation Leo, its gaze also sacralizes the union of heaven and earth at sunrise on the equinoxes. And while Serpent Mound may indeed be the earthly twin of the constellation Scorpius, its open jaws and the oval earthwork between them also serve to unite ground and sky at sunset on the summer solstice.
In this connection, let’s reconsider the reference cited earlier from the Book of the Dead concerning a great serpent on the brow of a mountain that brings the boat of the Sun God Ra to a halt, plunging that deity into a “mighty sleep” with nothing more than a glance.51 It may, of course, be a coincidence, but this description resonates curiously with the situation of Serpent Mound. For what do we encounter there on the bluff above Brush Creek if not a massive serpent effigy with its gaze targeted on the sun at its midsummer standstill? That’s indeed a time, as we’ve seen, when the setting point of the solar disk appears to remain fixed at the same place on the horizon for 3 days, an event that might appropriately be expressed, in mythical language, as a “mighty sleep” brought on by the precisely aimed gaze of the Serpent.
Then, too, the great serpent in the Book of the Dead is described as having “the first 8 cubits of its length”—its head and neck, in other words—“covered with flints and with shining metal plates.”52 The resonance here is with George Lankford’s study of Native American traditions of the Great Horned Water Serpent (see chapter 23), sometimes described as the “Master of the Beneath World” and sometimes as “the Great Serpent with the Red Jewel in its Forehead”—a notion not so very far away from the ancient Egyptian representation in which the creature’s head and neck glitter “with flints and with shining metal.” It is this Great Jeweled Serpent, Lankford concludes, represented as an adversary on the Path of Souls, that is depicted very frequently in Moundville designs where it is directly linked to other imagery associated with the afterlife journey. He also makes a strong case that Serpent Mound is a three-dimensional representation of the same supernatural entity 53 and draws an interesting comparison with myths of the Cherokees describing the Uktena, “a great snake, as large around as a tree-trunk,” with:
a bright blazing crest like a diamond on its forehead, and scales glittering like sparks of fire.54
The same myths also tell us that the gaze of this serpent had the power to “daze” people so that they were stopped in their tracks and could not escape from it,55 and again there is a notable parallel here with the great serpent of the Book of the Dead whose gaze plunges even the Sun into a “mighty sleep.”56
RENEWAL AND REBIRTH
SCHOLARS ARE IN NO DOUBT that the ideas about the afterlife journey of the soul expressed in the ancient Egyptian funerary texts are much older than the surviving inscriptions and extend far back into the oral traditions of the predynastic, pre-literate period before 5,500 years ago.57
Likewise, although we have no hieroglyphs or inscriptions from North America, it’s noteworthy that the same geometrical concerns and the very 371 same alignment to the summer solstice sunset that we see at Serpent Mound, supposedly from the “Adena” period around 2,300 years ago, are also present at Watson Brake 5,500 years ago. And indeed we may say that the sudden burst of mound-building and earthwork construction across the Lower Mississippi Valley between 6,000 and 5,000 years ago is mysterious and unexplained. Like the sudden and fully formed appearance of the high civilization of Egypt, it seems just to have come out of nowhere, with no apparent antecedents, yet already in possession of advanced knowledge.
The earliest mound sites we know of in North America may possibly date back as far as 8,000 years.58 After that the trail goes cold.
But then why should we be surprised? The trail goes cold for a full 1,000 years between the end of the Watson Brake epoch and the beginning of Poverty Point, and it goes cold again several times thereafter, only to reappear reborn and renewed on the far side of each lacuna. The same stop start process, however, also means that we can’t date the inception of the tradition to its oldest manifestations so far found.
First, the archaeology is very far from complete, and given the destruction of so much of the evidence from prehistory, will never be complete—so our ability to figure out what really happened in the North American past is deeply compromised. It may be that there was no mound-building at all before 8,000 years ago, but it could equally well be that the evidence of an earlier mound-building episode has simply been lost.
Second, because we are dealing with a system of ideas that has a proven ability to appear and disappear and reappear again fully formed, we must consider the possibility that it is such a “reappearance” that the archaeological record has identified at the supposed “earliest” mound sites— in other words, that the skills manifest in those already very ancient sites were, as my friend the late John Anthony West used to put it about the civilization of ancient Egypt, “a legacy not a development.”
But a legacy of what? And when? And how is it that it keeps on turning up all around the world, in different places at different times, but always expressing and manifesting the same core ideas?
Once again, the ancient Egyptian texts offer some suggestive answers.
REBIRTH OF A LOST WORLD
THIS TIME IT’S NOT THE funerary texts I’m referring to, but the Edfu Building Texts, so called because they are inscribed on the walls of the Temple of Horus at Edfu in Upper Egypt.
These texts take us back to a very remote period called the “Early Primeval Age of the Gods”59—and these gods, it transpires, were not originally Egyptian,60 but lived on a sacred island, the “Homeland of the Primeval Ones,” in the midst of a great ocean.61 Then, at some unspecified time in the past, an immense cataclysm shook the earth and a flood poured over this island, where “the earliest mansions of the gods” had been founded,62 destroying it utterly, submerging all its holy places, and killing most of its divine inhabitants.63 Some survived, however, and we are told that this remnant set sail in their ships (for the texts leave us in no doubt that these “gods” of the early primeval age were navigators 64) to “wander” the world.65 Their purpose in doing so was nothing less than to re-create and revive the essence of their lost homeland,66 to bring about, in short:
The resurrection of the former world of the gods …67
The re-creation of a destroyed world.68
For those readers not already familiar with the enigma of the Edfu Building Texts, and who would like to know more, I give a detailed analysis in my book Magicians of the Gods. I won’t repeat here the case I made there, nor support it with the evidence presented there. The takeaway is that the texts invite us to consider the possibility that the survivors of a lost civilization, thought of as “gods” but manifestly human, set about “wandering” the world in the aftermath of an extinction-level global cataclysm. By happenstance it was primarily hunter-gatherer populations, the peoples of the mountains, jungles, and deserts—“the unlettered and the uncultured,” as Plato so eloquently put it in his account of the end of Atlantis —who had been “spared the scourge of the deluge.”69 Settling among them, the wanderers entertained the desperate hope that their high civilization could be restarted, or that at least something of its knowledge, wisdom, and spiritual ideas could be passed on so that mankind in the post-cataclysmic world would not be compelled to “begin again like children, in complete ignorance of what happened in early times.”70
In this Edfu account of the wandering civilizers am I wrong to be very strongly reminded of the Tukano origin myth, given in chapter 18? It tells of how “Helmsman” and “Daughter of the Sun” brought the gifts of fire, horticulture, pottery-making, and other skills to the first humans to enter the Amazon while other “supernaturals” traveled over all the rivers, explored the remote hill ranges, identified the best places for settlement, and “prepared the land so that mortal human creatures might live on it.”
Before returning whence they had come these so-called supernaturals:
Left their lasting imprint on many spots so that future generations would have ineffable proof of their earthly days and would forever remember them and their teachings.71
These same spots, very frequently marked with petroglyphs, are still held sacred by the Tukano today, anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff confirms, as “proof of the divine origin of the cultural heritage, the foundations of which had been laid down by the spirit beings who, at that time, still dwelled upon earth.”72
Returning to ancient Egypt and to the Edfu texts, we’re told that the survivors of the Island of the Primeval Ones:
journeyed through the … lands of the primeval age. …73 In any place in which they settled they founded new sacred domains.74
We may deduce, therefore, that part of their mission was to promulgate the lost religion of the days before the flood.
Next we learn that architecture, initially in the form of earthen mounds, was also central to their mission. Indeed it was so central that they carried with them a book, The Specifications of the Mounds of the Early Primeval Age, that literally “specified” the locations in the Nile Valley upon which every mound was to be situated, the character and appearance of each mound, and the understanding that those first, foundational mounds were to serve as the sites for all the temples and pyramids that would be built in Egypt in the future.75
Little wonder then that included among the company of the “gods” of Edfu were the Shebtiw, a group of deities charged with a specific responsibility for “creation,”76 the “Builder Gods” who accomplished “the actual work of building,”77 and the “Seven Sages” who, in addition to dispensing wisdom, as their name suggests, were much involved in the setting out of structures and in laying foundations.78
My argument has long been that the Edfu Building Texts reflect real events surrounding a real cataclysm that unfolded between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, a period known to paleoclimatologists as the Younger Dryas and that the Texts call the “Early Primeval Age.” I have proposed that the seeds of what was eventually to become dynastic Egypt were planted in the Nile Valley in that remote epoch more than 12,000 years ago by the survivors of a lost civilization and that it was at this time that structures such as the Great Sphinx and its associated megalithic temples and the subterranean chamber beneath the Great Pyramid were created. I have further proposed that something resembling a religious cult or monastery, recruiting new initiates down the generations, deploying the memes of geometry and astronomy, disseminating an “as-above-so-below” system of thought, and teaching that eternal annihilation awaited those who did not serve and honor the system, would have been the most likely vehicle to carry the ideas of the original founders across the millennia until they could be brought to full flower in the Pyramid Age.
TURTLE ISLAND
IF WE TAKE THE EDFU Building Texts seriously, with their depiction of seafaring missions sent all around the world to attempt to restart a civilization after a global cataclysm, and if ancient Egypt is the distant descendant of one of those missions, then we would expect to find other distant descendants elsewhere in the world.
It is my case in this book that we do indeed find such a descendant civilization in the Mississippi Valley and that, like ancient Egypt, it carries the DNA of a “ghost” civilization of remote prehistory. At sites such as Cahokia and Moundville, and 1,000 years earlier at Newark and High Bank, 375 and 1,000 years before that at Poverty Point, and again 2,000 years before that at Watson Brake, we see the same sky-ground geometrical and astronomical system at work, with origins that keep on receding deeper and deeper into the past until the trail fades from view around 8,000 years ago. In the case of the older sites in this continuum—despite early evidence of a special place granted to the constellation Orion across North America 79— there is insufficient information for us to be sure of the afterlife beliefs of the people who made them and whether they were linked to the “Path of Souls” complex that we find so amply demonstrated in the later sites. But the fact that such beliefs are confirmed at Cahokia and Moundville, and other relatively recent Mississippian sites where the archaeological evidence can be enriched with ethnographic data, and the fact that they are also strongly implicated in Hopewell and Adena sites such as Newark, High Bank, and Serpent Mound, suggest strongly that the same “cultural package” of skyground geometry and astronomy, linked to the same set of beliefs about the afterlife journey of the soul, is likely to have been at work from the beginning to the end of the mound-building enterprise in North America.
Then there’s the matter of the Amazon, where earthworks incorporating geometrical and astronomical memes identical to those manifested in the ancient Nile and Mississippi River Valleys are now emerging from the jungle hand in hand with traditions of “geometrical gods” and evidence of an ancient quest using vision-inducing plants to gain knowledge of the realm of the dead.
At the same time, the whole story of the peopling of the Americas is up for grabs. We know that the New World has been separated from the Old—a gigantic island—since the epoch of sea-level rise at the end of the Ice Age between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. We know that there were subsequently no significant transfers of culture or genes between the two regions until about 500 years ago, when the European conquest of the Americas began. We may safely conclude, therefore, that anything held in common culturally or genetically between the Old World and the New that is not the result of mixing in the past 500 years is either a coincidence or has to date back at least 11,600 years—and could, of course, be far older than that.
The extraordinary similarities we’ve considered between ancient Egypt and ancient North America are far beyond the power of coincidence to explain and yet the differences, and the physical and temporal separation of the Nile and Mississippi Valley civilizations, mean direct influence also must be ruled out.
What’s left is a remote third party—a lost civilization, perhaps even the “island” that the Edfu texts call the Homeland of the Primeval Ones destroyed in the global cataclysm of 12,800 years ago.
North America—“Turtle Island” in Native American tradition—is always, almost automatically, assumed to be a place to which culture was brought from elsewhere, but let’s shift the reference frame. What if North America itself was the Homeland of the Primeval Ones? What if the distinctive system of ideas involving the afterlife journey of the soul and the building of very specific types of structures thought to facilitate that journey weren’t brought to North America but originated there?
Now that the “Clovis First” nonsense has finally been laid to rest we know for sure that humans have been in the Americas for at least 25,000 years, with compelling evidence for an even earlier presence 50,000 years ago or more. Indeed if, Tom Deméré and his team have correctly read the clues at the Cerutti Mastodon Site, the real First Americans may have inhabited the New World—as far south as San Diego—as much as 130,000 years ago.
Even if the continent wasn’t inhabited until 25,000 years ago, however, we’re still left with an immense span of time before the earliest evidence of mound-building in North America around 8,000 years ago. That’s an interval quite long enough for great innovations in human culture to have occurred, yet if they did occur, why do we find no trace of them?
We’ve already seen, and I think there’s no dispute about it, that a vast heritage of truth about Native American cultures, and what they really knew and believed, was utterly obliterated by the European conquest in the past 500 years. That’s one reason why the record is so patchy, with great chunks simply missing.
The second reason, as Tom Deméré explained (see part 2), is that archaeologists have, until recently, been unwilling to investigate older deposits because of a preexisting conviction that nothing would be found in them.
But there’s a third factor that may prove to be of far greater significance than the other two, and this has to do with the extinction-level cataclysm that the earth experienced 12,800 years ago. Although the entire globe was affected, all the evidence indicates that the epicenter was in North America. It’s giant ice cap, 2 kilometers deep and extending in that epoch as far south as Minnesota, was massively destabilized, and the destruction that followed was near total across an immense area where the archaeological record was effectively swept clean.
What happened in North America?
next part 7
apocalypse then
mystery of the cataclysm
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As Above So Below
As Within So without
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